Missouri: UAW, Ford settle during strike vote
BY DAVID ROSENFELD
DES MOINES, Iowa, November 15—Workers at Ford Motor Company’s Kansas City, Missouri, Assembly Plant were in the midst of voting to authorize a strike when company officials announced they had reached an agreement with officials of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union.
Preliminary results showed overwhelming support for the authorization to call a strike at the facility, which employs 3,500 workers. No details of the settlement were available.
The strike authorization vote came in response to rising anger and frustration with speedup and unsafe working conditions in the plant. Ford management had recently implemented what they euphemistically called a “rebalancing” of the workforce to improve plant efficiency.
Plant worker Mike Gorski told KMBC News just what that meant. “They're cutting jobs out on the line and wanting that work [to be done] by other people … and you’re just nonstop running. You don’t have time, like I said, you don’t have time to get a drink of water or scratch your nose. You’re just constantly running.”
“I voted yes to authorize a strike for us,” union member Moses Key told Fox 4 News. “I think the company is not treating us fairly and so it’s time. I think we’ve given up enough concessions.”
The strike authorization vote came less that two weeks after Ford workers nationally rejected a concessions contract by a wide margin. Seventy percent of production workers and 75 percent of those in skilled trades voted no. Ninety-two percent of workers at the Kansas City plant voted the concessions down.
According to UAW Local 249 president Jeff Wright, the company filed more than 200 disciplinary reports against workers in the weeks leading up to the vote on the concessions.
Company and UAW officials had touted the concessions as necessary to keep Ford competitive with General Motors and Chrysler. The concessions rejected included a wage freeze for new hires, a ban on strikes over wages and benefits until 2015, job combinations, and more leeway for management to move workers around. Workers would have received a $1,000 bonus in March 2010.
As voting on the contract was finishing up, Ford posted a third quarter profit of $997 million.
Jewish and Palestinian workers unity in Israel today bodes well for future struggles
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Progressive potential of media
Raymond Williams, and Why Culture Matters
— Terry Eagleton
THIS YEAR SEES the 20th anniversary of the death of Raymond Williams, one of the towering socialist thinkers of the 20th century. A superb biography of him, Raymond Williams: A Warrior's Life, has just been published by Dai Smith, who ranks among the finest scholars of Welsh culture and history of our time. Smith charts Williams's passage from the Welsh border country, where his father was a railway signalman, to Cambridge and then into adult education, a vocation he chose for political motives along with his New Left colleagues Richard Hoggart and E.P. Thompson.
In a rare moment of disillusion, Williams once told me that the difference between teaching adults and university students in the 1950s was one of "teaching doctors' daughters rather than doctors' sons." But he never doubted that any Labour government worth its salt would invest massively in what he called "institutions of popular culture and education," and lambasted them all from Clement Atlee to Harold Wilson for failing to do so.
"Culture is ordinary," Williams wrote in a pioneering essay, and his own life was a case in point. He saw his transition from the Black Mountains to the dreaming spires as in no sense untypical: the Welsh working class from which he sprang had always produced writers, teachers and political activists like himself.
Right to the end, he regarded the politically conscious rural community in which he was reared, with its neighborliness and cooperative spirit, as far more of a genuine culture than the Cambridge in which he held a professorial chair, a center of learning he once acidly described as "one of the rudest places on earth." Working-class Britain may not have produced its quota of Miltons and Jane Austens; but in Williams's view it had given birth to a culture of its own which was at least as valuable: the dearly won institutions of the labor, trade union and cooperative movements.
Since Williams's untimely death in 1988, culture, one might claim, has become more ordinary than ever. Not in the sense that Milton has sold in the supermarkets, though Austen has been sprung from the college libraries to give pleasure to millions through film and television.
In the teeth of the cultural Jeremiahs, Williams never ceased to argue for the progressive potential of the media. But he also believed that these vital modes of speaking to each other should be wrested back from the entrepreneurial cynics who exploited them for private gain. His prescription for dealing with the Murdochs of this world was bracingly free of his usual circumspection: "These men must be run out," he insisted.
The real sense in which culture since Williams's death has become more ordinary than ever has little to do with Dante or Mozart. One of his key moves was to insist that culture meant not just eminent works of art but a whole way of life in common.
In our own time, culture in this sense - language, inheritance, identity, kinship, roots and religion - has become important enough to kill for. Some men and women today will give up their lives in the name of culture, or take the lives of others. Dante and Mozart may be "elitist," but at least they have never blown the limbs off small children.
Culture and Civilization
The three political currents which topped the global agenda in the late 20th century - revolutionary nationalism, feminism and ethnic struggle - all place culture right at the heart of their project. In all three cases, language, identity and forms of life are the very terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.
In this sense, culture has become part of the problem rather than part of the solution, as it was for Matthew Arnold and F.R. Leavis. In more traditional forms of political conflict, working men and women have proved most inspired when what was at stake was not just a living wage but (like the mining communities) the defense of a whole way of life. The political demand our rulers find hardest to beat is one which is cultural and material together.
Ever since the early 19th century, culture or civilization has been the opposite of barbarism. Behind this opposition lay a kind of narrative: first you had barbarism, then civilization was dredged laboriously out of its murky depths.
Radical thinkers, by contrast, have always seen barbarism and civilization as synchronous rather than sequential. This is what the German Marxist Walter Benjamin had in mind when he declared that "every document of civilization is at the same time a record of barbarism." For every cathedral, a pit of bones. For every precious work of art, the mass labor which granted the artist the resources to create it.
Civilization needs to be wrested from Nature by violence, but the violence does not end there. It lives on in the coercion used to protect civilization once it is established - a coercion which is known among other things as the political state.
These days, however, the conflict between civilization and barbarism has taken an ominous turn. What we face now is a conflict between civilization and culture, which used to be on the same side of the fence.
Civilization means rational reflection, material well-being, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life which is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and a-rational. It comes as no surprise, then, to find that we have civilization whereas they have culture. Culture is the new barbarism. The contrast between west and east is being mapped on a new axis.
The problem, however, is that civilization needs culture even if it also feels superior to it. It needs it because its own political authority will not operate unless it can bed itself down in a specific way of life.
Men and women do not easily submit to a power which does not weave itself into the texture of their daily existence. And this is one reason why culture remains so politically vital. Civilization cannot get on with culture, and it cannot get on without it either. We can be sure that Raymond Williams would have brought his wisdom to bear on this conundrum.
ATC 137, November-December 2008
— Terry Eagleton
THIS YEAR SEES the 20th anniversary of the death of Raymond Williams, one of the towering socialist thinkers of the 20th century. A superb biography of him, Raymond Williams: A Warrior's Life, has just been published by Dai Smith, who ranks among the finest scholars of Welsh culture and history of our time. Smith charts Williams's passage from the Welsh border country, where his father was a railway signalman, to Cambridge and then into adult education, a vocation he chose for political motives along with his New Left colleagues Richard Hoggart and E.P. Thompson.
In a rare moment of disillusion, Williams once told me that the difference between teaching adults and university students in the 1950s was one of "teaching doctors' daughters rather than doctors' sons." But he never doubted that any Labour government worth its salt would invest massively in what he called "institutions of popular culture and education," and lambasted them all from Clement Atlee to Harold Wilson for failing to do so.
"Culture is ordinary," Williams wrote in a pioneering essay, and his own life was a case in point. He saw his transition from the Black Mountains to the dreaming spires as in no sense untypical: the Welsh working class from which he sprang had always produced writers, teachers and political activists like himself.
Right to the end, he regarded the politically conscious rural community in which he was reared, with its neighborliness and cooperative spirit, as far more of a genuine culture than the Cambridge in which he held a professorial chair, a center of learning he once acidly described as "one of the rudest places on earth." Working-class Britain may not have produced its quota of Miltons and Jane Austens; but in Williams's view it had given birth to a culture of its own which was at least as valuable: the dearly won institutions of the labor, trade union and cooperative movements.
Since Williams's untimely death in 1988, culture, one might claim, has become more ordinary than ever. Not in the sense that Milton has sold in the supermarkets, though Austen has been sprung from the college libraries to give pleasure to millions through film and television.
In the teeth of the cultural Jeremiahs, Williams never ceased to argue for the progressive potential of the media. But he also believed that these vital modes of speaking to each other should be wrested back from the entrepreneurial cynics who exploited them for private gain. His prescription for dealing with the Murdochs of this world was bracingly free of his usual circumspection: "These men must be run out," he insisted.
The real sense in which culture since Williams's death has become more ordinary than ever has little to do with Dante or Mozart. One of his key moves was to insist that culture meant not just eminent works of art but a whole way of life in common.
In our own time, culture in this sense - language, inheritance, identity, kinship, roots and religion - has become important enough to kill for. Some men and women today will give up their lives in the name of culture, or take the lives of others. Dante and Mozart may be "elitist," but at least they have never blown the limbs off small children.
Culture and Civilization
The three political currents which topped the global agenda in the late 20th century - revolutionary nationalism, feminism and ethnic struggle - all place culture right at the heart of their project. In all three cases, language, identity and forms of life are the very terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.
In this sense, culture has become part of the problem rather than part of the solution, as it was for Matthew Arnold and F.R. Leavis. In more traditional forms of political conflict, working men and women have proved most inspired when what was at stake was not just a living wage but (like the mining communities) the defense of a whole way of life. The political demand our rulers find hardest to beat is one which is cultural and material together.
Ever since the early 19th century, culture or civilization has been the opposite of barbarism. Behind this opposition lay a kind of narrative: first you had barbarism, then civilization was dredged laboriously out of its murky depths.
Radical thinkers, by contrast, have always seen barbarism and civilization as synchronous rather than sequential. This is what the German Marxist Walter Benjamin had in mind when he declared that "every document of civilization is at the same time a record of barbarism." For every cathedral, a pit of bones. For every precious work of art, the mass labor which granted the artist the resources to create it.
Civilization needs to be wrested from Nature by violence, but the violence does not end there. It lives on in the coercion used to protect civilization once it is established - a coercion which is known among other things as the political state.
These days, however, the conflict between civilization and barbarism has taken an ominous turn. What we face now is a conflict between civilization and culture, which used to be on the same side of the fence.
Civilization means rational reflection, material well-being, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life which is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and a-rational. It comes as no surprise, then, to find that we have civilization whereas they have culture. Culture is the new barbarism. The contrast between west and east is being mapped on a new axis.
The problem, however, is that civilization needs culture even if it also feels superior to it. It needs it because its own political authority will not operate unless it can bed itself down in a specific way of life.
Men and women do not easily submit to a power which does not weave itself into the texture of their daily existence. And this is one reason why culture remains so politically vital. Civilization cannot get on with culture, and it cannot get on without it either. We can be sure that Raymond Williams would have brought his wisdom to bear on this conundrum.
ATC 137, November-December 2008
Modern and anti-Modern
A scholar’s upside down pyramid scheme: Peter Gay’s Modernism
By Andras Gyorgy
By Andras Gyorgy
Throughout the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the bourgeoisie had few friends among the artists. In fact, the estrangement of writers, poets and playwrights from the moneyed class is a unique and defining feature of the period of startling artistic innovation to which “Modernism” has come to be attached as a period term.
A court poet of the seventeenth century like Andrew Marvell would speak well of court life and of the hosts who put him up for extended stays, while the Homer type would surely praise heroic warriors to an audience of heroic warriors and “would be” heroic warriors. By the late 1880s, the plutocrat who added to his store of wealth and reputation for supporting the arts did not expect a heroic depiction of his person, mansion or his garden, a specialty of seventeenth-century art.
On the contrary, there came between artists and the bourgeois class ugly reports in the arts rising from the Commune of 1871 and the Dreyfus affair, the First and Second World Wars, the Russian Revolution to which its leading avant-garde artists rallied, the Great Depression and the Spanish Civil War, all producing writing, music, drama, painting and architecture, if only to rebuild wrecked cities.
The list of Modernists who took sides in these world-historic conflicts would include—well, virtually everyone. It was a time when every person with a measure of human feeling, most especially artists, “the antennae of the race,” as Ezra Pound called them, felt revulsion at the ruling cliques and their representatives. “Did you do that?” asked the German officer visiting Picasso’s studio and pointing at “Guernica,” a powerful record of the Nazi atrocity. “No,” said Picasso, “you did.”
Interestingly, the term “Modernist” was never employed by the painters, writers, film-makers, architects and composers who were said to advance art under its banner. The word comes from theology, seeped into architecture and was picked up and made famous by Clement Greenberg’s article in the Partisan Review, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939). Greenberg employed Kant’s Critique of Judgment to argue that distinctively modern art, like Kantian critical thought, explores the conditions of its own production and the conditions under which we experience and understand the world.
“Modernism,” Greenberg tells us, “criticizes from the inside, through the procedures themselves of that which is being criticized.” He is saying that each art form justifies itself through the experience of its own productions. In his literary criticism, Leon Trotsky had written: “Above all, art must be judged by its own laws, that is to say the laws of art.” There is this crucial difference. What for Trotsky is true for artistic production in the last analysis, “above all,” is for Greenberg the only criteria. Art is “critical” by criticizing itself and demonstrating its worth purely in artistic terms, not by its effects on society or the influence of great historical events on the work of art.
Greenberg was promoting a particular school of American art: Jackson Pollock, his favorite, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hoffmann, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still. This is not the place to go into the New York art scene in the post-Second World War period, but it did not produce anything like the bitter art of, say, the Weimar era, about which Peter Gay has written an excellent pioneering study in 1968.
After the Second World War, art in its various New York circles turned increasingly self-referential and skeptical, aloof from popular movements and the world itself, concerned in painting only by flat surface, properties of the pigment, structural arrangements, and a two-dimensional surface. It was “disaffiliated,” to use a term of the period referring to an aloof, detached, alienated style that was found attractive in such Actors’ Studio graduates as James Dean and Marlon Brando, the Abstract Expressionists, the hipsters of the bop era in jazz, the underground filmmakers, the Beat and Black Mountain poets, Frank O’Hara’s circle of painters and poets, Andy Warhol with his Factory gang, and many others. It was a scene. Artists of every genre clung together, influenced and supported each other through the fifties and into the sixties, to be showered in the end with Lifemagazine features, university positions, State Department sponsoring of major exhibitions, and above all, a very hot art market.
This is the period that came to be known as “high modernism,” which gave way smoothly to post-modernism, once again by way of architecture. Like high blood pressure, the New York scene became the silent killer, for the fine galleries, museums and the expensive offices of leading architects turned beneath their glittering surface into stalls in a marketplace; Wall Street types practiced their simple pleasures in enormous and vulgar homes that displayed “their plays” in the art market, works purchased at ever more inflated prices. This is a nasty, parvenu crew which changed the art world, once a measure of the human spirit, into an asset bubble ruled by the aesthetics of hedge fund managers.
Of course, those who amass fortunes find plenty of defenders. Although initially attracted to Marxism, the circle known as the “New York intellectuals,” Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv and Dwight Macdonald, Greenberg’s Partisan Review crowd, developed in the fifties a horror of mass movements and popular culture. The “kitsch” Greenberg initially criticized was the culture of capitalism, but very quickly he suspected all mass culture, which MacDonald named “low brow” in distinction to genuine art which was “high-brow.”
Peter Gay in Modernism: The Lure of Heresy: From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (2008) follows these well-worn tracks to explain how Modernism achieves its goals by keeping the production of quality art as far from popular culture as possible. In fact, for Gay, Modernism died with the advent of Pop culture in which the images and techniques of mass production enter fine galleries. This too was Greenberg’s position earlier. Gay lays it on the line in an interview: “By and large, Modernists presupposed a cultivated audience. And difficulty meant ‘high’ art and ‘low’ art ... Artists like Duchamp split the public into three rankings: the vulgar masses (no real interest in art); the well-to-do middle class ... and the elite,” with an ascending level of interest in avant-garde arts, as if the arts were stages of Gnostic enlightenment ever more remote from the grossness of the material world and its “vulgar” masses.
While it is a large task indeed to sum up all the arts in their collective image over the most troubled of centuries, Peter Gay’s omissions are important: jazz and popular entertainment, for instance. Béla Bartók did not find it beneath his dignity to learn from jazz and commercial jingles while he composed in New York during the war, and Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill would have been poorer without the cabaret. In fact, the deliberate blurring of the lines between high and low art is found everywhere in avant-garde art, in the setting and voices both low and high class in juxtaposition in verse, the use of popular tunes and jazz rhythms, the folding in newspapers and making museum pieces out of ordinary objects in the works of Pablo Picasso, T. S. Eliot, Pound, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos and many others, for instance, all the Dadaists, Surrealists and Futurists.
Gay has in the past employed his academic reputation to make the middle class feel good about itself. Over the five volumes of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (1998), he praised the many virtues of the bourgeoisie: patronage of the arts, charitable work, support for the family unit, social responsibility and, despite the belief in the Victorian age as one of sexual repression, a sizzling sexual life, at least by the testament of the diaries of some of the leading ladies. He begins the final, fifth volume of The Bourgeois Experience looking ahead to what he then called “the modernist myth” that the bourgeoisie “loved money and hated art.” On the contrary, the rich were, as they are now, big buyers to whom artists should be more grateful, he explains.
Gay goes on to note with displeasure the revulsion with which Flaubert had recorded his encounters with the triumphant representatives of the bourgeoisie in his neighborhood after the tragic failure of the Commune of 1871. These gentlefolk were, Gay discovers using historical tools, charitable, socially responsible, good citizens and family men, undeserving of Flaubert’s scorn. In Modernism: The Lure of a Heresy, Gay picks up where he left off with a tirade against Flaubert’s attitude toward the middle class: “Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of virtue.”
As far as Peter Gay is concerned, the middle class serves as a bulwark manning the walls of the fort of culture surrounded by vulgar and savage masses, rather like the old film Beau Geste. This is pleasing to middle class readers, especially those who have invested in art, except that the supporters of the first modernists, from Baudelaire onwards (Gay begins the modern period with Baudelaire) were red-hot rebels living in considerable poverty, in many instances kept barely alive by fellow artists in Bohemian enclaves.
The close link between the avant-garde and the bourgeois marketplace is of recent vintage in the art world, as in academic life. The great artists of the earlier Modernist era had, to be sure, one or two individuals who promoted their work, often at a loss, publishers of “ little magazines” and art dealers who were in no way like the wealthy lords of today’s art market. In celebrated instances in the past, Modernist artists mounted their own exhibitions, having found that the established Academies and exhibitions had turned their backs on them. All that changed, of course, with the growth of American prosperity, and the bureaucratic domination of the workers movement, in the post-World War II period when Gay made his career.
Peter Gay is, above all, an academician of our time. Born Peter Fröhlich in Berlin in 1923, Gay fled Nazi Germany with his Jewish but assimilated family in 1939. He made it to the United States in 1941 after his family changed its booking from the ill-fated SS St. Louis to an earlier ship. Once here, the family changed its surname. He gained his PhD at Columbia (1951), where he came under the influence of the historian, Richard Hofstadter. After teaching at Columbia from 1948 to 1969, he moved to Yale, and remains known in retirement as an eminent academician of the “cultural history” school.
In fact, Gay’s Modernism: The Lure of Heresy is an exceptionally good example of a lowering of intellectual standards among the so-called culture-bearers and academicians of our time. The work is an upside down pyramid, a great subject matter resting on very narrow foundations. This is the argument: Modernist art in all its manifestation over a century may be characterized by, first, “the lure of heresy” against “conventional sensibilities,” and, second, “a commitment to a principled self-scrutiny.” The problem with this thesis statement, noted in nearly every review, is that the definition applies equally to the Byronic hero, Prince Hamlet and that witch Medea of the Greek classics. Again, it allows every artist to be pinned by a one-two punch of the thesis statement, transgression followed/accompanied by self-scrutiny, applied with a deductive thrust, as if a cookie cutter descended upon flattened dough.
Writing about Picasso, Gay gets to both parts of his thesis in just three sentences. Please note that the qualifier highlighted is Gay unwilling to stretch his neck out, even when nothing is at stake. In Picasso, he explains ponderously, “A shift in style might reveal—it is imperative not to be more definite than this—that a new woman was occupying his bed. But urges other than erotic cravings or gratifications also roused him into action, above all aesthetic conundrums calling for aesthetic solutions. He often made art quite literally for art’s sake.”
No kidding? It seems as if the dumbing down of America begins at the top among its more reputable scholars. The work is full of such statements: “The Waste Land is a veritable anthology of linguistic bravado.” “The conflicts of modernists with traditionalists, fellow revolutionaries, and themselves made for disorderly history, but it was always stimulating, never dull”; and, “Impressionist paintings were reports from the interior,” in case you had thought the Impressionists were interested in light falling in Provence, or had any contacts with each other.
Modernism: The Lure of Heresy demonstrates a severe decline of academic standards in our institutions of higher learning, for Peter Gay was once an excellent scholar who showed in Voltaire’s Politics (1959) and The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1969) how emotionally charged was the fight for secularism in the Enlightenment era and how that passion spread to the masses: “Voltaire delighted in seeing a Geneva workman intent on a book—by him.” It was a heroic battle with great political implications. The Enlightenment for Peter Gay was a “recovery of nerve,” a radical break in continuity giving human beings a precious legacy, mastery over their destiny by making reason the ruler of human affairs.
In this period, Gay, no post-modernist, stood firmly on the side of the objectivity of historical processes and of its representation in reflection. “The tree of the woods of the past fall in only one way,” he wrote, “no matter how fragmentary and contradictory the report of its fall, no matter whether there are no historians, one historian, or several contentious historians in its future to record and debate it.”
Of late, it has become axiomatic in post-modernist circles who believe otherwise that, despite all historical evidence of the deep antagonism for the arts promoted by Stalin and Hitler, Modernist artists were “subject, logo and Eurocentric,” and therefore grew from the same blighted Enlightenment soil as the totalitarian dictators. Put into plain English, the Modernist artists were engaged in representing, enacting or expressing some truth about the world or themselves as part of a cultural activity of Western Civilization to which they belong.
In those terrifying moments at the close of World War II,Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer looked about a devastated Europe and proclaimed in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) that “Enlightenment is totalitarian,” leading, they thought, to the rational (or at least, rationalized) slaughter of the Nazi concentration camps. It is but a short step from the anguished and confused proclamation by Adorno that after Auschwitz poetry is no longer possible to the rather odd conclusion that Modernist art, which is the contemporary of the extermination camps, is also an accomplice in some way, as both are heirs to Enlightenment thinking.
One would have thought that an eminent historian, an expert on the Enlightenment era undertaking a major work on Modernism, would address, “interrogate” if you will, this post-modernist challenge, but no such luck. Staying clear of conflict with colleagues, Gay admits in an interview, is a strategic choice for a peaceful academic life. He refuses to “problematize” or indeed to go up against the folks who dwell, they think, in the “discursive construction” of reality: “Early on, I wrote a chapter on Postmodernism, which particularly worried and incensed the academy. I therefore decided not to get involved in quite another fight,” he explains in an interview. Quite the contrary, he throws in the towel when he writes how Modernism“is not a democratic ideology,” though Gay means by that a separation of high or valuable works from the low art of the plebeians. He still insists, oddly, that Modernism in politics was, outside its few fascist deviations, a bourgeois-liberal impulse.
In Peter Gay’s hands, Freud’s work of making conscious what was unconscious is reversed, so the fascist option of “the anti-modern modernists” becomes a matter of instinctual drive and personal habit, not a rational choice at all. Knut Hamsun’s support of Adolf Hitler was in this way “a response to some elemental habits of mind, untouched ... by his sophisticated psychology.” He was at heart a simple farmer who did not like the modern world.
Similarly, Eliot’s “anti-modern modernism” was not a rational affiliation with the clerical-fascism of Charles Maurras and the Action Française, but a personal expression of discomfort in the modern world. Further, while he accepts that certain modernists were inclined to fascism, he ignores the leftist affiliation of many others. Worse, the historical issues that brought artists to commit themselves and their art to political causes, on the left, the right and the bonkers, is unexplained. Peter Gay’s odd view that, except for the fascist inclinations of a few, the essential political engagement of Modernists was “liberal” requires a defense he does not, indeed cannot, provide.
Actually, modernist artists were deeply and most consciously engaged in politics on the most varied fronts—except, in general, the bourgeois liberal one. André Breton, a supporter of Leon Trotsky, led Surrealist demonstrations on the Left Bank in 1934 to rally against Hitler, a year before the Communist Party, which Picasso joined in 1944, reacted with the fatal Popular Front.
Meanwhile, while the fascists were marching outside, Ezra Pound, barely mentioned by Peter Gay, held a seminar in Rappolo, Italy, for those future heroes of the post-modernists, the Jewish poet Louis Zukofsky, then a strong supporter of the American Communist Party, and Basil Bunting, a life-long Quaker Pacifist. Pound published these seminars as Guide to Kulchur (1938), dedicated to his two students, an address to an imaginary audience he thought he had as the Dante or Homer of his age. That led to those pro-Mussolini broadcasts (“Rome calling. Pound Speaking”) and his driving in the last days of the war to Mussolini’s last precarious and short lived republic to convince “il Capo,” who had earlier found his modernist epic, The Cantos, “divertimenti,” to adapt Major Douglas’ “social-credit” policies. That got him put into the animal cage on an army base in Pisa until the American authorities figured out what to do with him. This is where Pound wrote the beautiful “Pull down thy vanity” of “The Pisan Cantos.” Good advice for professors, that.
Modernism at its height is charged with the passions, the complexity and urgency of a convulsive historical period such as the one we are entering. Someone should write a good book about it.
A court poet of the seventeenth century like Andrew Marvell would speak well of court life and of the hosts who put him up for extended stays, while the Homer type would surely praise heroic warriors to an audience of heroic warriors and “would be” heroic warriors. By the late 1880s, the plutocrat who added to his store of wealth and reputation for supporting the arts did not expect a heroic depiction of his person, mansion or his garden, a specialty of seventeenth-century art.
On the contrary, there came between artists and the bourgeois class ugly reports in the arts rising from the Commune of 1871 and the Dreyfus affair, the First and Second World Wars, the Russian Revolution to which its leading avant-garde artists rallied, the Great Depression and the Spanish Civil War, all producing writing, music, drama, painting and architecture, if only to rebuild wrecked cities.
The list of Modernists who took sides in these world-historic conflicts would include—well, virtually everyone. It was a time when every person with a measure of human feeling, most especially artists, “the antennae of the race,” as Ezra Pound called them, felt revulsion at the ruling cliques and their representatives. “Did you do that?” asked the German officer visiting Picasso’s studio and pointing at “Guernica,” a powerful record of the Nazi atrocity. “No,” said Picasso, “you did.”
Interestingly, the term “Modernist” was never employed by the painters, writers, film-makers, architects and composers who were said to advance art under its banner. The word comes from theology, seeped into architecture and was picked up and made famous by Clement Greenberg’s article in the Partisan Review, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939). Greenberg employed Kant’s Critique of Judgment to argue that distinctively modern art, like Kantian critical thought, explores the conditions of its own production and the conditions under which we experience and understand the world.
“Modernism,” Greenberg tells us, “criticizes from the inside, through the procedures themselves of that which is being criticized.” He is saying that each art form justifies itself through the experience of its own productions. In his literary criticism, Leon Trotsky had written: “Above all, art must be judged by its own laws, that is to say the laws of art.” There is this crucial difference. What for Trotsky is true for artistic production in the last analysis, “above all,” is for Greenberg the only criteria. Art is “critical” by criticizing itself and demonstrating its worth purely in artistic terms, not by its effects on society or the influence of great historical events on the work of art.
Greenberg was promoting a particular school of American art: Jackson Pollock, his favorite, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hoffmann, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still. This is not the place to go into the New York art scene in the post-Second World War period, but it did not produce anything like the bitter art of, say, the Weimar era, about which Peter Gay has written an excellent pioneering study in 1968.
After the Second World War, art in its various New York circles turned increasingly self-referential and skeptical, aloof from popular movements and the world itself, concerned in painting only by flat surface, properties of the pigment, structural arrangements, and a two-dimensional surface. It was “disaffiliated,” to use a term of the period referring to an aloof, detached, alienated style that was found attractive in such Actors’ Studio graduates as James Dean and Marlon Brando, the Abstract Expressionists, the hipsters of the bop era in jazz, the underground filmmakers, the Beat and Black Mountain poets, Frank O’Hara’s circle of painters and poets, Andy Warhol with his Factory gang, and many others. It was a scene. Artists of every genre clung together, influenced and supported each other through the fifties and into the sixties, to be showered in the end with Lifemagazine features, university positions, State Department sponsoring of major exhibitions, and above all, a very hot art market.
This is the period that came to be known as “high modernism,” which gave way smoothly to post-modernism, once again by way of architecture. Like high blood pressure, the New York scene became the silent killer, for the fine galleries, museums and the expensive offices of leading architects turned beneath their glittering surface into stalls in a marketplace; Wall Street types practiced their simple pleasures in enormous and vulgar homes that displayed “their plays” in the art market, works purchased at ever more inflated prices. This is a nasty, parvenu crew which changed the art world, once a measure of the human spirit, into an asset bubble ruled by the aesthetics of hedge fund managers.
Of course, those who amass fortunes find plenty of defenders. Although initially attracted to Marxism, the circle known as the “New York intellectuals,” Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv and Dwight Macdonald, Greenberg’s Partisan Review crowd, developed in the fifties a horror of mass movements and popular culture. The “kitsch” Greenberg initially criticized was the culture of capitalism, but very quickly he suspected all mass culture, which MacDonald named “low brow” in distinction to genuine art which was “high-brow.”
Peter Gay in Modernism: The Lure of Heresy: From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (2008) follows these well-worn tracks to explain how Modernism achieves its goals by keeping the production of quality art as far from popular culture as possible. In fact, for Gay, Modernism died with the advent of Pop culture in which the images and techniques of mass production enter fine galleries. This too was Greenberg’s position earlier. Gay lays it on the line in an interview: “By and large, Modernists presupposed a cultivated audience. And difficulty meant ‘high’ art and ‘low’ art ... Artists like Duchamp split the public into three rankings: the vulgar masses (no real interest in art); the well-to-do middle class ... and the elite,” with an ascending level of interest in avant-garde arts, as if the arts were stages of Gnostic enlightenment ever more remote from the grossness of the material world and its “vulgar” masses.
While it is a large task indeed to sum up all the arts in their collective image over the most troubled of centuries, Peter Gay’s omissions are important: jazz and popular entertainment, for instance. Béla Bartók did not find it beneath his dignity to learn from jazz and commercial jingles while he composed in New York during the war, and Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill would have been poorer without the cabaret. In fact, the deliberate blurring of the lines between high and low art is found everywhere in avant-garde art, in the setting and voices both low and high class in juxtaposition in verse, the use of popular tunes and jazz rhythms, the folding in newspapers and making museum pieces out of ordinary objects in the works of Pablo Picasso, T. S. Eliot, Pound, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos and many others, for instance, all the Dadaists, Surrealists and Futurists.
Gay has in the past employed his academic reputation to make the middle class feel good about itself. Over the five volumes of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (1998), he praised the many virtues of the bourgeoisie: patronage of the arts, charitable work, support for the family unit, social responsibility and, despite the belief in the Victorian age as one of sexual repression, a sizzling sexual life, at least by the testament of the diaries of some of the leading ladies. He begins the final, fifth volume of The Bourgeois Experience looking ahead to what he then called “the modernist myth” that the bourgeoisie “loved money and hated art.” On the contrary, the rich were, as they are now, big buyers to whom artists should be more grateful, he explains.
Gay goes on to note with displeasure the revulsion with which Flaubert had recorded his encounters with the triumphant representatives of the bourgeoisie in his neighborhood after the tragic failure of the Commune of 1871. These gentlefolk were, Gay discovers using historical tools, charitable, socially responsible, good citizens and family men, undeserving of Flaubert’s scorn. In Modernism: The Lure of a Heresy, Gay picks up where he left off with a tirade against Flaubert’s attitude toward the middle class: “Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of virtue.”
As far as Peter Gay is concerned, the middle class serves as a bulwark manning the walls of the fort of culture surrounded by vulgar and savage masses, rather like the old film Beau Geste. This is pleasing to middle class readers, especially those who have invested in art, except that the supporters of the first modernists, from Baudelaire onwards (Gay begins the modern period with Baudelaire) were red-hot rebels living in considerable poverty, in many instances kept barely alive by fellow artists in Bohemian enclaves.
The close link between the avant-garde and the bourgeois marketplace is of recent vintage in the art world, as in academic life. The great artists of the earlier Modernist era had, to be sure, one or two individuals who promoted their work, often at a loss, publishers of “ little magazines” and art dealers who were in no way like the wealthy lords of today’s art market. In celebrated instances in the past, Modernist artists mounted their own exhibitions, having found that the established Academies and exhibitions had turned their backs on them. All that changed, of course, with the growth of American prosperity, and the bureaucratic domination of the workers movement, in the post-World War II period when Gay made his career.
Peter Gay is, above all, an academician of our time. Born Peter Fröhlich in Berlin in 1923, Gay fled Nazi Germany with his Jewish but assimilated family in 1939. He made it to the United States in 1941 after his family changed its booking from the ill-fated SS St. Louis to an earlier ship. Once here, the family changed its surname. He gained his PhD at Columbia (1951), where he came under the influence of the historian, Richard Hofstadter. After teaching at Columbia from 1948 to 1969, he moved to Yale, and remains known in retirement as an eminent academician of the “cultural history” school.
In fact, Gay’s Modernism: The Lure of Heresy is an exceptionally good example of a lowering of intellectual standards among the so-called culture-bearers and academicians of our time. The work is an upside down pyramid, a great subject matter resting on very narrow foundations. This is the argument: Modernist art in all its manifestation over a century may be characterized by, first, “the lure of heresy” against “conventional sensibilities,” and, second, “a commitment to a principled self-scrutiny.” The problem with this thesis statement, noted in nearly every review, is that the definition applies equally to the Byronic hero, Prince Hamlet and that witch Medea of the Greek classics. Again, it allows every artist to be pinned by a one-two punch of the thesis statement, transgression followed/accompanied by self-scrutiny, applied with a deductive thrust, as if a cookie cutter descended upon flattened dough.
Writing about Picasso, Gay gets to both parts of his thesis in just three sentences. Please note that the qualifier highlighted is Gay unwilling to stretch his neck out, even when nothing is at stake. In Picasso, he explains ponderously, “A shift in style might reveal—it is imperative not to be more definite than this—that a new woman was occupying his bed. But urges other than erotic cravings or gratifications also roused him into action, above all aesthetic conundrums calling for aesthetic solutions. He often made art quite literally for art’s sake.”
No kidding? It seems as if the dumbing down of America begins at the top among its more reputable scholars. The work is full of such statements: “The Waste Land is a veritable anthology of linguistic bravado.” “The conflicts of modernists with traditionalists, fellow revolutionaries, and themselves made for disorderly history, but it was always stimulating, never dull”; and, “Impressionist paintings were reports from the interior,” in case you had thought the Impressionists were interested in light falling in Provence, or had any contacts with each other.
Modernism: The Lure of Heresy demonstrates a severe decline of academic standards in our institutions of higher learning, for Peter Gay was once an excellent scholar who showed in Voltaire’s Politics (1959) and The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1969) how emotionally charged was the fight for secularism in the Enlightenment era and how that passion spread to the masses: “Voltaire delighted in seeing a Geneva workman intent on a book—by him.” It was a heroic battle with great political implications. The Enlightenment for Peter Gay was a “recovery of nerve,” a radical break in continuity giving human beings a precious legacy, mastery over their destiny by making reason the ruler of human affairs.
In this period, Gay, no post-modernist, stood firmly on the side of the objectivity of historical processes and of its representation in reflection. “The tree of the woods of the past fall in only one way,” he wrote, “no matter how fragmentary and contradictory the report of its fall, no matter whether there are no historians, one historian, or several contentious historians in its future to record and debate it.”
Of late, it has become axiomatic in post-modernist circles who believe otherwise that, despite all historical evidence of the deep antagonism for the arts promoted by Stalin and Hitler, Modernist artists were “subject, logo and Eurocentric,” and therefore grew from the same blighted Enlightenment soil as the totalitarian dictators. Put into plain English, the Modernist artists were engaged in representing, enacting or expressing some truth about the world or themselves as part of a cultural activity of Western Civilization to which they belong.
In those terrifying moments at the close of World War II,Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer looked about a devastated Europe and proclaimed in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) that “Enlightenment is totalitarian,” leading, they thought, to the rational (or at least, rationalized) slaughter of the Nazi concentration camps. It is but a short step from the anguished and confused proclamation by Adorno that after Auschwitz poetry is no longer possible to the rather odd conclusion that Modernist art, which is the contemporary of the extermination camps, is also an accomplice in some way, as both are heirs to Enlightenment thinking.
One would have thought that an eminent historian, an expert on the Enlightenment era undertaking a major work on Modernism, would address, “interrogate” if you will, this post-modernist challenge, but no such luck. Staying clear of conflict with colleagues, Gay admits in an interview, is a strategic choice for a peaceful academic life. He refuses to “problematize” or indeed to go up against the folks who dwell, they think, in the “discursive construction” of reality: “Early on, I wrote a chapter on Postmodernism, which particularly worried and incensed the academy. I therefore decided not to get involved in quite another fight,” he explains in an interview. Quite the contrary, he throws in the towel when he writes how Modernism“is not a democratic ideology,” though Gay means by that a separation of high or valuable works from the low art of the plebeians. He still insists, oddly, that Modernism in politics was, outside its few fascist deviations, a bourgeois-liberal impulse.
In Peter Gay’s hands, Freud’s work of making conscious what was unconscious is reversed, so the fascist option of “the anti-modern modernists” becomes a matter of instinctual drive and personal habit, not a rational choice at all. Knut Hamsun’s support of Adolf Hitler was in this way “a response to some elemental habits of mind, untouched ... by his sophisticated psychology.” He was at heart a simple farmer who did not like the modern world.
Similarly, Eliot’s “anti-modern modernism” was not a rational affiliation with the clerical-fascism of Charles Maurras and the Action Française, but a personal expression of discomfort in the modern world. Further, while he accepts that certain modernists were inclined to fascism, he ignores the leftist affiliation of many others. Worse, the historical issues that brought artists to commit themselves and their art to political causes, on the left, the right and the bonkers, is unexplained. Peter Gay’s odd view that, except for the fascist inclinations of a few, the essential political engagement of Modernists was “liberal” requires a defense he does not, indeed cannot, provide.
Actually, modernist artists were deeply and most consciously engaged in politics on the most varied fronts—except, in general, the bourgeois liberal one. André Breton, a supporter of Leon Trotsky, led Surrealist demonstrations on the Left Bank in 1934 to rally against Hitler, a year before the Communist Party, which Picasso joined in 1944, reacted with the fatal Popular Front.
Meanwhile, while the fascists were marching outside, Ezra Pound, barely mentioned by Peter Gay, held a seminar in Rappolo, Italy, for those future heroes of the post-modernists, the Jewish poet Louis Zukofsky, then a strong supporter of the American Communist Party, and Basil Bunting, a life-long Quaker Pacifist. Pound published these seminars as Guide to Kulchur (1938), dedicated to his two students, an address to an imaginary audience he thought he had as the Dante or Homer of his age. That led to those pro-Mussolini broadcasts (“Rome calling. Pound Speaking”) and his driving in the last days of the war to Mussolini’s last precarious and short lived republic to convince “il Capo,” who had earlier found his modernist epic, The Cantos, “divertimenti,” to adapt Major Douglas’ “social-credit” policies. That got him put into the animal cage on an army base in Pisa until the American authorities figured out what to do with him. This is where Pound wrote the beautiful “Pull down thy vanity” of “The Pisan Cantos.” Good advice for professors, that.
Modernism at its height is charged with the passions, the complexity and urgency of a convulsive historical period such as the one we are entering. Someone should write a good book about it.
An idiosyncratic and creative application of Marxist ideas and methods
Marxist Art Historian: Meyer Schapiro, 1914-1996
— Alan Wallach
— Alan Wallach
MEYER SCHAPRIO, THE leading American art historian of his generation and one of the few scholars to attempt to apply Marxism seriously to the study of art history, died on March 3 at the age of 91, at his home in New York.
An enormously gifted scholar, traded as a medievalist but with wide-ranging interests that transcended the boundaries of traditional specializations, Schapiro was born in Shavly, Lithuania, and raised in Brooklyn where he attended public school and studied painting with John Sloan at the Hebrew Educational Society. Graduating from Columbia College in 1924 with honors in philosophy and art history, Schapiro went on to write a ground-breaking doctoral dissertation, pubished in 1931, on the sculptural decoration of the romanesque monastery at Moissac.
As a teacher at Columbia and the New School for Social Research, Schapiro offered courses in Byzantine, Early Christian and medieval art and art-historical theory, and pioneered the study of modern art -- a field not accorded much in the way of academic respectability during the 1930s and 1940s. An amateur artist of some skill, he kept in close touch with artists and often played a crucial role in furthering artistic careers, perhaps most notably in the case of the abstract expressionists.
A lifelong socialist -- Schapiro joined the Brownsville Young Peoples socialist League in 1916 -- Schapiro's interest in Marxist politics deepened during the Depression, when he became actively involved in the left. During the early 1930s he was close to the Communist Party, an active member of the John Reed Clubs, and a founder of the American Artists Congress.
Disillusioned by the Moscow Trials, in 1936 he drew closer to the anti-Stalinist left, serving on the editorial board of the short-lived Marxist Quarterly, and between 1937 and 1940 writing frequently for the Partisan Review. He supported the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky and became a member of the League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism. Schapiro resigned from the American Artists Congress in 1939 to protest against the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and went on to found the rival Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors.
During the 1940s and early 1950s he continued to support revolutionary Marxism through his involvement with the Workers Party and the Independent Socialist League. Although never a member of a political party -- he believed he could not carry out a party members's responsibilities and continue to pursue a career as a scholar -- he was, as Alan Wald has observed, "a genuine independent, but a classical Marxist nonetheless, struggling to keep a Leninist view alive under difficult conditions."
Early Writings
During the 1930s Schapiro wrote lengthy articles on romanesque sculpture at Souillac, on romanesque and Mozarabic art at Silos, on the nature of abstract art, and on Courbet and popular imagery, that probed the social determinants of artistic production. Like the best Marxist cultural studies of the 1930s (e.g. those of Walter Benjamin), these articles were idiosyncratic, exemplifying a creative application of Marxist ideas and methods to specific art-historical problems.
Written at a time when art historians were mainly preoccupied with difficulties of attribution, patterns of stylistic development and questions of imagery (iconography), these essays struggled with the ways in which social and political conditions affect or limit artistic production and artistic form. For example, in the essay on Silos, published in 1939, Schapiro attempted a comprehensive sociological explanation of romanesque style, arguing that any renewed study of the subject would require "the critical correlation of the forms and meanings in the images with historical conditions of the same period and region."
Toward an Undogmatic Marxism
After the 1930s, Schapiro concentrated less on the social bases of art, and his work reflected interests in psychology, philosophy, and semiotics. yet unlike so many of his former colleagues on the anti-Stalinist left, Schapiro never repudiated Marxism or socialism and consistently encouraged Marxist approaches to the study of art history. In a well-known essay on style published in the depths of the McCarthy period, he reviewed major explanatory theories and, after demonstrating their strengths and weaknesses, concluded that an undogmatic Marxism provided the best hope for developing a general theory linking the social and the aesthetic.
As a Marxist working in the usually elite and conservative field of art history, Schapiro was unique. He strongly influenced several generations of artists and art historians, but unfortunately very few of his students seriously pursued a Marxist approach. Although now celebrated in the academy and the media -- the New York Times Magazine carried a feature article on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday -- scholars as well as journalists have for the most part ignored or glossed over Schapiro's achievements as a Marxist scholar as well as his long history of political commitment.
Schapiro will no doubt be remembered for his brilliance, for the extraordinary range of his mind, but his legacy as a scholar belongs to those willing to engage his most profound and most challenging work, in particular the Marxist studies he produced during the 1930s. Because they speak to current scholarly concerns, these studies have lost little of their freshness. Marxist art historians continue to struggle with the relation between the social and the aesthetic. For them, Schapiro will remain a point of departure and return.
ATC 62, May-June 1996
An enormously gifted scholar, traded as a medievalist but with wide-ranging interests that transcended the boundaries of traditional specializations, Schapiro was born in Shavly, Lithuania, and raised in Brooklyn where he attended public school and studied painting with John Sloan at the Hebrew Educational Society. Graduating from Columbia College in 1924 with honors in philosophy and art history, Schapiro went on to write a ground-breaking doctoral dissertation, pubished in 1931, on the sculptural decoration of the romanesque monastery at Moissac.
As a teacher at Columbia and the New School for Social Research, Schapiro offered courses in Byzantine, Early Christian and medieval art and art-historical theory, and pioneered the study of modern art -- a field not accorded much in the way of academic respectability during the 1930s and 1940s. An amateur artist of some skill, he kept in close touch with artists and often played a crucial role in furthering artistic careers, perhaps most notably in the case of the abstract expressionists.
A lifelong socialist -- Schapiro joined the Brownsville Young Peoples socialist League in 1916 -- Schapiro's interest in Marxist politics deepened during the Depression, when he became actively involved in the left. During the early 1930s he was close to the Communist Party, an active member of the John Reed Clubs, and a founder of the American Artists Congress.
Disillusioned by the Moscow Trials, in 1936 he drew closer to the anti-Stalinist left, serving on the editorial board of the short-lived Marxist Quarterly, and between 1937 and 1940 writing frequently for the Partisan Review. He supported the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky and became a member of the League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism. Schapiro resigned from the American Artists Congress in 1939 to protest against the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and went on to found the rival Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors.
During the 1940s and early 1950s he continued to support revolutionary Marxism through his involvement with the Workers Party and the Independent Socialist League. Although never a member of a political party -- he believed he could not carry out a party members's responsibilities and continue to pursue a career as a scholar -- he was, as Alan Wald has observed, "a genuine independent, but a classical Marxist nonetheless, struggling to keep a Leninist view alive under difficult conditions."
Early Writings
During the 1930s Schapiro wrote lengthy articles on romanesque sculpture at Souillac, on romanesque and Mozarabic art at Silos, on the nature of abstract art, and on Courbet and popular imagery, that probed the social determinants of artistic production. Like the best Marxist cultural studies of the 1930s (e.g. those of Walter Benjamin), these articles were idiosyncratic, exemplifying a creative application of Marxist ideas and methods to specific art-historical problems.
Written at a time when art historians were mainly preoccupied with difficulties of attribution, patterns of stylistic development and questions of imagery (iconography), these essays struggled with the ways in which social and political conditions affect or limit artistic production and artistic form. For example, in the essay on Silos, published in 1939, Schapiro attempted a comprehensive sociological explanation of romanesque style, arguing that any renewed study of the subject would require "the critical correlation of the forms and meanings in the images with historical conditions of the same period and region."
Toward an Undogmatic Marxism
After the 1930s, Schapiro concentrated less on the social bases of art, and his work reflected interests in psychology, philosophy, and semiotics. yet unlike so many of his former colleagues on the anti-Stalinist left, Schapiro never repudiated Marxism or socialism and consistently encouraged Marxist approaches to the study of art history. In a well-known essay on style published in the depths of the McCarthy period, he reviewed major explanatory theories and, after demonstrating their strengths and weaknesses, concluded that an undogmatic Marxism provided the best hope for developing a general theory linking the social and the aesthetic.
As a Marxist working in the usually elite and conservative field of art history, Schapiro was unique. He strongly influenced several generations of artists and art historians, but unfortunately very few of his students seriously pursued a Marxist approach. Although now celebrated in the academy and the media -- the New York Times Magazine carried a feature article on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday -- scholars as well as journalists have for the most part ignored or glossed over Schapiro's achievements as a Marxist scholar as well as his long history of political commitment.
Schapiro will no doubt be remembered for his brilliance, for the extraordinary range of his mind, but his legacy as a scholar belongs to those willing to engage his most profound and most challenging work, in particular the Marxist studies he produced during the 1930s. Because they speak to current scholarly concerns, these studies have lost little of their freshness. Marxist art historians continue to struggle with the relation between the social and the aesthetic. For them, Schapiro will remain a point of departure and return.
ATC 62, May-June 1996
A modern classic returns
A Classic Study Revisited
— Gerd-Rainer Horn
— Gerd-Rainer Horn
The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain
By Pierre Broué and Émile Témime
Chicago: Haymarket, 2008 reprint edition. $50 paperback.
PIERRE BROUÉ (1926-2005) was one of the few Trotskyist historians who carved out a niche in academia, though this career choice had to overcome many obstacles. Coming of age at a time in France when the historical profession mostly consisted of either conservative anti-communists or historians closely linked to the milieu of the hard-line French Communist Party, Broué, a long-time member of the Lambertiste current within French Trotskyism (until his expulsion in 1989), from early on had to learn to fight on his own.
Eventually settling near Grenoble in the French Alps, Broué was the guiding spirit behind the founding of the leading research publication on the history of international Trotskyism, the Cahiers Léon Trotsky, in 1979. But his long list of publications was by no means limited to the reconstruction of the history of this much-maligned current or his biography of Leon Trotsky himself.
Pierre Broué devoted himself above all to the analysis and description of revolutionary social movements in the first half of the 20th century and the key political currents within this range of activist organizations. A polyglot, Pierre Broué considered languages as tools to unlock the hidden history of emancipatory social movements, and thus he learned new languages in accordance with the evolution of his wide-ranging interests.
Given the centrality of the Bolshevik Revolution in Broué's understanding of the contemporary world, the many facets of the Soviet experience received probably the most extensive attention of this prolific scholar, though perhaps some of the most remarkable monographs were devoted to other countries and themes.
His 1971 The German Revolution, 1917-1923, translated into English in 2006,(1) a massive and empirically rich tome, should be mentioned here, but also his co-authorship (together with Raymond Vacheron) of a little-known study of Stalinist terror against Left Oppositionists in the French resistance, Meurtres au Maquis.(2)
Pride of place, however, must be reserved for Broué's very first major monograph, co-authored with Émile Témime, The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain. This book first appeared in 1961,(3) when interest in the libertarian dimension of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War was limited to the few trace elements of the revolutionary Marxist and syndicalist traditions that had managed to survive the terrible defeats of the 1930s and 1940s. This remarkable monograph saw the light of day a full eight years before Noam Chomsky’s pathbreaking critique of the liberal intelligentsia’s dismissal and neglect of the Spanish anarchist contribution to the arsenal of (social) liberation movements in the modern age, Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship.(4)
In short, The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain appeared at a most inauspicious time for the publication of a major monograph on a neglected pivotal moment in 20th-century European history. But the social movements in the latter half of the 1960s and then, above all, the 1970s widened the potential audience for such non-conformist critiques.
Over time, The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain saw perhaps more translations and republications than any other of Broué's many volumes. Haymarket Books' decision to republish it in 2008 is welcome as the most recent in a long list of recognitions of this modern classic.
Two Authors, Dual Traditions
One extraordinary feature of this volume should be highlighted straightaway. The book consists of two parts, the first half concentrating on domestic politics and society in Republican Spain in Year One of the Spanish Revolution. Part Two takes a detailed look at the foreign policy implications of the Spanish Civil War, foreign intervention in the Civil War, and the evolution of the Nationalist side, ending with Franco’s victory.
But it is not this organizational subdivision of the text which is unusual. The highly innovative feature was the decision of the two authors to join their efforts in the reconstruction of events in Spain, for Pierre Broué and Émile Témime hailed from two rather divergent and, in the context of the Civil War itself, rather conflictual political traditions, which, in their common foreword, the authors described in the following terms:
“(T)hough in spirit we were on the same side of the fence, we willingly parted company, one of us more in sympathy with the progressive Republicans and the moderate Socialists in his concern with organization and efficiency and the world balance of power, and the other with the dissident Communists and revolutionary Socialists.” (14) The confluence of differing political trajectories, in the case of this pathbreaking study, resulted in an overall product whose quality far surpasses the sum total of its two individual parts.
Émile Témime (1926-2008), the moderate within this team, later on made his name as an historian of Mediterranean migrations and the history of Marseilles. His detailed reconstruction of the international diplomatic dimension to the Civil War, the internal politics of Franco's side, and the involvement of international powers in the affairs of the Spanish Republic was, to the best of my knowledge, unsurpassed at that time. Témime's second half of the volume thus added much-needed international grounding to the efforts of the two authors, who were both ten years old at the onset of the Spanish Civil War.
Yet for the readership of ATC, the pages penned by Pierre Broué probably hold even more interest than the 200-plus pages by Témime which, however, remain a more than worthwhile read. In what follows, then, I will limit myself to highlighting certain select features of Broué's first 300 pages, in the hope that prospective readers will not only purchase but study the entirety of this captivating book.
One more necessary and obvious comment needs to precede the engagement with the book's central theses. Some 50 years ago many of the most crucial archival holdings had been closed to the two young French investigators.
Most crucially, of course, Spanish archives remained off limits, as Spain was then still in the midst of the NATO-supported Francoist deep freeze. And back in 1961 the team fared little better when attempting to utilize French and British holdings. Soviet archives and the document collections in the Vatican were equally inaccessible to Broué and Témime.
In the intervening half century, this situation has been nearly completely reversed. Most crucially, Spanish holdings became available to researchers soon after the demise of Franco in November 1975. Soviet archives have no longer been hermetically sealed in the wake of Gorbachev’s reforms and the implosion of the Soviet Union. Last but not least, the recent announcement by the Vatican authorities that materials from the pontificate of Pope Pius XI (1922-1939) will now be opened may well remove some of the last major restrictions on the full investigation of the domestic and international circumstances of the Spanish Civil War — although in all these cases there remain frustrating restrictions which still complicate serious research.
A Modern Classic
The attentive reader of this book must thus constantly keep in mind that Broué and Témime faced serious limitations with regard to their source base. No doubt, anyone wishing to delve further into the respective detail will uncover a host of new published research which casts additional light on the Spanish Revolution and the Civil War. It is likewise beyond doubt that a careful comparison between Broué and Témime's account and that of succeeding generations of scholars will uncover mistakes and flaws in the work of these two pioneering historians.
Yet it should be underscored that what makes, in my view, The Revolution and the Civil War a modern classic is the fact that the broad outlines of their arguments, their interpretive sweep, and the precision of their analytic insights remain, to this day, unsurpassed and fully valid. Even some of Broué’s introductory comments, setting the stage for his detailed exposition of domestic politics in Republican Spain, remain insightful almost 50 years after they were first published:
“It was one of the tragedies of the Spanish Liberals and Republicans that, in spite of the existence of a Basque and a Catalan bourgeoisie, the incompleteness of the Spanish nation and the persistence of autonomist leanings [i.e. for political independence — ed.] had hindered the formation of a genuine Spanish bourgeoisie. The bankers in the Basque provinces and the biggest Catalan businessmen were hand in glove with the oligarchy. All the petty-bourgeois elements, which in the Western countries served as the base for the parties most strongly drawn to the parliamentary system, had turned toward Autonomist movements.” (46)
Combined with an unusually combative working-class Left, these Spanish peculiarities were omens for disaster. And most of the central passages in Pierre Broué's text are devoted to the analysis and discussion of the contours, contributions and failures of this working-class Left.
What strikes this reader upon re-reading this seminal text is not only the didactic clarity of language employed by both authors, which makes this work easily accessible as elegant introductory texts even today, but the finely nuanced tone of the authors who consistently refrain from simplistic black-and-white depictions of their respective favorite protagonists and the latter’s detested detractors.
The dissident Communist Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM, immortalized in George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia), though often quite favorably portrayed by Broué, is never spared from insightful critique where critique is due. On the other hand, the dreaded Stalinists of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) are given credit where credit is due. The PCE’s central role in the defense of Madrid in November 1936 is fully described, an organizational effort much-aided by Soviet assistance and adoption of revolutionary measures at the home front in Madrid, which closely resembled the methods of the revolutionary camp elsewhere.
That the PCE’s recourse to quasi-revolutionary measures in Madrid were calculated and contingent is also underscored, however, and the true nature of its hostility to lasting radical social change shone through even in Madrid. By December 1936, the POUM first experienced bouts of repression and illegality within the Republican camp at the instigation of the PCE.
Yet political parties and organizations, as central as they are in Broué’s account, never take on exclusive pride of place. It is one of the most important insights of this book that it was not so much the political parties of the Left which played the decisive role in the life of the Spanish Second Republic at grassroots level; instead, the author maintains, “the worker’s life gravitated around the casas del pueblo and the labor exchanges, centers of collective life that were veritable strongholds.” (66)
This recognition of the social movement-type character of the Spanish Revolution makes Broué's contribution to this seminal volume of utmost value and probably explains to a significant degree the continued (relative) popularity of this tome half a century after its first publication.
Revolutionary Self-Organization
With the outbreak of the Spanish Revolution in response to Franco’s only partially successful military uprising on 17 July 1936, this rank-and-file-driven revolutionary impulse manifested itself in ever so many innovative ways.
“In effect, each time that the workers’ organizations allowed themselves to be paralysed by their anxiety to respect Republican legality and each time that their leaders were satisfied with what was said by the officers, the latter prevailed. On the other hand, the Movimiento [fascist] was repulsed whenever the workers had time to arm and whenever they set about the destruction of the Army as such, independently of their leaders’ positions or the attitude of “legitimate” public authorities.” (104)
An extraordinary process of self-organization thus commenced in those parts of Spain where the military uprising had been defeated and where the working-class and peasant revolutionary Left exercised a degree of hegemony. A welter of committees sprang up all over Republican Spain, and Broué clearly portrays the origins and functions of these organizations.
“All had been set up in the heat of action to direct the popular response to the military coup d'état. They had been appointed in an infinite number of ways. In the villages, the factories, and on the work sites, time had sometimes been taken to elect them, at least summarily, at a general meeting. At all events, care had been taken to see that all parties and unions were represented on them, even if they did not exist before the Revolution, because the Committees represented at one and the same time the workers as a whole and the sum total of their organizations....
“All the Committees, whatever their differences in name, origin and composition, had one basic feature in common. All of them, in the days after the uprising, had seized all local power, taking over legislative as well as executive functions, making categorical decisions in their areas, not only about immediate problems, such as the maintenance of law and order and the control of prices, but also about the revolutionary tasks of the moment, the socialization or unionization of industry, the expropriation of the property of the clergy, the “factionists,”or simply the big landowners, the distribution of land or its collective development, the confiscation of bank accounts, the municipalisation of lodgings, the organization of information, written or spoken, education and welfare.” (127-9)
Critical Analysis
This widespread experiment in self-management and self-organization stands at the center of Broué's analytical gaze. It is perhaps of more than passing interest that more recent historians with an eye for the emancipatory dimension of the Spanish Revolution, such as George Esenwein and Adrian Shubert, have continued to underscore the singularity of this historical process: “When compared to the Russian example [i.e. the Russian Revolution — GRH], it is patent that in Spain the degree of workers’ control was far more penetrating and of a greater magnitude.”(5)
To be sure, Pierre Broué is a far too conscientious scholar merely to praise the evolution of grassroots sentiments and experiments in the aftermath of 17 July 1936. He is quick to point out some self-limiting and debilitating flaws in the attempts of those committees to construct a fundamentally different (and better!) society.
On a regional level, a significant amount of overlap and conflicting interests between the various committees complicated the running of affairs. Moreover, the explicitly desired decentralization of powers led to certain inefficiencies and negative social consequences; “wages varied considerably from one branch of industry and even from one factory to another.” The author even goes so far as to state: “Collectivisation led to the same inequalities and even to the same absurdities that its supporters had criticized in the capitalist system.” (164)
Perhaps most crucially, these committees, “made up of leaders of organizations, whether appointed or elected,” never did become “elected bodies subject to recall, acting democratically according to the law of the majority;” instead,
“(T)he Committees gradually ceased to be genuine revolutionary bodies, because of their failure to change themselves into a direct expression of the insurgent masses. They became “nominal committees,” in which workers and peasants carried less and less weight as the revolutionary battles and the direct exercise of power in the streets by armed workers faded into the past, and in which, to the contrary, the influence of party and union apparatuses came to play a dominant role.” (189)
Still, if there was hope for the Spanish Revolution, it lay within the self-organization of Spanish activists within these committees, “this blossoming of initiatives [which was] not always happy but almost always generous in their inspiration.” (152)
But time was running out. “It was the war that reduced the revolutionary gains to rubble before they had time to mature and prove themselves in a day-by-day experiment compounded of progress and retreat, of groping and discovery.” (170) “In fighting a war, a single authority is essential. The duality between the power of the Committees and the state was an obstacle to the conduct of the war. In autumn 1936, the only problem was to know which of the two powers, Republican or revolutionary, would prevail.” (188)
The Tragic Dead End
Much of the remainder of Broué's contribution to the co-authored work portrays in cogent analytical and detailed fashion why the “moderate” side won. In the autumn of 1936 even the forces on the revolutionary Left, above all the anarchists, the left-wing activists within the Socialist trade union (UGT), and the POUM all got caught up in the supposed exigencies of the admittedly difficult conjuncture, acquiescing in and indeed supporting the gradual elimination of the committee structure in favor of strengthening the rival structures of the bourgeois state.
In the following winter and then the spring of 1937, the realization of the dead-end nature of this evolution suddenly began to dawn on growing numbers of the increasingly marginalized radical Left; but by then, it soon turned out, it was too late. The 1937 Barcelona “May Days,” the Communist-led suppression of the Left again immortalized by Orwell in his autobiographical account of his months spent in the ranks of a POUM militia unit, provided the symbolic endpoint of Year One of the Spanish Revolution, which in effect put an end to the Spanish Revolution as such.
The Civil War continued to rage for almost another two years, ably described in Émile Témime's portion of the joint text, but the most outstanding example of widespread libertarian self-organization in 20th century European (and, probably, world) history had come to an end.
Notes
1.Pierre Broué, The German Revolution, 1917-1923 (London: Merlin, 2006).
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2.Pierre Broué and Raymond Vacheron, Meurtres au Maquis (Paris: Grasset, 1997).
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3.Pierre Broué and Émile Témime, La revolution et la guerre d’Espagne (Paris: Minuit, 1961).
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4.Originally published as part of a larger collection of Chomsky’s writings, American Power and the New Mandarins, it has recently been reissued as a monograph: Noam Chomsky, Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship (New York: New Press, 2003).
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5.George Esenwein and Adrian Shubert, Spain at War: The Spanish Civil War in Context (London: Longman, 1995), 134.
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ATC 143, November-December 2009
"Curb Your Enthusiasm" a permanent carnival of fetishized inwardness
I don't watch much series TV, but I make an exception for Larry David's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" on HBO. It finished its most recent season Sunday night, satirizing the profit-driven big business entertainment mania for remakes and reunions of old TV warhorses. Of course David is the epitome of the "Hollywood left", which he also satirizes in his show. The environmentalist preening of David and his cohort about their Prius cars, their green toilet paper, and their contributions to NRDC are little more than what Georg Lukacs called "a permanent carnival of fetishized inwardness."
The current season's Episode 66 has the rightwing culture heroes up in arms. A blogger who styles himself the "Left Coast Rebel" had this to say:
Comedian Larry David is under attack from critics who say he pushed the mocking of religion and Christian belief in miracles over the edge in the latest episode of his HBO series "Curb Your Enthusiasm," which the cable network defended as "playful."
On the show's most recent installment, which aired Sunday, David urinates on a painting of Jesus Christ, causing a woman to believe the painting depicts Jesus crying.
I am nearly speechless. Nearly because I know full-well that David, HBO, Hollywood et al. come from the anything goes school of thought when it comes to conservatives/christians. Any and every proclivity of disdain and excess aimed at the Christian ethic is fodder for even the most vile of attack.
Liberalism 101:
To desecrate a picture of Jesus - Now that is funny!
To desecrate Muhammad, the Koran - Racist! Bigot! Boycott!
The Left Coast Rebel and the Fox News story he quotes to froth his self-righteousness are incorrect. In the offending scene, Larry David does not "urinate on a painting of Jesus Christ." While visiting the home of his assistant, he visits their bathroom. A very kitschy Jesus print is on the wall above the toilet. David relieves himself, his "stream" inordinately powerful because of some medicine he is taking. A particle of liquid ends up on the good lord's face. The homeowners take it to be a sign from God and drop to their knees before committing themselves to a cross-country RV trip to exhibit the weeping Christ.
All this reminds me of an older artistic work the right wing used in their fundraising, the "Piss Christ". The fact that Larry David is so outspokenly liberal and revels in the personal and social complexities of being Jewish just adds to the enjoyment for those of us tired of a lifetime of holier-than-thou special-pleading by reactionaries who present Christianity as a persecuted minority religion beset by unbelievers and Christ killers on all sides.
A few years ago Marxist Louis Proyect wrote these perceptive lines about "Curb Your Enthusiasm":
When Seinfeld's Executive Producer Larry David launched a new TV show on HBO playing himself, it might have been anticipated that "Curb Your Enthusiasm" would retain some of the characteristics of the Seinfeld show. This it does. Not only is the character Larry David just as self-centered and obnoxious as the Seinfeld regulars, he has the same whining Queens inflection as Jerry Seinfeld himself.
Unlike most Americans, I could not stand the Seinfeld show. I thought the show relied too heavily on shtick, a Yiddish word meaning gimmick--especially in the comic sense. For example, Jack Benny's cheapness was shtick, as was Chevy Chase's pratfalls on SNL. It also had the mandatory laugh-track, which has the same effect on me as the sound of a garden rake being scraped across a blackboard.
"Curb Your Enthusiasm" does incorporate the same kinds of convoluted plots as Seinfeld, usually putting one of the main characters into an excruciatingly embarrassing situation. Since they are not constrained by network requirements to keep bible belt figures like Donald Wildmon happy, these plots tend to be a lot rawer and a lot funnier. For example, in one show, Larry David performs oral sex on his wife only to get a pubic hair stuck in his throat. For most of the episode, he is seen gagging and choking in polite company trying to dislodge the troublesome hair.
But "Curb Your Enthusiasm" has many other features that were not seen on Seinfeld or any other television show on or off cable. For one thing, much of the dialogue is improvised on the spot. Larry David himself got started as an improvisational stand-up comedian in NYC. This means that the performances have few of the kind of histrionics associated with situation comedies. For example, on all network comedies the actors are always speaking in a completely unnatural manner leading up to some gag that is punctuated by a raucous laugh-track explosion. On "Curb Your Enthusiasm", you will more likely find the characters sounding like real people chatting over an awkward situation that does not lead up to a conventional punch-line.
For example, in last night's episode Larry David is in an examination room waiting for the doctor to look at a head wound (Mel Brooks has accidentally smacked him on the forehead when opening up the bathroom door in his office.) Growing bored, he picks up the doctor's phone and starts chatting with his business partner who is in the waiting room. When the doctor comes in, he tells him that patients are not allowed to use the phone. This leads to a five minute argument between David and the doctor over this practice, with David demanding to know the reason for this rule and the doctor telling him that he does not need to know. They end up calling each other pricks.
Despite its American (and Jewish) roots, the show will remind you of British comedy. The improvised dialogue, as well as the tendency to demonstrate human frailty and self-deception at its worst, will remind you of Mike Leigh. In addition, the universal tendency of each show to end up in some kind of calamity will remind you of "Fawlty Towers". In recent episodes, Larry David and his Hollywood buddies' attempt to open up a restaurant keep meeting with Fawlty-esque disaster. When a pet German Shepherd that has been trained to sniff out corpses goes frantic in the kitchen trying to dig something up, the restaurant is closed down until a police investigation is finished. A murdered body assumed to be under the floor turns out to be a soiled brassiere. (Larry David himself was flattered to learn that British critics view his show as having a British sensibility.)
Larry David and all of his big-time Hollywood players come across as total creeps. They will stab each other in the back in one episode and reconcile in the next on the most insincere basis. Utterly protective of their class status, they treat their maids and gardeners as serfs. When Christmas rolls around, Larry David goes around dispensing tips with a self-satisfied smirk on his face. When he fears that he has tipped one of his waiters twice by accident, he goes up to the man and demands the tip back. The waiter asks him, "You mean the single tip that you gave me?"
The show also sends up the phony liberalism of Hollywood big-shots. For example, an environmentalism benefit is seen mostly as an opportunity to hear pop-star Alanis Morissette who has been hired for the occasion or to make an appearance. When Larry David learns that a terrorist attack is planned for the same weekend as the benefit, he decides to leave town even though his wife wants to stick around to hear Morissette.
Cheryl: Do you think that's a good idea, for us to be apart if something did happen?
Larry (chewing gum): Then at least one of us would survive.
Cheryl: It just seems if we're gonna go we should go together.
Larry: Not necessarily. It almost seems a little selfish that you would want both of us to perish.
Cheryl: So you'd be fine going on without me.
Larry: It would be very difficult at first, sure, but hopefully at some point I could get back some semblance of a life.
Cheryl: OK. If you feel good about one of us dying and the other one surviving and you can live with that for the rest of your life, then you should go golf this weekend.
Larry: I'll think about it.
Cheryl: Think about it.
Since Larry David is notoriously reclusive and refuses to give interviews, it might be difficult to understand why he has created such a deliciously misanthropic show. Fortunately, Robert B. Weide, the show's Executive Producer and frequent director, is much more forthcoming. There's an interview with him on the "Curb Your Enthusiasm" website that I invite you to check out: http://www.hbo.com/larrydavid/interviews/ (You can also watch excerpts from the show there.) He also has a website at: http://www.duckprods.com/
Weide has a very interesting resume. He is the director of "Lenny Bruce: Swear To Tell The Truth" and cites Bruce's use of language as an inspiration for "Curb Your Enthusiasm". In the episode of the ill-fated restaurant's opening, the chef, who suffers from Tourette's Syndrome, yells out without provocation "Shit, motherfucker, cocksucker" at the top of his lungs. This inspires David and all his friends and partners to begin shouting out similar curses just to lessen the tension. Pure Lenny Bruce.
The current season's Episode 66 has the rightwing culture heroes up in arms. A blogger who styles himself the "Left Coast Rebel" had this to say:
Comedian Larry David is under attack from critics who say he pushed the mocking of religion and Christian belief in miracles over the edge in the latest episode of his HBO series "Curb Your Enthusiasm," which the cable network defended as "playful."
On the show's most recent installment, which aired Sunday, David urinates on a painting of Jesus Christ, causing a woman to believe the painting depicts Jesus crying.
I am nearly speechless. Nearly because I know full-well that David, HBO, Hollywood et al. come from the anything goes school of thought when it comes to conservatives/christians. Any and every proclivity of disdain and excess aimed at the Christian ethic is fodder for even the most vile of attack.
Liberalism 101:
To desecrate a picture of Jesus - Now that is funny!
To desecrate Muhammad, the Koran - Racist! Bigot! Boycott!
The Left Coast Rebel and the Fox News story he quotes to froth his self-righteousness are incorrect. In the offending scene, Larry David does not "urinate on a painting of Jesus Christ." While visiting the home of his assistant, he visits their bathroom. A very kitschy Jesus print is on the wall above the toilet. David relieves himself, his "stream" inordinately powerful because of some medicine he is taking. A particle of liquid ends up on the good lord's face. The homeowners take it to be a sign from God and drop to their knees before committing themselves to a cross-country RV trip to exhibit the weeping Christ.
All this reminds me of an older artistic work the right wing used in their fundraising, the "Piss Christ". The fact that Larry David is so outspokenly liberal and revels in the personal and social complexities of being Jewish just adds to the enjoyment for those of us tired of a lifetime of holier-than-thou special-pleading by reactionaries who present Christianity as a persecuted minority religion beset by unbelievers and Christ killers on all sides.
A few years ago Marxist Louis Proyect wrote these perceptive lines about "Curb Your Enthusiasm":
When Seinfeld's Executive Producer Larry David launched a new TV show on HBO playing himself, it might have been anticipated that "Curb Your Enthusiasm" would retain some of the characteristics of the Seinfeld show. This it does. Not only is the character Larry David just as self-centered and obnoxious as the Seinfeld regulars, he has the same whining Queens inflection as Jerry Seinfeld himself.
Unlike most Americans, I could not stand the Seinfeld show. I thought the show relied too heavily on shtick, a Yiddish word meaning gimmick--especially in the comic sense. For example, Jack Benny's cheapness was shtick, as was Chevy Chase's pratfalls on SNL. It also had the mandatory laugh-track, which has the same effect on me as the sound of a garden rake being scraped across a blackboard.
"Curb Your Enthusiasm" does incorporate the same kinds of convoluted plots as Seinfeld, usually putting one of the main characters into an excruciatingly embarrassing situation. Since they are not constrained by network requirements to keep bible belt figures like Donald Wildmon happy, these plots tend to be a lot rawer and a lot funnier. For example, in one show, Larry David performs oral sex on his wife only to get a pubic hair stuck in his throat. For most of the episode, he is seen gagging and choking in polite company trying to dislodge the troublesome hair.
But "Curb Your Enthusiasm" has many other features that were not seen on Seinfeld or any other television show on or off cable. For one thing, much of the dialogue is improvised on the spot. Larry David himself got started as an improvisational stand-up comedian in NYC. This means that the performances have few of the kind of histrionics associated with situation comedies. For example, on all network comedies the actors are always speaking in a completely unnatural manner leading up to some gag that is punctuated by a raucous laugh-track explosion. On "Curb Your Enthusiasm", you will more likely find the characters sounding like real people chatting over an awkward situation that does not lead up to a conventional punch-line.
For example, in last night's episode Larry David is in an examination room waiting for the doctor to look at a head wound (Mel Brooks has accidentally smacked him on the forehead when opening up the bathroom door in his office.) Growing bored, he picks up the doctor's phone and starts chatting with his business partner who is in the waiting room. When the doctor comes in, he tells him that patients are not allowed to use the phone. This leads to a five minute argument between David and the doctor over this practice, with David demanding to know the reason for this rule and the doctor telling him that he does not need to know. They end up calling each other pricks.
Despite its American (and Jewish) roots, the show will remind you of British comedy. The improvised dialogue, as well as the tendency to demonstrate human frailty and self-deception at its worst, will remind you of Mike Leigh. In addition, the universal tendency of each show to end up in some kind of calamity will remind you of "Fawlty Towers". In recent episodes, Larry David and his Hollywood buddies' attempt to open up a restaurant keep meeting with Fawlty-esque disaster. When a pet German Shepherd that has been trained to sniff out corpses goes frantic in the kitchen trying to dig something up, the restaurant is closed down until a police investigation is finished. A murdered body assumed to be under the floor turns out to be a soiled brassiere. (Larry David himself was flattered to learn that British critics view his show as having a British sensibility.)
Larry David and all of his big-time Hollywood players come across as total creeps. They will stab each other in the back in one episode and reconcile in the next on the most insincere basis. Utterly protective of their class status, they treat their maids and gardeners as serfs. When Christmas rolls around, Larry David goes around dispensing tips with a self-satisfied smirk on his face. When he fears that he has tipped one of his waiters twice by accident, he goes up to the man and demands the tip back. The waiter asks him, "You mean the single tip that you gave me?"
The show also sends up the phony liberalism of Hollywood big-shots. For example, an environmentalism benefit is seen mostly as an opportunity to hear pop-star Alanis Morissette who has been hired for the occasion or to make an appearance. When Larry David learns that a terrorist attack is planned for the same weekend as the benefit, he decides to leave town even though his wife wants to stick around to hear Morissette.
Cheryl: Do you think that's a good idea, for us to be apart if something did happen?
Larry (chewing gum): Then at least one of us would survive.
Cheryl: It just seems if we're gonna go we should go together.
Larry: Not necessarily. It almost seems a little selfish that you would want both of us to perish.
Cheryl: So you'd be fine going on without me.
Larry: It would be very difficult at first, sure, but hopefully at some point I could get back some semblance of a life.
Cheryl: OK. If you feel good about one of us dying and the other one surviving and you can live with that for the rest of your life, then you should go golf this weekend.
Larry: I'll think about it.
Cheryl: Think about it.
Since Larry David is notoriously reclusive and refuses to give interviews, it might be difficult to understand why he has created such a deliciously misanthropic show. Fortunately, Robert B. Weide, the show's Executive Producer and frequent director, is much more forthcoming. There's an interview with him on the "Curb Your Enthusiasm" website that I invite you to check out: http://www.hbo.com/larrydavid/interviews/ (You can also watch excerpts from the show there.) He also has a website at: http://www.duckprods.com/
Weide has a very interesting resume. He is the director of "Lenny Bruce: Swear To Tell The Truth" and cites Bruce's use of language as an inspiration for "Curb Your Enthusiasm". In the episode of the ill-fated restaurant's opening, the chef, who suffers from Tourette's Syndrome, yells out without provocation "Shit, motherfucker, cocksucker" at the top of his lungs. This inspires David and all his friends and partners to begin shouting out similar curses just to lessen the tension. Pure Lenny Bruce.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Continuities of Trotsky and communism
Theories of Stalinism
— Paul Le Blanc
— Paul Le Blanc
The Marxism of Leon Trotsky
By Kunal Chattopadhyay
Kolkata: Progress Publishers, 2006, 672 pages, including index, $25 paperback.
Western Marxism and the Soviet Union
By Marcel van der Linden
Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009, 379 pages, including index,
$20 paperback.
By Kunal Chattopadhyay
Kolkata: Progress Publishers, 2006, 672 pages, including index, $25 paperback.
Western Marxism and the Soviet Union
By Marcel van der Linden
Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009, 379 pages, including index,
$20 paperback.
KARL MARX AND his comrades deemed their own approach “scientific,” as compared to “utopian” intellectual efforts on behalf of socialism, because they believed that practical efforts to challenge and ultimately replace capitalism with something better must be grounded in a serious study of economic, political, social, historical realities and dynamics.
More, they believed that lessons learned from practical organizing and political experiences of the working class and popular social movements — sometimes glorious victories and often tragic defeats — must also guide practical efforts of the future. The combination of such study and experience has been called “Marxist theory.”
The massive crisis of capitalism has put the meaning of “socialism” back into public debate. Superficially equating state intervention in the economy with “socialism,” some are inclined to agree with Newsweek magazine that “we are all socialists now.”
Despite far-right hysteria, however, President Obama is no socialist. Like President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the last big decline in capitalism’s fortunes, he is insistent that bailing out capitalism is the purpose of his administration’s hands-on approach to the economy. But those who perceive that — from the standpoint of human rights, the dignity of labor, the preservation of our health and communities and environment — “capitalism fouls things up,” will certainly feel that we must go beyond the limitations of Obama’s policies.
One of the many differences between the present global capitalist downturn and that of the 1930s is that back then there were millions of people throughout the world who believed the 1917 Revolution that the Bolshevik/Communist vanguard led in Russia had actually opened the pathway to the socialist-communist future — despite the dictatorial emergency measures brought on by foreign invasion and civil war. Rule by democratic councils (soviets) of the workers and peasants seemed to have been established, and a global Communist movement took shape for the purpose of carrying out similar revolutions throughout the world.
After the revolution’s universally acknowledged leader, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, died in 1924, a sharp struggle erupted over future perspectives, between the intransigent revolutionary Leon Trotsky and the seemingly more patient and easy-going Joseph Stalin. Victory within the Russian Communist Party went to Stalin — who then guided the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) into what was called a “revolution from above,” involving the forced collectivization of land and a fiercely rapid industrialization. By the 1930s, the Stalin regime claimed that it had finally achieved “socialism,” a claim accepted with hope and rejoicing by many workers, peasants, students, intellectuals, and others throughout the world.
As time went on, increasing numbers of people came to the conclusion that what existed in the USSR had little to do with the socialism forecast by Marx — a “free association of the producers” in which the laboring masses had won the battle for democracy to create an abundant society of the free and the equal. Instead, it was a society which continued to be marked by a considerable degree of inequality, drudgery, scarcity, and extreme restrictions on freedom.
If this was not the socialism that the Stalinists said it was, then what was it? How could its emergence be explained? The answers to such questions have obvious implications for other questions: Is a socialist alternative to capitalism actually possible? What are the preconditions, the barriers, and the possibilities for such a transition? Such questions as these have a greater edge than ever in the present period of capitalist crisis. Each in their own way, the books under review here have relevance for those facing this dilemma.
Trotsky’s Marxism
The life and thought of Leon Trotsky have guided many seeking to understand the grandeur of the Russian Revolution and the tragedy of its betrayal. Kunal Chattopadhyay’s The Marxism of Leon Trotsky is not the first book to deal with the topic indicated in the title. The more serious biographies — by Isaac Deutscher and Pierre Broué (the latter still calls out for English translation) — naturally deal at length with Trotsky’s revolutionary perspectives, as does Tony Cliff’s more activist-oriented four-volume study.
Important discussions of Trotsky’s political orientation have been offered by such activist scholars as Ernest Mandel, Michael Löwy, Duncan Hallas, and John Molyneux — the first two inclined to embrace Trotsky without reservation, the latter two (along with Cliff) taking issue with him particularly for not agreeing with them that the USSR was “state capitalist,” and also for founding the fragile revolutionary socialist network known as the Fourth International.
But until the present volume, the only study reaching for a thorough and in-depth exposition has been Baruch Knei-Paz’s 1978 work The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky. When all is said and done, however, Knei-Paz is unsympathetic, even dismissive of Trotsky’s revolutionary Marxism, despite his devoting 598 pages to it. Chattopadhyay’s book (30 pages longer) provides a more sympathetic, insightful, reliable account.
A Professor of History at Calcutta’s prestigious Jadavpur University, Chattopadhyay brings to this study a sensibility developed through his own family’s long-time involvement in the substantial Indian Communist movement. In his youth, he himself was swept up in Maoist currents before experience and reflection brought him into the Fourth International. Such background may contribute to his ability to see and explain the coherence in the complexity and sweep of Trotsky’s thought.
It is unfortunate that this splendid book is not easily available to U.S. readers. Its length and polemical edge raise questions as to whether a U.S. publisher will be inclined to rectify the situation. Yet the occasional reference to recent debates within the Fourth International, or between the Fourth International and other left-wing currents, cannot obscure the fact that we are presented here with a clear, rigorous, richly textured examination of an amazing political theorist and revolutionary leader. Those seriously concerned with Trotsky, Marxism, revolutionary history and activism must take this massive contribution into account.
The book's chapters are grouped into four parts. “The Foundations” makes a distinction between Classical Marxism (associated with Marx and Engels, Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky) and the more rigid, mechanistic, dogmatic “Orthodox” Marxism supposedly predominant in the mainstream of the socialist movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Part Two, “The Strategy of Revolution,” offers two chapters exploring the development of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution in Russia, and then his generalization of it on a global scale.
Part Three, “The Revolutionary Process,” consists of three chapters dealing with the interrelationship of the working class and the revolutionary party, the relation between democratic workers’ councils and working-class political rule (or “dictatorship of the proletariat”), and the transition to socialism. The three chapters of Part Four, “Proletarian Internationalism,” deal respectively with imperialism, the Communist International which Lenin and Trotsky helped to found and lead (and which Stalin helped to corrupt and dissolve), and the Fourth International.
Chattopadyay helps us see in Trotsky’s thought the dynamic interplay of democracy and class struggle, the self-activity of the masses of laboring and oppressed people reaching for their own liberation within, while at the same time straining beyond, the context of global capitalism.
The three elements of his theory of permanent revolution — (a) the possibility and necessity, under the right circumstances, of democratic and immediate struggles spilling over into the struggle for working-class political power, (b) culminating in a transitional period going in the direction of socialism, (c) which can be realized only through the advance of similar struggles around the world — permeate Trotsky’s orientation from his youth to his death.
His vision of workers’ democracy, and his appreciation of the radical sub-culture created by the embattled working class, comes through in his failed effort to mobilize a Communist-Socialist united front against Hitler in the early 1930s:
“In the course of many decades, the workers have built up within the bourgeois democracy by utilizing it, by fighting against it, their own strongholds and bases of proletarian democracy: the trade unions, the political parties, the educational and sports clubs, the cooperatives, etc. The proletariat cannot attain power within the formal limits of bourgeois democracy but can do so only by taking the road to revolution … And these bulwarks of workers’ democracy [which Hitler’s Nazis were preparing to destroy] within the bourgeois state are absolutely essential for taking the revolutionary road.” (359)
The commitment to workers’ democracy also comes through in Trotsky’s effort to mobilize Communists in the Soviet Republic of the mid-1920s against the bureaucratic onslaught represented by Stalin:
“We must not build socialism by the bureaucratic road, we must not create a socialist society by administrative orders; only by way of the greatest initiative, individual activity, persistence and resilience of the opinion of the many-millioned masses, who sense and know that the matter is their own concern … socialist construction of possible only through the growth of genuine revolutionary democracy.” (398)
Chattopadhyay notes that in his 1936 classic analysis of the USSR, The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky rejected any “attempt to prettify the totalitarian regime.” Insisting “that statisation was not identical to the socialization of the means of production,” he “denied the claim that the USSR was in any sense a socialist society.” (537)
According to Chattopadhyay, “Stalinism (political counter-revolution within the workers’ state) and fascism (political counter-revolution in the bourgeois state) heralded a long black night. It was necessary to raise a new, ‘stainless banner,’ around which the revolutionary workers of a new generation could unite.” (515)
At the same time, running through Trotsky’s orientation is a thoroughgoing revolutionary internationalism which is rooted in a conception of “world economy and the class struggle as a totality subject to uneven and combined development,” as he put it, and an understanding that “today the entire globe — its dry land and water, its surface and interior — has become the arena of a worldwide economy; the dependence of each part on the other has become indissoluble.” (436)
The relevance of his perspectives for modern-day global justice movement seems striking:
“Imperialism represents the predatory capitalist expression of a progressive tendency in economic development — to construct a human economy on a world scale… Only socialism … which liberates the world economy … and thereby liberates national culture itself … offers a way out from the contradictions which have revealed themselves to us as a terrible threat to all of human culture.” (440)
And in sharp contrast to the ethnocentrism of many European socialists, he commented in 1919:
“We have up to now devoted too little attention to capitalism in Asia. However, the international situation is evidently shaping up in such a way that the [revolutionary] road to Paris and London lies via the towns of Afghanistan, the Punjab, and Bengal.” (447)
Critical Appreciation
While those inclined to take issue with key aspects of Trotsky’s thought will be dissatisfied with the author’s almost invariable defense, this is always accompanied by an informative and well-reasoned discussion that even the most severe critic would do well to consider. Nor is Chattopadhyay himself completely uncritical of Trotsky’s perspectives, and his contributions on this score are very much worth more attention and debate than will be possible here.
One of the sharpest criticisms seems to focus on what he views as Trotsky becoming, in a sense, too “Leninist.” While hardly rejecting Lenin’s fundamental orientation, Chattopadhyay approves of the young Trotsky’s conflict with what he portrays (wrongly, I think) as Lenin’s hyper-centralist deviations in What Is To Be Done? and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.
He is also critical of Trotsky initially giving too much ground to Bolshevism when he joined Lenin’s party in 1917. (For an impressive challenge to the gist of Trotsky’s 1904 criticism of Lenin, and thus of Chattopadhyay’s characterization, see Lars Lih’s splendid Lenin Rediscovered [Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008].)
Chattopadhyay’s argument is intriguing. In Trotsky’s anti-Lenin polemic Our Political Tasks (1904), “Trotsky made a point to which we will find him returning all his life: ‘The problems of the new [revolutionary] regime are so intricate that they can be solved only through the rivalry of the various methods of economic and political reconstruction, by long ‘debates,’ by systematic struggle — not only between the socialist and capitalist worlds, but also between the various tendencies within socialism, tendencies that must inevitably develop as soon as the dictatorship of proletariat creates tens and hundreds of new unresolved problems” (220).
This clear recognition of the necessity of political pluralism as an integral part of creating socialism is not present in Lenin’s otherwise magnificent The State and Revolution (1917). The calamities of civil war, foreign intervention, economic blockade, and social chaos following the 1917 revolution caused Lenin, Trotsky and the other Bolsheviks to establish a one-party dictatorship, curtail and ban various manifestations of political pluralism, and adopt other authoritarian measures on an “emergency” basis.
Some of Chattopadhyay’s sharpest criticisms of Trotsky center on this period of 1919-1922. In fact, the temporary expedients were never rescinded, contributing to the replacement of power of workers’ councils by the power of the state and party bureaucratic apparatus — and the crystallization of Stalinism. By 1923-24, Trotsky recognized the danger and began his leadership of the ill-fated Left Opposition.
In his final years, now living in exile before being murdered by a Stalinist agent in 1940, he had — Chattopadhyay shows us — explicitly reintegrated into his Bolshevik-Leninist orientation the pluralist insights of 1904, calling for a political revolution that would overthrow the bureaucratic dictatorship, and for a multi-party soviet democracy. Trotsky viewed this as a political revolution, which he believed could and must rescue the social and economic gains of the 1917 Revolution.
Making Sense of Stalin’s “Socialism”
The political revolution never happened, however. Trotsky himself spent more than 16 years seeking to make sense of Stalin’s “socialism,” a matter Chattopadhyay deals with capably, but not in great depth.* He never expected the bureaucratic dictatorship to last as long as it did.
In fact, several generations of Marxists labored to make sense of what the USSR represented and how it might be squared with Marxist perspectives. Marcel van der Linden, Research Director of Amsterdam’s prestigious International Institute of Social History, points out that “the ‘Russian Question’ was an absolutely central problem for Marxism in the twentieth century.”
In Western Marxism and the Soviet Union, van der Linden offers a survey of Marxist-influenced theorizations and debates. The discussion is not exhaustive but presents the thinking of over 100 people from 1917 to the dawn of the 21st century, whose works are listed here in 44 pages. The eyes and mind of even veteran Marxists may begin to blur after spending excessive stretches of time with this volume — but the author’s account is quite clear, coherent, fair-minded, and genuinely interesting.
The periodic crescendos of theory and debate (seven in all, van der Linden tells us, from 1917 to the end of the 1990s) have implications for the nature, but also the very possibility, of socialism. The nature of capitalism is also at issue, as are the capacities of the working class to improve its own situation and the world, and the adequacy of Marxism as a tool for understanding the world.
Marx’s materialist conception of history had posited a European historical development leading from a generalized primitive tribal communism, eventually giving way to the rise and fall of a succession of slave-based civilizations, then an extensive feudalism slowly evolving through the crystallization and expansion within it of a market economy, explosively giving way to a full-blown and dynamic capitalism, which would generate the possibility of immense productivity and abundance that would pave the way (after a working-class revolution) for a socialist future.
“It is necessary to reconsider the whole traditional structure of historical materialism,” according to dissident-Marxists György Bence and Janos Kis (under the pseudonym Marc Rakovskii) in Les Temps Modernes as they sought to comprehend Soviet-style societies. (247)
Indeed, how could such a society fit within the traditional Marxist schema? In 1980, Rumanian dissident Pavel Campeanu suggested a variety of contradictory elements that added up to “some kind of pre-capitalist socio-economic formation.” (284) Back in 1944 Czechoslovakian ex-Communist Josef Guttman, writing under the name Peter Meyer in the U.S. radical journal Politics, suggested what many others had concluded before him: “Perhaps there is neither capitalism nor socialism in Russia, but a third thing, something that is quite new in history.” (127)
As late as 1980, British economist Simon Mohun argued a point made by some other analysts, summarized by van der Linden in this way: “Just as the transition to capitalism could be understood only after capitalism was consolidated, the transition from capitalism to communism could only be fathomed once communism had become established.” (197-198) But others refused to assume that the USSR represented any such transition to socialism or communism.
In 1970s samizdat essays, Alexander Zimin, an old Bolshevik oppositionist who had somehow survived years in Stalin’s labor camps, suggested that the USSR represented “a mongrel and freakish social formation,” a stagnant evolutionary byway, a dead-end detour going away from both capitalism and socialism. (222) In the 1940s, German left-wing economist Fritz Sternberg had argued that the USSR was a hybrid form with progressive and reactionary tendencies (he increasingly saw the latter as predominant) and that one should resist labeling: “It is useless to attempt to cover with a name; it is misleading to mistake one side of the Russian development for the other.” (131)
This has not stopped many from seeking and applying one or another label. Van der Linden notes: “Numerous attempts were made to understand Soviet society, some with solid empirical foundations, but most lacking them; some consistent and carefully thought-out, others illogical and superficial.” (305)
The three “classical” theories predominating in critical-minded circles (each with some connection to the Trotskyist tradition) have been: (1) degenerated workers’ state, (2) bureaucratic collectivism, (3) state capitalism. Van der Linden argues that none of these matches up with what he calls “orthodox Marxism” — but we will see that some theorists have insisted that major aspects of Marxism itself have been thrown into question by the evolving realities.
Challenge to Marxist Theory
Among the early critics, some insisted that the existence of the authoritarianism and bureaucratic aspects of reality in the early Soviet Republic, and then the substantial concessions to market forces during the period of NEP (New Economic Policy, 1921-29), were far from the socialist goal. This meant, from the standpoint of the stages (primitive communal/slave civilization/feudalism/capitalism/socialism/communism) that have been associated with the Marxist schema, that what existed in Soviet Russia had to be some variety of capitalism, which the critics were inclined to dub “state capitalism.”
The Bolshevik leaders — Lenin and Trotsky most of all — never asserted that socialism had been established. Only Stalin and his followers would claim this, beginning in the 1930s. Lenin argued in 1921 that the 1917 working-class revolution had established a workers’ state (political rule by the workers’ councils, or soviets), but that under pressures of scarcity and war it was “a workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations.” The transition to socialism could only be completed on the basis of further economic development, the deepening of workers’ experience and power, and the triumph of the revolution in other parts of the world.
Bolsheviks could also point to Marx’s comments that the future communist (or socialist) society must be seen “not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society, which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth-marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.” (264)
Some socialists who had opposed the Bolshevik regime, such as the Menshevik Olga Domanevskaya, insisted that central dynamics of capitalism, such as economic competition and the insatiable quest for profit, were absent from the economy of Soviet Russia. Similarly, the famous Austrian Social-Democratic economist Rudolf Hilferding argued that “wages and prices still exist, but their function is no longer the same,” and that “while maintaining the form, a complete transformation of the function has occurred” in this emerging totalitarian order. (92)
This partly dovetails with the analysis of another Austrian Social-Democrat, Friedrich Adler, that (according to van der Linden’s summary) “Stalin’s ‘experiment’ should be judged as an attempt to realize, through the sacrifice of a whole generation of workers, the primitive accumulation process which in developed capitalism had occurred earlier, and in this way lay the foundation for a socialist Soviet Union.” (53) Hilferding, on the other hand, stressed that the bureaucratic-authoritarian state in Soviet Russia had fractured the classical Marxist dictum that the economic system determines the class nature of the state. Under Stalin it had converted itself into “an independent power” ruling over the Soviet people. (90)
Other challenges to traditional Marxist perspectives would crop up. For example, Simone Weil developed a 1933 analysis which argued that under modern capitalist production the growing division of labor and specialization increasingly resulted in the mass of individuals losing their ability to “see society in its totality,” which meant that they were “imprisoned in a social constellation” which prevented them from grasping the logic and history of social-economic reality. On the other hand, growing managerial and bureaucratic apparatuses were becoming essential for coordinating the “numerous fragmented activities.” If a revolution removed the capitalists, more likely than working-class rule would be the rising administrative forces becoming a new bureaucratic caste ruling over the economy, as in Stalin’s Russia. (74-75)
In fact, the division between intellectual and manual labor had been emphasized by many theorists, and had identified as a source of bureaucratization within the workers’ movement before World War I, and — by logical extension — in the first effort to create a workers’ state. This logic dovetailed with the perception of what actually manifested itself in the USSR, lucidly described in 1970 by U.S. Marxist economist and Monthly Review editor Paul Sweezy:
“The Party established a dictatorship which accomplished epic feats of industrialization and preparation for the inevitable onslaught of the imperialist powers [which took place during World War II], but the price was the proliferation of political and economic bureaucracies which repressed rather than represented the new Soviet working class; and gradually entrenched themselves in power as a new ruling class.” (209)
Some would come to perceive this inability to sustain workers’ power as involving a fatal shortcoming in the working class itself. As another left-wing economist, the Greek/French political theorist Cornelius Castoriadis put it in the late 1940s:
“Having overthrown the bourgeois government, having expropriated the capitalists (often against the wishes of the Bolsheviks), having occupied the factories, the workers thought that all that was necessary was to hand over management to the government, to the Bolshevik party, and to the trade union leaders. By doing so, the proletariat was abdicating its own essential role in the society it was striving to create.” (118)
Such perceptions contributed to some theorists — such as the 1970s East German Communist dissident Rudolf Bahro — concluding that since “the immediate needs of the subaltern strata and classes are always conservative, and never positively anticipate a new form of life,” the hope in bureaucratized “workers’ states” was with the more intellectual middle strata of specialists and administrators pushing aside the privileged bureaucratic elites in order to guide society to genuine socialism. (235-235)
For others, such as James Burnham — the most prominent Trotskyist intellectual in the United States before his rapid swing rightward to the Central Intelligence Agency and the editorial board of conservative journal National Review — a different conclusion became obvious: socialism is impossible.
Dismantling his previous Marxist convictions in the 1941 classic The Managerial Revolution, Burnham asserted that the inevitable wave of the future, already well under way and destined to be completed within half a century, was a global transition to variations of “managerial society” (already evident in the USSR, Nazi Germany, and the extensive social-liberalism of the New Deal in the United States). These different entities would enter into “direct competition in the days to come” for global empire. (83)
Varieties of Socialist Affirmation
While van der Linden feels “it is perfectly clear that the Soviet society can hardly be explained in orthodox Marxist terms at all,” his own sympathies bend toward those who refuse to abandon the Marxist method and the socialist goal. He gives greatest attention to those operating within the general revolutionary socialist framework personified by Leon Trotsky.
Trotsky himself followed the logic of Lenin (workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations) by terming the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state requiring a political revolution by the working class to replace the tyranny of the Stalinist bureaucracy with genuine workers’ rule. “Democracy,” he insisted, “is the one and only conceivable mechanism for preparing the socialist system of economy and realizing it in life.” He forecast in 1938:
“That which was “bureaucratic deformation” is at the present moment preparing to devour the workers’ state, without leaving any remains. . . . If the proletariat drives out the Soviet bureaucracy in time, then it will still find the nationalized means of production and the basic elements of the planned economy after its victory.” (66-67)
Some of Trotsky’s U.S. followers, led by Max Shachtman (and fleetingly Burnham), agreeing with Trotsky’s revolutionary-democratic thrust, concluded that by 1939 the bloated bureaucracy had indeed left “no remains” of the workers’ state. They held that a qualitatively new form of class society had crystallized — what they termed bureaucratic-collectivism. Its effective overthrow would require a much deeper break with the USSR than Trotsky was prepared to accept.
Van der Linden notes that for Trotsky “planned economy and bureaucratic dictatorship were fundamentally incompatible,” and that — as his French comrade Pierre Frank put it — “Stalinism was an accident, not a durable creation of history.” (67) He envisioned either the working class once again taking control of its own workers’ state, clearing away the bureaucratic deformations, and (within the context of working-class revolutions spreading to other lands) moving forward to socialism, or to continued bureaucratic decay ultimately resulting in a collapse that would pave the way for capitalist restoration — which is, of course, what took place 50 years after his death.
The weak point in Trotsky’s conceptualization was pinpointed by his one-time follower in Britain, Tony Cliff: “If the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class, then you cannot have a workers’ state without the workers having power to dictate what happens in society.” (119)
This was exactly the point made by Shachtman and other proponents of the bureaucratic-collectivist analysis — although the barely half-century survival of this purportedly “new stage of class society” does suggest the possibility that it was an optical illusion.
What Cliff and his co-thinkers came up with seems to avoid that problem. They asserted that the USSR under Stalin had evolved into a new variety of capitalism: state capitalism. The Cliff current has been one of the most influential proponents of the “state capitalism” analysis (though van der Linden also treats other proponents — the council communists, as well as C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya).
The “state capitalist” theorists have defended this conception from the types of criticisms noted earlier — for example, the absence of the dynamics of economic competition and of profit maximization as driving the capital accumulation process that defines capitalism — by claiming (as van der Linden summarizes Cliff’s thesis) “that the USSR should be defined as one big capital [or capitalist firm], which operated within the world market, and in so doing competed with the West, above all through the arms race.” (160)
One might question the analytical value of expanding the meaning of “capitalism” in this way. But, as was also the case with the bureaucratic collectivism concept, it served the function of drawing the sharpest line of demarcation between revolutionary socialism and the bogus “socialism” of Stalin and his successors. It also helped prevent, among its adherents, the demoralization and disorientation brought on by the collapse of Communism that afflicted so much of the Left in the 1990s.
On the other hand, van der Linden points out that Cliff and his supporters “had originally assumed that state capitalism represented a higher stage of development than Western capitalism” (258) and — ill-prepared for the crisis and impending collapse that became evident in the 1980s — were compelled to make dramatic if unacknowledged analytical shifts in their later theorizations. For that matter, even more “mainstream” Trotskyists — including such capable and brilliant figures as Ernest Mandel — were inclined to credit the USSR’s “nationalized, planned economy” with much greater efficiency than later proved justified.
It was maverick theorist Hillel Ticktin who in the 1970s broke important new ground by noting that bureaucratic “planning” — by denying democracy — was increasingly inefficient and wasteful, a point that Trotsky himself had made more than once. This allegedly planned economy was “really no more than a bargaining process at best, and a police process at worst.” Ticktin added that “the more intensive and more complex is the economy, the longer the chain of command, and the less intelligible is industry to the administrators, and so the greater the distortions and their proportionate importance.” (242, 243)
Ticktin’s view was that this represented neither a variety of capitalism nor a phase transitional to socialism nor a durable new form of society. Its insights, in fact, influenced competing views, as van der Linden observes:
“Increasingly dominant in all currents of thought became the idea that the Soviet Union embodied a model of economic growth which, although it had initially been successful using extensive methods of industrialization and extra economic coercion, could not maintain its economic and military position in the competition with globalizing world capitalism, because of growing inefficiencies and the absence of a transition to intensive growth.” (303)
Open Questions
In his conclusions to this rich volume, van der Linden emphasizes that while he does “not mean to imply that the old theories are of no use whatever in further theoretical developments,” his conviction is that a fully adequate analysis of the USSR has yet to be developed. (318)
It may be that if we are able to build mass movements and struggles — in various parts of the world, as the 21st century unfolds — that add to our experience of bringing about transitions from capitalism to socialism, a more fully adequate analysis will come more within our grasp.
Marxist theory and history have often been dismissed with shrugs and giggles and eye-rolling, even on the Left, with a few superficial comments being deemed sufficient to sweep away such “ideological cobwebs.” For those embracing that approach, the two volumes reviewed will seem explorations in irrelevancy. For serious activists, however, these books offer not only historical knowledge but insights on our struggle for a survivable future.
ATC 143, November-December 2009
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