March 16, 2010
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).
March 9, 2010
NY Timesman speaks out
John Swinton, former Chief of Staff of The New York Times, circa 1880, “On the Independent Press”:
There is no such thing in America as an independent press, unless it is in the country towns.
You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write his honest opinions, and if you did you know beforehand that it would never appear in print.
I am paid $150.00 a week for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with – others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things – and any of you who would be so foolish as to write his honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.
The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his daily bread.You know this and I know it, and what folly is this to be toasting an “Independent Press.”
We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping-jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
March 8, 2010
Chushingura; Harakiri
The figure of the ronin, or unemployed samurai, is a staple of Japanese movies that received its most celebrated treatment in Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and The Seven Samurai. Recently I saw two movies made in 1962—both available from Netflix—that offered starkly contrasting views of their ronin heroes, suggesting as a corollary alternative takes on Japanese culture and values.
The first is Hiroshi Inagaki’s 206 minute Chushingura, a name given to literary accounts of the 1703 vendetta by 47 ronin of the house of Asano whose master was forced to commit seppoku (ritual disembowelment known as harikiri outside of Japan) after landing only glancing blows against Lord Kira in the Shogun’s castle in Edo. Not only has the incident inspired several movies, it is also the subject of Kabuki and Bunraku (puppet plays) as well as serving as a kind of national martyrdom mythos on a par with Joan of Arc for the French or the Battle of the Alamo for the Americans. There is no trailer unfortunately for the 1962 movie on Youtube or elsewhere but this Kabuki version might give you a flavor for what is in the film:
At the beginning of the movie, Lord Naganori Asano (Yûzô Kayama) is embroiled in conflicts with Lord Yoshinaga Kira (Chûsha Ichikawa), a much more powerful figure with far less scruples than Asano who he presses repeatedly for bribes. When Asano refuses to make payments, Kira refuses to turn over instructions from the Shogunate about his duties. Without the document, Asano will lose his place in the pecking order of a grotesquely feudal pecking order and all that goes with it. When he strikes Kira with his sword in a fit of rage, he still ends up losing everything—including his life.
The conflict between Kira and Asano takes up perhaps the first half-hour of the film. From that point on, it becomes the story of his retainers who are forced to vacate the clan’s castle and take jobs as common tradesmen. Eventually we discover that their leader, Asano’s second in command, has a vendetta planned to kill Kira and uphold Bushido, the Samurai’s ethos of loyalty and courage. For most of the film, up until the final 20 minutes or so that depicts the bloody battle between Asano’s 47 ronin and Kira’s bodyguards, the plot revolves around the quotidian existence of an unemployed Samurai.
The Kira camp is lulled into a false sense of security from the seeming withdrawal of the 47 ronin from vendetta. But unbeknownst to their enemies, Asano’s former retainers have a major assault on Kira’s mansion. It is as much of a surprise as the Corleone family’s attack on the Five Families at the end of Godfather Part I.
I can only recommend this film for those with a particular interest in Japanese culture since it is clearly made for the domestic market and more particularly for the segment of Japanese society that has a thing about traditional values. At its most benign, this amounts to a commitment to courage, loyalty and honesty. At its worst, it is manifested as the 1941 version of Chushingura that was meant to arouse the Japanese army to a blind sense of devotion to the imperial cause. Unlike the hackwork put out for the Nazis by Veidt Harlan, the 1941 version was directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, one of Japan’s greatest directors who would go on to make Ugetsu in 1953, regarded as one of the greatest movies of all time. Mizoguchi made Chushingura under duress and the end product was considered insufficiently martial in spirit.
Also made in 1962, Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri is everything that Chushingura is not. Closer in spirit to Yojii Yamada’s recent samurai trilogy, it is a passionate denunciation of feudal values and especially the ritual suicide of the film’s title. For both Kobayash and Yamada, the feudal overlords represent a brutal and unyielding system that victimizes the samurai even as it puts them on a pedestal.
As art, Harakiri is Japanese movie making at its very pinnacle and surely ranks with Kurosawa and Yamada for its narrative and dramatic power. Unlike Chushingura, there are no slack moments as the movie hurdles forward with the power of a diesel locomotive until its wrenching conclusion.
It stars Tatsuya Nakadai as the middle-aged ronin Hanshiro Tsugumo who has arrived at the Iyi palace in order to make a request that was frequently being heard in such quarters in the capital of Edo in 1630.
Without a job and any prospects in a period of general peace, the warrior decides to do the only thing that makes sense—to disembowel himself in the house of a powerful Lord with all the dignity that entails.
The lord of the house Kageyu Saito (Rentaro Mikuni) feels duty-bound to explain to Tatsuya that when another ronin named Motome Chijiiwa showed up a couple of months earlier with a similar request, they decided to force him to go through with harakiri even though it was likely that he was only seeking a handout to last him for a few days. Given the collapse of so many samurai clans in the recent past, there had to be some way to set an example for other such beggars. Tatsuya reassures the lord of the manor that he fully intends to kill himself.
Through a series of flashbacks Lord Kageyu describes how the much younger ronin Motome was trapped into taking his life. He was prevented from leaving the palace until the deed was done in full view of his retainers. Unfortunately for Motome, he had to make do with a bamboo sword, an inexplicable replacement for the usually highly tempered steel instrument. Instead of lasting a second or two with a steel blade, Motome’s death is painfully drawn out he stabs himself with .the dull bamboo blade. Watching the lord and his retinue take in this spectacle is enough to inoculate one against Bushido culture once and for all, which was the director and screenwriters’ (Shinobu Hashimoto, Yasuhiko Takiguchi) intention.
Before taking his life in the same manner as Motome, Tatsuya only has one request. He wants to tell the imperious lord Kageyu how he came to such a desperate state and also why Motome was in such a state himself, adding that he knew Motome quite well and understood his decision.
Without giving away too much of the plot, it turns out that Tatsuya is Motome’s father-in-law and is seeking vengeance against the aristocrat and samurai warriors who forced him to kill himself. The movie moves forward through a series of flashbacks and encounters between Tatsuya and Kageyu as each flashback ends. At each point, Kageyu demands that the ronin get on with the hari-kiri, only to be told that the story is not finished. The climax of the movie, as you might expect, involves a choreographed fight between the ronin and Kageyu’s men. It is about as exciting a sequence as you will see in a Japanese samurai movie. It should be mentioned that the actor who plays Tatsuya was Toshiro Mifune’s replacement in Akira Kurosawa’s movies after their falling out. He is simply brilliant.
Harikiri is the first movie I have ever seen by Masaki Kobayashi who also directed The Human Condition, a trilogy on the effects of World War II on a Japanese pacifist and socialist. The wiki on Kobayashi states that he himself was a pacifist, who after being drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, refused to fight and refused promotion to a rank higher than private. Those are the kinds of values the Japanese should be celebrating, not Bushido.
March 6, 2010
Perry Anderson’s Weberian turn
Perry Anderson
In a massive (15,308 words) article that appears in the current New Left Review, Perry Anderson addresses “Two Revolutions”, namely the Russian and the Chinese. My expectations were that Anderson would be interesting as well as wrong. He did not disappoint.
Mostly the article can be reduced to a kind of laboratory experiment where one rat is compared to another. The rat that has been fed a constant diet of Big Macs will look sickly while the one that eats wheat germ and yogurt will look great. That, in a nutshell, is how Anderson approaches Russia and China. China’s success story, we are told, has a lot to do with “communism”, a term that Anderson deploys much more in the terms of bourgeois social science than Marxism. This is to be expected from somebody who announced to the world in 2000 in a NLR article titled “Renewals” that:
By contrast, commanding the field of direct political constructions of the time, the Right has provided one fluent vision of where the world is going, or has stopped, after another—Fukuyama, Brzezinski, Huntington, Yergin, Luttwak, Friedman. These are writers that unite a single powerful thesis with a fluent popular style, designed not for an academic readership but a broad international public. This confident genre, of which America has so far a virtual monopoly, finds no equivalent on the Left.
Little did Anderson suspect that only a few years later Fukuyama would do a 180 degrees turn and disavow his “end of history” thesis under the impact of an imploding financial system. That being said, he still seems smitten by the prospects of being “fluent” and “powerful”. I for one place much more importance on being truthful and revolutionary.
Setting the tone for the rest of the article, Anderson invokes the authority of Max Weber in distinguishing between the healthy and the sick lab rats.
More than just the wholly different temporality of this experience separated it from the overturn in Russia. The way in which power was won was altogether distinct. If the state is defined, in Weber’s famous formula, by the exercise of a monopoly of legitimate violence over a given territory, a revolution always involves a breaking of that monopoly, and the emergence of what Lenin and Trotsky called a dual power. Logically, there are three ways in which this can arise, corresponding to the three terms of Weber’s formula. A revolution can break the monopoly of the state’s power by destroying the legitimacy of its rule, so that coercion cannot be exercised to repress the movement against it. The Iranian Revolution, in which there was no fighting, the royal army remaining paralysed as the monarchy fell, would be an example. Alternatively, a revolution can pit an insurgent violence against the coercive apparatus of the state, overwhelming it in a quick knock-out blow, without having secured any general legitimacy. This was the Russian pattern, possible only against a weak opponent.
I don’t quite know what to make of all this except to say that I find Karl Marx’s definition of the state much more useful since it is put forward in class terms. In the formula above, that criterion is entirely missing.
Using the Weberian yardstick, Anderson finds the essential difference between Russia and China to revolve around the ability of the state to mobilize the power of the masses in achieving its goals in the fashion of a quarterback relying on his linemen. We are led to understand that the Chinese had a much better team, something that was afforded to a large part by particular historical circumstances as Anderson explains:
The victory of the PLA, far from leaving economy and society ravaged, delivered recovery and stability. Inflation was mastered; corruption banished; supplies resumed. In the countryside, landlordism was abolished. In the cities, no sweeping expropriation was needed, since over two-thirds of industry was already state-owned under the GMD [Nationalists], and comprador capital had fled to Hong Kong or Taiwan. The middle class was so alienated by the last years of Nationalist rule that much of it greeted the arrival of Communism with relief rather than resistance; as production revived, workers returned to normal employment and received wages again. The People’s Republic, embodying patriotic ideals and social discipline, entered life enjoying a degree of popular assent that the Soviet Union never knew.
After a while it becomes clear that Anderson’s main interest is in establishing how successful Russia and China were in accomplishing a set of goals usually associated with development economics and modernization, the very stuff of graduate school seminars using the texts of Max Weber, Walt Rostow and Theda Skocpol for reading assignments. By this criterion, progress is measured less in terms of social equality than it is in GDP. Anderson writes that Russia had a more auspicious beginning:
Of the two states as they crossed the threshold of reform, the USSR enjoyed to all appearances much the better conditions, material and cultural, for success. Its GDP was four to five times higher than that of China. Its industrial base was far larger, employing over twice the relative labour force. It was richer in nearly every natural resource—fossil fuels, valuable minerals, abundant land. It was much more urbanized. Its population was better fed, with an average intake of calories half as much again as in China.
But China would eventually leapfrog Russia largely because it could rely on much better “grunts”, the sort of social muscle that could put the football over the goal-line:
Socially, too, China had one huge, critical advantage over the USSR. The peasantry was not a listless, sullen rump of the class it had once been, as in Russia. It was neither tired nor disaffected, but full of potential energy, waiting to be released, as events would show. Historically, it had never possessed collective institutions comparable to the MIR. Rural society, long atomized in the North and shaken loose by the Taiping upheaval in the South, could recover after the Great Leap Forward with centuries of market impulses behind it. The absence of deep agrarian alienation was not, moreover, simply a difference between the two countrysides. Making up the overwhelming majority of the population, the Chinese peasantry was the central pediment of the nation. Its nearest equivalent in the USSR, even if not so proportionately large a part of society, would have been the industrial working class. But it too, though not so demoralized as the kolkhozniki, was by the 80s thoroughly disabused as a social force, deeply cynical about the regime, inured to make-work and low productivity, in compensation for the vast gap between its nominal role as the leading class in the state and its actual position in the hierarchy of privilege.
But most of all, China could rely on its superior leadership, who by comparison to the Soviet leaders were virtual Bart Starrs:
Yet, at the gateway to their reforms, perhaps the most decisive of all the differences between Russia and China lay in the character of their political leadership. In command of the PRC was not an isolated, inexperienced functionary, surrounded by aides and publicists infused with a naive Schwärmerei for all that was Western, but battle-hardened veterans of the original Revolution, leaders who had been Mao’s colleagues, and had suffered under him, but had lost none of their strategic skills or self-confidence.
Well, it is always good to have strategic skill and self-confidence especially when it comes to selling real estate or corporate bonds but I wonder how much this has to do with “communism”. Once again, Anderson is demonstrating a keen interest in everything about Russia and China except what once distinguished him as a Marxist a lifetime ago: the interests of the working class. For Anderson, the term “Leninist” does not mean what it once did. It is not what made Fidel Castro an exceptional politician but the kind of gift that will help you climb the corporate ladder at a place like Microsoft:
In confronting the situation of the country as Mao had left it, this leadership, with Deng at its head, remained the revolutionaries they had always been. Their temper was Leninist: radical, disciplined, imaginative—capable at once of tactical patience and prudent experimentation, and of the boldest initiatives and most dramatic switches of direction.
Much of the rest of the article is devoted to breathless invocations to the special gifts of the Chinese rulers that can be found in Andre Gunder Frank’s “Reorient”, Martin Jacques’s latest book or in any of a dozen book-of-the-month club selections hailing the “Chinese century”:
The task of making good the lag between communism in China and capitalism in East Asia was a formidable agenda for any programme of reforms. But the Immortals were not daunted. They tackled it with a vigour born not just from the momentum, still active, of the Revolution they had made, but from a millennial self-confidence, battered for a century, but ultimately unbroken, of the oldest continuous civilization in the world. Mao’s dynamism, for better or worse, had been one expression of the recovery of that confidence. The Reform Era propelled by Deng would be another. In this historical self-assurance lay a fundamental difference between Russia and China.
Anderson seems to be as mesmerized by China as the editors of Monthly Review are by Iran. In neither country are workers permitted to challenge the bosses who invoke socialism or Islam in laying down the law. It is a sign of the times that these two august publications have succumbed to the siren call of the powerful state rather than the possibility of socialist transformation.
In Anderson’s 2000 article, he virtually washed his hands of the socialist project:
Ideologically, the novelty of the present situation stands out in historical view. It can be put like this. For the first time since the Reformation, there are no longer any significant oppositions—that is, systematic rival outlooks—within the thought-world of the West; and scarcely any on a world scale either, if we discount religious doctrines as largely inoperative archaisms, as the experiences of Poland or Iran indicate we may. Whatever limitations persist to its practice, neo-liberalism as a set of principles rules undivided across the globe: the most successful ideology in world history. What this means for a journal like NLR is a radical discontinuity in the culture of the Left, as it—or if it—renews itself generationally. Nowhere is the contrast with the originating context of the review sharper than in this respect. Virtually the entire horizon of reference in which the generation of the sixties grew up has been wiped away—the landmarks of reformist and revolutionary socialism in equal measure. For most students, the roster of Bebel, Bernstein, Luxemburg, Kautsky, Jaurès, Lukács, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci have become names as remote as a list of Arian bishops. How to reweave threads of significance between the last century and this would be one of the most delicate and difficult tasks before any journal that took the term ‘left’ seriously. There seem to be few guide-posts for it.
When Perry Anderson was in his twenties, he wrote two books that challenged exactly such moods that had turned an earlier generation of Marxists into pessimists. “Considerations on Western Marxism” and “In the Tracks of Historical Materialism” rebuked those who retreated into the academy and turned Marxism into the stuff of graduate seminars rather than the barricades.
The combined impact of a general retreat of the mass movement and his own donnish pursuits have led Perry Anderson into exactly what disgusted him as a young man. Some of us remain unrepentant Marxists while others find ways to become penitents. Of course, it would be a lot better if they simply dropped the pretensions to Marxism for the sake of clarity.
Back in March of 1999 Edward Sidelsky wrote a rather devastating profile of Perry Anderson in the New Statesman that is worth reproducing in its entirety. I will conclude on this sad note:
The New Statesman Profile – Perry Anderson; He is one of Britain’s great Marxist intellectuals, yet now he seems a strangely conservative figure.
By Edward Skidelsky
Perry Anderson exemplifies a type that has almost vanished: the unaffiliated intellectual. The leading British Trotskyite, he has never belonged to a political party. An eminent historian, he has never held a full-time post at a British university. His writing belongs to none of the various categories of academic literature; it attempts, at its most ambitious, to comprehend them all in a total synthesis. His thought owes allegiance to no national tradition; it belongs to the floating corpus of western Marxism. It is fitting, if ironic, that this revolutionary free-booter should finally settle at the University of California at Los Angeles. Repressive tolerance has triumphed over one of its fiercest adversaries. Anderson is notoriously elusive. No interviews, no broadcasts – and even the London School of Economics, where he is a visiting lecturer, did not have a photograph to contribute to the illustration of this profile. Yet for all his elusiveness, his influence on British intellectual life has been enormous. The conduit of this influence was the New Left Review, the socialist bi-monthly which he edited from 1962 to 1982. Anderson’s goal was the introduction into Britain of a new kind of socialist culture, alternative to both the official Marxism of the Communist Party and the stolid reformism of the Labour Party. His followers saw themselves as a revolutionary vanguard. Inspired by Gramsci, they aimed to establish a socialist hegemony in the realm of ideas from which, they hoped, a revolutionary movement would follow. The leading lights of Continental Marxism – Lucacs, Gramsci, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse and Althusser – were published and discussed, often for the first time in Britain. Non-Marxist structuralists such as Lacan and Levi-Strauss were also introduced. High theory was interspersed with the other amour of the era: Latin American terrorism.
Anderson’s cosmopolitanism is partly a product of biography. He was born in 1940 into a wealthy Anglo-Irish family; his father was an official in the Chinese Maritime Customs. Eton and the stuffy Oxford of the 1950s no doubt exacerbated Anderson’s distaste for ‘spiritual patriotism’. Marxism offered the alternative of a truly international ideology, and Trotskyism, with its tradition of ‘revolution in more than one country’, was the most internationalist variant of Marxism. Anderson cites, as precedent for his own attitude, ‘the scorn of Marx and Engels for German provinciality and philistinism, of Lenin and Trotsky for Russian religiosity and Oblomovism, of Gramsci for Italian operatics and sentimentalism’. The cosmopolitanism of Marxist theory was, one suspects, a stronger source of appeal for Anderson than its promise of social justice. His is a socialism of the head, not the heart.
The agenda of the New Left Review was set out by Anderson in a couple of fierce polemics: ‘Components of the National Culture’ (1968) and ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’ (1964). They are the most scintillating essays he has written. The mediocrity of postwar intellectual life in Britain is the subject of the former. Written with a young man’s scorn, the essay surveys and dismisses British contributions to history, philosophy, political theory, psychology and aesthetics. These local failings are the consequence of a more fundamental vacuum: the absence, at the centre of British intellectual life, of any general theory of society that might unify the disparate branches of inquiry. Sociology, in Anderson’s view, is the queen of the sciences. In its absence, intellectual life fragments; a process dignified by the English totems of ‘empiricism’ and ‘piecemeal research’. This failure is not innocent; nothing is innocent for a Marxist. The absence of social theory serves to perpetuate the bourgeois social order; that which cannot be conceived cannot, a fortiori, be attacked.
‘Origins of the Present Crisis’ was one of a series of articles by Anderson and Tom Nairn offering a historical explanation for the predicament analysed in ‘Components of the National Culture’. The failure of the English bourgeoisie to develop a coherent world-view was, they argued, a consequence of its failure to draw a clear line of opposition between itself and the aristocracy. The revolution of 1640 was aborted: the reform of 1832 half-hearted. A corrupt bargain was struck between nobility and capital, in which the former lent dignity to the latter in return for the preservation of its constitutional privileges. The timidity of the bourgeoisie in the face of the aristocracy was later paralleled by the timidity of the proletariat in face of the bourgeoisie. ‘A supine bourgeoisie produced a subordinate proletariat.’ The proletariat accepted from the bourgeoisie the ‘timid and dreary’ philosophy of Fabian gradualism. The result was ‘Labourism, most stolid and mundane of political movements’. This denigration of British history provoked a passionate reply from E P Thompson, a Marxist of very different lineage. Anderson responded, and their exchange is as interesting and as revealing as the better-remembered ‘Two Cultures’ debate between F R Leavis and C P Snow.
Anderson’s argument was put forward as an explanation not only of Britain’s cultural conservatism, but also of her relative economic decline. It addressed a widespread mood of the 1960s, in which anti-establishment attitudes were mingled with anxiety about falling growth. The image of the ‘clean break’ seemed to answer both problems at once. It quickly became part of the lexicon of Wilsonism; its echoes are still audible today in Blair’s rhetoric of ‘modernisation’.
The influence of the New Left Review increased steadily under Anderson’s editorship, its circulation rising from 2,000 to 8,000. Its impact was particularly strong in the new universities and polytechnics, where it contributed to the formation of that leviathan called critical theory. But as the New Left Review entered the 1980s, it became increasingly clear that the revolution it had initiated would not spread beyond the academy. And even there, its influence was confined to certain sub-disciplines in the humanities. All it had achieved, in fact, was the replacement of one kind of intellectual provincialism with another. It could hardly have been otherwise, given the collapse of socialist politics in this period.
The movement away from practical politics towards questions of culture and ideology is characteristic of western Marxism as a whole. The failure of Marx’s political and economic predictions left his disciples with only one remaining role – that of Kulturkritiker. As Anderson himself points out, ‘the hidden hallmark of western Marxism . . . is that it is the product of defeat’. His attitude towards it is ambivalent. Admiring its sophistication, he reproaches it with ‘culturalism’ and contrasts it unfavourably with the classical tradition of Trotsky. Even Gramsci, the most politically minded of the great western Marxists, is accused of shifting the burden of revolutionary struggle on to the cultural sphere and neglecting the mechanics of state power.
Anderson is too intelligent and honest to deny the intellectual and political triumph of the right in the past decade, and yet he has never formally renounced his revolutionary convictions. They have just sunk quietly into the background, becoming a kind of coda to what is now his main occupation – the exposition of other people’s ideas. In this he is masterly. Yet intellect and political loyalties still occasionally conflict, producing confusion. A good example of this is his essay on Francis Fukayama’s The End of History. Fukayama’s grand narrative of historical progress – even though it culminates in the triumph of bourgeois liberal democracy – is of precisely the kind to win Anderson’s admiration. Anderson defends it against its detractors, claiming, on impeccably Marxist grounds, that their various refutations of Fukayama’s hypothesis amount to nothing more than local difficulties, and do not constitute a genuine contradiction. But then – as if suddenly realising what he has admitted – he amasses a whole set of difficulties of his own, ranging from environmental problems to feminism. But these are no more a fundamental contradiction than the difficulties he has previously dismissed. All are manageable within the confines of the present world-system. Fukayama has beaten Anderson at his own game.
Defeated on the political plane, Anderson has at last succumbed to the ‘siren voices of idealism’. His latest essay, The Origins of Postmodernity, is a work of cultural criticism in the classic tradition of Benjamin and Adorno. It is essentially a defence and an elaboration of Frederic Jameson’s thesis that postmodernism constitutes ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’.
Postmodernism is a natural target of attack for a Marxist. What it signifies is the final disappearance of any critical perspective on the capitalist order. The Soviet Union, for all its imperfections, provided such a perspective, and its existence sustained the avant-garde throughout Europe and America. Now there is nothing but capitalism. Any revolt is immediately assimilated and commodified. Art, realising this, has abandoned its haughty intransigence and entered into alliance with the market. The tone of the essay is one of sorrowful resignation. Anderson can diagnose the malady, but he has no cure.
There is something strangely conservative about Anderson’s denunciation of a world in which, to quote Jameson, ‘we are henceforth so far removed from the realities of production and work that we inhabit a dream world of artificial stimuli and televised experience’. All that remains of Marxism, now that the political illusions have been shattered, is nostalgia for a lost seriousness. It can hardly be a coincidence that the fiercest critics of postmodernism, the most intransigent defenders of the eternal verities, have all been Marxists: Alex Callinicos, David Harvey and Terry Eagleton. At first glance this appears an ironic reversal, but on reflection it could hardly have been otherwise. Marxism cannot be other than conservative, because the one truly revolutionary ideology of the modern world – under whose sign ‘everything solid melts into air’ – is capitalism.
