Lot of stuff seems to be happening in terms of trying to quit talking past
each other.
I have been reading various things on environmental issues for quite some
time, and had a friend who passed away early last year who was part of a
deep ecology organization. Crashlist and dieoff.org and other sites have
helped me quench my thirst to learn about this subject. Right now I am
working my way through Ecological Democracy, by Roy Morrison, after which I
intend to tackle God's Last Offer, by Ed Ayres, and World War III, by
Michael Tobias. If I weren't convinced that there is more than a cry of
"wolf" here, I wouldn't bother.
I have been made humbly aware of how many assumptions and how much dogma I
shared with other Marxists that have clouded and limited my thinking, and I
think I've owned up to that. But there's a reeason I still call myself
one--even though there seems to be the highly mistaken notion that Marxists
are somehow a homogenous group (HA!). I explained that, too. It's
forbidden knowledge, and as such requires an active and partisan defense.
But that doesn't give us call to be defensive, and certainly not to subvert
our own credibility by failing to take new insights and information into
our world view.
But the comments about historical materialism are on point. I alluded
earlier, for those who are not familiar with Marxist philosophical
foundations, to Marx's rejection of positivism, or mechanistic science, or
whatever you want to call it. I threw that out there, perhaps not so
ingenuously, to tease together a mutual re-examination of baseline
assumptions. Obviously, we need a shared point of departure, those of us
who are "deep ecologists" and those who are "marxists." I think there is a
synthesis to be achieved, but it can't be achieved by accident or by
papering over differences.
In looking at Morrison's "Ecological Democracy," he correctly identifies
common practices between industrial capitalism and industrial socialism,
which he calls, interestingly enough, capitalist industrialism and
socialist industrialism. This reversal is very instructive, and I would
ask Morrison and anyone who shares his views to think very carefully about
what they might be doing by swapping the adjectives with the nouns here.
By accident or design, I can't tell, this turn of phrase conflates the two
systems and attempts to underplay some very real differences in both
philosophy and practice. He emphasizes characteristics (according to his
perspective) of each system--capitalist predation vs socialist
bureaucracy-- and "ideological" differences, ie, market vs state planning.
Morrison promotes what I called "visions" earlier; alternative systems,
involving co-ops and ecological commons, and so forth. He seems to believe
here that simply articulating, or even in some isolated experiments,
practicing, alternative "models" to the prevailing system, and showing how
far less destructive these models are, will serve SOMEHOW to bring people
to their senses.
This is pure philosophical idealism, which Marxists reject... not out of
some dogmatic fidelity, but out of our devotion to seeking scientific
explanations, number one, and out of our bias toward action, number two.
Marx was a philosopher first, but he later became a sociologist, so to
speak. His whole notion of historical materialism, the basis of Marxist
thought, is that social relations have their roots in material conditions,
and that ideas are a reflection of material existence, not the opposite.
ONe reason that's so hard to get our heads around is that goes against a
longstanding historically and socially constructed intuition to the contrary.
Why do we insist that understanding the underlying motive forces for social
relations is so essential? Not anthroentrism. There can be no change
without human agency exercised in real social conditions.
No doubt, Marxists' error, beginning with Dr. Karl himself was to believe
that breaking the code on social relations--which I believe he did--meant
he had broken the code on capitalism, which he only partially did. He did
not do the math on sustainability, and neither did we, and we didn't do the
math on bioshpere. We figured out the relations between boss and worker,
but we ignored the relation between boss and bioshpere. A lot of it, we
didn't know, but after it was known, as embattled and defensive as were
were, we confused the messengers with the message, and many of us, to our
shame, dismissed such concerns as petit-bourgeois radicalism. Lenin
himself embraced Taylorization of industry, and he said socialism would be
constructed with electrification. Errors. Hell, we made plenty. Combine
that with what Morrison completely ignores, that socialism never enjoyed a
single day of peaceful development, which kept it on anemergency
industrialization program to conduct war, and it made a damn mess of
things. It also maintained capitalist relations of production in socialist
countries, which rotted the whole project from the inside out.
We can fix that, but we're not going to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
So Morrison's error is twofold. He misrepresents Marxism, and therein, he
evades the premise of Marxism that has NOT been invalidated by
history--historical materialism. And he makes the philosphical idealist's
mistake of believeing that "solutions" can come about based on their being
good ideas, and ignore the realities of existing social relations.
Moreover, he has a hard time identifying his own class biases. He
extensively quotes Jefferson, and uses the term "democracy," which is very
revealing (another discussion).
As a Marxist, I am not throwing historical materialism, analysis of
historical conjuncture, or even democratic centralism, up against you... in
a challenge. I am putting them on the table as our contribution to the
armory we shall need to identify and move against our common enemy.
What has frustrated the shit out of us, and often leads us to become
over-sensitive and irrascible (Guilty, your honor), is the programmed
tendency of people we sincerely want to make alliances with (and I ask all
to introspect hard on this one) to engage in reflexive red-baiting. By
that, I don't only mean calling "Commie! Commie!" but the attribution of
caricatures, the use of straw man arguments "against" us, and the
assumption that we're all trying to take over anything we participate in.
So in the spirit of criticsm and self-criticism, I put these thoughts out
there. I don't know what socialism will look like when it gets here.
Anyone who says s/he does is a fool or a liar. Right now, I agree with the
deep ecologists that we are entering into a very grave crisis. You know
what! I'll bet if we reds named our ten most wanted, and you named yours,
they'd be the same bastards.
Together we are greater than the sum of our parts. Understanding the 2nd
Law of Thermodynamics has changed me, made me smarter, made me stronger.
Understanding historical materialism did the same thing for me in the past.
So it's an offering to you. We are not the enemy. The enemy likes us at
each others throats.
As my old CP comrades used to say, unite and fight.
Do we have a choice?
"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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