Subject: Re: AUT: Fetishizing the Zapatistas: a critique of "Change the
From: chris wright <cwright.21stcentury-AT-rcn.com>
Date: 07 Jun 2003 19:07:08 -0500


Some obvious stuff pokes out here.

1.  Louis is arguing for a kind of 'hard fetishism' which Holloway
handles quite succinctly.  In louis' world, fetishism is an accomplished
fact, rather than an ongoing process reproduced daily by commodity
society.  As such, the only way out, if fetishism is accomplished in
fact always-already, then, is to have some vehicle which is not
fetishized.

2.  Here enters the party as that group outside of fetishism.  Of
course, how the party or anyone is outside fetishism is a mystery which
no amount of juggling will resolve.

3.  Cuba again?  Oh god.  Holloway did not mention Cuba because it is
the hobby horse of cranks.  Nicaragua was doing great in healthcare and
education too, so was that socialism?  This idea has nothing, not a jot,
to do with Marx's notions of human liberation.  But let's touch on those
quotes and Mssr. Bukharin for a minute.


> 
> At first blush, all of these books seem driven by the need to proceed 
> directly to something called communism without passing go. All the sordid 
> business associated with what Bukharin called "the transition period" will 
> somehow be leapfrogged by a monumental act of will, especially the bugbear 
> of the autonomist movement: the state.

First, it might be worth noting Lenin's own critique of Bkharin not
grasping dialectics and not really being fully Marxist, made in his
Will.  Second, Bukharin was notorious for the most crude formulations
and positions at times, such as his War Communism stuff and his awful
book on Historical Materialism, not to mention his policies in the
1920's.

> 
> Far be it for me to even suggest that something as pass as Marxist 
> dialectics can still have some value, it would appear to me that speaking 
> in terms of power versus non-power cedes too much to formal logic. 

Actually, Holloway focuses on power-over and power-to.  Certainly, this
might be left a bit too cleanly delineated, but collective power of the
women in Chiapas is not power-over in Holloway's sense, but precisely
anti-power in so far as it is the negation of aspects of patriarchal
relations oppressive to the women.

As for dialectic, Holloway is doing his best to rescue it from the
crudities of post-Lenin Leninism, from Lenin's own limitations, (and I
say that only because Lenin, unlike his progeny, made a serious, if
ultimately limited, study of dialectic that went far beyond the nonsense
of Stalinists, Maoists and Trotskyists), and most certainly from
Plekhanovite dialectical materialism.

> In a certain sense, attempts to seize power and transform all of society 
> along the lines described by the Subcommandante are doomed to failure 
> unless humanity overcomes something called "fetishization" which functions 
> in Holloway's schema as a kind of tragic flaw, like Oedipus's pride or Dr. 
> Frankenstein's mad desire to create life from the parts of dead bodies.

Fetishism plays the same role for Holloway as it does for Marx: a
central part of the very heart of commodity society, but one which is
ongoing and contradictory.
 
> Leaving aside the question of how to translate this sort of thing into a 
> punchy leaflet that will grab the attention of the average worker, 

Huh?  So many leaflets, so much doctrinaire, boring crap which Leftists
believe is punchy, so little real impact that anyone would want to take
credit for with a clear conscience...

> it does 
> not really convey what Marx was all about in philosophical terms. As a 
> materialist, Marx saw human beings as part of the physical universe: "The 
> first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living 
> human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical 
> organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest 
> of nature." (German Ideology)

This is not the crude matterism you reduce it to.  This is connected to
Marx's point in the Theses on Feurebach that the subject is first of all
sensuous human beings.

> Within this context, ideas arise from social relationships: "The production 
> of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven 
> with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the 
> language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, 
> appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour." 
> (German Ideology)

This is also not an argument about (fitting link) our material bodies
causing our consciousness, since it is hard to imagine us making even
the most rudimentary tools without thinking.  Rather, this is merely the
argument that those mental processes had prolly not yet quite taken on a
life of their own, but this is arather brief in the span of Homo Sapiens
Sapiens' origin, since that was relatively recent and we can trace back
various religious conceptions almost as far back.  That ideas and
material activity should not have developed much without the development
of human labor is not surprising.  But it is no argument for causal
relations, as if humans were 'doing' and then 'thinking about it'.

> For Marx, the only way to overcome alienation (and fetishism, by 
> implication) is to *change material conditions*:

Overcome fetishism entirely, yes.  But is that really Holloway's point? 
He is not the one pointing to an all or nothing notion of
defetishization.  The idea that all struggle is deftishizing, not wholly
or totally, necessarily, but potentially and partially for certain, does
not suffer one bit from your comment.  Rather, your attempt to place a
causal link between them is exactly impoverished in comparison (see
Miyachi's points on 'first seize state power, then social revolution',
which worked so well as the Bolshevik state undermined the factory
councils and the soviets, replacing them, in the few places they
existed, with piece wages and one-man management, ie capitalist
relations.)
 
> "This 'alienation' (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the 
> philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical 
> premises. For it to become an 'intolerable' power, i.e. a power against 
> which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great 
> mass of humanity 'propertyless', and produced, at the same time, the 
> contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which 
> conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree 
> of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive 
> forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their 
> world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary 
> practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with 
> destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business 
> would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with THIS 
> UNIVERSAL DEVELOPMENT OF PRODUCTIVE FORCES is a universal intercourse 
> between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the 
> phenomenon of the 'propertyless' mass (universal competition), makes each 
> nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put 
> world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local 
> ones." (German Ideology; emphasis added)

Productive forces are not merely the means of production, but the total
range of human productive capacity in a given society, and therefore
includes mental life, levels of culture, the development of human labor,
etc.  See I.I. Rubin on this matter, please!
 
> This is the reason that Marxists have historically targeted the state. In 
> order to achieve a classless society, it is necessary to develop the 
> productive forces to such a high degree that competition for goods becomes 
> more and more unnecessary. As leisure time and the general level of culture 
> increases, human beings will enjoy a level of freedom that has never been 
> attainable in class society.

This is a non-sequitir.  The rest does not follow from the first, except
for evolutionary socialists.

> For John Holloway, access to decent medical care seems far less important 
> than "visibility", a term that he sees as practically defining Zapatismo 
> and presumably missing altogether in dreary Cuban state socialism. This is 
> expressed through the balaclava, the mask that Subcommandante wore at press 
> conferences and which has since been appropriated by Black Block activists 
> breaking Starbucks windows in the name of anti-capitalism: "The struggle 
> for visibility is also central to the current indigenous movement, 
> expressed most forcefully in the Zapatista wearing of the balaclava: we 
> cover our face so that we can be seen, our struggle is the struggle of 
> those without face."

The issue is not visibility, as if it was about media coverage.  The
issue is the visibility of the struggle, of its ability to communicate
itself to the rest of the world, to infuse and inspire other struggles,
and to do so not through personalities, but through the face of the
faceless (though, IMO, Marcos is hardly faceless snce his name acts as
his face and is already another spectacularized fetish.)
 
> To fetishize these sorts of incomplete and partial rebellions as a new way 
> of doing politics not only does a disservice to the valiant efforts of the 
> Mayan people, it also creates obstacles to those of us who also want to 
> change the world but on a more favorable basis. For in the final analysis, 
> it requires a democratic and centralized movement of the working class and 
> its allies to take power in a country like Mexico.
> 
Well, the centralists have never been democratic, but I think that some
of Ilan's recent posts and his Platform take up the issue of
organization in a fairly direct and concrete way, although it left me
wanting more, to go further beyond the councilists and the Spanish
collectives in '36.

However, i am not sure that Chiapas and the Zapatistas are a universal
example.  Nor should they be and they do not seem to see themselves that
way.  It would be hard to reproduce the EZLN in the US and not a good
idea, as they started as Guevarist guerilla fighters.

Overall, I was hopeful that this would be one of Louis' better things. 
Sadly, it was dull, missed the point, and premised on a bald reading of
Lenin and Trotsky's reading of Marx, but expressing little or no
familiarity with Marx and dialectic.

Cheers,
Chris

ps I have left some stuff untouched because I liked most of Miyachi's
comments and hope he takes up his differences with Holloway over power
more directly, rather than bother more with Louis.



     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---