EDITORIAL PERSPECTIVES (continued)
Finally, the third group of vendors, who may be part-time or full-time,
completes the spectrum by representing its high end. These are the purveyors of
quality goods: fine art, vintage furniture, real (non-costume) jewelry, often from
different countries or with genuine antique value. These vendors must be expert in
their fields, must know their merchandise, and their customers, They work very
hard acquiring goods, must be skilled at determining optimal rotations of stock,
and must be sensitive to changing tastes and styles. Among the more successful
vendors in this class, significant incomes can be made, although markups are often
not as large as on the cheaper ranges of goods. From a socioeconomic standpoint,
the high-end flea-market vendors soak up a considerable amount of discretionary
income from the more affluent customers. The growth of this category, as well as
of its opposite number in the first category, together reflect, and symbolize, the
increasing polarization of income and wealth in recent decades.
Does any of this answer the "flea markets and socialism" question? The
beginning of an answer may be found by considering the underlying social
processes represented by vendor categories 1 and 3. First, a reserve of casual labor
both weakens employed labor, contributing to increasing exploitation and
polarization, and provides a safety valve defusing the potential political crisis
associated with deepening unemployment and underemployment. (The
unemployed, in effect, have a place to go — flea markets.) Second, the high end
within flea markets, along with the high end of the formal retail sector, is a partial
return to the visible flaunting of wealth that characterized earlier epochs in U. S.
capitalist history. Power consumption motivates the elites and middle strata,
maintaining ideological control; it also sends symbols of the unbreakable
permanence of the existing social order to the lower levels of the class structure.
Socialism has no use for a reserve army of un- and underemployed workers.
This negative incentive to submit to being exploited will have been replaced long
since by the positive incentive of individual and collective self-development.
Indeed, the basic premise of a materialist socialism is that this transition from
lower to higher forms of incentive and consciousness is not only desirable; it is
essential for the continued development of the productive forces, with due concern
for the ecological constraint. A maturing socialist society, then, will not ask any of
its members to accept the rigors of casual salesmanship — indeed, would not have
the mechanisms in place to make such a "request."
Similarly, socialism rejects — progressively sloughs off — all distorting
associations of consumption with status and power. As the core living standard
rises, people gradually become accustomed to appreciating consumption for
intrinsic reasons and not for invidious ones. The prospect of individually owning
valuable collectibles — as opposed, for example, to participating in acquiring them
as part of groups of people for community use and appreciation (in museums,
public spaces, schools, etc.) — will be increasingly less attractive. Absent also the
perverse income distribution characteristic of capitalist societies, the basis for the
high-end flea-market sector will atrophy.
There remains the middle range, and I like to imagine that a socialism born
of our deepest cultural traditions will be able to provide the infrastructures for
people to come together, on weekends or whenever, to swap those wonderful
memorabilia and artefacts of times past, and to help overcome the remnants of
standardization and "mallification" — to find things that enrich our consumption,
and our living spaces, with singularity and fine detail and a sense of history, and of
time. Perhaps with basic human needs irreversibly taken care of, and with
acquisition-for-acquisition's-sake becoming increasingly foreign to the popular
culture, we will still come together in flea markets — not so much as buyers and
sellers but as sharers and preservers of our rich goods culture, and history. Thus
— the socialist flea market. Hunger, and greed, and rivalry, all wither away.
Postage stamp collections, Irish tin whistles, glorious old-fashioned woolen scarves,
and hand-blown glass remain forever.
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IN THIS ISSUE
The present period of global polarization and shift in the world balance of
forces in favor of capital may be understood, at least partially, as a crisis of
capitalist expanded reproduction: a manifestation of capitalism's inability to carry
forward its historic role of transforming the world in its own image. The vacuum
created by the loss of postcapitalist state power in large parts of the world, is being
filled by a resurgent religious fundamentalism, most notably in the Islamic
countries of the Middle East, Central and South Asia. A parallel development is the
re-emergence of Christian fundamentalism, in a peculiar right-wing form, in the
United States. This attack against secularism is also a sign of capitalist weakness,
a retreat from the confident cosmopolitanism and univeralism of the early
bourgeoisie, as well as an element in the retreat of working-class cultural and
political influence from the mid–20th century on. If we are to grasp these
phenomena seriously, they must be placed within the frame of a Marxist
understanding of religion in general, and for this a quite reasonable starting point
would be the work of Marx and Engels and subsequent generations of Marxists on
the subject.
The study by Alexander Saxton, "Marxism, Labor and the Failed Critique of
Religion," begins this long-overdue inquiry. Saxton collects the scattered
references to religion in the early writings, notes Marx's claim that the criticism of
religion is the premise of all criticism, and traces the subsequent failure of either
the founding or later generations to carry this forward on a systematic level. One
conclusion is that, in the interest of working-class political unity, Marxists have
often avoided any sort of confrontation with religious belief. The spirit of
Christian-Marxist dialog, for example, has often been one of seeking common
ground while postponing full examination of the foundations of both religious and
secular belief systems. While Saxton does not outline the analysis whose absence
he decries, the idea is planted that, perhaps ironically, a more frank and direct
confrontation with religious philosophy from a materialist and secular standpoint
may be needed, if genuine unity-in-action between secular left forces and the
progressive elements and potentials within the religious communities is to be
forged.
One early Marxist contribution to the study of religion came from the well-known German Social Democrat, Karl Kautsky; his Foundations of Christianity was
first published in 1908. Kautsky was famously subjected to the formidable
polemical attention of V. I. Lenin, and his image today is dominated by imputations
of mechanistic, determinist, and crudely evolutionist ideas. It is time, says author
Paul Blackledge ("Karl Kautsky and Marxist Historiography") to repudiate this
image, and to go back to Kautsky's work, on the early Church but also on the United
States and Russian social formations, for the genuine insights it contains. This is
partly a matter of distinguishing carefully between the earlier and later work, and
not rejecting the former in toto because of deficiencies in the latter. There is also
a need to separate Kautsky's positions — as, for instance, on the revolutionary
potential of the U. S. working class — from the manner of their expression, which
does, Blackledge acknowledges, use formulations that come down to us today as
fatalistic or abstractly universal.
We are always pleased to learn that work presented in S&S is not only being
read, but is considered sufficiently outrageous to provoke the reader to action!
(Readers of the current issue, take note!) For some reason, we have experienced a
convergence of several debates on topics in Marxist economic theory, which we
have brought together as a Symposium, "Debate in Political Economy." (I wish we
could claim to have planned it this way.) Debate always sparks interest, and
interest is the root of knowledge acquisition. I will not try to summarize the
contents of these varied interventions, concerning absolute rent, homo economicus,
the theory of value, and the theory of accumulation & crisis, except to observe that
continuing controversy in these areas moves us greatly forward in the development
of a political economy tradition that can have a forceful presence in current political
discussion and give that discussion more secure foundations. We hope that this
spirit of comradely exchange of views will spill over into many other areas of
investigation in our pages.
Steve Ellner's Communication, "The Defensive Strategy of the Left in Latin
America," completes a round of discussion provoked by his earlier article in S&S
(Spring 2004), which led to the Symposium among three noted personalities on the
Latin American left, Jorge Castañeda, Marta Harnecker and James Petras (April
2005). Present-day promising political developments aside, the Latin American
experience is a unique and fertile testing ground for the ever-vital strategic needs
of the worldwide left, and we hope potential contributors will continue to share
their insights with us.
Finally, we are pleased to present Bettina Aptheker's review-essay on the
remarkable autobiography, Fireweed, by Gerda Lerner. Lerner's extraordinary
political life began in Austria in the 1930s in the emerging resistance to the
Anschluss, continued in the United States in the political ambit of the Communist
Party, and flowered subsequently in her work as a pioneer women's historian and
feminist. The later period, exemplified by Lerner's writings in the 1990s, is better
known, but Fireweed now tells the earlier part of the story, with unusual honesty
and both political and psychological insight. Readers should consult the book itself,
and Aptheker's review may also be read in connection with the Symposium
occasioned by Kate Weigand's Red Feminism (S&S, Winter 2002-2003).
D. L.
