Posted on 03/23/2002 7:54:36 AM PST by aculeus
Fifty years ago a few of the leading intellectuals on the left, such as Lionel Trilling and Dwight Macdonald, began to perceive growing weaknesses in the dominant liberal ideology of the time, and began to look hopefully for the emergence of a reasonable, responsible conservatism. Today, the shoe is on the other foot, as conservatives wonder whether a reasonable, responsible Left is possible. As David Brooks has pointed out, being on the left in recent years has meant being for freeing Mumia and cheering infantile leftists when they throw bricks through windows to protest globalization.
September 11 made the position of the radical Left even more acute, and brought out the worst instincts in many Leftists. It has also provided a clear dividing line between two kinds of Leftists: those who genuinely love America but who are confused, and those who resolutely hate America; between those who now fly the flag (some for the first time in their lives), and those who still want only to burn it. A number of prominent Leftists, such as Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman, have responded splendidly and correctly in the aftermath of September 11, while many of the usual suspects — Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, etc. — have reacted according to script.
Which brings us to Michael Walzer's immensely important article in the spring issue of Dissent magazine, entitled "Can There Be a Decent Left?" It might well be thought of as "Walzer's Razor," providing a cutting divide between the serious pro-American Left from the frivolous anti-American Left. (The article appears here.) Walzer, a professor at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, is the author of numerous books, including Just and Unjust Wars and Spheres of Justice, and thus is a serious man of the Left. His chief complaint about his fellow Leftists is that they are not serious. The Leftist critique of American power, Walzer says, "has been stupid, overwrought, grossly inaccurate." Walzer suggests that his fellow Leftists begin to acknowledge that not all uses of American power are evil. The Left conducts itself on this point with "willful irresponsibility" that Walzer thinks is "pathological." David Horowitz would be hard pressed to exceed this critical vocabulary.
"The radical failure of the left's response to the events of last fall raises a disturbing question," Walzer writes; "Can there be a decent left in a superpower?" Walzer thinks there can, but only if the Left jettisons most of its frivolous intellectual contrivances and emotional extravagances. Patriotism is not politically incorrect, as an earlier generation of Leftists (George Orwell and Mary McCarthy, for example) understood. The Leftists of earlier generations understood that it was possible to lend Western democracies their "critical support." Mary McCarthy famously remarked that she began to set aside her contempt for "bourgeois society" during World War II when she realized that she cared about the outcome of the war, and hoped the Allies would win. Too many of today's Leftists are embarrassed by, if not opposed to, America's success to date in Afghanistan.
More fundamentally, Walzer calls on the Left to find "something better than the rag-tag Marxism with which some much of the left operates today — whose chief effect is to turn world politics into a cheap melodrama." Egalitarianism — the cornerstone of Leftist social thought — is one thing; in recent decades the Left has been overtaken with elaborate theories of imperialism that give off an air of paranoia worthy of the black helicopter crowd. Walzer notes that many leftists revel in their self-marginalization and irrelevance. Walzer calls for the Left, in essence, to grow up, and "begin again."
This may turn out to be the most difficult step for the Left. Consider that the hottest book on the left today is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire, which argues, among other risible ideas, that terrorism is merely "a crude conception and terminological reduction that is rooted in a police mentality." (Worse: Hardt and Negri write that the Soviet Union was "a society criss-crossed by extremely strong instances of creativity and freedom.") Empire has been selling out at bookstores and is being translated into 10 languages. It has received the blessing of the New York Times, which commented on the "buzz" surrounding the book (thereby adding to the buzz). So long as Empire is a guiding light for the intellectual Left, Walzer's noble project has little chance of success.
Walzer is not an isolated voice on the left, however. The left-leaning sociologist Alan Wolfe took square aim at Empire in The New Republic just three weeks after the World Trade Center attack (it appeared in the October 1, 2001 issue of TNR), which means that his review did not receive the attention it deserved. Calling the book "shabby" and "a lazy person's guide to revolution," Wolfe writes that "Empire is to social and political criticism what pornography is to literature. . . Empire is a thoroughly non-serious book on a most serious topic, an outrageously irresponsible tour through questions of power and violence."
So Walzer has one ally, at least. Responses to Walzer's article will be posted on Dissent's website as they arrive. Their tone and substance will reveal whether the Left is participating in the post-September 11 sobriety that has swept much of the rest of the country.
Did the search and came up with nothing.
The sleazy left have a new term for lefties like Hitchens and Rushdie who support our war on terror: the belligerati.
The conservative movement, is being decimated in the field of education. I do not underestimate the opposition, I have studied them and their movement for a quarter of a century. They are a formidable foe, who will fight tooth and nail to keep the bread on their table and react like cornered rats when their ability to spread their ideology is threatened. To me Marxism is a sinister form of mental paedeophilia.
In 1910 William Allen White ( a cohort of John Dewey) supported a scheme for paying parents for the loss of family income which resulted in a child going to school instead of working.
"A few states ," White wrote," notably in Ohio, make provision for the reimbursement of parents for the time children are in school," he adds " For the pittance a child earns is little compared with the need of the state for that child's judgement formed by atrained mind in making public sentiment when he is grown."
The reference to the "need of the state" is bone chilling.Reformers who write of "the need of the state" are, first cousins to every dictator and despot who ever lived.
There can no more be a reasonable left than a young lady can be a little bit pregnant.Perhaps you are willing to swallow Walzer's a kinder gentler Stalin.
A clever ruse, at best. But those of us who are former leftists know this mantra to be among the larger, tactical lies proffered by the modern left - best described: a huge, steaming pile. Marxism has only been deemphasized in name because its fundamental ideas have been internalized by academia, and are simply de rigueur.
Nice try. But here, it won't wash.
The most important features of a society are its economic classes and their relations to each other in the modes of production of each historical epoch.
A class is defined by the relations of its members to the means of production.
Under capitalism, the capitalists own the means of production, the proletariat own only their capacity to work. Landlords rule the land, and the peasants are less significant than workers and are trapped in the idiocy of rural life. The proletariat definitely includes those who produce objects in factories with their hands, but Marxists dither about whether it includes people who work with their minds but are employees and live by their salaries.
History is the history of class struggles among the classes in society. New progressive classes arise that are related to new forms of production and struggle with the old. New forms of society arise appropriate to the new forms of production when the new classes win power. This doctrine is called historical materialism.
The state is the means whereby the ruling class forcibly maintains its rule over the other classes.
The successive stages of history include primitive communism characterized by equalitarian hunting and gathering, barbarism characterized by rule by chiefs, slave society with a slave class and agriculture, feudalism, capitalism, socialism and communism.
Most struggles in history are class struggles, even though the participants profess other goals. For example, protestantism reflects the rising capitalist class.
New classes usually win power by revolution. Revolutions are violent, because the dying ruling class doesn't give up power without a desperate struggle.
The capitalist class wins power over the feudal class by a bourgeois democratic revolution. A bourgeois democratic revolution is a good thing in its day, because it gets rid of feudal personal relations and replaces them by a cash nexus.
Capitalism creates the proletariat who have nothing to sell but their labor by bankrupting the artisan classes and the petty bourgeoisie and driving them into the proletariat.
The proletariat wins power by a proletarian revolution. According to Marx and Lenin, this revolution must be violent, because the bourgeoisie won't give up power by electoral means.
Neither Russia nor China had undergone a bourgeois-democratic revolution when the communists seized power. The communists undertook to build socialism anyway, and some of their rival socialists used the missing bourgeois-democratic revolution to predict that communist power would end badly.
Around the end of the 19th century Edouard Bernstein argued that it was possible to win power peacefully by winning elections. This was revisionism and the orthodox Marxist have used revisionism as an epithet ever since. "Revisionism" came to have more general meanings than Bernstein's actual doctrine, because it could be applied to people who denied Bernstein's doctrine but who could be accused of not being revolutionary enough.
Under capitalism the progressive class is the proletariat which is destined to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism, which will eventually evolve into communism.
Historical materialism is the Marxist methodology for interpreting history. The idea is to interpret all relations between groups of people as class relations and to interpret all conflicts as reflections of class struggles. A specific sequence of historical stages is part of the doctrine. It is (primitive communism, barbarism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism socialism, communism). Each stage of history has its own ruling class which uses the state to maintain its rule. Under feudalism the ruling class is the nobility, under capitalism it is the capitalists, and under socialism it is the proletariat. Primitive communism and communism are classless. In some countries oriental despotism happens as a stage distinct from feudalism.
The main feature of socialism is public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.
Under capitalism, workers "tend" to be paid the bare amount required for them to support their families and reproduce. This is because of competition for jobs from the reserve army of labor, i.e. the unemployed.
The capitalist sells the product of the workers' labor at a price proportional to its value, which is the socially necessary labor required to produce it.
The difference between what the product sells for and what the workers are paid is surplus value and is appropriated by the capitalist.
Because the workers can't buy the full product of their labor and the capitalists don't consume all the surplus value, there tend to be recessions.
The steady increase in labor saving machinery creates unemployment and drives down wages. This emphasizes the tendency for there to be economic recessions. The tendency to pay the workers bare survival wages leads to the increasing immiseration of the proletariat.
The other classes, e.g. artisans and petty bourgeoisie, e.g. small shopkeepers, go broke and are driven into the proletariat. Even the smaller capitalists go broke.
Then a socialist revolution occurs. Originally this was supposed to occur first in the most advanced capitalist countries, e.g. Germany, Britain and the United States. It wasn't supposed to occur first in a backward country like Russia, where a bourgeois-democratic revolution should have happened first.
In the first stages of socialism the state is a dictatorship of the proletariat., i.e the proletariat rules the other classes by force.
The socialist slogan is "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work."
The communist slogan is "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
Communism, which evolves peacefully from socialism, is a classless society under which the state will wither away.
Marx wrote
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, have vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of the co-operative wealth flow more abundantly - only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe upon its banners: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!" (K. Marx: Critique of the Gotha Programme)
Capitalism normally is replaced by socialism as a consequence of a proletarian revolution.
Prior to the overthrow of capitalism the proletariat must develop its own class consciousness. Other classes have their own forms of class consciousness.
Class hatred is a good thing and class collaboration is a bad thing.
Under capitalism, capitalist ideology penetrates other classes and must be struggled against by the proletariat.
Trade unions are good as training grounds for the class struggle, but it is capitalist ideology to suppose that they can make any permanent improvement in the condition of the proletariat. The belief that trade unions can make a permanent difference is a heresy called economism or trade-unionism, although the term may be due to Lenin.
The increasing exploitation of the working class leads to economic crises, because the working class cannot afford to buy the products of its labor. These crises get more intense with time. I forget whether the term general crisis of capitalism comes from Marx, but I rather think it comes much later. It refers also to imperialist wars
There is also a philosophy of history called historical materialism. Its main feature is the interpretation of history in terms of class struggle and historical progression in terms of revolutions in which a new ruling class takes over from the old ruling class.
It is all about Marxism---- changing the name to the "Fluffy Bunnies against Easter Eggs," as Walzer proposes will not change the ideology, rich vs. poor-- black vs, white--Latino vs the world--state vs corporations-- courts vs. legislators--it is an evil philosophy.
Do any of these points fit your agenda?
" We demand the nationalization of all trusts.
We demand profit-sharing in large industries.
We demand a generous increase in old-age pensions.
We demand the creation and maintenance of a sound middle-class, the immediate communalization of large stores which will be rented cheaply to small tradespeople, and the strongest consideration must be given to ensure that small traders shall deliver the supplies needed by the State, the provinces and municipalities.
We demand an agrarian reform in accordance with our national requirements, and the enactment of a law to expropriate the owners without compensation of any land needed for the common purpose. The abolition of ground rents, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.
We demand that ruthless war be waged against those who work to the injury of the common welfare. Traitors, usurers, profiteers, etc., are to be punished with death, regardless of creed or race.
In order to make it possible for every capable and industrious ---- to obtain higher education, and thus the opportunity to reach into positions of leadership, the State must assume the responsibility of organizing thoroughly the entire cultural system of the people The curricula of all educational establishments shall be adapted to practical life. The conception of the State Idea (science of citizenship) must be taught in the schools from the very beginning. We demand that specially talented children of poor parents, whatever their station or occupation, be educated at the expense of the State.
The State has the duty to help raise the standard of national health by providing maternity welfare centers, by prohibiting juvenile labor, by increasing physical fitness through the introduction of compulsory games and gymnastics, and by the greatest possible encouragement of associations concerned with the physical education of the young.
We demand the abolition of the regular army
We demand that there be a legal campaign against those who propagate deliberate political lies and disseminate them through the press.
We demand freedom for all religious faiths in the state, insofar as they do not endanger its existence or offend the moral and ethical sense of the -------.
In order to carry out this program we demand: the creation of a strong central authority in the State, the unconditional authority by the political central parliament of the whole State and all its organizations.
The formation of professional committees and of committees representing the several estates of the realm, to ensure that the laws promulgated by the central authority shall be carried out by the federal states.
The leaders of the party undertake to promote the execution of the foregoing points at all costs, if necessary at the sacrifice of their own lives."
As a betting man, I'd say you would approve 80-90%.
Was I wrong?
How thin is the barrier that seperates sanity from insanity? Those governments which have been the longest remembered in history are those that have inflicted the worst tortures, the foulest persecutions and the most hideous barbarisms on humanity,all in the interests of the people.
There is always the danger when one becomes enamoured of an idea or a philosophy that not only would it be nice for others to share it,it would be nicer if they could be forced to share it. This has led --------(fill in the blank with any name from your list,) astray in the past.
The section in quotes comes from a partial translation of the National Socialist German Workers Party, manifesto.
Munich,February 24, 1920. The Nazi's.
Ugly,wasn't it?
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