The Second as Farce

[alcibiades_mystery]

People make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a mountain on the brains of the living.(1)

It was spring 1998, and the war drums were beating. You may remember. President Clinton sent a few luminaries - including Secretary Albright - out to Ohio somewhere to put on a townhall, presumably to sell a step-up of aggressive action against Iraq. They were shouted down in the hall. At about that same time, the President himself came out to San Francisco, where I was living at the time, for what purpose I can't remember. We met him in force, filling Huntington Park, lining California and Sacramento streets, kept from Mason by a tight cordon of police: end the sanctions; stop US aggression against Iraq. Those were some years. This I remember: I never expected or even really wanted the approval of the Democratic president. We were leftists and activists; we put our bodies on the line against global capital; Seattle was the culmination of years of little Seattles - the arrest records and moderate immunity to tear gas we carry to this day attest to it. And we knew full well that the US government was an arm of global capital. About that, at least, we had no illusions. The bombing, in any case, was shelved...until December of that year, anyway.

As a lyric from one of my favorite bands goes, "Oh my God, it was a million years ago."

I've been greeted with so many accusations of centrism here that it may surprise some to hear that I am a Marxist. I make no apologies for it. Marx was correct in most of his analyses of the then emerging industrial capitalism, and in his critiques of then existing discourse of political economy. But his greater contribution was to say something like this: you can only be a Marxist by not being a Marxist. You have to do your own analysis, of your own historical occasion, and that analysis must begin with material conditions (Let's start with this simple item, the commodity...), what people actually do, how they relate to each other and things, actions, and the circumstances not of their making.

Now, the curious thing about being a Marxist is that you don't really expect your understanding of things to enter into the discourse of government or policy in any concrete way. Perhaps it's defeatist or comforting to take a long view. I won't bother psychoanalyzing it. But if I might analogize, it would be something like this: capitalism (and there have been at least three mutations of this "thing" called capitalism since Marx died) is, for lack of a better comparative, a cancer. And we all, of course, hope for a cure for cancer, and some of us work on finding such cures, or improving the means we have of combating it. But we know that when we walk for breast cancer research that breast cancer won't be cured at the finish line. Maybe this is what some people call "incrementalism." I call it attention to material conditions. Chip here, chip there. Help the ones you can help; make others at least comfortable. Do no harm. Get the best you can out of a bad situation, with a view toward changing it, but necessarily a long view. And it's a long view not because you want it to be, but because these material things, these cells keep making themselves, the problems they present are complex and when you solve one, three others crop up. It's a long view because the material makes it so. You do not get to make history just as you please.

Never trust anyone over thirty, I guess, for that reason. Twenty-five, soaked bandana over my face, pro bono lawyer's phone number inked on my arm. And a smile on my face; I remember that too. Stand or sit: here comes the kick. Oh my God, it was a million years ago. But the one thing that hasn't changed all that much is my estimation of the capacity of the US government: I didn't then and I don't now give one damn what the US government thinks of me or of the work that needs to be done. That work cannot be accomplished by this kind of government. But here's the important point: that doesn't mean that the government can't accomplish some things. Chemotherapy can't eradicate cancer, but it can eradicate particular cancers affecting actual people. It is also awful. In all those years, and the years since, I'm not convinced that I ever met one leftist - in person, a real activist, in the neighborhoods, in the factories - I'm not sure I ever met one who cared in the least bit what the press secretary of the president of these United States thought about him or her.

Obama is both right and wrong about this: "You have to make me do it." He's right to the extent that pressure is necessary for those things that this kind of government can do, and I applaud those here who understand that. He's wrong to the extent that it still assumes that social change is necessarily mediated by capitalist government. It is not. Get into the neighborhoods and factories and offices. Invent something else. Critical thought - and Marx was quite right about this as well - can't be just about critique. It has to be about production. So produce something.


(1) Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte