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What's Left?
"Lefty" Hooligan takes on the multicultural-pc-identity politics of the leftover Left. Reprinted from his column in Maximum Rock'n'roll.
What's Left?
By "Lefty" Hooligan
Column for Maximum Rock'n'roll #264 (5/05)
The generation starship is a well-worn concept in science fiction. If Einstein was right and the speed of light is the cosmic limit, then how might humanity colonize the stars? By building an enormous starship to house a completely self-contained, self-sufficient human society. The original crew lives, produces offspring, and dies in transit, with the whole colony arriving at their destination many generations later.
A much-overused treatment of this theme is that the entirely closed human society aboard such a starship gradually forgets its larger colonizing mission over the generations. Science becomes religion, history becomes mythology, knowledge becomes belief, and technical skill becomes ritual as the starship becomes their whole universe. Not everything is always passed down from one generation to the next however so knowledge is lost and skills are forgotten. Parts of the ship are damaged or its systems break down, but the humans are no longer able to make repairs. Increasingly, solutions are jury-rigged, and these makeshift solutions become how things were always done. The descendents of the would-be colonists arrive at their destination little better than savages and either sail right past it, unable as they are to pilot their starship, or park automatically in orbit, oblivious to their new home and the original intention to colonize it.
This sci-fi scenario is actually an apt metaphor for the devolution of the 1960s New Left into today's leftover Left. Once again I digress from my stated intention to critically examine socialism in general and Marxism in particular. The New Left, no less than the Old Left to which it was reacting, has a dubious relationship to authentic socialism and Marxism. The leftover Left's relationship to them is non-existent. This sorry-assed residual Left needs to be exposed as a delusional form of pseudo militancy that functions to divert and disrupt any truly radical response to the power of capital. First we need to see how the New Left became the leftover Left. "Always historicize!" as Frederic Jameson is fond of saying.
The New Left is often associated with the early days of Students for a Democratic Society, and the disaffected liberalism of SDS's Port Huron Statement in 1962 can be understood in the context of the broader civil rights movement and "ban the bomb" agitation of the day. The rise of an anti-Vietnam War movement, the turn of important elements of the civil rights movement first to black power and then to revolutionary nationalism, and the emergence of a nebulous youth revolt elevated to the status of counterculture were all to come. Also yet to come were women's and gay liberation, the ecology movement, the spread of revolutionary nationalism to other peoples of color as part of the emergence of "Third Worldism," even a much-neglected wildcat labor movement; all were in effect by the time SDS shattered into a handful of Marxist-Leninist splinters in 1968-69. Quite a heady and heterogeneous mixture of revolt to try to encompass under any single rubric or organization, a fact not disguised by mythologizing 1968 or by calling this welter of social unrest The Movement. An often-ignored point about the demise of SDS at this pinnacle of revolt is that there were two other major political responses to the spirit of revolution in the air that came out of SDS's ashes besides the ML one, those being democratic socialism and anti-authoritarianism.
By the start of 1970 then there was a rather lengthy shopping list of issues that any self-respecting leftist organization felt duty-bound to buy. Many of these were inherited from the ML/social democratic-dominated Left, old and new, but most derived from the extremely heterogeneous uprising known as the '60s. The following listing is by no means comprehensive, and a single term often encompasses several related issues. Racism, for instance, includes the topics of white supremacy and white skin privilege, as sexism covers patriarchy and male privilege. Finally, the terms of debate have changed since 1970 so that when people nowadays talk about global north versus global south, for instance, they're revising the discussion about imperialism and the Third World. So here goes: capitalism, imperialism, the working class, labor unions and parties, third party movements, electoral politics in general, real existing socialism, socialism in general, the state, nationalism, national liberation struggles, the Third World, racism, cultural or revolutionary nationalism, sexism, homophobia, radical separatism, self-determination, the draft, the war, non-violence and pacifism, bread-and-butter jobs and welfare issues, the elderly, youth and youth culture, drug use and decriminalization, vegetarianism, environmental destruction, ecology, animal rights.
Leftists worth their salt felt obligated to define and stake out a position on these and numerous other subjects, producing long boring lists called "points of unity" that read like Catholic catechisms. For this column I'm not much concerned with the democratic socialist tendency in the '60s that became social democracy. Exemplified by the New American Movement, which merged with the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee to become the present-day Democratic Socialists of America, these folks have either fully integrated themselves into the Democratic Party as its left wing, or opted for third party electoral politics-both rather conventional and uninteresting. Instead, I'll concentrate on the self-proclaimed revolutionary Leninist and anti-authoritarian tendencies to sketch out the transformation of a dynamic New Left into the brain dead leftover Left. To help with this, I will employ a conceptual lens-the dichotomy between form and content, process and substance-to sharpen the perspective.
Let's begin with Marxism-Leninism. A surprisingly large portion of the post-New Left Left claimed the ML mantle by 1970, including the explicitly antirevisionist alphabet soup of organizations called the New Communist Movement, the quasi-Maoist Progressive Labor Party, and the Third Worldist Weather Underground (all from the breakdown of SDS), in addition to a mushrooming cloud of Trotskyist sects of which the Socialist Workers Party was the biggest. The Communist Party-USA is not included in this camp, for while nominally ML it had thrown its weight behind social democracy by the 70s. All shared a common Leninist vulgarization of the Marxist base/superstructure concept that contended that every social ill and evil-from poverty, crime, and ignorance to racism, sexism, and homophobia-were solely a product of the capitalist mode of production, which would evaporate once capitalism was overthrown and replaced with socialism. Much of the above list of issues was reduced to a series of questions in true catechistic fashion, as in the black nation question, the national question, the women question, the ecology question, ad nauseam, with perhaps one of these questions considered paramount, as with the New Communist Movement's insistence that fighting racism and building multi-racial political organizations was central to the task of vanguard party building.
The process was straight-democratic centralism, criticism/self-criticism, political reeducation-and the substance was narrow-further degradations of Marxist-Leninist ideology through the vulgarizations of Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Castro, Hoxha, Kim Il Sung, Avakian, Klonsky, Baraka, et al, in an ever more sectarian search for the correct political line, the true vanguard party, and the status of "the real Marxist-Leninists," as Max Elbaum puts it in his book *Revolution in the Air*. Thus the diverse resistance, rebellion, and revolt of the 60s was to be straight-jacketed with a crude dogma, disciplined to the needs of building a vanguard party, harnessed to the task of fomenting socialist revolution lead by the true party with the correct dogma. The form was set, the content was crucial, and it was the ever more sectarian struggle over which organization or party had the correct political line that proved to be the hallmark of post-New Left Leninism. Using a Maoist formulation, Elbaum labels this ultra-sectarianism "ultraleftism" and counts it an important internal factor, alongside external factors like China's reactionary foreign policy, contributing to the demise of his beloved New Communist Movement. I'll discuss the decline of 60s radicalism shortly. For the moment note that Loren Goldner's review of Elbaum's book "Didn't See The Same Movie" (http:// home.earthlink.net/ ~lrgoldner/ elbaum.html) is a sufficient antidote to Revolution in the Air's eminently forgettable tale of Stalinism gone belly up. Goldner exposes Elbaum's narrow and skewed perspective on the Leninist scene, as well as on larger political realities, and reveals the "true historic ultra-left" of which Elbaum is clueless but that was very much alive in 1970.
I've often debated the merits of including the ultra-left of Pannakoek, Gorter, Bordiga, Mattick, and Korsch in the anti-authoritarian category. It's not as if the self-proclaimed anti-authoritarian milieu wasn't nebulous enough in the 70s, what with post-scarcity Bookchinites flanked on one side by a whole slew of traditional anarchist types like the syndicalist Wobblies and followers of Borsodi's green mutualism, and on the other side by a welter of anarchist countercultural crosspollinations in the form of Yippies, White Panthers, Diggers, and Motherfuckers This was all seasoned with a scattering of anarcho-pacifist and non-violent direct action types like myself in 1968. I've described my evolution from that position through revolutionary left anarchism to present-day left communism in a past column. What I'm pointing out at the moment is the key difference in the anti-authoritarian approach. While there were anarchists who insisted that The State, instead of Capitalism, was the source of all evil, the tendency among anti-authoritarians was to deny any center, or overarching unity, to the political issues of the day. The anti-authoritarian milieu was the most receptive to the freewheeling, multi-dimensional character of 1960s rebellion. But the shopping list above became a nebulous free-floating cloud: all struggles equally important, all oppressions equally legitimate, all political points of view equally valid. When there is little or no attempt to define and prioritize content, form comes to the fore. The anti-authoritarian milieu was pioneering the affinity group form, small-group process and consensus decision-making that would become part of the toolkit that the leftover Left uses to sidestep issues of content and substance today.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Different people had different scenarios, but almost everybody assumed that the rebellious spirit of the 60s would continue to spread, sparking insurgency in the working class, and eventually infecting every corner of American society until social revolution was inevitable. The reason that this never materialized is no mystery. One of the principle engines driving discontent in this country was the Vietnam War, opposition to which directly or indirectly fueled almost every other struggle at the time. Nixon ended the draft and began Vietnamizing the war in 1972, effectively taking the wind out of the Left's sails. The democratic socialist, ML, and anti-authoritarian tendencies on the Left were all faced with dwindling into irrelevancy or transitioning into some other line of political work in order to survive well before the US made its embarrassed retreat from Vietnam in 1975.
For democratic socialism, the transition was to social democracy. Adherents worked within the Democratic Party or for some third party movement, and placed their faith in progressive electoral politics. The ML response was more complex. That part of the ML left represented by the New Communist Movement tried transitioning to multiracial working class organizing and failed miserably, winding up replicating democratic socialism's turn to social democracy via Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition before the New Communist Movement petered out altogether. Elbaum's book is essentially "hundreds of pages on the wars of sects and ideologies" analyzing that demise in excruciating detail. Trotskyism had better success returning to its mainstay of working class organizing, the best example being the International Socialist intervention that became Teamsters for a Democratic Union and the election of Ron Carey as the Teamsters president.
Anti-authoritarianism had even greater success, considering its modest status to begin with, moving on as it did to the anti-nuclear movement. The various attempts to shut down the construction of the Seabrook nuclear power plant in the latter half of the 70s were a crucible in which tactics for mass nonviolent direct action were tested. Affinity group/spokescouncil structures, meeting stacks to keep outspoken people from dominating, and decentralized mass consensus process were practices from Seabrook that were familiar to people in the streets of Seattle over twenty years later. The collapse of Communism with the fall of the Soviet bloc between 1989 and 1991-a severe setback for the Left whether Leninist or social democratic-has had the paradoxical effect of emboldening anti-authoritarian forces as the only remaining opposition and last line of resistance to the status quo. The Black Bloc enfant terrible of the anti-globalization movement, anarchism is little more substantive these days than the circle A spray painted on some Starbucks window. Anarchist process, by contrast, rules the day.
Oddly enough, Elbaum's New Communist Movement hasn't entirely faded from the scene. Instead, it lives on in a very much attenuated form, via the anti-authoritarian milieu, through anarchists with vanguard envy. Self-proclaimed revolutionary anarchists associated with the now defunct Love and Rage Newspaper/Network/Federation, or at least those who proclaimed the centrality of the struggle against racism and for building multiracial political organizations in Chris Day's faction of that organization, declared the historical limits of anarchism and opted for the mass line post-Maoist politics of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. The anencephalic Chris Crass, also very much into the revolutionary and anti-racist labels, uncritically cheerleads for national liberation struggles, insists on sycophantically following the leadership of Third World peoples of color, and even declares the benefits of electoral politics, all the while calling himself an anarchist and keeping a straight face. Like Chris Day before him, Chris Crass is an unabashed admirer of the New Communist Movement's accomplishments in multiracial organizing. His Challenging White Supremacy workshops take anti-authoritarian process a step further into group therapy where everybody must raise their hands before speaking, police their language to make sure it's polite and couched in I-speak, and create safe spaces in meetings for women, gays, and people of color by prioritizing their voices. This oh-so-politically-correct process manages simultaneously to play on straight white male guilt and to reinforce the victim status of the oppressed.
But again, I'm getting ahead of myself.
Before I get into the heart of my critique of multicultural-pc-identity politics as exemplified by the idiocy of folks like Chris Crass, I need to discuss a not-so-tangential development. As Marxism was retreating from the streets and the workplaces during the 1970s and 80s, it was also in retreat on the campuses, gradually replaced by post-Marxist postmodernism with its insistence that there are no overarching political themes or central political meta-narratives, only an aggregate of fragmented identities, interests and narratives. In postmodernist thinking there is no whole, merely the disassociated parts of a non-existent totality. Against Marxists like yours truly who insist on identifying as working class and consider class politics absolutely central to any kind of theory or action, postmodernists argue that I'm being reductionist, that Marxism has never adequately explained racial or sexual differences, that such differences actually can't be encompassed by any single theory or system, and that these differences are what define politics today. Postmodernists would further argue that the entire working class is just an intellectual construct, entirely subjective, and essentially culturally determined. There are no class interests dividing society, and no class struggle based on those interests because interests are subjectively individual, culturally defined, or at most based on one's racial or sexual identity.
I'll kick down these arguments when I take on the leftover Left in a moment. And I won't dwell on the fascist origins and influences on postmodernism from the likes of Nietzsche, Heidegger, de Man, Schmitt, Gadamer, Bataille and Blanchot. I'll simply indicate the remarkable confluence between postmodernist anti-philosophy and the political approach of anti-authoritarianism described above. An extraordinary coincidence indeed. It's telling that postmodernists would rather believe in Jung's mystical synchronicity to explain such a riveting coincidence than, say, the possibility that capitalism might be a social system that expands, that totalizes, that remains the meta-narrative of our time.
Brass knuckles time.
Let's narrow the characteristics of the leftover Left to three, beginning with its uncritical inheritance of the list of issues mentioned above from the 60s and 70s Left. For the most part, the current positions taken on those issues are rehashed from better-written points of unity twenty to thirty years old by now. That is, when they're not "Oh, national liberation struggles? Cool! We support that." The second characteristic is the belief-either anti-authoritarian or postmodern-that there is no center to politics, no driving force, no totality, no absolute truth, no overarching theme or unity, no meta-narrative. The amalgam of struggles, identities and partial truths that emerged in the 1960s was just that. It's all that politics, or for that matter reality amounts to, and any attempt to foster a discussion that there might actually be some kind of totalizing agent like capitalism shaping both politics and reality is immediately suspect, if not automatically wrong. To quote the fascist Yeats "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." Finally comes process, the *sine qua non* of the leftover Left. There is an inordinate amount of attention paid to process, to raising one's hand, to speaking only when called upon, to following the stack, to not interrupting, in lieu of any discussion of ideas, of theory, of real substance. Drawn primarily from the anti-authoritarian milieu's rich experience with affinity group, spokescouncil, small group process and consensus decision-making, this process-oriented approach in the hands of the leftover Left is often infected with an admiration, if not an envy, of the accomplishments of some of the more unsavory elements on the Left, old and new, resulting in distortions of anti-authoritarian process.
To paraphrase an infamous 1970 pamphlet, *The Tyranny of Structurelessness*, what fundamentally characterizes the leftover Left is the tyranny of process, of process über älles. Because, let's face it, there's not a whole lot of actual substance to the leftover Left, no thriving theoretical or even didactic ideological debates. Indeed, it's the leftover Left's process that permits it to sidestep such debates altogether. Take that sacred cow consensus for example. Outside the context of a small, relatively homogeneous affinity group, consensus invariably has a dumbing down effect. Used in a broad organization of diverse individuals with diverse perspectives, consensus functions to emphasize action over ideas. It's far easier to get people who differ on just about everything to agree on what to do rather than on the reasons for doing something. Consensus facilities the sidestepping of analysis and critical thinking, promoting a profound anti-intellectualism that Featherstone, Henwood, and Parenti described so well in their essay "'Action Will Be Taken': Left Anti-intellectualism and Its Discontents":
'So over all is the activist left just an inchoate, "post-ideological" mass of do-gooders, pragmatists and puppeteers? No. The young troublemakers of today do have an ideology and it is as deeply felt and intellectually totalizing as any of the great belief systems of yore. The cadres who populate those endless meetings, who bang the drum, who lead the "trainings" and paint the puppets, do indeed have a creed. They are Activismists.
'That's right, Activismists. This brave new ideology combines the political illiteracy of hyper-mediated American culture with all the moral zeal of a nineteenth century temperance crusade. In this worldview, all roads lead to more activism and more activists. And the one who acts is righteous.'
When consensus does manage to produce some common reason to take action, it's usually of the lowest-common-denominator "gosh that's so wrong" kind of moralistic analysis.
Needless to say, anti-authoritarians in particular and leftover Leftists in general do not recognize that their emphasis on process facilitates the avoidance of thinking about and collectively debating theory and analysis. Instead, they insist that means are identical with ends. In order to get to a democratic society radicals must practice democratic methods, nicely collapsing substance into process. This notion that means and ends are identical is a polar opposite reaction to the Leninist fallacy that the ends justify the means, and no less fallacious. Historically, things are much more complicated, with democratic methods producing tyrannical results (elected dictators) and authoritarian means producing democratic ends (social revolution). The ultimate consequence of this fallacy is that means come to substitute for ends, action takes the place of thinking, and doing radical things is sufficient to make one a revolutionary.
Most anti-authoritarians stop at equating conscious methods with conscious results. Leftover Leftists take it a step further by saying that unconscious behavior is identical to conscious means and ends. If a man in a meeting doesn't wait to be called on to speak, interrupts others, and doesn't honor the sanctity of the stack, he is accused of exercising the straight white male privilege inherent in his socially conditioned behavior, automatically making him guilty of straight white male supremacy by the equation of behavior with means and ends. Straight white men are made to feel guilty of conscious crimes because of their unconscious behavior, and the oppressed are simultaneously reaffirmed as victims, so crippled and disempowered by their oppression they require meetings to be entirely safe spaces where their voices are prioritized, everybody uses therapy I-speak and is extremely respectful, and following procedure becomes sacrosanct.
Again because there is no real content to all of this, by which I mean objective standards and criteria for determining oppression drawn from a coherent political analysis, the truth about what is or is not oppressive is assumed to reside solely in the word of the oppressed and their subjective feelings of oppression. Of course "white folks, straight people and men" need to check themselves, stand back and "shut the fuck up" at meetings run by leftover Left process. "And how do you insure democratic control of industry?" Marvin Garson once asked rhetorically in a 1968 essay "Going Beyond Democracy" to spell out a kind of ultra-leftism called Council Communism. "Why, by setting up workers' councils in each industry which operate with full respect for all the normal democratic procedures-especially the right to establish caucuses and factions, and the right to strike. The economy, in short, will be run the way a government is SUPPOSED to be run; it will be like a gigantic New Left convention-impeccably democratic and a stone drag." The leftover Left's ideal meeting is radical group therapy run amok, which makes Garson's boring New Left convention seem downright inviting.
Finally, for all the scurrilous attacks by leftover Leftists and their postmodernist cohorts on those who insist on talking about class-we're economic reductionists, identity politics have replaced class politics, social class is an intellectual construct-no similar attempt has been made to "deconstruct" capitalism. This is truly a case of the leftover Left not seeing the forest for the trees, of not comprehending the totalizing dimension of capital for the essentialist distractions of racial and sexual identity. The leftover Left, no less than postmodernism, is afflicted with holophobia-the fear of totality-according to Terry Eagleton. Not looking for totality becomes code for not looking for capitalism. Capitalism is by no means a homogeneous, fully accomplished total system. Fundamental to capitalism, however, is the need to grow, to expand, to encompass, to globalize, to totalize.
It is the expansionist aspect of capital that creates a negative totality in the working class based upon exploitation, expropriation, and alienation. Capitalism-not culture or intellectual fiat or subjective smoke-and-mirrors-creates the working class. Capital organizes the working class to appropriate surplus value. So long as capitalism remains a globalizing force, the working class will hold the potential for its own self-activated and self-organized totality. Identity politics-the awareness of a particular form of oppression by a particular racial or sexual group-considers that awareness, that identity, as a be-all and end-all, instead of as a point of departure. A wealthy bourgeois woman somehow magically shares an elemental female identity with the maid she employs at starvation wages. Identity ultimately becomes an essentialist prison, a politics of isolated, competing groups unable to transcend their immediate points of oppression to confront and overthrow the social system in which they are rooted.
Because the working class has the potential to transform a social order based on class and other forms of oppression, class politics is the terrain on which we can go beyond the fragmentation and limitations of identity politics. That means analyzing and overcoming racial and sexual oppression within a class framework, developing an encompassing class analysis of the structures of bourgeois social power which define and control the social conditions of specific and general oppression, and heightening the subjective class consciousness of working people's objective class position so that they can organize themselves as a class to become the active subject of history instead of its passive object.
I mean, come on. What really makes sense here? Organizing a bunch of competing racially and sexually identified groups into an ersatz majority to try and affect marginal change? Or actually organizing society's overwhelming majority-the working class-to make social revolution.
Next column I'll describe the tendency I identify with most-left communism or the ultraleft-and then tell you a little story about how the ultraleft and the leftover Left skirmished over the flying picket. Then, honest, I promise to get to dissecting socialism and Marxism.
ANTI-POSTMODERNIST BIBLIOGRAPHY: *Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique* by Alex Callinicos, *The Illusions of Postmodernism* by Terry Eagleton, *Postmodernism, or, The Logic of Late Capitalism* by Frederic Jameson, and *The Seduction of Unreason* by Richard Wolin.
By "Lefty" Hooligan
Column for Maximum Rock'n'roll #264 (5/05)
The generation starship is a well-worn concept in science fiction. If Einstein was right and the speed of light is the cosmic limit, then how might humanity colonize the stars? By building an enormous starship to house a completely self-contained, self-sufficient human society. The original crew lives, produces offspring, and dies in transit, with the whole colony arriving at their destination many generations later.
A much-overused treatment of this theme is that the entirely closed human society aboard such a starship gradually forgets its larger colonizing mission over the generations. Science becomes religion, history becomes mythology, knowledge becomes belief, and technical skill becomes ritual as the starship becomes their whole universe. Not everything is always passed down from one generation to the next however so knowledge is lost and skills are forgotten. Parts of the ship are damaged or its systems break down, but the humans are no longer able to make repairs. Increasingly, solutions are jury-rigged, and these makeshift solutions become how things were always done. The descendents of the would-be colonists arrive at their destination little better than savages and either sail right past it, unable as they are to pilot their starship, or park automatically in orbit, oblivious to their new home and the original intention to colonize it.
This sci-fi scenario is actually an apt metaphor for the devolution of the 1960s New Left into today's leftover Left. Once again I digress from my stated intention to critically examine socialism in general and Marxism in particular. The New Left, no less than the Old Left to which it was reacting, has a dubious relationship to authentic socialism and Marxism. The leftover Left's relationship to them is non-existent. This sorry-assed residual Left needs to be exposed as a delusional form of pseudo militancy that functions to divert and disrupt any truly radical response to the power of capital. First we need to see how the New Left became the leftover Left. "Always historicize!" as Frederic Jameson is fond of saying.
The New Left is often associated with the early days of Students for a Democratic Society, and the disaffected liberalism of SDS's Port Huron Statement in 1962 can be understood in the context of the broader civil rights movement and "ban the bomb" agitation of the day. The rise of an anti-Vietnam War movement, the turn of important elements of the civil rights movement first to black power and then to revolutionary nationalism, and the emergence of a nebulous youth revolt elevated to the status of counterculture were all to come. Also yet to come were women's and gay liberation, the ecology movement, the spread of revolutionary nationalism to other peoples of color as part of the emergence of "Third Worldism," even a much-neglected wildcat labor movement; all were in effect by the time SDS shattered into a handful of Marxist-Leninist splinters in 1968-69. Quite a heady and heterogeneous mixture of revolt to try to encompass under any single rubric or organization, a fact not disguised by mythologizing 1968 or by calling this welter of social unrest The Movement. An often-ignored point about the demise of SDS at this pinnacle of revolt is that there were two other major political responses to the spirit of revolution in the air that came out of SDS's ashes besides the ML one, those being democratic socialism and anti-authoritarianism.
By the start of 1970 then there was a rather lengthy shopping list of issues that any self-respecting leftist organization felt duty-bound to buy. Many of these were inherited from the ML/social democratic-dominated Left, old and new, but most derived from the extremely heterogeneous uprising known as the '60s. The following listing is by no means comprehensive, and a single term often encompasses several related issues. Racism, for instance, includes the topics of white supremacy and white skin privilege, as sexism covers patriarchy and male privilege. Finally, the terms of debate have changed since 1970 so that when people nowadays talk about global north versus global south, for instance, they're revising the discussion about imperialism and the Third World. So here goes: capitalism, imperialism, the working class, labor unions and parties, third party movements, electoral politics in general, real existing socialism, socialism in general, the state, nationalism, national liberation struggles, the Third World, racism, cultural or revolutionary nationalism, sexism, homophobia, radical separatism, self-determination, the draft, the war, non-violence and pacifism, bread-and-butter jobs and welfare issues, the elderly, youth and youth culture, drug use and decriminalization, vegetarianism, environmental destruction, ecology, animal rights.
Leftists worth their salt felt obligated to define and stake out a position on these and numerous other subjects, producing long boring lists called "points of unity" that read like Catholic catechisms. For this column I'm not much concerned with the democratic socialist tendency in the '60s that became social democracy. Exemplified by the New American Movement, which merged with the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee to become the present-day Democratic Socialists of America, these folks have either fully integrated themselves into the Democratic Party as its left wing, or opted for third party electoral politics-both rather conventional and uninteresting. Instead, I'll concentrate on the self-proclaimed revolutionary Leninist and anti-authoritarian tendencies to sketch out the transformation of a dynamic New Left into the brain dead leftover Left. To help with this, I will employ a conceptual lens-the dichotomy between form and content, process and substance-to sharpen the perspective.
Let's begin with Marxism-Leninism. A surprisingly large portion of the post-New Left Left claimed the ML mantle by 1970, including the explicitly antirevisionist alphabet soup of organizations called the New Communist Movement, the quasi-Maoist Progressive Labor Party, and the Third Worldist Weather Underground (all from the breakdown of SDS), in addition to a mushrooming cloud of Trotskyist sects of which the Socialist Workers Party was the biggest. The Communist Party-USA is not included in this camp, for while nominally ML it had thrown its weight behind social democracy by the 70s. All shared a common Leninist vulgarization of the Marxist base/superstructure concept that contended that every social ill and evil-from poverty, crime, and ignorance to racism, sexism, and homophobia-were solely a product of the capitalist mode of production, which would evaporate once capitalism was overthrown and replaced with socialism. Much of the above list of issues was reduced to a series of questions in true catechistic fashion, as in the black nation question, the national question, the women question, the ecology question, ad nauseam, with perhaps one of these questions considered paramount, as with the New Communist Movement's insistence that fighting racism and building multi-racial political organizations was central to the task of vanguard party building.
The process was straight-democratic centralism, criticism/self-criticism, political reeducation-and the substance was narrow-further degradations of Marxist-Leninist ideology through the vulgarizations of Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Castro, Hoxha, Kim Il Sung, Avakian, Klonsky, Baraka, et al, in an ever more sectarian search for the correct political line, the true vanguard party, and the status of "the real Marxist-Leninists," as Max Elbaum puts it in his book *Revolution in the Air*. Thus the diverse resistance, rebellion, and revolt of the 60s was to be straight-jacketed with a crude dogma, disciplined to the needs of building a vanguard party, harnessed to the task of fomenting socialist revolution lead by the true party with the correct dogma. The form was set, the content was crucial, and it was the ever more sectarian struggle over which organization or party had the correct political line that proved to be the hallmark of post-New Left Leninism. Using a Maoist formulation, Elbaum labels this ultra-sectarianism "ultraleftism" and counts it an important internal factor, alongside external factors like China's reactionary foreign policy, contributing to the demise of his beloved New Communist Movement. I'll discuss the decline of 60s radicalism shortly. For the moment note that Loren Goldner's review of Elbaum's book "Didn't See The Same Movie" (http:// home.earthlink.net/ ~lrgoldner/ elbaum.html) is a sufficient antidote to Revolution in the Air's eminently forgettable tale of Stalinism gone belly up. Goldner exposes Elbaum's narrow and skewed perspective on the Leninist scene, as well as on larger political realities, and reveals the "true historic ultra-left" of which Elbaum is clueless but that was very much alive in 1970.
I've often debated the merits of including the ultra-left of Pannakoek, Gorter, Bordiga, Mattick, and Korsch in the anti-authoritarian category. It's not as if the self-proclaimed anti-authoritarian milieu wasn't nebulous enough in the 70s, what with post-scarcity Bookchinites flanked on one side by a whole slew of traditional anarchist types like the syndicalist Wobblies and followers of Borsodi's green mutualism, and on the other side by a welter of anarchist countercultural crosspollinations in the form of Yippies, White Panthers, Diggers, and Motherfuckers This was all seasoned with a scattering of anarcho-pacifist and non-violent direct action types like myself in 1968. I've described my evolution from that position through revolutionary left anarchism to present-day left communism in a past column. What I'm pointing out at the moment is the key difference in the anti-authoritarian approach. While there were anarchists who insisted that The State, instead of Capitalism, was the source of all evil, the tendency among anti-authoritarians was to deny any center, or overarching unity, to the political issues of the day. The anti-authoritarian milieu was the most receptive to the freewheeling, multi-dimensional character of 1960s rebellion. But the shopping list above became a nebulous free-floating cloud: all struggles equally important, all oppressions equally legitimate, all political points of view equally valid. When there is little or no attempt to define and prioritize content, form comes to the fore. The anti-authoritarian milieu was pioneering the affinity group form, small-group process and consensus decision-making that would become part of the toolkit that the leftover Left uses to sidestep issues of content and substance today.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Different people had different scenarios, but almost everybody assumed that the rebellious spirit of the 60s would continue to spread, sparking insurgency in the working class, and eventually infecting every corner of American society until social revolution was inevitable. The reason that this never materialized is no mystery. One of the principle engines driving discontent in this country was the Vietnam War, opposition to which directly or indirectly fueled almost every other struggle at the time. Nixon ended the draft and began Vietnamizing the war in 1972, effectively taking the wind out of the Left's sails. The democratic socialist, ML, and anti-authoritarian tendencies on the Left were all faced with dwindling into irrelevancy or transitioning into some other line of political work in order to survive well before the US made its embarrassed retreat from Vietnam in 1975.
For democratic socialism, the transition was to social democracy. Adherents worked within the Democratic Party or for some third party movement, and placed their faith in progressive electoral politics. The ML response was more complex. That part of the ML left represented by the New Communist Movement tried transitioning to multiracial working class organizing and failed miserably, winding up replicating democratic socialism's turn to social democracy via Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition before the New Communist Movement petered out altogether. Elbaum's book is essentially "hundreds of pages on the wars of sects and ideologies" analyzing that demise in excruciating detail. Trotskyism had better success returning to its mainstay of working class organizing, the best example being the International Socialist intervention that became Teamsters for a Democratic Union and the election of Ron Carey as the Teamsters president.
Anti-authoritarianism had even greater success, considering its modest status to begin with, moving on as it did to the anti-nuclear movement. The various attempts to shut down the construction of the Seabrook nuclear power plant in the latter half of the 70s were a crucible in which tactics for mass nonviolent direct action were tested. Affinity group/spokescouncil structures, meeting stacks to keep outspoken people from dominating, and decentralized mass consensus process were practices from Seabrook that were familiar to people in the streets of Seattle over twenty years later. The collapse of Communism with the fall of the Soviet bloc between 1989 and 1991-a severe setback for the Left whether Leninist or social democratic-has had the paradoxical effect of emboldening anti-authoritarian forces as the only remaining opposition and last line of resistance to the status quo. The Black Bloc enfant terrible of the anti-globalization movement, anarchism is little more substantive these days than the circle A spray painted on some Starbucks window. Anarchist process, by contrast, rules the day.
Oddly enough, Elbaum's New Communist Movement hasn't entirely faded from the scene. Instead, it lives on in a very much attenuated form, via the anti-authoritarian milieu, through anarchists with vanguard envy. Self-proclaimed revolutionary anarchists associated with the now defunct Love and Rage Newspaper/Network/Federation, or at least those who proclaimed the centrality of the struggle against racism and for building multiracial political organizations in Chris Day's faction of that organization, declared the historical limits of anarchism and opted for the mass line post-Maoist politics of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. The anencephalic Chris Crass, also very much into the revolutionary and anti-racist labels, uncritically cheerleads for national liberation struggles, insists on sycophantically following the leadership of Third World peoples of color, and even declares the benefits of electoral politics, all the while calling himself an anarchist and keeping a straight face. Like Chris Day before him, Chris Crass is an unabashed admirer of the New Communist Movement's accomplishments in multiracial organizing. His Challenging White Supremacy workshops take anti-authoritarian process a step further into group therapy where everybody must raise their hands before speaking, police their language to make sure it's polite and couched in I-speak, and create safe spaces in meetings for women, gays, and people of color by prioritizing their voices. This oh-so-politically-correct process manages simultaneously to play on straight white male guilt and to reinforce the victim status of the oppressed.
But again, I'm getting ahead of myself.
Before I get into the heart of my critique of multicultural-pc-identity politics as exemplified by the idiocy of folks like Chris Crass, I need to discuss a not-so-tangential development. As Marxism was retreating from the streets and the workplaces during the 1970s and 80s, it was also in retreat on the campuses, gradually replaced by post-Marxist postmodernism with its insistence that there are no overarching political themes or central political meta-narratives, only an aggregate of fragmented identities, interests and narratives. In postmodernist thinking there is no whole, merely the disassociated parts of a non-existent totality. Against Marxists like yours truly who insist on identifying as working class and consider class politics absolutely central to any kind of theory or action, postmodernists argue that I'm being reductionist, that Marxism has never adequately explained racial or sexual differences, that such differences actually can't be encompassed by any single theory or system, and that these differences are what define politics today. Postmodernists would further argue that the entire working class is just an intellectual construct, entirely subjective, and essentially culturally determined. There are no class interests dividing society, and no class struggle based on those interests because interests are subjectively individual, culturally defined, or at most based on one's racial or sexual identity.
I'll kick down these arguments when I take on the leftover Left in a moment. And I won't dwell on the fascist origins and influences on postmodernism from the likes of Nietzsche, Heidegger, de Man, Schmitt, Gadamer, Bataille and Blanchot. I'll simply indicate the remarkable confluence between postmodernist anti-philosophy and the political approach of anti-authoritarianism described above. An extraordinary coincidence indeed. It's telling that postmodernists would rather believe in Jung's mystical synchronicity to explain such a riveting coincidence than, say, the possibility that capitalism might be a social system that expands, that totalizes, that remains the meta-narrative of our time.
Brass knuckles time.
Let's narrow the characteristics of the leftover Left to three, beginning with its uncritical inheritance of the list of issues mentioned above from the 60s and 70s Left. For the most part, the current positions taken on those issues are rehashed from better-written points of unity twenty to thirty years old by now. That is, when they're not "Oh, national liberation struggles? Cool! We support that." The second characteristic is the belief-either anti-authoritarian or postmodern-that there is no center to politics, no driving force, no totality, no absolute truth, no overarching theme or unity, no meta-narrative. The amalgam of struggles, identities and partial truths that emerged in the 1960s was just that. It's all that politics, or for that matter reality amounts to, and any attempt to foster a discussion that there might actually be some kind of totalizing agent like capitalism shaping both politics and reality is immediately suspect, if not automatically wrong. To quote the fascist Yeats "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." Finally comes process, the *sine qua non* of the leftover Left. There is an inordinate amount of attention paid to process, to raising one's hand, to speaking only when called upon, to following the stack, to not interrupting, in lieu of any discussion of ideas, of theory, of real substance. Drawn primarily from the anti-authoritarian milieu's rich experience with affinity group, spokescouncil, small group process and consensus decision-making, this process-oriented approach in the hands of the leftover Left is often infected with an admiration, if not an envy, of the accomplishments of some of the more unsavory elements on the Left, old and new, resulting in distortions of anti-authoritarian process.
To paraphrase an infamous 1970 pamphlet, *The Tyranny of Structurelessness*, what fundamentally characterizes the leftover Left is the tyranny of process, of process über älles. Because, let's face it, there's not a whole lot of actual substance to the leftover Left, no thriving theoretical or even didactic ideological debates. Indeed, it's the leftover Left's process that permits it to sidestep such debates altogether. Take that sacred cow consensus for example. Outside the context of a small, relatively homogeneous affinity group, consensus invariably has a dumbing down effect. Used in a broad organization of diverse individuals with diverse perspectives, consensus functions to emphasize action over ideas. It's far easier to get people who differ on just about everything to agree on what to do rather than on the reasons for doing something. Consensus facilities the sidestepping of analysis and critical thinking, promoting a profound anti-intellectualism that Featherstone, Henwood, and Parenti described so well in their essay "'Action Will Be Taken': Left Anti-intellectualism and Its Discontents":
'So over all is the activist left just an inchoate, "post-ideological" mass of do-gooders, pragmatists and puppeteers? No. The young troublemakers of today do have an ideology and it is as deeply felt and intellectually totalizing as any of the great belief systems of yore. The cadres who populate those endless meetings, who bang the drum, who lead the "trainings" and paint the puppets, do indeed have a creed. They are Activismists.
'That's right, Activismists. This brave new ideology combines the political illiteracy of hyper-mediated American culture with all the moral zeal of a nineteenth century temperance crusade. In this worldview, all roads lead to more activism and more activists. And the one who acts is righteous.'
When consensus does manage to produce some common reason to take action, it's usually of the lowest-common-denominator "gosh that's so wrong" kind of moralistic analysis.
Needless to say, anti-authoritarians in particular and leftover Leftists in general do not recognize that their emphasis on process facilitates the avoidance of thinking about and collectively debating theory and analysis. Instead, they insist that means are identical with ends. In order to get to a democratic society radicals must practice democratic methods, nicely collapsing substance into process. This notion that means and ends are identical is a polar opposite reaction to the Leninist fallacy that the ends justify the means, and no less fallacious. Historically, things are much more complicated, with democratic methods producing tyrannical results (elected dictators) and authoritarian means producing democratic ends (social revolution). The ultimate consequence of this fallacy is that means come to substitute for ends, action takes the place of thinking, and doing radical things is sufficient to make one a revolutionary.
Most anti-authoritarians stop at equating conscious methods with conscious results. Leftover Leftists take it a step further by saying that unconscious behavior is identical to conscious means and ends. If a man in a meeting doesn't wait to be called on to speak, interrupts others, and doesn't honor the sanctity of the stack, he is accused of exercising the straight white male privilege inherent in his socially conditioned behavior, automatically making him guilty of straight white male supremacy by the equation of behavior with means and ends. Straight white men are made to feel guilty of conscious crimes because of their unconscious behavior, and the oppressed are simultaneously reaffirmed as victims, so crippled and disempowered by their oppression they require meetings to be entirely safe spaces where their voices are prioritized, everybody uses therapy I-speak and is extremely respectful, and following procedure becomes sacrosanct.
Again because there is no real content to all of this, by which I mean objective standards and criteria for determining oppression drawn from a coherent political analysis, the truth about what is or is not oppressive is assumed to reside solely in the word of the oppressed and their subjective feelings of oppression. Of course "white folks, straight people and men" need to check themselves, stand back and "shut the fuck up" at meetings run by leftover Left process. "And how do you insure democratic control of industry?" Marvin Garson once asked rhetorically in a 1968 essay "Going Beyond Democracy" to spell out a kind of ultra-leftism called Council Communism. "Why, by setting up workers' councils in each industry which operate with full respect for all the normal democratic procedures-especially the right to establish caucuses and factions, and the right to strike. The economy, in short, will be run the way a government is SUPPOSED to be run; it will be like a gigantic New Left convention-impeccably democratic and a stone drag." The leftover Left's ideal meeting is radical group therapy run amok, which makes Garson's boring New Left convention seem downright inviting.
Finally, for all the scurrilous attacks by leftover Leftists and their postmodernist cohorts on those who insist on talking about class-we're economic reductionists, identity politics have replaced class politics, social class is an intellectual construct-no similar attempt has been made to "deconstruct" capitalism. This is truly a case of the leftover Left not seeing the forest for the trees, of not comprehending the totalizing dimension of capital for the essentialist distractions of racial and sexual identity. The leftover Left, no less than postmodernism, is afflicted with holophobia-the fear of totality-according to Terry Eagleton. Not looking for totality becomes code for not looking for capitalism. Capitalism is by no means a homogeneous, fully accomplished total system. Fundamental to capitalism, however, is the need to grow, to expand, to encompass, to globalize, to totalize.
It is the expansionist aspect of capital that creates a negative totality in the working class based upon exploitation, expropriation, and alienation. Capitalism-not culture or intellectual fiat or subjective smoke-and-mirrors-creates the working class. Capital organizes the working class to appropriate surplus value. So long as capitalism remains a globalizing force, the working class will hold the potential for its own self-activated and self-organized totality. Identity politics-the awareness of a particular form of oppression by a particular racial or sexual group-considers that awareness, that identity, as a be-all and end-all, instead of as a point of departure. A wealthy bourgeois woman somehow magically shares an elemental female identity with the maid she employs at starvation wages. Identity ultimately becomes an essentialist prison, a politics of isolated, competing groups unable to transcend their immediate points of oppression to confront and overthrow the social system in which they are rooted.
Because the working class has the potential to transform a social order based on class and other forms of oppression, class politics is the terrain on which we can go beyond the fragmentation and limitations of identity politics. That means analyzing and overcoming racial and sexual oppression within a class framework, developing an encompassing class analysis of the structures of bourgeois social power which define and control the social conditions of specific and general oppression, and heightening the subjective class consciousness of working people's objective class position so that they can organize themselves as a class to become the active subject of history instead of its passive object.
I mean, come on. What really makes sense here? Organizing a bunch of competing racially and sexually identified groups into an ersatz majority to try and affect marginal change? Or actually organizing society's overwhelming majority-the working class-to make social revolution.
Next column I'll describe the tendency I identify with most-left communism or the ultraleft-and then tell you a little story about how the ultraleft and the leftover Left skirmished over the flying picket. Then, honest, I promise to get to dissecting socialism and Marxism.
ANTI-POSTMODERNIST BIBLIOGRAPHY: *Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique* by Alex Callinicos, *The Illusions of Postmodernism* by Terry Eagleton, *Postmodernism, or, The Logic of Late Capitalism* by Frederic Jameson, and *The Seduction of Unreason* by Richard Wolin.
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Sorry for the Zippyesque nonsequiter.
Consensus process is the most effective form of democratic process around. Contrary to what some whiners argue, consensus is used by tens of thosuands of groups, collectives, organizations, and so on, around the world. Consensus has been around for centuries and has been used in a wide variety of cultures. Yes, consensus can suck when you have a bad meeting. It can suck when the people using it aren't doing it right, but these problems doesn't change the fact that consensus is the most democratic and fair way to conduct meetings.
I know Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood. Their article on activism was not an attack on process.
Lefty is also misinformed (like many people) about the "Tyranny of Structurelessness." That article was written in the early 1970s by a "leftover leftist" to criticize anarchist methods of organization. Jo Freeman favored the traditional socialist approach of building parties and disliked the growing prevalence of anarchist methods in the women's movement.
Here's another critique:
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=04/11/15/9120508
Apparently Lefty has had some bad experiences being told he has to raise his hand before talking at meetings. Cry me a river.
Look, I find the intrusion of therapeutic language into radical politics and the triumph of process over serious analysis just as frustrating as Lefty. I agree with much of his critique of "activistism" as well as of the post-modernists refusal of any recognition of the totality, of the central fact of the logic of capital accumulation in our lives.
I also recognize that there is plenty of stupidity foisted on the various movements (such as they are) that is informed by the narrow horizons of identity politics.
But I can't just buy into Lefty's faith in an unproblematic or contradiction-free working class. The anti-colonial movements, the Black liberation movement, the womens liberation movement, the queer movement, the disability rights movement -- each of these movements (and others), concretely attacked cleavages that run not just through larger society but through the working class itself. They confronted the workers movement in its various expressions with the inadequacies of its politics, with its objective failures to fight for the total liberation of all humanity which Marx characterized as its mission. (Lefty's glib and superficial account of the history of this period and the significance of these challenges and the attempts to answer them is a travesty.)
It is true that in the period of revolutionary retreat since the early 1970s these challenges have in many instances become the basis of more or less anti-working class forms of identity politics (which often embraces the pomo rejection of grand narratives as inherently oppressive). But this is as much a failure of the revolutionary working class movement as it is an indictment of the utterly predictable poverty of middle class radicalism.
Any serious revolutionary working class politics in the 21st century must come to terms with the challenges posed by the movements of the 60s and 70s (and later). Taking potshots at identity politics (or kvetching about having to raise your hand at meetings for christsake!) is no substitute for the urgent theoretical and practical tasks of articulating and implementing such a politics. Neither is wistful nostalgia for bygone workers councils. The class struggle is a runing battle on constantly changing terrain that constantly calls forth new lines of struggle and new organizational forms. If we are serious about including serious analyses of race, gender and sexuality in our critique of capitalism we need to recognize the concrete expressions of struggle over each as real moments in the class struggle.
What Lefty can't seem to see is the way that his own "ultra-left" workerism is just another sort of identity politics: in this case the identity politics of older bitter over-educated mainly white guys with a fetishistic attachment to a long past historical moment when such sorts were in the leadership of the workers movement. It is in this respect similar to anarchism: the identity politics of younger alienated mainly white guys. It is the typical conceit of white guys to imagine themselves as the carriers of things universal (whether those are the "values of Western Civilization" or unconsciously Eurocentric versions of "proletarian internationalism") and to refuse to seriously grapple with their own contradictory positionality within the web of relations of power and pivilege that criss-crosses the working class. These can't be wished away with empty slogans of working class unity. Rather they must be overcome concretely through the often protracted and soul-wrenching processes of struggle by which the global, multi-hued, multi-lingual, polymorphously perverse transnational working class becomes a class for itself.
I won't waste any time here trying to defend Love and Rage or my role in it, except to say that it was a modest and ultimately failed partial attempt to confront some of thse questions and that for the most part we understood the critical importance of attempting to put our ideas into practice through constructive participation in genuinely mass struggles as a means of determining the validity of those ideas and keeping us from getting stuck in our own heads. We made plenty of mistakes but to our credit we kept moving and challenging ourselves and were never content with either our theory or our practice.
Despite some of its other failings one of the positive contributions of Maoism is the importance it places on the practice of self-criticsm. This can (and frequently does) degenerate into ritualized self-abnegation which does little good. But when understood properly it can be a powerful mechanism for continuously challenging onself and rethinking what it means to engage in revolutionary politics in the particular moment one finds oneself. Lefty takes many swipes at other people (democratic socialists, the New Communist Movement, puppeteers, and, most unfairly, my friend Chris Crass) but seems utterly incapable of critical self-reflection. How does he account for the complete marginality of his own politics to the U.S. or world proletariat? He condemns my (and Crass's) respect for the modest accomplishments of the 1970s New Communist Movement in building genuinely multi-racial revolutionary organizations but he doesn't indicate who he thinks has done better recently. It seems to me that nobody who calls themselves a revolutionary in the United States in 2005 has much grounds to boast about their accomplishments. Some groups or trends show more vitality than others but none can claim the allegiance of even 1% of the U.S. working class. Given that state of affairs I think we all might benefit from a spirit of greater humility and mutual respect. I have no problem with serious polemics but I don't see why you have to be so rude.
People talk about the ability of the "working class" to transform capitalist societies, but what is it?
I'm almost 45 years old, and the nature of work has been transformed radically since I was born. My mother and stepfather worked in what they called "printing" in newspapers, back in the "hot type" days, and such work today is virtually non-existent, as well as the union shop framework in which they engaged the workplace.
Now, as everyone knows, we have gravitated towards a service economy, and trying to organize and politicize today, in the way that people tried to do with my parents' generation strikes me as absurd, as it completely fails to acknowledge the day to day reality of how work is done.
Furthermore, Lefty misses a critical point: the working class in the US and Europe in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century embraced imperialism, as, to the extent that lower middle class Americans should be construed as similar to a "working class", many Americans do today.
So, in the context of the world economy, are the workers of the industrialized countries of the US, Europe and Japan part of the "working class" or are they part of the capitalist class?
If you compare what a worker in Indonesia or the Phillippines gets paid, and the quality of their housing and medical care, to what workers in the mature industrialized countries receive, even in today's neoliberal climiate, you might begrudingly acknowledge a really troubling answer, or, at least, start having some really serious doubts.
Of course, technically, workers in the US, Europe and Japan don't necessarily share in the profits of global multinationals that exploit their "brothers" in other regions of the world (leaving aside that in some instances, they actually do through profit sharing plans and ESOPs), but they do seem to have a lifestyle subsidized indirectly through the exploitation of their brethren in other, lesser developed countries
A classic example of this historically was the American South before the civil rights movement. Lower middle class whites lived a lifestyle of relative privilege (maid service, gardeners, home repair, all manner of services associated wth the middle class or better in other regions) through low cost services provided by African Americans who were forced to work for wages (with unions and post-secondary education out of the question for most) dictated by whites through segregation.
If African Americans had been forced to rely solely upon a strict, Marxist working class politics to seek desegregation and civil rights, such as the right to vote, I seriously wonder whether segregation would have ended in the South without a violent rebellion by African Americans.
One can go in many directions with this, but my primary point is that any effort to develop a "working class" politics based upon the inadequacies of purported "identity politics" must acknowledge the problematic relationship of workers in the fully industrialized, capitalist world with workers elsewhere, and not avoid the dilemma through some simplistic class analysis that renders them all the same
--Richard
It’s a common enough experience.
You run into a familiar name, a name from your past, the name of an old friend, enemy or lover. The context might be a hundred and eighty degrees different from that past, as when I came across the name of an old anarchist comrade turned bitter enemy. Noted for his long hair, ultra-left politics and intense drug use over twenty years before at UCSD, he became the mayor of a small coastal town north of San Diego noted for wearing loud Hawaiian shirts with three-piece business suits. Or the context might differ little in spirit from the past, as when I learned that freelance writer and journalist Billie Nessen had been arrested by the Indonesian government for attempting to report on that military’s brutal war against insurgents in Aceh from the rebels point-of-view. Billy had already embarrassed the Indonesian government with award winning reporting about East Timor, so they charged him with visa violations, sentenced him to time served and kicked him out of the country. I knew Billy from his Rebel Baker days in San Diego.
Such experiences often trigger bouts of reflection, speculation or analysis on my part. This was the case when I picked up a copy of Freedom Road #3, a publication of the post-Maoist Freedom Road Socialist Organization, at Oakland’s excellent Walden Pond Bookstore a couple of weekends ago. There, in a special section dedicated to critiquing Max Elbaum’s first-hand history of the New Communist Movement Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che is an article authored by Chris Day called “The Fire Last Time.”
That’s the same Chris Day who, a decade ago, was one of the honcho’s behind that revolutionary anarchist newspaper/network/federation Love and Rage.
Folks familiar with this column know Chris and I are not exactly chums. I was highly critical of the now deceased Love and Rage, but I’ve personally liked many of the people involved in the organization. Chris impressed me as slime pretty early on.
Even before Love and Rage in fact. In the spring of 1989 I was living in San Diego, publishing an anarcho-punk zine called San Diego’s Daily Impulse and participating in a pretty lively if short-lived regional network of anarchist and anti-authoritarian individuals and groups called the Borderlands Anti-Authoritarian Community. A number of us were getting ready for the big Continental Anarchist Gathering, scheduled for San Francisco in August, when Chris and a red skin named Kieren dropped in to promote an idea making the rounds of anarchist circles in those days for a continental revolutionary anarchist newspaper.
As it happened, a tiny Trotskyist sect called the Revolutionary Socialist League—noted mainly for publishing (with their own printing press) a quasi-party paper called The Torch—came to the conclusion that Leninism in all its varieties was irredeemably flawed. At least a majority of the RSL’s membership did, as well as the conclusion that they were actually anarchists. So they offered their press to the embryonic anarchist movement of the day, inspiring the idea for the above mentioned continental revolutionary anarchist newspaper.
Chris and Kieren made their first sales pitch at a BAAC meeting called for the occasion. Kieren was cool, clearly working class and very self possessed. I later learned he was also a red diaper baby. He talked about his experiences in the Twin Cities scene going steel-toed doc to steel-toed doc with fascist skins to drive them physically out of town. We argued over whether this wasn’t just one gang taking on another over turf, in this case an anarchopunk gang taking on a Nazi skinhead one for control of the Twin Cities scene. Chris talked all together too much, and what he said got us locals a bit upset. Essentially, he wanted us to fold our local anarchist work, to include the Daily Impulse, into the continental anarchist newspaper project. Now for someone to call himself an anarchist and not grasp that local work was the very heart and soul of anarchism struck me as more than odd.
I remember them unpacking at the house they were staying over while in San Diego. I watched as Chris fondled a pair of steel-toed docs and gushed about how much skinhead ass he’d kicked with them. I saw the romantic gleam of a revolutionary wannabe in his eyes.
It didn’t surprise me to find out later that Chris was middle class. True middle class, as in the son of a doctor or a lawyer, some professional. Chris was slick and glib, but he was also playing at being a bad ass revolutionary.
BAAC kept an open mind on the continental newspaper idea, despite my misgivings. That dimmed a little with the San Francisco Continental Anarchist Gathering, when some of the maneuvering of Chris Day and Co was on display as to who and what was or was not “revolutionary enough” to be a part of their project. Still, Chris proved the consummate politician, and the fallout didn’t come until the formative stages of Love and Rage when promises were broken, folks were lied to and my BAAC comrades decided to steer clear of the whole mess. I mean everybody suspected Love and Rage because of the RSL ex-Trot involvement. It didn’t help to have manipulative politicos like Chris associated with the project.
I wrote a humorous little pamphlet, “Do You Have Vanguard Envy?,” as my critique of L&R in general and Chris Day in particular. In trying to be “more revolutionary than thou” the organization aped some of the worst features of the Leninist Left. The newspaper was virtually indistinguishable in layout, and sometimes even in content from Leftist party papers. They glommed onto the Autonomen black bloc tactic as if to one-up their main competition for “revolutionary youth,” that being the RCP’s Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade. The “leadership” could run roughshod over the membership, as happened at the 1993 “Conference of the Long Knives” when L&R became a federation. And of course, L&R split with enough acrimony and deceit to warm the heart of old Trotsky himself. Surprisingly, the ex-RSL types had very little to do with this vanguard envy. As Chris Day’s post-split organization Fire By Night Organizing Committee wrote in their pamphlet “After Winter Must Come Spring,” half the former RSL members left within a year and many of the rest became inactive. Of those who stayed active in Love and Rage, virtually all remained anarchists after the split.
Nope, it was folks like Chris Day who gave L&R its vanguard envy. Chris came to anarchism wanting it to replicate the dubious successes of Leninism by insisting that his anarchism was revolutionary, organized and fixated upon race. Indeed, Fire By Night judged the theory and practice of anarchism insufficient because L&R had not adequately come to terms with racism and white skin privilege or revolutionary discipline and organization. This is how ex-L&Rer Wayne Price puts it in “Nine Years of the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation:”
"Chris Day, a founder and influential member (that is, a “leader”) had concluded that it was time to abandon anarchism. He told people informally that we had reached the limits of the anarchist “milieu” and it was time to move on. He wrote a paper on The Historical Failure of Anarchism, emphasizing the programmatic weaknesses of anarchism. He declared that no revolution could succeed without a centralized, regular army and a revolutionary state. A group formed around him, particularly of people who had never had to choose between anarchism and authoritarian Marxism. Although they suddenly discovered the value of the international working class, their new-found Marxism was not of any of the libertarian or humanistic varieties (autonomes, council communism, CLR James, Eric Fromm, Hal Draper, etc.). It was Maoism—one of the most Stalinist, authoritarian versions. […] There is a myth in the present anarchist movement that L&R collapsed due to weakness over African-American liberation. This was never a major dispute inside the organization, although perhaps it should have been. It was raised at the last minute, the main supporter of Race Traitor politics blocing with the Maoist faction. But it was never the issue in the faction fight, that being anarchism versus Maoism."
Fire By Night’s fawning admiration of the EZLN in particular and enthusiastic approval of “mass line” politics in general made their merger with the post-Maoist Freedom Road Socialist Organization an unsurprising dénouement to Love and Rage’s checkered history.
Now hold on, you say. Wasn’t I, at the very time Chris was visiting San Diego, claiming to be an anarcho-marxist and drifting toward left communism in part because anarchism did not adequately come to terms with issues of power, revolutionary organization and class? Yes, but I actually read Marx. I’d expect Chris to settle for the vulgar Maoist/post-Maoist milieu because it’s overarching themes are pretty much what he hoped to instill in anarchism. And let’s face it; Maoism is to Marxism what disco is to music, a travesty at best. I’ll demonstrate how Maoism plays fast and loose with Marx, and even Lenin, in a moment. First, let’s take a look at how sloppy and vague Chris’s thinking remains, even as a post-Maoist, with a quote from “The Fire Last Time.”
“Thousands of young people, largely from middle-class backgrounds, immersed themselves in the life of the working class by taking jobs in factories and moving into working class communities. They dedicated themselves to organizing for revolution, often sacrificing their own health and well being and risking beatings and arrests in order to build serious organizations of oppressed people, organizations that could really fight. More than any other trend coming out of the ‘60’s, the New Communist Movement sought to build and sometimes succeeded in building genuinely multi-racial organizations.”
Aside from salivating over Maoist successes, can you smell the patronizing air to this? Of course, this is actually Chris’s own path through life, a young middle-class person who sees himself as joining the oppressed to fight for revolution. It was also his analysis of punk youth when he was with Love and Rage. Not to make too fine a point of it, but Chris wouldn’t know class analysis if it bit him on his post-vanguardist ass. All it takes is a little basic Marxism to prove this analysis fundamentally flawed.
Ah, finally, the point of this column, a definition of working class. It has to do with our relationship to the means of production. Do we own and control the means of production, or do we work for those who do? Workers don’t own factories, businesses or farms. We own only our own labor, which we sell for a wage to those who do own these things in order to survive.
While this constitutes the basic Marxist definition of the working class, nothing is quite so simple, particularly when it comes to Karl Marx. Marx’s general concept of the proletariat, based as it is upon ownership of productive means and wage labor, took on a particular character thanks to Marx’s own emphasis upon the industrial proletariat as the vanguard of the working class. Industrial capitalism was the leading edge of economic development in the 19th century, and Marx fully expected the industrial sector of the working class to continue to expand until it made up not only a majority of society but virtually the entire proletariat as well. In addition, the industrial discipline and organization required of the industrial working class by the capitalist class as part of the proletariat’s exploitation could be transformed into the revolutionary organization and discipline needed by the working class to overthrow their exploiters, take power and usher in socialism.
Lenin, of course, converted this into dogma with the caveat that the vanguard in turn needs a vanguard. That’s why Leninist vanguard parties (and pre-party formations) in the United States continue to require their cadre to take jobs in factories and move into working class communities, this despite the fact that the industrial proletariat is a miniscule and continually shrinking part of the overall working class in this country. This fetishism of the industrial proletariat by Lenin and his heirs comes with the implication that, if you’re not industrial working class you’re not working class at all. Even though Marx held onto his revolutionary expectations for the industrial proletariat until his death, he was by no means so rigid in his class analysis. He first regarded the emerging stratum of white-collar workers as actually a part of the petit bourgeoisie, the true middle class. Toward the end of Marx’s life, upon seeing both the expansion and proletarianization of this white-collar sector, he included them more and more often in the working class proper.
If the working class is defined in broad Marxist terms, we’re talking about 60 to 70% of the population. If the working class is defined in narrow Leninist terms, we’re talking about merely 15% (and declining) of the working class. This makes quite a difference in terms of organizing strategy, let alone the power and potential of the class as a class. It also reveals one basic fallacy in Chris Day’s sorry excuse for a class analysis. Yes, the sons and daughters of America’s professional middle class, even of its bourgeois elite, sought to immerse themselves in the working class in the 1960’s (through the NCM, etc.), and to a lesser extent in the 1990’s (through L&R, etc.). Just as often, the children of the white-collar working class wound up taking factory jobs and moving into blue-collar working class communities to organize for revolution.
This tendency to see anybody who doesn’t work in a factory as middle class or higher in part stems from the complexities of defining the working class in an American context. On the one hand the capitalist class has eroded the basic integrity of the hourly wage as a standard in the definition of the working class. More and more folks are salaried, not because they’re management, but because the owning class doesn’t want to pay for overtime and other benefits. I’m on salary as an IT worker because my company wants to be able to call me for computer emergencies after hours and on weekends, without having to pay for it. The work remains wage labor, no matter how you cut it. On the other hand, working class folks are able to own their own homes and even invest in the stock market. It’s not uncommon for workers to have a little business going on the side or to rent out a converted garage to make ends meet. They remain working class however because they could never make it without their day—e.g. wage labor—jobs. That’s what pays the bills.
Couple this with wage disparities ranging from the few dollars a day earned by sweatshop workers to the $100,000 annual income of the highest paid Longshoremen, infuse everything with the American myths of “upward mobility” and the “middle class,” and you have the main elements of a bourgeois obfuscation in which even hamburger flippers at McDonalds think of themselves as “middle class.” Needless to say, this is intended to obscure a worker’s sense of self-interest and to thwart any development of what Marx called class consciousness.
The issue of “false consciousness” is a matter for another column. To continue with the ramifications of defining the working class, a number of factors go into defining someone as working class, first and foremost being their immediate status as a wage slave. Secondary factors can include whether someone comes from a working class background, aspires to rise above their class, or stands politically with the working class. The wild card factor is whether someone is working class and also class conscious. I say wild card because whereas Marx considered class consciousness simultaneously as the subjective made objective in the class struggle and as an essential element in the working class’s self-emancipation as a class, it has suffered horrible distortions at the hands of Mao.
Mao led a “proletarian revolution” in a country that was 99% plus peasantry. In order to do so, he detached Marx’s concept of working class consciousness from its material roots, called it “proletarian consciousness,” and bestowed it upon anyone who accepted his peculiar formulation of Leninism. A peasant, a doctor, a lawyer, even a capitalist all could possess proletarian consciousness so long as they adhered to “Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought.” To have the correct political analysis was tantamount to being working class in Mao’s bizarre twist on Leninist vanguardism, leaving Maoists to argue endlessly over the correct party line with a sectarianism that has rivaled Trostskyism. Even the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, known for its principled efforts to unify and incorporate the scattering of Maoist and post-Maoist sects outside the “Mao More Than Ever” Revolutionary Communist Party, suffered a split in its ranks, with the Fight Back faction also calling itself Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
It can be argued that, by making consciousness paramount in defining one’s class, Maoism makes the false “middle class” consciousness of much of the American working class a reality simply because working people believe it, which dovetails nicely with the bourgeois obfuscation I mentioned above. Another column maybe, because I’m so over my word limit at this point I’m in danger of the MRR Central Committee’s ruthless axe. I am grateful that Chris Day finally came out after almost 15 years in the Stalinist closet and no longer claims to be anti-authoritarian slash libertarian. And pleased my initial hunch about Chris as he got a revolutionary hard-on stroking his steel-toed docs finally proved on target.
I don't know if I "fondled" any Doc Martens, (I've owned a few pairs of the shoes over the years but never the steel toed boots) but I do know that I've never claimed to have kicked any skinhead ass. I've been present for a number of such events, but I make no pretensions to being much use in that kind of a fight. I also have never attempted to hide my middle class background.
The rest of what Joe has to say about me is just warmed over seven-year old (or more) anarcho-sectarian drama mongering that just isn't worth talking about anymore. At least not to me it ain't. It really is kind of sad to see grown folks still fixating on this kind of petty shit as if anything at all was at stake.
I've had a lot of folks crash on my various couches over the years. Some I liked. Some I didn't. Some had politics I thought were right on. Others didn't. But I don't use the good or bad luck of their ending up on my couch as grist for dopey psychologizing in the place of real political argument.
Joe has some interesting things to say about the basis of revolutionary working class politics in the U.S.. Most of it is wrong, but its the sort of thing that is worth arguing about, because these are always present questions that confront us. Personal sectarian gossip, political caricature and slander on the other hand only serve to drag down these sorts of more substantive discussions.
The working class as a category of people under capitalism is constituted by its place in the process of production, but as a revolutionary class with the capacity to overthrow capitalism and usher in a communist society it undergoes continual processes of composition, decomposition and recomposition in which consciousness and culture play absolutely pivotal roles, in which some sectors concentrate its most revolutionary aspirations and others do everything in their power to hold it back. In the United States historically race has played a central role in determining which sections of the working class have risen to to the challenges of their day and which ones haven't, but obviously there are many other factors. Leninists have no monopoly on the fetishization of the industrial proletariat (over its other sections and without regard to obviously enormous changes in the organization of production in the U.S. and around the world). Indeed even the most robotic Leninist sects tend to have a richer grasp of the complex and evolving character of the working class than many workerist anarchists and self-described ultra-left communists I have met. (The latter group, despite their proclaimed rabid anti-Leninism seem to have taken etiquette courses from the Spartacist League.) At any rate the conception of the working class Joe attacks here is not my own.