On 1/27/11 9:12 AM, Marv Gandall wrote:
> Can you and Louis elaborate a bit about your current problems with Jacoby?
> I'm not familiar with how his thinking has evolved.
The latest contretemps with Wright has an added dimension. Although you
might not have figured it out from Jacoby’s review, Jacoby is a
long-standing utopian socialism theorist so there is a kind of turf
battle going on. How dare Wright tackle a subject that Jacoby has made
his own?
In some ways, the intensity of Jacoby’s attack reminds me of the beating
Mark Danner took at the hands of George Packer in the NY Times Sunday
book review. Both men have staked out turf in the “decent left”, with
Danner urging NATO punishment of the dastardly Serbs throughout the
1990s and Packer defending Bush’s war in Iraq—until it turned sour. But
if you are vying for top honors in State Department liberalism, there’s
going to be a need to knock your competitor down a peg or two.
On the question of utopianism, it must be stressed that Wright and
Jacoby have completely different approaches. Wright is far more
interested in experiments like Mondragon than Jacoby whose notion of
utopia mostly revolves around the need for projecting lofty goals,
especially through imaginary literature such as Bellamy’s “Looking
Backward”.
Unlike Wright who has a very active presence on the Internet and who
does not mind duking it out with his ideological opponents, including
me, Jacoby is a rather aloof and remote figure whose output is almost
completely restricted to print journals. Indeed, he does not even have
an email address on his UCLA website, an effort one supposes to preempt
exchanges with riffraff like me.
Although it is restricted to subscribers, there is an electronic version
of an article that Jacoby wrote in the December 2000 Harper’s Magazine
titled “A Brave Old World: Looking Forward to a nineteenth-century utopia.”
The article was written to commemorate Bellamy’s “Looking Backward: From
2000 to 1887″ and to make the case for its relevancy in 2000, which
mostly has to do with the need for visionary schemes for future
societies. Jacoby’s main point is that utopianism has gotten a bad rap
because of a failed experiment in the USSR that also embraced ambitious
goals. He writes:
Anti-utopianism continues to suffuse our culture. Conventional as well
as scholarly opinion posits that utopia spells concentration camps and
that utopians secretly dream of being prison guards. Robert Conquest, a
leading chronicler of the Soviet terror, is lauded by Gertrude
Himmelfarb for telling the truth about “totalitarianism and utopianism”
in his latest book Reflections on a Ravaged Century. And the final
chapter of The Soviet Tragedy, by Martin Malia, another leading Soviet
historian, is tellingly entitled “The Perverse Logic of Utopia.” Indeed,
we now think of utopian idealism as little more than a prelude to
totalitarian murder. At best, an expression of utopian convictions will
call forth a sneer from historians and social scientists. In the
nineteenth century the anticipation of a future society of peace and
equality was common; now it is almost extinct. Today few imagine that
society can be fundamentally improved, and those who do are seen as at
best deluded, at worst threatening.
Now who am I to condemn anybody, least of all a widely respected
academic like Russell Jacoby, for having utopian convictions? Given the
terrible state of the world, one can surely understand why Jacoby would
want to hole up in his UCLA office and fantasize about a world where
there is no hunger, war, or alienation. It also certainly beats getting
your hands dirty working on a campus protest against the war in Afghanistan.
But I think the whole idea of utopia has very little use in the class
struggle today. As an old fashioned Marxist, I think the focus has to be
on the here and now. As American Trotskyist James P. Cannon once put it,
the art of politics is knowing what to do next.
I don’t think there is any great harm in dreaming up utopian solutions
to our problems. Erik Olin Wright’s endorsement of Mondragon will not
set us back in the class struggle, nor will Jacoby’s musings do much
harm either.
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
