Category: socialism

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DAVID GRAEBER AND CAPITALIST HOPELESSNESS

Coming close to the end of David Graeber’s marvellous Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) I encountered the following:

How did we get here?  My own suspicion is that we are looking at the final effects of the militarization of American capitalism itself.  In fact, it could well be said that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures.  At its root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world—in response to the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s—with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, flourish, or propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win.  To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms and military intelligence apparatus, and propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy.  Maintaining this apparatus seems even more important to exponents of the “free market,” even than maintaining any sort of viable market economy.  How else can one explain what happened in the former Soviet Union?  One would ordinarily have imagined that the end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army and the KGB and the rebuilding of the factories, but in fact what happened was precisely the other way around.  This is just an extreme example of what has been happening everywhere.  Economically, the apparatus is just a drag on the system; all those guns, surveillance cameras, and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and don’t really produce anything, and no doubt it’s yet another element dragging the entire capitalist system down—along with producing the illusion of an endless capitalist future that laid the groundwork for the endless bubbles to begin with.  Finance capital became the buying and selling of chunks of that future, and economic freedom, for most of us, was reduced to the right to buy a small piece of one’s own permanent subordination.

In other words, there seems to have been a profound contradiction between the political imperative of establishing capitalism as the only possible way to manage anything, and capitalism’s own unacknowledged need to limit its future horizons, lest speculation, predictably, go haywire.  Once it did, and the whole machine imploded, [Graeber seems to be referring to the 2008 financial meltdown here] we were left in the strange situation of not being able to even imagine any other way that things might be arranged.  About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.

But what has brought this situation about?  Let me assert that in the West at least, the two great systems of hope, as we may call them, have been Christianity and socialism—perhaps most specifically, Marxism.  Socialism has been betrayed by many of its so-called friends and alleged proponents in the form of party dictatorships, while being ruthlessly stamped out in hearts, minds, and the world by its enemy, capital.  Christianity has been co-opted by worldly power largely into two camps:  an ostensibly apolitical religion concerned solely with private faith and individual salvation on the one hand, and on the other hand a grotesque corruption of the Word of God into an aggressively and absurdly pro-capitalist, even fascist direction.  This perverse politics is not even a parody of Christianity, but an outright contradiction.  American Christian fundamentalism is as much a contradiction of Christianity as the Soviet Union was of Socialism (see Noam Chomsky, “The Soviet Union Versus Socialism”).

We are accustomed to looking at politics in terms of “Right” and “Left.”  This is useful.  (Of course, these useful labels are also routinely abused out of dishonesty or ignorance, as when the corporate media and those who use it as their only source of information refer to Democrats or liberals as “the Left”—cavalierly waiving socialism, communism, anarchism and anyone who actually is a leftist out of existence, or perhaps pretending that Hilary Clinton’s views are but a hairsbreadth to the right of Karl Marx’s).  However, we might also look at politics in terms of hope versus despair.

For it is only the Left, whether secular or religious, that has offered us any hope.  The Right is another matter.  Whereas the Left says that we can change things fundamentally, and for the better, such hopes tend to bring sneers of contempt to the faces of the Right, which proudly invokes “realism,” or perhaps “human nature,” or “the will of God” as in Luther’s conviction that the Almighty had given power and authority to the princes and so on.  On a theological level, the religious wing of the Left sees God as working not only in some otherworldly heaven, but has plans for this world, that may well include upheaval and revolution, but do not include writing the world off.

On the specifically religious plane, Left and Right are literally worlds apart.  The religious Left takes seriously the Biblical claim that “God so loved the world…” but the religious Right can’t wait to see him turn it into a fire pit.  Paradoxically, while the Right is therefor very otherworldly (in a most unhealthy sense) it preaches what is in fact a worldly gospel that absolutely loses sight of the poor and oppressed, handing over power and authority to the rich: the very people scripture most often castigates. 

Despair is a choice, and it is political.

For what “liberals,” the “woke” or “politically correct,” for all their faults–real, imagined or exaggerated–have in common is a belief that we can and therefor should improve things in major ways, that merely tinkering with the status quo is not enough.  The endless tirades since the late 80s or early 90s about “PC” and how everyone, apparently, is held in holy terror of its hysterical dictates mask what is in fact a deeper fear: that we can and therefor must change the world.

Hope can be frightening.

What really pains the Right is the possibility that that liberal/leftist realm is actually pointing out our real responsibilities, and our real powers, if we but use them.  And this call to action, if correct, alleviates us all from our excuses to do nothing.

That is the real terror: responsibility.

But in fact, the problem runs deeper, and is more interesting than that.  A politics of mere responsibility, though it would be an immense improvement over the slash and burn mentality of capital, has the same weakness as religion does when it loses its heart and degenerates into phariseeism.  “Thou shalt not,” in the long run, or “thou shalt” does not have the staying power in public or personal life that is needed for real change.  A genuine sense of ethical responsibility easily degenerates into a prim and censorious temperament, and lacks the power needed to overcome the darker elements of individuals or systems.

And what the Left and Right have often had in common is this phariseeism.

What is the answer?  Perhaps I should leave that discussion for a later post.

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I DON’T GIVE A DAMN IF PEOPLE ARE TIRED OF HITLER/TRUMP COMPARSONS: WHY TRUMP MUST BE PROSECUTED

Go into any well stocked bookstore or library and you are certain to find books about Nazis.  Consider the subject of how these Nazis got into power in Germany, and you will see these books deal with it in varying degrees of competence.  Indeed, the issue of how such terrible people could attain power, apparently with the approval or at least acquiescence of millions of Germans, is one of the topics that fascinates Western culture endlessly.

The reasons usually cited in popular public discourse for the rise of Nazism include such things as Germany’s history of authoritarianism and anti-Semitism, bitterness over defeat in WWI and over the terms of the treaty of Versailles, and despair and rage over the economic consequences of the great post-war inflation and the later Great Depression.

But of all the reasons for Hitler’s rise to power, there are some that are commonly overlooked.  And the reason they are overlooked is that these reasons threaten our society’s conception of capitalist, so-called “democracy” as the unquestionable apex of what is fair, or at least, of what is possible in the world.  These overlooked reasons are also neglected because they threaten to shine a positive light on the political Left: those people whom we are supposed to assume are at best well-intentioned idiots, or at worst Stalinist monsters–that is, when they are not ignored entirely, which they often are in discussions of how the Nazis gained power.

But let me be more specific about one of these reasons for Hitler’s success: essentially, the radical Right, even before the Nazi party had gained a large following, murdered hundreds of leaders of the Left and got away with it in every case.  The relatively few political murders committed by the Left were punished by heavy sentences, including death.

In 1922 one Emil Julius Gumbel published a book called Vier Jahre politischer Mord (Four Years of Political Murder).  In this book he analyzes the political assassinations committed by the Right and the Left since November 9, 1918, the beginning of the German Revolution.  Keep in mind that at this time the Nazi party was nowhere near as large and powerful as it would become eventually.  However, many of those right-wing people whose essential beliefs and attitudes were those of the Nazis, and who would eventually willingly join them, were already active and violent in other organizations such as the various Freikorps militias.

I can do no better at this point than present some very illuminating quotations from Gumbel himself.

Correspondingly, the right is inclined to hope that it could annihilate the left opposition, which is carried by hopes for a radically different economic order, by defeating its leaders.  And the right has done it: all of the leaders of the left who openly opposed the war and whom the workers trusted–Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Eisner, [Gustav] Landauer, [Leo] Jogisches, et al–are dead.

The effectiveness of this technique is for the moment indisputable.  The left no longer has any significant leaders, no more people toward whom the masses have the feeling: he has suffered so much for us, dared so much for us that we can trust him blindly.  The working-class movement has thereby doubtlessly been set back by years.  This success is all the greater since in no case has punishment occurred.

The unbelievable leniency of the court is also quite well known to the perpetrators. . . . Today the [right wing] perpetrator risks nothing at all.  Powerful organizations with an extensive network of confidantes over the whole country provide him with shelter, protection, and material sustenance.  “Right-minded” bureaucrats and police chiefs supply falsified papers for potentially necessary trips abroad. . . .  The beneficiaries live magnificently and happily in the best hotels.

Here is a summary of some of the statistics Gumbel collected on these events:

Political Killings Committed

                                                        Political killings                Political killings

.                                                              by the Left                   by the Right

Total number of murders                         22                                354

Number of convictions                             38                                  24

Duration of incarceration per murder    15 years                           4 months

Number of executions                              10                                   0

Gumbel also states,

Virtually all of the relatively small number of assassinations of reactionaries have been atoned for through severe penalties; of the very numerous assassinations of men of the left, on the other hand, not one has been atoned.  Credulousness, wrongly understood orders, or actual or purported insanity were always the bases of the defense to the extent that trials even took place.  Most of the proceedings were quashed either by the prosecutor’s office or the criminal court.

Gumbel also discusses how newspapers could call for the murder of specific individuals and be punished only by small fines.

Gumbel also relates how his earlier work, Two Years of Political Murder, which analyzed the earlier years of these same incidents, was received by the establishment.  He had thought that either this work would be believed by the judicial system, which would then punish the murderers, or that he would be accused of slander and be punished himself.  But neither happened.

Although the brochure in no way went without notice, there has not been a single effort on the part of the authorities to dispute the correctness of my contentions.  On the contrary, the highest responsible authority, the Reich minister of justice, expressly confirmed my contentions on more than one occasion.  Nevertheless, not a single [right wing] murderer has been punished.

So people always ask, why is it everyone in Germany was apparantly a Nazi, or a least a person who did not care enough to oppose them?  The answer, in part, is this:  there were anti-fascists in Germany (especially in the working class) who were numerous, active, and brave, and their leaders were murdered with impunity when Hitler was still in his political infancy.  This was one of the ways in which the capitalist structure of Germany (which had been shaken but not overthrown by revolution) paved the way for Hitler’s rise to power.  To ignore this fact is to slander the better elements of German society by ignoring them, and even more significantly, to slander the Left and the realistic hope it has always offered.

Gumbel also adds sobering words on how much of the public was suckered into accepting this murderous situation:

Public opinion in general approves of this procedure.  For clever propaganda has taught it that every enemy of militarism is a Spartacist, therefore an enemy of humanity, therefore open game.

Keep in mind that such propaganda was well underway when Hitler was no more than a gleam in Hindenburg’s eye.

Please keep in mind also that Gumbel’s work discusses only cases of premeditated, illegal killing of a well-known German by another German for domestic political motives, whereby the incident is characterized not as mass action but as an individual deed.  Four Years of Political Murder is not about deaths due to armed battles in the streets.  In these conflicts as well, however, killing by the Right far exceeded killing by the Left, and the violence of the Left was far more often used in self-defence than was the violence of the Right.  In other words, the German revolution was far less violent than the counter-revolution.  One could actually make a very strong case that the Left should have used a great deal more violence than it did.

Germany’s population in Gumbel’s time was approximately twice what Canada’s is now.  Were we to transpose Gumbel’s work to a fictional scenario set in Canada at the present time, we would be faced with a situation where, in four years, left wingers killed 11 people and were heavily punished in each case, and wherein right wingers killed 177 prominent, left-wing Canadians without one individual doing any serious time for this.

For anyone with their eyes open, the implications for America are even more alarming.  The tepid response of the Democrats to Donald Trump’s violent insurrection attempt sends the same message to the American Right what the German judiciary sent to the Nazis: do whatever you want; we will never get in your way.

Donald Trump must be prosecuted: yes, even if it means violence from his supporters.  For if the threat of that violence succeeds, it will be followed by far greater violence, just as the violence in the four years after the German revolution, horrible as it was, was dwarfed by the violence that followed when it helped to put Hitler into power.

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BEFORE YOU CRITICIZE “SOCIALISM,” KNOW WHAT THAT WORD MEANS

Christopher Hitchens, a hater of religion, once said of Martin Luther King that he was not a Christian.

To which I reply, so much for Christopher Hitchens.

One can pretty much say anything about anything, if one is redefining words to suit one’s own interests, treating them as private property instead of public property.  I can truly say that an apple is a potato if, by “apple,” I mean an irregularly shaped brown or reddish vegetable that grows in the ground.

And if one man like Hitchens can get away with this narcissistic nonsense through sheer bluff and swagger, what can not a whole class of people get away with generation after generation?

In effect, generations of anti-socialists have been telling us that an apple is a potato.

And it has not helped one bit that at the same time many potatoes have been calling themselves apples.  In other words, just as many people violate the teachings of Christ in word and deed and call themselves Christians (Hitchens doing a variation on the theme by labelling a man who followed Christ as a non-Christian) many people have discredited socialism by falsely claiming to practice socialism when they were doing no such thing.  In the one instance, Christ is slandered; in the other instance, it is socialism which is slandered.  Most of us seem to understand, whether we are religious or not, that there is such a thing as genuine Christian practice; there are people we would call real Christians, and others we would call hypocrites.  Socialism, however, is not granted the benefit of these kinds of distinctions: if some regime committing genocide, for example, calls itself or is called socialist, why then it must be socialist, and that is the end of the matter.

What, then, is socialism?  Simply put, there are two basic principles running throughout socialist thought since its beginnings:

1) a socialist society is one where those who do the work own and control the means of production

2) a socialist society runs fundamentally on cooperation, not competition or domination.  Brotherhood and sisterhood are the reigning context, not “the struggle of all against all.”

Whatever disagreements (and there are many) socialists have had amongst themselves, these are the two golden threads running through the history of socialist thought.  A genuine critique of socialism, whatever else it does, must say that these goals are not desirable.  For obvious reasons, this is very seldom done.

Much of the confusion in arguments over socialism is that they confound arguments over whether socialism is possible with arguments over whether socialism is desirable.  If it can be made clear that socialism is what is broadly but accurately defined in the two points above, these two issues can be separated from each other and clarified; then an informed, intelligent discussion can take place.  Likewise, two kinds of anti-socialist will be distinguished from each other, with the nature of both being made clearer.

The first kind of anti-socialist is simply ignorant of the meaning of the word we are discussing.  He or she has been told that the depravities of Stalin or North Korea etc. are manifestations of socialism.  It does not help that historically, many of those spreading these lies have called themselves socialists and have even believed their own propaganda.  Naturally, the person who has been misinformed by all this will become an anti-socialist, and with good reason.  (See, by the way, Noam Chomsky’s highly illuminating “the Soviet Union Versus Socialism” on why both the Soviet and capitalist empires falsely claimed the label of socialism for the U.S.S.R.).

The second kind of anti-socialist may or may not be ignorant of the true meaning of the word “socialism” but at heart, wittingly or not, hates the ideal outlined in the two points.  She does not want it to be possible.

To know that “socialism” means the two-point socialism above and to insist doggedly on this fact is to found the whole debate about socialism not on the interpretation of history but in the realm of the desirable or normative.  Let us establish what it is we should want before we look at how it has not been reached historically.  The leftist who refuses the label “socialist” to the old Soviet Union refuses to be backed into a corner where he must either deceitfully justify the crimes of that regime or surrender the dream of socialism altogether.  Why does Stalin get to decide what is and is not possible?

And of course, “socialism can only ever be a dream” is the next line of defense, usually presented in a tone of impatience and contempt.  The allegation that socialism is not possible is one that must be taken seriously.  However, this impatient reaction is not just a matter of a sensible person rejecting hopelessly utopian fantasies.  The type one anti-socialist resists the two-point definition of socialism because she will have to admit she has been fooled by lying definitions.  Nobody likes to admit they have been fooled, that sources they thought reliable turn out to be biased or ignorant.  But it is worse for the type two anti-socialist: when the historical monstrosities he has been criticizing turn out not to be socialism, he has lost the rhetorical advantage of socialism being evil practically by definition.

Of course, the type two anti-socialist can and most assuredly will switch gears and claim it was the two-point socialist dream which caused the reality of what is falsely called socialism.  But one can argue against this point far more honestly and effectively than if one decides to justify Pol Pot.  (The point that the socialist dream is itself the cause of a nightmare, by the way, has a great many holes in it.  It seems to be a convenient theory which its perpetrators seldom analyze in any historical context.  People who advance this theory do not seem to have actually looked at revolutionary processes, what causes them, what makes them go well or badly.)  Those who say “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” do not seem prepared to tell us straight up what kinds of intentions we should have.

Note therefor, that the type two anti-socialist needs to keep “socialism” in the two-point sense off the table.  The idea or ideal of socialism, much as its enemies disparage it as a fairy tale, is quite dangerous to anti-socialism.  When socialism steps in and claims its right to judge any government or movement calling itself socialist or claiming to move towards socialism, the terms of the debate are no longer the property of socialism’s enemies.

The fight over the word “socialism,” therefore is not simply about what the anti-socialist, in his ignorance, thinks the word means, but what he wants the word to mean, what he even needs the word to mean in order to defend his own ideology.  Hitchens’ seems to have decided that Christianity is evil by definition.  Ipso facto a good man like Martin Luther King cannot possibly be a Christian.  We learn nothing about religion or King by this blarney.  We do learn something about Christopher Hitchens.

Capitalism’s first line of defence is to make sure alternatives to it do not enter even the imagination, let alone the concrete political or economic sphere.  As long as “socialism” is merely a word for some kind of monstrosity, two-point socialism can not be talked about.  And what cannot even be talked about becomes even harder to imagine and nigh impossible to share.  The socialist movement, on the other hand, needs “socialism” in its basic sense to mean the two-point variety, or there is no way we can even talk about what we want or how to get it.  That kind of silence, of course, is what anti-socialism wants, and thinks it has a right to, so spoiled has it been by an unfair cultural struggle which confuses and silences any language with which the Left might express itself intelligibly.