The fact that committed liberals and supporters of capital rose to power within a government and party ostensibly in the business of advancing a communist project is an indictment of it in my eyes.
It makes sense that it was the leaders of industrial projects who stood to gain from their privatisation, but it isn’t great that the architects of the plundering of Russia and the other post soviet states had risen to leadership positions with the communist party, within soviet academia, or gotten posts in the supreme soviet
They suffered from the exact same problem that Western communists suffer from. People who were interested in communism as an ideological and historical project went into academia, those who were not went into industry, military, and government. Imo, the primary contradiction that a successful revolution must overcome is that which binds industry to the academy. Workers must learn how to facilitate their democracy and express their political power primarily through their knowledge and development of industry, something the USSR attempted to do but never actually succeeded at.
That is an interesting point. Mental labor and manual labor are considered as fundamentally different kinds of labor, but it’s worth questioning where this notion comes from.
Before the universities were the guilds which were (I think, not a historian) more closely bound up with production, even monopolizing their trade. Only with bourgeois development were the guilds converted into the liberal arts academies we know today, where abstract knowledge is pursued as an end in itself, and by means of pure contemplation in certain departments (ahem, the philosophers).
I don’t mean this as any kind of anti-intellectual rant, but only as a critique of the specific form taken by modern intellectualism.
Coming back to your point about workers reclaiming intellectual production, I’m reminded of the first three of Marx’s theses on Feuerbach, especially #3:
III
The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.
The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.
Although taken a bit out of context — Marx is directing this at the “mechanical” materialists — the warning still applies, that there cannot be a group that detaches itself from society and looks inward. Intellectual labor and theory production need to be kept in close contact with manual labor and material production. This is to prevent the “ivory tower” of academia, but also to restore the ownership of production by the manual laborers like you said. In a communist society there would not be such a strict separation of these two ostensibly opposite kinds of labor.
Side note, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology by Alfred Sohn-Rethel has been on my reading list for a while, but it’s on this topic. Not sure how much Frankfurt School brainworms are in it, but it’s an important contribution nonetheless.
My critique is also not to necessarily disparage the USSR, as I think part of how that developed was a consequence of their place in industrial development and need to place the expediency of specialized and differentiated industrial labor processes above an idealized communist factory, which they still attempted btw. They clearly did what they could with what they had, but hell, part of the Koch fortune came from advising the USSR on oil processing, they were simply not in the economic position Marx had theorized about.
Ideally we could live in society where one could work as a factory engineer for one month, a mechanic the next, and a line worker the next, because we do not need the process efficiency that capitalism demands. The factory process becomes piecework and human again.
I’m hoping China learned something from this and doesn’t let the same thing happen to them. Not sure how you stop it in a democracy, though, unless you can read someone’s mind to know they’re a lib.
The fact that committed liberals and supporters of capital rose to power within a government and party ostensibly in the business of advancing a communist project is an indictment of it in my eyes. It makes sense that it was the leaders of industrial projects who stood to gain from their privatisation, but it isn’t great that the architects of the plundering of Russia and the other post soviet states had risen to leadership positions with the communist party, within soviet academia, or gotten posts in the supreme soviet
They suffered from the exact same problem that Western communists suffer from. People who were interested in communism as an ideological and historical project went into academia, those who were not went into industry, military, and government. Imo, the primary contradiction that a successful revolution must overcome is that which binds industry to the academy. Workers must learn how to facilitate their democracy and express their political power primarily through their knowledge and development of industry, something the USSR attempted to do but never actually succeeded at.
That is an interesting point. Mental labor and manual labor are considered as fundamentally different kinds of labor, but it’s worth questioning where this notion comes from.
Before the universities were the guilds which were (I think, not a historian) more closely bound up with production, even monopolizing their trade. Only with bourgeois development were the guilds converted into the liberal arts academies we know today, where abstract knowledge is pursued as an end in itself, and by means of pure contemplation in certain departments (ahem, the philosophers).
I don’t mean this as any kind of anti-intellectual rant, but only as a critique of the specific form taken by modern intellectualism.
Coming back to your point about workers reclaiming intellectual production, I’m reminded of the first three of Marx’s theses on Feuerbach, especially #3:
Although taken a bit out of context — Marx is directing this at the “mechanical” materialists — the warning still applies, that there cannot be a group that detaches itself from society and looks inward. Intellectual labor and theory production need to be kept in close contact with manual labor and material production. This is to prevent the “ivory tower” of academia, but also to restore the ownership of production by the manual laborers like you said. In a communist society there would not be such a strict separation of these two ostensibly opposite kinds of labor.
Side note, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology by Alfred Sohn-Rethel has been on my reading list for a while, but it’s on this topic. Not sure how much Frankfurt School brainworms are in it, but it’s an important contribution nonetheless.
I will have to check it out. Thanks!
My critique is also not to necessarily disparage the USSR, as I think part of how that developed was a consequence of their place in industrial development and need to place the expediency of specialized and differentiated industrial labor processes above an idealized communist factory, which they still attempted btw. They clearly did what they could with what they had, but hell, part of the Koch fortune came from advising the USSR on oil processing, they were simply not in the economic position Marx had theorized about.
Ideally we could live in society where one could work as a factory engineer for one month, a mechanic the next, and a line worker the next, because we do not need the process efficiency that capitalism demands. The factory process becomes piecework and human again.
I’m hoping China learned something from this and doesn’t let the same thing happen to them. Not sure how you stop it in a democracy, though, unless you can read someone’s mind to know they’re a lib.
At the very least, China didn’t basically lose a generation in a recent world war. So they’ll have more good people to choose from