Exercising judgment: Radical change as a politics of the real
Posted by Mike E on January 13, 2012
Reality out of focus?
“We need the political judgement that comes from a capacity for integrating a vast amalgam of constantly changing, multicolored, evanescent perpetually overlapping data.”
“We have to actually know this shimmering, dancing world in the course of actually fighting to end its many horrors. We are in many ways at a fresh start.”
by Mike Ely
Elections are when this ugly system chooses its leaders. Their candidates create a simplistic facade to engage relatively apolitical sections of the people — like Romney (a lifelong politician) mascarades as “a businessman who knows how to create jobs.”
Meanwhile, in a relatively separate but decisive process, the ruling apparatchiks of this system (its political establishments, moneybags and media) debate which of the various political figures they should actually entrust with an empire. From the beginning (clearly) they decided that Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Ron Paul were unsuitable for the actual presidency — such people were were allowed to play a popularizing role, but never give the credibility to contend for power.
I ran across an interesting passage in this ruling class discussion of suitability. An essay by the British Liberal theorist Isaiah Berlin defines political judgment as:
“a capacity for integrating a vast amalgam of constantly changing, multicolored, evanescent perpetually overlapping data.”
NYT OpEd writer David Brooks elaborates:
“A president with political judgment has a subtle feel for the texture of his circumstance. He has a feel for where opportunities lie, what will go together and what will never go together.”
Brooks argues such a “feel” emerges from a deep knowledge of people and processes (in the conventional terrain of power and policy).
He says it comes from “a rich repertoire of experiences” and from “voracious social contact.”
“It comes to leaders who have a compulsive desire to be around people and who can harvest from a million social encounters a sense of what people want and can deliver.”
Wandering to our own choices
As I read this, my mind went (as it often does) to the problems of rebuilding a revolutionary movement — and (as it often does) to the problems we have inherited from our own immediate past.
I have a sense that we have to fight to regain a grip on two things:
First, a sweeping sense of political goals. We need to identity the specific radical changes needed to move humanity forward, and we need to articulate them as political goals. Sights have been lowered so that people want radical change, but (day to day) their politics and actions don’t flow from any real sense of a road heading toward that change. There is lipservice to vague socialism etc. etc., but beyond such mere words, the defacto goals have often become mere survival (of this-or-that dedicated group) or incremental pressure (on this-or-that important “issue”).
Second, a real sense of real politics — i.e. grow the capacity to constantly evaluate the actual terrain, the actual mood of real people, including the unexpected openings, and what such openings demand of us (changes, adjustments etc.) It has been so long since radical politics did this, that many sincere people will have no idea what I’m talking about. Such attention to real politics is rarely part of the toolkit of radical discussion that most of us have encountered (since many of us have never seen genuine mass movements!). And meanwhile, it is part of the tool kit of all serious bourgeois discourse (since they do actually rule, and speak to people, and encounter real problems with real solutions). As a result the very idea of actually speaking to the real can seem strangely suspect, as if it must be the foreplay of political capitulation.
We need the kind of political judgement that Berlin was describing — and we cannot just confine ourselves to a detached, cranky, predictable and relatively uninformed commentary on surrounding political events.
For a while now, the surrounding society has been relatively indifferent to radical politics — and then enforced marginalization has given rise to a kind of encapsulated fidelity among revolutionaries. In the surviving left’s atrophed subculture, we have had political views (lots and lots of them) and sometimes outreach for those views (hence the one-to-many stereotype of the newspaper seller).
But the kind of politics that identifies a social base (the relatively advanced within immediate political turmoil, and beyond them sociological layers of people more longterm) and then works to fuse ideas with base in a creative way…. that kind of politics has become more rare. The organized left has often lost the muscles for leaping out of the blocks, or the voice for speaking in its own name about its own passions. More — we often don’t even think that way, and often don’t have the layers of skills such activity requires.
Needed: A reconnection with real politics
I would like to make a simple plea for the kind of political judgement that Isaiah Berlin described for his political world. And I will repeat his words again (so we can think of them in our context):
We need the political judgement that comes from a capacity for integrating a vast amalgam of constantly changing, multicolored, evanescent perpetually overlapping data.
And we need to do that in a highly partisan way, of course: We need the strategic and tactical thinking that rests on political judgment for our cause (for liberation, not administering empire!)
And I would like to mention some contrary views that, like a crude wooden peg jammed into fine clockwork, fills that space where our political judgment should reside.
The exaggeration of principal aspect
One is a kind of kneejerk essentialism — where Marxist-sounding assumptions substitute for thinking.
Example: I am occasionally asked what I think the “principal contradiction on a world scale” is… because that is (after all) a major debate among existing Maoist formations. Personally, i think the world is large enough and complex enough that I don’t assume it has any principal contradiction of that kind. And more I believe that previous assertions of principal contradiction have proven to be the basis of some terrible decisions and abdications of judgment. (Were German and Japanese imperialism really the main enemy in World War 2 India?)
The idea often crops up that we can deduce policies, alignments, and alliances downward (in a trickle-down way) from such high level decisions about “principal contradiction.” It is one example of the abdication of political judgment through the use of mechanical formulas.
Another is the existence of all kinds of fixed assumptions of “what things must look like to be any good.”
The people of the Occupy movements “didn’t even know that cops are their enemy.” Well, yeah. They were not mainly rooted (demographically) in various favored social strata (whether the organized workers or the dispossessed Black and Latino communities). Well yeah. They didn’t even know to target capitalism (yet). Well yeah. They had populist thoughts bubbling up and even dominating their discourse. Well yeah. They had no real organization and long term plans and no clear demands. Well yeah.
And those observations represent relative and partial truths, and even represent real problems on the table. And it is all worth acknowledging.
But so often, the people saying these things have had little political judgment about how to approach such problems and such truths. Critique replaces mass line. (And again: the “mass line,” in this sense, is a communist method of exercising leadership — not mechanically elbowing for command or merely formulating promising arguments for agitation.)
There is a misunderstanding of dialectics involved: Instead of looking at contradictory aspects (inner and outer) in their development, instead of analyzing the whole, dialectics is sometimes misused in the service of an exaggerated essentialism — where our mental work becomes identifying the principal aspect of each process or moment, doing so not to understand the dynamics of the whole, but in order to justify a disregard for the other supposedly secondary aspects. Over and over I have encountered people trained to think that once they have “grasped the principal aspect” they have a reason to stop analysis — it has become “a thing” defined by its essence, not a dynamic process leaping through nodal changes. And with that thing-making (Entdinglichung, as our German friends say) other details (really, any subtelty, nuance and counterarguments) are shoved into a fade. In this way, a seemingly dialectical “break it down” method arrives at a metaphysical essentialism, the raw material for dogmatic work.
With exaggerated essentialist assumptions, we can never have a flexible or subtle “feel for where opportunities lie, what will go together and what will never go together.”
It won’t do: We don’t need a one-note symphony hammered out in monotony. We need ten fingers tickling the ivories with subtle subthemes and well-crafted crescendos.
Self-comforting toast of elitism: “Here’s to us and people like us!”
Another contrary view is to see “the advanced” (when seeking out the immediate focus of our work) as “people like us.” This is understandable, of course, given how humans spontaneously think. But it is precisely a failure of political judgment.
Often the relatively advanced in society are not like us at all… they generally don’t speak our language, don’t share our history, they often don’t even perceive us as relevant.
Often we walk right by them to coagulate with others in a leftist subculture (to gossip about our complaints and aggregated impotence).
Often the advanced (in their real diversity and common isolation) walk right by each other — because it is only in a new social space (of “profound political divergence”) that they even reveal themselves (to us and to each other) and start to those conversation that can turn them into an ongoing force (with an ongoing “truth-process”).
How do we (as political representatives of oppressed people and a liberated future) learn to evaluate and identify “the relatively advanced” (and especially the “unusually advanced”) when they emerge in political life?
This is a matter where political practice and its summation is crucial. To borrow Brooks’ words, we need to “harvest from a million social encounters a sense of what people want and can deliver.” And we need to consciously transform ourselves in profound ways — as communists have always had to do when they “go to the people.”
I see a crop of perceptual discussion of experiences from the Occupy movement — fascinating and valuable reports that describe a sequence of events, or that (in beginning ways) explore the terrain of this scene or that. But I would like to propose that we (somewhere) do the work to take such summation several steps higher — and start to discuss (at least among ourselves) the characteristics of the relatively advanced, and our experiences with the unusually advanced. We need to learn (collectively and deeply) how they view the world, and what they “want and can deliver,” and how they view projects like ours.
At the same time, I have also participated in some remarkable discussions that sharply raise key issues emerging from the current scene: describing how there are (within the Occupation discussion) groups of people who have vivid views of radical alternative societies (rooted in base democracy, popular control, international linkages, ecological paradigm shifts in production and consumption etc.) — who don’t connect those views with the insights and debates emerging from the communist movement. These kinds of summations start to get at the heart of our creative work, and need to be connected with our understandings of larger configurations in society (classes, social fissures, diverse potential wellsprings of radical cores).
Mao Zedong (the consummate practitioner) was getting at this when he wrote:
“No political party can possibly lead a great revolutionary movement to victory unless it possesses revolutionary theory and knowledge of history and has a profound grasp of the practical movement.”
We have challenges around each part of that: theory, history, and this “profound grasp of the practical movement.”
After critique, implementation?
We need to move further beyond critiques of impotent self-encapsulation — and actually start to do these things that will fuse our revolutionary politics (in experimental and embryonic ways at first) to actual sections of the people. And (just to insert a larger dialectic here) to accomplish that we also need to refine a new presentation of our communist project and its ideas (which in turn requires a conception of communist work that is much more sophisticated than the spontaneous “best fighter in the immediate, plus occasional agitation about socialism”).
I raise this now, in part, because our Kasama project is in a mode of re-imagining itself. We are trying to think through how to conduct several overlapping discussions in several overlapping languages with several overlapping audiences — and we will reinvent this Kasama site to advance that.
Here are the closing paragraphs of the 9 Letters to Our Comrades . As an ending it works well here too.
“Something important is being said if our movement in the U.S. can (at long last) develop an ability to even hear the voices of others. We have to learn to look past the text, the glib phrase, the comforting myth — and look deeply into the living thing and our living practice of engagement. We have to actually know this shimmering, dancing world in the course of actually fighting to end its many horrors.
“We are in many ways at a fresh start. Let’s re-teach ourselves to think with a critical spirit. Let’s struggle and debate creatively, as comrades. Let’s chart that uncharted course. Let’s actually “prepare minds and organize forces for revolution.” Let’s bring down the beast and move toward the final emancipation of humanity.”
Carl Davidson said
Good…just one note on this:
In thinking ‘for liberation’ and ‘against Empire,’ I often try to imagine the requirements not only for breaking up the old order, but also administering the new one, at least getting it launched on an even keel. In doing so, I often reason backwards, thinking of what will be needed THEN (say the means of producing and distributing clean and green energy), so as to begin fighting for, and even implementing some of it NOW (say the Smart Grid). via proposals for radical structural reform. Even if they are thwarted or sabotaged, the discussion around them alone can add to revolutionary education.
Patrick said
Another fine essay, Mike. This gives me hope.
I am rooting for Kasama and I hope that everyone in involved with this re-imagining of the project can come together and come up with something active and theoretically correct.
As a Maoist, I’m rooting for Kasama to take the big step of being a really revolutionary party based on the mass line and criticism and self-criticism and staying true to the anti-revisionist tenants of Maoist theory, as opposed to the RCP or FRSO’s.
SKS said
Patrick,
If I am correct, the meaning of this article was lost on you – because you made a fairly essentialist comment.
Mike,
I do appreciate this essay, is always good to read you in this nut-and-bolt question, even when we disagree.
And while I find little to disagree here – in particular around the questions of the mass line etc – I find precious little here in terms of practice, and in terms of meaningful political contradictions: in fact, in political writing, when there is collection of basically true assertions without an open confrontation, it usually means that there is an attempt to side-step the problems, rather than face them.
Which brings me to this: is the reality of how politicians operate not a reality we should struggle to transform? Isn’t the uncritical embrace of the political form as it exists, rather than its critical transformation, at the root of the liquidation of the socialist camp? Isn’t the reading of the mass line that defines the advance only as the cadre of the party what has led us to this place?
In this sense this article creates more questions in me than it answers, which is not a bad thing, but judging from the response above, I think that it can have the opposite effect: being understood as an answer, and if that was the intent, then I think it is not a good answer, but rather one that ironically does exactly the same it prescribes against.
When the same thing means two different things to two different people, that is usually a signal that either it is insufficient, on purposely ambiguous. If insufficient, it serves us better to see that, but if purposely ambiguous then it is the promotion of the old politics of coalition building, those of hiding dissent to unite around a theme, rather than position. And that requires a willful engagement in such politics. And those politics are in part what we need to transform, not embrace…
Mike E said
SKS:
what does it mean to you that there is not an “open confrontation” — I was just telling someone that this essay tries to hit several birds with one stone.
In my own defense, I don’t think you can judge someone by how they are misunderstood. After much time writing I am convinced that it is impossible to produce some water-tight clarity — that defies any misread. People often hear what they are able to hear. And Patrick extracted some of his own truths (correctly) from my piece (including hope) which perhaps you can’t hear.
SKS said
Oh come on Mike, so because this article didn’t give me hope then hope is alien to me? Are you serious?
RW Harvey said
SKS writes:
Really? There are always multiple meanings, as their multiple experiences and perspectives, no? It seems that you passion for de-essentializing does not extend to your desire to have things mean the same (exact?) to everyone.
As Rilke said: sometimes questions cannot be answered, they need to be lived… lived into an answer.
What I love about this piece is that it is not an answer; it deepens reverie and contemplation and inspires vision and a sense of “what if.” Must every essay be an essential treatise on practice? Don’t ideas and images inspire new considerations of practice as well?
Finally it is a bit disingenuous to say this essay is asking for the embrace of the way bourgeois politicians operate; it is using examples of a critical spirit, of an orientation towards leading, of being able to lead.
Mike E said
Sks:
I’m at least half serious. Though I resist making personal comments about anyone, or their inner workings.
K said
Mike, have you finally lost it? Do you seriously your self as having some sort of stellar importance in the ‘grand scheme of things?’ Do you seriously consider yourself an ‘advanced elite’ who needs to talk down to people and think that this blog/website is the ultimate expression and justifier of hope?
Because that’s completely nuts, I hope you realize. I am aware that you aren’t completely Napoleonic complex-mental and that this is just the sort of grandeur/megalomania that people get from watching television and posting on the Internet and then thinking that their lives are important, but they really aren’t. So come on, Mike, you look as if are becoming Bob Avakian with these overblown ego rantings, the Bob Avakian you have come to hate because of his megalomania and eccentricity.
So come on, Mike, let’s not go down that road. Having hope in your ideas is one thing but thinking yourself the cognive and material expression of that hope is fully another.
Mike E said
K writes:
K, don’t be silly. Please, take a deep breath.
You have (apparently) chosen to misunderstand the sequence here:
Patrick wrote an expression of encouragment and appreciation. SKS chose to respond with his (familiar) mix of snark, provocation and occasional insight. I chose to tease SKS for being pessimistic. And you (taking the distraction to extremes) chose to accuse me of believing i’m an avatar of hope.
I suggest we return to matters of substance, and I propose that SKS in particular stop flouting the rules of this site: and avoid repeatingly personalizing exchanges with others.
Cheers to all.
SKS said
Mike I only personalize when I am personally attacked. That is my rule. If you do not protect me, I will protect myself. After all rules are illegitimate if they are not enforced evenly – it is why we are revolutionaries, ain’t it?
That said, I have no problem with pessimism of the mind. I am, however, and optimist of the will (and at the danger of sounding religious, the spirit). Only reason I hang around here – snark aside, and my constant roll-eyes, at least there people around here who *try* to engage others. A problem of the left is how one-sided the conversation is, stuck in an era of the newspaper.
If anything has changed in politics today, at least in the countries with massive internet penetration, is that interactivity and constant dialogue are the new way to engage. And Kasama (and mike) get that, almost uniquely in the USA’s left, not in an artificial way – ie “trying to engage this new thing” – but in a very deep way that is organic. And I want to be there.
Doesn’t mean I have to be a seal applauding every thing.
Patrick said
Yikes. I didn’t mean to open up a shitstorm. I just wanted to say that I found the article motivating and I wanted to express my sympathies with the Kasama Project. And, by the way, it is most certainly possible for two different people to interpret the same text in different ways. That happens all the time. I’ve read the same things as friends throughout my life and there have been many instances of us interpreting the texts differently because we do often “hear what we want to hear” as some people say.
Noelle said
Hey, didn’t read the article (yet), but that Dr. House portrait is used without credit. Please take it down and ask the artist for permission. If you DO get her permission, don’t post it without crediting her. Her contact information seems to be private but her tumblr and gallery are public, and you can leave a note there. Don’t be a dick.
http://euclase.deviantart.com/
http://euclase.tumblr.com/ask