Alvin Toffler once noted that all humans need three things--meaning, structure and community--in making their way in life. You can find this in many ways, some functional, some dysfunctional, in street gangs, political parties, the military, churches and so on.

The Buddhists has a concept called the 'three jewels,' --the Buddha , the Dharma, and the Sangha (community of the faithful). These amount to the same thing. Likewise with the Christians--The Good News, the Way and the Fellowship. One could probably find the same pattern in many human institutions an endeavors.

I think Mike is on to something here. To build organizations that are powerful and thriving, we need more than written analysis. We need new ways of doing things together rooted in core moral values of solidarity and self-emancipation.

I've also argued here and elsewhere that our sociality, the social nature of our species being, also has three main elements--the practice of ritual, the use of languages, and the practices of natural right and obligation. The are shaped and reshaped through different periods of history and modes of production, but there is a constant core not to be ignored or denied.

Gramsci is the revolutionary thinker that, IMO, goes into this most deeply.

Mike, you are definitely on to something. I speak as both a class struggle anarchist and Christian. People cannot live at the level of their analysis alone, they require meaning, tradition and ritual. A good dose of community (loyalty, solidarity, call it what you will) helps too. Sadly, it seems to take so much time, sometimes more than a single person's lifetime, like withered grass (Psalm 37). Who wants to be withered grass? So how do radicals and revolutionaries move forward?

I really appreciate this piece because it goes to a core problem with the contemporary left (all-too common for both reformists and revolutionaries): the belief that rational truth alone is sufficient to win people over. Because we're won over by intellectual arguments we tend to assume everybody else will be. There's a smugness in that approach. It's a smugness that I myself have struggled with at times. Because it's difficult, when things crystallize and become clear to you, to understand why others can't see what you can see. You sometimes want to just tell people "snap out of it! Look at this world for what it truly is." That approach can win over a few people, but I've come to realize it's not nearly enough.

I think the flipside to the hyper-rationality of left politics is a deep-seated fear and distrust of emotion. There's a sense amongst many on the left that appeals to emotion (which is what the symbolic realm is all about) are inherently anti-intellectual and even dangerous. And on one level I can understand why. After all, isn't our greatest enemy, fascism, all about emotionality and appeal to the primitive in mankind?

But I think a left politics that doesn't engage on a visceral and even primitive level is fated to be the exclusive preserve of the intellectuals. So while we're busy congratulating ourselves on our superior rationality the world will continue on its downward spiral into barbarism.

The question then is how to responsibly appeal to people on a symbolic, gut-level. I'm not sure I know the answer.

The other day I was talking to a co-worker and the subject of potential war with Iran came up. My co-worker is I think an interesting example of the the split-consciousness of many proletarians I've known. He's pro-worker, very aware of his own exploitation and the exploitation of his fellow workers, and thinks it would be great if we could unionize. He was excited by the Occupy movement, telling me that it's about damn time people started standing up (though I don't think he ever went down to the encampment when it was there.) He's against the wars, recognizing that they're about "big business" on some level. One morning he was reading the paper and I asked him if he read anything interesting and he said, "same old shit...man abusing his fellow man." He's a former prison inmate too and we've talked a bit about how the law is basically used as instrument of the rich to criminalize being poor. And he doesn't trust the government one bit. Personally, on many levels he's a likable guy: funny, sharp-minded, generous.

So imagine my horror when he said that the way we should "deal with those people" (i.e. Muslims) is to nuke them, "to turn their countries into glass." Shocked, I asked him why he thought that. He started talking about how they're all barbaric and how they'll "never stop killing Americans" because of their religious beliefs. In a bit of twist though, he denounced not only their religion but all religion. "Just like the fucking Catholics and the rest of them. Nuke 'em all." So then I start trying to persuade him with rational arguments. I talked about how you can't blame all Muslims for what a small handful did on September 11th. I talked about how the U.S. government was using this fear of Muslims to gin up support for wars that make money for the relatively small group of people that run the country and how this money is then used to further consolidate their power. I talked about the innocent women and children that are being slaughtered. But no matter how I tried to explain things, he just seemed to become more agitated and irritated by "the Muslims" and "those people."

Now I think this episode illustrates the continuing appeal of racism for many white proletarians. But that just begs the question, doesn't it? There's a deep, visceral level on which this genocidal attitude works, so that even someone who is very much conscious of the fact that the real criminals are the ones that run this system and very much much conscious of man's inhumanity to man, is somehow impervious to a rational argument against the genocidal logic of the imperialists, the criminals that he already knows are oppressing him and his fellow workers.

I think all this just goes to show how deeply racism, patriotism, religious bigotry and other forms of reaction are embedded in this society and how weak rationality is in combating them. We need much stronger medicine to deal with this stuff. I realize we need to mine the symbolic realm to synthesize an antidote, but I'm at a loss as to how exactly we should go about this.

Absolutely wonderful. It replicates insights that <a href="/http://chaosmarxism.blogspot.com/2012/03/mike-ely-is-good-guy.html" rel="nofollow">my blog has been making for years</a>. Communists certainly do need to learn to take culture, psychology and community-building seriously, because a too-rigorous rationalism (as opposed to rationality) leads to dogmatism, guru-worship and cultishness.

Communists need to deal with the whole human animal. We are emotional as well as logical, rational and irrational. I've often said communists don't set aside enough time for community and play, which are innate human needs. When I first got active again, I set up some events: Socializing for Socialists, Minigolf for Marxists ... never got around to Bowling for Bolsheviks. When I was still in Chicago, I wanted to set up a softball league for the various rev groups.

Community is even more important now. As <i>The Manifesto</i> points out, capitalism abolishes every human connection and replaces it with a market relation. The only place people really have left for community are religion and sports, an both of those are dominated by reactionary politics and market forces (though far from totally).

The fundamental problem - and it bears out historically - with this political approach is that it either pushes you into lowest common denominator or to niche identities - usually those compatible with the leadership's affinities. Both have proven to been disasters for communism - one successfully capturing state power and then building state capitalism (because that was the lowest common denominator) the other incapable of creating a mass movement.

This is what I call the totalitarian impulse in communism - different from the "totalitarian" epithet from liberalism: the impulse to have both answers for everything and to establish these answers as communist cannon.

I think that is part of the reason the revolutionary left fails to move beyond a certain niche: the more precise and all encompassing (that is, total, hence, totalitarian), the less are the demographic chances of someone being able to adapt and meet them.

In particular, Mike is prone to this totalization - he has often said that every thing he believes and feels is communist, and hence that is what communism is. I think that is politically dangerous - and a flattening of complex sociological and psychological interplays of what makes an individual and an individual in society.

I think a communist from a capitalist society will inevitably have capitalist ideas. I also think that while communism in itself will take over all aspects of life, the struggle for communism, including socialist construction, cannot force this along.

There is also a self-centeredness to how this is viewed, for example, Mike says:

"There was never (that I saw) much discussion, debate, synthesis, essays, summations about such crucial processes of human life (processes that are deeply involved in the liberation and equality of women) — birth, dating, marriage, intimacy, experimentation, living solidarity, child-rearing, liberating education, divorce, resolution of interpersonal conflict, forgiveness and transformation, caring for each other in illness and death, forms of celebration and festival."

Red Love - a novel - by Bolshevik and Workers Opposition leader Alexandra Kollontai immideately pop-up to mind. Also Lenin's harsh dismissal of Kollontai's and Zetkin's revolutionary feminism...

But to stick tot he direct point, Mike is correct in caveating "that I saw". For there is indeed a whole body of literature and actual struggle (not often successful, but sometimes successful) around these questions.

IN fact, I will offer that dealing with these questions is one of the central motivations for radicalization of young people: what makes a liberal (because we are all liberals when we start) a revolutionary.

Even Mao began as an anti-arranged marriage activist, and quickly developed wider politics based on that. It was not the other way around.

So perhap the RCP was a stale desert, but even "paleo" organizations like WWP or ISO spend a lot of practical and theoretical work on these matters. Hell, the NPA in the phillipines had gay marriage before a single state in the USA!


@Red fly

I agree that over-rationalization is a problem, but I have zero idea from where do you pull that this is the major problem in the Left in the USA. I would offer it is quite the contrary: it is the over-use of emotion and subjectiveness as political connectors, of affinities of friendship and culture that mostly define the organized left. This is for example while it is rare to find truly multi-cultural organizations in the USA's left: you fit in based not on analysis and careful consideration of reality, but by the mere fact that yall get along.

I think mike - as usual - raises an important question, but as usual, I think his answers don't really match the historical experience, or worse, have been tried and failed. And one definition of insanity is trying the same thing time and time again expecting a different result...

We cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good, nor can we allow the good to be the enemy of the perfect... we need heart and we need mind, and we need their dialectical intersection, and we need to value the soul of poetry as much as the rationality of prose. And we need to struggle to find were both intersect most effectively.

And I do not presume to have answers - I am personally quite uncapable of suffering people who are normative and not riot nerds. But I know revolution needs all of us. So how do we join together such disparate groups into a successful line of march?

Culture is a big reason why Occupy succeeded in mobilizing so many so quickly while the socialist left's culture is a mixture of 1930s music and 1917 lingo. Ely's thoughts on this topic coincide with Lars Lih's discussion of what pre-WWI German social democracy was like. They had worker choirs, worker songs, and even a quasi-religious morality among its members.

All of this is necessary to inspire people to fight for themselves. Inspiration is emotional, not rational, logical, or intellectual. It's the difference between listening to a Malcolm X speech and listening to a middle class white college student read Malcolm's words. Politically the content of the two would be identical, but formal politics is rarely the most decisive factor.

This is really on point, Mike. I've been thinking through these questions myself for some time, and a few months ago I returned to studying some works on Christian communities precisely to help clarify the missing "spirituality" (and I use the term extremely loosely) and sense of collectivity in communist movements/organizations. It sort of occurred to me back in September, after I attended an ecumenical prayer service for the health of Hugo Chavez at Riverside Church in NYC, that there was something particularly powerful in the aura, the ambience, and the ritual of Christian church services (and I'm sure it is the same in the proceedings of other religions). I found it somewhat perplexing that, as a communist, I had to go to church to get that sense of euphoria, destiny, and community.

Anyway I don't really have any worked-out thoughts on this issue, but I'm glad it's entering the conversation.

I'd recommend Gustavo Gutierrez's book, <a href="/http://www.amazon.com/Drink-Our-Own-Wells-Spiritual/dp/1570754969" rel="nofollow">"We Drink from our own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People"</a> for this purpose, if anyone else is interested in looking at it from a religious angle.

We have to make a distinction between those who seek out Marxist ideology, and they are usually intelectuals. We do need symbols and maybe a few new ones. I like that earth smashing chains from the RIM.
We have our music going back to Paul Robeson, Woody Guthry, artists such as the Communist Freda Kahlo and modern rock and hip hop artist that take up our messages.
The symbols created by the ruling class need to be studied more. They build monuments to their wars, they build statues to the saints of Capitalism, They name buildings and stadiums after the 1% and their arguments are often simple soundbites that the average person can easily understand. They don't really use a lot of rational arguments and they go after the gut level. The "pro-lifers" constantly show pictures of dead babies.
I got tired of hearing mostly liberals say "I'm not going to stoop to their level. I'm going to present the facts and let the people decide. They are not stupid."
That attitude has not worked at all. We do have to reach the working and some middle class people on simplified ideas that will at least draw in their attention.
Maybe we need communist bowling leagues, soup kitchens and ball teams.
The young people are more and more disconnected to the intense fear of communism that our parents had in the 1950s and 1960s. It is not as dangerous to be a communist as it was 20 years ago.
If people see us willing to argue against the right-wing propoganda machine, maybe they will want to know what we really believe instead of having Rush and his cronies tell them.

If you want a powerful current example, take the events over 20 years at the the 'School of the Americas' protests in Fort Benning--the two days always combine, quite powerfully, ritual, symbol, and rational content with an emotional impact that has everyone in tears and with deeper commitment. It's one reason people keep going back to it year after year. Any of you who have been there will know exactly what I mean.

The same was true for the 'freedom marches' and other activities in the Southern Civil Rights movement. The songs we sang, largely rooted in the ritual and liturgy of the Black church, were themselves so powerful in shaping our revolutionary determination that 50 years later, when we hear them in old film documentaries, the tears immediately return, and we resolve again to carry on.

Some of these traditions can carry over, like the Internationale and the Red Flag, and some of the old freedom and labor songs, but each generation has to find new voices of its own. We had our Bob Dylans, Amiri Barakas, and Sweet Honey in the Rock. But now we have to look for the new.

But don't cast out rationality, Make use of the emotional in symbols and ritual, but not the irrational. The later is the path to fascist culture.

Another fine thought-provoking piece, Mike.

I sympathize with Red Fly, who’s experienced the frustration of talking with friends who have
progressive aspects but then chat comfortably about nuking all Muslims. The power of ignorance and
irrationality in this world should never be underestimated. It can be demoralizing if not horrifying.

It’s also disappointing to observe that, no how much so many of us have done to expose (“rationally”)
the fact that (just as one example) the war on Iraq was based completely on lies, about 40% of people in
this country continue to believe Saddam Hussein had a role in the 9/11 attacks.

It does bum you out (maybe academics in particular, whom inhabit a particular environment)
when you realize how limited the prospects are of influencing through (should I say “Kantian”?)
reason.

The problem is not that people are inherently illogical, or impervious to careful argument, but that
their access to information/misinformation---largely self-chosen in the vast marketplace of media---is
so powerfully skewed by the power structure, from the corporate media to the local church pulpit.

Still, I don’t see any alternative to keep trying to rationally argue! Specifically to argue that the
capitalist mode of production entails endless inequality, oppression and war and that another
world is possible. And to try to argue as concretely and convincingly as possible, adjusting language
and approach depending on the audience.

The question is how to integrate “words, ritual and symbols” into the rational movement towards
radical change. The Black Panthers were good at capturing the imagination of youth with public
ceremonies, slogans and images; the Senderistas were masters of it. But both movements floundered,
and unlike religious movements driven underground, which survived through the preservation of
rituals and symbols, these have not been so successful.

A revolutionary communist movement in this country can embrace and use (in a good way)
everything from reggae music to Che T-shirts, which have powerful symbolic value. The Soviet
national anthem, in instrumental or vocal versions (including Paul Robeson’s) moves all kinds
of people. Maybe in some cases the piling up of symbols and rituals sways more than “intellectual”
argument.

There might be a deep-seated human need for rituals and symbols, along with (maybe competing with),
the need for “rationality.” It’s fine for communists to respond to this; Mike links Karen Petrone’s book
on festivals in Stalin’s USSR. Having taken part in festivals in many Shinto shrines in Japan (as an
atheist outsider) I can testify to the emotional satisfaction and sense of community one can derive from
religious or quasi-religious ceremonial activity. I appreciate what Natalio is saying.

But there is ritual that is lighthearted, fun and theatrical, and ritual that amounts to suffocating
state religion. All North Koreans routinely visit what are, in effect, shrines to Kim Il-song, bowing
before his image. The personality cult represents (in my view) a mix of Japanese colonial State-Shinto
and Confucian elements. This is an irrational and oppressive use of symbols and ceremony---and
there were similar if less egregious phenomena in China during Mao’s time.

I read sometime back a kind of creedal statement from the RCP, designed for collective recitation.
It seemed designed after the Apostles’ or Nicene Creeds of early Christianity, not in any doctrinal
sense but in the fact that it was/is to be recited in unison at some events, like part of a liturgy. I
imagine those intoning it among comrades derive a certain pleasure from it, rather like AA members
reciting their commitment to reliance on a “higher power” as they hold hands. Maybe it binds the
binds the RCP congregation together and strengthens it. But isn’t it pretty ridiculous?

Maybe Marxism should mine religion for ideas about how to inspire. But whenever there’s a
conflict between rationalism and ceremony or symbol, we should err on the side of reason. As Red Fly
notes, fascism is all about emotionality and appeal to primitive belief. We should do better.

I want to touch on what Sks brings up. I think he raises an important point, but I'm not sure if it's as big a problem as he claims. I think for <i>some</i> organizations, this is a problem. I've been involved in a couple different groups where what mattered was not what you said, but how you said it.

The struggle in the Socialist Party, atm, doesn't revolve around politics per se, but whether or not people like you, whether or not you say it to "aggressively," etc. The consideration isn't whether it is right and wrong, but how we feel. I find it terribly frustrating to point something out and get in response, "but how do you think I feel?"

I don't think Mike is arguing for abandoning rationality, skepticism, the scientific method, but how do we avoid the extremes, and be three dimensional humans.

Comrades, I'm not sure what I like more, Mike's article or people's comments that follow! Thought provoking, everyone!