I wrote, in the context of a discussion of ecosocialist Joel Kovel, much of whose work I admire and teach,
"I'm not a socialist (although many anti-socialists in the US would certainly accuse me of being one, and some for good reasons) and I personally think it is silly to think one is likely to contribute more to actual democratization and progress in specifically American conditions through an insistent advocacy of socialism than through the widely affirmed language of secular democracy and progressivism."
To which an "Anonymous" interlocutor in the Moot responded,
OR you are a socialist who 1) is afraid of being marginalized in academia and the public square if you publicly advocate socialism, and 2) uses the language of secular democracy and progressivism to better promote a democratic socialist agenda. In light of the American conditions you speak of, I can respect that.
I'm not sure I agree it would be particularly marginalizing in the academy I actually care about to declare myself a "socialist." The fact is that there are a wide array of positions that can be and have been called "socialist" and I'm just trying to be sensitive to the history through which "socialist" means what it seems to mean in the context of the contemporary US. There are many views that can be rightly described as "socialist" that don't really seem to fit my own politics as well as other labels do. Given that, I fail to understand what is the benefit of shoe-horning myself into a label that may be ill-fitting to a number of the people with whom I would want actually to be communicating my aspirations and collaborating in my work, especially when there are other vocabularies on offer which do the job better? It makes perfect sense to me that, say, Erik Olin Wright might call me a socialist in his terms because of my advocacy of basic income (which I don't really think is anything like a near-term realizable goal in the context of the US in any case, and so I advocate expansions of welfare entitlements and subsidization of p2p formations funded by more progressive taxes in the meantime, something that is perfectly intelligible across the socialist and non-socialist left), but while his assignment of that label to me might make sense in his case, I don't think that rightly nudges me into a general assumption of that label since I don't agree that his are the terms through which that label has its actual public currency in the US. I think (and hope) many democratic socialists would be well pleased with many of my political aspirations, but that doesn't make me a stealth socialist, certainly. I suspect there are many instances in which my differences with some varieties of socialist assumptions causes me to celebrate incremental progressive reforms that some socialists see as differences that make no difference. These are real disputes as far as I can see.
"Anonymous" continues on with a wonderfully provocative and important question:
"If you know that the American progressivism you advocate is utterly inadequate to help us face the perfect storm of converging crises including climate change, peak oil, and financial recession because it will never get to the root cause of all these problems (capitalism whether it be free or mixed), how do you manage this cognitive dissonance?
But I don't "know" that, and neither do you. If you think you know this, then you know something that makes you decisively as ignorant as it makes you knowledgeable -- and I don't mean this in a silly insulting way, but in the crucial sense in which we will sometimes "ignore" realities the better to vouchsafe cherished knowledges.
Let me try to get at it this way: Violent revolution unleashes forces as bad as the ones it would address, and if progressive reform is all that remains to us once we repudiate revolution then it is finally pointless to contemplate whether or not reform is "adequate" to resist the weight of incumbency and injustice.
The air of reform is all the air we have to breath, if we would not take up the blade and become murderers and hence people with whom we would not want to live for the rest of our lives, and so debates about its inadequacies seem to me to be fairly distracting and finally rather narcissistic when all is said and done.
But more to the point, I think those who get caught up in the impasse of the dual impossibilities of both revolution and reformism forget that what is actually possible through reform itself changes in the face of the changing realities arising from reform and so cannot fully be known at the moment they are contemplated or enacted.
In "knowing" that reform is inadequate to the reality of violence and injustice in the world you claim to know something that cannot be known.
I think it is a mistake to fetishize what we currently take to be the "root" causes of immiseration -- even if it is so often true that an interrogation of such roots is the best practice we have through which to alienate folks from the assumptions that facilitate their collaboration in their own exploitation.
But more important is that "roots" are different from possibilities. Possibilities are not given or determined by origins or roots. With every genuinely democratizing consensualizing diversifying ramification produced through education, agitation, organization, legislation the whole terrain of the possible and the important is also transformed, and the horizon in the face of which reform is enacted is shifted sunward.
I don't think this attitude of mine is a problem of negotiating a "cognitive dissonance" so much as a problem of patience and realism and courage that arises from a proper recognition of the condition of plurality that always defines all genuinely political discussions.
By the way, I have always loved the Situationist slogan "Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible." It made a secular democratic progressive reformist out of me.
Updated: My exchange with "Anonymous" continued thus:
That was a beautiful speech but who talked about violent revolution? Not all socialists advocate revolution. Many advocate reformism to create a socialist society. However, the reformism of American progressives simply seeks to sustain capitalism while removing some of its social injustices. You know better than anyone that the history of the 20th century teaches us that the capitalist class will always fight and succeed in reversing many (but not all) of the progressive reforms we achieve and start taking for granted. That's what the era of neoliberalism was all about. So it is the people who seriously think that timid progressive reforms will make capitalism sustainable who aren't being realistic...
I think you are learning too many wrong lessons from history, "Anonymous."
Neoliberalism did not succeed in reversing anything like as many progressive reforms as it wanted (which is not the least to deny the horror of millions upon millions of dead and suffering victims of neoliberalism), and we are embarking on another progressive era with a legacy of disseminated knowledges and tattered but tangible progressive accomplishments to build on.
Neoliberalism from Mt. Pelerin to Chicago to Chile to Reagan to TINA to NAFTA to Bush's Killer Clowns actually provides a useful lesson in the efficacy of disciplined organization. Rich incumbents organized in the aftermath of the New Deal and the Marshall Plan to save and consolidate their privileges and slowed the accomplishment of social democracy worldwide for over three wasted devastated decades.
I am not sure it is useful to decry the "capitalist class" without taking great care to describe what you mean by it. Is corporate-militarism adequately described by the term "capitalism"? Is extractive-industrialism usefully identified with that same capitalist class? Is modest entrepreneurialism anathema, even under conditions of steeply progressive income and property taxes subsidizing extensive general welfare and equal recourse to the law?
I think all that is quite as tricky an issue as too glib an identification of the planetary precariat with the orthodox Marxist idea of the proletariat. I don't think orthodox Marxism -- or socialisms definitely indebted to Marx -- survives the postwar postcolonial biopolitical interventions of Arendt and Foucault and Fanon. (I have taught Marx, sympathetically and very critically to many hundreds of students for over a decade, by the way.)
I think you are too quick, perhaps, to assume my progressivism "timid" just because I think it can proceed through legible secular democratic stakeholder politics and reformism. I think you are very wrong to declare as always-only conservative the progressive organization, agitation, and reform through which so much actually existing democratic progress was achieved and maintained in history, especially since I cannot tell exactly what more radical practice you are presumably comparing it to that has presumably accomplished so much more but without recourse to violence? I see abolitionism, organized labor, votes for women, New Dealers, MLK, Queer Nation as progressive secular democratic reformist struggles. I think the struggles for planetary p2p democracy and basic income would be progressive secular democratic reformist struggles in their substance as well.
Of course you are right to point out that there are many socialisms, including violent as well as nonviolent ones in various construals. My earlier point about hesitating to assume that label in the face of legitimate differences as to its actual meaning and currency in the US was actually premised on that recognition, you may recall. I certainly didn't mean to vilify you by introducing the spectre of violent revolution into the discussion -- indeed, that is for me personally the question that defines my own sense of the possible and important confronting radical democratic politics. My own repudiation of violence was the defining moment for my own radicalism. I am happy to leave it to you to explain to me of what your own political "non-timidity" consists, disconnected from the question of violence that was so definitive for me.
14 comments:
That's a very interesting exchange -- I kind of think you're both right. S/he that socialism (broadly construed) is necessary for social and environmental justice, you that progressive democratic reform is the way to do it. And I think that insofar as "socialist" is a label you're really the only person in any position to call yourself one, even if your position is quite agreeable to many socialists.
So I don't think you're a stealth socialist, particularly since you've never to my knowledge advocated any public or social ownership of economic enterprise -- a rather key component of socialism beyond BIG. It seems to me a minimal socialism would be something like Schweickart's Economic Democracy, which is a step beyond redistribution of wealth.
Me, I happily call myself a socialist both because I am one and precisely because it provokes a reaction from pro-capitalists and the politically ignorant that I can use as a way of engaging them in conversation or hopefully constructive debate.
Carrico: I am not sure it is useful to decry the "capitalist class" without taking great care to describe what you mean by it.
Me: Ooops! I meant to say "transnational capitalist class" - the "segment of the world bourgeoisie that represents transnational capital, the owners of the leading worldwide means of production as embodied in the transnational corporations and private financial institutions".
Carrico: I think all that is quite as tricky an issue as too glib an identification of the planetary precariat with the orthodox Marxist idea of the proletariat. I don't think orthodox Marxism -- or socialisms definitely indebted to Marx (I have taught Marx, sympathetically and critically to hundreds of students for over a decade, by the way) -- survives the postwar postcolonial biopolitical interventions of Arendt and Foucault and Fanon.
Me: Actually, I subscribe to the Empire theory of Negri and Hardt who, as you probably know, were influenced by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.
Carrico: I am happy to leave it to you to explain to me of what your own political "non-timidity" consists, disconnected from the question of violence that was so definitive for me.
Me: Like many left-minded people, I'm still trying to figure out what the best strategy might be but I just think (rather than know) nothing short of radical change will save us from disaster...
I suspect we would be allies rather than antagonists more often than not, at least at ground level where the action is, whatever we want to call what we're doing.
On the issue of violence, I would just like to point out that many people equate revolution with violence and this is not necessarily the case. Certainly social changes in the past involved violence and social changes in the future might involve some more. But the present is also quite violent, especially if you should step out of line, and you are from the "wrong" ethnic group.
99 per cent of revolution is actuallly more mundane. It involves the long process of organisational building,education and fostering rational analysis of social conditions.
Technology actually plays a crucial role in tipping the scales. Humans are creatures of habit, and culture keeps us in a certain mode of thinking and living. It is only when technological developments are bursting the current social mode of existence at the seams that the many years of organisational building and education will pay off.
"Anonymous" there is quite a lot in what you say -- but I do hesitate to take you up on some of your suggestions here.
I think there has been a tendency to evacuate revolution of any discernible content, and to the cost of understanding, when we describe PR declarations about "improvements" in a dog food recipe as "revolutions" these days, you know?
I think revolutions as actual unique political events worthy of understanding on there own terms do have important things in common with wars as political events -- namely, they are limit instances of the political (which is, properly speaking, nonviolent in its essence) in which violence is nonetheless definitive.
Revolutions tend to break out at moments and in ways that are not at all predicted by professional revolutionaries, and indeed once the professional revolutions gain control over events (when they do) this tends to indicate a shift into a post-revolutionary domestications and policing of the forces unleashed by the revolution itself.
That is not to deny one will find structural conditions preceding revolutions -- loss of confidence in authoritative institutions being key, often indeed exacerbated by prior educational, agitational, and organization efforts by activists and professional revolutionaries -- but it is to deny that these conditions can be determinative in a way that yields a predictive science of revolution, say.
All this matters about revolution as a phenomenon we would understand on its own terms.
I also strongly disapprove what looks to me -- possibly I am in error in this impression -- like a technological determinism in your view, that it is only or mostly technical vicissitudes that interrupt customary practices, that revolutionary disruptions are enabled by technodevelopmental tipping points and so on.
It is prior politics that deploy technique in the service of revolutionary ends -- disruptive technoscience incubates revolution only when questions of the distribution of some technodevelopmental risks, costs, and benefits becomes a key location for some already-ongoing stakeholder dispute in my view. Revolution, like punkrock, needs little more in the way of technology than ubiquitous tools ready to hand, rocks, scissors, paper.
The point isn't to denigrate the role of particular prosthetic practices in particular revolutionary moments, but to resist any glib generality that endorses what look to me to be too eagerly instrumental and reductionist understandings of politics, history, social struggle, emancipation, progress already prevailing to the cost of democracy.
Carrico: I suspect we would be allies rather than antagonists more often than not, at least at ground level where the action is, whatever we want to call what we're doing.
Me: I agree. :)
In that spirit, I would like to get your take on the following article: http://question-everything.mahost.org/Socio-Politics/ampire.html
P.S. I'm not the anonymous who posted a comment on the issue of violence just above.
What's my "take"? It's an article. If you have specific questions or expectations please enlighten us, take a stand, and you are likely indeed to provoke and contribute to the ensuing discussion. But just flinging out a random link and asking for a review is something I'm not going to do unless you pay me for the privilege. I mean, no offense, but this kind of impertinence really annoys me.
"Revolution, like punkrock, needs little more in the way of technology than ubiquitous tools ready to hand, rocks, scissors, paper."
This is the anonymous who posted before on violence. The name is Mark (I'll register to get a proper user name)
I must confess that I am a technological determinist to some extent, even after reading much of the arguments against technological determinism.
I've examined the evidence (history) and I find striking the ways in which technology has proven to be the decisive factor in historical outcomes, whether this be in the form of superior weapons or superior manufacturing and trading capabilities.
I do understand that technology develops in response to dynamic social forces and reflects the balance of power relations. But sometimes technological developments achieve a momentum of their own and lead to unforeseen conclusions.
The discontented need nothing more than the available instruments to storm the castle, but what happens after? A new social order can only be constructed on the basis of more efficient means of production. Some might say that once old power relations are broken the victors can then set about creating the technology that they require. However, history does not confirm this. Spartacus would not have been able to create a free society in Roman times, even if he had been victorious. The material means for it simply did not exist.
Our freedom today is based on a certain level of productivity of society which is based on a certain level of technology. Technology determines the productivity of labour and, hence, the conditions under which labour is able to reproduce.
Let us engage in a thought experiment utilizing two of the predictions close to the heart of Transhumanism. Let us suppose technologies to easily replicate goods and autonomous robots are developed by some miracle. What would this mean for capitalism? Capitalism relies on the market mechanism to exist, if goods could be produced abundantly at very low cost by any one who could access this technology, markets would collapse. If autonomous robots could perform better at any given task at a lower cost than a human, most people would end up unemployed.
Therefore, we see that such technological developments alter social structure of society. Less sensationalized examples would be how steam engines, the printing press, railways, mass production altered previous social relations.
Of course, technology only prepares the basis for social change. Social change would have to be carried out by conscious men and women. And this social change would not be possible without the technology.
Hi, Mark, and welcome to you.
I wouldn't want to seem to deny that the capacities available to any given social formation are indifferent to the tools actually ready to hand, any more than they are indifferent to any of the other actually existing conditions out of which and over which social struggle makes history, through the clash of personalities, in the context of laws, mores, incentives, infrastructural affordances, geographical accidents, chance occurances, and so on.
But I cannot agree that "technology" (which again I must insist has no separate abstract existence in the first place, and is better considered as ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle, however gawky and awkward that phrase) of all things can ever be historically decisive, as you say, for the simple reason that the deployment of technique depends more decisively by far on the actual decisions we make quite literally in deploying it, collaboratively and antagonistically, in the service of our moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political ends.
These ends, playing out unpredictably in public, peer to peer, in the shared world of an ineradicable diversity of stakeholders are and will remain the basis for social change, so long as change is a register, however impaired, of human freedom.
Carrico: What's my "take"? It's an article. If you have specific questions or expectations please enlighten us, take a stand, and you are likely indeed to provoke and contribute to the ensuing discussion. But just flinging out a random link and asking for a review is something I'm not going to do unless you pay me for the privilege. I mean, no offense, but this kind of impertinence really annoys me.
Me: Impertinence?!? Bzzzt! Unless someone is trying to use your comments to write a university paper without telling you, I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would be offended by someone "flinging" them a link to an article and asking them for their take on it! We were having a great conversation on socialism, in which I mentioned that I subscribe to Empire theory so I was simply curious to know whether you agreed or disagreed with the gist of an anarchist's opinion on the subject. I didn't have specific questions or expectations nor did I want to "take a stand" but your take would have likely provoked a discussion. Isn't that obvious?
Carrico: Neoliberalism did not succeed in reversing anything like as many progressive reforms as it wanted (which is not the least to deny the horror of millions upon millions of dead and suffering victims of neoliberalism), and we are embarking on another progressive era with a legacy of disseminated knowledges and tattered but tangible progressive accomplishments to build on.
Me: You might be missing my point.
1. As long as we maintain capitalism (whether it be the corporate capitalism of the United States or the state capitalism of the Soviet Union), neoliberals (under a new name) will eventually come back to reverse some of the accomplishments of the old and "new progressive era". That's the cyclical nature of this Beast.
2. The stimulus plans in the United States seek to save the financial institutions while refueling consumption by lowering income taxes and maintaning jobs through infrastructure projects. This does not modify the economic inequality dynamic that was started in the 1980s! Massive interventions of the U.S. goverment seek to recapitalize the banking system by eliminating toxic assets in order for credit valves to open and flow again. This will allow a return to growth in 2010 without modifying the current economic system! This scenario is problematic because not only does it require massive public funds to maintain an economic system, which only a minority profit from, but this massive injection of public liquidity would put in place the structural conditions for the formation of another speculative bubble even more gigantic in light of the the mass of public liquidity available. Jump-starting the economy, in the current system, would only mean shovelling forward systematic problems, which will grow before a new explosion in 5 or 10 years. So you can kiss some of the accomplishments of the "new progressive era" goodbye much sooner than the beast usually demands...
Rock on with your radical self.
Carrico: I am happy to leave it to you to explain to me of what your own political "non-timidity" consists, disconnected from the question of violence that was so definitive for me.
(Note: I was the anonymous user whose question started this whole discussion)
After Leo Patnitch's work was pointed out to me by a colleague, I'm coming around to his world view.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Panitch
Have you read his book Renewing Socialism: Transforming Democracy, Strategy and Imagination ?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/0850365910/ref=dp_proddesc_0/176-4271204-1512560?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books
Panitch has his moments, I've benefited from engagement with his work, but I can't say that I endorse "his world view" as any kind of "answer" to the demands of democratization and social justice in our moment. And all that is quite apart from the usual problem of also not knowing exactly what you take "his world view" to consist of at the level of actual propositions, and probably not having time to really hash it out given everything else that is pressing at the moment.
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