Martin Luther’s 95 Theses on the Wittenberg Cathedral door helped put an end to the Middle Ages and heralded the dawn of the age of capitalism. Almost half a millennium later, world capitalism is going through rocky times, a new US administration is exploring new approaches, and socialist ideas are once again entering public discussion. It would seem to be our responsibility as progressives to “seize the time.” Ninety-five theses for our era would probably be far too many. So in the spirit of the moment, here are 9.5 controversial theses that need serious discussion, for struggles that need to be waged and won if we wish to eventually do in our era what Luther and his followers did in theirs.
1. A system that endangers human existence and human happiness is as close as we can get to defining raw, naked evil. Understood in this way, capitalism is clearly the greatest horror of our time, greater than drugs, greater than terrorism, greater than all the mass murderers with all the chainsaws in Texas. As leftists and working people we can never afford to simply reject capitalism at an intellectual level, as a Facebook “cause” to click on and forget, or as an academic point of argument. Our rejection of, repugnance toward and resistance to the capitalist system must be both heartfelt and constant, as well as solidly reasoned.
It is relatively easy to reject the capitalist system as an intellectual exercise and conclude “This is doesn’t work!” or “This is a crime against humanity.” Even New York Times columnists are now doing that. The point that we as leftists and progressives need to constantly share is that that capitalism is quite literally in a moral class with brutal mass murder, cannibalism or the eating of excrement. This is unpleasant talk, but when we recognize and proclaim the foul truth that a vastly larger number of humans have died from capitalism’s wars and exploitation than from all the above causes combined, the case becomes clear.
And when we fully commit ourselves ethically and emotionally as well as rationally to our cause, there is far less risk that we ourselves will compromise, surrender, burn out, make peace with the way things are or be seduced by the quintessentially materialist but inhumanly hostile bribery of history’s most evil social system.
2. Under capitalism, war, not peace, is the default condition, and the struggle against war is a primary front in the struggle against capitalism itself. “Bring the troops home NOW!” badly needs to be heard more clearly, more widely, and much more often, along with crystal-clear anti-imperialist class analysis of current events and conflicts.
The 20th century era of post-colonial revolution and “national liberation wars” has now been supplanted by a period of resource wars, chaotic nationalist, religious or sectarian conflicts, terrorist crimes and imperialist terror. In many if not most of these new conflicts there is no easily-identified “good side” or “bad side,” and precious few bands of heroes fighting selflessly for the future. In this aspect alone, the world alignment of forces can be said to much more closely resemble that of the 19th century than that of the 20th.
Among working people, this qualitatively new situation seems to have left some progressives and even a few committed Marxists confused and demoralized. It is perhaps a natural human tendency to want to see conflicts from a “my side” and “your side” point of view. Where there is no “good side,” we risk concluding that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” and sympathizing with ambiguous or even truly sinister forces only because they employ anti-imperialist rhetoric, because they are the underdogs, or because they are self-proclaimed “rebels.” Alternatively, we can fall into the error of offhandedly dismissing some armed conflicts as irrelevant to our politics, even wishing “a plague on both their houses” and quietly hoping that the two sides will kill each other off and be done with it.
As a healthy alternative, it would far better serve American leftists to re-explore time-tested Marxist dialectical tools of conflict analysis, defining and strengthening our fight for peace with class-based, internationalist denunciations of war itself. Seen in this light, extending the US war to Pakistan is wrong not only because of the slaughter of innocents, but because American, Afghan and Pakistani working people who have a common interest in peace and progress are being snookered into killing each other in order to support US imperial power and preserve the free flow of oil profits to US corporations.
A principled left response to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict could start from the undeniable point that both Israeli and Palestinian working people want peace, but have common enemies: religious fanaticism, hyper-nationalism, terrorism (whether state-sponsored or not), cycles of vengeance, and, ultimately, all those who seek to profit politically or materially from continuing hostilities.
In the United States, this analysis should lead to a strongly renewed left emphasis on antiwar work. The war is not over! We want peace! Where is the 21st century peace symbol that can be painted on our walls, chalked on our sidewalks and stamped into the snow? Where are the balladeers and singers for peace, the poets and cartoonists and authors and bloggers, the liberal and working class political activists pushing the long-forgotten “peace dividend” as the best and cheapest economic stimulus plan?
Peace work is not easy and not always popular. It will probably take another generation to finally lay the bogeyman of 9/11 to rest, and by that time there will surely be some other, quite different and horrifying provocation or “surprise attack” to revive war fever. Marxists must maintain a consistent response: “Working people have no war but the class war.” Period. And go on from there.
3. At this moment, our most dangerous ideological foe in the United States may not necessarily be conservatism (an ideology that has been largely regionalized even if not defeated), but rather libertarianism. While neoconservatives were promoting torture as the quintessence of American foreign policy under the Bush regime, it was libertarians (chief among them, Alan Greenspan) and not neocons who were bringing the domestic and world economy to its knees. In fact, these two ultra-right ideologies are quite different in content and modus operandi, occasionally even becoming hostile to one another. To carelessly lump both under the “conservative” label or to regard “ultra-right-wingers” as an undifferentiated mass of haters is a serious error.
Of course, the libertarian proposition that markets are self-correcting has now been repudiated, even by Greenspan. However, some immensely influential libertarian or pop-libertarian doctrines that liberals and leftists have still largely failed to denounce or even publicly challenge include the following:
o Taxes always and by definition represent a dead loss for the taxpayer. o Public or government services are always inherently less efficient than the private sector. o Capitalists are the creators of all wealth and the motor force of the economy o Workers create nothing, and are little more than necessary liabilities to be controlled, or whenever possible, eliminated from the production process. o The reason workers and the poor are not rich is because we are lazy bums. o Freedom is spontaneity; all discipline is tyranny Freedom is my right to do anything I want to do, when, where and how I want to do it. . o Union is not strength, but tyranny, since it inhibits spontaneous individuality, which is the definition of freedom. o Selfishness is a virtue.
Vicious unchallenged ideas like these are already distorting debate in several areas, including the fight for single-payer health care. Although very seductive to some intelligent, rebel-minded youth, the deeply anti-people libertarian ideology urgently needs to be attacked by liberals and the left for what it is: a re-warmed version of old right-wing crackpot anarchist doctrines, harnessed to the service of predatory capitalism. This is a priority struggle that has too long been ignored.
4. Historical amnesia is the biggest friend of exploiters, tyrants and murderers, and one of the greatest enemies of humanity. In the long history of the human race there has certainly never been a civilization as technically advanced as ours, and the common feeling, even among some progressives, that “we have nothing to learn from history” is, at least in that sense, thoroughly materialist. However, to the extent that even many leftists ignore history, this is a tragedy.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, CIA-funded academic theorist Francis Fukuyama joyously announced the “end of history.” Trotting out an old Stalinist theoretical analysis that the motor of history was the struggle of the USSR against the capitalist West, Fukuyama proclaimed that since the USSR was no more, history had ended! Even Fukuyama himself has now renounced this lunatic theory, but a similar, more practical unexamined ideology has now become surprisingly common even on the Left: the irrelevance of history.
Postmodern academics allege that history is nothing but an infinite mass of personal narratives, some heroic, some tragic, mostly just boring, but that anyone who proposes a “grand narrative” of history becomes by that very act an oppressor. Thus, the American Civil War was not a grand struggle to crush the slaveholders’ might, but rather a million essentially disconnected soldiers’ stories of suffering or triumph. The Depression was not about economics, it was about ketchup soup and about those who had their first sexual experiences at Civilian Conservation Corps camps.
In this view, even labor history consists only of the collected but unconnected stories of suffering workers, child laborers, union organizers, strikers, strikebreakers and bosses, told without rhyme or reason. The uprising in Iran is all about a certain innocent young woman bystander shot down in cold blood. The primary meaning of Obama’s presidency, if there is one, is a Portuguese water-dog or a swatted fly. Marx’ great discovery of the processes of history is discarded unexamined.
Perhaps the greatest ideological danger in neglecting history is a false eternalization of the present and a consequent abandonment of the future. If history is nothing but curious individual vignettes selected from a sea of ineffable chaos, any commitment to fighting for social change is an inherent absurdity and all that remains is putting our two cents worth into the sensational issue of the hour (as defined by dominant political forces or by the corporate media): Iran, a volcanic eruption, another American airstrike in Pakistan, elections, a beached whale, or the championship playoffs. They’re all the same.
As a result, leftists and activists wonder why we find ourselves running from issue to issue, “putting out fires” or trying to create progressive lines “de novo” on everything from yesterday’s unreality show winner to tomorrow’s horror in the Middle East.
If capitalism has repudiated history, then logically, “history is ours” by default. Materially, it has always been ours, and we must once again become its faithful guardians, not just of specialized “labor history” or even of the proud forgotten history of our own heroes and martyrs (what quaint, strange words those are!), but of the story of the entire world that we, the working people, built. It is that world that we, the working people, keep online and running every day, that world of ours that is ours to win.
5. The post-World War II American idea of a privately-owned nuclear-family house for all is simply untenable either economically or environmentally. The current US housing crisis is not just a “blip,” or even just a mortgage crisis. It is a crisis at the deepest infrastructural level of urban residential, occupational and transport patterns, one that may take decades or even centuries to correct.
Perhaps because so many of us, even on the Left, have personally bought into the so-called “American dream” of private house ownership (mortgage slavery, pimped-out by capitalism’s hired propaganda-pimps into “the family dream-home”) many leftist forces were caught by surprise when the housing crisis broke out. In this crisis it is a serious error to limit our criticism only to the criminal abuses of a deregulated capitalist mortgage industry.
Our critique of the housing crisis ought to be deepened to include the social atomization, environmental damage and environmental unsustainability of the present American housing model. From the post-World War II period onward, the right wing has consistently and correctly identified mass private “home ownership” as the single greatest barrier to mass activism and social change. The current crisis in the housing market is an opportune moment for the left to reopen debate on this reality and to develop and offer a radical urban and housing analysis that is ecologically, politically and economically progressive.
6. Great masses of individual passenger automobiles are economic folly and ecological suicide. Calls for rebuilding our mass transit systems are a step in the right direction, but almost a century of hyper-intense corporate indoctrination cannot be overcome simply by presenting reasoned alternatives.
Meeting and defeating corporate propaganda that “my car is my freedom, my car is my adulthood, my car is myself!” is an ideological war that is still waiting to be fought. In a moment when gas prices are on the way back up, a new generation of liberals and leftists should not fear to spark a new struggle, not only for public transit but against the auto fetish itself.
7. “Consumerism” is economic, ecological and ideological madness. Here, what is meant is not Ralph Nader-style “smart shopper” consumerism, but rather a peculiar contemporary insanity that several European languages describe as “consumismo.” This is a word that doesn’t even yet have a good translation in English, but is close to what Marxists have long referred to as “commodity fetish.” In modern America, this translates to a life-dominating obsession with shopping, buying, and ownership of ever more “stuff.”
Marx wrote scathing denunciations of how capitalists exploit the working classes not only by extracting surplus value from their labor but also by increasing their unnecessary consumption in order to get back what little workers do earn. This little-remembered but brilliant analysis applies more than ever in our day. Arguably, as fewer and fewer working Americans actually produce material goods, the material locus of capitalist exploitation tips more and more toward excess consumption and the creation and exploitation of phony needs at home as a counterpart to super-exploitation of labor abroad.
The truth is that most working class Americans now see themselves first of all as “consumers,” and only secondarily as citizens, much less as workers and producers of wealth, Speaking of “workers” or even “working families” has a quaint sound about it. Only when we regard ourselves first of all as workers, not just consumers at the trough, can working class politics become a mass reality.
Unlike hippies, monks or Christian socialists, Marxists, like most other real-world working people, have absolutely no illusions about the putative benefits or virtues of poverty. Very much on the contrary, we have always known, many of us from personal experience, that “poverty sucks!” Yet at the same time, have we presented a strong enough struggle (or any struggle at all) against the anti-human, anti-environmental, profit-driven cult of unlimited consumption for consumption’s sake? There is now a crying need for a high-profile, resolutely materialist yet clearly radical challenge to the dominant “consumista” cult that teaches that “the one who has the most ‘stuff’ wins.”
8. Debt is slavery. The household that is working several jobs to feed a mortgage, a car loan and tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt is brutally exploited by finance capital in a way that Marx could have never predicted in his lifetime. And debt exploitation is just as material, and often just as cruel, as that experienced on the job.
Nonetheless, perhaps because too many of us have managed to survive the recent “boom” times only by plunging deeper and deeper into debt, the silence from liberals, progressives and the left in general about the dangers of debt itself has been deafening. Well-meaning calls for foreclosure holidays or debt forgiveness are idealistic but nothing more, and the struggle for bankruptcy reform is only part of the solution. We are called “radicals” precisely because we wish to go to the root of problems. Let us go to the root of the debt problem.
Liberals and leftists owe America a standpoint that goes far beyond moralistic sermons about the dangers of credit cards, to a materialist political analysis of debt as an instrument of naked exploitation. Given the extent and depth of the consumer debt crisis, such an analysis, if transformed into practice, might potentially be an organizing tool of immense power.
9. Commercial advertising as it now exists is an act of war against humanity. Without advertising, contemporary capitalism falls. A struggle against advertising in its contemporary form is an axe against the taproot of the evil system itself. Cultural warriors like Noemi Klein have offered cutting critiques, but it is high time that liberals, progressives and leftists grab a chainsaw instead.
9.5 Socialism may be the road, but it is not the destination.
