17/7/07

My Design for Revolution web site has been neglected for some time, partly while I developed the philosophical concept of habitude, but also because I have not been feeling at all hopeful about the coming together of the divide that surely exists between people working for sustainable solutions to planetary problems they see as the most urgent now: climate change and peak oil, and socialists/communists/anarchists urging revolutionary change. A recent discussion at World in Common, on our Commoner forum, has given me fresh hope.

It is not easy to present forum discussions so that the debate can be followed, so I shall just include the last reply from a WiC comrade whom I once dubbed the Dark Horse, so here he is ‘DH’, and I am ‘Chris’.

Part of DH’s previous post said this:

… collective action, some kind of solidarity, even if inchoate at first, would be what to look for. Anarchist/communist/socialists who recognise the reality of the class struggle have to see where the strategic power of our class is located.

My post began (but DH ignored this paragraph in his reply):

I agree about solidarity being crucial, and collective action, and all through history downtrodden groups have rebelled, slaves and peasants have revolted, armed forces have mutinied, and groups of people have got fed up with division and inequality and gone off somewhere to live cooperatively. I’ve just been reading a history of the Seven Years War, 1756-63, [Tom Pocock, Battle for Empire: The very first world war 1756-63 (London: Michael O’Mara, 1998)] mostly stories of admirals and such, but I was conscious of the hosts of people there must have been manning the ships, fighting and dying in the infantry, repairing the ships, building the defences, and so on. All through ‘history’, recorded in great men’s journals, letters home and official despatches, there have been these hosts of nobodies doing all the work and most of the dying. And quite a lot of them said ‘sod it’ from time to time, deserted, changed sides, sloped off etc.

DH’s reply:

Hi Chris,

You prodded me into putting out a couple more bits that I didn’t before for considerations of space, but now feel empowered to because of apparent lack of general interest.

You said:

I’ve mentioned before getting my Marxist education at the SPGB ‘school’, and the trouble with schools is they feel they have to simplify the picture, hence that thing about the ‘stages of history being primitive communism, chattel slavery, feudalism, capitalism, then will come socialism.’ But of course what happened wasn’t linear like that. To the extent there was that kind of trend, it was very uneven, in history and geography, and still hasn’t run its course everywhere up to the capitalism stage, and it’s arguable whether or not it has been a good thing you’d call ‘progress’ or ‘development’, and whether it could ever end or be resolved so there’s no more ‘great men’, ruling classes, and nameless masses.

DH:

Yes, I’ve always been a bit put off when the MCH [materialist conception of history] is put in that layer-cake way, because I see it as merely an illustration that M & E [Marx and Engels] used, from the part of the world they were from, even Russia being somewhat beyond Marx’s comfortable grasp going by his forays into that field of research in his later years. The specifics of the stages you correctly lay out weren’t even true of the eastern parts of Germany in their day, at least certainly not as neatly as we all learned in our respective ‘schools’! But, as an example of how stages can happen, and did in the geography of Carolingian Europe plus Roman Britain, it’s simple yet apt.

Chris again:

I think Marx saw the proletariat as having a better chance of solidarity and collective action than earlier oppressed groups because they were together in the work place, and could communicate and organise en masse, so he was impatient for the world to catch up with Europe. There’s that (in)famous thing he said about India:

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution. (Karl Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’, June 25, 1853)

Gramsci said something similar in Prison Notebooks about wanting the peasants in the south of Italy to become proletarians so they could form a class.

DH interjecting:

Precisely. That is why I referred to the possibility of missing our historic opportunity when we were so gathered by the system itself. (sigh) It seemed such a neat arrangement, that.

Chris again:

The 19th to early 20th century picture isn’t like today, so why do we hang on to workers’ solidarity and collective action? Perhaps now solidarity and collective action can happen with vast numbers of dispersed individuals and small groups, acting maybe sometimes in the workplace but also acting from their private lives, their consuming, their downsizing and dropping out.

DH:

Even you’re ‘hanging on to them’, just you’re correctly noting the new forms that they can/ ‘must’(?), unfortunately, probably not/could, we hope, take in the new ways of doing, having (or as you say ‘consuming’), and being that are emerging around us today.

Chris again:

Maybe the internet is today’s best hope, not the proletariat. Maybe the language has to change, and to talk of ‘class struggle’ or ‘the strategic power of our class’ is outdated, alienates all but a few diehard socialist theorists, and is what keeps the masses from embracing revolutionary change. Maybe WiC needs to be broadminded and imaginative and tolerant enough to – for sure – be anti-state and anti-market but to have an inclusiveness not labelled ‘our sector’, this bunch of tiny sects clinging to an over-simplified conception of history and an outdated agenda for change.

DH:

I don’t see why it has to be the internet or the proletariat. If anything, and I think we have examples within our small band, it is precisely the growing proletariat in the internet/IT industry (there, I’ve said it) that is growing, that is making the proletariat of that industry remarkably worldwide/‘global’, and eventually may lead to a conscious coincidence of interests (how’s that for a new wineskin?), giving us some MCH based hope, since we’re losing the coal pits. But I do not want to wait on such an occurrence, because I am not at all sure that we have the time to, anymore, for all the reasons that we have all alluded to in this discussion. If such things happen before we’ve been able to move an inch, fine, we’ll use them then, but no waiting is reasonable, imv. Maybe the language does have to change into a more updated vernacular. You’ve floated this before and it’s still worth pursuing. Certain ideas, like ‘class struggle’, might do with a new name for the reasons you mention. But it is a reality, now, not our plan. We are merely responding to the class struggle that has been foisted upon us, and I would see us defend, and eventually aid our ‘stratum-siblings’ toward an effective offensive action to put a stop to it. But we can call it whatever that is clear in content. Otherwise, we’d be mouthing the Bush et al line saying that we’re the ones who started it. I’ve already indicated that, for me, the MCH is interesting, but given the very real time strictures we face, of limited utility now. Many strands of our sector don’t accept it at all, as I’ve noted before. We have to change the world we’ve got, not the one that may never get a chance to be born if we don’t. As to the agenda for change of our sector, I’m not sure it has one, or rather that any of the component strands have any agenda for change. We all seem to know where we want to go, but a lot of the sniping and sectarianism come from the perfectly obvious inability of any of us to get anywhere on the way toward it, imo. Our private lives, patterns of consumption, being conscious of all these aspects, including experiments with mindful anti-capitalist modes of living and social interacting in all spheres, as we each may be inclined and able, will certainly aid in an awareness among our fellow workers, if done properly. But like the political and economic confrontations with the law of value in the day-to-day, those pursuing it will have to keep their eye on the ball.

Of the three spheres, how many of us have been able recently to conduct an educational election effort in our locales? Not many, due to obstacles mostly. How many have been able to engage in really class-conscious economic action? Arguably even the Wobblies might have trouble answering yes, again, mostly beyond their control. And in the loosely defined ‘personal sphere’? I’m sure we recycle what we can (obstacles here, too, of course) but doesn’t any ‘modern’ liberal do the same? How many of us have actually had a chance in our real lives to join a LETS, or a co-op, or alternative agriculture effort, despite all our talk and interest in it? And if we did, were we able to remind ourselves, and others, that in any of these activities we still had to go further, both in terms of what we were attempting and in how we were thinking about it, for ourselves and fellows? True, the myriad possibilities offered by the personal sphere may be all that is realistically offered to us, in general, in these times, and can be used to good purpose both within and without, so should be taken full advantage of, as long as it 1) does not take on the onus of a ‘political duty’, but is valuable to us as a thing in itself, and 2) though seemingly paradoxical, we keep in mind its larger purpose. I suppose I would say the same about any of the activities listed in this post, because sometime, someway, the others have to open up as possibilities, too, and without the vast majority of the population at least open to the idea that there may be different ways of doing things, there will be no real future. The possibility of new ways of thinking about doing and being is the very real benefit that I see of such activity.

For freesocialism,

DH

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