The "Desirable and POSSIBLE" vs "BASTANTE!" (Was Iran...)

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Beth Goldstein wrote:

<< So, yes, I agree with you that it is important to create the
stories, the possibilities ---  the knowledge that it is not
merely desirable, but desirable and POSSIBLE.>>

Let me see how far I can agree with this, and in what way.

First what I take to be a given: no one reading these posts is
*ever* going to live in a socialist society, let alone a communist
society. The horrors through which the human species must trudge
before reaching even the first of those are, to me, almost
unimaginable, but they will certainly include many more failed
revolutions -- by which I mean both revolutions that are crushed
by capitalist power and those which fail *after* seizing
state power. And the latter kind of failure will not, for the
most part, be merely a repetition of the failures in the Soviet
Union, China, Viet Nam, but brand new kinds of failure which we
cannot now imagine or prepare for -- they will catch us (or our
descendants) by surprise.

Secondly, we must remember that Rosa Luxemburg's alternatives were
real, not rhetorical: socialism or barbarianism. As this thread has
insisted, there is no god -- no guarantee that things will turn out
well. Nuclear, biological, chemical warfare, ecocide, exhaustion of
engergy sources ... any or all may cut us off from the possible
future. Consider the insane ferocity of the imperialist response to
the really quite trivial challenge Serbia presented to the New World
Order. The world's leading capitalist classes may very well choose
universal destruction to surrendering their power.

Now this does not at all undercut Beth's insistence on seeing the
possibility of socialism, any more than Red Rosa's "The final
goal is everything, the movement is nothing" undercut the immense
importance of that movement. (I suppose this is where one should
talk about being dialectical, but I prefer to be as historical as
possible and let others take care of the philosophical niceties.)
What I think Luxemburg meant was something parallel to but not
quite the same as Doug and Beth mean. She insisted that only the
"final goal" could make the present intelligible, and I think her
point was roughly equivalent to the insistence of Sweezy, Baran, and
Magdoff on regarding "the present as history" -- which is only
possible if, somehow, we can look *back* on the present from the future.

If that is so, then to understand ourselves (i.e., to understand
capitalism) we must in some sense know not just a possible or
desirable future but (again in some sense) a *necessary* future.
There can be *no* other future than socialism: which is not to say
that socialism is inevitable but that outside socialism there is
no future at all, there is only destruction, death, depopulation,
wreckage of the very geophysical possibility of human life.

And within *that* context, questions of the desirability or
possibility of socialism seem to me almost trivial.

But, Beth and Doug say, in one of Doug's posts:

<<<Beth Goldstein wrote:

<<How can we, as Marxists, create, promulgate and maintain a
sustained understanding of meaning which fosters an immanently
humane, as opposed to a transcendentally 'divine' and immanently
inhumane, world?>>

We gotta come up with better fantasies, to start with. Following
my earlier precedent of quoting Stevens, the death of utopia was
a tragedy for the revolutionary imagination. But the minute you
start talking about solidarity as having a fantastic elements,
the materialists will jump all over you.

Doug>>>

I have a number of preliminary questions and observations:

First of all, why do you  say the that utopia is dead? Capitalism,
for which only the future is real (as opposed, for example, to
feudalism, for which only the past is real) more or less guarantees
the endless rebirth of utopianism of all kinds, so if in some sense
it is dead now, it will pop up again more or less spontaneously.

Secondly, while Mine's objections are simply bizarre, you give her a
handle by isolating the need for fantasies from the whole context in
which a socialist agitator or propagandist might actually *use* such
fantasies. In both my own experience and (so far as I can tell) in
the revolutionary practice of the last 200 years people never ask
whether socialism is desirable or possible until *after* they have
already become socialists.

And thirdly, as my above remarks on feudalism, capitalism, and
time are meant to suggest, the immense task facing socialists is
not to give hope or meaning to the future but to give hope and
meaning to the *Present*, which capitalism empties of meaning.

Doug wrote on Sun, 2 May 1999 19:19:19 -0400

<<<xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

<<what makes solidarity so "fantastic" that you seem to be making
fun of the socialists?>>

Jesus (meant as an epithet, not an appeal to the Son of God), I
wasn't making fun of socialists. An appeal to solidarity has to
be an appeal to an imagined world beyond the present, one beyond
the rational calculations of gain and loss, and one, dare I say,
eroticized by a notion of collectivity. It's kind of hard to
imagine such a thing right now, with bombs falling and the
Dow pushing 11,000, but I don't see how any socialist transformation
could happen without those dreamier aspects taking hold of the masses.

Doug>>>

"An appeal to solidarity has to be an appeal to an imagined world
beyondthe present . . ."

This is initially an empirical question, not to be settled by
debate on a maillist. We have 200 +/- years of revolutionary
history to which to appeal, to determine whether women and
men have been brought to the struggle by such an appeal or by
some other appeal. And my initial response is NO! NO! NO! -- This
is *not* how it works, in *practice*, in empirical fact -- empirical
fact which is to be determined by appeal to 1791, to 1848, to 1871,
to 1905, to 1917, to the 1930s, to 1947 (see *Fanshen*), to 1959,
to 1968.

And this empirical history has a summary which suggests that, in
any case, Beth and Doug have the wrong grammatical subject for
their questions. They ask how Marxists or Socialists should do
this or that. Mao replies: Trust the People. Don't think of the
"Maoists" who have infested western politics for 40 years. Don't
even think of the Old Shit who invented "Chairman Mao's Theory
of the Three Worlds." Think of the young Mao who wrote the greatest
single work of practical Marxist criticism: "Report on an
Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan." Most of those
peasants (perhaps all of them) had never even heard of Marx --
most had probably never heard of the CPC. But Mao did not start
out with saying, "We must dream up what to say to those peasants."
On the contrary: He said "Listen! Damn you! Listen!."

Currently, the people here in the U.S. are not speaking--at least
very loudly. That is the usual state affairs over the last 200
years and nothing to get excited about. And because they are not
speaking they *also* are not listening. And I mean that in the
simplest most mechanical sense: Invent all the beautiful utopias
or all the beautiful arguments for socialism you please. Put them
in the most intelligible language you or anyone else can. Leaven
them with the humor which Marxists are said to lack.

No one will hear you. No one (except other committed socialists
who don't need them) will even know you exist. As far as I know
in the entire history of socialist struggle the only people who
have listened (physically put themselves in the presence of)
socialists are those who have already become socialists. (Those
peasants in Hunan did eventually learn of the CPC and begin to
listen to it -- but only after the CPC had finally gotten around
to listening to them)

Bastante! That is the cry, in one language or another, which
opens the struggles which opens ears to socialist words. No More!
We've had enough! I cannot not say No!

And within (but hardly predominating or primary) the conversation
that ensues there will be no shortage (there will usually be far
too much) of utopian talk among comrades. But most people will be
far too shrewd, too aware of the possibilities to believe that *they*
will ever live in those utopias -- and the few that do will end up
writing long whining essays on "The God That Failed."

I have gone on long enough.

Carrol

P.S. In a recent post, Katha wrote, "We'll just have to take our
vitamins and hope we live long enough to find out." Not a chance
Katha. Perhaps our great great grandchildren. In the meantime we
need goals to fight for in the present -- like humiliating the
U.S. government for its attack on Serbia -- or keeping Mumia
alive, or making abortion not only a legal and a cheap but a
morally non-aggressive simple medical procedure.