| Sandra Bloodworth 26 March 2010 |
 A recreation of a female body holding a male plastered skull which illustrates the "central female presence in lines of affiliation" “Continuously inhabited for 1400 years between 7,400 and 6,000 BC, Çatalhöyük, while illuminating the history of mankind, its art and way of life, also raises numerous questions. “Forget everything you know about civilization: places, tools, relationships, diseases, what you eat and drink, your beliefs… In fact, put aside everything you have ever learned about the history of civilization. For Çatalhöyük is going to open up entirely different doors for you. In the history here, art flows not alongside life but right through it. There is no hierarchy, no war, no male-female strife… “At Çatalhöyük there was no hierarchy, for there are no spaces here where administrative decisions could have been taken, or areas where such decisions could have been announced to the people, or indeed any streets to bring them to such places. “…there are no signs of a ruling class that ate more or better than the others. … [men and women’s] teeth are worn down in the same way, and the time men and women spent in the house and the tasks they performed were almost exactly the same: they made tools, ground wheat, kneaded bread, and prepared to lead a family. “…these findings heralded the existence of equality between the sexes. Among the skulls that were passed down ceremonially from generation to generation, or, more precisely, from house to house, there are those of both men and women, indicating that both sexes could be ‘head’ of their family or line.” This is the publicity blurb by Turkish airlines in 2006 advertising tours to an exhibition in Istanbul about this amazing place, Çatalhöyük, in what is now south-eastern Turkey. It is a reasonable summary of what is known of this settlement in the Neolithic era, which in Anatolia stretches from the end of the Ice Age, about 10,000 to 6,000 BC. And it is of particular interest to Marxists because the idea that humans could live in a classless society has always been dismissed as a fantasy by right wingers and is even doubted by many left-wing people. The history of Çatalhöyük Çatalhöyük was settled some time before 7,000 BC. Probably about 3,000 to 8,000 lived there at any one time. Archaeologists find the cultural artefacts in this place absolutely inspiring and fascinating. The symbolism, the graphic images, the obvious continuation of traditions which were recreated and nourished, generation to generation, for about 1,400 years is a tribute to the creative potential of humans, and also to the possibility of a stable, classless society based on urban living. There are no depictions of aggression, or of disciplinary tribunals such as class societies display. The art is backed up by examination of skeletons which shows that no-one died from violence. What appear to be religious rituals happen, not in special buildings set apart from where people live, as they had in the earlier, hierarchical societies in Anatolia, but in every household. Which is why the remains are so rich in elaborate and inspiring art work; it is everywhere and it must have dominated people’s every activity. Apart from the evidence of how religious rituals were practised, the architecture indicates a society with no inequality in living standards. Every person has about the same amount of living space, and with complicated re-arrangements of storage and burial areas, larger families use their houses differently to ensure that with the same floor plan and structure, they end up with the same space per person. They buried their houses regularly (about every 30-80 years), but then built on top of the filled foundations. Ian Hodder, an archaeologist who has worked on the excavation of this site since 1994, commented that we can interpret this as destructive, or we can see it as a determination to preserve and honour ancestors and traditions. The presence of dead bodies buried in the walls and under floors must have imposed their presence as part of everyday life and consciousness. It’s not clear why, but the houses were clustered together with entry via the roof using a ladder, so lots of socialising and communal cooperation had to take place on the roofs. Just think about carting animals and food, disposing of human waste, coming and going with material for making stone tools and the rest, all across each other’s roofs. Ian Hodder concluded, after a decade working on the site: “In terms of size, we might call this settlement a ‘town’. But it has few of the other characteristics that we might mean by that term. Despite careful sampling of the surface of the mound, we have not found public spaces, administrative buildings, elite quarters, or really any specialised functional spaces except those on the edge of the mound (such as lime-burning) and animal penning… “…all there is at Çatalhöyük are houses middens and pens… “…it pushed the idea of an egalitarian village to its extreme… “It is as much a ritual centre as a centre of production. These various functions are integrated in the house and, as a result, there is no large-scale zoning of the town into functional areas.” This is significant because when Marx and Engels wrote, and until recently, we tended to think of classless societies as only existing among small bands of nomads. Çatalhöyük was settled in the aftermath of a crisis and possibly social revolution which overthrew emerging elites in Neolithic settlements in the east of Anatolia which had evolved into hierarchical societies. The evidence clearly shows that there was an urban, stable, classless society. The position of women Marx and Engels argued that before the division of society into classes, women were not oppressed. This is still a controversial question because both right wingers and many feminists do not accept that women and men were ever equals. With the benefit of new theoretical interpretations and advances in science in DNA testing and more detailed analysis of fragments of information retrieved from the layers of earth, Ian Hodder drew some conclusions about Çatalhöyük. Take a plastered male skull (a common practice) held by a female skeleton which excavators found in the wall of one of the houses. Taking into account the context and much other evidence, Hodder concludes that it tells us a lot about “the ways in which people…made specific links between the present and past ancestors…in some way showing ancestry and links through time”. He concluded that this find indicates there was a “central female presence…in lines of affiliation stretching through time”. But some of the strongest scientific evidence about the relative status of women and men is their diet, so Hodder’s team “searched hard” for differences. They found “little evidence of radically different lifestyles”. And the fact that all skeletons had carbon residue on their ribs from spending time in smoke-filled houses, shows that women were not tied to the home any more than men. In fact, he concluded: “Overall, there is little evidence that gender was very significant in the allocation of roles… There must have been differences of lifestyle in relation to childbirth, but these differences do not seem to be related to major social distinctions.” A strong focus on the loss of children by death suggests to the modern Western mind “a particular role for mothering. But in fact there are few, if any, clear depictions of women caring for, holding, or nursing children… “In spite of the widespread use of the term ‘Mother Goddess’ [based on an early interpretation of a clay statue of a woman]…, there is very little evidence that mothering was central to symbolic life.” Interpretations are changing all the time with new ways of looking at gender. At least some classless societies are now thought by some archaeologists and anthropologists to have not had any idea of gender. The evidence in Çatalhöyük fits with this. Hodder concludes: “We have little evidence of distinct roles for men and women throughout the early and middle occupation of the site… There is little evidence that gender was of central importance in assigning social roles.” Or that any differences in dress or lives “meant that one gender was privileged above the other in terms of the transmission of rules and resources or in terms of social status and lifestyle.” Çatalhöyük indicates that the memory of the brutal class society which had been emerging in Çayönü and other places in Anatolia must have played a role in the careful organisation of everyday life which continued traditions of collectivity and egalitarianism for so long. House beside house, generation after generation, activities were governed by the same layout and symbolism. For example ovens were always on the southern wall which were free of decoration, while in the north parts of the houses where burials always took place, walls are painted, embellished with amazing plaster art works, and bulls’ horns. The thousands who lived in Çatalhöyük showed that a settled, urbanised society could live in classless harmony. This Anatolian Neolithic society stands as a beacon of hope for the future of humanity. Mehmet Ozdogan is a Turkish archaeologist who worked on the excavations in the early 1990s and has written widely about his conclusions. He expressed the wonder and intrigue these societies hold for those who study them when in 2005 he described what he regards as their “outstanding” features: “a social system that enchanted [sic] sharing and distributing knowledge… such an active interaction and sharing of knowledge could not have been taking place under stress or hostility. … we do not agree with interpretations such as ‘rivalry’ or ‘competition’ or ‘conflict’ among settlements. Almost all known [of these] sites were becoming prosperous…and to our knowledge, there is no evidence of either hostility or of plunder.” The power of Çatalhöyük to touch the imagination and desire for a decent world today has the capacity to displace the despondency and pessimism induced by eight decades of Stalinism in the twentieth century. I think this quote from archaeologist Paul Wason, in his conclusions about Çatalhöyük, backs up my point: “To a war-weary century, whose own experiments with classless society have failed in the most extraordinary manner, this model encourages hope that something of the sort may nevertheless be possible – at least if it correctly appraises these societies both in their claim to ‘civilization’ and to their classless character, largely peaceful orientation, and relative equality of the sexes.” Sandra will speak in more detail about Çatalhöyük and the evidence for a social revolution in Neolithic Anatolia in about 7,200 BC at Marxism2010, at 10.00am Friday 2 April. References: Ian Hodder, The Leopard’s Tale.Revealing the mysteries of Çatalhöyük, (2006). Mehmet Ozdogan and & Nezih Basgelen (eds), Neolithic in Turkey. The cradle of civilisation – new discoveries (1999). Antonio Sagona and Paul Zimansky, Ancient Turkey, (2009). |
Mu
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Classless society is heritage of all humans
Karl Kautsky's Christ
Christianity, the Protocols of Zion and modern anti-Semitism
Karl KautskyIntroduction: In the last few years, undisguised anti-Semitism has again become a force in Europe, especially in Russia and the East. It has re-emerged both in its racist, zoological, 19th century form, and in its earlier Christian, "native Russian", form. In the west, anti-Semitic incidents have increased.
Why does this happen? Why, again and again, in one form or another, time after time, does Jew-baiting become a force in history? There are always "immediate" historical reasons, but one central, continuous, underlying "cultural" reason is this: anti-Semitism is threaded into the very fabric of Europe's 2000-year-old Christian civilisation.
Christianity is saturated with anti-Semitism. The Christian New Testament is one of the main documents of historical anti-Semitism —the New Testament of the Bible.
As Karl Kautsky, the leading writer of early 20th Century Marxism, shows in the following excerpt from his book The Foundations of Christianity, the writers of the New Testament set out, deliberately and systematically, to demonise the Jews and to foment hatred against them as the murderers of Christ. They did it by inventing fantastic and self-contradictory tales about the death of Christ.
The events Kautsky analyses are set 2000 years ago in Roman-occupied Judea. The vast Roman Empire united Europe, much of North Africa, and parts of Asia. The Judeans resisted Roman rule fiercely. While the upper classes tended to make peace, the people refused to reach an accommodation with Imperial Rome. The Jews were divided into parties and factions - Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots. Eventually, in 70 AD, the Romans razed the city of Jerusalem to the ground, completing the dispersal of the Jews, who already had settlements all over the empire.
The early Christians were one sect of Jews, who, in the nature of things felt sectarian hatred towards the others. As time wore on, the dominant Christian faction, led by Paul of Tarsus, ceased to be Jews, no longer, for example, requiring converts to be circumcised. By the time the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were written, decades after the events they purport to depict, the antagonism between Christian and Jew was very bitter.
Christianity grew stronger and stronger in the next 300 years, until it became a mighty power in the ossifying Roman Empire. At the beginning of the fourth century Catholic Christianity became the official religion of the empire. Its priesthood merged with the immensely powerful bureaucracy of the Roman state. Over time it got so strong that it did not have to tolerate other religions, or other Christian factions. A long age of religious tyranny began. The New Testament and its stories, ideas and motifs became, for well over a thousand years, the main subject of art and literature.
Many dozens of generations of children were drilled in the New Testament's malignant tales, presented as the word of God. "Who condemned Jesus Christ to death?" went the question in the Catholic catechism which, until recently, children from the age of five or six learned by heart. The answer? "Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, did it at the desire of the Jews."
Recently the Catholic Church has "exonerated" the Jews of guilt for Jesus Christ's death - 2000 years and many millions of victims too late.
An imaginary parallel will make the point clearer. Suppose that our own civilisation has broken down, as that of Rome did in the fifth and sixth centuries in Western Europe. Most of the survivors regress to subsistence farming. Literacy is almost lost, becoming the special expertise of ideologising monks and priests.
Most of our great books of learning and science are lost. Those we have saved acquire great authority in a world where scientific observation and experimentation have gone out of fashion, and where venerable authority is again, as in the post-Roman Dark Ages, and the Middle Ages up to the Renaissance, considered sufficient.
One of the books which survives, preserved by its devotees, is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
This book was forged early in the 20th Century by the Okhrana, the political police of ultra-Christian and anti-Semitic Tsarist Russia. It purports to be a Jewish account of Jewish plans to take over the world. It recast the traditional Christian Jew-hatred, with which Tsarist Russia was saturated, into a venomous modern political fantasy. It had immense influence throughout the 20th Century. It has rightly been called a "warrant for genocide".
Suppose then that in our imaginary world, thrown back to the level of barbarism, a new religion takes shape, a sort of primitive evangelical neo-Christianity, organised by a powerful caste of priests. It worships, as one of its central "holy books", the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.(And if you find that far-fetched, recall that the Russian Orthodox Church recently canonised the whole family of Tzar Nicholas the Bloody, overthrown in 1917, to be Saints!)
And then, as society evolves and develops over many hundreds of years, slowly redeveloping a civilisation, generation after generation would learn the divine truth concocted by the Okhrana policemen. It would form the subject of paintings and literature and drama. When a new Enlightenment arose, and drove this nonsense off the highways of intellectual life, it would survive as prejudice and folk-wisdom. Living Jews and their behaviour would be judged not according to everybody else's, that is, normal human, standards, but according to the patterns of malevolence outlined in the Protocols.
This is fiction, but it is horribly close to the true story of our civilisation and its development. The New Testament - with whose vicious anti-Jewish libels we are so familiar that they can and do go unnoticed – has, down the centuries, been the warrant for generations and ages of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe and Russia.
The Stalinist rulers did not fight anti-Semitism but used and fomented it. They took Christian anti-Semitism and wove it into their own "Protocols", according to which the great evil conspiracy in the modern world, the imperialism at the heart of imperialism. This is “Zionism", centred on Israel, and its “Zionist” supporters and agents all over the world,and especially in America. It is not Jewish exactly. In theory not all Jews are involved in it, and some Jews oppose it, but for practical purposes it involves all Jews who do not denounce Israel's existence and deny it the right to exist — that is, most Jews alive.
Many on the left, misled and befuddled by their justified and proper sympathy with the Palestinian Arabs who are in conflict with Israel, uncritically accept this Stalinist reworking of the old anti-Semitism.
Karl Kautsky's detailed analysis of the anti-Semitism threaded into the New Testament, and therefore at the heart of 2000 years of European civilisation, is part of the necessary antidote to this poison, which, in its "anti-Zionist" mask, still infects much of the left today.
S.M.
---------------------
THE DEATH OF JESUS
There are indeed a few things that may be pointed out in the Gospels with a certain degree of plausibility as actual facts in the life of Christ: his birth and his death; two facts which indeed, if they can be proved, would show that Jesus actually lived and was not merely a mythical figure, but which throw no light whatever upon the most important elements in a historical personality: namely, the activities in which this person engages between birth and death. The hodgepodge of moral maxims and miraculous deeds which is offered by the Gospels as a report on these activities is so full of impossible and obviously fabricated material, and has so little that can be borne out by other evidence, that it cannot be used as a source.
By Karl Kautsky
Not much different is the case with the testimony as to the birth and death of Christ. Yet we have here a few indications that an actual nucleus of fact lies hidden under the mass of fabrications. We may infer the existence of some such basic facts if only from the circumstance that these stories contain communications that were extremely embarrassing for Christianity, which Christianity had surely not invented, but which were obviously too well-known and accepted among its adherents to have enabled the authors of the Gospels to substitute their own inventions for them, which they often did without hesitation in other cases.
One of these facts is the Galilean origin of Jesus, which was very inconvenient in view of his claims to be a Messiah of the line of David. For the Messiah had to come from the city of David. We have seen what peculiar subterfuges were required in order to connect the Galilean with this city. If Jesus had been merely a product of the imagination of some congregation with an exaggerated messianic vision, such a congregation would never have thought of making a Galilean of him. We may therefore at least accept his Galilean origin, and with it his existence, as extremely probable. Also, we may accept his death on the cross. We have seen that the Gospels still contain passages which permit us to assume that Jesus had planned an insurrection by the use of force, and had been crucified for this attempt. This also is such an embarrassing situation that it can hardly be based on invention. It is too sharply in contrast with the spirit prevailing in Christianity at the time when it was beginning to reflect on its past and to record the history of its origin. Not - be it remembered - for historical purposes, but for polemical and propaganda purposes.
The death of the Messiah himself by crucifixion was an idea so foreign to Jewish thought, which always represented the Messiah with the splendour of a victorious hero, that only a real event, the martyrdom of the champion of the good cause, producing an ineffaceable impression on his adherents, could have created the proper soil for the idea of the crucified Messiah.
When the pagan Christians accepted the tradition of this crucifixion, they soon discovered that it had a drawback: tradition declared that the Romans had crucified Jesus as a Jewish Messiah, a king of the Jews, in other words, a champion of Jewish independence, a traitor to Roman rule. After the fall of Jerusalem this tradition became doubly embarrassing.
Christianity was now in open opposition to the Jews, and wished to be on good terms with the Roman authorities. It was now important to distort the tradition in such a manner as to shift the blame for the crucifixion of Christ from the shoulders of the Romans to those of the Jews, and to cleanse Christ not only from every appearance of the use of force, but also from every expression of any pro-Jewish, anti-Roman ideas.
But as the evangelists were just as ignorant as the great mass of the lower classes in those days, they produced the most remarkable mixtures of colours in their retouching of the original picture.
Probably nowhere in the Gospels can we find more contradictions and absurdities than in the portion which for nearly 2000 years has always made the profoundest impression on the Christian world and stimulated its imagination most powerfully. Probably no other subject has been so frequently painted as the sufferings and the death of Christ. And yet this tale will bear no sober investigation, and is an aggregation of the most inartistic and crude devices.
It was only the power of habit which caused even the finest spirits of Christendom to remain obtuse to the incredible interpolations made by the authors of the Gospels, so that the elemental pathos involved in the crucifixion of Jesus, as well as in any martyrdom for a great cause, had its effect in spite of this mass of detail and imparted a brighter halo even to the ridiculous and absurd elements of the story.
The story of the Passion begins with Jesus's entrance into Jerusalem. This is a king's triumphal procession. The population comes out to greet him, some spread their clothes before him on the road, others chop down branches from the trees, in order to strew them on his path, and all shout to him with jubilation: "Hosanna (Help us!); blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord: blessed be the kingdom of our father David, that cometh in the name of the Lord" (Mark xi, 9).
Kings were received thus among the Jews (cf. Kings ix, 13, speaking of Jehu). The common people are attached to Jesus; only the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, "the high priests and scribes", are hostile to him. Jesus conducts himself as a dictator. He has sufficient strength to drive the sellers and bankers out of the Temple, without encountering the slightest resistance. He appears to have absolute control of this citadel of Judaism.
Of course this is a slight exaggeration on the part of the evangelist. If Jesus had ever possessed such great strength, it would not have failed to attract considerable notice. An author like Josephus, who relates the most insignificant details, surely would have had something to say on the subject. Besides, even the proletarian elements in Jerusalem, the Zealots, for instance, were never strong enough to govern the city without opposition. They encountered resistance again and again. If Jesus had been attempting to enter Jerusalem and purify the temple against the opposition of the Sadducees and Pharisees, it would have been necessary for him first to fight a victorious battle in the streets. Such street battles between the various Jewish factions were everyday events in Jerusalem at that time.
It is worthy of note, however, in the tale of his entrance, that the population is represented as greeting Jesus as the bringer of "the kingdom of our father David", in other words, as the restorer of the Jewish kingdom. This shows Jesus not only in the light of an opponent of the ruling class among the Jews, but also as opposing the ruling classes of the Romans. This hostility is surely not the product of a Christian imagination, but of the Jewish reality.
There now follow in the report of the Gospels the events that we have already treated: the order that the disciples obtain arms, the treason of Judas, the armed conflict on the Mount of Olives. We have already seen that these are remnants of an ancient tradition that later were no longer felt to be appropriate and were retouched to make them more peaceful and submissive in tone.
Jesus is taken prisoner, led to the high priest's palace and there tried: "And the chief priests, and all the council sought for witnesses against Jesus to put him to death; and found none. For many bore false witness against him, but their witness agreed not together... And the high priest stood up in the midst, and asked Jesus, saying: Answerest thou nothing? What is it which these witness against thee? But he held his peace and answered nothing. Again the high priest asked him, and said unto him: Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed? And Jesus said: I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven. Then the high priest rent his clothes, and saith, What need we any further witnesses? ye have heard the blasphemy: what think ye? and they all condemned him to be guilty of death" (Mark xiv, 55, 56, 60-64).
Truly a remarkable form of court procedure. The court assembles immediately after the arrest of the prisoner, the same night, and not in the courthouse, which was probably on the Mount of the Temple, but in the palace of the high priest. What would we think in Germany of the reliability of an account of a trial for high treason, with the court reported as sitting in the Royal Palace in Berlin? False witnesses now appear against Jesus, but in spite of the fact that no one cross-examines them, and that Jesus makes no reply to their accusations, they can adduce nothing to incriminate him. Jesus is the first to incriminate himself by declaring that he is the Messiah. Wherefore all this apparatus of false witnesses if this admission is sufficient to condemn Jesus? Their object is solely to demonstrate the wickedness of the Jews. The death sentence is immediately imposed. This is a violation of the prescribed forms, on which the Jews at that time laid very careful stress. Only a sentence of acquittal could be pronounced by the court without delay; a condemnation could only be pronounced on the day following the trial.
But did the council at that time have the right to impose sentence of death at all? The Sanhedrin says: "Forty years before the destruction of the Temple Israel was deprived of the right to pronounce judgment of life and death."
We find this confirmed in the fact that the council does not execute the punishment of Jesus, but hands him over, after having tried him, to be tried again by Pilate, this time under the accusation of high treason against the Romans, the accusation that Jesus had intended to make himself king of the Jews and thus free Judea from the Roman rule. An excellent indictment to be drawn by a court of Jewish patriots!
It is quite possible, however, that the council had the right to pronounce sentences of death which required the approval of the Procurator for their execution.
Now what course does the trial take before the Roman potentate? "And Pilate asked him: Art thou the King of the Jews? And he answering said unto him: Thou sayest it. And the chief priests accused him of many things: but he answered nothing. And Pilate asked him again, saying: Answerest thou nothing. Behold how many things they witness against thee. But Jesus yet answered nothing; so that Pilate marvelled. Now at that feast he released unto them one prisoner, whomsoever they desired, and there was one named Barabbas, which lay bound with them that had made insurrection with him, who had committed murder in the insurrection. And the multitude crying aloud began to desire him to do as he had ever done unto them. But Pilate answered them, saying: Will ye that I release unto you the King of the Jews? For he knew that the chief priest had delivered him for envy. But the chief priests moved the people, that he should rather release Barabbas unto them. And Pilate answered and said again unto them: What will ye then that I shall do unto him whom ye call the King of the Jews? And they cried out again: Crucify him. Then Pilate said unto them: Why, what evil hath he done? And they cried out the more exceedingly: Crucify him. And so Pilate, willing to content the people, released Barabbas unto them, and delivered Jesus, when he had scourged him, to be crucified" (Mark xv, 2-15).
In Matthew, Pilate goes so far as to wash his hands in the presence of the multitude and to declare: "I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answered all the people, and said: his blood be on us, and on our children" (Matthew xxvii, 24, 25).
Luke does not tell us that the council condemned Jesus to death; the council simply denounced Jesus to Pilate. "And the whole multitude of them arose, and led him unto Pilate, and they began to accuse him, saying, we found this fellow perverting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Caesar, saying that he himself is Christ a King. And Pilate asked him, saying, Art thou the King of the Jews? And he answered him and said: Thou sayest it. Then said Pilate to the chief priests and to the people: I find no fault in this man. And they were the more fierce, saying, He stirreth up the people, teaching throughout all Jewry, beginning from Galilee to this place" (Luke xxiii, 1-5) .
Luke is probably closest to the truth. Jesus is here accused of treason in the presence of Pilate and with courageous pride he does not deny his guilt. When asked by Pilate whether he is the king of Jews, in other words, their leader in the struggle for independence, Jesus declares: "Thou hast said it." The Gospel of Saint John is aware how awkward it would be to retain this remnant of Jewish patriotism, and therefore has Jesus reply: "My kingdom is not of this world," meaning: if it had been of this world, my subordinates would have fought. The Gospel of Saint John is the youngest; it therefore took a long time for the Christian writers to make up their minds thus to distort the original facts.
The case for Pilate was very clear. As a representative of the Roman power, he was merely doing his duty in having the rebel Jesus executed. But the great mass of the Jews had not the slightest cause to be indignant at a man who wished to have nothing to do with Roman rule and summoned them to refuse to pay taxes to the emperor. If Jesus really did so, he was acting in full accord with the spirit of Zealotism, then dominant in the Jerusalem population. It therefore follows from the nature of the case, if we assume the accusation in the Gospel to be true, that the Jews sympathised with Jesus, while Pilate was obliged to condemn him.
But what is the record in the Gospels? Pilate finds not the slightest guilt in Jesus, although the latter admits such guilt himself. The governor again and again declares the innocence of the accused, and asks what evil this man has done.
This alone would be peculiar. But still more peculiar is the fact that although Pilate does not recognise Jesus's guilt, he yet does not acquit him.
Now it sometimes came to pass that the Procurator found a political case too complicated to judge it himself. But it is unheard of that one of the emperor's officials should seek a solution of the difficulty by asking the masses of the people what was to be done with the accused. If he preferred not to pronounce condemnation in cases of high treason, he would have to send the accused to Rome, to the emperor. The Procurator Antonius Felix (52-60 A.D.), for example, acted thus. He enticed the head of the Jerusalem Zealots, the bandit chieftain Eleazar, who had harried the land for twenty years, to come to him, by promising him safe-conduct, then took him prisoner and sent him to Rome, besides crucifying many of his adherents.
Pilate might thus have sent Jesus to Rome. But Matthew assigns a most ridiculous role to Pilate: a Roman judge, a representative of the Emperor Tiberius, lord of life and death, begs a popular gathering in Jerusalem to permit him to acquit a prisoner, and on their deciding negatively, replies: "Well, slay him, I am innocent of this blood". But no quality could more violently contradict that of the historical Pilate than the clemency suggested in the Gospels. Agrippa I, in a letter to Philo, calls Pilate "an inexorable and ruthlessly severe character," and accuses him of "corruption, bribery, violence, theft, manhandling, insults, continuous executions without sentence, endless and intolerable cruelties."
His severity and ruthlessness produced such terrible conditions that even the Central Government at Rome became disgusted and recalled him (36 A.D).
And we are asked to believe that this man was exceptionally just and kind in the case of the proletarian seditionist Jesus, besides showing a degree of consideration for the wishes of the people that was of fatal outcome for the accused.
The evangelists were too ignorant to notice these difficulties. But they must have felt that they were assigning a peculiar role to the Roman governor. Therefore they looked for a cause that would make this role more plausible: they report that Pilate was accustomed to release a prisoner at Easter at the request of the Jews, and that when he offered to release Jesus they replied: "No, we should rather have the murderer Barabbas."
In the first place, it is peculiar that no such custom is mentioned anywhere except in the Gospels; such a custom would be contrary to the Roman practice, which did not give governors the right of pardon. And it is contrary to any orderly legal practice to assign the right of pardon to an accidental mob rather than to a responsible body. Only theologians could accept such legal conditions at their face value. But even disregarding this, even if we accept the right of pardon so peculiarly assigned to the Jewish mob that happens to be circulating in front of the Procurator's house, we must nevertheless ask what is the relation between this practice and the present case?
Jesus has not even been legally sentenced. Pontius Pilate is faced with the question: Is Jesus guilty of high treason or not? Shall I sentence him or not? And he answers with the question: Will you make use of your right of pardon in his favour or not? Pilate, instead of pronouncing judgment, appeals for pardon! If he considers Jesus innocent, has he not the right to acquit him?
Now follows a new absurdity. The Jews are supposed to have the right to pardon; how do they exercise this right? Do they content themselves with asking that Barabbas be freed? No, they also demand that Jesus be crucified! The evangelists apparently infer that the right to pardon one implies the right to condemn the other.
This insane judicial practice is paralleled by a not less insane political practice.
The evangelists depict for us a mob that hates Jesus to such an extent that it would rather pardon a murderer than him; the reader will please remember, a murderer - no more worthy object of clemency was available - and is not satisfied until Jesus is led off to crucifixion.
Remember that this is the same mob that only yesterday hailed him as a king with cries of hosanna, spread garments before his steps and greeted him jubilantly, without the slightest contradicting voice. And it was just this devotion on the part of the mob that constituted - according to the Gospels - the cause for the desire on the part of the aristocrats to take Jesus's life, also preventing them from attempting to arrest him by daylight, making them choose the night instead. And now this same mob appears to be just as unanimous in its wild, fanatical hatred against him, against the man who is accused of a crime that would make him worthy of the highest respect in the eyes of any Jewish patriot: the attempt to free the Jewish community from foreign rule.
Has anything happened to justify this astonishing mental transformation? The most powerful motives would be needed as an explanation of such a change. The evangelists merely utter a few incoherent and ridiculous phrases, if anything at all. Luke and John assign no motives; Mark says: "The high priests incited the multitude against Jesus"; Matthew: "They persuaded the multitude." These turns of phrase merely show that the Christian writers had lost even the last remnant of their political sense and political knowledge.
Even the most brainless mob cannot be talked into fanatical hatred without some motive. This motive may be foolish or base, but there must be a motive. The Jewish mob in the Gospels exceeds the most infamous and idiotic stage villain in its stupid villainy. For without the slightest reason, without the slightest cause, it clamours for the blood of him whom it venerated but yesterday.
The matter becomes still more stupid when we consider the political conditions of the time. Distinguishing itself from almost all the other portions of the Roman Empire, the Jewish community had a particularly active political life, presenting the highest extremes of all social and political oppositions. The political parties were well-organised, were by no means mobs beyond control. The lower classes of Jerusalem had been completely imbued with Zealotism, and were in constant sharp clash with the Sadducees and Pharisees, and filled with the most savage hatred against the Romans. Their best allies were the rebellious Galileans.
Even if the Sadducees and Pharisees succeeded in "inciting" certain of the people against Jesus, they could not possibly have brought about a unanimous popular demonstration, but at most a bloody street-battle. There is nothing more ridiculous than the notion that the Zealots would dash with savage cries, not against the Romans and aristocrats, but against the accused rebel whose execution they force from the jelly-fish Roman governor, in spite of the governor's strange infatuation for the traitor.
No one ever invented anything more outrageously childish. But with this effort to represent the bloody tyrant Pilate as an innocent lamb, and to make the native depravity of the Jews responsible for the crucifixion of the harmless and peaceful Messiah, the genius of the evangelists is completely exhausted. The stream of their invention runs dry for a bit and the original story again peeps through at least for a moment: After being condemned, Jesus is derided and maltreated - but not by the Jews - by the soldiers of the same Pilate who has just declared him innocent. Pilate now has his soldiers not only crucify Jesus, but first has him scourged and derided as King of the Jews; a crown of thorns is put upon his head, a purple mantle folded about him, the soldiers bend the knee before him, and then they again beat him upon the head and spit on him. Finally they place upon his cross the inscription, "Jesus, King of the Jews."
This again brings out the original nature of the d�nouement.
Again the Romans appear as Jesus's bitter enemies, and the cause of their derision as well as of their hatred is his high treason, his claim to be King of the Jews, his effort to shake off the Roman yoke.
Unfortunately, the simple truth does not continue to hold the floor for long. Jesus dies, and it is now necessary to furnish proof, in the form of a number of violent theatrical effects, that a god has passed away: "Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. And behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many." (Matthew xvii, 50-53).
The evangelists do not report what the resurrected "saints" accomplish in and after their joint outing to Jerusalem, whether they remain alive or duly lay themselves down again in their graves. In any case, one would expect that such an extraordinary event would have made a profound impression on all eye-witnesses and convinced everyone of the divinity of Jesus, but the Jews still remain obstinate; again it is only the Romans who recognise the divinity.
"Now when the centurion, and they that were with him, watching Jesus, saw the earthquake and those things that were done, they feared greatly, saying, 'Truly, this was the Son of God'." (Matthew xxvii, 54).
But the high priests and Pharisees on the other hand still declare Jesus to be an imposter (xxvii, 63), and when he is resurrected from the dead the only effect is that the Roman eyewitnesses become richer by the bribe we have already mentioned, in payment for their declaring the miracle to be an imposture.
Thus, at the end of the story of the Passion, Jewish bribery transforms the honest Roman soldiers into tools of Jewish treachery and baseness, which had shown devilish hatred in fighting the sublimest divine clemency. In this entire tale the tendency of servility toward the Romans and hatred for the Jews is laid on so thick and expressed in such an accumulation of monstrosities that one would think it could not have had the slightest influence on intelligent persons, and yet we know that this device worked very well. This tale, enhanced by the halo of divinity, ennobled by the martyrdom of the proud proclaimer of a high mission, was for many centuries one of the best means of arousing hatred and contempt for the Jews, even in the most benevolent minds of Christendom; for Judaism was nothing to them, and they kept aloof from it; they branded the Jews as the scum of humanity, as a race endowed by nature with the most wicked malice and obstinacy, that must be kept away from all human society, held down with an iron hand.
But it would have been impossible ever to secure a general acceptance of this attitude toward the Jews, if it had not arisen at a time of a universal hatred and persecution of the Jews.
Arising at a time when the Jews were outlawed, it has immensely aggravated this condition, prolonged its duration, widened its sphere. What we know as the story of the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ is in reality only an incident in the history of the sufferings of the Jewish people.
Workers' Liberty 1/59
December 1999-January 2000
Read and revolt
from Fightback news
Music and revolution
Beethoven: man, composer and revolutionary - Part one
Friday, 19 May 2006
"Beethoven is the friend and contemporary of the French Revolution, and he remained faithful to it even when, during the Jacobin dictatorship, humanitarians with weak nerves of the Schiller type turned from it, preferring to destroy tyrants on the theatrical stage with the help of cardboard swords. Beethoven, that plebeian genius, who proudly turned his back on emperors, princes and magnates - that is the Beethoven we love for his unassailable optimism, his virile sadness, for the inspired pathos of his struggle, and for his iron will which enabled him to seize destiny by the throat."
Igor Stravinsky
After Beethoven it was impossible to go back to the old days when music was regarded as a soporific for wealthy patrons who could doze through a symphony and then go home quietly to bed. After Beethoven, one no longer returned from a concert humming pleasant tunes. This is music that does not calm, but shocks and disturbs. it is music that makes you think and feel.
Early years
Marx pointed out that the difference between France and Germany is that, whereas the French actually made revolutions, the Germans merely speculated about them. Philosophical idealism flourished in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries for the same reason. In England the bourgeoisie was effecting a great world-historical revolution in production, while across the English Channel, the French were carrying out an equally great revolution in politics. In backward Germany, where social relations lagged behind France and England, the only revolution was a revolution in men's minds. Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel argued about the nature of the world and ideas, while other people in other lands actually set about revolutionising the world and the minds of men and women.
The Sturm und Drang movement was an expression of this typically German phenomenon. Goethe was influenced by German idealist philosophy, especially Kant. Here we can detect the echoes of the French revolution, but they are distant and indistinct, and they are strictly confined to the abstract world of poetry, music and philosophy. The Sturm und Drang movement in Germany reflected the revolutionary nature of the epoch at the end of the 18th century. It was a period of enormous intellectual ferment. The French philosophes anticipated the revolutionary events of 1789 by their assault on the ideology of the old regime. As Engels put it in the Anti-Duhring: “The great men, who in France prepared men's minds for the coming revolution, were themselves extreme revolutionists. They recognised no external authority of any kind whatever. Religion, natural science, society, political institutions — everything was subjected to the most unsparing criticism; everything must justify its existence before the judgment-seat of reason or give up existence. Reason became the sole measure of everything. It was the time when, as Hegel says, the world stood upon its head; first in the sense that the human head, and the principles arrived at by its thought, claimed to be the basis of all human action and association; but by and by, also, in the wider sense that the reality which was in contradiction to these principles had, in fact, to be turned upside down.”
| |
| Bonn in the 18th century |
The impact of this pre-revolutionary ferment in France made itself felt far beyond the borders of that country, in Germany, England, and even Russia. In literature, gradually the old courtly forms were being dissolved. This found its reflection in the poetry of Wolfgang Goethe – the greatest poet Germany has produced. His great masterpiece Faust is shot through with a dialectical spirit. Mephistophiles is the living spirit of negation that penetrates everything. This revolutionary spirit found an echo in the later works of Mozart, notably in Don Giovanni, which among other things contains a stirring chorus with the words: “Long live Liberty!” But it is only with Beethoven that the spirit of the French Revolution finds its true expression in music.
Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn on November 16, 1770, the son of a musician from a family of Flemish origin. His father, Johann, was employed by the court of the Archbishop-elector. He was by all accounts a harsh, brutal and dissolute man. His mother, Maria Magdalena, bore her martyrdom with silent resignation. Beethoven’s early years were not happy. This probably explains his introverted and somewhat surly character as well as his rebellious spirit.
Beethoven’s early education was at best patchy. He left school at the age of eleven. The first person to realise the youngster’s enormous potential was the court organist, Gottlob Neffe, who introduced him to the works of Bach, especially the Well-Tempered Klavier.
Noting his son’s precocious talent, Johann tried to turn him into a child prodigy – a new Mozart. At the age of five he was exhibited at a public concert. But Johann was doomed to disappointment: Ludwig was no childhood Mozart. Surprisingly, he had no natural disposition for music and had to be pushed. So his father sent him to several teachers to drum music into his head.
Beethoven in Vienna
At this time Bonn, the capital of the Electorate of Cologne, was a sleepy provincial backwater. In order to advance, the young musician had to go to study music in Vienna. The family was not rich, but in 1787 the young Beethoven was sent to the capital by the Archbishop. It was here that he met Mozart, who was impressed by him. Later one of his teachers was Haydn. But after only two months he had to return to Bonn, where his mother was seriously ill. She died shortly afterwards. This was the first of many personal and family tragedies that dogged Beethoven all his life. In 1792, the year in which Louis XVI was beheaded, Beethoven finally moved from Bonn to Vienna, where he lived till he died.
 |
| Vienna in Beethoven's time |
The portraits that have come down to us show a brooding, sombre young man with an expression that conveys a sense of inner tension and a passionate nature. Physically he was not handsome: a large head and Roman nose, a pock-marked face and thick, bushy hair that never seemed to be combed. His dark complexion earned him the nickname “the Spaniard”. Short, stocky and rather clumsy, he had the bearing and manners of a plebeian – a fact that could not be disguised by the elegant clothes he wore as a young man.
This born rebel turned up in aristocratic and fastidious Vienna, unkempt, ill-dressed and ill-humoured, with none of the polite airs and graces that might have been expected of him. Like every other composer in those times, Beethoven was obliged to rely on grants and commissions from wealthy and aristocratic patrons. But he was never owned by them. He was not a musical courtier, as Haydn was at the court of the Esternazy family. What they thought of this strange man is not known. But the greatness of his music ensured him of commissions and therefore a livelihood.
He must have felt completely out of place. He despised convention and orthodoxy. He was not in the least interested in his appearance or surroundings. Beethoven was a man who lived and breathed for his music and was unconcerned with worldly comforts. His personal life was chaotic and unsettled, and could be described as Bohemian. He lived in the utmost squalor. His house was always a mess, with bits of food lying around, and even unemptied chamber pots.
His attitude to the princes and nobles who paid him was conveyed in a famous painting. The composer is shown in the course of a stroll with the poet Goethe, the Archduchess Rudolph and the Empress. While Goethe respectfully gave way to the royal pair, politely removing his hat, Beethoven completely ignored them and continued walking without even acknowledging the greetings of the imperial family. This painting contains the whole spirit of the man, a fearless, revolutionary, uncompromising spirit. Suffocating in the bourgeois atmosphere of Vienna he wrote a despairing comment: “As long as the Austrians have their brown beer and little sausages, they will never revolt.” [1]
A revolutionary epoch
The world into which Beethoven was born was a world in turmoil, a world in transition, a world of wars, revolution and counter-revolution: a world like our own world. In 1776, the American colonists succeeded in winning their freedom through a revolution which took the form of a war of national liberation against Britain. This was the first act in a great historical drama.
The American Revolution proclaimed the ideals of individual freedom that were derived from the French Enlightenment. Just over a decade later, the ideas of the Rights of Man returned to France in an even more explosive manner. The storming of the Bastille in July 1789 marked a decisive turning point in world history.
In its period of ascent the French Revolution swept away all the accumulated rubbish of feudalism, brought an entire nation to its feet and confronted the whole of Europe with courage and determination. The liberating spirit of the Revolution in France swept like wildfire through Europe. Such a period demanded new art forms and new ways of expression. This was achieved in the music of Beethoven, which expresses the spirit of the age better than anything else.
 |
| Revolutionary France |
In 1793 King Louis of France was executed by the Jacobins. A wave of shock and fear swept through all the courts of Europe. Attitudes towards revolutionary France hardened. Those "liberals" who had initially greeted the Revolution with enthusiasm, now slunk away into the corner of reaction. The antagonism of the propertied classes to France was voiced by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Everywhere the supporters of the revolution were regarded with suspicion and persecuted. It was no longer safe to be a friend of the French Revolution.
These were stormy times. The revolutionary armies of the young French republic defeated the armies of feudal-monarchist Europe and were counter-attacking all along the line. The young composer was from the beginning an ardent admirer of the French revolution, and was appalled at the fact that Austria was the leading force in the counter-revolutionary coalition against France. The capital of the Empire was infected by a mood of terror. The air was thick with suspicion; spies were ever-present and free expression was stifled by censorship. But what could not be expressed by the written word could find an expression in great music.
His studies with Haydn did not go very well. He was already developing original ideas about music, which did not go down well with the old man, firmly wedded to the old courtly-aristocratic style of classical music. It was a clash of the old with the new. The young composer was making a name for himself as a pianist. His style was violent, like the age that produced it. It is said that he hit the keys so hard he broke the strings. He was beginning to be recognised as a new and original composer. He took Vienna by storm. He was a success.
Life can play the cruellest tricks on men and women. In Beethoven's case, fate prepared a particularly cruel destiny. In 1796-7 Beethoven fell ill – possibly with a type of meningitis – which affected his hearing. He was 28 years old, and at the peak of his fame. And he was losing his hearing. About 1800 he experienced the first signs of deafness. Although he did not become completely deaf till his last years, the awareness of his deteriorating condition must have been a terrible torture. He became depressed and even suicidal. He wrote of his inner torment, and how only his music held him back from taking his own life. This experience of intense suffering, and the struggle to overcome it, suffuses his music and imbues it with a deeply human spirit.
 |
| The young Beethoven |
His personal life was never happy. He had the habit of falling in love with the daughters (and wives) of his wealthy patrons – which always ended badly, with new fits of depression. After one such spell of depression he wrote: “Art, and only art, has saved me! It seems to me impossible to leave this world without having given everything I have felt germinating within me.”
At the beginning of 1801 he passed through a severe personal crisis. According to the Heiligenstadt Testament, he was on the verge of suicide. Having recovered from his depression, Beethoven threw himself with renewed vigour into the work of musical creation. A lesser man would have been destroyed by these blows. But Beethoven turned his deafness – a crippling disability for anyone, but a catastrophe for a composer – to an advantage. His inner ear provided him with all that was necessary to compose great music. In the very year of his most devastating crisis (1802) he composed his great Eroica symphony.
The dialectic of the sonata
The dynamics of Beethoven's music were entirely new. Earlier composers wrote quiet parts and loud parts. But the two were kept completely separate. In Beethoven, on the contrary, we pass rapidly from one to another. This music contains an inner tension, an unresolved contradiction which urgently demands resolution. It is the music of struggle.
The sonata form is a way of elaborating and structuring musical matter. It is based on a dynamic vision of musical form and is dialectical in essence. The music develops through a series of opposing elements. By the end of the 18th century the sonata form dominated much of the music composed. Although it is not new, the sonata form was developed and consolidated by Haydn and Mozart. But in the compositions of the 18th century we have only the bare potential of the sonata form, not its true content.
In part (but only in part) this is a question of technique. The form that Beethoven used was not new, but the way in which he used it was. The sonata form begins with a quick first movement, followed by a slower second movement, a third movement which is merrier in character (originally a minuet, later a scherzo, which literally means a joke), and ending, as it began, with a fast movement.
Basically, the sonata form is based on the following line of development: A-B-A. It returns to the beginning, but on a higher level. This is a purely dialectical concept: movement through contradiction, the negation of the negation. It is a kind of musical syllogism: exposition-development-recapitulation, or expressed in other terms: thesis-antithesis-synthesis.
This kind of development is present in each of the movements. But there is also an overall development in which there are conflicting themes which are finally reconciled in a "happy ending". In the final coda we return to the initial key, creating the sensation of a triumphal apotheosis.
This form contains the germ of a profound idea, and has the potential for serious development. It can also be expressed by a wide range of instrumental combinations: piano solo, piano and violin, string quartet, symphony. The success of the sonata form was helped by the invention of a new musical instrument: the pianoforte. This was able to express the full dynamic of romanticism, whereas the organ and harpsichord were restricted to play music written according to the principles of polyphony and counterpoint.
The development of the sonata form was already far advanced in the late 18th century. It reached its high point in the symphonies of Mozart and Haydn, and in one sense it could be argued that the symphonies of Beethoven are only a continuation of this tradition. But in reality, the formal identity conceals a fundamental difference.
In its origins, the form of the sonata predominated over its real content. The classical composers of the 18th century were mainly concerned with getting the form right (though Mozart is an exception). But with Beethoven, the real content of the sonata form finally emerges. His symphonies create an overwhelming sense of the process of struggle and development through contradictions. Here we have the most sublime example of the dialectical unity of form and content. This is the secret of all great art. Such heights have rarely been reached in the history of music.
Inner conflict
The symphonies of Beethoven represent a fundamental break with the past. If the forms are superficially similar, the content and spirit of the music is radically different. With Beethoven - and the Romantics who followed in his footsteps - what is important is not the forms in themselves, the formal symmetry and inner equilibrium, but the content. Indeed, the equilibrium is frequently disturbed in Beethoven. There are many dissonances, reflecting inner conflict.
In 1800 he wrote his first symphony, a work that still has its roots in the soil of Haydn. It is a sunny work, quite free from the spirit of conflict and struggle that characterises his later works. It really gives one no idea of what was to come. The Pathetique piano sonata (opus 13) is altogether different. It is quite unlike the piano sonatas of Haydn and Mozart. Beethoven was influenced by Schiller's theory of tragedy and tragic art, which he saw not just as human suffering, but above all as a struggle to resist suffering, to fight against it.
The message is clearly expressed in the first movement, which opens with complex and dissonant sounds (listen here). These mysterious chords soon give way to a central agitated passage which suggests this resistance to suffering. This inner conflict plays a key role in Beethoven's music and gives it a character completely different to that of 18th century music. It is the voice of a new epoch: a thunderous voice that demands to be heard.
The question that must be posed is: how do we explain this striking difference? The short and easy answer is that this musical revolution is the product of the mind of a genius. That is correct. Probably Beethoven was the greatest musical genius of all time. But it is an answer that really answers nothing. Why did this entirely new musical language emerge precisely at this moment and not 100 years earlier? Why did it not occur to Mozart, Haydn, or, for that matter, to Bach?
The sound world of Beethoven is not one composed of beautiful sounds, as was the music of Mozart and Haydn. It does not flatter the ear or send the listener away tapping his feet and whistling a pleasant tune. It is a rugged sound, a musical explosion, a musical revolution that accurately conveys the spirit of the times. Here there is not only variety but conflict. Beethoven frequently uses the direction sforzando – which signifies attack. This is violent music, full of movement, rapidly shifting moods, conflict, contradiction.
With Beethoven the sonate form advances to a qualitatively higher level. He transformed it from a mere form to a powerful and at the same time intimate expression of his innermost feelings. In some of his piano compositions he wrote the instruction: "sonata, quasi una fantasia", indicating that he was looking for absolute freedom of expression through the medium of the sonata. Here the dimension of the sonate is greatly expanded in comparison to its classical form. The tempi are more flexible, and even change place. Above all, the finale is no longer merely a recapitulation, but a real development and culmination of all that has gone before.
When applied to his symphonies the sonata form as developed by Beethoven reaches an unheard-of level of sublimity and power. The virile energy that propels his fifth and third symphonies is sufficient proof of this. This is not music for easy listening or entertainment. It is music that is designed to move, to shock and to inspire to action. It is the voice of rebellion cast in music.
This is no accident, for Beethoven’s revolution in music echoed a revolution in real life. Beethoven was a child of his age – the age of the French Revolution. He wrote most of his greatest work in the midst of revolution, and the spirit of revolution impregnates every note of it. It is utterly impossible to understand him outside this context.
Beethoven boldly swept aside all existing musical conventions, just as the French revolution cleaned out the Augean stables of the feudal past. His was a new kind of music, music that opened many doors for future composers, just as the French revolution opened the door to a new democratic society.
The inner secret of Beethoven’s music is the most intense conflict. It is a conflict that rages in most of his music and reaches its most impressive heights in his last seven symphonies, beginning with the Third symphony, known as the Eroica. This was the real turning-point in the musical evolution of Beethoven and also of the history of music in general. And the roots of this revolution in music must be found outside of music, in society and history.
The Eroica symphony
A decisive turning-point both in Beethoven's life and in the evolution of western music was the compsition of his third symphony (the Eroica). Up till now, the musical language of the first and second symphonies did not depart substantially from the sound world of Mozart and Haydn. But from the very first notes of the Eroica we enter an entirely different world. The music has a political sub-text, the origin of which is well known.
Beethoven was a musician, not a politician, and his knowledge of events in France was necessarily confused and incomplete, but his revolutionary instincts were unfailing and in the end always led him to the correct conclusions. He had heard reports of the rise of a young officer in the revolutionary army called Bonaparte. Like many others, he formed the impression that Napoleon was the continuer of the revolution and defender of the rights of man. He therefore planned to dedicate his new symphony to Bonaparte.
This was an error, but quite understandable. It was the same error that many people committed when they assumed that Stalin was the real heir of Lenin and the defender of the ideals of the October revolution. But slowly it became clear that his hero was departing from the ideals of the Revolution and consolidating a regime that aped some of the worst features of the old despotism.
In 1799, Bonaparte's coup signified the definitive end of the period of revolutionary ascent. In August of 1802 Napoleon secured the consulate for life, with power to name his successor. An obsequious senate begged him to re-introduce hereditary rule “to defend public liberty and maintain equality”. Thus, in the name of “liberty” and “equality” the French people were invited to place their head in a noose.
It is always the way with usurpers in every period in history. The emperor Augustus maintained the outward forms of the Roman Republic and publicly feigned a hypocritical deference to the Senate, while systematically subverting the republican constitution. Not long afterwards, his successor Caligula made his prize horse a senator, which was a far more realistic appraisal of the situation.
Stalin, the leader of the political counter-revolution in Russia, proclaimed himself the faithful disciple of Lenin while trampling all the traditions of Leninism underfoot. Gradually the norms of proletarian soviet democracy and egalitarianism were replaced by inequality, bureaucratic and totalitarian rule. In the army, all the old rank and privileges abolished by the October revolution were reintroduced. The virtues of the Family were exalted. Eventually, Stalin even discovered a role for the Orthodox Church, as a faithful servant of his regime. In all this, he was only treading a road that had already been traversed by Napoleon Bonaparte, the gravedigger of the French Revolution.
In order to find some kind of sanction and respectability for his dictatorship, Napoleon began to copy all the outward forms of the old regime: aristocratic titles, splendid uniforms, rank and, of course, religion. The French revolution had practically wiped out the Catholic Church. The mass of the people, except in the most backward areas like the Vendee, hated the Church, which they correctly identified with the rule of the old oppressors. Now Napoleon attempted to enlist the support of the Church for his regime, and signed a Concordat with the Pope.
From afar, Beethoven followed the developments in France with growing alarm and despondency. Already by 1802 Beethoven’s opinion of Napoleon was beginning to change. In a letter to a friend written in that year, he wrote indignantly: “Everything is trying to slide back into the old rut after Napoleon signed the Concordat with the Pope.”
But far worse was to come. On May 18 1804 Napoleon became Emperor of the French. The coronation ceremony took place at the cathedral of Notre Dame on December 2nd. As the Pope poured holy oil over the head of the usurper, all traces of the old Republican constitution were washed away. In place of the old austere Republican simplicity all the ostentatious splendour of the old monarchy reappeared to mock the memory of the Revolution for which so many brave men and women had sacrificed their lives.
When Beethoven received news of these events he was beside himself with rage. He angrily crossed out his dedication to Napoleon in the score of his new symphony. The manuscript still exists, and we can see that he attacked the page with such violence that it has a hole torn through it. He then dedicated the symphony to an anonymous hero of the revolution: the Eroica symphony was born.
The Eroica caused a sensation. Up till then, a symphony was supposed to last at most half an hour. The first movement of the Eroica lasted as long as an entire sypmphony of the 18th century. And it was a work with a message: a work with something to say. The dissonances and violence of the first movement are clearly a call to struggle. That this means a revolutionary struggle is clear from the original dedication.
Trotsky once observed that revolutions are voluble affairs. The French Revolution was characterised by its oratory. Here were truly great mass orators: Danton, Saint-Just, Robespierre, and even Mirabeau before them. When these men spoke, they did not just address an audience: they were speaking to posterity, to history. Hence the rhetorical character of their speeches. They did not speak, they declaimed. Their speeches would begin with a striking phrase, which would immediately present a central theme which would then be developed in different ways, before making an emphatic re-appearance at the end.
It is just the same with the Eroica symphony. It does not speak, it declaims. The first movement of this symphony opens with two dissonant chords that resemble a man striking his fist on a table, demanding our attention, just like an impassioned orator in a revolutionary assembly. Beethoven then launches into a kind of musical cavalry charge, a tremendously impetuous forward thrust that is interrupted by clashes, conflict and struggle, and even momentarily halted by moments of sheer exhaustion, only to resume its triumphant forward march (listen here). In this movement we are in the thick of the Revolution itself, with all its ebbs and flows, its victories and defeats, its triumphs and its despairs. It is the French Revolution in music.
The second movement is a funeral march – in memory of a hero. It is a massive piece of work, as weighty and solid as granite (listen here). The slow, sad tread of the funeral march is interrupted by a section that recaptures the glories and triumphs of one who has given his life for the revolution (listen here). The central passage creates a massive sound edifice that creates a sensation of unbearable grief, before finally returning to the central theme of the funeral march. This is one of the greatest moments in the music of Beethoven – or any music.
The final movement is in an entirely different spirit. The symphony ends on a note of supreme optimism. After all the defeats, setbacks and disappointments, Beethoven is saying to us: “Yes, my friend, we have suffered a grievous loss, but we must turn the page and open a new chapter. The human spirit is strong enough to rise above all defeats and continue the struggle. And we must learn to laugh at adversity.”
To be continued... here
Footnote:
[1] Beethoven was wrong about the Austrians. Two decades after his death, the Austrian working class and youth rose up in the revolution of 1848.
Anniversary of 1984-85 UK miners strike: "When we were Miners"
When We Were Miners
By Ian Isaac
Reviewed by Alec Thraves
When We Were Miners marks the 25th anniversary of the ending of the 1984/85 miners' strike, the greatest movement of workers in Britain since the 1926 general strike.
While primarily a personal account of his role in the South Wales coalfield and National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) from 1974 to 1991, Ian Isaac's book is written from the standpoint of a young 'Militant' miner and socialist activist.
The miners were the vanguard of the trade union movement, and in order for Thatcher and the Tory government to pursue their anti-working class agenda they consciously aimed to obliterate the NUM. Unfortunately the right-wing leaders of the NUM in the period up to 1982 allowed pit after pit to close without lifting a finger of opposition.
As a Militant supporter (the forerunner of the Socialist Party), Ian took a principled socialist stand on many political and tactical issues, especially when he was elected onto the South Wales NUM executive.
He led by example: "Although I was elected full-time lodge secretary for life in 1978, by 1980 I had given up my right of lifetime tenure of office in favour of a more democratic five-yearly election." When he moved the miners' Broad Left demand for the regular election of full-time officials at the NUM's South Wales conference, Emlyn Jenkin, a full-time official in the area, went to the rostrum and said: "Over my dead body will this be passed"!
Ian writes that for Jenkin and his like: "Their better conditions, their 'socialism', had already arrived from within the bosom of the NUM, with higher pay, assisted car purchase and conditions that ordinary members could only dream about". But growing militancy among miners saw it passed two years later at national conference.
The year-long miners' strike is analysed in detail from a Marxist standpoint in Ken Smith's excellent book A Civil War Without Guns, but Ian also gives a real feel of the sacrifices, the hard work and the comradeship of not only the miners but of the millions of working-class people who supported them.
A Miners' Support Group was established in the Llynfi and Afan valleys and was quickly replicated around the country. A million pounds a week was raised for the striking miners by trade unionists and the public. But the miners were betrayed by the now millionaire ex-Labour leader Neil Kinnock and the right-wing trade union leaders. The defeat of the strike was a huge setback for the NUM and the trade union movement.
The following year, as pit closures proceeded at a rapid pace Ian stood as the rank-and-file candidate for president of the South Wales NUM under the slogan: 'A miners' president on a miner's wage'.
NUM officials vetoed his election address leaflet and removed that slogan but not before it had been delivered to a third of the coalfield. Up against two prominent officials Ian explained: "I had 26% of the first-preference votes cast, which I considered at the time to be a significant result and an affirmation of our ideas within the miners' Broad Left, which included active rank and file miners, Militant and the Labour Party Young Socialists in the coalfield."
Ian was later victimised and isolated in South Wales by the Coal Board and hostile NUM officials. But he played an outstanding role as a Militant miner over 15 years. However, like hundreds of miners who were involved with Militant in those tumultuous years, the defeat, the mass redundancies and the collapse of Stalinism in Russia and eastern Europe which followed had a disorientating political impact.
Ian points out that: "In October 1988 I was expelled from the Labour Party. This was a culmination of attacks upon me for the role I had played during the strike and afterwards and for my association with Militant before and during the strike".
Personal insight
However, many readers will be surprised and bemused when Ian explains that he actually rejoined the Labour Party in 1998 "without conceding any of my socialist principles". But he says "it has been saddening to see the drift to the right by Labour in recent decades", and may yet draw the conclusion of the need for a new workers' party.
When We Were Miners gives a valuable, personal insight of what it meant to be a militant miner at the height of Thatcherism and the importance of a clear Marxist programme and approach. Outlined in this book are lessons on preparing for battle, organising the workforce, mobilising public support and the willingness to struggle. For both the young and older generations of activists, alongside Ken Smith's book, it is well worth a read.
Miners' struggle anniversary offer
When We Were Miners By Ian Isaac
£7.99
£6.50 - special offer to readers of The Socialist, including postage.
A Civil War Without Guns By Ken Smith
£5.00
Order both for £10.00 including postage.
Also see: The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners by Seumas Milne £12.99
The Dirty Thirty: Heroes of the Miners' Strike (Leicestershire Miners) by David Bell £7.99
Cheques and postal orders to Socialist Books, PO Box 24697 London E11 1YD
bookshop@socialistparty.org.uk or www.socialistbooks.org.uk
A terrible beauty? No, just a beautiful birth of our power
Ireland: The 1916 Easter Rising -- striking a blow against an insane system
The Dubliners' version of "The Foggy Dew" (featuring photos from the Easter Rising).
By Stuart Munckton
April 2, 2010 -- The Future on Fire -- Easter is here again -- the anniversay of the Irish rebellion against British rule in Easter 1916. Over Easter week, Irish rebels took control of key parts of Dublin and declared a republic. It took seven days for the British to put the rising down.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Oppose slanders against Cuba
Victory of Cuban Revolution dealt
major blow to racist discrimination
Dictatorship of the proletariat is ‘most powerful
instrument’ toilers can wield to eradicate all forms
of oppression inherited from class society
The following is the 12th in a series of excerpts the Militant is running from Pathfinder Press’s latest book, Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power, by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. We encourage our readers to study and discuss the book. This excerpt is from the chapter “Black Liberation and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” and is based on reports presented to international leadership conferences organized by the Socialist Workers Party in January and March 2006.
BY JACK BARNES
Last week, when a Cuban American supporter of the revolution in Cuba who lives in South Florida first saw Our History Is Still Being Written, she asked why we had singled out three Chinese-Cuban generals to interview. “And why call them Chinese-Cubans?” Cubans of Chinese descent, she added, consider themselves Cuban, not Chinese-Cuban. For blacks it’s the same. “They think of themselves as Cubans, not African-Cubans.”
She went on to say, however, that when she started reading the book, she liked it a lot and became convinced how politically useful it is both in the United States and Cuba. Her response to the book itself seemed to contradict her first reaction to the title, as well as the political prejudices that underlay that reaction. Good!
That reader was expressing a view widely held in Cuba. It reflects a particular, and unusual, political insularity in the broad revolutionary cadre there, a slowness in recognizing the social and political legacy among blacks—and the impact on capitalist society as a whole—of the historical consequences worldwide of the African slave trade, chattel slavery, lynch-mob violence, and anti-black racism and discrimination.
At the same time, there is also an enduring legacy of black-led resistance to this oppression and exploitation— in the United States, in Cuba, and in other parts of the Americas where, under the slave owners’ lash, fields were tilled and products were manufactured by labor in a black skin. There is a history of slave revolts, efforts to press abolitionist movements onto a more militant course, and alliances with other toilers in the fight for land and in labor battles. Blacks have fought as soldiers in the U.S. Civil War (some 10 percent of the ranks of the Union army by the time of the victory in 1865); provided leadership during Radical Reconstruction in the states of the defeated Confederacy; engaged in organizing efforts of sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and industrial workers in the 1920s and 1930s; and led mass political struggles for Black rights during and after World War II, which reached new levels of radicalism within the ranks of the U.S. armed forces during the Vietnam War.
Here in the United States, the vanguard place of workers who are African American in the broad class struggle is a product of this record of political leadership in plebeian and proletarian struggles, combined with the greater working-class composition of the Black nationality in comparison to other sections of the population.
A legacy of resistance has shaped the class struggle in Cuba over the past century and a half, as well. The three wars for independence from Spain between 1868 and 1898 were integrally combined with the struggle to abolish slavery, peonage, and other forms of indentured servitude. Combatants who were black, as well as thousands of Chinese toilers, participated in Cuba’s independence army and acquitted themselves at every level, both rank-and-file soldiers and officers up to Lieutenant Colonel José Bu and General Antonio Maceo. From the 1953 Moncada rebellion and 1956-58 revolutionary war until today, the movement led by Fidel Castro has acted decisively against racist actions and bigotry, in word and deed. And black Cubans have been surpassed by none in their support and sacrifice in advancing the socialist revolution.
None of that, however, erases the fact that there are millions of very dark-skinned Cubans of African descent, and that they continue to confront the social and political consequences of past discrimination. Close to half a century after the victory of the Cuban Revolution, this legacy is still registered in housing and employment patterns, composition of the prison population, and other social markers.
While the concrete history of Chinese-Cubans is different from that of black Cubans, some of the same political considerations apply. Among Cubans with Chinese forebears, there continues to be a social awareness of their roots that is very much alive. And there continues to be pride in those roots and in their rich cultural heritage. In fact, the proposal for the interviews that eventually became the book Our History Is Still Being Written came not from us but from Gustavo Chui.
Our understanding of where the Cuban Revolution came from, and where it’s going, is enriched by Chui’s description of his youth. It’s enriched by his explanation of the complexities of the “Chinese consciousness” that he, as the son of a father who was Chinese and a mother who was black, was surrounded with as he grew up—including the antiblack racism that existed among many of Chinese origin in Cuba. Our understanding of the contradictory dynamics of the Cuban Revolution is enriched by Chui’s story of how he was won to the revolutionary struggle in the 1950s. The same is true for the accounts by Armando Choy and Moisés Sío Wong. Each of them from a Chinese-Cuban family of shopkeepers, but at the same time each from a slightly different social stratum.
Throughout the book, working people can see how each of these young Cubans, in the course of revolutionary combat, discovered what he and others like him are really capable of—how they discovered their own worth. Working people can see the communist conclusions Chui, Choy, and Sío Wong were led to by their experiences in the clandestine struggle and revolutionary war, as well as in the building of a new Cuba.
What does the victory of the Cuban Revolution open up for all those who are victims of long-standing discrimination institutionalized under capitalism? For oppressed nations and nationalities? For women, the oppressed and majority sex? What does any socialist revolution open up for the oppressed and exploited? Above all, it opens the possibility of using the state power of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is far and away the most powerful instrument fighting toilers can ever wield, to advance the battle to eradicate racism, national oppression, women’s second-class status.
These forms of oppression, which are maintained and perpetuated as part of the daily reproduction of capitalist social relations worldwide, are carried over and reshaped from modes of production that dominated earlier periods in the history of class society. While they warp and come into conflict with the “most efficient” workings of the laws of capitalism, the bourgeoisie finds ways to incorporate them, and then politically use them, to deepen divisions among working people and reap the profits of superexploitation. Far from being quickly eradicated by the revolutionary seizure of state power by the working class, the consequences of all these degrading social relations inherited from class-divided society are more persistent and long-lasting than had generally been anticipated by earlier generations of socialist and of revolutionary proletarian militants.
What the conquest of workers power does is make available to a mass vanguard of the proletariat the most effective political weapon in history—one we can use to battle all forms of oppression and lay the basis to establish human solidarity on new, communist foundations. That’s the challenge and the promise of the dictatorship of the proletariat: Win it, then wield it—to finish the job. And acting to help advance revolutionary struggle worldwide is the way to finish the job.
If the young founding leaders of the modern communist movement, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, recognized that classes, the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois family, religion, and the state could not be abolished but would wither away as socialism is developed, how could it be otherwise for the historic forms of oppression—reflecting the deepest prejudices— carried over from class society?
What’s most important, the withering away is not a passive process. These legacies of class-divided society don’t just “wither”; their foundations have to be withered. There’s nothing automatic about it. Like everything else in human history, the disappearance and replacement of these institutions is the product of practical social activity, of the struggles of the revolutionary toiling masses in countryside and city—their mobilization, leadership, and transformation. It is a product of the extension of the socialist revolution worldwide. The pace and thoroughness of this struggle determines not only whether the proletarian dictatorship advances, but whether or not inevitable pauses and retreats lead to its weakening and corrosion, to its becoming vulnerable over time to corruptions from within, and ultimately to defeat and destruction.
There are no guarantees beforehand. When the dictatorship of the propertied classes is overturned, however, and power is conquered by the toilers, the relationship of forces is qualitatively transformed to the advantage of all those fighting to eradicate capitalist exploitation and oppression root and branch.
If vanguard workers in the United States who are Black cannot be won to recognizing that the proletarian dictatorship is the most powerful instrument to open up the final and lasting battle for Black freedom, then how can communists expect them to fight heart and soul to make a socialist revolution in this country?
And why should they?
Yes, they will fight as part of the working class to free the toiling majority of humanity from capitalist exploitation. But they and their allies don’t expect to find ongoing racial discrimination at the end of the road! Otherwise they’d be living and fighting in denial of who they are. And socialism— a society without discrimination, a society of freely associated producers—would be a hopeless goal.
The same is true for women and all oppressed layers, who are at the same time allies of the working class.