Tag: Chomsky

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DAVID GRAEBER AND CAPITALIST HOPELESSNESS

Coming close to the end of David Graeber’s marvellous Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) I encountered the following:

How did we get here?  My own suspicion is that we are looking at the final effects of the militarization of American capitalism itself.  In fact, it could well be said that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures.  At its root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world—in response to the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s—with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, flourish, or propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win.  To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms and military intelligence apparatus, and propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy.  Maintaining this apparatus seems even more important to exponents of the “free market,” even than maintaining any sort of viable market economy.  How else can one explain what happened in the former Soviet Union?  One would ordinarily have imagined that the end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army and the KGB and the rebuilding of the factories, but in fact what happened was precisely the other way around.  This is just an extreme example of what has been happening everywhere.  Economically, the apparatus is just a drag on the system; all those guns, surveillance cameras, and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and don’t really produce anything, and no doubt it’s yet another element dragging the entire capitalist system down—along with producing the illusion of an endless capitalist future that laid the groundwork for the endless bubbles to begin with.  Finance capital became the buying and selling of chunks of that future, and economic freedom, for most of us, was reduced to the right to buy a small piece of one’s own permanent subordination.

In other words, there seems to have been a profound contradiction between the political imperative of establishing capitalism as the only possible way to manage anything, and capitalism’s own unacknowledged need to limit its future horizons, lest speculation, predictably, go haywire.  Once it did, and the whole machine imploded, [Graeber seems to be referring to the 2008 financial meltdown here] we were left in the strange situation of not being able to even imagine any other way that things might be arranged.  About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.

But what has brought this situation about?  Let me assert that in the West at least, the two great systems of hope, as we may call them, have been Christianity and socialism—perhaps most specifically, Marxism.  Socialism has been betrayed by many of its so-called friends and alleged proponents in the form of party dictatorships, while being ruthlessly stamped out in hearts, minds, and the world by its enemy, capital.  Christianity has been co-opted by worldly power largely into two camps:  an ostensibly apolitical religion concerned solely with private faith and individual salvation on the one hand, and on the other hand a grotesque corruption of the Word of God into an aggressively and absurdly pro-capitalist, even fascist direction.  This perverse politics is not even a parody of Christianity, but an outright contradiction.  American Christian fundamentalism is as much a contradiction of Christianity as the Soviet Union was of Socialism (see Noam Chomsky, “The Soviet Union Versus Socialism”).

We are accustomed to looking at politics in terms of “Right” and “Left.”  This is useful.  (Of course, these useful labels are also routinely abused out of dishonesty or ignorance, as when the corporate media and those who use it as their only source of information refer to Democrats or liberals as “the Left”—cavalierly waiving socialism, communism, anarchism and anyone who actually is a leftist out of existence, or perhaps pretending that Hilary Clinton’s views are but a hairsbreadth to the right of Karl Marx’s).  However, we might also look at politics in terms of hope versus despair.

For it is only the Left, whether secular or religious, that has offered us any hope.  The Right is another matter.  Whereas the Left says that we can change things fundamentally, and for the better, such hopes tend to bring sneers of contempt to the faces of the Right, which proudly invokes “realism,” or perhaps “human nature,” or “the will of God” as in Luther’s conviction that the Almighty had given power and authority to the princes and so on.  On a theological level, the religious wing of the Left sees God as working not only in some otherworldly heaven, but has plans for this world, that may well include upheaval and revolution, but do not include writing the world off.

On the specifically religious plane, Left and Right are literally worlds apart.  The religious Left takes seriously the Biblical claim that “God so loved the world…” but the religious Right can’t wait to see him turn it into a fire pit.  Paradoxically, while the Right is therefor very otherworldly (in a most unhealthy sense) it preaches what is in fact a worldly gospel that absolutely loses sight of the poor and oppressed, handing over power and authority to the rich: the very people scripture most often castigates. 

Despair is a choice, and it is political.

For what “liberals,” the “woke” or “politically correct,” for all their faults–real, imagined or exaggerated–have in common is a belief that we can and therefor should improve things in major ways, that merely tinkering with the status quo is not enough.  The endless tirades since the late 80s or early 90s about “PC” and how everyone, apparently, is held in holy terror of its hysterical dictates mask what is in fact a deeper fear: that we can and therefor must change the world.

Hope can be frightening.

What really pains the Right is the possibility that that liberal/leftist realm is actually pointing out our real responsibilities, and our real powers, if we but use them.  And this call to action, if correct, alleviates us all from our excuses to do nothing.

That is the real terror: responsibility.

But in fact, the problem runs deeper, and is more interesting than that.  A politics of mere responsibility, though it would be an immense improvement over the slash and burn mentality of capital, has the same weakness as religion does when it loses its heart and degenerates into phariseeism.  “Thou shalt not,” in the long run, or “thou shalt” does not have the staying power in public or personal life that is needed for real change.  A genuine sense of ethical responsibility easily degenerates into a prim and censorious temperament, and lacks the power needed to overcome the darker elements of individuals or systems.

And what the Left and Right have often had in common is this phariseeism.

What is the answer?  Perhaps I should leave that discussion for a later post.

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BEFORE YOU CRITICIZE “SOCIALISM,” KNOW WHAT THAT WORD MEANS

Christopher Hitchens, a hater of religion, once said of Martin Luther King that he was not a Christian.

To which I reply, so much for Christopher Hitchens.

One can pretty much say anything about anything, if one is redefining words to suit one’s own interests, treating them as private property instead of public property.  I can truly say that an apple is a potato if, by “apple,” I mean an irregularly shaped brown or reddish vegetable that grows in the ground.

And if one man like Hitchens can get away with this narcissistic nonsense through sheer bluff and swagger, what can not a whole class of people get away with generation after generation?

In effect, generations of anti-socialists have been telling us that an apple is a potato.

And it has not helped one bit that at the same time many potatoes have been calling themselves apples.  In other words, just as many people violate the teachings of Christ in word and deed and call themselves Christians (Hitchens doing a variation on the theme by labelling a man who followed Christ as a non-Christian) many people have discredited socialism by falsely claiming to practice socialism when they were doing no such thing.  In the one instance, Christ is slandered; in the other instance, it is socialism which is slandered.  Most of us seem to understand, whether we are religious or not, that there is such a thing as genuine Christian practice; there are people we would call real Christians, and others we would call hypocrites.  Socialism, however, is not granted the benefit of these kinds of distinctions: if some regime committing genocide, for example, calls itself or is called socialist, why then it must be socialist, and that is the end of the matter.

What, then, is socialism?  Simply put, there are two basic principles running throughout socialist thought since its beginnings:

1) a socialist society is one where those who do the work own and control the means of production

2) a socialist society runs fundamentally on cooperation, not competition or domination.  Brotherhood and sisterhood are the reigning context, not “the struggle of all against all.”

Whatever disagreements (and there are many) socialists have had amongst themselves, these are the two golden threads running through the history of socialist thought.  A genuine critique of socialism, whatever else it does, must say that these goals are not desirable.  For obvious reasons, this is very seldom done.

Much of the confusion in arguments over socialism is that they confound arguments over whether socialism is possible with arguments over whether socialism is desirable.  If it can be made clear that socialism is what is broadly but accurately defined in the two points above, these two issues can be separated from each other and clarified; then an informed, intelligent discussion can take place.  Likewise, two kinds of anti-socialist will be distinguished from each other, with the nature of both being made clearer.

The first kind of anti-socialist is simply ignorant of the meaning of the word we are discussing.  He or she has been told that the depravities of Stalin or North Korea etc. are manifestations of socialism.  It does not help that historically, many of those spreading these lies have called themselves socialists and have even believed their own propaganda.  Naturally, the person who has been misinformed by all this will become an anti-socialist, and with good reason.  (See, by the way, Noam Chomsky’s highly illuminating “the Soviet Union Versus Socialism” on why both the Soviet and capitalist empires falsely claimed the label of socialism for the U.S.S.R.).

The second kind of anti-socialist may or may not be ignorant of the true meaning of the word “socialism” but at heart, wittingly or not, hates the ideal outlined in the two points.  She does not want it to be possible.

To know that “socialism” means the two-point socialism above and to insist doggedly on this fact is to found the whole debate about socialism not on the interpretation of history but in the realm of the desirable or normative.  Let us establish what it is we should want before we look at how it has not been reached historically.  The leftist who refuses the label “socialist” to the old Soviet Union refuses to be backed into a corner where he must either deceitfully justify the crimes of that regime or surrender the dream of socialism altogether.  Why does Stalin get to decide what is and is not possible?

And of course, “socialism can only ever be a dream” is the next line of defense, usually presented in a tone of impatience and contempt.  The allegation that socialism is not possible is one that must be taken seriously.  However, this impatient reaction is not just a matter of a sensible person rejecting hopelessly utopian fantasies.  The type one anti-socialist resists the two-point definition of socialism because she will have to admit she has been fooled by lying definitions.  Nobody likes to admit they have been fooled, that sources they thought reliable turn out to be biased or ignorant.  But it is worse for the type two anti-socialist: when the historical monstrosities he has been criticizing turn out not to be socialism, he has lost the rhetorical advantage of socialism being evil practically by definition.

Of course, the type two anti-socialist can and most assuredly will switch gears and claim it was the two-point socialist dream which caused the reality of what is falsely called socialism.  But one can argue against this point far more honestly and effectively than if one decides to justify Pol Pot.  (The point that the socialist dream is itself the cause of a nightmare, by the way, has a great many holes in it.  It seems to be a convenient theory which its perpetrators seldom analyze in any historical context.  People who advance this theory do not seem to have actually looked at revolutionary processes, what causes them, what makes them go well or badly.)  Those who say “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” do not seem prepared to tell us straight up what kinds of intentions we should have.

Note therefor, that the type two anti-socialist needs to keep “socialism” in the two-point sense off the table.  The idea or ideal of socialism, much as its enemies disparage it as a fairy tale, is quite dangerous to anti-socialism.  When socialism steps in and claims its right to judge any government or movement calling itself socialist or claiming to move towards socialism, the terms of the debate are no longer the property of socialism’s enemies.

The fight over the word “socialism,” therefore is not simply about what the anti-socialist, in his ignorance, thinks the word means, but what he wants the word to mean, what he even needs the word to mean in order to defend his own ideology.  Hitchens’ seems to have decided that Christianity is evil by definition.  Ipso facto a good man like Martin Luther King cannot possibly be a Christian.  We learn nothing about religion or King by this blarney.  We do learn something about Christopher Hitchens.

Capitalism’s first line of defence is to make sure alternatives to it do not enter even the imagination, let alone the concrete political or economic sphere.  As long as “socialism” is merely a word for some kind of monstrosity, two-point socialism can not be talked about.  And what cannot even be talked about becomes even harder to imagine and nigh impossible to share.  The socialist movement, on the other hand, needs “socialism” in its basic sense to mean the two-point variety, or there is no way we can even talk about what we want or how to get it.  That kind of silence, of course, is what anti-socialism wants, and thinks it has a right to, so spoiled has it been by an unfair cultural struggle which confuses and silences any language with which the Left might express itself intelligibly.

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CAPITALIST ECONOMIC TERMINOLOGY AND RHETORIC

How do we discuss economics in our society?  Consider this from Michael Harrington’s Socialism: Past and Future (1989):

“But those Keynesian concepts and statistics are value-laden.  “Gross National Product” is, after all, truly a gross measure and certainly a very capitalist one.  It assumes that any activity that yields a profit – be it the production of carcinogenic cigarettes or automobile engines that contribute to acid rain – is to be given a positive weight.  If the GNP goes up, no matter what its composition, it is thought that the society is advancing.  But that advance could well be a stride toward catastrophe, for example, toward a greenhouse effect that will threaten life itself.” (p. 217 Arcade Publishing 2011 edition)

This quotation here is evidence of how biased the culture is in favour of capitalism, how ignorant (to be generous) are those allegations from the Right that we are too socialist, when even the language of economics is geared away from socialism towards the values of capitalism.  Popular culture and corporate media do not discuss economics except in the terms that are useful to capitalism and imply that capitalist economics and economics in general are one and the same thing.  Unless we see this and step out of the capitalist frame of reference, our discussions of economics will always be biased in favour of the wealthy and powerful, viewing the world through their eyes while assuming our approach is ideologically neutral.

In addition, the rhetoric of capitalism constantly portrays it as the wild and risk-taking swashbuckler of economic systems, the very opposite of life under Stalin, where “the basic decisions with regard to work, production, and consumption were made by a centralized bureaucracy” (226).  Harrington continues:

“If, a believable joke reported, a Soviet pin factory was assigned a quota of so many tons of pins, it would turn out one monstrously large and unusable pin; and if it were told to produce a certain number of pins, it would achieve the numerical goal with a myriad of pins so thin that they were also useless.” (227)

It is easy enough to see the absurdity of such a practice.  But is it indeed any more absurd than the GNP fetish Harrington in effect describes?  We see here the Soviet and capitalist versions of what are essentially bureaucratic and robotic mentalities.  Truly, Noam Chomsky’s frequent condemnation of both camps, with their managerial arrogance, is not misplaced.