Dear readers and writers,
Please send along any links on the subject of the Peasant’s War.
It was a remarkable time, a remarkable event, and there is much there to help us understand the dynamics of our own dangerous age.
I’m basically opening a file drawer, so anyone who might want to come back to this topic (full disclosure, includes me) has a place where s/he can find lots of links.
Jonas:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/peasant-war-germany/index.htm
8 September 2008, 1:54 pmIowan:
I’ve been doing some research on the Anabaptists and their views om the state and on community (my great-grandparents were Amish) and found the following book useful:
James M. Stayer, The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991. The book is still in print and is available online (if you can stand reading that much from the screen).
From the publisher:
James Stayer argues that Anabaptist community of goods continued the popular radicalism of the early Reformation and the Peasants’ War of 1525. During the German Reformation hundreds of thousands of commoners were mobilized by the hope that established clerical and aristocratic order could be replaced by justice and equity based on the divine law of the Bible. After the defeat of the commoners in the Peasants’ War, some of the most ardent adherents of social and religious reform attempted to achieve these same aspirations by trying to implement the apostolic model of Acts 2 and 4 through the Anabaptists. Thus, as Stayer reveals, the Peasants’ War was an essential formative experience for many of the original leaders of Anabaptism.
In the late 1520s persecution drove many Anabaptists to Moravia where, throughout the sixteenth century, they continued the commoners’ resistance to privilege in church and state. Stayer argues that in Münster, however, where there had been no Peasants’ War and where urban notables were prominent in the Anabaptist leadership, Anabaptist communism was badly corrupted. The historical continuities which Stayer establishes between the Peasants’ War and Anabaptism in Switzerland, south Germany, and Moravia can in part explain this contrast.
8 September 2008, 2:06 pmeoinmonkey:
“The battle of Frankenhausen was fought on 15 May 1525, and was the final act of the Peasants’ War: joint troops of George, Duke of Saxony, Landgraf Philipp I of Hesse, and Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, defeated near Frankenhausen, Thuringia, the peasants led by the Anabaptist leader Thomas Müntzer. The Imperial troops were mostly Landsknechte mercenaries. As such they were well equipped, well trained and had good morale. The Peasants on the other hand were badly equipped, had no training whatsoever, and fled as soon as the Imperial troops attacked. Casualty figures are unreliable but Peasant losses have been estimated at 3-10,000 and the Imperial casualites estimated as low as 6 (2 of whom were only wounded).”
There is definitely something to be learned from this. Do professional soldiers count as working class? Are they excluded because they do the work of the landed class? Still, another lesson in one eternal truth at least- you cant win a war purely on faith, and it might often be better never to start physical fighting at all unless you have prepared for it beforehand- but doesnt that then lead you down the same path as all professional warriors, of being the tool of political masters, and artisans of bloodshed and brutality (those 3-10,000 werent all killed on the field of battle, thats for sure).
9 September 2008, 10:33 amcharles:
Martin Luther chickened out on the peasants, no ?
STAN: No, he opposed them outright. The Anabaptists were the ones who carried the struggle forward beyond Luther.
9 September 2008, 2:20 pmLawrence:
eoinmonkey “Do professional soldiers count as working class?”
I think we need to expand our intellectual framework and while not excluding class (which is not a reality, it’s an intellectual tool, “tree” for example is a more exact term which represents something real, ‘class’ in fact only exists in the mind) should add class to an overarching concept of organized violence (war and the legal system) in order to understand the role of the rank and file military. The most effective organized violence is generally a hierarchical organization where people follow orders to murder/kill and risk being murdered/killed. Resolving conflict through organized violence thus tends to result in a more hierarchical society.
“Still, another lesson in one eternal truth at least- you cant win a war purely on faith,”
Agree, but also there is the possibility that faith is itself at the root of war (faith inevitably results in conflict, and that conflict tends to be resolved through organized violence).
“but doesnt that then lead you down the same path as all professional warriors, of being the tool of political masters, and artisans of bloodshed and brutality”
Yes, agree, that seems to be the path. Oranized violence destroys the spirit of conflict resolution through communication.
9 September 2008, 10:40 pmStan:
“Winning war” is a pretty broad abstraction, imo. And class is about as real as it gets. When one person owns four houses, ten cars, and a chicken factory, an the other rents a shitty house and rides the bus to work at the chicken factory, then those differences are pretty concrete… as is the social relation of boss-worker.
The Peasant War, however, emerged not from a “working class” (landless wage laborers), but from peasants (people who worked the land as tenants and paid tribute to the land owners.
Saying that you can’t win a war purely on faith would matter more if the only form of social struggle were war.
Begin by defining faith; because my experience is that the secular left defines it exactly the way the religious right does, which effectively marginalizes those religious people and movements that have a more nuanced and effectual view of faith. This, of course, includes the marginalization of the Civil Rights movement, or of the role played by groups like the AFSC (the inheritors of the anabaptist tradition that took hold during and after the Peasant War, without winning or losing any war) in opposing the current war.
I don’t believe you can prove that “faith inevitably results in conflict, and that conflict tends to be resolved through organized violence.” Active faith, for my own part, has moved me further into the pacifist column… as it has many people I know… and as it did those who embraced non-violent strategies of social struggle.
The anger at the church for selling indulgences et al (anything but faith) had far more to do with the peasant’s embrace of protestant alternatives than issues of theologtical doctrine. The church had merged its interests with that of the dominant classes; and when the dominant classes increased the intensity and breadth of exploitation, the impossibly difficult consequences of that exploitative behavior triggered the rebellion.
10 September 2008, 5:22 ameoinmonkey:
What about the implications of the Anabaptists antipathy to the Jews (which they admittedly shared with both catholics and Lutheran Protestants), and that had they succeeded in creating their perfect Chritian kingdom, it would have been just as exclusionary as the imperfect ones they saw themselves as fighting against? Isnt this a perennial problem with allowing people to base their reality on something as exclusionary as a “true faith”?
10 September 2008, 10:23 amLawrence:
“And class is about as real as it gets. When one person owns four houses, ten cars, and a chicken factory, an the other rents a shitty house and rides the bus to work at the chicken factory, then those differences are pretty concrete… as is the social relation of boss-worker.”
Well I disagree with that, based on this evidence:
1) ‘Class’ has a history as an idea, not as a reality. The notion of ‘class’ is a modern invention, used correctly as a tool to understand some dynamic relationships between human beings, but when the intellectual tool is believed to be reality itself, as in ‘as real as it gets’, then you will have a very inaccurate view of humanity and your actions will reflect that.
“When one person owns four houses, ten cars, and a chicken factory, an the other rents a shitty house and rides the bus to work at the chicken factory, then those differences are pretty concrete… as is the social relation of boss-worker.”
Yes, agree the differences are concrete, but the differences are between two human beings, which cannot be divided, in either sense. As individuals they cannot be divided without being killed, as human beings they cannot be divided into two species.
The class can be divided, constantly, to the point where you realize that there is no division, no separation and you are looking at an indivisible whole. Different so called ‘classes’ in fact cannot be separated. It’s never happened. The unity of humanity is in fact reality, while the division into ‘class’ is something created by the human mind.
One way to go ‘concrete’ is simply to rewind in your mind all the people you have ever known. Were they in one class at one time and another class at another? That means them ‘moved’ from one class to another. What changed about them, in reality? These people from different ‘classes’, did they remind you of each other?
The concept of ‘class’ is a modern way to find guilt outside of oursleves. “The blah blah class is guilty.”
However, what if in fact the concept of guilt is part of the problem from which we are trying to extract ourselves? Then perhaps we’ll be heading wrong from the start. Doesn’t it seem likely that most human beings will prefer to blame others for problems they themselves help create? When the old elites are shaven off the skin of the body public who takes their place? It seems to me much more reasonable and in accord with the evidence I’ve seen myself to view humanity as a whole, the common activities of this whole lead to group differences. Perhaps even the best people in the world (like AFSC) are spreading the seeds of violence. Perhaps faith is one of these seeds.
“I don’t believe you can prove that “faith inevitably results in conflict, and that conflict tends to be resolved through organized violence.”
Faith is based in thought. Its in your memmory. It is something learned (not only the content of faith but the concept of ‘faith’ is promoted to children as comething positive and real). It is not separate from the person who ‘has’ faith. The human mind invented the concept, it provides pleasure. When the faith is seriously questioned the pleasure is removed, and people often react to that be getting angry, or annoyed.
We can all do this experiment: question, as seriously and unwaveringly as you can, the faith of the people closest to you, and somebody you meet on a train. Then note their reaction.
10 September 2008, 3:27 pmStan:
Ched Myers has published a very good account of the roots of Christian-European anti-Semitism; I think we’ve linked it here somewhere…
…and you are right, EM, if you are talking about The True Faith, ie, a set of rigid doctrines designed to address the problems posed by a living reality.
That ain’t faith. The irony is that the two groups who most commonly equate faith with some blind belief system are the biblical literalists of the right, and the secular left that equates all accounts of faith with the one account given by literalists. That leaves a whole lot of people who profess some manner of faith or another… out.
10 September 2008, 7:08 pmeoinmonkey:
I think I remember that link- its seemed a triumph of decent christian faith over historical fact. Arent the roots of Christian European Anti-Semitism as deep as they could go? St Paul the Evangelist was pretty harsh on his former breathren, of course taking his cue from the scandalously re-written (or wholly invented…?) New Testament texts that pitched the message at the Romans (rather successfully) and away from the Jews. So from the very beginning, someone was being singled out for blame and discrimination.
Its a pretty good example of Faith when someone says “All thats bad is not what i believe” or “All thats good is what I believe”- something common to all religious adherants, whatever side of the political spectrum you judge them to be on. “By a mans works shall ye know him” is, I always thought, quite a good adage for examining those with faith, without resorting to the “thats not True faith” criticism of people who, afterall, are trying to say the same about anyone they disagree with, often with the same kind of spurious justifications from some highly disputed and disreputable ‘holy’ textbook.
STAN: Does that include King, Tutu, Day, Romero? Weren’t their “doings” in any way something to do with their faith? Or was faith merely an artifact?
11 September 2008, 8:05 amIowan:
The Journal of Peasant Studies devoted an issue to the Peasants War. (Volume 3, Issue 1, 1975).
Stan–I did a quick and dirty bibliography of print items on the Peasants War but it’s too much to post here. I can send it to you if you want.
11 September 2008, 1:43 pmshaukat:
Lawrence, it seems, serves as a perfect example of how the ideology that emanates from and reflects the capitalist mode of production also serves to conceal the reality of class power. The statement that the social relation between an owner and worker is in fact a relation between ‘human beings,’ although true on some level, is on such a level of abstraction that it is rendered utterly meaningless. The fact that class is a social relation between people, and not a creation of nature like a tree, makes it no less real.
If class is a structural division, what does it mean to say that ‘the unity of humanity is in fact reality’? In what way are a wage labourer and an owner united? When one group of people expropriates the surplus created by another group, how is this concrete fact ’something created by the human mind’?
“It seems to me much more reasonable and in accord with the evidence I’ve seen myself to view humanity as a whole, the common activities of this whole lead to group differences.”
What exactly does this mean? By what process do these “activities” lead to group differences? And what is meant by group differences? Every example given in the above comment has been dehistoricized to such an extent that they are all vapid.
11 September 2008, 4:02 pmSatan:
“Active faith, for my own part, has moved me further into the pacifist column… as it has many people I know… and as it did those who embraced non-violent strategies of social struggle.” — STAN
Jesus, this is the most painful thing I’ve read today. What happened to you bro? Seriously, this is anti-revolutionary nonsense. What proof do you have that god even exists? How are you “moving” towards pacifism when you know how ineffective it is? You, of all people?!
11 September 2008, 9:21 pmLawrence:
Hi Shaukat, so we disagree. I’ll respond as best I can in the time I have in the shape I’m in.
Shaukat: “…a perfect example of how the ideology that emanates from and reflects the capitalist mode of production also serves to conceal the reality of class power.”
What I’m talking about is a critique of ideology. Ideology emanates from the capitalist mode of production, yes, but who is involved in that production? Only the rich? Pas de tout, or something like that. The ideology is always tending towards a universalist ideology. People call that progress. But progress is reality, not ideology. Progress is less prison cells and maybe none. But the ideology becomes more universalist precisely because the ideology is created by both those who identify with the poor and those who identify with the rich and those who transcend in some way and express the common lot of humanity. There’s a reason why ‘class’ became part of the menu of ideological fields. Because it was pushed from the people without a lot of political and economic power.
Let’s get this straight, if you want to talk about change, then you have to be clear about what you are changing from, because if you are not clear you will only have an appearance of change. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss kind of thing. You’ve repeated an invention of a defense from criticism that is supported only if you are inside a certain belief system.
Your implicit idea, in my view, is this: “The capitalist system creates an ideological shield to protect their class from attacks and criticism.”
If that is not your view then I ask for you to state it explicitly yourself.
However, bearing in mind the possibility that I’m building a man of straw, I would ask you to look at this problem: any criticism of your view can be defined as a product of the ruling class, and thus dismissed. I’m talking 100%, of the criticisms and the dismissal too.
Now to your questions:
“If class is a structural division, what does it mean to say that ‘the unity of humanity is in fact reality’?”
My point is that class in fact is not a structural division. A structure implies permanance. Social groups are not permanent, they are always changing. That is evidence that the structure is an illusion.
“In what way are a wage labourer and an owner united?”
That frankly seems so obvious to me that I must answer your question with another question. How are they NOT united? Are they united by belonging to a common species? Yes. Are they united in their developmental process, from child to adult? Yes. Are they united in their respect and fear of death? Yes. Are they united in their work? Yes, after all they are, as you have said, in relationship. Unity doesn’t mean equality.
“When one group of people expropriates the surplus created by another group, how is this concrete fact ’something created by the human mind’?”
I’m not sure about your point here, but it seems you are attributing to me something I have not said or implied. Expropriation of surplus between human beings is a fact. However, in my view of things, the reaction to perceived surplus tends to be a general trait among human beings. We all like to get what other people have, be it a car or an idea or a person. The old triangle that Girard has talked about. I’ve been expropriated by the rich and the poor and everybody in between. It’s human based, not ‘class’ based.
“What exactly does this mean? By what process do these “activities” lead to group differences? And what is meant by group differences?”
It means I’m trying to dismantle your belief system, in terms of your view of class. I want that messy concept thrown into the dustbin of history. I want to change the activist paradigm away from religion, faith and sociological concepts and towards an active examination of organized violence (war and the legal system) within humanity as a whole. That’s my political work.
“By what process do these “activities” lead to group differences?”
Great question, that’s where we need to spend some intellectual energy. For me, the process is organized violence (legal system and war), and organized violence creates/maintains the group differences. So the process, and it is indeed a process because it proceeds very often in a developmental way, is organized violence.
“And what is meant by group differences?”
That is the most difficult question, because one human group is never separate from another human group. And the grey areas depend on which side of the Venn diagram you are looking. Here I think is required an intellectual tool, which as I said in my original post, is useful. The idea of class for example.
“Every example given in the above comment has been dehistoricized to such an extent that they are all vapid.”
Well perhaps my examples are not worthy, however the general proposal is not vapid in my view, but quite profound.
12 September 2008, 4:46 pmeoinmonkey:
“STAN: Does that include King, Tutu, Day, Romero? Weren’t their “doings” in any way something to do with their faith? Or was faith merely an artifact?”
And what about the Crusades, the Inquisition, Pogroms, Stalin, Mao, Reagan, W Bush? Hence my point about “by a mans works shall ye know him”. Your examples are to be respected because of WHAT they did, not WHY they did it. For every one good example of someone with faith who does good things, you could supply many more of people whose faith inspires them to do bad things. The appeal to faith as the arbiter of good behaviour does not stand up- and generally, people who defend their behavior purely through recourse to their faith (in whatever) are dangerous, because you cant disagree with them, discuss with them, or reach/expect compromise with/from them. The people you mention are examples of moral beings because they didnt let their faith in some human invention get in the way of a desire for justice and change- they may have drawn strength from their faith, but they were all thinking radicals within its rather narrow and oppressive framework, thankfully.
13 September 2008, 10:20 amJonny:
Laurence, there’s a prof at my uni who, like you has stated, wishes to expropriate (hehe) the very concept of class from the minds of the progressive movement. He offered up as evidence that after setting criteria of class membership, (the prof mainly chose income so as to avoid mentioning the hereditary billionaire class, where most of the movers and shakers are, his stats showed that people don’t neccessarily stay in the class into which they were born. Imho, permanent and hereditary membership is not a characteristic of class in the 1st world. For me, class in the metropoles is more like a theater play where the actors (we) may switch roles from time to time, yet must follow the script already layed out by the ruling class in order to be allowed access to what we need in terms of food, medical care, housing, transportation, retirement ability etc. For me, that is the definition of ruling class. My definition of working class is simple: those who have to work. Who’d lose everything if they stopped when they aren’t allowed to. Most of us are limited to earning a tiny percentage of the wealth we generate for the “self-made men” and hereditary capital holders. To my view, today is a bad day to fight against class consciousness, as it’s already scarce enough to allow our ruling classes to incrementally take away all the good stuff we won through conscious struggle. In my province, the minimum wage has been “ammended” to allow employers time to “train” workers: for their first documented 500 hours of work, workers may be paid 75% of the legal minimum wage. And we aren’t responding as a class because we have largely been fooled into believing we aren’t. 2 thumbs up for the level of debate and respect on this site. More topical to this thread, this is what I’m reading now:
Vo Nguyen Giap’s “People’s War People’s Army: the Viet Cong Insurrectional Manual for Underdeveloped Countries.” The foreward and “profile” of Giap included are written by US military men, and inform us that Giap is “fanatical” among other sins, while reassuring us that there is indeed reason to read Giap; because they need to know how his people keep winning peasant wars against powerful foes.
13 September 2008, 2:01 pmCraig:
You are not making a strong argument here.
An artifact. Not everyone who participated in the Civil Rights movement, for example, was a believer, but most of those who opposed the movement were. Faith is what led Kepler to devote most of his life trying to prove the Christian god created the five known planets to align with the geometry of the five Platonic solids. That he discovered elliptic orbits and Kepler’s Laws of Motion along the way was an accident, not something that derives from faith alone.
As a Catholic apostate, I’d reject the implication that good works derive from faith alone even if I were still a believer.
13 September 2008, 4:42 pmLawrence:
Without responding to many of the other interesting contributions to this thread, I’ll focus on this from Stan:
“…and you are right, EM, if you are talking about The True Faith, ie, a set of rigid doctrines designed to address the problems posed by a living reality.”
“That ain’t faith. The irony is that the two groups who most commonly equate faith with some blind belief system are the biblical literalists of the right, and the secular left that equates all accounts of faith with the one account given by literalists. That leaves a whole lot of people who profess some manner of faith or another… out.”
Faith has a content, otherwise it’s not faith. We have faith IN something. Just as the people you criticise have faith in something. A different content. You have put yourself in conflict with anyone whose content is different. For example, in your statement you have put yourself in conflict against two groups: the bible thumpers, and the critics of the bible thumpers. If you dropped your faith you would not be in conflict with either group, because you would have nothing to defend.
The key is focus on conflict and conflict resloution, and then progressively give up anything that creates conflict or prevents conflict resolution, including if necessary your faith and religion. When you talk with people you generally find that they are in conflict with this or that person. So why don’t we have the tools to resolve these conflicts and be at peace walking around town? Perhaps faith has no place here, perhaps what we need are new spaces, dialogue spaces with side rooms for conflict resolution. And an overarching theory of some sort that fit the dialogue center with conflict resolution. Then the center could have a theory and practice, and the two would interact.
Then that spreads quickly around and you have a base of people who see the sense in investigating conflict resolution, and that base affects the whole poplulation. Imagine all the churches turned into dialogue centers, and the altar is replaced by a space inside a circle and everyone has a right to speak, and question, and the explicit aim is to explore fundamental questions in order to expose the conflict, and then to look at that conflict and understand it.
13 September 2008, 8:20 pmElaina:
“That ain’t faith. The irony is that the two groups who most commonly equate faith with some blind belief system are the biblical literalists of the right, and the secular left that equates all accounts of faith with the one account given by literalists. That leaves a whole lot of people who profess some manner of faith or another… out.”
Wow. That is the best way I’ve heard to say this thing, and I want to say it to so many people. And I’m a total athiest. I just get sick of other athiests being assholes about atheism- especially on the left- when they don’t know any more than the bible thumper about what happens beyond the edges of the macroverse. Jesus.
I think I’m gonna quote you on this one, Stan.
14 September 2008, 10:25 amStan:
Hey Elaina, I owe you a call. Tomorrow. (:
Faith is radical trust. When Fidel asked Che how many people had survived the debacle of the Granma landing, Che said something like, “Twleve.” Fidel replied, “Then we have won.”
That’s faith. Not belief, but radical trust. The Christianity I subscribe to is not faith IN Christ (too damned easy), but having the faith OF Christ… to follow this example. And I guarantee you that MLK was on the same page. The Civil Rights movement was Christian inspired and Christian led.
The Chinese state is not communist; and the cults of a War Jesus are not Christians. Say what they might. Christian is diminutive… “little Christ.” It doesn’t mean say the magic words. It means follow. To the cross if necessary, but over the hard road of loving the neighbor, showing hospitality to strangers, clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, undermining the social order with non-violent resistance… and loving the enemy (and thereby neutralizing the category of enemy).
When Jesus said you cannot serve God and money at the same time, his own followers were like, “Whoa! Are you out of your mind there, rabbi? How can we live without money?” His reply included the phrase “You of little faith…” [You with little trust]. Then he said look at the lilies of the field, how they do not toil, and yet are more beautuful than Solomon’s (the wealthy king’s) wardrobe.
Theology is not science; and as far as I’m concerned my own theology does not contradict science one scintilla. These are different ways of knowing, not contradictory. Elaina hit this one square on the head. We are in a culture that has sterilized the universe with its scientism… the axiomatic belief that scientific observation has some exclusive claim on truth.
It’s a preposterous belief, a male belief, and an immensely arrogant belief. It’s also a white belief.
If this blog were populated by a majority of African Americans, the tone would be dramaticaly different. Because the prophetic role of the Black church cannot be discounted the way Jerry Falwell can be discounted.
14 September 2008, 7:18 pmShaukat:
Hi Lawrence,
Thanks for the response. I think most of our disagreement revolves around a misunderstanding of what is meant by class.
“Expropriation of surplus between human beings is a fact. However, in my view of things, the reaction to perceived surplus tends to be a general trait among human beings. We all like to get what other people have, be it a car or an idea or a person. The old triangle that Girard has talked about. I’ve been expropriated by the rich and the poor and everybody in between. It’s human based, not ‘class’ based.”
This is not at all what is meant by expropriation of surplus, which has a very specific meaning in a class society dominated by capitalist property relations. Again, capital is a process, an expansion of value, and a social relation between those who own means of production-factory buildings, machine tools, raw materials, semi-finished goods, etc-and those who have no option but to sell their labour power (variable capital)in order to reproduce themselves. The difference in value between what this class is paid in exchange for their labour and what they produce is expropriated by capital, ie the owners. Clearly, this structural and systemic expropriation is very different from being robbed, swindled, or cheated (whether by the rich or the poor) which is what you seem to be referring to in the above passage.
The relation between these two classes is also a relation between human beings, but, as I stated earlier, this statement is at such a level of abstraction that it is rendered meaningless; it does not speak to the defining element in the relation between owner and worker. What drives the interdependent production process in a capitalist society is not that both worker and owner are human beings, or share the same developmental process, or that they are united by belonging to the same species, but rather that the owner, in competition with other individual capitals, is compelled, as Marx put it, to “accumulate, accumulate, that is Moses and the Prophets.”
Furthermore, the owner and worker are not unified in their work, certainly not in the goals of their work. For the capitalist, the purpose of the work is M-C-M, the expansion of value, whereas for the worker the goal is C-M-C, the exchange of his/her labour for the necessary means of subsistence.
Also, while I do believe that capitalism creates a specific ideology that reproduces this social relation, I do not believe that this ever happens in a simple or straight forward manner, and I certainly would not dismiss any and every criticism of my position as a manifestation of the ruling class ideology.
Finally, Lawrence, I do not believe one can properly study organized forms of violence and coercion, such as the legal system or the military, without also understanding class formation in a very specific historical period. The legal system under feudalism was very different from the liberal rule of law that exists under capitalism, and woudl be impossible, in my view, to understand this difference without referring to the qualitative difference between the class relation between lord and peasant and capitalist owner and worker.
14 September 2008, 10:02 pmCraig:
Who exactly are these “secular assholes” on the left? I’m secular, and I’m a “leftist” (a sellout leftist, but a leftist nonetheless), and I’ve never had a problem with finding common ground with believers.
I hope you’re not suggesting that the practice of science is inherently male or white.
When I see what remains of the American Left infested with a cancer like the 9/11 Truth movement, I have a hard time believing that the problem with the left is too much science and too much empirical reasoning. I’m willing to admit the left suffers from a spiritual poverty that needs addressing if you’ll admit there’s also a dearth of intellectual honesty and rigor. In the meantime, I look forward to reading insipid takes on what happened over the weekend on Alternet and on Counterpunch.
14 September 2008, 10:14 pmLegume Sam:
I’m not going to touch the Christianity part of this thread, as I don’t see a whole lot of point in debating (especially on the Internet, a most polarizing form of communication) whether or not there’s a God or Goddess or gods. I suspect debate of being over-rated. People are unsure of me at first because I deliver too many “winning” arguments, then as they slowly get to know me they figure out that I’m not such a suspicious guy after all.
Who is to say what Christianity or God is? There’s this danger of falling into the Humpty Dumpty theory of language: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”
I think the Christianity of which Stan speaks makes sense as a sort of discipline — that one structures one’s bodily movements and one’s choices around a further principle, and its truth need not be proven in debate but rather lived as social drama, in the sense in which Victor Turner meant that term.
That having been said, I would like to argue, here, that when one effaces the notion of “social class” from one’s critical vocabulary, one disallows the notion of a proper analysis of POWER in society. The richest 1% of Americans owns half of all non-home capital assets, but if we can’t talk about an “investor class” then we aren’t going to figure out that they’re in charge, are we?
And if we can’t figure out who’s in charge, then “conflict resolution” becomes another tool of the status quo. Yes, our high priests of conflict resolution will tell us, we will have (capitalist) peace on Earth. You will starve, and we, in the pay of the privileged, will resolve all of your conflicts with the investor classes, and we will all pursue capitalist progress (or just starve to death) until planet Earth is overwhelmed by the climatic disaster that abrupt climate change will bring.
To be sure, peace is important. But it is not the most important value. Justice, by which I mean the coming of a just social order, is important too, but Marx showed in the century before last how justice can be what the owning class wants it to be. This century’s most important value will be some modicum of continued survival under a stable ecosystem. Our social order needs to align itself with Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of “punctuated equilibrium” — that ecosystems exist for the most part in stable equilibria, punctuated by disasters which precipitate large-scale ecological change. At this point we need to get our global ecosystems out of “change” and back into “equilibrium.” We will only be able to do this by providing everyone with an ecologically stable way of life, and this isn’t going to happen under the regime of laissez-faire.
14 September 2008, 11:00 pmStan:
Sam has the nub of what I’m getting at… a discipline (shared root with the terms disciple and discipleship).
There’s been no excision of the term class from the vocab, nor of Marx. Gustavo Gutierrez, author of Liberation Theology, cited the emergence of historical materialism as an analysis that the church must come to terms with… like the discovery of the mechanism of a disease process that one seeks to cure. Amy Laura Hall, Rosemary Reuther, and Walter Wink say the same thing about feminism. Catholic Worker was founded by Dorothy Day, who prior to taking up this ministry was a member of the Communist Party.
The link between peace and justice is reciprocal. Justice is the direction to which the Spirit bends in the realm of history.
You can’t have one without the other, unless it is the counterfeit peace of power… meaning successful repression. My own personal journey here began as an imperial soldier, which led me to the “third world,”
which led me to Marx,
which led me to radical feminism (note that no phase is left behind, but built upon),
to the critique of atomized instrumental MALE science,
to ecology,
to localization and community,
and thereby back to what Elaina so aptly calls “the edges of the macroverse” (the philosophical question of Being).
The question of enemization sat there the whole time like the pachyderm in the parlor; and seeking some reply to this from my own culture and history — which is inescapable and in my own case pretty heterodox — to the “peace of Christ.”
When antagonisms are structural — as in class, gender, race/nation — if we seek to rid ourselves of the category “enemy,” then we are obliged to go after the structure itself. Paul Tillich was emphatic that Sin is at its base a structural condition.
We have a great example of non-enemizing struggle right here (I am in the Southern US, mere miles from the Greensboro lunch counters and Shaw University where Ella Baker held the formative meetings fo the SNCC). When the Christian-led Civil Rights movement developed to overthrow legal apartheid in the US South, it did not overthrow it by force of arms, but by a movement that took up the cross (pronounced a mission of love in the face of violent hostility) again and again.
On male science, we’ve had this conversation before, but I won’t send Craig raking through the archives if he’s not prepared to study this argument. Science is not some Platonic essence, but a human practice that was developed under European male hegemony, during an imperial epoch, and it was developed to serve that epoch and order. Since it dispensed with God as the final arbiter of truth, it had to lay claim to some other standard that transended time and space, which was Objectivity.
Science has continued to serve power, which continues under male hegemony, and which has adapted to the evolution of whiteness as a hegemonic social phenomenon. With the consolidation and evolution of the bourgeoisie from the 17th Century until now, it has also followed this class-path. Male and white continue to serve as the neutral category against which all other non-male, non-white categories. Look at the word “ethnic,” and you can see what I mean. Ethnicity means other-than-white in the popular imagination. The roots of male power go much deeper still and so are powerfully formative and invisible at the same time.
The practice of science was conceived of as conquest and control… these are masculine memes. (The intentional poetic irony of the Jesus ministry “kingdom” was that the “king” was scourged and executed.) Bacon used a rape metaphor to describe the scientific endeavor, and the “conquest of nature” continues to be part of our cultural conversation.
This does not mean that knowledge obtained through sciencific practice is invalid. The notion of anything being “intrinsic” to science is a fallacious outgrowth of the central fallacy of purely self-referential science (what I call scientism). We can observe that most scientific practice has been in the service of the dominant class, the dominant sex, the dominant nations, etc; then we can discalim: “That doesn’t mean is has to be in the service of power. It could be used for good,”
Coulda shoulda. This is classic decontextualization, abstraction. Substituting what one can imagine for what is. An unscientific account that is a concealed appeal to authority: objectivity, that is — a pretension that humanity has somehow figured out how to escape from itself. The reason historical materialism was and is so important is that it forces us to ask the question: If science is so intrinsically or objectively anything, why have its main manifestations been in the service of power? Whether the demand for historical recontextualization comes from Marx or MacKinnon or Gutierrez; it’s valid… oddly enough from the point of view of the scientific method (which can be valuable in the discovery of the workings of the physical universe). That is, it is evidence-based and not abstract or imaginary.
Science is not a natural phenomenon, but an historical one.
The constant in all this is objectification, the process by which we learn divide everything into subject-object dualities. Man — the subjet — conquers woman (the object), or nature (the object), or colonies (objects). Workers become personnel, become human resources. By definition, if this dualism is axiomatic it retains the invisibility of the axiom… and the illusion is created that this is some eternal natural law, instead of a cultural and therefore psychic construction.
15 September 2008, 6:58 amcharles:
“class” is as real as a tree. Class is more like the forest than the individual trees. You can’t see the whole forest at the same time like you can see a single tree, but the forest is as real as the individual trees that make it up. Atoms are real too, even though you can’t see them.
15 September 2008, 3:38 pmcharles:
Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated by law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and their mode of acquiring it
15 September 2008, 3:45 pmcharles:
Since it dispensed with God as the final arbiter of truth, it had to lay claim to some other standard that transended time and space, which was Objectivity.
^^^
15 September 2008, 3:56 pmA “mo better” epistemelogical standard is that the test of the truth of a theory is practice
Lawrence:
Shaukat
No time to respond to everything, but this:
“Clearly, this structural and systemic expropriation is very different from being robbed, swindled, or cheated (whether by the rich or the poor) which is what you seem to be referring to in the above passage.”
It’s not so very different from the point of view of the victim, once you figure out you’re being robbed.
Stan, what a mistake you have made! In my opinion of course, but no doubt that’s what you figured many of us would say.
“Since it [science] dispensed with God as the final arbiter of truth, it had to lay claim to some other standard that transended time and space, which was Objectivity.”
I think youere the one creating the boogieman here Stan, this is a very simplistic view of science.
Science is created by scientists, mainly, and just as musicians have a variety of views about music, and do music at different levels, so scientists have a range of views about science and do science at different levels of proficiency.
Science is one of the most anarchistic human systems ever invented. It’s the living proof of many basic anarchic ideas. Number one is about authority. There is no authority. No book. The scientific method is a decentralized method, by default. And you can watch the struggle against that anarchy, and the normal anti anarchical growth of any institution, but long term the fight against the anarchic principles of science can’t work because the basis of science is not ‘objectivity’, but intellectual democracy. The individual scientist has a lot of power if she or he can provide proof. The scientific method is connected to the reduction of the political power of the church to impose ‘truth’. Truth was now open to question.
What you call ‘objectivity’ has been only one view of science. Kuhn’s view, which most observers of science tend to agree with now and have for years, but which Kuhn didn’t invent, was precisely that science was not objective.
But we needn’t quote people. Go talk with some scientists, a range of scientists, and you’ll find a range of views on science, but a 100% agreement that it’s ok to disprove a theory. And that you disprove a theory held by other human beings.
Compare that to religion. You really think you can or will allow yourself to be disproved by anybody on this blog, at this point? If so, on what basis? What would cause you to give up your theory of Jesus and realize your theory is false?
Because the falsity explanation made more sense? It doesn’t seem to work that way. What we will see in the coming days, if enough people take the time to respond to your Christian theory, is that you will remain rigid in the face of whatever sense people manage to send your way. That is, if you mean what you say and you really have the faith of Jesus, (which was his greatest fault), you will convince yourself you know something about god, and no sense will reach you.
15 September 2008, 3:56 pmStan:
Charles, what is the purpose of practice? Practice to accomplish what? What is the state of affairs that we drive toward with our practice?
15 September 2008, 5:05 pmLegume Sam:
Theories indicate practices, to be sure. But the issue of theory is more complex than that of whether or not a theory, when “applied” in practice, will achieve the intended results.
The preliminary question of theory is this: can we gain control over the production of history? And, if so, how? History is full of fools who tried to dominate the world, culminating in the current world domination of the New World Order and its steward, the transnational capitalist class. Note the hollowness of the current regime’s assurances that Everything Is OK as the Dow drops 504 points with the impending collapse of WaMu on the horizon.
And they all have no notion of what to do about abrupt climate change. According to NOAA, Earth’s atmosphere now contains 385 parts per million of carbon dioxide, and is adding 2 ppm per year. Nobody knows what this means for the future, whereas in the present moment the People’s Republic of China burns huge quantities of medium-grade coal, with the immediate effect of adding quite a bit of mercury to the world’s oceans, which travels through tunafish to the stomachs and eventually to the brains of Atkins Diet subscribers. The systems of global governance may be as consolidated as they ever were; yet all merely wait to reap the whirlwind.
15 September 2008, 6:41 pmCraig:
Science is the practice of the scientific method to test hypotheses that are testable and falsifiable using experiments that are reproducible. It is certainly not a Platonic ideal. I’ve read descriptions of science that describe it as if it were, or as if “Science” was the Greek god of wisdom. I don’t take this seriously, and neither should anyone else. The scientific method as it has evolved over time, with control groups, double blind tests, and the like, is really a set of best practices more than anything else, an ISO 9000 for inquiries about the observable world.
Merely practicing the scientific method doesn’t confer any special status or claim, and it’s essential not to let practice obscure where the real focus lies, namely the hypothesis. Scientists are products of their culture, and this is reflected in the hypotheses. What questions are scientists trying to answer? How are these questions framed? What unstated assumptions does the scientist make? When a scientist takes male superiority and dominion over women as a given, this is how I interpret what you mean as “male science.”
However, that’s not to say that all science is male science, or European science. Bacon’s description as you paraphrase it is disgusting (also, the scientific method predates him in the Muslim world), but that doesn’t invalidate the works of thousands of people spread over centuries any more than calling it the “War” on Poverty invalidates social justice. That the hypothesis can be a product of its culture and social order is a key insight, one that is not scientific in nature, though scientists can acknowledge this by being open to a critique of their work. Still, I admit I see too little attention paid by scientists, especially many social scientists, to the ways their hypotheses are products of the prejudices and injustices of their age.
I’ve also noticed a certain myopia in what I suppose you can describe as the secular community that ignores how the stakes can be higher if you happen be of a different race, class, or gender. An example of this is the snarky website Fire Joe Morgan. It’s a baseball blog that centers on sabermetrics, the use of statistical methods to evaluate baseball players and strategies, and Joe Morgan is is a color commentator with a documented antipathy towards sabermetrics, or Moneyball. Part of the antipathy, though, is the perception that sabermetrics is an arbitrary, pointy headed excuse to devalue black players in favor of white players, and though it is not true (at least in general), it is a reasonable fear, yet Moneyballers refuse to acknowledge this, choosing instead to “enemize” people like Joe Morgan instead of understanding his point of view and reaching out.
The baby in the bath water is the free inquiry, the challenging of unstated assumptions, included the ones made by each of us. This is what I mean by intellectual rigor, and this is what I feel is lacking in the tattered remnants of the American left.
AIG, then WaMu, then Wachovia once option ARM’s start exploding (I really hope no one reading this has one of these). No one in the industry takes Bush seriously; Barney Frank has more cachet, even with people who hate him.
15 September 2008, 10:46 pmStan:
Science is useful and effective. The question is useful and effective to do what? Someone makes that choice. Like Sam, my politics could easily be described as ecosocialist — or ecofeminist. These are standpoints that grow directly out of our understanding of the world in a more detailed and complex way than what was available pre-science.
Scientism is not science, but the claim that scientific reduction is the only valid method for assessing truth. Eco-science was once described to me as the renegade child of bourgeois science that we are obliged to adopt. The point being that the (male, white) bourgeoisie has exercised near absolute hegemony in the field of science, as it does in communicatons, ideology, etc etc.
Moreover, it is not possible to remove a point of view or a prejudice from the practice of science. Someone decides what will be studied and tested, that is, what’s important. In most cases, that also involves the banal issue of funds. The claim to objectivity masks the reality of interest and control.
I strongly recommend two tomes on this: Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature, and Maria Mies’ Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale.
16 September 2008, 3:54 amStan:
Theology is not theory.
16 September 2008, 5:33 amBuddhalovesPaine:
To Satan,
16 September 2008, 5:47 pmNon violent activities can be very successful. IMO the civil rights march over the bridge at Selma Alabama was the most successful propaganda victory of all time. Also, whistle blowing or espionage is a non violent activity that someone with the right connections who is angry enough or righteous enough could engage in. That is very effective. Also psychological warfare can be effective. For example a person in the US could send a nasty but non threatening letter to the CIA, or FBI, or Secret Service then follow that up by purchasing a large amount of fertalizer and oil with a credit card. Of course the reason that you would need a large amount of fertalizer and oil is because if there is a mideast war you will need to grow your own food and you will need to be able to have oil for oil changes stock piled because lord knows how high the price would be if there were a mideast war. Of course you better not be a drug dealer or user if you do this because the government is then going to examine you under a microscope. But if lots of people did things like this the FBI would be overwhelmed and their agents might start to realize that normally law abiding people are angry and that they are working for the forces of evil. There are many other things that a person could do to throw a monkey wrench in to the system and get away with it but I do not want to make all my ideas public.
In the final analysis though any final push to crush a corrupt political and social system will probably require the use of some violence. You have to know your enemy. I do not think the people ruling America are just misinformed I think that they would kill their own mothers to keep their positions of power. But maybe I am wrong about that. Time will tell.
charles:
For me, the process is organized violence (legal system and war), and organized violence creates/maintains the group differences.
^^^
17 September 2008, 1:50 pmIs organized violence ( legal system and war) a structure, in the way you say “class” is a structure, i.e. “permanent” ? Why is “class” permanent, but organized violence not ?
charles:
Charles, what is the purpose of practice?
^^^
One purpose is to test theory; another purpose of practice is to change the world for the better.
Faith without works (practice) is dead, as the Bible says.
^^^^
Practice to accomplish what? What is the state of affairs that we drive toward with our practice?
^^^^
17 September 2008, 1:55 pmLiving life is practice. Acting in the world is practice.
GaryE:
“Faith is radical trust.”
17 September 2008, 2:06 pmFaith is also grounded in experience. You cannot have faith that has no experiential link to it. Just as religious institutions tout the idea of “God” as something “other” or outside the physical experience, and that we must wait until death to really get into heaven. On the other hand, look at the distance between religion and spirituality. Two completely different systems. Religion or, “The body of the Church” was created specifically for political/economic purposes. The spiritual practices of Christ (ie. meditation . . . yes, I said it!)were removed as a hiderance of those aims. Spirituality is a science. It is practiced as a science. It is still in practice as a science.
charles:
Theology is not theory.
^^^
17 September 2008, 2:51 pmPerhaps, but given the “theo”/”god” semantic root in “theory” one has to suspect that “theory” derives etymologically from “theology”.
charles:
We are in a culture that has sterilized the universe with its scientism… the axiomatic belief that scientific observation has some exclusive claim on truth.
^^^^
I’m not sure about this. There may be a majority of Americans who believe in God as a source of truth more than science. Certainly, there is a huge minority who believe in God before science.
Look at the majority of voters. Hard to conclude that the majority that voted for Bush have scientific “culture”.
17 September 2008, 3:03 pmStan:
The question was to what end? Your reply was tautological. Theory is for practice; practice is for theory.
17 September 2008, 6:32 pmBuddhalovesPaine:
Point of clarification to my above post. When I said, they are working for the forces of evil I meant people working for the military industrial complex (including the FBI) not normally law abiding citizens who have come to the inescapable conclusion that the US Government has become the world’s largest continuing criminal enterprise.
18 September 2008, 5:33 ameoinmonkey:
Just to clarify, for myself and, I suspect, others, what variety of christianity (besides “the true one”) is this?
18 September 2008, 8:16 amDoes this mean that all of us other folk are doing wrong if we dont ascribe to the same belief system? If this is not the case, then what exactly is the point of being a christian? If this is the case, what hope is there for us?
Does god want everyone in the world to share the same belief system? If so, why? If not, then why does it matter?
If this is just a blueprint for living a good life, then what part do god, Jesus, and the Bible have to play?
charles:
The question was to what end? Your reply was tautological. Theory is for practice; practice is for theory.
^^^^
My reply was
“One purpose is to test theory; another purpose of practice is to change the world for the better.”
That’s not tautological, nor is it synonymous with your assertion “Theory is for practice; practice is for theory.” So, what are you talking about ( smile )?
^^^^^
Charles, what is the purpose of practice? Practice to accomplish what? What is the state of affairs that we drive toward with our practice?
^^^
18 September 2008, 2:59 pmCB: The state of affairs we drive toward with our practice is a better world , a better human society, the end of capitalism, imperialism, poverty, racism, male supremacy and environmental pollution.
northland:
I’ve never posted here before but I’d like a copy of that bibliography Iowan offered. This topic interests me deeply. (I’m a Lutheran pastor and a marxist. Please don’t all attack me!) Perhaps Stan could give him my e-mail? Many thanks.
3 October 2008, 8:27 pmHenry:
Re: “Perhaps, but given the “theo”/”god” semantic root in “theory” one has to suspect that “theory” derives etymologically from “theology”.”
No, the roots are different. Theology comes from the words for “divinity” and for a topic of knowledge or a topic to which reasoning is applied.
As for theory is comes from a root meaning to “see” as a spectator does, and by implication, the act of contemplation. To speculate in the ancient sense is to see by looking in the mirror (speculum) of the intellect. The intellect in this ancient sense is that of which reason is an instrument; it is the true knower.
There may indeed be an indirect and somewhat remote etymological connection, inasmuch as contemplation is traditionally related to archetypal hence divine realities (i.e. divine “names”) or to their cosmic reflections.
Theology which applies reason to the data of a given revelation has been contrasted with (traditional) metaphysics which is based on theory or contemplation in the ancient sense.
In the modern sense, theory is practically synonymous either with mere conjecture, or, in science, with the scientific method of constructing hypotheses–normally quantitative or mathematically expressible–which must account for experimental data (laymen often wrongly oppose fact and theory in this latter sense). None of these various meanings has to do with the ancient view of “theoria.”
5 October 2008, 11:02 pm