What does it mean?

A reminder: Radical Archives recalls Adbusters‘ 2004 antisemitic list of “Jewish neocons.”

A good-ish article on the right-wing response to and attempts at gaining influence over the Occupy movement: OWS: Yes, we are anti-capitalist!. In my view it suffers from the misplaced certainty that its ideas are somehow the true heart of Occupy, rather than a minority position that needs to be defended, explained, and promoted. Not to mention the optimistic idea that the right-wingers are somehow interlopers or manipulators; I would rather emphasize Occupy! and TeaParty, etc, as linked aspects of the same phenomenon. That is, I think that the links between “right” and “left” are something other than what the relatively mild term “crossover” (not used in this article) might suggest.

And then on 11/9, we remember what happens when right-wing populist anti-capitalism, scapegoating, and antisemitism get in power and out of control: Persecution, prelude to murder.

(thanks to Contested Terrain)

94 years since the Communist hijacking of the Russian Revolution

“The Bolshevik coup is a colossal crime and cannot be otherwise.” (Pavel Axelrod)

There was a Russian Revolution in February; there was no Revolution in October, only the coup d’état of a party, already germinally totalitarian in its structure and in its spirit, that seized power, set everything in motion in order to dominate and to domesticate the popular movement, and quickly succeeded in doing so (the final act taking place at Kronstadt in 1921). (Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Revolution before the Theologians,” in World in Fragments, p. 79)

Voline: The Unknown Revolution

October 28: Czechoslovak independence day (1918)

“Masaryk is my most serious ideological antagonist in Europe.” (attributed to Lenin)

My socialism is simply a matter of loving your neighbor, of humanity. I don’t want there to be poverty, I want everyone to live decently, in and by his own labor, and to have enough elbowroom, as the Americans say. Loving your neighbor is not old-style philanthropy; philanthropy only helps here and there. A real love of humanity seeks to amend conditions by law and deed. If that is socialism, I am for it.
I do not believe in equality, absolute equality, that is. There is no equality in the stars or in man. There always have been and always will be individuals who by their own gifts and a combination of circumstances not of their own making can and do achieve more than others; there will always be a hierarchy among people. But hierarchy means order, organization, discipline, knowledge, and obedience, not the exploitation of man by man. That is why I do not accept Communism. No sooner did Lenin take power than he called for leaders. The longer I live, the more I realize the role played by the individual in the evolution of humanity, but I repeat: more talent and more of what is known as luck do not justify the exploitation of the less gifted and less fortunate. I do not believe that all private ownership can be done away with. The personal relationship — the pretium affectionis — that binds an owner to his property is good in that it promotes economic progress. Communism is possible, but only among brothers, that is, in the family or in a religious community or close circle of friends; it can be maintained only by true love. I do not accept the principle of class war. There are social estates and social classes, there are degrees of difference among people. But that does not mean war; it means the organization of natural inequality and of inequality resulting from historical circumstance, it means leveling, growth, and development. I am not so blind and simple-minded as to fail to see injustice and oppression, and I know that individuals, estates, and classes must protect their own interests, but it does not follow that homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to man, as was said long ago.
As for Marxism, it is an economic theory and philosophy, a philosophy of history in particular. Economic theory, like every science, is a matter for investigation, revision, and improvement, and Marxism, like any philosophy, must be open to criticism and free deliberation. That is why revisionism arose and will continue to do so. Every revision of a creed or program is painful, but without the pain there can be no progress. I have no ready-made social doctrine in my pocket. As I’ve said elsewhere, I am always for the workman and working people in general, often for socialism, and rarely for Marxism. My views of socialism derive from my concept of democracy. A revolution or a dictatorship can occasionally abolish bad things, but it never creates anything good and lasting. Impatience is fatal in politics. When I consider that all recorded human history goes back only some ten thousand years and that we are still on the threshold of civilization, how can I believe that a fanatic, despot, or revolutionary will complete our development at one stroke? Serfdom and slavery were done away with less than two hundred years ago, forced labor even more recently, and it is only for the past hundred, no, even fifty years that we have worked consciously and systematically on the social problems of working people and the lower classes in general. We have hundreds of thousands, millions of years ahead of us. Must we really do everything at once? In any case, you can’t feed the hungry on the future. Faith in development and progress does not free us from tending to the needs of today. (T. G. Masaryk, in Karel Čapek, Talks with T. G. Masaryk. Catbird Press, 1995. Pp 161-164)

Fruit of the spring

From the Washington Post: Moderate [sic] Islamists lead in early counting of Tunisian votes

My view from here: throughout the Arab world, the total collapse of the Left and the implosion of “secular” nationalist tyrannies means a vacuum that the Islamists and their social networks will fill. I take it that this is an old story. I suspect some segment of Western opinion will peddle the fantasy (related to the fantasy that Dickensian hyper-capitalism will somehow “democratize” the Stalinist tyranny in China) that the Islamists, free from repression, will become domesticated, shed their extremist fringe, etc. In my view, this is placing the emphasis on entirely the wrong side. The Islamist parties aren’t “moderating” themselves: rather, just as here, politics and public discourse has shifted so far to the right that fundamentalist fascism will increasingly be seen as normal, legitimate, acceptable. Reality is accommodating to the fantasies of would-be religious tyrants and fundamentalist bigots, not the other way around.
Naturally, a lot of noise will be made about pluralism, respect for universal rights, respecting independent civil society, etc.; this will be contrasted with rhetoric from past decades. The Islamists have “matured,” they’ve “become realists,” we’ll be told. And as the transition takes place, they will continue to participate (in bad faith) in the institutions of the societies falling under their control, and clothe their activities in the yesterday costumes. The new “normal” will enthrone itself, and when the danger of any serious opposition has passed—and anyone in the West who might care is too busy battling this own process in our societies—the blood will start flowing. Worse: the parenthesis of Enlightenment will, in these countries at least, have closed, if not on the level of explicit political rhetoric then certainly on the level of hearts and minds.
But from what I can see, there are still other forces at work, and they need our support, and we, I should add, need theirs. The fundamentalist takeovers will not happen overnight, and so long as the Islamists are pretending, out of whatever motives, to respect pluralism and civil society, then there will be room for our comrades to move and breathe.
The problem then, is how to help our friends take advantage of this window and defend their newly liberated countries from the religious plague. (One thing that will not help: denouncing those who share our values as stooges of NATO, pawns of imperialism, etc.)
But the deeper issue remains: where do the Islamists get the grist for their mills? How can the oppression and indignities that have created the fertile soil for religious mania be undone? How can the ideological background that produces this mania be dismantled and dissolved?

Against the tyranny of concepts

“No,” answered Pilate. “I believe, I believe most passionately that truth exists and that man recognizes it. It would be madness to think that truth is only there for man not to know it. He knows it, yes; but who? I or you, or everyone perhaps? I believe that each of us has a share of it; the man who says yes and the man who says no. If these two united and understood each other, that would give the whole of truth. Of course, yes and no cannot unite, but people always can; there is more truth in people than in words. I have more understanding of people than of their truths; but there is faith even in that, Joseph of Arimathea, and it is possible to keep it alive with enthusiasm and rapture. I believe. I believe absolutely and without doubt. But what is truth?” (Karel Čapek, “Pilate’s Creed”)

Some thoughts on the occupations

The “We are the 99%” slogan. I don’t see how this can be justified, or redeemed. It is, first of all, false. It can mean two things coming from the mouths of “Occupy ____”: either “we have been delegated by the 99% to speak for them,” or “we are representative of the 99%.” Now, both these are false: no one has delegated these protestors, and clearly this isn’t a sample, but a core made of members of a political subculture, and then a larger number of some others. If I’m right, then it means we have to treat it less as identifying the protestors and more as announcing their analysis. Which, from this slogan, must be as follows. Society is divided into two groups: an overwhelming majority who are powerless or nearly so, and a tiny minority who oppress and exploit the majority. 1% of 300 million is 3 million: so the United States is (mis)ruled by a tiny clique which, since it’s unthinkable that such a small group could exploit the vast majority by normal mechanisms, must rule through deceit, conspiracy, subversion or misuse of normal institutions, etc. And this indeed is the mental world that most Leftists I know inhabit, with greater or lesser degrees of sophistication. The most important point is the personalization of politics: WE are the immense exploited majority; THEY are the tiny parasitical minority.
This kind of language has a long history, on the left and on the right. I see no reason to believe that it presents an accurate picture of American society. I see lots of reasons to believe that it will encourage the climate of scapegoating and conspiracy-theory that the right is already doing its best to create.
It’s possible, of course, that (some kinds of) power really is concentrated in the hands of a very tiny group. The mistake, I think, is to think that this is a sufficient explanation for the state of the world.
The demands for demands, or for leaders. In this case I am entirely on the side of the protestors. Liberals will lament, I suspect, that all this energy will go to waste unless it is channeled into influencing the proper institutions or winning elections. This requires concrete demands, and responsible leaders who can control the movement and push it in that direction. And I think they’re right. The question to ask, then, is whether there might not be some other result, other than a) the kind of change mainstream liberals counsel, and b) the protests fizzling out. Said another way: what significance could “Occupy Wall Street!” and its sister-protests have for more radical politics?
In a recent post, Norman Geras suggests (I paraphrase) that unless protestors who are questioning the legitimacy of the institutions of liberal-oligarchic “democracy” can either a) win elections or b) explain why they don’t have to, then “then their claim to represent an alternative democractic legitimacy is spurious.” Now, to the extent that anyone involved in the occupations is thinking in terms of undermining the legitimacy of representative institutions and replacing them, I think they should take up the challenge Geras offers here. If the liberal “within-the-system” solution is exhausted, if Bolshevik imposition upon the population is either impossible or undesirable, and if there is no majority who will join you in overturning existing institutions, then what is the 99% to do? A recipe from the old anarchist cookbook: use these protests as an opportunity to very visibly develop counter-institutions. I see some sign of this in the use of “general assemblies” and the like. There is a space, I will suggest, between pie-in-the-sky commune-type utopianism, and networking that is indistinguishable from any other bureaucratic institution save for its content. What exactly this will look like, I don’t know.
One step in this direction: a recognition that you are not the 99%, and that that which you find unacceptable comes from far deeper springs than the wickedness of bankers. A sober acceptance that those who cogently advocate a sane and decent society are a small minority will, if nothing else, help seal off the movement against tea-party populism, which, disastrously, some people seem to want to encourage.
What I fear is that there is no one to take up this kind of project, and that the composition of “Occupy Wall Street” is really a small clique of vanguardists-by-any-other-name steeped in High Theory and nihilism, and a much larger mass of well-meaning people who, but for a set of cultural or generational reference-points, might as well be going to Tea Party events. The ease with which the incoherent “99%” slogan was taken up, as well as the odd prominence of the term “occupation” (a buzzword of the academicized ultra-left), makes me wonder.

The position of the observer

I wrote up my very impressionistic impressions of two protests I saw in Chicago recently, and it had me thinking about the position of the observer. It strikes me that in one important way at least, the sympathetic outside observer, the armchair revolutionary, has much more in common with “99%” than the protestors themselves: we are outside, looking in. Slogans and even its firing up of imaginations everywhere aside, the “Occupy” movements remain the province of a small subculture. Like the workers or oppressed or the masses, I’m not a part of this subculture. Unlike them, I’m quite interested in it and its history. So perhaps my observations—which I wouldn’t offer if I wasn’t interested—can give the Occupiers or others an insight into how (at least some of) the uninvolved might see their activities.
On the other hand, say I came with the desire to do more than observe? Do I wade in despite my misgivings (a product, probably, of my background that produced my interest in the first place?) Do I appoint myself gadfly and walk down to offer my unsolicited intellectual objections? Do I stay silent, but put these objections online? I would hope that these movements are ready to listen to their critics, but I think this is not very likely. This connects also, I think, to the issue of “support” (“critical support,” “political support,” etc.), which I intend to address in another post.

What kind of human being does socialism require?

Real self-management presupposes the existence of a reasonable number of rational, socialised, and human persons who understand the major aim of the social process, persons who are themselves alive to the relative interlinking of personal, group and general interests and who base their activities on ideals of general human significance. (Marković, Mihailo. “Socialism and Self-Management.” Praxis 2, no. 3 (1965). [here])

Marković goes on to suggest that, if it lacks these kinds of people, socialism needs (or more charitably, has needed) a bureaucratic elite which will create them. Leaving this aside (and leaving aside what in the world the “major aim of the social process” means), isn’t there something very true here? And more: isn’t this often what is meant by the notion of the “citizen”?
Anarchists have often suggested that self-management is something that comes naturally. In some sense, this must also be true: we know that relatively egalitarian human communities have existed. This all raises the question of what exactly we mean by self-management? Is it to be taken broadly, so that any case of human beings more or less spontaneously or “organically” arranging their affairs qualifies? Or do we mean something more robust? Marković offers this:

Self-management means that the functions of directing social processes are no longer performed by forces outside the mass of society, opposed to it, but [are] in the hands of the very same people who produce, who create social life in all its forms.

But is this enough? Can’t we imagine the primitive “organic” community of the anarchist anthropological fantasy fulfilling this criterion, but without requiring the “presuppositions” that Marković lists?
More, why should we care? If “self-management” is the end we desire, and this can be fulfilled by, say, the obeying of egalitarian tradition by a tribal community, then we do we need these presuppositions at all? Why need there be self-managing citizens of the kind Marković describes?
I would suggest, that, granting these definitions, it can only be the case that Marković’s citizens are not presuppositions but part of the definition of self-management. That is, what we mean by self-management must integrally include “rational, socialised, and human persons who understand the major aim of the social process, persons who are themselves alive to the relative interlinking of personal, group and general interests and who base their activities on ideals of general human significance.” We declare this to be valuable in itself: we wish to be this, and we wish to continue creating human beings who are this. And this, then is a clue to “the general aim of the social process”: freedom, which we will just as an aim that we project, not as a interior telos of history that we discover.
So, I will suggest that something like “self-management” might be possible without the democratic citizen. But, for us, the democratic citizen is (1) a presupposition of the technical side of self-management (there must be people who can will living like this, and then do it well), (2) part of the definition of self-management (who is doing this managing, now?), and (3) the end of self-management, to reproduce and expand a free society, that is, a society of individuals like this.
So, the questions for us now aren’t abstract ones (person A belongs to system B etc.) but something like this: is not this kind of human being the outcome of the history of the democratic movements for the last several centuries? and is not this kind of human being gravely endangered today? and if so, how can we preserve and protect this heritage, and advance the project (socialism) that “presupposes” and aims at it?
(I have wondered, while reading Capital, if one of the worst affects of Marxism hasn’t been that by attempting to fit this history into a “scientific” schema in which the workers movement was treated as a given fact and “explained” abstractly through economic categories, it allowed socialists to think their project outside of its concrete history, and instead of seeing these sorts of human personalities as the precious fruit of centuries of struggle, simply treat them as a given natural factor–and ignore the reasons they exist, and what might cause them to disappear.)

“a mental labour-saving device”

The Marxist outlook was emphatically monistic. In it science, philosophy, sociology, politics, and tactics were closely knit into a single system of ideas. Yet the interest of practioners of Stalin’s type in matters of philosophy and theory was strictly limited. They accepted certain basic formulas of Marxist philosophy, handed down to them by the popularizers of the doctrine, as a matter of intellectual and political convenience. These formulas seemed to offer wonderful clues to the most complex problems—and nothing can be as reassuring to the half-educated as the possession of such clues. The semi-intelligentsia from whom socialism recruited some of its middle cadres enjoyed Marxism as a mental labour-saving device, easy to handle and fabulously effective. It was enough to press a knob here to make short work of one idea, and a knob there to dispose of another[...]

(Isaac Deutscher. Stalin: a Political Biography. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967)

For whom does the Left speak? And what happened at the “end of WWI”?

I am particularly interested in the history of the old SPA, its precursors, and the American labor movement before and after the civil war. A while back I read the following passages on Loren Goldner’s site:

Kenneth Rexroth, in his Autobiographical Novel (3) 3 takes a different but complementary tack. Rexroth describes a 1920 meeting of Chicago radicals orienting to the Third International with the infamous Joseph Pepper, the mysterious Hungarian figure who played an (apparently) self-appointed role as Comintern representative in the early American Communist movement of the 1920’s, wreaking havoc throughout. When a veteran Wisconsin radical asked Pepper how he thought the American revolution would happen, Pepper chilled the room by saying that revolution would come to America not by the actions of American workers but on the bayonets of the Soviet Red Army. Certainly no representative of the Second International had ever shown such contempt for American revolutionaries; indeed, as one counter-example, it is little remembered that the Dutch “ultra-left” (Pannekoek, Gorter, Roland-Holst) after 1908 had a significant following in the left wing of the American SP, especially in immigrant groups such as the Latvians, a following that had to be eradicated in bitter factional struggle in the early years of the CP (4) 4 Rexroth shows that damage inflicted by the Comintern on the American radical tradition, which we normally associate mostly with the 1930’s, was present from the outset. While Rexroth was first of all an artist, he also joined the IWW in 1917, and gravitated to the founding efforts of the Communist Party, and broke with the groups that became the CP by…1920, under the influence of encounters of the kind described above and of the selfsame German-Dutch ultra left. Rexroth not only depicts radical Chicago in its heyday, but gives a portrait of the world of American radicalism in the small town in Indiana where he grew up, where people (I paraphrase) had a sense of having won two revolutions (the American Revolution and the Northern victory in the Civil War) and damn well intended to win a third. (5) 5 (“Max Eastman : One American Radical’s View of the “Bolshevization” of the American Revolutionary Movement and a Forgotten, and Unforgettable, Portrait of Trotsky”)

I’m afraid I may be guilty of a desire “to justify and rehabilitate the most abject Social Democracy” (as Goldner says elswhere in the essay). In any case, I was reminded of what I just read in Michael Kazin’s new book, currently being mentioned in the New York Times and elsewhere. Kazin says:

During just one period of about four decades—from the late 1870s to the end of World War I—could radicals authentically claim to represent more than a tiny number of Americans who belonged to what was, and remains, the majority of the population: white Christians from the working and lower-middle classes. (American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation, XV)

I will have to read the rest of Kazin’s book to see how he treats “the end of World War I,” but for now I will ask: did the influence of Bolshevism alone make the American Left marginal (that is, if we’re not content to just blame government repression, propaganda campaigns, etc.)? When it was more representative, did it have to ignore the plight of those on the margins? And to become important again, would it have to do the same today? What is AK Press, for example, after when they say that anarchists are just consistent Glenn-Beckians?