2001

The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century

Toward a Theory of Historical Regression

On April 18, 2009, the Platypus Affiliated Society conducted the following panel discussion at the Left Forum Conference at Pace University in New York City. The panel was organized around four significant moments in the progressive diremption of theory and practice over the course of the 20th century: 2001 (Spencer A. Leonard), 1968 (Atiya Khan), 1933 (Richard Rubin), and 1917 (Chris Cutrone). The following is an edited transcript of the introduction to the panel by Benjamin Blumberg, the panelists’ prepared statements, and the Q&A session that followed. The Platypus Review encourages interested readers to view the complete video recording of the event.

2001

Spencer Leonard

THE ABANDONMENT OF EMANCIPATORY POLITICS in our time has not been, as past revolutionary thinkers may have feared, an abandonment of revolution in favor of reformism. Rather, because the revolutionary overcoming of capital is no longer imagined, reformism too is dead. As the task of achieving human society beyond capital has been abandoned, nothing worthy of the name of politics takes its place, nor could it. The project of freedom has now altogether receded from view. For, while bourgeois thinkers like Hegel were no doubt mistaken in their identification of capital with freedom, they nevertheless grasped that the question of freedom only poses itself with reference to the capital problematic. Realizing for the first time a noble savagery that never was before, contemporary humanity is sunk in the immediacy of second nature.

The year 2001 itself arrived late and now it, too, has slipped into the past. Still, it retains its significance as the moment when the light of freedom was definitively eclipsed, when mankind ceased to be able to discern whether or not night had fallen. For, since 2001, all recognize that we now live in what the Marxist thinker and critic of the New Left, Moishe Postone, has termed the “time of helplessness” (or, as the Spartacist League more colorfully describes it, the “senile dementia of post-Marxism.”) Though time continues to pass and, in some sense, continues to intensify, history—understood as the time when the tasks of freedom can still be performed—seems to have come to an abrupt, late-afternoon halt. This has caught most on the Left unawares, though one suspects a widespread relief among many that the task might finally be abandoned, for good and all.

Accumulated into the year 2001 is what precedes it in time, a mass of folly and wasted opportunities that may be disaggregated into three constituent moments. Each of these three stages in the “death of the Left” conveniently ends in the digit 9: 1979, 1989, and 1999. Each represents a stage in a process of retrogression that culminates in what is, after all, a crisis far more portentous than the current economic crisis that so dominates our discourse: the crisis of the Left, whose prospects for recovery are, at this stage, very grim. Rather than a crisis date in the history of the Left, 2001 is therefore the year in which the crisis of history became clear, though few noticed, and when it became unmistakable, though few caught the scent, that what passes for the Left today is a “stinking corpse.” It was the year in which the founding of Platypus became a necessity, though, here again, consciousness lagged behind events.

Islamic Revolution

Demonstration during the Islamic Revolution in Iran, 1979.

The Iranian Revolution in 1979 was and remains a catastrophe. Since the triumph of the Khomeini-ites the country has been dominated by a regime far more backward and repressive than its predecessor, governed in a manner even more reactionary than the way the country was governed under the Shah. With the Stalinist Tudeh Party subordinating itself to the Khomeini faction, the road to Islamist power was paved with the corpses of betrayed Iranian workers and self-betrayed Stalinists, even as the Western Left drowned out all dissent with its loud applause for the blow dealt to American imperialism. As the Iranian unorganized urban masses and the landlord class joined hands under Islamist leadership to crush the Tudeh Party and other leftist groups, the Left of the core capitalist states, hopelessly deluded by a specious Third Worldism, failed almost entirely to recognize the unfolding catastrophe. As David Greason has observed, prior to the Iranian Revolution most had simply assumed that any movement able to oust the Shah would have to come from the Left.[1] The actuality of Khomeini-style Islamism as a reactionary ideology, rather than an authentic “cultural expression” of the masses, was denied, and instead the Western Left acquiesced in the elevation of Khomeini’s mullahs to a dominant position in Iran. The Left was incapable of recognizing in Khomeini, who was hailed as a unifier, a threat no less grave than the Shah himself had been. Substituting criticism of American imperialism for the critique of capitalism, dominant strands of the New Left reshaped anti-Americanism as the touchstone of Leftist thought. This rendered impossible an adequate analysis of the Iranian Revolution, and of the Mujahideen’s “resistance” to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan as well. In place of an adequate analysis of the Iranian Revolution, defeat was transmuted into “victory” by the conjuring tricks of the New Left. It was an act of self-deception that had, by this time, become almost second nature for a generation that, despite its professions of anti-Stalinism, still worshipped the Stalinist idol of the accomplished fact. Accordingly, icons of the New Left like Michel Foucault saluted the Islamic Revolution as representative of a new “spiritual” politics, supposedly free of the instrumental rationality operative in both East and West during the Cold War.

Lech Walesa leaves the Gdansk Lenin shipyards to prepare for his meeting with John Paul II.)

Lech Walesa leaves the Gdansk Lenin shipyards to prepare for his meeting with John Paul II.

Other events circa 1979 that registered the degradation and disintegration of the Left were its uncritical responses to the Solidarnosc movement in Poland, and the Mujahideen’s resistance to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, both of which found support among a disoriented Left, with slogans—now forgotten in embarrassment—of “Ten million Polish workers can’t be wrong!” and “Allah-u-Akbar!” The Left failed to recognize the conservatism manifesting before their eyes, the right that they themselves joined. Indeed, by 1979, it was by no means clear, even to leading thinkers of the New Left, how the project of freedom might be advanced. Fred Halliday reports a conversation he had with fellow New Left Review editor Tariq Ali, with whom he was politically parting ways, in which he told Ali the following: “God, Allah, called the two of us to His presence and said to us, ‘One of you is to go the Left, and one of you is to go to the Right.’ The problem is, He didn’t tell us which was which, and maybe He didn’t know Himself.” Halliday then adds, “Tariq laughed. He understood exactly what I was saying, and he didn’t dispute it.”[2]

The practice of self-deceit, uncritical celebration of supposed revolts against reification, and the retreat from the project of freedom, was again in evidence in the second stage leading up to 2001, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. As the final, anti-climactic collapse of the failed attempt to overcome capital launched in 1917, the rightward fall of the Soviet Union was remarkable for its failure to prompt serious reconsideration on the Left. Instead, it was heralded as a rebirth of freedom, as though what happened were not the institution of neoliberalism but the de-Stalinization of the revolution. With scarcely a thought respecting the now definitive failure of the trajectory of the October Revolution that conserved, in however degraded a form, the emancipatory impulses of Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, and Lenin, the zombie-Left in 1989 congratulated itself on yet another supposed accomplishment of 1960s-style anti-authoritarianism. Celebrating what it ought to have analyzed, dominant strains on the Left helped legitimize the neo-Tzarism that rose on the ruins of Soviet Russia. Mirroring Marxism’s degeneration in the Soviet Union to an ideology affirmative of the status quo, and in place of the realization of the emancipatory potential of capitalism, in 1989 capitalism itself was celebrated as emancipation.

The third phase in the total exhaustion of the Left that culminated in 2001 comes in 1999, the year of the anti-globalization protests in Seattle. This event marked the triumph of our current “post-political” activist culture, what Liza Feathersone, Doug Henwood, and Christian Parenti have termed “activist-ism.”[3] As Platypus members Ben Blumberg and Ian Morrison have observed, with respect both to activist-ism in general and the new anarchism that dominated proceedings in Seattle in particular, “Today’s protesters celebrate simple altercations with the police as victories… Each blow of the truncheon dramatizes the difference between protesters [and the society to which they are being integrated].”[4] It is not unfair to say, they argue, “Protesters elicit a police beating to sensationalize their own submission to authority.”[5] Here, the regression already in evidence in the 1960s has reached full flower.

Black Bloc protest

Black Bloc protest

Reenacting not only the defeat but the defeatism of the 1960s Left, the Seattle protesters no longer even bother with the old talk about students or youth as a new “revolutionary force.” Nor do these new would-be radicals require elaborate rationalizations of their failure. Theirs is a disarmingly frank acting-out of a discontented middle-class youth, for whom the schedule of international trade meetings takes the place of rock concert tours as the site for a peripatetic anti-authoritarian subculture. This generation of activists fulfills rather than rejects the low expectations of their political parents, namely that they should either numb themselves with the pleasures on offer in neoliberalism—“sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll”—or else engage in revolution “for the hell of it.” Only, in the new protest culture, one can do both at the same time, achieving in the process only the sensationalizing of one’s own submission to authority and social integration of which Blumberg and Morrison speak. Politically, the embrace of the cult of death that characterized the dominant Leftist response to 1979 reaches its anti-climax in the full-blown Romantic-reactionary rejectionism, anti-modernism, and anti-globalization of “black bloc” anarchism and “turtle protest.”

The historic Left of bourgeois radicalism, culminating in Marx’s auto-critique of utopian socialism, isolates history as its problematic and freedom as its project. As Marx realized, capitalism posed a question that could only be answered by the overcoming of capitalism. In a similar vein, Postone has argued that proletarian society, the society of commodity-producing commodities, “points beyond itself.” But regression has advanced so far now that critical recognitions such as Postone’s are the affair of only a handful of intellectuals, while the labor movement, the necessary condition for the practical politics of the Left, is in full-scale rout globally. The point of saying this plainly is not simply to voice a knowing pessimism, but to recognize the actual character of our times. Platypus harps on the “death of the Left” in order to begin the work of rebuilding. After all, the reconstitution of Critical Theory, the specific task to which Platypus is devoted, does not occur in conditions of our own choosing, but in conditions we inherit from the past. Indeed, theory can be reformulated not by supplementing new bits to rectify the supposed inadequacies of past theory, but only by actually working through of the history of the Left. |P

Next presentation: 1968


[1] David Greason, “Embracing Death: The Western Left and the Iranian Revolution, 1978–83,” Economy and Society 34 (February 2005): 105–140.
[2] Fred Halliday, “Who is Responsible? An Interview with Fred Halliday,” interview by Danny Postel, Salmagundi 150–151 (Spring–Summer 2006). Available online at <cms.skidmore.edu/salmagundi/backissues/150-151/halliday.cfm>.
[3] Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood, and Christian Parenti, “‘Action Will be Taken: Left Anti-Intellectualism and its Discontents.” Available online at <www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Action.html>.
[4] Benjamin Blumberg and Ian Morrison, “Violence at the RNC,” Platypus Review 7 (October 2008).
[5] Ibid.

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1968

The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century

Toward a Theory of Historical Regression

On April 18, 2009, the Platypus Affiliated Society conducted the following panel discussion at the Left Forum Conference at Pace University in New York City. The panel was organized around four significant moments in the progressive diremption of theory and practice over the course of the 20th century: 2001 (Spencer A. Leonard), 1968 (Atiya Khan), 1933 (Richard Rubin), and 1917 (Chris Cutrone). The following is an edited transcript of the introduction to the panel by Benjamin Blumberg, the panelists’ prepared statements, and the Q&A session that followed. The Platypus Review encourages interested readers to view the complete video recording of the event.

1968

Atiya Khan

Theory becomes a material force when it has gripped the masses.
— Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right [1843]

Herbert Marcuse speaks to students.

Herbert Marcuse speaks to students.

IT MIGHT SEEM COUNTER-INTUITIVE to approach the date of 1968 through the political thought and self-understanding of Theodor Adorno, who is not only considered the most pessimistic in his critique, but also deemed an opponent of the New Left, especially after he infamously called the police on student demonstrators at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. Yet Adorno’s response to the politics of 1968 can help us understand both the roots of New Left politics and its legacy today. In his late writings, such as “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?” (aka “Is Marx Obsolete?”), “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” and “Resignation,” as well as his private correspondence with Herbert Marcuse on the character of the student movement in the 1960s, Adorno formulates important categories for a Marxian attempt to grasp the problem of theory and practice. He reminds us, “theory becomes a transformative force” only through “a reasoned analysis of the situation. In reflecting upon the situation, analysis emphasizes the aspects that might be able to lead beyond the given constraints of the situation.”[1] Hence, following Marx, Adorno emphasizes that the crucial lesson to be learned from the history of Marxism is that the mediation between theory and practice can only be grasped in the dynamic of revolutionary emancipatory politics. On the basis of Adorno’s writings, one can address the problem of “regressive” consciousness that beset the student movement of 1968, one of the critical moments in the history of the Left.

The Left since Marx’s day has wrestled with the problem of theory and praxis, but never so much as since 1968, the culminating moment of the post-World War II New Left. In his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx elucidated the conditions in which an effective relation between theory and practice in the attempt to change the world becomes possible. Such conditions of advancing the relation between theory and practice, as Marx reflected upon around the moment of the revolutions of 1848, arose in the history of modern society with the emergence of the proletariat—the modern working class of wage labor—and the historically specific constitution of industrial labor.

The historically specific, dialectical dynamic of capital is what both gives rise to and constrains the possibility of a post-capitalist, emancipated form of life. Armed with this insight, Marx examined the forms of discontent with capital emerging in the 19th century, which took the form of class struggles of the workers against capitalists, as immanent to the constitutive and contradictory character of social exploitation and domination under capitalism. Thus, in Marx’s conception, for the masses to be gripped by theory, for a progressive advance in their consciousness, theory must become a means of revolution

Like the October Revolution of 1917, the eruption of student protests in 1968 emerged as an international phenomenon extending from Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, Rome, and Prague to San Francisco as well as to the major cities of Latin America and South and East Asia. The process of politicization that proceeded at a furious pace involved an increasingly militant protest against “authoritarian structures” and traditional values of society. What united the students was their demand for educational reforms, opposition to the war in Vietnam, loathing of the inhumanity of capitalism, and solidarity with liberation movements of the Third World.

Yet what set this moment apart from the preceding revolutionary uprisings was an uncritical emphasis on “action” as well as a deep-seated aversion to theoretical reflection and analysis. This attitude found expression in the disruptive modes of behavior of the students, which involved interrupting lectures and discussions, occupying buildings, and going so far as to dismiss intellectuals by using the word “professor”—“to put them down, as they put it so nicely, just as the Nazis used the word ‘Jew,’” Adorno remarked in his letters to Marcuse.[2] Slogans such as “We can’t get bogged down in analysis” or “Whoever occupies himself with theory, without acting practically, is a traitor to socialism,” also affirmed that the student movement on the whole was symptomatic of a particular tendency that was, as Adorno observed, “regressive,” fascist in potential, and “authoritarian” in its attitude.

Jürgen Habermas

Jürgen Habermas

Taking into consideration such developments, Adorno used the epithet of “left-wing fascism,” originally coined by Jürgen Habermas, to warn of the dangers of a student movement that could just as easily converge with fascism. This characterization of the New Left, which became a point of contention between Adorno and Marcuse in their private letters, brought to the fore not only their differing views on the politics of the moment, but also offers us insights into the way in which the New Left of the 1960s was a legacy of the unfulfilled potential of the Old Left of the 1930s. Adorno’s main point was that the Left had not learned from its past defeats.

In his letters to Marcuse, who had embraced the student movement unreservedly, Adorno frankly expressed his doubts about the political consequences of practical action. He wrote that many of the student representatives tended “to synthesize their practice with a non-existent theory and this expresses a decisionism that evokes horrific memories.”[3] This was a gesture to the emergence of counter-revolution—expressed in the form of fascism/Stalinism—that had ensued in the aftermath of the crisis of 1917 leading to the disintegration of revolutionary Marxism by the 1930s and generating an acute problem of consciousness on the Left. In the postwar period, the devastation of the Left was supplanted by an “authoritarian character structure” that was expressed universally, not only in the fascist rallies, but also in the Popular Front movements, as well as in the anti-colonial, nationalist movements of the Third World. Frankfurt School theorists, including Adorno, theorized the notion of the “authoritarian personality” as a double-sided expression of counter-revolutionary and simultaneously, revolutionary potential that was rooted in the dialectical contradiction of capitalism. Borrowing from Freudian psychoanalysis, Adorno and his colleagues (Marcuse and Reich) interpreted the constitution of the “authoritarian personality,” characterized by “narcissism” and sadomasochism, as evincing a regressive “fear of freedom.” Thus, faced with “political hysteria” Adorno observed, “Those who protest most vehemently are similar to authoritarian personalities in their aversion to introspection.”[4]

Certainly the 1960s marked a political crisis, but one in which the Left, instead of evaluating the legacy of the 1930s Stalinism, reproduced those very structures and tendencies it sought to overthrow. As Adorno asked of Marcuse, How could one only protest against the horror of napalm bombs, and not revolt against the “Chinese-style tortures” that the Vietcong practiced with such unrestraint? He continued, “If you do not take that on board too, then the protest against America takes on an ideological character.”[5] In the course of this correspondence, Marcuse acknowledged that the situation “was not a revolutionary one, not even a pre-revolutionary one,” but the situation was “so terrible, so suffocating, so demeaning, that rebellion against it forces a biological, physiological reaction; one can bear it no longer, one has to let some air in. And this fresh air is not that of a ‘left-wing fascism.’”[6] Marcuse insisted that the situation had changed qualitatively, that it did not resemble the 1930s in any way, but called “more urgently today than ever for a concrete political position,” especially against American imperialism. It may be worthwhile to note that Adorno did not simply oppose Marcuse’s assessment of the 1960s New Left, but wished to avoid the pitfalls of either Stalinophobia, the anti-Leninist anarchist tendency espoused by Horkheimer, or Stalinophilia, the militant New Left tendency à la Maoism and Castroism, exemplified by Marcuse’s political stance. In his essay “Resignation,” Adorno emphasizes that even though the return of anarchism is that of a “ghost,” that is, of unresolved problems of Marxism, “this does not invalidate the critique of anarchism.”[7] In his attempt to transcend both Stalinophobia and Stalinophilia, Adorno stressed the necessity of critiquing the contemporary form of Marxism and its problematic relation to its past.

Return to Normal. Poster from May 1968 Paris

Return to Normal. Poster from May 1968 Paris

Adorno’s great insight was that he rooted the problem of authoritarianism in the structure of modern capitalist society. In his essay “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society,” he used Marxian categories to analyze the basic structure of contemporary society, which he explained was contradictory based on the dynamic of labor and capital. The drive to produce surplus value and capitalize on labor measured in socially necessary labor time was the source of social domination and exploitation. Exploitation in the traditional sense of class antagonism could no longer be established empirically because the working class had been subject to a high degree of social integration in the mid-20th century. Adorno characterized capitalism as a society driven by increasing levels of productivity, resulting in great increases in use-value output. He summed up this organization of social life as “the administered world”—a tendency that was expressed in both state-regulated capitalism and the welfare state system. However, the dynamism of growth displayed certain static tendencies reflected in the dominance of the relations of production, which included relations ranging from those of the administration of managerial bureaucracy to those of the state and the organization of society as a whole. “This creates the impression that the universal interest is to preserve the status quo and that the only ideal is full employment and not liberation from heteronomous labor.”[8]

The “administered world” produced a specific kind of mass society, what Adorno called the “culture industry.” The culture industry was largely the consequence of high levels of productivity and the widespread availability of consumption goods, but it was also illusory in that it gave the appearance of mass democratization when in fact production was standardized and tastes were manipulated only to preserve a pretense of individuality. This implied “the impotence of the individual in the face of totality [that] is the drastic expression of the power of exchange relations.”[9] Thus Adorno declared, “Marx’s dictum that theory becomes a real force when it grips the masses was flagrantly overturned by the course of events.”[10] The culture industry eventually paralyzed “the ability to imagine in concrete terms that the world might be different,” because the authoritarian character structure had itself become the force of repression.[11] Towards the end of his essay, borrowing from Freud, Adorno pointed to the “free floating anxiety” that arose from the “subjective regression [that] favors the regression of the system.” The consciousness of the masses had become seemingly identical with the system, which in turn had become increasingly alienated.[12]

Adorno was not opposed to people organizing themselves for political purposes, but he wished to draw attention to the “Archimedean point” at which “a non-repressive practice might be possible, and one might steer a path between the alternatives of spontaneity and organization.” This point, if it existed at all, “can only be found through theory,” Adorno maintained.[13] His own position arose from a political judgment that was based on a sober analysis of the situation. He made this clear in his controversy with Marcuse. “You [Marcuse] believe that practice in an emphatic sense is not blocked today; I see the matter differently.”[14] Given this scenario, Adorno was convinced that the student movement was bound to fail from the outset. In “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” he noted that the building of the barricades is “ridiculous against those who administer the bomb.”[15] A practice that refuses to acknowledge its own weakness when confronted by “real power which hardly feels a tickle” is deluded and regressive, or, at best, “pseudo-activity.”[16]

Adorno’s critique of the New Left was an honest attempt to shake the Left out of its state of self-abnegation and self-delusion. The problematic inheritance of the legacy of the 1930s meant that the intent of Marxian theory and practice had become an obscure issue by the 1960s, and the problem of social consciousness reemerged in the guise of “ego-weakness” that “refuses to reflect upon its own impotence.”[17] The political “radicalization” of the 1960s only meant further regression and, therefore, subjectively obscured the possibility of progressive transformation beyond capital even when objectively it was still possible. The deep irony of this history is that there has been no progress at all since 1917, and in fact the crisis of Marxism and that of social consciousness has been deepened, not solved. At a fundamental level the problem of consciousness is tied to what Wilhelm Reich had identified as the “fear of freedom” necessitated by a conservative psyche that is wedded to its symptomology. So the symptom needs to be worked through, as this not only provides an occasion for self-understanding and knowledge, but also constitutes the subjective, psychological preconditions of freedom. | P

Next presentation: 1933


[1] Theodor W. Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 264.
[2] Theodor W. Adorno to Herbert Marcuse, Frankfurt, June 19, 1969, in “Correspondence on the German Movement,” New Left Review I/233 (January–February 1999): 132.
[3] Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 456.
[4] Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” 271.
[5] Adorno, “Correspondence on the German Movement,” 127.
[6] Ibid.,125.
[7] Theodor W. Adorno, “Resignation,” in Critical Models, 292.
[8] Theodor W. Adorno, “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?” in Can One Live After Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and translated by Rodney Livingstone (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press), 119.
[9] Ibid., 120.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 446.
[12] Adorno, “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?,” 124.
[13] Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 462.
[14] Adorno, “Correspondence on the German Movement,” 131.

[15] Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” 269.
[16] Ibid., 271.
[17] Ibid., 273.

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1933

The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century

Toward a Theory of Historical Regression

On April 18, 2009, the Platypus Affiliated Society conducted the following panel discussion at the Left Forum Conference at Pace University in New York City. The panel was organized around four significant moments in the progressive diremption of theory and practice over the course of the 20th century: 2001 (Spencer A. Leonard), 1968 (Atiya Khan), 1933 (Richard Rubin), and 1917 (Chris Cutrone). The following is an edited transcript of the introduction to the panel by Benjamin Blumberg, the panelists’ prepared statements, and the Q&A session that followed. The Platypus Review encourages interested readers to view the complete video recording of the event.

1933

Richard Rubin

THE DATE PROPOSED for me to discuss, 1933, immediately summons up two names: Roosevelt and Hitler—Reformism or Barbarism. I wish, though, to couple them with another pair, and another date. The date is 1940. The names are Trotsky and Benjamin. These four names are meant both as contrasts and parallels. At first glance, Hitler and Roosevelt, the New Deal and fascism, might seem polar opposites. But, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch points out, many contemporaries understood Roosevelt and fascism as addressing comparable problems, albeit by somewhat different methods.  Similarly, while Benjamin the melancholic mandarin and Trotsky the fiery revolutionary might seem at opposite poles of Marxist discourse, it is the thesis of Platypus that they are both responses to the same crisis of Marxism, just as Hitler and Roosevelt are responses to the crisis of capitalism. These two crises, the crisis of capitalism and the crisis of Marxism, have determined the history of the 20th century, and continue to weigh on the history of the 21st.

These two pairs are also linked by the dates of their deaths: Hitler and Roosevelt in 1945, Trotsky and Benjamin in 1940. While such facts are, in one sense, mere accidents, they can also be read as signs. A generation may be linked by the date of its death as well as its birth.

Trotsky speaking to the Danish Social Democratic student group in Copenhagen, 1932
Trotsky speaking to the Danish Social Democratic student group in Copenhagen, 1932.

Two Marxist refugees with great literary talents, two men who experienced “a planet without a visa,” both Trotsky and Benjamin were of a type that was common among many Jews in the first half of the 20th century, before the great caesura of the Holocaust and the State of Israel intervened: men of a deep cosmopolitanism that is almost unimaginable today.They were both men who, despite everything that had happened by the mid-20thcentury, still seemed rooted in the earlier, less bleak beginning of the century. They are of their time, but also out of their time, figures um neunzehnhundert [“circa 1900”]. Their unnatural deaths seem to anticipate a new and incomprehensibly horrible world; Auschwitz and Hiroshima are around the corner, yet they just miss them. It is as hard to imagine them in the postwar world as it is to imagine Voltaire and Rousseau living on into the world after the French Revolution. They prefigure, and therefore do not pass beyond. If, as Adorno famously stated, after Auschwitz it will be forbidden to write poetry, they are spared, by the time of their deaths, from the burden of this prohibition. They are two fragments of the unfulfilled, secret counter-history of the 20th century—the history that remains actual, by virtue of its unfulfilled potential.

By contrast, Roosevelt and Hitler are the so-called “real” history of the 20th century. If Trotsky and Benjamin speak to the utopian possibilities that remain hidden away in capitalist society, waiting to be unlocked, Hitler and Roosevelt speak, by contrast, to the barbarism that lurks underneath the veneer of bourgeois society, on the one hand, and on the other, to the supposedly “realistic” limits to which we can hope to aspire for a better society. In the end, Roosevelt played the “good cop” to Hitler’s “bad cop.” It says everything about the poverty of our moment that, in the midst of the greatest capitalist crisis since the 1930s, the highest aspiration of most of the Left is Roosevelt, as evident by the increasingly common question, Will Obama be another FDR? From fantasies of neo-conservative “fascism” a few years ago, much of the Left has moved effortlessly into fantasies of a new Popular Front. But, of course, the obvious is avoided: There is no socialist threat for Obama to head off. On the contrary, protests against the bailouts take the form of an inchoate populism. AIG and “greed,” not capitalism, are the targets.

Similarly, if the avowed neo-conservative aim of “spreading democracy” is ideological eyewash, one must also admit that the chief targets of US imperialism are no longer primarily the Left, as during the Cold War. On the contrary, the “wars of empire” are now wars against extreme right-wing forces, as in Afghanistan—right-wing forces that themselves bear more than a passing resemblance to fascism. But this inchoate quasi-fascism is as unlike the world-threatening grand fascism of the 1930s and 1940s as it is unlike the Che Guevaras of the 1960s. Within the metropolitan Left, “anti-fascist” and “anti-imperialist” impulses clash over the problem, and leave only muddle.

Thus, if the Obama administration goes to “war” with Somali pirates, for example, some on the Left will surely feel obliged to express solidarity with the pirates. We will be told that Empires are really pirates writ large, et cetera. No one believes, of course, that piracy is really socialism—but, lacking socialism, we feel that we must make do with piracy, and label it a form of “resistance.” The sheer misery of the present cannot be confronted head-on. To use a phrase invented by Robert Musil, “Seinesgleichen geschieht” [“The like of it now happens,” or “Pseudo-reality prevails”]. Pseudo-reality prevails in a world of pseudo-politics. Something like reality is happening, but it is not really real. We sense this, but are unsure how to talk about it. We try to ignore what we know. We seek historical mirrors, but, like a house with a corpse in it, we find that the mirrors have all been covered over.

But how did we get here from the world of 1940? For, in 1940, the world was not as miserably depoliticized a place as it is today. It was a tragic and frightening place,indeed, but still tragically and frighteningly real. The difference of course is not in “the world,” but rather in our ability to understand it. The central meaning of“regression” is this: Increasingly, the Left does not address the world but rather its own unresolved history. One should not imagine defeat as something merely imposed on the Left by the right, by mere superior force; rather, defeat has been deeply internalized on the Left by ways of thinking, the goal of which is self-censorship. In particular, two crucial periods must be constantly reenacted and misunderstood: the 1930s and the 1960s. These are not high-points or models—we must now construct neither a new “New Left” nor a new “Old Left.” Instead, they are both crucial stages in the long disintegration of the Left. The period 1933–1940 is the last attempt of classical Marxism to rearm itself against the double menace of Stalinism and fascism. Trotsky represents the central figure in this struggle. Trotsky was the last of the Second International radicals, and, with him, the history of classical Marxism ends.

Benjamin working in the Bibliothèque National, 1939
Benjamin working in the Bibliothèque National, 1939

This was simultaneously the source of Trotsky’s greatness and his limitation. By contrast, the Frankfurt School, while politically less clear than Trotsky, saw other things perhaps more clearly. One might say that Trotsky understood Stalinism better, and the Frankfurt School understood fascism better. In the end, however, both Trotskyism and the Frankfurt School survived only as standing challenges. Neither would prove intellectually creative in the postwar world. At most one could only hold one’s ground. In the end, Adorno remained a lonely figure and the Trotskyists—all 31 flavors—were, even in their own estimation, mere epigones. Indeed, the best Trotskyists would insist that, in over two-thirds of a century since Trotsky’s death, there has been hardly anything deserving the name of Marxist theory. While scandalous, this is probably true. If we are to take Marxism seriously, the central task of any Marxist theorist now is to try to answer the question, Why we do not have an adequate Marxist theory of the present?

But if the 1930s were the tragedy, that is, an actual defeat, and the 1960s were the farce, that is, a defeat acted out before actual combat could be engaged, what needs to be understood is the bridge. The 1960s would repeat the 1930s in many ways, without understanding them. Hence, for example, the paradox of Maoism—a rebellion of sorts against Stalinism that was and is itself hyper-Stalinist.

Afterwards, the compulsion to repetition would set in, and there would be an even further evacuation of political meaning. The peace movement never dies, but that is merely because it never wins, nor even needs to reflect on its goals. There will always be war. We can always be “United for Peace and Justice,” can’t we? There will always be something to “resist.” Infinite, never-ending “struggle”—or the simulacrum of struggle—is all that matters. Struggle has become a symptom, not a means. One can no longer even counterpose reform and revolution; increasingly, the Left has ceased to believe in either. Both involve questions of power, and how can a powerless Left dare to think about power? Instead one is sustained by a myth: the myth of the 1960s.

For many decades, it seemed as if the waiting for the 1960s to return would never end. But, in the last year, the Zeitgeist has finally begun to change. On the one hand, the election of Obama, a black man who is a post-boomer, unsettlingly conservative, and unsettlingly popular with White America, and on the other, a real economic disaster that brings back all of those good Zusammenbruchstheorie [“Crisis Theory”] moments we thought we had lost. Finally, even the Left is starting to realize the 1960s are dead. But now we are waiting for the 1930s. Identity politics is passé, yet only in that “class” is the new “black.”

The problem, of course, is that we have been here before. For example, some may remember in the 1970s a “turn to the working class” by remnants of the New Left, which had only a few years earlier written off the working class. But even more to the point, the 1930s were a decade of defeat for the Left. The last thing we need is to revisit 1933! The myth of the 1930s is the flipside of the myth of the 1960s. It is precisely because the real but belated possibility of revolutionary politics was defeated in the 1930s that it took on a spectral and confused form in the 1960s, and it is the inability of leftists since the 1960s to overcome the notion that the 1960s represented a higher, better form of politics—that the so-called “New” Left had left the “Old” Left behind—that is the main reason for the nearly total obsolescence and irrelevance of the Left today. Neither the 1960s nor the 1930s offer models for a future Left, unless they are recognized as the two-fold trauma that the Left needs to overcome.

That, at any rate, is the Platypus thesis of regression in a nutshell. Is this a hopelessly pessimistic view? Certainly, it does not partake of Trotsky’s revolutionary optimism. The optimism of classical Marxism was once historically justified, but now, alas, is not. In this respect, Platypus is certainly closer to a Benjamin than a Trotsky. But we in Platypus believe that ours is a hopefully pessimistic view. We continue to hope that it is by an accurate recognition of its own defeatism that there is still time for the Left to reconstruct itself and create a future for human freedom. We reject a fake optimism, precisely because we continue to hope—and a false optimism is the deadly enemy of true hope. In answer to Nietzsche’s question, “Gibt es einen Pessimismus der Staerke?” [“Is there a pessimism of the strong?”], we answer: “Yes!” | P

Next presentation: 1917

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1917

The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century

Toward a Theory of Historical Regression

On April 18, 2009, the Platypus Affiliated Society conducted the following panel discussion at the Left Forum Conference at Pace University in New York City. The panel was organized around four significant moments in the progressive diremption of theory and practice over the course of the 20th century: 2001 (Spencer A. Leonard), 1968 (Atiya Khan), 1933 (Richard Rubin), and 1917 (Chris Cutrone). The following is an edited transcript of the introduction to the panel by Benjamin Blumberg, the panelists’ prepared statements, and the Q&A session that followed. The Platypus Review encourages interested readers to view the complete video recording of the event.

1917

Chris Cutrone

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
— Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party [1848]

Hegel links the freedom of each to the freedom of all as something of equal value. But in doing so he regards the freedom of the individual only in terms of the freedom of the whole, through which it is realized. Marx, by contrast, makes the free development of each the precondition for the correlative freedom of all.
— Karl Korsch, Introduction to Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme [1922]

THE YEAR 1917 is the most enigmatic and hence controversial date in the history of the Left. It is therefore necessarily the focal point for the Platypus philosophy of history of the Left, which seeks to grasp problems in the present as those that had already manifested in the past, but have not yet been overcome. Until we make historical sense of the problems associated with the events and self-conscious actors of 1917, we will be haunted by their legacy. Therefore, whether we are aware of this or not, we are tasked with grappling with 1917, a year marked by the most profound attempt to change the world that has ever taken place.

Bolsheviks speaking at a meeting of workers and soldiers in Petrograd in 1917.

Bolsheviks speaking at a meeting of workers and soldiers in Petrograd in 1917.

The two most important names associated with the revolution that broke out in 1917 in Russia and in 1918 in Germany are the Second International Marxist radicals Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, each of whom played fateful roles in this revolutionary moment. Two Marxian critical theorists who sought to follow Luxemburg and Lenin to advance the historical consciousness and philosophical awareness of the problems of revolutionary politics, in the wake of 1917, are Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch.

While neither Lenin nor Luxemburg survived the revolutionary period that began in 1917, both Lukács and Korsch ended up disavowing and distancing themselves from their works, both published in 1923, that sought to elaborate a Marxian critical theory of the revolutionary proletarian socialist politics of Lenin and Luxemburg. Lukács adapted his perspective to the prevailing conditions of Stalinism in the international Communist movement and Korsch became a critic of “Marxist-Leninist” Bolshevism, and an important theorist of “Left” or “council communist” politics. Meanwhile, Luxemburg was pitted against Lenin in a similar degeneration and disintegration of the revolutionary consciousness that had informed the revolution of 1917.

The forms that this disintegration took involved the arraying of the principles of liberalism against those of socialism, or libertarianism against authoritarianism. Lenin and Lukács became emblems of authoritarian socialism, while Luxemburg and Korsch became associated with more libertarian, if not liberal, concerns.

But what remains buried under such a misapprehension of the disputed legacy of 1917 is the substance of agreement and collaboration, in the revolutionary Marxist politics of that moment, among all these figures. Behind the fact of Luxemburg’s close collaboration and practical political unity with Lenin lies the intrinsic relationship of liberalism with socialism, and emancipation with necessity. Rather than associating Lenin with revolutionary necessity and Luxemburg with desirable emancipation in such a one-sided manner, we need to grasp how necessity, possibility, and desirability were related, for both Luxemburg and Lenin, in ways that not only allowed for, but actually motivated their shared thought and action in the revolution that opened in 1917.

Both Lenin and Luxemburg sought to articulate and fulfill the concerns of liberalism with socialism—for instance in Lenin’s (qualified) endorsement of self-determination against national oppression.

György Lukács, 1919.

György Lukács, 1919

Lukács and Korsch were among the first, and remain the best, to have rigorously explored the theoretical implications of the shared politics of Luxemburg and Lenin, in their works History and Class Consciousness and “Marxism and Philosophy,” respectively. Both Lukács and Korsch approached what they considered the practical and theoretical breakthrough of the Third International Marxist communism of Luxemburg and Lenin by returning to the “Hegelian” roots of Marxism, a reconsideration of its “idealist” dimension, as opposed to a “materialist” objectivistic metaphysics that lied behind “economism,” for example.

This involved, for Lukács and Korsch, an exploration of Lenin and Luxemburg’s break from the objectivistic “vulgar Marxism” of the politics and theory of the Second International, exemplified by Karl Kautsky. Lukács’s term for such objectivism was “reification”; Korsch addressed it by way of Marx’s approach to the philosophical problem of “theory and practice,” which, he argued, had become “separated out” in the Second International period, their “umbilical cord broken,” while Lenin and Luxemburg had tried to bring them back into productive tension and advance their relation through their revolutionary Marxism.

Ironically, while the title of Lukács’s work is History and Class Consciousness, it was concerned with a more “philosophical” exposition and categorial investigation of the problem of “reification” and the commodity form as socially mediating, following Marx in Capital. Meanwhile, Korsch’s “Marxism and Philosophy” actually addressed the historical vicissitudes of the theory-practice problem in Marx and Engels’s lifetime and in the subsequent history of the Marxism of the Second International. In both cases, there was an attempt to grasp the issue of subjectivity, or the “subjective” dimension of Marxism.

But it was this focus on subjectivity from which both Lukács and Korsch broke in their subsequent development: Lukács disavowed what he pejoratively called the attempt to “out-Hegel Hegel,” making his peace with Stalinist “dialectical materialism,” while (later) attempting to found a “Marxist ontology.” Korsch, on the other hand, distanced himself from what he came to call, pejoratively, the “metaphysical” presuppositions of Marxism—even and, perhaps, especially as practiced by Lenin, though also, if to a lesser extent, by Luxemburg and even by Marx himself—pushing him ultimately to call for “going beyond Marxism.”

In this complementary if divergent trajectory, Lukács and Korsch reflected, in their own ways, the return of the “vulgar Marxism” that they had sought to supersede in their theoretical digestion of 1917—a return marked by the Stalinization of the international Communist movement beginning in the 1920s. For example, Theodor W. Adorno was excited to meet Lukács in Vienna in 1925, only to be repulsed at Lukács’s disavowal of the work that had so strongly inspired Adorno and his colleagues in the Frankfurt School, such as Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer. Korsch, who had also, like Lukács, been associated with the Frankfurt School from its inception, had come by the end of the 1930s to scorn the Frankfurt critical theorists as “Marxist metaphysicians,” while in the 1960s Lukács wrote contemptuously of them as having taken up residence at the “Grand Hotel Abyss,” explicitly deriding them for following his early work. In such disavowals can be found evidence for the repression of the problems Lukács and Korsch had sought to address in elaborating Marxian theory from Lenin and Luxemburg’s revolutionary thought and action in 1917–19.

Rosa Luxemburg's funeral

Rosa Luxemburg's funeral

Likewise, in subsequent history, the relation between “means” and “ends” for the Marxist radicals Lenin and Luxemburg in the moment of 1917 became obscured, Lenin being caricatured as believing, in some Machiavellian fashion, that the “ends justified the means,” or exemplifying “revolutionary will.” Luxemburg was equally caricatured as an upholder of principled emancipatory means in extolling the virtues of practical defeat, seemingly happy to remain a Cassandra of the revolution. Biographically, this is crudely reconciled in the image of Luxemburg’s quixotic martyrdom during the Spartacist uprising of 1919, and Lenin’s illness and subsequent removal from political power at the end of his life, condemned to watch, helpless, the dawn of the Stalinist authoritarianism to which his political ruthlessness and pursuit of revolutionary ends had supposedly led.

In either case, rather than serving as an impetus for a determined investigation of these revolutionary Marxists’ thought and action at the level of the basis for their self-understanding and political judgment—models from which we might be able to learn, elaborate, and build upon further—they have been regarded only as emblems of competing principles, in the abstract (e.g., on the question of the Constituent Assembly, over which they had differed only tactically, not principally). So Lenin’s writings and actions are scoured for any hint of authoritarian inhumanity, and Luxemburg’s for anything that can be framed for its supposedly more humane compassion. At the same time, the futility of both their politics has been naturalized: It is tacitly understood that neither what Lenin nor Luxemburg aspired to achieve was actually possible to accomplish—either in their time or in ours.

In the words of Adorno’s writing on the legacy of Lenin, Luxemburg, Korsch, and Lukács, in his last completed book, Negative Dialectics, this way of approaching 1917 and its significance evinced “dogmatization and thought-taboos.”[1] The thought and action of Lenin and Luxemburg are now approached dogmatically, and they and their critical-theoretical inheritors, Lukács, Korsch, Benjamin, and Adorno, are approached only with a powerful thought-taboo firmly in place: that the revolutionary moment of 1917 was doomed to failure, and that its fate was tragically played out in the character of the revolutionary Marxism of its time. Their Marxism is thus buried in an attempt to ward off the haunting accusation that it did not fail us, but rather that we have failed it—failed to learn what we might from it. But, like Lukács and Korsch in their subsequent development, after they convinced themselves of the “errors of their ways,” we have not recognized and understood, but only rationalized, the problematic legacy of 1917.

1917 remains a question—and it is the very same question that Lenin and Luxemburg went about trying address in theory and practice—whether we ask it explicitly of ourselves now or not. It is the great tabooed subject, even if that taboo has been enforced, either by a mountain of calumny heaped upon it, or the “praise” it earns in Stalinist—or “Trotskyist”—“adherence.”

For example, it remains unclear whether the “soviets” or “workers’ councils” that sprung up in the revolutions of 1917–19 could have ever been proven in practice to be an adequate social-political means (for beginning) to overcome capitalism. The Lukács of the revolutionary period recognized, in “The Standpoint of the Proletariat,” the third part of his essay on “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” the danger that

[As Hegel said,] directly before the emergence of something qualitatively new, the old state of affairs gathers itself up into its original, purely general, essence, into its simple totality, transcending and absorbing back into itself all those marked differences and peculiarities which it evinced when it was still viable…. [I]n the age of the dissolution of capitalism, the fetishistic categories collapse and it becomes necessary to have recourse to the “natural form” underlying them.[2]

Lukács recognized that the “producers’ democracy” of the “workers’ councils” in the revolutionary “dictatorship of the proletariat” was intrinsically related to, and indeed the political expression of, an intensification of the “reification” of the commodity form. Nevertheless, it seems that the attempt, by Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks, to bring “all power to the soviets” in the October Revolution of 1917, and by Luxemburg’s Spartacists in the German Revolution that followed, is something we can learn from, despite its failure. For this revolutionary moment raises all the questions, and at the most profound levels, of the problematic relationship between capitalism and democracy that still haunt us today.

Similarly, Korsch recognized that the revolutions of 1917–19 were the outcome of a “crisis of Marxism” that had previously manifested in the Second International, in the reformist “revisionist” dispute, in which the younger generation of radicals, Luxemburg, Lenin, and Trotsky, first cut their teeth at the turn of the century. But, according to Korsch in 1923, this “crisis of Marxism” remained unresolved. The unfolding of 1917 can thus be said to be the highest expression of the “crisis of Marxism” that Luxemburg, Lenin, and Trotsky—and Korsch and Lukács after them—recognized as manifesting the highest expression of the crisis of capitalism, in the period of war, revolution, counterrevolution, civil war, and reaction that set the stage for subsequent 20th century history. Arguably, the world never really overcame or even recovered from this crisis of the early 20th century, but has only continued to struggle with its still unresolved aftermath.

In this sense 1917 was not, in the self-understanding of its thinkers and actors, an attempt to leap from the realm of necessity, but rather the attempt to advance a necessity—the necessity of social revolution and transformation—to a higher stage, and thus open a new realm of possibility. The enigmatic silence surrounding the question of 1917 is masked by a deafening din of opprobrium meant to prevent our hearing it. It remains, as Benjamin put it, an “alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds,” whether we (choose to) hear it or not.[3] But the degree to which those who have come later have done so, the repression of 1917 has been achieved only at the cost of a regression that, as Benjamin put it, ceaselessly consumes the past and our ability to learn from it, ceding the meaning of history and its sacrifices to our enemies, and rendering those sacrifices in past struggles vain.

Recognizing the nature of the difficulty of 1917, that the problems we find in this moment comprise the essence of its potential pertinence for us, may be the first step in our recognizing the character of the regression the Left has undergone since then. Like a troubling memory in an individual’s life that impinges upon consciousness, the memory of 1917 that troubles our conceptions of social-political possibilities in the present might help us reveal the problems we seek to overcome, the same problems against which Lenin and Luxemburg struggled. Even if a failure, theirs was a brilliant failure from which we cannot afford to be disinherited. | P

Next: Questions and Answers


[1] Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, translated by E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 2007), 143.
[2] Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 208.
[3] Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1930, edited by Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 218.

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Capital in history: The need for a Marxian philosophy of history of the Left

Chris Cutrone

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[The following is a talk given at the Marxist-Humanist Committee public forum on The Crisis in Marxist Thought, hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society in Chicago on Friday, July 25, 2008.]

I want to speak about the meaning of history for any purportedly Marxian Left.

We in Platypus focus on the history of the Left because we think that the narrative one tells about this history is in fact one’s theory of the present. Implicitly or explicitly, in one’s conception of the history of the Left, is an account of how the present came to be. By focusing on the history of the Left, or, by adopting a Left-centric view of history, we hypothesize that the most important determinations of the present are the result of what the Left has done or failed to do historically.

For the purposes of this talk, I will focus on the broadest possible framing for such questions and problems of capital in history, the broadest possible context within which I think one needs to understand the problems faced by the Left, specifically by a purportedly Marxian Left.

I will not, for example, be focusing so much on issues for Platypus in the history of the various phases and stages of capital itself, for instance our contention that the 1960s represented not any kind of advance, but a profound retrogression on the Left. I will not elucidate our account of how the present suffers from at least 3 generations of degeneration and regression on the Left: the first, in the 1930s, being tragic; the second in the 1960s being farcical; and the most recent, in the 1990s, being sterilizing.

But, suffice it to say, I will point out that, for Platypus, the recognition of regression and the attempt to understand its significance and causes is perhaps our most important point of departure. The topic of this talk is the most fundamental assumption informing our understanding of regression.

For purposes of brevity, I will not be citing explicitly, but I wish to indicate my indebtedness for the following treatment of a potential Marxian philosophy of history, beyond Marx and Engels themselves, and Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky, to Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and, last but not least, the Marx scholar Moishe Postone. And, moreover, I will be in dialogue, through these writers, with Hegel, who distinguished philosophical history as the story of the development of freedom.—For Hegel, history is only meaningful the degree to which it is the story of freedom.

Capital is completely unprecedented in the history of humanity, hence, any struggle for emancipation beyond capital is also completely unprecedented. While there is a connection between the unprecedented nature of the emergence of capital in history and the struggle to get beyond it, this connection can also be highly misleading, leading to a false symmetry between the transition into and within different periods of the transformations of modern capital, and a potential transition beyond capital. The revolt of the Third Estate, which initiated a still on-going and never-to-be-exhausted modern history of bourgeois-democratic revolutions, is both the ground for, and, from a Marxian perspective, the now potentially historically obsolescent social form of politics from which proletarian socialist politics seeks to depart, to get beyond.

Hegel, as a philosopher of the time of the last of the great bourgeois-democratic revolutions marking the emergence of modern capital, the Great French Revolution of 1789, was for this reason a theorist of the revolt of the Third Estate. Marx, who came later, after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century, faced problems Hegel did not.

It has often been stated, but not fully comprehended by Marxists that Marx recognized the historical mission of the class-conscious proletariat, to overcome capitalism and to thus do away with class society. Traditionally, this meant, however paradoxically, either the end of the pre-history or the beginning of the true history of humanity.—In a sense, this duality of the possibility of an end and a true beginning, was a response to a Right Hegelian notion of an end to history, what is assumed by apologists for capital as a best of all possible worlds.

Famously, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels stated that all history hitherto has been the history of class struggles; Engels added a clever footnote later that specified “all written history.” We might extrapolate from this that what Engels meant was the history of civilization; history as class struggle did not pertain, for instance, to human history or social life prior to the formation of classes, the time of the supposed “primitive communism.” Later, in 1942 (in “Reflections on Class Theory”), Adorno, following Benjamin (in the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 1940), wrote that such a conception by Marx and Engels of all of history as the history of class struggles was in fact a critique of all of history, a critique of history itself.

So in what way does the critique of history matter in the critique of capital? The problem with the commonplace view of capitalism as primarily a problem of exploitation is that it is in this dimension that capital fails to distinguish itself from other forms of civilization. What is new in capital is social domination, which must be distinguished both logically and historically, structurally and empirically, from exploitation, to which it is not reducible. Social domination means the domination of society by capital. This is what is new about capital in the history of civilization; prior forms of civilization knew overt domination of some social groups over others, but did not know as Marx recognized in capital a social dynamic to which all social groups—all aspects of society as a whole—are subject.

So we must first draw a demarcation approximately 10,000 years ago, with the origins of civilization and class society, when the great agricultural revolution of the Neolithic Age took place, and human beings went from being nomadic hunter-gatherers to becoming settled agriculturalists. The predominant mode of life for humanity went from the hunter-gatherer to the peasant, and was this for most of subsequent history.

Several hundred years ago, however, a similarly profound transformation began, in which the predominant mode of life has gone from agricultural peasant to urban worker: wage-earner, manufacturer, and industrial producer.

More proximally, with the Industrial Revolution in the late-18th to early-19th Centuries, certain aspects of this “bourgeois” epoch of civilization and society manifested themselves and threw this history of the emergence of modernity into a new light. Rather than an “end of history” as bourgeois thinkers up to that time had thought, modern social life entered into a severe crisis that fundamentally problematized the transition from peasant- to worker-based society.

With Marx in the 19th Century came the realization that bourgeois society, along with all its categories of subjectivity including its valorization of labor, might itself be transitional, that the end-goal of humanity might not be found in the productive individual of bourgeois theory and practice, but that this society might point beyond itself, towards a potential qualitative transformation at least as profound as that which separated the peasant way of life from the urban “proletarian” one, indeed a transition more on the order of profundity of the Neolithic Revolution in agriculture that ended hunter-gatherer society 10,000 years ago, more profound than that which separated modern from traditional society.

At the same time that this modern, bourgeois society ratcheted into high gear by the late-18th Century, it entered into crisis, and a new, unprecedented historical phenomenon was manifested in political life, the “Left.” —While earlier forms of politics certainly disputed values, this was not in terms of historical “progress,” which became the hallmark of the Left.

The Industrial Revolution of the early 19th Century, the introduction of machine production, was accompanied by the optimistic and exhilarating socialist utopias suggested by these new developments, pointing to fantastical possibilities expressed in the imaginations of Fourier and Saint-Simon, among others.

Marx regarded the society of “bourgeois right” and “private property” as indeed already resting on the social constitution and mediation of labor, from which private property was derived, and asked the question of whether the trajectory of this society, from the revolt of the Third Estate and the manufacturing era in the 18th Century to the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century, indicated the possibility of a further development.

In the midst of the dramatic social transformations of the 19th Century in which, as Marx put it in the Manifesto, “all that was solid melted into air,” as early as 1843, Marx prognosed and faced the future virtual proletarianization of society, and asked whether and how humanity in proletarian form might liberate itself from this condition, whether and how, and with what necessity the proletariat would “transcend” and “abolish itself.” As early as the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx recognized that socialism (of Proudhon et al.) was itself symptomatic of capital: proletarian labor was constitutive of capital, and thus its politics was symptomatic of how the society conditioned by capital might reveal itself as transitional, as pointing beyond itself.—This was Marx’s most fundamental point of departure, that proletarianization was a substantial social problem and not merely relative to the bourgeoisie, and that the proletarianization of society was not the overcoming of capital but its fullest realization, and that this—the proletarianized society of capital—pointed beyond itself.

Thus, with Marx, a philosophy of the history of the Left was born. For Marx was not a socialist or communist so much as a thinker who tasked himself with understanding the meaning of the emergence of proletarian socialism in history. Marx was not simply the best or most consistent or radical socialist, but rather the most historically, and hence critically, self-aware. By “scientific” socialism, Marx understood himself to be elaborating a form of knowledge aware of its own conditions of possibility.

For a Hegelian and Marxian clarification of the specificity of the modern problem of social freedom, however, it becomes clear that the Left must define itself not sociologically, whether in terms of socioeconomic class or a principle of collectivism over individualism, etc., but rather as a matter of consciousness, specifically historical consciousness.

For, starting with Marx, it is consciousness of history and historical potential and possibilities, however apparently utopian or obscure, that distinguishes the Left from the Right, not the struggle against oppression—which the modern Right also claims. The Right does not represent the past but rather the foreclosing of possibilities in the present.

For this reason, it is important for us to recognize the potential and fact of regression that the possibilities for the Left in theory and practice have suffered as a result of the abandonment of historical consciousness in favor of the immediacies of struggles against oppression.

Marx’s critique of symptomatic socialism, from Proudhon, Lassalle, Bakunin, et al., to his own followers in the new German Social-Democratic Party and their program at Gotha (as well as in Engels’s subsequent critique of the Erfurt Programme), was aimed at maintaining the Marxian vision corresponding to the horizon of possibility of post-capitalist and post-proletarian society.

Unfortunately, beginning in Marx’s own lifetime, the form of politics he sought to inspire began to fall well below the threshold of this critically important consciousness of history. And the vast majority of this regression has taken place precisely in the name of “Marxism.” Throughout the history of Marxism, from the disputes with the anarchists in the 1st International Workingmen’s Association, and disputes in the 2nd Socialist International, to the subsequent splits in the Marxist workers’ movement with the Bolshevik-led Third, Communist International and Trotskyist Fourth International, a sometimes heroic but, in retrospect, overwhelmingly tragic struggle to preserve or recover something of the initial Marxian point of departure for modern proletarian socialism took place.

In the latter half of the 20th Century, developments regressed so far behind the original Marxian self-consciousness that Marxism itself became an affirmative ideology of industrial society, and the threshold of post-capitalist society became obscured, finding expression only obtusely, in various recrudescent utopian ideologies, and, finally, in the most recent period, with the hegemony of “anarchist” ideologies and Romantic rejections of modernity.

But, beyond this crisis and passage into oblivion of a specifically Marxian approach, the “Left” itself, which emerged prior to Hegel and Marx’s attempts to philosophize its historical significance, has virtually disappeared. The present inability to distinguish conservative-reactionary from progressive-emancipatory responses to the problems of society conditioned by capital, is inseparable from the decline and disappearance of the social movement of proletarian socialism for which Marx had sought to provide a more adequate and provocative self-consciousness at the time of its emergence in the 19th Century.

Paradoxically, as Lukács, following Luxemburg and Lenin, already pointed out, almost a century ago, while the apparent possibility of overcoming capital approaches in certain respects, in another sense it seems to retreat infinitely beyond the horizon of possibility. Can we follow Luxemburg’s early recognition of the opportunism that always threatens us, not as some kind of selling-out or falling from grace, but rather the manifestation of the very real fear that attends the dawning awareness of what grave risks are entailed in trying to fundamentally move the world beyond capital?

What’s worse—and, in the present, prior to any danger of “opportunism”—with the extreme coarsening if not utter disintegration of the ability to apprehend and transform capital through working-class politics, has come the coarsening of our ability to even recognize and apprehend, let alone adequately understand our social reality. We do not suffer simply from opportunism but from a rather more basic disorientation. Today we are faced with the problem not of changing the world but more fundamentally of understanding it.

On the other hand, approaching Marxian socialism, are we dealing with a “utopia?”—And, if so, what of this? What is the significance of our “utopian” sense of human potential beyond capital and proletarian labor? Is it a mere dream?

Marx began with utopian socialism and ended with the most influential if spectacularly failing modern political ideology, “scientific socialism.” At the same time, Marx gave us an acute and incisive critical framework for grasping the reasons why the last 200 years have been, by far, the most tumultuously transformative but also destructive epoch of human civilization, why this period has promised so much and yet disappointed so bitterly. The last 200 years have seen more, and more profound changes, than prior millennia have. Marx attempted to grasp the reasons for this. Others have failed to see the difference and have tried to re-assimilate modern history back into its antecedents (for instance, in postmodernist illusions of an endless medievalism: see Bruno Latour’s 1993 book We Have Never Been Modern).

What would it mean to treat the entire Marxian project as, first and foremost, a recognition of the history of modernity tout court as one of the pathology of transition, from the class society that emerged with the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago and the civilizations based on an essentially peasant way of life, through the emergence of the commodity form of social mediation, to the present global civilization dominated by capital, towards a form of humanity that might lie beyond this?

With Marx we are faced with a self-consciousness of an obscure and mysterious historical task, which can only be further clarified theoretically through transformative practice—the practice of proletarian socialism. But this task has been abandoned in favor of what are essentially capital-reconstituting struggles, attempting to cope with the vicissitudes of the dynamics of modern history. But this re-assimilation of Marxism back into ideology characteristic of the revolt of the Third Estate means the loss of the true horizon of possibility that motivated Marx and gave his project meaning and urgency.

Can we follow Marx and the best historically revolutionary Marxists who followed him in recognizing the forms of discontent in the pathological society we inhabit as being themselves symptomatic of and bound up with the very problem against which they rage? Can we avoid the premature post-capitalism and bad, reactionary utopianism that attends the present death of the Left in theory in practice, and preserve and fulfill the tasks given to us by history? Can we recognize the breadth and depth of the problem we seek to overcome without retreating into wishful thinking and ideological gracing of the accomplished fact, and apologizing for impulses that only seem directed against it, at the expense of what might lie beyond the traps of the suffering of the present?

We urgently need an acute awareness of our historical epoch as well as of our fleeting moment now, within it.—We must ask what it is about the present moment that might make the possibility of recovering a Marxian social and political consciousness viable, and how we can advance it by way of recovering it.

For the pathology of our modern society mediated by capital, of the proletarian form of social life and its self-objectifications, the new forms of humanity it makes possible, which are completely unprecedented in history, grows only worse the longer delayed is taking the possible and necessary steps to the next levels of the struggle for freedom.

The pathology grows worse, not merely in terms of the various forms of the destruction of humanity, which are daunting, but also, perhaps more importantly—and disturbingly—in the manifest worsening social conditions and capacities for practical politics on the Left, and our worsening theoretical awareness of them. If there has been a crisis and evacuation of Marxian thought, it has been because its most fundamental context and point of departure, its awareness of its greater historical moment, the possibility of an epochal transition, has been forgotten, while we have not ceased to share this moment, but only lost sight of its necessities and possibilities. Any future emancipatory politics must regain such awareness of the transitional nature of capitalist modernity and of the reasons why we pay such a steep price for failing to recognize this.

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Nothing Left to say: a critique of the Guardian’s coverage of the 2008 Mumbai attacks

Spencer A. Leonard

[This article has been reprinted in Mainstream Weekly]

Deep historical precedents

However sincere its backers or belligerent its enemies, the “War on Terror” is not and cannot become anti-Islamist. This is not because, as some think, there is no Islamist or Taliban-style fascism on the receiving end of America’s War on Terror. Far from it. The reason is that the prosecutors of the war are only half committed to the selective elimination of certain religious reactionaries. In consequence, the War on Terror presents the Left with a dilemma: How to respond to apparently anti-fascist imperialism? It is a dilemma that has been faced before, most notably in the experience of World War II. Writing in the Partisan Review after the Allies’ “liberation” of French North Africa and the reinstallation of French imperialism there, Leftist intellectual Dwight MacDonald expressed those difficulties as follows:

A nation fighting the kind of war the French Revolutionary armies fought, or the Red Army in 1919, does all it can to politicize the struggle. It is notable that everything possible is done by [American] leaders to depoliticize this war. . . . Some weeks ago, the Office of War Information issued directives to its propagandists on “the nature of the enemy.” [Hitler] was described as a bully, a murderer, a thief, a gangster, etc., but only once in the lengthy document as a fascist. [“The Future of Democratic Values” in The Partisan Reader, 548]

Roosevelt and Churchill’s imperialist “anti-fascism” arose as a deliberate propaganda project set to counter that fascist “anti-imperialism” that found fertile soil among Persian, Arab, and Indian nationalists in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia in the 1930s and 40s. Leftists like MacDonald were aware that as in North Africa, the contradictions of the Allied war effort were most starkly revealed in the British struggle to preserve their empire in India. There, the crypto-fascist Subhas Chandra Bose emerged as a leading nationalist, eventually escaping British India and lending military assistance and the prestige of his cause to the fascist Axis. Anticipating such possibilities, Leon Trotsky chose to address the issue in 1939 in “An Open Letter to the Workers of India,” in which he warned against imperialist overtures to support a “war . . . waged for principles of ‘democracy,’ ” arguing that by dissolving itself into a liberal-Stalinist popular front, the Left prepared the way for its own marginalization and for the betrayal of the very anti-fascist aims that actuated it to begin with.

Unable to work through its past, the Left today is disoriented. It stumbles about aimlessly while the executors of the War on Terror, their first blush of neo-conservative ideological enthusiasm now dissipated, gradually abandon the rhetoric of “fascism” and “democracy,” growing more “pragmatic” day by day. Just as American officers found Vichy French colonial administrators and officers in 1943, American war makers today are discovering the congeniality of the “good Taliban” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, even as they applaud the “moderate elements” in Iraq. As I show in the following review of significant editorials on the Mumbai attacks written by prominent Indian Leftists, and Leftists writing about India, the crisis that MacDonald identified in 1943 remains with us still. Only now it seems that, if the Left could be said to still exist, we would be forced to confess finally that it has not learned the lessons of the failures of the Popular Front against fascism in the 1930s and that it remains the inheritor of Stalinism. Today, as in the 1930s, there prevails a tacit alliance between Islamist fascism and important segments of the Left which actively inhibits the re-emergence of emancipatory politics. Of course, some things have changed. In the 1940s the Left signed up with “anti-fascist” imperialism, in the 2000s the Left tends to keep company with fascist “anti-imperialists.” The review of media discourse that follows focuses on pieces appearing in one of the world’s most Left-leaning mass-circulation daily newspapers in English today, the Manchester Guardian or simply The Guardian. In examining works from this source, I argue that in their incapacity to isolate and cogently discuss the issues raised by the attacks they exemplify what Platypus terms “the death of the Left.” The shortcomings of these pieces are rooted in the Left’s inability to honestly face up to its historical circumstances.

Mumbai's Public Transportation

An overcrowded local train in Mumbai

9/11 and the Mumbai attacks

In the title of her December 4, 2008 Guardian editorial on the Mumbai attacks, Priyamvada Gopal asserts that “Comparing Mumbai to 9/11 diminishes both tragedies.” But even this title is deceitful, since, as her readers soon discover, the piece is not concerned with the particularities of the two events. Nor does the danger of “diminishing” 9/11 give Gopal pause. On the contrary, diminishing and displacing 9/11 from our active preoccupations is her intent. Allowing the November attack on Mumbai to be deemed “India’s 9/11” would be, she argues, “to privilege the experience of the United States” and to be complicit with India’s “relentless Americanization.” 9/11 is either another brand name in McWorld or something even more sinister, an event so “fetishized” as to “sanction endless vengeance,” even as it obscures “the experience of millions [elsewhere] who have suffered as much” as those who died or were injured in the attack on the U.S. on that day. 9/11 “legitimized a false war,” “created legal abominations,” and “strengthened neoconservatism.”

While Gopal’s piece makes perfunctory mention of the suffering of the victims of 9/11, it says nothing of the actual contours of that event, much less the intentions behind it. The U.S. reaction concerns her more than the attack itself does. Rather than offering any analysis of the event about which she was writing, Gopal strains to change the subject. Presumably the killing spree that took place in Mumbai from November 26th to November 29th 2008 (and has now come to be referred to “11/26”), requires no analysis. But when we actually specify what 9/11 was, can the comparison with it really be so easily avoided?

The crucial point to be made about 9/11 — and the one that Gopal studiously avoids — makes the comparison with the Mumbai attacks inevitable: both were attacks inspired by Islamism on intensely cosmopolitan urban populations with the intention of inflicting the maximum number of casualties. Moreover, like New York, Mumbai is an old colonial port city with a rich if submerged history of radical democratic struggle. Like New York, Mumbai is the commercial and cultural, though not the political, capital of a pluralistic democracy. In short, like New York, Mumbai is one of world’s great nerve-centers of contemporary capitalism. Also, the attacks on Mumbai were not on the Hindu chauvinist politics of Bal Thackeray, just as the 9/11 attack was not on the neo-liberalism of Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg. In both cases, the targets were the profane pleasures of modern society. In both cases, the attacks were made, so to speak, in plain view, so that the fascistic menace was unmistakable (albeit in the absurdly comic form of expressionless young men who might, but for the assault rifles in their hands, be easily mistaken for ravers en route to Goa). Finally, as with 9/11, the regional strategic consequences bound to flow from the Mumbai attacks are profound.

In a certain respect, the semiotics of the attacks in Mumbai were even more ghastly than those of 9/11, since it witnessed the deliberate hunting of Jews qua Jews, especially at the Chabad House, where Jews were subjected to savage beatings before their execution, unlike even the Americans and Britons who were also singled out. For those who planned the attacks killing Jews was a priority and it was executed in the midst of a police siege by killers who had, in all likelihood, never so much as seen a Jewish person before. Though the murderous anti-Semitism on display in Mumbai ought by now to be an all-too-familiar aspect of Islamist ideology, Guardian correspondent Richard Silverstein, like Gopal on the editorial page, declines to acknowledge the obvious. Instead he insists that the attack on Chabad House was “not necessarily anti-Semitic,” claiming that the attackers were seeking “redress for crimes against Palestine” [“Why did the Attackers Choose to Attack Chabad House” Guardian 12/4/2008, cf. Alex Stein “Inspiration from India” Guardian 12/4/2008]. From this we may safely conclude that, for Silverstein, anytime a Muslim kills a Jew he need only utter the magic word “Palestine” to have his guilt absolved: Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza means that it is open season on Jews all over the world. In the same vein, William Dalrymple, informs the wised-up readers of the Guardian that “the horrific events have to be seen in the context of. . . the abject failure of the Bush administration” and the “ill-treatment of the people of Kashmir” [“Mumbai Atrocities Highlight Need for a Solution in Kashmir” Guardian 11/30/08]. In Arundhati Roy’s column, too, we rely upon the terrorists to tell the truth and to remind “us” of the “things we don’t want to talk about any more” [“The Monster in the Mirror,” 12/13/08]. It is one thing for a journalist to report the content of authoritarian manifestoes or the statements terrorists make in the course of an attack; it is quite another matter to rationalize such statements in the manner of Silverstein, Dalrymple, and Roy.

Highlighting the political significance of the attack on Chabad House cannot be allowed to obscure the fact that there was also something quite discriminating about the seemingly more indiscriminate killing of commuters at the Victoria Terminus. It is not enough to say simply that, compared to the foreigners and the rich people at the Taj and Oberoi Hotels, the victims there were poorer, working people, though this is true. It is also worth pointing out that at the train station, the attackers fired directly into crowds. The Muslims among the dead there were not unintended victims. They were punished for living and working in peace in secular democratic India, i.e. of having failed to join the jihad. Of course, the Hindus regarded as pagans were positively marked for slaughter. As for the attacks on Mumbai’s elite hotels, likewise, the clear intent was to comingle on their marble floors the blood of dying unbelievers of all sorts — Zionist, Crusader, and Infidel. There again was the same unbridled murderousness that has been a significant feature of previous attacks, such as the 2006 commuter train in Mumbai and the serial bombings earlier in 2008 in Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, and Delhi, to name just a few. These rather elementary aspects of the politics behind the Mumbai attacks rarely merit mention in the analysis to be found in the Guardian. But while the “Left” cannot remain at this elementary level of analysis, neither can it afford to ignore the obvious.

While Gopal is right to claim that in many respects 9/11 is not unique as a point of comparison (there have been many other Islamist terrorist attacks besides 9/11), her aim seems not to locate the attacks in an alternative history of recent Islamist terrorism, as, for instance, in relation to the bombing in Pakistan in September of the Islamabad Marriott that killed 53 and injured more than 250. Rather, the Mumbai attacks are treated as have no determinate character whatsoever, Gopal preferring to speak only of a “massacre of defenceless innocents.” Presumably the same is true of the bomb detonated December 5th, 2008 in a market outside a Shi’a mosque in Peshawar in which 22 people were killed and more than 90 were wounded. While 9/11 posed for everyone worldwide the question of modern Islamism, Gopal’s editorial reveals once again how the Left continues to rely on its old reflex responses — supposed “anti-imperialism” — to defer any confrontation with the full scope of the barbarism in our time. In this way, the piece tends to obscure or deny what is salient for advancing (or even imagining) a politics genuinely capable of both countering fascism and reconstituting an emancipatory politics in South Asia.

Mumbai train terminal attacked

Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji Station (AKA Victoria Terminus) at rush hour

The Pakistan connection

All indications identify the culprit of the Mumbai attacks to be the notorious Pakistani Islamist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba [LeT], a group the CIA and Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence [ISI] founded in the early 1980s to foment jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Beginning in the early 1990s, it shifted focus to Indian Kashmir. It was in one of LeT’s Rawalpindi safe houses that the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was apprehended in 2003. Late the previous year, Pakistani authorities took al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah from a LeT safe house in Faisalabad.

LeT is not hidden away in remote tribal areas beyond the reach of the Pakistani state. It recruits, indoctrinates, and trains members for military action in full view of the Pakistani Army, which must, therefore, be said to protect it. And it is worth noting that there is nothing on the Indian side comparable to Pakistan’s harboring of such “non-state actors.” Of course, the Pakistani government’s first reaction to the news of the Mumbai attacks was, as usual, to flatly deny claims that the attackers were Pakistani, or that LeT was involved. But the important investigation of Guardian journalist Saeed Shah helped confound these denials. This he did by finding the one of many villages in Pakistan named Faridkot, where in his statement to the Indian police the sole surviving terrorist, Ajmal Amir Kasab, claimed he was born. To confirm that he had in fact found the attacker’s village and that LeT recruiters were indeed active there, Shah spoke to local people. One confirmed the story on condition of anonymity, adding, “We know that boy [caught in Mumbai] is from Faridkot. . . . We knew from the first night [of the attack]. They brainwash our youth about jihad. There are people who do it in this village.” [Saeed Shah, “Mumbai Terrorist came from Pakistan, local Villagers Confirm” Guardian 12/7/08]. Given Islamabad’s proven mendacity, Washington’s opportunism, and Delhi’s capacity for evidence-tampering and deception of the public (most notoriously in the botched frame-up of the alleged plotters of the December 13, 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament), Shah’s brand of investigative journalism is invaluable. His reports in the Guardian were significant and sound — in stark contrast to the irresponsible commentary we are addressing here.

Though officially denied in Islamabad, there can be no doubt that many in the Pakistani Army and ISI approve and promote LeT’s attempts to Islamicize the resistance to India’s long-standing military occupation of Kashmir. This collusion between elements inside the Pakistani Army and LeT is inextricably related to the Mumbai attacks. For years the Pakistani military has permitted jihadis fighting in Kashmir free rein to train and recruit in Pakistan creating the milieu from which the Mumbai attacks came. Even if the LeT and the other organizations of Kashmiri and Afghan jihadis which the ISI has created are no longer under their control, it can scarcely disclaim all responsibility for their actions. Moreover, as confirmed by the July 7th 2008 bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, the ISI is certainly directly engaged in the promotion of the Taliban and the sabotaging of the Karzai government in Afghanistan. We catch a glimpse of such Pakistani army councils when President Asif Ali Zardari, upon being pressed regarding LeT involvement, tellingly exclaims: “Even if these activists are linked to the LeT, who do you think we are fighting?” [quoted in Bernard-Henri Levy, “Let's Give Pakistan the Attention It Deserves” Wall Street Journal 12/3/08]. That is, the resistance to the newly elected government’s assertion of its authority over the military (a highly fraught proposition) derives from those elements still promoting a jihadi-based foreign policy.

LeT is chiefly a player in the growth industry that is Islamist terror attacks against India, a country al-Qaeda rightly perceives as a weak link in the Zionist-Crusader-Infidel alliance with which so many of its recent propaganda broadcasts have been preoccupied. While, in knowing tones, area specialists insist on the great significance of the theological distinctions between jihadi groups, bin Laden himself is clear in his reiterated calls for unity. He knows, even if they do not, that there is only one modern jihad and that, in Pakistan, it is bidding for the soul of the Army. As bin Laden’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri (otherwise notorious for his recent slander of Barack Obama as a “House Slave”), stated in his April 2006 message “To the People of Pakistan”:

Musharraf was the primary backer of [America’s] ouster of the Islamic Emirate from Kabul. . . As a result of Musharraf’s betrayal, Indian intelligence has crept close to the Pakistan-Afghan border. . . [Consequently] the Pakistani Army, with the exit of the Taliban government from Kabul, became a double loser: first, the Pakistani Army lost the strategic depth which Afghanistan, with its highlands and mountains, can offer it in any Pakistani-Indian confrontation. And second, the Pakistani Army’s back became exposed to a regime hostile to it and allied with its enemies.

Zawahiri demonstrates perfect familiarity with the “national security” language in which top ISI officers have long rationalized their support for Islamist fascism. The civil war within the Muslim world has long since become a struggle inside the state apparatus of Pakistan. The Army has become so Islamized that its strategic aims are now interchangeably describable in the rhetoric of Clausewitz or of jihad. The Mumbai attacks and LeT’s rising prominence also represents a fusion of al-Qaeda’s international agenda to long-standing projects of the Pakistani military and ISI.

Mumbai attack suspect
Mumbai attack suspect

Reaction in-progress

While it is certainly well for commentators such as Gopal to wish that cool heads should prevail in the Government of India’s deliberations regarding its response, her ignoring of the manifestly Islamist character of the attack, the apparent link to LeT, and the internal tensions within the Pakistani state weakens that very plea for moderation and peaceful negotiations. Her commentary leaves unspecified what the purpose of any negotiation might be. After all, it is clear that, as in the past, Pakistan will first try to deny all involvement, then refuse to extradite its citizens to face trial, and, in the end, will release all those it has rounded up under pressure from the U.S. In the course of this response, Pakistan will no doubt take the opportunity to point out the manner in which India has in the past used terror attacks as an occasion to frame inconvenient dissidents and advance repressive purposes. At any rate, it is not clear that Pakistan can be pressured to take on the jihadi groups at all. As Fareed Zakaria’s December 8, 2008 CNN interview with former ISI chief Hamid Gul suggests, the institutional culture of Pakistani military intelligence is so completely Islamicized as to permit a senior spokesman to state publicly, on global media, that 9/11 and the Mumbai attacks were “an inside job” perpetrated by the “Zionists and the neo-cons.” This is from a man who claimed in 2002 that “jihad has the UN sanction,” and who is rumored to have relayed information to the Taliban in advance of U.S. strikes. Given the fact that such opinions can be held by a man in Gul’s position, deepest anxieties are not unwarranted. We might add that Gul’s conspiracy-mongering is not confined to military circles, but is widely represented in the Pakistani media today [for which see, most recently, Kamal Siddiqi’s “Everyone at Fault Except Us” in The News (Islamabad) 12/15/08]. As for Pakistan’s bureaucratic and scientific elite, it will do well to remember that the “father” of the country’s nuclear program, A. Q. Khan, in February 1984 dismissed concerns about Pakistan’s nuclear program as “a figment of the Zionist mind.” Three years later, Khan reversed himself to gleefully announce that Pakistan had succeeded in constructing what he called an “Islamic bomb” [Leonard Weiss, “Pakistan: It’s Déjà vu all Over Again” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 60:3 (May/June 2004), 55-56].

Gopal’s analysis leaves unspecified a fact crucial for the Left to recognize, that Pakistan is subject to and an exporter of a murderous fascism that goes unopposed by any mass political organization inside the country and which enjoys informal state support. Radical street demonstrations and political organizing in Pakistan have been largely moribund for some decades now, as these have been the near-exclusive domain of reactionary and jingoistic displays, the recent “lawyers’ movement” notwithstanding. The little labor organization that once existed in the country is now utterly dispirited and depoliticized. At the same time, given the permanent political crisis in the region, a circumstance to which all the relevant political actors, not least the NATO commanders in Afghanistan, are reconciled, the demand for the reigning-in of fascism, whether “Hindu” or “Muslim,” serves only to reinforce the status quo. That is, at present this demand only translates into support for the Indian National Congress or the Pakistan People’s Party, political defenders of the wretched cronyism that prevails in both countries.
While Gopal is not wrong to note the crimes of the Bush administration, neither it nor American imperialism is responsible for the attacks on Mumbai. Nor does a recitation of the sordid history of U.S. support for military dictator General Zia ul-Haq’s Islamicization of Pakistan and for the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s fundamentally alter the fact that the jihadis have their own deeply reactionary agenda that is wholly irreconcilable with secular democratic politics in South Asia. In this era of political imbecility, it requires emphasizing that opposition to this ISI-jihadi nexus in Pakistan implies no tempering of the critique of the Hindutvavadis or Hindu fascists in India, nor any diminution of their crimes, such as the 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid and the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat. On the contrary.

At least since the time of Zia, the political order in Pakistan has rested on a despicable alliance between military despotism and Islamicism. This alliance, which has functioned during both civilian and military governments, is responsible for many thousands of corpses of Leftist activists, trade unionists, and intellectuals. Neither the Bush administration nor recent Pakistani leadership, whether that of Musharraf or Zardari, has done anything to disrupt it. Indeed, they are on the side historically of those who perpetrated those crimes. Rather than emphasize this complicity, Gopal reserves her concern for what the Indian government might do. If anything, what we have seen is something that demonstrates the strength of Indian democracy, as with the immediate acceptance of responsibility and resignation by the Indian Home Minister Shivraj Patil, Chief Minister of Maharashtra Vilasrao Deshmukh, and Home Minister of Maharashtra R. R. Patil. Her concern to restrain India also sits uneasily with the statements of President Zardari of Pakistan who, writing in the New York Times, seems precisely to pin his hope on leveraging U.S. and Indian pressure to strengthen his hand against the military establishment and the homegrown Islamism that seeks to overthrow his government. Certainly, recognizing Islamist responsibility and ISI complicity implies no support for the opportunistic use to which the Mumbai attacks be put by India’s military and political parties. As its entire long history shows, when the Left evades such facts as ill-suited to its preferred understanding of the political environment, not only does it confess its own helplessness in the face of the present, but threatens in the process to betray — yet again — what should be its own most fundamental commitments.

The possibility of a Left

In urging that the Mumbai attacks are not to be compared to 9/11, Gopal, as we have seen, was not concerned with the actual events themselves so much as the potential Indian response. Instead of strengthening democracy and the struggle against authoritarianism (much less any attempt to criticize and advance the politics of the Left), Gopal proposes something else: “Rather than imitate the US . . . India has the option of turning to its own unique history in seeking an end to the violence.” Invoking Gandhi, she declares, “India has no need to cede its unique cultural resources for the derivative language of 9/11.” To the same purpose Arundhati Roy relates her recognition that “November isn’t September, 2008 isn’t 2001, Pakistan isn’t Afghanistan and India isn’t America.” Like Gopal, Roy dismisses as trifling the “war on TV,” attempting to insert it into the familiar framework for understanding Hindu-Muslim antagonism in South Asia, that of so-called “communal violence” which she duly attributes to the legacy of British colonial mendacity. If indeed Gopal acknowledges any danger to emanate from Pakistan, she leaves it to the American Empire to sort out. As for the political (as opposed to cultural) resources available to India, Gopal declines to specify which of those is up to the task of opposing the fascism on display on 11/26. Should we inquire as to India’s political as opposed to cultural resources, Gopal would offer nothing in reply. But the degeneracy of the Indian left is a rich subject. After all, the Indian Left in recent years has been guilty of active complicity with Islamism as, for instance, in the 2007 expulsion of Bangladeshi asylum seeker, feminist, and critic of Islamism, Taslima Nasreen by the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Government of West Bengal.

In the world Guardian writers prefer not to face, the Left is in no position to affect outcomes. Still, acknowledging circumstances and the Left’s exhaustion is the only way forward. For, to invert Marx’s famous thesis, we will not be in position to change the world, until and unless we understand it. And the crucial conditioning factor of current events is the death of the Left. In the here-and-now, it is clear that the political struggle against Islamism in South Asia, as elsewhere, has a military aspect and that any marginally desirable political outcome will have been brought about at least in part by means of the violence of state action. Moreover, as most Leftists would doubtless be loathe to admit, the very prospect of reconstituting Leftist politics in South Asia rides to no small extent on the ability of the U.S. and NATO to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Left has a stake in historical processes that at present it is powerless to affect.

It has long been evident that with respect to “the war on TV” the scattered fragments of the Left can do little more than watch the bullets fly. However, we might even take some comfort in the fact that, once again in the recent elections, most people in Pakistan rejected the appeal of the religious parties. Despite the prevailing depoliticization, many recognized that they too have stakes in the struggle against Islamism, and did not allow their discontent with the status quo to lead to a reconciliation with it. The Left ought to attend more closely to the dilemma the Pakistani people are forced to negotiate on account of a failed politics, i.e. a choice between two right-wing alternatives. Certainly, as has been shown here, anti-imperialism in our time has become a smokescreen that obscures more than it reveals. It alone offers no way forward. While we cannot contemplate without horror an Islamist victory in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Kashmir. At the same time, it is impossible to imagine its defeat at the hands of such “enemies” as it now faces. That is, in present circumstances the “War on Terror” is no more horrific to contemplate than is the peace to be made with it. If, rather than railing against or rallying on behalf of one or another right-wing politics, the Left would be complicit with neither barbarous war nor rotten peace, it will have to subject itself to searching critical reflection. Though as “a newspaper of record” the Guardian will continue documenting atrocities symptomatically expressive of the ongoing political regression like the attacks on Mumbai, it will do so without the critical awareness that this is what it’s doing.

his poster reads in part: "Who gets the wealth that is produced in India? The British Empire. It is all sent there and is not used for the India’s benefit! Britain has ruled India for 200 years and still the Indian poor are dying of hunger."

This German propaganda poster (circa 1944) reads in part: "Who gets the wealth that is produced in India? The British Empire. It is all sent there and is not used for the India’s benefit! Britain has ruled India for 200 years and still the Indian poor are dying of hunger."

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The Maoist insurgency in India: End of the road for Indian Stalinism?

An interview with Jairus Banaji

Spencer A. Leonard and Sunit Singh

Platypus Review 26 | August 2010

Given the considerable international interest in the progress of Naxalism on the Indian subcontinent, particularly in the wake of the 2008 Maoist revolution in Nepal, we are pleased to publish the following interview with Marxist and historian Jairus Banaji conducted on June 28, 2010.

Spencer Leonard: The immediate occasion for our interview on the Naxalites or Indian Maoists is Arundhati Roy’s widely read and controversial essay, “Walking With the Comrades,” published in the Indian magazine Outlook. There Roy speaks of “the deadly war unfolding in the jungles of central India between the Naxalite guerillas and the Government of India,” one that she expects “will have serious consequences for us all.”1 Is Roy’s depiction of the current situation accurate? If so, how have events reached such a critical state? How, more generally, does Roy frame today’s Naxalite struggle and do you agree with this framing? Does the “main contradiction,” as a Maoist might say, consist in the struggle between the Naxalite aborigines on the one side, and, on the other, what Roy refers to as the combination of “Hindu fundamentalism and economic totalitarianism”?

Jairus Banaji: There certainly is a Maoist insurgency raging in the tribal heartlands of central and eastern India, much of which is densely forested terrain. The tribal heartlands straddle different states in the country, so at least three or four major states are implicated in the insurgency, above all Chhattisgarh, which was hived off from Madhya Pradesh in 2000. To the extent that there has been a drive to open up the vast mineral resources of states like Chhattisgarh and Orissa to domestic and international capital, there is the connection Roy points to. As a definition of the “conjuncture” that has dominated the conflict since the late 1990s, she is clearly right.

A Naxalite guerilla army in central India

But the Naxal presence in these parts of India has little to do with the factors she talks about. Naxalism, or Indian Maoism, goes back to the late 1960s. What distinguishes it as a political current from other communists in India is the commitment to armed struggle and the violent overthrow of the state. It is not as if the perspectives of Naxalism flow from the circumstances one finds in the forested parts of India. The question is why, after its virtual extinction in the early 1970s, the movement was able to reassemble itself and reemerge as a less fragmented and more powerful force in the course of the 1990s. To account for that we have to look to different factors than those Roy identifies.

The Naxalites have always seen the so-called “principal contradiction” as that between the peasantry or the “broad mass of the people” on one side and “feudalism” or “semi-feudalism” on the other. They have never abandoned this position since it was evolved in the late 1960s. The revolution has always been seen by them as primarily agrarian, except that now “agrarian” has come to mean “tribal,” since their base is on the whole confined to the tribal or adivasi communities.

Sunit Singh: Please explain the confluence that led to the formation of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in September 2004, which united the Naxalite splinters, the People’s War Group, and the Maoist Communist Center? What explains the dramatic revivification of Naxalism after its decimation in the early 1970s and how do we understand the CPI (Maoist) as a political force today? To what extent has today’s Naxalism changed from its predecessor, the original CPI (Marxist–Leninist) (CPI (M–L))?

JB: The key fact about the Naxals in the late 1990s and 2000s is that they began to reverse decades of fragmentation through a series of successful mergers. The most important of these was the merger in 2004 between People’s War, itself the result of the People’s War Group fusing with Party Unity in 1998, and the Maoist Communist Centre of India (MCCI). That 2004 merger, which resulted in the formation of the CPI (Maoist), reflected a confluence of two major streams of Maoism in India, since People’s War was largely Andhra-based and the MCCI had its base almost entirely in Jharkhand—the southern part of Bihar which also became an independent state in 2000. To explain the successful reemergence of Naxal politics in the 1990s, we have to see the People’s War Group (PWG) as the decisive element of continuity between the rapturous Maoism of the 1960s–70s, dominated by the charismatic figure of Charu Mazumdar, and the movement we see today. The PWG was formally established in 1980 after some crucial years of preparation that involved a unique emphasis on mass work, the launching of mass organizations like the Ryotu Coolie Sangham, which was like a union of agricultural workers, and a “Go to the villages” campaign that sent middle-class youth into the Telangana countryside. Kondapalli Seetharamaiah, its founder, was able to attract the younger elements because he was seen as more militant because, among other things, he refused to have anything to do with elections. Following a dramatic escalation of conflict in Andhra Pradesh from 1985, PWG was able to build a substantial military capability and a network of safe havens for its armed squads (dalams) across state borders, in Gadchiroli in Maharashtra, directly north of the A.P. border, and in the undivided region of Bastar or southern Chhattisgarh to the north and east. Regis Debray in his Critique of Arms points out that no guerrilla movement can survive without rearguard bases, by which he means a swathe of territory which it can fall back on with relative security in times of intensified repression.2 This is exactly what happened with the squads that had been trained and built up in Andhra, or more precisely in Telangana, the northern part of the state, in the 1970s and 1980s. The recent flare up of conflict in Chhattisgarh is largely bound up with the intensified repression of 2005 that drove even more fighters into the Bastar region.

SL: In “Walking with the Comrades,” Roy sidesteps the question of Naxalite politics in favor of siding with a marginalized group, in this case “the tribals.” Thus she states that “[some] believe that the war in the forests is a war between the Government of India and the Maoists… [they] forget that tribal people in Central India have a history of resistance that predates Mao by centuries.” But she also wants to have it the other way around. For instance, this is what she says of the Naxalite leader and theoretician who first founded the CPI (M-L): “Charu Mazumdar was a visionary in much of what he wrote and said. The party he founded (and its many splinter groups) has kept the dream of revolution real and present in India.” What do you make of this curious political ambivalence respecting the actual Maoism (and the Marxism) of the Maoists? How do you understand Roy’s anti-Marxist, tribal revolutionary romance?

JB: The idea that the tribals and the CPI (Maoist) share the same objective is ludicrous! What the tribals have been fighting against is decades of oppression by moneylenders, traders, contractors, and officials of the forest department—in short, a long history of dispossession that has reduced them to a subhuman existence and exposed them to repeated violence. A large part of the blame for this lies with the unmitigated Malthusianism of the Indian state. By this I mean that the adivasis have been consigned to a slow death agony through decades of neglect and oppression that have left them vulnerable to political predators across the spectrum, including the Hindu Right. As Edward Duyker argued in Tribal Guerrillas, the Santals whom the Naxal groups drew into their ranks in the late 1960s “fought for specific concessions from the established rulers, while the CPI (Marxist–Leninist) fought for a new structure of rule altogether.”3 There is a big difference between those perspectives! The tribal aim is not to overthrow the Indian state but to succeed in securing unhindered access to resources that belong to them, but which the state has been denying them. The tribal struggle is for the right to life, to livelihood and dignity, including freedom from violence and from the racism that much of India exudes towards them. The massive alienation of tribal land that has gone on even after Independence was something the government could have stopped if it had the will to do so. Today the huge mineral resources of the tribal areas are up for grabs as state governments compete to attract investment from mining and steel giants. But whatever the CPI (Maoist) might think, the vast majority of the tribals in India have no conception of “capturing state power,” since the state itself is such an abstraction except in terms of harassment by forest officials, neglect by state governments, and violence from the police and paramilitary.

SL: In online comments on Roy’s article posted on kafila.org, you responded to the preoccupation with tribals and Naxalites with a series of rhetorical questions:

Where does the rest of India fit in? What categories do we have for them? Or are we seriously supposed to believe that the extraordinary tide of insurrection will wash over the messy landscapes of urban India and over the millions of disorganized workers in our countryside without the emergence of a powerful social agency… that it can contest the stranglehold of capitalism… without mass organizations, battles for democracy, struggles for the radicalization of culture, etc.?

To this you add, “in [Roy’s] vision of politics, there is no history of the Left that diverges from the romantic hagiographies of Naxalbari and its legacies.” Thus you contend that Roy’s thinking is impeded by a kind of amnesia. How precisely does Roy’s lack of awareness of and confrontation with the history of the Left compromise her ability to think through what it would mean to stage an emancipatory politics today? How does awareness of the history of the Left in the sense you intend differ from simply knowing the Left’s past? What are the consequences we face because of the Left’s widespread failure to work through its own history, a failure of which Roy is but a recent and prominent instance?

JB: Roy lacks any grasp of the history of the Maoist movement in India, which is why she can make that silly statement about Charu Mazumdar being visionary, when the bulk of his own party leadership denounced his “annihilation” line as pure adventurism and a whole series of splits fragmented the movement within a year or two. Mazumdar also played a disastrous role in splitting the movement in Andhra through a purely factional intervention. Roy’s background is clearly not the Left or any part of it, including the Maoists. What she does reflect is the disquiet generated, beginning in the 1990s, by the opening up of India to the world economy and the drive to create a globally competitive capitalism regardless of the costs this would inflict on workers and the mass of the population.

The Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), the campaign to halt the project to build a hydro-electric dam on the river Narmada, was the best example of the kind of “new social movements” that emerged in India in response to issues that the party left simply failed to take up. It was not led by any party, was related to a major single issue, and had roots very different from those of the organized left. It involved large-scale mobilization of the communities uprooted by the dam, but the NBA of course was eventually defeated in the sense that it failed to stop the dam from being built despite massive resistance. The defeat of the NBA generated a profound disillusionment with the state of Indian democracy, which is strongly reflected in Roy’s worka kind of “democratic pessimism.” The most extreme expression of this is the idea that India has a “fake democracy,” whatever that is supposed to mean.

But, let’s get back to Roy’s bizarre reference to Charu Mazumdar as a “visionary” who “kept the dream of revolution real and present in India.” The fact is that the “annihilation” line had led to such disastrous results by the end of 1971 that the majority of his own Central Committee denounced him as a “Trotskyite” and expelled him from the party! Indeed, the majority of a twenty-one member Central Committee had withdrawn support from him by November 1970, and Satya Narayan Singh, who was elected the new general secretary, described his line as “individual terrorism.” Even when the AICCCR (All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries) transformed itself into a party in April 1969, leading figures of the early Maoist movement in India were unhappy with the decision and many stayed out.

SS: Elaborate, if you will, on the exact form of struggle that Charu Mazumdar is associated with. What was the “annihilation line,” exactly?

JB: Like all Maoists, Mazumdar believed that the key social force in the revolutionary movement in India would be the peasantry. He adhered to the strategy mapped out in the deliberations between the CPI leadership and Stalin at the end of 1950, one product of which was a document known as the Tactical Line, which spoke of a two-stage revolution starting with a People’s Democratic State that would be ushered in by an armed revolution. Of course, by then Liu Shao-ch’i was already recommending the Chinese revolution as a model for all colonial and “semi-colonial” countries in their fight for national independence and people’s democracy. This would have to be an armed revolution based on the peasantry and “led by” the working class. The reference to the working class was purely rhetorical, since the leading class force in the revolution was the peasantry and the leadership of the working class existed in the more metaphysical shape of the party. The distinctiveness of Mazumdar’s politics was that he seriously believed it would be possible to arouse revolutionary fervor among the “masses” by annihilating “class enemies” such as the jotedars or larger landowners of Bengal, by forming small underground squads that would selectively target landlords, state officials, and other representatives of the exploiting class and state apparatus. Such shock attacks, he felt, would create a decisive breach and unleash a mass response. Mazumdar believed that the revolution in India could be completed in this manner by 1975! The idea was that the masses were simply bursting with revolutionary zeal and only needed a catalyst. As I said, the line generated considerable dissent, not least because it abandoned any notion of mass work.

Charu Mazumdar (1918–1972), first General Secretary of the CPI (M-L)

SS: So, when the Mazumdar faction constituted itself as the CPI (M–L) in April of 1969, what followed? Were other factions loyal to Peking folded into the new party? What happened to Mazumdar’s Maoist critics, those who argued that their M–L comrades had substituted terrorism for mass organizations such as trade unions and kisan sabhas?

JB: The Chinese Communist Party backed away from the Naxals pretty early when they realized that they were talking about different things. There was a distinct loss of enthusiasm from Peking, and Mazumdar faced increasing criticism. Parimal Dasgupta, a prominent union leader, advocated the building of mass organizations among workers, and criticized the neglect of urban work by Mazumdar’s followers. He disapproved of the idea of a clandestine party organization because it would mean abandoning any effort to build broader class-based organizations. Another leading figure, Asit Sen, split on similar grounds. T. Nagi Reddy, the leading communist in Andhra Pradesh, disagreed with squad actions that were isolated from any mass struggle and simply substituted for it. He wanted a period of preparation and mass work before the armed struggle, but the group around him was disaffiliated from the All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR), the body that transformed itself into the CPI (M–L) in April 1969. Even people who were otherwise close to Mazumdar like Kanu Sanyal and [Vempatapu] Satyam, a leader of the Srikakulam Movement, disapproved of individual assassinations based on conspiratorial methods by small underground squads. As Manoranjan Mohanty shows in his book Revolutionary Violence (1976), a unified M–L was already in decline by the middle of 1970, roughly a year after the party was proclaimed.4

SS: How should we view the embrace of revolutionary violence as a tactic by the Naxalites, both in its moment of inception in the late 1960s and in the present day by groups such as the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army? Does this zealousness signal radicalism, or helplessness? Can it be seen as the outcome of the defeat of the Left in previous decades, the consequence of the abandonment of a politics seeking to abolish alienated labor or, indeed, the abandonment of any explicitly labor-based politics?

JB: When the CPI (M–L) was formed in 1969, its key function was seen as “rousing” the peasant masses to wage guerrilla war. Mazumdar believed that the killing of landlords would “awaken” the exploited masses. This, classically, was what Debray calls a “politics of fervor,” a politics in which revolutionary enthusiasm substitutes for ideas rooted in mass struggle and for the class forces that conduct those struggles.5 But there were tendencies in Andhra that rejected this line and even went so far as to argue that, if the armed struggle were waged as a vanguard war, the people would become passive spectators. One writer quotes Nagi Reddy as saying, “Their [the people’s] consciousness will never rise. Their self-confidence will suffer.”

Today we can see that this is a vanguard war trapped in an expanding culture of counterinsurgency, and the most the CPI (Maoist) can do is flee across state boundaries and regroup in adjacent districts. What they have not been able to do and cannot do, given the nature of their politics, is consolidate enduring mass support in their traditional strongholds. In Andhra, where the fight against the Naxals has been most successful, from the state’s point of view, the backlash has been ferocious and beyond all legal bounds. The state there has institutionalized “encounter” killings, India’s term for extra-judicial executions, on a very large scale, and trained special counterinsurgency forces to hunt down the Maoists. In Chhattisgarh the state has sponsored (armed and funded) a private lynch mob called the Salwa Judum, or “Purification Hunt” in Gondi, the local language, that has emptied hundreds of villages by forcing inhabitants into IDP (internally displaced persons) camps where they can be easily controlled. In Chhattisgarh both sides have recruited minors. Both states have seen staggering levels of violence, with a pall of fear hanging over entire villages in Telangana, and the atomization of whole communities in Dantewada. We should remember that it was successive waves of repression in Andhra Pradesh that drove the PWG squads into regions like Bastar and southern Orissa in the first place.

One consequence of the massive escalation of conflict from the late 1980s was a substantial weapons upgrade, a major increase in lethality. The Naxals have used land mines on an extensive scale, using the wire-control method, and inflicted heavy losses on the paramilitary. The crucial result of this conflict dynamic is a wholesale militarization of the movement, a major break with the pattern of the late 1970s when they built a considerable base through mass organizations, in Telangana especially. The civil liberties activist K. Balagopal, who saw the movement at close quarters, became progressively more disillusioned as the military perspective took over and reshaped the nature of the People’s War Group. In 2006, a few years before he died, he described the CPI (Maoist) as a “hit and run movement,” underlining precisely these features.6

SS: What kinds of affinities do the Naxalites share with other militant New Left groups?

JB: I would hardly call them “New Left.” I think the best comparison for the CPI (Maoist) is Sendero Luminoso in Peru. Abimael Guzmán’s idea that the countryside would have to be thrown into chaos, churned up, to create a power vacuum, is a mirror image of the CPI (Maoist) strategy. Guzmán called it Batir el campo—“hammer the countryside.” The idea was to generate terror among the population and demonstrate the inability of the state to guarantee the safety of its citizens. That is how Nelson Manrique has described the strategy.7 In the end it meant the assassination of village heads and increasing violence against the peasantry (from the Senderistas) that brought about their rapid downfall. A key element of the Batir el campo strategy was the systematic destruction of infrastructure with the aim of isolating whole areas of countryside from the reach of the state. The idea was that, effectively, these would become “liberated zones.”

The CPI (Maoist) have been pursuing a very similar strategy. The role they played in sabotaging the movement in Lalgarh bears a striking resemblance to the Sendero’s interdictions against all forms of autonomous peasant organization. The drive of the CPI (Maoist) to isolate the areas under their control from the rest of the country, to impose an enforced isolation on the tribal communities, is similar to the way the Senderistas worked in Peru. This is the deeper meaning of forced election boycotts. During elections the threat of violence is palpable. Sabotaging high-tension wires, goods trains, railway stations, roads, and bridges is simply the physical analogue of the election boycott. Interlinked with this is the continual execution of “informers,” a kind of exemplary punishment that is clearly designed to bolster a culture of fear in the CPI (Maoist) “base,” which breeds the kind of resentment that creates more informers. Balagopal was a powerful critic of these practices that, I suspect, were largely a product of the new leadership that took over the PWG in the early 1990s, when Kondapalli Seetharamaiah was driven out of the party.

A movement like this will obviously tolerate no dissent. There have been repeated instances of the different armed struggle groups murdering each other’s cadre, sometimes over the course of years and on quite a large scale. Indeed, at least one reason for the merger between the PWG and the MCCI was the turf war between them in the years before 2004, when on one estimate they killed literally hundreds of each other’s supporters. Left parties like the CPI (Marxist) have also seen their party activists being murdered, as if this is what the People’s Democratic Revolution needs and calls for! I should add that the CPI (Marxist) is hardly blameless, either, since they have their own vigilante groups or terror squads called the “harmads.”

SS: It seems to me that the perspectives of the Maoists do not arise from the circumstances of those they claim to represent, but are rather static in and of themselves. Party documents and Maoist “theorists” seem capable of little more than the recycling of desiccated fragments of ideology.

JB: Maoist theory has a timeless quality about it. It deals with abstractions, not with any living, changing reality. The abstractions stem from the debates and party documents of the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the agrarian line emerged as an orthodoxy for the Left in countries like India. The Chinese Revolution was an incorrigible template and everything about India had to be fitted to that. Within India itself this generated what were called the “Andhra Theses.” As I said, the deliberations with Stalin generated a series of documents that all factions of the undivided Communist party accepted to one degree or another. The Tactical Line mapped out the outlines of a strategy that flowed straight into the Naxalism of the late 1960s. Some of the terminology was changed, such that “People’s Democracy” became “New Democracy,” but these shifts in rhetoric marked no crucial differences. So there is a sense whereby the Naxalite split from the CPI (Marxist) did not represent a total break with orthodoxy within the Indian movement. It was the CPI (Marxist) that was poised ambiguously between the USSR and China.

SL: Embedded in this refusal of reality, this insistence upon rehashing empty abstractions, there seems an unmistakable retreat from the very project of Marxism. Am I wrong to see an elective affinity between Roy’s insistence that the tribal people’s impetus to resist comes from outside of capitalism, on the one hand, and on the other, the rhetoric popularized by Charu Mazumdar, which identifies the peasantry as the primary revolutionary class? Roy and Mazumdar seem to share the idea that the old anti-feudal struggle was and remains viable. Both exhibit a lack of interest in the question, What dynamics within capitalism point beyond themselves? While I agree that Arundhati Roy lacks any grounding in the history of the Left, there does seem to be common ground between the Naxals’ nihilism and her romantic anti-capitalism.

In earlier comments you argued that Roy’s “democratic pessimism,” as you referred to it, has led her to argue that the ongoing Naxalite insurgency “is the best you can hope for.” Similarly, with respect to Maoists, you have suggested that, at bottom, they view those whom they claim to represent as “cannon fodder,” so that “it is not hope but false promises that will lie at the end of the revolutionary road, aside from the corpses of thousands.” To begin to understand what has brought together these two political streams­—the new social movements and late Stalinism—is it fair to say that both, as expressions of political defeat and despair, are equidistant from what you have called “the vision of the Communist Manifesto,” in which Marx argues that the task of the Communists is, as you put it, “not to prevent the expansion of capitalism but to fight it from the standpoint of a more advanced mode of production, one grounded in the ability of masses of workers to recover control of their lives and shape the nature and meaning of production”?

Adivasis and Naxalites

JB: There are different strands here. One is Roy’s tendency to see Maoism as the passive reflection of a tribal separatism that is rooted in decades if not centuries of oppression of the adivasis. The trouble with this is that it makes the Maoists purely epiphenomenal. It is a reading that has little to do with politics in any sense. More to the point, Maoism simply is not a continuation or extension of tribal separatism. It is a political tendency committed to the armed overthrow of a state that is both independent (not “semi-colonial”) and democratic in more than a formal sense. Millions of ordinary people in the country have immense faith in democracy, despite the devastation that capitalism has inflicted on their lives—and when I say capitalism here I include the state as an integral part of it. The other strand relates to the way the Left has reacted to “globalization” and the isolationist stances that have flowed from that. This is not peculiar to the M-L groups—it is the soft nationalism of the whole Left and stems from the inability to imagine a politics that is both anti-capitalist and internationalist in more than purely rhetorical ways. The rhetoric of anti-globalization, which opposes the reintegration of India back into the world economy, forms the lowest common denominator of the entire Left in this country. The Indian Left today cannot conceive revolutionary politics apart from national isolationism. Everything is reduced to defending national sovereignty against the forces of international capitalism. But modern capitalism is not an aggregation of national economies, however much the working class is divided by country and in numerous other ways. It is hard to see how the movement in any one country, even one as big as India, can overthrow capitalism as long as it survives in the rest of the world. Paradoxically, it is the smallest countries, like Cuba and probably Nepal after the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) takeover, that survive best in these conditions!

SS: In its 1970 program, the CPI (M-L) claimed that “India is a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country…. the Indian state is the state of the big landlords and comprador-bureaucrat capitalists…. and its government is a lackey of US imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism.” What are the limitations of such a vision of anti-imperialism and of what might be referred to as the “semi-feudal” thesis of capitalist development in India?

JB: The Naxalites haven’t substantially modified their positions except to the extent that they realize that the forces they are up against today have more to do with capitalism than feudalism. So, if you read any of the interviews that they give to various publications like Economic and Political Weekly , there are more references to capitalism than there used to be back in the 1970s. Back then it mattered much more whether you defined the social formation as mainly “capitalist” or mainly “feudal.” Today it doesn’t seem to matter as much, since it is obvious to everyone that India is capitalist. Perhaps this wasn’t so obvious forty years ago.

Most Naxalite groups still accept the four-class bloc, and the “national bourgeoisie” is part of that alliance. This position derives from the “semi-colonialism” line, and its only practical function today is that it can help the Naxalites justify a whole nexus of relationships necessary for the party to fund itself, largely by means of the tax imposed on traders and contractors. For example, in Jharkhand it is said that the Naxalites demand (and are paid) 5 percent of all large, government-funded projects in the rural areas. If “national bourgeoisie” is supposed to refer to the smaller layers of capital, those are of course among the worst exploiters of labor, as the appalling conditions in small-scale industry and so much of the caste violence in the countryside show. As for “semi-feudalism,” the irony is that the Naxalites’ survival in the late 1970s and 1980s depended precisely on creating a base of sorts among the dalits and adivasis, the vast majority of whom have always been wage laborers. Indeed, the bulk of the population in India comprises the wage laboring and salaried classes, and a political culture that does not start from there—that does not start from the right to livelihood, the right to organize, and the aspiration to control resources and production collectively—is not going to make the least bit of difference. To keep referring to the land-poor and landless as a “peasantry” shows how much one’s political thinking is defined by dogma as opposed to reason.

SL: Earlier you spoke of how the Naxals, like the Sendero Luminoso, created a kind of ghetto around themselves. Is this the endgame of the politics launched in the 1960s and 1970s, which itself represented an inadequate response to what had become an increasingly bureaucratic and opportunistic Stalinism in India? How can the left politics that now trails this long legacy of failures reconstitute itself? But what about the larger question of intersecting the Naxalites, since many of these groups have been attracting some of the brightest young minds in India and, in this respect as in others, they represent a major impediment to the reemergence of the Indian Left? How do we break the appeal of political nihilism?

JB: As I said, the vast mass of India’s population are wage laborers. They work in very different sorts of conditions from each other. So it’s not as though we are dealing with a homogenous or unified class. One way forward as far as I can see is through the unions. Unions have been a stable feature of Indian capitalism and always survived despite repeated attacks. As a small but significant example of the kind of left politics we should be concentrating on, the New Trade Union Initiative (NTUI), which was formed around 2005, is an attempt to organize a national federation of all independent unions in the country, regardless of which sector they belong to. This started as an initiative of the unions themselves and it has seen slow but steady expansion all over the country and includes, for example, the National Federation of Forest Workers and Forest Peoples. There is also a great deal of rethinking on the Left, both against the background of the public relations disasters of the CPI (Marxist) in Singur and Nandigram and of course the violent internecine conflicts within the party left. There is a whole layer of the Left in India that can be called “non-party,” which is for that reason both more dispersed and less visible perhaps. It includes numerous organizations active in areas like caste discrimination and atrocities, communal violence, civil liberties, women’s liberation, child labor, homophobia, tribal rights (e.g., the Campaign for Survival and Dignity), the Right to Food Campaign, campaigns against nuclear weapons and nuclear power, and many others. Dozens of Right to Information activists have been murdered, and there are numerous movements against displacement throughout the country. All of this reflects a different political culture from that of the left parties, more specialized and professional, also more autonomous, and the true agents of the churning of democracy that India is currently witnessing.

SL: How do you imagine the potential political expression of that? Does this take a party political form? How does it intersect parliamentary politics?

JB: If India could establish a workers’ party on the Latin American model, then much of this non-party left would gravitate to that as its national political expression. But the culture of such a workers’ party would have to be radically different from the sterile orthodoxies of the old left parties. It would have to be a massive catalyst of democratization both within the Left itself and in society at large, encouraging cultures of debate, dissent, and self-activity, and contesting capitalism in ways that make the struggle accessible to the vast mass of the population. The fact is that the bulk of the labor force still remains unorganized into unions and a workers’ party could only emerge in some organic relation to the organization of those workers.

SL: What you are arguing then is that the Naxalites constitute a major impediment to the reinvention of the Left?

JB: Absolutely! That would be an understatement. The militarized Maoism of the last two decades is a politics rooted in violence and fear. Those in positions of leadership refuse to do any “hard thinking” in Mao’s sense. You cannot build a radical democracy, a new culture of the Left, on such foundations. The recent beheading of a CPI (Marxist) trade-union leader who refused to heed the bandh (strike) call of the CPI (Maoist) is a spectacular example of how profoundly authoritarian the Naxal movement has become under the pressure of its overwhelming militarism. When actions like that damage their credibility, they are explained away as “mistakes.” But these continual “mistakes” fall into a disturbing pattern. As a friend of mine wrote in Economic & Political Weekly, “the CPI (Maoist) is as little concerned about the lives of non-combatants as is the state.”8 | P

1. Arundhati Roy, “Walking With The Comrades,” Outlook, March 29, 2010, <www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?264738>.

2. Regis Debray, Critique of Arms: Revolution on Trial, Two Volumes, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Penguin Books, 1977-78).

3. Edward Duyker, Tribal Guerrillas: The Santals of West Bengal and the Naxalite Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

4. Manoranjan Mohanty, Revolutionary Violence: A Study of the Maoist Movement in India (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1977).

5. Debray, Critique of Arms.

6. K. Balagopal, “Public Intellectuals in the Chair 7: ‘All the News we get is Killing and Getting Killed,’” interview by Vijay Simtha, Tehelka, January 21, 2006, <www.tehelka.com/story_main16.asp?filename=hub012106inthechair_7.asp>.

7. Nelson Manrique, “The War for the Central Sierra,” in Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980–1995, ed. Steve J. Stern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 193–223.

8. Nivedita Menon, “Radical Resistance and Political Violence Today,” Economic & Political Weekly 44, no. 50 (December 12, 2009), 16-20.

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The Failure of Pakistan: A Concise History of the Left

The Platypus Historians Group

The present-day crisis in Pakistan resists adequate historicisation in pithy news headlines. Yet its concrete expressions include the autocratic state-of-emergency imposed by General Musharraf; the violent rise of Islamic fundamentalism, first in the anarchic north-west, but increasingly also in the cities; the over-dependence on economic as well as military assistance from the U.S.; the massive expansion of the army into civilian sectors, especially commerce; and the ever growing socioeconomic disparities—in short: the failure of Pakistan. And while, at first blush, it appears that Pakistan was riven from the start by contradictions, it is anachronistic to think that the “choice” politically was always between theocratic Islamism or secular despotism. For what this view effaces is that there was once a vital left in Pakistan. The aim in the brief political history that follows is to argue that the contemporary meltdown in Pakistan is the stark consequence of the cumulative (self-) defeats of the left.

Pakistan inherited a left under the ruinous impress of Stalinism. Committed to the theory of revolution in stages, the Comintern under Stalin entreated communists in India to support the creation of Pakistan in 1947, in effect prolonging the policy of the “Popular Front.” The incipient Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP) floundered in West Pakistan: its attempts to organize workers under the rubric of the All Pakistan Trade Union Federation were undercut by the state favored All Pakistan Confederation of Labor which had lined up with the American Federation of Labor; its ranks were further thinned after its hand in plotting a coup d’état, the thwarted Rawalpindi conspiracy, was revealed in 1951. Meanwhile in East Pakistan, the CPP tried a different tack—galvanizing the peasantry. The militant, CPP-backed All Pakistan Kisan Sabha, was able to exact modest land reforms—the main effect of which was to drive out Hindu landlords—that were implemented in East Bengal in 1950. However, the resolve to arm the peasantry on the model of the Chinese Revolution marked another volte-face in policy, one that was now in step with the “ultra-left” blueprint outlined in the first report of the newly formed Cominform. During 1948-58 there were no parliamentary elections in Pakistan; when regional elections were held in East Pakistan in 1954 as a first step toward enfranchisement, the main party in the west, the Muslim League, was routed by a coalition of Bengali nationalists, the United Front, which had succor from the CPP. For its role the CPP was banned in late 1954. On the international front, as India allied itself with U.S.S.R, Pakistan steered toward an anti-Soviet alliance in the Baghdad Pact of 1955. To skirt the authorities a leftist umbrella group, the National Awami Party (NAP), was founded in 1957. NAP was expected to be a member of the coalition that was touted to win the national elections scheduled for early 1959 when, in October 1958, General Ayub Khan wrested the reins of the state.

For a decade General Ayub stewarded Pakistan on a state-centric course of development. During 1955-65, the first “Five-Year” schemes led to increases in the GNP, the rate of industrialization, and total capital imports, but also underlined the limits to the developmentalist model. On the one hand, the influx of capital from the U.S. allowed Pakistan to find its role in the world-market. However, in its effort to build a national economy the state mandated a series of impediments on capitalization; in addition, the state siphoned off surpluses to fund projects that favored West Pakistan while permitting high unemployment rates and landlessness to fester in the East, which further alienated the incongruous halves. The left fueled this sense of difference in counter-intuitive ways after the Sino-Soviet split in 1964. Once “Red” China made overtures toward General Ayub, the Maoists in NAP, based primarily in East Bengal, made strange bedfellows with the military dictatorship. Stalinists, who had reservations about the role of the “peasantry,” found themselves opposing the regime by emphasizing the relative backwardness of the East. After another disastrous war with India in 1965, the rust on General Ayub’s armor started to show.

Like their French and Latin American counterparts, the student-led demonstrations set into motion in 1968 had a modest start but quickly spread to all the main cities—Karachi, Lahore, Dacca, Peshawar, Multan, Hyderabad, and Jehlum. The call to mass strike from the student left in December was heeded by workers, trade unionists and segments of the peasantry. Five months of activity on the left had a momentary success: General Ayub was forced to resign in March 1969. Nevertheless, when faced with the task of proclaiming control of the state no leftist party was on board, the left had failed to think beyond the collapse of the regime.

It was in this context that a new social-democratic party, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), surfaced in West Pakistan under Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, an ex-minister in the Ayub cabinet, while an older Bengali nationalist party, the Awami League, was revitalized in East Pakistan. Both were bolstered by the incorporation of leftists who brought with them trained cadres as well as an attractive ideological program. Pressured further by the growing labor unrest of 1968-69, the interim head-of-state, General Yahya Khan, was made to hold parliamentary elections in 1970. The outcome of these elections led to the secession of East Pakistan. For much of the seventies, especially after the world-wide economic collapse in 1972-73 that reached Pakistan on the heels of the Bangladesh War, the nation limped on in spite of the PPP’s slogans: “Food, Clothes, and Shelter” and “’Islam is our faith; democracy is our polity; socialism is our economic creed: All power to the people!” Bhutto tried to salvage the beleaguered state apparatus, including the military, but was unable to stem the exodus of unskilled workers and the middle class.

Developments in Pakistan in the eighties shadowed events globally. The decimation of the left in the seventies had culminated with the election of Thatcher in the U.K. and Regan in the U.S., both of whom raised the shrill Cold-War rhetoric in the wake of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. General Zia ul-Haq, who had overthrown Bhutto in 1977, tendered Pakistan as an Islamic bulwark in the proxy war. Thus while the C.I.A. trained the mujhideen in the mountains, General Zia set about promulgating fire-brand Islamism; there was the introduction of Shar’ia courts, interest-free banks, mandatory prayer in schools, blasphemy was outlawed: in other words the mullahs were allowed to run amok. After General Zia’s mysterious helicopter crash in 1988, what can only be characterized as neoliberal cronyism set-in in the nineties, that is, in the absence of a left or middle-class, the army, blessed by the clerics, asserted itself as a dominant capitalist. The lack of a progressive left in Pakistan continues to be felt in the politically opaque milieu after 9/11.

From within Pakistan the news is abject. There were food shortages reported in the markets in Lahore. Eid al-Adha celebrations in rural Sherpao were undone by a suicide attack at the local mosque. Karachi remains terrorized in the run-up to elections by the gang violence of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement loyal to the prevailing regime. In the capital, Islamabad, the last challenges to the presidency of General Musharraf were smoothed over by a new bench on the Supreme Court. The truth is that there is little to be hopeful about politically; the entire field of actors—Benazir Bhutto’s PPP, Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N, the embattled judiciary led by the ex-chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, or the panoply of Islamists (this includes the Taliban-like Jamaat-i-Islami as well as the softer Islamism of the Tablighi Jamaat and the Tarikh-i-Insaaf, led by the ex-cricketer Imran Khan)—is marked by its opportunism. The perfidy of Bhutto and Sharif is well-known, as is the threat by groups such as the Jamaat-i-Islami; the sole liberal light appears to be the group of attorneys protesting in the streets (backed up by a small number of human-rights activists). But theirs is a battle, while commendable, that offers little to build on; their demands mean a return to the corrupt status-quo of what was, replete with its tolerance for Shar’ia. The absence of the left only heightens the sense that it would take a revolution to secure even modest reforms in Pakistan. Yet there is a certain resignation or possibly even a kind of libidinal satisfaction amongst Pakistanis in the knowledge that the election of whomever follows General Musharraf will only substitute one form of incompetence with another.

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The poverty of Pakistan’s politics (PPP)

Atiya Khan

LIFE IN CONTEMPORARY PAKISTAN is marked by a sense of despair and helplessness. A report commis­sioned by the British Council based on research con­ducted by the Nielsen Company recently found that only a third of the Pakistanis surveyed thought democracy was the best system for the country, a ratio roughly equal to that preferring sharia. The findings amounted to what David Martin, director of the British Council in Pakistan, called “an indictment of the failures of democracy over many years.”[1] Add to this the weak economy, mounting unemployment rates, the ongoing war in neighboring Afghanistan, the looming threat of the spread of the Taliban, and the massive displacement of population resulting from the military’s ham-fisted “war” against the militants. In the face of all this, combined with the legacy of deteriorating schools, overburdened and out­dated infrastructure, and the permanent war with India over Kashmir, the common Pakistani woman is caught between corrupt “democracy” and Islamist “justice.” She has learned the true meaning of the neoliberal creed “there is no alternative”: All alternatives are equally intolerable.

May Day rally of 200 union workers in 2009 in the city of Hyderabad, Sindh. Led by former General Secretary of the Communist Party of India, Jam Saqi, this was one of 42 such rallies held across the country. Their banner reads, "Workers of the World Unite! Red Salute to the Martyrs of Chicago! Pakistan Trade Union Defense Campaign"

May Day rally of 200 union workers in 2009 in the city of Hyderabad, Sindh. Led by former General Secretary of the Communist Party of India, Jam Saqi, this was one of 42 such rallies held across the country. Their banner reads, "Workers of the World Unite! Red Salute to the Martyrs of Chicago! Pakistan Trade Union Defense Campaign"

Liberal Concessions to the Right

As worrisome as Pakistan’s descent into chaos is the apathy it has been met with from the liberal Left. Earlier this month, in an issue of the chief organ of left-liber­alism in the U.S., The Nation, the Pakistani-American historian Manan Ahmed deprecates the very idea of in­ternational alarm over the crisis playing out in Pakistan. According to Ahmed, whenever the Pakistani electorate is given the opportunity to vote, it “[keeps] conservative Islamic parties to less than 10 percent of the seats in any election.” And, revealing something more of the national­ism underlying his argument, Ahmed denies that, even in the absence of elections, there is any “path by which The Taliban… [could] overwhelm a nation of nearly 180 million, a standing army of more than 600,000, vibrant mega-cities and an established civilian infrastructure.”[2] But the lacunae of such liberalism are now so wide one must forcibly shut one’s eyes to not see through them.

After all, if electoral politics is the sole measure of the restoration of secular democracy, then how might we explain the rise of the Taliban in the past two decades, the ambivalence that Pakistani citizens seem to have toward democratically elected governments, and, in some cases, their unswerving loyalty for the exponents of sharia? Ahmed is unable to reconcile this problem, being wholly unable to see anything but the humanitar­ian crisis caused by American unmanned drone missile strikes in the country’s lawless, or rather Talibanized, “tribal” belt along the border with Afghanistan. Moreover, his explanation of the current crisis in Pakistan is, as we shall see, completely at odds with the fact that it was Benazir Bhutto who, during her first premiership in 1988, was complicit in nurturing the mujahideen in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Paradoxically, the project of Islamization initiated by Zia ul-Haq was fulfilled by Benazir who, in an ironic twist, became a victim of the Taliban in 2007. Ahmed cannot, it seems, bring himself to mention the catastrophic destruction unleashed by the Taliban, particularly in the northern areas of Pakistan, and the continuous suicide bomb explosions in all the country’s “vibrant” major cities. More shockingly, Ahmed was ap­parently not pressed by the editors of the standard-bearer of the American liberal Left to so much as touch on the atrocities the Taliban committed in Swat and Waziristan: the public flogging of men and women after summary “trials” in which semi-educated fanatics dispense justice according to medieval law; the decimation of schools, printing presses, radio, and TV stations; and, of course, the brutal murder of those who attempted to oppose the Taliban’s political values or their authority. As anyone who has the stomach for the news coming out of Pakistan this year knows, the desecrated corpses of these dissenters were piled on the roadside or hung from lampposts to ensure that the message of terror was legible even to the most wretchedly poor and illiterate person. But none of this concerns Ahmed. Rather, he denies the Taliban pose any threat, instead claiming that “the Taliban operating in the north and southwestern regions were and are still an amorphous, ill-defined lot, ideologically and politi­cally diverse—from jihadists to secular subnationalists to tribalists.”[3]

Contrary to Ahmed’s view, Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai explains that the Pakistani Taliban “[are] what they are. They are Taliban in the sense that they share the same ideology as the Taliban in Afghani­stan, and see them as their allies.”[4] As the well-known history of its origins goes, the Taliban first sprung to life from a witch’s brew of Chinese opportunism, the panic that gripped Washington after the fall of the Shah, oil sheikh “philanthropy,” and the reactionary political imperatives that have guided the Pakistani military since the country’s inception. Simply put, the communist coup in Afghanistan in 1978 prompted the neoliberal regimes in the Muslim world and the United States to intervene. Supported by CIA and Saudi money, but orchestrated by Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), the worst of the reactionary Afghan landlords, together with the more religion- and patriarchy-warped peasants whose al­legiance they could command, were armed and indoctri­nated with a caustic brand of fascistic Islam. At the same time, entire regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan shifted over to a war economy driven by opium, guns, and mer­cenary payments. Generations of young men dislocated in Afghan refugee camps were absorbed into madrassas closely aligned to one or another of Pakistan’s Islamist parties and sponsored by Islamist money flowing out of the Gulf. Far from amorphous, the Pakistani Taliban is linked ideologically and organizationally to the same elements that the ISI fostered in Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, the Taliban never recognized there to be any border separating those in the Pakistani madrassa from those doing the fighting in Afghanistan; rather, they saw themselves as all members of a single religious and political movement. As Yusufzai rightly saw and reported in 2007, the name “Taliban” itself does not refer to a loosely connected constellation of groups, but denotes a political program based on a pseudo-archaic and highly authoritarian system of government.

Another expression of the confusion regarding the Taliban is articulated by Faisal Devji in the pages of The Guardian, who lumps them together with the Naxalites or Maoist rebels in India, the supposed analogy between these movements of the radical Left and the radical right being that both have attempted to “take over certain areas and attack government forces there to provide an alterna­tive but non-governmental form of order.”[5] The Taliban, in Devji’s view, is just another corporate group jockeying for power, no different from the army, the religious par­ties, the private companies, or the NGOs, and so should the government treat them. It may “bring these groups into the political arena, as India did with Nepal’s Maoists, ensuring their investment in the state by forcing them to take it over.”[6] But this comparison between the right and Left, however debased the latter’s leftism may be, is in­vidious; it blurs an essential political difference that sets these groups apart from one another. Unlike the Taliban, the Naxalites are driven by a secular outlook, involved in a political struggle that seeks to secure social justice for a super-exploited peasantry. In fact, the Maoist rebels har­ken back to a rich history of the Indian Left responsible for the large-scale unionization of workers that took place under the auspices of the Left in the 1950s and 1960s. It is in line with this tradition that the Maoist rebels continue to struggle against the “saffron” right and religious ro­manticism. One may criticize them for the poverty of their strategic vision and their consequent incapacity to suc­ceed in substantially improving the Indian peasants’ life circumstances in the long term, and this, of course, points to the larger problem of the political inertia in which the international Left is mired. However, the Maoist victory in Nepal is certainly not the catastrophe for the Nepalese people that the Taliban coming to power in Afghanistan has been, or their coming to power in Pakistan would be. For Devji to suggest otherwise is obfuscatory, to say the least, or naïve at best.

The Collapse of the Left in Pakistan

Unlike in India, where the late Stalinist Left still retains considerable strength, in Pakistan the Left as well as its attendant labor movement had collapsed by the mid-1970s. Yet, if one is to be able to make sense of the present-day crisis of Pakistan, it is essential to recover the history of this collapse in which the Pakistani Left mutated into the new international right. The failure of the Left-labor coalition in Pakistan is a complex story intimately linked to the decline of the international Left in the 20th century.

At its inception as an independent country in 1947, Pakistan inherited trained trade unionists, veterans with valuable experience in the labor struggles that had formed the backbone of the wider anti-imperialist struggle against the British Raj. The Pakistani labor movement thus quickly developed significant influence after independence, so that by the 1950s trade unionism flourished in the railway, shipping, hydroelectric power, post and telegraph, cement, and mining sectors. Trade unions expanded by an estimated 650 percent in the half decade after the creation of Pakistan. Under the steward­ship of members of the All India Trade Union Congress who migrated westward, the All Pakistan Trade Union Federation (APTUF) was founded in 1948, which was affiliated to the Prague-based World Federation of Trade Unions. Other unions that took shape in that era were the Lahore-based Pakistan Federation of Labor, and the Seamen’s Union in Karachi, which was a direct offshoot of the Calcutta Seamen’s Union. In 1951, 209 unions had organized a total of 393,137 workers, but the unions were themselves split based on Cold War rivalries.[7]

Pakistani trade unions fell into distinct camps: On one side, the antecedents of the Indian Federation of Labor formed the Pakistan Federation of Labor, which adhered to a reformist program; on the other side, the APTUF lined up with the Moscow-affiliated Red International of Trade Unions. The latter, the APTUF, functioned as an umbrella organization for the important railway workers’ union in East Pakistan and for the stevedores’ union in Karachi in the West. However, by the end of 1951 com­munist influence in the trade unions started to wane, as the state-sanctioned All Pakistan Confederation of Labor (APCOL)—which aligned itself with the American Federa­tion of Labor (AFL), a self-professedly anti-Communist union—became the de facto representative of the working class in Pakistan.

In the period between 1950 and 1955, Pakistan vacil­lated between democratic and authoritarian leadership and, in the confusion, Pakistani labor surged forward. The rise of industrial and agrarian unrest in East Pakistan compelled the state to adopt a two-pronged policy grant­ing workers the right to organize and at the same time enacting legislation to control trade union activity. From the standpoint of trade unionists, the 1952 Pakistan Essential Services (Maintenance) Act, whose undeniable objective was to circumscribe their activities, was an expression of the collusion between industrialists and the state bureaucracy against the growth of industrial­ized labor. The statute was broadly applied to include the transportation, energy, communications, and educa­tional sectors.[8] From 1950 to 1955, the Government of Pakistan further limited trade union activity by imposing the condition that union officials had to be workers in one of the factories in which the union was active. The year 1954 was marked by further erosions of trade union rights, including a ban on the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP) and Pakistan’s entry into the U.S.-led anti-Communist alliance that was the South East Asia Treaty Organization. Pakistani trade unions were increas­ingly drawn together with their counterparts stateside. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) established offices in Karachi and Lahore, ex­tended financial and material assistance to the APCOL, and offered scholarships to Pakistani workers to study trade unionism in the United States. This was followed by a series of splits in the APCOL in the 1960s leading to the emergence of five federations: the Pakistan National Federation of Trade Unions which was granted affili­ation with the ICFTU; the West Pakistan Federation of Trade Unions, later renamed the All-Pakistan Federa­tion of Trade Unions in 1971; the West Pakistan Workers Federation and Karachi Workers Central Committee; and the Mazdoor Rabta Committee (Workers’ Coordination Committee) in Karachi. This last group, which included students and trade union leaders who, after the ban on the CPP, were seeking to start afresh, were instrumental in organizing the strike at the Karachi Port Trust in 1967 that contributed to the downfall of the military dictator General Ayub Khan.[9]

But in 1958, before his downfall, General Ayub Khan declared martial law, after repealing the new Constitu­tion, which necessitated reigning in the workers’ move­ment. General Khan acted swiftly to enact the Industrial Disputes Ordinance, an executive order that restricted labor agitation by giving leverage to state interests in labor disputes. But it was the formation of the Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation in 1962, which priva­tized Pakistan’s factories, that most directly contributed to a radicalization of labor in the 1960s. While the labor movement was in the course of negotiating its demands, leftist parties were also motivated to advance their politi­cal programs. After the disintegration of the CPP the Left was reconstituted under the National Awami Party (NAP) in 1957. This marked a shift in the ideology of the Left as it drew closer to a political framework based on nationalism. In a sense, the formation of the NAP was a symptom of the failures of the Left after World War II, a Left that had accommodated itself to the Stalinist slogan, “socialism in one country.” The Sino-Soviet split of 1964 had a further series of repercussions: As India lined itself up closer to Moscow, Peking made over­tures toward General Ayub, to disastrous effect for the Left. The NAP was factionalized, as the group in East Pakistan refused to oppose Ayub based on instructions from China, whereas NAP centers in Baluchistan and the Frontier Province struggled for regional autonomy, objecting to the hegemony of the central government in West Pakistan.

Despite the ideological limitations and theoretical confusion on the Left, the labor movement continued gathering momentum, pushing for further reforms be­tween 1969 and 1972. Rapid industrial development under the anti-labor statutes enacted by Ayub Khan, which restricted unionization while depressing wages, sparked a wave of strikes in Karachi, Lahore, and other industrial centers that drew in railway workers, doctors and hospi­tal employees, farmers, water works and electrical work­ers—all of them demanding restoration of the right to unionize, the right to collective bargaining, and the right to strike. After failed negotiations with the trade union leaders as well as the increasingly vociferous demands of the student movement, Ayub Khan announced his resig­nation in March 1969, appointing another Pakistani Army General, Yahya Khan, as interim head of state to reach an agreement with labor leaders. Though the government was able to retain some of its power, such as its “right” to ban and call off strikes, the labor movement was able to exact some of its salient demands.

It was in this context that a new party, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), emerged in West Pakistan in 1967, while an old one, the Awami League, was able to revitalize itself in East Pakistan. Both these organiza­tions were strengthened by the incorporation of a vast number of leftists who were either disillusioned by the NAP or inspired by the quasi-populist rhetoric of the PPP under Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. These leftists brought with them trained cadres in addition to an attractive ideologi­cal program to win over the allegiance of the masses. The PPP, therefore, was formed as a menagerie of leftist groups from the National Awami Party, ex-members of the Muslim League, students, and the landlords of Sindh and Punjab. Bhutto had the foresight to exploit the radical stratum of the party in the run-up to elections to secure a mass base. The rhetoric of socialism, combined with slogans capturing anti-imperial and anti-feudal sentiments, embraced the zeitgeist of the 1960s New Left. However, once the PPP wrested control of the state, its left flank was faced with the choice of either accepting the commands of the state or else self-liquidating. When the outcome of the 1970 election resulted in an overall majority for the Bengali nationalists in East Pakistan, entitling the Awami League to form the central govern­ment, Bhutto was unable to reconcile himself to a junior partnership in a coalition at the center. With the support of the United States, Bhutto sent in the army, precipitat­ing the Bangladesh War. Had it laid any real foundations in the years preceding the upheaval, the Left might have transformed the situation to its favor, but in 1972, when Bhutto’s nationalization policy brought the confronta­tion with the labor movement to a head, some 200,000 workers called a strike in Karachi that brought the city to a standstill. During this the Left was paralyzed: The left faction within the PPP feared that if the strikes continued this would jeopardize the possibility of long term benefits, while the China-aligned leftists were reluctant to support further strikes since the labor movement excluded the peasantry from its struggle.

From Defeat to Delusion

For much of the seventies, especially after the worldwide economic collapse of 1972–73 that reached Pakistan on the heels of the Bangladesh War, Bhutto tried to assuage the beleaguered state apparatus, including the military, but was unable to stem the exodus of workers and the middle class. The decimation of the Left and of labor had culminated on the international level in the neoliberal Thatcher-Reagan regimes that, in turn, strengthened conservative forces within Pakistan just as the Soviets marched on Afghanistan. General Zia ul-Haq, who had overthrown Bhutto in 1977, tendered Pakistan as an Islamic bulwark in the proxy war. Thus, with Zia at the helm of the state in Pakistan, along with the victory of Khomeni’s Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the char­acter of democracy in Pakistan was left to be validated by either the military establishment or by religious clerics. The brief interludes of civilian rule in Pakistan since then, such as the election of Benazir Bhutto in 1988 and then later in 1993, or Nawaz Sharif’s election in 1990 and subsequently in 1997, amounted to little more than neo­liberal cronyism. In the absence of an international Left, one struggles to imagine how they could have amounted to anything else.

It is ironic that a hundred years ago, when the workers of Bombay led strikes protesting the trial of their leader, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Lenin remarked, “in India… the proletariat has already developed to conscious politi­cal mass struggle.”[10] If the possibility, albeit somewhat obtuse, of a socialist revolution had existed in 1908 India, then one wonders why the Left in the 1960s was unable to capitalize in its historical moment. Ahmed and Devji are the clearest symptoms today of this history of failure; their unwillingness to deal with the rise of Islamization of Pakistan over the last 30 years represents an impover­ished imagination of internationalism, an international­ism that collapsed alongside the rest of the Left in the course of the 1970s–80s. Their attempt to search for a solution that minimizes the alarm over the Talibanization of Pakistan, their struggle to analyze the current situation in Pakistan within the framework of international norms, is bound to remain inadequate as it hypostatizes the situation of the present-day crisis. The problem with the liberal Left today, as illustrated in the pages of The Nation and The Guardian, is its inability to digest the legacy of the Stalinized Left and its problematic overcoming through the crypto-fascism of Talibanism. The real issue that the liberal Left seeks to evade is its own complicity in the death of the Left in the 1970s, a death hastened by the ideologies of conservative nationalism and cultural­ism. In the end, the liberal Left can do no more than to applaud Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif for restoring democratic values, when in fact such democratic regimes completed the agenda set by the Taliban in Afghanistan to find an ally across the Kyber Pass. The liberal Left is but the acute manifestation of the atrophy that continues in the increasingly depoliticized post-9/11 milieu and in the absence of a vibrant international Left. |P


[1] Quoted in Sabrina Tavernise, “Surveys of Pakistan’s Young Predicts ‘Disaster’ If Their Needs Aren’t Addressed,” New York Times, November 22, 2009, World section.

[2] Manan Ahmed, “Paranoia over Pakistan,” The Nation, November 9, 2009.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Cited in Graham Usher, “The Pakistan Taliban,” MERIP Online, February 13, 2007.

[5] Faisal Devji, “Pakistan, the Privatised State,” The Guardian, October 16, 2009.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Christopher Candland, Labor Democratization and Development in India and Pakistan (London & New York: Routledge, 2007), 36.

[8] Ibid., 38.

[9] Ibid., 39–40.

[10] Vladimir Lenin, “Inflammable Material in World Politics,” Proletary 33 (July 23, 1908).

Correction Dec. 22, 2009: This piece originally misspelled Manan Ahmed’s name.

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Lenin’s liberalism

Chris Cutrone

Platypus Review 36 | June 2011

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At the 2011 Left Forum, held at Pace University in NYC between March 18-21 , Platypus hosted a conversation on “Lenin’s Marxism.” Panelists Chris Cutrone of Platypus, Paul LeBlanc of the International Socialist Organization, and Lars T. Lih, the author of Lenin Reconsidered: “What is to be Done” in Context were asked to address, “What was distinctive about Vladimir Lenin’s Marxism? What was its relationship to the other forms of Marxism and Marxists of his era? Was Lenin orthodox or heterodox? Was there a “unity” to Lenin’s political thought, as Georg Lukács argued, or do his major works—What is to Be Done? (1902), Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), The State and Revolution (1917), “Left-Wing Communism:” An Infantile Disorder? (1920)—express distinctive and even contradictory phases in Lenin’s political development? How did Lenin’s Marxism overcome—or not —other competing forms of Marxism? How should we understand Lenin’s historical contribution to Marxism, today?” Our last issue (PR #35) included opening remarks by Paul LeBlanc, what follows below are Chris Cutrone’s opening remarks.

Introduction

Lenin’s Marxist politics has been profoundly misconstrued and distorted, both positively and negatively, as supposedly having wanted to strip capitalist society of its deceptive veneer and assert the unadorned proletariat as the be-all and end-all of “socialist” society. Certainly not merely the later Stalinist history of the Soviet Union, but also practices of the Soviet state under Lenin’s leadership in the Civil War, so-called “War Communism,” and the Red Terror, lent themselves to a belief in Lenin as a ruthless destroyer of “bourgeois” conditions of life. But, then, what are we to make, for instance, of Lenin’s pamphlets on The State and Revolution and “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder? For they emphasized both the necessary persistence of “bourgeois right” among the workers in the long transition from socialism to communism, requiring the continuation of state mediation, and the fact that Marxists had understood their effort as trying to overcome capital “on the basis of capitalism” itself. A prime example of Lenin’s insistence on the mediation of politics in society was his opposition to Trotsky’s recommendation that labor unions be militarized and subsumed under the state. Lenin wanted to preserve, rather, the important non-identity of class, party, and state in the Soviet “workers’ state,” which he recognized as necessarily carrying on, for the foreseeable future, “state capitalism” (characterized by “bureaucratic deformations” due to Russian conditions). Lenin thus wanted to preserve the possibility of politics within the working class, a theme that reached back to his first major pamphlet, What is to be Done? Lenin’s “last struggle”[1] was to prevent the strangling of politics in the Soviet state, a danger he regarded not merely in terms of Stalin’s leadership, but the condition of the Bolsheviks more generally. For instance, Lenin critically noted Trotsky’s predilection for “administrative” solutions.

Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, and Theodor Adorno, teasing out a “Hegelian” dimension to Lenin’s Marxism, derived from Lenin’s theoretical writings and political practice an elaboration of the Marxist theory of social mediation in capital, through the politics of proletarian socialism, that sought to recover Lenin from a bad utopian perspective of the desire to do away with politics altogether. Rather, such Marxist critical theory following Lenin understood overcoming the “alienation” and “reification” of capital as providing the possibility for the true practice of politics, a neglected but vital contribution Lenin made to the development of Marxism. Lenin did not attempt to destroy modern forms of political mediation, but rather to achieve the true mediation of theory and practice, in politics freed from society dominated by capital. This was the content of Lenin’s liberalism, his “dialectical” Marxist attempt, not to negate, but rather to fulfill the desiderata of bourgeois society, which capital had come to block, and which could only be worked through “immanently.”

The controversy about Lenin

Lenin is the most controversial figure in the history of Marxism, and perhaps one of the most controversial figures in all of history. As such, he is an impossible figure for sober consideration, without polemic. Nevertheless, it has become impossible, also, after Lenin, to consider Marxism without reference to him. Broadly, Marxism is divided into avowedly “Leninist” and “anti-Leninist” tendencies. In what ways was Lenin either an advance or a calamity for Marxism? But there is another way of approaching Lenin, which is as an expression of the historical crisis of Marxism. In other words, Lenin as a historical figure is unavoidably significant as manifesting a crisis of Marxism. The question is how Lenin provided the basis for advancing that crisis, how the polarization around Lenin could provide the basis for advancing the potential transformation of Marxism, in terms of resolving certain problems. What is clear from the various ways that Lenin is usually approached is that the necessity for such transformation and advance of Marxism has been expressed only in distorted ways. For instance, the question of Marxist “orthodoxy” hinders the proper evaluation of Lenin. There was a fundamental ambiguity in the way Marxism addressed its own historical crisis, in the question of fidelity to and revision of Marx, for instance in the so-called “Revisionist Dispute” of the late 19th century. Lenin was a leading anti-revisionist or “orthodox” Marxist. This was also true of other Second International radical Marxists, such as Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky. In what ways did these figures, and above all Lenin, think that being true to Marx was required for the advancement and transformation of Marxism?

The Frankfurt School Critical Theorist Theodor Adorno, in his 1966 book Negative Dialectics, wrote of the degeneration of Marxism due to “dogmatization and thought-taboos.” There is no other figure in the history of Marxism who has been subject to such “dogmatization and thought-taboos” as much as Lenin. For Adorno, figures in the history of Marxism such as Lenin or Luxemburg or Kautsky should not be approached in terms merely of their theoretical perspectives or practical actions they took or advocated, but rather in their relation of theory and practice, or, why they thought they did what they did when they did so. As Adorno put it, theory and practice have a changing relation that “fluctuates” historically.[2]

Lenin: history not linear but spiral

Lenin, among other Marxists, thought that the political party served an important function with regard to consciousness, and wrote in What is to be Done? of the key “importance of the theoretical struggle” in forming such a party. Lenin thought that theory was not simply a matter of generalization from experience in terms of trial and error, as in traditional (pre-Kantian) epistemology, but, importantly, in the Hegelian “dialectical” sense of history: this is how Lenin understood “theory.” As Lenin put it, history did not advance in a line but rather in “spirals,” through repetitions and regressions, and not simple linear “progress.” In this respect, the past could be an advance on the present, or, the present could seek to attain moments of the past, but under changed conditions. And such changed conditions were themselves not to be regarded simply as “progressive.” Rather, there was an important ambivalence to history, in that it exhibited both progress and regress. In his 1915 Granat Encyclopedia entry on Karl Marx, describing “dialectics” from a Marxian perspective, Lenin wrote,

In our times, the idea of development, of evolution, has almost completely penetrated social consciousness, only in other ways, and not through Hegelian philosophy. Still, this idea, as formulated by Marx and Engels on the basis of Hegel’s philosophy, is far more comprehensive and far richer in content than the current idea of evolution is. A development that repeats, as it were, stages that have already been passed, but repeats them in a different way, on a higher basis (“the negation of the negation”), a development, so to speak, that proceeds in spirals, not in a straight line; a development by leaps, catastrophes, and revolutions; “breaks in continuity”; the transformation of quantity into quality; inner impulses towards development, imparted by the contradiction and conflict of the various forces and tendencies acting on a given body, or within a given phenomenon, or within a given society; the interdependence and the closest and indissoluble connection between all aspects of any phenomenon (history constantly revealing ever new aspects), a connection that provides a uniform, and universal process of motion, one that follows definite laws—these are some of the features of dialectics as a doctrine of development that is richer than the conventional one.[3]

With Marxism, the “crisis” of bourgeois society was recognized. The crisis of bourgeois society circa 1848 was what Marx called “capital,” a provocative characterization. The spiral development through which Lenin, among other Second International radicals such as Luxemburg and Trotsky, thought that history in the modern era had regressed through the “progress” since Marx and Engels’s time in 1848, the moment of the Communist Manifesto, showed how and why the subsequent development of Marxism sought to re-attain 1848. Was history since 1848 progress or regress? In a certain sense, it was both. In this history, bourgeois society appeared to both fulfill and negate itself. In other words, bourgeois society had become more itself than ever; in other respects, however, it grew distant from its earlier achievements and even undermined them. (For instance, the recrudescence of slave labor in the decades leading up to the U.S. Civil War.) The Second International radicals thus sought to return to the original potential of bourgeois society in its first moment of crisis, circa 1848. As Karl Kraus put it, in a way that registered deeply with Walter Benjamin and Adorno, “Origin is the goal.”[4] Even though the crisis of capital or bourgeois society grew, the question was whether the crisis advanced. The Second International radicals recognized that while the crisis of capital, in Marx’s sense, grows, the crisis must be made to advance, as history does not progress automatically. It was in this sense that there was, potentially, a return of the 1848 moment in the development of Marxism itself, which was the attempt to make the growing crisis—what Luxemburg and Lenin called “imperialism,” and what Lenin termed capitalism’s “highest stage”—a historical advance.

The paradox of such development and transformation of Marxism itself through the return to the past moment of potential and resultant “crisis” was expressed well by Karl Korsch, who wrote, in his 1923 essay on “Marxism and Philosophy,”

[The] transformation and development of Marxist theory has been effected under the peculiar ideological guise of a return to the pure teaching of original or true Marxism. Yet it is easy to understand both the reasons for this guise and the real character of the process which is concealed by it. What theoreticians like Rosa Luxemburg in Germany and Lenin in Russia have done, and are doing, in the field of Marxist theory is to liberate it from the inhibiting traditions of [Social Democracy]. They thereby answer the practical needs of the new revolutionary stage of proletarian class struggle, for these traditions weighed “like a nightmare” on the brain of the working masses whose objectively revolutionary socioeconomic position no longer corresponded to these [earlier] evolutionary doctrines. The apparent revival of original Marxist theory in the Third International is simply a result of the fact that in a new revolutionary period not only the workers’ movement itself, but the theoretical conceptions of communists which express it, must assume an explicitly revolutionary form. This is why large sections of the Marxist system, which seemed virtually forgotten in the final decades of the nineteenth century, have now come to life again.[5]

So, what were these “revolutionary” aspects of Marxism that were recovered in the course of the “crisis of Marxism” (Korsch’s phrase), and how did Lenin help recover them?

Lenin and the political party

Lenin made a portentous but indicative remark in the first footnote to his book What is to be Done?, in which he stated that,

Incidentally, in the history of modern socialism [there] is a phenomenon… in its way very consoling, namely . . . the strife of the various trends within the socialist movement…. [In] the[se] disputes between Lassalleans and Eisenachers, between Guesdists and Possibilists, between Fabians and Social-Democrats, and between Narodnaya Volya adherents and Social-Democrats… really [an] international battle with socialist opportunism, [will] international revolutionary Social-Democracy… perhaps become sufficiently strengthened to put an end to the political reaction that has long reigned in Europe?[6]

In other words, could working through the issue of opportunist-reformist “revisionism” within Marxism be the means for overcoming capital? This would appear to be the self-centrality of Marxism taken to its fullest flower. But there was a rationale to this. Not only did Lenin (subsequent to What is to be Done?) want the Mensheviks thrown out of Russian Social Democracy (Lenin agreed with the Mensheviks on excluding the so-called “economistic” tendencies of Marxism and the Jewish Bund workers’ organizations), but a seldom remarked fact was that Luxemburg, too, wanted the reformist Revisionists thrown out of the German Social Democratic Party (Kautsky waffled on the issue). Lenin and Luxemburg wanted to split the Second International from its reformists (or, “opportunists”).

Lenin not only thought that splits, that is, political divisions, in the Left or the workers’ movement were possible and desirable, but also necessary. The only differences Lenin had with figures such as Luxemburg or Kautsky were over particular concrete instances in which such splits did or could or should have occurred. For instance, Luxemburg thought that the split in Russian Social Democracy in 1903 was premature and so did not concur with Lenin and the Bolsheviks on its benefits. And, importantly, the question was not merely over whether a political split could or should take place, but how, and, also, when. Politics was a historical phenomenon.

There is the specific question of the “party” as a form of politics. Marx and Engels had written in the Communist Manifesto that, “The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.” So, this would appear to present a problem in the case of Lenin, who is notorious for the “party question.” But it poses a problem for the question of Marxism in general, for Marxism confronted other, opposed, political tendencies in the working class, for instance anarchism in the First International. What had changed between Marx and Engels’s time and Lenin’s?

As Marxists, Lenin and Luxemburg considered themselves to be vying for leadership of the social democratic workers’ movement and its political party; they didn’t simply identify with either the party or the movement, both of which originated independently of them. Both the workers’ movement and the social-democratic party would have existed without Marxism. For them, the party was an instrument, as was the workers’ movement itself. In responding to Eduard Bernstein’s remark that the “movement is everything, the goal nothing,” Luxemburg went so far as to say that without the goal of socialism the workers’ movement was nothing, or perhaps even worse than nothing, in that it exacerbated the problem of capitalism, for instance giving rise to the “imperialist” form of capitalism in the late 19th century. How were the social-democratic movement and its political parties understood by Marxists? For considering this, it is necessary to note well Marx’s critique of the Gotha Programme that had founded the German SPD and Engels’s subsequent critique of the Erfurt Programme that had made Marxism the official perspective of the Social Democratic Party. They critiqued these programmes because that’s what Marxists do: critique. No matter what had been written in these programmes, it was certain to elicit critiques from Marx and Engels.

The Marxists, that is, Marx and Engels, seem to have reluctantly gone along with the formation of a permanent party of social democracy, but not without serious reservations and caveats. The endorsement of party politics was provisional and conditional. For instance, in 1917, Lenin himself threatened to quit the Bolshevik party. Lenin thought that he could quit the party and continue to lead the revolution, that he would quit the party in order to lead the revolution.

Luxemburg’s biographer, British political scientist J.P. Nettl, traced the question of the social-democratic party to a set of problematic conceptions, all of which were challenged in practice and theory by the radical Left in the Second International, in figures such as Luxemburg and Lenin. The party could be conceived as an interest-aggregator and pressure-group on the state, advancing the interests of the working class. Or it could be conceived, as it was most overtly by its leadership, under its organizational leader August Bebel and its leading theorist Karl Kautsky, as a “state within the state,” or what Nettl termed an “inheritor party,” aiming to take power.[7] Involved in the latter was a theory not only of revolution but also of socialism, both of which were problematical. Specifically troublesome was the idea of building up the working class’s own organization within capitalism so that when its final crisis came, political power would fall into the hands of the social democrats, who had organized the working class in anticipation of such an eventuality. But these were conceptions that were challenged and critiqued, not only by later radicals such as Luxemburg and Lenin, but also by Marx and Engels themselves. Marxists such as Marx and Engels and Lenin and Luxemburg were, rightly, deeply suspicious of the social-democratic party as a permanent political institution of the working class.

The problem of party-politics

To situate this discussion properly, it is important to return to the classical liberal scorn for political parties. There was no term of political contempt greater than “party man,” or “partisan” politics, which violated not only the value of individuals thinking for themselves but also, perhaps more importantly, the very notion of politics in the liberal-democratic conception, especially with regard to the distinction between the state and civil society. Whereas the state was compulsory, civil society institutions were voluntary. While political parties, as forms of association, could be considered civil society organizations, the articulation of such formations with political power in the state struck classical liberal thinkers as particularly dangerous. Hegel, for one, explicitly preferred hereditary monarchy over democracy as a form of executive authority, precisely because it was free of such a problem. For Hegel, civil society would remain more free under a monarchy than under democracy, in which he thought political authority could be distorted by private interests. The danger lay in the potential for a civil society group to capture state power in its narrow, private interests. Moreover, in the classical liberal tradition, the idea of the professional “politician” was severely objectionable; rather, state-political figures rose through other civil society institutions, as entrepreneurs, professors, priests, etc., and only reluctantly took on the duty of public office: “It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.”

This problem of modern politics and its forms recurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to thinkers such as Robert Michels, a student and associate of Max Weber, similarly concerned with the problem of modern “bureaucracy,” who, in a landmark study, compared the German SPD to the Democratic Party in the U.S., specifically with regard to the issue of the “party machine,” with its “ward bosses,” or machine-party politics, and the resulting tendency towards what Michels called “oligarchy.” Michels had been a member of the SPD, in its radical wing, until 1907. (Michels, who also studied the Socialist Party in Italy, went on to join Italian fascism under the former Socialist Benito Mussolini, because he thought fascism was a solution to the problem of “bureaucracy,” but that’s another story.) So the problem of party-politics was a well-known issue in Lenin’s time. For Second International radical Marxists such as Luxemburg and Lenin, the workers’ social-democratic party was not to be an interest-aggregator and permanent political institution of social power like the Democratic Party in the U.S. (which ultimately became the party of the labor unions). What, then, was the function of the social-democratic party, for figures such as Lenin and Luxemburg?

Obviously, Lenin’s concerns with politics were not the same as those of liberals, who sought to prevent the ossification of political authority from stymieing the dynamism of civil society in capitalism. For Lenin’s concern was above all with revolution, that is, fundamental social transformation. But was the issue of politics thus so different in Lenin’s case? This raises the important issue of how social revolution and transformation were related to “politics,” in the modern sense. That is, whether Lenin was interested in the “end” of politics as conceived in liberalism and practiced under capitalism, or instead concerned with overcoming the obstacle to the practice of politics that capitalism had become. How was overcoming the social problem capitalism had become a new beginning for the true practice of politics? In this sense, it is important to address how political mediation was brought into being but ultimately shaped and distorted by the modern society of capital, especially after the Industrial Revolution.

“Politics” is a modern phenomenon. Modern politics is conditioned by the crisis of capital in modern history. Traditional civilization, prior to the bourgeois, capitalist epoch, was subject to crises that could only be considered natural or divine in origin. Modern society is subject, for Marxists (as well as for liberals), rather, to human-made crisis thus potentially subject to politics. Bourgeois politics indeed responds to the permanent crisis of capitalism—in a sense, that’s all it does—but in inadequate terms, naturalizing aspects of capitalism that should be regarded as changeable, but can only be so regarded, for Marxists, as radically and consistently changeable, from a proletarian or working-class socialist perspective. Thus, modern politics has been haunted by the “specter of communism,” or socialism. As Marx put it, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “Every demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most insipid democracy, is . . . stigmatized as ‘socialism.’”[8]

Furthermore, the concrete meaning of socialism or communism is subject to change. For Marxists, the demand for socialism in the 19th century was itself an engine of capitalist development, historically. The story of socialism, then, is bound up with the development of capital, and the question of whether and how its crisis was growing and advancing.

Moreover, the question of party-politics per se is a post-1848 phenomenon, in which modern socialism was bound up. In other words, the crisis of bourgeois society in capital after the Industrial Revolution and the failure of the “social republic” in 1848, was the crisis of bourgeois society as liberal. The rise of party-politics was thus a feature of the growing authoritarianism of bourgeois society, or, the failure of liberalism. As such, socialism needed to take up the problems of bourgeois society in capital that liberalism had failed to anticipate or adequately meet, or, to take up the cause of liberalism that bourgeois politics had dropped in the post-1848 world. For Marx, the problem was found most saliently in Louis Bonaparte’s popular authoritarianism against the liberals in Second Republic France, culminating in the coup d’état and establishment of the Second Empire. As Marx put it, the capitalists were no longer and the workers not yet able, politically, to master the bourgeois society of capital. Party-politics was thus bound up with the historical phenomenon of Bonapartism.

Lenin and the crisis of Marxism

The period of close collaboration between Luxemburg and Lenin around the 1905 Russian Revolution saw Luxemburg leveling a critique of the relation that had developed between the social-democratic party and the labor unions in her pamphlet on The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions. (Also, during this time Luxemburg wrote a defense of Lenin against the Menshevik charge of “Blanquism,” which she called “pedantic,” and thought said more of the reformist opportunism of those leveling the charge against Lenin than about its target.[9]) In her Mass Strike pamphlet, Luxemburg delineated specific and non-identical roles for the various elements she mentioned in her title, that is to say, general strike committees, political parties, and labor unions (not mentioned specifically were the “soviets,” or workers’ councils). In this sense, the “mass strike” was for Luxemburg a symptom of the historical development and crisis of social democracy itself. This made it a political and not merely tactical issue. That is, for Luxemburg, the mass strike was a phenomenon of how social democracy had developed its political parties and labor unions, and what new historical necessities had thus been brought into being. Luxemburg’s pamphlet was, above all, a critique of the social-democratic party, which she regarded as a historical symptom. This was prefigured in Luxemburg’s earlier pamphlet on Reform or Revolution?, where she addressed the question of the raison d’être of the social-democratic movement (the combination of political party and labor unions).

From this perspective of regarding the history of the workers’ movement and Marxism itself as intrinsic to the history of capitalism, then, it becomes possible to make sense of Lenin’s further articulations of politics in his later works, The State and Revolution and “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, as well as in the political disputes that attended the young Soviet state that had issued from the Russian Revolution and had endured the Civil War and stabilization of international capitalism in the aftermath of WWI. Lenin maintained a strictly minimal conception of the state, restricting it to the monopoly of authority for the exercise of force, precisely in order to avoid an all-encompassing conception of the state as the be-all and end-all of politics. Similarly, Lenin deemed “infantile” the impatience of supposed radicals with existing forms of political mediation, such as parliaments, stating unequivocally that while Marxism may have “theoretically” surpassed a liberal conception of the state, this had not yet been achieved “politically,” that is, in practice. In response to Trotsky’s recommendation that labor unions be militarized in the Soviet state, Lenin maintained that unions needed to remain independent not only of the state, but also of the Communist Party itself. The workers needed the ability, according to Lenin, of asserting their rights against the party and the state. Lenin recognized the necessity of an articulated non-identity of state, political parties, and other voluntary civil society institutions such as labor unions. This was grounded in Lenin’s perspective that capitalist social relations could not be abolished in one stroke through political revolution, that, even though the state had been “smashed,” it was reconstituted, not on the basis of a new social principle, but on the continuation of what Lenin called “bourgeois right,” long after the political overthrow and even social elimination of a separate capitalist class. “Bourgeois right” persisted precisely among the workers (and other previously subordinate members of society) and so necessarily governed their social relations, necessitating a state that could thus only “wither away.” Politics could be only slowly transformed.

Finally, there is the question of Adorno’s continued adherence to Lenin, despite what at first glance may appear to be some jarring contradictions with respect to Lenin’s own perspective and political practice. For instance, in a late essay from 1969, “Critique,” Adorno praised the U.S. Constitutional system of “divisions of powers” and “checks and balances” as essential to preserving the critical function of reason in the exercise of political authority.[10] But this was an example for Adorno, and not necessarily to be hypostatized as such. The making common of executive and legislative authority in the “soviet” system of “workers’ councils” was understood by Lenin, as Adorno well knew, to coexist with separate civil society organizations such as political parties, labor unions and other voluntary groups, and so did not necessarily and certainly did not intentionally violate the critical role of political mediation at various levels of society.

It has been a fundamental mistake to conflate and confuse Lenin’s model of party politics for a form of state in pursuing socialism. Lenin presupposed their important non-identity. The party was meant to be one element among many mediating factors in society and politics. Moreover, Lenin’s party was meant to be one among many parties, including multiple parties of the working class, vying for its adherence, and even multiple “Marxist” parties, differing in their relation of theory and practice, or means and ends.

By contrast, there was nothing so repressive and authoritarian as the Kautskyan (or Bebelian) social-democratic “party of the whole class” (or, the “one class, one party” model of social democracy, that is, that since the capitalists are of one interest in confronting the workers, the workers need to be unified against the capitalists). The social-democratic party, after all, waged the counterrevolution against Lenin and Luxemburg.

Lenin preserved politics by splitting Marxism. For this, Lenin has never been forgiven. But, precisely for this, Lenin needs to be remembered. | P


[1]. Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).

[2]. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 143.

[3]. Lenin, Karl Marx: A Brief Biographical Sketch with an Exposition of Marxism, II. “The Marxist Doctrine,” in Lenin, Collected Works vol. 21 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974). Originally published in 1915. Available on-line at: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/granat/ch02.htm>.

[4]. Cited by Benjamin in “On the Concept of History,” Selected Writings vol. 4 1938–40 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2003), 395.

[5]. Korsch, “Marxism and Philosophy,” in Marxism and Philosophy, ed. and trans. Fred Halliday (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008), 67–68.

[6]. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (1902), available on-line at: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/i.htm>.

[7]. Peter Nettl, “The German Social Democratic Party 1890-1914 as Political Model,” Past and Present 30 (April 1965).

[8]. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Robert Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader 2nd edition (New York: Norton, 1978), 602.

[9]. Rosa Luxemburg, “Blanquism and Social Democracy” (1906). Available on-line at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/06/blanquism.html.

[10]. Adorno, “Critique,” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

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