Yeah, good question!
Forest in Factory is a text I wrote with my friend Phil Neal,
published originally on the Endnotes blog,
and our intent with writing this
is because we we found a lot of contemporary attempts
to speculate about the communist future to be unsatisfactory.
And our biggest complaint was the way
that systems of production are conceived of
or more importantly, not conceived of at all, completely ignored.
And so a big chunk at the beginning of the text is
discussing this notion of utopia and what it means
to think about the future, and more importantly,
how to think about the future
in such a way that has a political relevance to today.
And so
throughout the history of Marxism specifically,
there's this kind of tension about,
kind of like I've said many times during this interview,
we can't really predict the details of the future of communist struggle
or communist society because it's so contextual.
And so there on the one hand, you have on one extreme
people who say: There's no point in speculating.
Our horizon of thought should not extend beyond just
that which is immediately in front of us.
And that's the only thing we're really equipped to think rigorously about.
And we should just focus on that.
And then eventually we will iteratively build towards those things in the future.
That's one extreme.
And on the other extreme, there are people who assert that we can,
we need to fancifully imagine, what we want in the future,
and that can inspire everybody today
to work towards that particular imagined future.
And this future should reflect our needs and wants as we imagine them today.
And out of those two extremes,
the point we try making in "Forerst and Factory" is that they both are
right and wrong in their own ways.
we actually have a foreword.
- the French translation is coming out soon
and we wrote a new foreword,
which we'll be publishing in English around the same time
when the French edition comes out
that goes into detail about this more,
but the thing is, you can't ever separate out
the utopian, imaginative dimension of
communism specifically, but emancipatory politics in general.
You can't separate that from its more grounded, rigorous
strategic and tactical kind of approach, an approach
that we and many Marxists before us, called scientific.
And so the scientific and utopian dimensions are,
they both play off each other.
The utopian dimension, its shortcoming
is when it does not have enough fidelity
to the world that we live in today, to be able to trace out
how the world of today might be transformed.
It's tricky, because you want to imagine a world
that is fundamentally different than the world
we have today, because otherwise, what's the point?
What do we what are we working towards,
if the future is really just today, but arranged slightly differently?
But you have to be careful to ensure that the future that you're describing is not
that it is, in fact, realistic.
And realistic, of course, is kind of a loaded term.
What what makes something realistic versus not realistic?
And so that's kind of where the scientific dimension comes in.
You have to form a model, which for Marxism is
this critique of political economy, of how does the world today work?
And what don't we like about this world?
How does that relate to our model of how the world works?
And therefore, if we want to get rid of
these aspects of society we don't like, and fill it with something else,
how does that play into the model of how today works?
And what does that imply for
how all of that may change?
And so the trick is...
...you need to be able to
articulate a vision for a future.
And you need to have a bit of utopianism.
Because for any kind of emancipatory politics,
there is the necessity for a
emotive, ethical,
in some cases spiritual dimension,
that transcends the mere
the limited purview of a purely rigorous scientific inquiry.
And nobody gets into radical politics
because they just read too many economic stats.
And then they're like: Aha!
- It's that for many people,
but also a longing for a better world!
This world sucks,
but more importantly: it could be so much better.
And we can articulate the reasons why it could be so much better.
It's totally possible.
But the fact that it isn't, - we have to then be able to articulate
what that better world would look like in a way
that is actually reachable from today and so,
in "Forest and Factory" we take as our primary object of inquiry
the industrial systems of production that make our current world what it is.
We we articulate this minimal program
of what communism would have to be.
It would have to be this proliferation
of deliberative forms throughout society.
In short that means people would have to be able to
meaningfully participate in decision making about the things that affect them.
And of course, that looks very different at different scales.
But also it would be an abolition of the value form in capitalism,
which also by extension, means and abolition of markets and money.
It also means a,
for lack of a better term,
non domination.
Communism would be a classless society.
You therefore have to get rid of the material basis for class and ensure that,
the material conditions of society,
do not always threaten to reproduce new forms of class domination.
And so if you take this as a minimal guiding principle
of what communism could be,
there's like a million different ways that that could look.
Some of them very realistic, some of them very unrealistic.
But how to know what's realistic and unrealistic for us?
We chart it based on,
how those different types of schemas
relate to the question of production.
And so
we take the freeing of time
as a kind of central mechanism by which a future communist society
would be able to guarantee
theses different social arrangements that I just described,
these minimal conditions.
And in order to have this kind of freeing of time,
you need to rely a lot on the manufacturing capacity
that capitalism has created, both now and as a possibility for in the future.
But you have to fundamentally restructure that productive capacity
such that it does not serve the interests of the capitalist class,
or just the accumulation of value, more abstractly.
It has to serve these means and ends
that are determined collectively through these systems of deliberation,
where people can meaningfully participate in deciding:
What is important, why is it important, and how are we going to do it?
And we're going to collectively arrive at a decision on:
We're gonna make these things, and we're gonna make them this way,
and we're gonna distribute them to these people.
That's how we're gonna do it.
But, how you get there and how how that's gonna look
and where you break down different divisions of labor,
That's all something that you have to pay,
you have to really balance the tension between thinking carefully about
the technical material constraints
and simultaneously being able to truly be different than the world we have today.
And so Forest and Factory is an attempt to thread that needle
and to kind of navigate that tension and find a way to
kind of surpass that tension and show: Hey
this is the tension, but it's a generative tension.
It's a tension that constantly generates good ideas,
and you just need to be able to focus on the right things in order to
constructively generate ideas from that.
It's important for the
it's important for a couple different dimensions.
There's there's a persuasive part of it.
There's a lot of people, I think, who are very disillusioned
with capitalist society, but they don't have any kind of
sympathy for communism because they don't see it
as being possible, or their understanding of what communism is is
just simply
not one that actually, that we would agree with here
in this discussion, or that would actually be better.
Or they think that for whatever reason, capitalism
is just as good as it gets,
as terrible as it is, at least we don't live in something even worse.
I hope that that's not the case.
I hope that a better future is possible,
but sometimes people need to be convinced of that.
Part of that is just having a good, persuasive model
of what the future may look like.
But a lot of that persuasion happens in conjunction with,
the formation of a political subjectivity around them, wherein
the capacity to actually assert your needs
against the society that's dominating you, actually looks to be possible.
And so it's when revolutionary politics
or even just like class struggle politics takes material root
in the forms of possibility that people have in their lives,
that is when these kind of persuasive arguments about:
Hey, what if we instead of using markets and money to decide where things go,
what if we had this other mechanism instead?
If I just tell you that in a bar, it's like: Okay, so?
But if you're two people on a picket line and one person says it to the other
and you say like,
hey, it relates to us being on this picket line for reasons X, Y, and Z,
that's a much more persuasive argument.
And from that,
having having clarity around where you're going...
In the moment right now, it's really mostly just kind of an aspirational thing.
It's mostly it's more emotional than anything.
But, you know, if things continue on the trend they're on
and we get these increasingly ratcheted up forms
of communist organization and class struggle generates these forms
of proletarian power that did not exist before.
Eventually these kind of questions of utopian,
fanciful imagining actually start taking a real strategic dimension.
You know, at some point people very well may have the power to decide, like: Hey,
instead of letting ICE come and kidnap all our friends and neighbors,
what if we had a way to collectively stop them?
And that obviously has a very direct
relevance to emancipatory politics, to communist politics,
which is a society where something like ICE would never exist in the first place.
And so the point is to
have as much of that
ethical, moral, spiritual,
emotive, aspirational,
inspiring
content to your utopian vision as possible to catalyze the continued development
of this political subjectivity, such that that goes
from being a purely emotive
line of persuasion, to actually having strategic significance.
And because you can actually
look at a number of historical revolutionary junctures.
Jacob Blumenfeld had a really good piece recently
about the revolutionary confusion of the Bavarian Socialist Republic.
I believe it was, where there was just a lack of like critical,
good, solid strategic thinking about
what are we gonna do when we have the power
to actually make meaningful decisions over our lives?
And if you don't have a good understanding of what your program is
if you just say: I want it to be not as bad.
If I want to stop the things that are bad now, that's half the equation.
What about: What are you going to do instead?
And you need to make sure you have that answered
or at least answered enough by the time the question matters.