Correspondence:
Digging into the Science of Society: Discussion at Chicago Revolution Books on Raymond Lotta's Polemic
January 6, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
At the end of the Thanksgiving weekend, Revolution Books in Chicago was crowded with people (35+) who came to collectively grapple with the article from Raymond Lotta, "On the 'Driving Force of Anarchy' and the Dynamics of Change. A Sharp Debate and Urgent Polemic: The Struggle for a Radically Different World and the Struggle for a Scientific Approach to Reality.” There were veteran activists together with people very new to the movement for revolution. Almost everyone was there from the beginning right through to the end of the discussion three hours later and then stuck around to talk more.
The presenter opened with remarks that stressed why these questions are so important. Lotta’s article is addressing foundational questions about the nature of society relevant to understanding the world we are confronting and acting upon, the basis for change and for a radically different and far better world to be brought into being. Citing the Appendix to the Constitution of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, she brought out that to understand the world, and to change it in the interests of humanity, people need scientific theory. Science is not some set of “mysterious laws belonging to the scientists.” Science aims to learn the causes of phenomena, the reasons why things happen and how they develop—and it seeks these causes in the material world, which includes human society. A scientific approach does not seek supernatural “explanations,” nor does it accept any explanations which cannot be tested, and verified or disproved, in the real material world, but instead develops an initial theory based on evidence from the world, tests out the theory in actual practice and against the results achieved, and through this process arrives at a deepened understanding of what is true. That understanding must then be further applied to reality. Further, she also underscored the importance of the breakthroughs in science made by the leading revolutionary communists—Marx laying the foundation, right down to the breakthroughs by Bob Avakian including in rescuing and deepening a more scientific understanding of the actual underlying dynamics of the capitalist/imperialist system and the material basis for why revolution is not only necessary but possible.
The presenter also stressed that while the subject matter of the article was complex—not something obvious on the surface—she urged the group to approach this discussion as a beginning exploration and introduction to this for those who are new or as a start to a serious re-engagement for veterans of the communist movement who at minimum are likely “rusty” on this understanding of the very fundamental workings of capitalism. This is complex, but understandable.
The discussion did in fact serve to spur further reading and wrangling with the full article at revcom.us on the part of both some people very new to the movement for revolution, excited to get a scientific understanding of society, and some veterans who expressed a new appreciation for the breakthroughs of BA's new synthesis of communism and how that was reflected in Lotta's polemic.
Drawing from Views on Socialism and Communism: A Radically New Kind of State, A Radically Different and Far Greater Vision of Freedom, the section “A Scientific Understanding: The Decisive and Determining Contradictions in All Societies,” the presenter went very briefly into how in all of human society the most fundamental thing is the basic production and distribution of the material requirements of life and reproduction of the basis for life, BUT this is not producing material requirements in the abstract or an economy in the abstract. It is the case in all of human society that this production and distribution is carried out in very definite production relations and these are social production relations. No man or woman is an island—not Robinson Crusoe... and this went all the way back to the earliest period of human history, even “cave men” worked in various ways together in concrete social relations to produce and distribute these material requirements of life. While this discussion could not get into all of that complex history and development of human society, the discussion did focus on what these relations are under the current system of capitalism-imperialism.
The initial brief presentation was followed by watching the chapter “What Is Capitalism?” from the film Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It's All About, where BA breaks down the basic character of capitalism and its driving dynamics. This was a really good way to bring everyone into some of the complex concepts in the article.
There were five points outlined to guide the discussion, and although it wasn’t possible to cover them all in such a large group in that amount of time, it provided a framework including for further discussions and study of the article and related materials passed out in the session.
• What is a commodity, what characterizes capitalism: is it greed, and does it flow from human nature? What are the laws of capitalism and who is subject to having to follow “the rules” of the game: is it just the proletariat and other oppressed or do they apply to the capitalists too? Where does profit derive from and why do the capitalists face a compulsion to expand or die?
• The article and the excerpt from BA’s Revolution talk go into the fundamental contradiction of capitalism between socialized production (on an increasingly global scale) and private appropriation. What are these two forms of motion of this fundamental contradiction and how do they interact with each other? (One form of motion is the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, along with other struggles arising from various social contradictions conditioned by and incorporated into the development of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism on a global scale. The other form of motion is the antagonism between the organization of production at the level of the individual unit of capital, and the anarchy of production in society overall.)
• Dig into the importance of BA’s crucial breakthrough and deeper grounding in materialism in understanding the “driving force of anarchy” as the decisive dynamic of capitalism. What was this breakthrough in understanding in contrast to wrong understandings of this in the international communist movement including in method and approach?
• Exploring the example from Lotta’s article about the environment, including why capitalism cannot solve the climate crisis. Another example of this same dynamic at work: the globalization of food, the crises that followed and why there is no right to eat under capitalism. (In a packet given to all participants there was a two-page handout on socialist sustainable development from the special Environmental Emergency issue of Revolution and two pieces on the global food crisis—the centerfolds from June 22, 2008 and May 1, 2008).
• How could society be organized differently, and why do you need a revolution to accomplish that? (It was clear at the start of the discussion that we weren’t going to be able to dig into this question on any level that was deserved, so the presenter encouraged people right at this point to dig into the handout mentioned above on socialist sustainable development as well as the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal) to get a much deeper sense of how society could be organized radically differently.)
The discussion was fast-paced and wide-ranging. One of the participants right away said that the essential character of the capitalists is “without a doubt” greed. The discussion dug into slavery (and the movie 12 Years a Slave) by way of analogy—the slave masters committed monstrous crimes but what shaped and drove their brutal ugliness? And what were the implications of the slave system producing commodities for a capitalist market on the organization of production to extract everything out of the slaves’ toil? What would happen if a slave master wasn’t “greedy” and only worked his slaves for three hours/day? There was recognition that such a slave owner would go under. It became clearer through the discussion that the accumulation of vast wealth and the callous crimes of the capitalists is part of the reason why people spontaneously and erroneously think that the essence of the problem lies in the greed of the capitalists. The discussion brought out in different dimensions how bigger shaping forces are at work and if you don’t understand the actual laws and dynamics of capitalism and imperialism, you will constantly be fooled into thinking capitalism can be reformed through one scheme or another.
Many different aspects of political economy and social relations were spoken to in the discussion—this article can't do justice to the richness and liveliness of the discussion in which almost everyone participated. But to give a flavor of the types of questions that were explored (some in a beginning way and some more thoroughly) through the course of the discussion: how is living labor the only source of profit? Why can’t an individual capitalist be satisfied with a certain level of profit-making but instead is forced to expand or die? How are the social contradictions of capitalism-imperialism manifested not only in class antagonisms but also in the oppression of whole nations (internal and external to the country); the divisions between those who work with their minds and those who work with their hands (mental/manual contradiction); the old and new forms of patriarchy deeply embedded in class society including capitalism? What is the role of the superstructure (including culture, laws, etc.) and how does that interpenetrate with this fundamental contradiction and its driving dynamic in capitalist society as well as how do the prevailing ideas among all sections of people—including the most oppressed—reflect the ideas of the ruling class ideology in a world dominated by commodity exchange?
There was an important thread running through parts of the discussion off this last point on how even basic proletarians end up confronting the world as individuals trying to get the best terms for the sale of their labor power. This engenders looking at the world through the prism of commodity and bourgeois relations overall. Confounding this spontaneous outlook with the goals of the communist revolution has been the source of very sharp struggle among communists going all the way back to Marx. Is the goal of the communist movement “a fair days wage for a fair days work” or the actual abolition of the wage system and radical rupture with all of this—something BA has developed much further in the new synthesis? One person pointed to what was in the segment from the Revolution talk about how something that can be quite beautiful like intimacy between two people based on mutual respect gets turned to shit when commodity exchange enters in and that these are the relations and outlook cultivated by commodity relations and capitalism. There was also some struggle over whether class distinctions were part of human nature.
Other questions arose: Was the one form of motion, the “bourgeoisie/proletariat contradiction,” principal at the time of Marx but later changed to the anarchy/organization being principal or has the anarchy/organization form of motion been principal all along? What is the material basis for people from the middle strata to be won to being part of this revolution and what does this have to do with the anarchy/organization being principal? When the principal contradiction in the world in the 1960s was between oppressed nations and imperialism (when there were revolutionary risings all over the world)—how did this understanding correspond to the analysis in Lotta’s article that the anarchy/organization contradiction is principal in an overall way?
The discussion only was able to touch the surface in relation to the environmental crisis, which would have been a rich example to explore. Similarly, the question of why there is no right to eat under capitalism. Both are important manifestations of the two forms of motion addressed in the Lotta article. There was a recognition that this understanding of the breakthrough by BA in understanding the deep structural dynamics of capitalism, the shaping role of the form of motion of anarchy/organization and Lotta’s polemic need to get out in a major way as part of people seeing that there is a way out of the horrors, including the actual destruction of the planet.
In hindsight, it would have been good to focus even more time on the other lines within the international communist movement, and even though there were people very new to the movement for revolution at the discussion, we could have dug into more substantially what that wrong understanding is and done more comparing and contrasting. As part of this we could have maybe dug more than we did into how the accumulation of capital is not only a dynamic but at the same time a disruptive process of expansion and adjustment and crisis (in short, the fuller complexity of this driving force of anarchy) and how this opens up diverse channels for change and for sudden eruptions. Grasping this scientifically is a critical orientation for building the movement for revolution. Lotta's article in part IV ("The Stakes: A System That Cannot Be Reformed…The Revolution That is Needed) quotes Avakian from Birds Cannot Give Birth to Crocodiles, But Humanity Can Soar Beyond the Horizon (“Part 1: Revolution and the State”):
Now, we may not like all this, but that's where we are. We may not like the fact that capitalism and its dynamics are still dominant in the world, overwhelmingly so at this time, and set the stage for the struggle we have to wage—we may not like this, but that's the reality. And in that reality is the basis for radically changing things. It's in confronting and struggling to change that reality, and not through some other means. It's through understanding and then acting to transform that reality along pathways that the contradictory character of that reality does open up—pathways which must be seized on and acted on to carry out that transformation of reality.
And just after that excerpt quoted in Lotta’s article, Birds Cannot Give Birth to Crocodiles, But Humanity Can Soar Beyond the Horizon continues:
So this was a fundamentally important breakthrough when we firmly identified "the driving force of anarchy" as the principal dynamic of capitalism. And this has to do with everything I've been talking about: why you can't reform this system, in fact, and why you can't just arbitrarily try to replace it with any old utopian scheme of whatever kind, that you might like to impose on reality, proclaimed under whatever banner.
Along with all these dynamics of capitalism, which I've been speaking to, there are other aspects of the relations of production besides the ownership system, which capitalism embodies within its overall functioning, and there are other social relations that are embodied within the capitalist system. For example, what we call the mental/manual contradiction, the contradiction between people who carry out physical labor and those who carry out intellectual labor; patriarchy and the oppression of women; the oppression of various nations and peoples (national oppression); regional differences and disparities which can become antagonisms and often do; and other significant contradictions within a particular country or part of the world and between different countries, or different parts of the world, and different alliances of countries. These are all fundamentally encompassed within, and expressions of, the underlying dynamics of capitalism at this stage in the development of human society—not some predetermined development that was bound to happen, but how human historical evolution has actually taken place, and where it has actually brought us to.
So all that is something to dig into more fully.
Also, the article “ ‘Preliminary Transformation into Capital’ … And Putting an End to Capitalism” by Bob Avakian was crucial in preparation for the discussion and would have been good to include in the packet of materials given to participants for further study.
The presenter's closing comments returned to the theme that you need far-sighted scientific leadership that understands the world the way it really is in order to change it. This revolution is what humanity really needs. And on that basis we can unite with and lead all kinds of people. But we have to recognize that the dominant ideology out on the street—and among all different sections of society—is a reflection of the prevailing capitalist outlook. You need a scientific understanding that people do not get spontaneously through the experience of being oppressed. The reality in the world today is that well over 10,000 kids die daily from preventable causes; there is extensive malnutrition in this country and yet the productive forces are on a scale where these things can be solved. This party, the Revolutionary Communist Party, is needed at the core of the movement for revolution. We have to get into the science, fight for a new culture. And to people who run that all you can do is try to get “yours” within these awful social relations, we need to say to them "that is the old system way of thinking." We have to do battle ideologically and politically, while we wrangle with ourselves like a team of scientists who are out to change the world.
This was an important beginning discussion and it needs to continue in big and small groups digging into the most advanced scientific understanding of communism, including how capitalism functions as a critical part of being able to change the world in a way that is in the interest of the vast majority of humanity.
As one comrade wrote in the wake of the discussion at Revolution Books, “I have noted recently in conversations with a couple of [veterans of the revolutionary movement], the phenomenon of not getting the significance of the recent work by Lotta, the article and interview (“On the ‘Driving Force of Anarchy’ and the Dynamics of Change A Sharp Debate and Urgent Polemic: The Struggle for a Radically Different World and the Struggle for a Scientific Approach to Reality” and the interview “You Don’t Know What You Think You “Know” About...The Communist Revolution and the REAL Path to Emancipation: Its History and Our Future”) and the struggle for a scientific epistemology that we are currently waging both in our party, with the masses, and out in the world in terms of the actual possibility of breaking through. Both of these are tremendously powerful concentrations and distillations of the new synthesis of communism brought forward by BA. I feel this is something that we really have to grasp deeply, engage and re-engage, promote broadly and in particular dig into the method and approach being modeled in these pieces. (And this very directly relates to unleashing and uncorking the importance of fighting through and winning in terms of BA Everywhere and raising big bucks and being able to get this out into the world.)”
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