MacIntyre on Revolutionary Organization

From his excellent 1961 essay "Freedom and Revolution":

We cannot achieve freedom by merely wishing for it. And to see what is wrong with capitalism and what is right with socialism is still not to see how to pass from one to the other. About this I want to make simply two last points. The first is that because our society is unfree in certain specific ways, the working class will not and cannot find the road to freedom spontaneously. And, since the participation of every worker in the decision-making which governs his life is a condition of freedom as I have discussed it, it follows that, until the working class finds this way, no one else can find it for them. So the free society cannot be a goal for the politically conscious individual, except by way of moving with the working class into conscious political action. Thus the path to freedom must be by means of some organization which is dedicated not to building freedom but to moving the working class to build it. The necessity for this is the necessity for the revolutionary party. Moreover, such a party will have to fi nd some form of existence which will enable its members to withstand all the pressures of other classes and to act effectively against the ruling class. To escape these pressures two other things will be necessary.

First, it will have to keep alive in its members a continual awareness of the kind of society in which they live and of the need to change it and of the way to change it. It will have to be a party of continuous education. And, in being this, it will have to vindicate freedom in yet another way. Bourgeois democrats and Stalinists have often argued as to whether art or science ought to be controlled by state authority or not. The point which this discussion misses is that such control is impossible, logically impossible. You can stop people creating works of art, or elaborating and testing scientific theories; you can force them instead to do propaganda for the state. But you cannot make them do art as you bid them or science as you bid them; for art and science move by their own laws of development. They cannot be themselves and be unfree. To rescue and maintain genuinely free inquiry is in a class society itself a partisan activity. But a revolutionary party has nothing to lose by the truth, everything to gain from intellectual freedom.

Secondly, one can only preserve oneself from alien class pressures in a revolutionary party by maintaining discipline. Those who do not act closely together, who have no overall strategy for changing society, will have neither need for nor understanding of discipline. Party discipline is essentially not something negative, but something positive. It frees party members for activity by ensuring that they have specific tasks, duties and rights. This is why all the constitutional apparatus is necessary. Nonetheless there are many socialists who feel that any form of party discipline is an alien and constraining force which they ought to resist in the name of freedom. The error here arises from the illusion that one can as an isolated individual escape from the moulding and the subtle enslavements of the status quo. Behind this there lies the illusion that one can be an isolated individual. Whether we like it or not every one of us inescapably plays a social role, and a social role which is determined for us by the workings of bourgeois society. Or rather this is inescapable so long as we remain unaware of what is happening to us. As our awareness and understanding increase we become able to change the part we play. But here yet another trap awaits us. The saying that freedom is the knowledge of necessity does not mean that a merely passive and theoretical knowledge can liberate us. The knowledge which liberates us is that which enables us to change our social relations. And this knowledge, knowledge which Marxism puts at our disposal, is not a private possession, something which the individual can get out of books and then keep for himself; it is rather a continually growing consciousness, which can only be the work of a group bound together by a common political and educational discipline. So the individual who tries most of live as an individual, to have a mind entirely his own, will in fact make himself more and more likely to become in his thinking a passive rejection of the socially dominant ideas; while the individual who recognizes his dependence on others has taken a path which can lead to an authentic independence of mind. (In neither direction is there anything automatic or inevitable about the process).

Someone will object here that what I have posed as the two necessities for a party of revolutionary freedom are incompatible. How can intellectual freedom and party discipline be combined? The answer to this is not just the obvious one that a certain stock of shared intellectual conviction is necessary for a person to be in a Marxist party at all. But more than this that where there is sharp disagreement it is necessary that discipline provides for this by allowing minority views to have their say inside the party on all appropriate occasions. If this is provided for, then disagreements can remain on the level of intellectual principle without on the one hand hindering action or on the other hand degenerating into mock battles between "the individual" and "the collective".

The thread of arguments leads on to the conclusion that, not only are socialism and substantial democracy inseparable, but that the road to socialism and democratic centralism are equally inseparable. Those among socialists who have written most about freedom have tended most often to reject democratic centralism. But, if I am right on the main points of this argument, this rejection must necessarily injure our understanding of freedom itself.

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Roundup: "Kony 2012" and "Humanitarian" Imperialism

I don't really have anything new to add to the (growing) camp of left-wing criticisms of the completely ridiculous, politically insidious "Kony 2012" campaign. The people behind it are total douche-bags. The campaign itself uses moralism to cloak its imperialist "humanitarian intervention" politics. Here are a handful of pieces that I've found especially helpful on this question (feel free to suggest more in the comments):

Richard Seymour, whose excellent book The Liberal Defense of Murder is well worth reading to get a deeper understanding of "humanitarian intervention", has an excellent blog post here and a great article in ABC Australia here.

A comrade over at Needs Moar Class War has a detailed piece here that is well worth reading as well.

SW.org printed an article that nicely skewers the racist, colonial attitudes implicit in the "Kony 2012" campaign.

American Leftist has some thoughtful remarks and a link to a few interesting videos by Ugandans here.

Mahmood Mamdani, who's usually quite good on African politics (esp. on Sudan and Zimbabwe), has a short piece here on the controversy.

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Red Chicago: Multi-Racial Political Organization in the 1930s

I read Randi Storch's excellent book Red Chicago: American Communism at its Grassroots 1928-35 (see here for a review) a couple of months back and have been meaning to post on it ever since. There's a lot to say about this rich, well-researched and engaging social history of the Communist Party (CP) in Chicago during the "Third Period". But I only want to focus here on one particular theme running through the history here: the viability of multi-racial Left political organizations in a fundamentally racist society.

There is a lot that radicals can learn from the successes and failures of the CP in Chicago in the 1930s. By way of summarizing some of Storch's findings, I hope to try to shed some light on the challenges and prospects for building a fighting, multi-racial Left organization dedicated to fully uprooting racial oppression.

***

Before I say anything about Storch's book, it's worth reviewing what seems to have become the "standard view" about racism, working class politics and the possibility of multi-racial solidarity in the fight against oppression. The received wisdom is that the white working class has always been the most forceful defender of racial oppression throughout American history (whereas, allegedly, middle and ruling-class whites have been more "tolerant" and open to criticizing racism). According to this story, white workers have, without exception, been gripped by anti-Black racism throughout American history. Working-class racism has, in other words, been an unchanging feature of U.S. political life.

It follows, then, that Black/white unity is highly unlikely at best, or downright reactionary at worst. Highly unlikely because of the aforementioned historical narrative about unrelenting racism on the part of white workers. Reactionary because black/white solidarity under such conditions could only mean forcing black workers to compromise with the racism of white workers. But this would be tantamount to tolerating a fundamental injustice while, at the same time, diluting the forces of those committed to anti-racism and black liberation.

Now, the standard view rightly acknowledges that genuine multi-racial solidarity is indeed incompatible with white racism. And, it is of course quite true that there is a long history of racism in the working class movement, and even in the socialist movement in the US. The conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) was explicitly racist and excluded black and other non-white workers from its ranks. The Utopian Socialists like Owen and Forrier were racists, and the right-wing forces in the Second International supported colonialism. In the US, the early socialist movement varied from being, on the one hand, class reductionist/colorblind to explicitly racist on the other.

Daniel De Leon's Socialist Labor Party (SLP), for example, stood up against racism and fought for equality, but, at the same time, believed that racism was nothing more than a class question. As Ahmed Shawki describes it, De Leon argued that "Black workers were like white workers, and their problems were those of all workers. Racial oppression was simply a manifestation of class oppression. Therefore ...agitation around non-economic questions--segregation, lynching, or race riots--could only distract from the real struggle." The right-wing of the Socialist Party (SP), unlike the class-reductionism of the SLP, was explicitly racist. For example, Victor Berger, the first SP candidate elected to office in the US in 1902, openly scapegoated immigrants and described non-white people as "inherently inferior".

So that history of racism within the working-class movement is certainly there. But if this racism disfigures much of the history of the movement in the US, it could hardly be described as a monotone, static property of white working-class consciousness. Even the social/political status of being designated as "white" is dynamic and changing--indeed some previously "non-white" groups (e.g. Jews, Italians, Greeks, Irish) actually became white as social/economic/political configurations shifted.

In truth, the history of the working class in the US is far more complex than the standard view acknowledges. Despite the racism described above, there is also a long tradition of multi-racial struggle among black and white workers in the United States where anti-racist and class struggles overlapped and complimented each other. Contrary to the standard view, history itself refutes the cynical hypothesis that white/black unity on the basis of anti-racist, class struggle from below is impossible. Thus, the overall history of working class whites in the US would be better described as shifting, fractured, mixed and internally conflicted on questions of racism. Storch's book is useful in large part because it excavates an important piece of this largely hidden and little-discussed history of black and white workers uniting to fight for a shared project of ending oppression and exploitation.

***

"On a January evening in 1934, approximately six thousand Chicagoans gathered in the city's large Coliseum Hall to celebrate and remember Lenin... The audience included a contingent of five hundred children in addition to the thousands of grown women and men, half of whom were African American and the other half of whom were a mixture of native-born whites and first- or second-generation immigrants from various ethnic communities. They represented a number of occupations, including skilled and unskilled industrial workers, artists, intellectuals, and students."

This is a convenient introduction to the history that Storch's book uncovers. In the 1930s the Chicago district of the CP was--despite all of its problems and contradictions--a vibrant, multi-racial organization with thousands of members (and a much larger periphery) that actively fought against racism (in Chicago and in the South), fomented mass organizations dedicated to stopping evictions and put together a movement of Unemployed Councils that collected popular discontent and channeled it into a fight-back.

In the early 1930's, black people made up 7% of Chicago's population, but constituted roughly 25% of the more than 3,300 Chicagoan members of the CP. In a city as thoroughly saturated with anti-Black racism as Chicago, this is a striking statistic.

Black militants in the CP joined for a variety of reasons. When Harry Haywood joined the CP in the late 20s, he did so on the basis of his judgment that:

"it comprised the best and most sincerely revolutionary and internationally minded elements among white radicals and therefore formed the basis for the revolutionary unity of Blacks and whites...it was part of a world revolutionary movement uniting Chinese, Africans and Latin Americans with Europeans and North Americans through the Third International."

Haywood's remarks suggest that he was (in part) drawn to the CP because it was part of a global anti-imperialist and anti-colonial movement fighting to throw off the exploitation and oppression faced by (especially non-European) peoples across the globe. This fact, combined with an ambitious program to fight racism in the US at a time when anti-racist struggle was generally low, no doubt contributed in large part to the CP's successes in the 1930s as a multi-racial radical organization.

***

In the 20s and 30s, there was a vibrant political scene in the black community in Chicago. There were, for example, annual rallies and marches celebrating the Nat Turner rebellion as well as a radicalized layer of activists in or around Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). There were also a host of politically active community institutions such as the NAACP, the Urban League, churches, and the Chicago Defender.

In the early 30s, there were frequently open-air political debates in Washington Park between Garveyites and Communists. "By 1932, Communists were speaking daily at the park to crowds that sometimes reached between two and five thousand." UNIA was a mass movement with millions of members in the early 20s, but by the late 20s (following Garvey's deportation and a slew of scandals) the organization was in sharp decline. Still, Garvey's movement had a lasting effect on political consciousness in the black community that manifested itself in the open-air soapboxing and debates in Washington Park. These vibrant public political discussions drew in a layer of radicalized (or radicalizing) black Chicagoans, among them, David Pointdexter.

Poindexter had moved to Chicago from Nashville, TN where he had witnessed lynchings first-hand. As Storch describes it,

"Pointdexter first gravitated toward the Garveyites, but, listening to the debates in Washington Park, he eventually found Communists more convincing. William Patterson, an African American party leader, later recalled that the party's belief that blacks and whites needed to work together ultimately caused Pointdexter to leave the Garveyite movement."

Pointdexter developed a reputation as a fiery orator, "when he got through preachin' everybody'd be ready to go into the lake with him. That's how much power he had over people." Claude Lightfoot was another black militant drawn into CP at this time. Lightfoot cut his teeth as an activist within Democratic Party in Chicago, but eventually he found his way to the CP, partly,

"for idealistic reasons, to help the poor, the downtrodden and oppressed people all over the world." But if these reasons were important motivations for his decision to join, he also admitted that he joined "after having gotten up on the soap box... cursing out the police and then marching away triumphantly with the workers."

Unlike the racist Democratic Party in Chicago, the CP's candidates for a variety of city, state and federal offices included a large number of black members. One candidate for state representative, Dora Huckleberry, was described in a pamphlet as a "militant Negro woman. Arrested many times for her participation in struggles against discrimination and unemployment. A fighter for Negro rights." Candidates with this political profile were an important part of the CP in the 30s, even though contemporary liberal "wisdom" would have us believe that the Democratic Party is--and always has been--the leading political force in the US for anti-racism. It's fair to say that the CP did more anti-racist organizing in the 30s alone than the Democratic Party has done in all of its existence.

Leadership roles with the Chicago district were not confined to white cadre. Key leadership positions were occupied by black members who took an active role in shaping the organization's approach to black politics in the city. The flood of black members into the organization in the early 30s permeated the group from top to bottom.

Even conservative newspapers, such as The Whip, acknowledged the inroads the CP had made in the black community in Chicago:

"The Communists have framed a program of social remedies which cannot fail to appeal to the hungering, jobless millions, who live in barren want, while everywhere about them is evidence of restricted plenty in the greedy hands of the few."

As Storch sees it, these sympathetic attitudes toward the CP

"...made their way to the grassroots... it was not unusual, when parents feared an eviction, for them to tell their children to "run quick and find the Reds!"... James Yates, an African American members of the Unemployed Councils on the South Side, expressed the party's significance to him: "I was a part of their hopes, their dreams, and they were a part of mine. And we were a part of an even larger world of marching poor people. By now I understand that the Depression was worldwide and that the unemployed and poor were demonstrating and agitating for jobs and food all over the globe. We were millions. We couldn't lose."

***

The CP's emphasis on interracial political organization also

"brought blacks and whites together... often for the first time. Lowell Washington, an African American member of the Unemployed Councils, remembered, "I never really ever talked to a white man before, and I certainly hadn't said more than two words to a white lady, and here I was being treated with respect and speaking my mind and not having to worry about saying something that might rile 'em up...Let me tell you it changed the way I thought about things."

That this was exceptional speaks to the deep-seated racism--indeed, apartheid conditions--in Chicago in the 1930s. Nonetheless, despite all of its flaws, it is incredible that the CP was able to carve out a space--however small and tenuous--for social interactions approaching equality and solidarity among white and black radicals.

Unsurprisingly, these "frequent, unprecedented displays of interracial solidarity on Chicago's streets sparked the city's administration into action." As has often been the case throughout American history, city officials and business elites were deeply troubled by the emergence of a multi-racial political movement capable of upsetting the balance of power in the city by mobilizing groups of workers often pitted against one another.

In 1932, the City of Chicago, backed by police violence, ordered an end to the growing anti-eviction actions organized by the CP to keep working people in their homes in the midst of the Great Depression. At one point, police stormed a large crowd of anti-eviction organizers and murdered several activists, among them Abe Grey, "one of the best Negro organizers in the Party". Several days later, one of Grey's friends was found murdered, his body mutilated. CP members were virtually certain that this was the work of the Chicago Police. The CP organized mass marches and speak-outs to protest this spate of police brutality, drawing together white and black activists by the thousands into the struggle.

The fact that the CP was able to pull this off in Chicago in the 30s--where black people were regularly met with terrorism, bombings, and horrible violence when they merely attempted to move out of "designated" neighborhoods--demonstrates at least two things. First, it shows that dogged, consistent organizing work on the basis of anti-racist, socialist politics has the potential to forge political formations that have the potential to stand existing racist ideologies on their heads. Second, it shows that a multi-racial front--built on solidarity and genuine equality--against racist and capitalist domination is both possible and worth fighting for.

The politics of multi-racial radical political organization is complex and liable to run aground in a number of different ways. The biggest danger is that an abstract goal of "unity" encourages accommodating with the racist order by labeling certain issues "divisive" or "distractions" from the "main goals". "Unity" of this sort is nothing but a compromise with oppression. It is not an emancipatory goal. But genuine solidarity--which requires, as a precondition, that white workers reject racial oppression and enlist themselves in the fight against it--is both inspiring as an ideal in its own right, and necessary if the working class as a whole is ever going to emancipate itself. For all its faults and mistakes--organizational, political and personal--radicals today can learn a lot from the CP's anti-racist work in Chicago in the early 1930s.

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Some Thoughts on Lih's intervention in the "Cliff/Lenin Debate"

(Note: I wrote this post a couple of weeks back and didn't have the chance to "revise" it until recently (although, by "revise" I should not like to imply that the following post is anything more than a sketchy jumble of half-formed thoughts). I see now that Lih's polemic has since drawn return fire from Le Blanc among others. I thought I would go ahead and post this anyway, even if it is less interesting now than it might have been earlier this month).

Many readers may have noticed a debate, instigated by a polemic by Pham Binh against Tony Cliff's biography of Lenin, which has subsequently generated several replies and rejoinders from Lars T. Lih, Paul Le Blanc, and Paul D'Amato. In what follows, I'd like to discuss some of what I take to be shortcomings of the intervention made by Lih in particular, although I'd like to say something about the debate in general as well.

Of course, I am not a scholar on Lenin, I do not speak Russian, and I have not examined closely may of the relevant primary sources here. I do not aim to make a move within the terms of the debate such as they've been defined thus far, though it is interesting in many ways. Instead, I want to take a step back and ask a broad question about the political character of the debate itself (with an eye to make sense of Lih's contribution in particular).

That question is the following: what exactly is the political significance of discussing certain aspects of the history of the Russian workers movement in general, and of Lenin's role within that movement in particular? This question is unavoidable and everyone in the debate has a position—whether it is explicitly stated or merely implicit. In evaluating Lih's contribution we shall have to get clear on what his answer to this question is.

Now, I'd like to preface my remarks by saying that, in general, I find great value in Lih's work on Lenin. It is refreshing, rigorous and urgently needed in times such as these. In blowing apart the "textbook" interpretation of Lenin (e.g. that he was, from the beginning, an authoritarian monster always plotting to expand his own personal power, etc.) through careful scholarship, Lih has done the Left a great service. His short book on Lenin, which summarizes many of the conclusions he reaches in his 800 page tome, Lenin Rediscovered, is extremely useful and carefully argued.

But Lih—far more than the other players in the debate—avoids the political question above and tries to distance himself from judgments about political conviction, value and significance. In order to position himself as a mere scholar—rather than activist—Lih repeatedly invokes his expertise and specific role as a "historian" (as well as his command of Russian and the primary sources) which leads him to verge on being pedantic at moments. There are, to be sure, academic spheres in which this non-political posture is important and, indeed, itself politically useful. Getting people to actually look at what Lenin said, even in an ostensibly "neutral" way, is a huge improvement over dismissing it out of hand as "totalitarian".

Still, although there is instrumental value in casting one's arguments in certain ways in certain contexts, one cannot avoid judgments about political significance. So far as I can tell, Lih, however, explicitly avoids making such judgments in favor of an ideal of scholarly neutrality. Intervening in this debate, Lih argues that the main question seems to be whether or not we get the right answer to specific points of detail relating to matters such as the 3rd Congress in 1905 and the Prague Conference in 1912. Lih even concedes that his main motivation for entering the debate is to get it right on these two specific points of detail.

But the question remains: why is this significant? What, politically speaking, is at stake here?

There is no such thing as a purely academic, purely neutral assessment of the historical facts. Why not? I don't mean to suggest that there's no such thing as "getting it right" in the arena of historical research. Contra the totalizing suspicion toward truth among some postmodern theoreticians, there is such a thing as getting the facts right (or wrong). Rather, what I mean to say is that when doing historical work there is no way to avoid substantive value judgments—which are ultimately political in nature—that guide our assessment of what is significant and what is insignificant within the set of all historical facts. We can't study everything, and nor would we want to. We study, debate, and discuss some historical ongoings because they have practical significance for us. And we ignore others because they lack significance.

To illustrate: There is a fact of the matter about what Lenin ate for breakfast on June 13th of 1904, but nobody gives a damn. One could be "substantively right" (or wrong) about whether the number of times Lenin used a past-tense verb in his corpus is even or odd, but nobody gives a damn. There is a fact of the matter about how many leaves fell on the ground in the fall of Petrograd in 1903. Again, nobody gives a damn.

So, when doing historical work, there is no neutral way to proceed. We can't avoid making some judgment about what's important—and worth studying and writing about—and what's not. And importance isn't some fuzzy personal matter that bottoms out in claims about individual "preference" or taste. Importance or significance is a social, political and public matter that people can (and do) argue about with one another. Significance is always significance for us, right here, right now. We have to justify, then, why we read Lenin right here, right now, rather than, say, phone books. Our answer, inevitably, will something to do with our practical political commitments, goals and self-understanding.

The only unbiased, purely neutral way to proceed would be to say that everything is significant—how many leaves fell on the ground in 1903 (and every year before and after), whether Lenin consumed an even or odd number of meals in his lifetime, the exact volume in liters of ink used by Lenin in 1917, and so on and so forth. But of course, such a neutral posture is completely absurd—and useless.

So, while Lih—and Pham Binh to to the extent that he instigated the debate—focus the attention of large swaths of the Left on various points of detail in the Russian socialist movement, we have to ask: why are we debating this right now? How does this advance the struggle? How does this help us to clarify our assessment of the present conjuncture? And, in particular: how does it help us get clearer on what kind socialist organization we need today?

Since the whole exchange was instigated by Pham Binh's piece, he bears a greater burden of explanation here than other participants. But the biggest drawback of his polemic against Cliff's Building the Party, in my estimation, is that he does not clearly and explicitly answer these political questions. As I say above, considerations about significance and politics necessarily motivated Pham to write the piece in the first place. But these are neither explicitly stated nor defended adequately with argument. What does come through clearly, however, is the sense that Pham thinks Cliff's book is of zero value and should be thrown in the dustbin of history. He makes it sound as if the most important debate right now is, in some sweeping sense: "Tony Cliff: Yay or Nay?" But I'm not convinced that that is so and, from the looks of it, neither is Paul Le Blanc or Paul D'Amato. As both of them point out in their contributions, this debate ought to be about the relevance of Lenin thought and practice to contemporary political struggle. Pace Lih—and perhaps Pham as well—I don't think that defending some of the substance and practical import of Cliff's book commits one to being a "Cliffite" or agreeing with everything Cliff said.

Scholarship and historical accuracy aside, Cliff's book was self-consciously written with an eye to draw practical conclusions about organizing a socialist organization in the here and now. Whether or not his book is a success on this score is one question. But the narrow, merely "academic" question of pure scholarship, while undoubtedly related, is ultimately another matter.

The real question, in my estimation, is this: how does the debate about Lenin's thought and practice speak to where the socialist movement is and where it ought to be heading? On this question, Lih's intervention and Pham's polemic are basically silent.

There is, of course, Pham's virtually unexplained dedication to his piece which reads “to anyone and everyone who has sacrificed in the name of ‘building the revolutionary party’”. But a substantive political claim like this should defended in the body of the article, not added as garnish by way of dedication. It also conflates a series of historical claims Cliff makes with the practical points he offers activists as to how one should build a revolutionary group. The litany of quibbling complaints about this or that error made by Cliff does nothing in the way of substantiating or elucidating the claim that "building the revolutionary party" is a bankrupt political goal.

If there is one relatively clear political implication of Pham's intervention, it seems to be that Lenin was "an orthodox Kautsykist" and that the distinction between Second International reformism (associated with Kautsky and the SPD) and early Third International revolutionary politics (associated with Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Lenin) is historically inaccurate. But I have a hard time seeing how any good comes from blurring the line between the trajectory of the late Second International and the trajectory of the revolutionary energy running through the development of figures such as Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky and Gramsci. Was Lenin an avid "Kautskyist" in some sense at one point in his development? Sure. So was Rosa Luxemburg, who initially moved to Germany with the aim of building Kautsky's SPD. But what matters for socialists today is when, where, and why he (and, for that matter, Trotsky, Luxemburg and others) broke with Kautsky, and why they thought it necessary to build an entirely new international. What matters today is how events like the 1917 October Revolution were organized and what we can learn from them. (The errors and ultimate defeat of the German Revolution are similarly important to study and understand here). I don't see how this goal is advanced by muddying the waters so much that Lenin and Kautsky appear to us today as pals.

Lih also offers little insight into the questions that really matter here. The self-understanding of his intervention seems to be more academic than political. He seems more interested in setting the record straight about his scholarship than he is in advancing our understanding of the contemporary conjuncture and struggles within it. That's fine, as far as it goes. But insofar as we're to take what he says seriously and accord it practical significance, we need answers to the questions raised above. Yet he doesn't deliver in his intervention into the discussion. Even his claim that Lenin's polemical interventions should be taken at face value (rather than critically examined as potentially strategic maneuvers within a contested field of debate) lacks political umph.

Now, I'm not saying that history doesn't matter for the Left today. Nothing could be further from the truth. Some historical debates and arguments on the Left are extremely important. But others matter less and still others shouldn't really matter at all. We need to be clear about which is which. Everything depends on what our tasks are and what shows up as significant for us given what we're up against right now.

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Why history matters for radicals today

When new social struggles erupt, there is always a tinge of novelty that is completely unlike anything that came before. Part of that has to do with the nature of struggles from below, which tend to open up a kind of self-emancipatory maneuvering space previously foreclosed by the structures of the dominant order. And, of course, for those most radical of all struggles—revolutionary social transformations—we witness, as Trotsky puts it, "the forcible entrance of the masses into rulership of their own destiny." There is a thus sense in which the "direct interference of the masses in historic events" can never proceed according to a preordained script laid down ex ante. Stronger still, in order to even be a genuine social revolution, events must, to some extent, involve certain spontaneous energies that emerge in the course of collective self-activity for which there is no exact precedent.

Now, it would be easy to conclude from the above that contemporary radicals have no need of history. In periods of increasing social struggle, it's easy to think: "who the hell cares what happened in Paris in 1871 or Russia in 1917? The future won't ever follow the course of past struggles." As far as it goes, this is (in some ways) the right perspective. Contrasted with a fetishistic or dogmatic approach to history (which I'll explain in a moment), this anti-historical political approach has certain virtues. But if this approach succeeds in throwing off certain yokes, it is remains shackled by many others.

To fetishize history is to say that knowledge of it has some kind of intrinsic political value. It is to say that history is, as such, just politically important to know and that's all there is to it. "Serious" radicals simply have to know every detail or else they are politically deficient in the here and now. Accordingly, those who know every obscure historical detail must, on account of their political wisdom, be deferred to by those who don't.

It's not difficult to see that this position is flawed. Historical knowledge does not (and should not) translate into direct authority to command others about what to do in the present. And, as I argued above, genuine social revolutions from below, as self-emancipatory upsurges of a special sort, just aren't the sorts of things that be expected to follow an exact, pre-ordained script handed down from above.

The view that "history just matters and that's all there is to it" is, on reflection, untenable. After all, how much of history matters? Does the number of leaves that fell on the ground in the fall of 1917 in Petrograd matter? Does the evenness or oddness of the exact number of fish in the Baltic Sea in 1905 matter? Of course not. Neither are important for revolutionaries today. So it remains to be explained why some features of history are relevant for us in the here and now whereas others aren't. But explaining what's relevant for us requires that we refer to our own political context and our own practical goals in the here and now. Any simple "look, history just matters" style explanation won't tell us why certain historical facts are significant for us right now whereas other aren't. So the view that history—all history—is simply something revolutionaries have to know (for its own sake) is untenable.

This insight is easily misunderstood.

It would be easy, for example, to conclude that the implausibility of the fetishistic historical perspective means that history just isn't important whatsoever, no matter one's reasoning. If we assume that there are merely two alternatives here: one of fetishizing all of history, on the one hand, and one of abstractly rejecting all of it, on the other, then the rejection of fetishism seems to imply that we should accept the wholesale rejection of history.

But, of course, these aren't are only two options. History is of immense importance for contemporary radicals, but not because it bears some mystical intrinsic value. The key, is to connect our present predicament to the questions of the relevance and importance of history. Ultimately, what we should say is that history matters for political reasons.

So, the trouble with the a general attitude of impatience toward history is that it throws the baby out with the bathwater here. In (correctly) rejecting the fetishistic/dogmatic approach to history, it (wrongly) concludes that history as such is basically a political waste of time. But dismissing the history of struggle as irrelevant to the present is a grave political mistake.

It is a mistake for many reasons, but at least one of them is that such a posture is performatively self-contradictory. All social struggles—whether or not all of the participants explicitly say so—involve historical consciousness of some kind or other. One doesn't invent the idea of a mass march or a demonstration or an occupation out of whole cloth in the 21st century. To some extent, every demonstration or march inescapably draws on the experience of past marches and demonstration. And it's a good thing too, because it would be a terrible state of affairs if radicals had to re-invent the wheel every single time they engaged in struggle. Fortunately we don't—as politicized people we find ourselves in the position of having already learned from the history and experience of past movements of people fighting back against oppression and exploitation. This is how words like "sit-in", "factory occupation", "strike", "mass march" show up for us as meaningful phrases in the first place. If we know about such tactics at all we know about them from some form of historical consciousness.

But if we already rely on some kind of tacit historical consciousness, it seems obvious that the more reflective we are about it and the more we can deepen it, the better. The fact is that the experience of past social struggles provides contemporary radicals with an extremely rich source of insights about what worked and what didn't, what pushed struggles forward and what caused them to derail and crash. It is also detailed source of tactics, strategies, slogans, ideas, concepts, organizational forms, etc. that we would be foolish not to consult today. Learning about past struggles can expand our own political horizons and unsettle conservative assumptions about what's possible in the here and now. As Jean-Paul Sartre said about the events of May 1968 in Paris, "if it took place, then it can happen again." That is powerful stuff, and it unsettles the assumption that something like that could never happen here. When we think of the fact that most everyone judged May 68 to be unthinkable before it happened, its even more incredible. It's much easier to move contemporary struggles forward with the self-confidence that comes from knowing what past struggles were able to accomplish.

I'd like to share example that illustrates my point here. When struggle exploded in Wisconsin last year, I went there to be part of the collective fightback. I'd never seen anything like it: hundreds of thousands of people flooding onto the streets of the capital in defense of basic union rights. Growing up in a period of relatively low levels of struggle, I had no experience to draw on in figuring out which way forward. Now, I had some experience to draw on—innumerable betrayals by the Democratic Party, for example, convinced me that they were a fundamentally conservative constraint on the movement (this proved to be correct). But I had no experience, and little detailed knowledge of what it takes to put together a successful string of strikes—and I certainly I had virtually no experience with the idea of a general strike. The idea of a general strike was actually in the air in Madison—even the president of the Firefighters union said he'd endorse one—but objective conditions ultimately militated against it. Of course, as of last winter it had been more than 70 years since there was a general strike in the United States, so many of my friends didn't even know what a general strike was. I assume that this must have been true for many of the people active in the movement. For any serious radical the conclusion to draw here is obvious: the knowledge of past struggles—especially general strikes!—is a potent weapon that contemporary movements must lay hold of.

After the struggle in Madison was defeated, I tried to learn as much about general strikes as I could. Of course, this meant plunging into the history of the working class movement in the United States. It meant learning about the Minneapolis Teamsters strike in 1934 and the role that radicals played in leading it. It meant reading about Toledo and San Fransisco in 1934, the sit-downs in 1937, the 1946 Oakland General Strike, and many other struggles.

Looking back at these struggles wasn't just an opportunity to gleam tactical and organizational insights. It was also a source of inspiration, because it made clear that people can fight back and win. We aren't alone. We're part of a long tradition of emancipatory struggle from below and that should give us self-confidence. It was also liberating to go back to the history of struggle because it made clear that we don't have to start from scratch. We don't have to re-invent the wheel. And the status quo isn't unassailable, natural or inevitable. People have successfully challenged previously "unassailable" regimes of power in the past and succeeded in shattering them into pieces. We have to learn from their successes and failures if we're to avoid stumbling through their mistakes and ignoring their strengths. There's a good reason, after all, why we're not taught about this stuff in school.

Whether and how history matters depends on what one is trying to do. If one is merely trying to elect some schmuck to misrepresent us for 4 years, the history of the Black Panthers in the US is probably not that relevant. But once one arrives at the conclusion that genuine social transformation is needed, the following question arises: what does it take to make that happen? The only place to look here is to history. No amount of abstract reflection on the nature of the concept of revolution will settle the matter. Only the trial and error of mass movements and radical organizations from the past gives us any direction here.

Occupy is, to be sure, a movement that has no exact equivalent in history. But neither is it 100% unprecedented—it clearly draws on the experience of other movements and is rooted in an international tradition of struggle. We contemporary occupiers have everything to gain (and nothing to lose) from, for example, learning about the events in Paris in May 1968. A look at May 68 will hardly give us all the answers to what we should do next. But it gives us a rich array of political ideas and energies that can only sharpen our analysis of the present. The same is true of the experience of radical social movements in the US throughout history.

What the experience of Occupy has made clear for me thus far is that oppressive social conditions breed resistance. When you shit on people long enough, eventually they rise up and fight back. Capitalism produces social struggle. But if it is inevitable that people will fight back, it is not inevitable that they'll win. History is strewn with more defeats and setbacks than it is with victories for our side. In order to make sure that spontaneous upsurges of resistance are not squandered by avoidable failures, we must return to the historical experience of our sisters and brothers who've fought back before us.

That means, in particular, returning to the periods of history when social struggle reaches a fever pitch. Those periods of white-hot social struggle are the episodes we can learn the most from. That's why its worth paying attention to how the Russian Revolution was won (and how it was lost). That's why its worth looking back and figuring out why the German revolution ultimately failed. That's why its worth examining the experience of the Paris Commune in 1871 or learning about the successes (and failures) of the Black Panther Party.

It's not unthinking fetishism. It's simply a recognition that history can be a weapon. We'd be crazy not to use it.

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Occupy Forces Cancellation of Chicago G8 Summit

You may have already heard the news, but in case you haven't, The White House recently announced that the Chicago G8 Summit will be canceled on account of the Occupy Movement's incredible work organizing and planning resistance and demonstrations. Obama and company are moving the Global 1% summit to a remote location where masses of ordinary Americans won't be expected to show up and protest. The planners of the G8 are "cutting and running", so to speak, and changing their plans because of the resistance they expect to face if they "stay the course".

This should be seen as a victory for Occupy and the growing Left in the United States. And inasmuch as that is true, it should be seen as a serious defeat for Mayor 1% here in Chicago.

Rahm worked all of his Washington connections to bring NATO and the G8 to Chicago this Spring. At some point or other, it's likely that he used his leverage as former White House Chief of Staff to make a pitch to Obama something like the following: "Hey, trust me... bring the G8 to Chicago and I promise there won't be any fucking protests. And I'll find a way to raid the public purse to buy a bunch of riot cops and all the rest. Maybe I'll have to close a couple of libraries, schools and health clinics, along the way, but fuck 'em. So, what do you say?"

Obama, of course, said yes. And ever since Rahm public announced his plan to bring the G8 to town, he's been hammering away at anyone who's dared to question his decision. Of course, he never asked any actual Chicagoans whether they actually wanted to shell it out to throw a big party for the global 1%. But anyone who knows the Democrat Machine in Chicago knows that the Boss (whether its Daley or Rahm) simply does what the Boss wants around here. Asking the population what they need or prefer is not what the city government does in Chicago.

So, this time, Boss Emanuel decided that he wanted to throw a big party for the G8 on our dime. And he dug in his heels and used his command over the obedient City Council to force through anti-protest ordinances as well as measures that give him carte blanche to spend as much as he likes.

What's more, I think it would be fair to say that Rahm was excited about the whole thing. How could he not be? He and his minions planned and enthusiastically plugged it for months. He alone probably invested countless hours schmoozing with elites, chatting with millionaires, etc. to bring the representatives of the global 1% to town. Rahm recently said that "from city perspective, this will be an opportunity to showcase what is great about the greatest city in the greatest country." He was pumped.

But he didn't get his way. He lost. The G8 will not be coming to Chicago. Rahm's got to be pissed.

Of course, the ruling class politicians who organize these sorts of summits have an interest in concealing the nature of their decision to move the Summit. But try as they might, they can't fully conceal their intentions since circumstances make it so obvious that they're trying to avoid facing any public resistance to their agenda. Take, for example, the following statement from the White House:

"To facilitate a free-flowing discussion with our close G-8 partners, the President is inviting his fellow G-8 leaders to Camp David on May 18-19 for the G-8 Summit, which will address a broad range of economic, political and security issues," the White House announced this afternoon.

Yes, they moved it to facilitate a "free-flowing discussion". Translation: they realized that if they held the protest in the second largest city in the US, a city with a growing Occupy movement, that there would be massive public protests decrying the presence of a small clique of elites making decisions behind closed doors that will have grave consequences for the global 99%. This kind of mass showing of grass-roots resistance to the domination of the 1% in global affairs would, of course, disrupt their capacity to have a smooth, "free-flowing discussion." Better, then, to have it out in the middle of nowhere (see below).

That way there will far less public resistance to what is, quite obviously, a democratically illegitimate global organization.

But there's another dimension here is unlikely to be publicly addressed by Obama's White House. Let's not forget that it's an election year. Obama and the Democrats will be doing their best to try to rhetorically lull those sympathetic to the Occupy movement into voting for them. They will try to pose as the "party of the people", as the party that stands for taxing the rich and fighting for the 99%. But it's rather hard to do this effectively if there are massive protests underway in the President's hometown, especially since the very people on the streets will be the target of Democrat campaigning. A massive grass-roots confrontation has the potential to look rather bad for the man who desperately wants to position himself as the "President of the people" despite all of the evidence to the contrary.

So, once it became clear that the organizing efforts underway meant massive, large protests against the G8, Obama decided to renege on his decision.

Whatever he says publicly, we know that Rahm can't be pleased with this decision. Even the Boss of the Chicago Machine can be forced to relent when enough pressure is generated from below. We can take him on and win. He's not invincible. When we stand together and threaten to build mass movements that draw the majority of the population into active resistance, our leaders cannot fail to take notice.

This should be a lesson to everyone in Chicago fighting back against injustice and domination from above. We can stand together and defeat Rahm. We can challenge him and force him to back down. Because when the 99% stands together, it has a social power like no other. We--the 99%--do the work, we make this society run. When we are mobilized and organized, we have the ability knock our leaders off their thrones and force them to take notice.

Of course, in the midst of our victory celebrations, we have to be well aware of the challenges ahead. NATO, for the time being at least, is still scheduled to come to town. And, for all intents and purposes, NATO represents the exact same interests as the G8 (even the interests of French capitalists are served by NATO and they would be generally hard pressed to say otherwise). Still, we have a lot of work to do, probably no more or less than we had before us when both the G8 and NATO were slated to come.

But this victory has the potential to be a galvanizing factor as we move closer to May. It shows that we can win, it shows that what we do matters. Activists far and wide should seize upon the recent news to build the self-confidence of the movement and push participants to be even more ambitious in their demands. If we can win on this issue and force the President to relent, we can win on many others. We're just getting started.

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What is Imperialism?

"Imperialism" is a concept that is used often enough on the Left, but what exactly does it mean? There is no doubt that it has, like many other political concepts (e.g. freedom), been cheapened by frequent misuse. Still, if one doesn't need a complete theory of imperialism to know that what Washington has done in Iraq is clearly wrong, there is a lot to be gained from clarifying the basic contours of this important political idea.

In what follows I'm going to move through the basics of Lenin's account of imperialism in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. I'm simply going to strip his approach down to its barest elements. I wont offer any analysis of the context in which Lenin was intervening, nor will I illustrate the operations of his approach by considering concrete examples of imperialism. My aim is to do no more than to put us in a position to put forward a clear, succinct statement of what imperialism is.

***

As Lenin describes it,

"Private property based on the labor of the small proprietor, free competition, democracy, i.e. all the catchwords with which the capitalists and their press deceive the workers and the peasants—are things of the past. Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the people of the world by a handful of "advanced" countries. And this "booty" is shared between two or three powerful marauders armed to the teeth (America, Great Britain, Japan), who involve the whole world in their war over the sharing of their booty."

This is a convenient starting point for our discussion of imperialism. Riffing off of what Lenin says above, we can say that imperialism refers to the division (and constant re-division) of the globe by the strongest and most powerful nations. Imperialism, therefore, involves the domination and exploitation of weaker nation-states by the more powerful ones. By "domination" we mean nothing more than a relationship in which the dominant nation exercises power/control over a weaker nation in such a way that it can interfere in its affairs on an arbitrary basis. Importantly, interference can take many forms: colonial rule, direct military coercion, "financial strangulation", explicit or implicit threats of punishment, or manipulation/agenda-fixing. Domination too comes in many forms: direct colonization, semi-colonization, debt peonage, client regimes, and so forth. By "exploitation" we mean any process whereby the dominant state extracts profit from the subjugated nation.

Broadly speaking, then, imperialism refers to the competitive struggle among stronger nations to dominate and exploit the weaker nations. But what do we mean by "stronger" and "weaker" nations? And what forces lead the "stronger" nations to struggle among one another to divide (and redivide) the globe to increase their spheres of influence and control?

In fact, this competitive struggle is not simply a struggle among nation states. It is always also a struggle among big capitalist firms for the profits to be had from the global economy. "Strength", then, has something to do with a nation state's connection to concentrations of economic power. Lenin's account here is excellent:

The capitalists divide the world, not out of any particular malice, but because the degree of economic concentration which has been reached forces them to adopt this method in order to get profits. And they divide it in proportion to "capital", in proportion to "strength", because there cannot be any other system of division under commodity production and capitalism. But strength varies with the degree of economic and political development.

What this and the earlier block quote make clear is that imperialism is rooted in the structure of the global economy. It is not, as liberals would have it, one particular school of foreign policy which, in principle, could be set aside if only the "right candidate" were elected. Lenin correctly derides the hope that imperialism could be done away with through such superficial changes as a mere "pious wish." Neither is imperialism, again, as some liberals would describe it, a purely war-mongering or purely nationalist phenomenon adopted only by right-wing politicians. And neither is imperialism always overtly aggressive or always connected to saber-rattling from heads of state and military generals (although, to be sure, it often involves its fair share of saber-rattling and aggression).

Imperialism is nothing more than a rather basic feature of global capitalism. As long as we have global capitalism, we'll have imperialism.

Of course, this is not to deny that the particular foreign policy strategies of certain states change over time, that some periods are punctuated by acute military conflict while others aren't, etc.. But these changes are only changes in the forms that imperialism takes. It's basic class content—and the object of the competitive struggle—remains the same as there is a global capitalist economy. As Lenin puts it:

...the forms of the struggle may and do constantly change in accordance with varying, relatively particular, and temporary causes, but the essence of the struggle, its class content, cannot change while classes exist... it is in the interests of the bourgeoisie... to obscure the class content of the present struggle and emphasize this or that form of the struggle...

But what is the nature of this class content? And what is it about capitalism as such that generates this kind of competitive struggle for control over the conditions for accumulation?

***

The first thing we'll need to say is that capitalism has developed historically in such a way that it has become a global economic system. Capitalism is not a discrete feature of this or that nation, it is an international set of economic relations through which various nation-states—as well as non-state actors such as multi-national corporate firms—compete for control of raw materials, exploitable labor, markets for goods, investment opportunities to absorb surplus value—in short for all of the conditions necessary to accumulate profit.

Just as capitalism breeds ruthless competition for profit among various firms in a single country, it also engenders competition at a global level as well. This competition, in turn, is what fuels, for example, colonial oppression and financial strangulation of half the world's population by the wealthy industrial countries.

Intense global economic competition is not a 21st century development. Although we're often taught that "globalization" is a relatively new phenomenon, Marx and others argued that, as early as the mid 1800s, capitalism was already well on its way to becoming a global economic system. Take, for example, the following quotation from the Communist Manifesto (written in 1848):

The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer suffices for the growing wants of the new markets... Modern industry has established the world market... [which] has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land... The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country... All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose... products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations...

Marx is discussing how the internal development of capitalism leads it to expand and grow into a world system. This expansionary process isn't incidental—it is a fundamental aspect of capitalism. But what exactly is it about the internal development of capitalism that leads to this globalizing development?

For Lenin, the key mechanisms driving this process are: 1) the concentration of production and capital to such a degree that massive corporations—monopolies, trusts, syndicates, etc.—come to play a dominant, decisive role in economic life, and 2) the growth of "finance capital" through the merging of big banks with industrial firms. These two developments make possible a third process, namely, 3) a big increase in the international export of capital (as opposed to the mere export of ready-made commodities). This, in turn, creates 4) the formation of international capitalist monopolies which is what drives 5) the territorial division (and constant re-division) of the whole world among the strongest capitalist powers.

Lenin identifies 1-5 above as the "essential features of imperialism". These processes are all rooted in the workings of the capitalist economic system. This is what grounds Lenin's claim that "imperialism is capitalism in that stage of development in which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among among the international trusts has begun; in which the division of all territories of the globe among the great capitalist powers has been completed."

Still, this is all highly schematic. We need to look a little closer at 1-5 so that we can see how the argument is supposed to work.

***

The concentration of capital in the hands of a shrinking number of ever larger firms is a driving force behind imperialism. Lenin's writings on imperialism date from 1916, but it is obvious that this process of concentration has accelerated greatly over the course of the last 100 years.

What happens is that the "natural" inner-workings of "free market" capitalism give rise to concentration and monopoly. Concentration is therefore not some corruption of "pure" capitalism, but an inevitable outgrowth of "free competition". This is rather intuitive if we just think for a moment about how capitalism works. Firms are privately owned and controlled and the owners are forced, by competition in the marketplace, to maximize profit. What's more, competition forces capitalists not just to maximize profit, but to reinvest a portion of yesterday's profit into expanded production for tomorrow. Those firms that don't expand and grow—other things being equal—will be run out of business through competition by those firms that do. This process, in which losers drop out or get purchased by the winners, creates an internal tendency toward concentration.

What's more, as a profit-driven system, individual firms are not motivated to preserve an overall system of "free competition" among equals. They are motivated only to maximize their own profits. But profits for any individual firm are not maximized by competition. Competition increases risk and uncertainty and, among other things, can undermine the individual market power of any particular firm. Thus, from a purely profit-seeking perspective—which is the only perspective that matters in this context—capitalist firms have an interest in reducing competition and moving toward concentration. Besides mergers, take-overs, bankruptcies and all the rest, concentration can occur through informal agreements struck between big firms in which they decide not to compete among one another for certain markets (e.g. "you can have this market, we'll have this other one, and this will make our power in each of our spheres of market influence nearly absolute"). This is akin to mobsters dividing up turf and pieces of "action". It makes sense from the perspective of each, but it is also an inherently unstable agreement (think of the threat of sudden betrayal or back-stabbing in every gangster movie you've ever seen). Because such agreements are struck for merely profit-seeking self-interested reasons, any shift in the balance of power can lead one of the parties to break the previous agreement and try to grab more "turf".

This instability arises from the fact that capitalism is a highly uneven system marked by profound contradictions. We have been considering how there is a tendency toward concentration, but it is worth pointing out that this is only one tendency in the complex web of uneven, contradictory forces that constitute global capitalism. Lenin emphasizes the fact that our theories are likely to miss the mark if they fail to capture these "profound and radical contradictions", as between "the gigantic operations of finance capital and the "honest" trade in the free market...between cartels and trusts, on the one hand, and non-cartelized industry, on the other." Competition and struggle among various groupings tends to upset the stability of large concentrations, causing fractures, splits, internal conflicts, outright confrontation and the like.

Still, it remains true that capitalism, if left unchecked, tends toward the concentration of production in the hands of a shrinking number of large firms. But this is only part of the story. Capitalism doesn't simply encourage concentration within any particular industry. It also tends toward concentration across industries and even across national boundaries. As capitalism develops, industrial capital and finance capital merge together as the forces who own and control banks and financial institutions become bound up with those who own and control industry.

***

Thus, a key feature of contemporary capitalism—as opposed to early capitalism—is the "coalescence or merging of banking with industry." But, importantly, this development is not uniform or linear. It is uneven and spasmodic. In certain areas this development is advanced, others less so.

In the places where this development is furthest along, a problem arises, the problem of a "superabundance of capital" accumulated within the rich countries. Accumulation in the rich countries occurs so rapidly that the amount of surplus available far outstrips the profitable investment opportunities within the national borders of the rich nation. Capitalism becomes, so to speak, "over ripe" in the core advanced industrial nations. This drives the owners of this abundance of capital to scour the earth looking for places to absorb it profitably.

In earlier epochs of capitalism, manufacturing in the advanced industrial nations grows to an extent that industrialists start searching the globe for new markets to flood with the commodities they manufacture at home. They search the globe because they produce more commodities than they can profitable sell at home. But the growing concentration of capital and the merging industry and finance means that an overabundance of capital develops. This drives a sharp increase in the export of capital abroad. As Lenin puts it, "the necessity for exporting capital arises from the fact that in a few countries capitalism has become over-ripe and capital cannot find "profitable" investment" at home.

Why should finance capitalists with masses of surplus capital on their hands want to look abroad for profitable investments? Aside from the fact, already mentioned, that there are no such profitable investment opportunities within the "over ripe" core capitalist nations, capitalists stand to gain considerably from establishing "sphere of influence" abroad: they gain access to sources of cheap raw materials and more easily exploitable labor, places where surplus capital can be exported and absorbed, opportunities for deals, concessions and monopolist profits from loans and the like, as well as new markets to flood (or "dump") large quantities of goods at cut-rate prices (thereby wiping out any local competition and creating relations of dependence). We could go on. But we note that this isn't just an attractive way to increase profits. It is necessary for the expansion and continuing viability of capitalism as an economic system, because when capital becomes over-accumulated in the core countries it must find profitable investment opportunities or else the system stagnates and decays as profits decline.

This quest to find places to absorb surplus capital, however, is not a peaceful, harmonious process of "free trade". In reality, it creates an international competitive struggle for the control of foreign economic territory. This, in turn, drives the territorial division (and re-division) of the globe among the most powerful core capitalist countries which creates a state of affairs in which swaths of the globe come under the domination and exploitation of more powerful states.

***

Of course, by the time capitalism reaches this stage, the globe has already been divided into spheres of colonial domination or semi-colonial influence. By 1900, for example, nine-tenths of Africa had already been seized and occupied by European powers. Thus, contemporary imperialism is not about acquiring and dividing up previously "unoccupied" territories. Rather it is about the re-division of the world. As Lenin describes it,

"The colonial policy of capitalist countries has completed the seizure of the unoccupied territories on our planet. For the first time the world is complete divided up, so that in the future only redivision is possible; territories can only pass from one "owner" to another, instead of passing as unowned territory to an "owner"."

If earlier epochs of colonialism were about a mad dash to "acquire" lands hitherto unexploited by core capitalist nations, contemporary imperialism is a competitive struggle among the core nations to re-divide territories in a way more favorable to the strongest nations at any particular time. As the balance of power shifts (as a result, largely, of economic shifts), the previous configurations become unstable and more powerful elements are emboldened to contest previously stable spheres of influence. "Stability" always favors the strongest grouping at any point in time. When Washington, then, calls for "stability" in the Middle East, they are calling for no more than the preservation of the existing configuration of influence and power which they enjoy. Any instability favors other forces—whether it is anti-imperialist forces from below or other imperialist elements—and introduces the possibility of re-dividing the terrain in a different way.

***

But what about violent conflict and war? Isn't war really about the "national interest", glory, honor, religion, "our way of life" and all the rest? Or isn't war really just an expression of the "inherently violent" character of human beings?

Modern war has little to do with national pride, glory, religion, honor or any of it. This is mostly window-dressing. This is how you try to drum up support for imperialism among social groups who have no direct interest in imperialist wars for the 1%. And neither is modern war an expression of some timeless impulse toward violence. The vast majority of human history has been peaceful and cooperative rather than destructive and violent. Violence and war are products of the interests of elites in class societies—that is, societies in which a minority ruling class stands over and above the toiling majority.

Modern warfare is about profit. It is about securing all of the conditions necessary for ruling classes to accumulate, which means fighting among imperial powers to secure "spheres of influence".

War and violent conflict in the international arena are merely particular forms that imperialist rivalry and competition can assume in certain conditions. As I say above, "peace" and stability don't entail a decline in imperialism whatsoever; they merely indicate the temporary stability of a certain configuration of power (both economic and military). And, what's more, beneath the surface of such superficial stability there are often subterranean forms of conflict, less severe than direct military confrontation, that involve tension and struggle nonetheless. Imperialism is not simply visible when military conflicts arise. It is manifest in virtually all of the major economic and political actions occurring at the global level.

***

Let's close by examining two objections to this idea of imperialism. The hope is that this will further sharpen our highly schematic and brief overview of the concept.

The first was articulated by Kautsky in the early 1900s, but it is a favorite argument of the likes of Thomas L. Friedman and others. It goes as follows. Since capitalism is growing and expanding to such an extent that economic power is becoming more and more concentrated, huge regions of the globe that were hitherto independent are now hugely inter-dependent. This dense web of interdependence means that war will be unlikely because too expensive. Friedman once predicted that no two nations with a McDonalds would ever go to war with one another (this has, of course, been proven false many times over, but set that to one side for the moment). Although Friedman might not like to put it in such terms, his argument is that wars will cease under capitalism when economic power becomes so concentrated and intermeshed that it is more profitable for the global ruling class to join together and jointly exploit the rest of the world.

Lenin offers a trenchant critique of this argument in his text. Readers of Friedman would do well to consider it. Lenin's reply is that this view mistakes particular forms of imperialism for its basic class content. Huge international cartels only reveal the object of the imperialist struggle, that is, they only show us what it is that all the various imperialist players are fighting to win. It's the imperialist Lombardi trophy, so to speak, that we come to see when we observe huge multi-national cartels whose influence covers entire regions of the globe. Such configurations do not portend a decline in imperialism, on the contrary, they show us the basic motivation to play the imperialist game in the first place. And, as we know, it is unlikely that any one grouping will be able to hold on to the trophy forever. Sooner or later, internal fractures, economic stagnation within, shifts in the balance of power without, etc. will dislodge the stability of the configuration and the contradictions and unevenness of the world economy gives rise to conflicts.

Again, to repeat, imperialism is not a specific foreign policy preferred by certain groups and rejected by others. It is a structural feature of the global capitalist economy. Different capitalist groupings compete—utilizing the national governments which serve their interests—with one another in the global economy. They compete for control of raw materials, labor, markets for goods, that is, for "spheres of influence" which equip them with the necessary conditions for continued accumulation. The "stronger" nations, or group of nations, win larger spheres of influence—and "strength" is strongly correlated to level of economic and political development. And, inevitably, this economic struggle and competition gives rise to military struggle and competition. The two go hand in hand.

The final objection we shall consider is the following. Since imperialism is the result of concentration, what's needed is not an overthrow of the global capitalist order, but a re-introduction of the sort of "free competition" characteristic of econ 101 textbooks. This would create parity and would encourage non-violent trade interactions that would better everyone. As we know, trade always benefits the trading parties (otherwise they wouldn't engage in the transaction), so emphasizing genuine "honest" competition and "free trade" would undermine the material conditions which give rise to imperialism. To this end, we should oppose all tariffs and forms of protectionism and seek to create a maximally open, maximally "free" global market where violent conflict would be minimized.

This is frequently heard argument these days. But Lenin already refuted it in 1916. The first thing we'll say is that the opposition between "free trade" and "protectionism" is facile, abstract and highly misleading. It has nothing to do with the realities of global capitalism.

First of all, global capitalism is a highly uneven, contradictory constellation of different economic forces. In this context, one size does not fit all, not even among all of the imperialist powers. In certain circumstances, it befits one imperialist power to endorse "free trade" precisely because it undermines the influence or power of another imperialist power who, for this very reason, opposes "free trade" and opts for protections and tariffs. But the former, who pushes "free trade" in this particular circumstance, is likely to oppose "free trade" in all sorts of other instances where it makes more sense—from the imperialist point of view—to have protections, tarriffs, and all the rest.

Second, the period of high concentration, monopolies, syndicates, international cartels, etc. is one that precisely grew out of "free competition". Capitalist competition, as we saw above, naturally leads to concentration. To call for a return to "free competition" as an answer to imperialism is a mere "pious wish" that has no material basis in reality.

To pose the question as a tension between "free trade" and protectionism is to entirely misunderstand what's going on in the world. As Lenin puts it:

It is known...that the cartels add finance capital have a system peculiar to themselves, that of “exporting goods at cut-rate prices”, or “dumping”, as the English call it: within a given country the cartel sells its goods at high monopoly prices, but sells them abroad at a much lower price to undercut the competitor, to enlarge its own production to the utmost, etc. If Germany’s trade with the British colonies is developing more rapidly than Great Britain’s, it only proves that German imperialism is younger, stronger and better organised than British imperialism, is superior to it; but it by no means proves the “superiority” of free trade, for it is not a fight between free trade and protection and colonial dependence, but between two rival imperialisms, two monopolies, two groups of finance capital. The superiority of German imperialism over British imperialism is more potent than the wall of colonial frontiers or of protective tariffs: to use this as an “argument” in favour of free trade and “peaceful democracy” is banal, it means forgetting the essential features and characteristics of imperialism, substituting petty-bourgeois reformism for Marxism.

Lenin is exactly right here. The opposition is between two rival imperialisms, not between some abstract choice between "free trade" or protection. There is no neutral vessel standing above rival imperialisms who, impartially, aims to decide whether to push for universal "free trade" or universal protection. Rather, the global arena is nothing more than blocs of powerful capitalist nations (and their spheres of influence) who push for liberalization of trade or protection as needed. They have no principled preference for one or the other. Their only preference is for ever increasing control and power, because increased domination of spheres of influence means increased exploitation. All of this, of course, means an increase in accumulation, the basic driving force of the global economy.

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Socialist Politics and the City

(This is a slightly edited version of a post from September 2011).

A while back, I got into a lively debate with some comrades about the role of the city in socialist politics. The debate seemed to dwell on the question of whether the city or the urban form (it's worth noting that those very concepts were contested in the discussion) coheres with (or makes possible) the socialist ideal of a collectively self-governing society free of exploitation and oppression. I won't try to summarize the objections or positions of those with whom I disagreed, since I wouldn't be able to do them justice. But I would like to reflect a bit more about the position I found myself defending in that discussion.

Let me begin by confessing that much of my thinking about these matters is strongly influenced by an article Mike Davis wrote a couple years back for New Left Review. Here's an excerpt that is particularly emblematic of the view he puts forward in that essay:

There are innumerable examples and they all point toward a single unifying principle: namely, that the cornerstone of the low-carbon city, far more than any particular green design or technology, is the priority given to public affluence over private wealth. As we all know, several additional Earths would be required to allow all of humanity to live in a suburban house with two cars and a lawn, and this obvious constraint is sometimes evoked to justify the impossibility of reconciling finite resources with rising standards of living. Most contemporary cities, in rich countries or poor, repress the potential environmental efficiencies inherent in human-settlement density. The ecological genius of the city remains a vast, largely hidden power. But there is no planetary shortage of ‘carrying capacity’ if we are willing to make democratic public space, rather than modular, private consumption, the engine of sustainable equality. Public affluence—represented by great urban parks, free museums, libraries and infinite possibilities for human interaction—represents an alternative route to a rich standard of life based on Earth-friendly sociality. Although seldom noticed by academic urban theorists, university campuses are often little quasi-socialist paradises around rich public spaces for learning, research, performance and human reproduction.

The brilliance of Davis's argument is that he weaves together the ecological genius of urban living with the social and political importance of the city. Taking ecological concerns seriously, he argues, requires anti-capitalism. But sustainability also requires urban forms. And, independently of ecological concerns, Davis gives us reasons to think that the socialist ideal has always had a close affinity with the forms of social organization made possible by dense urban communities. All three political concerns -anti-capitalist, ecological and urban- hang together in a kind of equilibrium, each drawing support from the other. I find this to be a a highly plausible and attractive picture.

Before I say more about why I endorse this picture, let me say a little bit about what's essential to the idea of the city. Like any familiar concept, the idea of city carries with it innumerable associations and meanings, not all of which I intend to endorse. As I've noted elsewhere, the idea of "the urban" (or worse, "the inner city") is often a racialized euphemism in the United States. I've written elsewhere about the phenomenon of suburban white "fear of the city", which goes hand in hand with the racist image of black people (especially young black men) as dangerous, pathological, angry, and so on. This racist ideology, when combined with individualistic/consumerist ideologies nourished by the suburban form, yields an especially potent anti-city form of consciousness. Of course, as waves of gentrification flood into cities, expelling working class residents, most of them people of color, this generalized "fear of the city" has begun to wane among middle and ruling class whites. Still, it's fair to say that there is still plenty of animus against the urban form out there. In defending the city as an ideal, I'd like to sidestep these ideological encumbrances.

By "city", I mean nothing more than a densely populated community in which functional uses are integrated (rather than separated), that is walkable and bikable, where large numbers of people with very different backgrounds live together and share basic social institutions (e.g. libraries, parks, museums, schools, etc.). I mean an active, lively built environment that makes use of efficiencies created by density, mixed-use, and diversity. I mean a space that laid out on a human scale, not a automotive scale. Though every city fails to fully embody this ideal, big cities come the closest to approximating it. I'll elaborate more on this ideal in a moment.

Still, attractive though this ideal may be, cities continue to get a bad rap. Cities, it is often said, are dirty, cramped, polluted, dangerous, and concrete-heavy. They embody the worst of capitalist industrialization. According to this common view, if cities are gray and asphalt, suburbs and towns are green and leafy. Suburban living, the story goes, is comfortable, safe, harmonious and, most importantly for "green" politics, loaded with expansive lawns and large trees. Low density residential configurations make for a less concrete-heavy landscape, and strict separation of uses entails that residential spaces are far from industrial spaces. It follows, then, that cities, with all their iniquity, pollution and concrete, are the antithesis of sustainable living. Sustainability requires a suburban home with a Prius parked out front, a new-fangled energy efficient refrigerator full of organic produce, etc.

Though these ideas have wide currency, on reflection they have little plausibility.

As the Davis quote makes clear, we would need several additional earths for everyone on the planet to have the massive single-family McMansion with a big irrigated lawn, a couple of cars, etc. It therefore goes without saying that the McMansion lifestyle cannot be egalitarian or, for that matter, socialist in spirit since it is only possible on the assumption that the vast majority of humanity doesn't enjoy it. Now, McMansion enthusiasts might complain that I'm for levelling everyone down to shared poverty. But I'm not; I'm for privileging public wealth over private consumption. I'd rather enjoy the beauty and grandness of world-class public buildings than lock myself up in a McMansion.

Still, we know that McMansions aren't the root of the problem. The problem is one of a basic model of social/economic development that became dominant in in the postwar era. I'm talking about the low-density, use-segregated, car-heavy model of development characteristic of Postwar suburban sprawl, which has been nothing less than an unmitigated environmental (and social) disaster. It is well-known that this model was pushed by ruling classes after WWII to facilitate economic growth (think of, for instance, the impact of the suburban form on the sales of new construction homes, cars, appliances, etc.). The construction of the interstate highway system, in conjunction with huge subsidies for mortgages in low-density suburban areas, made this model hegemonic for a generation. Its dominance continues, though it is becoming increasingly contested and mired by its own contradictions.

Many readers of this blog will already know that I have no love for cars, so I'll set the issue of cars aside for the moment the problem of the environmental costs associated car-exclusive built environments. (See here for some of my own views, and see here and here for more recent socialist critiques). This leaves many other problems to be dealt with, e.g. extremely high per capita uses of energy (think of the energy spent heating a McMansion in the winter). Even the surface-level aesthetic credentials of the ideal "green" suburb are dubious. Most suburbs are monotonous nightmares where indigenous plant life is uprooted, old trees cut down to make space for useless lawns, tacky landscaping, multi-lane highways and, of course, massive parking lots. Many of the suburbs surrounding Chicago (especially the newer ones) tend to have far fewer trees than the typical street in the city. Moreover, the low density of suburbs combined with their extreme un-walkability (and un-bikability) means that you can only enjoy what green-space there is from the windows of an automobile. And let's not forget the massive, four-lane highways connecting sprawling residential subdivisions with other single-use spheres of activity. To say that these are an eyesore is an understatement.

But the problems of the suburban form aren't simply aesthetic or ecological. The social, political and economic problems are profound as well. I'll keep this point brief. The suburban form, as such, privileges individual consumption over public goods, it alienates individuals from one another, it nourishes individualist/consumerist ideologies by leaving little space for non-commercial social interactions among people. Moreover, suburbs are usually planned piecemeal in a top-down manner by developers in conjunction with national (and multi-national) corporations, they are often racially exclusive, and lots of them are little more than quasi-feudal gated "communities" meant to keep out those who aren't rich. It has also been noted (by Davis, among others) that the low-density spatial configuration of suburbs makes organization and collective action less likely to transpire (compared with a dense, urban working-class neighborhood where residents would be far more likely to unite and fight).

So much for suburbia. But what's the alternative?

The only viable alternative, I'd like to suggest, is the city. But not everyone on the Left agrees with that claim. Anarcho-primitivists, for example, argue that the city isn't the only alternative to suburbia. In fact, according to their view, city-dwellers should reject cities for similar reasons and return to pre-capitalist forms of social organization that predate the industrial revolution.

I could spend several posts saying why this view is wrong, so I'll have to be unfairly brief here. First of all, as a Marxist, I am not unequivocally negative about Modernity. I am ambivalent: modernity has brought with it all kinds of progressive possibilities for developing human potential, but it has also brought vastly increased environmental destruction and new forms of exploitation and oppression.

In classical Marxism, the ambivalence toward modernity (which, under any plausible interpretation of modern, has to be loosely identified with capitalism) expresses itself as follows. On the one hand, capitalism has developed the forces of production (e.g. technologies, productive instruments, productive techniques, technically useful knowledge) to an extremely high degree. But the highly developed productive forces and technology in capitalist society are not put in the service of human liberation. Though we can do so today in ways that would have been unthinkable in the Bronze Age, capitalism doesn't use the productive forces to eradicate all forms of poverty, suffering, and starvation. Technological innovation is not put in the service of developing human potential or creating green/sustainable living. Rather it is put in the service of generating ever growing profits. As far as the default mode of the system is concerned, it's all about the bottom line, all the time, and in the long run that the bottom line requires endless compound economic growth. It's not hard to see that this spells destruction for the natural environment.

But that destruction isn't the result of technology, industry, and cities as such (as primitivists would have it). Environmental degradation is the result of the social/political system of capitalism, i.e. an apparatus which generates and uses technology for purposes other than human need and ecological considerations. So the culprit is our political system, not technology or the urban form itself. A sustainable, green socialist society need not dispense with all technologies developed after the emergence of capitalism. That would be absurd. After the revolution, I'd still like to have modern plumbing thank you very much. And aside from improving human lives in innumerable other ways, many technologies enable efficiencies that reduce per capita energy consumption and waste.

And let us not even begin to list the incredible forms of knowledge, association, culture, and so forth that have been enabled by modern technological developments. There's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We should radically change the uses that capitalism puts technology to. And we should radically change the way that technological innovation proceeds under capitalism, and put in the service of worthier goals. And, to be sure, many technologies currently in vogue in capitalist societies will need to be abandoned, chief among them the personal automobile as a primary means for each individual to get around. So much for primitivism.

So if I'm right, that leaves us with the city as an ideal form of socialist community. I've set this up as a negative, indirect argument for the city using the process of elimination. But I don't think that's the main thing the city has going for it.

Aside from the environmental gains to be made from consolidating space, eliminating waste, and creating efficiencies from the shared use of public institutions and utilities, there are social and political benefits that attach to city life as well. As Davis points out, the possibilities for spontaneous social interaction and the propensity to feel a sense of shared fate make the urban form an excellent accompaniment to the socialist ideal of a free community of equals, or an association of free producers. Furthermore, if socialist politics privilege the common good and public wealth over private gain and individual greed, then cities are an excellent physical embodiment of the socialist ideal. Rather than hiding our interdependence on one another, cities lay it bare in a way that other forms of structuring communities do not.

The close affinity between collective self-governance from below and the dense, urban form should not be overlooked either. To some extent, the Occupy movement has certainly born this out. If we want to affirm the fact that we are a community of equals who cooperate together for mutual gain, urban forms are the way to go. There is an implicit disavowal of community and interdependence in low-density suburban forms. The built environment in suburban forms creates an illusion of individual self-sufficiency that encourages toxic political forms of consciousness. At their best, however, cities make it hard to ignore our interdependence. There's something intrinsically valuable, I think, about being aware of the ways that we're profoundly connected and inter-dependent.

Cities also unleash human potential and creativity in ways that no other social form can. The sheer density of interesting and creative people living in close proximity to one another creates the possibility for endless combinations of different approaches, lifestyles, artistic endeavors, and projects. If socialism is about making human development, rather than profit, the priority of social production, I can think of no better means than the best aspects of dense urban spaces.

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