On Studebaker's Remarks

On the Platypus panel “ The Legacy of Lenin" on 27/01/24, Benjamin Studebaker made the following remarks:

"I think part of why we can't imagine anything is that we have this notion of liberty that we have inherited from Benjamin Constant that is one-sided. Constant's intervention is not just straightforwardly correct. Constant is propagandizing because he wants people to think about liberty in a different way. I'm not saying that he is the only one who did it or the only one who thought this way. The enlightenment thinkers recognized that their old state, the ancient regime, wasn't capable of producing citizens that had the qualities that ancient people wanted them to have, nor did those citizens have the qualities that they thought people ought to have. So they thought 'let's come up with a state that will be able to give its citizens the qualities that we think people ought to have’. You can call that liberty, you can call it virtue, there are lots of words that capture some of it. What I'm saying is that we've come to a similar kind of pass where the state that we have can't produce the kinds of citizens it was intended to produce, it also can't produce the citizens we would like to see. And therefore we have to come up with another kind of state, and therefore also another way of articulating what the state is for, because the way in which the moderns articulated what the state is for led to ways of thinking and doing politics which are dysfunctional and don't work. That's why I think we have to go outside of the modern tradition for the purposes of doing what it set out to do. We have to dialectically interfuse modernity with other conceptions of these values, with other ways of thinking about states. We need to all read about states that aren't the modern state, that aren't the bourgeois state, that aren't the capitalist state. We need to read about values that aren't these kinds of values, not for the purposes of adopting these values in a trad kind of way or in a conservative kind of way, but for the purposes of synthesizing the modern with the pre-modern. Too much of the early propaganda of early modernity was about excluding and trying to move past and get rid of the stuff that at the time they experienced, and rightly so, as extremely limiting for them and preventing them from doing things that they felt were necessary. But we need to take up the same task: we can't just be bound in the modern tradition or in a specific narrow canon of Marxism or even in a specific wider canon of liberalism and Marxism, we need to interfuse with other things and it's this unwillingness to do it because Constant said that these ancients had an irrelevant kind of liberty or they're a slave society, these are excuses people have for not reading stuff. To give one example, and then I'll stop: Wang Yangming in China recognized that Confucianism was being turned into a dogma: instead of actually thinking about what are the norms and rituals you need to have in a society to produce gentlemen who have virtue, Confucianism had become something where you just set a civil service test and you quote Confucianism a bunch of times and if you quote the right parts at the right times, then you get a job, and no-one pays attention to whether you're doing any good work or whether you have any of the qualities you're pretending to have through the exam system. Confucianism had been turned into a dogma and no longer served the function of training people who could actually think about in a self-conscious way what form Chinese society should take, what form the Chinese state should take, how should this state act or behave in different situations. And a lot of the time we just go 'oh, nobody back then thought about those things', but I do believe they did. I think many of the Confucians did, I think many of the Greeks did, I think many Christian theorists in the Middle Ages did, I think Muslim theorists did. I think there is a lot of stuff out there that people aren't reading, and they're going 'well, Constant says I don't have to do that, Constant says that's not important, Hegel says he's superseded that', and that becomes an excuse to become narrow. And my plea to you guys is to not do that, to read this other stuff, not for the purposes of abandoning Marx's project but for the purposes of completing it today. And that will mean developing your own view, your own values, your own sense of what liberty means, your own sense of what is good, or what's virtuous, whichever words you like, it doesn't matter, pick your favorite one, I don't care, but form your own view, develop it, and then think about what would you need to do socially, politically, to actually create people that could do that thing that you want them to do. If you don't do that kind of thinking you're not actually engaging in political theory in the first place, and the problem we have these days is that political theorists don't do political theory because they've forgotten what it is. Political theory is about thinking how you can make a state that can produce the kinds of subjects that you want. So think about what kind of subjects you want, and then think about what kind of state you need to make them, and then how do you have to build that state, what does it require in the context that we're in. That's what we have to do."

Studebaker's vision of dialectically merging the pre-modern with the modern is overall correct and, on a personal note, quite stirring. However, it does not go far enough. Indeed, if the transformation from capitalism to socialism is as fundamental as the transformation from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural ones, as suggested by Chris Cutrone in "Capital in History", then the entirety of human history and pre-history, and perhaps even natural history, has to be considered in the fight against capital. However, Studebaker's focus on political theory does not highlight that this is true not just in the realm of politics, or even politics, economics and society, but also for technique, in the most general sense of the word. Indeed, it is telling that seventy years after Einstein's Why Socialism?, Marxism has become almost exclusively relegated to disciples of the humanities and economics and is borderline unknown among scientists (in the more narrow sense of the word) and technical experts. In fact, this lack of technique is obvious to anyone entering leftist milieus from those sciences, making itself known both in small things like the difficulty of citing even serious left articles and in fundamental ones like the rote replication of organizational forms of which it is in retrospect obvious that they were not up to the task of overcoming capitalism even in their prime and which are certainly not now, when both the configuration of global capitalism and its constituents, from the ownership of corporations and the management strategies of nation states all the way down to the make-up of individual psyches, has fundamentally shifted. In its failure or unwillingness to recognize these shifts, the left has become conservative in its outlook, not just in the welfare-statist nostalgia that characterized the millennial left through the Sanders and Corbyn campaigns but even in its attempts to hearken back to the revolutionary left of Marx and Lenin.

This conservatism cannot be afforded. It has become clear that the transition to socialism is a serious challenge not simply on a political level but also on a technical one and, if it is supposed to be one that truly recognizes its moment (which is the only one with any chances of success), requires all the technical know-how it can get. As such, it has to take up and weave together not just the various strands of the left, but also of movements that are outside the left but whose goal has been to use the emergent capitalist technologies for the goals of freedom and progress, such as the free software movement or transhumanism, along with bourgeois social causes such as feminism, environmentalism and animal rights and even movements that formed in reaction to capitalism and as such recognize an essential moment of capitalist unfreedom, such as primitivism and medievalism.

It goes without saying that such a wealth of information is beyond the capacities of any individual to comprehend. As such, it is of crucial importance to revive the merger formula, that a socialist movement requires the interchange of both intellectuals and the proletariat to be successful, but also to refine it, as capitalism in the past century has in its relentless drive to subdivide labor created further distinctions that have to be accounted for, such as in particular that between scholars of the humanities and of the sciences, and exhibited tendencies of either side that, if unchecked, become problematic for a socialist movement: humanities scholars on their own tend to become overly relativistic and unconcerned with technicalities¹while scientists and technical experts on their own tend to lose sight of the societal importance of their research and ignore ethical concerns as well as engage in skill hoarding. Thus, it is not just of importance that intellectuals and proletarians keep each other in check but in fact that humanities scholars and scientists and engineers do as well while both being held in check by the proletariat.

Furthermore, the transition to socialism, which has already shown itself to be a multigenerational project, has to be recontextualized as such. This means that it is of vital importance to keep prior insights into the nature of capitalism both alive and accessible, which goes against the capitalist tendency to drown prior content in a wealth of new one. Here again it is important to connect the socialist movement to the free software movement, which had been faced with the same problem and developed means of keeping its resources accessible even in spite of their growing complexity. A lot can be learned from these efforts.

Finally, the purely negative character of Marxism (as stressed by Cutrone for instance in his first appearance on the This is Revolution podcast) has to be overthought. Ridiculing statements about blueprints for socialism might have been understandable when socialism was still an unwritten page, but they are much less so in our historical moment, wherein socialism has already received a default meaning through the Soviet Union and shown itself to be an authoritarian management society without a further vision for its future, much less an idea for how to get there² . The truism that the future cannot be completely planned out should not be taken as an excuse to actually try to come up with a workable model that can be adjusted to reality in the course of history. Due to the complexity of the situation, no one person alone can come up with such a model, further reinforcing the need for a party or party-like structure in which experts of different areas can meet, collaborate and test their efforts against the experience of everyday working people.

Much is to be done.

1. Lawvere observed this in 1992 in the context of mathematics and philosophy in Categories of Space and Quantity:

“In his Lyceum, Aristotle used philosophy to lend clarity, directedness, and unity to the investigation and study of particular sciences. The programs of Bacon and Leibniz and the important effort of Hegel continued this trend. One of the clearest applications of this outlook to mathematics is to be found in the neglected 1844 introduction by Grassmann to his theory of extensive quantities. Optimistic affirmations and applications of it are also to be found in Maxwell's 1871 program for the classification of physical quantities and in Heaviside's 1887 struggle for the proper role of theory in the practice of long-distance telephone-line construction. In the latter, Heaviside formulates whathas also been my own attitude for the past thirty years: the fact that our knowledge will of course never be complete, and hence no general theory will be final, is no excuse for not using now the most general theory which science can support, and indeed for accuracy we must do so. To students whose quest drives them in the above direction, the official bourgeois philosophy of the 20th century presents a near vacuum. This vacuum is the result of the Jamesian trend clearly analyzed by Lenin in 1908, but "popularized" by Carus, Mauthner, Dewey, Mussolini, Goebbels, etc. in order to create the current standard of truth in journalism and history; this trend led many philosophers to preoccupation with the flavors of the permutations of the thesis that no knowledge is actually possible.”

2. And the Trotskyist excuse for the failure of the Soviet Union that socialism in a backward country is impossible can only serve as an explanation for the brutal accumulation of capital in the Stalin era, not for the visionlessness in the Khrushchev era, when plenty of productive capacity had been built up and an actual opportunity would have presented itself to create an alternative society, even if still inhibited by the confines of global capitalism, which would actually have had a fair shot of overtaking capitalism once its crises re-manifest itself.