ONE OF THE THINGS I LOVE ABOUT THIS BLOG

is that the readership is full of people who know all sorts of things really well that I do not know or about which I have only a sketchy awareness.  At its best, it is like an extended Senior Common Room conversation over sherry.

FROM MY MEMORY BANKS

Fifty-seven years ago, I taught an upper class undergraduate course in Harvard’s General Education program called “Value and Reality in Western Society.”  Part One of the course dealt with The Problem of Loyalty in Contemporary America.  Part Two was devoted to An Analysis of Historical Materialism.  Doing some background reading for Part One, I found myself one day in the reading room of the Harvard Law School.  I can still recall the look and feel of the long library tables, at one of which I sat reading a law review article about the origins of the modern practice of having witnesses in a trial testify under oath.

The author of the article [who was, I recall, a woman, but her name is long since lost to me] explained that the oath a witness swears in court originated as what she called a conditional self-curse.  That is, the witness said, in effect, “If I should testify falsely, let God damn me to eternal hell fire.”  This conditional self-curse was taken so seriously by all involved that if a witness issued uttered it, his testimony was accepted forthwith as reliable, since it was unimaginable that anyone would call down upon himself so terrible a punishment.  The modern phrase “so help me God” uttered ritually by witnesses “taking the oath” is a compressed and fragmentary remnant of the original conditional self-curse.

This has absolutely nothing to do with anything, but I thought it was interesting.

JURISPRUDENCE

I have a dim memory of an ancient case in the English Common Law, dating maybe from the 12^th or 13^th century, concerning a man who was sued for damages by a neighbor who charged that he had borrowed a jug and returned it cracked.  His defendant’s argument went something like this:  The jug does not exist; I did not borrow it; I returned it whole; and it was broken when I borrowed it.  I think this is now called “arguing in the alternative.”

It reminds me of Rudy Giuliani’s defense of Trump.

FAMILY HISTORY

As I was reading the daily pundit summary on Daily Kos, I came across this fascinating account of the anti-Asian paranoia in the early part of the twentieth century that led eventually to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.  I mention it here because it gives me the opportunity to tell once again a family story of which I am very proud.  Faithful readers of this blog will recall that my paternal grandfather, Barnet Wolff, was a leader of the Socialist Party in New York City during the first quarter of the last century.  In 1910, he went as a delegate [representing the Jewish Agitation Bureau!] to the annual Socialist Party convention in Chicago.  At the convention, I am appalled to have to report, the assembled socialists voted in favor of excluding Asian workers from the United States.  But my grandfather, God bless him, voted against the proposal.

For my account of the affair, you can read pages 22-5 of Barney’s Political Career archived at box.net, accessible via the link at the top of this page.

YET MORE COMMENTS ABOUT COMMENTS

Well, if nothing else, I seem to be able to provoke a flood of comments and disputes.  Let me expand on one of the several things Jerry Fresia said, the idea of circumventing the Electoral College without a Constitutional amendment that would be nearly impossible to pull off.  The idea, for those of you not familiar with it, is this:  One by one, state legislatures pass a law instructing their Electors to vote for the candidate who wins the popular vote nationally, regardless of whether that candidate has won the popular vote in that state, these laws to take effect only when enough states have signed on to yield a majority in the Electoral College.  This is completely consonant with the Constitution.  Since the Electoral College has 538 votes, a group of states having in total one half plus one, or 270 Electoral votes, must join the effort for the system to be implemented.  Remarkably, it is already the case, as Jerry notes, that states having a total of 165 Electoral votes have passed such laws, leaving only 105 to go.

As an anarchist who believes that all state authority is illegitimate, I take a transactional view of these matters.  Since the political forces I favor currently command a popular majority nation-wide [thank you, California], and seeing as how demographic trends promise to only increase that majority, I am all in with this idea.  Note that the Democratic candidate has won the popular majority in six out of the last seven presidential elections.  Such a system would, of course, totally alter the pattern and structure of campaigning, since under it, running up the vote in California or New York would be quite as effective as fighting for wins in closely divided states.  Candidates would go where their popular votes were, not where the Electoral votes are.

As for at-large slates of Congressional candidates, I have mixed feelings about that reform.  On the one hand, it would make it possible for minority parties to gain Congressional representation.  On the other hand, it would eliminate the current direct relationship between a constituent and his or her representative.  I would be interested in hearing what folks think about the idea.

MORE THOUGHTS [LORD, IS THERE NO END TO THEM?]

I had some further thoughts triggered by the Berman/Robin controversy [and thanks to Dean for his/her kind remarks].  They concern the subject, now much under discussion in the media, of the relationship of those identifying themselves as Democratic Socialists or Social Democrats to the main body of Democratic Party elected officials and operatives.  It strikes me that it is less than helpful to draw elaborate comparisons with European struggles between the two wars.  My reason is as follows.

Multi-party parliamentary politics always poses for the members of one of the parties, especially one of the smaller parties, a problematic choice: whether to work with, perhaps even to join, one of the larger parties, thereby gaining some measure of political power, but at the price of compromising severely with one’s principles and programs; or alternatively to remain separate and thus able to preserve the authenticity of one's principles and programs, but at the price of giving up even such power as participation in a coalition might afford.

I do not see this choice as a matter of existential purity, as it would be perhaps for a religious splinter sect convinced that precisely its interpretation of holy writ is the only pathway to salvation.  Rather, it is a choice forced on the party by the structure of parliamentary politics.

The American political system is not a parliamentary system, a fact that makes minor party political efforts unsuccessful save in the most unusual of circumstances.  The Greens, the Libertarians, and other minority parties are in general doomed to failure by the structure of the American political system.  The fight between the left of the Democratic Party and the establishment wing is taking place within the party.  Next January, if the Democrats have retaken the House, all the candidates who are elected on the Democratic ticket, whatever their political orientation, will choose a Speaker of the House and share around the committee chairmanships.  The fights will go on, just as they have in the Republican Party, and as the successes of the so-called Freedom Caucus demonstrate, unified minorities can have considerable success.  But the experiences of European Socialist, Communist, Social Democratic and other left parties do not, I believe, offer useful lessons or guides to American left activists.

MISREADING MARX

Once again, an interesting discussion has erupted in the comments section, this time triggered by a piece by Sheri Berman in the Washington Post.  [She is a member of the Barnard College Political Science Department, and I have just sent her an email suggesting that we meet for coffee some Tuesday in the fall.]  The comments here deal with her review of a book by Corey Robin, which I have not read, but one line in the Post piece prompts me to say a few words.  Early in the article, Berman writes: “Central to Marxism was the belief that capitalism’s internal contradictions would inevitably lead to its demise.” 

This is a standard line about Marx, repeated so often as to become little more than background music in discussions, but I think it betrays a deep misunderstanding of Marx’s analysis of capitalism, and the purpose of this post is to explore and clarify the matter.  [Some of you will have read my essay, The Future of Socialism, archived at box.net.  You may want to amuse yourself for the next few moments by contemplating the miraculous success of the Boston Red Sox.]

The problem, if I may get ahead of myself, is that Marx’s central idea has been so totally absorbed and internalized by absolutely everyone writing today about society and economics that no one recognizes it any more for the revolutionary idea that it was when Marx first advanced it.  It is rather like Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, which is simply assumed to be obviously true by everyone, including those engaged in bashing Freud.

Marx looked at the development of capitalism in England and saw a centuries-long process resulting from the decisions, choices, and struggles of countless men and women:  the enclosure of agricultural land to be used for pasturing wool-bearing sheep, which drove displaced peasants to flock to the big cities and become, in Marx’s evocative phrase, a “reserve army of the unemployed;” the movement of weavers and spinners from their cottages, where they were part of the “putting out system,” into large buildings called “make-eries” [i.e., factories];  the transformation of making-by-hand [“manufacturing”] into machine production, which robbed the workers of the hard-won traditional skills and reduced them to semi-skilled machine tenders; the gobbling up of small firms by larger firms in the competition of the market; the seemingly endless series of booms and busts produced by overproduction and underconsumption; the rising self-awareness of workers, made aware of one another by being brought together into the factories, and the consequent formation of labor unions, which would have been unthinkable during the period the putting-out system and cottage labor; and so on and on.

All of this was utterly new when Marx advanced it, but today it is part of the intellectual air we breathe, not at all the property of “the left.”

Writing when he was, and looking at the world as he saw it, Marx believed that these deep, broad developmental trends were moving in the direction of greater concentrations of capital, increased organization of labor, and ever more disruptive swings of the business cycle, all of which, he hoped and believed, were leading toward a trans-national upheaval.

This anticipated upheaval, be it noted, was not thought by him to be a behind-the-scenes metaphysical movement of world historical forces, a materialist version of the Immanent Unfolding of Reason or a secular version of God’s Plan for the Universe and Man.  What is more, Marx wrote surprisingly little about what he thought the outcome of these deep social and economic movements would be.  Capital, after all, taking into account the Theories of Surplus Value, which is officially Volume Four, runs to 5,000 pages.  One would be hard pressed to cobble together more than 100-200 pages by Marx on the post-capitalist world.  Marx did, however, tell us that the next stage after capitalism would grow “in the womb” of capitalism, just as capitalism had grown in the womb of feudalism.

Marx conceived of the “inevitability” of socialism in somewhat the way that modern climatologists conceive of global warming: as the slow working through of manifest present tendencies including the deliberate actions of human beings.

In my essay referenced above, I try to think about what those tendencies might be in capitalism as it is currently constituted.  I then identify three big tendencies that Marx got wrong, mistakes that, taken together, help to explain why things have not thus far turned out as Marx anticipated.

But none of this constitutes the claim that “capitalism’s internal contradictions would inevitably lead to its demise.”

Well, all of this may seem to have little or nothing to do with the debate between Berman and Robin, but I wanted to get it off my chest.  Now, about those Red Sox …