Category Archives: History
Foucault: Arch-liberal?
It’s too nice a day to really go off on Foucault.
I have oft wondered about the supposed radicalism of Foucault? He and Chomsky are two of the most cited intellectuals in the world, and yet I have wondered about his radicalness. His historical understanding seems to be rooted in Althusserian structuralism, and his notion of power seems to be nebulous in a way that his refusal to define for reasons of avoiding “reduction” seemed both arbitrary and a mystification in and of itself. Indeed, his turn just before the end of his life was an ethical turn aimed at the self, which seemed to come out of some of his particular failures of predicting politics in localities (Foucault’s failure to understand Iran seems key.)
While I do deeply respect Foucault’s historicism and think his structural critiques of differing European periods are key as well as his points about the basic failures of the liberal state, I think the failure to truly address what power is and what the self is the point where Foucault can be seen as less profound as both the Nietzscheans and the structural Marxists that he built on. Listening to Hans Sluga interview on Entitled Opinions, the fact that power is kept nebulous leads Foucault to want to critique without being unable to question any of the basic assumption of his own epoch/episteme. Sluga actually that Foucault’s slipperiness on his relationship to Nietzsche is key. Foucault mystifiies power in a way Nietzsche does not in which power is both a net good but it is the ability to assert the will and make values through Umwertung aller Werte, or re-valuation itself. So power is not just violence but the means to create values. Foucault is not that precise, and thus avoids the “right-ward” drift of Nietzsche, but does this at cost of radicalization or the ability to more radically against general trends in specific moments.
This is why Foucault seems so useful: He gives us means to talk about the past and critique, but his central analytic of power is vague and even quietistic. Sometimes a little Hegel does one good.
The twilight of winter, and historicism
I do not call myself a progressive, as it was a term used by left liberals to distance themselves from communism and for liberal-leaning communists to hide, furthermore as the demonization of the word liberal in the popular imagination and simplification of the political spectrum into a highly misleading and rather vapid binary. Yet in pondering the historicism of Hegel as well as Nietzsche and DeMaistre, there is a tension in all historical thinkers for even the most conservative ones realize that while time may not be moving in a presupposed teleos, it most definitely moves and Hegel supposed as did DeMaistre that history was the judge of right.
This, however, has always problematized the left. The left conception of history can not longer be simply linear. It cannot think this because history did not judge left projects well. One was seen two trends in left philosophy: to embrace and accelerate the end of history within liberal modernity or to see everything that has happened as regressive. DeMaistre had the same conflict when he saw the Enlightenment win. The Right has not be judged well by history either.
Now I do see a validity to this later view yet this is in fundamental contradiction to a materialist conception of history without a teleos which is known. We cannot know the future, and even the past is but a rhyming dictionary. To paraphrase Mark Twain, history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes. So this fundamental contradiction requires a self dialectic that remains unaddressed.
I say this on a day I am on a bus and ill with cold. The winter is over but peeking its head up for one more day, and the predictable unpredictability of the natural emerges yet the climate is altering slowly day by day. This actually primes my thought.
To Fight Stalinism one must get over Stalinphobia: A Dialogue.
Recently I got tired of the so many debates with leftists that attack Stalinism as if the thought was an extension of Stalin’s personal flaws. My assertion has been that it may be the case, but to say that one must cite chapter and verse and correlate that to the historical situation. While someone can lie about their true theoretical framework, as Marx indicated in The German Ideology, there isn’t a real gap between actually held to theory and praxis. My reason for asserting this was not a defense of Stalin, whom even many “anti-revisionists” have been reassessing in the last few years.
Ayika Kahn has written in an essay about 1968 and the decline of the new left,the twin poles of Stalinphobia and Stalinphilia were represented both within the Frankfurt school and society at large. One is left with a legacy on how Mao obscured his deviation from Stalin while many Left Communist started portraying Lenin in a light that was more in line with a damnation of Lenin, a feet that had taken primarily from anti-communists. Mike Ely, a Maoism himself, has been quite honest about this trend.
In more traditional Socialist groups, even those who consider themselves Marxist, there is over an allergy to Stalin manifested in misrepresenting the debates between Luxemborg and Lenin as being one of total opposition instead of one of a complicated dialogue of respect and trepidation, often ignoring that Lenin called for decentralization of Bolshevik leadership and for Stalin to lose his general secretaryship of the party. Often both Stalin and Trotsky used this movement as a key piece of propaganda.
I have noticed getting Marxist who aren’t Maoist to read Stalin and address the textual basis of Stalinism is like pulling teeth, as if admitting that Stalin’s reading of Marx perhaps a valid one and justified his actions as Kolakowski thought in the late 70s. To paraphrase Orwell, this is the secret fear of almost every Trotskyist (to which I would add also Left Communist, Anarcho-communist, and modern “democratic” socialist). One has an easier time getting Marxists to read Hitler often.
So we looked at Dialectical and Historical Materialism at first, in which we could find little flaws although the thinking on the base and the superstructure was more reductionist than Marx and the opposition to bourgeois far more simplified than found in Das Kapital. Still, it was clear, concise, and largely un-problematic. The people involved were a post-Maoist, a non-Marxist socialist, Ross Wolff , a Trotskii-influenced member of Platypus, Eric Lundin, a rare erudite anarcho-communist, and myself, a left communist who has warmed up to middle period Lenin. I have shortened the exchange to focused on a few key issues.
Eric Lundin: Well since we’re talking exclusively about what Stalin theorized about and not what he did. I’ll give a critique of solely his philosophy:
In “Marxism and the National Question” Stalin seems to say that any nationalistic struggles against imperialist should be supported. Which is why Stalin was expressing support for the Emir of Afghanistan’s struggle against the U.K. Even though the Emir was a feudal lord. This was basically the same logic that Mao used in “On Contradiction;” a belief that the larger contradiction must be solved more immediately than the others. So therefore the feudal Bourgeoisie of a nation and the peasant Proletariat must work together against a large imperialist enemy. But the idea of the Proletariat and Bourgeoisie ever working together seems to have been completely discarded by Engels in his “Socialism: Scientific and Utopian.” So to use an overused term, Stalin was a “revisionist.”
Skepoet: That’s exactly what I wanted Eric. We need to deal with Stalinism, not just Stalin’s character. If we can see things in his character in his writing, then fine. We note the error.
Eric Lundin: In fact, Stalin was even contradicting Lenin in this case. For example, here’s something from Lenin’s “National and Colonial Questions:”
“Second, the need for a struggle against the clergy and other influential reactionary and medieval elements in backward countries;
Third, the need to combat Pan-Islamism and similar trends, which strive to combine the liberation movement against European and American imperialism with an attempt to strengthen the positions of the khans, landowners, mullahs, etc.”
Skepoet: I, however, think honest revisionism is preferable to dishonest anti-revisionism. But that was Stalin’s logic on the popular front, and it was always deceptive. Now the question that will make some of our post-Maoist friends uncomfortable, how much is this deviation of Stalin still present in Maoism?
Remember Stalin’s claim that bourgeoisie are at odds in interests: the battles around fascism proved that even at the time. However, Stalin seems willing to reject the benefits of Bourgeois revolutions while embracing a popular front with the Bourgeoisie (but not even social Democrats who were seen as objectively fascists)–is this because Stalin is too reductionist in his Dialectics? Or because he was an political hack? Or both? I am not sure.
Eric Lundin: Well, I think Mao was using much the same logic in “On Contradiction.” In which his thesis was that within a nation there is a Hegelian-esque contradiction between bourgeoisie and proletariat. But within the world there is a contradiction between Imperialist and Colonialized. And that the larger contradiction must be solved first. This is sort of how he rationalized joining alongside the Kuomingtang to force out the Japanese. I mean, I can see some rationality behind making a peace deal with an opponent to fight a larger enemy. But I think it’s a bit dishonest to claim that this is all part of solving a “larger contradiction.” As opposed to just being honest and saying that you’re doing it out of desperation.
Skepoet: Wait, that doesn’t make much sense since Imperialism is an expansion of primitive accumulation of capital in a capitalist system. That seems precises inverted. Honestly, I think oppression and exploitation are two separate questions that interweave, but that is odd. But as to the last bit, concessions to history are forgivable when they are noted as such, Kolakowski was right about that. They are not forgivable when someone makes shit up post-facto to justify them theoretically. Anyway, this larger “contradiction” thesis, when taken to its extreme let to Lin Baio’s Maoism-Third Worldism which denies that exploitation even happens in first world countries. This is simpleton’s analysis. I don’t think Mao was such a simpleton, but the seeds of the error where there in Stalin.
I never understood the move to try to reconcile Lin Baio with both Mao and the cultural revolution since Lin Biao crushed the cultural revolution, supported Deng, and probably tried to coup Mao, but things got weird between the 1970s and now.
Eric Lundin: Mao also sided with an Anti-Communist dictator like Mobutu Sese Seko in order to screw with the Soviet Union. Since this was after the Sino-Soviet split and he considered them “Socialist Imperialist.” This seems to me as being beyond any sort of greedy opportunism, or even beyond coherent logic.
Skepoet: Yes, as was his justification with an alliance with the US against the Soviets.
Ross Wollf: Skepoet said, ”how much is this deviation of Stalin still present in Maoism?”
Yes. This is THE central question for Maoism in terms of its problematic Stalinist inheritance.
For Trotskyists and even Leninists the central question is how much of what became Stalinism was latent in Trotskii’s and Lenin’s own thought. Even if, as is the case with my own opinion, I don’t believe Stalinism was an inevitable consequence of Leninism, democratic centralism, or vanguardism per se, even the most ardent Leninist must admit that Stalinism existed in potentia. This is so even as a perversion owing to the Soviet Union’s national isolation; the possibility of perversion exists in these principles themselves.
But the same can be said of radical bourgeois thought and Jacobinism.
Skepoet: This is why I am think Left-Leninist may be the best statement of my position, although I am intensely interested in the various strains of post-Maoism. If one isn’t honest about problems in thinkers even one respects then you aren’t self-honest, saying a glaring contradiction isn’t a contradiction is fool-hearty.
Eric Lundin: I think I got the name of it wrong. It wasn’t “Marxism and the National Question,” it was a chapter of “The Foundations of Leninism” called “The National Question.” Anyway, here is the quote:
“the struggle that the Emir of Afghanistan is waging for the independence of Afghanistan is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the monarchist views of the Emir and his associates, for it weakens, disintegrates and undermines imperialism; whereas the struggle waged by such “desperate” democrats and “Socialists,” “revolutionaries” and republicans as, for example, Kerensky and Tsereteli, Renaudel and Scheidemann, Chernov and Dan, Henderson and Clynes, during the imperialist war was a reactionary struggle, for its results was the embellishment, the strengthening, the victory, of imperialism.”
The Weathermen: A Precursor to Anarcho-liberalism?
Much can be said on the Weatherman (a helpful documentary is available in full on youtube), and much has. Louis Proyect has pointed out that The Weathermen’s tactics were an inspiration for the black bloc , while I don’t share Proyect’s exact analysis of the black bloc as a tactic as I see it as more of a mixed blessing, it is ironic that while the Weatheman were supposedly Maoist in politics, they’re tactics seem more like Bakunin’s International Brotherhood than a Maoist mass-line or to a Leninist vanguard. The interesting thing is that this does lead not to building mass-lines, but to rather elitist notions that non-workers could represent workers and that breaking morality taboos was revolutionary.
In a way, I would have to admit the black bloc tactics seem mild compared to the Weathermen, and more justifiable as a tactic as it is not in such explicit self-contradiction. But reading an interview with Mark Rudd, I was struck by a good deal of what he said as he seems fundamentally more honest than Ayers:
SL: But, at that time, the success of the dramatic building occupations was viewed as a vindication of your Action Faction’s tactics over those of the Praxis Axis. But now you are saying that this was a misreading of the situation, because it was really their tactics that were responsible for the success of your actions.
MR: Yes. Militancy and confrontation maybe could be thought of as a strategy, but basically it was a series of confrontational tactics. The overall strategy was education plus confrontation plus personal relationship-building. But at the time we misread it completely. We took the Columbia Revolt of April and May 1968 to be a vindication of Che’s foco theory (i.e. the theory that a small group takes action and the masses join in once they see that guerilla warfare can work). That was a theory promulgated by the Cuban Communist Party in 1967 and 1968 and we lapped it up. Our Action Faction tendency and mentality fit in with the foco theory. At one point I made a speech quoted by Todd Gitlin in his book1 in which I am reported as saying, “organizing is another word for going slow.” I did not want organizing. I wanted speed and confrontation and militancy. After Columbia, however, almost every single application of this non-strategy of confrontation and militancy resulted in defeat and failed to build the movement.
There is something that I see in Rudd and, in Ayer’s more elitist version, is that in both instances one sees a confusion of tactics and goals, not in a dialectical synthesis, but in a simple substituting one for the other. This seems why so often the ultra-leftist becomes the center-left or even center-liberal reformist. I’ll quote Rudd again:
SL: In the German context, when the student movement emerged there in the 1960s, the Marxist intellectual Theodor Adorno called into question the movement’s leftist character and said, in essence, “These young people really seek only the narcissistic satisfaction to be achieved by direct action. They are not really interested in or capable of transforming the circumstances that generate the discontent.” He thus took a critical position against what he saw as the authoritarianism rampant on the New Left in Europe. To what extent do you think authoritarianism was a factor both in your own particular political experience and on the American left as a whole in the 1960s?
MR: I think the popularity of Marxism-Leninism is a good gauge of that. Marxism-Leninism is essentially an authoritarian organizational strategy. It says, “Our little group knows best. We have the truth and we are going to impose it on everybody.” And of course, the New Left wound up in the 1970s as a giant mix of Marxist-Leninist groupuscules. There is the authoritarian tendency, the idea that we know best about everything. To me it is reappearing in the kids in Pittsburgh who want to wear bandanas and march without a permit. They said, “Well, we know better than everybody else because we have the truth. We understand how terrible the system is. You are just a liberal and don’t understand.”
SL: What about the exclusive preoccupation with action? To my mind, this is what historically ties today’s anarchists to the Weathermen. In both cases reflection has determined that the problem is reflection. It is almost a theoretical anti-theory, or an intellectual anti-intellectualism.
MR: That could be, but that was not our problem. Our problem was too much of both, too much belief in the propaganda of the deed and too much belief that national liberation was going to defeat US imperialism. So we had the worst of both worlds. We had the action plus the ideology. There has to be some way of testing the truth of ideas. The best I can figure out is growth of the movement, numbers. If you count how many people are at a demonstration and then, a year later, you count again and discover that your numbers have gone up, you are probably on the right track. If they have not, you are probably not.
SL: How do you know that the movement that is growing is the movement you want?
MR: You don’t. Nobody can know. You just blunder along. That is why I am for non-violence, because at least you are adopting strategies and tactics that do not do irreversible damage. In my experience, almost everything I ever did that I thought it was going to turn out one way turned out another. That is why I am a liberal, because hopefully liberals kill fewer people than radicals. I am for nobody killing anybody else, and that includes governments, terrorists, and communists, though, of course, there are not that many of those left in the world anymore.
You can see Rudd actually not answer the question, he doesn’t address that maybe they have an understanding he’s abandoned and perhaps never had because tactics become both the ends and means, and fear of bad tactics seems like prudent caution, but is it true? Do liberals not kill as many people as radicals, for while the Weather Underground did have a body count, doesn’t the Democratic party? Is a war-time Democrat not a liberal? Or is the remove from the violence what makes one sleep better at night?
In a way, I admire Rudd for his honesty about this, and its a candor that one needs to really see the issues. Is this not one of the same contradictions of anarcho-liberal? The Weatherman tactics reflected that they didn’t believe that class consciousness is there, but it has to be developed but instead of the Social Democratic way of developing it, they pick the Bakunin’s vanguard of terrorists way. A way that betrays a lack of faith in the possibility that masses–the proletariat–could defend themselves. It’s not that violence is the problem: it’s that violence done by a few for the many against the will of the many is objectively not a mass-based action. Action for its own sake doesn’t lead to more action: if history is a teacher, it generally leads to inaction or, worse, regression.
Thanksgiving and Ambivalence
“Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanised work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanisation has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself. The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardised operations. What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time.” -Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Thanksgiving is today in the United States, a holiday that I enjoyed due to the family time and the relative peace. I forgot until this afternoon that it was Thanksgiving when I was talking to my depressed girlfriend who was spending her first Thanksgiving in Korea. The rhythm of my life had moved so completely away from the holiday that while it was one of my favorites in its celebration (but not what it celebrates) that I literally forgot about it. But my fondness for it is simple: beyond the family time, it is Americans only major mostly secular holiday that is actually celebrated by most people in the US, yet the mythology around Thanksgiving is hardly worth recounting as it is up there with Columbus Day in misleading and highly problematic celebrations. In fact, I have a hard time squaring the actual history with my enjoyment of an otherwise secular and fairly decent family holiday. For example, Mike Ely’s writings on Thanksgiving at Kasama:
In 1641 the Dutch governor Kieft of Manhattan offered the first “scalp bounty”–his government paid money for the scalp of each Indian brought to them. A couple years later, Kieft ordered the massacre of the Wappingers, a friendly tribe. Eighty were killed and their severed heads were kicked like soccer balls down the streets of Manhattan. One captive was castrated, skinned alive and forced to eat his own flesh while the Dutch governor watched and laughed. Then Kieft hired the notorious Underhill who had commanded in the Pequot war to carry out a similar massacre near Stamford, Connecticut. The village was set fire, and 500 Indian residents were put to the sword.
A day of thanksgiving was proclaimed in the churches of Manhattan. As we will see, the European colonists declared Thanksgiving Days to celebrate mass murder more often than they did for harvest and friendship.
Or this bit of information from the Speed of Dreams:
he pilgrims are glorified and mythologized because the circumstances of the first English-speaking colony in Jamestown were frankly too ugly (for example, they turned to cannibalism to survive) to hold up as an effective national myth. The pilgrims did not find an empty land any more than Columbus “discovered” anything. Every inch of this land is Indian land. The pilgrims (who did not even call themselves pilgrims) did not come here seeking religious freedom; they already had that in Holland. They came here as part of a commercial venture. They introduced sexism, racism, anti-lesbian and gay bigotry, jails, and the class system to these shores. One of the very first things they did when they arrived on Cape Cod — before they even made it to Plymouth — was to rob Wampanoag graves at Corn Hill and steal as much of the Indians’ winter provisions of corn and beans as they were able to carry. They were no better than any other group of Europeans when it came to their treatment of the Indigenous peoples here. And no, they did not even land at that sacred shrine called Plymouth Rock, a monument to racism and oppression which we are proud to say we buried in 1995.
The first official “Day of Thanksgiving” was proclaimed in 1637 by Governor Winthrop. He did so to celebrate the safe return of men from the Massachusetts Bay Colony who had gone to Mystic, Connecticut to participate in the massacre of over 700 Pequot women, children, and men.
About the only true thing in the whole mythology is that these pitiful European strangers would not have survived their first several years in “New England” were it not for the aid of Wampanoag people. What Native people got in return for this help was genocide, theft of our lands, and never-ending repression. We are treated either as quaint relics from the past, or are, to most people, virtually invisible.
The end of the day there seems to be more myths than not:
Myth #7: The Pilgrims invited the Indians to celebrate the First Thanksgiving.
Fact: According to oral accounts from the Wampanoag people, when the Native people nearby first heard the gunshots of the hunting colonists, they thought that the colonists were preparing for war and that Massasoit needed to be informed. When Massasoit showed up with 90 men and no women or children, it can be assumed that he was being cautious. When he saw there was a party going on, his men then went out and brought back five deer and lots of turkeys. (8)
In addition, both the Wampanoag and the English settlers were long familiar with harvest celebrations. Long before the Europeans set foot on these shores, Native peoples gave thanks every day for all the gifts of life, and held thanksgiving celebrations and giveaways at certain times of the year. The Europeans also had days of thanksgiving, marked by religious services. So the coming together of two peoples to share food and company was not entirely a foreign thing for either. But the visit that by all accounts lasted three days was most likely one of a series of political meetings to discuss and secure a military alliance. Neither side totally trusted the other: The Europeans considered the Wampanoag soulless heathens and instruments of the devil, and the Wampanoag had seen the Europeans steal their seed corn and rob their graves. In any event, neither the Wampanoag nor the Europeans referred to this feast/meeting as “Thanksgiving.” (9)
Myth #8: The Pilgrims provided the food for their Indian friends.
Fact: It is known that when Massasoit showed up with 90 men and saw there was a party going on, they then went out and brought back five deer and lots of turkeys. Though the details of this event have become clouded in secular mythology, judging by the inability of the settlers to provide for themselves at this time and Edward Winslow’s letter of 1622 (10), it is most likely that Massasoit and his people provided most of the food for this “historic” meal. (11)
Myth #9: The Pilgrims and Indians feasted on turkey, potatoes, berries, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and popcorn.
Fact: Both written and oral evidence show that what was actually consumed at the harvest festival in 1621 included venison (since Massasoit and his people brought five deer), wild fowl, and quite possibly nasaump—dried corn pounded and boiled into a thick porridge, and pompion—cooked, mashed pumpkin. Among the other food that would have been available, fresh fruits such as plums, grapes, berries and melons would have been out of season. It would have been too cold to dig for clams or fish for eels or small fish. There were no boats to fish for lobsters in rough water that was about 60 fathoms deep. There was not enough of the barley crop to make a batch of beer, nor was there a wheat crop. Potatoes and sweet potatoes didn’t get from the south up to New England until the 18th century, nor did sweet corn. Cranberries would have been too tart to eat without sugar to sweeten them, and that’s probably why they wouldn’t have had pumpkin pie, either. Since the corn of the time could not be successfully popped, there was no popcorn. (12)
Myth #10: The Pilgrims and Indians became great friends.
Fact: A mere generation later, the balance of power had shifted so enormously and the theft of land by the European settlers had become so egregious that the Wampanoag were forced into battle. In 1637, English soldiers massacred some 700 Pequot men, women and children at Mystic Fort, burning many of them alive in their homes and shooting those who fled. The colony of Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay Colony observed a day of thanksgiving commemorating the massacre. By 1675, there were some 50,000 colonists in the place they had named “New England.” That year, Metacom, a son of Massasoit, one of the first whose generosity had saved the lives of the starving settlers, led a rebellion against them. By the end of the conflict known as “King Philip’s War,” most of the Indian peoples of the Northeast region had been either completely wiped out, sold into slavery, or had fled for safety into Canada. Shortly after Metacom’s death, Plimoth Colony declared a day of thanksgiving for the English victory over the Indians. (13)
Myth #11: Thanksgiving is a happy time.
Fact: For many Indian people, “Thanksgiving” is a time of mourning, of remembering how a gift of generosity was rewarded by theft of land and seed corn, extermination of many from disease and gun, and near total destruction of many more from forced assimilation. As currently celebrated in this country, “Thanksgiving” is a bitter reminder of 500 years of betrayal returned for friendship.
So there is nothing much to celebrate in the reality of the situation. You may ask, “Skepoet, so if we dropped the mythology, we refocused on the natives and perhaps reparations, and kept our turkey and dressing and family holiday, would so think it was salvageable?”
The short answer is related to the Adorno and Horkheimer quote above is that the time demarcation around the holiday makes it seem draining and artificial as it is just a reminder of the work as alienated time. Now this is no where near as serious as the signs of colonialism hidden in the holiday, but it is very much a part of our experience of the holiday. It is almost a reminder of the destruction of the traditional family not by emancipatory choice but by the literalized alienation of factory life, then service sector economies and the transience imposed on our daily life. So Thanksgiving ends in a orgy of consumption which increasingly supports a large chuck of the bloated retail sector, so the holiday becomes a prelude not for a reminder of family, but an orgiastic web of spending for another deracinated and secularized religious holiday. The spectre of that alienation also reminds us of much.
In my heart though as a man born in the lower-middle class with working class parents, I do actually enjoy the simple family meal at the heart of this otherwise shameful celebration. However, through the critical eye, one sees all the problems in our rendering of the holiday. So I will have a nice meal with my girlfriend and write a letter to my family, but I will go on my normal daily life. The possibility and joy of giving thanks is worth having another day for, but this is hardly what Thanksgiving is actually about.
What Ever Happened to the Bundaím? (אַלגעמײַנער ײדישער אַרבעטער בּונד אין ליטע פוילין און רוסלאַנד)
Well, apparently, they still exist but they are aging and ghosts of their former selves. Given how much disillusionment there is in the Israeli youth, you’d think they would have more influence and more youthful numbers. Yet there is a necrophile quality to the whole question: the seem to be living with the ghosts of past. So what happened to the Bund?
Well, it is crucial to look at some of the key writings on the topic:
Lenin’s are interesting, if hard to completely understand outside of the context of 1917: Concerning the Statement of the Bund, Speech on the Place of the Bund in the R.S.D.L.P., and The Position of the Bund in the Party, the later has this bit of crucial detail:
That is precisely what the Jewish problem amounts to: assimilation or isolation?—and the idea of a Jewish “nationality” is definitely reactionary not only when expounded by its consistent advocates (the Zionists), but likewise on the lips of those who try to combine it with the ideas of Social-Democracy (the Bundists). The idea of a Jewish nationality runs counter to the interests of the Jewish proletariat, for it fosters among them, directly or indirectly, a spirit hostile to assimilation, the spirit of the “ghetto”. “When the National Assembly of 1791 decreed the emamcipation of the Jews,” writes Renan, “it was very little concerned with the question of race…. It is the business of the nineteenth century to abolish all ’ghettos’, and I cannot compliment those who seek to restore them. The Jewish race has rendered the world the greatest services. Assimilated with the various nations, harmoniously blended with the various national units, it will render no lesser services in the future than in the past.” And Karl Kautsky, in particular reference to the Russian Jews, expresses him self even more vigorously. Hostility towards non-native sections of the population can only be eliminated “when the non-native sections of the population cease to be alien and blend with the general mass of the population. That is the only possible solution of the Jewish problem, and we should support everything that makes for the ending of Jewish isolation.” Yet the Bund is resisting this only possible solution, for it is helping, not to end but to increase and legitimise Jewish isolation, by propagating the idea of a Jewish “nation” and a plan of federating Jewish and non- Jewish proletarians. That is the basic mistake of “Bundism”, which consistent Jewish Social-Democrats must and will correct. This mistake drives the Bundists to actions unheard-of in the international Social-Democratic movement, such as stirring up distrust among Jewish towards non-Jewish proletarians, fostering suspicion of the latter and disseminating falsehoods about them. Here is proof, taken from this same pamphlet: “Such an absurdity (as that the organisation of the proletariat of a whole nationality should be denied representation on the central Party bodies I could be openly advocated only [mark that! I in regard to the Jewish proletariat, which, owing to the peculiar historical fortunes of the Jewish people, still has to fight for equality I!!] in the world family of the proletariat.” We recently came across just such a trick in a Zionist leaflet, whose authors raved and fumed against Iskra, purporting to detect in its struggle with the Bund a refusal to recognise the “equality” of Jew and non-Jew. And now we find the Bundists repeating the tricks of the Zionists! This is disseminating an outright falsehood, ·for we have “advocated” “denying representation” not “only” to the Jews, but also to the Armenians, the Georgians and so on, and in the case of the Poles, too, we called for the closest union and fusion of the entire proletariat fighting against the tsarist autocracy. It was not for nothing that the P.S.P. (Polish Socialist Party) raged and fulminated against us! To call a fight for the Zionist idea of a Jewish nation, for the federal principle of Party organisation, a “fight for the equality of the Jews in the world family of the proletariat” is to degrade the struggle from the plane of ideas and principles to that of suspicion, incitement and fanning of historically-evolved prejudices. It glaringly reveals a lack of real ideas and principles as weapons of struggle.
* * *
We thus arrive at the conclusion that neither the logical, nor the historical, nor yet the nationalist arguments of the Bund will stand criticism. The period of disunity, which aggravated waverings among the Russian Social-Democrats and the isolation of the various organisations, had the same effect, to an even more marked degree, in the case of the Bundists. Instead of proclaiming war on this historically evolved isolation (further increased by the general disunity), they elevated it to a principle, seizing for this purpose on the sophistry that autonomy is inherently contradictory, and on the Zionist idea of a Jewish nation. Only if it frankly and resolutely admits its mistake and sets out to move towards fusion can the Bund turn away from the false path it has taken. And we are convinced that the finest adherents of Social-Democratic ideas among the Jewish proletariat will sooner or later compel the l3und to turn from the path of isolation to that of fusion.
As Naji Alloush points out:
[In 1922 International Press Correspondence, the official organ of the Third International, the Comintern, published a decision that had been taken by the International on the request presented by a Zionist Communist Party from Eastern Europe to join the Comintern. The Comintern leadership rejected the request on the grounds that the party was based on the supposed right of the Jews to establish a state and such a state could not be created except at the expense of some other nationality. On that basis the Comintern rejected the request and accused the party of being a petty-bourgeois party and not really Communist. The Comintern called on the militants in the Zionist party to join the ranks of the proletariat in their countries in order to struggle for socialist revolution.*]
Lenin’s views on assimilation, on the one hand, and national liberation, on the other, are clear. Despite this clarity, steps were taken in his time toward separating the Jews from the Soviet societies of which they were integral parts or to establish forms of autonomy for them under Soviet rule, which were not in conformity with Lenin’s philosophy. Lenin was clear: he was for assimilation when peoples are intermingling. He was for liberation when a people was being enslaved by another. Inasmuch as the Jews in Russia after the Revolution were not a people or a nationality, inasmuch as they did not have a defined political or social identity, it was necessary that the Leninist principle of assimilation be implemented with respect to them. This is what some Communists of Jewish origin sought to circumvent, as we shall see. Yet they failed, for reasons related to the Jews on the one hand, and for other reasons related to the Soviet system on the other.
But what happened with regard to the Jews after the October Revolution and during the Lenin period (1917-1924) can be explained on the basis of two factors.
First. The assimilation that Lenin spoke of was basically voluntary assimilation, i.e., not assimilation imposed by force. It would not, therefore, have been in keeping with Leninist principles to impose the amalgamation of the Jews or any other group into the rest of society by force.
Second. After October, Bolshevik rule resorted to developing the nationalities that had been subject to the Russian Empire politically and culturally. In this climate, efforts were made to resurrect nearly extinct nationalities and to create republics and governments for different eastern peoples like the Tatars, Bashkirs, and Kirgiz. Stalin declared at the tenth congress of the party in 1921, “the Marxist party that believes in ‘the deep-rootedness of nations and national languages’ ‘completely rejects the policy of national assimilation and merging of peoples, considering that to be a policy opposed to the people and opposed to the revolution’.”(48) The Jews were among those groups to whom the new state tried to give an opportunity for national growth within the socialist state.
But were the Jews a nation?Lenin had answered this question in the negative. Stalin too [had earlier] answered it in the negative. Nevertheless, an attempt was made to consider the Jews a nation and to give them the right that was given to other nations: the right to national existence within some borders of their own based on their disbursal into various different areas.
Now, it is important to remember that Leninist thought from the separates the idea of Nation from that of state, at least early Leninist thought does. It is also important to remember that Naji Alloush is on the Marxist-wing of the FATAH movement in the PLO. So take everything in context.
So what did Trotsky think on this, it is a little harder to say. According to Mario Kessler, Trotsky:
All socialist critics of Zionism interpreted the fundamental differences within the Zionist movement around 1903 as the decisive crisis in Zionism. At that time, the sixth Zionist congress in Basle was characterised by sharp contradictions between the majority of participants who saw Palestine as the only territory where the Jewish question could be resolved, and the minority who saw alternatives in British East Africa or in Argentina. Like the Bundists,3 Trotsky prophesied the end and ultimate defeat of Zionism. On 1 January 1904 he wrote in the party organ Iskra (The Spark) that the Zionist shibboleth of a fatherland had been exposed for what it was: the reactionary dream of a “shameless adventurer” (Herzl).4 “Herzl promised Palestine – but he did not deliver it [to the Zionists – MK].” The effect of the proposal at the Zionist congress was, indeed, to plunge the movement into a crisis from which it could not recover. “It is impossible”, Trotsky pointed out, “to keep Zionism alive by this kind of trickery. Zionism has exhausted its miserable contents…. Tens of intriguers and hundreds of simpletons may yet continue to support Herzl’s adventures, but Zionism as a movement is already doomed to losing all rights to existence in the future.” This was for Trotsky “as clear as midday”.
But a Zionist left, Trotsky predicted, would inevitably find its way into the ranks of the revolutionary movement; for the rest, the Bund would become their political home. This organisation, although anti-Zionist, would become more and more similar to the Zionists in stressing all-Jewish matters. It would be quite possible that the Bund would inherit Zionist ideas.
Almost ninety years later, we know how false this prediction was. The Bund remained an ardent critic of Zionism. Trotsky could not foresee the fact that a future Zionist left (the Poale Zion in particular) would foster the Bundist position of anti-Zionism and “diaspora-nationalism”. The question whether under different conditions the Bund should have made some concessions to Zionism in order to absorb some dissatisfied Zionists remains unanswered. But it was at that time nearly unthinkable.
So one is left with what? There are lipstick traces: The International Bund continued to meet until mid-2000s in New York, it sided with the One-state solution to the Palestinian problem, yet it did see an increase in Zionist ideas and Jewish separatism until the 1960s. In the Russian revolutions, the Bund sided first with the Mensheviks and then the Bolsheviks, and then at Gomel in 1920 split into the Social Democratic Bund and the Communist Bund, which soon dissolved itself and joined the Soviet Communist Party. Many of the former communist Bund leaders were purged in the Stalin era. The Polish Bund which had split prior to Gomel do Poland’s Germany’s 1917 occupation survived the relationship to communist party and lived on in New York and Israel, but never acquired any new life.
The question is what is to be learnt from this?
Six (or eight) ways of looking at a Lenin: Or the Russian Revolution as Steven’s Black Bird.
Recently one of the more combative but interesting blogger, Stalin’s Moustache , pointed out the six variant ways to look at Lenin:
1. Lenin was not really a Marxist at all, deriving all of his thought and political perceptions from Chernyshevsky. This position has been argued by Nikolai Valentinov, who was at one time sympathetic but then broke with Lenin (Valentinov 1969 [1954]; 1968 [1953]: 64-76) and in part by Agursky in a curious study (Agursky 1987: 71-80). The latter stretches the material well out of shape to suggest that used Marxism as a cover for Russian (revolutionary) nationalism, while Valentinov attempts to stress Lenin’s ignorance of Marx and that all of Lenin’s ideas came from Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? (Chernyshevsky 1989 [1863]). This novel, written in prison, tells the story of a small group of men and women who attempt to create new forms of communal living and work in the midst of tsarist Russia, with all the trails and limits posed by that situation. That this novel was massively influential for the Russian Left is well known, that Lenin read it avidly when he was a young man is also clear, but that he borrowed all of his ideas from it is far-fetched indeed.
2. A more common position is that Lenin was primarily a practical operator, shunning theory, either leaving it to others (Plekhanov) or happy to remain thoroughly unoriginal. Yet he was full of political instinct, able to pinpoint crucial political moments (Wilson 1972: 390; Donald 1993; Zinoviev 1973 [1923]: 44-5; Plamenatz 1975 [1954]: 221, 248)?[1] The problem with this position is that it makes little sense of the repeated insistence by Lenin on the importance of theory (throughout his works (all 45 volumes!)).
3. So we find the obverse position: Lenin was thoroughly impractical, unable to read a situation properly. Instead, he was theoretical and abstract. Although not a common view, put forward by the unaffiliated socialist Sukhanov (Sukhanov 1955 [1922]: 290-2),[2] it has a nice twist: for Lenin was brilliant, persuasive and ended up being invariably correct.
4. A fourth position has been held by a consistent minority from Lenin’s wife, Nadhezda Krupskaya, to the recent work of Lars Lih (Krupskaya 1960 [1930]; Tucker 1987: 39; Lih 2011).[3] This position argues that Lenin was thoroughly consistent and faithful to Marx throughout his life, operating with a grand socialist narrative that moved from the merger of the working class with intellectuals, to the revolution and then to the glorious construction of communism. The problem with this position is not only that it must end with a narrative of disappointment, for Lenin found after the revolution that events did not turn out as expected, but also that it must smooth over the many times Lenin took an unexpected direction.
5. So we find a fifth and very common position, namely, that Lenin was an unprincipled opportunist, a politician of compromise, confused even and throwing aside his convictions whenever needed and moving far from Marxism. In short, he was a politician but no philosopher (Service 1985-95, 2000; Lichtheim 1961: 325-51; Pearson 1975; Plamenatz 1947: 85; Lincoln 1986: 426-53; Agursky 1987: 71-80)?[4] Although the proponents of this position do recognise the many shifts in Lenin’s political-intellectual biography, they are usually very unsympathetic to Lenin, arguing that he merely used Marxism as a convenient tool to achieve power, as an abstract means to legitimate all manner of inconsistent political positions, and was perfectly willing to discard it when needed or alter it beyond recognition. This position may be traced back to Menshevik opposition to Lenin in the early 1900s, which was taken up by Luxemburg and Kautsky (without actually reading much Lenin). From there it made its way into Western scholarship.
6. In light of all these possibilities, as well as a thorough reading of all Lenin’s works, the best approach is that Lenin was a principled and theoretically motivated opportunist. This position recognises the many shifts in Lenin’s political and intellectual development, while also identifying a consistent theoretical core. In this light, Lenin constantly reworked his (dialectical) Marxist heritage, burrowing ever deeper into its theoretical nature, in order to make sense of and intervene in ever-changing conjunctures. Those who have taken this position include Neil Harding in his Lenin’s Political Thought, Georg Lukács’s brief but excellent Lenin, Rabinowitch’s The Bolsheviks Come to Power, a brilliant study by Kouvelakis and even by the first Commissar for Enlightenment after the revolution, Anatoly Lunacharsky (Harding 1996: 5-6; Rabinowitch 2004 [1976]: 168-78; Lukács 1970 [1924]; Lunacharsky 1967; Kouvelakis 2007; Michael-Matsas 2007; Anderson 1995, 2007).
Lenin has been put back into the lime light recently as has Trotsky, who I will be exploring in some serious detail. One of my more hopeful if not hyperbolic friends took the Occupy Oakland General Assembly as something akin to Soviet. I tend to agree that option six was likely, but that there are moments when deviations do seem like five may be a possibility. Either way, it proves that Marxian thought must move on the ground instead of relying of overly orthodox concepts that sound like theoretical debate. Furthermore, it is unclear if vanguardism doesn’t have the problems that category six easily turn into category five either in the same person or in the lines of power a problem. There is a reason for Marx’s suspicion of the state yet his unwillingness to abandon all of its lines of power in transition. A transition that, so far, have never actually been emerged from.
Yet this brings me to this quote: “In general, if signs of sectarianism do appear in a Socialist Party, these are only the products of the absence of a broad Labour movement in the country.” – Karl Radek
Debating over the ghosts of Lenin comes from the fact we still don’t seem to have our own because until recently we didn’t really have a big enough call against currently existing capitalism to make such a move. Let me add a few other part thoughts on Lenin, one from Zizek and the other from Badiou:
The problem with those few remaining orthodox “Leninists” who behave as if one can simply recycle the old Leninism, continuing to speak on themes like class struggle and the betrayal by the corrupted leaders of the working masses’ revolutionary impulses, is that it is not quite clear from which subjective position of enunciation they speak. They either engage themselves in passionate discussions about the past (demonstrating with admirable erudition how and where the anticommunist “Leninologists” falsify Lenin, and so forth), in which case they avoid the question of why (apart from a purely historical interest) this matters at all today, or, the closer they get to contemporary politics, the closer they are to adopting some purely jargonistic pose that threatens no one. Their symptomatic point emerges apropos of every new social upheaval (the disintegration of real socialism ten years ago, the fall of Milosevic); in each of these cases, they identify some working class movement (say, the striking miners in Serbia) that allegedly displayed a true revolutionary or, at least, Socialist potential, but was first exploited and then betrayed by the procapitalist and/or nationalist forces. This way, one can continue to dream that revolution is round the corner; all we need is the authentic leadership that would be able to organize the workers’ revolutionary potential. If one is to believe them, Solidarnosc was originally a workers’ democratic-socialist movement, later “betrayed” by the corruption of its leadership by the Church and the CIA. And if we add to this position four further ones, we get a pretty full picture of the sad predicament of today’s Left: the acceptance of the cultural wars (feminist, gay, antiracist, multiculturalist struggles) as the dominant terrain of emancipatory politics; the purely defensive protection of the achievements of the welfare state; the naive belief in cybercommunism (the idea that the new media are directly creating conditions for a new, authentic community); and, finally, the Third Way, capitulation itself. The reference to Lenin should serve as the signifier of the effort to break the vicious circle of these false options.
Consequently, to repeat Lenin does not mean a return to Lenin. To repeat Lenin is to accept that Lenin is dead, that his particular solution failed, even failed monstrously, but that there was a utopian spark in it worth saving. To repeat Lenin means that one has to distinguish between what Lenin actually did and the field of possibilities that he opened up, the tension in Lenin between what he effectively did and another dimension one might call what was “in Lenin more than Lenin himself.” There are parts of Lenin that should simply be abandoned today. It may appear attractive to reassert the lesson of Lenin’s Materialism and Empirico-criticism apropos of today’s New Age reading of quantum physics, where, also, matter is supposed to “disappear,” to dissolve in the immaterial waves of energy fields. It is also true (as Lucio Colletti emphasized) that Lenin’s distinction between the philosophical and scientific notion of matter undermines the very notion of dialectics in or of nature; because the philosophical notion of matter holds that reality exists independently of mind, any intervention of philosophy into the sciences is precluded. However… this “however” concerns the fact that, in Materialism and Empiricocriticism, there is no place for dialectics, for Hegel. What are Lenin’s basic theses? He rejects the reduction of knowledge to phenomenalist or pragmatic instrumentalism (namely, the assertion that, in scientific knowledge, we get to know the way things exist independently of our mindsthe infamous “theory of reflection”) and insists on the precarious nature of our knowledge (which is always limited, relative, and “reflects” external reality only in the infinite process of approximation). Does this not sound familiar? Is this, in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of analytical philosophy, not the basic position of Karl Popper, the archetypal anti-Hegelian? In his short article “Lenin and Popper,” Colletti recalls how, in a private letter from 1970, first published in Die Zeit, Popper wrote: “Lenin’s book on empirico-criticism is, in my opinion, truly excellent”.To repeat Lenin is to repeat not what Lenin did, but what he failed to do, his missed opportunities. Today, Lenin appears as a figure from a different era: it’s not that his notions such as a centralized party seem to pose a totalitarian threat; it’s rather that they seem to belong to a different epoch to which we can no longer properly relate. However, instead of reading this fact as proof that Lenin is outdated, one should, perhaps, risk the opposite conjecture. What if this impenetrability of Lenin is a sign that there is something wrong with our epoch, that a certain historical dimension is disappearing from it.
-Zizek, A Plea for Leninist Intolerance.
So the century, between 1917 and the end of the seventies, is in no way as today’s liberals claim the century of ideology, of the imaginary or of utopia. Its subjective determination is a Leninist one. It is the passion for the real, for what is immediately practicable, here and now.
What does the century have to say about itself? In any case, that it is not the century of promise, but that of realisation. It is the century of the act, of the effective, of the absolute present, and not the century of portent, of the to-come. The century experiences itself as the century of victories, after millennia of attempts and failures. The cult of the vain and sublime attempt, bearer of ideological enslavement, is assigned by the actors of the 20th century to the one preceding, to the unhappy Romanticism of the 19th century. The 20th century declares: no more failures, the time of victories has come! This victorious subjectivity outlasts all apparent defeats, because it is not empirical, but constitutive. Victory is the transcendental theme that commands failure itself. ‘Revolution’ is one of the names of this theme. The October Revolution of 1917, and then the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, as well as the victories of the Algerians and the Vietnamese in their wars of national liberation, all of this counts as empirical proof of the theme, and amounts to the defeat of defeats, redressing the massacres of June ’48 or of the Paris Commune.
For Lenin, the means of victory is theoretical and practical lucidity with respect to a decisive confrontation, to a total and final war. Only a total war will lead to a victory that is truly victorious. In this regard the century is the century of war. But this statement intertwines several ideas, all of which turn around the question of the Two, or of antagonistic scission. The century declared that its law was the Two, antagonism; in this sense, the end of the cold war (American imperialism against socialist camp), the last total figure of the Two, also signals the end of the century. Nevertheless, the Two can take on three different guises:
1. There is a central antagonism, two subjectivities organised on a global scale in mortal combat. The century is the stage of this combat.
2. There is an equally violent antagonism between two ways of considering and thinking antagonism. This is the very essence of the confrontation between communism and fascism. For the communists, the planetary confrontation is in the last instance that of classes. For the radical fascisms it is that of nations and races. Here, the Two divides in two. We witness the entanglement of an antagonistic thesis, on the one hand, and of antagonistic theses on antagonism, on the other. This second division is essential, perhaps more than the first. All in all, there were more anti-fascists than communists, and it is characteristic that the second world war was fought in accordance with this derivative split, and not on the basis of a unified conception of antagonism, which only gave rise to a cold war, save on the periphery (Korean and Vietnam wars).
3. The century is summoned as the century of the production, through war, of a definitive unity. Antagonism is to be overcome by the victory of one camp over the other. Thus one can also say that, in this sense, the century of the Two is animated by the radical desire of the One. What names the articulation of antagonism with the violence of the One is victory, as attestation of the real.
Let us note that we are not dealing with a dialectical scheme. Nothing allows one to foresee a synthesis, an internal overcoming of contradiction. On the contrary, everything points to the suppression of one of the terms. The century is a figure of the non-dialectical juxtaposition of the Two and the One. The question here is to know what is the century’s assessment of dialectical thought. In the victorious result, is the motor antagonism itself or the desire of the One? This is one of the main philosophical questions of Leninism. It revolves around what one must understand in dialectical thought by the unity of opposites. Without doubt, it is the question that Mao and the Chinese communists worked on most assiduously.
– Badiou, ONE DIVIDES INTO TWO
Burnham, Orwell, and Me Part 2: The calculus of class and the 1%
One of the haunting things that Burnham really hits you on is that the capitalist class is largely irrelevant to the functioning of the system. In fact, capital ownership is so diffuse that outside of the 1%, mostly in the financial sector, and the CEO’s who serve them: it is has true this is a problem as it makes the focal point of class rage generally aimed at abstractions such as corporations. While corporations have legal person-hood, you can’t put a corporations head on a pike. Furthermore there are some other instances one must look at honestly: the hyper-specialization of labor was not just a function of ideology, although this is true, but this relationship between the material states of technology and the division of labor lead one quickly to realize that the “socialist man” will not overcome the specialization of knowledge required in advanced technology any more than capitalist man does without rejecting most modern technology. This, however, assumes that such technologies would retain their current form or that specialization implies hierarchical relations in the totality.
Burnham was profoundly accurate on that problem: technology and spatial dynamics are not new to Marxian thought. Indeed, Marx writes almost rapturously on this in Das Kapital , but it seems like the way the material transactions play out seems to limit the possibility that one can apply easily the understanding of Marx from the 19th century. Yet, the crisis of capital do seem to still function: the business cycle remains unresolved and most ways out of that cycle seem to involve massive destruction of capital and human lives. Austrians point out that war is merely the destruction of capital, but the raw logic of competition makes this clear. All naive descriptions of capitalism seem to point out that competition is both zero sum but also blank without preferences for supply lines, means of crushing competition early, and strategic manipulation through public relations and outright collusion.
Yet why where Burnham’s political analysis so wrong in the geo-politics of world war 2? Well, Burnham may have been right about the change of the change of class, but many of his foundational assumptions were flat wrong. For example:
Only the hopelessly naive can imagine that France fell so swiftly because of the mere mechanical strength of the Nazi war machine – that might have been sufficient in a longer run but not to destroy a great nation with a colossal military establishment in a few weeks. France collapsed so swiftly because its people had no heart for the war – as every observer had remarked, even through the censorship, from the beginning of the war. And they had no heart for the war because the bourgeois ideologies by which they were appealed to no longer had power to move their hearts. ( p. 34 of the Managerial Revolution)
Yet it is the bourgeois ideology that produced the technological state in which the Burnham’s managerial revolution took place. In other words, Burnham is reifying the ideology. Ideologies reinforce the material conditions through reproducing the means of production–to borrow a concept from Althusser–but as some other Marxian thinkers have been reminding us against Althusser and Gramsci lately: ideologies also emerge and mutate in line with material conditions. It was not that bourgeois ideologies were indefensible or that the French could not maintain them, but that the conditions of mobilizations were not within French thought given their prior victory in World War 1. This flaw, of course, let Burnham to predict that the Fascist state with its supposedly anti-bourgeois and anti-proletariat bias–or more specifically, its lumpenproleteriat bias–would emerge victorious. He was flatly wrong, but I don’t know if it was because the liberating idea of “democracy” as Orwell claimed.
Yet the same book contains this insight:
In the new form of society, sovereignty is localized in administrative bureaus. They proclaim the rules, make the laws, issue the decrees. The shift from parliament to the bureaus occurs on a world scale. Viewed on a world scale, the battle is already over. The localization of sovereignty in parliament is ended save for a lingering remnant in England (where it may not last the next few months), in the United States, and certain of the lesser nations.
There is no mystery in this shift. It can be correlated easily enough with the change in the character of the state’s activities. Parliament was the sovereign body of the limited state of capitalism. The bureaus are the sovereign bodies of the unlimited state of managerial society. (p. 141)
One can see this explicitly in the rise of the importance of cabinet positions in the US as the mainstay of the power of the executive branch. Furthermore quasi-state institutions like the Federal Reserve and the European National Banks are also easily in this category. The sovereign body of the legislature in both parliaments and congress are largely their to rubber stamp the decisions of the technocrats within those rolls. This is even more blatantly obvious in the EU’s fear of public democracy and referendums as it knows that no single nation state will want to take the austerity measures to maintain an essentially pegged currency. Argentina is the primary example here.
Yet Burnham is problematic here:
“Experience has shown that the existence of a large number of sovereign nations, especially in Europe (and with somewhat less acuteness in Latin America), is incompatible with contemporary economic and social needs. The system simply does not work. In spite of the fact that the post-Versailles European arrangements were set up and guaranteed by the most powerful coalition in history, which had achieved victory in the greatest war of history, they could not last. The complex division of labour, the flow of trade and raw materials made possible and demanded by modern technology, were strangled in the network of diverse tariffs, laws, currencies, passports, boundary restrictions, bureaucracies, and independent armies. It has been clear for some while that these were going to be smashed; the only problem was who was going to do it and how and when. Now it is being done under the prime initial impulse of Germany.” (p165)
This is another reason why Burnham thought that fascism would be dominant, but he failed to imagine that the managerial revolution wasn’t actually a revolution, but an adaption that was already in bourgeois ideologies. For the working class was always just a wage earner, which since the 1920s has been essentially everyone with the exception of small, inefficent petite bourgeois whose material capital is often less than that of a managerial wage-earner even in the middle section of a large corporation. One of the brilliance of the limited-liability corporation that Burnham did not take into his account of the situation was that it was a way of making class itself diffuse and convoluting the working class of the first world with the capital interests through 401Ks, IRAs, etc. Micro-investment spread capital outside of the mere capitalists as even when I worked at Lowes in the early 2000s, I was a partial owner of the capital of the company by having minute shares of company stock given to me as an employee.
So this does not transcend Marx’s capital, but evolves from it. These contradictions are not removed, but shift focus making it harder and harder to pin the anger. Yet the logic of the 99% has put a picture on the situation. The iron law of olgiarchy in modernity, which is implied in capital, fascist, and late feudal orders. The primary means of power are still the means of production, and the primary mystification was ideological. So if this undoes Marx’s critique in totality is highly doubtful as Marx’s predictions for capital hold fast to reality way more than Burnham’s predictions for the managerial class, but there are internal contradictions within the notions of the current system left unexplored by simple class dichotomies.
Yet one wonders if there isn’t something Utopian about the whole enterprise.
I will have to dig deeper on the challenges this poses.
For the first article in this series see here.
