There are multiple reasons why Robin Hood remains the most-retold, favorite saga in the English language, exceeding, even in the United Kingdom, King Arthur and all the associated court drama. A perfect saga for popular theater, then films and television, Robin features the poor-versus-rich, the wrongful ruler, furtive romance across social classes, and so on. This year’s The Death of Robin Hood follows a century of film fascination.

In 1922, the newly launched independent United Artists studios borrowed heavily to produce the first notable film, Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood, and succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. Among much competition for successors, The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) with Olivia de Haviland and Errol Flynn, would remain totemic for generations of screen audiences.

In the time of my childhood, The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-59) was the first British series to become a hit on U.S. television, with an accompanying theme song that reached millions. Its scriptwriters happened to be blacklisted leftwingers who hid in the metaphorical forest, under pseudonyms.

It was succeeded best, in my view, by Robin and Marian directed by Richard Lester, an ally of the Beatles. In this version, we see Crusaders slaughtering innocent populations, Good King Richard in charge of war crimes, and Audrey Hepburn as the rebel Marian turned prioress (to escape persecution) who tries to revive Robin from war wounds with her healing herbs and finally administers the poison that they take together. 

Nothing since (and there have been many more) has been anywhere near as good, with one interesting exception: Maid Marian and Her Merry Men (1987-93), a hugely popular, perky, and funny British television show for children, which featured a Rastafarian who had his own interpretations of society and religion.

That Robin Hood lore is also, at base, a religious, folkloric saga is not well understood. We start with the Wat Tyler Rebellion of 1381, the first of the Radical Reformation mass struggles, highlighting the deteriorating condition of life for the poorer classes together with the impact of the Wycliffe biblical translation. Lollardy, a heretical Christianity, spread from the Oxford community as lay preachers and organizers mobilized the masses to urge the confiscation of the Church’s wealth and that of the Monarchy. The uprising was brutally suppressed, but the sentiment and the movement lived on across the continent. The 1525 peasant uprising behind Thomas Müntzer, a minister-revolutionary beheaded at the order of Martin Luther, stands among the most noted successors.

It was said that the Wat Tyler rebels could quote passages from Piers Plowman, that epic poem from the onset of English literature. Something is amiss, and protagonist Piers, sleeping in the Malvern Hills of Worcestershire, is awakened by the Lady explaining to him that the earth provides clothing, food, and drink if only its measures can be taken properly: it belongs to all. 

So much of English village life had been sustained for centuries around the Commons and the use of oak trees, along with ash and elm, apple and cherry, to sustain the  human inhabitants with their livestock. The Norman Conquest threw much of this into imbalance, but the expansion of serfdom pushed harder yet. The forest had become home to the deer—protein on the hoof— forbidden to villagers on penalty of death. It was now contested territory, notwithstanding the Magna Carta.

At one level, the more or less contemporary appearance of Robin Hood could be seen as revenge against the rising wealthy classes. For the great utopian socialist William Morris, ordinary people resisted the kind of “progress” pressed upon them by the rising upper classes, while they themselves looked backward at a Golden Age, before class society. A popular nineteenth century socialist idea, it reflected a belief in a kind of religion of nature. But it also reflected the folklorist English Christianity wrapped around holidays and rituals. Such rituals survived into the nineteenth century, including the Mayday night mating rituals in which the Virgin Mary became Marian the Queen of the Village and Robin her necessary mate.

The totemic Child Ballads folklore collection of English and Scottish ballads contains almost forty Robin Hood sagas. With plenty of direct action, these recall, explore and anticipate the further attack upon the established clergy in the name of a higher Christianity. No less than John Knox attacked the religious rebels, “the rascal multitude stirred up to make a Robin Hood… [who] disobey and trouble the town” of Edinburgh. The earliest printed version of A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode, reprinted several times in the sixteenth century, openly advocates civic insurrection and the overthrow of the empowered clergy. As Robin instructs Little John, “these bishops and these archbishops/You shall beat and bind.” 

It is not entirely clear when Friar Tuck appeared in the Robin Hood saga, but he matches the restless element of the Church as it consolidated its property and power. He spies upon the powerful and reports to Robin, allowing the Merry Men to prepare for battle. But he also, famously barrel-chested, is the jolly Christian dispatching the images of blue-nosed propriety.

This year, though, the Robin Hood on screen tells us that his legend is a lie, and in real time, the famous Sherwood Oak in which Robin allegedly hid his gold, has died. Neither Robin nor the Oak will be allowed to die in imagination, for the acorns planted by legend bear high hopes. Such is the nature religion of lore that the Oak is Robin and Robin is the Oak. 

Paul Buhle is, with Mari Jo Buhle, coeditor of the biographical William Morris graphic novel, If I Could But See It, written and drawn by Nick Thorkelson, scheduled for September publication by Pluto Press. Much of the material in this essay is drawn from the text in the collaborative comic edited by Paul Buhle, Robin Hood: People’s Outlaw and Forest Hero (PM Press, 2011).

The post Robin Hood Redux, or What Happened to Friar Tuck? appeared first on DSA Religious Socialism.

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In two recent episodes of the Jacobin Radio podcast Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber makes arguments about market socialism and central planning that should be familiar to those who remember the debates over what constitutes “feasible socialism” from the late 20^th century. Indeed, Chibber’s views are reminiscent of those offered by the entire market-socialist school that appeared in the wake of—at the latest—Alec Nove’s The Economics of Feasible Socialism (1983). Ultimately, the debate was not over whether or not there were gigantic flaws in central planning as practiced in the Soviet Union and other countries of what was termed “actually existing socialism”; virtually all contributors to that debate agreed such flaws existed. Nor was the idea that socialists need to do more than provide vagaries about the mechanisms of a post-capitalist economy seriously challenged. What was, and is, at stake in the debate is whether or not socialism can be a society in which—to quote Marx—capitalism’s “anarchy of production” for profit is replaced by planned production for use by “the associated producers.” Or if that strategy is found infeasible, the question is whether a vision of socialism that retains market coordination of (most) production of goods and services can fulfill the socialist goal of a classless, emancipated society. 

Despite saying that “if planning can further our [socialist] goals … we should push it as far as we can,” Chibber substantially agrees with Nove and other market-socialists—including avowed Marxists such as David Schweickart—that planning a modern, complex economy will lead to Soviet-style failure. Any attempt at comprehensive planning, however different it might be from central planning as it was practiced in the official Communist societies, can’t work; only via market pricing, with its sensitivity to supply and demand, can decisions on what and how to produce be rendered “efficient,” and only market competition can provide incentives to motivate worker-managed enterprises to be efficient and innovative. But we needn’t worry too much, Chibber says; as he puts it  in “Our Road to Power,” the market “will be constrained so it isn’t the arbiter of people’s basic well-being” and inequalities of wealth “will not be allowed to translate into political inequalities.”

This places entirely too much faith in “politics” being able to override “economics.” Presently, inequalities of wealth do translate into political inequalities, and there’s little reason to think that those who own (or, as in Schweickart’s model, lease from the state) firms in market socialism won’t do all they can to make sure that government policy once again rewards market “winners.” And how much “market constraint” can we really expect in market socialism? If it’s constrained too much, what happens to the much-vaunted advantages of the market over wide-ranging planning? Won’t this interfere with “efficiency” and “innovation”?

Marx vs. the Market 

Let’s go back to the Marxist basics. Any “socialism” that deliberately retains generalized value-production—wealth calculated by means of “spontaneous” prices set by the pressure of supply and demand—will be unable, as Peter Hudis puts it in Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (2013), to overcome capitalism’s “inversion of subject and predicate, in which the products as well as the actions of people take on the form of an autonomous power that determine and constrain the will of the subjects that engender them.”  Our working lives will remain dominated by abstract labor, “a monotonous, routinized activity” that serves as the substance of value. Businesses—even ones attempting workers’ self-management—whose survival depends on competition with each other to retain their market share will still be required to work at a uniform rate of exchange that workers themselves do not collectively determine. This will erode workers’ self-management and lead to a return to the traditional corporate-capitalist division of labor. Furthermore, the “planning” that exists within models of market socialism is generally indicative planning—where the government attempts to align commercial activities with wider economic objectives; planning by remote control, essentially. There’s little reason to think that such “planning” would be better able to overcome the “anarchy of production” in a “socialist” context than fiscal and monetary policy, foreign trade and exchange rate policy, urban and regional policy, competition and industrial policy, and prices and incomes policy have been able to accomplish within a capitalist context; there, as we know,  unemployment, inflation, balance-of-payments problems, regional and personal inequality, etc., remain norms.

In capitalist society, which lacks commanding centers of planned regulation, the distribution of productive forces—both people and means of production—among the different branches of the economy, the distribution of the net product between classes, the allocation of surplus value (Marx: “the value created by the labor of a wage-worker over and above the value of his labor-power and appropriated by the capitalist”) to expanded reproduction, the introduction of technical innovations, etc. are all determined by the law of value (the “invisible hand” of the market). It logically follows that a system of “market socialism,” in which the means of production are administered as the collective property of the immediate producers (in essence, its shareholders) would, in response to market signals, mimic capitalism, even if this property is formally owned by the public and leased to specific groups of workers. Such a system would be fundamentally unstable and most likely lead back to capitalism, which is the more consistent expression of these relations. This, after all, is essentially what happened in Yugoslavia, which is surely as relevant to discussion of market socialism as the failures of Soviet planning are to discussion of any type of planned economy. Market competition in Titoist Yugoslavia led to participation within enterprises which became  progressively dominated by professional managers, and inequality between the federal constituent Republics grew as growth rates and living standards deviated. As Pat Devine states, the unresolvable tension in visions of market socialism is “how to maintain an incentive structure based on the competitive performance of autonomous enterprises while at the same time limiting their autonomy in order to promote the society’s social objectives.”

Again, this doesn’t mean that the only alternative to market socialism is central planning. As practiced in the Soviet Union and other official Communist countries, central planning had many well-known deficiencies, which Chibber discusses at length. As Marxist economist Hillel Ticktin explains, “There is something wrong with an economy where the repair sector is bigger than the industry itself, where new technology has to go into new factories, as in two-thirds of cases, rather than updating old factories as in the West. There one-third of new technology goes into new factories. In short, new technology was blocked , and the product was normally technologically backward, defective and unreliable.” 

One aspect of Soviet-style planning that Chibber does not stress, however, is the absence of workers’ self-management at the enterprise level (or at the collective farm). The “planning” was neither conceived of nor carried out by the associated producers. Ticktin again: “The Stalinist system was organized or administered from above. The surplus product was extracted under the control of the Soviet ruling group … and the distribution and re-investment of that surplus was performed under their administration and in their favour. The essential problem was that, in spite of their political-economic control, they could not ensure the intended outcome of their ‘planning’. They could neither raise their own standard of living and that of their families to what they aspired, nor could they raise the level of productivity, or growth rate, to that which was necessary to assure the stability of the system.” Furthermore, in the Stalin-era USSR, command planning took place in the context of all needs being subordinated to the needs of the state for arms production; hence the priority rendered to heavy industry. 

Planning From Below 

We agree with Chibber that socialism can’t immediately dispense with all “market categories” (prices, money).  The a priori calculations of democratic planning must be tested against what might be called “market expectations” (is there a demand for this or that use-value, are there people trained and willing to perform this or that type of labor and, if so, in what quantities?). But this doesn’t have to mean the domination of the law of value. Following Pat Devine in Democracy and Economic Planning: The Political Economy of a Self-governing Society ([1988] 2010), social ownership of industry should be used to overcome market forces—where each private owner (including the worker-owned firm) acts in an atomistic fashion, in ignorance of the decisions being made simultaneously by all the other owners—while retaining the use of market exchange: the output of an enterprise, produced with its current capacity, being sold to another enterprise in the case of intermediate goods and services, or to consumers in the case of consumer goods and services. We shouldn’t try to plan consumption in advance, but we must incorporate planning in advance of significant investment. Changes in the structure of productive capacity, involving major investment and disinvestment, should no longer be brought about by the operation of market forces as in capitalism and market socialism, but by what Devine calls “negotiated coordination” among those who would be affected by changes in capacity and the structure of productive resources, analogous to the decisions made by the headquarters of multi-division capitalist firms.

The greatest strength of Devine’s model of democratic planning is the attention it pays to contributions made by the founders of the Austrian school of economics to the socialist calculation debate, initiated in 1920 by Ludwig von Mises and continued by Friedrich Hayek and the current Austrian school. The Austrians first claimed that much, perhaps most, information relevant to economic decision-making is local information, specific to time and place. They argue that such information cannot be formulated, transmitted to a planning center, and then processed because of the sheer enormity of the task. This has been answered by models of electronic socialist planning that make use of modern information technology and computer processing. However, the Austrians also insisted that such knowledge is not just decentralized but also generally “tacit”—meaning that it is knowledge based on knowing how to do something rather than on knowing that something is the case. Such knowledge, von Mises and Hayek maintain, is learned through practical experience and can be drawn upon only by those who have had that experience. It cannot be separated from those whose tacit knowledge it is, and so, by its very nature, it cannot be centralized. As Devine states, “[t]he classic example is learning to ride a bicycle: one can read or be told how to do it, but one only learns how to do it by trying, through experience.”

Devine’s model of participatory planning through negotiated coordination avoids what could be called the Hayekian problems that would surely plague even electronic central planning. Decisions at the level of Devine’s socialized enterprises are taken by the social owners at that level, drawing on their tacit knowledge, as is presently done by capitalist enterprises. The difference is that the social owners include all those with an interest in said decisions and not solely private owners and their representatives as in capitalism, and therefore the range of tacit knowledge drawn upon is much broader, and the decisions made are likely to be more efficient. Investment decisions, in particular, are made by negotiated coordination bodies, encompassing the social owners at that level, incorporating a much greater range of tacit knowledge than in capitalist decision-making.

A central point of socialist economics—Chibber would agree—is to maximize the public good and meet everyone’s needs. But this requires effective society-wide planning and central coordination while creating ample room for local autonomy and initiative. Contra Chibber’s doubts, this is technically feasible. But to provide every minute detail in advance would be futile. Ultimately, no mass audience for socialism will be recruited based on how convincingly Marxists answer von Mises or Hayek on socialist planning. Even with the inevitable usage of market exchange, socialist society can still be built upon an organizing principle that doesn’t capitulate to market forces, that abolishes labor-power as a commodity, and which places human needs at the center of social concern, rather than as a contingent instrumentality of capital accumulation. Socialist production and distribution will rest upon the solidarity of the associated producers. But advocating “market socialism” won’t help us reach that necessary solidarity. 

Image: Detail photo of the mural “If Walls Could Talk… About Economics” by Ángel Idígoras. Photo by Daniel Capilla and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Events and Actions

Tuesday July 14 (5:30 PM – 7:30 PM)  Phonebank for the Affordable Housing Guarantee Act (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Tuesday July 14 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Ecosocialist Bi-Weekly Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Tuesday July 14 (7:00 PM – 8:30 PM) EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing (1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday July 15 (6:00 PM – 7:00 PM)  What Is DSA? (1916 McAllister St)

Thursday July 16 (6:00 PM – 7:00 PM)  Education Board Open Meeting  (zoom)

Thursday July 16 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Immigrant Justice Regular Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)

Friday July 17 (9:30 AM – 10:30 AM)  District 1 Coffee with Comrades (2 Clement St)

Saturday July 18 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) HWG Food Service (Castro St & Market St)

Sunday July 19 (3:30 PM – 5:00 PM)  Understanding Socialism with DSA SF (1916 McAllister St)

Monday July 20 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Homelessness Working Group Regular Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Monday July 20 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Labor Board – Flex Meeting (zoom)

Tuesday July 21 (5:30 PM – 7:00 PM) Social Housing Working Group (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday July 22 (7:00 PM – 9:00 PM)  Socialist Shop Talk (in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Sunday July 26 (1:00 PM – 2:30 PM)  What Is DSA? (in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Sunday July 26 (5:00 PM – 6:00 PM)  Tenderloin Healing Circle Working Group (zoom)

Monday July 27 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM)  Tenderloin Healing Circle (in person at 220 Golden Gate Ave)

Monday July 27 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Labor Board – New Union Organizing (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Check out https://dsasf.org/events for more events and updates.

AHGA Phone Bank

Let’s call everyone and let them know about the Affordable Housing Guarantee Act! 

Join the campaign at the DSA SF Office or remotely for a phone bank. This is our big citizen-led ballot initiative to dedicate taxes from the sale of ultra-luxury real estate to affordable housing, create social housing, and fund eviction defense. Please bring a laptop if you can.

When: Tuesday July 14, 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM
Where: 1916 McAllister St

RSVP here

Propaganda Committee Meeting

Join the newly chartered Propaganda Committee for our weekly meeting! 

Do you love writing, videography, photography, speeches, or other creative mediums? Our working group aims to share socialist messages with San Franciscans, uplift DSA SF’s organizing wins, and support chapter leaders sharing DSA’s message. All members are welcome, no experience required.

Join in person at the DSA SF Office in the back room (right side – storage side) or join on Zoom. Check the internal calendar for more details.

When: Wednesday July 15, 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Where: 1916 McAllister St

Understanding Socialism Group Reading & Discussion

Join DSA SF’s Education Board for a group reading of excerpts from “The Long Transition Towards Socialism”. We’ll be examining what makes capitalism as a system function, its inherent contradictions, and how the transition to socialism can be achieved within those conditions.

No advance reading required! We’ll provide everything at the event

When: Sunday July 19th, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM
Where: 1916 McAllister St

Socialist Shop Talk

Come chat with comrades about socialism through the lens of current events! In this new series, we will read a short text together, then discuss and analyze it from a socialist point of view.

This is a low-key environment where comrades can develop their skills of applying socialist analysis to current events, while having an outlet to discuss and process everything that’s happening in the world together. This event is open to all, whether you’re socialism-curious, new to DSA, or a longtime member.

In this post-primary election session, we’ll discuss an article written by a DSA SF comrade discussing the role of electoral politics in progressing toward and winning socialism.

When: Wednesday July 22nd, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Where: 1916 McAllister St
RSVP here

Palestine Solidarity Bake Night

Do you like baked sweets and Palestine? Join the Palestine Working Group for our first bake night social as we learn to bake the traditional Palestinian dessert of knafeh!

Come bake and play board games as we celebrate Palestinian culture and get to know each other a little better 

When: Sunday July 25, 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM
RSVP here

EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing Course

EWOC holds a regular training course to help you build your union from the ground up alongside workers in your industry. It doesn’t require an organizing background to understand the material, which covers topics including mapping and charting, building an organizing committee, uniting over common concerns, and how to take action. If you’re interested in becoming any level of organizer for EWOC, this course is mandatory.

This course will in person at the DSA office (1916 McAllister). We’ll watch the EWOC lecture together and then go through the discussion activities. If you can’t make all of the sessions, reach out to Caitlin Stanton (SF EWOC local lead coordinator) for accommodations.

SCHEDULE:
Week 1: Developing Leadership
Tuesday July 14, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM

Week 2: The Organizing Conversation
Tuesday July 21, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM

Week 3: The Arc of the Campaign
Tuesday July 28, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM

Week 4: Inoculation and the Boss Campaign
Tuesday August 4, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM

On the ground from Seattle to D.C. and in state legislatures, DSA is pushing for accountability for data center projects.

The post How DSA Organizes Against Data Centers appeared first on Democratic Left.

The lone star radicals in David Griscom’s “The Myth of Red Texas” built power despite state repression. The next chapter of working class politics in Texas is being written today.

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