Opening tonight in New York, the annual Human Rights Watch Film Festival is a reminder that as a genre, the documentary can offer far more compelling drama than any narrative film for the simple reason that reality itself confronts us in a way that fiction cannot. If the narrative film often enjoys its greatest success as an escape from the cares of quotidian existence, the documentary succeeds by showing real people facing the frightening obstacles capitalist society throws in their path.
While Indiana Jones is the prototype of derring-do escapist fantasy, I much prefer the humble people seen in three of the festival documentaries starting with an Iraqi male nurse who is the subject of “Nowhere to Hide” that opens the festival tonight (screening information is here). I regret that this might not be enough lead time for most New Yorkers but it is worth changing your plans to see courageous filmmaking at its best. After all, it is time better spent than watching Seinfeld reruns or the new Wonder Woman movie.
Five years ago, Norwegian-Kurdish documentary filmmaker Zaradasht Ahmed approached male nurse Nori Sharif with a project that sounded almost like making a home movie. He would give Sharif a high-end DSLR camera and tripod to capture scenes of daily life in Jalawla, where he lived and worked in the emergency room of the local hospital. This is a town of about 80,000 people that breaks down into 70% Sunni Arab, 20% Feyli Kurd and 10% Shia Turkmen. The film reveals nothing about Sharif’s ethnicity. He identifies solely as an Iraqi throughout the film and his most frequent observation about the state of his country is that it has gone mad.
Last year I boycotted the annual Left Forum conference in New York, an event I have been covering since 2005. As I put it in a blog post last year, “the same sort of idiocy that has taken over the left on Syria has become so pervasive this year that I cannot justify spending $70 to attend.” When I bad-mouthed the 2017 conference this year, someone tipped me off on FB that there were a number of good panels on Syria. Indeed, there were four of them featuring my favorite people to balance those sponsored by the usual gang of “false flag” idiots. Just as encouragingly, I got word that the event would be more tightly controlled this year with an outright ban on 9/11 Truther panels. This elicited a complaint from David Lindorff on Counterpunch that I will address at the end of this report but for now let me turn to the workshops I attended that were among the most productive in my entire experience going to Left Forums.
Saturday 10am-11:50am: The Long Depression – A critique of the book by Michael Roberts
Michael Roberts, blogged about the workshop here. He also advised that the event was recorded and will be available on the Left Forum Youtube channel in a couple of weeks. Roberts is a strong defender of the falling rate of profit thesis found in V. 3 of Capital that not every Marxist agrees with, especially Michael Heinrich.
After Roberts recapitulated the arguments in his new book, he was critiqued by Paul Mattick, the son of the famous Marxist economist, and Jose Tapia—both of whom agreed with the FROP theory but had problems with some of Roberts’s findings that can be recounted in his blog article and that can be heard in all their complexity on the Youtube video when it becomes available.
While I understand the need to examine Marx’s theory against the actual data, I am not sure what bearing it has on the challenges facing the left. While I have problems with the critique of “catastrophism” mounted by people like Sasha Lilley, I have to wonder why economic immiseration does not produce working class motion. Throughout the rust belt, there are millions of workers who have lost their jobs and are being forced to work for Walmarts and other low-wage companies but this has not produced the kind of openness to radical ideas that you saw in the 1930s. Roberts refers to a “long depression” but to some extent I have to wonder about the appropriateness of this term given what I know about the period from my mother’s account. This was a time of great hardship that left families on the edge of disaster.
Roberts tried to explain the difference between recession and depression by referring to two graphic symbols. In the first, you see a V that indicates a sharp drop followed by a recovery to the old economic indicators but with a depression, you see something that looks like this:
The problem is that if economic recovery only reaches 80 percent or so of the previous level, that might just be enough to placate a working class that has become accustomed to the idea of austerity. I keep thinking back to Michael Moore’s documentary “Roger and Me” where he interviews unemployed auto workers in Flint who are either raising rabbits for food or making plans to move to Texas where the jobs haven’t dried up. That’s the American working class of today, not “Grapes of Wrath”.
Saturday 12pm-1:50pm: Rural Proletarian Revolutions, Oklahoma and Mexico, 1917: Capitalism, Environmental Disaster, and Why the Land Question Remains Relevant
As a rule of thumb, I try to attend workshops that will add to my knowledge. The provision of economic, historical or social facts that I have been unaware of is a kind of litmus test. With that in mind, the relationship between rural proletarian revolutions and Oklahoma was something I found most intriguing. What was up with that?
It devolved upon long-time scholar and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz to explain the connections in a talk on the Green Corn rebellion of 1917 that was about as promising a historical event upon which to make a film as “Free State of Jones”. As it happens, I have been apprised by Roxanne by her events in NY over the years but this was the first time I was able to attend one. I first became aware of her in 1971 when Trotskyist women working in Female Liberation were giving reports to the branch about the problems they were having with Abby Rockefeller and Roxanne Dunbar, who were in Cell 16. Looking back in retrospect, I should have gotten up and defended Abby and Roxanne. The SWP had a tendency to force its agenda on social movements and this was no exception, I’m sure.
Roxanne would seem to be well-equipped to speak about the Oklahoma left given her background (from Wikipedia):
Born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1939 to an Oklahoma family, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in Central Oklahoma, daughter of a sharecropper and a mother that Dunbar believes to have been Native American. Dunbar’s paternal grandfather, a settler of Scots-Irish ancestry, was a landed farmer, veterinarian, a labor activist and a Socialist Party member in Oklahoma and also a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, “Wobblies.” Her father was named after the leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World—Moyer Haywood Pettibone Scarberry Dunbar. Her father’s stories of her grandfather inspired her to lifelong social justice activism.
Since the panel was sponsored by Monthly Review, it would help to refer you to an article Roxanne wrote that covered the Green Corn rebellion.
In August 1917, tenant farmers and sharecroppers in several eastern and southern Oklahoma counties took up arms to overthrow the United States government, to stop military conscription and U.S. entry into the war in Europe. Renegade Socialists, organized in their own “Working Class Union” (WCU), white, black, and Indian, they believed that millions of armed working people across the country would march with them to take Washington.
In a time of leftist disparagement of rural farmers and workers, what better time than now to study this important part of working class history? My friend Yale Strom has made a documentary about Eugene V. Debs that covers the support he received in Oklahoma and other such “boondock” locations that the SP and the IWW oriented to. Maybe it’s time for a revival of Debs socialism that has little to do with what Bernie Sanders spoke about.
Saturday 3:30pm-5:15pm: Geopolitics, the International Left, and the Syrian Revolt
This was one of four panel discussions at the Left Forum that marked a departure from the majoritarian “anti-imperialist” camp. Although I am obviously familiar with the arguments that would have presented here, I made a point of attending since it helps my morale to see other people who continue to fight the good fight. The event was sponsored by The Global Campaign for Solidarity with the Syrian Revolution whose FB page is at https://www.facebook.com/Global-Campaign-of-Solidarity-with-the-Syrian-Revolution-147353662105485/.
Among the speakers were Ashley Smith, an ISO’er who has been writing terrific stuff on Syria, Loubna Mrie, who debated the wretched Max Blumenthal, Joseph Daher and Malak Chabkoun, who was described as an “independent researcher” and who I had not heard of before. Blumenthal, I should add, disparaged all of these anti-Assad panels and referred people on Twitter to the only pro-Assad panel that was the only one not to include a Syrian. Fancy that. My advice is to check Malak Chabkoun’s articles on al-Jazeera. She is really sharp.
Daher was as incisive as ever but I am not sure whether his call for ending the war in Syria will fall on deaf ears. It is true that peace will allow civil society to regather momentum but as long as the Assadists are in power, the same old restrictions will remain. The struggle against despotic regimes in the Middle East and North Africa will take decades to win and will likely gain the upper hand when the left is much more powerful globally. At least the “primitive accumulation” of a pro-revolution movement as represented by the speakers at this workshop gives hope that a better day lies ahead.
Saturday 5:20pm-7:10pm: Evaluation of Progressive Governments in Latin America in Recent Years
This was in sharp contrast to all the Chavista workshops at Left Forum over the years that featured people like Steve Ellner and Dario Azzellini over the years. Concurring with Jeffery Webber and people writing for the ISO press, the talks focused on the structural flaws of the Pink Tide that evolved from their dependence on commodity exports such as soybeans, oil, etc. that were gobbled up by an expanding Chinese economy.
For one of the speakers, an Argentine named Juan Kornblihtt, this was explained on the reliance on “ground rent”, a form of surplus value extraction analyzed by Karl Marx in V. 3 of Capital. I first ran across Juan Kornblihtt’s analysis while preparing an article for CounterPunch dealing with the point of view expressed by the speakers, which can be likened to a coroner’s report.
Essentially, Kornblihtt and others such as Daniel Ellinger who are committed to the ground rent analysis tie mining and agriculture (the “rent” is extracted from the soil or ground) to a decline in manufacturing, which is capable of providing more traditional forms of wage income. For Lula and Chavez, the “rent” could be used to provide subsidies to families and hence their support until prices began to drop.
I pointed out in the discussion period that investments in manufacturing might have dried up because capitalist investors saw much more profit in soybeans or oil than in starting up an auto sector—as if Brazil or Venezuela could ever compete with South Korea or Japan.
Much of it relies on the research of Juan Iñigo Carerra, a subscriber to the Marxism list that preceded Marxmail. Juan used to write in a style that sounded like a parody of Marx’s Grundrisse. He was quite the character.
Sunday 12pm-1:50pm India’s Contested Spaces: Labor, Land, and Environment
This was sponsored by India Civil Watch, a new group dedicated to opposing Modi that appears to involve some of the activist-scholars who used to sponsor workshops at Left Forum in the name of http://sanhati.com/.
Their analysis rests on the premise that Modi’s neoliberalism is simply an extension of Congress Party rule that will be distinguished by its attack on India’s marginalized population. Among the speakers was Biju Mathew, whose name was familiar to me as the founder of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, the only trade union that bears any resemblance to the labor movements of the past. He was also a member of the board of the now defunct Brecht Forum that these Left Forum events remind me of. No matter how valuable my exchanges with Marxists on the Internet, there is nothing about the face-to-face encounters in real space that stay with you.
In his talk, Mathew compared Modi to Trump, something that makes a lot more sense than Mussolini or Hitler for that matter. Matthew’s article on Modi’s election victory can be read on Sanhati (http://sanhati.com/excerpted/10478/) and is well worth it:
We are no longer fighting to defeat the BJP. Instead we are fighting for a new meaning and a more revolutionary democratic form that exceeds the bourgeois liberal framework we have been stuck within. It doesn’t matter that it may well take us a decade or more to win this battle. It’s the only kind of fight that can withstand the majoritarian logic especially now that the capitalist elite have signed on to it fully. This battle fortunately won’t be unique to India. All across the world liberal democracy under conditions of neoliberal dominance has begun to come apart on the question of minorities. In the US and the UK, for instance, Islamophobia and anti-third-world migrant sentiment has produced the sharpest divisions in civil society. In post-revolution Egypt, the struggle has also turned in significant part on the question of minority rights, though for now the army has fundamentally short circuited the debate. The significant showing of nine fascist parties in the EU elections is an indicator that in almost every part of Europe a majoritarian sentiment is on the rise. In Iran, the emergence of the Green movement over the last decade articulates aspects of a similar problematic. In Pakistan, the struggles around the status of Shias, Christians and the Baluch invoke the same limits. The solution in the end is to produce a global revolution in the democratic form that must arrest majoritarianism. Let’s work to put into place our part in this revolution.
Sunday 3:40pm-5:40pm Puerto Rico and the Junta: A tale of colonial and neocolonial dispossession
Three speakers, all Puerto Rican, spoke about how the island was being raped by hedge fund investors and a colonial government that bent over backwards to satisfy them. Ian Seda-Irizarry, who is in the economics department at John Jay—the host of the Left Forum, asked his fellow panelists who the most progressive governor of Puerto Rico was. They had no idea that he was speaking of Rex Tugwell, one of FDR’s top economics advisers who served as governor during WWII.
For the three speakers, the big job now is coming up with the data that can demonstrate how vulture funds are destroying the Puerto Rican economy. I recommend panelist Ed Morales’s article on the Puerto Rican crisis in The Nation and would urge you to pay close attention to the section that shows how the black bloc tactic was used to victimize 42 groups that are on the frontlines attacking austerity and colonialism. I also recommend Ed’s interview with Ian that includes a discussion of salsa music, something that he knows as well as his Marxist economics.
Afterword on Dave Lindorff’s article:
Titled “Left Forum Bans Four Panels Under Zionist Pressure”, the article takes up the case of Veterans Today editor Kevin Barrett and Anthony Hall, a tenured professor of the University of Lethbridge in Alberta.
Supposedly they were banned for anti-Semitism although I would have booted Barrett for his 9/11 crap that supposedly was being purged from this year’s Left Forum and all future events—thank god. They told him that they had no use for his workshops, a sign of growing maturity on the left. It seems that Lindorff was scheduled to appear alongside Barrett on the “false flag” panel discussion that included Barrett and someone named Ole Dammegard.
False Flags: Staged, Scripted, Mass Psy-Op Events 2-3:50pm Speakers: Dr. Kevin Barrett, Dave Lindorff, Ole Dammegard • Moderator: Dr. Lucy Morgan Edwards
9/11 Truth: Ground Zero for a Resistance Movement 4-5:50pm Speakers: Dr. Kevin Barrett, Barbara Honegger, Richard Gage • Moderator: Dr. Lucy Morgan Edwards
You can get a feel for Dammegard’s provenance from this:
During the interview, Ole Dammegard also affirms the role of elites such as David Rockefeller and the Rockefeller group, and the Rothschild City of London banking families in originating the Kennedy assassination for a variety of motives, ranging from Kennedy’s breakaway from the Rothschild-controlled Federal Reserve Bank in printing U.S. Treasury silver-backed currency to Kennedy’s plan to end the Vietnam War.
This sort of person has no business at the Left Forum. If Dave Lindorff wants to start a conspiracist conference, let him get in touch with Michel Chossudovsky and Alex Jones.
As far as Anthony Hall is concerned, his panels were also shit-canned:
Political Correctness: The Dangers of Thought Crime Police 10:00-11:50am Speakers: Dr. Anthony Hall, Jeremy Rothe-Kushel • Moderator: Cheryl Curtiss
Terrorism”: Fake Enemies, Fraudulent Wars Noon-1:50pm Speakers: Michael Springmann, Dr. Anthony Hall, Dr. Kevin Barrett • Moderator: Tom Kiely
Trying to prove that Hall is anti-Semitic is not that easy. He was punished by his university for tolerating an anti-Semitic comment on his FB page. He has also made a Youtube video urging “open debate” on the Holocaust, a rather fishy call if you ask me.
For my money, his worst offense and grounds from dismissal from Left Forum events is the imbecilic conspiracism that he and Veterans Today publisher Kevin Barrett traffic in. Like Barrett, Hall is a big-time 9/11 Truther. He runs two websites that offer the same crap as Global Research, Infowars, Off-Guardian, Moon of Alabama, Information Clearing House, et al.
One of them, No Lies Radio, will allow you to listen to the banned panels for only $15. If you want to waste your money on that rather than a nice bottle of Pinot Noir, be my guest.
Hall also runs American Herald Tribune that has about as much to do with the original newspaper that Donald Trump has to do with Abraham Lincoln. This website is virtually indistinguishable from a thousand others that traffic in 9/11, False Flag, pro-Assad talking points that more and more can be seen as shared by people like Richard Spencer, David Duke and Alex Jones. For me, the disappearance of Assadist and 9/11 panel discussions at the Left Forum is a welcome sign that the left is finally waking up from a deep slumber.
Two new documentaries will make you look differently at your electronic gadgets, especially the cool iPhone or other products from Apple whose logo might be changed to a skull-and-crossbones after seeing “Death by Design” and “Complicit”. They examine the damage done to both the workers who produce them and the environment, especially in China, as well as raise important questions about the meaning of “progress”. If being able to use an iPhone to pay for your Starbucks coffee comes at the expense of a leukemia epidemic for Foxconn workers and making 60 percent of China’s groundwater unsuitable for drinking, then the whole question of progress has to be thought through.
From the blog of Roland Boer, who was awarded the Isaac Deutscher prize in 2014, a decision that made about as much sense as naming Jeff Sessions Attorney General
The subtitle of a Jacobin article by New Left Review editorial board member Daniel Finn probably speaks for many on the left: “The Bolivarian Revolution went too far for capitalism but not far enough for socialism.” Like doctors examining a critically ill patient, the latest issue of the Jacobin features a panel of experts offering various cures. Favoring radical surgery is Eva Maria, a Venezuelan member of the ISO who answers the question “how socialist was Venezuela’s ‘twenty-first century socialism’” thusly:
Chávez’s thinking was that he could take over a capitalist state through an electoral process. Then, he could help foster the social revolution by using the position he held in the state. But I think that presupposes a lot of things that are unstable and untrue.
Mike Gonzalez, a former member of the British SWP that spawned the ISO, has an article in the same issue that accuses the Pink Tide governments of having “left stranded and disoriented those millions who fought for a different world”.
The methodology of Finn, Maria and Gonzalez is the one followed by film critics. You go to a press screening and take notes on all the terrible things that Michael Bay did in his latest movie. There is little doubt that Bay’s movies are crap but are the criticisms going to help young screenwriters and directors make better films? As a film critic and someone who was deeply involved in the Sandinista revolution–another that received thumbs down from the pure at heart–this sort of sideline criticism strikes me as utterly sterile.
But on a deeper level, it poses the question whether the ideological assumptions at the heart of these critics effaces one of the major theoretical challenges the left has faced since 1917—namely, can socialism be built in one country. This is exactly the meaning of the criticisms–that all of these countries should have “gone socialist”. One imagines that they came to this conclusion since Saint Lenin said it was possible in the Soviet Union but the fallen saint Leon Trotsky refused to describe the USSR in those terms even after 19 years of “socialist development”. In chapter nine of “Revolution Betrayed”, he describes the character of the USSR as not yet decided by history:
To define the Soviet regime as transitional, or intermediate, means to abandon such finished social categories as capitalism (and therewith “state capitalism”) and also socialism. But besides being completely inadequate in itself, such a definition is capable of producing the mistaken idea that from the present Soviet regime only a transition to socialism is possible. In reality a backslide to capitalism is wholly possible. A more complete definition will of necessity be complicated and ponderous.
This was the only conceivable way to describe a country that despite the total absence of private property was indistinguishable politically and socially from fascism. For those who have been trained in Tony Cliff’s ideology, characterizing the USSR was much easier. It was “state capitalism”, a term that had little purchase outside of the ranks of the international movement he built except for individuals like CLR James who while believing in it never devoted much ink to defending it. The Cliffites never really answered the question adequately, however. If it was impossible to build socialism in one country in Russia, how in the world could Cuba, Venezuela or Nicaragua “go socialist”? The Sandinistas ruled over a country that had a population about the size of Brooklyn, one elevator in the entire country, and whose GDP was less than what Americans spent on blue jeans. Socialism? If the USSR with its vast resources, immense population and powerful army was not capable of building socialism, how could any of these fragile Latin and Central American nations satisfy the demanding critics?
Up until Lenin took that train ride back to Russia in 1917, he never considered Russia to be capable of building socialism. He was for a revolution against feudalism that could motivate workers in the West to overthrow capitalism. In other words, he was for a world revolution. In 1920, Lenin gave a speech on the 3rd anniversary of the revolution that categorically denied the possibility of building socialism without the USSR being linked to more advanced and liberated nations to the West:
Three years ago, when we were at Smolny, the Petrograd workers’ uprising showed us that it was more unanimous than we could have expected, but had we been told that night that, three years later, we would have what now exists, that we would have this victory of ours, nobody, not even the most incurable optimist, would have believed it. We knew at that time that our victory would be a lasting one only when our cause had triumphed the world over, and so when we began working for our cause we counted exclusively on the world revolution.
Just three years later, he adopted the same cautious tone in an article titled “On Cooperation” that defined socialism in the USSR as a network of peasant cooperatives similar to those that the Chavistas promoted. The big difference between the USSR and Venezuela is that the Bolsheviks “expropriated the expropriators”, a bold act that prompted a counter-revolutionary invasion that cost up to 12 million lives, most of them civilian, and $35 billion. If Chavez had followed “20th century socialism”, he would have expropriated the expropriators as well. That would have eliminated the internal threat but accelerated the external one. The USA would have wasted no time imposing crippling sanctions to make the country “cry uncle”. None of this ever enters the calculations of someone like Mike Gonzalez. It might have been thrilling to him to witness such a transformation in Venezuela even if it lasted briefly and left our movement feeling just as crushed as when Pinochet took power in 1973. We need a permanent revolution, not in the Trotskyist sense but in the sense of permanence. Capitalism achieved that kind of permanence beginning in the 15th century because it pitted a bourgeoisie that was accumulating social and economic power within the framework of medieval political institutions.
Nikolai Bukharin was very clear about the differences between the bourgeois revolution and proletarian revolutions. Marxists traditionally had believed that just as capitalism emerged out of the old feudal order, so would socialism emerge out of bourgeois society. However, as Bukharin pointed out, the bourgeoisie was not an exploited class and therefore was able to rule society long before its political revolution was effected. The workers are in a completely different position, however. They lack an independent economic base and suffer economic and cultural exploitation. Prior to its revolution, the working-class remains backward and therefore, unlike the bourgeoisie, is unable to prepare itself in advance for ruling all of society. It was only through the seizure of power and rule through a vanguard party that the workers could build socialism.
What did Karl Marx think about a revolution in Russia? Toward the end of his life, he became increasingly convinced that the country was ripe for revolution. So persuaded was he of this eventuality that he began to study Russian to keep up with the developments in the country. Just two years before his death, he began corresponding with Vera Zasulich, a one-time Narodnik who had become a Marxist. However, she had qualms about whether Russia had to go through a capitalist phase before socialism was possible, a view held by Georgi Plekhanov who was regarded as the most advanced Marxist thinker in the country.
Marx said it was not necessary and even anticipated what Lenin would state in 1923 about socialism resting on communal peasant farming: “My answer is that, thanks to the unique combination of circumstances in Russia, the rural commune, which is still established on a national scale, may gradually shake off its primitive characteristics and directly develop as an element of collective production on a national scale.”
A year after Marx wrote this letter to Zasulich, he and Engels co-wrote a preface to a new edition to Capital that fleshed out the relationship between Russia and advanced nations in the West:
The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina [commune], though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?
The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.
In other words, in 1920 Lenin was simply repeating what Marx and Engels had written in 1882. If the Russian Revolution detonated revolutions in Germany, England, France et al, then a “communist development” would be possible. Marx never wrote much about what a socialist revolution would look like until 1871, when the Paris Commune became the first state ever governed by the workers themselves. Marx’s focus in his book on the Commune was not on “socialism” as much as it was about the proletariat in power. Clearly, the failure of the Commune to be replicated anywhere else in France, let alone the rest of Europe, sealed its fate. Its importance was an example of working people acting in their own interests without a ruling class. As such, it had to be destroyed. Marx ends “Civil War in France” with a judgement on its historical significance: “Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priest will not avail to redeem them.”
The key word is harbinger.
Yesterday, a graduate student in Tampa, Florida named Donald Parkinson replied to someone who identified Nikolai Bukharin as the inventor of the theory of socialism in one country even though it is usually attributed to Josef Stalin. Parkinson said that there were those who came before him including Karl Kautsky, something that was news to me.
I had never associated Kautsky with the theory but a brief search turned up an article titled ‘Socialism in one country’ before Stalin: German originsthat is worth reading. It was written by Erik Van Ree for the June 2010 Journal of Political Ideologies that includes a sharp analysis of Kautsky, who ironically attacked Lenin for trying to build socialism in a country that was not economically advanced enough. Van Ree writes:
After Engels’s death in 1895, the editor of Die Neue Zeit, Kautsky, was widely seen as the main theoretical spokesman of ‘orthodox Marxism’. In contrast to the revisionists, he rejected German colonial and imperial ambitions. In his view, the most effective way of strengthening the country would be to expedite the transition to socialism. In a remarkable March 1897 editorial of Die Neue Zeit discussing admiral Friedrich von Hollmann’s naval programme, it was concluded that Germany was too late to become a winner in the imperialist rivalry:
If Germany wants to get ahead of richer nations, only one road is available to her, the road of a ‘social revolution, which … makes possible the creation of new productive forces that cancel out the disadvantages of the geographical situation’. Marx expressed this thought already fifty years ago … and later Lassalle gave it the formulation that the world market will belong to that nation whose working class first manages to emancipate itself. … The Weltpolitik of the big industrialists must be confronted with the proletarian Weltpolitik.
This editorial suggested not only that Germany could establish socialism on her own, but that this would even represent the desirable state of affairs; for the spread of socialism to other nations would have undone the lead socialism would have given Germany, which was the whole point of the editorial. That was however not likely the real drift of Kautsky’s thinking. More likely, he only intended to show that the socialist economic system was a solution for countries that were insufficiently able to get ahead. Nonetheless, the editorial shows that even the ‘orthodox’ Kautsky was not insensitive to the patriotic attractions of socialism in one country.
Kautsky was influenced by the spirit of the times. From the 1870s onward capitalist states had been retreating from free trade to nationalization of their economies and protectionism. Correspondingly, in the work of German social-democrats, including even of free-trade advocate Kautsky, the concept of autarky became steadily more important. In his 1892 Das Erfurter Program, Kautsky defined the socialist state as a ‘self-sufficient association [Genossenschaft]’ that must produce ‘everything it needs for its existence’, something he said all socialists agreed on. He explained that the expansion of international trade had more to do with capitalism than with real needs, and that under socialism international trade ‘will be strongly reduced’.32 To be sure, Kautsky was probably not referring to an isolated socialist state but to an international community of socialist states, each of which would be organizing its own autarkic economy.33 Nonetheless, this was a programme of socialist autarky. The book was probably the single most authoritative compendium of the SPD’s ideology for the next 25 years, so the weight of these passages should not be underestimated.
Unlike Lars Lih who has devoted so many words to rehabilitating Kautsky’s reputation, this passage reminds me why I have always seen him a bit more critically. I would go so far as to advise all my readers to see all of the classic Marxist thinkers with “warts and all”, including a patzer like me.
Please excuse the intrusion on your time, but I’m a little lost and would appreciate some guidance.
I’ve been trying to understand Marxism and its variants for years, now, but it is a very thick and deep forest. It doesn’t help that there seem to be a lot of strongly held opinions out there, and everyone criticizes everyone else. That’s probably a good thing for the movement, but it is quite bewildering for the outsider or beginner.
For example, there are Marxism, Trotskyism, Communism, Socialism, and so on, and I see that each has multiple definitions (depending on whom and when one asks). One book I read on Marxist economics said that even Karl Marx himself said he didn’t recognize all the the things called “Marxist”, so many things were done in his name. To make matters worse, there are all of the uncertainties of history related to Marxism and its offshoots: Bolsheviks were financed by New York bankers, the Soviet Union betrayed the Spanish communists when they were fighting Franco, CIA strategy was developed in part by ex-Trotskyists, and so on. This can’t all be true, there are so many contradictions.
I’ve been exposed to American history all of my life (some of it quite false), and I am a little comfortable navigating around it, though I am certainly not an expert. That includes U.S. law (and its roots in England), the various antecedents of American “philosophy” (again, right and wrong), and the roots of U.S. culture. But, when it comes to other ways of thinking and other histories, I am a stranger. My idea of Russian history, for example, is a mass of facts, many contradictory, so I don’t have a sense of how it all ties together. I know that a lot of it relates to this or that political theory, and I know that Marxism started more in England than in Russia, so maybe it doesn’t have much to do with Marxism. But this cannot be exceptional: most of the thievery by the privileged in the U.S. is simple thievery, not based on anyone’s awareness of surplus value or democracy or anything like that. Maybe theory is just theory, and it’s simply fantasy to tie them much together.
I read and enjoyed Harman’s A People’s History of the World, and enjoyed it immensely. However, it only went so far, and it had very little theory in it. I’m not sure where to go from there. Marx himself is very dense, and frankly I have trouble following him, but things have moved forward from him, anyway, so he’s probably not the best place to start. Trotsky, Lenin, and Luxemburg (for examples) are quite readable, but I don’t know how to put them into perspective.
I don’t see a reading list on your web site.
So here’s my question and request: Can you recommend a book (or maybe several) which gives a “fair and balanced” introduction to all of these things, including both history and theory? (No, not “fair and balanced” in the Fox news sense!) Some theory, some history, some sense of relative theoretical and historical importance? By history, I’d like to see both history of Marxism et al themselves, as well as history of people and nations. When it comes to economics, numbers and formulae don’t bother me, I majored in math and economics. (And it’s quite possible to get an economics major without hearing either of the words, “ethics” or “Marxist”.)
Again, thank you for your time.
Best regards,
M.
Dear M.,
I see that you have read Chris Harman’s History of the World. I have that on my bookshelf at home and am looking forward to the time when I can read it myself. It sits next to Neil Faulkner’s A Marxist History of the World: from Neanderthals to Neoliberals that I hope to get to as well. Faulkner, like Harman, was a member of the British SWP until he left in a split led by John Rees. Like a number of people trained in this movement, these are the elite of Marxist theory. I would also recommend anything written by Neil Davidson, who may still be a member—I’m not sure. Davidson’s latest book is titled We Cannot Escape History: States and Revolutions and would be a good place to start since it is a collection of his articles that appeared in scholarly journals. Also, A.L. Morton is another British historian that I hold in high regard. Morton was a member of the British Communist Party Historians Group that included Morton, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson. Morton wrote a People’s History of England that is priceless as history as well as a model of how to reach a non-academic audience. I suspect that Howard Zinn had Morton’s book in mind when he wrote his American history. The good news is that Morton’s book is freely available on the net (https://libcom.org/history/peoples-history-england). I also recommend CLR James’s Black Jacobins that is about the revolution in Haiti led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. James was a great historian and arguably the most important Marxist thinker after the death of Leon Trotsky.
Turning to Russian history, I strongly recommend Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution that is online at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/. Trotsky was a great writer and his history was viewed as a literary masterpiece even by those who disagreed with his political analysis. I also have high regard for anything written by Moshe Lewin, who started off as a blast furnace operator in a Polish factory during WWII and then became a major figure in academic Sovietology. I read his Russia — USSR — Russia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate and recommend it highly. Another important work that will help you understand Soviet Communism is Stephen F. Cohen’s biography of Nikolai Bukharin. Like Lewin, Cohen is influenced by Marxism but is not really ideological in the same way as Trotsky or CLR James. To round out “the Russian question”, I would recommend Isaac Deutscher. His 3-volume biography of Leon Trotsky is indispensable. Deutscher started off as a Trotskyist but became critical of the movement later on. There’s a collection of his articles in Marxism, Wars and Revolutions: Essays from Four Decades that was written in 1985 that covers Russia as well as other topics. I have read some of the articles and found them very useful, especially one on the Polish Communist Party that will be referenced in a forthcoming article about the filmmaker Andrjez Wajda I am working on.
To conclude on economics, I’d have to start with Ernest Mandel who despite his life-long membership in the Trotskyist movement was regarded as a world-class economist even by his ideological adversaries. There is a large collection of his books and articles here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/index.htm. I particularly recommend An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory that was written in 1967. I am also very partial to the economists who are associated with the Monthly Review, a journal and book publishing company founded by Paul Sweezy in 1949. Sweezy and MR co-editor Paul Baran wrote Monopoly Capital in 1966, a book that dealt with the American economic system as well as the social relations that had characterized the post-WWII expansion (TV, advertising, etc.) Another MR classic is Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital, a 1974 book that is focused on the impact of automation on work. Braverman, unlike Sweezy and other MR editors, had a background in the Trotskyist movement but by the time he became associated with MR, he had developed a much broader outlook. Braverman’s book is online here: http://libcom.org/library/labor-monopoly-capital-degradation-work-twentieth-century
Maurice Dobb is among the authors published by MR’s magazine. To illustrate how broad its outlook, Dobb was involved with a major debate with Paul Sweezy in the 1950s over the origins of capitalism but that did not exclude him from consideration as a contributor to the magazine. I strongly recommend Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism that is focused on British economic history and as a good complement to A.L. Morton’s book. If you read the two in tandem, you’ll learn about British history and the Marxist class analysis. Like Morton’s book, Dobb’s is online: http://digamo.free.fr/dobb1946.pdf.
You also might want to look at the archives of a Yahoo mailing list I created in 2008 that was designed as an introduction to Marxism class. It never quite turned into an online seminar that I hoped it would become but you can find a number of “lectures” I gave to the group that you might find interesting: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/marxism_class/conversations/messages
Finally, I would recommend David Harvey’s online lecture videos on Karl Marx’s Capital. Harvey is a major Marxist economist in his own right and admired greatly by his students: http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/
This list of course does not exhaust the subject of learning about Marxism but I guarantee that a careful study of the included works will give you a leg up.
Last Friday Chris Gilbert wrote an article for CounterPunch titled The Chávez Hypothesis: Vicissitudes of a Strategic Project that like many I have read since 1999 try to put the late President into a Marxist context, in this instance claiming that “Hugo Chávez was an heir to Lenin’s political legacy.” Before replying to Gilbert, it might be useful to mention other attempts to ground the Bolivarian revolution in one strand of Marxism or another.
In the September 2011 issue of Dialectical Anthropology, Steve Ellner posed the question of whether the process of change in Venezuela resembled a “Permanent Revolution”. After reviewing five distinct stages of the process, Ellner asserts that “the sequence of events and the strategy that influenced them recall the concept of permanent revolution espoused by Leon Trotsky”. Like many other Marxists who have weighed in on post-Chávez Venezuela, there is little evidence that Ellner still expects Venezuela to have its own version of October 1917 any time soon, especially since the native versions of Kerensky and Kornilov have the upper hand.
Michael Lebowitz has written a number of books making connections between the process in Venezuela and what some might consider a Marxism influenced by István Mészáros, including one I reviewed for CounterPunch in August 2015 . In that article, I made a point that I will repeat later on in this article, namely that Venezuela’s woes today have much to do with its entanglement in global capitalist property relations. Even with the best of intentions and inspired by the best Marxism has to offer from either Lebowitz or Mészáros, there were objective constraints that made a socialist Venezuela very difficult if not impossible to attain.
Many on the left, including Jeffery Webber whose new book The Last Day of Oppression, and the First Day of the Same: The Politics and Economics of the New Latin American Left I reviewed for CounterPunch last month, dismiss Venezuela as a failed populist but neo-liberal experiment. They too hearken back to Marxist theory but mainly as a yardstick with which to measure (or spank) the “pink tide” governments for abandoning Marxist principles. Perhaps if Hugo Chávez had been reading Jeffery Webber rather than István Mészáros, the situation would not be so bleak. (Needless to say, when you are dealing with tenured professors, the emphasis is on reading.)
Last but not least we have George Cicariello-Maher, who like Gilbert invokes Lenin to help us understand the process in Venezuela. Cicariello-Maher is passionately devoted to the communes in Venezuela that pose a “dual power” threat to the capitalist state just as the soviets did in 1917. It is a bit complicated when you consider that the millions of dollars that have helped to get the communes off the ground in Venezuela came from that very capitalist state.
Turning now to Chris Gilbert’s essay, it is an homage to Chávez at a moment when ultraleft sectarians are blaming his policies for the current crisis. Gilbert’s focus is not on the economic woes of the country that some leftists attribute to the Bolivarian revolution’s failure to transcend its status as an oil rentier state or its adoption of a two-tiered currency model that led to runaway inflation but on Chávez’s political acumen in pursuing a single-minded strategic orientation as a latter-day Lenin.
On the Skeptic Magazine website there’s an article titled “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct: A Sokal-Style Hoax on Gender Studies” co-authored by Peter Boghossian, Ed.D. and James Lindsay, Ph.D. that details how they suckered a “peer-reviewed journal” into publishing a bunch of gibberish filled with postmodernist jargon.
The article appeared in Cogent Social Sciences, a division of Taylor and Francis that along with Sage, Springer and Elsevier represent the top-drawer of academic publishing. Or at least has such a reputation. A representative paragraph appears in the Skeptic article:
We conclude that penises are not best understood as the male sexual organ, or as a male reproductive organ, but instead as an enacted social construct that is both damaging and problematic for society and future generations. The conceptual penis presents significant problems for gender identity and reproductive identity within social and family dynamics, is exclusionary to disenfranchised communities based upon gender or reproductive identity, is an enduring source of abuse for women and other gender-marginalized groups and individuals, is the universal performative source of rape, and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.
The references are as bogus as the rest of the article, including one for the Postmodern Generator, a website coded in the 1990s by Andrew Bulhak featuring an algorithm, based on NYU physicist Alan Sokal’s method of hoaxing a cultural studies journal called Social Text, that returns a different fake postmodern “paper” every time the page is reloaded.
They have to admit that the article was rejected by NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, a Taylor and Francis journal whose editorial board is dominated by Scandinavian academics. An recent article suggests that the journal is strongly influenced by 1970s type feminism: ‘We wouldn’t be boys if we weren’t clever with our hands’ – childhood masculinity in a rural community in Norway.
Considering that is it not included in the top-ranked 115 journals in Gender Studies, being rejected by NORMA indicates a failure to leap a hurdle 6 inches above the ground. As is often (or perhaps universally) the case with being rejected by a Taylor and Francis journal, you get an autoreply inviting you to submit the article to a journal in their open-access Cogent Social Science series that despite the Taylor and Francis imprimatur functions like a predatory journal. Basically, you pony up $1,350 (the hoaxers paid half the normal fee for some reason) and Cogent will be happy to put any crap you write on their website.
Because I have been published in Capitalism, Nature and Socialism, a Taylor and Francis journal, I ended up on some mailing lists that periodically generate mass invitations to the recipients asking them to submit something to open-access predatory journals (Internet-based) as opposed to the far more expensive and exclusive print journals found on JSTOR . For a number of years, University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beal maintained a list of such journals that totaled 1,155 as of December 31, 2016. Beal took down his website in January 2017, providing no comment why. One surmises that he got fed up with being harassed by the conmen operating in this field, including an outfit in India that threatened him with a one billion dollar law suit.
One of the more outrageous predatory journals that solicited an article from me had the gumption to include the name of a professor I knew quite well on its editorial board. When I wrote him to inform him about his name appearing there, he was shocked and wasted no time demanding that they remove it. Typically, the worst of the journals don’t even include a phone number and use a bogus street address for their office. Others are more genuine but don’t really subject an submission to the serious peer review that is typical of academic journals. They also charge hundreds of dollars for the article to be published, a way for them to make a fast buck. Is there much difference between the way they operate and how Cogent Social Science operates?
The hoaxers claim that there is a difference since Cogent is included in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Clearly being included in the directory can be a transitory event since 3,776 were deleted from dataset of 12.595 since its inception, including 376 for ethical lapses. Japan is the worst offender apparently.
Why are these journals called predatory? Since I have become acquainted with many tenure-track professors over the years, I can tell you that they are under enormous pressure to accumulate a paper trail of publications—publish or perish, in other words. Some inevitably succumb to the temptation of paying hundreds of dollars for appearing in a journal that is borderline predatory. Does any of this have anything to do with enhancing humanity’s body of knowledge? I can tell you that even for the best journals coming out of an Ivy school, the number of people who read these JSTOR type articles is vanishingly small.
Unlike Alan Sokal, who received almost universal acclaim in 1996 except from those postmodernists he spoofed, Boghossian and Lindsay have gotten bad press. Salon notes that in making an amalgam between predatory publishing and gender studies, the authors neglect to mention that Cogent Social Sciences lacks a single editor in the field. They are experts in tourism, criminology, development planning, geography, sport management and communication sciences—hardly fields that qualify them to evaluate an article on gender inequality. The hoaxers made a self-righteous case against gender studies:
Our aim was smaller yet more pointed. We intended to test the hypothesis that flattery of the academic Left’s moral architecture in general, and of the moral orthodoxy in gender studies in particular, is the overwhelming determiner of publication in an academic journal in the field. That is, we sought to demonstrate that a desire for a certain moral view of the world to be validated could overcome the critical assessment required for legitimate scholarship. Particularly, we suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil. On the evidence, our suspicion was justified.3
I am not exactly sure what evidence they are talking about since the endnote pointed to “countless examples documented on the anonymously run Twitter feed @RealPeerReview”. A cursory glance of this Twitter feed will reveal this sort of thing: “Seems that many academics dislike the wonderful Martian movie (and probably @andyweirauthor’s book it’s based on)”. As a rule of thumb, anything that appears on Twitter is hardly worth considering so it is no surprise that the two hoaxers cite it as proving their point.
Since Boghossian has cultivated a career as a professional atheist, it is no surprise that he used Skeptic Magazine as a platform, where Dawkins is considered a leading exemplary. Boghossian is a featured speaker of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science and wrote a book titled “A Manual for Creating Atheists” that repeats the arguments made by Dawkins in his own book “The God Delusion”. His writing partner James Lindsay wrote one of those books himself. Titled “God Doesn’t; We Do: Only Humans Can Solve Human Challenges”, it tries to show that a belief in God is fed by social needs that people do not know how to meet. Since those social needs will exist as long as capitalism exists, I doubt that such books will do much good.
I get a chuckle out of Skeptic Magazine upholding hard scientific values against postmodernist mumbo-jumbo since its editorial board is a virtual hotbed of sociobiologists, including the aforementioned Dawkins, Jared Diamond and the infamous Napoleon Chagnon. Additionally, the hoax got the endorsement of Stephen Pinker, who like Jared Diamond believes that hunting and gathering societies were far more capable of genocide than Adolph Hitler. Why? Because it is in our genes evidently. Survival International summed up the beliefs of of this unsavory crew:
Steven Pinker (‘evolutionary psychologist’)
In The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), Steven Pinker promotes a fictitious, colonialist image of a backward ‘Brutal Savage’, which pushes the debate on tribal peoples’ rights back over a century and is still used to justify their destruction. Read more about why Pinker’s ‘science’ is wrong.
Napoleon Chagnon (anthropologist)
Steven Pinker would arguably not have been able to reach the conclusions he does about tribal violence without the highly controversial work of a single anthropologist: Napoleon Chagnon studied the Yanomami tribe from the 1960s, calling them ‘The Fierce People’. But are the Yanomami really fierce?
Napoleon Chagnon’s view that the Yanomami are ‘sly, aggressive and intimidating’ and that they ‘live in a state of chronic warfare’ has been widely discredited. Nonetheless, both Diamond and Pinker’s conclusions about tribal violence rely heavily on his work.
Jared Diamond (geographer)
Jared Diamond’s 2012 book, The World Until Yesterday is ostensibly about what industrialized people (whom he calls ‘modern’) can learn from tribal peoples (he calls them ‘traditional’). His book, however, carries a false and dangerous message – that most tribes engage in constant warfare, both needing and welcoming state intervention to stop their violent behavior. Read more.
As far as Dawkins is concerned, we can assume that he was eager to publicize anything that smacked of hostility to feminism given his track record. In 2011, he got in a flame war with feminists as reported by The Atlantic:
Richard Dawkins made an unexpected appearance in the comments section of biologist PZ Myers’ post at Scienceblogs.com last week. Myers was commenting on Rebecca Watson’s recent experience being propositioned in a hotel elevator by a male attendee of a conference at which Watson had just spoken in Dublin. Dawkins got himself into hot water by commenting in the form of a sarcastic letter to a Muslim woman, pointing out how trivial Watson’s experience in the elevator was compared to the abuses Muslim women deal with on a daily basis. “Stop whining will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and…yawn…don’t tell me again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery,” he wrote. “But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.”
Then in 2014, he Tweeted that women should not get drunk if they want to avoid being raped:
Two years later he was disinvited from a conference organized by skeptics for Tweeting a sexist video:
Finally, with respect to the Sokal hoax. Back in 1996, I was thrilled by the news that those masters of obfuscation and critics of Marxist grand narratives were finally getting their comeuppance and from a volunteer who had gone to Nicaragua with a Tecnica delegation I had helped to organize. It was only a few years later when I discovered the background to the con job he pulled on Social Text that I woke up:
I had never really given much thought to Alan’s relationship to Marxism. I, like most people, just assumed that he had gone through volume one of Capital, etc., in the way that young orthodox Jews learn to read Hebrew. Anybody who describes himself as a “socialist” repeatedly in debates with Andrew Ross et al, clearly MUST have at least familiarity with, if not commitment to, the Marxist intellectual tradition.
I discovered that this is not true at all. Despite Alan’s assertion that he is a socialist, in reality he is a left liberal. I had lunch with him on New Year’s Eve in order to discuss my concerns about his defense of the “Kennewick Man” excavations near the Columbia River in Washington State. Alan had defended the scientists against the American Indian “creationists” in his debate with Andrew Ross and I hadn’t given it too much thought at the time. Now that I had become thoroughly immersed in such questions, his position gnawed away at me like a piece of undigested food.
In the course of our discussion, it was revealed to me that Alan’s defense of science has nothing to do with Marxism or socialism. It is virtually indistinguishable from everyday liberal concepts of the role of scientists in society. He said that bad science would expose itself in a free society, so there would seem to be little risk of running into the sort of horrors that took place in Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia. All we have to do is criticize the excesses of archaeologists and everything would come out okay in the end. I sat there sipping my wine in a mood of total shock. Alan’s trust in capitalist society was touching but a bit naïve. After all, this was a free country when anthropologists and archaeologists wrote all sorts of racist nonsense throughout the 19th and early 20th century. Leaving this aside for the moment, I had a completely different analysis of how science is conducted. As a stodgy old Marxist, I had become convinced long ago that the ruling ideas of society are those of the ruling class. Science was not immune.
I asked Alan if he had ever read Richard Lewontin or Richard Levins, co-authors of “The Dialectical Biologist.” No, he had taken the book out of the library, but never read it. This was astonishing to me. How could Alan Sokal have become regarded as some kind of defender of Marxist rectitude when he had utterly no engagement with the main experts in the field. In his new book “Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science,” co-authored by physicist Jean Bricmont, there is no index entry for Marx, Lewontin or Levins. In the one chapter that deals with their own views on the science wars, as opposed to the follies of the pomos, they analyze Thomas Kuhn, not the Marxist analysis of what Lewontin and Levins call the “Commoditization of Science.” That is the real issue, not what Lacan thinks of pi.
In point of fact, the Social Text issue that Alan’s spoof appeared in is one of their better efforts. It is available now under the title “Science Wars” and contains first-rate articles by Levins and Lewontin. It turns out that the original Social Text issue was basically a rejoinder to Norman Levitt, Alan Sokal’s ally in the so-called science wars. Alan told Lingua Franca that his spoof was inspired by Levitt’s efforts to expose irrational tendencies in the academy.
Directing his attention to Levitt and co-author Paul Gross’s “Higher Superstitions,” Lewontin writes:
What Gross and Levitt have done is to turn their back on, or deny the existence of, some of the most important questions in the formation of scientific knowledge. They are scornful of ‘metaphor mongers,’ yet Gross’s own field of developmental biology is in the iron grip of a metaphor, the metaphor of ‘development’ To describe the life history of an organism as ‘development’ is to prejudice the entire problematic of the investigation and to guarantee that certain explanations will dominate. ‘Development’ means literally an unrolling or an unfolding, seen also in the Spanish desarollo, or the German Entwicklung (unwinding). It means the making manifest of an already predetermined pattern immanent in the fertilized egg, just as the picture is immanent in an exposed film, which is then ‘developed.’ All that is required is the appropriate triggering of the process and the provision of a milieu that allows it to unfold. This is not mere ‘metaphor mongering’; it reveals the shape of investigation in the field. Genes are everything. The environment is irrelevant except insofar as it allows development. The field then takes as its problematic precisely those life-history events that are indeed specified in the genome: the differentiation of the front end from the back end, and why pigs do not have wings. But it ignores completely the vast field of characters for which there is a constant interplay between genes and environment, and which cannot be understood under the rubric of ‘development,’ Nor are these characters trivial: they certainly include the central nervous system, for which the life history of the nerve connections of the roundworm is a very bad metaphor.
This is the kind of discussion that matters most in the so-called science wars. Instead of shooting fish in a barrel, Alan Sokal should be responding to these arguments. Instead, he has constructed strawmen that are easy to knock down.
Calvin Coolidge: The business of America is business
If the overarching goal of the USA is to use Saudi Arabia as its chief partner in a proxy war on the “axis of resistance” in the Middle East, then it can be said that Donald Trump is continuing with the policy of his predecessor Barack Obama and one that Hillary Clinton would have continued as part of the “neoliberal” foreign policy supported by John McCain, the NY Times op-ed page, and me–according to my intellectually-impaired detractors.
On the other hand, for NY Times reporters Ben Hubbard and Thomas Erdbrink, the visit was a departure from Obama’s foreign policy favoring Iran:
In using the headline address of his first foreign trip as president to declare his commitment to Sunni Arab nations, Mr. Trump signaled a return to an American policy built on alliances with Arab autocrats, regardless of their human rights records or policies that sometimes undermine American interests.
At the same time, he rejected the path taken by his predecessor, Barack Obama. Mr. Obama engaged with Iran to reach a breakthrough nuclear accord, which Mr. Trump’s administration has acknowledged Iran is following.
One has to wonder why the two reporters ever thought that there was a “return” to an American policy built on alliances with Arab autocrats given Obama’s actions as opposed to his high-falutin’ words. In a 2002 speech he called upon the Saudis to “stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent” but as President he sold $115 billion of arms to the Saudis, which was $30 billion more than George W. Bush ever did and even $5 million more than Trump’s deal.
Gareth Porter, a well-known supporter of the “axis of resistance” must be particularly disappointed in Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia since his foreign policy was supposedly a repudiation of Hillary Clinton’s hawkish stance. In a January 20, 2017 Middle East Eye article titled “US intervention in Syria? Not under Trump”, Porter expressed relief that Trump would cut off funding for the jihadi groups in Syria:
The US military leadership was never on board with the policy of relying on those armed groups to advance US interests in Syria in the first place.
It recognised that, despite the serious faults of the Assad regime, the Syrian army was the only Syrian institution committed to resisting both al-Qaeda and Islamic State.
It seems likely that the Trump administration will now return to that point as it tries to rebuild a policy from the ashes of the failed policy of the Obama administration.
Meanwhile, for the very first time in the six year war in Syria, the USA has deliberately struck Assad’s military. The first instance was to retaliate for the Khan Sheikhoun sarin gas attack; the most recent was an air strike against a convoy of militias advancing on a base where United States and British Special Forces were training Syrian rebels to fight the Islamic State. Pirouetting as nimbly as Baryshnikov, Porter warned Commondreams readers about Trump agreeing to the Pentagon’s “permanent War in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria” but held out hope that “judging from his position during the campaign and his recent remarks, Trump may well baulk at the plans now being pushed by his advisers.” This distinction between Trump and his bellicose advisers James Mattis and H.R. McMaster based on Trump’s “remarks” is a reminder that P.T. Barnum was right when he observed that there is a sucker born every minute. Doesn’t Porter understand that if Trump said it was a sunny day, you need to to bring an umbrella with you when you go outside?
On April 18th, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson wrote a letter to Paul Ryan assuring him that Iran was living up to the agreement made with the Obama administration not to develop nuclear arms even though the letter referred to Iran’s support of “terror” in the Middle East. Tillerson sounded very much as if he was Hillary Clinton’s Secretary of State on April 10th in the aftermath of the bombing of a Syrian air base (largely ineffectual) with his statement that Assad’s reign was “coming to an end”. One supposes that these words carry about as much weight as Obama’s frequently repeated call for Assad to step down.
Meanwhile, Al_Masdar news, the former employer of neo-Nazi/Assadist Paul Antonopoulos and a reliable source of “axis of resistance” opinion, has good news for those who hoped that the Trump/Putin détente could be salvaged:
Russia’s Chief of Staff General Valery Gerasimov and Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford confirmed in their phone conversation the readiness to reinstate the memorandum of understanding on safe flights over Syria and to draw up more measures so as to avoid any conflicts, Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Saturday.
“Syria was in focus of the talks in the light of the agreements, reached in Astana on May 4 this year, on establishing de-escalation zones in some regions of Syria,” the ministry said in a statement.
The Astana talks began in Khazakistan in early January. Sponsored by Russia, Turkey and Syria, they were supposed to lead to a truce and eventually an end to the war. The USA sent observers to Astana but did not push for “regime change”, even from the peanut gallery. Last week the rebel delegation boycotted the talks because Assad had violated the truce. Syria blamed Turkey for the breakdown at Astana but the idea that it was opposed to the general aim of the talks to consolidate Assad’s rule over the carcass that is Syria today appears ludicrous given Erdogan’s bromance with Putin that grew out of Turkey’s anxieties over the US-Kurdish military ties plus the need to reestablish commercial relations with Russia to counteract a deep economic slump.
Five days ago Trump announced that a waiver on sanctions on Iran would continue even with added restrictions. Relaxation will continue unabated in all likelihood given the election of Hassan Rouhani, a cleric who favors “globalism” as the people at Global Research might put it.
The verbal belligerence to Iran must be weighed against the USA’s continuing support for the Shi’a sectarian state in Iraq and its obvious willingness to abide by Assad’s continuing rule despite the two military strikes in 2017. If Trump and his generals were genuinely for prosecuting a proxy war with Iran and Russia, the first thing they would do is arm the rebels against Assad. However, as was the case with Obama, the rebels are expected to fight ISIS, not the blood-soaked despot whose brutal sectarian dictatorship helped ISIS take root.
In May 2016, Secretary of State John Kerry advised European banks to proceed full speed ahead investing in Iran, even if American banks still could not. It didn’t take too long for American corporations to take advantage of the thaw. On April 4, 2017 Iran signed a deal pay Boeing $4 billion for 60 jets to refurbish its aging state-owned airline. I am generally not in the business of playing Nostradamus but I am predicting that Trump will okay the deal. After all, Calvin Coolidge got it right when he said that the business of America was business.
As the WSJ reported on March 28, 2017 in an article by Asa Fitch and Benoit Faucon, those European corporations Kerry encouraged will take advantage of profit-maximizing opportunities that it will be impossible for the USA to resist, especially when it comes to someone as nakedly devoted to corporate interests as Donald J. Trump:
After years shunning Iran, Western businesses are bursting through the country’s doors — but U.S. companies are noticeably absent.
Dozens of development projects and deals have been hammered out since Iran’s nuclear accord with world powers in 2015 lifted a range of sanctions. Among them, France’s Peugeot and Renault SA are building cars. The U.K.’s Vodafone Group PLC is teaming up with an Iranian firm to build up network infrastructure. Major oil companies including Royal Dutch Shell PLC have signed provisional agreements to develop energy resources. And infrastructure giants, including Germany’s Siemens AG, have entered into agreements for large projects.
Chicago-based Boeing Co. last year got the go-ahead to sell 80 aircraft valued at $16.6 billion to Iran. But for the most part, deals involving U.S. businesses are few and far between.
Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co., have steered clear of Iran since the nuclear accord. A Ford spokeswoman said the company was complying with U.S. law and didn’t have any business with Iran. GM is focusing “on other markets, and other opportunities,” a spokesman said.
Peugeot has taken notice. Its Middle East chief, Jean-Christophe Quemard, said Peugeot’s early entry has left U.S. rivals in the dust. “This is our opportunity to accelerate,” he said last month.
U.S. companies are at risk of losing lucrative deals to early movers into a promising market of 80 million people, analysts say, setting off skirmishes among European and Asian companies eager to gain an edge on more-cautious U.S. competitors. But as latecomers, U.S. companies likely won’t face a learning curve in dealing with the political risks and the bureaucratic difficulties in Iran.
Apple Inc. explored entering the country after the Obama administration allowed the export of personal-communications devices in 2013, according to people familiar with the matter. But the company decided against it because of banking and legal problems, the people said. Apple declined to comment.
U.S. companies usually need special permission from the Treasury Department to do business with Iran. Further complicating matters for U.S. companies: President Donald Trump during his campaign threatened to rip up Iran’s nuclear deal, and he hit the country with new sanctions shortly after taking office. On Sunday, Iran imposed its own sanctions on 15 U.S. companies, mainly defense firms.
The nuclear deal removed a range of U.S., European Union and United Nations sanctions in 2016 that had held back Iranian energy exports and put the brakes on foreign investment. But while food, medicine and agricultural products are exempted from U.S. restrictions, U.S. products are available in Iran often only through foreign subsidiaries or third-party importers.
Peugeot, officially known as Groupe PSA SA, is aiming to hit annual production of 200,000 cars in Iran by next year in conjunction with its partner Iran Khodro, after the two signed a 400 million euro ($432 million) joint-venture agreement in June. Already, the pace of both Peugeot’s and Renault’s car sales in Iran has more than doubled.
Asian companies, mainly Chinese ones, have had a growing presence in Iran. Some have stepped up activities since the nuclear deal, including China National Petroleum Corp., which joined France’s Total SA in a preliminary agreement to develop a major Iranian gas field in November.
Iran has caught the attention of a broad spectrum of investors beyond autos, with foreign companies selling everything from gas-powered turbines to mining technologies in the country.
Government-approved foreign direct investment shot up to more than $11 billion last year, official figures show, from $1.26 billion in 2015. Pedram Soltani, the vice president of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, said more than 200 foreign business delegations have visited Iran since the nuclear deal took effect.
“We see what’s happening in the U.S. and Mr. Trump’s comments,” said Ghadir Ghiafe, an Iranian steel-industry executive who is exploring partnerships with South American and European companies. “Our businessmen don’t pay much attention to it.”
Foreign companies still face daunting obstacles to doing business in Iran. Iran placed 131st out of 176 countries for corruption in a ranking by Transparency International last year. It also has major economic problems, including high unemployment and a banking system saddled with bad loans.
Large international banks remain reluctant to re-establish links with Iran despite the nuclear deal. That reluctance has made transfers of money into and out of Iran a challenge.
Western banks such as Standard Chartered PLC, BNP Paribas SA and Credit Suisse Group AG have generally refused to handle transactions to Iran for fear of running afoul of banking sanctions that remain. Chinese and smaller European banks have attempted to step into the breach, even though many companies remain concerned about the regulatory environment.
Some large multinationals — including infrastructure giants and major oil companies — are keeping a close eye on the U.S. in case sanctions snap back into place. Shell, Total SA and OMV AG of Austria have signed memorandums of understanding for deals in Iran but have yet to complete terms.
Last month, Total Chief Executive Patrick Pouyanne said the company would wait for clarity from the Trump administration before completing a $4.8 billion investment in the country’s South Pars offshore gas field.
But many foreign companies are finding the country’s growth hard to ignore.
The International Monetary Fund recently estimated the economy grew 7.4% in the first half of the Iranian fiscal year that ended this month, rebounding from a decline in the previous year. Meanwhile, a surge in demand has pushed consumer spending in Tehran to $5,240 per capita so far in 2017, up about 11% compared with 2016, according to Planet Retail, a London research firm.
American deals with Iran will go full steam ahead. That’s my prediction based on the fundamental laws of capitalism, a system that allowed IBM, Coca-Cola and Ford to do business with Nazi Germany even after WWII had begun.
It is really amazing that despite the vast network of pro-Assad websites that can be relied on to put forward “false flag” narratives on the sarin gas attacks in East Ghouta and Khan Sheikhoun, there is still an obvious organized effort to discredit the articles on Bellingcat that put the blame on Assad. Bellingcat was launched by Elliot Higgins in 2014, just two years after he started the Brown Moses blog to counteract the “axis of resistance” propaganda that dominated the coverage of various hot spots, especially Syria and Ukraine.
Elliot’s specialty was using “open source” material from the Internet, including Youtube videos, satellite images as well as social media including Facebook and Twitter accounts by those on the scene.
Early on Elliot began to rely on the analysis of Dan Kaszeta, the managing director of Strongpoint Security Ltd who lives and works in London and who has 26 years experience in how to respond to chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear attacks. Dan was instrumental in bringing to bear the evidence of hexamine in the soil of East Ghouta as proof that Assad was responsible for the attack. As Kaszeta explained, hexamine is a key ingredient in weaponizing sarin gas. No matter how strenuous the efforts of Assadist trolls to discredit this testimony, they never managed to explain why Assad surrendered 80 tons of the stuff after a deal was brokered by Russia in 2013 to prevent Obama from punishing Assad, which never was his intention in the first place.
Since the Khan Sheikhoun attack has generated a virtual repeat of the troll attack on Bellingcat that took place in 2013, Kaszeta reminded Elliot’s readers why it was used in the first place in an article titled “Amines and Sarin – Hexamine, Isopropylamine, and the Rest…”. As might be expected, the trolls have been active trying to undermine the analysis found in the article, which is always connected by necessity to a “false flag” explanation.
They have their work cut out for them now that a commenter who calls himself DDTea has become a regular at Bellingcat drawing upon his considerable expertise. As a PhD student in chemistry who does not use his real name for obvious reasons, DDTea is not only a walking encyclopedia of the chemistry of sarin gas and other such weapons but is a formidable polemicist like Kaszeta. The two of them in combination with Elliot Higgins are like a trio of Van Helsings that are more than a match for the Assadist Draculas who bare their fangs on Bellingcat on an ongoing basis.
Here is DDTea’s latest reply to them under Dan’s article. Priceless.
I’ve posted this elsewhere, but people are repeating the same, tired claims that, “this seems suspicious.” Yet nobody can offer an alternative theory to explain the evidence, so I’ve gone ahead and proposed one myself. You will see it is far more plausible than the specious notion that a government aircraft dropped a bomb of Sarin. This theory is based on the reports of experts who should be trusted without further thought.
The Syrian regime bombed an Al-Nusra warehouse full of sarin, which was being delivered to and used by ISIS in Iraq [1]. However, this sarin did not poison anybody: instead, a cloud of burning plastic may have disseminated in the air [2], which caused symptoms remarkably similar to Sarin poisoning—especially the foaming mouths. Simultaneous with this air bombardment on a warehouse, Al-Nusra detonated a bomb on top of a pipe full of Sarin [3] to create a crater, thus giving the illusion of an airstrike that didn’t actually happen. They chose not to recover the tube to conceal their evidence when they went back to “tamper” with the crime scene–while recording it from multiple camera angles and releasing footage online, no less. As others have speculated (even here on bellingcat), this tampering may have involved spreading sarin and degradation products around the crater to create the illusion of a sarin attack, even though they already dispersed sarin.
But this Sarin didn’t poison anyone either! Instead, Al-Nusra took a bunch of Christians and gassed them with carbon monoxide or cyanide or other “rubigenic toxin” [4] in a basement. They then drove their victims to the hospital, where they were drugged with something to cause miosis [4]. Simultaneously, a bunch of collaborators were sent to Turkish hospitals to convey a false flag cover story about a regime airstrike with poison gas. To this date, they are still repeating the same false story–conspiring down to the finest details of their story when questioned separately. The OPCW was in on it, and agreed to falsify evidence together with the Turks—providing false witness to compromised blood samples. Then the rebels went back and tampered [5] with the crater and Sarin tube. The crater has since been filled in so that nobody would find the evidence they planted to frame the regime.
And everyone who disagrees with this version of the truth is a neoconservative imperialist NATO troll who supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Three years ago Jeff St. Clair affixed the title “Is Abbas Kiarostami the World’s Most Talented Film-maker?” to my review of the Iranian director’s 1999 masterpiece “The Wind Will Carry Us”. I, of course, would not only answer yes to his rhetorical question but would go one step further and argue that Iranian filmmakers collectively have been making the greatest films for the past 30 years at least. They are the equivalent of the French nouvelle vague of the 1950s and early 60s but paradoxically produce great films under the heavy constraints of a clerical state that not only puts obstacles in their path but drives some of the elite figures into exile or in the case of Jafar Panahi kept under house arrest.
Recently I was fortunate enough to view four documentaries about Iranian film by Jamsheed Akrami, a Professor in the Communications Department of William Paterson University in New Jersey, that were made between 2000 and 2013 and are now available from Arab Film Distribution, which markets DVDs to institutional customers such as university libraries and film departments.
The price is too steep for the average CounterPunch readers but I strongly urge film professors, Mideast studies faculty members and any other academics concerned about the problems of artists in an authoritarian society to set aside money for the films when they are preparing their budget for the next fiscal year. Akrami, who has a supreme mastery of Iranian politics and cinema, is an accomplished interviewer who adroitly blends the words of these stellar filmmakers with excerpts from their work that are spellbinding.
Although I have reviewed well over twenty films by Iranian directors since the early 2000s, including nearly every film Abbas Kiarostami has made, and have read scholarly treatments on Iranian film, I was surprised by how little I knew while watching Akrami’s documentaries. Even if you have never seen an Iranian film, the documentaries will still engage you intellectually and politically since they relate to the nagging problem of artistic freedom globally.
