View From The Couch - 03/Nov/2015

Marxism In The Rearview Mirror

I'm going to write a bit about communism today. It struck me how strange it was that this ideology beat such a retreat that nobody would ever own up to having sympathies any more.

It's hard to believe today but there were people in the 1980s that still believed in communism, right up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. I think about that today and wonder at the ability of people to believe in a system without any real world proofs. To be fair, none of the communist regimes existed in a vacuum where they could execute The Big Plan. Instead they spent considerable resources mounting the Cold War like the Eastern Bloc or simply trying to deflect the prying intrusion of the USA like Cuba or isolating itself like China, the communist program really didn't get to run the way its supporters in the west envisioned.

Ironically perhaps then, that there have been pockets of socialist democracies which have enacted significant chunks of welfare state policies like Scandinavia and France and Japan, where communists still exist. You sure don't find communists in the USA and here in Australia, I haven't met one since 1990. It might be an indication of just how far to the right the general discourse has run in this country that communists are in hiding the way fascists were in hiding until the late 1970s. I have to say I've seen and met more fascists since 1989.

All the same, Marxism in political terms has demonstrated that nothing in history is inevitable, and perhaps there are some flaws in Karl Marx's thinking after all. If you are on the centre left like I am, it's hard to give up Marxist thought, even though one never subscribed fully to communist thinking. This is partly because, Marxist thought still prevails in academic circles, and this is one of the interesting things. A lot of French criticism comes from Marxism, and this French criticism has become the mainstay of critical theory in the last 30years. Philosophy departments are shot through with Deleuze and Guattari and Derrida and Foucault, and all of their writings come out of a Marxist analysis. We're fed this stuff, and it informs a lot of the progressive thinking in this country. Weirder still is how nobody really calls them up on this as a problem.

It is a little bit like Freud, whose writings on psychology have long been superseded, but whose impact on literary criticism is enduring. The modern psychologist would tell you black and blue that Freud is no longer current or relevant, but there are any number of essays being written today about the Oedipal Complex in one book or another. The communication breakdown between the disciplines is a little comic, especially when the literature professor argues with the psychology professor about the relevance (or non-relevance) of Sigmund Freud's work to anything and everything.

Marxist thought is much the same. If you put a literature professor in a room with an economics professor, you get a similar sort of comic disagreement about the contemporary relevance of Karl Marx and his writings. You would think that if critical theorists could make so much hay out of Karl Marx, then just imagine what they could do with Schumpeter and Keynes and all the rest since Marx.

As much as we like to indulge in the Left-Right kind of political paradigm and all the dialogue that flows from it, it is obvious today that just as 1989 was the year Soviet communism died a horrible death, 2008 was the year Reaganomic and Thatcherite capitalism died its horrible death - in both cases, hoisted by their own petards.

The shame of it in Australia is that since then we've had a succession of governments in Australia that either try to pretend that the death was no big deal, or pretend that nothing happened at all. In both instances the Left-Right kind of discourse has persisted without any sense of the framework being questioned. This can be shown in the ushering in of the Trans Pacific Partnership, which amounts to more of the same Reaganomic/Thatcherite capitalism on a global scale, while the objections are mostly parochial unionist arguments trying to preserve their power base.

To a great extent, if the Left doesn't re-think its politics without being held hostage to the Marx of hold and the Marxists of old, it's not going to be of any use in the future. And if they are of no use going forwards, then surely it is a recipe to just let the discourse drift further to the right. The ALP doesn't have economic credentials exactly because people still think they are a pack of Marxists under the hood. They really need to find something else other than Marxist theory to come up with a framework to address economic inequality.

The Commies I Met

I think the first real commie I met was at university. He was an Irishman who studied history, but was firmly in the Marxist camp for the historic inevitability of Marx's vision. This would have been 1987 or so, so it wasn't yet obvious the Soviet Union was unraveling. Gorbachev was working through this thing called Perestroika, and according to this Irishman, it was going to work a treat and jump start the moribund Soviet economy. At this juncture I want to relate how one of the few fascists I've met was also an ex-pat irishman from Belfast, so don't for a moment think I think Irish people are particularly leaning one mayor another in their politics, merely that extremism didn't seem to phase these gents.

It was odd because Sydney University's campus was beset with a strange paranoia about the far left but when you spoke to the people on the far left, they were congenial conversationalists. Okay, perhaps not the radical feminist lesbians, but in most part, this particular Irish communist dude just wanted to talk and talk and talk. He wasn't loud or boisterous, he wasn't yelling slogans or quoting Mao or Stalin (thank goodness). Yet he was steadily insistent and perhaps a little too high on his own rhetoric about the inevitable collapse of capitalism. Mind you, his wild red hair was wilder than his rhetoric, but he was passionate about Marxism.

The second communist I met was after I dropped out of Sydney University, and went to North Sydney TAFE to study film making. For my weekend job, I worked in a parcel pickup service for Coles supermarkets. This would have been around 1988 or so. One of my 'colleagues' in the fine concrete box of an establishment, was a political science student who claimed he was a communist. This guy was boisterous and energetic in putting his point of view forward. He was much derided by all and sundry, but he too was convinced that communism was the way to go, simply because capitalism had - according to him - reached a limit.

I don't know what happened to him after I left that place to work elsewhere; I can't even begin to imagine how he got on with his professional life given that he was going to wave around a political science degree built around his strong belief in Marxism. Clearly he was intelligent because he understood what he had read and could build an argument based on it.  I can't imagine who would've employed somebody like that in 1988, let alone today. It made me think that it almost was the case that education was wasted on the intelligent idealist.

The third communist I met was 'G' at AFTRS. This was in January 1990 a mere couple of months after the Berlin Wall had come down. In G's case, he was fervently a Marxist because he was an exile from a land governed by fascists. To be a Marxist was his rebuke, his body-and-soul rejection of those who deprived him of his homeland. 'G' was pretty fierce. Everything was up for Marxist analysis. Even the food in the canteen was fair game. He was a tyro. If I had to imagine what Che Guevara was  like, 'G' was kind of it.

I'm still friends with 'G'. recently I chided him and asked him if he were still a communist. He totally rejected the notion. History since 1990 had been too traumatic for him to maintain the rage. None of these guys I imagine would want me outing them as ex-communists today and that just about tells you how far we've come in making the Left look abstract. it just seems so long ago, all of it: communism and varsity conversations about the end of capitalism.