Canadian Dimension Interviews Michael Albert
This Fall Michael Albert went to Canada for some talks and did an interview with
the excellent Canadian Magazine, Canadian Dimension. Here is an essentially
verbatim transcript they prepared for publication in Canada.
CD: How is Z Magazine doing? Where does it stand in terms of reaching an
audience -- have you reached a plateau beyond which you can't go?
MA: Well, I think there's lots of potential, but I do think that getting larger requires
more money. Z reaches people who want to read Z, and they find it. Or it reaches a
subset of the audience that has found some other progressive thing via mailing. So,
for instance, we'll mail to The Nation's mailing list. But, we can't mail to a
non-existent mailing list. We can only operate within the rubric of people who have
become involved with some Left periodical or organization or whatever. And I think
there's a much bigger audience than that, but to reach out to any larger audience
would require an expenditure that we don't have. So in the absence of getting some
more money, it's not clear that we can get too much larger unless some horrible thing
happens, at which time everything on the Left would grow. But, one doesn't want to
hope for that ...
CD: You've proposed creating a federation of progressive magazines, distribution
outlets, and so on; an alternative media network.
MA: It certainly would be desirable if various alternative, progressive media
institutions in both the US and Canada found a way to reduce redundancy without
having to submerge their identities. This kind of solidarity sharing of resources would
be good, but it's rather hard, partly because these various institutions have to a
degree differing agendas, even though to the mainstream they may look like peas in a
pod. And another impediment is that they're just so damned strapped. It's very hard
to give time to getting together when getting together only promises returns down the
road. Well, meanwhile, you're taking away from just surviving. So it becomes
difficult. We've had good response to that proposal, although, as you might expect,
most of it was from people who want to start up, not from established institutions.
CD: What is the state of class consciousness in the US? From up here it looks as if
there has been a remarkable development in the last few years, certainly more so
than in the recent past. Is that true?
MA: Well, it depends who you're talking about. The left, that is, people who
consciously see themselves as left in some fashion or another have left class behind.
And it's pretty abysmal. You can sort of chart it this way I guess: in the United States
there's a remarkable capacity to take any good idea too far, to take good ideas and
carry them off a cliff. Coming out of the late 60s there was a critique of economism
-- the conception that sees everything in terms of economics, and that class is the
only thing that matters, and is the only way that we can understand anything else -- a
critique which I think was very healthy and good and which I was a part of. But it
went so far as to say that "race matters, and gender matters, and maybe even power
matters, but who the hell gives a shit about class?" And that really penetrated the left,
I think, and so now and for a long time, the awareness of class, among the people
who call themselves leftists, has been really down. There's a second reason for that.
The phenomenon I just described would be described by many people, but this next
one may be idiosyncratic to me. The class consciousness of the left has never been a
very healthy class consciousness. Not the class consciousness of a working person,
but the class consciousness of the self-described left. It has often been a coordinator
consciousness, a consciousness of administering the well-being of others; a
consciousness that is associated with Leninism and central planning and so on. And it
has never really been a movement whose flavour and culture was welcoming of
working people. It rather was a movement that was more like business school. So, it
isn't that hard to jettison attention to class when attention to class on the left has
never been that constructive. As for the rest of the country, there I think there is an
increased awareness of class, but too little. I mean, basically there's a war going on.
There's always a class struggle in any capitalist country, clearly, but sometimes it gets
particularly vicious. There's a war going on in the United States, in which haves are
trying to amass more at the expense of have-nots, i.e.: capital at the expense of
labour. And that's been going on now for quite some time, and it's leading to an
awareness that there's an enemy, that there's somebody out to get us, that there's
somebody out to do us harm. But the remarkable success in the US of capital has
been to translate a lot of that anger into anger at the government, which is why you
see these right wing groups, like the fascists, and the militia -- they often have a very
significant working class base. There's a real anger there, and it's a real
consciousness that the down and out are being put upon, and that more and more is
being taken away. But that anger gets directed at the government, not at
corporations. Corporations don't exist in the US. When I'm out giving talks, one
question I'm often asked is "Is there any room for hope?" And what I usually answer
is this: if you could go get Joe Hill or somebody, some organizer from 50 or 70 years
ago, and you could bring them back, and give them a week to look around, and then
ask them if there was any hope, they would say "What the fuck is WRONG with
you people? This is an organizer's DREAM! What is your problem? EVERYBODY
out there is angry. EVERYBODY out there doesn't trust authority. EVERYBODY
out there doesn't trust the rich. EVERYBODY out there wants a change.
CD: So how do you account for the current inertia?
MA: If you look from the mid-'60s to now, what has the Left been doing, in a broad
sense of the term? It seems to me that in the past thirty years what the left has been
doing is explaining how everything is broken -- explaining how and why everything
hurts -- and they've been doing that over and over and over. And when you did that
in 1962, 1963, even up to the early 1970s, you were talking to audiences who
thought everything was fine, who thought that the only reason any pain existed in
their lives was because of them; everybody else was doing fine. People didn't even
know there was poverty; there were actually books published exposing the existence
of poverty. And when the women's movement started, it was a revelation that others
suffered. And that led to an upsurge of energy, and to a desire to do something, and
there was no reason to think you couldn't succeed. Everybody had hope, and so
these big movements were born. At that time, our behavior worked. But if you do it
for thirty years, after a while you succeed -- and we have succeeded, I think.
Decades ago, people thought that doctors existed to provide health care, that
corporations were concerned with the health and well-being of consumers. People
thought that lawyers believed in justice -- this is true -- and that the government was
a benevolent institution. And as those things crashed, people got mad, and now
nobody believes any of that shit any more. There is a very different consciousness
now. Nobody thinks that doctors are out for anything but money, or that lawyers
give a damn about justice, and nobody thinks that the executive of a corporation is
concerned with our well-being.
CD: So there's a kind of nihilism.
MA: And it's as much our fault -- on the left -- as anyone's. After years of saying
what's wrong, what do we say about vision, what about strategy? Nothing. Not a
thing, just hour after hour, month after month, year after year, of "Here's how bad it
is, and here's how strong they are." I don't even think there are many Leftists around
who think we can win. There are a lot of people who want to fight the good fight,
who want to be on the right side, but I don't know many who actually think we can
win anything. Well, what is that? After a while, you might as well go to the beach.
Internally, there's a pessimism -- so while class consciousness may go up, the belief
that you can actually accomplish anything is very low.
CD: Is it not also true that there has been an incredible blitz from the right, an
orchestrated campaign?
MA: Sure, and it has some effect. It doesn't convince you that the fact that you can't
afford to live well is pleasant -- they don't bother trying to convince people in
poverty that their poverty is pleasant -- but what it can do is make you feel that it's
your fault, it can make you feel that you're inadequate because you suffer. If you're
going to make a revolution in China, when they had a revolution, you don't have to
convince people that starving is painful -- they know that. What you have to do is
convince people is that you can deliver rice, and some dignity. What are you going
to have to do to make a revolution in North America? It's going to take more than
the promise of rice and dignity. You have to convince people that: you can fight city
hall, and win; and that if you do win, you'll establish something better, and not just
replace the old boss with a new boss. And the left has done almost nothing on either
of those two fronts. We've done something in terms of fighting, and we've won some
fights, although we have a remarkable capacity to snatch defeat from the jaws of
victory.
CD: That's always been one of the complaints about Chomsky, for example, that he
has fantastic analysis, and nothing positive.
MA: Well, he says "This is what I do, and I do it well, and I don't do the other well."
Which is fine -- especially in his case, because he does it so well that it has a
tremendous effect on people -- except that nobody does the other. Very few people
are providing future vision. And think about why: if you have to choose between
writing something about vision and strategy, and writing about how everything is
wrong, it's not hard to figure out which of those things is most likely to leave you
looking stupid. It's very hard for us at Z to find any submissions that are at all
visionary.
CD: But are you talking about these issues on the collective?
MA: At Z there are only three of us, but at, say, South End Press, there's no time.
You probably have the same experience at Canadian Dimension -- you do the thing,
and then how much time is there left to actually talk about politics? South End,
however, actually embodies some radical principles in its structure, which is based
on the principles that me and this other fellow, Robin Hahnel, developed. So you
could look at the response to that. Really, it's a sad situation we're in now, as radical
economists. URPE, the Union of Radical Political Economists in the United States is
now largely pro-market. I think that's pathetic. Really pathetic, in the sense that two
or three decades ago almost all radical economists would have been market
abolitionists. Now they're not, and there's no explanation, no reasons given for why
all their analysis was wrong. They don't do that because they can't do that, because
all of their analysis was right. So why are people now pro-market? Because if you
say you are against markets, you are branded a lunatic in the academy. So you don't
say that. And after a while, you can't believe differently.
CD: So what do you say, Michael?
MA: I'm a market abolitionist. I don't have any problem saying that.
CD: You just mentioned one economic vision -- participatory economics, developed
by you and Robin Hahnel. Can you tell us what that is?
MA: A friend and I, Robin Hahnel, have tried to argue in favour of a kind of
economy that we think would really fulfill what nearly every leftist says when they're
asked what values they'd like to see in an economy. It's a system that emphasis these
values: solidarity; diversity; equity -- meaning not just material conditions, but also
circumstances, so you don't have some people working fulfilling, empowering jobs,
and others working bad ones; and self management, which means you have a system
of decision making, a system of allocation that guarantees that each person can
influence decisions to the degree that they're affected by them. And we've developed
a rather comprehensive model of this participatory economy, as well as critiques of
other alternate economies that have been put forward. And the only ones that have
been put forward, in a substantial fashion, are what's called market socialism, as in
Yugoslavia, and what's called centrally planned socialism. At least, you can call them
that, but if you do you can't say that socialism means workers in control, because in
those kinds of economies workers weren't in control of anything. Instead, a class of
people -- an economically defined group -- that you can call managerial class, or
coordinator class, have access to decision making power not by virtue of owning a
deed to property, but by having a monopoly on skills and decision making -- and
they run the show. That's not the kind of an economy that I want, but it is the kind of
economy that a lot of people on the left have historically wanted, largely I think
because it reflects their class interests. I am not a Marxist, but lots of ideas in
Marxism are very powerful, and one of them is to try to understand how political
positions are derived from the economic interests of groups that hold those positions.
Intellectuals are a part of this coordinator class, and they also are in charge, in a lot
of ways, of much of the discussion on the left.
CD: To return to this notion of class consciousness, one of the things you said is that
working people direct their anger toward the coordinator class, yet that's where they
most want to go. That must be increadibly insidious.
MA: It is. To me it's one of the saddest and one of the most indicative things about
capitalism. A working class family -- and anyone who is part of a working class
family knows this from experience -- does have tremendous class consciousness of a
certain kind. It's centered around people in their lives who have power over them.
Most working people in North America have not only never encountered a
capitalist, they've never even seen one, or even been in the vicinity of one, except
maybe unknowingly. No interaction with them whatever. Yet on a fairly regular basis
they have interactions with this other group of people I'm talking about: doctors,
lawyers, academics. People who define the character of their lives, and who have a
relative monopoly on decision making power and on information, and who see
themselves as superior.
And working people describe to you their reaction to the coordinator class in the
same terms that women talk about men, or blacks in my country talk about whites,
at least when they are talking about their anger. They'll say that this group of people
thinks that they're stupid, and sees them as inferior, and just assumes as a matter of
course, that they will get more, etc. So when the Right comes along and wants to
drum up anti-liberal bias, what do they do? They identify liberalism with intellectual
elites. And it works like crazy. So much anti-communist sentiment in the US was, I
think, a healthy reaction by working people to a shitty system. What was called
communism in the United States was, for working people, their worst nightmare: it
was the lawyer or the academic becoming the government and the administrator of
the economy. If the Left can't address these feelings and concerns of working
people, then how can the Left possibly organize working people? How can the Left
be a working class Left in the way it's a feminist or an anti-racist Left, if it isn't even
aware of these feelings of working class people? And then the point that you made
-- working class people spend their lives wanting their kids to become that. They
spend every day working to make their kids become what they hate most. And
that's very sad.
CD: So how does the Left develop a working class movement?
MA: The left understands that you can't form a movement organization, or a
movement institution, and institute inside it patriarchy. Now we don't know exactly
how to do that yet, but certainly nobody consciously wants it there. Nobody would
celebrate it, much less set it up deliberately. Nor would we set up apartheid inside
our organizations -- if a Left organization consciously did that, everybody would be
nauseated. Now look at class: institution after institution on the left has job
structures, financial arrangements, even distribution of income that are barely
distinguishable from what exists in the society at large. Few of the funding
mechanisms of Left organizations are as progressive as the income tax. There is no
awareness that replicating class hierarchies is even an issue. Why is that? I think it's
because most people on the left don't believe in racism, don't believe in sexism, but
they do believe in intellectuals running the show. And in only a few people getting to
be intellectuals. "Intellectuals" here meaning "coordinator class."
This has to do with why I don't call myself a Marxist. I call myself a feminist because
I think that feminism a a way of thought, a framework, an attempt to deal with
reality, that's trying to understand gender, sexuality, and kinship relations, and to do
so from the perspective of people who are oppressed by those things. I would call
myself in some senses nationalist, or intercommunalist, because I think that's a
framework that's trying to understand race relations from the perspective of groups
who are dominated. I would also call myself -- in some sense -- an anarchist, and
there for political reasons. And I critique all of those things because they aren't
finished being developed yet, and they are all myopic, in some ways, in that they
point to the importance of the one thing they're interested in, and try to understand
everything in terms of, say, gender or race only, and I think that's wrong. Now when
you get to Marxism, I have the same critique -- a criticism of its economism. Of its
over-exaggeration or over-emphasis of the economy. But I also have another
critique, which is that I don't think Marxism looks at the economy from the point of
view of the workers, from the point of view of the worst off. One part of Marxism I
really like is the idea of taking an ideology and examining it to see whose interests it
serves. When good Marxists do that with bourgeois economics, they look at the
body of thought, and they recognize that neo classical economics isn't all wrong: it
examines the world, but its world view leaves some stuff out, and the reason it leaves
stuff out is to serve a certain ideological interest. It just rationalizes the economy we
have; nobody uses neo-classical economics to run their business. Now suppose you
use the same criteria to look at Marxism. You can pile up all the books on Marxism
on the planet, and I defy you to find -- with very, very rare exceptions -- a vision of
what they want for the economy that doesn't serve the interests of the coordinator
class. There's never been a Marxist party, much less Marxists in power, who have
ever proposed anything for the economy that was not in the interest of a new ruling
class as opposed to workers. A Marxist would look at that and say, "That tells us
something."
CD: How useful is Marxist analysis?
MA: For some things it's very useful. Some of Marxism's critique of capitalism is
very powerful in many respects. But here's an example of one way it doesn't work.
One time I was trying to raise money from this guy I knew who was loaded, and he
owned, among other things, a film production studio. And I asked him why
everything is so goddamn slow, why everything takes so long to get done. And he
described how the screenplay is sent in, and he can't deal with it all, so he hires these
people who are kind of like vice presidents, and what they do is go out and make
power for themselves. They have an interest in creating a situation in which they are
indespensible, and therefore have power. They're the coordinator class, and he says
he can't control them. In the same way, the capitalist needs mangers because he
can't administer everything first hand. Well, Marxism doesn't have much to say about
any of this shit. Why? Because there's a hole. The coordinator class is missing. The
class that benefits most from Marxist theory is absent from the theory. So, I'm not
Marxist because I'm socialist. That's the strange thing.
CD: Not that strange; there were socialists before Marx.
MA: True. But there were people who accurately predicted what would happen,
that Marxism wouldn't lead to dictatorship of the proletariet, but of a bunch of
intellectuals. And athey were right. So why didn't Marx recognize that, even though
the ideas were in the air at that time? Could be because he was just wrong. Or it
could be that even though he was a good person, maybe -- as he might say himself
-- his ability to perceive the world around him was hindered by his own
circumstances.
CD: I think you tend to read him back through Stalin and Lenin. Though someone
like Mezaros reads him instead through Luxemburg.
MA: Here's why I almost never want to say anything about Marx -- I always talk
about Marxism. One's a history of thought question, but the other's a political
question.
CD: There is a serious reconsideration of Marx going on.
MA: But don't you find something strange about that? Imagine reconsidering Louis
Pasteur, or reconsidering Einstein. Why would we have to do that? The textbook
gets it right -- a science textbook doesn't have Einstein's theories different than
Einstein did.
CD: Social theory is a bit different than scientific theory.
MA: Yeah, it's gobbledygook. Joan Robinson, the English economist, has this great
exchange. She has one passage in "Why I'm not a Marxist," in which she says, If I'm
at lunch with somebody who asks me a question about the way capitalism works, I'll
take out a napkin and a pencil and try to figure out the answer, and I might figure it
out or I might not. But if you do the same thing with a Marxist, they'll take out a
volume of Capital, and turn to some page in it and try to find the answer. She says
that's absurd. And she's right.
(
geocities.com/capitolhill)