Slamming the Peoples War in India: Complaints of a Left Opponent
Posted by Mike E on August 25, 2010
This following article attacks one of the world’s most important revolutionary movements — the Maoist insurgency in India.
It starts with an aggressive dismissal of Arundhati Roy and her passionate reporting from a Maoist liberated zone. This article moves on to dismiss the revolutionary movement’s accomplishments, its connection with the people, its goals of New democracy and its historical antecedents in the Naxalite uprising. The whole discussion radiates a gut-level dislike of revolutionary violence.
For all those reasons, Kasama was reluctant to make the article available here. After all, we don’t agree with the overall verdict, tone or method (to put it mildly).
However a growing revolutionary movement will have such detractors. There is value in knowing (and vetting) their arguments. This piece originally appeared as part of Platypus Review 26 (August 2010) on the website of the Platypus Affiliated Society.
* * * * * * * *
The Maoist insurgency in India: End of the Road for Indian Stalinism?
An interview with Jairus Banaji , conducted by Spencer A. Leonard and Sunit Singh
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.
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 work—a 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.
Radical Eyes said
Haven’t read this yet…(Will soon.) But glad to see Kasama engaging with work coming out of the Platypus Society. Particularly I would like to see us critically engage the writings of Moishe Postone, (who is associated with Platypus as far as I can tell) who has some very interesting things to say about marxism and political economy.
jp said
the platypus people are the usa version of the uk’s ‘decent left’; meaning there is nothing left about them except their assertion that it is so. you’ll find them surface on ‘the activist’ website, a michael harrington-type outfit. they like to say the left is dead, but they are projecting there.
as i remember, louis proyect’s blog, or marxmail list, or both, took them over the coals pretty good.
Corrections- said
@Radical Eyes, Postone taught a number of the founding members of Platypus, and his work is a significant inspiration for the project. But he isn’t a member. In fact, he’s halfway hostile to the group, mostly because of disagreements about politics and the legacy of the Russian Revolution.
@jp, if you spend five minutes on the Platypus website, you’ll see exactly how false the “decent left” accusation is. The group critiques the left from a revolutionary perspective, not a moralistic “eustonite” angle. Again, this is immediately apparent.
Mike E said
hmmmm. Eustonite? A new one on me. thanks.
Doug said
Here’s Louis Proyect on the Platypus group and Euston connection.
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/q-what-is-a-platypus-a-an-american-eustonite/
Mike E said
I really think we should deal with the specific arguments people raise — not dismiss arguments by dismissing the source. Here is an argument made by an anti-Naxalite writer in India.
Do we understand the charges against India’s Maoists better through quick dismissal of the journal these charges appeared in?
Doug said
Just a point, my #5 post was meant to provide a link to Louis Proyect’s blog since someone earlier brought it up. That said, I believe that Mike is right(engage with arguments, not necessarily the author).
Just reading this interview, this passage struck me:
“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.”
There are a number of points to be made. It seems to me that JB is rather dismissive of the tribal groups of India. For instance, the enemies of tribal in India are described as moneylenders, steel and mining corporations, and local gov’ts that support them.
Now, it strikes me that those would be the same enemies of the Maoists. Furthermore, to say that the tribal view the state as an abstract is to deny this passage. If local gov’ts and the Indian national gov’t are allowing foreign companies, surely that means that the state is not an abstraction but a fact of life. Is JB saying that the tribal people cannot attain political consciousness even though their lives are being disrupted?
Furthermore, this is a point that needs more investigation from me (since I am no expert on the CPI), but I think it is worth considering. JB describes the Maoists as relatively separate. Yet it would strike me that if the Maoist revolution has reached such a critical stage, wouldn’t there be some sort of fusion between the local population and the CPI?
Now wouldn’t a fusion between the local indignenous population and the Maoists actually be in the best traditions of Marxism? Look at Jose Carlos Mariagetui and his writings on the Incas and the potential for revolution in Peru. Or Gramsci and how his writings strove to build a Marxism based deeply on Italian soil.
What I’m saying is that maybe the Peoples War is actually quite different from what this passage (and the further work) says it is. It seems that the Maoists have built up impressive support in the countryside (I don’t know enough about the urban side of the movement to comment) which seems based on local conditions.
Green Red said
To an extent the way struggle is looked upon must be considered important too.
After decades of – with all their due respect and heritage and bravery – the off the true people’s struggles Regis Debary or, so called Che minded movement that some called adventurism is too old and off the subject to care much for. With all their due respects where have our friends in Nicaragua and El Salvador have reached? Of course the US intervention had lots to do with their failure but, wrong policies toward people, the indigenous people like Mosquitoes who were incorrectly approached by FSLN made their soil ripe for CIA plantation to make them arsons.
Were they making sewerage systems for the original people?
Were they teaching the tribes people to go on strike, don’t give away stacks of leaves of trees for tobacco rolling to make the urban thief traders buy them for five times more than before fixed price?
Mazumdar was wrong? No country EVER has had such suitable conditions for application of the thought of Mao Tse-tung. How many decades anybody want tribes people, Adivasis, the Dalits to be treated as underclass people? I was stunned to hear that seventy percent of Indian people in the so called biggest democracy of the world are basically under the social carpet living. And their finding Naxalites suitable to their cause is not an indoctrination or propaganda. Seeing written on the walls asking Naxalites to come and save us in villages is simply watching the true world.
Should people eternally be left in the countryside and when Salwa Judums come to burn their village to do coal and bauxite mining be displaced? See Indian Vanguard article
Indian government rejection of Vedanta bauxite mine a “landmark victory” for Indigenous rights
Did they get indoctrinated by wrong minded Maoists that this mistaking A Roy had written to praise? Or Lalgrah and Nandigram were they as CPIM cadre slandered Naxalites terrorist conspiracies?
No more blind games. People learn they have to fight and only then it is worthy to be called People’s War.
Read the Urban Perspectives. For sometimes, while working in the cities too but still they need people to join the people’s war. Being privileged educated in the cities brings the need to come and harmonize the thousands of people in the forests in conditions sometimes worse than African Sahara to give proletarian leadership to the revolution.
Is it enough to fight in bits of factories and disregard the shantytowns full of Moslems and so forth that are good only for clearing toilets and houses and get back to their ghettoes?
Or, be wiped out of their shanty due to “environmental measures” in the capitalist cities where foreign corps stack their cheap computer programmers and so forth?
It is the most genuine revolution of our times and, if you don’t support them directly at least oppose the Green Hunt atrocities.
hobgoblins said
Their “argument” is a re-hashing of Trotskyist proto-neocons. Nothing new to see here. Same game they were playing back in the Partisan Review days… left in form, right in essence and fundamentally opposed to not only revolutionary violence, but the very idea that people have the right to rule (in the real world). At least Christopher Hitchens could write. These Platypus types are like Ayn Rand follwers who think they are despised not because they are anti-social haters, but because they are intrinsically superior. It’s tiresome. And dignifying their ignorant, entitled complaints by “dealing with the issues” doesn’t get that their ignorant entitlement IS their “issue”.
Mike E said
Their dislike of the Naxalites is tied to their visceral fear of the peasants and “tribals.”
They just disdain the unwashed people — and see no prospects. And they dismiss those who sweat and die with a wave of the hand.
Everything about this essays reeks of class and privilege — and that special permission to just mock what the dark and forgotten people do.
Seamus said
I know very very little about these Indian Maoists guerrilas . But i do know from my knowledge of armed actions in Ireland from 1970 to today that there is really no correlation between miltancy and being more ”revolutionary ”. (There can be a thin line between so called ‘ revolutionary violence ” and outright gangsterism )
But once again i know next to nothing about this political/military tendency . So can someone dispute or confirm this allegation that ‘hundreds have died not from the Indian military or police but at the hands of their own (or ex ) comrades ?
Chris Cutrone said
It might be beyond hope to have an honest discussion of the issues here (because of entrenched stereotypical prejudices against “Trotskyism,” etc.), but I must protest the ascription of motives that sees critique as dismissal. I don’t think Jairus Banaji, and certainly not the Platypus interviewers Spencer Leonard and Sunit Singh, were in any way “mocking” oppressed people in India. The question is whether one can simply identify the Naxalites/Maoist guerrillas with the “tribals” on whose behalf they claim to act. It’s never a simple matter of being “on the side” of “the people.” If that can’t be admitted, then things are pretty hopeless, aren’t they?
Because there would be no room for improving the political means by which people pursue emancipatory ends. Don’t we all deserve better than this? Naxalism is working about as well to emancipate the people in India as Talibanism is in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or Hamas and Hezbollah are in Palestine and Lebanon. Naxalism has in fact degenerated (perhaps not completely) into thuggery, just as the NPA has degenerated in the Philippines, etc. Why is it such a “betrayal” to admit as much?
Can such criticism really be ascribed only to “privilege?” Isn’t it at least as “arrogant” to cheer on the Naxalites, et al. from the safe confines of American cyberspace? Don’t we an obligation to use our “privilege” of being able to familiarize ourselves and study the history of Marxism and social struggles for emancipation more generally to offer comradely critiques? It’s all fine and good to oppose the Green Hunts, but is the way of doing this by Roy et al. — uncritical solidarity with the “people” — really the only way to do this?
The longest that Mao’s “Long March” could be said to have endured was less than a decade and a half. Naxalism, etc. has been going much longer than that. At what point does the supposed “people’s war” turn into something else, and become an army existing for its own sake rather than an emancipatory movement of the people? Retreat is retreat. And when it becomes a way of life, it becomes, more than retreat, the institutionalization of defeat. Doesn’t it? But of course we’re not allowed to even raise this as a question, because it might insult “the people” to do so! But isn’t it actually condescending — that is, arrogant — to hold refrain from criticism, out of a fear of engaging in “privilege?”
Mike E said
Just some points from the interview above:
Isn’t commitment to the violent overthrow of the state something that “distinguishes” communism as a political movement (not just in India, but internationally and historically)? If not, shouldn’t it?
This is not true of Mao Zedong’s own work — as a look at his theory and his rewriting of Chinese history confirms. There are currents of the Maoist movement who have formulated a theory with a timeless quality. But that is not inherent within Maoism itself.
Ironicaly, the analysis in the interview has a timeless quality — as if the CPI(Maoist) is simply a modern clone of the earlier CPI(ML), and that what is true about the one applies to the other.
In fact, the history of this is quite a bit more complex and subtle… and even where there are continuities of language and formulations there are stark differences of content and practice. There are bases build now (in ways the earlier Naxalites were unable to do). There has been a transition from “roaming rebel bands” — to rudiments of red political power.
And there are in events like the Lalgarh uprising signs of real creativity, and adaptation to conditions outside a core base areas.
There is much I would want to say in defense of Arundhati Roy, but I will just make one point…
She says of revolutoinary communist leader and theoretician who first founded the CPI (M-L):
And this is mocked:
In fact it is quite possible to view Mazumdar as visionary, while also seeing his “annihilation” line as quite mistaken. And it is especially possible to see this on the basis of summing up the great practice of the Spring Thunder — where (as so often happens) the error of conceptions can be seen in the wake of a great and historic movement. And the next work takes its place on the basis of the past, and through the process of a critical summation of what has been done and learned.
It is in fact the view of many revolutionary communists broadly in India that Mazumdar was quite visionary, and that at the same time major new creative leaps have been needed beyond his political and organizational conceptions.
There is nothing silly about that (and certainly nothing silly about Roy in general). In fact it is a quite reasoned assessment that has a lot to recommend it.
This is ill-informed. I have seen the discussion documents in the CPI(Maoist) in which significant commissions of that party argued that the formulation “semifeudal, semicolonial” is outdated in India. The official view of the party overall remains “semifeudal, semicolonial” — however India is undergoing radical structural changes — and those changes are inevitably reflected within the Maoist ranks and within their practice in numerous ways.
Similarly, the understanding of the role of urban work has been a major source of debate and struggle. The CPI(Maoist) have made major efforts to develop urban-based work — in response to significant criticisms raised about their previously singleminded focus in their rural base areas.
And the work of the maoists against international corporations forcing people off their land is (obviously) not restricted to the contradiction between the peasantry and semifeudal oppressors.
Finally, it is simply untrue that (for the Maoists), “agrarian” has come to mean “tribal.” It may be true that their political work took root among the adivasi communities (but not solely there). But the fact that red political power emerges in one corner hardly means that anyone now intends to confine it there — or that concepts have become defined by sectoral successes.
There is more to say — including the elements that touch on Trotskyism’s long standing criticisms of New Democratic revolution (approach to forming a revolutionary united front, strategic approaches of peoples war, role of the peasantry and antifeudal agrarian revolution etc.).
But I do want to respond briefly to Chris’s opening remark:
I just want to comment on the irony of exhibiting “stereotypical prejudices” by assuming that others must have them. Perhaps that’s not the way to start off.
worker antagonism said
The problem with this article is not that it presents a critique of Naxalism, but that its critique comes from a right wing social democratic perspective.
The only “alternative” that this author can offer is a “worker’s party on the Latin American model” no doubt operating within the confines of the ruling class state, while condemning “militarism”, I suppose according to this logic the early American labor movement,the CNT,Italian Autonomia and pretty much every other political upsurge of the proletariat was just based on “violence and fear”.
I for one completely agree that the concept of “semi-feudalism” has failed to explain much for quite a while now, and that a unexamined Maoism will almost certainly lead to the entrenchment of a new state bourgeoisie,however the strategy presented above can only succeed in providing fat salaries for party and union functionaries within the confines of the old state apparatus.
Chris Cutrone said
Thanks, Mike. — I agree that there can be a complementary “stereotypical prejudice” — against Maoism.
I take you in good faith on the question of Banaji’s ascription of present-day Naxalism as a throw-back to 1960s conceptions, as if nothing has changed. I think your response to Banaji on this point is good and interesting.
The bottom line for me, however, is whether the heroic days of the Naxalite movement are behind or ahead of us, whether this really is a living movement in terms of emancipatory possibilities for South Asia in its global context, and whether something greater and other than learning from and correcting past mistakes is called for today, for the Indian as well as for the global Left.
While it’s true that the criticism of Naxalism by Banaji et al. may itself have a “timeless” character about it, as this critique was formulated long ago and maintained in essentially the same form since then (as “Trotskyist” or otherwise — Banaji is today not a Trotskyist but more of a “council communist”), this doesn’t mean that there was not a fundamental critique to be made of Maoism back in the 1960s that remains in some way relevant today.
But the question is whether really even that 1960s-70s-era “struggle continues” today. Roy’s concerns seem quite different from yours, Mike, in this regard. She wants to be on the side of the people, but primarily, it seems to me, as *victims* (“resistance”), ennobling their struggle against military annihilation (through the Green Hunts, etc.). You, on the other hand, are more closely concerned with the actual political practices involved. You may be happy to have Roy as an ally, but certainly there are problems with the way she (among others) puts things, no? That seems to be at least one of the main points of the Platypus interview with Banaji.
Mike E said
Chris writes:
That is a question for all of us, and (I assume) for the maoists themselves. And that is not an easy question to answer — in part because so much depends on what they do.
This is not just a a problem for the Maoists of India (or worldwide) — but in fact we are passing through a period that has not had successful revolutions in a long time. And part of the question posed is what the next wave of world revolution will look like.
There is a long-standing problem of “fidelity to past fidelities” — where people and movement are seeking to fight the next revolution with the forms, language and assumptions of the past ones.
We have had a few major revolutions in the twentieth century and each one has been turned into a “model” by some people — trying to reproduce Red October, or Mao’s Yenan, or the July 26 movement in very distant and different conditions. I sometimes think people like to dress up in granddad’s army uniform and pretend that makes them a soldier.
And the fact is that several of most powerful and visible revolutionary currents got stalled. And that once revolutionary movements get to a certain point, a kind of a strategic stall has been more of a problem than actual defeat.
In India and the Philippines, initial victories in establishing guerrilla zones (and even a few liberated base areas) have not automatically led (in linear ways) to new opportunities. In Peru, a certain plateau of early victories emerged, and the advances stalled on the problem of both consolidating and then entering Lima (where a third of the population lives) — the decapitation of the leadership in 1992 was (in part) a product of that stall, not the cause of it.
In China the communists had a policy of “hasten and await” (where they are both hastening and awaiting the changes in the objective situation that allow the seizure of overall countrywide power). And the opportunity emerged in the form of Japanese invasion (and then Japanese defeat in a worldwide war). The fact that the Maoists had created the Yenan base area and their great underground resistance movement meant they were able to (skillfully! creatively!) inherit the great vacuum created by the implosion of the Japanese occupiers.
And in India and the Philippines there has been a lot of “awaiting” but no conjunctural change in opportunities arrived. that’s how the dice rolled — in a period where there were no world wars (of a kind that produced the chinese and russian revolutions), or other major events playing a similar role.
That is not their fault — and I don’t assume that another strategy would have forged the possibility of countrywide power. It couldn’t. The Maoists in India have forged an infrastructure for taking advantage of a larger conjunctural change that hasn’t emerged (yet).
In Nepal, they face the danger of a holding pattern of their own kind (having gotten “so far” and yet seeming unsure that they can seize final countrywide power against an undefeated army.) And this is not just a problem for Maoists, of course: the IRA was in a similar stance of living resistance without an opening for victory, and the FARC experience in Colombia speaks for itself.
Chris writes:
This is a misunderstanding.
First, the Maoists have been in a holding pattern overall in places like India and the Philippines and Nepal. It is the absense (for now) of advance, but I see no reason for reading that as “retreat.”
What is also ignored is that the Maoists are actually not just in a holding pattern in South Asia (in both Nepal and India) — in both cases, there have been leaps of influence and opportunity.
We are talking about the Indian Maoists because they are growing, because they have led important struggles of major importance, and because the Indian military (!) has declared it is time to crush them militarily. In other words, we are talking about them because they are not simply in a holding pattern (let alone retreat or defeat).
They are advancing in significant ways (in a context that has not, yet, changed fundamentally, and that is not, yet, marked by some new conjunctural opportunity.)
In india, that conjunctural opening could potentially emerge from a number of directions, among them the possibility of a liberated New Nepal on India’s northern border — with all the unpredictable contradictions that could unleash.
* * * * * * *
I’m not of the school that slides by agreements rapidly to focus (like some attack dog) solely on differences. So I want to note that Chris wrote:
I choose to take that literally: that Chris does think it is fine and (even) good to oppose the Green Hunt genocide being planned by the Indian government. And I just want to mark that point of agreement.
But then Chris wants to make all kinds of secondary distinctions primary — in ways that would make it a bit hard to actually oppose the Green Hunt moves.
Actually that isn’t “the question” at all – if only because one can never “simply identify” a political force with those they represent or lead. There are always contradictions of many kinds in such relationships — as there certainly are here.
But this is a case of people (who are truly among the “wretched of the earth”) finding no other champions and organizers but those who want the most radical transformation of the world — and that kind of “meeting” is exactly the stuff of communist revolution in our epoch.
Of course, almost nothing important is ever a “simple matter.” An assertion and appreciation of complexity (in opposition to all-too-common reductionism and dumbing down) is pretty central to our Kasama Project.
But, I think it is very possible to be on the side of the people — as a basic matter of stand flowing from communist convictions –i.e. to have a broad and generous sense of solidarity with brothers and sisters, and a sharp uncompromising sense of who are their oppressors (and therefore our common enemies).
The people are hardly homogeneous — they are objectively divided into strata and classes, into different (often mutually hostile) groups and nationalities. Different sections of the people have different desires and goals — and even contradictory interests that erupt constantly and insistently.
But in an overall historic sense, capitalism (and all class society) is not in the interest of the vast expanses of humanity — and that forms a material basis for optimism and great attempts at common struggle.
Once again, Chris wants to declare what “the question” really is. And (once again) that isn’t really the question at all.
A. Roy is not a communist. But yes, she has chosen (with real courage and insight) to become an ally of communists (and an exposed target for anticommunists, including some quite capable of killing her).
Her views are not identical to mine. And on a number of those points of difference, she may ultimately prove to be more correct and wise than me. We’ll see.
But that isn’t really “the question.”
Let me say that one question of many worth considering is that if you survey our planet to identify where ground-pounding revolutionary struggle may well erupt — South Asia (with india and nepal entwined) starts beeping loud on the radar.
And in South Asia, some truly radical popular movements have emerged led by communists (i.e. by people who want to continue their revolution as rapidly as possible to socialism and worldwide communism). And they have accomplished some things we have not — including a living fusion of their communist movements with sections of the oppressed people. And this is true even if those communist movement have some real differences (as, by analogy, the Russian Bolsheviks and German Spartacists did in their common struggle to exploit World War 1).
And so, for me, that poses a series of tasks for us:
* to actively learn from these experiences (their positive and negative),
* to popularize the fact that revolution and communism are far from dead in our world,
* to reveal to large numbers of people around us ways that revolutions like this start to actually enable human being to liberate themselves from previously invulnerable structures of oppression, and finally,
* to actively use such awareness (that we can help build) to create material force that can help protect (and support) these revolutions from being crushed.
So if we are talking about what “the question” is, how about this: Are we willing to take up such tasks or not?
chegitz guevara said
It seems to me that Banaji is a classic “economist,” i.e, he’s seeking to create a wedge between the revolutionary movement and the people, explaining that the people don’t need revolution. All they need is unhindered access to their resources, and all the Russian proletariat needed was better wages and working conditions. Banaji is arguing that the Naxalites have hijacked the struggle of the adivasi, just as the social democrats hijacked te struggle of the workers.
Nate said
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” (…) Some of the terminology was changed (…) but these shifts in rhetoric marked no crucial differences.
SL: Embedded in this refusal of reality, this insistence upon rehashing empty abstractions, there seems an unmistakable retreat from the very project of Marxism. (…) 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”?
So you see, Maoists are timeless because they deal in abstractions stemming from documents that are 70 years old. In doing so, they abandon Marxism, which is not timeless because Maxists deal with abstractions stemming primarily from documents that are approximately 150 years old.
The question is which documents to use in order to stake a claim to cultural cache and theoretical pride of place. The question is really who shall speak and who shall be told to sit down and shut up until the speaker says otherwise.
Chris Cutrone said
@Nate: It is not a matter of which holy writ, Mao’s or Lenin’s or Marx’s, but rather the different kinds of lessons to be learned from different aspects of history, and how long insights last before their expirations. Perhaps Marx’s (and Lenin’s) lessons last longer than Mao’s. My question is: How does Mao help us make revolution in the U.S.? — This is why I find Mao(ism) inadequate, no other reason.
@Mike: I would answer your last question very simply: “Yes!” But the issue for me is: “How?” I think making a revolution in the U.S. would provide the requisite “material force.”
Revolution and “communism” may not be dead in our world, but there is the very real problem of what you call the “stalling” that revolutions have been subject to in the 20th century, and not without reason I would add. I would offer that unless and until the revolution goes global and affects the heart of world capital, such “stalling” is inevitable. My fear is that we let people in India, China, Russia, etc. bleed while we fail to make the revolution that they need us to make.
I’m very much aware of Rosa Luxemburg’s warning regarding the October 1917 Revolution, that Social Democracy in the West consisted of miserable cowards who would look on as the Russians bled to death. But this would include people who merely cheered from the sidelines and not only those who expressed skepticism. I try to avoid both forms of abdication from what I consider the central task.
Criticism of, e.g., Naxalism is only “Right social-democratic” if one assumes no possibility of revolutionary transformation of the U.S. That may be Banaji et al.’s assumption — also, Roy’s! — but it is not mine. The suffering and violence is perhaps more pervasive in India than the U.S., but that is no index to revolutionary possibilities. I would feel a lot better about “solidarity” with the Naxalites if I were doing so from the vantage of an American workers’ state. — Or, perhaps, it would be less necessary for us then to settle for mere solidarity.
Nate said
Chris, who said anything about holy writ? Not me, that’s for sure. Anyway, here was my point: the person interviewed says Maoist theory has a timeless quality about it and deals in abstractions and deals with documents from the 40s. One of the interviewers echoed this in a way that intensified it in two ways. One, made the point into denial of reality. (Whereas, the interviewed person’s remark could at least on a charitable read include a sort of “even a stopped clock sometimes tells the right time…” meaning.) Two, suggested that this removes Maoists or at least some Maoists from the Marxist tradition. The interviewer then went on to reference something the person interviewed said elsewhere. In that referenced statement, the person interviewed referenced a much older document and offered a quote which is at least arguably an abstraction.
I’m sure you can see the irony at least in terms of the surface content. At the very least, this is rhetorically clumsy and poor writing — it should have been glossed better in the editing, if nothing else, particularly given the gravity of the claims made (the graver the claim the higher the burden on the claimant). As may be clear, I suspect that this is not simply a matter of clumsy rhetoric but is a matter of misrepresentation or at best misunderstanding of others’ positions — I take Mike E’s comments here as support for this. I also suspect that this is done in a way that doesn’t particularly demonstrate an interest in engagement but is at least as much about the need to be right for the sake of being right, even if one isn’t actually right. (That is, this strikes me as more about winning arguments than about finding truth; as a fellow ex- graduate student I’m sure you’ve encountered that particular impulse taking place at the expense of the impulse toward truth-finding.) This does not speak to the issue of what Mao tells us about revolution in the United States in 2010, this instead speaks to very basic issues of intellectual integrity, which is a precondition for frank discussion among revolutionaries.
I will say that I’m glad to see you’ve moved from defining *the* question in all this into pursuing merely *your* question, that seems to me highly salutary, I mean that sincerely. I do assume, of course, that one of the main questions motivating the interview was as much about revolution *in India* in 2010 given that it’s about, umm, Indian Maoists. I also assume from the interview and from reading this thread and this blog over all that your question about Mao’s utility is only partially related to assessing these Indian Maoists or the particular Maoisms that converge around this web site. In any case, I don’t have an answer to your question about what the use of Mao is for revolutionaries in the US today. I’ve found some Mao edifying but haven’t read much and I generally take a “there are multiple routes to Paris” sort of approach. Which is to say, I tend to believe that in general while some writer or text may provide important insights to some people it’s likely that other writers or texts provide or could similar insights to other people.
One last thought – all of the above aside, the implication behind your question “How does Mao help us make revolution in the U.S.?” seems to be the answer “Mao does not help us make revolution in the US.” If that’s *not* your actual view, then this would mean that you really do think Mao offers us some things, in which case, I’d like to hear what you think Mao helps us on (honestly, I would). If that *is* your view, that Mao doesn’t help us at all, then please offer an argument for such, I’d like to hear that too.
Chris Cutrone said
I think that the issues posed by Maoism, of what Mike listed as “New Democracy,” “people’s war,” and “peasants’ antifeudal agrarian revolution,” are not about “communism” as Marx and Lenin understood this, but really about “proletarianization” (of countries like Russia and China), i.e., the “bourgeois” revolution. There seem to me to be important differences between Mao, on, the one hand, and Marx and Lenin, on the other, regarding the relation between the bourgeois revolution and what they understood as “communism.” (For instance, Lenin, in The State and Revolution, discussed the necessity of the state surviving not only negatively, as a function of enforcing the revolution against counterrevolutionaries, but more positively in terms of the need to enforce “bourgeois right” in the social relations among workers, even after the elimination of the bourgeoisie.)
About Mao’s contributions, I honestly think there are obfuscatory, but there seems to be some differences between Mao as a historical figure circa and leading up to 1949 and in the Cultural Revolution 1966-76. I’m not addressing his thinking so much as his political practices.
I think Mao(ism) is hampered by two important problems: 1.) assuming a national frame for the process of revolutionary politics; and 2.) assuming a one-party (and national) state model for the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what I, for one, would mean by that much-abused term “Stalinism.”
It’s not that I think Marx and Lenin have all the answers and, e.g., Mao, has none, but rather that there are deep problems to be considered in the earlier history (especially in the Russian revolutionary experience) that are glossed over and rendered inaccessible by the assumptions of Maoism.
I think that Banaji and his Platypus interviewers do not engage in merely rhetorical (or, less charitably, sophistic) arguments against Maoism, but it could appear as such because they are rather proceeding from fundamentally different assumptions than Maoists, and these differing assumptions or worldviews need to be stated as such (which doesn’t happen in the interview). (Also, important differences between the Platypus interviewers and Banaji.)
Recently, I wrote a critique of the RCP, USA on Alain Badiou, published alongside the Banaji interview, in which I lay out some of my arguments around these issues, albeit at a fairly basic level and in a relatively underdeveloped way, if anyone is interested:
http://platypus1917.org/2010/08/05/chinoiserie-a-critique-of-the-revolutionary-communist-party-usa%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Cnew-synthesis%E2%80%9D/
louisproyect said
Chris Cutrone:
I try to avoid both forms of abdication from what I consider the central task.
—
Actually, isn’t the Platypus project really about kibitzing from the sidelines? In a way, the relationship between Platypus and the left is like that of a film critic to a film director. Now there is nothing wrong with that in theory, but Marxist politics is fundamentally about what Sartre called “engagement”. That is why it is impossible to take you seriously.
Chris Cutrone said
@Louis: Platypus is about “kibitzing from the sidelines” in comparison to what? How are we any less “engaged” than anyone else? Simply by virtue of not making the ritualistic gestures of “engagement,” voicing “solidarity,” etc.?
*How* are we going to go about making a revolution in the U.S., starting from where we are right now? Not, I would argue, on the basis of accepted truths or received wisdom, of any kind.
Platypus is based on the premise that there are an awful lot of mistaken assumptions from which people need to be disabused, and a lot of assumptions that need to be re-founded, in order to be able to even begin to “engage” in politics. Adorno’s critique of Sartre was that “engagement” was hardly enough, and that the strident call for “engagement” masked the sobering reality that there may not be any existing politics worth engaging in.
In the face of the Indian “Green Hunts” against the Naxalites, etc., it may seem simple that one needs to be against the Indian state and for the oppressed “people,” “walking with the comrades,” as A. Roy puts it. We need more than to be on the “right side.”
How do we begin to take apart and examine everything that is taken for granted in such a stance, what it leaves out/aside, and what mistaken assumptions are smuggled into such a perspective? Platypus tries to establish a critical space for opening such questions, not as a pose, but an honest endeavor. It doesn’t do anyone any good to pretend that we can just proceed without confusion, however unconscious. As Marx put it, in his famous 1843 letter to Ruge calling for the “ruthless criticism of everything existing,”
“In fact, the internal obstacles seem almost greater than external difficulties. For . . . the question “where to?” is a rich source of confusion . . . among the reformers, but also every individual must admit to himself that he has no precise idea about what ought to happen. . . . [However] we do not anticipate the world with our dogmas but instead attempt to discover the new world through the critique of the old. I am therefore not in favor of our hoisting a dogmatic banner. Quite the reverse. We must try to help the dogmatists to clarify their ideas.”
The “Left is dead!,” according to Platypus, because it is completely swamped in sectarian dogmatism. This includes Banaji. It is an endemic problem of our historical moment, in which practices have not proceeded to be able to inform new theories. There isn’t a better way on offer, either theoretically or practically. So, as we are well aware, this also includes members of Platypus! This is why we refrain from taking positions or even offering positive analyses, and hence appear to be so “elliptical,” not for any other reason.
Today it is a matter, not of “What is to be done?,” but rather (as in the title of Lenin’s essay that preceded What is to be Done?), “Where to begin?” Or, “what is to be done” is precisely a matter of “where to begin,” and, following Marx, Platypus thinks that critique of the Left (with or without scare quotes) isn’t a bad place to start. It may be the only place we can begin.
louisproyect said
It may be the only place we can begin.
—
But you have shown no signs of doing anything except kibitz. My impression is that you are an academic gas-bag who attracts other grad students around him who like to think that they are radicals when they are only kibitzers.
Chris Cutrone said
We host events and publish a wide variety of Leftists, including: Ervand Abrahamian, Manan Ahmed, Michael Albert, Tariq Ali, Kevin Anderson, Siyaves Azeri, Jairus Banaji, Maziar Behrooz, Noam Chomsky, T. J. Clark (as part of the Retort collective), Hamid Dabashi, Barbara DeGenevieve, Stephen Duncombe, Kaveh Ehsani, Stephen Eisenman, Hal Foster (art critic), Coco Fusco, Terry Glavin, Raja Halwani, David Harvey, James Heartfield, Rohini Hensman, Brian Holmes, Peter Hudis, Hussein Ibish, Naomi Klein, Andrew Kliman, Joel Kovel, Ernesto Laclau, Michael Löwy, Staughton Lynd, James Miller, Leo Panitch, Claire Pentecost, Danny Postel, Moishe Postone, Mark Rudd, George Scialabba, Issam Shukri, Ayesha Siddiqa, and Richard Wolff, among others. Leftist organizations that have participated in Platypus public fora include: the International Socialist Organization, News and Letters Committees (as wells as various U.S., Canadian and British tendencies of Marxist humanism that have split from News and Letters), NEFAC, the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, Solidarity (U.S.), the new Students for a Democratic Society (2006 organization), the Worker-communist Party of Iran, and the Left Worker-communist Party of Iraq, among others. That’s what Platypus is about, not my articles or posts to this (or your) site or Doug Henwood’s LBO-talk list, etc.
Nate said
Chris, you ask “*How* are we going to go about making a revolution in the U.S., starting from where we are right now?” and answer “Not, I would argue, on the basis of accepted truths or received wisdom, of any kind.”
Does this mean that you are distant from what Jairus Banaji has called “the vision of the Communist Manifesto,” in which Marx argues that the task of the Communists is, as Banaji puts 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”?
That vision, after all, seems to me like a form of accepted truth or received wisdom.
b_y said
while i share their discomfort with collapsing ‘the naxalites’ and ‘tribal peoples’ into a common category, platypus seems to circumscribe a very narrow space from which the kind of critique that is useful to them is available. it seems to me very telling that the tribal resistance itself isn’t itself discussed as a form of immanent critique of the state, of primitive accumulation and the process of proletarianization, of the terms of military engagement and the state’s monopoly on legitimate use of force, of social organization.
i understand that platypus resists acknowledging their position (and positionality) or advancing a positive analysis, while maintaining an investment in the term ‘revolution’. but i can’t help but wonder what that revolution would look like when the only ‘revolutionary critique’ of value to them is developed in those sanitized ‘spaces’ far removed from work among masses or situations when conflict between classes are most sharp? what does clarity look like when the latter two are seen as a source of confusion?
Chris Cutrone said
@B_y: Did *Marx* occupy a “sanitized space?!” What was *his* (or Lenin’s, or Mao’s) “positionality?”
@Nate: It is all a matter of what M/E’s Manifesto *means*. As a text, its meaning is not self-apparent, but demands (re-)interpretation. I have problems with aspects of what Banaji means by the Communist Manifesto.
Platypus exists to push such questions, further and deeper. But we need the opportunity to do so. That means honest engagement. We admit that we ourselves don’t have the answers, and we push others to develop better answers than hitherto.
b_y said
both marx and lenin engaged social movements in their contradictions and advanced a positive analysis to push their movement, not just a line of questioning. but your question begs another, are you attempting to write ‘capital’ or ‘the communist manifesto’; ‘materialism and empiro-criticism’ or ‘what is to be done?’?
Chris Cutrone said
@B_y: The relative non-existence of revolutionary movements (relative to Marx and Lenin’s times) means that we don’t have anything to intersect with manifestos, elaborate theoretical analyses or programmatic recommendations. It would be sterile to try to do so under immediate present conditions. Things are pretty inchoate right now, and there’s a lot of garbage, e.g., pseudo-”Marxism” and bad “Leftism” that’s in the way, also relative to Marx and Lenin’s moments. It must be said that even Marx and Lenin both started out with critiques, however. Our problem is that what we have to critique is so lame to begin with. So even critique tends to misfire (or backfire). Nevertheless, we think it is (only part, if an essential part of) what’s necessary.
Chris Cutrone said
@B_y: P.S. Part of why we chose the Platypus identity is that the animal is not afraid to swim through the muck (it uses electro-reception) to find the tasty worms at the bottom of the creek on which to feed. We are n fact engaging (many different) people, which means not trying to keep our hands clean, but getting down and dirty with the “Left,” such that it is.
Otto said
This all reminds me of the Shining Path (AKA Communist Party of Peru) and those who argued against them. At one point they seemed close to being at parity with the Peruvian military. I would argue, that–yes they did have some questionable tactics and ides. On the other hand, they had a lot of popular support and seemed to be gaining ground as one of the largest insurgencies of the continent.
It’s always hard to tell what would have happened if they hadn’t lost their leader and the past is already written, but why would we oppose the rights of oppressed people to rise up against a clearly imperialist system? What alternatives did we have then and what alternative do we have in India today?
As for India, I think the Communist Party of India has done a much better job than Guzman did in Peru and I think they represent the peasants better. They may have some wrong ideas or unresolved issues, but how can anyone claim to be a communist or even a leftist and try to hold back the revolutionaries of India?
If you want to oppose the Communist Party of India, which has a very long history, than why not just join the Democratic Party and put your hopes in Obama?
b_y said
but this returns to the notion that critique as an academic exercise is the only useful critical practice for you. is organized resistance not critique? does engagement with mass struggles and the demands of organizing not involve the critical capacity of attentiveness and imaginative if provisional solutions to the problems that face the left?
b_y said
the contempt with which you frame mass struggles as not worthy of engagement or lame garbage speaks volumes. if engaging individuals (themselves often reserving a critical distance) with whom you share difference without staking a position for yourself is what you consider ‘dirty work’, it’s difficult for me to imagine what a revolutionary process that involves millions must look like to you
Chris Cutrone said
@B_Y: We’re trying to help provide for a missing element, not do it all ourselves — obviously! On the other hand, this passage from Marx and Engels’s correspondence, in 1851 int he aftermath of the failed revolutions of 1848-49, has always brought a smile to my face and warmed my heart (but the point is that our situation is much more wretched than M/E’s for making lemonade out of lemons):
Marx to Engels (Feb. 11, 1851):
‘I am greatly pleased by the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves. It is wholly in accord with our attitude and our principles. The system of mutual concessions, half-measures tolerated for decency’s sake, and the obligation to bear one’s share of public ridicule in the party along with all these jackasses, all this is now over.”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1851/letters/51_02_11.htm
Engels to Marx (Feb. 13, 1851):
“From now on we are only answerable for ourselves and, come the time when these gentry need us, we shall be in a position to dictate our own terms. . . . Besides we have no real grounds for complaint if we are shunned by the petits grands hommes; haven’t we been acting for years as though [Tom, Dick and Harry] were our party when, in fact, we had no party, and when the people whom we considered as belonging to our party, at least officially, sous réserve de les appeler des bêtes incorrigibles entre nous [with the reservation that between ourselves we called them incorrigible fools], didn’t even understand the rudiments of our stuff? How can people like us, who shun official appointments like the plague, fit into a ‘party’? And what have we, who spit on popularity, who don’t know what to make of ourselves if we show signs of growing popular, to do with a ‘party’, i.e. a herd of jackasses who swear by us because they think we’re of the same kidney as they? Truly, it is no loss if we are no longer held to be the ‘right and adequate expression’ of the ignorant curs with whom we have been thrown together over the past few years [since 1848].”
“We can always, in the nature of things, be more revolutionary than the phrase-mongers because we have learnt our lesson and they have not, because we know what we want and they do not, and because, after what we have seen for at least three years, we shall take it a great deal more coolly than anyone who has an interest in the business.”
“The main thing at the moment is to find some way of getting our things published; either in a quarterly in which we make a frontal attack and consolidate our position so far as [definite] persons are concerned, or in fat books where we do the same without being under the necessity of mentioning any one of these vipers. . . . What price all the gossip the entire émigré crowd can muster against you, when you answer it with your [forthcoming] political economy?”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1851/letters/51_02_13.htm
louisproyect said
‘I am greatly pleased by the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves. It is wholly in accord with our attitude and our principles. The system of mutual concessions, half-measures tolerated for decency’s sake, and the obligation to bear one’s share of public ridicule in the party along with all these jackasses, all this is now over.”
—
What arrogance to link your own masturbatory writings to Marx and Engels.
b_y said
“We can always, in the nature of things, be more revolutionary than the phrase-mongers because we have learnt our lesson and they have not, because we know what we want and they do not, and because, after what we have seen for at least three years, we shall take it a great deal more coolly than anyone who has an interest in the business.”
3 years after publishing the communist manifesto. they know what they want, and yet your whole project seems to be grounded in anxiety about articulating and defending what you want and what course of action you prescribe. i hope you can see the difference.
Chris Cutrone said
@ Louis and B_y: The whole point of Platypus is that we are *not* comparing ourselves to Marx and Lenin! That’s the point! That’s why we think it’s foolhardy to pretend otherwise, and proceed to draft manifestos, analyses, programmes, and found political parties (which are doomed to be mere sectlets), etc. We are not in their position, and so cannot aspire to their accomplishments. Our context today is wholly different, and so of course we ourselves are different. If they continue to serve as any kind of models, it is at at least one step removed from their practices.
Chris Cutrone said
@ B-Y: On “getting our hands dirty,” the point is that a platypus does not have “contempt” for the grubs or for the riverbed in which it must muck around. (Also, there’s a world of difference between oppressed people and the cadres who seek to act politically, i.e., the “Left.” One can differentiate one’s attitudes between the two.) But the point is that we are in fact engaged, and we recognize the limitations of our (chosen forms of) engagement. We’re not trying to be anything more or other than what we are, “bourgeois intellectuals” inspired in some dim way (as any today must be) by the history of revolutionary Marxism. The onus is on, e.g., the CPI(M) to prove that it is actually “Marxist” or “communist” or “socialist,” either theoretically or practically. We admit that to do such a thing — be Marxist — is exceedingly difficult today. That’s our point: to point to the problems getting in the way of advancing that tradition.
b_y said
in a time of militarist aggression, austerity and massive unemployment, and the organized advancement of a white supremacist agenda, it’s foolhardy to publish analyses and programmes? given the specificity of our time, what’s most pressing is… discussing ‘negative dialectics’?
b_y said
your honesty is appreciated. but it could’ve saved you a great deal of effort to have said it in your first post.
Chris Cutrone said
@ B_y and Louis: OK, I see the dis-ingenuousness here. You’re not paying any attention to what we in Platypus actually do as an organization (listed above), which is anything but discuss [Adorno's] Negative Dialectics, but you are just focusing on me and what I write here. — When was Adorno mentioned in, e.g., the Banaji interview or my article on the RCP and Badiou? — Ciao!
louisproyect said
You’re not paying any attention to what we in Platypus actually do as an organization…
—
Socialists have an absolute obligation to participate in living struggles. If you simply acknowledged that you were a discussion club, then there would be less resentment. My recommendation is that you spend less time attacking the left and more time fighting capitalist oppression. Unfortunately, given your background in academia and the Spartacist League, I doubt that you would know how to go about that. In any case, a lot more modesty would behoove you.
Mike E said
It is perhaps natural in such discussions that we ask really really basic questions of one another — dealing with what each considers remedial questions.
I’ll make you a deal: I’ll explain some ABC of how Maoists view these questions, if (in turn) you answer an “ABC of Trotskyism” question that has always bothered me.
Chris writes:
I’m going to break down my answer in ways that may make it both easier for you (Chris) to point out differences, and for newer readers to have access to this conversation.
Before World War 1, socialist revolution was basically a question that found footing in Europe. But during and after that world war (precisely because it was a world war, and precisely because it took place after the colonial division of the world), all kinds of areas were drawn into the orbit of the world communist revolution.
It was always true that the peasantry played an important potential role in socialist revolution — but it was only potential. In the Paris Commune, the socialist revolutionaries were unable (for various specific military and political reasons) to much outside city limits (or expand the movement from urban artisan-workers to rural peasants).
In a prophetic phrase, Marx talked about the need to combine the Paris Commune with a “second edition of the German peasant wars.” Marx was obviously not dictating form here — but poetically describing the possibility and need to combine the revolutionary energies of the earth’s two main oppressed classes into an alliance for initiating the era of communist revolution.
Over the next century, the communist movement on a world scale worked to make real this idea of a worker peasant alliance. And it happened on several levels — i.e. it was a conscious goal for a class alliance within countries, and there was a larger sense where the revolutionary working class movements in the metropoles were in alliance with the antifeudal revolutionary struggles based among peasants in non-industrialized countries.
The bridge for this transition (historically, away from a Europe-only confinement to socialism) proved to be the vast peasantry of Russia (of course) — who (barely out of serfdom) had been for over a century a vast reserve of Tsarism (and through Tsarism a reserve for the most odious reaction in western Europe). Then they helped Russia cross over to socialist revolution (in they were brutalized the trenches of war, then when they went back “down on the farm”).
The key concept (which I assume is familiar to us all) is that on some level there are progressive social tasks that historically had been addressed by the bourgeois democratic revolutions (within Europe at least) that now (for the first time) became addressable by the forces pressing for socialist revolution. And by democratic tasks we mean agrarian revolution, land to the tiller, abolition of arranged marriage and sale of women, the national liberation of oppressed countries, the establishment of the social ideal of popular rule, overthrow of clerical theocracy, entry of people into a cash economy, end to forced unpaid labor, end to monarchies and aristocracies, mobility from countryside to cities etc.
This assumption of bourgeois-democratic tasks by the socialist revolution increasingly characterized the twentieth century as the main stormcenter of revolution shifted from the anti-capitalist struggles of workers in Europe to the anti-colonial movements of people in the Third World.
And in that context, communists were able to lead several anti-feudal and anti-imperialist revolutionary movements (in colonial countries) in ways and in directions that connected those revolutions with the world communist movement, and with a transition to socialism (in those countries).
there was a mechanical set of assumptions in the Third International — i.e. that the imperialists could no longer carry out any “bourgeois democratic tasks”, and this was tied to the theory of General Crisis etc. In fact that was mistaken, despite its moribund features and deeply reactionary nature, capitalism (even in the imperiaist stage) has remained quite dynamic and has (in a great many places) been gobbling up feudal and semi-feudal relations. (The transformaiton of sharecropping and semifeudal agriculture in the American South before and after World War 2 is just one example of many).
So it is not like both bourgeois and clearly pro-imperialist political movements can’t put forward their own version of “antifeudal” and “modernizing” programs. Certainly Deng Xiaoping had his, and the Shah of Iran had his, and so on.
But I believe it remains true that it has been possible to connect the great wave of anti-feudal and anti-imperialist struggle (in the Third World) with the world-historic process of creating socialism.
And the name of one historically significant formulation of that connection is New Democracy — a communist strategy for socialist and communist revolution in countries where there are major anti-feudal and anti-imperialist “tasks” that confront the oppressed and the conscious. This strategy was carried through in china (where a socialist process emerged from an anti-feudal national liberation struggle).
In answer to Chris point: it is very onesided to view this merely as the “proletarianization” of China (or similar countries), as if the masses are merely being acted upon, and as if the transformations are merely in their class status. There was actual socialist revolution (in which the people were actors, not just raw material): including the development of an innovative planned socialist economy, the development of a socialist armed forces, the creation of unprecendented transformitions in agriculture (that eventually took socialist ownership forms).
This took place alongside ongoing struggles to end feudalism (in relations of production, social relations and ideology) and also to generally industrialize China. But this was a complex socialist revolution under obviously difficult conditions — full of lessons and innovations that deserves to be studied (and appreciated) in its own right.
Chris writes:
there has been decades of work seeking to explore and articulate how Mao helps us make revolution in the U.S. It is not a crime to be unaware of it. But it is a bit difficult to explain in a paragraph or two.
Let me say this:
The core of your verdict (that it is inadequate) is that you assume that Maoism is mainly about socialist revolution in the colonial world, and that the main components of maoism are insights and strategies that apply to once-colonial countries.
But that is not the case.
The advances represented by Maoism include in the first place a coherent and far-reaching analysis of the process of capitalist restoration in the socialist countries of the twentieth century. And this a set of insights and analyses that have implications and application far beyond any specific type of country. And it makes the most important critique of the Soviet Union of the Stalin era that has yet emerged — one that is deeply rooted in the very materialist problems of socialism, and the very real attempts to innovate within China (on the basis of struggling over that Soviet legacy).
Further, there are insights into the waging of war by socialist forces that are precious to the world, and would have importance no matter where revolutionary movements reach such stages. Mao developed the first coherent communist military doctrine (something not accomplished in the Soviet Union, despite their successful civil war and victory in World War 2). And that too is not confined (in its importance) to countries “like” China.
Third, Mao was a powerful force for the revitalization of Marxist philosophy — at a time when a tremendous struggle needed to be waged against a very mechanical and metaphysical current within the world’s communist movement. Mao fought to bring contradiction back to the heart of Marxist analysis and philosophy. there is much more to say, and much more to do (two separate matters!). But Mao’s work and innovation are not (in any way) only applicable to one kind of country, or one kind of revolution.
Finally, here is the particular part dealing with the U.S.:
No one has solved the problem of how to make revolution in the U.S. It is a problem of “charting the uncharted course.”
there have been attempts (formulations, strategies, decades of practical work, rectifications, theories) over many decades. But they have all fallen short… not just because they did not succeed (they did not), and not just because the communist movement remained marginalized (which it did), but because the strategies themselves did not have the potential to bring forward a revolutionary movement under these conditions (i.e. the specific conditions of the U.S.)
And so we have rich experience, and much of it is negative. and the influence of much communist thinking (imported from Europe, from the Comintern, and certainly from the Trotskyist formulations like the Transitional Programme) confront us mainly as negative examples — as things we can appreciate and learn from, but should not (in the main) adopt.
This is of course a sweeping statement of verdict (and not itself the analysis or argument). But I say this to get back to Mao:
In our work of charting the uncharted course, we have a tremendous amount to learn from Lenin and Mao who each did precisely that. What we have to learn is not mainly “lifting” from them this-or-that specific tactic or form of struggle — but their method, combining concrete analysis with practice, maintaining a sharp sense of larger communist goals while connecting deeply with the actual politics of their time, and finding the ways (appropriate for their time and place) of fusing communist politics with deeply oppressed and discontent sections of the people.
That is what we have to learn — from both Lenin and Mao. We need to be their students. (Not lifting things by rote, not dressing up in their uniforms, not mouthing their specific words — in fact to learn from them, we have to critique those who merely ape the past mechanically.)
And Mao (who lived longer than Lenin, and who waged revolutionary struggle under very diverse conditions including under the dictarship of the proletariat) is a particularly powerful set of shoulders to stand on, as we try to do (here, now) what needs to be done to destroy U.S. imperialism.
* * * * * * * *
those were my two remedial answers. Now let me ask my remedial question:
Crhis writes:
I have never understood the Trotskyist views on this.
First, in my view, the revolution has always been global. And you can’t look at the great conjunctures of WorldWar 1 and 2 without seeing how the victories then were part of global events (and global struggles for revolution).
It is not possible to complete the socialist revolution in one country. It is not possible to attain communist society and the abolition of classes in one country. But it is possible to “take the socialist road” (as Maoists put it) on whatever territory you can seize, and take it as long as possible (until exhausted or until others in the world arrive help push that whole process along.
In the early 1900s it was assumed that socialist revolution would be like an inkblot, spreading around the world. A + B + C…. as various parts of the world (read Europe) were liberated, and connected up in a larger federation of socialist states.
The world process has proven different. It is more like the capitalist world process, where revolutions punch through feudalism, and then get overwhelmed, only to punch through again. From the Hanseatic leagues to the global victory of capitalism/imperialism in the 1900s — the capitalist world process took centuries. And no revolution by capitalists simply “won.” (The French revolution ended with a crowned emperor within a decade, then the Bourbon restoration, then to the astonishment of all, France stood before them, a capitalist country.)
And the socialist process has been a similar one of “fight, fail, fight again, fail again” (as mao put it. And there is a dialectic here: victory where possible on specific patches of ground (part of the Russian empire, then china, with peripheral attempts at socialism in other place of East Asia and Eastern europe) — and then a restoration of capitalism after some decades on the socialist road.
There is both revolution and restoration in a country-by-country way and yet that a world process overall.
And I say this to say that this internationalist view seems very different from what trotskyissts mean when they say ” the revolution goes global” — since that seems to always imply that revolution “must” (somehow) erupt in several countries more or less in a tight timeframe or else we are fucked. And since that is now how it has happened (and since that seems unlikely to magically happen in the future), it seems like a demand that history take a path that objective reality refuses to take.
* * * * * *
Chris’s insistance on the “heart of world capitalism” part always seems wrong in several ways:
First, it seems like a demand that the world revolution not proceed by its own objective logic, but by one you prefer. Revolution has broken out at the “weak links” of the system — that that proved to be first Russia, and then the colonial countries. And we can’t (by throwing a tantrum) insist that it flow through the channels we prefer.
Marx assumed that revolution would break out where capitalism was strongest. But he was wrong. It broke out where the dominant system and powers were in most disarray. And socialist revolution was (for various objective and subjective reasons) not breaking out in Europe or America (which is, I assume, what Chris means by “the heart of world capital.”)
We are materialists: we need to actually understand (and “deal with”) the world as it is, not as we imagine it should be.
There is (and has been) an objective problem that socialist revolution has won in places where people were very poor — while the place where industrialized production has been most developed have remained as base areas of imperialism. But that is an objective problem — we didn’t wish for this, but we had to deal with it for the sixty years between 1917 and 1976 (the first wave of socialist revolution).
And in some ways, the problem has not diminished — the places where revolution has been most active in the world (Peru’s Andean highlands, Nepal’s mountain foothills, India’s remote Red Corridor, various Philippine islands, etc.) are the places in the world today where (like rural china in the 1930s) capitalism is least developed, where many people are even outside commodity exchange, and where (revealingly) the central state powers of the world have been least able to enforce a direct and powerful suppression.
We need to solve the problem — but not by telling those revolutionaries who are making revolution that their efforts are absurd and futile and marginal until we get our shit together! Let them make socialist revolution and raise the red flag — and let us find the ways to contribute to revolutionize the sharp contradictions in more developed parts of the world.
Finally, the talk of “heart of world capitalism” seems completely out of date. The whole world is now as urbanized as the U.S. was in 1925. The third world is not simply a source of raw materials. the proletariat is not concentrated in a few imperialist countries. there is no “heart of world capital” in the way there once was — especially in the 1800. We are living in a world now well dominated and characterized by capitalist relations…. and the old terms of core and periphery no longer have the meaning they once had.
Even a place like Nepal now has a significant working class (even while it has almost no factories) because so many youth are drawn to the massive urban labor markets of India and proletarianized there.
We need to actually see the world as it is, and see the world revolutonary process as it has actuall unfolded, and deal with these very very sharp contradiction in a real way (not assert old realities, and demand that the world conform to our concepts.)
I may not have understood the arguments i’m questioning too… but at least there is an opening here I am hoping to create for a response.
Mike E said
[moderator note: Louis and Chris, please focus on questions of substance, and avoid the empty snark. Such adhominem exchanges violate the rules of this space. ]
b_y said
as a gesture of self-moderation, or awareness at least, i’ll acknowledge that i’ve contributed to the snarky tone. however, i’d like to say that all my questions, prior to the adorno quip, were sincere inquiries that seemed to be treated as rhetorical or ignored completely by chris.
Chris Cutrone said
@Mike: Thanks for the engagement. There are a couple of quotations from Marx and Engels (which I used in my article critiquing the RCP, USA on Badiou, referenced above) that I’d like to cite to make my argument:
Marx to Engels (1858):
Marx from The Civil War in France (1851):
Engels to Kautsky (1882):
http://platypus1917.org/2010/08/05/chinoiserie-a-critique-of-the-revolutionary-communist-party-usa%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Cnew-synthesis%E2%80%9D/
I think that there is a fundamental difference between the historical transitions into and within various periods of (global) capital and the revolutionary proletarian socialist transition out of capital. I don’t think that socialism gestates within capital the way capital gestated within pre-capitalist societies.
I think it is indicative (of a problem) that “communism” has taken root in the poorest/most marginal parts of the global order. I think there is a danger of making a virtue of necessity in such cases. I think it is important that the tasks such remote “communists” have taken up are primarily bourgeois-democratic rather than socialist. If, as Marx put it,
then we must pay attention to his conclusion that,
I would argue that Marx was not wrong about this at all, but served warning that was ignored in the 20th century “communism” of Stalin, Mao, et al., which did not initiate a transition beyond capital in socialism but only “touched political formations,” and not sufficiently “bourgeois [social] life conditions.” Such “communism” was in fact “bourgeois” revolution, which is not to demote it, but to recognize it for what it actually was, which history leading to the present amply shows. We are not in any way closer to socialism today than in 1917.
But there’s nothing original or particularly “Trotskyist” about anything I’m pointing out: it is all already in Marx and Lenin (and Luxemburg) (as well as Trotsky when he was collaborating with the latter). There is something new and different, however, in Stalin and Mao’s treatments of these issues, and I think for the worse.
Chris Cutrone said
@ Mike: P.S. I think also that the transformation of traditional society into capital (in the 16th-19th centuries, and continuing into the 20th and even 21st centuries) was not in and of itself progressive, but will only have been proven to be “progressive” if humanity actually achieves socialism/communism, beyond capital. Otherwise, such “progress” will have only been barbarism; the conservatives will have been right. This is what Luxemburg, after Engels, meant by the choice humanity faces, at its historical crossroads in capital, between “socialism or barbarism.” Because socialism was not achieved, what happened in the USSR and China was, on balance, “barbarism,” certainly no less and perhaps no more than what happened in the rest of the world in the 20th century. (But I’m not claiming that China is barbaric whereas the U.S. is not.)
louisproyect said
as a gesture of self-moderation, or awareness at least, i’ll acknowledge that i’ve contributed to the snarky tone. however, i’d like to say that all my questions, prior to the adorno quip, were sincere inquiries that seemed to be treated as rhetorical or ignored completely by chris.
[snip of snark]
Otto said
Chris said;
Are you serious? Is this the trotskyist direction? It is purely defeatism.
Lenin, Stalin and Mao ran countries. For better or worse, they were socialist. They may not have been perfect, but do we sit around and wait for the perfect revolution before we put in our support? That is close to the anarchist assumption that all political power must be overthrown all at once. That’s not going to happen.
The US and French Revolutions brought in the era of capitalism, but not over night. Europe today is a capitalist continent. The feudalists didn’t close shop and go home over night. It took years for them to develop the system we seek to overthrow today. As we see with the Paris Commune, then 76 years of the Soviet Union (about 40 if we only count through the Stalin years), then the small revolutions, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Vietnam, Cuba, etc. Is all of this for nothing? We learn nothing from any of it?
If I really believed that nothing important has happened since 1917, I wouldn’t bother to be a socialist at all.
Chris said;
This country is a hard nut to crack and no one believes it is easy nor is there a magic bullet. Many of us believe that Mao is the best place to start for a variety of reasons which Mike E has already gone over.
It may take a lot of time to develop the correct strategies and turn the tide. I wrote on the Iraq war taking our young people’s lives for cheap gas and I got a comment calling me a bold face liar. But the reality is that no one wants to believe they have put their faith in a system built on lies. That’s definitely the case here.
Mike final point is probably the most important;
I couldn’t have said it better.
b_y said
“We are not in any way closer to socialism today than in 1917.”
china and the ussr have personally never been exemplary socialist models for me, while remaining inspiring as concrete/historical revolutionary experiments. but i think this statement demonstrates a reckless lack of attention and care to degree and scale, and generalizes in a way that flattens how certain capacities have been unevenly developed since this period in favor of a clean telos.
Chris Cutrone said
I think that taking an uncritical approach to movements such as the Naxalites is an integral part of the problem of making revolution in the U.S., where it is needed to ensure that developments in, e.g., India don’t have reactionary consequences. It’s not a matter of telling them not to struggle, but what can we do, in theory and practice, to advance their necessities in more emancipatory directions? I am concerned with how “revolutionaries” (or, just simply the “Left”) “here” is complicit in constraining possibilities “there,” but not through hostility or mere indifference to “their” struggles, but rather through uncritical sympathy, “solidarity” or endorsement. We should question, deeply, “our” psychological stake in “their” struggles, which should push us much more critically than is evinced by the treatment of politics by an A. Roy, for instance. The issues Banaji raises, if not exactly the terms in which (or the assumptions under which) he does so, are valuable in this respect. This is not a matter of idle thinking, but of recognizing how the degradation of the Left in places like the U.S. conditions phenomena such as Maoism in India, Nepal, the Philippines, etc. This is not a desire for a “clean slate” or “pure telos” but a taking stock and sober assessment of just how we got to this point. The narrative of progress-despite-everything seems to me like wishful thinking — avoidance of the deep challenges we face.
jf_t said
I’m a member of the Platypus project, and want to offer a response to what seems the most common complaint about Platypus. Louis put it punchily enough:
Although I doubt he would endorse my description, Louis appeals to what we might call the cheerleader conception of the socialist intellectual. Intellectuals and critics ought to participate the noble struggle, lay off the left and spend their time naming, describing and attacking capitalist oppression. Against the sectarian urge to self-immolate, Louis urges intellectuals to join in common cause. Platypus (and Chris Cutrone) fail, and fail utterly, to cheerlead the left and are thus attacked.
I don’t want to deny how attractive the “cheerleader conception” can be. It appeals to motives of comradeship and of solidarity, and seems to take a stand against sectarianism. But it is an approach that, I think, naturalizes the current, obvious weakness of the Left and, in naturalizing the weakness, perpetuates it.
The internationalist Left is sick. Even if one adopted the most charitable possible reading of Chavez (and there is no reason to do so: http://platypus1917.org/2010/07/09/the-dead-left-chavez-and-the-bolivarian-revolution/) the left is farther from political power or ideological hegemony than it has been for an extremely long time.
I’m not sure if this sickness will be denied. If it is, then I think you are denying the apparent, and I’m not sure we could even have much of a conversation.
But let’s say you’re still onboard. The Left is weak. So what? The Cheerleader Conception holds that socialist intellectuals should be cheering the “patient” on — “keep on fighting, little guy!”
This may be heartening, but it will not address the obvious and glaring decay of the Left, or, if you prefer, socialist politics. This is why Platypus begins from the diagnosis that “The Left is dead.” It is a way of calling our attention to the apparent – but continually misrecognized and naturalized political weakness.
Platypus, at its best, fulfills a different conception of the intellectual in politics — to offer critique. We (try) to post difficult questions to the left – whether in articles, fora, or interview. Chris’ recent critique of the RCP’s “New Synthesis” (http://platypus1917.org/2010/08/05/chinoiserie-a-critique-of-the-revolutionary-communist-party-usa%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9cnew-synthesis%e2%80%9d/) is a good example.
The goal of the critique is relatively simple: self-education, and, ultimately, the practical reconstitution of the Marxist left. It is against that goal which we should be judged.
Mike E said
Chris writes:
I’m confused by your assumption of “uncritical approach” — Let’s put it like this: If you take the formal public positions of the CPI(Maoist) and compare them to the politics I put forward (on this site every day), you will discover a rather sharp set of differences (on matters of ideology and politics).
For example, I think quite a few of us don’t agree with the analysis that India is (today) still characterized by “semifeudal, semicolonial.” And there is a generalized criticism that the CPI(Maoist) have had a rather one-sided approach to rural-urban work (though it is worth noting their efforts to reverse that).
Though my own personal knowledge is limited and is subject to correction, I also tend share the criticism raised by the Nepali Maoists that the Indian Maoists do not engage nearly enough in the macro-politics of the Indian social formation.
They have come a ways since the earlier days (when the Peoples War group was criticized for “armed economism” and for their disbelief in the possibility of stable base areas in India). And that too should be noted. And part of the point that needs to be raised is that this is a large, living and complex movement that is in dynamic motion (not a simple set of formal positions to be understood by mechanical textual analysis).
But these criticisms we may have are really not that significant… we are very far away, our understandings may be mistaken. And really, the world is not eagerly demanding our tentative thoughts on this important movement.
The main thing that falls to us is to find ways to build active political support for the revolutionary movements in South Asia — meaning specifically the communist movements in India and Nepal. There is nothing “uncritical” about that either. For example, the Kasama Project has (from its beginning) published sharply critical documents on these movement (including documents the Indian Maoists have written that are sharply critical of the Nepali Maoists). Our approach (consciously) is to both support these movements, and make available (as part of that support) critical analyses.
In fact, at the risk of stating the obvious — Kasama published the Platypus critique of the indian Maoists as part of that commitment to sharing substantive analyses of these revolutionary movements (even in cases where we, personally or collectively, don’t share the criticism).
We don’t have the method that I associate with the Spartacist kind of Trotskyist — which is all struggle no unity, with an obsessive focus on ideological shades of difference, combined with a spotty, insincere and largely rhetorical “support” (called “military support” or whatever.)
louisproyect said
Mike, I really think you need to study the Platypus website. You are too fixated on the specific questions raised by the Banaji interview which is focused on Indian Maoism, something obviously close to your heart. I plan to take up Banaji’s arguments, coming at them from the perspective of the Sanhati website, a group of mostly Indian radicals in the USA who are in solidarity with the struggles of the poor and the peasantry but without necessarily sharing the Maoist ideology of the current leadership. I also plan to take up the question of Shining Path, something I am pretty familiar with from having debates with Adolfo Olaechea, a spokesman for Sendero. I went to the trouble to read a book written by one of their leaders to get a handle on exactly what it is they stood for. They made many mistakes but they were not what the NACLA leftists depicted them as.
My take on Platypus, which involved reading every single word on their website, convinced me that they were American Eustonians. In other words, the ideological fellow travelers of Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman, Norm Geras, Marc Cooper, Kenan Makiya, Marko Attila Hoare, and a number of other members of the “decent left”, a group that either supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or devoted themselves to savaging the antiwar movement.
I haven’t checked their website since I wrote the article that somebody linked to in the comments section, but when I noticed the link on my WordPress dashboard, I took a look at their recent stuff. I was shocked to see Chris Cutrone refer to Lynne Stewart, the civil rights attorney, as part of tendency turning “reactionary” for “saying that Sheik Abdul Rahman, who orchestrated the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, might be a legitimate freedom fighter.” May I remind you that Lynne Stewart is a 71 year old woman battling breast cancer who has been sentenced to 10 years in prison. I find this reference to Stewart by Cutrone appalling beyond description.
I will of course have more to say about this on my own blog.
Chris Cutrone said
@Mike: I wasn’t accusing Kasama of an “uncritical approach,” but rather diagnosing that tendency more generally (which I would ascribe to, e.g., A. Roy).
And then there would be the issue of an adequately critical approach. It’s not black-and-white.
That’s why I raised the issue of “comradely critique.” It’s not a matter of “Which side are you on?,” I hope.
Obviously uncritical support for the Naxalites (or, e.g., Chavez) is much less problematic than for the Taliban, Hamas or Hezbollah, et al., which many on the “Left” do in fact engage in, I must remind everyone. But there still remains a problem. It may be in fact more urgent that we critique the best rather than the worst (we may simply *oppose* the worst). I’m not sure we’re in a situation in which “opposing” the Naxalites is a viable political possibility. But neither is “defending” them — at least, anything beyond opposing, as we must, the Indian govt.’s actions against them. *How* we do so seems important.
Roy’s way leaves me dissatisfied, and, furthermore, sows more confusion than necessary regarding taking an elementary stand against capitalist state repression. This isn’t “Spartacism,” but rather goes all the way back to Marx.
Marx was much if not all the time part of a revolutionary movement of one (or perhaps two, including Engels). So were Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky — and Mao! They weren’t afraid to differ, and differ sharply. Politics is constant, obsessive struggle. (Didn’t Mao make this point?) Now, this isn’t the point of the Platypus project, but it should be born in mind regarding the political consequences of critique. Lenin’s “April Theses” threatened to alienate him completely from his own party, but he delivered them anyway. I’m not afraid of the Naxalites, but I am very much dissatisfied with them.
Can’t that be put to good use? I think this is the spirit of engaging, and trying to push further, a perspective such as Banaji’s, critical of the Naxalites. Perhaps we in Platypus failed at doing what we set out to do engaging Banaji (I don’t think this is so), but if you want to know why we attempted it at all, that is what I have been trying to explain. We were definitely *not* trying to give some backhanded support to the Indian govt./capitalist state. But opposing the latter is not enough.
Mike E said
JF_t writes a critcism of the “cheer-leader” concept.
there has been, of course, a tendency to passively cheer on revolution — and I imagine we can agree that this is a result of a protracted period where revolution has not been on the horizon in some countries, while it has broken out in others.
But on another level it is a false caricature to paint all internationalist support as some kind of pathetic trendy “cheerleading.”
Throughout the history of the U.S., every wave of revolutoinary life has been connected with international events. the first abolitionists and social revolutionaries were inspired by the Jacobins. The first communists were organized immigrants of the German 48er generation. The Paris commune inspired the anti-imperialissts of the Spanish-American war days. the Russian Revolution gave rise to the communist movement (and helped give it roots among Russian, Jewish and Finnish immigrants). The Black liberation struggle is connected by a thousand threads to the anticolonial movements of Africa and China. The Vietnamese revolution stirred a whole generation, and (together with the Chinese revolution) spurred many to consider communist revolution as an alternative to capitalism.
It is not simply cheerleading to see that there are revolutions going on in the world — and to realize the we (as communists in the U.S.) have both responsibilities and opportunities.
I wrote above:
Our approach has been conceived in conscious distinction to previous forms of international solidarity. We have not sought to romanticize distant movement. We have worked to provide information that is unfiltered by our own partisan inclinations. We have shared the polemics that emerge from and around these movements.
But we do think that the emergence of revolution in the world can help inspire revolutionary sentiments in the belly of the beast. Don’t you?
it is also not true that internationalist support is inherently defined like this.
Chris Cutrone said
@ Louis: Lynne Stewart should be released from prison immediately, and not only because she has cancer. But that doesn’t mean that she’s beyond reproach. She’s a political activist, and taking political heat comes with the territory. It is demeaning to her commitments to try to defend her from political criticism, which she invites as her vocation. She is not some ingenue. Her point about Rahman is appalling, and very bad pedagogy for any new generation of purported Leftists that might emerge, which is what I as a member of Platypus am concerned with, the confusion that is constantly being sowed by preceding generations of “Leftists,” who have done, however unwittingly, a great deal to ensure that (any part of) the world is not emancipated any time soon.
Mike E said
Louis writes:
If you don’t think I have followed Platypus closely, well (heh) you just don’t know me. Of course I have studied the Platypus website. I know exactly what these politics are. I read Chris whenever he writes. (I’m on their list). And (of course) i have thoughts on all of this.
But why do I have to deal with all that here and now? Who does that serve?
Louis writes:
I understand your point, and I feel your point of view. But on the other hand, so what? So we should not have shared one of their articles? We should not have sparked this debate? We should have spit on Chris when he chose to respond?
We all know there are very sharp differences of concept and verdict between Platypus and Kasama… and it is worth unfolding them in a way that an actual audience can learn from.
Why deal with our differences (however real or sharp) as if our political opponents were a rat running across a floor, and we all need to yell “get him, get him”)?
What kind of approach are we modeling if we do that? What kind of a political culture are we creating? There is a whole generation of revolutionaries who are new to ALL of these questions — why not explore them? And what happens with any efforts to reconceive and regroup if we speak from entrenched former positions, and assume there is nothing to explore or learn — even with people whose politics (and very instincts) seem so radically different?
louisproyect said
We should have spit on Chris when he chose to respond?
—
Well, I would take this a lot more seriously if you hadn’t written early on:
They just disdain the unwashed people — and see no prospects. And they dismiss those who sweat and die with a wave of the hand.
Everything about this essays reeks of class and privilege — and that special permission to just mock what the dark and forgotten people do.
Spencer said
As one of the interviewers, I’d like to say first of all that, as is clear to anyone who reads the interview carefully, my perspective and JB’s are not the same. There are numerous points where I advance characterizations that he rejects, whether overtly or not. It should be recognized that in interviewing someone like Banaji the Platypus Review is neither attempting to criticize or celebrate his ideas in any straightforward way. We certainly are not claiming him as a sympathizer with Platypus. Nor is there any formula: I’ve conducted interviews with others with whom I also disagree, perhaps “more” and perhaps in a different way, but disagreement nevertheless. So, the text as a whole should be recognized for what it is and the lazy impulse to conflate my opinions with those of the person I am interviewing should be avoided. That said, obviously, an interview is not the place to try to elaborate all of one’s differences with somebody. An article of one’s own would be required for that.
I want to point out some of the evasions on this thread. In so doing, I will defend JB at points not because I agree with him wholeheartedly, but because I think the criticisms offered here have been inadequate. Chris has already indicated critical differences between us when he speaks of JB’s “council communism.” This is expressed in JB’s discussion of trade union politics and his rejection of the party political form tout court. Noe for some of my criticisms:
It should be pointed out first of that Mike E. begins with evasions and slanders. He plays to the gallery and evacuates the discussions of genuine political engagement when he speaks simply of Banaji’s and the interviewers’ “dislike of the Naxalites.” The attempt to account for this supposed “dislike” is even lamer with the repeated and disingenuous (because insinuated) attempts to account for it on the basis of racism or class bias. No evidence whatsoever is actually evinced for these suggestions of racism. Elsewhere in the thread it is implied (though not by Mike E) that Arundhati Roy’s persepctive is to be preferred to that of Marxists in the U.S. because at least she goes out and walks with the tribals.
Then come the comments on the violent overthrow of the state. Banaji makes clear that what distinguishes the Naxalites from other communist parties in India is their commitment to violence. But Mike E simply ignores this, acting as though it were a matter of Marxism vs. non-Marxism. Surely, he cannot be so naive.
In fact, JB is distinguishing the Naxalites from both the CPI and the CPI(Marxist), as well as from his own politics. As JB makes clear, the Naxalites’ tactics are unlikely (to say the least of it) to be able to address the circumstances of hundreds of millions of Indian workers. The interview is not primarily devoted to the criticism of the other forms of communism in India, but he makes clear that there would need to be a thorough-going criticism of them too and, in that case, the question of violence vs. non-violence would not be critical, since he no less than the CPI and CPI(M) would argue that there would need to be developed a politics that made tactical use of the opportunities that India’s democracy allows, i.e. use/vindication of the right to assemble, to publish, and, possibly, to operate in the electoral arena, not to mention exploitation and extension of the gains of organized labor in India. The attempt to stage the violent overthrow of the Indian state through a peasant-based people’s war has resulted in a massive amount of killing since the Telangana struggle led by the CPI in the late 1940s. As a result of all this, there have been precious few gains, so that India today has a much vaster body of super-exploited workers than it did in 1947. Quite obviously, this is what Banaji means when he speaks of the Indian Maoists penchant for “dealing in abstractions” while producing only a relentlessly escalating body count (and accompanying political demoralization). What, if anything, does Mike E. have to say about this? To say nothing would indeed demonstrate disdain for the suffering of the “unwashed people.” It would be precisely a “[dismissal of] those who sweat and die with a wave of the hand.” Contra Louis, I would say this is no “living struggle.” It’s much more literally a dying struggle. The point of criticism is manifestly to raise the question of what it takes not just to struggle, but to win. In this sense, criticism is the most crucial form of solidarity. This is precisely why Marx and Engels devote a great deal of the Communist Manifesto to criticism of other socialist tendencies. Marx’s Capital is a critique from beginning to end of the actually existing socialisms of his day (which he sees as more or less developed forms of “political economy,” i.e. left Ricardianism). Another way of saying this is that the critique Chris is making is precisely that the Naxalites are bourgeois, in that they serve to constitute and perpetuate capitalism.
Mike E. is also tendentious when he addresses JB’s criticism of the Naxalites’ semi-feudal line. He says, “India is undergoing radical structural changes — and those changes are inevitably reflected within the Maoist ranks and within their practice in numerous ways” immediately following his acknowledgment that “The official view of the party overall [???] remains ‘semifeudal, semicolonial.’” This is simply to disingenuously restate JB’s own criticism, namely that the Naxalites fail to grasp their own social circumstances. I would only add that when the semi-feudal line was originally developed it was inadequate. India didn’t become capitalist on account of neo-liberalism. The substance of JB’s criticism of the semi-feudalism thesis is that it provides cover for the Naxalites’ own opportunism whereby those capitalists who pay them a cut are dubbed the “national bourgeoisie” (so that the exploitation of “their” workers is ignored or, rather, sanctioned by the Naxalites). Mike E. sidesteps this issue.
Finally, to wrap up at this first posting to the thread, Mike E. again obfuscates when he says, “the fact that red political power emerges in one corner hardly means that anyone now intends to confine it there — or that concepts have become defined by sectoral successes.” Obviously, the point is that there is (and must perforce be) competition and rivalry among leftists, not a simple division of labor (you take the tribals and I’ll take the workers). The whole presupposition of an argument such as the one JB is engaged in is that for workers in India to stage a radical politics that could indeed contribute to the world revolution they would have to break with Naxalite leadership.
louisproyect said
Cutrone, it is not hard to find the article by Ward Churchill where he uses the term “Eichmanns”, but could you document where exactly Lynne Stewart described Rahman as a freedom fighter. I am not looking for somebody quoting her but an actual transcript of her words or something she wrote.
rob said
do platypus believe that the ‘left is dead’?? elaborate please.
Spencer said
@ Louis – I can’t wait to read your critique based on the perspective of the Sanhati website. Your concept of radical is radical politics is skewed indeed if those types strike you as “radical.” Between Sumanta Bannerjee (a straight forward Naxalite fellow traveler) and Gautam Navlakha, who has closely associated himself with Arundhati Roy on this issue, you’re hardly going to get some sort of alternative perspective.
@ Mike E – I take strong issue with this statement: “But these criticisms we may have are really not that significant… we are very far away, our understandings may be mistaken. And really, the world is not eagerly demanding our tentative thoughts on this important movement.”
The whole point is that this interview is being conducted by people who have bothered to familiarize themselves with the history. Neither we the interviewers or JB the interviewee are “very far away.” On the contrary, we have bothered to move beyond “tentative thoughts” on the subject. Presumably the Kasama Project has also done so at this point, since every time I’ve encountered your organization they are peddling literature about the Naxalites or the revolution in Nepal. And I can certainly tell you that having bothered to study and to familiarize yourself, there is nothing more welcome to our comrades in India than criticism, precisely because they agree with you that the matter is “important.” That criticism doesn’t require me to travel to the central Indian jungle. They read books, newspapers, and have the internet too. As Chris put it (though perhaps too mildly), “Don’t we an obligation to use our ‘privilege’ of being able to familiarize ourselves and study the history of Marxism and social struggles for emancipation more generally to offer comradely critiques?” I would also point out that knowledge of the history of socialist movements all over the world is just as relevant in formulating our criticisms as is “walking with the comrades.”
Mike E said
Spencer writes:
Sorry if my point was not clear enough. The “we” in my remarks refers (if you look back over it) to my own criticisms, and others in Kasama, and the fact that we have our own critical views, but don’t make them central.
It never occured to me that you might think it was referring to this interview (which is also discussed in the comment I made).
Spencer said
C’mon Mike. What a dodge. Obviously, you consider your organization’s approach to be well considered, unless, of course, you hold a conception of solidarity that would not recommend to others?
Spencer said
@ Louis – I believe the description of Rahman as a “freedom fighter” was made in court (though I’m not 100% on that). The comment was widely reported in the press (and you might expect) and Stewart does not deny it anywhere that I can find. If you want to see what sort of politics she represents, look at this:
http://www.ww4report.com/static/40.html#stewart
Chris Cutrone said
@ Louis: The Lynne Stewart reference is also widely available (a google search I just did returned many sites, but mostly Right-wing opinion pieces): I refer to statements Stewart made in and out of court on behalf of Rahman (it’s part of the official court record, but more importantly, in her public relations campaign in the media as an advocate of Rahman, which went beyond the exigencies of her legally representing him), and in defense of her breaching the restrictions on Rahman’s communications, which is what she was prosecuted for. Stewart didn’t deserve to persecuted for her opinion, but I take issue with it, politically, nonetheless. Louis, perhaps you agree with her about Rahman? Otherwise, I don’t see your point.
Nate said
I appreciate Mike’s call for civility and like B-Y I want to own up to contributing some to a less than ideal tone here.
Chris, you write:
“It is all a matter of what M/E’s Manifesto *means*. As a text, its meaning is not self-apparent, but demands (re-)interpretation. I have problems with aspects of what Banaji means by the Communist Manifesto. Platypus exists to push such questions, further and deeper. But we need the opportunity to do so. That means honest engagement. We admit that we ourselves don’t have the answers, and we push others to develop better answers than hitherto.”
That’s good and clear and helpful and from what you say here I don’t doubt your sincerity. Please here me, though, when I say that some of the time Platypus members talk in ways that sound strident in a way that does not make it obvious that you want to engage honestly with others. I suspect that the format of the Platypus publication — material which does not reflect a line but is edited, we might say it reflects ideas in a milieu, so to speak — makes it easy to make those of us outside the group to misunderstand as well. Some of the time (and the remarks I quoted from this interview) it is easy to interpret Platypus members as enjoying others’ being wrong and so forth. I believe you when you say that the project is motivated by sincere questioning, and I really don’t want to get into any ad hominem here, this is meant as honest feedback, but some of the time Platypus communicates in ways that make it easy to not see the sincerity and see instead a variety of problems. There’s not always an air of intellectual or political modesty and of questioning (as for instance in the phrase “the dead left” or in the insistence that the rest of the left is beset by pathologies that it appears not to know about, which Platypus does know about. And it’s not an unreasonable inference to draw from this that Platypus thinks it’s free of those pathologies.) This unlike in your remarks here that I quoted, which have a different tone and spirit. If you’ll allow me my own hobby horse about let pathology, I think many of us on the left all too often fall into a parliamentary debate mode that is about winning in some way – preferably by force of reason and by rhetoric or hostility if need be – rather than about having a discussion.
I won’t say more on this and don’t want to get into a long discussion of Platypus’s organizational personality, so to speak. I also hope you and Mike continue to hash out issues of Maoism and Trotskyism. Having no grounding in either tradition I find that exchange very helpful.
Otto said
Spencer said
“The attempt to stage the violent overthrow of the Indian state through a peasant-based people’s war has resulted in a massive amount of killing since the Telangana struggle led by the CPI in the late 1940s. As a result of all this, there have been precious few gains, so that India today has a much vaster body of super-exploited workers than it did in 1947. Quite obviously, this is what Banaji means when he speaks of the Indian Maoists penchant for “dealing in abstractions” while producing only a relentlessly escalating body count (and accompanying political demoralization). What, if anything, does Mike E. have to say about this? To say nothing would indeed demonstrate disdain for the suffering of the “unwashed people.”
Do you understand the concept of war? People fight and die. Many just die. Take up elections? How much social change have the Indian people benefited from supporting the pro-Chinese labor party that calls itself the Communist Party of India (Marxist)? I’ve never been to India but I have been to Nicaragua and El Salvador. I’ve seen how the people of the poorer countries live. We have elections here, but who was I suppose to vote for to stop Operation Green Hunt? At some point Mao quotes Lao Tzu in pointing out that people who have nothing have nothing to lose and do not fear death. People fight out of desperation and not out of a sense of adventurism. We are not Che Guevaras. We don’t support war for romantic reasons. People take up arms to defend their lives. The vote does little good for those who stand in front of advancing troops.
Your statement shows a serious lack of understanding of the need for armed uprisings and what is really at stake in these countries.
Chris Cutrone said
@ Nate: There’s a distinction between to be made between what we in Platypus do as an organization and how we understand the point of what we’re doing, in other words, a difference (in presentation) between practice and self-understanding.
We don’t exactly exempt ourselves from the diagnosis that the “Left is dead!” but we do credit ourselves with pointing it out, saying that the “Emperor has no clothes,” which is a political stance and not a matter of intellectual one-upsmanship.
It’s not about being smarter but about political disposition. How does one argue that the fundamentals of Leftism require reconsideration?
Obviously, this is not a matter of theoretical insight alone. Our arguments are not “academic,” but also are not subject to taking political “positions.”
Is there nothing other than these two alternatives? Rhetoric is a tricky thing, but at least we’re self-conscious (if not always successful in execution) about it.
louisproyect said
The Lynne Stewart reference is also widely available (a google search I just did returned many sites, but mostly Right-wing opinion pieces)
—
I see you are trying to squirm away. You simply repeated a charge that is found on rightwing websites that is attributed to her, and not anything that Lynne herself said. That is all I will say here, but will have plenty more to say on my own blog where I won’t be constrained by the need to be civil.
Chris Cutrone said
@ Louis: OK, I see: You’re taking issue with my *veracity*. I’m not going to do on-the-spot research for you at your command, in response to a comment thread. You don’t like the message, so you attack the messenger. Spencer already gave you a reference of Stewart’s own speaking to her political perspectives. So, before you go off an your crusade against me, pay close attention to what *I* actually said publicly about Stewart: “Lynne Stewart, the civil rights attorney, [said] that Sheik Abdul Rahman, who orchestrated the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, might be a legitimate freedom fighter.” I said “might.” This is because she said that it wasn’t for her to decide whether Rahman was actually a freedom fighter or not. That’s appalling, because she wasn’t defending Rahman purely on the basis of civil rights (like the ACLU defending the free speech rights of the KKK), but rather politically as a “Leftist.”
Chris Cutrone said
@ Rob: I wrote the following in the inaugural issue of The Platypus Review (November, 2007):
http://platypus1917.org/2007/11/01/vicissitudes-of-historical-consciousness-and-possibilities-for-emancipatory-social-politics-today/
Chris Cutrone said
@ Louis:
About Lynne Stewart:
From the World War 3 Report that Spencer referenced above:
WW3R: Do you support an Islamic revolution in Egypt? It didn’t work out too well for women and progressives in Iran and Afghanistan.
LS: You know, I’m always asked this question, its very interesting. The fact of the matter is I believe in self-determination. I believe people have the right to decide for themselves how their lives should be led, under what kind of government.
The American right is certainly anti-woman, anti-inclusiveness, and I certainly oppose that here in my own country for my own sake, for my children’s sake, for the way I want to live.
But I’m not going to second-guess people who are living in Egypt under conditions they know better about than I do. They have to decide for themselves. And my understanding is that Islamic revolution is the only hope of ever succeeding in unseating a group of what I consider to be charlatans–and I mean [Egyptian president Hosni] Mubarak, the king of Jordan, the people who run the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia. They are not there in their people’s best interest, and if their people see that they want to re-instate a system of law and government that was in existence for hundreds and hundreds of years, I’m not going to judge.
WW3R: Which was what?
LS: There’s a body of law, the shariah, that was in place, and can be put back in place. I do not hold myself out to be any expert in Middle Eastern history or law, but this system of shariah was certainly in place, it certainly can be re-instated. And it was certainly not what the Taliban were living under–they had their own system which was probably to the right of what most Islamists consider to be law.
WW3R: Well, I don’t want to get too much into the Sheikh’s personal views, but does he explicitly oppose what was the Taliban’s policy on women?
LS: No, but he and I had a lot of discussions, especially about women–because here I am, I’m defending him and I’m a woman. So right away you can see that he’s a not a traditionalist who thinks this is not a suitable job for a woman. He is extremely, extremely bright–I mean he’s a genius in his subject, which is Islam and the Koran. And I know that he is very, very big on education; he’s very, very big on women being educated, because they make better mothers, better people if they were well-educated.
You know, its an interesting thing. The left has sort of been led down this primrose path–and I have to think it’s media-and-government-orchestrated–into saying, “Oh, those Islamists, they do terrible things to women! So therefore, we can’t support them.”But actually, we do terrible things to women here too. And actually, the left has a love affair with people like Malcolm X, who was an Islamist, if you will. And no one ever questioned his adherence to Islam. Part of the way that they are able to debunk Islam is to use over and over and over the women issue. So unless they intend to make equal pay for women and not quibble over Title Nine and all the other things they do in this country, I find that it’s sort of the pot calling the kettle black.
WW3R: That’s a point. On the other hand, if we don’t oppose what the Islamists are doing to women in Afghanistan and Sudan and Iran, what legitimacy do we have to oppose what the Ashcrofts of this world are trying to do to women here?
LS: I think what’s difficult is to make a value judgment on another culture. And I’m not willing to make that value judgment. I know many, many women who are very strict Islamists, and they do not ask to be rescued from this.
http://www.ww4report.com/static/40.html#stewart
Lynne Stewart: “[M]y understanding is that Islamic revolution is the only hope of ever succeeding in unseating a group of what I consider to be charlatans–and I mean [Egyptian president Hosni] Mubarak, the king of Jordan, the people who run the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia. They are not there in their people’s best interest, and if their people see that they want to re-instate a system of law and government that was in existence for hundreds and hundreds of years, I’m not going to judge.”
– Appalling!
Spencer said
@ Otto – the oppressed having fighting and dying at the hands of their oppressors for time out of mind. Or, as you say, throughout history
Yeah, sure. I’m not opposed, but just don’t call that Marxism.
The point about Marxism is that the class struggle can be brought to an end and a classless society of abundant wealth realized. This has been the possibility that mankind has failed to realize since the mid-19th century. The persistence of capitalism beyond anything that can be called “necessary” is barbaric.
The Naxalites participate in this barbarism because they actively mislead. That is, in capitalism people’s struggles can lead to the realization of human freedom, but this depends upon politics, i.e. on organization, on theory, and on leadership. When people’s courage are bravery is squandered and betrayed by politics, then it is all the more incumbent upon us to critique those politics. These are the stakes.
In 1915, when the extension of capitalist barbarity to the farthest horizon had revealed itself as an unmistakable possibility, Rosa Luxemburg wrote this of the significance of Marxism:
The key thing to note here is her use of the past tense of the verb, which she meant both as a truth and as a provocation. As she said, there is no use in averting one’s gaze from the accumulating disaster.
The Salwa Judums and the Ranvir Senas, like their various 20th century precursors, continue to drag humanity through blood and filth, but, as Rosa Luxemburg says, what is genuinely “world-historical” is not death and struggle, but the extinction (or, rather, self-betrayal) of the project of human freedom. Marxism could again “light the way for the proletariat and for its emancipation,” but not so long as we stand around waiting on the Naxalites to do, what? surround Delhi and settle its score with the bourgeoisie at a Fourth Battle of Panipat?
Otto said
I can’t speak for all Maoists and Marxists, but I think I speak for many when I say that we have never endorsed Islamic revolution, especially their treatment of women and military tactics of large body counts for civilians. We also don’t endorse most of the Islamic kingdoms in the Middle-east today. It is true we are not going to tell others how to liberate themselves, but we don’t encourage Islamic revolution and we have fraternal parties in Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq. I have recently used a google translation (it’s the best I can do to translate) of an Iraqi statement from the Marxist Leninist Revolutionaries of Iraq,(second half of the article) http://ottoswarroom.blogspot.com/2010/08/is-iraq-really-over.html and the original follows, http://ottoswarroom.blogspot.com/2010/08/11.html. So let’s make it clear that we are not all supporting Islamic Revolution.
jp said
fine, we don’t have to call anything marxism as far as i’m concerned – the title could be ceded to you, except that would be a serious insult of karl.
we can argue about what karl would have done, or said, but i don’t think his goal was to establish ‘marxism.’ he was a lot smarter than that.
but can we agree, along with karl, that people have the right to fight back? the blood and filth stems from the muck of oppression, not the fightback. if you want peace, work for justice, as those papists say.
Chris Cutrone said
@Otto: I wasn’t implying any support for Islamist politics. I was reponding to Louis’s scurrilous remarks about me on Lynne Stewart. Free Lynne Stewart now! (But don’t let her get away with outrageous remarks about Islamists possibly being “freedom fighters.”)
Chris Cutrone said
@Otto: P.S. Discussion of Islamism is not entirely off-point, however, since many commentators on the Taliban who seek to downplay their dangerous reactionary character made invidious comparisons of them to the Naxalites, seeking to relativize problems of Af-Pak with India. The Green Hunts become an alibi for what’s going on, as if both the Taliban and the Naxalites represent comparable “resistance” to “neoliberalism”/”imperialism.”
Spencer said
@ JP – The issue is not the label “Marxism” but the struggle for emancipation that the label denotes. Marx was most certainly interested in contributing to the establishment of that project and he did so by criticizing those whose struggles failed because they could not clarify for themselves what it was they were doing and in what circumstances they were doing it. This is why ALL Marx’s major works are critiques of other socialists.
jp said
Spencer, mt comment was in response to your: “.. but just don’t call that Marxism. ”
to me, your point of apparent agreement, “Yeah, sure. I’m not opposed…” is more significant than what we call it. (I’m taking up Mike Ely’s method of noting agreement as well as disagreement.)
Seamus said
BTW a couple of days (and many posts ago ) I asked if anyone had knowledge of the claim that these Indian Maoists had engaged in a internal faction fight that had left hundreds dead. As of yet no response from any of you prolific writers . .
I hope that just means that No One knows . I certainly hope it doesn’t mean that people think that if true no big deal ! Maybe i’m a petit Bourgouis Moralist (Not ! ) but to me murdering comrades because one has idelogical/tactical differences with them is a pretty outrageous crime !
The problem is that other Maoists have been proven to have ”resolved contradictions ” permanantly !
Didn’t the NPA of the Philipines admit that they had killed a couple of hundred of their own comrades on suspicion of them being Govt. agents ?
Mike E said
Spencer writes:
It is, as you know, an argument for making polemics the very core of communist work. (And often polemics that step over the principal aspect to fight over the secondary.)
That is, I believe, a mistaken approach. And this appeal to Marx (in its defense) is mistaken on several levels:
In fact, the word “major” there distorts the matter. In fact a great many of marx’s works (major and minor) were not mainly polemics. Some contained polemics (i.e. the Communist Manifesto, Capital, Civil War in France), but get real…
Any writing (any assertion of analysis) involves and implies a critique of opposing analysis. But that is not the same as a style and orientation that puts attacks on other socialists at the center of communist work.
Further, the movement that Marx was part of (and led) did not confine or focus its work on polemics — its main work was organizing and communist exposure. And a great many of Marx’s works (which you may choose to call “minor”) were of that kind.
Further, as a simple matter of method, it is not much of an argument to propose a path (or a method) and then argue “this is what Marx did” or “this is what Lenin did.”
On one level, so what if Marx wrote a lot of polemics? That is not an argument one way or another for what we should do today (or, put another way, it may be an argument but a highly dogmatic and impoverished one).
And (in fact) I say this while believe that an important part of our work is a critical summation of the communist experience so far (which by its nature requires a polemical approach).
The Dullness of Angularity
Without putting too sharp a point on it, there is seems something fundamentally wrong (and self-defeating) about the whole vibe of “angularity” (that radiates from the Spartacists, but not just the Spartacists).
It is generally (and correctly) perceived as nasty, self-righteous, divisive, petty, self-important etc. And as irresponsibly sidestepping many of the other tasks of “preparing minds and organizing forces.”
Just an example of the results:
I said above that I didn’t think my/our criticisms of the Indian Maoists are all that important to trumpet:
And in reply you seemed to find it inconceivable that I could be talking about myself and my views that way:
No, it isn’t obvious at all. And they may not (in fact) be that well-considered yet.
That isn’t a particularly important exchange, but it does highlight your assumption that everyone must be arriving with an almost glistening certitude of their own correctness, wedded to a frantic eagerness to put everyone else in their place.
Well, we don’t all come from that school.
And I don’t think that kind of culture will serve us well given our tasks — or more importantly it will not over overall cause well.
As I wrote in the back and forth:
Don’t think for a moment that I don’t have developed views, and even some confidence in them.
But really, we all have to be good at learning. And a bit of scientific modesty and a culture of listening would help climb out of a real hole.
Spencer said
As for Marx (assuming, as I do, his intellectual and political example relevant), the Communist Manifesto is, in addition to being a polemic against other socialists, a paean to bourgeois society for having “played a most revolutionary part” “[compelling man] to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” Capital is a critique of political economy, i.e. of all existing socialisms, from beginning to end. It’s critique of political economy is meant as a political polemic against the left (as bourgeois ideology). If you don’t get that, you don’t get that book. Similarly, Marx’s political writings, most importantly his writings on the revolutions in France, all agree that, as Marx puts it in the first of these writings, “With the exception of only a few chapters, every important part of the revolutionary annals… bear the heading: Defeat of the revolution!” Thus, while, of course, in the case of these writings there is the very real accomplishments of the revolutionaries to be acknowledged and respected, nevertheless the defeat of the revolution requires that the “illusions, conceptions, [and] projects” exposed by that failure be registered. This is necessary and, indeed, a supremely comradely endeavor precisely in order to insure that the suffering entailed by the social struggle is not wasted. This can only be done by theoretically grasping the defeat to avoid its repetition. Our problem, of course (and as Chris has indicated), is that our defeats now no longer hold any lessons, or at least not any new lessons. This is because the struggle against capitalism has regressed behind the level it reached in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Our problem today is that today humanity has forgotten what once it knew.
Returning to Marx, I think you have a narrow conception of what is meant by “critique”: Robespierre and Danton, Smith, Ricardo, Fourier, Hegel, Robert Owen, the young Hegelians, Proudhon, Louis Blanc, Lasalle, and the other leaders of socialism in his own day – such are the targets of Marx’s critiques. They are all, every one, radicals for whom Marx has immense respect.
As for your “dodge,” I still consider it to be just that, a dodge. In one breath you say (with seeming humility), “[My organization’s approach] may not (in fact) be that well-considered yet” only to turn around and say “Don’t think for a moment that I don’t have developed views, and even some confidence in them.” The face of the matter is that I am engaging you in good faith and with the assumption that you do in fact have considered views. I assume that you take our comrades in India seriously enough to engage them up to and including critique. So let’s get on with it. Like I say, there is no more tangible form of solidarity we can offer. I assume that, as a Marxist, you disagree with Otto when he says, “we are not going to tell others how to liberate themselves” precisely you don’t feel our misguided comrades in India to be “others” (is this racial, ethnic, national, or what?).
Mike E said
On one point.
Spencer, you write:
The fact that we talk past each other on this is revealing. (And amusing in a good way).
In fact it is not a “dodge” at all, it is a contradiction.
I have developed views. I even have some confidence in them. And yet I truly believe we may find that such views may prove (in fact) to be not that well-considered. (And the fact that you find that unbelievable says more about your world outlook than mine.)
I constantly confront my own quite developed and quite confident views as something to be transformed. And considered anew. And (perhaps) considered better.
The fact that you see that as a dodge is exactly my point. And it frames my advice:
The cause of emancipation is not served that well by lining up for “angular” and meanspirited conflict around views that may prove (in the final analysis) needing transformation.
I think we need a model of communist who is not a know-it-all and a hectoring scold.
My model is more like Principal Lung in “Breaking With Old Ideas.”
In fact “breaking with old ideas” as a concept is an important part of being a communist and of having a scientific materialist approach…And we are not just talking about the old ideas of capitalism, but of our own movement (which emerges from capitalism deeply marked by that.
We need a critical Marxist approach to Marxism itself. We need both affirmation and negation — and that is not just true at major junctures of politics and ideology (where it has proven especially true). But affirmation and negation (as a unity of opposites expressed in particular ways in particular moments) is needed all along the way.
That is part of the relationship of theory to practice, and ideas to matter. And that dynamic is also involved in the relationship of communists to non-communists. It is not a one-to-many one-way relationship — it is far more dynamic and mutual. We have things to teach (of course), but also many things to learn.
I’m with Mao on this:
Chris Cutrone said
Let me clarify about the references Spencer and I have made to Marx. It’s not about fidelity to Marx — “orthodoxy.”
It’s entirely unfortunate that Marx remains so relevant today, but the point is that he may remain more relevant in certain respects than Lenin or Mao, by virtue of deeper, more historically lasting insights.
The fact that Marx was more about polemic than Lenin was, and Lenin was more than Mao, is an indication not of progressive maturation of the socialist movement, but rather its disintegration and collapse.
What Spencer and I are arguing is that there was a regression since Marx that makes him rise over those who come later. The only “socialists” there were for Mao to criticize were the Soviets.
Mao did not prevail over his rivals in Chinese Communism through critique and polemic — the way Marx and Lenin did — but through power-politics. This already says something. There was something quaint about Trotsky’s faith in the ability to turn the tide of history through critique and polemic. Stalin demonstrated his being more with the times. And that’s the point, that the Naxalites are the “communists” of our era is precisely the problem.
mediated abstraction said
The fact that Marx was more about polemic than Lenin was, and Lenin was more than Mao, is an indication not of progressive maturation of the socialist movement, but rather its disintegration and collapse.
That doesn’t really strike me as a materialist analysis. It seems to me that the different material conditions and situations in which these figures(marx lenin & mao) operated really ought to be examined before stating that the supposed decline in the degree they were “about polemic” represents a collapse of the socialist movement.
Chris Cutrone said
@ Mediated Abstraction: I said is was “*an* indication,” not a *causal* factor! I was pointing to the changing character of socialist politics, which affected the actors involved. The causes for that are indeed complicated, but I am focused on how the Communist movement adapted to these changes, and I don’t think for the better.
mediated abstraction said
I’m not entirely in disagreement with you, but I’m questioning your method as that’s a rather bold statement to make which would require a pretty comprehensive analysis of these figures, their works, and movements to substantiate. Why is the amount each of these leaders were “about polemic” your standard of measuring this decline and what exactly do you mean by this?
Chris Cutrone said
@ Mediated Abstraction: My judgment is based on almost twenty years of my extensive studies, comparing revolutions/movements in 20th century, in Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam/Southeast Asia, Algeria, Cuba/Latin America, Southern Africa, etc. I’ve also closely studied the history of socialism in Germany, France, Italy, the U.S., etc. My conclusion is that the movement in the era of the 2nd International leading up to the Russian, German, Hungarian Revolutions and Italian strike waves in the period 1917-19/21 was much more promising than anything that came after. My study of historical figures such as Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, et al. is within that context. In other words, what they took for granted about the social and political realities — including of their own movement — as a way of understanding the meaning of their very context-bound articulations in the texts we have handed down from them. My judgment is not based on abstract theoretical-textual analysis. I recognize a degradation in consciousness that is an index of the degradation of the movement. This is especially apparent in the post-1940 era (especially after the 1960s), but was also the case in the period 1917-40.
Jim T said
How is this claim of a ‘degradation in consciousness’ not based on thoroughly eurocentric assumptions about discourse and civility? Ugh.
Based on this analysis, we’re fucked without a time machine.
Spencer said
@ Mike E. – You quote Mao to the effect that “The masses are the real heroes, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant, and without this understanding, it is impossible to acquire even the most rudimentary knowledge.” While I strongly dislike the statement in any case, it should be pointed out that it was ripped out of context when inserted into the Little Red Book (which you seem to have taken it from).
In its original context, Mao was referring to the peasants’ testimony at fact-finding meetings held to determine conditions in different rural districts under Communist control in 1941. He was not disparaging the significance and necessity of Marxist theory. Rather, what he said was in China the communists were obliged to generate the sort of detailed factual knowledge about society – crop rotation patterns, landholding and tenurial forms, rainfall and irrigation, geography and transport, availability and use of stock, etc. – knowledge which was known and available in core capitalist societies. As Mao wrote,
“the infant bourgeoisie of China has not been able, and never will be able, to provide relatively comprehensive or even rudimentary material on social conditions, as the bourgeoisie in Europe, America and Japan has done; we have therefore no alternative but to collect it ourselves. . . everyone engaged in practical work [in the Communist Party] must investigate conditions at the lower levels. Such investigation is especially necessary for those who know theory but do not know the actual conditions, for otherwise they will not be able to link theory with practice.” (Preface and Postscript to Rural Surveys)
Of course, when one is speaking about intervening in people’s lives and developing tactics to be pursued by cadre in a specific locals, it would be foolhardy to deny that Communist party members are “often childish and ignorant” when it comes to local conditions (regarding which no books are available, as they would be in a more developed capitalist country) and that therefore the communist party workers must conduct systematic investigations. In these investigations, the peasants’ own testimony is a crucial source of information.
Unsurprisingly, in the Red Book the original meaning of Mao’s statement – which refers obviously and straightforwardly to the fact that local people are best informed respecting local circumstances – becomes warped into an anti-intellectual and anti-theoretical affirmation of the “masses’” consciousness as it encountered, however undeveloped or uncritical that may be.
jp said
isn’t mao’s quote to be understood as a call for some humility of approach?
Otto said
Chris Cutrone -
“Mao did not prevail over his rivals in Chinese Communism through critique and polemic — the way Marx and Lenin did — but through power-politics.”
So how many issues of Peking Review did you read during (if you are too young to have lived back then. I think these magazines are still available in some libraries.) the cultural revolution …..or before it…. or after it, when the Communist Party was still discussing ideology? When I read those publications it seems to me there were a great deal of discussion and polemics. Maybe it depends on your definition of polemics
The idea that Marxism ends with Marx reminds me of my anarchist days. It was easy to find fault in every system and in every power structure. It was easy to criticize our society and what it failed to do, but I had no actual plan or idea as to how these power structures could be changed. To put it simple: It is easier to criticize the system without having to actually fix it. Then I read Lenin’s Left Wing Communism and I noticed the strategical abilities of that leader.
So far I’ve read nothing from the Platypus society that links ideological theory to reality. I’m all for polemics, but putting ideas into action requires the risk of
Otto said
contradictions arising from one’s actions. Without taking any risk nothing can change.
I left off the last line.
mediated abstraction said
@Chris Cutrone:
Fair enough, I think I get where you’re coming from and I largely agree with your perspective in general but I guess there’s a lot of nuance that would require something more than a comment section to really get into. I appreciate the exchange going on here and I’ll be checking Platypus regularly as well. Do you publish issues in print?
Chris Cutrone said
@ Mediated Abstraction: Thanks. Yes, The Platypus Review is a monthly broadsheet, distributed mostly in Chicago and NYC, but also elsewhere (Toronto, Boston, etc.).
Chris Cutrone said
@ Jim T: I’m not arguing that degradation of consciousness only took place in either “West” or the “Third World.” I have never assumed that Mao, Ho, Fidel, Che, et al. didn’t have anything to offer theoretically, and I certainly learned a great deal from reading them, but I have ultimately been left a little underwhelmed. As I put it above, I find that their insights, though borne of more recent history, have paradoxically expired faster than Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, et al.’s have. I don’t think a time-machine is required, but rather a denaturalization and “self-criticism” of the unconscious assumption of historical “progress.”
@ Otto: Yes, I have read the foreign (English) language press, of both the USSR and China, from back then, and found a great deal fascinating, but also some relatively empty propaganda. Let me be clear however that I don’t dismiss Mao (et al.). And Lenin has been my friend for a long time. (You should know that a part of my argument in my dissertation on Adorno’s Marxism is to point out Adorno’s paraphrasing from Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder pamphlet in his 1969 writings “Resignation” and “Marginalia to Theory and Practice;” the degree to which Adorno’s thought owes to Lenin is usually overlooked — by anti-Marxist scholars, of course.) I agree that risk of self-contradiction is vital. But there must be distinguished the critique of (what Adorno called) “actionism” from some argument for abstention from action, which is not the same thing. One of my mentors, Adolph Reed, wrote of how in the 1960s events were so exciting and fast-paced that there was little time to think. I am wary of the “Left” culture that keeps such a mentality going even 40+ years later, when there’s nothing going on by comparison. And, obviously, e.g., Lenin never allowed himself to get so caught up in events as to not be able to critically reflect. As I wrote above, the Platypus is not about doing everything ourselves, which would be absurd, but providing, to whatever small degree, a missing element.
Dave Palmer said
Chris Cutrone writes:
This comment seems to suggest that there exists a sphere of ideas and reason and debate which is pure and noble, as opposed to the corrupt, “degenerate” world of state power (or “power politics”).
In this worldview, “Stalinism” (i.e. the engagement of Marxism with practical questions of power) is seen as the “degeneration” or even the maybe antithesis of Marxism. And “Marxism” is a bright, shiny idea which ought to stay in its divinely-ordained place in the bright, shiny world of ideas, unsullied by the dirt of this sinful world.
It is typical for this type of worldview to be backward-looking. In this particular case, it appears that the Zimmerwald Conference is the lost Garden of Eden, from which the international communist movement was cast out for the crime of eating from the tree of “Stalinism” (i.e. power).
It is also typical for this type of attitude to be born of defeat. Chris Cutrone clearly believes that the left has been decisively defeated, and that only the barest of remanents are left to pick up the pieces. (Interestingly enough, these bare remanents are located nowhere else but in the strata of “bourgeois intellectuals” in the imperialist countries, according to Chris).
In fact, the “death of the left” is old news. More than twenty years ago, revolutionary Marxism was officially declared a dinosaur, a relic of prehistory. All sensible people understood this “fact” (one’s degree of sensibleness being defined by one’s willingness to accept said “fact,” of course), and anyone who failed to understand this was clearly a non-serious person unworthy of being taken seriously.
Yet, to the consternation of the “sensible” people of the world, there suddenly appear to be millions of non-serious people, especially in Latin America and South Asia, who don’t accept the relegation of revolutionary Marxism to dinosaur status. In fact, they are actively working to constitute revolutionary Marxism as real, living presence amidst the dirt and muck of this ugly, sinful world. And their numbers are growing!
Shame on these unreasonable savages for depriving the left of its glorious defeat!
Chris Cutrone said
@ Dave Palmer: Obviously not. The problem is not “(state) power,” but rather making virtues out of necessities. The models derived from the Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban, etc. experience are woefully inadequate. (“Inadequate for what?,” you may ask: inadequate for making revolution in the U.S., Europe, Japan, etc.) Obviously civil war is not the best circumstances for emancipatory social struggles, unless one thinks that emancipation means, e.g., peasants offing their landlords. Clearly, that it hardly enough. And it’s also not so simple: conscious politics mediates such actions. We’ve had a century of “Third World revolution,” without advancing world socialism one iota. I would argue that the 20th century was characterized not by revolution so much as by counterrevolution. The imperialists and the Whites brutalized and ultimately bled the Russian Revolution to death — and long before 1989. Subsequent politics of “communism” picked up not from 1917 but from the conditions of its defeat. As Trotsky put it, Stalinism was the “great organizer of defeats,” not least because it dressed up defeat as victory (as all opportunist politics does). The revolutionary crisis in which Lenin (and Trotsky and Luxemburg) sought state power was derailed, cut short, swamped. And, unlike what Mike E. wrote above, it was not the case, that, at the end of it all, “to the astonishment of all, the USSR (or China) stood before them, a socialist country.” Why is pointing out this fundamental, undeniable fact regarded as motivated only by “purism?” If it is “typical for this type of worldview to be backward-looking,” does it really make a difference whether one is looking back 20, 40, 90, or 150 years? Also, I never said anything about exclusively “bourgeois intellectuals in the imperialist countries.” The point is that the Naxalites are inevitably also “bourgeois intellectuals,” i.e., they act with a consciousness borne of the bourgeois world in which they live, no matter how degenerate/barbarized, no less than I do.
Chris Cutrone said
@ Seamus: I don’t know the details of intra-Naxalite violence, but there were some sobering episodes regarding the ANC/SACP in the 1980s, as there have been in all post-1917 “revolutionary politics.” (There was some mention made by Louis above regarding Sendero Luminoso in Peru not being as bad as the “NACLA” types said. I disagree.) I regard it as an index of degeneracy, to whatever degree. It’s not the kind of thing Lenin ever engaged in, and not because he didn’t face secret police infiltration — and much worse. It is possible to retain one’s morality even under the worst circumstances.
Spencer said
@ Seamus – I agree with you when you write, “I certainly hope [the fact that nothing has been said about the infighting among Naxalite groups] doesn’t mean that people think that if true no big deal!” I think this is a very serious question for a group like the Kasama Project which offers seemingly unqualified solidarity with Indian Maoists. In fact, the history of the infighting between Naxalite groups is a very long and sordid tale the full extent of which may never be known, but whose broad outlines are beyond doubt.
In the case of groups operating in Bihar, you can check out Political economy and class contradictions: a study by Jose J. Nedumpara, pg. 268 where he not only gives the body counts that resulted from the infighting of the Maoist Communist Centre, the CPI (M-L), and CPI (Party Unity) in 2004 for control of territory in the central districts of that very impoverished state. Reinforcing Banaji’s point about the use of the poor as “cannon fodder,” Nedumpara remarks that “those killed in the fights belonged to poor peasant families and socially deprived castes.” Nedumpara also speaks of the rape of the women belonging to rival groups, as well as the practice of entering into the pay of local landlords to hunt down and kill rival groups. More distantly, at the the initial Naxalbari movement in West Bengal in the 1960s, there was massive violence between the Naxalites and their erstwhile colleagues in the CPI(M) only to be followed by murderous infighting amongst themselves in the 1970s.
Reinventing revolution: new social movements and the socialist tradition in India by Gail Omvedt gives some of the background. I would have to do proper library research to provide more sources, but I will say that murderous infighting is a well-known feature of Naxalism in India and I know of no Indian leftist who wholly denies it.
Chris Cutrone said
@ Dave Palmer: P.S. I should also mention, in terms of the Platypus project and organization, that an early and enduring controversy was our forthright identification with “1917″ and Lenin (and Trotsky) in particular. Among our initial members, the problem was posed as being one of choosing Bolshevism to be the “prow of the ship” for our project, about stepping out with that specific foot forward, making that aspect prominent. My response at that time was precisely that while this choice might make us (mistaken) enemies in places like the U.S. and Europe, it would have the opposite affect for us in places like Latin America and Asia (and Africa), that it would open doors for us among certain people and in certain places while closing them in others. I also pointed out that this would be the case, regardless of the question of Lenin (and Trotsky) and 1917, about calling ourselves “Marxists” at all. But then this raises the issue of the supposed “Euro” or “Western” -centric character of Marxism itself, doesn’t it? For I don’t think that somehow Marx et al. were de facto “Eurocentric” and that this was somehow corrected later (by Mao, et al.). In other words, I don’t think that the “race” of Marxists speaks to the question of whether Marxism does indeed inevitably have a strategic focus on the core capitalist regions and why this is so. I think that, like Lenin and Trotsky (after Marx himself), any purported Marxists today, regardless of where they are in the world, ought to make revolution in places like the U.S. their strategic orientation and practical political priority. We ought not to be thinking about the (in)applicability of Marx to rural India, but rather about applying whatever lessons can be learned (perhaps they are all negative) from the experience of “Third World revolution” to the political focus on the core capitalist countries and what the Left ought to do there.
Dave Palmer said
Chris writes:
The models derived from the Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban, etc. experience continue to inspire millions of people throughout the globe. Is that “woefully inadequate”?
We’ve had a century of Third World revolution, without achieving a decisive victory in the core capitalist countries. Does that mean that world socialism has not been advanced “one iota”?
The revolutionary movement led by Lenin succeeded in achieving state power in one fifth of the world. Is that what you mean by “derailed, cut short, swamped”?
Is the fact that Third World revolutionaries have failed to “make revolution in places like the U.S. their strategic orientation and practical political priority” as you urge them to — rather than ungraciously making revolution in their own countries — really the reason why there has not been a decisive victory in the core capitalist countries?
Or does the fact that so many would-be “revolutionaries” in the core capitalist countries have retreated into precisely the sort of backward-looking nonsense that you promote, soaked through and through with the logic of defeat (even the October Revolution is seen as a “defeat”!), have more to do with it?
Chris Cutrone said
@ Dave Palmer: You are (mistakenly, mis-)attributing to me some kind of Cold War liberal/”Left” defeatism that I simply don’t have. The October Revolution did not have the effect Lenin (and Trotsky) sought for it to have. It’s not a matter of space, but time. For how long, really, was the original intent of the Bolsheviks preserved in practice? I think that when Stalin concluded that while a revolution in, e.g., Germany was desirable, it was not likely, nor really necessary, that the USSR should proceed to build “socialism in one country.” This was never Lenin’s conception; Stalin’s attitude marked a retreat and a rationalization. In fact, Stalin did his best to prevent the possibility of rival leadership emerging internationally, outside his own in the USSR, and so his pessimism became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The attitude that while it may be desirable to make revolution in the U.S., it’s unlikely and so we must make do with what’s already going on, e.g., Naxalism, is a classic case of what Lenin called “tailism.” That is in fact what is “backward-looking,” advancing into the future with one’s back turned, playing catch-up with events out of one’s control, e.g., “Maoism” in places like India. I suspect that such an attitude does not really desire, and actually fears, revolutionary politics in places like the U.S., because the success of such politics would inevitably tend to subordinate and even come into conflict with phenomena like Naxalism. While you accuse me of defeatism, it is actually you who are expressing a defeatist line, however unconsciously, under the guise of supporting “the struggle.”
Dave Palmer said
Yes, Chris, if you regard the Russian Revolution as a “defeat,” then I am indeed a “defeatist,” and I hope for many more “defeats” like that.
Nate said
Spencer, it is not the case that v1 of Capital is primarily a critique of other socialists, nor is it true — if this is what Spencer means to imply, I can’t tell – that that’s the primary value of that book. Volume 1 of Capital is about — and, in my opinion, is absolutely necessary for — understanding how capitalism operates.
If you don’t get that, you don’t get that book. Embedded in your refusal of reality, this insistence upon rehashing empty abstractions, there seems an unmistakable retreat from the very project of Marxism. In my next post I shall put up a long list of subjects I have studied for the past twenty years, so you know that I am an authority figure who is correct in my assessments.
Please note that my second paragraph is both intellectualy quite profound and does much to further this as a productive discussion among communist revolutionaries, I’m sure you’ll agree, since, as Chris pointed out, the decline of polemic is an indication not of progressive maturation but rather disintegration and collapse.
Spencer said
@ Nate – Actually Marx grasps capitalism as the result of failed revolution. The critique of the left *is* the analysis of capitalism (and vice versa).
Nate said
Spencer, about capitalism as failed revolution, where do you see this interpretation in v1 of Capital? What chapter(s) or theme(s) support this reading?
About the critique of the left being analysis of capitalism, I’m happy to hear that as it makes my remarks against this portion of the dead left – that is, Platypus – of greater world-historical import than I had thought. That aside, you suggest that this is Marx’s view of his own work as well. Here too, where do you see evidence of this in v1 of Capital?
Otto said
Nate said;
“In my next post I shall put up a long list of subjects I have studied for the past twenty years, so you know that I am an authority figure who is correct in my assessments.”
What a great idea. I may do that also. That way I can prove I’m not just a blow-hard. I’m a well educated, well read, self taught as well as professionally educated blow-hard.
Mike E said
I know you are both joking (about listing your readings as proof of authority and depth)….
But sadly RCP leader Bob Avakian was not joking when he tried to answer charges of shoddy dilettantism.
The passage below needs a subhead that says
“Hey, I read books. No really! I read LOTS of books. And articles too!”
The following is an actual quote from an essay that was actually published. (I.e. this not a parody.)
In a related passage he tries to make a defense of his narcissistic self-quoting.
Green Red said
Take it easy Mike,
If Jesus Christ was not crucified, the older he got, to not let cheaters like Saul the Pharisy and his alike, he would keep on writing his latest bibles and quoting himself on and on, so that as he dies, Christianity will not be mixed up with Roman balderdashes and so forth.
Every messiah, every self proclaimed rightous leader of any ideology, has a right to defend his own things and, with changing in his own ideological positions, to alter them sufficiently. Thus let them have their own forte.
we better stick to discussing real revolution rather than remembering the fallen cults and spoiled movements.
with due respect to their past jobs,
Green Red
louisproyect said
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/thoughts-provoked-by-the-platypus/
[moderator note: We posted this piece by Louis as its own thread here on Kasama.]
Paul Cockshott said
Chris wrote :” The onus is on, e.g., the CPI(M) to prove that it is actually “Marxist” or “communist” or “socialist,” either theoretically or practically. ”
Why do they have an onus to prove that?
They are a political organisation with publicly declared objectives and a publicly declared strategy to achieve it. They have no onus to prove anything.
Mike E said
I agree. The idea that people making revolution have to “prove” something to observers around the world is a rather odd (and revealing) assertion.
They have an “onus of proof”? Nah. On the contrary we have a responsibility to make more contributions to the people of the world than we have so far done. Including by helping oppressed people within the U.S. have a better appreciation of the revolutions happening in very distant (and very different) places.
Paul Cockshott said
Spencer ” This is why ALL Marx’s major works are critiques of other socialists.”
This is surely an overstatement. In what way was the ‘Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy’, or Capital, a critique of other socialists. I would say that these, his most important works, were what they said on the cover: critiques of the main ideologists for capitalism not of other socialists.
Paul Cockshott said
It seems to me that the discussion here has diverged a long way from what it could have been discussing — the relative merits of the Naxalite and CPI(M) strategies in India.
Spencer said
Mike E. again insists that India is “very distant” and “very different” all by way of suspending criticism (and, as I argued above, suspending all but nominal solidarity). But the fact of the matter is that the history of Indian Communism is perfectly susceptible to knowledge and understanding, since its documents and the documents of its fellow travelers and enemies are all, as Paul said, “public.” Most of them are even in English. Were Mike or Paul to bother to consult the known, documented, and readily available record then they wouldn’t be so quick to take the party leaders and professed revolutionaries at their word. Or, failing that, it is always possible to think by analogy from the known to the unknown. The CPI(M) wouldn’t be the first case of a bourgeois political party cloaking itself in the mantle of Marxism or socialism. After all, since the revisionist dispute more than a century ago, there’s been a struggle over Marxism.
In the case of the CPI(M), we’re talking about a party that has been in power in West Bengal and Kerala for decades. For over three decades they have crushed all attempts to organize any alternative leftist politics, including the Naxalite struggle, which was put down by a CPI(M) Home Minister for West Bengal back in the late 1960s. A more recent example of the same phenomenon is the state violence (and party cadre violence) visited upon the peasants of Nandigram in 2005. Regarding this case, as in so many other instances, CPI(M) “dadagiri” and goonda-ism has been well documented through important efforts by (admittedly distant and different) journalists and and activists. See, for instance the report of the 2007 People’s Tribunal on Nandigram.
Spencer said
@ Paul – In Capital Vol. 1 – The critique of political economy Marx in fact rarely bothers with criticizing apologists for capitalism and Marx maintains a strict distinction throughout the text between time-servers, apologists, and vulgarizers, on the one hand, and bourgeois ideologists and political economists, on the other. Those against whom the critique is directed are taken up precisely because their thought represents the height of bourgeois revolutoinary thought. As Marx writes in the Poverty of Philosophy, “Economists like Adam Smith and Ricardo… are the historians of this epoch. [They] have no other mission than that of showing how wealth is acquired in bourgeois production relations, of formulating these relations into categories, into laws, and of showing how superior these laws, these categories, are for the production of wealth to the laws and categories of feudal society.” As Marx makes clear in this same text, the problem with leftists like Proudhon, against whom the whole text is directed, is that they fall below the level of bourgeois ideology as expressed by Smith and Ricardo. Proudhon is a bourgeois radical who falls below the theoretical level of the bourgeoisie (in its highest, most revolutionary expressions, such as those of Adam Smith and Ricardo).
Mike E said
Spencer writes:
This is an odd statement, given that I don’t argue for suspending criticism and further Spencer’s own comment appears in a thread formed by our posting of Platypus’ criticism of the Indian Maoists.
(Uh, if we are for “suspending criticism,” why did we post yours?)
In fact India is very distant, and its revolution takes place under conditions very different from ours)… and this is true even if Spencer chooses to bypass those facts, in favor of his own speculations about what my alleged motives are.
We are trying to build understanding of the actual revolutions in Nepal and India — I can tell you (from summing up real political practice) that among radicals and progressives in the U.S. there is very very little understanding of the conditions, demands, programs, etc. of those revolutions.
And this is not surprising because (once again) these are very distant countries with very different conditions. (I.e. Nepal and rural India is as distant from the US and as different from the U.S. as two countries can be on this one planet). And because our own movement for revolution is so very primitive and theoretically impoverished.
Spencer starts by assuming that I am unfamiliar with the available record, and then that I take “party leaders and professed revolutionaries at their word.” In fact, I’m neither unschooled nor naive.
And beyond that there really isn’t much of an analysis to respond to in Spencer’s note (beyond this speculative ad hominem analysis of my supposed dishonesty and stupidity).
Why don’t you deal with what people actually say and think? And contrast it to how you believe reality works?
Green Red said
The main difference is that the classic teachings of Mao about a backward feudal country is absolutely applicable.
Here without real large countryside and landless peasant talking about surrounding cities from the countryside is practically nonesence and what sort of real applicable understanding of teachings of Lenin and Mao in this imperialist country is what groups like Kasama must figure out and, adapt them in ways to match coming changes and crisis so that the oppressed grasp the correct leadership of the left as their only way out rather than going lower in the dungeons and guattes.
Mike E said
I don’t agree, green red.
First, India today is very different from China in the 1930s.
Second, our task in the U.S. is not simply to understand-and-then-adapt “the teachings of Lenin and Mao.” That is a religious view of “the classics” (as guru-like “teachings”) that leaves no room for critical appraisal, transformation and creative development of our theory.
Spencer said
@ Mike E. – I agree that conditions in India are very different. They are very different in Mexico and the West Indies, and many other places besides. None of this should diminish our obligation to understand the situation our comrades face. The Indian case is, if anything, the easiest to study and understand because, as I pointed out before, the Indian left intelligentsia is relatively large and it writes in English.
Now, I wanted to claridy that I took up the discussion of the CPI(M). In Chris’s original post, I think he probably mistyped when he wrote CPI(M). I think he probably meant to speak of the Naxals, whether the historic CPI(M-L) or the recently formed successor organization (which incorporated a number of splinter groups), the CPI(Maoist). Anyway, like Chris, it seems Paul knows the difference but his quotation of Chris’s post perpetuates the confusion. So, to be clear, I was balking at Paul’s perhaps mistaken defense of the CPI(M).
The main thing I want to point out, contra Mike’s claim that I provide no analysis, is 1) I point out that one gets into difficulty if one wants to support the CPI(M) and the Naxalites, since they are historic and avowed political enemies. This enmity began at the beginning, i.e. at the time the CPI(M), in a “United Front” government in West Bengal, deployed the resources of the state to put down the uprising at Naxalbari. (I mistakenly wrote before that a CPI(M) politician then held the Home Ministry portfolio, which is a mistake, but they were still in the government that put down the Naxalbari uprising. 2) The CPI(M)’s opposition to the emergence of an alternative left movement in West Bengal has been very gruesomely exposed in Nandigram in 2005 (and again in Lalgarh in 2009). This is just the tip of the iceberg, it’s true – entire books have been written on the betrayals of the CPI(M). But it is unfair to say that all I said was ad hominem. And, right now, it looks as if not even the over-hyped West Bengal land reforms won’t be enough to preserve the CPI(M) at the polls, where it seems they are almost certain to lose for the first time in decades (though, admittedly, the opposition is certainly no better and in some ways much worse).
Green Red said
Hi Mike,
What i meant was status of India with feudalism and its living standard still alive.
On Lenin and Mao i meant, we interpret them and, learn their way of thinking.
I do not have it on me but, there is a saying of chair Mao saying:
Read and study Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin… and, understand the whole thing but don’t take it like a copying machine. Learn the manner of thinking to apply it to your own time and place. Dig it?
Spencer said
@ Green Red – Did you read the interview? “Feudal” Are you joking? Only capitalism is capable of the sort of degradation so evidently and ubiquitously on display in India.
Green Red said
Hi Spencer. Actually talking about feudal minded people, calling countries with semi-feudal, semi colonial conditions (even in an expansionist petty imperialist like India) the Capitalism might be the ruling means of the cities and state altogether but, feudalism has a culture of its own that is severely indebted within the religion and the Hindu fascist party (I don’t call them fascist. It is what Naxalites have placed upon that party called BJP. And in India there are Myriad of situations. from strange family formations living on the mountatin to what have you, there is diversity and strangeness but yes, capitalism is the final connecting system and regime in which, greatest, most geniune, not inspired or incited withint a World War related matter that both, Russian and, Chinese revolutions happened related with. I have read three quarter of the Roy talk and, read unbelievable status of family structures. India (and Pakistan and other countries there) have very different conditions with the US but in and of it all of course, we ought to fight against capitalism and establish socialism.
Spencer said
@ Green Red – I’m a historian of India and, while that doesn’t necessarily make my opinion more valid, I don’t need to be “schooled” either. Also, it so happens that Banaji’s contribution to the so-called “Mode of Production” debate in the 1970s is a powerful rebuttal of any kind of qualified, vague, or otherwise half-hearted feudal or semi-feudal thesis. The key essay is “Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry: The Deccan Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century,” which is reprinted in his new book Theory as History. In the interview, you would do well to notice, Banaji ties the semi-feudal thesis to the Naxalites’ opportunism. Ultimately, the Stalinist line of socialism in one country lies behind the claim of semi-feudalism.
Mike E said
Is there a link to this essay, Spenser? Can you perhaps sketch the arguments (rather than merely the verdict)?
Spencer said
For those with access to JSTOR, the article can be accessed at http://www.jstor.org/pss/4365853.
The citation is as follows: Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 12, No. 33/34, Special Number (Aug., 1977), pp. 1375-1404.
While the article is long and complex, Banaji basically looks to the transformations of peasant production, enters into extended detail respecting what actually is meant by Marx’s notion of subsumption to capital (and why it matters), and, on that basis, argues that, even in the absence of certain property forms, most crucially in the absence of wage labor and the prevalence of debt bondage, the production processes themselves still come to be shaped from within by capital, i.e. that the peasant loses effective control over the production process and that peasant proprietorship as a persisting legal form masks underlying transformations in the actual function performed by “peasant,” “moneylender,” and, where applicable, “landlord” (the Deccan Districts of what is now Maharashtra were not characterized by large estates or zamindaris).
This article lays the basis for a much more profound and intrinsic analysis of the hollowing out of tradition and its subsumption to capitalism across society as a whole, so that isolated facts, such as those picked out by Green Red cannot simply be isolated from larger processes. For instance, stuff like the “persistence” of the extended family, arranged marriage, etc., are all completely capitalist forms, as capitalist as their very different counterpart institutional forms in the developed world.
The critical thing is not the presence/absence of one or another institutional form one takes to be characteristic of capitalism. It is rather the question of incorporation into dynamics of productive/destructive historical dynamics (which Marx grasps with his categories commodity, value, capital, etc.) Viewed from this perspective, Banaji argues that India’s major agriculture producing zones together with its urban centers must be viewed as formally subsumed to capital by the outbreak in World War I.
This is essentially congruent with the Bolsheviks’ political theory and practice in the years immediately following the Russian Revolution.
Green Red said
G N Saibaba writes in many places things like:
The persistence of this model in a semi-feudal, semi-colonial reality cannot be ensured without total reliance on imperialism.
- – - –
Let us now look into how imperialist logic or the reproduction of the future of imperialism gets articulated in a semi-feudal, semi-colonial reality like India.
Please read
Manufacturing Imperialism
The political Economy of Special Economic ones -GN Saibaba
where he talks about the alliance of comprador bourgeoisie and feudal landlords that even within capitalism keep traditions and backwardness alive.
Paul Cockshott said
QUite so Spencer, Smith and Ricardo were the best representatives of bourgeois economic thought, and arguably in Smith’s case, a founder of historical materialism. But in no sense could they be termed ‘other socialists’ to the criticism of which, you claimed, he had devoted all his major works.
Paul Cockshott said
Spencer wrote:”In Chris’s original post, I think he probably mistyped when he wrote CPI(M). I think he probably meant to speak of the Naxals, whether the historic CPI(M-L) or the recently formed successor organization (which incorporated a number of splinter groups), the CPI(Maoist). Anyway, like Chris, it seems Paul knows the difference but his quotation of Chris’s post perpetuates the confusion.”
You are right in my first post I assumed that Chris meant CPI(Maoist). In my later post my reference to CPI(M) was the old CPI(Marxist).
There is an inherent ambiguity now in the old initials.
Spencer:”
So, to be clear, I was balking at Paul’s perhaps mistaken defense of the CPI(M).”
I was not intending to defend the CPI(Marxist)
Paul Cockshott said
Spencer:
“The critical thing is not the presence/absence of one or another institutional form one takes to be characteristic of capitalism. It is rather the question of incorporation into dynamics of productive/destructive historical dynamics (which Marx grasps with his categories commodity, value, capital, etc.) Viewed from this perspective, Banaji argues that India’s major agriculture producing zones together with its urban centers must be viewed as formally subsumed to capital by the outbreak in World War I.
This is essentially congruent with the Bolsheviks’ political theory and practice in the years immediately following the Russian Revolution.”
I have not read the paper yet it looks interesting, but I approach it with some skepticism. An articulation of modes of production is not the same as the disappearance of modes of production. Also, from your short summary above, you are speaking only of a formal subsumption of labour to capital. There is clearly not a real subsumption, and it is unclear whether he is using the term subsumption here in the same sense as Marx did — I must reserve judgement until I read it.
Spencer said
@ Paul – To repeat, Marx is treating socialists as bourgeois. He rejects your distinction between bourgeois economists and socialists. As I said already, Marx makes it clear that he believes socialists like Proudhon (whom, it must be said, is alot more sophisticated than most “Marxists” and whom Marx treats as a serious opponent) fall below the threshold established by Smith and Ricardo. To this day, most “Marxists’” take Capital to do nothing more than repeat and perhaps articulate with a sharper edge Smith and Ricardo’s labor theory of value (the theory that undergirds what Lenin calls “economism”).
Spencer said
G N Saibaba is hardly the only scholar to repeat the semi-feudalism line. It’s spread all over the place, far beyond the writings of stalinist ideologues. Categories like “comprador bourgeoisie” may sound really radical, but Jairus points out how the binary category of “nationalist bourgeoisie” operates in Naxalite practice.
Paul Cockshott said
I can only access the first page of the article, the rest needs a subscription, but already in the first page there is, as I understand it, a fundamental economic mistake.
In discussing the reference to mercantile profit Banaji says that this is either (a) surplus value produced in capitalist production that is appropriated by commercial capital, or (b) that it is mercantile profit arising from exchange between separate enterprises which are not capitalist, in which case it originates from outbargaining and cheating.
Case (b) is not correct. Trade between separate independent producers allows an increase in the total material product through the development of the division of labour. This was emphasised by Smith, developed further by Ricardo in his theory of comparative advantage, and depends on properties of material production that were generalised mathematically by the Soviet Economist Kantorovich in the 30s. Trade by generating a larger material product with unchanged technology creates a surplus product, part of which is appropriated by the merchant. This is quite distinct from profit arising in the capitalist mode of production which arises primarily from changing the technology of production.
Spencer said
@ Paul – The critical point would be that Althusserian talk of “articulation of modes of production” differs fundamentally from Marx’s dialectical categories.
Paul Cockshott said
SPencer “To repeat, Marx is treating socialists as bourgeois. He rejects your distinction between bourgeois economists and socialists.”
Well he may treat some socialists as bourgeois, but you implied something quite different, that he treated significant bourgeois authors like Smith, Ricardo or Cairns as socialists. There is nothing that I have ever read in his writings that indicates that he thought that the political economists he was analyzing were socialists.
When he criticised Ricardo’s monetary theory, in the Contribution, he was not criticising a socialist.
I would have said that his major works are devoted to criticism of the then leading bourgeois economic theorists.
I would be very careful if I were you, in expressing such skepticism about the labour theory of value, and in making sweeping claims that the labour theory of value leads to economism.
Paul Cockshott said
Spencer: ” The critical point would be that Althusserian talk of “articulation of modes of production” differs fundamentally from Marx’s dialectical categories.”
And so?
What has Charlie’s background as a German Philosophy student in the 1840s got to do with science today?
Spencer said
@ Paul – the point is that for Marx the question of “socialism” is ultimately irrelevant for Marx. The point is how do we understand this social environment and, on the basis of that understanding, the potentials for human emancipation that it might allow. As for Ricardo, of course Marx thought he was dealing with the theoretical basis of the socialism of his day, whether the left Ricardians in Britain or the Proudhonians in France. The fact that Ricardo was not engaged in politics of course made no difference to the significance and consequences of his ideas.
I am careful in all my claims. Don’t worry. Your comment on Banaji (on the basis of a single page) is enough to indicate at least one thing, that you have no idea what Marx means by the category “value.” From Marx’s (and Banaji’s) perspective, there is no value produced in a non-capitalist society, regardless of the effects on the division of labor of the expansion of trade that you mention. Which is to say, your comments exemplify my point that Marx is not simply elaborating Smith and Ricardo’s labor theory of value.
Paul Cockshott said
Spencer “Your comment on Banaji (on the basis of a single page) is enough to indicate at least one thing, that you have no idea what Marx means by the category “value.” From Marx’s (and Banaji’s) perspective, there is no value produced in a non-capitalist society, regardless of the effects on the division of labor of the expansion of trade that you mention. Which is to say, your comments exemplify my point that Marx is not simply elaborating Smith and Ricardo’s labor theory of value.”
You mean I do not agree with your interpretation of what Marx meant.
I am well aware of a recent strand of marxian economists who claim that value only exists in capitalist society. These positions are very controversial and have been extensively and critically debated in on-line forum’s like OPE-L. I am quite unconvinced both of the historical accuracy of these claims, and, a quite distinct question, the accuracy of the claim that Marx himself thought this. Rather than rehash these stale arguments I will just refer to postings by myself and Jurriaan Bendian on the OPE-L list over the last 15 years.
I agree that Marx does not simply elaborate the labour theory of value. He uses that theory to introduce a number of concepts that were new at the time of his writing : surplus value, surplus product, necessary labour time, surplus labour time, reproduction schemes, production of absolute and relative surplus value. All these were substantial innovations on his predecessors. That said, Marx was not a totally modest man, and at times, in my view, somewhat exaggerates the degree of his innovations.
Mike S. said
I’ve been lurking on this thread for a while, but I feel compelled to comment on one methodological oddity. Spencer argues (in comment #119) that
This seems rather dangerously one-sided, especially coming from a historian.
Certainly for medievalists and other historians of the fairly distant past, the written record may be pretty much all there is to go on. But for living, contemporary history, there are always important historical details that don’t map neatly onto written documents. We are all familiar with the small radical sects that publish their manifestos and by-laws, etc, as if they were large and dynamic organizations, when in fact on the ground they are miniscule. In such cases from a historian’s persepctive the written record is inadequate at best and deceptive at worst. More pertinent is the common reality that written documents, especially for left movements, tend to portray a formalized version of reality from which messy details, confusions, contradictions, disagreements and ambiguities are excised. Other “written” documents such as transcripts of interviews can help fill in these gaps, but not totally. First-hand accounts of daily life, political economy, and culture are therefore essential to the task of presenting a rounded historical analysis.
Spencer may be a historian of India, but this fact alone does not make his analysis automatically compelling.
Paradoxically, the appeal to authority is actually even weaker than usual when the authority in question maintains that his authority consists simply in pointing others to accessible written documents. An old teacher of mine once described this method as “trash-can epistemology,” meaning that you pick up the lid of the trash-can, and “facts” are just sitting there looking back at you, “perfectly susceptible to knowledge and understanding,” if you will.
My point is that, despite my (admittedly underdeveloped) political disagreements with Maoism and the Naxals, Mike Ely’s emphasis on the distance between India and the US, and his unwillingness to proclaim his views as undeniably correct, is an important reminder of the limits on our understanding.
Mike E said
Part of the issue, Mike S, is where to the controversies lie.
For example, if we could deduce (from historical sweep and an investigation of the whole world) that revolution in poor and third world countries was impossible…. then one can deduce all kinds of things without carrying through deep analysis of any particulars. We would know something about (say) potential for change in Yemen, without knowing anything about Yemen in particular.
And it is a hallmark of some schools of thought that they proclaim verdicts on all kinds of particular things based on analysis drawn from the problems in general.
One of the particular things I’ve been pointing out is that Trotskyism often assumes that “Maoism is just a subset of Stalinism.” And so (if there is nothing new in Maoism), you can take your verdicts from the Soviet struggles of 1905-1927 and just announce your verdicts on the fifty years (!) of complex revoluti0n in China (from 1927-1976). It is a pedantic method, that has produced waves of argumentative cadre who know little about what they are denouncing.
I don’t doubt that Spencer and Banaji know quite a bit about India… and I don’t doubt there are things to learn from their investigations. But I have a sense of how complex conditions are in india, and how complex the struggle is among Maoists (in the real world, not some public archive of documents), that I think we should be reluctant to deduce too many things from afar.
There are some things that all of us deduce from general understandings. Will capitalism solve the problems of India? I suspect not. Can power be seized in India without armed struggle? I suspect not. And so on. We can know something about the whole larger human experience, and therefore have some insights that apply to particular places. But there are real limits to that… and there is always the danger that we will be surprised.
I also am not saying that we have no “right” to make judgements — that only the people involved (or directly oppressed) have any right to speak. I have always found that argument (from identity politics and elsewhere) to be absurd — and profoundly anti-materialist in its core, as if something are simply unknowable (without direct, personal experience), as if oppression is mainly an emotional experience that is only perceived directly, as if liberation is so idiosyncratic and internal that those at a distance have no right (as well as no possible insights). All of that is absurd, and its influence on the left in the U.S. is both tiresome and extremely debilitating for those affected.
What we are talking about is the complex interplay of investigation and insight, and the degree to which the particularity of contradiction influences particular verdicts and strategies. Some things are knowable about (say) India or Nepal from afar. (Certainly I know enough to support revolution there, and to seek to inform people in the U.S. about it in an enthusiastic partisan way). And other things are not knowable in the same way — because the data is complex or not available, because the analysis requires a real immersion in the process.
For example, there was a world of communist experts who (at every point of the way) were insistant that Mao was full of shit. They opposed his policies in the base areas, on the long march, in Yenan, in the Chungking negotiations, in the second civil war, in the decision to seize power, in the structure of the new society, in the unleashing of massive agrarian revolution, and so on and so on.
There was endless numbers of experts (especially in the Marxist-Leninist institutes of the Soviet Union, but also in the Fourth International) who insisted this revolution and its leadership was violating all the known rules. That is why Mao said “After 1935, we didn’t take their orders any longer.”
And I think we should learn from that. And not posture like that “scholar who never leaves his gate, yet knows all the world.”
Communists should not pretend to be know-it-alls. We need a real (materialist, scientific) sense of the limits of our knowledge, as well as a partisan sense of what we DO know (which is significant).
We should not think that Marxism is some magic verdict machine, that we point like a ray gun in the direction of anything (new? historical? distant? erupting?) and spits out a quick verdict for us.
Communist theory is (by contrast) a method that requires both work and data — and often verdicts and innovation regarding complex and protracted processes requires work and data that are intimately related to the practice itself.
Spencer said
@ Mike S. – I never claimed that a party’s own documents or representations were an adequate basis for judging it. What I am saying is that one doesn’t have to rely upon the work of a handful of scholars and self-appointed experts respecting movements that express themselves in languages one does not know through documents one cannot access. I also mentioned the work of “fellow travelers and enemies” as a way of indicating that there are innumerable works available from the entire range of perspectives available in English. Of course, there are many documents, memoirs, and accounts that are not available in English too. I should also point out that the fact that primary documents are available does not mean that they are self interpreting. I never implied such a thing. Rather, as is implicit in this entire discussion, the question of “interpretation” is far deeper for a Marxist than anything acknowledged by most historians. See, for instance, my and Chris’s comments on regression and the history of the left on this and the Proyect thread.
Chris Cutrone said
@ Paul: There is indeed a dispute over what Marx meant by “value.” First of all, I don’t think Marx meant an economic category, but rather a social category, which is different. Second, I think that what you refer to as the “new” categories Marx introduced are in fact critical categories — categories of Marx’s *critique* of the value-form of labor in capital. Pre-capitalist communities produced “value” only in the sense that they were pre-capitalist. In other words, Marx thought that pre-capitalist value was a function of the historical emergence of capital itself: it only retroactively becomes the case that “value” was being produced. This is because all sorts of concrete human activities, many of which are “pre-capitalist,” come to participate in the reproduction of capital in modern society. Their meaning in the social-historical process of human emancipation changes. I.e., religion is no longer religion but comes to serve a different function and take on a different historical significance. So Max Weber could legitimately think that Protestant Christianity led to capitalism. In a sense, it did, but in another sense it only came to have done so as a function of how history played out. Without the bourgeois-democratic revolutions, without the discovery of the New World, the liquidation of the peasantry, and other forms of “primitive accumulation,” Calvinism would not have on its own produced capital, despite the compatibility of its cosmology with the labor regime of capitalism. It becomes a chicken-or-egg paradox. But what remains clear is that for Marx value is a historical category, both historically specific (to industrial capital), and a category of *history* itself, i.e., that pre-capitalist communities are not (yet) part of history. Marx remained a Hegelian in this respect: only in capital does value (and its empirical expressions, namely money and labor-power as a commodity measured in time) “attain to its concept.”
Spencer said
@ Mike E. – So what we do know allow you to engage in a discussion of the particulars of the criticisms of the Naxalites that have been articulated in some detail, whether by Jairus in his answers or in my many replies? After all, a great deal has been said about the bankruptcy of Naxalite theory and the opportunism of Naxalite practice none of which has met with any serious reply. Arguments have been and sources cited. There have been some 145 posts so far and scarcely any contain any substantive reply to the charges made against the Naxals. In posting this interview, you wrote “a growing revolutionary movement will have such detractors [as Jairus]. There is value in knowing (and vetting) their arguments.” While some attempts were made at the beginning of the thread, these only scratched surface before the thread got bogged in all sorts of OT discussion.
Nate said
Spencer,
I agree with you entirely that “one doesn’t have to rely upon the work of a handful of scholars and self-appointed experts”, this applies as well to your claims about v1 of Capital, which are easily verifiable by textual evidence that could be found quickly by someone as well versed in Marx and as sure of your positions as you are.
You say that in Capital v1 Marx “rarely bothers with criticizing apologists for capitalism and Marx maintains a strict distinction throughout the text between time-servers, apologists, and vulgarizers, on the one hand, and bourgeois ideologists and political economists, on the other.”
Since this is so clear, you shouldn’t have any trouble citing or quoting a passage or two where Marx makes the distinction you say he makes.
You also say that “Those against whom the critique is directed are (…) the height of bourgeois revolutoinary thought” and in another post you say that Marx “rejects [the] distinction between bourgeois economists and socialists.”
Again, where do you see this in volume 1? You provided a quote from the Poverty of Philosophy. That’s a fine book but it’s a different book. If the CPI(M) is obligated to perform the large and difficulty task of proving their revolutionary credibility, surely you are able to perform the much simpler task of showing some passages in volume 1 of Capital (or perhaps some correspondence from Marx about v1) that support your interpretation of that work. It seems to me that doing so is a basic matter of intellectual integrity, given that you are asserting that some people and ideas are not in fact marxist at all — you’ve so far said this about Indian Maoists, Althusserian categories, and via the implication in your scare quotes other “Marxists” as well.
paul cockshott said
well Chris since economic categories are a subset of social categories I am not sure your distinction makes sense.
Where did marx make this argument about the existence of exchange value in pre capitalist economies being a function of the emergence of capital itself?
I really don’t recall him writing anything of the sort. His critical remarks on Mommsen seing capitalism in rome hardly back your idea up.
Chris Cutrone said
@ Paul: Not to get to abstruse, but my point is that in pre-capitalist humanity there is not “society” as we understand this, and so no “social” categories, either. Was there an “economy,” then? I don’t think so. Pre-capitalist community was religion, not “society.” Was there a social “metabolism?” Perhaps, but only in the way there is in any ecological system, not as a properly “social” form. My argument would be that Marx, as a good Hegelian, was well aware of this danger of transhistorical hypostatization of categories. This suffuses Marx’s use of categories, in all his writings. Capital is an event in natural history. As Durkheim put it, in good Hegelian manner, “nature takes place in society,” not society in nature, i.e., social transformation is also always a transformation of “nature.” The history of capital is the history of the emergence of society and of the social per se, and its transcendence will mean leaving this sense of society and the social behind as well. Most “Marxists” imagine capitalism in a non-Hegelian sense, of a transformation of and in society, rather than as a form of society — society per se as we moderns/bourgeois/capitalists use the term — emerging and then passing. Marx did not feel the need to re-write Hegel.
Spencer said
@ Paul – The plainest example of where Marx identifies value as a category of capitalist society is in his (non-)debate with Aristotle when the category of abstract labor is introduced in Capital. There Marx makes it clear that in the absence of proletarian labor there is no abstract labor and hence no value production.
Paul Cockshott said
Spencer :”The plainest example of where Marx identifies value as a category of capitalist society is in his (non-)debate with Aristotle when the category of abstract labor is introduced in Capital. There Marx makes it clear that in the absence of proletarian labor there is no abstract labor and hence no value production.”
Paul: No he does not say that. He says that where free wage labour did not exist it was not possible to see that the source of value was labour in general. Aristotle clearly understands the difference between use value and exchange value, and understands the concept of the pursuit of money for its own sake chrematistic, but he does not realise the source of the value that he analyses. Slavery prevented human equality being seen as everyday common sense without which, Marx averred, you can not conceptualise a labour theory of value. That is an interesting hypothesis. An alternative hypothesis is that without the invention of clocks and the ability to readily measure duration of time it was hard to think of labour time as being the source of value.
What you Spencer, are doing is confusing the origin of knowledge about something with the origin of the thing itself. Blood circulated before Harvey.
Spencer said
@ Paul – Actually, Marx doesn’t think Aristotle was wrong. Aristotle was not pre-scientific in this regard. To view it on the analogy of Harvey and the circulation of the blood would be, as Marx would say, “one-sided” just as Adam Smith was “one-sided” when he imagined primitive humans exchanging beaver for deer according to the logic of labor time.
The place where the argument of the historical specificity of the categories is really discussed explicitly is in the Grundrisse. For instance, here:
What Marx is saying here is that while the categories of political economy “do not apply” to non-capitalist society (and it is a function of fetishism to assume in the manner of Smith and Ricardo that they do), it is nevertheless not the case that there some other categories. This is not a positivist claim. Rather capitalism generates the categories of world history, just as it creates world historical as a fact (see Communist Manifesto, inter alia) – “the categories of bourgeois economics possess a truth for all other forms of society” – but precapitalist societies nevertheless do not have the same subjectivity/objectivity at all.
Precapitalist society is in a very literal sense, then, only quasi-human, since capitalism has created our sense (both as fact and potential) of what it is to be human (which, at the same time, carries with it a universality whereby, as Terentius said (before capitalism!), Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto).
Mike E said
A friendly translation for readers:
“Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto” translates into English as:
“I’m human. Nothing human is alien to me.”
This was cited by Marx once as his personal motto for life.
Chris Cutrone said
@ Mike: But Aristotle, unlike Marx, leaves aside the transformation of the “human.” (Aristotle was the one who characterized slaves as “tools that can speak,” so what counted as human for Aristotle was hardly universally homo sapiens, all of which were not for him zoon politikon.) The point is that humanity (what counts as essentially human) has changed historically, profoundly. From a hunter-gatherer existence (“primitive communism”) to peasant-based settled agricultural community (“civilization”) to worker-based urban (“bourgeois”) society in capital, to something possibly beyond this.
Spencer said
And, of course, Terentius didn’t mean what Marx meant when he said “I’m human. Nothing human is alien to me.” The problem isn’t one of translation (after all, Marx could speak and write Latin), the problem is that the category “human” didn’t mean the same thing, as, doubtless, it meant to Terentius (or Terence as he is often called), even though he was a freed slave.
Paul Cockshott said
Marx : “Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after the higher development is already known.”
Well Karl, you certainly have a way with words. You can make what we now know to be the most arrant teleological nonsense sound snappy, memorable and superficially credible. Of course in mitigation, you had yet to read the Origin of the Species, and be convinced by its anti-teleological arguments when you wrote that passage.
“The bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the ancient, etc. But not at all in the manner of those economists who smudge over all historical differences and see bourgeois relations in all forms of society. One can understand tribute, tithe, etc., if one is acquainted with ground rent. But one must not identify them.” ”
This is a reasonable point, and is a common feature between political economy and other sciences. More advanced forms of knowledge help us understand the truth in the less advanced. Understanding the genetic code gives us a deeper understanding of the causal mechanisms that operate in the processes that Darwin described for example.
“Further, since bourgeois society is itself only a contradictory form of development, relations derived from earlier forms will often be found within it only in an entirely stunted form, or even travestied. For example, communal property. Although it is true, therefore, that the categories of bourgeois economics possess a truth for all other forms of society, this is to be taken only with a grain of salt. They can contain them in a developed, or stunted, or caricatured form etc., but always with an essential difference. The so-called historical presentation of development is founded, as a rule, on the fact that the latest form regards the previous ones as steps leading up to itself, and, since it is only rarely and only under quite specific conditions able to criticize itself – leaving aside, of course, the historical periods which appear to themselves as times of decadence – it always conceives them one-sidedly.”
Marx here is talking about the understanding of society generated by bourgeois economics. The reflection upon a general commodity producing society gave these thinkers a depth of understanding that could be applied to earlier societies, which the earlier societies could not themselves develop. So Adam Smith could develop a theory of historical materialism and a theory of a succession of economic forms of society (nations of hunters, nations of shepherds, nations of farmers) that could not have been produced by a thinker among the Iroquois. And Marx comming later, in the period of already developed industrial capitalist economy could see things that were not evident to Smith.
But it is a long distance from recognising the historical limitations of science as Marx does above, to making actual statements about what economic relations did and did not exist in past societies. When you say that value doe not exist in pre-capitalist economy, you are making a statement about what actually existed as opposed to what the people of that society actually understood about their own society.
Spencer:
What Marx is saying here is that while the categories of political economy “do not apply” to non-capitalist society (and it is a function of fetishism to assume in the manner of Smith and Ricardo that they do), it is nevertheless not the case that there some other categories.
Paul: It seems to me he is saying almost the opposite. Money Rent, a form proper to capitalist economy allows us to understand pre capitalist forms of appropriation like tithes that served a similar function. One must not identify money rent with tithes, but one can see them both as historically specific forms of transfer of surplus labour to those who control land.
Spencer:
This is not a positivist claim. Rather capitalism generates the categories of world history, just as it creates world historical as a fact (see Communist Manifesto, inter alia) – “the categories of bourgeois economics possess a truth for all other forms of society” – but precapitalist societies nevertheless do not have the same subjectivity/objectivity at all.
Paul:
it seems to me you are again confusing understanding with what is understood. The categories to understand past economy have been developed more recently, and indeed thinking about socialist economy in the USSR provided conceptual tools that helped the understanding of capitalist economy: i/o tables, systems of national accounts etc. But this does not mean that for example input output relations did not exist in Germany in 1910, it was just that they were not conceptualised, measured or recorded.
Spencer said
@ Paul – First of all, I would suggest that Marx is suggesting a post-Lamarckian evolutionism, precisely because, as is implicit throughout the passage, “lower” forms are not simply stunted forms of what later emerge. Marx bends the biology metaphor to his purposes, rather than simply submitting to a Lamarckian logic. Elsewhere in Grundrisse Marx cautions against thinking that the categories he is using are to be understood as unfolding a world history – first simple barter exchange, then rudimentary equivalents, then money, then capital – no, they are rather to be understood (and unfolded according to a dialectical, rather than an analytical or a purported “historical” logic in Capital) strictly as categories of capitalist, which is to say dialectical, society. Though we have coins from most of the ancient civilizations, those coins are not “money” in the sense that money exists as an (fetishized) expression of social relations in capitalism. At any rate, the whole passage is manifestly anti-teleological (and there are many more to the same purport in the Grundrisse and in Capital, though there the insights are embedded in Marx’s mode of presentation, rather than being stated propositionally, as they are in his notes). So, you see Marx doesn’t wait and doesn’t need to wait for Darwin’s criticism of Lamarckian, teleological evolution. He is engaged in his own “scientific” enterprise.
You rightly observe, “When you say that value doe not exist in pre-capitalist economy, you are making a statement about what actually existed as opposed to what the people of that society actually understood about their own society.” Here I’m following Marx. As he wrote, “The bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the ancient, etc. But not at all in the manner of those economists who smudge over all historical differences and see bourgeois relations in all forms of society.” When Marx says that bourgeois relations do not exist in all forms of society and it is a mistake to “see” them there, he is not talking about “what the people of that society actually understood about their own society,” he is talking about “what actually existed.” I invite you to reread the passage.
Chris Cutrone said
@ Paul and Spencer: Also, what Marx and Engels specifically liked about Darwin was his *non-teleological* approach to evolution, a fact that challenges both conventional (mis)understandings of Marx and of Darwinian evolution. So Marx and Engels had already broken in their thinking from a conventional (e.g., Lamarkian) notion of evolutionary development. They were primed to receive well and favorably Darwin’s theory for reasons of their Hegelianism (i.e., a different notion of evolutionary development). The point is that apes *don’t* necessarily (but only possibly) lead to humans. So the “key to the anatomy” of a prior form is precisely the Hegelian notion of *retrospective* knowledge (“the owl of Minerva takes flight at duck,” etc.), what Spencer highlights about Marx on the “one-sided” character of modern/bourgeois perspectives on pre-capitalist history. It should also be pointed out that Marx is invoking natural evolution as an analogy/metaphor. Social change in historical development is different.
Chris Cutrone said
P.S. … “At *dusk*”!
Paul Cockshott said
It may seem Spencer, that this discussion has gone quite a distance from a discussion of the strategy of the Naxalites in India.
I do not claim any great expertise on the Naxalites so I am not in a position to take a definite view as to whether their
strategy is correct or not. But I do feel that perhaps the differences that have emerged on what seem rather indirect
philosophical/scientific issues may in the end reflect back on the original topic of the discussions.
I will therefore, after discussing some of the topics that have caused our latest disagreements, move back to the original
topic of this thread and try to tie it in to what may appear as digressions in the meantime.
Is the anatomy of humans the key to the anatomy of the ape?
Certainly not, according to biological science. On the contrary one can only understand much of human anatomy on the
basis of understanding features that we know to have developed in our primate ancestors. We inherit binocular vision
grasping forelimbs, finger and toe prints because these arose as adaptations for life in the trees. These are
primitive primate traits – they are shared both by monkeys and apes.
We have no tail because once apes grew too heavy there was a shift from walking along branches on four legs
using the tail both for balance and a fifth hanging limb, to a mode of locomotion involving swinging from
the arms beneath branches.
You say Marx’s view is not teleological but it clearly is. It reverses the temporal order of causality
and makes humanity the ‘higher’ endpoint, the purpose towards which develoment was tending.
The very notion of inferior an superior species is itself teleological. If there was any scientific
substance to Marx’s claims here, you would presumably be able to cite features of gorilla or chimpanzee
anatomy that can only be understood in the context of featues of human anatomy.
Can you point out any such anatomical traits?
You say that Marx’s biological views in that quote are post Lamarkian and thus non teleological.
I think that Marx’s views here are not even Lamarkian, they are instead a remnant of Marx’s Hegelian
intellectual upbringing. Lamarkian evolution, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, is not
particularly teleological, it is just based on an incorrect, albeit plausible hypothesis about
the mechanism of inheritance.
In Marx’s defence it must be said that he wrote these things in unpublished working notes, probably before
the publication of the Origin of the Soecies in 1859, and certainly before Darwin had published
The Descent of Man, and The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, the two works which most
clearly refute the views Marx put forward in that quote.
That great scientists take time to fully break with views with which they were brought up should
come as no surprise. Marx only gradually let go his Hegelian formation. Even with Darwin there
a few ‘Lamarkian’ passages in the ‘Expression of Emotions’. To a modern reader these leap out at
us, but they must have passed unnoticed by the author.
But what is less excusable is that, a century and a half later, there are scholars who are trying
to drag us back to these Hegelian modes of thought. We have available to us a century and a half
of scientific development, not just in historical materialism, but more generally in the biological,
mathematical and physical sciences. These have given us multiple new insights into how to understand
temporal development of systems, and yet there is a school of Marxists who grub around for insights
in old German idealist philosophyy.
The fact that you are sympathetic to a formulation in Marx that palpably does not stand up to a moments
modern scientific scrutiny indicates to me that you probably share some sympathy with this Hegelianism.
Now let us move on to the topic of whether value exists in some pre-capitalist societies.
“The bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the ancient, etc. But not at all in the manner of those economists who smudge over all historical differences and see bourgeois relations in all forms of society.”
Note the use of all in the last phrase.
It is right to say that commodity production and exchange value and money values do not exist in all forms of society.
But it is wrong to say that they do not exist in any pre-capitalist society.
They did not exist in hunter-gatherer societies. They did not exist in the empire of the
Incas. They did exist in classical antiquity, in classical Arab civilisation, China 2000 years ago
none of which were capitalist economies.
You are incidentally wrong to say that we have coins from most of the ancient civilisations. They
dont appear until the late 8th century BC.
The issue under dispute is not whether particular economic forms only exist in a subset of
societies. We can all agree that. It is whether value theory only applies to capitalist societies
or whether it applies to all commodity producing societies — a much larger group.
This is where the apparently abstruse argument leads back to modern India. Does the fact that parts of
the Indian economy were already linked to capitalist markets via commodity production in the 19th
century mean that it was already capitalist?
If value relations are limited to capitalism, then if India had value relations existing, then
that would imply that the economy must be classed as capitalist. If on the other hand, commodity
production and value relations are compatible with a number of different modes of production,
we can not draw that conclusion.
In a fully capitalist country the key goal of socialists has to be the abolition of the wages
system – since it is on this system that the exploitation of the direct producers is primarilly based.
The cancellations of debts, whilst still a key objective to free the working classes from
credit card and mortgage debt, is a subsidiary objective.
Can we say that the abolition of wage labour is a sufficient goal for a communist movement in a
country like India today. Clearly not. For this would fail to address the exploitation
by landlordism, bonded labour, the institutions of the caste system etc.
It is only if you see society as containing a combination of modes of production that you
are likely to approach things that way. Those who view India as having semi-feudal elements
are taking the latter approach. I dont necessarily endorse all of the Naxalites policies,
since at the very least I only have a superficial understanding of them, but the idea that
there remains a substantial potential for anti-feudal components of a revolutionary strategy
seems plausiblle.
Bishnu said
I agree with the article on the PW in India. The Naxals are powerful in the most backward area of India, in areas where there is not capitalism and there are not hospitals, schools, jobs, etc. Where the people are not integrated into the Indian society. I think the most the Naxals can do is to lead those areas to be integrated into capitalism and benefit from it. It is the same in Nepal, the people want roads, hospitals, schools, jobs etc etc. The Maoist have fought so that people can get those things. It is true that the peasants and adivasi are very badly treated and their lives are seen as cheap. but i dont think it is realistic to believe that the naxals have any chance to make a revolution against the indian state from these backward areas. the naxals have no chance of taking Kolkotta or Delhi or anything like that, and they do not have much support there also. I am an Indian communist, and i support the struggle of the naxals and the adivasi, but the naxals and Indian maoists cannot really lead a revolution in india. they have been fighting on and off for some 40 years and they have not got very far. also, people should be aware that the maoist leaders in India and Nepal are not themselves adivasi or peasants or even poor. they are often too willing, in my experience, to sacrifice the lives of the poor for some pie in the sky that is not going to happen. the nepalese have learnt about that now. i must say though, that it is right for the poor to rebel, and i dont question that. but the indian maoists are not going to lead any revolution in India, realistically. this interview brought out many of the problems of the indian left, particularly the maoist left. there is a big problem in indian left that there is very little creative thinking. the leaders know how to quote from Lenin and Mao, but many of the things do not work in india now. there needs to be something new, and I am glad that some people are willing to discuss this.
Spencer said
@ Paul – You just ignore what I wrote before and repeat yourself. So, it’s not much use my going on and on. The passage is dead set against your entire approach to Marx, so you just ignore it and repeat what you’re comfortable with. The one thing your post reveals is that you have no idea whatsoever about what the significance of the dialectic in Marx is. Fyi, I am more than “sympathetic” to Marx’s “Hegelianism.” I know that if you don’t understand Marx’s appropriation of Hegel you cannot understand his thought.
another brother said
The answer to scholastic Marxism (of whatever sort) has been much the reply famously made to Bishop Berkeley, “I refute it thus” when a chair was kicked over to demonstrate its existence. Those who think history is a line where we “must” adopt “capitalism” to enter some thing called “socialism”, and when faced by the current reality of communist revolution erupting in South Asia amid anti-feudal popular revolt seek to dismiss it for one reason or another… I just wonder who is doing this dismissal and toward what end. Indeed, nothing which is human is alien to me.
Adopting urbane chauvinism (and eurocentric, developmental racism) isn’t interesting. And at best it merely serves to isolate would-be judges and ideologues allergic to the masses of people from the communist movement that is finding its legs.
Let the glorious English working class find our communist revolt (while they embrace heroin and the National Front). Let the French have their overdue revolution (while the “Marxists” ignore that it is the immigrant workers who are rebelling against the empire within). Let the Trotskyists (of whatever stripe) reassert their old categories for new conditions, while lamenting our lack of fidelity to their chits and puffy-chested posture.
Revolutionary communism, there called Naxalism or Bolshevism, Maoism or “violence” — that is the organized movement of the oppressed for political and social agency, for the dictatorship of the proletariat in the MARXIST sense. But since the “orthodox” trembled before the salvos of October, let our latter-day Kautskys return to their footnotes, their disdain and misantropy. Who cares? When the red flag flies from bayonets, the sun is dragged from its night slumbers and the Old Mole replies.
Hic Rhodus, motherf*cker. Hic salta!
Spencer said
@ another brother – It’s interesting to see Marxists so contemptuous of international proletarian revolution. It’s an interesting bunch on this site, that’s for sure. So, what makes you so sure that what we are witnessing, despite all that’s been said, that what we see in India is “the current reality of communist revolution”? And what makes these revolts “anti-feudal” exactly, again, despite all that’s been said? Or are you excused from thinking by your demonstrable revolutionary elan?
Chris Cutrone said
@ Bishnu: Thanks for underscoring the point of the interview with Banaji.
@ Another Brother: If you think that Bishnu’s perspective is “Kautskyan,” then that’s the problem.
It’s not the case that Trotsky’s critique of Stalin was the same as Kautsky’s critique of Lenin. It’s the difference between these that was at issue throughout the 20th century. People followed Stalin and not Lenin. That’s the basic disagreement that everyone seems to be dancing around.
Dave Palmer said
Before the Second Congress of the Comintern, the Italian delegate Serrati argued (in opposition to Lenin’s theses on the national and colonial questions) that revolution in Asia was impossible without a prior revolution in Europe. Another member of the Italian delegation, Graziadei, proposed amending Lenin’s theses to say that the Comintern should take an active interest in liberation movements in oppressed nations, but not actually support them!
While claiming that everyone in the world (besides himself and possibly a handful of other “bourgeois intellectuals,” to use his description) has tragically failed follow Lenin, Chris Cutrone seems to be following Serrati and Graziadei — not Lenin — on this issue.
And, so as not to be accused of “dancing around” any “basic disagreements,” let me say that Stalin’s thinking on this issue was much closer to Lenin’s than Trotsky’s was.
Chris Cutrone said
@ Dave Palmer: How’s that, when Trotsky criticized the Stalin-dominated Comintern for failing to adequately support the Chinese Revolution in the late 1920s and Mao was only able to succeed by ignoring or otherwise resisting Stalin’s advice?
There are two issues that cannot be conflated: 1.) Primacy of Western/European proletarian socialist revolution; 2.) changing historical circumstances from the crisis of WWI 1914-19 through the later 20th century, to the present.
Russia in 1917 was not like China in 1949, nor is India today like either. The world situation has changed. The gamble that revolution in Russia would spark revolution in Europe — and Asia — turned out not to have been the case. But was China in 1949 meant to spark revolution in Japan, etc.? Are the Naxalites hoping to spark revolution even in the cities of India, let alone neighboring countries or elsewhere? Where is the perspective on world revolution?
After a century (the 20th) of “Third World”/”anti-colonial” revolution, where are we now? There’s such a world of difference between the Naxalites today and the Bolsheviks in 1917 — or Mao’s Communist Party in 1949 — that it is impossible not to question the revolutionary socialist bona fides of the Naxalites, which is what this interview with Banaji is all about. The question is how to advance socialism.
Even if one were to grant that Stalin and Mao promoted socialism as a world movement beyond Lenin, what about, e.g., the Naxalites today? Really.
To get back to a point I made much earlier, this problem began when Stalin estimated in 1924 the impossibility and perhaps undesirability of a German revolution and proceeded to try to build “socialism in one country.” Entailed in this was an adaptation to defeat that has not ceased but has only grown worse to this day. Why is it “Eurocentric” to say so?
Alastair Reith said
@ the Platypi: Maybe a large of the reason not many people are responding to your attacks on the Naxalite movement is the way you argue. You speak above our heads. You hurl century old quotes like grenades, and expect those of us less well armed with memorised dogma to retreat back to our intellectually inferior foxholes.
You don’t attempt to have a friendly, comradely and reasonable discussion about the issue at hand. You don’t try to make your points in such a way that ordinary people, nowhere near as intelligent as a noble academic such as yourself, could understand and respond to.
Your debating tactics rely on intellectual intimidation. You resort to the religious tomes in every second post, and when challenged you drag the conversation suddenly into treacherous ground (a discussion of Trotsky vs Stalin polemics, a discussion of the Paris Commune, a discussion of the labour theory of value and so on)… the idea being that in this academic swampland your opponents will sink and drown, whereas you, with your more advanced knowledge of the terrain, will find the path out and survive.
It’s a painful and unpleasant method of argument even to read. And it’s doubly painful to actually argue against.
I am not an academic. I don’t have a degree. I am obviously not as smart or well read as an academic genius like yourself. 99% of people are below your illustrious level. So why not adjust your argument, and more importantly your argumentative style, to reflect that?
Maybe then people will respond, rather than deciding they have better things to do than waste time arguing with someone like yourself.
Paul Cockshott said
Spencer said:”@ Paul – You just ignore what I wrote before and repeat yourself. So, it’s not much use my going on and on. The passage is dead set against your entire approach to Marx, so you just ignore it and repeat what you’re comfortable with.”
Paul C:
Well in arguments people often think that the other person is ‘just not listening’, I may feel the same about your responses. I ask you if you have any biological data to back up Marx’s anti-Darwinian position in the passage you quoted and you just ignore that, presumably because you are at a loss to find such evidence.
When I read Marx, I read his theoretical work as I would those of any other scientist. I attempt to assess both the internal coherence of the body of work and its conformity with empirical evidence and with the rest of the body of the sciences. Thus I reject those hypotheses that are now known to be false and accept those hypotheses that are now supported by evidence.
The hypothesis about human anatomy there, is one that falls because of the overwhelming evidence for Darwin’s theory.
To take another example, the theory of prices of production set out in the posthumous Volume 3 of Capital, has, in the last 20 years been seriously thrown into question by empirical data showing that high organic composition of capital industries have systematically lower rates of profit in all the OECD countries. On the other hand the simple labour theory of value set out in volume 1 of Capital turns out to be very well supported by the data.
So as proponents of science we must always assess past authors for their scientific correctness. We may understand the thought processes that led them to express things in a particular way, but that does not mean that we have to accept them.
“The one thing your post reveals is that you have no idea whatsoever about what the significance of the dialectic in Marx is. Fyi, I am more than “sympathetic” to Marx’s “Hegelianism.” I know that if you don’t understand Marx’s appropriation of Hegel you cannot understand his thought.”
I can understand Marx’s use of Hegelian ideas but that does not mean that I think these ideas remain useful. One should, I think, take Althussers steer on this and see them as an essentially coincidental part of Marx’s student training which he progressively abandoned as he matured. If, like Darwin, he had been educated at a great enlightenment center like Edinburgh rather than in the less developed Berlin his philosophical formation would have been different. But irrespective of the initial formation of a scientist, what is of lasting value in their work is the body of tested and verified theories that they complete.
The only useful application of dialectical ideas that I have seen in the last century or so is in Mao’s little pamphlet on contradictions, and even this could have been phrased in different language.
On the question of whether value existed in pre-capitalist economies I am now going to cite a posting yesterday on another list that puts the argument more cogently than I have:
—————
“According to the far Left, economic value came into existence when peasants
were kicked off the land and capitalists conquered private ownership of the
means of production. Value dropped out the air one fine day around 1750. And
some say it disappeared when Stalin crushed capitalism in the Soviet Union,
or alternatively, his socialism was really capitalism. Obviously there is a
very serious credibility problem when socialists cannot even agree if a
society is socialist, capitalist or something else.
But this kind of interpretation demonstrably has nothing to do with Marx,
nor is it an even remotely credible reading of economic history, economic
anthropology and social archaeology. The real dispute concerns a quite
different matter, namely what are the social forms of economic value in
different types of societies, and what are the human consequences of it or
the consequences for social relations, for the economic structure. OF COURSE
people ALWAYS attached value to their economic products, but the social
effects were very different depending on whether trade was very restricted
and limited in scope, or whether commerce dominated the very organization of
production and economic life.
I have discussed this a bit in recent times, explicitly or implicittly, often in the context of value-form theory (in debate with Michael Heinrich (May 2009), in response to which I posted a simplified wiki about the ABC of the value-form, another thread on the value-form (March 2009), Value-form theory 101 (December 2008), etc.. The controversy was also debated again in the thread “Odyssey and the Peruvian treasure” (february 2009). I replied to senator Reuten on the value-form in March 2009. I have also posted a brief overview wiki on abstract labour and concrete labour, and a wiki on the law
of value.
According to Chris Arthur, who has made substantive contributions to Marxian scholarship, a society of simple commodity producers never existed. But he conflates Marx’s analytical approach with economic history and with certain neo-Ricardian interpretations of Marx’s text. A society of “simple commodity producers” really did exist in the earliest phase of e.g. European settlement in North America; that is quite easy to prove; similar communities of simple commodity producers existed in parts of Australasia, South Africa and Latin America when annexed by Europeans (there are probably plenty more cases if we consider the economic history of the last thousand
years or so).
That is exactly on reason why Marx attended to the theoretical significance of the “problem of the colonies”, where it was often so difficult to retain wage labour and domestic servants, because of the great possibilities for escaping from wage-slavery and working for oneself – a important motive for many emigrants, who, when they arrived at their destination, had to produce many goods themselves or obtain them through simple exchange, because those goods were not readily available and no uniform currency regime existed.
Simple commodity production however did not last very long since, as soon as a regular, more comprehensive and secure trading circuit had been created, C-M-C’ rapidly gave way to M-C-M’, that is to say, the trading circuit became a means for capital accumulation, and capitalist production displaced simple commodity production. The whole theoretical debate is rather schematic though since, as Marcel van der Linden among others has shown, throughout the whole history of capitalism a variety of different kinds of labour relations coexisted with each other – and they still do.
A few writers such as Bruce Jesson (New Zealand), Maurice Godelier (France). Kozo Uno (Japan) and Frank Furedi or Jairus Banaji (Britain) pointed out long ago that Marx’s analytical attempt to “peel out” (Marx’s own expression) the defining forms of capitalist production and exchange from the historical evidence, through an analysis of history and theory, in order to define the essence and structure of the capitalist mode of production and exchange in a non-arbitrary way, should not be straightforwardly equated with the immediacies of observable reality, because that leads to theoretical deformation and political nonsense. I would add, that the greatest weakness of official Marxism is that whereas they talk about historical materialism, they rarely do anything so mundane as studying economic history, economic anthropology and social archaeology.
They have this definition, and reality or history has to conform to it, and if that isn’t idealist, I do not know what is.
One Marxist wrote to me, how can there be abstract labour when people did not even have reliable clocks? But this is a misunderstanding in my opinion.
It assumes that abstract labour is a fixed category, rather than an evolutionary one (and all economic categories are evolutionary, except certain super-abstractions which, by being super-historical, have little content and do not tell us very much about real societies; these super-historical abstractions merely tell us “where to look” in a methodological sense, their importance is primarily methodological). Without using any clocks, people were already thousands of years ago able to estimate fairly reliably how many days and how many workers or slaves were necessary to achieve a certain output by a certain date. They didn’t make those calculations simply for the intellectual pleasure of it, but because people’s very lives crucially depended on it.
If agricultural output was not sufficient, people could die. And that was particularly important given that the 70-90% of the working population (Bruce Trigger) who were engaged in farming in traditional agrarian societies produced a surplus to their own consumption of “at most” about 20-30% (Paul Bairoch).. It might take only one bad harvest, or a natural disaster of some sort, to cause many people to starve. So the “abstract thinking” about human labour in general had a very clear survival motive and was not simply an academic preoccupation in refereed journals. It is indeed one of the original sources of mathematical thinking (see Dirk Struik’s history and more recent archeological and anthropological studies of the origins of the practice of quantification).
Although many people tend to think that in the past people were more stupid and primitive than we are, in reality their total packet of life-skills was often far greater and more diverse than our own. Our superior facility for abstract thought in modern times can also lead to ideological malabstractions which are disastrous for humanity. So-called primitive people, who lived closer to the ground, would never think that way, because they were much more concerned with physical human survival.
Lacking an adequate understanding of the nature and dimensions of economic value, it is of course difficult to theorize a society in which the producers would no longer be dominated by the exchange-value of their economic products – the vision of Marx – other than in a sort of rhetorical way, a rhetoric about abolishing the market. In that case, the end goal of the Marxist movement is also unclear, the corrolary being that the steps leading to that goal cannot be understood very well either. And then you get an incoherent politics out of that.”
Chris Cutrone said
@ Alastair Reith: Your sarcasm aside, knowing Spencer very well at a personal level, I don’t think that he and I are attempting intellectually intimidate or assuming our greater intelligence. Certainly not greater experience. (I think Spencer and I are in fact both assuming — perhaps erroneously — that many of our interlocutors here are more senior in historical experience than we are.) We are raising issues that we presume our interlocutors have some opinion about, and we are sincerely interested in them. We’re not trying to sandbag anyone.
In fact, I have found myself quite productively revisiting and reconsidering various long-formulated opinions of my own in this dialogue, precisely because I am taking the alternative world- (and historical) views here seriously. I am not trying to win an argument but advance a debate as far as it can possibly go, and I am very much aware that it could be my fault if it doesn’t go very far.
Just because I argue with confidence doesn’t mean I assume infallibility or that there are no issues of substance about which I may not be right. I have dedicated the time to posting here because I think it’s productive and self-educational for me to thus expose myself to debate and criticism. I regret that fails to come through.
Chris Cutrone said
@ Paul: I agree that the issue of “commodity production” is not what many “Marxists” think it is (which tends to be quasi-Smithian/Ricardian, depending on the emphasis given in one’s analysis). I agree that abstract time is not the same as clock time. I agree that simple commodity production existed pre-capital. I also agree that it is not the case that moderns are more intelligent than ancients/traditionalists. It is not a quantitative distinction, but a qualitative one. This is what Spencer and I are emphasizing, the qualitative development that marks the emergence and constitution (and process of reproduction today) of capital.
But the spirit of all these aspects of the problem is different in Marx, I think, than what you are addressing. The issue is not commodities but “the commodity” — a metaphysical category, to be sure. This is where Hegel comes in.
Other aspects of the qualitative development of capital besides the economic are on-point in this respect. I would argue that anthropology has shown definitively that “human survival,” i.e., the survival and longevity of individual human beings, or the valuing of human life per se, was not a value of traditional (i.e., peasant-based) civilization. Rather, “ways of life” were valued. Forms of civilization and culture could and did survive famines, epidemics, exterminating wars, etc. (What is interesting is how none of these survived unaltered the emergence of capital.)
The value of human life as such, the valuing of the individual human being, is a fundamental aspect of “the commodity” form of value in capital. Capital is not an economic form but a form of society, a form of society mediated by labor, which preceding civilization was not (it was mediated by religion). For just as it is human labor-power which is the distinguishing commodity (object of use- and exchange-value) in capital, so is the concrete locus of that commodity, the individual human being. Capital is about the emancipation of the individual, as “bourgeois” subject, or as wage-earner. “Quantity changes into quality.” While exchange did occur in ancient civilization, the exchange of human labor-power measured in time did not, not least because there were no such subjects/agents of that kind of exchange.
Chris Cutrone said
@ Paul: P.S. Not to engage in the kind of dueling Marx quotations that has (rightly) annoyed people here, but I wonder what you make of the following passage, from Capital vol. 1 Ch. 1 section 4, the famous “Fetishism” chapter.
This is what Marx wrote in response to Engels’s request to make his argument more explicit/direct, to sum up the points of the first three sections.
I would argue that the reason people have continued to crack their heads against just this part of Marx’s Capital is that it has been poorly understood, and poorly related to the other parts/aspects of Marx’s argument in Capital. This part of Marx’s writing has been, ironically, “fetishized,” and abused in mystifying way. But I don’t think that therefore it should be avoided. I don’t think that it’s like, e.g., expressions of Lamarkism in Darwin, some kind of vestigial Hegelianism or rhetorical flourish or ornament of Marx’s book. It was meant to be a condensation and direct/explicit statement of Marx’s point of focusing on the commodity form, and it needs to be addressed as such, so that Marx’s greater argument can hold together.
Note that I have substituted the original “phantasmagorical” for the poorly and inappropriately translated “fantastic” (“phantasmagoria” is an English word, after all). A phantasmagoria is a shadow-play, in which object and shadow are indistinct. In other words, cause and effect are potentially reversed. The point is that people exchange their labor in capital in ways in which they misrecognize what they are actually doing. Hence the comparison to religion/theology.
It is also significant that Marx began his book with the following statement:
“The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities.””
In other words, in today’s parlance, an immense accumulation of per capita productivity/gross domestic product/purchasing power parity, etc. This is the essential “fetishism,” according to Marx, under which we live.
To get back to the point about the Naxalites, perhaps all they aspire to do is achieve the ability for the tribals to assert their rights as commodity-owners — of their own labor-power. That in itself is not a bad thing, hut in global context it is fraught with problems regarding trying to overcome capital, that is, the society of the commodity form. Also, it is important to recognize thus the essentially “bourgeois” character of the Naxalites’ politics. Again, not a bad thing, but needing to be recognized as such.
“A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour. It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was. [26a]
“The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use value. Just as little does it proceed from the nature of the determining factors of value. For, in the first place, however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, may be, it is a physiological fact, that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles, &c. Secondly, with regard to that which forms the ground-work for the quantitative determination of value, namely, the duration of that expenditure, or the quantity of labour, it is quite clear that there is a palpable difference between its quantity and quality. In all states of society, the labour time that it costs to produce the means of subsistence, must necessarily be an object of interest to mankind, though not of equal interest in different stages of development.[27] And lastly, from the moment that men in any way work for one another, their labour assumes a social form.
“Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself. The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labour power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products.
“A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the [phantasmagorical] form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.
“This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them.”
Paul Cockshott said
I agree with the analysis of fetishism of commodities, in our writings on socialism Allin and I explicitly advocate the replacement of money by Marx’s system of labour vouchers as a short term objective. The only people to take this seriously in the past were the Chinese Communes.
I use a slightly more up to date version of a shadow play ( Pepper’s Ghost ) as the metaphor in Chapter 10 of Money, Information and Value .
another brother said
You can have sex with shoes, but it will neither teach you to walk nor have children.
another brother said
That is my critique of Platypus (and Ayn Rand).
johng said
I was taken aback by the judgment that Arundhati Roy ‘didn’t have a background in any part of the left’. There is a danger of a rather exclusive definition of the term ‘left’ here. Whatever the political differences and the politics of those involved in the new social movements mentioned it just seems pretty sectarian not to describe them as part of the left.
Similarly I don’t really agree that Arundhati Roy is a ‘soft nationalist’. This seems an odd thing to accuse her of given that much of her unpopularity on the mainstream left (and certainly amongst a variety of media commentators) was motivated by precisely ‘soft nationalism’ on issues ranging from nukes to dams, to bringing the nation into disrepute by saying less then pleasant things about it in foreign forums.
I also think its simply mistaken to equate her critique of actually existing Indian democracy with the nihilism of the Maoists, who have little to say about the vast social churning associated with the practice of democracy in India over the last decades. When she describes the ‘hollowing out of democracy’ she is describing a process which activists have described all over the world as ruling parties and oppositions joined the neo-liberal consensus, what is sometimes described as the vanishing of mainstream ideological alternatives.
It therefore seems misleading to try and attribute these arguments purely to pessimism as the result of defeated struggles. There is surely a large element of truth involved, not just in India, as stated, but all round the world. That many people do have ‘faith’ in democracy is surely true, but its also true that many people are extremely disillusioned by its actual functioning and they’re surely right to be so.
Finally whilst its absolutely true that the Maoists have a distinctive brand of politics, and these politics have their own dynamic, it does not therefore logically follow that Arundhati is wrong to point to connections between their growth and what in other discussions are called ‘root causes’ (I am increasingly reminded of debates about the link between political islam and imperialism). To claim this is actually to place oneself to the right of, at least the rhetoric, of elements even in Congress, ie actually in government.
The article quotes her accurately when it comes to her statement on Charu Mazumdar, but leave out entirely the large critique of the whole Maoist enterprise which surrounds it (something which has irritated some of the political representatives of the same). This is problematical in a context where the media have been guilty of repeatedly distorting her statements to make it look like she is an advocate of Maoist strategy.
Grappling with the wider ideological legacy of Naxelism is a complicated business given the actually existing history of the wider left in India, something which even stringent critics like Balagopal recognised. His argument that in whole swathes of the country one of the legacies of the Naxelite period (and it should be said that Communist movement more generally) was the development of a new way of understanding exploitation and oppression and the fight against it. Struggles of the past, even defeated ones, continue to resonate in the minds and consciousness of millions and the balance sheet is considerably more complicated in this sense then the article suggests. She believes that it might be possible in the course of struggle that many peoples politics might be changed. I very much hope she is right about this.
On this I must also disagree with the idea that the Maoists are the main barrier to a new left and left re-alignment. They are certainly not a ‘new left’. But to identify them as the main barrier strikes me as over-egging the cake. Certainly there are other Maoist groups which have moved away from the militarism associated with the ‘Maoists’, embracing variants of a ‘mass line approach’ who, despite the ideological encumbrance of their past, potentially may play a very important role in such developments. In this situation what seems to me a variant of an ‘evil ideology’ theses strikes me as unhelpful (and this, as with the discussion of ‘root causes’ does indeed remind me of the ‘decent left’). I think the emergence of the Maoists is a signal to the new left to get its act together: getting its act together does not involve treating the Maoists as the main barrier.
jp said
i come from a left tradition that relegates maoists to a footnote. this site is giving me new perspective.
the ‘realistic’ pseudo-materialism that calls us to support empire, slaughter and wage/debt slavery (that’s obama, et al) in order to overcome it may in fact be the main barrier.
Chris Cutrone said
@ Jp:
It’s not really a matter of Maoism, etc., but rather the whole “opposition to empire, slaughter, etc.” business that’s the problem.
An emancipatory perspective must account for the world as it is, and that means global capital, U.S. and other core capitalist countries’ power. We must be thinking of how to transform this power, which is must greater than anything on the supposed “Left,” which is really just hopeless “resistance” to the inevitable. We need to be thinking about what we want from seizing/inheriting U.S. power — and this goes not only for American Leftists but others as well. This power is not going to disappear, but must be transformed. That’s what the “Left” today avoids in its “opposition,” which is just moralistic posturing and actually a dishonest and not-so-subtle apologia for/accommodation of the world as it is, and has little or nothing to do with changing it, which demands engaging it. American Leftists should not disdain U.S. power but want to seize it, for emancipatory ends.
jp said
“…the whole “opposition to empire, slaughter, etc.” business” is “the problem” says chris cutrone. he ends with “American Leftists should not disdain U.S. power but want to seize it, for emancipatory ends.”
well.
Chris Cutrone said
@ Jp:
What’s the alternative, wishing it away?
jp said
your claim as to ‘what the problem is,” and your recommendation to resolve it both need to air out for a while.
i’ve got a kid’s birthday party to attend before wading into this.
Chris Cutrone said
@ Jp:
P.S. How have any of the “revolutions” in the 20th century (Russia, China, Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, Venezuela, etc.) actually diminished U.S. power? It doesn’t work that way. It’s not a zero-sum game, and it’s not a matter of pro-U.S./anti-U.S., either. The point is that even the old imperial powers (Japan, Germany, France, Britain — even the Netherlands, et al.) still wield disproportionate power in the world, and there’s no reason to expect that the U.S., even if it were replaced by a new global hegemon (extremely unlikely), would not do the same. As would-be social revolutionists in the U.S., what is it that we want, exactly, if not the transformation of American power for different ends?
Dave Palmer said
Sadly, Chris seems to be following the trajectory of many other University of Chicago-educated Trotskyists who descended into neo-conservatism. If “the whole ‘opposition to empire, slaughter, etc.’ business” is “the problem,” and U.S. imperialism should not be opposed but “engaged” — what form of activity does that lead to, in a practical sense? Chris talks pompously about “changing the world,” “seizing power,” etc., yet he dismisses every form of practical activity by the left as “moralistic posturing” (even when it involves fighting, dying, or actually seizing power). I have to conclude that the only form of practical activity that will be left to him will be to become a professional apologist for imperialism — assuming imperialism will have him. He already seems to be 90% of the way there.
Sorry if this comes off as ad-hominem. Perhaps it is. But I honestly can’t see anything good coming out of a trend that views opposition to empire and slaughter to be a “problem.”
It is a disgusting distortion of dialectics to assert that fighting imperialism is “dishonest and not-so-subtle apologia” for imperialism, while actually being an apologist for imperialism means having an “emancipatory perspective.” This is such sophomoric nonsense that simply to restate it is to refute it.
Chris Cutrone said
@ Dave Palmer:
Yes, extremely ad hominem. One reaches for whatever one can in the face of what one cannot understand. That’s “sophomoric” by definition.
It’s not pro-imperialist to emphasize the need to transform the U.S.
My point about apologia/accommodation goes back to the question of Stalinism: trying to “build socialism” in some isolated backwater while leaving (the rest of) the world as it is. The Soviet and Chinese experiences, as well as that of Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, etc., show that it all comes back around to the question of the core capitalist countries and what we propose to do about them.
It is not only quite possible but evidently the case that people can fight and die in very high numbers without altering the course of the world: Russia in neo-Tsarism, China as capitalist labor zone, Vietnam crawling to the WTO, Cuba laying off more than 10% of its labor force at one stroke (and that only for now). And the rest of the world solidly situated in neo-liberal barbarism with no end in sight.
Dave Palmer said
Ok, Chris, why don’t you answer the question, then? What form of practical activity do you advocate, if the millions of people who gave their lives for socialism were so tragically mistaken, or even engaging in “apologia/accommodation”? If “if all comes back around to the question of the core capitalist countries and what we propose to do about them,” then what do you propose to do? (I mean, other than being so arrogantly dismissive of every effort to do anything?)
Chris Cutrone said
@ Dave Palmer:
My point is not to dismiss, but to face the outrage that people fought and died by the millions only to crawl to the WTO in the end. We need to redeem past struggles, and that also means not to repeat them fruitlessly.
We’re practically starting at zero, today, globally, so why not reconsider what was arguably the “long detour” of “Third World revolution” in the 20th century? Why the orientation towards endless diminishing returns? Why expect something of Chavez not gotten by Che/Fidel even though the latter attempted so much more? Why rest content with the Naxalites when Mao himself failed so dramatically?
What I am arguing for is a theoretical and practical orientation towards building revolutionary working-class parties in the core capitalist countries, especially the U.S. How to do this is the $64,000.00 question, of course. But I don’t think we will do it by telling American workers how bad the U.S. is for people around the world, especially in those abject regions where they were hardly better off before the U.S. military intervened. The guilt perspective (one of the worst legacies of the 1960s) will never work for politicizing and mobilizing the people necessary to change the world. The assumption that the entirely pseudo-”Left” starts with is that the U.S. is an unmovable object. This is matched by the illusion that the “wretched of the earth” are an unstoppable force. Neither is true.
Barry Lyndon said
It is very clear, from Cutrone’s words in print and from his behavior in person(which I have noted at various Platypus meetings), that Cutrone harbors deep-seated racist prejudices and pre-judgements against dark-skinned Muslims, and by extension a pathological hostility towards anyone who fights to defend them against imperialism abroad and institutionalized racism at home. Which is linked to his vitriol against dark-skinned people in the Third World in general, especially revolutionaries like the Naxalites, who he considers to be incapable by their very nature of waging a revolution, since dead white men that he has memorized in grad school obviously have all the answers. That Platypus itself has non-white members of Third World background is of no account, since they are largely uber-Westernized boot-licking Left Uncle Toms who confirm Cutrone’s feelings of white superiority.
This is not a charge I make lightly to anyone I disagree with, but it is very clear from Cutrone’s and the Platypi’s consistent behavior.
He had smeared longtime leftist Tariq Ali as some sort of closet Islamist(claiming he said things he never said) He has unfairly attacked the ailing and heroic Lynne Stewart, which has been noted above. He has outright lied that US imperialism is a friend of the Iraqi Left and ‘stands between’ the Iraqi trade unionists and Islamists(basically claiming that US imperialism is a progressive force). He even deliberately misrepresented of Franz Fanon’s brilliant works on anti-imperialism-in his talk on ‘The Dialectics of Defeat’, he claimed that what Franz Fanon’s quote “Let us take our leave of Europe” meant was ‘to leave politics’-basically saying that non-Europeans were incapable of contributing to politics in any way.
And in a Platypus meeting I attended, Cutrone outright called Students for Justice in Palestine a ‘Islamist’ group- when I corrected him on that wild assertion given that I am a member of that organization, he backtracked and claimed that they were ‘soft Islamists’, and furthermore that I had been ‘conditioned’ not to see their ‘Islamism’. This was outrageous pre-judgement that could only arise from racist assumptions.
Spencer is pretty outrageous as well, with his claim in a February 2009 article that the ‘ability of the Left to reconstitute itself in South Asia relies in no small part on the ability from the US military to defeat the Taliban’(I’m quoting off the top of my head, but regardless of whether a word or two is different, the point is the same). Or how in the talk ‘The Dialectics of Defeat’, Spencer dismisses someone’s question about the desperate condition of Palestinians, and says the conditions in the slums of Cairo are ‘much worse’ then in Gaza. As someone who has been in the Cairo slums and knows people who have been in Gaza, this is a brazen lie and only serves to whitewash the Israeli blockade.
With regards to theory, it is rather ironic that Platypi claim that Maoism is ‘timeless’-yet another Orientalist assumption that anything that comes from the East is of a ‘timeless’ quality that does not change with history. But it is in fact their ideology that is ‘timeless’ which presumes that we are still in the early 20th century and the only part of the world which contains revolutionary potential are the ‘metropoles’ of Europe and North America. No notice or analysis is taken of the massive industrialization and development of a modern working class that has taken place in China, India, and Latin America.
Therefore it follows from this fixed assumption that the people in those regions of the world-who happen to be overwhelmingly non-white- are incapable of making revolution. Look through the Platypi articles, whether on Cuba, Venezuela, Nepal, India, Bolivia-basically anywhere the wretched of the earth are trying to build a new world up from poverty, filth, disease, and imperialism, and all you see is a total lack of empathy or desire to learn from these sincere efforts, but condescension, derision, and hatred, as well as pious complaints that these ignorant brown people are not following the ‘correct’ way a revolution ‘must’ be fought.
This may be an uncivil post, but I find nothing civil in how Platypus serves as a font for pro-imperialist propaganda and consistently pumps out lies that disorient and confuse the Left, hiding behind academic disinterest and ‘critique’.
Chris Cutrone said
@ “Barry Lyndon”
I have no problems with Muslims or people of color. — In fact, with regard to the recent Mosque controversy in NYC, I don’t care if the Cordoba initiative is aimed at converting Americans to Islam. I don’t care is the U.S. were to become a Muslim country (at least, no more than I care and worry about it being a “Christian” country). Need I say I welcome the U.S. becoming a majority “people of color” country? So, what gives, man?
So your misapprehensions and fears about Platypus are baseless. The fact that you can only regard people of color who may disagree with you on certain issues as “boot-lickers” speaks to your racism, not Platypus’s.
Our point in Platypus is to not let people neglect the disparate opinions/positions on the “Left” (that is, the fake or at least problematic Left) today that are held by minorities in it, and to bring these to light to question and trouble some long-held but unthinking assumptions on the “Left” that may stand in the way of more emancipatory and practically effective perspectives.
For instance, our engagements with such dissident perspectives as not only Fred Halliday and Christopher Hitchens, but also Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi Communist Party and Worker-communist Parties of Iraq and Iran, not to mention Jairus Banaji, the original occasion of this post. Are all these “boot-lickers?” What about RAWA in Afghanistan? These are all people who at one time or another (and I would say, to this day) oppose the depravities of U.S. power in the world, but not the exclusion of consideration of other problems, such as Islamism and Right-wing nationalism (e.g., Baathism).
If such dissident “Leftists” (i.e., not any less problematical than the more mainstream perspectives) are to be dismissed out of hand and vilified (as “boot-lickers,” or “race traitors,” itself a racist sentiment), then how are we to explain the manifest utter ineffectuality of the Tariq Alis, et al. of the world? If they (alone) represent the future of the Left, doesn’t this bode ill? Or might we need to try to put the pieces back together of what once was a more coherent and robust perspective, historically, on the Left? That’s Platypus’s point in entertaining what are otherwise unpopular perspectives, to pay attention to what may be lost otherwise.
Do you really think it is Platypus’s fault that the “Left” is so pathetic today? Or might you need to reconsider some of your perspectives, precisely in order to be able to better — more effectively — fight “U.S. imperialism?”
– Chris
Mike E said
BArry Lyndon’s ad hominem attacks are way outside the allowed framework of this site. Moderators will deal with this.
Barry Lyndon said
Nice job avoiding everything I have written- have you taken those pro-imperialist positions or haven’t you?
Typical Platypus response- a long, rambling homily that doesn’t answer the actual subject.
And no, I don’t think Platypus itself is the reason ‘the Left’ is ‘so pathetic’(in the US and Europe that is- I think in other parts of the world its state is far from pathetic), but I think it is certainly a symptom.
The fact that you refer to pro-imperialist anti-communist propagandists like Christopher Hitchens and Fred Halliday as ‘dissidents’(so brave and lonely it is, apologizing for war and empire and scapegoating Muslims), reveals that you yourself are a product of a horribly decayed, postmodernist psuedo-Left who has no conception of who its friends and its enemies are.
Regarding RAWA, I’m glad you finally discovered them, when I have talked to many of your oh-so-intellectual members they had no clue they even existed, but thought that the only choice in Afghanistan was as you and Spencer posited it- between US imperialism and the Taliban.
Barry Lyndon said
Fine, Mike Ely. Go ahead and ban me for making completely factual points about Platypus. I’m sure that when the FBI raids your home on a totally “anonymous” tip from you-know-who, you may rethink your civility towards the likes of these budding neo-conservatives.
Barry Lyndon said
Mike E-
“Their dislike of the Naxalites is tied to their visceral fear of the peasants and “tribals.”
They just disdain the unwashed people — and see no prospects. And they dismiss those who sweat and die with a wave of the hand.
Everything about this essays reeks of class and privilege — and that special permission to just mock what the dark and forgotten people do. ”
Your basically agreeing with me, you just choose not to rock the boat and come out and call a spade a spade- in this case, racism.
Laurie said
@ Barry Lyndon,
You dug your own hole. Thanks for saving us the time.
“Barry Lyndon said
October 9, 2010 at 12:00 pm
Fine, Mike Ely. Go ahead and ban me for making completely factual points about Platypus. I’m sure that when the FBI raids your home on a totally “anonymous” tip from you-know-who, you may rethink your civility towards the likes of these budding neo-conservatives.”
Marco Torres said
Barry makes no secret about his belief that Platypus is funded by the State Department. As he put it to me, Platypus is paid to “demoralize” and to “spy” at Leftist events. Just pointing out the level of paranoia we’re dealing with here.
Mike E said
Our moderators have not been watching the site, hour by hour, today.
But clearly Barry Lyndon makes no secret of flouting the rules and purpose of this Kasama discussion:
Barry is not banned (as he suggests). But he is (for now) put “on moderation”: substantive contributions from Barry will be approved by our Kasama moderators. Further nonsense will not.
****
And if you think that Kasama is against “rocking the boat” you are not paying attention, and have a simplistic notion of how boats are really rocked.
On a methodological point:
Barry writes that he is uncivil because he finds nothing civil about Platypus’s role.
This makes no sense. If you think that Platypus is a new neo-con formation — what prevents you from laying that out, and making your insights the property of many new people (who are not familiar with the line questions or the background of this dispute)?
Why should we become “uncivil” in our exposure and confrontation around ideas? What better exposes and illuminates than the high plane of two line struggle?
One of the problems of radical people is that the moment we reach an insight, we sometimes rage (rage rage) against those who don’t yet join us there. Think about how infantile that is, and how little that respects about the way large and growing numbers of people learn.
Ideas in the possession of growing numbers of people become a material force. that is why we need and apply a mass line.
Barry Lyndon said
Interesting how, for all the sound and fury, none of the Platypi have directly addressed my points. Were these things said or written or were they not?
And if they are, doesn’t that raise serious questions about their judgement regarding fairly judging the Naxalite rebellion on its own terms?
Marco Torres said
“That Platypus itself has non-white members of Third World background is of no account, since they are largely uber-Westernized boot-licking Left Uncle Toms who confirm Cutrone’s feelings of white superiority.”
I’ll let Chris and Spencer account for the specific accusations you’re making of them. What I want to remark on is the pathologically racialized “helter-skelter” idea of imperialism that you seem to be dealing with here. It’s not a matter of politics for you, but a matter of race war. Barry, this is a profoundly racist worldview–and it is so far from Marxism or even liberalism that our critique of the Left is simply getting lost in translation for you. And this is because you can’t grasp the Left as an object, because all that matters to you is a hypostasized, universal, depoliticized notion of white oppression.
[snip of personalized commentary.]
Mike E said
[moderator note: Please stop the personal attacks now. Line and substance.]
Spencer said
What Marco had written was not personal, but insightful analysis of why the race-thinking that entertains categories like “Uncle Tom” makes it literally impossible for Barry Lyndon to grasp Marxism and hence to grasp Platypus. On his behalf and as a participant on this thread I protest against the moderators’ censorship of what Marco wrote. It was important and others deserve the benefit of it.
As for my own comments, I stand by them. I spoke on the Palestinians from personal experience. When I lived and went to school in Ramallah in Israeli-occupied Palestine as a teenager in the 1980s, I traveled to Cairo for my sixteenth birthday. At that time, we had friends who lived in Gaza (some of whom were deeply involved in the resistance to the occupation and went to prison for it). I noted then the marked difference between living standards between Gaza with its massive refugee population, on the one hand, and the West Bank – Ramallah, Nablus, East Jerusalem, etc., on the other. But those differences, like the variations of living standards with other parts of the Levant, were minor in comparison with the quite massive disparity between this part of the Arab world and a city like Cairo, which in the 1980s when I remember it was a Third World megalopolis, the first I had ever encountered. It was on this basis, then, that I made my comment that as long as I have known and participated in pro-Palestinian politics there are many so-called leftists who want to treat the Palestinians as the poorest, most miserable denizens of the Third World, writhing under the jackboot of Israeli imperialism. What I said was that this requires the left to distort facts and to portray Palestine and Gaza in particular as the most poverty stricken area in the Middle East. The reason (and this was the point I was making) is that few of those committed to the national self-determination of Palestine even attempt to connect that project to that of world revolution, which few such pseudo-leftists give a damn about. The preoccupation with Israeli “imperialism” is, in such cases, really not a concern with global capitalist imperialism at all. Rather, nothing is said of the masses of unemployed, underemployed, brutally employed and unnecessarily employed Palestinian and Israeli workers, and thus the issue of their counterparts in a similar position within free and independent arab states, like Egypt, simply does not arise to such leftists. I was deliberate in my condemnation of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and of the persistent refugee situation in particular, but, as I recall, I went on to add, using the comparison of the economic conditions of Egyptian workers along the way, that the curse of the Palestinian cause is that it attracts and is infested by the worst sort of nihilist, crypto-anti-semitic, and reactionary pseudo-leftism. I argued that this was so for precisely the sorts of reasons that were being elaborated in the Platypus Dialectics of Defeat panel (a transcript of which was published in the Platypus Review) to which BL refers. I suspect he did not like those comments not because they lacked factual basis, but because they hit too close to home.
As for the political and military strength of the Taliban constituting an unmistakable obstacle to the constitution of a Pakistani left, this is so obvious as to require no great elaboration. Anyone with the least connection to or awareness of Pakistani working class organizers and leftists will be familiar with the mortal threat the Taliban poses to them and their struggle to defend even to the most minimal degree the interests of Pakistani workers against the extreme exploitation that they face. I am fully aware (I dare say far more than BL is) that this struggle were it ever to advance beyond its current very modest aims would also and ultimately involve a struggle against U.S. imperialism, though I would also point out that such a development is practically inconceivable except as a regional counterpart to the reconstitution of the left in the United States.
Now to my last point which involves the fundamental political deceit involved in BL’s total evasion of the substance of the criticisms leveled against the Naxalite movement in India.
He writes that,
While it is true that the opinions expressed by Jairus Banaji in the interview that is the ostensible subject of this thread are not to be confused with the opinions of Platypus, it must be registered that Banaji is making quite forcefully and repeatedly in the interview Sunit and I conducted with him that Naxalism constitutes an obstacle to the building of a left in India that would take root among the massive indian industrial working class.
In my questions, I ask Banaji to elaborate on his rhetorical question,
Similarly, when asking another question, I ask Banaji (again quoting him from elsewhere),
Discussing the manner in which criticism of the Naxalites’ peasant- and tribal-focused politics emerged within the ranks of those who would found the Naxalite movement in the late 1960s, Banaji says,
Developing these criticisms made so many decades ago, Banaji directly challenges the Maoist program by arguing its inadequacy to the real circumstances of precisely those millions of Indian workers about whom BL professes such great concern:
Yet it is clear that BL has actually read the interview from his quotation of Banaji’s accusation that Maoist “theory” has a “timeless” quality (which BL characteristic attributes to “Platypi”, since he seemingly cannot fathom that a “brown-skinned” person would say such a thing). So, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that BL is politically dispositionally incapable of understanding the interview and hence is driven to make his unseemly comments out of a kind of blind rage. Certainly this much is clear: Like so many others on this site who claim to support the Naxalites and even to believe that there are significant revolutionary lessons to be learned from their struggle, it is BL and not Platypus that refuses to directly address the political criticisms being made. Indeed, what is remarkable about BL’s post is what is remarkable about this thread, namely the reluctance to take on directly the arguments made in the article ostensibly under discussion. At any rate, the claim is ludicrous on its face that what my efforts to interview Banaji, my questions to him, and his answers in reply constitute when taken together is “condescension, derision, and hatred, as well as pious complaints that these ignorant brown people are not following the ‘correct’ way a revolution ‘must’ be fought.”
Such a claim is a manifest evasion as are the cheaply bought accusations of racism. It is through the mantra-like repetition of such evasions that such so-called “leftists” occupy their minds given that, with their heads so deeply buried in sand, they can see and hear nothing. While I welcome the discussion of Platypus and its aims on this thread, it has been largely premature and has had something of the quality of evasion of which BL’s post reeks so strongly. Still, as our consistent replies on this thread demonstrate, there is in fact no attempt to retreat or obfuscate on our part.
This is not because we are “arrogant” or such thing, but because we want to see rise from the ruins of the present a left committed to the project of human emancipation and we believe that those who claim organizationally and intellectually to represent this project are utterly inadequate to the task.
Our saying so is not ad hominem but altogether sincere. Had we not thought this to be true in the profoundest sense, we would not have taken the highly improbable step of founding the only new Marxist organization in the world in the 2000s. As Chris has pointed out, this for us means first and foremost a critique of the existing left not on the grounds of program, but on that of the history of the left and, specifically, of the accumulated distortions and misappropriations of the legacy of past struggles, above all within Marxism, to realize the potential of capitalism for its own self-overcoming.
Barry Lyndon said
This is just one gigantic strawman.
About 20 years have passed since your trips to Egypt and the occupied Palestinian territories. You made the comparison not to the conditions that existed in Cairo and Gaza in the 1980′s, but to those that exist NOW.
You were making that false comparison in full knowledge of the suffocating Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip which has been depriving the 1.5 million Palestinians of Gaza food and basic medical supplies, which had been going on for three and a half years by the time you made that statement.
The fact that you are familiar with the region and its politics does not exonerate you, in fact it makes it far more likely that what you were saying was a deliberate LIE.
The rest of what you have said is classic red herrings that one is accustomed to hearing from Zionists and Zionist apologists-the charge that if you care about the occupation of the Palestinians, you don’t care about Arab dictatorships (having lived in Egypt for 10 years and being in contact with leftists who know people that have been incarcerated and tortured by the Mubarak dictatorship, I find that accusation particularly scummy).
The sly blanket accusations of anti-Semitism. Putting Israeli imperialism in scare quotes (as if there is any doubt about that, much like Cutrone does for American imperialism, as pointed out by LouisProjeyct).
I will respond to the rest of the Platypi’s points when I have more time.
Michael Caddell said
Ah Hell, all this to support some poor bastards taking up arms against their oppressors? Shove off, it’s a revolution!
Chris Cutrone said
@ Michael Caddell:
If Naxalism were just a matter of people fighting back against the violence of their landlords, that would be one thing. But it is precisely the Stalinist move to elide the specific politics of how this is being done as part of a greater strategy. “Power to the people” is all well and good, but the issue is, how. The point is that Naxalism is being taken up as some kind of model, not only here on Kasama but by the likes of A. Roy, et al. People are trying to generalize from this. This is a problem, in that it leaves out and indeed represses various questions (for instance, the one Spencer raises about what is the point of continuing to call people “peasants”). Banaji is at least raising this, albeit with reference to what goes on in the rest of “India,” which may or may not be beside the point.
@ Barry Lyndon:
If your definition of “imperialism” is one people conquering another one, then this is not the Marxist (i.e., Lenin’s) definition of the term. Whether that matters at all or not is another issue.
Platypus exists not to rail against all the various forms of misery in the world, but to see whether and how the history of *Marxism* and Leftist politics more or less derived from Marxism has any continued relevance whatsoever in ameliorating, improving and overcoming the conditions of the present.
This is why we engage people like Jairus Banaji, who are raising such questions, if in a more directly political manner than Platypus itself does as an organized activity.
To those who just want to know “Which side are you on?,” Platypus as a project is always going to be frustrating and indeed enraging, because that’s just not the way we approach things.
When Spencer says something like conditions for the poor in Cairo are worse than on the West Bank, he was doing so not for political but for pedagogical reasons, i.e., to provoke thinking that virtually everyone on the “Left” today avoids, that the conditions of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation is not necessarily the worst in the Arab or Muslim world, and therefore the Palestinian question is not necessarily the keystone or symbolic issue for Middle Eastern or geo-politics people take it to be. Indeed, treating it as such has been the hallmark not of Marxists (and this is for a reason) but rather Arab nationalists and more recently Islamists — precisely out of their anti-Marxism, i.e., their reactionary-conservative “anti-capitalism,” which is not that at all. Since Platypus prioritizes the issues of capitalism and Marxism, we remain distinctly cold to the issues that tend to fire the imaginations of the fake “Left” today. We want to throw some cold water of sobriety on all that. But, again, we adopt such a comportment not for political but pedagogical reasons.
Spencer said
@ BL. I was glad to read where you wrote,
Because I’m waiting. [snark snip]
As for the conditions that exist now in Gaza, the point I was making is just as true today. I don’t believe that even as adverse as the situation is now that with the massive presence of the UNRWA and a thousand Muslim charities it is worse in Gaza than in its for the millions of Cairo slum dwellers, who, because they are not refugees, are ignored by the UN.
But you should not obscure the fact that the Israeli-Palestinian issue didn’t arise yesterday. Rather it arose decades ago.
Mike E said
Chris writes:
I’m curious to know why you believe that?
Are you not clear on the difference between supporting a movement and taking it as a model?
Is there an element where you personally don’t believe movements should be supported unless they can also be taken as a model (i.e. that your politics require raising the bar for support until there is nothing worthy of support)?
Or are there elements in the discussion that make it unclear that many people support revolutionary events and attempts, without necessarily trying to univeralize or mechanically implant their features?
Marco Torres said
“That Platypus itself has non-white members of Third World background is of no account, since they are largely uber-Westernized boot-licking Left Uncle Toms who confirm Cutrone’s feelings of white superiority.”
What I really want to hear from Barry Lyndon is some sort of theoretical justification for using terminology like “Uncle Tom.” Do you really believe there is such a thing as race traitors? If so, you think this worldview is compatible with the struggle for world socialism?
Chris Cutrone said
@ Mike E:
I don’t think that the choice is between taking something seriously and taking something a model (directly, practically-programmatically), but rather the problem I have is with the idea that we must take the lead of those who are struggling, that taking Naxalism seriously means taking its lead. What this elides is the leadership that may be needed that in its absence actually produces something like Naxalism symptomatically. In other words, what is the unmet need that is being expressed by Naxalism as a problematic phenomenon.
Barry Lyndon said
“As for the conditions that exist now in Gaza, the point I was making is just as true today. I don’t believe that even as adverse as the situation is now that with the massive presence of the UNRWA and a thousand Muslim charities it is worse in Gaza than in its for the millions of Cairo slum dwellers, who, because they are not refugees, are ignored by the UN.
But you should not obscure the fact that the Israeli-Palestinian issue didn’t arise yesterday. Rather it arose decades ago.”
I don’t think people are machine-gunned to death by commandos when they try to bring aid to the Cairo slums. But nice try, once again, of attempting to exonerate Israel.
You have no substance in response to what I wrote [moderator snips snark]
Barry Lyndon said
I think you seem to be forgetting that slavery was also a class relation. Like slaves that are loyal to their master, Platypus and the comprador ‘Left’ academics in the Third World that it consorts with have a mortal fear of a revolution ever actually occurring, because that would undoubtedly threaten their position as comfortable critics.
[moderator snips snark]
As a Marxist, I very much believe that the defining line that ultimately matters is class. But to simply dismiss race as not being a factor, and not looking at how it is intimately tied in with class divides and the continuing legacy of colonialism, is disingenuous at best and enabling racism at worst. [moderator snips snark]
Mike E said
[moderator note to Barry: Our rules have been repeatedly explained to you, and you knowingly refuse to adhere to them. Each post has combined substance with snark. You force our moderating team to edit your comments, which we will not continue doing. If you post snark again, you will be put on moderation and your comments will not appear.]
Michael Caddell said
Here’s one for the dialectical (gangbox, my hard headed friend):
Entitled, “What Kansas “news” won’t tell you …. Radio Free Kansas will!”
… the conservative echo chambers in this state are creating thousands of domestic terrorists.
The largest bomb by American domestic terrorists ever built was constructed by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols at Geary County Lake, Ks. and moved to Oklahoma City, OK.
The state where an abortion doctor was murdered (lynched) in his own church, nurtured by a completely irresponsible news media and a compliant state legislature is about to mass manipulate consent at the election polls.
Driven by radical reactionary conservative sympathies, innumerable hypocritical church leaders, theocratic political demagogues like US Sen. Sam Brownback, “white law” constitutional professor Kris Kobach and the lying war criminal Sen. Pat Roberts; a statewide coup d’grace is about to take place.
The Kansas Republican Party and it’s most rabid reactionary representatives are about to sweep into office.
And the coffee table liberals, the crushed outlawed homosexuals and the tens of thousands of women who once had local reproductive choice are afraid to tell you!.
The great social experiment that founded “Free State” Kansas has been destroyed by a complicit conservative media.
Rise Up, Kansans and Vote this November!
Listen, call in to Radio Free Kansas this next Saturday High Noon!
Featuring Francis Schaeffer, best selling author “Crazy for God” and his most recent “Patience With God!”!
Hard links:
http://fightincockflyer.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-wibw580am-and-710am-kmbz-does-not.html
http://mediamatters.org/research/201010110002
Obviously I do not consider the OKC bombers and Tiller’s killer “revolutionaries” but I do wonder how we as revolutionaries are to fight in a security state we have here in America. I think cyberspace is the disjointed way for the immediate future,and it doesn’t require bombs, threats and hostages.
Of course, none of this matters to the fighters in India, but maybe North Americans will pick up that there is a fight to be had here.
Marco Torres said
Barry,
You didn’t answer my question. Are people of color obligated to have a certain kind of politics because if not they are “Uncle Toms”?
As for your heavily censored response. It is either too incoherent or too truncated by ad hominem deletion to be understandable.
Are you saying that Slavery (You mean modern american slavery or like, in ancient egypt?) is a class relation. That (because of this?) Platypus and “comprador Leftists” (???) are afraid of Revolution.
As for race mattering even if class is more important… Who is pitting race versus class? Who is denying that racism is deeply entwined in class society, as both false consciousness and apologetic ideology? Please show me remarks made by Platypus members saying that “race doesn’t matter” because I’ve never read or heard them.
Also saying that “as a marxist you believe the ultimate dividing line is class” sounds to me like some sort of ontology of oppressors and oppressed or bosses vs. workers, which is not Marxism at all. You don’t need Marx to tell you that the bosses oppress the workers. Marxism goes a little bit deeper than that. I suggest that you read Lukacs’ essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” and Moishe Postone’s book “Time, Labor and Social Domination” to see what I am talking about.
Also, I believe that you should write less angrily so instead of getting your rants censored, we can have an exchange of ideas.
Harsh Thakor said
Jairus Banaji makes some interesting points and it is true that the movement of the C.P.I(Moaist)is vitiated with left sectarian tendencies and there is inadequate development of mass line.However one has to defend that India is still a semi -feudal and semi-colonial structure and adapting to Indian conditions there is still scope for Mao Tse Tung’s concept of New Democratic Revolution.Remember the analysis ‘s of Manoranjan Moganty and Mohan Ram on the similarities between India and pre-revolutionary China.The concept of feuadlism being the principal contradiction has to be defended tooth and nail, as the peasantry is still the principla force.The Indian state has no bargaining power and is not controlled by a single Imperialist power,and is thus not a neo-colony.
Another important fact is what Banaji states on the writings of Com.Nagi Reddy as agaisnt the military line of Individual terrorism,which is relevant till today.It was Comrade T.N,who launched a struggle in the Andhra Pradesh Co-ordination Commitee of Communist Revolutionaries agaisnt Charu Mazumdar abandoning mass organisations,replacing mass movements with armed squads ,calling China’s Chairman India’s chiarma etc.Nagi Reddy also refuted the formation of the party prematurely from above as well as advocating boycott of elections as a strategic slogan.Comrdaes T.N and D.V.played ahistoric role in building the mass line in the Srikakulam Movement as against squad actions.Infact in Punjab in the late 1970′s implementing Nagi Redy’s line a historic mass movement was led in Punjab by the Punjab Students Union and the Naujavan Bharat Sabha,under the leadership of Com.Harbhajan Singh Sohi.Com D.V.Rao had written on the need of a strong agrarian Revolutionary Movement to facilitate the formation of a People’s Guerilla Army.In West Bengal in the Debra distric to,under Gunadhar Murmu,Nagi Reddy’s line wa s implemented.
Some sections claim that Indian agriculture has reached a capitalist stage with the advent of globalization.True it has affected agriculture but there is still rampant feudal economy. Imperialists are utilising 20% or 40% population and keeping its original state structure and protection system intact.-i.e.semi-feudal and semi-colonial structure.Thus no fundamental changes have occured with the infiltration of imperialist capital.More workers are leaving the cities being retrenched and returning to the villages.Today,true India has greater capitalsit development than China ,with far greater imperialist penetration in cities and certain modifications have to be made .Still it is the countryside which is the principal area of struggle.
Today whatever success the C.P.I.(Maoist)has achieved is because of its upholding theoretically Comrade Mao Tese Tung’s thought of protracted Peoples War and New Democratic Revolution.The most important anlysis theoretically is whether armed struggle and formation of the Peoples Guerilla Army have to be deferred as what Coms.D.V.Rao and T.Nagi Reddy stated in the early 1970′s.Toady the Maoist party has not developed the mass line and often replaces mass movements with military actions.In India the most correct implementation of armed struggle was in Telengana from 1946-51 where genuine base areas were created.The only reason that mass movements were built was that they upheld the analysis of agarian revolution being the principal contradiction.True urban work was neglected and it is the Workers who lead the revolution,but it is only by combating the contradiction between feudalism and the broad masses that the proletariat can lead the revolution in a semi-colonial country.as Com Mao advocated.
mf said
I realize that this thread has been dead for more than a year now, but I thought I’d drop in and say that I find these absolutely revolting, gag-inducing Platypus creeps to be the perfect example of first world chauvinists who believe its their role to sit on the sidelines and offer their negative and hate-filled judgment of revolutionary movements elsewhere.
Their prioritizing of U.S. and European revolution over that of revolution in third world countries, even to the point that they oppose the Maoist PPWs and cheer for their liquidation, seems quite revealing. When the storm-center of world revolution today lies in South Asia, and when there is no clear indication that a First World revolution on its way, it’s absolutely disgusting and a clear example of defeatism to push their type of politics, politics which disregards and marginalizes communists from the third world — regardless of whether this Uncle Sam shit has a Marx-face or not.
Spencer L said
@MF – In case you didn’t understand, the “Platypus creeps” didn’t make any argument here, whether pro-Naxal or otherwise. It is an interview. Say what you will about Jairus Banaji, but he is neither “on the sidelines” nor “first world.” So, first of all, get it straight.
Second, the critique of Naxalism is in the name of the Indian revolution, in case you didn’t get that one. So, cheerlead for Naxalism as much as you like, but simply highlighting how precarious and well-meaning they are will never establish that their practice is effective. Real leftism is going to take you beyond your conservative crypto-racist evasions.
Mike E said
[moderator note: "gag-inducing Platypus creeps" is a form of discussion that violates our rules here on Kasama. Please do not do this -- criticize ideas with substance, leave your hostile personal characterizations out.]
mf said
I am sorry that I violated the rules. I got a bit tempered from reading the comments by the Platypus folks.