Whither Egypt today?

Egypt: The Muslim Brotherhood's election victory – What does it mean?
Written by Alan Woods Tuesday, 26 June 2012

The Muslim Brotherhood's candidate Mohammed Mursi has won Egypt's presidential election with 51.73% of the vote. Ahmed Shafiq, the candidate of the military, got 48.27%, according to the election commission. However these figures should be treated with caution.

mohammed-mursiThe turnout was officially claimed to be 51.8%. However, many eyewitnesses say that the real level of participation was far lower than this. Even if we accept the official estimate, it would mean that the Muslim Brotherhood only won the support of about 25% of the electorate. Moreover, an unknown number of these votes may have come from left-wing people who voted for the Muslim Brotherhood as "the lesser evil".

Huge cheers went up from thousands gathered in Cairo's Tahrir Square after the result was known. But the cheering will not last for long, for these elections revealed deep fault lines in Egyptian society.

At one point the antagonisms reached such a fevered pitch that they threatened to break into open civil war if the generals had declared their candidate as the winner. That was clearly their intention. The elections were rigged. But they realised that such a move would provoke a social explosion with unpredictable results.

Crowds had been growing in Tahrir Square all day despite the sweltering heat. They were listening to the election result announcement silently and patiently. Loudspeakers were playing a live broadcast of the election commission announcement. Some gathered round TV sets under tents. They were preparing either to celebrate or to riot.

Tension was running high. There were fears that a violent response would be sparked if the result gave victory to Shafiq. Mohammed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood and former Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq both claimed victory. The generals looked into the abysm and reluctantly drew back, no doubt under pressure from Washington, which holds the purse strings.

Farouq Sultan, the spokesman of the electoral commission, delivered an interminable speech, clearly unwilling to make the announcement of the result. Then a great cheer went up in ‪Tahrir when he confirmed that ‪Mursi had won. Thousands were dancing and singing, waving Egyptian flags. Posters of the Muslim Brotherhood candidate were everywhere, as people chanted slogans through loudspeakers. The chant went up: "to the square, to the square" as people chanted "Mursi, Mursi, Allahu Akbar" and "Revolution, revolution until victory. Revolution, revolution, in all the streets of Egypt."

For a brief moment the people of Egypt felt united in an explosion of joy and relief. But this outburst of euphoria conceals deep divisions in Egyptian society and politics. For many people the electoral victory of Mursi and the Freedom and Justice Party (the political front of the Muslim Brotherhood) represented a defeat for the open agents of counterrevolution. But the nation is now polarised as never before.

"President of all the Egyptians"

The Muslim Brotherhood candidate, assuming that there are no new dirty tricks by the military, will be sworn in by the end of the month. The prime minister appointed by the military rulers, Kamal el-Ganzouri, met Mohammed Mursi on Monday to resign formally and assume caretaker duties until the new president's team is in place. Mursi has already moved into his new office in the presidential palace and begun work forming a government.

The new president declares that he is "president of all Egyptians" but the soothing announcements of Mursi are unlikely to defuse the social and political tensions. The Christian Copts fear domination by the Muslim Brotherhood. The secular revolutionaries, some of whom voted for Mursi in the mistaken belief that the Brotherhood represented the "lesser evil", are about to receive a stern lesson in political realities. Above all, the workers and peasants, whose expectations have been aroused by the Revolution, demand jobs and houses.

Mursi promises stability, freedom and prosperity, but these promises are in direct contradiction with the crisis of capitalism. Egypt's economy is in a deep slump. Unemployment is high and poverty is increasing. Homeless people are sleeping in the cemeteries. The Egyptian people will judge the success of the new government on concrete results, especially in the economic field. For the masses the Revolution is above all a question of bread, work and houses.

Samir Radwan, Egypt's finance minister just after the revolution told the BBC that the new president will have to deal with serious financial problems: "When I started my work just five days after the revolution, we had $36bn in reserves, international reserves - that's 18 months of imports. Now it's less than $15bn; it's rock bottom, really. Tourism, by any standard, has gone down tremendously, exports have gone down, unemployment is as high as 12% - that's the official figure which is understated; 42% of the population is below the poverty line."

Above all, the generals and bureaucrats of the old regime remain in charge. As a precaution, just before the election results were announced, they took the step of dissolving parliament and concentrating all the main powers in their hands. The new "democratically elected" president will be an impotent tool in the hands of the generals. The SAF, which seized power after last year's revolution, has issued a series of anti-democratic decrees:

- The justice ministry gave soldiers the right to arrest civilians for trial in military courts until the ratification of a new constitution
- A decree was issued dissolving parliament after a court ruling that the law on elections to the lower house of parliament was invalid
- The Scaf granted itself legislative powers and reinforced its role in the drafting of a permanent constitution
- Field Marshal Tantawi announced the re-establishment of a National Defence Council, putting the generals in charge of Egypt's national security policy

Thus, the elections have solved nothing.

'Stability'

On hearing the news of his victory, tens of thousands of cheering people in Tahrir Square, chanted: "Down with military rule!" But this correct demand found no echo in the statements of the new president-elect. In his speech on Sunday, Mursi, urged Egyptians "to strengthen our national unity" and promised an inclusive presidency.

Mursi paid tribute to the protesters who died in last year's uprising against former President Hosni Mubarak but also praised the role of Egypt's powerful armed forces. He also said he would honour international treaties. "There is no room now for the language of confrontation," he said.

This was a coded message to the generals and to Washington. Mursi is anxious to soothe their jangling nerves. In effect, he tells them: "Don't worry. You can trust us. Like you, we want to put an end to the Revolution and finish the chaos and instability that is bad for business. Only we will do this more effectively than you, not by guns and bayonets but by cunning and trickery."

The imperialists immediately sent a message back to the Muslim Brotherhood: "We understand you perfectly." The White House declared that the Egyptian election result was a "milestone in the movement to democracy". Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday: "We expect to work together with the new administration on the basis of our peace treaty."

There was confusion, however, over an alleged interview quoted by Iran's semi-official Fars news agency. Fars said that Mursi planned to expand relations with Iran to "create a balance of pressure in the region", but Mursi's spokesman denied the interview had taken place. Evidently, the policy of being all things to all men had been taken a little too far in the case of accommodating both Washington and Teheran!

A Mursi spokesman, Yasser Ali, said the president's key concern was political stability. State television showed Mursi meeting on Monday with Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the head of the ruling military council, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). Field Marshal Tantawi, the chief of the counterrevolutionary forces, said the military would "stand by the elected, legitimate president and will cooperate with him for the stability of the country".

So here we have it. The counterrevolutionary generals and the Muslim Brotherhood are singing the same song in different keys. The generals promise to "respect" the election result and co-operate with Mursi. The latter, for his part, has promised to appoint a range of vice presidents and a cabinet of "all the talents".

These gentlemen are now haggling like merchants in the bazaar. The first point Mursi has to haggle over with the SCAF will be the dissolution of the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated parliament, which happened days before the presidential run-off vote. Because of the dissolution of parliament, it is not even clear where the new president will take his oath of office. This shows where the real power lies.

The Muslim Brotherhood has been seeking, not the immediate rescinding of this anti-democratic decision, but only a partial recall of parliament so that he is sworn in before MPs. But they have even retreated from this timid demand. The Mena news agency quoted a Muslim Brotherhood spokesman as saying the oath would be taken before the Supreme Constitutional Court – that is, before the very same Mubarak-appointed judges who were responsible for the dissolution of parliament and the undemocratic seizure of presidential prerogatives.

What does this mean? It means that the Muslim Brotherhood, instead of fighting for real democracy, is striving with all its might to arrive at a deal with the SCAF. Instead of fighting to uphold the results of the elections, they are willing to accept the generals' right to rule from behind the scenes. All they ask is that the generals and bureaucrats move over a little to allow them a share of the rich pickings of state power that the latter have monopolised for decades.

In other words, Mursi and the Muslim Brotherhood have used the elections to haul themselves into positions of government that will enable them to haggle more effectively with the generals. All the sacrifices of the revolutionary masses in the last eighteen months are reduced to "mediation" (that is, horse-trading) between the Islamists and the SCAF on the president's powers.

The notion of a "government of national unity", that is, a government representing all classes is even hollower in Egypt than it was in Greece and Italy. When Mursi says he will be president of all Egyptians, what does that mean? How is it possible to represent the interests of the rich and the poor? How is it possible to defend the Revolution while accepting the rule of the army jackboot? How is it possible to stand for democracy while allowing the generals to dictate the rules?

The conduct of the Muslim Brotherhood is of no surprise to Marxists. Indeed, it should be of no surprise to any thinking person, especially in Egypt. Those who presented the MB as a "revolutionary force" before the elections were simply deceiving themselves and others. The leaders of the MB represent that wing of the Egyptian bourgeoisie that was hitherto excluded from political power. Its sole aim is to lean on the masses to pressurise the generals to share power with it.

These bourgeois leaders were never revolutionaries, but they cynically leaned on the revolutionary masses to carry them to power. Now they have achieved this objective they will not hesitate to detach themselves from the Revolution and join hands with the counterrevolutionary generals and imperialists to suffocate the Revolution. That is what is meant by the establishment of security and stability.

"As a businessman who engages in industrial activity, I belong in this place – even if the previous circumstances didn't allow me to participate in it." (See Ahramonline, 12 May, 2012)

These words, spoken by Khairat El-Shater, a leading Muslim Brotherhood figure and disqualified presidential candidate, were part of a speech delivered recently before members of the Egyptian Federation of Industries. El-Shater, who has substantial business interests, is typical of the bourgeois leaders of the Brotherhood. They convey very clearly both the class basis of the MB and its real aim: to be allowed to participate in the plunder of the Egyptian state, from which they were previously excluded.

El-Shater in his opening remarks let the cat out of the bag: "Investors from the Gulf countries see potential in Egypt's large market, but they need security and stability to invest... without these things you cannot conduct economic activity." This bourgeois ardently desires security and stability, as the prior condition for investment, that is, for the making of profit.

The victory of the Muslim Brotherhood is only a stage in the Revolution, which is destined to go through a whole series of stages before it is finally resolved one way or the other. The first wave has brought them to power. The second wave will dash them to pieces.

The most pressing task of the Egyptian revolutionaries is to unmask the counterrevolutionary nature of the Muslim Brotherhood and win over that section of the masses that have been misled and deceived by the Brotherhood. Instead of participating in the cynical fraud of a "government of national unity", it is necessary to step up the strikes, demonstrations and sit-ins.

All attempts to eliminate the class antagonisms in Egyptian society by talk of "national unity" will necessarily fail. The workers and peasants demand bread. The unemployed demand work. The homeless people demand houses. And the revolutionary people are demanding the immediate revocation of the sweeping new powers that the ruling generals have usurped, not deals at the top.

The workers and peasants of Egypt must now pass through the school of the Muslim Brotherhood. It will be a very harsh school, but it will teach them some important lessons. In the end, one class must win and the other lose. Either the greatest of victories or the greatest of defeats: that is the real choice before the working class and Egyptian people as a whole.

London, 26 June 2012

http://www.marxist.com/brotherhoods-victory-what-does-it-mean.htm

How a petty bourgeois views US society

This is a really loathsome and revolting display of petty bourgeois smugness and radicalness.  Most of it seems to add up to a critique which states that the US is in decline due to rampant philistinism rather than the lawful workings of capitalism. 

Jay
06/28/2012

Counterpunch June 28, 2012
The Downward Slide
10 Sure Signs America Is in Decline
by DAVID MACARAY

Now that it's painfully clear the U.S. is on a downward slide, the only question worth asking is when, precisely, did everything start to fall apart. At what point in time did the pendulum begin swinging the other way? Accordingly, history buffs, philosophers, and amateur intellectuals rejoice in debating this question.

Some say it was the Kennedy assassination. Others say it was Vietnam, the first war this country ever lost. Others say it was Watergate, the scandal that destroyed a president and shattered our faith in government. Still others say it was Ronald Reagan's firing of the air traffic controllers, a decision that put the zap on organized labor and set loose the dogs of unbridled corporate greed.

Personally, I think it all started in 1978, when TV weather people began referring to rain as "shower activity," but that's just me.

In any event, whatever it was that launched our decline, there can be no doubt that our best days are behind us. And anyone who thinks otherwise might consider the following.

1. Estonia has stronger labor laws than the U.S. It's true. According to the OECD (Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development), Estonian workers have better protection than American workers. Which raises the obvious, disturbing question: Where is Estonia?

2. Sarah Palin almost became Vice-President. Americans can take a joke as much as the next guy, but that little stunt could have backfired.

3. The movie Titanic beat out LA Confidential for the "Best Picture" Oscar in 1997. A big, splashy movie squeezes out a smaller, well-crafted, artistic gem. Quantity over quality. Style over substance. Ho-dads over surfers.

4. The U.S. now has almost twice as many suicides as homicides. In the 1970s, we were recognized as the murder capital of the industrialized West. But our murder rate has dropped precipitously. That's the good news. The bad news is that we've taken to killing ourselves instead of other people. Not an encouraging sign.

5. In 1983, the U.S. military invaded Grenada, an island nation (132 sq. miles) roughly one-fourth the size of Phoenix, Arizona. The justification for invading? It was determined that Grenada represented a threat to U.S. security.

6. In 2003, California, the most populous and, arguably, most diverse state in the union, recalled Gray Davis, a perfectly suitable governor, and replaced him with an ESL Austrian movie star whose physique was once described as a "condom stuffed with walnuts."

7. The Kardashians get better ratings than the PBS Evening News.

8. In 2002, President George W. Bush lost consciousness after choking on a pretzel. Bush's dog revived him by licking his face (something the First Lady regularly did to divert his attention from televised football). Washington survived Valley Forge, Kennedy survived PT-109, Reagan survived a gun shot. And our commander-in-chief passes out from eating a pretzel. Who can deny that our best days are behind us?

9. The United States is in the midst of an obesity epidemic. Babies are fat, children are fat, adults are fat. Even American pets are becoming obese. Oddly, this national obesity epidemic coincides with increasing annual expenditures on exercise equipment and athletic apparel.

10. According to unofficial polls, 92-percent of Americans believe they have a Guardian Angel watching over them. If that's true, then these "guardians" need to step up to the plate, because we're getting our rear-ends kicked.

DAVID MACARAY, an LA playwright and author ("It's Never Been Easy: Essays on Modern Labor"), was a former union rep. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at dmacaray@earthlink.net

 

The itinerary of Leopardi's thought

Sebastiano Timpanaro on Giacomo Leopardi & Materialist Pessimism

Once voluntarism and Platonist scientism (for a critique of the latter, see, in particular) 'Structuralism and its successors' below) have been rejected, the task is to go beyond the indications given by the Marxist classics, fundamental as they are, and to construct a 'theory of needs' which is not, as so often, reduced to a compromise between Marx and Freud, but which confronts on a wider basis the problem of the relation between nature and society. The accusation of 'biologism' or 'vulgar materialism' is, at this point, obvious and foreseen. If this label refers to an immediate reduction of the social to the biological and a failure to recognize the radically new contribution made by the appearance of labour and relations of production with respect to merely animal life, then I hope that these essays are already forearmed against any such error (see, in particular, pp. 63, 82, 102, 208 and 216 below). If, however, as is too frequently the case in the Western Marxism of our century, what is meant is denial of the conditioning which nature continues to exercise on man; relegation of the biological character of man to a kind of prehistoric prologue to humanity; refusal to acknowledge the relevance which certain biological data have in relation to the demand for happiness (a demand which remains fundamental to the struggle for communism); then these pages are deliberately 'vulgar materialist', From this point of view, they take as their point of departure certain hedonist and pessimistic themes which were widespread in eighteenth-century thought and which reached their highest point in Leopardi. They thus represent the continuation of a line of thinking first adumbrated in my earlier book Classicismo e illuminismo nell'Ottocento italiano.

Nor has this line of thinking—any more than what I said earlier about Maoism—reached a definitive conclusion, At the start of the fifties, it was difficult to speak of pessimism with Italian Marxists. In almost all cases, they were too full of historicist faith in human progress, and tended too much—as a consequence of their Crocean origins—to ignore the relation between man and nature. From that climate, my initial and fragmentary Marxism-Leopardism (if I may so term it for brevity's sake) contracted an original flaw from which, perhaps, it is still striving to free itself. This resulted from the juxtaposition of a historical and social optimism (communism as a now certain goal of human history, even if the price paid with Stalinism seemed even at that time excessive to many of us, despite our inability to see any alternative to Stalinism other than a social-democratic one) and a pessimism with respect to nature's oppression of man, which would continue to be a cause of unhappiness even in communist society.

Today the situation has changed. As a result of the increasingly monstrous developments of 'capitalist rationality' on the one hand, and the crisis of the world communist movement on the other, that tranquil faith in historical progress as a certain bearer of communism has vanished. Indeed, contemporary Marxism (especially through the agency of tlie thinkers of the Frankfurt school) has to a considerable degree taken on an apocalyptic hue. Certain Leopardian themes involving a critique of 'progress' and 'modern civilization' must be accorded greater attention than was done in that earlier period by Marxists. But in the face of the 'Adornian' interpretations of Leopardi which have already begun to appear and which are no doubt destined to develop further, it is necessary to recall that Leopardian pessimism, precisely because of the materialist and hedonistic basis which is most explicit in its final formulation, is immune from the Romantic and existentialist dross which gravely contaminates the thought of Horkheimer and Adorno—and even the later works of Marcuse, despite their far more political and secular character. Leopardi was able to work out for himself a complex relationship to the ideas of the Enlightenment (a relationship that involved criticizing the myth of progress, but strengthening hedonistic and materialist themes and hence refusing the Romantic restoration) which was far more correct than that in which the above-mentioned thinkers situate themselves. As far as the still crucial problem of what position to adopt vis-à-vis the Enlightenment is concerned, he is much more and much better than a precursor of the Frankfurt thinkers: indeed he helps to explain their limitations and provide a critique of them.

[10-11]

It is to further elucidate this problem of man's biological frailty that I consider it particularly important to study the thought of a poet and philosopher who is very little known outside Italy,[7] and who even in Italy is often more admired than understood: Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837). And while I certainly would not claim to be able to give my English and American readers, in a few words, any adequate exposition of Leopardi's thought and poetry, I must provide at least a few essential points of clarification.

European culture of the last two centuries is full of pessimists, from Scbopenliauer to Kierkegaard (and in many ways Nietzsche), from Horkheimer to Adorno; there are powerful pessimistic themes in Freud too, especially in the last phase of his thought, when Eros was joined by the death wish. If this book were to propose yet another marriage of Marxism and 'Frankfurt' pessimism, of existentialist or Freudian ancestry, it would no doubt appear far more in conformity with the present orientations of much of Western Marxism.

Why then go back to Leopardi? From a provincial and nationalistic desire to be able to say that Italy too has its pessimist, to be exhumed and inserted willy-nilly into Marxist cnlture? By no means. Leopardi's pessimism is radically different from the romantic and existentialist variety which characterizes the thinkers mentioned above (only in the case of Nietzsche shonld a certain distinction be made). These pessimists of Mitteleuropa all have an anti-materialist, anti-Enlightenment, anti-jacobin orientation; and all end up in, or at least tend towards, more or less explicitly religious positions. What is involved is for the most part a 'religion of the shadows', a mystical desire for annihilation, rather than a banal religion of consolation; but through their despair, however sincere, there peeps a faith in an 'other reality' to be attained not on this earth but in a metaphysical world.

The itinerary of Leopardi's thought—and of his poetry, which though never banally pedagogic, indeed one of the most purely lyrical in any language, was nevertheless, like that of Lucretius, born of the courage of truth, recognizing the revivifying power of illusions without ever accepting to make use of them as an escape from harsh human reality—was quite different. Leopardi too felt deeply, from the morrow of Napoleon's fall, what has been called the 'historic disappointment' which followed the collapse of Enlightenment faith in progress. However, unlike the greater part of the Italian and European bourgeois intelligentsia, he neither slipped back into religious positions nor into a 'reasonable' form of Enlightened thought, suitably castrated and purged of its subversive charge. In a first phase (roughly from 1817 to 1823) he professed a kind of secular Rousseauism: it is necessary to return to nature (and to the Greek classics, not as academic models to be imitated in scholastic fashion, but because they are closer to ns), to nature still virgin and uncorrupted.; it is necessary to struggle against a false and mortificatory civilization which identifies 'modernity' and 'popular character' with Christianity, as the Romantics did. Christianity, for Leopardi, is not genuine primitiveness, inseparable from a proclamation of man's inherent need for happiness, but barbarie, i.e. corrupted civilization, which aggregates within itself the ills of the excess of civilization which preceded it (distance from nature, mortification of hedonistic impulses) and those of ignorance and superstition. This demand for a return to nature, against a society which claims to educate the spirit while neglecting the body, Leopardi maintained to tbe end. But, first spasmodically later with increasing vigour, there developed in his thought another line, which derived not from Ronsseau but rather from the Voltaire of the Poème sur Ie désastre de Lisbonne, from the more radical of the French materialists (especially d'Holbach and Volney), and from hedonistic pessimists such as Maupertuis and Pietro Verri. Especially from 1825 on, the most intransigent materialism, the denial of any notion of providence or anthropocentrism and the refusal of all myths, 'humanistic' as well as religious, were taken by Leopardi to their ultimate conclusions. These conclusions, moreover once the joy inherent in every conquest of truth and every liberation from prejudice passed, revealed far more clearly than in Leopardi's eighteenth-century precursors their pessimistic complexion. If nature is 'good' in contrast to a repressive and ascetic education or a progress which perpetually creates new false needs in us, not natural and not necessary, it nevertheless reveals itself to be a limit on the human need for happiness. 'Physical ill', as I mentioned earlier, cannot be ascribed solely to bad social arrangements; it has its zone of autonomous and invincible reality.

Hence, no romantic and existentialist pessimism, but a materialist pessimism. Also, however contradictory the notion may at first sight appear, an 'Enlightenment' pessimism. The later Leopardi, while he did not believe that the growth of knowledge would produce a growth of happiness (and in this sense he was not and never had been an Enlightenment thinker, at least in the more narrowly defined sense of the term), was nevertheless convinced that it was necessary, against the Italian and European 'moderates', to develop a materialist and pessimistic culture for all. That it was necessary to cease 'pacifying' the masses with the opium of religion, and instead to found a common morality, based on the solidarity of all men in the struggle against nature: a struggle that is, in the final analysis, a desperate one, but which alone can make all men brothers, outside all paternalist hypocrisy and all the foolish pride of those who will not acknowledge that men 'are no more than a tiny part of the universe'.

I must make it clear that I have never sought to fabricate a Leopardi 'precursor of Marxism'. Leopardi had no clear idea of the antagonism between social classes, even to the limited extent that this was possible before Marx and Engels. His cultural ancestry as profoundly different from that of Marx: he neither had experience of English classical economics nor of Hegel and the Hegelian left; he did not even have any direct political experience. (Though the malice with which clericals and reactionaries denigrated and persecuted him and the efforts which liberals made to circumscribe his greatness by presenting him as simply an 'idyllic' poet, belated follower of a bad philosophy, show that the politically dangerous character of his thought—albeit indirect—was well understood.) Thus the point is not to seek in Leopardi what one can find much better in Marx, Engels and Leuin. It is to gain, through Leopardi, an awareness of certain aspects of the man-nature relationship which remain somewhat in the shadows in Marxism, and which nevertheless must be confronted—and confronted materialistically—if Marxism is to be not simply the replacement of one mode of production by another, but something far more ambitious: the achievement of the greatest possible degree of happiness (in the full, strong sense which this word had in the eighteenth century, when it denoted a need which, though it could never be fully satisfied, was nonetheless impossible to suppress).

Theories of human needs are once again beginning to be discussed by Marxists, and a pupil of Lukács, Agnes Heller, has recently devoted an extremely acute and moving essay, to this subject. [8] However, she still seeks a solution in a 'Westernizing', anti-materialist Marxism. Her work too, therefore, despite its merits, confirms my conviction that it is necessary to go back to Leopardi. The same can be said with respect to Freudian Marxism. This again is on the one hand too crudely biologistic, on the other too concerned to detach psychology from neuro-physiology; the pessimism of the later Freud lays emphasis mor·e on man's 'wickedness' than on his 'unhappiness'. From this point of view as well, Leopardian pessimism has its own specific characteristic: it is uncompromisingly hostile to misanthropy (apart from a few rare occasions which Leopardi soon transcends). 'My philosophy not only does not lead to misanthropy, as might appear to a superficial observer, and as many claim against it; instead, by its nature it excludes misanthropy . . . My philosophy renders nature guilty for everything and, totally exculpating men, diverts hatred—or at least lamentation—towards a higher source, towards the true origin of the ills of the living.' In this reflection of 2 January 1829 (see Zibaldone, page 4428 of the manuscript) there is contained the germ of what, in more heroic tones and with greater awareness, Leopardi will say in one of his last poems, La Ginestra. [9]

7 On knowledge of Leopardi in England, see G. Singh, Leapardi e l'Inghilterra (with an essay on the poet's fortunes in America), Florence 1969. See too the lively and intelligent book by John Whitfield, Giacomo Leopardi, Oxford 1954. Whitfield, however, though he polemicizes effectively against Croce's essay on Leopardi, totally ignores tbe 'new course' in Leopardi studies which by 1954 had already been under way for several years, with Cesare Luporini's 'Leopardi progressivo', in Filosofi vecchi e nuovi, Florence 1947, pp. 183ff., and Walter Binni's La nuova poetica leopardiana, Florence 1947. Moreover, Whitfield's 'vitalist' interpretation, although it represents an advance over tbe reduction of Leopardi to an 'idyllic' poet, nevertheless still fails to give adequate emphasis to Leopardian materialism.

8 'Theory and Practice in Function of Human Needs', originally published in Uj Iràs, Budapest, April I972; French translation in Les Temps Modernes, August-September 1974.

9 Both the section in question of the Zibaldone and La Ginestra are included in Giacomo Leopardi, Opere, Milan 1966, pp. 921-2 and 115-22.

[18-22]

Thus, I see materialism as a criterion for the unitary explanation of reality, and not as a prop for emotional reactions. Having said that, I must add, however, that I do not accept the definition of Leopardian pessimism—i.e. materialist pessimism, quite different from the various romantic-existentialist pessimisms which the European bourgeoisie has given birth to over the last two centuries—as an emotional disposition beyond the realm of science. As I have attempted to show elsewhere, the agreement between materialism and Leopardian pessimism has its basis in hedonism; and hedonism is the basis of all scientific systems of ethics. The problem of 'pleasure and pain', to use Pietro Verri's words,[8] is a problem that is scientific to the highest degree. That old age, sickness, etc. are causes of unhappiness for the great majority of persons afflicted with them is an objective fact, just as the suffering produced by social and political oppression is an objective fact. To cite as a counter-argument the heroic calm with which so many men have confronted suffering and death means that one has not taken into account the high price paid for the attainment of such calm. Of course, in addition to heroes there are fakirs: there are those who enjoy living on nails and there are 'social fakirs' who feel completely comfortable under the most oppressive regimes. But it still seems unwarranted to conclude that physical and social ills are a matter of 'subjective taste'.

Nor do I think that the question can be glossed over by pointing out, as Vacatello does, that Leopardi and Stendhal drew different axiological consequences from materialism. First of all, Stendhal's Weltanschauung is not at all the 'opposite' of Leopardi's; in both of them there is the same headlong rush of vitalism into pessimism, and even if the vitalism is more accentuated in Stendhal, his vision of life is just as tragic. Furthermore, the question has to be considered at an earlier stage, going back at least to the eighteenth century. One can then see that (as has already been noted) pessimistic themes were already present in Voltaire, Maupertuis,[9] Pietro Verri and other writers of the period, and that it is only because the element of struggle against the old obscurantist forces and the joy in being emancipated from religious prejudices still has the upper hand that these themes do not occupy a larger space. In Leopardi himself this element is not altogether absent: the 'bitter truth', when it is affirmed against degrading superstitions and errors, is a source of Enlightenment pride. Nonetheless, the general equilibrium has shifted in a pessimistic direction because Leopardi belongs to a different personal and cultural-political situation, which accords more space to the recognition of the unhappiness in which man flnds himself after the destruction of religious and humanistic myths. [10]

With regard to socio-political oppression, a millennial philosophical tradition (represented in ancient times primarily by Stoicism, and in more recent times by idealism) has proffered 'inner freedom' as recompense. The man of culture is always free, even if he is subject to enslavement or torture, because he lives in a world of ideas over which external restrictions have no power. Marxism represents the most decisive and coherent refutation of this consolatio philosophiae. It contends that, except in those cases where the notion of inner freedom represents an extreme defensive posture designed to hold out the prospect of a future resurgence, so-called inner freedom is a poor substitute for true freedom, which cannot exist apart from man's actual emancipation from oppressive social relationships. But this refutation, if it is correct, is also valid for 'physical ills'. One cannot rejectconsolatio philosophiae as illusory in relation to socio-political oppression and at the same time regard it as completely valid and sufficient unto itself in relarion to nature's oppression of man. In my opinion, this is the most valid aspect of Leopardian pessimism: its coherent refutation of all 'consolations', not only the crudely mythological ones provided by religion, as is obvious, but also those of an idealistic or stoical nature.

8 The reference is to Pietro Verri's Discorso sull'indole del piacere e del dolore (Discourse on the Nature of Pleasure and Pain), written in 1773: Verri (1728-97), as an enlightenment polemicist, wrote against the retrogressive nature of the family, against out-dated cultural and literary forms, and against forms of economic and administrative organization which impeded the development of a market economy; as a student of human sensations, however, he held to the less than optimistic notion that all pleasures derive simply from a sudden lessening or cessation of pain. (NLB).

9 Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759): French mathematician, known for the principle of Least Action as applied to optics. (NLB).

10 With regard to the delay in recognizing certain of the clearly pessimistic consequences of eighteenth-century materialism, see Giuseppe Paolo Samonà, G. G. Belli: la commedia romana e la commedia celeste, Florence 1969, pp. 117ff.

[65-67]

But the cosmic background against which Engels projected his vision of human history put other limits as well on the concept of progress. In all forms of materialism there is a fundamental contrast between an Enlightenment thrust, confident that every emancipation from myth and dogma, every triumph of truth, is in itself a contribution to our greater happiness, and the emergence of pessimistic themes that are the inevitable result of a de-mythologized view of the human condition. As long as a group of intellectuals is organically linked to a class on the rise and is engaged in a struggle against the humiliating and oppressive old prejudices, the former characteristic prevails and materialism is seen as essentially a liberating philosophy. If, however, the struggle bogs down, either as a result of historical 'disillusionment' or simply because of the onset of a phase of relative social stability, the second characteristic comes to the fore, at times completely effacing the former, at times (as in the case of Leopardi) coexisting with it in a delicate balance. The positivist era saw satisfied materialists like Büchner and Mo1eschott in the bourgeois camp. But it also saw a resurgence of pessimism, which tended towards nostalgic religiosity among the less lucid minds and towards a coherently pessimistic conception of reality among the more lucid (although never so lucid as to be able to overcome their class origins). This coherent pessimism represented a single, unchanging vision of the 'human condition' which was inspired by the insurmountable physical-biological limitations of man as well as by historically transient social relations. Carducci and Pascoli [46] on the one hand, and Verga [47] on the other, represent the most obvious examples in Italian literature of the two kinds of pessimistic reaction. But it would be easy enough to confirm the phenomenon on a broader scale, not solely Italian or merely literary. Indeed, among the impulses that gave rise to the idealist resurgence at the end of the nineteenth century, one has to number also this bewilderment produced by a pessimism which was unable to resume and elaborate on the 'struggling' path shown by Leopardi in the Ginestra and therefore had to either fall back on some form of religion or else 'flee forward' towards irrationalist activism. In the writings of Croce and Gentile neo-idealism is repeatedly represented as a new religion destined to overcome the dismay caused by positivist materialism. On the other hand, this immanentist religion—which did away with crude myths of transcendence and only called for the capacity to negate one's own 'empirical ego' and experience immortality in so far as one identified with a supraindividual Spirit—appeared in turn to many to be too barren, and was not forceful enough to prevent many relapses into the old mythological religions and many flights of blind activism.

46 Giovanni Pascoli (1855S-1912): Italian poet, whose lyrical, melancholic verse tended to succumb to a pantheistic and nationalistic mysticism. (NLB).

47 Giovanni Verga (1840-1922): Italian novelist; while his works reflected a melancholic view of life, at the same time they depicted the sufferings of the poor with stark realism (verismo). His I malavoglia (1881) was the inspiration for Luchino Visconti's famous neo-realist film La terra trema (1948). (NLB).

[96-97]

SOURCE: Timpanaro, Sebastiano. On Materialism, translated by Lawrence Garner. London: NLB, 1975.

http://www.autodidactproject.org/quote/timpanaro_leopardi.html

Slavoj Žižek on The Avengers (2012)

I have come to realize after doing a lot more reading of SZ a few weeks ago that he simply does not know much about Marxism. Not his fault, having grown up under Titoism, but he does have a habit of going on to make statements about it and in its name anyway.
Jay
06/24/2012


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tP4pcDLI57c

All the old paintings on the tombs

Guidepost toward some summer reading:

Walpole's Weird Wonder

The Castle of OtrantoThe Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

One of the most ludicrous Penguin Classics, this book reads as if the Monty Python boys had teamed up with Sir Walter Scott and they'd taken a whole bunch o' drugs together. If you're expecting this progenitor of the Gothic novel to have spooky atmosphere, credible shocks and believable characters, stop right there. It's an eighteenth century novel, and that means it's pre-Romantic. The novel was not considered a serious literary form at the time (or at least, not by most people) - real literature was non-fiction for sensible chaps, followed by poetry, followed by drama, with the novel lagging in last place as a fit diversion for silly young ladies. Walpole didn't really help the situation by writing a very silly book, but it's so bizarre that - if you try to visualise what's going on - you can almost appreciate why it was such a huge success. Which is why I've given it three stars. It's like one of those terrible horror films you remember when many a better-crafted work has been forgotten.

http://suptales.blogspot.com/2012/06/walpoles-weird-wonder.html

Otranto can be read here.

*

Allergic to Depths
Terry Eagleton

    Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin by Richard Davenport-Hines;      Fourth Estate, 438 pp, £20.00, December 1998, ISBN 1 85702 498 2

All over the world, postgraduate students of English who might once have written on Wordsworth or Mrs Gaskell are now turning out theses on vampires, monsters, sado-masochism and mutilation. Most of this can be put down to Post-Modern faddishness, though vampires have a more venerable pedigree, as Richard Davenport-Hines notes in his agreeable romp through Gothic art from Salvator Rosa to Damien Hirst. Bram Stoker's Dracula, now translated into over forty languages, has exerted an enduring fascination since its publication in 1897, with Dracula himself the most filmed fictional character after Sherlock Holmes. An English film, made in 1962, was responsible for five thousand fainting cases in cinemas, 75 per cent of them male. Women presumably see more blood than men, and men no doubt saw even less of it before they were allowed to be present at births. The late Romanian dictator Ceausescu decreed one of Dracula's prototypes, Vlad the Impaler, a national hero, while 27 per cent of respondents to an American survey confessed to believing in vampires. There is a Santa Cruz Vampires Motor-Cycle and Scooter Club, and US vampires communicate by e-mail.

Post-Modernism's obsession with the deviant, exotic and grotesque is partly an inheritance from Modernism itself. Modernism tends to find ordinary life tediously suburban, and sees the truth as disclosing itself only at an extreme. A tragic hero is anyone scooped off the 8.15 to Paddington and pushed to the limit. The acte gratuit, the existential gesture, the commitment sustained into death, the word to end all words, the one action which will fix your identity for all eternity: these are among Modernism's myths of extremity, along with the belief that language itself is in so dismally inauthentic a state that only by purging or cramming or dislocating it will you force it to yield up its secrets. It is what one might call, after George Orwell's 1984, the Room 101 syndrome: what Orwell's protagonist says when a cageful of starved rats are about to burrow through his cheek and devour his tongue must undoubtedly be the truth. Since most of us who found ourselves in this situation would say anything at all, the strangeness of this doctrine should give us pause. Why should truth and extremity be thought to be bedfellows?

Part of the answer is that everyday life is now felt to be irredeemably alienated, so that only what violates or estranges it can be valid. For Post-Modern thought, the normative is inherently oppressive, as though there was something darkly autocratic about civil rights legislation or not spitting in the milk jug. Norms are just those aberrations we happen to endorse – in which case, since all aberrations are potential norms, they, too, ought to be suspect. And if consensus is the tyranny of the majority, as it seems to be for, say, Jean-François Lyotard, then there can be no radical consensus either. Since most purveyors of this wisdom pride themselves on their historicising cast of mind, it is ironic that they fail to see in it a reflection of the particular social conditions of modernity. For Samuel Johnson, it was the socially typical which was imaginatively enthralling, and aberration which was boring. Johnson had a proudly populist trust in the robustness of routine meanings, and saw language as embodying the common experience distilled from everyday practices. These days, it is not hard to find radicals who affirm the cause of the common people but dismiss their language as false consciousness. Post-Modern celebrations of the off-beat, marginal and minoritarian belong, among other more positive things, to an age in which the notion of a radical mass movement has become, not least for those too young to remember one, a contradiction in terms.

Davenport-Hines sees the Post-Modern as the latest resurgence of Gothic – a self-confirming case to some extent, since he tends to read the latter in terms of the former. But he has a point even so. The speech of American youth – weird, gross, bizarre, wicked, scary – is certainly the discourse of Gothic, which before Modernism arrived on the scene was the most resourceful antagonist of literary realism we could muster. Malevolent barons, lascivious monks, victimised virgins, shaggy ruins, mouldering dungeons: if these gaudy pieces of theatre hardly seem the stuff of high art, they nevertheless played their part in an extravagant critique of Enlightenment reason, not least from the standpoint of the women who represented that reason's repressed underside. Gothic is the grotesque shadow thrown by its remorseless glare, the political unconscious of a middle-class society which has thrust its anxieties and persecutory fantasies into the safe keeping of its fiction. If we were to imagine that our daily social doings were all the time weaving a monstrously distorted subtext of themselves, an invisible verso to the recto of our waking life, then the guilt, horror and spectacular violence of Gothic might well be one place where this dreadful discourse could be uncovered.

There are other parallels between Gothic and the Post-Modern, which Davenport-Hines rather too tersely notes. If schlock has always been part of Gothic culture, much of which is terrible in more senses than one, kitsch plays an equivalent role in Post-Modern art. Television soap opera, which supplies 'shocks, facile emotional thrills and factitious intensity by manipulating stereotypical characters in mechanistic plots', is for Davenport-Hines the very essence of Gothic. But the two currents are also akin in their campness, their self-conscious theatricality and over-the-top artifice. This book's subtitle – 'Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin' – belongs to that genre. Davenport-Hines sees 'Goths' as in revolt against the stable, cohesive bourgeois self, celebrating human identity instead as 'an improvised performance, discontinuous and incessantly redevised by stylised acts'. This is to read the Gothic too doctrinally through the lens of the Post-Modern, with Ann Radcliffe playing Kathy Acker; but the analogy is suggestive. Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto is convincingly read here as high camp.

But there are important differences, too. Gothic represents a ruined or fractured realism, excessive because its desire carries it beyond the ego and social convention; Post-Modern horror belongs to an epoch in which horror itself has become conventional, and so must be suitably self-ironising. It is the culture of an era too calloused and streetwise to be shocked, and so reaps its wry humour from the pointlessness of any such attempt. Gothic, by contrast, is funny in the way all excessive intensity is, as well as in the manner of an obscene joke. It allows us to indulge our repressed fantasies so unashamedly that we laugh at its very bare-facedness, quite independently of its content.

Any terror put into an accomplished enough artistic form becomes enjoyable, and so self-contradictory. To this extent, Gothic is sado-masochistic in its form as well as in much of its content. We take pleasure in being terrified, not least when the terrors in question are those of others. As Schopenhauer knew, we reap pleasure from fictional frights partly because we relish our own immunity to the injury they threaten, and thus, as Freud might have added, we allow Eros its momentary triumph over Thanatos. But since the death wish means that we are gratified by destruction in real life, the enjoyment we gain from horror stories is also a heightened version of how we react to real-life alarms. Like the Freudian unconscious, Gothic is at once intense and mechanical, a realm of noble passion full of creaking machinery, hamfisted gambits and crude stereotypes. It is a world of trompe l'oeil, in which bookshelves conceal instruments of torture and nothing is as it appears; but if it distrusts appearances it is also allergic to depths, preferring to stage emotion and externalise its conflicts.

Just as Freud unmasks the bourgeois family as a cockpit of lusts and loathings, so the Gothic novel turns that sacrosanct community into a nightmare of incest, greed and lethal antagonism. One does not need to stray too far beyond the domestic hearth to find skeletons in cupboards, murky inheritances and murderous violence. Burke wished to portray political society as a family: the Gothic writers reversed the analogy to devastating effect. Davenport-Hines recounts the story of the extraordinary Kingsborough family of Mitchelstown Castle in Ireland, whose history outstripped their ill-proportioned Gothic pile in grotesquerie and extravagance. One Kingsborough, having blown out the brains of his daughter's seducer, chose to be tried in the Irish House of Lords, after his daughter had given birth to a still-born child and lost her sanity. Dressed in deep mourning for the man he had murdered, and standing under the poised axe of the executioner, Kingsborough was found not guilty by every peer there. His son George, having commanded his tenants to assemble in his hall to explain why they had failed to vote for him at an election, went mad before their eyes. Committed to the care of a mad-doctor, he 'was unwilling to conform to any regulations, but ... could give an opinion on the value of cattle'. When it comes to the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, of which the author of Dracula was himself a member, Gothic is largely a question – to quote another Irish Gothicist – of life imitating art. Mary Wollstonecraft was governess to the Kingsborough daughters for a while, and an under-cook called Claridge later opened a hotel in London.

If the demonic, macabre stuff of Gothic proves alluring, it is partly because the devil has all the best tunes. But why? For traditional theology, virtue is a matter of energy and enjoyment, and evil mere deprivation. Evil may make a lot of noise, but the dust and heat it raises derive from an incapacity for life, which is why nobody could actually be in hell. To be damned must mean to be dead. All this, however, is bound to look different when the middle classes are in the ascendancy. Once virtue becomes the deadly dull stuff of thrift, prudence, temperance, submissiveness and sexual repression, the devil has much less trouble in drumming up a fan club. Satanism is in this sense just the flipside of suburbia. As John Carey has observed, the grotesque freaks who populate the fringes of a Dickens novel represent the sadistic vengeance which the text wreaks on its own decorous middle-class story-line. Nobody would ask Oliver Twist to dinner if they could hook Fagin instead. Samuel Richardson must have known that the saintly Clarissa was a bore, just as the creator of Emma Woodhouse must have seen that the virtuous Fanny Price was hardly a bundle of fun; but both Richardson and Austen are challenging us to imagine how virtue, in such predatory social circumstances, could ever be anything else. The transgressions of Gothic are dependent on the sobrieties of realism, just as the 'bad' body of Gothic – monstrous, mutilated, libidinal – represents the guilty yearning of the 'good', sanitised body of the suburbs.

A further parallel between the Gothic and the Post-Modern, though one which this study seems not to notice, lies in their political ambiguity. Davenport-Hines points out that Gothic fiction 'is nothing if not hostile to progressive hopes'; for all its delight in excess and inversion, it is notably nervous of political upheaval. As he perceptively remarks, Gothic architecture evoked ideas of feudal hierarchy and stability which a good deal of Gothic literature took pains to subvert. But Gothic writing is more a revolution of the subject than a transformation of society, and much the same could be said of the politics of Post-Modernism. Much Gothic literature is sexually audacious for its time, and so, if the word 'audacious' still had any meaning, would a lot of Post-Modernist culture be. But in both cases, sexuality can come to stand in for other political conflicts, in a process of displacement which is of interest to the psychoanalytical theory that reinvented sexuality for our time. In the case of late 18th-century Gothic novelists like 'Monk' Lewis and Ann Radcliffe, this was largely because of a conservative stance towards the revolutionary events of their day, whereas for the Post-Modernists it is largely because there seem to be no revolutionary events around. If working-class militancy is dead, Marxism discredited and revolutionary nationalism on its uppers, then the field of sexuality can provide the forms of power-struggle, symbolism and solidarity which are less and less available elsewhere, along with a greater chance of political gains.

Gothic, as this book recognises, is all about power and domination: the fiction of the Brontë sisters, in which there is hardly a human relationship that does not involve a sado-masochistic power-struggle, is Gothic in just this sense. The Gothic is one of the first great imaginative ventures into what we would nowadays call sexual politics, boldly pursuing the business of power into the very folds and crevices of human subjectivity. To this extent, Foucault is a thoroughly Gothic theorist. But like a good deal of Post-Modern thought, the sexual radicalism of Gothic doesn't imply a revolutionary politics in general. If sado-masochism can unmask sexuality as a political affair, it can also urge the delights of deference. Not every 'Goth' was a Sade (a social revolutionary to whom this book devotes some fascinating pages).

This is clear enough from Davenport-Hines's inclusion among his Goths of Alexander Pope, the Earl of Shaftesbury and the architect William Kent. The dominant culture of 18th-century England was not averse to a spot of wild irregularity, not least when it came to gardening. Or indeed to the heroic couplet, which combines symmetry with freedom, the regular tapping of the metre with the curvings and flexings of the speaking voice. The sublime, an aesthetic notion much touted by Post-Modernists as subversive, becomes in Burke's hands the intimidatory aura by which political authority secures our compliance. English ideology has always been canny enough to incorporate a fair amount of fancy and freewheeling, of that stubborn contingency which resists the high-rationalist schemes of the inhuman French.

Even so, quite what Pope, Kent and Shaftesbury are doing in a study of Gothic is a question worth raising. Davenport-Hines's Goths are an oddly assorted bunch, including among others Goya, Piranesi, Fuseli, William Shenstone, Byron, Hawthorne, Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Poppy Z. Brite and David Lynch. 'Gothic' is no doubt as variable in definition as it is in quality, but one can't avoid the sense of a certain arbitrariness of selection. It is not so much that any obvious authors have been left out; it is rather that there are a few queer-looking gatecrashers, along with some unpredictable swerving between art-forms. One of the greatest accounts of Gothic, Ruskin's essay 'The Nature of Gothic', is passed over in silence. Nor does Davenport-Hines seem to spend much time actually thinking about his subject. A brief theoretical prologue, which concludes rather rashly with a flourish about the undying 'Gothic imagination', is followed for the most part by plot summaries and potted histories. Pitched adroitly in style between academia and the general reader, Gothic stitches together the topics of women, sexuality, the body, mystery, sensationalism and enigma. In today's cultural climate, it is hard to see how it could fail to win a wide readership – just what it was surely constructed to achieve.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n06/terry-eagleton/allergic-to-depths

Making the case from Gramsci (again)

Gramsci's Leninism
Written by Chris Walsh
Friday, 22 June 2012


Chris Walsh explores Antonio Gramsci as a Leninist, the originality of his thinking and the relevance of Gramsci today

The legacy of Antonio Gramsci is one of the most fiercely contested in the Marxist tradition. Gramsci's lineage is claimed by myriad schools of thought for innumerable theoretical purposes, both within and out with Marxism. There is scarcely a social science that hasn't incorporated Gramsci's key concepts into its literature: often presenting the Italian as an 'acceptable' Marxist and almost never confronting the possibility that he was a thinker and activist of the same political ilk as Lenin. In the history of Western Marxism, perhaps the major debate of the last fifty years has been around the question of whether Gramsci's politics were a continuation of, or a break from, the Leninist tradition.

The major task of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks was to begin to articulate a revolutionary strategy for socialists operating in the advanced capitalist West where the conditions were fundamentally different from those in absolutist Russia. To engage in such a project is enough, for some, to draw a distinction between Gramsci's politics and Lenin's. However, this is a shallow conclusion to reach; since in the early 1920s, no one was more acutely aware as Lenin that a different revolutionary strategy would be necessary for the West.

In the 1970s, a new wave of theory which relied heavily on a (mis)reading of Gramsci began to emerge from within the Communist Parties of Europe. This loose variety of perspectives became known collectively as Eurocommunism: centred on the idea that Gramsci's concept of 'War of Position' sanctioned a reformist road to socialism; the Communist Parties that adhered to this new perspective began to see electoral work as their political priority and quickly began to discount much of the politics of their Leninist heritage.

In Britain, Eurocommunism was championed by the Marxism Today journal, headed up by writers like Martin Jacques and Stuart Hall. Such figures had good reason to detach Gramsci from the Leninist tradition: they wanted to drive a theoretical wedge between themselves and the Stalinist USSR's 'cult of Lenin'; they were deeply pessimistic from decades of defeats for the hard-left and wanted to articulate a new socialist strategy which jettisoned the unmarketable old verities of their failed Marxism-Leninism, like 'The Dictatorship of The Proletariat'. Gramsci, they thought, was their ticket to such drastic revision and they purposefully tried to distance his thought from that of Lenin. These were, of course, politically motivated men. Their own conclusions were neither impartial nor strictly scholarly but dictated by their own specific agenda of radical left-wing reorientation and renewal, in a time of deep crisis for the left.

It is important here to clarify some, often ignored but crucial, points: Firstly, the concept which has become synonymous with Gramscian thought, 'hegemony', was not an original concept of Gramsci's, but one that he learned from Lenin and was widely used by leading theorists of both the Second and Third International. Gramsci's use of the term is not a departure from, nor contradictory to, the Russian's usage but is in fact a continuation and development of the same concept. Secondly, although it has been popular for decades to characterise Gramsci's hegemony as an alternative strategy to the increasingly unfashionable concept of The Dictatorship of The Proletariat, Gramsci never intended it thus; in fact the two concepts were, in the Italian's mind, very much complementary. In fact, Gramsci's Prison Notebooks was an attempt to carry on Lenin's legacy after his death.

Lenin and the West

As already mentioned, Lenin knew all too well that a different revolutionary strategy was required for the West. In 1921 he specifically outlined to the Russian communists the necessity of the theorisation of a strategy for Western workers which was suitable to their own conditions. He specifically regrets that the program set out at the Third Congress was scarcely comprehensible to the non-Russian mind:

"At the Third Congress, in 1921, we adopted a resolution on the organisational structure of the Communist parties and on the methods and content of their activities. The resolution is an excellent one, but it almost entirely Russian, that is to say, everything in it is based on Russian conditions. This is its good point, but it is also its failing. It is its failing because I am sure that no foreigner can read it…Second, even if they read it, they will not understand it because it is too Russian. Not because it is written in Russian – it has been excellently translated into all languages – but because it is thoroughly imbued with the Russian spirit. And third, if by way of exception some foreigner does understand it, he cannot carry it out." (Lenin; 'Five Years of the Russian Revolution and the Prospects of the World Revolution: Report to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International'; Lenin's Final Fight: 1922-23; p111)

The strength of the resolution was in its detail, specificity and ability to focus on the minutiae of organisational questions. Its weakness was that the specifics of the Russian social and economic conditions were exceptional and thus completely alien to the Western worker. Worse still is the fact that even after dedicated study of the Russian conditions leading to an understanding of the revolutionary organisation and practice of the Russian communists, this knowledge could become a fetter to the Western revolutionary if taken dogmatically since their own road to workers revolution would be so radically different to that of the Bolsheviks. This led Lenin to lament that "We have not learned how to present our Russian experience to foreigners." In order to rectify the oversights from the previous congress, he stressed to his compatriots that, "We Russians must also find ways and means of explaining the principles of this resolution to the foreigners. Unless we do that, it will be absolutely impossible for them to carry it out."

The key task for the Communist International at this point was to 'translate' the Russian experience into the many vernaculars of the European workers. No two states have identical form or conditions, and certainly the Russian situation was particularly far removed from those of the more advanced capitalisms in Europe.

War of Manouvere & War of Position

One of Gramsci's greatest contributions to revolutionary Marxism was his formulation of the dual strategies of War of Manouvere and War of Position. The former, as carried out by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1917, was conceived as an appropriate strategy for socialists operating within societies where capitalism was still underdeveloped. It involved an insurrectionary advance upon the state which is only possible when the ruling class within society maintain their superiority to the subaltern classes by sheer force, with little or no acceptance of their superiority from the masses. In such a situation, the subordinate classes do not consent to the class leadership of the bourgeoisie but are forced into acquiescence by the vast apparatuses of state violence, "special bodies of armed men, prisons, etc." as Lenin outlined in The State and Revolution.

The War of Position, on the other hand, is a more patient and protracted strategy. This involves not just an attack upon the bastions of state power, but a lengthy period building up to this moment in which class alliances are forged and ideological leadership amongst the subaltern classes is strived for. Gramsci explains the differing conditions that demand each respective strategy:

"In the East, the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state tottered, a sturdy structure of civil society was immediately revealed. The state was just a forward trench; behind it stood a succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements. Needless to say, the configuration of the state varied from state to state, which is precisely why an accurate reconnaissance on a national scale was needed." (Gramsci, Antonio; Prison Notebooks, Volume III; trans. Buttigieg; p169)

In this particular passage Gramsci identifies the state as being the fortress surrounding civil society. At other times he presents the converse, that civil society protects the state. There is no ultimate truth regarding the formulation of advanced capitalist states since "the configuration of the state varied from state to state". The key point to note is that in the West there was a far more mature relationship between the state and civil society. The state in the advanced capitalist West ensures the continuation of the domination of the capitalist class through a far more complex method of governance than the brute coercion of the underdeveloped Eastern state. There is a far more effective deployment of a combination of both coercion and consent. The more advanced that the capitalist state becomes, it utilises less and less force and becomes increasingly reliant on gaining consent from the masses to maintain the hierarchical status quo.

It is important to note at this point that the population is by no means duped into such an arrangement. The ideology of the ruling class purposefully appeals to certain needs, desires or fears that are actually held by the subaltern classes. These appeals are made upon different issues at different historical points and are obviously dictated by the specific conditions in any given society. They can be anything from: the restoration of law and order/domestic security; national security; concerns around the size of the state apparatus; anger at 'benefits culture', appeals to fairness. All of these were deployed in Margaret Thatcher's political project. All of these fears were stoked by Thatcher and her allies, predominantly through the role of the media in endorsing them wholeheartedly and giving little or no platform to any voice of dissent.

When the ruling class ideology becomes so widely accepted that the oppressed classes are willing to subscribe to it; when alternatives cannot be found, or if they exist but can't gain any traction; this is when the ruling ideology becomes, what Gramsci called, 'common sense'. This ideological shift in society becomes so stable that even the following political administrations seemingly have to subscribe to it. This is when a political project becomes truly hegemonic. This is what was achieved by the radical project of Thatcherism, so that the next Labour government after Thatcher's reign completely embraced and continued her neo-liberal project.

The Integral State

In the traditional Marxist duality of state and civil society; the ideological apparatuses such as the media, schools, universities, the family etc. are considered to be institutions of civil society. Gramsci recognized that in advanced capitalist society, such an assignment is not completely accurate. Civil society and the state become so inextricably linked that both must be tackled concurrently. If we consider the influence that powerful figures in society can have upon the state and vice versa: whether it be wealthy donors to political parties having a say in policy or decision making; or media tycoons who have such a vast influence upon the population that they play a decisive role in who is elected to office; it is clear that the power in society does not simply lie within the state proper.

This is why Gramsci formulated the concept of the 'integral state'. In this formulation, the state and civil society are not two distinct entities but two component parts of the same organism. There is a dialectical relationship between the two parts so that the capacities of the state to act are always dependant upon the balance of class and social forces, and the role of actors, within civil society.

It is a common misinterpretation of Gramsci that the War of Position is fought within civil society, and once hegemony is ensured, the state lies unprotected for the workers to lay hold of. When we consider the concept of the 'integral state' it becomes obvious that this is incorrect. The integral state is everything; one unitary 'state-form' that encompasses both civil and political society. The state proper and civil society prop each other up in a symbiotic fashion. A working class revolutionary movement must attack both at once. The strategy of the united front must be in constant deployment. The oppressed must be organised and drawn into constant and increasing struggle with the state and the ruling class. This must be given organisational form in the shape of new workers institutions and revolutionaries must always strive to ensconce politics into them, continually raising the consciousness and organisation of struggle in a dialectical interaction.

Civil Hegemony = War of Position = United front

We must understand that Gramsci's conception of hegemony cannot be comprehended in isolation from his other major prison researches. We are offered the equation: 'Civil Hegemony = War of Position = United Front.' The United Front is the strategy implemented in order to unite the subordinate classes in conflict with the state; Civil hegemony (the starting point of, and always progressing towards, political hegemony) is the leadership of the oppressed classes on the terrain of civil society; and War of Position is the steady, incremental advance of the proletarian-led alliance of the oppressed to subordinate the dominant hegemony, and when possible, manouvere for control of the apparatuses of the state. Each component part of this formulation is essential to the unity of the strategic whole. If any one is discounted, the strategy is rendered unintelligible and certainly un-workable. Leadership (hegemony) can only be established within civil society once the various oppressed classes have forged some form of allegiance (through the United Front) with the proletarian vanguard that will lead the struggle against the ruling class in the fields of both civil and political society. I will argue, and seek to demonstrate through a close textual analysis, that each component part of the equation owes a great deal to the influence of Lenin.

Lenin's Hegemony (Leadership)

As we have already noted, Gramsci adopted his concept of hegemony from Lenin. We should also remember at this point that hegemony for Gramsci, in any given pre-revolutionary period, simply means leadership of the subaltern classes, brought together in struggle by the United Front. Although Lenin doesn't often use the word hegemony, this has often mistakenly been interpreted as an absence or irrelevance of the concept from his discourse. As Buci-Glucksmann puts it:

"The majority of commentators, anxious to stress the decisive contribution made by Gramsci, or more subtly, to oppose Gramsci to Lenin, end up by underestimating the place of hegemony in Lenin's work and remaining almost completely silent on the Third International." (Buci-Glucksmann, Christine; Gramsci and The State; p174)

However, it is not difficult to find examples of the concept in his writings from long before 1917. Let us consider the following passages from Two Tactics of Social Democracy, written in 1905:

"All the usual, regular and current work of all organizations and groups of our Party, the work of propaganda, agitation and organisation, is directed towards strengthening and expanding the ties with the masses." (Lenin; Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in The Democratic Revolution, Lenin: Selected Works; p51)

"In a word, to avoid finding itself with its hands tied in the struggle against the inconsistent bourgeois democracy the proletariat must be class-conscious and strong enough to rouse the peasantry to revolutionary consciousness, guide its assault, and thereby independently pursue the line of consistent proletarian democratism." (Lenin; Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in The Democratic Revolution, Lenin: Selected Works; p85)

As early as 1905 Lenin recognises that class alliances must be made with the other subaltern classes in order to engage in effective revolutionary struggle. This is especially true in countries where the proletariat is not quantitatively the largest class. As well as forging this alliance of the oppressed, the proletariat must establish the trust and loyalty of the other component classes and lead and dictate the form of their revolutionary activities (just as in Gramsci's formulations). At this conjuncture, Lenin identifies the united front as a tactic, suitable to the specific period, rather than a strategy. One could easily argue that it was suitable for Russia in 1905 but quite ill-fitting to the conditions in which Gramsci operated in Italy. However, the United Front eventually establishes a more permanent role in Lenin's thought. It wasn't until much later, specifically at the beginning of the Third International that the united front was recognized as a strategy for the age rather than merely a specific manouvere. I will return to, and address, this point later when dealing with the theory and practice of the 'last Lenin' and its significance to Gramsci.

Lenin's overall strategy for proletarian revolution was evidently vindicated in October 1917. After the October Revolution, the concept of hegemony – class leadership of the oppressed – begins to appear far more frequently in Lenin's writings, and it appears in a more developed form. In 1918, in The State and Revolution, we read:

"Only the proletariat – by virtue of the economic role it plays in large-scale production – is capable of being the leader of all the working and exploited people, whom the bourgeoisie exploit, oppress and crush, often not less but more than they do the proletarians, but who are incapable of waging an independent struggle for their emancipation." (Lenin; The State and Revolution; Lenin: Selected Works; p281)

No other class other than that of workers has been prepared by its position in the mode of production for such a role; No other class is organized through labour in such large groupings and social conditions; No other class has the skills to continue production and lay the foundations for the new socialist society in the eventuality of the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.

The Dictatorship of The Proletariat (Domination)

At this point, after the revolutionary deposition of the capitalist class, Lenin's 'hegemony' acquires another vital aspect to its overall meaning, one that we also find in the writings of Antonio Gramsci; namely, domination. Now we see hegemony as necessary not just in order to lead the oppressed classes in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie; but also as essential to the proletariat to maintain its class domination and quell the "desperate resistance of the bourgeoisie". This period in which the proletariat assumes the position of society's ruling class is by no means the completion of the workers' revolution. It is simply the transitional period of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The workers revolution is only complete when all classes have been abolished from society.

Now, the distinction, falsely forged in desperation by the Eurocommunists and reformists of all shades, of Gramsci's notion of hegemony and Lenin's understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat is exposed to all as wholly inaccurate. Simply put, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the mobilization of "a 'special coercive force' for the suppression of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat". (Lenin; The State and Revolution; Lenin: Selected Works; p275) In other words, Gramsci's understanding of the 'domination' aspect of hegemony is identical to Lenin's 'dictatorship of the proletariat'.

In the writings of both Lenin and Gramsci, the proletarian-led, revolutionary alliance of the exploited remained essential before, during and after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. This working class leadership was coupled with a post-insurrectionary working class domination and suppression of the deposed capitalist class and the counter-revolutionary forces it would mobilise in a furious attempt to reclaim its lost superiority. In Gramsci's first notebook he writes:

"A class is dominant in two ways, namely it is "leading" and "dominant." It leads the allied classes, it dominates the opposing classes. Therefore, a class can (and must) "lead" even before assuming power; when it is in power it becomes dominant, but it also continues to 'lead'." (Gramsci, Antonio; Prison Notebooks, Volume I; trans. Buttigieg; p136)

Compare this with Lenin's outline of the strategic necessities of the revolutionary process, again written in 1918:

"In every socialist revolution, however – and consequently in the socialist revolution in Russia which we began on October 25, 1917 – the principal task of the proletariat, and of the poor peasants which it leads, is the positive or constructive work of setting up an extremely intricate and delicate system of new organizational relationships extending to the planned production and distribution of the goods required for the existence of tens of millions of people. Such a revolution can be successfully carried out only if the majority of the population, and primarily the majority of the working people, engage in independent creative work as makers of history. Only if the proletariat and the poor peasants display sufficient class-consciousness, devotion to principle, self-sacrifice and perseverance, will the victory of the socialist revolution be assured." (Lenin; The Immediate Tasks of The Soviet Government; Lenin: Selected Works; p402)

The overthrow of the bourgeoisie does not herald the birth of a new socialist society; it is merely the transitory stage of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The socialist revolution is only complete when classes have been eliminated from society and thus the state, whose very raison d'être is the suppression of the subordinate classes to ensure the continued superiority of the dominant, is rendered superfluous. The socialist revolution is only completed when a new, completely unprecedented state-form comes into being: the workers state; "which is no longer really a state." (Lenin; The State and Revolution; Essential Works of Lenin; p301)

The alliances forged before the insurrectionary movement must be maintained and continue to be led by the workers in order to construct the new social and economic conditions for socialism and allow the revolutionary process to progress beyond the temporary moment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Lenin writes in 1919:

"Classes have remained, but in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat every class has undergone a change, and the relations between the classes have also changed. The class struggle does not disappear under the dictatorship of the proletariat; it merely assumes different forms." (Lenin; Economics and Politics in The Era of The Dictatorship of the Proletariat; Lenin: Selected Works; p503)

Although Lenin and Gramsci use different language, it is evident that they are describing the same organisational, revolutionary practice. Just as the relative absence of the actual word 'hegemony' in Lenin doesn't denote an omission of the concept; neither does Gramsci's seldom use of the phrase, 'the Dictatorship of the Proletariat' in the Prison Notebooks signify its absence from his thought.

The 'Last Lenin'

The most significant themes of Gramsci's carceral writings: Hegemony, War of Position and the United Front; as we have seen, were all taken directly from Lenin. Gramsci's biographer, Alastair Davidson remarks that, "Leninism at its end-point and gramscianism at its beginnings are closely linked." (Davidson, Alastair; Gramsci & Lenin: 1917-1922; The Socialist Register, 1974; p146) This does not go far enough. Gramsci's prison writings carry Lenin's theoretical baton after the Russian's death. They seek to articulate his final strategic thoughts in a period when Leninism had been crudely distorted and Lenin's true legacy was fiercely contested, if not always openly, within the Communist International. Gramsci formulated his ideas at the same time as the Comintern was committed to the strategic folly of the Third Period and the abandonment of the United Front. In Lenin's final years, he realised that the United Front was no longer merely a conjunctural manouvere but in fact the only suitable strategy for the age. Gramsci took the minority position of being faithful to this Lenin. Peter Thomas writes:

"The struggle for 'civil and political hegemony', the attempt to construct a proletarian hegemonic apparatus, was Gramsci's attempt to remain faithful to Lenin's last will and testament and to deploy the qualitative advance in the development of the concept of hegemony in Western conditions. Far from leading away from the classical thesis of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Gramscian theory of proletarian hegemony posits itself as its necessary 'complement'. War of Position is now not only the 'only possible' strategy in the West; as an application of the mass class-based politics of the united front, it has become the sine qua non of a revolutionary politics that wants to produce a politics 'of a very different type' on an international scale." (Thomas, Peter D; The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism; p239)

In light of the evidence, there can be absolutely no question of whether or not Gramsci was a Leninist. His Leninism was far richer and more dynamic than any variant professed by his contemporaries. By crudely cleaving Gramsci from the Leninist tradition, the Eurocommunists and their ancestors present a picture of the man and his theory which is not only historically inaccurate, but opportunistically incomplete. We must reclaim his legacy from its wide-ranging abuse in political discourse and just about every other field of social science.

In the 21st century when much of the left have abandoned Lenin for being antiquated and outmoded, we must look to Gramsci in order to help define what Leninism means today and its relevance to revolutionary struggle in our age. The Leninist left's dreary re-reading of The State and Revolution and What Is To Be Done?, as if a solution to the many crises that confront us today will magically materialise from within the text, will provide little insight into the questions and tasks presented by the ever advancing and transforming (and increasingly crisis-ridden) capitalism of today. Dogmatism is our enemy within. Gramsci's dynamic Marxism can aid in undermining the dogma that silently retards us. The revolutionary left needs Gramsci; now more than ever.

From International Socialist Group site

http://www.counterfire.org/index.php/theory/79-gramsci/15853-gramscis-leninism

Marxist Update traffic report: some points of interest

Average stay by a visitor on a blog posting on Marxist Update has doubled in the last week.  333 visitors on 6/19, the height of the WWP Barron endorsement discussion.

                        Marxist Update                                                                                 -- Site Summary ---                                 Visits                                     Average per Day ................ 211                          Average Visit Length .......... 3:23                          This Week .................... 1,474                          Page Views                                      Average per Day ................ 434                          Average per Visit .............. 2.1                          This Week .................... 3,039                                         --- Visits this Week ---                           Day  Hour  6/15   6/16   6/17   6/18   6/19   6/20   6/21   Total  ---- ----- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ -------   1       3     16      4      7      9      6     12      57   2       8      2      6     14     15      7      9      61   3      12      2      5      7     19      5      5      55   4      11      6      9      5      9      8      8      56   5      10      1      5      5      9     11      3      44   6       5      1      6      9     15      7      9      52   7       8     11      8      9     10      8      5      59   8       7      4      3      7     14      6      1      42   9      13      8      8      4     18      7      6      64  10       5      4     10      4     21     12      6      62  11       3     10     11      9     23     14     13      83  12      13     16     12      9     19     13     11      93  13       4      6     11     16     32     12     10      91  14       9      8      7     16     14     13     12      79  15       9     10      8     11     15     12      6      71  16       8     11      3     17     13      8     13      73  17      12     14      8      7     13      2      3      59  18       5      8      3     13     11     12     12      64  19       8      8      4     11      7     10      8      56  20       7     13     10      6     11      9      4      60  21       2      7      8      7     10      3      4      41  22       4      4      5      7      9      4     16      49  23       3      4      9      6      8     10     11      51  24       6      5      5      8      9     10      9      52      ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ -------         175    179    168    214    333    209    196   1,474                      --- Page Views this Week ---                         Day  Hour  6/15   6/16   6/17   6/18   6/19   6/20   6/21   Total  ---- ----- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ -------   1       3     36      6     21     22     29     23     140   2      17     15     12     35     43     24      9     155   3      33      7      5     26     47     44      5     167   4      39      7     10     21     13     13      9     112   5      17      5     16     17      9     24      5      93   6      10      1     21     20     20      9     13      94   7      12     22     33     12     22     11      6     118   8       9      9      3      8     19      7      4      59   9      23      9     27      7     22     12      9     109  10       9      8     13      4     43     14      7      98  11       3     27     14     13     28     21     20     126  12      16     29     20     12     35     29     16     157  13       4     20     17     27     53     23     11     155  14      13     19     12     39     36     17     13     149  15      22     21     14     32     37     26      7     159  16      21     36     23     31     15     11     14     151  17      32     26     25     14     16      3      8     124  18      13     10     18     21     33     22     22     139  19      10     52      5     17     11     18     10     123  20      11     95     18     10     16     18      7     175  21       5     17     21     17     13      3      5      81  22       4      4      6      8     19      5     26      72  23       3      5     27     19     13     12     26     105  24      16      7      8     21     12     91     23     178      ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ -------         345    487    374    452    597    486    298   3,039      

An proposal to Workers World Party members and supporters

If there are any members or supporters of Workers World Party who would like to defend or explain the party's strategy of a Marxist-Leninist party endorsing a Democrat, I will post their article without prologue or epilogue or editorial comment or alteration.  I will also post it as by anonymous if they do not wish to reveal their identity.  I will also promote it as energetically as I circulated my own pieces critical of the Workers World party endorsement of Democrat Charles Barron.

Please send the piece to jayrothermel@gmail.com

Jay
06/20/2012

My pieces:

http://marxistupdate.blogspot.com/2012/06/workers-world-party-endorses-democrat.html
http://marxistupdate.blogspot.com/2012/06/charles-barron-and-name-of-game.html
http://marxistupdate.blogspot.com/2012/06/charles-barron.html

UNAC call

Emergency anti-war protests set for June 23 – July 1

By United National Antiwar Coalition

Fight Back News Service is circulating the following call from the United National Antiwar Coalition

Emergency Protests Against the Growing Threat of War

Hands Off Syria and Iran!

End the Drone Wars!

We Need Jobs, Education and Healthcare, Not Endless War!

The growing threats of war against Syria are alarming. Recently, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Russia not to get in the way of US backed efforts to force out the government of President Assad. The corporate media is making every effort to overwhelm us with calls for another "Humanitarian War". The drum beat of aggression against Iran grows daily as well. The coup by the U.S. funded and trained Egyptian military, overturning the first popularly elected government in recent history is another ominous warning. The threat of new war is real while US drone attacks are an expanding form of anonymous war.

During the period from June 23 through July 1, there will be demonstrations, vigils and forum around the country to protest the growing threats of war. Please join the protests in your city or organize one in your city. Send information about your action to UNACpeace@gmail.com

Black Agenda Report on Democrat Charles Barron

The Black Panther vs The Corporate Candidate

Water in Gaza

Workers World Party event: Kwame Nkrumah & African Revolution

Workers World Party endorses a Democrat

With a sense of shock and horror I read today that Workers World Party,  the party I once tried to join, and whose literature I have promoted locally and internationally as Marxist-Leninist, has endorsed a Democrat for the U.S. House in the 8th Congressional District in New York City.

Here is the article from Workers World Party, dated 18 June:

Charles Barron supporters rally
Published Jun 18, 2012

A special event — "Activists want Charles Barron in Congress" — was held at the Solidarity Center in New York City June 8. Barron, a city councilperson, is running for U.S. Representative for Brooklyn's 8th Congressional District. The primary election takes place June 26.

Barron is a former Black Panther who continues to connect with many sectors of the progressive movement. He has marched alongside oppressed activists and Occupy Wall Street in the fight against poverty, budget cuts, foreclosures, racial profiling like stop-and-frisk, police brutality, the prison-industrial complex, and all forms of injustice at home and abroad.

Barron recently won the endorsement of District Council 37, the city's largest public employee union, representing 125,000 members and 50,000 retirees, and the well-respected Black-oriented Amsterdam News.

International Action Center Co-Coordinator Larry Holmes, who emceed the special event, stated that if Barron wins the election, the movement will have an important radical and ally in Congress. Out of the 535 seats in both the House and Senate, only 42 are held by people of color, according to Barron.

To learn more about and to help with Barron's campaign, go to charlesbarronforcongress.com.

— Monica Moorehead

Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

I've recently written a few blog posts about Marxist-Leninsts bending to the opportunist illusions created by the Barron campaign.  They can be read here and here.

But an endorsement at a meeting chaired by Workers World Party First Secretary Larry Holmes raises the question to a much higher level.  The dishonesty of the whole WWP approach to Barron is underscored by the fact that the WW article never mentions he is a Democrat, an elected official of a capitalist party playing the leading role in the world's mightiest imperialist state.

When Barron speaks euphemistically about radical economic redistribution, he is dog-whistling to two constituencies:

    a.  To radicals and the so-called movement, indicating he and they share a secret regarding his actual politics: that he is on their side.

    b.  To Democratic Party and labor tops:  that he will only speak in a series of rather coy euphemisms and no more, to lock down a party cohort so it won't bolt for the door; this is the role the party leadership
        and the ruling class need Barron and his like to play. 

For a Marxist-Leninist to support any Democratic Party candidate for any reason smacks of Bernstein and nothing else. 

What can account for such a stand?  The error flows from a non-proletarian perspective and a too close integration into the left-liberal perspectives of the petty bourgeois protest politics milieu, the perennial popular-front-manufactured detour created the waylay reformists and identity politics nationalists from reaching scientific socialist politics.  This modern day popular front type politics is especially strong in imperialist countries like the US, and especially strong in capitalist centers like New York City.

For Marxist-Leninists to promote the electoral prospects of an imperialist party via the catspaw of the Barron campaign in 2012 is dismaying.  But, such detours typically have a long preparatory period of inhaling and exhaling based upon the vicissitudes of the protest politics milieu.  If a Marxist-Leninist party sees this milieu as the site of a future revolutionary movement-in-becoming, further and more unfortunate detours are possible if not certain.

This fact surprises in 2012 because of the whole-hearted support given nationwide OWS actions by Workers World Party.  OWS rejected electoralist and opportunist bread and circuses in favor of making the site of power, Wall Street, the physical zone of struggle.  Certainly many OWS rank and file will vote for a Democrat in 2012, but why give such a choice the imprimatur of Marxism-Leninsim?  Before and after the election we need to win the best of these youth to scientific socialism, and having support of a candidate of the imperialist Democratic Party on our grade card will make for costly [and avoidable] steps backward.

Marxist-Leninists must break from their decades-old [in some cases, six or seven decades old] reputation as being supporters of class struggle in off-years but supporters of the Democrats in election years.  Surely a seventy-year-old balance sheet of this failed path of opportunism and class-collaboration is enough?  The social base for such opportunism disappeared decades ago. 

The only way to begin addressing the profound U.S. social crisis is to break with the Democrats and build a political party of the working class.

Jay
06/19/2012