I have no doubt that Paul Mason believes he is on the side of the angels in trying to advance the cause of the working-class and socialism, and progress in general, and that he, honestly, believes that he is doing so on the basis of an application of Marxism. But, he is wrong, and, unfortunately, it is the road to hell that is paved with his kind of good intentions.
Trotsky in May 1938, wrote an article – Learn To Think – which has great relevance to the situation now in relation to Ukraine. It illustrates the need for using the Marxist materialist and dialectical method, to study the actual concrete reality, and to respond to it, in its specificity. Or, as Lenin used to say, “The truth is always concrete.” In the case of Paul, he would even admit that he has moved away from the ideas he held to in past years, though he believes, in doing so, he is applying Marx's method. He isn't.
I have set out, before, that, in fact, like many on the Left, Paul's method is based upon Idealism and Subjectivism. As a result, Paul tends to view situations in terms of their surface presentation, rather than undertaking a detailed analysis of the underlying material realities and class dynamics. Indeed, in his latest book, How To Fight Fascism, he demonstrates how far this analysis is from Marxism, because he rejects the analysis of it in terms of class interests, and, instead, focuses on the superficialities of what has come to be termed intersectionality, and culture wars. What he presents is not an analysis of phenomenon, but a stylised story about them, which is not surprising from a journalist, especially one who has emphasised that the secret to success, for politicians seeking election, is to present a narrative not an explanation. Maybe that is true if you now earn your living as an independent writer and media figure too.
The consequence is that phenomenon are pictured in simplistic black and white terms, a bit like the old black hats and white hats in cowboy movies. However, as he deals with each event as though its something discrete, a white hat in one scenario becomes a black hat in another, so that, if the whole thing were put together as a single movie, it would be full of contradiction and continuity errors. Its the inevitable consequence of “lesser-evilism”, and “my enemy's enemy is my friend”. That leads to very bad results when actually trying to relate to events. Paul's attitude to fascism, and its manifestation in the US, and in Ukraine, and in Russia, are a classic example of this problem.
In the US, Paul gave his narrative in relation to the coup attempt of Trump's supporters on January 6th 2021. Paul's narrative is that modern fascism is not about a ruling class seeking to mobilise violent paramilitaries to break up the organised working-class, but is about a large section of the population who cannot cope with the changes occurring around them in the modern world, which fill them with fear, because they see everything they have believed in, and upon which their existence has been based, is challenged, whether it is by homosexuality, immigration, or whatever. All of these masses can then be utilised, by an elite, to overturn the basic bourgeois-democratic institutions that have arisen, and which are the vehicles by which this new world is being imposed on them.
There are parts of this narrative from which I do not demur. There are, indeed, a large number of, mostly elderly, people, of conservative persuasion, who see this new world as not only perplexing, but as something to be feared. But, that could probably be said in every previous generation. When steam trains were first introduced, people feared that the immense speed would cause passengers heads to come off, and other such nonsense. Fifty years ago, I remember some of the people I worked with came up with one reason after another against computerisation, and tried to frustrate its introduction, and even 30 years ago, when I was charged with introducing a computer system into the council department where I worked, the clerk who currently did the job, never tired, each day, of telling me how it would not possibly work, and was not appropriate to the job she did. It wasn't Luddism in defence of jobs, particularly in her case, because she was retiring, anyway. It was just a normal resistance to change.
And, of course, as Marx points out, these new technologies do not just affect the workplace, and so on, but, necessarily affect the social relations around them. Trains brought town and countryside together, as well as different parts of the country, each of which now had to, for example, abandon its own local time, and adopt a standard time, required for the train timetables. All of this brought a social disruption that millions were not prepared for, and Lenin, in criticising the Narodniks, whose method is the same kind of idealism and subjectivism used by Paul, noted the account by Engels of just how much the lives of millions of people were turned upside down overnight by the Industrial Revolution. It brought with it a whole new set of ideas, and cultural changes.
But, the questions that Paul does not ask are, who are these people that are so fearful, and so form this volatile mass that can be mobilised by the elite, and secondly, who exactly is this elite, and for what purpose is it mobilising them?
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