Readers of the unrepentant Marxist attending the 2010 Left Forum gathering in NY are invited to hook up after the Saturday 5:00 PM – 6:50 PM panels and go out for drinks, food and conversation at a nearby pub with Marxmail subscribers. We did this last year and had a really nice time. Meet me at the Monthly Review book table, the same place we met last year.
March 17, 2010
Justified
Last night I caught the initial episode of Justified, a new series on the FX cable network based on the writings of Elmore Leonard, who is an executive producer of the show. The 84 year old Leonard, who is one of my favorite writers, has written 48 novels mostly about low-life criminals and the lawmen that pursue them. They are written in a dry comic style that emphasizes dialog and straight-ahead exposition rather than interior monologue and all the other accouterments associated with High Art. That being said, he has been praised by writers such as Saul Bellow and is also one of James O’Connor’s favorites, as he confided to me a long time ago.
Within his body of work, you will find some works that transcend his usual cops-and-robbers focus and that obviously explain his appeal to both O’Connor and me. The 1987 Bandits is one of them, described on Leonard’s website as follows:
Bandits assembles an unlikely crew: an ex-nun, an ex-cop, and an ex-con. They’ve got their eyes on several million dollars that they’ve decided should not be sent to aid the Contras in Nicaragua. Of course, a lot of other people have their eyes on the money, too – including the CIA. But Lacy, Jack, and Roy have a plan. Their motives may differ, but one thing is certain: Together they’re going to make out like bandits.
One I have not read but that appears to be in the same vein as Bandits is Cuba Libre, a historical novel set during the Spanish-American war that is described this way in an allreaders.com review:
On his arrival in Havana just three days after the American battleship Maine is blown up in Havana harbor, Ben meets a collection of characters worthy of Elmore Leonard’s rich imagination. There’s the planter, Roland Boudreaux, his lovely girl friend Amelia Brown and his second in command Victor Fuentes, who is to take delivery of the horses. There’s also a vicious member of the Guardia Civil, Lionel Travalera and a hotheaded Spanish officer, Teo Barbon. Tyler kills Barbon in a gunfight and ends up in Havana’s notorious Morro Castle, along with one of the few survivors of the Maine’s destruction, Virgil Webster.
Slipping in and out of the story is Chicago Tribune reporter, Neely Tucker, a source of much of the background information about the coming war between America and Spain – and how it will affect Tyler.
Amelia and Tyler fall in love at first sight, and get together after a wild gunfight between Cuban revolutionaries and the guards at a nearly abandoned prison to which Tyler and Webster have been transferred. Amelia – fed up with the life of the idle rich and disgusted at the treatment of the poor sugar workers – and the revolutionaries develop a bizarre scheme to raise money for the revolution. They will tell Boudreaux that she has been kidnapped and demand $40,000 in ransom.
One of Leonard’s novels—Comfort to the Enemy—can be read online at his website. It appeared originally as a serialized novel in the NY Times, perhaps as a way of fulfilling the role once assigned to him as “Detroit’s Charles Dickens”. These are related tales about a character named Carl Webster, whose crime-fighting career began in the 1920s. The final section has him tracking down Nazi war criminals. This is how the novel begins:
A German prisoner of war at the camp called Deep Fork had taken his own life, hanged himself two nights ago in the compound’s washroom. Carl Webster was getting ready to look into it. Carl’s boss Bob McMahon, 17 years the United States marshal at Tulsa, said there was a question of whether the man did it on his own or was helped. McMahon shook his head over it.
“I doubt you’ll learn what happened. He’s a grenadier, the dead guy, Willi Martz. You ask about it, they look down their nose at you, deciding if they want to tell you anything.”
“I know what you mean,” Carl said. “Some of ‘em ever talk to you, it’s like they’re doing you a favor. But then they march off to work like the Seven Dwarfs singing the panzer song, Heiß uber Afrikas boden. Or the one about Horst Wessel, that pimp they call a Nazi saint. I never saw a bunch of guys liked to sing so much. And they’re serious about it. You imagine GIs singing like that?”
There’s little indication in the biographical material I have seen on Leonard that would explain his sympathy for leftists in Nicaragua or Cuba. Perhaps this is just a function of living during the Great Depression or else just one more indication that he is simply carrying out the essential function of the novelist which is to describe the human condition. While you can be a reactionary novelist (V.S. Naipul and Martin Amis—a fan of Leonard I should add—come to mind), most tend to reflect the contradictions of the society that they live in.
In a February 15, 1996 interview with the New York Times, Leonard stated “My heros are John O’Hara and Steinbeck and Hemingway. I studied Hemingway. I loved the white space on the pages. It meant there was plenty of dialogue to move the story along.”
My recommendation, of course, is to read Elmore Leonard but if you want a good introduction to his work based on a film adaptation, I’d recommend the Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight that featured George Clooney as a bank robber who has an affair with a US Marshal on his trail, played by Jennifer Lopez. Soderbergh really has an affinity for Leonard’s style and Scott Frank’s screenplay retains the witty dialog of the original novel for the most part. (Frank also wrote the screenplay for Get Shorty, another adaptation of a Leonard novel.)
The FX show is not without its charms but is simply not in the same league as Soderbergh’s movie. The main character is Raylan Givens, a US Marshal who has been exiled to his home town in Harlan County, Kentucky—home of the militant labor struggles recorded in Barbara Kopple’s 1976 documentary—after gunning down a gangster in a busy Miami restaurant. Givens, who might be described as a hair-trigger type personality, is played by Timothy Olyphant, a young actor who bears a striking resemblance to Bill Paxton and even sounds like him.
In the premier episode, Givens investigates the murder of a neo-Nazi carried out by an old friend named Boyd whose father, like Givens’s, worked in the coal mines. Boyd fought in the first Gulf War and became a white supremacist somewhere along the line. There is not much care taken in the development of his character, especially politically. He is prone to mix rants about mountaintop removal, a pet peeve of the environmentalist movement in Kentucky, with denunciations of the Jews, Blacks and immigrants. The character will be immediately recognizable to anyone who has seen “Law and Order”, a convenient villain that plays to an audience’s liberal sensibility.
That being said, the show is still worth watching if only for some of the dry Elmore Leonard humor that shines through all the otherwise conventional storytelling. The NY Times review makes this observation:
The dialogue sometimes has a snap that’s rare, or let’s just say nonexistent, in prime time. After Givens shoots a man in that Florida hotel and then, upon being transferred to his home state of Kentucky, promptly shoots another, his new boss warns him that he might be getting a reputation. “Put it like this: If you was in the first grade, and you bit somebody every week, they’d start to think of you as a biter.”
At any rate, a second-rate adaptation of pop culture icon Elmore Leonard, like his fellow icon Stephen King, is better than first-rate CSI or Law and Order episodes—at least that’s my opinion. Check it out on Tuesday at 10pm for yourself.
March 16, 2010
Life in Houston
A native Houstonian at leisure
The media is all abuzz over the truly outrageous proposals of the ultrarightist-dominated Texas Board of Education. The NY Times reported on March 12:
In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the “free-enterprise system.”
“Let’s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation,” said one conservative member, Teri Leo. “You know, ‘capitalist pig!’ ”
In reporting on this development, the outstanding Harper’s Magazine linked to a collection of items about Texas that had appeared on their monthly Index, a roundup of startling factoids—always backed up by a citation. Here’s a few that should give you an idea of the kind of swamp from which these toxic weeds sprang:
- Number of Texas high schools that offered Bible courses as electives last year: 25
- Number of these courses that broke the law by being primarily devotional and sectarian, according to a September study: 22
- Amount appropriated by the governor of Texas in June to set up border-watching webcams: $5,000,000
- Number of U.S. counties where more than a fifth of “residents” are prison inmates that are in Texas: 10
- Rank of Texas among states in which the largest percentage of citizens lack health insurance : 1
All this brings me back to the time I spent in Texas in the early 70s as a Trotskyist on assignment. I reported on the confrontation between the party and the KKK here. I think that it would be worth it to give you a flavor of daily life in Houston that was less dramatic than that but related to it nevertheless. These are some random reminiscences about what it was like to live in Houston in 1973 and 1974.
Since this was before the SWP launched its “turn toward industry”, I still could work as a programmer without having people look dagger eyes at me. So within a month after arriving I had a job at Texas Commerce Bank (TCB) reporting to Billy Penrod, a 50ish Gary Cooper look-alike who had been a football player at Texas A&M until a knee injury forced him off the team. Billy once told me that he came from Gonzalez, Texas, a town he described openly as a “Sundown” town although he didn’t use that word. He put it this way: “Louis, if you were a nigger and found yourself in Gonzalez, you’d better not be seen on the street after dark.” Here’s how the preface to James Loewen’s recent book “Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism” put it:
Anna is a town of about 7,000 people, including adjoining Jonesboro. The twin towns lie about 35 miles north of Cairo, in southern Illinois. In 1909, in the aftermath of a horrific nearby “spectacle lynching,” Anna and Jonesboro expelled their African Americans. Both cities have been all-white ever since. Nearly a century later, “Anna” is still considered by its residents and by citizens of nearby towns to mean “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed,” the acronym the convenience store clerk confirmed in 2001.
Unlike my native New York City, Houston took its jaywalking laws seriously. I was warned by comrades not to ever try to cross the street when the light was red. I got an idea of what frightened them one morning as I approached the front door of TCB and heard the traffic cop telling some guy in a business suit who had gotten on his wrong side: “Mr., I got a bullet in this here gun with your name on it so you better not give me no lip.”
My first year or so at TCB involved a fair amount of hazing until people got used to me. I might have been a Yankee and a red but I knew well enough to keep my politics to myself. I worried especially about the guy who sat in a cubicle opposite mine who used to read the bible everyday at lunch. I now understood why people had coined the term “Bible Belt”.
Whenever I got restless and went to a nearby shopping mall to find a book to read, the pickings were really slim. On the tables at my neighborhood Barnes and Noble, you’d might find some vaguely interesting postmodernist novel or a quasi-Marxist analysis of the pirate trade, etc. but down in Houston it was wall-to-wall “inspirational” texts with titles like “How Jesus can make you rich”. The obsession with getting rich in Houston was widespread. If Jesus couldn’t help you, you’d be able to pick from a thousand different books on how to make a million dollars in real estate or franchise businesses that everybody referred to as bidness.
I lived in the Montrose neighborhood, not far from downtown. Montrose was home to Houston’s bohemia, what there was of it, and the gay community. On the main drags, Montrose and West Alabama Boulevards, you’d see lots of adult (pronounced Ay-dult, emphasis on Ay) bookstores, topless dancing clubs, Burger Kings and Liquor Stores. My girlfriend Debby had been working as a topless dancer until the SWP organizer told her to cut it out. Yes, our branch had a rather heterodox membership.
One of the more interesting branch members native to Houston was a guy named Gene Lantz who was living in a commune in Houston as a kind of benign Charles Manson who slept with various female members of the household. They struck me less as flower children than as Desperate Housewives. All had become separated from their husbands and suburban lifestyles and were eager to blend in with the motley crew of Trotskyists that had colonized their city.
One day Gene brought me by to visit an old friend of his who was famous for keeping a 700 pound gorilla in his living room. Not quite in his living room, but in a cage that abutted it. The animal’s pen was at the end of a twenty foot tunnel that led toward the living room and was in the habit of running down the tunnel gathering speed until he careened against the bars. The owner got a big kick out of this since it tended to scare the bejeesus out of first-time visitors like me. I fantasized occasionally about the gorilla getting his hands on his captor and ripping his face off.
One of my best friends outside the party was a young woman who had graduated from the University of Texas and had taken a job at TCB. Her boyfriend, like my boss, had been a football player whose college career had been cut short by a knee injury. She was the first person at work I felt free to discuss my politics with but she was more amused than shocked by my beliefs. It was close enough in time to the big SDS goings on at the U. of Texas for her to understand where I was coming from. I used to spend lots of time hanging out with the two of them at their rented house in Montrose drinking gin and tonics and shooting the breeze. They tried to hook me up with a friend of theirs named Dana something who was a reporter for the local television network. We never really hit it off but I was glad to spend time with her occasionally, a welcome break from the increasingly cult-like feel of the SWP branch.
Perhaps the greatest lesson I got from living in Houston for close to three years was how out-of-touch the Trotskyist leadership was with conditions on the ground in the USA. The city was swept up by a mad appetite for getting rich and the unionized workers, mostly in the oil refineries we first considered colonizing long before the turn, were totally into the cowboy life-style of the Lone Star state whether they were Black or white. Everybody dreamed to have a pickup truck, a four-bedroom house and a weekend ranch if they ever got that promotion that would afford it. I found my socialist ideals increasingly out of whack with the reality and sooner or later the contradiction would be too great to bear. Within three years the SWP would discover the industrial working class and make “petty bourgeois” elements like me so unwelcome that resignation would be the only acceptable course of action. More about that on another day.
March 15, 2010
Subscribing to Harper’s and the Nation
Not long after I left the SWP in 1979, I took out subscriptions to the Nation Magazine and Harpers. The Harpers subscription has been renewed continuously since then while I have let the Nation subscription lapse twice.
The first time was prompted by the magazine’s tailing after the Clinton White House as I explained in an open letter to the editor:
During the Reagan and Bush years, the Nation was an important source of anti-government analysis. This overlapped with the left-liberal perspective of the wing of the Democratic Party that had been marginalized. It seemed that the most powerful anti-Republican prose was coming from sources with a Marxist background, so I read those issues with great satisfaction and was happy to be a subscriber.
Once Clinton was elected, everything changed. The magazine was transformed into a critical supporter of the government in power. Since most Marxists have no use for the Clinton-Gore team, nearly every issue has contained something that can prove offensive. For example, the lead editorial in the current issue (Nov. 16) states that “Domestically, Clinton’s achievement as statesman will probably not make much difference in the coming midterm elections or with regard to impeachment hearings in the fall.” STATESMAN? Are you people out of your minds? Clinton is as much of a “statesman” as Bush was. The only reason that US foreign policy has not been as violently adventuristic as the previous administration’s is that most radical governments have already been beaten into submission. With the collapse of the USSR, the US has not seen the need to use gunboat diplomacy on such a promiscuous basis. But this is not “statesmanship”, just “realpolitic”.
I renewed again about 5 years ago mainly to do the crossword puzzles which were composed amazingly enough by a guy in his 90s—Frank Lewis. A few months ago the magazine announced that Lewis would be retiring after a 50 year or so tenure. Pretty fucking amazing stint, especially considering that he has been composing some really nifty puzzles for the past 10 years or so, at a time when most people are lucky enough to know their own name.
But the tipping point was the announcement that Cockburn’s column would only appear once a month. I have had my disagreements with Cockburn but at his worst he was infinitely more interesting than the mealy-mouthed liberals on their staff with their endless pleas to Obama to “seize the initiative”.
By contrast the latest issue of Harper’s has an article by Kevin Baker titled “The Vanishing Liberal: how the left learned to be helpless”. Like most Harper’s articles, it is behind a subscriber’s firewall but will possibly appear on the Harper’s website down the road.
But the thing that really keeps me loyal to Harper’s is the crossword puzzle, which like Frank Lewis’s, is made up of wordplay, anagrams, puns and the like. I may not be writing these puzzles when I am in my 80s or 90s but I sure hope to be doing them. In the latest Harper’s puzzle, there is a clue: “Around his kitchen, cooking is really small-time”, 11 letters.
If you’ve ever done these kinds of puzzles, you’ll figure out that “cooking” is a reference to an anagram. This is a much easier example of how to understand such a clue: “Deed of a sick cat”, 3 letters. Sick is a tip off for an anagram. So, if you rearrange cat, you get act—the same thing as deed. Get it? If not, don’t worry. I don’t get Sudoku.
So, here’s the solution to “Around his kitchen…” Rearrange “his kitchen” and you get “chickenshit”, or “really small time”. When I figured this out, I couldn’t help from smiling. Not only was I getting a magazine that had the guts to go against the liberal consensus even when Obama was a candidate, I was also lucky enough to work on a puzzle that refused to abide by the rules of “polite” language. You’d never see “chickenshit” as an answer in the NY Times or the Nation. Way to go, Harper’s!
March 13, 2010
History of the Marxist Internationals (part 4, the Centrists)
Before writing about the Fourth International in this series of articles about attempts to build a worldwide Marxist international, I decided to take up the “centrist” internationals nicknamed two-and-a-half and three-and-a-half respectively, mostly out of derision by their adversaries. The first is formally known as the International Working Union of Socialist Parties and existed in the 1920s, largely as a collection of leftwing socialist parties sympathetic to Austro-Marxism. Since it was launched by Austrians such as Friedrich Adler and Otto Bauer, it was only natural for it to be based in Vienna and was also referred to as the Vienna International. The second, known as the International Revolutionary Marxist Centre, was arguably to the left and included Spain’s POUM as its best known member party. Since the headquarters was based in London, it was referred to as the “London Bureau”. The British section was called the Independent Labor Party (it had also been attached to the Vienna International) and included George Orwell as a sympathizer. His “Homage to Catalonia” describes his involvement with the POUM in Spain.
Not long after I joined the Trotskyist movement in 1967, I learned that there was such a thing called “centrism”, a political current that supposedly was revolutionary in words, but counter-revolutionary in action. From what I can ascertain, this is drawn from Lenin’s characterization of Kautsky’s ideas in chapter six of “State and Revolution”: “This is nothing but the purest and most vulgar opportunism: repudiating revolution in deeds, while accepting it in words.” Since Kautsky was considered a kind of arch-demon in our movement, it was easy to understand why centrism became a curse word. The only problem is that pretty much everybody outside of our ranks, except for the Stalinists and the social democrats, could be referred to as a centrist if they did not go along with the entire Trotskyist catechism. This included just about every guerrilla group in Latin America, and implicitly Fidel Castro until he received absolution after 1963 or so.
Another definition of centrism can be found in Trotsky’s writings and complemented Lenin’s definition above. Trotsky characterized centrism as a current that oscillated between revolutionary and reformist politics. In addition to groups like the POUM, he felt that the definition applied to the Comintern since it was committed to socialism in one country.
It is very difficult to find documents from the “half” internationals either on or off the Internet, and I say that as someone with access to one of the best research libraries in the U.S. but you will find plenty of stuff directed against them.
Fresh from screwing up in Germany in 1921, Karl Radek uses the kind of vituperative language against the Vienna International in a 1922 article titled Foundation of the Two and a Half International that would be used against anybody who got on the wrong side of the Comintern leaders, including Trotsky:
The consideration that the Centrist spirit must be vanquished under the conditions of the world revolution, and by means of it, does not mean at all that the Communist International must offer peace to this spirit in its midst, in order that in may be ultimately overmastered by the revolution. Naturally, the infected organs into which the Centrist venom has had time to penetrate unnoticed must be removed, so that they shall not infect the whole body.
While very little of the Vienna International statements can be found on the Internet, there is one item worth reading, the Official Report of a joint meeting of the Second, Third and Second and a Half Internationals in Berlin on April 2, 1922. As opposed to Karl Radek, whose article revolved around the failure of the centrists to support the dictatorship of the proletariat and other key elements of Communist doctrine, Friedrich Adler was far more interested in figuring out ways the working class movement could unite in action:
I think that all of us here feel that common action on the part of the proletariat has never been more urgent than at the present time. However powerful the differences between us may be, however much we may feel those differences day by day and be compelled day by day to oppose comrades of one section or another, still we know that above all these differences, and stronger than any petty differences, the incredible distress of the world proletariat which is the outcome of the world war—the terrible conditions of misery caused by depreciation of currency and economic need on the one hand, and increased unemployment in the lands with a high currency on the other hand—this urgent need of the world proletariat has produced among them, side by side with their interest in theoretical questions, an imperative desire for unity of action in the immediate tasks of the day.
Friedrich Adler
While I have no interest in trying to salvage the reputation of the Vienna International, I can only say that Radek’s business about “infected organs” compares most unfavorably with Adler’s measured remarks that were far more in the spirit of the United Front policy that had become official Comintern policy. If the problem of centrism was a disjunction between words and deeds, one can only say that Radek’s over-the-top rant was unlikely to lead to the sort of working class unity so desperately needed in those days.
After Trotsky launched the Fourth International, he was confronted by the centrist Three-and-a-half International just as Lenin had to contend with the Two-and-a-half a few years later. Launched in 1931, the London Bureau was not so easy to pigeonhole since it had many genuine revolutionaries like Daniel Guerin and Andres Nin.
Trotsky had a knack for drawing hard-and-fast distinctions between his own movement and such centrists, even when they showed sympathy for his ideas. In a letter to the Independent Labour Party, Trotsky thanked them for printing one of his articles but chastised them for a formulation in the forward:
To the Comrades of the Independent Labour Party. – You have published my Copenhagen speech on the Russian Revolution in pamphlet form. I can of course, only be glad that you made my speech accessible to British workers. The foreword by James Maxton recommends this booklet warmly to the Socialist readers. I can only be thankful for this recommendation.
The foreword, however, contains an idea to which I feel obliged to take exception. Maxton refuses in advance to enter into the merits of those disagreements which separate me and my co-thinkers from the now ruling fraction in the USSR. “This is a matter,” he says, “on which only Russian socialists are competent to decide.”
By these few words the international character of socialism as a scientific doctrine and as a revolutionary movement is completely refuted. If socialists (communists) of one country are incapable. incompetent, and consequently have no right to decide the vital questions of the struggle of socialists (communists) in other countries, the proletarian International loses all rights and possibilities of existence.
Now I would never want to try to second-guess somebody as brilliant as Trotsky—except for this one time—but perhaps it was not the best move to make an issue out of what Maxton wrote in the forward. This sort of thing has a way of antagonizing people especially given the costs of publishing a pamphlet in the depths of the Great Depression.
Trotsky did understand that the ILP was much bigger than his own group in Britain and was blessed with its own prestigious magazine called The New Leader, which continues to be published with about the same analysis it had in Trotsky’s day. The Trotskyist section in Britain was called the Bolshevik-Leninists, just the sort of name that I would have advised against but what do I know.
Trotsky tried to proffer advice to his followers about how to approach the ILP, a group that they had little use for and which Trotsky was trying to orient them to in an “entryist” fashion:
Whether you will enter the ILP as a faction or as individuals is a purely formal question. In essence, you will, of course, be a faction that submits to common discipline. Before entering the ILP you make a public declaration: “Our views are known. We base ourselves on the principles of Bolshevism-Leninism and have formed ourselves as a part of the International Left Opposition. Its ideas we consider as the only basis on which the new International can be built. We are entering the ILP to convince the members of that party in daily practical work of the correctness of our ideas and of the necessity of the ILP joining the initiators of the new International.”
In what sense could such a declaration lower the prestige of your group? This is not clear to me.
I don’t know about prestige but the claim that its “ideas” are the only basis on which a new International can be built strikes me as a bit self-aggrandizing. It demonstrates a certain inability on Trotsky’s part to understand Marx’s words in an 1875 letter to Bracke that “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.”
Marceau Pivert
Trotsky’s polemics with Marceau Pivert, the chairman of the French section of the London Bureau, is also worth taking a look at. Pivert led the Parti Socialiste Ouvrier et Paysan (Workers’ and Peasants’ Socialist Party, or PSOP), a party I know almost nothing about. Pivert wrote an article titled The PSOP and Trotskyism in the June 9, 1939 issue of the PSOP journal. Just as was the case with Maxton, the article—an ostensible invitation to have a dialog—elicited Trotsky’s characteristically sharp reply. Since we are as always operating in the blind as far as the centrists’ words are concerned, we have to rely on Trotsky’s version:
Pivert is ready to collaborate with “Trotskyism,” provided only that the latter abandons all claims to “hegemony” and takes the pathway of “trustful collaboration with all elements that have courageously broken with social patriotism and national communism.”
He adds:
Having thus proclaimed “hegemony” to be his private monopoly in the party, Pivert thereupon demands that the Trotskyites “abandon factional methods.” This demand, repeated several times, comes somewhat incongruously from the pen of a politician who constantly underscores the democratic nature of his organization. What is a faction?
You’ll note the subtle distinction made by Trotsky between abandoning “factional methods” and the right to form a faction: “Whoever prohibits factions thereby liquidates party democracy and takes the first step toward a totalitarian regime.”
Considering the fact that the Fourth International was the most split-prone tendency on the left, you’d think that Trotsky might have paid closer attention to the need to “abandon factional methods” rather than try to amalgamate Pivert with Stalin.
Centrism as an organized international movement came to a climax and disappeared not long after the POUM’s struggle in Spain. For people like myself, the POUM is a symbol of centrism’s folly as it combined courageous tactical initiatives against fascism with political support for the Popular Front government whose failure to enact thoroughgoing structural reforms fed the fascist beast seeking to topple it. It was not just a question of supporting the Popular Front. The POUM formed part of the government but without the kind of power wielded by the liberal wing of the bourgeoisie and its reformist partners.
The Trotskyist movement was very good in diagnosing the POUM’s problems, especially in Felix Morrow’s The Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain that can be read online. Morrow made the “orthodox” case against the POUM entering the government:
‘The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes,’ declared Marx. This was the great lesson learned from the Paris Commune: ‘not, as in the past, to transfer the bureaucratic and military machinery from one hand to the other, but to break it up; and that is the precondition of any real people’s revolution on the Continent. And this is what our heroic party comrades in Paris have attempted.’ What is to replace the shattered state machinery? On this, the fundamental question of revolution, the meagre experience of the Commune was fully developed by Lenin and Trotsky. Parliamentarianism was to be destroyed. In its place rise the workers’ committees in the factories, the peasants’ committees on the land, the soldiers’ committees in the army, centralized in local, regional and, finally, the national soviets. Thus, the new state, a workers’ state, is based on industrial representation, which automatically disfranchises the bourgeoisie, except as, after the consolidation of workers’ power, they individually enter productive labour and are permitted to participate in electing the soviets. Between the old bourgeois state and the new workers’ state lies a chasm over which the bourgeoisie cannot return to power except by overthrowing the workers’ state.
It was this fundamental tenet, the essence of the accumulated experience of a century of revolutionary struggle, which the POUM violated in entering the Generalidad [bourgeois government]. They received their ministry from the hands of President Companys. The new cabinet merely continued the work of the old, and like the old, could be dismissed and replaced by a more reactionary one. Behind the protective covering of the POUM-CNT-PSUC-Esquerra cabinet, the bourgeoisie would weather the revolutionary offensive, gather its shattered forces, and, with the aid of the reformists, at the ripe moment, return to full power. To this end, it was not even necessary for the bourgeoisie to participate in the cabinet. There had been ‘all-workers’ cabinets in Germany, Austria, England, which had thus enabled the bourgeoisie to weather critical situations, and then kick out the workers’ ministers.
As inured as I have become to the Trotskyist pointing out of sins of commission, I find myself wondering to what extent responsibility must be placed on the Fourth International for having failed to build an alternative to the POUM. Could it be possible that the “factional methods” referred to by Pivert constitute an effective roadblock to reaching the critical mass necessary to impact events on the ground? If so, then we can only conclude that the Trotskyist movement was effectively guilty of sins of omission that in the sphere of revolutionary politics might not condemn you to eternal damnation but eternal irrelevance. Damnation is surely worse, but as Marxists we must aspire to relevance and not be satisfied with the smug feeling that goes along with not being damned.
March 12, 2010
March 11, 2010
In reply to Juan Cole
(A guest post by Mina Khanlarzadeh.)
This piece, of course, is not defending Ahmadinejad, the politically schizophrenic man whose hands are stained from the blood of the innocent people of Iran. But I can’t help but comment on Juan Cole’s blog post since he makes several gravely wrong points.
Juan Cole accuses Ahmadinejad of being an anti-Semite, quoting Ahmadinejad’s statement: “Thanks to the grace of God, the capitalist system founded by the Zionists has reached the end of its path.” In his critique, Juan Cole says: “But the trope of an essentialist connection between Jews, capitalism and exploitation is a commonplace in the literature of anti-Semitism, and is probably the origin of this bizarre allegation.”
The connection between capitalism and Zionism is obviously dead wrong. Juan Cole should have done a better job to distinguish between Zionism and Judaism. The Judaic faith has existed for thousands of years, while the Zionist political movement was born within the last hundred years. Zionists can be secular, Muslim, Christian, Atheist, etc. Not all Jews are Zionists and vice versa. In fact, the action of equating Zionism and Judaism is anti-Semitic especially when you consider that the Arabs are considered a Semitic race in some circles. Ahmadinejad’s naive statement about capitalism and Zionism is not explicitly anti-Semitic but once again reveals his tendency to give Israel and its friends a useful hook to hang their anti-Iranian propaganda on. His steadfast refusal to describe capitalism in class terms undercuts Iran’s ability to defend itself against the international capitalist system that will not be satisfied until it returns a new version of the Shah to power.
If I say “Thanks to the grace of God, the capitalist system founded by the terrorists has reached the end of its path.”, and someone claims that my sentence is anti-Muslim, it is my critic who is in fact anti-Muslim because s/he is equating terrorism with being Muslim which is obviously wrong. Juan Cole is making a terrible mistake which can have awful consequences. Equating Zionism and Judaism is completely wrong and anti-Semitic because it incorrectly holds the Judaic faith responsible for the suffering of many people in the Middle East, and the occupation and colonization of Palestine.
Juan Cole explains to his readers that Zoroastrianism (which has influenced Iranian culture) is responsible for Ahmadinejad’s notion of bad guys (Ahrimans) versus good guys (Ahoora Mazda). Could you, dear Juan, give us a break please? Good guys versus bad guys has been the main discourse of Euro-American politicians. For instance, George W. Bush, would focus his speeches on the conflict between good, righteous liberators and the axis of evil. Many Hollywood movies, for instance, make contrast between good guys versus bad guys. For this, Juan Cole has an explanation: Zoroastrianism affected Judaism and Christianity (consequently the culture of these religions) so if Euro-American politicians obsess with good verus bad guys, that maybe come from Iranian culture? If this isn’t anti-Iranianism, it’s definitely a misread or a shallow read of Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism is not about self-righteousness or the notion advertised by politicians that you either submit to us and become the good guy or stand in front of us and become the bad guy. As we say in Persian not all the spheres are walnut, not any bad versus good is similar to the message of Zoroastrianism.
Juan Cole also tells us that Iranians willingly converted to Islam: “Although Iran converted to Islam gradually (and mostly willingly) after the seventh century CE”. This is a sensitive subject since some Iranians show outrage over the conquest of Persia by Muslims, as if the conquest happened just recently. I am going to be super-cautious to not justify those who treat the conquest as it happened yesterday. First I want to acknowledge that being mad at an historic event like this is not helpful now and can help those who would benefit from causing anti-Arab sentiments among Iranians. Second I want to emphasize that Arab people in neighboring countries of Iran are the sisters and brothers of Iranian people and obviously had no responsibility over the Muslim armies conducting a war against Iranians several hundred years ago. However, it is ignorant and naive to dismiss the resistance of people who were attacked and were forced to not speak their mother tongue. They were forced to change their religion to a new one in which they didn’t even know the language of its prayers.
Some argue that before their invasion by Muslim armies, Iranians were very dissatisfied with the political atmosphere of their country so they “welcomed the attackers with flowers and sweets.” It sounds very similar to the nonsense that was said about Iraqis: since they are unhappy with Saddam Hussein, they will welcome Americans invaders with flowers and sweets. It might be hard for Juan Cole to believe but no population welcomes its attackers to burn the population’s books. It might be hard for Juan Cole to believe but no population welcomes its own enslavement. Does Juan Cole want to deny Iranians’ militant and cultural resistance to conquerors? Any unbiased history book would teach Juan Cole about the history of how Iranians struggled to keep their language, calendar, cultural habits, etc. It can be very dangerous to glorify the historic foreign invasion of a country and dismiss the hardship imposed on its population by that conquest. It’s particularly dangerous at this time since there is threats of war against Iranian people with the same delusion that Iranian people will welcome the invaders of their country by flowers and sweets because they are dissatisfied with their current government, and maybe they convert to Christianity gradually as Juan Cole described Iranian conversion to Islam.
Ahmadinejad talks about the end of capitalism while he himself is leading the most anti-worker administration since the revolution. He himself is more into privatization and the removal of welfare than Rafsanjani is/was. While many workers are unemployed, underemployed and forced to work as part-time, Ahmadienjad’s coup administration is going to remove the subsidies for the basic needs of Iranian people—something that even reformists could not hope to be able to do, although they would have loved to do it and discussed it a lot when in power. Thus Ahmadinejad’s words against capitalism are chosen to satisfy his friends, like Hugo Chavez, in south-American countries and as propaganda for the poor people of Iran or in the region. No one inside Iran buys his anti-capitalist slogans any longer. No one. His slogans are mostly for outside consumption.
However, it’s not moral or politically wise to obsess with Ahmadienjad’s propaganda. People in Iran need their voice to be amplified. Many students, journalists, human and women’s right activists and unionists are imprisoned in Iran. Ahmadinejad wants to make a fuss with his controversial speeches aimed to distract the media from the Iranian government atrocities. Ahmadinejad depends on harsh militant responses from warmongers to stir nationalistic sentiments and to ask everyone to unify behind his coup administration which would result in complete defeat of the Green Movement. Criticizing Ahmadinejad doesn’t help Iranian people now and it didn’t help Iranians when Ahmadinejad was in the news constantly. In fact he conducts his controversial speeches to get a huge coverage in the media and become the main focus to distract the real crisis taking place domestically. Forget about Ahmadinejad and the wrong conclusion that he is anti-Semite. Criticize Ahmadinejad for what he is doing to Iranian people and show him that he cannot distract us from those suffering in the prisons of the militaristic regime. We have to show him that his empty slogans against capitalism is meaningless when worker activists are held in jail for their activism and when thousands of workers have not been handed their less than poverty level paychecks for several months. We have to criticize Ahmadinejad’s coup administration for what he doesn’t want to be criticized not for what he is trying his best to make a fuss and hustle and bustle.
Mother
This is not quite the typical review since it will divulge the “surprise ending” of the movie under discussion. My goal is less to advise the reader whether to spend $11 or so to see “Mother” since 88% of the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes already give it a favorable rating and presumably carry more weight than my distaff Marxist take. I will join the 12% that are critical but my main interest is in explaining what went wrong in the latest movie from Bong Joon-ho, one of Korea’s most acclaimed directors. (His last movie The Host was a brilliant updating of the Godzilla genre.) In order to do that, I will have to reveal the ending which, like much of the rest of the movie, has a deeply alienating effect on at least this viewer and that is probably all that matters in the long run.
The mother referred to in the title is an old woman who runs a medicinal herb shop and does unlicensed acupuncture on the side. Played by Hye-ja Kim, she lives with her 27 year old retarded son Do-joon (Won Bin) and shares a bed with him even though there are no indications that theirs is an incestuous relationship. But there are signs that their relationship is not normal. She makes a point of telling him over a meal that one ingredient is good for his virility. In another scene he is shown urinating against a wall while his mother stares intently down at his penis.
But mostly their relationship is about her doting on him despite the difficulties she meets on a daily basis. As opposed to more severely retarded people, Do-joon is an independent spirit—perhaps too independent—who likes to go out drinking late at night and chase after women even if they reject his clumsy advances out of hand. Late one night in a drunken stupor he follows home a high school girl. After she ducks into an abandoned shack to avoid him, he propositions her from outside. Her response is to throw a heavy rock from inside that lands at his feet. The next morning she is found dead not far away. Shortly afterwards Do-joon is arrested for murder and his mother goes on a crusade to clear his name since he is not capable of hurting a waterbug, as she puts it.
Despite the fact that Do-joon is obviously retarded and even flies into a rage when people call him a “retard” in the spirit of the Rahm Emanuel epithet of recent notoriety, reviewers more or less avoid confronting this issue. The New Yorker Magazine’s Anthony Lane puts it this way: “The chief suspect is a local boy, Do-joon (Won Bin): twenty-seven years old, but a boy nonetheless.” Variety’s Derek Elley sidesteps the issue as well: “But Bong Joon-ho’s Mother is a mutha of a different kind — an engrossing portrait of a feisty Korean widow determined to prove her emotionally fragile son innocent of murder.” Well, there is nothing “emotionally challenged” about him. He is intellectually challenged and cannot be relied on to provide information that would help him avoid conviction, either through an inability to remember the details of the evening or to communicate them effectively to a jury.
The middle of the movie is a kind of whodunit as the mother tries to track down who the real culprit might be. It turns out that the murdered girl, who was desperately poor, turned tricks on the side to help her get by even accepting rice cakes instead of money on occasion. She also was in the habit of photographing her “johns” on her cell phone for posterity. When the phone turns up missing, Do-joon’s mother becomes an amateur detective to track it down.
Despite the fact that the two main characters come from Korea’s lower depths and have all sorts of repellent features, you inevitably hope that the mother will triumph in the end. But director Bong Joon-ho is so much into “subverting” audience expectations that you are robbed of such a possibility. It turns out that Do-joon is the killer after all. He did not actually intend to kill the girl but accidentally hit her on the head when he threw the stone back at her. The mother learns this from a junk dealer who happened upon the incident and was the sole eyewitness. When he tells her that he is about to go to the cops and give them his story, she bashes his skull in with a pipe-wrench and burns down his shack. So we end up with a truly pathological figure who does not prompt hate as much as disaffection. The audience has to be carefully taught that we are no longer living in the age of heroes and heroines.
While there is much to admire in Mother, especially the warped humor that so many Korean movies display, the story simply lacks the catharsis that you almost instinctively seek in any drama. There is a strong sense of nihilism that the movie conveys that I attribute less to any deep philosophical convictions of the director and the screenplay writers than I do to the perennial need to be “transgressive”, a sine qua non for film-makers looking for acclaim at movie festivals. Indeed, Mother was a big hit at the 2009 NY Film Festival.
My biggest problem, however, was with the absolutely repellent characterization of Do-joon who we are led to believe might be typical of retarded people convicted of capital crimes. I don’t know what the situation is in Korea, but in Texas mentally retarded people are routinely sent to the gas chamber. By choosing to make a main character capable of such an awful crime even if on an unpremeditated basis, Bong Joon-ho disappoints me even as he continues to show that his cinematic chops are awesome. This is enough to get rave reviews from most critics, but not from an old-fashioned, “politically correct” unrepentant Marxist.
March 10, 2010
Fighting Fascism Both Outside and Within Parliament
a guest post by Michael Barker
Last Friday was a momentous day for British plutocracy, it was the day when a fascist group of street-fighting thugs marched on the Houses of Parliament. Fueled by the incessant racism in the mainstream media, and aided by wealthy elites, Britain is witnessing a dangerous and well-coordinated campaign by right-wing forces intent on profiting from media-driven scapegoating and fear mongering; a campaign that on Friday received the support of conservative parliamentarians, Baroness Cox and Lord Pearson. The visible result of this ongoing propaganda offensive is that in the past few years the British public has been increasingly drawn to support fascist political parties like the British National Party and their associated brownshirts, the English Defence League. (Fascist electoral progress owes much to the fact that they are pooling their resources in just a few constituencies and are temporarily toning down limited aspects of their propaganda for the medias benefit.)
Last Friday not coincidentally also marked a sad day for me and the other anti-fascists who attempted to block the English Defence League’s (EDL) officially sanctioned march to Parliament. This is because although some 300 people had gathered to stand in the path of the fascists, the police decided that they needed to violently disperse our protest to ensure that the EDL could unite in the streets with minimal public resistance.
Police defence of racism is of course far from unusual, but Friday was unusual for me as it was the first time I have ever been arrested. And although the manner of my “arrest” was relatively restrained compared to those around me and those regularly targeted by racial profiling, it was a painful experience nevertheless.[1] Anyway the short of it was that dozens of peaceful protesters were ferreted away (ten to each police van), to locations all over London. In my instance we were taken, along with another van full of protesters, on a two and a half hour journey to Sutton Police station, some 20 km from the protest, and then promptly de-arrested.
Returning to the action: now that the anti-fascist protest had been sufficiently weakened by police intimidation and arrests, “democracy” rolled on as the English Defence League’s march resumed. Here it is worth mentioning that while the blockade that I was a part of was surrounded by police for some hours prior to my arrest (in what is referred to as a kettle), the EDL’s police escort, by way of a contrast, let them retire to the comfort of the Tate Britain gallery to have a few pints of lager until our protest had been broken up. To their credit, even after the police had smashed a large part of the anti-fascist protest, the remaining protesters continued to vocally oppose the EDL, and it is now, once the action was over, that a few members of the mainstream media reluctantly began misreporting on the day’s events.[2]
At this point it is critical to acknowledge the primary reason why right-wing elites helped organize the English Defence League’s last minute march on Parliament. The reason being that they wished to support Baroness Cox and Lord Pearson’s decision to invite Dutch cypto-fascist MP Geert Wilders to the House of Lords to show his anti-Islamic propaganda spiel, Fitna, a film which focused on genocidal anti-Semitism in the Muslim world. Thus Zionists and fascists overcame their differences to combat the mainstream medias latest mythical enemy, the so-called Islamo-fascists. And yes you did hear me right, I said fascists (Nazi-inspired ones at that) and Zionists united, as evidenced by the fact that both Cox and Pearson play a leading role in an Israeli think-tank known as the Jerusalem Summit, a group which was formed to “guide and control US foreign policy, particularly towards the Middle East and to push the world towards a clash of civilization in the form of a global war between the USA and the Arab-Islamic world.”[3] (The most infamous member of the Jerusalem Summit is well-known Zionist neocon, Daniel Pipes.)
To sum up, the English Defence League represents a clear and present threat to the British public, something that was more than evident by their recent rampage through the streets of Stoke. Their orgy of violence in Stoke was of course not reported on by the mainstream media, and as one might expect the police made little effort to stop their riot. Thus it is imperative that all people concerned with resisting racism oppose their next planned rally which is due to be held on Saturday 20 March in Bolton.
[1] While facing away from the police I was assaulted with what was either a punch or a knee to my thigh (I couldn’t tell which as I could not my police attackers), then I had my jeans ripped off my body, and a police officer applied a pressure point hold to my neck to prevent my passive resistance. (For more information on the routine use of police violence, click here.)
[2] This story was barely covered in the mainstream media, but one video report that strangely gives equal time to EDF and anti-fascists can be found on The Guardian’s Web site, see “When the English Defence League came to London” (March 5, 2010). Alternatively for useful commentary on the EDL and on the London protest, see Richard Seymour, “The Police, the Fascists, and the Antifascists,” Lenin’s Tomb, March 6, 2010; Viv Smith and Mark Thomas, “Anti-fascists confront the English Defence League in London,” Socialist Worker Online, March 6, 2010; Martin Smith, “The BNP and EDL,” Socialist Review, March 2010.
[3] Lord Pearson of Rannoch and Baroness Cox of Queensbury in addition to both being ardent Zionists supplement their conservative activism by serving on the board of trustees of a “humanitarian” venture known as the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust (HART). Cox founded HART in 2003, and Pearson presently serves as the chair of their board of trustees. Other notable members of HART’s board include Anthony Peel who is a trustee of Christian Solidarity Worldwide (see below), and Nicholas Mellor who is the co-founder of Medical Emergency Relief International, a group whose board of trustees is chaired by Lord Jay of Ewelme, an individual who was Tony Blair’s personal representative to the G8 Summits in 2005 and 2006. (Baroness Cox used to serve as a trustee of Medical Emergency Relief International.)
Christian Solidarity Worldwide was formerly headed by Baroness Cox (who now acts as a patron of the organization), and it was formed in 1997 as the British branch of Christian Solidarity International. The chairman and CEO of Christian Solidarity International (USA) since 1990, John Eibner, acts as an expert for the neoconservative Zionist think tank, the Middle East Forum (which is headed by Daniel Pipes). For a detailed examination of the ties between Zionists and Christian human rights activists, see “The Project For A New American Humanitarianism: Olympian Ambitions from Darfur to Tibet and Beijing” (Swans Commentary, August 25, 2008).
The chairman of the Jerusalem Summit’s international advisory board is the long-serving right-wing activist, Gary Bauer. Here it is interesting to note that Gary’s wife, Carol Bauer, has been a board member of another conservative democracy-manipulating group called AmeriCares, an organization that I critiqued in detail in another article (published today).
