The following is the text of a talk given at the 20th anniversary celebration of the New York Marxist School upon receiving the Arthur Felberbaum Award for the Integration of Theory and Practice, December 9, 1995.
We are now living in the trough between two great waves of revolutionary struggle. The first wave began in 1848 and ended in defeat with the fall of Moscow. The second wave is still incubating. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the East European bloc is a tragic defeat for all of us—not because these regimes were models of the society we want, but because they and the political movements influenced by them were the focus of the first worldwide challenge to capitalist power, capitalist exploitation, capitalist morality and culture. Only in the context of that challenge did corporations agree to bargain with labor, the U.N. recognize the human rights to employment, food, education and culture, self-determination, women's equality, the illegitimacy of racism and the rights of nations to autonomous development. After that collapse, the New World Order rushes to deny those rights in theory as it always has in practice. It is not longer necessary to pretend respect for workers, and we see a new age of meanness in policy and in ideology. Lenin's anti-imperialist stance gave voice and form to the colonial liberation struggles that came almost to completion only after world war II. Almost because a few places, such as Puerto Rico, remain as colonies, residues of the old colonialism even as recolonization intensifies.
After the collapse of the world socialists challenge, we see the rush toward recolonization as competition among the capitalists is released from the restraints of their common front against "communism" and they scramble for a new division of the world. Recolonization carries with it a revival of racism internationally and within our country. The upsurge in racism is not understandable as a psychological epidemic or the surfacing of long-repressed human nature. It is a necessary correlate of the reconquest and redivision of the world. At home, the mainstream and coded racism creates a space for the more "extreme" racists. At the same time, open Nazis like John Metzger make the David Dukes seem moderate, and they in turn make the Pat Buchanans seem moderate and the Pat Buchanans play the extremist for the mainstream racists of moderation.
The socialist call for the full equality of women was never achieved either in the socialist countries or in the revolutionary parties. But women did win levels of participation not seen before. The socialist movement was a seedbed for left feminism, and the feminist accomplishments of the socialist governments show up again starkly as we see what happens after they are overthrown. For instance, Ingushetia, the autonomous region of Russia next door to Chechenyá, now free of Soviet rule, has won the freedom to decriminalize polygamy and the sale of women in marriage. So in the new exuberant aggressiveness of world capitalism we see what communists and their allies had held at bay.
Finally, it was a massive defeat because almost all the socialist and communist parties have abandoned the struggle, their members scattered, some for the spoils of partnership, some to seek minor ameliorations of oppression under the slogans of "realism," some in anguish because history did them dirty, leaving a residue of despair and confusion even among many who struggled for decades with courage, imagination and sacrifice for a better world that is not yet.
In a trough we can't see very far or identify what is immediately ahead. There is much that is confused. But even in the bottom of the trough there are things we can understand clearly despite the confusion.
The New York Marxist School survived the Reagan years and the defeats of the last period because it refuses to generalize the experience of defeat into the impossibility of the struggle, the confrontation with the unexpected into an abandonment of historical materialism or turn present misery into "the human condition." It did not escalate current confusions into a denial of the intelligibility of the world. It does not embrace fashion on the Left in order to be "with it" nor use the movement's weakness and disarray to retreat into academic word games. At the same time, it does not defend a hermetically sealed fortress against new ideas and challenges. It is in this spirit of the New York Marxist School that I offer a few thoughts about the trough and what we have to do.
I expect a new wave of upsurge because capitalism is not only what it has always been, but is more so now without the restraints imposed even by flawed non-capitalist states. It is less able and less willing to confront the challenges of environmental deterioration, new and resurgent diseases, chronic unemployment even during times of prosperity, the volatility of a business cycle mediated by financial instruments several steps removed from production, and a growing gap between rich and poor.
With the renewed intensity of international competition it has revealed a franker, more cynical viciousness in the recolonization of the third world and in waging the global class struggle against all workers. It has celebrated the spread of democracy while inventing new techniques for commodifying elections and thwarting real democracy. Its technological ingenuity makes possible the deeper penetration of the commodity relation into all corners of our lives, producing immense profit but also growing uneasiness.
The United States of America is fast becoming a second rate economic power while remaining a first rate military, police and public relations power. This creates an especially dangerous situation, since it cannot but use its superior repressive power to strive to preserve its weakening economic domination.
All of this makes it necessary for people to engage in struggle one way or another. Class struggle in fact does intensify. The bosses impose down-sizing, speed-up, contracting out, two-tiered wage structures, union busting, take-backs and relocation. Workers have responded in long, bitter strikes, replacement of some of the most collaborationist leaders, new energy for organizing. Where organized conscious struggle is not yet visible they often resist in individualistic ways. Illegal immigration, the massive theft from American businesses by their under-paid and alienated employees, and robbery and street crime by the unemployed are but three modes of redistribution undertaken by the isolated subjects of capitalism made desperate by the growing concentration of wealth and callousness in the use of its power.
I think a second revolutionary upsurge will come because I see the first signs of it: there is a disillusionment with the triumphalism of global capitalism even in Poland and Russia as people begin to see that all the lies they were fed about capitalism by their censored media turned out to be true. French workers are asking whether the new Europe will be a new Europe only for the exploiters. There is a booming of local peoples' organizations all over the world struggling for environmental justice, equality, health and education. A recent directory lists 700-800 environmental organizations of people of color in the U.S. alone.
In the many conferences I attend I see that cold war red-baiting has been losing much of its power to terrify as people raise issues which would have been forbidden ten years ago because they would have been regarded as subversive. There is rage in Peoria today, at the Caterpillar plant, and rate in the human service professions at the callousness with which the new stinginess condemns education, health care, social service and science to frustrating inadequacy. Slogans such as "food for people, not for profit," or "health is a right, not a privilege" urge non-market criteria for the distribution of goods and services. There are – not quite winds-- but at least fresh breezes in the U.S. labor movement. Even in universities, which were to some extent buffered against the worst excesses of the marketplace, business consideration increasingly overwhelm educational and intellectual concerns. And it is at least noticed. There is awareness of the increases in the numbers and remuneration of administrators compared to faculty and staff, increased reliance on part-time and temporary teachers, increased teaching loads, and repeated efforts to undermine job security that express a creeping proletarianization of what were once freer professions. And there is an increase in solidarity with Cuba not only because it is a target of aggression but also because it is an example of the hope that things can be done differently.
But these glimmerings are still only incipient. We cannot predict outcomes of events but only identify the contradictions that are developing, the problems that have to be confronted again and again until some resolution is reached. We do not know what roles self-conscious Marxists of the religious left will play in the new movements, how much it will remember from the past or have to learn anew. We do not know how movements for specific causes or on behalf of particular oppressed constituencies will relate to political movements that embrace all the liberating struggles. We do not know what relationships will arise between the political movements and their intellectual organs that best combine the needs for responsible engagements, the mass mobilization of a collective intelligence and the relative autonomy of innovative inquiry. We do not know what new holidays will bring us to the streets or the beat of the new songs.
But without knowing the shape of the future, Marxists can still identify some of our tasks:
1. Assist in the revival and growing clarity of popular struggles – helping the new movements to broaden their vision, to understand the context of their immediate situations and the lessons of past struggles that they can draw on. The long view is vital in sustaining the short term and local struggles in the face of countless disappointments and frustrations. It can prepare us for the pressures of our adversaries to divide and co-opt. It is especially important in discovering the common ground between different struggles for justice when they seem to conflict. It is usually the case the just causes conflict with they ask too little, when they accept too many of the constraints and assumptions of an unjust society. If we accept the rule that business must make maximum profits then it seems that environmental protection is the enemy of employment and it looks as if owls kill jobs. But owls do not kill jobs—greed kills owls and jobs.
If we accept the constraint that jobs are limited by what companies decide to offer, then men and women, whites and people of color are all in competition for what employment is left. If we assume that medical care must remain in the hands of insurance and drug companies then health care is to expensive to serve everybody. The broader societal vision can show us that when we challenge the assumptions of capitalism the local struggles and particular movements can be allies in a larger liberating project.
2. Combat the ideologies of despair. As against the retreat into nationalism, we must reaffirm our internationalism, maintain ties among revolutionaries across borders, pool our experiences and ideas, and work for joint strategies. We need to uphold special solidarities with Cuba and Puerto Rico because both are special targets of U.S. oppression. Puerto Rico because, as one of the last of the old colonies and a decaying showcase for the U.S. model for the third world, it may spearhead the resistance to the recolonization of the world. Cuba because it is one of the very few societies that have retained a revolutionary commitment although having to make concessions to global capitalism. Even as it retreats in some spheres of life, it leads the world in others, in the vision of an ecological society and the development of socialist democracy.
In order to combat individualism we have to learn from left feminism to examine the much-ignored areas of the personal in society, explaining how our individual miseries are not ours alone, how the commonly marketed solutions to personal fulfillment fail to address the roots of the prevailing miseries and wasted talents. We can raise and explore the contradiction between accepting the personal responsibility that is a prerequisite for tolerable and even joyful lives despite and intolerable society, and the understanding of social causation that places our own situations in perspective and identifies the targets of our public struggle.
We must challenge the theories that misuse linguistic analysis or the mathematics of chaos to proclaim the impossibility of understanding the world. We challenge the misuses of the real uniqueness of every place and every person to deny the possibility of general theories about anything. We much challenge the misuses of the awareness of science as a social product to argue that all theories are equally invalid and the categories of science are just objects of discourse. We must challenge the fatalistic arguments of the genetic determination of inequality or meanness or aggression. We must do all this by showing the political instrumentality of such ideas and locating them in the history of ideology. We must do this also by confronting them with a dialectical understanding of the relations between chance and determinacy, the general and the particular, the partisanship and objectivity of science, the internal and external in causation. Dialectical materialism is a practical, urgent weapon in building a movement by providing a better way to understand the world and ourselves in it.
3. We reaffirm a militant Marxism. Marxism has been dismissed as obsolete even by some progressives. But rather than shrinking it down to merely a humane economics in order to gain respectability we need to broaden the scope of its engagement to confront all the ideologies of aggressive capital in all aspects of our existence. Only an honest, creative and self-critical Marxism can survive to play a vital role in the coming struggles. In order to reaffirm and revitalize our Marxism, we have to combine adherence to principle and creative flexibility.
a. We have to examine the history of our movement and understand the defeat it suffered. This is a matter of theoretical coherence, practical necessity and intellectual integrity. We have to examine the world and national conditions that besieged socialism and made it vulnerable to its enemies. We have to examine the ins and outs of Rosa Luxemburg's paradox, the contradictions that arise from building the new with the materials of the old. We have to look at the beliefs and practices that undermined socialism's development from within. This includes an honest appraisal not only of our errors but also of our crimes. Errors are misjudgments in the service of our agreed upon program, unnecessary compromises or pompous refusals to compromise, faulty estimates of our progress and the enemy's weakness, passive acceptance of capitalist ways of doing things in the hope that they could be domesticated to socialist ends. Crimes are violations of socialist democracy, socialist legality, revolutionary humaneness and that fierce honesty which is basic to the commitment to liberate and mobilize the collective intelligence of all the oppressed. Crimes are the debasement of Marxism to apologetics, the use of force to settle disagreements within the revolution, the covering up of corruption.
In dealing with the crimes committed in the name of communism, we cannot opt for the easy solution and simply expel pol Pot, Cayetano, Beria and others from our ranks, deciding that they weren't good communists after all and surely had nothing in common with us. That way we shed responsibility, feel good about ourselves and learn nothing. There is, of course, truth in the claim that these horrendous episodes are not communism but distortions of communism just as we might say that corn smut is not corn but a disease of corn. But there is also the other side of it: corn smut is a disease of corn, not of tomatoes or orange trees. It could only take hold in a vulnerable substrate, and our task must be to understand how to eliminate that vulnerability before we can expect people to take another chance. Thus we affirm the dual propositions: the triumph of centralism over democracy, the suppression of dissent among revolutionaries, the turning of labor from a rehabilitation process into a cruel punishment, all of these are not communism but distortions of communism, but they are also distortions of communism.
b. We have to be open to the ideas of the new social movements. Just as Marxism acknowledges its debts to English political economy, German philosophy and French socialism, so it must also welcome the insights of feminism, national and gay liberation, anti-racist struggles, and ecology. These are not alien to Marxism. Militants in all of these struggles include Marxists, people who were familiar with Marxism, people who passed through Marxist parties. Marxist thought has left its imprint on all of them. Marxist thought was also familiar with and influenced by feminism, nationalist thought ecological ideas. All of these movements have overlapped in ideas and people and will continue to do so.
c. Openness to new phenomena, to changes in our society and in the ways people confront that society, to new patterns of consciousness. Alertness to the new must be rooted in our understanding of the past so that we don't go around proclaiming new paradigms capriciously or declaring idea obsolete because they were written in the last century or because they seem to go against the trend of the moment. The decline of employment in the traditional basic industries of steel, coal and autos does not mean the end of the working class in a country where the overwhelming majority of the people still live by selling their labor power. The diversification of forms of exploitation in Africa and Latin America beyond simple extraction of minerals and agricultural produce does not mean the end of imperialism. The failures of overly centralized planning of the economy does not make the market the only alternative to stagnation.
But without a self-conscious rush to be revising Marxism, we do have to not the new: the massive and pervasive threats to the integrity of our biosphere, new patterns of linking local hierarchies to transnational corporations, changes in the technical structure of industry and finance, new kinds of grassroots organization popping up all over, a new willingness of people to go beyond challenging only local abuses.
We have to examine emerging forms of struggle, all aimed basically at changing consciousness and building solidarity even when we are small and seemingly helpless. Revolutionary politics is not limited to storming the winter palaces. Any action that pushes back the boundaries of the permissible, that legitimizes thinking and questions the unquestionable, that strengthens our own capacity to analyze and organize and tightens the ties that unite us for the long haul, that invents ways of broadening participation and that undermines the crippling burdens of racism and sexism and homophobia and hierarchical posturing within our own movement, is revolutionary practice.
Nor do I put down what is derisively called "preaching to the converted." We converted need lots of "preaching," lots of analysis, education, encouragement care, solidarity.
From the bottom of the trough we need to see the present moment in perspective, to know that it isn't over, that even when exuberant capitalism wins big victories these do not solve its problems. The problems return even more sharply. Therefore the struggle will surge again. We will add new pages to our songbook and fill the streets in celebration of new victories. I expect to see you there.
