Hi Arminius and others,

I’m replying selectively to your – Arminius’s – thoughtful email – please excuse me picking out the bits I feel are crucial:

1. “Our ‘mission’ as it were, is the whole fostering of comradeship among folks from groups who have historically defended their identities like a bunch of rabid weasels in a sack. That means, that when we have an open, free form chat and new folks show up, we do what we can to make them feel they are among fellows…”

and

2. “If we were to take positions on much more than our anti-capitalism, anti-statism, and anti-reformism, we narrow our effectiveness toward our real end.”

What you are saying here – and none of us, I think, would disagree in principle – is that we take an exclusive position on what we are ‘anti’ but (subject to that) an open position on what we are ‘pro’. This is presumably what distinguishes us from the old SPGB and (less so, if there’s a softening up) WSM, who were not ‘pro’ anything, except a deliberately minimally-defined ‘future socialist society of free access and common (or no) ownership’. Twenty-or-so years ago (!) I shared the view of Pieter Lawrence and a few others in SPGB that people are not attracted to a Party which is clear what’s it’s against but vague and uninspiring about what it’s for, and we were up against comrades who ganged on about ‘not drawing up blueprints…’.

Twenty years on I’m getting clearer about what I’m ‘pro’ in terms of political theory. I am ‘anti’ all the categories you cite, but picking out ‘anti-statism’, my current studies in Indian literature in English translation has led to ‘culturism’ as the opposite of statism. A useful theorist in this regard is Ashis Nandy (do a Google and there’s plenty on him). Culturism (in Nandy’s use of the word; there are others) goes very nicely with the practical activism I’m involved with, particularly community-building at a local level, which links to the ideas of another theorist, Patrick Colm Hogan, who has written stuff about ‘rooted culture’ and ‘practical identity’ (in contrast to ‘categorical identity’, so divisive and dangerous in today’s world). Theorists like these can be categorised as neo-Marxist – and perhaps neo-anarchist – as they sometimes cite Marx in support of their positions – so we need have no quarrel with them.

So far, so good? Am I still ‘in the club’? The trouble comes, though, when I seek collaborators in the difficult business of re-growing rooted culture in the West. Unlike most parts of the Third World, we lost our peasant and (real-)village communities long ago, so we don’t think that way, from the grassroots up. Recent discussion at WSM shows that socialists are stuck in the mechanistic, Newtonian, positivist paradigm, e.g. looking for automatic mechanisms to enable free access (perpetuating alienation from the land, so likely to continue to be unsustainable). I would argue they are still thinking ‘top-down’ and hence are in fact statist, despite having seen how such a model was corrupted into state-capitalism in Russia, and I believe that model would fail again however good were the intentions. The Nandy/Hogan model does not suppose that rooted cultures in the Third World are models for the way to go – they have their faults – but they may well be a better starting point and have much to teach the West, including socialists who cling to the ‘potential abundance’ created by capitalism enabling a future socialist society. Post Oil Peak, that is just not on – we can’t just clean up capitalism, prune out the useless occupations, presume an end to materialism and greed and markets for unnecessary commodities and so on. We need a paradigm shift.

Now the great thing for me is that I’ve voiced some of this at WiC and I’ve not been booted out. Hooray! I’ve even mentioned the strange bedfellows I encounter in pursuing this alternative direction. The question is, what else and who else will WiC welcome? There are a whole load of people with radical ideas who would say ‘Yes!’ to ‘anti-capitalism, anti-statism, and anti-reformism’, but who are not socialists by any stretch of the imagination – some New Age, religious, personal-growth sects, for example, who are fascistic and dangerous.

So I would advise that we do some thinking on what we are ‘for’ – but adopting a ‘position’, as you call it, on various things is too formulaic; deeper and more complex thought than that is needed.

More ‘mulling over’ called for, I think.

Definitely ‘For socialism’ – but what on Earth is that? – love, Chris

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