FIRST OF ALL

There have been a number of interesting comments lately pointing me in different directions.  Let me begin with Robin McDugald’s question:  “I understand it may have something to do with the over-all thrust of your course, but could you offer a brief word on why the reading and discussion of Wilmsen’s book—a book I’m completely unfamiliar with—takes up such a large part of it?”

Good question.  The authors whose writings are assigned in the course are Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Karl Mannheim, Edwin Wilmsen, Charles Mills, and Martha Nussbaum.  I can be absolutely certain that every student will have heard of Marx, because he is included in the required readings for the famous Contemporary Civilization course that they will have been required to take as first or second year undergraduates at Columbia.  Inasmuch as the course is being offered in the Sociology Department, I think I have a right to assume they have heard of Max Weber and Emile Durkheim.  I mean, that is like assuming that Lit students have heard of Shakespeare and Jane Austen.  Mannheim may be a stretch, but they are, after all, Columbia students, so they will at least know how to fake it.  Mills and Nussbaum look like add-ons to satisfy the PC police.  But Wilmsen?  Who he?

The overarching theme of the course is the thesis that the Social Sciences, unlike the Natural Sciences or the Humanities, are inherently and unavoidably ideologically mystified.  The three weeks spent on Wilmsen are, in a way, the heart of the course.  Let me explain.

Ever since Marx launched the enterprise of ideological critique [I know, I know, it was Hegel, but I hate Hegel, so leave me be], the most sophisticated thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth century intellectual tradition have been writing in ever more elevated and atmospheric ways about ideology, false consciousness, mystification, alienation, and such like things.  Their prose soars so far above the landscape below that reading it can make one feel lightheaded from a lack of facts.  Real ideological critique, of the sort that Marx and Mannheim carried on with such brilliance, requires a combination of detailed, particular knowledge with rarefied theoretical analysis that is rare indeed, even in such legendary haunts as the Frankfurt School for Social Research.  To do ideological analysis well, you must steep yourself in the object of your critique.  No one would think of offering an ideological critique of the novels of Dickens without knowing them inside and out, and knowing as well an enormous amount about the social, economic, and political milieu in which they were written.

Wilmsen’s book, Land Filled With Flies, is a devastating ideological critique of the work of a group of ethnologists led by the distinguished Canadian anthropologist Richard Lee.  Lee and his associates devoted years to a detailed study of the Zhu, a people living in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana and South Africa.  Wilmsen himself spent many years living with the Zhu, learning their language, getting to know them, recreating their history and that of the larger Kalahari from colonial archives. 

The result is, in my opinion, one of the most brilliant pieces of work ever written in the Social Scieces.  Wilmsen’s critique calls into question not only the legitimacy of the work of the Lee group but of Ethnography itself as a discipline, and it does so in the service of a Marxist perspective. 

My pedagogical message to the students in the class is this:  If you want to engage in ideological critique, this is the sort of work you must do.  You must combine an understanding of the general theory of ideological critique with a hard won mastery of the detail of the object of your critique.  Wilmsen’s book, aside from being in my estimation fascinating, is a perfect case study of how to do ideological critique.

That is why, along with such famous folk as Marx, Weber, Durkhim, and Mannheim, I devote three weeks of a thirteen week course to a book by Edwin Wilmsen.

A RESPONSE TO A REQUEST

One of the various anonymi  [anonymata?] asks that I say a few words about alienation and point to some readings.  The locus classicus is of course Marx’s 1844 manuscript on alienated labor, part of the 1844 Manuscripts, working papers written in Paris by the 26 year old Marx.  The subject is of the very greatest interest because it is one of the two points in Marx’s thought at which the broad structural analysis of capitalism intersects with the focused analysis of the subjective experience of the individual in a capitalist society [the other is his dscussion of ideological mystification.]  The central undertaking of the so-called Frankfurt School in Germany in the 1920’s and early 30’s was to carry through a fusion of Marx’s analysis of capitalist economy and society with Freud’s new understanding of the functioning of the individual mind, especially of the unconscious.  Hence the work of the Frankfurt School can be understood as an updating of Marx’s early work in the 1844 manuscripts and associated texts [such as the German Ideology.]  The works of Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, among many others, can be read on this subject with great profit.

The concept of alienation itself is provocatively ambiguous, a fact that Marx uses to great advantage.  In the law, “to alienate” means “to transfer ownership of.”  But the word also carries the meaning “to make an enemy of, to distance oneself from.”  In the Manuscripts Marx plays on this ambiguity, noting that workers by their labor create capital which, because it is owned by the capitalist, not by them, becomes their enemy and oppresses them.  Because the labor process, the activity of laboring, is under the control of and routinized by the capitalist, the worker becomes alienated from his or her own human nature, which is to collectively and purposefully transform nature so that it serves human needs and desires.  Hence, “to be a good worker” comes to mean “to work in an inhumane and spiritually stultifying manner, steadily, obediently, profitably.”

Well, that is a start.

THE SYLLABUS

Draft Week by Week Course Outline

Sept. 4:            Intro to seminar.  No assigned reading  

Sept. 11:          Marx, Communist Manifesto, Capital Chapter 1  

Sept. 18:          Marx. Capital, Chapters 2-6                                  

Sept. 25:          Marx, Capital, Chapters 7-10                                

Oct. 2:             Durkheim, Suicide, Preface, Introduction, Book III,                          Chapter 1

                        Max Weber, Economy and Society, Part One,                                    Chapters I and III, i-v   

Oct. 9:             Weber, Economy and Society, Part Two, Chapter XI

                        Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of                                                Capitalism, begin   

Oct. 16:           Weber, The Protestant Ethic finish                            Oct. 23:           Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, Parts I, II      Oct. 30:           Mannheim, Part IV, Edwin Wilmsen, Land Filled                                  With Flies, Chapters 1-2.

Nov. 13:          Wilmsen, Chapters 3-5                                                Nov. 20:          Wilmsen, Chapters 6-7                       

Nov. 27:          Charles Mills, The Racial Contract                           Dec. 4:             Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice, excerpts 

Written work:                          Short paper, due Oct. 9

                                                Final paper, Dec. 14

PREVIEWS OF COMING ATTRACTIONS

As I have several times mentioned, come fall I shall be flying up to New York each Tuesday to teach a course at Columbia University.  Jerry Fresia asked to see the syllabus, so I thought I would post it here after saying a few words about how the course came to be.

Something more than a year ago, I was elected to a group at Columbia called The Society of Senior Scholars.  The society is a group of thirty or so retired professors, most but not all retired from Columbia, who are interested in continuing to teach.  The Society has its roots in Contemporary Civilization, a legendary General Education course created at Columbia in 1919, which is required, along with other courses, of every Columbia undergraduate.  Some members of the Society teach sections of CC, as it is referred to, while others teach elsewhere in Columbia.

I am, I believe, the only member of the Society who does not live in the Greater New York area.   CC meets twice a week, for two hours each time, and it would be impossible for me to come to the city twice a week, so I cast about for something else to teach.  One of the people who had nominated me for the Society suggested that I create an upper level interdisciplinary course that could serve for a small group of Juniors and Seniors as a sort of capstone or consummation of their undergraduate education.  I jumped at the chance and very quickly came up with a proposal for a course dealing with a range of materials that I have been thinking about, teaching, writing about, and recording YouTube videos about for the past forty years.  The theme of the course that I proposed is the phenomenon of ideological distortion, mystification, and rationalization that characterizes all of the disciplines grouped together as Social Sciences and that distinguished them from the Natural Sciences and also [although this is debatable] from the Humanities.  I called the course Mystifications of Social Reality.

The folks I was talking with at Columbia were enthusiastic about the proposal, but there was a problem.  I am not a member of any department or other regularly established Columbia body [the Society does not count, for some obscure reason], so I am not authorized to offer a course.  This bureaucratic obstacle had everybody stumped until someone said, “Of course, if you co-teach it with a faculty member, there will be no problem.”  So, whom could I get?

The person who nominated me suggested a very senior member of the faculty of the famous Columbia School of Journalism who is also, as it happens, an Adjunct Member of the Sociology Department, a man named Todd Gitlin.  I was absolutely delighted by the suggestion.  Todd has had a long and brilliant career as a strong voice and active presence on the left in America, starting when he served as the third president of Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS as everyone knows it.  He has published many books and it would be simply delightful for me to collaborate with him on the course.  It all so happens, unbeknownst to the person who made the suggestion, that in 1960, fifty-eight years ago, Todd was my student at Harvard!

So there it is.  On Tuesday, September 4^th, Todd and I will meet a small class [limited to 20] in a room yet to be decided, and launch Mystifications of Social Reality.  Later today, I will post the syllabus we have settled upon.

BOULDERS AND PEBBLES

In the past few days, the comments section of this blog has taken a turn with which I am very unhappy, and I have only myself to blame.  The flood of comments was triggered by my post yesterday morning [good grief, was it only yesterday morning?] in which I commented on a brief YouTube Noam Chomsky clip to which “Heraclitus” had supplied a link.  These comments provoked just the sort of agitated and somewhat hostile back and forth on the left [in which I participated] that I have always decried and tried to stay out of.  In this post, I want to step back and make some general observations about political action, especially in pursuit of the sorts of goals that I think I share with most of my readers.

As I have observed before, political change is not like brain surgery, in which the slightest slip of the hand can mean death or terrible injury.  I prefer to liken political change to a landslide, in which an entire mountainside is transformed by an enormous flood of boulders, uprooted trees, rocks, clods of earth, but also pebbles and grains of sand, all tumbling, rolling, bouncing, pitching down a slope.  In the Civil Rights Movement, the greatest popular political movement of my lifetime, one sees huge boulders like John Lewis, Fannie Lou Hamer, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King rolling down the mountainside, along with small trees, like my UMass colleague in the Afro-American Studies Department Mike Thelwell, who ran the SNCC office in D. C. for a while.

But if nothing moves save for those few big objects, the result is not a landslide, and the mountainside is not transformed.  For that transformation to happen, everything, small as well as big, must be in motion.  If you are one of the pebbles or grains of sand, your participation in the landslide will make little or no observable difference, but without you and all the other pebbles and grains, it will not be a landslide.

The greatness and also the besetting sin of intellectuals is that they try to think about everything, not merely about something.  If all you are doing is thinking, then of course the one is as easy as the other.  But when it comes to political action, for most of us it is all we can manage to do just something – to be a pebble or a grain of sand.  The trick, if you are intellectually inclined, is not to make the mistake of imagining that arguing in grand terms about everything is any sort of substitute for actually doing something.

That is why I spent several days writing and merge printing some fundraising letters for young Ryan Watts here in the NC 6^th CD, which, Lord knows, is about as pebbly a thing as it is possible to do.

Now, I am, for better or worse, an intellectual, so I will continue to opine on the big picture, since that is what we intellectuals do.  But I am not going to get into arguments about that big picture with folks who, I hope, are tumbling down the mountain with me.  It is enough that we are tumbling down the same side.

BACK FROM THE BRINK

Well, one day under the weather is a reasonable price to pay for 97% protection against shingles.  Now, as to that clip from Noam Chomsky, which you can view here.  Noam starts by pooh-poohing the foofaraw about Russian interference in the 2016 election, indicating by his tone of voice as much as by what he says that he considers it pretty small beer.  [How’s that for two old fashioned slang expressions and one cliché in a single sentence?]  Then he moves on to a recent scholarly study that shows in granular detail the influence of money in American politics, which he suggests is much greater than any effect Russian efforts at interference might have had.  The second part of the short interview concerns the shape of post-war European power politics.  Let me say something about the first two points.

Were it not disrespectful to someone whom I like personally and for whom I have the very greatest esteem, I would be tempted to respond, “Duh!”  Big money plays a big role in American politics!  Who knew?  The ability of big money to shape politics is a fundamental structural fact not only about American politics but about the politics of all capitalist states.  The state exists in a capitalist economy for the purpose of facilitating the smooth and unchallenged exploitation of the working class, and one of the principal ways in which Capital accomplishes this in capitalist democracies is by shaping electoral outcomes.  Big money in American politics, to use again a catchphrase I have invoked before, is a feature, not a bug.

Does it therefore make no difference how that money is allowed legally to influence elections?  That depends on whether you think there is any point in trying to make American capitalism less harsh, less exploitative, less inhumane, even though those ameliorations are only at the margin.  I do think so.  Hence, for example, I decry the notorious Citizens United Supreme Court decision.  Did corporate and private wealth play a major role in American politics before that decision?  A silly question.  Would it continue to do so if the decision were reversed?  Equally silly.  Does the decision therefore matter?  That is a question worth debating.  My answer is yes.  Hence, I think it matters who sits on the Supreme Court.  Now, it goes without saying that every member of the Supreme Court now and for as long as matters has been nominated by a President, Democrat or Republican, who was committed to the capitalist exploitation of labor [though not of course under that description.]  I think we can also agree that all of the ice at the North and South Poles will have melted [and hell, correspondingly will have frozen over] before there is a workable majority on the Supreme Court ready to rule that capitalism is unconstitutional.

So I quite agree that the effect of the Russians on the 2016 election, whatever it may have been, pales into insignificance [another cliché] next to the influence of money.  Why, therefore, do I care about it?

The answer is simple.  I think Trump is a more serious threat to everything I care about than Clinton would have been, bad as she is and was, and I think his manifest conspiring with the Russians, which has taken place in plain view, may yet bring him down.  That’s it.  That is why I care.  Not because I believe it is besmirching the purity of the American political system, envy of the world; not because I think once he is gone America’s role as The Leader of the Free World, A City Upon a Hill, The Last Best Hope of Humanity, will be restored.  Just because I think the Russia thing may bring him down.

But if that is why I care about collusion, why don’t I care about Stormy Daniels and hush money?  Why don’t I care about the use of New York apartments to launder the dirty money of Russian oligarchs?  I do care!  And for exactly the same reason.  As the talking heads have now become fond of observing, it was tax evasion that sent Al Capone to jail.

I have had my say on the last part of Noam’s comments, concerning post-war Euro-American power politics, so I will pass on that.

BRIEF BREAK

On Thursday I had my second Shingles vaccine shot, and as anticipated, it had a bad effect on me.  I spent most of yesterday laid up, but will be back tomorrow blogging.  I would like to say something about the Noam Chomsky interview to which someone with the handle "Heraclitus" linked in a comment.  

And so, to steal a line from Pepys, to bed.