Beyond Good and Evil
BHASKAR SUNKARA
Despite my unapologetic Marxism, I never have considered myself a sectarian. But last year when asked by a member of a small progressive group (is there any other kind?) at George Washington University, why since on some issues in terms of tactics at least, me and several YDS campus activists at GWU (we constituted ourselves as the “Democratic Left”), seemed to be to the right of our liberal and anarchist comrades, why did we still bothered to cling to the socialist label and engage directly with Marx? Wouldn’t our goals be better served through a total fusion of the different progressive groups instead of mere popular-fronts on what seemed like every single, particular issue? I replied that we saw the importance of trying to build the embryo of a presence for DSA and YDS in the Washington D.C. area. I didn’t mention that the predominantly undergraduate, new Democratic Left would probably never come close to achieving this feat if it liquidated itself, while it was still growing independently.
We made it a point to reach out to the unpoliticized and mainstream Democrats, so we were able to make more inroads with Obama supporters than liberals who supported Nader or the Greens, but didn’t have any ideological misgivings about the limits of bourgeois democracy. I would also add that we have less of a penchant for alienating people by seeing brick throwing and veganism as the highest stage of revolutionary consciousness than certain (not all) American anarchists. I have a fun time organizing and socializing with like-minded people, but I try to engage in more than a lifestyle or the politics of “personal liberation.”
One tendency I noticed in my dealings with both these groups of activists is the tendency to see their activism in the terms of a biblical battle between the forces of justice and those of malevolence. I’ve always had no problem playing along with this narrative, though it always struck me, just like a lot of things on the psuedo-left, as intellectually wanting.
To preface I began my forays into Marxism by reading Animal Farm and the first 100 pages or so of a biography of Leon Trotsky before high school. The Spanish Civil War, the Russian Revolution and the figures of George Orwell and Leon Trotsky were where my very unlikely 21st century introduction to politics began, though I will admit that the vast majority of the material went completely over my head. In high school I discovered Howard Zinn and Richard Wright, more ordinary introductions to leftism, though at the time I probably wouldn’t have described myself as anything but a liberal with radical sympathies. Born to immigrants from the post-colonial world, who moved to the United States just months before my birth, my household was paradoxically always a bastion of support for not only Clinton, but for the Castro regime.
When I finally discovered Karl Marx it was through his early “humanist” writings, in particular the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, though the humanist streak of early Marx can certainly be seen throughout the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. The Manuscripts went unpublished during Marx’s lifetime until it was released in 1932 by researchers in the Soviet Union. It is in this document where the concept of alienation is elucidated. How important the manuscripts are and whether or not there was an “epistemological break” between the young Marx and the mature Marx, as Louis Althusser put it, have been points of contention between generations of Marxists, an overview of which is beyond both my modest capacities as a writer and my fleeting attention span as a student.
It was through the Marxist-Humanist tradition of Marshall Berman (Adventures in Marxism) and the Praxis School (a group of Marxists who advocated for change in Tito’s Yugoslavia) that I got my real start in Marxism. There is something about the writing style of early Marx, the Hegelian flourishes, that appealed to me. Moreover examining Marx as a theorist of the human condition first and foremost allowed me to table my own questions about the record of state-socialist police states. It was not until I later more fully examined Marx that I reached the revelation that is now obvious to me, that Marx was a democratic socialist and more of a theorist of capitalism and modernity than a writer of blueprints for future revolutions.
Concurrent with my examination of Marxist-Humanist thought I also attempted to dive into “neo-Marxist” theorists like Antonio Negri. Needless to say… well, needless to say. Luckily around the same time I started reading another Antonio (Gramsci), Rosa Luxemburg and most importantly Karl Marx through more of an “orthodox lens.” Reading Capital was a bit of a chore and certainly there are some concepts in there that you don’t have to read directly through Marx. I probably would’ve been just as well-off reading the basics of the use-value, exchange-value concepts from Wikipedia than from the horse’s mouth. It’s no wonder that Marx’s magnum opus easily passed the censors allowing its publication in 1867 Germany. Yet a comprehensive reading of Capital really reshaped my understanding of capitalist society and social change.
Reading chapter ten of Capital, the one on the working day, was particularly important to this understanding. In order for capitalism to function workers must have a property right in their capacity to perform labor (unlike the slave) and they must be separated from ownership of the means of production. They are thus compelled to sell their property right (labor-power) to the owners of the means of production, rent the means of production from the owners, or starve. (I would argue that workers’ renting the means of production from the state and running it in a democratic workplace even within a market economy, would constitute a post-capitalist society, but I’ll leave that for some other time.)
In short, the capitalist is renting the worker for the course of production and is thus entitled to maximize the “rate of exploitation,” the only line they won’t cross is infringing on the ability of labor to reproduce itself. If the worker feels she is overworked or the conditions are dangerous, she is free to seek employment elsewhere (labor flexibility and mobility are natural in capitalism). Ostensibly it appears that the cards are in the hands of the capitalist class. It seems like the bourgeoisie can decide whether their factories are safe or not, whether they employ children, give their workers a decent wage, etc. Lots of liberal activism still works from this assumption.: vilifying Wal-Mart and other corporations for not providing employee health care, attempting to force private corporations to “do the right thing” and serve the public good.
These ideas are utopian, because they ignore the fact that while it appears that the working conditions of proletarians are held captive to the caprice of capitalists, the capitalists themselves are imprisoned to market forces. Marx illustrates this point when he discusses the directors of the “Cyclops Steel and Iron Works” arguing with the factory commission that twelve-year old boys should be forced to work throughout the night. Responding to objections, the owner replies:
“But then there would be the loss from so much expensive machinery, lying idle half the time, and to get through the amount of work which we are able to do on the present system, we should have to double our premises and plant, which would double the outlay.”
Yes it may sound like the owner is a giant douche unable to see that his relentless pursuit of surplus value is ruining the lives of the young labor he is employing, but what is his alternative? Be altruistic, rebel against his interest to maximize the rate of exploitation and be undercut and driven out of business by less amiable competition? Leave both himself and his employees destitute?
Yet market forces can be managed and tamed to varying degrees by social solidarity. Workers individually have limited power, but collectively they can bargain with the capitalist class. Not to get dialectical, but it’s a matter of force. Two contrasting interests stand at opposite poles; the interest of the capitalist to make the workday longer, wages lower and the pace of work quicker and the interest of workers to shorten the workday, increase wages and slow down the pace of work. Neither is right or wrong. Short of a revolutionary rupture with the capitalist system, or the use of coercive state machinery to suppress worker organizations, the end result will lie somewhere in between these two poles. Of course activism at union locals and individual factories doesn’t change the fact that the market will continue to favor those capitalists that manage to keep labor in check, either through the reserve labor army of the unemployed, physical force or ideological co-option.
Thus the real triumphs of the developed world’s labor movement, for instance, came when workers were able to organize themselves politically, when they were able to either directly contend for state power or pressure existing parties enough to force concessions. The limitation of the workday was the major gain that Marx discusses in Capital and it was this kind of non-reformist reform that he was probably alluding to when he claimed that “democracy is the road to socialism.” The biggest triumphs of social democracy occurred in places like Sweden during the 20th century where an organized labor movement was able to achieve power through a mass social democratic party and cajole a numerically small capitalist class into accepting sweeping transformations that made capital work largely towards social gains. The scale of these transformations happened nationally in the 20th century, but the world has changed since then. With the globalization of capital and the general transformation of the world, the labor movement of the future will have to transform itself from a national movement to an international one, just like throughout the 19th and 20th century it transformed itself from embryonic local and regional movements into national ones. The only way to accomplish this daunting task is through organization, politicization, class struggle and social transformation.
Reading Capital eviscerated liberal, moralist bather from my vocabulary and since I also took to a “stagist” (two-stage theory) reading of the work, it also caused me to frown upon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution (despite my great respect for the man himself). The historical legacy of Leninism and my qualms with the dependency theory of whose locus classicus is Lenin’s theory of imperialism, the irrelevancy of Luxemburgism in a stable liberal democracy, my distaste for identity politics, “third worldism” and anarchistic ultra-leftism, all led me to embrace a democratic socialism rooted firmly in the ruminations of Marx, Kautsky and Harrington.
I find that ignoring the pitfalls of portraying the other side as evil or malevolent makes one a more effective debater, maintains intellectual clarity and historical context, and it also makes it easier to convey radical politics to mainstream workers. The other day I had a discussion with two local union activists and one ununionized worker (who helped manufacture boats for the U.S. Navy) in which I was able to explain the basics of Marxist thought in much the same way as I did above. The conclusion I believe they came to was that through concerted worker organizations, struggle and political involvement the balance of power between the capitalist class and labor could be brought to a point where something closer to social democracy could triumph in America. Not exactly that agitational, I know, but I implore a bleeding heart liberal or someone who thinks American workers are the enemies of more oppressed third world labor to do any better. (And to be clear, I don’t mean to say that socialist politics will inevitably arise out of class struggle or that the goals of trade unionism and socialism are always one and the same).
A more through answer to the question that I was posed by that campus activist would be “I don’t understand how ‘anarcho-liberals’ working to stop sweatshop goods being sold on their campuses don’t put their actions into a broader context or perspective.” They think I’m wasting my time with Marxism, but I think they are wasting their time spouting self-righteous petit-bourgeois moralism and confused anti-imperialist sloganeering without it. And some of the worst offenders relishing identity politics don’t seem to me to be engaging in anything more than a silly construct to allay white guilt. They would be better off taking a few doses of “vulgar” Marxism and preparing to join the transition from a post-political psuedo-left to the Next Left.
I think I could gleam an enamoring enough smile to pull off saying this to someone clad in a Balaclava or wearing a Che t-shirt with a Barack Obama button on it (I’ve seen it); what do you guys think?
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I like the phrase “Next Left”; I hope it gains currency
Have you read any of Mao’s writings? He has a few strong points, such as Mass Line, though his overall theory becomes trashed with “New Democracy,” simply his excuse for skipping the capitalist-bourgeoisie phase of society. It’s an interesting read, and although it’s the spiritual successor to Stalinism, if you can get your hands on a Red Book you should take a look.
Honestly, Lenin was about 100 years too early. Socialism requires as much reform as it does revolution to be successful. High-speed communication and transportation as well as globalism will bring about “intenationalization” of workers and people, much as it has of corporations.
I’d like Bhaskar to flesh out his “two-stagist” opposition to “permanent revolution.” What are the two stages? And what relevance does this have to the U.S.?
The old “stages theory” was that the bourgeois (anti-feudal) revolution havd to precede the socialist revolution by some definite period (as opposed to Trotsky’s theory of the proletariat leading the anti-feudal revolution and this passing over immediately into the socialist revolution).
But the question of which of these theories is right no longer really matters, because there are no significant genuine pre-capitalist state regimes or social orders remaining in the world. Our enemy today is capitalism and capitalist political regimes.
A forewarning, whenever I try to write a response to a question early in the morning before I get ready for work it normally ends up as an unintelligible mess.
The stages of development I was referring to were capitalism and socialism, not feudalism and capitalism.
Keep in mind the only Trotsky I’ve read first hand is History of the Russian Revolution, Literature and Revolution and My Life. I have not read his 1929 book Permanent Revolution in its entirety, but the part of his theory that was stressing was that the indigenous bourgeoisie in late-developing capitalist countries were not capable of developing productive forces and thus the nascent proletariat of the undeveloped world must in alliance with the peasantry seize state power.
A more orthodox reading of Capital would reject this idea and the growth of productive forces in India, Brazil, China and elsewhere seem to suggest that with some state intervention, capital can greatly expand productive forces and still play a historically progressive role.
The fate of national liberation movements and other attempts to use state accumulation to accomplish the historic tasks of the bourgeoisie also show the failure of attempting to skip the capitalist stage of development. There is this false notion that still looms around the left that colonialism and imperialism were essential to capitalist operation, I utterly reject that and I think developments since World War II have vindicated this stance.
I would call the conditions of much of the Indian peasantry, hundreds of millions of people largely “pre-capitalist”, as far as our enemy today, yes capitalist political regimes are foes, but as far as poverty and human degradation I would think that chronic underdevelopment is a far greater enemy to humanity than capitalist exploitation. You can look at the state of affairs in the United States and say capitalism is in a state of decay, but if you look at the world do you think its mission is incomplete, that the productive forces need to be unfettered immediately?
Our view of these issues change how we relate to regimes like Lula’s in Brazil and to a lesser extent the Congress Party in India. Do we largely support the market-driven development efforts of these administrations in the face of left-wing opposition?
Obviously this is all built upon the assumption that popularly agitated, state-controls can be put on capital to prevent imminent environmental degradation.
If we concede the successes of regulated market relations, can the growth be replicated without the private ownership, in other words would the empowerment and organization of labor through cooperatives in a regulated market produce growth and a more equal growth at that?
One point about Trotsky–we shouldn’t forget his support of collectivization and rapid industrialization, not unlike Stalin. I tend to think that right opposition of Bukarhin and the continuation of the NEP would’ve lead to a more humane, stable social development in Russia.
If you want to talk about relevance in the 21st century, I would point towards lessons from Karl Kautsky and the SPD. Katusky’s “centrism,” his justification of parliamentary democracy (he believed that both parliament and workers councils would form the bedrock of the proletarian dictatorship) are all relevant reads.
He was also completely right about the Russian Revolution. He recognized that the objective conditions in Russia were not even close to being ripe for socialism and the subjective will of the Bolsheviks would only lead them to draconian, insane measures to attempt to accomplish the impossible. The same can be said for Mao and to a lesser extent certain efforts in Cuba when Che was economic minister.
The origin of Stalinism, that humanitarian catastrophe, was the pursuit of socialism in a war-ravaged nation with a small proletariat, a large peasantry and undeveloped productive forces. Kautsky recognized that revolution was not going to be spread from East to West across Europe, rejecting Lenin and Trotsky’s “weak link theory” and he vehemently opposed Lenin’s views on political organization. Since we know the “weak link theory” did not yield successful revolutions in the West its helpful to read what Trotsky was writing about his former Menshevik comrades in 1917:
“Were Russia to stand all on her own in the world, then Martov’s reasoning [that Russia was not yet ripe for revolution] was correct.”
The “renegades” to Marxist theory were actually the Bolsheviks and not the Kautskyite wing of the SPD and the Mensheviks. That being said Lenin indicated that he wished to push the Soviet Union back towards cooperatives, dismantle some of the repressive state apparatuses and he did embrace the NEP towards the end of his life. I would like to think that Lenin and Bukharin would have done a fine job leading the USSR in the 20s and 30s, but this is all ridiculous conjecture.
Returning to my previous point I’m not sure I would be supportive of any maximalism in the undeveloped world and in general I cling to a more conservative Marxism closer to the centrism of Kautsky or the Mensheviks than the romantic figures of socialist lore — Trotsky, Luxemburg, Guevara.
I think history has shown that left-wing deviations have been far less productive and more costly than right-wing “timidity.”
That being said I do have some great hope in the development of the NPA in France. Whereas a lot of the new far-left projects in Europe in my view can’t do much more than attempt to return Social Democracy to some of its ideals (though I believe that objective conditions were far more important in its turn to the right–even though its in vogue to blame the “betrayal” of unprincipled European labor leaders), I think the NPA can provide a model for Trotskyites all over the world who are trying to bring their tradition into the 21st century, perhaps they can strike a balance between minimalist demands and the maximialist goal of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.
This is an interesting discussion that touches on two tricky subjects: 1) the mobilizing power of left-wing moralism versus the dispassionate analysis of the radical theory toolbox. 2) how does the left respond to the fact that billions of people living in underdeveloped societies stand to (potentially) benefit from the maturation of productive forces and the relative material abundance that industrial capitalism can deliver(?).
My two cents:
1) There is obviously a problem when analysis is abandoned entirely, like when liberals blame the catastrophe of the Bush years on the personal wickedness of Bush and his cronies while ignoring the material interests and social structures behind the Bush agenda.
Nevertheless, I’m usually more impressed by preachers than by theoreticians. I don’t know if MLK would’ve been a more effective civil rights leader if he had been less moralistic. Debs was informed by theory but his popular writings and remarks usually had a quasi-religious tone, and I have no problem with that. The very concept of “injustice” is hard to process without a moral framework of right and wrong. I know some people think they are dispassionately analyzing impersonal historical processes….but I just don’t buy it.
2) I’m not smart enough to say much on this subject but George Monbiot wrote a book on the question of development and globalization that I found very convincing.
I’m with Adrian on the importance of the socialist moral and ethical critique. In fact, I’d go so far as to argue that this is the core of socialism itself, even though having some sort of theoretical analysis that at least seems to be objectively correct is obviously crucial as well. If democracy is the road to socialism, and I hope we all agree that it is, then people need to be persuaded (both rationally and emotionally) that socialism is necessary. To me the only way this can happen is by appealing to people’s ethical, moral and religious sensibilities that the current regime is just plain wrong.
As for capitalism in underdeveloped countries, I’d say that yes, broadly capitalist development should be pursued in those places, but such development should be as social democratic as possible. There’s a book I’ve been meaning to read called Social Democracy in the Global Periphery that tackles this subject, and the authors made a brief statement of their argument in Dissent a couple years back: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=427
This might be a good book/article for all of us to read so we can be more educated on that thorny topic.
I’m not suggesting that a distance from moral appeals and ethical sensibilities is the best way to attract a mass movement, but I just find personally that if you’re talking one on one to someone who can be persuaded, the truth is easier to sell than a fiction. The truth being that their boss isn’t a malevolent character, same with the majority of capitalists; they are merely acting in their class interests and responding to the demands of a market economy.
It may seem like a very austere outlook, but I think its essentially a humanizing one.
As Marshall Berman writes, “These possessors [of the wealth of the society] don’t want to know how deeply they are possessed [by capital]. …If a good life is a life of action, why should the range of human activities be limited to those that are profitable?”
Tactics are tactics–I would love to tap into rage and hopefully there will be opportunities to shape popular anger into a political movement for social change; in the meantime acknowledging the truth has some intrinsic merit.
That article Chris linked to was excellent, well worth a read.
One other somewhat unrelated point– I think we tend to overemphasize how big the transition from social democracy to democratic socialism would be. A transition program wouldn’t be as utopian as even self-proclaimed socialists make it seem.
Of course democracy is the road to socialism, but there are some limits to parliamentary democracy. Obviously for the present in the United States this isn’t very relevant, but I would imagine that worker occupied factories, dual power through community councils, etc etc would all play a role. The cleanest way to socialism would obviously be through social democratic policy combined with non-reformist reforms that pursue worker management of the means of production. Kautsky I think is a good middle ground between the maximalism of Luxemburg and the gradualism of Bernstein.
Of course in 2009 it all seems like a ridiculous fantasy, but we’ve seen how fast the world can move. 40 years ago Marxist thought was everywhere, it was an era of revolutions. 20 years ago we had the neoliberal consensus achieve unprecedented hegemony in the world. Whose to say that social democracy and democratic socialism won’t be forces in 20 years?
I appreciate Kautsky. What I most like about him is that he tried to keep some radical fire alive in a German socialist movement that was, in practice, obviously following a Bernsteinian program.
The contradictions between the theory and practice of turn-of-the-century German Social Democracy infuriated left-wing radicals of the time. But I think that kind of “centrist” tension is exactly what is needed. Otherwise people devolve leftward into a Church of Pie in the Sky or rightward into pink conservatism. Rather than resolve the differences between Kautsky and Bernstein, or choose one over the other, I would rather opportunistically avoid taking “a line” on the controversy and let their beneficial antagonism play on.
I’m not sure if that kind of antagonism in the old SPD was really all that useful. The kind of orthodox Marxism represented by guys like Kautsky and Hilferding prevented the party from reacting effectively to developments within capitalism that orthodox theory couldn’t adequately deal with, and it certainly prevented the party from dealing with the Great Depression in any sort of effective fashion, which created a vacuum that the Communists and Nazis were more than happy to fill. I understand the need to maintain a vision of a new society in order to inspire the troops, but why should it have little grounding in political reality, like Kautsky’s ideological orthodoxy? To me, that just contributes to incoherence and confusion.
Bhaskar, who says that an ethical, moral or religious critique of capitalism from the left has to be some sort of fiction? To me, the argument that capitalism degrades the moral worth of persons (and the environment) and contradicts many basic ethical concepts as well as many of the teachings of basically all world religions is just as correct as the best objective, theoretical analysis. While people need to understand why capitalism is flawed in their heads, they need to feel it in their heart and their gut if they’re ever going to become committed to actually working for socialism. When I’m involved in any sort of organizing project or demonstration, I’m not thinking primarily of crisis theory or commodity fetishism or something. I’m thinking of the real-world effects that the current regime dishes out to real human beings. I’m willing to bet most of us feel the same.
I agree with Chris on that second point. In fact, some of the best “useful fictions” come from theory. For example, I’m a big fan of the (very discredited) labor theory of value because I think it makes an important moral point about where “stuff” comes from, even though economists think it’s silly.
I think I’m going to have to write a post on Kautsky, Bernstein, and Luxemburg for this site. I think there are many misconceptions as to what the differences between the three actually were.
As to the labor theory of value – or more specifically, the Marxian law of value – a good defense can be found here: http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine/notes/Law-of-Value.html