Communism: Opening windows to begin anew
Posted by Mike E on May 3, 2011
May First 2011 - Chicago (photo: JB Connors)
The causes of that suffering are not divine, or natural, or insurmountable. Suffering has existed throughout human history – hunger, desperation, enslavement, mutual killings…
“But now, surrounded by the great productive power and knowledge created by human genius none of these criminal conditions need exist any longer. And that makes this suffering intolerable in a truly different way.
“This is what floods into our minds as we open our eyes in the morning. It is what makes us communists. This is why we choose to serve the people.
“This is our starting point.”
For May Day, several of us from Kasama spoke at the Platypus convention in Chicago on “Badiou and Post-Maoism: Marxism and Communism Today.” Chris Cutrone of Platypus joined three of us, Joe Ramsey, John Steele and me. This is text I prepared — now edited a bit. We have make the other talks by panelists available too.
* * * * * * * * *
Throw open windows: Begin a fresh communism
by Mike Ely
Chris Cutrone ended his talk just now with a fitting introduction to mine: He complained about those who would “reduce communism to the perennial complaint of the subaltern.” Well, by contrast, I want to take up for, and speak for, and represent the cry of the oppressed.
I want to open by referencing the comments from a couple Platypus presenters in the previous panel who, it seemed to me, presented a stark and one-sided defense of the bourgeois revolution and its supposed accomplishments.
Really we can dig in anywhere, because we are literally surrounded by the suffering of the people, and the need to transform it.
But let me start here: This morning as I was preparing my talk, I ran across an article that said there are as many Black men in prison now as there were Black men enslaved in 1850. And there, if you want, is the state of your bourgeois revolution, of capitalism, 150 years after the Civil War.
Or we could look at the movements of hundreds of millions of desperate people on the planet Earth, leaving the countryside for massive shantytowns, crossing borders and oceans, to be exploited, abused and persecuted. There is your bourgeois freedom of movement and personal initiative. Because the liberations of the bourgeois revolution are ground up into the makings of new horrors under this system.
Or we could look at the sale of girls and women in the sex trade internationally, at least a million a year by most accounts. Semifeudal villages are drained of girls (and the rustbelts of Eastern Europe in their own way), as young women are channeled into major cities Mumbai, Bangkok, Manila, Cost Rica’s San Jose, and many more (soon Havana again?)… to literally become one more product sold in the worldwide capitalist circuits of commodity trade.
Here is your capitalism revolutionizing and rationalizing feudalism out of existence. Here is capitalism creating its revolutionary and unprecedented world market (“battering down the Chinese walls”). Here is capitalism tearing up the awful and ancient relations of village agriculture, then building new horrors out of the metabolized and atomized fragments.
The causes of that suffering are not divine, or natural, or insurmountable. Suffering has existed throughout human history – hunger, desperation, enslavement, mutual killings… But now, surrounded by the great productive power and knowledge created by human genius none of these criminal conditions need exist any longer. And that makes this suffering intolerable in a truly different way.
This is what floods into our minds as we open our eyes in the morning. It is what makes us communists. This is why we choose to serve the people. This is our starting point.
A particular view of truths
Mao Zedong said:
“Marxism consists of a thousand truths, but they boil down to one: it is right to rebel against reactionaries.”
That embodies a particular view of truths, and a particular view of Marxism, and a particular view the communist project.
It posits a statement of what is right – it is right to make revolution, It is right to find a radically different road for humanity. It is right for the people themselves to find the courage, the unity and the hope to rise up in their own behalf.
As for us communists…
Luther nailing his thesis on the church door
That stubborn monk Martin Luther said at the start of his revolt:
“Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders.”
In English: “Here I stand, I can do no other.”
So often our choice as communists feels to us as no choice at all. We often feel we can do no other. But it does come from a choice of course. A decision. A sharp and ongoing line struggle in our hearts and in our ranks.
We choose to serve the people.
Our cause is hardly just about the escalation of political liberties or economic development… however much those have been popular parts of the communist project.
We communists choose to embody wild hopes and visions of emancipation — for common abundance, radical equality and realization of countless human potentials.
And I want to make clear my point of view, because others here at the Platypus conference have made so clear an opposing point of view: Capitalist modernity was, yes, a major break with previous class society. And capitalist democracy, yes, raised for the first time the question of popular sovereignty. But we communists are nonetheless necessarily their gravediggers. These structures emerging from the bourgeois revolutions — industrial capitalism, the current global market, the institutions of bourgeois democracy — are the forms of our oppression. And we intend their negation — precisely in that Maoist sense of negation that involves the struggle, transformation and interpenetration of opposites.
While we are taking stock about this moment, and after discussing the suffering and cry of the oppress, let’s not be naïve about what stands in the way of liberation (something that has also been little discussed in the Platypus presentations today):
Navy Seals death squads dropping from helicopters
The Marines, the CIA, the armies of urban killer police, legions of heartless authorities in schools, family patriarchs with their balled fists, pimps and human traffickers, border patrols, prison guards, hirelings and hangmen of countless kinds across a whole planet. The wealth of modern capitalism has accreted and accumulated professional pigs, killers and corrupted agents at a unprecedented rate.
It is hard enough to imagine a new world. It is even harder to actually carry one out on the canvas of reality. And then, beyond that, there is the major problem that we have to defeat all that, all those guns and bribes and cruise missiles. Which will obviously take a conscious force of millions.
And if our movement doesn’t bring to those millions a sense of the need for force on a massive scale, then we are full of shit. Because it will take millions and it will take bitter sacrifice — to go where we are trying to go.
Taking this as beginning
I say all this – who we serve, what we are, what we face — to talk more about what this moment means for communists. As you all know, the communist project is almost invisible. And what is visible is often not communist.
We have contended on a world scale for a century – from World War 1 to the restoration of capitalism in the former socialist countries.
Communist fighters in the remote areas of South Asia
But today, when a living and revolutionary communism appears, it is either in very remote and marginalized corners of the planet – the Andes, the Himalayas, remote rural areas of Kurdistan where five armed sisters were just died in an avalanche. Or it is tumbles out of the radical dreams of revolutionary intellectuals.
Is that extreme weakness the end of communism, or is it a beginning?
I propose we take it as a beginning. And that means we have a great occasion for a new accounting. And, we should take up our work through a new presentation.
Chris has based a lot of his criticism of Badiou on a criticism of Badiou’s periodization of the communist movement, and in particular Badiou’s apparent dismissal of the Second International period. I think all this is a side issue, but I do want to say that there are ways in which we are on the ground floor, and thinking through (again) the forms of organization and approach that are appropriate for times when socialist revolution still lies over the horizon for most of us.
You don’t often get a second chance at first impressions. But we have that chance. We can retool our communist project, reinvent our modes of presentation, radically re-metabolize our experiences, and forge something new in a new century.
Proposing a particular direction
I propose that we do this with a particular mix:
I think we should be extremely radical (represent communism in its most sweeping sense), and I think we should be extremely contemporary and non-dogmatic:
First, we need to radiate a profound sense of the real: a profound and penetrating critique of capitalism in its current forms, and a materialist sense of what could replace it. Not a nostalgic clinging to this or that model. Not a pretense that things haven’t changed.
And in that I want to refer to a previous panelists who spoke about the “classic bourgeois revolutions” of Europe and so on. By contrast, I think we should recognize that there are not “classic” revolutions, and there are no “classic” texts. It only clouds our work if we approach things that way. Was the French revolution the “classic” bourgeois revolution, and the October revolution the “classic” socialist one, simply because they came first? And what would we harvest from that except rigid thinking exactly where we need to be creative?
Further, we should radiate a culture of profound engagement, listening, and even humility – a democratic sensibility — without which no one will give communism a second hearing.
And, third, we should embody a militant, even shocking negation of everything that torments humanity – uncompromising, unafraid, righteous enough to topple and pursue the oppressors.
Getting to a new conception and new presentation
Lenin frozen as statue, as his communism is codified into state religion.
To get there: I think we should energetically treat many so-called settled questions as fresh problems for solution. The existence of socialist states created Marxist doctrines that became highly elaborated for specific purposes. I suggest we strip them back down – with great attention to our goals and our times.
This is often viewed with suspicion and hostility by those few who want to cling to every detail of inherited Marxism — with a “from my cold dead fingers” tone. It is as if they assume that to restudy a verdict betrays an intention to abandon it. Opening a fresh, deep, and contemporary debate over “the dictatorship of the proletariat” is not automatically some “agnostic” scheme to bury the concept — on the contrary, you can’t get it INTO discussion without opening it for debate, and more, shouldn’t we look at such ideas anew after a hundred years of experience with particular socialist societies and states? How could we not?
We cannot and will not engage a new generation of radicals, if they don’t come in at the ground floor of such a creative process, or if existing communist circles make uncritical acceptance of orthodoxies the price of admission.
The Kasama project has only one publicly stated view:
“We are communists, and are for the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”
Activist credos have long said:
“The movement is everything, the final goal is nothing.”
But we are trying to reverse that, by saying:
“The final goal is everything, the movements for getting there remain to be charted.”
In other words, we all have together before us a great creative work.
The strategies in a country like this are unknown. Uncharted. We have lots of experience to sum up. But the creative work remains in front of us. And here is where Badiou starts to come in, because I believe that it is in many ways inherent in revolutions that the major creative work can’t be pre-done, and just imported (or applied) to “local” conditions.
In fact the Bolsheviks were re-forged by their civil war. A radically new Maoist communism was forged in Yenan. Or dare I say: the Black Panthers ripped away at three decades of communist assumptions inherited from the Comintern. That’s how it is going to look: Revolutions are very different, like snowflakes.
And while there is truth (and reasonable hope) in our sweeping view of a world transformative process — it is also true that each revolution will be startlingly different, with different moods, tones, transitions, origins, forms, and symbolism.
Bananas and imperialism: what will the circuits of food look like in a liberated hemisphere?
Let’s put it another way: In many places, over the last century, the key attraction of communism was its association with political liberty and rapid economic development. But where we stand (meaning in the U.S.) the key task is no longer creating a great human engine of economic development and modernization.
Ours is a very different crossroads. Our goals are much more about radical community, a society of solidarity in the place of dog-eat-dog cannibalism and capitalist atomization. We are seeking a sustainable society out of a past of great waste and meaningless stuff. And we are seeking to end imperialism — by striking within the belly of the beast — for a global order that can end the domination of a few countries and the wars that they unleash….
And that is not easy. [Picks up a half-eaten banana lying on the table.] Because all of that is woven into the very details and expectations of life.
Meanwhile there are deeply new phenomena. Who can miss that inter-imperialist conflicts don’t operate as they once did, with spheres of influence and rival blocs? Who can still believe that the world is divided into “two kinds of countries” — when those 1950s categories can’t discuss a South Korea, or an Argentina, or a Bangalore, or the regional roles of Turkey, Israel, India, Brazil or China.
An example: I have been attempting a deep study of the American civil war. And I have come to understand how much Northern thinking was changed during the war — including in the way they started the war thinking they were defending a “union of the states” and ended the war talking about a single “nation so conceived.” In other words, that war transformed the whole political world view into one centered on the nation-state (as a whole).
To make an analogy — I think we are living through a time where thinking and politics has been rooted in bourgeois nation-states (even among communists), even among those who talked of “inter-nationalism,” while in many ways (and for the first time) it is becoming possible for millions of people to be thinking of their world as a whole, and to be thinking of the fate and direction of humanity as a whole. The thinking of “solidarity between nations” can undergo a leap to a much more truly global thinking.
Every school child in the U.S. is starting to think about the planet Earth as a common interconnected thing, and of humanity as emerging from common origins in Africa and sharing a common fate. And such thinking is not inherently communist, but it is a huge and positive shift in thinking emerging on the basis of massive changes in production and communications (on what is called “globalization,” the “shrinking of the planet,” and on the increased knowledge of the ecocide that has been started by industrial capitalism.
I’m not saying this to argue for dismissing national liberation struggles (or the importance of them), or to act like imperialism has somehow dissolved into something else. But to say that the world and the consciousness of people has been changing in some remarkable ways — and we need to identify this, and integrate it into our strategic thinking, even as such phenomena are in the early and embryonic stages.
We are posing problems and questions that are not yet integrated into communist strategies, visions and solutions.
Is it just a crisis of will?
Some have argued that the crisis of communists requires embracing an orthodoxy and taking it out. That is the view of Peru’s Abimael Guzman – who argues that revolution is already (somehow!) the “main trend in the world today,” and we simply have to have the will to make his version of Maoism the commander of that world revolution.
And in their own way, Trotskyists (especially of the non-Pabloite varieties) have always spoken of a crisis of the subjective factor – for which they saw their own orthodoxy as the solution.
40 ago, in the high tide of Vietnam War and Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party said "revolution is the main trend in the world today." Is such an assessment a permanent verdict?
There is a basic error here: Our world society is not somehow inherently “ripe” – just waiting for a particular socialist turn. World capitalism is not “stuck” (in some generalized crisis of paralysis and decay). On the contrary it is quite dynamic. It isn’t waiting for us to assert our will (like Alexander at the Gordian knot) because it is quite energetically producing its own changes and its outcomes.
And there is a second error here: in the assumptions that we can find all the basic answers we need by simply applying locally in this or that particular, existing and universalized form of Marxism.
I raise that to counterpose a different approach:
First the fusion of socialism with mass discontent is a highly conjunctural matter – not something that we can just do when we decide to do it.
Second, I think that the forms of communist organization and thought are themselves deeply affected by the unique conditions of future conjunctural opportunities. Again, revolutions will prove to have been like snowflakes – each one unique, not an archetype.
The common fixation with models is a failure of understanding and of imagination.
Enter Badiou….
Since we are talking about Badiou in this panel today let me say:
Our reconception of communist theory needs to draw from the communists of the past, from our elaborate experience with socialism in the last century, and also from those who have been working, in parallel, in some different row of grapes in these same vineyards.
Badiou (and with him Zizek) have done important work bringing communist ideas to a new generation of students – who have otherwise been taught it is simply a dead letter. But I think there is more value than that narrow and instrumentalist one.
For example, I am attracted to Badiou’s theory of event – as a supplement to a Leninist appreciation of conjuncture and a Maoist mass line. (Mass line is our understanding that the people and those “complaints of the subaltern” are central to the advance of history.)
Our Leninism has led us to study the materiality of crisis – its roots in capitalist rivalry, economics, the manyness of capital, war, depression, and more. But what Badiou brings is a missing discussion of how contagious new truths erupt from a seeming void, in unexpected ways, and like hose sprays of antimatter corrode away the exhausted and compromised.
It is a meditation on the way shocking new truths forge cadre and sweep the field. And these are not truths in that mechanical sense (of a new incremental improvement in our ability to “reflect” matter in our brains). They are truths in the sense that they explode to reveal the old as dated and suddenly repulsive.
Sudden rearrangements of matter
Without naively adopting Badiou’s elaborate construct wholesale, there is much here to learn from – as we think through how to get out of this hole, and how to be part of the next waves of novelty that our intensely dynamic world will throw up.
We Maoists talk about hastening and awaiting changes in the objective situation. Hasten and await is a discussion of preparing for revolutionary opportunities. Well, I think Badiou is raising important things about what hastening might mean, and what exactly we are awaiting.
We need to reject the old sectarian strategies of forming tiny mini-parties, whose programs we fantisize will be picked up (in a telescoped way) by a grateful population in great crises. That is a grandiose and misleading fantasy which will just guarantee irrelevance in the actual conjunctures.
What we have inherited
We stand on the shoulders of giants.
Over a century of communism and revolution have left us a great body of work, theory and experience to build upon. And in particular I think that the best of Maoism forms a key platform for our work –– specifically in its mass line and its radical reconception of the socialist transition period.
In that sense, there is nothing post-Maoist about me (despite what this panel is called).
Marx and Engels created an open system of thought -- through research, investigation, assimilation of new ideas, constant summation of new experience and rigorous often-self-critical work.
To reconceive we have to have a deep sense (and even appreciation) of the earlier communist conceptions (which many newer revolutionaries have not had much access to, and which we are trying to provide on Kasama).
But what we extract from this past is not a single set of universal truths – in some fundamentalist sense.
Previous communists were, at their best, creative and iconoclastic – or else they were over and over relegated to the margins by reality. So, from the beginning we (and I’m speaking here of our Kasama project) have had to wage some of our first engagements against the idea (that is both prevalent and marginalized) that there is an existing universal theory (as a kind of closed and complete system or orthodoxy) that merely needs to be “applied” to specific moments – i.e. tweaked for local conditions.
No. There is no back to Marx…. or back to Lenin or back to Mao. Every great revolution has had to break with inherited orthodoxy (even if they sometimes hid that after the fact).
Or put another way: I’m much less interested in a discussion that asks “what is the real Marxism” than I am in a much more contemporary discussion of what do we believe, and what are we going to do?
That is an approach that will both get to the heart of what communism now means, and will be able to engage many more people who are not currently in the discussion.
These are two separate concerns that we should feel deeply:
First, we need to break with doctrine to get to a breath-takingly radical and creative politics.
And second, we should do it in ways that at every stage draw in the new – new people, new discoveries, new realities, a new generation of radical youth the best of whom will not tolerate being spoonfed old truths.
People are either in at the ground floor of creating a revolutionary movement, or it will not be built — and part of it is because those under thirty preceive the world around them with eyes that can sharply see what is new, distinct and rising.
Marx and Engels were amazingly open to the thinking of their times. They fused their communism from the thinking of many different sources – philosophy, socialism, economics. They studied Darwin and Morgan, and so on. Their theory was an open system – at their best. And that is part of what we should learn from them.
And (to return to Badiou for a moment) he always feels like a parallel communist project. I have personally been coloring inside the lines of Marxism-Leninism for forty years. And he hasn’t. Of course Badiou is not actually separate from inherited forms of Marxism-Leninism– that’s an appearance, and believing it would be an illusion. He is (of course) schooled in a deep knowledge of certain currents of Marxism, and forged in idiosyncratic French Maoism.
But he is operating unconstrained by the continuity with Hegel and Bebel, and I find the novelty exhilarating and thought-provoking – even when I don’t agree. Because he is working on the problems we all need to be working on.
How do we sum up the experience of the socialist party-state – and how could we do things differently? How do we conduct a radical politics at distance from the corrupt constituency bartering of reform politics? How do we have fidelity without having dogma? What does it mean for us to reconceive our understanding of mass line – popular agency – and its role in preventing the restoration of capitalism, or a socialism that points its guns at ordinary people.
In my study of Nepal, I have been gripped by Badiou’s discussion of a topology of points where a network of decisions emerges from a complex series of decisions. A map of crossroads on that high plane of two line struggle.
Again, I’m a student not a follower these days. But I think these are questions worth engaging.
How does socialism in one country function in a world infinitely more entwined than in 1930?
If we don’t work from models of October or Chingkangshan – how to we develop plans?
If our socialism is about stewardship of the earth, not accelerating the pace of dominion – what does that mean for our vision of society, production and abundance?.
What does that mean for our organization and preparation now? And what do we now consider the prerequisites of seizing power?
As you all know, I have my own current personal opinions on all these matters – organization, philosophy, strategy – I wasn’t born yesterday. And there is nothing agnostic going on here.
But what I have done here is try to sketch our common project.
We need a shocking, counterintuitive proclamation of the communist project – classless society, overthrow of all existing conditions, the whole over the self, a literally planetary world view….
And in the creation, it will involve a new political culture of mutual respect and collaboration, of modesty and experimentation.
We all walk in the door of this process with views, and we will be mutually transformed.
People are suffering. The only bright point about that is it is possible that the alienation, despair, energetic anger, and determination can arise a radical de-legitimization of what is – and then new ways of using human genius and productive power to emancipate.
That’s the revolutionary road.
Shitwit said
It’s a terrific thing to dream together! What WILL socialism look like? How is “communism springing from every pore of capitalist society”?
That is a topic well worth digging into!
Immediately I think of the Internet, of the Euro and how these things TRANSCEND the puny little nation state.
In the past few years, the ability of people to communicate with one another from any point on the globe to another is extraordinary!
Let us DREAM of the society we want with SERVE THE PEOPLE at the dead center of our collective imaginings.
As we go forward, let us always seek to unite with trends we might feel are mistaken in their approach to making revolution and emancipating humanity.
I like to think of the different trends as streams which conjoin to make a mighty, rapidly flowing river of LIFE asserting itself against the old, a river that cannot be stopped, and that many many of those who now support capitalist imperialism because they have been lied to all their lives about what this system actually IS, will join!
I really love to see the indignation of those who wake up to the truth of things and are enraged because they have been betrayed by the representatives of this rotted-out, vicious and distinctly crumbling SYSTEM.
Such people, when they awaken, become invaluable and very hard-working friends of our proletarian-socialist revolution.
We should ceaselessly unite as many as can be united for the immense storms ahead! (all rise and sing the International. LOL).
tellnolies said
This is great Mike, another eloquent statement of what we are trying to do here.
Your choice of title, perhaps intentionally, but I suspect not, echoes Pope John XXII’s statement when he called for the Second Vatican Council:
The statement may be apocryphal but it was taken up widely, as was his call for the church to investigate the “signs of the times,” that is to say to seek to really understand the new things in the world. Drawing such parallels will undoubtedly confuse the unimaginative, but I think Vatican II is actually a very useful example of how a call for reconception within in an ossified ideological framework can unleash considerable revolutionary energies.
I am wondering, however, how did the platypii respond?
Shitwit said
Avec de la patience, on arrive a tout, or in English, with patience one arrives at all.
I like this quote. We need to keep hammering away, and never give up!
A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. -Greek proverb
So let’s just keep planting those seeds and trees, baybuh! ;)
Radical-Eyes said
A very strong statement, on many fronts.
I think this section (from near the end) is particularly important, in orienting towards Badiou, as well as more generally towards new radical trends–in philosophy, in culture, in politics–that emerge:
redflags said
What a simple, powerful and open statement, Mike.
Procreation is more fruitful than genealogy.
Roxanne Amico said
This is a very moving read, Mike. In addition to Radical Eyes’s memorable excerpts, I have a few below, too…
Thank you for this deeply inspiring and refreshing summation and rally for the great creative work we all have together before us.
Mike E said
TNL, I’m amused by the connection with Vatican 2:
He seems to be talking about opening curtains to allow transparency (let those outside look in). And we know how well that worked!
I’m more talking about fresh air. Letting the smells and breezes of real life into body of thought and strategy that’s been sealed off, dusty and out of touch.
I’m noticing there is debate on the site of whether Lenin’s theory of imperialism applies in detail today. And on one level, how could it? (Finance capital? Is that really how it works, and has worked for a hundred years without change?)
But what stands out is that we (apparently) need to debate that. And part of the reason is that the pickings are pretty few on contemporary communist analysis.
Stiofan said
Mike wrote:
I would add to this insight that this process can occur at breathtaking speed and what seemed so overwhelmingly solid reveals itself to be riddled with fissures that shatter under the stress of economic decline.
The genius of capitalism is its suppleness and creative adaptability in squeezing wealth out of the many for the benefit of a few. The essence of capitalism is that behind the dazzling creation of wealth out of abstractions such as derivatives and credit default swaps is an unstable, malignant force whose logic of selfishness is both efficient and frighteningly self destructive. Is there a alternative? Is the best that can be a ‘left wing of the possible’ that serves a bourgeoisie regime with better health insurance?
Years ago I got a good look at the inside of the empire and the mechanics of mass death that serve its will. It inspired in me both disgust and, to be truthful, fear and depression. Mike got it absolutely right that to believe in revolutionary possibility means that
I was drawn to the revolutionary movement then but in my heart I simply did not believe revolution was possible. I know now, and feel from everything that I have experienced and learned from history that freedom is possible but that the struggle to achieve it will be both difficult and surprising.
It is time for a new start.
I wish I did not know that women traveling the long immigrant road from Central America to the US begin taking birth control pills weeks before the journey knowing that they will be repeatedly raped on the way.
I wish I could forget that working class American kids kill Afghanis for sport and pose grinning like idiots for snapshots to show their high school friends.
The problem with consciousness is that it can be ignored for a while but it never goes away. That is why there is a revolutionary road.
My thanks to Mike and the comrades who all labor on the Kasama site for making the case to begin that journey anew.
Tell No Lies said
Do we really?
This might be a digression, but I think its important in its own right.
Like the GPCR, the forces immediately unleashed by Vatican II went down to defeat. But not before profoundly shaking up many peoples longstanding and deeply held conservative ways of thinking and being in the world. Vatican II was very much a response to and attempt to engage the anti-colonial movements and other upheavals rocking the world in the early 1960s and it set the stage for the emergence of Liberation Theology in Latin America which functioned in many respects as a revolutionary alternative to the ossified pro-Soviet Communist Parties.
The “open up the windows” statement attributed to John XXII was likely apocryphal. One of the bits of evidence for this is that he supposedly shared the Italian peasant’s deep dislike/fear of drafts, so it was not a metaphor that would have resonated for him. But if the original intention was only to let in some light, the actual effect of Vatican II, particularly in Latin America, was definitely to open the church to a lot of fresh air — including historical materialism and radical critiques of colonialism, racism, and eventually the status of women and even questions of sexuality.
Things sometimes become their opposites. And in many areas in Latin America for a period of years and sometimes decades, the church or a wing of it, which had always been an instrument of feudal and colonial oppression, became a weapon in the hands of the oppressed. This was a complex and contradictory phenomena and the term “Liberation Theology” refers to people who took all sorts of political paths, but within all that there was an undeniable revolutionary thrust and it was often within the church or its base communities that the fusion of revolutionary theory with the struggles of the oppressed actually occurred on a mass scale.
I would argue that the current left turn taking place across Latin America would be unimaginable without the influence of Liberation Theology, and that it acted as a transmission belt for a whole range of radical ideas coming from lots of sources, not least of all the Cultural Revolution. As an atheist who thinks the Catholic Church can not be made an instrument of liberation without wrecking it this is an inconvenient truth and one that has important roots in Vatican II. But there it is.
Roxanne Amico said
Mike, I would also like to know how your talk was received by the audience of Platypus… And I look forward to hearing the audio, if that’s made available!
Stiofan said
Mike wrote:
..we could look at the sale of girls and women in the sex trade internationally, at least a million a year by most accounts. Semifeudal villages are drained of girls (and the rustbelts of Eastern Europe in their own way), as young women are channeled into major cities Mumbai, Bangkok, Manila, Cost Rica’s San Jose, and many more (soon Havana again?)… to literally become one more product sold in the worldwide capitalist circuits of commodity trade.
To these disgusting crimes against the people I would add the whole sale death of girls in India
‘Despite rapid growth, India lets its girls die’
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110504/ap_on_re_as/as_india_no_country_for_little_girls
..and the continuing abandonment of girls in China and their abuse in corrupt orphanages. Fewer infant girls are being discarded meaning some institutions that profit from their adoption to foreigners are resorting to buying children from impoverished families or from kidnappers. The director of an orphanage in Changning, Hunan, was actually arrested at the rail station buying children abducted from Guangdong province. In both countries the embrace of capitalist development has lead to ‘big cities full of luxury cars and glittering malls’ while inequality and traditional prejudices against women become worse and more entrenched.
Joe Ramsey said
The short answer to the question of how Mike’s talk–and our panel generally–was received by “the Platypus people” is that there wasn’t enough time left over after all the panel-papers to really find out.
There was a little bit of back and forth with Chris Cutrone, and one or two audience comments. One concerned who is actually reading Badiou, and the other, as I recall, dealing with how Platypus–and Cutrone–and Mike and John Steele appear to view the revolts of the 1960s in radically different ways.
In terms of the general feel, the room appeared to me to be full of both nods on the one hand, and smirks and glares on the other.
Chris Cutrone said
First of all, let me apologize for the shortness of the time slot in which the discussion at the Platypus convention took place. We clearly did not plan well to allow adequate let alone satisfying conversation to take place, and for that planning blunder, I’m sorry. I regret not having more time for exchange and, most importantly, audience Q&A.
I think that some of the reason audience Q&A discussion was lacking, even in the very short time we had (perhaps 20 minutes at most) was that our various presentations tended to speak past one another, if not work at entirely cross purposes. In other words, while I was trying to critique Badiou from a Marxist perspective, Mike, Joe Ramsey, and John Steele were trying to glean what could be gotten from Badiou’s work towards emancipatory politics today.
But that may the rub, our disagreement over the nature and character of emancipatory politics under capital.
My argument was that Marxism allows us to recognize how the struggle against oppression can be regenerative of capital rather than pointing beyond it or even moving it towards crisis in ways that might begin to point beyond it. In short, I think I fundamentally disagreed with Mike, Joe and John over Marxism. They tended to think that Badiou’s moving away from Marxism was beneficial, whereas I see it as symptomatic of lowered horizons and diminished expectations.
For anyone interested, my presentation can be found at:
http://chriscutrone.platypus1917.org/?p=1144
I’ll post a link here to the audio recording of the discussion when it’s uploaded and available.
Mike E said
Several people have asked how my talk was received by the audience of Platypus.
I think we should start by acknowledging that Platypus invited us to speak in the first place — knowing well that our views were quite different from theirs (and not just on Badiou). This was an expression of the importance of discussion between opposing views — of cross-fertilization, of the value of learning from people who don’t agree.
Chris starts by talking about problems of timing (and whatever) — but all of that was secondary. It is often true in conferences that presentations eat up the Q-and-A. That happened in our panel. And I was as much fault in that as the Platypus organizers.
But here is where I start on this: My first readings of Platypus materials took note of an early expression of “uber-sectarianism” on their part. They appear to have moved away from that.
What was the point of inviting us to speak and attending this panel if not, precisely, to learn from the contrast of opposing views.
I think this approach is positive. And I hope to see an expansion of that political culture — where it is assumed that people of rather sharply opposing views have things to learn from each other, and audiences have things to learn by the “compare and contrast” of opposing views.
And it was not just Kasama — that Saturday morning also had presentations by the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Marxist Humanists and so on.
It is interesting for me that Chris writes:
As you can see from my post above, I was arguing that gleaning from Badiou’s work for emancipatory politics was (in my opinion) precisely what a Marxist perspective should be. Ours is an open system of thought — not something fixed a hundred years ago.
Part of the issue here is (of course) “what is marxism?” Is Marxism simply the body of work of Karl Marx in the 19th century? Or is it a larger current of thought and politics that has developed continuously, and still (today!) needs to live, transform and develop in the context of experiences and new ideas of a new century?
Our panel attracted between 30 and 40 people — which was (I believe) about half of the conference. And this seemed to reflect some curiosity about Badiou, Maoism, and perhaps our unconventional Kasama project.
My overall impression of that audience was respectful interest.
Chris spoke first in our panel. And I followed expressing (from the beginning) a rather different view concerning the struggle and voices of the oppressed. And we were followed by Joe and John who took up more specific questions in regard to Badiou.
Cross-fertilization confronts a number of problems — starting with the lack of a common language and (quite often) a rather stark lack of knowledge of other political currents.
Chris feels we were “talking past each other” — but in many ways I was trying to talk to the thirty people in the audience, not mainly deal with Chris’ specific arguments about Badiou. And (as you can see) in my talk I deal with why that is: I’m not that interested in making checklists of “what Marx said” and “what Badiou said” and (after finding differences) making verdicts based on those differences. It just doesn’t interest me — because I don’t think that is how we will uncover the value of ideas. John mentioned that those trying to prove that Badiou is not some classic Marxist are trying to prove the obvious — and proving that still doesn’t answer the question of what is valuable, or what is true.
I think it is valuable that the different politics were on display — which were not mainly about the details of Badiou’s theory, but about our different approaches to capitalism and the oppressed.
Chris Cutrone said
Thanks, Mike.
I should say that there is some important difference to be noted between what I was trying to accomplish in my critique of Badiou and what Platypus as an organization was trying to accomplish by hosting this discussion. Platypus’s purposes, the aims of the conversations we seek to host, are not the same as or reducible to my (or any other speaker’s who is a member of Platypus) opinion.
I appreciate what Mike says, that the conversation was directed more at the audience rather than each other, which is only proper to the purposes of the discussion, to open up the issues for consideration. For what we as a project aim to do is in fact what Mike says, “to learn from the contrast of opposing views.” I only regret that on this occasion we didn’t have more time to do so.
land said
What is the relationship of our will or people’s will to a possible event as Badiou says or even just a major change that involves a significant section of people?
I am not saying that “will” can carry the day without some deep thinking or theory. In our case some new theory and thinking through some of the critical questions that this time period is throwing up at us.
But getting back to the question of “will.” I have always thought there is a question of “will in the picture. And it has to do with the picture of oppression that Mike drew a picture of at the beginning of this article. The picture of “But let me start here.”
Many people ask the question why aren’t more people outraged in a visible way at some of these horrors. Many times groups send out a flyer that is intended to bring people into the streets but there is no visible response. And they sum up incorrectly that people do not care.
In LA after the police beating of Rodney King the youth took pictures saying – we tell you this goes on all the time but you don’t believe us. Now we have a picture. And when the cops were let off there was a rebellion. People said even with a picture you don’t believe us.
That was not all a question of will. But it was drawing a line based on time’s up for relying on this system for justice.
Another example which I think is more a question of “will” Maybe I am stretching it. And it is not exactly what Mike was talking about.
Did people read the book by John Grisham A Time to Kill. The character played by Samuel Jackson has a daughter that is brutally raped by white men in the south. They are arrested but Jackson knows they will be let off. They will get a white jury etc, So he decides to kill them as they are going into court because that is the only way he will get justice for his daughter. In his trial he pleads innocent.
This incident changes the lives of people both black and white in this town. It brings black people from all over the south to the trial of Jackson. It is an event.
There is no communism in this picture although there should be. But the question of will. Black people have put up with all kinds of shit and they manage to live peacefully. But this rape took things over the edge. There are certain things people live with to a point. And then it becomes resistance. A murder or having to sit in the back of the bus.
Isn’t there a question of will
here. No one – black and many white thought Jackson was wrong. A white jury acquited him with a good closing argument by the attorney.
At some point people do have to say “No”. And they have to be willing to put some things on the line. Willing does come from the word will.
I do not think a lot of “NO”‘s is going to make a successful revolution.People need to understand things because revolution is more than resistance. But without the “No’s” there will not be much chance to find our Mississippi.
old commie said
A lot of very good theorizing, but unless we get down to specifics, it doesn’t mean anything. Too many communists think that the only way problems can be solved is by coming up with beautiful theories or programs, or by communist revolution.. But the masses of the people don’t care about or believe your theories,they just want their own specific grievances heard and solved. Secure jobs with benefits, basic civil rights, a steadily rising standard of living, education and medical care, etc.. We have to get involved in solving some of these problems before there can be a socialist revolution, or people are just going to think we’re no different than the capitalist politicians with all their promises about how wonderful things are going to be after they get in power. Seriously, why should anybody believe what we say, unless we can show them we know how to get things done by actualy doing some of them. Especially after all the failures of socialism that thery’ve seen over the years.
john said
agree up to a point. but my question for all is this: if you want to make a ‘new start’, then why bother with all this old and rather dated MLM stuff, why talk about Lenin and Stalin and Mao. these are the things that completely divide us, and frankly bore the hell out of younger people who could potentially be attracted to communism. for many people, it would seem that ML has had enough chances in the twentieth century. you can talk about Mao all you like, but at the end of the day, china is a capitalist power and Mao’s face is on their currency. is this a name we want to rally round? also, there seem to be problems that a new beginning must tackle, such as the undemocratic nature of most leninist parties, the cult of personality in maoism, and the extreme authoritarianism of most communist groups and states. its all very well to talk about nepal and peru, but these countries are very far away from our advanced capitalist countries, and the examples of Nepal and Peru have not exactly been successes either. many of the communist attempts in the 20th century alienated so many people and drove them into the arms of the reactionaries by their militant atheism. do we want to repeat this mistake also?
Jay Rothermel said
Below are my notes on Mike Ely’s presentation at the Platypus Affiliated Society’s 2011 convention, which occurred over the May Day weekend in Chicago. It is entitled, “Throw open windows: Begin a fresh communism”.
I originally posted the talk on my blog, Marxist Update, back in the spring without any notes. Coming from a completely different tradition than Maoism and the RCP, I am always uncomfortable and more than a little dismissive about the momentous and sentimentally poetic language used in many formulations [radical, deep, new, counterintuitive, et cetera] of the US Maoists.
My political education contained no such vocabulary. In the U.S. Socialist Workers Party we were trained to check current political trends, events, openings for intervention against the summations and continuity of our revolutionary heritage. We checked ourselves against previous party decisions, conventions, and leaders; previous international leaders; then the Bolsheviks in Lenin’s time; and finally against Marx and Engels. Of course every night was not library night, and the process was not as fustian as I have summarized. Party-wide and branch-wide educational classes went on regularly, and our party newspaper always had [and still has] articles about past struggles related to current events. The object was, in saying we stood on the shoulders on giants, to really embody that concept.
A communist education in a Leninist party is a thing of the past for most young people today. They read here and there on the web, but the web’ s wealth of Marxist material makes it hard to maintain a focus. Still, the goal of communist study is not to win on Jeopardy or bore people who no longer wish to be your friends. It is not even to fill up space in the blogosphere. Rather, it is, by reading the classics, to learn to think like a communist: to evaluate reality and decide, at each new turning point or opportunity, what is to be done.
In his article, Mike Ely writes: “those under thirty perceive the world around them with eyes that can sharply see what is new, distinct and rising.” That is the tremendous lever against which communists today can put their shoulders. Youth under 30 have not internalized 35 years of defeat, deflection, collapse, treason, surrender, and exhaustion. They are more clearly able to see what is new, and they certainly have “more bounce for the ounce.”
There are some phrases and formulations in Mike Ely’s talk that I would disagree with. But regardless of what shade of chinoiserie Mike chooses to clothe his thoughts, I agree with him that we need to present the “maximum” program in the most arresting way we can.
*
reading notes:
Throw open windows: Begin a fresh communism
by Mike Ely
the liberations of the bourgeois revolution are ground up into the makings of new horrors under this system.
for common abundance, radical equality and realization of countless human potentials.
wealth of modern capitalism has accreted and accumulated professional pigs, killers and corrupted agents at a unprecedented rate.
communist project is almost invisible. And what is visible is often not communist.
….Is that extreme weakness the end of communism, or is it a beginning?
…. we have a great occasion for a new accounting. And, we should take up our work through a new presentation.
…. there are ways in which we are on the ground floor, and thinking through (again) the forms of organization and approach that are appropriate for times when socialist revolution still lies over the horizon for most of us.
….retool our communist project, reinvent our modes of presentation, radically re-metabolize our experiences, and forge something new in a new century.
with a particular mix:
1. ….radiate a profound sense of the real: a profound and penetrating critique of capitalism in its current forms, and a materialist sense of what could replace it. Not a nostalgic clinging to this or that model. Not a pretense that things haven’t changed.
2. ….radiate a culture of profound engagement, listening, and even humility – a democratic sensibility — without which no one will give communism a second hearing.
3. ….embody a militant, even shocking negation of everything that torments humanity – uncompromising, unafraid, righteous enough to topple and pursue the oppressors.
energetically treat many so-called settled questions as fresh problems for solution.
strip them back down – with great attention to our goals and our times.
restudy a verdict
We cannot and will not engage a new generation of radicals, if they don’t come in at the ground floor of such a creative process, or if existing communist circles make uncritical acceptance of orthodoxies the price of admission.
“The final goal is everything, the movements for getting there remain to be charted.”
we all have together before us a great creative work.
strategies in a country like this are unknown. Uncharted. We have lots of experience to sum up
inherent in revolutions that the major creative work can’t be pre-done, and just imported (or applied) to “local” conditions.
where we stand (meaning in the U.S.) the key task is no longer creating a great human engine of economic development and modernization.
….Our goals are much more about radical community, a society of solidarity in the place of dog-eat-dog cannibalism and capitalist atomization. We are seeking a sustainable society out of a past of great waste and meaningless stuff. And we are seeking to end imperialism — by striking within the belly of the beast — for a global order that can end the domination of a few countries and the wars that they unleash….
Who can still believe that the world is divided into “two kinds of countries” — when those 1950s categories can’t discuss a South Korea, or an Argentina, or a Bangalore, or the regional roles of Turkey, Israel, India, Brazil or China.
40 ago, in the high tide of Vietnam War and Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party said “revolution is the main trend in the world today.” Is such an assessment a permanent verdict?
Our world society is not somehow inherently “ripe” – just waiting for a particular socialist turn. World capitalism is not “stuck” (in some generalized crisis of paralysis and decay). On the contrary it is quite dynamic
error here: in the assumptions that we can find all the basic answers we need by simply applying locally in this or that particular, existing and universalized form of Marxism.
revolutions will prove to have been like snowflakes – each one unique, not an archetype.
needs to draw from the communists of the past, from our elaborate experience with socialism in the last century, and also from those who have been working, in parallel, in some different row of grapes in these same vineyards.
….Badiou (and with him Zizek) have done important work bringing communist ideas to a new generation of students – who have otherwise been taught it is simply a dead letter….
….Leninism has led us to study the materiality of crisis – its roots in capitalist rivalry, economics, the manyness of capital, war, depression, and more….Badiou ….how contagious new truths erupt from a seeming void, in unexpected ways, and like hose sprays of antimatter corrode away the exhausted and compromised.
….Badiou ….he is operating unconstrained by the continuity with Hegel and Bebel, and I find the novelty exhilarating and thought-provoking – even when I don’t agree. Because he is working on the problems we all need to be working on.
shocking new truths forge cadre and sweep the field.
….truths in the sense that they explode to reveal the old as dated and suddenly repulsive.
think through how to get out of this hole, and how to be part of the next waves of novelty that our intensely dynamic world will throw up.
Hasten and await is a discussion of preparing for revolutionary opportunities. Well, I think Badiou is raising important things about what hastening might mean, and what exactly we are awaiting.
reject the old sectarian strategies of forming tiny mini-parties, whose programs we fantasize will be picked up (in a telescoped way) by a grateful population in great crises. That is a grandiose and misleading fantasy which will just guarantee irrelevance in the actual conjunctures.
a century of communism and revolution have left us a great body of work, theory and experience to build upon. And in particular I think that the best of Maoism forms a key platform for our work –– specifically in its mass line and its radical reconception of the socialist transition period.
To reconceive we have to have a deep sense (and even appreciation) of the earlier communist conceptions (which many newer revolutionaries have not had much access to, and which we are trying to provide on Kasama).
….against the idea (that is both prevalent and marginalized) that there is an existing universal theory (as a kind of closed and complete system or orthodoxy) that merely needs to be “applied” to specific moments – i.e. tweaked for local conditions.
….much less interested in a discussion that asks “what is the real Marxism” than I am in a much more contemporary discussion of what do we believe, and what are we going to do?
do it in ways that at every stage draw in the new – new people, new discoveries, new realities, a new generation of radical youth the best of whom will not tolerate being spoonfed old truths.
those under thirty preceive the world around them with eyes that can sharply see what is new, distinct and rising.
mass line – popular agency
I’m a student not a follower these days. But I think these are questions worth engaging.
there is nothing agnostic going on here.
We need a shocking, counterintuitive proclamation of the communist project – classless society, overthrow of all existing conditions, the whole over the self, a literally planetary world view….
a new political culture of mutual respect and collaboration, of modesty and experimentation.
it is possible that the alienation, despair, energetic anger, and determination can arise a radical de-legitimization of what is – and then new ways of using human genius and productive power to emancipate.
That’s the revolutionary road.
Earl Silbar said
This new sense of a global consciousness Mike refers to is real and important. It comes from manys sources and speaks in many voices.
One ‘small’ example:
While on vacation, I was talking with a desk clerk in Mexico who was telling me about his efforts to protect sea turtles on their island (Isla Mujeres) when he said, ” I’m born in Mexico, but I’m a citizen of the world!”
SKS said
Platypus Affiliated Society will most likely end up as scabs and pigs, because that is the inevitable result of any organization that puts itself outside of the left even if it is objectively part of it.
I dislike the Spartacist League’s politics and method, and vice-versa, but I cannot imagine them or myself snitching them out or scabing them. However, I have utter mistrust of the Platypus Affiliated Society’s ability to resist academic power and not use it against the left in the name of the new.
Those familiar with the past a number of New Left post-structuralists know what I am talking about… when the critique of the left (a valid thing) becomes a repudation of leftism (a bad thing) which becomes an embrace of reactionary power and its exercise (a terrible thing).
Its how George Orwell, whose sharp, witty, and mostly correct criticisms of the revolutionary left led him to in the end, become an agent of British intelligence, whose active cooperation with the State led to the destruction of many lives and livelihood, and whose pigwork lasted long after he died. And on top of that, made his valuable contributions to the criticism of the left become anathema based on the path the author walked, robbing us of valuable insights that we still grapple with to this day.
Hatin’ the left be the path to the dark side…
Mike E said
I received a thoughtful letter from a study group on the Northeast who included this essay as one of their readings.
They wrote:
I have read over the piece and that section.
The word that is missing is “function.” Though all of the words you raise (“develop,” sustain”…) are worth considering.
It is an old controversy under new conditions. Many communists understand that a key issue of the Stalin-Trotsky line struggle was whether “socialism in one country” was even possible. (Stalin said yes, Trotsky said no.) Stalin, however, went on (a decade later) to suggest that the struggle for socialism could be completed and settled in one country (i.e. opening the possibility of “communism in one country”) — and suggested, in the late 30s, that antagonist class relationships had been decisively eliminated within the Soviet Union.
Watching the developments in the Soviet Union over the 1950s, Mao (by contrast) argued that one country could take the socialist road, but that socialism could not be decisively victorious and consolidated apart from the larger expansion of socialism on a world scale. The twentieth century provides several examples of the extreme costs imposed on revolutionary forces by capitalist blockade (and the continuing domination of capitalism over the world economy). And it shows the extreme pressures to “open up” — enter the world market (not just in commodity goods), but also in the capitalism market in labor power (i.e. reoffer the laboring people to capitalist exploitation).
Since then, there has been a marked acceleration in internationalization of production circuits — where (for example) a study of very basic products (automobile transportation, telephone communications, etc.) shows a great deal of complexity (key ingredients come from one country, manufacturing happens in several others, assembly may happen somewhere else, transportation and marketing of goods is global, technology is rapidly unfolding in many centers of research and development, and finally the whole often rests on the increasingly globalized circulation of resources (oil, food, etc.) And in such a world, what does it mean to imagine taking the socialist road in one country? Especially a small country (like Puerto Rico, or Nepal or obviously Cuba)?
Do communists in smaller countries need a regional strategy from the beginning (as Carpio argued in Central America, and as the Nepali Maoists argued for south Asia)?
What would the economic relations between a new socialist economy (even in a very large country with resources and population) be with the surrounding world markets and networks?
What is the impact and implications of embargoes (as the U.S. refined against in the 1950s against “Red China” and after 1960 around Cuba, and more recently against so-called “rogue states” like Iran)?
And how should we prepare revolutionary movements and people before and after the seizure of power.
Many forces around the world have drawn very pessimistic conclusions from the realities of globalization (associating socialism with a kind of isolated “autarchic” economy that would have to take a “Pol Pot” route of isolation and lowered living standards — even a regression of technological methods). This requires a sharp and materialist answer. It is not enough to mumble (in a backward looking way) that 1930s communists said and then proved that “socialism in one country” is possible…. history is more complex, and the modern moment has its own particular features.
So I have fixed the typo. The essay’s series of questions now reads:
Thanks for pointing out the typo — but more so, thanks for engaging with us on these matters.