What Can You Do to Change the World?
Anthony and Maggie Mansueto
Students and collaborators often ask us what they can do to change the world, especially in the light of the global triumph of the market order and the defeat of the progressive forces since 1989. In accord with the larger vision and analysis outlined in Dialectic, Cosmos, and Society and other publications, we reply that the best and most important thing that they can do is to work to promote the development of human capacities in whatever field they feel called to, and that it is especially important to nurture the social fabric in which such capacities can alone flourish, something which we increasingly think requires the development of intentional communities of a new kind. Often our answer is met with skepticism and dismay. Doesn’t this outlook represent at best a lapse in to just precisely the sort of utopian socialism which Marx and Engels criticized so powerfully (Marx and Engels 1848/1978) --and at worst a complete withdrawal from active political life? This essay is an attempt to answer such objections, while laying out our strategic perspective, and its theoretical foundations more fully.
It is important to begin by remembering just why we want to change the world, and more specifically why we struggle against the market system. Our aim is to promote the full development of human capacities --both the capacities of individual human persons and the collective capacities of human civilization as a whole, as part of humanity’s larger calling to contribute to the evolution of the universe towards ever higher degrees of organization --or, to use a somewhat older vocabulary, the realization of the potential for spirituality which is latent in matter itself (Mansueto 1995, 1997, 1998).. We struggle against the market order because, as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle suspected, and as Marx clearly demonstrated over 150 years ago, the market holds back the full development of human capacities. Responding only to the motion of supply and demand, the market has no access to information regarding the impact of various activities on the development of human capacities, or on the integrity of the ecosystem and the social fabric. More specifically, as Marx demonstrated, as economies become more technologically sophisticated, (other things being equal) the rate of return to capital declines, leading to a systematic reallocation of resources to low wage, low technology activities where the rate of return is higher, thus holding back technological progress (Marx 1867/1978). The market system also forms people morally and intellectually to work only in order to consume, and thus turns human beings away from their cosmohistorical vocation as authentic participants in the creative life of God and thus habituates them to seek the lesser over the higher good (Fromm 1947).
We also do well to recall just how human societies grow and develop, how obstacles to their development emerge, and how those obstacles are most often removed. Here Marx had only part of the picture. He was certainly correct to stress the radical dependence of human societies on a definite material basis, and the role of this material basis in shaping the way societies develop. Different ecosystems require different technologies, and different technologies require different social structures. Hence, while fertile river bottoms may be cultivated without recourse to complex irrigation systems, and thus without the sophisticated forms of social organization required to build and maintain such systems, drier areas simply cannot be inhabited without development of such technologies, something which requires the centralization of a significant surplus product and the organization of huge labor levies. Marx was also quite correct to emphasize the role of social structures, especially what he called the “relations of production”, the way in which a society centralizes and allocates resources for production, both in shaping politics and culture, and in either catalyzing or holding back development (Marx 1859/1961). Thus, for example, any organization which can centralize sufficient surplus from small agrarian communities to make possible the construction of large irrigation systems is, almost by definition, a state structure, and the development of such structures, headed by a monarch of some sort, is almost always bound up with the emergence of the idea of a high God, for whom the earthly monarch provides a basis in experience. Such structures serve as a catalyst for new development, because they make possible the cultivation of regions previously too arid to support agriculture. At the same time, if they then monopolize surplus and begin to allocate it exclusively to warfare and luxury consumption, or even just to already established civilizing practices, then it can begin to hold back development, which is just precisely what we see with the great tributary empires which emerged after 3000 B.C.E (Mansueto 1995).
What Marx missed is the factor which moves human development in the first place --the fact that like everything in the universe, we seek the Good under the highest form in which we can apprehend it. Thus, like other animals we seek food and shelter and mates in whom we find pleasure and affection and the possibility of reproducing our form. Unlike other animals we have intellects which allow us to know higher goods such as love and justice, and even to rise to the idea of the Good as such. Even when human beings take a destructive path it is in service to some good. Thus, when the nomadic tribes which inhabited the arid uplands of Europe and Asia turned to warfare as a strategy for economic development around the year 3000 BCE, it was because they sought the same goods of civilization which their lowland neighbors enjoyed. It is just that the road they took created structures --the warlord state and its distorted religious superstructure --which, in the long run, held back the development of human capacities. Contradictions between the “forces and relations of production,” i.e. between the underlying material basis of a society and its economic and other structures, can lead to crisis and disintegration, even to civilizational collapse (a not infrequent phenomenon over the long haul); only the human drive for growth and development, the drive towards the Good, can turn such crises into opportunities for renewal --into occasions for authentic social revolution.
Marx’s critique of “utopian socialism” was directed above all at those socialists who imagined that they could change the social order purely and simply by moral suasion and/or political action, without respect to the underlying material and structural dynamics. The polemical context of his work, we would like to suggest, led him to underestimate the importance of teleological attractors --of the drive towards the Good-- in the process of social change. At the same time, we also believe that proper attention to the specific configuration of material and structural forces which characterize the present period will in fact point towards just precisely the sort of strategy we have been advocating --i.e. one centered on, though by no means confined to, education and community building. Several points are in order here.
First, as we have already suggested, nothing in the shear fact of civilizational crisis points towards social revolution rather than decadence or collapse. Indeed, the vast majority of social transitions have taken the form of “transitions by decadence.”1 Thus the great empires of late Bronze Age Asia had entered a period of decline when the hill country peasants of Judea, Samaria and Galilee and the specialized agriculturists of the Greek peninsula and islands began building new, iron age societies --along two very different pathways. Rome was slowly strangled by the closing of the limes, which cut off the supply of slave labor, long before anything like a new “feudal” civilization emerged in Europe. And “feudalism,” such as it was, had already accommodated itself in myriad ways to the incipient forms of capitalist development long before the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries swept away a few of the more troublesome (but by no means the last!) vestiges of the ancien regime.
Second, the specific characteristics of capitalist crisis point even less towards a spontaneous dynamic of social renewal than do the crises of earlier modes of production. Precisely because the market order reduces all human activity to a mere means of individual consumption, it degrades people and debases their aspirations (Fromm 1947). Precisely because capitalism strips workers of the last vestiges of property and leaves them with “nothing to lose but their chains” it tends to undermine hope and initiative, and school workers in passivity and resignation. The vigorous struggles --both rural and urban-- of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were above all struggles of resistance to capitalist development, or at least its most radical manifestations. In stable capitalist societies, the spontaneous tendency is for rage to be turned inward and to take the form of crime and self-destructiveness. It was just precisely this phenomenon (or rather an early, very mild manifestation thereof) which led Lenin to argue in “What is to Be Done?” for the importance of conscious ideological leadership (Lenin 1902/1929). For Lenin, however, this conscious leadership existed not to combat the intellectual and moral degradation of the working classes and prepare the people for socialism, but rather to lead a series of political maneuvers designed to swing the workers and peasants behind the revolutionary party with promises of “Bread, Peace, and Land,” making it possible to force a reorganization of society for which neither the economic nor the ideological conditions existed. It was Alexandr Bogdanov, Lenin’s rival for the leadership of the Bolshevik faction, who had the more profound vision, arguing that it was indeed necessary to build an ideological vanguard, but that the function of this vanguard was above all educative, to provide the people with the knowledge they craved and which alone would prepare them for the tasks ahead (Rowley 1987, Mansueto 1996).
In the present period the social disintegration which Lenin and Bogdanov had noted has grown far worse, especially in the “advanced” capitalist countries, and above all in the United States. Leninist sects which mimic Lenin’s (highly effective) strategy of organizing for communism by selling newspapers at plant gates find themselves reduced to objects of ridicule by workers who have been lulled by capitalism into apathy and despair. While on the periphery (and perhaps in parts of Europe) enough social fabric still survives for people to imagine a noncapitalist future, in the United States, where people rarely relate to each other outside of the marketplace, we are in a race against time to salvage what we can of the older tradition of resistance, and will be forced to rebuild, from the ground up, against the most difficult odds.
What does this mean for our strategy and tactics? A strategy (from the Hellenic strategos, or general) is first and foremost a plan for organizing, developing and deploying the resources necessary to fulfill one’s mission --in this case nothing less than helping humanity realize its vocation as an active participant in the creative life of God and thus in the cosmohistorical evolutionary process. Tactics, (from the Hellenic taxis, or order) refers to the way in which one arranges one’s forces on the battlefield and, at the highest level, to the direction in which one “aims the main blow” in a particular battle or during a particular phase of a struggle.
Now it should be clear that our principal resources in the struggle to help humanity realize its vocation are, above all the attractive power of the Good itself (something which is an objective factor which neither we nor our adversaries can affect) and, secondarily human creative capacities of all kinds (which we can do everything to help promote, and which our adversary has under constant assault). In this sense Marx was quite right to say that it is the working class which is the principal force for social change, though he unfortunately emphasized how little workers have to lose, rather than how much workers have to give.2 But human beings, as rational animals, act most effectively on behalf of the Good when they know intellectually the end which they are actually pursuing and how to pursue it, and when their will and passions have been formed in just such a manner as to keep them focused on and nourished during their struggle. We pursue the Good, in other words, most effectively when we have cultivated the intellectual virtues of wisdom, which tells us what the Good is, and prudence which tells us how to achieve it, together with the moral virtues of temperance, fortitude, and justice, which allow us to move toward the Good with grace and power. It is just precisely these virtues which capitalism, by make all human activity merely a means of securing consumer goods, most directly attacks. It follows that our principal task is the cultivation of these virtues, something which has historically been the office of the prophet and philosopher on the one hand, and the priest on the other, as opposed to the political leader in the narrower sense. The prophet and philosopher search out the Truth, helping humanity to understand its End in ever deeper and more profound ways. The priest “sanctifies,” or rather reveals the sacred present in all matter through ritual and, through spiritual direction and above all by pastoral leadership and community building helps people to cultivate the moral virtues and especially the virtue of justice, gradually making them connatural with God and capable of the caritative wisdom which is a foretaste of true beatitude.3
Under the difficult conditions of the present period, however, these tasks take on both a new urgency and a new form. In societies with an intact social fabric philosophy was a good but not a necessity. People could become habituated to the pursuit of justice simply by following the traditions of their people and, doing justice and thus becoming connatural with God, rise to the caritative wisdom which, in a wordless and preconceptual way, would illuminate their paths, no matter how difficult. In a market society, however, especially an “advanced” market society such as the one which exists in the United States, simply doing what is expected will habituate one not to virtue but rather to vice. And when people experience society as simply a system of quantities (prices) or only externally related atoms (individuals) each pursuing their own separate ends, there is no basis in experience for thinking about the End or the Good as such. Thus the nihilism and despair of the present period; thus our insensitivity to injustice. Thus the tendency of people, who cannot live without meaning, to embrace irrationalist ideologies (e.g. religious fundamentalisms of various kinds) which leave them open to authoritarian manipulation.
It was an incipient form of this development which led Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, to develop the via dialectica which allows people, by drawing out the internal contradictions and limitations of their existing perspective, to rise gradually to a first principle of explanation and of action --i.e. to the idea of the Good which draws all things to itself (Plato. Republic). Today the via dialectica has become all but mandatory for people growing up in “advanced” market societies, if they are not to become mired in the hegemonic consumerism and lose touch with what it means to be really human. Concretely this means that people who are to play an active role in the human civilizational project, and especially those who are to lead the transition to a postmarket order, need to have mastered what have traditionally been called the liberal arts, so that they can make and evaluate arguments regarding both the End of human life and the means of achieving that End, and thus come to know conceptually what their grandparents knew habitually and conaturally.
Similarly, in the past (and still today in parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America) it is quite possible to rely on traditional village communities or their urban counterparts, and the traditional religious leadership of those communities, in order to form people in a way which prepares them adequately to participate in, and to defend, the human civilizational project. Thus the success of the national liberation movements in Latin America in the 1970s which drew on a vision of the Good and on virtues and solidarities nurtured by traditional religious communities to build a powerful movement for social justice. But such communities have shown themselves powerless against the corrosive forces of consumerism in “advanced” market societies. And even where they are intact and functioning, they are often deformed by patriarchal-tributary religious ideologies which hate women and which regard true holiness as the prerogative of only a small elite. We need to build new communities which, by providing people with a day to day experience of meaning and nurture, cultivate the virtues and recreate the solidarities necessary for the long struggle which lies ahead.
Does this mean that there is no place for “political struggle” in the present period? By no means. On the contrary, all three of the principal forms of political activity --political-economic, political-diplomatic, and political-military --remain vitally important and form an integral part of the ensemble of tasks which face us in the present period. First, the work of education and community building requires resources, and thus some mechanism for centralizing and allocating resources. This may mean tapping into existing structures (private foundations, state structures, even corporations or individual donors) or it may mean working to develop enterprises which can provide us with an autonomous or partially autonomous economic base. Securing resources of one kind or another is, furthermore, a large part of what we actually expect from those in our network who participate in electoral politics, either seeking election to legislatures or attempting to affect what legislatures and other state bodies do through lobbying, etc.
Second, we need people who can build alliances between the diverse forces involved in the struggle for justice, so that our many different forms of activity are, in so far as is possible, mutually supportive, and the internal contradictions of our movement do not become too terribly destructive.
Third, we must be aware both of the fact that our work is under constant attack, and that, as the market order itself moves ever deeper into crisis, it will itself become vulnerable to our attacks. We need people who can defend our education and organizing work and where possible break the power of the political entities which defend the market order, creating room for us to invent a future for humanity.
We do not reject political struggle. On the contrary we regard it is vitally important. It is just that we do not believe that humanity’s future can be created by political fiat. And we do not want our movement dominated by a political vanguard. Political leadership has its prerogatives, but so too do intellectual and religious leadership and the cumulative wisdom of what we hope will be a growing movement of people who have fallen in love with the future and are actively helping to forge it in many diverse ways.
There are many useful ways in which the tasks of intellectual, religious, and political leadership can be carried out. It is the specific mission of our Institute to bring them together in a very particular way, creating a core community of scholars and teachers dedicated to the pursuit of the Truth in close collaboration with the working class communities we continue to believe provide the real social basis for building a postmarket society, and providing both with religious leadership of a new kind, which is at once rigorous in demanding that each develop fully his or her capacity to know and love God, and respectful of a diversity of paths and styles. Active participation in politics will be a constitutive dimension of the life of our community in the sense that everyone will need to contribute to organizing resources and making decisions regarding their allocation, to negotiating differences within the community and between our community and others, and to the task of defending our work and that of others who labor on behalf of humanity in whatever way conditions require and prudence advises. We also want to include those with a more specifically political vocation --especially those who are wise enough to know that politics is but one dimension of civilization-building and who think they might find in the intellectual and religious focus of our community the meaning and hope they need in order to struggle effectively to extend the space in which authentic human development can take place.
Just how this initiative will develop remains unclear. We have relocated the Institute to Dallas where we continue to have very strong relationships to start a community based liberal arts program for students form working class and ethnic minority communities which we hope will become the focus of the larger initiative we have described in this essay. We invite those who think they might share our vision to join us, either directly, if their talents and circumstances leave them situated to collaborate with us in Dallas, or on the Institute’s other projects, or by entering into a dialogue which will allow us to explore ways to join our efforts into a common stream, so that our diverse talents can be used in mutually supportive ways which serve the Common Good which draws all things to itself.
References
Amin, Samir
1979/1980 Class and Nation, Historically and in the Current Crisis. New York: Monthly Review
Fromm, Erich
1947 Man For Himself, New York: Holt Reinhart Winston
Lenin, V. I.
1902/1929 What is to Be Done? New York: International
Marx, Karl
1848/1978 The Communist Manifesto. in Marx-Engels Reader. New York: Norton
1859/1961 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: Preface in Fromm, Erich. Marx’s Concept of Man. New York: Continuum
1867/1977 Capital, Volume One. New York: Vintage
Mansueto, Anthony
1995 Towards Synergism: The Cosmic Significance of the Human Civilizational Project, Lanham, MD: University Press of America
1996 "From Dialectic to Organization: Bogdanov's Contribution to Social Theory," Studies in East European Thought 48:1.
1997 "Organization, Teleology, and Value," Journal of Religion
1998 “Against Philosophical Appeasement," in Dialectic, Cosmos, and Society 11
Plato
c. 385 B.C.E./1968 Republic, trans. Alan Bloom, New York: Basic
Rowley, David
1987 Millenarian Bolshevism. New York: Garland
Footnotes
1. This term was first suggested by Samir Amin (Amin 1979/1980) to characterize the transition from tributary to capitalist forms in Europe and to suggest a possible pathway towards the future in a world in which revolutionary movements had been largely defeated.
2. A worker is simply someone who engages in productive labor, i.e. labor which contributes in some way, directly or indirectly, to the development of human capacities or to raising the overall level of organization in the universe. This, fundamentally, is what makes workers progressive. It is also, true, as Marx pointed out, that the way in which producers are inserted into the relations of production may affect their political behavior. Thus, the petty bourgeoisie, which properly consists only of those who have sufficient capital, whether in a small business or in some professional skill, that they can insure that niether they nor their descendants need work for anyone else, will likely feel the oppresive character of the market order less intensely than those who have been entirely proletarianized, and may be more likely to seek solutions to social problems within the market order. In practice, however, this matters only in the final instance, when no other factors are in play. Petty bourgeoisies and peasantries struggling to defend their position against the penetration of market forces are often far more anticapitalist than proletariats which have accepted their lot. It is only rentiers who do nothing to contribute to humanity or the universe who stand entirely outside the potential constituency for a postmarket society.
3. There is, of course, a sense in which everyone participates in searching out the Truth and, by enganging in productive labor, participates in revealing the holiness latent in all things, by raising the level of organization of the matter on which they work. This is why Gramsci was able to say that in a sense every human being is an intellectual, and why it is quite propler to speak of a “priesthood of the whole people,” or at least a priesthood of all producers. Research, and especially philosophical research, however, is a specific calling which requires specific talent and training, as is the “ministerial priesthood” of those who devote their lives to helping others realizing their latent potential for spirituality. This is even more true of the prophetic office, which can be discharged only by those whose own intellectual and moral development has carried them beyond the merely human and, in the supernaturally just act, are able to apprehend truths which transcend what the human intellect alone can achieve.