The following notes and quotes from Joel Kovel have been compiled from my notebooks; scribbled between the years 2011 and 2018, in the course of study groups, meals, planning sessions, conferences and convergences, etc. Because the purpose of my notes was not academic citation, they are unlikely to be exact quotes, and shouldn't be treated as such. Nonetheless I hope that they will reflect and resonate with the spirit of Kovel's life and works. They have been rearranged and reassembled on the occasion of Kovel's 82nd birthday, to be shared and studied by anyone and everyone whose desires converge to carry on what Jim White has called “Joel's divine mission.” - Quincy Saul, August 27, 2018
SCIENTIFIC SOUL STUDY SESSION (co-taught with Fred Ho)
The
essence of the spiritual phenomenon is to reach beyond the given.
One
of the most deadly aspects of capitalism is how it indoctrinates
people to never reach beyond the given.
The
TAO is the cornerstone of the martial arts.
It's
not pacifist. (The Maoists trashed it because they called it feudal,
but monks didn't submit.)
Non-action
is a stance, not apathy.
There
is an embedded critique of the existing world inside the immense
philosophical enterprise.
It's
existential, not idealist. It's about nature.
A
serious stand against anthropocentrism!
Attacks
the harm of human hubris.
Everyone
in the room has had a direct, real experience of the Tao.
There
is something deep inside us that is pre-conceptual.
We
live in a shroud of false rationality.
A
profound critique of everything existing, no doubt about it!
Complete
pure updending of hierarchy, law, order, pure anarchy,
A
window to the original, pre-state society –
but
the Tao is not the Tao.
The
New Testament
The notion that humans have
innate dignity is first inscribed here.
Our traditions of freedom and
struggle arise from this.
The transition from Old and New
Testaments was marked by Roman Imperialism.
The word Gospel (“good news”)
is a subversion of Roman Imperialism – juxtaposed with Evangelists,
who carried news of victory from wars...
Jesus' death sentence was
throwing the money lenders out of the temple.
It was always about power and
money.
Theses on Revolution
- There are always multiple causes
- Outcomes always take you by surprise
- Every revolution has a long history (even if it ends quickly)
- There is a particularly human contagion, a flash point where the impossible becomes possible
- There must be a great deal of internal subjective factors which lead to personal transformation
- Revolutionary praxis releases something inside of you that is the best possible feeling
- You see yourself historically
- Bonds are created where none existed
- Power is created where none existed
- You'll never vote your way there.
Exchange:
Joel: “Is there a future for
Marxist-Leninist politics?”
Fred: “If it gets creative
again.”
ECOSOCIALISM
- Capital is money in a certain form, money in motion. If we're going to overcome it we have to understand its internal dynamics. There are two kinds of crises of capitalism – accumulation crises and ecological crises.
- You can't graft ecosocialism onto existing society; it will be rejected.
- The collapse is going to happen either way. We have to steer the collapse into ecosocialist formation.
- Ecosocialist Strategies: How do we conceptualize the path to the goal?>Development of prefigurative ecosocialist ensembles>Selective work within system to protect and safeguard the above> Worldwide awakening (non-institutional).
- The key is protecting and nourishing the germ of ecosocialist production (the making of ecosystems).
- The raw material for ecosocialism is present in the divine creativity of every new life. It must be prefigurative of a new kind of being, in the pores and interstices of the old order. They must be conscious of themselves and interconnected. We're not inventing anything; we're giving guidance to the creativity that is already present and emerging, in resisting and prefigurative points.
INTRINSIC VALUE
- Intrinsic Value is to Production as the Tao is to the Kingdom.
- What's at stake with intrinsic value is redemption! (“an ablation of our productive power”)
- Mere craftsmanship and utility, to confront the allure and violence of Moloch? There must be something more; a grander concept... You need a powerful belief system that will link you to something beyond yourself, your neighbors, your nation.... Spiritualization; reapplied to the category of intrinsic value...
- (Proposal:) A nodal conceptual map of the political philosophy of intrinsic value; points of practice new for ecosocialism which don't appear in either Marxist ecology or environmentalism...
- Marx falls apart somewhere around nature being passive; Something happened to him between the Manuscripts and Capital vol. 1... Unless Marxism changes value theory it will make no further progress in understanding or addressing the ecological crisis.
ON DIALECTICS:
The history of human beings
trying to make sense of the flux of the universe and to give it a
name.
A critique of reification –
process instead.
BUT, the notion of dialectics is
a reification.
There is no such thing as
dialectics:
It ranges widely in its efforts
to contemplate change, but betrays itself when it gives itself a
name.
The greatness of the ancient
texts has it; not naming it but moving with it. (The Tao, the Gospel
of John too)
The transhistorical struggle of
human beings to find words to understand the processes of the
universe; our relation to nature. Makes for endless ironies. William
Blake got this; he was superior dialectician to Hegel.
Joel's
advice to a young writer...
- No one worth a damn ever wrote in peace.
- Know the difference between prose and rhetoric... Between being satisfied, versus fighting for effect; beware grandiloquent writing in love with itself.... A true writer, who realizes their gift, watches their own bullshit.
- Discover your style.
- If you lack discipline, the ideas will be spread too thin.
- We all want to write the big book right now.
- What's the concrete problem which all the bold vision coheres around? A singular event that you can trace everything to? Where things converge? Where is the grain of sand for this world? (versus a whole beach)
- Has to touch down on lived life. Is it tied to the fallen world?
- Is there irony in it? Self reflection? Drawing out internal contradiction? Humor? Are people going to laugh? It will be much better if they do!
- Writing should want to limit itself, because all human thought is limited. You're not God.
- Where is the suchness and concreteness? Are the subjects real people? Or words like love and ideology?
- Exhorting people to action versus painstaking descriptions of the world?
- Anchor yourself; we all come from somewhere. Establish a lineage for yourself; where you're coming from intellectually.
- More rooting in Marx? (or be for Marx what Hegel was for Marx?) Preface to contribution to a critique of political economy (1859) – it's my foundation even if I don't get it. Sartre (in Search for a Method) says Marx is is the one unsurpassed thinker we have, because the social conditions to surpass him haven't been achieved. Is our moment approaching this, as the mode of production is failing?
- Take your grip of these things, take it into the realm of the imagination, and into the realm of our relation to nature.
- Prefiguration – a mandate! What it's becoming, what it can become. The only word that captures the immense task of the millions of sprouting new worlds; the common thread to tie them together conceptually and organizationally.
- Find the best title / best organization / best outline: A path through all the complexity.
- Spirituality – what will we say that others haven't?
- The ideas are there – hammer them out in the context of what's living.
- Summon common ideas and experiences like a genie from a bottle.
- We have an incredible amount to do.
- Despair, or a higher state of being? Operationalize the dichotomies; concretely ground them.
- Achieve the breakthrough to the foundations beneath the lofty ideas of human nature and imagination.
- Introduce chaos theory: initial conditions can't predict the end state.
- Comic books are great. But if we only do things to reach everyone then we're not doing our job.
Leftist
Publications Today
Lots of negation,
but no negation of the negation!
Lots of macho big dick guys with
the insight...
But the future is not granted to
the merely stoic!
Beyond wishy-washy,
sorta-stoicism...
Stop ranting about our poor
choices!
We should be unafraid to be
hopeful.
Joel
at the Massachusetts Convergence (2012)
Talk about what hasn't been
talked about.
Don't lose the common thread, or
it becomes just a question of technique.
If we don't talk about the
existential dimension, we miss the qualities that make
revolutionaries.
Revolutionaries need a quotient
of faith in what is not yet here.
The spirit dimension cannot be
immediately grasped.
The religion of ecosocialism
needs to take on a historical form.
Materialism – matter is active
and alive!
(Capitalist science destroys
this; turns nature into objects/resources.)
Reverse the accumulation of
capital! Rebuild the natural economy!
The thing which makes us
spiritual – the origins of consciousness –
A fissure in our being, for good
or ill.
The spiritual moment detaches us
from exchange value, commodity fetishism and the capitalist system.
Until then we are imprisoned,
without a spirituality worthy of our struggle.
Love is different from
infatuation. Follow your feelings, but have discernment.
Joel
at the Mosaic Convergence (2014)
We're in the grip of a power
bent on destroying you and itself.
Let that sink in.
There's a profound level of
denial. (Sitting in a burning house and waiting to see the next TV
program.)
Any rational person should come
to this conclusion.
Don't stop until you understand
capitalism in all its malignity:
It's murderous but it appears
rational.
It's intellectually advanced but
morally desolate.
The more money they make the
crazier they become.
The bigger the company, the more
bizarre and berserk.
Ruthless criticism implies
prefiguration,
Where boundaries of ruthless
criticism are torn asunder and revelation shines through.
Joel
at the Left Forum (2016)
There is an immanent critique of
the Left here.
This is not another number
target, it's a long built crisis and if you don't understand you'll
be buried in sand and not see the grains of sand.
It's a liberation: we have been
given this existential crisis to end the domination of nature.
Kovel's principles of Hope:
- The interstitial principle (spontaneous)
- Our visionary power (heritage of nature)
- Prefiguration
It's natural to construct
cosmovisions.
But environmentalism is a curse
word; an anti-cosmogony; defining nature in terms of its enemy
(capital) –
But we are part of ecosystems;
they inhabit us!
Beyond the lawn! Lawns are a
barrier to perception.
Visionary reckoning is what we
need.
This is what distinguishes the
ecosocialist approach,
Beyond the clumsy dance between
use and exchange value,
which always winds up as a knot
in favor of the latter.
Ontology:
Ecology versus Capital, Love versus Death
What do we think/say about
humans being part of an ecosystem?
What are the points of
connection between organisms?
What is the nature of the
connections?
What separates one organism from
another?
The answers transcend known
physics sometimes – we communicate as fast as electrons, across
space, faster than light. The puzzles of physics have something to do
with this...
Nature is formative (way beyond
metabolism).
So, putting capitalism on an
ontological basis –
Ego and capital are homologous;
derive from each other.
“It's pathetic how little
people pay attention to this.”
SO, bring intrinsic value into
ONTOLOGY:
“God's grace” – the
experience of being loved; bounteous love from the universe:
Everyone experiences this from
the moment of their birth.
Also, babies reverse alzheimers.
Love triggers emergence.
Love is a biological necessity.
It comes out of nature; nature's own production.
If you don't get it, you die
(“anaclytic depression”):
Death without love.
But even if we don't die, we can
still suffer from it.
Modern society suffers from
hospitalism.
The babies have milk bottles
propped up for them;
We have iphones and vending
machines, etc.
On
Chosenness
If you think you're chosen
It means you're not chosen!
It means you're debased in the
worst possible way –
You're fallen into hell and
you're dreaming of heaven.
Judaism is not an essence but a
structural predicament;
Almost a curse – you are
forced to think of yourself chauvinistically; an internal thrill!
The Jewish path must traverse an
obdurate reality: that the subject is not all humanity, but a chosen
people.
This can only be redeemed by an
abrogation of chosenness/chauvinism.
The Jewish Renaissance was the destruction of Jewish Culture.
The Jewish Renaissance was the destruction of Jewish Culture.
The definition of Zionism is the
destruction of Yiddish culture.
What will happen in Israel?
US support will fade, slowly,
then completely.
Israel will circle wagons,
become more oppressive:
Another nakba, or a
single state?
Will be determined militarily
and politically, via internal and external violence and nonviolence.
APHORISMS
- Unless you're trying to change the world, you can't understand it.
- Something went terribly wrong around 10,000 years ago. It's a big, long struggle, but that's no excuse for being an Oblomov.
- A critic is someone who knows the road but can't drive.
- Ideas have no rights.
- Without theory we just have the petty criticisms of activists...
- There's no end to the beginning, but there may be a beginning to the end.
- You're not on the right path if you're contributing to the accumulation of society.
- Everything in this society is prima facie FALSE, unless it prepares us to overcome the accumulation of capital.
- The destiny of our species is to explore the tail end of an evolutionary anomaly which we call, ironically, intelligence. We have pursued our gifts relentlessly to the heights of its transcendence and to the depths of its depravity. We can stop the world and kill it, love the world and hate it. This defines our species' uniqueness.
- On the Second Law of Thermodynamics: “I think about it a lot, but I can't find anyone to talk to about it.”
(By way of conclusion...)
This is all either an ending or
a new beginning.
Specify the conditions for a
radical break with capital, which maintains good cheer.
Learn to move through this world
detached from it so you don't get worn down.
In the history of
transformational moments, something emerges, through tectonic shifts.
Look for aporias and openings.
Keep open lines of thought for new subjects.
