Though I’ve done precious little of it, I am really getting rather fond of this blogging business. I’ve had some help. One person in particular kindly agreed to patiently answer my (often idiotic) questions about technicalities peculiar to the Harvard blogging world. Others have offered more or less helpful suggestions about content. Still more have written or called to ask why I of all people have undertaken to keep a blog in the first place. To one and all (and especially my adroit tutor), I say “thanks”.
To everyone who has read this far, let me offer an updated explanation of my purpose here on Marxism International. [The fact that haying season — in any event, the first cutting — is now over allows for a bit more time for gratuitous editorializing. I’ll try not to abuse it.]
Though I do not consider myself of the “official” Left (I mean the galaxy of minute warring sects, each claiming to possess the Holy Grail of political purity and united only in their collective inability to attract more than an insignificant fringe of the working class), I have an abiding aversion to the system we call Capitalism. So much so, in fact, that I can categorically state that I loathe the society in which I live as much as Lenin did his, though there are many obvious dissimilarities between his world and mine.
I see American society — the myriad of relationships existing within that society — as hopelessly and definitively corrupt. One cannot “destroy” American corruption. If you destroy the corruption, you destroy the system. Corruption holds the system together. Not articulated goals. Not shared values. Corruption. Or, perhaps I should say; “corrupt reciprocities”; by which I mean the countless thousands of habits and expectations that have been created and nurtured by the dispensation which now has a firm hold upon the imaginations of our civilization. Unlike most on the Left, I locate the source of this malaise not in the market but within the state, and doing away with the capitalist state (as a necessary pre-requisite to doing away with the state, period) is my primary political goal.
“So long as the state exists, there is no freedom; when freedom exists, there will be no state”
Lenin
My primary purpose in blogging in this site is to explore alternatives to the capitalist state, and indeed to the state itself; that is the one topic that transfixes me and defines politically who I am. I am not opposed to markets as such, but I want to see if we can have markets without a state, if we can in fact do without money or an exploiting class or the necessity of having large numbers of people who are wretched as well as poor.
In short, what is needed to render the state superfluous?
I am profoundly unhappy with our present situation here in the West, though I recognize any solution to the abject criminality of capitalism and its state must come primarily from people living within Western society. It is unlikely to come to us courtesy of a “morally” superior developing world (this beast I believe does not exist) nor from some formulae devised by observant but dis-engaged intellectuals.
Hence my interest in alternatives; In the weeks to come, I will be continuing to look at emerging societies, trying to ascertain basically three things: a) What, that is new or prescient, are these societies attempting to achieve? b) Do they have tenable long-term goals? and c) Can we in the West learn anything from their experiences?
I hope mine is not an immodest ambition. Only time will tell. For those of you reading this, I can say honestly that I would enjoy hearing from you. Learning from others makes urgent tasks easier. Or seems to.