From: PRISMA77-AT-aol.com
Date: Mon, 4 Mar 1996 00:57:59 -0500
Subject: Marx & Progressivism in 1996




                                          
MARX AND PROGRESSIVISM IN 1996

According to conventional wisdom old Karl no longer has 
anything of value to tell us.  While I don't dispute that conclusion
respecting most tactical considerations, I believe
his core dialectic concerning the how and why of progressive
social transformations could hardly be more instructive.
 
Marx contended socio-economic progress involves  
revolutionary paradigm shifts of the kind Thomas S. Kuhn claims have happened
in science (The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions).  Like Kuhn, Marx argued these shifts don't 
entail a change in the way facts are interpreted.  Rather, they 
involve a replacement of key assumptions about the very nature and origin of
"truth" which have been determining what the facts ARE, along with the
adoption of correspondingly new definitions/new truths.  Marx described the
indicated paradigm 
shifts as occurring whenever a majority has evolved whose
members' socio-economic existences can only be maintained
by razing the existing system of production, establishing a 
new productive order in its place.  "Men never relinquish what 
they have won," Marx wrote: "But this does not mean that they never
relinquish the social form in which they have acquired certain productive
forces.  On the contrary, in order that they may not be deprived of the
result attained and forfeit the fruits of civilization, they are obliged,
from the moment when the form of their commerce no longer corresponds to the
productive forces acquired, to change all their traditional social forms."

Marx further held that in the twilight hours of a productive 
order maintaining their hegemonic status forces its elites to 
do things which help bring the order down, to, in effect, "sow the seeds of
their own destruction."

Given his theoretical perspective, it was clear what 
progressivism meant for Marx.  When a productive system was nearing
exhaustion it entailed documenting the material
basis of that exhaustion, showing people why they were being made to
struggle. 

Marx and other Leftists of his time described at length how
agricultural-elites controlled feudal societies through theocracies,
justifying their dominion with the conviction 
that their political representatives were empowered by God and their feudal
systems had God's express approval.  In feudal Japan Shinto priests preached
obedience to the emperor as one who possessed the Mandate of Heaven.  The
Catholic clergy of feudal France argued the Divine Right of Kings and praised
the submissiveness of peasants.  The Russian Orthodox Church played the same
role in feudal Russia, and in feudal England, the Church of England.  

By premising all truth was an expression of God's will which arrived on earth
through his chosen representatives, Religious Absolutism automatically
prevented assaults on the feudal productive order.  In a time of economic
crisis the son of a noble who experienced difficulty securing his own estate
might succeed in having an unsympathetic bishop removed from office on the
grounds that he failed to do God's bidding.  An earl might be  excommunicated
and his lands seized with the same justification.  Socio-economically
diminished, and therefore recalcitrant, peasants might be forced into the
military and sent to die in a war.  In extreme circumstances an emperor or
king might be deposed or beheaded.  However, such efforts could only modify
how feudalism was practiced.  So long as the community continued acting upon
the assumption that truth derived from God via his personal emissaries, the
feudal order of production itself was safe.  It was safe because at every
turn the efforts of individuals which threatened the agricultural-elite
infrastructure could be and were spontaneously countered as "sacrilegious,"
the very expression of their menacing ideas repressed as "blasphemy."

Moreover, given the system-protective epistemological assumptions, those who
countered and repressed were able to do so with clear consciences.  When
Spain's feudal-elites discovered their productive order was being challenged
by industrially-oriented compatriots they began an inquisition.  Anyone found
to pose a threat, however minimal, was placed on the rack or burned at the
stake, or, if they were lucky (Jews in 1541), driven into exile.  Since life,
the feudal order and feudal understanding about the nature and origin of
truth were considered one, Spain's agricultural-elites felt virtuous about
what they were doing.  When heretics were incinerated in Madrid's Plaza Mayor
it was a public celebration, with the king and high religious authorities in
attendance.  To scourge anti-feudal heresy from an individual, by whatever
means, was considered not merely a holy act but a sacred duty.  Feudal
priests and nobles were able to tell themselves they stood for free
expression, while at the same time they energetically suppressed ideas vital
to the creation of an industrial-elite productive order as profane.  

According to Marx, the idea side of a revolutionary transformation involves
dragging an exhausted productive order's assumptions about truth into
consciousness and demonstrating that they have become false, meaning they are
no longer able to socio-economically sustain the individuals for whom that
demonstration is made. 

During counter-revolutionary periods like our own, when it 
is easiest for the majority to maintain social existence by 
moving to the Right and diminishing others at home or abroad, progressivism
for Marx involved holding a mirror up to their
faces, exposing the narrow self-interest which constitutes
the material basis of their hurtful thinking and doing.  
At such times he counselled, one should "make the ossified 
conditions dance by singing them their own melody," "cause the 
people to be frightened by their own image, in order to give them courage."

To ask, then, the obvious rhetorical questions:

Does Marx's dialectic tell us anything about our present
situation?  Are industrial-elite productive systems becoming unable to
sustain growing communities of people?  Are the
latter, as a consequence, becoming open to reaction or 
revolution?  And, are industrial-elites finding it necessary 
to abet the exhaustion of their productive system?  Are they 
having to sow the seeds of their own destruction qua elites?

A materialist consideration suggests we must respond to 
these questions with a resounding YES!

That the industrial-elite system of production is no longer 
able to socio-economically sustain the populations of countries which use it
is evidenced by the fact that they're
rapidly dividing into ever-larger sub-communities of have-
nots and ever-smaller sub-communities of haves.

Anyone who doubts the severity of our own structural crisis
would find it educational to talk to AT&T's 40,000 victims of 
"downsizing," or their counterparts at GM, IBM, Caterpillar, and other major
corporations, many of them high-salaried 
managers who have little prospect of securing new jobs 
paying a fraction of what they were earning.  They might also 
speak to some of the unemployed and semi-employed men and 
women between the ages of 18 and 45 who live in city ghettoes and in small
towns and villages across the nation. 
Numbering several million, the latter tread water with food
stamps, SSI payments and small amounts of money earned by
an occasional day's work in the underground economy.  Possessing none of the
skills required for economic success in the labor-nonintensive
high-technology world in birth, many numb themselves to their oppressive
situations with regular
doses of crack cocaine, methamphetamines or alcohol.  Surely they should talk
with representatives of the middle and  
lower class secondary and high school students whose futures are comparably
bleak.  Incarcerated in clapboard buildings,
with teachers who are dispirited by the recognition
that little of the information they impart helps prepare
their charges for socio-economic survival as adults, millions 
of these young people focus on the immediate gratifications 
provided by sex, drugs, and rock music whose lyrics are odes to their anger,
frustration and despair.

While they reject Marx's contention that it's natural necessity, 
Rightists and Rightwing publications (e.g., Gush Limpjaw, Newt 
Gingrich, The National Review, The Spotlight) have done an 
outstanding job of documenting that Americans, French, Germans, British, et
al. have been propping up their industrial-
elite orders through the creation of top-heavy public and private
bureaucracies.

Leftists and Leftwing periodicals (Michael Parenti, Alexander 
Cockburn, Noam Chomsky, Michael Klare, Z, The Nation, Covert 
Action Information Bulletin) have written volumes about how those nations'
economies are presently stimulated through 
the development and production of otherwise unneeded weaponry.

 Both the Right and Left have described how the U.S.  
industrial-elite economy is being invigorated with the sale of drugs worth
billions-of-dollars yearly and the laundering of drug money.

In addition, millions of Americans currently maintain social 
existence by practicing or fighting crime, activities which support them as
criminals, federal agents, judges, lawyers,
police, psychologists, counsellors, guards, manufacturers of
locks, chains, bars and pepper spray, self-defense trainers,
drug counsellors, as well as academics, TV producers 
and newspeople who teach, research and report on such things.  
With the deepening of our industrial-elite order crisis we have 
been creating imaginative new categories of criminality related to drugs,
taxes, civilian arms, and, more recently,
Internet transmissions.

It's no less apparent that industrial-elites are actively 
engaged in sowing the seeds of their own destruction.  Marx 
had said of them: "the development of capitalist production makes it
constantly necessary for the capitalist to keep 
increasing the amount of the capital laid out in a given 
industrial undertaking; competition . . . compels him to keep 
constantly expanding his capital in order to preserve it, but 
extend it he cannot, except by means of progressive accumulation."

Today, hanging on is not only constraining industrial-elites to 
aggravate the productive order crisis through an aggressive accumulation of
capital, it's also forcing them to disrupt  
their countries' economies further by transferring 
manufacturing operations to the Third World in order to 
exploit the cheaper labor.  Business economists treat it as 
axiomatic that corporations rarely take that step before the rising waters of
competition have begun threatening to drown
them.

When historians tell the tale it's likely they will point to an 
even more profound way in which industrial-elites energetically worked to
bring about their own demise: the 
promotion of credit.  Shortly after WWII ended the U.S., 
followed soon thereafter by other Western nations, faced a
major dilemma.  Mature industrial-elite productive orders 
were turning out a cornucopia of goods their populations could not afford.
 Unless the goods were sold the Great Depression
would return with a vengeance.  On the other hand, enabling
the middle class to purchase the flood of products through a
here-and-now provision of more money would mean a
here-and-now expropriation of the elites.  In the indicated 
context Keynesian economics suddenly became true, first for 
the nouveau riche and then for traditional elites.  According to Keynes
morphology the elites wouldn't have to be expropriated.
It would only be necessary to let the masses and the State
buy things on credit.  That way, the economy would not only
remain viable, it would thrive.  Even better, the elites as well
as the middle classes and many of the poor would find their 
social existences  elevated in the process.

Initially, the old money elites resisted any broad application 
of the Keynesian model.  Being on top of the socio-economic 
pile, they could always weather a depression by further diminishing those
below. The more confident and clever among 
them might even hope to prosper in a depression by buying 
land and factories at ridiculously low prices from those who
went under, as had happened in the 1930s.  However, for the
nouveau riche engaged in producing many of the new products, 
as for the middle and lower classes in general, Keynesianism had become an
imperative. So, Keynesianism came to pass, and, 
finding their fortunes greatly enriched, the old money elites 
quickly forgot their earlier reservations.   Homes began to be sold with 10
and 15-year mortgages, then 20-year mortgages, then 30.  Cars were purchased
with loans written for 1 1/2
years, then 2-years, 3-years, 4-years, and, finally, 5.  In time,
everything from aprons to massages to zithers came to be purchased on time.

Alas, we're now back where we began with the industrial-elite 
order crisis, except that it has wholly new and more ominous 
dimensions.  The terms of credit for houses, cars and many other items have
been extended to the expected life of the
products.  Pushing them further would entail giving them 
away, a socialistic redistribution of wealth which industrial-  
elites will use every weapon at their disposal to prevent.  At the moment
we've come up with a few stop-gap expedients, 
such as car leasing and condominiums.  But the car leases will begin to run
out in a couple of years and, given the depth of 
the crisis, a few million Americans are likely to discover 
they have neither the money to pay the residual, nor, 
therefore, a car.  As for condominiums, developers find it 
expensive and riskly to build them for a middle class whose
numbers are declining as many lose their jobs, and unprofitable to build them
for the lower middle class and the poor.  All the signs are there: the bubble
is preparing to 
burst.
 
Attempting to foretell precisely when it will happen is rather  
like trying to predict when someone who consumes a fifth of 
whisky and 4 pack of cigarettes every day will suffer a catastrophic
breakdown in health.  However, there are far  
more important and more answerable questions to be asked,
such as: "When the bubble does rupture, will the industrial- elite productive
order merely undergo new modifications, or is
it, at long last, approaching its final hour?"  Marx, argued, 
convincingly in my opinion, that as an order of production 
enters its terminal crisis the operative assumptions by which it exists (its
"spiritual quintessence" in his vernacular) begin to be brought into
consciousness, critically examined and 
rejected.  

Surely it is it now possible to identify the operative 
assumptions of the industrial-elite order and to show how their universal
acceptance has been the glue that held things
together.

Instead of the monarchs and priests of feudal nations, the elites of
industrial countries East and West rule through parliaments and elected heads
of state, and they rationalize their domination with the belief their
officials are empowered not by God but by the people.  The industrial-elite
vindication for ruling was found in the name of French revolutionary
Jean-Paul Marat's newspaper, The Friend of the People. It's 
there in the U.S. industrial-elite's contention that its government is "of
the people, by the people, for the people," and in the assertions of the
Soviet and Chinese industrial- elites' who came to power in their own
respective anti-feudal revolutions that their political systems are
"dictatorships of the proletariat" and "people's republics."

In place of feudalism's Religious Absolutism, industrial-elite productive
systems are founded on Scientific Absolutism, the proposition that
experience-independent "absolute" truths exist which are subject to
discernment only by persons who are properly "objective" and who employ the
correct methodologies.  The argument between Soviet/Chinese and Western
industrial-elites has always been a methodological debate rather than a
dispute over metaphysics and epistemology.  Self-styled communist elites have
insisted only a Marxist approach can lead one to objective truth.  Their
Western counterparts have argued that to the contrary Marxism will lead one
away from a genuinely objective understanding.  It's ironic that in
contradiction to Marx both have agreed such an understanding exists.

As Chris in London seems to sense, this belief in an observer-independent
"objective" form to reality is the ideational expression of the
industrial-elite productive order, its manifestation in thought.  It is the
logic which enables industrial-elites to maintain their hegemony by policing
 challenges to their order with clear consciences, and most of the time it
prompts the rest of us to automatically police ourselves.  

Within university walls individuals who present arguments menacing to the
industrial-elite order are routinely denied tenure and promotion on the
grounds they are not properly objective.  (An observation based on 28 years
of experience in the academy).  Judges declare anti-industrial-elite system
witnesses nonobjective and therefore "uncreditable."  Newspaper editors
automatically winnow out system threatening reporters with reference to the
same absolutistic suppositions.  

If, as I believe, we're headed toward an egalitarian post- industrial-elite
world, the indicated paradigm must surely be overcome.  Having power over
one's life necessitates having power over his/her truth.  In an egalitarian
world it would be considered self-evident that there are as many equally
objective understandings of any event as there are different observers
experiencing it in different ways, a proposition found at the core of Marx's
own dialectic.         

  




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