Orientation
Why bother reading and writing if you aren’t paid to do it?
I am the co-founder and co-organizer of the website Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism with Barbara MacLean. We have been in existence since 2014 and have slowly built up and expanded our website to include a presence on Facebook (17,000 followers) and Twitter 20,000 followers. As part of my work for our site, I write 15-page articles every two weeks and they are published regularly in Countercurrents, Dissident Voice, The Greanville Post and OpED News. Recently, a comrade expressed disbelief to my partner Barbara, who is an editor and founder of one of the political sites that publishes our articles. After reviewing many of my articles, he remarked, “I don’t know how he does it?” I’ve been reading, writing and teaching for 37 years and, especially in the last 12 years, all three processes are so interconnected and automatic that I’ve lost any sensitivity to how unusual this may appear to others who only engage in two, one or none of these activities. For example, the dean of a community college where I once taught told me I got his vote to teach there because at the time I had written two books as an adjunct. He couldn’t believe an adjunct with none of the pressure of a full-timer to write articles and write two books without being forced to. Such is the intellectual life of community college administration.
In the Crossfire of a Hurricane: 1968
I was 20 years old in 1968 and for anyone born either three years earlier or 3 years later I’m confident you know exactly what that experience was like. In the capitalist psychology of the West we were taught to separate individual development (ontogenesis) from world history. History, after all, is made by extraordinary people, not by the average bloke. My psychological development as a young adult was inseparable from hitting a cop on a horse with an anarchist flag at an IRA demonstration in New York City against the English in the Fall of 1968. My initiation into love in young adulthood was no college dance. It consisted of having a polyamorous relationship with a revolutionary woman working for the War Resisters League. Susan insisted on loving two men because monogamy was respect for private property that, as a communist she was opposed to. Her other lover needed a roommate for his apartment in West Greenwich Village and he asked if I would be interested. After two or three days of thinking about it, I agreed.
Born in Wrong Century
I dropped out of community college early because I wasn’t doing the reading and didn’t have a focus for the work I wanted to do. But once I dropped out of college, my experience with the New Left movement made me want to read. So from the beginning my reading was connected to a political practice, though not as rigorous a practice as I would have as part of a political party or a union. I read books that were not just connected to socialist theory and radical history but tried to educate myself in the history of philosophy, mass psychology, anthropology and comparative religion. I later realized that I was born in the wrong century. Fifteenth century Italy was better for me where architecture, sculpture, painting and color theorists mixed without having to explain themselves. Later, I also came to think my interdisciplinary bent was an intellectual sublimination of sexuality. I could be with as many disciplines as I wanted without having to give any field up.
My reading was eclectic because having dropped out of college I never had a mentor to guide me to focus my attention on the subjects that I might have some natural aptitude for. Neither did I have anyone to guide me to read some authors before others or to read some books of a single author before others. So, for example, when I first stumbled onto Marx in the West 8th Street book store in Greenwich Village in 1969 I picked up the first volume of Das Kapital. Had I met the anarchist Murray Bookchin two years earlier, he would have told me to first read The Communist Manifesto.
West Coast Situationism
In 1972, while living in San Francisco and Berkeley, after having hitchhiked 21,000 miles around the U.S., I hooked up with a Situationist Group called For Ourselves. We did an intervention into the Patricia Heart kidnapping and posed ourselves as a split-off group of the Symbionese Liberation Army. In our “Communique” to the Newspapers we took the occasion to criticize their terrorist methods from a Marxist Situationist perspective. This was the first occasion where through the methods of intervention and follow-up I learned how our practice (our intervention) shaped our theory. A couple of years later we collaborated on a book called The Right to Be Greedy. This book was an attempt to break past the typical sacrificial orientation of typical leftist motivation. If Marx and Engels had spent less time making sarcastic remarks and cheap put-downs of Max Stirner’s book The Ego and His Own they could have given the motives for being a socialist more of a bio evolutionary and psychological foundation. Communism could have been grounded in enlightened self-interest. The Right to be Greedy could have been the book they might have written.
Three years after For Ourselves had broken up in 1977, I wrote a follow-up book which was an expansion of the Right to be Greedy. I called it The Celebration of Selfishness: A Pagan Paradigm for Global Self-Management. In this book I attempted to expand what we had done in the Right to be Greedy so it was broader. I attempted to involve evolutionary psychology, social psychology, and the cosmic evolutionary theories of Teilhard de Chardin, OIiver L. Reiser and the Futurism of Buckminster Fuller. I never tried to get it published but the project of attempting to organize so many fields into a book helped me to move from eclectic dabbling to a real dialectical practice. I still have the typed manuscript from 45 years ago. In order of my priority so far, my dialectic was reading-practice-writing.
My Contradictions between Reading and Working
Between 1970 through 1977 there was a complete separation between my work life and my reading habits. I did working-class jobs unloading trucks for UPS and driving forklifts in factories so I had no place to apply what I was reading. I deliberately hid what I was reading from my workmates on my breaks because I didn’t want to explain why the anarchists and Marxists split the First International, let alone why I was reading it.
My Dialectic between Artist Modelling, Drawing, and Reading
In 1977 I began to take art classes at City College in San Francisco. One time in a figure drawing class the model didn’t show up. I volunteered to pose (nude) in her absence. Afterwards the teacher, Donna, said I was pretty good at it. The next time the model showed up I began to grill her about what models made per hour and how much work they could count on. It sounded much better than driving a forklift, so I asked what the procedure was for getting in to the San Francisco Model’s Guild. She told me they had auditions twice a year but it was very competitive. The next audition was in the Fall of 1978. There were 80 people who auditioned and they had six openings. I managed to be accepted and between 1978-1990 I worked as an artist’s model 15-20 hours a week.
One of my major motivations was to find an art teacher with who I could study. Being an artist model was perfect for that because we models were sent all over the Bay Area to work at the major art schools and community colleges. I found my art teacher at the Community College of San Mateo around 1982. Mr. Appleton had an Old Master’s approach to drawing which meant you had to draw skeletons and muscles before you drew the skin. I learned composition, color theory and art history from him and his student, James Smyth. Here I engaged in an active dialectic between drawing and reading, more drawing and more reading. I read books on Renaissance architecture, Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks and Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography.
My Adventures in Adult Education at Antioch
By the mid-1980s the political economy in Mordor began to contract, and I noticed that my income was just barely meeting my expenses. In the early 1980s, I began a romantic relationship with Barbara. One day we were in Golden Gate Park out for a walk. I had been reading a book called The Pre-Industrial City and was launching into the differences between cities in the Middle Ages and industrial cities. She stopped me. Though she was mildly interested in what I was reading, this time she threw down the gauntlet. She said something like “you need an audience. Here you are on the modeling stand, you have an audience, but your mouth is shut. You need to have people listen to you. You need to keep your clothes on and your month open”.
Barbara convinced me to return to college because there was a growing contradiction between my intellectual life and the physical work I was doing. I enrolled at Antioch University in San Francisco. I attended Antioch in the mid 1980s for only one year and got my BA degree. Why only one year? Because Antioch had a program where you could claim credit for prior life experience. For any credit you claimed for a prior life experience you had to write up the experience as a course and estimate how many hours it was worth. Then I had to find someone competent in the field who would interview me, asking questions, confirming my claims that my knowledge was legitimate. I claimed credit for 23 life experiences. Each of them was about a three-unit course. Why was this dialectical? Because it forced me to take my life experiences and organize them to prove that through those experiences I had constituted true knowledge about these subjects. Among other topics I claimed credit for my experiences included working with leftist groups; all the reading I had done for my manuscript The Celebration of Selfishness; all the art classes with Mr. Appleton that I never bothered to get credit for. I turned my 21,000 miles of hitchhiking between 1970-1972 into a three-unit class “Hitchhiking in the USA”. Don’t ask me which “expert” I got to review this!
In addition to this “independent study”, for the first time I took college classes with other students, older students like me who had lived unusual lives outside of school but could never have received credit for their experiences. I think I took 9 units per quarter for fall, winter and spring of 1983-1984. Writing papers and essays for these classes were like picking ripe plums off a tree. Because of all of my previous reading I rarely had to read new books. In my papers I would not only know about Freud, but Wilhelm Reich, Eric Fromm and social psychologists like George Herbert Mead, Serge Moscovici, whom most of my teachers had never even heard of. It was at Antioch that the dialectic between reading and writing became active, interpenetrating to the point where my reading was narrowed because the subject matter of the writing needed to be harnessed. So too, the process of writing a paper led to new books I wanted to read. Not any old books but books connected to the subject I had just finished writing about.
My Teaching: Interdisciplinary Vision vs Myopic Academic Bean Counters
I had begun college teaching in the field of psychology as an adjunct in 1988 and taught for the next 30 years at seven universities. These included Dominican University (Catholic); Chapman University (Navy and Airforce); Columbia University (prisons); Community Colleges and New College of California (radical); John F. Kennedy University (Liberal Arts) and Golden Gate University (Business School). But by that time I had developed a passion for a variety of fields that were way outside the field of psychology. They included:
- Marxian Political economy of World-Systems Theory
- Theories of nationalism
- Western history
- Social history including the History of Mentalities (French School)
- Ancient history of states
- Anthropology of tribal societies
- Evolutionary psychology of Darwin
- Environmental psychology – of spaces, places and interior design
- Sociohistorical Psychology (socialist psychology) of Vygotsky
- Propaganda and Brainwashing
- Cosmic emergent evolution and general systems theory
- Argumentation, Rhetoric and Critical Thinking of Douglas Walton and the Pragma Dialectical school
- Process philosophy of Samuel Alexander and Alfred North Whitehead
I did not want to give up reading and talking about these subjects with my students. This lead to long battles with different heads of departments who did not appreciate my Renaissance educational efforts. What I saw I was really doing is trying to integrate and expand the field of psychology with other fields. I saw the administrators as myopic bean counters producing specialized students who were blissfully ignorant of world history, political economy or propaganda. This is why I say I was born in the wrong century. When I began teaching my reading and writing dialectic was joined with teaching and it became my “trialectic”.
Undeterred by warnings, I managed to smuggle in another four or five fields into my psychology courses. Many times I remember students saying to me “I thought this was a psychology class. Why are we talking about Marx’s theory of alienation”. I’d say, “because Marx’s theory of alienation has psychological implications”. Then I’d explain what Marx’s theory of capitalist crisis had to do with the increase in psychological disorders. I successfully hid from the administrators what I was really doing in my classes. For nine years I transformed my Psychology of Modern Life Course into a course I made up, Brainwashing, Propaganda, and Rhetoric: Sinister Psychology in the 20th century. I made up two syllabi, one for the administration, which I called my “Suzy Creamcheese” syllabus. The other syllabus was my X-rated one in which described what I was really doing. This is what I gave to my students. I am very proud of the fact that for nine years not a single student complained to the administration about what I was teaching.
It was also at this time that I began putting notes on my computer for books that were especially challenging to me. I made my own tables to compare and contrast what I was reading so I could understand them better. Later these tables found their way into my lectures and I handed them out to students. At the same time I started seeing patterns between the books I was outlining. I started turning them into completed writing pieces that were summaries of five or six books I never thought of publishing. They just collected dust in my drawers. For example, I compared liberalism to republicanism in political philosophy. I compared immanent vs emergent evolution in cosmic evolution and I compared six different schools of philosophy. If Marx could do his PhD comparing Democritus to Epicurus so could I, even without prospects of a PhD. These pieces were all dressed up with nowhere to go, till later.
Writing Interdisciplinary Books
Between 1988 and 2000, I worked on my first book From Earth Spirits to Sky Gods which was my attempt to understand ancient magical traditions and how they led to monotheism from a Marxist point of view. Now my reading was directly organized up to writing this book and this channeled my reading into narrower channels. My teaching also narrowed my reading somewhat as there were some subjects like Western process philosophy and cosmic evolution which held my interest but didn’t translate into either teaching courses or writing books. From 2000 I had written five other books and those books I was able to use in some of my classes. Here are books by the author.
Most of the books I read now are connected up to writing or teaching. I have never been good at marketing my books so that, with rare exceptions, the only feedback I ever received was from the students who had to read my books for their courses.
We World-Systems Theorists Are Trespassers
I had some success tracking down scholars who were interested in the same specialized material I was. In 2003, I began to write a World-Systems theory scholar, Christopher Chase-Dunn, about his work and my questions interested him enough to ask me what I was working on. I told him about From Earth-Spirits to Sky-Gods and he asked me to send him the manuscript. Six months later he wrote a letter of recommendation to Lexington Press and helped me get that book published. A couple of years later he asked me to write a book with him on social evolution from the Stone Age to the present. I remember saying to him, “Chris, I have no degree in macrosociology or anthropology. I’ve never even taken a class”. He said to me “I know what you’ve read” (from the From Earth Spirits to Sky Gods bibliography). Besides, in world systems theory we are all trespassers”. I agreed to write a book with him and in 2014 we co-authored a book together Social Change from the Stone Age to the Present. I also had correspondence with scholars who were interested in social evolution and especially the extent to which there can be cognitive evolution in history. In other words, does Piaget’s formal operations have an origin in history. I also corresponded with Christopher Hallpike, an anthropologist who had studied Piaget.
One for My Baby and One More for the Road: Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism
In 2014 after much frustration attempting to find a socialist group to work with, Barbara and I began to put together our own website called Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. I wrote the theoretical parts of our documents. After that comrades gave us recommendations for political websites that might be interested in the articles I was now writing. Once we established 4 political news sites that still regularly take our material, I at last had regular places in which to be published. Just as with my teaching I could not help myself from expanding my articles crossing over four or five disciplines every time.
My Current Trialectic for Myself
Finally we come to the point where I explain how it is that I write 15-page articles every two weeks. These days I read about 5 books at time and they are usually from three different disciplines. For example, now I am reading a couple of books about the European New Right (Alain De Benoist), a book on argumentation theory, a book on tribalism and a book on evolutionary psychology. I read between two and three hours a day. Once in the late afternoon with coffee and then after dinner into the evening. Typically, after dinner I read in the living room (hour to an hour and a half) while my partner Barbara works on our Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism Twitter account. So my mind is filled with books before I write anything.
I am up at five every morning. By 5:30 I am at my computer. Some of the books that I read I think about using them to turn into articles and so I put notes about them on my computer. I work at putting these notes on my computer until about 7 am. I do this every morning and then use the notes on my computer as the infrastructure for an article. I rarely write an article with no foundation. Most of them are from notes of books I’ve captured on my computer. This article is a rare exception in that that I spontaneously wrote onto a blank page. Every Monday and Wednesday I work on potential articles for five hours from about 11 AM to 5AM with an hour break for lunch. Then Barbara edits them and publishes them on our website.
I stopped teaching for income in 2018 and since we moved from the Bay Area to Olympia Washington, I have been teaching adult education classes. On Tuesdays I have a regular teaching gig at the Senior Center for very low pay from 2PM to 4PM. They let me teach any classes I want. Here is a sample:
- Geopolitics from Globalization to BRICS
- Ages in Turmoil: The Rise and Fall of States
- Witches, Magic and Goddesses: Neopaganism in the West
- Forging Promethean Psychology: Emotional, Sensual and Imaginational Foundations of Western Psychology
- Lucifer’s Labyrinth: Individualism, Hyper-Abstract Thinking and the Process of Being Civilized
How my courses are received impacts the way I write. I made my living as a college teacher so I have always been sensitive to how my material was being received by people in the same room with me. I’ve always written imagining a real audience in my face, so my writing is never too far over people’s heads. I teach courses at the Olympia Senior Center in the fall, winter and spring for 10 weeks. I have a hardcore of about 15 students, ten of whom I can count on coming to my classes no matter what the course is. I have a following!
Book Clubs
Every other Tuesday at 5PM I have a book club phone date with a Facebook friend with whom I share a very common political history of Marxism. John is a nuclear physicist who had once worked with Laroche’s Labor Committees. Our discussion lasts about 75 minutes. We have read books on evolutionary psychology and some of the European New Right in which we are both interested. Every other Sunday, for an hour, I have a book club with another friend who is also named Bruce. Bruce and I go all the way back to the early 1970s when we were in a Situationists group together. Bruce is very knowledgeable about science and cosmic evolution and we have read many books together over the years from the different Marxist political economists as well as books on cosmic evolution. Bruce’s work has taken him all over the country so most of our relationship has been conducted over the phone. Both John and Bruce are my peers so I can count on being challenged by them. As a teacher, I found that challenges to my authority didn’t happen often enough.
Summing Up
How is it that I am able to write 15 page articles every two weeks? It’s because:
- I have an infrastructure of notes on my computer about books I am reading 7 days a week for 1 1/2 hours every morning.
- I discuss books I am reading every week for two hours with one of my friends.
- I am reading 2-3 hours a day in the fields about which I am writing.
- I spend 10 hours a week over 2 days a week writing the articles.
- I teach once a week for two hours and get feedback from my students.
All my reading is now integral to teaching and writing. As I am reading I am thinking of how this might turn into an article or how it might effect a course I might teaching or will teach. I am always keeping track of the bibliography at the back of the book for new books to read. In my writing, I am usually in silent dialogue with the authors of the books I am reading and I imagine their objections. I am also imagining the looks of perplexity of on my students’ faces which helps me to keep my articles closer to the ground. When I am teaching, I imagine other writers in the class raising objectives. I am also imagining other teachers and their criticisms of how I am presenting the material. My trialectic between reading, writing and speaking is ever-emergent, filled with conflicts, contradictions and synthesis. As Junior Walker and the All Stars once sang. “I live the life I love and a love the life I live. I’m a road runner baby. Got to keep on keepin’ on!”