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Fredy Perlman on Paul Baran (1965)

Published October 9, 2009 Anarchism , Marxism , Primitivism , Theory 1 Comment

FREDY PERLMAN

This is the reaction to the news of Paul Baran’s death of an American pursuing graduate studies in economics at the University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia.

The MONTHLY REVIEW with the news that Paul Baran is dead arrived in Belgrade yesterday (May 15th).

To those of us who were young enough to consider Baran a teacher and not a colleague, he was what Thomas Mann called an “archetype.” Offered the narrow experience of the “well defined scientific project,” we are able to resist only because of the force of Baran’s profound experience. His esteem for the critical intellect, his demonstration that the field of this intellect is not an academic discipline but the world of suffering and struggle, his proof that today as well as in the time of Vico, Hegel, and Marx, man can grasp and change what man constructed, are the instruments with which we evaluate all other “methodologies.”

Continue reading ‘Fredy Perlman on Paul Baran (1965)’

Emma Goldman on technology

Published June 21, 2009 Anarchism , Marxism , Technology 1 Comment

You are entirely right, dear Evelyn, when you say that the “simplification introduced by the machine is useful for manipulating thousands” and that “changes wrought by machine intervention are completely on the external side and leave the real battle which has to be fought from within the person.” Certainly the machine has become a fetish eulogized by every shade of Marxian schools. We Anarchists have realized this modern superstitution long ago. This is why we have insisted that… instead of [man] being subjugated to the machine, [the latter] must be so directed as to take very little time from man so that he may gain time and leisure for his inner growth and development. Above all, the use of the machine must be so directed as to take very little time from man so that he may learn to appreciate the quality and beauty of things he produces.

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from Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution, ed. David Porter (Edinburgh, Oakland, West Virginia: AK Press, 1983/2006), p 316.

Bouck White and the Church of the Social Revolution

Published April 20, 2009 Christianity , Marxism 1 Comment

By and large Socialist [[Party of America]] clergymen were among the more conservative party members, but there were a few who were quite radical. One such radical was the flamboyant Bouck White, author of the hilarious The Book of Daniel Drew, a purported autobiography, and of the once very popular The Call of the Carpenter, which portrayed Jesus of Nazareth as a social revolutionist. White’s radicalism embarrassed such relatively staid Socialists as Hillquit, Julius Gerber, once executive secretary of Local New York, and W. J. Ghent. Furthermore, many Socialists were uneasy about the presence of any minister in their party because the clerics hardly fitted the Marxist stereotype. White, minister of the Church of the Social Revolution in New York, became involved in a protest movement aimed at embarrassing the Rockefeller family for the Standard Oil Company’s role in the “Ludlow massacre” in Colorado, in which thirteen members of strikers’ families were killed by state militia. Upton Sinclair organized a group of pickets, wearing black bands of mourning, to parade around the Standard Oil Company building in New York. White invaded the Calvary Baptist Church, where the Rockefellers were members, with the announced intention of challenging its pastor, Dr. Cornelius Woelfkin, to a debate on the subject of the teachings of Jesus regarding men of great wealth. When White arose during the service to make his challenge, he was grabbed and dragged from the church by police and ushers. Subsequently he was convicted in a disorderly conduct charge and sentenced to six months on Blackwells Island, an unusually harsh sentence for such a charge. White was also an ardent opponent of war and nationalism, and, to demonstrate dramatically his contempt for nationalism and its symbols, he sometimes burned the American flag during his speeches.

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from David A. Shannon’s The Socialist Party of America: A History (New York: Macmillan Company, 1955), pp 60–61

Henri Lefebvre – “The Spontaneous”

Published January 16, 2009 Marxism , Philosophy , Primitivism , Theory Closed

The category of the ‘lived’ permits us to rehabilitate the category of spontaneity, which has long been disparaged, thanks to the attitude both of rationalist and of transcendentalist philosophy. Neither culturalism nor structuralism can admit the spontaneous and the unformed.

However, the rehabilitation of the ‘spontaneous’ does not rob critique of its rights. Quite the opposite. Are we about to make an apology for the spontaneous which would fetishize it? [fn11 – This is implied in the work on the ‘non-directive’ by the American psycho-sociologist Rogers and his school in France, for example.] Certainly not. Spontaneity has no privileges in any domain, be it everyday life or politics. When it is lacking, ‘something’ fundamental is missing; there is a gap, like a sterile little vacuum in the tissue of life. However, spontaneity is not always creative every time, with every risk it takes. It makes mistakes, and it fails more frequently than rational prognostication and calculation. Neither the idea of it nor its reality offers a criterion for existence or for value. Authentic per se (but how can we know this?), it eludes control and integration. And yet it imitates and mimics itself. In the spontaneous, it is difficult to make out what are dramas, dramatizations, de-dramatizations or super-dramatizations (which procedures of social control and integration encourage, and then repress). In periods of intense ideological control, the spontaneous and the non-spontaneous become merged, as do the natural and the artificial. This means  the members of a particular group discover ideologically saturated values, norms and symbols ‘spontaneously’.

To put it another way, whether it be in our consciousness or in the outside world, we never attain pure nature or an unconditional ‘being’. The spontaneous is already part of the social, although it is not the social per se. Everyday life gives it a place and a consistency and is the level on which it expresses itself. The spontaneous is nothing more than an element of the social, on a certain level. As such, it exists. It is active, it grows, it withers away, and as such it dies, in everyday life.

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from Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Vol II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans. John Moore (London & NY: Verso, 2002), pp 218-19.

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