Marxmail is 10 years old today

This is the tenth anniversary of the Marxism mailing list (also known as Marxmail, the name of the accompanying website) that was launched on May 1, 2008. It started off with about sixty subscribers who were fleeing the Marxism list that preceded it, which had been hijacked by supporters of the Shining Path in Peru, including one Adolfo Olaechea. Adolfo and his co-thinkers soon lost interest in the mailing list and went on to other projects. Adolfo, bless his soul, successfully defended himself recently against trumped up charges of terrorism in Peru and continues to rally people around the Maoist banner.

With all due respect to the Maoist left, it was not the kind of political culture that lent itself to a free and open exchange of ideas. After the Maoist comrades had seized the moderator’s reins, they began expelling people left and right-yours truly was the first to go. Ironically, I had written a defense of the Shining Path a few months before I was booted.

That did not save me from being punished as a “Trotskyite”. Those stormy days of 1998 seem like a century ago, while my genuine Trotskyist past from 1967 to 1978 now seems like a millennium ago. History marches on, to use a cliché.

The Marxism list now has 1103 subscribers. I serve as moderator and Les Schaffer serves as technical moderator. I have had a long and fruitful collaboration with Les whose solid grasp of subscribers’ psychologies, including my own, helps to keep the list on an even keel. To a large extent, my ideas about how to build a non-sectarian and non-dogmatic left are reflected in the way I moderate the list. Most of all, this involves a firm hand when it comes to any attempts to divide the list between ‘Bolsheviks’ and ‘Mensheviks’. Since Internet mailing lists tend to operate as pressure cookers to begin with, the worst thing for a Marxism mailing list would be to artificially raise the temperature. Labeling people as “revisionists” or “reformists” is an invitation to the kinds of flame wars that destroyed the mailing lists that preceded Marxmail.

While the list does not have nearly as many female subscribers that it needs, the global representation is pretty good-including many subscribers from the Third World. On a typical day, there will be posts from subscribers in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Colombia, Germany, and Great Britain. The political representation is also pretty good, with subscribers reflecting Trotskyist, Communist, state capitalist, and syndicalist traditions.

The mailing list has grown by about 100 new subscribers per year and I expect that it will continue at this rate unless there is a qualitative change in the political situation. If there was a radicalization as deep as that of 1968 (another anniversary now being celebrated) I can easily imagine adding 3 or 4 hundred subscribers per year. Given the economic crisis we are now entering, as well as the prospect of continuing imperialist war and environmental degradation, that could be in the cards.

Nearly 40 years ago, the Trotskyist sect that I belonged to embarked on a major infrastructure expansion campaign in anticipation of the same kind of future radicalization. Members gave millions of dollars to purchase an office building near the Hudson River and an expensive Web Press, which prints on continuous rolls of paper. The offices were seen as necessary to administer an explosive growth in membership and the Web Press would allow the massive circulation of party organs as the radicalization deepened. Although there were opportunities for the group after the 60s radicalization came to an end, they did not understand how to take advantage of them. Instead of growing, they shrank. The building and all the contents, including the Web Press, were sold a couple of years ago.

Although there will obviously always be a need for “dead tree” media such as books and newspapers, the Internet-which is a Web Press after a fashion-is as geared to our epoch as the Gutenberg press was geared to the epoch of peasant revolts. I like to think of the Marxism mailing list as the same kind of investment in infrastructure as the SWP’s office building and Web Press, even though it costs very little. In the coming years and decades, even after my ashes have been scattered in the Hudson River, Marxmail will enable revolutionaries worldwide to exchange information and debate ideas, all through the auspices of a technology that originated in the American military’s research into how state power could be maintained after a nuclear war! Talk about contradictions…

The Marxism list remains grateful to the support of Professor Hans Ehrbar of the University of Utah Economics department, one of the few schools in the country that allows scholarly critiques of the capitalist system to be mounted. Our mailing list operates on a computer that Hans donated and his technical support, along with Les’s, allows our communications to run smoothly.

I would also wish our comrade Doug Henwood well, whose LBO-Talk mailing list was launched on the very same day as Marxmail. Doug was a survivor of the early wild and woolly days of Marxism mailing lists on the Internet as well as senseless provocations from your moderator before I (and Doug) had reached our current Zen-like state of equanimity.

Who is Bill Ayers?

Bill Ayers

If you listen to rightwing talk radio, you’ve probably heard Bill Ayers’s name before. WABC AM, a prime outlet for Limbaugh and company, has been burning up the dial recently over this ex-Weatherman who is supposedly in bed with Barack Obama. The Ayers quote that they keep using over and over again comes from a September 11, 2001 NY Times profile that begins:

“I don’t regret setting bombs,” Bill Ayers said. “I feel we didn’t do enough.”

They keep harping on the September 11 date as if Ayers was in cahoots with Mohammad Atta. Any fool would know that the first newspaper reports on September 11 appeared the day after. It was just a coincidence that Ayers’s profile appeared the same day as the 9/11 attacks. They also make a big thing about Ayers stating that “we didn’t do enough”, when in fact he was almost certainly referring to their failure to end the war.

Ayers tries to explain what he really meant on his blog:

Regrets. I’m often quoted saying that I have “no regrets.” This is not true. For anyone paying attention-and I try to stay wide-awake to the world around me all/ways-life brings misgivings, doubts, uncertainty, loss, regret. I’m sometimes asked if I regret anything I did to oppose the war in Viet Nam, and I say “no, I don’t regret anything I did to try to stop the slaughter of millions of human beings by my own government.” Sometimes I add, “I don’t think I did enough.” This is then elided: he has no regrets for setting bombs and thinks there should be more bombings.

Obama told the idiot George Stephanopolous that he was only 8 years old when the Weathermen were setting off bombs. For the benefit of many of my readers, who were not even a gleam in their father’s eye back in the early 70s, a word or two of introduction is in order.

The Weathermen started out as a faction of SDS. At the 1969 convention, there was a 3 way split. The “Worker-Student Alliance” (WSA) was led by the Maoist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and basically promoted a kind of “serve the people” missionary-like strategy which involved students getting jobs in factories and preaching to the workers. The WSA was opposed by the Revolutionary Youth Movement, which was divided into RYM1 and RYM2. RYM1 was led by Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, Bernadine Dohrn and other SDS leaders who had become deeply frustrated by the inability of the student movement to end the war.

After RYM1 morphed into the Weathermen, the 200 or so members adopted a neo-Narodnik strategy and went underground. Unlike the original Narodniks, the Weathermen never assassinated government officials. They only set off bombs at government buildings. When they weren’t setting off bombs, they were imbibing huge amounts of psychedelic drugs and having orgies. Generally speaking, the Weathermen not only reflected the excesses of the 1960s but strove to embody them.

Like the WSA, RYM2 adopted Maoist politics, but supported Black and Latino nationalism, which PLP regarded as “dividing the working class” in the style of the CPUSA–a party that its leaders had emerged from in the 1950s. RYM2 was a genuine “New Left” tendency as opposed to PLP/WSA’s ambitions to resurrect “Third Period” Stalinism.

RYM2 eventually spawned a number of “Marxist-Leninist” formations whose history was documented by Max Elbaum in “Revolution in the Air“. All of the groups that originated in RYM2 are now defunct, except for the Revolutionary Communist Party, a sect-cult around Bob Avakian who was a RYM2 leader.

While everybody should repudiate the “violence baiting” of Barack Obama, there is a separate question of more direct concern to the radical movement and that involves the legacy of the Weathermen. It would be a big mistake to romanticize them since their politics did a lot to undermine the radical movement in the 1970s. The capitalist class can always replace the bricks that a Weathermen bomb destroyed, but it had a much harder job dislodging radical ideas from a student or young worker. By making an amalgam between the radical movement and the Weathermen, it sought to drive a wedge between us and ordinary American workers who had the social power to end the war and the capitalist system itself eventually.

In today’s Counterpunch, there’s an article by Dave Lindorff that gets the Weathermen wrong. He writes:

While many in the anti-war movement condemned the actions of the Weather Underground, I would argue that they, like the militant Black Panthers, performed an invaluable role by sending a loud, clear message to the nation’s ruling elite that if they continued the war, things would get worse at home.

Their actions made the peaceful mass protests against the Indochina War far more potent, because they forced the ruling elite in the US to have to ponder what would happen if those masses turned to the same kind of violent measures against them.

There is no evidence that the “ruling elite” feared the spread of Weathermen tactics. They knew that the frustrated young radicals had almost no support on the college campuses or high schools. Furthermore, people who demonstrated against the war were not likely to risk prison sentences. Indeed, examination of the historical record will show that the SDS’ers who became Weathermen had turned their back on antiwar organizing by 1967 at least. It was their retreat from mass demonstrations in fact that prepared the way for Narodnik tactics. Political isolation from the mass movement almost guarantees that you will be looking for short-cuts, like setting off bombs.

The late Fred Halstead, who led the SWP’s antiwar activity, once characterized the Weathermen as young people who never lost their ties to the bourgeoisie no matter how outrageous they behaved. If you think of them as children throwing a tantrum, it makes perfect sense. Instead of holding their breath until they turn blue, they set off bombs instead. If daddy didn’t stop bombing the Vietnamese, they’d drive him nuts. That was the real logic of Weathermen bomb-throwing, not socialist revolution.

If your goal is to pressure daddy into changing his ways, then it is likely that you will think up ways to persuade him that you are a good boy or girl when tantrums don’t work. Becoming a good boy or girl in the U.S. of course means becoming a pillar of your community and becoming active in the Democratic Party. Despite Ayers’s claims on his blog that he still “against imperialism”, he has found a home in the party that is totally committed to ruling the world on behalf of American corporations.

The NY Times reported that in 1995 State Senator Alice Palmer “introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.” In other words, Ayers and Dohrn were involved with the Democratic Party at a fairly high level. Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago, served as an adviser to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, the son of the former Mayor who unleashed the cops on peaceful demonstrators in 1968.

Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician, told the NY Times about his initial encounter with Obama at Ayers and Dohrn’s home:

“When I first met Barack Obama, he was giving a standard, innocuous little talk in the living room of those two legends-in-their-own-minds, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn,” Warren [Maria Warren, another liberal] wrote on her blog in 2005. “They were launching him - introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread.”

Warren’s blog entry apparently was what led to rightwing efforts to link Obama to the notorious “bomb thrower” when in fact Warren considered Obama and the former Weathermen as too tame by even her own liberal standards. Such is the grotesque character of American politics that an utterly conventional tête-à-tête among utterly conventional middle-class liberals can become transformed into the second coming of the Smolny Institute.

Left Forum 2008

Time constraints prevented me from attending today’s sessions of the Left Forum in New York, but I do want report back on what I saw yesterday. As a point of introduction, the Left Forum used to be called the Socialist Scholars Conference but was renamed as a consequence of a power struggle within the organizing committee. Rightwing social democrats sought to purge the conference of its more radical members including the conference organizer Eric Canepa who they viewed as insufficiently Serbophobic. You can read more about this here.

On Saturday morning I went to a panel on “Understanding Turkey Today: Class Dynamics, State Restructuring and Political Alternatives”. A paper was read by its three co-authors who were college professors from Turkey (Fuat Ercan, Marmara University; Selime Guzelsari, Abant Izzet Baysal University; Sebnem Oguz, Trent University in Canada) and judging by their youthful appearance, part of a new generation of Turkish Marxism.

My first exposure to Turkish Marxism at the Socialist Scholars Conference was perhaps 10 years ago when I heard Halil Berktay speak about the implosion of the sectarian left in Turkey that had left him utterly demoralized. Berktay was two years younger than me and part of the 60s generation of radicals that included Ahmet Tonak who used to be subbed to the Marxism list and PEN-L until returning to Turkey. You can read my comments on Berktay’s rather dispirited presentation here.

It is entirely possible that the crisis of the Turkish revolutionary movement of the 1960s is partially responsible for Turkey’s political situation today. A stronger movement might have created an alternative to both the Kemalists and the AKP but as things stand today the Turkish left is divided between nationalist and liberal components, who respectively support these two bourgeois parties.

The presentation seemed heavily influenced by Althusserian theory and focused on the struggle over control of the state between two sectors of the capitalist class. It began by making the point that political change in Turkey is not primarily driven by international factors such as the IMF but by internal class dynamics.

Specifically, the first generation of capitalists in Turkey, which arose in the 50s and 60s, were Kemalist and Istanbul-based. They used their connections to the state to accumulate capital in the form of holding companies. The new generation arose in Anatolia, the eastern and more backward section of the country, and sought international support for their mid-sized enterprises, which often relied on family employees. The new generation sought to differentiate itself from the older generation by stressing Islamic identity.

In reply to an idiotic intervention during the discussion period from the Spartacist League about the need to forge a Trotskyist party, Fuat Ercan pointed out that it is difficult to pose the task of a proletarian revolution in Turkey when the question of who the proletariat is has not been answered adequately. Throughout the country, the work force is in a constant state of flux and the informal sector is pervasive.

Although I had some problems with the Althusserian jargon, I was impressed with the seriousness of the presentation and their obvious grasp of the difficulties facing the Turkish left. It is impossible to build a revolutionary movement without looking hard realities in the face.

I have made available an April 2007 Science and Society article by Ercan and Oguz on “Rethinking Anti-Neoliberal Strategies through the Perspective of Value Theory: Insights from the Turkish Case” here.

* * * *

At 3pm I attended a panel on “Lenin’s Return” that I was very much looking forward to since it included a presentation by Lars Lih, the author of “Lenin Rediscovered: What Is To Be Done? in Context”, a scholarly work that essentially makes the point I have been making for years, namely that Lenin was not inventing a new type of “Leninist” party but simply trying to build a social democratic party in the mode of Kautsky’s party in Germany.

In addition to Lars, there was a presentation by Paul Le Blanc, the author of “Lenin and the Revolutionary Party”, a work that I value highly even though I disagreed with Paul’s notion that such a party can be built along the lines of James P. Cannon. As will be obvious in a moment or two, it is possible that Paul no longer believes that himself nowadays. Although I am not quite sure whether her presentation was exactly germane to the discussion, Helen Scott of the University of Vermont spoke on Rosa Luxemburg and stressed Luxemburg’s affinities with Lenin, despite the efforts of left anti-Communists to turn her into a kind of Kautsky figure. Finally, parts of a paper written by August Nimtz were read by Paul. August’s mother had died two days earlier, thus preventing his attendance.

Most of Paul’s talk can be described as a general defense of Lenin’s importance and avoided the sorts of controversy that might have been expected at an event such as this. Rather than getting into his ideas about how to rebuild a revolutionary party in the U.S., a topic that was very much on the front burner 10 years ago for him, Paul focused more on what all revolutionaries accept, namely Lenin’s commitment to socialist revolution and his hatred of injustice of all sorts. As a sign of Lenin’s reemergence as a figure to be contended with, Paul referred to “Lenin Reloaded”, a collection of talks from a Historical Materialism conference in London a few years ago that included a number of academic superstars like Slavoj Zizek and Fredric Jameson.

August Nimtz’s paper took aim both at Zizek’s talk and at Lars Lih’s book. Nimtz rejects Zizek’s claim that Lenin represented some kind of “departure” in Marxism. He also rejects Lih’s notion that Lenin was a kind of Russian version of Kautsky. For Nimtz, the key to understanding Lenin is his close ties to Marx and Engels and not in any “departure”, nor in any affinity with German social democracy. Although it is hard to argue with the idea that Lenin was very much in the tradition of Marx and Engels, I was somewhat perplexed with Nimtz’s apparent avoidance of the main issue stressed by Lars Lih, namely the heavy stamp of the German social democracy in “What is to be Done”. Here’s just one of my favorite quotes, which has to do with the question of defining the “vanguard”:

Why is there not a single political event in Germany that does not add to the authority and prestige of the Social-Democracy? Because Social-Democracy is always found to be in advance of all the others in furnishing the most revolutionary appraisal of every given event and in championing every protest against tyranny…It intervenes in every sphere and in every question of social and political life; in the matter of Wilhelm’s refusal to endorse a bourgeois progressive as city mayor (our Economists have not managed to educate the Germans to the understanding that such an act is, in fact, a compromise with liberalism!); in the matter of the law against ‘obscene’ publications and pictures; in the matter of governmental influence on the election of professors, etc., etc.

When you stop and think about this, it seems that there still is a lot to be gained from studying the German socialist movement. Clearly, the party’s parliamentarians and trade union officials had adapted to the German capitalist class, but there’s something to be said for “championing every protest against tyranny”.

Perhaps Nimtz, a former member of the SWP like Paul Le Blanc, still has illusions that “democratic centralism” in the style of James P. Cannon has a future. Since he was not able to attend and since his paper is probably not available on the Internet, I have no way of knowing.

Lars Lih reacted to Nimtz’s challenge with remarkable aplomb and an elfin sense of humor. He gave a presentation that sought to demonstrate that Lenin remained committed to Kautsky’s Marxism even after he broke with him over WWI. Time after time, Lenin referred to the correct ideas of Kautsky in works such as “The Agrarian Question” and expressed disappointment that the German Marxist leader no longer held to his earlier views. In hearing this I was reminded of how George Galloway quoted some of Christopher Hitchens’s earlier antiwar views to him during that infamous debate in N.Y. a few years ago. (I suppose comparing Hitchens to Kautsky is a bit like farce following tragedy but then again Galloway is no Lenin.) I will not try to communicate any more of Lih’s presentation since I will be getting the full paper from him shortly and making it available to you.

One of the more encouraging things about this panel was the presence of a large number of young people in the audience (some of whom who seemed to be members of the ISO). During the discussion period, they were distinguished by the seriousness of their comments and their ability to transcend the narrow sectarianism of the Spartacist League contingent that gave its customary gaseous remarks. One young woman made an excellent point that living up to the spirit of Lenin today means participating in the mass movement rather than constructing “purist” propaganda sects. A young Latino said that although the abuses carried out in the name of “Leninism” should be avoided; there is no reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater. My general perception is that these young people (and the ISO’ers in particular) are wrestling with the problems of sectarianism in the name of building a party like Lenin’s and are seeking to transform it, even if they are hobbled by some “vanguardist” conceptions built into their party’s constitution.

At 5pm I attended an interview on Pakistan given by Tariq Ali to David Barsamian who has been doing this sort of thing for years and is quite good at it, including a 2005 session with Tariq that is available from amazon.com.

Tariq made a number of fascinating points, including some that debunked the notion of an Islamic fundamentalist tidal wave sweeping Pakistan. He noted that no more than 10 percent of the population has voted for Islamic fundamentalist candidates in free elections. He also noted that the spread of madrassas in Pakistan is to be understood more in terms of the lack of public education than any enthusiasm for political Islam. One other bit of evidence of an absence of zealotry is the collaboration of Christian and Muslim farmers who are in a struggle to retain control over public lands that the army is trying to privatize. If which god you prayed to was all that important, these farmers would have never found a way to struggle against their common enemy.

Tariq also had some rather scathing comments on Benazir Bhutto, who he had a number of conversations with when she was in power. When he urged that she adopt some reforms that were rather limited in nature, she pleaded poverty. He then replied that she could do something that did not cost a penny but that could establish her as a groundbreaking reformer. She simply could push through legislation that repealed the emergency laws enacted under military rule. Since her party held a parliamentary majority, such repeal was feasible. She failed to take his advice. Tariq also proposed that if there was one thing that could make her mark in history, it was to establish a girl’s school in every village in Pakistan. Again, she ignored her advice.

Tariq Ali is very eloquent and very informed on his native country. One hopes that a book comes out of it since Pakistan is obviously being drawn into the “war on terror”. He feels that Pakistan has become a crucial element of this imperialist adventure since it is critical to eliminating the challenge to the Afghan government. In his opinion, Afghanistan has become a disaster for the occupiers, even more so than Iraq. But in a period of rising challenges to U.S. hegemony, the resource-poor land has taken on more and more value as a geopolitical asset, including its proximity to China. One top U.S. military official has said something to the effect that we are in Afghanistan because of the threat China poses. Ironically, this does not sound all that different from what I heard in 1965 when the U.S. was first getting involved in Vietnam in a major way.

Introductory remarks on Part Two of Karl Marx’s Capital, volume one

(This was posted to the Introduction to Marxism mailing list, an online class. For more information go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marxism_class/.)

Before getting into Part two of Capital, which deals with the generation of capital (or to use Marx’s notation M-C-M’), I want to offer some prefatory comments on how this relates to the real world–particularly with respect to the word capital.

In the parlance of the bourgeois academy and press, capital is pretty much associated with the funds necessary to produce commodities, or with the factories, mines, etc. that are used to produce such commodities. A manufacturer goes to Goldman-Sachs to raise capital; alternatively, capital indicates all of the inputs necessary to produce goods. In this respect, labor is a constituent part of the production. A capitalist brings together money, machines and workers in order to compete in the marketplace and make the kind of profits that will keep share holders happy. In this scheme of things, a worker, a photocopier and a potted plant amount to the same thing. It was Marx’s distinction to challenge this schema and to put the worker at the center.

Bourgeois economics also obfuscates the class distinction between worker and capitalist by representing workers as incipient capitalists. Since both capitalist and worker have the capacity to work, there is only a difference in degree between a Bill Gates and some lowly programmer working for Microsoft. Bourgeois society presents itself as a kind of grand competition in which everybody competes to become king of the mountain. This is deeply engrained in the popular culture as television shows like Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice” would indicate.

Furthermore, bourgeois sociology plays an important role in sustaining these illusions by representing class in terms of income. A “middle class” person is defined by a certain salary even though this criterion might be satisfied by both a shopkeeper (a true middle class person) and a truck-driving member of the Teamsters Union making $80,000 per year. It is no big surprise that given the hegemony of bourgeois ideology that the truck-driver often hopes to own their own rig so that they too can crawl their way to the top. When my own computer programming trade was much more in demand 30 years ago, I found myself more often than not in a desk next to somebody who was running his or her own little subcontracting business in the hopes that they could eventually live entirely off the profits generated by their sideline. This often went hand in hand with real estate investments. Needless to say, when downsizing began to thin the ranks of the programming field some years later, there was never an attempt to organize a trade union since middle-class individualism so permeated the programming ranks.

Even when bourgeois economics distinguished between the social role of capitalist and worker, it failed to acknowledge the intrinsic antagonism between the two. Ricardo, who developed a kind of labor theory of value without teeth, portrayed the two classes as having mutual interests in the development of “wealth” in chapter five (”Of Wages”) of “On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation .”

Ricardo writes, “When wages rise, it is generally because the increase of wealth and capital have occasioned a new demand for labour, which will, infallibly be attended with an increased production of commodities.” But in order for this happy state of affairs to transpire, “wages should be left to the fair and free competition of the market, and should never be controlled by the interference of the legislature.” And what could get in the way of this “fair and free competition of the market”? Well, for one there are the Poor Laws, which Ricardo described as follows:

The clear and direct tendency of the poor laws, is in direct opposition to these obvious principles: it is not, as the legislature benevolently intended, to amend the condition of the poor, but to deteriorate the condition of both poor and rich; instead of making the poor rich, they are calculated to make the rich poor; and whilst the present laws are in force, it is quite in the natural order of things that the fund for the maintenance of the poor should progressively increase, till it has absorbed all the net revenue of the country, or at least so much of it as the state shall leave to us, after satisfying its own never failing demands for the public expenditure.

Considering the fact that Bill Clinton was largely responsible for dismantling our modern Poor Laws in the form of the Welfare system and that Obama considers “tax money wasted by a welfare agency” or on the Pentagon to be equivalent, it appears that Ricardo’s hostility to the poor is still with us.

Marx wrote “The German Ideology ” in 1845 in a bid to help men and women “revolt” against “the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away.” Primarily, this meant establishing materialism as a guide to understanding the world, as opposed to the dominant idealist trend in German philosophy. To start with, it was necessary to understand that humanity distinguished itself from animals as soon as it “began to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.”

It was clear that unlike Ricardo, Marx saw the creation of the “means of subsistence” as a bitter struggle between the two major classes of society in which the workers were always getting shafted. As a young man, Marx’s apparent sympathy for the proletariat was a function of his own psychology and personality just as much as was the case for Che Guevara, who decided to devote his life to the Latin American working class after discovering their terrible poverty riding across Latin America on his beat up Triumph motorcycle in 1952.

In the section titled “The Real Basis of Ideology”, Marx writes about the rise of a working class. While there is no reference to M-C-M’, it is obvious that he views the capitalist system as benefiting only those who own the means of production, who in effect become the new aristocracy on the basis of a wage relationship rather than through the seizure of a portion of a serf’s crop:

Simultaneously with the beginning of manufactures there was a period of vagabondage caused by the abolition of the feudal bodies of retainers, the disbanding of the swollen armies which had flocked to serve the kings against their vassals, the improvement of agriculture, and the transformation of great strips of tillage into pasture land. From this alone it is clear how this vagabondage is strictly connected with the disintegration of the feudal system. As early as the thirteenth century we find isolated epochs of this kind, but only at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth does this vagabondage make a general and permanent appearance. These vagabonds, who were so numerous that, for instance, Henry VIII of England had 72,000 of them hanged, were only prevailed upon to work with the greatest difficulty and through the most extreme necessity, and then only after long resistance. The rapid rise of manufactures, particularly in England, absorbed them gradually.

In 1845, the son of a textile manufacturer named Frederic Engels was drawing identical conclusions about the mutual antagonism of worker and capitalist in a work called “Conditions of the Working Class in England ” that also evoked Che’s “Motorcycle Diaries”. Engels wrote:

On Monday, Jan. 15th, 1844, two boys were brought before the police magistrate because, being in a starving condition, they had stolen and immediately devoured a half-cooked calf’s foot from a shop. The magistrate felt called upon to investigate the case further, and received the following details from the policeman: The mother of the two boys was the widow of an ex-soldier, afterwards policeman, and had had a very hard time since the death of her husband, to provide for her nine children. She lived at No. 2 Pool’s Place, Quaker Court, Spitalfields, in the utmost poverty. When the policeman came to her, he found her with six of her children literally huddled together in a little back room, with no furniture but two old rush-bottomed chairs with the seats gone, a small table with two legs broken, a broken cup, and a small dish. On the hearth was scarcely a spark of fire, and in one corner lay as many old rags as would fill a woman’s apron, which served the whole family as a bed. For bed clothing they had only their scanty day clothing. The poor woman told him that she had been forced to sell her bedstead the year before to buy food. Her bedding she had pawned with the victualler for food. In short, everything had gone for food. The magistrate ordered the woman a considerable provision from the poor-box.

Suffice it to say that David Ricardo’s writings were innocent of such observations. Whether he was aware of them and deliberately chose not to write about them is a matter for scholars to decide. The power of denial runs very deep in bourgeois society, as commentary on the occupation of Iraq from neoconservative hawks to weak-kneed liberals reflects.

Our intellectual and political tradition, taking a stand against “the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings” of bourgeois society operates on a totally different basis. In order to help place ourselves better in that tradition, I will be posting some readings and some questions for discussion on Part two of Karl Marx’s Capital.

Introduction to Karl Marx’s Capital

(This was posted to the “Introduction to Marxism class” mailing list today.)

Marx’s decision to analyze the inner laws of the capitalist system was not primarily driven by intellectual curiosity. Faced with working class struggles breaking out all over Europe and challenged by theoretical debates in a socialist movement in its infancy, Marx decided that such a study would resolve political problems that were impeding future growth of the movement.

In this respect he was quite like Lenin who decided to analyze monopoly capital immediately after WWI broke out. When he was confronted by the immensity of the blood-letting and the betrayal of the socialist movement by its parliamentarians who voted for war, Lenin felt that it was necessary to look at the “latest stage” of the capitalist system, paying particular attention to the financial sector. In other words, economics for both Marx and Lenin is the handmaiden of politics.

Born in 1818 into a German Jewish family that had converted to Protestantism, Marx was a radical by his early 20s, just as was the case for just about everybody taking this class–including me. His early radicalism reflected the dominant current of his day, which was anarchism. If the anarchism of his time was as powerful as it is today, there was no alternate political movement that a young person could hook up with. Today you might have a choice at a place like Columbia University between an anarchist club and the ISO. In the late 1830s and early 1840s, anarchism and various forms of pre-scientific socialism were the only games in town.

As a challenge to the left in the 1830s, bourgeois economics largely served to justify existing class relationships in society and to represent the market as the most efficient way of generating wealth just as is the case today. Attempts at tampering with markets would only guarantee failure. There is nothing that a Thomas Friedman or one of Barack Obama’s advisers is saying now that has not already been said by Adam Smith. In attempting to answer both the anarchists and the bourgeois economists, Marx was forced to come to terms with their way of analyzing the world, which surprisingly overlapped in a number of ways.

When you first dive into Marx’s Capital with its terms like “use value” and “exchange value”, you might be led to the conclusion that Marx coined these terms himself. In reality, these terms had been around for a long time. Marx only hoped to redefine them using his own insights gathered from a study of the capitalist economy using a dialectical method he had adapted from Hegel.

In 1859, Marx wrote “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy “, which contained many of the concepts that he would elaborate on in Das Kapital. The earlier work contains an addendum to chapter one on “The Commodity” that is titled “Historical Notes on the Analysis of Commodities” and that gives credit to a number of others for having grasped that labor is the source of value. Among them is Benjamin Franklin, who wrote “Trade in general being nothing else but the exchange of labour for labour, the value of all things is, as I have said before, most justly measured by labour”.

But by far the most significant advocate of the view that labor creates value is the British economist David Ricardo, who like Marx was born into a Jewish family. Of Ricardo, Marx writes:

David Ricardo, unlike Adam Smith, neatly sets forth the determination of the value of commodities by labour-time, and demonstrates that this law governs even those bourgeois relations of production which apparently contradict it most decisively. Ricardo’s investigations are concerned exclusively with the magnitude of value, and regarding this he is at least aware that the operation of the law depends on definite historical pre-conditions.

In terms of the “determination of the value of commodities by labour-time”, Ben Franklin gives a useful example as cited by Marx: “As, suppose one man is employed to raise corn, while another is digging and refining silver; at the year’s end, or at any other period of time, the complete produce of corn, and that of silver, are the natural price of each other; and if one be twenty bushels, and the other twenty ounces, then an ounce of that silver is worth the labour of raising a bushel of that corn.”

What distinguishes Marx from Ricardo or the good Ben Franklin, however, was his ability to see how labor is exploited to produce surplus value. In the world of Ricardo and Ben Franklin, there is no exploitation. The man producing corn and the man producing silver are free agents who meet each other in the marketplace. But in capitalist society, the producer is a worker who receives a wage that is less than the value of the commodity he or she is producing. In the pre-capitalist epoch, exploitation was much easier to perceive. A Lord would come collect 10 percent of the corn produced by a Serf at the end of the growing season. Under capitalism, the wage relationship is mystified as a kind of contract between equals and thus less susceptible to exposure. It was Marx’s breakthrough to throw a powerful light on this kind of exploitation.

The other giant of bourgeois economics that Marx entered into battle with is the aforementioned Adam Smith. For Smith, the source of all wealth is the division of labor, which in conjunction with the free market, makes for a more efficient economy. This schema shares Ricardo’s emphasis on the individual free agent that assumes society to be organized on the basis of millions of Robinson Crusoes pursuing a rational path to their own enrichment that will automatically benefit everybody else.

Marx kept notebooks titled “Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie ” (Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy) that like the aforementioned “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” was to become transformed into Das Kapital. In the introduction, he wrote:

Individuals producing in Society – hence socially determined individual production – is, of course, the point of departure. The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine. As little as Rousseau’s contrat social, which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract, rests on such naturalism. This is the semblance, the merely aesthetic semblance, of the Robinsonades, great and small.

Annette Rubinstein, the great Marxist literary critic who died last year at the age of 97, had the last word on Robinson Crusoe’s island as a prototype of capitalist civilization in her magnum opus “The Great Tradition: From Shakespeare to Shaw”:

The emphasis is not on wonderful and terrible events but on resourceful and effective activity. The initiative comes from man throughout. Nature is raw material for his shaping, not a god for his worship. Sometimes stubborn and difficult, it is never purposeful or malicious and can therefore be mastered and used by any educated, intelligent, self-reliant, hard working and prudent man who has a reasonable share of good luck—just such a share as the laws of probability (or the goodness of God) is likely to afford him.

For bourgeois economics to work, it is absolutely necessary to make the individual the principal economic actor. As Margaret Thatcher once said, “And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.” It was Marx’s most subversive insight to tackle this myth and drive a stake into its heart.

Given Adam Smith and David Ricardo’s commitment to the capitalist system, it is somewhat surprising to discover that many of their ideas were reflected in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s “The Philosophy of Poverty”. Born in 1808 and 13 years older than Karl Marx, the French father of anarchism was a pivotal figure in the radical movement that Marx joined up with as a youth.

Initially Marx viewed Proudhon in favorable terms. In the 1844 “The Holy Family “, Marx hails Proudhon:

Now Proudhon has put an end to this unconsciousness once for all. He takes the human semblance of the economic relations seriously and sharply opposes it to their inhuman reality. He forces them to be in reality what they imagine themselves to be, or rather to give up their own idea of themselves and confess their real inhumanity. He therefore consistently depicts as the falsifier of economic relations not this or that particular kind of private property, as other economists do, but private property as such and in its entirety. He has done all that criticism of political economy from the standpoint of political economy can do.

But as Marx deepened his understanding of the capitalist mode of production, he was forced to disassociate himself from the anarchist and wrote a sharp polemical attack in 1848 titled “The Poverty of Philosophy ” that inverted Proudhon’s title. This was the first work in which Marx began to rigorously define the terms that would crop up in Das Kapital.

Before turning to Marx’s critique, it would be useful to take a look at Proudhon’s work, which is available on the Marxism Internet Archives, where most of our readings can be found. In chapter 3, titled “Labor as the Efficient Cause of the Domain of Property”, you find a wholesale adoption of Adam Smith’s division of labor:

Let us admire Nature’s economy. With regard to these various needs which she has given us, and which the isolated man cannot satisfy unaided, Nature has granted to the race a power refused to the individual. This gives rise to the principle of the division of labor, — a principle founded on the speciality of vocations.

The satisfaction of some needs demands of man continual creation; while others can, by the labor of a single individual, be satisfied for millions of men through thousands of centuries. For example, the need of clothing and food requires perpetual reproduction; while a knowledge of the system of the universe may be acquired for ever by two or three highly-gifted men. The perpetual current of rivers supports our commerce, and runs our machinery; but the sun, alone in the midst of space, gives light to the whole world. Nature, who might create Platos and Virgils, Newtons and Cuviers, as she creates husbandmen and shepherds, does not see fit to do so; choosing rather to proportion the rarity of genius to the duration of its products, and to balance the number of capacities by the competency of each one of them.

Furthermore, where Proudhon writes about the capacity of labor to create value, it is done in a fashion that owes more to Ricardo than to the revolution in thinking carried out by Karl Marx. In language that is addressed to the boss rather than the worker (anarchism of this sort has a natural tendency to appeal to the boss’s better nature), Proudhon only asks for a fair deal and generously assures the boss that since “you have contributed to the production, you ought to share in the enjoyment”:

The price is not sufficient: the labor of the workers has created a value; now this value is their property. But they have neither sold nor exchanged it; and you, capitalist, you have not earned it. That you should have a partial right to the whole, in return for the materials that you have furnished and the provisions that you have supplied, is perfectly just. You contributed to the production, you ought to share in the enjoyment. But your right does not annihilate that of the laborers, who, in spite of you, have been your colleagues in the work of production.

Marx throws a Molotov cocktail into this cheerful chatter:

In English society the working day thus acquired in 70 [years] a surplus of 2,700 per cent productivity; that is, in 1840 it produced 27 times as much as in 1770. According to M. Proudhon, the following question should be raised: why was not the English worker of 1840 27 times as rich as the one of 1770? In raising such a question one would naturally be supposing that the English could have produced this wealth without the historical conditions in which it was produced, such as: private accumulation of capital, modern division of labor, automatic workshops, anarchical competition, the wage system — in short, everything that is based upon class antagonism. Now, these were precisely the necessary conditions of existence for the development of productive forces and of surplus labor. Therefore, to obtain this development of productive forces and this surplus labor, there had to be classes which profited and classes which decayed.

Proudhon’s socialism was basically a romantic yearning for a return to the days of the small proprietor. When he wrote that property is theft, his hope was not to abolish private property but to establish the conditions for individual proprietorship. While Marx accepted the reality of those seventy years of the private accumulation of capital, Proudhon longed to turn the clock back as Hal Draper made clear in Volume IV of “Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution”, titled “Critique of other Socialisms”:

Early socialism—from the traveling salesman Fourier to the peasant-minded Proudhon, from the fashionable ladies’ tailor Weitling to the semi-proletarian artisans of the Communist League—was tied by a network of threads to petty-bourgeois producers caught in the act of turning into modern workers. All of socialism began with the tension between hostility to, and hope in, the state. This could be resolved only by a thought-through theory of the state, but the tension lasted for most of the nineteenth century.

There was, then, a vast reservoir of inchoate antistatism, lapping around the borders of the socialist movement, for a very long time, continually renewed as new streams of raw, undeveloped, unclass-conscious workers poured into the reservoir from the sea of peasantry. The history of anarchism—its flare-up and decline in one area after another, from the Jura Mountains to the plains of Andalusia—is one of history’s best cases of correspondence between politics and technology.

In volume one of “Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution” it was stressed that pre-Marx socialism usually entailed hostility to politics; it was social-ism counterposed to political-ism. This early socialism was inhospitable to concern with the major political issues of the day (constitutional democracy above all), which it saw as of interest only to the bourgeoisie or the “politicians.” It was a theoretical advance when Marx showed how it was possible to link the “Social Question” up with the “political question” in a single programmatic approach, which he called a “new direction.” The primitive state of mind in the movement, general antipoliticalism, was the source of several isms, including pure-and-simple trade-unionism and cooperativism, and only in a specially abstract form did it also show itself as an ingredient of anarchism.

So to conclude on the note that we started with, Karl Marx’s economic theory was a challenge to the prevailing anti-political mood of the existing radical movement. By identifying the underlying and inescapable class antagonisms of the capitalist system, he hoped to make it abundantly clear that the only way to live freely and justly was by abolishing that system and replacing it with one that was in the interests of the overwhelming majority of the planet: communism.

Tomorrow evening I will post readings and study questions for Volume One of Capital. Feel free to discuss this post but understand that detailed questions and comments about “exchange value”, etc. would make more sense until we have had a chance to look at the readings tomorrow.

Introduction to Marxism class

In response to a query about how one gets a “training in Marxism” from a Marxmail subscriber (the mailing list I moderate), I am organizing an Introduction to Marxism class that will operate as a mailing list. Information on the class is at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marxism_class/

Here is an introduction to the class:

This is a proposal for what we might want to cover in this class. Before I suggest any readings, I want to make sure that all of your concerns are being addressed. If you think that something should be added, changed or even deleted, please feel free to speak up. There are only 17 of us here and there is no need to feel shy.

1. Marxist economics: What is a commodity? The labor theory of value? Falling rate of profit? Etc., etc.

2. Marxist philosophy: What is dialectical materialism? Or, perhaps, what is the Marxist method? What are the origins of Marxist philosophy? Is Marxism a science?

3. Historical materialism: How does a Marxist understand history? Does history have some kind of logic? What is the role of the class struggle in history?

4. How are revolutions made? What is a bourgeois revolution? How does it differ from a socialist revolution? What is the role of a revolutionary party? What kinds of strategy and tactics must a revolutionary party develop in order to succeed?

5. Problems of socialism in power. What accounts for the rise of Stalin and the collapse of socialism in the USSR? Was the USSR ruled by a social class?

I think we can spend at least a couple of days in thinking these questions through before we decide on the readings, although I definitely have some things in mind. Also, I encourage to speak up and introduce yourself and to say what you hope to get out of the class. I have already heard from at least one person that their time is limited and that they might not have time to keep up with the readings. Don’t worry. You will definitely learn something just through the discussion, although there is of course no substitute for reading some of the classics that we will be covering.

Harvey Pekar, Paul Buhle and a new graphic history of SDS

Last week I received a copy of “Students for a Democratic Society: a Graphic History” from Hill and Wang. This book was written mostly by Harvey Pekar, with art (again, mostly) by Gary Dumm, a long-time Pekar collaborator, and edited by Paul Buhle. The publisher enclosed a letter that said:

“Harvey Pekar requested that we send along advanced copy of Students for a Democratic Society: a Graphic History in thanks for your hospitality while he was in town earlier this week. I hope you enjoy the book.”

The hospitality took the form of allowing Harvey to spend the night at my apartment while he was in town. His co-author Paul Buhle was a guest the previous evening. Both were in town discussing future projects with their publisher, including a series of graphic books on jazz musicians that would cover two of my favorites, Lester Young and Django Reinhardt.

Harvey Pekar

Writing about jazz might seem like a natural topic for Harvey Pekar since he used to be a free-lance reviewer for Downbeat years ago, but SDS? As it turns out, Harvey has always had a deep interest in politics even though it is obvious from his ongoing graphic memoir “American Splendor” that he is not an activist. Partnering with Paul Buhle makes perfect sense, however, since Paul is evolving more and more in the direction of this medium himself as his book on the IWW should make obvious.

For all three of us, the comic books of the 1950s were a big influence. Paul and I have discussed the importance of Mad Magazine, Tales from the Crypt, Little Lulu, Scrooge McDuck et al to us when we were 10 years old or so. If you were looking for something off the beaten track in the 1950s, but were just a bit too young to have discovered the Beats, there was nothing that could top comic books. In May, 2003 Paul wrote an article titled “The New Scholarship of Comics” in the Chronicle of Higher Education that noted:

The growing interest in researching and writing about comics by intellectuals who were born in the 1940s only partly reflects what’s happened in the world of commerce. More, I think, many of us are attempting to find, or relocate, ourselves — almost like an earlier generation tried psychoanalysis. Some of today’s more indulgent theorizing about comics, indeed, suggests a considerable overlap between the two. Most of us, however, have simply been struck by how much mass culture, from the early moments when we could take it in as children, has affected us. Memories of childhood grow more intense with aging, and we find Unca Donald (of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, that is), Wonder Woman (speaking for boys, our first sex goddess), and the hilarious Mad comics satires of the likes of them considerably more vivid in recollection than our real-life relatives.

His article also singled out the work of Harvey Pekar, who sought to bring his own working-class experience in Cleveland to life using this medium:

The never-say-die types continue, with a lot of nearly thankless effort. Two decades along, past Crumb-collaborator Harvey Pekar, an occasionally hectoring presence on the Letterman show of the 1990s, still brings out American Splendor, a narrative description of daily life in Cleveland, mostly his own life. An independent film under the same title, barely fictionalizing Pekar’s story, won the drama category at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival.

Indeed, it was my own passion for Harvey Pekar’s work that connected me with Paul originally. Scott McLemee, a book reviewer for a number of venues including the Chronicle of Higher Education at one time, was a subscriber to the Marxism mailing list that I had launched in 1998. After I wrote something about Harvey Pekar to the list, he sent me a copy of an interesting article on Harvey that he had written and put me in touch with Paul, another fan.

Paul Buhle

Harvey Pekar’s approach to SDS is an unlikely but altogether compelling mixture of “American Splendor” and Paul Buhle’s radical history, a perfect marriage of art and scholarship. If you are going to tell the story of SDS, you are naturally going to have to bring together personal human drama and the overarching struggles of the period.

Some of the stories involve people who eventually left SDS and joined the Trotskyist movement, where I first came in contact with them. Two are now highly regarded scholars of the left, Alan Wald, the literary critic who acknowledges Paul Buhle as a primary influence, and Paul LeBlanc, who–like Paul–is a CLR James scholar. I should add that CLR James, who had a life-long interest in popular culture, is an important figure for people like LeBlanc and me who went through the painful sectarian experience of American Trotskyism and seek a more nuanced kind of Marxism today.

Alan Wald’s story is of particular interest since it situated in Cleveland, Harvey’s home town:

When I read this story, a flood of associations came to the surface like the madeleine in Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past”. Just 4 years later Alan and Cecilia Wald (they had since married) found themselves on the opposite side from me in a bitter faction fight in the Socialist Workers Party. They were in something called For a Proletarian Orientation (FAPO) that was viewed as a concession to the PLP Worker-Student Alliance in SDS. As the name implied, it urged that the SWP send some members into the trade unions.

Up in Boston, FAPO had many supporters. I was asked to move up there in early 1970 to work with Peter Camejo, who had been assigned to do combat with FAPO. Peter, like the majority of SWP leaders, thought that the real action was on campus and sought to keep young Trotskyists in Boston on campus. One of the FAPO supporters was a Harvard student named John Barzman, the son of Hollywood blacklistees Ben and Norma Barzman (Norma was interviewed in Paul Buhle’s “Tender Comrades”). John had taken a job as a hospital worker alongside SDS’ers, who disdained the antiwar movement as “petty bourgeois”.

Peter Camejo, who is now battling lymphoma and working on a memoir that he hopes he can finish before fate gets in the way, asked me to prepare a contribution to the debate with FAPO on the Cochranites, a group that had been expelled from the SWP in the 1950s. Led by Bert Cochran, an organizer in the UAW in the 1930s, and Harry Braverman, the author of “Labor and Monopoly Capital”, this tendency sought to root Marxism in the American rather than the Russian experience and break with sectarianism–just like CLR James and Paul Buhle.

But for the SWP leadership in 1970, the Cochranites were a symbol of capitulation to capitalism. By downplaying the need for a vanguard party and urging the need for broad unity on the left, the Cochranites were supposed to be a symbol of how petty-bourgeois tendencies can afflict even auto workers, who in this case were supposedly being bought off by the 1950s economic boom. I made all these points in my report to the Boston branch, but never really thought that much about what the Cochranites really stood for.

Suffice it to say that both Peter Camejo and I came around to seeing things in the same terms as the Cochranites. For the past 27 years, a much longer time than I ever spent in the Trotskyist movement, I have been advocating the need for Marxism to be rooted in the American experience and to shun sectarianism. While the SDS of the 1960s imploded–largely as a result of the enormous frustrations of trying to end a seemingly endless war–there are many lessons that can be learned from Pekar, Dumm and Buhle’s graphic history.

SDS was a grass roots phenomenon that sought to build a movement from the bottom up. Despite the enormous media attention that figures such as Mark Rudd received, SDS was fundamentally a movement that was built from the initiative of young people acting on their own. There will obviously always be a need for such an organization as the rapid growth of the new SDS would indicate. Let’s hope that the young radicals of today can withstand the enormous pressures that a new seemingly endless war will generate. So far, the picture looks pretty good. Today’s SDS is militant but not self-destructive. Hopefully, its members and young activists in general will read this book to get a better grasp of the problems a previous generation tried to grapple with.

I want to conclude with some brief impressions of Harvey Pekar, who alongside Charles Bukowski, remains one of my favorite cultural icons. Although I didn’t have that much time to chat with him, we did manage to cover some topics that are very important to us. Paul had already mentioned to Harvey that I was interested in Jewish popular culture and he wanted to find out a bit about my experiences growing up in the Catskills.

I told him about how Murder Incorporated, a gang of Jewish hit-men led by Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, used to throw their victims in nearby Loch Sheldrake. I told him about all the famous comedians who used to work at local hotels, including Sid Caesar–a vegetarian–who used to buy vegetables from my father’s store. I studied piano briefly with the sister of the man who owned the Avon Lodge, where Sid got his start. She was just one of dozens of Communists in my little village that had been driven out of New York City. She had copies of Soviet Life all around her little house. I told Harvey about delivering fruit and vegetables to Joseph Greenstein’s bungalow colony. Better known as “The Mighty Atom”, Greenstein was a strong man who grew his hair long like Samson and followed a vegetarian diet like Sid Caesar, a strong man in his own right. Harvey had been checking out the career of another famous Jewish strong man, a Pole named Hersche Steinschneider who was the subject of Werner Herzog’s “The Immortal.”

I was curious about Harvey’s father. He told me that he was a shopkeeper like my own father, but a bit older. If he were alive today, he’d be 102. (Harvey is 6 years older than me.) Born in Poland, Harvey’s father was a bit more old country than my own father, who was European in his own way. Deeply religious, Harvey’s father spent his free hours studying the Talmud. After he retired, he became completely devoted to religious studies and even began wearing a fedora.

Harvey’s mother was a communist. She was also quite short, 4′9″ to be exact. Harvey’s father, who was living as a bachelor in the U.S., hooked up with her on a trip back to the old country. Here’s how Harvey described his background and his interest in Jewish culture to ClevelandJewishNews.com:

 Pekar, whose picture adorns a wall in the new Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, admits he doesn’t stay in contact with Jewish institutions much anymore. He went to Hebrew school and had a bar mitzvah ceremony, but grew increasingly alienated from the organized community. “I didn’t show much interest,” admits Pekar about his Hebrew education. “In those days, they didn’t concentrate much on teaching what the (words) meant. Just reading what was there.”

Pekar’s father was a Talmudic scholar who loved cantorial music. His mother was a socialist who supported Progressive candidate Henry Wallace for President in 1948. Both parents had an impact on young Harvey’s views.

“I’m strongly influenced by Jewish culture, but I’m not a nationalist,” he says. “I’d like to see (Israel) make an agreement with the Arabs, get an independent Arab state over there. Maybe internationalize Jerusalem.”

Pekar says he used to speak Yiddish fluently, and characters in his comic books spend a lot of time kibitzing in Jewish delis. Pekar even worked in a deli for a time during his fallow period and occasionally refers to himself in his comics as a “Yid.”

“I got a strong dose of things Jewish,” he says.

Although Harvey comes across as somewhat overwrought in the movie “American Splendor” and in appearances on the David Letterman show, he seemed perfectly relaxed in the time he spent with me. I imagine that being retired and being able to write full-time must go a long way to overcoming a sense of futility that comes with working in a low-paying job in a veteran’s hospital. One hopes that he and Paul, who has also just retired, will have many fruitful years of writing projects ahead of them. Insallah, I will be joining them soon.

One of my favorite Harvey Pekar stories from “American Splendor” is about a bit of an argument that took place between him and his father when he still lived at home. As an avid jazz fan, Harvey’s tastes were not identical to his father’s who preferred Jewish cantorial music. In the story, we see his father playing a record of one of his favorite chazzans (cantors) in the final panel for Harvey, slapping the record cover and proclaiming, “Now that’s music.”

As it turns out, I am both a jazz fan and a fan of cantorial music. Towards the end of our conversation, I played a performance of “Rozo D’Shabbos” by Pierre Pinchik– a renowned chazzan–for Harvey. I can only agree with his father: “Now that’s music.”

Lenin’s Tomb on the crisis in RESPECT

Richard Seymour, aka “Lenin’s Tomb,” has Leninism all wrong

An article by Richard Seymour (aka, the blogger Lenin’s Tomb) has just shown up on MRZine, an online publication that is associated with Monthly Review. The article defends Seymour’s organization, the British SWP, against its rivals over who is to blame for the split in RESPECT, a promising leftwing alternative to Labour. Edited by Yoshie Furuhashi, MRZine is widely perceived as a vehicle for some of her ideas about the need to synthesize socialism and Islamic radicalism. Since one of the SWP’s main complaints about its rivals is “communalism,” in other words pandering to “notables” in the Islamic/immigrant communities in order to get votes Tammany Hall-style, an exception to the general editorial dynamic must have been made in this instance. If there is one thing that can be said about Islamist politics in the Arab world, it is that it is based on this kind of old-fashioned politicking.

Seymour informs his readers that the struggle commenced with a letter written by George Galloway:

The letter, a scattergun attack on various organisational problems in Respect, with the implicit target being leading SWP member and Respect National Secretary John Rees, was taken by the SWP as a manifestation of a developing left-right division in the organisation and an attack on the largest far left party in the coalition.

As one who has read the letter, I could find no such “left-right” division–even implicitly. You can read it at http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=726. Mostly it seems consumed with organizational problems, including fund-raising:

This is all but non-existent. We have stumbled from one financial crisis to another. And with the prospect of an early general election we are simply unable to challenge the major parties in our key constituencies. None of the Respect staff appears to have been tasked with either membership or fundraising responsibilities. Or if they have it isn’t working. There is a deep-seated culture of amateurism and irresponsibility on the question of money. Activities are not properly budgeted and even where budgets are set they are not adhered to. Take, for example, the Fighting Unions Conference which was full to the rafters but still managed to lose £5000. The intervention at Pride, where we gave away merchandise rather than sold it, lost £2000.

Perhaps the “left-right” division is based on Galloway’s annoyance with giving away merchandise, a bourgeois deviation to say the least. Any true socialist will understand that selling merchandise rather than giving it way is the road to perdition.

Seymour next informs his readers about the kind of Tammany Hall behavior that forced the SWP to uphold the banner of the proletariat:

On various occasions, notable members attempted to purchase memberships at concessionary rates for a number of people at the door, with the presumed intention of affecting votes on crucial matters. One such vote would be on the delegates for the national conference that has recently taken place — a technique refined by the mainstream parties and known as “pocket members”. In another, a handwritten list of delegates, including non-members of the branch (one nominated entirely because they worked George Galloway’s office) was presented out of the blue, 90 minutes into the meeting.

This is what those in the legal profession call hearsay evidence and is hardly worth commenting on. I should add that when I was in the American SWP a lifetime ago (no relationship to the British SWP other than their belief that they are the vanguard of the coming socialist revolution), we used to call this an “atrocity story”. Used by somebody properly trained in the fine arts of demagogy, it can be a powerful tool.

At a subsequent committee meeting, George Galloway MP arrived and denounced the SWP. He argued that they were “Leninists”, “Russian dolls” who had no business being in the leadership of Respect. The implication was that the party was an outside element, its membership composed of Manchurian Candidate-style foils, trying to control the Respect coalition, a claim that has since been made explicit, despite its patent absurdity.

Well, I don’t know about “Russian dolls”, but surely somebody who calls himself Lenin’s Tomb might not want to make a big stink about being called a Leninist. I guess the problem being called attention to here is red-baiting. My advice to Richard Seymour, and anybody else who belongs to a group like the SWP, is this. If you want to avoid these kinds of complaints, you have to dump the “democratic centralism” nonsense. My experience in the American SWP from 1967 to 1978 gives me a kind of perspective into these sorts of conflicts that might be helpful.

My group was always being charged in the same fashion. And, like Richard, we always attributed this to red-baiting. What we didn’t understand at the time was the natural animosity that arose when people in the mass movement figured out that we had our votes lined up in advance and it made no difference what arguments were raised in favor of alternative proposals. As “Leninists”, we understood that the revolutionary party worked out its line within its ranks (the central committee) and then fought for it in the mass movement. It simply made no fucking difference if we were proposing something daft. If a party member decided that it was daft and spoke out against it or acted against it in public, they would get the boot.

This, in fact, is what has happened to a number of long-time SWP members working in RESPECT, including Nick Wrack. When Wrack decided that Galloway’s proposals made sense and voted to support them, he was expelled.

This kind of trigger-finger on the expulsion button has nothing to do with the Bolshevik Party’s functioning. From its birth to the victory of the October 1917 revolution, there is only a single member who was expelled–namely Bogdanov. When members of the Bolshevik Party, including central committee members, broke discipline and spoke out against the seizure of power in October 1917, they were not expelled. It is only with the fetishization of Bolshevik “norms” in the 1920s that this kind of strict discipline became commonplace. It was understood as “Leninism” both by the CP’s and by the Trotskyist parties, including subvariants of Trotskyism such as the British SWP.

Recent scholarship, most especially as found in Lars T. Lih’s “Lenin Rediscovered”, puts democratic centralism into some kind of context. If the British SWP or any other group swearing allegiance to Leninist principles went back and took a closer look at how the Bolsheviks operated with an unbiased eye, they would understand that they have very little in common. And as long as they adhere to bogus notions of “democratic centralism,” which essentially means accepting the discipline of the party rather than the mass movement, then they will continue to be regarded as manipulative, controlling, etc.

Richard continues:

To put it moderately, the SWP has always comprised a minority in both the membership of Respect and in its leadership positions and could therefore not possibly ‘control’ Respect.

This is really beside the point. The American SWP was also a minority in the coalitions and activist organizations of the mass movement. We were not interested in “capturing” ourselves. But a well-organized minority (we called ourselves the big red machine) could always push through its agenda through dint of effort. And when we couldn’t, we could always walk away as the British SWP did with respect to RESPECT.

It is of some interest what Richard has to say about members of the International Socialists Group, who have sided with Galloway:

The retort has been that many socialists in the organisation, such as the ISG, support George Galloway’s position, and therefore it could not be an attack on the socialist left. If you take this argument seriously, then it follows that there was no left-right split over the war on Iraq, since a number of people who place themselves on the Left supported it.

To start with, this is a perfectly silly argument. Just because Norm Geras and Christopher Hitchens “place themselves on the left”, there is no reason to accept that they are leftists. As is generally the case on the left, imperialist war is an acid test. If you back imperialist war, you suffer the consequences of being excluded from the left no matter how many times the Euston Manifesto describes itself as upholding the True Leftist banner.

It is of some interest that the ISG has a position that is much closer to Lars Lih and others (including myself) on the “Leninism” question. Murray Smith, who was one of the best known members of the ISG (he apparently is working with the LCR in France right now) has been involved in an ongoing debate on “democratic centralism” in the pages of Links, the theoretical magazine of the Democratic Socialist Party in Australia, a group that shares the British SWP’s misconceptions. Although the proximate cause of Smith’s article in issue 26 is to stake out a reasonable middle ground between the DSP and yours truly, who he describes as “mistaken”, I find much of what Smith writes to be highly commendable, including this:

The entire history of the RSDLP, and of the Bolshevik faction and then party, was marked by often sharp debates. Practically all of them were public. Why was that? In the first place, public debate is not necessarily contradictory with democratic centralism. Properly understood, democratic centralism is a means to achieve unity in action around decisions taken after democratic debate. What it is not is an attempt to impose ideological uniformity.

Although it would surely defy the most deeply held convictions of the British SWP, they would be acting more “Leninist” if they would have allowed a Nick Wrack to argue against John Rees openly. Furthermore, if a genuinely mass revolutionary party ever evolves in Britain, it will be marked by this kind of open debate. This is not to say that deeply mistaken and self-limiting propaganda groups like the SWP cannot play a useful role, for without them many thousands of young workers and students would be robbed of the opportunity of hearing a socialist analysis.

The rest of Richard’s article consists of “he said this,” “she did that” type atrocity tales that are hardly worth commenting on. I generally find Lenin’s Tomb a most bracing and perceptive source of Marxist analysis, but on the RESPECT affair, it is entirely wrong-headed and as a more serious offense quite boring.

Can Marxism offer anything to Arabs and Muslims?

Political Alternatives:

                Osama Bin Laden                                                        Amilcar Cabral

An article by Sukant Chandan titled “Secularism and Islam in the Arab World” appeared originally on the Conflicts Forum website and has been posted to MRZine as well.

The only conclusion that one can draw after reading it is that Marxism has little future in the Arab and Muslim world. This is a rather odd outlook for socialists, but not that surprising given the growing pressure on our movement to adapt to a seemingly far more powerful force. With the end of the Cold War, most of the ferocity of the imperialist ruling class is directed against political Islam. That being the case, perhaps it makes sense to hitch our wagon to a movement that has the power to keep our enemies awake at night. I am far from convinced that this a useful approach for socialists, however.

Chandan begins with a reference to Saladin:

Salahuddin al-Ayoub, more popularly known as Saladin, who liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders in the twelfth century is probably the Islamic leader most widely known outside of the region. Saladin’s legacy remains a profound source of inspiration for Arabs, especially so for radical Islamists who not only see the parallels with today’s military invasions and occupations, but directly employ this history in their political agitation in their fight against what they consider as the modern-day Crusaders.

Perhaps it is only of interest to pedants, but when Saladin overthrew the Shiite rulers of Egypt and instituted Sunni rule, that act lived in infamy for Shiites throughout history. The August 3^rd 2006 International Herald Tribune reports:

Extremist Sunnis like Al Qaeda have tried to portray their struggle as parallel with Hezbollah’s. But underneath the flood of support some Sunnis worry that their supremacy is threatened for the first time since a Shiite dynasty ruled a large swath of the region between the 10th and 12th centuries, including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Saladin, the commander who captured Jerusalem from the Crusaders, overthrew the dynasty. Hence Shiites revile him and avoid comparing [Hezbollah leader] Nasrallah to him.

In other words, the idiotic divide that allows US imperialism to play one Moslem sect against another in Iraq has been around for over 7 centuries. I am not one to offend religious sensibilities, but it seems far more important to throw out the imperialists and allow Iraqi working people to enjoy the wealth that nature has provided them than kill each other over the question of who should have succeeded Mohammad. The political philosophy that would allow working people to unite with each other against their class enemy still seems worth pursuing even if political Islam looks like a winner in the war of contending ideologies.

In characterizing non-Islamic political theory as an “outside” influence, Chandan reminds me of some Black nationalists in the 1960s who dismissed Marxism as a “white” and “European” ideology. I am dismayed to see this recycled in defense of political Islam:

While one can trace back the influences on modern Islamism from the region’s own history, making it an integral part of the political identity of the people and their struggles, in contrast it was the cultural and political influences from outside of the region in Europe that influenced modern secular Arab Nationalism. The founding father of modern secular Arab Nationalism was Syrian Sati al-Husri, who was inspired by French republicanism and nineteenth century German nationalism. Arab Nationalism became the ascendant political force in the post Second World War period.

Of course, this is a rather narrow understanding of Islam. It neglects the importance that Islam placed on Western texts in a period when Europe was in the “dark ages”. Under Moorish control, southern Spain was noted for the respect it paid to classical Greek philosophy. The books of Aristotle were studied by Islamic (and Jewish scholars), including Rabbi Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) and Muslim Judge Ibn Rushd (1126 - 1198); who both lived in Cordoba, Spain. Cordoba had 70 libraries, one of them with over 40,000 volumes; the two largest libraries in non-Arab Europe each had only 2,000 volumes. Thomas Aquinas used the writings and comments of Aristotle (”the philosopher”), Albert, Maimonides (”the Rabbi”) and Ibn Rushd (”the commentator”) and many others. Cross-fertilization between Islamic and non-Islamic thinkers was rife in this period and is a more useful example for us today than resentment of “outside” influences put in an improbably positive light by Sukant Chandan.

Continuing with his historical survey and hurdling forward to the mid 1950s, Chandan portrays the FLN in Algeria as “an Islamist nationalist movement as much as one inspired by the ideas of Fanon, Mao, and Che Guevara, although the Islamist current was purged shortly after independence.” I am not so sure that this particular purging of Islamists is of much interest to those of us who are trying to figure out how to change the world. The real purge that matters involved Ben Bella, who was an obstacle to a section of the FLN that sought to consolidate capitalist property relations under a radical façade. As this current took Algeria further and further away from its revolutionary roots, an Islamic revolt developed that was never able to provide an alternative to the new bourgeoisie. For those who are so enthralled with political Islam, a review of recent Algerian history would be in order.

The Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), which had initially been aligned with Ben Bella, won the elections in 1990 whereupon the army instituted a dictatorship. The FIS responded with a terrorist campaign that reflected the anger of the masses but that was ineffective politically. In January 28^th 1994, Robert Fisk reported on the type of struggle that FIS was conducting:

How else, secular Algerians might ask, can an Islamic revolution and civil war be averted after 30 years of largely socialist and equally corrupt government? Yet the families of security force personnel - and in some cases the officers themselves - have already been forced to retreat into government compounds each night for their own protection. And despite wholesale battles with the ‘Islamists’, the Algerian army and paramilitary police have been unable to reduce the number of victims cut down so savagely each day.

The word ”cut” is all too accurate. Many of those assassinated by the ”Islamists” are dispatched with knives, left on rubbish heaps or roadsides with their heads almost severed from their bodies. Five nights ago, a 24-year-old unemployed man in the village of Kasr el-Boukhari was decapitated and his head left on the steps of a disused cinema. ”An example,” his murderers said in a leaflet pasted on village walls, ”to all those who violate the morality of Islam.” On the eve of this week’s conference, a policeman was stabbed to death in front of a group of children in Anaba. On the night the conference ended, ”Islamists” assassinated six civilians in Djidjel province, one of them Ferhat Chibout, a professor of history, who was shot in front of his parents, his wife and two children.

As usual, the outside world has cared more about foreign than domestic victims of the war, a fact shrewdly grasped by the Muslim activists. Their promise to kill all citizens of ”Crusader states” culminated two weeks ago in the 26th murder of a Westerner in Algeria, a French consular official whose death led at once to the temporary suspension of all visas to France. Monique Afri’s murder was followed by the killing of Raymond Louzoum, 62, a Tunisian-born Jew who had been living in Algiers for 30 years. An optician who had married a Muslim woman and was seeking Algerian citizenship, he played French officers in a series of films about the Algerian independence war. Two bullets were fired into Louzoum’s head in Didouche Mourad street in central Algiers.

Needless to say, such tactics were less than effective in rallying the entire population against the corrupt FLN elites and the army that protected its class interests. It would have been far better if the FIS had a more adroit and more class-based approach to politics, but that was not likely to be found in Islamic religious texts. Of course, between the army and the FIS, progressives would support the Islamists. Trotsky never had any problem making such choices in Brazil or Ethiopia, but that does not oblige us to prettify Vargas or Haile Selassie. Moreover, the bigger task facing us is the construction of Marxist parties everywhere that can apply a scalpel to the class struggle rather than the crude ax blows of terrorism, just as was the case in Russia in the early 1900s. Some things never change.

Chandan also hails al Qaeda in terms that display a certain indifference to what Marxists call strategy and tactics:

In an ironic twist of history it was the Western and Chinese-supported Afghan mujahideen who fought against the Soviet army and pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan that gave further impetus to the development of modern militant Islamism which was soon to become a powerful force against neo-colonialism in the region. The Afghan jihad allowed militants to overcome the rivalry among militants that existed along national and ethnic lines. Overcoming these divisions and forging Pan-Arab and Pan-Islamist unity were some of the main strategies of Bin Laden and Zawahiri in the construction of their organization that was to become the violent “World Islamic Front for Jihad against Crusaders and Jews” or commonly known as Al-Qaeda, meaning “The Base,” formed in 1998. Initially for Bin Laden, Zawahiri, and others, Afghanistan was the base for international jihad, today it is mainly Iraq.

If Bin Laden and Zawahiri are supposed to be about overcoming “rivalry” and “divisions” in the Arab and Islamist world, they are certainly not doing a very good job of it in Iraq. The “jihadist” groups in Iraq that appear to be most strongly influenced by al Qaeda have antagonized Iraqi Sunni villagers to such an extent that they have opted to join forces with the US military. By imposing Wahhabi values on a resentful population, they follow the FIS and the Taliban’s examples of religious transformation from above. For a movement to genuinely challenge imperialism, it has to learn to draw in all sectors in a united struggle as the National Liberation Front in Vietnam did. That, of course, is one of the major differences between Iraq and Vietnam, the very absence of something like the NLF with its “secular” ideology imported from Europe. One would only hope that the people of the Middle East would be open to such imports, which are far more useful than Coca Cola or Mercedes Benz.

To some extent, the allure of political Islam for Chandan has much more to do with muscle than brainpower:

Today one sees the shift from secular nationalism to Islamism nearing the final stages of completion. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad writing for The Guardian on June 12th from Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon vividly described this transition, contrasting the “ailing, ill-equipped and ill-fed fighters of the old secular factions” and “muscular, bearded and well-equipped jihadis” funded through the network of Islamist organizations that spans the Middle East, and describing the migration of Palestinian radicals, both young and middle-aged, from the former Marxist camp to the Islamist.

One hardly knows how to react to this. I am reminded Reagan-era election campaign propaganda, when the wood-chopping ex-actor was always portrayed as being more muscular and more virile than the likes of Walter Mondale.

Chandan has little to say about Marxist groups in the article and is content to draw distinctions between a collapsing left nationalist/secularist current versus vibrant, bearded and muscular Islamists. When Marxists do enter the picture, they appear to be driven more by market opportunities than principles:

As one Marxist in his 50s told Abdul-Ahad, “I have never lost my political compass. Wherever the Americans and the Israelis are, I am on the other side. So if Hizbullah and the Iranians and the Islamists are against the Americans now, so I am an Islamist.” Highlighting the continuities between armed secular groups of bygone times and armed Islamist groups of today, a PFLP leader explains to Abdul-Ahad that “most of those jihadis were once fighters with us and other Palestinian factions . . . if you come to me and give me $100,000, I will split from the PFLP and form the PFLP: Believers’ Army. It’s so easy.”

I guess if you can switch affiliations for such a small price, then one wonders how deeply rooted the Marxist convictions of the PFLP were. As is the case with most Palestinian guerrilla groups, the emphasis has been on bold actions such as skyjackings. Emerging in the 1980s as the Mideast equivalent of groups operating in Argentina, the sole criterion to measure success was the amount of press coverage garnered by a political/military operation. When this strategy failed to produce the desired result–the overthrow of the Zionist state–some groups moved in an opportunist direction–symbolized by the Oslo Accords.

Unfortunately, the Arab resistance oscillates between “exemplary” actions and back door negotiations with the imperialists. Even Hamas, despite the reverential attitude of Chandan’s article, is not above cutting deals according to Palestinian journalist Ali Abunimah: “Hamas tried to enter mainstream politics through the front door - explicitly modelling its policies on those of the IRA in the context of the Irish peace process.” Of course, even if Hamas was interested in following the example of Sinn Fein, the Israelis would remain unresponsive. While I am not in the business of making recommendations to revolutionaries in other countries, I would not be above urging them to become grounded in Marxism. Many of these questions (terrorism, alliances with bourgeois nationalists, etc.) have been subjected to deep analysis in our movement and much can be learned from the likes of Amilcar Cabral, et al.–certainly much more so than reading religious tracts I am sure.

I have tried to explain the rise of political Islam as a function of the collapse of the USSR, which created a political vacuum. Even if the PLO, to take one example, was an ineffective political force, it did at least have the clout of the USSR behind it. With the disappearance of the USSR, world politics has reverted to the 19^th century when the British Empire faced down colonial revolts on a regular basis. From the Sepoy to the Taipei Rebellion, the inspiration was a mixture of nationalism and religion–just as is the case today. After the triumph of the Russian Revolution, nationalism became combined with Marxism even if it was a Marxism that was burdened by the Stalinist impulse to subordinate the working class to the national bourgeoisie.

In effect, the clock has been turned back to the 1800s. While one should never take the side of the Empire against those struggling to become free, it would be most unfortunate if we decided to jettison the need for Marxist theory. In an address titled “The Weapon of Theory” given to the first Tricontinental Conference in Havana in 1966, Amilcar Cabral noted:

The ideological deficiency, not to say the total lack of ideology, within the national liberation movements — which is basically due to ignorance of the historical reality which these movements claim to transform — constitutes one of the greatest weaknesses of our struggle against imperialism, if not the greatest weakness of all. We believe, however, that a sufficient number of different experiences have already been accumulated to enable us to define a general line of thought and action with the aim of eliminating this deficiency. A full discussion of this subject could be useful, and would enable this conference to make a valuable contribution towards strengthening the present and future actions of the national liberation movements. This would be a concrete way of helping these movements, and in our opinion no less important than political support or financial assistance for arms and suchlike.

This seems to be a basis for moving forward today, no matter how daunting the task. For without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.

Hugo Chavez and the Venezuelan Revolution, conclusion

After reading and reviewing Richard Gott and Michael Lebowitz on Venezuela, it is time for me to make my own modest contribution to understanding the unfolding revolution. I do not claim to be an expert on Venezuela, but after 40 years of writing about and trying to make a socialist revolution, I do feel qualified to speak about connections between the two.

To start with, I would argue that Venezuela marks the first significant step forward for the revolutionary movement in a period that has been marked by retreat since 1990. That year, the FSLN was voted out of office in Nicaragua–a consequence no doubt of the unwillingness of the USSR to offer strong support for a budding socialist society. Within a year or two, the Soviet Union would give up on socialism altogether. This led to a sense of futility among the Sandinistas and a willingness to adapt to global capitalism. FSLN leader Victor Tirado wrote an article declaring “the end of the cycle of anti-imperialist revolutions.”

Shortly on the heels of the FSLN defeat, the ANC and the Workers Party in Brazil also decided that there was no alternative to capitalism (TINA) even though they never quite put it in so many words. Of course, within a decade both Lula and Thabo Mbeki would have no such problems saying such a thing.

After being put on the defensive for 15 years, there is finally a government that is willing to stand up to the imperialists and to press forward with radical structural reforms. Ironically, this government is a product of a social explosion that took place in 1989, just a year before the long retreat would begin. History has a way of moving in contradictory directions, as Karl Marx observed in the Eighteenth Brumaire:

But the revolution is thoroughgoing. It is still traveling through purgatory. It does its work methodically. By December 2, 1851, it had completed half of its preparatory work; now it is completing the other half. It first completed the parliamentary power in order to be able to overthrow it. Now that it has achieved this, it completes the executive power, reduces it to its purest expression, isolates it, sets it up against itself as the sole target, in order to concentrate all its forces of destruction against it. And when it has accomplished this second half of its preliminary work, Europe will leap from its seat and exult: Well burrowed, old mole! [A paraphrase from Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5: "Well said, old mole!"]

If Hugo Chavez and his comrades make no other contribution to the working class movement than to reverse the long reactionary slide, then we must tip our hats to them.

Of course, some leftists–the dreamers of the absolute–will not be happy unless communism arrived in Venezuela tomorrow. Since it is obvious that Hugo Chavez is not a Lula, his ultraleft critics have to carry out a delicate task of triangulation. They must offer some solidarity with the “process”, but remind their readers that Chavez must ultimately be swept away. In “Bolivanarchism: The Venezuela Question in Our Movement,” Nachie advises his fellow anarchists:

As for the question of Chavez himself; while even an anarchist does not have to be familiar with the rhetoric of the “lesser of two evils” to realize that he could potentially be a progressive force in the country, we also have to look no further than his reception at recent World Social Forums to see the very real dangers of a dictatorial personality cult (growth in the popularity of the “Chavista” red beret certainly doesn’t help). What interests us most is the extent to which Chavez will allow himself to become obsolete. That is, will his projects of self-management and self-reliance in specific communities and the country as a whole transcend the need for a figurehead? Will the Revolution be able to entrench itself so sufficiently in the nation’s culture and politics that it could continue without - or beyond - him? Has it already? One of the most interesting things about the aforementioned Citizen’s Reserve army is that is that in the event of another coup or Chavez’ assassination, it could serve as a vehicle through which to push the Revolution beyond the bourgeois/democratic boundaries that it has so far respected.

How generous of comrade Nachie. I am sure that Hugo Chavez will not have a troubled sleep after reading this, knowing that he is not 100 percent rotten–only 95 percent so.

The anarcho-Marxists of the State Capitalist tendency put things in pretty much the same way. In an article that appeared in the January 2007 issue of Socialist Worker, the newspaper of the British SWP, party leader Chris Harman acknowledged that “Chavez has moved to the left as he reacts to the feelings of the million or more people who have played the key role in these movements from below.” This probably represents a passing grade, a gentleman’s C, I suppose. But even if he has moved to the left, he is still incapable of going the whole hog:

But there are still limits to his radical actions.

Most of Venezuelan big business remains untouched – and Chavez insisted in a recent speech that there was still an important role for the “national bourgeoisie”.

Chavez’s moves are not going to stop the corruption and bureaucracy which affects not only the parties of the electoral coalition, but the non-elected hierarchies of the state machine.

The top ranks of the civil service remain stacked with people appointed under the corrupt pre-Chavez system. And the armed forces continue to be full of career officers who share the values of the Chavez-hating upper-middle class.

So what is the hope of the Venezuelan people? They rest on the shoulders of people like Orlando Chirinos, a Trotskyist leader of the UNT (the pro-government trade union) and Por Nuestras Luchas (”By Our Struggles”) that “is influenced by traditions of urban guerrillaism and autonomism and looks to organising the poor, the peasants and the indigenous groups.”

From Harman’s cautionary note about Chavez and the “national bourgeoisie,” one would think that the caudillo was working overtime to maintain private property. But as early as 2005, a good two years before the current deep turn of the revolution, Chavez was giving the green light to expropriations:

Venezuela’s government seized the assets of the country’s largest paper product plant Venepal yesterday, after bankruptcy was finally declared last December.

The troubled company stopped production in September, 2004 threatening to sell off the plant’s machinery to pay off creditors. Workers at the plant who had not been paid for three months, organized a national campaign to encourage the expropriation of the factory, which culminated in yesterday’s official announcement.

The nationalization of Venepal was accompanied by a US$6.7 million credit, necessary to restart production. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez signed the declaration to expropriate the factory after the National Assembly -with the support from opposition parties- declared Venepal to be of “public benefit and social interest” last Thursday – which is a legal prerequisite for expropriation.

While one might plausibly have an orientation to an Orlando Chirinos, who does at least have a working class base of support, one wonders what popped into the head of Chris Harman when he decided to promote Por Nuestras Luchas. This group, which is influenced by guerrilla warfare and autonomism, is the last thing that the Venezuelan people need on the face of it. I would go into more depth about this boneheaded recommendation, but since this group is so obscure, I could find no petard that they have hoisted themselves on to this point. It seems rather likely that they no longer exist. One would hope that if the British SWP comrades go casting about for groups whose reputations they seek to boost, they would be a bit more assiduous. After all, they don’t want to get hoodwinked like a lot of Trotskyists did with a spurious “left opposition” group in Ukraine some years back.

Fundamentally, the anarchists and the State Capitalists–despite their furious disagreements over the “Russian questions”–share an idealistic conception of how revolutions are made. I don’t mean “idealistic” in the sense that young people are dubbed idealistic when they join the boy scouts or girl scouts (although there is an element of that.) Instead I am referring to the belief that one must have “correct” ideas in one’s head and then go out to bend historical forces according to those ideas. This involves perfecting what Marxists call a “program”, which is really much more of a set of dogmatic ideas based on past history than anything else. If one lacks such a “program”, then one is doomed to failure.

I would argue that the revolutionary program can never be worked out in advance, but must arise out of the class struggle through the constant interaction between thought and action, which is constantly bumping into the harsh but necessary classroom experience afforded by the class struggle. To believe that a revolutionary party (or nucleus of a party) can exist outside and prior to the unfolding revolutionary movement is an idealist error. It is analogous in some way to the statement once made by an individual that he had plans to become a capitalist as soon as he put together $100 million. In reality, the act of putting together that much money and becoming a capitalist are identical. By the same token, one can only develop a revolutionary party with a correct revolutionary program in the act of making a revolution. Whatever flaws they have exhibited along the way, the independent Marxist cadres of the Venezuelan revolution who have emerged out of the experience of groups like Causa R and the MAS have much more in common with what Lenin was trying to do than all of the self-proclaimed Trotskyist vanguards.

I want to conclude with some thoughts on the question of “21^st century socialism”. Although I agree that the USSR was a nightmare, it would be a mistake to think that a postcapitalist society (I hesitate to use the word “socialism” for the same reason that Trotsky did when he described the USSR as being in transition between capitalism and socialism) can be launched on foundations other than those of October 1917. Although I am a solid supporter of the Venezuelan government, I believe that qualitative changes are necessary before genuine socialism can come into existence. In some ways, the sectarian left is not wrong to point out that the state is hobbled by the “corruption” and “bureaucracy” that Harman referred to. Sooner or later, that sort of thing will have to be rooted out like a cancerous growth.

For obvious reasons, the Venezuelan revolutionary movement has to proceed cautiously. Unlike Cuba in 1959, Venezuela cannot rely on a powerful socialist government for trade and subsidies. It has to play with the cards that it has been dealt by history. Considering the success of Hugo Chavez and his comrades to this point, we might say that he is one of the sharpest card players in the history of our movement whose shoulder we should look over, rather than kibbitzing that he is some kind of Kerensky to be thrown into the ashcan of history.