Solution posted by Richard Seymour

In times of famine, Vladimir Ilych Lenin took a robust line on speculation. "We can't expect to get anywhere," he told the Petrograd Soviet in 1918, "unless we resort to terrorism: speculators must be shot on the spot".

Labels: capitalism, financial sector, food prices, lenin, leninism

Crisis and hegemony posted by Richard Seymour

• Labourism is more in crisis than ever before, with its heartland erosions pointing to a long-term breakdown in party identity;
• The Tories didn't win on the basis of Howard-style immigrant-bashing and being 'tough on crime', but by playing on Labour's weakness on the 10p tax and post office closures, so this isn't exactly a Thatcherite resurgence;
• Labour's response is to move to the right. Brown is planning on cutting 'green' taxes, Liam Byrne is imposing a points system on immigrants, and the Home Secretary is pressing ahead on upgrading cannabis against expert advice. Given this, it is unlikely that Labour will benefit from a big rush by left-wingers back into the party in order to save it from the Tories;
• But Labour owes its rich friends millions and has no money repay it. It is therefore entering an almighty battle with the unions over funding. Jack Straw is proposing to force unions to hand over all political funds from 4 million affiliated members straight to Labour HQ, with new legislation. Even the relatively friendly leaderships of the GMB and Unison are talking about breaking from Labour if that happens. If the Blairites get their way, their may be a further push to reduce the union block vote (still 40%), diminish the reliance on union funding, and continue the re-alignment of the party on Democratic Party lines by shifting further to the right and soliciting more funds from business. Even if they don't, something has to give, and this opens opportunities for the Left;
• The Tory vote, despite its recent showing, is also fragmenting over the long term with right-wing voters backing smaller parties like UKIP as well as the Nazis. Far be it from me to use metaphors like "the kaleidoscope has been shaken", but the party system is changing with growing rapidity.
• The antiwar movement has created a kind of common sense, which led people to spontaneously oppose Israel's assault on Lebanon and automatically prefer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's version of events to Tony Blair's during the brief 'hostage crisis'. This is not unassailable but, given the long-term centrality of the 'war on terror', it is a strategically important accomplishment in itself. It has also been significant in combatting the Islamophobia that the far right feeds off.

Labels: gramsci, hegemony, leninism, socialism, war of position

Guérin posted by Richard Seymour

The library is an erotic sort of place anyway, or at least it is to me, but imagine encountering Daniel Guérin for the first time in such a place. Of course, I've read Fascism and Big Business (excerpts here) in a non-commital sort of way, but I didn't know much about the author. About Guérin's life, you can read extensively elsewhere (he has a brief entry in Paul Avrich's Anarchist Voices). About his politics, you can discover some concise summaries online, as well as his own lengthy exposition. I only wanted to say what I like about him. I suppose you would expect me to admire his anti-colonialism, his outrage about American racism, his tireless combat against fascism (about which he theorised brilliantly), his anti-Zionism, his sympathy with Trotskyism and so on, especially since he held these views when both the reformist and Stalinist left in France had pathetic records on colonialism, fascism and Zionism (the less said about their approach to Trotskyism, the better). Well, yes. And there is the small matter of him being a sort of pioneer of gay liberation. But it was the Front Ouvrier International, and the Appeal to the German Proletariat Against the War, that left an indelible impression on my otherwise impassive kisser (as you know, I am one of those strong, silent types that Hemingway so admired). The attempt, that is, to revive the Zimmerwald Left in theory and practise during the darkest years of the Twentieth Century, in the most unpromising circumstances. That was bold, in a sense of the word that has been lost to an age pundits who are persuaded that a slight inflection in a Brown speech on Darfur can so be characterised. That was revolutionary.

You can read the appeal here, and for what it's worth, Google has a decent translation. Here he differed from those Trotskyists (including Trotsky) who advocated a Proletarian Military Policy which tried to turn an imperialist war into a revolutionary one, the Stalinists who offered a 'grand alliance' with bourgeois imperialism (after the tremendous success of the grand carve-up with Hitler), and the reformist left, which subordinated its anti-fascism to straightforward patriotic defense. I am not completely convinced that Guérin's position was the right one, but it's important to stress that it wasn't simple pacifism, or Beautiful Soul purity. He himself worked, after being freed from a Nazi internment camp, for the Comité d'Organisation du Livre, which regulated the publishing business in occupied France. His own Fascism and Big Business was one of the books on his 'banned' list. The opposition to the war was a revolutionary one, based on a rigorous marxist analysis of fascism. Guerin had himself spent some time in Germany before and during the Nazi years (see Dave Renton's review of The Brown Plague). As he wrote in 1945:

[T]he fascist regime, despite its “totalitarian” pretensions is not homogeneous. It never succeeded in dissolving into one single alloy the different elements of which it was composed. Its different wheels did not function without friction. Despite Hitler’s attempts for several years to find a compromise formula between the party and the army, the Wehrmacht on the one hand, and the Gestapo and the SS on the other, continued their cat and dog fight. Behind this conflict is a class question. The fascist regime, despite appearances, appearances that it delighted in maintaining, never domesticated the bourgeoisie.

The regime, despite appearances, was extremely fragile, and its unstable class formation was itself one of the reasons why war was pursued. It was also in part, as both Adam Tooze and Paul Hehn argue from different perspectives, a result of frenetic competition with the United States of America: as a model of development, and in terms of inter-capitalist competition over markets, particularly in Eastern Europe. Like most other revolutionaries, Guérin saw the war for what it was - not 'democracy versus fascism', but an imperialist conflict. So, while resisting the Nazi occupation, he and his confederates would not ally with De Gaulle as Maurice Thorez did. They sought to fraternise with German soldiers and encourage their revolutionary opposition to the war, to prise open the fissures in the regime and force its earliest possible downfall. We know that Hitler was funding his war in large part from extensive 'borrowing' from the German workers, which transaction - however coercive - relied on a certain amount of acquiescence. So it is by no means implausible that an upsurge in military and civil disobedience would have hastened the Nazi regime's implosion, and also hastened the end of the genocidal component of Drang nach Osten. But to think and act in such terms when the left has mostly sought to rely on the strength of the imperialist powers to defeat Hitler and Mussolini? When there were few visible signs that organised dissent was even possible within the Nazi war machine?

Such historical optimism seems insanely out of place, especially in light of the popularity of a version of Arendt's account of 'totalitarianism' in which social classes are liquidated, in which the individual is reduced to a fragment of the 'totalitarian' machinery and likes it, in which there is no match for the policeman inside the head of every 'totalitarian' subject. In light of accounts that accentuate the shadow of catastrophe under which we labour, alleged impulses to evil in the human make-up, the psychological appeal of mass violence - all of which would militate against the idea of socialist internationalism - the idea of a revolutionary struggle against both the war and fascism at that time seems impossible. But Guérin knew what we have been encouraged to forget: that the Nazis could not have succeeded without the timidity, confusion and pessimism of the Left. Had it understood the capitalist state, it would not have been disoriented by the failure of reformism; had it understood fully the threat of fascism, it would not have subordinated the struggle against it to sectarian rivalries or (as the German SPD did) passively sit out its coming to power, pursuing only legalist parliamentary opposition until liquidation; had it understood the rapid degeneration of the Russian bureaucracy, it would not have engaged in the criminal stupidity of 'third period' politics (or been surprised at the de-radicalising role of the Stalinists after the war); had it understood the significance of the Spanish Civil War, it would not have allowed the struggle to be subordinated to Stalin's foreign policy priorities; and so on (one really could go on).

It was through Guérin's analysis of fascism and the reasons for its success that he was able to look beyond the immediately self-evident, renounce the reigning pessimism, and try to subvert a war that killed 50 million people, and yet is still remembered as a 'good war'.

Labels: anarchism, anti-fascism, daniel guérin, leninism, marxism, resistance, trotskyism

Lenin: a political moderate and humanitarian posted by Richard Seymour

Lenin's Tomb, eh? It's like the trains: you're waiting for one post, and then three or four come along at once. (No, you certainly shouldn't interpret that as me saying that this blog is a train-wreck). I simply wanted to adumbrate a case, the basis for a future pamphlet, perhaps, or even a novella. A week or so ago, I was sandbagged on the MediaLens site by a bunch of anti-Leninists, some liberal and some anarchist. This is all very much par for the course, and I appreciate that my insistence that Lenin was a democrat and the Bolshevik Party a model of thriving conversational openness was bound to be provocative. And I'd be the first to admit that Lenin's often brutal language during the Civil War, imbibed very much from his era I think, is chilling. The 'Hanging Order', in which a number of bloodsucking capitalists were to be hung in public as part of a terrorist campaign against the White Army and the Entente forces, is not what one would typically understand as the language or action of a political moderate - but that merely goes to show how loaded the terms of moderation and extremism actually are.

I don't pretend that I can settle the argument over whether it is ever appropriate to use terror to increase the human cost of an oppressive and iniquitous system or movement. It is a problem that has come up in almost every revolt in human history: the slave revolts, the French revolution; the anti-apartheid movement; and almost every anti-colonial struggle. It is an abiding issue in the struggle for Palestinian liberation. However, I will tentatively make a few suggestions. In the first instance, one has to reckon with the human cost of not using such methods, as well as the human cost of using them. This isn't the case for a crude utilitarianism, but it does suggest that the argument is a lot less simple than the violent prohibition of liberal moralism, or pacifism, would permit. The fact that the Bolsheviks won the civil war by the skin of their teeth - against an ememy that would undoubtedly have not only crushed the democratic achievements of the revolution, but also set a record for Hitler to break in terms of Jew-killing - at least suggests that to dispense with the tactic would have invited defeat and a potential humanitarian catastrophe. To adopt a more pacific posture when one is under sustained and vicious attack not only domestically from the most horrendous reactionary thugs, but also internationally from the club of rich men who have recently sunk Europe into one of its most depraved episodes in history, is arguably a form of fanaticism and utopianism that defies logic. Lenin is frequently upbraided for utopianism, yet if anything defines the Bolsheviks in opposition and in power, it is their pragmatism, their awareness of the necessary compromises to achive their goals. And those goals themselves were very precise and Lenin was one of the most creative in formulating direct, material means of achieving them (see this lively little warning shot, for example). The Bolshevik role in the revolution wasn't a coup, as it is usually interpreted, but it was at the minimum a form of humanitarian intervention. Having fought alongside Russian workers to win their humane goals in the real world, not in Utopia, the Bolsheviks then sought to defend them in the real world. Aware of the threat that the bureaucracy itself posed and the parlous condition of soviet power after the civil war, Lenin opposed the abolition of trade unions as a power separate from the soviets. Having gauged the threat of Stalin's obsessive bureaucratism, his petty tyrannical tendencies, and his Greater Russian chauvanism, Lenin tried to stop the slow-moving coup.

What is striking about the reflexive anti-Leninist posture of so many is how apolitical it is. Take a few of Chomsky's usual raps, for example. Here's him in 'The Soviet Union Versus Socialism':

"Soon Lenin was to decree that the leadership must assume "dictatorial powers" over the workers, who must accept "unquestioning submission to a single will" and "in the interests of socialism," must "unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of the labour process."

This is taken from Lenin's 'The Immediate Tasks of the Proletarian Government', and the full quote is as follows:

"We must learn to combine the 'public meeting' democracy of the working people—turbulent, surging, overflowing its banks like a spring flood—with iron discipline while at work, with unquestioning obedience to the will of a single person, the Soviet leader, while at work."

Iron discipline at work because of the economic crisis the country was in as a result of the war and the decimation of the country's industrial working class, but with "turbulent, surging, overflowing" democracy! Here's Chomsky again:

Lenin explained that subordination of the worker to "individual authority" is "the system which more than any other assures the best utilization of human resources".

This is taken directly from Maurice Brinton, who took it from Lenin's partially transcribed speech to the Third All Russian Congress of Economic Councils in 1920. This pre-NEP speech advocated the rapid requisitioning of grain to be distributed to workers at fixed prices rather than those obtainable on the market, which would be sky-high. It also advocated the more widespread use of one-man management to the same end. The quote is as follows, and I add in square brackets the part ommitted by Brinton:

"The transition to practical work involves individual management, for that system best ensures the most effective utilisation of human abilities, [and a real, not verbal, verification of work done]."

What is the significance of the ommitted passage? Only that production levels were catastrophically low, the working class had been drastically reduced in numbers by the ongoing civil war, and labour discipline was in a terrible state. This was something that Lenin was kind enough to include in his speech, in fact. Not only are the quotes lazily distorted, the political context is entirely removed: it is a moralistic fable, in which the bad men with their bad Hegelian ideology do wicked things and blacken the name of socialism. Curiously, Chomsky has recognised that the circumstance of war necessitates a certain amount of authoritarianism, and cites America during the Second World War as his example. Well, say what you will for Pearl Harbour, but the United States was not being invaded by an international coalition during WWII and was not in a situation of near social collapse as a result of years of reactionary war.

It isn't reasonable to continue to pretend otherwise: Lenin was a political moderate and humanitarian. I'm not recommending that you kiss his cold dead arse for that fact, but I simply think that if the terms mean anything, then they apply especially to Lenin.

Labels: lenin, leninism, russian revolution, terrorism

Herrenvolk democracy posted by Richard Seymour

The most Liberal and Radical personalities of free Britain, men like John Morley—that authority for Russian and non-Russian Cadets, that luminary of “progressive” journalism (in reality, a lackey of capitalism)—become regular Genghis Khans when appointed to govern India...

Labels: anti-imperialism, communism, democracy, lenin, leninism, racism

Lenin Reloaded posted by Richard Seymour

Lenin is not merely the name of a deceased revolutionary, (or an epigonic blogger), but a signifier of pure evil. There is no good reason for this: Lenin fought a vicious civil war, but so did the sainted Abraham Lincoln; Lenin suspended habeus corpus, but ditto; Lenin was willing to expand the Bolshevik state with the use of the Red Army, but he wasn't a Great Russian chauvanist, in the way that successive US Presidents were Greater American chauvanists with new and perpetually shifting frontiers; Lenin ruthlessly pursued opposing parties when he perceived them as a threat to the revolution, but so did Robespierre, and to be fair, he had a great deal more provocation than Robespierre. Practically everything the bad man did was also done by good men, and women, under much less taxing circumstances.

To his credit, Lenin was not a racist or imperialist, while Wilson was; Lenin was not in favour of capitalist exploitation, while every opposing force was; Lenin was percipient and fought a sustained fight against Stalinist centralism and autocracy, before anyone else did; Lenin tried to stop World War I, that inferno of mass murder, while most European socialists capitulated. He popularised the term 'revolutionary defeatism', which is the most anti-racist, anti-imperialist and humane terminological innovation in a century whose other inventions included 'genocide', 'holocaust', 'ethnic cleansing' and so on - that one can even say 'and so on' is monstrous in itself. His April Theses foresaw the problems with the Provisional Government and the possibilities of a revolutionary situation even while most of his comrades thought him deluded. He also turned to a productionist version of socialism and was willing to compromise and re-introduce elements of capitalist social relations when it proved necessary. Most importantly, and to his greatest credit, Lenin oversaw the foundation of a Red Army to ruthlessly, without compromise and by any means necessary, defeat the White Army reactionaries and the Entente Powers. He practised what he preached, which was revolutionary realpolitik - power politics for the oppressed and exploited. He foresaw the threat of Stalinism, which is to say he foresaw the defeat of the revolution, and tried in his dying hours to stop it from happening. Of course he had his flaws: all of these circumstances tended to make his prose bombastic, and he was reputedly unwilling to spend much time listening to music.

The new volume, Lenin Reloaded, edited by Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and the particularly evil Slavoj Zizek, takes the figure of Lenin as an unmentionable, unspeakable thug, axiomatically responsible for The Worst Crimes of the Twentieth Century (although in fact he wasn't, not remotely), as it starting point (although, in fact, the theoretical starting point is Badiou and his Politics of Truth). It's a good collection of essays by some of the best marxist scholars working today, and among my favourites is the article by Domenico Losurdo on 'Lenin and Herrenvolk Democracy' - Losurdo is, if you ask me, the best critic of capitalist ideology writing today. Here, he engages with the difference between Lenin and Toqueville - between the Russian revolution and the American one, that is. Lenin, as I've mentioned elsewhere, was a birthday internationalist, and it is because of this internationalism, spooled into his gene pool if you like, that he won the respect of and provided the example for anticolonialists across the planet. Woodrow Wilson, a racial fundamentalist and Protestant fanatic, would try to be his equal in appealing to the colonised, but failed because he was himself a supporter of colonialism and Aryan supremacism.

Lenin is one of the topics on which Zizek is both entertaining and politically stringent, sort of. Lars Lih's essay on Lenin as an evangelical enthusiast overturns the notion of Lenin is a cold, calculating machinic presence hovering over the Russia of civil war and famine. It is known by Lenin's biographers that he was an uncharacteristically self-effacing and warm person for a leading revolutionary, (Trotsky, by contrast, was an imperious and dynamic orator). But it isn't well-known what an enthusiast he was: his most widely quoted statements speak of correcting spontaneist tendencies, but Lih shows - by citing more neglected statements and texts - exactly how important spontaneity and individual energy was to him. Frederic Jameson's essay is characteristially liberal and pomo, while Eagleton punctures the myth that Lenin's vanguardism is elitist and authoritarian. Bensaid's contribution is a reprint from International Socialism and can be read here. There are a whole swathe of excellent contributions that I can't really do a proper service to here, but it's worth having a look at. At the very least, if you fancy overthrowing the ruling class and replacing it with a revolutionary government of workers councils, or even if you simply want to realise what it means to think through alternatives to capitalism, and why the twentieth century was one of war and revolution, you need to engage with Lenin's legacy.

Labels: communism, lenin, lenin reloaded, leninism