HOUSE
ORGANS
Thinking the Unthinkable
12/04
Joel Kovel
The election of 2004 will be picked over like carrion for years to come;
yet its skeletal outlines are well in place and there to be reflected
upon by anyone with eyes to see. The election represents, in effect,
the interaction of a number of tendencies that have long been observed
and decried by observers on the left, in particular:
A steady, ongoing corruption of the political process, manifest in the
internal moral decay of the Democratic Party, now subject to rampant
pusillanimity and subservience to an increasingly corrupt, confident
Republican Party linked to the Christian Right; the corruption of the
latter now extends to frank criminality as evinced, for example, in
widespread voting fraud;
A parallel corruption of the press, fawningly subservient to state power
and shockingly derelict in presenting elementary facts, much less, their
interpretation, to a bemused and confused public. Swept up in the logic
of entertainment and trivialization, the press may have reached a nadir
in its failure to provide even minimally adequate coverage of the abovementioned
voting fraud.
There are innumerable important details to be considered, which I will
set aside for lack of space. I want to attend, rather, first, to some
of the broad implications of these changes; and second, to the matter
of their cause, as a way of setting the stage for exploring the essential
condition of what is to be done.
By ignoring the voting fraud in Ohio and elsewhere, the official media
let it be known that the collapse of electoral democracy is not newsworthy.
This of course makes them as complicitous in its destruction as a Democratic
Party that would not fight for a fair outcome. In any case, toleration
of the blatant criminality evinced in the last two Presidential elections
means that we have effectively lost the self-corrective mechanism that
has acted like a gyroscope for some two centuries to keep the system
of American representative democracy on keel. Nobody with any sense
will delude him- or herself that bourgeois democracy represents the
finest achievement of civilization. But it has defined a kind of stable
reference against which the parameters of political choice have been
able to take shape The prospect of voting the rascals out of office
has been a kind of foundation on which politics has been constructed.
To lose this possibility means becoming ever more open to an accelerating
radical right trajectory inasmuch as the popular forces which can be
set against the right lose effective means of representation. In this
way, the fascist endgame that many have feared can loom without any
particular coup or dramatic event.
This is not the place to haggle over the meaning of fascism and whether
it applies to contemporary America. Fascism, like any historical formation,
does not appear and reappear as an identifiable species whose inner
genetic mechanism provides a readily recognizable phenotype, as though
it were a kind of warbler being looked out for by birdwatchers. We do
not need a man with a toothbrush mustache, or a balcony, or a military
coup, for fascism to arise, nor are we its external observers. Fascism
is the reconfiguration of bourgeois rule along authoritarian and corporatist
lines once its democratic scaffold has disintegrated. In the doing,
it will engage such legitimating alliances (notably in the present instance,
Christian fundamentalism, with its various crusades against women and
minorities) along with such secondary measures, eg, forms of racism,
mythopoesis, etc, as are necessary to weave together its social fabric.
We are caught up in this, and, inhabiting its inside, cannot be expected
to fully see it for what it is.
I am not claiming that all corrective measures have been exhausted or
that the game, so to speak, is over. Quite to the contrary, numerous
means of affecting events still remain open; indeed, the purpose of
this discussion is to lay bare certain principles by which they may
be realized. But though we are still some way from a totalitarian closure,
the unprecedented degree of criminality endemic to recent elections
and the equally unprecedented degree of cynicism and fatalism with which
this has been greeted tells us that we are undergoing an accelerating
radical/authoritarian right takeover headed in a fascist direction,
and that the prime challenge for contemporary politics is to come to
grips with this.
The spectre of capital
Viewing the degeneration of the mainstream parties and the mainstream
press, one is impressed by certain common systematic features. To go
directly to the point, both are manifestations of the dynamics of capital
breaking through all boundaries in the relentless drive toward accumulation—that
“Moses and the Prophets,” which Marx recognized as the watchword
of the epoch. If capital, crudely put, is “money in motion,”
its essence can be seen in the inexorable changover of politics from
an activity guided by the principle of “one person, one vote,”
to that of “one dollar, one vote”; and, correspondingly,
of the takeover of the media by giant corporate interests. The foundation
of this development is the increasing division of wealth in the United
States. But this division itself is grounded in crisis. Indeed, the
present conjuncture was set into motion by the accumulation crises of
the early 1970s, and may be viewed as the unfolding of the steps taken
to remediate them. As Mickelthwait and Wooldridge describe in their
study of the rise of the right in America:
More generally [contrasted to the rise of right-wing foundations in
the 1970s], virtually everybody with a corner office in corporate America
in the 1970s was moaning about the same things: the economy was in the
doldrums, America was losing its competitive edge abroad, they were
being regulated “up to their necks,” “the other side”
was winning. In 1972, the heads of the 500 biggest companies established
the Business Roundtable to lobby for their interests on trade-union
rights, antitrust, deregulation and taxes.
There was no “right” waiting in its lair to spring loose.
Rather did neoliberalism develop as class struggle from above. One result
of this was to jettison the arrangement that had guided capitalist policy
and configured politics since the 1920s, the “Fordist’ entente
between capital and labor.This was replaced with heightened exploitation
of labor, heightened aggressiveness of capital domestically as well
as internationally, and with the right wing politics to match, all of
which surfaced and took shape with Reagan.
It is important to grasp this as a dialectical process, set into motion
by various conjunctures, and setting into motion other conjunctures
in turn. Those who undertook to radically critique the media in the
80s did so in alarm over its rightward shift and the structural changes
responsible for this, chiefly, the massive consolidation of the great
media conglomerates and the associated loss of alternative voices. These
were the result of the emerging neoliberal consensus, but they also
pointed toward worse. One said back then that if these tendencies were
allowed to proceed unchecked, we were going to get a really bad press
in the future, one that will further suppress alternative voices while
carrying the water of capital—a press, in other words, quite capable
of cynically standing by as the electoral gyroscope that had stabilized
bourgeois democracy for over 200 years is wrecked and thrown on the
scrap-heap. Such a press would not only reflect the rightward shift,
but open new ground for it, by normalizing what would have been viewed
as unthinkable in an earlier day. To repeat an often stated observation,
under prevailing conditions, the Center shifts rightward, in a process
that is disturbingly self-reinforcing.
The question of what is thinkable or not is a vexing reminder of old,
essentially unresolved, debates about “base” and “superstructure.”
As capital lurched into post-Fordism like a great beast of accumulation,
as Reagan took power as its avatar and as Clinton opportunistically
signed aboard as the “responsible” Democrat of the moment,
the next thing we knew, intellectuals in the academy, media and the
state suddenly began spouting, as though by force of magic, self-evident
“truths” that would have been considered despicable in old-fashioned
Fordist times. Ideas like the supreme value of productivity and efficiency
for the working classes; or the imperative for government to abandon
its pretense to taking care of those afflicted by life, began to be
seen as moderate and reasonable. At the same time other remnants of
the recent past became unthinkable, for example, that there could be
something like a guaranteed annual income for all, or as the UN dared
think in 1948, a universal human right which assured among other things,
health care, housing, even the right to meaningful work.
The Contours of Opportunism
It is relatively easy to see the forces pressing in this direction being
those of capital itself. But dialectics postulates the trajectory of
history as the result of an interplay between opposed moments. Thus,
the Right’s strength and the Left’s weakness are not simple
opposites, but a movement in which the strength of one derives from
the weakness of the other. This leads us to examine more closely the
abyss that is the Democratic Party.
Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council did not invent opportunism,
but inherited it and profited from it in an ethos defined by Post-Fordism
and the decline of the democratic media. Opportunism has been a regular
feature of class society in which power is deployed between a central
authority and courtiers who vie for influence. However, power changes
its face as times evolve, becoming under capitalism factored between
state and “market,” where the latter term gets its inverted
commas to indicate that what is entailed are not traditional markets
where producers and consumers meet in open exchange, but a globalized
domain under the aegis of accumulation. The salient feature of capital
from this respect--and it is one that with time steadily grows in importance
to dominate all others--is the relentless drive to extend the domain
of commodity formation to embrace all reality, nature and humanity alike.
What makes an opportunist is the selling out of one’s authentic
values to accommodate the reigning power structure. One thereby advances
that aspect of the self rewarded by centralized power. Just what configures
“authentic values” is of course not transparent, and an
adequate discussion is not possible here. Let me simply say that an
authentic value would be one which contains within itself the universal—ie,
the “Wholeness” of the universe and the fulfilment of human
being that comes from its appropriation, as against the aggrandizement
of the self (or Ego). In an earlier epoch this value structure could
be encapsulated in religious terms, and reached its first great syntheses
in the teachings of Buddha and Christ. Under the regime of capital,
it would have to develop further in order to counter the depredations
of commodity-invasion, else it could not claim to represent the universal.
The first great epoch of socialism addressed the commodification of
human beings into labor power. By resisting this through the building
of working class institutions countermeasures were taken against the
corruption of humanity by capitalist exploitation. But at the same time,
the nascent movements of the Second International fell victim to another
kind of domination, the corporatist insertion of bureaucratic unions
and parties as the mediation of the working class.
The rupture that has led to the abyss of the Democratic Party became
formalized in the now-obscure work of Eduard Bernstein in the now-forgotten
time of 1895. What Bernstein wrote then in Evolutionary Socialism (with
the imprimatur of Frederick Engels in his last years) deserves study
as an object lesson in the degeneration of a great spiritual ideal.
To the extent that Bernstein is remembered at all, it is as the proponent
of the idea that the working class can vote itself into power and achieve
the ends of the revolution without any particular upheaval. This is
indeed what he proposed; but its deeper aspect was revealed in his discussion
of another remark, that “the movement means everything for me
and what is usually called ‘the final aim of socialism’
is nothing.” In defending this statement Bernstein went on to
say that:
I have at no time had an excessive interest in the future, beyond general
principles. My thoughts and my efforts are concerned with the duties
of the present and the near future, and I only busy myself with the
perspectives beyond so far as they give me a line of conduct for suitable
action now.
This was the sort of statement that led Rosa Luxemburg to write scathingly
of Bernstein as an opportunist, in one of the first instances known
to me of the usage of that word. And indeed, Bernstein’s logic
can scarcely be surpassed as an example of contemporary opportunism.
It became the hallmark of Social Democracy and all its cousins, like
the Democrats in the United States. As Luxemburg correctly saw, once
notions like those advanced by Bernstein are put into practice, socialism
is finished, since it is nothing without its “final aim,”
which depends upon the envisioning of a future that is not a mere extension
of the present but its radical negation, not just a rearrangement of
ownership and a reshuffling of social roles, but a new beginning of
society, a “negation of the negation,” to use a term of
Hegel’s that Marx appropriated on a number of occasions and that
deeply guides his thought.
If socialism, as a practical ideal, is finished, then capital’s
reign is rendered practically eternal. The Social Democrat cum Democrat
cum liberal cum “progressive” is trapped in an eternal present
which, denying the future, denies history and impoverishes human existence.
Failure of the imagination—a defect built into contemporary liberalism
at its foundation-- is the real ground of the unthinkability that allows
the work of the propaganda machine to go forward.
The liberal social democrat believes in nothing, then, despite the fine
phrases about “the people.” Nothing, ultimately, is left
to him but self-advancement; this further betrayal of the ideal further
corrupts his moral sense, and renders the liberal the willing instrument
of the violence behind capital’s smooth and abstract façade.
Thus Noske and Ebert, Social Democratic tools of the Junkers in Berlin,
carried out the orders to summarily execute Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht;
thus Clinton gloried in the execution of the brain-damaged Ricky Ray
Lector in 1992, and carried out the wars in the Balkans; thus Kerry
signed on to the invasion of Iraq. And all in vain: the faithlessness
of the liberal compromiser will also be rejected by many voters (irrespective
of electoral fraud) who put faith in an unspeakable yet single-minded
and hence reassuring politician like Bush.
A parallel loss of faith afflicted many followers of the Leninist alternative
to social democracy who, witnessing the degeneration of their own ideal,
also abandoned hope that capital could be overcome, and retreated in
one direction or another. This collapse has, since 1989 (indeed, for
a long time before), been another condition of the seemingly unstoppable
surge of the right.
If that is now to be checked, the lesson is clear: socialism has to
be, so to speak, un-finished; this is less difficult than it seems once
one realizes that it never really got started. The necessity for this
is given in the global ruin wrought by ever-expanding, metastasizing
capital, sufficient to begin arousing new and global forms of resistance,
which now assumes ecological as well as socio-economic form. The faculty
for this remains, as ever, the human imagination, born anew with each
child. And its requirement is the refusal of death-dealing capital,
a negation that clears space for new affirmation. It is time to begin
thinking again, and acting accordingly.
This meant, among other things, not reporting the finding by a Professor
of Statistics that the probability that the large mass of “irregularities”
which favored Bush took place by chance is 1: 150,000,000.
John Mickelthwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation (NY: The Penguin
Press, 2004), 79.
The most influential of these studies was Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky,
Manufacturing Consent (NY: Pantheon, 1988). Ben Bagdikian, The Media
Monopoly (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983), more or less launched the genre,
in response to the beginnings of massive media consolidation.
As President Eisenhower wrote his brother Edgar on May 2, 1956: "Should
any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment
insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not
hear of that party again.... There is a tiny splinter group, of course,
that believes you can do these things. Among them are H.L. Hunt...a
few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman
from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
For a recent survey, see James Ridgeway, It’s All for Sale (Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 2004).
Quoted in David McClellan, ed., Marxism: Essential Writings (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988), 79.
Since the United States has never had enough of a worker’s movement
to field a true Labor Party, the roots of the Democrats lie in populist
soil as well as a wide and ethnically divided working class constituency.
During the New Deal, capital’s near collapse led the Roosevelt
adminstration to forge this into a simulacrum of social democracy, which,
notwithstanding the criticisms launched here, represented the high water
mark of antagonism to capital within the history of the United States;
and indeed, some of its branches, such as the Minnesota Farmer-Labor
Party, were quasi socialist. Post war anticommunism crushed these tendencies
and set the electorally grounded left on its present course. See Joel
Kovel, Red Hunting in the Promised Land (NY: Basic Books, 1994).
For discussion, see Raya Dunayevskaya, The Power of Negativity, Edited
and Introduced by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson. Lanham: Lexington
Books, 2002
For whom “progress” is given the incremental quality that
denies any radical negation of the given. Obviously, within the rubric
of the progressive there are many of an existentially radical persuasion.
It is the “liberal” as compromiser-in-depth, who cannot
envision fundamental alternatives, that we address.
See Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature (London: Zed, 2002).
Mumbai 6/04
The city of Mumbai, scene of the fourth World Social Forum,
occupies a sharply narrowing peninsula jutting into the Arabian Sea.
The once Bombay "beautiful harbor," according to the Portugese
in the 17th century-became the Queen of the Orient, and Britain's City
of Gold after the Suez Canal made it the primary point of entry into
India from the West. Since then, Bombay has never stopped growing, and
in its incarnation as Mumbai (the name of a local goddess chosen in
a surge of national pride by the people of Maharashtra state, of which
it is the capital) is scheduled to become the world's largest metropolis
by 2020. Since globalization broke through India's barriers in 1991,
the peninsula has become a sort of antenna through which capital, whether
as finance, trade or culture, enters the immense country. Torn from
the soil and sucked in by that force field, labor follows, which also
makes the peninsula a kind of narrow-necked funnel into the Promised
Land of fame and fortune. A tiny fraction emerges to glitter in the
sun; while for the rest, ghastly crowding and squalor is the rule
What a mess! If Another World is Possible, as the WSF insists, then
another Mumbai must be possible, too. But at first impression this appears
the wildest dream imaginable. The peninsula, feathery on the map, assaults
the visitor on the ground with an appalling facticity. Already variously
estimated between twelve and sixteen million, Mumbai blasts the senses
in every way. "Overwhelming" was the word most resorted to
by non-Indians at the Forum to describe their reaction to Mumbai: overwhelming
in sulfurous, cacaphonous traffic, overwhelming in sheer numbers of
people everywhere, overwhelming in the fetid ambience of pollution,
and most of all, overwhelming in the spectacle of its poverty.
There are undoubtedly other places in the South where poverty is as
absolutely dire as that of Mumbai, but I can imagine none where the
poor live so much on the road. There are four lane highways in Mumbai
where the outer two have become occupied by squatters who erect multistorey
shacks out of urban flotsam and jetsam. Elsewhere, for what seems mile
after mile, people simply camp out in the street (Mike Davis has estimated
that the poor of Mumbai have to cope with one toilet seat for 2000 people),
with cooking fires and children sleeping inches from passing vehicles.
A phenomenal amount of petty commerce takes place in the road, as young
men attempt to squeeze ever-diminishing amounts of value from the oceans
of over-produced commodities that define the economic geography of our
time, like the chap who set up a card table in the D.N. Road near our
hotel with some thirty used books, there to make his fortune. Needless
to say, in the aggregate the street commerce significantly worsens traffic
and pollution. As a side effect, crossing the street becomes a death-defying
sport. I was told that sixty people were killed last year by the red
buses that efficiently, cheaply and brutally carry the population to
unmarked destinations, but the wonder is that sixty times that number
are not run down every day.
Worst of all, at any rate for those of uneasy conscience like myself,
is the Mumbai begging industry (for which, see Rohatyn Mistry's great
A Fine Balance). Chiefly carried out by women and the very young, this
has become a perennially demoralizing experience for the sojourner from
the First World. One squirms inwardly to begin with at the tremendous
disparities in wealth between the Indian masses and the North; and the
mendicants see to it that the torment is externalized. The tiny hands
touching one's shoes or plucking at one's sleeve, the exquisite child-mothers
with their babies exposed to the choking air that come up to your taxi
at traffic lights or jams, or follow you as you walk, as one did for
a full mile as we strolled on the harbor road, repeating in that gentle,
maddening voice, "Sah, sah," and rubbing the stomach. There
is a sepulchral woman I could swear I saw in a hundred different places,
cloaked or rather shrouded in grey, face grey, too, and fine-featured
with sunken-cheeks and zombie eyes. If you give to one, it seems that
dozens materialize and surround you with their imprecations. Thus do
numberless human stories and struggles become reduced to a single awful
reminder of the injustice that rules the world, turns some of the poorest
people on earth into antagonists, and hurls into one's face the gravity
of the work before us.
Is another Mumbai possible?
Well, yes, since Mumbai is by no means simply a mess. It is, after all,
a very great city, as great as New York, which is also a mess and its
homologue across the space of uneven development. And greatness in a
city resides in the dispersed heart of its people and not its banks,
five-star hotels, or towers-these rendered by the Brits in a gorgeous
and syncretic "Indo-Saracenic" style, which is rapidly being
overtaken by marble, glass and steel temples to capital. India is currently
riding a jazzed-up and unprecedented boom, as the neoliberal intrusion
that began in 1991 finally takes hold, enriching some two per cent of
the population while the remainder awaits predictable further ruin.
The guidebooks may celebrate Mumbai's success-stories, its high-end
real estate, as expensive as New York and Tokyo, its dream machine of
Bollywood that surpasses the US film industry in sheer quantity and
exuberance, and its bill boards, some stretching several hundred feet
across the road, celebrating the latest IPO or mutual fund. But I would
celebrate the heroism of the producers of Mumbai. These are the real
soul of the city. Through all their tribulations, they never seem defeated
but muster an astounding degree of resilience, ingenuity and solidarity.
As I watched the artisans chiseling furniture in mini-factories next
to the road, or the cabbies collectively puttering on their antique
(though Indian-made and natural gas-driven) cars, or the women conjuring
up meals in the road, or the street merchants packing up their productat
the end of the day, taking millions and millions of commodities off
the roads and putting them god-knows-where, and waiting, hopefully,
for the next day, I started to see, not the "marks of weakness,
marks of woe" observed by Blake as he walked through a London that
was the late-18th century version of Mumbai, but another level of the
Blakean vision: a kind of sleeping giant, its limbs scattered, waiting
to be drawn together and awakened.
The World Social Forum, which asserts a claim to be that awakener, first
assembled in 2001 as a counterpoise to the World Economic Forum, the
yearly gathering of the Big Eight countries and their Satraps and Viziers
for the purpose of enhancing accumulation on a planetary scale. But
global capital engenders global resistance, and while the big capitalists
schmoozed in the extreme, secure luxury of Davos, Switzerland, a diverse
opposition came together in in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 15,000 the first
year, 30,000 in 2002, and 75,000 in 2003, preparing the way for the
continent-hop to India, where estimates of this year's attendance ran
from 80,000 to 125, 000. (Next year, the WSF returns to Porto Alegre.)
There's a structural ambiguity to the opposition rendered by the WSF,
however. Yes it is for and, to a degree, of the people. But a certain
organization of the people is necessary for any gathering so vast, complex
and ambitious; and the elements of this are provided by a formation,
the Non-Governmental Organization, that itself has proliferated under
the conditions of the neoliberal regime, sometimes under the moniker
of Civil Society. I recall hearing that there were some 2,500 NGO's
at the Mumbai conference center, which seems about right, given the
swarm of booths, banners and leaflets announcing one good work after
another.
Beyond question there were a lot of excellent people at the WSF, from
my friends at Anthra, who teach peasants how to give veterinary care
to goats, to trade union groups protecting the dignity of workers afflicted
with HIV, Japanese antinuclear activists, a great number of organizations
promoting an end to the exploitation of child labor, or championing
the rights of women, or opposing the privatization of water, or promoting
the liberation of the 250,000,000 Dalits of India (a.k.a. Untouchables),
no doubt the largest and longest-oppressed group in history.
But then there were groups whose names were not resonant with radical
potential, like the All India Insurance Employee's Association, or the
Lokavidya Knowledge Society, or the Maharashtra Shelter of Love Charitable
Trust. And there were others integrated with the state, like the Kitakyushu
Forum on Asian Women, established with a special fund from the Japanese
government and recognized as a Foundation by the Ministry of Labor;
and still other groups that are not NGO's at all, but more complex formations
like various international configurations of trade unions or political
parties. There was, for example, substantial presence by the Communist
Party of India (Marxist), the dominant political force in the states
of West Bengal and Kerala. Estimable the CPI(M) may be, however, no
one would confuse it for a fresh, radical initiative on the world stage,
or one that has earned the right to march under the banner of Another
World is Possible.
Now whatever the particulars of the internal politics of the WSF-and
I know virtually nothing about the subject-the fact remains that an
organization of this sort can have neither transparency nor internal
democracy from below. Moreover, the influence of NGOs of every stripe
and size, along with political parties, governmental agencies, and foundations
(for example, the Ford Foundation, major lifeline of many NGOs, was
in Mumbai keeping a keen eye on the proceedings), virtually ensures
a bureaucratic modus operandi. Given these structural limits, the notion
of the possible other world seems more like a lowest common denominator,
an abstraction to paper over differences rather than the coherent articulation
of a transforming vision. The rallying cry, like any signifier repeated
often enough without concrete relation to what it signifies, becomes
grating and eventually self-mocking. All right already! One wants to
say: Just what other world do you have in mind? Is it the neo-Gandhian
world of subsistence integrity? The bureaucratically administered, social-democratic
world of fossilized Marxist-Leninist parties? The world of the foundations
that stand behind the NGO's and mediates them with capital? Or "civil
society," within whose hopeless vagueness the needs of capital
for rationalization and legitimation can take refuge?
It was salutory then to see the rising of serious opposition to WSF
within the event itself. One began to hear of the MR--"Mumbai Resistance"--and
its intention to hold a parallel gathering, from the moment of arrival,
and saw evidence of its presence on the surreal train rides out to the
venue, in the shape of boldly painted slogans like "GLOBALIZATION
CANNOT BE HUMANIZED - MR." Because of bureaucratic paralysis, the
WSF itself had hardly a sign posted in the teeming city; whereas the
MR, lean and mean, simply went out, bought the necessary paints and
brushes, and, heedless of licenses and permission from the authorities,
sent cadre off to mark up the walls.
Alas, I never got to the MR counter-conference; the flesh was simply
too weak in face of Mumbai logistics. But discussions and various circulated
materials revealed its core to be a network of South Asian Maoist organizations
with a more consistent line on imperialism than the somewhat vacillating
WSF, and a common feature repellent to most if not all of the WSF's
constituents, namely, willingness to undertake armed struggle. I was
struck, too, by the serious and self-effacing character of those who
espoused these tendencies, which include significant ventures in Nepal,
central India (generally under the rubric of Naxalites, or the Communist
Party of India Marxist-Leninist), Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, as well
as movements in the Philippines associated with the name of Jose Maria
Sison. Given the overall tenor of the global struggle, it strikes me
as timorous and self-defeating not to include such people in the debate.
Considerable attention was given to the differences between the Mumbai
WSF and the previous versions in Porto Alegre. Not having attended the
Brazilian version, I can say little about this distinction, which generally,
speaking, goes like this: That Porto Alegre was more attuned to the
panels and formal sessions, Mumbai, to the action in the street, which
never ceased or even slowed no matter what was being said inside the
meetings. Of course, this is at best a relative matter, and has to take
into account the extreme variety of the more than 1200 panels at Mumbai,
which ranged from crashing boredom in cavernous halls to intense and
highly creative workshops. The distinction would hardly be worth mentioning
did it not highlight what seems to me to be the most important phenomenon
of the whole experience-the movement of the people.
I mean, literal movement, as the precondition for the social movement,
the stirring of the giant form-a movement that never stopped so long
as I was there, that pulsated up and down with cheerful cacophony, and
engaged perhaps the most concentratedly diverse assemblage of human
beings ever assembled. Remember, there were 130 different countries
at the WSF, and one of them, the host, India, with I would estimate
about three quarters of the whole, is a continent unto itself, containing
numberless varieties of humanity. Put all these folks, a great many
having been silenced throughout their lives, together, and give them
license to make themselves heard, to march, shout, recount, costume,
sing, dance, theatricize, manifest (and to drum, drum, drum), and we
get a spectacle unspoken of outside the work of Mikhail Mikhailovitch
Bakhtin, apostle of the carnivalesque.
Bakhtin, of course, never saw or heard of such a carnival as took place
January, 2004, in Mumbai. His model was the medieval variant, as transformed
by the imagination of Rabelais, which emphasized a sensual, scatological-erotic
element foreign to the WSF. But the authentic pulse of Bakhtin's carnival
is the movement from below and its regenerative power. This is based,
writes Bakhtin,
on the conception of the world as eternally unfinished: a world dying
and being born at the same time, possessing as it were two bodies. The
dual image combining praise and abuse seeks to grasp the very moment
of this change, the transfer from the old to the new, from death to
life. Such an image crowns and uncrowns at the same moment. In the development
of class society such a conception of the world can only be expressed
in unofficial culture. There is no place for it in the culture of the
ruling classes; here praise and abuse are clearly divided and static,
for official culture is founded on the principle of an immovable and
unchanging hierarchy in which the higher and lower never merge.
That immediacy, that contact, the rubbing against each other, the mixing
of ways of being (like the New York rap group which drew in an Angolan
musician, all surrounded by awestruck Indians)--that fermenting, unpredictable
and self-generated in interaction with one another-this to me was the
true heart of the Social Forum, which will endure after all the pontifications
and rhetoric: it is the authentic, "unofficial" germ of the
other, better world. Joel Kovel
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, translated by Helene Iswolsky
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) p.166
A New CNS @ 15 3/04
Capitalism Nature Socialism enters its second fifteen years
with a new publisher and a new name in the editor's box. With regard
to the former, the changes are before your eyes, and we hope you are
pleased with the results. As for the latter, some words of introduction
are here in order, since the new name is mine.
About ten years ago, increasingly preoccupied with the realization that
the ecological crisis was driven by the accumulation of capital, I sought
an intellectual community wherein this notion could be developed. CNS
seemed then--as it still does today--the ideal forum for the purpose.
And so I contacted Jim O'Connor and found that home. The journal and
its mission became precious to me, so much so that when Jim announced
that he was taking a leave to complete a major writing project, I volunteered
to do what I could to carry forward his vision in his absence. I have
been buoyed during the transition by expressions of solidarity from
the CNS community, international in scope and joined in common appreciation
of the great task before us and of the legacy Jim has built.
Let me set down how I understand my charge. CNS, in the words of its
mission statement, is "an international red-green journal of theory
and politics." There are three qualifiers here, which form an integral
whole: the journal is international; it is red-green; and it is dedicated
to theory and politics, regarded as two moments of a dialectical figure.
Thus:
- CNS is international because it responds to a crisis that affects
the whole world, and because the crisis can only be overcome if humanity-all
the nations, genders, identities, all the parts that immanently comprise
the whole-comes together into a new unity-in-diversity of planetary
proportion. Capitalism has always been a world-system; now the epoch
of ecological crisis represents a radically new development in which
for the first time in the billion years of life on earth the activity
of one species dramatically affects the entirety of the globe. More,
this has accelerated at a sickening pace in the last 30 years or so,
in tandem with the so-called epoch of globalization. This we now understand
to be not only a set of processes affecting economy and society on a
planetary scale, but also the introduction of new forms of ecological
destabilization across great distances-viz, the finding that polar bears
have the highest concentrations of dioxin of any species. There is nothing
new in the fact that human societies can foul their nest, and that this
can even lead to episodic collapse, a process that occurred in Mesopotamia
millennia before Saddam Hussein. What is new is the prospect of a single,
globalized production system leading to the incipient breakdown of planetary
ecosystems as a whole-and it follows, of the civilizations grounded
in those ecosystems. Thus imperialism, globalized capital, and the ecological
crisis are different facets of the same world-historical moment. It
is the mission of this journal to remain cognizant of this scale of
things-to not just bear witness but to be a voice for all those around
the world who would reclaim history from its capitalist usurpers.
Nor do we opt for the fashionable ideology of "thinking globally
and acting locally." It is, to be sure, necessary to attend to
local action, not least because if there is to be a unity-in-diversity
beyond the grasp of the dominant system, the diversity has to be genuinely
democratic, and this can only arise from a respect for place and the
fine grain of communal existence. But a world of simple localities is
a nostalgic fantasy which neither has nor deserves a chance of survival.
We are, after all, a species of six biilion, which has gone this far
in the metabolism with nature and cannot turn back without catastrophic
consequences. A new world society that rationally attends to the interactions
within and between humanity and nature needs to be made. Here a true
diversity will prevail--not the artificial negativity of consumerism,
but the integration of individuality into a new universal, the "species-being"
of a creature who creates universally.
- CNS is red-green because the present epoch manifests a dimension to
imperialism and capital expansion hitherto scarce appreciated, namely,
that this occurs in relation to nature as well as humanity. Or, since
humans are natural creatures, we locate the problem at the interface
between the human and nonhuman moments of nature, as it takes now one
and now another form, combining and recombining into the numberless
manifestations of the ecological crisis. The reason this afflicts us
now is, succinctly, that the earth has become increasingly unable to
buffer the destabilizing effects of production, which chaotically expand
throughout the capitalist ecumene. Ecological destabilization takes
place across a fluid boundary by no means restricted to environmental
breakdowns such as species loss, global warming, and the impending scarcity
of non-renewable energy sources. It occurs also in lived space-the spaces
of communities and cities, of human bonds and identities, and in the
subjective spaces between ourselves and nature, which is to say, in
nature as we represent it and recognize it. Therefore the crisis is
no less spiritual and cultural than it is political-economic. The same
has to be said for capital, which is not so much an economic system
in itself as the cancerous hypertrophy, imposition and insinuation of
the value-term into all aspects of human existence. Capital is not inherently
an economy, though it has one in spades, and unlike any other: a monstrous
transformation of production into a demiurge imposing abstract domination
over society and drowning it in the "icy waters of egotistical
calculation." It is the totality of capitalist relations and not
any singular economic law that sets into motion the cold state violences,
wild addictions and nightmarish fundamentalisms which haunt our times.
"Red" and "green" represent different ways of radically
contending with these developments, the former essentially in terms
of political economy, the latter essentially in terms of the defense
of lived space. There are historical and sociological reasons for this,
in that red ecological movements are branches of the tree stemming from
Marxian socialism while green movements tend to have anarchist genealogies.
In our view the red and green perspectives are each necessary because
they grasp a real aspect of the crisis; yet they are also individually
incomplete and fail to comprehend the crisis as a whole. We see the
role of CNS as providing the space for the coming together of radical
ecologies so that motion toward the whole can occur. We do this in the
categories we set forth, and in regard to the diversity of texts we
accommodate.
We have called ourselves a "journal of socialist ecology,"
but we are equally a journal of "ecological socialism," or
ecosocialism. Our ecology is socialist because we regard "nature"
as engaging human construction, because the nature we inhabit has histories,
and because said histories are the workings out of labor in various
degrees of alienation and class struggle. And so we "redden the
green." Our socialism is ecological"greening the red"-because
in contrast to "first-epoch" socialisms we attend to the neglected
use-value side of things: to qualities, needs, aesthetics and lived
life as these enter into production and offset the fetishism of exchange
and abstract labor. Ecological socialism does not rearrange the economy,
therefore: it transforms the economy and overcomes it by seeing the
cardinal goal of production as the making of integral and flourishing
ecosystems rather than commodities.
- That CNS would be dedicated to theory and politics follows directly
from the above reasoning, for just as green and red perspectives are
both necessary yet incomplete, so are theory and practice incomplete
in isolation from each other. We begin with the Eleventh Thesis, that
the point is to change the world and not merely to interpret it. But
we interpret this proposition to mean that one only properly understands
the world from the vantage of changing it, which is to say, through
active struggle. It goes withut saying that we can only change the world
on the basis of interpreting it, and the better we interpret, the more
worthy the change. Theory is a valid form of practice and valid practice
incorporates theory, which is, literally, a vantage place from which
to appropriate reality.
The vision of ecological socialism, achingly far from present realization,
needs to be continually framed concretely in the light of the here and
now. We do not disparage any good-willed effort to make this sad world
a better place. But we insist on hewing to Marx's youthful precept of
a "ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses:
The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict
with the powers that be." We are therefore open to everything and
bound by nothing except respect for the truth, high standards of scholarship,
and refusal to accept the mutilation of humanity and nature. And so
we also refuse the comfortable nihilism that proclaims there can be
no alternative to the ecocidal regime of capital. We do not know what
the [eco]socialism that sits at the end of the chain of signifiers making
up this journal's title will look like on the ground, nor, it follows,
how to draw exactly the path from here to there. But there are neither
logical, historical nor moral grounds to countenance the vulgar propaganda
that capital is as far as humanity can go, and we mean to give voice
to the positing of alternatives.
Jim O'Connor made CNS open not just to a wide range of viewpoints within
the rubric of socialist ecology, but to a wide range of genres as well.
The present issue, (which was mainly assembled by Jim, Barbara Laurence
and myself, reflects this catholicity, with Philosophizing,studies close
to the ground of struggle, examination of various episodes in the "history
of nature," critiques of various movements that have arisen to
counter the incursions of the dominant system, historical reflections
on struggles gone by, active argumentation and dialogue, and fiction.
We plan also to add an interview feature allowing an informal look at
the lives and works of leading figures in radical ecology, as well as
an expanded book review section, that includes thematically organized
review-essays along with shorter reviews.
We remain especially interested in the work of younger scholars and
activists-and, it needs to be continually emphasized, in work that integrates
the question of gender into radical ecology. This is not an empty exercise
in political correctness. The class system which eventuated in capitalism
began with, and has never ceased to embody, the violent assertion of
male perogative. Every move onward of the class system has involved
one turn or another in the gender system, and vice versa. Accordingly
the fates of women and nature have been intertwined in the twofold alienation
where women mediate nature to men while men devalue and exploit female
forms of labor as "mere" nature. An ecological politics that
is insensitive to this nexus cannot call itself radical.
We have no choice at all as to where we are thrown into history, and
one immense choice as to whether and how we are to transform history.
These are terrible, wonderful times, when an old order is dying and
a new one waits to be born. I am privileged to be able to work with
the CNS community as we try to bring this better world into being.
Joel Kovel
