I have been one of those people who has been politically adrift for most of my life (to say nothing of being socially out of place). By the right-wing I have always been called 'naive' and by the left I have often been considered cynical. This is fine, I guess, it is probably a good thing to be made up of a healthy dose of idealism and cynicism.

I have been occasionally guilty of referring to some people as naive who don't necessarily deserve it, like one of my readers and occasional commentators, Leo (sorry about that leo). Naive is the wrong word for what many of my political opponents are. I think many people in our society simply fail to see their own life in a proper historical context. Many like to believe that somehow the age in which we live is 'different' from all other ages. These are the people who think that Trade Unions have outlived their usefulness, as though without constant diligence capitalists wouldn't regress right back to the 19th century techniques of controlling and abusing employees, a condition so well illustrated by Engels in his Condition of the Working-Class in England. These are people who, because they were born white in a prosperous Western nation that they have what they have because of personal merit or don't realistically understand that the majority of people in the world continue to live in abject poverty. These are people who fail to understand the degree to which the ruling ideology is the ideology of the ruling and that capitalists effectively control not just our political agenda but have colonized huge swaths of our social structure a well.

While some of these people are, of course, naive, many of them have just understandably bought most of the ideology into which they were born and raised. And when we consider that almost every part of the media we see is owned and controlled by wealthy individuals who have a vested interest in the capitalist status quo, it is not surprising that more people don't have a better sense of how the power structure of our society is working. Capitalist ideology controls our society much the way ideologies have always dominated societies, by standing in (in most people's minds) for the 'natural' order of things. This is why revolutions in history have been relatively rare; because it is a significant leap for people to question what they have been raised to believe is 'natural.' People have a tough time imagining how this order which appears to grow organically out of human affairs, could ever be really challenged and replaced with something else. It is also why revolutions are often so bloody; because the powerful are fighting for their lives and their defenders are fighting for 'god' or 'nature' or some ideological equivalent, and on the other side of this change they see nothing but chaos.

And while I don't defend violent revolutions per se, they are often historically inevitable. This is just the nature of the social dynamic. The irony is that while the real dreamers often inspire revolutions and revolutionaries, they are often not in favor of the violent overthrow of the prevailing system. This is very true of people like Voltaire, Rousseau, William Godwin, and even Thomas Paine. Paine, who was so violently hated for so long by so many, was a genuine inspiration for the American and French revolutions but when he fled England and found himself in Revolutionary France, he was one of the people that argued against beheading the King.

I am decidedly not naive. I think probably the human race will fail and regress back into a state of barbarism from whence we came. This is because there are many people (and our own Prime Minister is one) who would prefer barbarism and the destruction of the human race than to see an enlightened system of cooperation. Their identity is so wrapped up in the machismo of power and so-called individualism and materialism that they can't imagine a system in which we actually help each other. But society has often progress despite, in in spite of, people like this. The dreamers work to undermine the use and abuse of power and to create a society in which cooperation is the real motive, while the others entrench power in the hands of the few, the privileged, and the abusive.

So I wonder if I am a cynic.

A new book. . .

Today I got a new book in the mail which looks like it will be quite good. It is The Life and Times of Thomas Spence by Mary Ashraf. Thomas Spence was a radical democratic reformer who lived between the years 1750 and 1814. He was one of the most radical reformers of his time, outstripping the even Godwin and Thomas Paine. Spence anticipated a great deal of Marx and was one of the first of the modern European radicals to call for common property. 

Leafing through the book I hit upon this paragraph which is an excellent indication of the books interest and quality. 

"Labour gives the title no only to its products but to its means; not because it produces things but because it does so socially and is in fact the universal provider and civilizer. The claims to superiority of those who monopolize and misuse the bounty of labour or of nature are contemptible and ludicrous. Without workers the- gentry would revert to savagery, like Saltykov-Shchrendrin's 'wild squire.'"

Good stuff. . . .

What has become of radicalism?

“The poor are set to labour – for what? Not the food for which they famish; not the blankets for want of which their babes are frozen by the cold of their miserable hovels; not those comforts of civilization without which civilized man is far more miserable than the meanest savage – no: for the pride of power, for the miserable isolation of pride, for the false pleasures of one hundredth part of society.  -Shelley

 

It is remarkable that radicals like Shelley who wrote nearly two hundred years ago, still sound radical today. The vulnerable are still everywhere the victims of the powerful, the majority continue to labor under atrocious conditions for little money while the rich and powerful work less under better conditions for a great deal more money. Political debates rage but the primary political parties differ little in their basic paradigm and few are ready to make any genuine changes that will raise average people up to a tolerable level. The great radicals of the late 18^th and early 19^th century, like Paine, Godwin, Thelwall, Holcroft, William Blake, etc., are even radical by today’s standards. How little progress we have made.

 

Democracy's Failure

If you are 35 or older then you should have a pretty clear memory of the demise of the Soviet Union and the so-called failure of the ‘communist’ project. ‘Fair enough’, most leftists contend today, ‘the horrors of Stalinism that exercised its power through the dreaded Commintern certainly deserved to be condemned to the dustbin of history. ‘ Of course, the real tragedy, as many of us predicted, was to be the fact that the failure of communism on the model designed by Lenin and Stalin would significantly contribute to discrediting almost all parts of the socialist cause. This was certainly not difficult to predict because the forces of greed will obviously take every possible advantage to undermine any and all collectivist efforts. But putting aside, for the moment, the tragedy of the general abandonment of most elements of socialism, there is an interesting historical phenomenon that accompanies the demise of communism. While people of various political stripes, and capitalists in every corner, have been trumpeting the failure of communism as evidence of the impracticality and impossibility of any collectivist effort, people have uniformly, failed to cast an eye on the credibility of Western Democracy. If communism, in its 20th century guise, can be said to have failed, surely democracy as we presently practice and understand it, has also failed quite miserably. The simplest expression of democracy is found in the paradoxical principle that those who seek power are, in most cases, the very people who should never possess it. But we need not look to principles to see the failure of democracy because it is everywhere for us to see at a practical level. Among Western democracy’s most profound failures are, in no particular order:

- the increases in the concentration of wealth and dependence of the electoral politics on money which makes general participation in the process of democracy difficult and increasingly meaningless.

- the concentration of media control means that information is managed by a small group of rich and powerful people. This media control narrows and minimises public discourse and without public discourse is impossible.

- the globalization of the economy increasingly restricts the policies that nation-states are able to pursue.

- democratic mechanisms are designed not to reflect a general will but the will of a relatively small and powerful group.

- modern capitalism atomizes people to the point that healthy communities are difficult to form and is becomes harder for grassroots organizations to meaningfully advocate on behalf of average citizens.

- modern ideology reduces people to the status of ‘tax-payers’ and an active notion of citizenship is slowly being eliminated.

- all of the above create a situation in which modern democracy is not a meritocracy but a system of salesmanship.

As though to add insult to injury, Western governments since September 11th have increasingly attempted to chip away at the civil rights that the West has so longed boasted about. Anyone who is honest with themselves must surely know that Western Democracy is suffering from a profound legitimation crisis and demands significant and thoroughgoing reforms if it is to survive and thrive.

Of course the left has always had a certain distrust of democracy and I leave you with some comments by William Godwin , founding father of Anarchist thought, from his classic Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Godwin wrote:
“But there are certain disadvantages that may seem the necessary result of democratical equality. In political society, it is reasonable to suppose that the wise will be outnumbered by the unwise; and it will be inferred that the welfare of the whole will therefore be at the mercy of ignorance and folly. It is true that the ignorant will generally be sufficiently willing to listen to the judicious, but their very ignorance will incapacitate them from discerning the merit of their guides. The turbulent and crafty demagogue will often possess greater advantages for inveigling their judgement than the man who, with purer intentions, may possess a less brilliant talent. Add to this that the demagogue has a never failing recourse, in the ruling imperfection of human nature, that of preferring the specious present to the substantial future. This is what is usually termed playing upon the passions of mankind. Politics have hitherto presented an enigma that all the wit of man has been insufficient to solve. Is it to be supposed that the uninstructed multitude should always be able to resist the artful sophistry, and captivating eloquence, that may be employed to perplex the subject with still further obscurity? Will it not often happen that the schemes proposed by the ambitious disturber will posses a meretricious attraction which the severe and sober project of the discerning statesman shall be unable to compensate?”

A rather pessimistic (maybe even paternalistic) view of things presented by Mr Godwin. But one only has to look at the present state of things to be infected by the same pessimism.