The anticommunism industry posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: anticommunism, capitalism, communism, history, leon trotsky, russian revolution, stalinism, trotskyism

Commie speaks posted by Richard Seymour

Red Russian exile predicts US world dominance! (Eat Snacky Smores.)

Labels: america, imperialism, leon trotsky, russian revolution

Solzhenitsyn and the right. posted by Richard Seymour

You can be sure that the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn is going to be celebrated in the most nauseating fashion in the mainstream press. Somewhat less importantly, the remaining supporters of the late USSR are going to waste some sorely needed energy laying a boot or two into the corpse of this "slanderer". There is plenty to criticise. Solzhenitsyn was notable for his reactionary pro-Tsarist politics, and for his concessions to antisemitism. And, as just as many of his criticisms of the Stalinist terror were, they were both exaggerated and conjoined to a paranoid view about the supposed menace posed by the USSR.

But this, threat-exaggeration and concomitant calls for a more aggressive US posture, was what he was loved for. The extraordinary atmosphere of hysteria The Gulag Archipelago unleashed once published in Paris served notice that he could be extremely useful. Solzhenitsyn was already extremely popular in the Western press for his earlier works, The Cancer Ward, The First Circle, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He had received the Nobel Prize in 1970, and his struggles to get his writings published in Russia had been detailed in a biography by Z A Medvedev. His eventual expulsion from the USSR in 1974 would have ensured a rapturous welcome for him even if The Gulag Archipelago had not been published. But the cult of Solzhenitsyn would not have become what it did without the publication of that three-volume opus in the Autumn of 1973, whereupon portions were serialised in the New York Times, and translated into French in June 1974. The drearily predictable attacks by the French communist party (PCF) and those intellectuals in its orbit can only have intensified the mystique. What followed was a curiously contrived affair, as formerly left-wing intellectuals who were apprised of the horrors of the camps decided that Solzhenitsyn's text was a revelation that, not only were Stalinist politics corrupted (they had already made that decision years before) but that the whole arcanum of Maoisms and Trotskyisms that stood as alternatives to those politics were also corrupted at source. Marx was the evil seed of a diabolical utopianism that could not but result in total slavery. Solzhenitsyn, who blamed Marx for the killing fields in Cambodia, could have found nothing objectionable in that. Yet, those leftists who had been acquainted with the texts circulated by David Rousset, Ante Ciliga and Victor Serge, all from the anti-Stalinist left, could hardly pretend to be shocked by revelations of the barbarism of Stalinism.

Solzhenitsyn's reputation as a novelist became secondary to his status as an anti-communist ideologue in the West. Thus, the refusal of Gerald Ford to meet the dissident in 1976 infuriated the neoconservatives, and raised the ire of one Ronald Reagan. He was championed by Jesse Helms, welcomed by rightist think-tanks such as the Hoover Institute (he actually stayed in Hoover Tower for a while, and contributed to their publications), and received an honorary degree from Harvard University. He was the right man for the post-detente period, precisely the sort of person the Reaganites sought. Though credited as a defender of human rights, he defended the Franco regime in its dying days, making a series of broadcasts on Spanish television demanding to know if Spaniards really knew what a dictatorship was like (yes, he was that kind of 'anti-totalitarian'). He attacked detente, and supported the UNITA in Angola (Jonas Savimbi admiringly referenced his denunciation of the 'Western disease' that he said was behind its inadequate vigour against the communists). He was also scathing about human rights organisations that he saw as insufficiently anticommunist (Amnesty International, in particular), and described Western peace campaigns as fronts for Russian ends, using "Russian means and Russian money". He attacked the Western left and the movement against the Vietnam war in particular, just as the fate of the 'Boat People' was becoming a global issue.

But his usefulness to the American empire was limited, and definitively reached its sell-by date by 1990. Neoconservatives might have appreciated his critic of the degeneracy of the West and its failure to defend itself by being more God-fearing, but he was a Russian nationalist and this stance made him unpopular with some of Reagan's advisors, who presumably hoped to turn the country into an IMF basket-case. In fact, his argument against communism was by no means a defense of liberal universalism. Instead, he appealled to Americans to understand the 'West' as a distinct cultural entity which, while it had to be defended both against its communist opponents and its internal decadence, had little applicability to other societies. He wrote to Reagan to explain that once the putative threat from the USSR had gone, the US should pull out of every country it was involved in, from Central America to Africa to South-East Asia, and leave the world to its own devices. Once he was able to return to Russia in 1990, his austere conservative criticisms of the decadence of Western society, long articulated but generally glossed over by his supporters, came to the fore. He became rather unfashionable at this point. By the time he was castigating US military interventions in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and defending the Putin administration, the American right had no more use for him.

Even so, reactionaries will surely find it in their hearts to forgive his later meanderings and remember instead the bold anticommunist who defended NATO's favourite fascist, worked to undermine detente, attacked the antiwar movement, and generally called for America to be far more aggressive than it was even prepared to be.

Labels: alexander solzhenitsyn, fascism, general franco, russian revolution, socialism, stalinism, tsarism

90th Anniversary Editions posted by Richard Seymour

Get these on a mug or t-shirt today:

Bolsheviks:


Czarist troops fire on protesters:

Mass protests:

Pro-Bolshevik soldiers surround the Winter Palace:

Lenin does the crossword:

Red Army troops off to fight counter-revolutionaries:

The Petrograd Soviet meets to decide policy:

Refugees of the Civil War:

Wounded Red Army soldiers:

Reservoir Dogs - Mr Red, Mr Red, Mr Red, Mr Red & Mr Red:

Labels: bolsheviks, russian revolution

Zizek on Trotsky posted by Richard Seymour

I have criticised Zizek's weaknesses on this blog more than once, but you have to give some credit to him for taking on Trotsky - not only for taking him on, but for taking on the most difficult work, the one that few Trotskyists defend, Terrorism and Communism. Part of my problem with Z's line on Trotsky in the past has been his (frankly pathetic) comparison of Trotsky's founding of the Red Army with his own decision to side with Slovenian secession (which I think he still defends) in terms of a willingness to get one's hands dirty and a refusal of Beautiful Soul politics. Ironically, Zizek's position on Yugoslavia looks more like Lukacs' 1935 'heroic' rapprochement with the politics of 'realism' (the position he criticises) than Trotsky's position (the one he endorses).

However, the latest of the 'Zizek Presents...' series is actually a decent read (partly because he has read Lars Lih's excellent contribution to the recent History and Revolution, itself an excellent volume, engaging with revisionist accounts of the English, French and Russian Revolutions). Lih's recent book on Lenin is coming out in paperback soon, and his penchant for meticulously busting anticommunist myth is evident in his contribution on the Bolsheviks' so-called utopianism and delirium. Zizek defends Trotsky's book on two key fronts: first, for its critique of the shortcomings of liberal democracy, especially in a revolutionary situation (contra Kautksy); second for its commixture of absolute realism about the horrible situation with its recognition of the need for a certain kind of utopianism, a willingness to seize advantages from the direst of circumstances. He doesn't really deal very well with the objections usually raised to the book (it mandates continued terror, it ), but he does effectively rebut some of the unfair criticisms of the Russian Revolution. Some of it is recycled from 'Revolution at the Gates', itself a nice introduction to Lenin's 1917 writings (in which he anticipated punk's apotheosis by exactly sixty years), and as usual with Zizek there are plenty of diversions, rhetorical ploys, set-pieces, extended quotations, gags etc.

It's important to introduce readers to a text like Terrorism and Communism with at least a sense of the immense difficulties of the Russian Revolution and of Trotsky's relationship with it - you really have to escape the powerful anticommunist blinkers, the auto-responses that make it difficult to properly read, and Zizek's introduction succeeds at that. This is no small matter. And, though Zizek is basically very Eurocentric and liberal (so I think), his willingness to engage productively with revolutionary ideology distinguishes him from the commonplace marxisant left-liberal theorist.

Labels: russian revolution, trotsky, zizek

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