Anonymous Comrade writes:

Leftist Globalization, Freedom, and Differences from the Right

Marx, alienation,
and what a future Communism would look like, written in contrast to pre-capitalist
communalism.

Globalization and anti-globalization moves to the local have been the
focus of lefty debate for years now: we've had Seattle, the IMF/World Bank
protests, and more attention thrown on the issues than ever before. Looking
at some of the fundamental concepts behind a move to the local, then, would
be a good way to flesh out what people mean when they talk about alternatives
to globalization. So here we go.
My aim is to show how anti-globalization from a leftist perspective
is different from the opposition to globalization given by fascist, third
way, conservative, and general rightwing ideologies. I don't presume to
dictate to people coming from a vastly different cultural background than
prevails in the Americas and Europe, but only to give an analysis based
on what Europe the U.S. went through in the transition from a medieval
way of life to a modern one.

The turn to the local that anti-globalization and anti-capitalist activists
have been advocating falls flat if it doesnít consider how the local, for
many people, has been something that they've wanted to get out of and is
not universally looked on as a good thing. The local experience, while
not the alienation provided by minimalls and suburbs, has nevertheless
been one that has come with provincialism, intolerance, and limited prospects,
stretching back centuries. Stories abound about the kid from the country
coming to the city to make his fortune. Unfortunately, because of thin
population density, the stereotype of the intolerant little town is probably
more true in the U.S. than in Europe. We have isolated hamlets that have
banished the devil as an official act, towns that have put up "No UN agents
allowed" signs on their lawns, towns that have voluntarily reinstated segregation,
to list only a few of the more shining examples of localism in the United
States.

When people oppose anonymous corporate globalization they either take
the track of approving of this sort of thing: saying that particularism
is a good model, that people with a distinctive cultural and religious
way of life have a right to expel people and businesses that try to change
those ways; or they appeal to a kind of localism which is more like socialism
with decentralization: people are assumed to have basic democratic and
human rights which prevent things like particularism from happening, but
life is changed to provide something more than anonymous capitalism, more
diversity is allowed more richness of experience. On the economic level,
too, the philosophies diverge: particularists usually back up their pleas
for cultural uniqueness with philosophies which recognize inequality as
a good thing, and as something to be preserved and even extended with the
rejection of anonymous capitalism. Leftist anti-capitalists, on the other
hand, see decentralization as going hand in hand with a society which provides
for the needs which anonymous capitalism leaves up to a market as a part
of a class based society.

So what exactly is the difference? Isnít going for cultural diversity
what both of these trends want? Isnít a concept wedded to that of Aristocracy
that the powerful should provide for the weak, sort of like socialism providing
for peoples' needs?

An answer as to why these two visions are different entails a trip into
the past when capitalism wasn't yet around. Capitalism was hailed as a
revolutionary innovation, and despite itís horrors people from the countryside
of their nation went to the cities to seek their fortune. And to this day
cities built around capitalism, like all the large cities of the North
Eastern U.S. as well as some cities, like Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee,
of the Great Lakes region, have a much more liberal culture than that which
prevails in cities which were the trading centers for rural commerce. Or
Slave based commerce. Why this could be goes back to Marx's conception
of Capitalism as starting with the alienation of workers from the product
of their work and a consequent alienation of consumers from the source
of their consumption.

Capitalism ushered in the era of anonymity. The anonymity cut both ways:
great horrors were covered up and great innovations were spawned. Yet liberty
in places dominated by capitalism was made possible by just that anonymity.
Marx seemed to be upset in his writings about this alienation, but think
for a minute about what a society would look like where people didn't just
go to anonymous jobs, live in anonymous apartments and houses, and shop
at anonymous stores -- but had all of these things present in their daily
experience.

First, the place would have to be small. Then, it would have to be isolated.
A person would be born into a job, like a farmer, which would mark them
to everyone in their community. It would be expected that the person would
follow in the footsteps which the family station provided. Activity would
be monitored. What little money the person had would not be able to be
spent on controversial material, providing that the person could read at
all, because word would get around which would lead to consequences. Open
expression of political views which threatened the status quo would be
met with consequences as well. Why? Because in lieu of a capitalist economy
providing some much needed space between people, our non alienated economy
would be held together by cultural solidarity. Goods would be so scarce
that the existence of products as commodities which could be bought and
sold at any price would be an alien concept. Instead, prices, as well as
choice in goods manufactured and grown, as well as how much, would have
to be roughly established according to immediate needs and the complex
web of obligations and traditions which would exist which would work out
how much of what each person was entitled to at that time. The economy
would be like this because in absence of a system of production which could
maintain itself outside of cultural traditions periods of extreme scarcity
would be common, more immediately serious than recessions, which would
force people to come together in solidarity for mutual survival.

In such a situation freedom to act like you want to act, say what you
want to say, and in the end take home a good chunk of money in spite of
an oppositional attitude might endanger the survival of the group itself,
a source of the conservatism surely. But such a life wouldn't be one without
depth. Pre-Modern Europe could boast a comprehensive set of cultural beliefs
possessed by the people. There was the theology of the Church, the traditions
which established the legitimacy of the current political system, ideas
about familial obligations, not to mention the traditions that went along
with the occupation one chose to pursue -- even farming had traditions somewhat
like guild traditions. So even though you wouldn't have freedom to do whatever
you wanted you still would have a cultural context in which to find meaning.
But you wouldn't be able to get away from it, and you wouldn't be able
to change it in any serious way if you felt that it was wrong.

Such a situation does present a local alternative to capitalism, and
it's this combination of social stagnation and authoritarian cultural richness
that the particularists want to salvage, where possible, and restore, where
needed. Alienation is surely worse than a unified world view, or so the
line goes.

This perspective has even made it into the mainstream with figures like
Alain de Benoist in France, and follower like le Pen, proclaiming a Europe
of a hundred flags as an alternative to capitalism.

I would argue that implicitly the leftist call for the local does not
deny the benefits that capitalism has brung, like human rights, but takes
capitalist alienation as a stepping stone to a more profound version of
what the local should be.

Alienation provides anonymity, which provides a stepping stone for liberty.
The move from a traditionalist economy to one which ran no matter what
cultural principles people held provided an opportunity to overturn much
of the authoritarian doctrine of the past. No longer did people have to
bow to tradition-or else. The economy operated no matter what a personís
religious beliefs were, or if they werenít a good people at all. By eliminating
severe scarcity, the kind leading to famines, and by detaching work, residence,
family, and consumption, from conservative constraints mobility, free expression,
and free thought flourished to a degree unknown in traditional societies.
But this detachment was effected by alienation. The economy seemed to run
on itís own because people went to work for companies making things that
weren't present in their daily lives, and because it offered goods the
variety of which was greater than people ever produced themselves in their
towns. With this change came the demise of conservative traditions which
kept people in check.

A person today, living after the horrors of capitalism have been lessened,
can seek out liberty in anonymity to such a degree that they can basically
secede from the society around them. They can buy whatever books they want,
have them delivered to their door, and have no one be the wiser about what
they're reading. With this change has come what Freud would refer to as
sublimation: Now that the immediate needs of survival are not the issue
the mindset which forces solidarity in order to attain survival has been
absorbed by the collective psyche and put into the unconscious. Now the
mental terrain deals with things that are more distant and reflective.
A mental space exists which has been cleared by capitalist alienation,
by the transition of people from traditional citizens to workers and consumers.
And people take advantage of it, leading to the cultural creativity and
innovation that characterizes big cities all across the world. But although
alienation provides variety, once the mental space is cleared, the identity
of being a worker assimilated, and life in this brave new world starts
it also becomes clear that the means which brought this freedom are also
an impediment to the total realization of it.

So far class hasn't been mentioned much. There are tons of Marxist and
Anarchist thinkers that deal with it superbly. What I've been talking about
has been the positive contributions of capitalism to areas which have become
capitalist. I've kind of been assuming a best-of-all-possible-worlds scenario.
But let's say that a workers' revolution does happen, that suddenly the
class system is overturned, they take control, and the workers institute
a radical redistribution of power and goods. They change society into a
much more collective entity. Assuming that they're not out to take society
back to traditional ways they'll still be faced with the problem of alienation.

Look at the Soviet Union: After Stalin it became much more honest in
it's doctrine and in it's construction, but even though the insane restructuring
and murder had ended it still was a alienated bureaucratic state. It would
be a mistake for leftists to dismiss the entire life of the Soviet Union
as being worthless: many of the people involved were very sincere in wanting
to build a socialist society based on Marx and Lenin, modified by scientific
socialism. The same bureaucracy in this classless society afflicted western
capitalism at the same time, suggesting that the source of it was a feature
of capitalism which was even more basic than the class struggle.

Both the capitalist world and the Soviet Union depended on an economic
system which reproduced itself outside of the bounds of traditional society
to function. In both societies the mechanics of making a capitalist based
world work overtook the actual living of life which they originally promised
to enhance. We're living with this today: it's great to have variety, or
convenience, but capitalism has taken the original variety which it fostered
and has used it as a mechanism for the system itself to grow. What we're
left with is facing the hulking alienation now of not just work and consumption,
but of the very system which originally facilitated that alienation. People
have malls, but they also have big ugly box buildings dotting the landscape.
In the Soviet Union the freedom that was ensured people was cooped by a
centralized authority which wanted to help out people in their pursuit
of freedom so much that it ended up telling them what freedom was and how
to pursue it, thereby ending any chance for real freedom to be realized.
In the Soviet Union much of this reasoning came as an outcome of economic
necessity instead of as dictat from cloistered philosophers.

So capitalism which originally liberated us from traditional society
by destroying it, and replacing it with the promise of social mobility
and self expression facilitated by people not giving a damn what you do
and why you do it, which took us out of the local into something greater,
has ended up by becoming an impediment in itself of realizing that "something
greater".

I propose that when people on the Left talk about a return to the local
they implicitly mean a return to the local that goes beyond bureaucratic
capitalism by asserting the pursuit of a higher kind of liberty which necessarily
takes us back to the local for fulfillment.

Capitalism has opened up the social and psychological space for something
different. It's anonymity provides tantalizing hints at what may be possible
while it stifles the realization of those desires. I propose that a return
to the local, a more towards decentralization, is based on the local needs
of those who chafe against the capitalist system to pursue their finer
desires. Capitalism is based on alienation, which also frees companies
from being rooted in spot and allows them to conglomerate and combine with
no restraint. But nevertheless their are localities. And to truly pursue
liberation and expression a person needs to be able to pursue it on the
local level irrespective of what the national capitalist culture is doing.
Freedom doesn't come by having faith that someday your video will be shown
on MTV. It comes from breaking from the promise of the system and instituting
your own way of life here and now, where itís most real. Capitalist culture
acts as gate keeper, but at this point itís so detached from real life
that it's role is meaningless.

Freedom needs a return to the local because freedom is enacted by individuals
who live in a particular place and enact it in their regular lives. I'm
proposing that a return to the local, for the left, is a two-tier solution:
the first return to the local is to facilitate the freedom that alienated
society has ended up denying but which capitalism has created the means
for. The second tier of decentralization would be decentralization of the
means of production so that the machinery of economic life exists on a
level relevant to the human needs of the first tier and not in line with
furthering it's own tendencies of growth and accumulation. The first tier
of localism would create humanity as the subject which the economic system
truly serves, the second tier would establish the economic system as an
object which should be trained by human beings to serve our ends. The first
tier would be devoted to personal creation, while the second tier would
be something that everyone participated in for the sole means of doing
their bit to keep society running, not as a thing to pursue in itself for
advancement and validation, although they could certainly feel pride in
their work detached from having that pride be based on domination and control.

The ultimate step would be the localities deciding how much economic machinery
and structure they really want. True freedom, beyond controlling economic
reproduction for our own ends, would come in being able to decide that
we want to a society with as little economic machinery as possible but
with a great deal of freedom or to go to a society that makes more of a
trade off of freedom, in the form of work and the effects of economic organization,
for the greater possibilities for expression opened up by what the economic
machinery provides.

This vision wouldn't chuck concerns for the environment out the window.
They could be integrated into second tier concerns, as could animal rights
issues. What would all this creativity add up to? An idea floating out
there is that it's possible to recreate the richness of traditional life
by filling life with voluntary creations which do not dominate over one's
life like the rich traditions of pre-capitalist living do. So in the end
the goal is the same between right and left, at least in some ways: We
both want a world where people can live, can exist, surrounded by depth
and richness. Freedom on the left is the primitive without the primitive's
limitations. Our biology is set up to situate ourselves in a world of meaning
and adventure, why not take biology up on the possibilities it provides
and create mythic worlds of our own, detached all the way from the economic
and cultural constraints which have made these things assume authoritarian
forms in the past. The freedom that provides this opportunity is rooted
in the sublimation that capitalist alienation produces. Without that, welcome
to authoritarian provincialism. But the possibility exists for freedom,
it's out there.

All this is localized. This is my idea about how one can be on the left,
against globalization, for the local, but not in sympathy with fascists
and particularists. They give an image of freedom, but the left can provide
the real thing. This idea is predicated on a serious change in the class
relations of capitalist society, so it's a "what do you do after the revolution"
type of thing. But aren't visions like that needed? Some of this is surely
similar to what more conventional anti-globalization books would present
as the answer, some of this goes beyond a lot of hard core anarchy, but
at least itís an option which exists, which is on the left, which is local,
which can be pursued, modified, denied, changed, plagiarized, with the
result being fruitful discussion and new ideas, hopefully.