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DH Lawrence, his poem ‘Poverty’ – and what does it mean to be progressive?

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DH Lawrence (1885-1930)

 

Marx understood perfectly well that capitalism was disruptive; that was what he liked about it, that, along with the possibilities that such disruption opened up in its wake.

The following is contributed by guest blogger TomG.

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DH Lawrence’s poem ‘Poverty’ was read to me by an old friend several years ago as a birthday gift. It turned out to be a very good one. I knew that DH Lawrence had a reputation as a right wing sympathizer; I also knew he hated the bourgeoisie and had written a poem, ‘How Beastly the Bourgeoisie Is’, to that effect. But aside from that poem I was unfamiliar with any other of his poetry. Beside liking ‘Poverty’ and appreciating my friend’s consideration of me I became sufficiently intrigued to pursue Lawrence’s poetry and ended up reading a collection of his shorter poems, Pansies, written toward the end of his life and which contained both ‘Poverty’ and ‘How Beastly the Bourgeoisie Is’. Both of these poems were written after the 1926 General Strike in the U.K. but before the rise of Hitler or the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, neither of which Lawrence lived to witness or offer an opinion about.

What is it about this man, who died in 1930, age 44, who hates poverty and the bourgeoisie with a visceral intensity (the bourgeoisie were not too keen on him either), and whose sympathies lie with the right? On a flippant note I think: this is the perfect man for today’s strange and politically discordant times. On a more serious note, on reading his poems, ‘Poverty’ in particular, I am reminded of the confusion that abounds today about just what terms like “progressive” and “reactionary” mean. Since my initial political schooling in the 1970’s, particularly in supporting the National Liberation Front in the Vietnam War and embracing revolutionary Marxism, these terms seem to have morphed into one another, the revolutionary left in the developed world has collapsed completely, the reformist left looks cadaverous and economic development and internationalism, once proud mantles of the left, are being championed more by the right. Go figure.

So looking at Lawrence’s poem became a vehicle for raising some very contemporary questions. But first, the poem.

Poverty

The only people I ever heard talk about my Lady Poverty
Were rich people, or people who imagined themselves rich.
Saint Francis himself was a rich and spoiled young man.

Being born among the working people
I know poverty is a hard old hag,
and a monster, when you’re pinched for actual necessities.
And whoever says she isn’t is a liar.

I don’t want to be poor, it means I’m pinched.
But neither do I want to be rich.
When I look at this pine-tree near the sea,
That grows out of rock, and it plumes forth, plumes forth,
I see it has a natural abundance.

With its roots it has a natural grip on its daily bread,
And its plumes look like a green cup held up to the sun and air
And full of wine.

I want to be like that, to have a natural abundance
And plume forth, and be splendid.

I remember being impressed when I first heard it and further readings deepened my appreciation. It captures the grim determination to survive that those subjected to the rule of the old hag need to have as they try to escape her grip; and it evokes their desire to flourish. One of its great strengths is its authentic tone; no privileged condescension here, Lawrence is speaking from a personal and very individual experience. This, I think, also proves to be its central weakness; more on this below. Its aims of natural abundance and splendour are modest; who could possibly deny the right to material comfort, to the personal and cultural growth Lawrence yearns for in the poems last lines, to those who either do not enjoy them or whose experience of them is tenuous or subject to the caprice of external forces?

But the question I returned to was how progressive is the poem? It would have been a pertinent question when Lawrence wrote it; and in today’s climate where confusion reigns about what it means to be progressive, it remains pertinent. In trying to answer this I ended up looking at the poem from two angles. The first of these is aspirational, deeply personal and all the more powerful because of it. The second deals with the ‘how to?’ question, the road to take to consign the old hag to the history books. The poem’s silence on this last point should not forbade us from taking this matter up for the silence contains suggestions which are implicit in the poem and are faithful to the man.

The Aspirational

Lawrence knew poverty first hand and arguably its effects contributed to his early death from tuberculosis; there is a bitterness, a knowing, which is intimately felt and communicated. Like those who feel her pinch now, the desire is to escape, to get out from under, to get ahead. This is a progressive yearning; it always has been and it remains so whether or not the pinch is felt in the so-called developed world or in the undeveloped or third world.

Lawrence’s attack on the romanticism accorded “lady poverty” by the privileged, his exposure of their hubris is also personally felt, hard edged and progressive. He wants the old hag removed, along with the pieties of her well heeled apologists; he wants to develop, to move forward (literally, to progress). No problems here. In spite of his generally right wing sympathies he could be speaking for workers everywhere; so too for those ground down and “pinched” by poverty over the millennia.

You take the high road and I’ll take the low road*

If Lawrence offers suggestions here, of what is the best path to take escape from the old hag’s grip, they are ambiguous to the point of being opaque; the poem is, after all a personal testament and not a manifesto. And I must confess to liking the way the question is left open. It is up to the reader to pick up and develop this should they be inclined to do so.

Being a communist I’m inclined to do so and somewhat absurdly perhaps the first person that popped into my mind when I read the poem was Richard Burton. The second was Deng Xiaoping, but more on him later. Actually the Burton reference is not so absurd: both he and D.H. were sons of miners who knew what it was to be pinched, and both became famous in their respective artistic fields, one being sympathetic to the left, the other the right. So while the reference to the dearly departed Welsh thespian is playful, it is also serious. Burton described himself as a socialist (a communist on occasions – because, he said, he didn’t exploit others) and justified his wealth and lifestyle by pointing out that everyone should be able to live like him. He was right. He too wanted to have a natural abundance and be splendid and it is something he thought all people should have. Greens and assorted pseudo-leftists, please take note.

If Marxists, of whatever stripe, are to promote beliefs in economic and social development and the cultural and personal transformations which spring from these, then we aim to level upwards, not downwards. We can argue about roads, (can of worms anyone?) but as soon as we concede, hands wringing, that development may have gone too far, too quickly, too disruptively; that it is ruinous to the environment or to ‘fragile eco-systems’ and must therefore be stopped; that the human footprint is bad; that modernity has sold us a lemon and so on, we cease to be progressive let alone Marxist and we give the old hag a legitimacy she does not deserve. We may remain concerned, decent and politically active souls involved in any number of things; and, heaven knows, there is a chance that some of these activities may even be progressive, but we ourselves are left at the starting blocks.

Marx understood perfectly well that capitalism was disruptive; that was what he liked about it, that, along with the possibilities that such disruption opened up in its wake. He understood too that in order to create a propertyless working class capitalist development dispossessed the mass of peasants and drove them into the arms of what was then (and is now, in developing countries) an unregulated free labour market with all the uncertainty, impoverishment, degradation and possibilities that accompanied this. But even before the Manifesto was written he also understood the need and opportunity that these same developments afforded the working class to organise and fight for political rights and economic concessions. And while it is true that he had wanted and expected the working class to recognise the need for revolutionary transformation – a task that still beckons – it is also true that the working classes in all advanced countries has been able to wrest significant democratic and economic concessions from their respective ruling classes, thereby ameliorating the kind of poverty that characterised the Industrial Revolution of Marx’s and Dickens’ time. While the old hag is still with us, she has been forced to give ground and develop the capacity to ‘shape shift’ as developed economies see a widening wealth gap accompanied by a decline in absolute poverty. In the undeveloped world she remains a traditional old hag while in the developed world she has also assumed a distinctly post modernist capacity.

Hit the road Jack …

Above I had indicated that Lawrence had made no suggestions about what road to take or whether there was even a choice of route. However such a view is disingenuous.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and a silence is just a silence; but not here, not with DH Lawrence. While this has something to do with his right wing sympathies, leaving it at this is a cheap shot. More at issue is his individualism and how this individualism is largely cut off from his working class roots. There is, for example, a warmth and a fidelity to his past in Burton which one struggles to find in DH Lawrence. It is as though the experience has been too painful and embittering for him to want to do anything other than turn his back on it and escape. He doesn’t want to be rich, to be one of “them”; he just wants to get out from under and to flourish. This is a modest enough desire on the one hand, but it’s all about him (as opposed to him and his mates, and beyond this, his class) on the other. And this is where Deng comes in.

Two sayings of Deng’s stand out above all others: “Black cat, White cat? Who cares so long as it catches mice?”, and “To get rich is glorious”. The former was a metaphor for promoting capitalist economic development over socialist economic development, was uttered under proletarian rule and was designed to fudge. The latter is a blunt, honest admission of his position and was said under restorationist rule where the need to fudge had disappeared. Cats may not matter, but roads do and Deng knew it. So too did his protagonists, which is why they were after his hide.

DH Lawrence and Deng neither knew, or knew of, each other and at first take they make strange bedfellows. But there exists a certain similarity between them, between their yearnings and the politics each is drawn to or promotes. The similarity is around paths to development or what Lawrence may describe as escaping the clutches of the old hag. When Deng uttered his infamous ‘black cat, white cat’ line he was not meaning the he was indifferent as to what approach was taken or that he valued each equally – no post modernist relativism for this man or the newly emerging class that he represented. He had an antipathy to the ‘socialist road’ and favoured the ‘capitalist road’. His appeal was both to the new, privileged class that found organisational and political expression in the communist party (those in power taking the capitalist road) and to the narrow type of individualistic aspirations this class nourished. It is all about getting ahead any way you can and Deng’s way (the capitalist way) will get you there quicker because you won’t have to worry about who you step over, or step on, on your way to achieve your “glorious” prize.

So far as I am aware DH Lawrence did not take an active interest in political economy and it is not on this level that he sidles up to Deng. Lawrence mistrusted and was estranged from his class. The idea of collectivism, of collective action as a means of getting out from under – and in the process, of finding himself as an individual, a very different individual from the one he became – scared him viscerally. My guess is he feared being overwhelmed individually to the point of losing himself. Nietzsche’s modernist affirmation of individualism – that the individual has always had to struggle against being overwhelmed by the tribe and that nothing was more important than the privilege of owning oneself – would have struck a deep chord in Lawrence. It is his rejection of his class and of class politics as such that place Lawrence alongside Deng and places his poetry in a very different political camp than that of the great communist poets like Mayakovsky, Brecht or Hikmet.

DH Lawrence ‘s path to salvation, to getting out from under, is an individual and lonely one. While there is occasional reference made in his poetry to workers, the poor, the rich… there is no sense of attachment or connection and even less of trust. There is a chasm that separates him from his class of origin which finds expression in his poetry. His attempts to bridge this chasm, to really connect, fail. He reaches out to individuals, generally women, never to his class. I think he would have argued that he didn’t reach out to any class, certainly not to the bourgeois class that he despised. While this is true in one sense it also reinforces my point. In terms of class, or even community attachment, he felt and was isolated. This affected his yearnings and his means of escape. It leaves him and Deng sharing an affinity around roads. While the encouragement to get rich would have stuck in his craw the idea of black cat, white cat, of get me out of here any which way, would have appealed.

Lawrence’s mistrust of class, particularly the class consciousness and loyalty that the working class requires if it is to overthrow the capitalist class and to rule society itself, his elevation of individual aspiration above all else, is precisely the bait that Deng (and his equivalents elsewhere) rely upon and appeal to. One doesn’t have to agree with all of it – as mentioned above, Lawrence would have rejected the appeal to be a bourgeois fat cat – to be hooked and reeled in. This is one of the appeals of petty bourgeois individualism (to give it its PC, old school description); we may be genuinely appalled at the behaviour of those who stab others in the back, push or keep others down as they go for glory and we may even protest the fact. But so long as we abjure a class identification and solidarity and put all of our eggs into the narrow form of individuality that appealed to Lawrence, such protest would be as effective as pissing into the wind and the pull of that lone pine tree, flourishing and abundant, becomes impossible to resist. No wonder the tree appealed – it was as cut off from its kind as Lawrence was from his. This type of reaction would have suited Deng and the new Mandarins right down to the ground.

(As an aside, the term ‘petty bourgeois individualism’ certainly describes the kind of individualism Lawrence was drawn to. Unfortunately it’s a term that has been typically used by the radical (and, too often, censorious) left as a term of abuse designed to silence rather than to critically analyse. This is a pity because it tends to discourage communists from asking what kind of individualism, or perhaps more accurately, individualisms, will flourish in post revolutionary and communist societies and how we can recognise their beginnings and encourage their development under capitalism.)

Lawrence’s poem, then, is progressive in so far that it is identifying a problem and in aspiring to rise above them, but reactionary in the solution it implies – individual talent and enterprise cut off from its social base – a solution that, by definition, excludes most of those in the old hag’s grip, leaving them to their own devices as well as to hers.

It might be eighty-five years since Lawrence’s early death from tuberculosis but the question of what constitutes progressive, the question of ‘roads’, if you like, is contemporary and urgent. As mentioned above, this piece is not so much about Lawrence as it is about us. Marxists, there have been numerous incarnations, have been the inheritors and are now the remnants of a once vibrant revolutionary movement (or movements, depending on your stripe) who are now so marginalised and irrelevant to the day to day life and struggles of the modern working class and, very importantly, the individuals who make up this class, that we can now comfortably meet in the roomy confines of a broom closet. To become relevant enough to move out of the broom closet, let alone be credible as a challenge to bourgeois hegemony we need to rediscover what it means to be progressive as well as revolutionary (Marx is a good place to start) and be prepared to fight for it.

If some of the divergent strands of DH Lawrence’s poetry can be of assistance with this then, eighty five years on, we can happily acknowledge the contribution he is now making to a progressive cause.

*The reference is to an old Jacobin song The Bonnie Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond. While the Jacobin cause of Bonnie Prince Charlie was a dud one the song is correct to suggest that roads matter (and that the low road, the one the common folk were made to take, is the right one). The chorus, which has a very familiar ring, is reproduced here:

O ye’ll tak’ the high road and I’ll tak’ the low road
And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye
For me and my true love will ne-er meet again
On the bonnie, bonnie banks o’ Loch Lomon’.

Climate change – opening up to dissenting views of scientists, letting a hundred flowers bloom

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I have long felt that in the discussion of climate change, the notion that the ‘Science is settled’ makes little sense – beyond the fact of the Greenhouse Effect. We see in an actual greenhouse how high levels of CO2 promote plant growth and the temperature in a man-made greenhouse is increased. But the real world is not a man-made greenhouse and climate is a complex system, with positive and negative feedbacks. There is consensus, expressed through the IPCC, that the planet has warmed by less than a degree since the 1880s but beyond that – for example on the extent to which CO2 is responsible – the consensus starts to break down.

The IPCC, as the representative of scientific consensus, should allow for minority reports alongside the final report and these should be available on-line and in summarised form, like the main ‘Summary for Policy Makers’.

Like democracy, Science must be based on informed and qualified debate if understanding is to grow and society to progress. The notion that ‘the Science is settled’, when applied to climate change beyond the Greenhouse Effect, has resulted in vilification of dissenting scientific viewpoints. The term ‘denialism’, with all its ugly moral connotations pertaining to Holocaust denialism, is a case in point.

Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and adjunct research fellow in the Centre for Plant and Water Science at Central Queensland University, has written to Bob Baldwin MP, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for the Environment, concerning the need for him to urgently establish a public forum to enable dissident views to be heard concerning what she claims, with strong supporting evidence, is the bastardization of Australia’s official temperature record by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

I like the spirit of her letter, as it seeks to allow the expression of dissident qualified views, and I like the analogy she uses with the Catholic Church. She says that leaving things entirely to the established and dominant view is “like expecting George Pell to admit pedophilia during a Sunday sermon”. Her letter can be read here.

I am not qualified to say who is right or wrong but a healthy democracy allows the clash of ideas in which the dominant viewpoint and conclusions may be challenged. Back in the late 1960s, such debate was common on university campuses and it was those of us on the Left who organised teach-ins, inviting opponents such as Frank Knopfelmacher and Jim Cairns to debate. It was through such open debate that we were able to build a broad mass movement in solidarity with the Vietnamese people.

Today, people who regard themselves as left-wing often oppose debate and are the ones saying things are ‘settled’. Indeed, this pseudo-left also throws around the epithets such as ‘denialism’. I say they do not represent a genuine left outlook and we need to revive the rebellious spirit of 1968.

‘Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend’ in Science as well as politics, lest the scientific establishment becomes ‘religious’.

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Are you Progressive Except for Syria? Take the handy test here!

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Are you Progressive Except for Syria? Take the handy test here! Reprinted with permission of Wewritewhatwelike Written by Mary Rizzo.

 

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We have all already heard of the phenomenon of PEP (Progressive Except on Palestine), in which those who consider themselves progressives (liberals in the USA) or leftists are pretty liberal on every single issue except the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But, their syndrome has been pointed out and diagnosed fully. A lot of them justify this position by saying that supporting the government of Israel is a liberal position. Their problems are not our problem… they need help that we surely can’t provide.

However, there is another phenomenon far more worrisome because it involves those who are Progressive ALSO for Palestine, and that is the case of PES (Progressive Except on Syria). Those who are afflicted by this malady feel safety in numbers, because they are in fact the majority of non-Palestinian supporters of Palestine. They will actually USE the argument of Palestine as justification of their support of Assad, even though his regime has a terrible record regarding Palestinians, (as did that of his father). They will argue that support of Assad is a progressive (liberal) leftist value. Whether it’s called “selective humanitarianism” “double standards” or “hypocrisy”, it is a dangerous and insidious disease and should be cured. Here is a little test to discover if perhaps YOU are afflicted with this mental illness.

Do you perhaps suffer from PES without being aware of it? Fear no more! We’re happy to provide you a self-diagnosis test with simple YES / NO replies so that you can discover your own hypocritical stance, and hopefully, be on the path to the cure.

Did you protest or complain about the unfairness of the USA elections for any reason but believe that Assad won a landslide victory in free and fair elections?

Do you think that Assad is fighting terrorism?

Do you think that the Palestinian cause is being defended by Assad?

Do you believe that the war in Syria is all about foreign aggression “due to their national and pan-Arab stances” and is not a people’s uprising? In fact, you think the whole Arab Spring has got to be “exposed” as an imperialist, western plot.

Do you think that the Intifada in Palestine is legitimate and that the uprising in Syria is manufactured (while of course saying so having been paid guest to Assad’s presidential palace)?

Do you think that the Palestinian cause is being defended by Hezbollah even when they target and kill Palestinian refugees and ignore the growing tensions between Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Hezbollah?

Do you condemn religiously-inspired militias such as ISIS and Al Nusra when they commit murder and use violence against civilians but have not condemned Hezbollah when it commits murder and uses violence against civilians?

Do you think that it was a good idea for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC) to shoot on the Palestinians who mourned those killed on Naksa Day 2011?

Have you called Gaza “the world’s largest open-air prison” but don’t agree with the UNHCR claim that Syria’s war “is more brutal and destructive than the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and has turned into the worst humanitarian disaster since the end of the cold war.”?

Have you endorsed or thought a No Fly Zone was a good idea for Gaza but reject it as Imperialist meddling or a bid to save Al Qaeda if it’s done in Syria?

Do you condemn the Palestinians tortured to death in Israeli prisons (since 1967, a total of 72 Palestinians have been tortured to death) but have not condemned the 200 Palestinians tortured to death in Syrian prisons since 2011? You naturally probably don’t know about the at least 2100 Syrians who were tortured to death inside these prisons.

Do the at least 10,000 bodies of prisoners in Syrian regime prisons that were ordered to be catalogued by the regime mean nothing to you since you don’t have details on what the reasons for their deaths could be?

Do you call for release of political prisoners from Israeli jails but do not call for the release of the tens of thousands of political prisoners in Syrian jails?

Have you actually asked for money to bring Gazan children to make a protest for the NFZ but think that asking for a NFZ in Syria is a bid to help Al Qaeda?

Do you think Al Qaeda and ISIS are Mossad / CIA inventions?

Do you protest against the death penalty in the USA: Executions in 2014, 35, but don’t do the same for Iran: executions in 2014, Between 721 and 801 at least.

Do you think it is wrong for the US to provide Israel with armaments because it engages in war crimes but at the same time, think it is justified for Russia to provide the Syrian regime with armaments and military experts because “it’s war against NATO”?

Do you condemn Israel’s “extra judicial killing” but claim that Assad must do everything he needs to maintain power because blocking his actions in any way, even by condemning them “… could end up ousting Assad. It would mean replacing him with pro-Western stooge governance. It would eliminate another Israeli rival. It would isolate Iran. It would be disastrous for ordinary Syrians.”

Have you ever praised Assad’s government because it is secular, or “fighting the enemy of the West”: because after all, you only see the alternatives being Assad or the “Islamic Fundamentalists”?

Did you support Haniyeh and Meshaal until they started waving the Syrian revolution flag?

Do you erroneously refer to the Syrian revolution flag as the “French Mandate Flag” ignoring that even the Assad regime celebrated it as the Independence flag each “Evacuation (Independence) Day on 17 April to celebrate the resistance against the French colonialists?

Do you know the names of at least one Palestinian dissident/political writer but don’t know any Syrian ones?

Do you call the opposition to Assad “Western-backed rebels” either from a Pro-Israel or Pro-Iran standpoint?

Did you protest for Palestinian detainees and even know their names but not do the same for Palestinian detainees in Syrian’s prisons?

Do you know the name of at least one minor arrested or killed by Israel but don’t know the name of at least one minor arrested or killed by the Assad regime?

You have protested against the racist and discriminatory Apartheid Wall and checkpoints in Israel/Palestine but you have nothing much to say about Syrian military checkpoints and sniper-lined checkpoints?

Did you get angry when a US newspaper used a photo of Iraqi deaths, claiming they were Syrian, but when Palestinian supporters use Syrian ones, it’s “illustrating the suffering in Gaza”?

You have protested against Israeli use of phosphorus bombs but you have nothing much to say about the unconventional weapons use by Assad against both opposition fighters and civilians such as barrel bombs and chemical weapons?

Are you critical of the US for intervening in affairs of other countries but think it’s normal for Iran and Russia to be sending troops into Syria to help the regime?

You would never consider Palestine compromising with Israel but you believe that the opposition must compromise with the regime in Syria.

Do you condemn the Saudi monarchy and refer to them as Wahhabis, Salafis, etc., but refuse to recognise that Iran is a theocracy?

Do you think that Assad is simply doing everything he can to protect the minorities in his country?

Do you call the Israeli occupation of Palestine ethnic cleansing but do not speak out against the regime-driven massacres in Syria that are ethnically based?

Do you refer to the Assad regime, Hezbollah and Iran as the “Axis of Resistance” even when they don’t react to Israeli attacks on them?

Do you think the following two statements are both true?

a. Dissent in the United States is patriotic.
b. Protesting in Syria is an assault on the State and needs to be quelled.

Do you think the following two statements are true?
a. Pepper spraying protesters in the USA is a violation of human rights.
b. The Syrian regime has to use whatever force it deems necessary against protesters, because they protesters have violent intentions.

Do you think that Israel must be brought to the ICC for crimes against humanity but think that the Syrian regime should not?

Do you condemn the USA vetoes on the UN Security Council in favour of Israel but praise the Russian and Chinese ones in favour of Assad both to stop sanctions and to prohibit ICC investigation including three Chinese vetoes on Syria alone out of eight total vetoes in their history?

Do you think the following statements are both true?
a.Calling a U.S. citizen anti-American or un-American for being critical of the US government is ridiculous, knee-jerk, unintelligent and actually incorrect.
b.People who are critical of Assad are closet or overt imperialists and want US control over the region.

You do not believe that Russia is an imperialist state while you are certain that Syria is an anti-imperialist state defending itself against imperialist onslaught.

Do you think that Erdogan is seeking to dominate politics in the region in an attempt to restore what was once the Ottoman Empire or even think the US is trying to establish an Islamic State but support Iranian domination and the Shi’a Crescent?

Have you signed petitions against companies such as Soda Stream and Coca-cola but not against weapons provider, the Russian monopoly Rosoboronexport or even the western companies providing the Syrian and Iranian regimes with surveillance equipment that they use against dissidents and opposition?

Do you call innocent victims killed by American drones or victims of war crimes but consider the Syrians and Palestinians killed by Syrian bombs and chemical weapons collateral damage?

Do you reject the USA/UK “War on Terror” but believe that Assad has a right to use whatever means possible to kill whoever he considers as a terrorist in Syria and that Syria is a sovereign nation fighting Al Qaeda?

Have you mentioned the Blockade on Gaza in conversations and know it is illegal and a crime against humanity but don’t feel the same about the Blockade on Yarmouk?

Do you respond to criticism of Assad by pointing out USA human rights violations?

You know the name of USA civilians killed by cops or vigilantes, but you don’t know the name of a single Syrian victim of torture in the Assad prisons.

You have protested for the closure of Gitmo, but you don’t raise your voice or even one eyebrow over the Syrian Torture Archipelago in which “The systematic patterns of ill-treatment and torture [in the 27 detention facilities run by Syrian Intelligence] that Human Rights Watch documented clearly point to a state policy of torture and ill-treatment and therefore constitute a crime against humanity.” Moreover, you don’t want to notice that Syria’s government has been cooperating with the CIA extensively in renditions and the torture programme.

You think that Israel should not have nuclear capacity but that Iran should have nuclear capacity. Extra points if you support Non-Proliferation. Super extra points if you participated in any No Nukes events in the West or signed any such petitions, super extra and mega extra points if you are against nuclear power.

You believe that the Palestinian struggle is about human rights but the Syrian protests were sectarian and religious-oriented, driven by people who wanted to overthrow and overtake power illegitimately if not in fact manufactured by the West?

Do you believe it’s normal for the Syrian constitution to be amended every time that it serves the Assad family but the US Constitution is sacred and especially no amendments should be made to limit gun possession whether you detest the US government or think it should basically call all the shots around the world?

Do you think that Jews protesting the Israel government are noble people who are fighting for human rights and justice while any Syrian protesting the Assad regime are in cahoots with the Israeli government.

Do you believe that, “We must not in any way call for the removal of President Assad unless he commits acts of terror against us. Assad’s government has committed no such act, thus rendering it criminal for foreign governments to undermine the Syrian regime. You either stand for national sovereignty, or against it. The choice is yours.” While at the same time have supported efforts from the liberals or conservatives to have Obama impeached?

Do you believe that foreign countries helping the Palestinians militarily to win against Israel is legitimate but helping Syrians win against Assad is meddling and think that “any further intervention in Syria would be for U.S. interests, like weakening an ally of Iran, and would encourage Assad’s allies to step up their armament shipments. The carnage would continue, and perhaps increase.”?

Do you reject claims that the involvement of Iran and Russia in favour of Assad is meddling?

Do you think that the entire Syrian war is for the purpose of the US weakening Syria so that it can pursue its own interests in the region but ignore the fact that Russia has enormous interests in Syria that are far more evident?

Have you ever found yourself denying Assad had chemical weapons but also applauding the Syrian regime’s decision to hand them over to Russia as a strong gesture towards peace?

How many questions did you answer YES to?

Between 1 and 5? You are headed towards selective humanitarianism, or even are afflicted with Western Privilege Syndrome!

Between 6 and 10? You are dangerously using double standards and believe that human rights aren’t something universal, but allow your ideological or dogmatic prejudices to influence your ethical judgement!

Over 10? You are a dyed in the wool Hypocrite! Maybe you should avoid “current events” altogether, you have no understanding of what human rights and justice mean, you should wash your mouth out before you ever speak about human rights for Palestinians or anyone.

If the Dalai Lama is Marxist, then so was Leo X111.

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Last month at a university lecture in Kolkata, India, the Dalai Lama declared that, when it comes to “socio-economic theory”, he is a Marxist. His reasoning was as follows:

“In capitalist countries, there is an increasing gap between the rich and the poor. In Marxism, there is emphasis on equal distribution.”

The Dalai Lama joins a growing list of religious leaders, including Pope Francis, and other global celebrities, to declare an affinity with the notion of ‘equal distribution of wealth’, an idea that is widely (but wrongly) regarded as being Marxist. A leftist influenced by Marxism does not ask, “How can wealth be distributed more equitably?” but rather “Who produces the wealth in the first place?” And: “Why does socially produced wealth end up in the hands of the owners of the means of producing it (machines, factories, raw materials, etc) rather than in the hands of those without whom it could not have been generated?”

The positive side of the publicity is that Marxism is of international interest again, as a theory that helps to understand the dynamics of capitalism. This is happening  at a time when, in the advanced economies, capitalism isn’t delivering the promised goods any more and growing numbers of people are pissed off.

But, one must feel some sympathy for old Karl. His exasperation with those who adopted the brand without understanding the content led him to declare 150 years ago that “If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist”. Marxism is not, and has never been, about the equal distribution of wealth.

‘To each according to his contribution’: Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme

In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, written as a letter in 1875 in response to the draft platform of the German Social Democratic Workers Party (SDAP), Marx pulled no punches when he described the idea of “fair distribution” being proposed by the SDAP as “obsolete verbal rubbish”, which ‘perverted a realistic outlook’.

He first tackles the proposal in the draft platform that “the proceeds of labor belong undiminished with equal right to all members of society” and asks: “’To all members of society’? To those who do not work as well? What remains then of the ‘undiminished’ proceeds of labor? Only to those members of society who work? What remains then of the ‘equal right’ of all members of society?”

Marx then dissects the notion of “proceeds of labor” in the sense of “a product of labor” with the co-operative proceeds “the total social product”.

“From this”, he points out, “must now be deducted: First, cover for replacement of the means of production used up. Second, additional portion for expansion of production. Third, reserve or insurance funds to provide against accidents, dislocations caused by natural calamities, etc. These deductions from the ‘undiminished’ proceeds of labor are an economic necessity, and their magnitude is to be determined according to available means and forces, and partly by computation of probabilities, but they are in no way calculable by equity”.

He continues: “There remains the other part of the total product, intended to serve as means of consumption. Before this is divided among the individuals, there has to be deducted again, from it: First, the general costs of administration not belonging to production. This part will, from the outset, be very considerably restricted in comparison with present-day society, and it diminishes in proportion as the new society develops. Second, that which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etc. From the outset, this part grows considerably in comparison with present-day society, and it grows in proportion as the new society develops. Third, funds for those unable to work, etc., in short, for what is included under so-called official poor relief today. Only now do we come to the ‘distribution’… to that part of the means of consumption which is divided among the individual producers of the co-operative society”.

As Marx notes, the “undiminished” proceeds of labor in the draft have now become converted into the “diminished” proceeds, “although what the producer is deprived of in his capacity as a private individual benefits him directly or indirectly in his capacity as a member of society”.

And what of the obvious and natural inequality among individual workers?  “… one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only — for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal”.

The Critique of the Gotha Programme is one of my favourite works by Marx. In it, he is thinking practically about how the future society based on socialism – ‘To each according to his contribution’ – and then communism – ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ – might develop. A most important point is that the new socialist society emerges from the old capitalist one and will still be marked by the culture and habits of the past. It will not be a wholly new system simply because the old social relations have been overthrown.

Accordingly, argues Marx, the individual producer in socialist society receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – “exactly what he gives to it”. He continues: “What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor…The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another”. Marx’s view of how this could be done involved certificates rather than money.

And, “the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values… a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form. Hence, equal right here is still in principle – bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads, while the exchange of equivalents in commodity exchange exists only on the average and not in the individual case. In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.”

Progressive taxation as a distributive measure

It is true that in the Communist Manifesto, Marx advocated a system of “heavy progressive or graduated income” taxation, which is the way wealth is redistributed by governments, and argued about, in capitalist societies today. But progressive taxation has now been part and parcel of capitalism for more than a century. It would be absurd to regard the Prussian government of 1891, when modern progressive taxation was first introduced, as Marxist; even if Emperor Wilhelm 11 did regard himself as “king of the mob”.

Progressive taxation imposes a greater rate of tax on the wealthier income-earners. In Australia, people who earn less than $18,200 per year pay no income tax, those who earn between $18,200 and $180,000 pay (an average of) 20%, while those who earn over $180,000 pay at a rate of 45%. It can be a way of redistributing wealth downwards, as in the case of funding the Welfare State, or upwards through subsidies and ‘bail-outs’ to the capitalist class. Labor parties, or right-wing social democratic parties, are particularly good at the latter. In Australia, under the former Labor government led by Prime Minister Gillard, subsidies amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars were handed out to the big capitalists. In 2012 alone, nearly $90 million went to General Motors Holden.

Mind you, the US experience shows that ‘right-wing’ parties, like the Republicans, are also extremely good at it too. Witness Bush jr’s $700 billion bail-outs to failed financial-services capitalists over there. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Democrats or Republicans, or Labor or Coalition, they will do what it takes with workers’ money to keep zombie capitalism going. Naturally, people become disenchanted with a political party system of that kind and it becomes common to hear phrases such as “No matter who you vote for, you end up with a politician”.

It cannot be disputed that progressive taxation occurs under capitalism and does not in any way challenge the basic set of social relations defining it.

Rerum Novarum, distributism and fascism

By the measure of the notion of fair wealth distribution, the Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo X111, which was formulated in 1891 as a Catholic conservative response to the ills of capitalism and the ascendancy of secular democracy and the growing interest in socialism among the working classes, might also be regarded as ‘Marxist’. Rerum Novarum advocated ‘distributism’, a system in which means of production and property are distributed throughout society as in medieval times, as an alternative to both capitalism and socialism. It was, and is, a desire to return to the era of the guild, an economy centred on small land holdings and artisan production, and based on class collaboration (ie, the peasants/workers ‘accepting their place’ in return for being exploited more nicely).

In Australia, the best known advocate of this system was B.A. Santamaria. In his book, The earth, our Mother (1945), the basis of the new small-scale distributive society was to be the family unit living as close to possible to self-sufficiency on the land. As in medieval times, prior to industrial capitalism, this society would be protected from the ‘corrupting’ influences of big cities and secular materialism by the unifying ‘higher’ spiritual values of the Church. The cooperation of owners and producers would also be cemented through the promotion of nationalism, adherence to custom and tradition, and ethnic solidarity (the folk or volk).

Much of this has resonance today in E. F. Schumacher’s Small is beautiful (1973) and the Green movement. The higher spiritual value from the viewpoint of green ideology is Gaia, or the idea of harmony with, and subservience to, Nature.

Not surprisingly, in the twentieth century, Rerum Novarum and distributism influenced fascist movements, including Italy’s with its corporatist form of tyranny under Mussolini. That influence is also seen in the right-wing social democratic and Christian Democratic commitment to systems of arbitration between workers and owners of means of production. Australia currently has one avowedly ‘distributionist’ parliamentary political party: the Democratic Labour Party. Appropriately, its representative in the federal Senate is a practitioner of one of the medieval era’s ‘mechanical arts’: blacksmithing.

Given that the medieval feudal past cannot – (and should not!) – return, then the quest for more equitable distribution of wealth ends up being a defence of the status quo, capitalism. To socialists influenced by Marxism, capitalism was a revolutionary leap forward from feudalism, because feudalism limited the capacity of individuals to expand their horizons and to be freer. It trapped people in what Marx called “rural idiocy”. At best, from a Marxist perspective, the issue of wealth distribution – the gap ‘between rich and poor’, as the media likes to put it – is useful because it can raise the real question of production rather than distribution, of how value is produced and how it is appropriated. And, from there, why the appropriators need to be expropriated.

The revolutionary nature of capitalism in the nineteenth century

To Marx, capitalism was revolutionary in the way it overturned feudal claptrap and “at last” compelled people “to face with sober senses their real conditions of life and their relations with their kind”.

In the Communist Manifesto, he put it poetically:

“The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades.

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air… “

Industrial capitalism created material conditions that cannot be unmade but only taken further, and social relations that can be overturned and transformed into something new and better.

Marxists are all for progress with a big ‘P’. It’s about the future, not yearning for a ‘small is beautiful’ rural past.

Distribution of wealth and relations of production

Under capitalism, with private ownership of means of production, and production for private profit, distribution of social wealth flows from the relations of production. The resultant scale of inequality can be no other way. Increases in inequality between rich and poor or, more to the point, between the owning class and the working class is part of the system of exploitation of wage labour itself, through which value is created.

In Wage Labour and Capital, Marx points out how,

“…even the most favorable situation for the working class, namely, the most rapid growth of capital, however much it may improve the material life of the worker, does not abolish the antagonism between his interests and the interests of the capitalist. Profit and wages remain as before, in inverse proportion. If capital grows rapidly, wages may rise, but the profit of capital rises disproportionately faster. The material position of the worker has improved, but at the cost of his social position. The social chasm that separates him from the capitalist has widened…

“Growth of productive capital and rise of wages, are they really so indissolubly united as the bourgeois economists maintain? We must not believe their mere words. We dare not believe them even when they claim that the fatter capital is the more will its slave be pampered. The bourgeoisie is too much enlightened, it keeps its accounts much too carefully, to share the prejudices of the feudal lord, who makes an ostentatious display of the magnificence of his retinue.”

On this last point, I think Marx would reconsider his position were he alive today. The ostentatiousness of the big bourgeoisie is sometimes astonishing – be it in the USA, the Russian Federation or China.

Marx would also be amazed at the material progress that has taken place, especially for the working class, but any great thinker from the nineteenth century would be the same. Marx acknowledged that the material conditions for the workers were improving even in his time. The important point is that the social chasm widens. (There are, of course, plenty of other reasons why capitalism sucks and has outlived its usefulness).

Labour theory of value: Marx meets the Jetsons!

The Marxist labour theory of value (LTV) explains how exchange value is created by labour’s interaction with nature and how, in the capitalist mode of production, wage labour is exploited. Bourgeois economists hate the theory because it lay at the heart of Marx’s analysis of the need for revolution. Capitalism reaches a point where it is a fetter on production – as we have seen for some decades now. Workers as a class without borders have nothing to lose by overthrowing this system based on their exploitation. Some real productivity can then occur, free from the constraints of production geared to the pursuit of private profit. For starters, we’ll be able to mass produce and have our own flying-cars!

I wanted to find a good summary of the theory that wasn’t too scant, and found the following at a non-Marxist economics blog called ‘Unlearning Economics’:

“Marx’s theory goes as follows: under capitalism, the value of commodities is determined by the ‘socially necessary’ amount of labour required to produce them (‘variable capital’), plus the current necessary cost of the capital used up in production (‘constant capital’). Fixed capital, such as machines, adds value at the same rate it depreciates, while raw commodities are used up completely and so add all of their value. Labour is generally paid less than the value it adds, and therefore is the sole source of profit.

“Here’s a brief mathematical example: say an hour of labour adds £1 of value, and a certain type of chair requires 8 hours of labour (‘labour-time’), uses £2 worth of wood and depreciates a saw worth £10 by 1/10th (i.e. after the saw is used 10 times it will break). It follows that, according to the LTV, the value of this chair is:

“(1/10)*£10 + (8*£1) + £2 = £11

“The only way the capitalist can make a profit is to pay the labourer less than the value he creates (for the most part, Marx suggested wages were determined by a social subsistence level). So if the wage is, say, £0.50, the capitalist will have £4 worth of profit. Contrary to what many think, this does not imply that capital-intensive industries will have lower rates of profit, as the rate of profit will tend to equalise between industries, ‘sharing out’ the total surplus value produced in the economy.

“The qualifiers of “necessary” costs and “socially necessary” labour are also important. It’s logically possible that a madman could purchase a saw for £100 for some reason, or that a lazy labourer could take 10 hours to make the chair, but this would do nothing to alter the resultant value of the chair. Marx was concerned with general rules, not specific cases, which could obviously fluctuate wildly as they are based on human behaviour.

“The main implication of this theory is that, since capitalists tend to use labour saving technology to increase productivity, over time they use relatively more constant capital – which cannot be a source of surplus – and this drives down the rate of profit: the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF). Though the first capitalist who uses the technology will be able to sell at the market price, and thus gain, once the technology is widely adopted, the value of the commodity will decrease – a ‘fallacy of composition’. Again, this may not be true in particular industries at any one time, but it holds true across the economy as a whole. The result will be intermittent crises as capitalists face lower profits and try to increase them by pushing down wages, devaluing their constant capital, or through technological progress. Marx never predicted capitalism would collapse in on itself, though he did suggest that the working class would revolt as their wages were pushed down”.

Conclusion

A shared prosperity can only spring from common ownership of the means of production. It is not possible under capitalism. The system would grind to a halt. The capitalist would not invest and they would have no incentive to force alienated workers to keep their noses to the grind stone. The system of distribution cannot be separated from the system of ownership.

 

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Not all imperialist wars are created equal

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Excellent article from Arabmaoists blog:

 

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The “anti-imperialist” left and Marxists in particular have made fools of themselves over Syria and the question of U.S. military action on two counts:

Failing to properly evaluate what is going on in Syria itself and clinging stubbornly to the radically false notion that all imperialist wars are created equal; that all of them are equally reactionary in intent and objective outcome, and concluding from this that the oppressed and exploited never have a dog in fights between their oppressors and exploiters.

This is not to imply that imperialist powers or their wars are by nature progressive, but just as it is possible for evil people to do good things, so too there are cases where working people do have an interest or a stake in the outcome of military conflicts between ruling classes and their states.

The most obvious example of this is World War Two, the world’s bloodiest and most devastating conflict to date. There were powerful imperialist powers and coalitions of their clients on both sides of the war and yet the consequences of one side’s victory could not be more dramatically different than the victory of the other’s.

Only a fool could assert that it made no difference to millions of people whether the Allied or Axis powers won the war and yet that is what one current within the international socialist movement, the Trotskyists, claimed at the time. James Cannon, a leader of the American Socialist Workers’ Party, put it thus after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor: “No imperialist regime can conduct a just war. We cannot support it for one moment.”

Instead of analyzing the war as it was, as a global struggle between two camps headed by imperialist powers, Trotskyists tried to pick and choose sides in the smaller conflicts within the overall war, specifically the USSR’s war against the Nazis and China’s war for national liberation against Japan, as if British imperialism headed by Churchill and American imperialism led by FDR were not sending Stalin war material and aiding bourgeois nationalist and even communist forces in the Far East and Yugoslavia as part of the broader effort to defeat the fascist Axis powers. This is doubly ironic given Trotskyism’s claim that it developed the “best” analysis of fascism as a uniquely reactionary force.

What does all this have to do with Syria?

Today’s anti-interventionists would have claimed back then that American military action could “only make things worse” for people in Europe and Asia, would have voted in Congress or in Parliament against taking military action against the Axis, and blocked weapons and aid from reaching Stalin, Hồ Chí Minh, and Tito (all of whom the Trotskyists claimed they supported; starving forces you support of weapons is probably one of the more bizarre implications of their political method).

The world was much better off without this brand of “leftism” back then and the Syrians would be much better off without it now.

INTERVIEW WITH A UKRAINIAN MARXIST AND SOLDIER FIGHTING IN THE DONBAS (from Ukraine Solidarity Campaign)

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“In Russia right-wing conservatism and authoritarianism are not just a tendency but full reality”.

Reprinted with permission from ukrainesolidaritycampaign in Donbas, January 12, 2015

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Ukrainian soldiers in Donbas with the symbol of Anti-Fascist Action – and slogan ‘Anti-Imperialist Action’.

Andriy M. (the name was changed) is one of those Kiev white-collar leftists, who after some hesitations supported Maidan last winter and in spring took a decisive stand against the reaction in Crimea and in Eastern Ukraine. His stand finally led him to the Ukrainian army and now Andriy is taking part in the ATO (Anti-Terrorist Operation) in the Donbas. Having known this, “Nihilist” [1] asked him a few questions. Republished courtesy of Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski.

– How did you come to join the army? What unit is it?

– A very ordinary one, the 72nd Separate Mechanized Brigade. The one that was surrounded near Izvarino in July. In that time it was constantly being shot at, while suffering heavy personnel and equipment losses. Four hundred soldiers were even forced to withdraw to Russian territory, an outcome that generated a lot of media hype. Later the Ukrainian troops gained control of Savur-Mohyla barrow, liberated the surrounded brigade, and led it out of the ATO zone. In August-September near Melitopol the brigade was replenished with personnel and armored fighting vehicles. I then joined that brigade as a gunner and was mobilized in August. At the moment the brigade is again in the ATO zone.

– Could you have evaded military service?

– Technically yes, definitely I could. But already in March I went to the military commissariat and told the commander that the army can count on me. At that time Crimea was just annexed and the riots in the Donbas and Kharkov had begun. It was clear to me that a big war was coming. I was also convinced that Russian Army intrusion was a matter of a few weeks. For me the Putin regime, Russian occupation, and ideas of “Russian World” are absolutely unacceptable. Therefore it was impossible for me to remain a bystander. Then everything went a bit different than expected. Instead of regular army invasion, Putin began by using local paramilitary formations, but in reality it did not change the situation. Of course, lots of friends offered me “help” – shelter, leaving Kiev and going abroad, applying for a visa etc. I did not take such alternatives into consideration for reasons of principle.

– Do you characterize yourself as a leftist and a Marxist today?

– In respect of beliefs, a worldview – definitely yes. However, if one takes a point of view that sees Marxism as a political practice in the first place, I could be reproached that according to this criteria I am not a Marxist. I will not argue with that, but I just ask whether the Bolsheviks were Marxists when they were defending the Kerensky government from the Kornilov Revolt.

As a Marxist, I am aware of the fact that today a Ukrainian state is an unpleasant thing. There are very strong rightist conservative and nationalist tendencies there, with the power in the hands of big capital – the same as before, a powerful offensive is launched against the social component of state spending and workers’ rights. You know, as in the “socialist realist” art, the priority was depiction of a conflict between the good and the better, today in the Donbas there is a conflict between the bad and the worse. In Russia right-wing conservatism and authoritarianism are not just a tendency but full reality. The new expansionism in the sauce of the “Russian World” is a disgusting reactionary ideology that in reality is translated into war, violence, lies and hatred. In the Donbas all of them are in full bloom and trying to expand themselves. In my opinion, the main task is to stop it. Referring to the Kornilovism analogy, I will mention that a good friend of mine, a socialist, says that this war takes place between Petliuraites [2] and White Guards. This analogy is a bit lame, but in the situation when at war there is no communist side, for me as a Marxist the choice between White Guards and Petliuraites is obvious: in favor of the latter. At the same time it is evident that we are not even allies but just fellow travellers and just to the first crossroad.

– What do you think about Maidan? What was that?

– Maidan is a very complicated theme. On the one hand, it was a popular uprising and an experience of the self-organization of the masses, followed by the creation of volunteer battalions and a powerful and effective network of volunteers supporting those battalions, but on the other hand, there was an openly right-wing political wrapping. My approach to Maidan was changing from careful neutrality towards critical support following the infamous 16 January Laws. In any case, even the very right-wing wrapping was not sufficient to discredit the powerful democratic component of Maidan. In my opinion, it is enough to deserve acknowledgment. In any way, Maidan is in the past now; we live in the post-Maidan epoch and at the moment that mixture of progress and reaction, prepared on Maidan, is breaking down into its components: so much the better. It would be easier to separate the wheat from the chaff.

– What is this war for you?

– Firstly, it is a huge tragedy for millions of people – sorry for the banality. The civilian population is being disinformed, deceived and terrorized by both sides. In those rare cases, when the dialogue with the local inhabitants is held, the majority of them ask: “Why have you come armed to our land?” When you answer: “To prevent separatists and Putin’s soldiers from coming armed to our land”, they do not accept it. However, this is a real goal. There are lots of aspects of this war and I clearly see political profits gained by the Ukrainian and Russian elites – the profits generated from sufferings of local population and Ukrainian and Russian soldiers. For me personally, such phantasms as a territorial integrity or a national statehood have no meaning and I do not see them worth life and blood. However, if Ukraine lays down arms, the war will not stop but imperialist Russia will just continue its bloody expansion undisturbed. It is an aggression and the aggressor must be stopped not appeased. Unfortunately, there is no good solution here. One has to choose between the bad and the worse.

– What are Ukrainian soldiers in the East fighting for?

– Every soldier is fighting for his own reasons. For example, my colleague, a Maidanist and romantic nationalist, Sanya is fighting for his fatherland and the centuries-old Ukrainian dream of independence. A robust peasant, Misha, is fighting so that no-one from abroad tells him, his children, and grand-children what rules they should live by. An electrician Serhiy is fighting only because he was mobilized and he is very unhappy with it. He is also personally unhappy with the commissar who sent him to the slaughter instead of somebody more suitable. However all that does not prevent him from performing combat missions with dignity. Some people do not hide that they are fighting for money – due to the poverty and unemployment in civilian life, going to war has become a noteworthy alternative for a number of people. The majority of soldiers are convinced that they are fighting for Ukraine, its territorial integrity, the right to live not on orders from Kremlin, preventing “Donetsk bandits” and “commies” for good from trying to govern the country. That is the main motivation.

– It turns out that the soldiers are anticommunists and it is a mass phenomenon. How could you explain it?

– There is a great temptation to shift the entire responsibility to the Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU). The party of Petro Simonenko did really all that could have been done to make the word “communist” offensive. Years of serving the interests of oligarchs accompanied by the socialist rhetoric and last year’s explicit support for the enemy – all that leaves a trace. However, this is not only the matter of the KPU. The ancestors of numerous soldiers and officers were victims of Stalinist repressions or died during the Holodomor (extermination by famine). For each of them those things are not an abstraction or historical events but a tragedy that directly touched their families, a crime committed by the Soviet government. And through two decades the Ukrainian state propaganda machine was successfully flooding the masses with the idea that the famine, violence and executions are the essence of communism. No wonder people easily adopt it as their own viewpoint.

– Does a communist feel comfortable in such an environment?

– Of course not. But there is one good principle: “neither to cry nor to laugh but to understand”. To keep one’s cool. To notice that the hatred to communism among the masses of soldiers is not hatred toward the ideas of justice, cooperation, solidarity and freedom. On the contrary, it is hatred of the social parasitism that typifies communist party hierarchies, and hatred of the total physical, ideological and economical violence. And it is entirely compatible with sharp non-acceptance of the new post-Maidan government. For the majority of soldiers Poroshenko, Yatseniuk and Klychko are no better than Yanukovych. The timeliness of the social question has not been abolished. Certainly, today the ultra-right forces are trying to speculate with it but that is because the left in Ukraine turned out unable to play on its traditional political field.

– Is that why the left has lost in Ukraine?

– It is a complicated question. Now I am to say a handful of standard phrases about the combination of objective and subjective factors. And where did you see a victory of the left in the period of primitive accumulation and redistribution of capital? The actual left-wing class-oriented mass movement has not been able to form yet – one cannot take for the left the Soviet-conservative KPU or pale pink bourgeois socialists! Not to mention commercial and technological political projects like Borotba, which, from the very beginning, were created to fulfill completely non-leftist tasks. Those left-wing organizations that were actually trying to fulfill the proper tasks, either were organizationally too weak to grow out of little circles or turned out to be so accustomed to the certain conditions that they were not able to realize themselves outside those conditions – like for example the Direct Action [3].

– Has your approach to the Western and Russian left changed?

– It has not changed but rather definitely formed. In the West the left is characterized by rational conformism, by dogmatism or – most often – by a combination of both of those unpleasant features. They, more or less successfully, fulfill the tasks in their own countries but in respect to Ukraine their position is affected in varying degrees by adjusting their thinking on the Ukrainian situation to some of the usual dogmas and to “export” opinions of their Ukrainian contacts that very often turn out to be presenting and analyzing in bad faith Ukrainian developments. As a result, numerous Western leftists believe that there is a socialist revolution in the Donbas, that Ukraine is a fascist state and this state is drowning the popular uprising in blood on the orders from Washington. To make them change their mind is incredibly hard, even impossible. Therefore, in my view, it is easier and better to live as if there was no Western left. As for the Russian left, a huge part of it is under the impression of bygone “Soviet socialism” and the “great victory against fascism”. The Soviet Union passed away long time ago, in the Kremlin there are no people in power who defeated fascism in 1945. Meanwhile in Kiev the power is not in hands of Bandera and Shukhevytch, but the matrix is in use and people who curse the regime furiously turn out to be faithful Putinists when it comes to the issue of Ukraine. Fortunately, not all Russian left is like that, but…

– What should be done?

– To observe attentively. In no case to shut away in an ivory tower but, quite the contrary, to be in the thick of things, as close to people as possible. As a matter of fact, it is another reason why I am in the war now. As long as we have the first-hand experience of what the people of Ukraine live and breathe, we will be able to create an effective strategy and tactics. A very complicated time is coming. A right-wing consensus in the society combined with an unsolved social question can lead to a fascist coup. One should become aware of this danger and prepare for it. To educate the masses, to propose a solution to social conflicts that would be based on a class approach. That solution must be more effective than the one proposed by the right-wing national-social populism. And I have fallen into the abstract again. Let us finish the war and then we will talk about this issue in more detail, ok?

Nihilist, December 6, 2014

Translated by Katarzyna Bielińska and edited by Louis N. Proyect

[1] “Nihilist” is a web portal edited in Ukraine by anarchists and left-wing anti-authoritarian radicals who try to “combine constant theoretical search with everyday revolutionary practice”.
[2] Petliuraites was the popular name of supporters of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, formed in Kiev after the fall of the Russian Empire. It existed since January until April 1918 and since December 1918 until November 1920. It was in war both with Soviet Russia and the imperialist Great Russian White Guards. Its Commander-in-Chief and, since February 1919, its President was Symon Petliura.
[3] The Direct Action (PD) is a network of independent students’ unions, with a left-wing anti-authoritarian and syndicalist orientation, established in 2008 in Kiev and active also in some other universitary centers of the country.

Weep for Charlie … but also pay more attention to Syrian cartoonist, Raed Fares

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Article by Bill Kerr. Reprinted with permission from his blog.

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I can certainly identify with the grief, anger and further preparation against home grown terrorist attacks in the “civilised” west. But I also think this needs to be compared with the so little understanding and commitment of what needs to be done in Syria. The problem of fundamentalist inspired terrorism can only be solved at its source. It’s the old story of do we fish the babies out of the water or make the effort to stop those who are throwing the babies in further upstream (from The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist)

The Daesh (aka ISIS, ISIL) is the monster created within the monster of Assad’s Syria.

The Syrian cartoonist, Raed Fares, survived a Daesh assassination attempt in January 2014… the would-be assassins fired at Fares 46 times. Twenty-seven bullets struck the wall behind him; 17 hit his car. Only two struck him. They shattered seven bones in his shoulder and ribs and punctured his right lung.

assad barrel bombs

Assad’s brutality in the face of the Arab Spring inspired Syrian revolution has created 200,000 plus deaths and 3.5 million refugees. Today we witness so much grief and preparation for terrorism at “home”. By contrast there is little understanding and commitment of what needs to be done in Syria.

This NYT article about Raed Fares, Radio-Free Syria, is very good. It includes one section about Obama’s failure in Syria:

“Three years ago, America could have saved thousands of lives,” Bayyoush went on. To them, what they needed seemed simple in hindsight: antiaircraft missiles, airstrikes against Assad, a no-fly zone. All of these options would have offered potential solutions. Their model for U.S. intervention was Libya, where airstrikes in support of the opposition helped to depose Qaddafi. Later the country descended into civil war. Fares acknowledged that Libya was hardly a success story, yet at least, he said, the United States had intervened to protect the Libyan people. In Syria, Assad was free to systematically imprison and kill the moderate leaders the United States was now looking for. “One by one, they were disappeared,” he said.

“Can I speak?” said Hamada, who is with the Fifth Regiment of the Free Syrian Army. “I told the Americans I met in Jordan: ‘If you help us, there will be no extremism in Syria at all. If you’re too late, there will be a time when neither you nor we will have any control.’ ” According to a senior retired U.S. military leader, who asked not to be named because he is no longer in the service, the delay in backing the Free Syrian Army led to the death of moderate military leaders. “If we had helped those people earlier, it could’ve gone differently,” he said. “A lot of the good leaders are dead now. They’ve been caught between rocks and hard places and ground into dust.”

The recent strikes against ISIS in Syria frustrated the Free Syrian Army commanders on two counts. First, unlike that of the United States, the F.S.A.’s primary foe was the regime. “The regime has launched chemical attacks and many more massacres than ISIS has,” Bayyoush said. Second, they had been warning the United States against the growth of ISIS for more than a year. “A year and a half ago, ISIS started activating cells,” Hamada said. “If America had helped us in the beginning, there would be no ISIS.” But the growth of ISIS wasn’t simply America’s fault. The Free Syrian Army bore its own responsibility. “These extremist groups formed because we were weak within the Free Syrian Army,” he said.

Some more Raed Fares cartoons, they are all located in one place here, Liberated Kafranbel .

Free speech is surely something to fight for… Memories of the Free Speech movement in Brunswick, Melbourne, Australia, 1933

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The following 22 minute edited excerpt from an interview I recorded with Ted Bull (1914-1997) between 1988 and 1990 recalls Ted’s memories and reflections on the Free Speech movement in Brunswick, Melbourne, in 1933. The struggle is commemorated today by a monument in Sydney Road, Brunswick, but the lessons – the need to defend and assert free speech – remain valid.

Ted Bull was arrested on the free speech protests. As he recalls: “You’d get half a dozen words out and you’d be arrested. Not only arrested but the coppers would take you behind the Town Hall and they’d give you a bloody ‘doing over’ – and a good ‘doing over’ too”.

For overseas listeners, a “stump” in this context refers to a spot where a speaker regularly set up – usually a street corner – to speak to passers-by. Crowds would gather and this was seen as dangerous by the state at a time when communist ideas were gaining support. Also, when Ted refers to “the hook”, he means his work as a waterside worker – or ‘wharfie’ – in the days before widespread mechanisation when much of the work was manual and sacks were carried using a hook.

At the time of interview, I had no idea that someone had been shot during the free speech struggle in Brunswick, which happens to be my ‘hometown’. Ted talks about ‘Shorty’ Patullo who was shot by police and hospitalised. It was also surprising, though shouldn’t have been, to learn that in addition to the police it was die-hard Labor Party supporters who would disrupt the stumps.

The 1933 struggle is probably best remembered for the makeshift cage in which Noel Counihan (1913-1986) locked himself in Sydney Road in order to give his speech without being arrested.

 

The above is a 22 minute edited excerpt but the full interview runs for about 20 hours, based on a whole-of-life approach, and is available in full via the National Library of Australia’s on-line catalogue.

William Hinton – China’s great reversal

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William Hinton was born in Chicago in 1919. He first visited China in 1937 and then in 1945 returned as a staff member with the US Office of War Information. During an eight year period, he also worked as an English teacher at a university in Shanxi and as a tractor-technician for the United Nations. He and his wife lived mostly in the village of Long Bow.

His best known book, Fanshen, documents in detail, from an on-the-ground perspective, the revolutionary process, especially land reform, in the area, based on his experiences of it. As a Marxist, he opposed the ‘capitalist roaders’ in China’s Communist Party and in 1990 wrote his critique, The Great Reversal, which is available below on-line in full. He died in the US in 2004.

From the Preface:

“June 4, 1989, stands as a stark watershed in China’s modern history. The slaughter of unarmed civilians by units of the Peoples Liberation Army as they blasted their way to Tiananmen Square illuminated the “reform” era as nothing else could. It lit up, like a bolt of cosmic lightning, the reactionary essence of China’s current leading group.

“This essence was known to many in China and to some abroad long before the lightning struck in June 1989, but most members of the Western media and academic world were too mesmerized by China’s reform rhetoric and market progress to apprehend the reality of the events unfolding before their eyes. Since privatization matched their prejudices and a consumption boom confirmed its validity, they preferred not to look too closely at the underlying currents of economic dislocation, infrastructural decay, environmental degradation, social disintegration, cultural malaise, and rising class antagonisms that threatened to unravel the fabric of Chinese society.

“Mao Zedong was far more astute. More than twenty years ago during the Cultural Revolution, he exposed Deng Xiaoping, Yang Shangkun, and most of their “hard line” colleagues as capitalist roaders. He accurately predicted that if such persons ever came to power they would transform the Communist Party into a revisionist party and finally into a fascist party and then the whole of China would change color.

“The surprising thing is not how accurate Mao’s prediction turned out to be, but rather how quickly it materialized in history.

– William Hinton, 1990

The Contents are:

Preface

Introduction: China’s Rural Reforms

A Small Town in China: Long Bow 1978

A Trip to Fengyang Country, 1983

Reform in Stride, Rural Change 1984

The Situation in the Grasslands, 1985

Reform Unravels: Rural Change 1986

Bypassed by Reform: Agricultural Mechanization 1986

Dazhai Revisited: 1987

Mao’s Rural Policies Revisited

Why not the Capitalist Road?

Tiananmen Massacre 1989

The book is available here.

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Open Letter to Oliver Stone – by Stephen Velychenko (Krytyka) 1 January 2015

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Historian Stephen Velychenko penned this ‘open letter’ to US film-maker Oliver Stone on 1 January 2015. It is reprinted with permission of Krytyka, the ‘Thinking Ukraine’ website. Among other things, the letter points out that foreign involvement in regime change and revolution is nothing new and that includes the American people’s own revolution against tyranny and the Vietnamese national liberation struggle during the 1950s to the 1970s.

‘Things can turn into their opposite’ and we see this today with the various ‘anti-imperialists’ who long ago stood on the side of the people but who are now siding with the far-Right Russian chauvinist Putin’s slanders against Ukraine’s democratic struggle.

As Lenin said: “Russian Socialists who fail to demand freedom of secession for Finland, Poland, the Ukraine, etc., etc.—are behaving like chauvinists, like lackeys of the blood-and-mud-stained imperialist monarchies and the imperialist bourgeoisie”. This applies not only to ‘Russian socialists’.

– C21styork

AN OPEN LETTER TO OLIVER STONE

Dear Mr. Stone,

I am an academic historian who likes to think he has some knowledge of world events during the past centuries. I am someone who has watched and thought about some of your better films and who had the good fortune to have been in Kyiv on the Maidan in November-December 2013.

I was appalled and distressed when I read that a person of your stature had decided he would make a film about Ukraine’s ousted dictator Victor Ianukovich. What unsettled me was not your idea about interviewing a dictator on film. Documentaries about surviving ousted dictators are important and useful. What I found appalling was not only that you seem to share his interpretation of his fate, but that you seem to attach particular significance to that interpretation. You seem actually to believe Mr. Ianukovich who, understandably, like any overthrown dictator, attributes his fate to “outside forces” rather than to himself, his policies and supporters, domestic and foreign. Just like Mr. Ianukovich and Mr. Putin, you seem to think that the new government that emerged from the Maidan events 2013-14 is the product of CIA machinations, that CIA involvement was something exceptionally noteworthy, and, implicitly, that because this government is supposedly a CIA product, it has no merit or credibility.

Do you really believe Mr. Stone that in any of the great events in world history during the past centuries the intelligence services and spies of the great powers of the time were not involved? Simply noting this fact in isolation from all other events leads either to apologetics or conspiracy theories. Allow me to illustrate my point.

In so far as French secret agents were involved with the leaders of the American rebellion of 1776, some of whom were Masons, does that fact override the influence of enlightenment ideals and the interests and grievances of those who fought King George’s army? Did the presence of French spies and Masons in Philadelphia New York and Boston mean George Washington was part of a foreign plot? Does the British government’s support for Greek nationalists in the 1820s mean their anti-Turkish revolt was merely a British plot? In so far as Spanish, French and German agents supported Irish leaders in their wars against the English government, does that mean that those who fought British troops in the name of Irish independence were dupes in foreign plots? Was the 1916 Easter Rising really a failed German plot? In so far as German intelligence supported and financed the Bolsheviks in 1917-1918, does that mean the Russian revolution was simply a German plot and that those opposed to the tsar had no legitimate interests or grievances? Did covert Russian and Chinese support for Vietnam mean a sizeable proportion of the Vietnamese people had no legitimate grievances against French or American rule and that their decades long war against those governments was merely a KGB plot?

I put it to you Mr. Stone that anyone who produces a film focusing only on the participation of one particular secret service in a given event merely creates cheap propaganda – in this instance of the kind that will benefit Mr. Putin and his dictatorship. At this point, I should perhaps add that, like many others, I have a critical view of the US government and US corporations. I am well aware of the work of analysts like Chalmers Johnson, Richard Barnet, William Greider, Naomi Klein, Gregg Palast, Will Hutton, Michael Hudson, Thomas Frank and Arianna Huffington. But I am among those who do not allow their critical view of the US and corporate power to blind them to the reality of Stalinist or Putinist Russia.

In so far as I am familiar with your films they do not suggest any knowledge of or previous work on eastern Europe or Russia, let alone Ukraine on your part. This is not surprising as for many Americans, even today, Ukraine still remains a “part of Russia”, a place “far away of which we know little.” But once one decides to undertake a project related to that part of the world such intellectual indifference is no longer acceptable. Allow me therefore take the liberty to suggest that you not limit any research you might undertake to Mr. Ianukovich, his cronies and Russian advisors. Might I suggest you at least peruse Karen Dawisha’s recent book Putin’s Kleptocracy (2013) and some of Andrew Wilson’s and Timothy Snyder’s books on Ukraine.

I hope that, at this early stage, your first thoughts about your possible film on Ianukovich and his rule have been misinterpreted or misunderstood and that my remarks prove unnecessary and irrelevant. But, in as much as you do seem interested at this point in a documentary film about one of the great events of post war Europe, I hope that you will record not only the activities of the CIA in that event. I trust you will also record the role of Putin’s FSB in bringing Ianukovich to power in 2010, in controlling his government thereafter, and in the events of 2013-14. Since Mr. Putin’s government has obviously given you a visa and permission to visit Mr. Ianukovich in Russia, dare one imagine your hosts might also oblige you with access to FSB files about FSB activities?

In any case, I trust that any film you might make on Ukraine will pay due attention to the interests and grievances of Ukrainians, who, like their eastern European counterparts demonstrated in 1989, do not want to be ruled by pro-Kremlin elites and are now again, as in 1917-22, fighting a Russian invasion to prove it. I would also hope that if a director of your repute did make a documentary film about Ukraine it would not simply parrot the ideas of a reviled ousted dictator who built fortified fairy-land palaces with gold toilets in a country foul with corruption private wealth and public squalor. I would hope such a film explain that Ukrainians want no more to be controlled by Russia or Russian controlled dictators, than Latin American and Asian peoples want to be controlled by America or American controlled dictators.

Respectfully yours

Stephen Velychenko

Krytyka