Socialism Without a Map

@nb #1: well, yes, if Wikipedia is treated – as it increasingly is, by most people who aren’t congenitally sceptical academics – as a reliable source of encyclopedic information not only on particular topics but also on what topics are worthy of having encyclopedia entries.

The Mondragon model seemed fascinating and hopeful 20 years ago. However, there is obviously a problem with this model. The Gintis/Bowles critique is not compelling, but it has the virtue of matching the evidence.

Alperovitz’s effort to use non-profit quasi public institutions like hospitals to anchor co-ops is interesting

Henry, please fix the Matt Hindman link.

Meant to say “enormous *expansion*”.

Also I think Wikipedia is a bit of an odd example because it is effectively the only encyclopedia in town, and due to network effects, will probably stay that way unless things get really, really bad. Most open peer projects are at most “first among equals” and must operate with the constant awareness that they could be cloned, bypassed by competitors or simply become irrelevant.

If it is true that “just 13% of Wikipedia editors are women”, that “males are disproportionately involved in all non-kin forms of cooperation”, and that they have also “been the initiators of every extensive form of social cooperation for the last ten millennia”, then cooperation at enormous scales and in extensive forms is not where we should orient our compasses.

How about service? Surely men and women serve in the same measure.

“We know that one such plan – the one of the people who built the USSR and its cognates and satellites – worked horribly badly. So Wright’s implicit recommendation is that we build a better society through careful exploration, guided by a general set of principles rather than a strong belief that we know the answers already.”

The beauty of utopian thinking is precisely its paratactic structure. Between the present and the future lies the great (terrible?) caesura of attainment. It is not a propositional genre of discourse: it does not link past and future by prophecy or logic. It suggests, as does all metaphoric language, possibilities. Because of this suggestiveness it is an erotic form of speech, creating desire for things not possessed. And as in any love affair, there are dangers, among which is the tendency to assimilate the object of desire to one’s own subjectivity: to destructively collapse the distance between what is and what one would have, as though having intimations and being intimate were the same thing (which might suggest that the Soviet experience was a truly terrible pun).

Which is, I suppose, why I think Wright is pretty damn good. Utopias help orient us in the aporia — they can’t (except perhaps through terrible puns) ever get us out — because, of course, there is no there, there. I would, however, question an overemphasis on ‘new forms of data analysis.’ Eros is such a key aspect of utopian thinking, and I’m not sure that awareness of convexity constraints make for him an effective bow.

How do we know the gender of wikipedia contributors? Don’t most editors use pseudonyms?

Harold – if you follow the link, you’ll see the data sources that they use.

Wow, I didn’t realize that 19th century ethnography was still so popular

#17 When you get the patriarchs of different clans cooperating together to form a Senate, then you have a male coalition of non-kin social cooperators.

Bill Barnes, rather than huffing and puffing about gross generalization, please at least try to come up with some counter-examples. I have given many specific examples, but my critics have not seen fit to submit even one disconfirming case.

The “problem” is that evidence from the entirety of “world history” isn’t evidence which sustains “generalizations from wikipedia.”

But then, there are larger problems than that here.

We need to get onto the primate evidence (or, if you prefer, ‘evidence’). Bonobos, chimps, gorillas, orangutans. Then this thread would *really* start to rock.

This explains perfectly why all those mom-and-sis stores.

@29 Your post seems a useful corrective to the excessive attention often given to productive activities in the construction of utopian models, as well as drawing a useful distinction between reproduction and production.

Labour (reproduction, or ‘life itself’), work (production of the things of the world), and action (the politics of plurality): the three fundamental activities Arendt uses to designate the vita activa. And I think three points indispensable in triangulating the outlines of a utopian position.

So that in response to #25 (“Any realistic notion of utopia has to take heed of these sorts of realities”) I would say that the “realities” of which you speak are a function of the gender based division of activity into reproduction and production. Any utopia worth talking about ought to recognize that until this gender inequity is addressed, paradise will be a very slow train coming.

If one class of people is doing 87% of the unpaid work, is that class exploited?

@ 31 & 32
I would suggest that the under representation of women in the Wiki work is a symptom of women’s over representation in the activities associated with reproduction. Fellas are free to be jabbering away on the internets because the gals are cooking dinner and loading the dishwasher. And doing the main part of child rearing … you know, ‘women’s work.’

So the class of people (men) doing 87% of the unpaid work on Wiki are able to do that work because other class (women) are doing a disproportionate share of the reproductive labour.

Some utopia.

A nice chart on men/women and leisure:

http://www.economist.com/node/13717514

@35 re: embedding ‘real utopias’ in the broader system.

Because these coops & etc. are ‘interstitial,’ they must exist in the spaces between. That these spaces exist, and are available for colonization by alternative, non capitalist modalities is probably the most encouraging thing I took from Wright’s narrative.

As to the question of who is transforming whom, that is another story. To be blunt, I don’t buy the prognosis for large scale social transformation. But I’d argue that kind of grand scale upheaval matters less than the kind of localized transformations that the interstitial alterities can achieve within Leviathan itself. Not only improvements in conditions of labour and work, but by the very fact that interstitial agitation keeps these spaces open, and from this openness comes so much of the creative energy that, frankly, makes life worth living.

It seems a common premise of this post, Holbo’s. I think Quiggan too, and Wright that Leninism and all its progeny constitute a failed utopianism, and that utopianism should be made circumspect by the fact of communism’s bloody trajectory. Meanwhile, Marx is virtually held harmless.

Marx and Engels made stridently, abundantly clear that they were not utopian thinkers and had little respect for such, save perhaps as well-intentioned primitives. Engels wrote an entire book to this effect. Lenin spits the word “utopian” with contempt all over his writing. Were they wrong about their own thought?

What some people here seem to think the communists did was design a utopian system and attempt to engineer society towards it. This is precisely what Marx, Lenin, and the rest condemned. Since we’re materialists, since we’re inverting Hegel, since it is the material relations of production and not ideas, such as visions of utopia, that drive history, attempts to realize idealized versions of society are self-deception at best. Here’s how Lenin defined utopia.

“In politics utopia is a wish that can never come true—neither now nor afterwards, a wish that is not based on social forces and is not supported by the growth and development of political, class forces. ” – Lenin, Two Utopias

And here he is on utopia in Marx:

“”There is no trace of an attempt on Marx’s part to make up a utopia, to indulge in idle guess-work about what cannot be known. Marx treated the question of communism in the same way as a naturalist would treat the question of the development of, say, a new biological variety” Lenin, The State and Revolution

This clearly is not how he saw his project. What was his project? Let me hand the mic to Mr. Lukacs:

“The admirable realism with which Lenin handled all problems of socialism during the dictatorship of the proletariat, which must win him the respect even of his bourgeois and petty-bourgeois opponents, is therefore only the consistent application of Marxism, of historical-dialectical thought, to problems of socialism which have henceforward become topical. In Lenin’s writings and speeches – as, incidentally, also in Marx – there is little about socialism as a completed condition. There is all the more, however, about the steps which can lead to its establishment. For it is impossible for us concretely to imagine the details of socialism as a completed condition.” – Georg Lukacs, Lenin: A Study of the Unity of His Thought

And what are these “steps”? Chiefly, the pursuit of class warfare, and the extinguishing of false consciousness.

Was all this wrong? Was Lenin a utopian who thought he was a Marxist? There have been generations of brilliant Marxists and are some still who did not think so. Is it really decisive, as Wright seems to think, that Lenin’s project had no electoral workers’ democracy? For Marx, democracy would be part of communism as finally achieved. But, of course, none of the existing communist societies claimed to be other than a work in progress. And, in any case, Marxism is not supposed to be dogma, it is supposed to be method, and the the Soviet, Maoist, and other communist were defended at vast length and detail with enormous rigor by brilliant Marxists not under the control of those governments as developments of Marxist dialectic. Was all this wrong because of the absence of elections? Why did no one tell Merleau-Ponty? Why did no one tell Hobspawn? Were these men idiots, who lived their lives by Marxism without grasping the most basic things about it?

How would communism have been different if it had been utopian instead of Marxist? Here we are under Stalin. We are supposed to be moving towards an image we have of the ideal society. Does this society look ideal? Everyone clearly living in fear? Vast numbers of people imprisoned and killed, theoretically for some kind of subversion. Why are so many attempting to subvert a society moving towards utopia? Utopia give you a way to measure yourself and see that something is wrong.

But a Marxist? We don’t know what socialism looks like. Marx thought it would involve elections, but Marx wasn’t living in the material conditions that gave rise to it, so how would he know? (In any case, we are still in the dictatorship of the proletariat phase. True, the proletariat aren’t really voting either, though the Party keeps a nominal proletariat majority. But the proletariat was a tiny portion of the population when the Bolsheviks took over. So how much difference would a voting proletariat have made?). The question before us is whether class warfare is being pursued with the maximal rigor compatible with further development of the productive forces. And it was! The society was certainly at war with itself in the name of economic classes, and it was developing industry very rapidly. From a Marxist perspective, what is really wrong here? That not all the victims of the Gulag were really class traitors? That’s a critique of implementation, not of the Gulag itself. One could say that Marxism does not necessarily imply the Gulag, but neither does it forbid it. Could one say this is too crude a rendition of Marxism? But isnt this effectively what many brilliant Marxists said? And I don’t think, after generations of brilliant Marxist the world over defended the USSR, or Mao, or other variations, that Marxists can pull an Emily Latilda and say “Never Mind” now.

The crimes and horrors of communism belong on the account of the philosophy that inspired them, and in whose name they were rigorously argued for. Utopianism owes no apologies here. Marx, Zizek, and Lenin are on the same side, and utopians are on the other.

As for the question of maps, an iterative approach is right, but let us not suppose the problem with communism was that it worked out too detailed a map of what it wanted to achieve and how. It deliberately avoided this. Rather, it insisted on socialism as a spontaneous result of class warfare. And this created, again and again, enormous tragedy: a society that refuses to have a vision of utopia, but insists on waging war with itself in service of a theory.

Let me close with Lenin again:

“(Revolutionary government) can be only a dictatorship, that is, not an organisation of “order”, but an organisation of war. If you are storming a fortress, you cannot discontinue the war even after you have taken the fortress. Either the one or the other: either we take the fortress to hold it, or we do not storm the fortress and explain that all we want is a little place next to it. ” Lenin, Lenin, Report on the Question of the Participation of the Social-Democrats in a Provisional Revolutionary Government

How could a government whose purpose is war against part of its own population, and modes of thorugh associated with them, not end where the USSR did? And in what sense is this not Marxist?

Hobspawn – Hobsbawm.

I don’t know, surely he is not insisting on creating enemies in order to fight them. It seems about the same as some writings of James Madison I read recently; goes something like this: ‘some will be rich, some poor. The poor will rebel. We would need to have an army to keep them in check. Would be smarter to give them some reasons to stay peaceful.’

See, the methods. Although, the difference between Madison and Lenin is that Madison does need the working class, and Lenin doesn’t need the upper class. So, this could explain the difference in methods. However: Madison&Co. didn’t need the Indians, so that part of the population had to go to some version of the gulags.

I don’t know, the terminology too is not exactly marxism-specific: war on drugs, war on terror.

Martin Bento:
Marx and Engels made stridently, abundantly clear that they were not utopian thinkers … Were they wrong about their own thought?

Arguably and to some extent, yes. A utopian or quasi-utopian vision does not become ‘scientific’ simply because the person advancing it asserts it is scientific or “empirically established.” Thus Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, as excerpted in D. McLellan, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings, p.171:

In history up to the present it is certainly an empirical fact that separate individuals have…become more and more enslaved under a power alien to them…, a power which…in the last instance, turns out to be the world market. But it is just as empirically established that, by the overthrow of the existing state of society by the communist revolution…and the abolition of private property which is identical with it, this power…will be dissolved; and that then the liberation of each single individual will be accomplished in the measure in which history becomes transformed into world history. (emphasis added)

M&E thought that the communist revolution wd occur when a variety of preconditions, eg the “universal development of productive forces” (whatever exactly that means) had occurred, but also thought its arrival cd be hastened by political activity (otherwise why did Marx engage in politics?). From the same p. quoted above: “Communism is for us not…an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”

You can call something whatever you like, but that doesn’t mean it is that thing. From a vantage pt of over 150 yrs since that sentence was written, it may make (does make, I wd say) more sense to see communism (as they describe it) as an ideal than as an ’empirically established’ eventual certainty. YMMV.

My take: Marx, in despair, discovered/invented a deus ex machina that could, he thought, rescue him from that despair. Did he really believe that a science of historical development — inevitable historical development — would make of him and his colleagues more than another sad iteration of utopian dreamers? Slogging my way through all 3 volumes of Capital, I wonder.

Marvelous stuff, to be sure, but for me it feels a lot like the record of a man burying himself in his work in order to avoid a grief that threatens to overwhelm him. What angers me most about those who dismiss him, especially the modern economists who poke fun at his labor-theory-of-value, or his falling-rate-of-profits, or accuse him of atrocities-before-the-fact, is that with all his agonies, and all his mistakes, he was so obviously a better human being than any of them.

Martin: Was Lenin a utopian who thought he was a Marxist?

No, he was a bloody-minded authoritarian modernizer who thought he was a Marxist.

@46 “…then the liberation of each single individual will be accomplished in the measure in which history becomes transformed into world history.”

One of the most interesting paradoxes in Marx’s thought is the realization of individual human freedom through the subordination of political action to historical necessity. With knowledge of necessity come the temptations of power associated with all certainties: as it turned out in the USSR it meant subjecting the present to the power of a cadre of initiates who, because of their certain knowledge of the future, made (often violently coerced) the changes deemed necessary to realize the future condition.

I would argue that the diamat/histamat strain of Marxism underwriting the actually existing socialism of the USSR was a particular perversion of utopian thought, a kind of stalker syndrome where the erotic distance between real and ideal is collapsed, where the desire for the object is mistaken for possessing that object — with terrible consequences for both lover and beloved. But I would also argue that a broad swathe of Marxist thought as such spends considerable energy wrestling (often, dare I say it, in fertile ways) with the paradox that underlies this perversion. And I’d further argue the paradox itself stems from the attempt to distance a science of history from ‘mere’ utopian thought.

“You can’t build anything living on nostalgia.”

Outside of the radical left, dominated by Marxists, no one seems to want to BUILD anything, which is kind of the problem.

That, which you would build, you first must destroy.

A part of the anarchist program must include creating worldwide, global conditions in which aggression would become increasingly less and less acceptable way of resolving differences. The EU, for all its problems and, imo, too limited a basis for forming a coalition, is one example, a step in the right direction.

The ur-text is not Das Kapital, but the French Revolution. Hegel, Marx, Lenin — they are all reading the French Revolution.

I don’t know if Marx was a better human being, as Timberman says. Human beings, as far as I can see, are a pretty lousy excuse for a species, overall. My dogs are better spiritual beings. My cat, the ultimate apex predator, is a better spiritual being. We are a social animal — the only herd animal, which can talk, and which is also a predator — but our social ability is riven through with resentment and betrayal. Our will to power strips us of empathy and our will to submit makes a fetish of sacrifice and suffering. Our celebration of nature’s Spring, this day, is bunny rabbits and colored eggs and a god, who rises from the dead after sacrificing himself to bloody torture.

Society’s conflicts, material and spiritual, mirror the psychological ambivalence of humans, projected outward and writ large. We long to be released from the paralysis of those conflicts, feel the power in the dynamics of those conflicts and powerless as we are carried along without individual intention by those same dynamics, and devoutly wish for some magic resolution of those conflicts. Revolution and Utopia are poles of a single axis of hope and despair, deep hopeless despair.

Timberman, when he writes, ” it feels a lot like the record of a man burying himself in his work in order to avoid a grief that threatens to overwhelm him”, seems to me to be in possession of a critical insight about Marx, about the dark night of the soul, which is the underside of the political Modern, the Industrial Revolution, the democratic nation-state, and all the rest. It reminded me of what Nietzsche wrote about the creative power of Dionysian pessimism.

Lawrence Stuart @ 52

I thought your remarks interesting. “Historical necessity”, it seems to me, is an attempt to restore some sort of teleological narrative to the analysis of history, without doing violence to facts. The accelerating rush of developments defied the ability of even a supremely analytic and insightful observer, like Marx, to wrap a mind around the course the world was taking, let alone to invent a new narrative without heroic intention, to relate that understanding. God is dead, how are we to talk, let alone pray?

It must — does — feel a bit like being in a canoe in a fast-flowing river. Some limited measure of control is possible only by paddling harder in the direction of the current. Yet, logic dictates that, if the flow of the river is being pushed from its past upstream, it must also be pulled by an unseen falls ahead (is that the roar of the falls we hear?). Even if we do manage to stabilize our canoe by paddling hard enough, we only speed ourselves along the path we are on, due not to our intentions or efforts, but to the material conditions of the river’s course. How are we to understand that?

Marx understood more or less instinctively, I think, that the Enlightenment had to be rejiggered to accommodate the irrational. So did Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and Freud. Einstein, you might say, blundered into the understanding while still full of the optimism that his designs on a Unified Field Theory seemed to justify. (Yes, I know, apples and oranges. Maybe.)

Anyway, we now have neuroscience promising to square the circle for us. I remain skeptical. Things are a lot weirder now than than the system builders of the Eighteenth Century foresaw. There’ve always been the warnings of mystics, but they were never in the business of doing anything about it, at least not collectively. All I have to offer is that we can’t plump for a system which doesn’t take all of this into account, not at least with any hope of success.

“What lessons for the present day Left are to be drawn from this?”

How about this: don’t do things like writing “Today those cruelties seem meaningless, inhumane, and unjustifiable, but we have the benefit of hindsight”, as if only in hindsight did they appear so.

Lets bring this around to intersecting with Erik Wright’s argument. He adamantly identifies Left utopianism with genuine democracy, which is of course completely incompatible with Leninist vanguardism. But few on the Left would say that “moments” of vanguardism can simply be entirely and forever and everywhere eliminated from the struggle to open the way to the realization of “utopia”. And the meaning, shape, etc of “genuine democracy” remains problematic and essentially contested.

“What lessons for the present day Left are to be drawn from” past struggles and successes/failures? To my mind, Wright’s book, does not go into this sufficiently. Here’s one of his most relevant passages, at p. 318:

“Some revolutionary socialists have believed that a turn to authoritarian one-party rule during a transition from capitalism need not destroy the possibilityof the subsequent evolution of meaningful egalitarian democracy. Historical experience suggests that this is very unlikely: the concentration of power and unaccountability that accompanies the abrogation of multi-party representative democracy and the ‘rule of law’ generates new rules of the game and institutional forms in which ruthlessness is rewarded, democratic values are marginalized, dissent is dealt with repressively, and the kinds of autonomous capacities for collective in civil society needed for democracy are destroyed. The legacies of such practices during the difficult times of a transition make a democratic socialist destination implausible.”
(More Gramsci, please.)
And here’s something of mine on lessons from the Central American Left of the last 50 years or so:
“The history of the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran left … shows a particular version of an epistemological and political problem common to all leaders whose projects are utterly dependent on the enthusiasm, determination, and self-sacrifice of their movement’s human capital and rank and file. To wage a revolutionary struggle of substantial duration under difficult circumstances, based primarily on popular activism, requires extraordinary idealism, morale, fighting spirit, and determination among rank and file and cadre at all levels. It’s hard to square these imperatives with encouraging realism, sensitivity, and thoughtfulness regarding the complexity, ambiguity, and unpredictability of the wider world – particularly when that wider world keeps undergoing major changes out of synch with one’s ideology. Over and over again, the FMLN and FSLN leadership were impelled to downplay or hide or suppress their own emerging recognition that they had misread wider reality and unfolding history in important ways (and therefore their policies and strategies had been unrealistic) – because of their fear of the impact of such admissions on their troops’ morale and unity. Over and over again, the leaderships found themselves prisoner to the utopianism and sectarianism they had striven to inculcate in their key cadre and bases as a means of promoting and sustaining morale and solidarity (and because, to varying degrees, they shared more sophisticated versions of such utopianism and sectarianism). Some degree of this is of course a universal problem in long, arduous campaigns of all sorts, in politics and war. But revolutionary movements are trying to be, at the same time, disciplined, decentralized undergrounds and armies, on one hand, and agile, creative above-ground national political bodies on the other. Vanguardism often works in the first context, but is a disaster in the second. Most leaders come to recognize this tension to some degree, but differ greatly in how seriously they take it. In the first context, factions fight over who has the correct vanguard line. In the second context, some leaders come to see that vanguardism is highly dysfunctional and ought to be left behind as soon as conditions allow, and perhaps never should have been so thoroughly adopted in the first place. Those who remain vanguardist at heart and seek to finesse the problems it causes in above-ground politics, in the interests of their own power and sense of mission, use the narrowly-cognitively-mobilized key cadres and bases as resources for internal campaigns to marginalize or purge those leaders who advocate internal democratization as part of the transition out of revolutionary struggle into a new, wider democratic politics. That is exactly what happened in the FSLN in Nicaragua in the first half of the 1990s and in the FMLN in El Salvador from about 1995 to 2004.”

@Rich Puchalsky
Marx lived in a world were most democratic states had census based suffrage. Hence, the idea that the proletariat had to make a revolution wasn’t that much undemocratic in itself.
The USSR was formally a democratic country with the supreme soviet elected by universal suffrage (the antidemocratic aspects mostly depended on a lack of division of powers) so I don’t think that your description of Lenin’s ideas about democracy is fair.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_(council)#section_3
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_of_the_Union

Bill Barnes, 68 “…meaningful egalitarian democracy… [] ….the concentration of power and unaccountability that accompanies the abrogation of multi-party representative democracy and the ‘rule of law’ generates new rules of the game…”

Whoa, I missed this bit. He sounds so positive about “multi-party representative democracy and the ‘rule of law’”, and the rules of the game it generates. Since the meaningful egalitarian democracy is already here, who needs utopias? Everything should work out fine, just by itself.

Well, I guess someone could argue that “multi-party representative democracy and the ‘rule of law’” are not necessarily “the game”, but only a game. Since we are talking about utopias, who knows what other models might emerge.

@61, Bruce Wilder

Thanks for directing my attention to the linked article. Just like you, I find it very provocative for precisely the same reasons. If you were caught unawares by the extent to which the “new ideologies” appear to encroach upon and penetrate into the areas of “personal identity and loyalty,” I was even more so and for a far more fundamental reason: it’s precisely because global multinationals are already overwhelming the many functions you’re referring to and which are typically the province of nation-states that Zuckerberg’s slogan, “Companies, not countries,” wouldn’t even cross my mind as a possible solution to the political impasse I was alluding to (indeed, we don’t see what right under our noses); and so, the moral you’re citing is indeed well taken. And yet . . .

First, if we restructure the concept of “companies” so that it would correspond more closely to jointly-owned, co-operative ventures (along the Marxian model), more intent on creating real value rather than simply maximizing the bottom line; and second, if we abandon Sheryl Sandberg’s radical notion of standing Marx’s alienation problem on its head and yes, be mindful of maintaining a healthy balance between life and work, then who knows?

As regards loyalty and personal identity, I’d suggest a Kantian model as an effective antidote: a loyalty to and an affinity with all of humankind, with stress on moral equivalence of persons.

@ 59 (in response to #58), Anarcissie

“Less acceptable and less usable, due to subversion and sabotage of hostile and authoritarian state institutions and practices.”

What institutions and what practices ? Do you mean, for instance, the inordinate German influence in trying to impose austerity programs on the “lesser” members?
In any case, the EU may yet survive what appears to be at present an economic dictatorship to evolve, eventually, into an increasingly political type of organization.

Even so, we can already point to the Hague as an example of some of its successes. Didn’t the Hague stop George W as well as Dick Cheney from venturing abroad for fear of being summoned?

Bruce,
Wright’s chapter 6, especially his discussion of combining elements of representative democracy, associational democracy, and participatory democracy in such way as to make an effective regime of egalitarian democracy, is worth reading. see pp. 160-167.

Here’s another bit from my paper with Nils Gilman, coming right after the bit I posted at 44 of the thread on my OP:
“The ray of hope that we hold out is that our imagined Green Social Democracy, underpinned and legitimized by producerist republicanism, will ground itself in an acceptance of the limits imposed by the fecundity of the local environment, rather than a Promethean ethos of constant overcoming of those limits. As such, it would encourage localized sourcing, localized production, and localized consumption. It would focus on the conversion of public infrastructure to low-carbon, clean energy as quickly as possible. It would provide universal access to such infrastructure, while making private use of centrally-generated power and water quite expensive above a very modest minimum allotment. Tax and regulatory policies would focus on environmental impact and resource management. Governments, educational systems, and civil society would prioritize training, equipping and enabling the population to be low-carbon “producers” of useful goods and services (especially the “human services”), and informed, environmentally-conscious, responsible citizens, within local communities, organizations, and enterprises. In other words, it would be something like the comprehensive elaboration of an intensely green version of the “social economy” model that has worked on the local level in Quebec and other places, and the “transition town” model that seems to be taking off in England.
There will be so much work to be done in conversion, reclamation, emergency response, human services, community development, and so on, that this will be a full-employment economy, for the most part very locally-focused. Moreover, such a political economy – emphasizing the development of high levels of environmentally conscious human and social capital, largely situated in small privately-or-coop-owned production units and community-based human services, supported and coordinated (but not centrally-planned or directed) by environmentally-informed larger public institutions – would enable cutting GHG emissions and render societies more resilient and adaptive in the face of climate change. It is plausible that people whose lives are rich in social capital, educational opportunity, interesting work, and citizenship rights and responsibilities are likely to be more amenable to being weaned-off materialistic addictions/enthusiasms, or not to develop strong versions in the first place.”

In such an ecology, a genuinely democratic politics would be possible and necessary, and have a fighting chance of prevailing.

I would say that the messiness of life lived and the utopian imagination are in creative tension with one another. I do believe that this is one of the those cases where we ought to be allowed to walk and chew gum at the same time without anyone stoning us. Not that they won’t do exactly that, mind you, but no one with a utopia or two up his sleeve and any sense of history at all expects to pull one out in the middle of the game and walk away scott free.

QED.

Henry: “As Wright makes clear, we don’t have any grand master plans which would allow us to see the road ahead.”

No master plans, but we can see the road ahead. At the risk of being accused an incrementalist or accommodationist (not that I really care), I think the main task is to change people’s expectations: Change the social preference! Only forty-four years after the Civil Rights Act, the U.S. elected a black President. Now seemingly in the wink of an eye, the tide has turned on gay marriage, though of course there was a long slow buildup. There is no reason to suppose that the shape of the economic system is any less amenable to change (I take this cue from the expectations of the 19th century thinkers).

But what has to change first? Answer: What has to change first is what people want and will accept, a.k.a. the social preference. How do you do that? Well for this moment in time, we should defend entitlements, environmental protection, climate action, healthcare reform etc. These are slowly inculcating the idea that the general society is responsible for some things. Then, it will develop a little further from there. And so on.

The fact that these policies are slowly inculcating that idea, is precisely why the Right is trying to squash them. As they will tell us. They often write it.

Example–But isn’t Obamacare a giveaway to health insurers? Yes for now, but finally, No. It is the “writing on the wall” for health insurers. The system is going to drive them all down to one price for basic coverage, while we all know that their insurance product is already completely useless anyway. (Detrimental, in fact; they were trying to limit your healthcare treatment.) The logical connection of “one price” + “useless function” will cause a new question around the dinner table: Why we suffer these schnooks at all? And that is exactly why the Right is right to disparage PrezBarryO as a “community organizer”, though they may not realize how good he can be at it. But again, it means more effort when the time is right, from we the pipples: The call for a public option or a single payer (or a two-tier system, so the rich can maintain their rhinestone-encrusted lifestyles) must be pushed back onto the political agenda at the right time. Because once again, why are we suffering an 80% “medical-loss-ratio” (i.e., giving 20 cents out of every healthcare dollar to private insurers) when their value-added is Zero? (Or negative.) This is not logical and not healthy.

That is how the world slowly is becoming more “socialist”: by making almost everyone find agreement upon the salutary and healthy nature of specific policies, first. Social Security (retirement security)? Check, done. Medicare? Done. Oh yes the plutocracy is going to bitch about it, but just try to take it away, try to harm to anyone in the here and now. And then tomorrow will be another here and now.

Next is coming a rather large and long social conversation about inequality. It isn’t quite here yet, but it is going to be a big deal. Inequality has been somewhat masked since the Reagan years by credit paper bubbles, but of course it isn’t going away. The bankers themselves blew the question open, for all to see.

Thus I think the future will change not by explications of grand plans, but in the way it is already happening: by issue-specific changes in individual preference, which counterpose the reigning ideology with a specific change in detail. Then these detail-changes, from house to house and neighborhood to neighborhood, finally amount to to a larger change in the social preference. In the wink of an eye, and this happens rather a lot.

@ 62 Bruce Wilder “It must — does — feel a bit like being in a canoe in a fast-flowing river.”

Oh, don’t get me started on rivers, necessity, and paradox! Suffice it to say, or rather for the poet to say:

Day begins in youth,
Where it commences growing,
Another is already there
To further enhance the beauty, and chafes
At the bit like foals. And if he is happy
Distant breezes hear the commotion;
But the rock needs engraving
And the earth needs its furrows;
If not, an endless desolation;
But what a river will do,
Nobody knows.

A nice translation in full of Der Ister here:

http://jacketmagazine.com/27/hold-trans-2.html

@Martin Bento
I agree that the USSR was not a democracy, obviously, but I disagree about the way it was a non democracy, an this is imho relevant to the argument about utopia.
I’ll try to explain the problem with an example from fascist Italy: Fascists went in rural italy were many people were very ignorant and couldn’t read or write, and instructed them on how to vote, so that in the elections during fascism they had great results since those people didn’t vote before.
Was this democratic or antidemocratic ? It is ambiguous, I would call it a failure of democracy, because democracy presupposes a group of individual voters each one already with his opinion.
Another important part of fascism was that fascim almost created italian public school system. Obviously people who attended school during fascism learnt fascist geography, fascist history, fascist science (racism) etc. Was this propaganda ? Obviously yes, but most of those people wouldn’t have had any scholarisation before fascism,

[Complete smartphone copy and paste failure, sorry]
is the most authoritarian part of marxism that was adopted by lenin and stalin, and that this explains most of the violence of the USSR. As I hinted, it was also enacted by fascist italy (a motto of mussolini was “fatta l’italia bisogna fare gli italiani” , we made italy now we have to make italians) and, I think, also japan was similar.
It is also I think the most utopian part of marxism, that of a new, freer man who arises from history.
So I don’t think that your idea that lenin and stalin only paid lip service to democracy is true, I think that they really believed in democracy, really believed that they were creating democracy (by creating the new man, thus creating “autentic ” democracy in the sense is sometimes used in these threads), and in the case of stalin, that he created a sort of echo chamber were he believed his own BS while murdering millions of people, and for what I can understand it is likely that most russians believed it too, making it in some very vague sense “democratic”.

Martin Bento @ 87

William, your psychoanalysis of Marx is interesting and poignant, and may be spot on, but is not terribly germane to evaluating the theory itself, which ultimately stands on its own.

No, it isn’t, but that wasn’t my point. Marx was certainly allergic to the very idea that what he was doing was anything like a utopian exercise, and intolerant of those who favored what he thought actually were utopian exercises, and did indeed offer his economic and revolutionary theories as antidotes to idle utopianisms of all sorts. My take is that there were psychological reasons why he couldn’t afford to think of himself as a utopian, which he actually was, and that, by one of those perversities which always seem to attend intellectual striving under the duress of compassion, it was to his credit that he was so thoroughly wrong about so much.

Can we say the same about the free-market enthusiasms of neoliberalism? Certainly neoliberals now seem to be just as mistaken, and just as psychologically incapable of admitting it, but their reasons for being both wrong and stubborn about it aren’t anywhere near as admirable as Marx’s, at least as I see them, even though the only utopias one could accuse them of favoring are those of self-aggrandizement at someone else’s expense.

MB, 87:

Your entire original comment reduces to:

“The crimes and horrors of communism belong on the account of the philosophy that inspired them, and in whose name they were rigorously argued for.”

This is idealist nonsense, just as is the claim that all “totalitarianism” was essentially caused by Rousseau. Jacob Talmon, etc, not withstanding, no reasonable scholar can hold Rousseau responsible for the rise to power of either Hitler/Naziism or Stalin/Stalinism, or “Totalitarianism.” See Robert Workler, Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment, and their Legacies. There is no reason to believe that Marx, had he been alive in the 1920s, would have approved of Lenin, much less sided with Stalin – — much more reasonable to envision Marx agreeing with Bukharin and NEP, and later respectfully engaging and perhaps agreeing with Gramsci, or even Hal Draper! Michael Harrington was more Marx’s true legacy than Stalin. Harrington’s version of realistic utopianism would be a good subject to pursue as part of this seminar on Erik’s book – as would the whole history of the relationship between Marxist social science and Social Democratic politics.

Ah, Rich, I’m not apologizing for authoritarians, just noting that they seem to be a historical constant. And I’m certainly not a pietist of any kind, Marxist, Leninist or otherwise. What interests me about the Horrors of Godless, Totalitarian Communism, as the Birchers used to put it, is how normal human impulses, of which the authoritarian urge is certainly one, have been turned into grotesque sausage-grinders by the empowering technologies that arose with industrialization.

The temptations of the end-justifes-the-means are as old as human civilization, but building factories to reduce your enemies to component parts which can be repurposed to your greater glory, as at Buchenwald, or in Stalin’s Gulags is something new in the world, as are the psychologies which turn such monstrosities into problems of rational management. Peel back the rationalizations of signature strikes, to pick a more recent example, and you’ll find something very old, and very ugly, but it presents itself — credibly, if we’re to believe our mass media — as a novus ordo seclorum. What piety has that got to do with, I wonder, and frankly, it surprises me that you don’t seem to wonder either, or think it a worthy endeavor to connect the dots that are very clearly there.

“beyond good and evil”

Why, yes, and Darkness at Noon is full of that kind of stuff. But it doesn’t really seem all that puzzling that people, especially intellectuals, might buy into it. Maybe it’s connected somehow to the ‘traditions’ thread.
I found it online, so here goes:

““I don’t approve of mixing ideologies,” Ivanov continued. “’There are only two
conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian
and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of
arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic
principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands,
that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the
community—which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial
lamb. The first conception could be called anti-vivisection morality, the second,
vivisection morality. Humbugs and dilettantes have always tried to mix the two
conceptions; in practice, it is impossible.”
…
“For a man with your past,” Ivanov went on, “this sudden revulsion against
experimenting is rather naive. Every year several million people are killed quite
pointlessly by epidemics and other natural catastrophes. And we should shrink from
sacrificing a few hundred thousand for the most promising experiment in history?
Not to mention the legions of those who die of under-nourishment and tuberculosis
in coal and quicksilver; mines, rice-fields and cotton plantations. No one takes any
notice of them; nobody asks why or what for; but if here we shoot a few thousand
objectively harmful people, the humanitarians all over the world foam at the mouth.
Yes, we liquidated the parasitic part of the peasantry and let it die of starvation. It
was a surgical operation which had to be done once and for all; but in the good old
days before the Revolution just as many died in any dry year—only senselessly and
pointlessly. The victims of the Yellow River floods in China amount sometimes to
hundreds of thousands. Nature is generous in her senseless experiments on mankind.
Why should mankind not have the right to experiment on itself?”
…
Truth is what is useful to humanity, falsehood what is harmful. In the
outline of history published by the Party for the evening classes for adults, it is
emphasized that during the first few centuries the Christian religion realized an
objective progress for mankind. Whether Jesus spoke the truth or not, when he
asserted he was the son of God and of a virgin, is of no interest to any sensible
person. It is said to be symbolical, but the peasants take it literally. We have the same
right to invent useful symbols which the peasants take literally.”

@ 99

There’s nothing to apologize here for, especially since there’s nothing new under the sun. The originality comes in connecting the dots. In any case. I meant it as a compliment.

Anarcissie @85

The EU, however, is an example of the sort of supergovernment and superstate which will be required by capitalism in the near future (or rather, recently and right now).

Well, perhaps there’s no other way out of the dilemma, conceptually speaking. A “superstate” would, in effect, do away with forever warring and competing nation-states, and thus restore the institution of statehood to what it may have originally been intended (in the mind of political philosophers) as the ultimate authority, a court of the last resort, spanning the entire globe – not unlike Alexander’s dream come true.

As for capitalism, perhaps we’ll never be able to eradicate it completely, especially in its highly-morphed, “humane” form; I’m not even certain, if we be true to the anarchist motto of “live and let live,” that we should (which renders the concept of justice somewhat problematic on the anarchist scheme of things). So at least from one standpoint, of facilitating exchange of goods and services globally, a unified currency and financial system is not such a bad thing. not only in the interim but in the long run as well.

In any case, if we’re heading towards a kind of general leveling of income and living standards throughout the globe, a kind of undifferentiated mass of humanity in the strictly economic sense – a fifty years of so is my projection, a bit longer perhaps – capitalism, in its raw form, will run out of steam (for it is my understanding that the system feeds on exploitable differences and thrives under no other condition; take those away and you’ll have deprived it of its raison d’être). And then, when that time comes, alternative means of raising capital (i.e., the material and human resources) will come into being and will eventually supplant the old forms – new kind of “companies” spoken of earlier, jointly-owned, co-operative ventures, or something in that nature. And so it looks as though, and I’m thinking on my feet now, Marx had it all wrong and we can stand him on his head: communism will be the final result of the state withering away, as it were, rather than the primary cause.

“…you really did it just to save your necks”

Well, I don’t know about that. However, the problem with intellectuals is that while they can embrace the vivisectionist idea, they (except for the proper psychos) cannot fully transfer themselves into vivisectionists, because of the baggage of their upbringing. A real (human) vivisectionist has to be made from a child. I’m guessing, this is something that Pol Pot understood. And some others, like LRA.

“Citizen Ivanov,” said Gletkin, “belonged, as you do, to the old intelligentsia; by
conversing with him, one could acquire some of that historical knowledge which one
had missed through insufficient schooling. The difference is that I try to use that
knowledge in the service of the Party; but Citizen Ivanov was a cynic.”
“Was … ?” asked Rubashov, taking off his pince-nez.
“Citizen Ivanov,” said Gletkin, looking at him with expressionless eyes, “was shot
last night, in execution of an administrative decision.”

B. Barnes @94
Harrington’s version of realistic utopianism would be a good subject to pursue as part of this seminar on Erik’s book
That had occurred to me also — not having read Wright’s book, just what’s been written about it here. My recollection is that Harrington’s last book Socialism Past and Future (which I no longer seem to have) was fairly short on details. (I also no longer have The Twilight of Capitalism; I do have his Socialism but it’s *many* years since I read it.) In any case one need not entirely accept Harrington’s reading of Marx (as various people did/do not) to find value in H’s work.

“The only really effective answer to either that I’ve ever come across is John Dewey’s reply to Trotsky”

This is why this part of the thread is so annoying (not geo’s answer specifically). What they did was stupid and wrong then, stupid and wrong now, stupid and wrong forever. It’s not rocket science or advanced morality to understand this. It’s like the people from the American South who say “Oh, we understand that slavery is wrong now, but you can see why good people supported it then — the South was a dream of civilization etc etc”. And, no. It was wrong then, and people knew it, and there is no advanced knowledge about truth or humanity or technology to be had by pretending to not understand this.

Marx empowered the authoritarian killers who used the justification that geo refers to by insisting that he really knew the course of historical development and that mass sacrifices could be made now so that they would never again happen. This is stupid, and wrong. The people who still defend Marx on it are being no better than people were then, and they should really just stop.

@ 109

Which is also why liberals are the most reactionary (stubborn?) element of society, as per the postmodernist critique of Project Enlightenment.

“Marx empowered the authoritarian killers who used the justification that geo refers to by insisting that he really knew the course of historical development and that mass sacrifices could be made now so that they would never again happen. This is stupid, and wrong. The people who still defend Marx on it are being no better than people were then, and they should really just stop.”

Complete horseshit (and I’m not even a Marxist). Marx was an admirer of the Abraham Lincoln of 1863 and the Radical Republicans and said so in print. Marx never justified “mass sacrifices” period – except in the sense that he said that Capitalism, and its massive cruelty, was a necessary evil. Was Marx in every way the height of humanitarian sensitivity? Not at all. Neither was anyone else, then or now, and Marx was a hell of a lot better than most, then and now. Thomas Jefferson was highly ambivalent about slavery and quite willing to order the whipping of 12 year olds for not working hard enough. Lincoln was born and raised a white supremicist and only very gradually turned decisively against slavery and never fully transcended his racism. What was so great about Lincoln was his life-long capacity for learning and change. As Du Bois said, “Many men were born hating. I love to say to them: Look at this man. He was born one of you, and yet he became Abraham Lincoln.” Read Foner’s The Fiery Trial. And until very recently there were hardly any males who weren’t male supremicist to some degree, regardless of their position on the Left-Right continuum. Rich’s compulsion to brand everybody who has any respect for any part of the Marxist tradition as complicit in Stalinism is what you hear from the likes of David Horowitz.

@111

As an addendum, you don’t start either with optimism or pessimism, for to do either presupposes too much. Where one should start is with a comprehensive and realistic philosophy of the subject (along with that of “human nature”). Everything else follows from that.

@Rich Puchalsky
Since I suppose I am one of those Marx apologists that annoy you, I’ll give you my answer:
If you criticise the USSR that was born from the russian revolution, I am with you: it caused millions of deaths.
But it seems to me that you are not criticising just this, but the whole idea of the revolution, that you seem to think was bound to cause those deaths in principle.
I think you are very wrong in this: Russia was a very poor and undeveloped country, with a very infertile soil, but still was a food exporter. Think of the political economy of this, it is very ugly. The revolution was caused by actual shortages of food during WW1, and also the famous mutiny of the Potemkin was caused by lack of food. All in all, I think that life for most russian peasants was not much better than life of slaves in the american south. And you think that they didn’t have to rebel?
On the other hand if you think they were right to stage a revolution you are accepting lot of Marx, and in facts even some Lenin.

“Marx was an admirer of the Abraham Lincoln of 1863 and the Radical Republicans and said so in print.”

I see that it was OK for Marx to be very confident about what needed to be done and very wrong, because he was really a pretty nice guy who you’d like to have a beer with.

And no, people who still follow some kind of Marxian tradition aren’t complicit in Stalinism. They’re just not very concerned with being wrong, evidently, like most followers of musty traditions. It’s when people start the “Did you think about how the world must have looked to Lenin and the revolutionaries? It’s too bad that they didn’t know what we know now, or they”d have known that mass murder is wrong” that they get more annoying.

Straw men of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but Rich Puchalsky’s withering contempt…

How about — providing them with a license, an excuse, a rationalization?

Take your pick.

Just some footnotes:

Martin Bento’s claims about “class warfare” have no Marxian source. The term was “Klassenkampf”. “Class warfare” was an American right-wing coinage to discredit Marx, (though supposedly, according the the American right wing, it doesn’t and can’t exist, except for anything opposed to their agenda).

Rich Pulchalsky’s take in blaming Marx for Stalin is on a par with blaming Nietsche for Hitler. Yes, ideas have implications and consequences, but not nearly to such an extent, nor in any such direct and linear fashion. They are just as much entangled in history and its material conflicts as anything else, and it doesn’t follow that complex thinkers are somehow responsible for gross simplifications and distortions.

Random Lurker: the Ukraine, together with the Mississippi valley and the Argentine pampas, is one of the most naturally fertile agricultural areas in the world. Their exploitation, rather than there lack of fertility, might have played a role in the backwardness of the Russian economy.

Yes, the record of the last century should establish a strong presumption in favor of social democracy. Market liberalism, classical and neo-, is socially destructive. The record of Leninism and its progeny, from Russia to Benin, is simply dire. But with the social democratic project in decades-long retreat, we ought to reconsider its conditions of possibility. If accommodation between capital and labor is no longer viable, we need to chart a path out of capitalism. Moralistic, anti-intellectual dismissal of the most powerful framework for this analysis — the Marxian tradition — is not helpful. We will need to re-examine past attempts to overcome capital to see what went wrong and how we can do better, not to platitudinize.

@ 126

“Capital,” in and of itself, understood to mean the pulling of resources both human and material, is not necessarily detrimental insofar as the human prospect is concerned. What matters is who controls it and to what uses/purposes it is being put.

And what exactly is the “social democracy” you speak of? How distinct is it from the kinds of things you’re contrasting it with? You fail to define it.

@john c. halasz
“the Ukraine, together with the Mississippi valley and the Argentine pampas, is one of the most naturally fertile agricultural areas in the world.”
I stand corrected. However I don’t think this changes substantially my point (food shortages were real).

(Rich, I apologize in advance for this, but you’ve brought it on yourself.)
A sudden insight into possible explanation for Rich’s obsessive ranting and raving blaming all the world’s ills on the lingering influence of Marx’s 19th century writings: When I compared Rich’s behavior to that of David Horowitz in an up-thread comment, I may have been onto something. Rich may be a former orthodox Marxist who was jilted by a comrade lover because of an dispute over the correct interpretation of some part of the Canon. Most of you have probably never heard of Robert Leiken. He was a leader in one of the sectarian Marxist organizations in 1970s Boston, who, by the late 1980s (after a brief period of relative sanity in the mid-1980s), had become the leading Neo-Con authority on Nicaragua and a little later one of the top people at something called (approximately) the Nixon Center (still there for all I know). In the mid-1980s, I met his ex-lover from his sectarian days, who told me that he had left her over her refusal to give up her disagreement with some aspect of his “line of struggle” of the time. Unlike Rich, this experience helped her get back to relative Lefty sanity (such as it is in any of our cases).

132:Nah, Rich is an anarchist.

Marxists and anarchists have history that goes back a lot further than the 1970s.

Of course, the history of anarchism, both in practice and theory, has its share of violence, callousness, and utilitarianism. I simply don’t care enough to speculate on Puchalsky’s particular variety of anarchist rage against Marxism.

And this contemptuous dismissal is also part of the history, and a source of the rage.

The only problem I can see with that Bob is we live in a world where those you’re going up against are armed with top of the range automatic weapons, so how effective do you think your pitchfork and torch are going to be?

William Timberman 04.03.13 at 3:46 pm @ 137
… As BW says above, @ 127, it would help if we — some we or other — could admit the seriousness and difficulty of the social democratic enterprise and just learn to do it right. …

If it’s possible to do it right, which I doubt, since social democracy is a form of the capitalist state.

Social democracy has the same problem as anarchism – too difficult to defend over a long period of time. You would have to assume a permanent victory of left-wing politics, which…I dunno…seems unlikely.

William, good point. The utopia of the Chicago school types is Ayn Rand’s – a mighty vicious utopia, but I think that’s what it is. Since people differ in what they want, what constitutes “utopia” will always be subjective. But the psychological motivation for Randianism and Chicago school and ilk seems to be an apologia for extreme selfishness, which is hard to respect, and certainly Marx had better motives than that.

Nonetheless, in his effort to avoid being utopian, Marx did avoid thinking backwards from his objective, which, ironically, was a practical mistake. Utopian thinkers came up with the idea of the welfare state. Utopia never came about, but the welfare state did. And, unlike the various Marxist projects, it worked. The idea itself was never freighted with baggage about a general theory of history.

Random, Some of the countries of Eastern Europe had educational standards comparable to Western Europe before they went communist. But it was the same story. Havel writes about this; there was a formal government that was not on paper dictatorial, but was almost irrelevant because actual power rested in the party. That is why the leader of the Prague Spring was not Jiri Svoboda, the President of Czechoslovakia, but Alexander Dubcek, the head of the Communist Party (though they were allies anyway). Dubcek was really in charge.

John, so “Kampf” just means some sort of struggle, not anything one could call warfare in any sense? According to the language teaching site ego4u.com, “warfare” is translated as “Kampffuhrung”. Other sources, such as http://dict.tu-chemnitz.de, give that and “Kriegfuhrung” both. “Kampf” evidently covers all kinds of conflicts – it means fight, battle, or combat, as well as struggle, whereas “krieg” seems limited to war in a fairly narrow sense. Of course, “class warfare” in English does not refer to warfare in a narrow sense, but, even so, kampf seems often to cover war in a narrow sense too. http://dict.leo.org includes specific military terms, and krieg and kampf seem often interchangeable. “Biological warfare” can be either “biologischer Kampfstoff” or “biologische Kriegführung ”. “Electronic warfare” is “elektronische Kampfführung ”. Urban warfare is “der Häuserkampf ”. Some other terms have only krieg variants listed.

You’re trying to split hairs and failing.

WT @137: We shouldn’t allow ourselves to dream of shooting capitalists until we’ve tried taking a deep breath, pulling up our socks and admitting that we’ll be over before it is

Well, we can dream, can’t we … ?

Rich @131: The Marxists and Marxians completely wasted this century and destroyed the strength of the left

Substitute “Marxist-Leninists” for “Marxists and Marxians,” and you’re right.

And thankfully following 1989, the collapse of Communism and declining influence of Marxism-Leninism, the Left has been undergoing a powerful resurgence. Oh wait…

I’ve got a response to some stuck in moderation, so let me respond to a few more.

Bill, so you’re going to have a seance and give us Marx’s opinions from the grave? The problem is that there have been many such seances. Whose do I attend? Satre’s? Angela Davis’? Zizek’s? Barnes’? Althusser’s (his channeling of Marx welcomes Lenin and Gramsci both)? I don’t believe, and please correct me if I’m wrong, that anyone ever said that Rousseau would actually get giddy over Jew-roasting. The connection some draw between his thought and 20th century totalitarianism is much more inferential, and must be more modest in its claims. But we have a huge literature by generations of prominent intellectuals deeply versed in Marx’s thought identifying Lenin as his intellectual heir. You can’t just say that is obviously wrong; if it were obvious, they would have seen it.

Mao Cheng Ji 04.03.13 at 6:03 pm @145

I think you misread what I meant to say, Mao. Of course Ana’s definition is spot-on; consequently, social democracy (as practiced today, in present contexts) fails on both practical and theoretical grounds.

On the other hand, if we do accept the proposition that “the state is the source of all evil” as a major part of the anarchistic thesis, that part is theoretically sound. The practical difficulty is getting there.

William, to clarify, I think it would be highly strange, in English, to call “biological warfare” “biological struggle”, but derivatives of the word “kampf” are so used in German military jargon.

Geo, so it will a while to resurge powerfully but nevertheless since 1989 and the loss of all that Marxist-Leninist dead weight, the Western Left has been gaining strength?

Geo, not great just at the moment and I don’t think the last couple of decades have really been a success story. I blame Cuba.

154-156: Parts of the Left, and I by no means limit it to “the West”, I think have been doing very well indeed. The New Left, ascriptive, identity, post-modernist post-structuralist post-marxist…whatever you want to call it…the feminists, gender and LGBT theorists, environmentalists, anti-racists and anti-colonialists etc were in a sense liberated and energized by the collapse of the Communist alternative so that IMO the last twenty years have been as exciting for emancipatory theory and practice, including political movement, as 1875-1925 was. The giants of the stature of Weber and Freud may be harder to find, but that has as much to do with population increase and the diffusion of intellectual talent. We do live in an unparalleled age of intellectual brilliance and I am grateful for living to see it.

Unfortunately, its dialectical position means that it strengthens the reactionary forces and crises of capitalism, and we really don’t have the political scientists and economists to match the cultural and social, or empower or inspire the fights against neo-liberalism.

So, a green flash at sunset or those glorious 1920s (Taisho, Weimar) before the darkness. Most of us feel it coming. It’s going to be worse.

I’m rather surprised, disappointed would be a better term, that this thread, thus far, has been practically bereft of any references to the French postmodernist movement — since we’re on topic, sort of, as per #159 — in particular, the writings of Jean-François Lyotard or Jean-Luc Nancy, but I would also include Foucault as the primary mover and shaker, Umberto Eco, Derrida and Giorgio Agamben for good measure. And what about our own Judith Butler? Are all these people insufficiently leftist or utopian in their thinking and writings to deserve no honorable mention, not even a beep, from the American-styled intellectual who, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, proclaims himself or herself to represent the vanguard, the ultimate standard bearer. Talking about American exceptionalism, and of all things and places, from the men and women of ideas!

Perhaps we should revisit the writing of Fredric Jameson who, for all his Marxist bent, is coming to terms with the postmodern thinking and critique in earnest, and to the extent possible, reconcile both. All of us would be richer for the fact.

Am surely glad, David, that I’m not the lone voice in the wilderness.

One reference.

Thanks for bringing it up.

@165 , Random Lurker

Can you expand a bit on the “overproduction crisis”? In particular, how does it relate to the notion that capitalism requires real or manufactured scarcity in order to thrive? Do you mean, therefore, that our movers and shakers blundered? Also, if we proceed on the assumption that we’re all heading towards equalization of incomes and lifestyles in the near future — an undifferentiated mass of humanity in the economic sense — how do you see capitalism performing under those conditions (if it’s also axiomatic that the system requires exploitable differences for its continuing success)?

As to your #2 remark, don’t you think the capitalist threat from the West was a real one, insofar as the Soviets were concerned? In any event, that seems to be R. D. Wolff’s view, as per some of his lectures.

@167

I don’t know that I see any reason to believe that Stalin’s various purges and atrocities were related to anything other than his own amoral powerlust and dead-set determination to liquidate any and all challenges to his own authority.

Nicholas II killed a lot of people, but obviously not enough.

Slightly off topic (I’ve only finished the posts now) but I haven’t seen any mention of immigration in all of this; either what affect it might have on trying to implement certain Utopian aspirations (such as the UBI) or as a ‘realistic Utopia’ in its own right. Out of all the aspirations listed here, a move towards genuine liberal immigration policies between the North and South is both attainable (I argue) and will have pretty concrete benefits in tacking global inequality, increasing social mobility (primarily for those coming), and for the long term economic health of the receiving country. (For which the evidence is strong enough, after taking into consideration specific exceptions when immigration may negatively affect wages etc)
So, assuming no one here actually wants to create a Utopia where the wealthiest portion of the world are subsidised to follow their dreams while everyone else is shut out, and rejecting the nonsense of the Noah Smith faction (who want to use Western immigration policy to headhunt for Silicon Valley) how do we create an open borders Utopia, without p**sing everyone of?

Jeez Bill, that’s not much of a campaign slogan!

“In the wrong hands for the wrong ends . . .” I like that.

This has always been the cause.

Maybe the word utopia and its derivatives should not be used at all (except, of course, for sloganeering) since it seems to be so negatively value-loaded. After all, it means ‘nowhere land’, and its sting depends on the idea that the realization of whatever is utopian is impossible.

engels @177

I don’t want to get stuck on debates over how best to use specific words. Marx can certainly be properly described as a revolutionary. And in the historical moment at which he wrote, the term “utopian” was used in a very specific way to identify projects of social transformation that tried to build a perfect model of an alternative inside of the existing social world — intentional communities animated by moral convictions would be the quintessential form. Marx initially included worker cooperatives in his denunciation of little utopian experiments, but later came to see these as very useful ways of demonstrating that workers could run industry and thus worthy of support. He continued to argue that by themselves they would not be able to displace capitalism, but he did feel that they were potentially constitutive elements of an alternative.

In the context of current, 21st century discussions, the question is whether given the way the idea of utopia is used today one can reasonably talk about a utopian dimension to Marx’s revolutionary ambitions and his revolutionary theorizing (or anyone else’s ideas, of course). A completely non-utopian revolutionary would be a person who denounced the oppressions of the existing world, said that the institutions which embodied those oppressions had to be destroyed before anything could be done, but would not propose any features of the institutional design for an alternative. There would be no effort to even sketch the positive outlines of the alternative — the alternative would simply be the negation of the present: if private property is part of the problem, eliminate private property; if the market is part of the problem, get rid of the market. Marx often sounded like that, but sometimes he did provide important elements of a positive institutional design that would embody emancipatory principles, and when he did that he was expressing the utopian moment in his revolutionary perspective.

The reason why I use the expression “real utopia” rather than just “utopia” is to distinguish between the blueprint fantasy construction of an alternative and the task of systematically exploring the problem of viability of emancipatory alternatives. Marx certainly did not do that — he never systematically investigated the potential dilemmas and contradictions of human emancipation in the process of transcending capitalism. Probably it would have been impossible to do this in the mid-19th century, because good theorizing requires empirical observation of experiments and their failures and successes. He also, I think, because of the strength of the undercurrent of historical determinism in his theory of the demise of capitalism, probably didn’t feel that worrying about the institution-building problem in socialism was all that needed. After all, if the contradictions of capitalism and its immanent laws of motion meant that its destiny was its self-destruction (capitalism inevitably destroys its own conditions of existence), then perhaps it wasn’t such a problem to leave the theoretical elaboration of alternatives to the actual process of experimentation in institution-building that would come in the aftermath of capitalism.

So, for understandable historical reasons Marx never engaged in systematic real utopia analysis even if there was a utopian dimension to his revolutionary theory. But now, in the 21st century, we both have vastly more data than he did and we face a different social, economic and political environment for social transformation. I think now a real utopian analysis is indispensable. It is indispensable both because convincing people about the viability of alternatives is part of the process of mobilizing people to challenge the limits of possibility in the present, and second because we now know much more about the perils of efforts at massive social change that are inattentive to the problem of viability.

“A revolution happened on Marxian principles.”

No, no. Marx worked all his life in mass-membership, democratically organized working-class organizations, which competed for power through elections, strikes, boycotts, and other nonviolent means. He never said anything about the seizure of state power by a self-appointed vanguard party.

But more fundamentally, Marx didn’t have any principles — or at least any very definite or original ones — about achieving political power. He was a theorist and historian of capitalism.

Actually, a small semi-substantive note: in admittedly a different context from the one being discussed here, quite a few 20th-c. (and earlier) writers on international politics had their own go-rounds with the term “utopianism” because it came to have v. negative connotations of naivete, etc. (cf. Anarcissie @178). But it never completely disappeared, e.g. John Herz in the ’50s spoke of ‘utopian realism’ or ‘realist utopianism’ (in his Political Realism and Political Idealism). I don’t think the word itself is a huge problem, esp. as it will usually be hitched to a mollifying adjective like “real,” “realistic,” “feasible,” etc.

Yes, really, Rich, at least according to Richard Hunt’s The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, on which I’m basing myself. Marx’s association with the Communist League was brief (the organization itself was pretty short-lived) and at least partly devoted to persuading it to be less conspiratorial and secretive. His other political affiliations were with mass working-class organizations. But really, he wasn’t a Leninist: when some Russian radicals wrote him late in life to ask if maybe he would make an exception to his insistence that only technologically advanced societies with a large and well-organized working class had the necessary conditions for a socialist revolution, he wrote back and said, “Well, maybe,” so as (I suspect) not to discourage them.

In any case, he spent most of his time in the British Museum, avoiding creditors, and scrounging money from Engels. He was a journalist at first, later a historian and (anti-)economic theorist. Political strategizing or theorizing were really not his brief. “Marxism” is primarily a critique of neoclassical economics, and secondarily a theory of history. Whether Marx was an authoritarian politically doesn’t matter much, if one can’t derive authoritarianism from those of his ideas that have some claim to originality and continuing relevance.

“Whether Marx was an authoritarian politically doesn’t matter much, if one can’t derive authoritarianism from those of his ideas that have some claim to originality and continuing relevance.”

QFT

If anything, if what we are saying is the decay of global resources and a long (possibly permanent) stasis where wealth production is dramatically curtailed, we should be MORE concerned about “class warfare” and an equitable distribution of wealth, not less. To not see that is just insane to me.

So what do we do about immigration..we either go with it or we don’t. I understand there’s a train of thought on the left ( Sheri Berman being the most convincing, and subtle, example) where we say no..but the other “extreme” (my own view, where the borders open, and the ‘utopias’ envisioned here fall apart) is very difficult to argue against….. But this can’t exist (more than likely)with the utopias envisioned here. (In the short/medium term)

Actually, I apologise for the above, bursting in here and insisting people talk about a personal hobby horse. Awful behaviour on my part!

@194

” It’s just that for Marx, at least in his ‘Critique of the Gotha Program’ mode (which was a critique of Lassalle’s program for the German socialists), distributional questions were not where the emphasis shd be placed.”

Isn’t it because, according to Marx, redistribution would take care of itself, as one of the byproducts of successful resolution of the class struggle? And so, to be concerned with redistribution would be like putting a cart before the horse, in addition to depriving the class struggle from its much needed impetus — surely a liberals’ concern rather than that of a true revolutionary.

Marx did indeed despise patchwork solutions, and was often over the top in his denunciations of them. When we see these days how easily social democratic income redistributions can be gutted, though, we might cut him some slack him on that score. Don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good makes at least some sense when argued sincerely, but these days — in the U.S., at least — bad faith expressions of it are the rule, and serve largely to allow the usual suspects to keep what they’ve already managed to steal.

rf@191

So what do we do about immigration..we either go with it or we don’t.

This presupposes that utopia will emerge in the West, that it will need extra labor to grow, grow, grow, and that poor communities elsewhere will continue to be devastated by free trade agreements, agricultural subsidies in rich countries, and Condor-like Plans. How then is utopia any different from neoliberalism? I really do not see why utopia has a better chance in LA than in Tegucigalpa.

“How then is utopia any different from neoliberalism? ”

I guess it’s not

as I said, win win

Some people emigrate because they fall in love with a foreigner or specialize in an area that does not exist in their country, but these are few. I do not see why mass migration is a relevant feature in utopia. Mass migrations are the product of tragedy and a community that requires life to be hell in other parts of the world for it to grow and survive is on its way to becoming a parasite, not a utopia.

I dont think emigration is a particularly positive reality, and in an ideal world it would be rare, to the point of non exsistent (and no one would be forced into it)..but any ‘realistic Utopia’ does have to deal with it

@199
I think that trying to find the answer to our problems in Marx follows the tradition of seeking individual salvation through Protestant readings of the Bible and national greatness through strict adherence to the US constitution.

Only two or three people — at most — on the latter part of this thread could be read as suggesting that “the answer to our problems” is in Marx. Most of the argument has been over a different question, namely whether there is anything worthwhile in Marx and, if so, what that is. Erik Olin Wright was clear about this a little bit upthread when he wrote of Marx:

… sometimes [i.e., occasionally, as I read it] he did provide important elements of a positive institutional design that would embody emancipatory principles, and when he did that he was expressing the utopian moment in his revolutionary perspective.

You can agree or disagree with that, but it’s not the same as saying “the answer to our problems” is in Marx.

I don’t think a welfare state is financed by redistribution from the rich to the poor. It’s financed by redistributing from the middle-class to the poor, while the rich keep getting richer.

There were different 20th-c welfare states w/ different arrangements — some, eg in Scandinavia, did do, I think, some rich-to-poor redist. Have the v. wealthy always tried to minimize their tax burden? Well, most have tried to do that most of the time I imagine, but there are exceptions.

I think I’m going to have to bug out of this thread, as (1) not a Marx scholar, (2) not a scholar of the welfare state, and (3) someone who, speaking of dist. and redist., has to do his taxes.

Apologies for mostly not having time for the give and take of the thread. I’ll get to these as soon as I can. For now:

Geo,

To start with a minor point, this is from the preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto:

“The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?
The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development. ”

This is not a private letter, this is something Marx and Engels published, near the end of Marx’s life. I don’t think we should have to save intellectuals from their own words by stipulating that they are insincere. They did not think Russia could maintain it on their own – so they did not endorse “socialism in one country” – but they did think Russia could lead.

At the end of his life, in 1895, Engels wrote a new introduction to Class Struggles in France, where he reflects on what he and Marx were saying in that period and later, and how it looks in light of the contemporary situation. Regarding their calls for rebellion, he writes:

“But history has shown us too to have been wrong, has revealed our point of view at that time as an illusion. It has done even more; it has not merely dispelled the erroneous notions we then held; it has also completely transformed the conditions under which the proletariat has to fight. The mode of struggle of 1848 is today obsolete in every respect, and this is a point which deserves closer examination on the present occasion. ”

In the course of that closer examination, he outlines that the violent rebellions of the 19th century were failures, but that social democracy in Germany was succeeding. This was, by his own admission, not what he expected. He and Marx did advocate suffrage as a tactic to advance working class interests, indeed a very important one in the context of the mid 19th century – suffrage represented progress over aristocratic rule and the other alternatives – but they did not expect much from it. He acknowledges, unlike some in this thread, that universal suffrage did exist in Europe when they were writing – at the least, in France, Spain, and Switzerland. But the results had not been encouraging for working-class interests. In Germany, by 1895, suffrage was creating gains for the working class that Engels regarded as real. This is not something that follows logically from Marxist theory, which is why it surprised them, but, to his credit, Engels was willing to see what was in front of his face.

Note this is not an endorsement of democracy as such – it is strictly provisional. Let circumstances change again, and Engels will oppose democracy. How could it be otherwise? To simply endorse democracy as “good” without reference to underlying conditions would be idealism. Democracy is an idea, and ideas have to be evaluated by how they function with regards to specific conditions, specifically class interests. And Engels acknowledges that democracy does not always serve the interest of the working class. Supporting democracy only when you like the results is not a commitment to democracy.

So when Lenin, Stalin, Mao, et al faced conditions much different than what Engels was talking about, was it necessary from a Marxist standpoint for them to embrace democracy? No, it wasn’t, which is why so many Marxist intellectuals were so untroubled by the fact they didn’t. And this applies as well to other ideas like human rights. Marx’s conception of materialism makes support of such ideals contingent on class interest. As I said, his writing does not imply the gulag, but neither does it prohibit it. He did advocate violence, after all, and in service of class interest, not necessarily individual guilt, and neither his writing nor the logic of his thought define some boundary beyond which violence may not pass. And the “revolution”, in the sense of the seizure of state power by the proletariat, doesn’t change this because it does not necessarily mean that classes are abolished and all social relations sufficiently transformed immediately; it is a stage.

Finally, what good has Marxism done?

The Marxists of the West, who never faced the temptations of power and who have finally wearied of apologizing for nightmare, seek to rule the evils done in the name of Marx out of bounds. It’s no-true-Marxist time. I don’t buy it, but let’s grant it for the sake of argument.

What stands on the good side of Marx’s ledger?

European Social Democracy took on some of his class analysis, but was ultimately the kind of reformist project he dismissed. The New Deal even more so.

It has been more than a century and a half since the publication of the Manifesto, and more has been invested in Marxism than any other political philosophy – or philosphy of any kind – in the modern world. Think of all the university faculties, the parties and other organizations, all the intellectual and other resources that have been poured into this.

For what?

One branch of intellectual Marxism has gone into detailed critique of culture and discourse as modes of power. This is Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, postmodern theory (not all postmodern theorists call themselves Marxist, but Marxian thought suffuses the field. Post-Marxist may be correct; if not Marxist per se, the field would not be there without him). To all this, after all this time, let’s address Marx’s own question “What is to be done?” Develop a counter-hegemonic discourse? Seriously? The ocean is spilling into my living room, and I’m supposed to be concerned with counter-hegemonic discourse? This branch of Marxism has robbed it of what could have been one of its virtues: its emphasis on practical action and concrete change (Gramsci was heavily involved in practical politics, of course, but he does not represent the contemporary state of this tradition). Of course, the theorists are all in favor of that stuff. They just don’t believe it is possible, at least not unless a long list of unlikely prerequisites are met, and they still resist specifying it. Instead they provide endless reams of critique and theory.

The left does not need more theory, so much as it needs vision. It needs an idea of what it wants concrete enough to be imagined. Then this vision can act as a guide to action. You can tell whether you are approaching it, because you know what it looks like.

Look at the examples Wright cites: Wikipedia, a collaborative effort born of the free-wheeling culture of the internet; Participatory budgeting, simply taking direct democracy seriously and implementing it; Mondragon, a syndicalist outfit set up by a priest decades ago. The last has some connection to Marxist concerns, as it does change the relations of production of an industrial enterprise, but is the kind of solution he disdained, save, perhaps, as proof of concept for worker control. The other two do not require his theory at all. None of this requires comprehensive philosophies, or reams of analysis. None was so difficult as to require revolution. Once you abandon the Marxist prerequisites, positive change becomes much easier.

So here we are again, looking at imaginative solutions to particular social problems, and to design of ideal societies, to see what guidance they may offer us for improving our world. Isn’t this where we were before people started listening to Marx in the first place?

@ 215

I had no idea that a Mediterranean mindset was, by definition, a positivist one.

Re: its process is unfolding in several countries, including VENEZUELA!

Yup.

Of course, twenty-first socialism doesn’t seem likely to appeal to wussified western liberals like Mr. Martin Bento. I don’t have time to scroll through his paragraphs and paragraphs of verbiage, but it’s fairly obvious he likes ‘liberal democracy’ more than he likes socialism. When capitalism eventually does collapse, I doubt people will have much time for his pious natterings: they’re going to want a government that can ration goods and plan how to get out of the peak-oil mess, and one that can meet any resistance (including by the aforesaid wussified liberals) with an iron fist.

Oh, and Hector, Venezuela is not a good alternative to the current situation. While Chavez has succeeded in improving the well-being of the poor to some degree, his government has become increasingly authoritarian. His government has harassed opposition politicians, closed down much of the opposition media, and jailed judges who issued rulings he didn’t like. In short, the Venezuelan government has acted in a very high-handed and power-hungry matter. This is not to say the opposition are spotless champions of democracy (they aren’t), or that they haven’t been guilty of similar anti-democratic behavior, (an attempted coup being the most dramatic example). But nonetheless, the civil rights of the opposition are being violated. You have expressed your disdain for democracy, and have openly said that the opposition shouldn’t have any rights, so naturally this doesn’t bother you. But I’m not willing to ignore this kind of thing just because it comes from a government that spouts leftist rhetoric. If you believe the government has the right to go after it’s political opponents, than nothing is stopping it from going after you if it decides you’re “counterrevolutionary”.

Furthermore, Chavez is not actually a good manager. Crime and inflation have both increased dramatically under his watch. Shortages of various goods and foodstuffs are chronic. Blackouts occur very frequently and the infrastructure of Venezuela is falling apart. There have been numerous examples of governmental incompetence and corruption. Again, this is not to say that the oppositon is much better, or that all problems in Venezuela are the fault of the government. But it does suggest that the Venezuelan model is not the best one to follow.

If Venezuela is the only alternative to the current neoliberal capitalist order, than we’re fucked.

JB,

Your ignorance about Venezuelan food production is pretty impressive. The shortages are because people are *consuming* substantially more, mostly because poor people had more access to jobs, cash transfers and subsidized food through government markets. Production of most staple foods increased or held steady under Chavez (and this is, mind you, simultaneous with large-scale land redistribution and reorganization of the agricultural sector, which might have been expected to depress production).

As for Chavez politicial opponents, no, you’re quite right, I don’t give a d*mn about them and their so-called ‘civil rights’. I want them to sit down, shut up, and do what they’re told, and if a bit of rough treatment/intimidation gets them to do that, then so much the better.

What goes along with the no true scotsman “anything bad is by definition not Marxian” bit? Defining everything else as a single alternative, the “neoliberal world order”. Not to particularly defend Venezuela, but the second of these things removes all variability of place, culture, and government. I remember asking people who liked this kind of thought whether China was part of the neoliberal wold order. Yes, I was told, because they were state capitalist, they functioned within the system, etc. If an officially Communist country, a major world power, can’t be anything but neoliberal, then maybe the problem is with the categorizers.

I won’t repeat Anarcissie’s comment that after all, to an anarchist a social democracy is another capitalist state, because she’s already written it and because in this context it only contributes to the false dichotomy being set up. But the rhetorical trope by which redistribution doesn’t matter because it can always be taken away deserves a closer look. If — as Marxians have said since the New Deal — redistribution is a trick intended to forestall a revolution, then you can’t simultaneously complain that it both is and isn’t effective. If it gets taken away, immiseration increases and the pressure for a revolution returns. But for this reason, a stable system never does take it away past a certain point. And that is the point well above the level at which a revolution — which after all are inescapably violent and kill people — would be better. It’s always possible that the right wing in some country will be particularly inept. But in general it looks like Marx was wrong about this too.

At this point I think the dichotomy reverses. The only alternative that Marxism offers is worse than the existing state of affairs — a “heighten the contradictions” hope that things will get worse and people will have to kill and be killed in large numbers, after which of course the practiced users of violence will control the aftermath. Neoliberalism is better than that. But it’s not actually the only alternative.

RP 224. “Neoliberalism is better than that.”

Neoliberalism practices plenty of violence, just not against you.

Anyhow, it just doesn’t mean anything, this whole thing about what’s ‘better’ and what’s ‘worse’, in this context. I usually prefer sun to rain, but it rains. Winter comes. Life goes on, evolution does not stop. Appeasement schemes (the “redistribution”, Marie Antoinette’s charities) work, till they don’t.

Briefly, I think that your points 2) and 3) are not specifically Marxist any more, and no longer best addressed by Marxism if they ever were. Your point 1)

“1 – There is a conflict of interest [struggle] between classes: owner and workers.”

Is, I think, the central current delusion of the left. You see it as far back as Gramsci, say — since Bill Barnes thinks not enough attention has been paid to him — when he was wondering why so many of the workers of Turin were on the right. Gramsci decided that there must be a huge voting bloc of shopkeepers and foremen and clerks. That excuse-making has been a feature of the left ever since, from “false consciousness” on the Marxian side to “what’s the matter with Kansas” tropes for the left-liberals, anything to not admit that some workers are not merely fooled by right-wing propaganda and superstructure but often have their core interests — such as W.E.B. DuBois’ “psychic wages of racism” — better served by the right. No contemporary right wing party could survive without a majority of its committed members being workers, whether you use “worker” in its cultural sense or in its Marxian “wage laborers” sense. But the left has to deny these people any sense of agency or self-commitment to the wrong cause.

How many people here are workers? Yes, we’re “left intellectuals”, and have to condescendingly speak for them instead of for ourselves. How many left-right divisions in contemporary politics really line up along an owner/worker clash? There was one recent attempt to align against the plutocrats, the Occupy movement, and in my experience of Occupy the people who I saw were no more “workers” than the people at any left demonstration in the U.S.

Re: That excuse-making has been a feature of the left ever since, from “false consciousness” on the Marxian side to “what’s the matter with Kansas” tropes for the left-liberals, anything to not admit that some workers are not merely fooled by right-wing propaganda and superstructure but often have their core interests — such as W.E.B. DuBois’ “psychic wages of racism” — better served by the right.

Uh, yes, people are often deluded about what’s really good for them, and need other people to make better decisions for them. I don’t see this as particularly controversial. False consciousness is a real thing.

Maybe a working-class voter thinks the right wing party serves their interests, by, for example, keeping abortion illegal, and maybe in some places and times they’re right. They’d be even better served, however, by a party that combined protection of the unborn with left-wing economics.

“About the “illusion of the left”, this would be true for any movement: for example feminists have to think that they work for the interest of women even if not all women are feminist”

No, they actually don’t. Feminists, for example, can work in the interest of all people, because that’s the kind of society that they want to live in and they think that everyone would be better off in a feminist society. “Feminists work for the interest of women” is a kind of essentialism that sees a female interest and a male interest and a necessary conflict between them.

Similarly, it’s possible to observe that there’s a clash between the plutocrats and everyone else — in fact, between two visions of society — without defining some essential quality that the people who aren’t plutocrats must have. All those contortions to turn a librarian with a media studies degree into a worker, so that he can properly be on the left.

“Would it not be the height of false consciousness, Rich, for a worker to think he’s not a worker but a little capitalist?”

I don’t think that many right-wing workers do. I think that they see themselves as participants in a hierarchical order that puts them comfortably above the bottom, in which the bottom is defined as another race, or as women, or gays, or foreigners, or just nonworking people. And I don’t think that consciousness is very false at all. If they can create that society, does that realistically give them better benefits than whatever economic support the left can scrape up? It’s an evil choice for them to choose that, but many do.

And I don’t think that consciousness is very false at all. If they can create that society, does that realistically give them better benefits

No, it doesn’t. On this, see Erik Olin Wright:

http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/ContemporaryAmericanSociety/Chapter%2014%20–%20Racial%20inequality–Norton%20August.pdf

‘Racism harms disadvantaged groups within the white population in two principle ways. First, racism has repeatedly divided popular social and political movements, undermining their capacity to challenge prevailing forms of power and inequality. … The second way that racism has negatively affected the interests of less advantaged segments of the white population is through the ways it has undermined universalistic aspects of the welfare state.’

Rich @ 228

You and I actually are close to agreement on some of what you say here. But many of the Left, at various times and places, have been workers, in a variety of senses — peasants, skilled and semi-skilled and unskilled factory workers, petty bourgeois who worked with their hands as much as their brains — take a look at Eric Wolf’s Peasant Wars of the 20th Century or lots of other stuff — the Black folks I worked with in Alabama in 1965 were mostly workers in some such sense, as were many of the revolutionaries I met during my 20 years of work in Nicaragua and El salvador – but of course, so were many of the non and counter-revolutionaries, and as you say, Left theorists have not done a good job of explaining that. But Gramsci actually provides some of the best raw materials for approaching this subject. Gramsci’s theory is NOT A THEORY OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS. That’s not the meaning of hegemony, except in the minds of vulgar Marxists. Jim Scott’s critique of the idea of false consciousness in his great book Weapons of the Weak is actually truer to the real/best Gramsci than are the vulgar Marxist interpretations.

“how are you going to convince people that a guaranteed spot a few steps up the ladder is better than trying to take the ladder down?”

Should be “*isn’t* better” in that sentence above. Wrote too quickly.

I agree that I should probably read more Gramsci.

geo,

Can you wall off Marx’s theory of capitalism from his theory of history? Or his dialectical materialist premises? I think he is too systematic for that. And a theory of capitalism can, and Marx’s does, suggest what is and is not possible with regard to it. This may not cause a particular strategy to logically follow, but it is likely to rule some out – to cause them to not logically follow.

Bill, I stated pretty clearly the yardstick by which I was measuring Western Intellectual Marxism, and it was Marx’s own question: what is to be done? If the point is not to interpret the world, but to change it, as Marx said, and the ultimate fruit of Marxism is just interpretations of Capitalism, then Marxism is pointless by Marx’s own criterion.

And what is Wright looking at? Mondragon is more or less syndicalism, an idea that was in the air in the 19th century, but has not been much developed: compared to Marxism, both the theoretical literature and the practical experiments have been miniscule. Marxism sucked all the air out of the left’s room. Where would such projects be if one tenth of the intellectual and tangible resources that have gone into Marxism went into them? Likewise, localized direct democracy, which is what participatory budgeting is. Wikipedia is something new, as it relies on new technology. But what has Marxism to say about it (obviously not Marx himself, but anyone drawing on his ideas now)? What does Marxism tell us is to be done regarding it? Yes, there is a huge body of Marxist analysis, but the hopeful signs Wright points to do not rely on it. If one leaves aside the regimes that no one now wants to defend, it doesn’t seem like anything has some of it at all but interpretations, which Marx said were not the point. Yet the responses to what I said have defended Marxism on the strength of its interpretations.

Sorry Rich but , personal attack aside (by the way I don’t think that only workers can be on the left), how is this that librarians are not workers?
In a service economy, most workers work in services, included libraries.
If you think that only blue collars are workers, I think your definition is a bit nonsensical.

@238, Bill Barnes

Thanks for making a reference to Jim Scott. He’s on my reading list as of now.

Heilbroner is all too predictable, don’t you think? How different is the book you mention from the Inquiry?

You may be right, Roger. But I like predictable.

@238

The following is an insightful reference to Jim Scott’s thought and works:

“James Scott on Agriculture as Politics, the Dangers of Standardization and Not Being Governed,” an interview on Theory Talks.

I dunno. All this talk about librarians and factory workers, and whether they are left or right or racist; I don’t think it has much to do with abstract concepts of ‘classes’ and ‘class struggle’. These are tools for analyzing socioeconomic systems, not individuals. Polar bears might have been eating, in the last 20 years, mostly garbage produced by humans, but that doesn’t invalidate the idea of natural selection. For individuals, what they feel and why, their ego, super-ego, and the third thing, read Zizek.

I actually defined myself as “working class” in response to the fact that you implied that nobody here was a worker.

My seniority accrued from forklift-driving means I get more vacation as an office-dweller. In crossing that divide I remained a shop steward. Baffling.

1. The point of [cancer research] is to [cure cancer].
2. Cancer has not been cured.
THEREFORE
3. Cancer research is / has been a waste of time.

Hmmm

Marx’s own question: what is to be done?

Oh dear.

Suggested reading on Gramsci, beyond his Prison Notebooks (see Hoare & Smith, eds, Selections from the Prison Notebooks) —

Back when I was keeping up with the secondary literature, circa early 1980s, the most stimulating single piece was Perry Anderson’s “The Antimonies of Antonio Gransci,” New Left Review, #100, 1976-77. Erik Wright recommends pp 142-59 in Cohen & Arato’s Civil Society and Political Theory (a book so huge that its always intimidated me, so I haven’t read it – but will read those pages now). Here’s the only writing of my own on Gramsci that I can find an electronic copy of:

Bill Barnes on GRAMSCI — Draft based on lecture notes of 1979-1984.
Left theorists have used Gramsci to explain the integration and acquiescence of “lower classes” generally and in the abstract. This misses the most interesting elements of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, which are more historically specific.
Gramsci is trying to explain the success of bourgeois liberalism (as a national political movement or regime) in industrializing Europe, how that success is based on including various middle sectors in a hegemonic alliance built up through ideological and political leadership within civil society. Eventually there must be a historical struggle between the bourgeoisie and the workers’ movement to determine the evolution of the views of traditional and modern middle strata (including skilled workers) as to how the bourgeois order/liberalism can be and should be reformulated so as to produce realization of its higher ideals.
In many of his most important texts, Gramsci is not talking about the hegemony or reproduction of capitalism in the abstract, but rather comparing more successful and less successful nationalist and reformist elaborations and maturations of capitalism in different regions of Europe (and also comparing the “Jacobin” phase of more successful cases with a later phase of “passive revolution”). Discussions of Gramsci often ignore his emphasis on different cases/stages in the development of capitalism in the West, and on corresponding differences/changes in the character of bourgeois hegemony and the character of popular “consent.” For Gramsci, hegemony is never perfect, never static, never achieved once and for all; it is a historical phenomenon, always being reproduced and reformulated through political struggle.
It is necessary to avoid conflating the rise of capitalism and its national elaboration (its initial establishment of some hegemony), with the later reproduction (and ensuing decline) of an established capitalist order. It is also necessary to avoid conflating relatively underdeveloped capitalism (Italy) with Russia (the extreme case of stunted bourgeoisie and stunted civil society). Gramsci is most stimulating not in contrasting Russia and the West, but in contrasting France and Italy — contrasting the French Jacobin experience followed by passive revolution with the Italian absence of a Jacobin phase, the failure of the Action party, the attempt at elaboration of capitalism through passive revolution without benefit of a preceding Jacobin phase on which to build. Gramsci is also suggestive on the subject of what changes as the Jacobin heritage and passive revolution are played out — what it means for bourgeois hegemony to be past its peak and in decline, the kind of terrain that that constitutes for the proletariat’s war of position, the similarities and differences between this and a case where the bourgeoisie (while more developed than in Russia) did not have an early Jacobin peak and is very late in trying to rise above (or fully realize) passive revolution and mount a full-scale war of position of its own (Croce’s project).
Bearing in mind that Gramsci’s own interests were really more historically specific, and that he was substantially (but ambivalently) Leninist, we can derive a non-Leninist reading of Gramsci’s political theory along the following schematic lines:
If a bourgeoisie is to mature as a class and rise to national power (rather than remaining fragmented among short-sighted factions or regional groupings, or remaining timid, subordinated, hamstrung within an absolutist regime), it must develop the ideological and political ability, will, and organization to mount a revolutionary war of position — a war for more extensive beachheads within civil society from which troops (intellectuals) can be enlisted, educated, organized, and deployed. A bourgeoisie must come under the leadership of factions (and organic intellectuals) ready, willing, and able to invest their economic resources in such an effort, ready to sacrifice short-term economistic interests for the sake of building the civil and political infrastructure of a bourgeois national society — an infrastructure that seeks to appeal to and incorporate the middle and petty bourgeois classes (old and new) generally.

It is developing the political ability and will to bring old middle class factions, petty bourgeois factions, aristocratic factions to enlist under your leadership that is key; learning how to broaden your cultural and political program so as to divide and out-flank opponents and build/maintain leadership over increasing numbers of “traditional intellectuals” attached to other groups. This means bringing those intellectuals to buy into your interpretation of what kind of reformulation of the existing order constitutes progress, bringing them to forego developing ideas of their own in this regard, bringing them to settle automatically for plugging narrow, economistic conceptions of their group interest into your overall framework, bringing them to settle for the opportunity to advocate such interests within your program.
Gramsci’s greatest contribution is his analysis of what makes for the successful elaboration and hegemony of capitalism — the way such achievement is dependent on the mobilization, national integration, and modernizing education of petty bourgeois ambition and idealism — the consolidation of bourgeois revolution as a two-way education through which localistic petty bourgeoisie (very broadly defined) steeped in folklore become a somewhat rationalistic national citizenry (and recruiting ground for staff for civil society and the state), and the bourgeoisie learns to be a national leadership class and to focus its political efforts on cementing and sustaining hegemony over such petty bourgeoisie. Gramsci presents France’s Jacobin experience as genuine bourgeois state-building, the achievement of great mobilization and incorporation of popular energies in the bourgeois revolution, and the creation of authentic national leadership within the bourgeois revolution.
Gramsci’s theory is not really a theory of either false consciousness or consensus. It is rather a theory of cooptation and manipulation through constant political and ideological activity within civil society. The greater and more sustained a dominant group’s success in this political and ideological struggle, the more that group’s political culture/ideology penetrates, pervades, remakes the wider political culture and “common sense” (sense of what is possible and realistic). But this is never an absolute or static accomplishment. Many people have misunderstood hegemony to indicate an achieved, stable determination of wider political culture and popular mentality. This is never the case for Gramsci (at least prior to the full maturation of socialism). There is no full normative integration, no homeostatic equilibrium, and this sets Gramsci off decisively from Parsons and liberal functionalism.
In fact, Gramsci believes that it is highly unusual for a bourgeoisie to be fully successful in penetrating, remaking, and elaborating civil society to the point of reaching the stage of generating the “state in the larger sense,” and full hegemony, even temporarily. This can happen only where the bourgeoisie enjoys a period of leading a genuine national, popular democratic revolution — an experience that forcefully teaches a bourgeoisie the importance of positive forms of popular mobilization and cooptation, and which leaves a lasting legacy of support for that bourgeoisie within popular culture. A key question for Gramsci is, has the bourgeoisie had this kind of experience and made successful use of it — really internalized its lessons, captured the traditional intellectuals of the petty bourgeoisie and old middle classes and set them to work elaborating bourgeois civil institutions and culture — before it faces the self-organization of the proletariat? If so, then the working class movement has a long, hard war of position ahead of it (even if classic economic crises continue). But even here (and more so where the bourgeoisie is less successful), civil society retains a certain autonomy and complexity, remains full of less than fully coopted traditional intellectuals and emerging socialist intellectuals, and becomes a terrain on which the bourgeoisie and the rising socialist movement compete for influence over the conceptualization of justice and progress — over the conceptualization of how the liberal capitalist order should be reformulated in order to realize its higher ideals and potentialities. No bourgeoisie can fully control/shape the cultural sphere — particularly given the uneven development of the world and the consequent intrusion of cultural, ideological, political influences from other societies.
Hegemony does not entail the complete subordination of all non-ruling groups. “Consent” does not mean acceptance of abject powerlessness or servile loyalty to the dominant order. In fact heterodox initiatives “from below,” inspired by petty bourgeois radical ambitions and ideals, are constantly reemerging within liberal capitalism. It is precisely the continuing effective cooptation, incorporation, and containment of these that provides advanced capitalism’s creative energy and defines hegemony — it is precisely the capacity for such “positive cooptation” that separates the more fully realized (more positive, less repressive) liberal hegemony from the less fully realized (more negative, repressive). And, for Gramsci, it is precisely (what he takes to be) the inevitable shift of the bourgeoisie toward increasingly negative and repressive approaches to maintaining its hold over popular petty bourgeois ambition and idealism, and the inevitable rise of the workers movement’s capacity to attract, coopt, incorporate petty bourgeois radicalism that dooms capitalism. The proletariat grows into a class on its way to hegemony not only through its struggle with the bourgeoisie, but also, like the bourgeoisie, through its struggle to mobilize, coopt, and incorporate petty bourgeois ambition and idealism through a two-way political education.
Gramscian hegemony involves not just one coherent and homogeneous ideology, but a complex full of contradiction and ambiguity in which the views of dominant groups decisively limit and organize other views and their mutual articulation. The struggle to sustain/reformulate the existing hegemonic constellation takes the form of struggle to reopen these limits and ways of articulating and combining, to reopen the “educational experience” of the past, to allow the subordinated elements of the hegemonic complex to understand their own potentials to develop differently and combine differently, against and beyond the dominant themes — to transcend the versions of themselves that are possible within the existing hegemony.
Gramsci is unacceptably teleological and goes much too far in presenting classes as historical and political subjects, but he provides the best available approach to transcending the choice between seeing liberalism as progress and rationality incarnate, and seeing liberalism as nothing but domination. He provides the beginnings of a theory of the development and importance of ideals within liberalism — emphasizing that the capacity to generate galvanizing ideals, to inspire “troops” with ideals, is essential to the struggle for hegemony, and automatically raises the problem of subsequent disappointment in the face of sustained failure to realize those ideals. He focuses our attention on the tremendous elaboration of civil society, the state, “intellectuals” and mental labor as a fundamental aspect of modern capitalism — to some degree willy nilly, autonomous to varying degrees in different times and places, rendering intellectuals and professionals and their political culture and practice of central importance.

Re: 1. The point of [cancer research] is to [cure cancer]. 2. Cancer has not been cured.

Uhhh….what?

The point of cancer research isn’t necessarily to ‘cure’ cancer, whatever that means, it could just be to buy extra time. Plenty of people are successfully cured of cancer, actually, and plenty of others are able to delay the progress of the cancer enough to enjoy more months or years of life.

We aren’t able to treat cancer as effectively as we treat, say, malaria. But that’s hardly the same thing as saying we haven’t made substantial progress, or that cancer therapies don’t work.

It’s a lot like arguing with people who think the Miles Davis album is called “A Kind of Blue”

I had thought Lenin’s title was taken from a Marx quote, but evidently not. However, the point is that Marx valued concrete results and did not think of himself solely as a theorist of capitalism, but as a revolutionary – one who would create change. Does anyone dispute this?

When he said the point is not to interpret the world, but to change it, he was being exaggeratedly categorical for rhetorical effect, as I was in quoting him. I had asked about concrete change in the world, and was told about theories concerning the historical sociology of Capitalism.

As I said, a tremendous amount has been invested in Marxism. This investment could have gone to leftism of different sorts, some of which we are now turning to after long neglect.

The second time, Bill answered me thus:

“There are very large numbers of very great scholars and thinkers whose thoughts and actions over more than 100 years have been influenced by aspects of Marx’s theorizing, though most have not become Marxists, who have contributed positively both to the culture and politics of their own times and places and to the field of historical sociology at large and to the shaping of the thoughts and actions of subsequent generations of students and scholars in that and related fields, and everone who reads their work with any seriousness ”

All of this is intellectual save the assertions that some of these scholars and thinkers had a Marxist influence in their contribution to politics. Assuming this means practical politics, and not just theory, what was this contribution? What is different in world politics that we can attribute to Marxism? What has Marxism contributed to the material life of the common man? Or to the proletariat, if you like? Marxists have been very involved in unions, but unions are not a specifically Marxist concept; they are reformist, not revolutionary.

So, in concrete terms, what has Marxism given us? To specify it further, what has Marxism produced that is:

1) Specifically Marxist, not some sort of reformist project that some Marxists happened to support, or that might have mixed Marxist influences with influences Marx disdained, like Social Democracy.
2) Not the product or result of a regime you would not consider part of Marx’s legitimate legacy. No cherry picking. If Marx doesn’t have to answer for the USSR, he doesn’t get credit for whatever redeeming features it might have had.

What is there? What are the top five things? I’m sincerely asking, if Marx’s legacy is not Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, what, other than theory, is it?

Mao, I mean concrete as opposed to abstract. What material change has it made in people’s lives?

Martin, The way you pose the question and cherry pick from people’s answers, obstinantly refusing to recognize the points they are trying to make, instead insisting that the only thing that matters is your polemical definition of the conversation, makes the conversation of little value, probably not worth pursuing. So after this I’ll stop. You insist on a strict separation between theorizing/scholarship and political practice, and you insist on an all or nothing conception of value. That framing leads to a dead end. Marx’s writings and the example of his life, in both cases a mix of positive and negative lessons, have had some major influence on many people who have made major contributions to theory and practice, whose lives, theory, and practice would have beeen quite different, less productive and advanced in significant ways, absent their encounter with those lessons. Examples: the entire adult lives of E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Michael Harrington, on and on. And I would include my own adult life, though I have never been more than half-a-Marxist.

Bill, it seemed to me the fairly long quote I gave from your answer got at the essence, but if you think I was cherry-picking, please point out what I left out that changes the meaning. I’m not insisting on a strict division between theory and practice, but there is a realm of practical politics where we can say things are different in people’s lives because of a political movement. For example, the lives of women and men have been changed in concrete ways by feminism – yes, there is a body of theory, and it has informed the political movement, but the legacy of feminism is not just a set of books, nor the personal and public lives of prominent feminists. There have been many changes to the legal system. There have been changes in socially-acceptable modes of behavior, and therefore changes in behavior. And this not just for scholars and theorists, nor even just for self-proclaimed feminists, but for everyone in Western countries, pretty much, and many outside them.

Rich, I think class conflict is very real and important. I don’t think it is the prime mover of all of history – it is one factor among many.

Martin Bento:

No one here AFAICT has been championing orthodoxy. Rather just arguing that Marx’ work and the several strands of traditions that descend from it retaining considerable heuristic significance that can inform our thinking and practice today, (with renewed relevance amidst the global crisis in neo-liberalism). But there’s no use denying that the Archimedean lever that Marx sought to devise failed about 100 years ago, partly due to defects in his own conception and partly due developments unforeseen by his conceptions, (such as, er, world wars).

But the trouble with your and Rich’s cavils is that neither of you evince much understanding of the conceptual structure of his thought, so your criticisms seem adventitious and off-the-mark, rather than seriously engaging.

The 11th thesis is a succinct expression of one of Marx’ genuine philosophical innovations, in which he advanced beyond Hegel, the notion of a philosophy of praxis, (whereby as well, the educator must be educated). It, though in a somewhat buried way, is a key feature of the architectonic of his work, (which Gramsci made central to his interpretation), There are two counters to the 11th thesis,- (such is the nature of “dialectics”),-: 1) but any project of changing the world must depend on some specific interpretation of the world and 2) but changing the interpretation of the world is already changing the world. But neither objection necessarily invalidates Marx’ own elaborated interpretation of the reciprocal relation between theory and praxis, let alone his insistence on the radically historical basis of any such relation. At any rate, it remains a problem that we still must grapple with and puzzle out.

Marx is a classic and belongs up on the book shelf with the other classics of Western philosophical tradition, Aristotle, Vico, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, etc. (or, o.k., make your own damn list). Under the aphorism of Nietzsche that one can learn infinitely more from the errors of great minds than the truths of small minds. It’s the effort to suppress and dismiss his work under some benighted notion of “progress” and by means of hindsight, a kind of historical version of post hoc, propter hoc, that arouses justified suspicion of your intellectual bona fides here.

If you want an example of an attempt to implement “really existing socialism” in a Marxian vein, other than the inauthentic and grotesque travesty presided over by that Georgian gangster Djugashvili, then I would offer Tito’s Yugoslavia, which arose under difficult circumstances to form a semi-successful development state. Until it was destroyed by IMF-imposed “shock therapy”. (So maybe it is a bit premature to dismiss the class basis of history, if only working in the opposite direction).

I’m not sure that a lot of what you guys perceive as the True Left, should be called that. The burning concern that too few CEOs are women, the same sex marriage, the environmentalism. And the welfare state, as well. The liberal agenda. It doesn’t really seem all that egalitarian, in the sense that it’s indifferent to hierarchical structures, their existence and preservation. So, perhaps the disagreement here is not marxism or not, but left or liberal. Not that anything is wrong with that; just to avoid the unnecessary confusion.

Bill, not at all, that is a response to the question. But these are the first examples you gave that went beyond influence on intellectuals. OK, so Marxists or people intellectually influenced by Marx in some way played a significant role in various 20th century movements of the left, and these movements do have concrete accomplishments to their credit. I would add the anti-colonialist movement in the 3rd world, actually, including things like anti-apartheid. Fair summary?

But are these accomplishments specifically Marxist? One need not be a Marxist to believe that blacks should have equal rights as whites or women as men. Some of those who believed this were influenced by Marx and some were not; Marxism is not essential to, say, feminism generally, though it is very important to the specific rendition of, say, Shulamith Firestone (since she came up). If Marx had never lived, would blacks’ or women’s situation be any different today? It is not clear that they would. But would the USSR ever have existed? Probably the Czar would have been replaced by something else by now, but communism as we have known it would have been literally unthinkable. And you can’t just say subtract all the Marxists from the civil rights movement and see how it becomes weaker, unless you think the only reason those people supported civil rights is because they were under Marx’s influence; this strikes me as unlikely.

A diverse mix of things, actually.

Harry Bridges.

Yes. That is the correct “Double Jeopardy” response. Your prize is a ticket to Maggie’s farm. (Or are those references only valid in the U.S.?)

@Martin Bento
“2. These people are not actually enemies of the proletariat. This is a critique of implementation, not of the gulag itself.”

I think that 2 is the correct answer, but you are wrong when you say that this is a critic of implementation and not of the gulag itself, because the concept of “enemies of the proletariat” imply people who are actually using vioplence on the proletariat, something that obviously people sent to the gulag couldnt do.

I believe that, when Marx speaks of “capitalism”, he speaks of capitalism of his times, that was much more similar to what we now speak of as “fascism” than to the social democratic capitalism we live in. Thus when Marx speaks of violent revolution, he has IMHO this idea of proletarian doing something progressive, evil capitalists using violence on them, proletarian being forced to make a revolution to defend themselves from the evil capitalists.
Arguably Stalin said that he was “defending the revolution”, but this rests on the question on whether the persons he sent to the gulag were actually using violence against the proletarians. This is not just a problem of sending to death the wrong persons, because the concept of “enemies of the proletariat” implies the fact that they are aggressors.

I think that a clear explanation of what is “just mass violence” for Marx is his writings about the secession war in the USA.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/10/25.htm

In those writings he makes clear that the violence of the war is just, but that the war was ultimately caused by the south, because of a sort of “crisis of overproduction” of slaves.
I think most people would agree today that the mass violence of the secession war was justified.

I think that the parallelism between Marx’s explanation of the secession war and his opinions about crises of capitalism are clear enough to show what was “just violence” for Marx, and Stalin doesn’t qualify.

“Why was the elimination of class structure not more effective at ending the sort of ills that Marx attributes to class conflict?”

I would say because the USSR was still an underdeveloped country hemmed in by a hostile capitalist alliance, which had an authoritarian political structure, and eschewed the actually liberating elements of what socialism was supposed to be.

Remember that in Hungary and the Prague Spring, workers tried to take over the factories in order to resist state power. They were trying to create something more akin to libertarian syndicalist socialism in opposition to the authoritarian-bureaucratic behemoth that Stalinist economic organization had become, and yet most of the people supporting this were also Marxists. The very fact that it was possible to have two forms of soi dissant socialism locked in mortal combat suggests that the picture is more complicated than you wish to allow.

“the reason this is not an essential objection to the gulag”

But who did have essential objection to the gulag those days? Nobody. Have you ever watched Cool Hand Luke?

“If class is defined by relation to the forces of production, then the Soviet Union did pretty much eliminate class.”

Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucratic_collectivism

And it’s not just Stalin: Mao, Pol Pot, Hoxha, Ceaușescu, the Korean Kims, there have been a whole string of these guys, not all as bad as Stalin, but it is debatable whether he was the worst, in large countries and small, European and Asian, previously-industrialized and previously-feudal, ethnically homogenous and ethnically diverse, what do they have in common but political philosophies derived from Marx? Tito is an outlier.

This is no less lazy than modern-day neocons who lump 1.5 billion people together under the category “Muslim” and then insist that all their problems stem from Islam.

History doesn’t work that way; you can’t just run some kind of regression model of ideas, get a large coefficient for “allegedly Marxist” and then declare that to be the common cause of their ills. There are no controlled experiments here and there’s no necessity that commonality of philosophical antecedents somehow necessitates or explains the actions of these different leaders in different nations in different times. Hoxha is not Stalin is not Kim il-Sung is not Ceaucescu, and the circumstances under which each of those leaders operated are not the same either.

Martin Bento,

1) The state intellectuals in Tito’s Yugoslavia devoted a lot of time to defending the claim that workers’ self management was fully consistent with Marx and Engels’ writing, more so than command and control socialism, and they did so quite well. They would dispute that they were ‘less purely Marxist than the Russians.’

2) I can’t believe I have to make this point, but you do realize that the Eastern Bloc states weren’t all independent replicates and independent tests of the ‘Socialism is bad’ hypothesis? most communist states were under heavy Soviet control, enforced with invasion if necessary (see 1956) and developed the way the Soviets wanted them to develop. the lack of independence makes your claim scietifically invalid. Maybe the only thing wrong with vanguardist Marxist communism was the way the Soviets did it and forced other countries to do it.

3) you’re at least somewhat overstating the failure of command economies. the Soviet Union was about as wealthy , per capita, as Spain by the time it collapsed. And it then entered an economic death spiral that I’m not sure if it has yet escaped from.

4) actually, I would place a big amount of blame on Stalin personally, yes. call that the great man theory if you want , but I’m not particularly impressed by name calling. central planning also has some basic problems of its own , which may or may not be surmountable, but as Tito showed, communism doesn’t require central planning.

Or to clarify:

Shorter Martin Bento (2013 edition): Marx was to blame for the Gulag because he believed that moral standards do not transcend historical epochs.

Shorter Martin Bento (2007 edition): Moral standards do not transcend historical epochs.

While these two propositions are not inconsistent, I am not sure they add up to a philosophical position that many people would wish to defend…

But like I said: I’m done.

Quickly, because I, too, do not know when the thread will close (I wish this were more predictable).

David,

Posing questions is not disallowing complexity. Although the Prague Spring was initiated by dissident forces within the Communist Party, not a spontaneous worker uprising. Rather like Gorbachev, just not in the country that ultimately called the shots. And you see where Gorbachev led. But sure, there are various interpretations of Marxism, and there were such within the communist world., The Stalinist interpretation generally dominated, but others got a word in edgewise or tried to.

As for lack of development being decisive, well, we can’t run the counterfactual to see. But after Stalin, the USSR was development, and, while it stopped with the mass murders, it was still an oppressive tyranny.

Mao,

OK, but your own namesake incorporated elements of this critique. He tried a de-centralized industrial revolution (The Great Leap Forward), endorsed, like Trotsky, permanent revolution, and inspired the masses, especially the youth to rise up against the bureaucracy (The Cultural Revolution). None of this is defensible either, I think.

And no one objected to gulags? Cmon. Stalin killed millions. He wasn’t the only kid on the block who did, but it’s not like everyone thought this was fine.

engels,

First of all, the quote you gave says I cannot recover the subjective experience of other eras. That is an epistemological, not a moral, claim. So it cannot fairly be summarized the way you have. The entirety of that baroque old thread, of course, is more complicated, but I believe carrying over old arguments from other threads is frowned upon here. I imagine this particularly applies to threads 6 years old. Finally, my own moral philosophy is not relevant anyway, as whatever Stalinism is, it is not an implementation of Martin Bentoism. Stalin can be consistent with Marx or not; I don’t come into that equation.

Yes, you said you were done before. But you were not. Pretending to be leaving a thread when you are not is an old commenting trick to try to get people not to respond to you, so you can have the last word.

Jerry,

Of course, comparing the various communist societies is not scientific, among other reasons because the variables cannot be isolated. But in history the variables never can be isolated. That is one reason it is absurd to propose a science of history. Though not all were Soviet dominated. Mao broke away, and his communism differed in substantial ways. The Khmers opposed the Soviet-aligned communists in their country, and I don’t think China had much control over them either; it was consumed with internal problems. But one could also say that all modern capitalist countries were deeply influenced by the Britain and the United States, that these countries created the modern financial system, and that these countries had a lot to do with creating world capitalism. It’s true. It complicates analysis. It shouldn’t stop comparisons dead in the water.

John,

Sure, Marxism has gone in a lot of directions, but Marx himself was skeptical of syndicalism, save, perhaps as proof of concept. If anything advocated by later Marxists is as purely Marxist as anything else so advocated – well, hello, big Joe. And if Marxist apologies for Stalin reflect a vulgar understanding of Marxism, why did people like Merleau-Ponty make them?

Hector,

Do you blame Stalin for the Khmers? If the productive forces of society are the driving force of history, why did the character of one man make such a difference, anyway? It’s not just that it’s Great Man Theorizing, it’s unMarxist.

Sorry to be pedantic, but “the Khmers” are the ethnic group that makes up ~86% of Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge is the infamous Cambodia communist group. You don’t really want to conflate the two.

@Martin Bento
I think you exaggerate the extent to which Marx was a moral relativist:
It is true that he believed that moral systems depend on material culture, but he was also an hegelian, he believed in historic progress.
This implies that while moral systems are relative, there is in some weird hegelian sense a moral absolute to which we can compare each moral system, otherwise we could only speak of change not of progress.
I believe that this abstract moral absolute can be easyly described as “a world where everyone is happy” (because it is a materialist absolute) .
On the question whether USSR was a classless society or not, I believe that Marx’s idea that a socialist society would be classless was stupid to begin with (how is this that every social revolution produces opposite classes, but not his favourite revolution ?).
Still it can be a change to the better , in the (rather marxist ) sense that capitalism is not perfect but is still better than feudalism.
I think that we are going to a world were the main opposition will be between a “managerial class” and the rest, and that part of right wing populism is already based on resentiment vs this class, but we are not yet there and, since this resentiment gives us to the owning class (which is worse ) is still reactionary.

Re: The few remaining Marxists like to sneer at criticism as coming from liberals

It’s interesting how a lot of American liberals like to talk as though Marxism is a dead letter. (Again, to clarify, I’m not a Marxist, I like to say I’m ‘influenced by Marxism’.)

It’s a dead letter *in America* and in the rich countries of the West, true. Por ahora. Even though there are a certain fraction of intellectuals who still consider themselves Marxists, and even though I think a good number of apolitical people in this country would probably sympathize with a lot of Marxist thought if they understood what it meant.

It’s still a major political force in plenty of other countries, though. In Venezuela, in the Andean countries of South America, in Cuba, in India, in Russia and its satellites. It’s not inconceivable that sometime in the near to medium term even some of the poorer European countries like Greece might see a mass swing to the far left, and any swing to the far left is at least going to be heavily influenced by Marxist ideas.

And, really, Bakunin?

In the last analysis, there is no such thing as political rule by the majority. People can run their own affairs in their personal lives and maybe even in the economic sphere, but in the political sphere, the majority of people do not and never will have the skills, the interest, the knowledge, or the cultural capital to take a significant role in politics and run their own affairs, and they need to have their affairs run for them. Every modern political order is oligarchic and vanguardist in some sense, whether that vanguard is revolutionary, liberal, or reactionary. Except for Anarchist Spain, and we saw what happened to them. The vanguardists of the far right and far left at least have the honesty to be up front about what their doing. Liberal democrats like to conceal oligarchic rule under various fig leaves.

Re: I believe that this abstract moral absolute can be easyly described as “a world where everyone is happy” (because it is a materialist absolute) .

Partly, but also “a world where everyone’s deepest nature is fulfilled” (i.e. a world where we can express ourselves through our labour, retaining control over our labour power and genuinely enjoying/taking pride in our work). I think the line in the ‘Gotha Program Critique’ about being a worker/fisherman/poet is probably closest to it. But in general you’re right, of course.

Um. Sorry, I was misremembering: it is from “The German Ideology”, not from the “Critique of the Gotha Program”. Thanks.

“And no one objected to gulags? Cmon. Stalin killed millions. He wasn’t the only kid on the block who did, but it’s not like everyone thought this was fine.”

What I meant to say is that ‘gulag’ is just a system of labor camps; penal labor. That is not unique to stalinism, and was practiced by all kinds of regimes, authoritarian and not.

Besides, stalinism only existed for about 20 years, and the gulag was dismantled, I believe, by 1956, or around that time. You feel it was an essential, defining feature, but on the historical scale of things it could just as well be an aberration…

Re: First of all, it separates out the people who think that Leninism was fine and who cares what the Cheka did.

It sort of depends on what you mean by “Leninism was fine”.

I don’t think that Lenin and the sBolsheviks were fine, at all. I think that, at the level of abstractions, left-wing vanguardism can be fine. It all depends on who you have running things.

Re: Marx dismissed them without ever bringing himself to write a straightforward dismissal of what would become Lenin’s doctrine.

It seems clear from his writings that Marx wasn’t in favour of the death penalty (his writings as a journalist show that), that he wasn’t in favour of starving people into submission (his writings on British rule in India suggest that), and that he wasn’t in favour of massive persecution of political opponents (the bit where he says ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat looks like the Paris Commune’ shows that). So I think the dismissal of what would become the Bolshevik doctrine is sort of implicit.

Hector_St_Clare 04.11.13 at 1:50 am @ 306:
‘… In the last analysis, there is no such thing as political rule by the majority. People can run their own affairs in their personal lives and maybe even in the economic sphere, but in the political sphere, the majority of people do not and never will have the skills, the interest, the knowledge, or the cultural capital to take a significant role in politics and run their own affairs, and they need to have their affairs run for them. …’

And since the most psychopathic or sociopathic members of the community will be those who are most interested in inserting themselves into positions where they have power over others, this seems like a really strong argument for anarchism or libertarianism — reducing or eliminating the state and government in favor of voluntary association. Since we can’t do it right, better to do it as little as possible or not at all.

I suggest we take this to the next logical step and place the blame where it really belongs: with Plato.

Thales.

As Sartre put it: “Far from being exhausted Marxism is still very young, almost in its infancy; it has scarcely begun to develop. It remains, therefore, the philosophy of our time. We cannot go beyond it because we have not gone beyond the circumstances which engendered it. ”

Take, for instance, your “labor theory of value.” As a cornerstone of a theory of general equilibrium, I suppose it’s mildly interesting. I’m agnostic between neoclassical and classical economic theories, because neither has a particularly impressive record of prediction. Now, “value,” as a category of modernity — that’s interesting. What Marx grasped is that, part of what capitalism makes modernity historically distinctive is that all of the qualitatively particular sorts of labor are rendered quantitatively commensurable by reduction to a common measure — time — and thereby integrated into a total world-system. However, this reduction is also the source of dynamical instability and secular trends (e.g. what Moishe Postone calls the “treadmill dynamic” whereby technological innovations shore up individual profits, until they diffuse across a whole sector — bringing profitability back to baseline.) Marx anticipates and embeds Weber on modern rationality.

I heartily recommend Moishe Postone, who develops a reading rooted in I. I. Rubin and, later, the German Wertkritik school:
http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2011/05/12/the-works-of-the-historian-and-marxist-theorist-moishe-postone/

“It is needful to say thought and being as the same”

That’s the assumption that was broken by mid-20th century philosophy, which Marx only half-anticipated, but half-way all the same.

OMG! It goes on forever. As if a parody of “eternal being”. Martin, don’t you realize that it comes down to historical contingency, a revolution occurring in backward and immense Russia and not, (as Lenin hopefully anticipated amidst world war), successfully anywhere else. And just why do you feel entitled to parrot Stalinist orthodoxy, in which the “forces of production” drive history, which is a travesty of Marxian concepts. Is it because you secretly believe in technological voluntarism combined with material determinism?

Hector, on Chinese influence on Pol Pot, what I understood was, he visited China, was impressed by the Cultural Revolution, and came up with the idea of a more extreme version of the same. Maybe you had a different definition of “influence?”

And if Marxists are really going to insist that the Moustache of Georgia is what really went wrong, or the chief thing that went wrong, then the relations of productive forces are not driving history.

IF ludicrous ‘one bad apple’ explanation of Soviet history is true THEN orthodox Stalinism must be false.

Alright, we’ll call it a draw.

“You can’t say avowed Marxists do not count as Marxists if you can find things in Marx that seem to contradict them”

I didn’t, actually. Bolsheviks definitely count as marxists, but so do (at that time/place) mensheviks, esers, anarchists, and several other factions.

“Either Marxism is sharply limited by what Marx actually said and thought or it is not.”

It doesn’t work like that; or only in a religious sect. Everybody is a human being, and everything is a work in progress. We don’t concern ourselves with Isaac Newton religious writings, we just take the mechanics.

Mao Cheng Ji-
How do you figure SR’s being Marxists? Socialists, yes, but afaik they came out of the narodnik tradition that Russian Marxists, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks both, were in part reacting against.
But I don’t know a whole lot about the SR’s, so I’m happy to be corrected if wrong.

I don’t know the details, but I’m pretty sure they were all marxists, to one degree or another. Even, surprisingly, nationalists, like the Bund. Except, of course, for those who explicitly rejected marxism: the royalists and the liberals.

Looking it up a bit they do seem to have been influenced by Marxism and have included some Marxists, but as a party I wouldn’t count them as Marxists, what with their emphasis on the peasantry rather than the industrial working class. I really do wonder what kind of constitution the Constituent Assembly would have produced if it had had the chance.

The Bund is actually the reason the terms Bolshevik and Menshevik fell out the way they did- the vote that gave the Bolsheviks their dubious majority was held right after the Bundists walked out.

Martin Bento,

Re: I didn’t say that Marxism inevitably leads to mass murder. But it has happened multiple times; it’s not just Stalin. In fact, by your own account here, a majority are “mass murder” states. 3 exceptions. How good a track record is that?

I’d say it’s too *small* a track record to make many useful conclusions. It’s clear that *some* Marxist states indulged in mass murder, but I don’t think there’s anything inevitable about it. We should try to figure out what Yugoslavia, etc. did *right*, and what the Soviets did wrong. Which you sort of did, except then you suggested Tito was less Marxist than Stalin (I think) because they did market socialism. I don’t think that’s accurate. Tito’s state ideologists argued eloquently that direct workers’ control was *more* faithful to Marx than command-and-control Russian-style socialism. And I don’t think the line between syndicalism and socialism is as clear as you’re implying.

Re: And if Marxists are really going to insist that the Moustache of Georgia is what really went wrong, or the chief thing that went wrong, then the relations of productive forces are not driving history. A good portion of the world spent some part of the 20th century under communism. If the historical tendencies that the relations of production of all those societies over all that time generate can be overridden by the personal character of one person, even decades after his death, even in countries where he never held any power, then forget it. Marx’s fundamental premise is falsified. If relationships of productive forces ever did drive history, they don’t now. The badness of Joe Stalin is more important.

If you’re saying that Marxism can’t account and doesn’t know what to make of Joe Stalin and his gulags, you’re absolutely correct. The experience of the twentieth century does falsify the statement ‘just get the means of production owned by the state, and everything else falls into place.’ Which means Marxism is incomplete and defective, not that it’s evil or fundamentally wrong. What theory of history and society *isn’t* incomplete and defective, to some degree?

I don’t claim to be a Marxist, partly precisely for the reason you state, that the experience of the Soviet Union falsifies the idea of economic determinism (and its corollary, the idea that the nature of the people in charge doesn’t matter). I disagree with you however, that Marxism needs to therefore be jettisoned. We didn’t jettison Linnaean taxonomy when we learned about evolution (even though Linnaeus was starting from a fundamentally wrong, creationist premise).

And yes, I’m going to side with the left-wing critique that ‘Joe Stalin corrupted communism’ rather than the National Review line that says ‘Communism corrupted Joe Stalin’. That seems just common sense to me. You’re right that it disproves one of the premises of Marxism, but you’re wrong that it means the whole Marxist edifice is useless.

Rich,

So you want to jettison Marx to the dustbin of history, right? Ok, fine, let’s say we do that. Now: is there some other theoretical framework you think is better, that can better help us understand the workings of capitalism in the 21st century? Or are you thinking we should jettison the very idea that we need a general theoretical framework in order to help us better understand, respond to, etc., capitalism as it currently exists? (And if you don’t like “capitalism” there, substitute whatever else.) I’m not by any means saying that the latter sort of idea is indefensible. Just curious what you think happens after we’ve jettisoned Marx.

“Just curious what you think happens after we’ve jettisoned Marx.”

Now we go on to something new. I wouldn’t try to stop those who want a theoretical framework (or those who don’t want a theoretical framework), but if we have one, it should take current knowledge into account, and not be held down by the perceived need to correspond to ancient ideology. In particular, and in my opinion:

1. The left has to take environmental limits and an environmental economy seriously. Some of the major problems of capitalism are defined out of the whole Marxian system. It’s impossible to even explain many of the most important current problems in political economy within a Marxist framework.

2. The left has to take anti-authoritarianism seriously. It’s easy for contemporary leftists to denounce the idea of vanguard parties, but there’s nothing in most non-anarchist frameworks to forbid them from reappearing in a new form. I’m not saying that everyone has to be an anarchist, but those who aren’t should think about e.g. feminism, gay rights, racism, and all of the other things that class-based leftists are fond of denouncing as distractions and treat them seriously as part of an anti-authoritarian approach.

3. Give up on class conflict and the whole worship of workers. Increasing production is going to mean that more and more people are unemployed, and should be unemployed. The left has to come up with a good society in which the unemployed can live well, not treat workers / proles as the important class antagonists of the oligarchs. The workers are often more invested in being one step up the hierarchy than the oligarchs are in keeping everyone immiserated.

“Marx doesn’t work very well for indigenous folks, as we don’t value what whites value.”

Is this a parody?

I don’t really agree with Marthe about white and indigenous people, but I’m going to refrain from arguing here, because whatever our disagreements, we are both fundamentally on the same side, whereas people like Rich Puchalsky, Martin Bento and Matthew Yglesias aren’t.

“The problem with Marxism is that it’s way too white, and whites are not the majority on this planet.“

How does this argument hold in regards to someone like Chavez, who was (afaik) partly inspired by two ‘white’ concepts (Christianity and Marxism)? Or is that the wrong way of looking at it? (I’m using that argument on your terms, not neccessarily supporting it)

“With the revolutions now taking place in dominantly non-white countries by folks who have been traditionally disenfranchised, the bourgoisie is on the run and dangerous in those countries, as they want to hang onto their white–or even their mestizo privileges by any means necessary”

Does it make sense to frame, for example, the Arab uprisings in this way, to remove them from the very specific context they developed in, and then set them in the context of Latin American politics? Is treating all these diverse and complex cultures, societies and politics as one homogenous bloc not itself racist?
Also, just to note, I’m not sure how much solidarity some groups in the Middle East might feel with the Venezuelan people at the moment considering Chavez’s sycophantic grovelling towards some of the regions tyrants. (Allowing his anti Americanism override his support for people living under authoritarian regimes)

Rich @344:

I don’t know what to do with “give up on class conflict” (like, I don’t think I actually understand what that means*), but I agree quite entirely with everything else you say. And, umm, I still find Marx extremely useful in thinking through these things—e.g. how different types of oppression (of women, of race-identified groups, etc.) can coexist in a given society and reinforce each other or come into conflict with each other, etc. I’d say I find Marx more helpful than anyone else I know or can think of. (On the other hand, internet arguments about true/orthodox/better Marxism are pretty much the Platonic ideal of negative utility—so with you there.)

*If “class-conflict” implies the dumb-ass conception of class whereby people say things like, “It’s not about race, it’s really all about class!”, then ok, yes please chuck that post-haste.

“because whatever our disagreements, we are both fundamentally on the same side”

Actually, this “white vs. indigenous” worldview sounds a lot like the sort of thing known as “socialism of fools”.

I’m not a Marxist, but the idea that Marx’s theory of history leaves no room for contingency is as laughable as the idea that because you can’t precisely predict the weather, you can’t say anything meaningful about global climate.

Mao Cheng Ji,

Possibly, but I don’t really care. indigenous ethnonationalists are at least doing *something* and giving voice to people’s anger at liberal capitalism. That’s a lot more than the liberals are doing.