Bratsis, P

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AN ARISTOTELIAN-MARXIST CRITIQUE      91Pleasure is the transition of a man from a less to a greater perfection.— Spinoza, The EthicsThe Fifteenth Street Manifesto Group, which is mainly composed ofmy fellow Situations editorial collective members, has issued a call toarms. Very much in the spirit of what a manifesto should be, thiswork is a much needed and timely challenge to take up the task of politicalorganization. The key and clearest message of the Manifesto is that there isa drastic need to overcome factional politics and the politics of protest andresistance in favor of political organization in the most substantive sense.Although not coming out explicitly in favor of a new political party, it doesargue for the need to organize a collective body for the purposes of radicalsocial transformation.As clear and direct as this central message is, however, I believe that theManifesto does not go far enough as a political text. First, although it makesgeneral references to such principles as ‘democracy’ and ‘equality’ it doesnot specify the political goals of the project. It does identify some possiblemeans (workshop democracy, popular education, seminars and books, etc.)that the political project may utilize, but it fails to identify the political endsof this radical project explicitly. To the degree that one can find particulargoals, these are mainly in the areas of economic life. Even then, these goalsdo not necessarily differ greatly from left-liberal sensibilities or, at least, it iscertainly imaginable that they (decommodification of essential services,ecologically sustainable development, an end to gendered and racial oppres-sion, universal access to heath care, employment, etc.) could be accommo-dated within a liberal polity. Despite the overall intention of the text, thereis no rising to the level of universality. In place of a universal political prin-ciple, we find an accumulation of particular social interests that, the hopeis, can be united by way of political organization. Second, and related to thefirst point, there is a general conflation between the mere life and the goodlife. To the degree that the political project, and the critique of the contem-porary situation, is focused on questions of human ‘needs’ and not on thecreation of humans who are capable of politics (who can pursue the goodlife in the Aristotelian sense) the Manifesto remains mired in the world ofvulgar self-interests. Thirdly, as a consequence of the first two failures, thereis no clear sense of who the enemy is. The question of organization is onlyrelevant in the context of a concrete struggle, in the context of a real andMANIFESTO FOR A LEFT TURN: AN ARISTOTELIAN-MARXIST CRITIQUEPeter Bratsis3.2_04_bratsis:SITUATIONS  11/12/10  3:26 PM  Page 91Peter Bratsis92 AN ARISTOTELIAN-MARXIST CRITIQUEsubstantive antagonism.1 There should be, then, some idea of the concreteenemy, of who and what it is that the struggle is against. This is not onlysignificant in that it is, in my opinion, a necessary element for uniting theLeft (there needs to be a common enemy), but also because the identity ofthe enemy will have much to say about what forms and strategies may bemost appropriate to the new political organization. I offer the followingcomments and rejoinders in the hopes of furthering the project of theManifesto and the debates that it has initiated.THE MERE LIFE VERSUS THE GOOD LIFE The Manifesto is not intended as a finished political program, as some defin-itive statement on what our political goals and strategies should or shouldnot be. The bulk of the work is dedicated to explicating strategic lessonsfrom the history of the Left and to cataloging the dire social, economic, andecological situation today. The choice of issues and topics discussed, how-ever, is significant. Key sections include the discussion of work and the fail-ures of unions, the crisis of health care access, the limits of suburbanizationand mass consumption, the stagnation and decline of wages, the currenteconomic crisis, and so on. Without doubt, all of these are important intheir own right. But, what do these discussions tell us about our politicalstandpoint? Is our critique of capitalism that it has occasional crises? Thatit does not provide enough development? Or, that the development it doesprovide is so skewed that we are now in a period where the dominated class-es are going to face austerity while the capitalists have accumulatedunimaginable amounts of wealth? Is struggle mainly for better and moreeconomic development for the dominated classes, shop floor democracyand more rational forms of income distribution? Similarly, is our main con-cern the possibility of ‘happiness’ in the form of commodious living? Thateveryone should have health care, economic security, housing, and so on?I know comrades Stanley, Michael, and Bill too well to think that this is thelimit of what they intended to say. However, the Manifesto may very wellgive this false impression. A key problem lies in the failure to distinguish between politics and its pre-conditions. There is no doubt that questions of food, shelter and the house-1 Related to this, the discussion of the anti-war movement may create the impression that the proj-ect is somehow against conflict or violence as such. That the political goal is an end to war andantagonism. There is no doubt that this is not the case and likely not the idea that was intended.3.2_04_bratsis:SITUATIONS  11/12/10  3:26 PM  Page 92Manifesto For A Left Turn: An Aristotelian-Marxist CritiqueAN ARISTOTELIAN-MARXIST CRITIQUE      93hold are central. But, they are not central as political goals in the same waythat simply being alive is not the goal of politics. Politics is more importantthan mere life and may even ask us to put our biological life at risk. That weare all animals and have certain needs is a given. In this context, our capac-ity for politics is, in the first place, predicated on our ability to rise beyondthe question of biological needs. The traditional Aristotelian divisionbetween the polis and the oikos signifies this divide between our biologicaland political natures. If we are preoccupied with feeding our empty belliesor finding someplace warm to sleep, we will not have much time or appetitefor political life. Therefore, if we take political life in the broad sense of theterm as our goal (following Aristotle, and many others, we could define pol-itics as the ‘good life’, the principled pursuit of human excellence, withwhat is ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ being an open question) the question of themere life must be addressed and solved but this is only as a precondition ofthe good life not the attainment of it. In this sense, the Manifesto is guilty of a certain economism, of putting theoikos above the polis. For example, the critique of suburbanization and thediscussion of the ‘right to the city’ is framed by the question of survival; thepatterns of consumption endemic to suburbanization are not ecologicallyfeasible. That may be the case, but what of the kinds of human beings thatsuburbanization produces? If we solved the ecological question, would sub-urbs be acceptable? Are the kinds of people produced by suburbanizationcapable of politics? Are they of a type appropriate to the pursuit of humanexcellence? Why only focus on the impact of suburbs upon nature and notalso focus on the impact of suburbs on our capacity for thought, for auton-omy, for political life? Similarly, why so much emphasis on the question ofincome distribution and employment? Do we want more employment?What kinds of human beings are produced through working as we know it?Where is the critique of work and the call for its radical reduction, if notelimination? I am not advocating a vulgar Arendtian position here, thatquestions of economics or the ‘mere life’ should be excluded from politics.Rather, we need to be explicit that questions of the ‘household’ are centraland fundamental as a precondition, not telos, of political life.UNIVERSALITY AND PARTICULARITY In this context, the typical Marxist discussion of exploitation and workercontrol should be rethought. The Manifesto repeats the very common linethat workers, who, after all, are the creators of value, should be the ones3.2_04_bratsis:SITUATIONS  11/12/10  3:26 PM  Page 93Peter Bratsis94 AN ARISTOTELIAN-MARXIST CRITIQUEwho control the commodities that they produce. The labor theory of valueas first deployed by John Locke, let us recall, functioned to tie the questionof property to the concrete body of the individual, to tie the question ofproperty to human rights; that the right to the ownership of our own bodyextends to the values that our body may produce. Indeed, for Locke, prop-erty is the most basic of human rights. Marx’s transformation of the labortheory of value was to detach it from concrete individuals and make itsocial. For Marx, exchange value was a product of abstract social labor,socially necessary labor time, not the concrete labor of any individual orgroup. I believe it is a regression back to the liberal version of the labor the-ory of value to argue that the ‘workers’, in the sense of the individuals whohappen to share any particular workplace, should ‘own’ what they produce.If the origin of exchange value is social labor, society as a whole, as a com-plex ensemble of interdependencies and interactions, is the origin of thisvalue. More to the point however, the question has to be addressed from thestandpoint of politics, not economics. There has to be an explicit project ofhuman excellence to ground the question of how the production of goodsand services should be organized. Should we support workplace democracybecause the ‘workers’ are the real owners of what they produce or should wesupport workplace democracy because this is a necessary moment in theproduction of more excellent individuals, individuals not alienated by thedivide between intellectual and manual labor, individuals who are notmade subservient to hierarchies and chains of command?The universality of politics must be established and it is from this stand-point that any judgments regarding particularities should be made. If weconfine ourselves to a laundry list of particular (self) interests, we concedepolitics itself and join the post-modernist and liberal tendencies that theManifesto so rightly critiques. If the ‘Left’ is simply a collection of move-ments (labor, feminist, anti-war, anti-racist, etc.) all joined together undersome meta-organizational umbrella, then we have not moved very far fromthe factional politics and politics of resistance that the Manifesto explicitlycomes out against.There are two dimensions to this universality of politics, one principle is inrelation to the particular social group or category which functions as a con-crete universal (for example, the proletariat in Marx or civil-servants forHegel). A second dimension is the universality of the substantive principles,or goals, which are sought (for example, the liberation of the proletariat isalso the liberation of the bourgeoisie and other classes from the shackles ofthe marketplace and bureaucracy). It is within this general Marxist dialecti-3.2_04_bratsis:SITUATIONS  11/12/10  3:26 PM  Page 94Manifesto For A Left Turn: An Aristotelian-Marxist CritiqueAN ARISTOTELIAN-MARXIST CRITIQUE      95cal form that the question of the enemy should be located. On the onehand, the universal principle is that everyone has the capacity for humanexcellence, that all social beings will be the benefactors of the politicalstruggle. The ‘enemy’ occupies a position within only the first moment, asthe antagonist of the concrete universal. That the Manifesto does not iden-tify an enemy is thus not at all surprising since it does not reach the pointof identifying the general universal principles that underpin the project andfrom which, then, we could identify the concrete universal and its enemies.What I want to contribute here is some speculation as to what these may beand how the problematic of the Manifesto can be extended.THE ENEMY; OR, IN PRAISE OF SELF-MASTERY One significant aspect of those problems we face today as outlined in theManifesto is that which is common to them all. On one general level wecould say that the crises of health care, education, labor, and so on, are allsymptoms of capitalism, and this is certainly true. But also common tothem is the peculiar truth that the agents who are responsible for defendingthem are, more often then not, those who have done the most to bringthem to their current lows. In relation to these examples, it is more oftenthan not that doctors, labor leaders, and academics have played an activeand eager role in subverting the labor movement, education, and healthcare. The role of doctors in limiting the availability of health care is funda-mental and this has been demonstrated very often, most recently in theiropposition to current efforts to reform the health care industry in theUnited States. Those of us in academia are witnesses to the fact that academ-ics themselves very cheerfully abandon any fidelity to higher learning andeducating students in the name of fiscal prudence, rankings, grants, jobtraining, market priorities and, ultimately, self-interest. Similarly, laborunions have increasingly become organizations for controlling workers andlimiting their agency rather serving as the weapons of their constituents.  None of this is any news to the authors of the Manifesto or to most otherson the left. But the question remains, how is it that there is so little capac-ity today for individuals to form or maintain a dedication to any principlesbeyond their immediate self interests? After all, if we cannot rely on doctorsto defend medicine, academics to defend education, or labor leaders todefend workers, what hope is there for a principled fight against the currentsocial order? One characteristic we see displayed in all of these examples isthe propensity towards obedience, voluntary servitude even. This propensi-3.2_04_bratsis:SITUATIONS  11/12/10  3:26 PM  Page 95Peter Bratsis96 AN ARISTOTELIAN-MARXIST CRITIQUEty is certainly to be understood as belonging to the register of the enemy asare the conditions, agents, and strategies that lead to this propensity. Nodoubt, one fundamental dimension to this problem is the degree to whichliberalism has structured contemporary societies and eradicated traditionalvalues, such as honor, to something one only finds in the mountains ofAlgeria or in the mafia movies of Hollywood. Possessive individualism is sopervasive today that even political leaders and other public servants areseen as utility maximizers; perversely, liberalism has become so successfulthat it has even eroded its own notions of public virtue. Rational choice the-ory has become the dominant analytical model for understanding thebehavior of politicians and, in popular perceptions, politicians are oftenseen as self-interested hustlers while civil servants are often presented aslazy freeloaders. The perceived unavoidability of self-interest is such thatwhen politicians flagrantly display the particularity of their interests(Berlusconi for example) people are no longer shocked or especially trou-bled. From the standpoint of political organization, we see that the logic isincreasingly one of producing only a single type of human being, funda-mentally servile and obedient. It is no longer a matter of class position oreducation that corresponds to the propensity for obedience or servility. Theexecutives of banks and other financial institutions, as we have recentlyseen, proved themselves as servile as everyone else, unable to resist liningtheir own pockets even when it was clear that it was to the detriment oftheir own institution as well as the broader economy. In this context,Schumpeter’s critique of modern capitalist bureaucracies seems especiallyprophetic. A corresponding development is the desire for mastery over others. As ser-vility and submission to organizational/market hierarchies have becomemore pronounced and entrenched, a displacement has occurred toward thedesire for mastery over others. Just as children desire pets as a counter totheir own powerlessness, as something they can exercise power over, wefind a spreading of this tendency to all segments of society. The ubiquity ofpet ownership itself is symptom of this, dogs have become stand-in slavesled around town in chains and completely dependent on their masters fortheir wellbeing. Most organizations today display similar tendencies, eachmanagerial level completely subservient to the one above and the powerlessmanagers focused on mastery over their immediate inferiors. The impossi-bility of self-mastery has greatly increased the desire for mastery over oth-ers and is the libidinal glue with holds together the bureaucratic chains ofcommand that enslave us all, even if in different levels of comfort.3.2_04_bratsis:SITUATIONS  11/12/10  3:26 PM  Page 96Manifesto For A Left Turn: An Aristotelian-Marxist CritiqueAN ARISTOTELIAN-MARXIST CRITIQUE      97If there is a need to turn Left, then this should be a turn toward the capac-ity for self-mastery, self-rule, and a turn away from subservience to others.The enemy is inside us, formatted and individualized as we have beenthrough the myriad of state apparatuses, and externalized in the form ofmanagers, technocrats, bureaucracy, and so on. The strategic dilemmabefore us is to engender a greater capacity for disciplined and principledaction among ourselves and to radically transform all of those material con-ditions that have led to the abandonment of honor and principled actionin favor of servitude, self-interest, and comfort. This is obviously a difficultquestion and one which necessitates a discussion of much of what theManifesto emphasizes: worker councils, popular education, and so on.It is best to leave a fuller discussion of strategy to a more appropriatemoment but if we take the capacity for political life to be a fundamentalgoal of the Left and servitude and those who desire it and impose it to bethe enemy, then the strategic stakes and context should become more clearand concrete. We can imagine revolutionary schools of popular educationwhere we not only learn Gramsci and Hegel but also self-discipline and ded-ication to principled action. We can imagine the overthrowing of bureau-cratic hierarchies and the shaming of academics, doctors, and others whodemonstrate their incapability to be faithful to their profession. Only byidentifying the enemy and universal political principles of the Left can weproceed with furthering the task of political organization and action. In this brief and schematic rejoiner to the Manifesto it is impossible to devel-op arguments in any great depth. My point has simply been to point to akey weakness in the text when it comes to political goals and principles andto suggest one way of addressing this weakness. In my opinion, the ‘Leftturn’ as outlined in the Manifesto does not trace a clear and revolutionarypath, it remains mired in the liberal world of self-interests and commodiousliving. Rather than taking the safe route of simply demanding better livingconditions, we need the courage to demand human excellence and all thatit presupposes.3.2_04_bratsis:SITUATIONS  11/12/10  3:26 PM  Page 97

Manifesto for a left turn: an Aristotelian-Marxist critique

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Manifesto for a left turn: an Aristotelian-Marxist critique

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