Reply to Ed Herman

ED HERMAN STILL DOESN'T GET IT. If we are to have any hope of changing things in democratic ways, we must scrutinize the ideologies and systems that oppress us from a point of view which assumes the potential of agency from below, and looks for points of vulnerability in the oppressing systems. Herman is responding -- but not really responding -- to this passage in my article:

I have often been critical of a hortatory left culture that shows up in such places as left film, song and history, and think it's the job of left intellectuals to tell the truth, even when the truth is uninspiring. Our goal is not uplift, but rather solid social science and a better understanding of how capitalism works and might be opposed. But what kind of analysis ignores agency and resistance, and how can analysis pretend to validity without them? Putting aside the notion of social science as inspiration, how accurate is a social science which . . . abandons the quest for sources of tension within and against the system? . . . Our analysis has to address questions to the established order on the assumption that there might indeed be effective resistance if the points of vulnerability could be found.

So, to begin with, let's throw out Herman's red herrings about my supposed quest for "uplift" and "the bright side" -- as if I came to the Socialist Scholars Conference with the expectations that I might bring to a Pete Seeger concert. What I asked for was clearly not some hortatory or moralistic imperative about balancing "strengths" with "weaknesses," but rather tough left analysis, which of course includes deep, holistic examination of dominant ideology.

Herman chastises me for my supposed lack of awareness that "there was a planned division of labor among the panelists" in the Monthly Review panel that I criticized. Under this division of labor, Herman was dealing with "the dominant ideology and its sources of power," so it was okay for him to leave it to Elaine Bernard to handle "the counter-ideologies and varieties of resistance." It is this very separation that I am criticizing. As I'll show, capitalists themselves don't make this separation. I expressed satisfaction with the focus on agency in Bernard's talk, and dismay over its absence in Herman's and Cloward's talks. Left social science is not blindly empirical; rather it works from some set of analytical categories, and it analyzes dominance through categories which aim at finding the weak spots and, finally, at overthrowing dominance. (As Bernard put it so nicely, mobile as capital may be, it must put its foot down someplace, and our job is to grab hold of that foot and break it: why, she asked, had not Herman concluded that we must oppose and break the system that oppresses so many?) So I am not assigning Herman to "cover" the entirety of both dominance and resistance; I am simply saying that our analysis of dominance has to build in, and search for, opportunities for resistance. It's a gross oversimplification for Herman to translate this to, "one is not even allowed to spell out the characteristics and strengths of the dominant ideology without in the same remarks pointing up its weaknesses." Of course we need analyses of dominant ideology. But finally what I am asking for is a little asymmetrical: my aim is to get rid of capitalism, and I analyze it with that in mind.

Interestingly, capitalists, who want to preserve their system, often build more awareness of agency into their analyses than does Herman. You can't talk sense about capitalism without taking account of opposing forces, and capitalists know it. Look at them, in their institutes, sniffing for breaches in their walls, and constructing defenses. Consider Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's sensitivities as he determines the prime rate. His concern about inflation is not a mere abstraction from above, but rather has to do with his perceptions of the strength of worker agency, predictions about their strength or weakness in demanding higher wages, their fears of losing their jobs, etc. Greenspan's analysis of how to strengthen capitalism builds in forces from below. He's way ahead of Herman.

As for Herman's idea that my critique reminds him of conservative criticisms of lack of "balance" in the liberal media, etc., this is another red herring. It would be about as relevant for me to say that his critique reminds me of tiramisu. I'm not talking, formalistically, about lack of balance, but rather about the analytic categories through which we view capitalism.

1997 SSC. This year's Socialist Scholars Conference (March 28-30) was in many ways better than last year's "No Exit." This year's theme was "Radical Alternatives on the Eve of the Millennium" (compare with last year's: "Two Cheers for Utopia!"). The introduction to the program booklet listed various struggles for social change in the U.S. and around the world and said that the SSC aimed "to develop strategies against the forces of global capitalism." Often program themes are just window dressing, but this one described the conference pretty well; I did not hear once the frequently mentioned phrases of the 1996 SSC, "no exit," or "no way out." (Borrowing from the British usage, Daniel Singer attacked "TINA" -- the notion that There Is No Alternative.)

Angry White Men on the Left. I heard no attacks on feminism, gay liberation, etc. as "identity politics" this year, and Todd Gitlin wasn't on the program. Although these themes were not pervasive, they were nonetheless present in a different form. I heard what sounded to me like a revival of a heavier old Marxist version which, I think, adds up to pretty much the same thing. For instance, in a session sponsored by Monthly Review, Ellen Meiksins Wood noted that capitalism is "universalist" (she failed to note that most social systems, e.g. Catholicism in the middle ages, looked the same way in their time), and therefore it needs a universalist rather than "particularist" response; we must not allow ourselves to be fragmented into particular identities. In the abstract, this has a neat sound. But finally, it's just words, i.e.: a universalist system needs a universalist response. Why? Words don't make reality, or dictate strategies. To me it sounds like the classic left ranking of race and gender below class, and an exhortation to subordinate struggles around race and gender to an imposed notion of universalism. (No wonder, in response to this hoary Marxist theme, some feminists, like Ellen Willis, have mistakenly turned to post-structuralism, culture studies, etc.) I think this year's attack, from commanding Marxist heights, on independent organization of various oppressed groups, is the Higher Gitlinism.

Herman's Critique

Contents of No. 23