Month: May 2014

Ideology Rules

Last night I met again with workers from Canton Tuzla. We decided last week to look at Karl Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach. My reasons for choosing this text seemed sound. For weeks I have been hearing from workers who complain about the prominent role of intellectuals and party members at meetings of Plenum. And there is no doubt. The organizers of Plenum — those who put together the Agenda and run the meetings — are for the most part university trained academics, some of whom are also SDP party members. So that, even though the Agenda is composed of items proposed from the floor, from workers and citizens whatever their academic history, it is not entirely implausible that the academics run the show.
Which is why Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach seemed to me such a perfect text. Since it focuses on practice, it helps us to see how and why abstract “scholastic” (Marx uses this term) debates over who runs the show are just that. The questions we should be asking are what are the practices that brought us to the place where we are? And what are the practices we currently are engaged in? In the end, however materialist they may sound, those who accept or exclude on the basis of ideology and not practice are, says Marx, idealists and not materialists. So, what a great text!
Wrong. Marx calls our attention to the fact that revolutionary and reactionary practices might arise from any number of places socially and historically. And so there is no reason to believe that workers will occupy the “practical” side of his critique while intellectuals will occupy the “idealistic” side of his critique. It might well be the reverse. Workers might embrace an ideological metric to differentiate who is and who is not revolutionary; while intellectuals might adopt a practical metric. And, in fact, that is precisely what happened at last night’s meeting. So Marx turned out to be right. But what this meant was that the workers were eager to exclude those who embraced the wrong ideas, even when they were engaging in the right practices.
Two observations: (1) Marx was not a member of the working class. I don’t know how his investments worked for him; and, yes, I doubt that he actually lived on his investments. But in the way that the workers in Bosnia and Herzegovina think of it, Marx was an intellectual. Even the leftists, the socialists, the communists view Marx as a class enemy. Go figure. (2) What workers want is their jobs, security, and security for the future. A labor leader at last night’s meeting said without any duplicity that she would happily deny the benefits of labor to the children of the workers who did not join in their struggle. When I asked her, simply on strategic grounds, whether it might not be more promising to tell the non-militant worker’s children that we were working on their behalf, she said, unequivocally, No.
Leading me to wonder about the pathologies — the regimes of pain — that lead even the most dedicated of workers to wish harm upon the children of workers who are too tired, too depressed, too scared to fight on their children’s behalf.
This is not an argument against theories of practice, but is instead an argument to think about such theories more clearly. What care do workers need before they open up and forgive one another? What care do we need to take before the regimes of practice by which they feel surrounded are such that they are willing to join our common struggle?
Because, in the end it really is a question of practice and not ideology.

The Communist Manifesto

Some readers of the Communist Manifesto feel that Marx is praising bourgeois society. For example, some readers feel that when Marx observes how
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
he means for us to applaud the fact that no other nexus remains between man and man than naked self-interest and callous “cash payment”; or that he means for us to celebrate free trade.
Some readers of the Communist Manifesto also feel that Marx feels that we should celebrate how “the bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.” Or that we should celebrate the subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour.”
And so some readers have suggested that it is a good thing that capitalism has made of the specific, individual, and distinct labors of non-capitalist workers a single, homogeneous, undifferentiated mass of labour.
Since history and numbers are on our side, all that now is required is for us to sweep away the bourgeois anachronism and constitute one, single, homogeneous, undifferentiated society.
However, some readers have suggested that Marx, who was himself an academic, intellectual, member of the educated bourgeoisie, held nothing but contempt for the actual conditions and affections of workers and wanted nothing more than for them to abolish themselves — abolish the working class and abolish the class relations that created the working class.
In one direction lies a working class society; in the other direction lies a classless society. On one side stands full employment, but perhaps few social benefits; on the other side stands social benefits, but perhaps not full employment.
On which side does Marx fall?