Intellectuals and the Struggle for Socialism from Below

I've been thinking a lot of about the role of intellectuals (and theorists in particular) in the struggle for socialism. There has been a lot of ink spilled over this question within the Marxist tradition and beyond. I don't pretend to address this topic in any comprehensive way. What follows are merely a couple of reflections aimed at helping me clarify my thinking about these matters.

One way to get into this problem would be to frame it in terms of theory and practice. To ask what role theorists should play is, in some sense, to ask what role theory should play in revolutionary practice. As far as I'm concerned, some of the best things said about this particular topic are addressed in Alasdair MacIntyre's short pamphlet, "What is Marxist Theory For?". Of course, there are plenty of other, more detailed treatments around. Those theorists interested in working-class self-emancipation tend to give the best accounts here, in my view. Michael Löwy's The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx and Hal Draper's work on self-emancipation, and Norman Geras's excellent essay "Marxism and Proletarian Self-Emancipation" all give detailed treatments of the problematic of theory and practice in Marxism with an eye to do justice to the ideal of working-class self-emancipation. Lenin's discussion of these questions in What is to be Done? is helpful. So is the work of Lukács and Gramsci.

Interesting though these questions are, I don't want to talk about the role of theorists in these particular terms. It's not for any systematic or political reason that I want avoid addressing the problem in these terms. It's just that my particular academic sphere of activity requires that I articulate myself in other ways, and I think it's worth attempting to think through these problems in vocabularies other than the standard Marxist lexicon.

One way to gloss the core of self-emancipation and the notion of socialism from below would be to read it as a democratic approach to social transformation--as opposed to the technocratic, administrative, and elitist approach known as socialism from above. Now, don't misunderstand me. By "democracy" I mean something completely different from the electoral procedures and political institutions that we see in many capitalist societies. In other words, by "democracy" I don't mean bourgeois democracy. Neither do I have in mind the typical liberal conception of democracy--often called the "aggregative" model of democracy--according to which democracy is merely a fair procedure for the aggregation of pre-political individual "preferences" (no different from consumer "preferences"). This aggregative conception understands democracy as a kind of market, takes individual "preferences" as given, assumes that individual preferences are merely private wants, and attempts to "reconcile" these conflicting individual preferences with each other through an aggregative mechanism such as voting. When I say "democratic" I have nothing like the above in mind.

When I say that socialism from below is radically democratic, it is because it involves a class-for-itself actively participating in and (determining the course of) the struggle to create society anew. It involves the conscious, deliberate action of the mass of working people who bring the basic structure society under their direct democratic control.

Contrast this with two other views of what socialism is and how it is won: utopian socialism and Stalinism. The utopian socialists started off with a blueprint of what a new society should look like down to every last detail. Fourier, for example, had a detailed system for how garbage collection would work that involved only children because, he reasoned, children liked to play in the dirt so why shouldn't they like to be the ones to handle all of the garbage in society? There are lots of things to say about the schemes of the utopian socialists, but what we want to say here is that they were all to some extent elitist or paternalistic. They didn't look to the masses of working people as a source of energy, insight and transformative power. And why should they have? They already had all of the substantive details worked out--what kind of lives people would live in a properly socialist society, what they would do, how they would do it, what they would produce, etc. etc. Accordingly many of the utopians detested genuine democracy. Many of them looked to the powers that be--kings, capitalists, state administrators--in an effort to win them through persuasion to implement their favored blueprint for a new society.

Stalinism is a complex phenomenon, but for our purposes we can boil it down to some rather simple elements. Whereas Marx and Engels distinguished themselves in the 19th Century by opposing the utopians, the Blanquists, and everyone else who chafed against the ideal of working-class self-emancipation, Stalinists cast all this aside. They reverted to pre-Marxist ideas that saw socialism nothing more than a specific form of bureaucratic administration from above. So long as private ownership of the means of production was abolished, and a form of bureaucratic state administration put in its place, a society was "socialist". The only question for Stalinists is: what sort of policies should the administrators implement from above? In some ways, their question had the same structure as the utopians. Both presumed that a layer of elites should sit above the masses and decide substantive matters such as what sort of life people should lead, what should get produced, how it should be produced, etc. etc. Socialism, for both of them, becomes little more than a social-engineering problem best solved by "experts" and technocrats.

In obsessing over the first-order question "what, substantively speaking, should society be like in all its details?" they completely elide the second-order question "but who should decide this?". It is sensitivity to this second question that distinguishes those who advocate socialism from below.

This brings me to the role of radical intellectuals (theorists, academics or whatever).

What we can already see is that socialism from below, in being radically democratic, refuses to put forward a substantive blueprint that pre-empts the collective deliberations of radicalized workers involved in the fight for a new society. Theorists take on an elitist, technocratic perspective when they pre-empt the decisions of a mass movement and propose a substantive picture of what people's lives should be like in a new society. Part of the point of socialism--genuine socialism--is to give the masses of people (for the first time) the power to genuinely control their own lives and determine collectively the course that society will take. It is about bringing the basic structure of society under the collective control of the activated masses. Now, there may be some role for intellectuals to play in proposing various institutional schemes to their fellows in the midst of collective discussions among workers engaged in building a new society. If these proposals find favor then it's possible that they might be implemented. But this is the sort of collective discussion that one has after the revolution. That's not where we are right now.

What, then, is the role of radical intellectuals qua intellectuals? Social criticism has got to be part of what they do. That can take many forms: immanent critique of dominant ideologies, criticism of ideas that function to stabilize or legitimate the status quo, criticism of historical narratives that obscure material conditions and class struggle, etc. Radical intellectuals can contribute to a better understanding of the status quo (the better to change it). But is the role of radical intellectuals purely negative or merely descriptive?

I don't think so. Radical intellectuals--qua intellectuals--can and must do more than criticize. But, and this is crucial, what they say in a "positive" spirit must be mediated by the sorts of criticism outlined above. Whatever they say in a positive spirit must grow out of a critique of the dominant order, it must be rooted in the practical activity of movements engaged in challenging it. It can't issue from nowhere and neither can it be the mere daydreams of the theorist.

What do I have in mind by "positive"? Let me introduce a distinction here to try to sharpen my claims. Call a positive claim "substantive" if it has determinate content that has to do with precisely what kind of life people should live, what activities they should be involved in if they are to flourish, etc. A substantive question might be: "What kind of clothing should be produced in a socialist society?" That is not a question intellectuals can answer a priori--that is a question that people must determine themselves, democratically, in a socialist society. Contrast that with "procedural" claims that are formal and lack determinate content about the good life, etc. Procedural matters have to with form and structure, not content and substance. A procedural/formal question might be: "what form of social relations among persons would have to obtain for a society to properly be called socialist?".

What I want to say is that, by and large, intellectuals (or anyone else for that matter) should not be in the business of deciding substantive matters themselves--substantive matters should be determined by the masses of working people themselves. Procedural matters--that is, formal or structural matters--are better suited to intellectual reflection. Of course, socialist democracy can not be conceived as purely formal or procedural--it would necessarily exclude certain kinds of substantive outcomes (i.e. those that involved oppression, exploitation, alienation, etc.). But socialism from below requires leaving a space open for people to determine the vast majority of substantive matters themselves.

Radical theorists, as I say, have no business pre-empting the democratic deliberations of workers by attempting to settle substantive matters ex ante. There are normative and epistemic reasons why they can't do this. Normatively speaking it is elitist and paternalistic, as we've seen. Epistemically, however, theorists can't know everything they'd need to know in order to get these questions right. Many of the concrete practical questions of how to build certain kinds of new, radically democratic social institutions is not one that can be fruitfully addressed from where we stand today.

However, radical theorists should, I think, see themselves as involved in the project of thinking through formal questions such as "what sort of social relations would obtain among persons in a socialist society?". Now, the way they address such questions cannot be abstract or idiosyncratic. It must be closely tied to the critical enterprise and the practical activity of movements on the ground. We only learn about what kind of social relations we want by seeing, in practice, what we don't want: exploitation, oppression, domination, etc. Only a critical analysis of exploitation and oppression in all of their material richness could put intellectuals--or anyone for that matter--in a position to address questions about the form of relations that would characterize some of the basic structural features of a socialist society.

Defenders of capitalism and the status quo attack socialists for advocating an impossible ideal. They say that there is no possible or desirable alternative to the market. They say that a complex society cannot be structured in any other way. They say that genuine socialist democracy would be nothing but the rule of the ignorant and irrational, so they extol the virtues of "experts". Others argue that socialist democracy is itself oppressive because it elides difference.

Radical intellectuals can and must see their role--in part--as dispatching these claims. Socialism is not impossible, and it is a worthwhile exercise to say why not. Genuine democratic planning of production is both possible and desirable, and there is nothing utopian or elitist about attempts to show that that is so. Showing that democracy is desirable involves clarifying and defending the democratic ideal. It doesn't involve giving a blueprint of socialist institutions, but it does mean explaining that democracy is not aggregation of fixed individual preferences. It does mean distinguishing real democracy from the institutions of bourgeois elections. It means showing the epistemic benefits of real democratic deliberation as embodied in practices such as collective assessment. It means emphasizing the collective learning process that occurs in and through mass movements that democratically self-determine their course of action.

Real democracy is deliberative and takes as a basic assumption that people's individual "preferences" aren't fixed. It assumes, rather, that they can change in the course of argument and debate (and through struggle). This model of democracy doesn't, of course, mean that the way we ought engage with the ruling class (or any oppressor) through patient argument and deliberation. The ruling class has to be removed by a movement that forces them out. But within that movement, and within the new society brought under the democratic control of the working class, we need democracy. We don't need "neutral" or "fair" procedures that attempt to reconcile fixed individual preferences. Democracy is much more than the simple act of voting. Neither is it mere discussion--because not all discussions are democratic. We need collective, deliberative processes aimed at producing action, whereby the better argument carries the day, where all of the relevant perspectives and experiences and ideas can be put forward free from oppression, marginalization, and all the rest. Clarifying our thinking about basic form socialist democracy--while steering clear of pre-empting matters of substance best decided by workers themselves--does not seem to me out of the reach of the radical intellectual engaged in the struggle for socialism from below.

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The Trotskyist Tradition and Black Liberation

Afro-Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James

A commonplace caricature of Marxism teaches us that Marxists are crude class-reductionists who have nothing interesting to add to the understanding of (or the struggle to overthrow) the oppression of Black people (or any other oppressed group for that matter). To be sure, it's quite true that some self-proclaimed "Marxists" have endorsed colorblind, and even racist views. Indeed, as is well-known, the majority of the Second International socialist parties—the "Marxist" German Social Democratic Party included—defended chauvinism, nationalism and imperialist war when WWI broke out. Then there's the legacy of Stalinism and its offshoots. It is undeniable that there have been people with terrible views who have called themselves Marxists.

But all this shows is that the Marxist tradition is, like any tradition worth engaging with, a contested one. It would be nothing but unthinking Cold War slander to paint the whole tradition with one brush, for this overlooks and ignores the sharp debates and disagreements within the tradition itself. To be a Marxist today is to stand for the best that the tradition has to offer—according to some view about what "best" means. It means putting some view forward about what's essential to Marxism, about what the "real" Marxist tradition is. That is unavoidable—one cannot stand for everything that has claimed the mantle of Marxism for that would mean embracing an incoherent jumble of opposed views.


Still, while it is important to acknowledge the presence of colorblindness and even outright racism within the Marxist tradition, it is nonetheless important not to make it sound as if the tradition has mostly been on the wrong side of such questions. That is not so, and to insinuate that it is would be to concede too much to the caricature of Marxism that many endorse today.

Whatever its faults, the Stalinist line in the 1930s embodied in the political work of the Communist Party of the United States, was that Black people constituted an oppressed, colonized nation which stood in need of national self-determination. The CP took this line seriously and fought against racial oppression and did some remarkable political work—in spite of its top-down organizational structure and awful political line on other matters. Likewise, Maoism in the United States should be criticized for many things, but (in general) ignoring the oppression of Black people and colonized peoples is not one of them. What this shows is that there is a rich tradition within Marxism of rigorous theorizing about racial oppression and a long track record of waging a fierce fight against it.

The Trotskyist tradition within Marxism is no exception. This tradition has some of the sharpest and most nuanced treatments of the question of Black liberation in the United States. It's uncompromising internationalism and defense of socialism from below is one of the reasons for its continuing vitality. Let's glance at a handful of important interventions that document some of the early ideas about Black liberation in the Trotskyist tradition.

The first we'll examine comes from some of Leon Trotsky writings on Black Nationalism from the early 1930s. Trotsky criticizes the Stalinist line that Black people in the US constitute an oppressed nation who, in order to be fully liberated, need to win their own separate nation on the basis of self-determination. His complaint is, first of all, that this line is abstract and paternalistic. Whether it make sense to frame liberation in terms of "national self-determination" depends on what it is that Black people themselves want and are willing to struggle for. As Trotsky puts it:

"We do, of course, not obligate the Negroes to become a nation; if they are, then that is a question of their consciousness, that is, what they desire and what they strive for. We say: If the Negroes want that then we must fight against imperialism to the last drop of blood, so that they gain the right, wherever and how they please, to separate a piece of land for themselves. The fact that they are today not a majority in any state does not matter. It is not a question of the authority of the states but of the Negroes."

If Black people themselves stand up and demand national liberation, then that is what socialists should help fight for. But the role of socialists isn't to demand that Black people form their own separate nation. Whether that makes sense is a question of Black consciousness, levels of struggle and, most importantly, what the masses of Black people themselves demand.

Mugshot of a young Leon Trotsky

 Trotsky also argues that:

"...today the white workers in relation to the Negroes are the oppressors, scoundrels, who persecute the black and the yellow, hold them in contempt and lynch them. When the Negro workers today unite with their own petty bourgeois that is because they are not yet sufficiently developed to defend their elementary rights. To the workers in the Southern states the liberal demand for ‘social, political and economic equality’ would undoubtedly mean progress..."

This flies in the face of the claim that Marxism, as such, denies that white workers play a direct role in the oppression of other workers. It denies no such thing. Neither does it deny that some working men play a direct role in oppressing women. The claims to the effect that intra-working class oppression benefits the ruling class do not negate this—they merely set it in context and show an important social function that oppression plays. Marxists are interested not merely in describing who does what to whom, but in understanding how social relations function within the system.

Trotsky also explicitly denounces colorblindness:

The argument that the slogan for ‘self-determination’ [for Black people] leads away from the class basis is an adaptation to the ideology of the white workers. The Negro can be developed to a class standpoint only when the white worker is educated. On the whole the question of the colonial people is in the first instance a question of the development of the metropolitan worker.

Trotsky's argument is that solidarity in the struggle against the ruling class is only possible on the condition that white workers reject racism and enlist themselves actively in the fight against racial oppression. To say that the struggle against racial oppression distracts from class, says Trotsky, is a concession to the racism of some working class whites. There is much more to say about this interesting document, but this should suffice to undermine the common misconception that Marxists have (traditionally) had nothing to add to the understanding of Black oppression. On the contrary, Trotsky's incisive contributions to these debates are still important today.

Another interesting document from the Trotskyist tradition is CLR James's "The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States" (1948). James, one of the most important Marxist theorists of the 20th century, is perhaps best known for his monumental work on the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins. Here is a representative quotation from James's resolution that gives you a sense of the basic line he defended on racial oppression:

We say, number one, that the Negro struggle, the independent Negro struggle, has a vitality and a validity of its own; that it has deep historic roots in the past of America and in present struggles; it has an organic political perspective, along which it is traveling, to one degree or another, and everything shows that at the present time it is traveling with great speed and vigor.

We say, number two, that this independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation, despite the fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights, and is not led necessarily either by the organized labor movement or the Marxist party.

We say, number three, and this is the most important, that it is able to exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary proletariat, that it has got a great contribution to make to the development of the proletariat in the United States, and that it is in itself a constituent part of the struggle for socialism.

This piece, written in 1948, proved to be remarkably prescient. The "Civil Rights Movement" proved to have a powerful influence upon progressive struggles of all kinds. It rejuvenated an ailing Left recovering from the lacerations of McCarthyism and gave inspiration and impetus to struggles as diverse as the Women's Liberation movement as well as the American Indian Movement.

To be sure, James wrote this document in an effort to distinguish the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) line from others on the Left. There was someone to argue with, which implies that James's line was by no means universally accepted across the broader Marxist Left.

But, as I said above, to be a Marxist today—as in the 1940s—is not to try to redeem everything that everyone who ever called themselves a Marxist did or said. Such a project would make little sense. To be a Marxist today is to stand for the best that the tradition has to offer.

First edition of Lenin's Imperialism

We've taken a look at what Trotsky and James had to say about racial oppression and black liberation. But there are many other important works on these topics in the Trotskyist tradition, broadly construed. Lenin's theory of imperialism, for example, was a huge contribution to the Marxist tradition and was (and continues to be) the best basic framework for understanding colonial domination, neo-colonial practices, war, the exploitation of people in the global South, and so on---all of which are central understanding modern racism. Lenin's text was a fierce polemic against the positively awful politics of those so-called "Marxists" who chose to support their "own" national governments in inter-imperialist struggles. It was this analysis of imperialism that paved the way for a new international---the Third, specifically Communist International---that decisively broke with the nationalist, reformist and Euro-centrism of the Second International.

It's hard to overstate the importance the theory of imperialism has had for anti-colonial and self-determination struggles in what was called the "Third World". Inasmuch as the rise of modern racism is linked to slavery and colonial expansion, the Marxist theory of imperialism has been a massive contribution to the struggle for the liberation of non-white peoples all over the world. Lenin's views on self-determination and colonialism are also important and enduring for those thinking through the dialectics of black liberation today.

In a similar fashion, Trotsky's theories of uneven/combined development and permanent revolution are also important to making sense of the complex, global nature of modern racism. With a wooden, linear "stagist" version of Marxism in hand---such as that adopted by some Second International socialists and, later, by Stalinists---one comes dangerously close to "classic" apologies for colonialism by Europeans (e.g. such and such people are not yet "ready" and need to go through a definite stage of capitalist development which we will provide from above, etc.).

This "stagist" interpretation of history entails that oppressed colonial and semi-colonial peoples must first undergo a classic bourgeois revolution, followed by a lengthy period of capitalist development, at which point then---and only then---will they be "mature" enough to take control of their own destiny through socialist revolution. Trotsky breaks completely with this mechanical schema. In giving a dialectical analysis of international relations and their combined and uneven development paths, Trotsky paved the way for thinking critically about how to relate working class struggles in the highly developed capitalist nations to the emancipatory struggles of poor peasants and workers in oppressed, colonial and semi-colonial nations.

Anti-colonial militants during the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya

His analysis has been less influential than Lenin's work on imperialism among contemporary thinkers working in the area generally known as "post colonial studies". But it is surely true that the (relative) marginalization of Trotsky's approach here follows from the general marginalization of Trotskyism worldwide during the period of white-hot anti-colonial struggle in the 60s. Still, be that as it may, the theory of combined and uneven development (and permanent revolution) have been one of many ways of developing the core of Marxism to adequately address questions of national oppression, colonialism and its afterlives, imperialist competition and north/south relations, or what some Marxists would call core/periphery relations. To the extent that the black freedom struggle in the US takes on a stridently internationalist character each time struggle reaches a fever pitch, Trotsky's theories of global capitalist development merit consideration as contributions to the project of Black liberation.

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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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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, fomented mass organizations dedicated to stopping evictions, and put together a movement of Unemployed Councils that collected popular discontent and channeled it into a large-scale 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.

Harry Haywood

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 radical (and 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 the 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 has, for most of the 20th century, 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 brutal violence when they merely attempted to move out of "designated" areas of the city---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 can tear asunder existing racist ideologies. 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, colorblind goal of "unity" encourages accommodation with the racist order by designating 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 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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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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Is the Property of the 1% Legitimate?

The dominant ideology in our society would have us believe that whatever results from capitalist markets is presumptively just. The idea is that whatever the 1% gets from the market is authoritatively theirs. Thus, pre-tax income appears as something "natural" and taxation appears as something alien, which swoops in from the outside to "intervene" and "interfere" with the "natural" workings of the market.

Some accept this ideology, even as they call for increased taxation on the 1%. While arguing that the present wealth of the 1% is excessive, many continue to assume that pre-tax incomes in capitalist societies are in some sense "natural" and presumptively legitimate. This is expressed in the following thought: "maybe the rich should be taxed more heavily, but at least some of they have is legitimate theirs."

Now, within the horizons of this liberal perspective, I certainly agree that the wealth of the 1% is in some sense "excessive". I also agree that unmet human needs override any ownership claims that might be invoked to argue against re-distributive taxation in a capitalist society. But this concedes far too much to the rich and powerful. We shouldn't just say that the wealth of the 1% is excessive; we should say that it is illegitimate through and through.

To talk of redistribution, after all, is to talk of altering some prior production and distribution of goods. But how does that prior production and distribution come about? And what makes it legitimate in the first place?

It's obvious that the 1% has a vested interest in making sure that the majority of the population think that their wealth is legitimate. It hardly matters whether it's aristocratic privilege, family lineage, racial or sexual supremacy that makes a group dominant. Throughout history dominant groups always try to preserve the basis of their dominance.

Now, dominant groups have at least two (analytically distinct, but in practice interwoven) means of maintaining their dominance. The first is obvious. Dominant groups typically monopolize control of the means of exerting physical repression. If you push too hard against the status quo, dominant groups will always (if possible) push back with physical repression in order to protect their dominant status. This explains the violent force used against the Occupy movement all over the country.

But dominant groups can't maintain their dominance through naked violence alone, at least not for long. Thus all ruling classes are compelled to stabilize their rule by telling stories to the ruled about why their power and privilege is legitimate. As Marx and Engels put it in The German Ideology:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.

Think of the "divine right" of Kings, the "positive good" doctrine that purported to justify the dominance of Slave owners, the so-called "civilizing mission" that justified colonial domination, or the supposedly "scientific" expertise that justifies the power of bureaucracies. The stories the rich tell about the supposed legitimacy of their wealth are part of a long tradition of lying to the masses to the protect privilege and power of the few.

What stories do the rich tell in our society? By my count there are at least four. Now, it's worth noting that growing numbers of people don't need to be told that these stories are bogus. Millions of people are coming around to the idea that the wealth of the 1% isn't simply excessive, but fundamentally illegitimate. Still, it's worthwhile from time to time to puncture the self-image and self-justifications of those in power. It's worthwhile to go through and debunk the familiar myths handed down from above that purport to show us that the wealth of the ruling class is legitimate.

One common story is that the members of the 1% deserve what they have because they earned it. More precisely, they deserve what they get from the market because it represents their just reward for productive activity. According to this story, the market rewards productive contributions. Thus, the rich deserve their wealth because it must be their proportional reward for their productive contributions to society. Unfortunately this is nothing but a fairy tale. Set aside the bank bailouts showered upon failing financial elites. Capitalists—even the ideal capitalists of the textbook—earn from owning, not from working. The pure capitalist makes precisely zero productive contributions to society and does no productive labor. They pay others to do it and reap the rewards of what they produce. So it can't be that the profits raked in by capitalists are what they deserve for productive contributions to society, since they need not do anything productive.

The second story, related to the first, is that the wealth of the rich is legitimate because it represent their reward for having taken bold risks. The thought is this: capitalists assume risk when they invest their money, so whatever they get in profits must be legitimate. They could have lost it all, but they didn't, so what they get is legitimately theirs. But though this story is told often enough, it is actually quite obscure, even by its own lights. And then there's the fact that workers are forced to assume all of the risk (and then some) assumed by their employer, even though they are entitled to precisely zero of the benefits if the risk pays off. This story is ultimately unconvincing. Rather than proving that the wealth of the 1% is legitimate, upon reflection it undermines the legitimacy of their riches.

But there's a third story that we've yet to consider. That story is that the wealth of the 1% is legitimate because it arises from nothing except free market exchanges. If a voluntary exchange between two consenting adults is unobjectionable, and the accumulation of wealth by the rich arises from nothing but consensual market transactions, it must follow that their wealth is legitimately theirs. And anyone who disagrees must think that a third party should paternalistically "prohibit capitalist acts between consenting adults". But that can't be right. So the wealth of the 1% is legitimate.

Though this argument is rhetorically powerful at first glance, it falls apart rather quickly on closer inspection. First of all, in order for anything to be transferred or exchanged legitimately, it has to already be legitimate property. The market can't create legitimate titles; it can only circulate existing titles. But how did unowned things come to be legitimate property in the first place? How did, for example, natural resources or large swaths of lame come to be private property? By what historical process did society's means of production come to be the private property at all? A quick glance at history shows that violence, brute force, conquest, war, genocide, colonial expropriation and slavery explain the origins of this property. This is what Marx called "primitive accumulation." Insofar as the wealth of the 1% rests on a history of violence and obvious injustice, it is illegitimate, even if acquired through "voluntary" exchanges.

But there's an even deeper problem with this argument. Even if the historical legacy of "primitive accumulation" didn't undermine the legitimacy of the origins of existing property, the idea that capitalism is nothing but an aggregation of genuinely "free" market transactions is ludicrous. Unequal relations of power are constitutive of market exchanges. The equality of citizens deliberative together in a democratic general assembly is never reproduced in the market place. If I, for example, gouge you for a bottle of water during a drought, and you relent because there's nothing else for you to do but cough up $200 for the water, that is a "free" market exchange. You consent to buy the water and I consent to sell it. There are, to be sure, massive asymmetries of power between us, but the transaction satisfies the criterion of "consensual capitalist act between adults." But it is clearly illegitimate for me to profit from the misery and vulnerability of others. Less extreme cases bear the same problems. Workers, who by definition own and control no significant means of production, are forced to work for a capitalist to earn a living, even if they can choose which capitalist work for. But that mere fact gives capitalists a large degree of social power over workers. The labor contract struck between the individual, atomized worker and the employer, then, is hardly free or fair. But it fits the bill of "consensual capitalist acts between adults", because what other choice does the isolated, individual worker have except to consent to her exploitation so that she can earn a living? So much for the virtues of "free" market exchanges as a way of conferring legitimacy on the wealth of the 1%.

The fourth story is that the wealth of the rich is legitimate because it is necessary to produce the greatest overall amount of beneficial economic consequences for all. That is, massive wealth for the 1% is a necessary precondition for economic growth and prosperity. Without it, they would have no incentive to do all of the allegedly marvelous things that they do which, we're told, tend to produce jobs and prosperity for all.

For my money, this is by far the weakest argument of them all. As we've seen, capitalists don't need to do any work at all. They need not do anything productive to earn their profits. So, this argument doesn't even get off the ground, because it assumes that we actually need capitalists to have prosperity and a functioning system of social production. But the fact is that we don't. We do all the work: the boss needs us, but we don't need the boss.

The most obvious objection to this argument, however, arises out of the fact that we're in the midst of a protracted global economic crisis right now. And, perversely, profits have soared to record levels amidst sky-high unemployment and economic misery for the 99%. What's more, the misery of the 99% is directly tied to the record profits which have been largely reaped through bailouts and austerity. But this argument suggests that the cause of our misery is necessary to produce something the 99% does not presently enjoy, namely prosperity and economic security.

A more specific version of the above argument is that the wealth of capitalists is necessary to incentivize innovation. But this argument rests on nothing. It's not as if we have experimental data that prove that all non-capitalist means of generating innovations are flawed. Open-source software is an obvious counter-example, and there are too many others to name. Moreover, as I've already explained, capitalists don't actually do the innovating. That's what they pay R&D departments for (if, in fact, they pay them... often corporate R&D is public subsidized through universities). So the innovation incentive argument simply doesn't show us that the wealth of the 1% is legitimate.

Things aren't looking so good for the idea that the wealth of the 1% is legitimate. It is being undermined daily. After all, the mere fact that the State has to resort to acts of violence to repress resistance and protest from below shows that it's ideological hegemony is fractured and incomplete.

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