THE NEED TO BE TRULY RADICAL
We are accustomed to describing SCIENCE & SOCIETY as the "longest continuously published journal of Marxist scholarship in the world." While past accomplishments necessarily take a back seat to current ones, and to plans for the future, longevity and continuity are sources of pride, and perspective. All the more necessary, therefore, to report that our longevity claim has been challenged!
In the April 2000 issue of The People, organ of the Socialist Labor Party, Acting Editor Robert Bills has an Open Letter in response to an S&S promotion letter that characterized S&S as the "oldest American Marxist journal." Bills quite correctly points out that The People, which has been issued variously as a daily, weekly and monthly, appeared first on April 5, 1891, setting its age at 109 years and giving it a 45-year head start over SCIENCE & SOCIETY. The Open Letter refers, with a hyperbole characteristic of its provenance, to the need for "justice to the thousands of workers who have fought, sacrificed and suffered, sometimes at great personal loss to themselves and their families, for socialism, for the Socialist Labor Party and for its official journal," etc.
Now I am sure I can speak for the entire S&S community in offering full credit, and justice, to anyone who has been in the struggle for socialism, however that struggle and its objective are conceived. I must, however, point out that the S&S claim to priority (stated somewhat vaguely in the promotion letter, it must be said) is narrower than the SLP Open Letter interprets it to be, and that both The People's priority and ours can therefore be sustained. We claim only to be the longest continuously published -- in a uniform format and schedule -- journal of Marxist scholarship. "Scholarship" here is not an invidious designation; it simply refers to the emphasis on first-order, documented studies in history and theory. In particular, no derogatory implications for journalism are intended. In the realm of Marxist journalism, The People may well have priority, although there are other Marxist publications -- Pravda comes to mind, a comparison that the SLP stalwarts will not relish -- that long predate S&S. In any case, we renew our claim to be the oldest continuous journal of Marxist scholarship -- in the world, be it noted, and not just in "America" (whether that term was intended to mean the Western hemisphere or just the United States).
In passing, I note that Robert Bills' Open Letter presents The People as a Marxist publication, although the only authority cited in it is Daniel De Leon, and no one else who has written or worked in the Marxist tradition, including Marx himself, is mentioned. I insist -- despite the skepticism of some of my editorial colleagues -- on defining a "Marxist" as anyone who sincerely believes himself or herself to be such, and in this sense The People is certainly an exemplar of Marxist journalism. The question whether this enterprise is being carried out well or poorly is, in my view, an entirely separate one. Bills' Open Letter takes us to task for other language in our promotion letter, in which we call for "reinvigorating Marxist theory and research," "assimilating current results from mainstream social science," and "reexamining the classical literatures of revolutionary social thought from a contemporary perspective." This language is subjected to predictable badinage from Bills, who asserts simply that "Marxism is social science" (additional emphasis on "is" clearly intended here) and warns us that assimilating results from the mainstream has no point, "unless it is to be absorbed by them." Unwilling to face even the slightest hint of that horrible prospect, The People stands as a monument to a static, reified, petrified doctrine that has not changed in 109 years. By my definition, of course, this is Marxism, but it is not a Marxism worthy of the great achievements, and promise, of revolutionary working-class movements around the world. We will let our own 64-year history, as well as our current practice, serve as our entry in the continuing debate about what Marxism is, and should be.
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The term "radical" is subjected to a singular level of abuse in the popular media and in academia; it is used to invoke visions of wild-eyed violence and fanaticism, and to conjure up fears of grave disaster should anyone be tempted to meddle with existing social realities. The status quo, by contrast, is a curious blend of stability and instability: it is presented as an immutable, beyond-ideology inevitability, as in "TINA," "There Is No Alternative" (see "Editorial Perspectives," Winter 1999-2000), but it also appears as a knife-edge, a perilous perch above an abyss that would swallow us up should we tamper with it. "Radicalism," then, is presented as a fatally consequential and irreversible leap into the unknown.
There is no need to recall for S&S readers that "radical" simply means "going to the root" of things. I want to suggest something further: reaching for radical perspectives on current problems may be increasingly necessary if we are ever going to transcend the limitations and "dilemmas" imposed by the restricted social horizons of "practical" politics. In other words, radicalism is more and more the means to identify and clarify meaningful possibilities in the present.
This claim clearly requires illustration, and I choose three examples out of numerous possibilities.
The first of these concerns the hot topic of international trade policy. The debate in the councils of the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund and World Economic Forum, sharpened greatly by the massive popular protests in Seattle, Washington and Melbourne, seems to be confined to a tradeoff between protection of labor and the environment, in one direction, and promotion of international commerce and division of labor, in the other. With existing social relations firmly in place, fighters for workplace safety and dignity, for protection of health and living standards of workers, and against destruction of the environment are cast in the role of enemies of "globalization," trade and international relations -- in a word, of "progress." The choice appears to be between autarchy and insularity, on one side; and "inevitable" globalization with its attendant despoliations of human life, on the other.
The radical perspective, however, starts from an old insight: capitalist property relations as such deprive the majority of people of freedom to trade, and therefore prevent them from participating in free trade, by excluding them from ownership of the means of trade, i.e., goods and the means to produce goods. Even with the minimum of governmental, or supragovernmental, interference -- indeed, especially under those conditions -- for the great majority there is no free trade. World trade cannot be free, in any meaningful sense, until the world's people can participate in it. (Selling one's labor power to the highest bidder, mass migrations and guest worker status do not meet the requirements of "participation" for this purpose.)
Given that the labor process is now and increasingly social and indivisible, this participation cannot be atomistic (carried out by isolated individuals); it must therefore be democratic. But democratic prerogatives cannot coexist with those of accumulated private property. In short, the question is not how "free" trade should be, but rather: free trade for whom? We have to deal not with freedom vs. unfreedom, but with mutually incompatible freedoms. Freedom of transnational corporations to move goods and capital "freely" (in unrestricted fashion) around the world in search of maximum profit is not the same thing as the freedom of the world's people to work out among themselves the best forms of international division of labor. Without trying to set out details here, I think we can imagine that a democratic -- socialist -- approach to world trade will eventually produce more complete international cooperation and specialization than anything likely to emerge from capitalist firms and their world representative bodies.
The point is not that we are ready now to mount a decisive challenge to the power of either national or transnational capital. It is rather that thinking from the larger, radical, perspective opens up space for creative policy interventions, and challenges the hold of neoliberal ideology over the minds of many who are seeking firmer footing in their opposition to the blatantly anti-popular institutions and policies of the hegemonic trade organizations.
A second example may be found in the area of bilingual education. In many parts of the United States, the public schools enroll many children from families where the spoken language is not English. Again, from the limited perspective of educational policy within conventional social parameters, a split arises between supporters of what has come to be called "bilingual education" -- who advocate instruction in the home language of children from non-English-speaking families -- and opponents -- who propose to mainstream such children and move them rapidly into English. The goals, variously held, are to advance the educational level and social prospects of such children most rapidly, and to protect their cultural identity and the unity between home and school cultures as the basis for their psychological well-being and sense of empowerment (thought, rightly, to be decisive for educational progress).
In the segregating and ranking environment of the present educational system, however, "bilingual" classes have often become the opposite of what the term implies: monolingual classes, taught in the "second" language. Children are identified and stigmatized as "bilingual children." The bilingual system then becomes a ghetto, and an impediment to children's self-image and development. On the other hand, immersing these children in "English-only" classes causes a rift between home and school, and a denial of culture and identity.
Once again, however, the tradeoff between evils results from insufficiently radical imagination. Genuinely bilingual education would run in both directions: from English to Spanish as well as from Spanish to English (here I take a situation in which there are two language communities, with a significant minority of home Spanish speakers, as case in point). In this proposal, all students receive bilingual education, with both home English speakers and home Spanish speakers learning both English and Spanish, and eventually being taught other subjects as well in both languages. Both groups of children acquire fluency in two languages; both acquire respect for the language and culture of the other; both see links between home and school, home and wider culture; neither is placed in a culturally superior or inferior position. Children from the minority linguistic background are neither repressed, nor stigmatized.
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