Category: Politics

Mandela

I’ve just been asked this:

Steve – I’m curious as to your thoughts on Nelson Mandela, a modern-day Lincoln, who freed a lot more folks without a full blown war. Like Lincoln, flawed, but as Lincoln promised before his assassination, no hatred and no recriminations for losing 27 years in a prison on a bogus charge.

My answer is: kind of mixed. I mean, personally, one can’t help but admire him: he was determined, courageous, and fundamentally principled even where those principles (in my opinion, of course) were misguided. The comparison to Lincoln, however, is misplaced: Lincoln’s task was the destruction of an entire ruling class; Mandela deliberately chose not to destroy the ruling class, but rather to replace elements of it while keeping it in power. It would have been a good analogy to Lincoln if Lincoln had seen his task as making sure there were plenty of black slave owners, instead of (after 1862 at any rate) the ending of the slave holding system. (For the record, the comparison isn’t fair to either of them; they were working under such drastically different conditions that no comparison can reasonably apply.)

Mandela was a profoundly contradictory individual: on the one hand, deeply committed to equality and willing to risk his life for it; on the other, a loyal servant of the system that prevents equality. It’s easy to say, “Oh, yeah, well, so he wasn’t radical enough for you, he was still a great man and helped move things forward.” To which I reply, yes, he was a great man; but if you look at what can only be called the revolutionary situation at the point the ANC came to power–a situation he worked very hard to limit and to direct into channels safe for capitalism–it’s hard to simply say he “moved things forward.”

The outpouring of praise from world leaders is not, I think, just a matter of jumping on the bandwagon because someone popular has died; I think they also recognize that Mendela played a huge role in preserving capitalism in South Africa. You see his handiwork both in the improved conditions of many South Africans, and in the mass murder of striking platinum miners a couple of years ago.

ETA: The World Socialist Web Site has a strong article on Mandela here.

Some Thoughts on the 150th Anniversary of the Gettysburg Address

Abraham Lincoln is one of my heroes, and I make no apologies for that. I am aware of his flaws, both personal, and political.  I do not demand perfection of a hero; rather, when I consider someone a hero, it means I am responding deeply and passionately to that person’s accomplishments and integrity.  Jerry Garcia, in discussing punk rock, remarked, “What’s important is what the music says, not what it doesn’t say.”  A valid standard, in my opinion, to apply to both art, and our understanding of historic characters.

Yes, I know; I’m sounding a little bit defensive.  It is hard not to.  In the milieu of contemporary science fiction, the pressure is constant to fall into line on a whole series of issues–issues that, as anyone who has followed my blog knows, I disagree with strongly.  I do not believe in fighting for a “kindlier, gentler” capitalism; I do not believe in separating the Working Class into disparate pieces and setting them against each other; I do not believe in fighting for increased prosperity among those who are already more prosperous than 90% of us.

I do believe in equality–in equality of opportunity for education, health care, standard of living, and, yes, personal expression.  In equality of whom and how one might love, and, of course, equality before the law.  Lincoln led a part of the human race in taking a huge step forward in the fight for equality, and I honor him for that.  One hundred and fifty years ago today, he made it clear (though this, perhaps, is the least significant aspect of the Address) that he did so knowing exactly what he was doing.

The fight for equality goes on.  My contributions to that fight are insignificant, involving a few blog posts that are unlikely to change anyone’s mind, and maybe–maybe–by telling the truth as best I see the truth, the creation of a story now and then that helps people understand their world a tiny bit better.  Not much, but it is what I do, and I make no apologies for that, either.  As far as I do anything at all, I do not fight for the advancement of one section of the Working Class (and certainly not for a section of the “people” regardless of class!), but for the equality of all human beings, because I believe that is the right thing to do.

If you want to know who is working against equality, look at those who hate Lincoln and you will have a pretty good idea.  The Right Wingers who run as far and as fast as possible from him because he took a stand for freedom, to the pseudo-Leftists who love finding reasons to tear him down because he took action that challenges their comfortable ideas, flowing, generally, from their comfortable lives.

Among those who fought for equality, Abraham Lincoln stands out as a hero, and the Gettysburg Address stands out as a shining example of a critical moment in that fight.  For a good analysis of what it means today, in general, try this.  But for me, personally, it stands as inspiration.  Yes, the fight is worth fighting. And yes, in the fight to build a better future, there are heroes.

 

 

 

But Who is Supposed to Pay for it?

One hears this a lot: Universal health care:  “But who is supposed to pay for it, and why should other people have to blah blah blah.”  Welfare.  Unemployment insurance.  Public education.  “But who is supposed to pay for it, and why should other people have to blah blah blah.”

Okay, I need to get the snide answer out of the way first:  Anyone who asks that question is probably someone who should be paying for it.

There.  I feel better.  Now, let’s get serious.

The inspiration for this post was when Cory Doctorow tweeted a link to this.  Please take a moment to look it over.

My problem, as always, isn’t with the original post–such filth is part of our lives and will be as long as private property defines human relationships.  No, my problem is with the replies.  One thing that is common to them all is an attitude that goes like, “I can justify having this nice thing, even though I’m on welfare, because of…”  And, yeah, all of the justifications are perfectly reasonable, and some of them are tremendously moving.

But why the fuck does it need justifying?   To justify having something nice, decent, useful, means you’ve accepted the fundamental argument:  It is perfectly okay for some people to be rich while others are poor, and the rich must have somehow earned it, and the poor somehow deserve it, and that’s just how the world is.  To accept that argument is to accept the morality handed to us by those who keep their privileged position by exploiting the rest of us.  It makes exactly as much sense as the slave-holder explaining to the slave how wrong violence is.

Let us be clear: Wealth means an accumulation of commodities (generally in the form of money).  Commodities are produced socially.  No individual–particularly the speculating banker, but even the semi-mythical Man-With-A-Vision-Whose-Hard-Work-Turned-His-Vision-Into-A-Fortune-500-Company–ever created wealth.  Wealth is a social phenomenon, and the creation of wealth happens by people working together.  And this, by the way, ignores the whole question of infrastructure:  Your “personal genius” is able to make money because his employees are able to get to work on roads built at public expense, and use basic skills learned at schools run at public expense, and avoid cholera because of water kept pure at public expense, &c &c &c.  Skip all that.  It isn’t the point.

The point is, we, human beings, society, got together and made everything.  Those with vision enough to see how things can be better are important and deserve praise, because they make vital contributions to making things better.  This does not mean they deserve the lion’s share of the wealth created by the rest of us.

One result of an economic system based on private property is that the system will take some number of individuals it can’t use and discard them.  These people do not need to justify having nice things–we need to demand of those who have appropriated our wealth how they justify denying things to these people.  The poor did not create the system that discarded them.

And, for fuck’s sake, when the Working Class gathers its strength and fights for and wins things like social security, unemployment insurance, better public education, public cultural institutions like libraries and museums, and, yes, welfare, do not try to act as if these are gifts of a magnanimous government that is too generous.  The Working Class fought for those things, and paid in blood.

So, reactionaries like the OP above can take their “But Who is Supposed to Pay for it” morality and shove it up their individual asses.  We have earned it all.  We deserve it all.  And someday–I believe sooner rather than later–we will have it all.

A Few Myths About Strikes

A friend just retweeted this link to a web site discussing the negotiations between the striking Minnesota Orchestra and management. It brought a few things to mind that some of you may not know, mostly myths about how to win a strike.

1. “In order to win a strike, the union must win over ‘public opinion.’

Not really, no. Sometimes it can be useful to win over public opinion (as a source of additional income for the strike fund, &c), but it is never decisive.

2. “To win over public opinion, show how willing you are to compromise.”

This goes beyond myth and reaches the level of outright lie. The great labor battles in the past that have, in fact, won over public opinion (whatever that even means), have done so either because the conditions against which the workers were striking were so obviously appalling that anyone with a shred of conscience couldn’t help but support it (various coal strikes and early textile strikes had this), or, more often, by displaying the sort of firm, uncompromising attitude that convinced people they meant business (the Minneapolis General Drivers strike; the sit-down strikes in Flint, Michigan; the South St. Paul packing house strike in the 40’s are good examples).

3. “Workers are too selfish to risk their comfort to support workers in other industries.”

This, if believed by the workers themselves, is the most dangerous myth. In fact, it has been shown again and again that, in a serious battle between labor and management, efforts to reach out for support from the rest of the labor movement will be rewarded. The clearest case of this in reverse was the PATCO strike, which began what can only be called the destruction of the American labor movement. Many air traffic controllers understood instinctively that the effort by Reagan to break their union would be followed by attacks on the rest of the labor movement; and (more importantly) so did workers throughout the country. The refusal of the trade union bureaucracy to enlist the aid of the rest of labor is exactly what led to the destruction of that union–and the subsequent attacks on labor throughout the country until today, for all intents and purposes, there is no labor movement here at all.

During the writers’ strike, the actors’ union and various unions of technical workers were very willing to support the strike (sometimes, it is true, against the wishes of their own leadership); the offers were refused. In the present case, no effort has been made to reach out to stagehands unions, or riggers, or any of the other associated industries. The leaders of the musicians’ union seem determined to fight with one hand, blindfolded, and a foot in a bucket. Management, meanwhile, is using every weapon at their disposal.

I continue to be optimistic. I think there is sufficient growing discontent that a labor movement will grow here in spite of the dead husks of what remains of  the unions hanging around the neck of the working class like millstones. But it will have to be in spite of those unions that, as the musicians’ union is demonstrating, aren’t worth the name.

Idea to Matter to Idea to Matter

WARNING: EPISTEMOLOGY AHEAD!

In the discussion of Post-Modernism (or, more precisely, Post-Structuralism), Chaosprime challenged my argument by making a strong point.  He writes:

As far as this goes, I have yet to get past the blatant contradiction. There’s this maneuver where we want to reject the political program of idealists who want to take no concrete action but talk people into thinking differently which will supposedly produce change, right? So we say, no, philosophical idealism is wrong, it’s material conditions, we should change those. And then we *slip idealism in the back door* by constructing ideas as some kind of airy-fairy thing that is specially excluded from the world. Sorry, that’s no good; can’t have it both ways.

Everything is material; therefore, *ideas are material*. Ideas are a part of the material conditions of existence. Thoughts are a part of the material conditions of existence. You can tell because consequences proceed from them.

Meanwhile, in what has been called my socialist FAQ, Oliver Campbell made the following observation:

First of all, it’s critical that the working class have a high level of political consciousness and culture, something that suffered major blows in Russia as a result of the deaths of the most class conscious workers in the civil war against the White army and the major imperialist powers.

Taken together, these provide an opportunity to explore, for the three of you who are interested, just how I approach the question of the relationship between objective material conditions and subjective ideas.

First, above all, the relationship is dialectical: the objective and the subjective can transform into one another. The point cde Campbell makes is a perfect illustration: The fight of the Bolsheviks took place, above all, in the arena of the consciousness of the Russian working class–it was a fight to bring to the worker an understanding of actual material forces: the conditions of Russian capitalism, the effect of the war, the reasons that, whatever he may have personally wanted to do, Kerensky was incapable of simultaneously fulfilling Russia’s agreement with the Allies, and solving Russia’s problems–it required simultaneous peace and war.  At the same time, he was incapable of solving the problems of the Capitalist Class’s need to end the resistance of the proletariat and the peasantry, and the need for the proletariat and peasantry to have “Peace, bread, and land.”  In the end, it became a clear choice: Lenin or Kornilov; there were no other options because of the correlation of objective, material forces (you don’t get much more objective than bullets and artillery shells; they tend not to care what you’re thinking).  And in the end, the October Revolution happened because the Russian worker and soldier, in particular the Petrograd worker and the soldier in the Petrograd barracks, understood this.

But that understanding took place in the heads of the worker and the soldier.  It is a matter of ideas.  It is subjective, personal.

And then, because of sheer numbers (an objective factor) and above all because of the social position of the worker and the soldier (another objective factor),  those subjective, personal ideas became an objective force: the decisive factor in the creation of a workers’ government.  Indeed, one might say that the subjective thinking of the Bolshevik Party became an objective factor in history at exactly the moment that those thoughts, through a combination of activity and the development of objective events, transformed the thinking of the Russian masses.  (Here I could go into the transformation of quantity into quality, but I shan’t. You’re welcome.)

And after Civil War, and the Wars of Intervention by the Allied Powers, in which the most advanced, most class-conscious elements of the working class were also the most self-sacrificing, the tremendous toll on those forces resulted in a significant lowering of  the consciousness of the working class, which, in turn, became an important factor in permitting the bureaucracy to gain power–that is, an objective factor, part of the material conditions.

So, in fact, Chaosprime is right when he speaks of ideas being part of the material conditions; at least under some conditions.

So, with this in mind, when I speak (admittedly, with a certain contempt) of idealism, what do I mean?

Let us go back to St. Thomas Aquinas for a sterling example of idealism. He argues: 1. God is, by definition, perfect. 2. One attribute of perfection is existence. 3. Therefore God must exist.

But, you see, St. Thomas never actually examined God. He did not measure God’s beard, he did not test God’s DNA, he did not discover how many decibels were produced by God’s speech. He had no God physically before him to investigate, which left him only able to discuss the idea of God.  Hence, the conclusion he draws says nothing about God, it only speaks of the idea of God, which was never in doubt; he then palms a card by obscuring the difference between the idea and the reality.

Marx is often quoted as saying, “Men make history, but not just as they please.” But let us look at the full quote for a moment: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.” (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852)

Being determines consciousness.  Consciousness, through human activity, can also then alter the conditions of being, but not willy-nilly, not arbitrarily in any way it chooses.  However much a Libertarian wishes to create a society with private property but without the State, it cannot happen: private property and the State are mutually dependent, one cannot exist without the other.  However much a “democratic socialist” wishes for socialism to be voted in and to immediately institute universal suffrage, the power and ruthlessness of the capitalist class requires violence and repression and the curtailing of human rights in order to prevent the bloodbath (and far more brutal repression) that inevitably accompanies counter-revolution.  And conscious political activity can neither start nor stop a revolution, only determine its success or failure.

We do not get to simply choose arbitrarily how our history will unfold. When L. Raymond, in the discussion of the Paris Commune, spoke of the reason for its failure as being squabbling among its leaders, without, in turn, explaining what conditions produced that squabbling, we have an example of idealism.  When J. Thomas, who I know means well, creates a long, involved study of what people should do, or what they actually do, piling conclusion upon conclusion upon conclusion, none of which is grounded in the natural and social conditions under which human beings live, we have as clear an example of Scholasticism (a particularly virulent form of idealism) as that provided by St. Thomas.

Our struggle, as human beings, whether political or not, is to continually increase our understanding of how the world actually works, and then to use that understanding to make things better.

And so, Chaosprime, here is my answer: If we explain ideas, above all, by pointing to  material conditions, we are materialists. If we explain material conditions, above all, by pointing to ideas, or we neglect material conditions entirely in our study of ideas, we are idealists.  They interact, they can transform one into the other, but the objective facts are always the prime moving force, and by neglecting that truth, we are failing to understand our world.