Experience, theory, possibility, outrage
A comrade wrote me a thoughtful and kind note (hi Chris, and thanks again!), and I feel very fortunate to have someone reach out to think with me and invite me to think on this stuff. It’s easy to kinda shut off in the day to day to day of life - “life” - in the hellscape. I wrote him a too long reply and then thought, well, having typed all that out I’ll slap some of it here in case I want to look at it again and in case it’s of interest to anyone else, and in cutting out some bits I had another thought or two.
Part of the conversation was about the role of theory in advocating for the kinds of social transformation we in the far left think are necessary. To my mind, theory is really important but its importance comes in the context of other things that the theory alone can’t establish. To put it another way, radical theory clarifies things for radicals who aren’t entirely and only a product of radical theory.
This means I don’t think it’s possible to establish the case for communism on the basis of theory alone. I’d say theory is at most necessary but not sufficient for making the case for communism - I think a great deal of what actually makes the case is rooted in experience. When people like me say ‘look, capitalism kills!’ some people could reasonably respond ‘well, sure capitalism kills, but all class societies kill, what do you want?’ We reply ‘we want a classless society’ and some of them go ‘pfffft that’s impossible’ and others go ‘whoa, okay, wow, yeah that’s what I want.’ The difference between those two responses, it seems to me, rests fundamentally in experience and maybe in ideology too.
As I’ve written about before on here, and Abby’s got some good posts on this too, I’m a big fan of Goran Therborn’s short book on ideology. He talks about resignation as a hugely important part of how ideology works and that feels right to me. I’m also a huge fan of EP Thompson, who has a lot to say in his early political writings about the role of morality in socialism and working class life. It seems to me that part of what happens with resignation is that people’s moral outrage goes away. (As an aside, related to moral outrage, I’m a big fan of EP Thompson’s essay on what he called ‘moral economy’ - https://libcom.org/article/moral-economy-english-crowd-eighteenth-century-e-p-thompson - and his follow up essay - https://libcom.org/article/moral-economy-reviewed-e-p-thompson - and I have a book chapter sort of rethinking this via Goran Therborn. For the sake of this here, the gist of Thompson’s essay is that it’s a mistake to explain food riots by going ‘well, people were hungry.’ It’s false to say that hungry people who riot for food are doing so because they are hungry. Hungry people who riot for food are doing so because their hunger is outrageous and because they have some knowhow regarding how to riot. So to explain food riots we have to investigate the sources of people’s outrage - it’s empirically false to say that hunger always outrages people - and investigate the sources of people’s riot-making knowhow.) I tend to think that if people can be made morally outraged then that produces a sense that social alternatives are possible - whatever is outrageous must be abolished, and if we’re convinced something must be done then it feels like it can be done. This doesn’t always work on everyone though.
Sometimes it goes the opposite direction - some people have to develop a sense that social alternatives are possible first, and then moral outrage follows. I think that sense of possibility is fundamentally rooted in people’s experiences and how they interpret those experiences. And this is where theory comes in - theory shows up in the interpretation of experiences, it can’t really be a substitute for experiences. I do think that fiction and historical work and maybe art and music can be a partial substitute for direct experiences sometimes.
Søren Mau has an essay on communism. It’s a good essay and at the same time I think I’m just the wrong audience for this kind of essay, I just kind of don’t need arguments like ‘communism will work THIS way’. Personally I feel like, the future workers councils will figure that out when the time comes, and the process of those councils coming into existence will be a process of collective learning wherein people develop the necessary knowhow or at least the necessary preconditions for that necessary knowhow. I just have a deep personal faith in human collective intelligence when organized correctly, and I’m just convinced that when the time comes the people involved will figure out what they need to, and that collective intelligence far outstrips whatever I can do. That said, some other people seem to need essays like this, and I want everyone to have their needs met, so I do think it’s good that these essays get written for people like that, I guess. (I say I guess because I do worry a little that too much hunger for this kind of essay may reflect a lack of confidence in human - and above all, specifically working class - collective capacity, but I could be wrong and I may be being unfair.) Anyway, I mention Mau’s essay because the second paragraph is really great in my opinion and I think works well as an argument about why the rest of the essay isn’t really necessary, and in my reading that paragraph is all about the centrality of experience. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/communism-is-freedom
That paragraph reads “Contrary to what many intellectuals are led by their vanity to believe, strengthening such a belief [in the possibility of communism] is generally not a question of having the right ideas, arguments, and analyses. It’s rather the result of having concrete experiences of being able to act and make changes together with other people. If millions of people in the early decades of the 20th century considered socialism to be a real possibility within reach, it wasn’t because socialist intellectuals had finally managed to sufficiently sharpen their arguments, but because the worker’s movement in its heyday had created political organizations that were capable of giving people a lived experience of accomplishing concrete improvements in their quality of life by means of collective action. Beautiful utopias don’t matter if they’re not accompanied by a confidence in the ability of collective action to change the course of history, and such a confidence can’t be conjured up by good arguments: political communities is the inevitable basis for ideas about another and better society.”
So I’d say, people need the kinds of experiences he talks about, in the social context of struggle that he talks about (and like I said I think history and art can provide some of this too), in order to develop a sense of possibility - not primarily as a theory but as a matter of real personal conviction, which is not to say that conviction is individual in the sense of isolated individuals; we are, as individuals, collective products - a sense of possibility that we can do massively better, and that we can and should not be resigned to just another version of this world. And then what theory does is help us to determine what exactly ‘another version of the world’ looks like - what kind of stuff should we get rid of etc. But those decisions about what to get rid of only make sense if we really think it’s possible to do so and like I said I don’t think that sense of possibility is actually established by theory.
To put that another way, I like this phrasing: our consciousness is the product of how we live, more than vice versa -- “social being determines social consciousness” is how EP Thompson says it, if I remember correctly. Of course we can consciously start to change how we live, and we should, and in doing so we tend to find that our consciousness is further transformed when we start to actually live differently. I think experiences of collective action as well as experiences of hardship make certain kinds of consciousness possible. The role of theory is to be a resource in the process of reflection through which experience comes to remake consciousness. So ideas totally matter, but they matter only in the context of experience and they can’t replace experience. That’s how I see it anyway.