Macdonald Stainsby wrote:
> I'll throw this in for Mark: It is time to simply begin any and all
> information distribution and solidarity building with the front lines of
> battle, currently being drawn out in the countryside of Columbia. Tirofijo
> et al, a simple pledge: We can do only what we can, but we cannot shirk from
> at least that much.
>
I think it was Scipio the Younger who ended every speech with the words 'Et
delendus est Cartago', Carthage must be destroyed. He got his way in the end and
probably you will too, but I still feel that there is another way of deciding
strategic priorities. Yugoslavia and Colombia are not, actually, strategic
priorities, IMHO, any more than abortion rights or other m-fem issues are
strategic priorities. No doubt this is throwing a hostage to fortune, but it's not
as if I don't think these are important things in their own right, I do. I just
think there are more overarching, global life-and-death issues, and that you can
only make sense of Yugo, Colombia, Cuba, the fate of the ex-SU or the fate of
women, in terms of the overarching issues which not only form a theoretical
synthesis (when anaylsed) but which also form the only possible basis for a
political synthesis, ie for the constitution of a class-for-itself, through whose
struggle for existence and power these *subordinate* issues can be resolved.
Most people here do not think questions like gender rights, homophobia,
commodification of women etc, are subordinate. On the contrary, there is a
consensus (as far as I can see) that these very questions are *the* decisive,
watershed questions. Thus the struggle against the WTO, the IMF, manifestations
like Seattle etc, are seen as synthesising a global class struggle against
capitalist hegemony, with a generalised struggle for emancipation, for social
solidarity, for social justice and the redistribution of wealth and power. On the
streets of Seattle, libertarian, anarchist, feminist, trade unionist, etc
struggles came together with the causes of the third world - the struggle for
women's rights in Asia, the struggle of peasant farmers against rapacious
landlords and US agribiz, etc. This is true, but not the whole truth.
Unfortunately there is another and more basic truth, a more depressing truth and
it is this: there is a split, a schism, which runs to the heart of the global
emancipatory project which the workers' movement inherited from the French
Enlightenment. This split has several causes and many effects: firstly, no-one any
longer has a self-evidently viable project for post-capitalist reality (if they
ever did have; the Bolsheviks did not have, nor the Maoists nor the Gramscians).
I say the Bolsheviks did not have a scheme: that is not quite true. What they
invented, mostly after they actually got power, was a scheme for recreating
capitalist social relations within a socialised Russia. Their ideas of development
+ emancipation, of economic growth + full employment + social justice, fuelled the
workers' movement for almost a century and informed almost all its thinking. But
this notion was always wrong, and today its is just the bars of an intellectual
prison.
As Jose Perez quite rightly says, in Nicaragua as in post-Soviet Russia, the
workers have come to accept gross inequality of wealth. There is little
indignation left. They do not question the existing order any more. This is not
because they believe TINA, but because they *don't* believe in the socialist
alternative. They know that "development" is a chimera, and that in some ways
there is more human dignity to be found in the blind, impersonal (non-patronising)
oppression of the markets, than there is to be found in the corrupt paternalism
and bureaucratic self-seeking of Actually-Existing Socialisms of all types. Until
you deal with this kind of issue you are not dealing with anything, in Colombia,
Yugo, the US or anywhere. Besides, people have other good reasons for hanging
hedonistically onto what they have got: ie, the subliminal but growing awareness
that there is an alternative, and it is not an inviting one, since it is shaped by
pandemics, population pressure, global warming, ecosystem collapse and energy and
water shortages. Neoliberalism's main buttress is not the glowing optimism of its
panjandrums but precisely the bleakness of its forecasts, the utter hopelessness
of the world outside your own front door.
All talk of 'sustainability' (the other term of the Seattle equation) founders
between the Scylla of the hard facts of known unsustainable realities, for eg,
inertial demographic growth, eg climate change, eg resource-depletion, and the
Charybdis of neoliberal TINA. It is not that there is no alternative, it is just
that most people find it hard to equate living in a bender off the scraps of the
land, pretending to be the Skokomish and trading with shells instead of money, is
equivalent to emancipation, progress or any kind of consummation of the
Enlightenment dream. If that is Marx's ideal of rus in urbes, you can stick it, is
how most people no doubt rightly feel. The furthest people will go is growing
their own vegetables on a weekend allotment (I know a famous socialist publisher
who does exactly this, but he does not believe that this is any kind of utopian
prefiguring of the post capitalist Mecca).
The left gravitates between two mutually-exclusive poles: on the one hand, is the
traditional ideal of collectivism, selfless work for others, solidarity, and
sacrifice for the bright tomorrow. On the other hand, there is the single-minded
pursuit of self interest, epitomised in single-issue causes, in the solipsistic
formalism of Western feminism, in the glorification of self, self, self as the
ultimate object of emancipation and gratification. These poles seem to be the
glorious past of the worker's movement ("I have seen the past, and it works" -
except that it didn't, unfortunately) and the unpleasant, genetically-engineered
future. Between these two axes is our ignominious, marginalised present. Lost in
the failure of any kind of totalising, historically-transcendent rationality, on
which triumphant proletarian hegemony might be realised, is also the complete loss
of faith in science, any science. Instread we have astrology, blind faith and the
neoliberal's throw of the dice ("probably we'll find some mroe oil"; "probably the
slimate won't change"). Marxism was probably the last hurrah of Western
enlightenment rationalism, the ideal of science promoted by Bacon and now
ridiculed as mere "scientism", another white male middle class aberration/tool for
hegemony. A century ago people had blind faith in the ratiobnality and scientificy
of Marxism, as explicatory tool, as programmatic instrument. Now you can barely
find a literate human being (outside these lists) who doesn't think it's anything
more than snake oil and who doesn't despise Marxism as a particularly nerdish and
impotent kind of huckterism.
One adaptation to this is that you stop talking so much, and take up the gun
(again), and finance yourself in thev traditional Bolshevik ways (rob banks,
smuggle stuff). This idea is actually more widespread than it seems, but what it
is the progenitor of is a new kind of groupyism, and an idea of illicit
underground brotherhoods with secret handshakes, secret codes etc, and romantic
noms de guerre, all highly reminiscent of the clandestine Brotherhoods which
prolferated in the oppressed nationalities of 19th century Austria, Russia etc. It
is precisely what "Leninism", if that ism meant anything, was articulated
*against*. It is a paradox that some modern proponents of Leninism have seized on
Bolsehvism's own secret history as an illegal organisation of exiles, to produce a
model consisting of all the kinds of political behaviour which Lenin struggled to
surmount. Of course, Lenin himself was a gigantic paradox, someone who perfected
the art of open conspiracy by making all of politics a matter of public intrigue,
by turning the party inside out and making the private realm of a voluntary
organisation into a substitute civil society, and under the sign of this
'proletarian hegemony' the Soviet masses for 70 years became mere spectators of
their own process of 'development'. No, Leninism is also not an unproblematic
model for would-be revolutionaries to adopt.
Since we no longer believe in science, however, we are inevitably reduced to
atomistic forms of political action, of mysticism, obscurantism, wish-fulfilment,
crazed sectarianism and the like. We have no common compass to steer by. There are
those, I repeat, who believe that if persuasion with words won't work, persuasion
at gunpoint will. They take Mao's homily to that effect as a starting-point, but
it is obvious that the first objects of this persuasion at gunpoint are going to
be the workers themselves (and actually they not only don't deny this, they openly
declare it, and glory machismatically in it). Of course, it is true that ideas
only become hegemonic when they are backed up by force. States and organised
religions have always been based on this fact. However, force may be a condition
of existence for ideational hegemony, but cannot be the ultimate cause. Ideas
become hegemonic because they work, albeit only briefly and in highly relative
ways. Bolshevism worked because the time was right for grandiose experiments in
development: the 20th century saw a great economic, scientific and technical
upswing, a huge increase in social productivity, an incredible cheapening of
factors of production other than labour, a relative privileging of labour, and
above all a colossal enrichment of the energetics-basis of social production.
Neoliberal hegemony is secured because all those indicators long ago went into
reverse. Of course, the plateau is rocky and its existence not very clear until
you already descend: as the petrogeologist Jean Laherrere puts it: "the central
limit theorem ... says that adding a very large number of independent objects
(from independent actors) gives a symmetrical (normal) curve. The problem is that
in fact there are many cycles (it is why the peak is fuzzy or multiple: the world�
s oil supply has already peaked in 1979) and that the objects are not independent
as they depend on economics and politics. Most of production curves in decline I
know display almost symmetrical cycle or cycles."
The issue is particularly clouded because what we have is not so much fuzziness in
the data is intense clouds of reality-obscuring contradiciton. In the past century
a central predicition of Marx's came about, and now more than half the human
species lives in cities. This decanting of rural 'free'workers into cities, and
the losses and benefits they cumulated thereby, is the great drama, the whole
history of civilisation of the past 150 years, in the USSR as much as the West,
and today in the Rest. Enornmous gains in social emancipation, general cultural
levels and living standards were realised. Mass psychology is deeply conditioned
by awareness of those intergenerational changes and the expectations and optimism
they aroused. But strong as this process was (it depended on 100 000-fold increase
in net per capita energy consumption over precapitalist, 'advanced organic'
societies) there is a still stronger undertow which is pulling society back in the
opposite direction, for which we have no answers, and which is already in many
parts of the world, liquidating the benefits of urbanisation and plunging
humankind into deep distress. Since no-one believes in science any more it is no
longer possible to convince people that there is even a problem. The response to
the science is not growing awareness that anything is wrong, but a chorus of
catcalls about 'Cassandras', boring apocalypticists, etc. This suggests what we
have is bnot political movements any more, but just lemming-like collective
suicide pacts, and a Gadarene rush to grab what you can before it's too late.As
Marx said, he whom you seek to persuade, you acknowledge master of the situation,
and therefore I am not wasting my own time any more speaking to the resolutely
unconverted. But my advice to you, since you are self-described red-green
activist, is to draw up a list of political and personal priorities which more
truly reflect not just the contingencies of the hour (the latest scandal to
scandalise about, in Yugoslavia or anywhere else) but which on the contrary,
relfect and embody the real underlying dynamics of history. You know what they
are, by now.
Mark
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