Platypus

Platypus summer 2012: Democracy and Marxism

admin — Tue, 15 May 2012 03:57:32 +0000

Chicago

Saturdays 1–4PM

School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)
112 S. Michigan Ave. room 920

Facebook invitation: http://www.facebook.com/events/339098822822962/

• required / + recommended reading

Film screening: May 2012

• Last Party 2000 (2001)

Week 1. May 26, 2012

Marx and democracy

• Dick Howard, selections from The Specter of Democracy (2002)
+ Howard, “Philosophy by other means?” (2001) (original version of Chapter 13 of The Specter of Democracy)
+ Benjamin Constant, “The liberty of the ancients compared with that of the moderns” (1819)
+ Karl Marx, On Bruno Bauer’s The Jewish Question (1844)
+ Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)
+ Chris Cutrone, “Lenin’s liberalism” and “Lenin’s politics” (2011)

Week 2. Jun. 2, 2012

Communist Party of Great Britain debates Platypus

• Selected articles from Weekly Worker
+ Original pages of Weekly Worker
+ Spencer Leonard, “Adam Smith’s profoundest reader: Marx” (Weekly Worker 895, 22 December 2011, pp. 12–14)

June 16 – July 28

Trotsky and Trotskyism

Platypus summer 2012: Trotsky and Trotskyism

admin — Wed, 09 May 2012 00:47:22 +0000

Boston, Chicago, Halifax, New York, Philadelphia, and Toronto

Saturdays 1–4PM

School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)
112 S. Michigan Ave. room 920

2–5PM

New School University New York (New School)
Lang Café, Eugene Lang Building
65 W. 11th St. ground floor (enter at 66 W. 12th St.) conference room

New York University (NYU)
Puck Building
295 Lafayette St. 4th floor Memorial Room

• recommended / + supplemental reading

Week 1. Jun. 16, 2012

1879–1905

• Tariq Ali and Phil Evans, Introducing Trotsky and Marxism / Trotsky for Beginners (1980)
• Leon Trotsky, Results and Prospects (1906)

Week 2. Jun. 23, 2012

1905–17

+ Trotsky, 1905 (1907)
• Trotsky, The Lessons of October (1924) [PDF]

Week 3. Jun. 30, 2012

1917–23

• Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism (1920)
+ Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (1924)

Week 4. Jul. 7, 2012

1923–33

+ Trotsky, Where is Britain Going? (1925)
+ Trotsky, Problems of the Chinese Revolution 1927–31 (1932)
+ Trotsky, writings on the rise of Hitler and the destruction of the German Left (1930–40)

Week 5. Jul. 14, 2012

1933–40

+ Trotsky, “Stalinism and Bolshevism” (1937)
+ Trotsky, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (1938)
+ Trotsky, “Trade unions in the epoch of imperialist decay” (1940)
+ Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1936)
+ Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism (1939/40)
+ Trotsky, “Art and politics on our epoch” (1938)
+ Mary McCarthy, “My Confession” (1954)

Week 6. Jul. 21, 2012

1940–53

+ James Cannon, “The coming American revolution” (1946)
+ C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, et al., “Program of the minority tendency of the Workers Party/U.S.” (1946)
+ C.L.R. James, “Dialectical materialism and the fate of humanity” (1947)
+ Earl Browder and Max Shachtman with C. Wright Mills, “Is Russia a socialist community?” (1950)
+ Ernest Mandel, “The theory of ‘state capitalism’” (1951)
+ Michel Pablo, “On the duration and the nature of the period of transition from capitalism to socialism” (1951)
+ Pablo, “Where are we going?” (1953)

Week 7. Jul. 28, 2012

1953–63

+ Cornelius Castoriadis, “The workers and organization” (1959)
• Cliff Slaughter, “What is revolutionary leadership?” (1960)
• Revolutionary Tendency of the Socialist Workers Party/U.S., “In defense of a revolutionary perspective” (1962)
+ Tony Cliff, “The coming Russian revolution” (final chapter of Russia: A Marxist Analysis, 1964)
+ Hal Draper, “The two souls of socialism” (1966)
+ Isaac Deutscher, “Marxism in our time” (1965)
+ Murray Bookchin, “Listen, Marxist!” (1969)
• Spartacist League, “Genesis of Pabloism” (1972)

2012–13

Primary Marxist reading group

I. What is the Left? — What is Marxism?

• required / + recommended reading

Week A. Aug. 4, 2012

• epigraphs on modern history and freedom by James Miller (on Jean-Jacques Rousseau), Louis Menand (on Edmund Wilson), Karl Marx, on “becoming” (from the Grundrisse, 1857–58), and Peter Preuss (on Nietzsche)
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754) PDFs of preferred translation (5 parts): [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
• Rousseau, selection from On the Social Contract (1762)

Week B. Aug. 11, 2012

• G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History (1831) [HTML] [PDF pp. 14-128]

Week C. Aug. 18, 2012

• Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (1874) [translator's introduction by Peter Preuss]

Week D. Aug. 25, 2012

• Nietzsche, selection from On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
• Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887)

Sep. 1, 2012 Labor Day weekend

Week E. Sep. 8, 2012

• Martin Nicolaus, “The unknown Marx” (1968)
• Moishe Postone, “Necessity, labor, and time” (1978)
• Postone, “History and helplessness: Mass mobilization and contemporary forms of anticapitalism” (2006)
+ Postone, “Theorizing the contemporary world: Brenner, Arrighi, Harvey” (2006)

Week F. Sep. 15, 2012

• Juliet Mitchell, “Women: The longest revolution” (1966)
• Clara Zetkin and Vladimir Lenin, “An interview on the woman question” (1920)
• Theodor W. Adorno, “Sexual taboos and the law today” (1963)
• John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and gay identity” (1983)

Week G. Sep. 22, 2012

• Richard Fraser, “Two lectures on the black question in America and revolutionary integrationism” (1953)
• James Robertson and Shirley Stoute, “For black Trotskyism” (1963)
+ Spartacist League, “Black and red: Class struggle road to Negro freedom” (1966)
+ Bayard Rustin, “The failure of black separatism” (1970)
• Adolph Reed, “Black particularity reconsidered” (1979)
+ Reed, “Paths to Critical Theory” (1984)

Week H. Sep. 29, 2012

• Wilhelm Reich, “Ideology as material power” (1933/46)
• Siegfried Kracauer, “The mass ornament” (1927)
+ Kracauer, “Photography” (1927)

Week 1. Oct. 6, 2012

• Chris Cutrone, “Capital in history” (2008)
• Cutrone, “The Marxist hypothesis” (2010)

Liberalism and Marx: An interview with Domenico Losurdo

PR web editor — Tue, 01 May 2012 06:03:05 +0000

Pam C. Nogales C. and Ross Wolfe

Platypus Review 46 | May 2012

On March 17, 2012, Ross Wolfe and Pam Nogales of the Platypus Affiliated Society interviewed Domenico Losurdo, the author, most recently, of Liberalism: A Counter-History (2011). What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation. Full video of the interview can be found at <http://vimeo.com/38923840>

Ross Wolfe: How would you characterize the antinomy of emancipation and de-emancipation in liberal ideology? From where did this logic ultimately stem?

Domenico Losurdo: I believe that this dialectic between emancipation and de-emancipation is the key to understanding the history of liberalism. The class struggle Marx speaks about is a confrontation between these forces. What I stress is that sometimes emancipation and de-emancipation are strongly connected to one another. Of course we can see in the history of liberalism an aspect of emancipation. For instance, Locke polemicizes against the absolute power of the king. He asserts the necessity of defending the liberty of citizens against the absolute power of the monarchy. But on the other hand, Locke is a great champion of slavery. And in this case, he acts as a representative of de-emancipation. In my book, I develop a comparison between Locke on the one hand and Bodin on the other. Bodin was a defender of the absolute monarchy, but was at the same time a critic of slavery and colonialism.

RW: The counter-example of Bodin is interesting. He appealed to the Church and the monarchy, the First and Second Estates, in his defense of the fundamental humanity of the slave against the “arbitrary power of life and death” that Locke asserted the property-owner, the slave-master, could exercise over the slave.

DL: Yes, in Locke we see the contrary. While criticizing the absolute monarchy, Locke is a representative of emancipation, but while celebrating or legitimizing slavery, Locke is of course a representative of de-emancipation. In leading the struggle against the control of the absolute monarchy, Locke affirmed the total power of property-owners over their property, including slaves. In this case we can see very well the entanglement between emancipation and de-emancipation. The property-owner became freer, but this greater freedom meant a worsening of the conditions of slavery in general.

RW: You seem to vacillate on the issue of the move towards compensated, contractual employment over the uncompensated, obligatory labor that preceded it. By effectively collapsing these two categories into one another—paid and unpaid labor—isn’t there a danger of obscuring the world-historical significance of the transition to the wage-relationship as the standard mode of regulating social production? Do you consider this shift, which helped usher in the age of capitalism, a truly epochal and unprecedented event? What, if any, emancipatory possibilities did capitalism open up that were either unavailable or unthinkable before?

DL: It was Marx himself who characterized the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688–1689 as a coup d’état. Yes, the landed aristocracy became free from the king, but in this way the landowners were able to expropriate the peasants and inaugurate a great historical tragedy. In this case, too, we can see this dialectic of emancipation and de-emancipation. After the Glorious Revolution, the death penalty became very widespread. Every crime against property, even minor transgressions, became punishable by death. We can see that after the liberal Glorious Revolution the rule of the ruling class became extremely terroristic.

RW: Insofar as the de-emancipation of the serfs led to the development of an urban proletariat (since the peasants thus uprooted were often forced to move to the cities, where they joined the newly emerging working class), to what extent did this open up revolutionary possibilities that didn’t exist before? Or was this simply a new form of unfreedom and immiseration?

DL: Of course, you are right if you stress that the formation of an urban proletariat creates the necessary conditions for a great transformation of society. But I have to emphasize the point that this possibility of liberation was not the program of the liberals. The struggle of this new working class needed more time before starting to have some results. In my view, the workingmen of the capitalist metropolis were not only destitute and very poor, they were even without the formal liberties of liberalism. Bernard De Mandeville is very open about the fact that to maintain order and stability among the workers, the laws must be very strict, and that the death penalty must be applied even in the absence of any evidence. Here too we can speak of terroristic legislation.

I also describe the conditions in the workhouses as approximating later internment camps and concentration camps. In the workhouses there was no liberty at all. Not only was there no wealth, or material liberty; there was no formal liberty either.

RW: You compile some disturbing passages from Locke, Mandeville, and Smith in which they liken workers to horses and other beasts of burden. You also offer a selection from one of Abbé Sieyès’s private notebooks in which he refers to wage-laborers as “work machines.” Hobbes claimed that there was a sensate understanding “common to Man and Beast,” and La Mettrie famously wrote of the “machine-man.” Might this language reflect these thinkers’ encounter with British and French materialism just as easily as it might indicate deliberate dehumanization?

DL: With the dehumanization of the working class in the liberal tradition, I don’t believe that this has to do with the materialistic vision of the world. These liberal theorists, on the one hand, dehumanized the working-man, while, on the other hand, they celebrated the great humanity of the superior classes. I quote in my book a text by Sieyès, a French liberal who played a considerable role in the French Revolution, in which Sieyès dreams of the possibility of sexual relations between black men and apes in order to create a new race of slave. That is not a materialistic vision. On the contrary, it is a futuristic, idealistic, and eugenicist vision to create a new race of workers who can increase productivity but who would be forever obedient to their masters.

Pam C. Nogales C.: In the seventeenth century, at least in England, doesn’t private property become the grounds on which certain demands of liberty can be made against the order of the king? Was it merely a historical necessity that demands of liberty could only be made through this particular form of private property? Or was this already a reactionary position to take, even in the seventeenth century?

DL: I would continue to stress this entanglement of emancipation and de-emancipation. The statement according to which men have the right to think freely and convey their opinions is of course an expression of an emancipatory process. But we must add that this class of property-owners, once free of the control of the government, could impose a new regime of control over their servants and slaves. In the first phase of the bourgeois-liberal revolution, the servants were without even liberal liberty, as well. I have quoted, for instance, that the inhabitants of the workhouses were deprived of every form of liberty. The [indentured] servants who were transferred to America, they were more like slaves. They were not modern wage-laborers. For instance, Mandeville writes that the worker must attend religious services. That is, they were not free in any sense of the word. On the workhouses, I quote Bentham at length, who claimed to be a great reformer, but was truthfully a great advocate of these workhouses. He envisioned the formation of an “indigenous class” of workers born within these workhouses, who would therefore be more obedient to their masters. This has nothing to do with modern wage-workers.

Marx, arrested: Brussels, 1848. Sketch by N. Khukov, 1930s.

PN: This gets back to the question of whether or not capitalism offers new forms of freedom while simultaneously posing new problems of unfreedom. On the one hand, we live in a most unfree moment. One could highlight the historically unprecedented living conditions for the worker in the crowded tenement houses of Manchester, or point out that his employer is only interested in gaining profit and not in granting him any form of freedom. But is the formation of a working class not at the same time a historical transformation of the conception of a subject in society that has implications beyond its manifestation in its present moment? After all, the worker is not identical with his social activity. He, as a bourgeois subject, has the right to work. Does bourgeois right point beyond itself and is thus not reducible to how it immediately appears?

DL: Of course I agree with you that some theorists from the ruling class end up inspiring other classes that were not foreseen as participants in liberal right. Consider Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the slave revolution in Santo Domingo, which later became Haiti. How can we explain this great revolution? We see in France the Declaration of the Rights of Man. In the original version of this document, the Rights of Man did not include colonial peoples or the blacks. But we see Toussaint Louverture who read this proclamation and claimed these rights for the blacks, as well. And we have this great revolution as a result. This is not a spontaneous consequence of liberalism, however. On the contrary, Toussaint Louverture was obliged to struggle against the French liberals of the time, who admired the conditions that obtained in the southern United States of America and strove to continue the oppression of the black slaves. In Santo Domingo, the slaveholders were at first positively impressed by the French Revolution. They thought this meant freedom from the control of the king, such that they could now freely enjoy slavery, and their property, the slaves. Toussaint Louverture drew the opposite conclusion, and thus became the organizer of one of the greatest revolutions in history.

PN: Concerning the radical inspiration for the framework you set up between Toussaint and the French Revolution, the striking thing about the Haitian Revolution is that it caused a division within France. It was not simply Toussaint versus the French liberals; the Haitian Revolution actually caused the French liberals to split and led to disarray. It raised another problem: Insofar as France could militarily continue to defend itself from counterrevolutionary forces in Europe, at this particular moment, it still depended on colonial production. It therefore seems to me that the Haitian Revolution posed the problem of the radicalism of liberalism straightforwardly and there were a number of responses. Is it possible to call Toussaint a liberal because he believed in the promises of liberalism?

DL: No! Toussaint was a Jacobin. Between the Jacobins and the liberals there was a great deal of struggle. If we read all the authors who are generally classified as liberal—for instance Constant, de Tocqueville, and so on—they spoke very strongly against Jacobinism. For these liberal authors, Jacobinism was something horrible. I don’t agree, therefore, with your claim that there was a “split” within the liberal parties of France. Jacobinism is in my interpretation a form of radicalism, because they appealed not only to the liberation of the slaves “from above,” but struggled together with the slaves in order to overthrow slavery. After the fall of the Jacobins in France, the new government began to immediately work for the restoration of slavery. The French slave-owners had acclaimed the first stage of the French Revolution, since they thought they could then freely exercise control over their slaves. After the advent of Jacobinism and the radicalization of the Revolution, the liberals went to the United States and expressed their admiration.

RW: Could you elaborate on the historical and conceptual distinction you draw between liberalism on the one hand, and radicalism on the other?

DL: Even if we conceive of radicalism as the continuation of liberalism, we should not forget that, for instance in the United States, even the formal abolition of slavery was the consequence of a terrible conflict, a war of secession. We don’t see a direct continuity between liberalism and the abolition of slavery, because this liberation was only made possible by a protracted Civil War. But Lincoln, too, was not a representative of radicalism because he never appealed to the slaves to emancipate themselves. Only in the final stage of the war of secession, in order to add more soldiers in the struggle against the South, did Lincoln agree to let some black soldiers fight.

It is another fact that in the history of liberalism, Robespierre is not considered a liberal, but a strong enemy of liberalism. In the French Revolution, it was Robespierre who abolished slavery, but only after the great revolution in Haiti. He was then compelled to recognize that slavery was over.

The author who makes the best impression on the issue of slavery is Adam Smith. Smith was for a despotic government that would forcibly abolish slavery. But Smith never thought of the slaves as catalysts of their own liberation. So on the one hand, Adam Smith condemns and criticizes slavery very harshly. But if we asked him what was in his eyes the freest country of his time, in the final judgment, Smith answers that it is England.

If we look at the history of the American continents, we can ask: Which was the most liberal country? I believe it was the U.S. But now, if we ask the question: Which was the country that had the greatest difficulty in the emancipation of the slaves? Again, it was the United States.

But if we consider the succession of emancipation in the American continents, we see Haiti first, followed by the countries of Latin America (Venezuela, Mexico, and so on), and only later the United States of America. If we read the development of the world between the United States and Mexico, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States—after defeating Mexico, after annexing Texas—reintroduced slavery into these territories where it had already been abolished. This, in my eyes, demonstrates that we cannot consider the abolition of slavery as a consequence of liberalism.

RW: How would you account for the admiration of Marx for a figure like Lincoln, who created the conditions (through war) for the emancipation of the slaves?

DL: Of course Marx was right in his admiration for Lincoln. Lincoln was a great personality, and Marx had the merit to understand that the abolition of slavery would bring about great progress. Why do I say this? Because in utopian socialism, there were those who constructed this argument: “Yes, capitalism is slavery. Black slavery is only another form of slavery. Why should we choose between the Union and the Confederacy? We see in North and South only two different forms of slavery.” Lassalle, for instance, was of this opinion. Marx understood very well that these two different forms of slavery—wage-slavery and slavery in its most direct form—were not equivalent. The South was for the expansion of slavery.

Marx in 1848

PN: For Marx, what was really at stake in the Civil War were the historical gains made by the bourgeois revolutions, on which any proletarian revolution would have to depend. And insofar as liberalism in its post-1848 moment had begun to undermine the promises of the bourgeois revolutions, it was no longer revolutionary. Do you think that with the relationship between Marx and the American Civil War, there was a certain promise that, insofar as slavery could be abolished, bourgeois right could potentially be radicalized?

DL: I am critical of some ideas of Marx, but not the enthusiasm with which he greeted the struggle of Lincoln or the Northern Union. In this case Marx was correct. But Marx spoke of the bourgeois revolutions as providing political emancipation. Perhaps he didn’t see the aspect of de-emancipation. We can make a comparison with the middle of the nineteenth century: the U.S. and Mexico. In Mexico, no bourgeois revolution took place. In the U.S. we must say that the American Revolution was a form of bourgeois revolution. Comparing these two countries, we see that in Mexico, slavery was abolished. In the U.S. slavery remained very strong. Why should we say that in the U.S. the political emancipation was greater than in Mexico? I don’t see why.

RW: In explaining the manifold “exclusion clauses” that restricted the application of bourgeois rights to certain privileged groups or individuals, you use the old dichotomy of the “sacred” and “profane.” According to this model, those fortunate enough to live inside the boundaries of this “sacred space” at any given moment can be said to inhabit the “community of the free,” while those who fall outside of its domain are meanwhile relegated to the “profane space” of unfreedom. Why do you associate freedom with sanctity, and unfreedom with profanity?

DL: In this religious analogy, the “sacred space” is, of course, the space that is more highly valued than any other. With liberal ideology, we see a religious attitude. But that isn’t the most important point, because even in normal language, “sacred” has a more positive meaning. Regardless of whether one is religious, when people speak of something that is “sacred,” what this means is that this thing has a particular importance.

RW: How do you account for the rise of nationalism, the role it played in carving out the “sacred space” of the “community of the free”? Nationalism goes virtually unmentioned in your account. Lost, then, is the patriotic particularity that emerged opposite Enlightenment universality at the outset of the eighteenth century. In your work on Heidegger, you draw on the sociologist Tönnies’s distinction between “society” [Gesellschaft] and “community” [Gemeinschaft] to explain the exclusivist connotations of the ideology of the national or folk community (the Volksgemeinschaft promoted by the Nazis).[1] Insofar as it displaced the spiritual energies traditionally invested in religion to that of the nation, might this be the root of the “sacred space” that you associate with the (national) “community of the free”?

DL: Regarding “sacred space” and “profane space”: I make a comparison with religion because religion proceeds in this way. Profane derives from a Latin word. Fanum was the temple or church. Profanum was what was outside the church. That is the distinction that we find already in the first phase of religious consciousness. Liberalism proceeds in the same way—we have the fanum, or temple, which is the space of the community of the free. Profanum is for the others, those outside of this space.

Why do I use this formulation for the community of the free? I don’t believe that the category of “individualism” is adequate to the description of liberal society. “Liberalism” and “individualism” are self-congratulatory categories. Why? If we consider individualism, for example, as the theory according to which every individual man or woman has the right to liberty, emancipation, and self-expression—that is not what we see in liberal society. We have spoken of the different forms of exclusion, of colonial peoples, of workingmen, and women. Therefore, this category is not correct.

RW: But is it liberal society or the national community that is free? In your study on Heidegger, you distinguish between the more universal category of “society,” the socius or Gesellschaft, and the more particular category of “community,” the communitas or Gemeinschaft. Isn’t this distinction useful here?

DL: If we consider the history of liberalism, we see on the one hand a “community of the free” that tends to be transnational. But on the other hand, we already see nationalism in this liberal society. For instance, Burke speaks of “the English people,” a people in whose “blood” there is a love of liberty. There is a celebration of the English people. The ideology of nationalism was already present in liberalism. England—though not only England—claimed to be a special nation, a nation involved in a project of liberty. Of course in the twentieth century we have a new situation, where Heidegger celebrates the German nation.

PN: Isn’t the transformation of concepts like nationalism symptomatic of a deeper problem in liberalism itself? Doesn’t the shift that takes place in 1848 indicate the conservative (and thus reactionary) transformation of the liberal tradition, because a latent conflict within bourgeois society was only now being historically manifested? Since you raised the criticism of how Marx conceived of bourgeois revolutions, I would like to talk about the relationship of liberalism to Marxism, specifically in the moment of the mid-nineteenth century. To what extent would you say that the success of a radical or Marxist conception of revolution be the negation of liberal society, and to what extent would you say that it would be the fulfillment of liberal society?

: Maximilien Luce, Une rue à Paris en Mai 1871 ou La commune, oil on canvas, 222.5 cm x 151 cm, 1903–1905 (Musée d’Orsay).

DL: One can find a new definition of liberalism and say that the October Revolution of 1917 was a liberal revolution—why not? But in normal language, the October Revolution is not considered a liberal revolution. All the liberal nations of the world opposed the Bolshevik Revolution.

Marx does not speak at any great length about liberalism. He speaks about capitalism and bourgeois societies, which claimed to be liberal. I criticize Marx because he treats the bourgeois revolutions one-dimensionally, as an expression of political emancipation. Marx makes a distinction between political emancipation and social emancipation. Social or human emancipation will be, in Marx’s eyes, the result of proletarian revolution. On the other hand, Marx says the political emancipation that is the result of bourgeois revolution represents progress.

Again, I don’t accept this one-sided definition of political emancipation, because it implied the continuation and worsening of slavery. In my book I quote several contemporary U.S. historians who claim that the American Revolution was, in reality, a “counter-revolution.” Why do I quote these historians? They write that if we consider the case of the natives or the blacks, their conditions became worse after the American Revolution. Of course the condition of the white community became much better. But I repeat: We have numerous U.S. historians who consider the American Revolution to be, in fact, a counter-revolution. The opinion of Marx in this case is one-sided. Perhaps he knew little about the conditions in America during the American Revolution. He knew the War of Secession well, but perhaps the young Marx was not familiar with the earlier history of the U.S.

Another example of the one-sidedness of the young Marx can be found in On The Jewish Question. He speaks in this text of the U.S. as a country of “accomplished political emancipation.” In this case, his counter-example is France. In France, he claimed there was discrimination based on wealth and opportunity. This discrimination was disappearing, and was now almost non-existent, in the U.S. But there was slavery in the U.S. at this time. Why should we say that the U.S. during the time of slavery had “accomplished political emancipation”?

RW: “Radicalism,” as you have been defining it, would be liberalism without exclusion. If one were to get rid of the division between the “sacred space” and “profane space,” it would just be liberalism for all. Insofar as radicalism purports to remove any distinction between those who are inside and those outside the realm of freedom, and thereby bring everyone into the “sacred space” of freedom, wouldn’t radicalism to some extent just be universal liberalism?

DL: It is impossible to universalize in this way. For instance, colonial wars were for the universalization of the condition of the white slave-owners. That was the universality proclaimed by colonialism. The universalization of liberal rights to excluded groups was not a spontaneous consequence of liberalism, but resulted from forces outside liberalism. These forces were, however, in some cases inspired by certain declarations, for instance of the Rights of Men.

In speaking of the enduring legacy of liberalism, I have never said that we have nothing to learn from liberalism. There two primary components of the legacy of liberalism. First, and perhaps the most important point: Liberalism has made the distinction between “sacred space” and “profane space” that I have spoken about. But liberalism has the great historical and theoretical merit of having taught the limitation of power within a determined, limited community. Yes, it is only for the community of the free, but still it is of great historical importance. On this score, I counterpose liberalism to Marxism, and rule in favor of liberalism. I have criticized liberalism very strongly, but in this case I stress the greater merits of liberalism in comparison to Marxism.

Often, Marxism has spoken of the disappearance of power as such—not the limitation of power, but its disappearance—the withering of the state and so on. This vision is a messianic vision, which has played a very negative role in the history of socialism and communism. If we think that power will simply disappear, we do not feel the obligation to limit power. This vision had terrible consequences in countries like the Soviet Union.

RW: So you believe that historical Marxism’s theorization of the eventual “abolition” of the state, or the “withering away” of the State—as Lenin, following Engels, put it—was misguided?

DL: Totally misguided!

RW: So do you feel that society can never autonomously govern itself without recourse to some sort of external entity, something like the state? Must the state always exist?

DL: I do not believe society can exist without regulation, without laws. Something must ensure obedience to the laws, and in this case the “withering away” of the state would mean the “withering away” of rights, of the rule of law. Gramsci rightly says that civil society, too, can be a form of power and domination. If we conceive the history of the United States, the most oppressive forms of domination did not take the shape of state domination, but came from civil society. The settlers in the American West independently carried out the expropriation, deportation, and even extermination in more extensive ways than the state. Sometimes, even if only partially, the federal government has tried to place limits on this phenomenon. Representing civil society as the expression of liberty—this is nonsense that has nothing to do with real Marxism.

Marx himself speaks of the despotism in the capitalist factory, which is not exercised by the state, but rather by civil society. And Marx, against this despotism, proposed the interference of the state into the private sphere of civil society. He advocated state intervention in civil society in order to limit or abolish this form of domination, in order to limit by law the duration and condition of the work in the factory.

RW: That’s the famous passage where Marx describes industrial capitalism as “anarchy in production, despotism in the workshop.” In other words, haphazard production-for-production’s-sake alongside this kind of militarized discipline of industrial labor. But insofar as Marx conceives the modern state as the expression of class domination, the domination of the ruling class over the rest of society, do you believe that a classless society is possible? Because it would seem unclear why a classless society would need a state, if the state is only there to express class domination.

DL: On the one hand, Marx speaks along the lines you just laid out. In many texts, Marx and Engels say that the state is the expression of one class’s domination over the other. But at other times, they speak of another function of the state. They write that the state functions to implement guarantees between the different individuals of the ruling class, the individual bourgeois. And I don’t understand why this second function of the state would disappear. If we have a unified mankind, in this case too there is the necessity of guarantees between individuals within this unified mankind.

Furthermore, we are not allowed to read the thesis of Marx and Engels in a simplistic way. Sometimes they speak of the “withering away” of the state. In other circumstances, however, they speak of the “withering away” in its actual political form. These two formulations are very different from one another. But in the history of the communist movement, only the first definition was present, the most simplistic definition: the “withering away” of the state as such. The other formulation is more adequate: the “withering away” of the state in terms of today’s political form.

RW: And the other great legacy of liberalism?

DL: The other great legacy of liberalism exists in its understanding of the benefits of competition. And here I am thinking of the market, too, about which I speak positively in my book. We must distinguish different forms of the market. For a long time, the market implied a form of slavery. The slaves were merchandise in the market. The market can assume very different forms. Not that the market is the most important fact. We cannot develop a post-capitalist society, at least for a long time to come, without some form of competition. And this is another great legacy that we can learn from liberalism. |P

Transcribed by Ross Wolfe.

1. Domenico Losurdo, Heidegger and the Ideology of War: Community, Death, and the West (Humanity Press, Amherst NY, 2001).↑

Changes in art and society: A view from the present

PR web editor — Tue, 01 May 2012 06:02:29 +0000

Mary Jane Jacob, Robert Pippin, and Walter Benn Michaels

Platypus Review 46 | May 2012

On 31 March 2012, the Platypus Affiliated Society invited Mary Jane Jacob (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Robert Pippin (University of Chicago), and Walter Benn Michaels (University of Illinois at Chicago) to speak on the theme of “Changes in Art and Society: A View from the Present” at the 2012 Platypus International Convention held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The original description of the event reads as follows:

Hegel famously remarked that the task of philosophy was to “comprehend its own time in thought.” In a sense, we can extend this as the raison d’être for artistic production, albeit in a modified way: Art’s task is to “comprehend its own time in form.” Yet only with the revolutionary rise of modernity can this dictum make sense. Beginning in the 18^th century, art sought to register and materialize the way in which social consciousness changed alongside the developing material conditions of social life. Thus, in times of great social transformation, we also bear witness to major shifts in artistic production: The French Revolution and David, The Revolutions of 1848 and Courbet, and the Russian Revolution and Suprematism and Constructivism are three major examples. This panel focuses on the relationship between social and aesthetic transformation.

The panelists were asked several questions in order to flesh out the uneven and at times obscure relationship that art has with a society that is constantly in flux. Full video of the event can be found online at <http://vimeo.com/41013265>. What follows is an edited transcript of the event.

Mary Jane Jacob: Terms like the avant-garde and the underpinnings of modernism are still at the heart of the motivations and activity of many artists—not necessarily in terms of style, but in terms of contributing to changing society. I would like to point to a few concepts at play: a huge part of contemporary art-making is concerned with the dematerialized, not art that is a static object traded on the marketplace; second, it often involves collaboration, which raises questions of authorship on the part of the artist, questions of voice on the part of collaborators, and questions of participation in general; and thirdly, there is a new look to the question of effectiveness in this context—not just the affect of art—and so we should ask, effectiveness to what end?

Here are a few examples. In the 1990s, Christopher Sperandio and Simon Grennan worked with the Chicago Confectioner’s Union at a Nestlé plant to design their own candy bar, including a memorable advertising campaign. The candy bar was sold in stores. Just last night, I was driving south on Halsted; the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has changed so dramatically since 1993, when Daniel J. Martinez did a major public intervention there. For all of the 20^th century the Maxwell Street Market was a center of a kind of open commerce; then UIC and the city joined forces to make it a campus village. So Martinez’s peoples’ plaza—he knew these redevelopment plans would come in 15–20 years—harkened back to labor events staged in that area, like the McCormick Reaper Strike or the Haymarket riot, along with world events throughout history. The Chicago collaborative HAHA worked on AIDS awareness in their project Flood, teaching kids at once about hydroponics and safe sex, but also coming to a deeper understanding of the epidemic, with each of some 50 members working during the course of the project within the larger AIDS healthcare network. In West Town, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s worked with youth to deconstruct their own images in the media and take control of creating their own images in neighborhood-based forms of presentation, culminating in a huge, 75-monitor video installation along an entire residential block. While the artwork was temporary, it permanently exists in the form of the organization Street Level Youth Media, now about to celebrate its twentieth year.

From 1992 to 1995 the art group Haha cultivated a hydroponic garden, with a focus on nutritional vegetables and therapeutic herbs, in a Chicago storefront.

Though drawn from Chicago, these examples participate in a worldwide movement of artists whose practice consists in taking action into their own hands—sometimes as gestures, sometimes as provocations—in an Alinskian drive to create permanent change. In Puerto Rico, for instance, when the government was about to do away with what they considered a squatters’ village in the mountains, Chemi Rosado painted everyone’s house green so that the community would blend in with the mountain. Kamin Lertchaiprasert and Rirkrit Tiravanija, an alum of SAIC, founded the Land Project in Chiang Mai, Thailand, as a kind of experimental studio for artists, designers, but also for developing bio-gas and other kinds of alternative energy engineering, while, at the same time, farming a rice field with a nearby community that has been devastated by AIDS. Or consider Artway of Thinking, a collective that will be with SAIC this summer, whose projects are often funded by the EU. One project looked at seafarers’ plight around the world and particularly in their homeland of Mestre, Venice. In response to this multi-layered, multi-year art project, a number of actions took place that led to change, among them the creation of two agencies dedicated to services for seafarers and new, more equitable policies regarding access when they are at port. Another one of their projects involved working with 13 provincial governments in Italy to change the law so that people can work legally in Italy while seeking asylum.

We are initiating a research project at SAIC on artists’ social practices in Chicago. My hope is that in the next few years we will explore the relationship between art and social change as it has been practiced in this city and intersects with the thinking and actions here since 1900.

Robert Pippin: The people I look to for help understanding the fate of art in bourgeois society are Kant, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, the Schlegel brothers, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Adorno, Marcuse, and Heidegger.

The historical events—the simple facts—that define the social reality of the present are not much in dispute. Most count the September 15, 2008 collapse of the massive investment bank, Lehman Brothers—what is sometimes, quite revealingly, referred to as “letting Lehman fail”—as the signal event. It was followed by the nationalization of Fanny May and Freddie Mac, in the hastily conceived, 700 million dollar bailout. With that came the sudden and deep freezing of the international credit markets, the near total ruin of the economy of Iceland, the bankruptcy of Latvia, the destruction, in a little over a year, of what is estimated to be 50 trillion dollars in assets. All of this is well known, but still not well understood. In fact we seem to be drifting rapidly, as if inexorably, back into the same form of finance capitalism that produced the crisis in the first place.

Because these events have not produced even a roughly agreed-upon explanation, their significance remains unclear. The idea that global capitalism may have finally reached its long predicted death spiral is plausible: It appears unable to grow at rates that will provide minimal stability (usually estimated at around 3 percent) and unable to find any novel way to sustain itself without such growth, and all of this for various reasons having to do with unmanageable periodic liquidity crises and the inability of national governments, especially the U.S., to debt-finance its way out of such a crisis, hemmed in by domestic conservatives, foreign creditors, and the massive size of the current deficit—the U.S. has been borrowing at the rate of about 2 billion dollars a day for many years now. That ever more obviously dire consequences will result from our reliance on polluting technology to promote the rapid but deadly modernization that would insure markets for the excess liquidity—or that there may not even be sufficient space on the globe for such expansion—is, I think, a depressingly persuasive argument. And it is persuasively made, by David Harvey in The Enigma of Capital, for instance, whose account I am relying on.

But our question today concerns changes in art and society, and, presumably, the implications for the production and appreciation of art works in the current situation, understood as a now perhaps unending crisis in financial markets, with its attendant high unemployment, right-wing populism, and hyper-dogmatic religious enthusiasms that, in the U.S. at least, seem to be the first manifestation of dangerous, perhaps permanent political instability. Asking about art in this context seems necessary, yet almost impossible to think about.

The category “art” still takes in everything from folk art to commercialized pop art (music, television), to extremely expensive gallery art for an ever-smaller and richer elite, to highly academicized art music (each piece of which is performed, I am told, an average of once), to ambitious and not-so-ambitious graphic novels, to self-consciously avant-garde installation art, and so on. I don’t know how to begin to get a handle on the issue except by ascending to a high altitude and talking about the “present” in much broader terms than those sketched above. Specifically, by talking about the present in terms of the situation of bourgeois society, after the basic institutions necessary for that society began to come into view in the mid-19^thcentury and afterwards, many aspects of which were the subjects of realist and modernist art. I mean by this the establishment of a domain of privacy created mostly by the bourgeois nuclear family; the establishment of the political public sphere; the reconstruction of marriage around the romantic love of partners, eventually equal partners who chose their own mates; what was so famously, and what still should be called, the fetishization of commodities; the establishment of mass consumer societies based in nation-states; and the increasing reliance on technology to produce the expansion and growth necessary to sustain competitive market societies.

I will assume that many of these aspects are well known and uncontroversial. But at that altitude, we can also say something equally abstract and, at such a level, a bit banal, about art. If we accept that in earlier forms of Western societies, works of great artistic genius were possible—a highly contested claim—then it has become a commonplace to say that the form of life coming into view in Paris and London in the mid-19^th century made the production and appreciation of art of that quality, or at least the consensual recognition of such art, much more difficult. Perhaps there might be such art, but the importance of there being such art, its significance, would have changed radically and would have been greatly reduced. Something like this might have been Hegel’s position, which was the first to claim that in modern bourgeois societies, the greatness of art had become a thing of the past. For others, the social institution of art was eventually unable, after the failure of the heroic resistance of high modernism, to resist its commercialization, commodification, and eventual trivialization in the likes of Damien Hirst or Dan Flavin.

Damien Hirst, Pharmacy, glass, faced particle board, painted medium density fiberboard, beech and ramin woods, dowels, aluminum, pharmaceutical packaging; dimensions variable, 1992 (Tate Modern).

I don’t mean to refer to anything much about the implications of the commodity form of value, as such, but to another, deeper problem. The production of art works—let us say, easel paintings—inevitably assumes the possibility of some shareable and non-discursive but primarily sensible, affective, form of intelligibility. If there isn’t such a distinct form, there isn’t art. Moreover, under the historical assumptions about meaning influentially insisted on by Hegel, the conventions necessary for such assumptions to be reasonable change over time. At some basic level, we need to understand that change before we can understand the possibilities of its specific modalities, like aesthetic modalities of shareable meaning.

These same considerations are in play in other bodily incorporations of meaning, for instance in the bodily movements we count as actions. There is some kind of crisis if actions taken by agents to be of certain types are not taken to be such actions by many others. Rousseau began an account of those conditions and their implications: Modern societies had created novel and profoundly deep forms of dependencies, in a novel and profoundly deep way—most famously, but not exclusively, the dependencies that result from ever more divided, specialized, and thus alienated labor. To make Rousseau’s long story short, this situation created a great social pressure for ignoring, for suppressing via conformism, for rendering invisible by various means the vast social inequalities that such unequal positions of dependence and relative independence would inevitably produce. This is the situation that would later be intelligibly called “dialectical.” The social relations and fundamental inequalities of modern capitalism greatly weakens the possibility of common conventions that could be shared in meaningfully fulfilling ways; rather, these sorts of tensions tended to be anaesthetized by a conformity-inducing redirection of human desire to what everyone else desired.

From Hegel to Adorno, the realm of the aesthetic has been called the realm of the negative—that which is not expressible in discursive articulation and so possibly resistant to those processes of conformism. For Hegel, “negative” did not mean unintelligible, but involved bearing truth in its own way, preserving some distinct mode of genuinely shareable meaning, or at least an aspiration for genuinely shareable meaning. The first expression of the crisis of aesthetic modernism was such negativity: the diminishing credibility of the traditional aesthetic forms that had previously made possible such sensible mutual recognition. The painterly conventions of illusionism, perspective, sculptural modeling to evoke solidity, or the traditions of genre, the nude, the ideal—these are all refused, all at once, in Manet’s Olympia, for example. Aesthetic intelligibility would from now on be immensely more difficult because continued reliance upon such conventions came to evoke conformism, a kind of enforced traditionalism, in the face of the looming possibility that prior assumptions about shareability of meaning were becoming irrelevant.

The events of 2008 have not changed any of this, and have added, as an even more effective conformity-inducing phenomenon, a shared mood—namely, deep anxiety—and the kind of neurotic, racist hysteria we see in the Tea Party movement. What we should expect is, at the very least, something very simple: that the occurrence of great art—art that means in a way that escapes the kind of social conventions necessary for a mass consumer society to sustain the conditions of its own survival, but still manages to embody a kind of shareable meaning not anticipated and normalized by such conventions—will be extremely rare. Perhaps so extremely rare as to be acknowledgeable and appreciated only many years after its appearance.

Dan Flavin, “monument” 1 for V. Tatlin, fluorescent lights and metal fixtures, 8’ x 23 1/8” x 4 1/2” (243.8 x 58.7 x 10.8 cm), 1964 (Museum of Modern Art).

Walter Benn Michaels: Maggie Nelson’s collection of poems, Jane: A Murder, centers on the murder of Nelson’s aunt Jane in 1969, four years before Nelson herself was born. At the time, and for a long while after, it was thought that Jane’s death was one of what were thought to be the “Michigan murders”: seven young women killed in Washtenaw county, Michigan, over a period of two years. In 1970 a man was arrested and convicted for what turned out to be the last of the murders. The assumption was that he had probably killed Jane. And Jane itself, the book, is written on that theory. As the book was going to the press, however, Nelson learned that a different man had been arrested for Jane’s murder. Her next book, The Red Parts, is about the trial and conviction of that man. Edgar Allen Poe makes an appearance in The Red Parts. Watching a TV show about the murder of a “beautiful Peace Corps volunteer in Tonga,” Nelson was taken aback to hear someone on the show explain his obsession with this crime by referring to Poe, who “once declared the death of a beautiful woman to be the most poetic topic in the world.” But while Poe was only incidental for The Red Parts, he is central to Jane.

One way that Nelson imagines this centrality is as a critique of Poe’s sexual poetic, which she suggests in an interview is an example of what she calls the ethically unsound practice of treating beautiful women as if their lives were “more grievable,” because somehow more valuable, than others. Hence it matters to her that Jane, unlike the Peace Corps volunteer, was not particularly beautiful. Indeed, she puts Jane’s picture on the cover of the book at least partially to prove it. But the picture plays another role as well, one that matches the other interest Nelson has in Poe. As she tells the interviewer, Poe made this comment in his Philosophy of Composition while describing, with what seems to be at least some glibness, how to make the perfect poem. The ambition to make the perfect poem—which is, she says, also a part of her book Jane—is not easily dismissed. The idea that a woman ought to be beautiful is one thing, the idea that a work of art ought to be perfect is another, and the idea that the beauty of a work of art is its perfection is something else. Nelson herself insists on this difference. A poem near the end of Jane begins, “Does it matter if I tell you now that Jane was not beautiful?” It goes on to describe Jane, her skin, white and chalky, her eyes set close together. It ends with a description of Nelson’s favorite photo of Jane, her face half bleached out, and the point is no longer that Jane is not beautiful, but that the picture is beautiful. The poem’s last words are, “the whole picture is beautiful.” The beauty of the photo is made out of someone who is not beautiful. More precisely, the kind of beauty the photo attains has nothing to do with the kind of beauty that the person in the photo might or might not have. This is emphasized by the insistence that it is the “whole picture” that is beautiful; the invocation of the whole calls attention in particular to the form of the work of art, to its ambition to be perfect, in a way that no person can ever be. We might say that just as the photograph of Jane must be made beautiful even though its subject is not, the poem Jane must be made into a whole even though the occasion of its production, Jane’s death, is loss.

There is a difference between the question of whether the person needs to be beautiful and the question of whether the poem ought to be perfect. This difference might plausibly be understood as the difference between a set of ethical or even political concerns, and a set of aesthetic ones. For example, the question of whether some lives are or should be more grievable than others might be understood as political in a way that the question of the possible beauty or perfection of the work of art is not. But this opposition, emptying the aesthetic of the political, is certainly not one that Nelson would herself accept, and in fact we might better understand the politics of the grievable as opposed, not to a set of aesthetic concerns, but to another politics, for which the question of grievability would not arise, or at least would not be primary. Similarly, we might understand the aesthetic of perfection as opposed, not to the political as such, but to another aesthetic, distinguished by its repudiation of the commitments that accompany the entire intellectual apparatus of perfection.

In photography, the most brilliant and influential exponent of the aesthetic of the grievable would be Roland Barthes, for whom the most important thing about the photograph, the punctum, was the element that shoots out of it like an arrow and pierces the beholder. That is why the most important photograph in Barthes’ wonderful book about photography, Camera Lucida, is the one we do not see, as it is not in the book: the picture of Barthes’ mother. The reason we do not see it is that it would not pierce us; she is his mother, not ours. For us, he says, “It would be nothing but an indifferent picture.” When Nelson reproduces the photo of Jane, she is going against both Barthes’ practice—Jane was her aunt, not ours, but she includes the photograph—as well as his theory. It is the picture defined in terms of its internal relations, face and torso against the sky, and thus turned into a whole, that Nelson finds beautiful. It is, in other words, the picture disconnected from the interest its beholders might have in a beautiful Jane, or even a Jane they might be drawn by the poem to grieve for. For Barthes, our indifference to his mother makes her picture not worth reproducing, but our indifference to Maggie Nelson’s aunt is the desired response. It is precisely the imagination of the beholder’s indifference to the person Jane that marks the ambition to achieve perfection in the poem Jane. If the aesthetic of the whole is thus the aesthetic of indifference, the politics it evokes is also, I want to suggest, a politics of indifference: namely, indifference to worries about whether beautiful women should be more grievable than others, or whether anyone should be more grievable than anyone else.

The question of Jane’s beauty and the critique of the idea that it should matter belong, as Nelson herself suggests, to a feminist politics, and more generally to what she calls the cultural moment of the triple liberation of the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, and the Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement. These represent liberations from the idea that the lives of white people, straight people, men, are more grievable than others’. The refusal of these hierarchies, the refusal of the hierarchy of grievability, is in Nancy Fraser’s useful shorthand “the politics of recognition,” a politics that is given further specificity by the distinction Fraser makes between recognition and redistribution. This distinction is not itself an opposition, of course; there is no logical contradiction between recognition and redistribution, no reason why a politics seeking to eliminate or minimize class difference could not collaborate with a politics seeking to respect racial and sexual difference. But in practice, beginning in the 1970s, there has been no such collaboration. On the contrary, in the years during which the triple liberations had become central, not only to progressive politics, but also in varying degrees to American society itself, economic inequality of the kind that would be addressed by redistribution, rather than recognition, has radically increased. The increase in inequality, the increased immiseration of the American working and non-working classes, Black, White, Chicano, and Asian, is a phenomenon that does not date to 2008, but on the contrary dates to somewhere between 1969 and 1974 or 1975.

One way to understand the differing fates of recognition, its increasing centrality in redistribution, its increasing marginality, might be just a question of emphasis. In its commitment to social justice, the Left has, for various reasons, focused on issues of identity but not on issues of class for the past generation, at least. Part of the utility of the concept of neoliberalism, if we accept its periodization as primarily a phenomenon of the mid-1970s, is that it helps us see what is misleading about that way of putting the point. It helps us to see instead that the commitment to anti-discrimination at the heart of liberal politics is also at the heart of neoliberal economics, and has been ever since Gary Becker argued that an employer’s racism could only add to his labor costs since, for example, the refusal to hire black labor increased the cost of white labor. Following this line, virtually all neoclassical economists understand racism, sexism, and heterosexism as obstacles to success in competitive markets. This argument about efficiency has been doubled by an ethical argument against preferring one prospective employee over another on the basis of any characteristic not relevant to doing the job. That is, economic commitment to the primacy of markets has been accompanied by an economic and ethical commitment to equality of access to those markets. Thus, far from opposing neoliberalism, the commitment to anti-discrimination is foundational for it. This is not to say that anti-discrimination is always or sufficiently defended in all cases, but only that sexism and racism, and increasingly all inequalities of access to markets, like homophobia, are understood abstractly to be both unproductive and wrong. Inequalities actually produced by those markets, unlike inequalities of access to them, are not understood by neoliberal economics to be wrong. By this I mean just that the increasing economic inequalities of neoliberal societies are a problem for neoliberalism only insofar as they are raced or gendered. Those critics whose way of protesting economic inequality consists precisely in focusing on disparities between men and women or Black and White—think of every complaint about the disproportionate poverty of minorities, every complaint about the glass ceiling—are defending the ideals of neoliberalism, not criticizing them. They are protesting the ways in which the raced and gendered subject has been classed; they are not protesting class itself. Another way to put this is just to say that racism and sexism are liberalism today functioning badly; when it is working well, you get economic inequality, which has nothing to do with our feelings of whose lives are more or less grievable.

Just as an alternative to the aesthetics of the grievable is an aesthetics of indifference, the alternative to a politics of the grievable is a politics of indifference. That is, inasmuch as the goal was to minimize inequality, what a class politics requires is redistribution of wealth without regard to the race and gender of the beneficiaries, without regard to whether we see them as inferior, without regard to our regard itself. That is why today it is only as form that art does class. Produced by capitalism, rather than racism or sexism, poverty is independent of how we feel about or see the poor, just as the formal unity in the photograph Jane is independent of how we feel about the person Jane. In fact, that independence is the very meaning of the photograph’s unity, of its being a whole. It is in this context that the ambition to produce a perfect work of art has taken on a political meaning and that it has the particular political meaning it has. For the perfect work is one that, asserting the difference between it and the world, asserts its autonomy, an autonomy that in our period may be understood as above all autonomy from—here thematized as indifference to—its reader or beholder. It is the production of the work of art’s difference from the world that counts as the work it does in the world.

Q&A

Professor Pippin, I wonder where a figure like Hölderlin fits in your narrative and, with him, the Romantic notion of the possibility of the transcendent? It seems to me that the crisis of art in modern bourgeois society is also tied to the crisis of religion. Secondly, do the panelists see a parallel between the high modernist aesthetic and what one might call a high modernist politics, which aimed at the abolition of capitalism? In what ways does this differ from a postmodernist aesthetic?

RP: Hölderlin is usually taken to represent a moment of rejection of the emergent forms of civil society that were visible in the early 19^th century. He is seen in terms of a nostalgic retreat driven by a deep sense of the fragmentation, disunity, alienation, and anomie of modern life. That is the traditional and perhaps typical reading. A different reading would hinge on a very difficult issue: the politics and the cultural valence of the aesthetic ideal of the beautiful. I say this because Hölderlin certainly represents the last fluorescence of an approach that attributed real philosophical depth to the Beautiful. That approach would begin to evaporate after the 1820s–1830s, in the last gasp of the German Romantic Movement. Central to that approach was the conviction that the possibility of the presentation and experience of the beautiful intimates an actual harmony between the fundamental disunifications of modern society, between sensibility and intellect, reason, understanding, and so forth. One way of answering your question is just to say that something like the historical fate of Hölderlin, tied as it was to aspiration of the beautiful, had something to do with the fate of the beautiful, which in the modernist movement ceased to have the same credibility as an aesthetic ideal as it did for the Romantics.

If what you say is true and one presupposition, acknowledged or not, of high modernism is complete non-complicity with the commodification essential to capitalism, then you have to ask what the position of refusal is supposed to entail. If you believe that there is at bottom no reformable moment internal to late capitalism, what do you do, as an intellectual, if there is no longer the Party? That is, after all, the situation that begins to emerge after the failure of the German Revolution in 1918, and intensifies in subsequent moments—the dates 1939, 1956, 1968, 1989, and others stand out. If you’re an intellectual who believes that there is no internally reformable trajectory visible in modern capitalism, what does the rejectionist stand that you attribute to high modernism actually entail, politically? That is a question for which no one has a good answer, really.

MJ: Can I just ask, are there other artists here in the room? It is unfortunate in panels like this that there is often not a full sense of what contemporary artists are doing, what work they are making. What are their motivations, ethical stances, and commitment to change? Instead, some here are working from a historical position. At the same time, we need to have a pre-modern, a pre-museum, a pre-market sense of what we mean when we say the word “art,” and how some essential reasons for making art still function for artists in society today. As with the examples I pointed to earlier, the actual practice of many artists today seeks join art with life, even to dissolve any such barrier. This has been such an important theme in modernism and essentially in all art.

I want to read something from Foucault that articulates my disappointment in the inability to locate our discussions in what artists today are actually doing. Foucault says, appropriately, “What strikes me is the fact that in our society art has become something that is related only to objects and not to individuals or to life. That art is something that is specialized or done by experts who are artists, but couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should a lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?”

But my co-panelists’ presentations still address art as objects, when what Foucault points to is what many artists are dealing with now, which often doesn’t involve art objects at all—at least in the traditional sense—much less worrying about how individual art objects will perform in the market.

WBM: Foucault has been very influential, but actually is one of the early exponents and defenders of neoliberalism. Post-modernism is and has been the more or less official culture of neoliberalism. No doubt, post-modernism is in some sense an avant-garde, but the idea that it has been a politically useful avant-garde is completely mistaken, in my opinion.

I think it is important to go back to the question that Robert was raising, a question I don’t have an answer to, but which is highly significant: He said art, great art, at this moment is going to be rare, and that sounds right. On the other hand I’m very much struck by the fact that there has been a kind of renewal in the last decade, and I think it’s probably above all in photography.

MJ: To clarify, there is the work of art that you’re referring to, which is done by the artist, and then there is also the work of the artist. Not all artists make works of art, per se. Being such a capitalist society, we unfortunately have fewer outlets for artists to be doing that kind of work, because such work doesn’t necessarily involve the creation of a discrete “product.” Moreover, a great deal of art today does not seem interested in participating in the discourse around the question, “What is great art?”

If art offers a way of understanding the possibility for freedom in modern life, characterized by free labor and free love, and if the difficulty of discerning great art in the present speaks to conditions of conformity that affect us all, how do you see the art and artists you have referenced as offering us a real hope of an emancipated future? To what extent do you feel confident in their present transcendent capacity to shed light on the possibilities of our moment?

MJ: Back to the notion of context, an aesthetic object might give us a sense of freedom, but what happens on our way to even having an experience with that art object? How are we free to even have experience and what do we understand experience to be? When we pay 18 dollars to get into the Art Institute, we enter it knowing that accessing these objects is worth a certain amount. How does this affect our experience of the object? I am interested in artists like Seamus McGuinness who spent five years working with a psychiatrist in Ireland developing the Visual Arts Autopsy to change policies, procedures, and laws within that country, addressing its post-Catholic crisis and the stigmatisms around suicide. The more-than-one-hundred families’ participation in those aesthetic moments of the Visual Arts Autopsy gave them an enormous sense of freedom, agency, and chances for personal change, as well as coming together to institute change.

RP: One important distinction seems to transcend the notion of produced works of art that could be or could resist being commodities, and your life as a work of art. I think the immediate question that one needs to ask, which I would argue is inevitable once the entire category of art is invoked, is not what it would take to make your life a work of art, but what it would mean to make it a successful work of art? There has to be a difference between attempting to make your life a work of art and failing, and attempting and succeeding. Perhaps there is another difference, in succeeding very well. The thing I’ve tried to argue very briefly today is that the possibilities of successful art are actually not self-definable by the artist. This has something to do with the issue of the avant-garde, but it also—more fundamentally, I’d argue—depends on shareable conditions for the possibility of non-discursive but nonetheless articulable meaning in a community at a given time. Art has a particular modality of rendering things intelligible. It is non-discursive and it is largely sensible and affective, even as it lends itself to certain forms of discursive articulation. The reliance of artwork of a historical period on various conventional conditions for the possibility of such shareability seems to me inevitable. It is at least conceivable that at certain stages of history it might be reasonable to think that the conditions for such shareability have been so distorted and degraded that it’s very unlikely that anything other than the minimal satisfactions of the conditions of art would prevail.

Art addresses itself to us as individuals, whereas politics by necessity addresses us in some sense as a collective, as humanity as such. I felt like the tension between those two issues, the relationship between the individual and the collective as addressees of art and politics, came out in different ways in each of the talks. Good politics doesn’t assume that the state of humanity in the present is the only possible state of humanity; does good art assume the same?

About the materialist account of art, I would say that art is an object not simply in the sense that it is a thing the artist has made, a “product,” but also in terms of what we might call the “social being” in the work. It seems like an artist can’t really get around the commodity form of the art object today, given that the predominant form of production today is commodity production. In this context, the socially engaged art practices I’ve seen recently seem driven to eliminate metaphor as a way of communicating, and so the art relies on this direct, one-to-one relationship between itself and the audience. A lot of it is about getting across a “message”—usually, a message concerning the lack of and need for services that the state once provided, but no longer does. On the other hand, with a Hegelian account of art, I feel like there is a problem the degree to which it posits a type of artist who doesn’t really know what he’s doing, but who simply gives form to things that don’t really quite have a form. Such an account seems to imply that it may be better that the artist is completely unaware of what he’s doing, so that later on it’s available for and completely open to interpretation. In such an account, how would it be even theoretically possible for an artist to self-consciously produce a work that’s adequate to the material conditions we live in?

MJ: Metaphor is something that creates possibility for shared experience, I think. But we also have to look at process. An artist’s process can be deeply invested within a place or within a constituency with people, with their activities. Process can look like the back-and-forth dialogue of permissions and checkpoints as a work develops, as with McGuinness’s project. The work of art also offers possibilities for reflection, and sharing that reflection. Our own, individual interpretation of a work of art, both deepens our relationship with the work and becomes the basis for communicative possibility—moving us, as Dewey would say, to the art’s ultimate ends of participation and communication. Your own life that you draw upon for such communication is your experience. You don’t necessarily need the art history, or other information; you just need to be aware, remain present in the experience. I’m interested in the possibility of works of art as this kind of mode of social communication.

WBM: If we think about art and politics in terms of the history of art, the question being raised is, what does it mean to make great works of art? Foucault has that well-known remark, which is that people ordinarily know what they do and why they do it; what they don’t know is, what does what they do, do? I think the artist has a pretty good idea of what he or she is doing in making these works—there is the sense of trying to make something like the perfect work of art, with an insistence on form. What I am suggesting is that there is a certain kind of work today that has both the capacity to produce major works of art and the capacity to produce an interesting, significant critique of our contemporary moment and that, in the main, these are not works of art that as their point take up the business of trying to help people. These are works of art that are produced as an attempt to make great works of art.

MJ: The fact that artists don’t know what the work does comes directly as a definition of art. I don’t think it is controversial to say that art involves both a creative act on the part of the artist and a re-creative act on the part of the viewer, and that those are more or less equal ends. The work of art is not finished when the artist finishes with it.

RP: The “German idea” is that works of art, as works of art, are essentially liberationist: They are connected deeply with the aspiration for the realization for freedom. What that means is an enormous and very thorny issue, but one that has come to the surface several times in our discussion. The idea that there could be a sensible embodiment of an intended meaning that is uniquely sensible, but shareable, evokes a resolution of the central modern antimony concerning freedom: We are corporeal, spacio-temporal objects, and at the same time we are subjects. With respect to our discussion today, the idea is that art preserves the possibility of this unity, as a kind of anticipation of its full realization, and this anticipation consists in the moment of actual sensible embodiment of an intended meaning in the artwork. The reason it’s supposed to be a moment of potential liberation is that the circulation and shareability of that meaning is in some way to be viewed, can be viewed, as the expression of free and equal subjects in a communicative relation of a sort that isn’t in the interest of anyone. Stating it so baldly makes it seem naïve, perhaps. This wouldn’t mean that art would not involve ideas, nor does it mean that the artist must remain ignorant of those ideas. However, I do think it is hard to imagine how art made—“in advance,” so to speak—specifically in service of certain ideas, could serve the ideal of freedom that this framework articulates. Nor is this freedom art points to, in this conception, simply the occasion for the individual to explore his or her own psyche; it is not the freedom that self-expression, per se, can express. This aspect I’ve tried to draw attention to, this shareability without the interests of anyone being served by the regime of shareability, is the aspiration that art embodies just by being art.

The discussion of the German idealist notion of freedom makes me wonder about fascism: Can great art be reactionary?

RP: I think of art as a normative term. That is, fascist art is not art; it’s just a façon de parler to call it art. It doesn’t achieve the conditions of art, so it’s not art. But then, of course, you would raise the question: How do you distinguish between bad art and good art? To put it most radically, there’s no such thing as bad art. Rather, that art which doesn’t achieve the condition of art, is not art.

WBM: Many of the major modernist poets of the first half of the 20^th century completely understood themselves as fascists. Ezra Pound would only be the most obvious example. We could think of this as a discrepancy between Pound’s aesthetic commitments—that is, the kind of art he thought he was trying to make—and his political commitments. However, he himself was entirely convinced. Indeed, many lines in the cantos do explicitly profess sentiments that could only be attributed to Italian fascism. If you’re going to say that it can’t be great art if it’s fascist then you are going to have to say either Pound’s Cantos suck—which is a very implausible claim for anybody who is interested in the history of poetry—or you’re going to have to say that the thing that makes them great art somehow disconnects them from the fascism that they themselves profess. There is no question, moreover, that fascism had a profound aesthetic component; however, it does not follow from this acknowledgment that there are therefore great works of fascist art.

MJ: This, too, is a question in the design field. What is good design? One could conceivably create a very well-designed crematorium in a Nazi death camp. So we come to a question of values and ends. I think we work from personal values, which come about in terms of our position and our perspective within society. Those are things that form personal ethics and larger civic ethics. Those have everything to do with making art, making design, and living life.

WBM: Indeed, it raises the question of the relevance of the artist’s ethics, and even of the artist’s politics, to the politics of the work of art. I am skeptical of the idea that people’s political intentions and political motives have much to do with the politics of the works of art they produce. However, their aesthetic intentions, their aesthetic motives, have a great deal to do with their politics. |P

Transcribed by Carolyn Graham and Divya Menon Kohn

Splits, regroupments, war, and revolution in Germany, 1914–1920: A conversation with Ben Lewis

PR web editor — Tue, 01 May 2012 06:01:58 +0000

Spencer A. Leonard and Watson Ladd

Platypus Review 46 | May 2012

Last winter, on their radio show Radical Minds on WHPK-FM Chicago, Spencer A. Leonard and Watson Ladd interviewed Ben Lewis, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and co-author and translator, together with Lars T. Lih, of Zinoviev and Martov: Head to Head in Halle (2011). The interview originally was broadcast on June 12, 2011. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Zinoviev and Martov: Head to Head in Halle (2011)

Spencer Leonard: Please give a brief overview of Zinoviev and Martov: Head to Head in Halle.

Ben Lewis: The book makes available in English a remarkable moment in the history of the European socialist movement—the debate at the October 1920 Halle Congress of the German Independent Social Democrats (USPD). The USPD had then around 700,000 members. It was bitterly divided over the new Soviet government, the Communist International, and the nature of the German revolution and the tasks it then faced.The split that resulted at this congress, as part of the drive to form parties affiliated to the Third International, created the new, United Communist Party (VKPD). It was a pivotal moment.

When I first came across the material, it struck me how apposite some of the discussions and debates were to mass revolutionary unity in today’s world – seeking to overcome crippling divisions and fragmentation through uncompromising political struggle. My collaborator in this project Lars Lih and I have contextualized and translated the speeches of the Bolshevik leader Grigory Zinoviev, who spoke for around four hours, and his Menshevik opponent Julius Martov. This Congress provides an almost unparalleled insight into the self-understanding both of the Bolsheviks and the “left” Mensheviks, as well as their supporters in the German workers’ movement. The main purpose of the book, then, is to make available a debate that has been largely overlooked or forgotten. Grasping the shades and nuances of opinion at the congress, as well as the strengths and limitations of the strategic outlines advanced on both sides,is intended as a modest contribution to the sort of debates that we on the left urgently need today.

SL: What were some of the circumstances that led to the altered landscape of the German Left in the aftermath of World War I, and in particular from 1917-1921? How had the outbreak of war itself precipitated a crisis in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and, indeed, international socialism? In the introduction to the book you write, “the war and the passing of political power into the hands of the military command can be partly understood as the ruling class’s challenge to the worker’s movement. The tragedy is that the SPD was unable to rise to that challenge” (11). How did the SPD’s 1914 vote to support the Kaiser’s war ramify through the war years? How and to what extent did the working class come to recognize the consequences of that vote, of that ongoing support, and of the leadership for responsible for them? How did it lead to the crack-up of some of the most important party leaders in Germany?

BL: In spite of its strategic disorientation and fractious nature, the German workers’ movement was enormously powerful, and its importance can be traced back to the successes of SPD in the period between the 1880s and 1914. His criticisms of its programme and its lack of republicanism notwithstanding, Marx’s friend and political legatee, Friedrich Engels, could barely contain his delight at the organization’s seemingly inexorable rise. In contrast to the “parties”on today’s far Left, this party had genuine mass influence and roots. It was not so much a political party as it was another way of life devoted to the political, cultural, and social development and empowerment of the working class. It ran women’s groups, cycling clubs, party universities and schools, churned out hundreds of newspapers, weekly theoretical journals, “special interest” magazines discussing cycling, the role of socialist academics, and even gymnastics! By 1912 the SPD had become the biggest party in Germany, with 110 Reichstag seats and 28 percent of the popular vote.

But as the party grew, so too did the gulf between its revolutionary theory and the daily practice of putting out newspapers, organizing in trade unions, and winning elections. The goal of socialism was increasingly relegated to Sunday speeches, party congresses, annual festivals, and educational events. Many party trade union leaders and functionaries, increasingly cut off from the control of the party membership, saw no further than higher wages and better conditions. Reichstag deputies aimed for minor reforms and parliamentary deals. In other words,the labor bureaucracy was gaining ground, and it found theoretical expression in the writings of the revisionist Eduard Bernstein. His writings of the late 1890s challenged the self-understanding of Marxism, as it derived from Marx and Engels, who in their lifetimes had thought him their star pupil.

Seen in that light, we can begin to understand the enormous shock felt by those who, while aware of the dangers of revisionism, had placed great hope in this movement when, on August 4, 1914, the SPD voted for war credits. Reading his copy of the Times, Lenin threw it on the floor and refused to believe the news. He could not fathom that a party of such promise had thus capitulated to the Kaiser state, though this is effectively what happened.

L: Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg; R: Paul Levi

However, it is worth noting as well that, right from the outset, many went along with this on the assumption that it was just some kind of aberration. The idea was that the party had temporarily lost its way. Karl Liebknecht, for example, who is held up quite rightly as a hero of internationalism, voted with the leadership on that fateful day. He voted for the war credits with the view that the party could be won over again to a principled opposition to imperialist war, in opposition, that is, to the interests of one’s own national state. After all, he thought, precisely such an opposition had been codified in many resolutions of the Second International. But the direct consequence of the Burgfrieden [Civil Peace] that the SPD had concluded with the military high command was an enormous clampdown on opposition to the war inside the SPD itself. The resulting political repression took different forms, ranging from a clampdown on party democracy to the SPD daily, Vorwärts, printing declarations from the German High Command threatening to shut down the publication if it broached the sensitive issue of class struggle. Indeed, Vorwärts was censored on several occasions for making the mildest of criticisms about bread distribution and other things during the war.

After the 1914 crisis, opposition emerged slowly. The party leadership and the state clamped down on the radical internationalist wing that upheld the resolutions and politics of the International. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were those most obviously involved in that activity. Yet they and their supporters were marginal. The most significant movement of opposition came from those parliamentary deputies who, like Liebknecht, had expressed doubts in private, but had at the time of the August 4th voted to put the unity of the party first. They gradually consolidated themselves into a vociferous and well known opposition, exploiting their position in parliament to speak out against the territorial annexations as the war dragged on. They exposed the horrific reality of the war as it became more and more fully manifest. This activity gave rise eventually to the USPD, which crystallized around the leadership of people like Hugo Haase. Interestingly, this new grouping accused the SPD of having abandoned its 1891 Erfurt programme. But the opposition went beyond the parliamentary delegation and the politics of its leading members to include figures such as Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, and Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Right from the start, people moved to distance themselves from the official SPD position, which had effectively become one of open collusion with the Kaiser state. Overcoming this huge shock and defeat for the workers’ movement internationally, and rebuilding that movement anew, became for them the order of the day.

SL: So one faction of the SPD supported the war outright while the rest staked out different positions over the course of the war years? Give us a sense of the timeline and the trajectory of the far Left, and of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, in particular.

BL: The birth of the USPD was not the decision to split. It was rather a decision by the party leadership to expel 33 parliamentary deputies who, in 1916, voted against further war credits. After being thus expelled from parliament, they were kicked out of the party in early 1917. The sharp increase in opposition to the war began in Germany in 1917-1918, as, of course, the war effort faltered unmistakably.

The founding congress of the USPD took place against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution. Hugo Haase referred to it at that time as the “light from the east.” The whole of this process, from 1917 through to Halle in October of 1920, must be seen as deriving from the impulse given by the Russian Revolution. The great events in Russia and the transformation of the Eastern front hammered home and exacerbated contradictions already latent within the German workers’ movement.

SL: Originally, the war had been sold to the German workers as a war against Russian barbarism, correct?

BL: Exactly! There is a quote from Kautsky, in which he says, “nowhere is the cause of socialism so advanced as in the land of the illiterates,” meaning Russia. When people in Germany began to recognize the truth of this, made manifest in the Russian Revolution, it had enormous ramifications. There was a burgeoning opposition to the war and, of course, at the same time conditions in Germany were deteriorating rapidly. Increasingly, the popularity of Soviets and the idea that we need to form worker’s councils grew. More and more, advanced workers wanted to “do what the Russians did.” That led to further strains on the USPD. People like Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein had joined only with the greatest of reluctance,expecting the project to fail because of the involvement of Spartacus Group, the “ultra Leftists” Luxemburg and Liebknecht. They went along with it to secure peace, with the idea that they would deal with the ultra Left later.

The most principled opposition, the Spartacus Group,was also the most marginal. Their struggle was a principled attempt to turn the imperialist war into civil war, i.e., to convert the war into an opportunity for the working class to seize power. In the run up to the fall of the Kaiser and the defeat of Germany, such questions had been posed. It was no longer just a question of solidarity with Russia, but of what to do given the collapse of the state. Given the confusion that still prevails in some quarters on this, it is worth once again stressing that the Spartacist approach was rooted in official policy of the Second International. For example, following an amendment by Luxemburg and Lenin, the 1907 Stuttgart International Congress had pledged to “utilize the economic and political crisis caused by the war to rouse the peoples and thereby to hasten the abolition of capitalist class rule.”

SL: The SPD under the pre-war theoretical leadership of Karl Kautsky upheld the unity of working class forces. Their watchword was one class, one party. As you have stressed, in the pre-war years this party was quite impressive in its press, its instructional and recreational institutions, its electoral capacity, and its organizational strength generally. Yet, after the war we see the SPD splintering in multiple directions. And from the Communist perspective the purpose of the Halle conference was to affect the split of the USPD. So, let’s address the question of unity and splitting. What were some of the problems with unity going into the war? How did the SPD turn out to be something very different from what some had imagined it to be? How did a belated—or premature, depending on how you look at it—splinter lead to the isolation of the Spartacists and the defeat of the 1919 uprising, events that form the immediate background to the Halle Congress?

BL: The Halle Congress is about splitting, but it is equally about unity. It revolves around the rapprochement of hundreds of thousands of advanced German workers into a single organization. Still, the question is pertinent. At the time they did have to confront the issue of what was the SPD and how did it operate?

There are a number of reasons why the Spartacus opposition was marginal. Some of these relate to what I said about what the nature of the opposition to the war. Writing in Die Kommunistische Internationale, Karl Radek made the point that many workers were reluctant to oppose the war by way mass demonstrations and strikes because of the way that the state, given the politics of “civil peace,” dealt with the most radical demonstrations, i.e., those who disrupted peace at home were conscripted. Opposing the war was risky. The USPD bore the scars of this, which is why it took mainly a parliamentary form.

Before the war, Luxemburg, of course, was known as a radical, but she lacked a unique voice and public faction in the party.The Kautsky center, by contrast, had a lot of the press and commanded significant, visible support. This becomes particularly salient after the 1910 breach between Kautsky and Luxemburg. Kautsky’s tendency—with all its problems, particularly on the question of the state and the refusal to openly struggle against the trade union bureaucracy—became dominant.

The relative marginalization of the Spartacus Group also led it into some dubious tactical and strategic judgements. For example, the decision to split from the USPD to form the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in December 1918 was premised on the idea that if they stayed in the same organization with those who had just taken part in the provisional government that had cracked down on popular demonstrations, this would constitute “disloyalty” to the revolution. So, the Spartacus Group and KPD were isolated in 1918-19. The USPD, by contrast, had by 1920 grown into a real force. At one point it attracted 200,000 new members within a single three month period. And this growth was at the SPD’s expense. Because the KPD wanted to split, they were isolated. So, on the question of splitting and unity, it was a tactical consideration in terms of timing and on what basis. As the insightful German Communist leader, Paul Levi, made clear at the Second Congress of the Third International, there was a sense in which the KPD was both too late and also too early. Certainly, they had had little impact on the ranks of the USPD and the worker’s movement more generally. Only with Halle in 1920 is there a real mass split towards Communist party-ism.

A cartoon commenting on the Halle Congress, "Whether you look to the right or left, you see an Independent cleft."

SL: The post-war German government was formed by the rightists of the SPD, the representatives of the trade union bureaucracy. Eventually they helped to put down the revolution. Explain how the crisis of the Left in this period eventually resulted in this situation whereby one fraction of the working class engaged in open civil war against another.

BL: It is difficult to get our heads around exactly what happened. Certainly, the SPD came into power and crushed the revolution both at home and abroad. And, given the organization they come from, this is difficult to fathom. The problem comes (and this is clearly evident in 1914) when the majority of a Marxist political organization commits both programmatically and strategically to the preservation of the imperial state and the existing constitution.

To understand the dynamics that led to this, we have to remember that, at least initially, the SPD-USPD provisional government was able to bring about real reforms in the post-Kaiser state. They had brought peace, of a sort. There was an eight-hour day, suffrage was extended to women and anyone over 20, etc. There was a “republic,” although certainly not the kind of republic envisioned by Marxist republicanism, even by the Kautsky of 1905 in his 1905 classic Republic and Social Democracy in France![1] These reforms may appear insignificant to us, but they were extremely important in the context of post-war dissolution and decay. So it was not simply that the new regime were murderous bastards, though, of course, they were that. But they were murderous bastards who brought about real reforms and counterpose their gradualist “sensible” approach to that of “Bolshevik putschism” and the risk of German living standards declining to those of the young Soviet state.

The 1918 provisional government essentially reflected the SPD’s understanding of socialism. This “socialism” was envisioned as arriving within the framework of the old constitutional order. It was based on the old pillars of the state bureaucracy and the military high command. So, for example, even though they formed a new “socialist” government, none of the commissars actually held ministerial posts. Most of the old ministries continued under the old appointees. One of the more ridiculous examples of this is when, the SPD sent the once great Marxist theoretician, Karl Kautsky, to watch over the affairs of the German Foreign Ministry, which was led by hated reactionary Wilhelm Solf. At the time, the Ministry was not only positioning troops to hold back the revolution at home, but also keeping troops in Eastern Europe where they did deals with the entente to hold back the Russian Revolution. Kautsky was, of course, meant to supervise (and, presumably, reverse) this. But, instead, Solf packed him off to the Ministry’s archives to investigate the causes of World War I! This, of course, was worthwhile in its way, and Kautsky wrote interesting things on the subject. But it exemplifies how the core pillars of the state apparatus remained intact. They were not, as Marx and Engels spoke of, smashed, but were allowed to continue.

The SPD understood itself as a caretaker government, gaining some concessions for the working class until such time as “order” was restored. In this period, a number of deals were signed between leading German industrialists and the trade unions. Politically, the SPD held the view that socialism could be introduced through the existing constitution. This is quite clearly nonsense, but anyone who challenged this view was subject to repression, as with the attack of General Lequis on the People’s Naval Division in Berlin in December of 1918. (Lequis was infamous for his implementation of Germany imperialist policy in South-West Africa, not least the suppression of the Herero uprising of 1904.)

Watson Ladd: The debate over the possibility of introducing socialism through the existing order goes back to the revisionist dispute in which Kautsky and Luxemburg together sided against Bernstein. How, in the decade or so after the revisionist debate, did the shift occur whereby many in the SPD, who had considered themselves followers of the “revolutionary” Kautsky, came to adopt the very position they once opposed?

BL: It is difficult to locate. Because so many have dismissed the writings of Kautsky not only after his renegacy, but also from the earlier period when, as Lenin remarked, Kautsky “wrote as a Marxist”; our understanding of this pivotal figure remains inadequate. We have to trace the development of Kautsky’s understanding of working class rule. If you go back to the polemics he and Luxemburg led against the revisionists, they both followed Marx and Engels in arguing that you could not just take over the existing state structure, but that these had to be smashed and subordinated to the will of the masses, and that a state must be made along the lines of the Paris Commune.[2] I have mentioned Kautsky’s 1905 Republic and Social Democracy in France, which is excellent. Still, it mainly focuses on the negative critique of French millenarianism and the illusions it bred in the bourgeois Third Republic.

My CPGB comrade Mike Macnair has convincingly argued that Kautsky’s conception of working class rule had always been problematic, even when his texts were the gold standard of international Social Democracy.[3] Macnair argues that Kautsky held the existence of a state bureaucracy and the bourgeois “rule of law” to be necessary in any modern state, whether bourgeois or proletarian. But the main problem with Kautsky stems from his commitment to the unity at all costs of the party with the trade union bureaucracy.[4]

This said, there are discontinuities between Kautsky the orthodox revolutionary Marxist and Kautsky the renegade. It is thus interesting to compare a text like Republic and Social Democracy in France with his later texts like Guidelines for a Socialist Action Program, which he penned in January 1919, just days before Luxemburg was murdered.[5]

After 1914, Kautsky plays quite a rascally game, if you will, with many of the concepts he once defended, such as the democratic republic. He applies them dishonestly, gutting them of the revolutionary content they had in Marx, Engels, and his own earlier writings. In 1918-19 he uses the concept of the democratic republic to justify the SPD/USPD government. At this time, he is a member of the USPD, though looking for some sort of rapprochement with the SPD. This, perhaps, helps to explain his agenda, to some extent. But tracing exactly where it came from is more problematic. It’s something I have committed myself to studying for at least a couple more years. Certainly, the Kautsky of 1919 is a watery image of the Kautsky of 1904-05.

SL: The fundamental issue at Halle was affiliation to the Third International and fusion with the KPD. How did both the Bolshevik Revolution and the failed Spartacist uprising of 1918-19 bear upon the debate?

BL: In the aftermath of the Second Congress of the Third International, the USPD after the Halle Congress essentially placed itself in the tradition of mass, openly Communist parties that no longer called themselves social democratic. The party modeled itself on Russian Bolshevism and attempted to apply the lessons of the Russian Revolution to Germany. This struggle for Communist organization was a protracted one, and went far beyond the disputes at Halle. As Lenin and Paul Levi recognized, the way to form a mass organization was to unite the vanguard of the class. This meant taking seriously the existing organizations such as the trade unions in general (dominated by Social Democrats) and the USPD membership in particular.

There were splits to the left in the young KPD, composed of people who did not want anything to do with the USPD rank and file. They thought the USPD was radically compromised after the experience of the SPD/USPD government, for example. There were also splits to the right. It wasn’t just Kautsky who was looking for rapprochement with the SPD. In February 1919 Bernstein established a center for socialist unification, which lasted for about a month. He also tried for a time to hold dual membership in the SPD and USPD. When that didn’t work out, he rejoined the SPD. So, the whole period between the opening of the German Revolution and the unity created in October 1920 is marked by the discussions that informed the original splits: What is the attitude towards war and towards the entente? Should we rebuild the Second International on a reformed basis? Do we split altogether to form a Third International?

It is worth noting the (understandable) mistrust that divided the USPD and the KPD. They had a fractious history and both sides were skeptical of each other. Nonetheless, following the formation of the Third International in March 1919, there emerged a growing, increasingly influential left wing in the USPD that looked to Moscow and thus came into increasing contact with the KPD leadership. The Russian Revolution itself was the impulse for unity, as it was in many other countries.

Title page of Lenin's 'Der „Radikalismus“ die Kinderkrankheit des Kommunismus', known in English as '"Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder,' 1920.

SL: You have referred to the Second Congress of the Third international. There, of course, Lenin’s Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder was distributed to the delegates. Against the background of Lenin’s attempt to reorient the Left after the tumultuous years of 1917-19, what was the burden of Gregory Zinoviev’s intervention at Halle? What had he come to Germany to say?

BL: Halle is the first congress where the Third International’s “Twenty-One Conditions” are debated by a mass socialist organization in Europe. These were the conditions for admittance into the International. The reasoning behind them was that, unlike in the First Congress where there were only a handful of people (some who came at great cost), the Second Congress received support and interest from mass socialist parties worldwide. There were many requests for affiliation. Zinoviev was adamant that such organizations were not simply to be absorbed into Comintern as they were. This was the role of the conditions.

Of course, not engaging the USPD as a way of winning over to Comintern 800,000 workers, “badly led as they are,” would be the worst sort of posturing. “Under no circumstances … would this congress permit intellectual dishonesty, nor will it make the slightest concessions on principle,” Zinoviev remarked. Organizing in the same party with forces who wavered on the cardinal questions addressed in the Twenty-one Conditions would risk another collapse from within like in Germany or Hungary. Moreover, given the extremity of the situation, there was no time for patient political debate. Soviet Russia was suffering under blockade. Delegates at the Second Congress were following the course of the Soviet-Polish war on a map. Miklós Horthy’s troops ran wild in Hungary, massacring working class activists of all political affiliations. The Finnish counter-revolution had, with the complicity of the German SPD, butchered a substantial amount of the Finnish working class. The British government was funding anybody and everybody set on occupying Moscow and Petrograd. In such circumstances, centrist forces only paying lip service to the cause had to be broken with. Kautsky is called out. Zinoviev was saying, “You must break with these people. Given the tasks we face, we cannot be in the same organization with them. We need clarity.” The Twenty-one Conditions were not some kind of communist baptism. Zinoviev understood that it was possible to accept 5,000 conditions and still remain a Kautskyite!

Zinoviev and the Comintern represented a clear commitment to continuing the revolution across Europe. When he arrived at Halle in 1920, he was a highly respected Bolshevik leader. He was held up as a model in that sense, and rightly so. The USPD right got Julius Martov to speak for them. He was likewise extremely well known and nopolitical lightweight.

This is Zinoviev from his four hour speech:

Menshevism or reformism is an international phenomenon. You see it in Russia, Germany, France, Italy, in America, everywhere. Comrades, it was said here,“well, would it not be better to join together in one front against the bourgeoisie?” Certainly that would be very good and desirable. Yet unfortunately that is still impossible. The situation is the following: The working class is already strong enough that, if we are tightly united and openly fight for communism, we can bring the bourgeoisie to its knees. If the workers are still slaves, then this is because we have still not stripped off the legacy of rotten ideology from our ranks. When the working class becomes intellectually emancipated, then there is no force in the world which would dare to fight against it. (119)

The point Zinoviev is making is for the broad unity of the working class, but only on the basis of a shared commitment to the working class taking power. That was the role of the Twenty-one Conditions that Zinoviev defended in Halle. He illustrates the point saying, “if you have an army of 800 people, 200 of whom are useless and lazy, it’s better to have a disciplined army of only 600.” Perhaps this is problematic in the context of today’s left, but, certainly, it made sense at the time.

SL: What came out of the Halle Congress? To what extent did Zinoviev, the Bolsheviks, and their comrades in Germany, achieve what they set out to do?

BL: The work that Zinoviev and the left USPD put in paid off. Zinoviev does express some reservation at the end of his speech. He says that a split has been achieved, that a rapprochement of hundreds of thousands of workers has been realized within a United Communist Party (VKPD), but there is still a long way to go to win the majority of the working class.

If we want to talk of ghosts that haunt the German workers’ movement, right from 1918 onwards, it is that fundamental lesson: Revolution can only be made on the basis of a conscious majority. Despite the wonderful achievement of Halle, with some 375,000-400,000 people united around the VKPD, following the “March Action” of 1921, the party was almost in ruins. The action was an application of Comintern’s new “theory of the offensive” developed by, among others, Béla Kun and Zinoviev himself. The KPD called a general strike and, following a small local uprising led by the anarchist-influenced Max Hölz, called on the whole of the German working class to arm itself in support of this uprising. They misjudged the mood of the masses and the uprising remained confined to a minority movement in a single part of Germany. When the masses failed to heed the call, the party even used artificial means to incite mass sentiment. When workers refused to strike in the Krupp works for example, unemployed workers sympathetic to the KPD were sent in to physically drive them out. Several hundred workers were killed in the ensuing repression and the KPD lost about half of its membership. Whatever good intentions and hopes lay behind the March Action, it was one of the main factors behind the marginalization of the Communists and the failure of the German working class movement more generally. Some of Zinoviev’s rhetoric at Halle about “going on the offensive” can certainly be seen as foreshadowing such actions.

There is a kind of paradox here. On the one hand, the Bolsheviks, the Russian Revolution, and the Third International brought together revolutionary forces into a single organization, instigating and cementing its unity. But given the overriding needs of the Russian Resolution to expand in the face of its enormous problems, an unnecessary attempt to seize power was pushed through. It was not challenged by the German leadership and this led to disaster. Zinoviev must bear some responsibility for this. The positive and enduring lesson to be drawn from Halle, what must be separated from the experience of March 1921 (because they are distinct), is the coming into being of a mass communist force as part of the revolutionary wave unleashed by the October Revolution.

SL: You make some provocative comments in the book concerning the current state of the study of history as well as the current state of intellectualism, more broadly. Why is it important for us on the Left to be concerned with our history? Why can’t we simply let the dead bury the dead? Why can’t we just set aside these endless and inevitably controversial discussions about the past? Why is the Left driven back to a reconsideration of its past over and over again? What role does research play?

BL: One thing Bertell Ollman said about the book, is that while the subject may seem esoteric, the arguments on both sides have proved relevant to every debate on the Left since. Of course, many of the problems discussed at Halle had already been discussed before, under different conditions.

We do have a very rich tradition, not just in terms of the workers’ movement, but in history more generally, which we can draw upon, learn from, and, hopefully, build on. It is a cliché, but nevertheless true that those who do not study the errors of history are condemned to repeat them. That is the first thing to be said.

Marxism’s strength is that it is profoundly historical. It does not allow itself to be exhausted by the existing parameters of society. But,for Marxism, the content and dynamics of history are both susceptible to human knowledge and subject to human practice. As such Marxism attempts to locate our position within human history more generally. So hindsight is extremely important. But—that said—history, for all its treasures and riches, is also open to manifold interpretation. This is a real problem. I think some of the ways in which the Left understands its own history at the moment, given the defeats it has been through, is quite problematic.

To this day Marxist historical research is tainted by Stalinism and what I call the “Cold Warrior consensus.” There was a certain overlap between historians funded by the Kremlin and those funded by the Hoover Institute. This is seen rather clearly in the recent Lenin debate.[6] It is no exaggeration to say that my friend and co-author Lars T.Lih is breaking up the terms of this consensus.

One of the problems we have is that so many documents, records, and articles remain either untranslated, or have been subjected to Soviet doctoring. So while we can all read Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, and Stalin in English, we often cannot read who they are arguing against and why. We do not get the whole picture.

The result, fully in line with the “cult of Lenin,” is one that sees Bolshevism as the product of “big men” who concoct and deliver the revolutionary message from on high. But this obscures Bolshevism as a mass political phenomenon that trained inspiring leaders because it has an inspiring project and a robust, healthy democratic culture. Read, for example, the recent Historical Materialism anthology on permanent revolution to see just what made those like Kautsky, Luxemburg, etc., “great”—the high level of debate and polemic that unfolded in the International.[7]

That is the importance of publishing Martov alongside Zinoviev. We want to let the arguments speak for themselves. For me, simply saying “I’m with Lenin against Kautsky” or “I’m with Luxemburg against whomever,” is insufficient historically. It does not allow us to appropriate the riches of history. In many ways it is a trap.

SL: In some ways, it is history that divides the Left more than anything else. The landscape of current groups and sectarian organizations is the product of an endlessly contentious history. At one point in your introduction, you say that you hope the book will “stimulate discussion in reviews and left meetings, on internet forums, etc.” (32). Can you talk about the kinds of discussions that need to take place on the Left today? Can you reflect on working through the history of the Left today and the relationship of research to that problem?

BL: There are now several reviews of the book available to read,[8] and several more are planned. That is excellent, and at some point I hope to write a response to some of the points that have been raised.

On history, I agree that it is divisive. History should not unite the Left. This is where we reach the limits of history. Unfortunately, a lot of Left groups today are not based primarily on any agreement about today, but on certain historical positions, such as the nature of the Soviet Union, the continuing relevance of Trotsky’s Transitional Program, etc. These to me are dead ends in terms of political unity. Nonetheless, history can inform and enrich our understanding of the world today. That is what its role must be.

Political unity must be based on political ideas and a political program for the here and now. That does not mean that we forget and ignore or even downplay real historical divisions and different interpretations of key events. We live in history, and to move forward we have to look back.

The Left is divided because it is based on a very narrow view of all the bad things of the Third International, like the banning of factions, as opposed to the good lessons to be drawn, like the need for open discussion, the need for democracy, the need for ideas to unite around. At Halle, Zinoviev spoke for four and a half hours, Rudolf Hilferding for three, and Martov for an least an hour. The unity achieved was not just thrown together. It was the product of rigorous discussion and polemics around the fundamentals of Marxist political strategy.

Transcribed by Pac Pobric

1. I have translated the first three parts of this seven part series. The whole series will soon be published in a book. The three parts can be accessed online at: <http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004372>; <http://cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004398> and <http://cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004409>↑
2. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “1872 Preface to the Communist Manifesto,” available at <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/preface.htm>↑
3. Mike Macnair, “Representation, not Referendums,” available online at: <http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004002>↑
4. For an excellent discussion of the tension between the unions and the SPD, see Daniel F.Gaido,“Archive Marxism and the Union Bureaucracy,” Historical Materialism 16.3: 115-136. It is also worth noting that the understanding of the democratic republic as the “form of the dictatorship of the proletariat” did not actually find expression in the party’s Erfurt programme. This was the main point raised in Friedrich Engels’s 1891 “Critique of the Erfurt Programme.”↑
5. My translation and introduction to this text can be read at <http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004611> and <http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004610> respectively.↑
6. A collection of links in the recent debate on Phan Binh’s critique of Tony Cliff on Lenin, can be found here: <http://links.org.au/taxonomy/term/665>. An expanded version of a talk delivered by Ben Lewis on this debate is available at: <http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004788>. A transcript of the complete discussion of this debate in which Lewis participated at the 2012 Platypus International Convention is forthcoming in the Platypus Review.↑
7. Daniel F.Gaido and Richard B. Day, Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record (Leiden: Brill, 2009).↑
8. E.Haberkern, Solidarity,<http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/3500>; Socialist Standard <http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2012/no-1292-april-2012/book-reviews-pity-billionaire-zinoviev-martov-head->; and Francis King, Twentieth Century Communism, <http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/twentiethcenturycommunism/archive/issue4.html>.↑

The occupation of art’s labor: An interview with Julia Bryan-Wilson

PR web editor — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 06:03:00 +0000

Chris Mansour

Platypus Review 45 | April 2012

[PDF]

On November 28, 2011, Chris Mansour interviewed Julia Bryan-Wilson, Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2009). Mansour and Bryan-Wilson talked about the history of the Art Workers’ Coalition and its political relevance today, in light of the increasing involvement of artists and artistic strategies in the Occupy movement. What follows is an edited transcript.

Art Workers' Coalition (AWC) with the Art Action Group (GAAG), and the Black & Puerto Rican Emergency Cultural Coalition stiking outside the MoMA in 1970.

Chris Mansour: How did you come to study the artwork of what you call the “Vietnam War Era” and its relationship to the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC)?

Julia Bryan-Wilson: In the beginning—when I was still a young graduate student—I was drawn to a performance by the Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG) that occurred in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1969. It was a bloody, visceral action that called for the immediate resignation of all Rockefellers from MoMA’s Board of Trustees. At the time I was thinking about performance art as a form of protest, and how bodies in space—occupying space—meant to register certain activist concerns. Digging further into GAAG, I learned more about how they functioned as a direct action offshoot of the AWC. I wanted to do a project about the AWC, perhaps plumbing its history and laying out what really happened there, because there had at that point only been scattered accounts, and most of them were by people who were involved themselves, so there was not much critical distance.

To me the AWC was a compelling, if short-lived, organization. I was also very intrigued by how many artists and well-known figures within the circle of contemporary art criticism participated in it. So it was not just people like Carl Andre and Dan Graham, but also critics such as Gregory Battcock, who was the editor of significant anthologies about “minimal art” and “idea art.” Some critics like Lucy Lippard and what were referred to as “low level curators” also saw themselves working within and amongst the AWC. But my focus shifted the further I delved into my research, and increasingly moved away from a strictly chronological account of the AWC towards larger questions of the politics of artistic labor in this moment, a moment when labor itself was radically transforming because of a shift to a postindustrial age. To me the intriguing question became not, “What happened to the AWC?” but rather, “How did understandings of artistic labor change in the wake of the formation of the AWC?” Also, how was artistic labor and broader political activism in mutual dialogue for a few key figures, such as Lippard or Hans Haacke? With my book, Art Workers, I never set out to write the comprehensive history of the AWC, but instead to think about the redefinition of artistic labor through figures that are very influential in contemporary art history, whose work has never been substantially talked about in relationship to this activism.

CM: The main redefinition of artistic labor, as you elucidate in your book, starts with the distinct division between art and craft during the Renaissance era, as articulated by the art historian Michael Baxandall. But art as a form of labor really takes sway with the development of capitalism as a social structure. You reference a lot of Marx’s writings on art as labor in your book to make this case. You also mention the Artist Guild in England in the 1800s, the Artists Union in the 1930s, and so on. How did these diverse conceptualizations of art as a form of labor influence the AWC, and how do you see the AWC’s understanding of art as a form of labor as differing from older aesthetic concepts?

JB-W: Those involved in the AWC had many different, and quite uneven, levels of sophistication regarding Marxist theory. Some of them knew nothing about Marxism, and were kind of going along with the flow or absorbing things that were ever-present in the atmosphere of the times. Others, like Carl Andre, were rather more serious students of Marxist theory. Of course, Marxist theories are also contentious and contradictory with regards to how art might or might not function as a kind of labor under capitalist forms of production. Even for Marx himself there is some friction regarding the role of patronage, creating a product for a potential market, and how making art might be understood as “free” or unalienated labor. So when artists turned to what was often half-understood Marxist theory in the late 1960s to call themselves workers, it proved to be fairly unstable ground.

But the people in the AWC did have some historical precedents regarding the relationship of art and politics: They knew something about the Russian Constructivists, who called themselves “art workers.” They also knew a lot about the WPA moment and the Artists’ Union in New York, because some of those involved were still around. But the AWC was founded during a totally different cultural context than the Artists Union in the 1930s. The WPA employed artists under the rubric of a state sponsored program. Artists in the 1960s–70s were working with strongly anti-governmental precepts, and it was difficult to make the WPA type of artistic labor fit their vision, since that was, in their minds, akin to making Social Realist murals under the guidance of a corrupt state. Those in the AWC wanted to be free to make recalcitrant art like Minimalism and Conceptualism. But they still wanted their work to be considered a form of labor.

Artists Union

CM: You also note that the members of the Artists’ Union—who were employed by the government—were substantially wage laborers, whereas a lot of the artists in the AWC and those affiliated with it supported freelance workers. So was it the case that the kind of political mobilization that the AWC had to seek out was qualitatively different in nature than the Artists’ Union given the structural changes of capital?

JB-W: It had to be different. The issue, which I even see today, is that there were calls to “occupy, organize, and unionize.” However, one question the AWC could never quite resolve was, “Who are the employers that you are directing your demands to?” When artists were wage laborers in the 1930s, there was actually a target: the U.S. government. So the artists could actually go on strike and withhold their labor if they wanted. Artists had some collective agency, in part, because there was a body to which they were clearly accountable. A rather more volatile question is, “How is art productive in society?” If artists today withhold their labor, who does it impact, exactly? The 1930s, the 1960s, and 2011 are crucially dissimilar. I hope the current Occupy movements continue to take into account the meaningful differences between these historical moments.

CM: What are the fundamental advantages and disadvantages you see in the strategies enacted by the present-day Occupy Museums movement? Is their historical imagination really following the footsteps of the AWC, or are the similarities unfolding haphazardly, or coincidently?

JB-W: For one thing, the AWC started in 1969 primarily around the issue of artists’ rights in museums. It is important to know that the kernel of its idea came from artists who felt their work was being put in contexts that they disagreed with, and that they were not being compensated fairly for how their work was displayed and distributed. It therefore started with concerns about the procedures and policies in places like MoMA, which was of course a highly powerful institution even in 1969. However, the AWC moved quickly into hosting a series of open hearings where hundreds of people aired complaints precisely about the question of the relevance of museums, and about how to formulate a kind of political-artistic practice. People had extremely divergent ideas about this. Some people wanted the museum to wither away, others wanted alternative methods of art distribution to flourish, others wanted to just infiltrate museums, and others just wanted “their piece of pie” and were happy if their work was shown at places like MoMA. So these disparate views were one of the fundamental contradictions that led to the AWC’s demise.

On the other hand, museums were absolutely central to what the AWC did, including the question of racial diversity, which was one of the primary items on the list of the AWC’s demands. The AWC called for greater representations of African American and Puerto Rican artists. A little bit later, the AWC also realized that gender inequities should be a focus of their activity. It also pushed for artists to be on the board of trustees of the museum, and advocated for greater transparency of museum procedures, and so forth. Part of my argument in Art Workers is that the artists of the AWC were a major part of instigating a broad institutional critique of how museums were run and managed. Given the centrality of the Vietnam War and the acceleration of anti-war activism at this time, it was easy for the AWC to realize that these issues were interconnected, in part because there were very powerful connections between museum trustees and the military-industrial complex, notably the Rockefellers.

The AWC focused a lot of their demonstrations in the space of the museums, such as protests within the MoMA or strikes outside on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, trying to shut down the Met for one day after the U.S. bombings in Cambodia. But the history that has not been talked about as much are the moments that the AWC tried to think not only about art issues. Artists at that time also tried to strike with the postal workers, and marched for abortion rights, issues that were not actually in the purview of the art institution or the art world, but, rather, were about building broader solidarities. Those moments are intriguing, and, in some ways, these actions arguably diluted the art workers movement, but also invigorated it in important ways.

CM: When or why did political ideology start to clash? You mentioned the instance when Robert Morris was interested in showing solidarity with the construction workers, but his interaction with them indicated a difference in ideologies. Could you elaborate?

JB-W: These questions are alive today: Think of the Occupy demonstration in solidarity with the Teamsters when art handlers at Sotheby’s went on strike. These issues of labor and how art is a productive force in the economy are still central. But activist organizing around economic questions cannot be merely about asking, “When do I get paid?” That question is extremely limited, and it is one that exposed the limitations of the Art Workers’ Coalition. Obviously the question of compensation and value is critical, and everyone should be valued for the work that they do. But if it comes down to just making lists of demands about individual needs, the critique is a lot less compelling, and not necessarily about how we re-envision society, inequality, and economics in the widest possible sense. What was interesting about the AWC was the sense that there were broader struggles that mattered alongside and in concert with the art industry, for example the Vietnam War, questions of race, class, and gender.

CM: This seems to raise the age-old problem between reform and revolution, and highlights the differences in ideology that encompass the whole organization. Since the AWC never really came to adopt a broad vision of how they sought to change society or express some kind of future vision, these absences may have been subject to its downfall.

JB-W: There were all kinds of ad hoc committees and splinter groups forming, in part because the AWC failed to develop a self-critique of how it conducted its own business. There were a lot of black artists and white women who felt like it was becoming a platform for grandstanding by white male artists.

No less than in 1969–71, those questions about ideology and reform versus revolution are critical today. In addition, some of the people in the AWC were on the cusp of becoming famous, and as they began getting more institutional support, they felt less urgency regarding the questions of exclusion that had once compelled them.

An Occupy Museums protester at Zuccoti Park, wearing a guerrilla mask in reference to the Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG).

CM: We could bring this back to what we see going on with Occupy Museums because a lot of the political rhetoric of the group is “anti-hierarchy.” Do you see a lot of similarities between the moment of the 1969–71 and Occupy Museums?

JB-W: Those similarities are some of the hopeful things about Occupy. I don’t think we need a rigid voice to come down from up high to say what the crucial issues are, what the goals should be, or to lend it more shape. Right now, the inchoate form of it is the most exciting aspect, because it’s a space of potential and openness. Partly, what we’re seeing is a new calibration regarding historical shifts in the economy, and I think artists feel the move towards precarity palpably—especially adjunct art teachers, or artists having to scrap together bare minimum wages to support their practice. At the same time, we need to maintain a thorough analysis of how art is different from labor. First of all, there is no one type of work and no one type of worker; these are not monolithic constructs. Simultaneously, art is itself a category that is fragile and tenuous. It is challenging to place someone who sells hand-thrown ceramics at a craft fair together with someone who is in the Venice Biennale: the markets are different, the value structures are different, the gendered valences are different, etc. So there is a huge range here, from what might be called the “low” to what we think of as the “high,” in levels of production, levels of cultural capital, levels of access, and the question of free time. We have to be careful to not collapse all these things, even as it is helpful to consider the moments of vital connection between all modalities of making. The moniker “art worker” has always been contradictory. Art, in some regards, maintains a distinction from other forms of labor because of its unruliness. So let’s not pretend that there is a total symmetry there. In fact, one of the helpful things about the phrase “art workers” might be that it contains within it some kind of explosive juxtaposition, some reminder that those words are held in tension, and I don’t want to see that antagonism get smoothed over.

In the past, there was more clarity on the stakes of what was being fought for and who the logical targets might be. For example, it’s curious that Occupy cares so much about museums or biennials, when museums or exhibitions are not necessarily where the production of culture is at its most visible or vital. The art world has really expanded, and there are so many other alternative sites where these issues are being addressed and debated. Museums used to be a central forum for questions of democratic ideals; they were seen as political institutions that have a trust or mission to a public, a pubic defined in its broadest and most optimistic terms. But hasn’t that ceased to be so, for the most part? At this point the imbrication of corporate interest and art institutions is the air we breathe. Museums are no longer seen as sacred or vaunted institutions; they are hybrid spaces like any other, riven with compromise.

There are still pertinent questions that need to be asked regarding labor in the art world, of course. For example, it is crucial that people are now publically asking what it means to be an art handler, to have your labor go unrecognized, when that work is critical to the function of the institution. And there is a push to think about art schools producing incredible student debt loans. I am not sure museums are the places where those questions will be answered. Museums are of course critical reservoirs of culture—I am not advocating that we ignore them or give up on them—but there are a lot of other spaces currently being activated that could also be addressed.

CM: This touches on the issue of what kind of culture is being produced and in what context. The general terms that seeks to politicize artistic labor today is “cultural producers” (used often in the e-flux crowd, for instance). This redefinition, it can be argued, replaces the category of “art worker” in order to include forms of cultural production that are not relegated to the fine art arena. How apt do you think the term “cultural producer” is as a mode to politicizing artistic—or cultural—labor? Could trying to politicize all forms of cultural production in this way be casting the net too wide, or, is this a politically important move for today’s conditions?

JB-W: As much as Dadists and others tried to dismantle it in the 20^th century, art is still a category that has a lot of built-in assumptions about taste, class, privilege, gender, and so on. So to widen art, to turn it into “cultural production” as a further expansion of artistic labor is, on the one hand, an important move and it does understand that culture gets produced in all kinds of forms. Cultural production could include musicians as well as teachers, and so is interestingly broad. Yet it doesn’t have the same kind of political charge that “art workers” has. As I said, if we can recognize that “art workers” as a phrase is loaded with tension, rather than taking it at face value, then it has a certain traction. I think the term “cultural producer” does a different service, as it does remind us that culture is a specialized model of production.

The self-descriptor “art worker” has recently been given a new life among some artists who rally around the 99 percent. I am fascinated by how that phrase disappears and then reemerges in moments of crisis. Because of the Occupy Art and Labor sub-group, the collisions between art and work have a fresh resonance. So it will be curious to see what people do with the idea of the art worker, where it goes, how people make distinctions between artistic labor and the “creative class,” which is also a category that has gotten a lot of attention recently.

CM: Artists like Carl Andre and Robert Morris were entrenching their art or their kind of performative social existence in stereotypes of the working class, e.g., Andre wore overalls and dressed like a “working class” laborer, while Robert Morris incorporated a lot of working class machinery and construction methods into his art production. What were these artists trying to convey?

JB-W: It was one of the basic shifts of the New Left to define itself in opposition to what they perceived the Old Left was about: rank and file, union politics, and organizing blue collar laborers. The New Left had a different focal point, which was more about students, drafting off of the Civil Rights Movement, and questions of identity. I think people in the 1960s understood rightly or wrongly that the working class was no longer the subject of revolutionary change—because they were mollified by high enough wages, because of mass infantilism through popular culture, and so forth. That’s the pessimistic and cynical view. There are all kinds of condescending texts you can read that were written in the 1960s, in brutally ugly terms, about who the working class folks ostensibly really are, and how they are no longer the people to care about in terms of political organizing.

Art workers were navigating this complex terrain. In some ways, blue collar manufacturing was becomes less important in terms of the U.S. economy—and terms like post-industrialism, immaterial labor, service work, and knowledge production were coming into focus. Some people in the AWC had nostalgia for the working class, because they were personally familiar with it, and their own personal affinities problematized any clarity vis-à-vis their own class status. This romantic affiliation with the working class is part of what made the moment so complicated. The idea that the artist is a working class man is a longstanding trope with the avant-garde, stretching back to Courbet, for example, or David Smith as a member of the United Steelworkers of America.

In the 1960s, however, there was growing confusion regarding who the working class actually was. Carl Andre in his overalls is a visible registration of the change of guard from the Old Left to the New Left. He’s wearing his overalls, and he has this formal affiliation with the working class through bricklaying, but at the same time he is adamant that his work is artisanal. He wants to align himself with the working class, but at the same time he understands that his art has nothing to do with that kind of labor. Similarly, this sort of tension led to the massive break within Robert Morris’s work circa 1970. He created a massive installation that was made with construction materials, in concert with construction workers. But then in the middle of his exhibit’s run, there were the well-publicized “hard hat riots,” where construction workers appeared pro-war and repressive, and Morris closed his exhibition down early as part of the Art Strike. The hard hat riots seemed to prove that the working class was actually promoting regressive demands. To me this illustrates the contradictions of that moment: Inserting whatever you think of as working class procedures into your art doesn’t necessarily make you one of them.

CM: In the 1970s, after the deflation of New Left’s student movements such as the SDS, many students believed it was important to redirect their political attention towards more classic concepts of working class politics. However, if we consider what artists and art institutions were interested in politically, issues surrounding multiculturalism and identity politics really shaped the art world following the New Left in the 70s. Can it be argued that this trajectory was even more of a divergence from grounding the art world’s politics on class issues?

JB-W: It points to a rupture in a structure that was already somewhat untenable. Some in the AWC urged a feminist perspective or demanded racial inclusivity in art institutions, such as building an African-American wing of the Museum of Modern Art—which never happened. At the time, those political goals seemed a lot more achievable than they might now. Most people in the AWC were never comfortable with the idea of fomenting revolution alongside, say, postal workers. Most of their concerns actually revolved around institutional inclusivity. In fact, most postal workers, and what we might simplistically call the working-class in general, did not want to have anything to do with the artists. There were aborted and failed attempts at solidarity by artists to include the working-class proper in their struggles. When protesting at the Met, for instance, artists called out to construction workers to join them, but the construction workers never did. The workers felt that the artists did not speak to their own concerns, that the artists’ political demands were not the same as theirs—it was never apparent how each group’s burning issues related to each other. These moments of thwarted solidarity happened again and again, which brings up the issue of who is mobile enough to assume multiple identities, to move in and out of the category of “worker” at will. There is a privilege embedded in the decision to adopt that category as a performance rather than to see it as a category that exists within the capitalist system, one that hails certain subjects quite specifically and fixes them in place. It is like a costume that Andre could easily step out of. His level of cultural privilege and access is starkly unlike someone who is normally a mason.

CM: The other notable thing about those whom you refer to as the Vietnam War era artists is their desire to distance themselves from the avant-garde model, which also sought to politicize art. It is curious to see them shift away from modern avant-garde approaches, but nonetheless maintain an interest in still drawing from its canon, for example the Minimalists that were associated with the AWC are influenced by Constructivism. Why do you think there was a push–pull relationship towards avant-garde approaches during this era?

JB-W: The term “avant-garde” during this time fell out of favor in part because it was heavily associated with Clement Greenberg’s ideas of Abstract Expressionism. By the late 1960s, there was an Oedipal desire to react against that category. The Minimalists and Conceptualists, for instance, really wanted to disavow the idea that the avant-garde was purely elite and removed from popular culture. Even though Conceptualism seems high-minded or esoteric today, its original impetus was meant to be populist and democratic. The idea was to get art out of the museums by recirculating it, having it being easily available, and allowing art to be made by basically anyone. Greenberg’s idea of the avant-garde cast a long shadow that these artists wanted to step out of. A bit later, in 1973–74, scholars affiliated with the AWC—i.e. Max Kozloff and Eva Cockroft—wrote exposés about how Abstract Expressionst works were used ideologically by the U.S. State Department during the Cold War, seeking to triumph the superiority of freedom of expression in the U.S. against the Soviets. Ironically, most people recognize a painting by Pollock as legitimate art, over a postcard by, say, the conceptual artist On Kawara, even though Lucy Lippard and others claimed that conceptual work had the potential to be more populist and democratic than Abstract Expressionism at that time.

According to some arguments, there was no real avant-garde in the second half of the 20^th century. Benjamin Buchloh, among others, theorizes the “neo-avant-garde,” positing that art in the last few decades is a form of return to an earlier moment, iterations with slight differences. Greenberg might have speculated that the cultural conditions that would make a true avant-garde possible have faded away, as there is no longer a distinct patron class and so on. In his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” from 1939, Greenberg talks about the paradox that the ruling class supports the avant-garde, as artists are attached to the elite via an “umbilical cord of gold.”[1] That structure has been so re-organized that it no longer makes sense to talk about the avant-garde in the present—it is a historical category and that historical moment has passed.

Robert Morris' Mirrored Cubes (1965)

CM: It seems that the minimalist artists and conceptual artists were in some ways an avant-garde gesture themselves in trying to advance beyond the historical avant-gardes. Many of the arguments about the relationship of art and politics gained a new life for these practices. Lucy Lippard in her later writings said that art should be ditched altogether in order to mobilize it for political gestures and spreading information, which was extremely counter to the modernist notion of keeping art autnomous from direct political activity. What was the relationship between art and politics during the Vietnam War era?

JB-W: The AWC did include artists like Leon Golub and Nancy Spero who were coming from the political figurative tradition in a recognizable way. But the AWC also consisted of artists who were deeply invested in abstraction and more obdurate, advanced forms that did not have a directly legible political content, even though they very much proposed a new ethics of spectatorship, which has been their lasting legacy. The classic example is Robert Morris’ mirrored cubes from 1965. When you see them, you see yourself looking at them and in relation to other people looking at them in a specific space. This is distinct from modernist ideas of viewership, where you were supposed to be taken away from yourself or use the work as a window into another world, or where you were glimpsing the artist’s subjectivity. Such conceptions of viewership have been theorized by Michael Fried in his essay “Art and Objecthood,” where he explains his notion of “presentness”. Fried thought that this kind of viewing experience with minimalist art was very agressive. It kept you very much aware of duration and the temporal aspect of spectatorship. I think Fried is right in claiming that minimalism creates these experiences, but I disagree with his negative judgment about it. This change in viewership is exactly what is transformative about minimalism. It paved the way for conceptualism and institutional critique, which recognizes that art is activated in distinct times and places and does not transcend its own context. It insists that the viewer ing something to the experience of art.

What I tried to do in Art Workers was to open up a lens to see how the works were part of the larger economic and political sphere. For instance, I researched where many of the materials minimalist artists used came from. Some of the magnesium plates that Carl Andre used for his floor sculptures were made by Dow Chemical, and Dow was under a lot of scrutiny in the 1960s for its terrible labor practices, and its connection to making napalm. Those factors of process and manufacturing can be highly veiled. They do not make themselves legible when you look at the art, but they are the necessary conditons for the art to come into existence. Such material conditions are important for art historians to investigate. We need to probe the sometimes literal, physical factors that go into the art’s making, as part of global and socio-economic practices bound to capitalism. In one way Andre’s floor scultures drastically brought art down by elimiating the pedestal, providing viewers the ability to walk upon its surfaces, etc. All of these things are potentially transformative for the way art is typically made and displayed. You cannot, at the same time, look at his floor works and immediately claim them to be an overt protest to the Vietnam War. They do not work ideologically in that way. But, on the other hand, you could say they are political because they propose a certain kind of leveling and viewership, and because they take part in an economic material system which the Vietnam War was deeply implicated in. |P

1. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 10. Available online at <http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/kitsch.html>.↑

Learning from the Communist Movement of the 20th century

PR web editor — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 06:02:12 +0000

A response to Richard Rubin

Grover Furr

Platypus Review 45 | April 2012

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Painted in 1939 V.P. Efanov, 11 x 17 meters (sic) in size, it was titled "Notable People from the Land of the Soviets." It was displayed in the USSR pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City. It was destroyed during World War II.

RICHARD RUBIN ARGUES that “the 1930s were a decade of defeat for the Left.” His essay, “1933,” in the Platypus Review issue on The Decline of the Left in the 20^th Century,[1] is an idealist abstraction from real historical events, one founded on an uncritical acceptance of Trotsky as a significant historical thinker and actor and a corresponding Trotskyist caricature of the Soviet Union, Stalin, and Chinese Communism. Consequently, the real history of the Left in the 20^th century is absent.

The 1930s were, in fact, a decade of historic advance in the USSR, China, and even in the USA. The forces for which the 1930s were a decade of defeat were mainstream bourgeois capitalism, social-democracy, and, of course, Trotskyism.

To say, as Rubin does, “The period 1933–1940 is the last attempt of classical Marxism to rearm itself against the double menace of Stalinism and fascism,” is an atrocious falsehood, a capitulation to the anti-Communist logic of Trotskyism—a logic recognized and embraced since the 1930s by overtly pro-capitalist anti-Communists, who regularly cite Trotskyite historians and their works as “respectable” secondary sources. Trotsky played a vital role in the Revolution of 1917 and an important role in the Russian Civil War, but not after that in the Comintern. Moreover, contra Rubin, Trotsky and Benjamin were not figures “of their time, but also out of their time, figures um neunzehnhundert,” rather these figures, whose deaths coincided in 1940, had no impact on world politics, the class struggle, or the future of the Communist Movement.

“Stalinism” as such never existed. It was simply an epithet that applied to the overwhelming majority of the international Communist Movement that rejected Trotsky and looked to the USSR and the Comintern for leadership in liberating the working class. Some small factions looked towards Trotsky, but these never amounted to anything. Tellingly, Rubin fails to consider what this insignificance implies about Trotsky or Trotskyism.

It was the USSR that “spoke to the utopian possibilities” of Communism. Between 1917 and 1960 the eyes of the world and the hopes of the working classes everywhere were on the USSR. Trotskyism was itself a “menace”—though on an incomparably smaller scale than Nazism.

In the grip of the Trotskyist myth Rubin says, “Trotsky understood Stalinism better [than the Stalinists].” It would be more accurate to say that, “Stalin understood Trotskyism better than the Trotskyists,” as anti-Communism can also assume a “left” disguise. A number of anti-Communist “historians,” such as Robert Conquest, Robert Service, Orlando Figes, Timothy Snyder, Oleg Khlevniuk, Robert Tucker, and Paul Gregory, to name just a few, embraced Trotsky or Trotskyists as allies. In the uniformly anti-Communist field of Soviet history, Trotskyist scholars and journals are respected, even honored.[2]

It is significant that Rubin effaces more recent research into Trotsky’s biography and activities during the 1930s, such as the following:

Trotsky’s “bloc” in 1932 and thereafter with the Rights, Zinoviev and Kamenev, and other clandestine oppositional factions, exactly as he was later charged in the Moscow Trials.[3]
Leon Sedov’s embrace of the tactic of assassination—in Russian, “terror.” Sedov, Trotsky’s son, was his father’s representative in continental Europe.[4]
Trotsky’s collaboration with Germany and Japan.[5]
Trotsky’s deliberate lies to his followers in his Bulletin of the Opposition and to the Dewey Commission hearings in 1936.[6]
His advocation of Ukrainian independence in May and July 1939 when—coincidentally?—the Nazis and the Polish government were planning to separate Ukraine from the USSR to create a fascist nationalist state.[7]
Schemes by both the Finns and the British in December 1939 to January 1940 to invade the USSR and install Trotsky in the “provisional government” to stimulate a civil war.[8]

Of these statements only Trotsky’s alleged collaboration with the Axis is at all controversial. The rest have long been known to serious students of Soviet history. Taken together, the works cited above by Broué, Rogovin, Getty, and Holmström demonstrate that Trotsky’s writings in the 1930s involved falsifications and deception. But who were these lies intended to deceive? His followers, who believed that Trotsky was telling the truth, for example, about the Moscow Trials, paid dearly with their lives in the USSR in 1937–38.

No doubt Rubin is unintentionally correct in saying “…the best Trotskyists would insist that, in over two-thirds of a century since Trotsky’s death, there has been hardly anything deserving the name of Marxist theory.” But then no one but Trotskyists would voice such nonsense.

The era after World War II became the greatest age of anti-imperialist victories in history, exceeding even the period of the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. But Rubin writes, “the real but belated possibility of revolutionary politics was defeated in the 1930s.” This nonsense reflects Trotsky’s economic determinist focus on the industrial West. Trotsky’s, and Rubin’s, theory cannot accommodate the real revolutions in China and Vietnam. The USSR did not decisively turn anti-revolutionary until Khrushchev embraced a demonized interpretation of Stalin that was not only similar to Trotsky’s views, but was in part borrowed from him. Blind to the successes of the Communist Movement after the 1930s, Rubin can see only failure. In reality, we need to learn from both failures and successes.

Few ideas in Marxist history have been so refuted by reality as the theory of “Permanent Revolution.” It amounted to an intelligent, though dogmatic, speculation when Trotsky originated it in the aftermath of 1905. Thereafter Trotsky wrote no more Marxist “theory” worthy of the name. Stalin and Mao certainly did, though of course it would be a serious error for Marxists to be uncritical of them, or of any aspect of the Communist legacy.

Neither Trotsky, who abandoned the working class masses, nor, obviously, the members of the Frankfurt School, who were completely isolated from political struggle, learned the main lesson: it is the working class, in their masses, that make history. Mao and the Chinese Communist Party certainly learned this. Trotsky, because he abandoned the working class masses just as they abandoned him, and the Frankfurt School, because they were completely isolated from political struggle, never understood this. Unlike many Communist leaders—Stalin is a good example—Trotsky was never an organizer of workers. Soviet scholar Robert McNeil noted long ago, “to Trotsky, intellectual capacity meant talent for theoretical treatises.”[9] Between 1905 and August 1917, when he accepted Lenin’s leadership, Trotsky was in political limbo. Once Lenin was gone Trotsky was again ineffectual.

But, for Rubin, Maoism is “a rebellion of sorts against Stalinism that was and is itself hyper-Stalinist.” He effaces the historic contributions of the Chinese Communist Party to the Communist Movement in the 20^th century by reducing it to “Stalinism.” He follows Trotsky’s Manichaean view according to which everyone who did not agree with him, Trotsky, was a “Stalinist.”

Rubin admits that his vision “does not partake of Trotsky’s revolutionary optimism,” concluding “the optimism of classical Marxism was once historically justified, but now, alas, is not.” Why call this optimism “Trotsky’s”? Tens of millions of ordinary Communists the world over had such optimism!

In historical retrospect, Trotsky’s view of the inevitability of the “road from capitalism through socialism to Communism,” is more similar to that of Stalin and Mao than it is different from them. By embracing a Trotskyist paradigm of history and of the path to Communism, Rubin has uncritically adopted one version of the Leninist concept that differs in detail only, but not in essence, from that of Stalin and Mao, and—for that matter—with that of Marx and Lenin, too. That version is “socialism,” what Marx called the “lower stage of Communism.”

I suggest that this is the most serious theoretical failure not only of Trotskyism, but of all the Communist movements of the 20^th century. Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, and all those in their movements were convinced that socialism would be the first stage in the march towards Communism. It was a good guess. But we can now see that it was mistaken. As one saying, reportedly of Cuban origin, runs, “Socialism is the stage between capitalism and capitalism.” Socialism, that is, leads to the reversion to capitalism, despite the best intentions of the best Communists.

Rubin’s Trotskyism asks the reader to accept a myopic view of history. If, for example, the year 1933 “summons up two names,” these would be Hitler and Stalin, not Hitler and Roosevelt. Stalin, along with Lenin and Mao, are the great Communist leaders of the 20^th century. By the 1930s Trotsky led clandestine groups within the USSR and a small dissident Communist faction outside it. After the early 1920s Trotsky was no “fiery revolutionary,” but an ineffectual political actor and writer. His attempts at Marxist theory were undermined by his growing obsession with Stalin, who had bested him in the leadership contests of the 1920s. Frustrated, Trotsky came to adopt the anti-Marxist “great man” theory of history, with himself as the “great leader” and Stalin as the “great villain.” It is historically ironic that this stance was essentially no different from the anti-Marxist “cult of personality” around Stalin, which Stalin opposed, though not strongly enough.[10]

In the “Critique of the Gotha Program” Marx outlined a trajectory, one that Lenin adopted, of passing through a “first phase” or “lower stage of Communism,” a.k.a. socialism (ersten Phase der kommunistschen Gesellschaft), which preserves “bourgeois right,” to a “higher stage” (höheren Phase).[11] Stalin and Mao did not “betray” this vision, as Trotsky believed—they achieved it. This path to Communism failed.

Trotsky believed socialism could succeed, though under conditions—advanced industrial capitalism—that did not prevail everywhere. He asserted that the revolution could only be finally successful if one or more industrially advanced capitalist countries also experienced a revolution. Yet, first Stalin, and then Mao, showed that socialism could be attained in one country, through the combination of industrialization, collectivization, and mechanization of agriculture, even if that country had a predominantly agricultural, peasant economy. This, together with their recognition of the primacy of ideology over economic development in the modern world, was Stalin’s and Mao’s contribution to Marxism.

Yet it turns out that socialism does not lead to Communism. Instead it leads back to capitalism. And Communism, that utopian vision, is what the world’s working class needs today as it always has. Marxists—we ourselves and others—must devise a new roadmap of how to create a Communist society once the revolution to overthrow capitalism has been victorious.

We can only do that through joining mass practice with theoretical work informed by an understanding of the history of the Communist Movement of the 20^th century. To that end we must abandon the comforting delusion that the problem of how to build Communism has already been solved, whether by Trotsky, by Mao, by Lenin, or by Marx. Today this is the “tradition” that “weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” |P

1. Richard Rubin, “1933,” Platypus Review 17 (November 2009). Available online at <http://platypus1917.org/2009/11/18/the-decline-of-the-left-in-the-20th-century-1933/>. Also see “The Legacy of Trotskyism” in Platypus Review 38 (August 2011), available online at <http://platypus1917.org/2011/08/05/the-legacy-of-trotskyism-2/>.↑
2. See Bernhard Bayerlein’s encomium on Broué on the latter’s death: “Pierre Broué (1926–2005),” Jahrbuch für historische Kommunismusforschung, 2006, 461–63. Bayerlein is a leading German anti-Communist, scholar-propagandist, and falsifier. Broué worked closely with Bayerlein on several research projects. Trotskyist historical journals published by major academic publishers include Revolutionary History and Critique.↑
3. Pierre Broué, “Trotsky et le bloc des oppositions de 1932,” Cahiers Leon Trotsky 5 (1980) 5–37; J. Arch Getty, “Trotsky in Exile: The Founding of the Fourth International,” Soviet Studies 38 No. 1 (January 1986).↑
4. John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, Deadly Illusions (New York: Crown, 1993), 283; Dmitry Volkogonov, Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 378–79; Pierre Broué, Léon Sedov: Fils de Trotsky, Victime de Staline (Paris: Editions Ouvrières, 1993), 210–11; Grover Furr, “Evidence of Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan,” Cultural Logic (2009): 162–63.↑
5. Furr, “Evidence.”↑
6. Getty, Trotsky in Exile; Sven-Eric Holmström, “New Evidence Concerning the ‘Hotel Bristol Question’ in the First Moscow Trial of 1936,” Cultural Logic (2008).↑
7. Trotsky, “Problem of the Ukraine,” Socialist Appeal (May 9, 1939); Trotsky, “The Independence of the Ukraine and Sectarian Muddleheads” (July 30, 1939) in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939–40 (New York, 1977) 44–54.↑
8. Talvisota. Kronikka. (Gummerus: Jyväskylä, Helsinki, 1989), 45 and 46; O.V. Vishlev, “Operatsiia Utka,” Nakanune 22 iunia 1941 goda (Moscow: Nauka, 2001), 131–32.↑
9. Robert McNeil, “Trotsky’s Interpretation of Stalin,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 5 (1961): 89.↑
10. See Grover Furr, Khrushchev Lied: The Evidence That Every “Revelation” of Stalin’s (and Beria’s) Crimes in Nikita Khrushchev’s Infamous “Secret Speech” to the 20^th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, is Provably False (Kettering, OH: Erythrós Press & Media LLC, 2011), 7–11 and 223–37.↑
11. Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Program” is available online, along with supplemental texts, at <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/>.↑

The New Left zombie is dead! Long live Occupy!

PR web editor — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 06:01:43 +0000

David Haack

Platypus Review 45 | April 2012

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In the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx disagrees with Hegel’s famous quote about history when he writes, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce…”[1]

Occupy is not a return to the New Left, a farce of the sixties. Usually history becomes codified once the right academic authorities have made their case most palatable to other academic authorities. However, Occupy exasperates this by being a horizontal movement that has avoided so far being pigeonholed by meta-narratives. Occupy is a meeting and molding of older forms of thought, which is why it is so important that it remains open. It marks a paradigm shift that is, even after the eviction of the park, still reshuffling time narratives.

In this piece, “time narrative” is a story about a time period told while this time is present. This is not the story dominant within academia. But it is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. A dominant narrative about a time is different from an ideology, which would be the dominant belief system of a time. An “alien time narrative” is therefore the story of a past time reinserted out of context into the present as if the two temporal points were continuous, and even though there is a disconnect between the original commentator and present conditions. From the post-World War II years into the first decade of the 21^st century, we saw the longest alien time narrative over a period of time. This was a form of narrative warfare that worked so effectively to define the concept of the Left that it constrained the Left from going beyond the discourse it had carved out for itself nearly 30 years before. The discourse of what is known as the “New Left” in part set itself up for this problem by calling itself “new.” Because of its self-proclaimed novelty, it was hard for someone to further claim that they were part of a “new” New Left. New Leftists used the word “new” to try to get beyond what they saw as the politics of the “Old” Left that had evolved before World War II. This break is best exemplified by the Port Huron Statement and American sociologist C. Wright Mills’s essay, “Letter to the New Left” (1960).[2] But by creating this conscious break, this generation of leftists used language that allowed their narrative to be projected decades into the future when the conditions they were addressing no longer existed. One element movements from 1955 to 1975 all shared was a focus on culture and tactics, in addition to a demand for what Richard Rorty has called “a less socially sadistic culture.” While the New Left achieved valuable ends, as these politics dragged on through the ‘80s, ‘90s, and into the ‘00s, it aged into a far less useful set of concepts and into what is now the zombie of the New Left.

The experiences from a vastly different time cover up the incongruencies even within the same subject. During the first decade of the 21^st century, anti-war activists compared the Iraq War to the Vietnam War, thus allowing for the continued domination of the narrative of the baby boomers. This nostalgic invocation of experience led to a blind narrative of time-warped empiricism. The slogans of the anti-war movement of the ‘00s avoided allusions to the roots of the war in a permanent war economy. Often the word “economy” was removed, and only the word “war” remained. In this way, discourse from the past helped paint over what is most important: that there is indeed a permanent war economy.

In Capital, Marx tells us that, if left to itself, capitalism will lead to the consolidation of firms until they become larger and larger. The corrosive laws of competition will make life worse (relatively, not absolutely) for the majority. After 1973, with the transition from Keynesian to neoliberal capitalism, from rigid to flexible accumulation, we saw this formula mirrored. A middle class sank into the lower class. The result was that the period of working class “prosperity” was effectively over. A huge global proletariat emerged in what we in the West call “sweatshop labor,” a phenomenon without parallel in the ’60s.[3] While these changes occurred, further action was suppressed by the presence of the alien time narrative of the New Left.

Occupy Wall Street has freed us from the grips of the New Left and the paralysis that has prevented the arrival of a new movement aligned with the present. Occupy presents an opportunity to once again relate to our moment. This has occurred in two intertwined ways: tactics and culture. Culturally, all it took was for the Occupy movement to target Wall Street with populist rhetoric. The movement made the simple complex, and as a result it created a pluralistic and deeply egalitarian space. The simple phrases exemplary of this approach are “Occupy Wall Street!” and “We are the 99 percent.”

These two slogans were enough to end the cultural focus of the last 40 years. A myriad of different sub-narratives appeared under them, awe-inspiring in their multiplicity. Occupy is not just another call for a less socially sadistic culture with the class dimension drained out of the analysis—characteristic of most of the New Left and the whole period after it. It has an economic and populist focus that has galvanized a cultural shift in America. This could happen because the dam that had kept the alien narrative in place was not strong enough to hold back the weight of the economic recession in addition to Occupy’s novel tactics. Discourse and conditions finally met once again after a 30-year disconnect.

The different tactics aligned with these new conditions created a triangle: time narrative, tactics, and conditions. The tactics were wildly different than what the zombie New Left had supported. Instead of picking a day, getting a permit, and fighting a particular cultural battle (e.g., “End War,” “End Racism”), Occupy did not seek anyone’s permission, thus remaining deliberately illegal. And, despite all odds, people camped out and stayed in one place. This was not a one-day affair, rather it was far more permanent and drastic. It was in no way the same as the temporary college takeovers of the ‘60s or the “People’s Park,” a park re-appropriated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1969. The occupation of Wall Street was fundamentally different. By taking Zuccotti Park, OWS took a space that was open to the public, but owned privately—a great metaphor for neoliberalism right in the heart of the symbolic home of finance capital. In occupying Zucotti Park, OWS protested against finance capital, a kind of capital that has been empowered through the shift from rigid to flexible accumulation. In this way, Occupy is a movement that fits the times and has helped create time narratives that do as well.

Occupy’s openness is also in no way a return to the ’60s. Douglas Miller’s New York Times Op-Ed best expresses what Occupy is not. With the New Left in mind, Miller writes that Occupy’s horizontal process could lead to what he calls “extremists”—insert “Weathermen”—taking over. But the horizontal process does exactly the opposite. It discourages any unpopular faction’s interests or narratives from being pushed through unilaterally and, furthermore, is more clearly worked out than ’60s “direct democracy” was. People involved in the present movement are well aware of the issues from the New Left and understand that their failure then was largely a result of the lack of proper definition and process. From the start, Occupy did not make these mistakes. Occupy set up a system that, by having a clearly defined process, will avoid SDS’s 1969 convention. This is why there is no need for a defining document explaining what Occupy is since this has already been done through praxis and a clearly defined process. Although the ‘70s saw the initial formation of something like a consensus process in response to the splits of the ’60s, this process was never as clearly defined as it is within Occupy.

The Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, has written that Occupy has retained a “carnivalistic ’60s element.” On the first day in New York, September 17, this was certainly true, but as Occupy developed it started to lose this carnivalistic element as an overt feature while allowing for this strain of activism to develop internally. By merging with an already more serious and economically focused protest environment, this form of protest politics turned into a comedic release in a populist environment with a different tone to it.

The Occupy movement has, however, retained some elements of the ’60s. These are the things about this era that I, and many others, see as overwhelmingly positive: Occupy continues to see fighting racism, heterocentrism, ageism, sexism, ableism, and cisgender privilege as important battles. In short, Occupy has left behind the negative elements of the alien narrative while upholding, and pushing even further, the positive demands fought for by the New Left.

One form of thought that has had a considerable influence on Occupy is anarchism, but this too has undergone a transformation in and through the Occupy movement. During the last ten years, anarchism has been mainly preoccupied with culture. This focus was an attempt to push politics even further in the direction of what the New Left established. The politics of this counter-cultural anarchism supported small-scale cultural production. Within the movement, anarchism shifted the focus to economic issues, thereby shedding its earlier counter-cultural form. The new focus of this form of anarchism is economic as well as populist. Populist appeals counter the fetishization of small-scale production to create the perfect balance of plurality and focus. This is why anarchism in Occupy did not do what all other politicized counter-cultures do, retract into themselves and shut out outside influence.

There have been some writers on the Left who see anarchism as the primary ethos in Occupy Wall Street. But really it was a coming together of progressive, “leftish,” economic reformism with anarchism that helped shape Occupy in its early days, coupled with David Harvey’s and Henri Lefebvre’s respective views. Marxists and unaffiliated socialists were also part of the movement from the beginning. A dialogue between Marxists and anarchists is as old as the ideologies themselves are, with both originating from post-1789 France. This dialogue is now going through yet another round of mediation and re-negotiation in and through Occupy.

This is why I think it is problematic when I see Marxist or socialist writers in socialist newspapers, or the Platypus Review itself, trying to decide how they can insert their perspectives into Occupy. Their influence is already there, and so is Marx’s analysis. But it simply does not dominate. When socialist papers make the statement that there needs to be a place for Marxism within Occupy, it seems like they are trying to subvert what is at its bottom an essentially plural movement. Occupy is based on a methodological ethos, not ideology. This is essential for the constitution of a new time narrative. Therefore, the Left should not get so caught up on the fact that the word “left” itself is not being used.

After the corporate era ends, and perhaps even after the fall of nation-states, the words “left” and “right” will still be useful since the cultural norms and views shaped by former politics will still be present. The common anarchist “post-ideological” claim that they are neither left nor right does not entirely make sense to me. However, it is possible that this will help clear the ground for a pluralistic reconstruction taking place within Occupy. In the same way that the French Revolution gave us these new terms, “left” and “right,” Occupy may do the same.

After the corporate order falls, we will not reach the end of history. We will not come to something that we can somehow call “history” any more than we can call the period we live in today, history. We will meet new problems, have new ideas, and discover new ways of thinking. All major shifts of a new era take from the preceding era its ideologies and mixes and molds them into something new. Occupy is coming out of an era with material conditions that no longer fit the dominant narrative of struggle. It has answered the Platypus question of when a “significant left” will return, although perhaps not in the way many Marxists are happy with. It is self-evident that Occupy is rooted in ideas associated with what is called the Left. The movement does not identify itself with the term “Left,” but this should not trouble us. Perhaps the term’s abasement will aid in the feeling that something new has come.

It is worth considering Occupy as another major turning point in history. In response, we need to let go of alien narratives and work within the new paradigm shift. Perhaps only now, in and through Occupy, can we free ourselves from the zombie of the New Left. |P

____________________

1. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Available online at <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/>.↑
2. C. Wright Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” New Left Review, I/5 (September–October 1960): 18–23.↑
3. See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990).↑

What is the #Occupy movement?

PR web editor — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 06:03:03 +0000

A roundtable discussion

Hannah Appel, Erik Van Deventer, Nathan Schneider, Brian Dominick, and Jeremy Cohan.

Platypus Review 44 | March 2012

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Late in 2011, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a series of roundtable debates on the #Occupy Wall Street Movement. Speakers at the event held on December 9, 2011 at New York University included Hannah Appel (OWS Think Tank Working Group), Erik Van Deventer (NYU), Nathan Schneider (Waging Nonviolence), and Brian Dominick (Z Media Institute), with Jeremy Cohan (Platypus Affiliated Society) moderating. The original description of the roundtable reads as follows: “The recent #Occupy protests are driven by discontent with the present state of affairs: glaring economic inequality, dead-end Democratic Party politics, and, for some, the suspicion that capitalism could never produce an equitable society. These concerns are coupled with aspirations for social transformation at an international level. For many, the protests at Wall St. and elsewhere provide an avenue to raise questions the Left has long fallen silent on: ‘What would it mean to challenge capitalism on a global scale? How could we begin to overcome social conditions that adversely affect every part of life? And, how could a new international radical movement address these concerns in practice?’” What follows is an edited transcript of the event. A complete video is available online at: <http://vimeo.com/33583635>.

Protesters occupy the grounds of St. Paul’s in London, autumn of last year. Their encampment has since been removed.

Jeremy Cohan: Though in question, it seems as though #OWS is here to stay, with its capacious symbolism—“We are the 99 percent.” Is it fair to say that the #Occupy movement has entered into a “Phase Two”? If so, what is the nature of this new phase of the movement’s development? To expand: How has the occupation been forced to adapt to a changing set of conditions on the ground? What sorts of fresh difficulties do these new conditions pose for the occupiers? A moment of crisis can often be a moment of opportunity. What direction do you feel the movement should take in order to remain viable and relevant?

Hannah Appel: First of all, I disagree with the idea that the capacious symbolism of #OWS which has enabled anarchists, Marxists, and liberals, is only a temporary strength and will be eclipsed by a need for a narrowing of ideology. Liberty Square was fundamentally a place of experiment. David Graeber and others have referred to this kind of experimentation as “prefigurative politics.” What does it mean to make something new in the shell of the old? What does it mean to provide free school, free food, and free education? Another question about “Phase Two” is what will post-park places of experiment look like?

#Occupy, narrowly conceived as the occupation of space, is not over in Phase Two, but we also want to think about prefigurative politics, not as they are narrowly related to space, but as they are related to the imagination. How do we begin in Phase Two to think about the intersection of capitalism and racism? What would popular control of the financial system look like? What would it mean if personhood were less mediated by credit scores? How do we democratize economic analysis? All of these questions that have been posed from the beginning of #Occupy Wall Street come to the fore in Phase Two.

Eric Van Deventer: From the opposite direction, I would say that what needs to come out of this is an independent movement of the working class in this country, and I don’t know what specific relevance occupations will have in the future of that. Foreclosure occupations are not really occupations. Yet that is exactly the kind of economically significant intervention that this movement can make. But the occupations of public squares don’t necessarily have the character of an attack on economic reproduction; they’re highly symbolic. Occupations should not be regarded as the distinctive or necessary characteristic of any future action.

Symbolically, #OWS offers people an opportunity to discuss, to develop politically, and to articulate different ideas. These are all very important, but the strategy to prefigure democracy through structures that we set up voluntarily in a park is not the society I would like to see in the future. I would not like to participate in meetings for hours on end unless there’s something important being settled. I don’t think a lot of people have the time to do that. We need to allow people to participate who are not committed in that way, or who do not have the capability to be committed in that way, otherwise #OWS will become a self-selecting community. The movement needs to develop more clarity in terms of its politics. It needs to sharpen the ideas people have and understand the contradictions between different viewpoints.

JC: As one commentator notes in issue 41 of the Platypus Review (PR 41), there are striking similarities between the #Occupy movement and the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle: Both began in the last year of a Democratic presidency, were spearheaded by anarchists, were motivated by discontents with neo-liberalism, and were supported by organized labor. What, if anything, makes this movement different? How is it a departure from Seattle? What are the lessons to be learned from the defeat of the anti-globalization movement?

Brian Dominick: It is key is that, although the similarities are quite profound, the differences are where the advantages are. From about day three of #OWS, the council meetings, decisions by consensus, and the aspiration for direct and open democracy, picked up exactly where the anti-globalization movement left off. There is a perfect continuity there. The difference is that with #OWS, we see a movement, with only a minimal understanding of where it was heading, taking off and expanding in ways beyond what anyone could have believed in their wildest imagination.

EVD: Much of the continuity with the WTO council protests is in the focus on the intolerable world economy, and in that the registered discontent would be found in as broad a group as possible as a means to affect social change. But in order to change things, which ought to be our objective, we need to work through actual means of leveraging structural power in this society, which fundamentally comes down to class power; we should be looking to the working class.

JC: Some have characterized the #Occupy movement as sounding the tocsin for “class war.” Others recognize the fact of dramatic inequality, and want the #Occupy movement to spearhead a set of economic reforms. Others see #Occupy as transforming something beyond the confines of the “economic.” These perspectives point to radically different directions for this movement. Would you characterize this movement as “anti-capitalist”? Should it be? And, if so, what is the nature of these “anti-capitalist” politics? In what way does the #Occupy movement affirm or reject the political ideas of anti-capitalist movements before it?

Nathan Schneider: My anecdotal demography suggests that some people identify as anti-capitalist, some people don’t, and a lot of people just don’t know. That we haven’t even been able to say the word anti-capitalist for however long and the fact we are able to have that conversation now is really vital.

BD: Again, I don’t really want to say what #Occupy is, but I do think #Occupy will at some point figure out its stance vis-à-vis capitalism. The slogan, “we are the 99 percent, they are the 1 percent,” obviously has had major resonance: It’s a great rallying cry. The concern is that the movement doesn’t recognize that there are more than two classes, or, that class is a bit different from how much money you have or make, but that it has to do with the relationship to the means of production and it has to do with access to power. There is in our society, and there could be in any future society a coordinator class, a class that has tremendous power that doesn’t necessarily make as much money or have as much wealth as the 1 percent. There are shadows of this class inside #Occupy. We know there are different levels of privilege. We know that looking at 99 percent as a monolith and not talking about race, gender, or the different gradations of privilege within a movement is going to be the biggest enemy of #Occupy—it can’t just be the 99 percent versus the 1 percent.

EVD: I don’t think at this point that #Occupy could be an anti-capitalist movement. We might agree that the majority of the movement subscribes to anti-capitalism, whatever that might mean, but #Occupy doesn’t include any processes for developing that. To be opposed to capitalism would require that somehow you are part of a process that has the potential to overcome capitalism, which I think is possible through socialism. And people advocate different kinds of anti-capitalism, but many don’t exist on a global scale or don’t have an anti-capitalist worldview which includes a planned economy aimed at the overcoming of the tyranny of the market, the blind determination of structure, and the anarchy of production. For #OWS to be anti-capitalist in some way it needs to be contributing to such a development. It is developing consciousness in certain ways, however it is not preventing capitalism from operating.

I don’t agree with the way others are theorizing classes, but I share some hesitation about the term the 99 percent. By speaking for the 99 percent the movement accepts the least common denominator, only uses language that everyone can immediately accept, and claims to speak for people it doesn’t; it thus binds itself to demagoguery. It is not clear, for example, that the 99 percent are the same ones who would benefit from the overthrow of capitalism.

HA: There’s no way that any of us, let alone anyone in the world, can speak for #OWS as a whole, to say that #OWS is anti-capitalist. “Ethnographically,” I can say people’s orientations to capitalism vary widely. I want to hold many kinds of capitalism in tension. There are all kinds of ways to think about revolution, to think of capitalism as a theoretical and historical concept, but there is also capitalism in particular since the beginning of the neoliberal era. It’s very important to understand the specificity of capitalism in the last several decades, and that capitalism is very different from before.

If right now we could do meaningful campaign finance reform, fight for the separation of corporation and state, that would revolutionize the way we’ve been living in capitalism. However, it would not revolutionize it the way socialists want it to be revolutionized. One of the scary things about revolution is that it seems so big, so far away and certain orientations make it seem unattainable. I think one of the things #OWS is doing is opening up what the revolutionary imagination could be and asking what revolution would be like. What do small forms of revolution look like that don’t necessarily allow capitalism to stage its own death just to be reborn afterward in a stronger way?

One division that emerged early on among the occupants concerned the need to call for demands. Some took issue with the content of the demands, arguing that if these are to be truly “representative of the 99 percent” they cannot assume a radical stance that would alienate a large section of the population. Others worry that demands focused on electoral reform or policy would steer the movement in a conservative direction. Some call into the question the call for demands in the first place, as these would limit, even undermine, the open-ended potential for transformation present in the #Occupy movement and could only close revolutionary possibilities.

JC: What, if any, demands do you think this movement should be calling for? And, more importantly, what kind of social transformation would you like to see this movement give rise to?

BD: Everyone reacted when the media asked about demands and everyone said we don’t know what our demands are yet, or that we don’t want to make demands. Movements typically start in one of two ways. They start with objectives and demands, which might come with legislative proposals that are fairly specific, or they demand rights that are not necessarily specific but concrete and understood. Those kind of movements pick up speed very quickly, get a lot of people involved, and it’s easy to articulate what the goal is, and they often achieve a lot. The other kind start with objectives that are fairly complex, which have more to do with structural change in the defining institutions of society. These movements are much harder to get started, they’re much harder to get people involved in, and they don’t catch fire very quickly.

With #Occupy is strange. It is a movement is on fire from day one and it’s not clear which of the types of movements it is, because the objectives aren’t defined yet. Well, #Occupy is at that stage where participation is there, and the greatest advantage is that the objectives aren’t known. What #Occupy is right now is an active group of people just starting to form objectives and tactics that are not just symbolic, but can create ways where you can start evaluating progress.

EVD: Demands are viewed differently by those in favor of them and those critical of them. The #Occupy movement makes demands all the time, as do all movements. The #Occupy movement demands an end to police brutality, which is what the Oakland port blockade was about. When the people were kicked out of the park, there was a motion put in to invalidate that order. There was a demand on the courts that the people should have the right to occupy the parks. When homes are given back to the people who have resided in them, that is a demand: The people have the right to continue to occupy their homes regardless of what foreclosure proceedings happened. Demands are a way that the movement communicates what it wants and it doesn’t have anything to do with asking power whether it concedes something. It expresses an intent to do something and in this way it overlaps with what you’re probably talking about in terms of objectives, but many of the people who are in support of demands don’t at all see it as a request.

If the #OWS movement starts issuing demands about particular bills in congress which are supported by Democratic legislators, it will be very easy for these politicians to co-opt the movement. But the absence of demands also raises the possibility that the movement will be co-opted. If we really don’t want the movement to be co-opted, which I think is of paramount importance, it is important to issue demands that will sharply differentiate the movement from the Democratic Party or the labor bureaucracy.

HA: Is #Occupy about systemic change? I obviously do not speak for the #Occupy movement, but it would be my hope that #Occupy is and will be about systemic change. Exactly how that will come to be articulated is, I think, a question of process.

Shepard Fairey’s #Occupy poster, based on his earlier Obama “Hope” image, proved controversial within the movement he sought to advertise.

NS: A lot of what this movement has done is produce a radicalizing experience. People come to the occupations and you don’t hear anything about either Sarah Palin or Obama, they talk about their needs and hopes for their lives and families. There was a lot of value in not bringing the movement’s message or orientation towards government and instead focusing the orientation towards the movement itself.

The documents produced by the consensus process of the general assembly are important to consider. The first document was, “Principles of Solidarity,” a document about what we stand together for as a community. The second one was a declaration, which was a call for occupations around the country and around the world. Again, they’re not addressing government. It’s saying government isn’t what matters first of all. All these documents complained about things in government and the banks and so forth, but they addressed the people, assuming one another as the audience for this movement.

JC: What would it mean for #Occupy to succeed and can it?

EVD: Well, it hasn’t defined any conditions for success so it can’t really be evaluated to see if it has succeeded. It has succeeded in politicizing many thousands of people. It hasn’t disrupted Wall Street to any great degree. It hasn’t disrupted capitalism. It has disrupted the Port of Oakland and it may do so again. It’s successful on those grounds, but in regards to the success of the movement, it needs to decide on the various visions of what it should do and evaluate success based on those things.

BD: I would like to see #Occupy continue to bring different people out of the various woodworks. #Occupy has accomplished a tremendous amount just by reminding us that there is energy. I don’t think that major reforms are right around the corner but I do think the energy is there and the energy is the main ingredient of the first major step to make change.

NS: I think that this movement—and I do think movement is a fair term—is predicated on having watched other movements across the world change things and exercise the power of people in large numbers against the power of interests that are far too comfortable and far too powerful. What needs to happen for this movement to fulfill the hope that made it possible in the first place, that made these kids feel it was worth getting beaten up by the police, and what needs to happen if we want people to really take notice, is to follow through by bringing about serious positive change in the structure of power.

HA: For 13 weeks #Occupy has succeeded, but that’s not to idealize it. There’s really difficult stuff that we all continue to deal with. To the extent that we’re all marginally sympathetic, I consider us all occupiers. When I say we, I’m not referring to some magical group I’m a part of and you are not—I’m referring to all of us who consider ourselves marginally sympathetic and critical. One of the key goals of the Platypus Affiliated Society has been the openness to criticism and even antagonism in the process of politics and I think #OWS is really bringing that to the fore for a lot of people.

And now going forward, I think that #Occupy will succeed if it recognizes that what we are dealing with is fundamentally global. This is a global movement and I think there is growing understanding of that within #Occupy. We’ve had visitors not only from the Indignados and others, but there is tremendous dialogue between Egypt and here.

Q & A

It’s interesting how emotional moments of interaction between the protestors and the police really energize the movement and bring many people into it. How do you the panelists think that tension will define or figure in the future of #Occupy Phase Two?

BD: I write extensively on this issue of police interaction with the protestors. A lot of people come out and say it’s an injustice. It also has the effect of waking up those who are privileged and don’t realize cops will beat you for any reason, as a large portion of society already understands. But the clashes with the police are a major distraction.

As a street medic during the anti-globalization movement, I was out there doing street medic work and constantly observing, watching, and dealing with the results of police interaction with activists. I strongly caution people from considering that interaction with police fuels a movement. I also caution people from thinking that police reaction to you has anything to do with the level of success. Police and mayors do not react to movements because they are threats to elites. It’s possible they do, but not necessarily. I’m not a fan of the police and I’m not a fan of the idea that they are our interface with elites. I’m also not a fan of the idea that police are part of the 99 percent. I don’t know where they fit in, but they’re not going to come around anytime soon, they’re institutionally opposed to what we’re doing because of their allegiances with the 1 percent, yet it doesn’t mean that any relations we have with them are conveying a response from the 1 percent except that they are the first line of defense.

On the question of models of social transformation: One of the popular tropes that emerged during the two months spent occupying Liberty Plaza is that many of the participants were working together to build a small scale model of what the future might look like. These occupants were looking to create a vision of the sort of society, in miniature, in which they want to live. Some radical thinkers of the past, by which I mean Marx, criticized this tactic of social change. Such authors have put forth the criticism that to build these castles in the air, utopians are compelled to appeal to the philanthropy of the bourgeois heart and purse. Applying this criticism to #Occupy Wall Street, doesn’t one have to accede that most of the services provided at Liberty Plaza were still dependent upon donations which came from the society of exchange? If the means for the provision of these services are, in at least some sense parasitic, does this in any way compromise the legitimacy of such allegedly prefigurative communities?

NS: There is truth to that, the extent to which the general assemblies have a pretty hard time figuring out what to do with the half a million dollars or more which has come in, a lot of the people from within are really concerned about this and hope that, insofar as this is a prefigurative society, it isn’t really that dependent on donations.

HA: I agree wholeheartedly with that critique and I also agree with what #Occupy is doing. I do not think those are mutually exclusive. I actually love Marx, but I think, historically, the biggest danger of certain kinds of Marxist politics is that they understand Marx in a certain way to the exclusion and detriment of every other possible strategy. They think that any strategy which isn’t exactly aligned with an originalist interpretation of Marx—and I use that word intentionally—only looks like it is destabilizing capitalism when it is not. I don’t think it is necessarily clear what it would look like to get to something like a Marxist revolution.

Whether foreclosure action is wonderful or it is only a gesture, private property is one of the cornerstones of capitalism. Putting people back in their homes is saying people should be able to own the homes instead of the banks. I’m not saying this is a radical critique of private property. But at the same time, the banks own those homes. Those people are effectively squatting those homes. There are more radical critiques of capitalism accidentally occurring in the #Occupy movement than appear to an originalist Marxist.

EVD: These actions are often ethically admirable. It’s very positive that people are spending their time in this way, but it can be a distraction that diverts energy from political organizing. We should be aiming for a society in which the provision of goods and services is socialized at the highest standard, in the most sufficient way, which is something that individuals can’t do, and can’t voluntarily organize in small groups to do, which means that you need to seize the means of production. It means that you need the capacity of corporations organized in a different manner, in order to organize society differently. On the question of finance, it’s perfectly apparent. In finance there’s already socialization of capital on the highest level and you would need to take charge of it on the highest level. There’s no in-between step—you could provide loans to people, but that doesn’t do anything about the power of finance as it exists. I think prefiguration is fine, but I’m not sure there’s any way that you can see it as a bubble sort of merging into a larger sub-society, which will then be resistant to capitalism—I think capitalism would be able to overcome any such “bubble.”

HA: I understand and am sympathetic to that argument, but without either romanticizing or abstracting something called a working class, it doesn’t at all “distract” from political organizing, but it is political organizing. We’ve mobilized more so-called working class people—that’s a category I’m not comfortable with—in the context of political action. If at a certain point, on a grand scale, we are able to seize the means of production, that would be thrilling, but first what it means is a certain form of politicization—a certain form of political discussion that is inchoate. What I’m saying is that the means to mass mobilization aren’t already known, but I think from participation we mobilize something a Marxist might call the working class.

BD: I do think there’s a bit of a false dichotomy between these two ideas. The idea that this is a microcosmic prefiguration of society on a farm or in a park somewhere—that’s a straw man, something that people can decide to exercise as part of their activism, which is what #Occupy Wall Street did. The idea of the human mic, an interesting thing to watch for the people involved, it’s very empowering and it drew a lot of people in, versus the idea that we need to seize the means of production, that we need to take over the power of politics—I think that’s also, in a way, a straw man or at least a bad idea.

The idea is that we can go into communities, build institutions, be engaged, participate in democracy on a small scale and build upward from the ground and challenge the top all at once, and that we do not need a vanguard to swoop in, take over the White House, and nationalize the means of production. We can seize the means of production on a small scale. We can build small institutions. I think we get dichotomized and that nobody here is advocating any of these things, except that we need to be engaged now, not waiting and just having discussions hoping we have that power someday down the road. We take it now where we can and look to take it down the road where we can.

On the double-edged sword of the openness of #Occupy: On the one hand, the whole advocacy for keeping it open is that the labor bureaucrats thus cannot co-opt us, but on the other hand, this openness is a way for the labor bureaucrats to stand for all this stuff they have no right to claim for themselves.

HA: That was an excellent point—that is a way that the lack of demands or lack of a clear ideology allows certain kinds of depoliticization. It allows the luster of looking like you’re allied with #Occupy Wall Street but doesn’t ask you to follow through. However, I think there’s a certain form of leverage there. The union president has come out publicly and said “I am with #Occupy Wall Street,” and you say, “Okay, here’s the plan.”

To follow up on the question about what would it mean for a movement to succeed, I was wondering about the flipside of the coin. What would it look like if it were to fail? Not only in the most general terms of dismantling or fizzling out without having achieved social transformation, nor in terms of co-optation, which has been raised. What obstacles and dangers does the #Occupy movement face strategically, politically, and organizationally?

BD: The failure of the movement would mean it has failed to evolve. There are stages and we’ve said that we don’t know what success would look like. But what what failure looks like, I think, is to take those steps, in evolving to the next stages. We’re kind of at square one. Most movements make it to square one at some point. This movement has a really early and solid step on square one and has time to evaluate that and move forward, and not making it to square two would not exactly be something disgraceful but would be, as it goes, failing to evolve.

EVD: The problem that faces #OWS is in many ways the same problem which has faced social movements in the US for the past hundred years or so, which is that they get co-opted to one of the mainstream democratic parties, specifically the Democrats. If #OWS failed to take this opportunity to make clear its differences and divorce its constituencies from their historic support of the Democratic party, that would be a failure. If in 2012, a substantial fraction moved towards campaigning for the democrats and if others do not succeed in making very clear what is wrong with that, it will be a failure. In terms of the evolution, there may be evolutions in the framework of #OWS. If not, there will surely be other movements. There are important things that have to happen very soon. There has to be great growth of this kind of movement, but also a clarification.|P

Marx at the margins: An interview with Kevin Anderson

PR web editor — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 06:02:22 +0000

Spencer A. Leonard

Platypus Review 44 | March 2012

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Last summer, Spencer A. Leonard interviewed Kevin Anderson, author of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism (1995) and Marx at the Margins (2010). The interview was broadcast on August 2, 2011 on the radio show Radical Minds on WHPK–FM Chicago. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Spencer Leonard: Broadly describe your aims and ambitions in writing Marx at the Margins.

Kevin Anderson: One aim was that, in the past couple of decades – really the past three decades since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, there have been a number of critiques of Marx that centered on charges of Eurocentrism, ethnocentricsm, and so forth. I wanted to respond to those, but also to look at Marx anew in light of them. Moreover, while there are various works on Marx and European nationalisms, on India and China, and the late writings on Russia, no one had covered the whole of these, including Marx’s writing on the Civil War in the United States, which deal directly with ethnicity. So my second aim as to address them together in a single study with the other, more well-known writings. This also required taking account of newly surfaced writings of Marx slated to appear in the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe.

SL: Regarding the Eurocentrism charge, it is raised not only to criticize Marx, but also to reject the Enlightenment tradition in which all critical theory finds its roots. Yet, rather than dismissing the charge as an expression of third world nationalism, your book takes it seriously—arguing that indeed Marx and Engels are not wholly immune from criticism on these grounds. You point to the “unilinearity” of their early writings, above all the Communist Manifesto and the New York Tribune writings of the early 1850s. But is the category of “the West” really relevant for Marx or for the radical Enlightenment out of which he emerges?

KA: Certainly there are places where that is the case. In some of the 1853 writings on India, for instance, Marx speaks of England as a superior civilization, which by virtue of its higher economic form is going to revolutionize India. Also, as late as the preface to Capital, Marx says that more developed countries show the less developed the image of their own future. These examples suggest almost, if one wanted to think of it in terms of a railroad train, that the Western European countries and North America are kind of in the front couple cars of the train and that Asia and the so-called “third world” are in the rear being pulled forward into modernity.

SL: So that all countries would in a sense recapitulate the historical trajectory of those at the head of the train.

KA: Right! Of course, stated so simplisticly, no one supports such a view. No one would say that India is going to become an exact copy of England. But of the extent that one would say that a country like Britain represents the future of humanity, one is adopting a Eurocentric model. Of course, there are also problems with the critique of Eurocentrism, which is often very critical of the social structures and social institutions of modern Western societies and far less so of the social structures and institutions of the non-West. Marx in examining “non-Western” societies is always critical. And as his thought matures, these criticisms cease to rely upon a Eurocentric unilinearity and move toward a more multilinear perspective. However, Marx is no primitivist anarchist interested in returning to a clan-based, low-tech society. Nor does he idealize the social formations in places like India, with their caste and other hierarchies, their subordination of women, etc. He does not sugar-coat any of that. Nonetheless, towards the end of his life, there is evidence that he entertains more of a possibility of societies evolving and revolutionizing themselves more on the basis of indigenous institutions. This is never entirely so, but he gives more consideration to the internally generated institutions of these societies.

SL: It seems to me that when Marx says England represents a higher civilization, he is not really talking about the “Englishness” of England, much less anything “authentically Western.” Capitalism for Marx is not a superior civilization. Rather, capitalist society is “civilization,” per se, in a way that the past can only be said to be by analogy with it. Thus, in the Communist Manifesto, he uses the language of “civilization,” and terms everything else barbaric, as for instance in the passage where he talks about the beating down of Chinese walls by British imports. The issue is the universality of the form realizing itself at the level of world history. So, it seems that when he is using that language, he is talking about a social form, one that just happens to have emerged in Europe.

KA: Well of course there is some truth in that, but as I also say in the book, the language sometimes verges on what today we would consider ethnocentric—the descriptions of India as an unchanging, unresisting society that has no history except that which is imposed on it by its foreign conquerors, and so on. There are some problems there. Another example would be an early text in which Engels applauds the U.S. war with Mexico, the conquest of California, and the incorporation into the United States of the Southwest, referring to “the lazy Mexicans” who were unable to develop the region in the way the North Americans are going to do. That kind of language reverses by the 1860s and 1870s. You can see a real turn there. Also in writings by Engels, but also on occasion by Marx, there is the claim that the Czech and the Serb peoples (to name only a few) are barbaric, so it is good that in some areas they are dominated by the Germans, who represent a higher civilization. These nations are destined to disappear, and this is a good thing. Again, there are exceptions to this even in the early writings. And whenever they are actually in contact with real historical movements of resistance that are at all progressive, they change their tune fairly quickly. The clearest example of this is Ireland. Nothing in their writings suggests any sympathy for any “progress” that Britain is bringing to Ireland. Engels especially was intimately involved with Ireland as early as his 1845 work The Conditions of the Working Class in England. There Engels devotes a lot of attention to the Irish sub-proletariat in Manchester and to its special oppression. Marx too supports the Irish national movement, though at first his support is not for independence but for greater rights within the empire.

SL: Marx and Engels seem to me to inherit a situation from an earlier period that is utterly unfamiliar to us. They lived in a time before the whole world was bourgeois, and it seems to me that part of the struggle of not just Marx and Engels but also of Hegel, Kant, Adam Smith, and Rousseau, is a struggle to critically apprehend the specificity of modernity, one that can be apprehended both temporally and ethno-geographically. This to me is what lies at the core of the early modern debate between the ancients and the moderns—major European intellectuals of freedom and emancipation are confronted with the fact that their society is expanding and that no other society seems genuinely capable of resisting it. Hegel thus says that the North American Indians fall at the mere breath of Europe, echoing Rousseau’s comments about the confrontation of civilization with the natural man. Similarly, Adam Smith was duly impressed by the fact that a small number of Englishmen in the East India Company could in his lifetime conquer significant territories in the ancient and fabled land of India. In this sense, then, there’s the question of the Eurocentrism of their experience. They had to address a question we don’t. That question is: What if the highest potentials of modern society are brought forward before globalization has done its work? What if there is a successful socialist revolution in Europe and North America before capitalism has spread to the rest of the world?

KA: One of Marx and Engels’s great worries is this – What if radical communism or radical democracy, as they sometimes call it, should overtake this small sliver of the modernized, capitalist world only to be smothered very quickly by the rest of the world? He is particularly worried about the power of Russia. We look back and we see England as the predominant power in Marx’s time. But in political terms, Russia was the second most important power in Europe. Do not forget that the 1848 revolutions were defeated in substantial part because Russia was able to send 400,000 troops into the Austro-Hungarian Empire to aid the old regime. So Marx and Engels certainly are concerned with the fact that the modern workers’ movement has emerged only in a small corner of the world. What if it should remain isolated? So on the one hand, they are happy about the spread of modernity, capitalism, and even to a certain extent colonialism, throughout the world, at least in their early writings. On the other hand, as they develop, as Marx moves in the 1850s towards the completion of the Grundrisse and Capital, the critique of capitalism becomes more intense, sharper, deeper, more unremitting. In the Communist Manifesto, we have those lines about the progressivism of capitalism. That language persists only in very muted form in the Grundrisse and Capital. Over the trajectory of Marx’s writing there is less enthusiasm about progress emerging out of capitalist modernity. And remember that Marx had not lived in England yet when he penned the Communist Manifesto. He hadn’t experienced directly a high development of capitalist modernity. Perhaps from the outside he even idealized it. It’s very strange to say this about Marx, but he becomes more critical of capitalism. I have argued that there is a gradual shift, never toward an uncritical third worldism, never toward a primitivist anarchism, but toward harsher critiques of capitalist modernity and a greater appreciation of some of the achievements and contributions of societies at the margins.

SL: Regarding this waning of Marx’s belief in capitalism’s progressive effects the question arises, In what sense did Marx ever think capitalism progressive, in the first place? For instance, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx argued that with the coming of capitalism, “all fixed fast-frozen social relations with their venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away. All that is solid melts into air and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind” Here he seems to be celebrating the fact of capitalism’s having swept the past away and given rise to the possibility of its own self-overcoming, the possibility of mankind’s confrontation with our circumstances with, as he puts it, sober senses. Capitalism in this sense only makes possible the conclusion of pre-history through deliberate action to achieve a post-capitalist society. In this sense, when Marx terms capitalism “civilization,” it can be viewed as having a doubled charge as both the overcoming and the perfection of the past. Do you think that Marx’s attitude about that ever changes?

KA: Even in the Communist Manifesto, where his praise is at the highest, in those paragraphs you were quoting, there is the phrase, “the icy waters of individual calculation,” which I don’t think he means as a compliment to capitalism and its culture.

SL: No? Don’t we sometimes splash cold water on our faces in order to wake ourselves up?

KA: The point I am trying to make is that even in that language about progressivism, it’s always dialectical. Part of the way the Manifesto is set up is that the first few pages set out this model that the subsequent pages undermine by talking about all the contradictions and oppressions brought about by capital, such as making the worker a mere instrument or machine, the recessions and depressions that capitalism creates, that fact that the capitalist class is unfit to rule because it can’t guarantee to the subordinate population, the proletariat, even the minimal level of existence, etc. As you were saying, there is the very clear implication that you have to go through this process. But in the later writings, that is less clear. The most dramatic example is the late writings on Russia, where the Russian villages are still overwhelmingly rural but are starting to be encroached upon by capitalist property relations and capitalist banking. You can see on the horizon the glimmers of what was to become the beginning of the industrialization of Russia in the 1890s, which Marx did not live to see. Still Marx does suggest that if the villages resist the encroachment of capitalism, this might be a good thing. He talks about the communal structure of the Russian villages and the collectivist social forms they take, even more so than in the medieval European village, let alone modern capitalist social relations. He sees in this a possible building block for a modern communism. And there was a revolutionary movement there at the time trying to do exactly that. In dialogue with that Russian revolutionary movement, Marx is wondering whether it might not be able to link up with the proletarian revolutions of the West he is anticipating. So not everyone has to necessarily go through this painful, uprooting process of the old social relations as happens with the industrial revolution. This has wider implications. And there are other examples one can point to in the later writings, the writings from 1881 and 1882 just before his death.

SL: In the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel says,

Without rhetorical exaggeration, a simply truthful combination of the miseries that have overwhelmed the noblest of nations and polities and the finest examples of private virtue forms a picture of the most fearful aspect and excites emotions of the profoundest and most hopeless sadness, counterbalanced by no consolatory result. We endure in beholding it a mental torture, allowing no defense or escape but the consideration that what has happened could not be otherwise, that it is a fatality which no intervention could alter. And at last we draw back from the intolerable disgust with which these sorrowful reflections threaten us into the more agreeable environment of our private individual life- the present formed by our aims and interests. In short, we retreat into selfishness that stands on the quiet shore and thus enjoys the safety of the distant spectacle of “wrecks confusedly hurled.” But even regarding history as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of people, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized, the question involuntarily arises: To what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered? From this point, the investigation [of History] proceeds…[1]

It seems to me that Marx inherits this very profoundly, for instance, in the statement,“that all hitherto existing history has been the history of class struggle.” But it also seems to me that Marx’s theory of capital reconfigures that concern somewhat. In particular, it raises not only the question of the suffering of all of world history, which, for some at least, in one corner of the world, involved the suffering industrial capitalism’s emergence, but also what Hegel says—that, in some unconsoling and inconsolable way, this is just a historical fact, albeit a deeply melancholy one. In the face of which Marx asks, What about when this suffering is no longer necessary? What about the post-1848 world? That is, in some ways it is the failure of the Revolution of 1848, the failure of the working class and indeed humanity to rise to the historical tasks of industrial society that is the most deeply melancholy fact (and the most fundamental object of critique) for Marx. It might be in that light that we’d look at his descriptions of the barbarities committed in India, China or elsewhere—i.e., that these are unnecessary. They are not History, in Hegel’s sense.

KA: Marx is a child of Hegel in that respect. On the language about fatality, I would say that Hegel is also the philosopher of the human subject. He is interested in the quest for freedom, for self-determination. This operates within a larger framework that adds up to a historical progression, as Hegel sees it. But, of course, even with Hegel progress is never one sided. He has room for retrogression within his concept of historical development. For example, he regards the entire European medieval period as one of retrogression. So neither Hegel nor Marx are the uncritical progressivists they are often portrayed as being.

But there are some differences with Hegel. Some of Marx’s descriptions of the Indian village and Indian civilization as backward, unchanging, unresisting, and passive, as not really having a history, are practically copied from Hegel’s Philosophy of History. But what I think held Marx back from being fully Hegelian, although that is certainly his major intellectual influence, is, as everyone points out, that Marx is a more empirical thinker. Marx is interested in looking at historical and social phenomena more closely than Hegel, although Hegel did do quite a bit of that too. Also, Marx is a humanist. That is the big difference. There is an implicit humanism in some of Hegel’s writings on the human subject, but in Marx’s 1844 critique of Hegel, he zeroes in on the abstraction of Hegel’s philosophizing where the real breathing human being, the corporeal, bodily being, is not really present or is insufficiently present in Hegel’s thinking. Marx is more reluctant than Hegel to think in terms of fatal laws of history, especially by the end of his life. In a response to Nikolai Mikhailovsky, a Russian who was trying to defend Marx by saying that he had a general theory of history, Marx replied that he did not have a concept of historical development that is inevitably or fatally imposed on all peoples. He is a little less global, as a thinker, in that sense, than Hegel, a little less totalizing, although it is a real caricature to paint Hegel as a thinker of totality without room for particularity. Because Hegel spent a lot of time attacking what he called the “abstract universal.”

SL: It seems to me that Marx is deeply beholden to Hegel on the question of the project of the self-conscious constitution of history. Of course, that project is radically reconfigured by Marx through his understanding of commodity fetishism and what consciousness means in the struggle to realize and overcome civil society in the age of capital. Like Hegel, the question is one of humanity’s becoming self-conscious. It is not just a question of fatality, but of reason’s cunning. In the modern world, as Hegel says, “everyone is free.” There is the question of the free constitution of history that Marx inherits. What you’re calling Marx’s pessimism or his increasingly harsh and unremitting critique of capital for me turns on the question of struggling with a social form whose potential for emancipation is bound up with its seeming recalcitrance to that project. Of course, post-1848 Marx thinks that the new tasks of the revolution have been announced yet humanity is not taking them up. The way I read the writings on the barbarity of British suppression of the Indian Mutiny is that Marx is arguing that, to the extent that modern society falls below the threshold of its own possibility, it renounces its title to supersede feudalism. It is not really a question of support for the Indian Mutiny, but of the melancholy recognition of a kind of civilized barbarism. But, once again, there are strong echoes here of Adam Smith’s earlier critique of the East India Company, to name only the most obvious instance.

KA: There is a lot packed into your comment. In the famous letter to Engels of 1858 where Marx talks about having reread Hegel’s Logic as he is reconstructing some of the categories that were to become the Gundrisse and later Capital, he says that the Logic was a great help to him in working through the economic categories. That’s the same letter where he says that the Indians are now “our best allies.” So, I do take that as support for the Indian Sepoy Uprising of 1857. The question is, What does support mean? It does not mean that he is supporting the political aims of the uprising, which, to the extent that they were coordinated, called for the restoration of the Mogul Empire. Certainly he doesn’t support that. My take on it is that it is very different.

Scene from the Indian Mutiny of 1857, depicted in a steel engraving from the 1860s. Marx addressed the Mutiny in a series of articles for the New York Daily Tribune.

In regard to Ireland, for instance, Marx always supports the Irish national movement, but the degree to which he is critical of it has to do with the social content of the movement and its leadership. In the 1840s, it was led by pro-landlord groups close to the Catholic Church. Marx and Engels are scathing of these tendencies. By the 1860s, there is the Fenian movement, which is more peasant based, less tied to the Church, and against property holdings not only of the British but also of the so-called Irish landowner classes. Similarly, the Indian movement did not have a socially progressive agenda in the Revolt of 1857. So Marx supports it, but not with the fulsomeness with which he supports the movement in Ireland later on. Marx is a supporter of national self-determination, but not as an abstract universal. The most glaring example of how he doesn’t support all claims to national self-determination is the southern U.S. Confederacy. He does not support their right to national self-determination because the political and social basis on which that was constructed was the defense of slavery.

SL: Let me ask you about the discussion in the book about Marx’s idea of modes of production. You specify what you mean by the “unilinear” model which Marx is breaking with by noting that this took the form of a purportedly universal philosophy of history, one that “focused on Western development from early stateless clan societies to the ancient Greco-Roman class societies based on slave labor to the feudalism of the Middle Ages and on to bourgeois society and its successor, socialism.” [2] As you point out, all pre-capitalist societies, for all of their empirical variety share, for Marx, the crucial theoretical aspect of being pre-capitalist. As you put it at one point, “the purpose of their labor was ‘not the creation of value.’” [3]. So, it seems there is a tension between making a claim about all of human history and making a claim about the specificity of capital. We would not want to let go of that tension, would we?

KA: I am not sure to the extent to which Marx saw the Asiatic mode of production as a core concept grounding his discussions of India, China, etc. I have not really thought that through, but certainly the Asiatic mode of production is not something on which he expended a lot of intellectual effort. There is the long section in the Grundrisse on pre-capitalist modes of production that talks about the Greco-Roman mode of production and the ancient Asiatic mode of production. There he is really talking about India, as far as I can tell. But beyond that, Marx wrote a lot journalistically about India, and the phrase “Asiatic mode of production” does not, to my knowledge, occur in those writings. I also used to think that there must have been a long essay somewhere by Marx describing the feudal mode of production. But there isn’t. It’s just a few scattered comments here and there, as far as I can tell. Marx is not Max Weber. Weber was a scholar who spent perhaps most of his intellectual effort on trying to figure out the uniqueness of modern Western capitalism vis-à-vis earlier social forms. He wrote voluminously on China, India, ancient Judaism, ancient Greece and Rome, and the European Middle Ages. With Marx, the concerns are very different. He does look at these kinds of issues sometimes, but he always does so with contemporary concerns in mind, not only about the structure of capitalism, but also to figure out the problems of resistance to and revolution against capital. Thus, Marx’s interest at the end of his life in the Russian and Indian villages develops because he thinks that these were possible sites of resistance to capital that could become allies of the Western proletariat. To the extent that he is concerned with the non-West or the non-core capitalist countries like Ireland in his own time, it is because of their relationship to the problematic of capital and labor inside the core countries. Sometimes he thinks these relationships can reverse themselves. Accordingly, in the late 1860s, Marx feels that an Irish revolution could become the lever that might spark proletarian uprising inside Britain. Similarly, he argues that the Russian communal village could be the starting point for a global communist development if it could link up with the proletariat in the West. These are not isolated questions for Marx. Certainly he never addresses Ireland, India, Russia or anyplace else for the sake of elaborating a philosophy of history. There may be a very interesting philosophy of history there, but that would have to be teased out.

SL: To return to a point I made earlier, my mistrust of the preoccupation with Eurocentrism is that it occludes the fact that revolution was, according to Marx, possible in his own time. This raised the question of how the transition to post-capitalist society would take place globally. For many who throw around the category of “Eurocentrism,” revolution to them was no more possible then than it is now, and they’re not interested in either case.

KA: For most academic thinking, even left-wing academic thinking, revolution is probably not possible. Even a school of thinking for which I have great respect, the Frankfurt School, devoted most of its energy to figuring out why the German working class, and later on the modern American working class in America, were not even really oppositional. In Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man this is a major theme. This goes with the territory of academic radicalism. But Marx was not an academic, and Capital was not written for an academic audience.

1. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History. The quoted passage appears in part III, “Philosophic History,” section 24. The text is available online at: <www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history3.htm>↑
2. Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 155–156.↑
3. Grundrisse quoted in Ibid., 156.↑

Platypus

Platypus summer 2012: Democracy and Marxism

Chicago

Saturdays 1–4PM

School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) 112 S. Michigan Ave. room 920

Film screening: May 2012

Week 1. May 26, 2012

Week 2. Jun. 2, 2012

June 16 – July 28

Trotsky and Trotskyism

Recommended preliminary readings:

Platypus summer 2012: Trotsky and Trotskyism

Boston, Chicago, Halifax, New York, Philadelphia, and Toronto

Saturdays 1–4PM

School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) 112 S. Michigan Ave. room 920

2–5PM

New School University New York (New School) Lang Café, Eugene Lang Building 65 W. 11th St. ground floor (enter at 66 W. 12th St.) conference room

New York University (NYU) Puck Building 295 Lafayette St. 4th floor Memorial Room

Recommended preliminary readings:

Week 1. Jun. 16, 2012

Week 2. Jun. 23, 2012

Week 3. Jun. 30, 2012

Week 4. Jul. 7, 2012

Week 5. Jul. 14, 2012

Week 6. Jul. 21, 2012

Week 7. Jul. 28, 2012

2012–13

Primary Marxist reading group

I. What is the Left? — What is Marxism?

Week A. Aug. 4, 2012

Week B. Aug. 11, 2012

Week C. Aug. 18, 2012

Week D. Aug. 25, 2012

Sep. 1, 2012 Labor Day weekend

Week E. Sep. 8, 2012

Week F. Sep. 15, 2012

Week G. Sep. 22, 2012

Week H. Sep. 29, 2012

Week 1. Oct. 6, 2012

Liberalism and Marx: An interview with Domenico Losurdo

Pam C. Nogales C. and Ross Wolfe

Changes in art and society: A view from the present

Mary Jane Jacob, Robert Pippin, and Walter Benn Michaels

Q&A

Splits, regroupments, war, and revolution in Germany, 1914–1920: A conversation with Ben Lewis

Spencer A. Leonard and Watson Ladd

The occupation of art’s labor: An interview with Julia Bryan-Wilson

Chris Mansour

Learning from the Communist Movement of the 20th century

A response to Richard Rubin

Grover Furr

The New Left zombie is dead! Long live Occupy!

David Haack

What is the #Occupy movement?

A roundtable discussion

Hannah Appel, Erik Van Deventer, Nathan Schneider, Brian Dominick, and Jeremy Cohan.

Q & A

Marx at the margins: An interview with Kevin Anderson

Spencer A. Leonard

School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)
112 S. Michigan Ave. room 920

School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)
112 S. Michigan Ave. room 920

New School University New York (New School)
Lang Café, Eugene Lang Building
65 W. 11th St. ground floor (enter at 66 W. 12th St.) conference room

New York University (NYU)
Puck Building
295 Lafayette St. 4th floor Memorial Room