|
“Revolutionary” and “Scarcity”
by citizen
(lifted from a comment)
At LeSpeakeasy, b real brought up for question Bookchin’s use of the terms "revolutionary" and "scarcity". I answered there, and will cross post here:
About scarcity:
I took Bookchin to mean something like what Malooga referred to the other day with the story of yeast in a culture – Two outcomes, either the yeast run out of sugar and die off for starvation (scarcity) or they don’t run out of sugar but do end up awash in a wealth of toxins that also kill off the culture (post-scarcity). Malooga I thought was citing a kind of nightmare, and I think it is the one that Bookchin could see coming all too well.
About revolutionary:
I dislike this term for a couple reasons, but for the main problem is
that it seems to be begging for arrest. I imagine Bookchin chose it
because he wanted to be absolutely clear about the conservatism of most
so-called revolutionaries, because he wanted to declare that the
capitalist rules/game serves humanity 0%, and therefore must eventually
betray us all, and so with such an opposition there can be no
accommodation, only opposition. The game MUST be changed.
But since I see no need to discredit myself as a proponent of humane
society, and because I agree with you that revolution is imagined by
most readers in a reactionary imagery, I would prefer a term more like
“communalist,” and so did Bookchin in the end.
But I wanted to start with “Listen, Marxixt!” because so many at MOA
clearly identify with the left, and I want to discuss what it means to
identify and ‘steer’ left. I am grateful to Bookchin for putting so
clearly that “appearing” left is a disaster. For Bookchin, nothing was
to be idolized, and especially not ones politics. Politics are to be
worked out in dialog, and that can never be done honestly when one
wants to appear to know all the answers.
A question now being addressed at MOA: do we identify with
particular anti-imperialists simply because they fight imperialism? If
we fail to make such solidarity, do we make ourselves tools of the
capitalist game/rules? My guess is that Bookchin’s take on fashionable
Marxians offers some guidance:
Let us contrast two approaches, the
Marxian and the revolutionary. The Marxian doctrinaire would have us
approach the worker–or better, "enter" the factory–and proselytize
him in "preference" to anyone else. The purpose?–to make the worker
"class conscious." To cite the most neanderthal examples from the old
left, one cuts one’s hair, grooms oneself in conventional sports
clothing, abandons pot for cigarettes and beer, dances conventionally,
affects "rough" mannerisms, and develops a humorless, deadpan and
pompous mien.
One becomes, in short, what the worker at his most caricaturized
worst: not a "petty bourgeois degenerate," to be sure, but a bourgeois
degenerate. One becomes an imitation of the worker insofar as the
worker is an imitation of his masters. Beneath the metamorphosis of the
student into the "worker" lies a vicious cynicism. One tries to use the
discipline inculcated by the factory milieu to discipline the worker to
the party milieu. One tries to use the worker’s respect for the
industrial hierarchy to wed to worker to the party hierarchy. This
disgusting process, which if successful could lead only to the
substitution of one hierarchy for another, is achieved by pretending to
be concerned with the worker’s economic day-to-day demands. (Listen, Marxist!)
The last line here is tough on us – it demands that we stop fooling
ourselves, and choose real strengths rather than make believe ones.
Bookchin seems to demand that we not pretend to care about people whom
we know nothing about, Rather, if we are honest, we will forthrightly
state that we do not know Hassan Nasrallah, and that any opposition we
have to anti-freedom imperial politics is based on very local intimate
knowledge that we actually can speak to authoritatively. Any sympathy
we might have for someone fighting empire in Lebanon is speculative.
However, it is not speculative to say, we are against babies
screaming pitifully for milk because an American made bomb has
destroyed the baby’s mother. We can speak as authorities on babies
crying because we have heard them and knew that the one thing for the
hungry baby is its mothers breasts – living breasts preferably. And no
armament profit will excuse that murder, that double murder. And of
course the armament profit will not even bother to excuse such murders,
but will simply sweep them aside. That is reason enough, reasons we
understand, to oppose the bombing.
We can speak as authorities on the evil of murdering mothers by
bombing them in their beds at night, or while cooking for their
families in the day, because we know that every child has one mother,
only one irreplaceable mother. We do not have to pretend exotic
knowledge and concerns – we already know enough about what it means to
be a Lebanese human being, because we know what it means to be a human
being.
We have our own ‘bombed-out’ city of New Orleans, and know the human
need in a capitalized society for assistance from the government. We
know that Cuba prevented casualties from hurricanes. And we know that
Lebanese displaced people are being housed without being imprisoned,
that HB is already rebuilding houses. What is the US and Louisiana
state record in like matters? I support the people who actually build
communities. My sense is that Bookchin is saying to first revolutionize
the hearts around you, and demand to have a say in how your community
plans and directs itself. Then, as a community, decide which other
communities to support. My sense is that the Bookchin answer for most
is to build community assemblies, and lobby to have them support other
communities in the world.
This seems more demanding to me, and so perhaps revolutionary
because it would demand that we first revolutionize oneselves. Rather
than talking first about whom we support, better we should work to
understand the point of working to create local assemblies, then
actually create general support for local assemblies, then to create
actual local assemblies, THEN to work to get that popular assembly to
speak in the voice of popular sovereignty, and it could say – “stop
bombing mothers.”
That’s revolutionary.
((citizen, I told you I haven’t read the book))
Scarcity. The process Malooga described is one of biological inevitability affecting very simple organisms, though it permits them, so far, to have survived. I don’t remember the context of M’s passage so I am not arguing against it.
For humans, scarcity is defined by desires, unsatisfied greed, productive, political and social, which includes economical, arrangements. I am finding avocadoes scarce, as they all come from Israel and so cannot buy, that is a bit flippant, never mind.
Even the bedrock of human survival – food, water, shelter in cold climates – is organised and dependent on social (widest sense) structure. Susan George followers endlessly point out that there is enough food in the world to feed everyone, the problem lies with the West’s domination, transport routes, a crazy economy, etc. Everyone knows those arguments, they are good ones. Nevertheless, by bemoaning the lack of the just, moral, right, relation between one crucial resource (food) and its production, then, distribution, or re-distribution (etc.) they leave the whole problem hanging in the air, and have no solutions to propose except the ‘stopping of exploitation’ and local measures, ideas that don’t address root problems but simply point to absurdities and unfairness.
They set aside the fact that the Green Revolution and technological progress have seen to it that the world’s population has multiplied and multiplied again, that many people in poor countries do today have a better existence than they would have had without them, indeed, without they would have had no existence at all. (Sophisticated Yeast!….) Others of course are worse off and some European greens and the like would prefer to see poor Africans living a pastoral life style complete with cute cows, quaint customs, cinematic ceremonial dances and health care parachuted in or provided by Western contractors in luxury mobile hospitals. Absurd arrogance.
Revolution. has a bad smell, as pointed out. Who would join the revolution today to take over the means or production, to get rid of the landowners, the industrial patrons (shortly put – I realise these are offshoots…) A fabulously rich famous football star? My banker, who by any definition belonged to the bourgeoisie and was fired last week and is on the dole with 3 children? My Colombian frined, who is a illegal cleaning lady and pays no taxes? It is easy to argue that the capitalist system has invaded all and that that is unspeakably ugly…
The problem with Marx, beyond the outmoded definitions of class, these can be handled or changed in function of today’s world (as I see it and I am no expert) is that he considered the Earth as a flat table, a landscape that was out there, a backdrop that was subject to human action, completely amenable, because not defined or described. Marx’s equations are man to man, Yeast and forests and oil and micro organisms are not part of the picture.
Some thoughts…
Posted by: Noirette | Aug 21 2006 14:33 utc | 5
@citizen re: scarcity:
I don’t remember saying this at all. I find your description of what I said to be eloquent, and, dare I admit, above me. Unfortunately, it does tend to imply that we are currently experiencing the burning and pain of a global yeast infection 😉
@Noirette:
and have no solutions to propose except the ‘stopping of exploitation’ and local measures, ideas that don’t address root problems but simply point to absurdities and unfairness.
Localizing, or “municiplizing” as Bookchin would term it, is a viable solution — and it is happening in many places, even despite the fact the the opposite trend of globalizing is still happening faster.
Despite our wishes, we all know there are no easy solutions to these problems; and none which do not at some time inevitably come into confrontation with power. I too think some of George’s prescriptions are a little naive, but I can’t fault her for the effort she makes to solve these problems.
Saying that “they” have “no solutions” is too easy. And praying for the final show-down between capital and the oppressed is even more hopeless than reciting “Namyo renge kyo.” There are always partial solutions, which in the absence of a complete solution, should not be negated. Guerrilla tactics — choosing how, when, and where to confront the leviathan on our own terms, is a viable partial solution. It sure beats joining them, and saving up for that brand new banana yellow hummer!
@slothrup:
only the global solidarity of the oppressed to confront capital can be any answer to the usual problems of exploitation and accumulation.
I hate to be cruel, slothrup, but have you read the article, and are you critiqueing it — or are you merely spouting Marxist cant from memory.
Bookchin notes:
The process of class decomposition must be understood in all its dimensions. The word “process” must be emphasized here: the traditional classes do not disappear, nor for that matter does class struggle. Only a social revolution could remove the prevailing class structure and the conflict engenders. The point is the traditional class struggle ceases to have revolutionary implications; it reveals itself as the physiology of the prevailing society, not as the labor pains of birth. In fact the traditional class struggle stabilizes capitalist society by “correcting” its abuses (in wages, hours, inflation, employment, etc.). The unions in capitalist society constitute themselves into a counter-“monopoly” to the industrial monopolies and are incorporated into the neomercantile statified econnomy as an estate. Within this estate there are lesser or greater conflicts, but taken as a whole the unions strengthen the system and serve to perpetuate it.
To reinforce this class structure by babbling about the “role of the working class,” to reinforce the traditional class struggle by imputing a “revolutionary” content to it, to infect the new revolutionary movement of our time with “workeritis” is reactionary to the core. How often do the Marxian doctrinaires have to be reminded that the history of the class struggle is the history of a disease, of the wounds opened by the famous “social question,” of man’s one-sided development in trying to gain control over nature by dominating his fellow man?
Bookchin is saying that you can’t cure the disease of “classism,” of oppression, by dealing with its outermost symptoms — namely, by “curing” inequality and taming capital flows. Working soley with those mechanisms, perversely, only strengthens the structure by alleviating the its most salient inequities.
A deeper way is required (unfortunately the text we are working with ends cryptically, like the a fragment from the Dead Sea Scrolls), which requires becoming aware of the effects that our domination of nature is having upon the world. Our awareness of this process is happening naturally — albeit at great, and possibly irremedial, cost to the planet — freeing us from the useless “shoulds” and “musts.”
Our preoccupation with our position vis-a-vis others in the world, only blinds us to the ramifications of our position within the rest of the natural world.
So, we must think deeper; we must think more integratively.
Even these most basic of questions —
Who are the oppressed? Do they conceive of themselves as oppressed?
Who do they blame for their oppression? How are they being oppressed?
Or from the other side:
How can we convince the oppressed that they are not?
How can we deflect awareness of who is doing the oppressing?
How can we manufacture buy-in to this system? How can we foster complacency with this system?
— must be addressed from a deeper level which takes the entire world into consideration.
As Bookchin says in What Is Social Ecology? :
Although always mindful of the need for spiritual change, social ecology seeks to redress the ecological abuses that society has inflicted on the natural world by going to the structural as well as the subjective sources of notions like the “domination of nature.” That is, it challenges the entire system of domination itself and seeks to eliminate the hierarchical and class edifice that has imposed itself on humanity and defined the relationship between nonhuman and human nature. It advances an ethics of complementarity in which human beings must play a supportive role in perpetuating the integrity of the biosphere, as potentially, at least, the most conscious products of natural evolution. Indeed humans are seen to have a moral responsibility to function creatively in the unfolding of that evolution.
Which is, I believe, what we are attempting to do here.
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 21 2006 22:38 utc | 20
For My good Friend Slothrop:
The Origins of Political Correctness
An Accuracy in Academia Address by Bill Lind
Variations of this speech have been delivered to various AIA conferences including the 2000 Consevative University at American University
Where does all this stuff that you’ve heard about this morning – the victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it – where does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic.
We have seen other countries, particularly in this century, where this has been the case. And we have always regarded them with a mixture of pity, and to be truthful, some amusement, because it has struck us as so strange that people would allow a situation to develop where they would be afraid of what words they used. But we now have this situation in this country. We have it primarily on college campuses, but it is spreading throughout the whole society. Were does it come from? What is it?
We call it “Political Correctness.” The name originated as something of a joke, literally in a comic strip, and we tend still to think of it as only half-serious. In fact, it’s deadly serious. It is the great disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world. It is the disease of ideology. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious.
If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious.
First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered North Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the local black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted “victims” groups that PC revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble. Within the small legal system of the college, they face formal charges – some star-chamber proceeding – and punishment. That is a little look into the future that Political Correctness intends for the nation as a whole.
Indeed, all ideologies are totalitarian because the essence of an ideology (I would note that conservatism correctly understood is not an ideology) is to take some philosophy and say on the basis of this philosophy certain things must be true – such as the whole of the history of our culture is the history of the oppression of women. Since reality contradicts that, reality must be forbidden. It must become forbidden to acknowledge the reality of our history. People must be forced to live a lie, and since people are naturally reluctant to live a lie, they naturally use their ears and eyes to look out and say, “Wait a minute. This isn’t true. I can see it isn’t true,” the power of the state must be put behind the demand to live a lie. That is why ideology invariably creates a totalitarian state.
Second, the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, like economic Marxism, has a single factor explanation of history. Economic Marxism says that all of history is determined by ownership of means of production. Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, says that all history is determined by power, by which groups defined in terms of race, sex, etc., have power over which other groups. Nothing else matters. All literature, indeed, is about that. Everything in the past is about that one thing.
Third, just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness certain groups are good – feminist women, (only feminist women, non-feminist women are deemed not to exist) blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals. These groups are determined to be “victims,” and therefore automatically good regardless of what any of them do. Similarly, white males are determined automatically to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism.
Fourth, both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. When the classical Marxists, the communists, took over a country like Russia, they expropriated the bourgeoisie, they took away their property. Similarly, when the cultural Marxists take over a university campus, they expropriate through things like quotas for admissions. When a white student with superior qualifications is denied admittance to a college in favor of a black or Hispanic who isn’t as well qualified, the white student is expropriated. And indeed, affirmative action, in our whole society today, is a system of expropriation. White owned companies don’t get a contract because the contract is reserved for a company owned by, say, Hispanics or women. So expropriation is a principle tool for both forms of Marxism.
And finally, both have a method of analysis that automatically gives the answers they want. For the classical Marxist, it’s Marxist economics. For the cultural Marxist, it’s deconstruction. Deconstruction essentially takes any text, removes all meaning from it and re-inserts any meaning desired. So we find, for example, that all of Shakespeare is about the suppression of women, or the Bible is really about race and gender. All of these texts simply become grist for the mill, which proves that “all history is about which groups have power over which other groups.” So the parallels are very evident between the classical Marxism that we’re familiar with in the old Soviet Union and the cultural Marxism that we see today as Political Correctness.
But the parallels are not accidents. The parallels did not come from nothing. The fact of the matter is that Political Correctness has a history, a history that is much longer than many people are aware of outside a small group of academics who have studied this. And the history goes back, as I said, to World War I, as do so many of the pathologies that are today bringing our society, and indeed our culture, down.
Marxist theory said that when the general European war came (as it did come in Europe in 1914), the working class throughout Europe would rise up and overthrow their governments – the bourgeois governments – because the workers had more in common with each other across the national boundaries than they had in common with the bourgeoisie and the ruling class in their own country. Well, 1914 came and it didn’t happen. Throughout Europe, workers rallied to their flag and happily marched off to fight each other. The Kaiser shook hands with the leaders of the Marxist Social Democratic Party in Germany and said there are no parties now, there are only Germans. And this happened in every country in Europe. So something was wrong.
Marxists knew by definition it couldn’t be the theory. In 1917, they finally got a Marxist coup in Russia and it looked like the theory was working, but it stalled again. It didn’t spread and when attempts were made to spread immediately after the war, with the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, with the Bela Kun government in Hungary, with the Munich Soviet, the workers didn’t support them.
So the Marxists’ had a problem. And two Marxist theorists went to work on it: Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary. Gramsci said the workers will never see their true class interests, as defined by Marxism, until they are freed from Western culture, and particularly from the Christian religion – that they are blinded by culture and religion to their true class interests. Lukacs, who was considered the most brilliant Marxist theorist since Marx himself, said in 1919, “Who will save us from Western Civilization?” He also theorized that the great obstacle to the creation of a Marxist paradise was the culture: Western civilization itself.
Lukacs gets a chance to put his ideas into practice, because when the home grown Bolshevik Bela Kun government is established in Hungary in 1919, he becomes deputy commissar for culture, and the first thing he did was introduce sex education into the Hungarian schools. This ensured that the workers would not support the Bela Kun government, because the Hungarian people looked at this aghast, workers as well as everyone else. But he had already made the connection that today many of us are still surprised by, that we would consider the “latest thing.”
In 1923 in Germany, a think-tank is established that takes on the role of translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms, that creates Political Correctness as we know it today, and essentially it has created the basis for it by the end of the 1930s. This comes about because the very wealthy young son of a millionaire German trader by the name of Felix Weil has become a Marxist and has lots of money to spend. He is disturbed by the divisions among the Marxists, so he sponsors something called the First Marxist Work Week, where he brings Lukacs and many of the key German thinkers together for a week, working on the differences of Marxism.
And he says, “What we need is a think-tank.” Washington is full of think tanks and we think of them as very modern. In fact they go back quite a ways. He endows an institute, associated with Frankfurt University, established in 1923, that was originally supposed to be known as the Institute for Marxism. But the people behind it decided at the beginning that it was not to their advantage to be openly identified as Marxist. The last thing Political Correctness wants is for people to figure out it’s a form of Marxism. So instead they decide to name it the Institute for Social Research.
Weil is very clear about his goals. In 1971, he wrote to Martin Jay the author of a principle book on the Frankfurt School, as the Institute for Social Research soon becomes known informally, and he said, “I wanted the institute to become known, perhaps famous, due to its contributions to Marxism.” Well, he was successful. The first director of the Institute, Carl Grunberg, an Austrian economist, concluded his opening address, according to Martin Jay, “by clearly stating his personal allegiance to Marxism as a scientific methodology.” Marxism, he said, would be the ruling principle at the Institute, and that never changed.
The initial work at the Institute was rather conventional, but in 1930 it acquired a new director named Max Horkheimer, and Horkheimer’s views were very different. He was very much a Marxist renegade. The people who create and form the Frankfurt School are renegade Marxists. They’re still very much Marxist in their thinking, but they’re effectively run out of the party. Moscow looks at what they are doing and says, “Hey, this isn’t us, and we’re not going to bless this.”
Horkheimer’s initial heresy is that he is very interested in Freud, and the key to making the translation of Marxism from economic into cultural terms is essentially that he combined it with Freudism. Again, Martin Jay writes, “If it can be said that in the early years of its history, the Institute concerned itself primarily with an analysis of bourgeois society’s socio-economic sub-structure,” – and I point out that Jay is very sympathetic to the Frankfurt School, I’m not reading from a critic here – “in the years after 1930 its primary interests lay in its cultural superstructure. Indeed the traditional Marxist formula regarding the relationship between the two was brought into question by Critical Theory.”
The stuff we’ve been hearing about this morning – the radical feminism, the women’s studies departments, the gay studies departments, the black studies departments – all these things are branches of Critical Theory. What the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. The term is ingenious because you’re tempted to ask, “What is the theory?” The theory is to criticize. The theory is that the way to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that. They say it can’t be done, that we can’t imagine what a free society would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as we’re living under repression – the repression of a capitalistic economic order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression – we can’t even imagine it. What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down. And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s.
Other key members who join up around this time are Theodore Adorno, and, most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and Marcuse introduce an element which is central to Political Correctness, and that’s the sexual element. And particularly Marcuse, who in his own writings calls for a society of “polymorphous perversity,” that is his definition of the future of the world that they want to create. Marcuse in particular by the 1930s is writing some very extreme stuff on the need for sexual liberation, but this runs through the whole Institute. So do most of the themes we see in Political Correctness, again in the early 30s. In Fromm’s view, masculinity and femininity were not reflections of ‘essential’ sexual differences, as the Romantics had thought. They were derived instead from differences in life functions, which were in part socially determined.” Sex is a construct; sexual differences are a construct.
Another example is the emphasis we now see on environmentalism. “Materialism as far back as Hobbes had led to a manipulative dominating attitude toward nature.” That was Horkhemier writing in 1933 in Materialismus und Moral. “The theme of man’s domination of nature,” according to Jay, ” was to become a central concern of the Frankfurt School in subsequent years.” “Horkheimer’s antagonism to the fetishization of labor, (here’s were they’re obviously departing from Marxist orthodoxy) expressed another dimension of his materialism, the demand for human, sensual happiness.” In one of his most trenchant essays, Egoism and the Movement for Emancipation, written in 1936, Horkeimer “discussed the hostility to personal gratification inherent in bourgeois culture.” And he specifically referred to the Marquis de Sade, favorably, for his “protest…against asceticism in the name of a higher morality.”
How does all of this stuff flood in here? How does it flood into our universities, and indeed into our lives today? The members of the Frankfurt School are Marxist, they are also, to a man, Jewish. In 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany, and not surprisingly they shut down the Institute for Social Research. And its members fled. They fled to New York City, and the Institute was reestablished there in 1933 with help from Columbia University. And the members of the Institute, gradually through the 1930s, though many of them remained writing in German, shift their focus from Critical Theory about German society, destructive criticism about every aspect of that society, to Critical Theory directed toward American society. There is another very important transition when the war comes. Some of them go to work for the government, including Herbert Marcuse, who became a key figure in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA), and some, including Horkheimer and Adorno, move to Hollywood.
These origins of Political Correctness would probably not mean too much to us today except for two subsequent events. The first was the student rebellion in the mid-1960s, which was driven largely by resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War. But the student rebels needed theory of some sort. They couldn’t just get out there and say, “Hell no we won’t go,” they had to have some theoretical explanation behind it. Very few of them were interested in wading through Das Kapital. Classical, economic Marxism is not light, and most of the radicals of the 60s were not deep. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for our country today, and not just in the university, Herbert Marcuse remained in America when the Frankfurt School relocated back to Frankfurt after the war. And whereas Mr. Adorno in Germany is appalled by the student rebellion when it breaks out there – when the student rebels come into Adorno’s classroom, he calls the police and has them arrested – Herbert Marcuse, who remained here, saw the 60s student rebellion as the great chance. He saw the opportunity to take the work of the Frankfurt School and make it the theory of the New Left in the United States.
One of Marcuse’s books was the key book. It virtually became the bible of the SDS and the student rebels of the 60s. That book was Eros and Civilization. Marcuse argues that under a capitalistic order (he downplays the Marxism very strongly here, it is subtitled, A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, but the framework is Marxist), repression is the essence of that order and that gives us the person Freud describes – the person with all the hang-ups, the neuroses, because his sexual instincts are repressed. We can envision a future, if we can only destroy this existing oppressive order, in which we liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we have a world of “polymorphous perversity,” in which you can “do you own thing.” And by the way, in that world there will no longer be work, only play. What a wonderful message for the radicals of the mid-60s! They’re students, they’re baby-boomers, and they’ve grown up never having to worry about anything except eventually having to get a job. And here is a guy writing in a way they can easily follow. He doesn’t require them to read a lot of heavy Marxism and tells them everything they want to hear which is essentially, “Do your own thing,” “If it feels good do it,” and “You never have to go to work.” By the way, Marcuse is also the man who creates the phrase, “Make love, not war.” Coming back to the situation people face on campus, Marcuse defines “liberating tolerance” as intolerance for anything coming from the Right and tolerance for anything coming from the Left. Marcuse joined the Frankfurt School, in 1932 (if I remember right). So, all of this goes back to the 1930s.
In conclusion, America today is in the throws of the greatest and direst transformation in its history. We are becoming an ideological state, a country with an official state ideology enforced by the power of the state. In “hate crimes” we now have people serving jail sentences for political thoughts. And the Congress is now moving to expand that category ever further. Affirmative action is part of it. The terror against anyone who dissents from Political Correctness on campus is part of it. It’s exactly what we have seen happen in Russia, in Germany, in Italy, in China, and now it’s coming here. And we don’t recognize it because we call it Political Correctness and laugh it off. My message today is that it’s not funny, it’s here, it’s growing and it will eventually destroy, as it seeks to destroy, everything that we have ever defined as our freedom and our culture.
Posted by: Hezzie Grrl | Aug 22 2006 2:06 utc | 29
I wasn’t attacking you personally, slothrup; I very much value your insight and input on these kinds of topics. I was trying to say that the phrase I singled out is Marxist boilerplate and only tangentially relevant to the article at hand. Bookchin makes very clear that he is not rejecting Marxism out of hand, he is transcending it:
We argue that the problem is not to “abandon” Marxism, or to “annul” it, but to transcend it dialectically, just as Marx transcended Hegelian philosophy, Ricardian economics, and Blanquist tactics and modes of organization.
Then he proceeds to clearly annunciate the reasons why it is time to dialectically trancend Marxism:
Is it conceivable that historical problems and methods of class analysis based entirely on unavoidable scarcity can be transplanted into a new era of potential abundance?
Possibly — you would need to justify your case here.
Is it conceivable that an economic analysis focused primarily on a “freely competitive” system of industrial capitalism can be transferred to a managed system of capitalism, where state and monopolies combine to manipulate economic life?
I think he is on the money here. All studies of so-called “free-trade” show that it is anything but. Take US agriculture, where we have immense subsidies for agribusiness grown commodities, which are then bought up at a pre-determined profit by the government, and used as “foreign aid” to countries that already produce those same commodities, in order to bankrupt local small farmers and initiate a dependency cycle. That is only one of a hundred examples. Dollars and Sense carries numerous studies like this, all of which were unforeseen by Marx. Therefore, you are stuck with a Marxism which must be held together by band-aid patches if you want any rigour to your theory.
Is it conceivable that a strategic and tactical repertory formulated in a period when steel and coal constituted the basis of industrial technology can be transferred to an age based on radically new sources of energy, on electronics, on cybernation?
Possibly, but again this would need much greater elucidation before we should accept Marxist claims blindly here.
As a result of this transfer, a theoretical corpus which was liberating a century ago is turned into a straitjacket today. We are asked to focus on the working class as the “agent” of revolutionary change at a time when capitalism visibly antagonizes and produces revolutionaries among virtually all strata of society, particularly the young.
I would say this is quite accurate. At least the alienation part if not the active revolutionary part. But we surely live in an age where all manner, and class, of people are coming to the slow realization that “something” is wrong. What remains is the work of educating them. In any event, at a time when substantial minorities of children and adults are on psychotropic drugs, the capitalist structure of society must surely be to blame for at least some of this alienation.
We are asked to guide our tactical methods by the vision of a “chronic economic crisis” despite the fact that no such crisis has been in the offing for thirty years,
One might be around the bend now, but this is forty years after Bookchin wrote this — and surely the earth reaching the limits to growth, a condition unforeseen by Marx, plays a significant role in this. Neither does Marxism have much to say about peak oil or radioactive pollution.
We are asked to accept a “proletarian dictatorship”–a long “transitional period” whose function is not merely the suppression of counter-revolutionaries but above all the development of a technology of abundance–at a time when a technology of abundance is at hand.
Bob Avakian, of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and Sunsara Taylor, who I’ve interviewed several times, both talk about China, and Mao’s challenges, very convincingly. They are much less convincing when they talk about instituting a “proletarian dictatorship” here, in fact, I find the thought downright chilling.
We are asked to orient our “strategies” and “tactics” around poverty and material immiseration at a time when revolutionary sentiment is being generated by the banality of life under conditions of material abundance.
I will address scarcity in a separate post.
We are asked to establish political parties, centralized organizations, “revolutionary” hierarchies and elites, and a new state at a time when political institutions as such are decaying and when centralizing, elitism and the state are being brought into question on a scale that has never occurred before in the history of hierarchical society.
You would need to counter this substantively if you disagree with Bookchin here.
We are asked, in short, to return to the past, to diminish instead of grow, to force the throbbing reality of our times, with its hopes and promises, into the deadening preconceptions of an outlived age. We are asked to operate with principles that have been transcended not only theoretically but by the very development of society itself. History has not stood still since Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky died, nor has it followed the simplistic direction which was charted out by thinkers–however brilliant–whose minds were still rooted in the nineteenth century or in the opening years of the twentieth. We have seen capitalism itself perform many of the tasks (including the development of a technology of abundance) which were regarded as socialist; we have seen it “nationalize” property, merging the economy with the state wherever necessary. We have seen the working class neutralized as the “agent of revolutionary change,” albeit still struggling with a bourgeois framework for more wages, shorter hours and “fringe” benefits. The class struggle in the classical sense has not disappeared; it has suffered a more deadening fate by being co-opted into capitalism.
Yes, we have seen the state merge with the economy: it is called the military-industrial complex. Then there are the many examples Chomsky puts forth of the state subsidizing the development of technology, then giving it away to private interests when it becomes viable — as with the development of the internet by BBN here in Boston. Indeed, institutions like MIT would cease to exist without this melding of state and private interests.
We have see the working class neutralized beyond even Bookchin’s expectations. Now mobilizations are no longer about more wages, shorter hours and “fringe” benefits — they are about keeping jobs from leaving the country, and how much less pay and benefits workers are prepared to accept to keep those jobs.
anarchism/libertarianism is a pointless detour. and bookchin was detoured without good justifications, imo.
Nice of you to judge another’s intellectual development two generations ago so blithely. In any event, he did break with both over the course of the next two decades, as described in his article What is Communalism? His description of the dynamics of achieving consensus in the Clamshell Alliance, which was formed to oppose the Seabrook nuclear reactor in the mid-1970s in New Hampshire, I find particulary interesting, both as a description of praxis in action, and because I happen to know many of the principle actors personally and have heard their stories from each of their individual viewpoints.
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 22 2006 2:08 utc | 30
@citizen:
Scarcity had a very personal meaning for Marx, whose early threadbare existence led to the loss three children, including his favorite daughter, to disease caused by grinding poverty.
That era was a world where grinding poverty could be found anywhere in the world.
As Noisette points out, we live in an era where we are able to produce enough to meet the needs of every human, but chose not to. Clearly, capitalist structures benefit from starving workforces in the third world. And it seems fairly obvious that other impovershed populations are being slated for removal of one type or another to get at the resources.
So, it seems clear to me that the “post-scarcity” era highlights the criminal failures of capitalism even more starkly. I think Bookchin would agree with this assessment.
But there are two ways in which Bookchin’s thinking (and Marx’s) comes up short to me here:
First, “scarcity” is only one lens through which to view conflict.
Another lens might be termed “indigenism,” whereby the struggle for land and resources is between people who want to preserve traditional ways of life vs. those who want to destroy those ways in order to integrate them into the bottom of the capitalist totem pole. To my knowledge, precious few peoples have wanted to give up their traditional ways (and lands and fisheries, etc. which this entails) in order to work in some sweatshop somewhere for wage labor. One of the reasons for the war in Vietnam, as well as those of Central America, was to break up and destroy relatively self-reliant, communal, peasant ways of life so that factories and plantations could be introduced. The result of such forcible pacification is never pretty.
Another might be termed “technologism,” that is to say, the belief in all forms of technology as good. Here again, the struggles against the introduction of nuclear power, dams, terminator seeds and other GMO crops, pesticides, DU weapons, etc. CAN be viewed through a class lens as concentrating wealth, but it can also be viewed throught the lens of blind faith in technology vs. the precautionary principle — essentially an ethical lens. It can be viewed as a struggle between centralization vs. decentralization, or control vs. loss-of-control.
There are many lens’s through which to view conflict and change, and Marxist class struggle is just one of them.
Second, we may now be at the cusp of a new era of real scarcity, call it “post-post-scarcity”, or “scarcity II”, or “growth-induced scarcity”, or post-peak scarcity — either way the probability of its arrival increases every year. World fisheries are on the verge of collapsing, climate change is leading to increasing rates of crop failure, aquifers are being polluted and deleted, our agriculture is increasingly petroleum based and dependent, etc.
How these changes will affect political thinking and organizing in the future cannot be completely known or predicted.
Bookchin, and Marx, (as opposed to Lind, the true non-ideological conservative; and slothrup, the perfect all-knowing Marxist) recommend the use of reason, ideological flexibility, and the adapting of theory to fact, rather than the reverse.
As Bookchin said: “[T]his attempt to find a haven in a fixed dogma and an organizational hierarchy as substitutes for creative thought and praxis is bitter…”
When Bookchin says:
The complete, all-sided revolution of our own day that can finally resolve the historic “social question,” born of scarcity, domination and hierarchy, follows the tradition of the partial, the incomplete, the one-sided revolutions of the past, which merely changed the form of the “social question,” replacing one system of domination and hierarchy by another.
–he is challenging those like slothrup to answer why every Marxist revolution up to now has yielded less than satisfactory results without sounding like Bush defending why every intervention he has gotten us into has also sucked. Eventually, fact wins out over theory, except fot the “true believers” who will never be disuaded by any accumulation of evidence. Those “true believers” represent the revolutionary vanguard who are just waiting for the opportunity to lead the rest of us dolts. Or, at any rate, to discuss different books. Hey, slothrup, wanna discuss something else which doesn’t bore you? Ask b for a thread — or start your own blog.
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 22 2006 3:50 utc | 47
thanks, slothrop, for directing me back to the ecology book. bookchin writes
Scarcity is not merely a functional phenomenon that can be described primarily in terms of needs or wants. Obviously, without a sufficiency in the means of life, life itself is impossible, and without a certain excess in these means, life is degraded to a cruel struggle for survival, irrespective of the level of needs. Leisure time, under these conditions, is not free time that fosters intellectual advances beyond the magical, artistic, and mythopoeic.
ouch.
Is is a time when hunger is the all-encompassing fear that persistently lives with the community, a time when the diminuation of hunger is the community’s constant preoccupation. Clearly, a balance must be struck between a sufficiency of the means of life, a relative freedom of time to fulfill one’s abilities on the most advanced levels of human achievement, and ultimately, a degree of self-consciousness, complementarity, and reciprocity that can be called truly human in full recognition of humanity’s potentialities. Not only the funtional dictates of needs and wants but also a concept of human beings as more than “thinking animals” (to use Paul Shepard’s expression) must be introduced to define what we mean by scarcity.
…
The problems of needs and scarcity, in short, must be seen as a problem of selectivity – of choice [italics in original]
pity those poor savages who somehow managed to barely survive hand-to-mouth for thousands of years before the greeks came along, eh? methinks bookchin is a bit too ideologically rigid here & shapes history to fit his preconceptions. but that’s another topic…
in the le speakeasy thread, i pointed out this article that appeared in znet the other day which nicely summarizes bookchin’s contribution in a nutshell
Bookchin’s rejection of Marxism as a philosophical and political programme, then, marked him off from other ex-Communists of the 1960s, and placed him firmly on the side of the anarchists. Here Bookchin would have stayed – in all probability, indistinguishable from many other anarchist critics – had it not been for the further dialectical development of his thought that occurred as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s. This development can be clearly traced through the two main conclusions Bookchin had reached thus far. First, if revolution was about the abolition of something much wider than class – i.e., hierarchy and domination – then the emergence of these conditions, and the path toward their amelioration, had to be justified and explained; just as Marx had outlined the origin of classes and the state, so Bookchin would have to explicate the emergence of hierarchy and domination. Second, as Bookchin had discounted the proletariat as an agent of revolutionary change, with what could it now be replaced? That is, if not the proletariat, what one factor or agent would be the primary drive toward revolution?
Both of these factors – the need to examine hierarchy and the need to find a replacement for the proletariat as revolutionary agent – would lead Bookchin to the same conclusion: to ecology. In the first instance, ecology would form the basis of Bookchin’s critique of hierarchy: nowhere in the natural world could a similar system to the hierarchy that affected human society be found. Ranking systems amongst animals, yes; individual acts of aggression and domination by the strongest in animal groups, yes – but not the institutionalised and immutable system of hierarchy that develops in human societies. In the second instance, the fragility of the world ecology – i.e. of the world’s ecosystem – brought almost to its knees by capitalism, would now be the main driver of revolutionary change. Humanity now had no choice of whether it wanted to overthrow capitalism or not (or of whether this could be delayed until a future time which would be more conducive to change) for its very survival depended on the immediate transcendence of capitalism. Under the Bookchin model, capitalism’s grave diggers would arise not from the immizerisation of the proletariat, but from the immizerisation of the planet as a whole.
From the confluence of these two conclusions would emerge the complete Bookchin philosophy, that which he would call social ecology. And this confluence of conclusions would give his thought and proposed action a complete unity: for if capitalism was rendering the world uninhabitable, largely because of the existence of hierarchy and not solely economic exploitation, and if hierarchy can be shown to be unnatural, in that it is not found anywhere else in the natural world, then its dissolution must be worked for through an understanding of and adherence to the non-hierarchical laws of natural ecology. Here, Bookchin’s thought comes full circle, and infuses every aspect of his output with a deep holism: the place society wants to get to has to be the place society tries to be now. This entails a re-working of every social structure, within the present society, to accord with laws of a non-hierarchical nature. Crucially though, this re-working must come from human society – the only repository of reflective ethics – and involve the active imposition of human values onto the natural world: an aspect of social ecology that would draw Bookchin into conflict with many ecocentrics in the ecology movement.
It is this overarching holism, this grand narrative of the planet as a whole – of human society within its wider ecology – which marks Bookchin off as a ‘stand-out thinker’ of the last 50 years. Bookchin’s thrashing-out and professing of his vision is even more remarkable in light of the fact that over the same period we have seen the near total rejection of the concept of a ‘grand narrative’, in both the academic and activist world, in favour of a relativism, or an individualism, often as indefinable as it is unworkable. And the Bookchin narrative is as grand as any could be: the full reformation of the human condition to more fully accord with the non-hierarchical striving and growth found in a natural world. Bookchin was fully aware of the scope of his project, of its utopian nature. Indeed, he once wrote of the ‘unabashed messianic character’ of his work, of the striving toward defining an almost objective process toward a utopian freedom. But in keeping with his commitment to dialectic, the messianic Bookchin laid his theory open to the dialectical tension he ‘valued the most’: that between the reader of a book and the writer. In other words, his work was to be taken on by others, to be refined and re-worked.
while there are differences i have w/ many of bookchin’s “presuppositions”, i cannot disagree w/ the general thrust of his thinking. indigenous peoples have been trying to get this message out to us forever, so if it takes a dialectical approach couched in a particular lingo to reach one portion of the population. that’s cool w/ me so long as it eventually gets around to the same grounded essence – it’s always about the landbase. personally, i think that’s an easier selling point to the public for dismantling the master’s house/plantation, in terms of influencing changes in perception & attitudes re what we currently tolerate, than trying to convince a heavily-indoctrinated, self-centered citizenry of the importance of drawing meaningful distinctions between the eurocentric concepts of capitalism, socialism, & communism. it’s a quite simple equation to work from – no local life-sustaining landbase, no future. and it benefits everyone – euro, non-euro, and non-human alike.
Posted by: b real | Aug 22 2006 4:11 utc | 49
I agree with your perceptions, b real.
Nice article. I shoulda just looked around and posted that instead of trying to express it far worse myself.
Crucially though, this re-working must come from human society – the only repository of reflective ethics – and involve the active imposition of human values onto the natural world: an aspect of social ecology that would draw Bookchin into conflict with many ecocentrics in the ecology movement.
I’m a little unsure of emphasis here, too; perhaps I also would have it the other way around. Or I would add a spiritual component to the mix: with all indigenous people, their behavior is based upon their spiritual outlook of the world — where man resides within nature, not above it. When we lost that with the Abrahamic religions, we gained dominion over the world.* But that dominion has shown itself to be a cancer; capitalism is but one large and ugly external growth of that cancer. But the real disease, and its etiology, reside deeper within the spirit of man.
To put it in the language of the quote, human values must be derived from the natural world, not imposed onto it. That was what Bookchin was doing anyway when he sought to understand the world through ecology. That is the true scientific method.**
What we call the scientific method is yet another ugly outgrowth of the same spiritual pathology man suffers from, for it seeks to derive principles from experiments which are purposely isolated from the greater world. Hence the lessons learned are always used to dominate the world, not harmonize with it; and the products engineered from such a science, by their very conception, must be destructive of life.
_____________
* I won’t categorically state that man lived in a completely sustainable state before this break, but I do argue that the break accelerated the process of unsustainablity exponentially. Earlier pantheistic, and panentheistic, and even polytheistic religions had god schema that were largely part of the world, not lording over it.
I might call my conception ecological communalism, or perhaps just communalism, since ecological, like health, is a word used more in its absence than presence. Once balance is reached and maintained, the word, and the concept it stands for, drop away.
** Where else can human values be derived, if not from the natural world? Once values are derived from the world, general principles of interaction, in harmony with those values, can then be developed which can govern our own interactions with the world. Otherwise, you run the risk of a value/world feedback loop. Along with this, concepts like Progress, as we currently understand it, must be radically reformed, so that instead of meaning getting somewhere else, it means better being able to be here. Anyway, it all gets very eastern mysticism influenced and I won’t develop it any more here.
_________________
Anyway, why are we discussing all this? After all Marx said everything that was worth saying. Anything else is clearly misguided, irrelevant to class struggle, or in denial of Marx’s grand theory of the world. Right?
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 22 2006 6:19 utc | 51
no. i think if anyone took the time to actually read marx, the complulsion to “transcend him” might seem foolish to any perspicacious reader.
I guess it’s too bad that in all his 85 years, Bookchin, despite basing his life work on Marx, never quite got around to reading him. Maybe if he had lived another five years; or if he had been a more perspicacious reader. Same goes for all his students at the Institute for Social Ecology — deluded morons, the whole lot. Well, I’m glad we’ve gotten that out of the way.
technologism, indigism, whatever neologism you invent for these “other conflicts” implicate class conflict. there are forms of conflict, racism & sexism, that endure every charitable construction of reality aiming for universal manumition; and these conflicts have been masterfully exploited by capital.
I lived in the Virgin Islands for seven years, and spent 4 of those years living exclusively among blue-collar black West Indians, most of whom had never left the West Indies. We worked shift work, so we had tons of time to talk when on the night shift. I found my co-workers to be unusually bright and far more discerning about the post-plantation mentality we worked under than statesiders were — and this despite their lack of formal education.
But, there was one thing I never got past — and that was their unyielding belief that the entire world was a conflict between black and white. They could only see reality through that prism. Not that it is an invalid prism: Skin color has played, and continues to play, a huge role in the history and politics of the Carribean. There were elaborate scales of gradation of hue, all possessing unique names — “clear skin,” “yellow skinned,” “cinnamon,” “mauby,” “blue,” and so many others. Initially, I would see myself as hanging out with a group of say, five, black guys. But, talking to one later, I learned that they all knew who was what gradation of color, and how they stacked up in relation to all the others. They also knew what color the parents were, and so on, back through time. When a particularly dark man, because of wealth or position, “married up” with a “high-colored” woman, a slight scandal rippled through the community — and there was always talk about “what else” he might possess to capture such a treasure. Eventually, I caught on, and learned to instantly perceive these heretofore invisible gradations in color, and perceive how these differences played out subtly in social interactions.
I saw the importanced that color played in that society, but I could never bring myself to endow pigmentation with the primacy that my West Indian friends did. This was at the time of the OJ trial, so you could imagine what an uproar that caused. If we, for instance, were discussing two politicians and their actions, say Condi Rice and Colin Powell, all decisions and their implications would be ascribed to skin color, and how that affected how they related to the “white man.” Do you even know which of the two is darker, and how many shades darker, and what color both of their parents were? I do. I pick this stuff up instantly and unconsciously now because I learned from my time in St. Croix.
But everything, all social relations, were reduced to black and white, as if nothing else ever mattered at all. If you tried to throw your theories at them, it would be because white people have money and blacks don’t, despite the numerous exceptions to this rule.
My own skin color — I’m Jewish, but with enough pigmentation that in the Carribean sun I can pass for Mexican or Puerto Rican — was also endlessly discussed. It was finally decided that I must have black blood in my past, which I was unaware of, accounting for my pigmentation — this is how I was finally rendered safe for friendship. If I attempted to discuss the Levant and the pigmentation of people from around there, it was instantly reduced to black and white.
If I brought up the fact that over 1/4 of the world, up to two billion people were East Asian with yellow skin and “oriental” features, first off, the magnitude of the numbers was dismissed. Then it was posited, without any evidence, that all relations in that part of the world were also based on skin hue. And that Asians were really “white” people because they weren’t black. (No, there were no Cubans in the bunch. Being familiar with Chinese, they would never come to such a conclusion.)
So, I finally came to accept that that was how the world appeared to my friends down there. And I can similarly accept that class is your singular lens and that is how the world appears to you. But it would sure be fun to throw you guys together on a slow night shift and hear you thrash it out.
Oh, and I forgot the other group, the Pentacostals, who, despite their high school reading levels, interpreted the bible literally, and believed that only their small church of less than one hundred people on this one small isolated island in the Carribean interpreted the bible correctly; and that everyone else in the world was going to hell. That crowd, dear slothrup, would rip you to shreds.
_______________
In light of your failure to defend your point of view with anything but the most cryptic of scribblings — scribblings which wouldn’t even enable me to fill a prescription from a friendly pharmacy — I am forced into making your case.
So I went to the website of Bertell Ollman, a guy I’ve interviewed and like and respect, and perhaps the most renowned Marxist academic in the US, and found this Marxist rebuttal of Bookchin and Alpert:
In defense of Marxism
Z Magazine
(May 1989)
Dear ZETA,
“Reduces everything to an economic cause?” Marxism? (Spleen, Z, March) Overemphasizes, misunderstands, distorts economics—maybe. This we can argue over. But “reduces everything…”, well, that’s simply kid stuff. While the claim that we can find in Marxist logic the various “statist, economic, sexual, cultural and social ills” of the socialist bloc is pure rehash of the French “New Philosophers,” anti-socialist all, and unworthy of a radical publication.
So why is comrade Mike Albert saying these god-awful things, even while throwing the occasional bouquet to those—like this writer—who continue to work with the Marxist tradition? James O’Connor did and admirable job (April Z) in responding to Albert’s (and Murray Bookchin’s—April, Z) charges in the field of ecology, but the distortions of Marxism that underlay these charges deserves a more extended treatment.
First, and most important, Albert and Bookchin seriously misconstrue the nature of Marx’s subject, what he was studying, and consequently what most of his theories are about. According to Albert and Bookchin (and, of course, they aren’t alone in this), Marxism is about society, each and every society and the rules that govern them. Viewed in this manner, capitalism is but Marx’s most important illustration for the working out of these rules. The truth, however, is the other way around. Marx’s major theories deal essentially with capitalism, with how it works, for whom it works better and for whom it works worse, where it has come from and where it seems to be heading. Certain generalizations can be lifted from this effort, to which Marx devoted the greater part of his writings, and used to help us understand non-capitalist societies and non-social phenomena, but we should not wonder at the incomplete character of such accounts. Marx’s theories, for example, cannot adequately explain the origins of patriarchy or the function of religion, nationalism, racism, sexism and the workings of the economy in non-capitalist class societies, or the carry over of these functions and some of their effects into the capitalist period—nor should we expect them to. (Marx’s dialectical method, on the other hand, can prove very helpful in extending our understanding to these areas).
Secondly, as regards capitalism, Marx’s theories are chiefly concerned with mapping an evolving context that establishes both the broad limits and variety of possibilities (stressing what is most likely) for what can go on in it. This analysis is constructed for the most part out of two overlapping accounts, that of capital accumulation (the growth and development of the means by which wealth is produced in our era) and that of class struggle (the history of the accompanying social relations). The emphasis on economic conditions is due to the fact that what is most distinctive about this context is of an economic nature, though this must be understood in a very broad sense. (This is what Albert caricatures as Marx’s “productivist bias”).
Third, as a dialectical thinker, Marx cannot offer any factor, no matter how important, as a first or only cause. Whatever is treated as having a major or special effect, and these are usually—though not always—economic conditions and events, they themselves are never wholly isolated from the broader conditions out of what they arose and which continue to act and interact alongside them. (This is what Albert caricatures as “reductivism”). The trick, of course, is to sacrifice neither that multiplicity of causes for whatever deserves greater or special emphasis (as vulgar economic determinists often do) or the latter for the former (as like Albert and some other social movement theorists do).
Fourth, the various non-class dominations of special concern to social movements people have both capitalist and non-capitalist components. Marxist inspired revolutions, therefore, cannot be expected to completely eradicate any of them, at least in the short run. So why should people involved in the social movements be interested in Marxism?
Well—because most of them/us are also workers (white collar as well as blue collar), and Marxism is invaluable in helping to develop a strategy that serves their/our interests as workers. Because the other forms of domination from which they/we suffer all have a capitalist component, and Marxism best explains it. Because even those parts of these oppressions that are older than capitalism have acquired a capitalist form and function, so that a Marxist analysis of capitalism is required to distinguish what is historically specific in their operation from what is not. And, lastly, because overturning capitalism is the necessary (though not sufficient) condition for doing away with all forms of domination, including domination over nature, and only a class conscious working class has the numbers (still), the power (potentially), and the interests (always) to bring about a change of this magnitude. Hence, the priority Marxists give to class analysis and class based politics (which does not rule out organizing around other oppressions at specific times for specific purposes). The priority given to class here (not to “the workers” but to “us as workers”) has nothing to do with who is hurting more or which form of oppression is more immoral or which dominated group happens to be in motion, and everything to do with what is the adequate framework and vantage point for grasping the specific manner in which all these oppressions are interacting now and how best to get rid of them all. (And this is what Albert caricatures as a “master discourse”).
I do not expect that simply making these claims has convinced anyone that they are right, but I hope they help clarify where the real disagreements between Marxist and social movement theorists lie, and, hence, what is worth discussing if we are ever to construct the united movement that is needed to achieve our—yes!—common goals.
Bertell Ollman
Bookchin was a social movement theorist, you are a Marxist. Were you able to, even with a minimum level of cogency, put forth even one of these four caveats to the all-encompassing nature of Marxism, I might find an interchange with you useful and learn something. Your failure to do this speaks louder that your unalloyed faith.
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 22 2006 19:50 utc | 64
A Little Clarity: Revolution = Commodity Form stymied
According to Albert and Bookchin (and, of course, they aren’t alone in this), Marxism is about society, each and every society and the rules that govern them. Viewed in this manner, capitalism is but Marx’s most important illustration for the working out of these rules. The truth, however, is the other way around. Marx’s major theories deal essentially with capitalism, with how it works, for whom it works better and for whom it works worse, where it has come from and where it seems to be heading.
Malooga,
I disagree with Bertell, but maybe I haven’t read enough of Bookchin yet. In the piece we are discussing, however, Bookchin never claims anything like this. In fact, he is very specific about Marx’s analysis of a capitalist class system proceeding out of a feudal class system. He furthermore refers to Marxist analysis as specific to the 19th century. So Bertell seems to be confused, referring to something else we’re not reading here, or deceitful.
slothrop,
I’m curious why you agreed with Bertell given that he blithely smears Bookchin as being too stupid to understand that Marx’s analysis of Marx is historically specific – an accusation refuted by the very text we are looking at.
Third, as a dialectical thinker, Marx cannot offer any factor, no matter how important, as a first or only cause. . . . The trick, of course, is to sacrifice neither that multiplicity of causes for whatever deserves greater or special emphasis (as vulgar economic determinists often do) or the latter for the former (as like Albert and some other social movement theorists do).
I don’t disagree, but neither is there much point in agreeing. This doesn’t help understand much. What might be clarifying is to point out that Marx begins his big book of analyzing capitalism with the commodity form, and then he keeps dialectically developing social logics from the commodity form for three volumes. His notes in the Grundrisse end with the commodity form too, and at that point he seems to have settled on how to write the whole analysis. So, sure, no mono-cause, but rather clarity for those reading (including movement activists such as Marx once was) is certainly not something Marx himself abhorred.
As Ollman says, Marx never specified how the revolution was supposed to occur exactly, but he’s pretty damn clear that as long as everything unfolds from the commodity form, we’re still in a capitalist game, still a world dominated by creation of commodities in a cycle of making money, M-C-M’. Which brings us back to Bookchin.
Bookchin actually does suggest a way to eradicate the commodity form as the basis of social rules/games: he points to a revolutionary consciousness developing among people who see their entire bio-world threatened with death, cancer, and reproductive horror. Nothing Ollman says suggests even the slightest argument about how fear of death by pollution would not equally fulfill Marx’s broad predictions for how revolution might overthrow the complex game evolved via commodity form and its developments. So, although I appreciate Malooga’s attempt to clarify slothrop, I don’t think Ollman helps.
I don’t really get everything slothrop is saying, but I wonder if he and I could agree that Bookchin can be fair-mindedly accused of not doing what all good dialectical thinkers should do – specifically to justify his solution not merely by its possibility as a solution, but to justify his approach by 1) supporting its own argument, and 2) simultaneously explaining why his opponents will fail to agree with him. This is the great achievement that Marx pulled off and one that, I think, offers slothrop solid justififcation for cleaving to a Marxixst technical vocabulary.
I cannot say that Bookchin has been as exhaustive as Marx, but neither am I a competent judge of Bookchin’s more detailed theory. I do see, however, that Bookchin has used his approach to nature not only to structure his acocunt of revolution, but also to explain how domination and hierarchy will destroy all the apparently more efficient approaches to revolution nominated by revolutionary authoritarians such as slothrop suggests he may be in #60. With Bookchin, I submit that revolutionary authoritarianism historically ends in reaction rather than freedom. Bookchin’s constantly open municipal assemblies, however, promise rule and a democratic rule, not mere anarchy, and so might even satisfy slothrop, if such assemblies could remain free from subversion.
But that may be a movement problem, not a theoretical one. Or is someone suggesting that environmental threats cannot, in theory, overcome capitalist determinations?
Posted by: citizen | Aug 23 2006 4:17 utc | 72
I appreciate your thoughts, citizen.
I think we are missing the basic point of a very simple article. Rather than discussing the entire Marxist vision(s) vs the Bookchin vision, when few of us are qualified to make this assessment, let’s go back to the article at hand.
In the article, Bookchin is making one simple but fundamental claim: that the revolution, as predicted by Marx, and in the form predicted by Marx, has not happened, and will not happen, and he explains why.
Nothing that slothrup has put forth has addressed this claim in any substantive way. Neither can I find this fairly obvious predictive flaw in Marixst theory directly addressed in Ollman’s writings on his website.
Ollman does say something very helpful: Marxism, as Bookchinism, and other predictive visions for the future fall under the category of utopian visions. He adds (in the final footnote of the link below):
A final word on the sources of Marx’s vision of communism: having as my main purpose to reconstruct this vision and believing that it is internally related to Marx’s analysis of capitalism, I have purposely omitted all mention of the Utopian socialists. Yet, there is no question but that Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Owen in particular exercised an important influence on Marx. They have been left out of this paper because I distinguish between those ideas which brought Marx to that analysis of capitalism and history we call ‘Marxism’ and the somewhat similar views which exist as a part of this analysis. The Utopians’ vision of the future, operating as some kind of ethical ideal because it stands outside of what is understood of man and society, contributed to Marx’s early political stance and clearly influenced the direction of his studies. Once Marx’s analysis reached the point where he could project the real possibilities inherent in capitalist society, however, the logical status of such views changed from being the independent principle or ideal in an ethical system to being an integral (if still to be realized) part of the real world. The same analysis resulted in a sifting and refocusing of whatever notions Marx inherited on communism in line with newly discovered possibilities. Lacking such an analysis, the Utopians could only serve up a mixture of dreams, intuitions and fond hopes. If it is necessary to study Utopians, therefore, in order to understand how Marx came to Marxism, including its vision of the future, the same study may actually distort what these ideas are and confuse rather than help our efforts to judge them.
That “still to be realized” caveat, so blithely handled, has proved to be the weak link in any Marxist claims to be more than just another imagined social utopia. As it is this weakness that Bookchin, with the ruthlessness of a chess Grand Master, exploits.
Ollman concludes with this: this:
There is really only one way to evaluate Marx’s vision of communism and that is to examine his analysis of capitalism to see if the communist society is indeed present within it as an unrealized potential. If Marx sought, as he tells us, “to find the new world through the criticism of the old,” then any judgment of his views on communism rests in the last analysis on the validity of his critique of capitalism. This is not the place for the extensive examination that is required but I would like to offer three guidelines to those who would undertake it: 1) capitalism must be conceptualized in terms of social relations, Marx’s way of incorporating the actual past and future possibilities of his subject into his study of its present forms (this is the logical basis of Marx’s study of history, including future history, as a process); 2) a Marxist analysis of today’s capitalism should be integrated into Marx’s analysis of late 19th century capitalism (the social relations from which projections are made must be brought up to date); and 3) one should not try to show that communism is inevitable, only that it is possible, that it is based on conditions inherent in the further development of our present ones. After all, communism is hardly ever opposed because one holds other values, but because it is said to be an unrealizable ideal. In these circumstances, making a case for communism as a possible successor to capitalism is generally enough to convince people that they must help to bring it about.
So, we must ask ourselves: “Is Marxism possible?” Has Bookchin proved Marxism to be impossible, or merely highly unlikely? Is Bookchin’s vision possible? If both are possible, which is more likely and why, and which is more desireable? Which description is more complete and predictive? If neither are possible, is there another vision which is possible and worth striving towards?
We must ruthlessly and honestly distinguish between imagined realities, desired realities, possible realities, probable or likely realities, and our present reality. Then we must pick a future reality, defend our choice by successfully answering the questions above, and chart a path towards that reality.
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 23 2006 14:48 utc | 74
|
