Sunday, January 12, 2014

Our American Discomfort with Unsolved Pain

by Lucy S.

I don't have much time, so this won't be written as well as I'd like, but I'll do what I can in 60 minutes or so. I started to write back to a friend of mine who told me we shouldn't stay in the initial slump of depression as we more fully realize how the system functions, but should push onward with renewed strength. The system "wants" us to be depressed, said my friend. What I've written here isn't positioned in any kind of opposition to my friend's stance.  I am not saying that he is for some kind of uncritical, perpetual cheerfulness. Rather, these are things that came to me as I began writing my own thoughts in response. I will share what I wrote (and did not send, deciding instead to make it this post), interwoven with what I am adding now as I go back through it. Bur first, some context:

I recently was fortunate enough to be part of a one week intensive seminar focused on better ways to teach writing to students. My university offered this.  I applied last fall and was among twenty selected from different disciplines.  I love many aspects of this approach to teaching writing - making course and assignment goals align with what is taught along the way and with how students are finally evaluated and assessed. Students are well supported all the way through the process and so they fare better. This caring, constructive approach lines up with my own philosophy of teaching, writing, trying to enact more democracy in our classes, and building relationships with students.

At the same time, there were aspects of my experience in the seminar that hit me hard. A number of faculty from the business department were in our group, along with people from other disciplines who by and large continued to emphasize the need to prepare students to have the skills their corporate employers want. As I noted in my last post, if all goes "well" for these students (and for our university's reputation), these folks will graduate and become the professional-managerial class. If they're lucky, some will become the capitalist class - the elite. Or in various ways, they may become both (owners of businesses, investors, high level executives). At any rate, with all the emphasis on preparing students to meet the demands of their business employers, it sunk in particularly deeply that education, especially at institutions where students pay so much in tuition, is so forced to twist and turn itself to what big business wants.

 And so I had written to my friend something along the lines of what I said in the above two paragraphs, but I additionally expressed that I felt depressed by what I've explained in the second paragraph. My point here isn't to attempt to adequately represent his own undoubtedly more nuanced view or to "debate" whatever that view may be, but instead to share some of the thoughts that came to me as I started to write back.

I already have known for many years that education under capitalism is for getting jobs. That is even what people who aren't at all critical of capitalism already believe. But the big question is always whether we are educating against that grain or whether even our efforts to do so are co-opted back into serving the system. And that is a question that I think everyone not only has to answer for themselves, but will inevitably go on answering in changing ways. Education as it has been delivered for most of the last 60 years in public institutions (free or low cost) is quite different than education as it is increasingly being delivered even in our "public" institutions with their soaring tuition (high tuition with huge student loans for most people or wealthier parents who save up and pay these exorbitant fees).  Disciplines like literature, history, and philosophy start falling apart when they're forced to answer to market logic that way, just as libraries would if it started costing $1000 a year or whatever to belong to your "public" library.

And so more than ever, the pressure is on to turn English into a discipline that churns out good corporate writers. Furthermore, the only ones who can afford to study literature, philosophy, history, etc. "for its own sake" become those in more affluent classes. And that is a massive change from what has been the case in previous post World War II decades.  It works very well for corporate interests for higher ed to change into this kind of structure.

At my university, where students paying full rate for tuition and board (and almost all live there in the dorms) spend $180,000 for their B.A. (in whatever combination that happens - parents paying part; student loans...), it's easy to see why most students major in the things that they think will lead them to making a lot of money when they're done. The degree must "pay." It's not just that they "have to work" under capitalism. It's that they will become the upper-middle to upper class. And we know from Gramsci, Marx, etc. that people by and large behave according to their class interests. My goal isn't to syphon off a tiny amount of class traitors (though that's always nice to have happen), but to be part of educating the working classes to more fully grasp their own position in capitalism. It is in their class interest to actively oppose capitalism because they're the ones most screwed over by it.

The poverty- and working-classes are also the ones far less likely to find that college degrees change their class from working-class to the middle or upper classes.  Jack Conroy wrote about that way back in the early 1930s in The Disinherited - the way that very few working-class people "rose" out of their class by means of higher education - and we're seeing that more and more again now. (I see it in the experience of my two kids with B.A.'s, in my income post-M.A., and in the experiences of so many people working low paying retail and food service jobs after college graduation.)

I know all this on an intellectual level and political theory level, but knowing it in that way and living it are different. This is why the great Brazilian educator Paulo Freire emphasized the importance of "class knowledge." The lived realities that shove you up against the wall, exhausting you, scaring you when you don't know how you'll have enough money, limiting your options, angering you, breaking your heart over and over... these teach you what theory alone cannot.

But I don't think that the system in its American instantiation "wants" us to be depressed. It functions best when most people find ways to be "positive" within it and keep viewing their own and other individual lives in terms of "choice."  Those kind of "positive" and "hopeful" people make the best workers. They "know their place" and at the same time, believe that if they try hard and play by the rules, they and everyone else can make good lives for themselves. People who are upset, sad, angry, etc. are the ones who may organize against capital - we can see it in recent times as well as historically. But in the U.S. this is often cast as some kind of individual problem or even illness. Or it gets romanticized and individualized and directed into expressions of depoliticized personal angst. I am sympathetic to that individual angst, but I think it's crucial to show how it's not just an amorphous despair, as it seems - how its source should be identified in the structure of the system, and how we can then respond to it effectively. But cutting off our mourning, our grief, our chronic pain cannot be the answer, and at any rate, people can't just turn them on and off at will.

In terms of what this means for those of us working in education, it's not that I see it as wrong or foolish to do this work. If I did, I wouldn't root so strongly for friends of mine to get into academic programs or get the positions they're trying for. And I wouldn't do the work myself.  Also, I know the constraints we're all under. But there's no need for people to try to not feel whatever it is they feel, whether that is depression at various times, grief, joy, etc. Some of the strongest people I've known were what gets called "depressed" in American terms. It's just that we're so infused with the contemporary American ideology - the push to be relentlessly "positive" - that we tend to connect that mental state with "strength," and many of us tend to become uncomfortable with people who express their raw pain without any neat and easy solutions to it.

I have found that people who are more invested in the system and are faring pretty well under it, even if they are in theory on the Left, struggle enormously with the cognitive dissonance they feel when presented with other people's testimony that the system is working horribly for them or that their own efforts may be co-opted into perpetuating the same inequalities. (In basic terms, cognitive dissonance is the extreme discomfort people feel when they find out that their beliefs don't match reality.) The work of social psychologist Melvin Lerner is extremely useful here. I will lift something about it from a graduate paper I wrote in fall 2012:

Social psychologist Melvin Lerner’s research, known as the “just world” theory (first published in 1966 and repeatedly followed up and expanded on by a multitude of researchers in a variety of countries), demonstrated that when people encountered others who were suffering, they tended to blame the sufferers if they could do nothing to alleviate their suffering.
[His research] arose, initially, out of the efforts to explain why scientifically trained university students insisted on condemning poverty-stricken victims as “lazy and no good” while denying the evidence of their victimization by overwhelming economic changes. The explanation offered … was that people, for the sake of their security and ability to plan for the future, need to believe they live in an essentially “just” world whereby they can get what they deserve, at least in the long run. This may involve acting to eliminate injustice. But failing that, by blaming, rejecting, or avoiding the victim, or having faith that the victim will eventually be appropriately compensated, people are able to maintain their confidence in the justness of the world in which they must live and work for their future security (Lerner 1).
Most awfully: “The greater the injustice the greater the tendency to denigrate [the victim]” (2). Yet these researchers found that if observers found the victims to be similar to themselves, the blaming did not tend to occur. Thus, they report, homosexuals did not blame homosexuals with AIDS; unemployed people did not blame others for being unemployed; and so on (4). Moreover, the psychologists found that “giving observers instructions to empathize with the victims (imagine it is happening to you) seemed to prevent their victim derogation, as did reminding the observers that they were not supposed to condemn innocent victims” (2).


That paper was about the importance of connecting working-class literature to Critical University Studies, but I could broaden the argument to emphasizing the importance of connecting real working-class lives to critical analyses of the institutions.  And I am using it here to most of all emphasize why it is that many are so uncomfortable with, as I said earlier in here, raw pain that lacks neat and easy solutions.

This isn't to say I'm advocating some kind of "learned helplessness" - quite the opposite - but I'm arguing that those who resist the system best are those who can't find individual solutions or those who have close relationships with people for whom individual solutions fail. As Lerner's research shows, people don't blame others in similar straits.

Demanding that people put on cheerful, ever upbeat facades is not a genuinely progressive demand, nor does it help people who are suffering. When I talk with my cousin Johnny who got out of prison last year, he often expresses anger, bitterness, and profound grief.  It would be disrespectful and damaging for me to start lecturing him about what he can do to "better" himself.  (Not to say I haven't ended up delivering my fair share of disrespectful, moralizing lectures to people that I later regretted - including in some of my comments to people's responses in this blog last year.) The truth is that the system horrifically screwed Johnny - stole so much of his life - left him in a terrible mental and physical state when it finally let him leave its prison.

In 2011, I was volunteering for a project locally and mentioned to the director - a man who'd left his corporate marketing job of 24 years to "give back' to the community - that my cousin was in prison on a 27 years to life sentence for nonviolent crimes relating to his heroin addiction - and this perpetually exuberant person exclaimed with a big smile, "It probably saved his life!!"  It is people from his class that need to put a perpetual happy face on every rotten experience of those who are supposed to thankfully accept the crumbs the system's benefactors hand out to alleviate guilt and cognitive dissonance.  Otherwise,  people like that man would have to interrogate the system they support.

But those of us who want systemic transformation know better. And this is why I say, we need to critically analyze the urge toward cheery positivity within ourselves - the American white middle to upper class norm that makes people so uncomfortable with unsolved pain and so unable to fully accept it without berating or avoiding the person expressing it for being "a downer."

Thinking about my discomfort with not only the last post of mine but so much of what I've written on this blog for the past year, I know that I too am infused with these ideas about being "positive."  This is I think why I feel so guilty when I express pain and anger about the way the system plays out in my life and the lives of many close to me.  And I've chosen to use a lot of my life energy and time in these educational systems, so I too find it hurtful if too much of the meaning in what I do is unraveled.  And it HAS been transformative. I am still trying to sort all of this out,

One last thought: another reason I find myself feeling that something I've strongly expressed is not true enough is because so many of these things are dialectical. Out of the seeming contradictions, we work out a complicated, paradoxical truth that encompasses what seem to be at opposite ends.  And that's true with this topic as well.  We do need (as Frederic Jameson says) the utopian impulse. We need to imagine and try to create better. Mixes of joy, anger, and despair at the possibilities within the system can push us in that utopian direction. And that is probably what my friend was getting at.




Works Cited:

Lerner, Melvin J. and Leo Montada. Responses to Victimization and Belief in a Just World (Critical Issues in Social Justice) New York: Springer, 2010. Print.

24 comments :

  1. Hey Lucy, Yeah I think the last part is really where I was going with my comments. I wasn't meaning to convey that being depressed about higher education or other issues is wrong (or right), or preferable or not, but rather that that's one place we can be, but not stay at. Like you express shifting emotions on an issue, that it's all very complicated. I think anger, rage, depression have an emotional place in the struggle, but only a place, not the only place. But I also think that as the process of disillusionment deepens, that the place and role for anger, rage, and depression ultimately weakens.

    On a different note, negative thinking (a la Marx, Frankfurt School, Marxism) does increase. It's not an opposition between depression and cheeriness. (Why can't, for instance, someone who recognizes what capitalism does also be cheerful/optimistic?) So while positivity is rampant in this society, that doesn't mean that being angered or depressed or upset with this society is a way of counteracting positivity--though it's certainly better than being happy with the way things are. There's a really engrossing body of texts and ideas in Marxism that speak to and situate the issue of the rise of positivity, especially among the Frankfurt School.

    I see my role in higher education (in particular at the graduate level, I think it's a different case at the undergrad level) differently now than I did in the past--even a couple years ago. I see it as an opportunity to pursue my intellectual interests. For me, that means Marxism. No, that's not to say that Marxism is an exercise in philosophy, though it is that, but that a huge tradition of Marxism does include the type of critical activity that people in academics have the opportunity to do. It's really hard to imagine another place in our present society where people can engage in those intellectual debates and deeply engage with and affect the way people think, including the people we teach. Marxism changed the way I see the world. Completely. It re-prioritised my focus, in so many ways. And the fact that I was first exposed to Marxism in academia, and not anywhere else, is revealing. But the fact that Marxism (classical) is basically non-existent in academia is also revealing.
    -A

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  2. *P.S. Not an exercise in philosophy, but a philosophical activity

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  3. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this. Yeah, I don't think of being angry, depressed, actively grieving, etc. as a chosen stance for counteracting positivity. Instead, I think of them as normal fluctuating emotions that people will experience over the course of their lives when they suffer in various ways. This is true for people in all classes (as when they get diseases, see loved ones suffer and die, etc.). For those in the working-classes and poverty-classes (which nowadays includes so many academics) or even those in close relationship with them, there are additional pains and struggles.

    I don't think even a deep understanding of Marxism is going to keep someone from being angry and depressed if they are, for example, homeless, as is the case with a number of PhD students in some of the programs at UC Santa Cruz, because the stipend is not nearly enough to cover the cost of living in that very expensive area. (Some sleep in the libraries on campus.) Nor will it make them feel cheerful and optimistic if they're working as adjuncts either teaching many classes racing around from campus to campus providing a low quality of education to students while they earn little money. Last time I saw K. before he went to India, he mentioned a friend teaching four classes in Louisiana at a community college. The college allowed in 30 students per class - already so many students to teach - but right before the semester began, they upped it to 45 per class. That professor very well might feel angry and overwhelmed - and may doubt the point of his work at that point.

    Just some thoughts... Thanks for the dialogue.

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  4. I should have added one other thing about that Louisiana professor. If he's an adjunct, he might be making a total of $16,000 a year for the eight classes (fall and spring), or $24,000 a year if he works summers there. He'd be working most of his waking hours every day during the semesters. This is becoming the norm in academia. I'm not saying people shouldn't still go into it, because I agree with you that it provides access to experiences and knowledge that are hard to come by elsewhere in society. I'm only saying that people in it, even with a Marxist understanding of society and their place in it, are still likely to feel plenty of pain and anger.

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  5. Hey, I just read an excellent piece in Chronicle of Higher Education. I'll paste the link here; i think it won't be active, but you can copy and paste it. http://chronicle.com/article/OveruseAbuse-of-Adjuncts/143951/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

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  6. Weird, I wrote a comment and it didn't come up. Trying again, but shorter:

    Yeah, I agree with you on both of your above comments.
    Having a Marxist understanding does help, tremendously. Many revolutions--Russia, others in Latin America--were sparked not merely by the oppressive conditions, but were actually hugely and directly influenced by Marxist thought. Theory becomes a weapon, as Marx says, when it reaches a certain point, in particular a collective point. Marxism offers something that merely a description of what is going on, such as those found in mainstream presses including Chronicle or CNN, cannot offer. It's a force that transforms the entire way of thinking and seeing, and inevitably, at some point down the road, maybe generations, maybe sooner, living. I know also for myself (and a few other orthodox Marxists that I know), it also changes the way emotions are processed, because emotions are thoroughly intertwined with thought (and not only with the conditions as such).

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  7. Can you say a little more about what the change in how emotions are processed actually means for you? Changes them from what to what? I can't say that I experience Marxism as something that makes me feel less despair. If anything, I felt more hopeful before studying more of it, because it makes it clear how inevitably destructive and voracious capitalism is, so it can become harder to put effort into reformist approaches. It can tend to elicit an "all or nothing" approach at times, though not inevitably. And it isn't a religion; if many ecosystems on the planet are destroyed or the living reality of someone is filled with suffering (as is the case with too many people in this world) or someone you love is suffering, it does nothing in itself as a theory to carry in one's head to change that. It always has to be applied to current conditions in specific places by specific people - which is why I think it's vital for people to understand the systems they're a part of. Marx himself was actively involved in trying to get Lincoln elected in the U.S. because he analyzed the political realities at that time and concluded that doing away with slavery was crucial to moving forward (and believed Lincoln would do it).

    What made the difference in the Cuban Revolution was seeing people like Che Guevara put into living practice the care for those around him. When they were in the Sierra Maestra, he and others won so many local people to their side - people who were poor peasants - by setting up makeshift schools and medical clinics in the camps and by appropriating food and distributing it. It gave people an example of what life might actually be like if the revolution against Batista succeeded. And without the massive numbers of people who were won over by those kinds of experiences, the small number of theoretical Marxists could never have gotten anywhere. In Man and Socialism, he famously wrote:

    "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality... We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force."

    Theory has to be applied to current realities, and there has to be profound concern with the living beings around us now and with our life as we live it or else there is the risk of it becoming something cold and even dangerous if people who adhere to that cold version get enough power. (That happened in the USSR and with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, for example.) There can be this sense that particular lives don't matter. And if they don't matter, why would other particular lives en masse that maybe don't exist, but are only an idea - a future possibility - people who might be born - matter?

    But Marxism is grounded in material realities, so I think it's always bound to the particular and the now.

    I don't mean this as a counter-point to what you're saying, as if it's in opposition to that, but as what comes to mind reading your response and continuing to think about these things.


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  8. I just had that happen, too. I wrote a comment and it was there, and now it's gone.

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  9. In Marxist theoretical activity, theory is not applied to concrete realities. Its the opposite. Concrete realities are studied and then abstracted. That's what makes it theoretical. Think of theoretical physics; though it's not the same, the practice is guided by actual physics, and then it is generalized out from there. Theory is particular and general. It's not only the particular here and now, but it's also the general situation and explaining it theoretically.

    That's what makes Marxism concrete. It does engage with actual reality, but it doesn't stop there. It abstracts from it, as a mental endeavor, in order for "the thinking head to appropriate the world" (Marx). Thought guides action, and vice versa. Dialetically.

    To me, Marxism IS hope. The greatest hope humanity came up with. The most riveting and engaging and truthful analysis of human society, begun not only with Marx, though Marx revolutionised it forever.

    The word Marxism is just a term. But what it involves is not a belief (and certainly not a religion). It is actually, according to its founders, a science.

    Studying Marxism is disllusioning. But that is different from hope. I would rather be disillusioned, than live with false hope (ideology). That is what Marxism provides, without falling into resignation or cynicism.

    It's a whole rich tradition of ideas and texts. It's so inspiring. And the changes it has inspired in entire countries--nothing else has had that impact. Russia. China. Latin America. All revolutions helped guided by Marxist thought.

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  10. I think concrete realities are studies and abstracted, but then that theory is applied onto concrete realities. Otherwise, it wouldn't have any use. It only brings hope if it can be applied. The idea of everything that people feel and try and create while not knowing Marxist theory or not having that understanding of their experience and society - the idea of that being a deluded life "inside" ideology while those who "truly" know it being above ideology has its problems. Eagleton talks about that in his book Ideology: An Introduction. I don't know if I see Marxism as a science, though some people insist that it is. I see it as a political theory and philosophy and practice in its various incarnations. Does it meet the definition of a science? Not sure. If so, it would be vital to know the history very well of where the ideas have been used, and to study what sometimes when horrifically wrong. and why That would seem to be part of a scientific approach.

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    1. Typo: "concrete realities are studied...."

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    2. Man, I don't know what's wrong with my writing these days.... "what sometimes went horrifically wrong and why."

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  11. "I think concrete realities are studies and abstracted, but then that theory is applied onto concrete realities."

    True. That makes it dialectical. So therefore Marxism is both concrete and theoretical/abstract, It's not just concrete materiality.

    "It only brings hope if it can be applied."
    Hence, revolutions in Russia, China, and Latin America. Marxist thought applied.

    "The idea of everything that people feel and try and create while not knowing Marxist theory or not having that understanding of their experience and society - the idea of that being a deluded life "inside" ideology while those who "truly" know it being above ideology has its problems. Eagleton talks about that in his book Ideology: An Introduction."

    It's not that Marxists know something that others don't, or that life is deluded without Marxism. It's that Marxism provides a powerful ANTIDOTE to capitalist thought (ideology). It's not about a pure state of thought (doesn't exist), but about having the theoretical apparatus to resist capitalist thinking.

    "I don't know if I see Marxism as a science, though some people insist that it is. I see it as a political theory and philosophy and practice in its various incarnations. Does it meet the definition of a science? Not sure. If so, it would be vital to know the history very well of where the ideas have been used, and to study what sometimes when horrifically wrong. and why That would seem to be part of a scientific approach."

    Marx, Engels, Lucaks, Mao, Lenin--all major, fundamental thinkers in Marxist tradition all insist it is a science; i.e. it has a scientific nature. It's okay if you or I don't see it as a science, but major, defining thinkers who have spent 50+ years in the tradition think it is. Frankfurt School also did just that--studied what happened to Russia under Stalinism. They criticized it, to learn what happened. Yes, it is also political, but in its approach it uses a scientific method.


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  12. Yeah, I agree that it's a powerful antidote to capitalist thinking - definitely. When I question whether it is a science, I'm questioning whether it meets the objective definition of a science. Yes, Frankfurt School did that, and that's important. Mao's leadership in China was pretty horrible. More than 40 million died because of policies implemented; it was top down leadership with people lying about production abilities at many levels in order to please the authorities who reported up the ladder. There were mass executions and starvation. Most people don't trust Marxism because of the ways it was applied in China and the USSR, and the aftermath of rampant capitalism there brings up further questions. I guess the science itself is "political science" or history as an academic discipline, and then Marxism is the theory used, don't you think? I mean, if "geology" is a science, then a particular theory of geology isn't in itself the science.

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  13. I would hesitate to try to include Marxism into an objective definition of a science. Objective, in what sense? The crucial point is that Marxism is not merely a theory, it is a methodology; It is a way (a method) of studying society. That is probably it's most lasting contribution. Geology has its methods. Marxism has its methods.

    When speaking of Mao, of course everyone knows the situation that happened, but I am referring to his texts and ideas in theoretical Marxism.

    Stalinism and Maoism are easy ways that peopel write off Marxism. But they will not do the same to write of capitalism--which has killed billions of people, and routinely starves hundreds of millions more.

    The USSR had its successes--as much as its failures. Most Russians are terribly proud of USSR. The decline into Stalinism is the case of a dictator. Look into Lenin's contributions--theoretically and practically. He galvanized a nation, and helped millions of poor peasants realize a better life for themselves.

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  14. Yeah, it's true that capitalism is not interrogated in that way because people tend to see it as "just life" rather than a specific way of organizing society. But there are people who are highly critical of capitalism yet who question the top-down ways that implemented Marxism has played out in the 20th century. Zizek has written about the terrible blow to Marxism caused by the ways the USSR and China turned out. It didn't take long in the USSR for Stalinism to take over.

    Well, you already know that I'm no fan of capitalism. The question for me is what we are to do in our own times - how we are to address the specific realities of our particular lives as well as respond in some way to these large questions, such as those brought up by climate change. I read a good article in Jacobin about this, calling for a guaranteed income as a way to address both the jobs question and the ecological ones. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/alive-in-the-sunshine/

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  15. Just responding briefly since I'm burning out on the computer (work), but:

    "It didn't take long in the USSR for Stalinism to take over." It's not a question of time. You have to read the history of what happened. Lenin started to fall ill, and Stalin was one of his sub-commanders. When Lenin went to take a health break in the country to recover, Stalin grabbed the power, as a dictator. The focus, in any case, needs to be more on Lenin's period, in part to counteract the tendency to equate USSR with Stalin. A bad choice, inherited from Red Scare. Lenin is the main figure.

    To do in our own times: a huge question. But I know for sure that theoretical Marxism will need to play a huge role in preparing the way for socialism.

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  16. I know the history. Questioning Stalinism is not a bad choice. it's been done by many who don't at all support the Red Scare. Stalin wasn't a supernatural god. We have to ask why he was able to do what he did. What authoritarianism bound to maybe a fundamentalist simplistic worship-like stance allowed it? What is the explanation for what happened with Mao? Or the brutal way the Khmer Rouge dealt with their fellow Cambodians? North Korea? Marxism as a theory is tremendously valuable. But Marxism without democracy becomes another way for an upper class and a buffer class of managers to dominate the majority of the humans under them.

    Capitalism is structured to demand profit above all. That aim permeates society, so employers pay the least they can to maximize profit - though capitalists may pay managers enough to try to ensure loyalty to them rather than to the majority whom they manage - and investors want the most profit on their money, and "consumers" want the best deal on what they buy - and markets must expand in order to ensure continuing profit, meaning continual growth, even as that growth devours ecosystems and people's lives. Capitalism has put the whole planet in crisis.

    We need a real response by enough of humanity to this crisis, and we need it soon. If we want that response to not include intentional extermination by various means of many millions, we need something substantively democratic - not what we have here. (which is in so many ways undemocratic) and not what was done in USSR or China, but the kind of bottom up councils and mass participation in the early manifestations of the "soviets" (the workers' groups - which could also be neighborhood groups).

    This is why I believe broad education is crucial. It does no good to the rest of our society if you or I walk around with Marxist theory inside our heads (or the study of literature or historical knowledge). You or I may "enjoy" it, and you or I may even be able to parlay our education into a job producing more of the professional-managerial class to go do capital's bidding, but as I said in my post, only a small number will become "class-traitors." And being a "class-traitor" doesn't mean knowing something; it means actively taking a stand with the working-class and poverty-class rather than with those who dominate and exploit and kill them. Recognizing one's position in all this isn't enough. This is a common contemporary phenomenon; as Zizek describes it: they know it and they are doing it anyway.

    Once we are in the position of 'knowing it but doing it anyway,' we can either become cynical so that with all self-awareness we keep participating full-speed ahead with no pain because it suits our individual interests for now, or we can dive back under other delusions, or we can realize our position and agonize over it as it eats away at us because we feel and may be trapped, or we can try to actively try to change the situation. Maybe people move back and forth between these states and blend them in various ways. But I don't see how anyone who understands these realities well enough and wants an end to the massive harm inflicted on the majority of humanity by the upper layers and the capitalist system would not find it painful to live their lives producing those whose job it is to keep dominating and exploiting.

    And this is what I struggle with. Gramsci said we need organic intellectuals - intellectuals not only from the working class but who remain bound to that class. I'm trying to understand how to be an organic intellectual and help others do that. At the same time, I've been struggling with pain about my own income and the situation with my loved ones. But the point is to work on these things in solidarity with others rather than being upset about my situation as if it should be something different than it is while we're in the system we're in. The goal isn't to individually rise, but to change society.

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  17. I'm still thinking about this. My old political science professor used to simplify it by saying that if you have to work for your income rather than living on other people's labor as a capitalist, then you're in the working class. Maybe that builds more solidarity and is more accurate. The question is who gains if we collectively own the means of production and reap the benefits together, so that we can work far less hours, do more meaningful work, live sustainably, and care for one another far better. I think most or all people who work for an income in the current system would benefit enormously. Our quality of life would be so much better.

    As I think about it, it's hard to classify people in the professional / managerial class as all doing capital's bidding. What about those who teach and try so hard to help their students - as Delaine just wrote about and as I know she does from knowing her - or others like her? Or me? I make a low income now, but I'm still teaching at a college. And I don't think it's wrong to study or create because we "enjoy" something. We aren't after Puritanism. So I'm still thinking about this.

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  18. I like what you say.

    "But I don't see how anyone who understands these realities well enough and wants an end to the massive harm inflicted on the majority of humanity by the upper layers and the capitalist system would not find it painful to live their lives producing those whose job it is to keep dominating and exploiting.

    And this is what I struggle with. Gramsci said we need organic intellectuals - intellectuals not only from the working class but who remain bound to that class. I'm trying to understand how to be an organic intellectual and help others do that. At the same time, I've been struggling with pain about my own income and the situation with my loved ones. But the point is to work on these things in solidarity with others rather than being upset about my situation as if it should be something different than it is while we're in the system we're in. The goal isn't to individually rise, but to change society. "

    Thanks for expressing that so clearly. That helped me to understand more clearly what you were getting at.

    Of course I feel pain knowing the reality of existence under capitalism. And it's a pain of not merely knowing theoretically, but practically. I think the recognition, at times, *has* made it harder. But perhaps that is okay. I meant it when I said that I would rather be able to see clearly the crushing, brutal reality of life in capitalism, than to see everything going on and not know what it came from. Before I would see all the problems separately, and I couldn't really understand why they were happening. I guess that is part of what Marxism provided--a way to understand that. So of course that is painful, that learning. But it helped.

    "My old political science professor used to simplify it by saying that if you have to work for your income rather than living on other people's labor as a capitalist, then you're in the working class."

    That is the traditional Marxist understanding of class. The way Marx conceived it, and some other economists before him too.

    Anyway, glad to have the back-and-forth. Don't know I can contribute anymore for a while, as I need a break, but perhaps another time, so don't think I just fell off the loop.

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  19. Yeah, that is it exactly for me - what you say about knowing where the brutality of life came from - it's true. It's better to understand than to have a sense of bewilderment or to just think that some people are really mean and "if only" they would be kinder... Yes, it's good to go back and forth like this. It helps me think more deeply about something.

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  20. Important article connecting to these issues. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/in-the-name-of-love/

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  21. I was remembering what my plan was when I started teaching at my university last fall. The idea was to teach a class there and to teach at a community college, once I got experience, and to let those experiences inform one another in various ways, such as trying to give my community college students the same quality of education, at least to the extent that it depends upon me - to give them what the friend at my university calls a handcrafted education rather than an off the rack one. It's important fro me to remember that.

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