Tom Warren wrote:
> 1. Is the discussion/deconstruction of Marxism heading anywhere?
Tom, yes, some people have unsubbed (others have joined). People who are
bored by this discussion can go away. If there is some other list where
people discuss the crash in a better or more focussed way, I'll unsub and go
there myself. I don't know of such a list. I get as irritated as anyone with
perambulatory discussions, verbal muggings with other people's ideological
baggage etc. But I'm also guilty of these things. This is an open list. The
criterion for being here is that you believe that the capitalist
world-system is unsustainable and that this is a problem for us in our own,
contemporary, time and not one that we can defer to our grandchildren's
time. Most people still don't believe this and even most people on this list
only believe it some of the time. There is a psychological self-defence
here: if we believed it all of time, we'd be institutionalised.
We have to move forward together, but we have to take people with us. We are
living in a unique moment in history; human use of fossil fuels can only
encompass a period of 2-300 years, it's (as has been said before) like a
flash of light in the deep darkness of geological time, both before and
after us. We are right at the end of that period, right at the cusp of
profound and terrible change. Most people are sleepwalking thru it. Those of
us who are wakeful must try to learn what we can and to rouse the folks
around us, but not lose our dignity, humanity and sense of proportion in the
process. We must help each other to do this. I think that people in 50 years
time will retrospectively boggle at the generalised insanity of these
Gadarene times, but those of us who see the moment for what it is will later
on look like beacons of sanity.
I don't think we should be hubristic or crazy enough to be system builders.
None of the systems I've seen, avoid obvious flaws in logic or historical
understanding (or grasp of human psychology). We are no more capable of
planning futureworlds than Thomas More was. What we can do, and should do,
is relentlessly analyse and fixate the everyday world we live in, and make
it transparent and intuitively explicable to others. And we should focus on
prefiguring the alternative future we seek, not in terms of policy
prescription (no-one in power today is going to enact our policies anyway)
but in terms of creating institutes of accord and understanding, in terms of
celebrating the things that are divine about the merely human (even if God
too is only our own invention, we are part of the material world whose laws
we inhabit and inherit, and if the laws of nature are not arbitrary, but
fixed and determinate, then that in itself is a great cause for hope).
I've just been reading Heidegger on technology and I've reached the
conclusion that in one important respect, Heidegger was right: the search
for ultimate states where all is known and predictable, is also a natural
human concern for the avoidance of suffering, but it is inherently
unrealisable. There is no ultimate state (capitalist or socialist) which we
can either imagine, or which is within history's gift to bestow, and where
everyone is secure, where technology delivers even immortality and all the
great existential questiosn are somehow answered or us. That is a definition
of hell, not utopia, and this too is why we should not be system-builders.
. What we can do (all that we can do) is militantly combat the injustice,
corruption and egotism of the present and do so without hope of reforming
the present, but in the real hope and expectation of forestalling
catastrophe by overturning the present. Either there will be a sustainable,
just and humane and tolerant human lifeworld, or our species will be extinct
and the planet will revert to the unconscious blackness that existed before
us. It seems self-evident to me that we cannot survive unless we substitute
cooperation for competition, and a profound sense of solidarity for the
solipsism of capitalist society. These values have to be instituted at the
heart of collective consciousness, they have to become the everyday frame of
reference for every individual's lived life.
It is obvious that the states we live in are corrupt and empty machines and
have to be destroyed. But that can only happen when huge numbers of people
do not only passively resist, but actively impose a different framework.
Conspiracies do not work. Only mass activity works, and that requires
seismic changes in mass consciousness. We have to work patiently and
systematically to achieve this. We have to appeal to self-interest, and show
people that for instance that the reason gas prices are hiked and brownouts
are deepening is more fundamental than Saudi geopolitics.
We are so weak and marginal, our voice is so drowned out, that we have no
chance even to be heard, unless our core message is true and is dramatically
confirmed by events. But if we are right (we are) then we will be heard, and
that is why we have to work very hard now to make sure we are saying the
right things, that our arguments are unanswerable and our principles are
invincible.
I agree with you that what fatally disables most "Marxist" and also most
green thinking is the
>sense that what is implied is that it is a settled issue that
> �Malthus was wrong� and that �there is no doom approaching�.
That complacency is within us too and we have to intransigently fight it.
Mark
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