-----Original Message----- From: "Eubulides" <paraconsistent at comcast.net> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Date: Sat, 7 Feb 2004 12:34:34 -0800 Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Activistism piece
>
>
> [ My first attempt at reply -yesterday- crashed when one of my dogs
> decided to settle down for a nap on my surge protector and hit the off
> switch. Hopefully, this one makes it...]
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Todd Archer" <todda39 at hotmail.com>
>
> The article never mentioned how or why those chemicals get into the
> food-chain, only that they're "byproducts of the industrial age". Would a
> class-analysis a la Marx help figure that out and what might be done? Or
> would it just be completely erroneous and a waste of time?
>
>
> ========================
>
> Well it's not necessarily the place of daily news journalism to get
> involved in articulating the causal dynamics of the
> capital/technology/science/environment nexus, so criticizing the piece for
> what it doesn't talk about does not seem to help.
>
> One of the reasons I posted the piece is that the problems it describes
> are going to be with us even if capitalism ended today. In that sense,
> what are the theories we need to know to solve those *types* of problems,
> irrespective of whether we've gotten rid of capitalism or not. Yeah, we
> can engage in all kinds of hand waiving about which is the one true
> analysis that will enable us to solve the problem[s] [or is it to mitigate
> and adapt to them?]. In that sense, while it would definitely help that
> lost of us had M, B & F on our shelves, not all the challenges, such as
> the ones the article mentioned, we face can be squeezed within their
> frames.
>
>
> >
> I'm terribly sorry I can't match your erudition, Ian, with some quote or
> paraphrase of a main idea from Marx about chemicals entering the food
> chain.
> I'm sure it's in there somewhere, but I'm just not a smart enough guy to
> find it.
>
> ===================================
>
> Don't apologize, you're as smart as anyone else on the list [a fine
> collection of knuckleheads, actually; even if we're grumpy quite a bit of
> the time].
>
> "The same holds good for every kind of refuse resulting from a
> labour-process, so far at least as such refuse cannot be further employed
> as a means in the production of new and independent use-values. Such an
> employment of refuse may be seen in the large machine works at Manchester,
> where mountains of iron turnings are carted away to the foundry in the
> evening, in order the next morning to re-appear in the workshops as solid
> masses of iron...
>
> "Every advance in Chemistry not only multiplies the number of useful
> materials and the useful applications of those already known, thus
> extending with the growth of capital its sphere of investment. It teaches
> at the same time how to throw the excrements of the processes of
> production and consumption back again into the circle of the process of
> reproduction, and thus, without any previous outlay of capital, creates
> new matter for capital."
>
> ============================
>
> Let's say capitalism collapses tomorrow. How much of the above helps us
> deal with cleaning up the various toxicities we have produced? I can hear
> Carrol now, saying we don't use quantum mechanic to calculate how to build
> a bridge and that's precisely my point. In that sense critically studying
> the works of Robert Ayres:
> http://www.insead.edu/CMER/team/profiles/ayres.htm and the industrial
> ecology paradigm, say, is every bit as important for us as studying Smith,
> Ricardo and Carey were for Marx--in order to be more effective in dealing
> with just one category of problems.
>
> I have a friend who would be more than capable of understanding M, B &F if
> he had the time to read them, but he'd tell us all in no time flat "how
> would they help me deal with stopping the trade/production of toxic wastes
> associated with current technologies and motivating others to see the
> importance of that struggle while avoiding the use of terminologies and
> attitudes that turn people off?" That is to say, there's a division of
> labor amongst activists and theoreticians that is not working for lefties
> and anti-intellectualism is only one piece of that problem. Indeed, it may
> be the case that communicating with each other more effectively about our
> dol is a possible big step in overcoming the challenges posed by the
> latter.
>
> "Under conditions of scarcity, so traditional Marxism maintains, class
> society is inescapable, its property structures settle questions of
> distribution, and discussion of justice is therefore futile, for a
> political movement whose task must be to overturn class society, *rather
> than to decide which of the many criteria by which it comes out unjust is
> the right one to use to condemn it*....We can no longer believe the
> factual premisses of those conclusions about the practical [ir]relevance
> of the study of norms...We can no longer rely on technology to fix things
> for us: if they can be fixed, then we have to fix them, through hard
> theoretical and political labor." [G.A. Cohen]
>
> What Cohen just misses mentioning is that it is precisely theorizing the
> consequences of science/technology, as much as theorizing class, race,
> gender, law etc. that must be part and parcel of the division of labor by
> activists and if, in the process of dialogue with activists who speak
> in/from idioms/theories that aren't reducible to or translatable by the
> idioms of nineteenth century theorists we shouldn't be too quick to reach
> for the charge of anti-intellectualism. There are a plethora of idioms in
> Big Science that we have to deal with if we're to dismantle "the larger
> society's division between mental and physical labor?" Not all of those
> idioms and heuristics are going to be consistent with or reducible to the
> analytical frames created by M, B & F, nor should we insist that they
> should be.
>
>
> >
> Yes, these authors wrote in a very different time; one could say a
> "simpler"
> time. And human society keeps growing and growing more complex too,
> right?
> So does that mean constantly, and earlier and earlier as society keeps
> changing, throwing out what's been observed and theorized? There are no
> "basic observations" that are valid any more? Marx wrote about class
> society, primarily the one with which he was most familiar; has class
> disappeared then? How about capitalism? It's changed, certainly, but
> aren't the basics (private ownership, appropriation of surplus labour,
> etc.)
> still there?
>
> BTW, don't try to sell this line of obsolesence to the Christians about
> their "Old Man" . . . .
>
> ====================
>
> All I'm asserting is that we need to substantially enlarge what
> constitutes our "basic observations" without getting into zero-sum debates
> as to which observations should take a greater priority when engaging in
> organizing. It is self-defeating to insist that every activist be fluent
> in M, B & F as a criteria for being an activist-cum-intellectual. I'm not
> suggesting by any means that that is what Doug is implying. As Doug will
> be the first to tell you, there are very radical ways of criticizing our
> current epoch without have to rely on the vocabulary found in Capital
> Vols. I-III. Deepening that communicative competence is part and parcel of
> navigating the various idioms used to deal with the staggering variety of
> observations we're capable of making about contemporary societies.
>
>
>
>
>
> >Do we shut down the machines,
> >complexify our technologies to the point where only Einstein's can
> >understand how they work no matter how much we democratize big science
> and
> >access to 'higher' education, what?
>
> M (and I'm guessing), B, and F didn't talk about these particular
> questions,
> but about "bigger" matters that, I'm assuming, lie behind them.
>
> These questions you ask, for all the good of talking about them, how can
> we
> even hope to do anything about them when we can't even get the tiniest say
> in such basic stuff as how to make sure people can be fed, clothed, and
> housed with a fair degree of human dignity?
>
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be demanding a Theory of
> Everything
> to Fix Everything. The radical analyses I've read come closest to that
> (closer than liberal moralising anyway), but that doesn't make them
> perfect
> weapons to take on absolutely any problem.
>
> Todd
>
> ====================
>
> Just the opposite; I'm asserting that there is no
> socio-political-econo-ecological-techno Theory of Everything under which
> all the struggles to build a better world for ourselves and those who come
> after us can be subsumed. Understanding various
> vocabularies/theories/analyses is necessary in order to sustain creative
> dialogue rather than the cacophony we have now which, to some extent, is a
> product of the very attempt theorize the one true Theory of Everything
> which would then serve as the catalyst for *the* collective action that
> would solve The One Big Problem.
>
> 'It's important to encourage better thinking, says Jiramanus, "so
> hippie-to-yuppie doesn't happen again." As she points out, without an
> analysis of what's really wrong with the world - or a vision of the better
> world you're trying to create - people have no reason to continue being
> activists once a particular campaign is over. In this way, activist-ism
> plus single-issue politics can end up defeating itself. Activistism is
> tedious, and its foot soldiers suffer constant burnout. Thinking, after
> all, is engaging; were it encouraged, Jiramanus pleads, "We'd all be
> enjoying ourselves a bit more."'
> http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Action.html
>
> To which I would juxtapose:
>
> "We cannot believe that, even if the proletariat were the last class and
> Marxism its authentic representative, its vision of history is *the*
> vision that will definitely bring an end to all discussion. The relativity
> of historical knowledge is not only related to its production by a class,
> it is also related to its production in a culture, at a given epoch, and
> the latter cannot simply be reduced to the former." [Cornelius
> Castoriadis]
>
> The "hippie-to-yuppie" dynamic occurred largely due to what happened in
> May 1968 and it's aftermath. Castoradius wrote the above between 1964 and
> 1965. One can only hope that those whose inauguration into radical
> politics then do not repeat the mistakes made by the French CP when trying
> to understand and participate in the activism of those who were born well
> after such events transpired.
>
>
> Htbw,
>
> Ian
>
>
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