Friday, November 04, 2011
Historical Materialism 2011 posted by Richard Seymour
I'll be talking at this next week:My talk: "Red Hunters in the Deep South: The Raciological Dimensions of Cold War Anticommunism", Thursday 10th November, 1600-1745. Provisional programme here.
Labels: anticommunism, cold war, communism, hegemony, historical materialism, marxism, racism, US imperialism, us politics
Friday, October 07, 2011
Springtime posted by Richard Seymour
The green shoots of the American Spring: New York; Austin; New Orleans; Boston; Portland; San Francisco; Los Angeles; Sacramento; Atlantic City; Richmond; Atlanta; Seattle; Boise; Baton Rouge; Mississippi; Illinois; Detroit; Oklahoma; Kansas; ... and, of course, Madison, Wisconsin. (And there's more where that came from. Just google 'occupy x' where 'x' is any major US city or town). This isn't east coast-west coast. It isn't red state-blue state. It isn't north-south. It isn't Democrat-Republican, Cheech-Chong. It's class war, the 99% against the 1%.Coming to London next week, and worldwide. Strike, march, occupy. Build the new model commune!
Labels: anticapitalism, change we can believe in, commune, communism, finance capital, socialism, us politics, wall street
Friday, July 08, 2011
The anticommunism industry posted by Richard Seymour
Labels: anticommunism, capitalism, communism, history, leon trotsky, russian revolution, stalinism, trotskyism
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Hobsbawm posted by Richard Seymour
Away you go and have a read of my piece on Eric Hobsbawm in Red Pepper:![](http://web.archive.org./web/20191120033819im_/http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Qou8gz4w-dg/TdI2GkXofgI/AAAAAAAADCQ/96yAIaIViK0/s400/eric-hobsbawm-002.jpg)
Labels: communism, eric hobsbawm, gramsci, historical materialism, history, marxism, socialism
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Towards a new model commune posted by Richard Seymour
I was asked to post this online, so here it is:talk at ICA 19.03.11
(25 minutes in, if you want to watch).
What are we fighting for? I think we're fighting for self-government. I think all of our efforts so far have been a way of saying that we should be collectively in charge of our own lives. I think, whether we conceive it in this way or not, this means trying to move beyond the public; not so much new publics, but post-public. This is not just because notions of publicity are gendered and historically elitist - and by the way, Dan Hind's recent book 'The Return of the Public' is an excellent account of this - but because the public-private dichotomy is part of the means by which we are maintained as dependents. As public citizens we exercise a franchise, but in the private sphere we accept bondage: the discipline of the market compels us to accept it. For most of our waking hours, we cede executive control over our bodily and mental powers to someone else – in the vain hope of one day retiring with a decent pension. Whoops, that’s gone. You’ll just have to save more. But you’ll have to borrow more, because the economy needs you to spend. And we find that in all but the most mundane matters, when it comes to the activities and processes that constitute the major part of our lives, we have no autonomy. We do not govern ourselves.
Even our free time is not really ours. Much of it is spent commuting for a start - the average person's commute is equivalent to four weeks out of a working year. Four weeks - on that tube, that bus, that motorway lane. Think about what that's costing you psychically. Much of the rest is spent recuperating, essentially recovering our ability to labour so that we can go into work and do it all again the next day. And don't forget, of course, that even your free time isn't necessarily your own, because companies now want to organise your fun. Dress-down Friday - because Friday is funday; birthday parties, and office drinks, team-building outings, sporting days. Your fun, your enjoyment, your affection, often your time - on their orders. Awkward socialisation with middle and senior managers, stressful, moronic conversations, and long-winded explanations of what goes on in different departments that you didn't ask for, and you don't need. Then there's voluntary, unpaid overtime, worth £29bn a year to the employers - that's called flexibility, and what a good sport you are for doing that.
No more do we govern ourselves in our home lives which all too often become tiny kingdoms, patriarchies in which, among other things, children are acculturated to being ruled by others, and in which the first springs of what I would call 'capitalist guilt' are lodged in place - capitalist guilt is that gut-wrenching anxiety you feel when you're late for work, even though you probably won't get in too much trouble for it; it's the sickly shame that ruins your day when you throw a sickie, and immediately, absurdly start to think "should I go in anyway?" I'm just clarifying my terms.
So, we must be alert to the ways in which, when something beautiful starts to happen, people begin to declare their independence. They begin to run their own lives, to take their rightful part in the running of the whole of society. They exercise their due franchise fully, in every sphere of life. I will not exhaust you with utopian blueprints or detailed analysis of the Paris Commune, or the Russian Revolution, though these repay analysis. But look at the history. In almost every revolution, there are workers' committees, cordones, shurahs, soviets, popular councils, cooperatives, collectives, syndicates of some kind, some attempt to work out the protocols for self-government. Even in protest movements and rebellions short of outright revolution, people always confront the problem of how they organise themselves properly, democratically; sometimes that has to confront issues of oppression, sexual, gendered or racial oppression that can operate within movements; sometimes it just has to do with developing procedures that genuinely include everyone, avoiding majoritarian tyrannies (this is why in the students' occupations, we've seen experimentation with things like consensus decision-making); in striving toward self-goverment, toward the commune in other words, we always encounter unanticipated levels of complexity, but the basic problem remains one of self-government.
So, I want to look at the materials that are available to us to flesh out a 'new model commune', and it seems to me that the best starting point is to look at the tendencies immanent in recent struggles in the Middle East. Here, for example, are some of the features of the revolutionary movement that overthrew Mubarak, and even now is still fermenting in Egypt. First of all, they took over a nominally public space which the state wished to exclude them from access to, Tahrir Square. Having taken it over, and affirmed that they wouldn't simply go home at the end of the day - something we might want to think about - they saw off wave after wave of assault on the protests, from police and plain clothes thugs. They set up committees to keep watch for government men. They set up barricades, and routine ID checks for everyone attempting to enter the square. They set up a network of tents for people to sleep in - it's freezing overnight, so some of them jog round the square to get their temperature up. There are toilet arrangements - no small logistical matter when there are routinely hundreds of thousands of people occupying the capital's main intersection. They rig up street lamps to provide electricity. They set up garbage collection, medical stops - they occupy a well-known fast food outlet and turn it into somewhere that people shot at or beaten by police can get treated.
They set up a city within a city, and collectively coped with many more challenges than the average city would have to face in an average day. There was of course commerce, people hawking food and cigarettes, confident that the whole system of exchange wasn't being overthrown. Yet, far more of their actions were driven by solidarity, collective decision-making, and democratic delegation, than is ever usual for a city. Tahrir Square was the beginnings of a commune. Beyond that spectacular exercise in the capital, the labour movement that had been kicking since the 2006 strikes in Mahalla, was doing something that labour movement's usually don't do. It was starting to strike to demand a change in management. It was striking over the exercise of authority. This had happened in Tunisia, and usually it was because the CEO was some ruling party stooge. But it was the people who normally have no say in the running of the company - and Egypt's private sector economy is overwhelmingly informal, and insecure - seeking to exercise a sort of limited franchise. They did not seek to replace the management of the company with themselves, which would have been the ultimate statement of their confidence in their ability to rule themselves. But they were trying to have a say, and usually succeeded in that. And when the government withdrew the police from local communities and encouraged looting and thuggish behaviour, the people - instead of panicking, and deciding that we can't do without the police after all, please send the uniformed thugs back in Mr Mubarak - organised self-defence committees. Just as in Tahrir, they set up checkpoints, ID checks, and they made decisions about how their community would be run.
Now, this isn't socialism. Socialists were a current in the revolution, but not a big one. The major currents were Nasserists, Islamists, and liberals. And there are all sorts of political struggles that still have to continue - the horrible attacks on women in Tahrir Square on international womens' day shows that this fight has to occur within the revolution. And there's now the prospect that the army leadership will seek to consolidate a conservative ruling bloc with the assistance of the Muslim Brothers, who were an invaluable part of the revolutionary coalition but always the most right-wing element of it. While many Brothers will have been shaken up, radicalised and blasted with ecstasy by this revolution, their core base of small businessmen are probably anxious to get back to making money, and leave the commune behind. Still, the utopian moment of Tahrir Square and beyond showed us some of the lineaments of what a commune might look like. It demonstrated that with opportunity comes competence: that we can, if given the chance, quickly learn and apply the techniques of cooperation, solidarity and self-government.
Lately, our Party of Order - the Tories, the right-wing media, the police, the agents of authority and control - has been most vexed about the challenge posed by the mob, the student protesters. Cameron denounces them as 'feral', and the ideological frame that the media sought to apply, of selfish, solipsistic vandals disrespecting democracy, was ultimately supplied by one totemic incident, that of a fire extinguisher being lobbed from the top of Conservative Party headquarters. This 'mob', they said, clearly doesn't respect democracy. But democracy is not law and order. Democracy is the mob; the mob is democracy.
Democracy is supposed to mean popular sovereignty, not the unimpeded rule of a no-mandate government. It is supposed to mean that the will of the majority governs, not the interests of the rich. It is supposed to mean at minimum that people get the policies they vote for, not those they are overwhelmingly hostile to. In liberal democratic theory, the people are sovereign inasmuch as their aspirations and prerogatives are effectively mediated through a pluralist party-political state. They may not get all that they want all of the time, but the decision-making process will be guided by the public mood, which rival parties must compete to capture and express. Yet this system has only ever been effective to the limited extent that it has been when it has been supplemented by militant extra-parliamentary pressure, by the threat of disruption to stable governance and profit-accumulation. To the extent that the parliamentary system is ever really democratic, it is parasitic on a much more fundamental popular democracy. This reality, be it ever remembered, should exhort us to go further than we have, to turn our mobs into committees, shuras, soviets, communes. Let us, in future struggles, pose in practise the material possibility of our self-government.
It is, of course, a long-standing ruling class prejudice that we cannot govern ourselves. Trotsky once said, perhaps incautiously, that the Russian revolution was a gamble on the idea that ordinary working class people could rule themselves, and against the filthy aristocratic prejudice that they could not. His recent biographer, Robert Service, aligns with the Party of Order, insisting that Trotsky was foolish ever to have believed such a stupid thing. No surprises there. Trotsky, and the movements he inspired, hated the Stalinist regime for its savage despotism, the complete lack of genuine autonomy enjoyed by the mass of people. What the Party of Order hate about communism, however, is not what went catastrophically wrong with it, but what is right about it, what is admirable, just, plausible and emulable about it. It is the same thing that they hate about us - and we should welcome their hate, and their natural fear. It shows that their right to govern is no longer assured.
Labels: communism, events, marxism, revolution, socialism, the complete and utter works of richard seymour
ICA event today. posted by Richard Seymour
I'll be speaking at this today:Radical Publishing: What Are We Struggling For?
19 March 2011£12 / £11 concessions / £10 ICA Members / £5 students and ICA Members under 26 (call box office to book)
Last year’s student protests saw a new generation take to the streets. Much was made of the vandalism and disruption that occurred, with some arguing it eclipsed the protests’ intentions—but were the students’ demands ever clearly articulated? Did the protestors know what they were struggling for? From pamphlets and theses to journals and zines—the relationship between protest and print goes back a long way and has helped galvanise and articulate dissent, but do radical publishers and radical thinkers still matter today and how do they relate to contemporary protest?
For one day, the ICA will host some of the UK’s most exciting radical thinkers, published by British radical publishers such as Verso, Zed Books, Zero Books, Pluto Press and AK Press, to grapple with these issues and more.
The event runs from 12–5pm.
Schedule
12–1pm, Tactics of Struggle: with John Holloway and David Graeber
1–2pm, New Public: with Peter Hallward, Hilary Wainwright and Richard Seymour
2–3pm, Break
3–4pm, New Psychic Landscapes: with Franco Berardi ‘Bifo’, Mark Fisher and Saul Newman
4–5pm, New Economics: with Andrew Simms, Milford Bateman and Ann Pettifor
Labels: communism, events, revolution, socialism, the complete and utter works of richard seymour
Saturday, January 15, 2011
"The First Middle Eastern Revolution Since 1979" posted by Richard Seymour
Labels: communism, dictatorship, islamism, revolution, trade unions, tunisia, US imperialism, working class
Friday, October 22, 2010
1970 posted by Richard Seymour
Duncan felt a bit uncomfortable for another couple of minutes. He thought about Liz, but even here, just in the street outside the record shop, he couldn’t remember what she looked like. Now he could only see Maria.But he’d got the record. It was a good omen. Killie would surely win, although with these power cuts you didn’t know for how long football would be on as the nights would start to draw in soon. It was a small price to pay though, for getting rid of that bastard Heath and the Tories. It was brilliant that those wankers couldn’t take the piss out of the working man any longer. His parents had made sacrifices, determined that he wouldn’t follow his father down the pit. They insisted that he was apprenticed, that he got a trade behind him. So Duncan had been sent to live with an aunt in Glasgow while he served his time in a machine shop in Kinning Park. Glasgow was big, brash, vibrant and violent to his small-town sensibilities, but he was easy-going and popular in the factory. His best pal at work was a guy called Matt Muir, from Govan, who was a fanatical Rangers supporter and a card-carrying communist. Everybody at his factory supported Rangers, and as a socialist he knew and was shamed by the fact that he, like his workmates, had obtained his apprenticeship through his family’s Masonic connections. His own father saw no contradiction between freemasonry and socialism, and many of the Ibrox regulars from the factory floor were active socialists, even in some cases, like Matt, card-carrying communists. — The first bastards that would get it would be those cunts in the Vatican, he’d enthusiastically explain, — right up against the wa’ wi they fuckers.
Matt kept Duncan right about the things that mattered, how to dress, what dance halls to go to, who the razor-boys were, and importantly, who their girlfriends were and who, therefore, to avoid dancing with. Then there was a trip to Edinburgh, on a night out with some mates, when they went to that Tollcross dancehall and he saw the girl in the blue dress. Every time he looked at her, it seemed that his breath was being crushed out of him. Even though Edinburgh appeared more relaxed than Glasgow, Matt claiming that razors and knives were a rarity, there had been a brawl. One burly guy had punched another man, and wanted to follow up. Duncan and Matt intervened and managed to help calm things down. Fortunately, one of the grateful benefactors of their intervention was a guy in the same company as the girl Duncan had been hypnotised by all night, but had been too shy to ask to dance. He could see Maria then, the cut of her cheekbones and her habit of lowering her eyes giving an appearance of arrogance which conversation with her quickly dispelled. It was even better, the guy he befriended was called Lenny, and he was Maria’s brother.
Maria was nominally a Catholic, though her father had an unexplained bitterness towards priests and had stopped going to church. Eventually his wife and their children followed suit. None the less, Duncan worried about his own family’s reaction to the marriage, and was moved to go down to Ayrshire to discuss it with them. Duncan’s father was a quiet and thoughtful man. Often his shyness was confused with gruffness, an impression accentuated by his size (he was well over six foot tall), which Duncan had inherited along with his straw-blonde hair. His father listened in silence to his deposition, giving the occasional nod in support. When he did speak, his tone was that of a man who felt he had been grossly misrepresented.
— Ah don’t hate Catholics, son, his father insisted, — Ah’ve nothing against anybody’s religion. It’s those swines in the Vatican, who keep people doon, keep them in ignorance so that they can keep filling thir coffers, that’s the scum ah hate. Reassured on this point, Duncan decided to keep his freemasonry from Maria’s father, who seemed to detest masons as much as he did priests. They married in the Register Office in Edinburgh’s Victoria Buildings and had a reception in the upstairs rooms of a Cowgate pub. Duncan was worried about an Orange, or even a Red speech from Matt Muir, so he asked his best pal from school back in Ayrshire, Ronnie Lambie, to do the honours. Unfortunately, Ronnie had got pretty drunk, and made an anti-Edinburgh speech, which upset some guests and later on, as the drink flowed, precipitated a fist-fight. Duncan and Maria took that as their cue to head off to the room they had booked at a Portobello guest house.
Back at the factory and back at the machine, Duncan was singing The Wonder of You, the tune spinning in a loop in his head, as metal yielded to the cutting edge of the lathe. Then the light from the huge windows above turned to shadow. Somebody was standing next to him. He clicked off the machine and looked up. Duncan didn’t really know the man. He had seen him in the canteen, and on the bus, obviously a non-smoker, always sitting downstairs. Duncan had an idea that they lived in the same scheme, the man getting off at the stop before him. The guy was about five-ten, with short brown hair and busy eyes. As Duncan recalled, he usually had a cheery, earthy demeanour, at odds with his looks: conventionally handsome enough to be accompanied by narcissism. Now, though, the man stood before him in an extreme state of agitation. Upset and anxious, he blurted — Duncan Ewart? Shop Steward?
They both acknowledged the daftness of the rhyme and smiled at each other. — I art Ewart shop steward. And you art? Duncan continued the joke. He knew this routine backwards.
But the man wasn’t laughing any longer. He gasped out breathlessly — Wullie Birrell. Ma wife … Sandra … gone intae labour … Abercrombie … eh’ll no lit ays go up tae the hoaspital … men oaf sick … the Crofton order … says that if ah walk oaf the joab ah walk oot for good … In a couple of beats, indignation managed to settle in Duncan’s chest like a bronchial tickle. He ground his teeth for a second, then spoke with quiet authority. — You git tae that hoaspital right now, Wullie. Thir’s only one man that’ll be walkin oaf this joab fir good n that’s Abercrombie. Rest assured, you’ll git a full apology fir this!
— Should ah clock oaf or no? Wullie Birrell asked, a shiver in his eye making his face twitch.
— Dinnae worry aboot that, Wullie, jist go. Get a taxi and ask the boy for the receipt and ah’ll pit it through the union.
Wullie Birrell nodded gratefully and exited in haste. He was already out the factory as Duncan put down his tools and walked slowly to the payphone in the canteen, calling the Convenor first, and then the Branch Secretary, the clanking sounds of washing pots and cutlery in his ear. Then he went directly to the Works Manager, Mr Catter, and filed a formal grievance. Catter listened calmly, but in mounting perturbation at Duncan Ewart’s complaint. The Crofton order had to go out, that was essential. And Ewart, well, he could get every man on the shop floor to walk off the job in support of this Birrell fellow. What in the name of God was that clown Abercrombie thinking about? Certainly, Catter had told him to make sure that order went out by any means necessary, and yes, he had actually used those terms, but the idiot had obviously lost all sense, all perspective.
Catter studied the tall, open-faced man opposite him. Catter had encountered hard men with an agenda in the shop steward’s role many times. They hated him, detested the firm and everything it stood for. Ewart wasn’t one of them. There was a warm glow in his eyes, a sort of calm righteousness which, when you engaged it for a while, seemed to be more about mischief and humour than anger. — There seems to have been a misunderstanding, Mr Ewart, Gatter said slowly, offering a smile which he hoped was contagious. — I’ll explain the position to Mr Abercrombie.
— Good, Duncan nodded, then added, — Much appreciated.
For his part, Duncan had quite a bit of time for Catter, who had always come across as a man of a basically fair and just disposition. When he did impose the more bizarre dictates from above, you could tell that he didn’t do it with much relish. And it couldn’t be too much fun trying to keep bampots like Abercrombie in line.
Abercrombie. What a nutter.
On his way back to the machine shop, Duncan Ewart couldn’t resist poking his head into the pen, boxed off from the factory floor, which Abercrombie called his office.
— Thanks, Tarn! Abercrombie looked up at him from the grease-paper worksheets sprawled across the desk.
— What for? he asked, trying to feign surprise, but his face reddened.
He’d been harassed, under pressure, and hadn’t been thinking straight about Birrell. And he’d played right into that Bolshie cunt Ewart’s hands. Duncan Ewart smiled gravely. — For trying to keep Wullie Birrell on the job on a Friday afternoon with the boys all itching tae down tools. A great piece of management. I’ve put it right for ye, I’ve just told him to go, he added smugly.
A pellet of hate exploded in Abercrombie’s chest, spreading to the extremities of his fingers and toes. He began to flush and shake. He couldn’t help it. That bastard Ewart: who the fuck did he think he was? — Ah run this fuckin shop floor! You bloody well mind that!
Duncan grinned in the face of Abercrombie’s outburst. — Sorry, Tarn, the cavalry’s on its way.
Abercrombie wilted at that moment, not at Duncan’s words but at the sight of a stonyfaced Catter appearing behind him, as if on cue. Worse still, he came into the small box with Convenor Bobby Affleck. Affleck was a squat bull of a man who had a bearing of intimidating ferocity when even mildly irritated. But now, Abercrombie could instantly tell, the Convenor was in a state of incandescent rage. Duncan smiled at Abercrombie and winked at Affleck before leaving and closing the door behind them. The thin plywood door proved little barrier to the sound of Affleck’s fury. Miraculously, every lathe and drill machine on the shop floor was switched off, one by one, replaced by the sound of laughter, which spilled like a rush of spring colouring across the painted grey concrete factory floor.
— Irvine Welsh, Glue, 2001
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Labels: communism, labour, Literature, militancy, shop stewards, socialism, strike, trade unions, working class
Monday, July 26, 2010
'Populism' and the mob posted by Richard Seymour
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20191120033819im_/http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_JNlxgs6qm2M/TE1vf23r46I/AAAAAAAAC1M/R4x3yvDRQqM/s320/Rabble+1.jpg)
I don't much care for Hutton's Eurocentric liberalism, and no more do I like his oligarchic conception of 'democracy'. It's more than apparent that, like most of his cohorts in the liberal commentariat, he doesn't at all like democracy in the sense of popular rule. To blame corporate reaction of the kind vended by Fox et al on this specious notion of the "mob" is to buy into one of the most culturally pervasive, and pernicious, conceptions of popular rule.
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20191120033819im_/http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_JNlxgs6qm2M/TE1ySIXY4AI/AAAAAAAAC1U/2dTc32RMsho/s320/rabble+2.jpg)
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20191120033819im_/http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_JNlxgs6qm2M/TE10f9TAHoI/AAAAAAAAC1c/3WosmD6ICvM/s320/rabble+3.jpg)
It's all the same. "Mom" is a Machiavellan power-maximiser, where in her guise as an arch-capitalist or a revolutionary demagogue. The masses are a stupid, baying insta-mob, incapable of rational, collective deliberation, whether they're spouting ignorant bigotry ("they took our jobs!") or snippets of de-sequentialised pseudo-marxist rhetoric. Populism in this sense is a political fable about the irrationality of crowds, and the impossibility of reasoned collective decision-making. That there are and have been mobs does not alter the fact that this cultural motif is a fabulation. It has nothing to do with the real historical processes in which murderous mobs - say, pogromists - have been galvanised. The 'mob' of popular culture is an Aunt Sally, and it is surely of some significance that this 'mob' is with few exceptions the only way in which masses appear as an agency in said culture. Contempt for the 'populist mob' really expresses hatred for democracy.
Labels: capitalism, capitalist ideology, cold war, communism, culture industry, mobs, pogroms, Pop Culture, populism, ruling class
Friday, July 02, 2010
Alberto Toscano on fanaticism posted by Richard Seymour
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20191120033819im_/http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_JNlxgs6qm2M/TC5ZbLemCqI/AAAAAAAAC0U/Sjq4v6wRVKc/s200/final-front-cover_toscano_fanaticism-small.jpg)
We have encountered the trope of "native fanaticism" before, in the context of imperialist ideology, from Uttar Pradesh to Baghdad. Orientalism has produced various "Muslim fanatics" over the centuries. The figure of the fanatic is also a familiar subject of Cold War obloquy, from Spargo's appraisal of Bolshevik psychology to the 'antitotalitarian' literature of Fifties America and Seventies France. And of course, these discourses have been reinvented today to meet the putative challenge of "political religion". Today, "fanaticism" is held up as a sort of sock puppet opponent for those who would consider themselves enlightened, liberal, and modern. But is there anything that unites these various ideas? The answer might be that fanaticism is a mood, a psychic state characterised by a non-negotiable commitment to "something abstract" - whether that abstraction is revolutionary liberty, communism, or the earthly rule of God. In contrast, the liberal is empirical in his attitudes, and sensible of the need for compromise in pursuit of a modus vivendi. This is the ideologeme, the stereotype, or at least one variant of it.
Toscano's terse, penetrating account of the "uses" of "fanaticism" seeks to historicise and contextualise an idea that vigorously resists history and context. The book is not so much a history, though its chapters are arranged in a roughly chronological sequence, as a work of philosophy, a literary critique, a genealogy of ideas and also - inasmuch as each chapter could stand alone - a volume of thematically continuous essays. In examing different aspects of the idea of fanaticism, from origins in the Germans Peasants War (here he draws on the work of the excellent Peter Blickle), through its uses in the Enlightenment, in the defence of slavery and in imperialist theodicy, Toscano juggles an intimidating array of topics - psychoanalysis, philosophy, racism, anticommunism, recondite marxist polemics, secularism, anti-utopianism, etc etc. - comfortably shifting between multiple perspectives and analytical frameworks. One of the most surprising and enjoyable chapters in the book deals with the complex relationship between reason and fanaticism in Enlightenment thought. In this, we encounter fanaticism not merely as irrational dogma, but as a surfeit of reason. Indeed, the whole Burkean critique of those revolutionary "fanaticks" is precisely mounted on anti-rationalist precepts framed by one trained in Humean empiricism.
As far as "political religion" is concerned, this line of critique comes from two angles. One suggests that a political religion is a perverted expression of a spiritual impulse that is far better served by authentic religion. This raises a potentially discomfiting chain of induction for the devout since, by identifying religion with a set of ideological gestures and social processes, it raises the prospect that all religions are in essence no different to other ideologies and thus susceptible to the same modes of critique. The other angle, the response of the empiricist liberal ostentatiously displaying the looted intellectual treasury of the Enlightenment, suggests that the very idea that a form of politics recalls religion in having non-negotiable tenets, in pursuing non-empirical, abstract goals (eg, universality) is already to damn that politics. But that line of critique assumes that there is some form of behaviour that is essentially religious. Toscano deflates this with a choice quote from Kenelm Burridge:
"Meditating on the infinite may be a religious activity, so may writing a cheque, eating corpses, copulating, listening to a thumping sermon on hell fire, examining one's conscience, painting a picture, growing a beard, licking leprous sores, tying the body into knots, a dogged faith in human rationality - there is no human activity that cannot assume religious significance".
Which, if you think about it, somewhat takes the sting out of the charge of "political religion". The war on terror has of course produced various kinds of 'anti-fanatical' discourse. In the main, this is has focused on Islam, although some of the soft liberal critique of the neoconservative right also takes this form - they're obsessed with some kind of abstract global democratic revolution, because they're all closet Trotskyists. But that aside, the main way in which we encounter such discourses is with respect to Islam. Toscano is entertaining on the history of this kind of vituperation, particularly on the laboured analogies drawn between Islam and communism. Depending on who you listen to, Islam is the communism of the 21st Century; communism was the Islam of the 20th Century; Lenin was Mohammed (Keynes); Robespierre was Mohammed (Hegel); and even Hitler was Mohammed (Barth, Jung). The logic is curious. It is as if Islam itself is merely a worldly, materialist social doctrine in devotional get-up; but at the same time, Bolshevism (and/or Nazism, depending on who you're hearing from) is really a fanatical pseudo-religious doctrine with worldly trappings. It sets up a dichotomy that automatically deconstructs. But the even more curious thing is how, from the counter-revolutionaries of the 18th Century to the counterinsurgency texts of the 21st Century, the role of 'fanaticism' always turns out to mandate an equal and opposite 'fanaticism' in retort: since our enemy is fanatical, will stop at nothing, knows none of the humane and liberal limits that we assume, we must be fanatical, stop at nothing, throw aside our humane and liberal limits, otherwise all is lost.
Toscano has much fun, and vents justified disgust, at the expense of the turgid polemics about Islam that have been produced in the context of philosophy and psychoanalysis. This includes, but is not restricted to, a finely pointed, piercing critique of Zizek's engagement, or non-engagement, with Islam. In contrast to his ostentatiously philosophical approach to Christianity and Judaism, Toscano maintains, Zizek's encounters with Islam are strictly ideological, or sociological, tending merely to reproduce trite clash-of-civilizations discourses, predictable interrogations of the 'veil' that feed into the usual moral panics, dichotomies that award to Christianity an emancipatory, rationalist kernel that is held to be missing from Islam, and which produce the Muslim-as-pervert, the fundamentalist fanatic with a direct line to God. Taken in conjunction with Zizek's particular appropriation of Bloch's atheism-in-Christianity thesis, his belabouring of Islam feeds into the typical problematic of a Christianity that is supposedly the religion to end all religions, but is chronologically prior to Islam and is in some sense haunted by Islam's alterity. At best, this results in Orientalist pseudo-analysis of the kind that his favourite philosopher, Hegel, was rather fond of. The relationship between this kind of 'anti-fanatical' discourse and Zizek's broader Eurocentrism, not to mention his explicit apologias for US imperialism in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, is obvious and requires no elaboration here. I will not do Toscano's analysis - either with regard to Zizek, or the wider topic of psychoanalytic treatment of Islam - justice by attempting to render it in a few brief phrases here. But I found it useful to have an argument that meets and bests the psychoanalyst on his own turf.
This dissection of fanaticism, and the family of concepts surrounding it such as political religion, totalitarianism, and so on, is a potent intervention that defends radical and revolutionary Enlightenment, and the emancipatory ideologies emanating from it, from the pall of misappropriation on the one hand, and defamation on the other. It is a compendium of useful idiocies trumped by biting retorts, extravagant rhetoric let down by coolly deflating satire, rampant idealism met and surpassed by sophisticated materialism. For those who remain faithful to the liberating adventure of Enlightenment-as-insubordinate-thought, who still cleave to the possibility of emancipation licensed by reason, and who are marginalised by doctrines of extremity on account of it, this book is a weapon. In the best sense, it is, as Tocqueville said of French revolutionary ideology, "armed opinion".
Labels: 'totalitarianism', colonialism, communism, enlightenment, fanaticism, imperialism, islam, islamophobia, native fanaticism, political religion, slavery
Friday, November 13, 2009
Immanence posted by Richard Seymour
Just a thought. In Zombie Capitalism, Chris Harman points out that the 2,000 largest companies control half of the world's wealth. Harman figures that if a board of directors has about ten people on it, that's 20,000 people (or, by my calculation, 0.0003% of the world's population) who have decisive control over the world's production, output and surplus. There's another way to look at it, of course. The workers of those companies exert decisive leverage over the future of production. They don't constitute a multitude, admittedly, but if they formed communist associations - workers' councils, soviets, whatever - that would surely establish a new hegemonic paradigm of work that could increasingly become the norm. Admittedly, they would then have to wrest control of the means of production from the employers and then eventually take on the state (who seem to get uppity when workers decide to take control of the means of production). But such a process seems altogether more probable than, say, a sphere of cooperative value production gradually eroding the boundaries of capitalist production until the latter withers away. Doesn't it?Labels: capitalism, communism, immanence, immaterial labour, negri, ruling class, socialism, soviets, workers control of industry
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
The graveyard of the Russian empire posted by Richard Seymour
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20191120033819im_/http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_JNlxgs6qm2M/Svqe7PpzDcI/AAAAAAAACtk/zbLLC9mQ3Sg/s320/russian-army-withdrawing-from-afghanistan.jpg)
The communication lines to the palace were cut, so Amin had no way of knowing what was happening. When the horrendous noise of the bombing campaign reverberated through the city, he asked Jahandad, the commander of his presidential guards, what was happening. Jahandad reported that the Soviet Union was invading. Amin did not believe that the USSR would let him down in that fashion, and rebuked his subordinate. Within hours he was dead, and Jahandad's troops were being annihilated by napalm bombs and other incendiary weapons as they attempted to fight off the invaders. (Underscoring the fragility of Amin's support, his officers across the country largely did not resist the Soviet invasion.) The USSR would later claim that they had been 'invited' by the prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan to send troops into the country to defend socialism. As a matter of fact, Amin had pleaded with Russia to send forces to defend his narrow regime, based as it was upon the support of a fractious military cadre (mainly the officer corps rather than the rank and file), a layer of urban intellectuals, and practically no one else. He had not pleaded with them to overthrow his government and impose their preferred client regime.
What did the USSR want with Afghanistan? Even some of their supporters had difficulty working it out. Alexander Cockburn ironically extolled the virtues of the invasion as a civilising mission: "I yield to none in my sympathy to those prostrate beneath the Russian jackboot, but if ever a country deserved rape it's Afghanistan. Nothing but mountains filled with barbarous ethnics with views as medieval as their muskets, and unspeakably cruel too..." Others insisted that Russia was there to defend the gains of the 'Saur revolution', support womens' rights, build schools for the people, overthrow the khans, etc. There is no doubt that this is what the Afghan communists wanted, and had sought to achieve through the disastrous strategy of military dictatorship.
But the idea that an exploitative and oppressive bureaucratic state like the USSR approached Afghanistan as modernising revolutionaries is tweaking the nose of credulity. The USSR valued a loyal Afghan state, from which it had been able to extract energy on its own imposed price schedules. In 1968, it had constructed a hugely successful gas pipeline from the country, so that only 3% of 2.4bn cubic meters of gas produced in the country by 1985 went to serving Afghan needs - all the rest went to Russia. The USSR also did not want that state to fall to a Muslim uprising, adding to the example of Iran and potentially setting a new example for the largely Muslim populations of the energy rich central Asian Soviet republics. Already in March 1979, inspired by the Iranian revolution, a bloody uprising had taken place in Herat against the Khalki government. Russian 'advisers' were tracked down and killed by the insurgents, before Russian bombers dropped their payloads over the city, crushing the revolt. 25,000 people were killed during that single uprising. During this revolt, a major rift emerged in the administration.
The USSR was concerned that Amin, who belonged to the 'Khalk' (People) faction of the communists, was too radical. In his place, therefore, they installed Babrak Karmal of the moderate 'Parcham' (Flag) faction. They imagined that it would be possible, through a more conservative client-state, to forge a rapprochement with the existing ruling class. Such, after all, had been their strategy in the "people's democracies" - in Romania, they rallied to the King, in Bulgaria they pledged to protect private property, in Poland and Czechoslovakia, they took already nationalised economies and preserved more or less the same personnel running them - so why should they come over all revolutionary in Afghanistan? Just to make the break with any radicalism dramatically clear, Amin's bullet-ridden body was displayed to the selected leadership of the new client regime.
The Russians, eager to scotch rumours that they had overthrown a 'socialist' ally, put it about that Amin had been making deals with the Ikhwanis (Muslim Brothers) and the CIA, and was intent on turning Afghanistan into another Chile. This claim had initially been made by Amin's rival, Taraki, and Soviet diplomats who saw Amin as a rough-hewn 'extreme Pushtu nationalist' among other things, were inclined to believe it. Amin's independent tendencies, his attempts to keep Soviet 'advisers' in their place, and pleading that the USSR revise its gas price schedule (since gas was the state's single biggest source of revenue), surely added to the suspicion. The claim would later feature in the official documentary record of the Brehznev administration recording the reasons for invasion. But it was patently false, and unsupported by any evidence. If anything, it was the USSR that would shortly be applying the methods of Pinochet against the Solidarity movement in Poland.
Of course, the CIA along with ultra-reactionary Wahabbis trained in Pakistan did have their say in Afghanistan. The US had been anxious to overthrow the Amin administration and was also, if Brzezinski is to be believed, desperate to goad the Soviet Union into invading, the better to dissipate increasingly scarce resources in an unwinnable war. From 1978, the US had been training insurgents in Pakistan, and CIA aid was being sent to Afghan insurgents six months before the USSR invaded. The division of labour that emerged was that the CIA would manage the overall project, Special Forces would train managers, and Pakistani ISI would train mujahideen. Money and support was later raised from Saudi Arabia, and logisitical cooperation developed with China. US involvement in stimulating revolt was part of the rationale offered by Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko for having voted in favour of invasion. The realpolitik analysis was the US intended to replace its lost ally in Iran with anti-Soviet bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which could then become the basis for destabilising Russia's Muslim republics. There is some truth in this. It would be utterly foolish and misleading, though, to pretend that the tribal rebellions that had been breaking out could be credited exclusively to American shit-stirring. The truth is that the Amin regime had made itself unpopular by attempting to impose dramatic change from above, without ever attempting to engage the popular majority.
As Jonathan Neale has pointed out, the rebellion against the Soviet occupation began with public protests and strikes, sometimes from those who would have been expected to support the communists. The civil servants, whom the Afghan communists had looked to as a base, went on strike. The students at a girls high school in Kabul, who had led the struggle for womens' rights, now demanded that the men fight the occupiers. In Herat, protesters gathered on the rooftops in imitation of the Iranian revolutionaries, chanting 'God is great'. More importantly, ttens of housands of ordinary Afghans outside of the cities which the Russians successfully controlled, sought out parties and organisations that could supply weapons and organisation. Many were not interested in following the line of an established party, such as the Jamiat or Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb, so what emerged was a number of loose party structures based on coalitions between potentially rivalrous factions, generally pursuing the same right-wing Islamist politics with Saudi money. Given that the left, the secularists and the feminists were overwhelmingly backing the Russian invaders, the growth and appeal of such fronts was a logical - though tragic - development.
In response to this, and to the growing cost of an invasion that was supposed to be a cakewalk, the USSR sought to 'Afghanise' the war. They proposed to gradually transfer military responsibility to a well-trained Afghan army that could hold off the terrorists and defend Russian security interests. It was a complete failure. The Afghan military was well-armed, and well-trained, but it was consistently defeated by the popular resistance. In the Spring of 1988, the USSR began its withdrawal, leaving their beleaguered Afghan allies to their fate.
The war killed half a million people, wounded millions, forced millions more into fleeing as refugees. It cost Russia a total of 60 billion rubles, purely in operational terms. A Stiglitz-style report on its total costs might put the figure much higher, and it certainly kept military investment artificially high when the imperative was to reduce such spending as growth slowed down throughout the 1980s. In combination with a crippling economic crisis, (which shouldn't have affected the 'socialist countries', shurely?), the war was one of the major reasons why the USSR collapsed when it did. The defeat of Russian imperialism created a space for dissidents in the "people's republics". How could an army exhausted from defeat at the hands of Afghan peasants be expected come to the rescue of Stalinist elites in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia etc? And with what? Moscow's rulers were staring into an empty treasury. For the Berlin Wall to fall, the Alpha antiterrorist squad of the KGB had to fall.
But the fact that the resistance had been monopolised by the right also strengthened the landlords, the mullahs, the narco-capitalists, the warlords. The sources of oppression and exploitation that the Afghan communists had sought to defeat were left victorious to fight over the scraps of a wrecked Afghanistan. The communists lost because their understanding of socialism was that it was something that had to be imposed from above - their models were Castro, Nasser, Sukarno, developmentalist states resting on a coalition between the officer corps and the intelligentsia. And if it could be imposed by Amin, it could just as well be imposed by Brehznev. The result is that today, US imperialism can offer a nepotistic coalition of khans, drug-dealers and right-wing ruling class thieves as if it were some kind of progress. And, oh yes, they're building schools and supporting womens' rights, and...
Labels: afghanistan, communism, islamism, russian imperialism, socialism, US imperialism, ussr
Sunday, August 30, 2009
"Race Mixing Is Communism"; or, race is class posted by Richard Seymour
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Race is class - this is the point that won't go away. My cursory look at how the American race 'question' presents itself has always taken me toward two topics: class, and anticommunism. One cannot talk about class without talking about labour, and therefore about how labour is managed, stratified, waged, etc. Therefore, one cannot talk about race, in a Myrdalian way, as if it was just a set of dogma rather than a socially constructed institution with decisive implications for the class structure. How can one talk about the suburbanisation of 'blue collar' labour without considering 'white flight'? And how can the decline of 'blue collar' manufacturing labour be considered apart from 'globalisation', or rather the global stratificaton of labour created by capitalism in the era of white supremacy? Equally, any history of anticommunism is incomplete without at least discussing how it was initially conceived as a racial counter-conspiracy: against the Jews, against Germans, against African Americans, and finally against Russkies plotting to have unfit countries achieve "premature independence". The liberal and social democratic variants of anticommunism did not perform any better in this respect than the conservative variants.
The thread that ties anticommunism and racism at a conceptual level, I think, is the issue of "self-government", ie democracy. In American racial thinking, self-government is a cultural state attained by Anglo-Saxons and Teutons, a condition in which people are able - on account of god-chosenness, race experience, and fine blood lines - to control their primitive urges toward sin. This was not just a conservative position, but a staple of turn-of-the-century progressivism. In contemporary discourse, one doesn't speak of Anglo-Saxons and Teutons but one may, with a certain respect for racial propriety, discuss the prospects for self-government in similarly culturalist and mystifying terms. This is an art that the neoconservatives refined, but it is not just reactionaries who hold to such views. In a very contemporary parlance, the liberal religious philosopher Marilyn McCord Adams has expressed the belief that the persistence of evil proves that people are no more equipped for self-government than they ever were: she, perhaps unreflectively, referred to the spectre of sometimes genocidal 'failed states' as examples of what she meant. Communism, being in theory the most advanced state of self-government available to humanity, represents for such thought both an unrealisable utopia and a recognisable dystopia. For southern segregationists, self-government for African Americans was unrealisable (utopia), and the attempt to impose it would inevitably result in such disorder that some possibly 'totalitarian' dictatorship would emerge to keep order (dystopia).
A notorious image from the history of the segregated south is that of white conservative protesters bearing placards that read: "Race Mixing Is Communism". This image was chosen for the cover of Jeff Woods' Black Struggle, Red Scare (Louisiana State University Press, 2004). I think there is a commonsensical reaction to this, which is to conclude that the protesters were either hysterical and deluded, or instrumentalising a much more widely accepted anticommunist discourse for the purposes of promoting an unpopular racial agenda (I think Woods' case is a mixture of these two). Given the alarmist tone of reactionary propaganda in the US, and given the fact that American southerners have, since the Wilson era at least, represented themselves as the most patriotic Americans of all, these commonsensical conclusions seem to be more than justified. But I think they are wrong. My suggestion is to take the reactionaries seriously. When they said "Race Mixing Is Communism", they meant something important and relevant by it. It is manifestly wrong to think that 'race mixing' is identical with communism, but the claim was not just a ruse, nor was it blind panic. For such people, white supremacy was meritocratic. It reflected the innate, natural differences between people (and, as a corollary, the difference between the white labourer and the white owner was just as natural, if mitigated by blood solidarity). To attack the race system was to introduce a principle that was, to them, a state-sponsored attack on a well-maintained, meritocratic free enterprise society.
In the same way, you'll notice, when bourgeois ideologues want to mystify class relations without reference to race, they reach for the same combination of naturalising and culturalist tropes. Either the allocation of rewards and punishments reflects some innate biological differences between people, or it corresponds to a kind of ethnicity in which class itself is spoken of in 'native' or 'tribal' terms - one's "roots", "tradition", the signature cloth cap, the pub, the East End argot and lifestyle (as described in various sentimental best-sellers), etc. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously attributed to African American culture a "tangle of pathologies", which he held responsible for inhibiting their social advancement and maintaining them in a state of disproportionate poverty. Similarly, UK politicians are inclined to interpret the polarisation of wealth within Britain's class structure as a result of the unchecked laziness, decadence and sexual promiscuity of the 'underclass'.
One could conclude from this that race overlaps with class in mainly discursive ways, but this would be to miss the point. The point about the "colour bar", whether it operates formally or de facto, is that it excludes non-white labour from certain positions, or substantially reduces their participation in those roles. These positions are sought after for the levels of skill, responsibility, autonomy and rewards entailed in them. But those social facts about the job - skill, responsibility, autonomy and rewards - are interpreted by racist institutions as natural or cultural facts. Thus, 'whiteness' = skill, responsibility, self-government and the rewards those qualities deliver. In much the same way, the socially produced imperative to drive workers harder and extract more free overtime labour is interpreted as a particular expression of one's culture and personality, ie. as a reflection of one's 'flexibility'. So, what race does is not just overlap with class, but constitute it, rendering its demarcations more intelligible in the terms of bourgeois ideology. The imperative of anticommunism in such a system being to defend, with greater or lesser reservations, the balance of wealth and power in capitalist societies, it follows that the disproportionate distribution of non-whites among the unemployed, poor and imprisoned - however lamentable it may be for liberal anticommunists - is not too far from meritocratic justice.
There are other ways to come at this topic, but the basic relationship is as crucial to understand today as it ever was. After all, as Tim Wise has pointed out, the delirious charges of socialism against the Obama administration are not neutral with respect to race - neither Clinton nor Bush faced similar charges over ambitious programmes of government spending, whether on healthcare or on the military. There is surely a sense in which socialism, for some people, "is little more than racist code for the longstanding white fear that black folks will steal from them". If it's not the DVD player, it's nothing less than the country itself that "black folks" are supposed to be eloping with. And a good white conservative meets such a threat as he would any common burglar: gun in hand, trigger happy, fully convinced that the life he is about to annihilate is worth less than a toaster. The defence of property is, in American politics, cosubstantial with the defence of the prevalent racial order. The 'American dream', (a PR initiative floated in the 1930s but really taking hold during the anticommunist hunts of the 1950s), was always white, and so it largely remains.
Labels: anticommunism, colour line, communism, deep south, racism, segregation, self-government, socialism, US imperialism, us politics
Monday, August 03, 2009
Francis Jeanson RIP posted by Richard Seymour
More important than any of this, though, Jeanson was one of the few in the French left who took an early and consistent stance against the French empire in Algeria. His sympathy for anticolonial struggle was evident in his preface to the first edition of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. But having visited Algeria in 1948, three years after the repression of the Setif uprising (during which the communist faily L'Humanite had described the insurgents as 'Hitlerite killers'), he set up what became known as the Jeanson Network, an alliance of leftists and avant garde intellectuals supporting self-determination for Algeria. The book Jeanson co-wrote with his wife Colette Jeanson about the FLN's rebellion, based on their visits to Algeria, explicitly took the side of the rebels, and would provide Sartre with the ammunition to denounce the pitiless colonial system, particularly those who favoured a 'good' colonialism and who worried about 'abandoning' Algeria. The Network didn't just passively support the uprising: it funnelled money and documents to the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) after the group's formation in 1954, and was important in winning thargument in the left for solidarity with the anticolonial movement. For this reason, the Network was awarded the contemptuous sobriquet, 'porteurs de valise', or 'bag carriers' (just for chuckles, wiki describes it as a "fifth column"). Their manifesto declared, as the Gaullist state was arresting antiwar dissenters:
The undersigned, considering that each of us must take a stand concerning acts which it is from here on in impossible to present as isolated news stories; considering that whatever their location and whatever their means, they have the obligation to intervene; not in order to give advice to men who have to make their own decision before such serious problems, but to ask of those who judge them to not let themselves be caught up in the ambiguity of words and values, declare:
* We respect and judge justified the refusal to take up arms against the Algerian people.
* We respect and judge justified the conduct of those French men and women who consider it their obligation to give aid and protection to the Algerians, oppressed in the name of the French people.
* The cause of the Algerian people, which contributes decisively to the ruin of the colonial system, is the cause of all free men and women.
The record of the French left on this issue is one I discuss elsewhere (can't remember the name of the book, something about murderous liberalism), but suffice to say that the Socialists under Guy Mollett prosecuted the war as ferociously as the right. And the PCF - who had in better years taken a principled anti-imperialist position, and helped found the Étoile Nord Africaine, the first Algerian nationalist group - voted to give them 'special powers' to do so, while publicly advocating an 'antiwar' position that didn't challenge France's right to possess Algeria. Indeed, the PCF distrusted the anticolonial revolutionaries, believing that Islam was "essentially reactionary" and therefore couldn't be the basis for a supportable national rebellion. Jeanson was the FLN's delegate in negotiations with the PCF during which he demanded that they accept independence for Algeria, and not merely an end to the war. They promised to do so, but only after the USSR recognised Algeria's independence did they actually support independence - long after de Gaulle and the right-wing philosopher Raymond Aron had come to acknowledge that independence for Algeria was inevitable. Only in the last year of guerilla struggle did the PCF become involved in active resistance to the war. And even then, their struggle was more against the fascist Organisation de l'armée secrète (OAS), since the OAS was waging the most vicious terroristic aspect of the war. (By the way, the OAS distinguished itself as possibly the first 'politically correct' fascist organisation, when it argued that support for independence was both racist toward Muslims, denying them the right to be Frenchmen, and antisemitic since the policy was latterly supported by a Gaullist state that had Nazi connections). According to Martin Evans' book about the rebellion, The Memory of Resistance, two key clarifying moments in the struggle were 1956, when the socialists and communists backed 'special powers' and when the first rumours of torture started to emerge, and 1958, when the French left basically capitulated to the Gaullist coup without a whisper of resistance. It confirmed the rebels in their strategy of armed insurrection, and demonstrated to them that they had no choice but to win complete independence from France.
Given this terrible record, Jeanson's role is all the more remarkable and valuable. He escaped arrest when several of his fellow militants were captured and put on trial in 1960, but he was tried in absentia and sentenced to ten years in prison. He was pardoned in 1966, and remained a significant enough figure in French politics and culture to feature in Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise, about the New Left and the growing radicalism among French students, released a year before the May 1968 general strike and riots (those who don't need the subtitles can cut straight to his dialogue here and here). Unfortunately for those interested to learn more, the only English-language biography of Jeanson costs over fifty quid in its current hardback edition.
*Jeanson's highly critical review of Camus' Man in Revolt, which appeared in Les Temps modernes, was the kind of cutting attack that Sartre was not himself prepared to deliver to his old friend. He castigated Camus' reputation for saintliness, ironised about his Beautiful Soul moralism, denounced his implicit attack on revolutionary ideology - but still, for it was early days, held up the PCF as the party of the French working class, and the USSR as a successful revolutionary state. It was a review-cum-attack that provoked intense controversy, drawing a ferocious seventeen page response from Camus which implied that it was more or less the dictated thoughts of Sartre himself, an unflattering distortion of Camus' politics in the service of Sartre's communism. Though Sartre had not written the review and, apparently, didn't even like it very much, it was a seminal moment in the contretemps, crystallising disagreements that would later be expressed in relation to Algeria, with Camus refusing to back the rebellion. (I'm drawing heavily on Ron Aaronson's book on the Camus-Sartre split, here - better you should read it yourself).
Labels: algeria, anticolonialism, communism, france, francis jeanson, pcf, sartre, socialism
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Badiou on Le Petit Nicolas posted by Richard Seymour
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According to Badiou, the French Left (and by extension, the Left as such) has practised a reactive politics based on fear of the right, which in turn is essentially mobilised by the fear of the leftist challenge. At the same time, the politicians of the reformist left flaunt their impotence, their inability to transform affairs, and cling to it. All they can do is keep the right out of office and limit the reaction. Then Sarkozy wins, and Socialists - many from the generation of the nouveau philosophes - flock to join his administration, or be part of the clique. Sarkozy expresses his 'openness' to the left, the better to coopt its luminaries for the creation of a technocratic single-party state (this is what the language of bipartisanship always boils down to) and form what Badiou calls a Union for Presidential Unanimity (a pun on the name of Sarkozy's party, the Union for a Popular Movement). This is the state that neoliberal capitalism has reduced politics to. As Badiou says, quoting Zizek, those who used to oppose parliamentary democracy to Stalinism missed the point that Stalinism was the future of parliamentary democracy. Indeed, "the technological means for controlling the population are already such that Stalin, with his endless handwritten files, his mass executions, his spies with hats, his gigantic lice-ridden camps and bestial tortures, appears like an amateur from another age".
And how many times have you heard pundits boasting about the big turnout for a particular election? Boast they must, because it is happening with less and less frequency these days. But what does this say about voting, as an act? What matters, apparently is that people participate, and thus give the system a democratic imprimatur. Badiou's conclusion is different. Observing the heralds of Sarkozysme ratify the new administration with its engorged turnout, he retorts: "If numbers alone are a cause for celebration, then this means that democracy is strictly indifferent to any content". If people vote for a mediocre clerk, then "all glory to them! By their stupid number, they brought the triumph of democracy". The bards of parliamentarism are "more 'respectful' than I am of the 'popular will', even when they see it as idiotic and dangerous. Bow down before the numbers!"
Beyond which caustic banter lies the humane purpose of defending migrant workers, upholding the hippocratic principle, supporting creative art, putting emancipatory politics before managerial necessitarianism, and ultimately restoring the 'communist hypothesis' to its proper place. Said hypothesis, which is that the system of classes can be overthrown, is a "real point" to hold onto against the alternative hypothesis of parliamentarist impotence. Those who reject the communist hypothesis are bound to market economics and parliamentary democracy, and therefore to the very logic that leads to the Rat Man. You could wish that Badiou would not say 'democracy' when he means 'parliamentary democracy', or that he would not say 'left' when he means something much more ambiguous (is Ségolène Royal really in any meaningful sense on the Left? Or Bernard Kouchner for that matter?). But the provocative, ludic manner of the collection is part of its charm. It is because Badiou doesn't respect the rules of the 'capitalo-parliamentarist' game that even his ultra-left tendencies - an overhang from his wild Maoist days - become the basis for important insights.
Labels: alain badiou, communism, nicolas sarkozy, reactionary subjectivity, socialism, socialist party
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Mumbai posted by Richard Seymour
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20191120033819im_/http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_JNlxgs6qm2M/SS6sMX0fqRI/AAAAAAAACOk/OGCd8UQYHns/s320/Mumbai+terror.jpg)
The shocking and depressing news from India would seem to defy any glib conclusions or slogans beyond the patently obvious - namely, that this grotesque hunting and killing of innocents is likely to succeed in (what appears to be) its principle aim of generating both a repressive response from the Indian state and a communal reaction. The facts so far reported do point to some general conclusions about the likely aims, and possible culprits. There has been a claim of responsibility from the 'Deccan Mujahideen', which could be related to the 'Indian Mujahideen' (IM), who in turn are alleged to be the latest incarnation of banned right-wing Islamist groups, the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), and Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT). The former originated in Uttar Pradesh in 1977, inspired by the Iranian revolution, championing a Deobandi strain of Muslim revivalism. The latter originated in Kashmir in 1990 and is, alongside the Jaish-e Mohammed, one of the larger Islamist groups operating in Pakistan. It has been associated with figures belonging to 'Al Qaeda'. This is presumably the basis for Indian intelligence claims that the violence of the IM is the result of ISI subventions across the subcontinent. Whatever the ratio of truth and falsehood in those claims, two other dimensions are probably far more important: one is the domestic aspect of communal violence, and the other is the global politics of the jihadis presumed to be involved. The choice of targets suggests that the emphasis must be on the latter. One analysis in the Telegraph explains that the symbolic significance of the attack on the Taj Mahal hotel is that it was built to give the Indian upper class somewhere decent to stay in an age of colonial racism and segregation. The hotel is now "a symbol of Western decadence", because of the rich tourists it attracts. Similarly, the train station attacked was a terminus busy with tourists. Unlike the attacks in 2006, which were designed to exact maximum casualties among Hindu civilians, this attack seems to have been designed to kill foreigners.
Let's suppose that the 'Deccan Mujahideen' is indeed a name chosen by members of the IM based in the Deccan plain of Maharashtra. According to the Indian government, the IM is a front for members of the banned SIMI and LeT groups. But these are very different organisations - if not doctrinally, then certainly in origin and manner of organising. SIMI was originally the student wing of the Jama'at-i-Islami Hind (JIH), who expelled it on the basis of its ultra-radicalism (the JIH today work alongside the Indian communist parties against the BJP and Congress Party). It was a tiny sect for years. But the accelerating trends in communal violence over the last two decades of the twentieth century saw it gain members beyond its areas of strength in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, into some areas of the south. It has been banned several times, the first time shortly after 9/11 on the basis of claims of involvement in terrorist activities. Human rights advocates among others noted that Hinduta groups promoting racist violence, with close ties to the government, were not banned. They argued that the ban was a pretext for harrassing and terrorising Muslims in general, and indeed subsequent events bore this assessment out. The police slaughtered protesters supporting SIMI's legalisation in Lucknow shortly after the first ban was imposed. The subsequent massacre of 2,000 Muslims in the state of Gujarat, with the involvement of state officials including Narendra Modi, demonstrated that the Indian state was indeed on the war path against Muslims. The recent finding by the Justice Navati commission, exculpating Modi and pinning the blame for the violence on a 'Muslim mob' who are held responsible for the burning to death of 58 Hindu passengers on a train, rather suggests that the war is not over. Actually, a number of armed Hindutva groups were reportedly able to train and operate with impunity under the BJP.
At any rate, the bans on SIMI appear to have been based on insubstantial evidence of involvement in terrorism. In August this year, for example, a Delhi High Court tribunal lifted the ban, stating that evidence from the home ministry was inadequate to maintain it, although the Supreme Court threw this ruling out. The bans would certainly have seriously impacted on the organisation's size and ability to act, given that its members must retire from the organisation after thirty while new recruitment would have been impossible under conditions of illegality. This weakened organisation was held responsible by the Indian authorities for the Mumbai bombings in 2006 as well as attacks against Hindus in Malegaon the same year, both of which were communal attacks (subsequent attacks in Malegaon this year appear to have been carried out by Hindu nationalists seeking to re-create the fabled 'Aryan' state of old, the 'Hindu Rashtra' ideology of the BJP). It is possible that the SIMI, or elements of it, have engaged in some attacks. Eight years of repression, scapegoating, and some of the worst anti-Muslim violence for years, might have radicalised layers within it. However, the Indian state has too much of an interest in demonising all Islamist groups as a means toward repressing Muslims in general for its claims to be taken at face value.
LeT supposedly has connections with SIMI, but to the extent that these are reported they seem tenuous, and LeT is a very different kind of organisation. It was funded from the start by the Pakistani state to facilitate its control over the Kashmiri struggle for independence, which emerged through years of torture and murder by the Indian state (the Indian government's widespread practise of torture has led to the formation of a people's tribunal to combat it). This is part of the Pakistani state's general strategy of promoting various groups to create a pro-Pakistan consensus across central and southern Asia. Even under the conditions of the 'war on terror', the ISI has been able to redeploy these groups, including LeT, moving their camps to avoid detection by US bombers and so on. Unlike SIMI in India, LeT has some real social weight in Pakistan - after the US bombing of Afghanistan in 1998, it mobilised 50,000 youths at a religious gathering near Lahore at which attendees vowed to avenge the attacks. It also undoubtedly has a willingness and an ability to plan and execute highly sophisticated attacks. This doesn't mean any accusations against them are reliable, or that the ISI in any sense co-ordinated it. The Indian government is already more or less explicitly blaming Pakistan, which is one reason to be wary of such claims.
Whoever the 'Deccan Mujahideen' turn out to be, Jason Burke argues that the signs point to them being a home-grown movement. This means that any attempt to comprehend what is happening has to start with the Indian social structure, and particularly the position of Muslims in Indian society. So, let's stick with the obvious. Indian Muslims, comprising 13.5% of the population of India, are poor and disenfranchised: under-represented in most official organs, among the most exploited layers of society, and vulnerable to chauvanistic attack by Hindu nationalists. Their status as an insecure minority within a Hindu-majority state is one of the deadliest issues in Indian politics. The rise of atrocious Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) throughout the 1990s reflected the growth of communal politics that was due to a number of factors. Demographically, Muslims were a faster growing group than any other, a fact that right-wing politicians sometimes ascribed to illegal migration by refugees from Bangladesh (many of these were actually Hindus). The rise of Islamist politics amid the disintegration of Congress hegemony (the Congress Party had failed to alleviate the extreme polarities of wealth or fulfil its pledges on poverty as outlined in Ghandi's Garibi Hatao programme was accompanied by the rise of other forms of politics rooted in caste or regional interests - so, for example, the Dalit party sought to build a coalition between Muslims and low caste blocs. Hindutva politicians and activists successfully exploited these changes to argue that the Muslim population was a surging menace, and that it would become a threat to the security of the Hindu population. The BJP's rapid ascent helped to accelerate the rise of communal violence. The party, which had at its core another organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, known for its fascistic tendencies, began its most illustrious phase with bouts of vicious sectarianism. One of these was the demolition of the Babar mosque in Ayodhya, in 1992. The demolition was not really an attack on a religious symbol so much as an attack on a symbol representing the integration and acceptance of Muslims. It was an attack on the very idea that Muslims were a part of Indian society, which the BJP explicitly rejected in their literature and speeches. And it duly prompted one of the worst riots in recent Indian history. Subsequently, it incited pogroms against Muslims in Bombay/Mumbai in 1993. (Just in passing, it was the far right BJP ally Shiv Sena, whose candidate threatened the extermination of the city's Muslims, which changed Bombay's name to its Marathi name, Mumbai, in 1995). The BJP are the most vicious exponents of communal politics, and it is no exaggeration to say that they came close to fascism at times, albeit the Indian ruling class wasn't ready for that level of repression and instability. It is now quite possible that they will sweep back to power, and the Gujarat massacre may be multiplied many times over.
All of this bodes extremely ominiously for the future of the world's largest democracy. Every filthy reactionary and pogromist will be strengthened, while the more violent jihadi groups will probably expand under a wave of state terror and communal violence. The only hope is in the Left organising a coalition to stop this horrible political logic in its tracks, and to my mind that entails defending Muslims from the inevitable resurgence of anti-Muslim hatred, while opposing the politics of the jihadis. The hypocritical policy of banning Islamist groups over allegations of terrorism while tolerating and even encouraging violent Hindutva groups has to be opposed. Those who try to mount pogroms have to be fought in the streets. Any escalation of the struggle with Pakistan also has to be opposed. Even if Manmohan Singh's government doesn't treat Pakistani intelligence as the ultimate culprit, there are other ways in which escalation can take place. Given that the largest concentration of India's Muslims is based in Jammu and the Indian-occupied area of Kashmir, any generalised repression by the Indian state will inevitably intensify the Kashmir conflict - and provoke further set-piece atrocities such as we have seen over the last day or so.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Capitalism hits the fan posted by Richard Seymour
Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Richard D Wolff, on the crisis and America's desperate need for communism.
Labels: capitalism, communism, conservatism, liberals, neoliberalism, regulation, socialism
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Britain's contribution to Gladio? posted by Richard Seymour
Well, Operation Gladio is a neglected component of the Cold War - neglected even though Cold War studies are obsessed with the struggle for Europe. The term itself embraces an array of different anti-communist repressive strategies deployed throughout Europe, using 'stay-behind' armies to thwart leftist upsurge wherever necessary. Revelations, well after the fact, are gradually emerging about the extent of secret operations conducted by European states against the Left, not always under the rubric of NATO. Recently, Paddy Woolworth produced a detailed history of Spanish state terrorism following the overthrow of fascism in that country - essentially a story of key structures of the fascist state persisting under the constitutional monarchy to orchestrate terrorist attacks that were attributed to ETA while at the same time conducting horrendous repression against the Basque revolutionaries. The revelation that Britain considered promoting an anti-communist coup in Italy to help thwart the Left is, as Philip Willan points out, unsurprising in this light. It was, after all, a fairly commonplace idea among the ruling elites that popular participation in political life should be restricted to choosing between an exceptionally narrow range of political forces, especially during the raging years of the 1970s. One small irony, of course, is that it was the same Labour government that elements in the security services and British ruling class had considered a coup against that were considering the overthrow of the centrist government in Italy.Labels: cold war, communism, operation gladio, socialism, terrorism