EDITORIAL PERSPECTIVES - SUMMER 2000 (continued)
Of course, the deepest historical materialist insight is that the work of great men (and women) rests in a fundamental way on a platform of labor activity by millions, mostly exploited and dominated, which provides the surplus and the developmental stages that set the questions and the preconditions for answers. Marx expressed this in his proposition that humankind only sets itself problems when the conditions for their solution have come into existence. Leslie White proposed the existence of patterns, or periods, in a particular phase of development in a scientific or cultural field:
The development of a pattern is the labor of countless persons and of many generations or even centuries. But the pattern finds its culmination, its fulfillment, in the work of a few men - the Newtons, Darwins, Bachs, Beethovens, Kants, etc. Men working both before and after the time of fulfillment of the pattern have less, usually much less, chance of winning distinction. The men whose accident of birth has placed them somewhere along the slope of the pyramid of the developing pattern have no chance to win the sort of achievement and fame given to those whose births place them at the peak. (Patterns of Culture, 216.)
White quotes the mathematician Ferdinand Lagrange: Newton was a great genius but fortunate as well, "for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish" (217).
So if the effort to write down the names of the millennium's top 100 people is misguided and naive, is there any other way to proceed? Might we try to find representative people who embody, in their achievement but also in their potential, what we would want to remember about the past?
Focusing not on the millennium but only on the 20th century, two candidates from my personal experience come to mind.
About 35 years ago, I was working in a photo-offset print shop in Cleveland, Ohio. I discovered a workmate, call him Bill, who operated huge cameras shooting camera-ready mechanicals and turning them into film negatives. As we were working in the vicinity of Severance Hall, home of the Cleveland Symphony, talk turned to music, and as soon as it did, Bill would rise to prominence. If, for example, the orchestra was doing a choral piece by Paul Hindemith, and if a review had stated the cliche that Hindemith was "all craft and no heart," Bill would say something like this: "For Hindemith, structure and symmetry were mystical and communicative; they were transfusions of truth, the juice of a piece. The spirit is in the letter: getting a chord in tune means the truth is at stake." On hearing this, you would immediately want to ask him: who are you?
Bill was, it turned out, holder of a Masters Degree in Music History, and the more you got to know him, the more you sensed the boundlessness of his profound knowledge and love of music. Why, then, was he running cameras in a print shop? Because, as he said, 15 years earlier he had a young family, children to feed, and he could not make a living teaching or doing music history.
But the person I really want to tell about is Luisa.
I met Luisa in the late 1960s, in New York. A political meeting was taking place at her apartment on the Lower East Side, and I had been invited to attend. I had been told that she was of Puerto Rican descent, and worked in the garment district. Arriving a few minutes early, I was met by Luisa at the door and ushered to a sofa. On the coffee table was a college-level textbook in linear algebra. As a graduate student in economics, I was of course attracted to this book; picking it up, I saw that it was being used actively and intelligently by someone, who was underlining the text, inserting missing steps into the proofs, writing marginal notations and questions.
I inquired, and Luisa indicated that the book was hers! Why would a garment worker be doing college-level math? Well, she said, it was just a hobby; she did it because she enjoyed it. She said she had worked through a calculus text, and when she was done with this one she would go on to advanced calculus, or perhaps set theory. Then she told me the most amazing part of the story.
Years earlier, Luisa was failing miserably in her high-school algebra class. Her white, male teacher called her in and told her he would pass her with a D grade so that she did not have to repeat the course, but that she should never, never take math again! She was distraught, and she received the implication very strongly that it was her status as a woman, and a Hispanic woman at that, which was responsible for her utter incapacity to do math!
For years she lived in fear of math, until her own son was in high school and having difficulty in algebra. "What could I do"? she said. "I had to try to help him." When she opened her son's textbook, the material in it all started to gell. As clarity descended, and the crisis of the moment passed, Luisa went further and further into the subject, so that when I met her she was doing math, for the sheer pleasure she derived from it.
I think I was angrier than she was. I have no idea whether, in a non-racist and non-sexist society, Luisa would have developed into a major mathematician whose name would wind up on somebody's list of the top 100 geniuses. More likely, she could have been a valued math teacher, or perhaps an actuary, or statistician, or applied economist. Now multiply that loss by hundreds of thousands, and millions. An image begins to form of the countless people of the millennium who should have been celebrated: not instead of, but along with, Einstein, Darwin, Beethoven - and Marx.
All three articles in the present issue raise critical questions about Marxism, and offer connections to other perspectives, perspectives that call for incorporation into a growing, developing enterprise. We may take for granted, of course, that a scientific and humanist body of thought cannot be stagnant; it either assimilates new elements from outside of itself constantly, or it dies. The three perspectives are: feminism; religion; and (what might be called) cultural historicism.
We are pleased to present, first, an analytical retrospective study, "The Domestic Labor Debate Revisited," by Lise Vogel. Vogel, who for two decades has been a major contributor to new thinking at the intersection of feminism and Marxism, now re-examines central issues - not only in the characterization of women's unpaid family work in capitalist societies, but also in the understanding of the social sources and nature of the subordination of women, the interaction of ancient and modern historical developments in the determination of the social realities defining and affecting women's roles, and the implications of this re-examination for the continuing transformation of both feminist and Marxist theory.
Re-examination of the studies of the unwaged labor of housework, childbearing and childrearing, done in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, is still relevant and important, Vogel argues; this literature "followed an intellectual agenda that has not been well understood." We expect and hope that Vogel's reappraisal will inspire a fruitful discussion in future issues.
Dialog between Marxism and religion has blossomed at intervals, often in periods of growth and positive ferment in popular struggles, as in Western Europe in the 1960s and Latin America in the latter decades of the 20th century. This mutuality has played an important part in building unity around shared goals, while the deeper philosophical questions have not always been faced. Now author John Brentlinger ("Revolutionizing Spirituality: Reflections on Marxism and Religion") addresses the Marxist left directly with a claim: popular religious movements and communities of faith have not merely been "allies" with confused ideological and ethical positions. On the contrary, their profession of a spiritual dimension and connection underlying the struggle against exploitation and for new social realities offers something that the Marxist left has been missing all along, and to its detriment. The heart of the matter is Brentlinger's claim that enlightened self-interest alone cannot be a sufficient basis for the left to succeed; and that the religious movements carry a tradition of spirituality which supplies the missing element. Spirituality, then, as opposed to its embodiment in particular religious doctrines and ideologies, is the attitude and reality of being "bonded reverently to the world"; without this, Brentlinger argues, the secular left has been defenseless against the penetration of the de-spiritualizing pressures of capitalist society. This, in turn, accounts, at least in part, for some of the failures of the left in the 20th century, and a grasp of this fact is therefore crucial to any left renewal in the 21st.
Part Two of Oscar Berland's study, "The Emergence of the Communist Perspective on the "Negro Question" in America, 1919-1931" (the first installment appeared in our Winter 1999-2000 issue) presents a richly detailed account of the developing consciousness in the early Communist Party concerning the condition of African-derived peoples in the United States, and of the variety and change in the theories advanced to explain this condition in relation to Marxist fundamentals and worldwide realities. The connection to the other articles' interrogation of Marxism from the standpoints of feminism and religion, respectively, lies in Berland's ultimate skepticism concerning the possibility of a fruitful Marxist "theory" of the condition of Blacks in the United States; any such theory - and quite a number are recounted in Berland's study - must finally do violence to the complex reality that it seeks to encompass. Just as in the case of women and spiritual communities, the Black community constitutes an irreducible reality for Marxists, and cannot be subsumed within its foundation categories. The CPUSA, and the Comintern, never did make the contribution they aspired to make, with their evolving understandings of the Negro Nation, etc.; they did, however, make a signal contribution, especially in relation to the "Scottsborough Case," to placing the African-American people firmly on the national and international political agenda.
Finally, our "Communications" section offers two contributions to ongoing discussion. Paul Saba's paper, "Theorizing the Cultural Front," continues the discussion of Michael Denning's The Cultural Front, begun by Gerald Horne in Spring, 1999. Saba defends Denning against some of the arguments raised by Horne, while still calling for a more nuanced blending of objective and subjective factors in the explanation of the decline of the left cultural momentum of the 1930s and 40s. Michael Munk ("Socialism in Czechoslovakia: What Went Wrong"?) addresses the proposition that socialists themselves were responsible for the "world-historic defeats" of socialism in the 20th century, by re-examining in detail the experience in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.
D.L.
