Reification and agency in Lukacs

Capitalism and Class Consciousness:
the ideas of Georg Lukács

Georg Lukács was the great theorist of revolution in the 20th century. In the process of explaining the principles of the Russian revolution he provided answers to some vital questions: How do capitalist ideas maintain a hold on our consciousness? In what circumstances do people become radicalised? And how can socialists build genuinely mass revolutionary movements?

Lukács’ revolutionary ideas of the 1920s were suppressed by Stalin and have been marginalised by academics and even many on the left. They have lived a kind of underground existence re-emerging whenever fundamental change is being discussed. The book introduces his ideas and argues they are vital to our world of crisis and war.

A philosopher activist

Lukács became a revolutionary and a Marxist during the greatest wave of working class struggle in history, unleashed by the Russian revolution at the end of the First World War. Already a well known intellectual in Hungary, months after joining the newly-formed Hungarian Communist party in December 1918 he found himself a leader in the events which led to the brief Hungarian soviet republic in 1919. He was People’s Commissar for Education and for a short time a political commissar at the battlefront.

The Hungarian Workers Republic ended in disaster. This was, as Lukács himself came to recognise, because it was unstable from the start. The Hungarian Communist Party had called an insurrection in February 1919 well before it had majority support in the workers’ councils. The uprising was crushed, as mass radicalisation proved no substitute for political preparation. All the same, the militancy of peasants and workers and the annexation of parts of the country by foreign powers led to the collapse of the bourgeois government, creating a power vacuum.

The Hungarian Soviet Republic came about in March 1919 through a merger between the Communists and the reformist Social Democratic Party (SDP). The SDP was handed power by the ruling class in a last ditch attempt to salvage the system. Lukács and the leadership of the Communist Party interpreted the new alliance of reformists and revolutionaries as a spontaneous restoration of proletarian unity, but it turned out to be a recipe for confusion and then disaster.

Communist Party leaders acted as if they were in a revolutionary government, forcing through nationalisation of the land with no concern for the interests of the peasantry while the majority of workers remained under reformist leadership. Faced with new attacks from an alliance of counter-revolutionary powers, the SDP leaders capitulated and the Communists were isolated. A reactionary government was formed, which unleashed a reign of terror on the left, executing 5,000 and driving tens of thousands more out of the country.

Lukács wrote his key works of the 1920s – Lenin: A Study in the Unity of his Thought, History and Class Consciousness and Tailism and the Dialectic – in the aftermath of this experience, while he was in exile in Vienna. We can see now this was a decisive moment for the socialist movement. Before the war the world socialist movement had been organised in the Second International, whose complete accommodation to the system was exposed by its leading parties’ support for the First World War. The Russian Bolsheviks stood out against this betrayal and led a successful revolution that became an inspiration for millions around the world.

Both History and Class Consciousness and Lenin: A Study in the Unity of his Thought express the revolutionary potential of the moment, and the fear that lessons were not being learnt from the experience. By 1925, when Lukács wrote Tailism and the Dialectic, there were signs that the isolation of the Russian revolution was encouraging a new form of fatalism.

Life under capitalism

In History and Class Consciousness Lukács does take the role of capitalist institutions as mediating elements into account. But he explains their capacity to secure workers’ acquiescence as a product of the lived experience of capitalism. He also explains how and why that same experience can create opposition.

Lukács’ starting point is the fact that capitalism turns everything in to a commodity, a unit of product whose only purpose is to generate profit for capitalists. Lukács argues it is no accident that the commodity was also Marx’s starting point when he wanted to ‘portray capitalist society in its totality and lay bare its fundamental nature’ in his major works.

The problem of commodities must not be considered in isolation or even regarded as the central problem in economics, but as the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects. Only in this case can the structure of commodity relations be made to yield a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them.

Commodity production shapes how we experience and understand the world. It reduces quality to quantity and it conceals the overall process of exploitation in an immediate world of buying and selling. Echoing Marx’s words in Capital, Lukács described how commodification has the effect of giving relations between people the character of things, of ‘reifying’ them.

In the process relationships acquire a ‘phantom objectivity’ and an autonomy ‘that seems so strictly rational and all embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature.’ This is why commodities have what Marx called ‘the character of a fetish’. Like primitive fetishes made by humans and then worshipped as gods, commodities come to rule over us even though we create them ourselves.

We can only grasp the full impact of this process of reification when we realise that the essential condition for the conquest by the commodity form is the transformation of labour itself into a commodity. If the value of goods is going to be determined by the labour time necessary in their production, labour power must be fully integrated into this rational, universally-quantified system. The worker must sell her labour power like any other commodity on the market.

Neither objectively nor in relation to his work does man appear as the authentic master of the process; on the contrary, he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system. He finds it already pre-existing and self sufficient, it functions independently of him and he has to conform to its laws whether he likes it or not.

Commodification shapes the physical process of work itself and our understanding of it. Work becomes dominated by rationalisation, a high division of labour, repetition and obsession with quantity rather than quality. The finished article no longer appears as the object of a process at all. The fragmented process of production of the object ends up producing a fragmented subject: ‘The personality can do no more than look on helplessly while its own existence is reduced to an isolated particle fed into an alien system.’

Reification then has three reinforcing effects on consciousness. It hides the real, human relations of capitalism; it makes the system appear as if it is driven by an inhuman, preordained logic; and it makes workers feel powerless to do anything about it.

It is often pointed out that Lukács, through his reading of Capital, arrived at a concept almost identical with the idea of alienation contained in Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which was written in 1844 but not published until 1932.

But he did more than that. He broke new ground by showing how reification permeated the whole of capitalist society and laid the foundations for the first ‘unified structure of consciousness’ in history. He went on to explore the implications of this for radical politics.

Lukács argued that the state of mind generated by the experience of work at the sharp end of capitalist production is suffused throughout the institutions of capitalist society.

The atomisation of the individual is, then, only the reflex in consciousness of the fact that the ‘natural laws’ of capitalist production have been extended to cover every manifestation of life in society; that for the first time in history the whole of society is subjected, or tends to be subjected, to a unified economic process, and that the fate of every member of society is determined by unified economic laws.

Lukács argued for example that bureaucracies are a corollary to the factory system:

Bureaucracy implies the adjustment of one’s way of life, mode of work and hence of consciousness, to the general socio economic premises of the capitalist economy, similar to that which we have observed in the case of the worker in particular business concerns. The formal standardisation of justice, the state, the civil service and so forth, signifies objectively and factually a comparable reduction of all social functions to their elements, a comparable search for the rational formal laws of these carefully segregated partial systems.

So way beyond the profit-making workplace, in institutions across society, tasks are reduced to quantifiable functions, to ‘unit throughput’, in processes that acquire autonomy from the personality and therefore from human judgement. Even for those dealing directly with other human beings the sense of overall purpose is lost, all sense of cause and effect obscured.

Lukács gives the example of the journalist whose powers of empathy, judgement, knowledge and expression are divorced from personality, and who is placed in an unnatural isolation when confronting the facts or events he or she ‘reports’ on. ‘The journalist’s “lack of convictions,” the prostitution of experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification.’

Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

Meaning and Marxism

Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

By V.N. Volosinov

Harvard University Press

Reviewed by Neville Spencer

Although originally published in Russian in 1929, this work was not published in English until 1973. Since then it has come to be recognised as the original classic of Marxist linguistics, as well as one of the most important works of general Marxist philosophy.

Marxism and the Philosophy of Language is the clearest introduction to the ideas of the Bakhtin circle, which as well as Volosinov included the famous literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. It is in fact a disputed question whether Volosinov or Bakhtin authored the book. Bakhtin's works are likewise arousing renewed interest amongst non-Russian scholars.

Several of the most popular schools of philosophy of the 20th century have grown out of the concerns of linguistics. The work of the Bakhtin circle largely predates the rise of these schools, yet much of the resurgence of interest in it is due to the fact that it can be read as a powerful critique of them.

Individual or social

Volosinov develops his views on language through a critique of what he identifies as the two main trends in linguistics. The first he terms individualistic subjectivism. This trend sees language as an essentially individual phenomenon.

The explanations of the function and formation of language which are characteristic of this trend are based on psychology. Volosinov proposes that the reverse should be the case: psychology should be understood on the basis of an understanding of language.

Language, he explains, is always a social phenomenon. It could not possibly arise other than through communication between different individuals. In its original form it exists outside of the mind of any individual as sounds or as written words. The importance of this point has been overlooked in many explanations offered by linguists.

The internalisation of these forms of language creates in our minds an inner voice — the flow of words which are always passing through our minds even when they are not actually being spoken. Our inner voice allows us to understand what others are saying, to reflect on what others say and to consider what we ourselves might say in reply. Rather than merely voicing thoughts which have already occurred to us, it is through this voice that we actually think.

Volosinov gives a convincing rebuff to those who attempt, in whatever field of knowledge, to place the individual at the centre of the universe. Any human who can speak or sign is a social animal.

Structuralism

The second trend of linguistics Volosinov terms abstract objectivism, the key exponent of which was Ferdinand de Saussure. Out of Saussure's linguistics, the school of structuralism extended its views into fields such as philosophy, anthropology and literary theory.

The fact that our language makes sense to other people demonstrates that it is a system which has laws which are fixed for everyone. People must have some agreement on what words mean in order to be able to communicate.

On the other hand, language cannot be entirely fixed and immutable. Languages have gone through complete changes over the centuries. As well, minor changes in the way people speak happen continually.

Saussure bridged this dichotomy by describing language as composed of two separate elements — langue and parole. Langue he saw as the fixed logical element, providing the norms through which language can provide meaning and thus allow people to comprehend what others are saying. Parole plays only a secondary role; it is made up of the individual acts of speech, which always vary from the norms of language. Saussure saw these variations as accidental and random and therefore not the appropriate object for the scientific study of linguistics.

The words which compose the system of langue have a stable identity. There is a singular, fixed thing to which they refer in whichever situation they are used.

Volosinov criticised this view, pointing out that a system composed of elements with self-identity never occurs in any real situation. When someone uses a word such as "table", it is possible to determine to which particular object they are referring only by knowing the context of its use.

When people actually use language, its importance to anyone trying to understand it lies in its relation to the specific circumstance in which it is used rather than to its theoretical ideal as defined in a dictionary. Such dictionary definitions give language its necessary stability but are only abstractions.

Likewise, a work of literature would not make sense if it were taken simply as a collection of words to which rules could be applied in order to understand it. It has to been seen and understood in relation to other works.

In concrete, language is composed of all the individual acts of speech which make it up, as they actually are. Words have meanings only in the actual context in which they occur, and this is what is significant about them. The meanings of words are as varied as the different contexts in which they are used.

This non-identity of language explains how language can be in its state of continual, if often imperceptible, change. The langue which Saussure proposes is only an abstraction against which this change can be perceived. Were it the reality of language, language-change could not take place.

Post-structuralism

The critique of this untenable supposition of the absolute identity of words led to the collapse of structuralism in the late '60s and early '70s. Perhaps the most popular school which criticised structuralism along these lines was post-structuralism.

The theoreticians of this school, however, soon ran aground by in effect absolutising non-identity. Instability of meaning became everything and its stability nothing.

This left them in a contradictory position from which none could offer an escape. With the destruction of meaning, their own theories became meaningless along with all else.

Volosinov's critique of structuralist linguistics does not slide into irrationalism, as does the post-structuralist critique. Neither identity nor non-identity are absolutised: "The meaning of a word is determined entirely by its context ... [but] the word does not cease to be a single entity; it does not, so to speak, break into as many meanings as there are contexts for its usage."

The question "What is the time?" has a different meaning every time it is used. None the less, it plainly has something about it which is common to every usage of it.

Volosinov's approach is through the introduction of a distinction between what he terms theme and what he terms meaning. The aspect of language which is different each time it is used is its theme, while meaning denotes the elements of language which are self-identical and unchanging in every instance. As he pointed out in his discussion of Saussure, meanings are therefore abstractions; they do not have any concrete, autonomous existence. But meaning still forms the apparatus through which a theme can be implemented.

These two aspects are inextricably linked. The co-existence and interaction of identity and non-identity, the abstract and the concrete, must be a part of any coherent theory of language.

Volosinov offers a sound way out of some of the most fundamental problems to have plagued linguistics and philosophy. As a consequence, his book still proves to be the most illuminating study of the philosophy of language available, more than half a century after its original publication.

Psyche and organism

from http://leninology.blogspot.com/

Volosinov and ideology

I. Consciousness as a social-ideological entity. Somewhere near the middle of Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, V N Volosinov makes this startling declaration:

"The psyche enjoys extraterritorial status in the organism. It is a social entity that penetrates inside the organism of the individual person. Everything ideological is likewise extraterritorial in the socioeconomic sphere, since the ideological sign, whose locus is outside the organism, must enter the inner world in order to implement its meaning as sign."

The psyche, that inner world of signs through which you are experiencing and understanding this text, which is most intimately you, is also radically alien, something penetrating the organ from without. It is the territorial avenue through which the social enters the individual - the biological individual, as opposed to the socioideological individual. From this, we gather that the psyche is an objective fact, a social fact, susceptible to understanding and interpretation. Not, mind you, a simple fact, availing itself of easy intelligibility - but nonetheless, as Volosinov says elsewhere, "it is in the capacity of consciousness" to "find verbal access" to inner signs of whatever order, and thus these inner signs can, through introspection, become "outer signs". Thus, proceeding from individual to social, from psyche to society, we learn that the psyche, is "a social-ideological fact" which, if deprived of its "semiotic, ideological content" would "have absolutely nothing left".

To put it another way, "without signs, there is no ideology." In fact: "consciousness itself can arise and become a viable fact only in the material embodiment of signs. The understanding of a sign is, after all, an act of reference between the sign apprehended and other, already known signs; in other words, understanding is a response to a sign with signs." And again: "The individual consciousness is a social-ideological fact." Thus: "If we deprive consciousness of its semiotic, ideological content, it would have absolutely nothing left."

II. Signs, and the word as the semiotic material of inner life. But what is a sign? A sign is whatever has semiotic content, has meaning, refers to something outside of itself. It can be anything, because anything can acquire a semiotic content. Aside from words and images, here are some of the examples Volosinov gives of 'inner signs': "breathing, blood circulation, movements of the body, articulation, inner speech, mimetic motions, reaction to external stimuli ... and so forth". Yet the word is "the purest, most indicatory sign", a "neutral sign", not specialised for any particular field of ideological creativity. Because it is not so circumscribed in its uses, it can be "the medium of consciousness", "the semiotic material of inner life". The word, in the form of inner speech, is the indispensable sign as far as the understanding of all other signs is concerned. "No cultural sign, once taken in and given meaning, remains in isolation: it becomes part of the unity of the verbally constituted consciousness. It is in the capacity of the consciousness to find verbal access to it."

III. Signs and the word as a register of social processes. Moreover, because of the ubiquity of the word, it is "the most sensitive index of social changes" including "changes still in the process of growth, still without definitive shape and not as yet accommodated into already regularized and fully defined ideological systems". The emergence of a new use of language, a neologism or a coined phrase, is an early symptom of a changing social environment, because "the forms of signs are conditioned above all by the social organization of the participants involved and also by the immediate conditions of their interaction". "In order for any item, from whatever domain of reality it may come, to enter the social purview of the group and elicit ideological semiotic reaction, it must be associated with the vital socioeconomic prerequisites of the particular group’s existence; it must somehow, even if only obliquely, make contact with the bases of the group’s material life. ... only that which has acquired social value can enter the world of ideology, take shape, and establish itself there ... all ideological accents are social accents, ones with claim to social recognition".

IV. "Social multi-accentuality" - the sign as a vector of struggle. "Existence reflected in sign is not merely reflected by refracted. How is this refraction of existence in the ideological sign determined? By an intersecting of differently oriented social interests within one and the same sign community, i.e. by the class struggle. ... differently oriented accents intersect in every ideological sign. Sign becomes an arena of the class struggle". To the class struggle, of course, we can add any number of social antagonisms. This means that signs tend to have a "social multi-accentuality". The discussion of 'British values' can be understood in this light: a sign like 'family' will have multiple social accents, because it touches differently on different groups' material lives; the same goes for 'the troops', 'free markets', 'militancy', etc.. To understand a sign in a given conjuncture is to analyse its "specific variability", to pin down the ways in which it can be made to change both within and between discrete social purviews. This tells us how the same sign can work to create distinct and opposing conceptions of the "we". In normal circumstances, the articulation of these signs within a stable, dominant ideology means that a 'common sense' conception prevails. During a crisis of authority, the flux allows for these signs to be re-encoded in a new chain of equivalences. Take 'the nation' as an example. In the post-war era, 'the nation' was linked in a chain of equivalences to a corporatist state, welfarism, the 'war for democracy', and (therefore) formal 'colour-blindness' on race. In the crisis of the late Sixties, Powellism linked 'the nation' to a different chain of equivalences, centred on the restoration of public authority, national competitiveness, and white cultural cohesiveness and dominance. Of course, Powellism would have been as short-lived as Powell's national prominence if these social accents had not then become part of a new hegemonic constellation of forces allying big business and finance capital with the middle class right. Outside of crisis, however, these different social accents and their antagonistic relationship with one another are less immediately obvious. The study of ideology, the study of signs, is not merely the study of individual psychology. Rather, it is the study of social antagonisms and their appearance in daily discourse. It is also, obviously, the study of hegemony, and of counter-hegemonic political struggles.

Manning Marable's Malcolm... and Ours

Dragging Malcolm X to Obamaland

Written by Glen Ford of BlackAgendaReport.com

Manning Marable’s rendition of Malcolm X’s life should be read very carefully, so as not to confuse Malcolm’s evolving worldview with the late Columbia University professor’s left-reformist politics. “Marable tries to convince us that Malcolm must have contemplated a reformist political path in his mind, if not in practice.” The author’s mission is to discredit revolutionary Black nationalism as outdated and primitive. Black Democratic Party activism and support for President Obama are hyped as the new Black Power.

“Marable grows so bold in pushing his back-to-the-future reformist fantasies, by page 333 he describes a Malcolm X who has become ‘race-neutral.’”

In packaging the life of Malcolm X for a wide audience, the late Dr. Manning Marable has presented us with an opportunity to reignite the debate over the meaning of Black self-determination, a discussion-through-struggle that effectively ended when the Black Freedom Movement became no longer worthy of the name. Unfortunately, it appears this was not Dr. Marable’s intention, since Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention is largely an attempt to render useless the vocabulary of Black struggle. Essential terms such as “self-determination,” “Black nationalism,” “revolutionary” and “empowerment” lose their meaning, abused and misused in order to portray the great Black nationalist leader as inexorably evolving into a “race-neutral” reformer on the road to Obamaland.

This article does not address the complaints of those angered by Marable’s insistence that Malcolm X had a youthful homosexual relationship with an affluent white man, although it is shocking that Marable would throw this in the mix based on wholly inferential evidence and the author’s own psychological speculations. Our overarching concern is that Malcolm’s politics have been distorted by often clumsy, sometimes clever manipulation of the language of struggle, so that the politics of today’s left-reformers and Obama supporters, like Marable, appear vindicated.

Marable’s interventions in Malcolm’s mental processes begin in earnest on page 285, in the “Chickens Coming Home to Roost” chapter. It is early 1964, and Malcolm is contemplating a final break with the Nation of Islam. Marable takes over as the Black icon’s muse, deconstructing Black Muslim theological doctrine, as he speculates Malcolm must have struggled to do, and concluding that “a new religious remapping of the world based on orthodox Islam would not necessarily stigmatize or isolate the United States because of its history of slavery and racial discrimination. Instead of a bloody jihad, a holy Armageddon, perhaps America could experience a nonviolent, bloodless revolution.”

“Malcolm derided those who conceived of revolution as anything other than bloody.”

While Malcolm was certainly questioning the catechism of inevitable, white man-scorching, Allah-directed Armageddon, it is another thing entirely to have Malcolm pondering a “bloodless revolution” in America. Malcolm derided those who conceived of revolution as anything other than bloody, and he was speaking in secular, not religious, terms. His best-known speech on the subject is “Message to the Grassroots,” October 10, 1963.

“There’s no such thing as a nonviolent revolution. [The] only kind of revolution that’s nonviolent is the Negro revolution. The only revolution based on loving your enemy is the Negro revolution. The only revolution in which the goal is a desegregated lunch counter, a desegregated theater, a desegregated park, and a desegregated public toilet; you can sit down next to white folks on the toilet. That’s no revolution. Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.”

Malcolm never did accept the notion of revolution as bloodless, nor did he recognize the fight against segregated public accommodations as revolutionary. But Marable tries to convince us that Malcolm must have contemplated a reformist political path in his mind, if not in practice. This is William Styron-style biography, as Morgan State University’s Dr. Jared Ball has suggested, with Malcolm forced to play Styron’s Nat Turner.

By 1964 Malcolm had made a strategic decision to support Black integrationist efforts, at least rhetorically, but there is nothing that leads us to think that integration had become his end-goal, or that he believed integration was revolutionary. He had decided to become part of the broad “movement,” in order to both influence and benefit from it. Marable would have us believe (page 298) that Malcolm’s public endorsement of desegregation and voter drives signified that he had scaled down his liberationist aspirations, or that he thought voting equals or leads to African American self-determination –some very faulty logic. Revolutionary Marxists have also seen the value in electoral politics at certain junctures, but that didn’t mean they stopped preparing for the forceful overthrow of the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, Marable tells us that Malcolm’s movement activities “marked an early, tentative concession to the idea that perhaps blacks could someday become empowered within the existing system.”

“Marable would have us believe that Malcolm’s public endorsement of desegregation and voter drives signified that he had scaled down his liberationist aspirations.”

The clear inference is that Malcolm was wilting in his desire to wipe “the existing system” off the map. What existing system does Marable refer to, precisely? White supremacy? Capitalism? Bourgeois electoral pay-for-play democracy? Marable keeps Malcolm’s mind vague and cloudy, although in his actual historical voice the “evolving” Malcolm hates capitalism and U.S. imperialism more intensely than did the “old,” Nation Of Islam Malcolm. Marable also introduces his trick word “empowered,” which he will use repeatedly in the book to confuse, rather than clarify. Blacks “could someday become empowered within the existing system” – to do what? To determine their collective destinies? To defy white majorities? To push aside the rule of capital? Marable tries to cage Malcolm, while assuring us that the revolutionary Black nationalist was “tentatively” becoming a liberal reformer.

Gratuitous, non-defensive violence, in Malcolm’s NOI talks, always came from the hand of Allah. Malcolm never rejected the right of self-defense; otherwise, he would not have become Malcolm the icon. Marable knew this, so he again invades Malcolm’s mind (page 302). “By embracing the ballot, he was implicitly rejecting violence, even if this was at times difficult to discern in the heat of his rhetoric.”

What kind of violence was Malcolm rejecting? Certainly, not defensive violence. And Malcolm had never publicly urged Blacks to commit unprovoked aggressions against whites. The purpose of Marable’s sentence can only be to show alleged movement by Malcolm toward some state of non-volatility, which we are expected to associate with political moderation: reform.

Marable grows so bold in pushing his back-to-the-future reformist fantasies, by page 333 he describes a Malcolm X who has become “race-neutral.” On May 21, 1964, Malcolm spoke at Chicago’s Civic Opera House, telling a crowd of 1,500 people, “Separation is not the goal of the Afro-America, nor is integration his goal. They are merely methods toward his real end – respect as a human being.” Malcolm went on the say: “Unless the race issue is quickly settled, the 22 million American Negroes could easily adopt the guerilla tactics of other deprived revolutionaries.” Not that he necessarily advocated that. (wink)

“Obamites cannot imagine that others are not as enamored of Power as they are.”

Three days before he was assassinated, Malcolm said, “I’m man enough to tell you that I can’t put my finger on exactly what my philosophy is now.” But, not to worry, Dr. Marable has the vision and the answer. He concluded that Malcolm had “made his race-neutral views clear in Chicago….” There is no rational basis for Marable’s amazing interpretation, other than he thought it moved his political story line on Malcolm’s evolution (or race-neutralization) forward.

The opposite of race-neutral, Malcolm lived and died a Race-Man, meaning simply that he put the Race first. As he wrote to an Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood luminary who was disappointed that Malcolm was so decidedly non-race-neutral, “As a black American, I do feel that my first responsibility is to my twenty-two million fellow black Americans.” (page 368)

In the final “Reflections on a Revolutionary Vision” chapter, Marable speaks for himself – in the process confirming that he has been sneaking his own words, thoughts and politics into Malcolm’s head for four hundred pages. The Columbia University professor of African American Studies claims to know what Malcolm really, really wanted: “What Malcolm sought was a fundamental restructuring of wealth and power in the United States – not a violent social revolution, but radical and meaningful change nevertheless.”

Although the description is so vague, wishy-washy and – damnit!! – so soft and noncommittal as to bear no resemblance to any incarnation or developmental stage of Malcolm X, it fits the self-image of Manning Marable and his circle perfectly. They are the left Black Obamites, purported radicals who have a perpetual love affair with Power. Such people cannot imagine that others are not as enamored of Power as they are, and are eager to graft their own vacillations and corruptions onto others, by rhetorical hook or literary crook.

If this assessment seems harsh, it is certainly not as outrageous as Marable’s gall in superimposing his politics on Malcolm X. Even when Marable speaks in his own voice, he manages to intimate that Malcolm would agree with him. “If legal racial segregation was permanently in America’s past,” wrote Marable on page 486, “Malcolm’s vision today would have to radically redefine self-determination and the meaning of black power in a political environment that appeared to many to be ‘post-racial.’”

“Marable insists that Malcolm would be forced to redefine self-determination and its sibling, Black Power.”

Marable appears to think these are heavy questions, but they’re actually products of an unfocused, but deeply biased, mind. First of all, legal segregation was defeated before Malcolm’s death, and no sane person at the time thought it would be brought back. Malcolm had time to find out what life was like for Black southerners without state-sanctioned Jim Crow. Marable’s question is badly put. If he means, What would Malcolm think about today’s levels of segregation, then the answer would be that the northern cities would remain very familiar to him in their racial composition, and are in fact blacker than in Malcolm’s day – which might tend to indicate to Malcolm that self-determination was an even more critical concern.

Still, Marable insists that Malcolm would be forced to redefine self-determination and its sibling, Black Power. But self-determination, as a foundational principle of relations among peoples, requires no redefinition. Marable understands it as “the right of oppressed nations or minorities to decide for themselves their own political futures,” and he agrees that Malcolm “never abandoned” the “ideal.” Why then, would Malcolm in 2011 have to “redefine” self-determination and the “meaning of black power?” Because the political environment “appeared to many to be post-racial?” Who is it that thinks the environment appears post-racial? If Marable is speaking of white people, or any non-African American people, their opinions cannot be cause for “redefinition” of another people’s right. If he meant that Black people in the mass believe we live in a post-racial nation, he was a damn fool. But even if such Black folks existed, that would not require a redefinition of self-determination. African Americans would simply “determine” that they love post-racialism and want to do nothing to change it, as is their self-determinationist right.

Marable risks making himself look stupid simply to make the intended point that Malcolm and his Black Nationalism and self-determination talk are passé and should be dismissed except as historical artifacts. For Marable and his Black left Obamites, Malcolm’s only other use is to somehow authenticate today’s reformers – and even President Obama! – as heirs to yesterday’s revolutionary Black nationalists. This is the purpose put to Malcolm by Peniel Joseph, the Tufts University professor of history and author of Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama, which attempts to draw a straight-line historical connection between Malcolm X and the corporate politician in the White House.

“For Marable and his Black left Obamites, Malcolm’s only other use is to somehow authenticate today’s reformers – and even President Obama! – as heirs to yesterday’s revolutionary Black nationalists.”

Manning Marable was up to the same trick. “Given the election of Barack Obama,” Marable writes on page 486, “it now raises the question of whether blacks have a separate political destiny from their white fellow citizens.” He does not explain why Black destinies have changed just because a Black Democrat who raised more corporate money than the Republican won a presidential election. How did that electoral fact entwine Black/white destinies in ways that did not previously exist? How were the Black masses empowered by Obama’s victory, and if they were somehow empowered, why would that draw them closer to whites?

It would have been better for Marable to have left out his last chapter of Reflections – it reflected badly on his powers of reasoning.

Finally, Marable attempts to create artificial space between Malcolm X and his direct political progeny, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. On page 403 he wrote:

“Had Malcolm continued to mainstream his views, it is unclear how he would have negotiated relations a few years later with the Black Panthers, a group born of much of the intellectual framework Malcolm had assembled in the early to mid-1960s.”

It is nearly impossible to conceive of a Black Panther Party had there not been a Malcolm X. Marable insults a generation of Blacks that came into political consciousness in the Sixties – a cohort to which he chronologically belonged. He substitutes his imagined, inferred, reinterpreted Malcolm for the man whose words and bearing called forth and virtually sculpted the youthful Party that debuted in the year following his death. Marable projects Malcolm as if he would be a stranger to the Panthers, with whom he would have to “negotiate,” when Malcolm’s life tells us it is far more likely that the emergence of a militant revolutionary nationalist youth movement that spoke his language – because they learned it largely from him – would compel Malcolm to take the struggle to an even “higher level.”

Reflections on the late nuptials at London

This pathetic royal wedding: A state religion of celebrity?

“What function does monarchy play in modern society? We can say it’s an “antiquated” institution, and confidently predict its historical demise. But we should try to understand its lingering basis of strength too.”

by Gary Leupp

I wasn’t going to write anything about this, or read or watch anything about “the royal wedding.” It’s all so pathetic. On the other hand I have a few thoughts so here goes…

* * * * * * *

Kingship is as old as class society, and compatible with all kinds of class systems. What all forms seem to have in common is some sort of religious legitimization. The Japanese emperor is supposed to be a descendent of the Sun Goddess, the Chinese emperor was the Son of Heaven possessing the Mandate of Heaven, the Dalai Lamas are incarnations of the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, caliphs derived authority from their descent from Muhammad, European kings possess the “divine right of kings” and are appointed by God (Romans 13:1), etc. Queen Elizabeth is the head of the Church of England.

The connection between religion and rulership is indicated by the evolution of the priest-king in ancient Sumeria into the king-priest; the sacerdotal function, initially primary, becomes secondary and the method of control evolves from use of magic and spiritual control to use of armed bodies of men. This suggests that the figure of the shaman, whom in pre-class societies with minimal social distinctions has a special status, merges with that of the chief and evolves into the king.

While kingship did not prevail everywhere (as Plato points out in the Republic, there was a wide variety of political forms including oligarchy and democracy in ancient Greece) it was the global norm into modern times when it accommodated itself to capitalism. Engels (I think) writes somewhere about the near-equal balance of power between the French aristocracy and bourgeoisie during the period of absolutism, and Marx and Engels wrote about the accommodation between the German bourgeoisie and aristocracy with its dukes and princes after 1848.

The question that interests me is: what function does monarchy play in modern society? We can say it’s an “antiquated” institution, and confidently predict its historical demise. But we should try to understand its lingering basis of strength too.

Prachanda in an interview some years ago, during one of the periods of talks between the Nepali Maoists and the regime then in power, suggested that the party might drop its insistence on the immediate establishment of a republic if the other side agreed to a Constituent Assembly. Maybe he was just indicating flexibility on the point for tactical reasons. He noted that (what he called) communist parties had worked with or compromised with monarchy before. (He was referring as I recall to the Khmer Rouge alliance with Prince Sihanouk and the Pathet Lao’s inclusion of Prince Souphanovong.) Perhaps King Gyanendra might have retained some symbolic role. I think the point was, the preservation of some form of monarch does not necessarily prevent the establishment of popular sovereignty. It might be retained as a concession to the monarchist faction including the large Congress Party, and to the religious views of those Hindus who view the monarchs of the Shah dynasty as incarnations of Vishnu. (Of course this didn’t happen; the king was unceremoniously deposed and the republic proclaimed in 2008.)

Monarchs’ positions within a polity vary greatly. In Japan, up to 1945, the emperor was sovereign, with absolute veto powers over the Diet. Advocacy of popular sovereignty—“democracy”—was prohibited by law, and no one was allowed to criticize the “kokutai” or “national essence,’ meaning essentially the divinely-ordained imperial institution. Japanese military leaders might very well have agreed to surrender to the Allies before August 1945 had the U.S. agreed to preserve the institution in some form—as they in fact did after establishing the “unconditional surrender.” Gen. McArthur, head of the Occupation, called Emperor Hirohito the “queen bee” meaning that by manipulating him the occupiers could receive the cooperation of the Japanese people. So the monarchy fulfilled a function, although constitutionally redefined; the current, U.S.-scripted Japanese constitution defines the emperor simply as the “symbol”—not the head—of the state while bestowing sovereignty on the people.

Most Japanese are (in a western sense) irreligious, and few believe the emperors are descended from any gods (the Occupation authorities pressured Hirohito into publicly denying claims to divinity in 1946). But the emperor continues to perform Shinto rituals connected to the first planting and first harvest every year, and the coronation ceremony is a thoroughly religious event. The coronation of current emperor Akihito in 1990, attended by “world leaders,” produced much opposition ranging from Christians protesting that the rite violated the constitutional separation of religion and the state to quasi-Marxist anarchists (such as the Chukaku-ha) opposed to the imperial institution entirely. The dominant reaction (as I saw it) was indifference. But many found the pageantry interesting, even inspiring. Somehow the religious charisma surrounding the throne has been replaced with entertainment value.

But in Japan the monarchy is “above the clouds” and a compliant press corps basically leaves it alone. It doesn’t hound the royals, looking for scandals and headlines so much. The marriage of the crown prince, Naruhito, to now-crown princess Masako in 1993 was a huge news story, but the press gently handled the issue of Masako’s subsequent mental illness (“adjustment disorder”) and the imperial family members aren’t subject to paparazzi intrusions or the sort of treatment that destroyed Princess Diana.

The House of Windsor

In Britain, the monarchy seems to serve various functions. I recall visiting Buckingham Palace as a child during the changing of the guard and enjoying the “pomp and circumstance.” It was theater, and the repository of interesting tradition. How you react to such displays perhaps depends on your own relationship to British imperialism.

There’s the soap-opera function. The cult of Princess Di (seen as a victim of the royal family, although herself depicted as somehow regal, “the people’s princess”) suggests that many people dissatisfied with their own lives want to fill their own emotional voids by following and fantasizing about the lives of their “betters.” It is the same type of alienation that produces other kinds of fandom. Meanwhile the antics of Prince Charles and Princess Camilla, Andrew and Fergie, Princess Margaret etc. produce huge profits for the tabloids.

Also, the monarchy personalizes patriotism; the military is Her Majesty’s Armed Forces. Maybe it feels a little different feeling to be fighting in Afghanistan for the Queen, as opposed to the forbidding figure of Uncle Sam? My point is just that, however rooted in concepts of inherent privilege and divine right that most people on the planet probably now reject as antiquated, it’s being used successfully by the (very modern) British bourgeoisie.

A recent poll showed that 63% of the British people think the country’s better of with the monarchy while only 26% want to get rid of it.

In constitutional monarchies where the royals are basically display pieces, family events can generate substantial political discussion. When Princess Masako “failed” to produce a male heir, feminists (and others) in Japan campaigned to change the law to allow for the next emperor to be female. (The campaign fizzled after Naruhito’s younger brother’s wife bore a son. He’s now next in line.) In Sweden, the parliament changed the succession law in 1980 such that the eldest child of the monarch inherits the throne. So Princess Victoria rather than her brother Carl is to be the next monarch (despite the reported opposition of her father King Carl). Of course feminists and other progressives have better things to do than campaign for changes in royal succession laws. We should get rid of monarchs entirely. (I don’t mean kill them; I have major issues with the Bolsheviks’ execution of the entire Russian royal family including children, with servants, in 1918.) But there have been these interventions into the shaping of monarchy by sections of the people that haven’t been entirely meaningless.

I was talking to my mother late last night. Over 80, she’d just gotten out of the hospital so I was checking up on her. Was I watching the royal wedding? she asked. I was struck by the fact that in her condition of stage-four cancer she was interested in something so trite. But the fact that she is (and that so many people in the U.S. follow such events with rapt interest) shows that the existence of especially privileged “beautiful” people retains a mystical value, even if it’s basically these days one of entertainment and fantasy projection. How to combat it? I guess one needs to find a way to fill the void that celebrity worship, like other forms of religiosity, seems to fill.

New international regroupment

http://kasamaproject.org/2011/04/30/may-first-maoist-parties-move-toward-new-international-movement/

People want revolution

Proletarians want the Party of the Revolution

Communists want internationalism and a new international organization

This year’s May Day comes at a time of unprecedented protests and uprisings all around the world. In the Arab world and Persian Gulf, the youth, the proletarians and the broad masses took to the streets and toppled or tried to topple, one after the other, the dictatorial regimes subservient to imperialism.

In the heart of the imperialist countries, working class struggles, general strikes, rebellions of students and youth are opposing the policy of reactionary governments and the development of a modern fascism aimed at shifting the burden of the crisis on to the backs of the masses, bringing layoffs, job insecurity, intensification of exploitation and attacks on education, health care and basic social services.

Struggles and rebellions are ranging from China to the US, from Russia to Latin America. Particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq, imperialism, mainly U.S. imperialism, is suffering blows that prevent it from realizing its plans of occupation, invasion and geo-strategic control on important areas of the world. Its plans to sanctify Zionist occupation in Palestine through sell-out leaders have been checked.

People’s wars are the strategic reference for the proletarians and peoples of the world. The people’s war in India successfully withstands unprecedented attacks by the enemy and is able to expand and advance. The people’s war in Peru persists and recuperates. The people’s war in the Philippines advances. In Turkey, revolutionary struggles led by the Maoists advance along the people’s war strategy. In other countries of South Asia it is being prepared, for initiations and new advances.

In Nepal, 10 years of people’s war have created the conditions for the advancement of Nepali revolution. This revolution is now at a complex crossroads and must be supported against the counter-revolution waged by internal and external enemies as well as against the reformists who try to undermine it from within.

The protracted people’s war is necessary to defeat the enemy both in countries oppressed by imperialism and the imperialist countries themselves, according their own specificities. It represents a new and sharpening phase of the class struggle that expresses the revolutionary aspirations of the proletariat and the world peoples.

All this indicates that the main contradiction at the world level is that between imperialism and oppressed people, while the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie and as well as inter-imperialist contradictions are sharpening. In the context of the spreading crisis, the revolution emerges more and more clearly as being the main trend in the current world.
The economic crisis of imperialism, far from being resolved, widens and deepens according to the laws of uneven development and as a result of the contention on the world market and the tendency towards a maximal extortion of surplus value. The “financialization” of the economy— the main immediate cause of the crisis — tends to reject any control. The use of surpluses from China’s, India’s and Brazil’s economies can’t ensure more than a temporary recovery, which opens the door to new and even more distressing crisis.

The struggling and uprising proletarians and popular masses demand the building of revolutionary parties at the height of the current clash of classes; and that process of organization is developing. We need communist parties based on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism able to lead the class struggle in all fields and aimed at seizing the political power without which it is not possible for the proletarians to overthrow the capitalist and imperialist system. Maoist Communists strive to answer this need for a scientific and decided leadership for the proletarian class struggle, by fighting all kinds of revisionist, reformist and dogmatist deviations. Our class can rely on the huge amount of experience through 140 years of struggles and revolutions, from the birth of the Glorious Paris Commune through the peaks of the October Revolution, the Chinese revolution and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. We must learn from both our victories and defeats, as well as from our mistakes.
Within that wave of struggles, uprisings and people’s wars, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist communists should put proletarian internationalism into practice in order to unite proletarian struggles and those of the oppressed peoples against imperialism in crisis and remain firmly united with masse, as they make history.

Communists must achieve a new unity of the international communist movement based on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and build the international organization that we need today.

Imperialism has no future!
The future belongs to communism!

• Communist Party of Bhutan (MLM)
• Communist Party of India (maoist)
• Communist Party of India (ML) Naxalbari
• maoist Communist Party, France
• maoist Communist Party, Italy
• Maoist Communist Party, Turkey and North Kurdistan
• Revolutionary Communist Party, Canada
• Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)
• Committee of People’s Struggle “Manolo Bello”, Galicia, Spain

5/1/11

May Day and proletarian internationalism

Written by Lal Khan
Friday, 29 April 2011

This year the workers across the planet will commemorate May Day in one of the most turbulent and traumatic periods in history. The world is ravaged by wars, terrorism, bloodshed, economic catastrophe and unprecedented poverty, misery, disease and destitution. The vast majority of the human race has been plunged into the abyss of deprivation, hunger and agonising suffering.

After the failure of the Keynesian model in the 1980s, free market enterprise or the “trickle down” economy has led to the biggest financial crash in the history of capitalism. And the exploitation and drudgery of the working classes has worsened horrendously. The gains of the workers through immense struggles of the last fifty years are being drastically slashed even in the advanced capitalist countries.

A new norm has been established. Already the relations between labour and capital had deteriorated with the policies of privatisation, downsizing, liberalisation, restructuring and contract labour. Redundancies and layoffs have become a regular feature of modern capitalism. Social services and the benefits of the workers have been viciously cut through draconian austerity measures throughout the capitalist world.

Even during the recession when the workers had to bear the brunt of the financial meltdown, the bankers, capitalists and the bosses of the multinational corporations plundered on and enriched themselves to obscene levels. The gap between the ruling elites and the toiling masses has widened to unprecedented levels.

In the largest capitalist country of the world, the USA one percent of the richest households now own more wealth than the 95% of the rest of the population. The same story is repeated throughout the world. The situation in countries like China and India is even worse. Out of the 16 members of the standing committee of the Politbureau of the Communist Party of China (which is neither communist nor a party), 12 are billionaires. India has 20 percent of world’s population yet hosts about 40 percent of world’s poverty and yet now there are more billionaires in India than in Japan. The highest amounts of plundered money stashed away in Swiss banks belong to Indian capitalists, reportedly 14.7 trillion dollars.

This looting and plundering by the bourgeoisie has ushered in a malaise within society on a world scale. In his latest book, “Reformism and revolution”, the renowned Marxist theoretician, Alan Woods gives a graphic description of this decline. He writes, “The crisis of the capitalist system is reflected in a crisis of bourgeois values, morality, religion, politics and philosophy. The mood of pessimism that afflicts the bourgeoisie and its ideologues in this period is manifested in the poverty of its thought, the triviality of its art and the emptiness of its spiritual values. It is expressed in the wretched philosophy of post modernism, which imagines itself to be superior to all previous philosophy, when in reality it is vastly inferior.... They talk of the end of ideology and the end of history in the same breath. They do not believe in progress because the bourgeoisie has long since ceased to be progressive. When they talk of the end of history it is because they have ended in an historical dead-end and can see no way out. When they talk of the end of ideology it is because they are no longer capable of producing one”.

However, after a relatively long period, a new wave of class struggle is emerging. After the movements of the oppressed in Latin America and the youth and workers’ movements in Europe, the Arab revolution has shaken the planet.

In the context of these stirrings of the working class May Day 2011 attains an extraordinary significance. Every year May Day is commemorated in memory of those workers demanding an eight hour day that were brutally shot and killed by the police in the American city of Chicago on 1^st of May 1886. The decision to commemorate it as a labour day was taken at the congress of the Second International in July 1889 held in Paris. The leading figure in the meeting of this international was Fredrick Engels who along with Marx was the founder of scientific socialism and co-author of the epic work “The Communist Manifesto”.

The unique feature of May Day is that it is perhaps the only anniversary that is commemorated all over the world. It cuts across the prejudices of race, colour, creed, religion, nationality, ethnicity and caste, which are used by the ruling classes to drive a wedge in the unity of the proletariat. Hence the real message of May Day is that of proletarian internationalism. It is also the reaffirmation of the pledge for unity in struggle on a class basis against this system of exploitation and plunder. The ultimate victory of this struggle can only be achieved by the overthrow of capitalism through a socialist revolution. Anything else attributed to this day is a deceit and distraction for the workers. In the present epoch the crisis of capitalism offers no progress or prosperity to the human race. Rather, with every passing day it is intensifying exploitation, coercion, death and destruction for the masses. The spectre of barbarism haunts society shackled by this decaying and moribund system.

Reforms under capitalism are a thing of the past. Hence reformism or narrow trade unionism cannot offer any way out of this misery. Most of capitalist investment today, if any, is not labour intensive in character, but it is capital intensive. This means that it will create more unemployment rather than generating any new jobs. All the technological advances enhance exploitation rather than alleviating the plight of the workers. Capitalism cannot cope with the spirit of the new technology to which it has given rise. This has torn through the national boundaries of the bourgeois state. In the present epoch we live not only in a world economy, but most social and political relations have also been moulded by this crushing domination of the world market. That explains why no proletarian revolution can survive on a national basis for long. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the capitalist degeneration of the Chinese bureaucracy are glaring examples of this. But the masses around the world are yearning for change, for a transformation of this agonising socio-economic system. A successful socialist uprising in one country would unleash a revolutionary wave that this obsolete system and its bosses would not be able to stop. That is the real message of hope for the oppressed and the essence of Marxist internationalism that May Day espouses.