Norman Geras

As for ‘betrayal’: although it has been overused, I believe this notion is sometimes apt, in political as in personal affairs. People can betray comrades or supporters; or their own stated principles. I think an excellent example of the latter case to be, precisely, the conduct of many ‘anti-militarist’ social-democratic leaders at the outbreak of the First World War...
Norman Geras, 1988.

I am not going to pass any kind of extended comment on Norman Geras, who I never knew personally, and who passed away yesterday, other than to say that he was once a Marxist - indeed a Trotskyist - who wrote some important work on matters including Rosa Luxemburg and human nature before betraying his comrades and own stated principles by cheerleading Western imperialism in a vocal manner on the blogosphere for the last decade or so of his life while trying to keep up the pretence he was still somehow on the 'Left'.  One of his best and most important books was entitled Literature of Revolution - his blog in contrast might best be filed under 'Literature of Imperialism' - and so is destined to be ultimately confined (to borrow a phrase from Leon Trotsky) to the 'dustbin of history'.

Gramsci: Everything that Concerns People

What would Paul Robeson make of contemporary theatre?

A nice little article by Tayo Aluko, organiser of the excellent Paul Robeson Art as a Weapon Festival, on throughout Black History Month in London. 

International Socialism # 140 online

The latest issue of International Socialism journal is online, and there is a whole host of material there including Alex Callinicos on spectres of counter-revolution in the Arab world, Michael Roberts on the world economic situation, and a series of discussions relating to ''the future of the British Left'' including Julie Sherry on Len McCluskey's strategy to ''reclaim Labour'', Ed Rooksby of Left Unity responds to Paul Blackledge on ''Left Reformism'' and socialist strategy, Jane Hardy and Joseph Choonara respond to Neil Davidson on neoliberalism, and Charlie Kimber and Alex Callinicos write on the politics of the SWP crisis.  There are also a discussions of the German KPD, Giorgio Agamben, and two British politicians, the Tory Michael Gove (pictured below) and Labour's Chris Mullin  With teachers strikes last week and in the pipeline, here's hoping socialists don't have to talk about Gove too much more in future... 

Adventures in Marxism

 
 I was saddened to read of the passing of the late great Marxist humanist Marshall Berman last month - not least because the title of a selection of his writings - Adventures in Marxism - helped reinforce my decision to call this blog 'Adventures in Historical Materialism'.  By way of tribute to Berman, I will refer interested readers to my review of Berman's work from 2006 here.

Speaking of 'adventures in Marxism', while longstanding readers of this blog will have spotted that I am really contributing very little here at the moment, I may as well take this opportunity to note that registration is now open for Historical Materialism conference in London in November - though, as HM conference tends towards the academic and obscurantist, I should probably also recommend a short but sharp critique of 'academic Marxism' from 1989 by Chris Harman, who made the point that 'revolutionary Marxism starts from different premises and has different aims to the academic version', and the two should not be confused for each other.  Fans of Harman might also be interested to learn that the four essays that were later published together to form the basis of his 1984 study of Marxist economics, Explaining the crisis, are now online as part of the ongoing process of making the second series of International Socialism journal accessible, see Theories of the crisis, Marx's theory of crisis and the critics, The crisis last time and State capitalism, armaments and the general form of the current crisis.   These essays really help explain the economic crisis of the 1970s - for Harman's explanation of the crisis which began in 2007, see his Zombie Capitalism.

Finally, a quick salute to the late General Võ Nguyên Giáp, who has passed away aged 102 - and who was a military genius who helped mastermind the defeat of first French colonialism and then American imperialism in Vietnam.  To paraphrase Tom Paine, to play a part in the military defeat of two empires in one's lifetime really is 'living to some purpose'...

Once more on the Daily Mail and Hitler

This article from the Histomat archive 'Reasons to Hate the Daily Mail # 94: Hitler-worship' seems timely as the Daily Mail (of Hurrah for the Blackshirts fame) continues to attack the great Marxist Ralph Miliband, who as a young Jewish teenager with his family was forced to flee the rise of fascism. 

 Edited to add:

Protest: for everyone the Daily Mail hates

London:
12pm, Sunday 6 October
Daily Mail offices, Young Street
London W8 5EH (High St Kensington tube)
Map
Share and invite your friends on Facebook

Manchester:
12pm, Sunday 6 October
St Ann's Square, Manchester
Map
Share and invite your friends on Facebook

On Sunday, all the people hated by the Daily Mail - that's pretty much all of us - are going to turn up at their headquarters, loud and proud about who we are. If you're a woman, a Muslim, LGBT, a nurse, a socialist, a trade union rep, a disabled person or just someone who doesn't like hatred being pumped into public life every day, turn up.

This is an upbeat, carnival-type protest, a statement of defiance against bigotry and hatred. So turn up in a good mood, with colourful banners, full of pride about who we all are.

Journalist and campaigner Owen Jones said: "A newspaper that once had the cheek to back Adolf Hitler and the Blackshirts has smeared Ralph Miliband, a Jewish refugee who fought the Nazis for this country, as a 'man who hated Britain'.

"But the reality is it is the Daily Mail who hates Britain. They hate our proud institutions, like the NHS and the BBC. Their campaign of hatred has targeted women, public sector workers, trade unionists, immigrants, Muslims, benefit claimants, travellers, and other vast swathes of our society.

"We're calling on all those hated by the Daily Mail to join us on Sunday, and to be loud and proud about what they are in a show of defiance against bigotry and hatred."

The hypocrisy of the West over Syria

 In 1970 the Senate reported: "The US has dumped on Vietnam a quantity of toxic chemical (dioxin) amounting to six pounds per head of population." This was Operation Hades, later renamed the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand – the source of what Vietnamese doctors call a "cycle of foetal catastrophe". I have seen generations of children with their familiar, monstrous deformities. John Kerry, with his own blood-soaked war record, will remember them. I have seen them in Iraq too, where the US used depleted uranium and white phosphorus, as did the Israelis in Gaza. No Obama "red line" for them. No showdown psychodrama for them.
The sterile repetitive debate about whether "we" should "take action" against selected dictators (ie cheer on the US and its acolytes in yet another aerial killing spree) is part of our brainwashing. Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law and UN special rapporteur on Palestine, describes it as "a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence". This "is so widely accepted as to be virtually unchallengeable".
It is the biggest lie: the product of "liberal realists" in Anglo-American politics, scholarship and media who ordain themselves as the world's crisis managers, rather than the cause of a crisis. Stripping humanity from the study of nations and congealing it with jargon that serves western power designs, they mark "failed", "rogue" or "evil" states for "humanitarian intervention"...
  From John Pilger 'The silent military coup that took over Washington'

The problem for America in all of this is that its capacity to impact diplomatic negotiations is limited by the fact that its record of asserting its military power stands squarely at odds with its pretensions of moral authority. For all America's condemnations of chemical weapons, the people of Falluja in Iraq are experiencing the birth defects and deformities in children and increases in early-life cancer that may be linked to the use of depleted uranium during the US bombardment of the town. It also used white phosphorus against combatants in Falluja.
Its chief ally in the region, Israel, holds the record for ignoring UN resolutions, and the US is not a participant in the international criminal court – which is charged with bringing perpetrators of war crimes to justice – because it refuses to allow its own citizens to be charged. On the very day Obama lectured the world on international norms he launched a drone strike in Yemen that killed six people.
Obama appealing for the Syrian regime to be brought to heel under international law is a bit like Tony Soprano asking the courts for a restraining order against one of his mob rivals – it cannot be taken seriously because the very laws he is invoking are laws he openly flouts....
From Gary Younge, 'The US has little credibility left'

The Other 9/11 - Forty years after Pinochet's coup in Chile

Allende can no longer hope to satisfy the owners of industry and the working class. He will have to choose to side with one or the other.

But one side is armed, the other not. And Allende shows no inclination at all to break his pledges to the middle class of a year ago not to “interfere” with the state machine.

Instead he will probably use his influence, and that of the bureaucrats within Chile’s working-class based parties and trade unions, to persuade workers to put up with harsh conditions and an erosion of last year’s reforms.

Such a course will tend to create confusion and a lack of direction among many workers. But it is not likely to lead to any great loss in the spontaneous militancy in the factories and mines. Because of that it will not satisfy those who continue to hold real power in Chile. In the past we have seen a number of examples of regimes in some ways similar to Allende’s.

After a period their mass support became demoralised and the government themselves were easily overthrown by right-wing military coups.

Socialist Worker, 20 November 1971

Tragically, that analysis of 'the Chilean road to socialism' as led by Salvador Allende was proved correct and forty years ago today - as the current issue of Socialist Worker reminds us - on 11 September 1973, the Chilean military led by General Pinochet organised a bloody military coup and killed some 30,000 people as it overthrew Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity (UP) government - killing Allende himself.  Like the Egyptian military takeover recently, this had the blessing of the United States.  As Henry Kissinger had famously put it in June 1970,

I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.

 The lessons of Chile remain important - if contested ones  - for the coup is a classic demonstration of the classical Marxist analysis of the state machine as fundamentally an instrument of class oppression and domination designed to defend the rich - and a reminder of the fallacies behind the notion of a 'parliamentary road to socialism'.  As Ian Birchall and Chris Harman noted in September 1973 just after Pinochet's coup,

The lessons of the Chilean experience, are not particularly original ones. They were first drawn by Marx, at the time of the Paris Commune more than 100 years ago, and they were reiterated by Lenin writing ‘State and Revolution’ on the eve of October: there is no way of carrying through a socialist transformation of society without first destroying the old state apparatus, with its standing army, its police, its judiciary, its bureaucratic hierarchy. In its place has to be established the rule of directly elected and recallable workers’ delegates, backed up by a workers’ militia.
Many would-be marxists have claimed that under modern conditions the bourgeois state can be reformed peacefully, at least in countries with strong parliamentary traditions.
These were the arguments used by Allende and the Communist Party in Chile. They are also the arguments of the labour left and the Communist Party in Britain. The Chilean coup has proved their fallacy. The ruling class will not just sit back and accept in-roads into its privileges, however ‘constitutionally’ reforms are carried through or however deep-rooted parliamentary traditions. The state machine in even the most democratic bourgeois states is built on strictly hierarchic principles, with control over the activities of the army, the police and the civil service concentrated in the hands of the relatives and friends of those who hold economic power. And the ruling class will use this state machine to re-establish its own, untrammelled domination the moment it feels the balance of forces are favourable to it.

That said, as the Chilean socialist Mario Nain notes today, if Pinochet's Chile was subsequently the laboratory for testing the ideas of 'neoliberalism' in practice, then in recent years anti-capitalist resistance and revolt have swept the country, led by new generations of workers.  If there is hope today in Chile after the memories and legacy of Pinochet's tyranny, it lies with them.

Edited to add: See the Chile 40 Years On website for some anniversary events etc in the UK around this.