Re: AUT: RE: antiwar movement

["FoofighterPilot" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It is interesting.  My main hope was not to paint a picture of universal
despair.  I find, for example, some definite differences in different types
of Christians and Christianities.  My workplace is particularly bad, but I
suspect for particular reasons.  The response has largely been
generalizations.  Or some comments on specifics that beg a lot of questions.

For example, I have had a few conversations with and know a bit more than
most about Dan Lane, a former Staley striker and a decent guy (at least, 5
years ago) who was really transformed by the experience, as well as an
African American worker, Lorel, who was not real active in the strike, but
who has done a lot since, who was catalyzed in some way by the experience.
I worked on the Staley support campaign on and off for the duration of the
strike and was in attendance in Decatur at several moments.  Even in defeat,
there is some element among the Staley strikers and people connected to them
who left that strike, defeat though it was, with a greater clarity and
willingness to fight than many people I see here.

Its not comparable to my workplace, but it is the incomparable aspect that
is interesting.  The specific reasons, the fighting back versus the
omnipresent pro-company material in people's cubicles, for example.

I am also quite certain that there is resistance.  Given that I have spent
most of my time on this list defending ideas roughly comparable with John
and the Open Marxism folks, that should not be surprising.  However, there
is a question we have to ask.  There is no doubt in my mind that people
individually act in ways that are in conflict with capital.  The problem is
the movement from micro-resistance to macro-resistance, from individual
opposition (and the cheerleading of micro-resistance is IMO more akin to
populism than anything else, but more on that later) and defensive actions
(which often rely on reactionary, anti-social aspects from which to secure
some foothold, such as, say, attacking women's access, say, to a skilled job
area, which leads to a strike or to forcing the company to back down) to
collective and offensive actions which actively increase solidarity, build
confidence, open up people to the possibility of more changes and make them
look forward to upping the ante.

If there is no response in particulars to what people are seeing in their
lived situations (and not from a podium where you have no idea what people
do when you have left), and there is no engagement with the movement from
micro-to-macro, then we are left with a surprisingly uncritical populism,
which is right in such a one-sided way that everything which disturbs the
'omnipresence of resistance' argument is sidelined, wished away.  What
amazes me is the readiness to sacrifice the formal critique argued so
forcefully by the Open Marxism tendency.  The specific forms are lost, the
contradictions smoothed over in the name of omnipresent resistance, without
seeing that that resistance can also be the means by which capital carries
out its existence, a necessary aspect of its dynamism.

As a result, you get Dave's textbook populist opposition to Marx and New
Democracy's more or less populist politics.  And by this I do not mean that
there is no call for revolution, but that revolution is still treated as a
demand and that the content of the critique of capital is watered down into
a folksy language.  Or at least folksy for 50+ white workers.  And yes, that
is meant to be sharp because I have listened to the same language from
Leninist friends of mine, either Trots or ex-PL soft Maoists or
ex-Marxist-Leninist Party Albaniites (and don't get me wrong, some of them,
esp the ex-MLP people, are really sharp and I respect them personally, even
when I have fights with them) for almost 20 years.

Beyond that, because I have been having discussions like these recently with
a few people:

Dave said:
The nub of the question is: Was it in fact, as you put it, "the problems the
Soviets were faced with that led them to reify at every instance the very
thing that they intended to abolish?" That is, were their problems a
function of
the material conditions of semi-feudal Russia? Or was there something
endemic
to Leninism which led to the revolution's disastrous result? Or was it
something endemic to Marxism itself?

Chris:
Can't we get past this tired nonsense?  The Bolsheviks, Social Democracy,
'post-Marx Marxism', represented the left wing of capital, either securing
bourgeois democracy and reforms or leading anti-feudal revolutions and the
separation of the workers from the means of production.  There are other
more interesting questions re: Russia.

Dave:
Marx contended that capitalism contradicts humanity's essence as a species.
Workersâ??"proletarians"â??are those men and women who are forced by their
circumstances to live by the sale of their own labor power to capital. Under
capitalism, man is alienated from other men and alienated from himself. The
effect of
the division of labor on the laborer, Marx quotes Adam Smith, is that "He
generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human
creature to
become." Man can only overcome alienation by doing away with private
property
and creating communist society.

Chris:
I just had this conversation with someone.  Sounds like Lewis Feuer.  Wait,
it sounds like Althusser.  Wait, it sounds like every post-WW2 structuralist
and post-structuralist.  Nonetheless, it retains currency among those who
choose to not, for whatever reason, take Marx seriously.

Dave:
Marx saw human nature as an abstract ideal rather than as something present
in each human. According to Marx, proletariansâ??workersâ??are dehumanized by
capitalism; they revolt against their dehumanization, to fulfill the role of
their
class in history.

Chris:
Marx did not see human nature as an 'abstract ideal' nor as present in each
human (which is a nice populist rendering of bourgeois notions of the
individual).  Marx argued that 'human nature' was present in us as social
beings, operating not merely in us as individuals, but as social bodies.
What is more, that nature is mutable and transformed by us in our practical
activity in the world.  it is our practice that shapes and makes our nature.
How could such a nature reside merely within 'each human' aka individuals?
If you want to get all quotey, we can do that to.

As for this 'role in class history' thing, Marx saw the proletariat as the
universal class for concrete, historically specific reasons, not as the
outcome of some kind of self-acting History.  That is why Marx's argument
about the form of social relations is so important and why all major attacks
on Marx depend on a denigration of his notion of form and the importance of
forms.  Absent the problem of form, Marx certainly is easily read in this
way.  Of course, that makes Marx not very interesting, at which point one
can dispense with him without further thought.

Dave:
While Marx clearly saw the industrial proletariat as the agent of revolution
against capitalism, his view of workers as dehumanized is inconsistent with
the idea of workers fighting for revolution as conscious historical
subjects.
Marx's model of history endows the proletariat with an historic mission at
the
same time as it deprives the proletariat of the human qualities which would
enable it to fulfill this mission.

Chris:
I cannot highly enough recommend Theorie Communiste's work in this regard.
Difficult but sharp.  Marx's view of alienation is not some transcendant,
universal, uncontradictory alienation.  Nor is Marx interested in the
somehow always-already revolutionary worker of positivist social science,
which lies at the base of Dave's conception of the working class and which
is part of what links it with Left populism.  There is no contradiction
between being absolutely alienated and therefore being absolutely
revolutionary.  Rather, you cannot have one without the other.  Only a class
which has no interest, no self-recognition, in the form of social relations
in which it exists, can possibly be revolutionary in the way Marx discusses
the proletariat.  There is no grand, positive working class identity from
which we can make revolution.  That identity goes hand in hand with
micro-resistance to reproduce the capital-labor relation.

It is not Marx, but Dave, which has to ascribe an abstract human nature, a
'good by nature', barely held in check by the most powerful ruling class
ever, mass of loving humanity.  Of course, as a result, i think Dave has a
lot in common with autonomist Marxism.

The idea of conscious historical subjects is another matter.  That is not a
pre-given state just because one is born with a blue collar or a factory
job.  Nor is it some precise state to be obtained with the right slogans and
Sunday church speeches.  It is rather more complicated than that, and much
like a human nature, is not an individually held consciousness.  For fear of
not doing the positive exposition of the problem justice, I will duck that
for now.  Suffice to say, I do think it is a very important question and one
which separates Dave off from autonomist Marxism, even where previously I
find him to share other fundamentals.

Dave:
Marx accepted the capitalist view of human motivation: "individuals seek
only
their particular interest," he declared (Marx's emphasis). For Marx,
self-interest is fundamental to historical materialism as a science. Only
self-interest is scientifically valid as a motivation; the rest is
"ideology." Marx's
belief that he had discovered a "science" of revolution rests on his notion
that
the relations of production and the economic forces which they constitute
operate independently of men's will. He does not mean by this that
individual
thought or initiative is not possible or not a real factor in society, but
that
individual acts often have results contrary to their intent, and that the
economic forces constituted by the sum of individual actions act according
to their
own laws.

Chris:
Wow, have you read Lewis Feuer?  This is almost word for word.
Self-interest is here grasped in the most narrow way.  Please feel free to
cite the reference for us.  Then i would happily discuss this.  But if ever
I smelled a rat, this is it.

More importantly, Marx's idea of science involves the idea that essence and
appearance do not coincide.  Science critiques the disjuncture between
essence and appearance, form and content, while showing how this content
expressed itself, found its mode of existence, through that appearance or
form.  Dave, on the other hand, is talkng more of Lenin and Social Democracy
than Marx.  A reasonably close reading of Capital or Marx's other work would
unearth this for what it is: not a battle with Marx, but with someone's old
ghosts.  Th individual action thing is straight Plekhanov, btw, and crude by
all standards.  Positively pre-Hegel.  No wonder Marx referrred to Plekhanov
with contempt in the last years of his life.

Dave:
Workers as individuals in Marx's paradigm do not have any goals beyond their
individual interests. They do not act in conscious pursuit of revolutionary
goals, and they do not act to fulfill a vision of human life and values
fundamentally opposed to the capitalist vision. They have goals larger than
their
particular interests only as they represent man's "species essence" seeking
to
fulfill itselfâ??that is, only as abstractions.

Chris:
Wow Dave, no they don't act like this most of the time.  it is very rare
that anyone acts in such a manner.  Mostly only Leftists.  Your notion of
consciousness is pure populist happy thoughts. Leftist triumphalism turned
into a credo, its own ideology.

Dave:
Though it is destined to act as the agent of revolution, in Marx's paradigm
the working class puts an end to human exploitation not as a conscious goal
on
behalf of all humanity, but as the inevitable by-product of ending its own
exploitation. It accomplishes the general interest of humanity by acting in
its
own self-interest.

Chris:
Now this is not entirely bad.  Marx would indeed see your argument that
revolution happens because a mass of individual subjects consciously come
together to end human exploitation on behalf of all humanity as twaddle.
And indeed, you here succumb to the kind of balderdash you accuse Marx of.
Or rather, it tends to smack of the populist importation of imperial
doctrine: we know we are the saviours of the world.  Exactly what people say
as they send their sons and daughters off to die in Iraq.  Now that is
Messianic.

Dave:
Marx's declarations to the contrary, the logic of the Marxist paradigm is
that workers can only be the beasts of burden of the revolution, not its
conscious creators.

Chris:
Dave, the falsity of this statement is so grand that it almost is
believable.  Leninism got along for a long time by pushing this in practice
and in its attitude towards the working class, while denying it vociferously
and even with violence.  How could anyone make such an accusation of them.
This has nothing to do with Marx and again, if you want to play the citation
game, bring it on.

One of the results of all of this stuff is the uncritical approach to the
EZLN.  Let's take one example: there are several well known quotes from
Marcos in which he argues that he is not a leader, but that the will of the
EZLN or of the people of Chiapas flows through him.  And this is the exact
same kind of statement that, when uttered by Stalin or Mao, became the means
by which to execute, torture and imprison all opponents, for in speaking
against me, against a mere voice of the people, you speak against the
people.

One of the other results is that we try to find a kernel of revolution in
every piece of filth.  I certainly think that it is more important to see
much of what is seemingly reactionary as a complex and contradictory
response to capital, to not attack religion with an abstract atheism but to
grapple with why this belief comes to be at that moment in that way.  But
that does not mean that everything has a radical kernel, that secretly all
actions are in rebellion against capital.  John, i am surprised you would
connect with that.  I remember you making the distinction between the idea
of crime as resistance and crime as reinforcing capital and that some was
one and much the other, but that merely violating private property was not
in and of itself radical.  As such, resisting capital is not in and of
itself revolutionary, esp if the desire is to seek older forms of
accomodation with capital, whether or not that is realistic, or holding onto
pre-capitalist social relations with distinctly reactionary aspects, from a
retrograde Catholicism that invokes violence against protestants in Chiapas
or Islamism in the Middle East.

Well, that is much too long, but hopefully not wasted.

Cheers,
Chris



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