ReMarx III

I’m back to sorting out how I got into Marx and how I’m going to get out of it. There is a lot of socialism outside of, or alongside of, Marxism. Rejecting, or better, qualifying one does not imply rejecting the other.

My early views were colored by too much Lenin and too much Rosa Luxemburg of “The Mass Strike.” Both rely on what I would call (and I’m not the first) a “catastrophist” notion of revolution. In that fantasy, the masses are so immiserated and the economy has broken down to the point where a desperate working class is anxious to rise up as one and smash the bourgeois state. Russia was in a state of catastrophe that handed Lenin an opportunity to lead a minority to seize power. Luxemburg’s book was thrilling and tells you how a full-scale revolution could actually happen. It’s a fiction. The Russia model was a one-off. Revolution was expected to happen sooner in Germany and France, but it never came close.

Lenin’s and Marx’s rhetorical style appealed to my dyspeptic nature, where you are always obliged to destroy any adversary in argument, even if you agreed with them yesterday. It does not lend itself to practical politics. In politics the only conceivable approach is transactional parliamentary incrementalism. You can find support for this in Marx, especially in the need to defend democracy and incremental gains. The democracy bit is particularly relevant this year.

Speaking for myself, after coming of age with a milk and cookies sense of the U.S., the shock of realization led me to the fallacy that to be serious, and the times above all called for seriousness, one had to embrace more radical positions. That does not follow, but it had a lot to do with pushing the student movement towards an uncritical Marxism-Leninism. Something similar is in play today in Democratic Socialists of America.

Marx’s immiseration bit is a non-sequitur. Actually, its formulation in Marxian economics itself is flaky. It is not supposed to be a biological minimum. That would be simplistic, as well as not observed in the advanced capitalist countries. It is said to be a cultural standard, but then it is really nothing in particular. Business firms would like to depress wages for sure, but that doesn’t tell you very much.

In Marx, technical progress and the evolving division of labor driving productivity growth are a school for working class consciousness, educating the workers in the need to seize the means of production and in how to run it. This is just ridiculous. The working class is never inclined to smash the state. If you’ve ever worked in a union shop — I have — you have experience in how timid most workers tend to be. Advocating a job action, even just missing pay, is a huge thing for most people. Mass strike? Oh please.

There is no lack of immiseration in the “Global South” or the Third World or whatever you’d like to call it. It can be found in spots in the U.S. itself, but it is more the exception than the rule. It is true that many are obliged to devote inordinate hours to work and have little to show for it. In any case, there are few signs that the natives are restless in the terms envisioned by Marx, and fewer still that they look to their class interests, rather than ethnicity, race, and the like.

I like to point out that the most mind-boggling thing has been the popular resistance in the U.S. to public health measures, which knocks into a cocked hat the beloved Marx-y thing about the working class being motivated by its material interests. You can't get more material than not dying.

I do think there is potential for progressive mass agitation, but it will be heavily inflected with themes of anti-racism, with the difficulty of being a citizen while black. As Adolph Reed has shown, there was a social-democratic current in the 1950s in which African-Americans like A. Phillip Randolph and Bayard Rustin played central roles. (The recent Rustin biopic glossed over his labor credentials, overshadowing his socialist politics with gay love drama.) It can revive. That’s for the future. Right now we just have to prevent more backsliding.

What I do take to heart is the fundamental Marxian notion of the alienation of labor. The worker with labor power as his only endowment is obliged to produce a world in which he has no ownership, control, or agency. This is true no matter how well one is paid. It’s really about the stifling of human potential. Furthermore, the blind, irrational drive for the accumulation of capital gives rise to economic disruption and ecological peril. All that is plain enough and commends an interest in socialism.

The emphasis on economic factors in historical development is also well-taken. In my view is it has become a commonplace now in social science. The initial, simplistic “economic determinism” has evolved into a fruitful flexibility.

The economic system lurches into crises, harming millions in the process, but it never succumbs to utter breakdown. The closest analogy is the 1930s, but in that case it’s been shown that unradical reforms could have reduced the misery. I expect bigger catastrophes to result from climate change. Related migration will bring social and political chaos, and with Trump back in the White House anything could happen.

Reading about socialist controversy a hundred years back provides an interesting backdrop to the goings-on in our largest left organization, Democratic Socialists of America, presently swirling around the toilet bowl thanks to its delusionary “National Political Committee,” whose most recent political debacle is congratulating Nicolas Maduro for his electoral triumph in Venezuela, contrary to the postures of the bona fide left leaders in the region.

One trait one observes in DSA is the resemblance of the hostility to politics to the Bakunin anarchists of the First (Communist) International. Another is the devotion to Lenin, Kautsky, Stalin, and Mao. I never said this is consistent, much less intelligent. All those heroes were bound to defend the catastrophist-founded Bolshevik revolution. The rhetorical style referenced above evolved into a reign of political dictatorship. So it is unrealistic and unappetizing, all at once. We can do better.