Event Recap
The second session of the Flying Seminar presented the opportunity for a comparative historical dialogue about key issues of radical political engagement. Adam Michnik, a leading Polish dissident intellectual of Communist Poland and founding editor of Poland’s major newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, and Occupy Wall Street activists compared notes. There was much that separated Michnik from the Occupiers, which gave the discussion its critical edge. But there was also much that connected them: a commitment to democracy and experimentation, a critical attitude concerning political elites disconnected from society, an understanding of the importance of creative social action.
Capitalism separated Michnik from the occupiers. They often invoked the term to summarize what they were against. This was also clear and shared at our last meeting between OWS and Shiroto no Ran. Michnik was quiet on this issue. Capitalism is a normal economic situation, what the previously existing socialist system was not.
There was also a difference in the assessment of utopia. Michnik spelled out three characteristics of Poland’s self limiting revolution. It was against violence. It was anti-utopian when it came to political ends. And it was geopolitically realistic, aware of where Poland is on the map. (Here he was referring to Poland’s proximity to Moscow and what then seemed in 1980 to be the solidity, overwhelming power and steadfastness of the Soviet Union.) The tension between taking up political activity versus remaining “splendidly isolated” from mainstream politics dominated the meeting, evolving in different directions – both pragmatic and philosophical ones.
Against his realism (he is the author of a brilliant essay “Grey is Beautiful”), an OWS activists asserted that being against utopia means accepting the unacceptable, rejecting the need for fundamental change. The struggle for imagination against realism, for achieving desirable change without new forms of tyranny provided a fertile field for discussion, with broad agreement.
Michnik recalled how the older generation was sure that the protests in Poland in 1968 and of the seventies lacked clear political goals and, therefore, was doomed to failure. But he and his fellow students and activists persisted. He told an interesting story about the rejection of a self appointed leader in a tram workers strike that occurred weeks before the emergence of Solidarity in August, 1980. He clearly admired the imagination and energy of the OWS activists and identified their struggle against a political leadership that is unaware of the condition of the vast majority of the population, the 99%, with his and his fellow Poles struggles leading to great transformations of 1989.
The OWS activists perceived an eloquent and brave comrade, who put his body on the line. He comes from a different world, but their commitment to the notion that people should rule and their experiments in defending ways that can be achieved, was also his commitment.
You can view the discussion in its entirety here. The dialogue was packed with moving and illuminating observations and insights. We will publish a selection in a post or two in the coming days. I also hope we continue the discussion here at Deliberately Considered.
It’s a shame that Michnik, being so caught up in what the Stalinists in Poland were telling people what their society was, i.e., “communist”, didn’t realize that it was just another form of capitalism! It really is time that we understand capital for what it truly is–a totality in the Hegelian sense of the word, which underscores how as members of a certain class socially-reproduce not just ourselves, but at the same time, the very society under which we live. If we continue to abide by a surface-level understanding of science or social phenomena, we’ll have a hard time to uncover the tendencies and laws of motion which operates beneath all of the media and popular catch-phrases. More importantly, if we are to advance into a world where democracy is practiced at the economic level, then we’ll indeed need to take notes from movements of the past, but at the same time, disregard other aspects. In such a spirit did Karl Marx write in the 18th Brumaire that it was time to “Let the dead bury the dead”. It seems to me that the Occupiers have a much more sophisticated understanding of what capitalism is, and hopefully it will continue to do so as their very existence attests to the start of a possibly newer way of living, stinking in the nostrils of ossified, institutional bourgeois democracy.
Joe, in fact Michnik didn’t say much about capitalism at the seminar. It was a time for mutual learning, and both he and the other seminar participants knew that there were different positions around the table on the question of capitalism.
Mine, for instance, I am not so sure that there is desirable alternative to capitalism. 20th century socialist experiments from the Soviet Union to Tanzania, from Cuba to China, all ended in failure. I rather think there are different kinds of capitalisms, different modern economies, where the issue is how social control of the market and capital accumulation and power is achieved.
Further, when one’s life includes experience with real dictatorship, what you call “ossified bourgeois democracy” looks awfully good. The radical project is not to replace liberal democracy, but to empower democracy more fully.
The point of the seminar was to bring people together with different views who share deep concerns about the present order of things, to develop a capacity to act through their differences. I think this is also the significant achievement of OWS. Given the opinions of the vast majority of American and Polish citizens, not to speak of other parts of the world that are now engaged, (the 99%?) more than this is less. It suggests other sorts of utopian dreams that have turned into nightmares. But this is not a finding of the seminar discussions, but one opinion that was brought to the table.
Jeffrey, thanks for your rejoinder.
I would like to reiterate that we really do need to understand capitalism, but not in its bourgeois sense of the word which empties all aspects of exploitation. The “socialist” experiments you speak of degenerated back into a more authoritarian, or what I would consider to be state capitalism for specific historic reasons. There is an entire literature on this from a Marxian perspective, which is not terribly apologetic to the actions of the Bolsheviks.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that there are “different kinds of capitalism” and that what occurred in Russia from NEP through the successive Five Year Plans were akin to Keynesian managerial techniques in which the CPSU ultimately became the sole “capitalist” in an entire country, or empire. There was money, there was commodity production, there was exchange, the law of value did operate just the same…all of the hallmarks of a basic capitalist system, although the arrangement is not the one typical to most. Since I ascribe to an understanding of social class as being a social relation, particularly the working class to the bourgeosie, it makes perfect sense to understand how certain proletarian revolutionaries turned into a new bourgeoisie. But this is also because a detailed and nuanced understanding of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath have show how and why this process took place.
I’m sorry, but your logic of pitting American democracy against other types of political arrangements strikes me as somewhat conservative, especially in the context of OWS. For most of the Occupiers–and I include myself among them as I’m active in the student movement–where perhaps “99%” of us are American and only grew up under the current political structure in place, it doesn’t really make sense, nay, doesn’t even attempt to provide any sort of reference to how we in this country experience oppression. Apart from lacking the vocabulary, which is woefully absent in any liberal discourse, we can only broaden and therefore redefine what freedom and democracy are for us and to make a distinction between “types of democracy”, i.e., bourgeois and what may (hopefully) lie around the corner. It is only Marx, to my knowledge, who has laid down not just a vocabulary to articulate what bourgeois democracy otherwise masks.
I’m glad you’re having these talks as they are important. I hope to make one at some point!