INTEGRATED WITH THE ENEMY

Wilfred G. Burchett's classic, Vietnam: Inside Story of the Guerilla War (International Publishers, 1965), has a wonderful chapter, "Integrated with the Enemy," describing conditions "on the ground" in South Vietnam during the U. S. imperialist intervention and the National Liberation Front insurgency.  Taken as a whole, the information presented there is a devastating, if implicit, critique of the authoritarian and voluntarist conception of guerilla war implied by the slogan, "The guerilla is a fish in a sea of people."  Instead, we get a picture of an active, conscious, involved population — anything but a passive "sea" — living and working in constant struggle to control and develop economic activity, territorial and political organization and the entire quality of social existence,  against but also "integrated with" the Ngo Dinh Diem (and subsequent) regimes and the U. S. military.  "Contested terrain" does not quite capture this; the terrain was not only contested, but also in an active state of mutual development, and the "battle for hearts and minds" was carried out in this context.  The best sense of this may be conveyed by the words of NLF representative Tran Nam Trung, as quoted in Burchett (page 72):

 

The enemy set up posts all over the place but they could not control the population through the posts. . . . They could only move out with the aid of mobile forces and take part with the latter in large-scale military operations.  But the enemy could not accumulate the necessary mobile forces for the "general counter-offensive" because such a high proportion were tied up in the posts. . . . They could not move out to collect taxes.

The population controlled the posts and not vice versa.  The garrisons had to get permission from the guerillas to draw water, to take a bath or go out to market.  If the guerillas agreed, they could move out a few yards to draw water but were limited to a certain number of men and for a set time.  If you looked at the military maps, you could see posts everywhere but in fact the surrounding territory was liberated, in the hands of the people. . . . where the enemy insisted on staying in the countryside, he was forced to live integrated with us, on our terms.

 

I had the pleasure of meeting Wilfred Burchett, in 1979 or 1980, and on that occasion I mentioned the "integrated with the enemy" concept, clearly drawn from the thinking, and practice, of the NLF.  He was pleased that someone had remembered this, and receptive to the idea that the concept might have more general theoretical application.  I was thinking then, and am thinking now, of its relation to a much-misunderstood and much-maligned proposition, in Lenin's What Is to Be Done?  This is the claim that the spontaneous activity and experience of the working class are not a sufficient foundation for socialist revolutionary capacity and consciousness; that the working class can build genuine revolutionary potential only by absorbing — "from without"  — all of the accumulated scientific and cultural knowledge of humankind.  Far from being elitist, "vanguardist," etc., this should be understood as a call for a world-historic democratic achievement, just as the control of the military posts by the guerillas (rather than the other way around) clearly required a high level of consciousness, support, and organization of the people in the Vietnamese countryside surrounding the posts.

In Lenin's conception — and, one may argue, in the entire Marxist tradition — the "enemy" is a dialectical entity.  The capitalist ruling class is a surplus-extracting, oppressive obstacle to human development; but it is also, at the same time, the carrier (bearer) of all prior development.  The political revolution is the transfer of power to the working class, and this can only be accomplished by force (whatever forms this force may take on in any given historical situation).  The social revolution, the ultimate goal and means to secure the political revolution, is the use of that power to extract from the capitalist class and its various institutional embodiments all of the inherited social knowledge and capacities to carry human progress forward, now on a working-class foundation.  This massive, world-historic extraction has, as its necessary premise, integration with the (dialectical) enemy.

Most readers will undoubtedly notice the affinity of this line of thought with the heritage of Antonio Gramsci.  The concept of hegemony, from the Prison Notebooks, is also widely misunderstood, even by sympathetic observers (who sometimes confuse it with political power).  Ruling-class hegemony is a structural capacity (i.e., not merely a product of will, even of collective or institutional will) to make the foundations of a given society appear — especially in the minds of the exploited and dominated majority in that society &mdash as "natural," "eternal," "inevitable."  Capitalist hegemony is the incapacity of the working classes in capitalist societies to conceive of alternatives — to see capitalist social relations from the outside.  That is because capitalism embodies everything social and historical, indeed everything conceivable, from the historical symbols of national life to the canons of science to the contents of art museums.  Working-class hegemony, by contrast, is the work-in-progress of separating those symbols, canons and contents from their capitalist integument and taking responsibility for them in the name of human development.  Again, "integration with the enemy" follows: Gramsci famously applied the idea of hegemony to the working-class conquest of education, literature, philosophy, and the myriad institutions of daily life.¹

Three conclusions appear to follow from this.

First, we find a profound unity in fruitful revolutionary thought throughout the 20th century, from the Leninist tradition and the October Revolution, to the enormous impact of Italian Marxist thinking for the advanced ("Western") capitalist countries, to the Vietnamese Revolution and national liberation struggles in "third-world" countries.  At one time, it was important for the left to come to grips with difference.  A single theory, mechanically applied to all times and places, would certainly be a source of errors and costly detours.  Lenin, and Leninism, in this view, are products of a particular conjuncture of underdevelopment, and their relevance for advanced capitalist conditions is either limited or, at best, highly mediated.  Gramsci, in particular, has been credited by certain schools of Gramsciani with having "rescued" Marxism for the "advanced" political systems of the "West," which could only have been misunderstood or poorly understood by the Bolsheviks.  Lenin, then, should be taken with a Gramscian grain of salt.  Moreover, the underdeveloped/developing/underdeveloping world (take your pick) has its own particular realities and theoretical requirements.

Now no one will disagree with the need to grasp difference and to avoid unmediated application of a single general theory to variegated situations.  A unilinear approach of this sort would amount to confusing unity with identity, in effect substituting the latter for the former — a clearly reductionist move.  The present moment of world neoliberal dominance, however, may be an occasion to swing the pendulum back somewhat, and to grasp, once again, the essential unity of the multiple theaters of world capitalist development and the tasks of the working-class movement.  (This may be all the more true if those tasks are complicated by the incompleteness of capitalist penetration in many parts of the world; but this is a topic for another occasion.)  Living "integrated with the enemy" is clearly revealed as part of the shared reality, uniting revolutionary tasks in diverse contexts.

Second, the distinction between political and social revolution, as motivated by "integration with the enemy," may help us come to terms with a profound ambiguity surrounding the concept of revolution as such.  Is revolution the end goal of Marxist organization and thought?  I am happy to share the views on this matter of Dr. Herbert Aptheker, whom I consider to have been a mentor and major influence on my own thinking.  Dr. Aptheker, both in classes and in conversation, used to insist that socialist revolution was a means, not an end; that the ultimate "goal" of Marxist thinking and practice could be nothing other than the ennoblement of human life — needless to say, a goal with an infinite horizon, never to be completely accomplished.  The left, in this conception, presses forward to transform people's lives in capitalist societies, toward democracy, fulfillment in work and in personal relations, and ever-greater realization of human potential.  The capitalist class prevents this, as it must do, by virtue of its very nature and the basis of its power.  At some point, when its interests are decisively threatened, it closes off the channels of legal social change (especially the institutions of electoral democracy).  (Or tries to close them off; this depends on the historical specifics.)  At this point, revolutionary mass mobilization, electoral activity, and, if necessary, military forms of struggle commence.  Revolution, then, is a negative response to capitalist power's blocking of non-revolutionary paths of change.

But this is the political revolution.  The social revolution is the transfer of real power and knowledge — capture of the entire storehouse of human evolution for the transformation into socialist social relations.  In other words: living integrated with the enemy.  This latter revolution also has decisive moments, i.e., breaks in continuity and leaps to new levels of development.  But the social revolution — whose actual content is the object of continuing study and debate — is not a negative response to counterrevolution; it is a positive goal, albeit one whose achievement is never complete, and whose core values are indeed the continuing ennoblement of human life.  Revolution, in this sense, can be embraced; it is not merely a response to counterrevolutionary power, or a necessary evil, or a means to some larger goal.  There is no larger goal.

Finally, we have considered examples of living integrated with the enemy in guerilla warfare situations, and as a general principle of revolutionary struggle in semi-developed and advanced capitalist conditions.  Might there be any further applications?  I think in particular of the ideological front within the academy.  I have recently been asked to contribute a chapter to an "alternative" textbook in economic theory, on the subject of economic growth.  This led me to wonder: why do we so often define what we do as "alternative," "heterodox," etc.?  Isn't this a form of intellectual self-ghettoization?  (The issue was addressed in my "Of People, Curves, and Autism," Editorial Perspectives, Fall 2001.)  What would it look like if we were to take the accumulated heritage of economic thought, and transform and develop it &mdash rather than placing ourselves outside of it and supplying endless "critiques"?  The thought also occurred: isn't this — developing from within — exactly what Marx did in the middle of the 19th century?  Would this cause us to lose our critical edge?  Then: if the reality we are studying is profoundly contradictory and pregnant — i.e., containing immanent pressures for transformation — then won't scientific practice bring those qualities to the fore?  To ask the same question differently: are revolutionary potentials immanent in objective reality (to use an old but somehow comforting turn of phrase), or are they imported from outside, at the level of ideas?  From the philosophical materialist standpoint this is, of course, a non-question.  But if revolutionary potentials are indeed immanent, they are discoverable by the progressive development of science.  Perhaps Lenin's classic formulation of Marxism as containing three equal moments, or streams — the critical, the revolutionary, and the scientific — is wrong.  Perhaps the scientific moment is fundamental and defining, carrying the other two along with it.

So, how do we take the received theory of economic growth, and transform and develop it to reveal the actual social and class relations of a capitalist economy?  This is an ongoing project, and I will not go into details here, except to remark that even my own small part of it seems to be requiring a considerable amount of — well — living integrated with the enemy.

 

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IN THIS ISSUE

The rise of destructive religious fundamentalisms in today's world calls for serious explanation, and response.  Marxists addressing this subject will of course look back into Marx's own confrontation with religion, as well as the history of attitudes on the left toward religious institutions and movements.  Following upon the essay by Alexander Saxton ("Marxism, Labor and the Failed Critique of Religion," S&S, July 2006), now Norwegian political economist Jørgen Sandemose presents a powerful analysis ("Modern Eleusis: Religion and Factory"), developing Marx's insights into the connection between religion and capitalist society along the lines of three broad categories: citizenship, circulation, and production.  Identifying Protestantism (perhaps especially its Calvinist variant) as the religious form best adapted to capitalist society in its fullest development, Sandemose uses his analysis to raise questions about the role of religion in the reproduction of the capital relation (the subsumption of workers) on a global scale, linking the study of religion to ongoing inquiries into the nature and problems of the current stage of capitalist expansion, with which S&S readers will be well acquainted.

Much has been written about the content and method in Capital I, especially the early chapters on commodities, exchange and money, where the law of value is promulgated as a tool for penetrating to the core of capitalist social relations.  There is, in fact, a current revival of interest in the nature of dialectical method, as revealed in this inquiry.  Now Guido Starosta, in his "The Commodity-Form and the Dialectical Method," argues that this literature does not fully address the "phase of analysis" in Marx's presentation — which contrasts with the "phase of synthesis" — and especially the dialectical, as opposed to formal-logical, characteristics of the analytical phase.  In Starosta's view, the important development of Marx's understanding occurs in section 3 of Chapter 1, on the forms of value, where it may have been missed owing to an interpretation of this section as a mere "filling-out" of the theory's detail, rather than as a substantive contribution to the theory as such.  The determination of "privately performed abstract labor as the substance of value" is not a recondite, and long-exhausted, topic; it is, in fact, central to many continuing controversies about the nature of capitalist society and its transcendence.

Mining a different theoretical vein, Larry Ceplair, in his article "The Base and Superstructure Debate in the Hollywood Communist Party," shows once again the close connection between theory and significant political-cultural movements.  The  Hollywood branch of the CPUSA at mid-20th century was a powerful collection of creative intellectuals, constantly under attack, blacklisting and imprisonment, yet always aware of their crucial actual or potential role in shaping the way an entire country sees itself — a connection not lost on the owners of the means of production of cultural artefacts and of their dissemination.  What is the meaning of the designation "superstructural," as applied to film?  How should historical materialism inform screen writers' sense of what is possible, and what is the best course of action, when their commitment and talent resonate with deeply felt emotions and values in the movie-going public, but in an industry that is tightly and carefully controlled by the ideological lieutenants of the capitalist establishment?  Neither Ceplair nor his protagonists come up with definitive answers, but the questions, and the story of the debate around them, are of continuing interest and importance.

Finally, the brief communication by Morten Ougaard, on "The Political Economy of the 'Creative Class,'" examines once again the relation between the core concepts of political economy in the Marxist tradition, and the development of ever-new qualities of labor as the productive forces develop in late capitalism.  The best results clearly depend on avoiding twin (opposite) distortions: unmediated application of old categories, on the one hand; and nihilistic rejection of those categories, on the other.  Ougaard writes: "The political orientation of this [creative] segment of the work force should be expected to be contingent on a variety of discursive struggles and strategies."  He is concerned to show the continuing relevance of Marx's class theory to the study of this process.

At this writing (January 2008), as the Hollywood writers' strike enters its third month and is in full force, and increasingly impacting the quality of television, movies and the public debate, what emerges is the intense synergy among the contributions: Ougaard on "the creative class," Ceplair on the Hollywood writers in the CPUSA and their theoretical discussions, and political economists Sandemose and Starosta on the nature of abstraction (of the commodity, of the individual) in capitalist society.  Perhaps this is a vindication of Science & Society's transdisciplinary thrust: the synergy is neither contrived after the fact, nor planned a priori; it is objective, inherent.

D. L.

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1          A question arises: how do we view from this perspective the evolutionary socialism of Eduard Bernstein and the socialameliorative practice of German Social Democracy in the late 19th century?  In other words, what distinguishes revolutionary from reformist approaches to working-class social, educational and cultural empowerment?  Without attempting a complete answer to this question, the discussion of the concept of revolution (below) may offer some perspectives toward answers.