[lbo-talk] Thought for the day...

Wojtek S wsoko52 at gmail.com
Wed Oct 27 09:18:44 PDT 2010


RE: 'the total overturn of capitalist relations"

[WS:} http://www.cartoonbank.com/1997/before-we-try-assisted-suicide-mrs-rose-lets-give-the-aspirin-a-chance/invt/116480/

Wojtek

On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 3:08 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
> Comments below.
>
> Sean Andrews:
>
> I think it was Potemkin, but maybe Krondstat had something like that as
> well.
>
> In any case, I hope we're not staking out prospects for revolution on
> children's disgust at cafeteria food: several decades of very bad food have
> proven no such potential to exist.
>
> s
>
> On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 20:22, <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>> My daughter just informed me that elementary schools in Oakland are
> feeding
>> kids meat that McDonalds rejects.
>>
>> Having just watched Food Inc., this revelation has actually pushed me to a
>> state beyond nausea.
>>
>> Carrol dismisses my concerns about quality of food, but didn't Krondstat
>> start over spoiled meat?
>>
>
> Several preliminary points. I dismiss Joanna's complaints about food only to
> the extent that they implicitly sneer at people who love junk food. It's
> mostly junk-food lovers who will have to overthrow the capitalist state. To
> sneer at them, even by tenouous implication is to immortalize capitalism.
>
> That aside, I think Sean is wrong in his hope that we are not "staking out
> prospects for revolution on
> children's disgust at cafeteriaa food." He is wrong for two reasons. The
> first is that our hopes should be focused on _insurrection_ , not on
> revolution. It is a focus on revolution which drags us into arguments about
> "socialism" which are cunter-productive and grounded in a false conception
> both of the scope and limits of theory and of human motivation. The only
> people who think socialism must be the goal of socialist revolution are
> those who (a) are already "revolutionaries" and (b) ignorant of the process
> by which they themselves became socialists. Speculatively, and as a mere
> personal opinion having no theoretical force, I kind of think that socialism
> may work - but to assert _either_ that it will or that it will not work is
> to claim possession of a crystal ball, and neither Marxists nor
> anti-Marxists possess a crystal ball in which they can forecast the future.
> Socialism as a motive for present action is a pipe dream, a fantasy.
>
> But while focus on revolution (i.e. on the total overturn of capitalist
> relations, which will take generations to achieve) - while that is a
> fantasy, focus on insurrection is of vital importance to make sense of
> current activity. But we must take care here: there can be no scenario for,
> not theorization of _any_ future event, let alone an  insurrection to
> overthrow the capitalist state.
>
> Let me go back to the first time I read Vol. I of Capital - at a time when I
> wouldhave said anyone was crazy who thought I would ever become a Marxist. I
> had  the utmost contempt for Marxism while (of coruse) knowing nothing about
> it. Anyhow the book had an immense impact on me - but NOT  at all in the
> direction of socialism. I remember a conversation at the time when I idly
> speculated that perhaps the best future for humanity was a return to some
> moderate form of feudalism. That is, _Capital_, even on first reading, for
> some at least (at least for me) posed the future of humanity in terms of the
> destruction of capitalism. I knew nothing of either Lenin or Luxemburg at
> the time, but what I was feeling was a version of her "socialism or
> barbarism," but in the form of "non-capitalism or barbarism" with no
> particular conception of what that "non-capitalism" would consist of but
> with something like certainty that capitalism not only led to barbarism but
> _was_ barbarism.  Now, a cou0le years later, when I decided that when I
> learned what it was I would be a Marxist and a Leninist, I of course got
> interested in that will-o-the-wisp, that pig in a poke, "Socialsim," and I
> convinced myself and others that the motive for revolution was to achieve a
> socialist society (with all the crystal-ball gazing, all the writing of
> recipes for the cookshops of the future, all the ridiculous assumptions as
> to the "reach" of theory and human thought in general, that such a 'motive'
> implies.) That motive simply butters no parsnips - it is a form of
> self-delusion, like believing in Obama. Marx, if I remember correctly,
> devoted one paragraph in _Capital_ to "socialism," withut using the term.
> That paragraph says all, I think that can usefully bee said abut "socialism"
> in any serious theoretical discussion: It is the realm of freedom (a freedom
> dimly glimpsed by Marx by his knowledge of the embryonic struggles against
> capitalism, and then _used_ by him not as a vision of the fture but as a
> perspective by which to LOOK BACK  on capitalism as a completed whole, as
> history, and therefore able to develop his Critique of Political Economy,
> his demonstration that the onoly escape from the barbarism in which we are
> trapped lies through the utter destruction of capitalism. That is our motive
> -we have only vague hopes of what may follow it. And further, we  do not
> know, we cannot know, whether we will ever win this struggle to smash the
> imfamy. Humanity  may lose: there is nothing in our knowledge of the world,
> of human history, to give any basis for simply assuming "victory." But then,
> for many humans, when it comes t making the actual choice, do prefer to die
> on their feet over living on their knees.
>
> So the gate to a future forhumanity can be summarized as one-two-three many
> insurrections (both successful and failed), and we can see only dimly what
> the possibilities are on the other side of that gate; we can only see that
> capitalism creates the _necessity_ (forget the possibility or desirability)
> of its destruction, and that destruction depends on such insurrections. Thus
> while there is no blueprint for insurrection, we _do_ need a dim image of
> it, analogous to the dim image of socialism Marx posits  in Capital. (And,
> pace Marv and his demand for a _socialist_ insurrection, we need only a dim
> image of insurrection against _any_ modern or semi-modern state, regardless
> of the motives of that insurrection. Hence counter-revolutions can be as
> useful an image as a workers- insurrection. And we have such; moreover, we
> have them echoed, dramatized, made visible in some of the great artworks of
> the 20th-c, of which perhaps Eisenstein's _Potemikin_ is the greatest.
> Brecht catches one aspect of it in the pome in which he points out a tank is
> wonderful weapon but it takes a man to drive it. And Lincoln Stephens caught
> the same aspect in a series of lectures he gave in Paris, which Pound heard
> and condensed in the Cantos.
>
> But Potemkin remains supreme, and I have some difficulty here. I can books
> read to me, and short texts I can read on screen. But there is no way that I
> would ever see Pottemkin again except as a sort of abstract  impredssdionist
> painting in varius shades of green. I'll have to trust to a shaky memory of
> seeing it 55 years ago. And I'm particularly unsure about the precise
> sequence of the exploding lions, the tipping baby carriage, & the sobering
> of the monocled lady in her Sunday best.  They all merge together in my
> memory, and I think there the three echo each other in the film, but I may
> be mistaken. The whole of the Odessa steps episode is choreographed against
> that  baby carriage rolling down the steps, and its final tipping over at
> the bottom is humanity's future plunge into the abysss of barbarism, a
> barbarism initiated both by the rotten meat at the beginning and the
> perfection of dress, movement, and firing of the Cossacks (or was it
> catets?), a part of the sequence which points forward to Tiananmen Square or
> the Chicago Convention Riots of 1968. Thhen, as the baby reaches the bottom
> of the steps, the guns of the Ptemkin finally roar and we see the shattering
> of the Czarist Lions. But without the almost Easter Parade nature of the
> early parts of the Odessa steps sequence the guns would be irrelevant. And
> that returns our focus to the Potemkin as the fleet approaches, with those
> enormous guns (all of modern technology and police brutality caught up
> there). Clearly the Potemkin mutineers are as helpless against that force as
> were the monocled woman and mother of the baby in the Odessa steps against
> the Cossacks.  We see the same terrigying precision as the machinery moves
> the guns into position to destroy the Potemking. And then they do not!
>
> They don't fire: but they could have! It is as though Eisenstein had
> intuited Luxemburg's grim realistm or seen the implications of Marx's final
> word in an interview, not long before his death, with a reporter from the
> U.S. "What is?" the reporter, and after a long pause the old man replied,
> with a single word: Struggle!  And the outcome of struggle, of course, is
> never predictable - that is why we call it a struggle rather than a
> mechanical puzzle. And the men on the Potemkin, however cetain their defeat
> by the approaching fleet, were prepared to fight back - that had already
> been presaged in the firing of their own guns (even though they knew already
> that the fleet was approaching) at the Czarist Lions: a futile gesture of
> revenge for thd death of humanity in the monocoled woman, the fallen mother,
> the crashing baby carriage. The viewers of the movie know that the gaiety at
> the top of the steps is doomed, but (I hope) do not whine about it. In
> Yeats's great poem, Lapis Lazuili, substitute "insurrection" for his
> "things" in:
>
> All things fall and are built again,
> And those that build them again are gay.
>
> Capitalism is not evil - it is merely history. I forget now the thread in
> which one of my posts drew the response from Chuck Grimes, "Fuck You,
> Carrol." But my point then, and in several of my responses to Joanna, is
> that leftists have no right to complain about any aspect of capitalism
> merely to indicate their dislike or the pain it gives them. Too fucking bac.
>
> I want to see the gaiety in such posts, and if there is no gaiety there,
> then they are reactionary.
>
> And yes, why not children's dislike of cafeteria food being what we stake
> our hopes for "revolution" (or rther insurrection) in. Why not. That is
> essentially the way all serius insurrections begin: someone reacts to some
> stimulus, and before anyone knows it, the Insurrection has begun. They can't
> be planned. They always surprise us.  After all, Lenin did not object to the
> spontaneous - that would be spitting against the wind. He objected (and
> rightly) to the WORSHIP of the spontaneous. And he also called Trotsky a
> windbag for saying there would be no more Father Gapons (a purely
> 'spontaneous' event), declaring that if there was to be a revolution there
> must be hundreds of Father Gapons in our future. Why not some grouch who
> complains of food, and mutinies - not whines - in response.
>
> Carrol
>
>
>
>
> This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from
> http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm
>
>
>
> Comments below.
>
>
> Sean Andrews:
>
> I think it was Potemkin, but maybe Krondstat had something like that as
> well.
>
> In any case, I hope we're not staking out prospects for revolution on
> children's disgust at cafeteria food: several decades of very bad food have
> proven no such potential to exist.
>
> s
>
> On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 20:22, <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>> My daughter just informed me that elementary schools in Oakland are
> feeding
>> kids meat that McDonalds rejects.
>>
>> Having just watched Food Inc., this revelation has actually pushed me to a
>> state beyond nausea.
>>
>> Carrol dismisses my concerns about quality of food, but didn't Krondstat
>> start over spoiled meat?
>>
>
> Several preliminary points. I dismiss Joanna's complaints about food only to
> the extent that they implicitly sneer at people who love junk food. It's
> mostly junk-food lovers who will have to overthrow the capitalist state. To
> sneer at them, even by tenouous implication is to immortalize capitalism.
>
> That aside, I think Sean is wrong in his hope that we are not "staking out
> prospects for revolution on
> children's disgust at cafeteriaa food." He is wrong for two reasons. The
> first is that our hopes should be focused on _insurrection_ , not on
> revolution. It is a focus on revolution which drags us into arguments about
> "socialism" which are cunter-productive and grounded in a false conception
> both of the scope and limits of theory and of human motivation. The only
> people who think socialism must be the goal of socialist revolution are
> those who (a) are already "revolutionaries" and (b) ignorant of the process
> by which they themselves became socialists. Speculatively, and as a mere
> personal opinion having no theoretical force, I kind of think that socialism
> may work - but to assert _either_ that it will or that it will not work is
> to claim possession of a crystal ball, and neither Marxists nor
> anti-Marxists possess a crystal ball in which they can forecast the future.
> Socialism as a motive for present action is a pipe dream, a fantasy.
>
> But while focus on revolution (i.e. on the total overturn of capitalist
> relations, which will take generations to achieve) - while that is a
> fantasy, focus on insurrection is of vital importance to make sense of
> current activity. But we must take care here: there can be no scenario for,
> not theorization of _any_ future event, let alone an  insurrection to
> overthrow the capitalist state.
>
> Let me go back to the first time I read Vol. I of Capital - at a time when I
> wouldhave said anyone was crazy who thought I would ever become a Marxist. I
> had  the utmost contempt for Marxism while (of coruse) knowing nothing about
> it. Anyhow the book had an immense impact on me - but NOT  at all in the
> direction of socialism. I remember a conversation at the time when I idly
> speculated that perhaps the best future for humanity was a return to some
> moderate form of feudalism. That is, _Capital_, even on first reading, for
> some at least (at least for me) posed the future of humanity in terms of the
> destruction of capitalism. I knew nothing of either Lenin or Luxemburg at
> the time, but what I was feeling was a version of her "socialism or
> barbarism," but in the form of "non-capitalism or barbarism" with no
> particular conception of what that "non-capitalism" would consist of but
> with something like certainty that capitalism not only led to barbarism but
> _was_ barbarism.  Now, a cou0le years later, when I decided that when I
> learned what it was I would be a Marxist and a Leninist, I of course got
> interested in that will-o-the-wisp, that pig in a poke, "Socialsim," and I
> convinced myself and others that the motive for revolution was to achieve a
> socialist society (with all the crystal-ball gazing, all the writing of
> recipes for the cookshops of the future, all the ridiculous assumptions as
> to the "reach" of theory and human thought in general, that such a 'motive'
> implies.) That motive simply butters no parsnips - it is a form of
> self-delusion, like believing in Obama. Marx, if I remember correctly,
> devoted one paragraph in _Capital_ to "socialism," withut using the term.
> That paragraph says all, I think that can usefully bee said abut "socialism"
> in any serious theoretical discussion: It is the realm of freedom (a freedom
> dimly glimpsed by Marx by his knowledge of the embryonic struggles against
> capitalism, and then _used_ by him not as a vision of the fture but as a
> perspective by which to LOOK BACK  on capitalism as a completed whole, as
> history, and therefore able to develop his Critique of Political Economy,
> his demonstration that the onoly escape from the barbarism in which we are
> trapped lies through the utter destruction of capitalism. That is our motive
> -we have only vague hopes of what may follow it. And further, we  do not
> know, we cannot know, whether we will ever win this struggle to smash the
> imfamy. Humanity  may lose: there is nothing in our knowledge of the world,
> of human history, to give any basis for simply assuming "victory." But then,
> for many humans, when it comes t making the actual choice, do prefer to die
> on their feet over living on their knees.
>
> So the gate to a future forhumanity can be summarized as one-two-three many
> insurrections (both successful and failed), and we can see only dimly what
> the possibilities are on the other side of that gate; we can only see that
> capitalism creates the _necessity_ (forget the possibility or desirability)
> of its destruction, and that destruction depends on such insurrections. Thus
> while there is no blueprint for insurrection, we _do_ need a dim image of
> it, analogous to the dim image of socialism Marx posits  in Capital. (And,
> pace Marv and his demand for a _socialist_ insurrection, we need only a dim
> image of insurrection against _any_ modern or semi-modern state, regardless
> of the motives of that insurrection. Hence counter-revolutions can be as
> useful an image as a workers- insurrection. And we have such; moreover, we
> have them echoed, dramatized, made visible in some of the great artworks of
> the 20th-c, of which perhaps Eisenstein's _Potemikin_ is the greatest.
> Brecht catches one aspect of it in the pome in which he points out a tank is
> wonderful weapon but it takes a man to drive it. And Lincoln Stephens caught
> the same aspect in a series of lectures he gave in Paris, which Pound heard
> and condensed in the Cantos.
>
> But Potemkin remains supreme, and I have some difficulty here. I can books
> read to me, and short texts I can read on screen. But there is no way that I
> would ever see Pottemkin again except as a sort of abstract  impredssdionist
> painting in varius shades of green. I'll have to trust to a shaky memory of
> seeing it 55 years ago. And I'm particularly unsure about the precise
> sequence of the exploding lions, the tipping baby carriage, & the sobering
> of the monocled lady in her Sunday best.  They all merge together in my
> memory, and I think there the three echo each other in the film, but I may
> be mistaken. The whole of the Odessa steps episode is choreographed against
> that  baby carriage rolling down the steps, and its final tipping over at
> the bottom is humanity's future plunge into the abysss of barbarism, a
> barbarism initiated both by the rotten meat at the beginning and the
> perfection of dress, movement, and firing of the Cossacks (or was it
> catets?), a part of the sequence which points forward to Tiananmen Square or
> the Chicago Convention Riots of 1968. Thhen, as the baby reaches the bottom
> of the steps, the guns of the Ptemkin finally roar and we see the shattering
> of the Czarist Lions. But without the almost Easter Parade nature of the
> early parts of the Odessa steps sequence the guns would be irrelevant. And
> that returns our focus to the Potemkin as the fleet approaches, with those
> enormous guns (all of modern technology and police brutality caught up
> there). Clearly the Potemkin mutineers are as helpless against that force as
> were the monocled woman and mother of the baby in the Odessa steps against
> the Cossacks.  We see the same terrigying precision as the machinery moves
> the guns into position to destroy the Potemking. And then they do not!
>
> They don't fire: but they could have! It is as though Eisenstein had
> intuited Luxemburg's grim realistm or seen the implications of Marx's final
> word in an interview, not long before his death, with a reporter from the
> U.S. "What is?" the reporter, and after a long pause the old man replied,
> with a single word: Struggle!  And the outcome of struggle, of course, is
> never predictable - that is why we call it a struggle rather than a
> mechanical puzzle. And the men on the Potemkin, however cetain their defeat
> by the approaching fleet, were prepared to fight back - that had already
> been presaged in the firing of their own guns (even though they knew already
> that the fleet was approaching) at the Czarist Lions: a futile gesture of
> revenge for thd death of humanity in the monocoled woman, the fallen mother,
> the crashing baby carriage. The viewers of the movie know that the gaiety at
> the top of the steps is doomed, but (I hope) do not whine about it. In
> Yeats's great poem, Lapis Lazuili, substitute "insurrection" for his
> "things" in:
>
> All things fall and are built again,
> And those that build them again are gay.
>
> Capitalism is not evil - it is merely history. I forget now the thread in
> which one of my posts drew the response from Chuck Grimes, "Fuck You,
> Carrol." But my point then, and in several of my responses to Joanna, is
> that leftists have no right to complain about any aspect of capitalism
> merely to indicate their dislike or the pain it gives them. Too fucking bac.
>
> I want to see the gaiety in such posts, and if there is no gaiety there,
> then they are reactionary.
>
> And yes, why not children's dislike of cafeteria food being what we stake
> our hopes for "revolution" (or rther insurrection) in. Why not. That is
> essentially the way all serius insurrections begin: someone reacts to some
> stimulus, and before anyone knows it, the Insurrection has begun. They can't
> be planned. They always surprise us.  After all, Lenin did not object to the
> spontaneous - that would be spitting against the wind. He objected (and
> rightly) to the WORSHIP of the spontaneous. And he also called Trotsky a
> windbag for saying there would be no more Father Gapons (a purely
> 'spontaneous' event), declaring that if there was to be a revolution there
> must be hundreds of Father Gapons in our future. Why not some grouch who
> complains of food, and mutinies - not whines - in response.
>
> Carrol
>
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>



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