Tom Warren wrote:
>
> Thanks, Carrol, for your reasoned and civil response.
I apoligize for my loss of temper, but it seems that marxists must
(in contexts where other participants pretend to a certain level of
sophistication) forever debate ghosts. "Economics" as popularly
conceived (and as conceived by the professional economists) can
provide more or less (mostly less) useful technical advice to
capitalists and it can provide morale-building justification for
capitalists' trust in the eternal truth of TINA.
A note on political activity. Most posters on this list seem to me to
be expressions of voluntarism -- the conviction that there exists
some policy which, if activists adopt it, will enable them to force the
movement of history. This can have various repercussions, but one
of them is a tendency to endless hand wringing over "what should
we do, *now*, to make things moves. Voluntarism exhibits a total
inability to honor the sheer contingency of life. I am not arguing for
mere passivity; there is usually a good number of things to do, and
I am attaching at the end of this post a recent post on the m-fem
maillist from Yoshie Furuhashi which exhibits that. But I am arguing
that the occasions on which history *moves*, and on which our
actions (and our ideas) can make a tremendous difference, are few
and far between, occur behind our back and in utterly unpredictable
ways, and cannot be forced, no matter how anguished our attempts
to force them. Someone once told me (though I know no actual
source for this, it rings true to my sense of Lenin) that Lenin once
observed that there are three revolutionary virtues: patience, patience,
and patience.
Before going further, let me note that "reasoned and civil response" is
only half correct in its description of my post. Uncivil I may have been
but if you think it was not carefully reasoned you are blinded by your
own (understandable but intellectually stultifying) irritation at the
incivility.
You write:
> I assume from the above statement that marxism therefore is of no practical
> value in addressing the impeding problems of the crash,
This exhibits what I call dogmatism -- the belief that there must be a direct
relationship between theory and practice. One kind of [un]marxist dogmatism,
for example, operates as follows. Marx says (this kind of Marxist hasn't
read Marx either <g>) that class is central to understanding the movement
of history, therefore in organizing this struggle to stop a Hog Farm in
McLean County we must not become distracted by trivial concerns over
gender or sexuality." That is, this sort of Marxist (who, incidentally, is
far more rare than anti-marxist mythology holds, but does exist) assumes
that there must be a direct relationship between the fundamental analytic
category of class and whatever tactical or strategic situation is immediately
involved. (Unfortunately, incidentally, my example is purely fictional. No
battle, well or badly organized, is being waged against the proliferation of
Hog Farms in McLean County.)
This sort of dogmatism is often but not always closely intertwined with
various forms of voluntarism. The right ideas *must* lead to the right
action *must* lead to success. But very seriously, you will plan badly,
even in local activities, if you haven't granted (at least parenthetically and
in the back of your mind) that we may finally fail, fail completely, and
Rosa Luxemburg's "or" (barbarism, depopulation, utter wretchedness)
will cover the earth. Only Summer Soldiers and Sunshine Patriots believe
that success either is or can be guaranteed.
(I'm not going to argue this point, but your post seems to imply that
"economics" has to be of use, and that since Marx is not, at least
in your or Martin Feldstein's sense of the word, an economist, he
and marxists can be of little use. I can't condense the literature and
history of 200 years into a post, so I won't try, but I urge you to
at least keep in the back of your mind the possibility that economics
is of no use to those who want to change the world. This isn't true,
but it ontly ceases to be false after you have granted its truth to
begin with. If you begin with hope in economics, you sill spin
futilely in one spot forever. Are you so utterly uninterested in
humans and their activity that you believe that an understanding
of how, under given historical conditions, that activity is shaped
can be of no use to anyone?)
> other than perhaps
> producing a nice little watertight critique of the Political Economy
You don't know what Political Economy is -- and you don't know what
a Critique is. I have, in the past, been not wholly unsuccessful in giving
various people some sense of the content of these terms. Perhaps even
at the age of 70 I might help a few more in the next decade or so, but
I can't do it on a maillist and I'm not going to try. It does seems to me
that having at leas a shadowy understanding of the forces operative in
the greatest transformation of human history since the neolithic revolution
might be of some general interest to anyone hoping to be part, however
small, of a transformation which will probably prove rather more
difficult than either the neolithic or the capitalist revolutions -- and as
many on this list have emphasized, the stakes of that wished-for
necessary transformation are rather high.
> that
> got us to the edge of the abyss? Ahhh yes, well your response DOES confirm
It wasn't "Political Economy" that got us into anything. It was that huge
transformation
of the world called capitalism. Classical Poltical Economy (Quesnay, Smith,
Ricardo)
was an honest and superb effort to understand from the inside that
transformation, and
to understand from the inside is to deny history. Lurking in even the greatest
and noblest
of the efforts of bourgeois culture, including Political Economy, is the silent
assumptioin:
There has been history but there no longer is any. Marx's critique (to use a
gross bu
essentially accurate simplification) reintroduced history. Economics as we know
it
arose within the threats and triumphs of late 19th century capitalism as an
essentially
apologetic discipline, which tried to isolate the "economy" as a watertight
compartment
of human life, into which all other concerns could be regarded as an
illegitimate
intrusion. Hence such bizarre propositons as those that speak of political
interference
with the economy -- which is something like speaking of the brain's
interference in
the nervous system. A hundred years of "economics" (by which in the bourgeois
soul
the dread news brought by both implicitly by Political Economy and explicitly
by
the Critique of Political Economy -- the dread news that we live in history --
could
be concealed, and the lackeys of capitalism could proclaim TINA (almost
everyone),
Society does not exist, only individuals and their families (Margaret
Thatcher),
The End of History (Fukuyama), and The New Economy (almost everyone). Only
from the perspective offered by the Critique of Political Economy can the
insane vulgarity of those slogans be fully revealed.
History isn't over, and it is I think worthwhile to understand, in other than a
sloganeering way, *why* history isn't over. And people still struggle. Very
rarely, and for reasons we cannot predict in advance and in ways or occasions
that are equally unpredictable, those struggles coalesce around some issue
that people, not we, select, and larger struggles explode. These usually,
incidentally, come in periods *not* of crash but in periods of improvement,
as was the case of both the French and Russian revolutions, and was actually
the case even in the decade of "The Great Depression." Mere misery
individualizes and suppresses struggle.
An ancient Chinese general whose name I forget is frequently quoted by
Mao: Know your enemy and know yourself and you will fight a hundred
battles without defeat. That, I believe, is overoptimistic. You can do
everything right and still lose if the enemy is stronger. (Mao also points
this out.) Marx's critique of political economy provides the framework (but
only the framework) within which it becomes possible to understand our
enemy (and not only the enemy "out there" but the enemy "inside" in so
far as the common sense emerging from the daily experience of living
inside capitalism engenders in us the spontaneous assumptions which
empower the enemy.
One final suggestion. The greatest barrier to the recruitment and growth
of a force to fight capital is male supremacy within progressive movements
and the working class as a whole. If you want to do something about
global warming, I suggest you put front and center in your concerns
the struggle against male supremacy. Otherwise you will never raise
the army you need to change the world.
>
> my suspicions of the parochial nature of Socialism.
Who said anything about socialism? I think I posted just the other day
on the futility of spinning recipes for the cookshops of the future (quoting
Marx).
Here is the m-fem post I mentioned above. At the end I have placed
some brief remarks linking it to the concerns of this post.
=================
Subject: Re: FW: Skepticism & Obscurantism (was Re: Radical Feminism)
Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2000 03:07:46 -0400
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
References: 1
>what always amazes me is how quickly and arrogantly people on this list
>are to size people up and write them off for the sake of winning an
>argument.yu wouldn't last five minutes trying to organize talking to people
>like that, and i'm sure yu don't, so why do it on this list bb
Instead of fantasizing about snuff films, I'm active in the local
political scene, and we (in Columbus, Ohio) are currently organizing
a large protest (scheduled on September 28, at the statehouse in
Columbus) against the prison industrial complex, and the protest is
led by the Prisoners' Advocacy Network & joined by other political
activists, including unionists, Greens, anti-sweatshop student
activists, etc. Lots of us are going to participate in the September
9 rally in Mansfield, Ohio in support of locked-out steelworkers of
AK Steel. There will be a rally against TANF time limits & sanctions
("Stop the Clock") in Columbus, organized by welfare rights activists
(on September 12). What are you guys doing?
One thing that relieves me is that, whatever fantasies you, Margaret,
& Diane are spouting on this list with regard to the ghosts of snuff
films, I'm certain that *none* of you is doing anything like hunting
down ghostly snuff film producers. You *can't*, because they *don't*
exist.
Do some real political work, for change, instead of buying into
fantasies promulgated by the Law & Order crowd like "Citizens for
Decency Through Law."
Yoshie
=================
The important point for present purposes is to emphasize (a) that
whenever possible it is essential to engage in such struggles as Yoshie
describes, which most directly do not change the world but contribute
to learning the enemy and to raising at least the cadre of future larger
struggles, and (b) that there is no guarantee whatsoever that anything
whatsoever will come from these struggles. The second point is
crucial because it involves respecting the huge contingency of human
history, its resistance to encapsulation within any one "plan." Activists
in such a period as the present, when the enemy seems and to some
extent is all powerful, is to train ourselve, to learn to understand how
history moves (that contingency is not mere shapelessness -- but
that is another question), to probe the enemy wherever possible,
because we do not know where or on what grounds "The Old
Mole" as Marx described the working class, will suddenly explode
again. I would recommend you read the little pamphlet from which
the titanic struggles of the Chinese Revolution grew. Mao, "A Report
on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan." Mao was
not in the leadership of the CCP at that time, and this pamphlet is
as it were a begging note: LOOK! Look what is happening. Don't
just follow your textbooks. Here is history in motion and we must
honor it.
Incidentally, I don't know what you know about Amiri Baraka, but
I suggest you don't let differences of rhetoric or other preconceptions
blind you. He may or may not be right on specific points at specific
times, but any progressive who ignores Baraka is a fool.
Carrol
_______________________________________________
Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
