Mu
Monday, July 30, 2012
Nothing new under the sun? Zizek's new insights
Zizek: Capitalism can no longer afford freedom
In his recent re-reading of Marx's Capital, Fredric Jameson identifies the inherent contradiction of the world market: that it is the very success of capitalism (higher productivity, and so forth) which produces unemployment (renders more and more workers useless), and thus that what should be a blessing (less hard labour required) becomes a curse.
As Jameson puts it, the world market is thus "a space in which everyone has once been a productive laborer, and in which labor has everywhere begun to price itself out of the system." That is to say, in the ongoing process of capitalist globalization, the category of the unemployed acquires a new dimension beyond the classic notion of the "reserve army of labor," and should now include
"those massive populations around the world who have, as it were, 'dropped out of history', who have been deliberately excluded from the modernizing projects of First World capitalism and written off as hopeless or terminal cases."
We should thus include among the unemployed those so-called "failed states" (like Congo and Somalia), victims of famine or ecological disasters, those trapped in pseudo-archaic "ethnic hatreds," objects of philanthropy or (often the same people) of the "war on terror."
The category of the unemployed should thus be expanded to encompass a wide range of the global population, from the temporary unemployed, through the no-longer employable and permanently unemployed, up to people living in slums and other types of ghettos (that is, all those often dismissed by Marx himself as "lumpen-proletarians") and, finally, all those areas, populations or states excluded from the global capitalist process, like blank spaces in ancient maps.
Does not this extension of the circle of the "unemployed" point to the fact that what once lay in the inert background of History becomes a potential agent of emancipatory struggle? Just recall Marx's dismissive characterization of the French peasants in his Eighteenth Brumaire:
"the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes … Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented."
In the great twentieth-century revolutionary mobilizations of peasants (from China to Bolivia), these "sacks of potatoes" excluded from the historical process began actively to represent themselves.
But Jameson then makes the crucial observation that this new category of the "unemployed" is itself a form of capitalist exploitation – the exploited are not only workers producing surplus-value appropriated by capital, they also include those structurally prevented from getting caught up in the capitalist vortex of exploited wage labour, including entire geographical zones and even nation states.
This demands, then, that we rethink the concept of exploitation. Today, the exploited are not only those who produce or "create," but also (and even more so) those who are condemned not to "create." Everything hinges here on the fact that the capitalist mechanism not only needs workers, but also generates a "reserve army" of those who cannot find work: the latter are not simply outside the circulation of capital, they are actively produced as not-working by this circulation.
The importance of this shift of accent onto exploitation becomes clear when we oppose it to domination, the favourite motif of different versions of the postmodern "micro-politics of power." To put it simply, the influential theories of Michel Foucault and Giorio Agamben are insufficient: all their detailed elaborations of the regulatory power mechanisms of domination, along with their conceptions of bare life, homo sacer, and so on, they all must be grounded in (or mediated by) the centrality of exploitation. As Jameson rightly insists, without this reference to the economic, the fight against domination remains:
"an essentially moral or ethical one, which leads to punctual revolts and acts of resistance rather than to the transformation of the mode of production as such."
In other words, the outcome of the emphasis on domination is a democratic program, while the outcome of the emphasis on exploitation is a communist program. There lies the limit of describing the horrors of the Third World in terms of the effects of domination: the goal becomes democracy and freedom.
What this notion of domination fails to register is that only in capitalism is exploitation "naturalized," inscribed into the functioning of the economy. Domination is not the result of extra-economic pressure and violence, and this is why, in capitalism, we have personal freedom and equality: there is no need for direct social domination, because domination is already inscribed in the structure of the production process.
This is also why the category of surplus-value is crucial: Marx always emphasized that the exchange between worker and capitalist is "just" in the sense that workers (as a rule) get paid the full value of their labour-power as a commodity. There is no direct "exploitation" here – that is, it is not that workers "are not paid the full value of the commodity they are selling to the capitalists." So while in a market economy I remain de facto dependent, this dependency is nonetheless "civilized," realized in the form of a "free" market exchange between me and other persons instead of in the form of direct servitude or even physical coercion.
It is easy to ridicule Ayn Rand, but there is a grain of truth in the famous "hymn to money" from her Atlas Shrugged:
"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns or dollars. Take your choice – there is no other."
Did Marx not say something similar in his well-known formula of how, in the universe of commodities, "relations between people assume the guise of relations among things"? In the market economy, relations between people can appear as relations of mutually recognized freedom and equality: domination is no longer directly enacted and visible as such.
The liberal answer to domination is recognition – recognition, according to Jameson, thus "becomes a stake in a multicultural settlement by which the various groups peaceably and electorally divide up the spoils." The subjects of recognition are not classes (it is meaningless to demand the recognition of the proletariat as a collective subject – if anything, fascism does this, demanding the mutual recognition of classes). Subjects of recognition are those defined by race, gender and so on – the politics of recognition remains within the framework of bourgeois civil society, it is not yet class politics.
The recurrent story of the contemporary left is that of a leader or party elected with universal enthusiasm, promising a "new world" (just think of Mandela in South Africa or Lula in Brazil) – but, then, sooner or later, they confront the key dilemma: whether to dare to mess with the capitalist mechanism, or to just "play the game"? If one disturbs the mechanism, one will be very swiftly "punished" by market perturbations, economic chaos and the rest.
So although it is true that anti-capitalism cannot be the direct goal of political action – in politics, one opposes concrete political agents and their actions, not an anonymous "system" – we should apply here the Lacanian distinction between goal and aim: anti-capitalism, if not the immediate goal of emancipator politics, should be its ultimate aim, the horizon of all its activity.
Is this not the lesson of Marx's notion of the "critique of political economy"? Although the sphere of the economy appears "apolitical," it is the secret point of reference and structuring principle of political struggles.
Returning to Rand, what is problematic is her underlying premise: that the only choice is between direct and indirect relations of domination and exploitation, with any alternative dismissed as utopian. However, as I've already said, we should nonetheless recognize the moment of truth in Rand's otherwise ridiculously ideological claim: the great lesson of state socialism was indeed that an immediate abolition of private property and market-regulated exchange, in the absence of concrete forms of social regulation of the process of production, necessarily resuscitates direct relations of servitude and domination.
Fredric Jameson himself falls short with regard to this point. By focusing on how capitalist exploitation is compatible with democracy, how legal freedom can be the very form of exploitation, he ignores the sad lesson of the twentieth-century experience of the left: if we merely abolish the market (including market exploitation) without replacing it with an adequate form of communist organization of production and exchange, domination returns with a vengeance, and with it direct exploitation.
What further complicates the situation is that the rise of blank spaces in global capitalism is in itself also a proof that capitalism can no longer afford a universal civil order of freedom and democracy, that it increasingly requires exclusion and domination.
The case of Tien An Mien crackdown in China is exemplary here: what was quashed by the brutal military intervention was not the prospect of a quick entry into the liberal-democratic capitalist order, but the genuinely utopian possibility of a more democratic and more just society. The explosion of brutal capitalism after 1990 thus went hand in hand with the reassertion of non-democratic Party rule. Recall the classical Marxist thesis on early modern England: it was in the bourgeoisie's own interest to leave the political power to the aristocracy and keep for itself the economic power. Maybe something similar is happening today in China: it was in the interest of the new capitalists to leave political power to the Communist Party.
This, of course, raises the immediate question of what to do after the Occupy movement, when the protests which started on the periphery (the Middle East and Greece), reached the centre (the United States and the UK) and then gained strength and multiplied around the world?
What should be resisted at this stage is precisely a quick translation of the energy of protest into a set of "concrete" practical demands. The protests did create a vacuum – a vacuum in the field of hegemonic ideology, and time is needed to fill this vacuum in a proper way, since it is pregnant, an opening for the truly New.
What we should always bear in mind is that any debate here and now necessarily remains a debate on the enemy's turf: time is needed to deploy the new content. All we say now can be coopted and reappropriated and recycled – everything except our silence. This silence, this rejection of dialogue, of all forms of clinching, is our "terror" – ominous and threatening as it should be.
Evoking Herman Melville's emblematic figure of Bartleby, the protesters of Occupy Wall Street were not saying only that they would prefer not to participate in the dance of capital and its circulation, they would also "prefer not to" cast a critical vote (for "our" candidates) or engage in any form of "constructive dialogue." This is the gesture of subtraction at its purest, the reduction of all qualitative differences to a purely formal minimal difference which opens up the space for the New.
The emergence of an international protest movement without a coherent program is not an accident: it reflects a deeper crisis, one without an obvious solution. The situation is like that of psychoanalysis, where the patient knows the answer (his symptoms are such answers) but doesn't know the question. It is only through the patient work of analysis that the right questions emerge.
There is old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic. A German worker gets a job in Siberia. Aware that his mail will be intercepted and read by censors, he tells his friends:
"Let's establish a code: if a letter you receive from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false."
After a month, his friends receive the first letter, written in blue ink:
"Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls eager to have affairs – the only thing unavailable is red ink."
Does this not grasp our situation? In the West, we have all the freedoms we could want – the only thing missing is the "red ink." In other words, we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our un-freedom.
Perhaps this, then, is the role of intellectuals: not to listen to the demands of the protesters and provide clear answers – the protesters themselves are the answers – but rather to pose the right questions. In other words, to give the protesters red ink.
In his recent re-reading of Marx's Capital, Fredric Jameson identifies the inherent contradiction of the world market: that it is the very success of capitalism (higher productivity, and so forth) which produces unemployment (renders more and more workers useless), and thus that what should be a blessing (less hard labour required) becomes a curse.
As Jameson puts it, the world market is thus "a space in which everyone has once been a productive laborer, and in which labor has everywhere begun to price itself out of the system." That is to say, in the ongoing process of capitalist globalization, the category of the unemployed acquires a new dimension beyond the classic notion of the "reserve army of labor," and should now include
"those massive populations around the world who have, as it were, 'dropped out of history', who have been deliberately excluded from the modernizing projects of First World capitalism and written off as hopeless or terminal cases."
We should thus include among the unemployed those so-called "failed states" (like Congo and Somalia), victims of famine or ecological disasters, those trapped in pseudo-archaic "ethnic hatreds," objects of philanthropy or (often the same people) of the "war on terror."
The category of the unemployed should thus be expanded to encompass a wide range of the global population, from the temporary unemployed, through the no-longer employable and permanently unemployed, up to people living in slums and other types of ghettos (that is, all those often dismissed by Marx himself as "lumpen-proletarians") and, finally, all those areas, populations or states excluded from the global capitalist process, like blank spaces in ancient maps.
Does not this extension of the circle of the "unemployed" point to the fact that what once lay in the inert background of History becomes a potential agent of emancipatory struggle? Just recall Marx's dismissive characterization of the French peasants in his Eighteenth Brumaire:
"the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes … Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented."
In the great twentieth-century revolutionary mobilizations of peasants (from China to Bolivia), these "sacks of potatoes" excluded from the historical process began actively to represent themselves.
But Jameson then makes the crucial observation that this new category of the "unemployed" is itself a form of capitalist exploitation – the exploited are not only workers producing surplus-value appropriated by capital, they also include those structurally prevented from getting caught up in the capitalist vortex of exploited wage labour, including entire geographical zones and even nation states.
This demands, then, that we rethink the concept of exploitation. Today, the exploited are not only those who produce or "create," but also (and even more so) those who are condemned not to "create." Everything hinges here on the fact that the capitalist mechanism not only needs workers, but also generates a "reserve army" of those who cannot find work: the latter are not simply outside the circulation of capital, they are actively produced as not-working by this circulation.
The importance of this shift of accent onto exploitation becomes clear when we oppose it to domination, the favourite motif of different versions of the postmodern "micro-politics of power." To put it simply, the influential theories of Michel Foucault and Giorio Agamben are insufficient: all their detailed elaborations of the regulatory power mechanisms of domination, along with their conceptions of bare life, homo sacer, and so on, they all must be grounded in (or mediated by) the centrality of exploitation. As Jameson rightly insists, without this reference to the economic, the fight against domination remains:
"an essentially moral or ethical one, which leads to punctual revolts and acts of resistance rather than to the transformation of the mode of production as such."
In other words, the outcome of the emphasis on domination is a democratic program, while the outcome of the emphasis on exploitation is a communist program. There lies the limit of describing the horrors of the Third World in terms of the effects of domination: the goal becomes democracy and freedom.
What this notion of domination fails to register is that only in capitalism is exploitation "naturalized," inscribed into the functioning of the economy. Domination is not the result of extra-economic pressure and violence, and this is why, in capitalism, we have personal freedom and equality: there is no need for direct social domination, because domination is already inscribed in the structure of the production process.
This is also why the category of surplus-value is crucial: Marx always emphasized that the exchange between worker and capitalist is "just" in the sense that workers (as a rule) get paid the full value of their labour-power as a commodity. There is no direct "exploitation" here – that is, it is not that workers "are not paid the full value of the commodity they are selling to the capitalists." So while in a market economy I remain de facto dependent, this dependency is nonetheless "civilized," realized in the form of a "free" market exchange between me and other persons instead of in the form of direct servitude or even physical coercion.
It is easy to ridicule Ayn Rand, but there is a grain of truth in the famous "hymn to money" from her Atlas Shrugged:
"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns or dollars. Take your choice – there is no other."
Did Marx not say something similar in his well-known formula of how, in the universe of commodities, "relations between people assume the guise of relations among things"? In the market economy, relations between people can appear as relations of mutually recognized freedom and equality: domination is no longer directly enacted and visible as such.
The liberal answer to domination is recognition – recognition, according to Jameson, thus "becomes a stake in a multicultural settlement by which the various groups peaceably and electorally divide up the spoils." The subjects of recognition are not classes (it is meaningless to demand the recognition of the proletariat as a collective subject – if anything, fascism does this, demanding the mutual recognition of classes). Subjects of recognition are those defined by race, gender and so on – the politics of recognition remains within the framework of bourgeois civil society, it is not yet class politics.
The recurrent story of the contemporary left is that of a leader or party elected with universal enthusiasm, promising a "new world" (just think of Mandela in South Africa or Lula in Brazil) – but, then, sooner or later, they confront the key dilemma: whether to dare to mess with the capitalist mechanism, or to just "play the game"? If one disturbs the mechanism, one will be very swiftly "punished" by market perturbations, economic chaos and the rest.
So although it is true that anti-capitalism cannot be the direct goal of political action – in politics, one opposes concrete political agents and their actions, not an anonymous "system" – we should apply here the Lacanian distinction between goal and aim: anti-capitalism, if not the immediate goal of emancipator politics, should be its ultimate aim, the horizon of all its activity.
Is this not the lesson of Marx's notion of the "critique of political economy"? Although the sphere of the economy appears "apolitical," it is the secret point of reference and structuring principle of political struggles.
Returning to Rand, what is problematic is her underlying premise: that the only choice is between direct and indirect relations of domination and exploitation, with any alternative dismissed as utopian. However, as I've already said, we should nonetheless recognize the moment of truth in Rand's otherwise ridiculously ideological claim: the great lesson of state socialism was indeed that an immediate abolition of private property and market-regulated exchange, in the absence of concrete forms of social regulation of the process of production, necessarily resuscitates direct relations of servitude and domination.
Fredric Jameson himself falls short with regard to this point. By focusing on how capitalist exploitation is compatible with democracy, how legal freedom can be the very form of exploitation, he ignores the sad lesson of the twentieth-century experience of the left: if we merely abolish the market (including market exploitation) without replacing it with an adequate form of communist organization of production and exchange, domination returns with a vengeance, and with it direct exploitation.
What further complicates the situation is that the rise of blank spaces in global capitalism is in itself also a proof that capitalism can no longer afford a universal civil order of freedom and democracy, that it increasingly requires exclusion and domination.
The case of Tien An Mien crackdown in China is exemplary here: what was quashed by the brutal military intervention was not the prospect of a quick entry into the liberal-democratic capitalist order, but the genuinely utopian possibility of a more democratic and more just society. The explosion of brutal capitalism after 1990 thus went hand in hand with the reassertion of non-democratic Party rule. Recall the classical Marxist thesis on early modern England: it was in the bourgeoisie's own interest to leave the political power to the aristocracy and keep for itself the economic power. Maybe something similar is happening today in China: it was in the interest of the new capitalists to leave political power to the Communist Party.
This, of course, raises the immediate question of what to do after the Occupy movement, when the protests which started on the periphery (the Middle East and Greece), reached the centre (the United States and the UK) and then gained strength and multiplied around the world?
What should be resisted at this stage is precisely a quick translation of the energy of protest into a set of "concrete" practical demands. The protests did create a vacuum – a vacuum in the field of hegemonic ideology, and time is needed to fill this vacuum in a proper way, since it is pregnant, an opening for the truly New.
What we should always bear in mind is that any debate here and now necessarily remains a debate on the enemy's turf: time is needed to deploy the new content. All we say now can be coopted and reappropriated and recycled – everything except our silence. This silence, this rejection of dialogue, of all forms of clinching, is our "terror" – ominous and threatening as it should be.
Evoking Herman Melville's emblematic figure of Bartleby, the protesters of Occupy Wall Street were not saying only that they would prefer not to participate in the dance of capital and its circulation, they would also "prefer not to" cast a critical vote (for "our" candidates) or engage in any form of "constructive dialogue." This is the gesture of subtraction at its purest, the reduction of all qualitative differences to a purely formal minimal difference which opens up the space for the New.
The emergence of an international protest movement without a coherent program is not an accident: it reflects a deeper crisis, one without an obvious solution. The situation is like that of psychoanalysis, where the patient knows the answer (his symptoms are such answers) but doesn't know the question. It is only through the patient work of analysis that the right questions emerge.
There is old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic. A German worker gets a job in Siberia. Aware that his mail will be intercepted and read by censors, he tells his friends:
"Let's establish a code: if a letter you receive from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false."
After a month, his friends receive the first letter, written in blue ink:
"Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls eager to have affairs – the only thing unavailable is red ink."
Does this not grasp our situation? In the West, we have all the freedoms we could want – the only thing missing is the "red ink." In other words, we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our un-freedom.
Perhaps this, then, is the role of intellectuals: not to listen to the demands of the protesters and provide clear answers – the protesters themselves are the answers – but rather to pose the right questions. In other words, to give the protesters red ink.
http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?page_id=2334
The ceremonies
UK SWP's Richard Seymour on the London Olympics opening ceremonies:
http://www.leninology.com/2012/07/puke-britannia.html
Puke Britannia
via LENIN'S TOMB by lenin on 7/29/12
A few days ago, I got wind of some of the arrangements prepared for the Olympics opening ceremony. Danny Boyle was readying a celebration of the NHS and multicultural Britain. It was going to be a New Labour-tastic re-imagining of Cool Britannia some fifteen years on. Two things were immediately apparent. The Tories would hate it; and some on the Left would temporarily lose their reason and find their patriotism.
This is all very well in a way. After all, this isn't 1997 - the NHS is under unprecedented attack, and Britain's multiculture has been hammered for more than a decade. We are living in an age when celebrating these things is seen by some as 'too political' or, for the riper pundits, 'left wing propaganda'. And if the "people's history" found empire too touchy a subject to encounter except obliquely, through the prism of Commonwealth immigration - the sole complaint of Boris Johnson who otherwise professed to be delighted with its focus on the NHS, the rise of the industrial working class, and "the triumph over the capitalism" - its acknowledgment of any social antagonism amid the diorama of 'Britishness', from bucolic prancing to industrial dancing, was probably a little unexpected for most viewers.
An ideologically interesting gesture was the binding of what Owen Hatherley presciently called 'austerity nostalgia' (that reverence for the virtuous Forties when everyone pulled together, backs to the wall, living off rationed food and facing down the enemy with stoical good humour, their struggle eventually rewarded with social peace and plenty) to a vaguely critical left-of-centre politics. Perhaps this was not dissimilar in tone to that UK Uncut 'Great British street party'. It was nationalism, but it was a decidedly Labourist nationalism.
My point, basically, is that one can always grin through it while perfectly normal people find various reasons to be #ProudOfBritain, and pundits fall over themselves to worship at the shrine of Boyle's genius. (And really, his films are enjoyable, but if anyone thinks this guy is a creative mastermind they really need to check out his Twitter feed.)
Still, amid the general Sunday morning hangover, I hope those on the soft left who threw aside their probity for a saturnalian flag-fest are now in the mood to confess and repent. Lawks, Mary Poppins saving the NHS from Voldemort to the tune of Branson's money-spinner Tubular Bells! Let the Tories dare privatise the NHS now! (They're already doing it. They'll still be doing it on Monday. The fine nurses and doctors from Great Ormond Street Hospital danced in vain if this was supposed obstruct this determined class assault.). James Bond and the Queen! Britain loves to take the piss out of itself! (This is the sort of self-congratulatory dribble, in this instance referring to an insufferably smug streak of meconium passing itself off as wry British humour, that proves patriotism cannot be genuinely self effacing; it is only in the service of its amour propre that it allows the slightest critical reflection.). Boyle loves Britain's modern social and racial mobility, and so do we! (Every bit as real as the dark legions of Voldemort.)
Whatever the creators' intentions, whatever people now do to appropriate elements of this spectacle for their own agendas, the fact is that it's major achievement was to induce people to forget temporarily what a disgrace the Olympics are; how hated they are in the East End where the Olympics Green Zone has been implanted, protected by rooftop missiles that residents don't want; how poor people have been drive out of their homes as they always are when the Olympics comes to town; how much our civil liberties have already been attacked in the name of suppressing criticism of this ugly metro-plasty, as legislation and police exercises have been framed in the assumption that protest during these events is a potential terrorist plot; how preposterous it is that the 'security' for this montage of pointless exercises is being supplied by thousands of soldiers fresh from hunting shepherds in Afganistan; how fucked up it is that the major sponsors of this debacle, their names glowingly referenced all over the city's billboards, are corporations like McDonalds (which specialises in heart disease, bowel cancer and obesity), and Atos (which specialises in throwing disabled people off benefits and will no doubt have a special role in the Paralympics); and above all the fact that this is sports, pointless, boring sports, and the only reason anyone really wants to watch someone else swim forty lengths or jump over sandpits is because they're doing so on behalf of the nation.
Those leftists who did have a patriotism binge this weekend can report here to expiate their craven indulgence first thing tomorrow morning. I have some chores for you to do.
via LENIN'S TOMB by lenin on 7/29/12
A few days ago, I got wind of some of the arrangements prepared for the Olympics opening ceremony. Danny Boyle was readying a celebration of the NHS and multicultural Britain. It was going to be a New Labour-tastic re-imagining of Cool Britannia some fifteen years on. Two things were immediately apparent. The Tories would hate it; and some on the Left would temporarily lose their reason and find their patriotism.
This is all very well in a way. After all, this isn't 1997 - the NHS is under unprecedented attack, and Britain's multiculture has been hammered for more than a decade. We are living in an age when celebrating these things is seen by some as 'too political' or, for the riper pundits, 'left wing propaganda'. And if the "people's history" found empire too touchy a subject to encounter except obliquely, through the prism of Commonwealth immigration - the sole complaint of Boris Johnson who otherwise professed to be delighted with its focus on the NHS, the rise of the industrial working class, and "the triumph over the capitalism" - its acknowledgment of any social antagonism amid the diorama of 'Britishness', from bucolic prancing to industrial dancing, was probably a little unexpected for most viewers.
An ideologically interesting gesture was the binding of what Owen Hatherley presciently called 'austerity nostalgia' (that reverence for the virtuous Forties when everyone pulled together, backs to the wall, living off rationed food and facing down the enemy with stoical good humour, their struggle eventually rewarded with social peace and plenty) to a vaguely critical left-of-centre politics. Perhaps this was not dissimilar in tone to that UK Uncut 'Great British street party'. It was nationalism, but it was a decidedly Labourist nationalism.
My point, basically, is that one can always grin through it while perfectly normal people find various reasons to be #ProudOfBritain, and pundits fall over themselves to worship at the shrine of Boyle's genius. (And really, his films are enjoyable, but if anyone thinks this guy is a creative mastermind they really need to check out his Twitter feed.)
Still, amid the general Sunday morning hangover, I hope those on the soft left who threw aside their probity for a saturnalian flag-fest are now in the mood to confess and repent. Lawks, Mary Poppins saving the NHS from Voldemort to the tune of Branson's money-spinner Tubular Bells! Let the Tories dare privatise the NHS now! (They're already doing it. They'll still be doing it on Monday. The fine nurses and doctors from Great Ormond Street Hospital danced in vain if this was supposed obstruct this determined class assault.). James Bond and the Queen! Britain loves to take the piss out of itself! (This is the sort of self-congratulatory dribble, in this instance referring to an insufferably smug streak of meconium passing itself off as wry British humour, that proves patriotism cannot be genuinely self effacing; it is only in the service of its amour propre that it allows the slightest critical reflection.). Boyle loves Britain's modern social and racial mobility, and so do we! (Every bit as real as the dark legions of Voldemort.)
Whatever the creators' intentions, whatever people now do to appropriate elements of this spectacle for their own agendas, the fact is that it's major achievement was to induce people to forget temporarily what a disgrace the Olympics are; how hated they are in the East End where the Olympics Green Zone has been implanted, protected by rooftop missiles that residents don't want; how poor people have been drive out of their homes as they always are when the Olympics comes to town; how much our civil liberties have already been attacked in the name of suppressing criticism of this ugly metro-plasty, as legislation and police exercises have been framed in the assumption that protest during these events is a potential terrorist plot; how preposterous it is that the 'security' for this montage of pointless exercises is being supplied by thousands of soldiers fresh from hunting shepherds in Afganistan; how fucked up it is that the major sponsors of this debacle, their names glowingly referenced all over the city's billboards, are corporations like McDonalds (which specialises in heart disease, bowel cancer and obesity), and Atos (which specialises in throwing disabled people off benefits and will no doubt have a special role in the Paralympics); and above all the fact that this is sports, pointless, boring sports, and the only reason anyone really wants to watch someone else swim forty lengths or jump over sandpits is because they're doing so on behalf of the nation.
Those leftists who did have a patriotism binge this weekend can report here to expiate their craven indulgence first thing tomorrow morning. I have some chores for you to do.
http://www.leninology.com/2012/07/puke-britannia.html
Marx and Freud via Gattari
Freudo-Marxism
FELIX GUATTARI
Question: How, in your opinion, can or should the works of Freud and Marx
complement one another?
F Guattari: Can or should ... The problem is that they have effectively done
so. At least in the university , where the concoction of " cocktails" mixing the
two in various proportions seems to be the guarantee of an "appropriate"
political affiliation. Reread Marx, return to Freud, assure their peaceful
coexistence . .. a whole Program! And then isn't it marvelous to be able to
serve the people tllis way , on the sole front of "theoretical combat" without
having to leave our lecture-hall or our office?
No, definitely, this kind of question makes me very suspicious. FreudoMarxism
is the busy work of the Victor Cousin type of academics of our
time . The academician always returns to the same devices for shunning
reality, by taking refuge behind the exegesis and interpretation of texts. Bilt
behind Marx and Freud, behind "Marxology" and "Freudology," there is the
shitty reality of the Communist movement, of the psychoanalytic movement.
That's where we should start and that's where we should always return. And
when I speak of shit, it is hardly a metaphor: Capitalism reduces everything
to a fecal state, to the state of undifferentiated and unencoded flux, out of
which each person in his private, guilt-ridden way must pull out his part.
Capitalism is the regime of generalized interchangeability: anything in the
"right" proportions can equal anything else. Take Marx and Freud for
example, reduced to a state of dogmatic mush; they can be introduced into
the system without presenting any risk to it. Marxism and Freudianism,
carefully neutralized by the Institutions of the worker's movement, the
psychoanalytic movement, and the university , not only no longer disturb
anyone , but have actually become the guarantors of the established order, a
demonstration via reduction to the absurd, that it is no longer possible to
seriously unsettle that order. One might object that these theories shouldn't
be blamed for deviations in their application; that the original message has
been betrayed; that precisely it is necessary to return to the sources, review
the faulty translations, etc .... That's the trap of fetishism. There is no
comparable example in any scientific domain of a similar respect for the
texts and formulae pronounced by great scientists. Revisionism is the rule
here. The process of relativizing, dissolving, and dislocating these established
theories is permanent. Those which resist are constantly under attack. The
ideal thing would not be to mummify them, but to leave them open to
other constructs, all equally temporary, but better strengthened by such
experimentation. What counts in the long run is the use one makes of a
theory. Therefore , we cannot disregard the pragmatic implementation of
Marxism and Freudianism. We must start from existing practices in order to
retrace the fundamental flaws of these theories insofar as, in one way or
another, they lend themselves to distortions of that kind.
Theoretical activity escapes only with difficulty the propensity of capitalism
to ritualize and retrieve any minimally subversive practice by cutting
it off from its libidinal investments (cathexes); only by confronting real
struggles can theoretical activity hope to leave its ghetto. The primary task
of a theory of "desire" must be to discern the possible ways in which it can
invade the social field , rather than guarantee the quasi-mystical exercise of
psychoanalytical eavesdropping such as it has evolved since Freud. Correlatively,
any theoretical development bearing upon class struggle at this time
should be concerned primarily with its connection with libidinal production
and its impact on the creativity of the masses. Marxism, in all its versions,
excludes desire, and loses its guts with bureaucracy and humanism, while
Freudianism, from its very beginning, has not only been alien to class
struggle, but moreover has continued to distort its first discoveries about
desire by trying to lead it back, handcuffed, to the familial and social norms
of the establishment. The refusal to confront these fundamental deficiensies,
the attempt to mask them , lead one to believe that the internal limits of
these theories are actuilly insurmountable.
There are two ways to absorb these theoretical statements; the academic
one, which takes or leaves the text in its integrity, and the revolutionary
one which takes and leaves it at the same time , doctoring it to its requireme~
ts in an attempt to use it in order to elucidate its own co-ordinates and
guide its practice. The only question is to try to make a text work. And,
from this point of view, what has always been alive in Marxism and in
Freudianism, in their initial stages, is not the coherence of their statements,
but the fact that the very act of enunciating them represents a breaking off,
a way of telling Hegelian dialectics, bourgeois political economy, academic
psychology , and psychiatry of the time , etc. to go to hell.
Even the idea of the possible coupling of these two separate bodies,
Marxism and Freudianism, falsifies the perspective. Some bits of a "dismembered"
Marxism can and should converge with a theory and practice of
desire ; bits of a "dismembered" Freudianism can and should converge with a
theory and practice pertaining to class struggle. Even the idea of a separation,
between a private exercise of desire and public struggles between
opposite interests, leads implicitly to integration into capitalism. Private
ownership of the means of production is intrinsically bound up with the
appropriation of desire by the individual, the family , and the social order.
One begins by neutralizing the worker's access to desire, by familial castration
, by the lures of consumption, etc. in order to subsequently seize
without difficulty , his capacity for social work. To sever desire from work:
such is the primary imperative of capitalism. To separate political economy
from libidinal economy: such is the mission of those theoreticians who serve
capitalism. Work and desire are in contradiction only in the framework of
relations of production, of well-defmed social and familial relations: those of
capitalism and bureaucratic socialism.
There is no alienation of desire, no psychosexual complexes that may be
radically and permanently separated from repression and psychosocial complexes.
For example, to tell the present-day Chinese that their Maoism would
continue to depend upon a universal Oedipus would be the same as considering
Maoism itself as something eternal, always being reborn from its
own ashes. But, of course, history just doesn't work like that! A revolutionary
in France after May '68, with regard to desire is of a completely
different race than his father in June '36. There is no possible Oedipal
relationship between them! Neither rivalry, nor identification! No continuity
in change! And if it is indeed true that the rupture is as radical as that,
theoreticians of society and those of psychoanalysis would do well to
prepare themsel~es for a serious recycling.
Translated by Janis Forman
Intended for Le Nouvel Observateur, which never published it. The title is ours.
FELIX GUATTARI
Question: How, in your opinion, can or should the works of Freud and Marx
complement one another?
F Guattari: Can or should ... The problem is that they have effectively done
so. At least in the university , where the concoction of " cocktails" mixing the
two in various proportions seems to be the guarantee of an "appropriate"
political affiliation. Reread Marx, return to Freud, assure their peaceful
coexistence . .. a whole Program! And then isn't it marvelous to be able to
serve the people tllis way , on the sole front of "theoretical combat" without
having to leave our lecture-hall or our office?
No, definitely, this kind of question makes me very suspicious. FreudoMarxism
is the busy work of the Victor Cousin type of academics of our
time . The academician always returns to the same devices for shunning
reality, by taking refuge behind the exegesis and interpretation of texts. Bilt
behind Marx and Freud, behind "Marxology" and "Freudology," there is the
shitty reality of the Communist movement, of the psychoanalytic movement.
That's where we should start and that's where we should always return. And
when I speak of shit, it is hardly a metaphor: Capitalism reduces everything
to a fecal state, to the state of undifferentiated and unencoded flux, out of
which each person in his private, guilt-ridden way must pull out his part.
Capitalism is the regime of generalized interchangeability: anything in the
"right" proportions can equal anything else. Take Marx and Freud for
example, reduced to a state of dogmatic mush; they can be introduced into
the system without presenting any risk to it. Marxism and Freudianism,
carefully neutralized by the Institutions of the worker's movement, the
psychoanalytic movement, and the university , not only no longer disturb
anyone , but have actually become the guarantors of the established order, a
demonstration via reduction to the absurd, that it is no longer possible to
seriously unsettle that order. One might object that these theories shouldn't
be blamed for deviations in their application; that the original message has
been betrayed; that precisely it is necessary to return to the sources, review
the faulty translations, etc .... That's the trap of fetishism. There is no
comparable example in any scientific domain of a similar respect for the
texts and formulae pronounced by great scientists. Revisionism is the rule
here. The process of relativizing, dissolving, and dislocating these established
theories is permanent. Those which resist are constantly under attack. The
ideal thing would not be to mummify them, but to leave them open to
other constructs, all equally temporary, but better strengthened by such
experimentation. What counts in the long run is the use one makes of a
theory. Therefore , we cannot disregard the pragmatic implementation of
Marxism and Freudianism. We must start from existing practices in order to
retrace the fundamental flaws of these theories insofar as, in one way or
another, they lend themselves to distortions of that kind.
Theoretical activity escapes only with difficulty the propensity of capitalism
to ritualize and retrieve any minimally subversive practice by cutting
it off from its libidinal investments (cathexes); only by confronting real
struggles can theoretical activity hope to leave its ghetto. The primary task
of a theory of "desire" must be to discern the possible ways in which it can
invade the social field , rather than guarantee the quasi-mystical exercise of
psychoanalytical eavesdropping such as it has evolved since Freud. Correlatively,
any theoretical development bearing upon class struggle at this time
should be concerned primarily with its connection with libidinal production
and its impact on the creativity of the masses. Marxism, in all its versions,
excludes desire, and loses its guts with bureaucracy and humanism, while
Freudianism, from its very beginning, has not only been alien to class
struggle, but moreover has continued to distort its first discoveries about
desire by trying to lead it back, handcuffed, to the familial and social norms
of the establishment. The refusal to confront these fundamental deficiensies,
the attempt to mask them , lead one to believe that the internal limits of
these theories are actuilly insurmountable.
There are two ways to absorb these theoretical statements; the academic
one, which takes or leaves the text in its integrity, and the revolutionary
one which takes and leaves it at the same time , doctoring it to its requireme~
ts in an attempt to use it in order to elucidate its own co-ordinates and
guide its practice. The only question is to try to make a text work. And,
from this point of view, what has always been alive in Marxism and in
Freudianism, in their initial stages, is not the coherence of their statements,
but the fact that the very act of enunciating them represents a breaking off,
a way of telling Hegelian dialectics, bourgeois political economy, academic
psychology , and psychiatry of the time , etc. to go to hell.
Even the idea of the possible coupling of these two separate bodies,
Marxism and Freudianism, falsifies the perspective. Some bits of a "dismembered"
Marxism can and should converge with a theory and practice of
desire ; bits of a "dismembered" Freudianism can and should converge with a
theory and practice pertaining to class struggle. Even the idea of a separation,
between a private exercise of desire and public struggles between
opposite interests, leads implicitly to integration into capitalism. Private
ownership of the means of production is intrinsically bound up with the
appropriation of desire by the individual, the family , and the social order.
One begins by neutralizing the worker's access to desire, by familial castration
, by the lures of consumption, etc. in order to subsequently seize
without difficulty , his capacity for social work. To sever desire from work:
such is the primary imperative of capitalism. To separate political economy
from libidinal economy: such is the mission of those theoreticians who serve
capitalism. Work and desire are in contradiction only in the framework of
relations of production, of well-defmed social and familial relations: those of
capitalism and bureaucratic socialism.
There is no alienation of desire, no psychosexual complexes that may be
radically and permanently separated from repression and psychosocial complexes.
For example, to tell the present-day Chinese that their Maoism would
continue to depend upon a universal Oedipus would be the same as considering
Maoism itself as something eternal, always being reborn from its
own ashes. But, of course, history just doesn't work like that! A revolutionary
in France after May '68, with regard to desire is of a completely
different race than his father in June '36. There is no possible Oedipal
relationship between them! Neither rivalry, nor identification! No continuity
in change! And if it is indeed true that the rupture is as radical as that,
theoreticians of society and those of psychoanalysis would do well to
prepare themsel~es for a serious recycling.
Translated by Janis Forman
Intended for Le Nouvel Observateur, which never published it. The title is ours.
http://www.aaronvandyke.net/summer_readings/Guattari_Felix-Freudo-Marxism.pdf
Saturday, July 28, 2012
From school to prison USA
The American Prison in the Culture Wars
H. Bruce Franklin
The following talk was delivered at the 2000 Modern Language Association Convention in Washington, DC, on the panel, "The Imprisonment of American Culture."
1. In 1920, when Ho Chi Minh spoke at the founding convention of the French Communist Party, here is the very first example he gave of "the atrocities that the predatory capitalists have inflicted on Indochina": "Prisons outnumber schools and are always overcrowded."1 Seventy-eight years later, thousands of San Francisco Bay Area high school students staged a series of walkouts, marching from their ancient overcrowded crumbling schools to newly constructed jails and police stations, chanting "Education, not incarceration."
2. Cut to 1968, just past halfway between these two protests against substituting prisons for schools. First the Tet Offensive shattered Washington's hopes for victory in Vietnam and forced President Lyndon Johnson to abandon his bid for reelection. Then came the assassination of Martin Luther King, who had a year earlier declared that in Vietnam and elsewhere the United States was fighting on "the wrong side of a world revolution." King's murder ignited a week of rebellions in 125 U.S. cities. The same month, students and community activists began their two-month siege of Columbia University. A few weeks later, antiwar candidate Robert Kennedy was assassinated the night he won the California primary. In early August, the Republican convention in Miami Beach nominated Richard Nixon, while a line of tanks sealed off Miami Beach from a Black rebellion in Miami; gunfights, described by a police official as "firefights like in Vietnam," came within a mile of the convention.2 Later that month, the Democratic convention in Chicago nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey, although he had won only 2.2 percent of the delegates in the state primaries, which had been swept by antiwar candidates Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy. In November, the day after Nixon was elected president, a five-month strike began at San Francisco State College demanding Black and other ethnic studies programs, and open admissions for Black, Latino, Asian, and other people of color.
3. In the midst of these events, the culture wars erupted in, of all places, the Modern Language Association convention. Hundreds of professors and graduate students marched from a teach-in on the Vietnam War to a sit-in in the Americana Hotel lobby, while busloads of New York City Tac Squad police in riot gear prepared to attack. The teaching of literature was turned into an open battleground over such issues as the racism and sexism that determined not only which works should be taught but also who should be allowed to teach them, as well as the role of class, race, and gender in determining aesthetic criteria, literary canons, cultural hierarchies, and critical methodologies. By the time the convention ended, the Modern Language Association had condemned the war and the growing repression, this Radical Caucus had emerged, and the battle lines had been drawn for the culture wars on the literary front into the next century.3
4. But the main front in the culture wars was not literary. In April 1969, students sat in at City College of the City University of New York (CUNY), denouncing the university's discrimination against people of color and the poor in admissions policy. In response, the Board of Higher Education began open admissions for every graduate of a New York City high school. At the time, CUNY was the nation's third largest system of public higher education, behind the University of California and the State University of New York. Never, since its first college was founded in 1847, had CUNY charged tuition. For well over a century, it had thus been a boulevard to success for many tens of thousands of poor and working-class New Yorkers. Now combining open admissions with free tuition, CUNY appeared as the vanguard in the democratization of American higher education.
5. At this point, a fierce counteroffensive against the progressive campus movements was launched and coordinated by the White House, now occupied by Richard Nixon. In June Nixon delivered a speech in which he equated "drugs, crime, campus revolts, racial discord, [and] draft resistance," expressed horror at the "patterns of deception" in American life stemming from contempt for moral, legal, and intellectual standards, and denounced the campus movement as central to this national crisis: "We have long considered our colleges and universities citadels of freedom, where the rule of reason prevails. Now both the process of freedom and the rule of reason are under attack. At the same time, our colleges are under pressure to collapse their educational standards . . . ."4 Vice President Agnew (not yet indicted for his own criminal activities) was even more explicit. In early 1970, Agnew argued that there was too high a percentage of Black students in college and condemned "the violence emanating from Black student militancy." Declaring that "College, at one time considered a privilege, is considered to be a right today," he singled out open admissions as one of the main ways "by which unqualified students are being swept into college on the wave of the new socialism."5 Later that year, Roger Freeman--a key educational adviser to Nixon then working for the reelection of California Governor Ronald Reagan--defined quite precisely the target of the conservative counterattack: "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That's dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go through higher education."6
6. The two most menacing institutional sources of the danger described by Freeman were obviously those two great public university systems charging no tuition: the University of California and the City University of New York. Governor Reagan was able to wipe out free tuition at the University of California in 1970, leaving CUNY as the lone threat. The vital task of crippling CUNY was to go on for six more years, outlasting Nixon and falling to his appointed successor, Gerald Ford.7 In 1975, President Ford announced that he would withhold federal aid from New York City, then in a financial crisis, until it eliminated open admissions and free tuition at CUNY. To be financially responsible, Ford declared, New York must no longer be a city that "operates one of the largest universities in the world, free of tuition for any high school graduate, rich or poor, who wants to attend."8 Or, as the President's press secretary explained, New York City had become like "a wayward daughter hooked on heroin": "you don't give her $100 a day to support her habit. You make her go cold turkey to break her habit."9 Finally in 1976, the assault on public education succeeded in terminating the City University's 129-year policy of not charging tuition, thus wiping out the last U.S. stronghold of free public higher education. The university then fired hundreds of young faculty members hired to implement the open admissions program.10
7. In the decades since then, with free tuition looking like a relic of some ancient past or a dream of some utopian future, tuition and other charges have kept rising at public colleges and universities across the nation. Combined with reduced budgets for scholarships, these escalating costs have made it ever more difficult for poor and working-class students to obtain higher education, a trend accelerated in the 1990s by open attacks on affirmative action and remedial education.11
8. Meanwhile, just as the state and federal governments were taking away the funds that could open up the universities, they were beginning to spend far greater sums to build alternative institutions for the poor, with exceptionally easy entrance requirements and lengthy enrollments for people of color. From 1976, the year when free higher education was eradicated, until the end of the century, on average a new prison was constructed in America every week. The prison population went from under 200,000 in 1971 to two million in 2000 as America became the prison capital of the world. The states of California and Texas now run the second and third largest prison systems in the world. By the late 1990s, many states had followed California's lead in spending more money for prisons than for higher education, and across the country far more young black men were in prison than in college.12 Not just coincidentally, the amount removed from public higher education in New York equalled the amount added to the budget for the state's prisons. Felony convictions had stripped the vote from 4.1 million American citizens.13 This proved to be decisive in determining who would soon sit in the White House, for in Florida one-third of African-American men--as many as 204,000 potential Black voters--were disenfranchised.14 The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been effectively repealed by the criminalization of the poor, especially people of color, through the so-called war on drugs, racial profiling, unleashed police, and felony disenfranchisement. Grotesque experiments in dehumanization are being conducted in the form of "supermax" prisons. This has been culture war with a vengeance--and with a very effective strategy.
9. Make no mistake about it. The prison-industrial complex is a major component of a strategy in the culture wars. While disintegrating Black and Latin communities, it attracts the white working class with a carrot--prison-related jobs--and a stick--fear of people of color, imaged as a criminal underclass. This strategy developed from the tactical use of the prison as an overt weapon against the urban rebellions and social movements of the 1960s. But during that period, the imprisonment of activists and rebels helped turn the prison into a cultural matrix that generated political leadership and an explosion of prison literature. Unlike earlier periods when reformers and even revolutionaries viewed prisoners mainly as victims to be rescued by progressive social movements, parts of the movement viewed prisoners as a potential revolutionary vanguard. The Black Panther Party, for example, deeply influenced by Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X--who had shown how prison could be transformed into school--saw what they called the lumpenproletariat as the truly revolutionary class, and their leaders included ex-convicts such as Eldridge Cleaver, as well as George Jackson, the main spokesman of the movement inside the prison. Meanwhile, many convicts and ex-convicts were becoming radicalized, as exemplified by authors as disparate as Etheridge Knight, Iceberg Slim, Piri Thomas, Jack Abbott, and Donald Goines.
10. By the late 1970s, prison literature was becoming a powerful force in the culture wars. Then came the repression that was to build during the 1980s and 1990s. Educational opportunities, including creative writing courses, in prison were defunded. Congress eliminated Pell Grants for prisoners. By 1984, every literary journal devoted to publishing poetry and stories by prisoners was wiped out. "Son of Sam" laws made it illegal for convcts to collect money from their writings.15 And while prison literature was being outlawed by the state, it was being delegitimized by fashionable critical theories that, like New Criticism, revered coterie literature brimming with complexity, indeterminacy, and ambiguity, while disdaining socially purposeful works accessible to a mass audience.
11. Today, amid the growing consciousness of the magnitude and effects of the prison-industrial complex, the literature of the American prison--past and present--is being rediscovered. The American Studies Association has made a major effort to spotlight the prison-industrial complex as a fundamental institution of American society, leading to the development of a variety of exciting new courses centering on the American prison. The 2000 MLA convention itself suggests that something similar could be emerging in literary studies. Besides this panel, there is the Black American Literature and Culture Division session on "Criminality and Incarceration." As I argued there, just as we now assume that one cannot intelligently teach nineteenth-century American literature without recognizing slavery as context, one cannot responsibly teach contemporary American literature without recognizing the American prison system as context. For we are beginning to become aware that, in the words of Ho Chi Minh eighty years ago, one of the great "atrocities" of the "predatory capitalists" is substituting prisons for schools.
H. Bruce Franklin, Rutgers University, Newark
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~hbf/priscult.html
Stu Singer, Presente!
In 1990-91 I spent the week before and after New Years as part of a team Stu lead at the leadership school. He was always calm, quiet, and indefatiguable, no matter what extra work I made for the team. He had a bottomless thirst for coffee, and I never visit Dunkin Donuts without recalling him.
He lead party work in so many areas for so long, and was a real builder of the SWP movement. There was no breach he couldn't fill.
Jay
07/28/2012
http://www.themilitant.com/2012/7629/762954.html
He lead party work in so many areas for so long, and was a real builder of the SWP movement. There was no breach he couldn't fill.
Jay
07/28/2012
Stu Singer: 45 years building communist movement in US
NY meeting celebrates his life, political contributions
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS
NEW YORK—A meeting here June 16 celebrated the life and political contributions of Stu Singer, a member and supporter of the Socialist Workers Party for 45 years. Singer died June 1 at age 65 after a battle with cancer.
The event, attended by some 100 people, was organized by party supporters in the New York area. Among those attending were members of the communist movement Singer worked with over the years; coworkers Edgar Malave and Roosevelt Hudgson, who worked with Stu at AVA Pork Products in Hicksville, N.Y.; and his companion Robin Mace, brothers Jeffrey and Robin Singer, sister Wendy Singer and other family members.
Jack Barnes, national secretary of the SWP, sent a message that was read to the meeting by John Studer, a party leader in New York. “Stu Singer, first and foremost,” Barnes said, “was part of the generations that politically transformed the Socialist Workers Party by initiating and carrying out the turn to industry at the opening of the 1980s.”
Barnes called that political turn “the third proletarian transformation of the communist party in the United States in the past century.” The first, he said, followed the party’s founding in 1919, under the impact of the October 1917 Russian Revolution and “responding to the example and leadership of V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks.” The second was the struggle for a proletarian party begun in 1938 under the guidance of SWP leader James P. Cannon and Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky—a transformation “carried out as Washington entered into the second world imperialist slaughter,” World War II.
If a single book could capture what the SWP accomplished through the turn to industry, Barnes said, it is The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions. “That is truly a book less written than dictated by the actions and voices of hundreds. And Stu is rightfully, and unqualifiedly, one of its authors.” The course it records “inseparably combines practicing revolutionary proletarian politics with involvement as part of the working class through disciplined fractions of party members in industrial workplaces and unions.”
As a member of party branches from Houston to the Minnesota Iron Range, from Des Moines to New York City, “Stu stayed that course for a quarter century,” Barnes said.
1960s Black rights fight
Steve Clark, a member of the SWP National Committee, spoke about the life-changing impact the struggle for Black rights in the U.S. had on Singer. He joined in that fight from his high school years in Roanoke, Va., in the early 1960s on.
In June 1966, along with other supporters of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in Boston, Singer hopped in a car and drove to Mississippi for the last leg of a three-week-long “March Against Fear” on the state capital in Jackson. The action aimed to push back racist terror and discrimination in Mississippi. Its nightly encampments were guarded by Black workers organized in the Deacons for Defense. Sharecroppers, tenant farmers and other working people joined in the action along the way.
The final eight-mile walk from Tougaloo College to a June 26 rally of some 15,000 in Jackson was the largest mobilization for the rights of Blacks and other working people in Mississippi since the bloody crushing of Radical Reconstruction in the 1870s. After the march, Singer and others joined the outpouring in Black neighborhoods, where people opened their porches and doors, inviting others to eat, talk and celebrate late into the night.
From Jackson, Singer went on to spend a week in Lowndes County, Ala., where farmers and workers who were Black were setting a powerful example by breaking from the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties and launching their own independent working-class party—the Lowndes County Freedom Organization.
Singer gained great confidence in the fighting capacities of working people from these experiences, Clark said. Two years earlier he had bought a Militant subscription in Boston and began attending socialist meetings. “But what I saw and learned on that trip settled any questions I had about the course I was going to follow,” Singer later said. He joined the Young Socialist Alliance and then the Socialist Workers Party.
SWP National Committee member Dave Prince spoke about a photo on one of the displays prepared by party supporters for the meeting. It showed the January 1969 Young Socialist Alliance delegation to the 10th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution in which Singer and 12 others participated, including Prince.
After spending a month on the island meeting and talking with working people, Prince said, “we reaffirmed that the revolutionary capacity of toilers to make the revolution in Cuba will be true in the U.S., and a leadership to do that can and will be built.”
Returning from Cuba by cattle boat, Prince said, Singer and other YSA members—despite bouts with their stomachs—worked hard together on board preparing talks on that revolutionary perspective that they ended up giving to hundreds of young people and others when they got back.
Producing books for party work
Gale Shangold chaired the meeting. She and Don Mackle, who also spoke, are party supporters and leaders of the Print Project. Project volunteers help produce, upgrade, and keep in stock more than 300 Pathfinder books and pamphlets used by SWP members and other vanguard workers. Shangold read excerpts from some of nearly 20 messages, several of which commended Singer’s patient assistance during construction projects to upgrade the party’s meeting hall and other facilities in New York.
Mackle said that Singer, a party supporter for the last half-decade of his life, was always conscious about training other volunteers in skills needed to produce books important to the party’s work. Singer was also a “top-notch salesperson” to bookstores in New York, Mackle said, a point seconded by Shangold, who helps lead the project’s sales to retail stores, distributors and libraries.
Disciplined habits, not individualism
In 1982 Singer spent six months in upstate New York at a session of the party’s leadership school that Barnes organized. “As we prepared to jump into following the line of march of the early modern working-class movement, as it affected, transformed and was recounted by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,” Barnes wrote, Singer was asked to organize an introductory class on an outline by SWP leader Farrell Dobbs of his series Revolutionary Continuity: Marxist Leadership in the United States. Dobbs completed the first two volumes before he died in 1983.
In preparing the discussion, Barnes said, “Stu did what we had come to count on from him—a thorough, workmanlike job.”
In the section Singer was asked to focus on, Barnes wrote, Dobbs explained that in addition to turning its back on the social-patriotic Socialist Party leadership in the U.S., who backed Washington’s imperialist military efforts in World War I, the young Communist Party also had to break from revolutionary-minded left socialists such as Eugene Debs and from “the individualist, self-serving radicalism” of the Industrial Workers of the World—the Wobblies—and leaders such as Vincent St. John.
Forging a communist party in the U.S., Barnes wrote, “involves surmounting some extra hurdles. It runs up against the petty bourgeois tradition of American ‘individualism’—a by-product of the long duration of the Westward-shifting frontier and access to free land. It’s even reflected in literature, such as the restless, questing, chasing-and-doing Huck Finn. …
“Who among those early generations of communists in this country,” Barnes said, “could even have imagined that close to a century later, a bumper sticker aimed at workers, among others, would cynically proclaim: ‘He who dies with the most toys win.’”
Singer and others at the leadership school, Barnes said, came to recognize that “the kind of disciplined habits and selflessness” Dobbs was describing at the birth of the communist movement were also the “norms and values that shaped the generations in the party who carried out the turn in the 1970s and made the SWP so unique a party, a proletarian party.”
Barnes quoted from a message by Jeff Powers, a friend of Singer who joined the YSA and SWP in Boston around the same time in the mid-1960s. Powers recalled that Singer once found both of them a job—one they thought at the time was “a perfect gig. Not much work and a company vehicle that served as a delivery truck for leaflets, buttons and posters for the Boston Peace Action Coalition throughout the area, with the gas included.”
At the time, Barnes said, such jobs were “close to universal in what comrades in the YSA, and younger ones in the party, looked for in a job. But that ended for all time with the run-up to the party’s turn. From then on, each generation in the party converged—not only in program, but in our lives and work—with the struggle for a proletarian party as fought for” by Trotsky, Cannon and Dobbs.
“All this rang true to Stu’s roots as a young person who came to the party along the road of the working-class-based fight for Black freedom in the 1960s—one of the great turning points in the U.S. class struggle,” said Barnes.
For a number of years Singer had organized Barnes’ secretariat. His experiences in the Black rights movement in the South, Barnes said, “was substantially responsible for the fact that no one I ever worked with in my secretariat was more attentive to security. … Nothing, nothing, was ever going to happen on Stu’s watch.”
Singer “remained to the end true to the young man who first discovered the truth about capitalism and the class struggle from the racism he saw all around him, hated and combated for the rest of his life,” Barnes concluded.
An appeal for contributions to advance the work of the Socialist Workers Party raised nearly $3,600.
http://www.themilitant.com/2012/7629/762954.html
Friday, July 27, 2012
"Overcoming moods which retard revolution"
Leninist Theory of Revolution and Social Psychology
B. Porshnev
Novosti Press Agency Publishing House
Chapter 4. SUMMATION OF REVOLUTIONARY SENTIMENTS
Prior to the triumph of the October Socialist Revolution Lenin’s interest in socio– psychological processes and phenomena was oriented quite differently than after its victory. Before the victory the comprehensive communist education of the masses was not the active purpose of Leninist social psychology. He described such orientation as deception of the workers by the parties and leaders of the Second International. While socio-economic conditions remain capitalist, while the working people remain under bourgeois oppression which sometimes takes refined forms it would be deceitful to assume that the majority of the exploited was capable of developing firm socialist convictions and character. It is only when exploitation is done away with, Lenin wrote, “...only after this, and only in the actual process of an acute class struggle, that the masses of the toilers and exploited can be educated, trained and organised around the proletariat under whose influence and guidance, they can get rid of the selfishness, disunity, vices and weaknesses engendered by private properly; only then will they he converted into a free union of free workers.” [38•1
Before the victory of the socialist revolution all Lenin’s observations and thoughts on social psychology gravitated to one decisive purpose. In the conditions of an autocratic-capitalist system the important thing was concentration, merging and thus boosting revolutionary sentiments and overcoming moods which retarded the revolution. “It was the task of the older generation,” Lenin said in 1920, “to overthrow the bourgeoisie..., arouse hatred of the bourgeoisie among the masses, and foster class-consciousness and the ability to unite their forces.” [38•2
This was by no means a simple and direct process. On the one hand, as was shown by the 1905 revolution, “The long and undivided rule of the autocracy has stored up revolutionary energy among the people to a degree perhaps never before known in history.” [38•3 On the other hand, that people were part of capitalist society and therefore “not free from the shortcomings and weaknesses of capitalist society. It (the proletariat—Ed.) is fighting for socialism, but at the same time it is fighting against its own shortcomings.” [38•4 Yet at times these shortcomings overrun it. When the First World War flared up, “Everywhere the bourgeoisie vanquished the proletariat for a time, and swept them into the turbid spate of nationalism and chauvinism.” [39•1 But in the final count the main trend made itself felt.
The essence of that basic trend was increasing psychological awareness and clear understanding that the existing society was divided into two opposed camps—“us” and “them”. Lenin wrote of this with great force: “This member of the oppressed class, however, even though one of the well-paid and quite intelligent workers, takes the bull by the horns with that astonishing simplicity and straightforwardness, with that firm determination and amazing clarity of outlook from which we intellectuals are as remote as the stars in the sky. The whole world is divided into two camps: ‘us’, the working people and ‘them’, the exploiters. . . ‘What a painful thing is this ‘exceptionally complicated situation’ created by the revolution,’ that’s how the bourgeois intellectual thinks and feels. ‘We squeezed ‘them’ a bit; ‘they’ won’t dare to lord it over us as they did before. We’ll squeeze again—and chuck them out altogether,’ that’s how the worker thinks and feels.” [39•2
We shall return to the extensive theoretical significance for social psychology as a science of this “us” and “them” principles briefly outlined by Lenin.
At this point it interests us as a concrete indication of the complete, maximum maturity of the proletariat’s revolutionary spirit. Once the awareness of the world’s separation into “us” and “them” has been formed, the decisive battle is inevitable. “The determination of the working class,” wrote Lenin, “its inflexible adherence to the watchword ‘Death rather than surrender!’ is not only a historical factor, it is the decisive, the winning factor.” [40•1 This factor urges the proletariat to give armed battle and win. “An exploited class which did not strive to possess arms, to know how to vise them and to master the military art would be a class of lackeys.” [40•2
Although Lenin held that the task of complete liberation of the spirit of the masses from capitalist heritage became possible only after the socialist revolution, the very revolutionary struggle, the revolution itself served as a powerful educator of the masses.
“The real education of the masses can never be separated from their independent political, and especially revolutionary, struggle. Only struggle educates the exploited class. Only struggle discloses to it the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will.” [40•3 When a revolutionary war attracted and interested the oppressed people, Lenin said, it engendered “the strength and ability to perform miracles.” [40•4
This is true both of the foremost revolutionary class, the proletariat, and the peasantry. In Lenin’s words, “Out of a mob of muzhiks repressed by feudal slavery of accursed memory, this (1905—Ed.) revolution created, for the first time in Russia, a people beginning to understand its rights, beginning to realise its strength.” [41•1
While there was no such reciprocal influence of the revolution itself on the psychology of masses in the pre-revolutionary, “peaceful” conditions, all of Lenin’s socio-psychological observations were centred on one single task—to make the best possible appraisal and unite those potential forces in society which could, directly or indirectly, bring closer the onset and victory of the revolution. It was the job of tirelessly merging all separate rivulets, streams and drops of social protest. This undoubtedly required, first of all, the pursuit of the objective final community of interests, yet the immediate task was the subjective, the psychological aspect. The task, as Lenin saw it, was “to gather, if one may so put it, and concentrate all these drops and streamlets of popular resentment that are brought forth to a far larger extent than we imagine by the conditions of Russian life, and that must be combined into a single gigantic torrent.” [41•2 Leninist science of revolution demanded such scientific detection of any signs of upsurge, even utterly insignificant tendencies which could be brought together and summed up in the revolutionary camp. Lenin wrote as early as 1901 that public unrest was growing among the entire people in Russia and it was the duty of Social-Democrats to teach progressive working– class intellectuals “to take advantage of the flashes of social protest that break out, now in one place, now in another.” [42•1
The foremost task was the summing up of the manifestations of discontent and protest among the working class. Lenin described with amazing precision certain psychological regularities of the effect the actions of one group of workers had on others: “...the workers of neighbouring factories gain renewed courage when they see that their comrades have engaged themselves in struggle... It is often enough for one factory to strike, for strikes to begin immediately in a large number of factories. What a great moral influence strikes have, how they affect workers who see that their comrades have ceased to be slaves and, if only for the time being, have become people on an equal footing with the rich!” [42•2 This “infection” goes beyond spreading such moods and actions, it also raises them to a new level. “When the movement is in its early stage,” wrote Lenin, “the economic strike often has the effect of awakening and stirring up the backward, of making the movement a general one, of raising it to a higher plane.” [42•3 In 1905 Lenin gave a vivid description of one such quantitative and qualitative shift: “The compositors’ strike in Moscow, we are informed, was started by politically backward workers. But the movement immediately slipped out of their control, and became a broad trade union movement. Workers of other trades joined in. Street demonstrations by workers, inevitable if only for the purpose of letting uninformed fellow-workers learn of the strike, turned into political demonstrations, with revolutionary songs and speeches. Long suppressed bitterness against the vile farce of ‘popular’ elections to the State Duma came to the surface.” [43•1
Lenin thus commented on the influence of the workers’ strike movement, on the sympathies and sentiments of the peasants: “Only the waves of mass strikes ... roused the broad masses of peasants from their lethargy. The word ‘striker’ acquired an entirely new meaning among the peasants: it signified a rebel, a revolutionary, a term previously expressed by the word ‘student’. But the ‘student’ belonged to the middle class, to the ‘learned’, to the ‘gentry’, and was therefore alien to the people. The ‘striker’, on the other hand, was of the people; he belonged to the exploited class.” [43•2 This observation traced once again the shaping of the “us” and “them” anti-thesis among the people. Many little bridges were built, such as the preference of the word “striker” to the word “student”, creating a psychological community of the workers and the peasants and their common alienation from the “gentlemen”, although the socio-economic roots of the peasants’ and the workers’ revolutionary sentiments were quite different.
Lenin spoke of the apathy of the peasants only in a political sense, meaning their alienation from the proletarian movement. The peasants came to 1905 with their own blind revolutionism. “The peasant needs land, and his revolutionary feeling, his instinctive, primitive sense of democracy cannot express itself otherwise than by laying hands on the landlords’ lands.” [44•1
Lenin associated this psychological trait with economic peculiarities—there were more remnants of serfdom in the agriculture of Russia than anywhere else, hence greater primitive and direct revolutionism among the peasantry and the working class closely linked with them. Yet this “revolutionary sentiment,” Lenin explained, undoubtedly expressed “a general... protest, rather than proletarian class-consciousness”. [44•2
Both Mensheviks and Economists paid lip service to social psychology, but to them the psychological differences between the workers and the peasants only served to support the apriori dogmatic thesis that no consistent union was possible between the working class and the peasantry in a revolution. Having thus built a stone wall between the proletariat and the peasantry they were incapable of taking a single revolutionary view of the moods of both.
Lenin boldly refuted these dogmas, showed their incompatibility with Marxism. He saw with absolute clarity that revolution in Russia, as in many other countries, could win only by bringing together all mass forces of protest and social discontent, that to disunite them in keeping with scholastic dogmas would be tantamount to betraying the revolution. Genuine unity of the revolutionary efforts of the proletariat and the peasantry required a study of both common and specific features of their social psychology and through this, the possibilities of the workers’ psychological influence on the peasant mass. Lenin described the weaknesses and vices of peasant psychology in a severe and realistic manner. “The peasants .. .were soothed as one soothes little children... How did they deceive the peasants? By feeding them with promises.” [45•1 Above we have read Lenin’s description of the non-revolutionary, reactionary aspect of peasant psychology. Yet even when speaking of its revolutionary side, he tirelessly stresses it is not up to the level of proletarian revolutionism. “ However,” he wrote, “solidarity, organisation, and class-consciousness are naturally much less developed among the peasants than among the workers. Thus there still remains an almost untapped field of serious and rewarding work of political education.” [45•2 These last words show that he did not consider the situation hopeless. Yet, it is of importance that the peasant mass, including the village poor, because of their economic position “have always and in every country proved to be less persistent in their struggle for liberty and for socialism than the workers.” [45•3
All these observations of Lenin serve one purpose—to find everything, including psychological traits, that may be employed not to divide, but to unite the workers and peasants in common revolutionary action. There was, for example, a remarkable point which gladdened Lenin at a time when a certain lack of understanding had developed between Soviet proletarian power and the peasants (1921). He writes of a peasant who was not in sympathy with the Soviet government on several points. “The poor peasants of his district had called him a ‘bourgeois’, and be felt this to be an affront..., a disgraceful name... And there is a world of meaning in the fact that this term has come to be regarded as an odious one by the peasants... It is the basis of our propaganda and agitation, and the influence exercised by the working class through the state.” [46•1 To Lenin this fact was one of the numerous signs that, the working class was guaranteed the support of the peasant masses, except for the kulaks and profiteers. This purely psychological point marked a certain stage in the shaping of “us” in which the peasants, together with the workers, oppose themselves to “them”, the bourgeois.
Thus it was not only at times of revolution or revolutionary situations but also in the years of rudimentary forms of revolutionary struggle, even in the years of dark reaction and decline that Lenin’s mind invariably sought and detected the seeds of revolutionary possibilities of the popular masses, their spontaneous and unconscious moods of discontent and protest, in order to add up and multiply them.
When he was interested in opposite psychological phenomena, such as traditions, habits and customs accumulated by the people over centuries, he did so with a view to possible removal of these obstacles from the path of the revolution.
“The force of habit in millions and tens of millions is a most formidable force,” wrote Lenin. [46•2
To overcome habits is a tremendous job before the revolution and even after its victory. The “struggle against, habits that, in the course of hundreds and thousands of years have become second nature to every petty proprietor is something that requires many long years of persistent organisational work after the exploiting classes have been completely overthrown.” [47•1 What then can he said of the burden of habit in the dark pre– revolulionary years! Lenin remarked with regard to the violation of Finland’s Constitution in 1901: “We are still slaves to such an extent that we are employed to reduce other peoples to slavery.” [47•2
But Lenin paid much less attention to such psychological traits and features as habits and submissiveness than to adding up, even by tiny grains, the sentiments of discontent and struggle.
The people seemed to be asleep, yet their sleep was so light that on the slightest ground they might jump up in great excitement. Lenin spoke of this duality in a lecture on the 1905 Revolution: “The broad masses, however, were still too naive, their mood was too passive, too good– natured, too Christian. They flared up rather quickly; any instance of injustice, excessively harsh treatment by the officers, bad food, etc., could lead to revolt.” [47•3 The same psychological trait of the masses, excitability, as it were, was noted by Lenin in 1905. “Mock elections will never rouse the masses,” he wrote. “However, a strike, a demonstration, mutiny in the armed forces, a serious students’ outbreak, famine, mobilisation, or a conflict in the State Duma, etc., etc., etc., ran really rouse the masses, constantly, at any hour.” [48•1
All these were grains which would in time add up to be one action against I he monarchy and the existing system of all forces of protest, accumulating in society. “The growth of mass strikes, the enlistment of other classes in the struggle, the stale of the organisations, and the temper of the masses will all suggest of themselves the moment when all forces must unite...” [48•2
Despite persisting naive faith in the tsar and primitiveness of social views Lenin emphasised “the significance of the revolutionary instinct now asserting itself among the proletariat. The political protest of the leading oppressed class and its revolutionary energy break through all obstacles, both external, in the form of police bans, and internal, in the form of the ideological immaturity and backwardness of some of the leaders.” [48•3
Lenin, noted a similar disruption of habits and traditions in describing the experiences of the masses in the First World War. He wrote of millions of semi-proletarians and petty bourgeois deceived by chauvinism, “whom the horrors of war will not only intimidate and depress, but, also enlighten, teach, arouse, organise, steel and prepare for the war against (he bourgeoisie of their ’own’ country and ‘foreign’ countries. [48•4 In 1917 Lenin wrote of this with greater certainty: ”...the Russian people—who have always shed blood without a murmur, and have done the will of an oppressive government, when quite ignorant of its aims and purposes—will undoubtedly throw their weight, into the struggle with so much more courage and vigour when it came to fighting for socialism...” [49•1
In conclusion we would like to make the following two points.
Why was Lenin certain that the moods of protest and discontent, the force of resistance would be inevitably summed up? First of all, because the proletariat plays the role of liberator not only of itself, but also of all working people, all society, from exploitation and antagonism. Further, because this authority of the working class relies in turn on the authority of the world revolutionary experience and movement. The working class needs authority, wrote Lenin. “The proletarians of every country need the authority of the worldwide struggle of the proletariat. We need the authority of the theoreticians of international Social-Democracy to enable us properly to understand the programme and tactics of our Party. But, of course, this authority has nothing in common with the official authorities in bourgeois science and police politics.” [49•2
Finally, it is to be noted that Lenin had an equally clear understanding of the psychology of the masses and of the upper classes. Whereas at one social pole you have growing protest and wrath, on the other, you have the development of opposing attitudes of the upper classes. We shall quote an example of how Lenin characterised these attitudes. “Generally speaking, it must be said that our reactionaries (including, of course, the entire top bureaucracy) reveal a fine political instinct. They are so well-experienced in combatting oppositions, popular ‘revolts’, religious sects, rebellions, and revolutionaries, that they are always on the qui vive and understand far better than naive simpletons and ‘honest fogies’ that the autocracy can never reconcile itself to self-reliance, honesty, independent convictions, and pride in real knowledge of any kind whatsoever. So thoroughly imbued are they with the spirit of subservience and red tape that prevails in the hierarchy of Russian officialdom that they have contempt for any one who is unlike Gogol’s Akaky Akakiyevich, or, to use a more contemporary simile, the Man in a Case.” [50•1
Notes
[38•1] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 31, p. 187.
[38•2] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 31, p. 290.
[38•3] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 8, p. 448.
[38•4] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 29, p. 208.
[39•1] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 21, p. 418.
[39•2] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 26, p. 120.
[40•1] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 30, p. 454.
[40•2] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 35, p. 195.
[40•3] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 23, p. 241.
[40•4] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 30, p. 153.
[41•1] Lenin. Coll. Works, Vol. 17, p. 89.
[41•2] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 5, p. 420.
[42•1] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 5, p. 288.
[42•2] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 4, p. 315.
[42•3] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 18, p. 84.
[43•1] Lenin, Colt. Works, Vol. 9, p. 348.
[43•2] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 23, p. 243.
[44•1] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 8, p. 247.
[44•2] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 12, p. 64.
[45•1] Lenin, Coll. Works. Vol. 25, pp. 140, 147.
[45•2] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 17, p. 382.
[45•3] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 11, p. 395.
[46•1] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 32, p. 118.
[46•2] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 31, p. 44.
[47•1] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 29, p. 523.
[47•2] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 5, p. 310.
[47•3] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 23, p. 245.
[48•1] Lenin, Coll. Works. Vol. 9. p. 366.
[48•2] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 18, p 109.
[48•3] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 8, p. 93.
[48•4] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 21, p. 40.
[49•1] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 26, p. 346.
[49•2] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 11, pp. 412–413.
[50•1] Lenin, Coll. Works, Vol. 5, pp. 281–282.
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