Poulantzas and socialist strategy - part I posted by lenin

Nicos Poulantzas' detailed and sometimes difficult writings on fascism, dictatorship, the state, capitalism and social classes, were all written with the goal of elaborating strategic concepts to assist the advance toward socialism.  This series of posts deals with some aspects of Poulantzas' thinking on political strategy (the whole corpus is obviously far too rich and varied for me to anatomise here), beginning with a look at his ideas on class and class alliances.  The idea is not simply to see what, if anything, we can find useful in his strategic conclusions today.  It isn't even to decide whether we should agree or disagree with his ideas (Poulantzas' relationship to Eurocommunism will come up consistently, particularly in the final post in this series).  It is mainly to look at the method, the steps involved in the development of his strategic concepts.  It is to see what complex strategic thinking looks like.  If nothing else, in a period when strategic thought on the Left is recovering from a long quietus (see the late Daniel Bensaid's wonderful essay here), the theoretical depth and novelty of Poulantzas' arguments would make him an important contributor to the emerging debates.

I should make it clear that Poulantzas' views evolved and altered in ways I can't properly summarise.  Suffice to say that there is an important shift between an early historicist phase, which I won't go into, a structuralist phase, evident in books such as Political Power and Social Classes and Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, and a later phase where he gradually abandoned some of his Althusserian commitments, which can  be seen in Fascism and Dictatorship and his final book, State, Power, Socialism.  (Althusser's maligned influence deserves some recuperation - fortunately, Gregory Elliot's superb revision of his legacy has been reprinted recently).  I should also say upfront that many of the criticisms that follow are 'immanent', taking Poulantzas' marxist framework for granted and faulting him for not following his precepts through to their logical conclusion.  This isn't to attack Poulantzas for departing from revealed wisdom in "some holy text" as he might have put it, but simply to judge his writing by standards he himself adopts.


Part I: Classes, the 'new petty bourgeoisie' and class alliances
According to Poulantzas, socialist strategy is weakened by a failure to properly grasp changes in the class structure of contemporary capitalism: "it was on this question, among others, that, as we now know, the socialist development in Chile came to grief."  The major development that warranted attention was the growth of "nonproductive wage-earners, i.e. groups such as commercial and bank employees, office and service workers, etc., in short all those who are commonly referred to as 'white-collar' or 'tertiary sector' workers".  (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, pp. 193)   There was a tendency at the time to assess this in terms of the 'embourgeoisement' of the working class and thus the dissolution of hard class boundaries.  Others, like the French Communist Party (PCF) to which Poulantzas adhered, theorised this group as an 'intermediate stratum' within a series of strata that exist independently of either the proletariat or the bourgeoisie.

Poulantzas holds that it isn't sufficient to describe this layer as a strata: the "class specificity" of this group had to be grasped.  It could not just be subsumed into the wider categories of bourgeois and proletarian either, because the effect of this was to dissolve both categories by compelling theorists to introduce new theoretical determinations that weakened their explanatory power.  Theorising them as simply part of the extant middle class tended toward the same conclusion, since such accounts regarded the middle class as a "stew in which classes are mixed together and their antagonisms dissolved, chiefly by forming a site for the circulation of individuals in a constant process of 'mobility' between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat."  The result was that classes simply ceased to exist as classes.  (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, pp. 194-9)


The starting point for his own analysis was the structuralist framework that he took over from Louis Althusser.  Thus, he explained that the concept of class refers to "the overall effects of the structure on the field of social relations and on the social division of labour".  (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, p. 199)  This structure comprises several distinct regions: "everything happens as if social classes were the result of an ensemble of structures and of their relations, firstly at the economic level, secondly at the political level, and thirdly at the ideological level".  (Political Power and Social Classes, NLB, 1975, p. 63)  This draws from Althusser, who holds that the capitalist mode of production comprises an articulation of distinct economic, political and ideological levels.  Classes must be determined by all three levels - at least, so the early Poulantzas claims.  Importantly, however, the economic level bears the strongest freight of determination here.  It is in the structures of 'economic exploitation' (the appropriation of surplus value by the bourgeoisie), 'economic ownership' (the power of the bourgeoisie to dispose of economic resources for various uses), and 'economic possession' (the power of the bourgeoisie to organise and determine labour processes), that class is determined first and foremost.

Poulantzas draws an important distinction between class determination and class position.  The former is an objective determination: the working class is such due to its situation within the matrix of the capitalist mode of production.  The latter is relational and partly subjective.  A class can adopt a position that converges with that of another class, without altering its objective class determination.  For example, a section of the working class (Poulantzas cites the fabled 'labour aristocracy') may take a position identifying with the bourgeoisie, but "the adoption of bourgeois class positions by a certain stratum of the working class" would not "eliminates its class determination".  Class position has some bearing on class determination, however.  Classes are "reproduced according to the reproduction of the places of social classes in the class struggle".  This, of course, leaves open the possibility that the class struggle will fail to reproduce the places of social classes, or will radically disrupt their efficient reproduction.  (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, pp. 201-3)


Poulantzas chooses to define non-productive wage earners as the "new petty bourgeoisie", asserting that "they belong together with the traditional petty bourgeoisie".  (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, p. 204)  Defining the petty bourgeoisie correctly, he argues, is "the focal point of the Marxist theory of social classes" because it shows that "relations of production alone are not sufficient, in Marxist theory, to determine the place a social class occupies in a mode of production ... It is absolutely indispensable to refer to ideological and political relations".  (Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of Fascism, NLB, 1974, p. 237) So, it's clear that in identifying a "new petty bourgeoisie", he is making both a strategic political intervention which will have profound consequences for the elaboration of class alliances and hegemonic manouevering, and a theoretical intervention in the sociology of classes.

But on what basis does he identify this "new petty bourgeoisie" as a class apart from the working class and akin to the "traditional petty bourgeoisie"?  Poulantzas asserts that the layers that Marxists have traditionally identified as petty bourgeois - small property owners who do not exploit wage labour, or only very occasionally - are actually transitional elements proper to pre-capitalist modes of production: this is why Marx expected them to be subsumed over the long-term into the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.  (This has in fact been an observable trend.)  Yet, the "new petty bourgeoisie" identified by Poulantzas seems to be very different - it is not a mass of small producers, but wage earners who do white collar work, mental labour, but do not contribute directly to the production of surplus value. Despite the fact that they are waged, Poulantzas says that their non-productive status excludes them from the working class.  To explain this position, he cites Marx to the effect that the distinction between productive and unproductive labour is "not derived from the material characteristics of labour ... but from the definite social form, the social relations of production, within which the labour is realised."  Thus, "productive labour in a given mode of production is labour that gives rise to the dominant relation of exploitation of this mode ... productive labour is that which directly produces surplus-value, which valorizes capital and is exchanged against capital"  (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, p. 211)  Thus, those who perform non-productive labour do not produce surplus value and are thus not central to the reproduction of the dominant relation of exploitation under capitalism.  This, for Poulantzas, excludes them from the working class.


Having said all this, their exclusion from the working class (and from the bourgeoisie) leaves them in a middling position.  It doesn't automatically mean they are part of the petty bougeoisie and, as noted, they are very different from traditional petty bourgeois in terms of productive relations. The unity of traditional and new petty bourgeois layers is secured, Poulantzas argues, within the political and ideological regions where they have similar effects.  That is to say, in the polarised situation created by the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, they occupy an intermediate position.  Their 'negative' definition, arising from their exclusion from the two' fundamental' classes, means that they are not a 'fundamental' class, have no long-term interests in this struggle, and will tend to vacillate as a consequence.  They will also converge on certain basic ideological positions: their hatred of the rich combined with fear of proletarianisation will tend to lead them to "status quo anticapitalism" where they embrace property but oppose monopolies in favour of more opportunity and competition; this segues into the second position which is an aspirational faith in "the myth of the 'ladder'" of opportunity; the third is an unwavering belief in the class-neutral position of the state, "statolatry".  Because of their shared political and ideological positions, then, they comprise a single class.   (Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of Fascism, NLB, 1974, pp. 237-44; Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, pp. 206-12; Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Analaysis, Macmillan, 1985, pp. 169-70)

Critics of Poulantzas' class analysis point out that it involves a break with Marx's own method.  The whole conception is built on what appears to be a non-sequitur: that is, an illegitimate extrapolation from certain arguments in Marx.  It is not clear, even from Poulantzas' selected quotes, that Marx excluded 'non-productive' labour from the working class.  Indeed, there are several passages that suggest that the division between mental and manual labour that Poulantzas focuses on is not central to Marx's definition of class.   Poulantzas' analysis of the new petty bourgeoisie attributes to politics and ideology, more than one's objective situation within the productive matrix, a determining role in one's class position.  Not only is this incompatible with Marx, it also contradicts Poulantzas' own statements to the effect that there is an objective class situation that is more important in defining classes than their orientation in any "concrete conjuncture of struggle".  (Quoted, Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Analaysis, Macmillan, 1985, p. 164).  Even within a recidivist structuralism, Poulantzas' argument seems odd.  Recall that in his early work he did insist on the idea that class should be determined at all three levels of the mode of production, but insisted that the economic level had the primary determining role; here, he not only puts the primary determining role at the level of ideology, but he denies any but an indirect economic input.

Lastly, some absurd conclusions appear to follow from Poulantzas' narrow definition of the working class: for example, assuming that the working class only includes those engaged in direct productive or extractive industries, some 70% of the US workforce would be petty bourgeois, and only 20% working class.  (see Alex Callinicos, 'The "New Middle Class" and socialist politics', in Chris Harman and Alex Callinicos, The Changing Working Class: Essays on class structure today, Bookmarks, 1987, p. 19)  Nonetheless, the strategic conclusions that follow from Poulantzas' class analyses are clear.  Poulantzas took from Gramsci the idea that hegemonic struggle was the normal form of political class struggle in a capitalist society.  He argued that the working class needed to build hegemonic alliances similar to those built by the bourgeoisie.  But if the working class does not form a clear majority, then it is arguably in need of a particular kind of hegemonic cross-class alliance: the Popular Front. Thus, for Poulantzas, the need to win over the petty bourgeoisie was central to the anti-monopoly, anti-imperialist alliances behind Union de la Gauche in France, as well as the possibility of the anti-dictatorship alliance in Greece turning into an anti-imperialist and anti-monopoly alliance.  (Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Analaysis, Macmillan, 1985, p. 149)  Given the outline of the petty bourgeoisie's political and ideological dispositions that he has given, this will tend to require the dilution of any agenda for socialist transformation.  Poulantzas was operating on the left-most end of Eurocommunism, and did not go as far down the road of eschewing class politics and anti-imperialism as some did.  Yet, concessions to the economic policies and political tactics of fractions of the bourgeoisie (the 'interior' or 'domestic' bourgeoisie, which may or may not exist), as well as to the purviews of the petty bourgeoisie, were essential to his strategic perspective.


Before leaving the subject of class, it's worth stating that one of Poulantzas' most telling insights concerns the way in which 'class interests' should be understood.  Here, he rejects the idea the idea that such interests can be determined from the relations of production themselves.  The historicist (Hegelian) problematic sees class as a subject of history, with interests that can be inferred from its role as a factor in historical transformation.  This raises the problem of how a class becomes aware of those interests and moves from being a class-in-itself to a class-for-itself.  It also raises the deeply problematic notion of "false consciousness", to explain how a class fails to grasp its own interests.  Instead, Poulantzas argues that 'class interests' are not computable outside the field of 'class practises' in a given conjuncture.  That is to say, at any moment in the development of the class struggle there will be a series of 'objective' and 'subjective' factors which limit the working class's possible range of actions.  These form a 'horizon of action', defining the maximum possible advances against opposing classes at any given moment.  One of the determinants of this horizon is the form of political representation that the class has, which means that the 'interests' of a class in a given moment are susceptible to modification by political intervention, even if the objective circumstances have not changed.  (Political Power and Social Classes, NLB, 1975, pp. ; Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Analaysis, Macmillan, 1985, pp. 153-4)  As Jessop points out, this puts the emphasis on "strategic calculation" rather than objective, given facts.  It also has certain political consequences, inasmuch as it avoids the potential elitism of parties or their intellectual cadres presuming to be the bearers of an objective, historically given truth. 

The ensuing posts deal with Poulantzas' ground-breaking work on the state, his arguments on the power bloc, and finally his orientation toward Eurocommunism.

Labels: class, eurocommunists, middle class, poulantzas, ruling class, socialism, socialist strategy, working class

Cameron's immigration spiel posted by lenin

Me in The Guardian on Cameron's latest immigration spiel:

The increasing frequency with which Cameron is turning to immigration as a rallying theme is arresting. He needs it to inject excitement into a dysphoric party faithful and revive the flagging ideological props of the administration. He sidelined the anti-immigrant xenophobes before 2009. Now his speeches are increasingly littered with demagoguery – anecdotes about forced marriage being used to evade immigration controls being an example of note-perfect Powellism – and pander to the chauvinist sentiment once characterised by Christopher Hitchens as "John Bullshit".

Cameron may grow more attached to such rhetoric as the ideological self-confidence of the government evaporates, and as it becomes more embattled by adverse economic and political conditions. But the danger for him in doing so is that he isn't very good at it. His "toughness" looks ersatz because it is; his promises seem phoney because they are; he is unconvincing because he is unconvinced by his own rhetoric. There are others on the right who know better how to play with this fire, and Cameron is arguably giving them the ammunition with which to depose him when the time comes.

Labels: 'integration', chauvinism, class, immigration, john bullshit, racism, the meaning of david cameron, tories

The Class Struggle in Greece posted by lenin

Labels: austerity, capitalism, capitalist crisis, class struggle, eu, greece, left, militancy, ruling class, socialism, strikes

Orwell on the liberal defence of murder posted by lenin

I skimmed through Homage to Catalonia while reading up for The Liberal Defence of Murder, but missed his pointed insights on the "best strategic opportunity" of the Spanish Civil War.  I cited the French government's refusal to free Abd-el Krim, and the Spanish Republic's unwillingness to support Moroccan independence, as a tragic example of self-defeating pro-imperialist politics on the Left helping the fascists to succeed.  This is Orwell:

Labels: fascism, general franco, george orwell, liberal imperialism, morocco, spain

Liberals and reactionaries posted by lenin

Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (Verso, 2011), and Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (Oxford University Press, 2011)

I was speaking alongside Domenico Losurdo and Robin Blackburn at a launch event for the former's book at King's College some while ago. Losurdos' latest, Liberalism: A Counter-History, is an investigation into the limits and exclusions of liberalism. A salient point, which marks the beginning of one of his inquiries, is the fact that the three bourgeois revolutions conducted in the name of liberty and equality, were followed by a staggering increase in the global slave trade.

Three interesting problems arose in this discussion. The first is that it is a mainstay of marxist accounts of liberalism, and certainly central to C B Macpherson's analysis, that the core of it is property rights. This is not Losurdo's position, exactly. When a questioner from the floor asked about this question of property rights, he argued that what defined liberalism was not property, but the logic of exclusion. He mentioned the example of Palestinians who were expropriated at every opportunity by Israelis in the name of certain liberal values. And indeed the tension in Losurdo's narrative centres on how far liberalism can be made to expand on its revolutionary promise.

I still think that property is central here. For a start, the expropriation of the Palestinians doesn't disturb the principle of property rights. Property rights have always been structured in such a way as to allow white Europeans to expropriate non-white non-Europeans, from Locke to Vattel onward. After Katrina, the property rights of working class Americans, especially African Americans, were cancelled by fiat - but this didn't disturb the basic politico-legal order of property rights. In fact, I would bet on the idea that the state authorities and companies who carried out this expropriation worked very hard on devising a legal justification for this theft. Moreover, it is the nature of capitalist property relations, to which liberalism is committed, that builds exclusions into liberalism. The second difficulty concerned the distinction that Losurdo wished to draw between radicals and liberals, which is not always a stable boundary - for example, William Lloyd Garrison took liberalism to its most radical conclusions in opposition to racial slavery, the colonization of Indian land, and the oppression of women, but he by no means departed from liberalism (indeed, he refused the term 'wage slavery', supported capitalist 'free labour' and tended to be suspicious of unionism).

The third, related issue arose over the question of what, or who, counts as a liberal. Losurdo argues the case in his opening chapter for seeing the pro-slavery statesman John Calhoun as a liberal. Robin Blackburn disputed this, arguing that it involved far too expansive a definition of liberalism - Calhoun, he said, is a conservative.  Blackburn's concern was that Losurdo was risking a sectarian position, failing to acknowledge and that this wasn't resolved by cordoning off some liberals as 'radicals'.  Jennifer Pitts' recent review in the TLS takes this criticism much further, and in a much more hostile direction.  What I would say is that, taken as a whole, Losurdo's book is more appreciative of liberalism's merits than might appear to be the case from some of the tendentious readings - which, in a counter-history, has some validity.  His conclusions are not indiscriminately hostile.

Part of the problem here is that conservatism in its modern sense takes its cue from liberalism. Burke drew from Smith, almost all US conservatives draw from Locke, and modern conservatives are almost all influenced by classical liberalism. So, if Calhoun himself based his arguments on liberal precepts, which he certainly did, does this mean he is a liberal? There is also a deeper theoretical issue when discussing people like Calhoun. Antebellum slavery, some would argue, was a non-capitalist formation. That's a core part of Charles Post's argument in The American Road to Capitalism, written from a 'political marxist' perspective: that the US before the civil war was based on a combination of different modes of production - slavery, petty commodity production, mercantile capital, etc. The interaction between these different productive forms drove the expansionism of both north and south, eventually leading to Civil War.  (Some of these arguments were debated on a recent Facebook thread and recorded by Louis Proyect). John Ashworth's classic two-volume marxist history, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, makes the argument that southern political thought was largely pre-capitalist, drawing on classical republican ideologies because they happened to be conducive to the preservation of slave relations. Indeed, he maintains, the Democratic Party when it first emerged was anticapitalist - 'Jacksonian Democracy', based centrally on the valorisation of the white, freeholding farmer, could challenge the power of the banks and commerce in the name of agrarian interests while also being profoundly opposed to strong state intervention in the economy. So, was John Calhoun a liberal, because of his strong individualism and hostility to the over-concentration of central authority, or did liberalism merely provide part of the vocabulary for the defence of conservative interests?

This vexed question, of the relationship between liberalism and conservatism, receives a sustained treatment in Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind.  I have written a review of this for future publication, so I will make no detailed attempt to summarise its arguments here.  Suffice to say that, for the purposes of this discussion, there is no doubt for Robin that Calhoun is a conservative.  But what does being a conservative entail, then?  The image of conservatism as anti-modern, traditionalist, evincing a preference for the familiar and for gradual evolution, is one that he, like Ted Honderich, C B Macpherson and others before him, disputes.  The original conservatives - Hobbes, Burke, Maistre - are contemptuous of tradition, largely because of its inability to meet the challenge of revolution.  What they are conserving is not a traditional order (as mentioned, Burke was already a free market capitalist), but hierarchy, dominance, unfreedom: they are reactionaries, counter-revolutionaries.  To be effective counter-revolutionaries, conservatives must incorporate the ideas and tactics of the enemy.  They must speak in the language of the people, "make privilege popular", "transform a tottering old regime into a dynamic, ideologically coherent movement of the masses". 

Conservatism is thus not distinguished by its ideas which, with the enormous exception of race, it largely borrows from elsewhere, nor by its tactics, but by its praxis.  It would follow that it is not Calhoun's republican, pre-capitalist 'states rights' ideology that makes him a conservative, any more than his defence of private property makes him a liberal.  It is his attempt to arouse the South in response to the abolitionist danger, his attempt to conserve hierarchy against mass democracy, that makes him a conservative.  Liberals, you may say, have also been known to defend hierarchy and racial supremacy.  This is true, but liberalism does not pivot on the defence of hierarchies and domination; that is precisely why it devises 'exclusion clauses'.  Indeed, it is because of liberalism's much vaunted commitment to humanitarian and egalitarian values that 'the liberal defence of murder' is a hypocritical ideology, riven with tensions that aren't usually present in the rightist equivalent.

Labels: capitalism, class, conservatism, counter-revolution, liberal imperialism, liberals, racism, reactionaries, reactionary subjectivity, the liberal defence of murder

Springtime posted by lenin

The green shoots of the American Spring:  New York; Austin; New Orleans; Boston; Portland; San Francisco; Los Angeles; Sacramento; Atlantic City; Richmond; Atlanta; Seattle; Boise; Baton Rouge; Mississippi; Illinois; Detroit; Oklahoma; Kansas; ... and, of course, Madison, Wisconsin.  (And there's more where that came from.  Just google 'occupy x' where 'x' is any major US city or town).  This isn't east coast-west coast.  It isn't red state-blue state.  It isn't north-south.  It isn't Democrat-Republican, Cheech-Chong.  It's class war, the 99% against the 1%.

Coming to London next week, and worldwide.  Strike, march, occupy.  Build the new model commune!

Labels: anticapitalism, change we can believe in, commune, communism, finance capital, socialism, us politics, wall street

Questions from a worker who reads obituaries. posted by lenin

Labels: capitalism, cult, exploitation, technophilia, the rate of exploitation

The concentration of capital posted by lenin

Labels: banks, capital, capitalism, finance capital, monopoly

Whatever it is, it isn't justice posted by lenin

The Sun's front page headline said, "Cry Freedom", referencing the 1987 Richard Attenborough film about Steve Biko.  The subject of the headline was Amanda Knox, an upper class white American acquitted of participating in the murder of Meredith Kercher on appeal.  Let me pause to acknowledge that, had the original guilty verdict been upheld, the headline would have probably made some reference to the prosecutor's characterisation of Knox as a "she-devil".  I simply take it as read that misogyny of one form or another has characterised aspects of the prosecution and of the capitalist media's responses to the case.  Channel 5's The Wright Stuff, for example, sensitively asked male viewers "would ya?" with reference to "Foxy Knoxy".  What do we do with the thought, I wonder, that the obscene, contemptible slavering over "Foxy Knoxy" has nothing to do with the "beauty" that Rolling Stone drools over, and everything to do with the fact that she is an alleged murderer?  And why are these same media outlets now telling us that the conviction of Knox rested on misogyny and that she is the victim of a modern day Salem?  Meanwhile, how many people even know Raffaele Sollecito's name, never mind what he looks like? 

That said, the Sun's headline was revealing on its own terms, referring to a bizarre economy of racial affect.  Consider it next to the many articles that juxtapose Knox's name with that of Troy Davis, and you begin to realise that for our media, the racially victimised, oppressed subject is not the woman of colour who has been murdered, and whose family has seen no justice, but a wealthy white woman who had US senators, Hillary Clinton, the Berlusconi administration (which has its own fights with the Italian legal system over Berlusconi's alleged crimes), a rich suburban family and the greater part of the Anglophone media behind her.  She is the victim of, what else?, anti-Americanism.  And, indeed, the sympathy of the Anglophone press for Knox and her family, from the Sun to the New York Times to Rolling Stone, is staggering.  The relentless dissemination of claims obviously originating from either the defence or Knox's family or their PR firm is no less so. 

As you will have gathered, the appeal hinged on the quality of forensic evidence, which a panel of reviewers decided was unreliable.  Once the review panel had reached its findings, it was inevitable that the defence would focus on that as the weak link.  They didn't have to attack the whole prosecution case.  Now I'm not in a position to dispute the validity of that procedure, but you wouldn't know, judging from the responses in the press, that the whole case hadn't just been demolished.  You would get the impression from the news reports that Knox was convicted on comically risible evidence, and that an innocent woman spent four years in jail for nothing.  They had the killer, Rudy Guede, with abundant evidence supporting their argument for his guilt, but insisted on dragging two innocent people, Knox and Sollecito, into their account of what happened.  This, so the logic goes, required elaborate imaginative leaps, singular feats of interpretation from paltry evidence.

Let me take an example.  This is Timothy Egan in the NYT:  "In search of evidence to back a faulty narrative, prosecutors pulled a knife from the kitchen of Sollecito. Of course, Knox’s DNA was on the handle — she used it to cut bread at the home of her boyfriend. The prosecutors said there was a trace of Kercher’s DNA on the blade, a claim that was nearly laughed out of court by an independent panel of experts. These experts in the appeal found instead a kernel of starch on the blade — from cutting bread, most likely."  Thus, from less than a bread crumb, you would think, a murder case was developed.  How could a guilty verdict have been reached on the basis of that?  In fact the panel of exerts was in no position to 'find' anything on the blade, starch or otherwise, since it didn't examine the knife but the manner in which forensic evidence was gathered.  It did not deny that DNA evidence was found on the knife, but disputed the handling and thus reliability of that evidence.  The fact that experts testifying for the prosecution thought differently, ie that the DNA had been gathered according to international standards, is no reason in itself for me to dispute this conclusion.  But it is a reason for journalists not to caricature events.  Yet, this distortion is in an ostensibly serious piece.

Egan adds that the prosecution was particularly culpable in its attempt to supply a motive for the killing: "This is where any defender of women’s rights, or modernity, should howl. Standing in front of the crucifix that adorns Italian courtrooms, prosecutors and lawyers for their side called Knox a “she-devil,” a seducer, a “witch,” someone who manipulated Sollecito into an orgy with Kercher and Guede."  This is an argument that has been repeated many times.  Now, the evidence on which Knox was convicted is discussed in the Massei report (pdf, or summarised in detail here) outlining the reasons for the court's guilty verdict.  If you've read through this, two things are clear.  First, while the motive is discussed in the Massei report, it isn't a very important plank of the conviction.  Second, whatever the misogynistic rhetoric, the jury which convicted her didn't base its conviction on that rhetoric.  It rejected a number of prosecution claims concerning the motive, specifically any pre-meditated component.  It infers from the circumstances that both Knox and Sollecito spontaneously decided to help Rudy Guede as he tried to force himself on Meredith Kercher.  There is no she-devilry, and no witchcraft.  You would not know this from Egan's account.  Nor would you know that the "she-devil" remark was made not by the prosecutor but by a lawyer for Patrick Lumumba, and not during the original trial process but earlier this year.

Before going any further, I want to briefly summarise what I understand to be the main points in the Massei report.  The report describes the circumstances of the murder, and indicates a number of points at which Knox's descriptions of what happened were drastically at variance with material evidence.  It notes that Knox's falsehoods would, if verified, have provided her and Sollecito with an alibi.  On the other hand, as she was seen at a grocery shop purchasing cleaning products when she claimed to have been in bed, her alibi is untenable.  It touches on Knox's attempt to frame her boss, a bar owner named Patrick Lumumba, for the killing.  (She claimed, when the case against Lumumba collapsed, to have 'imagined' hearing Meredith Kercher scream as she was sexually assaulted and murdered by Lumumba.)  It describes the incompatibility of the wounds with the 'single attacker' theory, suggesting that multiple attackers must have restrained Meredith Kercher and assaulted her from different angles while preventing her from engaging in defensive movements.  It describes how the kitchen knife recovered from the apartment, allegedly with Kercher's DNA on the blade, was compatible with the large, fatal stab wound to Kercher's neck; and how Knox had shown distress on being shown the knife, and conveyed her concern to her parents about precisely that piece of evidence.  It describes how a bloody footprint in the bathroom matched those of Sollecito.  It describes several instances of Meredith Kercher's blood being mixed with Knox's DNA, dismisses the idea that this was due to ex-foliation on Knox's part, and suggests that it was due to the vigorous scrubbing of hands and feet, which resulted in the blood and DNA being found spattered over the bidet and sink.  It describes evidence of blood being traipsed about the house by Knox and subsequently cleaned up vigorously with bleach.  It describes the expert testimony concerning the DNA evidence.  It describes evidence indicating that the killers had staged a burglary of the flat after the murder was committed to give the impression that the killer had broken in.  It concludes that Rudy Guede initiated sexual advances on Meredith Kercher, that Kercher refused, that Knox and Sollecito then joined in when Kercher resisted, and that the situation escalated spontaneously from a sexual assault to a murder.

Having read the above, I invite you to download the Massei report and compare it with any number of articles making the case for Knox's innocence - the Rolling Stone article is a real peach, its author doing a word-perfect imitation of an amanuensis for Gogerty Stark Marriott.  What you find is that public opinion is being decided by factors that have nothing to do with evidence, court procedures, police conduct or anything of the kind, and everything to do with resources.  Reasonable doubt liberates Amanda Knox and Rafaelle Sollecito, while Rudy Guede is in jail, and is unlikely to be freed.  It is beyond my competence to say whether this is legally appropriate.  This would only become clearer in light of a further appeal.  Yet, if the Massei report holds for the evidence not discounted by the review panel, it would seem that he could not have committed the crime alone.  Only Sollecito could have tramped Meredith Kercher's blood into the bathroom to make the footprint on the mat, only Knox could have left the bloody footprints subsequently cleaned up and traced with Luminol, and only Knox could have scrubbed the blood off her hands and feet in such a way as to leave her DNA spattered on the bidet and sink, mixed with Kercher's blood.  So it may be legally appropriate that the appeals court acquitted Knox and Sollecito.  But it doesn't look like justice to me.

Labels: amanda knox, crime, media, meredith kercher, murder, propaganda, racism

First we take Manhattan posted by lenin

Wall Street's famously chaste, humble bearing may not be the secret of its charm.  When you ask what is, you begin to realise what the Right has accomplished.  It has plausibly retailed something as banal as markets, and all the variations and derivatives thereof, as a libidinised field of popular (competitive) participation, the final source of all wealth/value (stock markets delivering oodles of the stuff like ducks farting out golden eggs), and, if this isn't a tautology, a genre of erotica.  The insurance company as an aphrodisiac.  Yet it had to occur to someone to give Goldman Sachs and allies something to worry about, a something from which they have thus far been protected.  Under the Obama administration, which treats the quack orthodoxies of investment bankers as technocratic panaceas, the politically dominant fraction within the US ruling class has rarely seemed more powerful and at ease.  In their home city, the banks and traders have colonised the political system to the extent that one of their own sons, Michael Bloomberg, can take office and actually run the city as a favour to them.  (Bloomberg declines remuneration for his services.)  This is 21st Century philanthropy.

On that very subject, it must be a felicitous coincidence that JP Morgan Chase donated $4.6m to the New York Police Department on the same day that the same department engaged in a mass arrest of hundreds of #OccupyWallStreet activists marooned on the Brooklyn Bridge.



"The whole world is watching," the protesters chant. No doubt. The question is whether any of those watching will take this as a cue to join the occupation in solidarity.  Admittedly it is already an over-worked reference, but there are compelling, if distant, echoes of Tahrir Square in New York (and now, I understand, financial districts in Boston, Miami, Detroit, San Francisco, etc.), in the sense of a nascent attempt to find a new model commune.  What the occupiers seek to create is both a rallying point for oppositional forces, and a model of participatory democracy that, if replicated, would give popular constituencies the ability and authority to solve their problems.  We'll come back to the model of self-government being debated in Zuccotti Park, but as far as rallying opposition forces and pricking the mediasphere goes, the occupation has been having some success. The critical moment has been the participation of the organised labour movement, with the direct involvement of transport and steel workers, and the solidarity of Tahrir Square protesters.  (A mass strike by transport workers in Egypt has just won a major victory, gaining a 200% pay rise, just months after the army outlawed strikes).  The context of which it partakes is a germinal revival of class struggle in the United States.  Doug Henwood, who initially expressed reservations about the (lack of) politics of the initiative, describes the situation as "inspiring".  This is why the initiative has been greeted with the predictable sequence of tactful silence from officials, followed by open hostility, police brutality, threatening murmurs from Bloomberg and, finally, last night's mass arrest - which I would imagine follows orders from the mayor's office. Bloomberg, you'll be relieved to know, is not exercised on behalf of multi-billionaires like himself, but those Wall Street traders on a measly $40-50k, inconvenienced by anticapitalist wildlife. 

As far I can tell, the occupation began with a deliberate strategy of having minimal concrete politics and no demands.  The idea was that the politics and tactics of the occupation would be agreed in the context of a participatory, open-ended symposium.  No doubt some of this is mired in what I would consider a destructive and caricatured anti-Leninism, but I can imagine it comes from real experiences and expresses legitimate desires.  Some participants reportedly argued that what was important was the process, not a set of demands.  The process itself, the decentralised, participatory system, should be the main 'demand' in this perspective.  "Join us," would be the slogan.  I can't imagine this approach being effective.  There was an early fear that this could mean that right-wing elements would easily take over the movement and distort its agenda, and indeed some of the Tea Party websites have been vocal in their support for the occupation.  Yet they aren't setting the agenda in New York.  The political messages vary from the extremely abstract ("Care 4 Your Country") to the bluntly specific ("End Corporate Personhood"); from the maximalist ("Smash capitalism, liberate the planet") to the broadly populist ("I am the 99%").  The best slogan I've seen is, "How do we end the deficit?  End the war, Tax the rich."  This has the virtue of being a popular demand, a concise point, and right on the money.

On the issue of populism, I see that Doug Henwood has reported some misplaced sympathy for small businesses among some of the occupiers.  Perhaps this would be a fitting moment to revive the old Stalinist/Eurocommunist idea of the "anti-monopoly alliance".  I'm not being completely sarcastic.  While the petty bourgeoisie is largely a bedrock of reaction, it can have its radical moments, especially when capitalism is wrecking the lives of small traders, shopkeepers, homeowners - as we've recently seen in Greece, where the lower middle class is overwhelmingly on the side of the working class and the left in this fight.  I'm just saying that while one wants ultimately to win people to consistently anticapitalist politics, a sort of leftist, Naderite populism opposing the 99% to the 1% (the people against the ruling class in other words) is not a terrible place to start.  The main thing is what the most organised and militant sections of the working class do - if they throw their weight behind the movement, they will probably lead politically.

But what I find most interesting is not the immediate politics, the tactics and the process - which I think tends to become an obsession - but what these say about the strategic orientations of the occupiers.  In the broad outline, there have been two major strategies for those challenging capitalism.  The reformist strategy has been the dominant one, and immense human capital and potential has been sunk into its promise.  It posits society as, above all, a body of intelligent, rational citizens who can judge capitalism as wanting by reference to standards that transcend the system itself - ethical precepts that are universal, rational and humanistic.  The influence of Kant on such thinking is well-known.  The goal is therefore firstly to mobilise people behind a community interest favouring the gradual supercession of capitalism.  This allows for a certain elitism, since it requires the dominance of those deemed most articulate, rational and intelligent in their advocacy of socialist values, as well as those most equipped to handle office.  Secondly, those people are to put their trust in parliamentary means, using the power of the executive to impose abridgments of capitalist relations.  Those advocating this strategy have differed immensely on the degree to which such an approach needs to be supplemented by industrial militancy and mass pressure.  But it is ultimately the parliament which asserts the community's interests versus capitalist interests.

The revolutionary strategy rests on a different analysis.  It judges capitalism by standards immanent to it, and raises socialism not as an abstract, supra-historical project, but as one situated within a specific historical moment - a technologically advanced, complex socialism has become possible because capitalism has created the material preconditions for it.  Its universalism is not abstract, but class-anchored; rather than the sane, adult citizenry being the repository of universal values, it is the working class that is the 'universal' class, since it has a direct interest in the abolition of capitalism and an historically produced capacity to bring it about.  Finally, it sees parliament not as an ideal democratic space in which socialist values can be elaborated and implemented with the authority of the executive at its back, but as a component of the capitalist state that is hostile to socialism.  It follows that the aim is to create alternative, working class centres of sovereignty capable of implementing democratic decisions made at the level of the rank and file.  Whether such a counter-power was to call itself a soviet, a commune or a Committee of Public Safety (as envisioned in News from Nowhere), its purpose would be to work as a rising alternative form of legitimate authority that would eventually be in a position to challenge the capitalist state.  Through a period of dual power, the working class would learn to govern itself, acquiring the skills and self-confidence it would need, resisting attempts by the state to suppress it, until it was in a position to win a majority for taking power.  This counter-power would logically centre on the process of production, but extend well beyond the workplace.  It would have its own media, its own budget, its own leisure, and its own pedagogy.  It would be the material infrastructure of the socialist order it sought to create.  This doesn't preclude parliamentary strategies, as a means of helping legitimise and even attempting to legalise extra-parliamentary power.

Where does Occupy Wall Street fit into this?  It is not my objective to pigeon-hole it as either a revolutionary or reformist strategy - it is neither, in fact.  To put it in what will sound like uncharitable terms, it is baby-steps, the experimental form of a movement in its infancy, not yet sufficiently developed theoretically or politically to be anything else.  There is a sort of loose autonomism informing its tactics, while its focus on participatory democracy is redolent of the SDS wing and the Sixties 'New Left', but it is not yet definite enough to be reducible to any dominant strategy or perspective.  It is, however, potentially the nucleus of a mass movement, and how it relates to the problems addressed by both reformists and revolutionaries now will make all the difference in the future.  At a certain point, the severity of the state's response to it will force a theoretical and political clarification on its (official or unofficial) leadership.  Recall how the high watermark of Sixties radicalism in 1968 was also the moment at which the state got serious in its repression.  This was the year in which the term "police riot" was invented to describe Chicago cops' response to protesters outside the Democratic convention, where police mercilessly assaulted protesters and bystanders alike, while students chanted "The whole world is watching".  This was the year in which the FBI murdered several black leaders.  It was in the years that followed that the movement was forced to crystalise politically, to become a much more grim undertaking - though with the unfortunate drawback that many of the leaders were drawn into the most ultra-Stalinist politics while others simply took their 'community organising' schtick into the Democratic fold.  So, I would say that if a mass movement emerges from this, the early orientation of Wall Street occupiers to the major strategic questions will make a big difference.

The very attempt to mimic Tahrir Square implies a goal of creating an oppositional, popular sovereignty - a goal also hinted at in the rhetoric about "being the change you want to see in the world".  It implies an aspiration, at this stage no more, to take and keep control of public spaces, conveniences, workplaces, government buildings, etc.  This is a good, radical development.  For the moment, it would be an improvement if they could march on a public highway without being arrested for it, and that is why it is so important that the movement spreads and enlarges.  To that end, the evidence of class-anchored analysis and tactics by the occupiers is hopeful. For example, Pham Binh reports that Occupy Wall Street won the support of the Transit Workers' Union after engaging in a solidarity actions with workers at Sothebys and the post office.  In this respect, the movement is already light years ahead of some of the early New Left trends, while the union movement is politically in a much better place than it was in, say, 1965.  As in Wisconsin, the fate of this movement will partially depend on how much it defers to the Democratic leadership.  I see no evidence of Obamamania or any other form of Democratic filiation among these occupiers.  Indeed, the movement arrives just as Obama's support is crumbling among all sectors of his base (despite the efforts of apologists such as Melissa Harris-Perry to reduce this to the carping of white liberals), and could work as an alternative pole for its scattered elements, much as the left and various fragments of Clinton's disaffected base were fused together into a movement in Seattle in 1999.  The achilles heels of the movement will inevitably be any tendency to exaggerate the suspicion toward centralism, which would tend to leave it vulnerable to repression, and also any tendency to over-state novelty as a virtue in contrast with the ideologies of the 'old left', which would leave it ideologically disarmed - as if any movement can do without the condensed learning and experiences of past generations facing similar problems.

At any rate, there is much to be said for the idea of an American Spring.  And beginning the arduous process of experimenting in self-government is not a bad way to herald its advent.

Labels: barack obama, capitalism, democrats, occupation, occupy wall street, protest, ruling class, socialist strategy, strategy, wall street

Syria's opposition and 'intervention' posted by lenin

Anti-regime activists inside Syria oppose the Syrian National Council, an opposition body formed in Turkey last month, because it favors foreign intervention, prominent activist Michel Kilo said on Thursday.
"The opposition within the national council are in favor of foreign intervention to resolve the crisis in Syria, while those at home are not," Kilo claimed in remarks to Agence France Presse at his home in Damascus.
"If the idea of foreign intervention is accepted, we will head towards a pro-American Syria and not towards a free and sovereign state," he said.
"A request for foreign intervention would aggravate the problem because Syria would descend into armed violence and confessionalism, while we at home are opposed to that."
Kilo, 71, a writer who has opposed the ruling Baath party since it came to power in 1963, was jailed from 1980 to 1983 and from 2006 to 2009.

In an unprecedented move over the past several days, Syrians in Syria and abroad have been calling for Syrians to take up arms, or for international military intervention. This call comes five and a half months of the Syrian regime’s systematic abuse of the Syrian people, whereby tens of thousands of peaceful protesters have been detained and tortured, and more than 2,500 killed. The regime has given every indication that it will continue its brutal approach, while the majority of Syrians feel they are unprotected in their own homeland in the face of the regime’s crimes.
While we understand the motivation to take up arms or call for military intervention, we specifically reject this position as we find it unacceptable politically, nationally, and ethically. Militarizing the revolution would minimize popular support and participation in the revolution. Moreover, militarization would undermine the gravity of the humanitarian catastrophe involved in a confrontation with the regime.
Militarization would put the Revolution in an arena where the regime has a distinct advantage, and would erode the moral superiority that has characterized the Revolution since its beginning.

Our Palestinian brothers are experienced in leading by example. They gained the support of the entire Palestinian community, as well as world sympathy, during the first Intifada (“stones”). The second Intifada, which was militarized, lost public sympathy and participation. It is important to note that the Syrian regime and Israeli enemy used identical measures in the face of the two uprisings.
The objective of Syria's Revolution is not limited to overthrowing the regime. The Revolution also seeks to build a democratic system and national infrastructure that safeguards the freedom and dignity of the Syrian people. Moreover, the Revolution is intended to ensure independence and unity of Syria, its people, and its society.
We believe that the overthrow of the regime is the initial goal of the Revolution, but it is not an end in itself. The end goal is freedom for Syria and all Syrians. The method by which the regime is overthrown is an indication of what Syria will be like post-regime. If we maintain our peaceful demonstrations, which include our cities, towns, and villages; and our men, women, and children, the possibility of democracy in our country is much greater. If an armed confrontation or international military intervention becomes a reality, it will be virtually impossible to establish a legitimate foundation for a proud future Syria.
We call on our people to remain patient as we continue our national Revolution. We will hold the regime fully responsible and accountable for the current situation in the country, the blood of all martyrs – civilian and military, and any risks that may threaten Syria in the future, including the possibility of internal violence or foreign military intervention.
To the victory of our Revolution and to the glory of our martyrs.
The Local Coordinating Committees in Syria

Labels: 'humanitarian intervention', dictatorship, liberal imperialism, revolution, syria, US imperialism