Up on the Mountain, Down on the Ground

By R. John
special to redFlags

Here's what I want to understand more deeply: this question of the "everyday" – the place, importance, meaning and political relevance of that “everyday” locus of human existence. What emerges from that vantage point for viewing and evaluating human existence? How important is specificity and how do we know that importance?

I remember during the civil rights struggle when white racists insisted that “outsiders” didn’t “understand” Mississippi, and had no right to denounce its long evolved local “ways.” Their slogan was seen on handcrafted signs as marchers came. “We live here, you suck,” one read. “States rights” after all defended jim crow (and before it slavery) under the banner of local rights (and even “self-determination”!)

 

I think it is the larger material coherence of society, that makes politics possible. You don’t have to know all the many particularities of each county or township, or else a Red Army couldn’t march through on a Long March liberating people, or enter Tibet with profound insights into the transformations needed there.

   

I start here: Some things can only be known well by direct experience. All knowledge has its roots in experience (however removed the specific practice and practitioners may be from those synthesizing that knowledge). But intimate contact with everyday life (and especially a close personal focus on the everyday in life) does not at all automatically or directly breed insight to the problems and solutions of that life.

Is it natural that people in the U.S. are so pre-occupied with their private lives? I don’t think so. That focus blinds people (including oppressed people) to the potential for change. In "everyday life" the challenge to fundamental relations seems unimaginable. Macro-class relations and their dynamics are a given. doesn't a glimpse the potential for basic change come from without (inherently) -- and often stand in stark contrast to the lack of potential assumed from "everyday life."

 

And it is not just a matter of perspective, but of the contradiction of material conditions: In their “everyday lives,” working people are often the desperate sellers of their sole commodity (labor power) It means their “immediate interests” are formed by contradictory pulls: On one hand, competition with all other sellers (i.e. other workers – both their neighbors and their brothers-and-sisters around the world). On the other hand, the power and possibility of solidarity. It’s not like the first is “false consciousness” and the second is “real.” Those interests both impress themselves upon the material reality of “everyday lives” in a dog-eat-dog system. (Think of how Black people are viewing the arrival of new immigrants eager for low paying jobs – and all that this is producing).

 

That contradictoriness of “immediate interests” is why the roots of the trade union movement in the U.S. were never simply in a "struggle for better working class conditions" but were so often dominated by demands for the exclusion of Asian people, Black people, women and so on from the workplace, the industry, the country. And that is why trade union politics are still dominated by protectionist demands and “buy American campaigns” aimed at workers around the world.

 

Is the measure of "liberation" the degree to which people have subjective control over “their own lives” and dynamics around them? Or is it the degree their objective interests fundamentally govern the transformation of cardinal matters of society (direction of development, basic structure of relations, priorities of investment and distribution)? And what is the relationship between those two?

 

If women can’t finally STOP sexual harassment on the streets they walk – I can’t imagine they will believe that their interests now rule society as a whole. But I don’t think we should confuse direct local control with state power.

there was a current among progessive historians (emerging from the 60s) to focus on "everyday life" of the people -- with the view that it was daily work, family, thoughts, culture that "made" society. And it went with a certain inattention to the macro political events of history (the so-called "decisions of states and great men"). but i think that populism did not get history or society right.

I would argue for “the mountain” -- for viewing things from a sweep and from a height, with a sense that things can be understood and brought to fundamental changes only from that level.

I don’t believe that only the “everyday” is real – or that the sweep of history and progress is a deception. And I think the Leninist view of spontaneity (and the insights of "everyday life" and "day to day struggle" connected with that) are deeply valid (because they correspond to a basically correct view of where understandings of large social dynamics and possibilities arise (which is “outside” the everyday, in the realm of scientific summation and analysis).

Official U.S. politics acts as if people can only engage the things that "directly affect their lives" -- and as if they can only judge things by "what is in the direct personal interests of me and my family." But in fact, official politics is seeking to train people in that way of thinking and acting -- because that brings them, over and over, under "the wing of the bourgeoisie." If that is all that is possible, then this society is all that is possible.

 

But the revolution is also about changing people's lives and lifting their burdens. Two Maoist slogans developed real resonance broadly among "the people" in the U.S.: "Serve the People" and "Power to the People."

And yet those slogans have been allowed to lie so unused by so many Maoists today. Why? What thinking led there?

 

Is that thinking part of the reason that revolutionary communism has not (yet) gotten a hearing or traction among sections of the people – including the most oppressed. Revolutionary communism has been a credo, but really never a political movement with roots and ties into social bases.

We need to unravel why: how much lies in what revolutionaries are saying and doing? How much lies in what the oppressed are thinking, hearing and saying themselves?

Comments

[JB]

Regarding Tibet, I promise to post up the Mike Ely piece later in the week for it's own feature, online back-up and our usually charming debate and discussion.

That said... let's not let a "competing narrative" tangent overwhelm the underderlying point – which we can discuss considerably more direct, tangible terms than the entirely complex unfolding of Tibetan/Chinese relations and class struggle.

[JB]

Ansel, check back later.

In the meantime, you can get a headstart on the Tibet discussion by reading the best communist history of Tibet, that is booklet-sized and probably not at all what you expect.

The True Story of Maoist Revolution in Tibet by Mike Ely

[JB]

The "parallel" doesn't hold because China wasn't enforcing priviledge and power... it was overthrowing it. Maybe anarchism makes you immune to distinctions of this kind, but I hope not.

[r. john]

The emergence of a Tibet thread is not a bad thing. but it does underscore that the usage of this "blog format" has real limitations for (what has long been) essentially a threaded discussion. JB: there need to be ways for people to create their own threads -- so things can take off on tangents, and so that a multiplicity of threads can be seen and followed.

As it stands now, when one discussion takes off, it unnecessarily "disappears" two or three other (still vital) threads.

Plans?

[r. john]

Tibet and that experience injects a number of questions that demand real materialism for a correct resolution:

a) Marxists uphold a right of self-determination (i.e. a right to independence and self governmance) for oppressed nations -- but not for every ethnic grouping and formation. Why is that? Because, in the real world, not every grouping can be independent.

Tibet is an example: this was a highly scattered people, living in feudalism in remote valleys. It never had a coherent national market -- which is objectively a basis (and a measure) of the emergence of a potential nation-state.

The objective fact was that the world was "closing in" on water-tight feudal kingdoms like that -- and had been "closing in rapidly" globally since the mid 1850s. Tibet was one of the few parts of the world NOT YET colonized by western powers because (like other such places, including Afghanistan, or ethiopia) it was just not wealthy enough or strategic enough to bother with.

But after World War 2, such pockets were not going to survive. Tibet could not (and cannot today) function as a self-determined country -- in a very material way, it was going to be part of something larger one way or another.

If it did not remain part of China, it would be dominated by India. If it was not dominated by India, it would be ruled by Anglo-American agents.

And under any of those contingencies, the vast bulk of Tibet would remain (for a long time) essentially unruled by any of them. In that it was very similar to Afghanistan where Indian, British or Russian agents could stage palace coups against each other in Kabul, but the valleys and villages of the countryside would remain under the rule of feudal patriarchs (until a basic change of mode of production emerged).

Given this material fact, self-determination was not an option for Tibet -- for real material reasons. If it had not been incorporated into the maelstrom of the chinese revolution, it would simply have been plucked and used by one or another outside power (while the people remained in one form or another of serfdom to the decrepit lamaists.) It was, in short, not a nation (in the marxist sense) -- a phenomenon which (marxists hold) is tied to the emergence of the bourgeoisie and its national markets.

b) Within the Chinese communist party there were always two lines on how to handle tibet. One, filled by chauvinist views and dreams of modernization -- saw the Tibetan people as hopelessly backward, and basically called for seizing the region, using it, and ignoring its small population.

Mao's line was opposed to that. He saw the hope for tibet being an anti-feudal anti-lamaist revolution of its people.

This approach had to confront a very real problem: There was in 1949 no internal communist force in Tibet. There were literally no Tibetan communists. None. the decades of peasant war in te rest of china had not trickled into the watertight world of the lamaists.

You can export revolution, but one way or another someone has to be there to import it.

And so from 1949 on, the tasks the CPC set for themselves was training sections of the Tibetan literate elite to operate a modern state in Tibet, as an autonomous part of revolutionary china, while training sections of the oppressed to make and lead the masses in revolution. And while, drawing a line -- forbidding and suppressing open armed revolt and pro-imperialist covert operations (which were both truly massive through the 1950s)

It was a complex plan, and proved difficult to carry out.

And as we know, ultimately the first line won out: I.e. Tibet is now dominated by a CPC run by the revisionist forces who are crude in their distain for the masses (and not just in Tibet), and whose vision of "modernity" is not far removed from raw capitalist rape a la "Deadwood."

In that light, the last half of Mike Ely's piece is worth reading. Far too often the discussion is left at his first chapter: which is exposure of Lamaism and pre-revolutionary society -- which was one of the most awful societies known, and one declining with rapid depopulation toward collapse, through raw decadence and religious dogmatism, like a number of earlier "civilizations." But the discussion of the line struggles of the cultural revolution unravel the sharply opposing views (and possibilities) for handling a problem like Tibet in the course of the revolution.

and lets not be naive:

Tibet is unique (like all nationalities). But every great revolution (especially in large multinational states) will have to deal with the dilemma of sections of a large country that is not particularly connected to the revolution.

In Russia it was Poland and the Western Ukraine. (And after the revolution, Poland became an independent fascist state, and the western Ukraine did not.)

Several people have raised the notion of Mississippi, where large sections of the population never reconciled themselves to the outcome of the Civil War.

what about a future revolution... What should be done about Utah? Or Georgia's Cobb County? Should the revolution only prevail in places where it has a majority? and leave the countryside as a checkboard of "independent" fascist states within or along the borders of the new socialist one?

[JB]

"In Russia, it was Poland and the Western Ukraine..."

And Central, largely Muslim Central Asia...

[JB]

The implication of the "autonomous" line is not just that "yes", large areas of the country should remain essentially fascist fiefs, but that revolution anywhere, always and forever is intrinsically "authoritarian" and that we should reconcile ourselves to being a permanent, disloyal opposition.

It's genuinely depressing when advocated openly, which it is. It's continually startling when it's argued de facto, and allowed to just sit there among people who should full well know better.