Stan Goff rejects Marxism: a reply

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2006/12/02/stan-goff-rejects-marxism-a-reply/
Recently Stan Goff posted an article on Feral 
Scholar that has generated a fair amount of 
discussion. Nominally an explanation for his 
retreat from sectarian politics, it touches on 
the viability of Marxist theory. While I welcome 
anybody's decision to withdraw from the world of 
self-declared vanguard politics, I am a little 
less comfortable with some of Stan's broader 
challenges to Marxism. Unfortunately, there is a 
tendency to obscure the points of demarcation 
between his own particular experience with 
Freedom Road, other sectarian groups and Marxist 
theory in general. I attribute this to a certain 
tendency among Freedom Road comrades to adopt a 
semiclandestine posture that was standard 
operating procedure for Maoist groups in the 
1970s. Let's take a look at the following 
paragraph to get an idea of the sort of confusion that this leads to:

One of my primary disappointments has been what I 
consider the failure to take seriously the 
struggle against patriarchy, and to give it the 
same weight in our organizing as we do class and 
national oppression. There have been only token 
efforts in this regard, and no serious initiative 
that I have seen to go outside the canon to 
understand this system. Worse, there has been a 
reactive embrace of liberal-libertarian 
"feminism" by many comrades? which I consider to 
be a sly academic reassertion of male power in 
the consumer-choice package of "freedom," 
undermining the whole analysis of gender as a 
system. But this is not the crux of the issue for 
me. Feminism was the gateway to a number of other 
interrogations of the assumptions of organized Marxism.

Who are the "many comrades" referred to above? 
Freedom Roaders? If so, why not refer to exactly 
what kind of "liberal-libertarian 'feminism'" 
they have been espousing? Without a specific 
reference, Stan's complaint has a somewhat vaporous quality.

If the Freedom Roaders could be faulted on their 
commitment to fighting patriarchy, at least Stan 
gives them credit for pushing "refoundation":

My own last association with organized Marxism 
was with members whose work I greatly admire. In 
particular, I was attracted to their analysis of 
national oppression, which remains in advance of 
most of the US left, and their stated committment 
to refoundation of a politically efficacious left in the US.

For those who follow left politics, the term 
refoundation might ring a bell. There is a party 
in Italy called Communist Refoundation, which is 
more or less of an attempt to build on 
Eurocommunist initiatives of the 1970s and that 
mixes together genuine militancy with the 
traditional horse-trading that has tainted the Italian left since WWII.

The Freedom Roaders proposed their own kind of 
refoundation in 2000, which amounted to a kind of 
embrace of the same ideas that were being 
promoted by Solidarity and Committees of 
Correspondence, which in the 1950s was called 
"regroupment". It was an attempt to build a new 
Marxist or radical left without the traditional 
"Leninist" concepts that were actually alien to 
the way that the Bolshevik party operated. 
Although the left would have benefited from a new 
party that included all of these various currents 
opposed to sectarianism, their own habits and 
inertia prevented them from coming together.

Perhaps the failure of "refoundation" to go 
anywhere after it was proposed in 2000 led some 
Freedom Roaders to pull back from this approach. 
In an article from 2 years ago on their website, Badili Jones wrote:

I believe that Freedom Road must uphold and 
demonstrate to the Left at large the value of the 
organizational principle of democratic 
centralism. It must be clear that we do reject 
bureaucratic centralism. Democratic centralism 
has become the bogeyman for many on the Left. 
This is because the practice has been perverted and misunderstood historically.

Perhaps Freedom Road adopted Badili's proposal 
and retreated to older organizational concepts. 
As such groups customarily keep such 
decision-making processes to themselves, it is 
impossible to say. My guess is that Stan would 
have been uncomfortable with moving back in that 
direction based on the evidence of his article.

After chewing over the failures of the sectarian 
left at some length, Stan switches gears and 
begins to look at more fundamental problems. This 
is where I begin to part company with him.

The industrial utopia imagined by Marx and touted 
by Lenin (who even embraced the soul-killing 
efficiency doctrine of Frederick Winslow Taylor) 
is not possible in the real world, and less so 
each day, and it is a Man's world in any case, a 
notion based fundmentally on the patriarchal 
belief in Man-Nature dualism (and the gendered 
pronoun is not an accident, nor has it ever been 
neutral). It is the Marxist method of inquiry 
that exposes the fetishism of the machine - the 
idea that technology is innocent of the social 
system that produced it, and that a factory under 
socialist control works differently than one 
under capitalist control, even though the 
spirit-murdering machinery of capitalism remains 
unchanged. It was Lukacs theses on reification 
that gave rise to the most radical version of 
Western feminism, which also called the 
Man-Nature dualism to account. And these were 
summarily rejected by the "organized" left.

Well, I first heard this sort of thing from Stan 
about 5 or 6 years ago when he was a subscriber 
on Mark Jones's a-list. It is utter nonsense from 
top to bottom. Marx never imagined an "industrial 
utopia". He in fact was the foremost ecological 
thinker of the 19th century who identified 
declining soil fertility as a symptom of that 
very "industrial utopia" that bourgeois 
ideologists were championing. Marx wrote:

"If small-scale landownership creates a class of 
barbarians standing half outside society, 
combining all the crudity of primitive social 
forms with all the torments and misery of 
civilized countries, large landed property 
undermines labor-power in the final sphere to 
which its indigenous energy flees, and where it 
is stored up as a reserve fund for renewing the 
vital power of the nation, on the land itself. 
Large-scale industry and industrially pursued 
large-scale agriculture have the same effect. If 
they are originally distinguished by the fact 
that the former lays waste and ruins labour-power 
and thus the natural power of man, whereas the 
latter does the same to the natural power of the 
soil, they link up in the later course of 
development, since the industrial system applied 
to agriculture also enervates the workers there, 
while industry and trade for their part provide 
agriculture with the means of exhausting the soil."

("The Transformation of Surplus Profit into Ground-Rent" in V. 3 of Capital)

You will note that Marx takes aim at "large-scale 
industry and industrially pursued large-scale 
agriculture" and "the industrial system". Now it 
is up to Stan to decide whether or not Marx has 
something to say on the environmental crisis, but 
I would at least ask him to argue with what Marx 
actually wrote than some Frankfurt School distortion.

As I stated above, Stan frequently makes an 
amalgam of the sectarian left with the writings 
of Marx, as if the author of Capital were somehow 
responsible for the nonsense that appears in some 
sectarian rag. It would have probably been better 
if he had settled accounts with the vanguard left 
in one post and Karl Marx in another, but I 
imagine that he is so busy that he sought to kill 
two birds with one stone--leaving political 
clarity a victim as well. This is especially true 
when he takes up the question of the working 
class, a question that goes to the very heart of Marx's writings:

Every one of the Marxist formations, in 
accordance with its most teleological assumption 
- that the working class, once forged in struggle 
as a class-for-itself - will be the inevitable 
midwife of socialism (claim for which there is 
not yet one shred of supporting evidence), have 
hewn to a dying trade union movement in the US, 
and one with its remainder so woven into the 
military-industrial-security complex as to be 
almost indistinguishable from it. The Crisis of 
Socialism can be found here, I believe, in the 
heart of Marxist doctrine, and not in treasons 
and deviations and contigent "errors."

As I have stated in an earlier reply to an 
article by Stan on truthdig.com, he has a 
tendency to exaggerate the backwardness of 
working class people. Using the scare-mongering 
reports of the Southern Poverty Law Center as 
documentation (they rely on these reports to 
pressure liberals into writing checks), he tried 
to make the case that Timothy McVeigh was somehow 
typical of the American military. From there, it 
is only a small step to conclude that the working 
class is "so woven into the 
military-industrial-security complex as to be 
almost indistinguishable from it."

I find it odd to hear such claims so soon after 
the Democrats swept both houses of Congress. 
Stan's business about workers as willing 
collaborators with the 
military-industrial-security complex is not that 
much different from what we heard from Thomas 
Frank and other "red state" theoreticians after 
Bush was reelected. California and New York had 
to succeed from the rest of a country that was an 
undifferentiated mass of wife-beating, football-watching, flag-waving apes.

Speaking as somebody who helped to organize 
antiwar demonstrations in the 1960s, I am 
astonished to hear such views today when ordinary 
working people have either voted for peace 
candidates or voted with their feet in union 
contingents on peace demonstrations. And this is 
without a draft. I think most socialists, 
including myself, assumed that the war in Iraq 
could go on forever as long as there was no draft 
and as long as the costs of the war were not too 
onerous to bear for the average worker. Well, we 
were wrong. Working people have become appalled 
by the blood-letting, the lies, the torture and 
the sheer sense of doing wrong. When they 
eventually come to understand that the same class 
system that savages the Iraqi people is their 
enemy as well, classical Marxism will be 
vindicated just as it was in 1968 when French 
workers joined the students in a general strike.