[Marxism] Response to the query

[Joonas Laine <jjonas@xxxxxx>]

(My name is Joonas Laine, and I'm 26 years old.)

> 1) How did you get interested in Marxism?

I remember having general and fuzzy leftist sympathies since my late teens,
though I have no idea where this originated. When I moved from my small
home town to study in the university of Turku in 1999, I became involved
in a group which was engaged in solidarity work for the benefit of Angolan
war refugees. They were sharing their premises with a few other green-left-
environmental-anticonsumerism-etc groups, and I found the atmosphere
sympathetic. The work was very practical (running a fleamarket for raising
funds etc), so it was easy to get in.

There, immersed in environmental and economic justice related issues,
I started developing a conscious interest in socialism. I had to get
into it by myself, because there were no outspoken socialists around.
At first I was balancing between anarchist and marxist socialism, and for
a few years I was going through an ultra-voluntaristic phase: the people
(as individuals) have to realise that it is they who have to do it, and
I am one of them, so I must do my part, and practice as I preach and
show the example, because how can I expect anyone to do something and
not do it myself etc. I gave away all my money, my apartment, whatever
I thought was bourgeois crap, lived on skip-diving and without income,
quit studying in order to dedicate my time to working for the Angolan
war refugees etc.

One of my main internal struggles was with that Party stuff and all,
isn't that kind authoritarian, and as such, hierachical and un-free
etc.. shouldn't people have to do it themselves instead of anyone
having the right to lead anybody else etc.

As time wore on and I kept reading all kinds of materials, both finnish
marxist stuff that I found in second hand book shops, and marxist classics,
the scales tilted to Marxist socialism, though to put it abruptly like this
sounds pretty silly. But it is hard to describe the actual process
succintly, because it didn't have any major milestones, and anyway the
final watershed and dialectical turn was concerned not with anything that
I read in socialist books or sources, because they could not answer the
most burning question I had, which revolved around what constitutes
human agency, and what kind of agency is realistic to expect in different
situations (voluntarism, determinism etc). More on this below when I
write about books that have influenced my political evolution.

Also one thing which pushed me towards party-based struggle for socialism
was the brilliant music of the Finnish political song movement from the
60s and 70s, which for a big part was associated with but not by any
means guided by the Finnish Communist Party.

> 2) how do you respond personally and politically to the apparent
> "triumphalism" of the system today, the so-called "End of History"

This is not something I would have experienced personally very frequently,
so I haven't had to think of any coherent responses to this one in
particular. Maybe I'm not very able to answer if the question is
formulated like this.

> 3) What are some of the books that have influenced your political
> evolution and that you think other people would learn from?

a) Personally, it's not accurate to put this much emphasis on the 'Communist
Manifesto', as it was merely the focal point on which I finally had a kind
of revelation, which had been in the process of becoming and which - I can
say this only afterwards - proved to be the final nail in the coffin of my
abstract thinking about society and all that. But I'll mention it here
for lack of anything better.

For some time I had been wrestling with the way Marx and Engels were
lavishing praise on capitalism - I couldn't understand and found it hard
to explain to myself how they could "thus" "justify" all the miseries
caused by it by making it the necessary foundation of socialism. To put
it schematically, up to this point I had been thinking in the idealist
terms of e.g. human rights of Amnesty International & co, a discourse
in which the true progressive worth of support is the one with the
brightest halo of outstanding moral examplarity, and in terms of rigid
principles fixed to some practical conduct or rule of thumb (four legs
good, two legs bad, violence can never be justified etc).

Connected with the above thinking process and the subsequent katharsis and
aufhebung resulting in a major decrease of cognitive dissonance is Lenin's
'Left-Wing Communism'. When I was reading it the first time, I didn't
understand too much of it, because I wasn't familiar with the circumstances
in Russia and the Bolshevik Party to which it was a response. But the part
which back then felt totally mind-blowing was the chapter entitled "No
compromise?" in which Lenin said that it is ridiculous to formulate rigid
principles to be applied all across the board, but instead one has to take
it the hard way and think, study and think in order to orientate correctly
in each situation, and not base one's actions on some all-transcendent
armchair strategy.

Yet another one I'd like to mention is Bertolt Brecht's 'Me-Ti' collection
of pseudo-chinese aphorisms, from which I quote offhand (my translation):

"Mi-en-leh was not given to pity. When he saw the distress of the exploited
and the oppressed, at once there developed a feeling in him which immediately
turned into anger. In the minds of ignorant people the same feeling turns
into pity. Pity is vague uneasiness, much like despair. Pity, said Mi-en-leh
is offered to those who are denied help. I do not place myself into the
position of the suffering in order to suffer in their place, but in order
to end their sufferings."

b) Michel Foucault: Nothing in particular, but I'll mention 'Discipline and
punish' because I think that's the most easily accessible of his major works
I have read. I have the idea that not everybody fancies F, but when I was
reading Gramsci's 'Prison notebooks' after having read some F, the ideas
that I had gotten from F seemed to be there in G. Now I don't pretend to
know very much about Gramsci, but to me his ideas about hegemony seemed
very much like a prototype of what I think is the gist I got from reading
Foucault, and I think that F's ideas about discourse (as a kind of social
psychology) have been beneficial as I've tried to interpret the world and
how people might see their position in it, what they perceive as being
within the limits of the possible, so as to decide which strategy or
tactic is likelier to be effective than some other in this or that
conjuncture.

In Foucault I'm not interested in the foucaultology (or whichever way is
the correct way to write it) of what _he_ thought, but what good insights
I have found there, whether I have understood them the way F would have
meant it or in some substantially different way. I don't claim to be able
to dissect which is which, but I have a strong gut-feeling of the
usefulness of the insights that reading F helped to give birth to in
my case.

c) Again, not any one book in particular feels the most important, but
I could mention Richard Dawkins' 'The Selfish Gene' and 'The Extended
Phenotype', which I read after my friend had introduced me to some
ideas one meets in evolutionary psychology. Shortly after having read
the mentioned Dawkins books, and Steven Pinker's 'How the mind works',
I felt like my search as to what is the general foundation against
which human agency and its perspectives must be viewed was over over,
and now it's about making the correct adjustments.

As with Foucault, I feel the need to justify myself with a few notes,
because it is my understanding that ev.psy seems mostly be considered
reactionary and sexist crap and whatever. At least that is what I've
mostly seen, and not so much attempts at considering which part of it
could be useful in understanding how people as a species and as a
society relate to the world, and what kind of limitations that might
impose. Based on what I've read, Pinkers and all, I don't believe
there is anything such in the human nature which somehow would negate
socialism or make it impossible.

It is another matter to argue against e.g. Pinker about him not knowing
shit about socialism and the history of the USSR, which he "deals with" in
lenght in 'The Blank Slate'. By mentioning his name in favourable tone
I will not be associated with his ideas about society and his sorry
liberal "communism would be nice, but unfortunately human nature is not
like that" bullshit. I prefer to let him talk about his own sphere of
expertise, absorb what I think makes sense, and discard the rest and make
my own synthesis.

> 4) What are the political conditions in the region of the world you live in?

I live in Finland (that's in Scandinavia, east of Sweden, West of Russia),
a small country of 5 million people. It has been a member of the EU since
1995. It is not a member of NATO, but certainly the political elite is
trying to make it happen - cautiously, because most of the people are
against it.

Finland is a relatively recently industrialised country (even in 1960
36% of the people were working in the agriculture/forest sector).
Historically Finland's economy has been heavily dependent on the
paper industry, the competetitiveness of which has been guaranteed
with repeated devaluations of the currency.

During 1980-1999, the growth of productivity of labour was among the fastest
within the OECD, only Turkey and Ireland ahead, and the GDP share of capital
(as opposed to the share of labour) has increased from 36% to around 46%
between 1991-2000, due to the extremely modest rise in wages - only in
Ireland was the growth of productivity of labour vis-a-vis the growth of
wages faster, and only in Ireland, Greece and Italy was the resulting
share of labour lower.

In 1999 Finland's labour productivity was almost 90% of that of the USA.
Also during the last decade the capitalists have not invested enough to
cover the wearing out of the fixed capital, but have instead dealt the
surplus out to shareholders home and abroad.

Unemployment rate is 7,8% according to the Statistics Bureau (7/2004),
and a few percent lower according to the Ministry of Labour. Union
membership is 80%, and the main export industries are metal 49,5%,
paper 21,4% and chemicals 10,5% (2001). Balance of trade has been
around +10.000 million $ during the last decade.

In terms of political parties, Finland is (and has been) dominated by the
SDP and the Central Party (which historically has roots is the rural
population), with both getting 20-25 percent of the votes cast. Next is
the Coalition Party (with 16-20%) which is the right-wing conservative
party.

Nowadays it is these three parties that make up the spine of the government,
usually two of them forming a coalition, often with a few auxiliary parties
such as the Greens (around 10%) and the Left-Wing League (around 10%), which
don't put up much of an opposition IMO as they all would like to be in
the government as well (in the 90s they actually all WERE in the government,
the whole flush from Coalition party to Left-Wing League!), and in
practice they implement neoliberalist policies of privatisation etc.

> 5) What are your political activities?

I have never been a member of any political party, but I have been hanging
around the finnish communist party SKP for a few years, and I think it is
just a matter of time that I join them, as I think they are the most
potential force around at the moment for furthering the cause of socialism
in Finland.

SKP is electorally quite small, nationally averaged around 1%, with a
bit over 4.000 members. I don't know SKP's past in very much detail,
for example what its role was in being a strong communist party with
intimate relations to the neighbouring USSR. But no doubt this relationship
and it's perceived carries a certain weight - for good or ill - in the
eyes of the generations that have lived a politically conscious life in
times that the USSR still was in existence, and communism has a good or
bad echo respectively (mostly bad).

As to myself, I became politically conscious only well after the USSR
had collapsed, so even though I do think that it is worthwhile to know
the history of the party as closely as possible, I don't trouble myself
too much with whatever Stalinist/somesuch past it might have had, and
instead I prefer to judge it on the merits of today, and the politics
I think it tries to advance in the present. I'll find out in more detail
when I get involved more closely.

Much (or maybe most) of my political activity at present is aimed at
self-education, the fruits of which are to be reaped only in the future
(hopefully). I'm studying economics in the university of Turku, and
recently I've written a few articles for the magazine of the Communist
Youth League. But that's about it.

--
jjonas @ nic.fi



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