Being Considerate (and Scientific Socialism)

Because of the taboo nature of Marxism these days, and its absence, even ridicule in popular press culture, I wanted to ask myself the question: "what are the consequences of the absence of these ideas for the ruling bourgeois class"? We might fairly easily, or at least more commonly, conjecture what effects its absence has on the working class and the oppressed, or on Marxists and communists themselves.

Considering that Marxism is scientific socialism, this amounts to asking what are the consequences of the absence of a science. This latter framing of the question of course assumes that Marxism is scientific, which the bourgeoisie and its fellow travelers obviously deny, along with everything else. But this is the claim of Marxist theory, that it is a scientific theory of socialism, and of society in general and its economic development, and it is a claim that has never been refuted in any serious way.

The answer to the question is not just that the absence of Marxism constitutes a victory for the bourgeoisie, which it does in a small way, in the first place, this is because Marxism is a product itself of bourgeois culture and science, of its own advancement on what went previously. But also the absence and exclusion of Marxism or scientific socialism from the debate leaves a gap in science where only ideology can rule. And this gap and its ideology does not only impact on the class enemies of the bourgeoisie. We have all by now heard of 'blowback', the (mostly) unintended consequences of actions that react back upon the maker of those actions. Well, this would be one form of feedback from the absence of scientific socialism: i.e. the inability to accurately predict the course of future society and to consider how such actions may have effects that rebound (not to mention collateral damage).

I came to thinking about this when I was examining another question, about being considerate to others. In one sense it means having good manners and discretion. We all know what it means to be considerate, it means taking care to account for what other people feel and think in various situations and with regard to your own actions and their consequences; but it also has a less benign sounding application: if a person has the capacity to foretell another person's feelings, and so their actions, better, if they 'can think in other peoples shoes' as Brecht said somewhere, this faculty is obviously quite useful if you have enemies whose behavior, say on a battlefield, needs to be foreseen so you can make the relevant strategic plans.

One aspect of the humanist variant of Marxist theory, that version which the bourgeoisie tends to allow into the academy for the sake of seeming 'balanced', would appear to be very much concerned with caring about people, about the oppressed and the exploited and the underdog, you might say this is its popular cultural position on the 'left' of the so called political spectrum, and you might think that this means it is considerate, and thus able to understand its opponents, to have empathy. However this does not seem to be the case.

Humanism is allied quite strongly with the spiritual side of things, even when ostensibly materialist: the 'human spirit' according to humanism, or 'human nature' will win out in history, to put it crudely, for the sake of humankind. It believes in an essence of humanness, in certain incorruptible qualities or essences.

Marxist humanism inherits this bourgeois philosophy, which was revolutionary once in the struggle against the old aristocracy and the divine rights of kings etc, but now is generally reactionary (though this can still depend on the social circumstances). Putting essences into the human pot, in short, means that this Marxism becomes, peculiarly, and usually (there are always exceptions), insensitive to what is going on materially around it, since it tends to see its principles and ideals everywhere as essences and overlooks the facts, not perhaps the bare facts, but more importantly the subtleties that you might pick up when you are, e.g., a considerate kind of person (this is beside the phenomenon of the probably many cadres of 'Marxism' that are little more than police spy versions and are therefore obviously going to be crude, misinformed, and deliberately put people off the subject in any case).

In western Ukraine recently (May 2014) the far right, including Nazis, have been supported by western political leaders in an uprising against a corrupt leader and parliament. One characteristic that the far right have is a severe lack of consideration for their fellows, and in this case the easterners living in the country, which mirrors the broadly crude attitude of fascists towards the value of human life in general, and their essentialism, which is also a crude form (again) of humanism and their crude ideals (strength, unity based on fear of the alien, chauvinism, absolute identity, sexism, etc). National Socialism has socialism in the name of course but there is actually nothing about it that is socialist, unless you call being fake socialist socialism. It is simply that fascism sometimes simulates the popular radical ideology of socialism (popular i.e. in times of crisis despite the taboo), in order to gain power, just as it has in Ukraine. It is highly likely that in Ukraine people did not even see the struggle against the corrupt capitalist president as a socialistic one (which it was), therefore the Nazi elements of Right Sector and Svoboda came to the fore in the struggle and could channel the anger in the direction it wanted.

It's flaw, however, is that it lacks consideration, and it always fails to 'think in other peoples shoes', a factor which leads it into making strategic mistakes. To it, being crude and unfeeling is a strength, but its strength is its big weakness. The same in a smaller way is true when the bourgeoisie are successful at turning Marxism into a taboo, which they have been. This success rules out a scientific understanding of society and leads to them misunderstanding their own position, it also leads to support for foolish and extreme powers, and to a lack of consideration for their own actions, being blinded already as they are by profit in the short term.

With regard to the Ukraine conflict, almost all the press, including Russia Today, refers to the protesters who are anti the fascist led government in Kiev as 'Pro Russian', and in this we get a simplistic opposition between Pro Europe (or West) and Pro Russian protesters, essentialist labels that are conducive to civil war. It is clear from this that the vested profit interests of the ruling classes on both apparent sides of the struggle see no value in unearthing a deeper level of analysis, for them this crude appearance seems to serve its purpose. And up to a point it does, it tends to lead people away from socialism and into the humanist, and sometimes fascist, mode of thinking about the crisis, the best criticism that is allowed is some economic cynicism on profit motives.

A war on the mainland of central Europe serves to enable emergency measures to combat resistance to austerity measures, diverts moves to socialism into fascism, and generally confuses everything, in this sense it benefits the capitalist, who sees the possibility of extending its free trade area eastwards via the European Union. But it can only do this by exacerbating the situation and using fascist forces, now openly. These fascist forces are not reliable and do not always act as they are meant to, they are even in many cases opposed to their 'masters'. The latter fact does not matter that much to those who can profit from this circumstance and who live far away in secure places and who can move around their capital on the international markets, and this can easily also include the Russian bourgeoisie, who may not have much interest in defending eastern Ukrainian anti-fascists or socialists or those wanting a return to Soviet days even when they are 'Pro Russian'. And it is likely that those who will suffer at first will be the working classes who resist capitalist expansion.

But the flaw in the plan is that these fascist forces do not see liberal democratic capitalism (the most profitable capitalism) as their real friend or as having any future potential for them, so blowback on liberal capitalism becomes inevitable. Certainly there are those who think that they, by virtue of being wealthy, are immune to the effects of such blowback, but this is only as true as anyone, any class or faction, can be immune from the effects of, for example, human induced global warming, there is no guarantee, and in the chaos of war or of weather nobody can really be considered safe, especially in a nuclear armed world.

If we can talk about our species as a species, refer to its chances of survival as a species, we definitely need a scientific way to understand society and its relation to the rest of nature, whether Marxist or not. Us communists believe that Marxism is the current representative of this science, this of course does not mean it will stay current forever, science moves on, but it is built on its achievements, and socialist science is one of these crucial building blocks. The bourgeois lack of theory here is to actively oppose science, any science not just Marxism, that might lay claim to exactitude in social economics. The mantra in the final instance at work here is that you cannot be scientific about society, that such an effort leads to being crude, you must let it stay 'free' and this reflects the 'free market' as the essence of human nature. So in effect we have the championing of ideology over science. This element of backwardness in the bourgeois class is where it will inevitably misunderstand its own progress and take the wrong decisions even on its own survival as a class.

It is also where it becomes inconsiderate. To consider the feelings of others, to have empathy, rather than only (external) sympathy, becomes a taboo for its version of society because it shows a material kind of fellow feeling exists, it refers to that peculiarly neglected area where socialism might grow up from the 'grassroots'. In place of this the bourgeois interests place technical expertise and statistics, polls, questionnaires and surveys, and all the 'democratic' paraphernalia and rituals, overseen by corporations, to divine what 'the people' think, these corporations, all have interests to find in the data exactly what they want to see, and so they do. The 'data' is not scientific, because that is ruled out in any case, it is merely instrumental, technical, and it often points to the fact (in crises) that we 'need' technical governance (which has happened in this present crisis in e.g. Greece and Italy).

What can 'technical' mean if it is not scientific? We know the term voodoo economics; it has to be a kind of number mysticism, it must, in the modern world, resemble the sciences without ever becoming science, it is a kind of conjuring. It is the use of something without its core, without its heart, it is in this sense superficial and inconsiderate. And this is why it comes up, repeatedly, with inconsiderate policies in the real world: such as the ideological attacks on single mothers by rightist Conservative governments in the UK, or indeed it supports fascists, who then attack the weak and the alien. Certainly these targets are also scapegoats and represent other opportunities for the powers, but it is the logical illogical outcome of this instrumental anti scientific attitude and which surfaces at its most extreme in the capitalist crisis.

There are, as we know, many examples of e.g. the U.S. governments supporting fascist forces elsewhere than at home as a foreign policy, e.g. Franco in Spain. The reason on the surface is to counteract 'communism'. But this is only a small excuse for what is really a way to ensure its capitalist business interests are secured and fixed in place abroad, and a stable non democratic regime ensures this best, because an enlightened democratic administration that changes in time might represent a commercial threat (look at the recent machinations in Egypt). Fascism not only represents U.S. interests by this fixing down of authority but it also prevents the potential competitor from possibly advancing to equal terms given its backward ideology. And this is also why the most advanced capitalist bourgeoisie even needs some Marxism at home. Without such authentic internal criticism it stagnates into fascism, and this fascism is simply not so profitable for the largest corporations, and represents a level of risk to their predominance. It is a need, however, that can fail to be recognized and necessitates an enlightened bourgeois faction with a lot of power and influence in culture and which can be 'considerate' in the strategic way. The latter appears to have gone missing in regards to Ukraine, not so urgent an issue for U.S. citizens a long way away perhaps, but for the European it is a dangerous precedent to set so close to home, we have been here before.

by Gary Tedman

The Question of Stalinism and the Modern Protest

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 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, as we know, 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 theater 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 real opposition never ever happens in this structure. 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. 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 conjurer, 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.

All modern political arguments seem to lead to a single argument and question: to Stalin versus Hitler. It was for this reason 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 used (wrongly) 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 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 stated above about the two great camps of politics. 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, on the contrary, are the only real political positions that exist today, after the Holocaust.

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, are we saying that Stalin's opposition to Hitler was pure and progressive, 'the good', etc? No, 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.

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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 terrorist 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 necessary for 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 same argument has been leveled 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.

Note

An 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 stated, 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 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.

Notes on Fidel Castro (part 1) on Obama’s speech to the 60th Session of the United Nations General Assembly regarding Libya, Syria, Palestine, and the Arab Revolutions of 2011

by Gary Tedman

The Fidel text was published online in Granma (English) Havana, dated September 26, 2011

See:
http://www.granma.cu/ingles/reflections-i/26sept-40Reflex1a.html


I would like to first point out that I have the utmost respect for Fidel, but at the moment I find the arguments of some socialists and communists to be mistaken, at least in part, and I would like here to focus on a text by him which gives the chance to approach the subject head on.

To begin with, Fidel asks the rhetorical and rather loaded question:

“…what position to adopt on the NATO genocide in Libya?”

The conclusion contained in this question is that genocide has in fact taken place in Libya, conducted by NATO.

Now, asking loaded questions are more a trick of bourgeois law than Marxist science (it seeks to win the argument through rhetorical means), but here we have it. Fidel asserts the intervention in Libya is essentially the same as that of Serbia, Iraq, and Afghanistan and uses the same reasoning to justify it. To justify these assertions, he uses the following evidence drawn from past history:

“Was it not precisely the government of the UN host state which ordered the butchery in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the mercenary Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba, the invasion of the Dominican Republic, the "dirty war" in Nicaragua, the occupation of Grenada and Panama by the U.S. military forces and the massacre of Panamanians in El Chorillo? Who promoted the military coups and genocide in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, which resulted in tens of thousands of dead and disappeared?”

Note that, while all these latter accusations are correct, this does not by itself prove or mean that by default today’s military intervention by NATO in Libya is the same. For each intervention and each revolution, conflict or war has to be judged according to its specific material situation and historical circumstance. This must be done according at least to Lenin’s principles.

“Socialists have always condemned war between nations as barbarous and brutal. But our attitude towards war is fundamentally different from that of the bourgeois pacifists (supporters and advocates of peace) and of the Anarchists. We differ from the former in that we understand the inevitable connection between wars and the class struggle within the country; we understand that war cannot be abolished unless classes are abolished and Socialism is created; and we also differ in that we fully regard civil wars, i.e., wars waged by the oppressed class against the oppressing class, slaves against slave-owners, serfs against land-owners, and wage-workers against the bourgeoisie, as legitimate, progressive and necessary. We Marxists differ from both the pacifists and the Anarchists in that we deem it necessary historically (from the standpoint of Marx’s dialectical materialism) to study each war separately.”

It is a slightly worrying sign when past history is used exclusively to damn certain actions, because history is undergoing development all the time, and things, especially political positions in a time of massive economic crisis, change and often invert. We must study each war separately.

Besides, military interventions by ‘western’ powers have not all been imperialist and negative in history: the most obvious example is the intervention against the Nazi’s in Europe in WWII.

Is NATO’s intervention in Libya genocidal? Did it seek to wipe out all Libyan citizens?

I think this is untrue, I suggest that there are two sides to the conflict in Libya, and this means the situation cannot be reduced to a simple ‘NATO genocide’, ‘against Libya’. It is only possible to assert such a thing by completely separating the popular revolution that began there from its roots in the Arab Revolutions across the region, in Egypt and Tunisia, and the other uprisings that began in Algeria, Morocco, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria and Oman, as well as the protests in Iraq, and by failing to even acknowledge that the ‘rebels’ in Libya were revolutionary and received de facto support from NATO (yes, not for ‘pure’ humanitarian reasons, but the reasons do not matter much to a materialist, what matters is the act). Does Fidel think that the siege of Misrata by Gaddafi’s forces and the attack on Benghazi should have been allowed to go ahead, to proceed to their conclusion? The answer seems sadly to be, yes. With the firepower available to a modern army it is possible for a relatively small unpopular contingent, a regime, to massacre very many protesting people, perhaps to commit genocide, in order to protect its position. What was possible in the Cuban revolution (the armed guerrilla struggle against the unpopular regime) was not possible in Libya, with its different landscape (desert), number of people, and large number of foreign workers and the pre-planned use by the regime of foreign mercenaries, as well as the particular history of the borders being created to corral the Arab people into different areas capable of being overseen by imperial powers. None of this can be passed over without comment, and, frankly, the attempt to do so points to problems.

Let me skip this next bit of Fidel’s piece, where he refers to the 'race' of certain South American political leaders, I find it embarrassing that a communist should worry about ‘race’ in this way, and refer to Evo Morales as “pure millenary indigenous origin” as if it were by itself a good thing, as proof of something. It is not.

Fidel quotes extensively Chavez’s message to the UN:

“I address these words to the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization […] to confirm, on this day and in this forum, Venezuela’s total support of Palestinian statehood: the right of Palestine to become a free, sovereign and independent country. It is an act of historical justice to a people who have carried within themselves, always, all the pain and suffering of the world…”

Of which this support for Palestinian statehood is an exemplary Marxist position, without any doubt. Of the rest of the quotations we can only agree too, Chavez provides a very good, clear analysis of the Israel/Palestine situation.

We move on here to Fidel’s analysis of Obama’s comments on Tunisia and Egypt and the Arab Revolutions.

It is perhaps noteworthy that Chavez, at least in the quotes that Fidel sets before us, do not contain any reference to these massive revolutions, which you might think a little surprising from a communist point of view, and which you might think would have a profound bearing upon the Palestinian situation.

Fidel:

“…A bit later he [Obama] mentions Tunisia and takes credit for the popular movement which overthrew the government in that country, which was an ally of imperialism.
Even more astonishingly, Obama fails to acknowledge that the Untied States was responsible for the installation of the tyrannical, corrupt government in Egypt of Hosni Mubarak who, absconding with the principles of Nasser, allied himself with the imperialists, stole billions from his country and tyrannized his valiant people.”

This is true, but again rather rhetorical, and what can be said of Mubarak can equally be said of Gaddafi, they follow the same mould. And can we really expect a President of the US, even if he were to disagree with past US actions, to openly criticise past US foreign policy under past Presidents? Not really. So a ‘failure to acknowledge’ is not surprising and beside the point. What matters is what this relatively new President of the US does and is doing today. We know that the US supported these tyrannical leaders during the post WWII period and they should be and are condemned for that. What’s harder to explain here is not Obama’s position, but the small element of sleight-of-hand and evasion in this argument of Fidel’s.

Fidel quotes from Obama’s speech:

“Day after day, in the face of bullets and bombs, the Libyan people refused to give back that freedom. And when they were threatened by the kind of mass atrocity that often went unchallenged in the last century, the United Nations lived up to its charter. The Security Council authorized all necessary measures to prevent a massacre. The Arab League called for this effort; Arab nations joined a NATO-led coalition that halted Qaddafi’s forces in their tracks.
"Yesterday, the leaders of a new Libya took their rightful place beside us, and this week, the United States is reopening our embassy in Tripoli.
"This is how the international community is supposed to work — nations standing together for the sake of peace and security, and individuals claiming their rights.
"All of us have a responsibility to support the new Libya — the new Libyan government as they confront the challenge of turning this moment of promise into a just and lasting peace for all Libyans.
"The Qaddafi regime is over. Gbagbo, Ben Ali, Mubarak are no longer in power. Osama bin Laden is gone, and the idea that change could only come through violence has been buried with him.”

This is the point where Fidel’s logic begins to show the strain of its position. There is an attempt in the following, while commenting upon Obama’s speech, to make us somehow feel sorry for Osama bin Laden and the manner of his killing, and then, the (unproved, even un-evidenced in this article) re-invocation of Libya as a NATO conducted genocide is used to defend the Syrian regime from similar intervention and interference. There is no real challenge to Obama’s remarks on Libya, no grappling with the detail of the story of the conflict in Libya.

In effect, this is an attempt to theoretically defend the very obviously fascist regime in Syria from revolutionary justice, from the same justice as has been meted out in Tunisia and Egypt, against Ben Ali and Mubarak and their regimes.

By implication Fidel’s justification for his position is that US –

“…intelligence services along with those of Israel, systematically assassinate the most outstanding scientists involved in military technology”

This is decidedly weak. In those countries, this, while it may be true, does not mean (pretty obviously) that the peoples uprising in Syria (like in Libya) is any less legitimate. It just means it is complicated.

It is in any case, as Obama’s speech demonstrates with its calls for ‘peaceful transition’, by no means certain that any military intervention on the side of the people of Syria or Yemen will happen from the direction of the US or Europe, and certainly the interests of the US are at this moment on the side of the repressive regime in Bahrain, where a hypocritical reformist agenda is being supported (Fidel notes the US has the naval base there). But it would seem that from the statements of Fidel he would not support any help to the Bahraini, Syrian or Yemeni people either, anyway, so in this sense would be in fact in the same essential (materially speaking) boat as Obama -: the people, through weak theoretical pseudo justifications, must be left to ‘their own’ brutal repression. This kind of conclusion I suggest is not worthy of a communist or Marxist, doing nothing is not an option.

We move on here rapidly to the question of Israel and Palestine in Obama’s speech.

Says Fidel of Obama:

“He then launches into a long lecture explaining and justifying the inexplicable and unjustifiable”

He is right about this, what follows is mealy-mouthed and half baked pseudo justifications for the status quo to remain as it is, and Fidel points out -:

“The least Obama could have done was acknowledge that Israel's own citizens are tired of the squandering of resources invested in the military, denying them peace and access to the basic means of life. Like the Palestinians, they are suffering the consequences of policies imposed by the United States and the most bellicose, reactionary sectors of the Zionist state.”

And Fidel rightly shows how Obama edges sneakily from talking about Palestine into talking about nuclear weapons, and from here brings in the argument against Iran and North Korea, as if this has a bearing (unstated in an open fashion) on what can happen, or be allowed to happen, with the Palestinian situation.

When UNICEF confirms Cuba as the only Latin American country with no child malnutrition I consider this as more important to Cuba than the above theoretical disagreement. However, to the people suffering and fighting in Syria and Yemen, their own circumstances and the foreign support they get is more important to them, even if it is only theoretical support, and I think the position as regards much of the South American progressive leaderships towards their comrades in the Middle East and North Africa is inconsistent and mistaken in many crucial respects.

The Libyan intervention was and is a complex event. It did not happen in isolation from the people of Libya, who were uprising against the Gaddafi regime, nor did it happen in isolation from the revolutions that happened in neighbouring Arab countries, Tunisia and Egypt. This in itself is a great difference, and a crucial one, to that of Afghanistan and Iraq, which were imposed under false pretences. Also the method that NATO and the US used to intervene was different in terms of tactics and strategy: there was to be no occupying force, and the intervention sought approval from the Arab League and not only the UN Security Council.

Whilst the intervention was put forward ideologically as to be on ‘humanitarian grounds’ to protect the civilians from massacre and genocide (from Gaddafi’s forces and their threats), you cannot bomb people in a humanitarian fashion, and so we can see here the limits of the bourgeois understanding of its intervention as far as the UN is concerned. Yet this does not of itself de-legitimise the intervention. It had to be sided, and in fact it was sided. The notion of humanitarian protection was and is a myth that is always present in bourgeois ideology – the myth of the universal middle line, countering the false dialectic of opposed forces of good and evil, and the UN has to stick to this

The reasons for the NATO intervention were probably ‘impure’, in the sense that one consideration was probably the oil resources and that they (the nations represented by NATO) might lose access to them if they lost. Another reason was probably that Gaddafi often pretended to socialist credentials, and the intervention could ostensibly appear as also an anti-socialist intervention at a time when capitalist democracy was under severe threat from internal strife due to the economic crisis, i.e. in Spain and Greece in particular, and it wanted to portray itself as progressive but anti-socialist (famously Gaddafi was thought to perhaps be escaping to Venezuela in a mischievous comment by Hague). That Gaddafi was not socialist in any genuine sense seems to have been shown up even more through the revelations about western collusion with the regime since the liberation of Tripoli and since Gaddafi has reverted to being the terrorist that he always aided while keeping up the rhetoric against terrorism.

But to understand the reasons for the intervention we must understand what it would have meant had the western powers generally sided with the forces of reaction in the Middle East and North Africa, against specifically the Egyptian people. Faced with such an obvious and open reactionary stance, the people of Europe, already angry at the austerity measures being thrown at them, would be far more sure of who their social enemy was. After the Libya intervention, the global bourgeoisie have for once shown a small progressive side, and we must give credit to the people of Europe for pressurising for this. At the same time, though, if the Tunisian and Egyptian people had not struggled quite so hard and not been so brave and resolute, the western powers would have continued to support these regimes in total.

It is clear at the moment that the Arab revolution is not over, that it has many facets, and that the position of the advanced western powers towards them vacillates. The circumstances, however, of the Palestinian people are now greatly enhanced. No longer do they need to see the endless almost ritual violence between the Israeli rightist government and the Palestinian factional leaders as the only ‘solution’, or the fake ‘peace negotiations’. Now the solution appears to be happening by default through the revolutions in the region, and it is with these revolutions that the Palestinians will find their goal, as too will the Israeli ordinary people, who have shown that their voice is also being ignored and that they too are part of the movement.

Fidel: "The Cuban model doesn't work for us anymore"

by Joel Wendland

Inspired by a new article at People's World on Fidel Castro's first major public appearance in about four years, I am now catching up on my reading of Jeffrey Goldberg's recent trip to Cuba where he met with former President Fidel Castro over a three day period. In addition to talking about Middle East politics and anti-Semitism, Castro expressed to Goldberg some regrets about his role in the Cuban missile crisis.

Here is some of Goldberg's account:

There were many odd things about my recent Havana stopover (apart from the dolphin show, which I'll get to shortly), but one of the most unusual was Fidel Castro's level of self-reflection. I only have limited experience with Communist autocrats (I have more experience with non-Communist autocrats) but it seemed truly striking that Castro was willing to admit that he misplayed his hand at a crucial moment in the Cuban Missile Crisis (you can read about what he said toward the end of my previous post - but he said, in so many words, that he regrets asking Khruschev to nuke the U.S.).

Goldberg then turned to the question of socialism in Cuba:

Even more striking was something he said at lunch on the day of our first meeting. We were seated around a smallish table; Castro, his wife, Dalia, his son; Antonio; Randy Alonso, a major figure in the government-run media; and Julia Sweig, the friend I brought with me to make sure, among other things, that I didn't say anything too stupid (Julia is a leading Latin American scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations). I initially was mainly interested in watching Fidel eat - it was a combination of digestive problems that conspired to nearly kill him, and so I thought I would do a bit of gastrointestinal Kremlinology and keep a careful eye on what he took in (for the record, he ingested small amounts of fish and salad, and quite a bit of bread dipped in olive oil, as well as a glass of red wine). But during the generally lighthearted conversation (we had just spent three hours talking about Iran and the Middle East), I asked him if he believed the Cuban model was still something worth exporting.

Fidel's response:

"The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore," he said.

Goldberg did a double take:

This struck me as the mother of all Emily Litella moments. Did the leader of the Revolution just say, in essence, "Never mind"?

I asked Julia to interpret this stunning statement for me. She said, "He wasn't rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. I took it to be an acknowledgment that under 'the Cuban model' the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country."

Julia pointed out that one effect of such a sentiment might be to create space for his brother, Raul, who is now president, to enact the necessary reforms in the face of what will surely be push-back from orthodox communists within the Party and the bureaucracy. Raul Castro is already loosening the state's hold on the economy. He recently announced, in fact, that small businesses can now operate and that foreign investors could now buy Cuban real estate. (The joke of this new announcement, of course, is that Americans are not allowed to invest in Cuba, not because of Cuban policy, but because of American policy. In other words, Cuba is beginning to adopt the sort of economic ideas that America has long-demanded it adopt, but Americans are not allowed to participate in this free-market experiment because of our government's hypocritical and stupidly self-defeating embargo policy. We'll regret this, of course, when Cubans partner with Europeans and Brazilians to buy up all the best hotels).

And then they all went to see the dolphins at Havana's aquarium.

"Socialism" Not So Negative, "Capitalism" Not So Positive

“Socialism” is a negative for most Americans, but certainly not all Americans. “Capitalism” is regarded positively by a majority of the public, though it is a thin majority. There are certain segments of the public – notably, young people and Democrats – where both “isms” are rated about equally. And while most Americans have a negative reaction to the word “militia,” the term is viewed more positively by Republican men than most other groups.

These are among the findings of a national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press that tests reactions to words and phrases frequently used in current political discourse. Overall, 29% say they have a positive reaction to the word “socialism,” while 59% react negatively. The public’s impressions of “capitalism,” though far more positive, are somewhat mixed. Slightly more than half (52%) react positively to the word “capitalism,” compared with 37% who say they have a negative reaction.

A large majority of Republicans (77%) react negatively to “socialism,” while 62% have a positive reaction to “capitalism.” Democrats’ impressions are more divided: In fact, about as many Democrats react positively to “socialism” (44%) as to “capitalism” (47%).

Reaction to “capitalism” is lukewarm among many demographic groups. Fewer than half of young people, women, people with lower incomes and those with less education react positively to “capitalism.”

Read the whole report here...

Building Bridges with Cuba

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Political Affairs #102 - Building Bridges with Cuba

On this episode, we talk with Elena Mora and John Bachtell, both members of the National Board of the Communist Party and who traveled this month to Cuba for meetings with the Communist Party there and with leaders of various Cuban social and cultural institutions.

Backgrounder on John Maynard Keynes

The General Theory and the Current Crisis: A Primer on Keynes’ Economics
The “Revolutionary” Who Wasn’t
By Alejandro Reuss
Dollars and Sense

Keynes is often described as a “revolutionary” thinker. In one sense, this is correct. Keynes was one of the most important economic thinkers of modern times, and his ideas were at the center of a major “paradigm shift” in economic theory and policy. He issued his masterwork, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), at a critical juncture, in the middle of the Great Depression, when the orthodox views from which he had broken seemed at a loss to explain the crisis or a way out of it.

Keynes was not the first major economic theorist to understand that capitalist economies were prone to depressions (Marx had written on the subject nearly a century before), nor was he the only major economist of his generation to arrive at the basic insight that total demand could fall short of the level required to ensure full employment. (Some others, most notably the Polish economist Michal Kalecki, came to the same conclusions separately from, and even slightly earlier than, Keynes.) Keynes, however, was already a major figure in British economics and politics at a time when Britain was a much more important world power than today, so his ideas had a bigger impact in ruling circles than they would have coming from elsewhere, or from economists with a more radical views about the changes necessary to cure the problem.

As “revolutionary” a figure as Keynes was in the history of economic thought, he was, in another sense, a profoundly anti-revolutionary thinker. This is not to say that the changes he proposed, particularly in the role of government in capitalist economies, were trivial. He believed the problems of capitalism—especially the “arbitrary and inequitable” distribution of income and wealth and the “failure to provide full employment”—were very serious, and he did not think that these “outstanding faults” of capitalist economies would fix themselves. He thought that the state would have to play a major role in fixing them. However, as much as it was his goal to get rid of what he considered bad about capitalist societies, he also aimed to preserve what he considered good about them, which was a great deal.

Read more...

Why doesn't anyone blame PoliticalAffairs.net?

From The Daily Beast:

Socialist Shocker
by Benjamin Sarlin

A stunning new poll shows that just 53 percent of Americans favor capitalism over socialism. The Daily Beast’s Benjamin Sarlin writes that it’s not Obama’s fault. It’s Rush Limbaugh’s.

Maybe Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are right—socialism is a real and dire threat to America. The latest Rasmussen poll shows a stunningly low 53 percent of Americans favor capitalism over the dreaded "s" word, with a full 20 percent preferring socialism and an addit[i]onal 27 percent unsure.

Even in the current economic gloom, it’s an eye-opening result. But it’s worth asking whether the supposed socialist resurgence is really the work of President Barack Obama, who has been branded a socialist since the 2008 campaign, or the same right-wing talkers who have been shouting it over the airwaves.

Read the whole blog post here...

How physics is validating the Labor Theory of Value

Found this interesting tidbit. Let's discuss.

By Paul Cockshott http://21stcenturysocialism.blogspot.com/

When I was a student my economics professor told us that whilst the labour theory of value had been an important historical stage in the development of economics, it was now known to be fatally flawed. 20th century economists such as Sraffa and Samuelson had shown that it was unnecessary to accord labour any special place in our understanding of prices. Instead, the structure of prices could be perfectly well understood as the result of the monetary costs faced by firms and the behaviour of profit maximising entrepreneurs. If there was in reality no such thing as labour value, it followed that Marx's theory of exploitation was an invalid incursion of moral prejudices into the 'positive science' of economics.

The professor who taught us this, Ian Steedman, was actually quite left wing, an active member of the Communist Party.

This is just an anecdote, but fact that even a prominent communist intellectual believed that the central component of Marx's theory was scientifically worthless is significant. In retrospect it gave an indication of how poorly prepared the intellectuals of the communist movement were to be, when faced with the very intense ideological attacks on socialism which unfolded in the 1980s and 1990s.

But 25 years ago help came from an unexpected source. Two mathematicians Moshe Machover and Emanuel Farjoun, wrote a book called the Laws of Chaos. Their book gave a radically new way of looking at how capitalism worked as a chaotic and disorganised system. Farjoun and Machover had the the insight to see that physics had already developed theories to describe similar disorganised and chaotic systems.

In a market economy, hundreds of thousands of firms and individuals interact, buying and selling goods and services. This is similar to a gas in which very large numbers of molecules interact, bouncing off one another. Physics speaks of such systems as having a 'high degree of freedom', by which it means that the movements of all individual molecules are 'free' or random. But despite the individual molecules being free to move, we can still say things about them in the aggregate. We can say what their average speed will be ( their temperature ) and what their likely distributions in space will be.

The branch of physics which studies this is statistical mechanics or thermodynamics. Instead of making deterministic statements, it deals with probabilities and averages, but it still comes up with fundamental laws, the laws of thermodynamics, which have been found to govern the behaviour of our universe.

Now here is the surprise! When they applied the method of statistical mechanics to the capitalist economy, they found that the predictions it made coincided almost exactly with the labour theory of value as set out in volume 1 of Marx's Kapital. Statistical mechanics showed that the selling prices of goods would vary in proportion to their labour content just as Marx had assumed. Because the market is chaotic, individual prices would not be exactly equal to labour values, but they would cluster very closely around labour values. Whilst in Kapital I the labour theory of value is just taken as an empirically valid rule of thumb. Marx knew it was right, but did not say why. Here at last was a sound physical theory explaining it.

It is the job of science to uncover causal mechanisms. Once it has done this it can make predictions which can be tested. If two competing theories make different predictions about reality, we can by observation determine which theory is right. This is the normal scientific method.

Farjoun and Machover's theory made certain predictions which went directly against the predictions made by critics of Marx such as Samuelson. In particular their theory predicts that industries with a high labour to capital ratio will be more profitable. Conventional economics predicts that there will be no such systematic difference between the profit rates in different industries. When put to the test it turned out that Farjoun and Machover were right. Industries with a high labour to capital ratio are more profitable. But this is exactly what we should expect if the source of profit was the exploitation of labour rather than capital. Their theory made predictions which not only turned out to be empirically spot on, but at the same time verified Marx's theory of the exploitation of the worker.

The next big advance was made by the phsyicist Viktor Yakovenko, who showed in his paper 'the Statistical Mechanics of Money' that money in a market economy played the same role as energy in physics.

Just as energy is conserved in collisions between molecules, so money is conserved in the acts of buying and selling. So far so obvious!

What was not obvious was what this implies. Yakovenko showed that the laws of thermodynamics then imply that the distribution of money between people will follow the same form as the distribution of energy between molecules in a gas : the so called Gibbs-Boltzmann distribution. This sounds very scientific, but what does it actually mean?

What the Gibbs-Boltzmann distribution of money says is that a few people with end up with a lot of money and a lot of people with end up with very little money. It says that the distribution of money will be very uneven, just as we see in capitalist society. In fact Yakovenko showed that the distribution of wealth in the USA fits the Gibbs-Boltzman distribution pretty closely.
There is a tendancy to think that rich people owe their wealth to intelligence or effort, but physics tells us no. Given a market economy, then the laws of chance mean that a lot of money will end up in the hands of a few people.

In fact when we look at the USA we find that the distribution of wealth is even more uneven that we would expect from the Gibbs-Boltzmann law. If the Gibbs Boltzman law held, there would be millionaires but no billionaires. Why the disparity?

Yakovenkos original equations represented an economy that is rather like what Marx called simple commodity production. It assumed only buying and selling. More recent work by Yakovenko and Wright, has shown that if you modify these equations to allow either the earning of interest on money, or the hiring of wage labour, then the equations predict a polarisation of the population into two groups. The great bulk of the population, the working class and petty bourgeois, follow a Gibbs-Boltzmann income distribution. But there is a second class, those whose income derives from capital, whose wealth with follow a different law, what is called a power-law. Again, look in detail at the distribution of wealth in and you provide exactly the distribution predicted by Yakovenko's theory. This, says Yakovenko, proves that Marx was right when he said that modern society was comprised of two distinct and opposed classes : capitalists and workers.

So modern physics has shown that not only was Marx right in his basic analysis, but he was right because his conclusions follow from the most basic laws of physics, the laws of thermodynamics.

There is also a less obvious conclusion that we can draw from physics relating to the undesirablity of Market Socialism. We can see from Yakovenko's work that a market socialist economy would also have a very uneven distribution of money. There too the Gibbs-Boltzmann law would rule. A small number of people or co-operatives would end up with a lot of money, and many such people or co-operatives would end up poverty stricken. From this capitalism would be regenerated. As Lenin wrote : "small production engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a mass scale".

Nationalization, Socialism, and the U.S. Banks

By Jim Genova

Associate Professor of History

The Ohio State University-Marion



In the midst of the unfolding global economic crisis politicians, pundits, and bankers have engaged in much hyperbolic discussion about the prospect that major banks in the U.S. may be “nationalized.” On 27 February the U.S. Treasury Department announced that it was converting its “preferred shares” in Citibank into “common shares” giving it a 36% ownership in one of the world’s largest financial institutions. This and other actions taken on the part of the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department since the crisis began to accelerate last Autumn has led hardened neo-liberal ideologues to exclaim that this is “creeping socialism.” The proclamations of many anchors across the business channels, Conservatives gathered in Washington on 28 February, and Republicans in Congress during the debate over the stimulus bill have elevated to the level of mainstream discourse a conversation over the meaning of the terms “nationalization” and “socialism,” even if the purpose of such right-wing defenders of unbridled global capitalism is to induce ideological confusion and a sense of panic.


On 25 February, members of the House Financial Services Committee asked Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to explain what he understood to be the definition of “nationalization.” In response, he said it is when “the government ‘seizes’ a company, ‘zeroes out the shareholders and begins to manage and run the bank.” He reassured the anxious Congressmen that “we don’t plan anything like that.”[1] Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner seconded Bernanke’s comments, describing nationalization as “the wrong strategy for the country and I don’t think it’s a necessary strategy.”[2] Sen. Charles Schumer, member of the Senate Banking Committee, also tried to reassure a nervous investor class stating that a “federal takeover of the banks should be avoided at all costs. No one intends, ever, to have the government running these banks or insurance companies for a long period of time.” His goal, somewhat more ambitious than that proposed by either Bernanke or Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, is to have the government “come in, clean them out, take out the bad assets, put in new management.”[3] Despite such reassurances from those at the center of power, howls from the right and from brokers on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and Chicago Mercantile Exchange continue to charge that the U.S. beginning under the Bush Administration and continuing at an accelerated pace is heading down the road to “socialism.”



None of the half-measures, abrupt shifts in policy, or tenuous interventions in the financial sector over the past year at least (Bear Stearns went under on 17 March 2008) have been effective at stemming the ever deepening global financial crisis. Banks continue to fail, large monopolistic financial institutions are reeling around the world, and the global economy is spiraling into perhaps its worst crisis ever. Events, as the recent contorted interventions to rescue Citibank have shown, are forcing the leaders of U.S. capitalism to make very difficult and, to them, unpalatable decisions. Neither former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (a supposed expert on the Great Depression of the 1930s) nor current Treasury head Tim Geithner (Governor of the New York Fed when Lehman Brothers went down in September 2008) appear to have to will to carry off what is historically necessary – the outright seizure of the major financial institutions of this country. This should not surprise us as they are “true believers” in the neo-liberal capitalist world order. For them, the current crisis is perplexing since it should not be happening at all. At the very least, the market should have shown the way out by now. This led former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan to recently acknowledge before Congress that the theory to which he (along with Paulson, Bernanke, and Geithner) ascribed was “deeply flawed.” No such statement of contrition has as of yet come forth from Bernanke and Geithner.


Ultimately, many analysts believe that the U.S. government will have no choice but to nationalize some of the largest financial firms, including Citibank, Bank of America, and some large regional banks.[4] Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz recently echoed calls from leading economists Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb to nationalize the U.S. banks telling German television network Deutsche Welle “the banks have failed. Nationalization is the only answer.”[5] Stiglitz has much experience at the center of global finance having served as a member of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors (1993-1997) and as Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank (1997-2000). During those terms he witnessed the LTCM and East Asia currency crises (1996-1998) that some economists like Paul Krugman warned was a prelude to a global economic depression.[6] What has happened in the meantime is that trillions of dollars have been thrown down the bottomless chute of fundamentally insolvent institutions beyond hope of rescue.[7] Moreover, for all of this public money used to prop up badly run speculative private institutions not once has the government forced the management to resign (the recent move at Citibank showed the first signs of the Treasury making demands about the composition of corporate boards) nor has it called for any “claw back” provisions of the bonuses and extravagant pay for executives who ran their enterprises into the ground. Instead, public wealth is being transferred on a rapidly moving conveyor belt into the hands of unscrupulous and failed bankers. This is becoming one of the greatest thefts in world history. As Stiglitz told Deutche Welle, “separation of ownership from control is a recipe for disaster.”[8]


What is called for is an emergency solution not unlike that confronting Russia in the summer of 1917 when the Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin wrote The Threatening Catastrophe and How to Fight It. In that pamphlet, Lenin described an unfolding crisis where the wheels of the Russian economy were grinding to a halt. Banks had ceased lending, railroads were shutting down, food supplies were dwindling, and unemployment was mounting. Lenin also noted that there was much public discussion among politicians and leaders of industry that something dramatic had to be done to salvage the situation. “Everybody says that. Everybody recognizes that. Everybody has agreed to that. And nothing is being done.”[9] Even more recently, Sweden’s experience in the early 1990s has been held up as analogous to the broad parameters of the current U.S. situation. There a housing boom in the late 1980s led to speculation on mortgage-backed debt that eventually ended badly leading to the government taking effective control of the largest banks. Sweden then forced the banks to create two institutions under one roof – a good bank and a bad bank. All of the “toxic assets” were concentrated in the bad banks, which gradually (over four years) sold them off.[10] The problem with using Sweden’s banking crisis as a model for understanding our own is that not only is Sweden’s economy a fraction of the size of that in the U.S. but its institutions are not at the epicenter of the global capitalist system. Institutions like CitiGroup, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and others are global monopolistic enterprises with branches, partners, and subsidiaries throughout the world. Moreover, they are the vehicles through which the leaders of U.S. government pass on their way to political power. Consequently, there is an incestuous relationship between the “too big to fail” banks and the officials in charge of their oversight. There was nothing analogous in Sweden’s case. Finally, the U.S. crisis does not stem entirely from a decline in home prices (the much vaunted bursting of the housing bubble). Rather, for decades there has been a mounting structural weakness in the U.S. economy and by extension global capitalism. That is the overwhelming dependence for the survival and expansion of the system on debt of all kinds – credit cards, mortgages, auto financing, leveraged stock trading, and greatly expanded issuing of public debt of many varieties. Since the early 1970s there has been a widening disconnect between the real wages of workers in the industrialized world and the accumulation of public and private debt.[11]


We are at a crossroads in the current crisis. Every leading politician, pundit, and financial analyst acknowledges that the situation requires urgent action. On financial, ethical, and political grounds it is imperative that the U.S. government nationalize the major financial institutions, place them under federal control, unify them into one central bank to provide for more efficient management, and completely dispatch the executive management of those firms that have been seized. Only through that device can the process of daily pumping billions upon billions into dead institutions be stopped. Only through such bold moves can the government gain the leverage it needs to control the credit markets, make interest rates meaningful, and aggressively restructure mortgages. Only through the decisive action of seizing, controlling, and re-directing the functioning of the banks to serve the immediate and long-term needs of the people can the rate of decline be slowed and some stability be restored to the financial sector of the economy.[12]


This should not be confused with socialism. Such labeling is an effort on the part of those ideologues still committed to the failed neo-liberal policies of the Washington Consensus dating to Reagan and Thatcher years of the early 1980s to derail any meaningful assistance to those workers, farmers, and middle class people who are suffering because of the greed of the capitalist elite. Moreover, it is the same callousness that those practitioners of gung-ho capitalism displayed in guiding IMF and World Bank policies on a path to crippling and impoverishing developing countries around the world through “Structural Adjustment Programs.” Lenin clearly delineated the difference between “state monopoly capitalism” and socialism, but argued that it was imperative in the period of impending catastrophe that responsible officials of any government take the decisive measures necessary to save people from mass unemployment, famine, and deep social dislocation. That the global economic crisis portends widespread political upheaval has been attested to by analysts and researchers who work in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.[13] In describing the 1917 crisis in Russia, Lenin wrote that nationalizing the banks would improve “the accessibility and the easy terms of credit, particularly for small owners [and] for the peasantry.” Further, the state would “be in a position to survey all the main monetary operations without concealing them, then to control them, then to regulate economic life, and finally to obtain millions and billions for large state operations.”[14] This addresses many of the most salient aspects of the crisis in the financial sector: transparency, accountability, assistance for those who actually need it, saving funds that will be needed for further stimulus, and it resolves the fatal disconnect Stiglitz identified in the current approach between having ownership without control. Beyond the current crisis, though, since the capitalist ideologues have raised the specter of socialism in the U.S., it is an opportunity for progressive forces to intervene in the public conversation and offer a real understanding of what socialism is while also highlighting the ultimate flaws of capitalism that can never be overcome or resolved from inside the system. This is an historic opportunity for the government to act on behalf of the people to mitigate the effects of a dying system and for progressives to make the case for socialism. The fate of millions of people around the world depends on the abilities of both to do what is historically necessary.




[1] Craig Torres and Bradley Keoun, “Bernanke Rejects ‘Anything Like’ Bank Nationalization,” Bloomberg.com 25 February 2009.
[2] Robert Schmidt, “Geithner Calls Nationalizing Banks ‘Wrong Strategy’ for Economy,” Bloomberg.com, 25 February 2009.
[3] Torres and Keoun, “Bernanke Rejects ‘Anything Like’ Bank Nationalization.”
[4] Matthew Richardson, “The Case for and against Bank Nationalisation,” VoxEU.org, 26 February 2009.
[5] Michael Knigge, “Stiglitz: Nationalized Banks are ‘Only Answer’,” Deutche Welle, 16 February 2009. Reprinted in the People’s Weekly World.
[6] Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics and The Crisis of 2008, New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.
[7] On 27 February Bloomberg Financial Group provided an assessment of the entire contribution made by the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department to prop up the financial system since the beginnings of the crisis in August 2007. Its conclusion was that to date $11.6 trillion has been either spent or taken on as liabilities in the process. This includes cash injections into the trading markets, the TARP and other emergency programs, loans to banks facilitating their takeover of other even worse off financial institutions, the seizures of AIG, Freddie Mac, and Fannie Mae, loans to the Auto Industry, and the expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet to facilitate the commercial paper market that seized in September and October 2008.
[8] Knigge, “Stiglitz: Nationalized Banks are ‘Only Answer.””
[9] V. I. Lenin, The Threatening Catastrophe and How to Fight It, New York; International Publishers, 1932, p. 5. The essay was written 23-27 September 1917.
[10] Edward Harrison, “Did Sweden Really Nationalize Its Banks?” online blog post, 25 February 2009.
[11] Federal Reserve Table 100.B Data for 1945-2005, published by AutoDogmatic.com.
[12] Binyamin Appelbaum, “What Is Nationalization? Depends Who You Ask,” Washington Post, 25 February 2009. See also Robert Griffiths, “Why Nationalization Isn’t Socialism,” Politicalaffairs.net, 3 November 2008, reproduced from the Morning Star.
[13] Nelson D. Schwartz, “Job Losses Pose a threat to Stability Worldwide,” New York Times, 15 February 2009.
[14] Lenin, The Threatening Catastrophe and How to Fight It. Italics in the original.