LENIN'S TOMB

Friday, December 23, 2011

Not mourning Vaclav Havel posted by Richard Seymour

Dear Alex,
As a good and loyal friend, I can't overlook this chance to suggest to you a marvelous way to discredit yourself completely and lose the last minimal shreds of respectability that still raise lingering questions about your integrity. I have in mind what I think is one of the most illuminating examples of the total and complete intellectual and moral corruption of Western culture, namely, the awed response to Vaclav Havel's embarrassingly silly and morally repugnant Sunday School sermon in Congress the other day. We may put aside the intellectual level of the comments (and the response) -- for example, the profound and startlingly original idea that people should be moral agents. More interesting are the phrases that really captured the imagination and aroused the passions of Congress, editorial writers, and columnists -- and, doubtless, soon the commentators in the weeklies and monthlies: that we should assume responsibility not only for ourselves, our families, and our nations, but for others who are suffering and persecuted. This remarkable and novel insight was followed by the key phrase of the speech: the cold war, now thankfully put to rest, was a conflict between two superpowers: one, a nightmare, the other, the defender of freedom (great applause).
Reading it brought to mind a number of past experiences in Southeast Asia, Central America, the West Bank, and even a kibbutz in Israel where I lived in 1953 -- Mapam, super-Stalinist even to the extent of justifying the anti-Semitic doctor's plot, still under the impact of the image of the USSR as the leader of the anti-Nazi resistance struggle. I recall remarks by a Fatherland Front leader in a remote village in Vietnam, Palestinian organizers, etc., describing the USSR as the hope for the oppressed and the US government as the brutal oppressor of the human race. If these people had made it to the Supreme Soviet they doubtless would have been greeted with great applause as they delivered this message, and probably some hack in Pravda would have swallowed his disgust and written a ritual ode.
I don't mean to equate a Vietnamese villager to Vaclav Havel. For one thing, I doubt that the former would have had the supreme hypocrisy and audacity to clothe his praise for the defenders of freedom with gushing about responsibility for the human race. It's also unnecessary to point out to the half a dozen or so sane people who remain that in comparison to the conditions imposed by US tyranny and violence, East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise. Furthermore, one can easily understand why an oppressed Third World victim would have little access to any information (or would care little about anything) beyond the narrow struggle for survival against a terrorist superpower and its clients. And the Pravda hack, unlike his US clones, would have faced a harsh response if he told the obvious truths. So by every conceivable standard, the performance of Havel, Congress, the media, and (we may safely predict, without what will soon appear) the Western intellectual community at large are on a moral and intellectual level that is vastly below that of Third World peasants and Stalinist hacks -- not an unusual discovery.
Of course, it could be argued in Havel's defense that this shameful performance was all tongue in cheek, just a way to extort money from the American taxpayer for his (relatively rich) country. I doubt it, however; he doesn't look like that good an actor.
So, here's the perfect swan song. It's all absolutely true, even truistic. Writing something that true and significant would also have a predictable effect. The sign of a truly totalitarian culture is that important truths simply lack cognitive meaning and are interpretable only at the level of 'Fuck You', so they can then elicit a perfectly predictable torrent of abuse in response. We've long ago reached that level -- to take a personal example, consider the statement: 'We ought to tell the truth about Cambodia and Timor.' Or imagine a columnist writing: 'I think the Sandinistas ought to win.' I suspect that this case is even clearer. It's easy to predict the reaction to any truthful and honest comments about this episode, which is so revealing about the easy acceptance of (and even praise for) the most monstrous savagery, as long as it is perpetrated by Us against Them -- a stance adopted quite mindlessly by Havel, who plainly shares the utter contempt for the lower orders that is the hallmark of Western intellectuals, so at least he's 'one of us' in that respect.
Anyway, don't say I never gave you a useful suggestion.
Best,
Noam

Labels: anticommunism, eastern europe, noam chomsky, stalinism, US imperialism, ussr, vaclav havel, warsaw pact

Friday, July 08, 2011

The anticommunism industry posted by Richard Seymour

To put it bluntly, this is a story of an anticommunist bullshitter sinking in his own ordure. Robert Service is someone who has set out to correct 'revisionism' about Leon Trotsky, who he claims is subject to warm, fuzzy nostalgia among the Anglophone intelligentsia that obscures his real character and impact. Yet, his own work has been exposed as sloppy, distorted revisionism in a rather unusually damning scholarly review (read it here) that's generated a bit of buzz among historians and anoraks for the fact that it completely upsets the received view of the book as a masterpiece and final rebuttal to the likes of Deutscher. The review, written by someone who appears to be no more sympathetic to Trotsky's politics than Service, corroborates the challenges raised by leftist reviewers such as Paul LeBlanc and Hillel Ticktin, and goes further. Scott McLemee, chasing up the mini-furore, seeks comment from reviewer and reviewee. Service's retort is as simple as it is unconvincing: he alleges that he is being attacked in a scurillous fashion over minor blips by Trotskyists and their fellow travellers, and that people should ignore this sort of thing. But you can check the reviews for yourself and establish that the misrepresentations and gaffes described are neither minor, nor blips in an otherwise solid narrative. Which, of course, leaves the question (hardly a question, really) as to why such a shoddy book should have been so lavishly received? It is not that one expects publishing and media industries, or the academia, to be favourable to Trotsky's reputation or legacy. But the intensity of the assault, the attempted 'second assassination of Leon Trotsky' as LeBlanc called it, and the triumphant dancing on his grave, is suggestive. Among ideologues of this cohort the shade of Trotsky, meaning (as Service has made perfectly clear) the possibility of an anti-Stalinist socialism that can't be consigned to the same historical dustheap as Stalinism, has still to be exorcised.

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

Monday, October 04, 2010

More chocolate laxative. posted by Richard Seymour

Zizek has dusted off some of his old routines - the tolerant liberal, the chocolate laxative, decaffeinated Otherness - and tenuously connected them to some current political controversies in order to visit this upon us. As amusing as these whiskered old gags may once have been, and as much as I once thought Zizek quite sharp on the limitations of multiculturalism, the more he repeats himself (or repeats on himself), the less persuasive he becomes. And that's when he's not, you know, bigging up empire, traducing Lenin, reflating Euro-supremacism in the guise of the liberal tolerance that he criticises, and generally carving out a niche as the Roy Chubby Brown of European philosophy.

The basis of Zizek's polemic is that while once European politics was polarised between centre-right and centre-left, it is now increasingly polarised between a large pro-globalisation centre, and a smaller but growing anti-globalisation xenophobic right. The pro-globalisation centre is the hypocritical tolerant liberal who 'respects' the Other in a certain way, but only respects a non-invasive Otherness that doesn't intrude on his/her private space, this being the political space of Europe. Thus, while the centrists attack the populist right, they celebrate diversity and Otherness in the same way that 'moderate' antisemite Robert Brasillach celebrated the achievements of Chaplin, Proust and Yehudi Menuhin, while insisting that instinctive antisemitism could only be constrained by the practise of moderate antisemitism. The populist right can only be appeased by the practise of a moderate anti-immigrant racism. The example of Brasillach does, admittedly, resonate. Bourgeois politicians whipping up racism do indeed rely on the idea that there's something instinctive and commonsensical about it, and that it can only be controlled through moderate, sensible, prudent racism.

But the rest completely fails as an index of the concrete political realities on race and globalisation in Europe. First of all, when the pro-globalisation "centre" attacks the xenophobic right, it is usually not in the name of liberal multiculturalism. Rather, it is in the name of an alternative nationalism based on cohesion, integrationism, an acceptance of "legitimate concerns", and a regretful conclusion that multiculturalism (read: multi-racial society) "didn't work" and that immigration has to be severely limited while minorities are to be disciplined and coerced into internalising some core set of national or European or Western values. It is culturally dominative, hierarchical and authoritarian, not 'tolerant', libertarian or egalitarian. Official multiculturalism has its limits, but it is not to blame for the right-wing anti-immigrant turn of mainstream politics. Indeed, the tolerant liberal, Zizek's sock puppet opponent, is entirely innocent of this bullying. He, let's suppose it's a he, is obviously white, but he's not all bad. He supports attempts to attack and undermine the material legacy of white supremacy, such as affirmative action. His worst crime is that he doesn't want to hear loud rap music in the privacy of his home. (Because, as I'm sure you already know, black people uniformly walk around white neighbourhoods with ghetto blasters playing NWA's 'Fuck The Police' at top volume. White people, by contrast, play Bach on gramophones while writhing with ecstasy over Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right. This has been confirmed by our finest evolutionary psychologists - it's hard-wired behaviour, and there's nothing we can do about it.) It seems rather unfair to blame him for those who want to destroy affirmative action and purge the country of immigrants.

Secondly, it fails because some of the most hawkishly pro-globalisation forces in European and American politics are also the most right-wing xenophobic anti-immigrant forces. If you look at the Tory Right and UKIP, or even the Law and Justice Party, they may be Eurosceptic, but they aggressively favour US-led globalisation. In the US, many the same right-wingers who favour 'free trade' and other shibboleths of globalisation are also among the most pungent anti-immigrant racists. There are, of course, nativists and fascists who fit into Zizek's characterisation of the xenophobic right as anti-globalisation, but these are still minority fringe currents, and not by and large the people who lead Law and Justice, or the Dutch Freedom Party, for example. The Tea Partiers, meanwhile, may have some nativists among them, but their texts are Austrian, and their 'Contract from America' contains a great deal about economic freedom and nothing at all about restricting globalisation or free trade. The opposition being created here between multiculturalist globalisation and xenophobic reaction is illusory. This is because globalisation is an imperialist process that is entirely compatible with restrictions to migration. It does not entail free movement for labour, except on terms amenable to Euro-American capital, since its purpose is precisely to facilitate the exploitation of labour and the extraction of surplus largely for shareholders based in the core capitalist economies.

Lastly, Poland, Zizek's "best example", is not actually typical of a European trend. The legacy of Stalinism, and the postcommunist purges, has meant that politics has been narrowed to a division between liberal-conservatism and right-wing nationalism. But there is a new left emerging there, reflecting dissatisfaction with - well - 'globalisation' among other things. The bulk of the continent is still bissected between left and right, weakly reflected at parliamentary level by parties of the centre-left and centre-right. Despite the best efforts of capital to coopt electoral processes, and despite the illusory transcendence of left and right by 'Third Way' politicians, organised labour retains the ability to uphold some basic social democracy. Indeed, the capitalist crisis is accentuating this polarisation between left and right, and bringing that struggle to a head, as the victor will determine whether labour bears the costs of crisis, or whether the bankers and the rich do. It goes without saying that if the right wins, immigrants and minorities will be among the first to suffer, and the fragile institutions of multiculturalism will be in tatters.

Labels: globalisation, immigration, imperialism, liberalism, multiculturalism, racism, stalinism, zizek

Friday, July 23, 2010

The class struggle in China posted by Richard Seymour

If the militant strike wave in China has succeeded in doing one thing, it is to have frightened the Chinese ruling class sufficiently that it is declaring its intention to tackle the shocking increase in inequality in the country (while avoiding measures that might increase the political clout and bargaining power of labour):

The People’s Daily recognizes the severity of this potentially explosive problem. According to the article, China’s Gini Coefficient, which is an index that measures inequality, clocks in at 0.47 – very close to the 0.5 marker, which often signals risk of instability. It also mentions that from 1997 to 2007 labour remuneration as a percentage of GDP went from 53.4 per cent to 39.74 per cent. Workers weren’t the only ones to lose ground. People living in rural areas have also fallen behind their urban countrymen. In 1978 urban per capita income was 2.78 times higher than rural income. By 2009 that gap had widened to 3.33. Also, in cities, the richest 10 per cent controlled 45 per cent of the wealth, while the poorest 10 per cent only had 1.4 per cent.

The paper also outlines the main ways the government intends to tackle the problem. Implementing a wages increase mechanism, perfecting the minimum wage system, and ensuring wages are paid in a timely manner are all main priorities. The collective consultation system will be promoted. Farmers salaries will be increased. The social insurance system will be improved to cover those in the cities and countryside.

Although the article outlines other plans to create a more progressive tax system, the focus of redistributive efforts seems to be on the points mentioned above, and conspicuous by its absence, is the role of collective bargaining and reform of the ACFTU. Ironically, even the ACFTU sees the need for reform in order for collective consultation and collective contracts to play a major part in the government’s efforts to more equitably redistribute wealth. On 9 July 2010 the ACFTU announced that collective contracts would be a key ingredient in improving workers rights. In the China Daily, Li Shouzhen, spokesperson from the ACFTU noted that collective contracts will be promoted and but that, “…legislation will be needed first to make it mandatory for enterprises to set up such a mechanism, which is still lacking at most small and medium-sized enterprises…. if we made it mandatory (having employers sign collective contracts with their employees) and stepped up punishment for violators, I think workers would be placed in a much stronger position”.

That a powerful, organised labour movement might come out of the current struggles over the distribution of the social product, and even produce a space for a labour-based political opposition, is undoubtedly a more threatening prospect than temporary remuneration concessions. The lessons in organisation and tactics that workers can learn from pick up from such militancy are the greater danger than a temporary redistribution of wealth to prevent militant outbreaks. These strikes are not only winning much of the time, and winning big when they do, they are showing workers how to deal with both employers and the state, facing down police repression as well as employers' economic power. This is why, in addition to the government's commitments (which it can certainly afford with 10.3% growth) local governments are increasing the minimum wage to forestall strikes. As the world system shifts to a more obviously multipolar one, with US hegemony in slow but perceptible decline, the outcome of the struggles of the emerging Chinese labour movement will be increasingly important for the international working class as a whole. Solidarity with the Chinese working class is in the interests of workers in Britain, but I should say that learning from the Chinese working class as it experiments with ways to deal with far more difficult struggles than we face, is also paramount.

Labels: capitalism, china, labour, maoism, neoliberalism, stalinism, state capitalism, trade unions, working class

Friday, June 11, 2010

Chinese working class kicks back posted by Richard Seymour

The Chinese working class is on the move: there is a wave of strikes taking place across China, and they're winning. Workers at Honda have won a 30% pay increase in the latest strike affecting that company, while workers at FoxConn have reportedly been offered a 100% increase in 'basic pay' (with strings attached) after strikes and a string of employee suicides. The strike at FoxConn is particularly auspicious since that company has so far demonstrated considerable success in maintaining a divided, weakened, timid workforce. Across the country, a series of hard-fought strikes have pitted workers against the usual double act of management and cops (strikes are effectively legal, but the Chinese police force is hardly more pacific than the LAPD, and management frequently beat insubordinate workers) resulting in injuries but also some signal successes. The analysis of the China Labour Bulletin suggests two factors here:

1) As ever, the militancy of these workers is driven by hyperintensive rates of exploitation. In recent decades, much of the surplus value accumulated by capital in China has been the result of unpaid labour, accumulated wage arrears that are never paid off. Otherwise, wages are so low that workers have to perform dozens of extra hours of overtime per month in order simply to live.

2) Most of the strikes involve smaller groups of workers, in the thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands. The absence of independent union organisation and the surveillance capacities of capital mean that workers find it very difficult to organise on a very large scale, which takes time, coordination and an apparatus of communication that those workers as yet lack. But two or three thousand workers in a single factory can much more feasibly halt production.

We have seen waves of strikes and direct action in China before but, Charlie Hore argues, these were mostly of a defensive character. Recent strikes have been offensive. The FT reports:

In fact, China has witnessed considerable industrial unrest in recent decades, much of it localised and attracting little publicity. The causes have tended to be unpaid wages or Dickensian working conditions. While the organisers of such strikes have often got into trouble, in many cases the authorities have taken a relatively relaxed attitude, provided the disputes remained small and non-violent, seeing them as a way of blowing off steam.
Mr Gilholm and other analysts, however, said the Honda strikes were a new development because they focused on wages rather than perceived abuses, meaning even well-run factories could become vulnerable to labour disputes.
“It is a new form of strike – a very symbolic event,” said Liu Cheng, a professor at Shanghai Normal University and an outside adviser in the drafting of the 2008 labour law. After wages had been held down for long periods, he said, “finally there is this explosion. It is because of workers’ growing awareness of labour rights, and more talk and debate about the subject.”

In the strike at the Honda plant in Foshan, notably, workers formed an organisation separately from the official union, with independently elected delegates to represent them vs management. They have also been using new technologies (which the Chinese working class has, after all, manufactured in bulk) to coordinate their actions. The success of those workers has inspired a series of similar actions within Honda, with workers in other plants demanding parity with Foshan. There is another factor that improves labour's bargaining power, and that is the labour shortages that have occurred in many areas as the Chinese government has battled recession by investing heavily in infrastructural projects. To attract workers, some cities have had to raise their minimum wage,which has led to workers in other cities demanding the same. These advantages are temporary - a sudden economic reversal could put workers on the back foot again. But they could produce a movement that will irreversibly alter the status of the Chinese working class.

The threat to capital, the Chinese state and the stock markets, is that a model of de facto independent trade unionism will start to be taken up and replicated among other Chinese workers, and will result in an increasing share of production going to the working class. More generally, it poses a potential long-term political threat to what has been one of the most advantageous states for capitalist investment and development in the world. The ability to appropriate basically free labour, to super-exploit migrant workers moving from the villages to the coastal slums, to accumulate some of the fattest profits in the world, has always depended on containing the expanding working class. For example, the migrant worker economy in China works much the same way as it does elsewhere. Millions of workers flee impoverished rural lives, where a basic safety net is being taken away, many of them relying on false identification papers to get a job. Once they've got a job, they often end up as part of a live-in work-force, sleeping in dormitories, eating collectively. They are a cheap labour force, producing for an export market. If they acquire political and economic rights - increase their class power in other words - their susceptibility to this kind of exploitation is greatly diminished. Foreign investors in the coastal 'boom' areas may, business papers warn, be frightened away by a period of industrial unrest. Since the CCP is not going to restore some mythical Maoist golden age, it will either have to break the strikes with repression, or find ways to accomodate the workers politically, offer some reforms without substantially threatening profits. Or it may lose control in the long run.

Labels: 'communism', 'socialism', capitalism, china, inequality, maoism, neoliberalism, poverty, ruling class, stalinism, working class

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Party like it's 1989 posted by Adam Marks

If 1989 is important it’s because it’s the only commonly agreed year of revolution in living memory. The student-worker uprising in China during the summer was spectacular enough. By the end of the year government after government in Eastern Europe fell into retreat or fell outright. This process was crowned by the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9th, the anniversary of the revolution in 1918 that toppled the Kaiser and finally ended World War One.

1989 happened because a global economic crisis combined with the rocketing pressure of the second cold war to bring down the weaker superpower. The Stalinist Empire, which only 20-30 years previously looked so imposing, had ground to a halt.

Having created a military-industrial complex on the sweat and oppression of millions of working people the Eastern Bloc had built up huge industrial capacity from an impoverished base with little outlet on the world market. This was evidenced by the steep economic and social decline that hit Eastern Europe once it was opened to direct market competition. As the global tendency shifted from protected national economies to the dominance of multi-national corporations the Eastern Bloc began to fall behind.

It also had the added problem that the economy was entirely state owned. In an exploitative society with state ownership of the means of production there cannot be any meaningful democracy.

Western economies had come under great strain since the breakdown of the long boom. This not only caused economic turmoil but also provoked heated class struggle right at the heart of the system. The relative freedom granted in the west meant that this struggle could be diverted. The groups thrown up by the struggle could be absorbed and neutralised.

There was little scope in the east for generating consent. The state had to maintain a constant war against the population. There are numerous examples of grotesque Stalinist oppression. One example: by the end of the DDR anything up to 10% of the population was in the pay of the Stasi, a recipe for social derangement.

This sort of oppression was not a problem when the stalinist system was founded, during the stage of primitive accumulation, when Stalin pitched Russia into making good the 100-year gap with the west in 10 years. As the system developed and expanded westward it became more and more difficult to extract surplus value by squeezing the population.

But attempts at reform tended to result in rebellion, witness the events of 1953, '56 and '68. Any expression of social conflict was liable to become a challenge to the state system, and the state and ruling class were one and the same under stalinism.

The legacy of the revolution was used by the western ruling classes as further evidence (piled on top of their own recent neo-liberal assault) of the decline and death of socialism. Likely readers of this post will know that the above argument is a state capitalist argument. Put simply, what was passed by many (including the western ruling classes) as Actually Existing Socialism was, actually, a system of exploitation of wage labour. At root the systems east and west were the same.

The idea that Russia and its satellites represented some form of socialism must be challenged. It will be overcome as part of the process that creates a new and purposive working class movement at the core of the capitalist system. The working class is the only possible leader in a movement for socialism. Part of the difficulty in overcoming the Actually Existing… argument (however expressed) has been the lack of movement and, therefore, relative unreality of socialism.

Connected with this argument is the line put that this was a good revolution, at last! It was a nice, peaceful, bloodless process, except in China and Romania of course, but there are always exceptions.

This is interesting because the revolutions were not welcomed in as simple manner by the western powers at the time. In his book The Revenge of History, Alex Callinicos lists some of the queer statements from thinkers and heads of state given at the time of the revolutions. They were mostly musing, “whither NATO?” You get the sound of Margaret Thatcher praising the Warsaw Pact as a force for peace and stability. Various defence analysts insisting that the defunct treaty be revived.

There were geopolitical concerns, such as what to do with a reunified Germany. But more than anything else there was a concern about what had been unleashed. Millions of people had been moved by the revolution, the old regime was blown away by great passions that could prove hard to extinguish.

But, aside from the decade-long conflict in the Balkans (a rather large aside), the fires were put out. Within a matter of months, for example, members of Solidarity arguing for austerity measures, job losses and cuts. A common event in post-revolutionary Europe.

The watchwords of the revolution were democracy and freedom. But these are ambiguous terms in need of content. The people who ended up filling these terms were the ones thrown up by the revolution, combinations of well-known dissidents and free market radicals from the old CP. Though they had different motives and came from different directions they had arrived at the same point. The neo-liberal turn had an ideological, as well as economic effect inside the empire.

It could not have harmed that western governments took an interest in these movements. While the US was dealing in counter-revolution on the cheap in places like Nicaragua and Angola it also spent time and money courting the leaders of Solidarity, helping it on its way from radical workers councils to social liberalism. The US government took a similar interest in Serbian revolution and opposition groups such as Otpor.

What became known as revolution after 1989 was a nebulous formula where people appeared on the streets, something happened in government and a ‘revolution’ took place. This trick has been pulled off several times recently, in places like Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgystan. Others have tried and failed, for example, in Tibet, Lebanon and Zimbabwe.

The missing X factor is outside intervention. The United States has a policy of intervening where it can tip the global balance in its favour. It cultivates client groups within local ruling classes who then (in the absence of any genuine alternative) try to use social conflict as a shoehorn into power.

Two more examples: George Bush declared a democratic revolution for the Middle East and began by invading Afghanistan and Iraq. The men and women chosen to formally rule these ‘liberated’ countries were particularly useless and added to the eventual failure of occupations. The point is, however, we now have imperial game play through ‘revolution’.

The revolutionary grand tour recently swung by Latin America. The upheavals there produced new watchwords. Movements were driven by ideas such as autonomy, popular power and civil rights. The Latin American revolutions put genuine content back into political demands.

Modern capitalists may or may not be facing an immediate crisis such as the one that faced their state capitalist cousins in 1989. Things are unlikely to settle down soon. Whatever the coming struggles there will be a battle on to keep the social and political aspects of the movement linked.

Labels: 1989, Berlin Wall, imperialism, revolution, socialism, stalinism

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Brief note on the function of 'political religion' posted by Richard Seymour

Following up on this 'Satanism' business...

'Political religion' is a weird thesis that, like its twin 'totalitarianism' theory, was long descredited before experiencing a revival during the 'war on terror'. (On 'totalitarianism' it is worth pointing out, as Corey Robin does, that Hannah Arendt has not been served well by her epigones. They take the more strange and least incisive of her arguments from the last third of The Origins of Totalitarianism to subsume difficult contemporary phenomena in a peasoup of pseudo-psychoanalysis.) Since the second half of 2001, there has been an academic journal devoted to disinterring this discourse. Its founder, the conservative historian Michael Burleigh, has produced several relatively popular books reheating the arguments of Eric Voegelin and Raymond Aron. Burleigh, being an ideologue of the counter-revolution, has taken the opportunity to recast Jacobinism, anarchism, Marxism and Nazism as movements reconstituting Christian metaphysics and eschatology.

The basic argument is that the secularization of church and state produced a sacralization of politics resulting in the Nazism and Stalinism of the twentieth century. The 'totalitarian' movements were political religions to the extent that their total claim over the lives of subjects enjoined them to fully determine the meaning and ultimate aim of those lives. They developed belief systems, myths and rituals equivalent to those of the overthrown church. Their fetish-object was not the cross but the state. As Eric Voegelin put it: "the divine head is cut off, and the state takes the place of the world-transcendent God". For Voegelin, a Christian theologian who hated all forms of collectivism, Nazism was a "satanical" force (he literally believed that evil was a "real substance", a "force that is effective in the world"). It was, moreover, a force made possible by the "secularization of life" that accompanied the "dissolution of Western imperial unity", the emergence modern states, and of doctrines such as humanitarianism. In short, while most critics of 'totalitarianism' hold it to be an anti-modern reflux, Voegelin holds modernity itself responsible. Human experience since the Diet of Worms has been characterized by spiritual cannibalism.

Burleigh draws extensively on this argument and shares its sympathies. As a result, he covers for the behaviour of the Catholic church during WWII, and casually expedites the whole history of Christian authoritarianism, persecution, antisemitism, racism, pogroms, etc from the narrative. As the historian Neil Gregor points out, the Nazis were not exactly reinventing the wheel when they progenerated their antisemitic texts: they drew on a history of pungent Christian slanders against the Jews. But the game is really given away by his deployment of the very apocalyptic gesture that he identifies as the hallmark of 'totalitarianism'. He indulges the rather commonplace idea that a tiny band of transnational jihadis represent a threat to "western civilization". Such doom-laden nonsense was given a free ride in the months following 9/11, and I deal with some of it in Liberal Defence (buy it already!). Essentially, it is a moral and political sanction for a wide-ranging and open-ended war in defence of said "civilization" which, if it is serious about defending itself, is adjured to restore its Christian roots.

Labels: 'totalitarianism', 'war on terror', hannah arendt, nazism, political religion, stalinism

Sunday, February 01, 2009

Class struggle at the Morning Star posted by Richard Seymour

Since I've written for the Morning Star and allowed them to use materials from my blog (all free of charge, naturally), I feel I should briefly point out that the bosses there are currently tearing up existing agreements with the staff union. Those staff members are now balloting for strike action. The new deal imposed by management amounts to a real terms pay cut, and as such has been rejected by the union. The bosses are crying poverty, but they are actually planning to hire new staff and have just received half a million pounds in new investment to expand the paper. They claim that when the investors gave this money, they insisted it be 'ringfenced' for expansion of the paper. Even if this is true, there is no excuse for terminating negotiations and imposing a unilateral deal that breaks previous agreements. The former editor John Haylett (himself the beneficiary of successful industrial action by the paper's staff back in 1998) is now acting as the management committee representative, and is responsible for sending out the letters imposing the deal unilaterally. He has accused NUJ members of being "a group of workers who are putting their own interests before those of our class as a whole". Supporters of the management position have flooded the blogs with vitriolic claims about the journalists, including the charge that they are going to do what "a government ban, Hitler’s bombs and the triumph of revisionism in the CPGB and the Soviet Union failed to achieve", by finishing off the Morning Star. This is a lavish Stalinist variant on the old management excuse that "if you strike, you'll ruin the business". Well, until this dispute is resolved, my advice to anyone approached to contribute to the Morning Star would be to politely remind them that socialists do not cross picket lines.

Labels: class struggle, morning star, stalinism

Monday, August 04, 2008

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

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

"Down With the Velvet Revolution!" posted by Richard Seymour

After having been so rude to the Fidelistas on one or two of the blogs and websites, I read this piece in The Guardian, and began to feel penitent. Allow me to quote:

The dearth of suspense [over the selection of Raul Castro for the presidency] underscored the authorities' tight control over the island and its 11 million people, many of whom hanker for relief from poverty harsher than that experienced in eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin wall.

The Bush administration called on Havana to move towards democracy, an implicit acknowledgment that Cuba retained the initiative despite Washington's economic embargo.

This is not one of the worst articles I've read, to be fair, but it does grate against common sense. Poverty in Eastern Europe before the collapse of the Eastern Bloc? Yes, okay, there was plenty of it, but what about after? Surely one of the more unfortunate metaphors he could have chosen. And what about that economic embargo? Does it have anything to do with poverty in Cuba? Well, this is to be expected. Corporate media is the Land of Forgetting, a constant stream of Shocking Images and headline grabbing events with no context and no connections, just a very random assortment of things. Journos have to work fast and, if sense and context is required, they are under immense pressure to rely on internalised narratives supplied by official ideology.

One of the effects of Washington's economic embargo (and constant warfare) was to make Cuba highly dependent on the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, with whom most of its trade was conducted. It was partly for this reason, and the revolution's failure to spread, that Castro adopted the Sovet Union's model of economic development, which entailed strict targets and a highly disciplined labour force. In a way, they didn't have much choice - in order to develop in a highly hostile world system, they had to produce a huge surplus of commodities and try to export them. They couldn't afford to have serious discussion and dissent, otherwise they risked seeing the whole system unravel and get incorporated into the Washington Consensus. The invasion, the nuclear stand-off, the surreptitious guerilla warfare, the terrorism, the hotels blowing up here and there, airline hijackings, 630 assassination attempts and so on, also contributed to making the island state quite a repressive one. Falls in worldwide commodity prices could make the system very vulnerable, and stagnation in the Soviet Union could lead to lower growth in Cuba. For all that, the Cuban economy sometimes did better on average than Latin America as a whole. And, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, the Cuban revolution survived. You can't explain that simply by reference to the 'tight control' of Fidel Castro and his bureaucratic clique. It has, clearly, a substantial popular base because of the changes it has managed to achieve in extremely difficult circumstances.

What would have happened if the Cuban regime had fallen in 1989 or 1991? Realistically, it would not have become a thriving workers' state. It would not be a rich little Barbados either. What other state in the Carribean would it most closely resemble? Haiti. An American plantation with an exiled ring of death squad mercenaries ready to discipline the population as and when required. I mean, really, if people want to talk about dictatorship and poverty, look no farther, and it can't be more than a few dozen miles from the Cuban mainland. Constant US subventions, the repeated crushing of democratic dreams, virtual slave labour, staggering poverty, horrible inequality, low life expectancy, hardly any public sector, just a disgrace and constant misery. A whole new class of Andy Apaids, bumpkin billionaire oligarchs, gangster capitalists, would have sprang up. Life expectancy would have plummetted and poverty would be far worse than it is.

In Russia, the catastrophe of shock therapy was unleashed on 2nd January 1992. The shock came in two ways – first, the price explosion (food suddenly cost four times what it used to), and second, the massive public expenditure cut-backs. Inflation did drop – from almost 250% in January 1992 to approximately 30% in December 1992. Progress indeed. By 1995, it was estimated that 80% of Russians had suffered a serious decline in their income. Income from work for families had dropped from being about half of all income at the start of the 1990s to just 39% in 2000. From a mortality rate of 11 per thousand in 1990, the death rate soared to 15 per thousand in 2000, peaking in 1994 at almost 16 per thousand. In fact, in this “unprecedented peace time mortality”, we find an alarming underlying truth about Russian society. Between 1990 and 1999, there were 3,353,000 excess deaths in the whole Russian territory. Male life expectancy fell from 63.5 years in 1991 to 57.6 years in 1994. Female life expectancy fell from 74.3 years in 1991 to 71.2 years in 1994.

In Cuba today, the average life expectancy is a bit higher than that for the average American and is among the highest in the world, and that average takes no account of the horrifying nadirs in life expectancy for the poorest in the US. This is just because healthcare is a priority in Cuba, whereas in the United States profit is the only priority. You don't set up systems to look after human beings under capitalism - what about self-reliance and responsibility? - so naturally you just let the workings of the market wipe out the surplus population. Cuba has a slightly lower infant mortality rate than the United States too. Recently, there has been a severe increase in infant mortality in the south-east of the United States, which has reached 17 per thousand live births among black people, a figure comparable to Vietnam and Albania. Cuba, while it is not a socialist paradise, is a functioning state against all odds, and the population has been spared the fate of the poorest Americans. Inequality is rising in Cuba, but it remains one of the least unequal societies on the planet, which is one indicator of social justice. It has overcome a legacy of racist segregation and colonialism and slavery in a way that other states have not been able to. Unfortunately, it looks like Raul Castro is preparing to liberalise the economy further, presumably hoping to see growth on the current Chinese model of mixing neoliberalism with strong political oversight. But China doesn't have the disadvantage of implacable US hostility, which has shut off most sources of US investment and income from multilateral institutions that are effectively controlled by the US. China isn't in the American back yard. China is important to US capital, and can retain a measure of independence. Cuba, to put it crudely, is just going to get fucked.

I would love to see Cuba become a thriving socialist society and overcome its present impoverishment and difficulties. But the only way that can happen is if Latin America and the Carribean is revolutionised, (quite independently of the top-down politics of Castro, I might add), and if the American Empire is defeated. ALBA, (the Bolivarian Alternatives for the Americas, uniting Cuba, Bolivia and Venezuela) is a step forward in that direction. So, just to rile the neoliberal consensus and just to play nice with the Fidelistas, I am toying with a new slogan: "Down With the Velvet Revolution!" Obviously that ain't a cri de coeur.

Labels: capitalism, cuba, development, neoliberalism, socialism, stalinism

Friday, January 11, 2008

Alasdair Macintyre and the moralists. posted by Richard Seymour

Why did so much anti-Stalinist criticism descend into mysticism, platitudes, heroic ‘stands’ and dogma? Why was it so easily co-opted? There were principled socialist critics of the system, and there were charlatans and reactionaries. And then there were the moral critics who sometimes evolved from New Left positions, or avoided that business entirely, but often – in their role as moral critics – took pains to distance themselves from general theorising, which they saw as part of the problem, part of the totalising gesture by which the Stalinist machine assumed the right to arrogantly despoil millions of lives. Unless you take the position that anti-Stalinism is inherently petit-bourgeois anti-materialism, inherently counter-revolutionary, and inherently anti-socialist, the above questions demand answers. The philosopher Alisdair Macintyre tried, in the milieu of dissident Marxism, and in the afterglow of Hungary and Berlin, to provide them. In a two-part article for the New Reasoner, entitled ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness’, he argued:

The ex-Communist turned moral critic of Communism is often a figure of genuine pathos. He confronts the Stalinist with attitudes that in many ways deserve our respect - and yet there is something acutely disquieting about him. I am not speaking now, of course, of those who exchange the doctrines of Stalinism for those of the Labour Party leadership, the Congress for Cultural Freedom or the Catholic Herald. They have their reward. I mean those whose self-written epitaph runs shortly, ' I could remain no longer in the Party without forfeiting my moral and intellectual self-respect; so I got out.' (A. H. Hanson, An Open Letter to Edward Thompson, N.R. No. 2, p.79.) They repudiate Stalinist crimes in the name of moral principle; but the fragility of their appeal to moral principle lies in the apparently arbitrary nature of that appeal.

The ex-communist had, by acquiescing in liberal morality, exchanged “one dominant pattern of thought for another; but the new pattern gives them the illusion of moral independence.” For the Stalinist, objective laws were to be found in the historical process, into which morality could be conveniently deliquesced. For the liberal, no such laws existed. Morality could be no more grounded in history than football could be grounded in astrophysics. Only the individual voice mattered, and from there all moral claims radiated, acquiring greater or lesser consensus. “Here I stand. I can do no other.” The critic in this way authorises herself to criticise, but at the cost of reducing the moral claim to arbitrariness. Thus:

The individual confronting the facts with his values condemns. But he can only condemn in the name of his own choice. The isolation which his mode of moral thinking imposes on the critic can tempt him in two directions. There is the pressure, usually much exaggerated by those who write about it, to exchange the participation in a Stalinist party for some other equally intense form of group membership. But there is also the pressure, far less often noticed, to accept the role of the isolated moral hero, who utters in the name of no one but himself. Ex-Stalinists who pride themselves on having become hard-headed realists seem to be peculiarly prone to this form of romanticism. They are the moral Quixotes of the age.

Not only that, but although they may as ex-communists continue to belabour non-communist governments in a display of impartiality, their ground has already been bought and reserved by the ruling classes. The “Western social pattern has a role all ready for the radical moral critic to play. It is accepted that there should be minorities of protest on particular issues.” And if one insists that one’s values are private matters, if morality is an autonomous sphere, all the better – if there is no shared public standard by which one’s claims can be judged, one’s opponents can also claim to be motivated by personally significant values. The only beguiling political question then becomes one of sincerity versus hypocrisy. The former Prime Minister can say “I honestly did what I believed was right”, and that becomes the last word on his probity until such time as we can crack his head open and apply some technological wizardry to discover whether he ‘really’ believed it was right to invade Iraq or not. Macintyre thus accuses the moral critic of “imagining that moral knight errantry is compatible with being morally effective in our form of society.”

Now, Macintyre associates this problem with the Reformation and the reconstruction of morality as a series of “divine fiats”, “totally arbitrary”, entirely unconnected with people’s lives. I don’t know how to assess that (although my inner Orange bigot says it’s the fenian in him), but I like the way he associates morality with desire. For Macintyre, morality represents “the more permanent and long-run of human desires”. Moral codes prohibiting imperialist murder, for example, express a long-term, public desire about how we should live. I can see the logic. As a good liberal moralist, you might simply start by taking the Decalogue and so on, removing God from the equation and stripping out all those crazy commandments that are incompatible with late capitalist life, (whether that means removing the misogynistic stuff, or the genocidal material, or merely those commandments that conflict with good commercial sense, such as the rule against coveting). So, instead of “Do this because you will benefit from it, it serves your desires etc”, or “Do this because God commands it”, which is arbitrary enough, you get “Do this”. Morality is thus totally divorced from desire, which is totally ineffectual. It mirrors the Stalinist gesture in which the sole effective basis for morality is the historical process which, at best, one might give a nudge in its predetermined direction (a consolatory doctrine). Not only that, but in its focus on the ‘I’ of the norm, it is logocentric.

Problematically, Macintyre seeks to close the gap between morality and desire by appealing to a Marxian version of ‘human nature’ in which people overcome the anarchic individualistic desires convoked by capitalism and ‘rediscover’ some ancient socialistic desire through collective solidarity. It seems at first blush to repeat the mistake of the historical determinist, with the idea that there could be a foundation for morality in something ‘objective’ about human beings. On closer examination, however, it is apparent that his ‘human nature’ is not really human nature as it is ordinarily understood. ‘Human nature’ would appear to be a set of capacities that are constantly under negotiation, constantly being reconstructed through historical processes. In that way, socialist morality would be historicist without being determinist. The socialist would justify moral claims both in terms of the historical processes and in terms of the desire that is convoked by them.

Labels: 'human nature', liberal moralism, stalinism