To the “Alternative Orange” staff:
Shaun Huston
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • Spring 1994 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 3, No. 3 (pp. 3-4) | ||
| • October 1, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
December, 14 1993
A common thread running through the Winter 1993 issue of the A.O. was a call, made by A.O. staff members individually and collectively plus Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, for authors and activists operating in non-Marxist frameworks, especially those engaged in ‘post-modern’ identity politics, to ‘problematize’ and 'historicize’ the categories and assumptions that inform their politics (see, for example, Cotter, p. 3; Staff, p. 4; and Zavarzadeh p. 12). However, throughout the A.O., concepts such as ‘capital,’ ‘capitalism,’ and ‘the international proletariat,’ plus passages from the works of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, are used in a manner which assumes that the meaning and relevance of such words are self-evident or, dare I say, ‘common-sensical.’ Indeed, the introduction to “Notebooks Toward a Critique-al Practice” openly and uncritically assumes that “what Marx wrote over a hundred years ago” is in fact “applicable” today while chastising people of the non-Marxist ‘left’ for (allegedly) making the opposite assumption (p.33). In sum, what I find puzzling is not the suggestion that people should confront the historical genesis of and ‘problems’ with their politics per se, but what appears to be a reluctance to apply this principle to the A.O.’s own Marxist theoretics. It is my purpose in this letter/essay to suggest areas of Marxist doctrine that are in need of ‘problematization’ and ‘historicization.’
Before turning to my primary purpose, I should state that I do not fall neatly into the ‘broad left’/Marxist left dichotomy spelled out in the A.O.’s mission statement. ‘My politics,’ and my nineteenth century political and theoretical baggage, are anarchic in character, and cut across both ‘identity politics’ and ‘materialist politics’ without accepting either at the full expense of the other. To be general and simplistic, I believe in the critique and dissolution of all assumptions to authority and all forms of top-down social, ecological, and spatial hierarchies. I hope to contribute to fostering human social arrangements that: are ecologically rational, allow people, as individuals and collectivities, to participate in all of the decisions that affect their lives, replaces competition and hierarchy with mutual aid and complementarity, and displaces senseless toil with meaningful work and leisure. Rightly or wrongly, this is all I choose to write about ‘my politics’ here, though the content of those politics will undoubtedly become more evident through the criticisms and questions that follow.
The first aspect of the A.O.’s politics that I would question is the dual privileging of class struggle, in particular ‘international class struggle,’ and ‘the proletariat’ as the only ‘true’ or worthy struggles and agents of change (for example, Staff pp. 2, 33-34; Zavarzadeh pp. 18-19). The first problem with this assumption is that it is premised on the notion that there exists a singular, international grouping of people known as ‘the proletariat.’ When Marx et al. were writing, the small number of industrialized and industrializing places, and the similarity in conditions faced by workers in those places, made it easy, simple, and, perhaps, sensible to construct a category such as ‘the international proletariat’ for purposes of political analysis and action. Today, the globalization of capitalism, changes in the nature of capitalist production, and certain detours in the formation of class consciousness have made any belief in a singular ‘international proletariat’ extremely problematic.
In the first place, globalization of capitalist modes of production has created a division of labor that is far more complex than the one that existed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One oft-noted trend is a shift away from Fordist-style industrial production and toward low- and high-wage ‘service’ industries in ‘advanced’ industrial states with a subsequent relocation of Fordist operations to so-called ‘developing’ states where wages and regulations are minimal. In the United States, this shift to service work has included a fast and numerically significant rise in the ‘temporary’ or ‘contingent’ workforce. The problem here is this: service workers tend to work in small operations and shifts that function to separate workers from each other at the site of work, thereby making organization and development of a common class consciousness a difficult, if not impossible, task. Organization of temporary workers is even more difficult because such workers depend upon their ‘flexibility’ and being freely rented out to find employment. Building an oppositional movement out of workers whose very livelihood depends upon embracing ‘alienation’ and offering themselves up as substitutes or replacements for other workers is a unique and difficult task. ‘Knowledge’ workers—various types of consultants and technicians, workers in the field of advertising and the like—also pose a special case. Such workers are often well paid and compensated, but are nonetheless ‘proletarian’ in the sense that they do not control the means of production and do not own their own labor. However, the high degree of material reward associated with such positions, and the extent to which work such as data analysis and advertising only exist to deepen capitalist economic control and commodification, make ‘knowledge’ workers highly unlikely sources of ‘proletarian’ revolution despite their class position.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the new division of labor is the extent to which service workers in ‘advanced’ industrial places owe their jobs to deindustrialization and the shift of heavy industry to ‘underdeveloped’ places. Service workers exist to ‘serve’ those people who own and manage the means of production, populations which owe their existence to globalized corporations. In other words, service workers in ‘advanced’ industrial places depend upon the exploitation of industrial workers elsewhere for their positions. There is thus no necessary convergence of interests between workers in ‘advanced’ industrial locales and those in ‘industrializing’ locales. Additionally, low-wage service workers also ‘service’ high-wage service workers, yet another change in the division of labor that separates different parts of ‘the proletariat’ from each other.
Capital mobility also serves to drive wedges between workers in different places. Where capital is in a position to relocate at a moments notice, there is a strong incentive not to organize and to acquiesce to the demands of capital just so you can continue to feed yourself. This can lead to situations where workers, and states, compete with one another in the making of concessions to capital. Much more so than in Marx’s time and place, when capital was often very dependent on specific national labor and consumer markets, the material risks of resisting private control of the means of production are very high today.
The ‘reality’ of such risks are evident in the development of class consciousness in the United States. Organized labor has, for a long time, been engaged in a ‘welfare contract’ with corporations and government and has not been focused on restructuring capitalist class relations. Labor activism on policy questions such as NAFTA has centered not on overturning private control of the means of production but on corporate and state breaches of the ‘welfare contract,’ a contract that at best alleviates the destructiveness of capitalist class relations and at worst normalizes such relations. Furthermore, it has long been the case that the only class in the United States with a developed and well-articulated common consciousness is the business or capitalist class. The bulk of the rest of the population is mired in an amorphous ‘middle class’ consciousness regardless of income or status. A similar labor situation exists in Japan. In Western Europe there is a longer history of ‘proletarian’ resistance, but over the past five years or so European communist parties and other working class parties such as the British Labor Party have become moderate social democratic reform parties. The ‘marketization’ of Central/Eastern European and Chinese communist parties and political economies is clearly evident. Only Cuba and North Korea stand out as ‘proletarian’ states. However, it should be noted that class struggle is alive and well in many ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘developing’ states such as Brazil and Chile.
So, what does all of this mean? Do the preceding passages suggest that class struggle and class politics are unimportant or irrelevant? No, of course not. Indeed one of the sad ironies of the contemporary moment of capitalist globalization is that class politics are of the utmost importance even as fostering such politics has become more difficult. What the preceding analysis does come to is this: in many places, especially in the ‘advanced’ industrial world, radical class struggle is moribund or in retreat. Where active class struggle is to be found, it is usually in ‘developing’ or ‘industrializing’ places. The significance of this is that there is little evidence of any ‘international class struggle.’ Rather, there are, at this moment, multiple class struggles, some radical, some accommodationist. To be sure, I have engaged in a great deal of generalization regarding the status of class consciousness and class struggle in different parts of the world. Nonetheless, I have accurately described the broad picture, and in Europe, North America, and Japan the degree of ‘proletarian’ ferment and resistance is much less than it was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Marx and his immediate ‘disciples’ projected an international revolt against capital.
To recognize uneven development in ‘the international class struggle’ is not to uncritically celebrate ‘difference’ between different sections of ‘the proletariat,’ but it is to recognize that substantive changes in the character of capitalism and the composition of the ‘proletariat’ have drastically changed the terms of class struggle since Marx. All people interested in class politics need to recognize that in ‘advanced’ industrial states class struggle has been defused by welfare measures and a belief in ‘corporate responsibility.’ Furthermore, ‘the proletariat’ has become disaggregated and heterogenous. It is to ignore ‘real’ change in the nature of production to act on any theory that assumes there is an ‘international working class’ united by a common position in the social division of labor. Temporary workers are difficult to organize because, one, they face almost certain job loss if they do, and, two, the ‘contingent’ nature of this workforce means that any organized resistance will always be undermined by its own internal dynamics. Furthermore, some sections of ‘the proletariat’ lead relatively comfortable lives under capitalism and therefore have little material incentive to mobilize against capital. Most significantly, this relative comfort is in part, if not in whole, based on the subordination and exploitation of other sections of ‘the proletariat.’ These are only three of the most obvious and significant results of the contemporary material, spatial, and functional variation in the composition of ‘the international proletariat.’
Even if it were possible to meaningfully theorize the existence of a singular ‘international proletariat’ and ‘class struggle,’ that does not mean that it is sensible to privilege ‘the working class’ as the agent of ‘revolution’ or ‘class struggle’ as the only ‘true’ struggle. Despite Mas’ud Zavarzadeh’s claims to the contrary (pp. 18-19), not all people can be divided up and categorized according to their position in the social division of labor. For example, many indigenous people, such as the native peoples of Amazonia, cannot be fitted into the global division of labor under capitalism. More often than not, such peoples have free access to the means of production upon which they depend and they do not rent their labor out to any capitalist organization, local or global. From the perspective of capital, such peoples are, at most, inconvenient obstacles in the way of continued ‘development.’ More generally, the opening up of the entire globe to capitalist integration in combination with deindustrialization and automation has created new classes of people who are totally useless to capital, even as ‘reserve labor.’ Much of the global population of homeless and urban slum dwellers, plus elderly and disabled peoples, fall into this ‘useless’ category. Accounts of social change which privilege ‘production’ and ‘workers’ necessarily exclude and cannot account for the oppression and ‘revolutionary potential’ of peoples who are ‘expendable’ and ‘irrelevant’ to capital and the division of labor. In fact, it is not difficult to understand how a singularly ‘proletarian revolution’ would do nothing to stop destruction of natural habitats or assist the survival of ‘non-industrial’ peoples. After all, ‘nature’ is the ultimate basis of production and such peoples contribute little to ‘progressive development.’
There are three additional problems with privileging ‘the proletariat’ and ‘class struggle’ in the creation of a liberatory project. First, this belief results from a nineteenth century, early industrial obsession with progress and industrialization. In the periods where capitalism was less ‘normal,’ and the remnants of a more communal past were still in evidence and memory, the elevation of ‘production’ as the site of social change was perfectly understandable. As capitalism has become ‘normal,’ the elevation of production over other areas of struggle in social life is less understandable. The struggles against discrimination and social and personal violence on the part of women, non-whites, and socially constructed ‘deviants,’ such as homosexuals, are no less ‘real’ for not being focused on social class and production. Second, privileging ‘the working class’ as the ‘true’ agent of change has always been based on an absurd faith in the ‘intrinsic’ goodness of ‘the proletarian class.’ Again, at the early stages of capitalism, where ‘production’ could reasonably seem all-important, this faith was, perhaps, defensible. As capitalism has developed and it has become evident that working classes are just as capable of exhibiting racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. as any other class, even during times of intensified struggle, such faith seems naive and insulting to all who identify themselves as non-white, non-male, and/or non-heterosexual (or any other culturally relevant combination of social positions). Finally, even if one were to accept the contention that ‘identity’ politics simply reproduces bourgeois individualism and late capitalist cultural commodification, it seems strange to act on an assumption that there is necessarily a zero-sum relationship between class struggle and other forms of struggle. People have to deal with multiple concerns all of the time. Why should social struggle and resistance be any different than activities such as going to school or going on vacation?
The second theoretical category that goes ‘unproblematized’ and ‘unhistoricized’ in the pages of the A.O. is ‘class.’ Specifically, ‘class’ is fetishized as the only basis from which capitalism can be critiqued and resistance organized and articulated. Ecology and place are two sources of critique and resistance that go unnoticed by the A.O.’s contributors. Eco-anarchists, bioregionalists, and other radical ecologists (including some Marxists and socialists) have developed an extensive body of work that critiques capitalism on the grounds that capitalist development generates growth and competition which negatively disrupts the functioning of ecological systems or communities. Many of these same people have noted that capitalism works to ‘level’ the natural and social differences between places, thereby eroding the quality and meaning of social and community life for all people who, by necessity and choice, are committed to living in particular places. Obviously I am not providing any of the nuances of these ‘new’ critiques of capitalism, but my point is clear: critiques of capitalism need not be based on class. Does this mean that class-based analyses can be adequately subsumed or displaced by such critiques? Of course not. Furthermore, there is no reason why one form of critique needs to compete with any other.
In the interest of ‘historicizing’ the fetishization of class, it should be noted that Marx did not theorize the potential of capitalism to negatively affect, particularly, places and ecologies. On the contrary, Marx celebrated such degradation in the name of ‘developing the forces of production’ for the purposes of laying the material foundation for socialist revolution. Marx, in other words, was an advocate of economic growth and competition for historical-instrumental reasons. Writing as he was at a relatively early stage of capitalist development, before pollution, habitat loss, depletion of stock resources, and cultural-spatial homogenization were readily evident problems with the ‘progressivity’ of capitalism, it is understandable why Marx did not attempt to theorize ecological degradation and the leveling of places.
The final set of categories that are not ‘problematized’ and ‘historicized’ in the A.O. are ‘capital’ and ‘capitalism.’ Specifically, these categories are uncritically treated as all-encompassing sources of subordination and domination and objects of resistance. There are many hierarchies—gender hierarchies, racial hierarchies, governmental hierarchies—that predate the emergence of capitalism and capitalist class relations. Social stigmatization of certain groups of people, such as people with certain diseases like AIDS and leprosy, and people who engage in certain practices, such as homosexual sex, also predates capitalism. Many hierarchies in non-capitalist social formations, such as hierarchies based on ‘specialized’ legal and religious knowledges and age, have little or no relationship to modes of production. Even within capitalist social formations there are hierarchies that exist within, rather than between, social classes. These hierarchies include hierarchies between: men and women, different racial and ethnic groups, different sexual identities, and different types of work. It is also critical not to forget the bureaucratic hierarchies of statist political organization and hierarchies between human and other life forms on the planet. That eliminating private capital and capitalist class relations does not lead to the elimination of other hierarchies is made obvious by the experience of the Soviet Union and its allies. The states of the former Soviet bloc enacted economic policies that devastated their local ecologies and created highly unequal hierarchies of bureaucrats and general populations. The point here is not that Marxism necessarily leads to totalitarianism, although unmodified it certainly produces ecological degradation, but that the states of the Soviet bloc successfully eliminated capitalist class relations without eliminating other domineering hierarchies.
I do not begrudge the A.O. its ‘hard’ Marxist orientation, but I do believe that contributors to the A.O. should exhibit a critical, historical approach to their theoretics. This is, after all, what A.O. author after author exhorted other scholar-activists to do. If nothing else I would assume that any self-respecting ‘scientific socialist’ would adapt his/her theory to concrete changes in political economies and would not simply rely on the AUTHORITY of some pre-existing canon to explain social form and radical change.
Sincerely,
Shaun Huston
Graduate Student
Geography
