EDITORIAL PERSPECTIVES (continued)
The most important element in the precapitalist/government
cell is undoubtedly prison labor -- a matter of rising importance
in a country, the United States, which has the largest incarcerated
population, both relatively and absolutely, in the world. The
impact of prison labor on the market for labor power (in the
present scheme appearing in the dominant capitalist/private
spontaneous cell) is, in its essentials, fairly obvious, but requiring much precise study.
The postcapitalist harbinger sector, whose elements are under
severe constraint imposed by their relation to the other capitalist
sectors, is also a source of (socialist) hope. In its
private/organized cell, we have producer cooperatives, worker
partnerships, consumer cooperatives, the "Ithaca dollars" movement
-- any organized forms of production and consumption that seek to
transcend the capitalist imperatives of wealth and power and follow
principled, social-use criteria. These organizations, of course,
are always fighting an uphill battle: they face the organized power
of capitalism in the form of suppliers, retailers, financiers; they
also face capitalist power in the form of state regulation,
taxation, etc. The internal culture of cooperatives, in principle
socialist, is continually threatened by, e.g., the need to pay
"competitive" (high) salaries to administrators, lawyers, and so
forth, and the corrupting influence of bureaucratic, individualist
and possessive values constantly thrown up by the cultural hegemony
of capitalist society. With all this, cooperatives are an
important harbinger; they should be neither idealized nor ignored.
Among private/spontaneous harbingers, we may locate
progressive social movements, soup kitchens, self-help
organizations, "Pay It Forward." Finally, at the government
level, harbingers are the (always threatened) publicly funded
sources of well-being and growth for working people: public education, training funds, health care support, housing subsidies, cultural organizations. The classical European Social Democratic
programs were based on establishing, extending and maintaining
these social welfare structures and programs, with greater or less
insight into either their long-term importance -- their role in
developing in the working class the capacity to eventually take
power and run society -- or the profound structural constraints and
political resistance to these projects due to be encountered from
the capitalist class, once they reach critical proportions and
potentials.
In any case, this sketch of a structured "mixed economy,"
with its distinctions among both sectors and principles and its
attempt to sort out the relative centrality of the elements in the
different cells and their forms of interaction, is offered as an
example of the potential of a Marxist understanding of capitalist
society -- as compared to the insipid conceptualization offered by
the mainstream "public vs. private," "Democrat vs. Republican,"
"big vs. small government" framework. The irony of this, in view
of much standard academic Marx-critique, is that it is the mainstream conceptualization that is simplistic. The Marxist one, by
contrast, is based on a clear foundation in the fundamental classes
of capitalist society but also incorporates the richness of the
concrete through the layering of abstractions. It is therefore
able to grasp the complexity of a "mixed" social reality without
losing track of that reality's core structure. It combines the
different levels and analyzes the present in a way that not only
contains both immanent structure and contingent complexity, but
also enables these levels to inform and enrich one another. This
is a continuing goal of Marxist research. Like the similar effort
to grasp the unity of determinism and agency, it will never be
finally achieved, but it can be increasingly realized in practice.
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IN THIS ISSUE
The articles in this issue form a trio of contributions to the
study of politics and culture in the mid-20th century. The defining events, of course (apart from the Russian Revolution and its
aftermath, of which more below), are the Depression of the 1930s
and the subsequent rise of fascism; these gave rise to the period
of greatest left influence and the emergence of the Popular Front.
Gerald Meyer's "Frank Sinatra: The Popular Front and an American Icon" examines the life and political activities of the famous
singer. The fact that Sinatra's decidedly left-of-center philosophy and activism have been driven from public consciousness will
make Meyer's study a revelation to many readers (and would be a
complete surprise to millions of Sinatra fans around the world who,
unfortunately -- let's face it! -- will never come across SCIENCE &
SOCIETY). While Sinatra never embraced socialism, he did consciously
espouse, often against great pressure and at great personal cost,
the radical democratic opposition to racism and affirmation of
labor and working people that were central to the Popular Front
positions. The attack against these positions, in turn, reveals
their importance, and the urgency with which the capitalist establishment sought to eradicate them from both reality and memory.
This is the context in which Sinatra's subsequent drift to the
right must be viewed.
The most consistent champions of the Popular Front were, to be
sure, the Marxists, who were always looking for ways to link the
defining insights of socialist theory to the cultural realities of
mainstream American life. At its height, the left produced some
remarkable educational institutions and experiences. Marvin E.
Gettleman, in his paper "'No Varsity Teams': New York's Jefferson
School of Social Science, 1943-1956." examines one of these. The
"Jeff School" (as it was fondly called) offered hundreds of courses
during its brief existence, and affected tens of thousands of
lives, both faculty and students. A new look at its activities
reveals some of the limitations and inadequacies of left
scholarship and pedagogy, especially that associated with the
CPUSA. It also, however, shows that the left of that period had a
deeper grasp of culture, hegemony, forms of consciousness, and so
forth, than many observers from later left vantagepoints have subsequently given it credit for having. Moreover, no subsequent
efforts in left education have done more to reach large numbers of
people; to develop detailed, articulated programs of study for
working adults, students, children, people of varied racial and
cultural backgrounds, and women; and to tie political understanding
to life-as-experienced. We have, evidently, much to learn from
this venture.
Moving from culture and education to core politics, we round
out the section with Neil Redfern's study, "A British Version of
'Browderism': British Communists and the Teheran Conference of
1943." In the period of the greatest Communist influence, with the
Soviet-led routing of fascism in World War II and the intense mobilization of democratic and labor movements within capitalist countries, it is understandable that this great progressive force might
be exaggerated in the minds of many who, after all, deeply desired
a postwar world without class conflict and the threat of war. That
exaggeration took the form of "Browderism" in the United States
and, as now revealed in Redfern's paper, in parallel -- but not
exactly parallel -- ways in the Communist Party of Great Britain.
It is always good to learn more about left history in periods of
rapid change -- such as the present! Hindsight is much clearer
than foresight, which suggests that we should judge as we hope
later to be judged -- a clear instance of the Golden Rule.
Shorter papers in this issue include a discussion between
David Laibman and David M. Kotz on the question, "Is Russia Becoming Capitalist?" The question was posed in the latter's article in
the Summer 2001 issue, and answered in the negative. The current
discussion is less about the nature of the Russian social formation, post-1991, than about the reasons for the failure of capitalist restoration in Russia. Was the neoliberal "shock therapy"
strategy a misguided policy choice, to be compared unfavorably to
China's state-directed and gradual transition strategy? Or was it
a more-or-less necessary move due to implicit and explicit socialist resistance stemming from expectations and practices inherited
from the Soviet era? These are difficult and important questions,
and we very much hope the discussion will continue; contributions
from varied points of view are invited.
Sidney Resnick writes on "Harold Cruse's Attack on Jewish
Communists," in reference to Alan Wald's major study of Cruse (Winter, 2000-01). Faulting Wald for pulling his punches, Resnick sees
Cruse as an obsessive anti-Semite, and urges the critique, begun by
writers such as Ernest Kaiser and Herbert Aptheker at the time of
publication of Cruse's Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, and carried on subsequently by Wald, be driven home. An interesting question here is whether Cruse's attacks against Jews in the left can
be separated from his hostility toward Black left activists and
intellectuals, and toward the fact that these intellectuals articulated positions that were both liberationist and left?
We round out the issue with two review articles, of important
books. Edward Tverdek's examination of Ellen Meiksins Woods' The
Origins of Capitalism brings the issues raised in that work to the
fore, and links Woods' research to the long S&S tradition of historical materialist investigation. And Alan Carling's critical
reworking of the arguments in Samuel Bowles' and Herbert Gintis'
Recasting Egalitarianism also ties this discussion, which is in the
broad tradition of market socialism and "rational choice" Marxism
stemming from the work of Jon Elster, John Roemer and Erik Olin
Wright, to a long-standing S&S interest in socialist theory, most
recently embodied in our special issue, "Building Socialism Theoretically: Alternatives to Capitalism and the Invisible Hand"
(Spring 2002).
D. L.
