Читать книгу The Anti-Capitalism Reader - Группа авторов - Страница 11

Does It Mean Anything to be a Leninist in 2001?

Doug Henwood

For the conference “Towards a Politics of Truth: The Retrieval of Lenin,” Essen, Germany, Feburary 4, 2001

When I was asked to present a topic for discussion at this conference, I chose the question, “Does it mean anything to be a Leninist in 2001?” I really had no idea of an answer then, but was convinced I’d come up with something in the intervening eight weeks. I’m not sure I have, even though most of this conference is now behind us.

One reason I picked the title is that over the years I’ve asked self-identified Leninists for their definition. I can’t say that I’ve gotten a memorable answer yet—or one that isn’t a literal transposition of Lenin’s own writings into the present, like some case of ideological time travelling. I just don’t see how a revolutionary doctrine that was devised for a lightly industrialized, semi-peripheral monarchy, remains relevant to highly industrialized metropoles where censorship and the police operate in much more subtle, often unconscious ways.

I’ve heard some efforts at definition over the last couple of days. One set of suggestions held that Lenin serves as a reminder of the centrality of politics, the crucial importance of a good analysis, and the indispensability of The Party. The first two seem fairly obvious to me, and so general that Margaret Thatcher or the people who thought for Ronald Reagan would have assented to them.

Lenin’s emphasis on the centrality of The Party seems like a dead idea to me. Like it or not, the notion of a vanguard party in the Leninist model, operating on quasi-military principles of discipline and hierarchy, has less than zero appeal to all but a handful of relics today. It is, I’m fairly certain, beyond any hope of revival. To speak that language today, to an audience not already in basic sympathy to your program, is to condemn yourself to irrelevance.

So much for the Leninist style of politics. There is also the matter of Lenin as icon, the successful revolutionary who keeps alive the possibility of revolution today. I’m susceptible to this appeal; I even have a picture of Lenin hanging in my kitchen. There’s no denying that he is a great image. But again, I doubt the breadth of that appeal. The other week I asked a friend of mine who is a professor of English at a major American university, whose allegiance to Marxism has almost certainly hurt his career, what he thought of Lenin. His answer was that he was a philosophical cretin and a political gangster. I’m sure almost everyone in this room would disagree with this characterization. But if you get this kind of response from a Marxist intellectual, I’d say Lenin’s image problem borders on the fatal.

I’m certainly not endorsing this view of Lenin. However, in politics you have to work with the hand you’ve been dealt, and Lenin’s face isn’t even in the deck these days. A more possible project might be the retrieval of Marx, a topic I’ll return to a bit later. Nevertheless, I have to dissent from Slavoj Zizek’s picture of the Old Man’s growing respectability, at least from my experience in the U.S. Aside from a handful of universities, Marxism has disappeared from American economics departments. In fact, I know of only one Marxist who’s been hired by a major U.S. department in the last twenty years—John Roemer, by Yale. That was a joint appointment with the Political Science department, and it was Poli Sci that was the driving force behind the hire. Yes, things are a bit better in the humanities, but many of my friends in the Marxist Literary Group have severe publication and employment problems.

There are very few Marx-o-philes on Wall Street. I know of one exception, though I think he’s rather paranoid about having this be known: Bruce Steinberg, the chief economist at Merrill Lynch. Steinberg was on the editorial board of the Review of Radical Political Economics about twenty years ago, and has been heard saying that his study of Marx helped him immensely. I strongly suspect he was the unnamed Wall Streeter who was quoted in John Cassidy’s article on the Marx revival in The New Yorker in October 1997. But that’s about it. My own Marxist book on Wall Street—though our friends the Spartacists will dispute its Marxism—was received mainly with silence by financiers, though the financial weekly Barron’s described it as “loopy” and “repellent.” A member of the business staff of the Los Angeles Times characterized it as mapping out the road to the gulag (of course). Some years ago, the former executive editor of the Wall Street Journal told me that I am “sick and twisted,” and added that it’s tragic that I exist. But that’s Wall Street. The exuberant reception for Verso’s 150th anniversary latte-table edition of the Communist Manifesto and Cassidy’s New Yorker article suggest a broad willingness to listen to Marx, now that memories of the USSR are fading and the moment of capitalist triumphalism is starting to feel hollow. Perhaps even false.

Aside from media evidence, my own experience of talking to popular audiences in the U.S. has been that people are quite willing to listen to a Marxian analysis, especially if they don’t know that’s what they’re hearing—and that younger audiences don’t even have any problem with the name. With Lenin’s name, though, they most certainly do.

What about Lenin as a political analyst? The essay on imperialism has come up a lot here, and it so happens that I just reacquainted myself with it, after a long separation, to prepare for this conference. It’s certainly of great historical interest. But unfortunately, too many self-identified Leninists take it and apply it unmodified as an analytical template for today. That just won’t do. One very serious problem is the prominence of Hilferding’s analysis of finance capital, a book that has long afflicted Marxian analyses of finance in general. First, let me start with the achingly obvious: the era of high colonialism is over. Right now, Kautsky’s ultra-imperialism seems a like a not-bad characterization of the world in the early twenty-first century, even if he was very wrong about the early twentieth century.

Yes, there are contradictions in the system; yes, there are rivalries among the major imperialist powers; yes, the three metropoles, the U.S., the EU, and Japan, each have their own geographic spheres of particular influence. But conceding all that, it’s amazing how peaceful the coexistence is among the imperial powers. The members of the EU fought among themselves over who would be the first head of the European Central Bank, but they ended up with a nominee. The major powers fought over who would head the WTO and the IMF, but they ended up with nominees. The U.S. is the major investor in Latin America, but the EU is the major investor in Brazil and Argentina. Yet all parties pretty much get along. The U.S. is in the process of economically annexing Mexico, but you’ll find Sony and Volkswagen plants operating happily there.

After all, in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, John Maynard Keynes wrote that an upper-class Londoner around 1910 regarded the then-prevailing freedom of trade and capital flows as (freer by many measures than the present, I should add):

normal certain and permanent, except in the direction of improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.

Maybe there’s a serpent waiting to pounce sometime in the future, but not right now. Right now it sure looks like a truly global ruling class is constituting itself through public institutions like the IMF and private ones like the Davos World Economic Forums.

And then there’s the stuff about cartels and banks. I often hear self-described Leninists apply these concepts to the present with almost no modification. The word “monopoly” is thrown around, as if J.P. Morgan were still walking the earth. First off, lets take cartels. For the last twenty years, it has been the policy of many governments around the world to promote competition, through deregulation and the dismantling of import barriers. The executive committee of the bourgeoisie realized that the comfy world of the 1950s and 1960s, the one described with some admiration by John Kenneth Galbraith and with considerable hostility by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, had led to systemic sclerosis. Nor is there any compelling evidence of a trend toward monopoly. A study of twenty industrial sectors published last summer in the Harvard Business Review found increased concentration of market share in only one, semiconductors. All others saw a decline or no change. It also found that cross-border mergers imparted no competitive advantage on the new entities, a result confirmed by other studies showing that multinationals are no more profitable than domestic firms.

To complicate the picture even further, contrary to Lenin’s assertion that profits are higher in poor countries, data on American multinationals shows returns on Latin American investments to be lower than those in Canada or Western Europe, and returns in Taiwan to be higher than those in China. Furthermore, over two-thirds of the total stock of U.S. foreign direct investment is in countries with incomes roughly comparable to the home country’s. Throw in the four classic Asian Tigers and you’ve got over three-quarters of the total. I’m not entirely sure what this all means theoretically, but it does suggest that some serious rethinking of received wisdom—received wisdom to which Lenin’s Imperialism contributed no small amount—is in order.

And as for the banks, well, to quote the Velvet Underground, those were different times. Lenin, following Hilferding, declared that the stock exchange was an institution in serious decline. It’s not. In the U.S., the power of stockholders has grown enormously over the last twenty years, and other countries are following suit. One of the vastly under-appreciated aspects of the Euro project is to create more American-style financial markets, and to weaken the hold of German-style bank ownership. The point is to expose companies to the constant public discipline of profit maximization.

There’s been a lot of talk about Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire over the last couple of days. I’ve only begun to think about the book, but there’s a lot to consider in it. I think they overdo the assertion that today’s Empire has no Rome—Washington, Wall Street, and Hollywood are a lot more central to the structure than they allow—but their point about the dispersion of power in the new order is absolutely right, I think. Empire today is a much more collective and dispersed affair than it was in Lenin’s day, what with the UN and NATO acting the part of imperial enforcers, and stock markets arranging ownership and discipline. No, the nation state isn’t dead, and yes, financial power is still concentrated—but too much attention to Lenin will only confuse us.

* * *

Having doubted the relevance of Lenin for the last two thousand-some words, I’ll now invoke the clichéd Leninist question: What is to be done? I wish I had a good answer, or even several approximations of the beginning of an answer. Certainly the state of official electoral politics everywhere is dismal. European leftists can kvetch about the “Third Way,” but we’ve just inaugurated a reactionary moron who didn’t really even win the election. It’s almost enough to make me nostalgic for Bill Clinton.

But outside the electoral realm, there are some new-ish and very exciting political movements for which “Seattle” has become the shorthand. I understand there’s quite a dispute going on between the British Socialist Workers Party and its U.S. subsidiary, the International Socialist Organization, on just what these movements are all about, with the SWP calling them “anti-capitalist,” and the ISO calling them “anti-corporate.” In part this may be a geographical difference. I’ve noticed that the European press uses the term “anti-capitalist” to describe them. The U.S. press calls the demonstrators “anti-corporate” or “anti-globalization,” both because they can’t even imagine how anyone could object to capitalism and because we don’t have much of a native strain of anti-capitalism in our political tradition—but we do have a populist, petit-bourgeois, small business one. All these names, you’ll observe, begin with the word “anti-,” which suggests that they’ve got a pretty good idea of what they’re against, and a much vaguer idea of what they’re for. That criticism has been made here, and its truth has to be conceded. But after twenty or twenty-five years of political torpor, this is some serious progress.

Even though I said that “Seattle” is the shorthand for these movements, it’s important to remember that they weren’t born there. You can trace them back at least a few years earlier. There was the worldwide mobilization against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, which was being negotiated in effective secrecy by the major powers—until a draft text of the treaty was leaked and posted on the web in January 1997. Within weeks, an anti-MAI movement was formed, in large part through websites and email lists, and not all that much later, the MAI talks collapsed in April 1998. Part of the problem was that the major powers had some differences among themselves, but the popular movement contributed a lot to the failure. Then there were the coordinated worldwide demonstrations around the G-7 summit on June 18, 1999. At the time, almost no one paid serious attention to these summits. However, J18 was marked by scores of protests from New York to Nairobi. The front page of the Financial Times carried an inspiring picture of a shirtless protester hurling a rock at some cops; the city of London was effectively shut for the day.

Then, of course, there was Seattle. There was a lot that was unique and irreproducible about that event. For one, the authorities were caught off guard; for two, it’s a liberal city whose government wanted to be as tolerant of protest as possible; and for three, the local police just weren’t up to the task. At the end of the protest week, I walked up to a group of cops and said, “I’m from New York, and believe me, this couldn’t have happened there. The mayor would have surrounded the meeting site with 40,000 cops and no one but the delegates would have gotten close.” One of the cops replied, “Yes, but the NYPD has lots of experience with crowd control. We don’t.”

A few months later, in Washington, DC, the cops were plenty prepared for the April 16 protests against the World Bank and the IMF—but the meetings were still disrupted, and virtually the entire center of the city was shut down. But of more political importance, the Bank and the Fund had to junk their prepared agenda and instead talk unconvincingly about their deep concern for the world’s poor. If hegemony consists in part by establishing the terms of discourse—as they say in the opinion-management business, we can’t tell the public what to think, but we can tell them what to think about—then something is happening here. We were telling them what to think about.

I could list some more names: Melbourne, Davos, Porto Alegre, and, in two months, Quebec City. That kind of catalog would point out one of the risks of this movement—that, in the words of the Canadian writer Naomi Klein, it threatens to devolve into serial protest. But since I’m trying to be more optimistic these days, I’ll say that hasn’t happened yet because it’s still a young movement, trying to find its feet.

Related to this movement is an explosion over the last three years in the level of political activism on U.S. campuses, most prominently the anti-sweatshop movement. (Anti- again, but it’s having serious real-world effects.) Maybe I’m a bit biased about this because I live with its leading journalistic chronicler, Liza Featherstone, but this is profoundly inspiring stuff. Here’s an example of what it’s up to: A few weeks ago, a South Korean-owned firm that does contract work for Nike fired some workers who were trying to organize an independent union. The students heard about it, and within days they were on the scene in Mexico—and at home, they started publicizing the fight. Just the other day, Nike, fearful of bad publicity, forced the Korean firm (whose managers had claimed that it was an acceptable form of labor discipline to hit lagging workers in the head with a hammer) to rehire the organizers. Maybe this is just temporary; maybe it’s a PR coup that will soon be quietly undone. Maybe this is all too media-driven. News that MTV is working on a special about “Revolution” confirms anxieties that the system is, in the words of Tom Frank and his colleagues at The Baffler magazine, commodifying our dissent. But better MTV is doing a special on revolution than on apathy. Again, we’re telling them what to think about.

Some of the many exciting things about these recent movements is that they’re global, they’re fast, and they’ve had an impact. They couldn’t exist without technologies like the web and the cellphone, things that were only recently the stuff of capitalist triumphalism. Organizationally, they’re flexible yet disciplined, serious yet good-humored. Their structure has more to do with Spanish anarchism of the 1930s than with the Bolsheviks of 1917. Soon after I got back from Seattle, I was part of a panel reporting on the events to the New York City chapter of the Labor Party. After I was done, a voice arose from the audience to complain that what I was talking about sounded more like a carnival than politics, and then it launched into what sounded like a computer-generated Leninist diatribe about imperialism. How especially odd it seemed to hear that; it was as if the speaker wasn’t, as the doctors say, properly oriented in time and space. The kids wouldn’t have listened to him for a second. And the carnival was absolutely wonderful, one of the greatest weeks of my life.

So, is there a role for Marxist intellectuals in these new movements? Yes, absolutely, I’d say. It’s true that they’re theoretically unsophisticated (though Michael Hardt told me that some of the anti-sweatshop activists at Duke, where the movement started in 1997, are really liking his class on Kapital). Seattle, the new revolutionary icon, was ideologically a very mixed bag, with nationalist Steelworkers mingling with topless lesbians, petit-bourgeois Greens, and some unaffiliated socialists—and the infamous Black Bloc of anarchists, who marched around chanting things like “Capitalism, no thanks/We will burn your fucking banks!” The new activists tend to focus on extreme abuses like sweatshops, or on state institutions like the IMF and WTO—though it’s easy to understand that institutional focus, because such institutions give Empire something like a home address. But in my experience of talking to the protesters (and I don’t want to give the impression that they’re all young, though they mostly are), they’re extremely open to a radical analysis.

The ISO has been spending a lot of time around the anti-sweatshop movement. From what I’m told, the kids are grateful to hear a coherent analysis of how the parts of the system fit together. However, they’re extremely wary of furtive takeover attempts. Vanguardists have this distressing habit of trying to take over movements that they had no role in starting. It reminds me of the American poet A.R. Ammon’s line (which I’m quoting from memory, so I may not have it exactly right) that the way to look like a leader is to get in front of a moving crowd and start waving your arms. That’s not very helpful, and it will give Marxism a very bad name at a moment when its prospects look better than they have in a very long time. It seems like it would be far more efficacious for Marxist intellectuals to talk with the protesters, to engage them in conversation with some modesty, perhaps even a touch of awe.

A few months ago, I interviewed the Columbia University economics professor Jagdish Bhagwati for an article I co-wrote on the anti-sweatshop movement that will appear imminently in the academic gossip magazine Lingua Franca. Bhagwati was very disturbed by the events in Seattle, and came back from there to organize his free-trading comrades into a protest group of their own, the Academic Consortium on International Trade. Bhagwati recalled a chat he had with a masked young woman in Seattle. He asked her if the mask signified that she was a Zapatista. She said no, she was an anarchist. He just didn’t know what to make of her, or the crowd she was part of, but he was quite shaken up. The ruling class is rather unnerved by this new generation of protest, and that can only be a good thing. I’m almost tempted—especially given the lack of a female presence on the platform throughout this conference—to nominate the anonymous masked woman as the Lenin of our time. That wouldn’t be quite accurate, I know, but it’s still mighty tempting.