Marxism and Milkshakes
on the reproduction of low-quality things
and, tangentially, on a limitation and a promise of cooperatives
I’ve argued elsewhere, most recently in “Socialism: Let’s Not Repeat the Worst Mistake of the 20th Century”, that Marx’s theories and predictions that went beyond the functioning of Capital (which were brilliant in their day and are useful to understand now)—for example those that delve into geopolitics, colonialism, progressive views of history, how to carry out a revolution—have proven dead, dead wrong.
Socialism: Let’s Not Resuscitate the Worst Mistake of the 20th Century
In the mid-19th century, socialism and communism were largely synonymous, and as often as not they referred to the dream of a future without all the institutions at the service of bankers, landlords, and factory owners; a future without the State. Since Marxism crowded out the utopian variations of socialism, however, the term has come to refer to the a…
An interesting thought occurred to me the other day, when I was thinking once again about why so many intelligent and especially so many highly educated people (this is actually a Venn diagram with a very small Vesica Piscis [which I just learned is the name of the shape formed by the overlap of two circles, and means “fish bladder”]) gravitate towards sophisticated frameworks that are actually based on a gross simplification of the world, or well crafted theories that have huge amounts of evidence stacked against them.
Examples of this include the prejudice towards mechanistic causation that is hardwired into the scientific worldview born, or reborn, in the Enlightenment (for a critique of this, see “Science” and “Science Revistited” or my newsletter “That’s Not What This Machine Is For”), or how today burnt-out or wealthy-background revolutionaries drift towards vanguardist or state-reliant visions of revolution, from your standard political parties to more interesting and equally tragically flawed varieties like Maoist sects or Tiqqun.
The interesting thought was this:
Oh my! Aren’t these world-flatteners a lot like McDonalds milkshakes!
A historical footnote might be in order. The story goes, when Ronald McDonald was laying the groundwork for his diabolical franchise in the morning years of the car-dependent, suburban American hellscape, his Igorian engineers brought him two different designs for a milkshake machine. The first milkshake machine, it is said, enabled a trained worker, ahem! employee—sly side-eye—to make quite a good milkshake. Meanwhile, the second machine produced an inferior milkshake, but the product was always an identical milkshake even when produced by employees with less training.
Eureka!!!
The second machine won the contest, and the rest is history!
I will not, like the world-flatteners, say that Marxism’s more ambitious appendages and the McDonald’s milkshake are products of the same cause. But they do share an affinity, which is a rationalistic preference for reproducibility and a fear of the complexity and chaos of the real world, a world that always has too many limbs for the straitjacket of simplifying frameworks, a world in which any unilineal concept of cause-and-effect proves wholly inadequate. A world that can only be fairly navigated with intuition, compassion, and an ability to hold contradiction.
Then, in a sort of sentimental endosymbiosis, another recollection entered the cell constructed by the first two. I remembered the time, for a job, I had to attend a webinar [dry heave] on racism in the work environment. Requiring the webinar was well intentioned, as the job was a cooperative that sincerely wanted to get better at identifying and undoing whiteness in the group culture. The ideas presented in the webi – fuck no, in the online seminar, were a combination of quite valid and wretchedly counterrevolutionary.
In sum, the presenters did an effective job, and with a whole lot of facts and figures, of proving the hypothesis that racism is a real force in society and in people’s lives, and that it is structural rather than the mere result of individual prejudices or the imperfections of certain institutions. However, they implicitly limited the range of racism to US society, thus they avoided the possibility that it was a global, historical phenomenon fundamental to modernity itself (much the way slavery was presented in its day as a peculiar institution specific to the South rather than a foundation of the global economy over three centuries). And, they explicitly articulated the goal of creating workplaces (in capitalism) that rose above the harmful effects of racism, spreading the idea that capitalist businesses could effectively confront racism through education and the change of business practices.
In other words, regardless of whatever goals they believe they held, the presenters (Asian American, white, and Black, all with post-graduate degrees and speaking higher class dialects) were working to update white supremacy into more subtle forms, to protect white supremacy from popular revolution. And I mean they were “working” literally, as they were getting paid higher salaries than I’ve ever seen to design and deliver these presentations to businesses that either had a guilt complex or, more frequently, an image and marketing problem.
I began to think, perhaps idealistically, what about cooperatives who sincerely want to confront racism while creating better quality, empowering jobs since, for now, we’re saddled with capitalism and need a paycheck to pay rent?
Can an entity that reluctantly has to think like a business still contribute to the fight against white supremacy, or is it doomed to feed into the nonprofit industrial complex or the marketing industry (read The Revolution Will Not Be Funded for more rumination on this subject)? Does the kind of reformism pretending that capitalism can be separated from white supremacy and patriarchy help all three of these systems (ever entwined, never one breathing without giving the others breath) update themselves and survive our resistance?
And there it appeared again, reproducibility, that troublesome little demon, child of the Enlightenment, aspect of rationalism, offering to help us out.
Though I can get damned judgmental, I’m actually not a purist. None of us are clean, and still we must do this work (work, now, not in a capitalist sense). This is why, for example, I think organizations like cooperatives can contribute to revolutionary work, and they certainly have in powerful moments around the world, like in the Iberian anarchist movement in the early 20th century. The cooperative, though, if oriented not towards recuperation but towards our survival against and destruction of capitalism, is at best an intermediate step. It will not be able to cross over the threshold with us. There is a reason, for example, that Franco kept cooperatives legal even as he suppressed all the anarchist social centers and any union that was not the employers’ pet.
But I think for a cooperative to helpfully engage in this struggle, there is no blueprint for it to follow. It would have to learn how to position itself strategically in its own territory. If few of its members are Black or Indigenous, they would have to learn about white supremacy and colonialism through their own unique processes and through solidarity with people who are not beneficiaries of white supremacy and colonialism. Among the people worst impacted by colonial capitalism, you can find the greatest depth of radical memory and revolutionary insight, which you are never going to find in a room full of PhDs and NGO activists.* But at the bottom of this hierarchical society, you can also find fundamentalist Christians, snitches, patriarchs, and plenty of people who are too close to drowning to offer anyone else guidance.
In other words, there is no manual for revolution. You can’t come to the revolution in robes of white, plug your nose and dip into the pool, baptized, pure as a baby, and find some token figure to fill you with the Truth. You always have to be present to your own history and experiences, you always have to take responsibility for your own analysis and strategic decisions. You have to learn how to listen but also learn how to decide for yourself whether what you’re listening to is reactionary bullshit or maybe, actually, emancipatory. And that means learning to think and feel in a communal and solidaristic way rather than situating oneself in a framework of competitive interests, like whiteness and the State teach us to.
That’s a lot of work. It’s easier to buy the answers. But if we turn towards some idealized revolutionary subject or prefabricated theoretical framework, abdicating our responsibilities, buying into whatever answers we find first, there are no guarantees of quality. We might meet people who have digested their experiences in brilliant ways, or we might meet people caught up in some scam or people submerged in bitterness and trauma and people who are themselves profiting off some scam of selling miracle cures. We might adhere to a theory that is convincing enough to provide some valid answers, but could never hold up to all the complexities of struggle in the real world.
What the conscientious non-profits can offer us, with their deterritorialized and higher class templates, is reproducibility. It might not be the best quality analysis and it might not come with actual relationships that can become the basis for real solidarity, but at least it comes with the guarantee of a minimum level of quality and something we can buy into, something that gives us the comfort of having answers, something—however poisonous it might be—to fill our bellies with.
Hopefully we can see, that’s just not good enough.
And here’s an earlier newsletter with some thoughts on reducing power to economics.
*Love to my friends who do their best from the universities or the smaller NGOs to help people think critically or repurpose resources meant for charity towards urgent survival, contrary to the intentions of those institutions.
There’s so much to dive into here, but I really like the fact that you called out higher class dialects. I think that’s a big problem in our world (even in radical scenes). I grew up rurally in a town of 1500 and am currently living rurally again. Not to sound like a classist but if you speak about racism, gender, etc in words that people don’t understand they aren’t going to follow what you’re saying. I’m an educated trades person who studies alone and I don’t even understand half of it! Anyway great article as always.
Thanks for this Peter. So often you are able to put into words, or tease out frameworks to contextualize, thoughts that so far had floated around in me in vagueness and/or confusion up to that point. This is very helpful, yet again.