>> I think you just have to expect that neither electoral nor extra-electoral
>> pressure will accomplish much as long as there are so few leftists.
>> Pressure would be effective with more leftists. The question is how to
>> manufacture them.
>
> You've got a chicken-egg thing here: one reason there are so few leftists
> is that the political system is stacked against us.
Pardon my jargon, but chicken-and-egg situations resolve themselves *dialectically*.
Recently at Holden Village, WA I used an analogy to illustrate how some of us look at the dialectics between structure and agency. I may have already used that analogy here on the list, but I can't locate it. I hope it helps people dispel the notion that it's either structure or agency. Anyway, here's the whole (long) text. People can pick and choose what to read.
* * *
Like European Marxists in the late 19th and early 20th century, many in the English-speaking world (including Marxists) remain trapped in the chicken-and-egg dispute about the "primacy" of structure versus agency.
Among Latin American Marxists -- and I'm mostly thinking of a host of Mexican Marxists and Marxist exiles from Spain, Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, and Peru, the people who raised my generation to political adulthood -- there was a sense that there is a "dialectical" interplay involved here.
Unfortunately, these discussions remain largely an oral tradition in Latin American Marxism. The few texts on the subject have not been translated. The single exception I know of is Sanchez Vazquez's book on Marx's aesthetic ideas, published by Monthly Review, a book I cannot recommend enough. I admit that it may be a difficult read for Americans, mainly because the context is largely alien to us, here and now. But those are the challenges involved in trying to learn from each other's experiences.
I guess the fastest way to update you on the dispute is to present to you with two texts by Marx that can be read as if they are saying incompatible things. I'll then argue, by the use of a personal analogy, that they are not incompatible, but entirely consistent with each other. From the 1859's Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:
“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter
into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely
relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the
development of their material forces of production. The totality of
these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of
society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political
superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the
general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not
the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their
social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain
stage of development, the material productive forces of society come
into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this
merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property
relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.
>From forms of development of the productive forces these relations
turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The
changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the
transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
“In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.
"Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient,[A] feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals' social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation."
Now, from Marx, Karl (1852) The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
So, which one is it? Clearly, our consciousness mediates our deliberate behavior. The production of our lives, as specifically human beings, is directed and regulated by our *purposeful* activity, what we call "labor." I'm not saying that all our behavior is conscious. I'm just saying that to the extent our behavior is truly unconscious, we are not talking about what distinguishes us from the rest of nature. If we have no way to regulate certain aspects of our behavior, then clearly talking about social change is idle. We are just subject to blind natural laws.
Therefore, our consciousness necessarily mediates our behavior as specifically human beings. Now, is our consciousness "determined by" the mode of production, which is largely inherited? Clearly, we are born in a given social setting, where a certain mode or certain modes of production prevail. So, are we stuck then with the existing mode or modes of production? Or is it rather that we make our own history, not arbitrarily, but ultimately it is up to us to shape up our collective destiny?
The answer is both. We are talking here about the relation between two aspects of one and the same social life. We are using the method of abstraction, just like physicists do, to look at society as existing at a point in time. In that case, what we observe is society as constituted by a set of social *structures*. Alternatively, we are looking at society as shifting over a period of time, as a flow, directed by purposeful human actions (i.e. by labor or, to use the term used in the context of political or historical discussions, by *agency*). Clearly, society exists at a point in time and, also, society mutates over time, and it mutates because we humans make it change. That is why I say that the relation between structure and agency is a *dialectical* one. To illustrate the point, consider the following analogy:
An adult man is trying to regulate his body weight without resorting to surgery or some other invasive or drastic method. His body weight -- for simplicity, let’s call it his "anatomy” -- depends on factors that, given existing resources and technology, this man may not be able to alter easily or at all, such as genes, the irreversible effects of aging, etc. Always struggling with my weight and with a history of diabetes in my family, you can easily see where this analogy comes from.
The biological and medical sciences have established that, largely, anatomy conditions metabolic rates. It is obvious that, for example, the range of metabolic rates of large mammals is orders of magnitude different from that of, say, insects. Physiological rates (e.g. how heavy an object I can lift, the rate of food I can digest safely) are bounded by anatomic structures (e.g. the size and composition of my muscles, the size and shape of my stomach). So, anatomy imposes constraints on one’s metabolism and overall physiology. In turn, body metabolism conditions the patterns of calorie intake and expenditure. And, in the case of humans, one’s metabolism and one's lifestyle (the amount of calories we ingest and how active we are over, say, months) conditions -- through brain chemistry -- our overall sense of physical and emotional wellbeing, our momentary thoughts and feelings.
In other words, our psychological states are conditioned by our lifestyle. Our lifestyle is conditioned by our metabolism or physiology. And our physiology is conditioned by our anatomy. Now, that X "conditions" Y doesn't mean that X "determines Y absolutely." It means that X imposes a limiting range of variation to Y, i.e. X "determines" or pins down the range of variation of Y, because Y is allowed to vary, but within the range imposed on it by X.
Again, anatomy conditions physiology, physiology conditions lifestyle, and lifestyle conditions psychology. That is the general direction in which objective structure (in this case, anatomy) affects one individual's agency (our present thoughts, feelings, and actions) through the mediation of our physiology and lifestyle. Now, let me underline here that the existing objective structures are not destiny.
Objective conditions don’t predetermine or determine absolutely the behavior of individuals. If they did, then we’d be like programmed robots. Social change would be impossible. We would be stuck in the conditions that nature endow us with or in the conditions that we inherit historically. It would be impossible for us to alter the status quo. In my illustration -- we would be unable to alter our anatomy.
If we rule out extreme neurosis or psychosis, the cases where the individual may not be able to have any reasonable measure of control over his momentary thoughts and emotions, the individual has choices -- i.e. within constraints, he can manage or change his psychological states. Moreover, to the extent the individual succeeds in exercising control over his thoughts, feelings, and momentary actions, he may be able to expand the room for those choices -- he may be able to expand his freedom or powers. For example, by deliberately focusing his thoughts and emotions, he may be able to sustain a chosen lifestyle, which will then help him lock in the psychological gains in a virtuous cycle.
Hegel had a formulation that is very helpful in understanding how this proceeds. Of course, nowadays, scientists have more precise ways of formulating this same idea. But I still like Hegel's speculative formulation, which I could loosely paraphrase this way: The quality of a structure, the quality of a given organism, i.e. the set of properties that define that structure as what it is in contrast with other things, allows for certain range of variation (in the trivial case, the range of variation is discrete and binary, like a switch, but in many cases it's more like a dial, allowing for very gradual quantitative shifts). A window can be smaller or larger and remain a window. But if the window gets too big as to stop on the floor and function not as an opening to let air or light flow, but as an opening to allow people to get in and out, then the hole on the wall stops being a window and becomes a door or something else. Again, doors can be small or large, yet they will retain their door-ness up to a point.
Etc.
That relation or ratio between the quality of a given structure and the range in which it is allowed to change while remaining the self same thing is what Hegel in his book on Logic called "measure." This view of "measure" is, by the way somewhat prescient, because it turns out to be not a terrible anticipation of the the modern mathematical theory of measure, which is the foundation of today's probability theory. Simply said, a "measure" in mathematics is a mapping from a set of any dimensions to a one-dimensional set (a real number line or an interval in it). Hegel's insight, which actually goes back to philosophical developments in Ancient Greece, is that the leaps in the quality of a structure are prepared by the accumulation of gradual quantitative changes. Thus, sudden changes in one's anatomy are preceded or prepared by long periods during which gradual physiological, lifestyle, and psychological changes accumulate.
We should understand that the psychological choices of the individual trying to control his weight are never absolutely free. They are always bounded or constrained (otherwise they would not be choices!). Or said differently, there is always a certain degree of objectivity or inertia built into the existing physiology and anatomy of the individual that manifests itself as an inability to control one's psychology and, hence, lifestyle. That is why we need little victories. We need to, ASAP, turn our temporary psychological gains into a lifestyle, as I said, to lock in those gains and assist our further efforts to reign on in our psychology. The longer the individual entertains certain ideas and emotions, the longer he accustoms himself to a certain lifestyle, the more this psychological patterns and lifestyle get rooted and solidified, turned into a sort of second nature in his physiology and anatomy. Consequently, the harder it will be for him to alter them. Again, only by regulating his thoughts and emotions in order to consciously and persistently choose his intake and expenditure of calories over a sufficiently long period of time will the individual be capable of gradually reconditioning his physiology and, thereby, his anatomy.
Bad news: anatomy conditions physiology, physiology conditions lifestyle, and lifestyle conditions psychology. Good news: psychological changes, if sustained, can alter lifestyle. Lifestyle changes, if sustained, can alter physiology. And physiological changes, if sustained, can alter anatomy. The individual's behavior -- e.g. his choice of thoughts and emotions -- and through it his conscious choice of calorie consumption and expenditure, is the key to altering his metabolic rate and, thereby, his body weight. Through a series of mediations, this is the general direction in which an individual subjective activity (his practice) modifies the objective structure.
What does this story have to do with the Marxian view of history, of social change? Well, it is actually a very similar story. In the remainder, I will lay this out in a very schematic manner. Things are, of course, more complicated, but I'll state things in the driest manner, because we need to start somewhere.
Marxists view history as a layered organic process. The deepest objective structure of society is given by our ability to produce in general: our ability to produce wealth. That ability is, ultimately, dependent on our understanding of nature (and when I say nature, I don't mean only the natural environment but also our inner or human nature), our ability to conform nature to our designs, our ability to transform nature into something we can use (what we call "wealth"). Clearly, if we have more power over nature, if we can produce more wealth per minute of our life, then the more capable will we be of producing social conditions that fit our higher demands. As I have said, you can think of those deliberately engineered social conditions as a form of wealth: "social wealth." But let us call the former, those deepest structures the production possibilities, productive powers, or productive forces.
The next layer, the economic structures, or what we could also call the economic "institutions" of our society (for example, the fact that we humans rely largely on private ownership and markets, places where people exchange what they own, or that we rely on families, or business firms, or governments to manage certain resources) are largely conditioned by our production possibilities. In turn, our economic institutions condition the legal framework of our society. Also, our legal framework conditions the political configuration of our society. And the political configuration conditions the ideological landscape. This is the causal direction in which objective social structures affect our subjective activity as individuals living in society.
That is the bad news. The good news is that, within the given constraints imposed by those objective social structures, we can alter the ideological landscape. We can change our own minds and, within constraints, we can take specific actions. We can talk to one another. We can argue in the public arena. We can undertake all sorts of civic actions, individually and in small groups. Gradually, we can expand the scope of our activities, organizing, linking groups of people with similar agendas, etc. We can try and shift and reframe the ideological discourse in our communities. We can try and change minds and, through concerted action, we can alter the political configuration of society, the balance of political forces.
Even small changes in this political configuration (e.g. small progress made in local battles, the creation of local or virtual organizations that foster cooperation among us, reading clubs, etc.) can help us lock in our gains and make it easier for us to change minds, unleashing a virtuous cycle. By gradually changing the political structures, within constraints, we can then alter the legal framework of society. Changes in the legal system help us lock in our political gains, and facilitate further political advance. And, looking in the other direction, these legal changes are the vehicles through which, within constraints, we alter the economic institutions in our society. Finally, by refitting our economic institutions, we can unleash our productive powers and expand our freedom. This is the causal direction in which our subjective practice, our struggles as individuals, affect the objective social structures. And again, it proceeds from the gradual accumulation of quantitative gains in the lower-objectivity layers making its way and becoming apparent in the higher objectivity layers as sudden, often unexpected, quality changes.
I will conclude this discussion by referring to yesterday's session on the environment, here in Fireside. We were talking about the role of public policies -- e.g. tax breaks, regulations, etc. -- to foster certain types of choices, by individuals and businesses, in transportation and energy production and use. I was arguing that we couldn't avoid the political struggle, better if guided by a clear policy and legislative agenda, that we couldn't limit ourselves to just changing our individual lifestyle, using more the bike or turning off the lights or eating local, that such individual measures would prove insufficient, because economic, legal, and political structures all conspire for more energy use. It's tempting to be cynical about politics and withdraw into an ever-narrowing comfort zone of individual righteousness, but that is an illusory exit. There's no escape from politics, other than through it. We need to take over our political life and remake it from the inside out.