FUGITIVE POLITICS Fugitive Politics explores the intersection between politics and ecology, between the requirements for radical change and the unprecedented challenges posed by the global crisis, a dialectic which has rarely been addressed in academia. Acrosseightchapters,CarlBoggsexploreshowsystemicchangemaybeachieved within the current system, while detailing attempts at achieving change within nation-states.Boggsstatesthatanynotionofrevolutionseemsfancifulinthecurrent climate,contendingthatcontrollingeliteshaveconcentratedtheirholdoncorporate power along three self-serving fronts: technology (Big Tech) and the surveillance order, militarism and the warfare state, and intensification of globalized power. Combined with this Boggs cites the fundamental absence of revolutionary counter- forces, arguing that after decades of subservice relevant, allied to the rise of identity politics and social movements, the Marxist theoretical legacy is now exhausted and willnotprovideanexitfromthecrisis.Boggsconcludesthattheonlypossibilityfor fundamentalchangewillcomefromanopenstyleofpolitics,intheJacobintradition, operatingwithintheoverallstructuresofthecurrentdemocraticstate. Written for both an academic and a general readership,intheU.S. andbeyond, FugitivePoliticswillbeofvitalimportancetothosestudyingpoliticaltheory,political philosophy, political history, Marxism and Marxist theory, authoritarian politics, ecology,environmentalpolitics,andclimatepolitics. CarlBoggshasbeenprofessorofsocialscienceatNationalUniversityinLosAngeles formorethan30years.Hehaswritten25booksintheareasofcriticalsocialtheory, Europeanpolitics,Americanpolitics,U.S.foreignandmilitarypolicy,andfilmstudies. Forthepast25yearshehasbeenaregularcontributortotheonlinemagazineCoun- terPunch. He is a member of the editorial boards of New Political Science, Theory and Society, and the Global Studies Association. He is recipient of the Charles McCoy AwardforcareerachievementfromtheAmericanPoliticalScienceAssociation. “In Fugitive Politics, Boggs returns to his days as a campus radical, yolking together twoinfluentialyetseeminglydisparatenarrativesinordertofashionafugitivepolitics repurposed to challenge the misplaced ontological confidence of much of today’s academicleft.Insodoingheprovesthattoday’salgorithmicunderstandingofpolitics oftenservesasanontologicalblocktocapturingtheanalogueexperienceofpolitical repression that Boggs and his contemporaries lived on a daily basis. Blending the prehensive nature of political activism with his pathfinding theoretical work on Gramsci,Lenin,and Marx, and hisprescientforaysinto ecosocialism, Boggscreates newzonesofcontestation,sitesofscholarlyoutlawry,enclavesofpoliticalinsurgency andfugitivedeploysthatareequippedtochallengethearcofhistoricalstrugglethat could not be anticipated by the political sages of yesteryear. This book is vintage Boggs,fearlessandforward-looking,atthecuttingedgeofthepoliticaldiscourseof theday,abeaconoflightinthesedarktimes.” Peter McLaren, Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, Chapman University, USA FUGITIVE POLITICS The Struggle for Ecological Sanity Carl Boggs Firstpublished2022 byRoutledge 605ThirdAvenue,NewYork,NY10158 andbyRoutledge 2ParkSquare,MiltonPark,Abingdon,OxonOX144RN RoutledgeisanimprintoftheTaylor&FrancisGroup,aninformabusiness ©2022CarlBoggs TherightofCarlBoggstobeidentifiedasauthorofthisworkhasbeenasserted byhiminaccordancewithsections77and78oftheCopyright,Designsand PatentsAct1988. Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbookmaybereprintedorreproducedor utilisedinanyformorbyanyelectronic,mechanical,orothermeans,now knownorhereafterinvented,includingphotocopyingandrecording,orinany informationstorageorretrievalsystem,withoutpermissioninwritingfromthe publishers. Trademarknotice:Productorcorporatenamesmaybetrademarksorregistered trademarks,andareusedonlyforidentificationandexplanationwithoutintent toinfringe. LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData Acatalogrecordforthistitlehasbeenrequested ISBN:978-1-032-05416-2(hbk) ISBN:978-1-032-05414-8(pbk) ISBN:978-1-003-19746-1(ebk) DOI:10.4324/9781003197461 TypesetinBembo byTaylor&FrancisBooks This book is dedicated to my Ventura College amici: Anne, Bill C., Cyndie, Gerry, Jaimee, Julie, Kim, Michael W. CONTENTS Preface ix Introduction 1 1 Marxism and Early Capitalism 9 Marxism and Ecology 11 In Search of an Ecological Marx 12 Capitalism and the Natural World 16 2 Capitalism: From Marx to Weber 23 The Logic of Economic Rationalization 24 Modernity and State-Capitalism 30 The Rise of Corporate Globalization 34 The War on Nature 36 3 From Lenin to Gramsci 44 Breaking the Theoretical Impasse 44 The Retrieval of Politics 48 Marxism in History 49 The Problem of Revolution 52 Gramsci’s Jacobinism 56 viii Contents 4 Authoritarian State, Mass Society 63 Sources of Domination 63 Rise of the Authoritarian State 67 The Problem of Mass Culture 71 5 Mills: Beyond Marx and Weber 77 The Authoritarian State Revisited 79 The “Higher Immorality” 82 The Mass Society 86 6 Capitalism, Technology, Power 96 Capitalism and Technology 97 The McDonaldized Society 100 The Mass-Surveillance Order 102 Big Tech Oligarchy 108 7 The Military Behemoth 115 The New Imperial State 117 The Doomsday Threat 120 Permanent War? 124 The Age of Technowar 127 8 The Road to Ecosocialism? 133 The New Global Landscape 133 A Modern Jacobinsm? 137 Gramsci’s Politics Revisited 139 The Grand Illusion 141 Traversing the Modern Impasse 142 Sheldon Wolin: A Tribute 146 Index 151 PREFACE The title of this book, Fugitive Politics, has its rather unusual origins in a bizarre confluence of personal narratives – one going back to an intellectual mentor during graduate-student years, the other involving a friend engaged in antiwar politics at the time of the Vietnam War. The mentor was Sheldon Wolin, whose last (and posthumous) book was titled Fugitive Democracy, a lengthy collection of brilliant essays on political theorists ranging from Thomas Hobbes to Karl Marx, Max Weber, the Frankfurt School, and more recent writers such as John Rawls. AsprofessorofpoliticalscienceatU.C.,Berkeleyduringthe1960s,Wolinwould exert a profound impact on my intellectual and political development extending well past that turbulent decade. Fugitive Democracy would be the final work of a prolific career that included such classics as Politics and Vision (1960) and Democ- racy, Inc. (2007). The activist friend is Howard Mechanic, author of the recently published The Fugitive Candidate, which traces the lengthy history of Mechanic’s protests against the Vietnam War as a student at Washington University in St. Louis (where I taught in the 1970s), his improbable arrest and prison sentence, his underground years in Arizona, his ultimate detection and arrest while running for Scottsdale city council, and his final pardon in 2000 by President Bill Clinton. I was honored to be able to write the foreword to Mechanic’s fascinating book, its appearance coinciding with a documentary on his remarkable saga. Viewed through the lens of both experiences, the term “fugitive” takes on special meaning – simultaneously open-ended and transgressive, transitory and exotic, fragmentary and radical. Put differently, the reference captures a dynamic elementofpoliticsembedded inanongoing process ofdeconstruction, wherethe outer surface of historical reality is increasingly penetrated and revealed. The seminal though quite diverse contributions of Wolin and Mechanic would seem