Rethink Everything (Maybe It's Always Been This Way)
Arico, José
HISTORICALLY THE LEFT--THE WORLD LA- bor and socialist movement of the last hundred years--has always presumed the existence of an objective, a program, an organized force capable of...
...We have entered a period of cultural struggle...
...The Left has lauded it and criticized it, but it has never discussed or evaluated it...
...Perhaps the world has always been this way, and we on the Left only thought it was otherwise...
...The grand issues are finally rising to the surface: world government, a new design for the world, new types of international organizations, overcoming North-South oppression, the limits of national capitalism, a new type of state...
...NeiThis article is based on an interview with Argentine historian Josd Aric6 conducted by Report on the Americas editorMark FriedinApril oflastyear...
...It defends the status quo, and fights the old battles for employment and decent wages...
...If socialists are to change the rules of capitalism they can't do it only by changing government policy...
...If past experience is any indication, they don't seem up to the task...
...In any case, this transformation of the productive system will require rethinking and remaking the institutions of society...
...Not that socialists should avoid taking power, but once in office they must govern according to the rules of capitalism...
...Who says there is a limit...
...Perhaps we are approaching the epoch, which Marx imagined in The Grundrisse, when the power of science and technology is so great that labor power is a miserable way to measure it...
...It still can't talk independently about Cuba, because it thinks any criticism will lend a hand to imperialism...
...The program may have been improvised, the objective unreal, and the organized force nothing of the kind, but this was how the Left thought about change, at least how it legitimized its activities...
...Profound reforms can mean revolutionary changes, but we can't think of revolution as an act that "e4 on4 AmiCsiC...
...If the labor movement operated on a world scale, for example, it could take on the problem of structural unemployment...
...Others claim that the notion of imperialism pertains to an earlier epoch and no longer accurately describes the world...
...Society is undergoing great change...
...And once again it is the reactionaries who have recognized it and acted on it first...
...Perhaps we can rethink these ideas, applying them to the struggle for a redistribution of wealth between North and South...
...The Left changes reality...
...But today there is no center, no rear guard, no way of integrating dispersed struggles...
...They repeat the same old things, the same speeches, the same formulations, the same words...
...But what's fascinating is how they've honed in on the arena of struggle that will be fundamental for years to come: the arena of culture, of values, and the legitimacy of a political and social order...
...ther can we speak any longer of a force like a political party that represents the struggle for socialism...
...Perhaps people should ponder Marx and Engels' old debate on Ireland...
...If we don't find some concept to explain these real differences, we'll be left with the old argument that capitalism is a truly free system where everything is possible, and the poor are to blame for their poverty...
...The Right doesn't have this problem because it runs with the system...
...Previously, with the existence of the First International, the Second International, the Third International and the Fourth International, the Left could conceive of itself as part of a world movement...
...The Right relies on an invented history, on a false, idyllic past...
...We can no longer think of revolution as leading to some ideal goal...
...If not, it will just become the administrator of an order that it cannot change and ultimately must accept...
...But today socialism is on the defensive...
...If English workers struggled for Ireland's freedom, then Ireland could be free...
...Socialism is thus acountercultural force, a force for changing culture, rather than one that seeks particular goals...
...We can no longer think in terms of an ideal model with certain characteristics defined by the experience of existing socialist countries...
...If no class has the historic destiny of changing society, if the elements that negate or question the system are scattered in a multitude of places, then we have to rethink everything...
...The fact is that we live in a world that grows ever more profoundly unequal in terms of real power...
...Then he came to believe that the English workers were part of the system of domination that kept Ireland in bondage, and that the salvation of English workers lay in Ireland's Chilean peasants in the early 1970s...
...National reforms will only work if a worldwide movement supports them...
...Among other things, we are in the midst of an industrial revolution unlike anything that came before...
...The Right has rediscovered Gramsci, in particular his belief in the primacy of cultural struggle-the struggle to remold society's sense of what is right and natural...
...Many stand firm by the old categories, insisting that nothing has changed...
...This struggle can't be condensed into a party...
...It's as if the definition of class were flexible once again, as if we were in a process of founding new social and economic groupings...
...Of course there are groups who call themselves socialist and pursue particular goals, but socialism can't be only that...
...One of the great question marks for socialists today is the concept of imperialism...
...It has retreated from its capacity to mold a new world, leaving that to the physicists, chemists and biologists, who proceed to change the world without any ethical values to define the work they do...
...in SOCIALISMOstruggle for independence...
...Computerization could transform the entire productive system...
...Now the wall that contained the debate of the Left-the existence of the socialist camp-has dis- appeared...
...Socialism could be the ideological, social, political or cultural force which tackles this issue...
...why not propose changing it to four hours today...
...And the Left is not prepared to do this...
...Rather we ought to think of it as a process ofchanging people's mentality...
...All of this is now open to question...
...Perhaps socialism from here on should focus on reforming the industrialized countries, rather than solving the problems of poor nations...
...Either socialists take charge of this great challenge, or we will end up choosing between alternatives defined by others...
...Aric6, who died in August, was the author of numerous books and an editor of the journal La Ciudad Futura...
...The great issues are before us and in attempting to answer them we can build a new Left...
...Indeed it has avoided it historically...
...it takes place at many levels throughout society...
...The Left has to transform political culture...
...Marx said that when society reached that point the theory of value would no longer function...
...In the last century workers succeeded in changing the workday from twelve to eight hours...
...Perhaps they're right...
...The central confusion arises when socialists take the reins of government and are obliged to assume responsibility for the complexity of the world and to leave behind the simplicity of their dream...
...The limit is only in our minds...
...The crisis of the East has opened up an historic opportunity...
...HISTORICALLY THE LEFT--THE WORLD LA- bor and socialist movement of the last hundred years--has always presumed the existence of an objective, a program, an organized force capable of carrying out that program, and a theory that explained the logic of the system...
...At one time Marx believed that the independence of Ireland depended on English workers...
...If the Left is to transform the capitalist system, it must fight In the arena of n.*~.-c A -c h .inI...
...JF SOCIALISTS WANT TO BE SOCIALISTS IN today's world, they have to take on the crucial problem of North-South relations...
...They may modify how profit or growth are evaluated, but as a national government they can't radically transform the system because the world economy won't allow it...
...Perhaps the Left was always what I describe, rather than what it believed itself to be...
...The Left has to govern against the current...
...One of the signs of the weakness of the Latin American Left is the fact that it still avoids discussing the experience of the Soviet bloc...
...Although many criticized that experience, it was the framework everyone used to think about socialism...
...Today the Right recognizes that society must be changed from the bottom up to achieve their vision...
...But the old concept of imperialism sought to explain phenomena that haven't disappeared: differences in growth rates among certain parts of the world, dependence of some regions on others, and economic mechanisms that by reproducing capital exacerbate these differences...
...Like the Soviets, they view historiography as a political instrument, and have no qualms about lying...
Vol. 25 • May 1992 • No. 5
