When I was getting out of my car an hour ago, a story was playing about the escalating popularity of Fox News, and some right wing nut was saying, "So if you really want socialism, all we're asking is that you be honest about it."
But despite the Right's inflammatory rhetoric about the Obama administration, it's fairly obvious that Barack Obama couldn't even bring about socialist change if he wanted it. His job is to save the capitalist economy, and no one has happy answers to that problem.
I think we can all tell we are facing a major fork in the road. Like the efforts to solve the environmental crises without fundamentally changing the way the world exploits the environment and like the efforts to stop terrorism without getting at the root causes of unrest, we all must at least sense with ever increasing certainty that we are going to have to come to a point of reckoning in our near future. The world is changing dramatically, and the chance for that change to turn positive is getting slimmer every day.
In the U.S., we've had over 600,ooo first time job losses for three months in a row. At this rate, that will be over 7 million newly-unemployed people by the end of the year. Modest projections suggest over 20 million job losses worldwide this year. This is like nothing we've ever seen before.
Alongside the many manufacturing jobs that are being lost, the recently expanding service sector has begun contracting. And of course people in real estate and banking are in trouble. My friends in journalism have less and less options as they face unemployment, and even those in the ivory tower, tenured professors, are beginning to lose their jobs.
One of my neighbors, an old vet who waves the flag proudly every day, joked to me recently, "Give me a bail out!" We've all heard that one. But within that joke, within the anger at the rich CEO's who are getting bonuses while the rest of us wonder how long we'll keep paying rent, there's an opening to a new kind of thinking. If we have a government by the people and for the people, what's its responsibility to the people when the economy goes in the crapper? Do we really live in a society where you can be too big to fail, meaning you can also be small enough that failure is acceptable? Is that really the society we want to live in?
This is genuinely a blog. I'm just throwing these ideas down to get some discussion going, and my only interest in doing this is if we actually do have a discussion. I promise not to always be so long winded. I want to get a talk going that I feel is long overdue by people coming from all kinds of perspectives in our society.
I know nothing about Michael A. Lebowitz, except that he is a Canadian economics professor. But what I do know is that he wrote an article for Monthly Review that is meant to kickstart just such a discussion. As he explains in his preface, he wrote the article for "educational and political discussions in Venezuela," but he was thinking of how an American audience might use it as well. He points out that it was written, not for the "individual passive reader" but to "encourage collective struggle....to fight for a society which permits the full development of [everyone]."
We still live in the shadow of the Cold War, in which Marxist thought was effectively propagandized as anti-American. And that has left us with a great hole in our public debate. I believe deeply that we need to understand what Marx was saying about our system, the course of its development and its ultimate self destructiveness, if we are going to be prepared to deal with the choices that lie ahead.
None of this is easy stuff. But Lebowitz has tried to develop an explanation of Marxist methodology applied to our 21st Century situation. I think he may be missing some crucial stuff, that will no doubt come up over the course of our conversation, but I think he's done a tremendous job of laying the bricks for the construction of many more arguments that need to happen.
For almost two decades now, I've been convinced that the choice between "socialism and barbarism," the choice Lebowitz says we have to make, lies ahead of us. In fact, I think it's practically upon us, and the forces for barbarism are growing stronger all the time. That's why I want to have this piece-by-piece discussion of his article with as diverse a group as people I count as friends and allies as I can.
I would encourage you read ahead through the whole article at any point. It is available at http://www.monthlyreview.org/090223lebowitz.php. If, at some point, it is not available, please let me know, and I will get you a copy. As Lebowitz says, "Monthly Review's policy of placing articles online will make it possible for organizations to make whatever use of "The Path" they think may help the struggle." I'm taking him at his word.
So, without further stalling, I'm going to skip past the introduction, though I encourage you to read it, and start simple, with the opening paragraph.
Lebowitz writes:
1. What do we all want? We want to be all that we can be. And we want this not only for ourselves. We want our families and our loved ones to be able to develop all of their potential—that we all get what we need for our development. To each according to her need for development.
It seems self evident, but I feel like we should take a few minutes just to look at this and make some of our initial responses.
Is this true for you? Do you want this for your families and loved ones? Do we live in a society where "we all get what we need"? Why or why not?
I'll move forward tomorrow, with the longer paragraph #2. And we may tackle larger sections at a time later, although the material grows more complex. If I print a paragraph a day, this will take us 115 days, but in my opinion, it will be four months well spent.
Do not feel you have to only talk about what's in the paragraph. For instance, today, I've written a number of other thoughts, and I've left many more out about how and why I've reached the conclusions I have. We can each testify at whatever length based on our own perspectives, or we can have as many side arguments as we might want to have at a time. For now, as long as we don't get people simply running interference, I am going to leave this a completely open blog, in the interest of as much open communication as possible. I know this might better serve a list serve or some other format, but it makes sense to me to stick to the overall coherence of Lebowitz's article, and I'm happy to leave a written record of what we've done out here on the web for blog hoppers to discover. I would also encourage you to share this link with friends who you think might be interested.
But enough of that. I promise not to ramble this long very often, if ever again.
Back to the question:
Do we want a society where we all get what we need?
Do we have one?
Can we imagine one?
Other thoughts?
Danny, this is a great opportunity for us to talk about a subject we previously couldn't talk about out of fear of Bush's domestic spying programs and imprisonment of being terrorists! It is reassuring to know that I can talk to some people about these subjects without being ignorantly scrutinized. Back to the questions at hand.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite book is the original Utopia, written by Thomas More in the 14th century. More, despite being a crooked politician himself, did have the idea of a perfect society away from the unrelenting parliamentry, violent crusading religion, power and war, and the ill-effects of money and greed that were all characteristics of his day. The book described a morally upscale group of people who had no system of government other than their own communitarianism. The government was democratically elected, but to avoid corruption, the people realized that a candidate for government could not campaign nor raise money for himself or he would be disqualified for government office. The people in the government were skilled in a variety of trades, but everybody, including the children, were particularly good at farming. In his own words, More describes the Utopian's as a "people who owned nothing, yet had an abundance of everything." Hilariously, the gold and silver money received from other nations for various deeds was used for children's play toys! They had no use for money, as they knew it had no true value.
This is obviously a story of almost fairy tale proportions, but it helps me answer your first question. Of course I certainly want a society that allows everyone to have what they need, and limits what many people really don't need. Our current system encourages the opposite; enabling people to necessitate over and above what they need for themselves, while allowing us to neglect those who are truly in need. It seems to me our economy has distorted what is truely of value in life. I agree with Lebowitz that true human development should be one of the main goals of a society, especially if it is to be able to sustain itself through the long term. But it seems that, through the course of events beginning at the industrial revolution, going through two world wars, and creating a globalized "knowledge" (and I might add finance) dominated economy, we have taken a wrong turn in forgetting or even neglecting the basics of true human development. Wow I have rambled on too long!!! I will stop yapping and let someone else write for a change.
I really appreciate this, Isaac. It helps to ground this in More's ideas and to pinpoint, as you have, a turning point in human development--the Industrial Revolution. That's precisely the point when Marx started making his analysis--the changeover from the Agrarian to an Industrial world. Now, we're looking at another leap, based in our electronic development--which played a key role in the pop culture revolution I grew up in and which has led to microchips and nanochips, suggesting entirely new ways to orient our relationship to the world around us. I, too, don't want to talk to much, but I'm very thankful for you getting the discussion started.
ReplyDeleteHey all; glad to be here.
ReplyDeleteI too appreciate Isaac's comments, particularly his getting the notion of utopias on the table from the jump. I can't tell you the number of arguments I've had in my life that have broken down over this issue--that is, over the issue of just what can people do, what can humans actually accomplish--with people at some point expressing to me a version of "Well, what you're talking about is utopian." This word choice is typically meant to trivialize its target as unpractical, unrealistic, pie in the sky, not serious, a mere dream...and a childish one, at that. It's meant to close the discussion.
The argument as its usually iterated, or at least implied, is just this: The world ain't perfect; therefore, any discussion of attempts to create a world that has no problems, that isn't imperfect, is at best a waste of time and at worst delusional. (This is what Hillary Clinton was up to when she derided Obama with (I'm paraphrasing0 "and the sky will open up and the sun will shine and everything will be perfect!") Usually, this point is made as to me--and I bet it's been made to you all, as well--as if it were some deep insight into the nature of things that we just don't understand.
Really? The world isn't perfect?
Well...touche.
The problem as I see it with such a condescending and all-too-common Utopian dismissal is that it is about as perfect (ironic!) an example of a straw figure as you could imagine. I mean, Thomas More and Jesus, and maybe Edward Bellamy, excepted, who are these utopians fighting for a world without pain or strife, or without problems big and small, public and personal, individual and communal?
Marx and Engels certainly don't fit that description. Indeed, their utopian impulse, as I understand it, is materialist to the core and, therefore, an attempt to engage the world in a way precisely opposite of fantasy (and the opposite, too, of what Stephen Colbert terms "truthiness.")
So...I've come to the conclusion that people who demean as "utopian" the sorts of discussion Danny is trying to jump start here are not serious people. Well, let me pull back from that a bit...they are people who do not really want to have a serious discussion about achieving human potential in the face of all of the many limits that come along with being human.
It's funny: Often the very people who use utopian as a trump card are the same ones who so strenuously advocate that most fantastic of American myths...If you try hard, and want it badly enough, you can be anything you want to be.
No, you can't.
No, WE can't. But, as I have said elsewhere many times, while we cannot be any- and everything we want to be, we can be so much more than we know...or even as yet imagine. Humans face limits because we are animals, but because our particular variety of animalness is human, because we have reason and imagination, we are in the position of understanding that in some cases what seem like built-in-to-the-species limits on human potential are in fact human-imposed limits. We can also understand that some limits that are very real today, and that must remain so if we are all in this on our own, might in fact be transcended tomorrow if we work together (the way I am communicating to you now over the miles being one very obvious example of that truism).
I could go on like this all day but will stop now with this. To me, when I call myself a utopian, what I mean is that I know that human beings have not yet become fully human but that the technological potential exists today, at last, to provide in abundance for the "merely" biological needs of our species. And that when that need is met, our real human potential awaits. It is then and only then, as I believe Marx said, our real human history will begin.
More on point....do we want a society where we all get what we need? I'm pretty sure that "we" all do not want that. But I've already yacked too much today...
ReplyDeleteI'll be curious to hear you go into your second point. Getting what we "need" being different from getting what we "want." Although, I think one of the things that's different about this period and any period before in history is that we are talking about this in a world where abundance is possible. Whole campaigns revolve around the idea of a PC for everyone because it's more than doable. It's more doable than ever if we take some kind of rational control of a system that is currently running on the blind drive for profits.
ReplyDeleteBeautiful initial post, David! I think the points you make are crucial, and I particularly appreciate you pointing out the fact that it's hard to imagine anything more irrational than the faith we seem to place in the American Dream or in the Capitalist system, which has always been prone to crisis, but which should have lost all credibility for the future. Of course, part of what we are doing here is breaking that down and looking at why those myths are myths, so I'll try not to get ahead of myself.
And your point about Marx and Engels is well taken. They bring the materialism to the dialectic. That's at the heart of the argument: we don't have to choose between a vision and reality, but we do have to deal with reality if we want any hope of achieving our vision.
Great post David! Danny, I like how you stick it to the American dream. I don't believe in the American dream not because I am a pessimist (I try not to be) but because I am a realist. I think that if the dream were actually a reality, then it would be available to anyone who would like to pursue it. But it's obvious that it's not with the levels of poverty and exploitation on which the capitalist system thrives, unless those are fundamental characteristics of capitalism. This is one of the antiquations of capitalism I can think of right now. Also, I hate how the free market promoters try to equate capitalism with democracy. With what capitalism has developed into, hasn't it eroded our democratic traditions and values beyond recognition? Also, we've talked an awful lot about the negatives of capitalism, which seems fitting since we just got out of the era of Bush crony-capitalism. But shouldn't we discuss Adam Smith's capitalism while thinking of the modern deviations of it?
ReplyDeleteSure. Feel free to bring up any of the particulars of Adam Smith's capitalism as you see fit. Marx doesn't so much disagree with Adam Smith's analysis as he factors in aspects of it Smith may have overlooked that become more apparent as it matures under industrialism and as it becomes increasingly globalized. Someone who reads more Smith than I may want to weigh in here.
ReplyDeleteAn important part of what we are looking at here is that these systems are not static. What worked in one era, at one level of technology, is not going to continue to work as technology develops and as globalized capitalism reaches the point of worldwide glut in terms of production and an increasing diminishment in the size of the workforce. We are at a different stage of development than when either of these writers wrote their analyses, and we should apply each distinctly as it is helpful to look at the system as it exists, and as it is changing, today.
I am jumping in a little late, my apologies. I will have to catch up piecemeal. Here is a thought that has been running through my head that is inspired by my limited understanding of alienation and Nietzsche. Where is the joy, pride, and satisfaction of the working class? I not would classify myself as a realist; I don’t know what that would mean. I don't like being a buoy in the raging sea of capitalism, but there exist powerful economic systems, laying outside our control, that were set into motion when the American economy took off after the Civil War. The economic downturn is the result of continuous pillaging of the working class that was set into motion by the deregulation of Reagan. However, since I am broke, I look to get out of this financial meltdown unscathed. My thoughts rest in the resentment, and alienation, felt by workers that manifests itself in the form of self-hatred and need for inferior attributes such as humility, meekness, and hope based on treasure earned in the afterlife. Very few jump classes, to grow up poor and become rich is an anomaly. My attainment of a middle class life would be gravy based on my lower middle class upbringing. I am fine with that. Workers and the middle class don’t need another imaginary fairytale to pacify their angst. What is needed is pride in what we are, an appreciation for what we have accomplished, and a desire to continue our service for the greater whole. Workers should not play the part but should take pride in their contribution to society.
ReplyDeleteSomething happened that made me have to moderate this, David. I think I sat it up that way on comments on older posts, so that I would notice them when they came in. My apologies it took a day or so to get it up. Comments on new posts will go up immediately without moderation.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I am with you right up until you say "I am fine with that." Everything you've said up until that point is what Marx's class analysis was trying to address.
When you say "My attainment of a middle class life would be gravy" that sounds like an imaginary fairytale to pacify the average American's angst. Is that what you mean?
The middle class, as we use it, is not what Marx meant by the term or what most people meant by the term 150 years ago, so if there becomes confusion about that in our discussion, let's keep clarifying it. Marx meant the owners of business.
But what I hear you saying is that you would be happy with your little slice of the American Dream. Since the rich have gotten richer and the poor have indeed gotten poorer in the three decades you sight, the idea of a working class that can attain that gravy is increasingly becoming a fairytale for more and more people. I don't see that ending any time soon. The argument here that we are analyzing is built on theory that capitalism is built to destroy itself and that we can't turn the clock back. You may be able to jump on the boats that rise, but more and more people are going to be on sinking ships until the world's standard of living hits the worldwide level created by a dog-eat-dog system. The fairytale that American workers believe in is that that system is somehow going to go against its nature and begin working for them. I believe the fear in those tea parties, the fear of the government that is trying to manage this crisis, reflects the average person's increasing angst over the system. I don't think the tea parties suggest a vision of how the system could ever work on behalf of the worker.
That's the vision we're trying to tackle here. I don't think it's a fairytale that we can live in a more fair world than the one we live in. We have the resources to feed the world. If we could manage the environment in a sane way, we could halt the incredible damage we're doing to this planet. If we weren't driven by the need to control resources and what Eisenhower called the "military industrial complex," we wouldn't have to live in a state of perpetual war. We can all see sane solutions to the problems that face us, but the myths that keep us from tackling the root causes of those problems keep us from moving forward.
A working class hero is indeed something to be. But I think the alienation of the worker (white or blue collar) is a real understanding of the average worker's relationship to production and control within the system as it exists. You and Marx and Lebowitz would all, no doubt, agree on your contempt for fairytales and on your belief in the integrity of the working class. Marx fought hardest against what he perceived to be the Utopian socialists (not a dig at Moore, Isaac) because he thought they dealt only in dialectics and not enough in the realities of the material world. The question you might debate is what is the potential of the real world, and how can the working class assess reality with solid information and a vision of what's possible. What I'd like to see is even a beginning of that discussion in our culture. I think the real world is falling apart because we have blinders on to the real world possibilities.
Thank you for these insights. I look forward to digging deeper into all of this with you, David. And if you write any more on these back posts, I'll be sure to get them up right away. Again, sorry for the delay.
I hope others will see this went up and chime in as well. Some of us on this list, I know, have a great deal more dirt on their hands in this struggle than I do.
Sorry to start up a dialogue on the very first post, but I appreciate your response and would like to reciprocate. Without much knowledge of the subject, I decided to jump in because I like the plane of thought (I can’t wait to study Marxism at KU). I also like the ring of “middle class hero” but don’t know if I agree with the expression. The term “hero” seems to have the same implications that that the term “savior” has. Automatically this turns me off. With heroes, come victims and with religion, comes sinners, who are less than and in need of something that is apart from and out there. What comes to mind is the song “Pink Houses.” I love the pulse of this song, the no frills attitude, the pride in doing what we do: pay the bills, the thrills, the pills that kill. We don’t need heroes; we need satisfaction. Accountability to ourselves, our obligations and our loved ones is worthy of self-respect and contentment. Over indulgent consumerism really symbolizes what I am trying to say. There is the need to buy, to fit in, to be a part of, with the hopes of filling up a subconscious vacuum soul. Maybe the wayward soul stems from a lack of community. Maybe, we can find ourselves through our community. This is what bothers my about alienation and the self-hatred that comes with Nietzsche’s slave mentality. The working class should take pride that it is with their hands that built this country. Sorry about the tangents, these are just my random thoughts; this is not a rebuttal. One note on capitalism, my economist friend says that there are 40-50 year cycles when the economy goes, as he put it, “berserk.” I thought that I wanted to be an activist before I came back to school, but after meeting people like you, I don’t know if it’s in my blood. You are a different breed, and I do mean this with the upmost of respect. Hopefully, I have yet to find a calling. There are many issues that are interesting, but it seems like to be an effective activist one should specialize. My issue is how can one be truly effective? I see many things wrong with society, but what are practical steps to alleviating gross injustice?
ReplyDeleteWell, I was just quoting John Lennon as you call up John Mellencamp. There are a lot of arguments about heroes versus other terms for people who inspire other people, people who believe in themselves and have a strong sense of who they are. By my definition, I have heroes, too numerous to count, and I don't see them as saviors and/or as bringing about victims. But that's a semantic difference, and I don't mean to get sidetracked by it.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the question of whether the economy is simply cycling through a crisis or coming to a significantly new kind of breakdown is one of those ongoing debates. Marx talks about worsening crises every time they cycle around, and he makes a pretty strong argument (revised over and over from 1948 to the end of his life) why he things it ultimately has to collapse. Of course he's not alone. Back in the midst of the economic bubbling of the 90s, a wide range of thinkers from Noam Chomsky to Lester Thurow to Jeremy Rifkin were predicting the kind of collapse we are seeing now. With the level of automation in our society, the increasing move toward labor replacing technologies (both Adam Smith and Marx agreed that the economy's wealth was based in the value of labor) and the globalization of the markets, I have a hard time seeing why, at the very least, we aren't watching this particular empire fall. Of course I think the system is falling. But I think the rest of Lebowitz's argument will help some with this. The thing about dialectical materialism is that it is philosophy based in an examination of changing technologies and material conditions.
It's funny. I don't see myself as an activist. I think people do what they do because they feel it's the right thing to do. What I think will make us all more effective, in whatever role we play in life, is if we take time to analyze the root causes of the changes surrounding us. Our society doesn't encourage that kind of analysis, for many reasons (not a few being myopically self serving). One reason I feel distant from the term "activist" is that it suggests there is some direct action to be taken at the moment that will bring an end to gross injustice. While I believe anyone who recognizes gross injustice naturally feels compelled to do whatever he or she thinks will end it, I don't think we can ever really solve the symptoms of what's wrong with our society without taking time to analyze and talk about root causes. I believe we need to do this in an ongoing way in tandem with whatever kind of activity we do. As far as I'm concerned, your journalism is your activity (whether or not you want to call it activism), but the way you get better at it is not only doing it early and often (of course that's crucial) but also finding ways to step back and synthesize your experience, analyze beyond the surface details and look for the connections in the deep structure of what's happening. This blog will be a failure if it doesn't help us to do this in a way that, in the long run, makes us all more truly effective.
So that's why I'm writing all of this and inviting the dialogue, to answer both of your last two questions, not with my answers but with a methodology.
No rush to that calling business. Some of the best advice I ever got was to give myself a decade to bounce around and see what I thought about things. I've never really quit doing that, but it took some pressure off and allowed me to explore things I wouldn't have otherwise explored.
Thanks for all of your thoughtful commentary, David. You're tackling the tough stuff, and I appreciate it.