The next wave of the Left

“As a cohort, throughout the world, our generation didn't "solve it." We didn't solve the problems of health, education, food, and injustice in the world,” writes one of my oldest comrades in struggle, Daniel del Solar in some recent reflections. He and I are Zeitgenossen, to use Heinrich Böll's unimprovable term -- comrades of our era, in our case, those who reached voting age right around the time of the Cuban missile crisis (October 1962).

Danny's right. We didn't accomplish all the things we dreamed of, but he and I and tens or even hundreds of thousands of us sure made the effort. Not always wisely -- we were young and inexperienced, and for the most part without the benefit of counsel from older cohorts of struggle, for the reasons I noted in last Friday's note ("My '68"). And even if we had been wiser, we still would have made mistakes because the world is complicated, and one can never quite predict the consequences of any change we make. But those sit-ins, mass demonstrations, confrontations with police, leafletting and (Danny's specialty) radio and TV broadcasts to make more people aware and to mobilize them to demand civil rights for people of all races, an end to the war in Vietnam, and all the other issues we took on, all of that did make a difference. Even beyond the specific, usually small victories (securing the release of particular political prisoners, forcing the state to explain its actions, and so on), we helped save the dignity of the human race. We kept the ancestral tradition of protest against inequality alive, the tradition of the Left. And now, though some of us (including Danny) are still in the struggle, it's approaching time to hand over that tradition to the next generations.

The problems they face include some that we were only dimly aware of. Global warming and deterioration of the habitability of the planet are the biggest ones. Dangers of nuclear war, depredations of trans- and multinational enterprises in weaker countries, and racism -- such as the latest assaults on Rumanian gypsies in Italy -- are ones we are very familiar with.

The left that we, my Zeitgenossen, the generation of the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam and so on, knew came apart around the same time, and for the same reasons, as the Soviet Union and its bloc. Most of us had long since abandoned the illusion that the USSR could be the model for world revolution, but its sudden disappearance gave force to the new slogan, "There is no alternative" (TINA) -- that is, no alternative to capitalist domination.

There are and always will be alternatives. Capitalism, the reduction of all things and all humans to commodities and/or factors of production, runs counter to the inerradicable human drive of solidarity which has permitted our race to survive this long. So there will always be resistence, and there is right now, under a dozen different slogans. "Another world is possible," "Greenpeace," groups focusing on women's rights, others on "Third World," others on amnesty for prisoners of conscience, and more. The task now, as it was for us (combining civil rights and antiwar movements into one big movement) and for our immediate predecessors (the "Popular Front" of the 1930s) and for their predecessors, is to bring enough of these narrower causes together to make an impact.

And the task for us, my Zeitgenossen, is to offer what experience and energy we can to help the new guys and gals. They should be smart enough to ignore us when we're spouting irrelevancies, and to find in our successes and our mistakes lessons they can use. Some of them may even be curious enough to look at this and other blogs of us '60s people.

I'm enthusiastic about a lot of the newest Leftists. Here's just one I think we should be watching: Olivier Besancenot, who is only 34 and already a force in France. He is now seen by François Hollande and other leaders of the Parti socialiste as their biggest threat on the left, far more dangerous than the once-feared Parti communiste. His proposals make sense to me, and he makes sense to enough Frenchfolk that he got 4.25% of their votes in presidential elections in 2002 (when he was 28).

The ever-shifting self

If you've seen my notes on William James and Daniel Dennett, or if you've read my book Hispanic Nation, you know I'm fascinated by the processes by which we assemble, disguise and change our "identities" -- or to put it in older terms, how we perceive and project our "selves." The intro by Christopher Looby to this early American novel, Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself by Robert Montgomery Bird, reminds us of David Hume's very radical interpretation of this problem -- which is also the subject of Bird's novel. If you haven't read or don't remember Hume's argument (basically, that the "self" is an illusion), click on the link to Looby's introduction and do a search for Hume.

Which way is Left? (3) - Thinking otherwise

In previous notes, I've discussed the ideas of Ulrich Beck (Roots & Wings, 9/30) and, last Friday, Vidal-Beneyto (The Spanish Exception). In our recent visit to Paris I picked up the latest book of another sociologist, Alain Touraine, whose work has interested me since his publications 40+ years ago on workers' consciousness in São Paulo.

In the course of his long career, Touraine (Hermanville-sur-Mer, France, 1925) has not only explored consciousness and social change among the oppressed, but has also worked to facilitate both. With workers in Latin America and Poland, or more recently with Muslim women in France, his research design has been a guided dialogue (guided by sociologists) among activists, with the objective of helping those activists understand their situation better so as to act to change it. Since 1992, he has been summing up these experiences for the rest of us in a series of books, of which this is the latest:

Touraine, Alain. Penser autrement. Paris: Fayard, 2007.

He begins with a critique of what he calls the "dominant interpretive discourse" (discours interprétatif dominant) or DID of the past 60 years. The 19th century had effectively killed God (i.e., an eternal and unchanging moral arbiter beyond our reach), and then the horrors of the 20th century (world wars, genocide, etc.) destroyed our faith in God's replacement, Progress (better and juster society through the advance of science and technology). Then, before the world's thinkers could recover from the shock of World War II, they were split by an Iron Curtain that almost completely blocked new social thought on either side. The sudden and unexpected collapse of that curtain left intellectuals on both sides without any clear idea of where to go next and deepened their pessimism that human beings could even affect the course of our history. From such pessimism arose what Touraine calls the "dominant interpretive discourse", that our lives are shaped by forces beyond our control, and any contrary idea is an illusion or "false consciousness." According to the DID, our individual lives are ruled by material and sexual instincts that we barely understand and can't change, our social lives by the market, especially the mechanisms of global capitalism. This is a view of a society without "actors" (acteurs), that is, human beings capable of acting upon and changing their situation. Such a desperate view of our possibilities encourages people to behave completely narcissistically, with no sense of any larger social purpose or moral control. For those with power, it's all about money and how to get more of it, with no reason to regard the poor. For those without, it's also sometimes about money and survival, but also about something more precarious, personal identity, the precariousness of trying to be recognized as a human being with rights. Among the social consequences of such desperation among the poor are delinquency and "identity politics," including the many forms of fascism or extreme, exclusionary nationalism we see all over the globe, even in places thought to be as staid and stolid as Belgium and Switzerland (not to mention ex-Yugoslavia, Pakistan, Sudan, Guatemala, etc.) Among the social consequences of the irresponsible behavior of the powerful, eager to exploit and profit from the turbulence of the less powerful, are wars and global warming.

The second half of Touraine's new book is his proposal to "think differently" -- penser autrement. It is a continuation of an argument he has been developing in a series of books since 1992: that we don't need faith in either God or Progress, but in ourselves. And the self that you or I or Touraine needs to look to is what he calls "el double", the better self or ideal self that I or you imagine and constantly compare with our practical, here-and now selves: a self with rights, affirming its "right to have rights." Most importantly, this must be a self that recognizes equal "rights to have rights" in all the other selves we encounter.

Touraine insists that this is not just wishful thinking, but a description of something that is already happening all around us. In myriad groups, organized around concerns ranging from global warming to neighborhood deterioration or, what he takes to be the most significant change-agent today, women's rights, people are coming together, discovering their differences and how to accept and even profit from them in terms of personal growth. In the end, Touraine's proposed solution, or path to a solution, to the world's problems is parallel to and quite compatible with Ulrich Beck's: we liberate ourselves and one another through social movements, by which he means self-conscious organizations (conscious of our aims and of the conditions in which we struggle) to confront whatever form of oppression we experience.

Like Vidal-Beneyto, Touraine thinks that the "Left" is exhausted and has nothing more to offer us, but that is because both thinkers think of the Left the way the Left thought of itself in recent decades -- the decades of the "dominant interpretive discourse" where individuals counted for nothing, and only a mass organization led by an enlightened elite had a chance of effecting change. And since the forces of global capitalism were so strong and pervasive, the only change worth struggling for was a total, violent rupture with the present order, that is, revolution.

But the Left (at least in my mind) is and always has been something much more valuable and more permanent, since long before the French Communist Party (Touraine's bête noire) and similar outfits tried to congeal it. That something was never better expressed than in 1789, exactly 200 years before the collapse of Soviet communism: liberté, égalité, fraternité. And those are the values that Touraine is working to recover.

My earliest contact with this thinker, research still worth reading:

Touraine, Alain. "Industrialisation et conscience ouvrière à São Paulo." Sociologie du Travail Octobre-décembre.4 (1961).

Roots & wings

In his much-praised recent book, Ulrich Beck, German sociologist and professor at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich, demonstrates why neither nation-states nor international capital alone can save us from the many dangers of the "globalized" globe, and proposes an alliance of these two forces (which can't be ignored) with global "civil society" movements -- not to withdraw from globalization, but to engage it and realize its potential for making a better world for all of us.

Beck, Ulrich. Power in the Global Age: A New Global Political Economy. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity, 2005.

Beck argues that: 1. The most urgent problems are now too global to be dealt with effectively by any state (global warming, pollution, exhaustion of carbon fuels, AIDS and other diseases, immigration, terrorism, etc.); 2. Transnational organizations (UN, WTO, NATO, etc.) are clumsy and ineffective, because they are still playing by obsolete "rules" of seeking common ground among states rather than among citizens; 3. Global capital is thus unrestrained by laws except companies' own "extralegal laws" of agreements among themselves, and exercises power over states by nonviolent means of threatening not to invest (in, say, Bolivia, if its laws become too uncomfortable) -- though companies do have to invest somewhere in order to survive, and fierce competition among and within companies makes their leaders' power precarious; 4. Global NGOs can exploit the vunerabilities of global capital (e.g., by organizing consumer boycotts) and pressuring states (e.g., by mobilizing voters and demonstrators), either to solve terrible humanitarian or ecological problems (e.g., Greenpeace, Amnesty International) or exacerbating them (e.g., al-Qaeda -- which is another kind of global nongovernmental organization).

The only hope for humanity is for these three forces (states, which are still necessary instruments of power, enlightened global capital, and global civil society) to combine forces as cosmopolitans, meaning that they feel themselves as belonging simultaneously to the cosmos and to the polis ("glocalization"), not to impose a Western vision of democracy or American culture or any other particular ideology ("universalism" of this sort is imperialism), but recognizing and accepting "the otherness of others" (die Andersheit der Anderen), different strokes for different folks, all recognizing one another's rights to live in a better world.

He says all that in far too many words (my favorite, from p. 286, is Globalisierungsbefürwortungsgegner, rendered by the translator as "opponents of the pro-globalization lobby") and occasionally surrealist metaphors (cosmopolitans should have "both roots and wings" he says over and over), repeats ideas and even phrases, and tells you many things that you already knew (e.g., Pres. Bush's attempt to impose his own sketchily-developed vision of a world order has had and can only have disastrous results, in Iraq and everywhere). Still, the basic ideas (the 4 points numbered above) are probably valid and well worth thinking about and maybe even acting upon -- the utopian (his term) cosmopolitan vision is a lot better than any of the alternatives under discussion.

Thanks to Professor Christopher Leo (University of Winnipeg) for suggesting the importance of this book. For other interesting postings by this astute reader of social theory, see his blog, Christopher Leo.

Blue day, somewhat cloudy

Tammet, Daniel. (2006). Born on a Blue Day: A Memoir of Asperger's and an Extraordinary Mind. London, Hodder & Stoughton.

Tammet's Asperger's and autism take the form of "Savant Syndrome," a combination of extraordinary abilities and equally extraordinary disabilities-- he's a whiz with numbers, helpless in personal interaction, can learn a new language in a week but can't converse spontaneously, sees details far more sharply than almost anyone but fails to notice larger patterns -- he may see your nose but not your face. He cares about people, but has no empathy: that is, he does not sense what it is they feel, and thus either does not respond at all or responds in startlingly inappropriate ways, taking in only the literal sense of another person's words. It is surprising and admirable that he could write a readable book, and his descriptions of how he experiences events are valuable clues as to how the brain processes information (apparently his left lobe is somehow damaged so the right does almost all the work). But be warned: a book by a very bright person who has no empathy with an imagined reader nor any notion of the overall pattern of what he is writing can be no more than a string of informative but emotionally flat episodes.

See Daniel Tammet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and

Optimnem: The Official Website of Daniel Tammet; when I'm ready to try again to improve my German, or learn some other new language, I'll try out his system.

Thanks to my friend Jeanne Durban for suggesting this book.

Understanding the world in hopes of changing it

(Regarding the Israeli assault on Lebanon and the petition of U.S. Jews mentioned below, I just sent this note to my friends in Ramallah, Lois & Khalil Nakhleh. Khalil is an anthropologist and all-round intellectual; years ago he and I were colleagues in the Sociology and Anthropology Department of St. John's University in Minnesota.)

I don't know what I can do. Something, I hope. I didn't sign this petition because I'm not Jewish, but I've signed others. It's a small gesture, barely noticed anywhere, but then, even serious, risk-taking journalism is not taken into account by the decision-makers. And I'm a little old for such adventures, anyway, and my skills are different. The only thing I can think to do -- to save my conscience, if not the world -- is try to understand and then explain events clearly enough that other people may avoid repeating such barbarities. Sociology and fiction (the two modalities in which I write) work slowly, painfully slowly, but it is better to affect generations of the future than to surrender and have no effect at all.

But it really is false consciousness

Somehow I missed this essay by David Brooks when it came out--the clearest explanation I've read recently about why America keeps coddling the rich. Thanks to Eva Das for pointing it out.

Gatsby, Ralph, and rescuing the rich

Finally, something about literature AND politics. I don't usually read the "Styles" section in The NYT, but today I found a real treasure: a hilarious and highly literate story by Cathy Horyn on a Prince of Superficiality: Chasing the Threads in the Life of Ralph Lauren. Horyn was amused to find that our hero likes to compare himself to the title character of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. (Correction to an earlier note: Ralph designed the clothes for the male leads in the 1974 movie; thanks to Kate Coe for pointing out my error; due to too-hasty reading, I thought he'd merely seen the movie.) Horyn comments that the two may have much more in common than Lauren imagines. "I think it's more useful to look at Mr. Lauren," she writes, "and the source of our fascination with him, in a literary way. And the obvious parallel is Fitzgerald's bootlegger, Gatsby. Both came from nowhere; both prize the trappings of old money but have made theirs in new ways,..." etc. But read the article, and think back on Fitzgerald's (not Hollywood's) Gatsby as you ponder the Bush administration's new tax plans for the rich.