EDITORIAL PERSPECTIVES (continued)
Looking for historical and literary parallels, I immediately think of the celebrated musical, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as
Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the
Marquis de Sade (Peter Weiss, 1963), colloquially Marat/Sade. (Speaking of time-impatience: this is set in the time of the French Revolution, more than two centuries
ago.) The Parisian "mob" declares:
Marat, we're poor, and the poor stay poor!
Marat, don't make us wait any more!
We want our rights, and we don't care how.
We want our Revolution — now!
|
The resemblance between Marat and Chavez is striking. I have italicized a few
phrases. Time impatience ("don't make us wait any more"). An underlying sense of
impossibility ("the poor stay poor"). Leave the details to the leader ("Marat . . . we
don't care how").
Here is another historical referent. In late 1917, in Petrograd, according to
the testimony of Albert Rhys Williams,3 a delegation of workers came to Lenin to
ask him to decree the nationalization of their factory. Before doing so, Lenin asked
the delegation if any of them knew how to get raw materials, keep accounts, maintain machinery and equipment, and market the products. Regrettably, they did not.
Said Lenin: "Well, comrades, don't you think you are not ready to take over your
factory now? Go back home and work over these matters. You will find it hard, you
will make many blunders, but you will learn. Then come back in a few months and
we can take up the nationalizing of your factory." The story is evocative of the intense bottom-up building process that must underlie the successful implementation
of any law, or decree. The only thing one wonders about is the time frame: Lenin
sees the workers as mastering production "in a few months," and this may be yet
another example of the time-foreshortening that is the subject of this essay.
The real point, however, is the relation between passing a law, and development of the real capacities in the people to carry the law into effect. To neglect that
relation would be to fall into — to borrow another, characteristically blunt, term
from Lenin (from State and Revolution) — "parliamentary cretinism," or perhaps,
in the Venezuelan instance, Presidential power cretinism, or again, perhaps simply:
decree-tinism!
Impatience with reactionary opposition is one thing. Impatience in the face
of the difficult consciousness- and capacity-building process is quite another. It is
never just a matter of revolution "by any means necessary," to use a popular slogan
from the U. S. 1960s; it is, rather, "by any means necessary — and possible." And
my experience with the politically mobilized poor in Caracas also suggests that reverence for Chavez, the Leader, is yet another instance of early forms of consciousness that must, eventually, be transcended, if the Bolivarian Revolution is to be
firmly grounded and the old order finally uprooted. We need a solid combination
of impatience and staying-power ("passion and patience," as William Z. Foster once
put it), if this time around, in Venezuela and elsewhere, the divide between authoritarian shortcuts and utopian maximalism (what Fidel Castro once called "ridiculous
idealizations," referring to West European left intellectuals' hostility to all things
Soviet) is to be successfully transcended.
So, Michael, this comrade is indeed "in a hurry," but only to do it right. What
that specifically means for the Enabling Law (whether it is necessary), or for the
formation of a single party (whether that is premature, or indeed desirable), I leave
to people much more knowledgeable than I about Venezuelan politics today to decide.
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IN THIS ISSUE
In academic Marxist circles, if you say "state theory," most people will think first of
the classical confrontation between the "instrumentalism" of Ralph Miliband and
the "structuralism" of Nicos Poulantzas, in a debate from the late 1960s and 1970s.
However, as political scientist Clyde W. Barrow reminds us, Poulantzas' original
target in the New Left Review articles was not Miliband; it was the U. S. non-Marxist sociologist C. Wright Mills. Moreover, Mills had come under intense, and productive, scrutiny by the U. S. Marxists Herbert Aptheker and Paul M. Sweezy, whose
work was essentially ignored in the later debate. There are important lessons to be
learned from the original Marxist interrogations of Mills' conception of class, state
and power; these interrogations stand up quite well, even after the later critique of
Mills, Miliband and others from the structuralist perspective. One lesson, indeed,
is that"Western Marxism" as a defining place for an intellectual tradition is less a
geographical concept than a political, and even generational one. But Barrow insists
that Marxist work on both the theoretical and empirical aspects of class and political
power in capitalist societies has gone far beyond the contributions of "structural
Marxism," both before and after Poulantzas. This work, moreover, still owes much
to C. Wright Mills, as seen in the current revival of interest in that heterodox and
intriguing thinker.
In the stream of pejorectives4 emanating from postmodern critiques, we find
"productivist" — overemphasis on the productive forces, or on a model of labor that
is unduly tied to production, in the sense of physical transformation of raw materials into products. Marx is the main culprit, of course. The modern —
postindustrial — world has moved beyond this model into realms of immaterial
labor, services, weightless electronic activity, and so on, requiring transcendence of
Marx's "productivist" model. The challenge, as always, is to grasp genuine novelty
in a rapidly evolving social reality, without succumbing to faddish nihilism. In "The
Concept of Labor: Marx and His Critics," Sean Sayers tackles this challenge. He uses
the Hegelian context of Marx's concepts to develop a broad interpretation of labor,
going beyond the limited interpretation imposed upon Marx's texts by his
postmodern, postindustrial ("postal") critics.
Arthur DiQuattro's "The Labor Theory of Value and Simple Commodity
Production" has both a historical and a theoretical dimension. Noting that Marx
applied the category "simple commodity production" to the social formation present
in the North American colonies in the 18th and 19th centuries, DiQuattro draws on
many historical sources to show that what he (and others) call the "moral economy"
of reciprocity, gift-giving, mutual support and community survival dominates over
the market economy and individual maximization of gain. This conception of simple commodity production, therefore, has little to do with the law of value, and
Marx's Capital is therefore about capitalism from the outset. There is no value-theoretic entity called simple commodity production. Efforts to "explain"
statements to the contrary in Marx's texts that rely on Hegelian "dialectical"
readings are vulnerable to the Analytical Marxist critique, in DiQuattro's view. All
this raises many fruitful questions, including the relation of the "moral economy" to
both simple commodity production and to capitalism, and the relation of dialectical
understanding to problems of interpreting and developing Marx's texts.
Finally, our "Communications" section this time features a talk given by
Michael Lebowitz at a conference on Marx in Havana, Cuba in May 2006. Lebowitz,
already familiar from the earlier parts of this editorial, here addresses Marx's
Critique of the Gotha Programme. The Critique famously distinguished between
lower and higher stages of communism (the former later commonly called
"socialism"). Possibilities are limited in the lower stage due to levels of
consciousness present in the capitalist society from which the new society emerges.
The lower stage thus embodies "defects" inherited from the past. Lebowitz
interprets Marx as arguing that these defects must be consciously avoided and replaced by solidaristic and egalitarian relations. This could be dubbed: "Che Guevara
meets the Gotha critique"! It will surely arouse controversy — and controversy is,
after all, what drives us forward.
D. L.
ANNETTE T. RUBINSTEIN
1910-2007
Most readers will already know that our dear colleague and senior
member of Science & Society's Editorial Board and Manuscript
Collective, Dr. Annette T. Rubinstein, passed away on June 20, at the
age of 97.
Annette began to publish in S&S in 1942. She joined the
Editorial Board in 1964, and was active in the journal's work until the
final days of her life. In recent years, the Manuscript Collective met at
her home, as her deteriorating health made travel difficult for her. But
in contrast to her physical capacities, her mind, memory, inimitable
sense of humor, vast grasp of literature and history, and sheer
erudition never deteriorated. She was sharp, and wonderful, a
dedicated socialist scholar, teacher, writer and activist, right up until
her last moments.
Some of us remember at least a few of the early editors,
including founding editors: Dirk Struik, Henry Mins, Abner Berry
Burgum, Margaret Schlauch, and David Goldway. Annette was our last
living connection to that earliest group at S&S. Our sense of loss, then,
is both personal and historical. We are, now, truly on our own, and we
feel the weight of responsibility to pass the torch to new generations of
editors, contributors and readers.
We will soon publish a full review of Annette Rubinstein's life
and work, and we invite readers to share their thoughts and memories
with us for that review.
The Manuscript Collective
Science & Society
________________
3. Albert Rhys Williams, Lenin: The Man and His Work (New York: Scott and
Seltzer, 1919). The entire excerpt summarized here appears in the Editor's
Introduction to the Special Issue of Science & Society, "Lenin: Evaluation,
Critique, Renewal," Vol. 59, No. 3, Fall 1995.
4. I hope readers will forgive this neologism, a contraction of "pejorative" and
"adjective." Here is an undoubtedly incomplete list: reductionist, determinist, essentialist, workerist, teleological, positivist, linear, rationalist, scientistic
(the "ic" is necessary here), and — productivist.
