Doug Henwood has put up an edited version of his panel discussion from Left Forum on his website. In it he discusses what is currently going on, in the bowels of Washington and in the minds of revolutionaries, with regard to the banking industry. We are not, he argues, on the brink of a revolutionary moment when the banks are seized and the means of production handed over to direct producers; what’s more, we are not seemingly even on the eve of a progressive movement, if the lack of mass protest and the insipid tea party movement are any indication.

Henwood makes some interesting remarks about how the radical movements of the 60s and 90s coming at the end of long boom decades while the downturns of the 50s and today seemingly have failed to produce a broadbased movement of people angry enough to take to the streets. What we have instead, he claims, is people hunkering down and longing for the status quo ante. Oh, and tea-bagging (which I find somewhat amusing on its multiple superficial levels, but most of all the whiteness of the white faces that are screwed up into a rage over taxation without representation). 

Most interesting for me however, is the point that Henwood makes at the end of his paper about a “creeping socialism.” This sort of socialism is the kind that would start with a local association, say, purchasing an apartment building, setting up a cooperative ownership framework that allows people to buy in at a fixed rate, and serves to re-enter a bit of property into a sort of commons. Similar sorts of things could be done with all manner of the things required for life, from public utilities to groceries. Henwood claims that he suggests this sort of tactic with a bit of disappointment. But I don’t see why this is disappointing at all. Give that we’re already skipping around the vast piles of shit that a post-scarcity society produces, this  seems an incredibly effective way to proceed. The fact that he has to qualify it, I think, points to an older divide in the leftist tradition on the nature of historical change. One side sees the world inverting in a moment, when finally this or that idol rears its head; the other sees change as an ebbing and flowing with the gradual pooling and dissolution of individual efforts.

I think that the two articles by Geoff Mann and Robin Blackburn in the most recent NLR are indicative of these strains, and I’m going to write something up demonstrating it. Broadly, I would call the respective sides idealistic and pragmatic. But more on that in a bit.