Showing posts with label book reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book reviews. Show all posts
Less Than Nothing
“I am writing a mega-book about Hegel. It is a true work of love. This is my true life’s work. Even Lacan is just a tool for me to read Hegel." —Slavoj Žižek
So that we can all be doing background reading before this Friday's overnight reading, we asked Slavoj Zizek which books influenced the writing of his Less Than Nothing. Here's the list (in no order):
Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution - Rebecca Comay
The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic - Catherine Malabou
In the Spirit of Hegel - Robert C. Solomon
The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath - Robert Pippin
Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of the Spirit—Fredric Jameson
L' envers de la dialectique: Hegel à la lumière de Nietzsche - Gerard Lebrun
Book review: For All the People
by Kate Whittle ‘For All The People’ by John Curl
Uncovering the hidden history of cooperation, cooperative movements, and communalism in America
PM Press, PO Box 23912, Oakland CA 94623 www.pmpress.org
John Curl is a professional woodworker and a 30-year member of Heartwood Cooperative Workshop in Berkeley, California
For all the People is a magnificent, comprehensive and detailed history of co-operatives and collectives of all kinds in the USA. It covers so much ground, and in so much detail, that it’s hard to summarise in a short review, so I’ll highlight those details that particularly spoke to me.
The book starts with a look at the co-operative cultural patterns of indigenous peoples before the arrival of the Plymouth Pilgrims in 1620 and goes on to describe in detail how the co-operative movement has thrived and foundered, thrived and foundered again and again under different circumstances throughout four centuries of US history.
The concept of a federation of north American states was inspired by indigenous peoples of the Americas
It was the League of the Iroquois which inspired the concept of a federation of colonies. The first person to propose that the colonies unify as the Iroquois had done and speak with one voice was Canassatego an Onondaga Iroquois chief, at an Indian British conference in Pennsylvania in 1744.
The political system of the indigenous peoples of the Americas was an inspiration for Tom Paine
Tom Paine experienced indigenous democracy at first hand as secretary in negotiations between the rebels and the Iroquois in 1711. He studied the Iroquoian language and used indigenous society as a model in his writings.
Role of co-operatives in supporting working people as labour relations changed from skilled artisan to waged labour in the early 19th century.
As in the UK, capitalist industrialisation in the early 19th century forced a change on working people from being autonomous skilled artisans – with a range of strategies for survival and self-expression – to becoming wages slaves, reliant on only one source of income to feed their families and live their lives. Co-operatives became an important means of support, providing support for striking workers to co-operative warehouses, and co-operative stores.
Curl describes how in 1794, Baltimore shoemakers formed the United Journeymen Cordwainers and demanded the standard piece work rate be raised to 6 shillings. Their demand rejected, they went on strike, taking with them over half the city’s workers. They organised the first co-operative ‘manufactory’ in the United States, a large workshop open to all journeymen boycotting the masters’ shops. Soon some of the masters began paying the higher rates and the workers returned to their shops. It seems that the co-operative model was often used in this way, supporting the workers while they were on strike and abandoned once the strike was successful.
In the early 19th century customers of country stores often paid their bills by trading produce, livestock or artisanal products for merchandise. Robert Owen’s store at New Harmony was the earliest prototypical co-operative store, which did business based on labour notes redeemable in the store. Community members received supplies, clothing and groceries on credit, which they redeemed with time credits for work performed.
Secret Co-operatives
The Knights of Labor was established in secret in 1869 by members of a Philadelphia taliloring cutting local trade union, blacklisted for striking. Its’ aims were ‘to secure to the workers the full enjoyment of the wealth they create, to harmonise the interests of labor and capital’ . One of their first principles was co-operation. When they went public in 1878, ‘we will endeavour to associate our own labors, to establish co-operative institutions, such as will tend to supersede the wage system, by the introduction of a co-operative industrial system”
The Knights of Labor called for public ownership of railroads and other commercial transport, of the telegraph and telephones, water systems and utilities; for an 8-hour day, equal pay for equal work, abolition of contract, convict and child labour. They were one of the first organisations to include white and black in the same union and the first to include women – KOL had 50,000 women members at its peak, including many housewives, whom the Knights of Labor recognised as workers.
The early1880s was a time of industrial expansion, machinery was being introduced on unprecedented scale and an increase in unskilled & semi skilled labour, cuthtroat competition, and wages forced down. At the same time the USA was experiencing the peak of immigration from northern Europe, and the beginnings of immigration from southern & eastern Europe, bringing 5 million immigrants, mostly unskilled. When industrial capitalism forced these immigrants into wage slavery, they organised production and mutual aid co-operatives.
By the middle of 1886 there were between 185 and 200 Knight co-operatives across the US, concentrated in the east and mid west. More than half were mines, foundries, mills and factories making barrels, clothes, shoes and soap, as well as co-operative printers, laundries, furniture makers, potters, lumberjacks; factories making nails,boxes, underwear, brooms, pipe and stoves.
Co-operative development
The KOL general co-operative board published forms of constitutions and bye laws that could be modified to suit any form of co-operative, and numerous articles on the nuts and bolts of different kinds of co-operation.
However, as usual, capitalists and competitors hit the Knights co-operatives hard, making it difficult for them to obtain credit, supplies and markets.
Solidarity co-operatives
In 1886, New York City’s district assembly 49 – one of the most radical of the Knights assemblies, established an extraordinary group of co-operatives. A committee on co-operation, chosen by the whole district, managed all the enterprises. They offered non-interest bearing shares for purchase to individuals and labour organisations that were redeemable after one year. Investors could not determine which co-operative their funds would be used for. No profits went to shareholders, but stock was to be bought back by the co-operatives from profits. Shareholders had no control over management. Of the net profits after salaries and debt payments, 50% went to expanding the co-operative chain, 25% insurance and 25% to a fund for buying land.
Solidarity Co-operatives in 1887:
It also looks at the Berkeley Co-op, Bay Warehouse Collective and the Heartwood Cooperative Woodshop, with which the author was very much involved, and reviews co-operatives and the counterculture of the 60s and 70s. It also looks at early and 20th century Communalist movements and ends with a survey of the infrastructure of the co-operative movement in the US today.
Why do worker co-operatives fail?
John Curl asks why so many worker co-operatives fail. He points out that the majority of all new businesses fail in their first year and that start ups are advised not to expect a profit for two years. He also points out that most enterprises are increasingly based on costly technology and that most co-ops start out under capitalised.
However one of the points that most clearly comes across throughout the whole book is the consistent opposition from corporate interests and the politicians that serve them. For example, the Sherman Anti Trust Act of 1890, declared illegal any combination or conspiracy to restrain interstate commerce. The Act aimed to outlaw the Trusts which controlled most of US industry in the wake of the Civil War. It supposedly favoured small business by curbing monopoly, but made no distinction between conspiratorial practices of big business and co-operative practices of small producers. It outlawed co-operatives engaged in interstate commerce and unions organising interstate strikes. The Sherman Act made numerous co-operatives illegal and was used to break strikes 12 times in the decade, but never once to break a Trust.
Curl concludes by describing how the system has failed dismally to provide a decent life, basic services or jobs for vast numbers of north Americans. He says that the corporations still fear worker co-operatives, for the same reasons they have used their power to put them down throughout history.
It’s clear that there has been consistent and significant opposition to the cooperative idea, throughout US history, however I believe that this is a result largely of historical circumstances which resulted in a political system located to the right of the political spectrum, which views worker organisation of any kind with fear and suspicion.
I also believe it is time to review the traditional focus of co-operatives – both in the US and the UK – on just one stakeholder group: consumer, employee, or community. A more sustainable way forward might be to explore the potential of the multistakeholder model, a model that takes into account the needs and concerns of employees and customers, as well as other stakeholders, such as suppliers, the wider community, the environment. A co-operative enterprise supported by all its stakeholders might perhaps have a better chance of surviving the slings and arrows of a competitive and individualistic society. The co-operative I work for – Somerset Co-operative Services – has developed such a model, which can be downloaded for review at: http://www.somerset.coop
There is a current of opinion growing and manifesting itself everywhere that not only have our political systems failed us, but also there are serious flaws in a business model that is legally obliged to look no further than the interests of shareholders. Surely one of the problems associated with capitalism is its primary focus on one stakeholder, namely the investor? As Noam Chomsky said in a recent interview, US CEOs and senior managers are caught in an institutional contradiction, they are obliged by law to maximise short term profit, i.e. to benefit the investors at the risk of ignoring other issues, such as climate change. (see http://bit.ly/f5mfgr).
For all the People is an important and timely book – read it to see where co-operatives have succeeded, how they have supported and inspired working people to action and where and how they have failed. We can learn much from this history and we need to look back and learn in order to look forward and act.
‘I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country’
Thomas Jefferson 1816
Uncovering the hidden history of cooperation, cooperative movements, and communalism in America
PM Press, PO Box 23912, Oakland CA 94623 www.pmpress.org
John Curl is a professional woodworker and a 30-year member of Heartwood Cooperative Workshop in Berkeley, California
For all the People is a magnificent, comprehensive and detailed history of co-operatives and collectives of all kinds in the USA. It covers so much ground, and in so much detail, that it’s hard to summarise in a short review, so I’ll highlight those details that particularly spoke to me.
The book starts with a look at the co-operative cultural patterns of indigenous peoples before the arrival of the Plymouth Pilgrims in 1620 and goes on to describe in detail how the co-operative movement has thrived and foundered, thrived and foundered again and again under different circumstances throughout four centuries of US history.
The concept of a federation of north American states was inspired by indigenous peoples of the Americas
It was the League of the Iroquois which inspired the concept of a federation of colonies. The first person to propose that the colonies unify as the Iroquois had done and speak with one voice was Canassatego an Onondaga Iroquois chief, at an Indian British conference in Pennsylvania in 1744.
The political system of the indigenous peoples of the Americas was an inspiration for Tom Paine
Tom Paine experienced indigenous democracy at first hand as secretary in negotiations between the rebels and the Iroquois in 1711. He studied the Iroquoian language and used indigenous society as a model in his writings.
Role of co-operatives in supporting working people as labour relations changed from skilled artisan to waged labour in the early 19th century.
As in the UK, capitalist industrialisation in the early 19th century forced a change on working people from being autonomous skilled artisans – with a range of strategies for survival and self-expression – to becoming wages slaves, reliant on only one source of income to feed their families and live their lives. Co-operatives became an important means of support, providing support for striking workers to co-operative warehouses, and co-operative stores.
Curl describes how in 1794, Baltimore shoemakers formed the United Journeymen Cordwainers and demanded the standard piece work rate be raised to 6 shillings. Their demand rejected, they went on strike, taking with them over half the city’s workers. They organised the first co-operative ‘manufactory’ in the United States, a large workshop open to all journeymen boycotting the masters’ shops. Soon some of the masters began paying the higher rates and the workers returned to their shops. It seems that the co-operative model was often used in this way, supporting the workers while they were on strike and abandoned once the strike was successful.
In the early 19th century customers of country stores often paid their bills by trading produce, livestock or artisanal products for merchandise. Robert Owen’s store at New Harmony was the earliest prototypical co-operative store, which did business based on labour notes redeemable in the store. Community members received supplies, clothing and groceries on credit, which they redeemed with time credits for work performed.
Secret Co-operatives
The Knights of Labor was established in secret in 1869 by members of a Philadelphia taliloring cutting local trade union, blacklisted for striking. Its’ aims were ‘to secure to the workers the full enjoyment of the wealth they create, to harmonise the interests of labor and capital’ . One of their first principles was co-operation. When they went public in 1878, ‘we will endeavour to associate our own labors, to establish co-operative institutions, such as will tend to supersede the wage system, by the introduction of a co-operative industrial system”
The Knights of Labor called for public ownership of railroads and other commercial transport, of the telegraph and telephones, water systems and utilities; for an 8-hour day, equal pay for equal work, abolition of contract, convict and child labour. They were one of the first organisations to include white and black in the same union and the first to include women – KOL had 50,000 women members at its peak, including many housewives, whom the Knights of Labor recognised as workers.
The early1880s was a time of industrial expansion, machinery was being introduced on unprecedented scale and an increase in unskilled & semi skilled labour, cuthtroat competition, and wages forced down. At the same time the USA was experiencing the peak of immigration from northern Europe, and the beginnings of immigration from southern & eastern Europe, bringing 5 million immigrants, mostly unskilled. When industrial capitalism forced these immigrants into wage slavery, they organised production and mutual aid co-operatives.
By the middle of 1886 there were between 185 and 200 Knight co-operatives across the US, concentrated in the east and mid west. More than half were mines, foundries, mills and factories making barrels, clothes, shoes and soap, as well as co-operative printers, laundries, furniture makers, potters, lumberjacks; factories making nails,boxes, underwear, brooms, pipe and stoves.
Co-operative development
The KOL general co-operative board published forms of constitutions and bye laws that could be modified to suit any form of co-operative, and numerous articles on the nuts and bolts of different kinds of co-operation.
However, as usual, capitalists and competitors hit the Knights co-operatives hard, making it difficult for them to obtain credit, supplies and markets.
Solidarity co-operatives
In 1886, New York City’s district assembly 49 – one of the most radical of the Knights assemblies, established an extraordinary group of co-operatives. A committee on co-operation, chosen by the whole district, managed all the enterprises. They offered non-interest bearing shares for purchase to individuals and labour organisations that were redeemable after one year. Investors could not determine which co-operative their funds would be used for. No profits went to shareholders, but stock was to be bought back by the co-operatives from profits. Shareholders had no control over management. Of the net profits after salaries and debt payments, 50% went to expanding the co-operative chain, 25% insurance and 25% to a fund for buying land.
Solidarity Co-operatives in 1887:
- Solidarity fancy leather goods factory
- Plumbers co-operative association
- The Leader publishing association
- The Concord Co-operative printing company
- Solidarity cigar company
- Solidarity co-operative and distributive store
- Solidarity KOL watch case company
It also looks at the Berkeley Co-op, Bay Warehouse Collective and the Heartwood Cooperative Woodshop, with which the author was very much involved, and reviews co-operatives and the counterculture of the 60s and 70s. It also looks at early and 20th century Communalist movements and ends with a survey of the infrastructure of the co-operative movement in the US today.
Why do worker co-operatives fail?
John Curl asks why so many worker co-operatives fail. He points out that the majority of all new businesses fail in their first year and that start ups are advised not to expect a profit for two years. He also points out that most enterprises are increasingly based on costly technology and that most co-ops start out under capitalised.
However one of the points that most clearly comes across throughout the whole book is the consistent opposition from corporate interests and the politicians that serve them. For example, the Sherman Anti Trust Act of 1890, declared illegal any combination or conspiracy to restrain interstate commerce. The Act aimed to outlaw the Trusts which controlled most of US industry in the wake of the Civil War. It supposedly favoured small business by curbing monopoly, but made no distinction between conspiratorial practices of big business and co-operative practices of small producers. It outlawed co-operatives engaged in interstate commerce and unions organising interstate strikes. The Sherman Act made numerous co-operatives illegal and was used to break strikes 12 times in the decade, but never once to break a Trust.
Curl concludes by describing how the system has failed dismally to provide a decent life, basic services or jobs for vast numbers of north Americans. He says that the corporations still fear worker co-operatives, for the same reasons they have used their power to put them down throughout history.
It’s clear that there has been consistent and significant opposition to the cooperative idea, throughout US history, however I believe that this is a result largely of historical circumstances which resulted in a political system located to the right of the political spectrum, which views worker organisation of any kind with fear and suspicion.
I also believe it is time to review the traditional focus of co-operatives – both in the US and the UK – on just one stakeholder group: consumer, employee, or community. A more sustainable way forward might be to explore the potential of the multistakeholder model, a model that takes into account the needs and concerns of employees and customers, as well as other stakeholders, such as suppliers, the wider community, the environment. A co-operative enterprise supported by all its stakeholders might perhaps have a better chance of surviving the slings and arrows of a competitive and individualistic society. The co-operative I work for – Somerset Co-operative Services – has developed such a model, which can be downloaded for review at: http://www.somerset.coop
There is a current of opinion growing and manifesting itself everywhere that not only have our political systems failed us, but also there are serious flaws in a business model that is legally obliged to look no further than the interests of shareholders. Surely one of the problems associated with capitalism is its primary focus on one stakeholder, namely the investor? As Noam Chomsky said in a recent interview, US CEOs and senior managers are caught in an institutional contradiction, they are obliged by law to maximise short term profit, i.e. to benefit the investors at the risk of ignoring other issues, such as climate change. (see http://bit.ly/f5mfgr).
For all the People is an important and timely book – read it to see where co-operatives have succeeded, how they have supported and inspired working people to action and where and how they have failed. We can learn much from this history and we need to look back and learn in order to look forward and act.
‘I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country’
Thomas Jefferson 1816
Kate Whittle has been working with co-operative and social enterprises, both in the UK and overseas, for more than 25 years.
Original article available here
For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America
‘The Ecological Rift’: a radical response to capitalism’s war on the planet (book review)
by Simon Butler
Climate change is often called the greatest environment threat facing humanity. The threat is very real. Unless we cut carbon pollution fast, runaway climate change will worsen existing environmental and social problems, and create new ones of its own. But it's no longer enough to simply refer to the climate crisis. Climate change is one part of a broader ecological disaster, brought about by an economic system that relies on constant growth, endless accumulation, and ever-deepening human alienation.John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York. The Ecological Rift: Capitalism's War on the Earth. Monthly Review Press, 2010. 544 pages.
A 2009 study published in Nature revealed some of the extent of this ecological crisis. The study, which was led by Sweden's Johan Rockstrom and included US climate scientist James Hansen, identified nine "planetary boundaries" that are critical for human life on the planet. Along with climate change, these boundaries are: global freshwater use, chemical pollution, ocean acidification, land use change, biodiversity (the extinction rate), ozone levels in the stratosphere, aerosol (or small particle) levels in the atmosphere, and the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles that regulate soil fertility (and hence food production). The study said three of these critical planetary boundaries -- climate, the nitrogen cycle, and biodiversity loss -- had already been crossed. A further four -- land use change, the phosphorus cycle, ocean acidification, and freshwater use -- are emerging problems. The scientists said these boundaries had not yet been breached but could be soon if nothing was done. The state of the ozone layer, which regulates the ultraviolet radiation from the sun hitting the Earth, was the only good news. A global treaty to phase out ozone-depleting gasses, such as chlorofluorocarbons, seems to have made a difference. The study's authors said they didn't yet know enough to measure the planetary boundaries for chemical pollution and aerosol levels.
In their 2010 book, The Ecological Rift, US Marxists John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York remark on this study:
The mapping out of planetary boundaries in this way gives us a better sense of the real threat to the earth system. Although in recent years the environmental threat has come to be seen by many as simply a question of climate change, protecting the planet requires that we attend to all of these planetary boundaries, and others not yet determined.Capitalism, a grow-or-die system, must ignore the planet's boundaries. But we cannot afford to -- not if we are to secure a safe planet that can sustain human civilisation. As Foster, Clark and York conclude: "No solution to the world's ecological problem can be arrived at that does not take the surmounting of capitalism, as an imperialist world system, as its object. It is time to take the planet back for sustainable human development."
The essential problem is the unavoidable fact that an expanding economic system is placing additional burdens on a fixed earth system to the point of planetary overload. . . . Business as usual projections point to a state in which the ecological footprint of humanity will be equivalent to the regenerative capacity of two planets by 2030.
The Ecological Rift deserves – and needs -- to become a classic in its field. Dozens and dozens of new books, and many thousands of papers and articles, are published about the ecological crisis each year. The literature on the Earth's growing environmental problems has become a minor growth industry in itself. But despite the scale of the crisis, surprisingly few environmentalists in the global North are challenging their own preconceptions about the present social and economic system, the causal role it plays in driving ecological decay, and the ways in which the system can be challenged, overcome, and replaced. Curtis White zoomed in on this persistent trend in a 2009 article in Orion magazine:
There is a fundamental question that environmentalists are not very good at asking, let alone answering: "Why is this, the destruction of the natural world, happening?" . . .The Ecological Rift is an exception to this norm. Its starting point is a frank assessment of the problems, but it focuses on a sustained critique of the mainstream ecological theories, solutions, and proposals that do not address the root cause of the dilemma and that do not deeply investigate why the ecological crisis has reached such dire proportions.
But as scientifically sophisticated as environmentalism's thinking about natural systems can be (especially its ability to measure change and make predictions about the future based on those measurements), its conclusions about human involvement in environmental degradation tend to be very reductive and causal.
Environmentalism's analyses tend to be about "sources". Industrial sources. Nonpoint sources. Urban sources. Smokestack sources. Tailpipe sources. Even natural sources (like the soon-to-be-released methane from thawing Arctic tundra). But environmentalism is not very good at asking, "Okay, but why do we have all of these polluting sources?"
A big issue for those concerned with climate change and other environmental ills is to get a better understanding of the capitalist system, who benefits most from it, and how it works to undermine stable ecosystems. The authors describe capitalism as a system of rifts and shifts. Rifts, because its reliance on short-term profit and endless growth means it must drive an ever-deepening wedge between human society and the natural conditions needed to sustain all life. Shifts, because when it's confronted with environmental degradation the system tends to simply move it elsewhere. These shifts are often geographical -- toxic, polluting industries are moved out of urban areas or from the rich nations to the global South. Another example is how the depletion of natural resources in one region merely drives capital to expand its reach somewhere else in the globe. The oil industry, which has expanded offshore drilling operations in the past few decades (think the Gulf of Mexico) and now wants to drill for oil in the relatively untouched Arctic Ocean, is a classic example of this kind of geographical shifting characteristic of capitalism.
But the shifts are also technological. Capitalism has typically responded to environmental problems and resource depletion with technical changes in the methods of production: wood-burning substituted for coal-burning, natural fertiliser for synthetic fertiliser, paper for plastic, conventional oil for biofuels, and fossil fuel power plants for nuclear power plants. These changes have opened up new profitable markets but have also created new, and more pressing, ecological rifts. The authors explain:
One way to look at this is to see capitalism as a bubble economy, which uses up environmental resources and the absorptive capacity of the environment while displacing the costs back on Earth itself, this incurring an enormous ecological debt.Yet the nearness of this crash won't prompt the system's rulers to change course. Environmental destruction is part of capitalism's DNA.
As long as the system is relatively small and can keep expanding outwardly, this ecological debt is displaced, often without any recognition of the costs that have been incurred. Once the economic system begins to approach not just its regional boundaries but planetary boundaries, the mounting ecological debt will become ever more precarious, threatening an ecological crash.
Capitalism is incapable of regulating its social metabolism with nature in an environmentally sustainable manner. Its very operations violate the laws of restitution and metabolic restoration. The constant drive to renew the capital accumulation process intensifies its destructive social metabolism, imposing the needs of capital on nature, regardless of the consequences to natural systems.Mainstream environmental commentators and groups resist this conclusion. Although they may be harshly critical of the environmental destruction, they limit their proposals to what is feasible within the framework of the capitalist system. Sometimes this is justified on pragmatic grounds that the ecological crisis is so advanced that we don't have time to change the system, and so we need to work within the flawed system we've got. Others have been convinced by the neoliberal argument that capitalism can be made green and serve ecologically sensible outcomes -- the idea that once environmental goods are adequately priced, preserving ecosystems can be made profitable and the market could become the saviour, rather than the destroyer, of the planet. Yet others still may acknowledge capitalism's anti-ecological features, but are either pessimistic about the potential to change society or think that any other social system would be even worse.
Capitalism continues to play out the same failed strategy again and again. The solution to each environmental problem generates new environmental problems (and often does not curtail the old ones). One crisis follows another in an endless succession of failure, stemming from the internal contradictions of the system. If we are to solve our environmental crises, we need to go to the root of the problem: the social relations of capital itself.
But Foster, Clark, and York argue that these outlooks actually serve to play down the gravity of the crisis and condemn environmentalists to pursing strategies that are doomed to fail. They say:
The ecological and social challenges that confront us are often minimized as the logic of capital goes unquestioned and various reforms are put forward (such as improving energy efficiency via market incentives) under the assumption that the system can be tamed to accommodate human needs and environmental concerns. Such positions fail to acknowledge that the structural determinations of capital will inevitably grind onwards, threatening to undermine the conditions of life, unless systematic change is pursued to eradicate the capital relation entirely.The Ecological Rift devotes a lot of space to a critique of the various green capitalist theories, which contend market-based solutions to climate change and other environmental problems are the most efficient and realistic options available. Advocates of these theories say capitalism is well placed to deliver the technological advances and release the ingenuity required to restore ecosystems, especially if governments help out by subsidising new green markets to give them an advantage.
The most ambitious of these "ecological modernisation" theorists suggest the capitalism could eventually be dematerialised: that is, transformed from a system dominated by the production of commodities for profit to a system based on the exchange of ecologically sound services. Others have argued that capitalism, which relies on the constant growth and accumulation of capital, could be reformed into a steady-state economy -- an economy that has ceased to grow.
The authors reply that a serious failing with these ideas is that they do not understand, downplay, or disregard the fact that any serious challenge to capitalism's anti-ecological course would necessarily take the form of a serious class conflict, a struggle for social and economic power against the powerful minority that benefit most from the status quo.
"Ecological modernization theory is", Foster, Clark and York say, "a functionalist theory in that that it does not see the emergence of ecological rationality as coming primarily from social conflict but rather from ecological enlightenment within the key institutions in societies. Ecological modernization theorists contend, then, that radical ecological reform does not require social reform -- that is, the institutions of capitalist modernity can avert a global environment crisis without a fundamental restructuring of the social order, with gradual change in its operations."
A highlight of The Ecological Rift is its chapter on consumers and consumerism. The most dispirited environmentalists and activists tend to elevate the high personal consumption and endemic waste of ordinary working people in the global North as the most intransigent ecological problem of all.
Meanwhile, the most naive environmentalists argue that enlightened consumer choices are the solution and that consumer behaviour has the power to determine how the capitalist market operates.
There is no question that mass consumption, and the alienating consumer culture it has given rise to, has a very serious ecological impact. But Foster, Clark, and York discuss the rise of the mass consumer society in its proper context. Consumerism is not so much the cause of ecological decay but is another symptom of capitalism's drive to expand itself at all costs. And before anyone rushes to blame the shoppers crowding the supermarket aisles or the commuters idling in traffic jams for heedlessly pushing the planet's ecology towards oblivion, the authors ask us to take deeper look at who the real mega-consumers are.
Indeed, the class reality in the United States and the discrepancies in environmental impact that result are far from more startling than official consumption figures suggest. A relatively small portion of the population (around 10 percent) owns 90 percent of the financial and real estate assets (and thereby the productive assets) of the country, and the rest of society essentially rents itself out to the owners. The wealthiest 400 individuals (the so-called Forbes 400) in the United States have a combined level of wealth roughly equal to that of the bottom half of the population, or 150 million people. The top 1 percent of US households in 2000 had roughly the same share (20 percent) of US national income as the bottom 60 percent of the population. Such facts led a group of Citigroup researchers and investment counselors to characterize the United States as a "plutonomy", a society driven in all aspects by the rich. In this view, the "average consumer" is a meaningless entity, since the consumption is increasingly dominated by the luxury consumption of the rich, who also determine production and investment decisions.And it's next to meaningless to discuss the ecological impacts of consumerism without paying attention to advertising (easily the most far-reaching, manipulative, and successful mass propaganda system devised in world history) and its evil twin, planned obsolescence.
The entire system of marketing, in which trillions of dollars are spent persuading individuals to buy commodities for which they have no need, and no initial desire, would have to be dismantled if the object were to generate a genuine ecology of consumption. Today's gargantuan marketing system (which now includes detailed data on every US household) is the most developed system of propaganda ever seen, a product of the growth in the twentieth century of monopoly capitalism. It is not a system for expanding choice but for controlling it in the interest of promoting ever-greater levels of sales at higher profits. . . . The production of high-quality goods increases production costs and decreases sales (since the products thereby do not have to be replaced as often) and this goes against the goals of capital. The general thrust is the production of commodities that are inexpensive and low quality and frequently replaced. In recent decades, the consumer trap has merged with the debt trap in which ordinary working people are more and more enmeshed -- part of the growth in our time of monopoly-finance capital -- in their attempts simply to maintain their "standards of living".The final section of The Ecological Rift, titled "Ways Out", includes some interesting conjecture on what groups and social forces might be the main agents of the ecological revolution that the authors call for.
It is conceivable that the main historic agent and initiator of a new epoch of ecological revolution is to be found in the third world masses most directly in line to be hit first by the impending disasters. Today the ecological front line is arguably to be found in the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta and the low-lying fertile coast area of the Indian Ocean and China Seas -- the state of Kerala in India, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia. The inhabitants of these cases, as in the case of Marx's proletariat, have nothing to lose from the radical changes necessary to avert (or adapt to) disaster. In fact, with the universal spread of capitalist social relations and the commodity form, the world proletariat and the masses most exposed to sea-level rise -- for example, in the low-lying delta of the Pearl River and the Guangdong industrial region from Shenzhen to Guangzhou -- sometimes overlap. This, then, potentially constitutes the global epicenter of a new environmental proletariat.Of course, this passage amounts to a thoughtful speculation, not a prediction. The first decisive breaks with capitalism and imperialism may well occur in Latin America or the Middle East, regions that have also borne the impacts of colonialism and imperialism, which are also arguably already in the ecological front line. But Foster, Clark, and York's emphasis on "a new environmental proletariat" reflects their belief that environmental concerns will play a crucial role in future revolutionary upheavals against the system.
The authors insist, however, that "the planetary crisis we are now caught up in . . . requires a world uprising transcending all geographical boundaries", including the advanced capitalist nations. They say:
This means that ecological and social revolutions in the third world have to be accompanied by, or inspire, universal revolts again imperialism, the destruction of the planet, and the treadmill of accumulation. The recognition that the weight of environmental disaster is such that it would cross all class lines and all nations and positions, abolishing time itself by breaking what Marx called "the chain of successive generations", could lead to a radical rejection of the engine of destruction on which we live, and put into motion a new conception of global humanity and earth metabolism. As always, real change will have to come from those most alienated from the existing systems of power and wealth. The most hopeful development within the advanced capitalist world at present is the meteoric rise of the youth-based climate justice movement, which is emerging as a considerable force in direct action mobilization and in challenging the current climate negotiations.How exactly such a "universal revolt" against capitalism can be brought into being cannot be answered by any book. It can only be discovered through struggle. And engaging in a struggle aimed at ecological revolution is, it itself, no guarantee of success. But if people-centred solutions to the ecological crisis are sidelined we can guarantee that the capitalist elites will impose their own barbaric solutions, solutions that will have even greater human and ecological costs. This means, in a sense, that we've all got our backs to the wall. The Ecological Rift makes clear that the world's workers and poor are left with no other option -- we've got to fight.
Simon Butler is a Sydney-based climate activist, a member of the Socialist Alliance, and co-editor of Green Left Weekly. This article was first published in LINKS: International Journal of Socialist Renewal. Australia’s leading socialist newspaper.]
John Bellamy Foster, renowned US economist and ecologist, editor of the US socialist journal Monthly Review and author of The Ecological Rift, The Ecological Revolution, The Great Financial Crisis (with Fred Magdoff) Marx’s Ecology; Ecology Against Capitalism, and The Vulnerable Planet, will be a featured international guest at the second World at a Crossroads: Climate Change – Social Change Conference, Friday, September 30 – Monday, October 3, 2011, Melbourne University.Editorial Notes
LINKS has an excerpt from the book online:
http://links.org.au/node/1947
We also published some excerpts:
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-10-26/ecology-consumption-exc...
-BA
http://links.org.au/node/1947
We also published some excerpts:
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-10-26/ecology-consumption-exc...
-BA
Original article available here
AK Press Working Classics Series reviewed in PMR
Paul J. Comeau over at the Political Media Review has admirably tackled the job of reviewing our entire Working Classics series. Check it out below, and be sure to checkout PMR’s web site too.
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AK Press Working Classics Series
Reviewed by Paul J. Comeau
Anyone looking to educate themselves on the history and principles of anarchism should look no further for a starting place than the books in AK Press’s Working Classics series. The series as a whole represents some of the finest writings on anarchist theory and practice ever published, reprinted in small and relatively inexpensive volumes, making the ideas of anarchism accessible to a modern audience. These reprints offer something for everyone, with clean and easy to read layouts making them inviting to first time readers, and convenient for readers already acquainted with the works by allowing easy searching of favorite chapters and passages.
The four volumes in the series (so far) are:
Vol. 1. What Is Anarchism? – Alexander Berkman
Vol. 2. Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice – Rudolph Rocker
Vol. 3. Post-Scarcity Anarchism – Murray Bookchin
Vol. 4. The Conquest of Bread – Peter Kropotkin
What Is Anarchism was one of the first books on anarchism that I ever read. Re-reading it for the first time in several years, it’s easy to see why it made such an impression on me, and why it continues to make an impression on readers everywhere, over eighty years after its’ first publication in book form. Writing in plain language, and in a conversational tone, Berkman not only elucidates the principles of anarchism in ways that are easy to understand, but he provides concrete examples to which readers can relate. The book is divided into three parts (frequently published separately in pamphlet form). In the first part, Berkman attempts to explore the structure of society in which we live, and show readers how this structure is unjust by highlighting the disparities that exist between the social classes. Berkman emphasizes how the social classes can never live in harmony with one another as their interests are opposed. “There can be no justice as long as we live under conditions which enable one person to take advantage of another’s need, to turn it to his profit, and exploit his fellowman”(42), Berkman writes. In part two, he explores anarchism in earnest, both what it is, and what it means for those who are part of it. Berkman does not shy away from the criticism of anarchism as a violent ideology, but tackles it head on. “It is capitalism and government which stand for disorder and violence,” Berkman counters. “Anarchism is the very reverse of it; it means order without government and peace without violence” (138). Part two concludes with a discussion of the distinction between communist anarchists and non-communist anarchists. Communist anarchism – anarchism based on the principle of “social ownership and sharing according to need” (169), according to Berkman “would be the best and most just economic arrangement” (169). Non-communist anarchists, individualist and mutualist anarchists, don’t agree on the concept of “social ownership” as Berkman sees it. They prefer a system of individual private property that Berkman takes to task, identifying private property as “one of the main sources of injustice and inequality, of poverty and misery” (169). After taking the individualists and mutualists to task, Berkman turns in part three to outlining the chief aim of communist anarchism: the Social Revolution. The Social Revolution is the situation that will bring about the realization of the aspirations of the communist anarchists, and lead to the state of anarchy. Berkman outlines how such a situation could be brought about, and how it could and should be defended by those who would oppose it. What Is Anarchism outlines both the ideology, and the methodology of anarchism, as envisioned by one of its’ greatest thinkers and practitioners.
Though published in 1929 and in a second edition in 1937, by ‘37 Berkman’s emphasis on communist anarchism, and his focus on the Russian Revolution had become dated by recent developments. The chief among these developments was the Spanish Revolution, and the concurrent interest in anarcho-syndicalism, anarchism with an emphasis on radical trade unionism, both as a basis of organization, and as the direction towards which the social revolution could be brought about. The English publisher Secker & Warburg approached Emma Goldman, one of the best-known anarchists in the world, who was then living in London and organizing on behalf of the Spanish anarchists, about a book on Anarchism and the situation in Spain (Rocker vii). Though she had just written an introduction to the second – and posthumous edition – of Berkman’s book, it was she who realized that a new work was needed to explain the Spanish situation, and the ideals and practices of anarcho-syndicalism to the masses clamoring to understand developing events in Spain. To that end, she tapped German-born anarchist Rudolf Rocker, then living in the US, to write such a book. After a back and forth correspondence, Rocker agreed to the project, and Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice was first printed in March 1938.
Anarcho-Syndicalism is a great addition to this series, acting as a perfect companion to Berkman’s What Is Anarchism. Reading Rocker’s concise and calculated explication of the principles of anarcho-syndicalism acts as a temper to some of the exuberant idealism expressed by Berkman, and serves to give the theories expressed in What Is Anarchism on how a social revolution might be brought about, a more concrete direction. Rocker begins by tracing the history of anarchist thought, and some of its’ basic principles, from William Godwin to the present in which he wrote. He follows this with a section tracing the development of the labor movement, from the industrial revolution and the birth of capitalism as we know it, to the influence of socialism, particularly libertarian socialism (anarchism) on the labor movement. This co-mingling of labor and anarchism sowed seeds that would later sprout into movements towards anarcho-syndicalism, and embodied Rocker’s assertion that “New worlds are not born in the vacuum of abstract ideas, but in the fight for daily bread, in that hard and ceaseless struggle which the needs and worries of the hour demand just to take care of the indispensible requirements of life,” (Rocker 33). This understanding of the connection between the current struggle and the building of a future anarchist society is a theme that Rocker returns to when he explores “The Objectives of Anarcho-Syndicalism” (54), which he explores in the context of a then current real-world example, the syndicalism-in-practice of the CNT and FAI in the Spanish Revolution. Rocker demonstrates here and in the chapters that follow how the methods and practices of anarcho-syndicalism are not simply meant to address economic – bread and butter – issues, but that they are political issues as well, though more significant than any one party or platform under existing systems. Indeed, what Rocker describes is a new form of politics, replacing all previous forms, where all political and economic life is managed by the productive classes through the organs of the local, regional, national, and ultimately international unions and syndicates into a loose federalism, “an alliance of free groups of men and women based on co-operative labour and a planned administration of things in the interest of the community” (72). Rocker traces developments in syndicalist practices apart from Spain in the closing chapters, and the original ending closes on a hopeful note with the full possibility of the situation in Spain waiting to be actualized. That ending is not the ending of this reprinted edition however, which also includes Rocker’s epilogue to the 1947 reprint of the text. In this epilogue, Rocker laments the defeat of the Spanish anarchists, and indeed the destruction of organized labor everywhere, counting the labor movement among the casualties of the Second World War. Despite the destructive effects of the war on the movement, Rocker retains an optimistic view of the future, and it is this belief in the validity of the ideals of anarcho-syndicalism that readers will take away from the reading of this book.
The series takes a different turn in the third volume, with Murray Bookchin’s Post-Scarcity Anarchism. Anarchist, radical ecologist, theorist, and writer – few have endured such rabid admiration by their followers or disgust by their detractors as Bookchin. Arguably one of the most influential theorists of the mid-late twentieth century, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, first published in 1971, collected for the first time in book-form essays Bookchin wrote during the 60s. The collection represents some of Bookchin’s most important writings, including the title essay, “Post-Scarcity Anarchism,” “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” and one of his most controversial pieces, “Listen, Marxist!” In three prefaces introducing the works and their ideas, Bookchin is a bit overly self-congratulatory in discussing the influence these essays have had over countless activists and radical theorists, but that influence cannot be discounted or dismissed however inflated his ego might appear. In the first prefatory essay, Bookchin lays out for readers the general themes running through every essay in the book, the tying of anarchism and ecology, and his view of the current state of society, the ongoing ecological crisis, and how best to respond to it. In discussing the ecological crisis, Bookchin dismisses attempts to solve it within the contemporary framework. “Capitalism is inherently anti-ecological,” he writes (viii), an argument he will expand upon in the essays themselves.
In the first essay, the title essay, Bookchin makes the case that in a society where the needs of man can be met by technology – a post-scarcity society – the only reason they are not, is due to the massive centralization of every aspect of human life. “The bourgeois control of technology reinforces the established organization of society and everyday life,” Bookchin writes (3). “By their centralistic nature, the resources of abundance reinforce the monopolistic, centralistic and bureaucratic tendencies in the political apparatus” (3). The solution Bookchin sees is in anarchism. “The absolute negation of the state is anarchism – a situation in which men liberate not only “history,” but all the immediate circumstances of their everyday lives,” (7) he writes. This liberation of everyday life Bookchin cites as among the most important aims of any revolution. “Revolutionary liberation must be a self-liberation that reaches social dimensions, not ‘mass liberation’ or ‘class liberation’ behind which lurks the rule of an elite, a hierarchy and a state.” (10). “There can be no separation of the revolutionary process from the revolutionary goal” (11), he adds. After establishing the premises upon which post-scarcity anarchism is based, and its ties to ecology, Bookchin closes with the comparison of contemporary society to that of the Enlightenment era of the 18th century, particularly in France.
He argues that the growing disenchantment with the “values, the forms, the aspirations, and above all, the institutions of the established order” (13) mirrored the sentiments felt by the masses in years leading up to the French Revolution.
The Enlightenment serves as a touchstone upon which Bookchin returns in his essay “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought.” Here, he explores how the cross-pollinating of the sciences, philosophy, and revolutionary thought led to the revolutionary upheavals at the close of the eighteenth century (20). He argues that in our time, the science most relevant to modern times, as it affects revolutionary thinking, is ecology, which “Broadly conceived…deals with the balance of nature. In as much as nature includes man, the science basically deals with the harmonization of nature and man” (Bookchin 21). He describes the pollution of the earth, as man’s “parasitism” (22) and explores the connections between our destruction of the environment, and the nature of our society. “Man has produced imbalances not only in nature, but, more fundamentally, in his relations with his fellow man in the very structure of society. The imbalances man has produced in the natural world are caused by the imbalances he has produced in the social world” (23) he writes. This idea that the unhealthy nature of our society might be the cause for our disregard for the health of our environment might seem obvious to contemporary readers concerned with the preservation of the earth and the freedom of humankind, but at the time of it’s writing it was a profound thought to link the oppressive nature of human society to the human oppression of the earth’s ecosystem. To best understand the interweaving relationships between man and man, and man and his environment, Bookchin lays out the study of “social ecology,” a system that examines the structure and organization of society in terms of it’s relation to the environment. He argues that when looked at through the lens of this social ecology, the solution to both problems is in anarchism – in decentralizing all aspects of human existence, from the structures of society, to our habitats. The doing away of centralized urban areas for smaller and more manageable and sustainable urban areas, spread out over regions. “The validity of the decentralist case can be demonstrated for nearly all the ‘logistical’ problems of our time” he writes (34). He furthers the case for anarchism by tracing the commonalities, as he sees them, between anarchism and ecology, and turns this discussion into an outline of his vision of what an ecologically stable anarchist society would look like (36-40). The ecological case for anarchism is an interesting one, because it is larger in scope than many past arguments. It makes the case for anarchism not just against the domination of man over his fellows, but against the domination of man over his environment, and argues for a more just and sustainable approach to all aspects of our existence.
While these first two essays lay the basis for understanding Bookchin’s thought, it is his essay “Listen Marxist!” that has stirred up the most controversy over the years. The essay continues Bookchin’s argument towards a critique of capitalism and an advocating of the ideology of post-scarcity anarchism, but it does this in the context of an attack on the ideas of contemporary Marxism. While Bookchin laid out more complex and detailed criticisms of Marxism in his books Toward an Ecological Society and The Ecology of Freedom, in this essay are the germination of his ideas that the critique of capitalism that Marx made, while sharply on point and relevant to the time in which he wrote, has since been outdated by capital’s continuing development – necessitating a newer and more relevant critique of existing social and economic structures. Bookchin criticizes not only the relevance of Marx in the contemporary world, but the ideals which contemporary Marxism touts, what he calls “The Myth of the Proletariat” (114), and “The Myth of the Party” (122). He argues that “The worker becomes a revolutionary not by becoming more of a worker but by undoing his ‘workerness’” (119), by developing not a class-consciousness as the Marxists would desire, but an “un-class consciousness…What he is shedding are precisely those class shackles that bind him to all systems of domination (119-20). He further argues against the Party and other centralist forms of organizing, and looked to the Paris uprisings for inspiration. He concludes by drawing a line in the sand against hierarchical structures of all kinds, including revolutionary ones. “The organization we try to build is the kind of society our revolution will create. Either we will shed the past – in ourselves as well as in our groups – or there will simply be no future to win,” (143), a rather bleak outlook, but one that may bear out if the ecological decline we find ourselves on continues unchecked.
In the other equally thought-provoking essays in this book, Bookchin presents scathing critiques of technology (“Towards a Liberatory Technology”), syndicalism (“The Forms of Freedom”), and other subjects. He also includes two pieces covering briefly the facts and analysis of the Paris uprising of ‘68. While these are all interesting in their own right – particularly Bookchin’s criticism of syndicalism and advocating for local assemblies, in “The Forms of Freedom,” – it is the essays discussed at length that bear the most relevance to contemporary readers, and are where they should first turn their attention when picking up this book.
No collection of significant writings on anarchism would be complete without including Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread, the fourth and most recent book in this series. All three of the other writers in this series took inspiration at one level or another from Kropotkin’s ideas and theories, laid out here in perhaps his best known work. The Conquest of Bread is not merely a work of theory, but also a work of propaganda, written in plain language, and meant to be read by working people. The text is based upon a series of articles Kropotkin wrote for the anarchist newspaper Le Revolte, compiled by a comrade at Le Revolte and revised by the author to read as a whole.
(Kropotkin 25). The book takes as its task to explore in practical terms how wealth – the productive output of working people everywhere – would be distributed in an anarchist society. “Well-being for all is not a dream,” Kropotkin writes (63). “We must recognize, and loudly proclaim, that everyone, whatever his grade in the old society…has, before everything, THE RIGHT TO LIVE, and that society is bound to share amongst all, without exceptions the means of existence at its disposal” (70).
Kropotkin goes on to explore the basis for how such a system might be organized, that of anarchist-communism, which he devotes an entire chapter to explaining. “Every society which has abolished private property will be forced, we maintain, to organize itself on the lines of Communistic Anarchy” Kropotkin writes (73). The reason for this is that “in the present state of industry, when everything is interdependent, when each branch of production is knit up with all the rest, the attempt to claim an Individualist origin for the products of history is absolutely untenable,” (73). This view countered the arguments of many contemporaries that workers would be compensated for the full value of the products they produced individually, by arguing essentially that there is no such thing as individual production; that all the goods produced by society are created collectively, and must therefore be shared collectively. Kropotkin’s system would do away not only with the wage system, tied as it was to capitalistic enterprise, but other forms of individual compensation as well. What his system opts for instead can be summed up by the ideal that “to every man according to his needs” (75). Kropotkin elaborates a critique of wage systems in post-revolutionary societies in chapter 13, arguing that they are untenable and violate the spirit of the revolutionary ideals upon which their revolution was founded – the abolition of private property (190).
Kropotkin not only lays out a plan for how an anarchist-communist society might be organized, but he also devotes an entire chapter to addressing the chief arguments against such a system. The chief objection Kropotkin addresses is of how in a society where people are not forcibly compelled to work, would anyone work? (171). Kropotkin argues that if people shared equally in the product, that they would work out of a desire to benefit the community, and he goes on to provide examples of such communal work (174).
What we see in reading The Conquest of Bread is a positive vision of a future anarchist society, covering virtually every aspect and function of such a society in clear language and in a relatively small space. It is a book that doesn’t just argue for the overthrow of the state and capitalism, but lays a concrete vision for what a post-capitalist society might look like.
If there is one thing readers should take away from all of these books, it is recognition of the untapped potential of people to reshape their world for the better, and how that future world is closer than we might think, if we are all willing to come together and struggle to make it reality.
original url: http://www.politicalmediareview.org/2011/05/ak-press-working-classics-series/
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AK Press Working Classics Series
Reviewed by Paul J. Comeau
Anyone looking to educate themselves on the history and principles of anarchism should look no further for a starting place than the books in AK Press’s Working Classics series. The series as a whole represents some of the finest writings on anarchist theory and practice ever published, reprinted in small and relatively inexpensive volumes, making the ideas of anarchism accessible to a modern audience. These reprints offer something for everyone, with clean and easy to read layouts making them inviting to first time readers, and convenient for readers already acquainted with the works by allowing easy searching of favorite chapters and passages.
The four volumes in the series (so far) are:
Vol. 1. What Is Anarchism? – Alexander Berkman
Vol. 2. Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice – Rudolph Rocker
Vol. 3. Post-Scarcity Anarchism – Murray Bookchin
Vol. 4. The Conquest of Bread – Peter Kropotkin
What Is Anarchism was one of the first books on anarchism that I ever read. Re-reading it for the first time in several years, it’s easy to see why it made such an impression on me, and why it continues to make an impression on readers everywhere, over eighty years after its’ first publication in book form. Writing in plain language, and in a conversational tone, Berkman not only elucidates the principles of anarchism in ways that are easy to understand, but he provides concrete examples to which readers can relate. The book is divided into three parts (frequently published separately in pamphlet form). In the first part, Berkman attempts to explore the structure of society in which we live, and show readers how this structure is unjust by highlighting the disparities that exist between the social classes. Berkman emphasizes how the social classes can never live in harmony with one another as their interests are opposed. “There can be no justice as long as we live under conditions which enable one person to take advantage of another’s need, to turn it to his profit, and exploit his fellowman”(42), Berkman writes. In part two, he explores anarchism in earnest, both what it is, and what it means for those who are part of it. Berkman does not shy away from the criticism of anarchism as a violent ideology, but tackles it head on. “It is capitalism and government which stand for disorder and violence,” Berkman counters. “Anarchism is the very reverse of it; it means order without government and peace without violence” (138). Part two concludes with a discussion of the distinction between communist anarchists and non-communist anarchists. Communist anarchism – anarchism based on the principle of “social ownership and sharing according to need” (169), according to Berkman “would be the best and most just economic arrangement” (169). Non-communist anarchists, individualist and mutualist anarchists, don’t agree on the concept of “social ownership” as Berkman sees it. They prefer a system of individual private property that Berkman takes to task, identifying private property as “one of the main sources of injustice and inequality, of poverty and misery” (169). After taking the individualists and mutualists to task, Berkman turns in part three to outlining the chief aim of communist anarchism: the Social Revolution. The Social Revolution is the situation that will bring about the realization of the aspirations of the communist anarchists, and lead to the state of anarchy. Berkman outlines how such a situation could be brought about, and how it could and should be defended by those who would oppose it. What Is Anarchism outlines both the ideology, and the methodology of anarchism, as envisioned by one of its’ greatest thinkers and practitioners.
Though published in 1929 and in a second edition in 1937, by ‘37 Berkman’s emphasis on communist anarchism, and his focus on the Russian Revolution had become dated by recent developments. The chief among these developments was the Spanish Revolution, and the concurrent interest in anarcho-syndicalism, anarchism with an emphasis on radical trade unionism, both as a basis of organization, and as the direction towards which the social revolution could be brought about. The English publisher Secker & Warburg approached Emma Goldman, one of the best-known anarchists in the world, who was then living in London and organizing on behalf of the Spanish anarchists, about a book on Anarchism and the situation in Spain (Rocker vii). Though she had just written an introduction to the second – and posthumous edition – of Berkman’s book, it was she who realized that a new work was needed to explain the Spanish situation, and the ideals and practices of anarcho-syndicalism to the masses clamoring to understand developing events in Spain. To that end, she tapped German-born anarchist Rudolf Rocker, then living in the US, to write such a book. After a back and forth correspondence, Rocker agreed to the project, and Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice was first printed in March 1938.
Anarcho-Syndicalism is a great addition to this series, acting as a perfect companion to Berkman’s What Is Anarchism. Reading Rocker’s concise and calculated explication of the principles of anarcho-syndicalism acts as a temper to some of the exuberant idealism expressed by Berkman, and serves to give the theories expressed in What Is Anarchism on how a social revolution might be brought about, a more concrete direction. Rocker begins by tracing the history of anarchist thought, and some of its’ basic principles, from William Godwin to the present in which he wrote. He follows this with a section tracing the development of the labor movement, from the industrial revolution and the birth of capitalism as we know it, to the influence of socialism, particularly libertarian socialism (anarchism) on the labor movement. This co-mingling of labor and anarchism sowed seeds that would later sprout into movements towards anarcho-syndicalism, and embodied Rocker’s assertion that “New worlds are not born in the vacuum of abstract ideas, but in the fight for daily bread, in that hard and ceaseless struggle which the needs and worries of the hour demand just to take care of the indispensible requirements of life,” (Rocker 33). This understanding of the connection between the current struggle and the building of a future anarchist society is a theme that Rocker returns to when he explores “The Objectives of Anarcho-Syndicalism” (54), which he explores in the context of a then current real-world example, the syndicalism-in-practice of the CNT and FAI in the Spanish Revolution. Rocker demonstrates here and in the chapters that follow how the methods and practices of anarcho-syndicalism are not simply meant to address economic – bread and butter – issues, but that they are political issues as well, though more significant than any one party or platform under existing systems. Indeed, what Rocker describes is a new form of politics, replacing all previous forms, where all political and economic life is managed by the productive classes through the organs of the local, regional, national, and ultimately international unions and syndicates into a loose federalism, “an alliance of free groups of men and women based on co-operative labour and a planned administration of things in the interest of the community” (72). Rocker traces developments in syndicalist practices apart from Spain in the closing chapters, and the original ending closes on a hopeful note with the full possibility of the situation in Spain waiting to be actualized. That ending is not the ending of this reprinted edition however, which also includes Rocker’s epilogue to the 1947 reprint of the text. In this epilogue, Rocker laments the defeat of the Spanish anarchists, and indeed the destruction of organized labor everywhere, counting the labor movement among the casualties of the Second World War. Despite the destructive effects of the war on the movement, Rocker retains an optimistic view of the future, and it is this belief in the validity of the ideals of anarcho-syndicalism that readers will take away from the reading of this book.
The series takes a different turn in the third volume, with Murray Bookchin’s Post-Scarcity Anarchism. Anarchist, radical ecologist, theorist, and writer – few have endured such rabid admiration by their followers or disgust by their detractors as Bookchin. Arguably one of the most influential theorists of the mid-late twentieth century, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, first published in 1971, collected for the first time in book-form essays Bookchin wrote during the 60s. The collection represents some of Bookchin’s most important writings, including the title essay, “Post-Scarcity Anarchism,” “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” and one of his most controversial pieces, “Listen, Marxist!” In three prefaces introducing the works and their ideas, Bookchin is a bit overly self-congratulatory in discussing the influence these essays have had over countless activists and radical theorists, but that influence cannot be discounted or dismissed however inflated his ego might appear. In the first prefatory essay, Bookchin lays out for readers the general themes running through every essay in the book, the tying of anarchism and ecology, and his view of the current state of society, the ongoing ecological crisis, and how best to respond to it. In discussing the ecological crisis, Bookchin dismisses attempts to solve it within the contemporary framework. “Capitalism is inherently anti-ecological,” he writes (viii), an argument he will expand upon in the essays themselves.
In the first essay, the title essay, Bookchin makes the case that in a society where the needs of man can be met by technology – a post-scarcity society – the only reason they are not, is due to the massive centralization of every aspect of human life. “The bourgeois control of technology reinforces the established organization of society and everyday life,” Bookchin writes (3). “By their centralistic nature, the resources of abundance reinforce the monopolistic, centralistic and bureaucratic tendencies in the political apparatus” (3). The solution Bookchin sees is in anarchism. “The absolute negation of the state is anarchism – a situation in which men liberate not only “history,” but all the immediate circumstances of their everyday lives,” (7) he writes. This liberation of everyday life Bookchin cites as among the most important aims of any revolution. “Revolutionary liberation must be a self-liberation that reaches social dimensions, not ‘mass liberation’ or ‘class liberation’ behind which lurks the rule of an elite, a hierarchy and a state.” (10). “There can be no separation of the revolutionary process from the revolutionary goal” (11), he adds. After establishing the premises upon which post-scarcity anarchism is based, and its ties to ecology, Bookchin closes with the comparison of contemporary society to that of the Enlightenment era of the 18th century, particularly in France.
He argues that the growing disenchantment with the “values, the forms, the aspirations, and above all, the institutions of the established order” (13) mirrored the sentiments felt by the masses in years leading up to the French Revolution.
The Enlightenment serves as a touchstone upon which Bookchin returns in his essay “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought.” Here, he explores how the cross-pollinating of the sciences, philosophy, and revolutionary thought led to the revolutionary upheavals at the close of the eighteenth century (20). He argues that in our time, the science most relevant to modern times, as it affects revolutionary thinking, is ecology, which “Broadly conceived…deals with the balance of nature. In as much as nature includes man, the science basically deals with the harmonization of nature and man” (Bookchin 21). He describes the pollution of the earth, as man’s “parasitism” (22) and explores the connections between our destruction of the environment, and the nature of our society. “Man has produced imbalances not only in nature, but, more fundamentally, in his relations with his fellow man in the very structure of society. The imbalances man has produced in the natural world are caused by the imbalances he has produced in the social world” (23) he writes. This idea that the unhealthy nature of our society might be the cause for our disregard for the health of our environment might seem obvious to contemporary readers concerned with the preservation of the earth and the freedom of humankind, but at the time of it’s writing it was a profound thought to link the oppressive nature of human society to the human oppression of the earth’s ecosystem. To best understand the interweaving relationships between man and man, and man and his environment, Bookchin lays out the study of “social ecology,” a system that examines the structure and organization of society in terms of it’s relation to the environment. He argues that when looked at through the lens of this social ecology, the solution to both problems is in anarchism – in decentralizing all aspects of human existence, from the structures of society, to our habitats. The doing away of centralized urban areas for smaller and more manageable and sustainable urban areas, spread out over regions. “The validity of the decentralist case can be demonstrated for nearly all the ‘logistical’ problems of our time” he writes (34). He furthers the case for anarchism by tracing the commonalities, as he sees them, between anarchism and ecology, and turns this discussion into an outline of his vision of what an ecologically stable anarchist society would look like (36-40). The ecological case for anarchism is an interesting one, because it is larger in scope than many past arguments. It makes the case for anarchism not just against the domination of man over his fellows, but against the domination of man over his environment, and argues for a more just and sustainable approach to all aspects of our existence.
While these first two essays lay the basis for understanding Bookchin’s thought, it is his essay “Listen Marxist!” that has stirred up the most controversy over the years. The essay continues Bookchin’s argument towards a critique of capitalism and an advocating of the ideology of post-scarcity anarchism, but it does this in the context of an attack on the ideas of contemporary Marxism. While Bookchin laid out more complex and detailed criticisms of Marxism in his books Toward an Ecological Society and The Ecology of Freedom, in this essay are the germination of his ideas that the critique of capitalism that Marx made, while sharply on point and relevant to the time in which he wrote, has since been outdated by capital’s continuing development – necessitating a newer and more relevant critique of existing social and economic structures. Bookchin criticizes not only the relevance of Marx in the contemporary world, but the ideals which contemporary Marxism touts, what he calls “The Myth of the Proletariat” (114), and “The Myth of the Party” (122). He argues that “The worker becomes a revolutionary not by becoming more of a worker but by undoing his ‘workerness’” (119), by developing not a class-consciousness as the Marxists would desire, but an “un-class consciousness…What he is shedding are precisely those class shackles that bind him to all systems of domination (119-20). He further argues against the Party and other centralist forms of organizing, and looked to the Paris uprisings for inspiration. He concludes by drawing a line in the sand against hierarchical structures of all kinds, including revolutionary ones. “The organization we try to build is the kind of society our revolution will create. Either we will shed the past – in ourselves as well as in our groups – or there will simply be no future to win,” (143), a rather bleak outlook, but one that may bear out if the ecological decline we find ourselves on continues unchecked.
In the other equally thought-provoking essays in this book, Bookchin presents scathing critiques of technology (“Towards a Liberatory Technology”), syndicalism (“The Forms of Freedom”), and other subjects. He also includes two pieces covering briefly the facts and analysis of the Paris uprising of ‘68. While these are all interesting in their own right – particularly Bookchin’s criticism of syndicalism and advocating for local assemblies, in “The Forms of Freedom,” – it is the essays discussed at length that bear the most relevance to contemporary readers, and are where they should first turn their attention when picking up this book.
No collection of significant writings on anarchism would be complete without including Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread, the fourth and most recent book in this series. All three of the other writers in this series took inspiration at one level or another from Kropotkin’s ideas and theories, laid out here in perhaps his best known work. The Conquest of Bread is not merely a work of theory, but also a work of propaganda, written in plain language, and meant to be read by working people. The text is based upon a series of articles Kropotkin wrote for the anarchist newspaper Le Revolte, compiled by a comrade at Le Revolte and revised by the author to read as a whole.
(Kropotkin 25). The book takes as its task to explore in practical terms how wealth – the productive output of working people everywhere – would be distributed in an anarchist society. “Well-being for all is not a dream,” Kropotkin writes (63). “We must recognize, and loudly proclaim, that everyone, whatever his grade in the old society…has, before everything, THE RIGHT TO LIVE, and that society is bound to share amongst all, without exceptions the means of existence at its disposal” (70).
Kropotkin goes on to explore the basis for how such a system might be organized, that of anarchist-communism, which he devotes an entire chapter to explaining. “Every society which has abolished private property will be forced, we maintain, to organize itself on the lines of Communistic Anarchy” Kropotkin writes (73). The reason for this is that “in the present state of industry, when everything is interdependent, when each branch of production is knit up with all the rest, the attempt to claim an Individualist origin for the products of history is absolutely untenable,” (73). This view countered the arguments of many contemporaries that workers would be compensated for the full value of the products they produced individually, by arguing essentially that there is no such thing as individual production; that all the goods produced by society are created collectively, and must therefore be shared collectively. Kropotkin’s system would do away not only with the wage system, tied as it was to capitalistic enterprise, but other forms of individual compensation as well. What his system opts for instead can be summed up by the ideal that “to every man according to his needs” (75). Kropotkin elaborates a critique of wage systems in post-revolutionary societies in chapter 13, arguing that they are untenable and violate the spirit of the revolutionary ideals upon which their revolution was founded – the abolition of private property (190).
Kropotkin not only lays out a plan for how an anarchist-communist society might be organized, but he also devotes an entire chapter to addressing the chief arguments against such a system. The chief objection Kropotkin addresses is of how in a society where people are not forcibly compelled to work, would anyone work? (171). Kropotkin argues that if people shared equally in the product, that they would work out of a desire to benefit the community, and he goes on to provide examples of such communal work (174).
What we see in reading The Conquest of Bread is a positive vision of a future anarchist society, covering virtually every aspect and function of such a society in clear language and in a relatively small space. It is a book that doesn’t just argue for the overthrow of the state and capitalism, but lays a concrete vision for what a post-capitalist society might look like.
If there is one thing readers should take away from all of these books, it is recognition of the untapped potential of people to reshape their world for the better, and how that future world is closer than we might think, if we are all willing to come together and struggle to make it reality.
original url: http://www.politicalmediareview.org/2011/05/ak-press-working-classics-series/
Irene Gammel on The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg for Toronto's Globe and Mail
This past weekend Toronto's Globe and Mail dedicated its non-fiction review to The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg with reviewer Irene Gammel praising the letters for the way they
challenge the stereotype of “Red Rosa” as a ruthless fighter by revealing Luxemburg's sensitivity and humanity, a woman who, even from the darkness of her prison cell, showered others with her warmth and caring, as in this letter to Luise (Lulu) Kautsky from Cell No. 7 at Wronke women's prison: “I would very soon get you laughing again, even though your last few letters sounded disturbingly gloomy,” she writes, cheering her moody friend by evoking memories: “When we two were together you always felt a little tipsy, as though we had been drinking bubbly.” She lifts her own spirits by singing the “Countess's aria from Figaro” to an audience of blackbirds.Gammel continues,
Letters are a means of staging the self, and Luxemburg performs herself with remarkable confidence and affection, extending herself into friendship and community as in this March 5, 1901, letter to Clara Zetkin, which begins: “My beloved Clarisse! Today is my birthday, and I am celebrating it by writing you a letter.” Ultimately, these passionate letters, which commemorate the 140th anniversary of Luxemburg's birth, show the living, breathing and loving woman behind the legend of “Red Rosa.”Visit the Globe and Mail to read the review in full.
“Slivers of a Life, Bound Together”
In his review for PopMatters, Rick Dakan compares the experience of reading The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg to that of walking across Hans Haacke's “monument” to Luxemburg in Berlin's Rosa Luxemburg platz—the book acts as a “similar kind of memorial, a kind of sliver of one woman's life bound together in one place.”
Observing that there is no grand and imposing statue of Luxemburg in the platz that bears her name, Dakan writes,
Observing that there is no grand and imposing statue of Luxemburg in the platz that bears her name, Dakan writes,
Yet there were these long, thin strips of bronze or brass scattered all over the place, like sticks that had been cast out across the sidewalks and open spaces and left to sink into the ground. They were plaques, most of them several feet long, with whole sentences on them, all of them quotes from the murdered Rosa Luxemburg. What better memorial for a powerful writer and movement-head than to immortalize her words where every downcast gaze in the plaza would see them.
The book, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg is a similar kind of memorial, a kind of sliver of one woman's life bound together in one place. Like walking through the platz, reading it won't give anyone a full appreciation for the author's life and its significance, but it will give you an important sense of what she stood for.Showing appreciation for that which makes The Letters so appealing to both lay readers and experts alike, Dakan notes a crucial difference between the memorial and the book:
Unlike the memorial, it will also evoke like nothing else can, how completely and utterly human [Luxemburg] was. And of course for the best heroes, its their humanity that inspires us, for that's how we can see ourselves in them and hopefully try and emulate some of their best achievements despite our many failings.And his conclusion is unequivocal in the face of such “an expertly assembled piece of raw history”:
If you love or admire or are just fascinated by Rosa Luxemburg, then you've no excuse not to buy this excellent book.Visit PopMatters to read the review in full.
“Far more than philosophy”—the Times Literary Supplement on Georges Bataille
Ian James is full of praise for Michel Surya's Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography in the Times Literary Supplement. Focusing on Bataille's political and philosophical thought, James writes that“Bataille's thinking elaborates an all-embracing cosmological vision of material and human life inscribed within a general economy of excess, expenditure, ruination and death”.
James notes that Bataille's sensational life and work can in no way be fitted into a singular narrative. Nevertheless, there are threads running throughout Bataille's work (both fiction and theory) and his life, notably his lifelong committment to materialism:
James notes that Bataille's sensational life and work can in no way be fitted into a singular narrative. Nevertheless, there are threads running throughout Bataille's work (both fiction and theory) and his life, notably his lifelong committment to materialism:
Surya, perhaps more than any other commentator, does justice to the intimacy of the relation that subsisted between Bataille's life and his writing, and to the complexity of their interrelation. Despite their resolutely paradoxical, enigmatic or incomplete qualities, Bataille's life and writing are, Surya shows, united by a sustained concern to affirm and elaborate an uncompromising anti-idealism. If he was fascinated by the debauched the filthy, and the work of death, it was because he held ideality of any kind to whatsoever to be a dangerous repression of the base materiality of life ...
Bataille, Surya underlines, sought only to consent to the totality of the world as it is, and not as we think it should be. In doing so he re-inscribed the entire legacy of post-Enlightenment thinking about the foundations of knowledge, of the self, of religion and art, social organization and political economy within one of the most ambitious and uncompromising affiirmations of materialism it is possible to imagine.Visit the Times Literary Supplement to read the review in full (subscribers only).
Review: Jameson's The Hegel Variations
An new review from Choice offers a useful summary of Fredric Jameson's The Hegel Variations: on the Phenomenology of Spirit:
Although best known as a Marxist theoretician, Jameson (Duke Univ.) long has declared his debt to Hegel's Phenomenology. Yet Jameson's distance is evident in the title's musical allusion, in turn owing something to Adorno's advocacy of variation form—development that keeps its options open. Mediating the poles of formalism and hermeneutics, structure and narrative (or history), his approach, he says, “might helpfully defamiliarize readings of Hegel's texts as a whole, recasting each moment as a determinate variation on subject/object ratios.” Not everyone will admire Jameson's heavy dialectical machinery. But once in gear it yields a series of audacious reading of a “non-teleological” Hegel, throwing a distinctive light on such themes as master-slave dialectic, linguistic subjectivity, expressive production (“the animal kingdom of spirit”), normative division in the Antigone (inaugurating chapter 6, “Spirit”), and the French Revolution. Jameson then projects a history that extends modernism into contemporary globalism, and finally sketches out a reading of Hegel on religious picture-thinking (Vorstellung) interpreted in turn as allegory. It is material enough for several books. Recommended.
[M. Donougho, University of South Carolina—Columbia]
Arab News reviews The Punishment of Gaza
Arab News has reviewed Gideon Levy's acclaimed book The Punishment of Gaza calling it “a heartbreaking story of the daily sufferings of an oppressed people and of the world's indifference to their plight”
It narrates the saga of the sufferings of the Gaza people, as the Israeli government punishes an entire people for no fault of theirs, while the US continues its military, economic and diplomatic assistance to Israel and the West, in general, by looking the other way.Visit Arab News to read the article in full.
Publishers Weekly intern Ben Zarov on Intern Nation
In a new review in the March 1 issue of Publishers Weekly, PW intern Bern Zarov writes: “[Perlin's] exposé on the internship model initiates a critical conversation on internships ... and his thoughtful book is necessary reading for the millions of young people trying to break into the working world through internships”:
Perlin's most shocking revelation isn't that many internships are exploitative but that most are illegal. Companies of all sizes and across industries flout (with no consequences) the requirements outlined in the Fair Labor Standards Act to benefit from free labor. Perlin covers the complicity of colleges, many offering dubious internship programs aimed more at generating revenue for the school than benefiting students. Not even the federal government's massive, intensely competitive internship programs escape Perlin's scorn; he describes them as a hotbed of nepotism and squandered talent-but still, the right government internship is an all but necessary career step for an aspiring politician.Visit Publishers Weekly to read the review in full.
Fortunately, Perlin also offers hope and bright solutions, and ends the book with an Intern Bill of Rights and the observation that "a general strike of all interns would show all they contribute for the first time [and would bring] a delicious low-level chaos to the world's work.
Slavoj Zizek: Lenin Shot at Finland Station
- What Might Have Been: Imaginary History from 12 Leading Historians edited by Andrew Roberts
Phoenix, 208 pp, £7.99, May 2005, ISBN 0 7538 1873 6
This is empirically not the case. Roberts ignores the central ideological paradox of modern history, as formulated by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In contrast to Catholicism, which conceived of human redemption as being dependent on good deeds, Protestantism insisted on predestination: why then did Protestantism function as the ideology of early capitalism? Why did people’s belief that their redemption had been decided in advance not only not lead to lethargy, but sustain the most powerful mobilisation of human resources ever experienced?
The conservative sympathies of the ‘what if?’ volumes become clear as soon as you look at their contents pages. The topics tend to concern how much better history would have been if some revolutionary or ‘radical’ event had been avoided (if Charles I had won the Civil War; if the English had won the war against the American colonies; if the Confederacy had won the American Civil War; if Germany had won the Great War) or, less often, how much worse history would have been if it had taken a more progressive turn. There are two examples of the latter in Roberts’s volume: had Thatcher been killed in the Brighton bombing of 1984; had Gore been president on 9/11 (in this last essay, written by the neo-con David Frum, any pretence to serious history is abandoned in favour of political propaganda masked as satire). No wonder Roberts refers approvingly to Kingsley Amis’s novel Russian Hide-and-Seek, which is set in a Soviet-occupied Britain.
So what should the Marxist’s answer be? Definitely not to rehash Georgi Plekhanov’s dreary thoughts about the ‘role of the individual in history’ (had Napoleon never been born, someone else would have had to play a similar role, because the deeper historical necessity called for a passage to Bonapartism). I would rather question the premise that Marxists (and leftists in general) are dumb determinists who can’t entertain alternative scenarios.
The first thing to note is that ‘what if?’ history is part of a more general trend, one which takes issue with linear narrative and sees life as a multiform flow. The ‘hard’ sciences seem to be haunted by the randomness of life and possible alternative versions of reality: as Stephen Jay Gould put it, ‘wind back the film of life and play it again. The history of evolution will be totally different.’ This perception of our reality as only one of the possible outcomes of an ‘open’ situation, the notion that other possible outcomes continue to haunt our ‘true’ reality, conferring on it an extreme fragility and contingency, is by no means alien to Marxism. Indeed, the felt urgency of the revolutionary act relies on it.
Since the non-occurrence of the October Revolution is a favourite topic of ‘what if?’ historians, it’s worth looking at how Lenin himself related to counterfactuality. He was as far as he could be from any reliance on ‘historical necessity’. On the contrary, it was his Menshevik opponents who emphasised the impossibility of omitting one of the stages prescribed by historical determinism: first bourgeois-democratic, then proletarian revolution. When, in his ‘April Theses’ of 1917, Lenin claimed that this was the Augenblick, the unique opportunity to start a revolution, his proposal was at first met with stupefaction or contempt by a large majority of his party colleagues. But he had understood that the opportunity was provided by a unique combination of circumstances: if the moment wasn’t seized, the chance would be forfeited, perhaps for decades. Lenin was entertaining an alternative scenario: what if we don’t act now? It was precisely his awareness of the catastrophic consequences of not acting that impelled him to act.
There is a much deeper commitment to alternative histories in the radical Marxist view. For a radical Marxist, the actual history that we live is itself the realisation of an alternative history: we have to live in it because, in the past, we failed to seize the moment. In an outstanding reading of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (which Benjamin never published), Eric Santner elaborated the notion that a present revolutionary intervention repeats/redeems failed attempts in the past. These attempts count as ‘symptoms’, and can be retroactively redeemed through the ‘miracle’ of the revolutionary act. They are ‘not so much forgotten deeds, but rather forgotten failures to act, failures to suspend the force of social bonds inhibiting acts of solidarity with society’s “others”’:
The post-Communist outbreaks of neo-Nazi violence can also be understood as symptomatic outbursts of rage, displaying an awareness of missed opportunities. A parallel can be drawn with the psychic life of the individual: in just the same way as the awareness of a missed private opportunity (of a fulfilling love affair, perhaps) often leaves its traces in the form of irrational anxieties, headaches and fits of rage, so the void of a missed revolutionary opportunity can result in irrational fits of destruction.
The ‘what if?’ dimension goes to the core of the Marxist revolutionary project. In his ironic comments on the French Revolution, Marx opposed revolutionary enthusiasm and the sobering ‘morning after’: the actual outcome of the sublime revolutionary explosion which promised liberté, égalité, fraternité is the miserable utilitarian/egotistical universe of market calculation. (This gap was even wider in the case of the October Revolution.) Marx’s point, however, is not the commonsensical one, that the vulgar reality of commerce turns out to be the ‘truth of the theatre of revolutionary enthusiasm’ – what all the fuss was about. In the revolutionary explosion, another utopian dimension shines through, that of universal emancipation, which is in fact the ‘excess’ betrayed by the market reality that takes over on the morning after. This excess is not simply abolished or dismissed as irrelevant, but is, as it were, transposed into the virtual state, as a dream waiting to be realised.
The conservative sympathies of the ‘what if?’ volumes become clear as soon as you look at their contents pages. The topics tend to concern how much better history would have been if some revolutionary or ‘radical’ event had been avoided (if Charles I had won the Civil War; if the English had won the war against the American colonies; if the Confederacy had won the American Civil War; if Germany had won the Great War) or, less often, how much worse history would have been if it had taken a more progressive turn. There are two examples of the latter in Roberts’s volume: had Thatcher been killed in the Brighton bombing of 1984; had Gore been president on 9/11 (in this last essay, written by the neo-con David Frum, any pretence to serious history is abandoned in favour of political propaganda masked as satire). No wonder Roberts refers approvingly to Kingsley Amis’s novel Russian Hide-and-Seek, which is set in a Soviet-occupied Britain.
So what should the Marxist’s answer be? Definitely not to rehash Georgi Plekhanov’s dreary thoughts about the ‘role of the individual in history’ (had Napoleon never been born, someone else would have had to play a similar role, because the deeper historical necessity called for a passage to Bonapartism). I would rather question the premise that Marxists (and leftists in general) are dumb determinists who can’t entertain alternative scenarios.
The first thing to note is that ‘what if?’ history is part of a more general trend, one which takes issue with linear narrative and sees life as a multiform flow. The ‘hard’ sciences seem to be haunted by the randomness of life and possible alternative versions of reality: as Stephen Jay Gould put it, ‘wind back the film of life and play it again. The history of evolution will be totally different.’ This perception of our reality as only one of the possible outcomes of an ‘open’ situation, the notion that other possible outcomes continue to haunt our ‘true’ reality, conferring on it an extreme fragility and contingency, is by no means alien to Marxism. Indeed, the felt urgency of the revolutionary act relies on it.
Since the non-occurrence of the October Revolution is a favourite topic of ‘what if?’ historians, it’s worth looking at how Lenin himself related to counterfactuality. He was as far as he could be from any reliance on ‘historical necessity’. On the contrary, it was his Menshevik opponents who emphasised the impossibility of omitting one of the stages prescribed by historical determinism: first bourgeois-democratic, then proletarian revolution. When, in his ‘April Theses’ of 1917, Lenin claimed that this was the Augenblick, the unique opportunity to start a revolution, his proposal was at first met with stupefaction or contempt by a large majority of his party colleagues. But he had understood that the opportunity was provided by a unique combination of circumstances: if the moment wasn’t seized, the chance would be forfeited, perhaps for decades. Lenin was entertaining an alternative scenario: what if we don’t act now? It was precisely his awareness of the catastrophic consequences of not acting that impelled him to act.
There is a much deeper commitment to alternative histories in the radical Marxist view. For a radical Marxist, the actual history that we live is itself the realisation of an alternative history: we have to live in it because, in the past, we failed to seize the moment. In an outstanding reading of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (which Benjamin never published), Eric Santner elaborated the notion that a present revolutionary intervention repeats/redeems failed attempts in the past. These attempts count as ‘symptoms’, and can be retroactively redeemed through the ‘miracle’ of the revolutionary act. They are ‘not so much forgotten deeds, but rather forgotten failures to act, failures to suspend the force of social bonds inhibiting acts of solidarity with society’s “others”’:
Symptoms register not only past failed revolutionary attempts but, more modestly, past failures to respond to calls for action or even for empathy on behalf of those whose suffering in some sense belongs to the form of life of which one is a part. They hold the place of something that is there, that insists in our life, though it has never achieved full ontological consistency. Symptoms are thus in some sense the virtual archives of voids – or, perhaps better, defences against voids – that persist in historical experience.For Santner, these symptoms can also take the form of perturbations of ‘normal’ social life: participation, for example, in the obscene rituals of a reigning ideology. In this way of thinking, Kristallnacht – a half-organised, half-spontaneous outburst of violent attacks on homes, synagogues, businesses and individuals – becomes a Bakhtinian carnival, a symptom whose fury and violence revealed it as an attempt at ‘defence-formation’, a covering up of a previous failure to intervene effectively in Germany’s social crisis. In other words, the very violence of the pogroms was proof of the possibility of an authentic proletarian revolution, its excessive energy marking the reaction to an (unconscious) awareness of the missed opportunity. And is not the ultimate source of Ostalgie (nostalgia for the Communist past) among many intellectuals (and ordinary people) from the defunct German Democratic Republic also a longing not so much for the Communist past, but rather for what that past might have been, for the missed opportunity of creating an alternative Germany?
The post-Communist outbreaks of neo-Nazi violence can also be understood as symptomatic outbursts of rage, displaying an awareness of missed opportunities. A parallel can be drawn with the psychic life of the individual: in just the same way as the awareness of a missed private opportunity (of a fulfilling love affair, perhaps) often leaves its traces in the form of irrational anxieties, headaches and fits of rage, so the void of a missed revolutionary opportunity can result in irrational fits of destruction.
The ‘what if?’ dimension goes to the core of the Marxist revolutionary project. In his ironic comments on the French Revolution, Marx opposed revolutionary enthusiasm and the sobering ‘morning after’: the actual outcome of the sublime revolutionary explosion which promised liberté, égalité, fraternité is the miserable utilitarian/egotistical universe of market calculation. (This gap was even wider in the case of the October Revolution.) Marx’s point, however, is not the commonsensical one, that the vulgar reality of commerce turns out to be the ‘truth of the theatre of revolutionary enthusiasm’ – what all the fuss was about. In the revolutionary explosion, another utopian dimension shines through, that of universal emancipation, which is in fact the ‘excess’ betrayed by the market reality that takes over on the morning after. This excess is not simply abolished or dismissed as irrelevant, but is, as it were, transposed into the virtual state, as a dream waiting to be realised.
A downloadable PDF version of this book review is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
Lenin Shot at Finland Station - London Review of Books (Aug. 18)
Slavoj Zizek: Knee-Deep
- Free World: Why a Crisis of the West Reveals the Opportunity of Our Time by Timothy Garton Ash
Allen Lane, 308 pp, £17.99, July 2004, ISBN 0 7139 9764 8
Timothy Garton Ash would appreciate this tragicomic accident: it comes close to the spirit of ethically engaged irony that permeates his best work. Although he is my political opponent, I always consider him worth reading for his wealth of precise observations, and as a reliable source on the vicissitudes of the disintegration of Eastern European Communism. In Free World he has taken the same perspicuous and bitterly witty approach to the conundrums of the recent tensions between the key Western European states and the US. His aperçus about the relations between the UK, France and Germany often recall the gentle irony of a novel of manners, giving a new twist to the old topic of the ‘European trinity’.
In a famous scene from Buñuel’s Phantom of Liberty, the roles of eating and excreting are inverted: people sit at toilets around a table, chatting pleasantly, and when they want to eat, sneak away to a small room. So, as a supplement to Lévi-Strauss, one is tempted to propose that shit can also serve as a matière-à-penser: the three basic types of toilet form an excremental correlative-counterpoint to the Lévi-Straussian triangle of cooking (the raw, the cooked and the rotten). In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. No wonder that in the famous discussion of European toilets at the beginning of her half-forgotten Fear of Flying, Erica Jong mockingly claims that ‘German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything.’ It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement.
Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. In terms of the predominance of one sphere of social life, it is German metaphysics and poetry versus French politics and English economics. The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology.
Garton Ash’s observations suggest that the three terms of the trinity have recently undergone a strange displacement: the French are preoccupied with culture (how to save theirs from vulgar Americanisation), the English are focusing on political dilemmas (should they join a politically united Europe?), and the Germans? The Germans worry about the inertia of their economy, as if, in postponing economic reforms indefinitely, they were persisting in an attitude which turns around their own saying: morgen, morgen, nur nicht heute, sagen alle faulen Leute (‘tomorrow, tomorrow, just not today, all lazy people say’).
And what if there was a further shift of terms? We might then see the United Kingdom focused on culture (cultural tolerance and lack of pretension could serve as an antidote to French elitism and excessive German seriousness); France focused on the economy (which, against all expectations, has done rather well in recent decades); and – surprise – Germany focused on politics (is the political life of the Bundesrepublik not a triumph of reasoned debate over blind passion?).
So far so good. In the second half of the book, however, Garton Ash passes to a general diagnosis of the threats to freedom since the end of the Cold War, and the tone becomes dogmatic and simplistic, and the proposed solutions hopelessly naive. The final pages are full of journalistic commonplaces – ‘Western-style consumerism is unsustainable on a global scale’ – which contrast starkly with the witty remarks about ‘Janus Britain’ earlier in the book. True, there are forthright statements, unusual for a man of Garton Ash’s political views (an unambiguous attack, for example, on the unfair trade practices of the developed countries), but he fails to ground his proposals in a detailed analysis of the global situation. First, he identifies four ‘new Red Armies’ (sic), the forces of evil – or historical processes – that pose (or will pose) a threat to democracy and freedom in the coming decades: the situation in the Middle East (the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the rise of Islamism), the situation in the Far East (how will China develop with regard to democracy?), the gap between North and South, and the global ecological deadlock.
These four areas of anxiety are enumerated rather than analysed and, as a result, Garton Ash’s proposed solutions (or, rather, since he is appropriately modest, his guidelines for solutions) read like a list of desiderata: the developed countries should abide by the rules of fair competition they want to impose on the underdeveloped ones; they should make a more concentrated effort to thwart ecological catastrophe; the Middle East crisis should be resolved through the joint effort of the US and Europe, and so on. And what is one to say of his tendency to moralistic platitude? ‘If we want to be able to look ourselves in the face every morning, anyone who earns more than the average wage in a rich country should aim to give 1 per cent of his or her annual income to charities with a good track record in the developing world. We can afford it.’
Garton Ash’s conclusion does not live up to the promise, stated in the book’s subtitle, to show how the post-Cold War world, although it generates new problems, also opens up a unique chance to confront them. My own view of these shortcomings is hopelessly ‘outmoded’, because tinged with Marxism: the four problems Garton Ash lists are clearly grounded in the general dynamics of today’s global capitalism. This link is self-evident in the case of ecological problems and the poverty gap between North and South. Is the rise of Islamism not conditioned by the refusal of Muslim civilisation to accept the social dynamics of capitalism? Is the strange turn in China not to do with the fact that it is a Communist state which has fully endorsed a capitalist economy? The question should therefore be put at a more general level than Garton Ash would like: how do we stand with regard to global capitalism? Are his ‘new Red Armies’ symptoms of a structural flaw at the heart of the capitalist machine, or are they accidents that can be kept under control, if not averted?
Not that we should respond to Garton Ash with the crude Marxist retort that ‘he doesn’t take into account the dialectical totality of the situation.’ The singularity of human suffering may reach a level at which the easy reference to totality turns into cynicism. The only argument for the war against Iraq was repeatedly put by Christopher Hitchens: the majority of Iraqis were victims of Saddam and were glad to get rid of him. To this majority, the caution expressed by Western liberals could only appear deeply hypocritical. A typical middle-class Western leftist has no right to despise a Cuban who has decided to leave Cuba not only because of political disenchantment, but also because of poverty and hunger. I remember from the early 1990s dozens of Western leftists who proudly proclaimed that Yugoslavia still existed, and reproached me for betraying the opportunity to prolong that existence – to which I answered that I was not yet ready to lead my life to avoid disappointing the dreams of Western leftists. There are few things more worthy of contempt, few attitudes more ideological (if this word has any meaning today, it is here) than a tenured Western academic leftist patronising an Eastern European from a Communist country who longs for liberal democracy and some consumer goods.
One should ask the naive question: why should the US not be a global policeman? The post-Cold War situation called for a global power to fill the void. The problem, however, is not that the US is a new global empire, but that it isn’t one, though it pretends to be. In fact, the US continues to act as a nation-state, ruthlessly pursuing its own interests. The watchword of recent US politics is a weird reversal of the well-known ecologists’ motto: act global, think local. This contradiction is amply illustrated by the twin pressures the US was exerting on Serbia last year: it demanded that the government in Belgrade hand over suspected war criminals to the Hague tribunal (the logic of the global empire demands a trans-state global judicial institution) while at the same time urging it to sign a bilateral treaty with the US obliging it not to deliver to the International Criminal Court any US citizen suspected of war crimes or other crimes against humanity. No wonder the Serb reaction was one of perplexed fury. Apropos the Hague tribunal, Garton Ash wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that ‘No Führer or Duce, no Pinochet, no Idi Amin and no Pol Pot should any longer be allowed to feel safe behind the palace gates of sovereignty from the intervention of people’s justice.’ One should take note of the names missing from this list.
Garton Ash is well aware that the same logic of exception applies to economic relations. In Cancún last year, the US insisted on keeping subsidies for its cotton producers, thus violating its own advice to Third World countries to abandon state subsidies and open up to the market. With torture it’s much the same story. The exemplary economic strategy of today’s capitalism is outsourcing – contracting out the ‘dirty’ process of material production (but also publicity, design, accountancy) to other companies. In this way, it is easy to circumvent environmental and health legislation: the production takes place in Indonesia, say, where regulations are much less stringent than in the West, and the Western company which owns the logo can claim that it is not responsible for any violations by the sub-contractor. Torture is nowadays ‘outsourced’ to Third World allies of the US, which can practise it without worrying about legal liability or public protest. Garton Ash’s analysis does not allow him to see how the things he condemns (ruthless disregard for the environment, the hypocritical double standards imposed by the superpowers etc) are products of the social dynamics which sustain the role of the exporters of democracy and guardians of universal human rights.
Then there is the question of depoliticised ‘human rights’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’. When Sarajevo was under siege for more than three years in the early 1990s, there was no attempt by UN forces, Nato ” or the US to create a corridor – the most modest of options – through which people and provisions could move freely. It would have cost little and a bit of serious pressure on the Serb forces would have ended the prolonged spectacle of the encircled Sarajevo, exposed to ridiculous levels of terror. So why was nothing done? There is only one answer to this: the one proposed by Rony Brauman, a former president of Médecins sans Frontières, who co-ordinated the relief effort for Sarajevo. The presentation of the crisis of Sarajevo as ‘humanitarian’, the recasting of the politico-military conflict in humanitarian terms, was in Brauman’s view sustained by an eminently political choice – that of siding with the Serbs.
More generally, how is it that human rights are so often the ‘rights’ only of those excluded from the political community and reduced to ‘bare life’? Jacques Rancière has proposed in an essay in the South Atlantic Quarterly that when such rights are of no use,
However, there is another area of ‘opportunity’ that goes unremarked. The explosive growth of slums in the last decades, from Mexico City and other Latin American capitals through Africa to India, China, the Philippines and Indonesia, is perhaps the crucial geopolitical event of our times. The case of Lagos, according to Mike Davis, ‘the biggest node in the shanty-town corridor of 70 million people that stretches from Abidjan to Ibadan’, is exemplary: no one even knows the size of its population. Davis quotes a UN report: ‘Officially it is six million, but most experts estimate it at ten million.’ Since, some time very soon, the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural population (this may already have happened), and since slum inhabitants will constitute the greater part of the urban population, we are in no way dealing with a minority phenomenon. We are witnessing the rapid growth of a population outside the control of any state, mostly outside the law, in terrible need of minimal forms of self-organisation. Although these populations are composed of marginalised labourers, former civil servants and ex-peasants, they are not simply a redundant surplus: they are incorporated into the global economy in numerous ways; many of them are informal wage-earners or self-employed entrepreneurs, with no adequate health or social security provision. (The main reason for their rise is the inclusion of the Third World countries in the global economy, with cheap food imports from the First World countries ruining local agriculture.) One should resist the easy temptation to elevate and idealise slum-dwellers into a new revolutionary class. It is nonetheless surprising how far they conform to the old Marxist definition of the proletarian revolutionary subject: they are ‘free’ in the double meaning of the word, even more than the classical proletariat (‘free’ from all substantial ties; dwelling in a free space, outside the regulation of the state); they are a large collective, forcibly thrown into a situation where they have to invent some mode of being-together, and simultaneously deprived of support for their traditional ways of life.
The slum-dwellers are the counter-class to the other newly emerging class, the so-called ‘symbolic class’ (managers, journalists and PR people, academics, artists etc) which is also uprooted and perceives itself as universal (a New York academic has more in common with a Slovene academic than with blacks in Harlem half a mile from his campus). Is this the new axis of class struggle, or is the ‘symbolic class’ inherently split, so that one can make a wager on the coalition between the slum-dwellers and the ‘progressive’ part of the symbolic class? The new forms of social awareness that emerge from slum collectives will be the germs of the future and the best hope for a properly ‘free world’, whether or not it’s the one that Garton Ash refers to in his title.
In a famous scene from Buñuel’s Phantom of Liberty, the roles of eating and excreting are inverted: people sit at toilets around a table, chatting pleasantly, and when they want to eat, sneak away to a small room. So, as a supplement to Lévi-Strauss, one is tempted to propose that shit can also serve as a matière-à-penser: the three basic types of toilet form an excremental correlative-counterpoint to the Lévi-Straussian triangle of cooking (the raw, the cooked and the rotten). In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. No wonder that in the famous discussion of European toilets at the beginning of her half-forgotten Fear of Flying, Erica Jong mockingly claims that ‘German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything.’ It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement.
Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. In terms of the predominance of one sphere of social life, it is German metaphysics and poetry versus French politics and English economics. The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology.
Garton Ash’s observations suggest that the three terms of the trinity have recently undergone a strange displacement: the French are preoccupied with culture (how to save theirs from vulgar Americanisation), the English are focusing on political dilemmas (should they join a politically united Europe?), and the Germans? The Germans worry about the inertia of their economy, as if, in postponing economic reforms indefinitely, they were persisting in an attitude which turns around their own saying: morgen, morgen, nur nicht heute, sagen alle faulen Leute (‘tomorrow, tomorrow, just not today, all lazy people say’).
And what if there was a further shift of terms? We might then see the United Kingdom focused on culture (cultural tolerance and lack of pretension could serve as an antidote to French elitism and excessive German seriousness); France focused on the economy (which, against all expectations, has done rather well in recent decades); and – surprise – Germany focused on politics (is the political life of the Bundesrepublik not a triumph of reasoned debate over blind passion?).
So far so good. In the second half of the book, however, Garton Ash passes to a general diagnosis of the threats to freedom since the end of the Cold War, and the tone becomes dogmatic and simplistic, and the proposed solutions hopelessly naive. The final pages are full of journalistic commonplaces – ‘Western-style consumerism is unsustainable on a global scale’ – which contrast starkly with the witty remarks about ‘Janus Britain’ earlier in the book. True, there are forthright statements, unusual for a man of Garton Ash’s political views (an unambiguous attack, for example, on the unfair trade practices of the developed countries), but he fails to ground his proposals in a detailed analysis of the global situation. First, he identifies four ‘new Red Armies’ (sic), the forces of evil – or historical processes – that pose (or will pose) a threat to democracy and freedom in the coming decades: the situation in the Middle East (the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the rise of Islamism), the situation in the Far East (how will China develop with regard to democracy?), the gap between North and South, and the global ecological deadlock.
These four areas of anxiety are enumerated rather than analysed and, as a result, Garton Ash’s proposed solutions (or, rather, since he is appropriately modest, his guidelines for solutions) read like a list of desiderata: the developed countries should abide by the rules of fair competition they want to impose on the underdeveloped ones; they should make a more concentrated effort to thwart ecological catastrophe; the Middle East crisis should be resolved through the joint effort of the US and Europe, and so on. And what is one to say of his tendency to moralistic platitude? ‘If we want to be able to look ourselves in the face every morning, anyone who earns more than the average wage in a rich country should aim to give 1 per cent of his or her annual income to charities with a good track record in the developing world. We can afford it.’
Garton Ash’s conclusion does not live up to the promise, stated in the book’s subtitle, to show how the post-Cold War world, although it generates new problems, also opens up a unique chance to confront them. My own view of these shortcomings is hopelessly ‘outmoded’, because tinged with Marxism: the four problems Garton Ash lists are clearly grounded in the general dynamics of today’s global capitalism. This link is self-evident in the case of ecological problems and the poverty gap between North and South. Is the rise of Islamism not conditioned by the refusal of Muslim civilisation to accept the social dynamics of capitalism? Is the strange turn in China not to do with the fact that it is a Communist state which has fully endorsed a capitalist economy? The question should therefore be put at a more general level than Garton Ash would like: how do we stand with regard to global capitalism? Are his ‘new Red Armies’ symptoms of a structural flaw at the heart of the capitalist machine, or are they accidents that can be kept under control, if not averted?
Not that we should respond to Garton Ash with the crude Marxist retort that ‘he doesn’t take into account the dialectical totality of the situation.’ The singularity of human suffering may reach a level at which the easy reference to totality turns into cynicism. The only argument for the war against Iraq was repeatedly put by Christopher Hitchens: the majority of Iraqis were victims of Saddam and were glad to get rid of him. To this majority, the caution expressed by Western liberals could only appear deeply hypocritical. A typical middle-class Western leftist has no right to despise a Cuban who has decided to leave Cuba not only because of political disenchantment, but also because of poverty and hunger. I remember from the early 1990s dozens of Western leftists who proudly proclaimed that Yugoslavia still existed, and reproached me for betraying the opportunity to prolong that existence – to which I answered that I was not yet ready to lead my life to avoid disappointing the dreams of Western leftists. There are few things more worthy of contempt, few attitudes more ideological (if this word has any meaning today, it is here) than a tenured Western academic leftist patronising an Eastern European from a Communist country who longs for liberal democracy and some consumer goods.
One should ask the naive question: why should the US not be a global policeman? The post-Cold War situation called for a global power to fill the void. The problem, however, is not that the US is a new global empire, but that it isn’t one, though it pretends to be. In fact, the US continues to act as a nation-state, ruthlessly pursuing its own interests. The watchword of recent US politics is a weird reversal of the well-known ecologists’ motto: act global, think local. This contradiction is amply illustrated by the twin pressures the US was exerting on Serbia last year: it demanded that the government in Belgrade hand over suspected war criminals to the Hague tribunal (the logic of the global empire demands a trans-state global judicial institution) while at the same time urging it to sign a bilateral treaty with the US obliging it not to deliver to the International Criminal Court any US citizen suspected of war crimes or other crimes against humanity. No wonder the Serb reaction was one of perplexed fury. Apropos the Hague tribunal, Garton Ash wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that ‘No Führer or Duce, no Pinochet, no Idi Amin and no Pol Pot should any longer be allowed to feel safe behind the palace gates of sovereignty from the intervention of people’s justice.’ One should take note of the names missing from this list.
Garton Ash is well aware that the same logic of exception applies to economic relations. In Cancún last year, the US insisted on keeping subsidies for its cotton producers, thus violating its own advice to Third World countries to abandon state subsidies and open up to the market. With torture it’s much the same story. The exemplary economic strategy of today’s capitalism is outsourcing – contracting out the ‘dirty’ process of material production (but also publicity, design, accountancy) to other companies. In this way, it is easy to circumvent environmental and health legislation: the production takes place in Indonesia, say, where regulations are much less stringent than in the West, and the Western company which owns the logo can claim that it is not responsible for any violations by the sub-contractor. Torture is nowadays ‘outsourced’ to Third World allies of the US, which can practise it without worrying about legal liability or public protest. Garton Ash’s analysis does not allow him to see how the things he condemns (ruthless disregard for the environment, the hypocritical double standards imposed by the superpowers etc) are products of the social dynamics which sustain the role of the exporters of democracy and guardians of universal human rights.
Then there is the question of depoliticised ‘human rights’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’. When Sarajevo was under siege for more than three years in the early 1990s, there was no attempt by UN forces, Nato ” or the US to create a corridor – the most modest of options – through which people and provisions could move freely. It would have cost little and a bit of serious pressure on the Serb forces would have ended the prolonged spectacle of the encircled Sarajevo, exposed to ridiculous levels of terror. So why was nothing done? There is only one answer to this: the one proposed by Rony Brauman, a former president of Médecins sans Frontières, who co-ordinated the relief effort for Sarajevo. The presentation of the crisis of Sarajevo as ‘humanitarian’, the recasting of the politico-military conflict in humanitarian terms, was in Brauman’s view sustained by an eminently political choice – that of siding with the Serbs.
More generally, how is it that human rights are so often the ‘rights’ only of those excluded from the political community and reduced to ‘bare life’? Jacques Rancière has proposed in an essay in the South Atlantic Quarterly that when such rights are of no use,
you do the same as charitable persons do with their old clothes. You give them to the poor. Those rights that appear to be useless in their place are sent abroad, along with medicine and clothes, to people deprived of medicine, clothes and rights. It is in this way . . . that the Rights of Man become the rights of those who have no rights, the rights of bare human beings subjected to inhuman repression and inhuman conditions of existence. They become humanitarian rights, the rights of those who cannot enact them, the victims of the absolute denial of rights. For all this, they are not void. Political names and political places never become merely void. The void is filled by somebody or something else . . . if those who suffer inhuman repression are unable to enact the human rights that are their last recourse, then somebody else has to inherit their rights in order to enact them in their place. This is what is called the ‘right to humanitarian interference’ – a right that some nations assume to the supposed benefit of victimised populations, and very often against the advice of the humanitarian organisations themselves. The ‘right to humanitarian interference’ might be described as a sort of ‘return to sender’: the disused rights that had been sent to the rightless are sent back to the senders.The reference to Lacan’s formula of communication (in which the sender gets back from the recipient his own message in its inverted – i.e. true – form) is here to the point: in the reigning discourse of humanitarian interventionism, the developed West is effectively getting back from the victimised Third World its own message in its true form. And this is also where we should look for candidates for the position of the ‘universal individual’ – a figure or group whose fate stands for the injustice of today’s world: the detained in Guantanamo, or the Palestinians. Palestine is today the site of a potential ‘opportunity’, in the sense of Garton Ash’s subtitle, precisely because the standard ‘pragmatic’ solutions to the Middle East crisis have repeatedly failed, so that a utopian invention of a new space is the only ‘realistic’ choice. Furthermore, the Palestinians make good candidates on account of their paradoxical position of being the victims of the ultimate victims, the Jews, which of course puts them in an extremely difficult spot: when they resist, their resistance can be denounced as a prolongation of anti-semitism, as a secret solidarity with the Final Solution. Indeed, if – as Lacanian Zionists like to claim – Jews are the objet petit a among nations, if they represent the troubling excess of Western history, how can one resist them with impunity? Is it possible to be the objet a of objet a itself? It is precisely this ethical blackmail that we should reject.
However, there is another area of ‘opportunity’ that goes unremarked. The explosive growth of slums in the last decades, from Mexico City and other Latin American capitals through Africa to India, China, the Philippines and Indonesia, is perhaps the crucial geopolitical event of our times. The case of Lagos, according to Mike Davis, ‘the biggest node in the shanty-town corridor of 70 million people that stretches from Abidjan to Ibadan’, is exemplary: no one even knows the size of its population. Davis quotes a UN report: ‘Officially it is six million, but most experts estimate it at ten million.’ Since, some time very soon, the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural population (this may already have happened), and since slum inhabitants will constitute the greater part of the urban population, we are in no way dealing with a minority phenomenon. We are witnessing the rapid growth of a population outside the control of any state, mostly outside the law, in terrible need of minimal forms of self-organisation. Although these populations are composed of marginalised labourers, former civil servants and ex-peasants, they are not simply a redundant surplus: they are incorporated into the global economy in numerous ways; many of them are informal wage-earners or self-employed entrepreneurs, with no adequate health or social security provision. (The main reason for their rise is the inclusion of the Third World countries in the global economy, with cheap food imports from the First World countries ruining local agriculture.) One should resist the easy temptation to elevate and idealise slum-dwellers into a new revolutionary class. It is nonetheless surprising how far they conform to the old Marxist definition of the proletarian revolutionary subject: they are ‘free’ in the double meaning of the word, even more than the classical proletariat (‘free’ from all substantial ties; dwelling in a free space, outside the regulation of the state); they are a large collective, forcibly thrown into a situation where they have to invent some mode of being-together, and simultaneously deprived of support for their traditional ways of life.
The slum-dwellers are the counter-class to the other newly emerging class, the so-called ‘symbolic class’ (managers, journalists and PR people, academics, artists etc) which is also uprooted and perceives itself as universal (a New York academic has more in common with a Slovene academic than with blacks in Harlem half a mile from his campus). Is this the new axis of class struggle, or is the ‘symbolic class’ inherently split, so that one can make a wager on the coalition between the slum-dwellers and the ‘progressive’ part of the symbolic class? The new forms of social awareness that emerge from slum collectives will be the germs of the future and the best hope for a properly ‘free world’, whether or not it’s the one that Garton Ash refers to in his title.
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Knee Deep - London Review of Books (Sep. 2)
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