My girlfriend at the time--also a comrade--had studied philosophy in college. "I don't like George Novack," she said. A heretical thought, for George and his wife, Evelyn Reed, had God-like status within the Movement.
I looked at her, shocked. In a parallel universe such a comment could've gotten her shot.
Nevertheless, since I had no prior opinion about Mr. Novack one way or the other, the remark has forever biased me against him. After all, she, better educated than me, should know a philosopher when she saw one.
Mr. Novack's name hasn't crossed my radar screen for decades, so it was with sentiment that I read the excerpt republished in The Militant, entitled "Socialist revolution is ‘historical mission of modern proletariat’" The entire piece is an introduction to Frederick Engels' classic work, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. That book was first published in 1880, while Mr. Novack made his contribution in 1972. With a bit of fiddling you can likely read the whole introduction using Amazon's Look Inside feature, which is what I did.
My girlfriend was correct--Mr. Novack is not a philosopher. But he is a lucid exponent of Marxist thought. The piece is worth reading for that reason.
Like all Marxists, Mr. Novack understands nothing about economics.
The material source of the conflict between capital and labor is their ceaseless struggle over the division of the social surplus product in the form of the new value that is added to the total wealth produced by the laboring population. The profits of the capitalist stand in inverse ratio to the wages of the workers.This is manifestly not true, as evidenced by the dramatic rise in global living standards since 1880. The "conflict" between workers and capitalists is not the zero-sum game that Novack and Engels imply.
"Utopian socialism" was the sort practiced by, among others, Robert Owen in New Harmony, Indiana, where a group of like-minded souls got together and tried to live under socialist principles. Of course it failed, surviving only for two years, from 1825 to 1827.
"Scientific socialism," proposed by Marx and Engels, was the root-and-branch social transformation into a socialist society. It was "scientific" because it depended on "social forces," and "material conditions," rather than some idealistic dream. Mr. Novack gives us a summary statement of how this transformation is supposed to occur.
The workers--also known as the proletariat--trying to recover their rightful share of "surplus value," will form trade unions. These will fight around narrow, workplace issues, such as wages and working hours.
When this doesn't satisfy them, they will expand their fight to the political realm. This leads to the formation of a labor party, distinguished from capitalist parties by being beholden only to proletarian interests.
Since the capitalists cannot relinquish their hold on profits and still stay in business, not even a labor party will satisfy the workers. Hence they shall be inspired toward revolution, implementing the dictatorship of the proletariat, and ultimately communism.
Only the triumphant proletarian revolution can clear the road to a classless society. Then, at last, long-suffering humanity will be the master of nature and its own social organization, and its full creative capacities will be released to beautify a bountiful world. This will mark “the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.”It's a silly model, yet Mr. Novack claims some success. He notes that when Engels wrote his book, it was
...no more than a prophecy. History had yet to demonstrate whether his prediction of things to come was solidly based or an aberrant hypothesis of social development. Now a century later, the act of emancipation he anticipated has been effected in fourteen countries, beginning with Russia in 1917 and extending to Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam and Cuba after the Second World War.While it's hard to think of Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, or Castroist Cuba as being in any sense "emancipated," it is nevertheless true that (apart from Cuba) there is nothing "socialist" about them now. Mr. Novack was premature in his claim of success and Engels' prophecies are just flat-out wrong.
Yet the dying embers of the Marxist dream are kept alive by my Trotskyist friends, who still insist that Engels' template can be turned into reality. But they're stuck on Square One, still championing the union movement. Socialist Action (SA), for example, touts hotel unions--service workers who Engels probably didn't have in mind when he wrote his book. Indeed, it is unlikely that hotel workers--even collectively--hold the keys to civilization.
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is even more out on a limb urging the unionization of Uber drivers. This is a nigh impossibility--the closest they could come would be to quit their jobs, which if the proceeds from driving Uber ever fell below the market rate is precisely what they would do.
The union movement is fading, not just in the US but globally. There are many reasons for that, including: automation has supplanted the majority of industrial workers; workplaces are smaller and harder to organize; supply chains are longer and therefore redundant, meaning strikers have less leverage; management has been flattened, which means employment is much more sensitive to the marketplace than previously; and most employees are now service workers who directly interact with customers. I think this trend is irreversible.
So Trotskyists have made no progress on Engels' step one.
Step Two is the formation of a labor party, and both groups are striving. SA has gone the furthest with this--they are now engaged in Jeff Mackler's quixotic and deeply unserious presidential campaign. The core platform is Build an Independent Labor Party, which, of course, is copied straight from Engels.
But it is more complicated today. SA believes in "catastrophic climate change," and par for the course they're on the radical extreme of that movement, claiming the world will end in ten years. Their solution to this imminent disaster is to Build an Independent Labor Party. I, for one, wonder how such a labor party is gonna prevent catastrophe at all, much less within ten years--especially since it's so far from becoming reality.
Engels would be flummoxed, as I suspect George Novack would be as well.
The SWP has dropped the "climate change" nonsense, which puts them back in the real world. And further, they've gone all-in on the blue-collar billionaire, supporting President Donald J. Trump.
OK--that last sentence is an overstatement. They don't endorse Mr. Trump, but they do sympathize with his supporters. An attack on Mr. Trump--or so they perceive--is an attack on the workers who are his fans. The SWP adamantly (and in my view correctly) rejects the charges of treason and racism so often and casually thrown at the president's constituents.
It's a fine line: defending Trump's supporters against completely spurious charges--without supporting Trump. Many on the Left accuse them of actually supporting Trump. The case is stronger because the SWP has rejected the antisemitism otherwise so rampant on the far Left.
Nevertheless, I think they are very much on the Left: they strongly support the Cuban "revolution"; they defend North Korea as a workers' state ("emancipated"?); they generally oppose Trump's crackdown on immigration; and above all, they aspire to Build an Independent Labor Party.
So I predict they'll again run candidates for president and vice-president in 2020, just have they done since 1948. The campaign will be just as quixotic as Socialist Action's, though less incoherent.
Still, I can't help but hope that at least a few comrades, in the privacy of the ballot box, will join me in voting for Donald J. Trump.
Either way, George Novack is spinning in his grave.
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