Wednesday, May 11, 2016
http://oregonsocialistrenewal.blogspot.com/
How should we think? How do we understand the Sanders movement?—Part 7
We are winding this series down on thinking and thought processes, but we’re not quite done. In the first post in this series we made an argument for critical thinking and critical thinking skills and then we tried to show why critical thinking, by itself, only takes us so far. We tried to make a case for thinking as an art and as a science; something we do and improve upon constantly because it enriches our lives and helps us change reality. We then shifted gears and focused on dialectical materialism and on the work of Alexander Spirkin and some other philosophers because Spirkin and the others are most accessible to modern readers in a hurry.
I want to avoid anything here that sounds transactional—the idea that thinking and correct ideas are only there to accomplish pragmatic ends and that if one can only “think right” then only good will follow. Two lines from Mao come to mind here. In A Letter To The Red Guards Of Tsinghua University Middle School (1966) Mao said, “Marx said: the proletariat must emancipate not only itself but all mankind. If it cannot emancipate all mankind, then the proletariat itself will not be able to achieve final emancipation.” and Mao is said to have said in this period that “Marxism comprises many principles, but in the final analysis they can all be brought back to a single sentence: it is right to rebel.” Gil Scott-Heron took it further and said, “You see, revolution sounds like something that happens, like turning on the light switch, but actually it’s moving a large obstacle, and a lot of folks’ efforts to push it in one direction or the other have to combine.” Our point here is that the projects of change, revolution and liberation are imperfect and that correct thinking or correct actions, taken by themselves, don’t guarantee outcomes since human beings are involved at every step of the way. We can’t somehow design and redesign reality in order to satisfy our desires. Instead, we take Marx at his word when he wrote “Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice…The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself…The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice…All social life is essentially practical…The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity.”
I’m going to take Mao’s On Practice as a point of departure. Mao says, “Above all, Marxists regard man’s activity in production as the most fundamental practical activity, the determinant of all his other activities. Man’s knowledge depends mainly on his activity in material production, through which he comes gradually to understand the phenomena, the properties and the laws of nature, and the relations between himself and nature; and through his activity in production he also gradually comes to understand, in varying degrees, certain relations that exist between man and man. None of this knowledge can be acquired apart from activity in production…Man’s social practice is not confined to activity in production, but takes many other forms–class struggle, political life, scientific and artistic pursuits; in short, as a social being, man participates in all spheres of the practical life of society. Thus man, in varying degrees, comes to know the different relations between man and man, not only through his material life but also through his political and cultural life (both of which are intimately bound up with material life). Of these other types of social practice, class struggle in particular, in all its various forms, exerts a profound influence on the development of man’s knowledge. In class society everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.” This obligates us to look at the class make-up of the Sanders movement and the other political campaigns underway.
We need to be careful to distinguish here between the forces at work and do this in a way which is consistent with the logic we laid out in our previous 6 posts. The tensions we are describing here reflect shifting forces and balances of power, attempts to find equilibrium while some part of the core forces are also trying to make a spontaneous break or leap, relations between existing forces. The Sanders movement represents working-class and “lower-middle-class” interests based on real fears and a democratic hope, while the Clinton campaign represents a particular wing of capitalism and has within it a contradictory relationship between core social forces and these capitalist institutions. The two forces, the Sanders movement and the Clinton campaign, exist is relationship to one another because the economic forces underlying them exist in relationship to one another. These relationships have deep and contradictory aspects to them. For instance, another peculiarity of our politics is that the shift in economic and political relations in the US has meant a shift in the role of the military-industrial complex so that Clinton can correctly position herself as a hawk and a leading figure in the military can speak openly about the military opposing Trump. The quantitative and qualitative features of bourgeois (capitalist) rule are also shifting in relation to one another and in relation to peoples’ struggles.
Beyond the matter of the economic forces at work stand matters of race, class and gender which increasingly appear as antagonistic contradictions among the peoples’ forces. Our take-away point here is that Clinton’s capitalist backers do not represent the most reactionary segments of capital, they do not come from the monopolies and trusts which are now threatened by crisis and by imperialist crises. This will certainly change, but for now Clinton represents other interests.
This united front, this change in the order of “planets” and “gravity,”cannot logically be based on a “Sanders-only” approach to the elections. Neither can it be based on a surrender to conservative forces or, for that matter, to spontaneity. We are talking here about a principled or scientific change in relations between contradictory class forces in order to “negate a negation.” In this case it may be a matter of us (workers) joining forces with others to “negate” or oppose Trump’s incipient fascism and the most “negative” or reactionary sections of the capitalist ruling class and the means of production, distribution and administration which they own and control. Or it may mean a temporary class alliance driven by necessity and the need to elect and then push a President Clinton on every key issue. In either case, we are talking about negation and continuity, not progress. Spirkin says, “Development is not a straight line and not motion in a circle, but a spiral with an infinite series of turns. Forward motion is thus intricately combined with circular motion. If all processes in the world developed only successively, without repeating themselves, such things as life, animal and human behaviour, and the life of society could never have arisen; mental activity, consciousness, material and spiritual culture could never have come into being. The process of development also involves a kind of return to previous stages, when certain features of obsolete and replaced forms are repeated in new forms. The process of cognition on a new basis often repeats cycles that have already taken place.”
We take this position with our main concern being with moving from negation to progress, and with some anger at those forces on the left who blocked the left from consolidating and protesting under the Obama administration and those who want to dissolve socialist organizations. This failure to consolidate, organize and fight under Obama is not something to repeat.
In the past, and in other countries, the kind of social-democratic forces represented by Sanders were given some ability to manage social crises when there was an economic downturn. They could ally with the trade union leaderships and enforce austerity in limited ways and as junior partners. Prior to that the social democrats derived much of their power from functioning as a bulwark against the USSR and the committed left. Now there is no USSR, the US organized left is especially weak, the trade union leaderships in the US do not represent more than 12 per cent of the workers and the economy is temporarily in relatively good shape. So it is that we now have a different set of circumstances than we have had in the past and, as a result, new possibilities emerge.
In line with this thought we will wrap up this post with a summarizing quote from Mao. He said, “It often happens, however, that thinking lags behind reality; this is because man’s cognition is limited by numerous social conditions. We are opposed to die-herds in the revolutionary ranks whose thinking fails to advance with changing objective circumstances and has manifested itself historically as Right opportunism. These people fail to see that the struggle of opposites has already pushed the objective process forward while their knowledge has stopped at the old stage. This is characteristic of the thinking of all die-herds. Their thinking is divorced from social practice, and they cannot march ahead to guide the chariot of society; they simply trail behind, grumbling that it goes too fast and trying to drag it back or turn it in the opposite direction…We are also opposed to ‘Left’ phrase-mongering. The thinking of ‘Leftists’ outstrips a given stage of development of the objective process; some regard their fantasies as truth, while others strain to realize in the present an ideal which can only be realized in the future. They alienate themselves from the current practice of the majority of the people and from the realities of the day, and show themselves adventurist in their actions.”
