Category Archives: Tom Griffiths

‘Mother’ Nature is punishing us with Covid? Call Child Protection!

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Tom Griffiths

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“In a tribal society in which ‘everyone knows’ that you need to sacrifice a goat to have a healthy baby, you make sure you sacrifice a goat. Better safe than sorry.” – Daniel Dennett (Breaking the spell: religion as a natural phenomenon, 2006)

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The world is now well into the third year of Covid and how we have dealt with it is a mixed bag. Scientifically we have ticked quite a few boxes with research and treatment responses being rapid, ongoing and impressive. The political and policy responses, nationally and internationally, are less impressive due to varied approaches, all ostensibly following the same scientific advice. Regardless of this, governments have taken the pandemic and its impacts – health, social and economic – seriously and negatively.

However I will not be going down this rabbit hole here because it would be a distraction from the purpose of this post although, regarding the politics, hints may be drawn from here. What I am wishing to comment on are the frankly reactionary voices that emerged from some sections of the environmentalist and related movements that took an overtly sanguine and/or smug attitude to the implications of the pandemic – the benefit to the planet of the slowdown, the view that Mother Earth is, in effect, striking back.

These romanticised and reactionary attitudes lie behind, and breathe life into, the positive spin placed on the crisis. For example A Pandemic in Retrospect – Looking Back on the Corona Virus by Hazel Henderson and Fritjof Capra is a case in point. Readers may remember the latter’s The Tao of Physics from the mid 1970’s. This article has pretensions of ‘scientific’ expertise, being written by two people with scientific qualifications and experience. In reality it reads like poorly envisaged sci-fi. The Corona Virus is not Mother Nature’s Revenge by Alan Levinovitz provides a counter view, although as the title suggests, there are plenty of views afoot that do see Covid-19 as Mother Nature’s revenge, as this piece in Counterpunch by Evaggelos Villainatos affirms. Its title, ‘Nature’s Revenge: Climate Change and Covid19’ rings the alarm bell and its concluding sentence is as blunt as it is backward looking:

But unless we connect the virus with the horrors of climate change and the anthropogenic impoverishment of the planet, we imperil ourselves and this beautiful Mother Earth, Mother to All.

Now, in terms of what I want this post to be about I couldn’t have put this better as it is this romanticised and backward take on our dear ‘Mother’ that galls and that is reactionary in more than just a contemporary sense. I’ll pick up the Child Protection angle at the foot of the article – if some think it okay to romanticise and deify our dear ‘Mother’ then it is also okay to take the piss out of ‘her’ and those who worship and apologise for ‘her’.

Whether our relationship with nature is seen and expressed metaphorically, the principal mode of expression in the modern world, or in divine or mystical ways as something actual, as it was in premodern times, there are themes that underlie both viewpoints. These are our dependence upon nature, our compliance with nature’s requirements or dictates, the need to maintain a balance between what we want from nature and what nature can give us, and the need for us to respect nature, to have an attitude to it characterised by scientific understanding as opposed to servility and hubris. Of these, our dependency is the most obvious, containing as it does a level of credibility, as we are part of the natural world and are subject to its laws. But we are left with choices as to how we respond to this dependence and this is where the politics really kicks in. A fine line can distinguish being dependent/part of nature and being subservient before nature, being subject to its control and vagaries. It is important to be clear about the difference and I would argue that it is a part of humanity’s nature, and hence part of the natural world, for us to rebel against the constraints of powerlessness and to maximise autonomy. Goethe’s Faust gave expression to this when he said to Mephisto “If I stand fast I shall be a slave”, the practical expression of which is found in science and technology, not to mention a spirit that rebels against servility.

Struggle against the constraints of ‘Mother Nature’

The struggle against these constraints is a very old one that precedes the development of written language. By Ancient Greek times, Archimedes for one, had picked up the gauntlet, advising those around him: “Don’t just live in the lap of the gods. Don’t be dominated by Mother Nature. You, as a man, can take control of your own destiny.” What Archimedes was getting at was that destiny can be something we create, not something that is delivered to us and that we are bonded to. And this process of creation implied a struggle against, and a wrenching from, prevailing forces, be these natural or human made.

Although the term ‘mother nature’ itself heralds from a Greco-Roman heritage, Gaia being the mother of all life in Greek mythology, equivalents are a common feature of human history and mythology. Most of human history, even extending into the medieval period, saw humanity being subject to what must have appeared to be the whims and caprices of the natural world. Being solution-seeking animals, our forebears sought answers. In colloquial vein and employing my favourite acronym of the early 21stC, they wanted to know wtf was going on and wtf they could do about appeasing what were powerful and mysterious forces. 

Our ancestors came up with answers that enabled them to survive. Beliefs in spirits, gods and demons of varying powers and persuasions, some good, some bad, but nearly all fickle, the movers and shakers of the natural world, made sense to them. It appeased fears; it gave them sufficiently credible answers and directions that helped them get on with the much more pressing task of survival and to accept the inevitability and propriety of their severely limited agency. 

To make these gods and spirits more understandable and potentially accessible to human influence, our ancestors anthropomorphised them. As an inevitable part of this (a devil’s bargain if you will) they accepted personal/communal responsibility for pleasing them and gaining their support or displeasing them and incurring their wrath. The philosopher Daniel Dennett wryly put it this way: “in a tribal society in which ‘everyone knows’ that you need to sacrifice a goat to have a healthy baby, you make sure you sacrifice a goat. Better safe than sorry.” (p160 Breaking the Spell)

While these conclusions are not contentious in the modern world, it is worth reminding ourselves that it was our ancestors who created the spirit world and the divinities that inhabited it; and for those forces they anthropomorphised, our forebears projected much of themselves into their creations. Which brings me back to ‘Mother Nature’. One of the gains we have made in the modern world is, in essence, the jettisoning of the idea of Mother Nature as a sentient, subjective force and the embracing of the natural world (with us being part of it) as something controlled by natural laws that can be understood and applied for humanity’s betterment, of helping us get out from under, develop and improve. 

While speaking of mother nature metaphorically is clearly a step or few in advance of divine interpretations, the line between them, as suggested above, can be thin. It can also be easily breached. Henderson and Capra’s piece, ostensibly scientific, employs ambiguous phraseology such as: “our planet taught us”, “our mother star”, “Gaia responded in unexpected ways”, “Earth is our wisest teacher”. This is an ambiguity that stretches credulity to breaking point. Villainatos however takes it further. His language, like that of Henderson and Copra, is certainly deferential but more overtly mystical. As well as the sentence I quoted above he writes:

“The Earth, I think, is still beautiful, fruitful, alive and sacred. The Homeric Hymn to Gaia (Earth) describes the Earth as mother of the gods and wife of heavens, very ancient Mother of All, which nourishes every single plant and animal.”

Both pieces are awash with a smorgasbord of mainstream to extremist environmental concerns, ranging from overpopulation to environmental depredation, and laced with environmental hubris and varying degrees of misanthropy. In this sense they vary little fromthe traditional model of mother nature – the need of obedience or compliance to nature or to the whims of the gods; of understanding and accepting our ‘place’. The subsidiary meanings and implications of this stance, its politics, has always been conservative and as human society developed beyond the limitations and constraints imposed by prehistorical, tribal and medieval conditions, reactionary. 

In saying this I am not wishing to sidestep the gendered nature of the creator because our Mother of All had male ‘consorts’ and competitors – Uranus, Zeus, Odin and the Abrahamic God amongst others. Both ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are human creations that their followers, well, follow, seeking to please and to gain succour from; or disobey and suffer the consequences. And the fear of the consequences of disobedience was a very useful tool to wield against those whose behaviour or manner differed too much from those who held the power to do the wielding.

But whether we are speaking of and relating to nature as sentient and emotional, or whether we employ these as metaphors in describing the natural world and our part in it, we cannot be absolved from the politics our stance and our choice of language contains. 

But that being said, and meant, I’m going to end this post poking a bit of fun at both ‘mother’ and her contemporary two legged acolytes. I am going to accept these projected fantasies as real and play with them. In doing this I wish to bring no slight upon our ancestors, those we all have to thank for figuring out ways that worked for them in the survival game (we are here because of them). The same cannot be said for today’s advocates and the conceit they embrace.    

As mentioned above we are curious and problem solving creatures with a tendency to anthropomorphize things, a perverse form of empathy perhaps, and Mother of All is the gold standard. But the freer we become – especially of constraints that have really boxed us in – the more another human quality emerges from behind the shadows. And that is our capacity for humour, to take the piss out of things, including, especially including, ourselves. 

With this in mind I would like to accept Mother Nature as the beautiful ‘Mother to all’, as Villainatos put it, and on this basis ask questions about Mother’s KPIs as a ‘parent’, whether she has met or failed to meet basic parenting responsibilities. Evidence appears overwhelming that Mother Nature has been cruel, capricious and utterly indifferent to the suffering inflicted upon her progeny, including to those who have worshipped her. Countless millions lost to starvation, disease, disasters termed ‘natural’ and occurring with no or little warning and cynically ascribed to human folly (in contemporary jargon this is known as victim blaming). Need I go on? But why is our Mother to All so cruel, indeed viscous in her indifference to human wellbeing? All we can do is hypothesise, but unlike Villainous et al, my hypothesising will be focussed on Mother of All and not ‘her’ victims.      

Mother Nature as a ‘dominatrix’?    

Could Mother Nature be a dominatrix? Kinky, and depending on one’s proclivities…. But ultimately unsatisfactory, the nature of the SM relationship being too voluntary. Dominatrixes are supposed to elicit sexual pleasure through the infliction of measured physical pain, humiliation or servitude. If that was all it was, Nature’s role would be trivialised beyond measure. Humiliation and servitude are certainly part of the ‘deal’ but the physical pain inflicted has been anything but measured. This hypothesis can therefore be discarded.

Could she be a single divine parent with a tragic history of severe attachment disorder? This is more promising as it may explain why ‘Mother’, and ‘her’ slightly lesser divine male cohorts, flipped between going missing in action, perhaps at some divine haunt getting a skinful, or going troppo when presented by the kids with anything remotely resembling demanding behaviour. (Please [mother] may I have some more?). To my mind this hypothesis is worth consideration and jostles with the one that follows.

Mother Nature is suffering from an uncontained sociopathic personality disorder, aka Mother Nature is a nasty piece of work. This too ticks a few boxes, but it raises the question of wtf was the intergalactic child protection agency doing? It was either missing in action (in a collusive relationship and rubbing shoulders at the above mentioned haunt?) or, heaven and associated divine agencies forbid, it doesn’t exist. Either way we kids are on our own and are forced to shoulder the responsibility for negotiating what has been a difficult and complex developmental pathway. And this is where Faust’s advice comes in, enabled as it was by Mephisto’s Life Coach Facilitation Agency.

My point in taking a swipe at Mother of All and her human cheerleaders, aside from having some fun, is to criticise their profoundly reactionary nature. It is misanthropic too of course but misanthropy is, perhaps, too broad for it allows its essentially class nature to slip through unnoticed. It is not the aspirations of the less well-heeled that is the problem. Where significant environmental or social problems emerge we do not point our fingers at the Oliver Twist brigade – wanting more is not just reasonable, but proper – but at those, or the systems, that stand in the way.

Finally, let us not forget that there are two targets we confront in our ongoing struggle for development and prosperity. One is Nature, the natural world. We have an impressive track record in this struggle, discovering and applying natural laws to our advantage. The other is human made, the reactionary killjoys and misanthropes who, generally from a position of privilege, accuse the less well-heeled of greed, selfishness, of caring more about themselves and their progeny than they do about ‘the planet’. And behind the killjoys? Marx hit the nail on the head.

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Afghanistan, the Taliban and women/girls – and a poem

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(contribution by Tom Griffiths)

With the Afghan government’s ignominious defeat on the tail of the US government’s humiliating withdrawal, a lot – and I mean a lot – of gloating has been in evidence on Farcebook by ostensible leftists, some of whom are former comrades, celebrating another defeat for good ole US imperialism.

Pointing out the defeat and the role of the US in effectively setting up this situation is not the problem. What the problem is is the total (this might be an exaggeration, but not by much) silence on the fate of the Afghan people, in particular Afghan women.

Nowhere amongst my former comrades do I see an ‘ok, now the Yanks and their lackeys have gone the main enemy of the people is the Taliban and the most likely means of defeating them will be through armed struggle.’ Instead, there is silence. If this continues for more than a nanosecond this silence transforms into collusion. Left in form, right in essence we could call it.

A year or so ago I wrote a poem celebrating the bravery and example of a 15 year old girl in regional Afghanistan who, in response to her parents being gunned down before her sought out her father’s machine gun and killed the murderers, at least one of whom was Taliban. I reprint it below:

Qamar Gul and a father’s teaching

As others forgot to question

And rushed to defend the

Old verities and

Inherited wisdom.

As others remained fast

Confusing darkness for light

The old spell began to break

And its truths began to decay

As others panicked

Shielding themselves

From the revealing light

Confusion spread and freedom beckoned.

From the depths ghouls and false healers emerged

Screaming and cajoling

Harnessing death and instilling fear

Settling old scores and new alike.

Such times are indeed dangerous.

How was this man to protect his family?

What if he should fall?

Can friend still be seen from foe?

What if he should fall?

Tradition dictates his daughter’s marriage

The past may still protect…

But what if these ways are not enough?

What if they should fail?

He placed his gun into her hands

He’ll teach her what to do

If fall he should and well he may

Let new ways show the way.

When death came bursting through the door

Stealing her parents from her

This father’s girl knew what to do

And didn’t fail to do it.

Conquering fear

Harnessing anger

She honored her father’s teachings

And moved into the light.

Postscript:

I wrote this poem a year ago when news of Qamar Gul’s actions made international news. I was very impressed by her bravery and the example she was setting – and worry about her safety now given that the Taliban are back in control. When I completed the poem I sent it to a young Afghani colleague and asked her to check the accuracy of its ‘line’ and suggest corrections if necessary. She gave it the thumbs up.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-22/afghan-girl-kills-two-taliban-after-they-killed-her-parents/12479568

“Follow me and you need never think again”: Richard Wright, Liu Shao-Chi, Julius Fucik, the CPA(ML)… and the fire we need…

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The following article is by Tom Griffiths…

“Follow me and you need never think again.”

This was the pithy saying uttered by an old comrade to describe secular religious thinking, or blind faith, in adhering to the Party line, no matter what the line was or how it was arrived at. It need not be confined to, or even predominantly associated with, Communist Party politics of course with yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir, the Daleks “I obey” and other variants all treding the same path. Follow me … arose in the aftermath of the CPA M-L kindly informing a number of us that we had “expelled” ourselves and the sense we then made of how a reputedly revolutionary organization, prompted by the arrest of the Gang of Four, could perform a 180 degree pivot overnight without discussion and still keep a straight face. I need hardly add that we did not keep a straight face but saw this as a joke – and not one on us.

I don’t know about others, but there are some sayings I hear that are gold and are instantly hard wired. “Follow me …” was one of them. It spoke to me then, and has done so since, most  recently after reading Richard Wright’s American Hunger, the second part of his autobiography Black Boy that deals, in large part, with his experiences in the CPUSA in the 1930’s. I will come back to this, for while this post is not about Wright per se, his experiences have certainly prompted it. Not for the first occasion it brought into sharp relief the contradiction between  communist aspirations (what we believe in, this is what we are fighting/struggling for), and the more disturbing, at times reactionary, internal and personal processes involved with what the ‘correct line’ is, how it is arrived at and ‘followed’. Walking the walk, as well as talking the talk, in other words; how what we do, and how we do it, as a reflection of our revolutionary (transformative or synthesizing) aspirations and practice.

So let me come back to Richard Wright and American Hunger. Wright (1908-1960) was a black American writer of great talent and vision who effectively fled the Jim Crow south when 19. Like so many of his black contemporaries he headed to Chicago. “The environment the South creates is too small to nourish human beings, especially Negro human beings.” he said later in a radio interview. He brought with him an intense curiosity, a hunger, a desire to grow. It was this that enabled him to observe in himself and others who had fled the south, loneliness and confusion. “Wherever my eyes turned they saw stricken, black faces trying vainly to cope with a civilization that they did not understand. I felt lonely. I had fled one insecurity and embraced another.”

By his mid twenties his hunger and curiosity, containing as they did a worldly, universalizing vision, had led him to the CPUSA. “Of all the developments in the Soviet Union the method by which scores of backward peoples had been led to unity on a national scale was what had enthralled me. I had read with awe how the Communists had sent phonetic experts into the vast regions of Russia to listen to the stammering dialects of peoples oppressed for centuries by the czars. I had made the first total emotional commitment of my life when I read how the phonetic experts had given these tongueless people a language, newspapers, institutions. I had read how these forgotten folk had been encouraged to keep their old cultures, to see in their ancient customs meanings and satisfactions as deep as those contained in supposedly superior ways of living. And I had exclaimed to myself how different this was from the way in which Negroes were sneered at in America.”

He wanted to use his ability and drive, with the organizational and political support of the CPUSA, to give the ignored and sneered at a place and a voice on the political stage. This was not simply a political quest, but also one that unavoidably required acculturation. In the same decade Mao was developing the mass line in China, while in still unoccupied Europe Bertolt Brecht was writing The Life of Galileo, the sixth scene of which begins with this couplet: ‘Things indeed take a wondrous turn/When learned men do stoop to learn’. In effect Wright advocated the adoption of a stooping stance and he began a process of taking oral histories from men, like himself, who had migrated north, effectively changing planets in the process. The one we hear about in American Hunger is Ross, a fellow Party member. But rather than applauding and supporting his initiative, what in Maoist language would be termed ‘learning from the masses’, the CPUSA viewed his project with suspicion. Paranoid thinking, in partnership with anxiety, is probably more accurate.

Outside of Ross, who was initially cooperative, this suspicion came from both black and white members. I think I get the nervousness of his black comrades. The confusion and insecurity Wright refers to above sounds very familiar to utterances I have heard from refugees. One, a young Hazara man from Afghanistan, said to a colleague some eight years ago, that what he really needed to know was “where do I fit in?” Coming from a society still dominated by strictly hierarchical and tribal norms this is a question he would never have had to seriously consider before he changed planets. Another, from a Sierra Leonean colleague, put the anxiety and confusion this way: “We have come from hell to find heaven. And it is heaven, if you change overnight.” Wright’s black comrades were still finding their feet, not yet standing on culturally solid ground and needed the support and approval of their white comrades.

Empathic understanding (an interest in, and understanding of, the hurdles they faced) appeared not to be present or offered, a situation Wright found baffling. Offering feelings of acceptance and purpose, probably patronizing, where the rules pertaining to these are too heavily sourced from above, was not good enough. Fascist organizations, and there were a few around at the time, provided this too. Indeed they were arguably better at it as they had no desire at all to see their membership grow intellectually or emotionally. Unthinking loyalty was what was demanded to both the organization and its ideological script.

Under a veil of suspicion Wright was repeatedly questioned about his motives and actions. His explanations fell on deaf ears and he was, again repeatedly, told by members higher up the food chain that he did “not understand”. Projection is an interesting psychological defence mechanism. It is a pity that those not listening to Wright were ignorant of their use of it. More disturbing, however, was the parallel process being reproduced in the party. Being a ‘good communist’ – being seen (needing to be seen) and understood as being compliant, obedient, well behaved and toeing the party line, qualities valorized by Lui Shao-Ch’i (see Quotations of Liu Shao-Ch’i, Paul Flesch and Co.1968, a ‘Little Yellow Book’ worth getting hold of), is not the same as being a good communist. The latter has the capacity, in reality develops the capacity, to swim against the tide, be that tide external or internal and to accept the associated risks. The party line down south was the Jim Crow line where the consequences for not being seen to be ‘good’ and obedient to Jim Crow cultural norms could, and often were, fatal. What Wright and so many others from down south were doing in heading north, was learning how to swim against the tide.

There is a difference between toeing the line (being obedient) and agreeing that a given line or position will be supported and acted upon, and that the processes by which it has been arrived at are democratic and not autocratic. Wright’s experience speaks of the latter and it was something, on a lesser scale, that I recognized at the time I and others ‘expelled ourselves’.

Walking hand in hand with this, and generally justifying it, was the question of organizational security. Wright mentions that, to his understanding, security was reckoned using the conditions under Czarist oppression as a measuring stick. The darkening clouds beginning to engulf Europe will have done nothing to abate this. But the USA was not a fascist state – unless you happened to be black living under the heel of Jim Crow. That this was not sufficiently grasped, underscores the importance of what Wright was trying to do and the failure of the CPUSA in supporting him in doing it. It also indicates that any purportedly revolutionary organization that is too reliant or wedded to top down decision making and the concomitant creation of a culture of membership obedience or compliance is likely to miss what’s under its nose.

None of this is meant to downplay the significance or need of security or measures to maintain a Party’s viability and effectiveness, considerations that become pressing the more oppressive and reactionary the prevailing context. The activities of the Czar’s secret police, the Okhrana, gave the Social Democrats, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks et al good reason to take those activities seriously. So too the activities of the Italian fascist secret police OVRA, the organization upon which the Nazi Gestapo was modelled, not to forget the Gestapo itself. But none of this could justify closing the minds of party members. Caution, in the face of external danger is not the same, and should not be confused with, closed or narrow mindedness in the face of such danger. Paranoid mindsets can be cultivated.

The most influential, and moving, account from a communist who kept the distinction between external danger and internal openness as distinct as circumstances would allow comes from Julius Fucik and his Report From the Gallows. Fucik, a central committee member of the Czech Party, was arrested and gaoled in 1942 and executed the following year. With the assistance of two patriotic cum anti fascist prison warders  he was able to write and smuggle out notes of his experiences and thoughts, his report from the gallows. I came across Fucik’s work in the mid to late 1970’s and, given recent events, I found it refreshing, insightful and invigorating. Here was a man experiencing the harshest of treatments, knowing that death was near, yet still embracing life rather than merely clinging to it. What I found particularly impressive was his ability to listen, to want to understand what made his jailers and wardens, most of whom came from working class stock, tick. Much of the book is devoted to what are dubbed in my edition “Figures and Little Figures”, nuanced reflections on comrades (Figures) and those in a more mixed bag, such as the prison superintendent who were certainly enemies and others among the wardens who deserved a deeper level of understanding (Little Figures), His ability to reflect upon and engage with both/all sides of contradictions was an ability, it would seem, that was absent, or certainly wanting in the CPUSA and the CPA M-L 

One of the things Fucik’s book did for me was to reinforce or make less abstract the absurdity of the CPA M-L adopting the same organizational structure as that used by the Czech and, I presume, other communist parties in occupied Europe (three member cell structures with one reporting higher up the chain, secrecy over membership etc). In occupied Europe this made a lot of sense – it was about survival. But not in the Australia we lived in. And in attempting to explain the rationale for its being, without getting sidetracked in theoretical bushland, the temptation to reach for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association) to determine the clinical criteria is difficult to resist. ‘Fucked’ seems an appropriate term to use that bridges the theoretical/clinical divide.

It is tempting to see my use of the concept ‘fuckedness’ as somewhat flippant. And to a degree it is because the ‘clinical’ component can seem like a cheap shot. But there is also a serious side to this that goes well beyond the drab manifestations I and others saw in the CPA-ML or the more disturbing, but not yet out of control manifestations that Wright witnessed and was subjected to. The example I wish to point to is the fate that befell the El Salvadoran revolutionary poet Roque Dalton who was murdered by elements in his own party with whom he was in disagreement over the importance of the party developing a mass base if it were to have any chance of overthrowing the regime. Unsurprisingly perhaps, given his murder, Dalton was argueing the importance of developing a mass base.

Dalton’s poetry is worth chasing up and to give a flavour of it – and of its relevance to this post – the following is the first stanza of his Dialectic of Genesis, Crisis and Rebirth:

‘For you we will not put the Party on an altar/Because you taught us that the Party/is an organism which lives in the real world/and it’s sickness is the same as bankruptcy/Because of you we know, Lenin/That the best crib for the Party/Is fire’

A bitter irony exposed in these lines is that Dalton’s murderers, and those who sanctioned it, were trying to put out the fire.

The fire that Dalton was speaking of, was not simply, or even primarily, that of the class enemy, whose fire belongs in the blindingly obvious department, but, as with Mao’s view of swimming against the tide being a revolutionary principle, refers to internal fire. Using gentler language, but making the same point, Wright referred to this as a “nurturing environment”. To see the meaning of this sentiment as being only directed against the tide generated by one’s political foes misses the point.

The proposition, be that stated openly or assumed, that the party line is, by definition correct, is a reflection of one sided, non dialectical thinking, the heritage of which comes more from medieval or pre medieval mind sets than modernist ones. If ever history were able to assume a sentient human form its reaction to the idea that leadership, be that in revolutionary organizations or not, automatically confers correctness and is thus deserving of deference, would be hysterical rolfing.

Our experience in the CPA M-L exposed political fuckedness, an organizational suspicion cum aversion to internal democratic processes, and a gift for paranoid thinking. This also seems to be the case in Wright’s experience of the CPUSA. The same cannot be said for Dalton’s. Politically fucked, certainly. But his murder exposed something pathalogical that was not only not organizationally contained, but was organizationally facilitated.

Revolutionary movements and parties in the developed world have disintegrated leaving in their wake a smug capitalist class and an opportunist and reactionary ‘left’ cum pseudo left drawn to every form of oppression other than that of class. It is ironic and certainly telling that we now live in an age where the capitalist class is quite happy to bend to and accommodate ‘woke’ agendas. And why not? The property question, the goal of expropriating the expropriators, has been successfully swept under the carpet. No prizes for guessing who/what has been doing most of the sweeping.

One of the tasks of a reemergent and genuine revolutionary left, will be to clean up its act regarding democratic processes; or to borrow from Dalton, to actually understand that the best crib or nurturing environment for its existence and growth is ‘fire’. It is not enough that a leadership pays lip service to the idea, as opposed to the practice of criticism and self criticism, reducing it to an auto de fe in the process. It must be open and be seen as being open, to itself being a target of fire.

One of the things communist parties, in whatever form their new iterations take, will need to do is to ensure that, to paraphrase and tweak Wright, the environment it creates is large enough to nourish the development and growth of rebellious and critical spirits, spirits who can not only keep an active eye and involvement on fire that is externally targeted and generated, but internally generated and directed.

Who do you ‘sock’? From Alice Springs to the ‘Foolish Old Man who moved the Mountains’ – and back

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Tom Griffiths

 

This post is about two seemingly unrelated situations separated by both time and distance. The first situation is local, Alice Springs to be specific, and emerges from a men’s family violence program I helped establish in Alice Springs some five years ago and some of the things I have learned over this time. The other concerns an American steel worker called Mike who was interviewed in one of Studs Terkel’s oral histories, “Working…” published in 1974.  Originally reviewed by Marshall Berman in the same year, I first came across it in Berman’s Adventures in Marxism that came out in 1999. For reasons best known to the book gods I reread Berman’s book earlier this year  and the connection between Mike and Alice jumped out at me. I will pick this up below but first let me introduce Mike the steel worker.

 

“Here is “Mike Lefevre” … a 37 year old steelworker. First he abuses intellectuals, complains that they denigrate workers. A moment later, however, he stereotypically denigrates himself: “A mule, an old mule, that’s the way I feel.” He is hurt and angry that his teenage son “lacks respect.” And yet “I want my kid to be an effete snob. …I want him to tell me that he’s not gonna be like me.” He talks about the anger and violence inside him: he goes to a bar, insults someone randomly, starts a brawl. “He’s punching me and I’m punching him, because we really both want to punch somebody else.” But who? Forty years ago in Clifford Odets’ play Waiting for Lefty, a worker punched out his boss, and the audience stood up and cheered. But Terkel’s worker has the brains to see how things have changed: the structure of work is far more abstract and depersonalised today, and cathartic moments don’t come easy. “Who you gonna sock? [asks Mike] You can’t sock General Motors, you can’t sock anyone in Washington. You can’t sock a system.””

 

What sets Mike apart from many is that he knows, as he’s punching somebody out, that he really wants to direct his fire elsewhere, but feels trapped. He has a sense of what the target might be, but as a solo steelworker, can’t fix the target in his sights, can’t get close enough to ‘sock it’. He has insight, but is hamstrung by despair and self loathing, compounded, it would seem, by isolation. Hope is there too – he reads, looking for answers and direction, but so far these have eluded him.

 

We don’t know what happened to Mike, whether he was able to shake off his despair and self hatred, find kindred spirits and together work out ways of socking systems rather than each other, but Mike, and so many like him, has soul mates in places like Alice and across the Top End.

 

Up here where hopelessness, self loathing and despair could be stamped on nearly everyone’s birth certificate, people quickly come to ‘get’, on some instinctive level at least, that you can’t ‘sock the system’, be that the white fella system or the broken aspects of the traditional tribal system, where humbugging, jealousing and payback are spinning out of control, but where you can sure as hell sock one another. And they do, especially the men who target women, usually their wives partners or girlfriends, as well as one another. And when that doesn’t solve anything they take it out on themselves. The family violence rate, often alcohol fueled, the jail numbers, the hospital admissions associated with violent assault and self harm, the suicide rate and the churning out of corrugated road kids who so quickly grow into corrugated road adults … all this and more screams of the pain and rage that springs from despair, the self loathing that often accompanies this and of feeling trapped. Just like Mike.

 

“Two way learning”

 

This phrase was used by a close colleague and camp resident whose activism was involved in two of the examples I give below. It describes a means of broadening one’s scope in seeking solutions, of learning from and supporting one another and is in direct contrast to the narrowing and, dare I say it, ‘exclusivizing’ pull of identity politics.

 

So what do we learn from Mike and how can this learning be used to help people stop abusing one another, especially their family members, and instead to find targets, political, institutional or community ones that are, or have become, part of the problem and not part of the solution? The first thing is to acknowledge that there are sufficient parallels that exist between Mike, his equivalents elsewhere in the world and indigenous populations in Alice and up the top end for similarities to be sought and lessons to be drawn, be these lessons positive ones or negative ones. Without this we turn our backs on one another or look upon one another as curiosities. And Mike gives us both positive and negative. He knows himself that he is hitting the wrong target and hates himself for doing it, for repeatedly getting sucked in. That’s why he drinks himself to sleep, to escape.

 

Knowing this however, knowing you’re hitting the wrong target, is not a bad place to start. But as Mike would be the first to admit, it’s also not a good place to stay. So how do people get unstuck and find a way forward? They can take another lesson from Mike, a positive one, and look for solutions. Mike’s not just unhappy with himself, he’s unhappy with the situation; it’s why he wants his son to be better than him and good on him for that; it’s why he reads, it’s why he wants to connect somehow with the outside world and to look for ways that will help him find some direction and purpose, to get out from under.

 

What Mike had not yet learnt (and I hope that he ended up learning this) is that you can, in fact, take on a system but you can’t do it on your own. You need to find friends, people in similar situations who are also pissed off and frustrated, and you need to take this to a higher level (to synthesize it) and figure out which targets are real, accessible and ‘sockable’. This doesn’t happen by magic and it doesn’t come from a bottle; it needs determination, organisation, mutual support and a willingness to learn from one’s mistakes. And if you need to stick your hand up, looking for that support, you do that too.

 

Invariably this process starts small. Remember the song “From little things big things grow”? It’s telling us something important. Remember Mike’s frustration “you can’t sock Washington”? Wherever Mike was in the States he was nowhere near Washington, nowhere near the government or the bureaucrats he felt screwed by and he was flying solo. Starting too big can be overwhelming and self defeating. More than enough to hate yourself and seek escape in grog.

 

So what does starting small mean? Let me place this within an Territorian context and give some examples. The first is well known – the struggle for land rights at Wave Hill – the other two, like so many significant struggles engaged in by those who are notionally powerless, virtually unknown and flying under the radar.

 

The well known. 

Vincent Lingiari, land rights and Lord Vestey 

 

This is a very well known story and one that won’t be forgotten. Washington may have been a long way off from Mike, but nowhere near as far as Britain, where Lord Vestey was, or Canberra where the politicians and bureaucrats were and where there was no understanding or support for land rights. As we know, Lingiari and those with him at Wave Hill weren’t budging for anyone and over several years gained widespread support across the nation. Be the politicians sympathetic or be they dragging their heels, they were forced to listen and to give ground, forcing open a door that enabled new struggles and new targets to be identified and targeted.

 

The less well known

  1. Grog, humbugging and mayhem at a town camp.

 

Most readers will have no difficulty understanding the connection between lots of grog and the potential for mayhem. Humbugging may need explaining. As used up north humbugging describes a perversion of the traditional system of mutual obligation where individuals connected by ties of kin are obliged to assist one another in times of need. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Jared Diamond have written of similar systems in Somalia (Infidel) and New Guinea (The World Until Yesterday) respectively. When the natural world held the whip hand mutual obligation within family or clan systems was essential to survival. While any system is capable of being abused the fine line that existed between survival and disaster acted as a powerful constraint and the system worked, performing its function as intended. Modernity, in whatever form it has taken, has loosened the grip of the natural world significantly and the constraint it exercised no longer applies. The effect of this development has been to undermine the place of mutual obligation and allow its perversion, often distorting it beyond recognition. Under these circumstances it has become parasitic and exploitative rather than supportive.  A parody of family humbugging was made in this skit from the ABC’s Black Comedy team. It is one of the funniest and most astute pieces of comedy I have seen in a long time.

 

With this in mind let me get back to the grog, humbugging and mayhem with a story told to me by one of its principal architects and actors.

 

Following yet another grog fuelled and mayhem inducing ‘visit’ by some out of town family tearaways to a family in one of Alice’s town camps another of the families decided that enough was enough and began to look for allies and solutions. Consultations with others indicated that they were not alone, everyone knowing the pattern of behaviour and its impacts – humbugging the family to get lots of grog, wild partying, no respect for others, alcohol fuelled violence and a lousy, often dangerous time for others. This pattern had become not only familiar and predictable, but disturbingly so.

 

With sufficient support garnered within the camp, support was sought externally. This brought on board the Night Patrol, auspiced by Tangentyere Council, the indigenous organization responsible for most of the town camps and the police. Relations between the indigenous population and the police has a very mixed history, but unity here was essential for a viable plan of action to be formulated and enacted. This enabled the identification of two interrelated targets – the visiting tearaways and the distorted obligation system they were riding on, a system that had been turned into its opposite. The plan formulated was simple but required commitment, cooperation and organization. Its success rested upon it being driven from the bottom  up. When the tearaways turned up and humbugged the locals to get the grog the police would be informed, would turn up and the grog would end up down the sink. This didn’t need to happen too often before the pennies dropped and the wayward behaviour was curtailed. Mike was shown to be wrong here. You can sock a system, but it needs to be within reach and something that others can agree on.

 

  1. The Women’s Safety Committee and the Men’s Safety Committee

 

When Tangentyere Council began to provide  men’s family violence groups  in 2014 a few eyebrows in the camps were raised followed by a ‘let’s wait and see how fair dinkum this is’ kind of attitude. Five years down the track the program has shown itself to be fair dinkum, that it understood that you can’t respect people without listening to them and that change that didn’t put most of its energy in a bottom up approach was patronizing and a waste of time. People took notice. Firstly a number of women camp leaders, followed later by male camp leaders, let it be known that they were very unhappy about the violence, often grog fuelled, that was tearing families and communities apart. They requested training and support. Over several months in 2015 the women, who has initiated the contact and the request and then the men, along with the workers from the program that provided the training, learnt a lot from one another. Posters opposing male violence in particular started to appear in the camps, negotiations with various authorities aimed at making the camps safer, word being spread encouraging people to speak out and no longer accept violence, these and more all bear witness to identifying clear targets and working to ensure that blows are aimed at these targets rather than at one another. They also bear witness to the wisdom contained in a traditional Chinese folk tale, The Foolish Old Man Who Removed The Mountains, promoted anew last century in a speech given in 1945 by Mao Zedong, telling of a man who ignored community derision and literally chipped away at his task until God (the people in Mao’s telling), impressed by his determination granted him success. And for those unfamiliar it did involve moving mountains. In Alice we can call this The Foolish Old Women Who Are Moving Mountains. And moving it they are, uniting with others in the process. They will eventually succeed, and while derisive comments can still be heard from naysayers, be they whitefella or blackfella, these are now mutterings, uttered more under the breathe than in the open. A tide has turned. It has a  way to come in but its direction and growing momentum is unambiguous.

 

I think if Mike and the various Mike’s around the world knew about all this he and they would get a real lift, there would be, as my camp colleague put it, “two way learning” and the growth of solidarity on that basis. That’s the good thing about seeking connection with people all over, be they locals or from far away; we get to learn from one another and support one another, we get to identify the right targets and to work out strategies to take them on, we get to sock systems.

 

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The politics of the House and of the City… New York, New York, So Good They Named it Twice…

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‘… an ongoing commitment to revolutionary politics have pulled me up and enabled me to appreciate that 280 odd years ago Montesquieu identified what was vital and, in terms of social relations, revolutionary about the city. His heroes, were a couple of expat Sultans (what else), caught up in the thrall of the street where everybody is unveiled. “Here everything speaks out; everything can be seen; everything can be heard; the heart is as open as the face”. And it wasn’t long before the fact that “everything can be seen” exposed the Bourbons and the aristocracy in general as emperors with no clothes’.

Thanks to Tom Griffiths for this contribution.

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New York, New York, So Good They Named it Twice…

And the rest goes…

 

New York, New York, all the scandal and the vice …

I love it.

New York New York, now isn’t it a pity

What they say about New York City?

 

I loved this song when it came out, its cheek, irreverence and capacity to laugh at itself. And I couldn’t help being reminded of it as I was reading the late Marshall Berman’s On The Town, One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square. Both seemed to be singing from the same song sheet.

 

While this post has been prompted by my reading of Berman’s final book my point in doing so springs from my view of how important the city – urban life and experience – is in human development and how ‘missing the boat’ much of the left has been in accepting both the opportunities and challenges this development has thrown up.  The politics I will be drawing attention to (and where the left is, or should be in relation to it) can be summarised in the distinction to be made between the politics of the House and the politics of the Street. And let me be clear, I’m for the politics of the Street. I will give some space to the House further down, but first lets go for a walk because the modern city creates an essential link in providing individuals, in particular working class individuals, with opportunities for personal development and growth (they are individuals as well as members of a class, remember) opportunities for them to break free of the constraints imposed by the House.

 

What impressed me about Berman’s book – the spin Berman puts on the maelstrom that is the modern world generally and of which Times Square is a highly concentrated symbol – is its vitality and its liberating aspect. And in saying this I in no way wish to downplay or ignore the challenges that have accompanied this. Berman makes no claim to being the first to highlight this and makes reference to two French writers of past centuries to point out that the link between modernity and the Street, while an essential feature of modernity,  is not new. A key Enlightenment figure, Montesquieu wrote of it in his Persian Letters (1721), and over a century later the poet Baudelaire identified the modern urban centre as a space where old (pre modern) boundaries were broken down and new possibilities opened up, coining the term “the heroism of modern life’ in the process. Times Square, the flawed hero of Berman’s book has lived, or should I say enabled, Baudelaire’s heroism in concentrated form since the 1890’s.

 

Berman gets down to business straight away describing the modern city as a place that enables an individual to be both oneself and someone else. Being social animals we carry the seeds of curiosity, a desire for growth and an empathic sensibility within us and the possibilities described by Berman enables their germination and growth. What is made possible here is to expand beyond oneself, beyond formerly socially or family imposed boundaries and constraints, to be able to transcend these limits and grow.

 

In the early 21stC the Islamic fascists are acutely aware of and threatened by this possibility and this helps explain their violent hatred of modernizing influences that disrupt and transform social and family relations. Please note that social and family relations are not being spoken of here as abstract relations, but as relations that still have pre modern or medieval hooks embedded in the flesh of the men, women and children who are the real life players in those relations. Those who identify with the left should not be too smug about this because although what now passes for the left have never approached the loony killjoy levels of the Islamic fascists or Islamic fundamentalists generally, it  has historically contained a strong current of killjoyism of which the odd parallel can be drawn – that being the antipathy and mistrust felt about the unconstrained individual, let loose from the ‘safe’ bonds of the House where, historically, the teaching and maintenance of family and social hierarchy were enacted.

“One of the primary human rights is the right to the city” argues Berman, the right to a space and an opportunity for individual and social transformation. But how does the city enable this, what makes it happen? And, in any case, anticipating mutterings coming from the background, aren’t there casualties, I mean cities are hardly beds of thornless roses and many with progressive pretensions think thorns is about all they have or have come to have.

Enter Times square, what it represents and opens up.

Times Square as we know it – an entertainment and commercial centre – came into its own with electrification and by the 1890’s had already developed a ‘reputation’ that scandalized the morally precious of the day by giving them innumerable reasons to hyperventilate and complain about falling moral standards. It takes little imagination to write their script – the denunciation of public spaces like bars, theatres, dance halls, cafes and the like as “brothels” or to understand it as a voice belonging to the House.

Initially this group had, to rope in modern terminology, some diversity, being a collection of traditional moralists, including secular moralists and evangelicals. Low hanging fruit one might think. But by the early 20thC their number came to include secular intellectuals with left politics “who wanted the masses to be radical and militant and to struggle for their rights…” [just so long as these rights didn’t extend to expressions of individual and sexual freedom] “…who believed that commercial mass culture was corrupting their minds”. In spite of the cultural shift in social attitudes to sexual mores this whinge remains a very contemporary trope. And it wasn’t just (or even, if we are to be honest) commercial mass culture that was the main corrupting element, it was sex. No surprises here of course.

Both men and women had good reason to be drawn to the Square’s promise, to be able to break free of the rigid stereotypes and expectations of the House, stereotypes and expectations that had been particularly constraining on women. A good way of looking at the complaints of the moralists (of whatever hue) – the Mary Whitehouse set and the Iranian and Saudi  moral police being more contemporary equivalents – was that they were complaining about the breakdown between the rigid separation of the House and Street and the power relations between the sexes that were reflected in this. This distinction rang bells for me in two ways. Most importantly (and most recently) it summed up a lot of what I have seen in the work I have been doing in the family violence arena and the refugee/new settlers arena where individuals and families have come from regions where the transition from the traditional to the modern is unfinished business. Here women are supposed to belong in the House; it is not only their domain, it is where they belong and where they have been kept.

In western societies women have been on the Street and fighting for their right to be there for a considerable period as the examples of Montesquieu, Baudelaire, Jacques Brel (see below), amongst others and Times Square indicate, but for many coming from backward or relatively undeveloped regions this fight is in its early stages. By way of example a former colleague had recorded a series of interviews with three former refugees from Africa dealing with family based violence and “upside down families”. The female interviewee, entering middle age and with dependent children, had likened traditional marriage in Africa to “a prison” where she was obliged to obey her mother in law and submit to the overall authority of the men of her husband’s family. She initially found the situation in Australia so different and confusing that, she explained, “for two years we go mad”. She meant by this that the breakdown of the rigid and hierarchical boundaries between the House and the Street was so exhilarating and discombobulating that it took, in her experience, two years for the penny to drop that with this new freedom came the opportunity for personal growth and, contained in this package, personal responsibility. That being said, she was under no illusions that upside down was the right way up.

 

Baudelaire’s ‘heroism of the street’ spoke of this development in the mid 19th century, but over a century earlier Montesquieu had noticed that the cat was already coming out of the bag in his Persian Letters. Montesquieu and I go back a long way, to my first year at university and we parted company soon after (read almost immediately) and too soon for me to really get was he was on about when it came to urban life and modernity. Time, Berman and an ongoing commitment to revolutionary politics have pulled me up and enabled me to appreciate that 280 odd years ago Montesquieu identified what was vital and, in terms of social relations, revolutionary about the city. His heroes, were a couple of expat Sultans (what else), caught up in the thrall of the street where everybody is unveiled. “Here everything speaks out; everything can be seen; everything can be heard; the heart is as open as the face,”” And it wasn’t long before the fact that “everything can be seen” exposed the Bourbons and the aristocracy in general as emperors with no clothes.

And this brings me to the second bell ringing aspect of the distinction between the House and the Street and that is the overtly political aspect, that which should be the bread and butter of those holding revolutionary or radical pretensions. Here I found Berman’s take on Times Square (and by implication its equivalents elsewhere) refreshing, thought provoking and speaking directly to the synthesising sensibility that sits at the analytic heart of Marxism – or, rather, should sit at its heart. Above I had touched upon the modern cities transformative qualities, qualities that enable growth and that throw up new challenges. Berman describes Broadway street culture as being created by the sons of migrants, especially from the more backward areas of Europe, who had come to America seeking a better life. With them they not only brought aspirations that challenged the old ways, but constraints that contained them, a cultural drag from the old times, representing the mores of the traditional House. One of the aspirations of the sons was for this street culture to include women. Women also wanted that space and stepped in, although not yet as equals. It was a task of the daughters (and granddaughters …) to begin to renegotiate the rules of the dance.

But from the word go the daughters were part of the action and as early as 1892, a mere eight years before the formation of the International Ladies’ Garment Union in New York, a writer wrote of working class women, lonely after a working day venturing out of their hall bedroom, cold and lonely ”to lose herself in the unending procession on Broadway.” Berman points out that “there may never have been such a vast variety of women thrown together in any one place before.”

The square emerged as a place where men, women, kids from all over the world dreamed of ‘making spectacles of themselves’, of being unveiled. Picking up the same theme late Belgian singer/songwriter, Jacques Brel, in his song Timid Frieda picked up in the mid 20thC where Montesquieu and Baudelaire had left off in the preceding two. And in doing so he was able to highlight the tensions and challenges of the politics of the Street that had now fully matured. Timid Frieda:

Will they greet her

On the street where

Young strangers travel

On magic carpets

Floating lightly

In beaded caravans

Who can know if

They will free her

On the street where

She comes to join them

There she goes

With her valises

Held so tightly in her hands

Timid Frieda

Will life seize her

On the street where

The new dreams gather

Like fearless robins

Joined together

In high-flying bands

She feels taller

Troubles smaller

On the street where

She’s lost in wonder

There she goes

With her valises

Held so tightly in her hands

Timid Frieda

Won’t return now

To the home where

They do not need her

But always feed her

Little lessons

And platitudes from cans

She is free now

She will be now

On the street where

The beat’s electric

There she goes

With her valises

Held so tightly in her hands

Timid Frieda

Who will lead her

On the street where

The cops all perish

For they can’t break her

And she can take her

Brave new fuck you stand

Yet she’s frightened

Her senses heightened

On the street where

The darkness brightens

There she goes

With her valises

Held so tightly in her hands

Timid Frieda

If you see her

On the street where

The future gathers

Just let her be her

Let her play in

The broken times of sand

There she goes now

Down the sidewalk

On the street where

The world is bursting

There she goes

With her valises

Held so tightly in her hands.

 

It is a fabulous song. As one would anticipate after 200 plus years Brel’s lyrics picks up Montesquieu’s identification of early promise and Baudelaire’s more developed 19thC depiction and exposes a fully developed dialectic. The left I identify with walk with Timid Frieda offering encouragement if asked for – although she seems to be doing pretty well under her own steam. The square, the Street simultaneously liberated women and presented them (and the guys) with new challenges. But there was no turning back. If the rules of the dance were to be renegotiated you needed to be on the dance floor.

As touched upon above revolutionary parties or organisations (or those with pretensions), have a pretty chequered history when it comes to jumping onto the dance floor, letting their hair down and encouraging others to join in. And when it comes to understanding the transformative possibilities inherent in this they didn’t even make it onto the dance floor. The irony here is that the proverbial masses – and most were working class remember – were showing us the way and embracing “the street where the future gathers.” In doing so they ignored the cautionary, if not disapproving tones coming from comrade central about bourgeois frivolity and self indulgence undermining class solidarity and commitment to ‘the struggle’.

Breaking out and having fun, especially where sex is stirring the pot, has been more House than Street with communist parties and organisations stepping around the issue rather than embracing it. Class struggle and revolutionary politics were serious business (this aspect is true) and demanded a commitment that found the ‘letting one’s hair down’ side of things diversionary (read, with Russian Accent) petty bourgeois individualism. This aspect is not true and is a false antithesis; it is a voice coming from the House.

This is not to suggest that the tension between the serious aspect and being “on the street where the beats electric” is ever in abstract balance. Letting one’s hair down for those revolutionaries in occupied Europe during WW2 was not an option and needed to be put on ice while confusing right wing bourgeois democrats as ‘fascists’ and drawing parallels with Nazism is simply nutty and a sign of isolation. Please pass the bucket of cold water.

What the politics of the Street does, in effect, is ‘invite’ us to look forward, to grapple seriously with the contradictions inherent in its development, those affecting personal development, our place in the dance, in particular and to try and identify the synthesising processes that take us forward, that open up new possibilities and new challenges. But this remains an invitation; free will, choice and responsibility cannot be avoided whether we accept the invitation or not. While it would be drawing a long bow to say that the left’s collapse has been due to its inability to transcend the politics of the House and embrace that of the Street – its failure to get on top of economic challenges and present credible revolutionary alternatives having a bit to say about this collapse too – the left’s conflation of the development of individuality with bourgeois individualism has seen it trailing rather than leading.

This aspect has been a primary interest of mine since my work as a relational and group therapist has forced me to confront the place of choice and personal responsibility within the context of group and family dynamics and by implication social dynamics. This has taken a sharper form with the work I have done over the past 10-15 years with individuals and groups from within what is called new and emerging communities – primarily refugee communities – where the politics of the House, the traditional understandings or role and place, have been predominant. The link between this and the transformative possibilities of the Street became impossible to ignore. Nor was the link to the left’s ambivalence and its failure to confront and transcend its own assumptions regarding individual growth and development, especially as this related to the place of women. We need to get back onto the dance floor and formulate a few moves of our own.

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The Individual and the left

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THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE LEFT

Tom Griffiths

  

Some introductory ideas/context

The medieval soul is superficial, impoverished, miserable – that’s why the role of religion had to be imposed to fill in gaps or provide a veneer.

The modern soul is deep, complex (and therefore prone to neuroses) developing further layers of complexity. Increasingly the link is to individuality within an increasingly complex and multilayered society.

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I want to start this essay with a quote from The German Ideology, a work by Marx that predates the Communist Manifesto by not very much, and pose a rhetorical question to the reader: what stands out to you? What is Marx actually getting at?

“…private property can be abolished only on condition of an all round development of individuals, because the existing character of intercourse and productive forces is an all round one, and only individuals that are developing in an all round fashion can appropriate them, i.e. can turn them into free manifestations of their lives.” Selected Writings ed McLellan p 191

In case we missed it – and the left has a long history in peering through Nelson’s telescope on its position relating to the individual – Marx was pointing out that the development of communism couldn’t occur without the all round development of individuals.Abolition of private property from above, via some form of executive fiat, is no substitute for the broad cultural changes that “the all round development of individuals” assumes and that the abolition of private property must be a reflection of.

A Procrustean bed has no place here. As with spirituality, we have left the field of individuality and authenticity to the right – which is why we find some of their libertarian ideas attractive (presumably this must also apply to the Spiked crew).This 55+ year old quote from Barry Goldwater is a case in point: “Every man, both for his own individual good and for the good of society, is responsible for his own development.

The choices that govern his life are choices he must make: They cannot be made by any other human being, or by a collectivity of human beings.” (The Conscience of a Conservative, 1960). It’s like Nietzsche with a southern twang. And before readers start hyperventilating over the very obvious holes in old Barry’s argument – “he would say that wouldn’t he, he’s let the property question slip through” – we need to be aware that the radical left has been complicit in effectively allowing individual agency and responsibility – cornerstones of freedom – to become the ‘property’ of bourgeois property.

Late American Marxist, Marshal Berman, (The Politics of Authenticity , All That is Solid Melts into Air  made a spirited attempt to rescue the individual and reclaim territory once charted by progressive forces, including the revolutionary left, and he deserves our thanks. I’ll be dipping into his material, amongst others, below. There are a lot of reasons why what have formerly been mass revolutionary movements can now hold conventions in broom cupboards and assuming the ostrich position concerning the individual is one of them.

But before proceeding further some off road detours or context, hopefully relevant, are called for.

Why bother?

My first detour is: why am I bothering? My motivation is twofold. The first, and oldest, springs from an ongoing interest and dissatisfaction with how communist, and broadly revolutionary leftist thinking, has dealt with the individual. The second comes from my not quite as old work as a family therapist, group worker and supervisor (men’s family violence groups) and refugee support worker. I have come to appreciate that there is a considerable degree of overlap between these areas.

Human Nature

My second detour takes a very brief look at human nature. An uncontentious materialist view of human nature sees it as neither purely biological nor as an atomised abstraction along the lines of Adam Smith’s ‘natural man’. Our biology may be fixed within evolutionary frameworks but our individual and psychological makeup occur within social and historical ones. These latter therefore unfold and develop as we interact with both the natural world and the world we create and struggle to overcome their constraints; as we make our history, so we make ourselves.

Late German sociologist Norbert Elias expressed this rather well when he said “What is fixed by heredity, the range or pitch of voice, for example, merely provides the framework for an infinite variety of possible articulation.” (p36 The Society of Individuals)

Since the scientific revolution that accompanied modernity, numerous figures have expressed this fundamental truth. The 19thC thinker J.S.Mill, for example, wrote that: “Human nature is not a machine to be built like a model, and set to exactly the work proscribed to it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of inward forces that make it a living thing.” (On Liberty)

A more robust view  was expressed by Ivan Michurin, a Russian/Soviet scientist (he straddled epochs): “We cannot wait for favours from Nature, our task is to wrest them from her”, while English Marxist historian Christopher Hill, in God’s Englishman (p218) quoted Hugh Peter saying in 1648, “The work of God will go on [but] I am not in the mind we should put our hands in our pockets and wait what will come.”

Hugh Peter was expressing the idea of giving “history a push”, of loosening the reins on human subjectivity. During periods of revolutionary turmoil the “task to wrest them from her”, was not so much directed at Nature as at moribund ruling classes content with the idea that it was their natural and divinely ordained right to be in charge.

This idea captures a dilemma faced by proletarian parties which led successful revolutions in backward societies. These revolutions were obviously on the side of historical development but the ‘push’ was not solely directed at proletarian revolution. There was first the not so small problem of the bourgeois revolution to complete or even get started. We are familiar with the expression ‘push/pull’ and the push in Russia and China was in both bourgeois and proletarian directions with the latter being eventually defeated by a pull that was able to pass itself off as progressive. Deng Hsiao Ping’s “black cat, white cat: who cares so long as it catches mice” summed this up. As necessary and correct as the united front with the peasantry was, it was also a compromise and one of the components of this compromise – the one I’m interested in here – is the cultural space given to individuals and the cultural beliefs and practises that corralled that space.

Clearly siding with Michurin’s stand, Berman proposes that “It is inherent in our nature to make all things new – including ourselves.” (The Politics of Authenticity p165). In today’s world of deadened discourse we would insist that this view must accord with ‘evidence based practise’. What can I say, other than: it does and in bucket loads.

The Individual in Context

Picking up the point that we make ourselves, it seems reasonable to ask: how and from what?  Elias makes the obvious, but easily overlooked observation that individuation, the process of becoming individual, presumes some sort of social context because one must have a society, clan or group to individuate from.  While this may seem obvious its implications are easily missed, even by so-called Marxists, who should frankly know better.

In dialectical jargon the individual and society are in relationship as thesis and antithesis, each being antithesis or opposite to the other. In more colloquial vein they occupy different sides of the same coin. Speaking of the relationship between society and the individual across history, Elias  speaks of the ‘frozen antithesis’, a forced and inevitable one sidedness that cements one side of a contradiction, the ‘society’ side, to the exclusion of its opposite, the ‘individual’ side. When this happens the mutual interpenetration of opposites cannot be seen, let alone analysed, blind-siding us in the process.

Plekhanov’s favourite Hegelian aphorism that a contradiction leads forward covers similar ground. And this is what we have seen in traditional (pre modern) societies where the relationship between society (or group) and individual, the we/I balance, as Elias puts it, is fixed. And from the point of view of those involved, eternally so. Dynamism or fluidity in the relationship is absent and the individual is severely constrained and barely recognised.

There were very compelling reasons for this and they revolved around the issue of survival. For tens of thousands of years human survival was marginal and hard won. Individual survival depended upon the survival and viability of the group the individual belonged to. Initially these were small, family based units before developing into larger clan or tribal based societies and beyond. To use a maritime metaphor, the seas were too rough and the water too close to the gunnels for the individual to be able to stand up and rock the communal boat. Hence for most of our history the individual has had to serve the interests of the group and by so doing enhance his/her own chance of survival. The first struggle for freedom then was freedom from imminent danger, the freedom to survive. The struggle to wrest ourselves free from domination by nature is the basis upon which individual freedom emerges.

But this took many thousands of years and the development of mystical beliefs and practises – cultural, religious and loosely, ideological, were the secondary, and at this stage of our development, the most useful vehicles deployed to pass survival manuals from one generation to the next. As Daniel Dennett points out, harsh realities meant that we simply didn’t have the time or opportunity to turn the wealth of empirical knowledge our ancestors gained into higher level, scientific knowledge.

Romantic beliefs that surface from time to time, like those espoused by many greens, that our forebears lived in a harmonious relationship with nature, leapfrog conservatism and head straight for reaction. The fallacy of this belief rests upon an assumption that the relationship was essentially benign, if not between equals then at least between mutually respectful partners where a fair, de facto accommodation could occur. Nothing could have been further from the truth. For many tens of thousands of years nature held the whip hand. Our ancestors did as nature dictated.

The Individual in Pre-Modern Society

Alienation, here the separation of individuals from their potential to develop, was systematically imposed, unavoidable, unconscious and experienced as normal in static societies that were governed by fixed norms and traditions. Here, people must be satisfied with the roles given, experiencing themselves, Berman says, as pegs, aspiring “only to fit the holes that fit them best.” (The Politics of Authenticity p xxvii-xxviii) A static equilibrium is Berman’s description of Elias’ frozen antithesis.

This static equilibrium was dominant in the west until the demise of medievalism between the 16th and 20th centuries – (Russia across the 19th and 20thC, although if we include the Vatican in our reckoning we will need to push out the time frames a century or few). It is difficult to find a better, more dispassionate and dystopian description of traditional power and order than that given by prominent 19thC French reactionary Joseph de Maistre  who saw humanity as sinful, weak and proud with savage natures that must be kept in check by an uncompromising and unquestioned authority. “…all greatness, all power, all social order depends upon the executioner.” What can one say but “yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir.”

A static equilibrium describes social arrangements that warm the hearts of conservatives and reactionaries across the broad sweep of history, from Plato to Edmund Burke, Burke’s contemporary de Maistre and beyond in both directions.

Marxists have no difficulty in identifying Burke as a stick in the mud given his immediate hostility (1790) to the French revolution and his valorization of tradition, albeit within the context that accepted the gains of the English Revolution. Plato is more interesting because he was identified by the Second International’s leading theoretician, Karl Kautsky, as a prototype socialist come communist. Late American Marxist Hal Draper, was no fan. “Plato’s state model is government by an aristocratic elite, and his argument stresses that democracy inevitably means the deterioration and ruin of society. Plato’s political aim, in fact, was the rehabilitation and purification of the ruling aristocracy in order to fight the tide of democracy. To call him a socialist ancestor is to imply a conception of socialism which makes any kind of democratic control irrelevant.”

Like so many aristocrats after him Plato’s ideal of individual perfection was one’s acceptance of the role a person was born into, performing one’s ‘proper’ function, a perfect balance Plato called justice. It was a pity that Kautsky was unable to ask simply: justice for whom?

While Plato was an aristocrat and a static equilibriumist (it’s not a neologism, I’ve checked) there is little point getting carried away with his reactionary politics two and a half thousand years down the track. But the same allowance cannot be extended Kautsky or other revolutionary figures drawn to Plato as some kind of Ancient Greek avatar of revolutionary socialism.  While violent class struggles may occur within Plato’s schema “they concern only the allocation of particular holes to particular pegs. The board itself, the closely knit but rigidly stratified system of the Greek polis, which defines men precisely by their functions, remains unquestioned and intact.” (Berman The Politics of Authenticity p xxviii) What Berman is drawing attention to is, in systems jargon, first order or quantitative change. What is required is second order or transformative change. The board itself needs to go. That the leading figure of the Second International saw Plato as a prototype socialist indicates the depth of the problem for the left around the individual and the demos generally.

Under traditional circumstances people’s personal identity was derived from the roles they were born into or assigned. This promoted social stability of course (what’s not to like comrades?) while inhibiting innovation and creativity. It also shielded the undeveloped self from expectations and disappointments beyond one’s station. While systems are not sentient the advantages they confer pass on to those that are and these advantages were most warmly accepted by those who, coincidentally, sat at the top of what Hill describes as “the cosy hierarchical world picture [that] must not be disturbed lest the social hierarchy be challenged.” (The Origins of the English Revolution p345)

Berman’s take is similar pointing out that “Individual thought or feeling, insight or initiative, could only be destructive to these traditions and routines. Hence it was essential for traditional society to keep individuality from developing, at the bottom as well as at the top.” (The Politics of Authenticity p100)

The dead hand of the past, a point not missed by Marx, weighed down on the aristocracy and the peasants alike, but “it was easy to see why the upper classes were willing to make the sacrifice of self which their social roles demanded.” But no matter what station one was born into everyone “was reduced to a function of the rank which he acquired at birth – or, perhaps more accurately, to paraphrase Marx, the rank which acquired him.” (Ibid p101)

The respective autobiographies of Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Infidel, Nomad), Souad Burned Alive and Phoolan Devi (The Bandit Queen of India) describe both these aspects with an intense, intimate clarity. The life stories of these women are required reading by those serious about understanding, on a personal level, how tradition works and the risks that must be confronted in the struggle to form an authentic self.

THE WINDS OF CHANGE – CULTURAL REVOLUTION IN EUROPE

What I have been attempting to describe is the dividing line between the pre-modern and the modern world. The transformation of the former to the latter saw the relationship between the individual and society transform from suffocating stasis to dynamism. The place of the individual has grown enormously, with modernity facilitating this growth and there can be no doubt that this development has enriched those societies subject to its influence. There can also be no doubt that the transition was, or is for those societies still in transition, anything but smooth or complete.

While contradictions and conflicts of interest between society and the individual continue to exist and may often be very sharp, modern societies have created a social and political space (a cultural space if you like) where individuals can fight for and extend their own piece of the action. While we often think of these developments in terms of ‘rights’, it is worth remembering that along with creating ourselves we create the need for new rights and we win them through struggles against both nature and socially imposed impediments.

Gramsci described as a cultural revolution the period ushered in by the Renaissance and the Reformation. I’d not previously thought of these events, or movements, as cultural revolutions before, but he was right. They sounded the death knell of medievalism and it is worth remembering that the transition was protracted, violent and characterised by what we have come to realise as historical transformations with their obligatory twists and turns. This latter point should serve to reassure, by the way – looking back we can see that frozen antitheses were melting all over the place, a fact that should encourage us to look for the current melting points.

These transformations ushered in the modern era and with it the modern individual. Most bourgeois opinion, that is, most ‘opinion’, prefer to either be overtly negative about revolutions or to ignore them. This also applies to attitudes of any oppositional movement that comes from below – cultural or otherwise – where the default perspective offered is, as suggested, to not only turn a blind eye or to focus on the negative aspects but to demean and treat with contempt the ignorant or stupid masses. Where are Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters pumping out Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive when you need them I ask rhetorically.

The threat and fear of ‘chaos’ is an oft repeated mantra by both conservatives and reactionaries, especially as revolutions threaten or are in their midst. Communist parties, especially those in power, have shown themselves to be prone to catching this bug and the challenges it throws up in spite of their need to launch cultural upheavals or revolutions. This latter is surely part of the job description, a recognition that it’s ok to consciously and deliberately give history a push. But the modernist cultural revolution, if I can call it that, was not prescribed or consciously directed and the participants were most unlikely to have had a clear idea about how things would unfold or where they would end up. Developments were more akin to an unpredictably moving but unstoppable tsunami, moving forward here, being held back or pushed in other directions there, leaving untouched some remnants and swallowing up others. One way of reading Hill’s histories is with this in mind. So too with Shakespeare who wrote his plays as the tide began to surge.

The ‘left’, of whatever stripe, speaks of and seeks to work with ‘social units’ – the working class, unions or worker or community organisations, parties etc. But unless this contributes and leads to an ongoing transformation of the social unit or group (getting rid of the board), and thereby to the opening up of opportunity for individual growth and transformation, the ‘left’ would be pissing into the wind and indicating that, on this matter at least, it has failed to understand or embrace the modernity that Marx and Engels, amongst many others, were so enraptured by.

Group maintenance without transformation is a dead end. Group transformation without individual transformation, is politically fraudulent and reactionary, seeking to maintain the existing or traditional power relations within the group, community or society. As repeated once already, the board itself has to go.

THE EMERGING INDIVIDUAL

Hill makes the point that the transition from tribal to village society involved a shift from kinship (blood bond) to neighbourhood; that is, from tribalism to feudalism; and that the transition from parish to sect was a shift from local community to voluntary organisation. Voluntary organisation cannot occur without the existence of self-motivated individuals. Today this is the norm, indeed so normal as to barely raise comment. In the social sphere alone we see a plethora of activities, clubs, associations and the like which people engage in freely. It covers all classes, ages and tastes and could not occur without freely choosing individuals, all taking responsibility for fulfilling certain of their needs.

But the communist movement has struggled with the free aspect of the individual uncritically buying (I use the term advisedly) the bourgeois assertion that central to this freedom is freedom of property ownership and hence of capital. The individual that emerged from the medieval straightjacket was associated with the development of capitalism, capitalists and aspiring capitalists, what Hill termed ‘the industrious sort’. One sidedness in an analysis is always a problem and an embarrassing one when the analysis is promoted as dialectical. Here the matter of the individual is left dangling, a frozen antithesis, stained with its association with the ‘industrious sort’ so central in the development of capitalism (Tawney’s depiction makes this connection a defining characteristic). Individuality, individualism, bourgeois individualism and its junior, aspiring cousin petty bourgeois individualism, are generally carelessly treated as synonyms. While some common ground between them is real, contradictions and points of divergence emerged early on. Failing to see this, or downplaying their importance and lumping them all together, is more than careless, it is lazy and betrays an ambivalence about the place of the individual absent from Marx and Engel’s thinking.

As mentioned Berman has attempted to correct this by focusing on the emergence of the individual, as has Hill. One of Hill’s great contributions has been his determination to track and expose the development of both sides or aspects of the individual’s development in England from the 16th to the 18th centuries. That is, the individual’s connection to bourgeois economic and social development, the aspect that has ‘form’, and the flourishing of the individual among the ‘lower sort’, the members of the ‘many headed monster’. (Change and Continuity in 17th Century England)

Failure to distinguish between capitalism and modernity

Associated with this has been a failure by the left to distinguish between capitalism and modernity. Each has developed together and each has, within itself, contained the possibility of the other. This is best seen and summed up in the “all that is solid melts into air’” aspect, the dynamism, that has been common to both. By the early 19th C it was becoming possible to clearly distinguish between the two and to see that the development of one was frustrating, distorting and impeding the development of the other. Marx’s writings were very much concerned with this distinction (we can see it too in Goethe’s Faust, albeit in a less politically conscious way); indeed he and Engels were key figures in making it. In effect they were saying: I like this part, the dynamism, the restlessness, the urge to develop, the newfangledness, which in turn enables the individual to develop; but not this part, the tying of labour, in perpetuity, to market relations and the exploitation and alienation that goes with this.

Marx and Engels spent most of their lives demonstrating that capitalist economic and social development will materially create the conditions where it can be superseded. Where, in other words, modernity can be fully transformed and shed itself of its capitalist constraints.

The identification that left wing radicalism has made between the capitalist economy and the liberal state with ‘individualism’ has also seen it linking radicalism with, as Berman puts it, “a collectivism that negated individuality.” This is succinct and accurate. A collectivism so understood, one that attempts to negate the ‘newfangledness’ so admired by Marx, will take us nowhere other than a dead end. More disturbingly it aligns a radical, anti-capitalist sensibility regarding the individual with the premodern. Indeed, that is what it is a hangover from. It is backward looking and as communists or assorted radicals we need to remind ourselves that that is not the direction we should be heading.

The Marxist Archive reflects this problem and makes its own contributions (see the entries for ‘Individual’, ‘Individualism and Collectivism’ and ‘Autonomy’ for examples). While not wishing to make such a detour as to get lost let me make the following points. Its entry for ‘Individual’ goes no further than formal logic or the medieval Latin word ‘individuum’ in describing particular, indivisible things. This includes individual humans, of course, but also individual rocks, horses or flies crawling up a wall. Unique persons, with their multiplicity of individual characteristics fail to make the team. ‘Individualism and Collectivism’ is more nuanced, but remains problematic (or should I say symptomatic?). It speaks of collectivism transcending or sublating individualism; that is a collectivism which does not suppress the individualism of bourgeois society, but supersedes it. This gets closer, but supersedes to what? Primacy is given to collectivism with the transcendent, dialectical leap, only relating to it. Individualism, which remains ‘bourgeois’, or consistent with the individuality that emerged under capitalism, remains unsuppressed but also untransformed. It is as though dialectics has had a seniors’ moment and forgotten that individuality too, must transcend its bourgeois limits.

Individuum (and its siblings individualis and individuus) was, in relation to the now emerged individual (bourgeois or otherwise) a word at a low level of synthesis, a direct reflection of Elias’ frozen antithesis and Berman’s static equilibrium, characteristic of undeveloped or backward societies. A collectivism that negates, or awkwardly slides over individuality within a modernist context, that strips the particularities of individual persons and highlights only those features common to all is backward looking and reactionary.

The bods at the Archive, seem to understand that the individual is important but their ambivalence gets in the way of them seeing the matter as dynamic. The antithesis remains frozen.

But if dialectics has meaning this must also indicate that we also have a problem with the universal, although this is not an issue for here.

Although we are social creatures who define ourselves in relation to the other, modern societies enable identities to be achieved and transcended. The synthesis has developed to a much higher level. Roles and limits are transcended regularly and to such a degree we barely notice. Your average citizen at work transcends him/herself out of work or even at work – is he/she a junior sports coach, team manager, assistant this or that, the secretary of a club, an amateur whatever, a blogger … How about a revolutionary? Now, that’s a novel idea!

Berman points out that “To be authentic, authentically “oneself”, is to see critically through the forces that twist and constrict our being and to strive to overcome them” (The Politics of Authenticity p xiv). In a repressive society people cannot be themselves within the system but must strive to become themselves in spite of the system. This can take private, even mystical forms, as with the Stoics, or openly rebellious forms where people can only be themselves, or strive to become so, against the system. Revolt, Berman reminds us, is the only mode of authenticity a repressive society allows. It is not only right that we rebel against reactionaries, but in doing so we act authentically.

If the theory of revolution grows out of and develops alongside the idea of authenticity, we need to be able to evaluate how well proletarian parties like the Bolsheviks and CCP fulfilled or sought to fulfill this within the boundaries of what was historically and socially achievable. Within the west I think we’ve been under performers and more aligned with the historically regressive. Revolutions in undeveloped countries present a more complex picture. With 80/90% of the population in China, for example, being peasant and where feudalist culture predominated, the communists had to work with the raw materials at hand and an emphasis on a collectivism that downplayed individuality was probably unavoidable. That was certainly what they inherited. This did not mean that individuality did not develop. It is difficult to read Lu Hsun or any of William Hinton’s accounts without seeing new and vibrant individuals emerging. But there is also an ambivalence borne of the circumstance (the constraints) of these revolutions. In his very sympathetic Reconstructing Lenin, Hungarian historian Tamas Krausz remarks that “the autonomy of the individual and of personality as the communal societies’ main context of unfolding was missing not only from Lenin’s legacy, but from the legacy of the entire period, which insisted on other areas of development.” (p369)

What I find disappointing is the lack, or apparent lack, of theoretical material from either the CCP or the Bolsheviks that laid the realities on the table in such a way that indicated that they knew the growth of the individual was an important goal and that it was occurring, but that circumstances did not allow them to focus on this. This distinction, and its rationale, does not strike me as beyond the wit of the players to articulate. While my own ignorance may be the driver here, the lack of much written material indicates that it was not seen as a problem. This reinforces my hunch that there has been a deep ambivalence about the individual in revolutionary movements generally and that this has been dealt with through avoidance and a one sided focus on notions of collectivism.

One of the problems I have with this (there are a few) is that this ambivalence leaves the door open to the development of anti-capitalist feelings that spring from a backward looking romanticism, a yearning for a pastoral, harmonious, pre industrial past, based on scarcity and frugality.

This reactionary yearning looks to an idealised, non-existent past and posits it as the future. Its most modern form can be seen amongst extremist greens and Islamic fascist groups like ISIS. It certainly had a presence in the English Revolution and re-emerged as a current of the Romantic period that arose partly in response to the Industrial Revolution. However, as Berman states, we envision equality within an urban, dynamic economy based on growth and abundance. (p36) And Amen to that!

During the 18thC and 19thC that reactionary yearning for harmony and stability was expressed strongly in reactions to the Enlightenment and to the French Revolution. Prior to the revolution reactionaries on both sides of the English channel were busy drawing the cultural authoritarian wagons into a circle, drawing upon Neo-Classicism from the arts and Newtonian physics, in order to promote social stability by encouraging people to submit to fixed, eternal rules, externally imposed and closed to scrutiny. This de facto united front between a decaying French feudalism and an ascendant British capitalism occurred because both ruling classes required social stability. The British were more successful having had a revolution, albeit limited in its extent and aims; the French were not because they hadn’t. But on both sides of the Channel ruling class anxiety was a clear sign that the horse had well and truly bolted. Whilst it is obvious that there were a great many other issues that drove the revolution, the progressive unfettering of the individual, his/her emergence as subjects on the social and political arena, was prominent among them. Following similar developments that had been occurring in Britain, the third estate mob was becoming less and less mob like.

By 1790, for example, before the direction of the revolution had become clear, Edmund Burke was quick to fire a shot across the bows, dismissing the philosophes and the revolution that Burke would have seen as their mongrel child, as “sophisters, economists and calculators. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.” Proud submission? Servitude an exalted freedom? Warming to his theme and moving seamlessly into hyperbolic overdrive he predicted that “All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonised the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics all the sentiments that beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by the new conquering empire of light and reason. All decent drapery of life is to be torn off …” (Reflections… paras 127-8)

While Burke’s prose is simultaneously impressive and nausea inducing he employs a sophistry unmatched by any of his erstwhile French targets. We should keep in mind that de Maistre’s reflections, made after the revolution, dispensed with Burke’s draperies and cut to the chase. Berman points out that what Burke was effectively admitting to was that the “whole social system of Europe was essentially a system of lies” which is where de Maistre’s executioner comes in as reinforcer. Shelley exposed these lies in his poem Anarchy, written in response to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. It is good to have Burke in mind while reading it.

French reactionary responses were also predictably hostile. What had been lost was the clarity and predictability of medieval Catholicism, especially the stability and obedience to medieval hierarchy. Individuals, they argued, had been severed from their traditional (and subservient) ties. The atomised, uncontrolled individual, the individual who no longer respected the sanctity of the place of his/her superiors, was a threat to social cohesion and aroused consternation among those superiors for whom de Maistre was an influential spokesperson. Individualist liberalism was destructive to the social order and de Maistre’s uncompromising worldview has cast a long shadow.

Had figures like de Maistre simply faded into the background and, along with their ideas, exited stage right, we could happily channel the Mandy Rice-Davies line of “well he would [say that] wouldn’t he” and move on. What is of ongoing interest about de Maistre, aside from his ‘casual’ attitude on maintaining social order, is his influence on Saint-Simon, one of the Utopian Socialists’ heavy lifters, a man who had a significant influence on the development of numerous socialist currents that developed in the mid to late 19thC. Both men were contemporaries and it was de Maistre’s thinking about social cohesion and political authority that garnered influence. Auguste Comte, Saint-Simone’s secretary and father of sociology, frequently and approvingly cited him.

Culture that draws its authority from a closed and oppressive past cannot prepare or aid its members to negotiate the permanently turbulent waters that modernity throws up. For such cultures, the future has already happened and all it does is prepare people for more of the same.

Historical events demonstrate more powerfully than words that this has a shelf life. Taking sides in the individual/social divide, however, presented real challenges, cultural and political, that have seen ostensibly radical and revolutionary ideologies promote ideas that bore disturbing similarities to feudalist or semi feudalist ideas of community with limited space for individual development, let alone transformation.

The development of society to  higher levels (higher levels of syntheses as Elias would put it) enables higher levels of individuation and individual development, opening the way to increased fulfilment (and increased dissatisfaction); increased chances of happiness (and increased chances of unhappiness and disappointment), all of which are society specific. So which road, the high road or the low road? Old maritime charts used to have “this way there be dragons” to describe unknown waters and discourage exploration. Dragons might be scary, but “this way there be development”.

This of course is not a one way street as the development of the individual in modern societies is necessarily accompanied by the development of society, of a multiplicity of choices in how we can be ‘we’ as well as ‘I’ and ‘we’ relationships are no longer necessarily permanent and inescapable, no longer a constraint to the development of free will and personal responsibility.

The working class itself has made it clear through its actions and choices that it values individual growth and development and the economic development which facilitates this.

The question for communists and assorted ratbags is: do we?