Mu

Mu

Thursday, March 31, 2011

SB5


By Staff

Columbus, OH - Around 700 workers, students and community activists poured into and around the statehouse here yesterday, including 200 who were admitted to the House gallery to witness the passage of Senate Bill 5.

Senate Bill 5 is a blatant attempt by Republican Governor John Kasich and the Republican controlled Ohio legislature to break the back of unions while lying to the public about “budget difficulties.” This same governor and his cronies in the state government have also been pushing to eliminate Ohio’s estate tax, which taxes property inherited by the relatives of the very rich. It’s clear that this bill, along with other similar bills in other states, is a coordinated attack on the working class in America and has nothing to do with budget problems.

The bill passed the house by a vote of 53-44 with minor changes from the Senate version of the bill. The Senate passed the House version by a vote of 17 to 16. The passage of Senate Bill 5 was met with loud opposition by the workers and trade unionists who were in attendance at the statehouse. Many opponents of the bill were forcibly removed from the gallery as they sang We Shall Not Be Moved and shouted “Repeal it!” and “Ohio hates you.”

The union busting bill eliminates all collective bargaining rights for public employees employed by the state and state agencies, including corrections officers, state troopers and college professors, among others. City and county employees will have bargaining rights severely restricted. Among the many attacks on workers’ rights, SB-5 makes it so public workers will no longer able to bargain over healthcare benefits or pension contributions. Public employers are not allowed to pay more than 80% of the costs for health care benefits. Teachers’ unions have been stripped of their power to negotiate over layoff procedures, teacher salaries, teacher placement and classroom sizes, with those decisions now being decided solely by superintendents.

Furthermore, public workers cannot agree to contracts in which seniority is considered as a factor when determining layoffs. Public employers “last best offers” will now be considered the default “agreement” whenever a labor contract is in dispute. The bill rigs labor negotiations so that the final decisions made about contracts are left in the hands of politically motivated elected officials, instead of arbitration. Public employers have also been given the power to unilaterally reopen labor contracts when they deem there to be a “fiscal emergency.” Finally, among other things, public workers are banned from striking and striking workers can be permanently replaced.

The bill is expected to be signed into law by Governor Kasich on March 31 and large demonstrations are expected. Workers, students, trade unionists and their allies are expected to push to put the law up for vote on the ballot in November.

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Tuesday, March 29, 2011

The "Great Debate" revisited

Isaac Deutscher

Deutscher on the Chinese “Cultural Revolution”


First Published: September 1966
Interview conducted by:
Ernest Tate on behalf of the editorial board of the Italian left-communist journal, La Sinistra.
Transcribed:
Martin Falgren
Online Version:
Marxist Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2011
HTML Markup:
D. Walters, 2011


Question: Many political commentators now speak about the imminence of a “direct clash” between People’s China and the United States. In support of their thesis they show the recent declaration of the Chinese on the Vietnam question. What do you think about this?

Answer: I don’t believe at all that China can contemplate a war against the United States. In other words, I am ruling out the possibility that China should harbour any “aggressive plans”. Whether China and the United States clash eventually or not depends solely on the United States. But the Chinese do reckon with the possibility of an American attack on them; and some of the recent developments in China must be seen in this light. I think that Mao Tse-tung and Lin-Piao are working on the assumption that an American attack is possible or even probable, and that it is the duty of the Chinese government to prepare for this emergency.

This has been a very important factor behind the recent political crisis and the so-called “cultural revolution”. The talk about China’s aggressiveness vis-á-vis the United States, or vis-á-vis the West at large, is empty; it is part of the anti-communist and anti-Chinese propaganda. Unfortunately, Soviet and Titoist sources and also the Western European Communist Party have sinned in this respect, sinned quite disgracefully, by lending a semblance of verisimilitude to this anti-Chinese propaganda.

Some of the Chinese accusations against the Soviet leaders and the leaders of the Western Communist parties are, on this point, justified, as is also the Chinese resentment at the total withdrawal of Soviet aid from China, the diplomatic line-up between the Russians and the Indians and other Soviet moves. I also think that much of what the Chinese say about the opportunistic character of the Russian influence on the international Communist movement is justified. I am saying this because in my subsequent remarks I shall have quite a few critical things to say about the latest events in China and I want to put my criticisms in the right context.

To go back to the question of China’s preparation for the emergency of a possible American attack, it seems quite clear that the Chinese Government, Mao Tse-tung and his present supporters, are thinking in terms of fighting alone against the United States. They assume, in other words, that the Soviet Union will fail them and, in the case of an American attack, will not honour its obligations under the Russo-Chinese alliance. On this assumption, the Chinese would have to face the whole overwhelming technological superiority of the United States, and they would have to frame their military doctrine accordingly. They seem to be starting from the premiss that fighting alone they cannot expect to win in a regular war against the United States, a war such as the Soviet Union fought against Germany between 1941 and 1945, but that they have every chance of resisting and frustrating any American invasion by means of a nationwide guerrilla warfare.

Question: What about nuclear attack?

Answer: Precisely because of American nuclear superiority the Chinese, who cannot dream of nuclear retaliation, must stake everything on decentralised partisan warfare, which cannot be disrupted or paralysed even by nuclear blows.

I would not undertake to judge, of course, the military prospects of a nuclear war. No one is capable of assessing these. We don’t really know to what extent nuclear war would put an end to all strategy, to all our accustomed military thinking. But it is understandable that the Chinese, considering as they are, the threat of an American attack, are inclined to rely on a method of fighting which, if any method at all can be effective, would give them a chance to counterbalance the American technological superiority by their own indubitable moral-political superiority.

This is, after all, what has happened — not so far in conditions of nuclear war — in Vietnam, where American superiority in weapons is being neutralised by the moral and political superiority of the Viet Cong and of the National Front of Liberation. The Chinese imagine any armed conflict between themselves and America to develop on this pattern, as a kind of Vietnamese war on a gigantic scale, a war in which the disadvantages for the United States would grow in geometrical progression, whereas the Chinese, if only they can hold out under the attack, will benefit from fighting with all the resources of their manpower and their morale, from their feeling that they are fighting in a good cause, a sacred cause, in defence of their country and their revolution. They still rely on their tradition of partisan warfare: prior to 1949 Mao’s armies had held out, for nearly a quarter of a century, against the superior forces of Chiang Kai-shek, of the Japanese and, in the last resort, of the Americans as well.

They held out by means of a special organisation of their armed forces and of the areas they controlled during the so-called Yenan Period. The essence of their method consisted in an extraordinarily close, intimate political relationship between their partisan troops and the peasant population of their areas, and, further, in an effective decentralisation of their armed forces and administrative units, so that every unit was in a position to carry on the struggle even while it was cut off from the centre.

They also managed to achieve a close combination of fighting and productive units. What is going on in China now can be described as a conversion of the whole of China to something like the Yenan regime. In the Yenan period the Maoist army controlled a limited territory with a population of 90 or 100 million people. Now they are converting to a comparable regime a nation of 700 million.

They have probably been working on this conversion ever since 1959, when they found themselves under Krushchev’s political attack, and especially since 1960, when Krushchev ruthlessly withdrew all Soviet aid from them. From that moment they began working on the assumption that they could not count on the Soviet alliance in case of war. Until then, until the break with Moscow, China’s armed forces were organised more or less on the Soviet pattern, that is, as a modern army, hoping to benefit from the technological resources of the Soviet Union and to develop its own modern weaponry within not too long a time. Since the break with the Soviet Union, they have turned to a different policy, a policy which is to some extent reconciled with China’s inability to catch up technologically with the probable enemy, the United States, within any foreseeable future. Even the fact that the Chinese have now exploded three nuclear weapons emphasises the tremendous lag.

But this assumption is complemented by another one, namely, that the United States cannot match the moral and political power of China either.

Question: Mr. Deutscher, do you consider it correct for the Chinese to exclude from their strategy. eventual Soviet aid in the struggle against Imperialism? In your opinion, is it correct for them to assume their isolation, to struggle alone — not to involve — and not to have as part of their strategy the involvement of the Soviet Union in common struggle against Imperialism?

Answer: While I recognise that the possibility that the Soviet Union may fail China as an ally must, of course, be present in Chinese minds, I am inclined to take the view that this may be too pessimistic an attitude, which leads the Chinese to reconcile themselves with the possibility of the worst perhaps too soon.

It seems to me that no Soviet Government can really afford, in case of an American war against China, to fail the Chinese as an ally; and that a Soviet Government that would not honour its Treaty obligations towards China would, in all probability, be quickly overthrown by its own opponents in Moscow. But evidently the Chinese do not want to rely on this. The rise of Marshal Lin Piao, who has now become Mao Tse-tung’s second-in-command, is significant in this respect — Lin Piao has represented the policy that aims at training, educating, and organising China’s armed forces on the Yenan model, as a nationwide partisan force rather than as a regular army organised on the Soviet pattern.

It was as part of this policy, and, one is told, on Lin Piao’s initiative, that the abolition of ranks in the Chinese army was carried out some time ago. The abolition of ranks had political as well as military implications — it amounted to a rejection of the entire hierarchical structure of the armed forces, which they had borrowed from Russia, and to a revival of the type of partisan army which had fought and triumphed in the Chinese Revolution.

I have said that the Chinese no longer count on the Soviet alliance. In truth they no longer make any serious appeal to Soviet opinion, any appeal aiming at an improvement in Russo-Chinese relations that would give new life to the alliance. In this, I think, they are mistaken. At the latest session of the Cultural Committee, held in Peking between the 1st and the 12th of August, Mao Tse-tung stated with absolute finality that there cannot be any united front between China and Russia either over the war in Vietnam or in any action directed against American imperialism. He denounced the Russians as “revisionist stooges and helpmeets of American imperialism”. He charged the Soviet leaders with the ambition to establish a Soviet-American world condominium, designed to keep down and suppress revolution and anti-imperialist struggles in Asia and Africa. With such people, Mao said — and this is now embodied in the official resolutions of the Chinese Central Committee — there can be no united front against American imperialism. I am convinced that this Chinese view of the Soviet

Union’s role in the world, and of the class character of the relationships between the Soviet Union and the U.S.A., is profoundly mistaken.

To be sure, the Soviet bureaucracy and diplomacy have gone out of their way to achieve a so-called amicable accommodation with the American ruling class, with Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, and even with the Johnson Administration. In their striving for the “peaceful co-existence” with American imperialism the Soviet leaders have behaved in a most opportunistic manner and have shown themselves again and again ready to sacrifice the interests of revolution and of the oppressed peoples of the world.

Nevertheless, there are certain limits to this policy. There are certain limits within which they can be relatively successful in pursuing this policy and beyond which they cannot go. We can see this from the indubitable fact that whatever the Soviet leaders may think and whatever their intentions may be, the hostilities in Vietnam have brought back a tension in Soviet-American relations that seemed to be vanishing before the Vietnamese war. The class antagonism between the Soviet Union and the U.S.A. is still there, undiminished, even if the cold war has been somewhat mitigated during spells of detente.

The Soviet Union is still the only great power, apart from China, whose economy is publicly owned; and no matter what reactionary developments there may be inside the Soviet Union, this fact keeps in being the gulf between the Soviet Union and America. It also creates the objective possibility, and the objective need, for a common front between Russia and China whether over Vietnam or other issues. The logic of their negative attitude towards a common front drives the Chinese to declare that the class antagonism between the Soviet Union and the United States has vanished, and to speak of the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union. To anyone who observes the Soviet Union coolheadedly and analyses its social structure with a modicum of realism, this is an absurd contention.

The Soviet Union is very far from any restoration of capitalism, despite the fact that its bureaucracy is privileged and that social inequality prevails there. But even this inequality was much stronger during the Stalin era than it is now; yet the Chinese don’t say that Stalinism brought about the restoration of capitalism — on the contrary, they defend the record of Stalinism! Here is their double and fundamental mistake.

Let me repeat: I hold that many of the accusations they level against the Russians and their criticisms of Russian opportunism in dealing with the Western powers are justified; but, as Lenin liked to say, no one discredits a good cause as badly as he who tries to serve it with excess of zeal — no one spoils a good argument more than he who exaggerates it and overstates it. It is enough, Lenin liked to say, to exaggerate a good argument “just by a hair” to destroy it; and Chinese exaggerate much much more than “by a hair”.

Question: Quite probably you’ve answered this question at another time but it seems to naturally occur here. How is it possible for the Chinese to commit such a colossal error in their analysis of the Soviet Union?

Answer: We must try and feel ourselves into the position of the Chinese. In 1960 when at a stroke Krushchev withdrew all aid from China, all Soviet specialists were recalled; the blueprints of many industrial establishments, the plans, the knowhow, everything was withdrawn. This was a tremendous shock to the Chinese economy and people. The whole industrial development of China was set back by many years; and this coincided with a series of natural calamities and bad harvests. The effect was a traumatic shock. Millions of Chinese lost their jobs in the cities and had to trek back to their native villages where there wasn’t enough food for them. Thousands of factories, into which the Chinese had invested a great amount of their meagre resources, could not be built up and completed. Huge investments were frozen with disastrous results. Since then, I think, the Chinese have been reacting to blows and shocks in an irrational manner, from deep resentment and a sense of grievance.

The Russians had indeed committed a crime against them far worse than any military intervention; compared with the blows the Chinese suffered, the brief, violent, Russian 1956 intervention in Hungary was almost child’s play. China is still smarting under the shock; and Mao Tse-tung and his present supporters are simply not in a position to reason coolly about their relations with Russia. They are speaking from disturbed emotion. Unfortunately, irrationality is still playing a big part, not only in capitalist and imperialist politics but in the politics of revolution in underdeveloped and backward countries as well; and in the politics of the Soviet Union and China.

There are, unfortunately, ominous precedents for all this in the history of the Labour movement. I am thinking, for instance, of the relationship in Germany, just before the rise of Hitler, between the Social Democrats and the Stalinised Communist Party. In those days the Social Democrats did all they could to pave unwittingly the way for Nazism; they did it, first of all, by struggling to preserve German capitalism; and secondly, by their anti-Communism. And the Communist Party, under Stalinist leadership, reacted in a highly irrational way, by denouncing the Social Democrats as “social-fascists” and refusing to join hands with them against Nazism. That was the policy of the so-called Third Period of the Comintern. Allow me, please, to dwell a little longer on this instructive analogy.

I speak here partly from my own experience (I was at the time, in the early 1930’s, involved in the controversies over those policies). The fundamental mistake committed then by the Comintern and by the German Communist Party was that they imagined that Hitler would come to terms with the Social Democrats and would build his Third Reich with their cooperation. The behaviour of the Social Democrats lent some colour to this misconception — the Social Democrats were going out of their way to obstruct any struggle against Nazism; and even at the last moment, when Hitler was already in power, they offered him their collaboration. Yet, despite this, the decisive factor of the situation, one which the Stalinists overlooked, was the basic and irreconcilable antagonism between the aims of the Nazis and those of the Social Democrats, between the kind of regime Hitler was out to establish and the continued existence of any working class parties, whether social democratic or communist.

At that time, Trotsky and some of us argued that Hitler was going to destroy the entire labour movement, both its sectors, the social democratic and the communist; and that this threat to both sectors of the labour movement was and should be used as the objective basis for their joint action against Hitler. The Communist Party didn’t want to see that. They assumed a basic harmony of interest between Nazism and Labour reformism, just as the Chinese now assume a basic harmony between American imperialism and “Soviet revisionism”. They underrated, or rather didn’t see at all the inevitability of a clash, a mortal clash, between Nazism and the Social Democratic Party; and, denouncing the Social Democrats as the “left wing of Fascism”, they refused any common front with the Social Democratic leaders.

The refusal played into Hitler’s hands and also into the hands of those Social Democrats who really didn’t want a common front with the Communists. If the Communist Party had adopted a different policy and pressed them for a common front, the Social Democrats would have found themselves in a difficult situation; a large part of their following would have responded to the Communist call; and this would have made the workers’ resistance to Nazism much more effective and perhaps prevented Hitler’s triumph in 1933 and its consequences.

I really think that today Mao Tse-tung has, as it were, his own version of the theory of “social fascism” which he has applied to Krushchev and his successors, treating them indiscriminately as sheer accomplices of American imperialism. He underrates the antagonism between Moscow and Washington. He underrates the inevitability of conflict between them. I don’t speak of armed conflict here, but of the permanent, continuous social and political conflict that may or may not lead to armed struggle. The Maoists overlook the fact that the Soviet Union has a vital interest in stopping aggression and expansion of American imperialism, no matter how much Krushchev or Kosygin have tried to appease Washington.

The Maoists therefore don’t see any objective basis for their own co-operation with the U.S.S.R., and they reject the united front, instead of calling for it indefatigably, tirelessly, day in and day out; instead of appealing for the united front to Soviet opinion, to the Soviet masses, and to the Communist Parties all over the world. It is the Russians who are calling for joint action; it is they who are appealing for the United Front. One may doubt their sincerity; but the Maoists, by refusing the united front, play into the hands of the American Administration and also into the hands of those in Moscow who really don’t want to do anything over Vietnam, to coordinate action with the Chinese, who really are not interested in promoting the anti-imperialist struggle and the revolutionary ferment in the world.

The Maoists provide those people with a political alibi; and instead of placing the odium of the breach in the Communist camp on those Soviet leaders who are primarily responsible for it, take that odium quite needlessly on themselves. I think that they are committing a great, a fatal mistake, comparable to the mistake committed by the German Stalinists between the years 1929 and 1933. The latter covered up with ultra-radical phraseology a policy of complete passivity and inactions; similarly, I think, the Chinese are covering up a policy of inactivity, which may not be much better than Soviet policy, by means of ultra-revolutionary rhetoric.

It is in this light that we ought to interpret the latest events in China, especially the August session of the Central Committee and the so-called cultural revolution. It seems that the ultra-radical Maoist policy, the refusal of any united front with the Soviet Union, has in recent months or years caused considerable uneasiness and criticism among the Chinese Communist leaders; that men like Liu Shao-chi, who was until August Mao Tse-tung’s second-in-command and is still China’s president, and perhaps even Chou En-lai, saw that this ultra-radical policy was leading Maoism and China into an impasse. Evidently influential quarters in Peking have demanded that an attempt be made to re-establish contact and resume negotiations with Moscow, especially over Vietnam.

For the time being these demands have been rejected. Mao Tse-tung has been stubborn in his refusal to have any talks with the Russians or to make any appeals to them. This accounts for Liu Shao-chi’s sudden demotion in the party hierarchy; he is still a member of the Politburo and the Central Committee but somewhat in the way that Trotsky was a member of the Soviet Central Committee and Politburo, in 1925 and 1926, when he was already in opposition and “disgraced”.

Mao’s critics have, of course, been denounced as revisionists or as agents of capitalist restoration. Yet nothing is less likely than that Liu Shao-chi should be a revisionist. He has been, throughout the Russo-Chinese controversy, on record as a determined opponent of Krushchev and Krushchevism — he has been an orthodox Maoist over the many years during which he has been one of the most distinguished leaders of Chinese Communism. But it is possible to criticise severely Mao’s latest tactics from a perfectly orthodox Maoist viewpoint. It is possible to argue that it is necessary, in the interests of Maoism, precisely in the interests of Maoism, to make a fresh approach to the Russians and to press for a united front against America. This, I assume, is what Mao’s critics have been saying; and if men like Liu Shao-chi and/or Chou En-lai were among them, they must have had considerable support in the Party.

Question: What meaning do you attribute to the latest decisions of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee and to the movement of the Red Guards, also in relation to Lin Piao’s position in the hierarchy of the Party?

Answer: The latest events in China have in effect been a showdown between Mao Tse-tung and his critics. Among the latter there may have been revisionists as well, people who have felt a sneaking sympathy with Krushchevism, but there are certainly also anti-revisionists alarmed by the ultra-left turn that Mao has taken. The Chinese press now speaks openly about the party’s division into a “Right”, “Left” and “Centre” although it treats the Left as “only a variety of the Rightist revisionism”. It is quite possible to classify these divisions somewhat differently, to see Mao Tse-tung and Lin Piao as an ultra-left, or at any rate to describe their tactics as ultra-left, and to see that they are opposed by a wide variety of groups. ’In any case, Mao Tse-tung has decided to bring the whole opposition to its knees, no matter what its motives and no matter what shade of party opinion they represent. He or Lin Piao has staged the so-called cultural revolution in order to swamp any inner-party debate over strategy and tactics, over the relationship with the Soviet Union and over China’s attitude towards the war in Vietnam. Backed by Mao, Lin Piao has incited immature school children and undergraduates against the party hierarchy and the critics among the members of the Central Committee. Of course, Lin Piao would have had no chance of winning in this struggle if the school children had been his main striking force. He and Mao have also played the army against the old party cadres. Lin Piao who is a Marshal and Minister of Defence has become Mao’s second-in-command in the Party as well. That gives to the situation a somewhat Bonapartist colouring. One can read in Peking Review and in the bulletins of the Chinese News Agency many reports of attacks staged by the school children and students against Party leaders in various localities, of assaults on local party headquarters and so on. Foreign correspondents in Peking have described those clashes with a lot of circumstantial evidence which, even if part of it is discounted, still points to a severe convulsion of the whole structure of the Chinese Communist Party.

The conversion of China to something like the Yenan regime — to a nation-wide Partisan camp — has its grave economic, social and political implications. Under such a regime it is hardly possible to carry on with — or to resume — China’s rapid, up-to-date industrialisation. The decentralisation that such a regime involves is likely at least to weaken central planning, to obstruct standardisation in industry, to reduce efficiency, to slow down the rate of economic growth and to keep down standards of living. When each administrative region, economic unit, and army corps is to be self-sufficient, an economically rational distribution of resources becomes very difficult or impossible. Such a policy gives rise to frustration, discontent, and opposition. It can hardly arouse enthusiasm in industry.

Characteristically, the “cultural revolution” has made hardly any appeal to the working class. Not only were school children and students its main force, but the working class was conspicuous by its absence. So were the peasants. You could read in Peking Review appeals to the workers that they should not interfere with the cultural revolution; mind you, not that they should participate but that they should not interfere. In other words, this allegedly proletarian revolution was carried out — without any participation of the working class — by elements which, even if they are children of workers, no longer belong to the working class but have entered a different social layer, namely the intelligentsia.

What then has been the value and the meaning of this cultural revolution in its own field, that is, for China’s cultural life? If one takes things at their face value, if one reads literally the various appeals for the cultural revolution, one finds in them things calculated to appeal to certain socialist sentiments. The Red Guards are presented as a spontaneous movement from below, preferable to any bureaucratic establishment working from above. Young people are called upon to rebel against established authority. The Red Guards have been urged to elect their leaders according to the rules established by the Paris Commune, so that every leader could be revoked or deposed by the electors at any time. These evocations of a Marxist-Leninist tradition would be convincing if at the same time you could hear any genuine debate going on in the country, any genuine discussion, any genuine exchange of opinion. Then this movement could be regarded as a manifestation of a new democracy from below. In fact, all that one has been allowed to hear are Mao’s and Lin Piao’s denunciation of their “revisionist” opponents, right or left; you don’t hear any dissenting voice; you are not allowed to find out for yourself what Mao’s critics have been saying, or on what grounds they have been opposing him. In these conditions, the democratic paraphernalia of the “Red Guards” with the implied evocation of the Red Guards of the Russian Revolution, must be dismissed as sheer make-believe. What talk can there be of any genuine movement from below as long as the Chinese working class is not allowed to consider the issues on their merits. I’m sorry I have to say this; I would have preferred to applaud these Red Guards. But they have really acted — unfortunately, I can find no other, more adequate expression — in a hooligan-like manner, stopping any debate, and muzzling any criticism of the Maoist line.

This has led to a senseless attack and humiliation not only of the party cadres but also of the old revolutionary intelligentsia. Most of the intellectuals that are now branded as bourgeois decadents and revisionists are scholars, writers, and artists who have been associated with Chinese communism for 20, 30 or 40 years — before, during, and after the revolution — and who have, since 1949, been in charge of the educational work among the masses. Evidently it is in these social groups and circles that the Maoist policy has met with considerable resistance and so Mao and/or Lin Piao have incited and stage-produced a nationwide riot of school children against the old communist intelligentsia.

Question: Does this explain also the hostility to Western culture as such?

Answer: Naturally, the old intelligentsia have had relatively close ties with Western as well as with their own native cultural traditions. For many of them, Shakespeare and Beethoven and the great figures of French literature are part of a cherished heritage. Since the revolution, and even since earlier, they have cultivated the great Russian writers of the last two centuries. Now you have a reaction against all this. In the name of Marxism-Leninism, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Balzac are denounced as a specimen of bourgeois degeneration. The great “revolutionaries” that denounce them do not even suspect — or do they? — that Karl Marx had a lifelong admiration for Balzac and Shakespeare, that Lenin loved Beethoven and Pushkin (Pushkin’s monument, erected in Shanghai after the revolution, has been defaced!). They have even denounced Tchernyshevsky and Herzen also as products of a degenerate bourgeois culture, not knowing that Tchernyshevsky was a decisive formative influence in Lenin’s thinking and that both Tchernyshevsky and Herzen were the founders and the most brilliant mouthpieces of the Russian revolutionary movement in the 19th century.

All this goes to show that the “cultural revolution” has been negative only, that it has had no positive content, no positive idea. Incidentally, the Soviet press has compared it with the so-called Proletkult, the “movement” for a proletarian culture that developed in the Soviet Union shortly after the revolution. Pravda even described Trotsky as an inspirer of the Proletkult, which should presumably be enough to discredit both the Russian Proletkult and its supposed Chinese counterpart. Now, this is a double falsification. For one thing, Proletkult was a mild and civilised affair compared with the “cultural revolution” in China; for another, Trotsky was not its inspirer but its adversary. He devoted much of his book Literature and Revolution to the refutation of “proletarian culture”; and in this he was at one with Lenin.

True, Trotsky defended the right of the writers and artists of Proletkult to express themselves; he was against their suppression, but he severely criticised their view that it was possible to promote and create any proletarian culture, literature, or art. Pravda and other Soviet papers might have found a closer analogy to the Chinese “cultural revolution” in what happened in Russia during the last years of the Stalin era, when Zhdanov was denouncing Western culture, when the works of Einstein, Freud, Mendel and the many Western scientists and thinkers were banned from Russian universities, when “rootless cosmopolitanism” was being denounced, when all things Russian were glorified, when we were told that almost every important invention and discovery had originated in Russia and that the West had only plagiarised the products of the Russian genius. This is the real analogy! And the analogy extends to the contexts and the backgrounds of the two campaigns. In Russia these outbursts of “cultural” anti-Westernism were, in Stalin’s last years, connected with the cold war and the war in Korea; they were part of Stalin’s attempt to isolate Russia as hermetically as possible from any Western influences and to boost Russian self-confidence.

Now this is precisely what Mao Tse-tung wants to achieve in China at present — he wants to isolate China more hermetically than ever from any outside influence, to boost Chinese morale and pride, to glorify China’s isolation from the world and at the same time to give the Chinese a compensation for their sense of isolation. All this may be seen as part of preparing the national morale for a warlike emergency.

One consequence of this upheaval is a social shift leading to the replacement of the old cadres of the intelligentsia by new cadres who are very young, immature, and uncritical enough to accept Maoism in its latest version. Some such changes through which the old guards and age groups of the intelligentsia give place to new and young ones may, to some extent, be progressive and may occur in any revolution; but when they are carried out as brutally and demagogically as they are being carried out in China now and as were carried out in Stalinist Russia, they impoverish the nation intellectually and spiritually, leave an immense cultural gap between generations, a gap that Russia is feeling till today. I am convinced that just as post-Stalinist Russia has recognised what great harm has been done in this way to the nation and its cultural life, so post-Maoist China will one day — but perhaps too late — recognise it.

Question: There appears to be a contradiction here in terms of the Russian experience: It seems generally agreed that when Stalin carried out the extreme Stalinisation measures and all the things that went with that it was in the interests of the privileged strata in Soviet society, or bureaucracy, as Trotsky described them. In China, however, there has yet to be any evidence produced that there is a development of bureaucracy, of a caste gaining materially an immediate sense. It could be said that the ground has been prepared for such a development but there is certainly no one who would accuse the Chinese leadership of being an extremely bureaucratic privileged stratum as the Soviet bureaucracy was.

Answer: This is correct, and I have myself pointed out this difference on some occasions. I don’t think that the bureaucracy is as formed in China as it is formed in Russia, into a massive privileged social layer. The present movement is causing yet another upheaval in the bureaucracy, and allows us even less to speak of any privileged position of the managerial groups in China. The cultural revolution leads to the overthrow not merely of the old educational cadres but also of technical and managerial elements in industry. On the other hand, it is difficult to see how a country as underdeveloped and poverty-stricken as China is can practise any genuine socialist egalitarianism. That is also impossible. The social inequalities in Chinese society are bound to be quite large, but they seem to be fluid; they are not allowed to crystallise into definite social divisions.

Well, I don’t consider the present Chinese policy as a manifestation of any special bureaucratic struggle for privilege. I have not said this at all. I explain the events in political rather than in socio-economic terms, that is, as a reaction, morbid in part, against China’s isolation by American imperialism on the one hand and by the Soviet Union on the other. I am convinced that even with regard to Russia very often the explanation of Stalin’s moves had to be sought not in the interests of the bureaucracy because Stalin acted quite often against the interests even of his bureaucracy — he was, after all, sending hordes of Russian bureaucrats into concentration camps ! I don’t therefore believe that Stalin’s policies can always be explained by his role as the leader and mouthpiece of a privileged bureaucracy — he often acted only in the narrowest interest of his autocracy, of his personal rule; and at times he acted in the wider national interest. Still less can one consider Mao as the champion of bureaucratic privilege, especially of economic privilege. On the other hand, although there is no fixed crystallised, privileged bureaucracy in China, there exists a lot of political privilege, the paramount privilege under which only the men of the ruling group can express their views and take political decisions. This is indubitable privilege. Even so, until yesterday a man like Lin Shao-chi and his adherents enjoyed that privilege, and now they have been robbed of it. Things do not seem to fit here any clear-cut socio-economic formula. I know it’s always a temptation for a Marxist to find the sociological formula that would fit the situation; but we have very often to analyse phenomena and events in political terms because politics has its own internal dialectics which are not immediately linked with socio-economic phenomena.

If you study Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire” or his other “minor” writings, you see how very often he had to do this, how often he discusses politics, in political rather than in socio-economic terms, although ultimately we have always to go back to the socio-economic structure within which the political processes unfold their dialectics. In the present “movement” in China there is much emphasis on egalitarian slogans; but this doesn’t make the “movement” politically more progressive — egalitarianism isn’t enough in a “cultural revolution”. When they throw Shakespeare and Beethoven into the dustbin, they may imagine that they are acting in an “egalitarian” spirit; but this is reactionary, not progressive.

Question: To go back to the political crisis, what are the long-term prospects? And how does the Chinese situation affect the Labour movement and Communism outside China?

Answer: The present crisis is probably also connected with a struggle for the succession to Mao Tse-tung. Here the events also seem analogous to what happened in Russia in Stalin’s last years. For the time being it looks as if Lin Piao were assured of the succession. He is the head of the armed forces, hero of the Red Guards and, with the help of the armed forces, he is taking control of the party machine. But is he, the heir apparent, really going to be Mao’s successor? And if he is, will he continue the present Maoist policy? These are questions that must, of course, be left open.

In any autocratic regime the factor of the personality, of the leader’s personality, plays a great role; and politics is to some extent affected by such “biological accidents” as to what old age a dictator survives or fails to survive. But whenever Mao goes, his successor may well try and make a new beginning; he may especially try to bring back to life the Russo-Chinese alliance. In the meantime there may be changes in the Soviet Union as well. We should not imagine that the situation is static and will remain frozen for goodness knows how many years. Dynamic developments are likely to occur both in the Soviet Union and in China. What has happened in Peking this summer may have settled the struggle over power and policy only in the short run; in the longer run things may once again be in flux, and Mao’s successor or successors may try to re-establish a common front with the Russians. This is only a hypothesis; not a forecast.

It may also be that the Chinese youth movement, which has now been let out into the streets to storm the old party hierarchy and the old intelligentsia, that this movement will unfold its own dynamic. At present the school children and students are told not to interfere with production, not to disorganise the working of industry and agriculture; and with much drum beating they are being led out of the big cities; one phase of the movement is evidently at a close. We learn that the army is appointing its commanders and political commissars to take charge of the “Red Guards”, that it is trying to bring the movement, which may be something of a Frankenstein, under its orders. The new generation which has now been brought on to the political stage, may gradually develop its own political ambitions and aspirations.

In the long run also a great nation like the Chinese is not likely to reconcile itself to the present rather sluggish tempo of economic development. They have had three or four very good harvests in China, and this has improved the economic situation. A new five-year plan has been launched after an interval during which there were no five-year plans, no overall industrial plans. But the targets of the new plan have not been divulged. They are not so impressive that much play should be made of them in public. In isolation, cut off from the outside world, cut off from Russia, China finds her development greatly slowed down; and it is unlikely that the young generation should make peace with this.

Nor does it seem likely that the almost mystical apotheosis of Maoism, that glorification of Mao’s every gesture and word, a glorification touching the depths of absurdity that the Stalin cult touched in Russia in 1950, it seems to me unlikely that all this should survive Mao. Even now there must be some revulsion against this cult of Mao, the great swimmer, the great philosopher, the great scientist (who helps you in selling melons and has an answer to every question that may trouble you); and I don’t believe that China after Mao’s death will want to go on living with this holy picture of him; although Mao will undoubtedly hold his place in China’s revolutionary history, as the great commander of the partisan army that made the Revolution. In this respect Mao isn’t quite what Stalin was — he is rather like a combination of Lenin and Stalin. But the older he gets the more he looks like Stalin and the less does he resemble Lenin.

Such comparisons are, of course, of limited value. In saying that Mao is half-Lenin and half-Stalin, I mean to make a distinction between Mao, the great revolutionary leader, and Mao, the deified despot. It is the latter, the Stalin-element in him that has now come to the fore. I think the new Chinese intelligentsia will react against this just as the old intelligentsia has reacted. In other words, I believe in China’s progress and I don’t see the present phase, deplorable as it is, as being in any sense definitive. And I believe also that sooner or later the objective logic of their situation will drive the U.S.S.R. and China to make a common front.

I should perhaps explain that when I speak of the need for a common front, I do not mean to say that the Chinese and Russians necessarily need to compose their “ideological” differences. On the contrary, such differences should be openly stated and openly discussed in the international communist movement. Any living movement has its internal contradictions and differences, which it can suppress only to its own detriment. In a way, this sectarian-fanatical conflict between Maoism and Krushchevism (and post-Krushchevism) is the price which the Communist Parties of these countries are now paying for decades of Stalinist monolithicism.

After the “monolith” has broken, it turns out that the people who have been moulded by it are incapable of discussing their differences in any rational manner. They haven’t discussed, argued, debated, or even thought for themselves, over so many years and decades that when their differences do break into the open, they take the most obsessive and demented forms. The situation would be hopeless for the Communist Parties, if they were not in the end to learn the language of rational discussion and debate, and if they were not to learn to co-ordinate joint action, regardless of differences of opinion. We communists and socialists in the West should regard it as our task, not to identify ourselves either with the Russians or with the Chinese, for clearly the present attitudes of neither of them can suit anyone brought up in a Marxist school of thought and has at heart the interests of socialism in the advanced capitalist countries. We ought to maintain an independent attitude.

We ought to criticise the Soviet opportunism and the Soviet betrayal of China; and we ought also to try, as far as we can, to argue the Chinese out of their present ultra-radical and irrational idées fixes. We ought to recall to both the Russians and the Chinese their duty to act in common against the danger of world war, against the American aggression in Vietnam, and in the interests of socialism in the world.

Question: Don’t you find anything positive and progressive in the present cultural revolution in China?

Answer: Now the term “cultural revolution” has to be clarified. You may use the term in a metaphorical sense to indicate the cultural rise of formerly oppressed and illiterate people, a cultural rise that must take many, many years and decades. When hundreds of millions, or tens of millions of illiterate peasants are taught to read and write and are further educated, one can speak broadly of something like a cultural revolution extending over the lifetime of two or three generations. But to speak of a cultural revolution as of a single act is absurd. What is a revolution? The classical definition of it is the transfer of power from one class to another. You can make a social and a political revolution. You make a social revolution when one class seizes the property of another and nationalises it. You make a political revolution when you seize political power from one class and another takes it into its hands — then a revolution is made in a single act or within a very short time. A social revolution is already more than a single act. A political revolution may be an armed uprising which overthrows a government and establishes representatives of a revolutionary in office.

But how can you make a cultural revolution in a single act? Can you transfer at a stroke the knowledge and the skills accumulated in the head of one class into the head of another? Revolutionaries who would achieve this would indeed perform a feat of which the philosophers, including the philosophers of Marxism, have not dreamt. One can, of course, kill, or reduce to silence, or send to concentration camps a whole generation of an intelligentsia and in this way deprive society of a certain fund of knowledge, civilised habits and skills that have been accumulated over generations, but this will not turn those who destroy the old intelligentsia into the possessors of the knowledge, the skills and arts they have annihilated.

Lenin, therefore, spoke not of “cultural revolution”, but of the cultural heritage which it was the duty of the Bolshevik Party and of the revolutionary government to preserve and develop. Trotsky posed the problem of employing specialists in this context — he posed it with regard not only to military specialists employed in the army but to specialists employed in the economy and in education as well; he saw this as part of a great endeavour to make the cultural heritage of the past accessible to a new revolutionary class and to the revolutionary regime. Not “cultural revolution” but mastery of the cultural heritage was the guiding idea in Lenin’s time.

To be sure, the Bolsheviks were not just attending to the cultural heritage of the bourgeoisie and of the feudal classes — they did their utmost to carry education into the masses of the Russian workers and peasants — only in this way could the cultural heritage be made accessible to the rising social classes; and Lenin and Trotsky and their followers accepted the cultural heritage critically, with Marxist discrimination, absorbing what was vital in that heritage and overcoming its obsolescent elements. And so much was and is vital, because in science and in the arts the old dominant classes had in a sense transcended themselves and their own limitations.

One may consider Shakespeare as a representative of the bourgeois dream, as the representative of what was in his time an essentially new bourgeois individualistic sensitivity. But in Shakespeare this bourgeois sensitivity transcended its own limitations and rose above itself, as it were, to create lasting artistic values which retain their force after so many changes of governments, regimes, and social orders Similarly, the old Greek drama can be said to have represented a type of sensitivity and a way of thinking that was rooted in a society which lived by slavery; but Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus artistically transcended these limitations and created lasting values, which are not to be overthrown in any “cultural revolution”. (My Italian readers will, of course, remember the contempt with which a Marinetti and other Futurists once treated Dante, Petrarch and the masters of the Renaissance.)

Only savages, or petty bourgeois, half-baked ultra-radicals, or bureaucratic upstarts can make bonfires of the works of the great thinkers and artists of the past. The Maoists, who do it in the same name of Marxism and Leninism, commit moral harakiri. And they harm the revolutionary interest of China, they harm it shamefully and disgracefully ! We must defend the revolutionary cause of China, despite them and even against them!

Isaac Deutscher.

20th September, 1966.















Source

Disaster capitalism in imperial Japan

The Militant (logo)

Vol. 75/No. 13 April 4, 2011


Capitalism’s toll mounts
for workers in Japan
(front page)

BY CINDY JAQUITH
After a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and giant tsunami struck Japan March 11, the catastrophe facing workers and farmers is far-reaching. Nuclear contamination, homelessness, unemployment, and lack of power are widespread, while the government and capitalist rulers focus on protecting profits, not lives. All the while, needed information about the scope of the disaster is being hidden from working people.

The owners of the Fukushima nuclear plant deliberately delayed action to cool down reactors affected by the earthquake and tsunami because they wanted to protect their investments, the Wall Street Journal reported March 19. As of March 22 the danger of a complete meltdown at the site was subsiding, but vegetables, milk, and tap water in towns many miles from the plant were contaminated.

There are six reactors at the Fukushima site. The earthquake knocked the plant off the power grid, halting cooling of fuel rods. The tsunami that followed destroyed the plant’s backup generator.

The fuel rods at the No. 1 reactor began to heat up right away. Executives of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), which operates the plant, rejected the idea of cooling it down with massive amounts of seawater. Tepco “hesitated because it tried to protect its assets,” said Akira Omoto, a member of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission.

While the company delayed, the rods got hotter and hotter, producing hydrogen gas, which exploded March 12 at 3:36 p.m. Prime Minister Naoto Kan at that time ordered seawater to be applied. The company began that operation at 8:20 p.m.

The cooling system failed at the No. 3 reactor March 13, the Journal reported. Tepco tried first to cool it with fresh water, but that failed. That afternoon the company began using seawater. An explosion hit the No. 3 reactor the morning of March 14, damaging the containment vessel and leaking radioactive particles into the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, the No. 2 reactor’s cooling system broke down. It suffered an explosion March 15.

It was not until March 16 that the Japanese army sent significant forces in to help with spraying seawater. By that time four of the reactors had been damaged and the other two were heating up.

Asked about the Journal story, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said, “We did our best during the whole process, and we aren’t at a stage where we can make any judgment on that.”

Now radioactive contamination has been found in produce in Tokyo, about 125 miles from the Fukushima site. The radioactive iodine level in spinach from the region is 27 times what is considered an acceptable amount. Fukushima milk contains radiation 17 times above the limit. Rain and dust are also affected, as is tap water.

The government has banned shipments of spinach from the four provinces near the plant, as well as milk from Fukushima Province. Japanese farmers are demanding compensation from the government for their loss of sales.

Government spokesman Edano sought again to downplay the dangers of milk and produce contamination. “Even if you eat and drink them several times it will not be a health hazard,” he said.

But World Health Organization spokesman Peter Cordingley disagreed. “Quite clearly, it is not what we thought in the early stages. It is more serious,” he said. “We have seen Japanese people in grocery stores paying close attention to where their produce is coming from, and we think this is a wise practice.”

The overall toll of the earthquake and tsunami now stands at 7,197 dead and 19,000 missing. Five workers at the Fukushima plant have died, two are missing, and 22 are injured.

Some 400,000 Japanese remain homeless. Tens of thousands of factory workers are laid off. Rolling blackouts and fuel shortages still affect the whole country.


Related articles:
What social class can meet energy needs of billions?



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Maoist magazine launched in Paris


A l'occasion du 1er Mai, le n°0 du magazine Maoist Road, la Voie maoïste, est sorti. N°0 parce que c'est le compte rendu intégral de la réunion internationale tenue à Paris les 30-31 janvier derniers.

Le magazine est à commander à drapeaurouge@yahoo.fr et coûte 5€. Il est également possible de se procurer des exemplaires à la librairie Le Point du Jour, 58 Rue Gay-Lussac, 75005 Paris


Google translation:

On the occasion of May 1st, the magazine's No. 0 Maoist Road, Lane Maoist, was released. No. 0 because that is the full account of the international meeting held in Paris on 30-31 January.

The magazine is to be ordered and costs 5 drapeaurouge@yahoo.fr. It is also possible to obtain copies at the bookstore Le Point du Jour, 58 Rue Gay-Lussac, 75005 Paris

If it's Tuesday, it must be...

Morocco: “The people reject the constitution of slaves”


A new momentum has been reached by the protest movement in Morocco. The call for a new Day of Action on March 20 was a test. Would the King’s shadowy reforms succeed in demobilising the masses or on the contrary push the movement forward? As we predicted the latter happened. Possibly twice as many people came out on the streets than a month earlier.

March 20, Rabat. Photo: MarocStoun
Demonstrations were held in 64 cities and villages around the country. During the first Day of Action on February 20, people mobilised in 52 cities and villages. Between 400,000 and 600,000 people took part this time. The interesting thing this time was that large numbers also turned in the big cities. In the industrial capital Casablanca around 100,000 turned out in a particularly militant march; in Rabat the figure was 30,000; in Tangiers, 50,000; Oujda, 30,000; Bengrir, 30,000; Agadir, almost 10,000; Nador, 4000; Chefchaouen, 4000; Tetuan, 3000; Ouarzazate, 1500; Azila, 1000, etc. In the city of Fez even retired army soldiers joined the demonstration (See video summary). The slogans were: “The people want the downfall of despotism”, “The people reject the constitution of slaves”, “You can kill us, you can execute us, but the people will always be reborn”, and so on.

One interesting detail in Casablanca was that the march took a different route than the one during the earlier demonstration. It started in the working class neighbourhood of Derb Omar. This choice of route was part of the strategy of the 20F youth movement to seek closer links with the working class neighbourhoods of the city. Thus students could join in with workers and unemployed. This strategy expresses the growing maturity of the movement. Not by accident did the demonstration in Casablanca attract much higher numbers than the one a month earlier and it was also more militant. Also remarkable was the fact that, apart from the desire for “regime change”, the people in different cities protested against the French multinational companies, Veolia and Suez who benefited from the privatisation of local public water, electricity, transport, public lighting and waste management companies. Earlier in Tangiers the local headquarters of Veolia was burned down by angry protestors who rejected the price hikes imposed by those companies. So we are seeing that the protest marches of 20M also become a focal point for local social struggles.

The monarchist youth of the “9M youth movement” (referring to the date of Mohamed VI’s latest speech) succeeded in only gathering a few hundred (390!) supporters, despite massive media publicity. Their main slogan was “Long live the King”. If anything, this reveals the real balance of power in the country, a worrying signal for a regime where the popularity of the king is practically an unquestionable “state dogma”. The attempt by the 2M state television to present the protest as being infiltrated by the fundamentalists of the Al Adl Wal Ihssane (Justice and Charity) movement of Cheik Yassine is just laughable and was answered thus way by the organisers.

Doublespeak fools fewer and fewer people

20MposterWhat does the success of the March 20 Day of Action indicate? On the one side, it revealed that the youth and the broader layers of demonstrators were not fooled by the announcement of constitutional reform. They clearly understood the King’s speech as a “tactical diversion” and well beneath what the movement is demanding. On the other hand the very fact that Mohamed VI had to appear on television and react to the growing movement was seen as a sign of weakness on the part of the regime. This manoeuvre, rather than weakening, emboldened the masses.

What also helped to understand the ‘tactical’ nature of the promised changes was the brutal repression of a peaceful demonstration in Casablanca by the police a week after the King’s speech (see Youtube). The same regime that had promised more individual freedom came down very hard on those who took this promise at face value. Now anyone who may have hesitated or been confused by the King’s speech understood that the regime was speaking with a forked tongue.

A few days earlier jobless protesters rioted at the offices of state-run phosphate monopoly OCP in the central city of Khouribga. They reacted to the brutal attempt of the police to dislodge their peaceful sit-in. The unemployed men then invaded the OCP's administrative offices and damaged the building's facade with stones, destroyed 11 vehicles and company documentation (see Youtube).Khouribga is home to the country's biggest phosphate mine.

In another city, Taourirt, on March 21 the police also tried to dismantle a tent camp. The camp had been set up by families to protest against their exclusion from access to land to build homes. The local real estate mafia and the administration are accused of working hand in hand to keep control over the land. The police intervention was very brutal, with women and children being beaten. The families and the local population reacted with an insurrection in a part of the city. The house of the local mayor was also attacked. The next day the political leaders of the city were forced to announce an inquiry into the criminal activities of the mafia.

The state media, such as the 2M state TV channel, has also been affected by the wave of protests. On March 18 the unions of the state TV workers organised a sit-in in Casablanca to demand “public media at the service and in the interests of the people and democracy”. This movement has taken firm roots amongst the 2M staff and is getting wide support from other unions and also from the 20F youth.

School students enter the movement

Teachers occupying ministry
On Wednesday, March 23 the school students decided to go on strike in many schools in different cities. March 23 is not any date in the history of the country. The school student action coincided deliberately with the beginning of the Moroccan “May 68” on March 23 in 1965! Without doubt this widespread revolutionary fervour is giving confidence to the different layers and sections of oppressed to vent their grievances and push for their demands. On the initiative of the school student group of the 20F movement, demonstrations and strikes were organised in Imzouren (El Hoceima), Ouarzazte, Rachidia, Beni Mellal, Inzgan (Agadir), Zagoura, Kheribga, Chefchaouen, Tanger, Souk Larbae, Tetouan (See video). Two school students were arrested in Chefchaouen and another in Tangier. The school students are demanding the dismissal of the Minister of Education, better quality education, free education, an increase in the number of teachers, better infrastructure, more security in the schools and smaller classes and the elimination of favouritism and nepotism. The following day unionised teachers occupied the buildings of the Ministry of Education in Rabat, the administrative capital, in protest at the education policy. Here again their action was ferociously repressed with baton charges of the police.

In general we can say that the beginning of the Moroccan revolution is being accompanied by a marked increase in local or sector disputes. The political movement for “regime change” is fuelling the social struggles which will also push forward the 20F movement and influence its character. The thin wall separating the economic and the political struggle is crumbling. The regime is clearly on the defensive and trying to find new means and methods to survive. But the movement is not going to let itself be fooled. Yesterday (Sunday, March 27) there were many more demonstrations all over the country. Revolution until the overthrow of the regime is the only realistic perspective also in Morocco.

"90% of today’s leftists are effectively Fukuyamaists"

Slavoj Zizek: “Neoliberalism is in Crisis”

photo: Rasha Chatta

Philosopher and Critical theorist Slavoj Zizek, says he’s not an optimist when it comes to Europe and the broad political and ideological struggle in the continent and the world. But he salutes the demonstration of the British workers last Saturday (26 March 2011) and the awackening “of some kind of authentic left” as the only hope in defense of the European values. Greek Left Review met Slavoj Zizek and prof. Costas Douzinas at Birkbeck college in the center of London on Saturday morning. While according to the Guardian 400.000 workers were marching towards Hyde Park, Slavoj Zizek emphasized that social mobilization and the emergence of European solidarity amorng workers is the only way to break out of the vicious cycle that neoliberal technocrats and religious fundamentalists are driving the continent.

GLR: Today we’re witnessing in Britain the largest march since the Iraqi war. After a year of unrest in many European countries an image of possible solidarity appears. Is there anything to be gained by European solidarity and is this solidarity even possible? What is the European project about today?

SZ. Το paraphrase this quote from May 68: It’s not possible, but it’s necessary. If by saying Europe we mean what is worth fighting for like egalitarian legacy, the idea of solidarity, welfare state and so on, then, maybe it’s the only thing that can give us, some hope. Europe, not only, cannot realize its project but it cannot even see what this project is. What makes me happy in this protest today is that it gives me the pleasure to correct my previous analysis which was that today in Europe you only have two choices: On the one hand the pro-capitalist liberal parties which can at the same time be progressive in issues like human rights, abortion and so on and on the other – the only moment of true passionate politics – right-wing anti-immigrant formations. My claim is that this would be a dead end if these were the only choices. It’s a great hope for Europe that some kind of radical or authentic left is awakening.

GLR While Europe is reviving and rediscovering radicalism we have revolts all over the Middle East. How can we link this huge insurrection and revolution wave in Africa to what is happening in Europe?

SZ. Obviously the “standard”, what we call the neoliberal ideological model is coming to a crisis. For me these two are kind of supplementary phenomena. Capitalism is coming into crisis in Europe, but not only. What happened in Egypt was both authentically democratic but also a call for economic justice. Yet, what I find extremely interesting is that the Egyptians and other Africans are demonstrating something much more important. Although, our official dream in the west was the silent presupposition of the western democracy, we secretly did not really want others to become like us. Until now the standard racist reaction of western Europeans was that, we would love Arabs to become democratic, but hey… they are primitive. The only way you can arouse the crowds there is either by religious fundamentalism, or anti-Semitic nationalism. So, now we get exactly what we wished for: A secular uprising, that in some cases even lifts religious divisions (Copts and Muslims are praying together in Egypt). But the result for us, is anxiety, instead of joy. “Where is this going to lead”? Not only we have a proof that all the distrust to the Arab democratic potential is false, but what is more important is that it proves that democracy is universal, it’s not our own. We desperately try to read out of the events that they want, what we want. These events are authentically democratic but they are also a call for economic justice.

Now, we need to rethink even old events, like the Khomeini revolution in Iran. It’s now clear that the Khomeini revolution was not simply a fundamentalist takeover. We should remember that for over one year and a half there was a hard internal struggle, which allowed the fundamentalist clerics to take over. The Khomeini revolution was also an emancipatrory explosion, which is now returning through the green movement and Musavi. This is the most precious lesson: We need to break out of this cycle where our choices are either pro-western liberals or religious fundamentalism and here we come to the crucial point. Why do we focus on Libya now? Because it allows the re-normalization of the crisis. It fits in our standard western clichés. Qaddafi is a crazy leader, one of the axes of terror and so on. Here we know where we stand. We can translate this to the old anti-fundamentalism struggle and therefore the media can pass silent through what is happening at the same time in Bahrain where Saudi army is directly intervening into another country in order to crash the same as in Egypt democratic struggle. Where is Obama in this case, where are the western leaders? My only hope is that this procedure will go to the end. And the name of the end is clear. Saudi Arabia.

CD. I should probably add that this idea of re-normalization has also another part and that is that Libya gave the western powers the ability to go back to this idea of the nineties of humanitarian interventions, which had declined due to the catastrophes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, what Sarkozy, Cameron and a little less maybe Obama, tell us is that we’re there to save civilians. That kind of cosmopolitan rhetoric can now reorganize or re structure the ideological field around the image of the west as a humanitarian power.

GLR. But the popular movement is facing its limits when bombs are falling and people die. How should we address this problem?

SZ. In Libya the situation is objectively mixed. I don’t think we have a clear-cut case. I have no sympathy for Qaddafi, but nonetheless I don’t think that what is happening in Libya is the same as in Egypt or elsewhere. We cannot say it’s simply and only about a bad tyrant opposed by the people. There are all sorts of tensions there like tribal relations and this is why the west loves it. The west liked that same phenomenon in the ex Yugoslavia as well. It was not politics, but tribes fighting each other. The only thing we can do, is simply ignore, side step Libya. For me what is going on now in Egypt is much more important. As I always emphasize, they are beautiful – we all cry. But these enthusiastic moments are in a way cheap.. What will happen now? How will this spirit of the revolution be institutionalized?

CD. We’re moving from constituents to constitutive powers

SZ. It would be very sad if Egypt only becomes a slightly more pro western, pro liberal capitalist society. It’s important to see now how trade unions are formed, how students organize themselves and so on. The true battle is going on now. And in regards to the whole area I find crucial what is happening to Saudi Arabia and the rich Emirates. It’s where you get the western hypocrisy and contradiction at its absolutely purest – the obvious paradox. US are worried about human rights and proclaiming Iran as the evil. I’m sorry but if you’re worried about women’s rights in the Middle East, Iran is a paradise compared to Saudi Arabia. Even Ahmadinejad named one or two feminine ministers. Friends told me that men are idiots there. If you go to a ministry even if the minister is a man you have to work with a woman in order to get your job done. In all of the emirates you have a neo-serfdom if not slavery with so many poor immigrant workers from Philippines… I think it’s crucial to bring these developments in front and sharpen the contradictions.

GLR. A theoretical question: There were articles in the leftist greek newspapers and websites endorsing the idea that anyone who is lacanian cannot support the idea of the revolution on the basis of this famous discussion of Lacan with the students of May 1968. Is a Lacanian position necessarily non-revolutionary? Can there even be a revolutionary policy in the Lacanian field?

I will not say the opposite. It is definitely not necessarily revolutionary. Here’s what I was claiming: In the confusion of today’s ideological contradictions, how does it happen and in our permissive societies we get to have more regulations and anxiety? We get sexual freedom, which means that half of us are impotent and frigid and so on. To even understand this you need something like the Lacanian theory. Off course I violently disagree with that statement if you read it like a kind of liberal wisdom (you wanted to play with the revolution so you’re going to get another master). I don’t read Lacan as a limitation, part of this nouvelle philosophie anticommuniste (which suggests that gulag follows the revolution). But nonetheless, this was the problem of 20th century communist revolutions.

There is a moment of truth for us. What will come after, how do we effectively avoid a new terror? I think the question is totally legitimate. What I’m saying is something more. Lacan is clearly inconsistent, often with himself. The big question today -and the left stilldoesn’t have a good answer – is what goes on ideologically. I think you cannot understand all the paradoxes today without psychoanalysis. Are we aware in what strange societies we live? I always love to mention this example. In the previous UK elections there was a show in BBC, on who was the most hated politician and Tony Blair came first. One week later he won the elections. This worries me. There’s a level of social frustration, which is simply not captured by simply parliamentary vote. I’m not against democracy. In the socialist times we liked to say “don’t bullshit me with ideals. Look at how socialism really is”. Let’s be honest and do the same today. Let’s see really what parliamentary democracy captures and what not. Precisely if you like democracy and you’re passionately attached to it you should worry about it. Does it function effectively? Does it capture the social discontent? We should search for solutions. See what’s happening in Latin America. In some cases the solution they give is to combine representative democracy (the model of Lula or Morales) with social movements. Isn’t it obvious that democracy is turning more and more to an empty ritual? If we even vote, we don’t know what we vote for. Look at NAFTA, one of the crucial economic agreements. Nobody was asked. Even in the congress they were more or less blackmailed to do it, nobody read the 5000 pages of the agreement. You in Greece are in the same position. Specialists are giving you their special opinion in a way you cannot judge. “Sorry people, these are the facts”. Up to a point they’re true – they’re not simply lying. If you are into the current system, it’s true. But it’s time to start questioning: Is the system our ultimate horizon? And then, even these experts, often cheat. Are they really honest?

I remember the late 90’s and the big economic crisis in south East Asia. These greater liberal economists here attacked Mahathir Mohamed because he suggested the Malaysian government to take over of all the bank transactions in the country. It worked triumphantly. Even in the existing space, the rules are not fixed in the way neo-liberal ideologists are trying to convince us. By the same time, Schroeder sacked Lafontaine who wanted to do the same in Germany. Forget about this idea -that even Toni Negri buys too much- of the disappearing state and the appearance of the global empire. The state is more and more important.

GLR. Are we watching the insistence of Neoliberals to impose an end to history?

SZ. It’s a bit more complicated than this. It’s easy to make fun of Fukuyama about the end of history. But I would argue that 90% of today’s leftists are effectively Fukuyamaists. Or, maybe, at least until a couple of years ago. They don’t ask the big questions. The alternate models are not clear. Even the most radical rhetoric in Porto Allegre or Seattle is basically moralistic. Is there a positive model? It’s very easy to play the card of local movements and local self-organization. This is not the model. I don’t believe in this Negrian dream that the multitude will somehow take over. We have to accept the need of some kind of regulatory apparatuses. Not only the standard dreams of social democracy and state socialism but even this dream of soviet councils, immediate local democracy has also reach its limits.

GLR How will we organize resistance in a bigger scale? And how would you characterize what the guardian calls the freedom flue?

SZ. I’m not a pessimist but I don’t think we know as much as we think we know. I don’t think we have what Frederick Jameson would have called cognitive mapping. Some leftists think we know what is going on today with new capitalism and neoliberals, we just don’t know how to mobilize people. I think we don’t even really know what is going on. In the short term I’m not an optimist. I cannot give you a recipe on what to do. All I know and on this I stand is that we will be pushed to do something, if not we will approach a new authoritarian society. This is the moment when utopias emerge. You invent utopias when you’re in deep shit and cannot do otherwise. You especially in Greece are pushed now to find ideas for popular control, the functioning of state and so on. The way they try now in Bolivia. This is my almost tragic position. I agree with you but I don’t take it as an argument to justify that therefore we should continue to live the way we do now. If we do that, I wouldn’t like to live in such a society. I think we have clear signs that we are approaching some kind of new liberal capitalism with new forms of apartheid where private freedoms will remain. You will be able to individually express any way you want but social mobilization will be less and less. We can no longer have this old Marxist confidence that we know where history is going. History is going into an abyss.

Wild about Terry [Eagleton]

Was Marx Right?

It’s Not Too Late to Ask

Thirty-five years ago many people in the United States and Europe were willing to give Marxism a hearing. Just a decade later nearly everyone agreed it had been discredited. Why this sudden change?

Photo: © eugene

Thirty-five years ago many people in the United States and Europe were willing to give Marxism a hearing. Just a decade later nearly everyone agreed it had been discredited. Why this sudden change? Had some new discovery disproved Marxist theory? Were people no longer interested in the problems Marxism addressed? Or had the problems themselves disappeared?

Something had indeed happened in the period in question. From the mid-1970s onwards, the Western system underwent some vital changes. There was a shift from traditional industrial manufacture to a “postindustrial” culture of consumerism, communications, information technology, and the service industry. Small-scale, decentralized, versatile, nonhierarchical enterprises were the order of the day. Markets were deregulated, and the working-class movement was subjected to savage legal and political assault. Traditional class allegiances were weakened, while local, gender, and ethnic identities grew more insistent.

The new information technologies played a key role in the increasing globalization of the system, as a handful of transnational corporations distributed production and investment across the planet in pursuit of the readiest profits. A good deal of manufacturing was outsourced to cheap-wage locations in the “underdeveloped” world, leading some parochially minded Westerners to conclude that heavy industry had disappeared from the planet altogether. Massive international migrations of labor followed in the wake of this global mobility, and with them a resurgence of racism and fascism as impoverished immigrants poured into the more advanced economies. While “peripheral” countries were subject to sweated labor, privatized facilities, slashed welfare, and surreally inequitable terms of trade, the bestubbled executives of the metropolitan nations tore off their ties, threw open their shirt necks, and fretted about their employees’ spiritual well-being.

None of this happened because the capitalist system was in a blithe, buoyant mood. On the contrary, its newly pugnacious posture, like most forms of aggression, sprang from deep anxiety. If the system became manic, it was because it was latently depressed. What drove this reorganization above all was the sudden fade-out of the postwar boom. Intensified international competition was forcing down rates of profits, drying up sources of investment, and slowing the rate of growth. Even social democracy was now too radical and expensive a political option. The stage was thus set for Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who would help dismantle traditional manufacturing, shackle the labor movement, let the market rip, strengthen the repressive arm of the state, and champion a new social philosophy known as barefaced greed. The displacement of investment from manufacturing to the service, financial, and communications industries was a reaction to a protracted economic crisis, not a leap out of a bad old world into a brave new one.

Even so, it is doubtful that most of the radicals who changed their minds about the system between the ’70s and ’80s did so simply because there were fewer cotton mills around. It was not this that led them to ditch Marxism along with their sideburns and headbands, but the growing conviction that the regime they confronted was simply too hard to crack. It was not illusions about the new capitalism, but disillusion about the possibility of changing it, which proved decisive. There were, to be sure, plenty of former socialists who rationalized their gloom by claiming that if the system could not be changed, neither did it need to be. But it was lack of faith in an alternative that proved conclusive. Because the working-class movement had been so battered and bloodied, and the political Left so robustly rolled back, the future seemed to have vanished without trace. For some on the left, the fall of the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s served to deepen the disenchantment. It did not help that the most successful radical current of the modern age—revolutionary nationalism—was by this time pretty well exhausted. What bred the culture of postmodernism, with its dismissal of so-called grand narratives and triumphal announcement of the End of History, was above all the conviction that the future would now be simply more of the present.

What helped discredit Marxism above all, then, was a creeping sense of political impotence. It is hard to sustain your faith in change when change seems off the agenda, even if that is when you need to sustain it most of all. After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was. If the fainthearted had managed to cling to their former views for another two decades, they would have witnessed a capitalism so exultant and impregnable that in 2008 it only just managed to keep the cash machines open. They would also have seen a whole continent south of the Panama Canal shift decisively to the political left. The End of History was now at an end. In any case, Marxists ought to be well accustomed to defeat. They had known greater catastrophes than this. The political odds will always be on the system in power, if only because it has more tanks than you do. But the heady visions and effervescent hopes of the late 1960s made this downturn an especially bitter pill for the survivors of that era to swallow.

What made Marxism seem implausible, then, was not that capitalism had changed its spots. The case was exactly the opposite. It was the fact that as far as the system went, it was business as usual but even more so. Ironically, then, what helped beat back Marxism also lent a kind of credence to its claims. It was thrust to the margins because the social order it confronted, far from growing more moderate and benign, waxed more ruthless and extreme than it had been before. And this made the Marxist critique of it all the more pertinent. On a global scale, capital was more concentrated and predatory than ever, and the working class had actually increased in size. It was becoming possible to imagine a future in which the megarich took shelter in their armed and gated communities, while a billion or so slum dwellers were encircled in their fetid hovels by watchtowers and barbed wire.

In our own time, as Marx predicted, inequalities of wealth have dramatically deepened. The income of a single Mexican billionaire today is equivalent to the earnings of the poorest 17 million of his compatriots. Capitalism has created more prosperity than history has ever witnessed, but the cost—not least in the near destitution of billions—has been astronomical. According to the World Bank, 2.74 billion people in 2001 lived on less than two dollars a day. We face a probable future of nuclear-armed states warring over a scarcity of resources; and that scarcity is largely the consequence of capitalism itself. Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism. The traditional leftist slogan ‘‘Socialism or barbarism’’ was never more grimly apposite, never less of a mere rhetorical flourish.

Apart from the apparent triumph of capitalism, though, hasn’t Marxism been discredited from within? How could Marxists ever live down the history of Communist totalitarianism, which has been pitting self-described Marxists against one another ever since the Russian Revolution? Surely anyone who calls himself a Marxist today must answer for Stalin’s show trials and Mao’s labor camps, as well as the brutal crackdowns in Prague and Tiananmen Square.

Taken overall, both Stalinism and Maoism were botched, bloody experiments that made the very idea of socialism stink in the nostrils of many of those elsewhere in the world who had most to benefit from it. Marx never imagined that socialism could be achieved in the impoverished conditions Stalin and Mao faced. Such a project requires almost as bizarre a loop in time as inventing the Internet in the Middle Ages. You cannot reorganize wealth for the benefit of all if there is precious little wealth to reorganize. You cannot abolish social classes in conditions of scarcity, since conflicts over a material surplus too meager to meet everyone’s needs will simply revive them again. As Marx comments in The German Ideology, the result of a revolution in such conditions is that “the old filthy business” will simply reappear. All you will get is socialized scarcity. If you need to accumulate capital more or less from scratch, then the most effective way of doing so, however brutal, is through the profit motive. Avid self-interest is likely to pile up wealth with remarkable speed, though it is likely to amass spectacular poverty at the same time.

Building up an economy from very low levels is a backbreaking, dispiriting task. It is unlikely that men and women will freely submit to the hardships it involves. So unless this project is executed gradually, under democratic control, and in accordance with socialist values, an authoritarian state may step in and force its citizens to do what they are reluctant to undertake voluntarily. The militarization of labor in Bolshevik Russia is a case in point. The result, in a grisly irony, will be to undermine the political superstructure of socialism (popular democracy, genuine self-government) in the very attempt to build up its economic base.

It is not that the building of socialism cannot be begun in deprived conditions. It is rather that without material resources it will tend to twist into the monstrous caricature of socialism known as Stalinism. The Bolshevik revolution soon found itself besieged by imperial Western armies, as well as threatened by counterrevolution, urban famine, and a bloody civil war. With a narrow capitalist base, disastrously low levels of material production, scant traces of civil institutions, a decimated, exhausted working class, peasant revolts, and a swollen bureaucracy to rival the tsar’s, the revolution was in deep trouble almost from the outset. In the end, the Bolsheviks were to march their starving, despondent, war-weary people into modernity at the point of a gun.

Marx himself was a critic of rigid dogma, military terror, political suppression, and arbitrary state power. He believed that political representatives should be accountable to their electors, and castigated the German Social Democrats of his day for their statist politics. He insisted on free speech and civil liberties, was horrified by the forced creation of an urban proletariat (in his case in England rather than Russia), and held that common ownership in the countryside should be a voluntary rather than coercive process. Yet as one who recognized that socialism cannot thrive in poverty-stricken conditions, he would have understood perfectly how the Russian revolution came to be lost.

Imagine a slightly crazed capitalist outfit that tried to turn a premodern tribe into a set of ruthlessly acquisitive, technologically sophisticated entrepreneurs speaking the jargon of public relations and free-market economics, all in a surreally short period of time. Does the fact that the experiment would almost certainly prove less than dramatically successful constitute a fair condemnation of capitalism? Surely not. To think so would be as absurd as claiming that the Girl Scouts should be disbanded because they cannot solve certain tricky problems in quantum physics. Marxists do not believe that the mighty liberal lineage from Thomas Jefferson to John Stuart Mill is annulled by the existence of secret CIA-run prisons for torturing Muslims, even though such prisons are part of the politics of today’s liberal societies. Yet the critics of Marxism are rarely willing to concede that show trials and mass terror are no refutation of it.

There is, however, another sense in which socialism is thought by some to be unworkable. Even if you were to build it under affluent conditions, how could you possibly run a complex modern economy without markets? The answer for a growing number of Marxists is that you do not need to. Markets in their view would remain an integral part of a socialist economy. So-called market socialism envisages a future in which the means of production would be socially owned, but where self-governing cooperatives would compete with one another in the marketplace. In this way, some of the virtues of the market could be retained, while some of its vices could be shed. At the level of individual enterprises, cooperation would ensure increased efficiency, since the evidence suggests that it is almost always as efficient as capitalist enterprise and often much more so. At the level of the economy as a whole, competition ensures that the informational, allocation, and incentive problems associated with the traditional Stalinist model of central planning do not arise.

Market socialism places economic power in the hands of the actual producers; it does away with social classes and exploitation. It is therefore a welcome advance on a capitalist economy. For some Marxists, however, it retains too many features of that economy to be palatable. Under market socialism there would still be commodity production, inequality, unemployment, and the sway of market forces beyond human control. How would workers not simply be transformed into collective capitalists, maximizing their profits, cutting quality, ignoring social needs, and pandering to consumerism in the drive for constant accumulation? How would one avoid the chronic short-termism of markets, their habit of ignoring the overall social picture and the long-term antisocial effects of their own fragmented decisions? Education and state monitoring might diminish these dangers, but some Marxists look instead to an economy that would be neither centrally planned nor market-governed. On this model, resources would be allocated by negotiations between producers, consumers, environmentalists, and other relevant parties, in networks of workplace, neighborhood, and consumer councils. The broad parameters of the economy, including decisions on the overall allocation of resources, rates of growth and investment, energy, transport, and ecological policies would be set by representative assemblies at local, regional, and national levels. These general decisions about, say, allocation would then devolve downward to regional and local levels, where more detailed planning would be progressively worked out. At every stage, public debate over alternative economic plans and policies would be essential. In this way, what and how we produce could be determined by social need rather than private profit. Under capitalism, we are deprived of the power to decide whether we want to produce more hospitals or more breakfast cereals. Under socialism, this freedom would be regularly exercised.

Some champions of such so-called participatory economics accept a kind of mixed socialist economy: goods that are of vital concern to the community (food, health, pharmaceuticals, education, transport, energy, subsistence products, financial institutions, the media, and the like) need to be brought under democratic public control, since those who run them tend to behave antisocially if they sniff the chance of enlarged profits in doing so. Less socially indispensable goods, however (consumer items, luxury products), could be left to the operations of the market. Some market socialists find this whole scheme too complex to be workable. As Oscar Wilde once remarked, the trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings. Yet one needs at least to take account of the role of modern information technology in oiling the wheels of such a system. Even the former vice president of Procter & Gamble has acknowledged that it makes workers’ self-management a real possibility. In Democracy and Economic Planning, Pat Devine reminds us of just how much time is currently consumed by capitalist administration and organization. There is no obvious reason why the amount of time taken up by a socialist alternative should be greater.

Socialists will no doubt continue to argue about the details of a postcapitalist economy. There is no flawless model currently on offer. One can contrast this imperfection with the capitalist economy, which is in impeccable working order and which has never been responsible for the mildest touch of poverty, waste, or slump. It has admittedly been responsible for some extravagant levels of unemployment, but the world’s leading capitalist nation has hit on an ingenious solution to this defect. In the United States today, over a million more people would be seeking work if they were not in prison.

Spectacular inequalities of wealth and power, imperial warfare, intensified exploitation, an increasingly repressive state: if all these characterize today’s world, they are also the issues on which Marxism has acted and reflected for almost two centuries. One would expect, then, that it might have a few lessons to teach the present. Marx himself was particularly struck by the extraordinarily violent process by which an urban working class had been forged out of an uprooted peasantry in his own adopted country of England—a process Brazil, China, Russia, and India are living through today. Writing in the Guardian, Tristram Hunt points out that Mike Davis’s book Planet of Slums, which documents the “stinking mountains of shit” known as slums to be found in the Lagos or Dhaka of today, can be seen as an updated version of Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class. As China becomes the workshop of the world, Hunt comments, “the special economic zones of Guangdong and Shanghai appear eerily reminiscent of 1840s Manchester and Glasgow.”

What if it were not Marxism that is outdated but capitalism itself? Back in Victorian England, Marx saw the system as having already run out of steam. Having promoted social development in its heyday, it was now acting as a drag on it. He viewed capitalist society as awash with fantasy and fetishism, myth and idolatry, however much it prided itself on its modernity. Its very enlightenment—its smug belief in its own superior rationality—was a kind of superstition. If it was capable of some astonishing progress, there was another sense in which it had to run very hard just to stay on the spot. The final limit on capitalism, Marx once commented, is capital itself, the constant reproduction of which is a frontier beyond which it cannot stray. There is thus something curiously static and repetitive about this most dynamic of all historical regimes.

Capitalism has brought about great material advances. But though this way of organizing our affairs has had a long time to demonstrate that it is capable of satisfying human demands all round, it seems no closer to doing so than ever. How long are we prepared to wait for it to come up with the goods? Why do we continue to indulge the myth that the fabulous wealth generated by this mode of production will in the fullness of time become available to all? Would the world treat similar claims by the far Left with such genial, let’s-wait-and-see forbearance? Right-wingers who concede that there will always be colossal injustices in the system, but that that’s just tough and the alternatives are even worse, are at least more honest in their hard-faced way than those who preach that it will all finally come right.

Marxists want nothing more than to stop being Marxists. In this respect, being a Marxist is nothing like being a Buddhist or a billionaire. It is more like being a medic. Medics are perverse, self-thwarting creatures who do themselves out of a job by curing patients who then no longer need them. The task of political radicals, similarly, is to get to the point where they would no longer be necessary because their goals would have been accomplished. They would then be free to bow out, burn their Guevara posters, take up that long-neglected cello again, and talk about something more intriguing than the Asiatic mode of production. Marxism is meant to be a strictly provisional affair, which is why anyone who invests his whole identity in it has missed the point. That there is a life after Marxism is the whole point of Marxism.

There is only one problem with this otherwise alluring vision. Marxism is a critique of capitalism—the most searching, rigorous, comprehensive critique of its kind ever to be launched. It follows, then, that as long as capitalism is still in business, Marxism must be as well. Only by superannuating its opponent can it superannuate itself. And on the last sighting, capitalism appeared as feisty as ever.

Most critics of Marxism today do not dispute the point. Their claim, rather, is that the system has altered almost unrecognizably since the days of Marx, and that this is why his ideas are no longer relevant. It is worth noting that Marx himself was perfectly aware of the ever-changing nature of the system he challenged. It is to Marxism itself that we owe the concept of different historical forms of capital: mercantile, agrarian, industrial, monopoly, financial, imperial, and so on. So why should the fact that capitalism has changed its shape in recent decades discredit a theory that sees change as being of its very essence? Besides, Marx himself predicted a decline of the working class and a steep increase in white-collar work. He also foresaw so-called globalization—odd for a man whose thought is supposed to be archaic. Though perhaps Marx’s “archaic” quality is what makes him still relevant today. He is accused of being outdated by the champions of a capitalism rapidly reverting to Victorian levels of inequality.

This essay is adapted from Why Marx Was Right, published this month by Yale University Press. Copyright © by Terry Eagleton. Reprinted with permission.