- Welcome to The Graduate Center.
My name is Chase Robinson.
I'm the Interim President
of The Graduate Center,
and it is a great pleasure and privilege
to make a few words, by
the way, of introduction
before I introduce the introducer.
The Graduate Center, as
many of you will know,
is home to about 5,000
students, 1800 faculty,
depending on how you count
them, 30 PhD programs,
30, 35 research centers and institutes.
We are a matrix of doctoral
training, advanced research,
and public programming.
We educate the leading
scholars of tomorrow,
and we create and interpret
bodies of knowledge
from anthropology through
to urban education,
which we disseminate for the public good.
Now, literary and political theory
and now increasingly economic
and scientific theory
have been and are becoming
even moreso strengths
of The Graduate Center, and
tonight it is a great pleasure
to welcome and introduce
to you two grand theorists.
The topic of tonight's
event is An American Utopia:
Frederic Jameson in conversation
with Stanley Aronowitz.
Now, as I said, I will
be turning the microphone
over to distinguished
professor Andre Aciman,
who has the pleasure of
introducing our two speakers.
But I should say in closing
that this is very much
a coordinated effort that
reflects the collaborative nature
of our faculty and our students,
and the proof of that is
the number of entities
in The Graduate Center which
are co-sponsoring the event.
The main driver is
Professor Aciman himself,
distinguished professor,
as I said, of comparative literature,
and indeed the program
in comparative literature
is an important sponsor, and I should say
parenthetically that
we're all very pleased
to see that the program
of comparative literature
is now offering a critical
theory certificate.
Joining the program in
comparative literature
is The Writer's Institute,
The Center for the Study
of Culture, Technology, and Work,
The Office of Public Programs,
The Center for the Humanities,
The Doctoral Students Council,
and The Political Science
Graduate Student Association.
So I thank all of them
for working together
to bring the night's
activities to fruition,
as I thank and pass the
microphone over to Andre Aciman.
Andre?
(audience applauds)
I think I'm going to have to
take this sweater off, too.
- Good evening.
It's really a pleasure
to see such a full house.
There are two other rooms
that are equally full
and that have live streaming.
So this is good.
Thank you very much, President Robinson.
One of the things that
Chase Robinson did not say
is that his office was also
part of the symbiotic relation
that we have here in what is called
a collaborative endeavor
at The Graduate Center.
Everybody works together.
The other thing that I
haven't mentioned yet
is that all this is also
possible because students
are involved in bringing
about an event like this,
and I should also mention
that there's one student
in particular, Claire
Summers, who's sitting there,
who is responsible for
making these things happen,
because she's literally
indefatigable and intrepid,
and if you think you
don't have to be intrepid
and indefatigable to
bring about such an event,
you don't know anything about events.
What makes this event
particularly meaningful
to The Graduate Center is
that it represents the capping
of our long and arduous struggle
to bring about a critical
theory certificate program.
That means that graduate
students at The Graduate Center
in the humanities and the social sciences
will take five courses and earn with that
a certificate in critical theory,
a wonderful boon
to people who are thinking
ahead about job prospects.
(audience laughs)
We've done so...
Well, if you think that's irrelevant, yes.
You're laughing because you
know how meaningful that is.
(audience laughs)
It's a good thing.
But it was a struggle to bring it about,
and it takes a lot of, again,
pugnaciousness to bring it on.
We have done successfully this,
and now we're moving onto a new venture,
which is another program for the people
in literature in particular,
a translation certificate.
We haven't decided yet if it's going to be
a certificate or not, but
that's where we're headed.
So we look for more work, more innovation,
and more enterprise.
Today is an important day for me,
because most of you here
are graduate students,
but it represents also a
moment in my own graduate year.
In 1973, I was in my first
year as a graduate student
in comparative literature,
and I was flummoxed,
and I was lost,
because we were in the cusp
of a very meaningful moment,
and at that point, I remember
a green colored book.
It had a green cover,
and it was called The
prison-house of language,
written by Professor
Jameson, published in 1972,
and it was, for me,
a great help to understand
A, what was linguistics
and why was everybody
talking about linguistics.
Never heard of that subject before.
Second of all, what was the
formalist movement in Russia?
What did it sort of promise?
And third of all,
what on earth in 1972,
73, was structuralism?
Most of you may not know
what structuralism is,
because you know what
post-structuralism is.
But in those years, it was very confusing.
So it gives me an enormous
amount of pleasure
to introduce Professor Jameson,
who is the William Elaine Junior Professor
of Comparative Literature
and Professor of Romance
Languages at Duke University.
He's a noted cultural critic.
He's the author of several books,
including The Political Unconscious,
Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act,
Postmodern or the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism,
Archaeologies of the Future,
most recently, The Antinomies Of Realism,
and the second book that I purchased,
Marxism and Form in those years.
Professor Jameson received the Award
for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement
from the Modern Language Association.
There is a moment in the Gospel of Mark
when Jesus says, "A prophet
is not without honor,
"except in his own town
"among his relatives and in his own home."
Prophets are never praised in their home,
but tonight, we're really
happy to praise one of our own.
Stanley Aronowitz is a
distinguished professor
at the CUNY Graduate Center
and the director of the Center
for the Study of Cultural,
Technology, and Work.
He's an advocate for
organized labor and the author
of several books,
including False Promises:
The Shaping of American
Working Class Consciousness,
Left Turn: Forging a New Political Future,
and most recently, Taking It Big:
C. Wright Mills and the Making
of Political Intellectuals.
He's also the co-founder
of Situations Journal.
In 2012, Professor
Aronowitz, our own prophet,
received the Lifetime Achievement Award
from the Stony Brook University's
Center for Study of Working Life.
I leave you to these two highly gifted
and competent men to discuss,
read, talk, and possibly argue.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)
- Thanks very much, Andre,
and I'm very happy to be here
in particular to celebrate
this critical theory certificate,
which is certainly close to my own heart.
Now, having spent a
number of years arguing
that utopia is to be defined
as what we can't imagine
within this society,
and that that's precisely
its use, its political use,
I find myself in the embarrassing position
of having to try to invent one after all.
There is, in fact,
something like a reality
principal within fantasy.
Even to fantasize what doesn't exist,
you have to be able to talk yourself
into a framework in which
dreaming about it is still
somehow practically possible.
So I find myself in a no man's land
between political strategy
and utopian aspiration
in which those boundary lines, again,
become blurred or undetectable,
in which I can't be sure
whether I'm proposing a political
program or utopian vision,
neither of which, according to me,
ought to be possible any longer.
Why not?
Well, the left once had
a political program.
It was called revolution.
No one seems to believe in it anymore,
partly because the agency
supposed to bring it
about has disappeared.
Partly because the system
it was supposed to replace
has become too complicated
and too omnipresent
to begin to imagine replacing it.
Partly because nobody
believes in revolution anymore
and the very language
associated with it has become
as old-fashioned and as archaic
as that of the founding fathers.
It's easier, someone once said, to imagine
the end of the world than
it is the end of capitalism,
and with that, the idea of revolution
overthrowing capitalism
seems to have vanished.
Well, let's be fair.
The left did have another
political strategy,
whatever you think about
it, and that was reformism,
sometimes, in contradistinction
to revolutionary communism,
called socialism.
But I'm afraid no one believes
in that any longer either.
The reformist or social democratic parties
are in a complete shambles.
They have no programs any
longer, save perhaps to regulate
capitalism so it doesn't
do any catastrophic damage.
There is omnipresent corruption,
both in these parties and
in the system at large,
which isn't any case too
enormous and too complex
to be susceptible of
any decisive tinkering
which might improve it, let alone lead
to something you could
truly call systemic change.
Social democracy is on our
time irreparably bankrupt,
and communism seems dead.
Thus, it would seem
both of Gramsci's celebrated alternatives,
the war of maneuver and
the war of position,
no longer seem theoretically adequate
to the current situation.
Fortunately, there exists
a third kind of transition
out of capitalism, which
is less often acknowledged,
let alone discussed,
and that's what was
historically called dual power.
Indeed, dual power will
be my political program
and will lead to my utopian proposal,
as I'll try to show in a moment.
The phrase is, of course,
associated with Lenin
and his description of the coexistence
of the provisional government
and the network of Soviets
or Worker Soldiers Councils in 1917,
a genuine transitional
period if there ever was one,
but it has also existed
in numerous other forms
of interest to us today.
I would most notably single out the way
in which organizations like
the Black Panthers or Hamas
function to provide daily
services, food kitchens,
garbage collection, healthcare,
water inspection, and the like,
in areas neglected by some
official central government.
In such situations, power
moves to the networks to which
you turn for practical help and
leadership on a daily basis.
In effect, they become an alternative,
an alternate government
without officially challenging
the ostensibly legal structure.
The point at which a confrontation
and a transfer of power takes place,
at which the official government
begins to whither away,
at which revolutionary violence appears,
will of course vary
with the overall political
and cultural context itself.
It's not necessary to
supply a historical catalog
of these anomalous structures
of transitional coexistence,
which range from the
dualities of church and state
in some periods to that
of local communes in
the French Revolution,
most notably the first
commune, La Commune de Paris,
that supported still informal power.
What might be more useful
would be to indicate
the kinds of events of
structures which cannot
be considered as relevant
examples of dual power.
Enclaves, for example,
such as Chapas or Ecotopia
or the Free Zones or the Maroons,
which are spatially separate
from the dominant state
and have their own autonomy.
I would also suggest that current
form of the mass uprising,
from the Arab Spring to Occupy,
does not really qualify either.
The first of these two
revolutionary phenomenon,
the enclave, stands as a
kind of state within a state.
The second, the uprising
as a spatial event
which pioneers information technology
as a substitute for
political organization,
nor would I wanna underplay the importance
of the residual forms of
the more classic forms
of revolution I mentioned
at the beginning,
the armed uprising, a guerrilla warfare,
serving to demonstrate the weaknesses
of the state apparatus and its incapacity
to constitute a genuine
popular government,
to use a word we probably need to replace,
as you'll see in a moment.
As for the older political parties
such as the various socialist
ones that I've mentioned,
although they're incapable of achieving
any real change in their own right,
they cut, nonetheless,
their best service platforms
for discursive struggle and its vehicles
for the renewed public
consideration of hitherto repressed
and stigmatized transformational policies,
such as the wholesale
nationalization of banks,
insurance companies, and utilities;
the taxation of the great corporations
and the gradual transfer of wealth
from the upper one
percent of the population,
and the eventual abolition
of inheritance as such,
the establishment of a minimum
annual wage for everyone,
and the reorganization
of the political system,
the dissolution of NATO,
the reform of an unequal federalism,
the popular control of the media,
free healthcare and education,
universal wifi, and so on, and so forth.
The function of political
parties is to legitimate these
slogans and demands and to
make them thinkable once again,
even if they can't achieve them,
and that's accomplishment
enough, I would think.
As for genuine revolutionary
change, however,
that will be the function,
as I wanna suggest here, of dual power,
and it's now time to examine
our society as it is today
in order to weigh the
chances for such dual power
and to identify those
already-existing institutions
which could be its vehicle.
Traditionally, of course,
it's to the labor unions
which the left has always turned
as to its base and its
natural constituency.
The very nature of the
proletariat has been transformed
and enlarged by the transformation
of peasants into farm workers,
by underpaid service industries,
and by the white collar workers
in the now immense government bureaucracy.
On the other hand, as everyone knows,
the original industrial character of work
has itself been reduced by
informational technology
and the power of the
unions greatly diminished.
Traditionally, in any case,
there was always a tension
between the unions and
the political parties,
which had different aims,
nor must we underestimate
the success of anti-union
propaganda during the
dissolution of the New Deal
that is for the whole
of the Cold War period
by way of alleged
association with the mafia,
with corruption, with the
stigma of identification
as a special interest,
ridiculous expression,
as we call lobbying groups over here.
The defeat in Wisconsin after
one of the most encouraging
political developments in
recent years is sad proof
that this kind of anti-union
prejudice persists unabated.
So unions no longer
offer an effective chance
at dual power, even if they ever did,
and maybe we should conclude
actually that in this society
it's the mafia which offers
the most suggestive example
of already-existing dual power.
However, its effectiveness
seemed to have waned
as significantly as that
of the unions themselves.
What other candidates can we identify
to play the role I've been imagining?
Almost all of them have suffered
the institutional debilitation
endemic to late capitalism.
Take, for example, the post office.
In Europe, it's a kind
of savings bank as well.
Here, it offers a parallel to the census
and could presumably, along
with your motor vehicle agency,
secure your voting rights.
It distributes retirement, pension,
and Social Security
checks and is apparently
even developing some kind of
institutional relationship
with its once-mortal enemy, the internet.
It mints money in the form of stamps.
It used to be an important
source of employment,
particularly for those seeking
to drop out of the system
as inconspicuously as possible,
and generally on foot.
It offers a unique experience of nature,
(audience laughs)
as well as of urban space
and an equally unique
relationship to the community
where that still exists.
But once again, information
technology now stands
as an absolute historical
break with whatever utopias
might have been imagined on the basis
of this uniquely relational system.
The professionals do not
seem any more promising.
The legal profession, for example,
could scarcely stand in
competition with the state
insofar as it is the
state in the first place,
something confirmed by
the loss of autonomy
of the judiciary system in our time.
For an aging population,
the medical profession
might seem to offer
more promising material,
insofar as its benefits and
necessities come doubled
by that sort of moral authority
with which Plato wanted to
surround his philosopher kings.
But the privatization of the hospitals
and the institutionalization
of the private practitioner
bid fare to strip away that aura
and the doctors have, for the most part,
had to bow to the economic
power of insurance companies
and pharmaceutical giants
while their guilds,
such as the AMA, which once
functioned as a powerful
anti-political lobby on the order
of the National Rifle Association
are probably no longer very effective.
Then there are the churches,
many of which do function
as a nation within a nation
and provide solace and
the proverbial haven
in a heartless world
to families alienated by late capitalism.
Nor was Robespierre wrong, it seems to me,
to call, following Jean-Jacques,
for a state religion,
a secular religion of reason of some kind,
insofar as neither had any other concept
for what necessarily
binds a society together.
I suggest that rather
than religion as such,
it's the existence of a fetish
that provides social
cohesion in those instances
in which the latter has been possible.
The American Constitution,
the French conception
of the République, of the
Japanese emperor system,
certain repressed national languages,
these are so many examples
of fetishes which have proved
more successful than the
usual forms of patriotism
and dynastic succession, and any utopia
hopeful of duration will have
to discover such a fetish,
for it cannot be invented,
and probably already
secretly exists in the
hearts of its citizens
in whatever as yet unimaginable form.
Excuse me.
Religion, however, is
clearly the most dangerous
of all candidates for
dual power, based as it is
in what Kant would have
called a subreption,
a mistaking of superstructure for base.
Religion, as we've seen for some time,
is an invitation to all
kinds of private obsessions
and violence, but I don't either recommend
an enlightenment program for
the elimination of religion
in general and specific
religions in particular.
They should be allowed to
run as wild as possible,
but should be abandoned
to the sphere of culture,
as I'll try to argue in a moment.
What is then left as a
vehicle for dual power?
Stanley Aronowitz once
observed that in the future,
as computers are down 20% of the time,
the true levers of power
will lie in the hands of
the computer repairmen,
with a proletariat of
third-world women turning out
the machines, and a financial
elite reaping the benefits.
(audience laughs)
That may be.
But we're not talking
about power as such here,
but rather an ambiguous
political framework
in which, in a dual system,
power can be observed
to slip from one to the other.
This is then the moment to explain,
if you haven't already guessed it,
that there's only one system left
which can function in so
truly revolutionary a fashion.
This is a thought that
must have first come
to me many years ago, inspired by an image
by one of our greatest political
cartoonists of that time,
or for forever.
I think it must have
been in the first year
of Eisenhower's presidency,
probably not still during the campaign,
when the last vestiges of
the New Deal still survived
and in particular,
Truman's ill-fated campaign
for socialized medicine
on the then-contemporary
British labor model and Canada's adoption
of it beginning in
Saskatchewan in those years.
Ike, presumably still in
full military regalia,
perches informally on the edge of his desk
in the oval office and
observes, conversationally,
"Well, if they want socialized medicine,
"they have only to join
the army, as I did."
(audience laughs)
The implication is as crystal
clear as a thunderbolt.
Only the army constitutes
a state within the state,
capable of assuming
the structural function
and promise of dual power.
And this alarming proposition
will make up the argument
of the concluding part of this talk
from both political and
utopian perspectives.
Now, the army we currently have
is what's called a volunteer army,
that is, a commercial
profession like any other.
I probably don't have to remind you
of the history of citizens armies,
from the Greeks to Machiavelli,
and very much including
the French Revolution.
These armies, based on the draft,
had political missions,
most notably in modern times
to forge the nation out
of a variety of local
and provincial populations,
sometimes not even speaking
the national language,
itself a political creation
of the new national state, in any case.
To be sure, nowadays the
media have already done that
for us, but the usefulness of
the analogy lies in the fact
that in our federal system,
the army is virtually
the only institution to
transcend the jurisdictions
of state laws and boundaries,
divisions which are among
the most important
counterrevolutionary principles
embedded in the American Constitution,
itself one of the most successful
counterrevolutionary
documents ever devised.
No genuine systemic
change can take place here
without an abrogation of the Constitution,
a foundational fetish as I've claimed,
and in fact a document the left itself
would be as loathed to
forfeit as the right,
owing to the protections
of the Bill of Rights.
The single advantage
of the army as a system
is that it transcends that document
without doing away with it.
It coexists with it at a
different spatial level
and becomes thereby potentially
an extraordinary instrument
in the erection of dual power.
You also know, I'm sure,
that Nixon ended the draft
in order to put an end to
popular, and in particular,
student resistance to the war in Vietnam.
Johnson had already modified the draft
with hosts of class and racial exemptions
in order to limit its political impact.
More recently, during the Iraq War,
what we may call the Rumsfeld period,
this professional army has
been further privatized,
and I insist on the relevance of this term
for the way in which it
underscores the relationship
with the variety of other
privatizations all over
the world inaugurated by
the Reagan-Thatcher regimes.
Rumsfeld further privatized
this already specialized
and salaried private army by outsourcing
many of its functions
to private corporations
of the Blackwater type
and by introducing complex
advanced technology
in order to render other portents
of the military workforce redundant,
that is, by downsizing
them via mechanization,
a process Marx already
described in Capital.
I put it to you that this
very significant moment
in the history of the modern army
had a political purpose above
and beyond its adaptation
of current late capitalists
business practices,
and that purpose was to remove
this small professional group
possessing Max Weber's
proverbial monopoly of violence
from any possibility of
mass democratic action,
and furthermore to assimilate it
to the structure of the police force,
which it now has become on a global scale.
So, the first step in
my utopian proposal is,
so to speak, the
renationalization of the army
along the lines of any number
of other socialist candidates
for nationalization, some of
which I've already mentioned,
and by reintroducing
the draft to transform
the present armed fores back
into that popular mass force
capable of coexisting
successfully with an increasingly
unrepresentative representative government
into a vehicle for mass democracy,
rather than the representative kind.
Now, inasmuch as you'll
continue to associate the army
with the various coup
d'état of modern times
all over the world as
well as with all the wars
it's been called on to
wage in recent years
and is still being called on to wage,
I will at once specify
the most important steps in the process.
First of all, the body
of eligible draftees
would be increased by including
everyone of both sexes
from 16 to 50, or if you
prefer, 60 years of age;
that is, the entire population.
Such an unmanageable
population would henceforth
be incapable of waging foreign wars,
let alone carrying out successful coups.
(audience laughs)
In order to emphasize the
universality of that process,
let's add that the handicapped
will all be found appropriate
positions in the system
and that pacifists and
conscientious objectors will be
placed in control of arms
development and arms storage,
(audience laugh)
and the like.
Now I need to remind you
of the breadth of the military system,
particularly under the
pre-Rumsfeld dispensation.
We can begin with medical
attention, and in particular,
the hospitals, which, as you know,
are currently in desperate straits,
at a moment when the hospitals themselves,
the other hospitals, the private kind,
have become big business in
this country, to our disgrace.
In our new universal system, of course,
the military hospitals become
a free national health
service, open to everyone,
insofar as everyone is a
service person or a personnel
or veteran, and the
entire center of gravity
of universal healthcare,
and also, I would add,
pharmaceutical production,
disease control,
and the experimentation
with and production
of new medicines, would now
be organized around the army.
We may also assume a reorientation
of education itself under its auspices,
not merely for the children
of this military population,
but for various advanced degrees.
Nowadays it's difficult to think
of any kind of advanced training,
maybe except for business schools,
which would not be required
within this system,
the Army Corps of Engineers
is the obvious example,
and we may think of the socialist
or ex-socialist countries
for models of our situation
in which the various armies
included, and I think in
China, maybe still do,
such functions as the
manufacture of clothing,
the production of films,
the eventual production of motor vehicles,
and even, in China, for example, again,
a writers union in which
intellectuals and writers
and artists find their space and income.
The army is also notoriously
the source of manpower
for disaster relief,
infrastructure repair,
and construction and the like,
and the question of food
supply would immediately place
this institution, if it
can still be called that,
in charge of the ordering
and supply of food production
and therefore in a controlling position
for that fundamental activity as well.
In fact, as this new army
will no longer be defined
by war and the profession of warfare,
and I've avoided foreign
policy in this sketch.
I'm inclined to follow
the utopian tradition
and recommend a healthy
isolationism for the new system.
As war will no longer become available
to shape this new army's
activities, it seems clear
that its place will be
taken by natural disasters
of which we can expect ever more,
and worse ones in this climate,
along perhaps with economic disasters,
the economic disasters of capitalism,
which can be expected to
be reduced by the abolition
of the banks and the
gradual nationalization
of all sectors of the economy.
But as our current army and the country
of which it is the expression
is a culture of violence,
it may seem paradoxical
to recommend the problem
as its own solution.
But consider that at once,
all the guns and firepower
within our borders become the
property of the army itself,
and are thus automatically registered,
and then in a universal system, rape
and other forms of violence
can no longer remain concealed
and the equality of men and women
becomes a universal social
reality so inevitable
that it seems to be a mere fact of nature
rather than a lofty ideal of some kind.
And obviously there are
many more negatives features
of this kind to be addressed,
the social and psychological
results of a society
whose superstructures are
organized around the supreme value
of competition and its
symbolic exemplifications
in sexual identity, sports,
business practices, and social intercourse
and encapsulated in new
forms such as the high school
hazing dramas and other adolescent comedy
and adventure stereotypes,
which set the tone
and intellectual level of much
of contemporary mass culture.
The gradual transformation
of subjectivities
as they adapt or are reprogrammed to new
infrastructural realities is
called cultural revolution,
and I'll touch on it implicitly later on.
But it may be worthwhile saying something
about the survival of older institutions
in the situation of dual
power I've been imagining.
It might be well, for example, to remember
that when Augustus founded
that the Roman Empire,
as such, in distinction
to the ancient kingdoms,
as memory was important to that tradition,
he left the institutions of
the Roman Republic in place.
The Senate continued to meet
and to debate in its customary
fashion, but no one paid any
attention to it any longer.
One thinks of Pierre
Clastres's old analysis
of the tribal chiefdom before state power.
His function was not
to command but to talk,
endlessly, perhaps, but without authority.
And this rhetorical gift
remains an essential
if unanalyzed component
of modern political power,
an aesthetic or perhaps a
poetic component as such.
But perhaps this is also the place
to add another classical analogy as a way
of dealing with the fear of
charismatic or dictatorial
leadership in the modern
political unconscious.
The ancients transformed
this unresolvable problem
of the individual leader
into yet another institution,
the one, indeed, from which
we derive our word dictator,
namely, an individual endowed
with exceptional power,
the power of exception, if you prefer,
for a limited period of time only,
after which he sank back into
equality with the population,
and was, in fact, often banished.
We may indeed link this extremely
provisional personal power
with another ancient institution, namely,
the temple of Janus, whose
gates were ceremonially opened
at the onset of a war and
closed to signal its conclusion.
I've already suggested
that wars will not be tasks
for this new system,
which will be confronted
with other kinds of
collective crises such as,
above all, ecological ones.
But it's always well to
remember William James's
famous remark, whose genial
insight was made dramatic
by its paradoxical
misconception, for in America,
wars are the moral equivalent
of collection action,
as witness, the great American
utopia of World War II.
Yet new kinds of crises
might well be moments
in which charismatic dictatorship
is temporarily required,
and its limits and
obligatory provisionality
might well be signaled by
the opening and closing
of just such ceremonial gates
as those of the temple of Janus.
But now we approach the point
at which a political program
necessarily of this kind,
necessarily passes over
into that very different kind of thing
which is the utopian project.
And I'm aware that these modes of thinking
often seem incompatible and indeed arouse
the hostility of both
sides to one another.
Political theory takes as its object
problems without solutions.
Utopian speculation,
solutions without problems.
The first constitutes an ontology
which is necessarily obliged
to work within the limits
of being and of reality
as it currently exists.
The latter, utopian speculation, aims
at a radical transformation
of the present and the system.
In that respect, it remains the sibling
of revolutionary thought
and today occupies the place
of a revolutionary politics
which is not yet fully reemerged
from the transformations
of globalization and post-modernity,
of finance capital on a world scale.
Utopian thinking demands a revision
of Gramsci's great slogan.
It might run like this:
cynicism of the intellect;
utopianism of the will.
On the other hand, it's obvious
that unlike revolutionary politics,
the utopian impulse is always
transmitted through individual
rather than collective wish fulfillment
and always reflects the private
fantasies of its inventors
who are readily identified
as crackpots and oddballs,
solitary lunatics whose
ravings and imaginings
draw their strength, if they have any,
precisely from their distance from society
and worldliness rather
than their knowledge of it.
Still, one might cite
some eminent authorities,
like, quote, "the great socialist utopias
"of the 19th century
function not as ideal models
"but as group fantasies,
that is, as agents
"of the real productivity of desire,
"making it possible to disinvest
the current social field,
"to deinstitutionalize it,
"to further the revolutionary
institution of desire itself."
That's Deleuze and Guattari.
Still this is the point at which we pass
from strategies about which
we can reasonably argue,
that one about the
universal army, I think,
to the multiplicity of
fantasies and possibilities,
the variety of content
and decoration, with which
we may fill out the basic
framework of the scheme,
all of which is simply
to say that from now on,
the project and its description
will be far more a
private utopia of my own,
for which others may wish to substitute
their own particular obsessions.
However, at this point,
also two further things
need to be said against political theory
and practical politics as such.
I've already commented on the antagonism
between the practical-political
and the utopian,
but I should point out
again that it was there
even in an earlier time
when changing the system
and replacing it was called revolution.
The incremental changes
and corrections at stake
in day-to-day politics and even yesterday
in the socialist or reform
parties has always found
the revolutionary or the
utopian totalizing demands
and positions exacerbating and
a waste of precious energies,
whether they took the form
of terrorist or voluntarist,
interventions were ivory tower frivolity,
'cause there's always, I
think, in American politics,
a latent anti-intellectualism.
I think we need to maintain a
serious double standard here,
and while supporting
all the local struggle
is ever more urgent and
desperate in the heartland
of late capitalism today,
we need to keep alive
the ideal of a radical
or revolutionary change,
one which is today mostly
preserved in utopia
rather than in political thought.
But I had in mind a more
specific theoretical objection
to political theory, and it has to do with
the very nature of the
concepts with which it works.
Bellamy, as is well
known, not only imagined
his utopian industrial or universal army,
on which I draw for this sketch.
He also became a practical
politician whose party,
new party, enjoyed unrivaled
success in the great era
of populism at the end
of the 19th century.
He called it the National Party,
and I suppose as my whole
talk here is an exercise
in American exceptionalism,
I can't object to such nationalism,
but let me say another word
about terms like nation,
which attempt to
characterize the collective.
That particular word seems to
have had a linguistic origin.
It was the name for the various
foreign language-speaking
students in medieval Paris,
who, of course, spoke a
non-national language, Latin,
in their theology classes
in the university.
But I wanna make a
philosophical point here.
I suppose it's a Kantian
once, since it involves
the impossibility of thinking
certain kinds of things,
such as that peculiar thing in itself
called consciousness,
which no human philosopher
has ever been able to describe.
I think it's the same
with collective reality.
That is, owing to our individuation
as biological individuals,
it is impossible
collective reality to conceptualize.
But we can list the attempts to do so:
groups, communities,
Gemeinschaften, mobs, crowds,
tribes, clans, democracy, republic,
cooperatives, peoples,
nations, and even multitudes.
None of these words correspond
to the thing I've been calling collective
by way of picking the most
neutral term I can think of,
which of course all of these terms
end up being ideological in the long run
and pushing a certain kind of politics.
For all such terms which
cannot succeed in naming
the unconceptualizable
fact, not of the other,
but of the multiple and the plural
end up being drawn into the service
of this or that ideology.
On peut pas venir, said Deleuze wisely,
implying that any implication
that it already existed was an impression
and a normative or repressive ideology.
This is why the plural
cannot have majorities or
minorities or pluralities,
and incidentally, why
Rousseau's social contract
is the only intelligent
political work ever written,
starting as it does from
this representational problem
and the fact that the
collectivity is unthinkable.
This is also why political science
as a discipline cannot be substantive.
Either it's a history,
hopefully involving relentless
ideological and philosophical
demystification,
or it produces handbooks
for practical techniques
in a given status quo where
it must ceaselessly camouflage
its origins in the one
supremely great model
never to be repeated,
namely, Machiavelli's Prince.
I can't resist giving an example
of the theoretical bankruptcy
of political theory
or at least of some of those
contemporary ideological uses,
an example which actually has
some relevance to our current topic.
A while back, this
discipline formed a concept
aligned to pseudo-scientific
state by its economic language,
and that was the idea of underdevelopment,
a category which assumed that development
and national autonomy were still possible,
something the work of Robert
Kurz completely undermined,
and has, for that reason,
been passed over in a
conspiracy of silence.
This pseudo-concept was
then laterally followed
and replaced by another one, a new one,
more obviously neo-conservative
in Iraqi-Afghan origin,
and that's the slogan of the failed state.
This idea is all the more
ridiculous in the light
of the fact that today, all
stated are failed states,
very much including the
one we're in right now.
None of them function.
None can even be patched up
with the various political
strings and Band-Aids.
Not even the dictatorships work anymore,
and one is, reluctantly or not
drawn to Samuel Huntington's
scandalous proposition that
the more democracy there is,
the less governable a state,
indeed, that genuine
democracy is ungovernable.
We must, however, draw the
opposite conclusion from his,
and, as a consequence,
abandon government altogether.
In fact, no one wants even a failed,
even a non-failed,
successful, functioning state
in the first place, and
indeed, in practice,
almost all the factions on either side
aren't one in denouncing
the state as such.
But the state is the
object and the privileged
subject matter of political science.
And the latter is impossible,
simply because the thing
I'm provisionally calling collectively
is not only impossible to
think; it's impossible to form
in any kind of state in the first place.
So for collectivity,
let's go a little further
and substitute the even more neutral term
and reality of population as such.
This was also Rousseau's great insight.
It is population which is both
the conceptual and social scandal.
That philosophically fearful
thing called the other,
which has haunted modern
thought in recent years,
is in reality plural,
and it's population as such
which constitutes otherness.
Not overpopulation, as Malthus thought.
Nothing underpopulation,
as the early 20th century
French thought, along with
other countries today,
but simply sheer plurality
and multiplicity.
Nor is this scandal of the
real to be avoided in the other
direction be retreating
into nostalgic microgroups
or clans of a fantasy ethnic type,
today's politics, the imaginary players
in the so-called culture wars
of current American politics.
These singularities are
as ineffectual in theory
and as in practice as the universalities
they're supposed to subvert.
But I wanna add a fundamental
proviso to all this
about social class, namely,
that class is not a concept of this kind.
It doesn't seek to name
a form of collectivity,
despite numerous misuses of that kind.
Class simply names an economic locality,
a position within the capitalist system.
The class in itself is an
analytic and descriptive term,
and Marx never used it any other way,
however much he may have
recommended organization,
combination they called it,
and the achievement of
class consciousness,
that is, the notion of a class for itself,
the struggle over class
constitution, as Stanley puts it.
Marx was, I venture to say,
productivist, but not workerist,
and the term proletariat,
in the early theory,
in the writings, the early
theory of the weakest link,
was not necessarily a
class concept, although one
could certainly subscribe
to it in all kinds of ways,
as Marcuse did in the 1960s.
Marx analyzed the
contradictions of capitalism,
and he was also a great
political strategist,
but maybe not exclusively
a class-based one.
Anyway, I wanted you to
understand that I don't include
the term class among the
various words for collective
that I was criticizing.
So indeed, my critiques
of these various attempts
to conceptualize and philosophize
that reality I can only call
as neutrally as possible
the group or the collectivity
must finally arrive at
the following point,
that from Aristotle to Kant and on,
the ultimate aim and
endpoint of political theory
lies in the drafting of a constitution,
conceived as bringing
to an end revolution,
revolution as such,
rather than standing as its apotheosis.
I like Toni Negri's masterful analysis
in which he shows how the
arrival of constituted
constitutional power shuts down
that brief moment of freedom
of the constituant of the
construction of power.
But remember that the strengths
of the universal army scheme
is that it cuts across
the federal constitution
in a wholly novel way,
transgressing its boundaries
and carefully-drawn limits
without annulling it,
leaving its map intact
beneath a wholly different topology.
So let me now propose another
thought about the political,
a revival of the most stigmatized slogan
of traditional Marxism, and
that's the infamous distinction
between base and superstructure,
which Marx, I think, only used
once, as far as I can see.
I've often suggested in the
past that it's a mistake
to take this distinction
of base and superstructure
as a principle or dogma
inherent to Marxism
as a system of thought;
rather, it should always be
considered as a starting point
and an initial problem as Marxism's
fundamental contribution
to a whole new problematic.
Base and superstructure are,
in other words, a beginning,
and not a conclusion,
a laboratory experiment
and not some tenet of a
quasi-religious belief.
But in the present context, I
want to affirm this opposition
far more decisively.
The base or superstructure
is the realm of necessity.
It's the realm of production
and the dictate of the
production of value.
I won't enter here into
the interminable tradition
of Marxian debates about the state,
except to say that in my current proposal,
the state is simply the
mode of organization
of production itself, which
is to say, in this instance,
the universal army,
something somewhere between
a universal democracy,
a political party, and a bureaucracy,
so every one their own
bureaucrat, in other words.
So the infrastructure is a
Bellamy-type regimentation,
an industrial army, an order which offers
a feasible path to utopia at the same time
that it arouses multiple kinds of fears
and stirs the deepest
layers of the unconscious
in a variety of ways.
It awakens, indeed, all
the fears of utopia itself,
while adding to them those of dystopia,
such fears of power and
totalitarian military control
and the like, combining the anxiety
about the withering away of the
state and impending anarchy,
with that of the
overdevelopment of the state
in some kind of implacable
and standardizing machine.
So this is certainly the moment to affirm
that in this scheme, the superstructure,
the realm of culture, will be conceived,
in counterdistinction to the
base, as the realm of freedom.
Here, a single name
sums up the whole answer
and can stand in counterpoise
to the tutelary image
of Bellamy that presides
over the infrastructure,
and that name is Jean Ferrié.
Ferrié, to my mind,
represents absolute freedom
and the only possible way
in which a collectivity
or multiplicity can coordinate
its ineradicable individualities.
As against most of the great
revolutionary traditions,
I believe it is essential to avoid
left Puritanism at all costs,
to reduce the inevitable
repressions any social order
interiorizes in order to cohere,
and to welcome the most
outrageous self-indulgences
and personal freedom of
its citizens in all things,
very much including
Puritanism and the hatred
of self-indulgence and personal freedoms.
Ferrié it is who squares this circle,
and this is why, at the very
center of our new society
there will appear a new
kind of institution,
destined to supplant
traditional government agencies
and executives of all kinds.
We may provisionally
call this new institution
the psychoanalytic placement bureau,
(audience laughs)
and it will, in conjunction
with unimaginably
complex computer systems,
handle and organize all
forms of employment,
of universal employment, of
course, as well as all manner
of personal and collective therapies.
Mediating between the
individual and the collective,
and you may insert innumerable
familial structures
and groups of your
choosing in between them,
the new institution will
combine the functions
of a union and a hospital,
an employment office and a court,
a market research
agency, a polling bureau,
and a social welfare center.
(audience laughs)
Presumably, what's left of
the police as an institution
will eventually be to
attach to and transform
by this central agency,
which will itself eventually
replace government and
political structures as such,
The state, thereby
withering away into some
enormous group therapy.
(audience laughs)
This development is only
possible at the price
of a radical disjunction
of base and superstructure
or of production from culture itself.
We used to call this
disjunction work and leisure,
but hopefully the influence of Ferrié
will dissolve this opposition
on the personal level.
But in the current intellectual climate,
I think it's important
to insist on a radical permissiveness,
on an absolute freedom
in the cultural realm,
including the freedom
to do nothing at all,
to drug yourself into oblivion.
A guaranteed annual
minimum wage does of course
make this utopia of this
utopia a paradise for slackers,
yet this society is wealthy
enough to let them go their way,
and Ferrié will help us absorb
the envy and bitterness,
the sad passions, indeed,
the hatred which will follow
them from other workers in this vineyard,
such as a religious fundamentalists.
But at our present
stage of post-modernity,
no future society can
retreat into older kinds
of order and discipline,
unless indeed you like that kind of thing.
One imagines a multitude
of distinct ideological
collectivities, scattered
through this space
like the distinctive cities
of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy.
As for crime, or more
accurately put, the anti-social,
as someone with a horror
of the death penalty
and of prisons generally,
I recommend a return to
the old Greek and Zoros
traditions of banishment,
but I also propose
adoption of Samuel Delany's
magnificent institution
in his utopian novel Triton of a so-called
unlicensed center where no
law exists and anything goes.
In fact, it has occurred to me today
that that might be a good idea for cities,
generally, for people who
don't want to have to live
in phalansteries or
hearths, as David puts it.
On the other hand, it's clearly
a loss of whatever we think
is freedom, which is the
centerpiece of all conservative,
not to say anti-utopian politics,
and which will certainly be
reactivated with a vengeance
by a plan like this for the
total militarization of America.
The whole history of
anticommunist ideology lies here,
and it's been instilled in us for 65 years
or 220, or even the thousands of years
since the emergency of the state itself,
depending on your periodization.
It is that immemorial brainwashing
and deep, unconscious
anti-utopian and anti-collectivist
habituation which any utopian thinking
must confront before it ever gets a chance
to spread its wings
imaginatively and positively,
as Ferrié was able to do.
Thus, the anti-utopian imagination today,
at a moment when anti-socialism
has been enlarged
into anti-governmental
prejudice in general,
is placed in the defensive
position of argumentation
and refutation before it
can even begin to imagine.
So our first task is diagnostic,
to isolate the anti-utopian prejudice
in order to treat it more effectively.
And as for the universal
utopian army I proposed here,
you have to remember that
it would come into being
in an age of multiple subject positions,
which is to say multiple group formations,
since the old-fashioned individual subject
is scarcely with us any longer.
Therefore, you have to
remember that any member
of the universal army
will also be a member
of multiple other limited
groups of ethnic, cultural,
lifestyle, superstructural types,
all at the same time.
But the universal army
is that fetish of unity
which must persist within
any coherent social order,
and my wager has been that
it's a different kind of fetish
from those of past societies.
As a unity, it subsists over and above
the multiple groups and associations
that are the content
of our individual lives
in a different way than
the old-fashioned state,
and I think with that, I'll end.
Thank you very much.
(audience applauds)
- I'm gonna confine my remarks
to some commentary on
Fred's provocative paper.
In the context of that commentary,
I'll introduce some ideas
that might not have been made explicit.
The first question I want to address
is the problem of utopia itself.
The beginning of Jameson's paper
seems to indicate that the utopian project
is virtually impossible,
as also revolution is impossible,
and what it reminded me of,
when I read the paper...
I have a copy of most
of it, not all of it.
He fooled around with
the paper that I have,
so I had to even listen.
I'm just kidding.
(audience laughs)
Marcuse's end of utopia,
in his five lectures,
makes a coherent, it seems
to me, a cogent argument
that one of the reasons that
utopia is no longer possible
is because if utopia
represents the impossible,
then developed capitalist society,
much less other societies
that are not developed,
have reached the point
where, at the global level,
almost everything is possible.
And if everything is possible,
the problem is no longer
the problem of utopia.
The problem is the problem
of some kind of vision
on the one hand, which we heard tonight,
or late this afternoon, and
another kind of politics.
I would suggest that nothing
that Fred has proposed,
including the universal army
and the transformation of the state,
which is quite a big idea,
and I'm going to try to
unpack it a little bit,
is impossible any longer,
because we've reached a
stage of human history
where we have the means, both scientific,
technological, as well as cultural,
to actually change things
without worrying about
the issue of scarcity.
A little discursive point, here:
scarcity, today, is manufactured,
and I think that's
implied in what Fred says.
It's manufactured.
What late capitalism
requires is the invocation
of scarcity as fear, as
one of the aspects of fear,
and that, as long as
that fear is prevalent,
then what happens is that
all possibility of change
from the point of view of
subjectivity is foreclosed.
And so what people do now,
for the most part,
I'm gonna qualify that in a minute,
is they fight to preserve the past,
and that past, generally speaking,
both in the United States
and in western Europe,
is really the preservation
of the social welfare state
in the face of the onslaught of the right.
And so we haven't got
time, nor do we have space,
the emotional or the mental
space, for the vision.
And because we don't
have time for the vision,
the possibility of even alternatives
that might be possible
are no longer entertained,
so that for the sake of argument,
as Fred has indicated,
if we thought about the state
no longer in the old way
as a possible future,
the state as an organization,
as a coordinating agency,
rather than an executive agency,
and that's an idea, by the way, which is
very, very important if
you're going to do anything.
You've got to eliminate
the power of the state
to direct the work
forces, to direct culture,
to direct everything about our lives.
The policy function of the
state must be severely limited.
If you're gonna look upon the state
as a coordinating function
and also a provision of
certain kinds of benefits
that are made possible by the development
that we have already witnessed,
then we have the question
of what happens to the
rest of the population?
What happened to social life?
What happens to cultural life?
And the suggestion that he makes,
which I find completely compatible
with my own vision of the future, is that
we now have the possibility
of doing almost everything.
We can tolerate as a society
those who choose not to work,
because, as some of you may know,
I don't believe that
we have much work left.
We are in the midst of
the jobless present,
and in 1994, I wrote
a book with a graduate
of The Graduate Center, Bill DiFazio.
We called it The Jobless Future.
We don't really have...
We have work.
Don't misunderstand me.
There's plenty of work,
and people are working
their fingers to the bone.
Much of it is unnecessary.
Yeah, how do you keep people disciplined?
You keep people disciplined
by keeping their nose
to the grindstone eight,
10, 12, 15 hours a day.
We don't need that anymore.
And we don't need it globally.
And so, the first real question
that we have to address
is the question of,
is this utopia, or is
really this exploring
the possibilities that
have already been created
by even the evils of
the capitalist system?
I take the position, essentially,
that nothing is impossible anymore.
I agree with Marcuse and
with Fred in this respect.
I wanna take up a second question,
and that is, it seems to me,
and I don't want to use the model,
but I'm going to use the word model,
because in a sense, it is a model.
It is also, it is not a fantasy.
In the revolutionary period
the Chinese,
especially the Eighth Route Army,
in the revolutionary period,
the Chinese implemented
the politics that Fred is
actually talking about.
It became essentially the administrator.
The army became the administrator
of virtually all of the
benefits of civilization
that were possible at that time.
It redistributed land and took it away,
later on.
It provided public education.
It provided healthcare.
It actually fostered, initially...
I'm talking about the 30s and 40s.
Initially, an agricultural
policy that fed a lot of people.
It killed a lot of people, too.
Don't misunderstand me.
I'm not supporting the Chinese.
No disrespect.
But there is a model here that
has to be taken seriously,
and it was done through the army,
because there was no
other institution in China
that was able to do that.
You didn't have the division of labor
at the levels of the state.
The state was completely corrupt
and also decentralized in
the hands of war lords.
So you had a different kind of model.
That question is a significant question.
What institution would
be capable of organizing
the economic and social life of society
without infringing on freedom,
both collective freedom
and personal freedom?
And here's where the
first genuine controversy
would have to be
addressed, it seems to me,
in Jameson's paper.
Can we assume that a bureaucracy,
and we're not going to all be bureaucrats.
I'm sorry to say that.
But can we assume that a bureaucracy,
which has got enormous responsibilities,
even though that bureaucracy
includes putatively,
that is to say, tangentially,
much of the whole population.
I'm not so sure that that's...
He hasn't figured it out,
I haven't figured it out
from this paper.
Can we assume that a
bureaucracy's going to sit still?
It's going to be simply a coordinator
and will not bid for power.
Now, as we have seen over
and over and over again,
in all of the revolutions,
the Chinese revolution among them.
The Russian revolution
was more complicated.
The Latin American revolutions for sure.
In most cases, the revolutionaries,
as the army,
where they were the army,
took power as well as
control of the society,
and the degree of personal
as well as collective freedom
were severely restricted.
That's a problem.
I'm not going to suggest
a solution at the moment
because I do hope that what we could do
is what Fred suggests, which
is to relegate the state,
whether it be in the form of
the army or be it another form
to a coordinating agency,
but that would require having
to address at some point
the question of what it means
to have or to take or not to take power.
And the struggle for power
always entails these contradictions.
You want a state
which is not going to oppress
the people on the one hand.
On the other hand, you have a state
which is going to oppress the people.
And so, the anarchist proposal,
for the elimination of the state
has a partial truth,
which I want to simply put on the table.
There is a long history,
which some of you may know,
of the debate within Marxism,
and Fred alludes to that
debate, about the question
of the transition from
capitalism to communism,
and the transition was called socialism.
Let's not fool around.
The revolution is not about
revolution to socialism.
The revolution is a
revolution to communism.
But in the socialist phase,
namely, the phase where you have a state,
you still have to have the
repressive function of the state.
You still have to have an army and so on.
The problem with the transition,
as we have seen, at the
very least, since 1917...
The problem with the transition
is that the transition becomes permanent.
Now, certain Marxists have
tried to ascribe that permanence
to the underdevelopment question,
and I think Fred has done a very good job
in deconstructing the
concept of development
and underdevelopment.
If we do not insist on
the doctrine of progress
in relationship to development
and underdevelopment,
then we might have to
come to the conclusion
that the radical
transformation in the nature of
as well as the function of the state
is a condition for the possibility
of social transformation.
And that's what he proposes.
And that's what every
anarchist or quasi-anarchist,
I myself do not come out
of the anarchist tradition.
I come out of a council
communism tradition,
and that means...
Except when I was a boy Stalinist.
(audience laughs)
Well, I was a boy Stalinist.
And you know what?
I learned a lot.
I really did.
One of the problems of not
being a girl or a boy Stalinist
is that you never get into contact
with certain kinds of political
techniques and talents.
I have some of those,
and I didn't get them from reading.
People are appalled by this.
I mean, I don't know why
people should be appalled.
Anyway.
But what's true is that the
problem that Fred raises...
The army proposal is one possibility,
but the problem that's at
the core of his discourse
is the problem of the state,
is the problem of the form of rule,
of social rule.
And I must say, as a
fairly careful student
of political and social theory,
that is the big actions,
the big void,
in Lacanian terms, the big lack,
in the hope and all of
political and social theory,
except for the liberals.
Once you decide that
you are going to accept
the democratic liberal state as a given,
as a precondition for any possible change,
then you have become a liberal,
and it doesn't matter whether
you call yourself a socialist
or call your a communist
or call yourself whatever.
You are a liberal, and what
that means, essentially,
is you're taking the present system
of political rule for granted.
And the great virtue of this
paper that we just heard
is that Fred does not
take the present system
of political rule for granted.
What's the part of it that needs to be...
Of the anarchism that
needs to be discussed?
And that is, how would we organize
economic, political, and social life?
The army is a, in some sense,
a proposal that would still need content.
And the argument that is made
by the councilists...
Who broke with Communist Party
right after the Bolshevik Revolution,
and the argument that is
made by the anarchists
are very close together,
and that is, how that
society must be organized
to a large extent on
the basis of councils,
councils of the people.
Now, if the army becomes
that kind of council,
we could all it anything you want.
The psychoanalytic something or other,
or the army, or whatever,
but in fact, it becomes
radically decentralized,
and that's the real message.
The message of this paper
is the radical decentralization
of social rule.
I've got a couple of more
things and I'll stop.
Practical issues.
I entirely agree with the statement
that if you...
Never mind about whether
it's a question of the army.
Yes, you have to do it
as this new institution
of the possibility of
a democratic, small d,
social rule, and the provision of areas
of economic life.
You have to eliminate the draft,
eliminate the volunteer army,
and reintroduce the draft.
The only time I ever got booed
by large numbers of students
at a public rally was
at Columbia University,
and this was not during the Vietnam War.
It was after the Vietnam War,
when Bruce Robbins and
I were on a platform.
Bruce Robbins is a friend,
and we're on a platform,
and I publicly called
for the end of the draft.
Boo.
- [Man Offscreen] For the reinstitution.
- That was what I got.
On the other hand,
and now, of course, I went on to explain,
the volunteer army is an
invitation to fascism.
Once the army itself is self-selected
on the basis of careers...
I mean, the traditional army.
On the basis of careers, on the basis
of being a job substitute,
on the basis of being
essentially a privatized army,
which is one of the great
points of Fred's paper,
then that army is extremely dangerous
for any possibility of freedom.
You can't have it.
You have to have a draft,
and one of the things about the draft...
And he kidded around,
thought maybe we'll draft 60-year-olds
and they won't fight any wars.
But during the Vietnam War,
we did not need a draft.
We did not need 60-year-olds
to oppose the war on the battlefront.
The untold story of the
end of the Vietnam War...
Well, you know about the mass movements
in the United States, students and others,
but on the battlefront,
the soldiers were in full
rebellion against the war.
So if you have a draft,
you have a great opportunity
to have a democratic refusal to war,
and war is no longer a luxury.
You can't have any war anymore.
At least, you can't have that kind of war.
And just to remind you,
reintroducing the draft
to transform the present
armed forces back into that popular mass
for it's capable of
coexisting successfully
with an increasingly
representative government
into a vehicle for mass democracy
rather than the representative kind.
And that leads me to my
final point, I suppose,
and I already mentioned it.
But you have to take it seriously.
Representative government
is not simply a limited form
of democracy.
It is an anti-democratic form.
When you have a member of
the United States Congress
who is a Republican
in the newspaper, a week ago, complaining
that he cannot represent his community
when his community is 700,000 people,
that is numbers,
and in many cases, gerrymandered
so that the weakest kind
of contiguous population
is represented by that government.
When you have billions
of dollars, literally,
over time, being spent on electing people
who are really not elected,
when you have 50% of the
people who do not vote
and do not vote because
they see no reason to vote,
they may be the smartest among us.
When you have a population
that only sees its only possibility,
and I think,
here, I'm gonna take
one swipe at this piece.
Who see direct action...
Then you have a very different perspective
on representative government.
Representative government
only under conditions of mass
uprising has any possibility
of even becoming the
users of social change.
But if you don't have mass
uprising, representative
government is almost
inevitably reactionary,
and that reactionary does not
simply extend to the right.
It extends to the left.
The social democratic project,
as Fred says, is dead,
and the communists who allowed themselves
to fall into that social
democratic project
in western Europe with one exception,
two exceptions.
Well, one and a half exceptions.
I'll put it another way.
Greece,
and Germany.
Only a small exception.
But the social democratic, the communists,
are themselves gone, because
they allowed themselves
to fall into the social
democratic project,
which was you hold onto the liberal state,
and you'll make reform.
The problem is,
we don't necessarily have to...
You don't necessarily
have to agree with this,
but the evidence is pretty clear
that the era of social reform
of the traditional kind
is no longer possible.
Given the political situation,
it is even increasingly unpopular
and not possible, partially
because of the kind
of political system that has emerged
in the United States and
elsewhere of a really one-sided,
as unions like to say, class struggle.
The councilists talked
about workers councils.
I don't think that's good enough.
I think that's necessary
but not sufficient.
I think what you need is at
the level of the community,
at the level of schools,
at the level of virtually
every institution as well
as every sphere of life,
you need the passing of
control into the popular.
Now, last word.
I don't think that the defeat in Wisconsin
is so simple.
I think it begins a process
which was carried out with Occupy
that you do not any longer have the option
to take the electoral
process all that seriously.
You have to confront
the electoral process.
You have to confront the
organization of space
as well as the organization
of social life in general
by direct action.
Now, that Occupy has refused to engage
in political organization, and by which,
I don't mean electoral organization,
I mean political organization,
is a fatal weakness for that organization.
But what I think has now
been put on the table
in the United States and
to refuse to accept that
or to recognize that is
to make a serious mistake,
and that is popular
organizations of minorities,
and I don't mean racial minorities
or gender minorities alone,
but the popular organization of minorities
is the way to begin to implement
a new democratic project,
because majoritarianism is
essentially authoritarianism,
under these circumstances that live now.
I think...
I wanna say one more thing
about that, and that's it,
which is that if we are in a new era,
then we should expect defeats,
but that the defeats may
not be the end of that era,
but will be preliminary.
I mean, I'm not gonna
be cavalier to suggest
the 1905 and 1917 analogy.
What I'm talking about,
the Russian Revolution,
which failed in 1905
and succeeded in 1917,
but that is a way of thinking
that needs to pervade what
remains of an American
as well as a global left,
and that kind of thinking,
I think, is beginning to take hold.
And the one thing that
Fred has actually given us,
and I think I'm grateful for it,
is he's given us the invocation
that without a vision,
without a proposal,
for how to change or what to change to,
without a discussion
of what the implications
of those changes are,
then what we're fated to become
is simply a vanishing breed of romantics
and a vanishing breed of sentimentalists.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)
What am I doing?
The problem of...
Is it late?
(audience laughs)
- Can we take some questions?
10 minutes, 10 minutes of questions.
- I'm happy to do that.
The only problem that we have...
Is...
(audience laughs)
That some people are soft-spoken.
I don't happen to be soft-spoken.
Oh, you do have mics?
All right, where are the mics?
Over here?
All right.
I will entertain questions,
under this proviso:
one, that you use the mic,
and two,
that if you have a question,
it's a question, and no
prolonged statements,
like I'm a member of
the Sixth International
and this is our position.
Cut it out.
So, questions.
Go ahead.
No?
All right.
- [Audience Member] Can
cyberspace be a vehicle
of dual power of resistance?
- Well, I think, there was a
whole set of utopian fantasies
crystallized around all
that, and certainly in these
mass uprisings that I
touched on, it played a part.
I mean, but I think that it would be more
an auxiliary to other kinds of things.
That is, it has a function of disclosing,
revealing scandals, and
so on, and so forth.
And calling people out, sure.
So I think...
But one would have to try to
imagine a more specific place
for it in this scheme.
I mean, the big question...
I agree with Stanley on a lot of things.
I think the council idea
is very interesting.
It's clear that this moves
towards a kind of federalized
or decentralized system.
Well, that's the point at which something
like cyberspace comes into
play, because that keeps,
that keeps various local, seemingly local
and isolated communities
in touch with each other.
So to that degree, maybe this
is a new way of overcoming
the kind of breakdown
that has always threatened
the federal system.
I think myself that, you
know, when people talk about
the end of communism and so forth,
it was a failure of federalism fully
as much as communism.
I mean, Gorbachev didn't
understand the secessions
that were about to happen
in the Soviet Union.
So I think it would be a component
of any kind of decentralization.
- One small thing.
You're a mayor of Richmond, California,
and you've been elected
on the Green Party ticket
to be the mayor of Richmond, California.
And so what you do, with the
support of a large number
of people in Richmond,
California, an old, industrial
oil town, an old, industrial town,
is you actually reverse
the eminent domain doctrine
which was used to drive
farmers off the land,
and so now what you do is you
drive the real estate people
out of the city.
Now, that is not something that I made up.
That is something that the
mayor of Richmond, California,
announced, and then she backed off.
We haven't figured out
yet why she backed off
and how she backed off.
You can figure it out for yourself,
but that is an example
of a decentralized action.
The problem is that none
of that gets disseminated
widely enough so it can be imitated,
improved on, discussed,
and become a more
general kind of activity.
Yeah.
Oh, over there,
and then there.
Is that okay with you?
Go ahead.
- [Woman Offscreen] As you probably hear,
I'm from former Soviet Union,
so I was subjected both radical systems,
radical socialism and radical communism,
radical capitalism.
And for 20 years,
I already see the political circus here
as I saw it in Soviet
Union, but in Soviet Union,
the main problem was with distribution.
It was on the way to
distribute all resources,
people on the top distributed
it between the friends
and the relatives, and then
to the bottom it was going.
But if you talk about this problem,
it's only possible, this
distribution process
is only possible by computer system.
It's not possible by...
It could not be enforced by
any kinds of humans, even army,
because on the way to the
bottom of the society...
- Do you have a question?
- Yes.
My question is,
what do you think is,
in the future utopia,
will be it's only possible,
this distribution process,
only possible by computers
and actually be on the way to it?
- Well, you know, you talk
about corruption and so on.
I think that would be
another use for the internet;
that is, that's a source of
the revelation of these things
that in a lot of
countries, was kept secret.
I mean, the East Germans
were stunned to find out
that these people who ran them
had these villas and so on,
that nobody really knew about,
but that suggests something else here.
And we've talked a lot about
the state as a problem.
I mean, we're not talking
about solving problems here.
We're talking about
producing problems, right?
By way of the attempt to imagine a utopia.
And one of those problems
clearly remains the state,
as it always has been.
The other one we haven't mentioned.
That's money.
When you're talking about corruption,
you're talking about money.
When you're talking
about media and so forth,
you're talking about money.
I mean, one of the things I think that,
you know, Hegel had this
scandalous expression
which I hope he didn't
really mean literally.
It was, "War is the health of nations."
I suppose he meant by that,
patriotism and so on and so forth,
but I think what he really meant
is that war destroys capital.
I think the post-war
situations, some of them,
made things possible.
In Britain, for example, Labor Britain,
because so much capital had been,
so much money had been destroyed.
What's happening to us now
is that all this money has
accumulated in one place,
and I think you know where that place is,
and it makes any kind of
representative system,
public media, and so forth,
really very difficult,
if not to say impossible.
So this kind of proposal
would have to be accompanied
by, I don't say redistribution of wealth.
I would say destruction of wealth.
It has to be accompanied by a general...
How can I say...
I don't wanna say lowering
of living standards exactly,
but it certainly has to be,
I think, the great merit
of Occupy was to put this
at the center of the table
where nobody was talking about it before,
and it certainly is important for us.
- Yeah.
- [Man Offscreen] Thank you.
- Why don't you raise the microphone.
- [Man Offscreen] Sure.
(audience laughs)
A little bit easier.
Stanley, you said in your
speech in Columbia...
- You gotta speak louder.
- [Man Offscreen] Stanley,
you said in your speech
at Columbia that you called
for the abolition of the draft.
- No, no, you called...
He called for the reinstatement.
- [Man Offscreen] That's
what I was wondering,
if you misspoke.
- I called for the
reinstatement of the draft.
- [Man Offscreen] That's what I thought,
because volunteer service
would be, I think,
in your opinion, would be
a step towards fascism,
it would ensure fascism.
Is that correct?
- Yeah.
- [Man Offscreen] Yeah, thanks.
I just wanted to make sure
if you misspoke or not.
- Oh, no.
It become the most...
It became the foundation
of the democratic struggle
against the war in Vietnam,
against the southeast Asia war,
was the fact that there was a draft,
and Richard Nixon, who was no dope,
decided, how do you get
rid of the movement?
You get rid of the movement
by eliminating the draft
and have everybody bully Aronowitz.
No, but I mean, that kind
of thing happened all over.
Yes.
One more question, right?
Two more questions, okay.
- [Rachel] Hi, I'm Rachel.
I was wondering if you
could say more about
how we get from where we are
now to your imagined future.
So, what is the mechanism,
and how might the mechanism
or the process shape
the ultimate outcome
of the future political
organizations that you're thinking about?
- That's a good question.
- Well, I don't know exactly
what the legalities are,
but it seems to me that
among the President's powers
would be to reinstitute the
draft, as an executive action,
and that could be extended
and so on, and so forth.
I mean, you're asking for
practical implementation.
That's one way of imagining it.
The other way is what
Stanley has talked about,
in terms of popular
organization and so forth.
But there's an answer,
some kind of answer.
- We are in a stage, I mean,
if it is a stage.
Let's stipulate that possibility.
We are in a moment, anyway,
when the basic issue
is not how to get from here
to there in the abstract.
The basic issue is where are
we going to find the cadre?
Where are we going to find the activists
who are going to not
only fight for the draft,
as one example, or fight for
a $15 an hour minimum wage.
We know how to do that.
I'm not saying we're successful yet,
but a group of people of
several hundred thousand,
not a large group, to start with,
who actually will dedicate themselves
to the elaboration of
a new way of thinking
about society, and not the way,
not that we don't learn from
Marx or learn from Lenin
or learn from Aristotle or
learn from anybody else,
but that there are new problems.
And just one of the
problems that Fred raises,
which has to be raised,
is the framework of
industrialization dead,
or has it been transferred
to virtually every aspect
of work and of social life?
That is to say, can we think
through the issue of hierarchy?
Can we think through
the issue of authority,
in every aspect of our lives?
Now, when people don't do any of that,
and not just think through,
but think about how you're
going to address that in practical terms,
then what they ask for is for the state
and its representative government
to confer upon us its benefits.
I get, every day, no, no,
I get three times a day,
a request for me to sign a petition
to Obama, to this one, to that one,
and the truth of the matter is
that every now and then,
if the petition is sufficiently
local, I'll sign it.
If it says, de Blasio,
get the god damn
pre-kindergarten program going,
I'll sign that.
I won't sign a single petition to Obama.
It's worthless,
and it's really not
going to change anything.
- Let me add another
little more serious bit
to my answer to you.
It is not a happy one, I think,
that this kind of transformation
that we're talking about,
and that I was talking about,
this utopian army and so forth,
that only happens in emergencies.
Now, I deliberately, this scheme of mine
was predicated on excluding
foreign policy and war.
So that's a first, that's a first limit.
But it seems to me, it's
only in a national emergency,
and for us, I think that means ecology,
that you can do something
like this, you draft everybody
and they have to help
out in that situation.
And those things are probably coming,
so it's not maybe quite so
imaginary, to fantasize that.
But that's the moment in
which one can effectuate
that kind of transformation, I think.
- You've got the final question.
- [Man Offscreen] Okay, thanks.
I think what I find
maybe disappointing about
this exercise so far,
maybe more in what Stanley was saying,
is that when we think
of, when we try to think
in a utopian register, some
kind of total transformation,
but we continue to talk
about the completely transformed situation
in terms of the same kind
of economic rationality
that we're in thrall
of, or that we're using.
In other words, how are we gonna...
Okay, we've got this utopia.
Now, how are we gonna
distribute the scarce resources
on a global scale again?
Okay, let's decentralize or
let's use computer networks
to achieve that.
We've in no way escaped the
kind of economic rationality
or even a global market that we're in.
So in other words, my
question is, why is it that,
even when we try as hard
as you've both tried
to think of a way of exiting this world,
broadly speaking,
why can't we escape from this
kind of economic rationality,
especially since we've recognized,
you've both recognized and
we here have all recognized
to varying degrees
that what this kind of
economic rationality
has been doing to this
world and to this planet
has brought it not to
the brink of apocalypse
but well into the midst of a
slowly-unfolding apocalypse
that we're living through right now?
- I thought we had eliminated the banks
and the big corporations and so forth,
and destroyed some of the money supply.
I recommend,
as these are just suggestions,
I recommend two other
books I didn't mention:
Ernest Callenbach's great book Ecotopia,
which has just been republished,
and an even more forgotten
book by an East German,
Rudolf Bahro, B-A-H-R-O,
called The Alternative,
which has to make some similar proposals
for the former socialist system.
I mean, those are maybe
more practical beginnings
than not, but Callenbach shows
that you can have a lot of dynamism
and innovation and all the rest of it
in a system that doesn't
depend on big business.
- Just one little comment.
Imagine what kind of a
society and what kind of life,
social life, we would have,
if we took up a simple demand
of somebody called Karl Marx in the 1850s
that the purpose of the movement
that he was hoping to ignite,
its primary purpose, was the
abolition of the wage system,
which would entail the abolition of money.
Now, one of the things that,
one of the reasons that
Aristotle and, you know,
a certain number of people,
especially, you know, Aristotle,
Hegel, and Marx, and a few others,
we still read them, is not
only because their analysis
is good, but because they
challenge the foundation
of the systems within which they lived.
We can't regard market as religion.
It is only a religion,
and we've got to begin to think,
how would we organize
social and economic life
outside of the market, and how do we begin
to think about what
constitutes a good life?
I've just finished a book
which is going to be published in the fall
about this forgotten organization
called the Labor Movement.
And what I argue in that book
is that one of the reasons
that we've seen the precipitous decline
of the US labor movement
and the slower decline
of the European labor movement
but both of them are surely declining,
Europe we like to hold up
because we're in such terrible shape here,
is because they lost the grasp
of what it means to offer a good life
to masses of people.
They no longer speak that way.
They no longer have the language.
They no longer have the ideas.
They no longer have the
educational project,
and it reminds me,
because what was true
about Plato and Aristotle
and Marx and Hegel and so on
is that they always insisted
on the problem of not only
the process by which we get
from this life to the good life,
but what the good life might consist in.
And we might not like
Hegel's republic 'cause it,
you know, the Marxist
analysis of Hegel's republic,
I mean, Plato's Republic, it says Plato
was simply justifying the
system within which he lived.
I don't agree with that, by the way.
But, he actually becomes
powerful to the extent
that he suggests what it would be like
to have a system of
democracy or hierarchy,
and he has both of them
going on at the same time.
We don't talk that way anymore.
That's what's so strong
about Fred's paper.
He's talking that way.
And that's what we have to do more of.
(all applaud)
