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Doctrine

29th November 2006, 09:27 pm by Stan

With some sadness and with not the least desire to devalue the experiences I have had with comrades, nor to minimize the hard work, nor the consciousness and concience, nor the friendship of many comrades, I am herein announcing and explaining my definitive rejection of Marxism in its current organizational forms, be they called Marxist-Leninist or Trotskyist or Maoist.

This decision comes after months of intense reflection. I will not attempt to separate the personal from the political reasons. My personal life, as a spouse, father, grandfather, friend, and member of local and poltical communities, is my most direct window on the world, and the experience against which I have to measure any political belief or organizational theory. Even moreso, as I now find myself indefinitely caring again for an infant; and thereby bound to the house in the same way as many women, constantly being confronted with the most immediate and practical necessities. The kind of politics that does not take these constraints as the starting point of all politics is what I am now taking under long review.

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

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

It is this project, refoundation, which carries with it wherever it goes another question, that has preoccupied me for my entire tenure in and out of Marxist formations. The associated question, of course, has been “What happened? Why is there no organized left with the attention and support of broad masses of peope in the US?” What is the nature of this “Crisis of Soicialism”?

The Marxist method (as opposed to doctrine) of interpreting these issues led me to address that latter question with deeper ones still? What do we mean when we say “organized”? Who do we mean when we say “masses”?

In arriving at tentative answers to these questions, I have — almost with a sense of grief — concluded that neither Marxist-Leninist nor “Trotskyist” nor Maoist, nor Guevarist, etc etc etc, organizations are suitable to the task, no matter the quality of the individuals who populate them. The history of these organizations has been, for more than six decades minimum, a string of failures, punctuated by periodic successes only in mass work that was self-organizing outside Marxism to some extent anyway. I have come to believe this is a failure of the structure and of the over-reaching scope of these organizations.

Marx himself began his career preoccupied not with questions of economics, but of human happiness. What he observed was oppression of one by another, and the sense of personal fragmentation — of alienation — that permeated modern society; and he determined that these two things were related.

Since then, the accumulation of historical experience has provided us with both confirmations and rebuttals of the “lessons” of Marx and Engels. A series of thinkers and leaders after them, in the same tradition, elaborated on that connection between social power and personal alienation.

Unfortunately, the struggle to give these intellectual and practical breakthroughs organizational assertion has been one of hostile encircelment — literal and figurative — which gave rise to a bunker mentality.

This bunker mentality led to the transformation of Marx’s analyticial toolbox into a quasi-religious organizing doctrine, and one that was fought out almost like an epoch religious struggle in painful cycles of orthodoxy and reformation, then reformation itself morphing into orthodoxy.

Marxism-Leninism is a term coined by Stalin to establish an imaginary line of predestination (Stalin had his opposition shot as a demonstration of his own ardency on the issue.) from Marx-the-Godhead to himself as a way of mapping his encircled-and-militarized state leadership onto the collective consciousness of Eurasian mass still steeped in the episteme of hierarchical and patriarchal religion, complete with its struggle-to-salvation teleology.

It was this disciplinary regime that inherited and ossified in its own image the notion of a Leninist Party as the last word in political organization, and “democratic centralism” as its organizing principle. It remains to this day the axiomatic faith of Marxism-Leninism and all the other variants.

From the very beginning, however, this principle that worked during the contingencies of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions — both still majority peasant societies (look at Nepal and Haiti today) — was never an organic match to the social conditions nor the prevailing consciousness in the United States. For this reason, I believe, the mismatch between the idea-driven M-L organizations and the lived experience of US society at large has consistently been a history of leadership sects without a solid, organic popular base, especially since the World War II.

Each of these sects then competes with all others for the extremely finite pool of potential recruits. In such a market competition, the competing “sellers” are obliged to explain and emphasize their differences, not their similarities — a point made very clearly by Louis Proyect — and in emphasizing differences over unity, a climate of perennial sectarianism has been created that seems inescapable. This has also created an internal climate in each of these organizations of consolidating members into an ideological conformity… to the point where members ask leadership questions like, “What do we think about this?”

This has further led us to believe that the obstacle to consistent influence — as opposed to temporary and contingent successes, mostly in mass work — has been the “false consciousness” of the masses. My own last affiliation was better than most of the other M-L formations in eschewing the establishment of the One True Revolutionary Party, not hawking sectarian newspapers, and looking self-critically at the left (as evidenced by their collecitve preoccupation with the “crisis of socialism”).

It is not what has been done well by members of these organizations that concerns me; it is the fact that the people who have done well would have done well with or without the organizations. In my own last gourp, there is a very good, very committed, and very non-sectarian impulse that is widely shared by the members. The flaws with which I cannot myself be reconciled are flaws in Marxism-Leninism itself, the orgnizational fetish of democratic centralism, and the unavoidable overreach of any inorganic effort to “build a national organization” on the basis of an alien ideology and political practice. And Marxism-Leninism, as it is presently organized, as well as its Trotskyist cousin, constitutes a structurally alien formation within American culture.

It is the organizing principle of the “Leninist Party” that still carries the day, democratic centralism, and the method inhering in that organizational model, which requires “the line,” which I have come to believe is responsible not merely for a failure of the left to gain a consistent foothold among the broad masses, but which is — more significantly — an illusion that “the left,” as we define it, is the only appropriate vehicle to carry out the transformation of society. This illusion is shared by many elements in what we widely call the left, that “correct ideas lead to correct practice,” yet we have never questioned the whole notion of correctness, with its hubristic assumptions of cookie-cutter universality.

While I observed some formations last year, responding to Katrina, put the brakes on actual relief efforts in the process of trying to develop a line on the response to Katrina, it was impossible not to notice that in the spaces abandoned by patriarchal white supremacist capitalism, the more decentralized efforts of one group’s volunteers managed to move into those abandoned spaces and establish outposts, operating in a very immediate and practical way, and exercising the utmost tactical agility. This was when it occurred to me that the notion of unity at the core of Leninist organizing philosophy is one that is a centralized and imposed unity, and an imposed ideological and practical unity which reaches for a scale that cannot keep pace with social development. It is, then, constantly mismatched with the social reality of the masses these ideational vanguards wish to lead.

And yes, I still believe in vanguards… but that is another topic.

There are things the Hezbollah can teach us that the former Chinese Communist party cannot; and distance and scale set material limitations on the ability of political cadres to simultaneously administer themselves in a singular organization and remain conversant with emergent social and political realities.

The Leninist tradition in organization, whether taking its cue from Trotsky, Stalin, or Mao, is uniformly possessed of this crippling combination of internal comformity, external lack of an organic class-for-itself, the illusion that bigger is better, the market-trap of competing orthodoxies, and the patriarchal attachment to “conquest of nature” dualism.

It is this latter issue which led me — in familiarizing myself to the extent possible — to try and understand the epistmeology, social structure, and psychic realities of gender as a system of men’s social power, and which has contributed to my own decisive break with Leninism. The other area of study that has led me to reject Leninism is that of energy as both a phsycial and social phenomenon. These are connected in my mind, and point directly to the major errors not only of Leninism but within the whole Marxist tradition more generally… and I still consider myself in many respects a Marxist.

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

These are not incidental errors. The theories of socialism that stumbl;ed again and again through the world system of the 20th Century were fundamentally shaped by these basic assumptions, and the rejections of the basic premises necessarily implies at least the dramatic reformulation of the whole theory. Marxism is effective to study one dimension of capital accumulation; and Marxism has provided some valuable interpretive instruments, like fetishization, like reification, like commodification. But as Myles Horton said, Marxism is a good tool box, but a bad blueprint.

The struggle for state power here is chimeric. There is not the slightest chance of any Marxist-Leninist group ever taking state power in the US, or of any movement under the sway of Marxism-Leninism, or Trotskyism, or Maoism, et al. It is a theoretical doctrine that is alien to the American experience: one that has made some of us smarter than the average American, in some sense, but which has no chance — because it is so culturally alien — of ever making us stronger than the mass of US residents who will continue to reject it. It is not organic to our reality; and like a failed organ transplant, it will continually be expelled from this body. This in no way reflects negatively on the people in M-L organizations, who are some of the smartest, most tireless, and dedicated people I have ever known.

There is some “sense” in the recapturing and cumulative strategic principle of mass line, as a way of assessing work within movements. But M-L organizations who employ mass line, and other dotrines, apply them to reified instances like the anti-war movement, which is not a social transformation movement at all, but a very contingent and heterogeneous response to a symptom of the crisis of empire. The role of Marxists in this movement has been mixed. On the one hand, they were quick to do the grunt work required to cohere opposition to the war into some political focus; on the other hand, they brought their competing agendas and lines into the heart of American response against the war… and we cannot know what deletrious effect that had at the end of the day, because we cannot know what might have happened without the great UFPJ-ANSWER struggle. It was, however, without a shadow of a doubt, a sectarian struggle between Marxists. We have employed our doctrines in the context of work with a national scope, in the spoken and unspoken belief that the larger scale work will be determinative of local work, and that this is a sound strategic docrine.

If it is, then I am having difficulty seeing the evidence of it. Top-down strategies do not work. We are not turning our fingers into a unified fist. We are building one-sized beds for a thousand Procrustes.

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

First, our conception of socialism as a blueprint for state power that addresses the questions rasied by dualism and industrialism only after some imagined political victory ignores what we haven’t studied (or have selectively ignored as a “deviation”) from Ivan Illich to Alf Hornborg to Maria Mies. This inherently patriarchal, industrial, state-socialist “theory” is as dead as my great grandfathers. Second, the trade union movement is not the whole working class, and the trade unions in the US have chosen — more often than not — patriarchy and-or white supremacy and-or reactionary nationalism at almost every turn. The exceptions do not disprove the rule. There is a reason for that. An imperial working class has imperial privilege, and their livelihoods are lashed to the survival of a system designed for domination and war. As a friend — Joaquin Bustelo — recently put it:

“I can’t imagine how it is possible to deny that there is not now nor has there been for a very long time a working class movement worthy of the name in the United States (a “class-for-itself” movement). Does anyone disagree? Does someone want to correct me on the half-century long decline in union membership, the decline in the number of strike-days, etc.? Does someone want to let me know about the thousands of Anglo workers who organized their workplaces to walk out last May Day in solidarity with Latino and immigrant protests?

“That white male workers would try to decert their union because they don’t want to be in the same collective as Blacks and Latinos, doesn’t that tell you something? That’s going on right now, TODAY in my area. And things like that have been going on day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade for a VERY long time in the United States. (’Things like that’ = white Anglo male workers identifying their interests with those of their nationality, gender and ruling class instead of with their class. But this isn’t an exclusively white, male thing. You will find varying degrees and sorts of privilege –male privilege, ‘legal’ privilege, ‘citizen’ privilege, age privilege– among women, Blacks, Latinos, and so on, where it also tends to have a corrupting influence but that is a much more complicated discussion.)

“This is not ‘a period of reaction,’ this isn’t ‘the downturn after a defeat,’ nor ‘a lull during a prolonged prosperity,’ nor anything else like that.

“You cannot explain the state of the U.S. working class movement by pointing to economic cycles or things like specific punctual or exceptional circumstances, even ones lasting many years. It wasn’t the post-WWII boom, because that ended three and a half decades ago. It wasn’t the cold war, that’s been dead and buried for a decade and a half. Try to think of the reasons why this situation has come to be… It is time we start reconstructing Marxism to explain the real world, instead of dreaming of catastrophic scenarios that will restore the real world to compliance with our Marxist class-reductionist dogma.”

And to that, I would add that it might be time to reconstruct a politics of resistance that is not Marxist, in the sense that Marx himself said, “I am not a Marxist.” This ande that formation have been ahead of the pack on deconstructing privilege as a material feature of whiteness (far less so masculinity); but as “Marxist” formations, they inevitably return to the default position — sometimes by a circuitous route — of the working class as the key, and democratic centralism as the organizational principle. When we have seen all the other variables tested, and no fundamental change has happened, then it seems time to question the untested variables. But Marxism — the organizational doctrine, not the interpretive method — may well be part of the problem of the Crisis of Socialism. I tend to believe that this is so.

Democratic Centralism has put a series of socialist governments in power; and in almost every case, the restoration of capitalist relations of production (the insturuments of capitalist producion were kept, and even sought out) has been accomplished, or the society has fallen into collapse. The machinations of imperial governments cannot be discounted in this; but that is a real thing, too.

The single exception where the revolution has been effectively defended to any degree has been in Cuba, but Cuba began with smaller scale (ergo, greater social embeddedness, in the Polanyian sense), and Cuba was forced to decentralize and re-localize as a survival strategy. The centralism of DC was forced to give way to the democracy of effort required to re-localize the very basis of Cuban survival and independence; and the successes of Cuba have largely been predicated, since 1990, on implementing deviations from the norms of Marxism-the-doctrine.

My friend goes on to say:

“Building a socialist movement for the 21st Century means starting from the premise, and very palpable reality, that the socialist movement of the second half of 20th Century, viewed as a whole, largely DID NOT WORK. And it especially did not work in the places where Marxist theory says it was SUPPOSED to work, in the advanced capitalist countries with a fully-developed working class that is the big majority of the population.”

Unless and until we face this fact, and ask the critical question, Why?, then refoundation of an effective politics of resistance in the US will never happen. We will simply become more and more politically irrelevant, and grasp every contingent breakthrough, like our important roles (which I recognize) in the antiwar movement, as proof that Marxist (meaning Leninist) organization works, whereupon — with the inevitable waning of that influence as the fissures close — we rely again on the explanations that we are experiencing “periods,” “lulls,” and “downturns.”

The tendency to compartmentalize, to which I myself fall prey, and which is an essential part of the dominant ideology into which we are all trained from birth, combines with the conservatism of institutions that characterizes even very radical political formations. That combination provides us with the excuse that “the ideas are right, but the method, or tactic, is wrong.”

One of the most difficult but important realizations that I am coming to in this process of trial and error is that the ideas and the methods and the tactics are all both determinants and products of each other.

The Marxist doctrinal belief that the working class represents the potentially liberatory force within the primary contradiction — a notion that is, in my view, plain mysticism posing as a “scientific doctrine” — of bourgeois-proletariat, attempts to override the demonstrable fact that patriarchy is an older, deeper, and more durable “contradiction,” that the most turbulent and transformative struggles of the 20th Century, while often under the leadership of Marixists, had a primarily national character, and that they were more often carried out by majority-masses of peasants, not proletarians.

The Marxist history of bourgeois revolutions makes prominent note of the fact that the bourgeoisie gestated its social power outside the “primary class contradiction” of its time — artisocrat and serf. Why do we believe a metropolitan industrial proletariat will — even recognizing its exploited position — rise up against the system upon which it is completely dependent, and from which it takes its very identity? The advantage that a peaseantry had in emerging capitalism was that it was not yet locked into the capitalist unity of opposites. The implications of this fact seem to have been lost on us.

The last thing a metropolitan industrial working class is going to do is embrace a project that threatens the only stability it knows. Boeing workers are not going to oppose the military-industrial complex. Prison guards are not going to oppose prisons. Agri-business workers are not going to oppose processed foods. Auto workers are not going to oppose cars.

Our experience is that this class in the US, with occasional exceptions, fights for its privileges within that class — male, national, and white. Moreover, the collapse of the current system faces this working class with catastrophe, beginning with the fact that it is thoroughly dependent on military spending to hold back that catastrophe. I can only conclude that an imperial working class is not and never will be the midwife of anything except reaction.

It is only possible, then, in my view for now, at least — and I am enthusiastic about saying I could be wrong — to effect the basis for any genuine and sustainable resistance movement in the United States by first attending to the question of local community independence, beginning with the material basics: food security, water security, energy security, acess to learning, and a health infrastructure.

We have mostly ignored the laboratories for exactly these things, calling the “utopian,” i.e., intentional communities; and we have looked on locally organized efforts to impact local politics as somehow less developed than we are… when these formations are often well advanced of anything being done by the M-L and Trotskyist left. They don’t need a line. Their practice is always responding to things immediate and concrete; and their leadership, though this practice, is very very smart, in very very practical ways.

World systems theory has gained an element of acceptance within Marxism, but only to a degree that doesn’t contradict the canon. But there are other theorists, Hornborg stands out on the issue of unequal exchange and Carole Pateman on the flaws in “labor power” as a concept, who have taken siginficant steps toward overcoming all that is normative in Marxism, and incorporated the best and most universal values of Marxism into theories that are far more adequate accounts of imperialism and gender than anything still residing within the canon of the M-L and Trotskyist left.

One of the reasons we have had such difficulty keeping up with these genuine breakthroughs has been our sectarian insularity — a feature of our organizations even when we struggle against it, as several aborted attempts at “integration” should be telling us. We recruit, then we push through an educational program to consolidate new membership around the line, relying on our own group-by-group canon, and our respective exigeses of dead revolutionaries in the Marxist pantheon.

Not only have we not incorporated the laws of physics (energy) into our world view, we have not incorporated any of the discoveries that have permanently altered the science known by Marx and Lenin, except to elaborate on their Cartesian dualism. Ivan Illich wrote in 1973 (in typical sexist fashion, but accurately aside from that):

“If a ruler could draw power from sources other than men, his control over this power still depended on his control over men… Political control coincided with control over physical power, and the control of power depended entirely on authority. Equal power and equal direct control of power [generated by individual bodies] were both features of preindustrial societies, but this did not guarantee an equal autonomy in the exercise of this control.”

This was the beginning of a comprehensive critique of industrialism, and one which Carolyn Merchant and Alf Hornborg and others have elaborated on at length. The implications of the incorporation of energetics, and chaos theory, and of the patriarchy in the very DNA of the myth of “scientific objectivity,” are not add-ons to Marxism that will leave its basic structure unaltered. The produce a comprehensive change in how we understand the world… and if we are in a DC organization, that means we reject it.

Hornborgs’ thermodynamic analysis of unequal exchange (in understanding imperialism in a mesaurable, non-normative way) yields dozens of new insights into the dynamic of imperialism that address apects of the world system that Lenin and Hilferding never touched. And the reason Marxism has been so far unable to accommodate these new insights has been a kind of reactive reluctance to hear anything that might suggest that Marxist organization (and therefore practice), and the class-reductionism that has been carried forward for 150 years, no longer match reality.

By and large, we remain trapped in the development paradigm, which still fails to grasp energy physics as the zero-sum game that it is, and establishes goals that would leave the masses at the mercy of machines and bureaucrats. This has not only led us to remain insular; it continually leads us into competition for people and resources with more organic efforts that have more traction and relevance than the projects flowing out of our DC process, making a fetish of collectivity, and stifling individual initiative and the creativity that goes with it.

Any revolutionary movement that has a prayer of taking hold in the US must be organic, that is, self-organizing… and consist of small and many independent, but networked, practical efforts. The larger any organization is, in personnel or in scope or in geography, the more the institutional tail begins to wag the mission dog. This is no longer pop science. With increased scale, the tooth-to-tail, operations-to-adminstration/management ratio of any organization shifts correspondingly. Larger scale, smaller ration of energy invested in operations, higher into management. The average human is only bio-psychologically equipped to handle around 150 relationships in the absence of administration (Dunbar’s number), and a bunch of those people are already family and friends. But has the left even studied this cross-disciplinary discovery? No. We just say we have to struggle against bureaucratism without ever trying to identify its origins. If it hasn’t been mentioned by the pantheon, we don’t know it. And if it doesn’t extend directly from the pantheon, we reject it.

Again, this is not a moral or intellectual failure. It is, I believe, a failure that is hard-wired into the organizations’ structural-practical dialectic, into Marxism-as-a-doctrine.

It is my opinion, at least at this point in time, that leftist organization in this disciplinary cadre model is not only incapable of bringing the refoundation of an effective politics of resistance into being, it stands as a real impediment to any refoundation process for a wide-scale politics of resistance.

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185 Comments

  1. charlene grant:

    I would like to make a few, scattered comments (no coherent philosophizing) as to why I find the Marxists objectionable. I started reading the World Socialist Website (WSWS) several years ago. At first I liked them because they were the only ones referring to the Bush Administration as being a bunch of thuggish criminals (now, more voices are saying this). But I quickly grew disenchanted because they were such “one-issue” people. The only problem they saw with the world and the only solution they had for the world was summed up by “Workers of the world, unite!” Nothing here has changed.

    They do not acknowledge the reality of Peak Oil (how could they, since this is going to be a real “globalisation and internationalism” killer-diller?); they do not acknowledge the problems of over-population (along with the highly patriarchal Catholic Bishops, they seem to think the world can easily accomodate 40 billion people); they do not acknowledge that all mankind shares the same basic, human nature (why should I believe that a “dictatorship of the prolertariate” would be better for me than all the other worldly power structures have been - I well remember the 1960’s when women were not welcome in Unions or working-class jobs).

    They seem to believe that only rich people can be thuggish criminals, whereas it is obvious to almost everyone else that precious “working-class” people can also be thuggish criminals. As Hemingway supposedly noted, the poor and the rich are different primarily in the amount of money they have. Give the poor more money and more power and watch them them start to act exactly, in every way, just like their richer brethren. A wonderful book has been written about some pigs who took over a farm, drove the oppressive human farmer out, and then rather promptly began walking about on their two hind legs (like the detested humans) and oinking the philosophical line that although “all animals are equal, some are more equal than others.”

    Anyway, “workers of the world, unite” does not seem to me to be any kind of solution to this world problems, especially, in the face of “Peak Oil” and “Global Warming”.

    “Population Reduction”, however, is an idea whose time has come.

    29 November 2006, 10:59 pm

  2. Fire Witch:

    “It is only possible, then, in my view for now, at least — and I am enthusiastic about saying I could be wrong — to effect the basis for any genuine and sustainable resistance movement in the United States by first attending to the question of local community independence, beginning with the material basics: food security, water security, energy security, acess to learning, and a health infrastructure.”

    Exactly. And in order to realize these very basic elements of community independence, would it not do for us latecomers (whether immigrant or imported)to humble ourselves and ask our Indigenous neighbors, who, through at least 500 Nations, already had developed sustainable, human-scale, deeply embedded lifeways that were shattered only after these Nations were invaded and deculturated?

    Yet despite that shattering, Traditionals throughout Indian Country struggle everyday to continue their ancestral ways in the face of overwhelming odds, and have done so for better than 500 years. No doubt they have much to teach us about where we are and what we need to do to live here with this land, and in accordance with laws worked out since time immemorial.

    By both treaty (legally binding international agreements) and tradition, we who are not Native are on someone else’s national territory. If we moved to Ireland or Ethiopia or India, we would be expected over time to be naturalized into the traditional lifeways of those countries.

    Why should it be any different here on Turtle Island?

    So the question remains, for me anyway - what does Naturalization look like?

    And how might honoring the treaties and listening to the land be a part of that process?

    29 November 2006, 11:50 pm

  3. Stan:

    How, exactly, does this “population reduction” occur?

    If it’s an idea whose time has come, what is the first step?

    This is likely to open up a whole ‘nuther thread on neo-malthusianism, so we must be veddy veddy alert.

    One way I suggest we reduce the population-effect is we cut consumption by two-thirds in the United States, begining with those who earn more than $100,000 per capita.

    Higher population countries aren’t using a fraction of what we do. One rich American, so to speak, has the ecological footprint of a couple thousand rural Indians.

    But again, the question comes up: What do we do? Aside from have ideas, that is.

    If it’s to be population reduction, and not population-effect reduction, then combining the two means we begin “reducing” with the rich people first. More bang for you buck if you see my meaning.

    Mass sterilization?

    Firing squads?

    Space colonization?

    See how tricky this population thing is?

    29 November 2006, 11:58 pm

  4. RedDan:

    Are you rejecting Marxist Parties and other political formations, or are you rejecting Marxism as a tool for political, social, and economic analysis?

    The former I certainly understand and have some strong agreement with.

    The latter I see as needlessly limiting - there is no reason (at least to me) why Marxist analysis (and the many flavors thereof) cannot be a powerful complement to gender/liberation/feminist and other analyses that have equal or greater power to illuminate in different venues of intellectual exploration and political organization.

    Marxism and its various variants make for excellent diagnostic tools, and very poor prescriptive tools.

    I, myself, remain committed to the root/fundamental ideals and core analyses expressed in many Marxist writings, theories, and actions/organizations….

    But I agree with you in that ultimately there is something about all of the above that induce or pre-dispose Marxist political parties to factionalize, decompose, and scatter to the winds.

    Many of those parties then spend more time fighting each other, even to the point of actively hurting the political movements and harming the political fortunes of the very same “oppressed” that Marxists invoke as political and ideological inspiration.

    When I think about political parties, political organizing, and political groupings that are or were most effective, especially in the US, I think about the IWW.

    Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is one of my heroes, as are the other “leaders” of that movement.

    It seems to me that what “Marxists” all to often lack in terms of connection to the struggles that are so avidly analyzed, the “populists and syndicalists” understand and utilize to great effect. The opposite is true when it comes to hard core analysis and diagnosis…

    I am not sure that “disavowing” one or the other, or any other theoretical basis is the way to go.

    I have, in my own travels, taken to “absorbing” and then trying to see how the advantages of one can be combined with the advantages of the other…and how the drawbacks and flaws can be eliminated.

    In short, I understand where you’re at, why, and how you got there…and I have a lot of agreement and sympathy…

    I remain redly yours…and regardless of the nametags, the struggle continues.

    30 November 2006, 1:10 am

  5. Yolanda Carrington:

    Charlene, two things. First “over-population” is a white male supremacist boogeyman. As Stan noted, the problem isn’t overpopulation, it’s overconsumption of finite resources by people in the industrialized metropoles (read: the White West). If Americans and other fools in the Global North would just stop chugging down all the petroleum, natural gas, and water, the Earth would be alright.

    Second, please don’t refer to humanity as “mankind.” There’s nothing neutral or benign about this appellation—indeed it cuts to the very heart of what white male supremacy is about. “Mankind” is a term loaded with every colonialist notion ever conceived, from the “White Man’s Burden” theory of progress to eugenics. Most humans on Earth are not in the Brotherhood of Man.

    30 November 2006, 1:12 am

  6. Marilyn Farhat:

    Stan,

    This is a very sobering analysis and I think your observations hold so true. I will address a couple of aspects only.

    I am not deeply familiar with the Left/Marxist/Socialist movement(s) in the United States. There are many who claim they are Leftist, but that really means nothing if it only implies a certain framework of thought with no action.

    My experience with the Marxist and Socialist movements in the Middle East are extensive and, from your observations, it is clear to me that the problems you address are more ubiquitous than we may have liked to admit.

    In the US and in my part of the Middle East, the leadership of the M/S (abbr.) is comprised of the educated and economic elite. They had the ability to “mobilize” the masses around two main areas: economic (not class. Class is the backbone of Lebanese society) struggle and political reform. Although women were a large part of the movement and were more active than their counterparts in other political organizations, their status as women was not part of the stated “struggle.” All M/S leaders I came in contact with were men, rich men from old money, educated men who had a “vision” of what was just and what was not. I doubt if there was mass consensus per se as to what those injustices were for everyone. Also, those same movements were tied to other states. In a sense, they were not autonomous and were more driven by regional and international political maneuvering as much as by people’s rights. The Middle East was a hotbed of mass demonstrations, sloganeering, shooting guns in the air, yelling the evils of Capitalism, Imperialism, Zionism, terrorism (yes, that term was in existence among the Left in the 60s, and it implied state terrorism), treason, etc. People were riled up and went home complaining about all the evils in the world that the Left was going to eradicate, but they went home with the same feudal and corrupt mentality, and they went home with the same cultural paradigms that kept their women second class citizens. I believe that the right conditions have to exist for a successful mass movement of the oppressed. I think it is a rare occurrence in history, but it does have a chance. However, I do not think that mass movements will eradicate class or prejudice completely. Our human system is one of checks and balances, whether in Capitalist or non-Capitalist societies. However, even that is not enough. Political and economic struggle cannot be divested from the moral and cultural base. People can be indoctrinated into a certain framework of thinking without really giving the reasons behind them much thought. That is why many movements have failed and that is why most people end up believing what their parents believe in.

    In order for the masses of the world to take charge in a just and equitable fashion, a few things have to be present:

    1- There has to be an ideology, or belief, that all human beings, no matter what their religion, culture, gender, politics, criminal background, disability, etc., are worthwhile and that they are all entitled to a “piece of the pie.” These same people are also obligated to behave honorably towards others and participate in society to the best of their individual abilities. Women have to be a rationally, as opposed to an emotionally or ideally, recognized part of that struggle. This means that if my religion or culture tells me that women should cover their head whether they like it or not, but I believe in justice for all (a common contradiction in Islam and other religions), I really have to evaluate my moral honesty (by the way, you probably know that Islam and Marxism are mutually exclusive, unless Marxism decides to divest itself from the issue of God and leave it to the individual person. But I am sure there are those who can reconcile both). We have to also understand that many poor people do come from religious and cultural backgrounds that have their prejudices built in.

    2- There has to be power sharing and it does not have to always be the educated elite. Mass movements seem to work well on the community level because of the uniqueness of the circumstances of each community. That encourages self-worth and participation by all. People need to govern themselves by consensus as opposed to elections. Consensus, although more time consuming as a political and social process, is more equitable and just in the long-run.

    3- The new movement has to be able to address and tackle, to a certain functional degree, the problems raised by the troublemakers who will try to manipulate situations to their advantage. I am in total agreement with what Charlene has pointed out. And I have read “Animal Farm” in high school and it is so applicable.

    I always say that we are all capitalists at heart if we do not put rational and moral thought into every action we make. We all engage in consumption practices that do not promote individual and group justice. The way our behavior impacts the environment is also very critical as you stated (that is a whole new dissertation).

    It is doable, but it gets more difficult by the day. Marxism was the answer to our ills in the minds of the old time Marxists and the old revolutionaries but it has failed in the “field.” It joined the ranks of the oppressive monarchies, oligarchies, and democracies. When the Arab countries were carved up after WWII, many of them tried all the “isms” and the poor are getting poorer and state oppression is on the rise. This new age of Empire and the militarization of the youth will, in my opinion, serve to polarize the working classes (the military are working class too). One segment of the working class will serve the military/industrial elite (either in the system as soldiers or in work areas that support the military system), another will be resisting it, and another will probably be completely apathetic or incapable (like today).

    Which brings me to my final point; there can be no effective long-term justice for the masses and mass awareness if disarmament does not become part of our ingrained world view. Demilitarization on all levels and respect for human life have to exist on a global level, along with respect for women and the environment, before we can even think about functionally aware masses. Some of this can be accomplished through social consensus and after hundreds of generations have been indoctrinated into this new world paradigm.

    Did I forget multi-national corporations and exploiting people in the non-Western world?

    It is going to be a mess before it gets better.

    30 November 2006, 2:27 am

  7. Dick R.:

    Hmm. “Thinking” and ‘acting’ locally - creating decentralized and automomous initatives and organizing around immediate concerns certainly has much to recommend it. But the very real objective limitations of this as a primary focus for forging revolutionary or transformative praxis are also increasingly apparent …

    Ask the APPO in Oaxaca about this.

    30 November 2006, 5:02 am

  8. Yolanda Carrington:

    Oh…by the way Stan…this piece is powerful. I can already hear folks accusing you of a shift towards anarchism. But that’s the mindset we marxists are stuck in.

    I’ve grappled with this impasse for a minute now, as you well know. To me there always seemed to be this huge gulf between marxist practice and American reality as I knew it. The reality of living here, while it has evolved and adapted for the better, has not fundamentally changed. This is still a settler state based on white male supremacy—-and nowadays it’s a settler state that’s the dominant empire of the world.

    An effective politics of resistance has to begin with that basic understanding.

    30 November 2006, 6:09 am

  9. Stan:

    Full disclosure: Dan and I have a history, practical solidarity and ideological struggle, whic supports my points… we wasted a fair amount of bandwidth some time ago on the Tralin-Stotsky debate. He was among a circle of rads hereabouts who took me in, so to speak, befroe I’d even taken off my uniform eleven years ago.

    I’m with you, Dan. I love Marx, warts and all. People may not realize it, but when they get hold of a gem like Foner’s Reconstruction, they are enjoying the result of an analysis that is strongly influenced by that special Marxist standpoint.

    It’s democratic centralism that no longer makes a lick of sense to me. I mean, no one here — as far as I know — is hiding from the tsarist secret police.

    My issue with Marxism (the doctrine, the organizational model, etc) is not that Marxism (the interpetive method) doesn’t explain a lot of stuff. It damn well does; and that’s why the ruling class still hates it. The problem is, it doesn’t explain everything, including a lot of stuff that has a real influence on the political work we do. Yet that pretension is there among Marxist orgs, that they have gotten hold of the final Grand Unified Theory, which is treated more as an article of religious faith than “science,” which acolytes also claim M-L is… “the science of Marxism Leninism.”

    On the issue of Marxism’s supposed incompatibility with religion; that has been the outgrowth of doctrinaire Marxism. Illich was a Christian socialist. Gustavo Gutierrez was very explicit in his embrace of historical materialism as the secular core of liberation theology’s outlook.

    As a resident of the American South, I can say pretty much categorically that there ain’t gonna be no mass movement down here that don’t get prayed over. During the final struggle to break legal US Apartheid, there were preachers out front and praying at every turn. I don’t know if angelic postal workers were carrying the messages through the barrier between us and infinity; but the praying sure kept the prayer-makers steady in some perilous times. Being a results-based person, I’m not gonna argue with that.

    30 November 2006, 8:29 am

  10. howard:

    Stan wrote:
    On the issue of Marxism’s supposed incompatibility with religion; that has been the outgrowth of doctrinaire Marxism. Illich was a Christian socialist. Gustavo Gutierrez was very explicit in his embrace of historical materialism as the secular core of liberation theology’s outlook.

    –Has anyone seen Bob Jensen’s pieces in Counterpunch over the past few months about how he as a committed progressive activist has been coming to terms with his own spirituality? Also, folks might want to check out the writings of theologian Walter Wink. I think he is fairly good on patriarchy and its inherent problems — he calls it the Domination System. A good starter for anyone interested in this is his book The Powers that Be.

    –I haven’t run into a better “interpretive method” (Stan’s term) than Marxist analysis, especially as updated by radical feminists and others. That said, I can think of maybe dozens of great leftist analyses I’ve read over the years, pages and pages of great facts, analysis, and presentation on some issue of huge importance, and then you get to the “what we can do” chapter at the end and you can tell it is just a tacked-on afterthought — suddenly it gets all vague and abstract and “we must be more vigilant” or something like that is the usual sort of statement. Noam Chomsky would be a good example of this kind of writing — terribly stimulating, thought-provoking, and informative, but very short on any sort of suggestion about what to do.

    So for me the problem has always been - “what is the praxis here”. Maybe that’s where spirituality can come in to play, and maybe that’s where feminist Marxism is taking us.

    30 November 2006, 11:33 am

  11. Winston Warfield:

    Stan,
    I spent a year in Vietnam in the infantry (I Corps, Quang Tri, 1st Bde., 5th Inf. Div.), and had already been “infected” with the organic and local essence of resistance to the war. No M-L party formation with an “advance line” brought me to it. It was direct experience and observation, with a little background reading (Malcolm X, some Marxism). Resistance was truly “local” (one’s own unit), and usually found expression in countercultural modes. Refusal to respect officers; long hair; the music you listened to; if you were white (like me), hanging out with black brothers, etc., etc. It had organizational impact when I declined an order/invitation go out on ambush with our mustang brigade S3; the authority crisis passed without me seeing the wrong side of a stockade (I was a Spec./5 at the time). He knew my disgust with the war, and agreed with some of it; we had had a few verbal flareups already. I recently finished “Soldiers in Revolt”, by Cortwright, and was astonished at how widespread and effective was the resistance on the inside. It was huge, and had grown over several years, by the piling up of myriad local acts. There were heroic organizers at some bases, but they weren’t M-L “outsiders”; they were grunts, too.
    After I got out, VVAW hit the streets like a 20-megaton meme, and I joined immediately. To my knowledge, VVAW grew out of local experience and wasn’t the organizational creature of some M-L central committee, either. It was only later that M-L formations, lusting for credibility, infiltrated and started their games.
    I experienced some of the same frustrations you have articulated with the M-L firmament, having gone through that particular wringer for a time. I ended up quitting in disgust with the sectarianism, the lack of any reality-checking, the requirement for ideological conformity, etc., etc.
    You have written an important piece in this critique. Marxism is not a religion, and emerged at a point in history when its discoveries were progressive. It was not the last word. Feminism, the environmental movement, etc., needn’t ride parallel rails, but continue to do so because the “canon”, as you say, is still worshipped (reified?). The notion of “unlimited growth”, shared by both capitalism and socialism, has to find its way into the dustbin of history, for starters.
    Keep writing. You have something to say.

    30 November 2006, 12:23 pm

  12. Stan:

    There you have it, Howard. Chomsky is actually a Bukuninist or some such thing; but I saw his faltering with his approach to Haiti. Describe what is wrong, then castigate the people who take up the struggle in earnest when it gets messy.

    The problem with the left, as laid out above, imo, is structural, and the structure determines the practice, and the practice shapes the reflection on practice into an ideology.

    Marx was against ideology.

    Praxis, for those who may find this arcane is a 50-cent word meaning reflective practice. Reflection without action is sterile. Practice without reflection is chaotic. Praxis is the notion of these two artificial divisions organically linked.

    Two reasons, imho, that the organizational forms fail are (1) the actual system is still stable enough to survive, and (2) we cling to the illusion that we can “take it on” head-to-head as it were.

    Cribbing again from the late Mark Jones:

    How will it happen?

    It will happen amid a general and catastrophic crisis of capitalist commodity production or it will not happen at all. The point of planning will then be transparently, abundantly clear to every survivor on the planet: planning will be, not to produce, but to conserve and repair damaged ecosystems, to ameliorate the catastrophic aftermath of the demise of capitalism and its prior exhaustion of all the great ‘commons’ — the commons such as land (19th century, beginning with the English enclosure movement, ending with Africa); the intellectual and cultural heritage of all previous civilisations; water; all that is under the land or seabed; and in our own time, the last great common — DNA, the pillaging of which also embraces the deconstruction of the human genus.

    Mark’s point that the system itself has to unravel is not original. It came directly from Marx. And Mark Jones was constantly in trouble with other Marxists for pissing all over their pretty schemas and stating obvious but painful truths.

    So, to me at least, the primary question becomes one of organization, but there must be organizations that are stable in the Prigogenian sense, that is, embedded — with all the limitations that imposes on organizing. And by organization, I don’t mean book clubs or periodic coffee klatches or toy Internationals. I mean networks of durable human relationships that are actively preparing for and addressing the concrete manifestations of said crisis and on-going collapse.

    This is obviously not the same as Mark’s suggestion about the eventual necessity for global planning, about which I believe he is absolutely correct. The more immediate question is how do we get there from here… I mean, really? We can’t just name a series of fantasy milestones, when we haven’t given the first thought to what we do tomorrow or next week or next year to get to the first milestone.

    Given my own deep mistrust of the psychic hotliners of schematic Marxism, and my firm belief in unpredictability in complex systems, the key at this stage seems to be facilitating the development of these locally-embedded strucutres, mere oases for the time being, into islands of resistance culture. Do we call it that? Not if we want anyone to participate.

    This is really the main question we’ll be addressing when we open Insurgent American, a subscription website, (The date is still fuzzy, but we’ll announce it here, and publish The Insurgent’s Handbook there.).

    We need a practice that simultaneously creates the networks and the culture, an anti-commodity culture, a cooperative culture, and that also serves as a broad, decentralized laboratory to figure out the hard practical solutions to the incoming crisis. So we need to try and understand what that crisis may look like, and not in purely apocolyptic terms (as malthusians are wont to do, because they are statisticians).

    That’s why ideas like feminist food praxis and such are intriguing to me. The preoccupation with food is universal. Eating together is an integral part of human bonding.

    It’s also why figuring out how to get off the grid (that is, outside the system to the degree possible) is not a survivalist method, but a way to start staking out literal independent zones that serve the same purpose that the rural hinterlands did for the Chinese revolutionaries. The reason we don’t need the True Revolutionary Party, aside from the fact that it is an illusion, is that people in Rochester are not facing the same circumstances and people as the people in Birmingham or San Pedro.

    So my simple suggestion for what to do, aside from what we are already doing — which is plenty — is start small and work on things like food independence, or establishing local independent media, or community gardens, or building community around women’s shelters, etc etc etc.

    No reason to invent the wheel. As an indigenous Nations organizer from New Mexico told me once, we (whoever that is) don’t need to organize people. All people are already organized. We just have to find out where, and show up.

    30 November 2006, 1:06 pm

  13. Victoria:

    I always learn from you Stan, thanks very much for your analysis. Not that I felt drawn to commit to Marxism at any time, but I do like one of his questions and use it many times when there seems to be too much hype - “Who benefits?” Sometimes it is obvious, white men, usually. Sometimes the surface hype is that “people” benefit, say with Welfare Deform, uh, Reform, or Trickle Down Economics. What has had me puzzled for a long time is that when the answer seems so obvious - who benefits from the government bailing our hedge fund investors to the tune of billions of dollars - not so much as a ripple of protest ensues, except among a handful of people like the folk who read your blog.

    Patriarchy and capitalism are so closely entwined that the death of one will be the death of the other. It has been encouraging over the years to learn of your growth as a human being and a feminist, though I sure do wish your experience could be more widespread among the men of the world! How about making all men take charge of infants for the next two years while women go out to do the “important” work of earning money? We will quickly find that any work men do IS the important work. Personally, I think the time of the Goddess is coming again, and you may interpret that as the Gaia theory or Mother Nature taking back her own after us human parasites have annoyed her just too far to be ignored any longer.

    I dont think there can be any mass movements without local movements. The issues facing localities, while similar on the surface, can be very different and certainly the approaches to solving them are various. From my work with a Haitian organization that works with grassroots groups, the first thing you do is listen! With respect! And include everyone in decision making! Sounds kind of democratic but I dont want to go out on a limb here. People know what their problems are and know how to solve them - no need for outside experts or evaluations or commissions or more study! Talk to the experts, the people themselves.

    If we remember Friere, one of the first things people who have lived under oppression do, is oppress those they feel are “under” them. What do we mean by “working class”? People who we may classify that way probably think of themselves as middle class, and think they do not share the concerns of those who they think of as working class, even though economically they may not be earning a middle class wage. We know from repeated experience that people vote against their own self-interests if they think they may get some benefits trickled on them. NOT that I think Bush was ever actually elected, but still, it seems people didnt care enough that he wants to privatize social security and kill their children in multiple ways - war in South West Asia, “war” on drugs, limiting their educational prospects through “All Children left Behind” or gutting nutritional and medical programs.

    Enough - I applaud your efforts always and wish that more people could actualize their experiences so honestly.

    30 November 2006, 2:58 pm

  14. Louis Proyect:

    For people interested in my critique of “Marxism-Leninism”, go here:

    http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/organization.htm

    I want to respond to Stan’s obviously very important statement but I need some time to digest it fully.

    30 November 2006, 3:54 pm

  15. Curiouser:

    A non-doctrine related question, Stan: what prompted you to write this? And does it mean you’re renouncing membership in Freedom Road?

    30 November 2006, 4:17 pm

  16. Stan:

    Just as it says. I am without political affiliation.

    30 November 2006, 4:39 pm

  17. onto:

    This is exactly what anarchists, anti-authoritarians, and non-heirarchical autonomous social movement activists have been saying for years! Read David Graeber’s short book “Fragments of An Anarchist Anthropology” (online here: http://prickly-paradigm.com/paradigm14.pdf ) for a short primer on what anarchism actually means, which is basically, exactly what you’re saying. Fighting for localized, networking independence and autonomy, understanding the intersections of oppressions and not privileging any revolutionary subject or class above another, taking seriously ecology and energy, against democratic centralism, against the illusion of the ‘mass’, and more. Whether you see it or not, you’re critiques and projections are ‘anarchistic’, which is really a good thing, since anarchist or anarchistic social movements and organizing has been resurgent, strong, successful, vibrant, practical, self-critical, and exciting.

    30 November 2006, 4:48 pm

  18. Legume Sam:

    Kees van der Pijl describes the Soviet Union as follows:

    The Soviet Union has posed the most serious challenge to the pre-eminence of the West in modern history. It not only mobilized a large population and a vast territory rich in resources; in addition, the state class pushed the contender state posture to its logical limit, as a state socialism with a planned economy. (p. 216, Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq

    Van der Pijl describes the history of capitalism as the history of two basic state formations: 1) the “Lockean heartland,” the dominant state formation (as a guarantor of the capitalist class) which, for van der Pijl, began in England with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and 2) the various “contender states,” which typically have employed autocratic methods (in the spirit of political theory as laid out by Thomas Hobbes, thus “Hobbesian”) in order to resist “peripheralization” by capital’s tendencies to world-domination. (See Chapter 3 of Transnational Classes and International Relations for elaboration.)

    Thus we might take the above assessment of the Soviet Union as fitting into this history. The Soviet Union was a contender state — thus its resistance to capital took authoritarian forms, as (within the context of global domination) contender states generally must “catch up” in industrial terms with the “Lockean heartland,” which had all of the advantages of imperial exploitation at its disposal. Contender states, moreover, had to cope with populations that had been subject to capitalist discipline to a lesser degree than the “Lockean heartland,” thus their imposition of authoritarian forms of what we might still call “capitalist discipline” was an adaptive feature of their various “catch up” efforts. Contender states which dared engage the “Lockean heartland” in global combat lost; thus Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Hitler lost their wars.

    The Marxist-Leninist parties IMHO borrowed whatever legitimacy they claimed to have from the fact of the Soviet Union’s existence. They may have claimed adherence to “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism,” but such an ideology rested upon the rivalry between the various other “Marxist-Leninist” states (China, Albania, Romania) and the Soviet Union itself.

    Thus, we might conclude, “Marxism-Leninism” appropriates the insights of Marx, only to use said insights in defense of the creation and maintenance of contender states. What points to the obsolescence of said doctrines is, obviously, the disappearance of “Marxist-Leninist” states around the world, but also the spread of capitalist discipline throughout the preponderance of human societies. The Maoists may still lurk in the corners of Peru and Nepal, but this points to their isolation. The US, the “Lockean heartland” of the era of populist Keynesianism, is becoming more and more “Hobbesian” with the increasingly authoritarian character of its government; the “contender states” are becoming more powerful by the day, and the crises spawned by neoliberalism, the last stage of capitalist discipline, get worse each decade.

    As Stan and others have pointed out, any revolution in this era will precipitate as the result of a “general and catastrophic crisis of capitalist commodity production,” quoting Mark Jones. Simply put, the world will at that point have had enough of capitalist discipline per se, and that then we can expect a revolt against capitalist discipline at all levels.

    Stan suggests actions such as “getting off the grid” — it may be of use to broaden this into a general call to reassert the right to live off of the land, against the general state of enclosure with which capitalism was imposed upon the world’s nations. It may also be useful to call for the general abandonment of what Marx called the “circulation sphere,” since its main ruses (especially law and economics) lie in capitalist ideology.

    30 November 2006, 5:10 pm

  19. James M:

    the key at this stage seems to be facilitating the development of these locally-embedded strucutres, mere oases for the time being, into islands of resistance culture. Do we call it that? Not if we want anyone to participate.

    I recently began to tell a friend about the Vets’ Gulf March, whereupon she interjected that she doubted the efficacy of this form of protest … something I doubted at the time, too, and still doubt, if all we’re talking about is marching and carrying signs and shouting slogans. But I explained to her that it actually taught us all something about spreading the meme of our resistance culture in what Audrey called “negative spaces” (the artist’s metaphor applied to social geography) — places abandoned in the wake of disaster and capital flight. Places like Slidell, LA, where we stayed at Bayou Liberty Relief Camp. Veterans for Peace, IVAW, and others moved in there to fill the void of human assistance left by the government’s neglect, and to my amazement (having grown up in the region,) the locals came to be on our side, and were even proclaiming our values.

    My question is this: We have demonstrated an ability to embed ourselves and begin to incubate socialistic structures in these negative spaces, where previous social structures had broken down due to inability to cope with disaster … is it not possible that we’re creative enough to also do it in less receptive places, like complacent suburban enclaves, as well? It would have to be *extremely* covert in terms of ultimate motives, but the first thing that comes to mind would be something like a community food garden that would invite locals to participate in producing their own sustenance, rather than relying on the industrial-ag and Safeway model. And perhaps organizing some kinds of events through churches, or somesuch thing. I don’t know, I fear I’ve got stars in my eyes, but it seems there is a general (submerged) yearning, even among complacent suburbanites, to escape their disaffection and atomization … and there’s got to be a way to exploit it, in the best possible sense.

    Am I dreaming?

    30 November 2006, 5:22 pm

  20. DeAnander:

    I am pleased to offer a comment by my buddy rootlesscosmo — he of the sadly impaired Safari browser which cannot handle this site for some reason. all that follows is his text not mine:

    I can’t imagine how it is possible to deny that there is not now nor has there been for a very long time a working class movement worthy of the name in the United States (a ‘class-for-itself’ movement). Does anyone disagree? Does someone want to correct me on the half-century long decline in union membership, the decline in the number of strike-days, etc.? Does someone want to let me know about the thousands of Anglo workers who organized their workplaces to walk out last May Day in solidarity with Latino and immigrant protests?

    I agree completely but I’d extend the scope of this point, as also of this one:

    Building a socialist movement for the 21st Century means starting from the premise, and very palpable reality, that the socialist movement of the second half of 20th Century, viewed as a whole, largely DID NOT WORK. And it especially did not work in the places where Marxist theory says it was SUPPOSED to work, in the advanced capitalist countries with a fully-developed working class that is the big majority of the population.

    I think it’s in order to ask whether a “class-for-itself” movement, in the sense postulated by Marx, has ever existed anywhere. In none of the countries where Communist Parties came to power was there anything much like this ideal-type movement, except in the Eastern sector of Germany (where the Communists came to power under the guns of a victorious occupying army) and in Czechoslovakia, where a real mass Communist Party, which had won a comfortable plurality of the votes in the 1948 election, then seized complete power (almost certainly at the behest of the USSR) and proscribed its political rivals, transforming itself from a fairly honest participant in democratic life to a hated elite whose next major activity was to conduct a monstrous show trial of many of its leading members. (The best source on this, I think, is Artur London’s “The Confession” — he was one of the few accused to escape with his life.)

    The classic mass, working-class-based CPs of the developed capitalist world (Italy, France, Greece, post-dictatorship Spain and Portugal) were, and their inheritors still are, essentially Left Social-Democrats, leading trade union movements (which are *by definition* not revolutionary organizations) and forming Parliamentary blocs or junior coalition partners in governments based on programs of reform. (This is why the custodians of Marxist purism denounce them; it’s also why those custodians remain politically negligible.)

    Which is another way of stating my proposed extension of the second quote (from Joaquin Bustelo) above: the socialist movement of the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century DID NOT WORK either, if by “work” we mean “overthrow capitalism and inaugurate workers’ power over a fully socialized economy and social life,” or even “win a majority of workers to a practical revolutionary program at the level of tactics.”) The Bolshevik Revolution — as pretty much everyone knew at the time, including Lenin — was not a fulfillment of Marx’s (sketchy) prediction but on the contrary a direct challenge to it; the consolidation of “socialism in one country” was (as Trotsky pointed out) not a fulfillment of Lenin’s prediction that the revolution could survive only on condition that the workers of capitalist Europe, especially Germany, made successful revolutions of their own, but on the contrary a response to that prediction’s failure to come true.

    I think we’re only fretting over how much of Marx to retain because we’re still standing amid the remains of a historical peculiarity, namely that real (trade union) movements and real (social-reformist) parties, headed in the main by Left intellectuals, latched onto the ideas of Marx and Engels as a “scientific” validation that their efforts would have some final, contradiction-transcending triumph — they got very angry when Eduard Bernstein suggested that this was a distraction (at best) and that the only sure thing was struggle, on into the indefinite future. Marx’s theory of value in Vol. I has to be laid aside, in Vol. III, in order to try to analyze how actual capitalist economies (not capitalism in the abstract) function; the labor theory is there, I believe, not because it’s empirically accurate but because it lays a “scientific” foundation for the theory of crises which in turn supports the vision of revolutionary change. (The same goes for the even less well-founded view that capitalist productive relations become “a brake” on the development of the productive forces.)

    Lenin’s theory of the state is crudely reductive except as enriched by Gramsci, who laid the theoretical basis for a political practice — that of the post-Stalin CPI — that was *not* revolutionary (as, again, the Italian ultra-Left kept saying, though as events showed they had no real revolutionary strategy of their own, only a set of dogmatic formulas about “autonomy” and a practice that repelled most workers by its evident contempt for democracy. And as for the “vanguard party,” I think Stan lets the air out that balloon quite effectively.

    In short, I think that *even on its own terms* — and leaving aside the way it hypostasizes one social contradiction while ignoring or minimizing others, and the way it’s committed to an unsustainable view of the relations between humanity and the limits of its physical environment, and the impossibility of reaching agreement on what it is, and the really terrible crimes that have been committed in its name — Marxism really doesn’t hold together. Like Stan, I’m not sorry for the time I spent in a (soi-disant) Marxist-Leninist group, in my case the CPUSA; like Stan, my greatest debt to it is that I met brave, smart, extraordinary people, some of whom really understood how our society is soaked in racism (though not how it’s also saturated by patriarchy) and were serious about trying to fight that. I wasted a fair amount of energy and time — going to pointless meetings, defending or excusing the glaring defects of “existing socialism” — but who’s to say I would have spent that time and energy more usefully if I’d taken another path? I might very well have frittered it away at the poolhall.

    At all events I don’t have an alternative revolutionary strategy, or comprehensive analysis, to put in Marxism’s place; partly that’s because I haven’t got a tenth of Marx’s learning and originality and application, partly also because I don’t foresee a revolution of any kind and I distrust Theories of Everything such as Marxism tried to be. I talked to our friend S B the other evening… It was a very interesting conversation, in the course of which she said quite matter-of-factly that she — I imagine she’s probably 31 or 32 now — fully expects to live long enough to see the tide of cruelty and horror and violence and misery, the condition that most of the world’s people are already living in, reach her still-sheltered life. This makes me feel really bad, as I told her, because our generation, including her own parents — lifelong teachers’ union activists — really thought we were going to leave a better world for her and her contemporaries, and we failed. She answered that that’s why she’s decided never to have any kids. I think this is as good a summary of where we are as any I’ve come across, and I think Marx is no more help in dealing with it than Saint Anselm.

    30 November 2006, 5:34 pm

  21. Guy Montag:

    Stan,

    Good to hear you’ve joined the club of apostates to Marxism. Folks like Simone Weil and Dwight MacDonald came to the same conclusions you did back in the 1940s. Marx’s analysis of capitalism is valuable. But, I never liked the idea of “democratic centralism”. Later, I discovered the “anarchists” (e.g. Proudon, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Ed Abbey) who advocated decentralism and self-governing communities. Maybe thats utopian. But hell, industrial civilization is utopian! (especially considering the implications of global warming and peak oil). Wendell Berry is a fine advocate of local eonomy and community and well worth reading (try “What are People for?” or “Sex, Community & Economy).

    Guy Montag, Engine Co.451

    30 November 2006, 8:19 pm

  22. DeAnander:

    meanwhile I am going to say something nice for the only actually-existing socialist state that still looks anything like a socialist state, and I’ll let old Fidel say it for himself (in his 80th birthday speech the brevity of which is testimony to his frail health).

    A few days ago, the prestigious organization World Wildlife Foundation, based in Switzerland and considered the most important NGO in the world to monitor global environment, acknowledged that the set of measures implemented by Cuba to protect the environment made it the only country on Earth to meet the minimum requirements for sustainable development.

    emphasis mine. note those important words, only country and minimum requirements. wanna read ‘em again?

    Cuba it seems to me is one of the the great riddles of our time. if we understood how it survived/transcended the doctrinaire socialism that decayed into such aberration in Russia, China, NK; how Cuba flourishes in its multiracial diversity instead of devolving into interethnic strife; how one of the lighter-handed dictatorships on the planet maintains relative order and cooperation in a population severely stressed over 50 years by revolution, blockade, peak oil… we might understand far better how the rest of the human race might survive this coming century.

    does Cuba meet the minimum sustainability requirement because it is a socialist state? (that is, the future and the commons are a legitimate part of planning and planning is a legitimate part of governing) … or does it succeed because it is Cuba, and the ideology is just a veneer on some deeper historical or cultural pattern that gravitates towards community and survival?

    Cuba, Tikopia, Gaviotas, Curitiba, Mondragon: riddles of our time, Rosetta Stones which we’d do well to study as we contemplate the final days of the fossil empires (in every sense). anyone want to add some more examples of (at least local) success?

    30 November 2006, 8:32 pm

  23. Jonny:

    Back at age 21, I was a full time activist in Vancouver, Canada. Attending Communist Party of Canada (CPC) meetings, I was intellectualy and politically attracted yet ultimately repelled by the culture inside the CPC: their young member was 38, and the rest were 65 plus. The principle of democratic centralism further pushed me away cuz I didn’t want to be just an arm instituting policies from above(which were then halking papers, wooing union members and general recruiting). Although I desired strongly to be part of an organization, I found none that seemed worth joining at that time.

    My experience + that of at least 20 people like myself who went thru the same, supports Stan’s thought. Rather than problems of mystified, anti-communism innoculated, overworked or confused masses presenting new challenges to recruiting, high quality potential party components such as my comrades and I were finding parties of that type uninhabitable, despite our initial attraction to the many good points the party had.

    I did become demoralized by age 24 by the repeated tragedies I witnessed: my beloved and electrifying political groups were being destroyed from the inside via repeated fuckups by patriarchally thinking male leadership. Of my 3 heroes who abused their leadership positions by having sex with much younger female members, 2 destroying their marriages in the process, all 3 irreparibly damaged their credibility as leaders, particularly among the female group members.
    After each instance, each group lost key people, limped along for a bit, then dissolved. Who needs COINTELPRO simulations when our leadership is this messed up?

    30 November 2006, 8:57 pm

  24. Sololeum:

    Methinks there is an over intelectualisation of the issues, which are infact very simple.
    1. Most people now are employed in the “Superstructure”, in admin and personal service industries, and many more in non-essential industries.
    2. Non-essential industries and the superstructure is fueled not by people but by fossil fuels - in the smaller scale past it was fueled by sun vide the grass.
    3. Our system is based on growth and is now hitting its straps as sources of oil and other fossil fuels are not providing more fuel…
    4. Soon we begin the decline and we have to decide on the type of society that will replace ours, and how will we eat.
    5. I see Stans article as the beginings of an eco - anarchy movement, that will only succeed if it is tied to the earth. The alternative is Fascism - see how in England the Right are planning for Peak Oil….for only a strong centrist government could bring about the Cuban model for food production - the only one possible for a mass society.

    Yes Stan to avoid Fascism we must move to small scale, local food and necessities production systems that fit well with the earth, and that means abandoning the current mass society.

    I for one have moved to a rural area, and am learning to provide food from the land within an organic land use system. I advocate the lifeboat model - Arks and hence the development of an Arkadian society. Living simply is just alot nicer!!!

    30 November 2006, 9:15 pm

  25. Antonio:

    The radical right is dancing for joy. But I don’t know why. It is a sad thing to see here and I don’t know how to address it. As an African-American revolutionary I never saw Marxism as a doctrine or a religion for me so I guess there is no delusion for me to get over here. As one who came up in the struggle for Black Liberation I remain aware of the need for a revolutionary party in this country. As a gay male who has some of the privilege of being male but also the experience of hetrosexism and homo hatred I know all to well the need for the struggle against patriarchy and all forms of oppression. One century in the struggle against capitalism is a short time. We learn from our mistakes and our victories. We persevere in a revolutionary love. Stan I wish your journey to this point could have been a little more transparent. I don’t understand but I still love you.

    30 November 2006, 9:23 pm

  26. DeAnander:

    it’s not just the god-botherers…  [sorry, that was in response to Jonny]

    30 November 2006, 9:32 pm

  27. Stan:

    The right can jump all it wants… all three of them who even ever stop by here. My contempt for white supremacist capitalist patriarchy remains intact.

    On growing food, etc, I hope we can talk about how to do it in the suburbs. That’s where most of us live, and we can’t just evaporate when things start frazzling on the edges. Burbs off the grid could actually be fine; burbs in crisis are hothouses for fascism.

    That’s why permaculture is so interesting to me.

    Later, we can plow up the strip malls to build suburban community farms.

    30 November 2006, 9:39 pm

  28. Fire Witch:

    At what point do we begin to develop community defense/offense?

    Do you arm from the beginning?

    30 November 2006, 10:22 pm

  29. Stan:

    I have a lot of trepidation about discussing self defense, but we have to say it sometime. The trepidation is that this discussion seems to trigger gun fetishists (and often males generally) to dive in and show how enthusiastic they are about using firearms against human beings… a kind of male dominance display rooted in what Hartsock called the agonal male universe.

    I think gaining control locally of all security issues is part of this; especially getting control of the police. I also think that women need to have access to graduated, multi-dimensinal self-defense training, to ensure that this need and responsibility is uprooted from its traditional gendered division of labor (since the sexual contract, as Pateman notes, is protection for obedience). Defense is not about firearms, though it can — under specific circumstances — require them. It is an integrated, multi-layered, multi-dimensional task, that thinks about how environments are structured, and about how relations are structured. It can be physical barrier, legal, social camouflage and deception measures, various organized forms of vigilance and intelligence, trained situational awareness, etc etc. And it can — in the case of an individual woman, for example, be graduated… martial arts training, situational awareness training, small non-lethal weapons, pepper-spray, etc, up to an including firearms.

    Plain conflict resolution and de-escalation are undervalued in this society, but they are forms of community self-defense.

    When to begin? I think that depends. A cohesive community can begin immediately, and how is determined by situation.

    One thing I am clear on, it has to be organic to the community, and accountable to it. Otherwise, we just end up with thugs.. or cops. (I’m really mad at cops tonight.)

    30 November 2006, 11:15 pm

  30. Elaina:

    Shit. I think my head just exploded. Maybe I just really need to learn to take stuff more lightly.

    30 November 2006, 11:19 pm

  31. howard:

    To Rootless Cosmo (through Denander) – I have the Safari problem on this site too. I am going to try to get around it by writing up my comments in say Word or notepad and then pasting them in to the comment window. If it works for me maybe it will for you too (my other posts have been from my computer at my job – accounting for the at times furtive tone) — so if you see this post, then you could try the technique.

    To Denander on the request for other positive examples: how about the Peace Communities in Colombia – campesinos who’ve refused to be displaced by the armed actors in the half-century-old civil war. They’ve come to a lot of the things discussed in this thread naturally, just working out on the fly what they needed to do to survive, keep their humanity, and assure the best possible outcome for their children. For instance, they’ve developed technologies of food independence (in their rural tropical setting – they call it “soberania alimentaria”) because they were under economic blockade; they’ve worked out an assertive radical, anarchic pacifist stance in a situation that’s probably almost as violent as Iraq or Darfur or the Congo (for instance, they completely moved their village, undergoing several months of extreme physical hardship, when the Colombian government insisted on putting a police station in the middle of the town); and they have networked between geographically disparate communities to pool traditional and other forms of knowledge with the Universidad Campesina (btw, I noticed that the afro and euro campesino peace communities refer to the indigenous communities as “elder siblings” (herma@s mayores). I heard one of their members say with quiet emotion “ellos [the governing elites] siempre creian que los campesinos eramos no mas unos brutos. Ahora pueden ver que estaban equivocados.” [they always thought that we country people were just a bunch of dumb brutes. Now they can see that they were wrong.] And btw they aren’t doctrinaire about any of this. For instance, they’ve refused to have anything to do with the Colombian state – but only with the repressive aspects of such. So that means no dealings with police or army or with the justice system (this latter because when they reported atrocities to the authorities, the people doing the reporting got disappeared). But they would accept a health clinic (well, in principle anyway, since there’s little chance Bogota would come through on something like that – as they say “pedimos medicos y nos mandan soldados y pedimos maestros y nos mandan policias” [we ask for doctors and they send us soldiers and we ask for teachers and they send us police].

    To Stan and others on local activity, food independence, permaculture, the suburbs: my wife and I had been thinking along these lines for several years. In April we found and moved into a pretty cheap house on a whole acre of land in an unincorporated suburban area with the intent of experimenting long term with food independence (specifically looking at permaculture techniques) in a suburban setting to see what ultimately could come out of it, both with the land and with some as yet undefined community. Four blocks to the south begins a significant (mostly Mexican) immigrant trailer community. Our immediate surroundings are more traditional suburban dwellers. On the other side of a large busy road at the back of our property are housing developments with racially and ethnically mixed working class people. Opportunities for community or tinder for fascism – we shall see.

    We are moving slowly, but always trying to accomplish some little thing every day, inventing as we go along, and we would like to know more about the American Insurgent web site Stan mentioned.

    1 December 2006, 1:25 am

  32. d:

    It’s funny reading Stan and Joaquin’s disquisitions on “patriarchy” - a concept anti-racist and Black feminists have long challenged, particularly in the ahistorical and essentializing ways it is too often applied (which is unfortunately just how S&J avail themselves of it)…

    MODERATOR’S NOTE: Let’s see… bell hooks refered to the system, over and over, as “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” I just wrote a book on gender, and in it quoted quite a few Black and anti-racist feminists, as well as Latina and post-colonial feminists from the periphery. They all seemed pretty much convinced of the existence of systemic male power over women, whatever linguistic marker you want to attach to it. The book also has a pretty comprehensive critique of anti-essentialism. The editor for that book is a regular here, and a writer herself.

    Don’t drop in with these anonymous, elliptical, and inaccurate little jabs, when you won’t name your sources and give an example or two. This is very post-modern in the same sense as the Bush administration, that does the same thing. You construct your own simplistic narrative in the hopes that it the narrative might actualize itself, yours being to trump the notion of patriarchy with an imputed racial critique to place a wedge between “feminists” and feminists of color… as if there were no overlap here.

    1 December 2006, 1:32 am

  33. RedDan:

    Stan,

    First of all, it’s been a long strange trip, eh? (Do you remember the first time we met, and E.M. confronted you and asked if you were a cop??)

    Regarding Tralin and Stotsky (ha!) It seems to me that the Statist Dictator has much less to offer than the Rootless Cassandra…the one offers temporal power at the expense of progress, soul, and potential; while the other offers the immediate prospect of howling in the wilderness, but rich ground for pondering future directions and ways out of self-erected traps…

    The wonder of Marxist analysis is exactly that it can encompass works like those of Foner, or CLR James, or Fanon, or Luxemburg. The horror of Marxist parties and groupings is that if you get 10 Marxists in a room, you will immediately witness the formation of 14 political parties, NONE of which have any chance of actualizing or reifying the veritable torrent of verbiage sure to ensue.

    It’s democratic centralism that no longer makes a lick of sense to me.

    Frankly it NEVER made sense to me, and still does not. I understand the need for party discipline of some sort, but that particular version of it is so noxious, so open and easy to use for material gain and power games, so stifling, I simply cannot imagine that such a system would EVER flourish except under conditions requiring the need to maintain a cellular, highly authoritarian control (like secret police and etc).

    My issue with Marxism (the doctrine, the organizational model, etc) is not that Marxism (the interpetive method) doesn’t explain a lot of stuff. It damn well does; and that’s why the ruling class still hates it. The problem is, it doesn’t explain everything, including a lot of stuff that has a real influence on the political work we do. Yet that pretension is there among Marxist orgs, that they have gotten hold of the final Grand Unified Theory, which is treated more as an article of religious faith than “science,” which acolytes also claim M-L is… “the science of Marxism Leninism.”

    Well put! First of all, I am a practicing, professional scientist…and Scientific Socialism is not even close to being scientific. Science in its pure form involves observation, hypothesizing, testing, and reconfiguring the hypotheses based on failures.

    Since when has any Marxist grouping actually sat back and said “Hmmmm, this and that doctrine, theory, ideological line are failures, we therefore need to reconfigure how we operate and view this or that situation!!” How many have done that? Like…zero?

    As a resident of the American South, I can say pretty much categorically that there ain’t gonna be no mass movement down here that don’t get prayed over. During the final struggle to break legal US Apartheid, there were preachers out front and praying at every turn. I don’t know if angelic postal workers were carrying the messages through the barrier between us and infinity; but the praying sure kept the prayer-makers steady in some perilous times. Being a results-based person, I’m not gonna argue with that.

    I would go even further than that…I would say that no mass, populist, class-based, popular political rising or grouping will take place without hefty admixtures of religion, racism, sexism, nationalism, ignorance, crudity, and other things that so many of us here spend so much time fighting or rejecting or criticizing.

    Will we therefore refuse to act, refuse to help, and refuse to participate?

    It’s a tough question, and it runs parallel to the Electoral question regarding whether or not to vote for a Democrat…well, it seems to me that you nailed that one a while back, and that the same lessons should apply.

    No reason to invent the wheel. As an indigenous Nations organizer from New Mexico told me once, we (whoever that is) don’t need to organize people. All people are already organized. We just have to find out where, and show up. (from the comment about getting off the grid and etc)…

    More than just show up…we (meaning “intelligentia”) have unique and extremely specialized skills that are in desperate shortage among so many of the groups that are ALREADY organized. Writing for impact. Sloganeering. Web design. Communications, Desk Top Publishing, Data analysis, Information search and retrieval, Pig-speak decoding, Graphic Design, and so on and so forth….we need to more than show up, we need to HELP. We need to put ourselves at the disposal of the people that are already out there, doing what needs to be done…we don’t lead, they do. We don’t know what “must be” they do…but we have skills and training and tools at our disposal that many do not.

    1 December 2006, 1:48 am

  34. Janet W:

    Wow… this is a Major Statement, and I’m still digesting it. I’m sure I’ll re-read it. A few non-intellectual comments at the end of a long day, on points that no one has yet addressed:

    1) Taking care of a baby. Good for you, Stan, for taking on this difficult work, and I immediately thought back to my baby-caring days of long ago, and my heart went out to you… though you are not suffering from depression, as I was, so maybe it’s a little easier for you, harder in other ways, maybe. Your grandchildren are fortunate to have your love and capable attention. Caring for children is the most humbling, real, dynamic, demanding work, and any politics that does not recognize and honor it (not falsely, but truly) is not worthy of our commitment.

    2) My senior thesis in college was on bread riots in Milan, around 1900, led by poor women, and their influence on Italian politics. A lot of politics can be reduced to these questions: who’s eating what, and how reliably? and what are the women doing and feeling?

    3) Cubans dance. I mean, REALLY dance. What does that do for social solidarity, gender relations, ability to be flexible? (Of course, that doesn’t mean automatic virtue; Cubans in Florida dance too.) We need to go with the flow and move with the groove… seriously.

    4) I went to a talk by an ANSWER “leader” in SF in October. I had never been and was curious. He went on about labor history in the 30s, and his own history as a young Marxist in Rochester, NY, although the talk was supposedly about the possible effects of the November election on Iraq! Some was mildly interesting, but it was all so terribly dated, so lame. The only good thing was I spent some time with an interesting acquaintance and after the talk we chatted with a few other interesting folks… like a church where you put up with the boring sermons to get to the gossip over good coffee and cake later… I won’t go again.

    You’ll find another political home, Stan, or make one, outside on this online one, that is… Hope I do, too.

    1 December 2006, 3:24 am

  35. RedDan:

    I feel somewhat compelled to comment on a lot of the “off-the-grid” comments and discussion…

    I grew up in an off-the-grid, semi-communal group.

    My parents moved to Maine in the late 1960’s, bought a farm, and lived as close to subsistence as you can get in the modern day.

    When I was a child we grew all our own vegetables, raised our own meat (chickens, pigs, cows, sheep, etc), made our own yogurt, butter, cheese; canned and pickled and froze and root-cellared vegetables, smoked the meats, and so on and so forth.

    We cut our own firewood, we traded labor on neighbors farms (similar folks, different focus) hefting hay bales, bringing in harvests, canning foods…in return for labor in kind, in return for the use of tools and equipment, or in return for raw materials. One example is that we would help neighbor X with harvest and hay, and in return we would receive some of the bounty, and we also received a large alottment of wool. We carded and spun the wool, and we knitted or wove the thread into cloth that was made into blankets, clothes, etc. We made our own shirts and etc for a while. We set up raw material production businesses - ours was a shingle mill, and we cut the trees, sawed up the bolts, ran the mill, and dealt with the waste…sold or traded the shingles to builders or homeowners, again for labor/materials in kind, or for cash to pay for the things we could not or did not provide for ourselves - electricity, gasoline, grains that did not grow in Maine, and so on.

    In short, I grew up inside the “off-the-grid” life that many are discussing here.

    My experience was wonderful - it was a great way to grow up, and I would not trade it for the world, but it has immense costs and has, in some way, a tremendous detrimental impact.

    Here’s why:

    1) That lifestyle is an incredible, intense, amazing amount of work. I would venture to state that living that way for a year is more work than most people do in ten years. If you get sick? If you get injured? Well…you’re in deep, deep trouble, and not just because you lose your sick days or maybe lose your job…but because you literally will have not enough food for the winter, and you will have no cash to get you by.

    2) You are living extremely, totally, and intensely close to the bone. Bad weather, crop blight, animals eating your stock or your garden, sickness in the animals kills or renders them sterile or inedible and you have no meat, no stock, and no way to insure the next year’s stock…unless you can buy more. But without the produce to sell or trade, without the milk/butter/cheese/eggs to eat, sell or trade…you can’t afford to buy that crucial base stock.

    3) Dependence on neighbors and communal style living is the most marvellous way on the planet to live…until there is a dispute about money, food, tools, labor, love, land, or whatever. Then, the same people who made living possible, enjoyable, and easier than going alone…well, now they make your life miserable, they endanger your security…this gets more critical the smaller the community or the “closer to the bone” you live.

    4) “Getting back to our peasant roots” - this became a serious issue in our community for a number of reasons. Living off-the-grid requires working in ways that resemble our historical roots in many aspects. One aspect is the “traditional” division of labor, and the roles of men, women, children, weaker, stronger, dextrous, clumsy, intellectual, non-verbal and so on and so forth. This, needless to say, caused a LOT of tension. Here we had college educated, lower-to-upper middle class men and women taking on roles from 200 years ago. Many, many of them, both men and women, found this refreshing, interesting and rewarding…for a while. But then, WHOA! “here I am, college educated, liberated, feminist, working like a peasant wife from 1740…fuck that noise!” This caused a LOT of tension (I know from very, very intimate experience what happens when the tension between the lifestyle, the project, and the roles played gets nasty. My parents now live on opposite sides of the country, and the same is true of about 80% of the people I grew up with.)

    5) Impact of “getting out” on the places that you get out OF…one of the reasons, IMO, for the chaotic fracturing of the various social progress movements in the late 60’s and early 70’s (Anti-War, Women’s Rights, Black Power, and so on) was that a significant fraction of the “middle class intelligentsia” demographic simply disappeared and “did their own thing”…those people felt that if everyone did the same, then we could simply change the world by living differently. This was, again IMO, an extremely selfish and shortsighted view. To be sure it is one that I, personally, benefitted immensely from! But selfish nonetheless. Not everyone could move, not everyone could afford to move, not everyone had the requisite freedom (financial, temporal, social) to move out…and the people that did move out had skills (see my last post) that were needed to maintain and grow a coherent progressive movement. When they disappeared, perhaps coincidentally, the beginning of the destruction of the various movements began to accelerate. This was both a result of internal tensions AND a result of external opposition (COINTELPRO, for example). Would the results have been different had they all stayed, stayed engaged, and kept fighting? I really do not know, but I have my suspicions that things may have been different. Basically, though, when the shit got real, and bloody (Kent State, Trenton, Watts, Chicago, and etc…) a huge group got scared, got paranoid, and “went back to the land”…and then the early 70’s happened. And then Carter. And then Reagan.

    To sum up, IF people here and in other places are serious about getting off grid, then I would beseech you to make close study of the successes and failures of the “back to the landers” of the late 60’s and early 70’s.

    If you are interested, I can put you in contact with people who are STILL living off the grid, communally and semi-communally, in a variety of settings both rural and urban. Listen to them, find out what they did, and did not do. Check out some of the histories and some of the colossal failures as well, as those might be even more instructive.

    It’s not as easy or simple as it sounds, and there are a huge number of pitfalls, traps, dead ends, and potentially fatal (literally!) problems that can come up.

    In struggle…

    RedDan

    1 December 2006, 5:04 am

  36. RedDan:

    One addendum…

    Living off the grid also has another, somewhat hidden requirement/pre-requisite if you intend that such living will really change the world…

    You have to make it a viable long-term community that grows.

    Which means that you have to make sure that there are people coming into the movement.

    That requires either aggressive recruitment, serious and simultaneous desires on the part of a large group of people (zeitgeist?!), or…lots of children.

    And people have to STAY in that community and KEEP living/working that way, otherwise, it all goes away after one generation.

    Kinda like where I grew up.

    1 December 2006, 5:09 am

  37. Dick R.:

    The sad historical fact is that alternative intentional communities - organized around principles of solidarity, self organization mutual aid, living off the grid and delinking from capitalism have had an abject failure rate in the United States equal if not surpassing ML political formations or structural defiencies. Nothing to cheer about there.

    Nor can we ignore exactly what became of those grassroots organizing projects - rooted in the realities of everyday life - which sought to develop forms of ‘organic’ popular power and succumbed to brutal state repression or coptation and corporate donor capture. Or both.

    Several powerful examples jump to mind — the community survival programs of the the Black Panther Party or the various commumnity initiatives the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union [ http://www.cwluherstory.com/ ] - arguably one of the largest urban radical feminist organizing projects of the 1960-70’s.

    1 December 2006, 5:58 am

  38. Dick R.:

    The sad historical fact is that alternative intentional communities - organized around principles of solidarity, self organization mutual aid, living off the grid and delinking from capitalism have had an abject failure rate in the United States equal if not surpassing ML political formations or structural defiencies. Nothing to cheer about there.

    Nor can we ignore exactly what became of those grassroots organizing projects - rooted in the realities of everyday life - which sought to develop forms of ‘organic’ popular power and succumbed to brutal state repression or coptation and corporate donor capture. Or both.

    Several powerful examples jump to mind — the community survival programs of the Black Panther Party or the various commumnity initiatives the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union [ http://www.cwluherstory.com/ ] - arguably one of the largest urban radical feminist organizing projects of the 1960-70’s.

    1 December 2006, 5:58 am

  39. Jonny:

    DeAnander, I’m not sure what you mean..
    “it’s not just the god-botherers…”

    1 December 2006, 6:51 am

  40. DoC:

    Stan,

    I understand this must have taken some commitment from you.

    My feeling is that you have rightfully identified some limitations of marxism-leninism (and I do believe its a science) but you have generalised these in an overarching rejection of marxism leninism itself.

    You raise a number of problems with traditional marxism-leninism. Many of which I agree with you on.

    The first is the obvious sectarianism of the cults and the limitations of applying a model of organisation which is an idealised reflection of a model used in Russia or China almost 100 years ago. This is a critique of misappropriating the ‘leninist’ model of party organisation.

    The second is that this sectarianism closes the eyes of marxists in these organisations to developments in theory elsewhere. I think that this is very true.

    The third is that marxism fails to fully develop an analysis of patriachy and undercuts the feminist struggle. I think I agree with this as a reflection of concrete reality but I disagree that there is something fundamental about marxism that precludes feminist struggle. To me, understanding the origins of patriachal society is only possible following Engels. Just as understanding the origins of Christianity is only possible following Kautsky. In some sense you stray in this argument from rejecting the inherent monism of marxism. That economic relations and the mode of production defines the superstructure through dialectical change. This to me is the crux of marxism. You admit that is provides us with a useful toolkit but not a useful blueprint. Marx was at pains to not provide a blueprint. The central element of marxist struggle to me is that the people themselves need to drive history. Marxists attempt to analyse that history in relation to the underlying dialectic. The role of marxists in that is akin to a catalyst in a chemical reaction. We are the yeast that makes the bread rise. You don’t seem to deal with this sufficiently. You don’t once deal with dialectical thought or analysis which lies at the heart of marxism. How you can reject marxism without stating a position on dialectical materialism is questionable, I have to say.

    The fourth thing you refer to is the reality that the US working class has become a worldwide labour aristocracy. Or to clarify, there is male white privilege which underpins imperialism. This is not new to marxists. Lenin himself (and Trotsky even) understood this as far back as 1917. Sir Cecil Rhodes admitted that there would be a revolutionary situation in Britain if it weren’t for the empire (and that wasn’t simply economic). Again, we return to the monism of marxism - which I don’t see you undermining in your argument.

    Does this reality undermine marxism? No, of course not. That Marx forecast a revolution in the imperial centres was natural for a man living at a time before industrialised imperialism was fully developed. Like all sciences ideas need development to step forward and describe the present. The ideas you raise in relation to an energy model of imperialist trade relations seems interesting although I haven’t come across it myself yet. There’s certainly a sense to it if it isn’t another case of substituting mathematics for thought. Reformist Social Democracy was largely the philosophy of this privileged layer and had (monist) roots in their economic position in the imperialist hierarchy.

    Once we realise that the US working-class is infected with chauvinism and largely lives at the expense of the third world. The logic of beginning the struggle *where they are at* which is what you seem to suggest is tantamount to proposing tail-ending of their chauvinist agenda. This is the problem with what you appear to be saying which is to do politics where people will react to it.

    Marxist politics cannot proceed from an analysis of where the working class of any particular country are at. It must proceed from an economic value based analysis of social reproduction. That’s really saying we must proceed from a class-based analysis of imperialism and then identify where opportunities exist in our own circumstances to advance the struggle.

    I would think that Marxists in the USA have a duty to orientate themselves to struggle alongside those layers of the US working class who are not part of the imperialist labour aristocracy. That means the dispossessed, disadvantaged, discriminated against and immigrants. That such an engagement can occur within a non-’Leninist’ political structure is obvious.

    Does this constitute a historic break with marxism? To me of course not. I think that you are overgeneralising your disagreements with some aspects of Marxist theory and practice to reject the body of what is the science of human society.

    1 December 2006, 6:53 am

  41. RedDan:

    DoC,

    The problem is that what has potential to be a tool for the scientific analysis and implentation of political organizing for change…is all too susceptible to unscientific, and indeed anti-scientific warping, twisting, and misuse on every scale from the personal interaction to the local group to the nation to the globe.

    The problem in the transformation from analytical method and theory to political organization in many ways mirrors the problems found in the translation from religious philosophy and moral code up to organized religion…hierarchy, patriarchy, power games, and so on and so forth.

    My problem could be boiled down to this:

    Marxist analysis COULD BE scientific, in the same way that cooking is scientific (which it most definitely IS!)…

    But all too often, Marxist Parties are to Marxist Analysis what TV dinners are to cooking.

    1 December 2006, 8:00 am

  42. Stan:

    DoC,

    THE science of human society? This kind of sepcious claim is exactly what I am breaking with… not Marxism, which to “break” with it implies that it’s a church.

    On intentional communities, I think I said they are laboratories… not the final answe