Marco, a graduate student in Western Australia, blogs:
So many people have written about what’s wrong with the world, but very few are writing about what people are doing to change the world. Getting politicised requires: a) learning about what’s wrong with the world, and b) knowing what to do about it. So many people reach A; You know, they read Noam Chomsky and all about the horrors of capitalism and the like, but they never learn or become convinced of their own power to intervene in reality and change things because often they’re not exposed to the rich history of people’s movements and what they’ve achieved, and all the creative things that people are doing in the present… Therefore, in my work, my focus is on activists and what people are doing to change the world, instead of just coming up with another theory of capitalism and how fucked it is.
Take Marx for example. As Harry Cleaver points out (see article here), Marx was more interested in writing about capitalist domination, and not in working class subjectivity! Like Cleaver, I would argue that this is the entirely wrong starting point! The starting point of my work is not capitalism, but the revolutionary subjectivity of those challenging capitalism, and it is for precisely this reason that I am studying social movements.
I liked the post, though I think some of his criticisms of traditional Marxist theory are a little weak. I agree that writing about creative, new, active solutions is what’s urgently required at the moment. However, I didn’t really find any of that on his blog, beyond some pictures of supposedly ‘carnivalesque’ demos with big foam-headed Bush masks, which… yawn. And plenty of rambling about Deleuze and Guttari and rhizomes, which – well, I’m a sorta-kinda-almosta graduate student, and it made even me suffer that specific sort of cringe that usually only comes on when I listen to undergrads talking excitedly about ‘The Matrix’ and Descartes and Plato’s cave. Talking about practical, creative action is difficult, especially in an age where – in my country at least – demonstrations and petitions and so forth really don’t seem to be working very well any more.
Go back and read up on dialectics. You can’t understand the limitations or potentials for “working class subjectivity” without understanding capitalism. There is an obvious dynamic tension between the two. You would know this if you had really read Marx, instead of some cartoon version.
Ok, ‘a little weak’ was an understatement. But although the dichotomising the OP attempts basically fails, it’s still possible to perform analysis of the failures of Capitalism without any addressing of possible strategies for action, and too often that’s what takes place. It seems to me that too often we’re clinging to old paradigms of action:
It’s been shown that critical theory can be absorbed and quarantined almost as much as any other discipline; NVDA was dependent upon the ‘scissor action’ of limitations to the kinds of conflict that society could internalise which just don’t operate in the same way any more; lobbying and its attendants (letter-writing, protest’s redefinition as a form of lobbying, etc) are obviously parasitic on the status quo and extremely limited in potential effect; community-level organisation to provide alternative services etc. is again too readily reabsorbed under the ‘NGO’ model.
Many of these have the potential to do real good, but there’s a ceiling they all hit and the ills they address are clearly at a fundamental level deeper than they can reach at present (just to mix spatial metaphors in a confusing manner). And if there’s one topic it seems to me the blogosphere ignores far too much, it’s that one. Sadly, the blog quoted does so too, possibly more than usual.
I liked Maia’s recent post about the perils of framing these problems in individualistic terms. But even if I can’t do anything, the question ‘What should I do?’ still stands.
Very true comments all around. I agree with Marco’s standpoint on studying those who wish to change capitalism; but, I too think that it makes little sense to criticize Marx for pointing out the failures of capitalism because how does one change a system without knowing what is wrong? Keep the good comments coming though.
The real question is, how does one change a system without having a workable alternative to present. Without that, these movements simply devolve into nihilism and thuggery for its own sake.