On Wed, 24 Sep 1997, Bill Schell wrote:
>
> Bill: Your interpretation of what Marxist thought is questionable -- no,
> rather from some parallel universe. Marx everwhere negates the importance
> of the individual and individual goals -- class, economic relations, mode
> of production leave to room for purely person aims. Those were the
> inventions of the bourgeois which he hoped to put aside. Nor did he
> conceive of rasing the workers' level of material well-being from
> subsistance as "consumerism" -- in fact, the neglect of consumer demand is
> a hall-mark of Marxist command economies.
There are varying levels of "Marxist thought." I am referring not
to the interpretation of Marxism by Soviet-style command economies, but to
the definition of the highest stage of communism implicit in Marx's more
"humanistic" writings. I do not deny that Marx is far more collectivist
in orientation than most liberals, but there remain undeniable undertones
of influence from precisely the liberal society that he was critiquing.
The scientific materialist approach predisposed him to a mechanical and
individual-based notion of fulfilment, since "society" could not exist
with any transcendental reality independent of its component parts.
Repeated use of the word "freedom" to describe the highest stage of human
development betrays a continued influence from the thought of his time. In
short, I submit that the model of fulfilment still remains very
individualistic, albeit cooperative in its methods and universalised in
its scope. More authentically and viscerally collectivist interpretations
of Marxism, such as the Chinese under Mao, are such only because they tap
into underlying, non-Marxist, traditional notions of social reality. The
limited attention to consumption in "Marxist" economies says little if
anything about the very long-term ideals of original Marxist thought. If
you want more evidence of this troubling tendency within Marxist thought,
ask any current Chinese Communist Party member about the moral content of
the future society; any thought system lending itself so easily to that
kind of essentially liberal and technocratic reinterpretation merits
scepticism.
> Bill: That [the follies of eliminating older values with no clear idea
> of what is to replace them] was the point of my post. Starting from the
> YEAR ZERO has historically been disasterous for the bulk of humankind --
> whether it is to create the future from scratch or to wipe out the
> present in order to restore a rose-colored past as Adam seems to
> suggest.
My critique here was of Marxist faith in technological progress,
and specifically Marxists' blithely optimistic view of the ability to
recreate a sense of common decency after the socially disintegrating phase
of capitalist development has passed. I mean that mainstream Marxist
thought evidently attaches little importance to genuine values of
solidarity, because it celebrates their demise as features of "backward"
culture. That, I suspect, differs somewhat from your original point.
I have no desire to start from year zero and "recreate" a
rose-coloured past. Most of the world still has not wholly abandoned
those values, so it amounts more to curtailing the cancerous spread of
liberalism and achieving a new synthesis in which appropriate values are
permitted to prevail in their logical spheres. I might point out that
there has never been a widespread, "democratic" assessment of whether the
anomic vision of society should be promoted--it is always imposed by a
minority of people such as Kemal Ataturk, Carlos Salinas, and Deng
Xiaoping, who under the guise of "joining the club" impose their perverse
vision of human nature against the evidence of millennia. Liberals would
be terrified of a frank global referendum on precisely the values they
regard as universally desired. Why else are the most problem-free
"Westernisations" being carried out under authoritarian or
semi-authoritarian structures during the transitional generation(s)
(China, Pahlavi Iran, Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, Korea, Taiwan, etc.)?
It is rather ironic for me to be accused of wholesale
destructiveness simply because I wish to protect timeless aspirations and
common decency against the homogenising onslaught, while others promote
the "liberating" annihilation of the vast majority's values. The
totalising vision of modern liberal capitalism goes far beyond any moral
project of "traditional" society, which almost always has permitted a
variety of functional interpretations of the hegemonic ideology to coexist
in various spheres of society. Mercantile values, while contained
throughout history and not permitted to invade other spheres of human
life, still were generally accepted as playing a needed role in some
arenas. Now liberal universalism, under which mercantile values hide,
seeks not only to invade the public sphere, but to restructure all aspects
of human interaction. No stone unturned....
> Bill: You equate freedom with license. But worse, you would impose the ONE
> definition of the COMMON GOOD on all. Nazis idealitically pursued their
> COMMON GOOD -- a world without Jews etc; Pol Pot, a world without cities.
> the KKK/Ayran Nations, a world without color. What would you forbid?
The valuable aspects of "freedom" can be put under other more concrete and
historically acceptable headings. The questionable aspects that often
have been equated to licence should be analysed with more care than they
currently are. Do you decline to see any logic at all behind the
historical consensus? If liberal autonomy is human nature, why is it so
rarely seen as an ideal anywhere before the modern era, even in fringe
uprisings? Every cry for social justice throughout most of human history
has used wholly different modes of discourse, such as solidaristic
egalitarianism, that you would find abominably constraining for the
individual.
Bill: I don't want to overthrow anything. Gradualist
reform is the only > way to achieve what you identify as a "synthesis
based on as broad a view > >as possible of how that social system
contrasts with all other > >alternatives."
If one wishes to retain the underlying assumptions of the hegemonic order,
your position makes eminent sense. You never "gradually" change an entire
social system's underpinning values, any more than you "gradually" convert
a car from right- to left-hand drive. There are processes of hegemonic
socialisation at work that would prevent that, as we both no doubt are
aware. The liberal conversion of the world's peoples continues apace in
the meantime, eventually foreclosing all forms of popular mobilisation
except for a hegemony-refining warmed-over social democracy.
> Bill: Moderate fundamentalism and moderate revolution is as wacky as Marx
> the individualist consumer.
Do you deny that there are multiple currents within what you call
"fundamentalism"? Why do most Iranians regard the Afghan Taliban as
atavistic and discrediting to the cause of Islamic revival? I cannot
recall ever advocating a "moderate" revolution. If "moderate" means a
minimum of unnecessary chaos, though, I suppose any sensible revolutionary
would be a "moderate." Far wackier is the notion that humanity's choice
rests between Michael Jackson and Pol Pot.
> Bill: The trouble is when they win, everyone else looses and the game
> ends. Just like this message.
Liberalism is winning now, and soon there may very well be no "thick"
cultural material left for future challenges to liberalism. But I suppose
that sort of irreversible victory would elicit your celebration. Far
better to create a global structure within which the several major
value currents can coexist, each within the sphere whence it originated.
Individual anomie might be the only workable social psychology for certain
mercantile pursuits, but a world society made up exclusively of merchants
and their fellow travellers seems to me at best misguided and at worse a
tragic negation of longstanding human ideals.
===============================================================================
Adam K. Webb
Department of Politics
Princeton University
Princeton NJ 08544 USA
609-258-9028
http://www.princeton.edu/~akwebb