Wikileaks

The battle over Wikileaks has only just begun

Colleen Bolger 24 December 2010

Julian Assange has been released from custody but he is not a free man. After 9 days in solitary confinement, the British High Court on 17 December upheld a magistrate’s decision to release Assange on bail. However, this is only the first of the legal battles he faces. A triumphant Assange addressed his supporters and media outside the court: “I hope to continue my work.” Of the prosecution he said, “It has not altered my position; in fact, it has confirmed my position to me personally that we are on the right path. It has given me enough anger about the situation to last me 100 years.” His defiance should spur on his supporters to continue to fight to defend Wikileaks: In solitary confinement in the bottom of a Victorian prison I had time to reflect on the conditions of those people around the world also in solitary confinement, also on remand in conditions that were more difficult than those faced by me. Those people also need your attention and support. Assange was likely conscious that the next day Bradley Manning, the soldier who leaked the cables, would celebrate his 23rd birthday alone in a prison cell in Virginia. Like a rat in a cage, he is kept in solitary confinement under 24 hour surveillance. Arguably the rat is better off as it can run around a wheel. Manning on the other hand is prevented from exercising in his cell where he spends 23 hours a day as well as being denied sheets and pillows for his bed. Nothing short of torture, these conditions are designed to break the spirit of a young soldier who simply adhered to the Geneva conventions of war, in reporting a war crime he witnessed. That crime is the cold blooded killing of Reuters journalists and civilians as they attempted to get medical assistance. It is precisely because Wikileaks has exposed this and so many other crimes that the organisation, its figurehead and Manning have been hounded. As Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff when he was Secretary of State under George W. Bush) said, “Wikileaks has teased the genie of transparency out of a very opaque bottle, and powerful forces in America, who thrive on secrecy, are trying desperately to stuff the genie back in.” In early February Assange will face his first hearing of to have him extradited to Sweden for questioning. The Independent has reported that Sweden and the United States have been negotiating to have him extradited from Sweden to the United States. The Swedish prosecutor’s office has confirmed any charges laid by the United States would take precedence over the possible charges he faces in Sweden, prompting Assange’s lawyer, Mark Stephens to ask whether they were merely a “holding charge” so that “ultimately they can get their mitts on him”. Assange also believes that an indictment under the Espionage Act, which was used against Daniel Ellsberg, is imminent. Further, his lawyers believe that a secret grand jury investigation is already under way to try to establish that he is an accomplice to Manning. US Vice President Jo Biden added his voice to those who have likened the Wikileaks founder to Osama bin Laden, calling Assange a “high-tech terrorist”. Fox News commentators continue to call for him to be assassinated. Bob Bechell suggested that rather than having him tried in a court, someone should “illegally shoot the son of a bitch”. Bank of America has announced it will not process transactions to Wikileaks. It is the latest in a list of companies – including Paypal and Amazon – that have complied with the US Government’s insistence that Wikileaks be treated as a terrorist organisation and denied service. In the words of Assange, this is “business McCarthyism”. He added, “There is a threat to my life. There is a threat to my staff. There are significant risks facing us.” Nonetheless Assange and Wikileaks remain intransigent in their commitment to continue to publish the leaks and plan to release a major leak that will devastate the US banking sector early in 2011. So long as there are these attempts to silence Wikileaks, we must continue to fight for Assange and the organisation. The protests organised around the country while Assange was in prison and after were very positive, and received international press coverage. Protests are planned around the country again through January in the lead up to the extradition hearing. Supporters of Wikileaks should be joining the facebook groups, inviting friends to the demonstrations, putting up posters in their suburbs, leafleting train stations and using all mechanisms to publicise the rallies in their capital cities. It is important that these demonstrations build on the anger displayed at the first round of demonstrations, to establish an ongoing campaign to free Assange and in so doing standing up for our democratic rights.

The end of the party

Reflections on Adorno on Beckett

One of the benefits of moving to Dublin from Portsmouth, where I lived and worked for nearly forty years, is the accessibility of top class theatre. Since my arrival in August I have seen productions of O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars (at the Abbey), Miller’s Death of a Salesman (at The Gate), Euripides’ Medea (at The Samuel Beckett), Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (at Bewley’s), Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkmann ( at The Abbey) and two Samuel Beckett’s, Endgame (at The Gate) and Happy Days (at The Project Arts Centre). Seeing the Becketts led me, on the recommendation of a friend, to read T.W. Adorno’s essay ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’ New German Critique, No. 26, Critical Theory and Modernity (Spring - Summer,1982), pp. 119-150.

Adorno’s merit in my eyes is that he defended Beckett (and Joyce and modernism) against Lukacs’ fundamentally conservative condemnation. Nevertheless I found myself in serious disagreement with his interpretation of, and response to, Endgame.

Adorno was plunged into deep melancholy despair by what Victor Serge called the ‘midnight in the century’ i.e. the twin triumphs of Hitler and Stalin, combined, in Adorno’s case, with his view of the twentieth century culture industry as a system of totalitarian control and domination which more or less excluded the possibility of significant resistance. It is tempting to describe Adorno’s attitude as an extreme pessimism, but its main characteristic is not so much gloominess about the future prospects of humanity as a determined negativity about the present, a refusal to countenance the existence of positive developments either in the present system or in rebellion against it. In 1947 he wrote:

'In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.'
Dialectic of Enlightenment, Verso ed. London 1979 p.3.

Adorno focused much of his miserabilism on the holocaust; witness his famous declaration that ‘there can be no lyric poetry after Auschwitz’. This particular claim has of course been refuted in practice many times over but I also think his general gloom was, though understandable, unjustified, not because the most terrible disasters had not occurred or because the most terrible crimes had not been committed (Auschwitz, the Gulag, the Russian Front, Hiroshima and Nagasaki etc. etc,) but because the situation was still contradictory. The Nazis had been defeated; there had been the resistance movements in Italy, France, Greece, the Balkans, and elsewhere in Europe; India was gaining its independence; China was on the road to revolution, and so on.

In my opinion the roots of Adorno’s negativism lay not so much in the horrors of the holocaust as in his isolated elitism which cut him off, and made him unable to see or respond to any positive developments or initiatives, cultural or political, coming up from below. Adorno was a ‘Marxist’ of sorts, but at no point in his life did he have any engagement with the workers’ movement, or flesh and blood workers in struggle [unlike Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Gramsci, etc]. When he encountered revolting students in his Institute in the sixties he called the police. On the cultural front his elitist tunnel vision was epitomised by his notorious denunciation of jazz. In Adorno’s defence it is sometimes claimed that he was using ‘jazz’ as a general term for what today would be called ‘pop music’ but what is to be said of someone who pronounces general anathemas on contemporary music as though Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Bessie Smith, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk etc did not exist. He claimed that

...culture now impresses the same stamp on everything. Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm

But were Billie Holiday, Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly really the same as Al Jolson,Stepin Fetchit and Fred Astaire?

In any event, Adorno evidently believed that in Samuel Beckett he had found a kindred spirit. And here is the root of my disagreement. This was not at all my concrete response to the two productions I have just seen, which I found positively inspiring and in a strange but real way uplifting¹. Nor is it my considered reading of Beckett as a whole. Beckett is not about surrendering to pessimism and negativity but looking into the abyss and defying it. In this respect Beckett stands in the tradition of the Shakespeare of King Lear, of Rembrandt’s last self portraits and Goya’s Black paintings. Consider three of Beckett’s endings. The Unnamable ends as follows

Perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

Waiting for Godot ends:

ESTRAGON: Well? Shall we go?
VLADIMIR: Pull on your trousers
ESTRAGON: What?
VLADIMIR: Pull on your trousers
ESTRAGON: You want me to pull off my trousers?
VLADIMIR: Pull ON your trousers
ESTRAGON: (realising his trousers are down). True
He pulls up his trousers
VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go?
ESTRAGON: Yes, let's go.
They do not move.

And then the behaviour of Clov at the end of Endgame which has to be described rather than quoted. After their long tense (and oppressive) relationship Hamm tells Clov he doesn’t need him any more and Clov replies ‘I’ll leave you’. Clov exits and returns ‘Enter Clov, dressed for the road. Panama hat, tweed coat, raincoat over his arm, umbrella, bag. He halts by the door and stands there, impassive and motionless, his eyes fixed on Hamm, till the end.’ Will Clov leave or remain? It is left an open question.

Three endings, three Beckettian variations on Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be?’ question. One ultimately affirmative answer ‘I’ll go on’, and two where the question is batted to the audience to answer for itself. This is challenging, but it is not despair or nihilism.

In contrasting Beckett’s attitude and stance to Adorno’s (and to others who attribute nihilism to him) it is worth noting that during the war Beckett joined the French Resistance and did important and dangerous work as a courier and translator until his unit was betrayed to the Gestapo by a double agent, whereupon he and his partner had to flee (on foot, hiding in barns etc) to a village in unoccupied France where he continued to aid the Maquis in the mountains. For this he was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille de la Resistance by the French Government. He thus engaged in more important, more serious and certainly more dangerous practical anti-fascist work than Adorno or the rest of the Frankfurt School put together.

Adorno’s projection of his own attitude onto Beckett results in a number of evidently false claims and misreading. For example he writes:

The condition presented in the play [Endgame] is nothing other than that in which "there's no more nature." Indistinguishable is the phase of completed reification of the world, which leaves no remainder of what was not made by humans; it is permanent catastrophe, along with a catastrophic event caused by humans themselves, in which nature has been extinguished and nothing grows any longer.

This sounds impressive - ‘completed reification of the world’ – but the moment it is actually thought about is clearly an exaggeration to the point of being definitely untrue. A world in which there is no remainder of what was not made by humans, in which there is no more nature, is manifestly impossible, and impossible to present in a play. Even if there were the most destructive imaginable nuclear war (and it is possible to think of Endgame as being set in such a world, with Hamm and Clov as the last survivors), the one thing that would not be abolished is ‘nature’, just as the one thing climate change does NOT threaten is the survival of the planet. Having written these lines I then realised that in the play Hamm calls it an exaggeration too.

HAMM: Nature has forgotten us
CLOV: There's no more nature
HAMM: No more nature! You exaggerate.
CLOV: in the vicinity
HAMM: But we breathe, we change! We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom! Our ideals!
CLOV: Then she hasn't forgotten us
HAMM: But you say there is none
CLOV : (sadly) No one that ever lived ever thought so crooked as we.

Adorno says:

Hope creeps out of a world in which it is no more conserved than pap and pralines, and back where it came from, back into death. From it, the play derives its only consolation, a stoic one:

CLOV: There are so many terrible things now.
HAMM: No, no, there are not so many now.

But think for a moment about the state of the world when Endgame was written (it was first performed 3 April 1957): the statements by both Clov and Hamm were quite literally true. On the one hand there were ‘so many terrible things’ – the possibility of nuclear war, starvation in the Third World , the crushing in blood of the Hungarian Revolution, Suez, the war in Algeria and so on. On the other hand ‘there were not so many now’ compared to the recent past – the Second World War was over, the Nazis had been defeated, France was no longer occupied, the standard of living of working class people in Europe was rising etc. Why does Clov and Hamm’s realistic assessment of the situation signify hope creeping out of the world and back into death?

Particularly striking is the difficulty Adorno gets into over humour. Beckett is funny, very funny. Adorno who is never funny, appears not to approve of humour. He writes:

Humour itself has become foolish, ridiculous - who could still laugh at basic comic texts like Don Quixote or Gargantua - and Beckett carries out the verdict on humour. The jokes of the damaged people are themselves damaged. They no longer reach anybody

And

Psychoanalysis explains clownish humour as a regression back to a primordial ontogenetic level, and Beckett's regressive play descends to that level. But the laughter it inspires ought to suffocate the laughter. That is what happened to humour, after it became - as an aesthetic medium - obsolete, repulsive, devoid of any canon of what can be laughed at; without any place for reconciliation, where one could laugh; without anything between heaven and earth harmless enough to be laughed at.

Again one has to say this simply isn’t true. Humour has not become aesthetically obsolete and repulsive. I don’t know about Gargantua but it is clearly possible to laugh at/with Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Joyce, Chaplin, Keating, Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, Bill Hicks and The Producers, to offer a fairly random list. And things don’t have to be harmless to be laughed as most of those examples from the Fool in Lear down to Mel Brooks demonstrate. And the laughter inspired by Beckett doesn’t suffocate the laughter.

When, at the start of Happy Days, Winnie waking, buried up to her waste in a pit of sand, proclaims ‘Another heavenly day!’ it is wonderfully funny. It is obviously ironically funny because she is half buried in sand, but, at the same time, it is happily funny because there are still ‘heavenly days’ (with bright sunshine, blue skies etc) and this may well be going to be one. This capacity to write lines that are true in two opposite senses simultaneously, is as Stephen Spender has observed², a key feature of Beckett’s art, and to grasp only the negative, bitter side and never the affirmative side, which is what Adorno does, is to misread him.

When Hamm at the start of Endgame asks ‘Can there be misery - loftier than mine?’ it is very funny. He could be parodying Adorno, who specialised in lofty misery. And, after all, what about the trousers?
Adorno is also wide of the mark when he attributes ‘meaninglessness’ and ‘incomprehensibility’ to Endgame.
The interpretation of Endgame therefore cannot chase the chimera of expressing its meaning with the help of philosophical mediation. Understanding it can mean nothing other than understanding its incomprehensibility, or concretely reconstructing its meaning structure - that it has none.
Adorno claims textual support:
Not meaning anything becomes the only meaning. The mortal fear of the
dramatic figures, if not of the parodied drama itself, is the distortedly comical fear that they could mean something or other:

HAMM: We're not beginning to... to... mean something?
CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that's a good one!

But again Adorno is misreading. There is no ‘mortal’ fear here, nor is it ‘distortedly comical’. It’s a joke and the joke is funny for the same reason ‘Another heavenly day!’ is funny: it contains the possibility of opposite meanings, resigned irony (not fear) and positive affirmation or the glimmer of hope of positive affirmation.

The meaning of meaninglessness is a philosophical conundrum and the notion of the interpretation of the meaning of any work art, especially a great one, is highly problematic. I will not explore either question here except to say that any ‘interpretation’, however accurate, is almost certain to be ‘less’ than the art work itself i.e. to express only some of the work’s ‘meaning’ , which really is the work as a whole, and to express it less well (less precisely, less powerfully etc.) Nevertheless I want to say that Endgame, and this goes for Beckett as a whole, is neither incomprehensible nor meaningless. On the contrary it is not difficult to follow, the language is simple and packed with meaning, or rather multiple meanings, and as for the play as a whole some, not all, of its meaning can be grasped and expressed fairly straightforwardly.

Endgame (and Beckett’s work as a whole) is a study in and of alienation. The most profound diagnosis of alienation was made by Marx 166 years ago in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Marx’s analysis, expressed as briefly as possible, was that capitalism was based on the alienated labour of working people. The alienation of labour was so significant because it is through labour that the human race created itself and continues to create itself. As a result of the alienation of labour people come to be dominated by the products of their own work which form a hostile world standing over and against them. They also become estranged from themselves, their own essential human nature (as creative makers), from other people (because labour is social labour and mediates the relationship between people), and from nature (because labour is the mediation between human’s and nature.)

Endgame is an exploration of the human condition in this alien world. I do not mean by this that Beckett had read or was influenced by Marx (I don’t know if he was or not) but he experienced alienation and its effects – we all do. The threat of nuclear war, which haunted the imagination of both the general public and many artists in this period, was (and is) an extreme manifestation of alienation, of the human race being threatened with annihilation by the products of its own hands and brains. Endgame at least alludes to such a catastrophe, at least hints that it may have happened: the empty corpsed world seen through the telescope, the seeds that will never sprout.

Alienated labour cripples us physically and spiritually, reduces us as human beings, as Hamm and Clov, Nagg and Nell are crippled and reduced. Alienation distorts all human relations including the most intimate; it separates us from our fellows and sets us against each other. The relationships presented in Endgame between Hamm and Clov, as master and servant, and Nagg and Nell, are clinical dissections of alienated relations. Think of Nell and Nagg in their bins trying to kiss each other but unable to reach.

But plumbing the depths of alienation and laying them bare, as Beckett does and Marx did, does not at all signify surrender or hopelessness. Indeed presenting them to the world in a work of art is in a sense already an act of resistance. And it matters that buried within Endgame are two tragic love stories. When Nell first emerges from her bin her first words to Nagg are ‘What is it, my pet? (Pause) Time for love?’ and a subterranean elegiac note of memory of their past love, in the Ardennes, at Lake Como, permeates their exchanges. Early in the play there is this dialogue between Hamm and Clov:

HAMM:... Why do you stay with me?
CLOV: Why do you keep me?
HAMM: There's no one else
CLOV: There's nowhere else
Pause
HAMM: You're leaving me all the same
CLOV: I'm trying
HAMM: You don't love me
CLOV: No
HAMM: You loved me once
CLOV: Once!
HAMM: I've made you suffer too much?
CLOV: It's not that?
HAMM (shocked) I haven't made you suffer too much?
CLOV: Yes!
HAMM (relieved) Ah you gave me a fright! (Pause.Coldly) Forgive me. (Pause. Louder.) I said,
Forgive me.

Then at the end, when Clov is on the point of leaving, Hamm asks him to say something before he goes, ‘ A few words ... from your heart’ and, amazingly, Clov responds:

They said to me, That's love, yes, yes, not a doubt ...

It is because I believe that this affirmation of resistance (‘I’ll go on’) and affirmation of humanity, in spite of everything, is as much integral to Beckett as all the well justified bleakness, that I disagree so strongly with Adorno.


Notes:
¹'After seeing Happy Days I watched the audience leaving the auditorium and was struck by how many were smiling.
²‘Samuel Beckett's theme is the very Irish one in this century: the identity of opposites [my emphasis –JM], a theme with which Yeats made so much play in his idea of the "Antinomes," and which is implicit in Joyce, where the subjective view of the world merges into its opposites, the objective and universal.’ Stephen Spender, ‘Lifelong Suffocation’, New York Times , 1958, http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/reviews/beckett-unnamable.html.
Spender calls this an Irish theme but of course ‘the identity of opposites’ is a key idea in the Hegelian, and Marxist, dialectic, discussed, incidentally, by Lenin who preferred the term ‘unity of opposites’.

John Molyneux
10 December 2010

A handbook for every class-conscious worker

The three sources and three component parts of Marxism

Written by VI Lenin

Friday, 24 December 2010

This short but important article was published in 1913 in Prosveshcheniye No. 3, and was dedicated to the Thirtieth Anniversary of Marx’s death. We are grateful to the Marxist Internet archive for making this and a wealth of other material available. We believe that the ideas of Lenin, as well as those of Karl Marx, Frederich Engels, James Connolly and Leon Trotsky are vital weapons for the Labour and Trade Union Movement across the whole of this island and internationally. Prosveshcheniye (Enlightenment) was a Bolshevik social, political and literary monthly published legally in St. Petersburg from December 1911 onwards. Its inauguration was proposed by Lenin to replace the Bolshevik journal Mysl (Thought), a Moscow publication banned by the tsarist government. Lenin directed the work of the journal from abroad and wrote the following articles for it: “Fundamental Problems of the Election Campaign”, “Results of the Election”, “Critical Remarks on the National Question”, “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination”, and others. The journal was suppressed by the tsarist government in June 1914, on the eve of the First World War. Publication was resumed in the autumn of 1917 but only one double number appeared; this number contained two articles by Lenin: “Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?” and “A Review of the Party Programme”. Throughout the civilised world the teachings of Marx evoke the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both official and liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of “pernicious sect”. And no other attitude is to be expected, for there can be no “impartial” social science in a society based on class struggle. In one way or another, all official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery. To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as foolishly naïve as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers’ wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital. But this is not all. The history of philosophy and the history of social science show with perfect clarity that there is nothing resembling “sectarianism” in Marxism, in the sense of its being a hidebound, petrified doctrine, a doctrine which arose away from the high road of the development of world civilisation. On the contrary, the genius of Marx consists precisely in his having furnished answers to questions already raised by the foremost minds of mankind. His doctrine emerged as the direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism. The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism. It is these three sources of Marxism, which are also its component parts that we shall outline in brief. I The philosophy of Marxism is materialism. Throughout the modern history of Europe, and especially at the end of the eighteenth century in France, where a resolute struggle was conducted against every kind of medieval rubbish, against serfdom in institutions and ideas, materialism has proved to be the only philosophy that is consistent, true to all the teachings of natural science and hostile to superstition, cant and so forth. The enemies of democracy have, therefore, always exerted all their efforts to “refute”, under mine and defame materialism, and have advocated various forms of philosophical idealism, which always, in one way or another, amounts to the defence or support of religion. Marx and Engels defended philosophical materialism in the most determined manner and repeatedly explained how profoundly erroneous is every deviation from this basis. Their views are most clearly and fully expounded in the works of Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and Anti-Dühring, which, like the Communist Manifesto, are handbooks for every class-conscious worker. But Marx did not stop at eighteenth-century materialism: he developed philosophy to a higher level, he enriched it with the achievements of German classical philosophy, especially of Hegel’s system, which in its turn had led to the materialism of Feuerbach. The main achievement was dialectics, i.e., the doctrine of development in its fullest, deepest and most comprehensive form, the doctrine of the relativity of the human knowledge that provides us with a reflection of eternally developing matter. The latest discoveries of natural science—radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements—have been a remarkable confirmation of Marx’s dialectical materialism despite the teachings of the bourgeois philosophers with their “new” reversions to old and decadent idealism. Marx deepened and developed philosophical materialism to the full, and extended the cognition of nature to include the cognition of human society. His historical materialism was a great achievement in scientific thinking. The chaos and arbitrariness that had previously reigned in views on history and politics were replaced by a strikingly integral and harmonious scientific theory, which shows how, in consequence of the growth of productive forces, out of one system of social life another and higher system develops—how capitalism, for instance, grows out of feudalism. Just as man’s knowledge reflects nature (i.e., developing matter), which exists independently of him, so man’s social knowledge (i.e., his various views and doctrines—philosophical, religious, political and so forth) reflects the economic system of society. Political institutions are a superstructure on the economic foundation. We see, for example, that the various political forms of the modern European states serve to strengthen the domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat. Marx’s philosophy is a consummate philosophical materialism which has provided mankind, and especially the working class, with powerful instruments of knowledge. II Having recognised that the economic system is the foundation on which the political superstructure is erected, Marx devoted his greatest attention to the study of this economic system. Marx’s principal work, Capital, is devoted to a study of the economic system of modern, i.e., capitalist, society. Classical political economy, before Marx, evolved in England, the most developed of the capitalist countries. Adam Smith and David Ricardo, by their investigations of the economic system, laid the foundations of the labour theory of value. Marx continued their work; he provided a proof of the theory and developed it consistently. He showed that the value of every commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time spent on its production. Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people. The exchange of commodities expresses the connection between individual producers through the market. Money signifies that the connection is becoming closer and closer, inseparably uniting the entire economic life of the individual producers into one whole. Capital signifies a further development of this connection: man’s labour-power becomes a commodity. The wage-worker sells his labour-power to the owner of land, factories and instruments of labour. The worker spends one part of the day covering the cost of maintaining himself and his family (wages), while the other part of the day he works without remuneration, creating for the capitalist surplus-value, the source of profit, the source of the wealth of the capitalist class. The doctrine of surplus-value is the corner-stone of Marx’s economic theory. Capital, created by the labour of the worker, crushes the worker, ruining small proprietors and creating an army of unemployed. In industry, the victory of large-scale production is immediately apparent, but the same phenomenon is also to be observed in agriculture, where the superiority of large-scale capitalist agriculture is enhanced, the use of machinery increases and the peasant economy, trapped by money-capital, declines and falls into ruin under the burden of its backward technique. The decline of small-scale production assumes different forms in agriculture, but the decline itself is an indisputable fact. By destroying small-scale production, capital leads to an increase in productivity of labour and to the creation of a monopoly position for the associations of big capitalists. Production itself becomes more and more social—hundreds of thousands and millions of workers become bound together in a regular economic organism—but the product of this collective labour is appropriated by a handful of capitalists. Anarchy of production, crises, the furious chase after markets and the insecurity of existence of the mass of the population are intensified. By increasing the dependence of the workers on capital, the capitalist system creates the great power of united labour. Marx traced the development of capitalism from embryonic commodity economy, from simple exchange, to its highest forms, to large-scale production. And the experience of all capitalist countries, old and new, year by year demonstrates clearly the truth of this Marxian doctrine to increasing numbers of workers. Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital. III When feudalism was overthrown and “free” capitalist society appeared in the world, it at once became apparent that this freedom meant a new system of oppression and exploitation of the working people. Various socialist doctrines immediately emerged as a reflection of and protest against this oppression. Early socialism, however, was utopian socialism. It criticised capitalist society, it condemned and damned it, it dreamed of its destruction, it had visions of a better order and endeavoured to convince the rich of the immorality of exploitation. But utopian socialism could not indicate the real solution. It could not explain the real nature of wage-slavery under capitalism, it could not reveal the laws of capitalist development, or show what social force is capable of becoming the creator of a new society. Meanwhile, the stormy revolutions which everywhere in Europe, and especially in France, accompanied the fall of feudalism, of serfdom, more and more clearly revealed the struggle of classes as the basis and the driving force of all development. Not a single victory of political freedom over the feudal class was won except against desperate resistance. Not a single capitalist country evolved on a more or less free and democratic basis except by a life-and-death struggle between the various classes of capitalist society. The genius of Marx lies in his having been the first to deduce from this the lesson world history teaches and to apply that lesson consistently. The deduction he made is the doctrine of the class struggle. People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old institution, how ever barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes. And there is only one way of smashing the resistance of those classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, the forces which can—and, owing to their social position, must—constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organise those forces for the struggle. Marx’s philosophical materialism alone has shown the proletariat the way out of the spiritual slavery in which all oppressed classes have hitherto languished. Marx’s economic theory alone has explained the true position of the proletariat in the general system of capitalism. Independent organizations of the proletariat are multiplying all over the world, from America to Japan and from Sweden to South Africa. The proletariat is becoming enlightened and educated by waging its class struggle; it is ridding itself of the prejudices of bourgeois society; it is rallying its ranks ever more closely and is learning to gauge the measure of its successes; it is steeling its forces and is growing irresistibly. Published: Prosveshcheniye No 3., March 1913. Signed: V. I.. Published according to the Prosveshcheniye text. Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1977, Moscow, Volume 19, pages 21-28. Translated: The Late George Hanna Original Transcription: Lee Joon Koo and Marc Luzietti Re-Marked up by: K. Goins (2008) Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive (1996). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.

Romanian laments effects of capitalism

Romania: 21 years since the Revolution- We were free. And then?

Written by Diana-Adela Ionita

Wednesday, 22 December 2010

In December’89 thousands of Romanians struggled against the communist regime in the only violent revolution from an Eastern Bloc country that ended with the execution of the state leader. Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife Elena were executed on Christmas day, after an extremely controversial trial. During the protests, many people died for refashioning the nation in accordance with their dreams of establishing a democracy. Yes, they’ve achieved to change the destiny of our society. After so many years of oppression, we were finally free. But what have we done with our liberty in 21 years? Our democracy came with hungry eyes and starving soul, dreaming of oranges and bananas, of Coca-Cola and blue jeans, of good music and quality books: simple things that we were not allowed to have before. Although the tears for our heroes haven’t dried yet, our democracy learned how to smile and hope. It was our chance for a better life, wasn’t it? In 2004 (on March 29), Romania joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, following the decision taken at the Prague Summit, in November 2002. At that time, our democracy was 15. Becoming a NATO partner during its teenage phase was one major step towards maturity, with decisive influence on the foreign and domestic policy of the country. In 2007 (on January 1), after 18 years since the Revolution, Romania joined the European Union. Our democracy was officially at the age of majority in most of the states, starting to achieve more rights, but also to assume bigger responsibilities. At the age of 21, it is beyond doubt in its adulthood, waiting to join the Schengen Area in March next year. But its future regarding this episode it is doubtful already and almost postponed. If today someone would come in Romania and ask what we did with our liberty he would most probably find a lot of locked doors - abandoned homes and children for an unfulfilled American dream; one-way tickets abroad for poor quality jobs; closed national factories for the illusion advertising of imported products. The ones that still populate this almost deserted land would perhaps answer his question by talking about the credit agreements with the IMF and the economic austerity measures that they have to endure, the lack of employment opportunities, weak civil society, corruption, bureaucracy or citizen apathy. They will find themselves bored with the conversation, decide right on the spot that there’s noting left worth doing here and just leave. Anyway, they don’t seem to believe in miracles anymore, nor in fighting for making a difference. They will just enlarge the number of Romanians who have gone abroad, which has already increased three times in 2010 compared with last year. Is this the change for which our heroes died? Diana-Adela Ionita/ LaSpecula.com

Last Updated ( Thursday, 23 December 2010 )

Karl and Fred's excellent adventure

Carleton Prof Takes Unique Approach to Teaching About Communism

OTTAWA – Carleton Prof. George Rigakos is taking an “anything but textbook” approach to his teaching and writing. He is creating a four-part comic book series that features the original words of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as expressed in the Communist Manifesto. The first volume is now available.

“The Manifesto is a foundational and fundamental text that students should be aware of,” says Rigakos. “I thought it would be intriguing to bring this part of history alive using a graphic novel or comic book approach that would engage more students.”

He adds: “I am also hoping that this approach will spark a more informed discourse by the general public about a political pamphlet that forged the ideological foundations for one of the most idealistic yet repressive eras of human history.”

Written in 1848, the Manifesto described the Communist League’s purpose and program by taking an analytical approach to the history and concept of class struggles. Authors like Maerin Seymour-Smith have included it on a list of the 100 most influential books ever written.

“The Communist Manifesto lends itself to the graphic novel or comic book format as it can be interpreted as a story about villains, victims and heroes,” says Rigakos. “The original work of Marx and Engels focused on the bourgeoisie, the proletariat and their heroes - the Communists, which will each constitute separate comic books in the series.”

Rigakos points out that the format has been used by many others to engage the public. “Comic books are about more than just superheroes. They have been used as a venue for great works of literature on through to portraying important social issues. I think our series is a real work of art.”

Rigakos, who is an associate professor in the Department of Law, researches in the area of political economy and policing. He is also head of the editorial collective for Red Quill Books, a new peer-reviewed publishing house committed to the support of critical political economy, sociology, criminology, legal studies and social science research.

Their Scrooge and Ours

December 16 2010

The Pagan winter

Charles Dickens and his 'A Christmas carol' are routinely represented as a conscience-pricking call for charity at this time of the year. But, argues Harley Filben, there is more to the novel than that

The modern Christmas is not as old as it would like you to think - a Bacchanalian feast, in which the aim is to start eating in mid-afternoon and finish drinking in the small hours. The persistent influence of Puritan and Calvinist Protestantism in the early period of bourgeois ascendancy in this country had rather different ideas on how to commemorate the birth of Our Lord - asceticism, sobriety, moral reflection ...

The most enduring cultural document of the birth of ‘the festive season’ remains A Christmas carol by Charles Dickens, which appeared in 1843, at the tail end of a renewed interest in pre-Puritan religious celebration. Indeed, that part of the novel on which moral instruction weighs least heavily - the third ‘stave’, the visit from the Ghost of Christmas Present - takes the form of a jaunt through the streets of London, alive with communal celebration - snowball fights on the rooftops; the masses congregating in churches and chapels, “flocking through the streets in their best clothes, and their gayest faces”; the family feasts, in poor households and rich, miraculously free from social tension and unbearable in-laws.

Dickens - and his protagonist, Scrooge - has to confront a contradiction here, between Christian religiosity as a bulwark of the existing social relations of industrial exploitation and impersonal finance, and Christianity as an embodiment of shared, communal life. Like other contemporary Christmas revivalists, he endeavours to take the festival back, in some sense, ‘to its roots’, however mythical these roots may be. Dickens in fact goes further back than anyone else - he somewhat daringly attempts to save Christmas by way of a return to a distinctively Pagan spirituality.

This is most visible in the homology between A Christmas carol and what is now known as ‘urban fantasy’. The latter (for example, Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden novels, or Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere) rewrites the contemporary urban landscape as split between the everyday existence of its human residents and a clandestine demi-monde of demons, spectres and undead. Instead of presenting a fully-realised fantasy world, the fantastic functions as an oblique slant on a space we all (think we) recognise. (The allegorical resonances are generally hard to miss - after all, cities really are divided spaces, ethnically and economically.)

A Christmas carol is a peculiarly clear prototype for this more recent phenomenon. Into the utterly drab daily life of Ebenezer Scrooge there erupts a whole other London - populated by ghosts in permanent limbo, as the cost of their failings in life: “the air filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went”. These unfortunates are apparently cut off from the living - their punishment is for it to be impossible for them to intervene in society; to be permanently cut off from a world they failed to improve in life. This agglomeration of spectres is the collective ghost of the rapacious front-end of capitalism.

Of these spirits, apparently only Jacob Marley is able to overcome his isolation. He is as confused about this as Scrooge - “how it is that I appear before you in a shape that you can see, I may not tell. I have sat beside you invisible many and many a day”. As the protagonist of this tale, Scrooge is partly responsible - it falls to him to be the narrative link between the two cities. It is also implicitly a function of Christmas - like any good Pagan feast day, the way is open for fleeting communion with the dead.

Apart from the dead in the strict sense, there are the spirits of Christmas, Past, Present and Yet To Come - perhaps part of an incomprehensibly enormous pantheon of animistic figures (indeed, Present claims to be one of many thousands of brothers). They are not cut off from the living - instead, their role is to intervene, strategically and (mostly) invisibly, in our lives. Present carries a torch, whose ashes, liberally sprinkled, bring jollity wherever they land; blissfully unaware, human subjects receive these gifts and imagine their happiness to be their own.

Present is the only one to intervene in this way - he is fatally tied to the social moment (“my life upon this globe is brief ... it ends to-night”). Past obviously faces a different limitation, tied irrevocably to the weight of history which cannot be changed, only compulsively repeated. Both can speak, and frame what they display to Scrooge.

The most traumatic encounter is with the shrouded, mute Yet-To-Come - Scrooge is shown his deathbed, his grave and, worst of all, the death of Tiny Tim, in complete ignorance as to the ontological status of these images - are they, with the mechanical inevitability of billiard-ball causality, already accomplished? Can they be changed? Only a twitch in the ghost’s hand indicates any which way - as well, perhaps, as the classic Kantian ethical principle: “you can because you must!”

Lee Edelman, an aggressively polemical queer theorist (queer theory being an offshoot of continental thought concerned with opposing to gay identity politics various arguments for the social construction of gender and sexuality), is somewhat instructive here. His No future: queer theory and the death drive - impressively provocative, though fundamentally bonkers - argues that, in effect, queers are oppressed by the future. The future is won through reproduction, in the strict sense - those outside of heterosexual reproduction will always be vulnerable to the charge of, in effect, being in league with death. This ideology - the identification of sexual reproduction with ‘immortality’, of transcending death - he calls “reproductive futurism”.

The ultimate image of the reproductive future is the Child - in culture, the Child emotionally blackmails us into enslaving ourselves to a future from which (if we are queer, or otherwise alienated from the patriarchal family) we are otherwise excluded. Unsurprisingly, Edelman is not overly fond of Tiny Tim - the ultimate doe-eyed, helpless child, already crippled and doomed to an early grave if Scrooge does not change his ways; the child, after a fashion, who stares out at us from the front of innumerable charity flyers. In any case, Scrooge learns his lesson: “I will live in the Past, the Present and the Future”. Beforehand, he has lived in none of them - he has all but forgotten his past, he is alienated from his present, and he has no future.

It is easy for a Marxist to caricature the ideological punch of Dickens’s novel - as a simple-hearted argument for bourgeois philanthropy, stemming from a moral horror at the degraded conditions of the poor in 19th century London. In fact, it is not quite so simple. The Spirit of Christmas here is not the alienated charity of the Oxfam standing order form - rather, philanthropy is linked with the recognition of the fact of social and communal life, that one’s fate is tied up with innumerable others.

Capitalism, presumably, goes on - but Scrooge’s conversion is about more than salving his conscience. It is about whether there will be a future at all - whether society can continue. In this gap, between the transformation of one individual and the reproduction of social relations, there is the utopian possibility of everything changing, which exists only because the celebration of Christmas is a communal link between all.

Dickens is not simply concerned - in the manner of charity fundraisers - that people suffer, but that they suffer alone. In their mutual isolation, they are cut off from the magic around them - the wailing ghosts of their ancestors, the animistic spirits working in the present, and the mute, unknowable future which is nevertheless theirs to alter. Like the innumerable hordes of spectres, with the streets of London serving either as hell or purgatory, bound by ‘the chains they forged in life’, A Christmas carol persists as an index of our collective failure to enter into meaningful solidarity. We return to it annually, in its written form or in one of its many film adaptations - perhaps one day we will understand it better than as an unpaid advertisement for Oxfam, or (as Edelman does) a moral imperative to reproduce the same hell in perpetuity.

"A huge crisis is in the making"

Subject: Emergency Alert: ACUTE DANGER OF WAR OVER KOREA

Antiwar movement calls for Emergency response actions at 5 p.m. should fighting break out:

NYC — Times Square Washington, D.C. — the White House

In Many Cities - Federal Buildings on Day-of or Day-after

SIGN the ongoing ONLINE PETITION to the Obama Administration and s. Korean Govt. at http://www.facebook.com/l/61ab1cOmEEgbKD9McPnH7YLrZoQ;www.iacenter.org/korea/stopattackondprk NOW!

The right-wing government in South Korea is once again threatening live-fire war “exercises” from an island right off the coast of north Korea (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea). The DPRK has made it very clear that this would be an act of war to which it would respond vigorously.

A huge crisis is in the making. The U.S., which over the last month has been conducting joint naval exercises in the area with both Japan and South Korea, could tell its client state in Seoul to cancel these provocative military maneuvers. But instead, the U.S. again blocked any agreement to resolve the crisis during a day-long meeting of the Security Council at U.N. headquarters on Dec. 19.

The anti-war movement must prepare to respond immediately to any military action by South Korea, the U.S. and/or Japan against the DPRK. With tens if not hundreds of thousands of U.S., Japanese and South Korean troops mobilized in the area — on land and on hundreds of warships and aircraft carriers — the danger of a general war is acute.

China and Russia have also made it clear that these provocations from the south are very dangerous.

A look at the background shows why this aggression is so dangerous for world peace:

• The U.S. still has tens of thousands of troops occupying South Korea and Japan, which have been there since the end of World War II — 65 years ago.

• Washington still refuses to sign a permanent peace with the DPRK.

• This island and the waters in question are north of the Demilitarized Zone and only eight miles from the coast of the DPRK.

• The U.S. deployment of thousands of troops, 50 to 70 ships, and hundreds of aircraft to the area while South Korea is firing thousands of rounds of live ammunition and missiles is an enormously dangerous provocation, not only to the DPRK but to China.

It is important that antiwar and social justice organizations begin to make plans now for emergency response actions all across the country should the crisis break out in fighting.

The United National Antiwar Committee is also circulating a call for Emergency Response Demonstrations in the event of an attack.

Many groups are sending out Emergency Alerts and circulating calls for Day After Actions. Together we can make our voices strong and unified.

International Action Center, c/o Solidarity Center, 55 W 17th St Suite 5C, New York, NY 10011, 212-633-6646, iacenter@iacenter.org