Cross-Cultural Comparative Politics: Social Science or Cold War Propaganda?

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

Bruce Lerro

OpEds

Resize text-+=

Prefatory Note

The field of comparative politics took off in the 1950s in Mordor and for many years it never lost its heavy anti-communist tinge. It continues to take for granted the fact that democracy exists (sic) in the United States and compares it favourably to "authoritarian" societies of communism, a convenient Cold War dualism. Its definition of politics. It is lopsidedly insensitive to cross-cultural definitions of politics. Historically, its definition excludes the politics of egalitarian hunter-gatherers and simple horticulturalists who comprised well over 90% of human history. Comparative politics is part of a self-propagandizing triumphalism that includes domestic political science, neoclassical economics and international relations theory. All these fields are ideological smoke screens that keep the West from facing its deep political and economic decline in the face of the rise of the East.

Orientation
What is politics?

Nine Questions for Determining What is Politics
In Part I of my article Seven Theories of Politics I posed ten questions for narrowing down what the range for defining what is politics.

Temporal reach

How far back into human history does politics go? Does politics go back to pre-state societies? Or does politics begin with state societies? Is politics possible before there were political parties?

Cross species scope

Is politics confined to the human species or does it ooze into the life of other species? If so, which ones? If politics crosses species, is it social species that are political? Is it possible to have animal societies which are social such as lions or wolves, but not political? Does a species need to be social to be political? Is being social a necessary but not sufficient condition for politics? Is being social a necessary and sufficient condition for politics? Or is being social neither a necessary nor sufficient condition? In other words, is it possible for a non-social species to have political relationships?

How much does evolutionary biology impact politics?

At a macro level, how does natural adaptation impact human politics? In terms of men and women, how much does sexual selection determine politics? At the micro level, how much do genetics and brain chemistry determine the level and the interest and skill in politics? Or is politics primarily a creature of the socio-historical level of reality?

Spatial reach

Where does politics take place? Many political scientists limit politics to what is taking place within states. Is that casting the net too narrowly? Can there be politics through discussions in private space? Is it politics when I get into a discussion about the viability of capitalism while I am at the unemployment line waiting for my check? Are there politics within families? Are there politics between lovers? Or are politics only about public affairs?

Am I being political if I ask my partner if she wants to go to the movies and propose a movie and she agrees to both proposals, is spontaneous agreement political? Suppose she said she wants to go to a movie but prefers another movie. We debate about it, and one of us persuades the other. Has the discussion become political? Suppose you and I are riding bicycles. We reach a crossroads where we have to decide whether to turn left or right. We each want to go in a different direction. Is the process of deciding this political?

Political agency

Who does politics? Is politics done only by politicians? If I argue with my neighbor about police brutality in my neighborhood, are my neighbor and I political beings in this discussion? Do I become political only when I vote on the issue in the next election? Do I become political when I bring police brutality to a town hall meeting next month? Or is the only person who is political the mayor who decides whether or not to make it part of his platform for his campaign next month?

What is the relationship between politics and power?

Can you have politics without having power? Can you have power without having politics? If power and politics are related, in what way? Are politics and power interchangeable? Is one a means to another? Is power the means and politics is the end? Is politics the means and power the end?

Politics, force and coercion

Let’s go back to this movie issue. Suppose Sandy has been drinking, and in the past she has been bad-tempered to her partner. She starts drinking while they are deciding on a movie. Sandy’s partner starts worrying and gives in to the movie Sandy wants to watch prematurely to avoid the risk of being yelled at. Is that politics?
This example is a small slice of a larger issue: what is the relationship between politics and force or the threat of force? Is violence an inherent part of politics or is politics what you do to win someone over without being violent? Some political theorists like Bernard Crick say that politics is the art of compromising when you know you cannot get what you want. Others say that the whole political system is based on violence because the entire class system is based on exploitation and force. All attempts to change things must come up against this militaristic force which protects the rulers. Some say that the only force is political and that the state is the ultimate political actor because it has, in Weber’s words, a monopoly on the means of violence.

Interdisciplinary span of politics

How (if at all) is politics related to economics? What is the relationship between technology and politics? Does the economy dictate politics? Does politics determine economics? Does technology determine politics or does politics determine technology? The same question could be asked about religion or mass media.

What, if any, is the relationship between theories of politics and political ideologies?

Is there a relationship between a consistent set of answers to these questions and whether you are a liberal or conservative? How will the answers of social democrats, communists and fascists be different than that of either anarchists on the left or libertarian capitalists on the right?

As it turns out, the field of cross-cultural politics I will be discussing gives very narrow answers to these questions and therefore leaves a great deal out.

Temporal reach – narrow, starts with class societies and leaves out tribal societies
Cross-species – narrow, limits it to the human species
Is politics biological? Narrow, politics is limited to the social, psychological
Spatial reach – narrow, limited to what happens in states
Political agency—limited to what politicians do, no one else
Relationship between politics and power, wide, used interchangeably
How is politics related to force or coercion? Narrow, understates force
Interdisciplinary span of politics – narrow, it excludes economics
Theories of politics and ideology -narrow, it tries to make politics scientific and above ideology

In Part II of my article, I identity seven theories of politics:

Old Institutionalists

Civil Republicans

Weberian political sociologists
Marxian political scientists
Rational choice theorists
Radical feminists
Bio-evolutionary

All the answers comparative politics gives to those questions primarily come from two schools, the old institutionalists and rational choice theorists. They pretty much leave out the other five schools.

Connection to past articles
About three years ago I wrote four articles about the ideological nature of political science. One article Anti-Communist Political Science: Propaganda for the Capitalist State was primarily about political science as it is practiced in the United States (not Europe). The second article, Invasion of the Body Snatchersconnects political science to neo-classical economics and shows how both support each other while blocking out an integrated approach called political economy. In my third article Dictatorship and Democracy I expose how Mordor political scientists were quite interested in dictatorships both in Europe and even within the United States in the 1930s. On the other hand, their interpretation of democracy was thin and lacked any subsistence. Lastly, my piece Totalitarian Anti-Communism showed the manipulation of the use of the word “Totalitarian” from the 1930s into the late 20^th century. However, there is one topic that I did not cover in much detail and that is the subject of comparative politics. I did discuss it a bit in the last part of my first article but not in any depth. I would especially like to write about it now because while the field of comparative politics is not taken seriously outside the United States because its political manipulation is well-known, it still serves as propaganda for war and imperialism within the United States. It is as part of Yankee self-propaganda that discussing the field of comparative politics is still worth an analysis.

To call them democratic serves the ideological purposes of cold warriors and their desire to fight communism and preserve Western imperialism, in one shot.

Sources for my criticisms of comparative politics
Sources for my criticisms of comparative politics are as follows. Ronald Chilcote wrote a very good criticism of comparative politics from a Marxian point of view. He was especially good at exposing the ideological nature in the field. For example he pointed out the connection between the social sciences and the CIA. Ido Oren was also really excellent at showing the connection between modernization theorists and the promotion of US foreign policy. Michael Latham’s book Modernization as Ideology
reveals how modernization theory was behind JFK’s international anti-communist program, Alliance for Progress. Lastly, Irene Gendzier’s book Development Against Democracy explains how the word “development” was used by comparative politics involved in foreign policy to railroad countries on the capitalist periphery away from socialist and communist transition programs.

Where are we going?
In this article I will show eight foundational problems with comparative politics:

Its treatment of nation-states as autonomous and not determined by alliances and between larger, more powerful states and transnational capitalists.

Oligarchies vs Democracy

Those of you who were unlucky enough to take a political science class might have been exposed to a cross-cultural version of the same thing. I refer to the field of comparative politics. The first thing that struck my eye in looking at the table of contents of a college textbook on comparative politics was the different types of rule. According to mainstream theorists, there are only two kinds of rule, democratic and authoritarian. The United States and Western Europe are deemed “democratic” whereas Russia, China and Iran are deemed authoritarian.

The unpopularity of democracy in the West until the 20^th century
One problem with this formulation is that it fails to address the unpopularity of democracy in Yankee history itself, not only among conservatives but liberals as well all the way to the end of the 19^th century. In the 19^thcentury when liberalism really took hold as a political ideology, liberals were not interested in democracy, and considered it “mob rule”. Most industrialized countries did not have the right to vote at the end of the 19^th century. Back then farmer populist parties and socialist parties took their democracy seriously, bringing economics into it. The result was a “substantive democracy” championed by Charles Merriman and Charles Beard in the 1930s. But the rise of fascism and communism had shaken liberal confidence in the natural sympathy between democracy and capitalism. So in the 1940s Joseph Schumpeter introduced a weakened form of democracy as simply the circulation of elite politicians that people choose between. The procedural democracy of Robert Dahl of the 1950s involved choosing between these elites through voting. There was nothing about economics.

In his book Strong Democracy, Benjamin Barber distinguishes “thick democracy” from the “thin democracy” of Dahl. My point is by the standards of thick democracy few if any Western countries are democratic. To call them democratic serves the ideological purposes of cold warriors and their desire to fight communism. Since democracy is a loaded virtue word, and authoritarian is a loaded vice word, a cold war opposition between the two is built into the entire field of comparative politics.

How many parties make a democracy?
What is striking is the criteria for what constitutes democracy when it comes to political parties. For comparative politics, a single party rule constitutes authoritarian rule. But the addition of just one more party, as in the American political system, we suddenly then have a democracy. Countries with many parties including most of Europe are also constituted as democracies. Aristotle argued that there were 3 forms of rule – monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. Oligarchy is the rule of the few. Given the actual nature of who controls the elections in the United States, it is most reasonable to say the United States and Western Europe are oligarchies, ruled by the ruling class, the upper class and the upper middle class. Taken together this is about 20% of the population, hardly a democracy. In the United States most of middle class, working class and poor have no representation and yet the country is called democratic.

One party – authoritarian
Two parties – democratic
Many parties – democratic

In other words, the difference between one and two parties is greater than the difference between two parties and many parties. In fact, the implication of those who defend the two-party system is that having many parties can be confusing and unwieldly. So we wind up with the two parties of the United States as a kind center of stability. This is so despite the fact that for about the last 50 years, forty percent or more people in the United States do not vote. Is this a sign that democracy in the United States doesn’t work? Not at all. Those who don’t vote are dismissed as ignorant, apathetic or pathological in some way. The reason people don’t vote is simply because neither party represents their interest is never present. When voting tallies are presented, the number of people who don’t vote is rarely presented. Voting tallies are presented like 50% vs 49% for the two parties as if that constituted all the people who could have voted. In fact, in the actual tallies the winning party gets 30% of the vote. The loser gets 29%. What is ignored is the highest tally: 40% who don’t vote. This is democracy? What we have here is an oligarchy. But in comparative politics, democracy is not a process that actually exists but a self-congratulating ideology for the ruling capitalist oligarchs who control both parties.

Governing vs Ruling
In comparative politics, “governing” is a taken for granted term for Western capitalist societies. “Ruling” is saved for countries suspected of not being democratic, like “authoritarian” countries. I prefer to take the governing word very seriously as it is used in cybernetic systems. Governing in cybernetic systems means steering a system which includes goals, communication within the system, adaptation to the environment, feedback systems which allow for adjustment and few forward system which results in planning. The human heart is a “governor” of the human body. By these standards the only type of society in which there was governing was the egalitarian politics of hunting and gathering societies. Simple horticulture societies in these societies decision-making was collective. They adapted and moved when the ecology dictated a change.

For the last 5,000 years, complex political systems had rulers. This means that political goals were rarely carried out, communication systems were blocked and muddled by self-interested bureaucracies. Adaptations to the environment were slowed down by the machinations of the short-term thinking of ruling classes. Feedback systems were ignored such as extreme weather and pollution. Feed forward mechanisms were clogged by myopic ruling classes who couldn’t think three months ahead – if that. In Joseph Tainter’s book The Collapse of Complex Societies he describes how inept the ruling classes can be. Calling complex societies “governing” is ridiculous when compared to hunting and gathering societies which prevailed for 90% of human history. We are ruled by oligarchies and this should be reflected in any political field that considers itself scientific.

The Exclusion of Propaganda from Political Communication in the West
In part, the reason we have the illusion of democracy and a governing class rather than rulers of an oligarchy is because of Western propaganda. There are many textbooks describing propaganda in the West. If you like videos more than books, check out Adam Curtis’ documentary, The Century of the Self. This video demonstrates how 100 years of psychological propaganda in the person of Edward Bernays and the brainwashing in the work of Ewen Cameron controlled the Mordor public. Despite this, the only mention of propaganda in my comparative politics textbook is when it comes of “authoritarian” regimes. No surprises here.

Comparative Politics Ignores Capitalism
Following the tradition of Mordor social sciences, just as political science excludes economics while neoclassical economics ignores politics, comparative politics ignores the economic system of capitalism when it discusses Western politics. They ignore economic exchange and act as if politics was merely system of law, voting, institutional systems of bureaucracies and foreign policies. Without saying so, countries that count as “democratic” have capitalist exchanges. The field of comparative politics theorists act as if there was a natural, unremarkable relationship between capitalism and democracy. But as Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens have described in their book Capitalist Development and Democracy, it was not the capitalist merchants that brought representative democracy to the West, but the working class. Capitalist economic exchanges should be foundational to understanding political systems. Yet in my comparative poetics textbook that I’m reading, “political economy” is buried in the last chapter of the book.

Two reasons why capitalism should be included in politics
Capitalism should be foundational to politics because countries that have counted as politically “underdeveloped” have become so because of capitalist imperialism, as Gunder Frank pointed out decades ago. At the same time capitalist societies should be foundational to politics because it was under capitalist crisis that fascism emerged. The political ideology of fascism can never be understood without its roots in capitalism. There has never been fascism in human history before capitalism and there has never been fascism without the presence of capitalism.

The Deep State and International Pressure Groups are not Included in the Decision-making Processes of Politics

Supposedly, democratically elected leaders of political parties govern their populations by carrying out “the will of the people”. I am countering this by saying these politicians represent the will of the oligarchs who rule over people. But the oligarchs do not just use political leaders to carry out their will. Besides capitalists that politicians have to answer to, there are agencies such as the FBI, the CIA as well as international pressure groups such as AIPAC, Five Eyes, and NED. None of these groups are mentioned in my comparative politics textbook as involving political decision making. The textbook on Political Psychology in International Relations writes as if political leaders make decisions for their nation by themselves. It is only in “authoritarian” societies that bureaucracies, revolutionary factions and terrorist groups come into play that constrain the decision-making will of the official political leaders.

Authoritarian Politics is Synonymous With Socialism

When it comes to the West the field of comparative politics ignores the fact that its ruling oligarchy is run by capitalism. However, they have no problem declaring that authoritarian politics goes with a socialist “command economy”. Western countries that became socialist, such as Sweden and Norway, are presented as socialist democracies only because the presence of a market or capitalism. This made the naturally socialist authoritarian states more democratic.

Most military dictatorships are capitalists

Advocates of comparative politics ignore the fact that military dictatorships are often attempts by capitalists to hold on to power in the face of socialist uprisings. Most dictatorships are not socialist, but capitalist installations. In the case of socialism, the textbook cases that are trotted out are the old Soviet Union, Cuba or China. These countries have oligarchies as well. But whether or not they are more authoritarian than the capitalist West is much more complex than it first appears. Theories of comparative politics play down or ignore the relentless international class war any socialist system has to endure on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis at the hands of the heads of state in the West along with their capitalist rulers. Capitalists in the West act as if the whole world is their private property. They treat any elected national leader (even if not a socialist) who has the nerve to set their own agenda for international trade as an enemy. All socialist leaders have to treat most any oppositional party in their country as potentially a tool of international capital. The extent to which socialist countries are authoritarian has a great deal to do with the pressure they experience from international capital.

What about “totalitarian”?

Fortunately, this Cold War vice word is now internationally discredited. However, the use of the term totalitarian to characterize socialist or communist countries, leaves out at least the following. If we grant that Sweden and Norway were once socialist, there has never been a socialist country with an advanced technology, communication systems, or advanced science. These societies have never had the ability to control the messages sent out to the population so that people were all thinking the same thing at the same time due to centralized control of propaganda. It is only advanced capitalist countries that have the capacity to do this. For example, Mordor’s media has roughly five corporations that all send out the same propaganda message in the case of Israel. People are severely punished by the police for supporting the Palestinians. All third parties in Mordor are blacked out. They cannot get into the “debates”. My point is that because of its control over mass media, capitalist control of the state is much closer to real totalitarianism than anything Stalin or Orwell ever dreamed up. The Soviet Union and China are poor countries. Their communist parties have no centralized control over their entire nation state. Peasants in both countries made up their own mind as to what was happening. Only in Mordor do you hear the same anti-working-class slogans against health care, or “welfare queens” from New York to San Francisco, from Houston Texas to Missoula in Montana. This is the power political propaganda holds to be internalized by people who imagine they are making up their own minds.

Comparative Politics Ignores Anarchism as Part of Socialism
The claim that all socialism is authoritarian ignores the 180-year history of the anarchist movement and its leaders from Proudhon to Bakunin to Malatesta, Kropotkin, to Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman to Durruti. Anarchism was no intellectual movement. It was followed by thousands of people who fought in and out of labor unions and in the Russian and Spanish revolutions. This negligence on the part of comparative political theorists is ironic given that anarchism at its best is the purist form of democracy – direct democracy. If comparative political theorists understood the scale that the anarchists organized during the Spanish revolution of 1936-1939, they would be ashamed to think that what goes on in Western societies has anything to do with democracy, at least comparatively speaking.

Comparative Politics Ignores the International Pressures Within Larger States or Alliances Between other States

Comparative politics acts as if political decisions begin and end at national borders and with only official political leaders. But today’s nation-states have formed alliances with other nation-states. They have agreements about where they or won’t all act together. In the West we have the alliance of United States, England and Israel. None of those countries enacts a political decision by themselves. The same is true with China, Russia and Iran. Nation-states are interdependent, not independent actors.

Conclusion

I began this article with nine foundational questions of what politics is. I described how narrowly the field of comparative politics is in answering these questions. Then I identified seven theories of politics and showed how each of the seven theories of politics answers these nine questions differently. As it turned out, the field of political science uses only two of the seven theories: old institutionalism as rational choice theory.

Then I embedded within this article other articles I had written about how anticommunist domestic political science and neoclassical economics are in their studies and how international political science (comparative politics) is in carrying on that tradition. After that I named eight areas in which comparative politics are weak, including:

Its propagandistic use of the word “democracy”. I claim that no state society on this planet is democratic. They are oligarchies.
Its propagandistic use of the world governance. I identify with a cybernetic definition of governance, using the heart as an example. With this as criteria, no state system in the world governs a society. They all rule, not govern.
Comparative politics over-emphasizes the use of propaganda in “authoritarian” societies while barely even mentioning propaganda in capitalist ruling oligarchies.
Comparative politics does not successfully integrate capitalism into the comparative systems it analyzes . One textbook tacks it on as a last chapter.
Comparative politics ignores the power of the institutions of the deep state and transnational capitalists in determining the decision-making capacities of politicians.
Its treatment of the term “authoritarian” is more or less synonymous with socialism. It plays down the existence of socialism in Scandinavian countries and communal councils in Venezuela.
Lastly, the use of the term “totalitarian” to depict Soviet Union, China and Cuba is completely false. In the case of the Soviet Union and China they were too poor to have a centralized state that could reach down to every peasant village and bombard them with propaganda. The foundation for this totalitarian state is a centralized media apparatus, mass transportation, a country that was electrified. Paradoxically it is Mordor’s control over its mass media where we see the closest approximation to totalitarianism.

Lili News 029

In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.

URL has been copied successfully!

window.addEventListener("sfsi_functions_loaded", function() { if (typeof sfsi_widget_set == "function") { sfsi_widget_set(); } });

Print this article

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License •
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers: How They Can’t Face Their Loss to the “Eurasian Miracle”

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

Bruce Lerro
SOCIALIST PLANNING BEYOND CAPITALISM

Resize text-+=

The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers: How They Can’t Face Their Loss to the “Eurasian Miracle”

International Relations (IR) theory fails to deliver on one of its key promises, specifically to produce positivist, value free analysis. What we encounter in the vast majority of international theory is the provincial or parochial normative purpose of defending and celebrating the ideal of the West in world politics. IR theory can no longer be represented as positivist, objective or value free.

—John M. Hobson

Orientation
In 1981, Eric Jones wrote a very powerful book called The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia. He was not alone in claiming there was something unique about Europe compared to the rest of the world. Though I doubt it was his intention, his work perhaps unintentionally supported a Eurocentric, paternalistic, racist orientation of a Wren theory which claimed to explain world politics. This is called International Relations Theory which claimed to be positivist, objective and value free. International relations theory is so deeply embedded in Western triumphalism that it has failed to notice that the West has been losing to China, Russia and Iran for the last 20 to 30 years. International relations theory barely understands that this has happened and it has no theory to explain it. What we are witnessing today is a “Eurasian Miracle.”

The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, I point out a good reason for this is because of the Eurocentric nature of Neocon Realists, Neoliberal Globalists and Liberal Institutionalists theory. However, Hobson’s criticism of Eurocentrism does not stop there. He argues that even left-wing theories like constructionism and world-systems theory are guilty of Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism, not only because it takes different forms, but that some of these are even anti-imperialist. The conventional contrast of a Eurocentric or racist conception of imperialism from a constructivist and Marxist point of view is too simple and Eurocentrism is too deep.

What is Eurocentrism?
Hobson’s claim that there two steps in Eurocentric big-bang theory of world politics:

Europeans single-handedly created a European capitalist international state system through their pioneering and exceptional institutional genius.
They export their civilization to remake the world in their own image through globalization, imperialism or hegemony.
To add to this, Eurocentrism claims the Eastern and Southern part of the world had no independent status. There was no East or South big bang. In the West the various movements of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation the scientific revolution, capitalism, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution or socialism were purely Western. The East and South either helped out or they were left behind. With rare exceptions. Eastern and Southern parts of the world system never led Western development.

What is paternalism?
Historians of the modern West sought to explain social evolution. In doing so, they divided societies into three stages:

barbarism (horticultural and agricultural states) and
civilization—industrial capitalist societies

Supposedly Europeans hoped that all societies would want to become civilized. But when societies of the East and South did not aspire to this, they were labelled either savages or barbarians. However, some historians and anthropologist thought it was their duty (white man’s burden) for the savages and barbarians to see the light. This led to paternalism.

An example of well-intentioned paternalist Eurocentrism: Rawls
John Rawls believed that his liberal vision had genuinely universalist criteria and it did not offend cultural sensibilities of non-Western people. He was interested in culturally converting Eastern people rather than containing them as in Western liberal realism.

Yet there are five key Eurocentric dimensions of his theory:

All well-ordered hierarchical societies must exhibit a separation of church and state (this will not work for Muslims).
Imposition of free trade (free trade can only work with wealthy societies).
Governed by a liberal law of peoples (teaching Eastern women to have less babies won’t work if they are being blocked by the IMF and the World bank from industrializing.
Eastern states receive only conditional sovereignty because they are classified as despotic states and “failed” states are deemed uncivilized.
Developed societies have a duty to assist burdened societies (paternalism).

Hobson’s claims

Hobson’s explicit claims are first that International Relations Theory contains six myths:

the theoretical great traditions myth.

Hobson’s 2^nd claim is there are six types of imperialism which are laid out over 250 years. His third claim is that Western racism was not always triumphant but was based on fear of what would become of Europe if Easterners and Southerners of the world got the upper hand. Lastly, I close out with theories that are exceptions to the rule and are not Eurocentric or paternalistic and with a minimum of racism.

Hobson’s implicit claim is that without “the rest” there might be no West. The West was not an early, but a late development. This topic will be covered in my future article based on another of Hobson’s books, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization.

Six Eurocentric Myths of International Relations Theory
Hobson tells us the conscious or unconscious moral purpose of IR is to be a defender and promoter of Western Civilization. The key of disciplinary assumptions that are presently revered as self-evident truths really are largely Eurocentric myths. As stated above, these include the above myths.

The noble identity foundation myth: Whig and progress theory of history
International Relations Theory has embedded in a Whig an interpretation of its intellectual history. Whiggish means that the past is reorganized to make it seem that the present was the only possible passage that could have led to contemporary life. The Whig theory of history has the theory of progress embedded in it. The theory of progress claims that the later in time we go in social evolution the better societies get in material wealth, less labor, higher morality and happiness.

It is a now conventional assumption that the discipline of International Relations was born in 1919. Supposedly, it had a moral purpose to finding ways to solve the universal problem of war. This now conventional view was originally constructed by E.H. Carr in his classical text The Twenty Year’s Crisis(1946).

Contrary to this convention, IR theory did not appear all of a sudden after WW I out of the head of Zeus. It continued from its pre-1914 roots which were neither positive, objective nor value free. Rather they were paternalist, Eurocentric and intentionally or unintentionally racist. There are deep continuities that the 1919-1945 period of international theory has with the pre-1914 period of international theory. The Eurocentric racism and paternalism that underpinned it had been forged in the previous century. In addition, there is a continuum of imperialism that goes all the way back to the middle of the 18^th century. Thirdly, there was an explosion of anti-colonial resistance. What were colonists resisting – those noble Western powers that colonialized them. In this larger scheme of things, the end of World War I was not the only game in town. As positivists, what Neocon realists and liberal globalists ignore is that the noble identity myth can also be a ideological justification for Eurocentrism, capitalism, racism and imperialism. The four stages are of Hobsons history if International relations include:

1760-1914 Manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism
1914-1945 Manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism
1945-1989 Subliminal Eurocentrism
1989-2010 Manifest Eurocentrism

The positive myth of IR of theory of liberalism as emerging between the wars

This myth was that the between the wars IR theory was dominated by liberal globalists who searched for a new cooperative global order as a reaction to the Neocon realism of World War I. It was characterized as a harmonious and optimistic theory because it stands for peace. But as Hobson points out, interwar international theory was not monopolized by idealism or liberalism because it also exhibited a vibrant racism realist stream that emerged after 1889, especially in the world of geopolitical theorists, Ratzel, Mackinder, Mahan and others.

IR claims to be positivist with a value free epistemological base. This has been challenged by African-American Marxists Ralph Bunche, WEB Dubois and CLR James. They say that when viewed through a non-European lens, the vast majority of international theory produces a parochial or provincialanalysis of the West that can masquerade as if it were universal. Further, the imperialist aspect of interwar idealist theory has not been widely noticed among modern IR scholars. Realist and so-called Liberal Idealists were united by the concern to restore the mandate of Western civilizational hegemony in one guise of another.

The great debate myth and reconceptualizing the idea of the clash of IR theories

These debates include the controversy between realism and idealism in the interwar period between history and scientism in the 1960s and between positivists and post-positivists in the 1990s. The first two appear as if these were great qualitative struggles, but like with Republicans and Democrats in Mordor, all parties have far more in common than they have in differences. The struggle between positivists and post-positivists are real but it are presented in too stark a manner. There were post-positivists as far back as the 1960s and those political scientists who were more statistical and quantitative also go back to the 50s and 60s. In other words that debate did not begin in the 1990s as IR theorists claim but thirty years earlier. In spite of these differences, there is consensus of virtually all parties concerning the politics of defending and celebrating Western civilization in world politics. These theories supported the Western powers. Their differences were small compared to the paternalism, racism and imperialism that they all shared.

Sovereignty vs anarchy myth
The sovereignty vs anarchy myth claims that in International Relations Theory all states are sovereign. But because there is no world-state the relations between nation-states are characterized as anarchistic. In the first place, IR theory limits which nation-states are considered sovereign to European countries. Eastern and Southern states are not considered sovereign because they lack the proper Western European credentials such as voting systems, more than one party, and capitalism. The school of Realism operates with universalist analytical principles that supposedly apply to all states regardless of how 2^nd class some states are treated in practice. The problem for IR theorists is that the post the 1648 era there had been a proliferation of international imperial hierarchies, which were comprised of a series of single sovereign colonial powers, many of which were not nation-states. Its supposedly universal and ideologically unbiased principles of state-centrism sovereignty directly contradict its practice. For example, in 1878 the conference in Berlin divided Africa between European imperial powers. These sovereign states had colonies.

Furthermore if by anarchy they mean disorder, the relationship between sovereign states without a world state is by no means disorderly. There are shifting alliances between states rather than a Hobbesian war of all single states against each other. Secondly, to characterize this disorder as “anarchy” reveals either complete political bias or ignorance of anarchism as a respectable political tendency on the socialist left. Anarchism has involved thousands of people in many countries around the world since the late 1840s. It has had some success in the Paris Commune, the Russian and especially the Spanish revolutions. To characterize this as disorderly is an unforgivable omission from theorists who claim to be political scientists.

The globalization myth
The myth is that globalization has only recently (the last century) become an issue for international theorists. But to Hobson’s own surprise in his initial research, in many areas including some though not all realists, international theorists since 1760 have placed considerable emphasis on globalization. In his book The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, Hobson points out that there were globalizing trade networks of, Africa, West Asia, India and China as far back as 500 CE.

The theoretical great traditions myth
IR theorists are no different than those who initiate artistic or spiritual movements in their search for origins. All political, artistic or spiritual movements seek to find their origins in the deep past rather than the recent past. In the IR traditional textbooks realism is claimed to go back to Thucydides in the ancient world and then forward to Hobbes and Machiavelli to culminate in Waltz, Gilpin and Mearsheimer via Carr and Morgenthau. But each of these theories are not air-tight. In fact IR theories mix with other theories within a given moment in time and each theory changes internally due to changes in history.

Defining Imperialism and Anti-imperialism International Theory
Hobson claims that the vast literature on imperialism and anti-imperialism generally lacks conceptual precision. Here Hobson confront two broad definitional approaches:

Narrow Eurocentric
Expansive postcolonial

Most of modern Eurocentric international theory embraces a narrow definition and allows for considerable wiggle room when confronted with a charge of imperialism. It sees Eurocentrism and imperialism as distinct. You can be Eurocentric and not imperialist and conversely imperialist without being Eurocentric. At the other extreme, by contrast, post-colonial theorists seek to completely shut down this wiggle room by assuming that being Eurocentric is inherently imperialist and imperialism is always Eurocentric.

In table 1 I have a divided a spectrum of imperialism throughout history into 6 types. The three types on the left accept that they are imperialists and don’t apologize for it. The theories on the right deny they are imperialists. The theories on the left are formal empires, while the theories on the right are informal liberal empires. The people in the last cell are the theorists of various types of imperialism. The cell above it include the nature and justification of their mission. The names of the theorists are not important for now, but some of the more famous ones might be familiar to you. The importance of this table are not the theorists but rather the systems of justification, none of which are value free, universal and objective.

Table 1 The Definitional Continuum of Imperialism, Past and Present

Definitional Consensus Most coercive definition Accept they are imperialists	Definitional Controversy Least coercive definition Deny they are imperialists
Formal Empire	Informal liberal empire

Tributary relations, political containment conquest of barbarism

National civilizing mission/cultural
conversion

Civilizing mission, via international government
protectorates

Anglo-Saxon hegemony

To protect, duty to prevent, duty to assist concept of democracies

Universalization

of Western civilization and global empire of liberal democratic peace

Gumplowicz, Ward, Mahan
Mackinder,
K. Pearson, Hitler, Von Treitschke, Kidd, Spykman
Haushofer

Cobden, Bright, Angell, Mill, Marx, Reinsch,
W.Wilson

Hobson, Buell, Woolf
Krasner, Fukuyama

Gilpin
Kindleberger Kagan, Brzezinski,
Cooper, Ignatieff

Slaughter, Ikenberry, Wheeler, Risse, Finnermore Rawls, Held
Nussbaum

Friedman, Wolf, Russet, Owen

Eurocentric Imperialism: Liberal and Marxism

In Table 2 below, one interesting but expected difference between liberalism and Marxism is that liberals see imperialism as benign. J. A. Hobson and John Stuart Mill see imperialism is benign at an international level, but Cobden, Bright and Angell see imperialism as benign at a national level. The fact that Marxists thinks imperialism as coerced rather than benign should not come as a surprise to anyone. Traditional International Relations Theory sees liberal internationalism and classical Marxism as the antithesis of imperialism. However, John Hobson’s main point is what Marxism and liberals have in common. They all agree that:

The East can be characterized as “barbaric oriental despotism”
The capitalist peripheral countries (Third world) are savage, anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature
Western agency is always pioneering, learning nothing from the rest of the world
Eastern agency even at its best is conditional, always learning from the West

It is these four points that show how deep Eurocentrism of all Western theories, even Marxism. These are the type of deep assumptions, hundreds of years old the keep Western theorists of world politics that the BRICS world of the East is bypassing them.

Table 2Paternalistic, Eurocentric. Institutional Imperial Concepts of World Politics

Marxism	Left Liberal	Liberal
Marx	Mill and Hobson	Cobden, Bright, Angell
Coercednational civilizing mission	Benigninternational mission	Benign national mission
East as barbaric Oriental Despotism	East as barbaric Oriental Despotism	East as barbaric Oriental Despotism
South as savage—3^rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature	South as savage—3^rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature	South as savage—3^rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature
Pioneering Western agency	Pioneering Western agency	Pioneering Western agency
Conditional Eastern agency	Conditional Eastern agency	Conditional Eastern agency

Here are some further examples of Eurocentrism. In the 19^th century, even when IR theory was sensitive to interdependence, it wasn’t world interdependence. Rather it was interdependence among the civilized states of Europe. Outside of Europe there was no recognition of interdependence. Eastern societies only got recognition once they became colonies or only if these countries were at war with Europe. It is something like calling the ultimate baseball playoffs “the World Series” even when it only includes the United States.

At the same time, the Eurocentrists had no problem imagining war with the East if it was profitable. But when it came to the civilized states of Europe, war was seen as unprofitable. Also, as we shall see later, racist theories bemoaned Europeans fighting because this would result in the depletion of the white race. Colonial annexation was entirely appropriate when it came to Europe’s relation with the East. The East has conditional agency, such as Japan during World War II. However, the East cannot take the lead in historical development without being predator (as in the Yellow Peril).

As for the Global South, (Africa) for it to be a respectable civilized state, Western core countries took a page out of Calvinism and insisted that these “savage societies” have a duty to develop their land productivity (meaning agriculturally) and abandon their primitivism (hunting and gathering). Non-Western politics, whether they be monarchies without constitutions or the egalitarian political consensus societies of hunting and gathering, are not recognized as sovereign. It was representative bourgeois state politics that was the “civilized” norm. As late as 1993 Paul Johnson said most African states are not fit to govern themselves. Their continued existence and the violence of human degradation they bring are a threat to the stability and peace as well as an affront to our moral sense. As of today Zionist Israel has massacred over 200,000 Palestinians. Yet there is no call from the United Nations (controlled by the West) to intervene in this “failed state”.

European imperialists hide their protectionist policies. As Friedrich List remarked, once imperialists have attained their summit of greatness, they kick away the ladder by which they climbed up in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up afterwards behind them.

Both the US and Britain industrialized on the back of extremely protectionist regimes and only turned to free trade once they arrived at the top of the global economic hierarchy. Thus, the imposition of free trade on developing countries by Britain after 1846 and the US after 1945 prevents Third World states from using tariffs to protect the infant industries. The projection of “free trade” by Americans…constitute an economic containment strategy to keep the Third World down.

A Century of Marxist Eurocentrism
Karl Marx’s paternal Eurocentrism and the political necessity of the Western civilizing mission
Marx appears to have had little appreciation for the complexity of ancient Chinese and Indian civilizations. For him China and India were the home of “Oriental Despotism”. The East could only be emancipated from its backwardness by the British colonialists. India stands outside world history and China was understood as a rotting semi-civilization. Believe it or not, for Marx, opium wars were emancipatory for China. Without British intervention there would be no future emancipatory socialist revolution. Imperialism was an instrument for both political progress and a requirement of global primitive accumulation. Was the result of British colonization Chinese emancipation? No, it was a century of Chinese humiliation (1839-1949). The imperialist engagement with China did not lead to order but to massive social-dislocation. The various Chinese revolutions were in part stimulated by a reaction against the encounter with the West.

For Marx and Engels, the East could belatedly jump aboard the Western developmental plane as Hobson says as “The Oriental Express”. It could participate in the construction of world history. But they could never lead the train in a progressive direction. They only had conditional agency. The Western states on the other hand had hyper-sovereignty. Sadly, Hobson says there hasn’t been much effort to reconstruct Marx’s theory along non-Eurocentric lines in traditional Marxism.

Lenin has no theory of Eastern emancipation
According to Hobson, Lenin says the East is inherently incapable of self-development. Lenin discusses how the period of free competition within Europe was succeeded after 1873 with the rise of cartels which intensified after 1903 into full-fledged monopoly capital and finance capital. But the causes of the crisis lay in the West whether underconsumption (Hobson) or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (Marx and Engels). There was no mention of resistance in the colonies. Lenin discussed the right of self-determination of nations, but those nations would never influence the West or provide leadership.

World-systems theory
Wallerstein
Immanuel Wallerstein was heavily criticized by Robert Brenner and other classical Marxists for overstating the interdependence of trade and hierarchy between societies and understating the class struggle within societies. But he maintains his traditional Marxian orientation in emphasizing the dynamics for the evolution of the world-system clearly in the Western part of the world. The West represents the civilized world, the core countries. The second division in the world is occupied by the regressive redistributive world empires in Asia. Division three of the world system is occupied by primitive reciprocal mini-systems found in North America, parts of Africa and Australasia (savage societies in the 19^th century parlance).

World-empires mainly in Asia saw their state structures weakened while their boundaries underwent a forced contraction and the surviving mini-systems of North American, Caribbean and Australia underwent wholesale destruction.

Arrighi and Chase-Dunn

Other world-systems theorists like Giovanni Arrighi and Christopher Chase Dunn suggested that the world-system didn’t consist of just a core and a periphery but consisted of a semi-periphery which may or may not be Western. They argued that when core Western countries experienced crisis and decline, it was the semi-periphery countries that provided a new resource which allowed them to become a new core.

Exceptions to the rule Gunder Frank, Abu-Lughod

To be fair, both a sympathizer and an arch-critic of World-Systems theory, Andre Gunder Frank accused Wallerstein of Eurocentrism in his writings culminating in hisbook Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. The work of Janet Anu-Lughod Before European Hegemony was so very powerful in showing the advanced state of non-Western trade networks between 1250 and 1350 CE.

Exceptions to the Rule Outside of Marxism: James Watson

The Evolution of International Societymoves from the Italian city-state system and then proceeds with the emergence of sovereignly at the Westphalia conference by way of the Renaissance and the Reformation to arrive at the balance of power in 1713 at Utrecht. Yet he does talk about Eastern developments as reacting back on Europe as in a dialectical way. What the East contributed from the West included:

Industrialization, centerpiece of “British genius” was significantly enabled by Chinese innovations that stem back several millenniums.

Further, Watson analyzes in considerable detail many non-Western political formations prior to 1648.

Western Fear of Eastern and Southern Power

Most interesting is that many anti-imperialist racists argue against imperialism because it brings the white race in racially fatal conflict with the contaminating influences of non-white races. The impossibility of Eastern progressive development renders the Western civilizing mission all but futile.

Charles Henry Pearson: the decline of white supremacy and the barbaric rise of the yellow peril
National Life and Character, a Forecast. He argued that white racial supremacy was being superseded by very high levels of predatory Eastern agency. But in Pearson’s racist imagination it is the white West that has been fated to remain within its stationary limits while the yellow races are destined to expand and triumph over the higher whites. The barbaric threat also came from within as a result of the socialist states’ preference to prop up the unfit white working classes and from without via the Yellow Peril were all leading to deterioration.

James Blair and David Jordan

Jordan’s defensive social Darwinist racism was a pacifist’s eugenics. It had three components:

The white race cannot survive in the tropics.

It serves to affect a degeneration of the physical and intellectual energy of the Europeans. He gives an example of that as the Philippines lie in the heat of the torrid zone which he called natures asylum for degeneration. Benjamin Kidd argued though we in Europe have the greatest food-producing regions of the earth, we want to administer the tropic from a distance. The white races needed to wake up because the tropics will lure them to their death. Kidd wanted to absolve the West of its home-grown liberal imperial guilt syndrome. His key concern about colonizing the tropics was the degenerative impact that the climate would have on white imperialists.

The second anti-imperialist argument concerned the perils of immigration.

The Oriental is of the past. They have not progressed for centuries. The Easterner hates progress. He contends that the constitution of China is said to not have been changed for thousands of years. On the other hand, the West is progressive, energetic and intolerant of the very thing which is the East’s most marked characteristic, indolence. The two races should never amalgamate.

Anti-war because the fittest white people would get killed

Jordan argues that warfare selects the best or fittest elements of the civilized white race to go out and fight, but in so doing leads to a reduction in the numbers of the fittest element as they lose their lives in futile colonial wars. Meanwhile the infirm and cowardly and feckless stay home, away from the battlefield. Some defensive racists were against the war between white countries so they could preserve white unity.

To summarize the threat from the East:

Domestic white barbaric threat – unfit working class
Racist interbreeding threat – contamination
Tropical climatic threat
Threat of European wars depleting the white race

The crisis of Western self-doubting and deep anxiety was reflected in a host of books which included:

Spengler’s Decline of the West (European Institutionalist) (1919,1932)
Madison Grant’s the Passing of the White Race (1918)
Lothrop Stoddard The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy (1920)
Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)

Stoddard

Eurocentrism and racism do not always deny non-white race’s agency. The climax of eugenics reflected not the moment of supreme white confidence but an acute sense of anxiety regardless of the future hegemony of the white race. For Stoddard, globalization is a real threat. The greatest threat to white racial existence lies

in colored immigration problem
a demographic explosion

The white races are under siege and disunited within their inner sanctum excavated by the Trojan horse of Western liberalism. Stoddard takes the notion of predatory Eastern agency beyond Mahan and Mackinder. He wants to call out the hubris of the white race. He is nervous and panicked about the Japanese victory over the white Russians in 1905. Further, rise of communism dealt a cruel blow to white racial unity. He is afraid of the white wars in which the best white stock would be lost on the battlefields. The white need to retreat from their imperial bases in Asia and leave the land to yellow and brown rule.

Madison Grant

Racialist Madison Grant

Grant claimed colonialism weakens the white races. The Nordic race is unable to survive south of the line of latitude on white Virginia because of the detrimental impact of the hot climate. Nordics must keep away from the native population for fear of racial contamination from the sun’s actinic rays. Grant says the rapid decline in the birthrate of native white Americans is gradually withdrawing from the scene, abandoning to these aliens the land which they once conquered and developed. The man of the old stock is being crowded out.

Patrick Moynihan
In Patrick Moynihan book Pandemonium, he explores a Malthusian logic in predicting the demographic doomsday scenario at the hands of the Eastern Hordes as does Paul Kennedy in his book Preparing for the 21^st Century. For them, the greatest challenge to world order in the coming century is the rising relative demographic gap between West and East. Western civilizations will have stable or declining populations and would be swamped by the East and the South. While Malthus in his day did not prevent a rising demographic to Europe from the East, by the late 19^th and early 20^thcenturies these became a staple of much of racist Western thought.

Huntington and Lind on demographics
In the work of Huntington and Lind a close parallel can be drawn between their work and the racist imperialist thinker Mahan. But an even closer link can be found with CH Pearson’s National Life and Character, a Forecast; Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy(1920); Clashing Tides of Color (1935). In Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations (1996). The roots of the barbaric threat that the Chinese and Muslims pose for the Western Civilization are located within a neo-Malthusian framework. It begins with the Eastern population explosion. This surplus population is problematic because it will seek to flood into the heartlands of the West.

For Huntington and Lind, non-Western societies were increasingly becoming the movers and shakers of their own history and of Western history. This meant in their ability to economically develop as well as resist imperialism. Lind writes that with the break-up of the Soviet “empire” the West’s great right flank will almost certainly be endangered as the Islamic republics will seek to join their Muslim brothers. Islam will be at the gates of Vienna as either immigrants or terrorists. Domestically multiculturalism in the West today is a “political virus” for it serves to boost the vitality of foreign cultures within the West.

Conclusion
The purpose of this article is to expose the theoretical blockages to the West’s understanding that they are being left beyond by the multipolar world of BRICS.

First, their Western International Relations Theory history has hardly been a positivist value free theory. It oozes Eurocentrism, paternalism, racism and imperialism. Secondly International Relations Theory only dimly perceives that these theories are not 100 years deep, starting after World War I, but have a 250 year history as Table 3 below shows. Thirdly, table 3 shows over 50 theorists over that 250 years, thus cementing a deep ideological commitment to “the rise of the West”. Those international theorists who have really understood that the East and the South are not merely passive recipients of the wisdom of the West but are themselves innovators. These theorists are isolated and could be counted on two hands.

Table 3 Eurocentrism, Paternalism and Racism in International Theory 1760-2010

1760-1914 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalism Cobden/ Bright, Angell, Hobson, Mill, Marx	Ant-paternalism Smith, Kant
Scientific racism	Offensive racism Ward, Reinsch, Kidd, Mahan, Mackinder and von Treitschke	Defensive Racism Spencer, Sumner, Blair, Jordan, CH Pearson, Ripley, Brinton
1914-1945 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalism Wolff, Zimmern, Murray, Angell	Anti-paternalism Subliminal Eurocentrism Laski/ Brailsford, Lenin, Bukharin
Scientific racism	Offensive Racism	Defensive racism
Wilson, Buell, Kjellen, Spykman, Haushofer, Hitler	Stoddard, Grant, E. Huntington
1945-1989 Subliminal Eurocentrism	Paternalism Gilpin, Keohane Walz, Bull, Watson	Anti-Paternalism Carr, Morgenthau
1989-2010 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalist Rawls, Held, Nussbaum, Fukuyama	Anti-paternalist World-system theory, Cox
Offensive Eurocentrism Kagan, Cooper, Ferguson	Defensive Eurocentrism SP Huntington, Lind

Below is the Conventional linear narrative of Liberal great tradition:

From 1760 to 1816 there is classical liberal internationalism of Smith, Kant and Ricardo.
From 1830 to 1913 classical liberal internationalism continues in the work of Cobden, Bright, JS Mill and Angell.
Between 1900 to 1945 the emphasis switches to interdependence theory of liberal institutionalism of Hobson, Wilson, Zimmerman and Murray.
Between 1989 and 2010 liberal cosmopolitanism is embodied in the theories of Fukuyama, Held and Rawls.

The Table 4 below shows Hobson’s very different breakdown of liberalism, calling it “paternalistic imperial liberalism”.

Table 4 Hobson’s history in international Liberalism

1830-1919	1860-1919	1900-1939	1914-1939	1960-1989	1989-2010	1989-2010
Liberal imperialism	Liberal Imperialists	International Imperialists	International Imperialists	Statist liberals	Liberal cosmopolitan	Realist liberals
Cobden, Bright Mill, Angell, Robertson	Dike, Seeley Ritchie Ireland, Bagehot	Wilson, Buell Jordon	Hobson Zimmerman Angell Murray	Bull, Watson, Keohane	Rawls, Fukuyama, Held Nussbaum	Ikenberry Slaughter Cooper Ignatieff
Manifest Paternalist Eurocentrism	Offensive Racism	Oppressive Racism	Manifest Paternalist Eurocentrism	Subliminal Paternalist Eurocentrism	Manifest Paternalist Eurocentrism	Manifest Paternalist Eurocentrism

Table 5 shows that history of realism has also been filled with political activity about as far from positivism as one can imagine.

Table 5 Hobson’s history of international realism

Racist realism	Racist cultural realism	Classical realism	Neorealism	Western realism	Western liberal realism	Cultural Realism
Mahan Mackinder von Treitischke Spykman Haushoter Hitler	CH Pearson Stoddard, Grant	Carr Morgenthau	Gilpin Kindleberger Kennedy Krasner	Kaplan Brzezinski Ferguson	Kagan, Krautammer Bootk	Huntington Lind
Explicit Imperialism	Anti-imperialism	Anti-imperialism	Implicit Neo-imperialism	Explicit Neo-imperialism	Explicit Neo-Imperialism	Explicit Anti-imperialism
Offensive racism	Defensive Racism	Subliminal Eurocentrism	Subliminal Paternalist Eurocentrism	Offensive Eurocentrism	Part- Paternalist Part offensive Eurocentrism	Defensive Eurocentrism
1889-1945	1889-1945	Post 1945	Post 1973.	Post 1989	Post 1989	Post 1989

Lastly Hobson charts the history of Marxism from 1840 to post 1989.

With classical Marxism of Marx and Engels between 1840-1895. Hobson calls it explicit imperialism which is paternalist Eurocentrism.
Between 1910 and the 1920s classical Marxism continues with the work of Lenin, Luxemburg, Hilferding and Bukharin which Hobson characterizes as anti-imperialist, but a subliminal anti-paternalist Eurocentrism.
Between 1967 and 1989 although World-Systems Theory differs from classical Marxism with its emphasis on conflicts between states more than class struggles within states, it shares the same combination of anti-imperialist, subliminal, anti-paternalist Eurocentrism of the Marxists of 1910-1920. The same is true for Robert Cox’s Gramscian hegemony theory.
In the post 1989 period we find in the work of Giovanni Arrighi and Christopher Chase-Dunn a continuation of anti-imperialist, anti-paternalist emphasis on Europe, but both are more willing to grant autonomy to non-Western countries. If Eastern or Southern countries occupy what both call the capitalist semi-periphery of the world system. Arrighi’s last book was called Adam Smith in Beijing, showing his interest in China as the new global hegemon
In the same period It is in the work of Andre Gunder Frank and Janet Abu-Lughod that we finally theories that challenge any Eurocentrism or paternalism. Gunder Frank has always contended that World Systems Theory is Eurocentric and claims, as Hobson argues in another book that Europe only surpassed China after 1800. His book Re-Orient claims, correctly I think that the new Asian Age is on the horizon.

ADDENDUM
Recommended related post

The decline of the West, the rise of the East and the South, and the internal dynamics of Western collapse discussed in this extraordinary video with Garland Nixon and Joti Brar.

IMPERIALISM: DECADENT AND DOOMED WITH JOTI BRAR - PEOPLE HAVE HAD ENOUGH - REVOLUTION IS IN THE AIR!

Garland Nixon
Streamed live on Oct 18, 2024

URL has been copied successfully!

window.addEventListener("sfsi_functions_loaded", function() { if (typeof sfsi_widget_set == "function") { sfsi_widget_set(); } });

Print this article

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License •
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Choose-Up Games from the Sandlots of Jamaica, Queens NY

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

Bruce Lerro

Resize text-+=

Editor's Note: With the prospect of World War 3 approaching like a hurricane from both Ukraine and the Middle East at once, and humanity on the brink of nuclear extinction due to the US Empire's idiotic and ever arrogant policies, we were recently deluged with submissions not just from our regular contributors but from new voices that, with the field of free speech constantly shrinking, turned to us as a possible venue to publish their thoughts. While we are ourselves under severe pressure through shadowbanning and other forms of "algo censorship" that have substantially reduced our outreach, we welcomed these new possible collaborators. That compelled us to do a bit of triage and momentarily postpone the printing of pieces that, despite their undeniable quality, seemed less topicaly urgent. That said, since this level of insane and completely manufactured crisis seems now like the new normal in the world, courtesy of Washington's degenerate leadership, we will be opening the door to less urgent but more broadly cultural and humanistic topics from time to time as a badly needed tonic for our spirits in wartime. This essay by senior contributing editor Bruce Lerro fits that bill.—PG

PERSPECTIVES & ANALYSIS

Choose-Up Games from the Sandlots of Jamaica, Queens NY

Culture and Class Conflicts 1956-1969

09/24/2024 - by Bruce Lerro - Leave a Comment

Field of Dreams

When I was about seven years old I used to play a “let’s pretend” baseball game in our backyard. I laid out 4 rags I’d gotten from the garage and placed them in a diamond form which represented the bases. The bases were about 20 feet apart. Then I looked at our house and took my batting stance and let my imagination take over. The imaginary scene is no doubt familiar to many of you. It is the last of the 9^th inning, we are losing by three runs. The bases are loaded and there are two outs. Then I swing and hit the ball – tsssssch! As Mel Allen was saying in my head “there is a high fly ball deep to right center. The center fielder is at the track. It is going, going, gone”. Then I would trot around the bases. As I got older, I played a great deal of hardball and I hit home runs, but never quite experienced the situation I imagined when I was seven until the end of my playing days.

Coming Through the Hole in the Fence
Around the same time, my father used to take me across the street in the woods to play catch and bat. It was a good scene because the weeds would always stop the ball from going too far. In addition, I always hit with a tree in back of me so that if my father’s pitches were outside the strike zone or I missed or fouled it back, the tree stopped it. Then about a year later my father initiated me into the mysteries of the multiple baseball fields at Jamaica, Queens High School. Officially you had to go through a gate way at the end of the field to get in. But the local kids weren’t having it. They used cutting wires to pry open a hole in the fence. My father and I climbed through the fence and set up. He would pitch to me even though we only had one or two balls. If I hit it past him, he had to get it. But as happens often in these kind of situations, other kids or even adults are around, size up the situation and volunteer to catch or play the field. Willie came by and volunteered to be a catcher. He was an older kid, maybe 14, and looked like he could be a soccer player from South America. If I hit a ball past my father, I would run around those imaginary bases again. My father would retrieve the ball and throw it to Willie to try to get me out at the plate. Willie would make believe he missed the tag or the throw so I could hit a homerun. I was at the age where I couldn’t quite figure out if this was intentional not. Even then, I appreciated his kindness

Geographical Constraints of Choose-up Games in the Corner
Our house was only 2 long blocks away from Jamaica High School so I went past the school for many reasons other than baseball. One time I noticed in the distance a group of kids playing baseball in the corner of the park. The actual baseball field for high school games was only part of the park. Surrounding the field was a track and beyond the track was a corner where the kids were playing. The “bases” were old rags of some sort that were laid out maybe 60-70 feet apart (as opposed to the official high school field which was 90 feet apart). These distances were decided long before I began to play. In part it was determined by the fact that our throwing arms weren’t strong enough to make a throw from third base to first, or short to first with the bases 90 feet apart. Also, the pitcher’s mound was only about 45 feet from the plate as opposed to 60 feet for the same reasons.

Adapting to Inadequacies in Numbers and Positions
Our games never had 18 players. Mostly we had maybe 10 or 12. That meant that any kid who wanted to play could. We would adapt our rules to accommodate them. For example, we might decide that right field was in foul territory to shorten the distances to be covered by the outfielders. In addition, we might only have one outfielder to cover center and left. That wasn’t a big deal because most of us were not strong enough to hit it to the outfield. If you hit one on the other side of the high school track it was a home run. In right field there was large tree. As we got older and could hit the ball to the outfield more consistently and the right fielder had to play the ball off the trees. If someone hit a fly ball into the trees and the right fielder could catch the ball bouncing off the trees the batter was out. Needless to say, no one wanted to play right field! The pitcher and the catcher were not specialized positions. The catcher might not even be on the team on defense. It might be a player on the offensive team that was just backing up if the batter missed the ball or it was too far out of the strike zone. While the pitcher was on the defensive team, there were no balls and strikes. The pitcher’s job was to just get the ball over the plate so everyone could hit. There was no standing around. If you struck out it was because you missed the ball on the 3^rd strike after either missing or fouling off the first two. Our fields had pebbles and sometimes rocks in the infield. There were many bad hops, but you just took it in stride. In the outfield you had to look out for potholes, mole hills and gravel.

Choosing Up Sides
Choosing up sides was an opportunity to feel proud or humiliated depending on when you were picked. The best players were usually the ones who picked the teams. The better players were chosen first and players with less skill picked later. In those days, Brendan and Owen were two of the best as was Tony Cirillo and I. We could all hit homeruns. Tony and I played shortstop on opposite teams. The shortstop position was usually the best fielder on the team and got the most action. Tony had a great arm. My arm was average but I covered a lot of ground. Brendan and Owen were close friends and always wound up on the same team. I don’t know why. They were both big guys and it might have been the case that we were too afraid to get them on opposite teams. How was it determined who picked first? Well, some neutral player would hold a bat out and grip it tightly. One of the guys who wanted to be captain had three chances to kick the bat out of their hands. If they were successful, they got to pick the first player

Culture and Class
Most of these kids were working class Irish and Italian. Here is a list of the players I remember. Brendan Rice, Owen Brennan, Chris Green, Tony Circillo, James (Head) Circillo, Abe Circillo, Ronnie Christian, Billy Smolin, James Sheehy, Georgie Robles, Bernard Rubino, Evan Munkmeir; Danny Mettines , Billy Insulman, Kenny Lowe, and Frankie Majori. Once in a while a tall lanky guy would slither thorough the hole in the fence on his way to the library. What was odd was that this guy (I think his name was Luke) wanted to be the Pope. As you can imagine, he was mercilessly teased. We’d say “there goes the Pope!”. Our neighborhood was very unusual. Within an area of about a mile and a half we had three social classes represented. From Parson’s boulevard to Jamaica high was a working-class area. The closer you got to 168th Street the houses were lower middle class attached houses. Our block, 168th Street was middle class. I would say there was subliminal tension between us around social class which I will get to later.

What to do About Close Plays
Those adults and kids who were involved in Little League have no idea how easy they had it. The teams had coaches who determined who was going to play what position, and they had umpires who determined who is safe and who is out on close plays. In the sandlots we had to figure this out for ourselves. For us the captains determine the battling order and the positions. But the captain of a team was the first among equals. By a long process of trial and error we learned who was the best in each position so the captain barely had to say a word about who was going to play where. Also, the players themselves got to know who was a weak and a strong hitter and they would self-organize themselves accordingly. No one kept personal records of performances. We just knew what the score was and what inning we were in. To this day I cannot imagine how we kept track of close plays at home, first, second or third base. Our arguments were never technical or legal. They were always matters of who beat the throw and who didn’t. What was interesting as I remember it, is the arguments never lasted very long. We just wanted to keep playing. Our games were usually high scoring so a game was usually never determined by a single call.

The Passing of a Comet: Danny Mettines
My father never liked the kids I played ball with. He grew up very poor. His mother raised seven kids and they were “on the dole”. He was an artist who rose out of poverty to become a commercial artist. We lived in a middle class neighborhood (one square block) and he was afraid my baseball friends would be a bad influence on me. He was always trying to get me to play for church teams as an alternative. I never gave up my friends but I did play on one church team in grammar school. I could never get enough of baseball. At St. Nicholas of Tolentine the teams were organized with the names of native American tribes – The Mohawks, Algonquins, Iroquois, Cheyannes. One day the Mohawks showcased a pitcher who was a real phenom, Danny Mettinis. Danny just towered over us in terms of skill. As a left-handed pitcher he could strike out anybody. As a first baseman he could scoop the ball out of the dirt and do splits to sweep up errant throws from the infield. Danny ran like the wind and as a hitter he could hit the ball 100 feet further than any one else. He wasn’t a big guy but he was built like a tank. He was charismatic, funny and sarcastic. I prayed that he’d never find out about our games in the corner, but that day came.

When Danny came to participate in our games, he revolutionized the existing hierarchy. Brendon, Owen, Tony and I were all knocked off of top ranking. Danny was in a class by himself. Danny was a lefthanded power hitter who would not only hit balls into the trees but over them. He would regularly hit homeruns over the track. It was hard to lose a game if Danny was on your side. Danny was charismatic, funny and sarcastic. You didn’t want to get on his bad side.

For the Love of the Game: Joe Austin
On the actual playing field of Jamaica high, sometimes games and practices would be going on that were not connected to the actual high school baseball team. The players were older, maybe 15-17 years old. The person who was coordinating their practices was an old guy who I eventually came to know as Joe Austin. Joe was an ex-minor league baseball player who worked with kids in the neighborhood and eventually took them into leagues. Joe had skills way beyond any coach I had seen. If you happen to go to a baseball game early and watch the infield and outfield practices, that was the routine Joe would go through with his players. He would provide bats and balls for the players and when they were old enough to go into leagues, he would buy the uniforms. Joe worked at night in a brewery and then five days a week he would take the bus from his house on Sutfin Blvd about a mile to 168th Street. He would then walk 4 blocks to the field carrying bats, balls and gloves in a duffle bag. He was on the field from about 9AM to 3PM. When he went into leagues he named his teams Irish names. Like the Lepricons leprechaun? , Blarney Boys and Shannons.

When Joe thought we were old enough, he started coming to our choose-up games in the corner. He was not pushy at all. He provided bats and balls for us regularly and offered to umpire our games. This was a great relief for us as time wasn’t wasted arguing. He started to make lineup cards for us that he would draw on the back of a paper lunch bag. When we got a little older, maybe 11 or 12, he moved us to another part of the high school park, which had more room. Then he offered to pitch for both sides. This was a boom for us because he got the ball over the plate virtually all the time which speeded up the games. Joe had skills that in retrospect no other coach could ever come close to let alone match. He started to pitch us knuckleballs and curve balls us to get us used to hitting pitches other that weren’t straight. He also worked with kids who seemed to want to become pitchers and he taught them not only to throw curves, but sliders, screwballs, and forkballs. One kid, Joey Fitzgerald made it as far as the Mets farm system. Little did we know Joe was grooming us to be his next team, the Emeralds.

“Yaw wanna play ball, play ball! Ya don’t? Get the fuck off the field”
Joe always welcomed new players so that once we transitioned to a bigger field, more boys came to play. Now the teams each had 9 players on a side. We were bigger, stronger and we could hit the ball further. Younger kids started coming including Jesse Braverman (with whom I’m still friends), Joey Fitzgerald, Bobby Saca, John Brennan, Ritchie Ames. While Joe was very inclusive, he was also very demanding. Once you started playing in the games, Joe expected you to be there every day. Some of the guys I started with stopped coming to the choose-up games probably because they got tired of it. Their skills had leveled off or they got involved in other activities (some activities like drugs or stealing cars). But one player, a catcher by the name of Davey Heckendorn, made a conscious choice to stop playing, told everyone about it and he paid for it.

One day Davey came to the field with someone I had never seen before. I later found out his name was Joe Trapp. Davey started to cry as he announced he wouldn’t be coming anymore. His music teacher told him that if he continued catching, he would ruin his hands by digging the balls out of the dirt. Joe Trapp and David Bernstein were there to support him. As I recall, Joe cursed him out for quitting. If you can imagine what a response was like from a group of 15 predominately Italian or Irish boys hearing this, it wasn’t pretty. We mocked him for crying and I’m sure we threatened Joe and David with a good beating for even daring to come to our turf again. I spoke with him years later, and this is the first topic we discuss. In retrospect, this was one of many miserable things I did as a 12-13 year old.

The lazy hazy days of summer pick-up games with Joe
In spite of the intensity that Joe demanded I would say the two years we spent on the big field were the happiest of all my 13 years of baseball. I loved playing against people I knew and because there were no crowds, uniforms, bells or whistles it was easy to relax. During the course of a summer’s day we would have two games. One in the morning, starting about 9:30 and one after lunch. After the first game I would rush home for lunch, eat quickly and then run back to the field. As I remember it, we let Joe pick the teams instead of us choosing up. Joe had a very good sense of how to pick combinations of players who would make the teams evenly matched. As I recall it most of our games were close. I switched over from shortstop to second base because as the field was larger I couldn’t make the throw from short to first very easily. I started secretly keeping records of my hitting statistics – batting average, homers, RBIs, doubles and triples. Because we were bigger now and could hit the ball further the outfield became more attractive to play rather than a sentence of banishment.

Poetry in motion
One of my favorite activities was having Joe hit fungoes to me in the outfield. He would stand at home plate and I would be stationed in center field. With the wave of his hand, he would motion to me to run from center to right center. He would hit the ball to me perfectly, neither too far to make it uncatchable nor too easy where I would stand still and wait for it. I always had to catch it on the run. Then he would motion me to run to left-center back to right center field and the same thing would happen, back and forth for maybe 30-45 minutes. I loved to fact there was no fence to worry about crashing into. Playing the outfield really developed my arm so by the time I started playing that position I developed a really strong arm. Also, I was a very fast runner but you would never know it with me playing second base. Playing center field, I could utilize my speed to the max. I loved center because, like shortstop, it’s a position where you see the whole field at once.

Joe had nicknames for some of the players. He called me “Lash LaRue” after a movie he had seen where the cowboy used to strip a gunslinger’s gun out of his hand with a whip. Because my arm was pretty wild in center field when it was still developing, my throws home were often way off. He once yelled at me, “hey Lash, the backstop is 18 feet across. Do you think you get that shotgun within that range? I never took it personally. I was flattered that I had enough standing for him to tease me.

Crossing the Rubicon
We did not always just play games among ourselves. Occasionally we would get a challenge from a group from another neighborhood to play a game. The game was not slow pitch. It was with pitchers pretty much throwing fast balls as hard as they could with someone calling balls and strikes. These games were harder for everyone because we had to hit pitches coming at us at much greater velocity. Some of our better players stopped coming. Billy Smolin and Bernard Rubino didn’t return. Tony Circillo stopped being the power hitter he was, but hung on as a pitcher. Brendon Rice was not a good hitter once we switched to fast pitch but continued as a catcher. Chris Green and I made the transition as did Danny.

Our entry into organized leagues as the Emeralds
It was in 1961 when I was 13 that Joe moved us to play on the actual Jamaica High School field. It was around the same year that Joe prepared us to play in the Queens-Nassau League. We stopped playing pick-up games and when we were together it was strictly infield and outfield and batting practice. Joe bought all uniforms. He never made any cuts (telling players they didn’t make the team). I think in our first year we had close to 30 players on our team. I believe it was in 1962 that we had our first team. The league had players that could be up to the age of 17. Our oldest players were 14. Joe wanted to play in a league with older players because the competition would be good for us. In retrospect I think it was a mistake. Before we got into the league, we knew that we were much better than kids our own age. But playing against teams with players who were 2-3 older than we were was demoralizing. I think in the first year in the league we were 4-16. The next year we did better. I think we played about .500 ball. Our last year in the league we thought we could compete for the championship. I think we won more than we lost but we never won anything.

A taste of the East Side kids
Our team was a rough team, kind of like the East Side kids. We got into some fights with the other teams and probably the organizers of the league warned Joe. When we played occasionally in the suburbs we could feel the class tensions and this would carry over to Joe and his relationship with the other players. Joe would coach first base. Sometimes he’d get into razzing with opposing teams’ first baseman. One time
Joe told me to spike the first baseman. I said no. Joe took me out for a pinch runner.
Our team did not have good team spirit. We teased each other almost as much as we teased the other team.

Who’s in and who’s out?
Soon before our first year in the league two players we had never seen before started to come to our practices: Mark Kenny, Ronnie Gerreki. They were not from our neighborhood and naturally enough that challenged the existing pecking order. As I recall Mark Kenney’s father talked to Joe about taking Mark on the team. His father had professional aspirations for Mark and his father knew Joe would develop his talents. I think the same thing happened with Ronnie. Both Mark and Ronnie were very good. Probably the only player we had better than they was Danny. But there was a problem. Mark played short-stop and Ronnie played second. What was going to happen to the existing people we had to play short and second?

There were a number of tension points. One was the fact that Mark and Ronnie did not come up from the ranks. They just appeared, so naturally those who played with Joe for years would feel pushed aside. I was a good hitter and Joe still wanted me in the line-up so he moved me into center field where I had been practicing for a year or two. But we already had a center fielder, Frankie Majori. I was a much better hitter than Frankie and so because of me, Frankie was on the bench. This caused tension between some of Frankie’s friends and I who were also on the team. This was amplified by class conflicts. Frankie, Brendan and Bernard were working class. I was middle class and they knew it because they knew where I lived. I started to feel more isolated than I ever had.

My distance from others on the team was aggravated by the differences in where we went to school. Many of the Emeralds were also playing ball for Jamaica High School, a working class public school. My parents did not want me to go to Jamaica High. It was too rough and they thought I would get a better education at a Catholic school. So instead of going to a high school with my friends which was 2 blocks away, I was shipped off Holy Cross High School, three or four miles away. I was very angry at my parents for this and I had a major rift with my them that never really healed completely. Meanwhile the players who went to Jamaica high noticed my absence and probably concluded that I was spoiled, being shipped off to a private school. After I got home from school in high school, I would walk over to Jamaica High to watch my old friends play, hoping to find some solidarity and imagining I was in center field there. But my old friends rarely acknowledged me. I was an outsider. After a while I stopped going. It was too painful. I never even tried out for the Holy Cross baseball team. I hated going there and didn’t want to spend any extra time there.

My father coming to my games
Despite my father’s disapproval of Joe and the Emeralds, he came to the games. From his point of view it was a natural thing to want to watch your kid play ball. But with rare exceptions, none of the kids' fathers came to the game, so he stuck out like a sore thumb. In addition, being Italian he would yell when I did something well. It was humiliating. I asked him not to come but he didn’t, telling me that the other kids were jealous because their fathers didn’t come to the game. He didn’t understand that for a 15-year-old teenager living in the United States in the early 1960s, the last thing they wanted was to be seen with their parents. One time we had a Saturday afternoon game in which the field we were supposed to play on was waterlogged by the previous days of rain. I got word that we would switch fields. I called my father to tell him not to come to the waterlogged field and that we were playing somewhere else. He asked me where, and I made believe I couldn’t remember it. Well, I was very happy to know I wouldn’t have to deal with him for a day. However, when I stepped up leading off the game in the new location, Tony Cirillo says to me from the bench, “hey Bruce, guess who’s here?”. It was my father, who must have made some phone calls and found the field.

My performance
I didn’t do nearly as well as I did in the pick-up games. In my three years with the Emeralds I think I hit about .260 or so. I was a streak hitter and better with runners on base. I was a good left-handed drag bunter so Joe translated that as my being a good leadoff batter. I wasn’t. I didn’t like taking pitches and my main goal was to get my cuts in. In retrospect, my best position was batting fifth, after Mark and Danny. That way I could hit with runners on base. The only reason I liked hitting lead-off was I would come to the plate more. Our home field was the 201^st Street field which had a short rightfield fence. It was a great experience to hit a ball over the fence and trot around the bases. Until then if I hit one deep over the outfielders I had to run it out as it was it was an inside the park homer. I hit some homers but I also had bad streaks. I once struck out six times in a double-header, four in the first game and two in the second. By the end of the game, Jesse’s brother Roger was pointing out what I was doing wrong in front of a small crowd. He meant well, but it was humiliating.

By my seventeenth birthday my time with the Emeralds was up. I either had to find a new team or stop playing. I had been playing ball for 10 years and wouldn’t know what to do with myself, so I played on. I played three more years, one with the Dukes in South Zone Park; one was with a team in Forest Hills and one with a team from South Jamaica. I will focus most on my crazy year with the Dukes. I learned more about myself and life than I ever dreamed of in all my years with Joe. I had to face my shadow side.

From Joe Austin to Ray Church and the Dukes
The shadow side of my baseball life
In all my years with Joe I was a very good player all around. I could hit for power, I was a very good center fielder, I had a good arm and I was fast. I started every game and finished every game That meant I could count on:

never being pinch-hit for;
never pinch-hitting;
Never being pinch run for
never pinch running; and
never going into the outfield for defensive purposes

Doing any of these things was a sign you were not a complete player and only had part-time status. Yet when I played for Ray Church, I had to learn to accept all these roles. But what I found was that as I rose to the occasion and in the process formed at deeper relationship with a coach that I ever dreamed of.

Who was Ray Church?
Ray Church was no Joe Austin. He could not hit fungoes like Joe. He couldn’t curse like Joe and he never played minor league baseball. I later found out the Ray worked at the LaGuardia airport in some administration capacity, he had been in the Air Force, and like Joe, he was single. What Ray had that Joe didn’t have was he was natural psychologist and social psychologist. Ray was very even-tempered and he seemed to have emotional relationships with most of players who were all about 17-18 years old. Ray was about 45 years old. My friend Jesse who used to represent Joe at the league meetings told me that Ray had coached the South Ozone Park Dukes for many years.

My introduction to Ray and Dave Laney
Dave Laney was a well-built, good looking, tall Irish kid with a mass of bleached blond hair and a red face. I never knew whether his face was red because he had been surfing or drinking. I later found out it was both. I played against Davey when I was with Joe. He was a good left-handed pitcher and first baseman with power. One day he showed up at our Jamaica high field to pitch informal battling practice. I didn’t know why he was here, given South Ozone park was about five miles or so from Jamaica. However, Joe remembered him, let him pitch to us and Dave fit right in. I happened to be hitting well in batting practice and remember hitting everything he threw – line drives. I hit one over the wall. The next pitch he just rolled in like he was bowling. “Try to hit that one” he said. We had a good laugh. I liked his spirit. So I asked him about playing for the Dukes. As if he had rehearsed ahead of time he gave me Ray’s phone number. It was only later that I suspected that Ray had sent him over to recruit me. Anyway, two days later I called Ray and asked him if I could play for him. He said “any one of Joe’s boys can play for me”. I asked him when the first practice was and we were off.

From center field to the bench
I got a late start in the Spring of 1968. The snow was slow to dry and so I wasn’t able to work out with Joe as I usually had (his “Spring training” began March 15^th). Also I had put on some 10 pound, possibly from drinking in the woods with friends. We had some practices but I was struck by how rudimentary the practices were compared to Joe. However, the players were very good. The Dukes started me in center field but after three games or so I think I only had one hit. Meanwhile a center fielder named Wally Shultz was tearing up his high school league hitting .500. So, by the fourth game Wally was in center and I was on the bench. Ray seemed to understanding how disheartening this way for me. Without too much prodding sitting in his car after a game I blurted out how my father was driving me nuts, trying to control me. Before the next game Ray, came to pick me up along with some other guys and drive us to the field. I invited him to come in and meet my parents, which he did. Soon after he told me how much he understood about my situation of being controlled after meeting my parents.

As the season went on I played some of the time but never constantly. The players were much more supportive of me than anything I had experienced with Joe and all the guys I grew up with. One thing I noticed is that whenever I started a game I was never pinch-hit for, even if I wasn’t doing well. I think Ray understood that would be more painful for me to start and be taken out than not starting at all. Ray had a couple of coaches who were more impatient with me than Ray and I felt Ray was defending me.

One time after another fight with my father, I called Ray and asked him to come get me. He did and we spent a long time talking at his house until about 1 in the morning. I was becoming more and more attached to him and the more I wanted to show him I was a better player than what I had shown so far.

I hit a pinch-triple
That summer I had been working at UPS unloading trucks. I dropped a 50-pound box on my foot so my toe was bandaged for a while. However, I didn’t want to miss our night game we were playing so I went to game. I could still hit but I couldn’t run very fast. In about the 8^th inning of a game, Ray told me to pinch hit for a player. The first pitch was a high fastball which I fouled back. I thought to myself I would have creamed that in any other year but this one. Well, lo and behold the pitcher threw me the same pitch. This one didn’t get away from me. I tomahawked to straight away center. It must have been 100 feet over center fielder head. I lumbered around to third with triple. Ray called time out and took me out of the game for a pinch runner. This was so weird. I had never been pinch-run for before. But then again, I probably never pinch hit before starting to play with Ray. After the game I sat in Ray’s car crying. I was so happy I contributed something. We hugged.

A late inning defensive replacement
A little later in the summer when my foot healed and I lost the weight I had gained I found myself still on the bench. In the eighth inning of a game in which we were barely ahead, Ray called on me to replace Al Locaccio, a catcher who was only in left field because we needed his bat in the line-up. I hated left field because there was so little room to run. However, I was in no position to move Walley Shultz out of center. The field we were playing at was Rosedale. This field was notorious for fog. So sure enough, a right hand batter hits a long high drive towards me but curving foul. I keep on running into and through foul territory. I lose the ball in the fog but then it comes out of the fog and I snag it. I must have been 50 into foul territory. Our bench explodes with cheering. Mike Dunn, the other coach who was sympathetic to me looked at Ray in disbelief. Ray taps his forehead with his finger three or four times. I am fighting back the tears.

Ray confides in me he is gay
My relationship with Ray was obviously deepening. He invited me to his place on Friday nights a couple of times just to visit. I asked him questions about himself because I thought it was selfish of me to keep the focus on myself. He told me he wasn’t looking forward to going to his sister’s house on Sunday because they kept asking him when he is going to get married. He then said something to me like, “Bruce, I have to tell you something. I’m gay.” I didn’t have an adverse relation other than sympathy for the situation he was in with his sister. I asked him why he didn’t just tell her. He said he wasn’t ready to do that. It would send shock waves through his family. I understood. I was very pleased that I built up a relationship with him such that he didn’t have to say “don’t tell anyone”. He just knew I wouldn’t. I was proud of that.

Pinch hit double and score the winning run
We were a pretty good team and at the end of the year we were in contention to go to the playoffs. Maybe we were about 12-8. Our game was being played at my old 201^ststreet field where I played with the Emeralds. In our last game which was to determine if we were going to the playoffs or not I came up to pinch hit to start off the bottom of the 9^th inning of a game that was tied. Before I stepped to the plate Ray motioned to me to come towards him where he was coaching third base. He looked me straight in the eye and said “look, this is your turf. Act accordingly”. I went back to home plate looked it him. He always gave me a sign to hit line drives, and not to try to hit everything out of the park. I stepped in. The first pitch was a fastball right down the middle. I blasted it over the right field fence and over the Long Island Railroad tracks for a ground rule double (it wasn’t a homer for reasons I won’t go into.). As I look my lead off second, I noticed that instead of pitching from a stretch, the pitcher went into a full wind-up. I broke for third. I got such a great jump I was less that 10 feet from third base when Sandy Ameroso lined a single to right. It reached the right fielder in two hops. I paid no attention to any signals from Ray, I just instinctively thought I could beat the throw. I turned on the jets and slid safely underneath the throw which reached the catcher on a hop. Our dugout exploded from the bench to greet me at home. It was hard for me to cry in front of other boys. They didn’t seem to understand what I was crying about. But coach Mike Dunn and Ray knew what I was crying about.

Our end of the year party
Every year some sandlot baseball teams have a dinner in which the coaches give speeches and awards to the players. I was sitting at a table with one of some of the players I felt closest to. Since I batted .206 for the season, I was confident I wouldn’t be standing up for anything. So along with many other 18-year-old boys at a table, I started to drink. I was never much good at holding my liquor so after 3 beers I was pretty high and the room seemed foggy. Then out of the fog I hear my name. “For sportsmanship award, Bruce Lerro”. What the fuck” I think to myself. I don’t even know what the award is for. The people at my table already started laughing at the prospect of me walking to the front of the room. As I was making my way to the front, Ray, said “and to present him with this award, the only and only, Joe Austin” Now, Joe himself was known to drink a bit and it seemed like he too had been drinking. I got the trophy and wobbled back to my table. the players at my table were fighting off laughing until I was respectfully seated. Then they burst out full flush.

My happy ending with my Forest Hills team
I was done with the South Ozone park Dukes because I was too old. So the next year I hooked up with another team in Forest Hills Queens. I had a very good year with this team. I played center every game and I hit consistently throughout the year. But the climax came at the end of the year when we made the playoffs. This section has been taken from my article Facing the Music: Religion, Nationalism and Sports Have Enchanted the Working Class; Socialism Hasn’t

Making my dreams come true
In 1968 our team from Brooklyn got into a playoff game at Victory Field which was one of the fanciest fields around. My girlfriend, Rose Nuccio, let it be known to me that this was the last time she was coming to my games. Sunday was her only day to sleep in. “Besides” she said, “you are 0-8” (referring to my performance in the last two games.) She brought her sister Miriam along with her for this game. In the top of the first inning, I was up with two guys on base and two outs. The left-handed pitcher, Rick Honeycutt, threw me a high inside curve ball.

“Tshrush”! I tomahawk the pitch and the ball really does head for the right center field fence just like in my fantasy 13 years ago. As I watch the ball head for the fence time and space seem to contract. It’s as if I were in my backyard 13 years ago. The ball lands on the tennis courts on the other side of the fence scattering everyone. I am so out of it that as I make my rounds of the bases, I miss first base. The coach has to get me to touch the base. As I round second, I see Rosie and Miriam jumping up and down screaming like two young Italian gals will. The look on Rosie’s face as our eyes met was like a melting ray of sunlight that united our eyes. I missed third base, too. Finally, as I headed for home most everyone on our team came out to home plate to meet me. It was as if we won the World Series. I disappeared in a mass of teammates at the plate.

A thirteen year life cycle is complete dialectically. I returned to my fantasy of thirteen years ago, on a higher level, deeper, richer more real. I tell this story in my Brainwashing Propaganda and Rhetoric class to point out the Propagandistic power of Sports. There is rarely a dry eye in the house.

URL has been copied successfully!

window.addEventListener("sfsi_functions_loaded", function() { if (typeof sfsi_widget_set == "function") { sfsi_widget_set(); } });

Print this article

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License •
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

The Collective Creativity of Workers: From Unconscious Sleeping Giant to Builder of Barricades Part II

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

Bruce Lerro

Resize text-+=

OpEds

The Collective Creativity of Workers: From Unconscious Sleeping Giant to Builder of Barricades Part II

Orientation

Summing up Part I
My purpose in this two-part article is to show how creativity can be understood not only at the micro level of the individual artist, but also at the macro level of world history. I began in Part I by describing the ways in which the individual artist is different from the other workers. But then I show how romantic theories of art get in the way of seeing creativity as also a collective process rooted in history. I discuss the creative process of the artist, but then close by following Gertrude Stein and Henry Miller in demanding that an artist’s whole life should be a work of art.

What’s ahead?
We are now ready to discuss creativity at the macro level of workers. Like sleeping giants for the last 5,000 years workers have been unconsciously shaping and reshaping society. First, I talk about how all the arts were once integrated into magical activity in egalitarian hunting and gathering and horticultural societies.But then with the rise of caste and class societies, collective creativity in labor became unconscious and alienated. The magical rituals of egalitarian societies that united all the arts in the service of magic is undermined. What happens is:

But then I describe how even within capitalist societies there are instances during natural disasters, social movements and ultimately revolutionary situations where workers express their collective creativity consciously in the construction of workers councils. Ultimately, in communist society all the arts will be joined again in communist magical activity which will include the merger of the sciences and the arts in the service of communist planning, the development of high technology which allows us to do more and more with less and less. Unlike in tribal societies where creativity was mostly collective, in communist societies creativity will be conscious at both the individual and group level.

Creativity as Collective Activity
Labor as human species activity
In order to earn a living in our environment and solve problems the human species has to work. Work involves collective-creative cooperation in the process of deciding on a means of subsistence, making and using tools, harnessing energy, dividing up the work and sharing the resources if successful. Labor is the totality of collective human energy, both physical and mental, which is expended on reproducing society, hence reproducing human beings. It is creativity beyond how an individual lives their life. The problem is that this is unconscious collective-creativity.

Co-creation of the socio-sphere
Labor creates and sustains human society. Over tens of thousands of years the activity of working and using up resources over generations has introduced creative changes onto the surface and depths of Earth. This socio-sphere is like a film, a social membrane which has also developed over generations. The socio-sphere overlays and interacts with the biosphere. The earth is our collective canvas that we have been painting for the last 100,000 years. We are thus self-transforming beings. By the practical transformation of the world through working we find ourselves changed, we find ourselves in a new world, a world of our own making, a world which invites us to satisfy new needs, desires and powers.
Let me briefly review:

this socio-sphere is the collective canvas of humanity, but so far we have been painting behind our own backs, as if sleepwalking.

From society to history

Human social institutions are shaped and in turn shape the biosphere, but as society changes over time, it can no longer simply be understood as an extension of biological evolution. The “aging” process of society becomes human history which developed its own processes and laws that are not reducible to the biosphere. History-shaping includes periods when particular means of subsistence were dominant—hunting-gathering, horticulture, agriculture, industry. These ways of life come into being as creative strategies to ward off population pressure and a resource depletion crisis.

Human practice
History is the story, the ongoing saga, the odyssey of the marriage of society’s actions and consequences upon the rest of nature over time. This is called human practice, which is partly conscious and partly unconscious, and contains these ingredients:

collective endeavors which are unconscious but which have consequences which accumulate behind our backs. For example the long-term effects of shabby health-care, education and housing on the productivity of a society.

The historical unconscious
It is this last dynamic that we can speak of as the historical unconscious. This is a result of a series of collective actions which slip beyond our attention span and over which we lose control. The collective sleep walk is our everyday work-life. We become unaware of the effect of our collective actions or inactions upon the production of history. We are like painters who are too close to the canvas to see what we are doing.

There are social institutions which produce a kind of collective defense mechanisms – ideologies. These go with the suppression of this historical unconscious. This is where history is presented as something other than the collective creative activity of the average individual working and breeding. Either taken together or taken separately, here are some examples:

history is exclusively about the past.

In the first case, behind the institutions and the upper class and upper-middle class elites who embody these institutions are the countless laboring actions which provide the food and other necessities that provide those classes with what they need to govern. Without the work of the lower classes, these institutions would cease to function. The second proposition assumes that only vivid and unusual events created by extraordinary men make up history. Everyday events and the average person who makes them stand outside of history. The third proposition ignores that history is always being made in the past, present and future. It ignores the possibility that groups can intervene in history by using what is known about the past to change the future. In fact, we cannot shape history. We either shape it consciously or it is shaped unconsciously.

Creativity as matters of scale
Summing up: creativity can be expressed as matters of scale as:

the collective creativity of history shaping of the entire human species.

The Alienation of Collective Creative Activity in Class Societies

So how did it come to be that the collective creativity of humanity, labor in shaping history and the lives of individuals were not connected to creativity and the only activity associated with creativity was the arts?

Egalitarian hunting and gathering societies and participatory magic
In egalitarian hunting-gathering and in simple horticultural societies, collective-creativity – labor – was collective and conscious. People decided together what the means of subsistence was, what the division of labor would be, how long they would work, what tools they would fashion and how the fruits of their labor would be distributed.

At the same time, before going out to hunt, gather plants or cultivate them preparation was needed. Magical rituals were undertaken to increase the chances of success. Most, if not all the activities which we now associate with art including mask-making, drawing, music, dance and theatre were once magical rituals. In the beginning both arts and crafts were in the service of magic, and magic was in the service of transforming the world.

Chiefdoms and pristine states
As hunting-gathering societies and simple horticultural societies became more complex commodity production emerged. Alongside arts and crafts in the service of ritual, we now have arts and crafts as secular activities in the service of commodity production. With the emergence of state civilizations 5,000 years ago, there is a split between conscious and unconscious creativity. Conscious creativity is channeled into three social arenas.

artistically in that a class of artists and artisans emerge who produce profane objects not only for public sale, but objects which for ideological support, as for example, monumental architecture for the ruling class. A second group of objects is in the service of conspicuous consumption by the ruling class.

Fall of magic and the rise of religion
With the fall of magic and the rise of monotheism, art ceases to be a collective-creative activity and becomes the act of isolated and rarefied individuals who prostitute themselves to religious authorities. Art becomes a wandering ghost, with a methodology but without an ontology.

Capitalist Societies
At the same time, the work of the lower classes becomes alienated, more or less mechanized and unconscious. In other words, the work itself contributes to the creative reproduction of society. But because the lower classes do not participate in the design and implementation of social policy, because they do not reap the full fruits of their labor (most of it is given over to the ruling class and its minions) their part of the creative contribution to society appears alien. The lower classes become unconscious of the full weight of what they produce. They merely perceive their work as something that reproduces their own life and the life of their family, rather than for the whole of society.

Making History Collectively Consciously
There is a kind of collective creativity which surfaces periodically in our society and sometimes sustains itself alongside the social unconscious. These activities are harbingers of what collective creative activity might look like in a post class society. The first kind is the spontaneous response of groups of people to natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes and swarming lizards. These collective actions are more or less reactive to circumstances and they dissipate when the catastrophic events have subsided. We will call this “historically conscious” collective creativity. There is another kind of collective-creative activity which is ongoing and designed to change history. This is the collective-creativity of social movements. Marx called this practical critical activity. I will also call this “historically self-conscious creativity”.

People in natural disasters
The following is a description of a personal experience I had with others during a snowstorm. The setting is New York City in the early 1960’s. I am 15 years old. It is the dead of winterin January and about 3:30 in the afternoon. It has been snowing or days. Upon leaving high school I see that the snow drifts have smothered all traffic. Things seem eerily still. In the distance I see something moving. Someone is coming towards me, waving for me to meet him. My fleeting reservation fizzles in the face of the starkness of these extraordinary circumstances. He asks me to help him push his car to the side of the road. As we begin, I notice that we have been joined by two or three others who spontaneously pitch in. When the car is safely pushed to the side of the road, we proceed to help the latest arrivals dig their cars out. More people come along. They suggest we all shovel out the entire street, since then we will all have access to the main road. Since I don’t have a car, this is not relevant to me. Still, I am caught up in the moment and what under normal circumstances I wouldn’t do in the name of individual self-interest, I find myself doing anyway. We organized ourselves into little groups and worked into the night

What is happening here? I am hustling about, shoveling here, pushing there. I have long since forgotten about eating. I feel as if I’m regressing in time, as if I were 8 or 9 years old. My adolescent posturing has wilted and, in its place, seeps an adventurous joy of plotting and scheming with playmates long ago. But this time, instead of “let’s pretend” fantasies, the snow and the storm invite us to actually change reality.

As this street-clearing project takes shape, we relax a little. Strangers are laughing and joking. Grateful neighbors are out in the street. Some offer hot chocolate and a hardy fire to war up by. Someone throws a snowball at me from across the street. A man in a three-piece suit ducks behind a car to avoid retaliation. How bizarre! But then this whole episode suggests something forbidden, not of this world. Time seems to have stopped. Since no traffic is moving, the street is ours to do anything we want with the piled-up snow, from sleigh-riding to castle-building to snowball fights. Kids come out of the houses and begin sleigh riding. Some are carrying ice skates on their way to a frozen pond three blocks away.

Both in process and result, we have created the seeds of a new social life. The labor of clearing the street, digging out cars, chopping ice was a spontaneously organized collective activity, achieved without coercions from authorities nor with the carrot of wage labor as a consolation. But some nameless abdication, we have inherited some hidden recess in the Himalayas.

Sometime around 7:00 pm the snow has stopped. The snow plows are out and traffic has begun to move. People acknowledge their exhaustion and car pool for rides home. But I don’t want this to end! I no longer have a material foundation to house the exuberance I felt that has begun to rapidly dissipate. I felt joy with those people in the wild snow, but the snow has been tamed. What do I do with the joy? Under what social conditions could I feel this way again? Will I ever feel this way again? Rarely have I despised the prospect of “normal life” as much as I did then. It is as if the freshly plowed street was like the sun beating on my face, early in the morning, awakening me from an enchanting dream.

On that twilight winter’s day, social life itself seemed as pliable, as impressionable as a slab of clay or a blank canvas. In our collective actions – shoveling snow, pushing cars, chopping ice – we experienced a creative process similar to what the individual artist lives through from the beginning to the end of a single painting – inspiration, a flurry of activity and finally a new artifact or situation. Our snow shovels were our paints and brushes, and the street, that microscopic chunk of social terrain, was our canvas. Society turned out not to be an impenetrable aggregate of frozen institutions, but a vast network of activities whose future is open-ended.

Under normal circumstances it is hard not to think of social institutions as solids rather than liquids, as nouns rather than verbs, as things rather than processes. Just as a fan revolving at maximum speed does not reveal how the individual rudders are connected or even visible, so too, the macroscopic “social fan” of life under normal times whirls too quickly and over too vast a terrain (an entire country) to display its structural components, the collective creativity of people working to produce the life of social institutions. It is as if the snow storm clogged a small corner of the rudder long enough for its constituent elements to become detectable.

Social movements
The second kind of collective creative activity is more assertive. Instead of reacting to extraordinary circumstances, social movements are on-going rather than sporadic and they are, at least in some cases, dedicated to creating extraordinary social conditions. These movements aspire to actively change the course of history.

Let’s take a very small, simple example. Let’s say a group of neighbors call a meeting to combat the rise of drugs and prostitution in their neighborhood. In order to address the problem, these people must meet more than once if to have a chance of being successful. Phone calls need to be made, petitions drawn up, house to house calls made, flyers designed, meetings with local neighborhood mediators scheduled and a system of vigilance set up. This endeavor involves collective creative activity. Like all creative actions there comes a point where the work they have done is tested by the larger community response including, the surrounding neighborhoods, the dealers, the prostitutes, their Johns and the police.

The reactions of these groups affect the future plans that these neighbors made. Resistance calls for one set of plans while a positive response calls for another. Other neighbors might be indifferent, the police ignore the problem, but a local socialist politician is supportive and willing to work with them. Just as an artist will alter the subject matter of his work, together with the color scheme or medium in response from the public, so too this community of neighbors will develop new plans and theories based on their practice. Social movements can be reformist (as above) or they can be revolutionary. In some cases, social movements seize power and transform the economic and political relations. This is the highest form of historically self-conscious collective-creative activity.

Workers’ councils
Especially in the last 150 years, there erupted a series of attempts to take over social life without capitalists, or without the state. These “workers’ councils” arose out of irreversibly critical situations in the existing order. In some situations, they emerged alongside the state, creating a “dual government”. When the state fell, some workers’ councils spread over a wider terrain. During the Spanish revolution they reached as much as 1/3 of the country. In some cases, they not only governed without the state but in places they abolished the local currency and began their own system of exchange. These experiments took place during revolutionary processes when the official authorities lost power but before their power was regained. The organization of this world and the experiences that participants experienced must have been beyond their wildest dreams. These movements lasted as briefly as 3 days (the Seattle General Strike) or as long as 3 years (the Spanish revolution).

Like most social movements, these councils began by simply reacting to the abuses of the existing order. Workers wanted higher wages, better working conditions, most justice. But once the authorities lost power, these workers found themselves doing far more than they bargained for. Though these workers’ councils were inventive and festive, like all creative activity it was productive and it contained its own collective discipline. In Spain, following the failure of Franco’s coup in 1936, at least one third of the country was self-managed with better productive records than the overthrown government. This was done in the middle of a civil war!

The internal organization of the councils expressed the creativity it was demonstrating in the world. They were organized in an anti-hierarchical and anti-bureaucratic manner. The workshop of the councils, the foundation from which all decisions were made, was the general assembly. Whatever resolutions resulted were carried out by mandated delegates who had no independent power of their own (unlike representatives who, once elected have power to make their own decisions). They merely carried out decisions already made in the assembly. Secondly, these delegates were often rotated so that no one got too comfortable being a permanent authority. Lastly, the delegates were immediately revocable. This means that any abuses of power were grounds for immediate termination. There were little state bureaucratic procedures or the political red tape where population had to wait until the next election.

In both their amazing coherence of their social management capacities and the profound change in the quality of their interactions, these experiments were truly “out of this world”. In fact, the depiction of what happened to the participants runs into the same problems that any mystic or artist or anyone who has had a peak experience has when they try to describe what happened to them. How do you describe an experience which seems almost that it is on another plane of reality than the language of the existing order.

Where did they occur? Workers’ councils have dotted the globe in at least the following countries:

The Paris Commune of 1871
The St. Petersburg Soviet of 1905
The Russian Revolution of 1917
Short-lived experiments in Poland, Italy, Germany and Bulgaria between 1917-1920
The Seattle General Strike of 1919
The Spanish Revolution of 1936 (for most of the first year and then on and off until 1939)
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956
The French General Strike of 1968
The Chilean Revolution 1970-1973

Workers’ councils today exist in hundreds of factories in Argentina and are present in an embryonic form in workers’ cooperatives around the world. Let us look at how the metamorphosis begins.

The Paris Commune: from reacting to collective creativity
In order to envision how these workers councils begin, we will combine the descriptions from the Paris Commune of 1871 with the French General Strike of 1968. The Paris Commune emerged at the tail end of the Franco-Prussian war. It began as a patriotic movement at odds with its government which it felt was conducting the war in a half-hearted manner. In 1870 while the army was called to the front, the National Guard was called on to defend the fortifications in Paris.

“The war fever that now gripped the city generated a patriotic demand that all citizens be armed. Within a few weeks, there were over 130 new battalions, making a total of some 300,000 Parisians in the National Guard. ‘No one could call himself a citizen’ it was being said “unless he had a rifle’. The cry was for more arms, and the authorities were forced to distribute hundreds of thousands of weapons to those flocking to join the newly formed battalions. (Steward Edwards The Communards of Paris, 1871. 21)”

Here we have an armed, but so far merely patriotic population. The change from this to a social revolution began on March 18, 1871:

“Thiers [then the head of the government] sees the armed workers of Paris as his main obstacle to the conclusion of a peace treaty with Bismarck {head of Prussia]. He decides to send ‘loyal battalions to remove the cannons… the operation starts successfully in the early hours of the morning…but the operation has been bureaucratically and inefficiently planned. The necessary gun carriages don’t arrive to remove the captured guns. The crowd begins to grow. Women, children, old people mingle with the troops…Some …start talking to the guard. When General Lecomte, losing his head, orders his troops to fire, it is already too late. The soldiers refuse to fire, turn their rifle butts up…soldiers and civilians have fraternized…the soldiers who have deserted their regiments shouted to them to surrender, but they stayed in the saddle, and continued to spur their horses on furiously…’cut the traces’…The crowd let out a great cheer…the women closest to the cannons, to which they had been clinging to for half an hour took the knives that the men passed down to them from hand to hand…the maneuver was carried out amid joyful laughter and cheering. The artillerymen were carried off by their mounts and found themselves cut off from the guns and surrounded by groups of people inviting them to fraternize. They were offered flasks of wine and meat rolls… They were soon won over to the side of the rebels. The cannon had been retaken. . (Steward Edwards The Communards of Paris, 1871. 63)

National Guard barricade during the Paris Commune, May 1871

Adolphe Thiers, head of the Counter-Revolution

Two points are worth mentioning. First, revolutions begin when situations get desperate enough to where formerly indifferent or hostile groups recognize they have more in common with other groups than they had first suspected. In this case the soldiers, who were supposed to be loyal to their commanding officers. But in reality, most soldiers are working class. They have more in common with the people in the streets than with their officers. When a critical mass of soldiers refuses to follow orders, it undermines and limits what loyal soldiers can do. From the disarming of these solders the next logical step is the building of the barricades. For a portrayal of this we turn to the French general strike of 1968.

Thiers' suppression of the Commune. A Paris street, May 1871.

“Here with the help of cars, billboards, railings, torn off branches, trees, as well as cobblestones, the first serious barricades went up…(Singer, Daniel Prelude to Revolution, 127) anything could serve the purpose… a neighboring building site was a real treasure. The most precious find there was an air hammer, which, once mastered made it possible to open up the streets wholesale. The paving stones then went from hand to hand…people were coming down with sandwiches, drinks, chocolate.” (139-140)

Whereas yesterday social life appeared as this alienated series of exchanges out of the control of most everyone, for days, weeks, months and even years in some places, these alienated institutions revealed their true nature as malleable institutions dependent on the continued alienated activity of workers for their very life. When social life stops their true origin in labor reveals itself. When social life resumes without these institutions people begin to grasp how superfluous capitalists and the state really are to social production and reproduction.

Seattle, 1919
The Seattle strike of 1919 was different than other strikes. The ship workers did not simply shut everything down and limit themselves to a set of demands. They used the strike as a stepping stone for starting things up under their own management. Additionally, the strikers organized themselves to provide essential services in areas not under the direct control of the strikers, such as taking care of hospital laundry, getting milk to babies, and collecting wet garbage. They didn’t stop at controlling their own factories or buildings. They related to the entire city as if it was theirs. Just as Daniel Cohn-Bendit argued, in expanding the terrain of their management they gradually learned how the city is run:

“The strikers were at once brought face to face, with the way in which the whole community, including their own families, is intrinsically tied together… if life was not to be made unbearable for the strikers themselves. (Root and Branch: The Rise of the Workers Movements, 280)

Here are some of the achievements of the milk wagon drivers who

“…established through their own organization thirty-five neighborhood milk stations all over the city…The stations were announced as open from nine to two., but the milk was always gone before noon. The amount handled increased as the days went on until about 3,000 gallons were handled in various stations. The first day the supply ran noticeably short…but by the third day…the irregularities were ironed out and the supply was more adjusted to the need. (Root and Branch: The Rise of the Workers Movements, 254-255)”

The most intense and complex re-organization fell to the provision trades, charged with feeding the strikers:

“Some 21 eating places were opened in various parts of the city. The food was cooked in large kitchens…and then transported to various halls where it was served cafeteria style …(R and B, 256-257)…Locations had to be found, numbers of diners estimated, food purchased, equipment borrowed or bought, transportation problems solved. (Robert Friedheim The Seattle General Strike, 127).

The resolution of these problems depended upon an improvised community of people who probably barely knew each other, without the benefit of any pre-existing organization and in open hostility to all established authority. There were delays in the opening day of this “feeding depot” for many reasons:

“…there was no corps of dishwashers to keep up the meager supply of dishes until the waitresses union, assisted by patrons, leaped into the breach…By the second day however, the difficulties were much reduced and meals began to appear with regularity. (R and B 256-257)…By the last day of the strike, 30,000 meals a day were served without a hitch. (Robert Friedheim The Seattle General Strike, 128).

In summary,

Commonalities between natural disasters, social movements, workers’ councils and artistry
Both kinds of history shaping – reactions to natural disasters and consciously planned as in social movements – require the spirit of the arts and those who make them. Art, like all forms of creativity has its feet in both worlds. On one hand, it is an expression of what is possible. On the other hand it reproduces and justifies the old world. But the highest form of art does not represent reality, or even make pictures of the world to come. Artists must supersede art itself and use artistic talents in the planning, together with others, the world to be built. Henry Miller sensed something like this when he wrote:

“One has to pass beyond the sphere and influence of art. Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant, it merely points the way…All art will one day disappear…and life itself will… definitely and for all time usurp the field… (The Creative Process, Ghiselin, 162)”

History of Conscious and Unconscious Creativity
I would like to close by summarizing the place of creativity in the human species, both at the individual and collective levels, at the micro world of individual development and the macro world of history.

Bio-social, historical foundations
First, creativity in general was a survival strategy that human beings use in competition with other species for resources. Second, we built an envelope around the earth, a “socio-sphere” first locally then regionally, then nationally and finally globally. Third, there is the building up of a thickening crush of human history as human societies change over time.

Creative and conscious creativity in egalitarian societies
There is conscious collective creativity involved in the production, circulation, distribution and consumption of goods. There is also conscious collective creativity involved in magical rituals for hunting and planting societies and these magical activities include all the arts, including mask-making, drawing, sculpture, music, singing and dancing.

Unconscious creativity in caste and class societies
This appears in the alienated labor of peasants and workers in Bronze Age, Iron Age civilizations as well as feudal societies and industrial capitalist and socialist societies.

Conscious creativity in caste and class societies
This exists In the economic and political design and implementation of social policies by elites—priests, priestesses, aristocrats and merchants. Secondly, in the religious construction of myths and rituals by priestly castes. Third, in the religious projection of creativity out of humanity in the forms of the activity and characteristics of gods and goddesses in the work of priest and priestesses. Further, there is a sacred and secular realm in individual creativity of men and women in the arts and crafts which serves the ruling classes as conspicuous consumption. Lastly, as we have seen, there is conscious creativity in the work of those involved in survival during natural disasters and in social movements.

Conscious creativity in communist societies
The first stop is what people do in revolutionary situations. The description of the activities in workers’ councils is an example. From there, maximum collective creative activity lies in the political and economic decision about the production and circulation of goods and services by a dialectical exchange between the local and regional workers councils on the one hand and the centralized socialist state on the other. This happens first locally regionally and internationally. The same process occurs when the human species sets up civilizations in outer space. In addition, there are collectivist myths and rituals for socialists which draws from the rich traditions of Neopaganism. In the process women and men re-own their alienated labor and become goddesses and gods themselves. On the individual level there are not visionary arts in the service of socialism

Conclusion: Healing the Split Between Conscious and Unconscious Collective Creative Activity
As I’ve shown in the last section, collective responses to natural disasters and the building of social movements are examples of attempts to make collective creativity conscious. In the case of social movements, through what Marx called “practical-critical activity”. In the case of workers’ councils, examples include conscious creativity in the service of building dual power proto-communist organizations.

Conscious collective creative activity under communism
Collective creativity would express itself in the design and implementation of political and economic organization and no longer be determined by aristocrats, capitalists or state bureaucrats. Secondly, whatever myths and rituals remained in society would be co-created by everyone, not by a priestly caste. Thirdly, humanity would re-own the projection of its creations as the work of gods and goddesses and simply recognize that humanity creates itself over time and across space through laboring. Lastly, while there would be arts and artists who would pursue their work on an individual basis, the arts would be freed from the service of the ruling class either as ideology or for conspicuous consumption. The arts would no longer be for elites. On a collective level, the arts would return to their magical roots, not as superstition but in the form of visions of the world being born through mask-making, drawing, sculpture, music, dancing, theater and writing for a socialist future.

Lili News 029

In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.

URL has been copied successfully!

window.addEventListener("sfsi_functions_loaded", function() { if (typeof sfsi_widget_set == "function") { sfsi_widget_set(); } });

Print this article

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License •
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

The Collective Creativity of Workers

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

Bruce Lerro
SOCIALIST PLANNING BEYOND CAPITALISM

Resize text-+=

The Collective Creativity of Workers

From Unconscious Sleeping Giants to Conscious Builders of Barricades Part I

Orientation

One purpose of this article is to get you to think of creativity in a whole new way. Our notion of creative today is baked with the assumptions of a Romantic theory of art. These have their good points but they also limit us. In this article I want to argue that the most powerful forms of creativity are collective, not individual. One problem is that with the evolution of society into social classes the collective creativity of workers and peasants is buried in their alienated social-historical unconscious. Making this collective creativity conscious is inseparable from making a social revolution.

I proceed first by discussing individual creativity. I begin by describing the ways in which the artist is different from other workers. Then I connect this to the values and limitations of the romanticization of art. Then I discuss what an artistic person is like. In the second part of my article I discuss the field of history. First, I talk about how all the arts were once integrated into magical activity in egalitarian hunting and gathering and horticultural societies.

There is the long shadow of alienation of collective creativity in caste and class societies. But then I show how even within capitalist societies there are instances during natural disasters, social movements and ultimately revolutionary times when workers express their collective creativity consciously in the construction of workers’ councils.

The Artist as a Visionary

The life of an artist provokes many, if not most, people. Whether dismissed as a good-for-nothing slacker, a vehicle through which the Muses may speak or just an eccentric personality, an artist in the 21^st century West is not boring. One reason is that artistic activity flies in the face of that old sop, “you can’t mix business with pleasure”. In its highest moments, considered as a process (rather than a product), artistic activity approaches a synthesis of work and play as well as work and pleasure.

For most of my twenties I worked in various blue-collar jobs, unloading and loading trucks and driving a forklift in a warehouse. Wage-labor, especially the unskilled kind, is so mechanical and deadening it became associated with suffering. It was something I hated to do, a drudge to be gotten over with, a scourge to be wistfully contrasted to “the good life”. After years of this kind of work, it is difficult not to generalize from this particular job to work in general. Among workers not only is work avoided like the plague, as Marx says, but activity itself can come under suspicion. By activity I mean purposeful, non-frivolous deeds which require concentration and the exertion of will. When activity is done under alienated conditions, it is experienced as a dissipation. Rather than experiencing the outpouring of energy as producing more energy, the expenditure of energy is felt to be a loss.

One the other hand, if the hatred of work because synonymous with activity, then the good-life appears to be consuming sprees of mass media, sporting events and concerts, sensual, sexual pleasure, substance abuse and rest. In the United States, even active play like table games, video games, dancing or travel far from home competes with TV, or internet surfing. Rather than an interlude, a moment of respite and fertilization for the more gratifying work to come, leisure becomes an end-in-itself. Bourgeois utopias are written about a time when leisure will be all there is.

However, we all need a rest from rest. Justifiably, there is a sense of uneasiness when idleness is posed as a way of life, and the discomfort is not limited to puritanical preachers. Many of us can sense this House of Death, jingling with the trappings of divine honors, as Nietzsche said, when we refuse to retire from jobs, even miserable ones, because we “wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves.” I wonder how many people unconsciously kill themselves before or soon after retirement, when we start to get a full dose of “leisure for leisure’s sake”. Contrary to superficial notions of pleasure, rest can be disturbing just as activity can be alienating.

The careful ascertainment of how we shall do so, and the art of guiding it with consequent authority – this sense of authority, is for the master builder, the treasure of treasures – renews in the modern alchemist something like the old dream of the secret of life (Creative Process, Brewster Ghiselin, pg. 150).

In this self-contained magical workshop, in this valley of fertility, the artist pushes and pulls, she hems and haws, and when the oils dry, when the clay is fired, when the curtain falls a baby begins to make its way through the world.

Every artist is at heart a magician. Just as the shaman ventures into the forest or the desert on his vision-quest, so the artist heads for her secluded place of work, fitfully muttering “good riddance” to daily distractions. Alone at last, she surrounds herself with her talismans – a hat with a feather, a ring of beads. Like the Greek chorus, they whisper to her of previous glorious ventures, revelation. “Yes” they tell me, “this time you too can make magic on paper”.

Magical considerations of timing motivate the artist’s habits. Just as a magician studies the stars and arranges her correspondences, so too the artist becomes attuned to when and how she does her best work. What are the optimum conditions? What stage of the creative process is most appropriate based on her mood that day? What non-artistic activities are most likely to stimulate further creativity? The artist becomes sensitive to knowing when persistence pays off and when it doesn’t. In short, the artistic creative process is a secularization of a magical ritual:

In the minor occurrences of everyday life which passed unnoticed…the person disposed towards the creative life repeatedly finds clues, fragile portents which he seizes as the basis of some future identity at odds with the social pressures prevailing about. He lives like Schubert’s wanderer, in search of the land which speaks his language. (Dialectical Economics, L. Marcus, pg. 100)

Artists can be understood as the link between the old world and the one which may be born:

How can an individual within capitalist society base his identity on a non-capitalist set of identity and world-outlook? In the study of creative personalities. (Dialectical Economics, pg. 98)

Limitations of Romantic Theories of Art

The following bullets below are the beliefs and assumptions of Romantic theories of art. Let us take them one by one. The first two beliefs can be taken together. Like other animals, the human species has to adapt to its environment. Creativity is rooted in the capacity to solve problems that its environment presents. Since all human beings problem-solve, all human beings have some degree of creativity. The Romantic artist not only fails to see the creativity necessary for people to live in everyday life, he also images that the very involvement in the arts bestows upon him the mantle of creativity. By merely crossing the sacred portals of the arts each novice becomes initiated into the mysteries of creativity. It’s as if artists could never be accused of being mechanical or uncreative just because they are artists. But on the contrary, there can be instances of everyday problem solving that involve more creativity than an artistic product.

We can also combine tenets three and four. Romantic artists have a distrust of groups. Rooted in the individualist reaction to the mindless repetition of factory work of the industrial revolution, romantic artists think of groups only as a force for conformity or obedience to the authorities. The Romantic takes the alienation between the individual and society as given. He ignores the fact that extraordinary social circumstances, such as natural disasters and revolutions, can bring out the most of an individual’s creativity.

When the Romantic artist discounts planning and structure, he accepts that creativity is fundamentally unreasonable or irrational activity. On one side are the emotions, intuition and spontaneity and antithetical to that are reason, organization and constraints. It is hard to imagine how a Romantic artist who made their living from art could hold these beliefs. To sell a work to the public requires rationality, organization and deadlines. Only individuals who are supported by others or dabble in the arts as a form of therapy can imagine art as antithetical to organization, planning and setting priorities.

What is the place of shock in the arts? Surely one of the callings of the artist is to move a society beyond the comfortable, the taken-for-granted and the obvious. In the early part of the 20^th century, Cubists, Dadaists and Surrealists did this as a reaction to the Renaissance and Baroque conventions. Before a society is crumbling this is a very important calling. However once social cracks appear and spread, too much shock from the arts is counter-revolutionary. The Romantic artist imagines that shocking people might propel masses of people into social action. This may be true. But too much shock can result in anesthetizing, not moving people. Past a certain point artists should be creating constructive visions of the future not tripping over themselves about how to outrage a public already frightened by social conditions.

The values and beliefs of Romantic theories of art include:

All creativity is artistic. All other activities are less creative.
There are creative individuals and then there are the rest of us.

Maximum creativity is achieved in isolation (groups hold creativity back).

Creative activity has nothing to do with everyday life. It is an escape from that life.

Creativity and planning are mutually exclusive.

(Disciplined, intellectual and structured activity holds creativity back)

What is creative is what is shocking and incomprehensible

What is creative is what makes us feel better. Art as therapy (Feedback from an audience matters little to the creative process).

What is creative is what appears to be absolutely new.

Art expresses more creativity than craft. Art is non-utilitarian (the more people use the art, the more debased it becomes). Art is about ornaments and decorations.

Art is in the eye of the beholder. Objective judgments about what is creative are impossible. Judgment of creativity is purely subjective.

Art is secular and has little do with sacred beliefs, mythology or rituals.

Art is all about the process and the product doesn’t matter.

Being an artist means you are eccentric, an outcast, unrealistic and a dreamer.

Art is the opposite of necessity. It is subjective and voluntary.

Art is fictional. It is an escape from reality.

Romantic artists turn art into therapy. However, while there are certainly therapeutic elements to the arts, the purpose of art is to move the public from more than it is to massage and prop up the emotional states of the artist. Romantics fancy themselves as undiscovered geniuses who are too sensitive to subject themselves to the barbaric tastes of the public. But without criticism from the world the artist loses a vital feedback loop that helps him to stay in touch with the socio-historic reality.

Is there anything that comes into the world that is absolutely new? Romantic artists imagine creativity in the Christian sense of God making the world out of nothing. In reality, the most creative work is always built upon the work of others in society, in the cross-currents between societies as well as the influence of those who have went before. There is no such thing as a genius creating something out of nothing.

Crafts are about making things for everyday use such as baskets, hats, pots, and beads. Crafts are embedded in everyday life and can be used by others in the spirit of carrying on a tradition of their kin and the ancestors. The separation of art from crafts in the modern period came about as part of the class divisions within society. Artists were hired by the Church to support its spiritual ideology and among the upper classes to immortalize themselves. During the Romantic period, artists began to rebel against these influences and began to make statements about societies that were somewhat independent of the upper classes. Unlike craft, art in this sense was more abstract, self-reflective, intended for fewer people and involved innovation as part of an ideology of change. To say that art is more creative than craft says that creativity has less to do with everyday life, large groups of people and that which has continuity across time and space. It is a hard case to make. At its worst, the Romantic artist can be accused of being elitist.

The notion that art is merely a matter of subjective taste is a relatively recent phenomenon. Western art became increasingly psychological in the 20^th century and with that, the inner experience of the artist became a subject of consideration. This change in part was a reaction to the objective standards of the academic painting. Cross-cultural research on aesthetics together with evolutionary psychology has shown, however that there is a set of objective standards that all cultures point to when making aesthetic judgments about beauty. Among them include bodies of water, places to hide, and available food.

The Romantic movement was not opposed to spirituality, but to organized religion. While many Romantics wanted to bring back myths and rituals, still for many of the Romantics spirituality was an individual experience so that art in the eyes of Romantics is separated from collective myths, rituals and religious practices. This stance ignores the fact that for most of human history, art was in the service of preparation and delivery of magical rituals and the making of costumes for acting out mythological stories.

While Romantic artists rightfully drew attention to and reflects on the creative process rather than just the product, there is a point at which process becomes everything and the product becomes incidental. Again, artists who make their living as artists must pay attention to the product and reactions of the public in order to continue to paint. It is only those who are supported by others or using art for therapeutic purposes who can afford to ignore the product.

“I will live on the fringes of society rather than compromise my art”. This imagine of an artist as being an outcast, an eccentric, unrealistic or a dreamer has not been typical of how artists have been seen throughout history. More times than not the artist was producing objects that supported the existing order. Many artists who lived during the Renaissance were well-off, conventional, realistic and by most standards, creative. Suffering based on feeling misunderstood is atypical in the history of art.

What does it mean to say that art is the opposite of necessity? By necessity I mean that there is some external crisis or constraint that the artist must respond to. In other words, making art is not a voluntary experience. This is offensive to the Romantic because art is imagined to be coming from within, a free choice uninhibited by external circumstances. But why can’t art begin in reaction to something that must be done for social or historical reasons? Art, like problem solving is often most creative when forced by circumstances out of their control. Conversely, without the force of external events artist can fall asleep, falling back on the usual subject matter, materials and treatment or means of creativity. They can become obsessed by personal problems and lose their perspective.

Lastly, the belief that art is fictional is based on the assumption that reality is unchangeable, and the best you can do is escape it into an imaginary world or a future world. On the contrary, revolutionary art can change social and historical reality by being used in the service of a social movement.

The Artist’s Life as a Work of Art

Though Gertrude Stein and Henry Miller were both significant artists in the traditional sense, each understood that artistic products and artistic processes are just moments of living life. How creative is the artist beyond the activity of making art? Certainly, it is possible to be creative as an artist and uncreative in how life is lived. Both Stein and Miller understood that creativity should be extended beyond art. The artistic products and processes are like streams, which, if followed long enough can converge into the river of how an individual lives their lives. Stein points out the shortsightedness of exclusively identifying creativity with being an artist:

“They become writers. They cease to be creative men and they find that they are novelists, or critics or poets or biographers. When a man says “I am a novelist” he is simply a literary shoemaker (The Creative Process, Ghiselin, pg. 162) – a very important thing – and I know because I have seen it kill so many writers – is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing…When one has discovered and evolved a new form, it is not the form, but the fact that you are the form that is important (Ghiselin, 167) ‘This book will make literary history’ and I told him, ‘it will make some part of literary history, perhaps, but only if you can go on making a new part every day and grow with the history you are making, until you become part of it yourself’.

Henry Miller continues the same line of argument:

“I don’t consider myself a writer in the ordinary sense of the word. I am a man telling the story of his life… I become more and more indifferent to my fate as a writer and more and more certain of my destiny as a man…My life itself becomes a work of art…Now I can easily not write as write, there is no longer any therapeutic aspect to it. (Ghiselin, 178-180)”

These are modern artists aware of their own psychology. However, there were artists before them like Leonardo or Goethe who clearly as artists, lived extraordinary lives and their lives were works of art.

Coming Attractions: Conscious and Unconscious Creativity in History

the return of conscious creativity in capitalist society which can be seen in natural disasters, social movements and revolutionary situations which are expressed in workers’ councils.

URL has been copied successfully!

window.addEventListener("sfsi_functions_loaded", function() { if (typeof sfsi_widget_set == "function") { sfsi_widget_set(); } });

Print this article

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License •
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Cross-Cultural Comparative Politics: Social Science or Cold War Propaganda?

Bruce Lerro

OpEds

Orientation What is politics?

To call them democratic serves the ideological purposes of cold warriors and their desire to fight communism and preserve Western imperialism, in one shot.

Print this article

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.

The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers: How They Can’t Face Their Loss to the “Eurasian Miracle”

Bruce Lerro SOCIALIST PLANNING BEYOND CAPITALISM

The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers: How They Can’t Face Their Loss to the “Eurasian Miracle”

Hobson’s claims

Arrighi and Chase-Dunn

Stoddard

Madison Grant

ADDENDUM Recommended related post

The decline of the West, the rise of the East and the South, and the internal dynamics of Western collapse discussed in this extraordinary video with Garland Nixon and Joti Brar.

IMPERIALISM: DECADENT AND DOOMED WITH JOTI BRAR - PEOPLE HAVE HAD ENOUGH - REVOLUTION IS IN THE AIR!

Print this article

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.

Choose-Up Games from the Sandlots of Jamaica, Queens NY

Bruce Lerro

Field of Dreams

Print this article

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.

The Collective Creativity of Workers: From Unconscious Sleeping Giant to Builder of Barricades Part II

Bruce Lerro

Orientation

Print this article

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.

The Collective Creativity of Workers

Bruce Lerro SOCIALIST PLANNING BEYOND CAPITALISM

Orientation

The Artist as a Visionary

Limitations of Romantic Theories of Art

The Artist’s Life as a Work of Art

Coming Attractions: Conscious and Unconscious Creativity in History

Print this article

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.

Orientation
What is politics?

Bruce Lerro
SOCIALIST PLANNING BEYOND CAPITALISM

ADDENDUM
Recommended related post

Bruce Lerro
SOCIALIST PLANNING BEYOND CAPITALISM