While America closes its door-to-the-future to its youth, its aspiring hotshots smash their guitars onto the impervious consciousness of the video-streaming narcoleptic herd, furiously hammering away at the portals of hipness lusting for penetration into the voluptuous folds of affluence and renown they want so badly to deserve and which are only never-to-be-achieved potentialities in their feverish imaginations.
And so they “smash fascism” in virtual print while parading their righteous revolutionary irrelevance for all to see, if all those others bothered to look as a few pseudo-intellectual armchair hobos do to help survive their consumerist boredom.
At nearly 4,500 words, Paul Street’s article titled “The Anatomy of Fascism Denial” is just the first half of a polemic against those on the left who do not share his analysis that Trump was an imminent fascist threat.
This is part of a campaign he has been waging for the better part of four years. It started off harmlessly enough by focusing on Trump’s bad behavior. Yes, he wasn’t breaking any new ground but at least his heart was in the right place. It was only in the last year that our intrepid radical journalist’s campaign began to take on an obsessive character. Like Noam Chomsky and other “lesser evil” voices, Street began to make voting for Biden a sine qua non for the left. I never paid much attention to his daily blizzard of FB posts defending this position until one showed up that was obviously an attack on me. My support for Howie Hawkins had gotten under his skin to such a degree that he flamed me as an effete, well-off yuppie who was helping to elect someone as bad as Hitler, or maybe even worse.
Reading through his article, I noticed a reference once again either to me or perhaps his confused notion of what I stand for:
Mid-way through the Trump years, it dawned on me that many of the older and upper-middle -class white former New Left (now “old new left”) fascism-denying thinkers I knew wouldn’t be willing to see fascism as a problem in the U.S. until paramilitaries came to their comfortable homes and dragged them off to detention camps. Among the affluent Caucasian males who predominate among Trumpism-fascism-deniers (this is no accident given how their race, class, and gender-privilege insulated them from the worst outcomes of the Trump regime), it has been common to advance an idiotic all-or-nothing black and white litmus test for fascism: either [A] a triumphant consolidated fascist regime on the maximal model of Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Third Reich or [B] “no fascism.” Serious contemporary analysts of neofascism are working instead with a more reasonably nuanced attention to gray areas, “fascist creep” (“creeping fascism,” if one prefers), and fascist movements in the neoliberal era.
Suffice it to say that I was never part of the New Left. When I joined the Trotskyist movement in 1967, it was a conscious decision to become an apprentice to people like Farrell Dobbs and Joe Hansen who learned their Marxism from Leon Trotsky. Really, who in their right mind would rather line up with Tom Hayden than Trotsky? It was like picking Kenny G. over John Coltrane.
If you scan through all the names of the people Street wants to crucify, not a single one has ever written for New Left Review or even Jacobin. The name Marx only appears once and not as someone whose writings would have some bearing on the question of fascism.
Hitler’s brown-shirts didn’t run around smashing heads and killing people chanting “Let’s Build a Corporate State with a State Command Capitalist Political Economy!” They went about beating up and murdering Marxists and Jews, two threats they merged in the phrase “judeo-bolshevism.” They were very much about white nationalism.
For Street and others like him, you can have constitutional rights such freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, a secret ballot in a multi-party state and other gains won over centuries of struggle by working people and still end up living under fascism—or more exactly as is de rigeuer in his circles—neo-fascism. By sticking on the prefix ‘neo’, everything is possible.
Those of us who saw and see Trump and Trumpism as fascist never posited or expected an exact replication of German Nazi or Italian fascism in the contemporary U.S. A 21st Century Neoliberal-era American fascist regime would be considerably less state-command-oriented than the classic historical European fascism of the last century.
It is absurd to call American neoliberal corporate and financial rule “the opposite of fascism.” The opposite of fascism, a brutal form of capitalism, is democratic socialism.
You’ll notice the binary opposition between neoliberal/corporate/financial rule and democratic socialism. Isn’t it the case that neoliberal corporate and financial rule will be continuing under Biden? For that matter, there are qualitative differences between bourgeois democratic states and fascist states. What Street doesn’t seem to grasp is the preference of the ruling class for parliamentary democracy since it allows it to rule on the basis of what Gramsci called hegemony. Drawing from Marx’s idea that “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force”, Gramsci saw the capitalist state as being made up of two overlapping spheres, a ‘political society’ (which rules through force) and a ‘civil society’ (which rules through consent). Under fascism, civil society no longer exists unless of course you adhere to the theory of “neo-fascism”, which allows everything under the sun.
Even more critically, Gramsci refers to the “manufacture of consent”, the term more familiarly associated with Noam Chomsky. Civil Society creates the conditions under which the working class can control itself. If there is a free press, etc., the illusion of democracy can be sustained. If Donald Trump decided after being re-elected to put the Murdoch corporation in charge of the NY Times, the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC, that illusion would disappear and the ruling class would have to resort to naked force. The media, the universities, the religious bodies, the nonprofits, the vast array of clubs and professional institutions of bourgeois society constitute what Gramsci called civil society. While defenders of civil society like George Soros see it as a crucial factor in strengthening democracy, they in fact are essential to the stabilization of bourgeois society by serving as a pressure valve. Upset over Donald Trump? No problem. Form a group that will get out the vote for Joe Biden or some other enlightened bourgeois politician like Pete Buttegieg. His father Joseph, one of the USA’s leading Gramsci scholars, explained how all this worked in an article titled Gramsci on Civil Society (boundary 2, Vol. 22, No. 3, Autumn, 1995):
Gramsci regarded civil society as an integral part of the state; in his view, civil society, far from being inimical to the state, is, in fact, its most resilient constitutive element, even though the most immediately visible aspect of the state is political society, with which it is all too often mistakenly identified. He was also convinced that the intricate, organic relationships between civil society and political society enable certain strata of society not only to gain dominance within the state but also, and more importantly, to maintain it, perpetuating the subalternity of other strata. To ignore or to set aside these crucial aspects of Gramsci’s concept of civil society is tantamount to erasing the crucial differences that set his theory of the state apart from the classic liberal version.
All of the advanced capitalist countries see the need for protecting civil society even at the same time they tried to erode it as the need arises. Under Donald Trump, there was little attempt to throttle it. Under fascist rule, the main goal is to rule by force because the masses lack the means to affect public policy. In classical fascism, Hitler and Mussolini created an alternative to civil society (Nazi boy scouts, sports clubs, etc.) that worked as long as the system could provide the material conditions that kept the working-class placated. Once the economy begins to shrink, especially during wartime austerity, there are attempts to use counter-force to return to “normality”. Under Vichy France and Mussolini’s Italy, resistance movements arose that threatened the long-term viability of the capitalist system. Fortunately for the ruling class, the Communists essentially sought the same goal: bourgeois democracy. In Germany, where the totalitarian grip was deepest, the resistance was weaker. It fell to the student activists of White Rose and the military brass organized through Operation Valkyrie to defeat fascism but not capitalism.
A word or two on Street’s nasty demagogy. This bullshit about “the affluent Caucasian males” was obviously aimed at people like me. Of course, it would apply to Frederick Engels who was a textile mill owner. My entire life has been spent as a computer programmer, a job that was enough to pay my rent, put food on my table and give me the leisure time I needed to do political work. I have no idea what Street does besides lecturing students but I have been a revolutionary since 1967. After I broke with sectarianism, I became active in the solidarity movement for the revolution in El Salvador. That led in turn to my work with Tecnica, a volunteer organization that sent people to Nicaragua and South Africa after Nelson Mandela became president, as well as other frontline states.
While I doubt that he will take my advice, it would behoove him to lay off this class baiting. Affluence does not come from writing Cobol programs. It comes from owning real estate or succeeding on Wall Street. Ernest Mandel, who was one of the foremost Marxist economists of the post-WWII period, tried to theorize the new working class that included programmers. I admit that I saw very little initiatives taken by fellow programmers over the years except for the formation of Computer Professionals for Peace that campaigned against Reagan’s Star Wars program. However, the winds might be shifting. People working for Google have formed a union that can easily become part of a transformed labor movement that will be as key to our epoch as the CIO was in the 30s. NPR reported:
After the death of George Floyd, Google engineer Raksha Muthukumar sent an email to colleagues.
In it, she pointed to a list of criminal justice reform groups and bail funds for protesters who were seeking contributions. Soon after, Muthukumar was summoned into a meeting with Google’s human relations department.
“I remember that was such a scary experience. It was such a mysterious HR letter. And I was texting friends who had been involved with organizing and they were like, ‘Oh, this is my experience with HR. This is what has happened. Don’t forget to take notes on it,'” said Muthukumar, 25, who is based in New York City.
This is the kind of repression we have to worry about now, not the clown show that broke windows at the Capitol.
Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 60s, Volume One, Canada 1955-1965 By Ernie Tate 268 pages. Resistance Books. $15.00
Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 60s, Volume Two, Canada 1955-1965 By Ernie Tate 394 pages. Resistance Books. $20.00
Exactly four years ago, as my wife and I were in the final week of our vacation in South Beach, we were pleasantly surprised to hear a female voice with a distinctly Scottish burr piping up just behind us on the sidewalk as we were going out for breakfast. “Is that Lou?” The distinctly Scottish burr belonged to Jess MacKenzie, the long-time partner of Ernie Tate, a veteran of the Trotskyist movement who had the audacity like me to vacation in a spot that in our youth would have been regarded as a decadent bourgeois swamp.
It turned out that Ernie and Jess were staying in a hotel right next to the apartment building where we had paid for a month-long sublet. I had run into Ernie and Jess at Left Forums once or twice and knew him as a Marxmail subscriber but beyond that mostly by reputation. In 1967, not long after I had joined the Socialist Workers Party in New York, members were still buzzing about how Ernie had been beaten up by Gerry Healy’s goons in London while selling a pamphlet critical of the cult leader outside one of their meetings. Since that incident loomed large in my mind even after decades had passed, I introduced my wife to him as the guy who Gerry Healy’s goons had beaten up. This prompted Ernie to remark genially but firmly that he preferred to be described as a leader of the British antiwar movement.
After enjoying dinner with Ernie and Jess that evening, I offered to bring my camcorder over to their hotel room where I would interview them. A decade ago I had begun an oral history project of Trotskyist veterans and Ernie’s reflections on a career as a revolutionary was one that deserved to be recorded, as did Jess’s.
As the camera rolled, the stories I heard from them transfixed me. Over the years I have learned that the lives led by people on the far left are often far more adventurous and dramatic than any novelist could concoct if for no other reason than their Sisyphean quality.
The son of an impoverished Protestant family in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Ernie dropped out of school when he was thirteen years old. Since his only hope for the future was factory work, he was relieved to find a job at a spinning mill where he would find himself in the sort of dead-end, low wage job that was at the heart of the textile-based industrial revolution of the British isles a century earlier.
In a much more low-budget vacation than the one he took in South Beach, a twenty year old Ernie went to Paris in the summer of 1954 to stay at a hostel. When he went out on the street one morning, he ran into an immense parade of trade unionists and Communists carrying banners with red flags and hammer-and-sickles. Dien Bien Phu had just fallen to General Giap and the French left was out on the streets celebrating. Ernie said that this was a transformative moment. As a young worker, he identified with the Vietnamese and the French workers even if he had no clear idea what socialism meant. He was sure, however, that the Soviet Union was on the right side of history.
Jess had her own amazing stories to tell, the most memorable of them involving her role in transporting money on Robert Williams’s behalf to his followers in the USA. When she was in Cuba as part of a delegation organized by the Canadian Fair Play for Cuba Committee, she had come into contact with the NAACP leader who had fled trumped-up charges of kidnapping a white couple. Williams’s real crime was to organize armed self-defense squads against KKK terror in North Carolina. Given the American Trotskyist campaign to defend Williams, he felt confidence enough in Jess to entrust her with substantial sums. Of course, given the high security alerts around Williams, she was taking a chance that she too might have ended up on J. Edgar Hoover’s enemies list.
A year or so later I learned that the stories Ernie related to me that day came to him with surprising fluency because at the time he was immersed in the research that would culminate in the publication of a two-volume memoir titled “Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 60s”, one that is filled with such tales and, as I am sure Ernie would admit, of a Sisyphean character. For us, as it was for Max Horkheimer who put it memorably, “a revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison and a voyage into the unknown, illuminated by only an almost superhuman belief.”
That being said, much of Ernie’s memoir can be described as a joy ride through history. As I related to him midway through reading it, it reminded me—despite myself—of the good times I enjoyed when I was out on the streets selling socialist newspapers. There’s very few pleasures, including a room facing the ocean on South Beach, that can compete with the ones you experience as a committed revolutionary secure in the knowledge that you are part of a movement challenging a capitalist class that is a threat to the survival of humanity and all life on earth.
Trying to escape the brutal poverty in Belfast, Ernie immigrated to Toronto, Canada in 1955 where he ran into Ross Dowson at the Labour Bookstore that was the headquarters for the tiny Trotskyist movement in Canada. Dowson was something of a hair shirt, leading a monk-like existence at the bookstore, where he hoped to replenish a movement that had been hollowed out by the witch-hunt. He lived in a tiny apartment in the back of the bookstore that did not even have a shower or bath. Over the years when he became a full-timer for the party, Ernie learned that Dowson was determined to make everybody live by his norms, even when it posed risks to their health and morale.
Of course, when you are young and full of enthusiasm for the imminent victory of the socialist revolution (Ernie thought that the revolution would take place no later than 1960), you are willing to make all sorts of sacrifices. For Ernie and a small cadre of adventurers, this meant going on newspaper and literature sales campaigns across Canada in rickety vans, one of which was a converted poultry truck that retained a fowl odor (pun intended) no matter how many scrubbings with strong disinfectants had been applied.
After a decade in the Canadian party, Ernie accepted an assignment to move to London where he would try to establish a Trotskyist party. Like the Americans whose orientation had a major influence on the Canadians, this meant placing a major emphasis on building the Vietnam antiwar movement and recruiting activists who had become radicalized through the protests. That was how I became a member of the American movement myself. After learning that the SWP was spearheading the antiwar movement, I decided that this was where I belonged.
For Ernie, this meant working closely with the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation that had established a Vietnam International War Crimes Tribunal. For a public anxious to learn about the origins and nature of an imperialist war that sought to turn the clock back to before 1954, this was in effect a European version of the teach-ins taking place in the USA. It was Ernie’s chance to turn the tide of history back to that summer when he was radicalized by the mass celebrations in the streets of Paris. A new victory would take place in the 1970s, finally establishing the right of Vietnamese to determine their own destiny.
Working with Bertrand Russell meant working with Ralph Schoenman, who was Russell’s secretary and who spoke in his name. At the time many people had a suspicion that given Russell’s advanced years it meant that directives issued in his name were actually traceable to Schoenman who some regarded as a Svengali taking advantage of a nonagenarian. Ernie makes a convincing case that Russell was intimately involved in the workings of the Tribunal and spoke entirely for himself even if he was forced sometimes by old age and infirmity to keep a low public profile.
The portraits of Russell and Schoenman are carefully etched in the memoir, the former coming across as a moral exemplar committed totally to the liberation of the Vietnamese people and the latter a force of nature confronting all sorts of obstacles standing in the way of the Tribunal. Reading Tate is a reminder of how difficult it was in the early years of the antiwar movement to establish the legitimacy of a war crimes tribunal. Charles De Gaulle, despite his reputation for being a thorn in Uncle Sam’s side, was hostile to it as was the Swedish government. As Schoenman was storming heaven and earth to establish its right to exist against elite resistance, he had to face all sorts of internal problems some of which were of his own doing. Prickly personalities serving on the tribunal were frequently at each other’s throats, including Jean Paul-Sartre who was all too ready to take offense even when it seemed that he was someone most prone to giving it.
As a kind of moderating influence, Isaac Deutscher’s role was indispensable. As one of the most respected Marxist scholars in the world and a journalist whose insights were respected universally, his background in the internecine struggles of the Trotskyist movement prepared him for resolving disputes within the tribunal, often conferring with Ernie Tate on how to deal with what appeared to be intractable problems.
In the course of consulting with Deutscher, a friendship developed. Despite having established himself as a revolutionary organizer and activist with a good command of his movement’s theory, Ernie was always aware of his working-class roots and somewhat capable of being intimidated by the intellectuals his work with the tribunal brought him into contact with. In my favorite passage in the memoir, he recounts a discussion with Deutscher that conveys in a few words the tension that often exists on the left between the intellectual and the worker-activist:
I remember once when he made a few disparaging comments in my company about the Fourth International, that I took to be a questioning of its very existence and which got my back up a little, I faced him directly on the issue, sort of poking fun at what he was saying. I posed a hypothetical situation to him, that of an imaginary apolitical young worker, who after reading a Deutscher book, for example, might become convinced of the need for socialism and shows up on Deutscher’s doorstep to ask him advice about what he, the young worker, should do to help bring about this fundamental change. For me, I said, I wouldn’t hesitate a moment because from what I knew from history, without their own organization, workers won’t get anywhere and I would tell the young worker to join my group as the first step in trying to build such an organization which could help lead workers in transforming society. What would you tell the young worker? I asked him, and I knew I was appealing to his background as an active revolutionary leader, of which I knew he felt proud. Momentarily, he looked a little bit non-plussed, probably thinking that I had a bit of a nerve challenging him like that, but he came back, surprisingly, saying he would recommend the same thing. Better that than nothing, he said, in a sort of backhanded compliment.
After his work with the tribunal was finished, Ernie turned his attention to the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign whose most prominent spokesman was Tariq Ali. Ernie’s memoir makes an interesting contrast with Ali’s “Street Fighting Man: an autobiography of the Sixties”, a very lively memoir that unsurprisingly puts the celebrated author in the foreground.
Perhaps because of his humble background, Ernie chose to downplay his own role and personality. You will find very little of the self-regard that goes into most autobiographies by veterans of the Trotskyist movement that was most egregiously on display in Irving Howe’s “A margin of hope: An intellectual autobiography”. For Ernie Tate, the real interest is in the personalities he encountered over a fifty-year career in the movement, for whom he retains considerable affection even when they were driving him a little crazy.
For someone like me or for veterans of the broader socialist movement, the memoir will be richly rewarding since it is a beautifully written and deeply thoughtful account of the revolutionary life. With his dry sense of humor and a perfect grasp of the psychology of his subjects, reading Ernie Tate delivers the pleasure that will never be found in fiction, especially in a period of history when the novelist is trained at places like the University of Iowa writers workshop to focus on personal and family matters.
For young people coming around the radical movement today who are trying to figure out what to do next in a period of deepening reaction, the memoir is a reassuring testimony to how a mass movement can erupt when a people has decided that it can no longer endure existing conditions. If the mid-50s had the advantage of an actually existing socialism in Russia, China and Eastern Europe, we are in a period that lacking such “liberated territories” at least leads to the conclusion that capitalism no longer has the ability to satisfy the basic needs of millions—perhaps billions—of people demanding their place in the sun. For them, just as was the case for Ernie Tate in 1954, the need for revolution is more urgent than ever.
Last night at around 10pm I got a phone call from Jess McKenzie informing me that her husband Ernie Tate had finally succumbed to cancer of the pancreas, something Ernie had revealed to me about six months earlier. I counted Ernie and Jess as two of my closest friends and political confidantes and his passing has affected me deeply.
My first encounter with Ernie was in the early 2000s, when he showed up as a Marxmail subscriber. His name was familiar to me because when I joined the SWP in 1967, a defense campaign in England had been organized after Gerry Healy’s goons had beaten him up as he was selling a pamphlet critical of Healy outside one of their meetings. For me, almost like a word association game, the name Ernie Tate always summoned up this incident—until he smiled and said that he had put it behind him. Unlike me, Ernie did not hold a grudge even, according to Ian Birchall, having “some positive things to say about Healy’s SLL.”
Oddly enough, it was his calm and sunny disposition that was matched to my own surly nature that have complemented us over the years. Early on, Ernie asked me if I could post a 14,000 word article he wrote about “Changes in Russia” on my website. This was long before people began blogging, something that didn’t seem to interest Ernie. All his energy went into a two-volume memoir “Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s & 60s.” on his lifetime in the trade union and revolutionary movement that is one of the best to come out of the Trotskyist movement. More about this book to follow.
Not long after Ernie subscribed to Marxmail, he invited me to meet with him at a Left Forum in New York to go over this and that. The Marxism list was well-known (and even notorious) as a forum for those trying to understand the wreckage of the SWP and its affiliated sects so I had a feeling that he wanted to compare his experience with my own. The conversation revealed that Ernie had left the Canadian section of the FI because of its “workerist” turn that was inspired by the American SWP. Keep in mind that Ernie had been a blue-collar worker since the early 50s so he was in a better position to evaluate the “colonization” project. He described a fumbling, amateurish operation that recruited not a single worker and led to an exodus from the party. It was our common understanding of this experience that led to our close political bonding, but there was much more to it than that.
In December 2011, my wife and I were walking out of the monthlong rental in Miami Beach, when I heard a woman’s voice in a distinctly Scottish burr about a dozen feet away: “Ernie, isn’t that Lou?” Just by coincidence, Ernie and Jess were staying for about the same length of time at a hotel close to where we were staying. We had dinner several times and really enjoyed the warmth and wisdom both radiated, especially my wife who does not share my surliness unless you get on her wrong side. I had ideas about doing a video when I was down there, mostly about the area’s history and to interview a former mayor who spent time in prison for taking bribes. But the only record I have of my trip was an interview I did with Ernie that was a very short version of his 2-volume memoir. It is shown above.
His story was spell-binding. Born in 1934, he was a working-class Irish Protestant kid from Belfast who took a vacation in Paris in 1954 just after the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu. The powerful demonstrations celebrating the victory organized by the CP were such an inspiration to him that he decided on the spot to become a communist.
Jess joined the movement in 1964 and before long found herself on a trip to Cuba that would put her in touch with Robert Williams, the NAACP leader who had organized a militia to defend African-Americans against Klan terror. She found herself functioning as a courier between Williams and his comrades in the U.S.
These were just two of the high points of this couple’s extraordinary voyage through the revolutionary left. Unlike the academic left, they lived the type of life that Max Horkheimer described “a revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison and a voyage into the unknown, illuminated by only an almost superhuman belief.” Well, that does sound a bit too grim, doesn’t it? In fact, most of the time it was loads of fun. Whenever the topic of time travel comes up in idle chatter, I always say that if I could return to any year in the past, it would be 1968.
Much of Ernie’s memoir can be described as a joy ride through history. As I related to him midway through reading it, it reminded me—despite myself—of the good times I enjoyed when I was out on the streets selling socialist newspapers. There’s very few pleasures, including a room facing the ocean on South Beach, that can compete with the ones you experience as a committed revolutionary secure in the knowledge that you are part of a movement challenging a capitalist class that is a threat to the survival of humanity and all life on earth.
I loved Ernie as an older and wiser brother and will miss him dearly. My condolences to Jess, who is a formidable revolutionary in her own right. As our generation wends its way into the inevitable fate that awaits us, it is reassuring to know that there is a legacy that is being left behind in works like “Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s & 60s.” And, keep your eyes out for this, for comic relief I will soon be serializing the graphic novel I did with Harvey Pekar called “The Unrepentant Marxist”.
“I’m assuming that in 30 or 40 years, everyone will (pretty much) be using nuclear power for their energy needs. By last count, there were 440+ nuclear reactors in the world, with dozens more planned for installation. France (of all countries) is roughly 70% nuclear. My question: Why are people still pretending that nuclear energy isn’t the cleanest, most efficient method available?”
Navalny’s viral video on Putin’s palace (with English subtitles)
As might have been expected, Alexey Navalny has his detractors on the left. Jacobin published an article by Alexey Sakhnin and Per Leander titled “Russia’s Trump” that dismissed his intrepid campaigns against corruption. For the authors, he was trying to “drain the swamp” just like Donald Trump. Sakhnin, who was active in the Left Front in Russia before emigrating to Sweden, followed up with a new screed on Jacobin titled “How a Russian Nationalist Named Alexei Navalny Became a Liberal Hero” that facilely attempted to explain away Navalny’s support for Bernie Sanders in the last election rather than Trump. He saw it as a cynical, Machiavellian maneuver rather than a sincere attempt to address social equality in Russia:
From the protest rallies of 2011-13, Navalny learned an important lesson: it is not right-wing nationalist, but left-wing, social populism that brings real popularity among the people. And although he has often been compared to Donald Trump, he has increasingly turned to a social agenda.
You’ll note the use of passive voice. He has often been compared to Donald Trump? No, comrade Sakhnin, it was you who made such a comparison, wasn’t it?
When I was doing some background research on this article, Sakhnin did not even appear on my radar screen. Instead, I looked for articles in the London Review of Books and LeftEast, where a less conspiratorial mindset prevailed. From the LRB, I tracked down two articles by Tony Wood, who has written some great analysis of Putin’s Russia, including a book I reviewed for CounterPunch in 2018. As for LeftEast, a ‘zine published by Eastern European Marxists, I was particularly interested in what Kirill Medvedev had to say in a roundtable discussion titled “Navalny’s Return and Left Strategy”.
Medvedev is a poet, essayist and Marxist activist who I met back in 2013 and took an instant liking to, not only for his political insights but for his work in translating Charles Bukowski into Russian. Medvedev was on tour promoting a documentary on Putin titled “Winter Go Away” that revealed what a sleazy authoritarian he was. The film was a revelation to me:
Basically the documentary demonstrates how radical the opposition to Putin was. Despite the pro-capitalist leanings of some of the major opposition figures—from multibillionaire candidate Mikhail Prokhorov to the aforementioned Gary Kasparov (he should stick to chess)—the rank-and-file of the movement are exactly the same kinds of people who occupied Zuccotti Park. Indeed, some of the chants you hear on the demonstrations are directed against Russian capitalism. You see young people heading toward the protests wearing Guy Fawkes masks, etc. The protests have been erroneously described as upper-middle-class temper tantrums funded by George Soros. It takes a huge amount of brass for some leftists to make such an attack when the Putin rallies are staged affairs that make the Republican Party’s look Bolshevik by comparison. Putin’s slogans were mind-numbingly nationalistic, with his well-heeled supporters chanting “Russia, Putin, Victory” at rallies.
The meeting opened my eyes to the Russian left that I have identified with ever since. Indeed, I had already made the case for Pussy Riot on CounterPunch a year earlier as women who had much in common with Abby Hoffman. Those leftists who supported their arrest reminded me of how American conservatives got upset over bra-burning during the Nixon presidency, except in this instance they were lining up with the Kremlin rather than the White House.
The articles pointed to three key years that marked different stages of Navalny’s political evolution: 2012, 2018 and 2020. In 2012, Navalny led mass protests against voter fraud; in 2018, he led mass protests again against pension cuts, thus revealing a turn toward questions of inequality; finally, the return to Russia opened up a new stage in the struggle as anger against crony capitalism boiled over.
In a 2012 LRB article titled “There is no Alternative”, Tony Wood reports on Russia just prior to the presidential election. After Putin’s stooge Dmitry Medvedev’s presidential term expired, Putin would be eligible to run again. The Russian constitution limits the presidency to two consecutive terms but after having served twice, and a third time by proxy through Medvedev, Putin was bent on maintaining his rule for another four years. Now that he has indicated to tack on another 4 years in 2024, Putin will have been the longest-running head of state in Russia since Brezhnev.
In Chechnya, an election produced bogus numbers that were the reality equivalent of Trump’s fictional claims about being robbed of victory. After 10 percent of its citizens had been killed by Putin’s invasionary force, they didn’t seem to mind. Putin’s United Russia party got 99.5 percent of the vote on the basis of a 98.6 percent turnout. This would even embarrass Assad.
At the time, Wood took note of Alexi Navalny having both assets and liabilities. In some ways, he is a throwback to the kind of idealistic “clean government” characters so typical of Frank Capra movies. He writes, “But what drives him is not hatred of inequality so much as hatred of cheating: in his view, genuine entrepreneurs haven’t flourished as they should in Russia because of ‘Komsomol bastards’ profiting from political clout or personal networks. For him, malversation [corrupt behavior] is a symptom of Russia’s incomplete transition to capitalism, rather than a structural feature of the kind of capitalism the country has.”
Wood is unstinting about Navalny’s nativism, calling it even worse than Putin’s. Obviously, these liabilities are what Sakhnin focus on but in the context of Russian crony capitalism, Navalny’s intransigent opposition to corruption helped to create a fighting mood that would be manifested five years later in the protests over pension “reform”.
That mood erupted into fury in 2018 when the Russian government proposed a pension “reform” that victimized the elderly, already suffering from inadequate income. In a February 2nd, 2019 article titled “Russia’s Oppositions”, you can see Wood becoming convinced that the Navalny scale had begun to tilt in the assets direction. The regime sought to raise the retirement age for both men and women, from 60 and 55 respectively to 65 and 63. Despite 89 percent of the population being opposed to the change, Putin’s popularity continued to soar, likely a result of his seizure of Crimea. While many on the left tried to put a positive spin on Russia’s population benefiting from oil and gas sales, almost seeing Putin as an authoritarian version of Hugo Chavez, the reality for most pensioners was grim.
In the mid-1990s, IMF and World Bank officials pressured Yeltsin government to reduce pension benefits but unpopularity over the first Chechen war made this impossible. In 2002, Putin was able to push them through using a mix of private and state financing that would be the envy of Charles Koch. Tony Wood reports:
In May, an IMF mission to Russia praised the Putin government’s ‘strong macroeconomic policy framework’, but like Kudrin insisted that ‘the focus has to shift to structural reforms to boost productivity and the supply of labour and capital.’ Any increases in spending on health, education and infrastructure, however, ‘should be done without compromising the credibility of the new fiscal rule’. One way of gaining ‘fiscal space’, the IMF helpfully suggested, would be through ‘parametric pension reform’ – in other words, making fewer people eligible to claim one.
In June 2018, Navalny emerged as a key leader of the pension protests. Showing his allegedly cynical, Machiavellian tendencies, he abandoned his own party’s support for pension “reform”. Or maybe, as Wood put it, it was hard to say what motivated him.
Was this a real shift in his thinking, or was it opportunism, a reaction to the unpopularity of such views among the broader Russian electorate? It’s hard to say, just as it’s hard to say whether Navalny’s unwillingness to join forces with other parties is based more on an understandable aversion to being drawn into the deadening embrace of the pseudo-opposition, or on an overriding need to maintain his distinctive political ‘brand’.
Isn’t it possible that Navalny can be a conniving politician at the same time he is reflecting mass pressure against a corrupt and brutal head of state? Looking at his role dialectically, you might say that he was like many figures in the 1930s who adapted to the revolutionary mood of the masses even though their intention was to contain the fire. I speak here of FDR, not that I am comparing Navalny to FDR but only reminding readers that politicians usually have mixed agendas unless they are someone like V.I. Lenin or Fidel Castro. People writing for Jacobin seem to be complaining that he is no Lenin or Castro. Given their general political orientation, one would think they’d be amenable to someone who supported Bernie Sanders in 2019 rather than Donald Trump.
In one of the more perceptive articles on Navalny’s intentions titled “Russia: The Protest Movement is Younger, Poorer, and More Left Wing” written by Ivan Ovsyannikov for LeftEast, you get a feel for the complexities of the relationship between a mass leader with a tarnished past and a population desperate for any actions that could force the knee off its neck.
It’s not just age. The class composition of opposition protests is also changing. If the metropolitan middle class were the predominant participants in the 2011-2012 protests (or, at least appeared so in eyes of most of the population), then the lower classes were entering the political stage in 2017–2018. “The interviews we conducted at Navalny’s rallies show that they had more poor people, young people and poor teenagers. The protest’s rhetoric also shifted to the left. This is connected both with the change in their social composition and with Navalny’s leftward shift. He’s sensitive to and anticipates public sentiment. By shifting from criticizing dictatorship to criticizing oligarchs, he clearly understood that going beyond a narrowly liberal or nationalist fringe would allow him to expand his constituency and become the sole leader of the opposition,” Oleg Zhuravlev believes.
In his concluding paragraph, Ovsyannikov describes a burgeoning radical movement that sees Navalny as a tool rather than someone to be followed blindly. Those in Russia trying to build an anti-capitalist opposition to Putin might consider the need for far more flexibility than the Jacobin authors would permit:
The populist leadership of the modern Russian opposition movement strikingly distinguishes it from protests at the beginning of the decade. However, according to commentators, the situation may change again. “Since social groups in Russia don’t have a clear identity, the protesters are highly susceptible to the rhetoric of leaders.” “But,” Oleg Zhuravlev adds, “I wouldn’t call the Navalny movement personalistic. A great number of people interviewed at his rallies say: ‘We don’t personally like Navalny, but his protests are the only ones around.’ Today, an increasing number of people think not only in emotionally charged moral categories, but also in terms of group interests. It’s possible, there is already a critical questioning of Navalny from the most radical young protesters.”
In August of 2020, Navalny was poisoned with Novichok as was the case with Sergei and Yulia Skripal in 2018. In a pattern consistent with chemical attack investigations in Syria, the left was divided over who was responsible. Writing for CounterPunch, Gary Leupp probably spoke for most on the left:
But this attack on Skripal and his 33-year-old daughter (by somebody) is highly useful to those who want to vilify Vladimir Putin, just as the use of chemical weapons in Syria last April (by somebody) was useful for those wanting to further vilify Bashar Assad and justify a U.S. missile strike. Have you noticed that we live in an age of constant disinformation, misinformation and “fake news”?
Using the same ideological template and the same outlet, Roger Harris wrote: “An alternative explanation for this poisoning story is that this is a setup to discredit and weaken an official enemy of the US imperial state. The nation’s newspaper of record has a long history as a faithful mouthpiece of empire. On spinning the Putin-the-Poisoner tale, the Times has been but one voice in the Russo-phobic chorus of western media.”
As was the case with chemical attacks in Syria that both authors tried to discredit, it was left to Eliot Higgins and his staff at Bellingcat to use open source to track down the perpetrators. I recommend “FSB Team of Chemical Weapon Experts Implicated in Alexey Navalny Novichok Poisoning” that was published on December 14, 2020. Using open source, Bellingcat discovered that throughout 2017, and again in 2019 and 2020, Russian agents in a clandestine unit specialized in poisonous substances followed Navalny during his trips across Russia, trailing him on more than 30 overlapping flights to the same destinations. When the Skripals were poisoned, Bellingcat provided evidence of two spooks from the same unit flying into London and ending up suspiciously close to the paths that the father and daughter took. You might call this circumstantial evidence but given Russia’s denial of any wrongdoing in Syrian chemical attacks might lead to the conclusion that this was sufficient to convict them in a war crimes tribunal.
Interviewed by the snake Aaron Maté and showing a novel take on these hit jobs, long-time Russia commentator Fred Weir doubted that Putin was responsible because “First of all, I’m pretty sure that Russian secret services—and I’m posing this as a question, not as a polemic—but Russian secret services, I think, I’m guessing, know how to kill efficiently and without creating a really loud, scandalous trail leading to themselves.” Of course, this begs the question of how one can get their hands on Novichok unless they have ties to the state apparatus just as was the case with sarin gas in Syria. It is unfortunate, I might add, that a journalist like Weir would allow himself to be interviewed on Grayzone.
After recovering from the poison, Navalny returned to Russia fully determined to continue the struggle against Putin. His arrival and his arrest prompted protests far larger than those seen in 2012 and 2018. Now, for the first time, there were important voices on the Marxist left urging a more flexible approach to Navalny that is not based on dredging atrocity tales about his nativism and neoliberal ideas from a decade ago.
In a response to Alexey Sakhnin and Per Leander’s “Russia’s Trump” article on Jacobin, Ilya Budraitskis, Ilya Matveev, and Sean Guillory advised a less purist approach. Ironically, they reminded me of how many people concluded that Jacobin and DSA were behind the curve on the BLM protests: “This popular upsurge caught the Russian left flatfooted. Though many committed activists and adherents remain in the movement, repression has weakened it, and disagreements over the annexation of Crimea and the Russian intervention in Ukraine have divided it. How should the Russian left — not to mention the international socialist movement — respond to this upsurge and, especially, its leader?”
Their article is about the best analysis available and a must-read. There is no need for me to recapitulate all of their points but let me cite one of their strongest arguments:
Moreover, Navalny’s campaign has taken strong positions on the Russian economy. He criticizes government authorities not just for being undemocratic but also for creating a predatory system that only profits the top 0.1 percent. While we can’t call him a genuine social democrat, he’s certainly not Trump, whose tax plan greatly benefits the American counterparts of those Navalny attacks in Russia.
I should add that in a EastLeft panel discussion on Navalny, Kirill Medvedev understood Navalny as a transitional figure who it is incumbent on the left to unite with tactically:
But the more convincingly Navalny works with the theme of corruption and the ostentatious consumption of top officials, the more the limits of this rhetoric are exposed in a country like Russia, exhausted by inequality and permeated by class contradictions. Now the situation looks like this: Navalny is showing us the palaces of the rulers, playing with the fire of class resentment, while at the same time (together with his comrades-in-arms) promising businesses complete freedom in the Beautiful Russia of the Future. They say that the problem is not the palaces and gigantic fortunes per se, but where they come from. But of course, with the further development of this populist line, it will no longer be easy to separate the corrupt “friends of Putin” from those whom Navalny calls “honest businessmen,” but whose fortunes are just as huge, and similarly generated by illegal schemes from the 1990s and 2000s and, of course, by over-exploitation of workers. All of this opens up great opportunities for leftist politics, which, with an equally skillful combination of valor and rationality, could produce a far more powerful wave of discontent and a far more coherent program of change than Navalny’s eclectic populism.
“Navalny is showing us the palaces of the ruler” is a reference to the viral video Navalny made about a palace reputedly owned by Putin on the Black Sea. After the controversy broke, one of Putin’s oligarchic pals claimed that it was owned by him rather than Putin. In any case, it probably didn’t matter to the masses, who clearly had the same fury that Ukrainians had when they took a tour of the fallen would-be Putin Yanukovych’s presidential manor.
None of this seems to matter to many on the American left, who are preparing the same tired “anti-imperialist” talking points they’ve used on Ukraine, Syria or any other nation aligned with Russia. Worst of all that I have seen recently is the dreck that Jim Naureckas wrote on Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). His article is basically to smear Navalny with stands he took a decade ago, as is the custom with these crypo-Stalinist scribblers. The last paragraphs should give you a feel:
After telling readers that he has “Nordic good looks, a caustic sense of humor and no political organization,” Troianovski’s predecessor Ellen Barry (12/9/11) related some rather more relevant background:
He has appeared as a speaker alongside neo-Nazis and skinheads, and once starred in a video that compares dark-skinned Caucasus militants to cockroaches. While cockroaches can be killed with a slipper, he says that in the case of humans, “I recommend a pistol.”
FAIR, as most of my readers are aware, used to be a reputable critic of the bourgeois media but over the past 10 years has pretty much turned into a clone of Grayzone, maybe even getting rubles under the table. Back in 2013, Naureckas took the reporting on Mint Press at face value on the sarin gas attack in East Ghouta in 2013 Not long after the Mint Press article appeared under the byline of AP reporter Dale Gavlak, Gavlak screamed bloody murder because she did not write the article, nor did she agree with the analysis. More on the controversy is here. Any investigative reporter would have put in the time and effort to get to the bottom of the story but Naureckas is no reporter, just a cheap propagandist.
Perhaps the intensity of the debate about Navalny has been generated by the facts on the ground. With the largest protests in recent history, he could no longer be ignored. Using bogus charges of embezzlement and parole violations, he now faces a new trial that will result in him being exiled to a prison camp far from the streets of Moscow. Will this amount to putting the genie back into the bottle? It is difficult to day, but one must take into account his ability to connect with the masses. The real power is in their hands. In any case, we are entering a new period in Russian politics that this article hoped to clarify. My advice is to keep your eyes on Russia since as Lenin said (possibly apocryphal), “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen”.
