The Necessity of Political Organization (part 2: What Is an Organization?)

This should have been part 1, but the temporality of thought does not always match up with logical structure. (One of the intrinsic weaknesses of the blog as a mode of publication is that it is organized by temporal succession.)

What is an organization? It is not an emanation of an Idea (or of an ensemble of ideas called a Program), nor is it a Thing-in-Itself (or an End-in-itself). It is an ensemble of social relationships embedded within a wider set of social relationships, whose purpose is to carry out certain defined aims.

It is from the aim of an organization that its type can be deduced, and its structure and functioning should be determined from the relations within which it exists as a means toward relations of its aims. If an organization, in its internal functioning and interaction with the wider sphere of social relationships, does not accomplish its aims within a reasonable time-scale, then the suspicion would be well-grounded that its actual aims differ from its stated ones. It would thus be a cynical organization.

A political organization is one that is engaged in politics. (Sorry about the apparent tautology.) For that to make sense, however, requires a definition of politics. Among those calling themselves Marxists, most definitions of politics center around the question of the State and State power. This is an adequate definition for most purposes, but it does not include several of the every day uses of the word, nor even all its uses within the corpus of writings by Marx and Engels themselves. For example, let's take one of the places where Marx makes his famous statement that the class struggle is a political struggle, from the Poverty of Philosophy:

Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle. In the bourgeoisie we have two phases to distinguish: that in which it constituted itself as a class under the regime of feudalism and absolute monarchy, and that in which, already constituted as a class, it overthrew feudalism and monarchy to make society into a bourgeois society. The first of these phases was the longer and necessitated the greater efforts. This too began by partial combinations against the feudal lords. Much research has been carried out to trace the different historical phases that the bourgeoisie has passed through, from the commune up to its constitution as a class. But when it is a question of making a precise study of strikes, combinations and other forms in which the proletarians carry out before our eyes their organization as a class, some are seized with real fear and others display a transcendental disdain.

Note that Marx refers to strikes and "combinations" (e.g. unions) as nascent forms of proletarian political organization. There is no hint of ultimatism which would insist that workers move beyond such activities in order to have their activities christened with the name of politics. Neither a political party engaged in parliamentary struggle, nor a soviet engaged in an insurrectionary seizure of state power, are preconditions to proletarian politics (though they can, as history has shown, be key forms of it). Instead, he refers sarcastically to the attitude that would set such preconditions as "transcendental disdain". Such activities and organizations may not be sufficient to particular tasks, but they are not ends in themselves, rather means toward the formation of the identity of an oppressed class.

Let us also consider some every day uses of the word: "office politics" or "workplace politics". "Family politics." "School politics" or "academic politics". Though all of these can be said to involve the state, to one extent or another, at some level of abstraction or analysis, rarely do these directly involve struggle within, against or over the state, and thus escape the commonplace definitions of politics. The commonplace uses of the word politics tend to bring us back to its etymological root, as the doings that go along with being part of a polis, a member of a civilization.

There are human social relationships that can seem at times to escape the bounds of politics, i.e. those of love and friendship. To borrow language from another philosophical tradition, they can seem so when we treat another person as an end, rather than a means. Viewed from the position of what escapes it, politics is the domain in which human beings relate to one another as means toward an end. To engage in politics is to accept that. No political organization could ever base itself upon Kantian ethics.

This is not an intrinsically bad thing. Means can be justified with reference to the ends that they enable, and some ends are more to be desired than others. A capitalist uses the workers he employs as a means toward the creation of surplus value. The workers, when they engage in collective struggle against that capitalist, treat him as a means toward gaining a better standard of living, and one another as a means of building solidarity and strength in that struggle. Antagonistic social relationships--relationships of class--mean antagonistic ways of engaging toward political ends.

So when Marx says that class struggle is political struggle, a corollary that derived from accepting that view of the world is that political organization is class organization that is sufficient for class aims. What are those aims? Moving right along in Marx:

The condition for the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of every class, just as the condition for the liberation of the third estate, of the bourgeois order, was the abolition of all estates and all orders. The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society. Meanwhile the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle of class against class, a struggle which carried to its highest expression is a total revolution. Indeed, is it at all surprising that a society founded on the opposition of classes should culminate in brutal contradiction, the shock of body against body, as its final denouement? Do not say that social movement excludes political movement. There is never a political movement which is not at the same time social. It is only in an order of things in which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions.

This is one of the clearest statements of the basic hypothesis: that the political aim of the proletariat is its own abolition, as part of the abolition of classes, and therewith the abolition of politics (the relationship of human beings to one another as means) as such. An ambitious hypothesis, that requires ambitious means for its testing and realization (or perhaps, though I shudder at the thought since the likely alternatives are so dire, negation). A fundamental test, then, of whether a given organization is a proletarian political organization (even if in embryonic form) is the vigor of its activity and the scope of its implications.

The counterposition with which I began this--"It is not an emanation of an Idea (or of an ensemble of ideas called a Program), nor is it a Thing-in-Itself (or an End-in-itself)"--was not accidental. When an organization presents itself as the emanation of an Idea or Program ("we represent the genuine continuation of..."), or when its protagonists treat its growth and preservation as an end in itself ("the movement is everything, the goal is nothing"), that is a clear sign that, whatever its other representations it is either not a political organization, or to the extent that it is political, its actual aims differ from any hopes of revolutionary transformation it may put forward.

May Day (International Workers' Day)

This is what May Day looked and sounded like in Cairo:

(Sorry, non-Arabic speakers: I only understand enough to be inspired, not enough to translate.) For context, Al-Jazeera has done a story on how the revolution essentially started among the workers in Mahalla (and this is the English version):

This is what it looked and sounded like in Tunis:

(Note the pictures of Stalin brandished by what must be the Communist Workers Party of Tunisia (PCOT). There is a woman identified as belonging to a "Socialist Workers Party"--don't know if this is a new grouping that I hadn't previously heard of, or a mistranslation of the PCOT's name.)

And in Casablanca, Morocco, it's a bit rainy, but loud:

Apparently, in the Maldives (a small island nation in the Indian Ocean), it is day two of some volatile protests over skyrocketing commodity prices:

In Kenya, the Trade Unions are calling for 60% wage increases, and a general strike in 20 days:

In Hong Kong, the focus is also on the minimum wage:

In New York, I attended the Union Square May Day demonstration, with various immigrant workers' groups and dominated, from the podium, by the constellation around the Workers World Party, not the rival Foley Square demonstration with official union support. Left groups that were also visibly present at the one I attended (in order of my seeing them):

• Internationalist Group (hard to miss, with a huge banner, a decent-sized contingent, and several placards)
• Anakbayan
• League for the Revolutionary Party
• Revolutionary Communist Party
• Spartacist League
• Socialist Alternative
• Freedom Socialist Party
• Socialist Party
• International Socialist Organization
• Socialist Core (new U.S. franchise of the LIT, focused around the PSTU of Brasil)
• Bolshevik Tendency (after a hiatus, they're once again active in New York)
• Kasama Project (known only because I asked one of their supporters if he could spare a red flag, and he said they were for his contingent, so I asked "which contingent?")
• Freedom Road Socialist Organization / OSCL (that one, not the other one, with a rare banner to identify themselves)
• MIUCA - El Acción por el Cambio (Dominican left group that had decent chants and better drumming)

Since the purpose of this blog is not Leftist Trainspotting, I will note a conversation of political significance: The BTer I spoke with, to his credit, pressed me for a quick summation of why I'm no longer with the LRP. It's not a bad thing to be able to sum such things up in one or two sentences. It was only after we ended our conversation that a summation, however, occurred to me: That much of the left, LRP included, treats the question of political organization in a religious manner, not a scientific one, and does what it does on the basis of varied understandings of a tradition of choice.

A realization I had, ironically enough, on the closest day a Marxist materialist has to the High Holidays. Elaborations on this to come.

Work and family obligations have disrupted my self-imposed weekly schedule for the installments of the Badiou critique. Moreover, I am going to read the literature I picked up today, and to the extent that there is anything worth commenting upon, will likely do so. This will likely prevent me from posting more reading notes on Mészáros any time soon, either. And I will be at the Historical Materialism conference next weekend. Apologies in advance.

A Good Meeting

Last night I had the distinct pleasure of attending a meeting.

The phrase "pleasure of attending a meeting" is rare enough in its utterance as to be nearly a paradox, particularly in New York.

The meeting itself is somewhat hard to describe. Its title was "From Wisconsin to New York: Crisis, Austerity and Resistance". It has a Facebook page, so those of you who have a Facebook login (which I don't) can view it at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=194911303884295. It was convened by a nameless group of mostly-young leftists who seem to be more or less in an academic orbit, who refer to themselves, perhaps somewhat disingenuously, as "a group of friends who are interested in revolutions." The conveners seem to be largely of a left-communist cast. This was the second such meeting I attended; the prior one, last month, was about the revolutions in the Arab world. At the earlier meeting, the Solidarity organization was in evidence; if its supporters were present at this one, they were not known to me.

The speakers included Loren Goldner of Insurgent Notes, and two younger guys who are not public figures in the same way Loren is, and who therefore I do not know if they would appreciate having their full names published in this connection. Loren spoke on his observations of the Wisconsin protests, in much the same vein as this article. There was also a well-researched historical presentation on the 1975 New York City fiscal crisis and the politics of austerity, and the third speaker gave a presentation of the austerity measures contained in the newest New York State budget. (A presentation which, in content and style, seemed to reflect his job in the legislative office of a New York City council member more than his professed anarchist politics, but which was nonetheless informative.)

For now, however, I will not comment so much on the content of the discussion as on its style. For, in a room that included left-communists, anarchists, Trotskyists (in addition to myself, there was Jan Norden of the Internationalist Group), as well as several people whose political viewpoint was more difficult to pinpoint (social-democrats?), the discussion remained cordial and (mostly) focused throughout. Even Norden, who did filibuster a bit, contributed in a meaningful way and a comradely tone. In fifteen-plus years of leftist militancy, I don't think I've ever attended such a meeting. (The prior meeting called by this grouping certainly couldn't have been described that way.)

A couple of suggestions, however, addressed not only to the conveners of this meeting but to anyone trying such an enterprise:

1. We need to do away with the academic norm of repeatedly giving the original speakers in a discussion the chance to respond. Yes, if they've been asked a direct question, let them respond, briefly, but if it's done after comments as well, it interrupts the flow. More problematically from a perspective of human emancipation, it derives from a presumption of hierarchical expertise. In this particular case, it did not seem to me to result in anyone not getting their say, but it often has that effect.
2. I am greatly tempted to propose a rule that no political meeting disperse without a democratic vote on at least one concrete action of follow-up. Even if the concrete action is just to call another meeting. Toward the end, there was a palpable sense in the room that this sort of thing should continue, but no one (and I certainly include myself in this) made an attempt to propose something specific. The initiative remains with the informal "group of friends," and I hope they'll take it.

The main thing it helped me to do was to clarify my thinking a little bit on the question of proletarian political organization. The basis of the need for such organization is not the existence of different ideas in the minds of individual workers, but the need for the immediate interests of the most exploited and oppressed to be brought forward, as they coincide the ultimate interests of the class as a class-for-itself. Otherwise, the tendency to break into sectoral patterns within the framework of capitalist politics will prevail, as remains the case so far in anti-austerity struggles in Wisconsin, California and New York. (With the struggles in the last location being far behind the prior ones in scope and militancy.) More on this later, but not immediately.

A note on the next post: I believe it was about eight years ago that Sy Landy gave me a photocopy of an old Hal Draper article, entitled The "Inevitability of Socialism": The Meaning of a Much Abused Formula (The New International, December 1947), a polemic against arguments by C.L.R. James (then in the Socialist Workers Party) and George Novack. Draper had, many decades before, been Sy's mentor, and much of his theoretical work amounted to critiquing and setting aside much of what he had been mis-taught by Hal. On this article, he had a gut feeling that Hal was wrong, but neither were James and Novack right, and he wanted someone with more philosophical training to take it on. On and off over the following year, it turned into a sprawling project that took me through Hegel, Plekhanov, Althusser, the philosophy of science, various schools of "ideology critique," etc., going far beyond the original ambit of critiquing what is, actually, a rather slight and amateurish article. The question of "historical necessity" proved to be way more complicated than Draper or his SWP opponents wanted it to be. The results were sheafs of hand-written notes in my barely legible scrawl, and occasional e-mails to various people about what I was thinking about--not even an internal discussion article, because more urgent questions abounded. But the upshot of all this was my conclusion that the necessity of a classless, communist society was a historical hypothesis.

So imagine my disappointment in 2008 as the ex-Maoist, and incurably obscurantist philosopher Alain Badiou was making a splash with his notion of a communist hypothesis--which uses the exact same words I had fastened on four years before, but gives them a very different meaning.

The point of this is not to claim intellectual priority or make a claim to some kind of copyright--Badiou can keep his royalties unperturbed. It's to indicate why, in setting out my thoughts about politics, I now have the duty of beginning with a polemic against Badiou. That will be the subject of my next post. (Probably not today, but hopefully by tomorrow night.)

Introduction to a Research Program

A Note on the Title

The title of this blog is a pun. Sorry.

In the jargon of capitalistically-organized science, the Principal Investigator (PI) is the man or woman (usually a man) who is designated as being responsible for the expenditure of grant funds and the supervision of the accomplishment of research aims. As such, he functions as a kind of straw boss, hiring, firing, and directing the work of a greater or lesser number of students, technicians, research scientists, etc., while answerable to those who provide the funds, the space and institutional setting for his work. He takes most of the credit and usually gets most of the blame, sometimes collaborating but most often competing with other PIs in the search for new knowledge within a given disciplinary framework.

The author of these lines is not a Principal Investigator, nor do I have any desire to become one. I intend, however, to be a Principled Investigator. Now just what does this have to do with my subtitle, and its talk of "proletarian revolutions"? Let me explain.

The politics of proletarian revolution, known variously as "Marxism," "revolutionary socialism," "communism," etc., has often presented itself as being grounded in, or working toward, a scientific understanding of its object. I begin from the premise that this aim is both desirable and attainable. However, this science would have a distinct relationship between subject and object. (For now I'm using these terms in the philosophical sense, as the knowing subject and the known object. This is confusing, since in the jargon of research the object of study is often referred to as the "subject". At some future point I'll try and de-confuse this.) In the physical sciences, as well as in the "social sciences" as academically defined, the subject (the researcher) and the object (what is being researched) are distinct, discrete and non-overlapping. The object of a science of revolutions, however, would be history. Not history, however, an aggregate of facts and judgments about a remote past, but history as something still in the process of being made, and as a guide to those who would make it consciously. "People make their own history, but not out of whatever they wish, not in circumstances of their choosing, but in immediate circumstances carried over, handed down and given to them." The investigators, the subjects, and what they study, the objects, are, or ought to be, one and the same. To be a subject of such an endeavor one must first of all regard oneself objectively. (Any reader familiar with the usual practices and attitudes of the radical left has probably snorted in disbelief. That gap between what is and what must be is one of the objects of a science of revolution.)

This is also where principles come into it. We have no "institutional review board" looking over our shoulders, making sure we are doing no harm to ourselves and our fellow human beings / collaborators as we strive to remake the world that has been "carried over, handed down and given" to us. In revolutionary politics there is much talk of principles, which can give it an ethical appearance. In truth, it is a matter of practice: If the ends justify the means, then they only justify those means that are appropriate to the ends. To say that a given political practice is unprincipled means, ultimately, to say that it doesn't work, that it does not get us any closer to testing our basic suppositions--i.e., that history can be remade--but leads us down a dead-end. (And it shouldn't be so hard to see: Often, such dead-ends have been marked with piles of skulls.) The ethical appearance masks a practical and epistemological essence. More plainly: It's not about what we ought or ought not to do, and that's that; it's about figuring out how to do what we have to do to know what we have to know (so we can do what we have to do to know what we have to know, so...).

So that is "A Principled Investigator". "A", because it's necessarily a collective effort: Even if I am only one, I can only be one as one of many. This blog functions as a call to the many, a standing invitation to collaboration, debate and putting theories to the test.

A Note on the URL

The French Revolutionary Calendar has been a rich source of metaphor for those who have pursued revolution as a science: e.g. 18th Brumaire, or Thermidor. Ironically, the very metaphor is an example of "nervously invoking the spirits of the past to 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." The use of a name from that same calendar is a irony re-doubled upon itself, borrowing language from the borrowers. After all, the ancient Mayan calendar probably has greater resonance in today's intellectual culture than the festivals of republican France. And yet one of the topics of this blog is to combat the stereotyped use of outmoded language to describe new tasks.

Still, I have my reasons. The Sansculottides were the five to six days without a month tacked on at the end of the calendar to bring the decimal framework into alignment with the solar year. The very name celebrates the plebeian and proletarian masses that drove the revolution forward. (I had briefly considered entitling the blog "Science without Pants", but decided that would not exactly convey an appropriate degree of gravity.) And that is in fact what they were, at first, a time for the masses to celebrate themselves. So the name signifies:

• a festival of the oppressed;
• a hiatus between the old and the new;
• a clumsy attempt to bridge the gap between a rigid schema and a messy reality.

This blog takes each of those phenomena as potential topics--and perhaps unintentionally exemplifies one or more of them.

A Note on the Writer

The writer of these lines was, until recently, a supporter of the League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP), and a "frequent" contributor to its magazine Proletarian Revolution (at least insofar as anyone can contribute frequently to an infrequent and irregular publication).

The central realization that made it impossible for me to continue in good faith in that relationship was that the basic form of organization regarded as a necessary prerequisite for the creation of the revolutionary party, namely a democratic-centralist propaganda group, needed to be understood historically as having been conditioned, in the last analysis, be the development of the productive forces. And as a historical product, it was necessarily transitory, and, I would now argue, overcome. One would have to be blind or willful to deny that we are currently experiencing a revolutionary transformation in the means of communication. Today, revolutions blaze with the immediacy of image, sound and chatter in near real time. Nor is this confined to wealthy nations and privileged strata: Combined and uneven development have made it so that cities and villages where nary a land-line telephone can be found are, in many parts of the world, abuzz with cell phone rings and text messages. In such a social environment, even the most effective organization based on a 70-year old form, while it may be able to have significant local impacts based on a tactical concentration of efforts, will necessarily tail behind world events. If the aim is to shape world events, then the form must be superseded.

Note: I am not using this to argue against the need for organization, for propaganda, or even against (that much-misunderstood bête noire of so much of the left) "democratic centralism" (though its historic significance still needs to be excavated from beneath a heap of archeological rubble). Only that the specific concatenation of those concepts, and the resultant meanings that have been "carried over, handed down and given" to us, need to be radically rethought, and that rethinking put to the test. As such, the questions of the impact of technological development on capitalist social relations, the ways it has conditioned a reordering of political struggles, and the future forms of proletarian organization emerging from such struggles will be a primary theme of exploration in this blog.

An immediate trigger for this was close observation of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and the role of new media technologies in helping (though by no means being solely responsible for) the acceleration of events. So long as those revolutions remain living phenomena--long may they live, deepen and spread--that will be a major secondary theme. Unfortunately, I do not have sufficient Arabic-language skills to do that on my own (working on it). Comment from those who do, especially those who are participants in the events, is most welcomed, even if we disagree.

Other likely themes, off the top of my head and by no means exhaustive:

• Marxism, philosophy of science, and the philosophy of Marxism as science
• History and development of the far left in the U.S.
• Political events in Latin America
• Arts and culture (most likely infrequently)

Some Final Notes on Policy

• Links are not endorsements. I will link to pages in the blogroll because I find them interesting enough to want to remind myself to check them regularly, not because I agree with all or most of the content to be found that way. I do welcome suggestions (in the comments). I also link within the text of blog posts, so that readers can familiarize themselves with the texts, organizations, individuals, phenomena, concepts, etc. to which I am referring.
• Debate is welcome. Debate is not abuse, which is not welcome. Comments will be gently moderated against abuse. Mischaracterizing debate as abuse, however, is a way of avoiding debate, and thus is also not welcome.
• Racism, sexism and bigotry of all forms is a form of abuse particularly unwelcome when the object of inquiry is the liberation of all humanity from oppression. Don't even try slipping it past.
• English is the primary language of this blog, but comments in other languages are most welcome, so long as they fit the rest of the policies. I'll do my best, using my knowledge and/or Google Translate, to help make such comments intelligible to readers who need English. When linking, I will link to English-language documents first if available, original-language documents next if I understand them, and documents translated into a third language if necessary. I do reserve the privilege of re-translating quotes, however, for reasons of grammar, precision or felicity.