I’m not sure, but hopefully Angela will write more about. She wrote a post about this topic, starting with a letter from Marx to Ruge.
I’d like to hear more about the idea. I’m not completely sure I follow, but I think it’s an interesting concept. The first three times I was out of the US I was terribly embarassed, at pains to not be identified w/ “my” government’s actions and many of the aspects I don’t like about some of the culture here. It was very much along the lines of the feelings I had at the same time regarding romantic relationships, being a hetero guy who was kind of a Dworkinite feminist, all of which made for some very complicated interactions with people. I’m not as neurotic about all of it now, being older and all and not as compelled by any of those stories. I also like that my US workplaces had a lot more different skin tones than the ones when I was in Scotland. I think that’s pretty cool, and something that was useful for me in moving away from a self-lacerating leftist puritanism that found anti-americanism eminently useful for producing masochistic kicks and little else (other than alienating family and friends who then for years wouldn’t take any of my more important points seriously).
Thiago argues against Angela (in a discussion at the archive that’s inclused in the page linked to above in the word “post”. Thiago is also deleting his blog in a month, which is unfortunate). He seems to be asserting the responsibilities of those of us in advanced so-called democracies. I fail to see what the claim does beyond mobilize a probably toothless moral force.
I’ve not been to or read much of anything about Basra, Saudi Arabia or Haiti so I can’t comment on what people are doing there, and I won’t try the whole “you can’t measure misery” line. I can say that it’s really hard and getting harder to get by for a lot of people in the midwestern United States, and that there are almost no channels whatsoever available to many people by which they can feel like they’re having any impact on the actions of their employers, let alone the government. That’s partly a self-delusion, but only partly. It’s also partly what the balance of forces is here right now.
I’m not sure what’s accomplished by the finger-pointing at privileged sectors etc, unless you’ve got a specific plan and program within which that finger-pointing is useful. One does what one can when and where one can, and if in some places people find it useful to decry what is perceived as the irresponsible inaction of the lucky denizens of the global hegemon, then they should by all means carry on. I’m not convinced that that at all helps decrease that hegemon’s dominance, though. But then, I’m not real compelled by the concept of responsibility except linked to specific relationships with people whose names and faces I’m familiar with (and who are thus also capable of acting back on me with negative consequences).
Nate, that was definitely written as a note for later. So, for sure planning to work it up into something longer - which might be a while.
But, now, I’m fascinated with your Dworkin period. It’s interesting the paths that people take to get where they are.
Comment by s0metim3s — November 3, 2005 @ 4:51 am
That’s a story that could take ages to tell Angela!
As briefly as I can… Among other factors, I had a violent childhood. When I went to university I got very involved in Take Back The Night and involved, though less so, in GLBT stuff on campus. I also started reading Dworkin type stuff, primarily through Propagandhi, an anarchist band I used to completely head over heels for. It made sense at the time, and was thoroughly of a piece with the type of marxism I was invested in (around this same time I was being recruited by the PLP, which I never joined but I was involved to some degree for about 12 or 18 months). It was all very despairing and objectivist - we’re doomed etc - with no place to stand where one can act without being a prior compromised. It was quite suffocating.
The anti- gender violence stuff was tremendously important to me, and was a lot of broke me out of the dumber aspects of the marxisms I cycled through, though I still had a similarly static/objectivist and powerless view of gender and power.
At one point I thought I wanted to be a social worker - I spent a year as a student working part time as a peer counselor for sexual assault survivors and as peer educator around various issues to do with sex and gender. Over the course of that I realized I didn’t have the temperment to be the frontline contact with people who’ve been terribly hurt. I found that encounter really traumatic, as does everyone in that situation of course, and I never really developed the skills of putting it down to walk away. I found the peer educating bits really exciting though, in my head I posed it as something like disaster prevention instead of disaster relief, the former being a role I could usefully and livably play. That shaped my attempts to find work in NGOs etc, and has been something I come back to now and again in thinking about and doing different things.
When I got out of university in 2000 I stumbled across Harry Cleaver’s book and that was the first time I was able to read Marx(ism) differently than the bad readings, and started to be able to integrate some of the different disparate threads of my experiences and ideas. At that same time I as I was starting to read more of the stuff I’m into now I was also working in different places, where my ‘analysis’ of the world just didn’t fit a lot of the time.
Since that time I’ve not really thought as much about the Dworkin stuff etc. I used to be quite taken with it. It’s lost a lot its hold at this point, partly because I’m older and more tired - I only have so much energy with which to feel outraged.
At some point I’d like to go back and re-read that stuff, though first there’s a lot more stuff I’d like to read and think about regarding sex and gender and politics, to see what I think about different things. I’m also quite interested, though I’ve not had the time to spend on it, on organizing by workers in the sex industries.
One of the things that moved me away from what I used to think is that I used to concede too much to the view of people as being objects, victims, rather than capable of power and action, and that sentiment has been pretty definitively wrecked by what I’ve read and also by organizing experiences I’ve had (and rethinking past organizing experiences in the present light). I’m particularly interested in sex and gender, but generally any time a group who doesn’t have the authority to act for themselves (like say unions of child workers) organizes themselves I think that’s tremendously interesting - as is the (non)response by ostensibly radical folks who want to ’speak for the voiceless’. My general feeling is that the world is much more complicated - and a lot less hopeless - than I used to think, and there’s more room now in my head to think about and be open different prospects for or experiments in self making. At the same time I think the general targets I was trying (crudely, and badly) to have a go at still mostly deserve lining up against walls.
Comment by Nate — November 3, 2005 @ 3:36 pm
Well, is moral force toothless? Slavery was stopped partly because of the moral outrage of those in the slave societies - slave rebellions played a relatively minor part overall, sadly, it was possible for slaver society to contain these. Sometimes, it is the oppressors who can stop oppressing - there seems to me to be something altogether obvious about that. If they benefit materially from oppression, and they stop, that’s because of other interets - and moral force has historically been one of these. It takes a certain courage to accept that you have the boot on somoene’s neck. That’s the first step to lifting the foot - although in our society, acknowledging these things often becomes a means to distract onlookers while you crush harder.
As for ‘national shame’ - the problem with this is that it is entirely unclear what it means. If people feel horrible about being subjected to the nation-state form, feel apalled by what is done in their name, and then go and do something about it, then maybe in one sense this reproduces the ‘affective geography’ of nation, but in another, it is still an improvement. The task of social change is partly to do things like this, which are piecemeal and problematic, and not allow them to become an excuse for complancency and further repression, I think. I think that in an actually-existing electoral democracy, there is a strong chance that civil disobedience and electoral work can force governments to restrain themselves: because of this we have a certain responsibility. We can’t abdicate that, even if we want to fight for a world in which solidarity doesn’t mean participation in swindles and the state.
Maybe I feel this way because my family was actually involved in the dictatorship, I don’t know. My grandfather, for example, was the military attache in Washington, he did considerable harm, though he was also a lovely man, a progressive. I feel like rich people such as my family, powerful people, have an unusual degree of reponsibility for the ruin of Brazil, though not for the ruin of El Salvador or Poland: ie. the nation form is imposed on my guilt. If I just reject this, pretend it doesn’t exist, that we have no responsibility, that won’t be courageous, it will be farcical. Actually, it would be considerably worse than that, it would be perpetuating structures of oppression. It would also be that if I took this responsibility and crafted a new way of justifying my privilege, say by pretending that acknowledging having been bad buys especial moral force and entitles us to continue running the joint - what many Brazilian elites, or South African elites, did. But as I said, maybe I am as a matter of fact closer to the dragon than most people.
Comment by Ghost of the Machine — November 11, 2005 @ 5:32 am
hi Thiago,
You’re dead right on moral force - no, it’s not always or a priori toothless.
Beyond that, I’m not real sure what to say. I’m not sure what to do with categories and feelings like guilt. I think I’d want to ask moral force (guilt) linked to what? That’s the same question I’d want to ask about pleasure, desire, love, and other terms that come up sometimes as having one political content (including my own ascribing of a lack of content to moral force in this post, which I appreciate you pointing out). If it’s a guilt connected to organizing projects, then great - as long as I like the projects. If it’s guilt that’s self-lacerating, then not so much. I remember something I read once by Howard Zinn, about a talk he gave on the Holocaust. He was saying that remembering the Holocaust ought to mean caring about and intervening in genocides elsewhere, similar circumstances. Some people got offended, saying “there are no similar circumstances!”. Zinn linked this partially to zionism (I think), but I took his main point to be about something like what I’m trying to say, about projects and organization - memory should be part of other projects beyond only mourning, and so forth.
More specifically, with regard to responsibilities of people in advanced democracies, I probably take that a little more personally than I should and than I admit. I hear that remark to apply across the board and with a relatively equally apportioning of the moral burden to all residents, and that doesn’t sit well. And, I’m not convinced that there are many channels for meaningful access to the representative democracy that does exist here, activity around those fronts strike me as an exercise in futility (especially compared with something that doesn’t engage with the government here, say, trying to raise money to send to places and cool projects that need it). To be clear, this is less of an anti-engagement with the state idea, though I do think that, than my impression of what the state is like here. Also - and I suspect this won’t satisfy you because as you noted it’s perhaps not a matter of ideas and arguments for you, which I can respect - I think the implied calculus of guilt and morality can’t be rendered consistent. In some sense, everyone alive and capable of acting when an atrocity occurs is guilty of not stopping it (one can quibble over who is capable, and what degrees of capability may exist) - I could sell everything I own and send it to somewhere/someone who will die without it, and I could devote my time 24/7 to some important cause. But I don’t, and won’t. I’d probably be willing to go along to say that that’s a moral failing, but that a very widely shared one (even if we could distribute the failing based on certain mitigating factors, like being a child, being in prison, etc, it seems that we would still have to end up with nearly everyone being in a situation where they could and should do more or at least try to). I’m not sure what would come of this, beyond being really unhappy, as it seems likely that one sets oneself up for failure if that moral move is universalized. Which, I realize, is not what you’re suggesting, but it does raise questions about the move (at least for me).
All that aside, I think I share what I take to be your view that increments can still be very meaningful - we may reproduce things we hate, but perhaps things are a little better in that process (since it’s not like there seems to be an immediate alternative) - and that this doesn’t mean we can’t still hold on to and try to work for someday not needing the incremental changes anymore.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — November 11, 2005 @ 5:55 am
I understand what you are saying. I don’t think we should martirize ourselves. I really don’t know what the situation is in the US - I have heard horror stories - but in Australia, it is actually feasible to avoid the labor force and work 24/7 on activism. You would be poor, and it would hurt a lot, but you would not die. That’s important; it’s one of the reasons I think reformist crap reforms like better unemployment benefits actually matter a lot. A lot of people get to write because of them, and bands also.
I don’t think we should guilt trip each other for not sacrificing a lot. For one thing, you want to make sacrifices that are actually meaningful if you’re going to make them at all - ie. which would actually benefit someone, and I don’t know many such sacrifices that could be made. However, people in Brazil, in P.NG and I am sure also in other countries I don’t have personal experience in, are simply unable to sacrifice anything. They’re pressed against the wall. Often the level of repression they can expect is awesome; you know, the banlieues are bad, but I look at that from a Rio de Janeiro or Port Moresby perspective, and those people actually look fortunate. I know this is a daggy sermon, but there is awesome suffering in the world, and it just becomes kind of obscene to talk about the things we would sacrifice when for people to eke out an existance they have to risk death. I don’t want to be misunderstood. I am a very privileged person. In Brazil, my family is relatively rich, powerful and well connected, in Australia I have played the academic game well enough to acquire certain privileges. I speak for myself, and for people in a similar situation to me.
Is it a moral failing not to go headlong into a cause that might actually help some people. It is very hard to say, really. If you do x instead of y, and as a result of not doing y people suffer, you must have a good reason for doing x. But we’re not perfect, moral saints; that doesn’t stop something being a failing. This is a fact that make me feel I should be far humbler.
Comment by Ghost of the Machine — November 11, 2005 @ 8:32 am