Kevin > Books: theory-change‎ (96)

Unfortunately, explaining the global market before liberation is beyond the scope of this project. We highly recommend Understanding the Capitalist Market, Understanding the Geopolitics of Imperialist Nation States, and Understanding Wage Dependency as supplemental reading to this section [these are fictional works].

But all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism.

Starting, as I say, from the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” allows us to look past the question of individual or private ownership (which is often little more than formal legality anyway) and at much more immediate and practical questions of who has access to what sorts of things and under what conditions. Whenever it is the operative principle, even if it’s just two people who are interacting, we can say we are in the presence of a sort of communism.

Of course, it wasn’t the doctor who had really turned grannie away [for not having health insurance]! It was the hospital! And who was the hospital? It was whoever was making money off it, and those faces were invisible. It was the whole fucking system. I remembered these pamphlets that people would hand out on the subway or on the street or that people would forward to me. Things about how the system was broken, how it was capitalism, etc. I always thought, “I don’t have time for this,” or “I don’t have energy for this.” But then I realized, “I don’t have time because of this. I don’t have energy because of this.” This system had taken everything from me, from us. It had taken my mom, my grannie—even myself. It had even taken me away from me.

Like, the universities are gone, of course, or the idea these specialized fields of knowledge are separated out from the rest of life or not subject to the same logic of profit and exchange. But, in this other way, the zeal for knowledge was saved. Way, way more people read and debate philosophy and theory than ever when I was growing up.

‘Our [English] father got it right with you. He left you to ferment until you were literate. But he brought me here before I’d formed enough connections, enough memories. What’s more, he was the only person I ever spoke Mandarin with, when my Cantonese was far better to begin with. And that’s lost now. I don’t think in it, and I certainly don’t dream in it.’

‘You know how it feels for your native tongue to slip away. You caught it in time. I didn’t.’

‘But Babel [Western education/academia] gave you everything.’ Letty seemed unable to move past this point. ‘You had everything you wanted, you had such privileges—’

‘Not enough to make us forget where we’re from.’

This confusion, this jumbling of different conceptions of imagination [idealism], runs throughout the history of leftist thought.

One can already see the tension in Marx. There is a strange paradox in his approach to revolution. As I’ve noted, Marx insists that what makes us human is that rather than relying on unconscious instinct like spiders and bees, we first raise structures in our imagination, and then try to bring those visions into being. When a spider weaves her web, she operates on instinct. The architect first draws up a plan, and only then starts building the foundations of his edifice. This is true, Marx insists, in all forms of material production, whether we are building bridges or making boots. Yet when Marx speaks of social creativity, his key example—the only kind of social creativity he ever talks about actually—is always revolution, and when he does that, he suddenly changes gears completely. In fact he reverses himself. The revolutionary should never proceed like the architect; he should never begin by drawing up a plan for an ideal society, then think about how to bring it into being. That would be utopianism. And for utopianism, Marx had nothing but withering contempt [see Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific]. Instead, revolution is the actual immanent practice of the proletariat, which will ultimately bear fruit in ways that we cannot possibly imagine from our current vantage point.

Why the discrepancy? The most generous explanation, I would suggest, is that Marx did understand, at least on some intuitive level, that the imagination worked differently in the domain of material production [i.e. “means of production” via factory wage labour, where most workers are “alienated” as cogs in the machine while imagination’s idealism is reserved for elite workers/capitalists] than it did in social relations [i.e. “social reproduction” via carework, where elites are privileged with violence’s stupidity while those below have to perform imagination’s idealism to reproduce the elite’s fantasies and to empathize with others, i.e. “interpretive labour”]; but also, that he lacked an adequate theory as to why. Perhaps, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, long before the rise of feminism, he simply lacked the intellectual tools. [Graeber’s footnote: “I might add that it is a profound reflection on the effects of structural violence on the imagination that feminist theory itself was so quickly sequestered away into its own subfield where it has had almost no impact on the work of most male theorists.”] Given the considerations already outlined in this essay, I think we can confirm that this is indeed the case. To put it in Marx’s own terms: in both domains one can speak of alienation. But in each, alienation works in profoundly different ways.