Marx Reloaded, A Film by Jason Barker: Review and Commentary

Thomas Riggins

Jason Barker's film, Marx Reloaded, was released in 2011. It is 52 minutes long and is now available for viewing on the internet. It was interesting to watch but it did not have a lot to do with Marx except superficially. If Marx was reloaded it was with blanks.

The film presents a series of talking heads many of whom have no grasp of what Marx and Marxism are all about and who engage in flights of "postmodern'' speculation as to the meaning of Marxism today. There are a few exceptions that I will note. There are also a few non-Marxist supporters of capitalism who don't see any future for Marx. There are no representatives from contemporary labor movements or political parties which are part of the ongoing Marxist tradition.

The question addressed is if Marx's critique of capitalism is valid for our time. If the critique is valid then what comes next? Is Communism going to make a return? Is it coming back to replace the capitalist system?

The film opens with an animation of Marx meeting Trotsky and Trotsky undertaking to enlighten Marx as to the significance of Marxism today. Trotsky will attempt to guide Marx to an understanding of how ideology works in society. Quite the tail wagging the dog.

The film then begins by asking how economists today explain the greatest capitalist crisis since the great depression of the 1930s. The answers we get are not very telling. Now the talking heads take over.

First up is the late former chief economist of the Deutsche Bank, Norbert Walter (1944-1912) who says that we [bankers] made mistakes. E.g., in the USA people could get mortgages at 110% of the value of their houses. The banks made money cheaply available, people borrowed too much and they couldn't pay back what they owed. Later in the film he tells us that Marx's ideas about getting rid of capitalism by abolishing a society based on commodity production for profit would create a world that people would not want to live in as that would lead to the abolishment of "the universal medium of money" which "turns everything around us into commodities" and "money is an essential medium for civilization, for peaceful coexistence and the organization of complex societies." This begs the question as communism is a complex society based on production for human needs not commodities for profit. Mr. Walter must have forgotten about the two world wars that almost destroyed European civilization in the last century when he opined that "peaceful coexistence" is one of the benefits of a money economy.

Next up is Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute, and author of "Taming The Trade Unions", who tells us the crisis was caused by inflation due to governments printing too much money. That is all we hear from him.

On a more general level of the problems of capitalism and the meaning of Marx's writing the film interviews several people identified as philosophers, political philosophers, theorists, critics, etc. Some are well known to the academic community although their grasp of Marxism may be questionable. We now hear from Antonio Negri, co-author of "Empire", an expert on Spinoza, and a founder of Italian Autonomism, and "Worker's Power" (Potere Operaio) an ultra-left formation in Italy with a secret armed wing. Negri tells us that the capitalists [neo-liberals] cannot pay the workers the price of their labor [which doesn't even make sense in Marxist terms-- a wage is the price paid for labor-- he should at least be talking about the value of their labor-power not the price] and that they remain in power and are able to wage wars around the world only as long as the working class remains quiescent  due to high wages. But as we see the capitalists can't do that so Marx is still relevant.

This line of thought is taken up by the film which now asks does Marx's theory of exploitation hold today or is the way capitalists make their profits changing? The answers are sought from more talking heads without any clear explanation having been given as to what Marx's theory of exploitation is. What is clear is that with a few exceptions, which I will note, none of the answers given in this part of film are dealing with Marx's theory.

The philosopher Slavoj Zizek is now up to bat (what film on "Marxism" would be complete without this latter day Eugen Dühring). He is described as the "leader" of a new movement to revive Marxist and Communist thinking. He revives Marx by proclaiming that the classical notion of exploitation [left unexplained] no longer works due to the knowledge explosion-- he does not tell us why this is so. However, it has something to do with computers because we need them to communicate with each other and so we have pay "rent" to Bill gates because he owns part of our mental substance. I am tempted to think that in professor Zizek's case Mr. Gates  is a slumlord. Finally we are told that we need a redefinition of the "proletariat" because the "proletariat" is larger than the working class. Zizek also notes that the unemployed today demonstrate because they want jobs-- "please exploit us in the normal way" they are saying to the capitalists. I think he strikes out as the "leader" of a new "Marxist" movement. He will appear again later.

Antonio Negri now reappears. Capitalism, he says, has evolved in ways Marx could not have predicted. Exploitation is not only of factory workers but of workers throughout society. You can't start a revolution with the factory workers-- you need them but also all the other workers too [I think Marx could have predicted this, in fact he already knew it.] You need the other workers, Negri says, because they are the "most" exploited. What can that mean? The examples he gives is of research and cinema workers and the like because they produce more value. None of this makes sense because the Marxist concept of "value," "surplus value," "labor power" and "exploitation" are never brought up in the film. If they were none of the things these talking heads and intellectual will o the wisps are saying would make sense anyway only the viewers would at least understand why.

Herfried Munkler now makes his appearance. Dr. Munkler, co-editor of the Complete Works of Marx and Engels and a professor at Humbolt University, in contrast to those who have appeared before, actually knows a thing or two about Marxism although in its Social Democratic deformation. His concern is not limited to discussing the plight of working people in the West but focuses on the exploitation of working people in the so-called Third World where working conditions are subhuman and wages are ridiculously low in comparison to the advanced capitalist countries. Here it is obvious that Marxist ideas are relevant and that capitalism is being abusive.

Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri's collaborator on the book "Empire" (not worth the read) now appears to bring us back from the Third World to the the First to tell us the economy is now centered on "immaterial" and "immeasurable" products-- that is, on "ideas" not on "objects" like old fashioned commodities such as cars, refrigerators, toasters-- the products of industrial manufacturing. Economics is about relationships and intangible assets [not, coal, oil or natural gas]. He is listed as a literary critic and political philosopher, at least he talks about political philosophy like a literary critic.

Now is the time for Jacques Ranciere, the co-author with Louis Althusser of "Reading Capital" (although his part was left out of the English version). He is noted for an educational theory which says a person can be a teacher without knowing anything about the subject he is going to teach; a view welcomed by not a few teachers. Ranciere makes three appearances in the film and manages to say nothing of importance in any of them.  Here he tells us many societies have had exploitation without "explosions" so we can't draw from exploitation the logic of an end to exploitation. Economic exploitation is not the dominant factor in all social struggle. Ranciere seems oblivious to the Marxist view that, as Engels says, in the last analysis all major social struggles in class based societies have economic exploitation at their root. Each society and its economic formation needs to be individually studied. There have certainly been "explosions" over exploitation in all societies that have distinct social classes despite Ranciere's contrary assertions.

The film now takes up a new subject. We are told that to understand capitalism we must delve into the the "mystic realm" of the COMMODITY.  It is certainly true that without an understanding of the origin and role of commodities we will not understand our economic system which is based on the production and exchange of commodities. Marx devotes the first chapter of "Das Kapital" to the commodity. It is a difficult chapter but once grasped the rest of the volumes of Das Kapital will be easily understood.

The film however does not deal with Marx's scientific analysis of commodities but skips to the last section of the chapter which is entitled "The Fetishism of Commodities." Without an understanding of the preceding sections it is easy to misunderstand this last section and, true to form, both the film's narrator and all of the talking heads in this part of the film completely miss the point and fail to grasp Marx's ideas concerning commodity fetishism.

To make a long story short, Marx's point is that the laws of the capitalist system are not  products of  nature as, say, are the laws of gravity or of aerodynamics but they are the result of human activity. Commodities and their relations are created by human beings and human beings can abolish them. Yet, because we are ignorant of the laws of economics we think of commodities as natural, as things which , although created by us, assume an existence independent of us and go to a market whose laws we are subject to and must conform to. This is similar to the creation of religions or "primitive" belief systems where a person creates a fetish and then bows down to it and thinks it has power over him and he must subject himself to its demands and will. The capitalist market appears as the natural form of economic exchange and there is no alternative to it.  It is not true that there is no alternative and humans can abolish capitalism and rid themselves of subjection to the laws of commodity production and create an economic world which serves human needs and one where human needs do not take second place to the need to exchange commodities at a profit. None of this is addressed in this part of the film. Instead we get baloney. This is because the talking heads are in the grips of the very fetishism Marx warns us about.

Norman Bolz (media theorist): "The theory of commodity fetishism is Marx's most important discovery." It isn't. Marx's most important discovery is the distinction between the value of labor and that of labor-power which is the basis of the labor theory of value and of his analysis of capitalism. It is, however, one of the most important consequences of that discovery.

Bolz continues by saying Marx's theory reveals a secret as to why capitalism today "functions so well" [!!!]. The secret is "that goods in the capitalist market place satisfy more than simple needs  they also convey a spiritual surplus value and this value is the real reason for the purchase." This is complete and utter nonsense.

Peter Sloterdijk (philosopher [but not a very good one]) is not so definite. He says the theory is probably "the important part of Marxist doctrine." This is because "Marx is among those who discovered the fact that things live."  He goes on to say, Walter Benjamin "discovered the structural similarity between human commodities [?] and commodities as objects." He thus "universalized the category of prostitution." While there may be a relationship between fetishism and prostitution on some level, I don't think this is what Marx was getting it. "Prositution is always present when a beautiful thing feigns life and tries to seduce passersby with an offer."  I think professor Sloterdijk should reread Marx's chapter on commodities.

Finally, here is Famonn Butler"s (policy analyst) take: he says it's human psychology to want things-- the economy is neutral-- it just produces what people want.  Well then, that's it. Capitalism just produces what people want. Then why are there so many adverts all over the place? Do we need to be constantly reminded about what we want?

The film now turns to Marxism and Ecology-- only by now Marxism has been unloaded rather than  reloaded. Zizek is now taking about  "Communism" in the sense what we have in "common"-- the Earth as our "common substance" and we have to manage it together. He makes no proposal about how to do that. Michael Hart is also back talking about the "common" in "Communism" and how different that is from both the "Communism" found in the Soviet Union (derived from Marx incidentally) and also the "Communism"  of American Anti-Communism [evidently he doesn't approve of either kind of "Communism"].

Herfried Munkler points out that Marx "applies exploitation not only to human labor but to the limited resources of nature. He says that if the exploitation of nature continues nature will be destroyed." Munkler thinks that we can reduce the exploitation of nature under capitalism and have common ownership of the Earth without  a Marxist society. But this is just social democratic optimism as befits anyone affiliated with the SPD in Germany. He gives no program. But at least he brings up an all important issue; the destruction of the environment under capitalism today.

John Gray weighs in with the observation that international capitalism develops in ways impossible to predict and impossible to control (revealing that he is completely under the sway of the fetishism of commodities). He says the "New Leninists" [we have not met any "Leninists" in this film-- nor will we] and "Greens" are correct about the fact that "human action" has destabilized the environment but they are "deluded" in thinking human action can restabilize it. It doesn't occur to him that it is not humans qua humans that are destructive but only humans under the sway of particular sorts of economic and social relations. Even if humans could get together as a global collective, which he says will never happen, they could not restabilize the environment. Doom and gloom is all we can expect.

The film now asks if the current economic crisis was caused by an under regulated banking system. Is the only solution now and in the future to have state regulated economic systems? The film suggests we look back into history for solutions. I should note here that people who look  to the past for solutions to present day problems are usually seen to be reactionaries.

Be that as it may, we return to Norbert Bolz who likes the fact that in the 19th century banks issued their own scripts which functioned as money. You could take it to another bank and redeem it in coin of the realm-- if the other bank trusted it! This system would make all the banks very aware of the true value of the scripts and bad banks would be exposed. He thinks this is a really good idea and I suppose there were no banking crises in the 19th century, except there were.

John Gray rightly thinks this idea is nuts because state monopoly capital [not his term] has become so evolved and complicated since the 19th century and this has happened as a result of the close interconnection between capitalism and state power-- there is no going back. But is there going forward?

Why is it that the state rushes in to save capitalism all the time? Is it possible, the film now asks, that these crises, like the one we are in right now, which broke out in 2007, are not side effects of capitalism but essential to its very existence?

Herfried Munkler tells us that Marx thought that crises would lead to the downfall of capitalism but since his day capitalism has gone through many crises and has "rejuvenated itself." He mentions Joseph Schumpeter's theory of crises as periods of "creative destruction." "Capitalism," Munkler concludes, "doesn't age. Instead crisis is its Fountain of Youth."  This from the co-editor of the Collected Works is rather strange. Marx thought the internal contradictions would eventually bring about capitalism's collapse (or the mutual destruction of the contending classes within the system) but there was no time table and he argued that capitalism had at its disposal many tools to stave off immediate collapse but it would eventually prove dysfunctional as had the economic forms (slavery, feudalism,) that preceded it. Schumpeters "creative destruction" (destruction of the lives of workers and the majority of the population and creative of wealth for the so-called 1%-- the capitalists) is no refutation of Marx's theories.

The "theorist" Alberto Toscano, one of the very few interviewed who seems to have his head in the right place, points out that capitalism, whatever its ultimate fate, is responsible for creating a gigantic surplus population that it does not know what to do with. He mentions the book "The Planet of Slums" by Mike Davis and talks about  the "surplus humanity" that capitalism has on its hands because its technological advances have made the number of workers it needs redundant. This is the "reserve army of labor" that Marx wrote about-- but now it is no longer a "reserve" it is just a surplus of human beings that are socially unneeded piling up in the slums of the world with nowhere to go. The "creative destruction" they may eventually bring about capitalism may have a hard time dealing with. Only the Chinese, with a non-capitalist economic system, seem to have been able to cope with the massive poverty in the rural areas  of their country (and of course Cuba and Vietnam and a few others with non-capitalist economies, and now Venezuela, are beginning to follow suit).

Finally, the film asks what sense is there in believing another world, other than capitalism, is possible. TINA-- There is No Alternative was Ms. Thatcher's motto-- was she correct? Can a Communist alternative emerge after the experiences of the past century?

  Antonio Negri says there is only capitalism so we must fight the bosses as the bosses fight us. This seems to be an eternal struggle-- there is only the movement Bernstein thought and so it seems  does Negri-- at least in this film-- it is difficult to get just what he means so I may be incorrect here. He tells us what we all know-- Russia didn't have "Communism" it had "socialism." What is socialism? It is a way to manage capitalism, just like liberalism is. How would Communism come about? It "comes into being through a relation between transformations of reality and the will or decision to do it or to build it." After this bit of balderdash  he leaves us with the admonition to junk the old Communist Manifesto  and to write a new one-- he is not , however, the man to do it.

Nina Power, feminist philosopher, has more regard for the Communist Manifesto, and says it has continuing power to influence people. She is surely correct.

Zizek writes off the 20th century "communist" states, Social Democracy, the idea of local councils, collectives, Soviets (which first popped up in the 1905 Russian Revolution) and their latter day reincarnations. What's left? He tells us he likes the idea that "A communist society is one in which each person could dwell in his own stupidity." Zizek is already doing that so he should be happy. He says he got that idea from reading Frederick Jameson. He thinks it would be great if Communism turned out to be like a Bruegel painting. Whenever I hear Zizek expostulating it brings to mind what Karl Marx said about Jeremy Bentham i.e., "in no time and in no country has the most homespun common-place ever strutted about in so self-satisfied a way." At least Bentham did not resort to pseudo-Hegelian verbiage.

Micha Brumlik (professor of education at the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main) maintains that after the 20th century we have the right to know what Communism is going to be like-- it has to be democratic to be supported. There will be a big fight over that, I fear, as different concepts of "democracy" will be put forth. But he is right to demand a politically active civil society not divorced from a democratic political system. He thinks that Hardt and Negri's  unclear views on the "the multitude" will never get that concept up and running or have any practical outcome.

Jacques Ranciere leaves us with the view that while Marx wanted a "classless society" what we really need is what he calls an "emancipatory society." This is one "in which each has an equal share." This has a vague utopian sound to it-- a throwback to pre-Marxist French socialist thinking. Marxist logic, he tells us, is to prepare for the future, but he believes "instead that the idea of emancipation is really tied to a sort of appearance in the here and now of those we call the 'have-nots' and of those who make their presence felt through their capacity to think, to intervene politically  and to prove themselves capable of organizing economic production." Ayn Rand would like this-- the have-nots and their masters-- only for Ranciere they would be good masters. This is a latter day reincarnation of Plato's Republic.

Ranciere goes on to criticize Negri. "Negri thinks capitalism produces communism [in the film Negri appears to think capitalism is here for the long run and must always be struggled against-- or if communism comes about it will be through the triumph of the will-- few of the people in this film are logically coherent]. In reality, capitalism only produces its own form of communism. But this is not the communism of everyone's capacity. There are those who say 'Look at what capitalism does. The idea of communism can't be so bad.' But I don't think those people are involved in constructing the idea of real equality today." What is this rambling discourse suppose to mean?

The last pronouncement I will consider comes from Peter Sloterdijk, who tells us that "People must join together to forge alliances against the lethal. They must provide mutual security and offer each other communities of solidarity on a planetary scale [sounds like an advert for NATO]. Because for the first time collective self destruction is possible. [Is he referring to the bomb? climate change?] Before we say 'communism' we must understand the principle of 'immunism' [a new -ism to worry about] or the principle of our mutual insurance which is the most profound motive of solidarity."

This is the sum and substance of the movie. Some of these thinkers are better than they have appeared in this movie-- but not by much. I don't think this film has reloaded Marx-- quite the contrary. I think it completely fails to present what Marxism is all about and its past accomplishments and future possibilities. No film can hope to present Marxism to the public without at the same time dealing with the real life problems of the union and working class movements and issues in the Third World. As I pointed out at the beginning of this review this film completely ignores working class leaders and the leaders of political movements inspired by Marxism and confines itself to interviewing intellectual talking heads who, quite frankly, often don't know what they are talking about. You can find this movie on You Tube complete with subtitles. It is 52 minutes long, and once you have watched it I think you will agree with my assessment.

Notes on Stalinist Humanism, Italian politics and the 'Grillini'

I realized recently that it was hard to accurately name a certain type of 'communist' (an unusual situation in itself) that I regarded as having a retrograde effect in today's political arena, specifically in Europe. But now I think I've nailed it: Stalinist-humanists. These communists (or 'communists', it depends) come from the history of the notion of 'actually existing communism' and its post war social imperialist past, particularly the Soviet Union.

The idea that 'communism existed' was an error or at least a deviation from Leninist theory, given that what actually existed was socialism and continued class struggle (excepting with the previous main class relations inverted). - Post WWII Stalinism tended to assert that the class struggle was concluded for it. This state position was combined with the cult of personality and a socialist-but-imperialist foreign policy. - Both of these positions also deviated from Leninism. It is possible to trace the roots of this deviation but I shall not here, suffice to say WWII had a big effect (which is of course an understatement).

There are certain parties in Europe that owe their existence to a past allegiance to the Soviet Union, as is natural, and these often had or have a peculiarly fusty, conservative flavor which seems, today, extremely anti-radical, promoting a sort of humanist gradualism and compromise with, even fondness for, almost any fixed authority, even while being able to propagate classic Marxist critical analysis. One traditional reaction to this co-option with the state is to counteract this, 'within the fold' so to speak, through Trotskyist anarchism directed from outside the traditional corridors of bourgeois power, i.e. with an extreme 'militancy'.

The current European 'communist' movement is split by this division between Stalinism and Trotskyism, as played out in the political arena. It is, I suggest, a false dialectic that actually represents a threat to Marxist theory and practice in the day-to-day struggles we currently see in the severe global capitalist crisis. It is fairly apparent the bourgeois media enjoys this agonistic situation. 

- Not that I wish to create some kind of 'grand unity' here, and I recognize that often the arguments between factions are productive, and this isn't ever a pure thing, but what I suggest this represents, basically, is the repression of the Bolshevik position within current revolutionary communist politics and the splitting of an old Menshevik type position into two essentially humanist tendencies: Stalinist humanism and Trotskyist humanism.

Bolshevik versus Menshevik was an old struggle in revolutionary Russia that most comrades will know about. I am unable here to go into the details of the historical differences between them, but the Menshevik position tended to represent bourgeois reformist 'Marxism' in a more social democratic flavor, seeking to stick with the then existing bourgeois state structures. The Bolshevik position was that of the early revolutionary Soviet Union, one of its famous slogans was "All Power to the Soviets" (worker councils). 

In the S.U. the New Economic Policy and the war tended to reduce the impact of Bolshevism, even though Lenin was a revered Bolshevik figure. The embalming of Lenin's body after he died represents, I think, a stage in the eventual victory of this humanism, and reveals a resort to political social democracy within (a denegated) socialism in the Soviet Union's state apparatus - to cut a long story short of course.

We all recognize, even when we are sympathetic to the Soviet war-time experience, that the Soviet Union began at some stage in its later social evolution to resemble the more rightist type of authoritarian state, particularly in its superstructure and culture. It is a matter of irony that this statism derives from the return of humanism and social democracy, exactly what the external bourgeoisie decried as missing in such an 'authoritarian' or 'totalitarian country', but this is, I submit, the case. What else could it be? After all the normal bourgeois answer boils down to the idea that there is something innately wrong with all socialists.

Stalinist humanism is a bourgeois ideological variant of Marxism. As such it is a reversion to the Menshevik position, which is as I have described dualistic. It does not just contain Stalinism: the dualism derives from the way the Menshevik humanist position acts on the current political stage. Its gradualism and Statist reformism corresponds to the fondness for stability and authority that we see today among the 'communist' parties that cooperate within the European bourgeois parliamentary systems, while the sometimes sudden and forced realization that this is obviously not producing the desired social results ('actually existing communism') leads to, as it were, an extreme reaction that goes the opposite way: to a rejection of all gradualism, reform, and authority, even in socialism.

We should be quite familiar with humanist dualism as a bourgeois philosophy, it is a source of a lot of cultural angst, anguish and stress, the constant swinging from love and peace to extreme violence and hatred, because of its belief in and sometimes abandonment of (in disgust) the 'human spirit' and God; it goes back to Descartes at least and is tied into religion. Indeed it is to a large extent a religious attitude and aesthetic more than a strict ideological system and corresponds to the feelings of alienation that are not eliminated by the socialist state merely asserting that those problems have evaporated.

The Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser addressed in his work the subject of Marxist humanism and critiqued the phenomenon of cult of personality and Stalinism, but not from the standard rightist position, in fact he demonstrated that the rightist critique was actually the same position (theoretically) as Stalinism. It is also possible, though, as I think the above shows, to extend this critique into the modern political arena, for example the career of Giorgio Napolitano the Italian politician who has been the 11th President of the Italian Republic since 2006 and who has just been re-elected (April 2013) due to a political deadlock. He was a long-time member of the Italian Communist Party but later the Democrats of the Left, and served as President of the Chamber of Deputies from 1992 to 1994 and as Minister of the Interior from 1996 to 1998. The current radical intervention into parliamentary politics of Beppe Grillo's party has upset the old established left and right political cartel and false dialectic, but it has also discredited, thankfully, much of the Stalinist humanist conservative communists. At least at the moment M5S is more communist than the communists.

Russian Homeland Threatened by Feminism

Thomas Riggins

Vladimir Putin's government's crack down on Pussy Riot may have helped save the Russian Federation from the peril of creeping feminism. One of his government's closest allies, Patriarch Kirill who leads the Russian Orthodox Church, has just announced, according to Reuters, that feminism is a very dangerous ideology and could even lead to the destruction of the Russian Homeland. This makes it more dangerous than Communism which never threatened the existence of the homeland. It puts feminism right up there with Nazism which did threaten the existence of the homeland.  President Putin has said the Church is a protector of Russian national values, something he would never say about Pussy Riot. After having had over seventy years of a socialist government 75% of the people still identify with the Russian Orthodox Church (say it ain't so Joe!).

I don't want to contradict the Patriarch, who like the Pope, Pat Robertson, Billy Graham and some others may share a party line with Jesus, just report his wisdom to the laity. That wisdom consists of knowing what the true role of men and women is in the world and in society. After all, the organization represented by the Patriarch has been around for a couple of thousand years and has had plenty of time to figure this out, even if it had not been handed down from on high. The role of women is, as many men have always suspected the 3Ks, Kinder, Küche, Kirche (sorry for the German that's Children, Kitchen, Church).

Last Tuesday ( 4-10-13) the Patriarch stated: “I find very dangerous this phenomenon, which is called feminism, because feminist organizations proclaim a pseudo-freedom of women that should in the first place be manifested outside marriage and outside the family.”  Well, progressives should be against pseudo-freedom and it seems the Church thinks women can only find real freedom inside marriage [ presumably a gay marriage would not count ] and inside the family. This leaves Christian feminists, gay or otherwise, in an embarrassing position.

But where do men find freedom? The Patriarch said, " “Man turns his sight outward, he should work, make money. While a woman is always focused inwards towards her children, her home. " So it seems stay at home dads have pseudo-freedom while those lucky guys out in the factories and assembly lines, or anywhere they can make money, are enjoying freedom (even if they have to compete with pseudo-free women demanding equal opportunities).

It would also seem the more money the more freedom-- and this may actually be so in a capitalist economic system. Putin and Kirill may be on to something. They don't want communism [crypto-feminism, or is it vice-versa?] back in the homeland subjecting women to the pseudo-freedom of  jobs and daycare and trying to enslave men into doing housework (I'm not sure that was very successful anyway).

It is fairly obvious that feminist groups and organizations (and bands like Pussy Riot) are a grave danger not only to themselves but to the true function of womanhood in service to the KKK of freedom. The Patriarch warns "If this exceptionally important role of a woman is destroyed, everything will be destroyed as a consequence — family and, if you wish, the homeland.” Мой папа!

Well. we can't have that. But I doubt that the KKK is really in the best interests of women or even if the Patriarch is on the right party line. His calls may be coming from that other place. Maybe  Pussy Riot really should be performing in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior-- it has divine acoustics.

The Economy: Happy Days Are Here Again! For Whom?

Thomas Riggins

Last week the stock market made a great leap forward. "Dow Leaps to Record" the Wall Street Journal blazons on its front page (3/6/13). The news weekly The Week quotes Bernard Condon of the AP: "The stock market is back." ["Markets: Dow soars to a record high" 3/15/13] Investors and other social parasites living off of unearned capital gains are celebrating getting back the $11 trillion dollars eaten up by the Great Recession. The Week says this is seen "as another sign of recovery." The Wall Street Journal hails it as "a key milestone in the long slog to recovery from the financial crisis."

This remarkable "economic comeback" is even happening under the Obama administration-- which the Wall Street Journal and other right-wing prognosticators and prevaricators of presidential malfeasance have been telling us is running the economy into the ground and scaring investors away from the markets because of its anti-business "socialist" proclivities. Paul Krugman in The New York Times (3/8/13) quotes the op-ed of one these negative Nellies, Michael Boskin who advised presidents Bush 1 & 2 on economics: "Obama's radicalism is killing the DOW." Whose policies were it now that brought the stock market and the economy crashing down? I think they were those of the presidents being advised by Michael Boskin.

Now to be a wet blanket. The resurrection and coming again of the DOW is only one expression of the economy. The fat cat expression. What about people at the other end of the economic blight-- how are they faring. While the bankers and speculators who caused the Great Recession are partying on Wall Street the nation's homeless are increasing in numbers.  After reading the front page of the same issue of the Wall Street Journal celebrating "recovery" we find a quite different story on page 6: "New York City Leads Jump in Homeless."

New York City prides itself with being the leading city in the U.S. and under Mayor Bloomberg it has become first in the nation in homeless families. The city also set a new record for its homeless shelters-- 50,000 souls a night in January of this year. Revealing, the WSJ says "an unsettling national trend: a rising number of families without permanent housing." Higher stock prices and bigger bonuses for bankers do not a recovery make.

According to the Coalition for the Homeless (using numbers from January provided by New York City) 1% of all children in the city are in shelters (over 21,000) which is up 22% over last year (corresponding increases for Boston and Washington D.C. were 7.8% and 18% respectively). Mary Brosnahan, of the Coalition, said: "New York is facing a homeless crisis worse than anytime since the Great Depression." Some recovery!

Resources to help keep families in their homes have been cut by the Obama administration, advocates for the homeless say, in order to concentrate on the "more visible" problems-- i.e., getting those unsightly homeless from sleeping on the streets and in public areas where they can be, God forbid, seen.  So the money goes for shelters after the fact, not to keep people housed before the fact. But this did not start with Obama-- it goes back to the Bush years as homeless families have increased 73% since 2002 in New York City alone. The city reflects national trends. It has, for example, gotten back, in gross numbers, all the jobs lost since the Great Recession" began, according to the WSJ --but not really, as the the jobs are lower paying than those lost--- you don't come out even getting an once of silver for an once of gold just because you still have an once of something. When asked to comment the Department of Housing and Urban Development did not respond.

For the crisis in New York City the Bloomberg administration said it was the fault of, that abstract beast, "the economy."  Seth Diamond, NYC's commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services (a whole department for this!) was quoted in the WSJ as saying, "The economy is very different in the past years, and that is a substantial change. We understand we have an obligation to continue to work with people and provide shelter for those who need it, and the economy is nowhere near where it was."

Was it the fault of "the economy" that the State of New York ended aid to help people who got out of shelters to keep their new housing-- thus forcing them back out on the street? Ending that program resulted in a 35% increase in families in New York City shelters alone.

Was it the fault of "the economy" that in 2005 Mayor Bloomberg (forgetting his "obligation" to help people) ended a program from the 1990s that had been created to set aside some federal housing units and vouchers managed by the city for homeless people so they could get out of the shelters and live normal lives? We can't accept that being homeless is the "new normal."'

No, it's not the fault of "the economy" it is the fault of politicians that prioritize aiding the rich and well off at the expense of everyone else; of politicians who would rather see children thrown out on the streets than raise, even minutely, the taxes on the bloated incomes of the rich squeezed out of the labor of working people as well as grants and subsidies they get from the Congress corrupted by lobbyists and corporate contributions.

The "Great Recession" is not over and never will be no matter how high the stock market goes as long as homelessness, unemployment, low wages, and the persecution of unions and their members continues. The American people voted for a progressive government and they must now unite to see that the forces of reaction which refuse to recognize the choice of the people are driven from the centers of power and an end put to their obstructionism and attempts to undermine popular democracy. Only then will "Happy Days Be Here Again" or at least the possibility for them.

The Question of Stalinism

by Gary Tedman

The organized and deliberate horror of the system that produced Auschwitz stands as a kind of philosophical toll-booth at which we cannot seriously pay in the same old currency anymore, and once we have passed through it everything must be in a new currency, a different one. Let me put this even stronger: fascists made Auschwitz and the other death camps, and Communists opposed it, all those who are not with the Communists, are with the Fascists, it is not possible to take any other position: that system forbids this, completely and utterly. To be sure, the WWII and post WWII situation was and is complex, and the lines to be drawn are not easy, but I maintain these are the real lines.

Notwithstanding, many people, groups, have passed through this toll-booth without changing their currency and are, as it were, living the illusion that things remain the same as before.

The rationalization for this is invariably 'Stalinism' and the associated 'Gulag'. The image of an equal and opposite horror to Hitlerism is there and keeps the old currency going in this new territory, it is there, I suggest, to rewrite history, in the end it is there, no matter its reality, its reasons for being, or not, for the moment, to tell us that the Auschwitz system did not really exist, or if it existed, it was just the opposite of an equally horrible horror that it opposed, in effect, to tell us that it is 'just like' an extreme version of the daily politics that we all know so well.

This means most people are in fact, though they don't know it, communists. They are because they obviously oppose this fascism, but they do not know they are communists. There are a few fascists who have the knowledge of what they are doing, and they are largely in positions of power and wealth, although of course there are also fascists among the poor and working class, those who have been brutalized. Nevertheless, low level fascism (for want of a better name) represents a quite different phenomenon to high level fascism. The Brownshirts (the Sturmabteilung) functioned as a paramilitary organization of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (or Nazi Party) are an example of this difference, and they had to be dispatched by the higher level Nazis in the infamous 'Night of the Long Knives'; the key to grasping this difference is that the Brownshirts could not be trusted to 'do the right thing', which was to attack and blame minorities, chiefly for economic problems, rather than the ruling class.

Allow me to provide an example that will make this philosophical-political position clearer:

In Greece there was a coalition government (February 2012), which coalesced because they all agreed on some basic principles, and wanted to 'rescue' the Greek economy and nation, one method to do this was to introduce some extreme 'austerity measures' for the population: - sackings, redundancies, public and private sector wage/salary cuts and freezes, increased taxes, privatizations. The coalition was formed by the two main parliamentary parties PASOK ('socialist')/New Democracy (rightist) plus some extreme rightist fascists. These parties were led respectively by Georges Papandreou, Antonis Samaras and Georges Karatzaferis, the latter a party leader who has openly used anti-Semitic phrases and slogans. Essentially, the fascist held the deciding vote, in spite of the fact that he represented a tiny minority of the citizens of Greece in electoral terms.  This coalition was led by an 'installed' (by the Eurozone state apparatus) Prime Minister, Lucas Papademos, described as a 'technocrat' whose political affiliation remained 'officially' undecided but who was a banker with a history not unconnected with the causes of the crisis. The question arises: why would anyone, or any party, enter into an alliance with the extreme rightist, fascist party unless they had something in common with them? We were of course made aware officially that this was not the case. The other leaders always disavowed any connection of this type. Yet here we have, de facto, a close political relationship.

My argument is that what we saw in front of our eyes, we saw because it is true and fact, it is the reality. The coalition represented at bottom like minds, it represented agreements, similar goals and aspirations, and so on. It means that they are the same, an identity. This means conversely that the opposites that we thought the apparent left Socialists and right New Democracy were, in fact, fake. In reality they are performing a double act, a false dialectical piece of theatre that allows us to vote for each party as if we were deciding a sports match, who after the spectacle share in the spoils. Why? They do this because they do share in the spoils, because they share class interests, and these interests are their private interests. In the Greek coalition of that time it reached a point in the economic crisis where those interests were best served through an alliance with the fascists. This is because any individual party holding power would be held to blame as responsible for the austerity that they both wanted to impose, so a coalition would neatly spread the blame and unpopularity as well as allow each to blame the other, in other words it allows the false dialectical double act to continue relatively unscathed (in theory, because this was happening against a backdrop of continuous protests). But it only allowed this to continue with the assistance of the fascists: only the fascists had the same interests at heart. Only the fascists had the same ruthlessness and brutality.

The two major left parties did not enter into this coalition and opposed it. This group included the Greek Communist Party (KKE), ostensibly a Stalinist party. We have, therefore, here the fascists versus the communists, although few involved would have accepted this as an accurate description, in fact they would of course have rejected it outright in indignation. And the reason why this description would not be accepted, and so strenuously, is because parliament must (it is an imperative), function as a stage on which political conflicts take place and argue democratically, and this entails of course that they are and must be opposed to each other, except in times of necessary national unity or emergency; i.e. they must really be opposed for this to be a genuine democracy, because democracy means choice. If we were to find that these parties were not really opposed but in fact shared their outlook, we would realize that we were living in a plutocracy, a dictatorship, not a genuine democracy, because changing the one to the other by election would really be no change at all.

Now, it is not that I do not think that some degree of real opposition ever happens in this structure, I do. The fact of the necessity to perform on this stage means that they must do certain things, intervene, make political decisions, and so on, politics must be seen to be done and so it must often be done in fact on the stage that is parliament. However, the idea that they are opposed in any fundamental way is false as far as this structure is concerned; they are only opposed as factions within the one position of the rule of the ruling class. This is the key to understanding all bourgeois democracy I suggest. It is its classical form, as with the English Parliament. There are of course always exceptions.

We are using the metaphor of a stage here, but this is more than a metaphor; it really is a stage with actors performing roles. The political effect is chiefly the response of the audience to this performance, not the laws they put into effect. The laws are always decided beforehand by the class that the politicians are drawn from, or that they now de facto represent as politicians. The role of the parliamentary politician is to sell these political decisions. Apart from a stage performance with the actors, the process also more than resembles the performance of a conjuror, as well as has something of a comedic double act, with the classic straight man (who is funny and who is straight depends on your sidedness) or the classic nice cop v nasty cop routine. It is therefore no accident that the parliament resembles a stage set, it is a stage set. It is a place in this sense where art meets politics in a very pure way, the design must be right, the rituals and aesthetics of it all must add to the effect, in fact you might say it is a site where there are 'special effects' and a special atmosphere created. If politics is show business for ugly people, then this is their special stage, and it too is ugly.

There are a couple of caveats to make that I can best put as self critical questions:

a) People are complex; they don't seem to fall into these two broad camps, so my argument appears to be a bit of an extreme Manichaean, good v evil position.

b) How come I can get out of the illusions of positions that I am talking of? Is this not a kind of bigheadedness?

Perhaps for a) it is possible to take a step backwards to the earlier argument about (re: the Brownshirts). On the level of the family and the civic local community we can see that generally people operate in and with a communal spirit, that they regard each other in a generally decent and communal fashion; and this in spite of all the influences and pressures not to do so in present competitive society. As one climbs the institutional ladder and escape the family structure, you will find that you meet with the institutional subject more often, the 'authoritarian personality' (to use Adorno's terminology). Indeed, in the UK the term 'institutional racism' has become accepted generally as an existing problem, and institutional racism cannot function without actual institutional racists, of course. Amongst this, people are certainly complex, we are not saying that the political positions people have are not complicated. But they are complicated because they are a mix of the two camps, and because, on top of this, the illusions of the political positions that are possible. As regards b), this is more difficult to answer: it certainly sounds as though I (as the author of these statements) am claiming to be special in some way, that I can transcend the 'illusions of the day' and see what other people cannot.

In one sense, I would have to claim that this must be possible. It is possible for certain people to transcend their humble everyday position and understand things that the general population does not. If this were not possible we would not have many great geniuses who have made astonishing discoveries against the grain of common ideology. Well, I am not claiming genius of course, but still the possibility exists. At the same time I will say that I have tried to study the subject of aesthetics and alienation for many years, and with study and concentration on a problem you learn things, things become clearer, this is simple hard work. But anyway, why should we be so certain that people do not tacitly, anyway, already recognize the reality of this position and in many ways just play along with the accepted norms for the sake of a peaceful life with regard to the existing institutions?

In this latter sense, it is not that people are really in a total illusion, like zombies, but that they are acting to a social script and are often aware (though it 'comes natural' to them to act this way) that they are doing so. In fact a lot of humor is based on this recognition of an underlying reality that we shouldn't really refer to but nevertheless is there. Humor acts as the sort of safety valve if the repression of the truth of the situation becomes too much to bear. Human beings also enjoy playing roles and performing rituals generally anyway, tradition is a strong part of culture and ethnology, you could say, for instance, that gender is one such role that is not too hard to perform, but we tacitly recognize, often (perhaps not often enough though), that it is a performance and not an essence. So, in my defense against the charge of bigheadedness, I would say this is something we often recognize, yet we keep to the 'script'.

The real answer to this difficulty, and a complex one, exists in the relation of feelings to social alienation created by the means of production which tend to form a cycle in which we operate. In the reciprocal relations that occur here, alienation becomes glorified by the media as the 'true state' of humanness. Yet at the same time this state is also an antagonism to the genuine human being. I am far from opposing here a 'natural Man' as a subject to the ideological subject, except in one sense: the human species was not formed, did not evolve, in the period of class struggle, which has been very short in evolutionary terms, and so does not necessarily equate with the 'natural Man' supposed by modern capitalist economics. In fact I would say on the contrary, the social and altruistic nature of the species is antagonistic. So, yes, in this sense, we are indeed counterpoising a 'natural' against this 'natural'.

But we digress: all modern political arguments seem to lead to a single argument and question: to Stalin versus Hitler. It was for this reason I suppose that Godwin created his 'law' of blogs, although it mainly refers to Hitler and Nazi comparisons (although it may also be expanded to imply any of this type of figure); Wikipedia:

"Godwin's law (also known as Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies or Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies[1][2]) is a humorous observation made by Mike Godwin in 1990[2] that has become an Internet adage. It states: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."[2][3]  In other words, Godwin observed that, given enough time, in any online discussion—regardless of topic or scope—someone inevitably criticizes some point made in the discussion by comparing it to beliefs held by Hitler and the Nazis.

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There are many corollaries to Godwin's law, some considered more canonical (by being adopted by Godwin himself)^[3] than others.^[1] For example, there is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress.^[8] This principle is itself frequently referred to as Godwin's law. It is considered poor form to raise such a comparison arbitrarily with the motive of ending the thread. There is a widely recognized corollary that any such ulterior-motive invocation of Godwin's law will be unsuccessful.^[9]

Godwin's law applies especially to inappropriate, inordinate, or hyperbolic comparisons of other situations (or one's opponent) with Nazis."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_Law

Whilst the 'law' does not and should not prevent genuine discussion of Nazism and Hitler or fascism where this is relevant, it is often, I found, used on blogs in precisely this way, to prevent discussion of the history, specifically of Europe and its last world war. At the same time, the blog law tends to function to deny (whilst secretly recognizing it as a phenomenon) that all blog discussions seem to be inexorably drawn towards the political issue that the last world war was fought over: fascism versus communism. Blogs are merely an example, I suggest, of a kind of cultural injunction, almost a taboo that exists in this space. In this sense it tends to act as a prohibition against recognizing everything that I have stated above about the two great camps of politics. As I see it, Stalin/ism is the real focus of the law. The argument regarding Stalin, Stalin's existence, acts as the universal position that says we may pass through the toll booth without changing our political-philosophical currency. It also says that any defense of Stalin is 'beyond the pale', even more so than Hitler. We may not discuss Stalin even in the context of Nazism, because to do so would be to challenge the accepted ideological norm of a 'balance' of forces, of bourgeois politics as the great balancer between two extremes that are essentially the same, two forms of evil, which of course we all know as the Cold War ideology.

This ideology was the post war switch in the Allies entire ideological position from support as an ally of the Soviets to outright antagonism. It was the switch necessary (whatever the actual complex circumstances) so that the ruling class and capitalism could return to its pre-war narrative of the evils of socialism, a switch it had to make, and was successful in making. For this reason the anti-Stalin position is essential to this ideology. The existence of an evil figure on the Left is essential to the modern concept of democratic politics and the entire notion of political 'extremes' of Left and Right balanced by universalist humanism, extremes which I am saying, on the contrary, are the only real political positions that exist.

Are we saying that Stalin and Stalinism did not really exist, that the 'phenomenon' is a figment of bourgeois illusion making, that it is not as evil or equal to Hitlerism, am I saying that Stalin's opposition to Hitler was pure and progressive, 'the good', etc? No, I am not saying this, such would hardly be a proper Marxian analysis; but it will be worth looking at the trajectory of the main proponent of the 'evil Stalin as equal to Hitler' ideology.

The Great Purge is supposed to be the fault of Stalin/Stalinism and 'his evil'; Wikipedia (I must say I support this mode of information and see no problem with it) again:

"The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938.[1][2] It involved a large-scale purge of the Communist Party and government officials, repression of peasants, Red Army leadership, and the persecution of unaffiliated persons, characterized by widespread police surveillance, widespread suspicion of "saboteurs", imprisonment, and arbitrary executions.[1] In Russian historiography the period of the most intense purge, 1937–1938, is called Yezhovshchina (Russian: ежовщина; literally, the Yezhov regime), after Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the Soviet secret police, NKVD.

In the Western World, Robert Conquest's 1968 book The Great Terror popularized that phrase. Conquest was in turn inspired by the period of terror (French: la Terreur) during the French Revolution."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purges

Conquest then joined the Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), a unit created for the purpose of combating communist influence and actively promoting anti-communist ideas, by fostering relationships with journalists, trade unions and other organizations.^[1] In 1956, Conquest left the IRD and became a freelance writer and historian. Some of his books were partly distributed through Praeger Press, a US company which published a number of books at the request of the CIA.

(…)

Some critics have argued that examination of archives following the USSR's collapse in 1991 challenge many of Conquest's statements.[15]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Conquest

Now, Robert Conquest's personal role in this construction is pivotal in that it is his work that generally feeds into the mainstream media and consciousness as 'the truth' about the Soviet Union (SU) and Stalin as an evil figure representing the SU, and it turn representing all forms of (should we say consistent or authoritative) Left socialism. It is not exactly difficult to detect that he is an agent (whether factually or not) of that thing known as 'the west' (if we treat this term as synonymous with advanced democratic capitalism), and that his ideology fits into the rightist framework of understanding history, and the fact that he started as a Communist only adds to this. One of the primary ways that he derives huge figures for death rates in the purges is by adding together the deaths from famines. Apart from this simple subterfuge, these famines were a feature of Russian life (and death) long before the Soviets came to power, and the Soviets were of course trying to eradicate them. The other salient aspect of this, however, is the background ideology or philosophy at work here, and the concept of the 'terror', the idea of an all powerful evil force to which any death or destruction may be attributed in a society. Now, it is noticeable that such an ideology is itself rather 'Stalinist', in the sense that it really believes and asserts repeatedly that such an evil overarching quasi-mystical force is actually possible and exists and operates as a factor in history.

The Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser has already remarked on this in his criticism of the rightist interpretation and critique of Stalinism, and counterpoised to this a very different left critique of same that looks at the problem of the cult of personality (in Essays in Self Criticism).

In November 2005 Conquest was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush, a president infamous of course for cajoling the fabrication of the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) as the excuse for the gung-ho invasion of Iraq to effect 'regime change'. It is noteworthy that President Bush, acting for his class, after the atrocity of 9/11 used the concept of a widespread 'War on Terror' as the reason to justify the invasion of another nation unrelated to this act of terrorism, and as a rationale for many other reductions in US civil rights at home, also unrelated (unless we mention class). In this way the rightist vision of history of the SU functions to generate just the kind of political conditions that are conducive to the rightists own political aims for a 'strong state', and very peculiarly in other words 'Stalinist' conditions, but minus any socialistic content. To put it more simply: Stalinism here becomes the rationale for Stalinism.

From another direction, may we not assert that Stalinism, or more specifically Hitlerism (which we seem to have forgotten), may justifiably be a real excuse for Stalinism, or a 'strongman', if we are faced with fighting a truly terrible despotic force, one of those earthbound mundane evils that may not have mystical projective powers but certainly cause a great deal of grief and destruction. Every nation, even democracies, do indeed have a way to resort to emergency laws, martial law, and the 'strongman', and we all know that Churchill represents just such an historical figure, a hero for most, but who also had a personal history and reputation that on close inspection cannot be denied of being ruthless and at times cruel (i.e. earlier in Africa, or as regards the firestorm bombing of Dresden and Hamburg).

Attached to all this is the way this same rightist fantasy of evil and good ultimate powers leads also to the repeated insistence on peace as opposed to violence, as if one side (the rightist one) somehow owns the rights to peace as such. The suggestion is that there are, again, two fundamental forces at work: those who want peace and those who are hell bent on 'mindless' destruction and death. Lately (in 2011) this argument came to be used against the Arab Revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa, and against the uprisings of the Tunisian, the Bahraini, Libyan, Egyptian, Yemeni and Syrian peoples, etc. The suggestion is that these uprising have been generated by a kind of will to violence and that the existing state and the stasis it produces is in contrast peaceful 'stability'. What we find is that the institutions of the state, because it only presents a bureaucratic violence which is insidious and hidden, is framed as peaceful, while protesters who resist repression with an open vigor are regarded as 'violent'. Recently this argument has been levelled at Greek protesters in the context of the (seemingly never ending) negotiations by the Greek government with the troika (the ECB, IMF and EU) that offered to the Eurozone currency group of nations even further austerity measures that were forcing the nation into penury and its people into ever deepening poverty. Protesters, normally peaceful, are in Greece often accompanied (except for the Communists who resisted this) by groups of other protesters (or rioters) who act in an immediately and rather too ready way with violence against the state riot police, who then have the convenient excuse to heavily tear-gas the protesters.

On one occasion in Greece during such protests (February 2012) it was (on video evidence that is widely documented on the internet) the riot police which first began the violence by firing down into the packed crowd of protesters, only after this did the stone throwers begin attacking the riot police, who began their familiar routine of surrounding the mass of peaceful protesters and herding them by copious amounts of teargas. To cut the story short, on this night many shops and buildings, including historic ones, were the next day reported as burnt out, smashed and looted. Some were ostensibly targets of Left wing rage – such as the HQ of the fascist party (Laos), or some were loosely connected to this apparent agenda (the cinema which had been used as a Gestapo torture chamber, as well as banks). The destruction was quite widespread. Naturally the Greek press and the government mostly, but not totally, avoided the question of parastatal elements involved in agent provocateur acts, and described the violence in terms of wanton thuggery and 'mindless evil'. In the UK comparisons were made sometimes to the recent English riots and looting (which nevertheless also gave rise to questions over the sudden reluctance or inability of the nation's police to contain it). The narrative was clear: protest against the state was a form of terror and evil that had to be eradicated, and reflected that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Greek people. This came after months of descriptions on blogs etc of Greek people as lazy and inefficient, too expecting of 'entitlements', and 'not living within their means' and thus needing constant loans in the crisis.

The Greek people, and its kind of state, were essentially becoming the scapegoats for the global capitalist crisis in the western media. The case of Ireland was financially at least as grave, if not worse, than Greece, but all the concentration was on the plight of Greece as a 'special case'. This barely hidden racism, since it had no justification in rationality (in fact in the blogs it was hardly concealed at all, and was allowed as if 'fair comment'), on a broader level was reflected in the insulting name for the badly affected southern states, PIIGS (for Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain). Tellingly, these are all states which still had unfinished business to deal with after the last world war: for instance the legacy of the Junta in Greece and of Franco in Spain; Greek people were actually still in the process of trying to gain some war reparations from Germany over a well known massacre of civilians. Disregarding the doubts over who is responsible for the violence of the protesters, we have here, I would argue, two kinds of violence presenting itself: the one is state violence and the other is people's force resisting this. Part of the state violence, when it is not tear-gassing people, is 'peaceful', in the sense that it presents itself ostensibly at least through lawful methods and bureaucratic processes to implement austerity. Some of these methods are doubtful in terms of their Greek constitutional legitimacy, but we can leave that aside too. What is austerity? It is the systematic reduction in the living standards and welfare benefits of the ordinary people of Greece (and other nations). These are generally not the people who were or should be held responsible in the sense of punishment for the global crisis, but who seem to be being treated as such, and we must place this in the European context of big bankers still receiving colossal financial rewards even for their total failure and need to be bailed out from the public purse, i.e. the very people who were being 'punished'. The people of Greece were and are very angry about this situation and they resist it. They feel (obviously) justified in this resistance.

What happens? A few buildings, property, some historic, get burnt in the struggle, little proof of who did it (the earlier Marfan bank atrocity may be the exception). The bourgeoisie are generally horrified. In actual fact the media horror expressed at the buildings and shops being burnt down as a result (apparently) of the anger over the severe state imposed austerity seems to be far higher than, say, passion against the massacres of civilians taking place concurrently in the city of Homs in Syria, who the UN and Arab League have failed miserably to protect even in words. For this we get mere sadness and some mild hand wringing, even prominent Left figures (such as Seamus Milne of The Guardian newspaper) walks away from the Syrian issue saying it is too 'toxic' and offered no plan of action even for the Left. In the UK, persons have been arrested and imprisoned for supporting and encouraging the riots in words only, such as through the new social media. So in this sense free speech is being curtailed over an issue that could be aired in this respect: is violent rioting (even, in contrast to protesting) never legitimate? Is the expression of anger by the people never justified? Let us forget for the moment the easy way in which the rightists will confuse and conflate, deliberately and for their own project, riots with protest. Is it never ever justified? Wanton destruction is only wanton and mindless when it has absolutely no point to it. To fulfill this it would have to be to all intents and purposes mad, i.e. psychopathic, and in that sense would lead us to a different problem since psychopaths are not considered responsible subjects. Such destruction as we have seen in Greece is not psychopathic though, it is anger about something and in response to a definite political event. You might say it is an expression (if genuine) of – if you attack me this way, I will attack you this way. The working class and people are unable to defend themselves or express their anger through legal constitutional means from the austerity measures that are (against the legal Greek constitution anyway, and even against the principles, at least, of the European Charter) reducing their lives in fact, so all that is left is (apparently) illegal methods. It is clear that by calling these methods 'mindless' (the repeated refrain in the press) as well as naming it 'rioting' is a way to link ordinary peoples protest to the general idea of 'terror'. To fight this 'terror' the (Greek in this instance) state feels justified in its violence or its own 'terror' as a way of combating it, so it resorts to the 'Stalinist' position (or perhaps we should say the Hitlerist in this case). If we add to this the suspicion that the state is encouraging and/or allowing this response and see that parastatal elements are included, then a picture emerges of a state itself going beyond legality, becoming an illegitimate state, a state which is no longer interested in performing its democratic function with regard to its people but only interested in its survival as a form of power become arbitrary and beyond law.

It is this kind of arbitrary power, which is being ascribed to radicals constantly under the name of Stalinism, yet arises from the position of Stalinism (or Hitlerism), which says we must not voice this position as the people, even as a concern about power, and we must accept that we all want 'peace', even though this is a peace which kills us: what is, we must ask, the ultimate austerity measure, do we not already know? Yes we do, it as Auschwitz. The same people who would call this hyperbole would call those who alluded to the early indications of the rise of the Nazi party and its dangers as conspiracy mongers and paranoiacs. There is a fundamental and deep hypocrisy at work here and it can be simplified down to this: they, the bourgeoisie, feel it is wrong to make a revolution, to overthrow an oppressive regime if there is nothing for them to gain from it. In Libya there was something to gain for capitalists from intervention: politically Gaddafi had appeared sometimes in the popular press as 'socialist', so intervention could be seen to be both anti-socialist (a strategic political gain), and there was oil present, plus the geography and demography helped, it was 'doable'. In Syria this was not the case, and the much vaunted democratic moral imperatives did not play a strong role, all the capitalist nations failed (at least in the first months, as I began to write this) in their self appointed 'duty' (including China and Russia). If Syria is a bourgeois revolution with working class components as well as an independence struggle against foreign tyranny, and as well as against home grown corruption and despotism, the world's bourgeoisie can only, at the moment, see its working class aspect, its courage and real violent resistance, as a threat.

One additional aspect of the problem of Stalin and Stalinism is a historical difficulty: if this were to be taken as true, how may we approach the bare fact that the Soviet Union and Stalin was an ally during the war and that our (say, British) press was affectionate towards the figure of Stalin (Uncle Joe etc)? Should we 'westerners', to be consistent, say that this 'realpolitik' (at best) was complicity in war crimes? This would of course be very awkward and in fact of course it does not happen, in its place there is a void, the question is not confronted, it is simply never grappled with. Instead a kind of historical anachronism is produced, wherein, if 'we' ever think it, for the duration of the war it was 'normal' to be allies with the Soviet Union, but now, after a certain dividing line in time, it is not, and this 'doublethink', although contradictory, coexists. Common ideology has no inbuilt necessity, after all, to be consistent.

The existence of this line of demarcation, the division of future from past and the inability to rationally configure the one by and with the other, creates an historical anachronism and leads to a kind of violence in the present, based on it. For, if we cannot address this, it is a kind of repression. What is being repressed? If we were projected back to, say, Europe 1943, a British subject could not so easily openly exclaim "Stalin is an evil bastard", but now it is the reverse, if you do not claim he is an evil bastard you are an evil bastard. The violence here is that which prevents us from examining this as a genuine historical and ideological problem. It prevents us from researching the subject matter in a serious way. The only option that appears to be open to us is to strike the rightist attitude and interpretation of history. As I said, this rightist attitude does not exactly replace the figure of Stalin with anything much other than its own vision of a 'strong man', i.e. with its own Stalinism (e.g. Putin for instance). The violence of ideology is always based in this rejection of rational discourse, but the rejection does not appear so much in ideology, since it is irrational and therefore in a sense outside of ideas, but in affective practice, or in the affective practice that accompanies the ideology and appears at the moment it becomes aware that the line of demarcation and the prohibition is being challenged somehow, which in this case is a kind of historical line. In other words, it surfaces as an emotional response. This emotional response is, after the fact, usually excused through moral and ethical terms: with indignation, horror, astonishment, bluster, apoplexy, and a shutting down of the lines of rational communication, and then, censorship, the final act of which is to actually kill. And yes, ironically, Stalinism (if it is indeed what they say it is) itself followed this course, even (and this is the sad aspect of it) after it became unnecessary for the ruthlessness of war. We have in the Stalinist insistence on the end of class struggle in socialism the illusions of the post war Soviet state, since a state, of course, cannot be the end of class struggle given its end is the ending of the necessity for a state (this is the simple, basic, Leninist principle).

This is why I think here, on this ground, socialism grew its own, home grown, false dialectic. On the one side we have the notion of gradualism and total cessation of struggle in Stalinism, and on the other the ideas of the total continuation of continual revolutionary struggle in Trotskyism. What this represents is actually the same repression, in the end the repression of the science of social change that is Marxism, by being happier with the condition of stasis produced by holding apart these two sides and preventing synthesis. Why should this happen within socialism (ignoring the antagonistic pressure from outside)? A provisional answer may be this: socialism has no magic immunity from ideology, and especially from the ideology of its own victories and disappointments. There is an ideology of Marxism as much as any other politics, in fact even more so because of what is at stake.

Federal IDs for All Workers: A Trial Balloon?

Thomas Riggins

According to an article in last Thursday's Wall Street Journal (2-21-13) the Senate is considering a bipartisan plan to require all working people in the United States, citizen as well as non-citizen workers, to carry a biometric ID card with their finger prints or other markers in order for them to "prove" they have a right to work in this country.

This plan has come about as a result of bipartisan negotiations on an immigration bill. It was originally proposed for non-citizens but the senators involved, including Democrats as well as Republicans, decided the entire working class should be biometrically IDed. Some civil libertarians suspect the real function of the card is to create a national identity card that could be used to track and locate people wherever they happen to be-- at work, at home, in hospitals or airports, on the road, etc (the card could have a chip for this purpose-- Big Brother indeed!).

There are eight Senators on the committee working on a draft for an immigration bill and five of them favor the new ID including John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Charles Schumer. But they are not insisting on the ID at this point, merely tossing around the idea. The Wall Street Journal report is clearly a trial balloon to see what the reaction will be to this universal (for working class people) ID card.

The purpose of the new ID is to let bosses know what the legal status of a worker is and also to discourage illegal immigration since immigrants without the card won't get jobs (or so the plan is). The new system will replace the current E-Verify which lets the boss match a worker with a list of social security numbers; but this is a flawed system because of stolen, forged, and borrowed social security cards, according to the WSJ.

While ostensibly there are other ways to have immigrants IDed which the senators are looking at, Senator Graham (R., S.C.) thinks that only a biometric ID card (for all workers) will work. He is quoted as saying "This is the public's way of contributing to solving the problem" of people being in the US illegally. In other words, the contribution of the US working class is to allow itself to be potentially tracked by the government 24/7 so that the bosses will know who is and who is not "legal." The "public" would be wise to vote Sen. Graham out of office.

Senator Jeff Flake  (R., Ariz), Sen. McCain's comrade in reaction, also on the committee, is also favorable (but says he is still open) to a biometric ID: "You have to give employers the tools" they need to check out potential workers, he maintains. Would the Senate also consider an ID for employers so that workers could check them out as well with respect, for example, to their attitudes towards  the legal rights of unions, decent wages, workers rights, sick leave, and racist attitudes (if any), as well as women's rights, and views on voter suppression. Workers are more in need of tools to check out bosses than bosses are to check out workers.

In 2010 Senators McCain and "Chuck" Schumer (D., N.Y.) devised a plan for a biometric ID card for immigrants (it would have had their fingerprints or a scan of the veins on the top of a hand) but today Schumer, along with Sen. Dick Durban (D., Ill.)-- who also backed biometric cards previously-- says the new bill they are working on may not include such a card.

President Obama does not back a universal biometric ID card but is in favor of getting biometric information from undocumented people who are in the US as a precondition for getting "legal status." As far as a universal card is concerned he advocates a "fraud-resistant, tamper-resistant Social Security card."

The remaining three senators on the committee are Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), Michael Bennet (D., Colo.) [both "no comment"] and Robert Melendez (D., N.J.) who wants "antifraud measures" (the Senator is having his own "fraud" problems right now, perhaps the Senate needs some measure of anti-fraud protection that voters can have access to?)

At any rate, this trial balloon has lifted off into the atmosphere and the weather reports are beginning to come in.  C. Calabrese of the ACLU says, the ID "becomes in essence a permission slip to do all of the ordinary things that are your rights as an American." Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute [originally the Charles Koch Foundation co-founded in 1974 by one of the Koch brothers] says "It's not only a gross violation of individual privacy, it's an enormously high-cost policy that will have an incredibly low to negligible benefit." Would it not be so bad if it were cheap and effective? Personally I don't trust the Cato people to care all that much about the violations of worker's privacy.

There are also other opinions coming in for and against the biometric card-- it is pretty much a mixed bag, but it seems there is opposition and support from both the liberal and conservative camps. While it really is a big civil liberties issue and the adoption of the biometric ID for all workers smacks of Big Brother perhaps, in our current deficit crazed political landscape, the economic cost will prohibit its adoption as a study out of the University of California (Berkeley) says it will cost over 22 billion dollars to put it in place and over 2 billion annually to run it. Progressives will have a major fight on their hands if that doesn't stop it.

Lessons and Conclusions from Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism an Infantile Disorder

Thomas Riggins

In the last chapter, the tenth, of his 1920 book "Left-Wing" Communism an Infantile Disorder" Lenin looks back over the previous nine chapters and then draws several conclusions about the then current state of the world struggle for socialism and also predicts some future developments. Let us see how accurate he was from our point of view some 93 years later.

He begins by looking at the Russian Revolution of 1905 and remarking that two lessons can be drawn from it. First that the industrial working class (the proletariat) has far more power and influence in society  than its actual numbers would suggest. It does not have to be a majority of the population in order to lead the population in a revolutionary direction. By waging economic and political strikes it can start an armed uprising aimed at the ruling class. Granted that 1905 was premature, but the tactics developed then paid off in 1917. Second, the creation of Soviets in 1905 was the beginning of a new way to organize the masses and to lead a mass struggle against capitalism.

 I think we can give Lenin high marks here. Even though only at the beginning of a new revolutionary upsurge, due to the on going crisis of world capitalism, we can already see the working class more and more organizing both economically and politically to lead the struggle against the rule of the banks and financial and industrial oligarchs.  "Soviets" is a Russian word, so whether you want to use it  or the term "worker's councils" or "the occupy movement" organizations similar to these will have to be eventually set up as the bourgeois governments lose control of the economy and working people have to take it over and direct it towards serving the needs of the people.

Having said that, we must admit that Lenin's optimism about the near future in his own day was completely wrong. He thought it was clear that bourgeois parliamentary types of government were clearly on the decline and would be replaced throughout the world by Soviet type governments. That trend, after the rise of fascism, World War II, and the Cold War, is no longer discernible in the early 21st century.

Lenin was convinced that "communism"-- i.e., revolutionary Marxism was on the ascent  in the working class movement against its two  main enemies "Menshevism" (by which he meant nationalism and opportunism under whatever forms in different countries) on the one hand, and ultra-leftism ("Left-Wing" communism) on the other.

After a hectic century of struggle we currently have five "communist" countries in which both those currents have been nominally overcome (at least as openly argued for positions). In the rest of the developed world Menshevism is alive and well as a popular option in the working  class movement and "revolutionary" Marxism, where it exists at all, is a very small fraction of the working class (although in some countries it is growing and radicalizing thousands of workers in response to the calls for "austerity" in response to the general crisis of capitalism). "Ultra-leftism" has been reduced to small cult-like extremist groups on the fringes of the anti-capitalist struggle with little or no influence within the working class.

The Second International (which Lenin thought "virtually dead") is alive and kicking while the Third International, which Lenin held was winning the dual between the Internationals "on a world-wide scale"- is, as they say, "history." Lenin was blinded by the stunning successes of the Bolshevik revolution and its positive reception by the international working class. The founding of the Soviet Union in 1922, just two years after his book on left-wing communism came out would seem to have justified all this optimism.

What else did Lenin think was on the agenda for the near future, or at least the not very distant future? Well, he thought the international working class was ripe to be led towards the construction of "a world Soviet republic." This is a pipe dream today vis a vis the near future. However, the preconditions for such a republic remain exactly as Lenin stated them.

There are, he said, two FUNDAMENTAL principles of communism that parties have to work towards-- one is Soviet power (i.e., working people actually meeting in councils and taking political and economic power as a result; the other is "the dictatorship of the proletariat"-- an infelicitous  expression these days-- but this only means that the working people once in power will not allow the bourgeoisie to engage in active opposition to the worker's new government.

Lenin thought the establishment of these two fundamental principles on a world wide basis was the historic task of the working class  in his day. As it turned out it was all the working class could do to keep itself from being crushed by fascism and economic depression and it failed to live up to the expectations Lenin mistakenly, as it tuned out, had had for it.

He thought the "chief thing" necessary for the struggle he saw coming had already been achieved by the time he wrote LWC. The chief thing was that internationally the vanguard of the working class had been won over to the need for proletarian dictatorship and the establishment of the Soviet system and was "against bourgeois democracy." Let us grant that Lenin was correct about this (although I have my doubts). Even so this "vanguard" was not able to pull off the NEXT step in the struggle--i.e., "the search after forms of the TRANSITION or the APPROACH to the proletarian revolution." It was unable to convince the majority of the working masses to follow its lead and remained a militant contingent of the working masses but not THE vanguard (except in a theoretical sense).

Lenin was well aware of the necessity of winning over the majority as he said, "Victory cannot be won with a vanguard alone." And the broad masses of the people cannot be won over by agitation and  propaganda "alone." No, "the fundamental law of all great revolutions" is that "the masses must have their own political experience."

Well, in the U.S. and Europe they have had plenty of time to gather this experience and unless they are suffering from some type of attention deficit disorder (ADD) we can only hypothesize some failure on the part of the socialist leadership (opportunism, nationalism) OR, dispute the horrendous world upheavals that have rent the world in the last ninety years, the three crucial constellations of social forces have not come together which portend the outbreak of a world wide revolutionary movement  such as Lenin expected in his time.

ADD is not to be taken seriously (only about 2.5% of the world's population, plus or minus a few percentage points, appear to suffer from ADD according to many experts) so what are the three social conditions that have to be in action? Lenin says that millions and tens of millions of people must be on the move and ready for progressive revolutionary leadership to change the system.

 If this is the case then revolutionary Marxists must find (1) ALL the hostile bourgeois class forces usually united against the workers are embroiled in internecine struggles among themselves and have so weakened themselves they can no longer effectively oppose the workers ; (2) the petty bourgeois democrats (Mensheviks of whatever stripe) and their parties have so discredited themselves politically that the workers no longer have faith in them and will not vote for them; (3) the working people are becoming more and more determined, as the struggle continues, to support revolutionary forces dedicated to over throwing the bourgeoisie and creating  a workers government.

All three conditions must hold and if they do "revolution is indeed ripe", and if the Marxists have correctly understood that these conditions are in fact present and they act on them at the RIGHT MOMENT, then "victory is assured." This is a tall order indeed! I can see why "victories" are few and far between, especially considering the fact that Marxist leaders in many countries they already "controlled" were blind to the fact that they were the ones their "own" workers had lost faith in. Well, as Lenin pointed out earlier, it is not a crime to err, but it is not to learn from the error and correct it. The five "Leninist" states still standing have their work cut out for them.

Here is another important conclusion that Lenin draws looking back over the history of the socialist movement and adapting it to the struggle he sees coming. That is, that since the really class conscious vanguard can be numbered in the thousands, while a revolutionary upsurge is to be measured by the activity of millions who are not at a high level of class consciousness but reacting to oppressive conditions in an almost instinctive manner, the vanguard must be able to master all forms of revolutionary struggle-- both legal and illegal-- and be ready to correctly act under rapidly changing conditions.

It is relatively easy to act in a revolutionary manner once the pot of discontent has boiled over, Lenin points out; the really difficult time for the class conscious Marxist is to know how to behave in times that are not revolutionary, are indeed relatively calm and peaceful and revolution looks to be a far off possibility, or no possibility at all,  and the bourgeoisie is seemingly benign or even when it is behaving in a reactionary manner does not seem about to lose control of the state.

In these situations when conditions for "direct, open really mass and really revolutionary struggle DO NOT YET EXIST" it is the task of the revolutionary Marxist not to lose sight of the revolutionary ends even when the masses of working people "are incapable of immediately appreciating the need for revolutionary methods of action."  Lenin says in these conditions the main task for socialists in both America and Western Europe [nowadays we might as well include the whole capitalist world] is to find a way to lead the oppressed classes "to the real, decisive and revolutionary struggle." I think if Lenin were around today he would see this as the real task  of 21st Century socialism. The problem is, to figure out how to do this without falling into the traps of opportunism (Menshevism) on the one hand, and/or being too focused on national peculiarities and interests at the cost of not maintaining an international outlook on the other.

Lenin understood this problem and stipulated that Marxists must actively engage with the political struggles in their own countries but in a NEW way completely different from the usual way of working in the union movement and in political movements influenced by the traditional (and opportunist) left. They must propagate Marxist theory to the masses with leaflets and meetings and work not only with the advanced industrial workers but also get involved with "the unorganized and downtrodden poor" and their election work should NOT be aimed at winning elections per se ("to 'get seats' in parliament") but to educate and inform the masses about what Marxism is all about, they should "try to get people to think, and draw the masses into the struggle, to take the bourgeoisie at its word and utilize the machinery it has set up, the elections it has appointed, and the appeals it has made to the people."

 This may have to be done within the rules of the bourgeoisie but the Marxists will always keep to their own slogans and advocate Marxist solutions and not water down their positions to curry favor with the opportunists and their followers. Lenin says this is a very hard job to do, "and extremely difficult in America" but nevertheless "it can and must be done." Well, this is the message of the 1920s to us and to the 2020s: is it still appropriate or is it out of date and ready for the ash heap?

One must note, in considering this question, that the tactics put forth by Lenin were based on the historical conditions that he found himself in and his interpretation of what they portended. Here is the context as he understood it.  The masses were on the rise everywhere as a result of colossal destruction inflicted upon the people by the savage world wide war waged by imperialism from 1914 to 1918 "for the sole purpose of deciding whether the British or the German robbers should plunder the largest number of countries." Social "sparks" were flying every where and revolutions could flare up at any moment and the Marxists had to be ready and able to take advantage of them.

The Russian Revolution had shook the world and the bourgeoisie was "terrified of Bolshevism" and over reacting to the perceived threat to such an extent they were actually helping Bolshevism grow in popularity with the working class. Lenin refers to the Palmer raids when the American bourgeoisie had "completely lost its head" and arrested thousands and thousands of people suspected of being Bolsheviks. This could only help the cause he thought because it helped to get "the masses interested in the essence and significance of Bolshevism."

But this revolutionary fervor was tamped down, a great economic depression gripped the world leading to another explosion of a world wide imperialist war (1939-1945) , followed by revolutionary upheavals which were countered by a resurgent imperialism led by the U.S. in the form of the "Cold War." McCarthyism was a revival of the Palmer "red scare" and definitely showed how the bourgeoisie could "lose its head"-- but (pace Lenin) did not "help the cause" by moving the working class to become more interested in Marxism. Finally the "Cold War" eventuated in the demise of the Soviet Union and east European socialism. So, looking at the world of today, we have to decide if the tactics Lenin put forth in the 1920s are still the best guide to action in the struggle to overthrow capitalism. Are there any after shocks from the Russian Revolution still to come?  What tactics could be better?

Lenin himself was not unmindful of the fact that the capitalist countries would gang up on Russia and do all in their power to crush "Bolshevism"; he just did not think it was possible for them to do it. He tells us that the bourgeoisie thinks of practically only one thing when it hears the word "Bolshevism": "insurrection, violence, and terror; it therefore  strives to prepare itself for resistance and opposition primarily in this field." This sounds familiar.

 He even thinks they may succeed for a time in putting down the Marxist "contagion" (their favorite word) by violence and the killing of "hundreds, thousands, and hundreds of thousands" of revolutionary Marxists (as they have already done in India, Hungary and Germany-- [and were about to do in China])-- but these are only the actions "of all historically doomed classes." Lenin is a little too cavalier here, I fear, and certainly underestimated the future death toll inflicted on the worker's movement by the capitalists-- especially their Nazi incarnation which cost about 25 million Soviet lives alone.

At any rate Lenin thinks they will fail to eliminate revolutionary Marxism because the "contagion" is too wide spread and has infected every aspect of the capitalist organism-- its social, political, economic, educational, and moral institutions-- Marxist ideas are every where and the corruption and exploitation of capitalism can no longer be hidden from the masses who must, eventually, overthrow it. "Life," he says, " will assert itself." Today, when the bourgeoisie is busily destroying the planet itself and threatening the existence of billions of people these views of Lenin remind us how far we still have to go to rid the earth of the exploiters and to educate masses of people in the fight against "the frenzied ravings of the bourgeoisie."

In his day Lenin thought that only ONE THING was preventing the victory of the socialist movement from rapidly coming about-- is it the same thing that is holding it back in our time as well?-- "namely, the universal and through awareness" on the part of all revolutionary Marxists dedicated to the achievement of socialism "in all countries of the necessity to display the utmost FLEXIBILITY in their tactics." This is something that from Lenin's day to the present most Marxists have failed to learn how to put into practice.

Finally, Lenin explains why the leading Marxists of the pre-World War I Second International (Kautsky, Otto Bauer, and Plekhanov to name just a few of the better known) fell into opportunism and took the capitalist road ( if I may use that expression). It was their lack of flexibility and inability to properly understand dialectics. "The principal reason for their bankruptcy was that they were hypnotized by a definite form of growth of the working-class movement and socialism, forgot all about the one-sidedness of that form, were afraid to see the break-up which objective conditions made inevitable and continued to repeat simple and, at first glance, incontestable axioms that had been learned by rote…."

In other words, they did not appreciate the revolutionary environment created by the war and its aftermath and attempted to impose bourgeois political legitimacy and parliamentary democracy on the socialist movement which they had learned in the post 1848 struggle of the working class to organize itself and develop its consciousness. By failing to ally with the new revolutionary consciousness (such as manifested by the Soviets and revolutionary worker's councils) they ended up on the side of the bourgeoisie and against the workers. At least this seems to me to be his position.

Considering the situation to be as he described it, Lenin held that the two trends within the socialist movement, he called them Right doctrinairism (opportunism) and Left doctrinairism (ultra-leftism), had to be opposed but that the Right was far more dangerous than the Left (which was new and experience would soon correct).  Today the ultra-left is confined to fringe groups or to groups that thrive in countries with an under developed working class due to backward economic conditions, while almost all of the major political parties following the dispensation of the Second International are completely controlled by opportunist non revolutionary cadre that are running dogs (another useful expression from another context) of the dominate forces of finance and industrial capital.

 Those remaining socialist parties and groups which consider themselves "Leninist" in orientation will find Lenin's book on "Left-Wing" Communism still a meaningful tool to use in the struggles of the 21st century as will others who are struggling with the problems of organizing the working people to take political and economic action to liberate themselves and humanity at large from the scourge of capitalism.