Louis Proyect wrote:
> 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?
If Wright's contribution to the utopian literature as I understand it
("look at Mondragon! wow!") is so feeble, it's hard to understand why
Jacoby should see him as an interloper. Ah, these academics! the fight
is so vicious because the stakes are so low?
(BTW, is that really a reference to a quote from Kissinger? or did
someone else say it?)
Jacoby:
> 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. ...
This anti-utopianism is as common among establishmentarians as it is
laughable: the utopianism of the Russian revolution died before Stalin
and the Terror took over. After 1918 (or 1919 or 1920?), the question
for the Bolsheviks was not about instituting Lenin's STATE AND
REVOLUTION in practice or about responding to the grass-roots
aspirations of workers and peasants but instead about trying to
actually run a relatively poor country that was being undermined by
opposition forces from within and attacked by imperialist aggressors
from without in the aftermath of an extremely destructive war (and
civil war), while addressing basic problems of poverty, deciding on
national priorities, etc.
Contrary to Jacoby, utopianism continues to suffuse our culture: we
should also remember that the establishmentarians themselves are often
quite utopian. The neoliberals pushed free-market nostrums onto
society assuming that that perfect markets could ever fit harmoniously
with an actual human society, while the neoconservatives (more like
Himmelfarb, if I understand her views) pushed ideas of imposing
"democracy" onto other countries without the actual democratic
participation of the people who live there (as with Iraq).
> 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.
As a famous old bearded guy once wrote, "what distinguishes the worst
architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his
structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of
every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the
imagination of the labourer at its commencement [if things work right
-- JD]."
All practice involves some sort of thinking about what we want as a
result: it's not just about how to get there (strategy and tactics)
but also where we want to go. The same is true of socialist practice:
the working class has to have _some idea_ of what they want, including
what they want to replace capitalism. This opens the door to
working-class utopianism. If I understand Hal Draper and other serious
authors who've written about this subject, Marx and Engels saw
utopianism -- and discussions or arguments about it -- and part of
working-class collective self-education, as part of building
self-organization (class consciousness, labor parties, unions, etc.)
What they rejected was the idea that intellectuals could promote
socialism by insisting on adherence to some pre-digested utopia (à la
Fourier, etc.) The actual results arise from the interaction of ideals
and practice. The working class might learn from Fourier, but in the
end it has to be the working class that makes the decision about
implementation.
By the way, up to about 20 years ago, there was a specific kind of
utopianism that was popular on the left and in some working-class
circles: advocacy of an cleaned-up (idealized) image of the USSR.
--
Jim Devine / "Living a life of quiet desperation -- but always with style!"
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