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The History of Socialist ThoughtWrite-up by CM of the discussion, 7 December 2007. The full write-up of the discussion is below, and this is the handout (MS Word doc) introducing the topic of the meeting, and two links related to the Radical Anthropology Group which was referred to in the introduction: Article from New Scientist: 'Painted Ladies' (Adobe pdf). Write-up of the introductory talk, and group discussion, and afterthought:
Since I am responsible for maintaining the Exeter Socialists web site, I generally try to keep the tone a bit formal to keep my distance and allow others to have a voice and contribute material, but I hope that friends, comrades and visitors to the site will forgive me for writing this write-up from a personal point of view.
I started by confessing that I was still only ‘half prepared’ for the talk, and had only offered the topic because I’d been given a book on the subject (Albert Fried, and Ronald Sanders, eds., Socialist Thought: A Documentary History), which I had read but not written it up sufficiently well, mainly because I kept being drawn into side issues. Two of these side issues were religion and ‘radical anthropology’.
I sometimes envy people who have religious conviction because they know what they think. I know what I think about religion to the extent of being very definitely atheist, but on pretty much every other subject that matters I see all sorts of aspects at once, and confuse myself as much as I must confuse anyone who listens to me or reads what I write. That makes me a poor speaker, I think, because I’ve got too much to say, and my introduction to this discussion was typical of one of my outpourings, and inevitably I failed to keep to the topic. My excuse was that preliminaries like definitions and context were crucial to understanding what was, when was, and why there was, ‘socialist thought’.
The period when there was ‘socialist thought’ and socialist thinkers is the three centuries from 1700 to 2000, a period I call ‘the Lump’ because I regard it as anomalous, an interlude, and an interruption, before which there was socialist or communist life, and socialist thought was unnecessary, and I hope that there will be socialist or communist life again in future – and I also believe that socialist/communist life continued through the Lump centuries, in the lives of ordinary people, but was progressively put under threat and disrupted, and is now almost entirely gone. The prospect of humankind regaining socialist/communist life in future is central to the mission of the anarchist Radical Anthropology Group (RAG).
If one draws a timeline from 200,000 years ago, when modern humans arrived on the scene, and marks on that the period of ‘human history’, which is also when settled farming began, from 10,000 years ago, clearly human history: written and oral, is very, very recent. For most of our time on Earth, and crucially, before that when we were evolving as a species, we have been hunters and gatherers, living in tribal communities, originally in Africa.
Turning to the theme of ‘religion’, the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden in Genesis in the Bible is very obviously an account of the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. The date 4004 BC, when ‘God created the heaven and the earth’, given in the St James’s edition, which was calculated from the ‘begats’, the genealogy of the patriarchs, is about right, since 6,000 years ago is a fairly good approximation to the change from worship of the Goddess and the moon: associated with matriarchal society and hunting, to the God and the sun: associated with patriarchal society and farming.
A key idea in Marxist socialist thought is the ‘materialist conception of history’ (MCOH), and early, ‘primitive’, communism is identified as the first stage in that model, after which came chattel slavery, feudalism, and capitalism, after which an advanced stage of communism, and ‘the end of history’, is predicted. In his recent book Black Mass, John Gray refers to this as Marxist teleology, a version of ‘apocalyptic religion’ and utopianism, which he argues constitutes a ‘black mass’ of political myths. I argue that the MCOH is wrong in another sense. Not only was ‘primitive communism’ only primitive in the sense of being first, and was actually culturally very rich and varied, but also it was not succeeded by the later named stages, but has persisted until very recently. The encyclopaedia People of All Nations, published in 1926, contains thousands of photographs of tribal and village peoples, from every continent of the world, each with its distinctive costumes, cultures and ways of life.
Chattel slavery was also not a ‘stage’ in an historical progression but a form of exploitation perpetrated occasionally by city cultures in different parts of the world, the citizens enclosed within their walls being supplied from a hinterland, which, once exhausted, brought about the city’s demise. (Vernon Gill Carter and Tom Dale, Topsoil and Civilisation, Revised Edition (University of Oklahoma Press, 1974)
Feudalism was also very far from a distinct stage, and from the distorted Marxist picture of virtual enslavement and cruel exploitation of the degraded serf by a class of feudal lords, but again was very varied and enduring, and generally provided people with community and fulfilment. Books like Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost describe the richness and resilience of the English village. D. Hartley’s Made in England (London: Methuen, 1939) tells how rural crafts were still being practised until the 1930s. H.J. Massingham, in Britain and the Beast, writes about ‘the village community … in the history and pre-history of England … as a self-governing organism that functioned by internal custom and tradition, and was largely independent not only of external law but of foreign invasion, political change, and national progress.’ (http://www.des4rev.org.uk/massingham.htm) A similar resilience in the Indian village and economy was recognised by Marx, and he relates with considerable regret the necessary evil of the British Empire putting that system under threat:
The ‘Cocacolanisation’, or homogenisation, brought about by globalised market capitalism, is quite a recent phenomenon.
Returning – after meandering from the proper subject – to ‘the history of socialist thought’, socialist thinking arose as a result of changes in society away from socialist or community life. From the perspective of men of leisure and privilege who did the thinking, the major change that occurred was a phase of questioning ‘at the top’. Seventeenth century science and the Age of Reason, the Renaissance, the Reformations, all resulted in weakening of the Catholic Church, and Absolute Monarchy and the Divine Right of Kings, and the result was the Enlightenment, and ultimately the French and American Revolutions. According to Camus, writing on Rousseau, the Social Contract replaced the deference and trust, and the giving up of their rights and freedoms, by the people to the King, with a similar giving up of sovereignty to themselves, whence the state.
There was more, probably, but that’ll do!
As is often the way, our discussion started before the meeting proper began, and we were waiting in the foyer for the regulars to assemble. We usually say: ‘Why are there so few of us here? Shouldn’t we do something about this?’ Another aspect of that which comes up is: ‘Why do the various radical groups meet separately; shouldn’t we be getting together more?’ We have really good discussions, taking turns to lead them, unlike many groups I’ve belonged to where it’s all business, rather dull, and involves taking on jobs. But we have been rather self-indulgent, and we are meant to be a serious revolutionary socialist/communist group, with deep green perspectives well represented, such as veganism, animal rights, and concerns over land use issues, and, probably because of that, some anarchist views and solutions too. We ought to be attractive to more people whose views lie in those various directions. Our ‘core group’, if that’s what we are, is friendly and tolerant of our different inclinations; we disagree in a very comradely fashion. The problem is mainly getting ourselves organised, which is why we’re having an organisational meeting in January.
Once we got to the discussion proper, since I had been questioning the MCOH, historical/dialectical materialism, and the Marxist prediction/prescription that the revolution will come about when the working class sees its common interest and overthrows capitalism, the question became: well, what else may happen? What sort of future might there be?
DP began this by quizzing us on ‘Which country is the worst carbon polluter?’ The answer is Indonesia, due to the logging of indigenous forest to plant oil palm for biodiesel. And we discussed biofuels generally, including sugar in Brazil and maize in the USA for ethanol, as well as oil seeds for biodiesel, and the fact that they make the situation worse.
GB was dismissive of my hope of a return to some form of communism or village or community living, and that gave rise to a lively debate. Obviously the sheer numbers of us is an issue, and the fact that natural resources: mineral ores, soils and forests, and the ocean, have been depleted due to the ready availability of fossil fuels, so there’s no ‘going back’. Also, as GB pointed out, the majority of the world’s population now live in cities, and rural people continue to lose their land and pile into the cities.
I mentioned that interest in dropping out of conventional living is growing, and cities are beginning to organise themselves into city villages, growing food on allotments, making links with community supported agriculture, learning to live in community. GB was sceptical: how did I know that? From people I know, but also through discussions and blogs on the web, including the Zapatistas and various groups following their ideas and supporting them, and the anti-capitalist movement generally. Ah! says GB, they’re not very dropped out if they’re spending their time on their computers.
This is a fair point, and PH pointed out that local communities of the future – if society takes that route in a big way – won’t be able to make computers locally; big, expensive factories are needed. Years ago, PH said, he could fix electronic devices at home with a soldering iron, now everything is so miniaturised you can’t even see it.
My feeling about that is that capitalism drives the perpetual change and ‘improvement’ of technology, and I would like to see that stop and consolidate; devices have too many ‘bells and whistles’ already. But most crucially, the model of aiming for local self-reliance in meeting basic needs is not invalidated because some goods will continue to be made at a regional level.
There was some lively discussion about whether bringing back horses, as is happening in France, would be feasible on a large scale. GB felt not because of all the land needed to grow fodder and because cities would end up metres deep in horse-shit. PH pointed out that if everyone ate less meat, there would be enough land to feed the horses, and the shit is a valuable fertiliser.
There was more, before we moved on to discuss future meetings. I didn’t take notes this time, so if those who were there care to remind me what they said, that would be very welcome.
One aspect of the discussion I failed to acknowledge properly was that there was resistance to my questioning of the MCOH, dialectical materialism, and the route to Revolution being through the working class taking power and abolishing capitalism.
GB, in particular, said that workers worldwide are fighting for better pay and conditions, to such an extent that capitalism is running out of sources of really cheap and compliant labour, with North Korea being virtually the only one left.
The solidarity and potential power of the proletariat perhaps needs to be combined with that of the ‘precariat’ (http://www.metamute.org/en/Precarious-Precarisation-Precariat). I discovered the term ‘precarity’ in the People’s Global Action (PGA) newsletter: http://aresistance.net/data/PGA_inspired_newsletter_3_reading.pdf, in particular the article ‘Call for a working group to write a political reader on precarity (for the next PGA conference)’
From Wikipedia: Precarity is a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare. The term has been specifically applied to either intermittent work or, more generally, a confluence of intermittent work and precarious existence. Chris Marsh |