O texto abaixo é o capítulo 10 do livro ''Socialism... serisouly - A brief guied to human liberation'', do jornalista, ativista e comediante Danny Katch. Ele foi publicado no sítio jacobin.mag, mas parece estar inacessível em território brasileiro (e pelo que pude verificar, igualmente em território lusitano), ou melhor: só é possível acessá-lo se se tiver uma conta em Jacobin. Estou-o traduzindo e realizando uma adaptação, que desejo publicar em breve aqui no blog, mas gostaria de publicá-lo já agora no blog -- ainda na língua inglesa -- para compartilhar com os camaradas.
The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
This is not my
version of 2081, but Kurt Vonnegut’s in the opening lines of his
“Harrison Bergeron,” a short story about a future in which
everyone is the same. Attractive people are forced to wear masks,
smart people have earpieces that regularly distract their thoughts
with loud noises, and so on.
As one would
expect with Vonnegut, there are some darkly hilarious moments —
such as a ballet performance in which the dancers are shackled with
leg weights — but unlike most of his stories, “Harrison Bergeron”
is based on a reactionary premise: equality can only be achieved by
reducing the most talented down to the mediocre ranks of the masses.
Socialism has
often been portrayed in science fiction in these types of gray
dystopian terms, which reflect the ambivalence that many artists have
toward capitalism. Artists are often repulsed by the anti-human
values and commercialized culture of their society, but they are also
aware that they have a unique status within it that allows them to
express their creative individuality — as long as it sells. They
fear that socialism would strip them of that status and reduce them
to the level of mere workers, because they are unable to imagine a
world that values and encourages the artistic expression of all of
its members.
Of course there’s
another reason that socialist societies are imagined to be grim and
dreary: most of the societies that have called themselves socialist
have been grim and dreary. Shortly after the revolutions in Eastern
Europe that ended the domination of the Soviet Union, the Rolling
Stones played a legendary concert in Prague in which they were
welcomed as cultural heroes.
The catch is that
this was 1990, Mick and Keith were almost fifty, and it had been
years since their most recent hit, a song called “Harlem Shuffle”
that is god-awful. Forget about the censored books and the bans on
demonstrations. If you want to understand how boring Stalinist
society was, watch the video for “Harlem Shuffle” and then think
about one of the coolest cities in Europe going out of its mind with
joy at the chance to see those guys.
Does it really
matter if socialism is boring? Perhaps it seems silly, even
offensive, to be concerned about such a trivial matter compared to
the horrors that capitalism inflicts all the time. Think about the
dangers of increasing hurricanes and wildfires caused by climate
change, the trauma of losing your home or your job, or the insecurity
of not knowing if the man sitting next to you sees you as a target
for date rape. We like watching movies about the end of the world or
people facing adversity, but in our actual lives most of us prefer
predictability and routine.
Worrying that
socialism might be boring can seem like the ultimate “white people
problem,” as the Internet likes to say. ''Sure it would be nice to
eliminate poverty, war, and racism . . . but what if I get bored?''
But it does
matter, of course, because we don’t want to live in a society
without creativity and excitement, and also because if those things
are being stifled then there must be a certain ruling clique or class
that is doing the stifling — whether or not they think it’s for
our own good. Finally, if socialism is stale and static, it will
never be able to replace capitalism, which can accurately be called
many nasty things, but boring is not one of them.
Capitalism has
revolutionized the world many times over in the past two hundred
years and changed how we think, look, communicate, and work. Just in
the past few decades, this system adapted quickly and effectively to
the global wave of protests and strikes in the ’60s and ’70s:
unionized factories were closed and relocated to other corners of the
world, the stated role of government was shifted from helping people
to helping corporations help people, and finally all these changes
and others as well were sold to us as what the protesters had been
fighting for all along — a world in which every man, woman, and
child is born with the equal right to buy as many smartphones and
factory-ripped jeans as they want.
Capitalism can
reinvent itself far more quickly than any previous economic order.
“Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form,”
write Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, is “the first
condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant
revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all
social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish
the capitalist epoch from all earlier ones.” While earlier class
societies desperately tried to maintain the status quo, capitalism
thrives on overturning it.
The result is a
world in constant motion. Yesterday’s factory district is today’s
slum is tomorrow’s hipster neighborhood. All that is solid melts
into air. That’s another line from the Manifesto and also the name
of a wonderful book by Marshall Berman, who writes that to live in
modern capitalism is “to find ourselves in an environment that
promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of
ourselves and the world — and at the same time, that threatens to
destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.”
Yet most of our
lives are far from exciting. We work for bosses who want us to be
mindless drones. Even when a cool, new invention comes to our
workplace, we can count on it to eventually be used to make us do
more work in less time, which might arouse the passions of
management, but will only fill our days with more drudgery.
Outside of work,
it’s the same story. Schools see their primary role as providing
“career readiness,” which is an inoffensive phrase that means
getting kids prepared to handle the bullshit of work. Even the few
hours that are supposed to be our own are mostly spent on laundry,
cooking, cleaning, checking homework, and all the other necessary
tasks to get ourselves and our families ready for work the next day.
Most of us only
experience the excitement of capitalism as something happening
somewhere else: new gadgets for rich people, wild parties for
celebrities, amazing performances to watch from your couch. On the
bright side, at least most of it is better than “Harlem Shuffle.”
Even worse, when
we do get to directly touch the excitement, it’s usually because
we’re on the business end of it. It’s our jobs being replaced by
that incredible new robot, our rent becoming too expensive ever since
the beautiful luxury tower was built across the street. Adding insult
to injury, we are then told if we complain that we are standing in
the way of progress.
The sacrifice of
individuals in the name of societal progress is said to be one of the
horrors of socialism, a world run by faceless bureaucrats supposedly
acting for the common good. But there are plenty of invisible and
unelected decision-makers under capitalism, from health insurance
officials who don’t know us but can determine whether our surgery
is “necessary” to billionaire-funded foundations that declare
schools they have never visited to be “failures.”
Socialism also
involves plenty of change, upheaval, and even chaos, but this chaos,
as Hal Draper might have said, comes from below. During the Russian
Revolution, the Bolshevik-led Soviet government removed marriage from
the control of the church one month after taking power and allowed
couples to get divorced at the request of either partner.
These laws
dramatically changed family dynamics and women’s lives, as
evidenced by some of the song lyrics that become popular in rural
Russian villages:
Time was when my
husband used his fists and force. But now he is so tender. For he
fears divorce. I no longer fear my husband. If we can’t cooperate,
I will take myself to court, and we will separate.
Of course,
divorce can be heartbreaking as well as liberating. Revolutions cast
everything in a new light, from our leaders to our loved ones, which
can be both exciting and excruciating. “Gigantic events,” wrote
Trotsky in a 1923 newspaper article, “have descended on the family
in its old shape, the war and the revolution. And following them came
creeping slowly the underground mole — critical thought, the
conscious study and evaluation of family relations and forms of life.
No wonder that this process reacts in the most intimate and hence
most painful way on family relationships.”
In another
article, Trotsky described daily experience in revolutionary Russia
as “the process by which everyday life for the working masses is
being broken up and formed anew.” Like capitalism, these first
steps toward socialism offered both the promise of creation and the
threat of destruction, but with the crucial difference that the
people Trotsky wrote about were playing an active role in determining
how their world was changing.
They were far
from having complete control, especially over the mass poverty and
illiteracy that the tsar and world war had bequeathed to them. But
even in these miserable conditions, the years between the October
Revolution and Stalin’s final consolidation of power demonstrated
the excitement of a society in which new doors are open to the
majority classes for the first time.
There was an
explosion of art and culture. Cutting-edge painters and sculptors
decorated the public squares of Russian cities with their futurist
art. For the record, Lenin hated the futurists, but this didn’t
stop the government from funding their journal, Art of the Commune.
Ballets and theaters were opened up to mass audiences. Cultural
groups and workers’ committees came together to bring art and
artistic training into factories. The filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein
gained world renown for the groundbreaking technique of his movies
depicting the Russian Revolution.
The silly premise
of “Harrison Bergeron” was refuted. Socialism didn’t find
talented artists to be a threat to “equality” or find a
contradiction between appreciating individual artists and opening up
the previously elitist art world to the masses of workers and
peasants.
The possibilities
of socialism that the world glimpsed in Russia for a few years were
not a sterile experiment controlled by a handful of theorists but a
messy and thrilling creation of tens of millions of people groping
toward a different way of running society and treating one another,
with all the skills, impediments, and neuroses they had acquired
through living under capitalism, in the horrible circumstances of a
poor, war-torn country. They screwed up in all sorts of ways, but
they also showed that socialism is a real possibility, not a utopian
dream that doesn’t fit the needs of real human beings.
And the society
they were pointing toward was a place where equality meant not
lowering but raising the overall cultural and intellectual level of
society. In the many novels, movies, and other artistic renderings of
socialism, there is little mention of rising divorce rates and heated
debates about art. Most of them imagine societies without conflict,
which is why they seem so creepy — including the ones intending to
promote socialism.
A similar problem
exists inside many protest movements today, in which some activists
want to organize movements and meetings around a consensus model,
which means that almost everybody present has to agree on a decision
for it to get passed. Consensus can sometimes be an effective way to
build trust among people who don’t know and trust one another,
especially because most people in this supposedly democratic society
have almost no experience participating in the democratic process of
discussion, debate, and then a majority-rule vote.
When organizers
view consensus not only as a temporary tactic but as a model for how
society should be run, however, there is a problem. I want to live in
a democratic society with conflicts and arguments, where people
aren’t afraid to stand up for what they believe in and don’t feel
pressured to soften their opinions so that, when a compromise is
reached, we can pretend that we all agreed in the first place. If
your case for socialism rests on the idea that people will stop
getting into arguments and even occasionally acting like jerks, you
should probably find another cause.
Socialism isn’t
going to be created, Lenin once wrote, with “abstract human
material, or with human material specially prepared by us, but with
the human material bequeathed to us by capitalism. True, that is no
easy matter, but no other approach to this task is serious enough to
warrant discussion.”
To be an
effective socialist, it is extremely helpful to like human beings.
Not humanity as a concept but real, sweaty people. In All That Is
Solid Melts into Air, Berman tells a story about Robert Moses, the
famous New York City public planner who flattened entire
neighborhoods that stood in the way of the exact spots where he
envisioned new highways. Moses, a friend once said, “loved the
public, but not as people.” He built parks, beaches, and highways
for the masses to use, even as he loathed most of the working-class
New Yorkers he encountered.
Loving the public
but not people is also a feature of elitist socialists, whose faith
rests more on five-year development plans, utopian blueprints, or
winning future elections than on the wonders that hundreds of
millions can achieve when they are inspired and liberated. That is
why their visions for socialism are so lifeless and unimaginative.
By contrast,
Marx, who is often presented as an isolated intellectual, was a
rowdy, argumentative, funny, passionate person who once declared that
his favorite saying was the maxim: “I am a human being, I consider
nothing that is human alien to me.” I find it hard to see how a
world run by the majority of human beings, with all of our gloriously
and infuriatingly different talents, personalities, madnesses, and
passions, could possibly be boring.
