From anticapitalist2 at yahoo.co.uk Sun Sep 1 13:20:18 2002 From: anticapitalist2 at yahoo.co.uk (=?iso-8859-1?q?Jan=20Pole?=) Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2002 20:20:18 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] But what about human nature ? Message-ID: <20020901192018.16592.qmail@web21203.mail.yahoo.com> The human nature objections to socialism take several forms, but it is almost always other people, and not the objector, who are said to make socialism impossible by being incurably acquisitive or aggressive or whatever. Rarely is the objector himself or herself included among those who have these nasty characteristics. It is claimed that it will be impossible to get people as a whole to work together to their mutual advantage because humans are by nature acquisitive. Each, it is said, will always want to get the better of the other, to grab the lion's share of whatever is going. True this does sometimes happen in capitalism, although there are many examples of people behave differently, even risking their own lives to help others. In socialism there will be much more scope for us to help each other, and no reason for us to act acquisitively. Each will be free to take what they need from the common store, so there will be no point in anyone trying to get more of anything than their neighbour. Such behaviour would not only be unnecessary but also a nuisance. Air is free to all and nobody is stupid enough to try to store any up. the same would apply to things generally in socialism, to which access will be free, each determining their own needs. Anyone storing up much more than they need would be treated sympathetically, perhaps indulged a bit as an eccentric. Then there is the question of whether the alleged aggressive propensity of human nature would make socialism impossible. In his book The Brighter Side of Human Nature Alfie Kohn effectively rebuts the claim that aggressive behaviour is part of human nature: The frequency with which national leaders have to draft their citizens into combat is powerful evidence against the idea that wars reflect natural human aggressiveness There is no evidence from animal behaviour or human psychology to suggest that individuals of any species fight because of spontaneous internal stimulation Assumptions about aggression owe much to images presented by the mass media, controlled by interests who benefit from just such assumptions No circle is more vicious than the one set up by the fallacious assumption that we are unable to control an essentially violent nature Another human nature objection to socialism is that men and women are naturally lazy and will only work if they are forced to by economic or other means. Certainly the profit system encourages workers to get the best price they can for their skills, and to withhold it if the pay is too low or the working conditions too bad. But all the evidence is that healthy human beings are normally active and creative and don't relish sitting around doing nothing for any length of time. In fact studies show that people do their best work when they find it fun or enjoy doing it in the company of others, not when they are in it for the money. Encouraging pro-social behaviour by the use of incentives or other appeals to financial self-interest doesn't work very well or works only in the short run. Capitalism tries to put a price, and to make a market, out of everything, but it also relies heavily on a tacit appeal to people being to helpful to others. The system couldn't operate without a substantial amount of ?free? labour given by unpaid carers, volunteers and ?good citizens?. In socialism all activities will be undertaken because someone or the community needs the product, service or experience that results. An outbreak of mass laziness is far less likely than a temporary shortage of things to do. Then there is the ?stupid? objection to socialism. The mass of people are said to be too ignorant and unteachable to enable any system that doesn't rely on compulsion of some kind to work. It is claimed that either most men and women are incapable of understanding socialism or they would never be able to run society in their own interest. Propagandists for capitalism never tell us that we are too stupid to understand the tortuous arguments that are used, for instance, to prove that the way to preserve peace is to prepare for war. The point is that the will to learn is only actively discouraged when its threat to the continuation to the continuation of the present system becomes apparent. If most people are stupid then they must have leaders. Thus it is said to be human nature for some people to be leaders and others to be followers. The existence of leaders and the led means that only the former have the power to make decisions. But in co-operative enterprises in capitalism, and in socialism generally, the concept of leadership is foreign, since all participants have a common purpose. When you know what you want to do collectively, you may appoint or elect organisers, but you don't need somebody else to lead you to do it. Human nature is strictly what is common to the biological nature of all human beings. It has nothing to do with possession or non-possession of knowledge. The varying capacity to acquire knowledge means nothing more than that some people learn things quicker than others. It does not prove that some are incapable of learning. Socialism will entail a world in which everyone will be encouraged to learn what they wish, for their own interest and pleasure and for the sake of the co-operative community and society in which they live. Jan www.worldsocialism.org __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com From farmelantj at juno.com Tue Sep 3 12:24:38 2002 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2002 14:24:38 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Fw: Critique a socialist journal (from Jim Monaghan) Message-ID: <20020903.143241.-121032791.0.farmelantj@juno.com> I picked up the latest issue of this important journal while in Glasgow recently. I regard Ticktin as amongst those such as Ernest Mandel who are original Marxist theoreticians. I take the liberty of publicising this journal as I consider it important that journals such as this be supported. Jim Monaghan Critique 32-33 ?9.95 or $15.95 Available form Hillel Ticktin ISEES Glasgow University Glasgow G12 0ph Email gkfa at udcf.gla.ac.uk http://www.gla.ac.uk/Inter/CSSTM/ The website could do with updating Contents Hillel Ticktin Why the transition failed? Socialism to klepto-capitalism in the former USSR Jenny Harden Gender issues in Soviet Russia Bob Arnot Small firm development in Russia Christopher Arthur Epitaph for the USSR Hillel Ticktin Theses on the Present crisis Stephen Schwartz The Spanish Civil War in historical context Martin Glaberman and Seymour Faber The continuing relevance of Marx Survey Yassamin Mather and David Mather The Islamic Republic and the Iranian Left Various review articles ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. From 74742.1651 at compuserve.com Wed Sep 4 21:44:00 2002 From: 74742.1651 at compuserve.com (neil) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2002 23:44:00 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Labor day rally/march LA prop -agits Message-ID: <200209042347_MC3-1-EBA-D787@compuserve.com> Spread Workers' Class Struggle Against The Bosses' Offensive! The working class finds itself under increasing attacks by the corporate bosses and their 'democratic' political government. In LA County , health services are being cut to the bone. On August 20, the 'bi-partisan' Demopublican LA Board of Supervisors voted to close down 11 health centers and 4 school based health clinics by Oct. 1 & 360 health workers will be displaced. More cuts are planned and by 1996 , nearly 4,300 more county workers may lose their jobs (LA Times, 8/21/02, Pgs. B1 & B8). The political government is making the cuts to cut expenses & shore-up the declining profit rates of the corporations/banks. This is happening even as the mass of capitalists profits continues to grow. The immediate saving for the rich from the August 20 cuts/layoffs alone will be near $50 million. LAUSD Public School employees and students are also being hammered with cut-backs and lay-offs. The LA school site cuts total over $200 million for the school year that began July 1. Some music teachers and teachers aides (TA's) have been getting fired. Class sizes for grades 4-12 will increase by 8% on average and many teachers may find themselves short of basic supplies like text books, pencils, etc. Classified and Certificated employees alike got zero raise last year , actually then a 6% or 7 % pay cut. Today, many teachers spend nearly $1000/yr. out of their own pockets just to provide basic supplies to students that the Demopublican lieutenants on the school board will not fund. The trade unions have become mediating organs which merely negotiate the terms of your exploitation and no longer fight for the genuine interests of the working class. In capitalism's upswings, the unions once were able to wrest temporary gains in wages, conditions, and benefits. But in periods of crisis, the unions acceptance of capitalism means its "bargaining" has been reduced to zero and even acceptance of mass concessions for the bosses' interests and their promotion of workers sacrificing for capitalism . In addition, the AFL/CIO is a loyal recruiting sergeant for capitalist wars. If workers are to rise up and fight the capitalists offensive, they must build up new organizations/groups of struggle from below, both economic and political. The US government has plans to use the military to break a possible West Coast dockworkers strike if the workers don't bend down to the shipowners demands for huge concessions (LA Times, 8/5/02). This scheme by the 'democratic' US Government shows which side of the class struggle it is really on. The dockworkers union has offered up their 'solution' which includes 600 job cuts and increased production in which workers will work harder for less. The wages system of the rich hides the greatest robbery in history. The fact is that most waged workers create wealth equal to their day's pay by 10:30 a.m., the rest of the day is unpaid labor, wealth created by workers labor power and legally stolen by the bosses. Recently the Chamber of Commerce of the state of New Jersey openly bragged that for every dollar of capital invested there, the exploiters collectively get back nearly $4.50! We workers need to meet on our own initiative and plan real fight back struggles that at the same time can educate and organize us industrially and politically in our own class interests. If we can organize new groups of struggle from below , then with our own workers assemblies and strike committees controlled by the rank and file, we can become not just a class in itself but really a class for itself. New Internationalist /journal of US Workers' Voice/$2/copy Box 57483, Los Angeles, CA 90057 e-mail: 74742.1651 at compuserve.com Aug. 31, 2002 From farmelantj at juno.com Fri Sep 6 04:35:13 2002 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2002 06:35:13 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] In war, some facts less factual (FWD: Christian Science Monitor) Message-ID: <20020906.063515.-119078825.0.farmelantj@juno.com> from the September 06, 2002 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0906/p01s02-wosc.html In war, some facts less factual Some US assertions from the last war on Iraq still appear dubious. By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor MOSCOW - When George H. W. Bush ordered American forces to the Persian Gulf ? to reverse Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait ? part of the administration case was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia. Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid?September that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier. But when the St. Petersburg Times in Florida acquired two commercial Soviet satellite images of the same area, taken at the same time, no Iraqi troops were visible near the Saudi border ? just empty desert. "It was a pretty serious fib," says Jean Heller, the Times journalist who broke the story. The White House is now making its case. to Congress and the public for another invasion of Iraq; President George W. Bush is expected to present specific evidence of the threat posed by Iraq during a speech to the United Nations next week. But past cases of bad intelligence or outright disinformation used to justify war are making experts wary. The questions they are raising, some based on examples from the 1991 Persian Gulf War, highlight the importance of accurate information when a democracy considers military action. "My concern in these situations, always, is that the intelligence that you get is driven by the policy, rather than the policy being driven by the intelligence," says former US Rep. Lee Hamilton (D) of Indiana, a 34-year veteran lawmaker until 1999, who served on numerous foreign affairs and intelligence committees, and is now director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. The Bush team "understands it has not yet carried the burden of persuasion [about an imminent Iraqi threat], so they will look for any kind of evidence to support their premise," Mr. Hamilton says. "I think we have to be skeptical about it." Examining the evidence Shortly before US strikes began in the Gulf War, for example, the St. Petersburg Times asked two experts to examine the satellite images of the Kuwait and Saudi Arabia border area taken in mid-September 1990, a month and a half after the Iraqi invasion. The experts, including a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who specialized in desert warfare, pointed out the US build-up ? jet fighters standing wing-tip to wing-tip at Saudi bases ? but were surprised to see almost no sign of the Iraqis. "That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn't exist," Ms. Heller says. Three times Heller contacted the office of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney (now vice president) for evidence refuting the Times photos or analysis ? offering to hold the story if proven wrong. The official response: "Trust us." To this day, the Pentagon's photographs of the Iraqi troop buildup remain classified. After the war, the House Armed Services Committee issued a report on lessons learned from the Persian Gulf War. It did not specifically look at the early stages of the Iraqi troop buildup in the fall, when the Bush administration was making its case to send American forces. But it did conclude that at the start of the ground war in February, the US faced only 183,000 Iraqi troops, less than half the Pentagon estimate. In 1996, Gen. Colin Powell, who is secretary of state today, told the PBS documentary program Frontline: "The Iraqis may not have been as strong as we thought they were...but that doesn't make a whole lot of difference to me. We put in place a force that would deal with it ? whether they were 300,000, or 500,000." John MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine and author of "Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War," says that considering the number of senior officials shared by both Bush administrations, the American public should bear in mind the lessons of Gulf War propaganda. "These are all the same people who were running it more than 10 years ago," Mr. MacArthur says. "They'll make up just about anything ... to get their way." On Iraq, analysts note that little evidence so far of an imminent threat from Mr. Hussein's weapons of mass destruction has been made public. Critics, including some former United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq, say no such evidence exists. Mr. Bush says he will make his decision to go to war based on the "best" intelligence. "You have to wonder about the quality of that intelligence," says Mr. Hamilton at Woodrow Wilson. "This administration is capable of any lie ... in order to advance its war goal in Iraq," says a US government source in Washington with some two decades of experience in intelligence, who would not be further identified. "It is one of the reasons it doesn't want to have UN weapons inspectors go back in, because they might actually show that the probability of Iraq having [threatening illicit weapons] is much lower than they want us to believe." The roots of modern war propaganda reach back to British World War II stories about German troops bayoneting babies, and can be traced through the Vietnam era and even to US campaigns in Somalia and Kosovo. While the adage has it that "truth is the first casualty of war," senior administration officials say they cherish their credibility, and would not lie. In a press briefing last September, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld noted occasions during World War II when false information about US troop movements was leaked to confuse the enemy. He paraphrased Winston Churchill, saying: "Sometimes the truth is so precious it must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies." But he added that "my fervent hope is that we will be able to manage our affairs in a way that that will never happen. And I am 69 years old and I don't believe it's ever happened that I have lied to the press, and I don't intend to start now." Last fall, the Pentagon secretly created an "Office of Strategic Influence." But when its existence was revealed, the ensuing media storm over reports that it would launch disinformation campaigns prompted its official closure in late February. Commenting on the furor, President Bush pledged that the Pentagon will "tell the American people the truth." Critics familiar with the precedent set in recent decades, however, remain skeptical. They point, for example, to the Office of Public Diplomacy run by the State Department in the 1980s. Using staff detailed from US military "psychological operations" units, it fanned fears about Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista regime with false "intelligence" leaks. Besides placing a number of proContra, antiSandinista stories in the national US media as part of a "White Propaganda" campaign, that office fed the Miami Herald a make-believe story that the Soviet Union had given chemical weapons to the Sandinistas. Another tale ? which happened to emerge the night of President Ronald Reagan's reelection victory ? held that Soviet MiG fighters were on their way to Nicaragua. The office was shut down in 1987, after a report by the US Comptroller-General found that some of their efforts were "prohibited, covert propaganda activities." More recently, in the fall of 1990, members of Congress and the American public were swayed by the tearful testimony of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only as Nayirah. In the girl's testimony before a congressional caucus, well-documented in MacArthur's book "Second Front" and elsewhere, she described how, as a volunteer in a Kuwait maternity ward, she had seen Iraqi troops storm her hospital, steal the incubators, and leave 312 babies "on the cold floor to die." Seven US Senators later referred to the story during debate; the motion for war passed by just five votes. In the weeks after Nayirah spoke, President Bush senior invoked the incident five times, saying that such "ghastly atrocities" were like "Hitler revisited." But just weeks before the US bombing campaign began in January, a few press reports began to raise questions about the validity of the incubator tale. Later, it was learned that Nayirah was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington and had no connection to the Kuwait hospital. She had been coached ? along with the handful of others who would "corroborate" the story ? by senior executives of Hill and Knowlton in Washington, the biggest global PR firm at the time, which had a contract worth more than $10 million with the Kuwaitis to make the case for war. "We didn't know it wasn't true at the time," Brent Scowcroft, Bush's national security adviser, said of the incubator story in a 1995 interview with the London-based Guardian newspaper. He acknowledged "it was useful in mobilizing public opinion." Intelligence as political tool Selective use of intelligence information is not particular to any one presidential team, says former Congressman Hamilton. "This is not a problem unique to George Bush. It's every president I've known, and I've worked with seven or eight of them," Hamilton says. "All, at some time or another, used intelligence to support their political objectives. "Information is power, and the temptation to use information to achieve the results you want is almost overwhelming," he says. "The whole intelligence community knows exactly what the president wants [regarding Iraq], and most are in their jobs because of the president ? certainly the people at the top ? and they will do everything they can to support the policy. "I'm always skeptical about intelligence," adds Hamilton, who has been awarded medallions from both the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. "It's not as pure as the driven snow." ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------- Copyright 2002 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. From farmelantj at juno.com Fri Sep 6 19:20:29 2002 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2002 21:20:29 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Richard Hudelson and Robert Evans critique John McCumbers's *Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era* Message-ID: <20020906.212032.-118955133.0.farmelantj@juno.com> Professors Hudelson and Evans argue in their paper "McCartyhism and Philosophy in the USA: http://frontpage.uwsuper.edu/hudelson/McCarthyism.htm "In his recently published Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era, John McCumber argues that McCarthyism had a deep and lasting impact on academic philosophy in the United States. In outline, McCumber argues that, faced with external political threats, American philosophy retreated from engagement with the world into the safe confines of an a-political analytic philosophy, abandoning "philosophical traditions and approaches that were banished from most American philosophy departments at the time of the McCarthy era." Hudelson and Evans contend that McCumber got it wrong in his interpretation of the effects of the Cold War and McCarthyism on American philosophy. They dispute McCumber's contention that post-WW II anti-communism and McCarthyism was responsible for the triumph of analytical philosophy in the philosophy departments of American Universities, since for one thing, this interpretation is based on a misunderstanding of the political character of American analytical philosophy in general, and of logical empiricism. Like George Reisch (see www.iit.edu/departments/humanities/impact/colloquium/reisch_2001s.html http://pages.ripco.net/~reischg/Hopos_mtl_003.pdf) Hudelson and Evans emphasize the initially leftist and even Marxist character logical empiricism both in its original home in Central Europe and when it was first introduced to the US in the late 1930s. Thus, unlike McCumber, Hudelson and Evans do not associate rivals schools such as continental philosophy or American pragmatism, as being any more predisposed to leftist radicalism, than was the analytical school. And at any rate, they do not believe that the success of analytical philosophy was due primarily to political factors anyway. They argue that by the 1920s, both idealism and pragmatism were in decline, and there were already strong pushes towards developing scientific philosophies (i.e. the critical realist school associated with Ralph Barton Perry, R.W. Sellars, and George Santayana), and for making philosophy itself more like science. These intellectual shifts, helped to prepare the ground for the favorable reception of logical positivism, in the following decade. And as I have already mentioned, they dispute McCumber's contention that analytical philosophy was as a particularly "safe" position for American philosophers to adopt, since many of its early proponents were leftists (i.e. Bertrand Russell, A.J. Ayer) and some among the logical positivists were avowedly Marxist like Otto Neurath. Hudelson and Evans conclude their paper with an addendum on whether Communist philosophers should have been purged from their posts, as many were during the McCarthy era, and which was defended by Sidney Hook. They find Hook's argument which defended the purge on the grounds that membership in the CPUSA was incompatible with the disinterested pursuit of truth that constituted the professional duty of philosophy teachers, to be uncompelling. Their examination of the writings of philosophy professors who had been members of the CPUSA, leads them to conclude that they were just as committed to the pursuit of truth as the rest of their academic colleagues. That in the interest of pursuing truth, a number of the people changed their political allegiances over time. And in any case, Hook was inconsistent in his argument. He never called for the purging of Catholic professors, even though the Catholic Church demanded that its adherents to follow the Church's line on theological and moral issues, and the Church demanded that Catholics who occupied academic positions to conform their teaching to the Church's positions. Of course, probably not many Catholic professors in practice, privileged conformity to the Church's doctrines over the disinterested pursuit of truth. But then again, Hudelson and Evans do not find any evidence that the situation was any different with Communist professors either. Jim Farmelant ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. From farmelantj at juno.com Wed Sep 18 19:09:55 2002 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 21:09:55 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Re: Why Hobsbawm remained a Communist Message-ID: <20020918.213056.1520.1.farmelantj@juno.com> A question of faith When Eric Hobsbawn came to England in the 1930s he became a Marxist and began a distinguished academic career. His new autobiography reveals that at 85 he remains an 'unrepentant communist'. Maya Jaggi on the historian who made us fall in love with history again An orphan in 1930s Germany, Eric Hobsbawm came to England where he became a Marxist and began a distinguished academic career. His books are said to have fuelled the current popularity of history. At 85, he remains an 'unrepentant communist', as his new autobiograhphy reveals. Maya Jaggi reports Saturday September 14, 2002 The Guardian Eric Hobsbawm was a schoolboy in Berlin when Hitler came to power. He knew he stood at a turning-point in history. "It was impossible to remain outside politics," he says. "The months in Berlin made me a lifelong communist." They may also have shaped his moral universe. When asked on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs in 1995 whether he thought the chance of bringing about a communist utopia was worth any sacrifice, he answered "yes". "Even the sacrifice of millions of lives?" he was asked. "That's what we felt when we fought the second world war," he replied. Martin Amis in his new book Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, discussing a perceived "asymmetry of indulgence" in attitudes towards Hitler's crimes and Stalin's Great Terror, characterises Hobsbawm's "yes" as "disgraceful". Interesting Times, Hobsbawm's autobiography, also out this month, offers an insight into the adherence to communism of many of the brightest of his generation, from an "unrepentant communist": Hobsbawm, who joined the party in 1936, remained in it until he let his membership lapse not long before the party's dissolution in 1991. His book - taking its title from the Chinese curse - traces his communist faith in "the most extraordinary and terrible century in human history". "I've never tried to diminish the appalling things that happened in Russia, though the sheer extent of the massacres we didn't realise," says Hobsbawm. "In the early days we knew a new world was being born amid blood and tears and horror: revolution, civil war, famine - we knew of the Volga famine of the early '20s, if not the early '30s. Thanks to the breakdown of the west, we had the illusion that even this brutal, experimental, system was going to work better than the west. It was that or nothing." He says of Stalin's Russia: "These sacrifices were excessive; this should not have happened. In retrospect the project was doomed to failure, though it took a long time to realise this." Yet he appears to argue that some goals are worth any sacrifice. "I lived through the first world war, when 10 million-to 20 million people were killed. At the time, the British, French and Germans believed it was necessary. We disagree. In the second world war, 50 million died. Was the sacrifice worthwhile? I frankly cannot face the idea that it was not. I can't say it would have been better if the world was run by Adolph Hitler." Since coming to Britain in 1933 as a 15-year-old orphan, Hobsbawm has been both influential and controversial, not least as Britain's best known and most enduring Marxist historian. His innovative social history on bandits, revolutionaries and workers inspired a "Hobsbawm generation" of researchers in the 1960s and '70s. His trilogy charting the rise of capitalism - The Age of Revolution (1962), The Age of Capital ('75) and The Age of Empire ('87) - became a defining work of his chosen period, the "long 19th century", from 1789 to 1914. Encylopaedic and determinedly accessible, Hobsbawm has been credited with a hand in history's current popularity. Ben Pimlott, warden of Goldsmiths College, London University, says Hobsbawm - multilingual and steeped in the culture and history of central Europe - "thinks on a grand scale". While Hobsbawm has described history as a process of uncovering the patterns and mechanisms that transform the world, Pimlott says his Marxism has been "a tool not a straitjacket; he's not dialectical or following a party line". According to Stuart Hall, emeritus professor of sociology at the Open University, he is one of few leftwing historians to be "taken seriously by people who disagree with him politically". The Age of Extremes (1994), which was translated into 37 languages, extended Hobsbawm's range into the "short 20th century" almost spanned by his own life, from the first world war to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He sees his autobiography as a "flipside" to The Age of Extremes, being world history "illustrated by the experiences of an individual". Interesting Times also reveals other sides to a man, who, under the pseudonym Francis Newton, was the New Statesman's jazz critic for a decade. His proudest moments were receiving an honorary degree beside Benny Goodman and meeting the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. He disparaged modernism in high art, when the "real revolution", he suggested, lay elsewhere, such as in the movies. Now 85, and professor emeritus at Birkbeck College, London University, Hobsbawm lives in Hampstead, on the slopes of Parliament Hill, with his second wife, Marlene, a recently retired music teacher and writer. They also have a cottage in Wales "between the Hay-on-Wye literary festival and the Brecon jazz festival", where, according to the biographer Claire Tomalin, "they reproduce the urban intelligentsia in a Welsh wilderness". The couple have a "social circle of immense variety", says Roy Foster, a former colleague at Birkbeck. "Eric's a European intellectual; he doesn't allow ideology to infect the ordinary relations of life." While some find Hobsbawm cold and imperious, for Pimlott he has a great serenity. Peripatetic as a displaced child then as an academic, Hobsbawm speaks German, French, Spanish and Italian fluently, and reads Dutch, Portuguese and Catalan. His reputation is arguably even greater abroad. Official recognition came slowly in Britain, where he was made a Companion of Honour in 1998. Hobsbawm insists that "whatever I've achieved has been with minimum, or no, concessions". He was born in Alexandria in 1917. His British father, Leopold Percy Hobsbaum (a clerical error altered Eric's surname), was the son of a cabinet-maker from London's East End who had migrated from Russian Poland in the 1870s. Eric's mother, Nelly Gr?n, was the daughter of a "moderately prosperous Viennese jeweller". She met Leopold in 1913 in Egypt, a British protectorate, and they married in neutral Switzerland in 1915, but were unable to live in either country until the first world war ended. His parents moved to Vienna when Eric was two, and continued to speak English at home. Both died during the Depression, his father of a heart attack at the age of 48, when Eric was 11, and his mother of lung disease two years later, at 36. In the interim, the family was destitute. Eric, whose only sibling, Nancy, was two years younger, worked as an English tutor, then a male au pair, while the social insurance of "Red Vienna" paid his mother's medical bills. Hobsbawm remembers little of his father, a tradesman and amateur boxer. "I must have made a conscious effort to forget," he says. His insecure childhood, he believes, made him "more self-contained, unwilling to open out", as well as hard-headed: "not having illusions - facing the situation without trying to kid oneself". His maternal aunt Gretl and paternal uncle Sidney married, and after Eric's mother died, he and Nancy lived with them and their son Peter, in Berlin, where Sidney worked for Hollywood's Universal Films. Arriving in 1931, "as the world economy collapsed", Eric joined the Socialist Schoolboys. "In Germany there wasn't any alternative left. Liberalism was failing. If I'd been German and not a Jew, I could see I might have become a Nazi, a German nationalist. I could see how they'd become passionate about saving the nation. It was a time when you didn't believe there was a future unless the world was fundamentally transformed." He had grown up in an "entirely unobservant" Jewish household, though he recalls his mother's injunction never to do "anything that suggests you're ashamed of being a Jew". In Israel later, "people didn't see this as as sufficient basis for Jewishness, but it is". He was known at school as "der Engl?nder", an identity which he believes shielded him from overt anti-Semitism. It also immunised him - a lifelong anti-Zionist - against the "temptations" of Jewish nationalism. In March 1933 the family regrouped in London - not, he insists, as refugees. Isolated and bored, he retreated into "hot jazz" and the library near his Marylebone grammar school, reading English poetry and The Communist Manifesto, and keeping voluminous diaries in German. In these he listed the basis of his communism as a sense of "mass ecstasy"; "pity for the exploited"; the "aesthetic appeal of a perfect and comprehensive intellectual system - dialectical materialism"; a "Blakean vision of the new Jerusalem"; and "intellectual anti-philistinism". He joined the Communist party while at King's College, Cambridge, in 1936-39, though he speculates that his overt politics precluded any Soviet efforts to recruit him as one of the Cambridge spies - Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt. He edited the student weekly, Granta, and joined the Apostles, a university secret society which had previously counted Burgess, Philby et al as members. Vacations were partly spent in France, where he lost his virginity in a Paris brothel. "It's just what young men did," he says. Weeks before finals in 1939 (he took a starred first), his remaining family emigrated to Chile. His sister, who died some 10 years ago, later married a naval officer and became, he says, a "conventional Anglican country matron and Conservative Party activist in Worcestershire". After the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin, Hobsbawm followed the party line that the western powers were more interested in defeating communism than in fighting Hitler, until the German invasion of France in 1940, when he realised the party line was "absolutely useless". He held it until the German attack on Russia in 1941. Called up in February 1940, Hobsbawm had an "empty war" in Britain, first with the Royal Engineers, then the Educational Corps. Despite speaking German, he was turned down for intelligence work, whether owing to his party membership or his mother's nationality. In 1943 he married Muriel Seaman, a "very attractive LSE communist girl" who became a senior civil servant. "For 20 years my intimate relationships would invariably be with communists," he says. Their divorce in 1951 left him wounded. "We separated in nasty circumstances: she went off with another man." They never saw each other again, and the new couple died in a car crash in Portugal 10 years later. Hobsbawm had a son, Joshua, by a married woman, who opted to remain with her husband. Joshua works in schools drama, as a writer and teacher. Hobsbawm returned to Cambridge in 1947 to do a PhD on the Fabian Society, and was a fellow of King's in 1949-55. He became a lecturer at Birkbeck in 1947, fortunate in getting in "under the wire" before the cold war slammed the door on further Communist appointments. He was then rejected by a succession of Oxbridge colleges, and despite a growing international reputation, became a professor of history at Birkbeck only in 1970. It was 1959 before he published his first major work, Primitive Rebels - about banditry - alongside his collection The Jazz Scene. Yet while the cold war delayed his career, there was no purge. While teaching evening classes at Birkbeck, he reviewed jazz for the New Statesman and Nation, thinking he could more than match Kingsley Amis in the Spectator. From a Bloomsbury flat he led a late-night lifestyle, sharing the jazz scene of Colin MacInnes, George Melly and Francis Bacon and becoming drawn into protests against the 1958 Notting Hill riots. Hobsbawm was a member of the Communist party historians' group of 1946-56, which included EP Thompson and Christopher Hill, and in 1952 he co-founded the influential journal, Past and Present, whose contributors included many non-Marxists. They pioneered social history from the "bottom up". For Roy Foster, Hobsbawm "brought British social and labour history into an intellectually exciting and European-influenced sphere, bringing in culture from Romantic music to the role of the flat cap and fish and chips in working-class consciousness. At the same time he was writing about Sicilian bandits and Chicago gangsters." Unlike fellow British Marxist historians, Hobsbawm took an international approach, in such works as Industry and Empire (1968). In 1954 he paid the first of only two visits to the Soviet Union , finding a "dispiriting" absence of intellectuals. The year 1956, with Khrushchev's speech on Stalin's crimes to the 20th party congress and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, destroyed the international communist movement, says Hobsbawm. Yet despite the droves quitting the party - including many Marxist historians, such as EP Thompson - Hobsbawm weathered the "intolerable tensions". He recalls being repelled by the idea of being in the company of those ex-members who turned into fanatical anti-communists and describes keeping faith with fallen anti-fascist heroes, "because the movement bred such men and women". Perhaps most crucially, he writes: "I did not come into communism as a young Briton in England but as a central European in the collapsing Weimar Republic." Hobsbawm's decision to stay in the party continues to puzzle even his sympathisers. Yet the writer and journalist Neal Ascherson, a student of his at Cambridge in the early 1950s who became a friend, recalls Hobsbawm being "in great distress and finding it difficult to talk... He said that you could achieve more by criticising from within." Hobsbawm signed a historians' letter of protest against the Soviet invasion of Hungary and was passionately in favour of the Prague spring, arguing against the "tankies" who backed its crushing by the Soviets in 1968. Yet he remained in the party, "recycling" himself from militant to fellow traveller, and resigning himself to interpreting the world, rather than actively changing it. Pimlott says Hobsbawm remained a member when it was deeply unfashionable and limiting; "he couldn't travel freely to the US. There was sacrifice in his position." Hobsbawm remained friends with many who did leave. Robin Blackburn, former editor of the New Left Review, for which he wrote, says, "I doubt he had many illusions about the Soviet Union after 1956; he was more hard-headed than many others." "The [British] party criticised Moscow like mad from 1968," says Hobsbawm. "Those of us in Britain and elsewhere weren't in it because of anything happening in the Soviet Union, but because of things we wanted to happen in Britain and elsewhere." Yet he writes: "I belonged to the generation tied by an unbreakable umbilical cord to hope of the world revolution and of its original home, the October Revolution, however sceptical or critical of the USSR." Hobsbawm was prolific, with Bandits (1969) and Revolutionaries (1973). He co-authored Captain Swing (1969) on the English agrarian uprising of 1830 and reopened the "standard of living debate" by challenging labour historians who claimed industrialisation was benign for 19th-century workers. He says, "These aren't my people, and I'm not like them. But there was sympathy, because these were the poor trying to come to terms with social injustice. You can't be against social injustice unless you're for the poor." His grander scale work began when George (now Lord) Weidenfeld commissioned The Age of Revolution for ?500 in 1958, initiating what grew, unexpectedly, into the trilogy. He married the Viennese-born Marlene Schwarz in 1962. "She brought me a lot more happiness than I expected," he says. He traversed South America and visited Castro's Cuba, though sceptical of the Guevarist guerrilla strategy. He wrote about music in Havana's black barrios but the rock-and-roll revolution eluded him (he attributed its appeal to "infantilism"). He has avowedly never worn blue jeans. In the 1960s he was visiting professor at Stanford, then MIT, having to apply each time for exceptions to the US ban on communists. In Paris in 1968, Hobsbawm found the events welcome "and puzzling to middle-aged leftwingers". He was enthusiastic yet critical of the limitations of protests. "I misunderstood the historical significance of the 1960s," he says. "It wasn't a political or social revolution. It was more a spiritual equivalent of a consumer society - everybody doing their own thing. I'm not certain I welcome this." Another movement which some claim has eluded him is feminism. "His unwillingness to take seriously the research and concerns of women historians pissed off a whole generation of feminists in his profession in the '70s and '80s," says Harriet Jones, director of the Institute of Contemporary British History at London University. She senses a possible change of heart, however. "It's interesting that he has now identified women's history in the Communist party as one of the key gaps in 20th-century British politics." Hobsbawm espoused Italian Eurocommunism, which distanced itself from Moscow (he found its late guru Gramsci "marvellously stimulating"). He also played a controversial role in the emergence of New Labour in Britain, having canvassed for the Labour party in 1945 ("If there was anything to be done in this country we knew it would be through the Labour party"). His Marx memorial lecture in 1978, The Forward March of Labour Halted? pointed to the inadequacy of Old Labour in the face of social and economic changes. Dubbed "Kinnock's guru", Hobsbawm reveals that he was depressed about "[Kinnock's] potential as a future prime minister". Hobsbawm has since criticised New Labour for going "much too far in accepting the logic of the free market", and been disparaged in turn as an out-of-touch "special intellectual" by the Number 10 adviser Geoff Mulgan, in 1998. Hobsbawm says: "While I share people's disappointment in Blair, it's better to have a Labour government than not." His daughter, Julia Hobsbawm, a proponent of "ethical PR", was a fund-raising consultant for the Labour party before the 1992 election, then co-founded a public relations company with Sarah Macaulay (now married to Gordon Brown) in 1993, though they ended the business partnership last year. Hobsbawm's son, Andy, is an executive for an American internet advertising firm. Neither has a degree. "It's very tough on kids to have a father who's an academic and known to be good at it," Hobsbawm says. "It's something to live up to." Hobsbawm turned a sceptical eye on nationalism in the ground-breaking co-edited book The Invention of Tradition (1983), and in Nations and Nationalism (1990). For Tony Judt, director of the Remarque Institute at New York University, Hobsbawm's tendency to disparage any nationalist movement as passing and irrational weakens his grasp of parts of the 20th century. In Ascherson's view "Eric's Jewishness increased his sensitivity about nationalism. He's the original happy cosmopolitan, who's benefited from being able to move freely." After retiring from Birkbeck in 1982, Hobsbawm began a "seasonal commute" to teach a semester a year at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, until 1997. Hobsbawm says he felt relief at the fall of the Berlin Wall, though he sees conditions in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union as an "unbelievable economic and social tragedy". In his new book he declares that Communism is dead. Looking back, he says, "starting in Russia, this system would not and could not have worked". But he still believes that asking Marxist questions is the way to understand the world - to tackle the big questions, to fit things together into a pattern , "even if it may not be the right pattern". He adds: "I used to believe you could predict the direction in which history goes. But contingency is clearly more important than we used to allow." Hobsbawm felt freed by the end of the Soviet experiment to write the history of his own century. He had avoided what he saw as a choice between being denounced "as a heretic" for openly countering the party line or compromising "my conscience as an academic". The Age of Extremes involved the greatest test of his own objectivity, though it is also one his most highly praised books. Judt argues that on the two great issues of the 20th century, "Eric's political stance has prevented his achieving the analytical distance he does on the 19th century: he isn't as interesting on the Russian revolution because he can't free himself completely from the optimistic vision of earlier years. For the same reason he's not that good on fascism." Hobsbawm, Judt says, "clings to a pernicious illusion of the late Enlightenment: that if one can promise a benevolent outcome it would be worth the human cost. But one of the great lessons of the 20th century is that it's not true. For such a clear-headed writer, he appears blind to the sheer scale of the price paid. I find it tragic, rather than disgraceful." Many see Hobsbawm's failed faith as setting the pessimistic tone of The Age of Extremes, with its insistence on the built-in defects of capitalism. He also believes the collapse of a rival superpower has ended half a century of stability. Of the current "war on terrorism" he says, "There's no enemy; it's an occasion for America to assert global hegemony. There's no difficulty about winning battles, but what you do afterwards is what counts. The world cannot be recolonised." While some might seek a mea culpa in his autobiography, Hobsbawm writes that he seeks "historical understanding... not agreement, approval or sympathy". In Ascherson's view, "Eric is not a man for apologising or feeling guilty. He does feel bad about the appalling waste of lives in Soviet communism. But he refuses to acknowledge that he regrets anything. He's not that kind of person." "I look back in amazement rather than regret," says Hobsbawm, "that not only I but humanity have made it through the past hundred-odd years." Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm Born: June 9 1917; Alexandria, Egypt Education: S chools in Vienna; Prinz Heinrich Gymnasium, Berlin; St Marylebone Grammar School, London; King's College, Cambridge (BA, PhD). Married: 1943-51 Muriel Seaman; '62- Marlene Schwarz (one son, Andy; one daughter, Julia). Career: Birkbeck College, London University: 1947 lecturer, '59 reader, '70-82 professor, '82- Emeritus professor of history; King's College, Cambridge: '49-55 Fellow; New School for Social Research New York: '84-97 visiting professor. Some books: 1959 Primitive Rebels; The Jazz Scene (as Francis Newton); '62 The Age of Revolution; '64 Labouring Men; '68 Industry and Empire; '69 Captain Swing; Bandits; '73 Revolutionaries; '75 The Age of Capital; '78 History of Marxism; '83 co-ed The Invention of Tradition; '84 Workers; '87 The Age of Empire; '90 Nations and Nationalism; Echoes of the Marseillaise; '94 The Age of Extremes; '97 On History; '98 Uncommon People; '99 The New Century; 2002 Interesting Times . Some honours: 1973 Honorary Fellow, King's College, Cambridge; '78 Fellow of the British Academy; '98 Companion of Honour. ? Interesting Times is published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press on September 30, price ?20.00. To order a copy for ?17 plus p&p call the Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. ~~~~~~~ PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message. ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. From farmelantj at juno.com Wed Sep 18 19:09:06 2002 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 21:09:06 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Why Hobsbawm remained a Communist Message-ID: <20020918.213056.1520.0.farmelantj@juno.com> New Statesman, September 16, 2002 The day when heaven was falling; Eric Hobsbawm saw the October revolution as the central reference point of the political universe. In this exclusive extract from his memoirs, he explains why, even when the crimes of Stalin were exposed, he could not bring himself to break with the Communist Party Eric Hobsbawm I am among the relatively few inhabitants of the world outside what used to be the USSR who have actually seen Stalin in the flesh. Admittedly, he was no longer alive but in a glass case in the great mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square: a small man who seemed even smaller than he actually was (about 5ft 3ins), by contrast with the awe-inspiring aura of autocratic power that surrounded him even in death. Unlike Lenin, who is still on view, Stalin was displayed only from his death in 1953 until 1961. When I saw him in December 1954, he still towered over his country and the world communist movement. As yet he had no effective successor, although Nikita Khrushchev, who inaugurated 'destalinisation' not many months later, was already occupying the post of general secretary and getting ready to elbow his rivals aside. However, we knew nothing of what was happening behind the scenes in Moscow. 'We' were four members of the Historians' Group of the British Communist Party invited by the Soviet Academy of Sciences during the Christmas vacation of 1954-55: Christopher Hill, already well known as a historian of the English revolution; the Byzantinist Robert Browning; myself; and the freelance scholar Leslie (A L) Morton, whose People's History of England enjoyed the official imprimatur of the Soviet authorities. Two of us knew Russian - Hill, who had spent a year in the USSR in the mid-1930s and had friends there, and the apparently almost accentless Browning. Nevertheless, the USSR was not then a place given to informal communication with foreigners. Outside buildings, our feet were barely allowed to touch the ground. As intellectual VIPs, we were treated to more culture than most visiting foreigners, as well as to an embarrassing share of products and privileges in a visibly impoverished country. We would, for instance, be whisked straight off the famous Red Arrow Moscow-Leningrad overnight train, to a matinee children's performance of Swan Lake at the Kirov, where we were installed in the director's box. After the performance, the prima ballerina - I think it was Alla Shelest - was brought straight from the stage, still sweating, to be presented to us, four foreigners of no particular importance who found themselves momentarily in the location of power. Almost half a century later, I still feel a sense of curious shame at the memory of her curtsy to us, as the children of Leningrad prepared to go home and the (overwhelmingly Jewish) musicians filed out of the orchestra pit. It was not a good advertisement for communism. But of Russia and Russian life we saw little except the middle-aged women, presumably war widows, hauling stones and clearing rubble from the wintry streets. What is more, even the intellectual's basic resource, 'looking it up', was not available. There were no telephone directories, no maps, no public timetables, no basic means of everyday reference. One was struck by the sheer impracticality of a society in which an almost paranoiac fear of espionage turned the information needed for everyday life into a state secret. In short, there was not much to be learned about Russia by visiting it in 1954 that could not have been learned outside. Still, there was something. There was the evident arbitrariness and unpredictability of its arrangements. There was the astonishing achievement of the Moscow metro, built in the iron era of the 1930s under one of the legendary 'hard men' of Stalinism, Lazar Kaganovich; a dream of a future city of palaces for a hungry and pauperised present, but a modern underground which worked - and, I am told, still does - like clockwork. There was the basic difference between the Russians who took decisions and the ones who did not - as we joked among ourselves, they could be recognised by their hair. The ones who took action had hair that stood up on their heads, or had fallen out with the effort; the ones who didn't could be recognised by the lankness above their foreheads. There was the extraordinary spectacle of an intellectual society barely a generation from the ancient peasantry. I recall the New Year's Eve party at the scientists' club in Moscow. Between the usual toasts to peace and friendship, someone suggested a contest in remembering proverbs - not just any old saws, but proverbs or phrases about sharp things, such as 'a stitch in time saves nine' (needles) or 'burying the hatchet'. The joint resources of Britain were soon exhausted, but the Russian contestants, all of them established research scientists, went on confronting each other with village wisdom about knives, axes, sickles and sharp or cutting implements until the contest had to be stopped. That, after all, was what they brought with them from the illiterate villages in which so many of them had been born. Yet we met hardly anyone there like ourselves. Unlike the 'people's democracies' and 'really existing socialisms' of the rest of Europe, where communists came from persecution to power at the end of the war, in the USSR we found ourselves in a country long governed by the Communist Party, in which having a career implied being a member of that Party, or at least conforming to its requirements and official statements. Probably some we met were convinced as well as loyal communists, but theirs was an inward-looking Soviet conviction rather than an ecumenical one. We would probably have had more in common with some we asked to meet but who were 'unfortunately prevented from coming to Moscow by problems of health', 'temporarily absent in Gorki' or not yet returned from the camps. But among those we did meet, it was much easier to sense what the 'great patriotic war' meant to them, privately and emotionally, than what communism meant. At all events I am certain that, standing by the Finland Station in the marvellous winter light of that miraculous city I shall never get used to calling St Petersburg, what we thought about the October revolution was not the same as what our guides from the Leningrad branch of the Academy of Sciences thought. I returned from Moscow politically unchanged if depressed, and without any desire to go there again. I did return but only fleetingly, in 1970 for a world historical congress, and in the last years of the USSR for brief tourist excursions from Helsinki, where I spent several summers at a UN research institute. The trip to the USSR in 1953-54 was my first contact with the countries of what was later called 'really existing socialism': my visit to the 1947 World Youth Festival in Prague occurred before the Party had taken full power in the new 'people's democracies'. Indeed, in Czechoslovakia it had just emerged, with 40 per cent, as by far the largest party in a genuine multiparty general election. I made direct contact with the other socialist countries only after the 20th congress of the Soviet CP which inaugurated the global crisis of the communist movement. There are two 'ten days that shook the world' in the history of the revolutionary movement of the 20th century: the days of the October revolution, described in John Reed's book of that title, and the 20th congress (14-25 February 1956). I cannot think of any comparable events in the history of any major ideological or political movement. To put it in the simplest terms, the October revolution created a world communist movement: the 20th congress destroyed it. The world communist movement had been constructed, on Leninist lines, as a single disciplined army dedicated to the transformation of the world under a centralised command situated in the only state where 'the proletariat' had taken power. It became a movement of global significance only because it was linked to the USSR, which became the country that tore the guts out of Nazi Germany and emerged from the war as a superpower. The victory of the cause in other countries, and the liberation of the colonial and semi-colonial world, depended on the USSR's support and on its sometimes reluctant, but real, protection. Whatever its weaknesses, its very existence proved that socialism was more than a dream. And the passionate anti-communism of the cold war crusaders, who saw communists exclusively as agents of Moscow, welded those communists more firmly to the USSR. Throughout the world, communist parties absorbed or eliminated other brands of social revolutionaries. Though the Communist Universal Church gave rise to one set after another of schismatics and heretics, none of the rebel groups it shed, expelled or killed had ever succeeded in establishing itself more than locally as a rival, until Tito did so in 1948 - but then, unlike any of the others, he was already head of a revolutionary state. The joint strength of the three rival Trotskyite groups in Britain, it has been estimated, was fewer than 100 persons as 1956 began. Since 1933, the CP had virtually cornered Marxist theory, largely through the Soviets' zeal for the distribution of the works of the 'classics'. It had become increasingly clear that, for Marxists, 'the Party' - wherever they lived, and with all their possible reservations - was the only game in town. The great French classicist J P Vernant, a communist before the war, broke with the Party when he defied its line by immediately joining the Gaullist resistance. But he rejoined the Party after the war, because he remained a revolutionary. Where else could he go? The late Isaac Deutscher, the biographer of Trotsky, but in his heart a frustrated political leader, said to me, when I first met him at the peak of the communist crisis of 1956-57: 'Whatever you do, don't leave the Communist Party. I let myself be expelled in 1932 and have regretted it ever since.' Unlike me, he never reconciled himself to the truth that his political significance rested entirely on his being a writer. After all, it was the business of communists to change the world, not merely to interpret. Why did Khrushchev's uncompromising denunciation of Stalin destroy the global solidarity of communists with Moscow? After all, destalinisation had been advancing steadily for more than two years, even though other Communist Parties resented the Soviet habit of suddenly, and without previous information, confronting them with the need to justify some unexpected reversal of policy. (In 1955, Khrushchev's reconciliation with Tito particularly exasperated comrades who, seven years earlier, had been forced to hail his excommunication from the True Church.) Indeed, until Khrushchev's speech was leaked to a wider public, the 20th congress looked simply like another, admittedly rather larger, step away from the Stalin era. We must distinguish here between its impact on the leadership of Communist Parties, especially those who already governed states, and on the communist rank and file. Both had accepted the mandatory obligations of 'democratic centralism', which had quietly dropped what measure of democracy it might originally have contained. And all of them, except perhaps the Chinese CP, accepted Moscow as the commander of the disciplined army of world communism in the global cold war. Both shared the extraordinary, genuine and unforced admiration for Stalin as the leader and embodiment of the cause; both unquestionably felt grief and personal loss at his death in 1953. While this was natural enough for the rank and file, for whom he was a remote image of poor people's triumph and liberation - 'the fellow with the big moustache' who might still come one day to get rid of the rich once and for all - it was undoubtedly shared by hard-bitten leaders such as Palmiro Togliatti, who knew the terrible dictator at close quarters, and even by his victims. Molotov remained loyal to him for 33 years after his death, though in his last paranoiac years Stalin had forced him to divorce his wife, had her arrested, interrogated and exiled, and was plainly preparing Molotov himself for a show trial. Ana Pauker, of the Comintern and Romania, wept when she heard of Stalin's death, even though she had not liked him, had indeed been afraid of him, and was at the time being prepared to be thrown to the wolves as an alleged bourgeois nationalist, an agent of President Truman and Zionism. ('Don't cry,' said her interrogator. 'If Stalin were still alive you'd be dead.') No wonder that Khrushchev's impassioned attack on his record, and on the 'cult of personality', sent shock waves through the international communist movement. On the other hand, much as their leaders admired Stalin and accepted the 'guiding role' of the Soviet Party, Communist Parties, in or out of power, were neither 'monolithic', in the Stalinist phrase, nor simple executive agents of Soviet policy. And since at least 1947 they had been told by Moscow to do things, often politically prejudicial, which they would never have done themselves. While Stalin lived, and the Moscow leadership and power remained 'monolithic', that was the end of it. Destalinisation reopened closed options, especially as the men in the Kremlin patently lacked the old authority, and still faced strong opposition from the old Stalinists. Moscow was (briefly) no longer under monolithic rule. The cracks in the region under Soviet control could now open. Within a few months of the 20th congress they did so, visibly, in Poland and Hungary. And this in turn aggravated the crises within the non-governmental Communist Parties. What disturbed the mass of their members was that the ruthless denunciation of Stalin's misdeeds came not from 'the bourgeois press', whose stories, if read at all, could be rejected a priori as slanders and lies, but from Moscow itself. It was impossible not to take notice of it, but also impossible to know what loyal believers should make of it. Even those who had strong suspicions, amounting to moral certainty, for years before Khrushchev spoke, were shocked at the extent of Stalin's murders of communists. (The Khrushchev report said nothing about the others.) Nevertheless, at the start of 1956 no leadership of any non-state Communist Party seriously thought that destalinisation implied a fundamental revision of its role, objectives and history. Nor did the leaders expect major troubles from their members, who had resisted the propaganda of the cold warriors for ten years. Yet probably because of their very confidence, this time they failed to carry a substantial part of the membership with them. Why? Because we had not been told the truth about something that had to affect the very nature of a communist's belief. Moreover, we could see that the leaders would have preferred us not to know the truth - they concealed it until Khrushchev's off-the-record speech had been leaked to the non-communist press - and they manifestly wanted to bring any discussion about it to a close as soon as possible. When the crisis broke out in Poland and Hungary the leaders went on concealing what our own journalists reported. One could understand why as Party organisers they might find this convenient, but it was neither Marxism nor genuine politics. When the familiar call to unswerving loyalty failed, their immediate instinct was to blame the unfortunate vacillations of those well-known elements of instability and weakness, petty-bourgeois intellectuals. When the leadership re-established itself in 1957, after fending off an outburst of open opposition without precedent, the British Communist Party had lost a quarter of its members, a third of the staff of its newspaper, the Daily Worker, and probably the bulk of what remained of the generation of communist intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s. It also lost several of its leading trade unionists, though it rapidly regained its industrial influence, which reached its peak in the 1970s and early 1980s. It is difficult to reconstruct not only the mood but the memory of that traumatic year, rising, through a succession of lesser crises, to the Soviet army's reconquest of Hungary, and then stumbling and wrestling to an exhausted defeat through months of doomed and feverish argument. Arnold Wesker's play Chicken Soup with Barley, about a Jewish working-class family struggling with its communist faith, gives a good idea of what has been called 'the pain of losing it and the pain of clinging to it'. Even after practically half a century, my throat contracts as I recall the almost intolerable tensions under which we lived month after month, the unending moments of decision about what to say and do on which our future lives seemed to depend, the friends now clinging together or facing one another bitterly as adversaries, the sense of lurching, unwillingly but irreversibly, down the scree towards the fatal rock face. And this while all of us, except a handful of full-time Party workers, had to go on, as though nothing much had happened, with lives and jobs outside which temporarily seemed unwanted distractions from the enormous thing that dominated our days and nights. 1956 was a dramatic year in British politics, but in the memory of those who were then communists, everything else has faded. We mobilised against the Eden government over the Suez crisis, but Suez did not keep us from sleeping. For more than a year, British communists lived on the edge of the political equivalent of a collective nervous breakdown. Unlike most of my friends in the Historians' Group, I remained in the CP. Yet my situation as a man cut loose from his political moorings was not substantially different from theirs, and I maintained my relations with them, though the Party asked me not to. The Party chose not to expel me, but that was its choice, not mine. Party membership no longer meant to me what it had since 1933. In practice, I recycled myself from militant to sympathiser to fellow-traveller or, to put it another way, from effective membership of the British CP to spiritual membership of the Italian CP, which fitted my ideas of communism rather better. In any case, our individual political activities no longer mattered much. We had influence as teachers, as scholars, as political writers or, at best, 'public intellectuals', and for this - at least in Britain - our membership of party or organisation was irrelevant. If we had influence among the left-wing young, it was because our left-wing past and our present Marxism or commitment to radical scholarship gave us what is today called 'street cred', because we wrote about important matters and because they liked what we wrote. So why did I remain in the Party, albeit as a dissident? I think two things explain it. First, I came into communism as a central European in the collapsing Weimar Republic. And I came into it when being a communist meant not simply fighting fascism but the world revolution. I belong to the tail-end of the first generation of communists, for whom the October revolution was the central point of reference in the political universe. No intellectual brought up in Britain could become a communist with the same sense as a central European 'in the day when heaven was falling/The hour when earth's foundations fled' because, with all its problems, this was simply not the situation in the Britain of the 1930s. Politically, having joined a Communist Party in 1936, I belong to the era of anti-fascist unity and the Popular Front. It continues to determine my strategic thinking in politics to this day. But emotionally, as one converted as a teenager in the Berlin of 1932, I belonged to a generation tied by an almost unbreakable umbilical cord to hope of the world revolution , and of its original home, the October revolution, however sceptical or critical of the USSR. For someone who joined the movement where I came from and when I did, it was quite simply more difficult to break with the Party than for those who came later and from elsewhere. But the second reason was pride. Losing the handicap of Party membership would improve my career prospects, not least in the USA. It would have been easy to slip out quietly. But I could prove myself to myself by succeeding as a known communist - whatever 'success' meant - in spite of that handicap, and in the middle of the cold war. I do not defend this form of egoism, but neither can I deny its force. So I stayed. ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. From farmelantj at juno.com Wed Sep 18 19:30:45 2002 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 21:30:45 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Fw: Science & Society - Sidney Resnick on"harold Cruise's Attack on Jewish Communists: A Comment" Message-ID: <20020918.213056.1520.2.farmelantj@juno.com> HAROLD CRUSE?S ATTACK ON JEWISH COMMUNISTS: COMMENT I wish to comment on the section of Professor Alan Wald?s article (Wald, 2000- 2001) that dealt with Harold Cruse? s views on Jews and Jewish Communists as set forth in Cruse? s 1967 book, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. Wald deserves much credit for venturing, as he says, into ?the specificities HAROLD CRUSE?S ATTACK ON JEWISH COMMUNISTS 393 Science & Society, Vol. 66, No. 3, Fall 2002, 393-400 of [Cruse? s] treatment of Jewish Communists in Crisis [which] have never been discussed (407). On the whole I thought that Wald? s comments on and refutations of Cruse?s attacks on the Jewish Communist spokesmen Mike Gold, Herbert Aptheker, James Allen and V. J. Jerome were appropriate, though unnecessarily restrained or overly polite. Unfortunately, Wald did not confront directly a more odious charge that Cruse made against Jews in the Communist Party: that they used the party to promote Jewish ethnic group interests while they limited the struggle for Black demands. I believe that in his book Cruse reveals himself as an obsessive anti- Semite. Almost every reference to Jews is negative. He sees Jewish Communists as "devious" persons who misled African American Communists into devoting themselves to white-led integration efforts and to avoid creating independent Black cultural organizations and businesses that he advocated to advance the struggle of the Negro people. Cruse attributes to these few Jewish Communists a malignant power over Black intellectuals that was ludicrously out of proportion to anything they could have effected had they even wanted to. Yet Wald is in most instances unduly protective of Cruse even when criticizing him, and sees Cruse as an intellectual who is "exceptionally thoughtful" (410). I believe this accolade is unwarranted. Wald begins his essay with a quotation from Cruse?s book which reads: "The radical Left of the 1940s and 1950s was not a movement of Anglo-Saxons or their ideology. It was an ethnic movement dominated by Negroes and Jews, and it was the Jews who ideologically influenced the Negroes." In my opinion this is a completely false picture of what the radical left movement (here Cruse means the Communist Party) was like in those years. It was not organized to be a movement of Anglo-Saxons or their ideology. This movement was not "dominated" by Negroes and Jews though it had leaders who were Negroes and Jews along with others of different ethnic origins, including "Anglo-Saxons." In passing it may be said that the participation of Jews in the movement at the time was numerically very much larger than that of African Americans. I showed Cruse?s quotation to several friends who were active in the broader left movement or the CP at the time, and none of them thought that Cruse?s description of it was like anything they remembered or recognized. Yet this statement is indicative of the tone and direction of much else in Cruse? s book. One example of Wald? s restrained treatment of Cruse is this passage from Cruse?s book and Wald? s comment on it (409). At one point Cruse contends that only "Negro revolutionaries" and not Jewish Communists were capable of "Americanizing Marxism." "The Jews . . . with their nationalistic aggressiveness, emerging out of Eastside ghettoes . . . demonstrate(d) through Marxism their intellectual superiority over the Anglo-Saxon goyim. . . . The Jews failed to make Marxism applicable to anything in America but their own national-group social ambitions or individual self-elevation. As a result the great brainwashing of the Negro radical intelligentsia was not achieved by capitalism . . . but by Jewish intellectuals in the American Communist Party." (Cruse, 1967, 158.) Wald does acknowledge that in this statement Cruse, "the prisoner of `group caricature,? runs roughshod over elemental facts." But what are these elemental facts? Wald informs us that three of the Jews Cruse apparently had in mind (Herbert Aptheker, James Allen and V. J. Jerome) are not from the "Eastside ghettos" at all! Instead, they "hailed from backgrounds and upbringings remote from `Eastside ghettos?"! Indeed, they came from upper middle class backgrounds, they went to universities and won doctorates! Would these facts impress the anti-Semite Cruse and besides, what is wrong with having been born on the East Side of New York? Wald also does not challenge Cruse?s disgraceful claim that the Jewish Communists acted solely on behalf of "their own national-group social ambitions," that is Jewish group ambitions, of course, and not because of their desire to see Communist ideas become more popular in the United States. One is thus reminded that just as there are some non-Jews who when they see a Jew will immediately assume that he is ?rich,? so Cruse assumed that every Jew in the party was using it to advance the interests of the Jewish ethnic group and never mind the class struggle or socialism. As it happens, the group of Jewish Communists named and defined by Cruse as "assimilated" were the very people who were least likely to be much concerned with "their own national-group social ambitions." For the most part they were disconnected from and not especially interested in Jewish concerns, and had no relations with the Communist-oriented Yiddish or Jewish organizations that existed then. Herbert Aptheker did become quite involved for a time with some Jewish issues when he assumed the editorship of the party? s publication, Jewish Affairs, after the death of its first editor, Hyman Lumer, in 1976, but then mainly as the polemicist of the party against the left-progressive Jewish movement. Perhaps a sample of Cruse?s statements on Jewish Communists will indicate his own bias. In a key chapter of his book entitled "Jews and Negroes in the Communist Party," Cruse claims that in 1929 "the West Indian- American Negro braintrust (in the CP) could not utter a single theoretical idea about themselves unless they first invoked the precedent of the Moscow `line?." Cruse then goes on to explain: "This situation led inexorably to the period of Jewish dominance in the Communist Party. It culminated in the emergence of Herbert Aptheker and other assimilated Jewish Communists, who assumed the mantle of spokesmanship on Negro affairs, thus burying the Negro radical potential deeper and deeper in the slough of white intellectual paternalism. The new inner group was composed of Old Guard, first generation Communists from the Jewish Socialist Federation . . . plus a young wave that was to emerge as the Communists? intellectual and theoretical corps of the 1930s and 1940s. This younger group, who took command of The Daily Worker, New Masses and The Communist, assumed various roles . . ." (Cruse, 1967, 147.) What is one to make of this astounding claim of a period of "Jewish dominance in the Communist Party"? Did the Jewish members of the party have their own conventicles within it where they schemed together, out of earshot of their non-Jewish comrades, to advance "Jewish interests" or Jewish cadres? If there were many Jews in the leadership of the pre- World War II Communist party, did this not reflect the fact that the party at that time had many Jewish members? A later Jewish party activist and editor of its publication, Jewish Affairs, noted that since the party? s founding in 1919, "about half the CP?s membership and a quarter of its leadership during most of the ensuing six decades were Jewish" (Kutzik, 1994, 14). In its first three decades the CP enjoyed considerable prestige among immigrant working-class and even middleclass Jews and among many of their American-born children. I?m sure there never was a situation in the CP where any of its Jewish members worked outside of regular party channels to gain ideological positions or jobs in the party for Jewish members on the basis of their being Jewish. Jewish party members, both the native and the foreign-born, were sincerely devoted to the idea of internationalism and they would have vehemently rejected the very notion of some parochial Jewish nationalism or ethnic favoritism. Jewish party members sought out and welcomed non-Jews as members or leaders if only because this was proof of the Americanizing of the party, which was so desirable for an organization that had a large foreign-born composition in the early years of its existence. As a young YCL member and later as a party member in the overwhelmingly Jewish Communist Party organization in the Bronx, New York, both before and after World War II, I remember how pleased and thrilled we were to have white Gentile or Black leaders address our meetings or rallies. Something needs to be said of Cruse? s claim that "Jews took command" of the Communist Party press in the 1930s. If one were to examine left publications in the United States in the past 50 or so years including such magazines as Science & Society, Monthly Review, Socialist Review, Against the Current, Rethinking Marxism or other left- progressive publications, names would be found of many Jews among their editorial boards and contributors. Is this an example of Jews again taking "command"? None of these Jews sought out these positions or assignments for any particular "Jewish" aims or purposes and most of them probably did not feel any especial affinity to any form of Jewish culture or even Jewish peoplehood (not that there should be anything wrong if they had). These many Jewish writers or contributors were attracted to the views espoused by these publications and felt eager or able to make a contribution to them. Are they to be censured for that? The whole idea of labeling people according to race or ethnicity so as to prove these the inevitably determining factors of their ideological or political outlook ought to be repugnant in general. But Cruse is so determined on this that he even invented a period in the Communist Party, in the 1920s, which he defined as "Anglo-Saxon" when the party enjoyed an "open-minded freshness" which, he writes, it was to lose when the ascendancy of the Jews began (Cruse, 1967, 147). The fact that Jews participated in visibly greater numbers in different left and progressive causes and movements is a phenomenon of the past two centuries. For example, V. I. Lenin and Frederick Engels, both non-Jews, did not think the noticeable participation of Jews was something negative. Lenin, for example, while in exile in Zurich, Switzerland, declared in a lecture that he gave on the 1905 revolution in Russia: "Tsarism vented its hatred particularly upon the Jews. On the one hand, the Jews furnished a particularly high percentage (compared with the total Jewish population) of leaders of the revolutionary movement. And now, too, it should be noted to the credit of the Jews, they furnish a relatively high percentage of internationalists, compared with other nations . . . "(Lenin, 1974, 134.) Frederick Engels, in a letter of April 1890, wrote: "We owe much to the Jews. To say nothing of Heine and Borne, Marx was of purest Jewish blood; Lassalle was a Jew. Many of our best people are Jews. My friend Victor Adler, who is . . . in prison in Vienna, Eduard Bernstein, editor of the London Sozial-Democrat , Paul Singer, one of our best men in the Reichstag ? people of whose friendship I am proud, are all Jews! . . . "(Letter No. 211, Engels, 1942, 469.) One may suppose that if ever Cruse was aware of such sentiments by Lenin and Engels he would most likely have dismissed these as further evidence of the "deviousness" of Jews in the movement. Still another grotesque statement by Cruse reads: "Under Jewish Communist prodding, the Communist Party took up the anti-Hitler crusade in the late 1930s" (Cruse, 1967, 168), that is, during the popular front period. Cruse, true to his anti-Communism, would have us believe that after the enormous catastrophe in 1933 of Hitler? s coming to power and the Nazi regime? s brutal destruction of the strong German Communist and Social Democratic parties, the trade unions and all anti-Nazi opposition, the leaders of the American Communist Party (Earl Browder, William Z. Foster, etc.) were so dense that they didn? t know what hit them and their world movement and needed the "prodding" of Jewish Communist members to take up the anti-Nazi struggle and the Popular Front orientation. Wald, however, finds Cruse?s statement cited above on Jewish Communist prodding "a unique theory." Anyone who lived through this period will recognize that Cruse? s "theory" was not far off from the argument of the reactionary and anti-Semitic forces in the United States then who claimed that President Roosevelt, responding to pressure from Jews, was getting us into a "Jewish war" in Europe. We are indebted to Wald not only for discussing some of Cruse? s crank arguments against Jewish Communists but also for noticing a deception that Cruse committed regarding the distinguished poet, Langston Hughes. Cruse claimed that in pursuit of the "Jewish crusade against Hitler" in the 1936- 1939 period, "a very large corps of Negro volunteers went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War . . . to fight and die for Spanish democracy." He then went on to quote a statement made by Langston Hughes about his visit to Spain in his 1956 book, I Wonder As I Wander. Hughes wrote: "With so many unsolved problems in America, I wondered why would a Negro come way over to Spain to help solve Spain? s problems - perhaps with his very life. I don?t know. I wondered then. I wonder still" (Cruse, 1967, 168). Wald saw that Cruse had abridged this quotation. The sentence immediately following after the above reads: "But in my heart I salute them" (Hughes, 1956, 364). But Cruse, for his own reasons, ignored it! Hughes went on to relate a few of the answers these African American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade gave for fighting Franco. Wald adds: "Hughes should not be enlisted for Cruse? s cynical argument." True enough. Yet Wald? s protectiveness of Cruse comes into play again and he writes: "It is regrettable that Cruse did not give us a longer excerpt from this section of Hughes? memoir." Indeed, it is regrettable but after so many other deceptions by Cruse what else were we to expect? Since Dr. Herbert Aptheker was the target of much of Harold Cruse? s animus it may be useful to present Aptheker?s opinion of Cruse?s book. As far as I can determine Aptheker made only two published criticisms of it. The first was a footnote to an article of his in the April 1969 issue of the Communist Party theoretical magazine, Political Affairs, entitled, "Anti- Semitism and Racism." The footnote reads as follows: "Where anti-Semitism does appear in the writings of a Black author it is ignored if it is ensconced in sufficient anti-Communism. Thus, Harold Cruse?s thoroughly poisonous book, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, steeped in anti-Semitism of the most blatant kind and fanatically anti-Communist, has a major publisher (Morrow), gets excellent reviews, brings the author a professorship (at the University of Michigan) and is hailed for its 'brilliance' by no less a 'brilliant' authority than Prof. Eugene Genovese! If the American Jewish Congress, or the American Jewish Committee or any Jewish newspaper, has said a word in condemnation of Mr. Cruse?s anti-Semitism it has escaped this writer." The second reference was made in a speech Aptheker delivered six years later when he referred in one sentence to "a sickening book by Harold Cruse, a renegade who is incapable of recognizing the truth and who is the author of the most blatantly anti-Semitic book to be published by a major house in the United States in fifty years" (Jewish Affairs, New York, May? June, 1975). The writer of this communication has had his disagreements with Dr. Aptheker, including one episode some three decades ago concerning the problem of anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union and the former People?s Poland. Aptheker and his party at the time denounced those of us who were associated with the Jewish Currents magazine and the Yiddish Morgn Freiheit for criticizing anti-Semitic publications and discrimination in those countries. Yet, when Cruse? s book appeared and was extolled in many New Left circles, I was cheered by Aptheker?s angry response to its anti-Semitism. Still one was puzzled. Why did Aptheker relegate his first criticism to a footnote in an article? Why didn?t he then or later contest Cruse? s malicious libels against him and other of his party colleagues who were Jews? Was Aptheker? s limited response to Cruse? s attacks against him and his Jewish colleagues an example of white Communists refraining from criticizing an African American even when such criticism was justified and expected? There is another figure in the Black left cultural field, Ernest Kaiser, who was an outspoken critic of Harold Cruse. After being hit by Cruse? s mean-spirited shots at Jewish Communists it is a relief to once again look into Kaiser? s review of Cruse?s book in the Winter 1969 issue of Freedomways, where he wrote: "Cruse?s statement that minority Jewish nationalism is more successful than majority Anglo-Saxon nationalism is absurd and anti-Semitic. His treatment of Negro- Jewish relations is away off. Israel and some of the Jews there are tied up with imperialism in Africa and should be opposed. But Cruse would rather fight them than the main imperialists who are American WASPs. . . . Jews as a group are not the Negroes? enemy; the power elite which includes some Jews is . . ." For some readers of Cruse? s book this review was balm indeed. Wald declares that "Cruse?s book retains authority because it has secured a niche" (415). If this is so I hope this authority doesn?t owe anything to Cruse?s false explanations of the motives of Jews who were active in the Communist Party in a previous period and who together with their non-Jewish comrades brought the struggle against white racism and respect for African American history and culture to a broader American public. In dealing with some of Cruse? s negative and misleading views of Jewish Communists, Wald has performed a valuable service and I am grateful for that. Yet, having met or worked with many of these comrades over several decades, though not specifically with those Cruse was most exercised about, I felt hurt and insulted by what he said of all of us. I believe Wald would have been justified to deal more sharply with Cruse, and not as if he were an "exceptionally thoughtful" intellectual who made regrettable errors. Sid Resnick 230 Treadwell St., #602 Hamden, CT. 06517 as-r at juno.com REFERENCES Cruse, Harold. 1967. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: From Its Origins to the Present. New York: William Morrow and Company. Engels, Frederick. 1942. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, 1846- 1895. New York: International Publishers. Hughes, Langston. 1956. I Wonder as I Wander. New York: Rinehart. Kutzik, Alfred J. 1994. The Communist Party and the Jews: Implications for the National Question. New York: Red Balloon Collective. Lenin, V. I. 1974. Lenin on the Jewish Question. Edited by Hyman Lumer. New York: International Publishers. Wald, Alan. 2000-2001. "Narrating Nationalisms: Black Marxism and Jewish Communists Through the Eyes of Harold Cruse." Science & Society, 64:4 (Winter), 400- 423. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Harold Cruise's Attack on Jewish Communists.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 81601 bytes Desc: not available URL: From farmelantj at juno.com Mon Sep 23 04:21:52 2002 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2002 06:21:52 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Mechanists versus Dialecticians in early Soviet philosophy Message-ID: <20020923.062156.5252.0.farmelantj@juno.com> Probably the most important debate that drew the attention of Soviet philosophers during the early years of the USSR was the debate between the "mechanists" and the "dialecticians" or Deborinists. This debate at first began as a discussion within the philosophy of science but over time came to encompass most aspects of philosophy. Furthermore, despite the fact it was formally settled in 1929, the issues underlying the debate never went away, and recurred in different forms over time. Indeed, since the issues at hand were among the most important ones concerning Marxist philosophy, they in fact have never really went away. By the early 1920s Soviet philosophers were debating what conception of materialism provided the best philosophical basis for Marxism. One school held that a mechanistic conception of materialism was acceptable. Most of the advocates of this view either came straight out of the natural sciences, or they were philosophers who had been closely associated with natural science in some way. Among the leading advocates of this school were A.K. Timartizev, Timianski, Axelrod, and Stepanov. These people were staunch empiricists. They did not deny the validity of dialectics but maintained that dialectics must limit itself to what was observable and verifiable by the methods of natural science. Dialectics must follow science, and not pretend to be able to lead it. Materialism for these people meat a strict and thorough reliance upon the methods and findings of the natural sciences. These philosophers embraced the label of "mechanists" as a designation for their school of thought, and they insisted that a mechanistic outlook was valid not only for the natural sciences but also for the philosophy of history and of society as well. For these people, a Marxist philosophy therefore had to root itself in the natural sciences and to follow the findings of natural science. In their view, it was illegitimate to posit a Marxist philosophy that would attempt to dictate to the sciences. Closely allied to the mechanists, though not entirely agreeing with them was the prominent Bolshevik, N.I. Bukharin. Thus Bukharin in his *Historical Materialism* embraced a positivist interpretation of Marx's materialist conception of history, emphasizing that the goal was to develop causal explanations of history, which would take the place of teleological explanations. Furthermore, Bukharin argued that "It is quite possible to transcribe the 'mystical' (as Marx put it) language of Hegelian dialectics into the language of modern mechanics." Bukharin thus maintained that Marx's materialist conception of history should over time lead to the development of a positive science of society that would be mechanistic in character and in which the concept of equilibrium would play a central role. The mechanists maintained that the dialectical conception of nature, properly understood, was the mechanist conception. Indeed, Stepanov once wrote an article bearing the title "The Dialectical Understanding of Nature is the Mechanistic Understanding" in case anyone should be confused about his position. As the mechanists saw it, Soviet philosophy was torn by a debate between those who maintained that dialectical method was one to be used insomuch as it was fruitful for revealing new facts about nature and society, versus those who looked to the dialectical philosophy of Hegel to provide themselves with ready-made solutions to problems. The mechanists charged their opponents (i.e. the dialecticians) with offering a priori solutions to problems in the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of history. Opposing the mechanists were the so-called dialecticians or Deborinists. These people had a much higher regard for Hegel than did the mechanists. Furthermore, they maintained that the mechanists misunderstood how Marx & Engels had reconstructed Hegelian dialectics on a materialist basis. Th dialecticians were vigorous defenders of what Marxists call the "dialectics of nature." They maintain that the laws of dialectics as described by Engels in such works as *Anti-Duhring* and "The Dialectics of Nature* are actually found in nature. Dialectics reflects the natural world. The dialecticians argued that the mechanists were positing a narrow, rigid, and lifeless conception of nature. Whereas, the mechanists tended to be either natural scientists or philosophers close to the natural sciences, the dialecticians tended to be professional philosophers with a strong background in Hegelian philosophy. The leading dialectician was the philosopher Deborin, who had been a protoge of Plekhanov (the "father of Russian Marxism"). Like, his mentor, Deborin had been prior to the October Revolution a Menshevik. Deborin and his followers hit hard against the mechanists, arguing that their conception of science could not adequately make sense out of the new developments in physics like relativity and quantum mechanics, nor was mechanism, in their opinion adequate for making sense out of the then latest developments in biology. The dialecticians attacked the positivism of the mechanist school which they saw as naive and mistaken. They as I already pointed out venerated Hegel, in contrast to the disdain that most of the mechanists had for him. They held that Marxism could not be adequately understood except in reference to Hegel and Hegelianism. While the mechanists on the other hand held that Marx had superseded Hegel and Hegelianism. For them the Deborinists constituted a regression back to an idealist metaphysics that Marx had transcended. Besides disagreeing about Hegel, the two schools had quite different opinions concerning the meaning and importance of Spinoza's philosophy. The mechanists tended to dismiss Spinoza as an idealist metaphysician. While Deborin followed his mentor Plekhanov in holding Spinoza to have been a materialist and a dialectician. For Deborin as for Plekhanov, dialectical materialism is a kind of Spinozism. The debate between the mechanists and the dialecticians heated up in the late 1920s, finally coming to a head in 1929 at a meeting of the Second All-Union Conference of Marxist-Leninist Scientific Institutions where all the leading figures from both sides of the debate appeared. Deborin gave the leading report, and a resolution was passed which condemned mechanism. The mechanists were condemned as underming dialectical materialism, and charged with trying to substitute a vulgar evolutionism for materialist dialectics, and positivism for materialism. However, the victory of the Deborinists was short-lived, since the following year controversy broke out over the issue of "idealism" and of "menshevising idealism." Essentially what happened was that Stalin had concluded that while the Deborinists had made valid criticisms of mechanism, they had gone too far in pushing the stick towards a Hegelian idealism. The application of the term "menshevizing idealism" was a reference to Deborin's past support for the Mensheviks over the Bolsheviks. Thus, he was being accused of not just being an idealist but of being a "menshevizing idealist" which was presumably a lot worse. Stalin moved to settle the debate between the mechanists and the Dialecticians by fiat. The critique of Deborin was pressed forward by two young philosophers, Mitin and Yudin who linked the alleged failings of Deborin to those of his mentor Plekhanov. Deborin was accused of divorcing theory from practice. His philosophy was said to be of little use for advancing forward Stalin's Five Year Plan with its break with NEP. Mitin in particular argued that both the Deborinists and the mechanists had failed to grasp the dialectics underlying the transition from NEP to socialism. Thus both schools were charged with promoting a divorce between theory and practice. The new view promoted by Mitin (with Stalin's backing) attempted to split the difference between the two schools. Dialectical materialism affirmed an ontological materialism as advocated by the mechanists. But the validity of the dialectics of nature (which the Deborinists had placed great emphasis on) was also affirmed as well. At a Party conference this critique of the two schools was officially adopted and Deborin made a show of support for Mitin. Deborin and just a handful of other Soviet philosophers had the fortune of surviving the great purges of the 1930s. Axelrod of the mechanist school also survived while numerous other people from the two schools disappeared into the gulags and were never heard from again. This new view provided the basis for Stalin's codification of dialectical materialism as presented in his *History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks): Short Course* which became official dogma for all Communists. It is also interest that the issues underlying the debate between the mechanists and the Dialecticians appeared in other disciplines as well such as in Soviet psychology. The reflexology of Ivan Pavlov can be seen as representing a mechanist approach to psychology in which behavior was broken down into reflexes - both unconditioned and conditioned. In contrast the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky attempted to construct a psychology directly from the premisses of dialectical materialism. He developed Genetic approach to the development of concepts in early childhood and youth, tracing the transition through a series of stages of human development, based on the development of the child's social practice. His work eventually impacted Western psychology especially through his influence on the thought of Jean Piaget. However, under Stalin Vygotsky's work was considered to be heretical while Pavlov's work became the basis for official Soviet psychology. Indeed, in the later years of Stalin's regime, it was made the official Soviet psychology and most other schools were suppressed. Thus, while mechanism was rejected as a general philosophical outlook, it was embraced in psychology. Soviet philosophy thus became frozen for the next couple of decades, until the death of Stalin. Upon the ascension of Khruschev there was a "thaw" in Soviet intellectual and cultural life, and during the "thaw" a revival of Marxist philosophy broke out. And some old issues got revisted, with new ground being broken. Thus, the Soviet philosopher E. V. Ilyenkov, developed Marx's method and his idea of social phenomena as 'objectified' activity. Ilyenkov, treated our forms of thought as being objectified in our mode of interaction with nature and in the form our activity lends the world. Children acquire consciousness through the internalization of this externalized 'spiritual culture'. In this analysis, Lyenkov drew upon Vygotsky's research on cognitive development in children. Like Deborin in the early Stalin era, Ilyenkov pushed an interpretation of Marxism that emphasized its Hegelian roots. And in that sense he can be viewed as attempting to bring Soviet Marxism more into line with the Western Marxism of such people as Georg Lukacs (*History and Class Consciousness*), Herbert Marcuse (*Reason and Revolution*), Karl Korsch, or even Sidney Hook (*From Hegel to Marx*). Ilyenkov was a stauch foe of positivism and scientism in Soviet philosophy and Soviet intellectual life generally. He was a passionate critic of reductionism and naturalism in the philosophy of mind. And in the end he eventually ran into resistance from the Soviet establishment which grew more conservative after the ouster of Khruschev. He is probably best known for such works as *Dialectics of the Abstract & Concrete*( 1960), *Dialectical Logic* (1974), and *Concept of the Ideal* (1979). In another work, *Leninist Dialectics & Metaphysics of Positivism* (1979), he revisists the controversy that broke out in the Bolshevik faction between Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov over the empirio-criticism of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius. As a true-blue Soviet philosopher Ilyenkov opts for Lenin over Bogdanov, and comes down hard on Bogdanov's attempt at reinterpreting Marxism in terms of Machist positivism. However, underlying Ilyenkov's book is the not so subtle implication, that a positivism, not unlike the kind that Lenin had codemned had taken charge in Soviet intellectual and cultural life. Ilyenkov dissects Bogdanov's science fiction novel *Red Star* and pokes fun at Bogdanov's attempt at depicting a future communist society, and he knocks Bogdanov's scientism and technocratism, while implying in not so many words, that the very sort of scientism and technocratism which was attributed to Bogdanov, was in fact rife in the Soviet society of Ilyenkov's time. Thus, Ilyenkov pushed what in Stalin's time would have been condemned as a "Menshevizing idealism" into a general critique of not just Soviet intellectual and cultural life, but also implicitly of Soviet society itself. Not too surprisingly, Ilyenkov found himself in increasing hot water, and in 1979 he took his own life. During the same period other Soviet thinkers were advancing views that were more than a little reminscient of the 1920s mechanists. Many Soviet scientists were more or less positivistic in their philosophical outlooks. During the 1960s and 1970s Western philosophies including analytical philosophy and logical empiricism began to make a mark in Soviet thought. Very often these philosophies were presented using the language of dialectical materialism, but the underlying substance might bear more than a passing ressemblence to the ideas of a Rudolf Carnap or a Bertrand Russell. Jim F. ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/.