"We stand today at a crossroads: One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other leads to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice." I’m using this quote from Woody Allen mostly for laughs, but also as an assertion of the dangers of thinking in either-or terms when it comes to our economic future. I also identify with its self-deprecating tone of faux authority. I mean, I haven’t even balanced my checkbook in some fifteen years, and I have no pretension here to be offering any sort of economic expertise. My humbler task today is simply to trace some of my thoughts, fears, and experiences as a life-long would-be socialist, and extract from that some questions for us to think about.
I’ll begin my story in the middle of the Reagan years — those years under a president who once said, “A communist is someone who reads Marx and Lenin. An anti-communist is someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”
I actually used to think just the opposite: that if people simply understood the meaning of socialism — in essence, the idea of planning production, sharing the wealth, and caring about one another —they would surely support it. But then I heard Marion Gordon Robertson speak.
The event was a debate originally scheduled to be between the Rev. Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority and Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler, the head of the movement for Reform Judaism, for whom I was a speechwriter. Falwell fell ill before the debate, and Marion Gordon Robertson — known to us as Pat Robertson — took his place.
Robertson has a law degree from Yale. Robertson is slick. And he made an appeal to his mostly liberal Jewish audience by saying that he and they had something in common insofar as they shared an opposition to “coercive utopianism.”
“Coercive utopianism.” How odd to hear the denunciatory phrase from a leader of one of the most utopian movements imaginable, the born-again Christian right!
Still, his phrase startled me. I had never heard a rightwinger describe communism or socialism as a form of idealism. Robertson apparently understood that supporters of socialism acted from a place of deep humanistic idealism. The problem, for him, was that such idealism flies in the face of human and metaphysical reality. If we empower that idealism, Robertson believed, it would only mean to bend, spindle and mutilate the human reality in order to fit. Based on his assessment of human beings as fundamentally flawed — original sin, perhaps, sinners, certainly — Robertson judged us as incapable of turning our idealism into something real without coercion.
I’ve been thinking about that critique ever since.
Here’s an example of socialist idealism, for example, that used to inspire me: a passage from Karl Marx’s The German Philosophy, 1845: “In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” It sounds good to me, this description of work as unalienated activity; work as play; work as art. Dilettantism and hippiedom forever!
Here’s what my linguist friend George Jochnowitz, who has spent considerable time in China, including during the Tiananmen massacre, has written about the passage: “Marx’s dream is not simply impossible; it is a nightmare. Its ugliness comes from its rejection of the human desire to know more and more, which involves specialization; from its denial that people want to move from the country to the city and not vice versa; from its blindness to the fact that disagreement is inherent in human nature and necessary if society is to change and face new problems.”
Well, I moved from the city to the country 25 years ago and haven’t regretted it for a day. But our disagreement itself proves George’s point, which is that the vision of a perfectly harmonious, consensus-driven society based on economic equality and rationalism is utopian — that is, impossible — at least, without coercion, without totalitarianism. If, indeed, disagreement is fundamental to human existence, as George argues — whether because of class biases or not! — then the “withering away of the state” that Frederich Engels imagined after the establishment of communism also cannot happen. George and I will need a government to adjudicate between us. The withering away of the state implies the withering away of diversity of opinion, and the notion leads to its opposite, the totalitarian state.
I have to say, as an aside, that The German Philosophy is known as Marx’s attack on idealism. In fact, I identify strongly with one of the objects of his attack, Ludwig Feuerbach, insofar as a key point of my platform today is that our orientation must be towards the cultivation of our socialist nature through spirituality as I define it — as the emotional surge that human beings experience when their awareness of the reality of interconnection is heightened and their own borders are softened.” This cultivation, I believe, is a necessary antecedent to the evolution of a humane social democratic system; we must become, in other words, as Mohandas Gandhi put it, the change we want to see. But here’s what Marx says: “Feuerbach’s whole deduction with regard to the relation of men to one another,” he writes, “goes only so far as to prove that men need and always have needed each other. He wants to establish consciousness of this fact, that is to say, like the other theorists, merely to produce a correct consciousness about an existing fact; whereas for the real communist it is a question of overthrowing the existing state of things.”
Now, that makes me nervous, to hear talk about “overthrowing the existing state of things.” Marx’s whole tone makes me nervous, with his strident, pointed assertions of reality principles that have no way to be tested except on human subjects.
As a red-diaper baby, the child of communists, and a young radical/aspiring Marxist myself, I struggled with that nervousness for years. I wanted to believe that there was a reality principle governing our economic lives and our historical evolution, so that I could escape the illusion of appearances and get at the fundamentals. I was hungry for revelation, if not revolution, and Marx spoke with that kind of prophetic fervor that compelled attention.
I tried, for instance,to believe in the reality of class struggle as the moving force of history.
From the Communist Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight . .
I tried to believe in the liquidation of other elements of human divisiveness — gender struggle, religious factionalism, national antagonisms, racism, etc. — by the dynamic march of capitalism:
Again, from the Manifesto: “Our epoch . . . possesses . . . this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other . . . All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.”
I tried to believe in the historically inevitable emergence of socialism out of the ashes of rapacious, self-devouring capitalism.
The Manifesto: “The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”
And I tried to dismiss my own doubts about socialist theory as thoughts polluted by my own class bias. When I would pause and think —Wait a minute: How can we explain as a matter of “class struggle” the capacity of men in to veil, prostitute, rape, control and exploit women? How can we attribute to “class struggle” the capacity of abused adults to abuse children, in turn? How can we attribute to class struggle the capacity of people to despise and slaughter the ethnic or religious or other kind of “other.” What about human nature? What about instincts of hierarchy and territoriality? What psychology? biology? geography? — I would usually end up shrugging my shoulders, saying What do I know? and surrendering to the aggressive force of Marxist argument.
There were, however, three countervailing intellectual influences in my life that kept me suffering with uncertainty and unable to make an ideological commitment.
One was my slow discovery of Jewish historical reality and Jewish philosophy. There was the simple reality of my group’s persistence as an international conundrum, not quite a nation, not quite a class, not quite a religion, not quite a club — an international people with both an internationalist and a particularist mentality; an historical aberration that Marx dealt with in an ugly way: “What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time. . . .”
Let us say that in this realm, at least, Marx did not provide an overpowering analysis.
As for Jewish philosophy, three specific teachings held me back from Marx’s embrace. One was the negative golden rule of Hillel. The story is told of a would-be convert to Judaism who comes to Hillel, the premiere sage of his time, and asks for a summation of all of Judaism while standing on one foot. “What is hateful to you, do not do to others,” Hillel says. That is the whole Torah. Now go study.” I was struck, when I first discovered this tale, by Hillel’s use of a golden rule of political self-restraint, not of missionary zeal. We are not to “do unto others” in Hillel’s view.
There was also Jewish economic philosophy itself, which recognized as a reality principle the social or socialist nature of economics —that human wealth is created by something larger than the individual, far, far larger — by the generations of humanity, using resources that are our common blessing, our common inheritance. Who can argue? At the same time, however, Judaism also recognizes human greed and selfishness, in the story of the yetzer hara, that I’ve shared from this platform before — in brief, the rabbis capture the evil urge, the yetzer hara, and chain it in a cave, and go out into the world to see the results. The story concludes with the warning that without the yetzer hara, the evil or lustful urge, human beings would not build a house, beget children, or do anything really useful. We are driven by our urges, our biology, our hierarchical nature. How does Judaism resolve this “socialist” reality’s conflict with this “capitalist” reality? By mandating tsedoke, the redistribution of wealth to achieve justice. We give ten percent of our wealth in acknowledgment of the reality that we don’t really own it, that the community owns it; and we keep 90 percent to keep our yetzer hara satisfied.
Finally, there was the Talmud’s own warning against “coercive utopianism” — “All the calculated dates of redemption have passed, and now the matter depends upon repentance and good deeds.” This dictum, uttered during the time of Roman rule in Palestine in an effort to keep the lid on messianic revolutionary fervor — fervor that had already yielded two disastrous uprisings against Rome — also constitutes a strong statement against ideological thinking and in favor of personal responsibility and personal transformation. The rabbi seems to express the understanding that belief in the calculability of redemption implies belief in its inevitability, and that this belief in inevitable outcomes, whether because God is on our side or history is on our side, lends an extraordinary arrogance to salvational enterprises. As I put it in one of my artworks, “Why Marxism Failed #2” — You have Marx saying, “Workers of the world, unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains!” And Stalin is there saying, “And why should they even give up their chains?”
Ah, yes, Stalin. Stalin moves my discussion beyond Judaism — because far more powerfully instructive for me was the reality of millions of deaths, coercively destroyed lives, under so-called socialism: between 20 and 30 million starved by Mao Tse Tung’s Great Leap Forward, an ideologically spawned monster that constitutes the largest famine in human history; another half million or more killed in the course of the Cultural Revolution, the effort to make a “new socialist man” through terror, displacement, rape and beatings; the 20 million or more killed by Stalin through starvation, imprisonment or outright execution; one million killed outright by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia as they sought to create a classless society through terror and liquidation in the span of a couple of years; and so forth.
All right, by this point you might be thinking: It took him this long to come to these conclusions? I mean, the Berlin Wall collapsed twenty years ago! And in Iran today, Ahmedinejad, who supports state control of the economy, is called a conservative, while those who want a market economy are called reformers. The old definitions are kaput! Why is he spending time throwing brickbats at socialist theory?
The old definitions may be kaput, yet just a month ago, Newsweek magazine had a headline saying that “We’re all socialists now.” Still, it’s true: I have spoken this morning at too great length about despair and utter hopelessness. So now let’s talk about extinction.
Looking out from the graveyard of socialism, we see our very planet being consumed by the chaos and rapacity of capitalism. And the crisis of so-called socialism exemplified by the fall of the Berlin Wall is now being matched by a crisis of capitalism, exemplified by the fall of Lehman Brothers, just twenty short years later.
The capitalist system may not produce gulags or mass famines, but its landscapes are certainly filled with corpses. Today, for example, March 22, is World Water Day. Since 2005, the United Nations has called this date World Water Day, and the last time I looked, the UN was asking for only $15 billion per year to build water and sanitation facilities that would save the lives of millions of human beings, especially children under 5. More than two billion of us have no place to go to the bathroom without polluting our drinking water; and more than two billion of us suffer from a scarcity of unpolluted drinking water and therefore lose our toddlers, basically to diarrhea. Is this the fault of capitalist economics? A legacy of capitalist colonialism? I really don’t have an analysis of the problem, but it certainly indicates a lack of planning, and a severe lack of morality, when hundreds of billions of dollars are given to AIG — the American Institute of Greed — and millions and millions are given as bonuses to Wall Street buccaneers, while hundreds of thousands of children in Africa, Asia and Latin America are dying for lack of $15 billion for toilets and sewer systems.
While we may well be wary of the “coercive utopianism” of socialism, the problem is that our human species simply cannot afford any longer to surrender ourselves to the marketplace, with its endless demands for growth; with its cultivation of greed and consumerism; with its infantilizing of us with high technology “innovations;” with its unnerving and environmentally rapacious pace of change; with its utter lack of attention to the ethical uplift of the human race. Our environment, especially, cannot stand to have nearly seven million human beings pursuing their self-interest with the only planning being about maximizing dollar profits. If this is the best we can do, we’re in very serious trouble.
While I’m now afraid of the revolution that I used to want — for when I think about Marx’s proletarian class coming to power, the least educated, most alienated, most abused, with least to lose, I shudder at the prospect — at the same time, when I look at the capitalist power structure, with its moral obtuseness, its commitment to greed as an ideology, its capacity to turn plow-shares into swords and homes into so-called “mortgage-backed securities,” I want a revolution.
I certainly want a revolution in leadership and in the ethical consciousness of people. Ultimately, it makes little difference who owns the means of production if the decision-maker is an alpha gorilla or an unethical, hollow man. I want, the question, “Who owns the means of production?” to be less vital than “Who owns the means of production”— meaning, what is the ethical quality of the human being making such decisions? — and by the questions, “Production for what purpose and with what impact?”
How do we cultivate such discussion? In a recent issue of The Nation, Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher Jr. noted that “we don’t even have a plan for the deliberative process that we know has to replace the anarchic madness sof capitalism. . . . we have no precise models of participatory democracy on the scale that is currently called for . . .”
It’s a challenge, notwithstanding Facebook and MySpace and all the social networking possibilities of the Internet. The systems of participatory democracy that are necessary for building a new socialism have been corroded and corrupted, mostly by corporate power, so that there is a real lack of a vital center for ethical discussion and decisionmaking in our globalized world. We know what we can do with our science and our technology, but we have barely a place, outside corporate boardrooms, where we get to ask, what should we do?
We can genetically manipulate life forms to improve food supplies, lessen pesticide use, and complete the industrialization of food production — but should we? To what extent does degrade local economies, destroy water supplies, alienate us from nature, enlarge our arrogance?
We can develop prenatal genetic engineering, place feathered wings on the backs of human beings, and extend our life spans to 180 years or more — but should we? Will the human species remain one species for long with such “innovations” in play?
We can split the atom to produce energy without adding carbon to the atmosphere — but should we, given that the radioactive byproducts of fission persist in the environment for tens of thousands of years, an eternity as far as human history is concerned?
Who shall lead these discussions? Shall it be the very corporations that are responsible for developing many and marketing nearly all major scientific and technological innovations — whether needed or not? Most corporations resist efforts to be held accountable to any community beyond their stockholders, and are empowered in that resistance by their increasing control of information flow, the absence of meaningful international environmental law and law enforcement, and their status as legal “individuals” with full property rights and full protection from criminal or civil prosecution for their managers and shareholders?
Who else?
Governments are distrusted by their populations, neutered or controlled by business or military interests, led by domineering males who are incapable of exercising effective communal leadership, or caught up in ethnic, religious, economic and political competition with one another. The United Nations lacks an effective policing and enforcement role. Universities lack unity of vision or amplitude of voice or the financial independence or the grassroots authority. The mass media tend to be muzzled by the pressures of corporate or government ownership and by the profit motive. NGOs are dwarfed by abusing corporations and the governments that they monitor. Gatherings of elites are just that, gatherings of elites. Religions are commodified by their own dogmas as “brands.”
That is why centers like the one in which we sit, centers of ethical discussion that cultivate socially conscious parenting, diversity, and the exploration of meaning in our lives and in our work, are so important. The discussion has to begin somewhere, and the training of human beings who are ethically incapable of indulging in the shenanigans that have dragged down world capitalist economy has to begin somewhere. We have to take ourselves seriously, folks.
Our challenge is fundamental: to keep alive our spirituality of interconnection, our very ability to respond to one another. Here in America, capitalism’s broadest and perhaps most insidious and revolutionary impact has been the privatization of our lives. Marx was right, in a sense, when he wrote about the proletarianization of society: the involuntary bonds of community that once were determined by class, gender, ethnic and caste status, religious affiliation, birth order, and so on, have been largely swept away by capitalism and by the advent of a freewheeling consumer culture in which money does the talking. Incredible tools of self-sufficiency have privatized our lives and removed all sense of interdependency from our relationships, and community has been reduced to a purely voluntaristic activity that we can easily do without. But if we are to improve upon the anarchy of capitalism, we have to express our interdependence in how we structure our lives. We have to be seriously social if we want to evolve towards socialism. We have to cultivate our ability to respond if we believe in social responsibility.
Let me mention just a few other ideas about leadership models that can help lead us towards the discussions we need.
I was very gratified when Nelson Mandela, on his 89th birthday, organized a group called The Elders, which included Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu, Mary Robinson, and others — statesmen who had transcended ambition by dint of achievement and were now prepared, in Mandela’s words, to “speak freely and boldly, working both publicly and behind the scenes on whatever actions need to be taken.” “Despite all the ghastliness that is around,” say Archbishop Tutu, “human beings are made for goodness. The ones who ought to be held in high regard are not the ones who are militarily powerful or even economically prosperous. They are the ones who have a commitment to try and make the world a better place. We — the Elders — will endeavor to support these people and do our best for humanity.” Such an idea of true philosopher kings and queens organizing themselves to mobilize public opinion is an idea just right for today. Of course, they have a website at www.theelders.org.
The last such moral authority with international stature was Albert Einstein. Recently, the mathematician and writer Norman Levitt suggested formalizing such a role for scientists by establishing a kind of Federal Reserve of Science that would grant science “a social authority commensurate with its astonishing success in living up to its own ambitions.” Levitt argues that such a body would help society measure environmental impact of technologies realistically, motivated not by religious dogma, or political ideology, or the possibility of profit, but by objective, expert opinion. Participating scientists would, of course, have to renounce political ambitions, limit their advisory role to their scientific fields of competence, and credibly distance their judgments from any financial or institutional self-interest.
In my book, Waiting for God, I see to expand Levitt’s new “federal reserve” to include ethicists and leaders of other humanistic disciplines. It seems to me, at the very least, that corporations producing new innovations, and all such development projects, should have to put together not only environmental impact statements but ethical impact statements that evaluate their products’ impacts upon the human being. The need for a far-ranging discussion about what we can do and what we should do on this frail planet of ours is essential, and we should not shy away from it for fear of giving too much power to some ethical commisars or back-room powerbrokers. Surely there must be effective ways to honor, organize and ensure the dispassionate service of diverse people who combine expertise and wisdom in order to shape a world advisory board that could serve as a counterweight to the self-interested, unaccountable forces of political and economic power that currently dominate our planet.
The prerequisite to such a step is to believe, as Margaret Mead put it, “that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Classic socialist theory has pooh-poohed this idea, seeing capitalism as a system that cannot be stopped or transformed by good intentions. But I very much believe in the power of individuals to make change. Starting right here, in this room.
As workers, as consumers, as shareholders, as capitalists, as social-minded, socially responsible human beings, we can make change. We can do so especially because we live in a democratic and capitalist society that wants our buy-in. As Marx believed, capitalism sows the seeds of its own . . . let’s not say destruction, let’s say evolution. It’s happening. These are exciting times.
