A final point anyway.
This sentence of Henwood's: 'a future society has to emerge out of this one,
on the basis of experimentation and struggle' -- was obviously written to
have, not the ethical-imperative designation I gave it, but literally the
following meaning: 'realistically-speaking, no future society can evolve
except out of this one,' i.e., we are bound within the constraints of everyday
life and global realities which common-sense (he's implying) says our politics
must respect and cannot jump over. Ergo, those who promote alternative futures
which do not have this common-sense causal connection with today, are
sectarian loonies, Leninists, daft utopians etc.
I want to ignore this literal meaning and focus on the highly reactionary and
socially-conservative subtext, which is all about the idea that you can't
really change anything and everything will go on just as it always has. This
just a version of TINA of course. This means that the notion of
'experimentation and struggle' which Henwood goes on to invoke is at once
utopian and defeatist.
This kind of writing is such a commonplace among closet conservatives that it
deserves a special name and I nominate the word "boustrophedon". This word
describes, as everyone knows, an ancient writing-system in which words are
written from left to right and then right to left on alternate lines.
Henwood's "Wall Street" is a good example of the political orthography known
as boustrophedonic, in which each left-tending thought is instantly balanced
out by a right-tending thought.
It is trivially true that, as Doug Henwood says, the future can have no other
origin than the present. Even, perhaps especially, the most profound social
revolutions turn out to be prisoners of their own past. It is a historical
paradox that once in power, Lenin's Bolshevik party was forced to carry out
highly conservative policies in almost all fields. This was so because the
October Revolution was so shattering that it wiped the slate clean: society
had to be rebuilt from ruins and in the circumstances it was the Bolsheviks --
the only surviving large-scale social institution-- which had to do things
like preserve bourgeois culture and artefacts, insist on elements of bourgeois
public and family morality etc. In other ways, too, the post-revolutionary
state and society was forced to carry out to the logical end, certain tasks
left unfinished by the ancien regime. This possibility is not an unfortunate
and unexpected byproduct of revolution, but even of its essence. Thus Lenin
declared that it would be necessary for the*Bolsheviks* and precisely they and
no others, to complete the historic tasks of the so-called 'bourgeois
revolution' which Tsarism and its over-compliant bourgeoisie left incomplete.
This was because their only rivals, the Mensheviks and their allies, were
politically incapable of carrying out this 'stage' even though they believed
in it in a way the Bolsheviks did not.
The revolution happened not only because the masses would not go on in the old
way, but also because the rulers *could not* go on in the old way. But the old
way was indeed continued, altho in a transformed form and under a different
sign, and what's more *this outcome was envisaged* by the Bolshevik leaders,
especially Lenin. Thus Tsarist industrialisation programmes developed under
Stolypin, were taken up wholesale by the Soviets, as were the land reform
programmes of the old peasant parties.
Revolutions happen when and only when they become unavoidable if social life
is to continue at all. There may be experiments and innovations, but
revolutions are not experimental processes, but a struggle for life in which
all human, material and spiritual resources are mobilised by all sides. They
do not happen because someone wants one badly, and they are not prevented just
because privileged elites don't like them. Social revolutions are cataclysmic
because they are elemental and unstoppable. However, if revolutions are also
emancipatory it is because they draw the multimillioned masses directly into
history in new ways. It is precisely *this* possibility which we must be alive
to and which boustrophedonic sentences like 'a future society has to emerge
out of this one, on the basis of experimentation and struggle', and books like
Wall Street, are designed to anaesthetise us from, and which serve to block
off at every turn every possibility of thinking the past or anticipating the
future, except through the prism of the ineluctable everyday reality which
'common-sense' presents us to. It was Gramsci, was it not, who declared that
common-sense is the main ideological enemy we face? That, and boustrophedonic
writing.
Mark
_______________________________________________
CrashList website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
