Jacobin, which is certainly one of the more sophisticated Leftist publications in the country, posted this excerpt the other day:

“For all his shortcomings, this snippet from the end of Michael Harrington’s Socialism is beautiful.

In desert societies — including the American Southwest — water is so precious that it is money. People connive and fight and die over it; governments covet it; marriages are even made and broken because of it. If one were to talk to a person who has known only that desert and tell him that in the city there are public water fountains and that children are even sometimes allowed to turn on the fire hydrants in the summer and to frolic in the water, he would be sure one were crazy. For he knows, with existential certitude, that it is human nature to fight over water. Mankind has lived now for several millennia in the desert. Our minds and emotions are conditioned by that bitter experience; we do not dare to think that things could be otherwise. Yet there are signs that we are, without really planning it that way, marching out of the desert. There are some who loathe to leave behind the consolations of familiar brutalities; there are others who in one way or another would like to impose the law of the desert upon the Promised Land. It may even be possible that mankind cannot bear too much happiness. It’s also possible that we will seize this opportunity and make of the earth a homeland rather than an exile. This is the socialist project. It does not promise, or even seek, to abolish the human condition, for that is impossible. It does propose to end that invidious competition and venality which, because scarcity allowed no other alternatives, we have come to think are inseparable from our humanity.”

source



While I agree with the general statement of his article (Socialism is surplus re-appropriated into prosperity for all), I think this is a topic that anyone with Marxist/Communist/Socialist leanings has to seriously re-consider in the 21st century.

Capitalism in its relentless drive for profit secures the surplus for such off-balanced prosperity as we experience today, what with the 1 percent gorging everything and (more or less – let’s not lump the comfortable Upper Middle Class in with the rest of us) passing the scraps on to the remainder of the population. So we should, so the argument goes, tip the scale (although how Harrington, a Democratic Socialist envisions this total transformation remains to be seen —although I personally am quite unfamiliar with the great bulwark of Harrington’s work, so please correct me if I am wrong), and then everyone would equally reap the long-deserved benefits of Surplus.

But here are just two problems I see, especially in the 21st century: 1. Without the ever accelerating profit-motive to fuel such accumulation (which is quite a different argument from the inane well without the incentive of profit no one will do anything… line of thinking) will we be looking at such a world of unparalleled material glories? Any good thinking Socialist doesn’t envision a truly post-Capitalist world as being one in which cars are still pumped out at an infinite rate, the idea being that instead of only the wealthy owning a car per person, now every family will have just such an arrangement. This is merely a form of the American dream made more Utopian and fair, which, as opposed to this current system, would be better, but it is Utopian in the pejorative sense, not the Revolutionary, Marxist one. Socialism has to be a completely re-envisioned world, not just this one but with a few “better options.” As Zizek has repeated, the most important day of the Revolution is going to be the day after.

2. Also, on a planet that is ever approaching its so-called Zero Point, due to the strain that Capitalism has put it through with it’s never-ceasing drive for products and markets (although I’m sure a more concise thinker could have worded that better), the question has to be asked, do we still have a planet capable of such easy living? Without necessarily reverting to anarcho-primitivism or some form of ludditeism, even the most head-in-the-clouds Socialist has to come to terms with the fact that any society that emerges after Capitalism (taking it for granted that Capitalism doesn’t first plunge all life into extinction, which the more pessimistic side of me claims is still very much a possibility) will have to deal with the after-effects of Capitalism, and these include Environmental devastation on a quite massive scale. Even if the most Utopian thinking of “Well, we’ll go ALL green!” is accounted for, this still maintains a Radically new way of living, one in which our current Surplus-fueled way of life (let’s face it, even the most disposed of us in this country, discounting the lumpenproletariat, is much better off than the majority of people in all Third World Nations) is utterly incompatible with.

So this is where I believe Utopian Socialism has crept its way back into a large part of mainstay Socialist thinking, especially in this country. I have attended several Socialist groups, and it is common to find among them a sort of neo-Wellsian line of thinking, one in which the We’ll find a way attitude pervades. And as I stated before, this is a Leftist offshoot—although I don’t necessarily believe it stems from—the American dream, and I think it arises out of that exceedingly tough stance of saying “We can’t go on living like this.” Surplus is a blood-soaked gift of these times, and I think any world, any different world, which is really what Socialism aims for, isn’t it? is going to be one of scarcity. A certain discipline of living, almost among Spartan lines, must be at least toyed with, especially where material conditions are concerned. If we want to keep living on this planet—a finite planet, it must never be forgotten—we must rid ourselves of Utopian fantasies of Paradise on Earth, and try and find the paradise of sustainable, affordable (if such a term has any meaning left in it post-Capitalism), and actual living and societal arrangements on a Planet and peoples who have just weathered the catastrophe of Capitalism.

Socialism is our redemption, not just an easy fix to salvation. The way things are going now, we’d better get damned use to the desert.

– Nolan Kane (3/12/13)