The auditorium fills up when people either have nowhere else to run, or
they are herded in there to be massacred. I spent 24 years as a military
instrument of US imperialism, and got a first had look at the reality of
power beneath all this number-crunching and theorizing. Perhaps we need to
prepare for what we can do once those things for which we have passed the
point of no return happen.
We're not going to talk people into the auditorium. No one can hear.
We're being drowned out by CNN, The Enquirer, NYT, the latest crop of
sitcoms. The place where people can hear are where they don't have TVs.
This propaganda doesn't take in Haiti, where I spend a substantial amount
of time, because they aren't plugged in. No electricity, you see.
I suppose I can be called a Marxist. If belief in the necessity to
recognize historical conjunctures, economic, political, military... makes
me a Leninist as well, so be it.
Marxists have to begin by acknowledging three things: Marx and Engels and
Lenin and Stalin and Mao, and all the other great scientific socialists,
were human. They made mistakes. And as humans, they could only
concentrate their attention on a finite number of the aspects of their
reality, which they so greatly influenced. Finally, consistent with the
historical materialist dialectic, things have changed... quantitatively to
qualitatively.
I say this to preface what I think is an extremely critical error we may be
making as Marxists now. It's been alluded to by Mark again and again. We
are failing to integrate real science into our thinking now, and we have,
as a consequence, ignored the biggest crisis of capitalism imaginable,
which is just on the horizon. Global collapse.
For a number of interpenetrating reasons, socialist projects have come to
ruin. Trying to divide the reasons into internal and external has not only
posited a false dichotomy-and axle we now continually get wrapped around-it
has diverted our attention from the real, practical discoveries and
developments since then. The siege mentality created by incessant
hostility, which we are all familiar with, has also served as a set of
blinders. It has kept us in a defensive frame of mind and contributed to
our narrow-mindedness and our sectarianism. These characteristics,
magnified in the caricature our enemies use to trivialize us, are
nonetheless based on some real shortcomings, and so we bear a bit of the
blame.
No one doubts our dedication, but many credible, critical thinkers are
stricken with our predisposition to try and conform realities to our
theoretical models before we have examined all the facts-something I myself
have been guilty of on more than one occasion-instead of constantly
updating our understanding of practical reality, testing our assumptions
against that reality, and conforming our theory to our discoveries. This
leads many who would be interested in our methodology to dismiss us for a
lack of intellectual rigor and a consequent intellectual mediocrity.
Myles Horton once said, "Marx gave us a tool box, not a blueprint." There
is no system called Marxism. It is a methodology. Anti-Marxists call it a
system to discredit it, and Marxists have treated it as a religion, and
discredited themselves.
I want to propose the hypothesis that there is one major problem that
contributed to the failure/destruction of socialist projects, for which we
did not have the knowledge in Marx's time, but which we can ill afford to
ignore now. And this hypothesis is immanently materialist, that is, it
looks for the SOURCE of the problem in material conditions. It also has
profound implications for the direction and character of impending
capitalist crisis, and therefore how we should prepare to respond to those
crises.
Capitalism is a system whose motive force is economic competition and
capital accumulation-expansion. This is precisely the characteristic of
capitalism that inevitably leads to crises of overproduction and periodic
economic collapse. COMPETITIVE MOMENTUM always makes it overshoot. In the
past we have seen the market overshoots-recessions and depressions. But
the next crisis of capitalism will be profound and permanent.
We have overshot our energy base with our aggregate population.
Overshooting one's energy base with one's population is similar to the
overproduction phenomenon, but it differs in one critical respect. Energy
is more than a mere commodity. It is the lifeblood of all productive
activity. Our aggregate population has grown in direct proportion to the
available, readily exploitable energy-mainly primary oil. Now that oil is
running out. Fast. That's basic to the discussion on this list.
Socialist societies overshot, too. Partly out of failure to understand the
implications of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Partly out of their faith
that socialism could be built on the material basis laid down by
capitalism, and a somewhat uncritical fidelity to that teleology. And
significantly, because of the competitive pressure of capitalist
encirclement. That competitive pressure (read: competitive momentum... the
same inherent characteristic of capitalism that leads it inevitably to
crisis) led to adoption of capitalist industrial division of labor, which
also-consistent with Marx's materialism-led to the constant regeneration of
capitalist epiphenomenal categories within the socialist project. It also
led socialist countries to environmental devastation.
Historical materialism rejects the notion that we can revert to an earlier
epoch from a maturely developed current epoch. Capitalist restoration can
not happen from re-acquiring the IDEAS of the past out of a socialist
society. It can only have happened, with the suddenness that it did,
because our instruments and relations of production remained rooted in the
capitalist paradigm. That paradigm is characterized by competitive
momentum... which always overshoots. That the imperative to maintain this
competitive momentum came from encirclement is important to understand, but
does not change the fact that its net effect is very much the same.
For this reason, the fall of the Eastern Bloc was inevitable, and the fall
of China is equally inevitable, if civilization survives long enough, and
if a more enlightened left wing doesn't take over the CCP. The nodal point
of loss of state power by the Communist Party just hasn't arrived quite
yet. But it will.
The scarcer oil gets, the faster this conjuncture approaches. It is
strategic, and therefore the quest to begin controlling remaining reserves
will be more and more militarized (as we are already seeing in
interventions at Iraq, Kosovo, and Colombia).
Well before it hits $50 a barrel, the stock markets crash. Before 2008,
over 50% of all available oil will be under the control of five Middle
Eastern nations. The competition to gain permanent access to these
reserves, as well as Caspian and Venezuelan-Colombian reserves, is already
on. Ultimately, this is a military venture.
Mechanized agriculture, without which there would now be mass starvation,
is totally based on petroleum products, from pesticides to herbicides to
fertilizer to transportation to power for irrigation and machinery. The
implications of this alone are as inevitable as they are unthinkable. And,
given the current political-economic structure of society, we all know
where the burdens of this crisis will be shifted. That's also where the
military foi will be shifted, until our military capacity overreaches itself.
The combination of external militarization (which has already happened, and
is proceeding apace) and internal crisis in the US (where the crisis will
hit especially hard, because we have developed such an abject dependence on
personal, gas-powered vehicles), will lead to increased social
polarization, sharpened class struggle, more overt state-repression, and
will likely lead to mass conscription into military and non-military
service. This is not a far-off science fiction scenario. AND THIS IS WHAT
WILL FILL THE AUDITORUIM. The question is whether there will be any
leadership in the auditorium, and the survival of civilization, it seems to
me, depends on the answer to that question.
These processes are already in motion. Society is attributing what we see
to a set of presumptions that have not taken this energy crisis into
account. This is not just the classic replay of class struggle as Marx and
even Lenin saw it. It has a whole new variable that has never in human
history been faced before. Lenin taught us to keep our eyes out for
conjunctures. This is the big one.
These crises have already hit some regions, and we can get a glimpse of
what's coming. Look at Russia. In the US, we can count on a resurgence of
state-sanctioned fascism, and on scapegoating that will open all the old
divisions among the working class. Look for direct and brutal attacks on
trade unions, left political formations, and oppressed nationalities. This
will be accelerated by external wars to maintain control of oil reserves,
and by growing resistance from the southern nations. It is only a matter
of time until ruling classes begin to openly regard the southern nations
and oppressed nationalities here, no longer as part of the reserve army of
labor, but as surplus population. Our current willingness to incarcerate
millions presages this.
Self-defense will become a prerogative, FOR US, and the open fight to
overturn capitalism will become a matter of survival-first of us, then of
our species. The radical changes necessary to prepare for the overwhelming
global crisis simply can NOT be made in a capitalist structure. Socialism
may not guarantee a way out, but it is certainly a prerequisite. But
socialism presupposes survival!!!
Inevitably, there will be a collapse of industrial society. This is the
grimmest and surest prognostication. We will not be building socialism as
a shiny city left behind by capitalism, but as survivors of a hellish
descent into a world of toxins and trash heaps and scraps. That's really
icky, but so is individual mortality, and it's just something we have to
deal with.
There is no chance of stopping it, because we have passed many of the
points of no return. But our only chance of attenuating the shock and
ameliorating the damage is to prepare now, FIRST TO SURVIVE THE COMING
FASCIST ASSAULT, then to rebuild on a whole new footing, with 3-4 billion
fewer people in the world. Because there will surely be a die-off. Russia
has lost 11 million since 1991.
The future-if we have one at all-is not in the highly industrialized
classless society envisioned by Marx and Lenin. If we want to see the
shape of our only thinkable future, we need to look at Cuba, now using a
socialist state to adapt to a situation where massive petroleum-based
inputs into the economy were abruptly lost, and where more socially and
environmentally sustainable practices are being explored.
Rosa Luxemborg was right. Our choice is socialism or barbarism.
I apologize for both repeating what people have said before, and for any
element of redundancy. I am sorting out my own thinking on this, partly in
the writing of it.
Stan Goff
"If insurrection is an art, its main content is to know how to give the
struggle the form appropriate to the political situation."
-Vo Nguyen Giap
"Rather than seeking comparabilities in statistical terms among what are
all too often superficial features of different situations, comparabilities
must be sought at the level of determinate mechanisms, at the level of
processes that are generally hidden from easy view."
-Eleanor Burke Leacock
"Every day one has to struggle that this love to a living humanity
transform itself into concrete acts, in acts that serve as examples, as
motivation."
-Ernesto "Che" Guevara
"Mask no difficulties."
-Amilcar Cabral
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