Two, Three, Many...

The Return of Revolution

2011-02-19T13:38:00.004-05:00

This is a lightly-edited version of a talk I gave to kick off a study group on the book Revolutionary Rehearsals, which has essays on the struggles in France in 1968, Chile in '72-3, Portugal in '74-5, Iran in '79, and Poland in '80-1.

Hosni Mubarak is no longer president of Egypt. His overthrow, following that of Ben Ali in Tunisia, is already changing the world. There are protests in Algeria, Libya, Jordan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen... The imperialists of the US don’t know what to do, the colonialists of Israel are near panic, and people across the world have been not only fascinated but inspired.

Of course, by any reasonable standard I know little about Egypt - I've never visited and I don't speak Arabic. That said, I will have to focus less on what is particular to Egypt, and more on what events there show us about the dynamics of revolution.

I’ll talk first about the most obvious lessons - that protests have power and that revolution isn’t just for the history books. I’ll talk about how revolution becomes necessary. Then I’ll talk about the power of class analysis in understanding what’s happening, and the roles of the various classes. Finally, I’ll talk about the possibilities that have been opened up, the way that advance and reaction interact back on the further development of the struggle, and entrance of the subjective element of organization into history.

Just a few years ago in Egypt, street protests were typically outnumbered by police. There are a million and a half people in Egypt employed by the internal security apparatus, and hundreds of them would turn out even if there were only scores of protesters. The first time in years where the opposite was clearly true was January 25 of this year, less than a month ago. Just days later, protesters chased police off the streets. They overturned armored vehicles, burned police stations, captured infiltrators, and established control of movement in the major cities.

When the right combination of frustration and inspiration comes together, the world can change very suddenly and dramatically. Individual experiences of hunger, unemployment, wage stagnation, corruption, and police brutality, built up under the surface of Egyptian society, with little outward political expression. But by the end of 2010, Egyptian journalist and activist Hossam el-Hamalawy could write, “There is something in the air... Not a day passes without reading or hearing about a strike. No one knows when the explosion is going to happen, but it seems everyone I meet or bump into today feels it’s inevitable.”

One day, Hosni Mubarak, backed by a military regime more than fifty years old and the US, the most powerful empire in the world, seemed invincible. Just weeks later, he has resigned, and there are rumors that he has fled Egypt.

There are two things to note here. One, our rulers aren’t infinitely powerful. If we organize, we can topple them - no matter what they try. Working people can now add their victory over the police in Egypt to their victory over two attempted military coups in Portugal, and over bosses’ strikes which shut down much of the economy in Chile (and both, more recently, in Venezuela).

The second thing to note is that what seems like popular apathy can conceal a deep desire for change and a willingness to risk everything.

There’s another side to this. Electoral politicking did not topple Mubarak; when he had to, he just falsified the results. Bombings and other individual acts of terrorism by Islamists in the 70s, 80s and 90s, including Sadat’s assassination, only reinforced the Egyptian military regime. The so-called opposition parties which tried to “work within the system” of Mubarak’s rule, from the liberals to, in recent years, the Muslim Brotherhood, were left behind by the revolution, and contributed little except when their cadre jumped ahead of their leadership. Mass action on the streets, culminating in strike action by tens of thousands of workers, was needed to finally overthrow Mubarak.

Not every uprising against a dictator or against imperialism is a working-class revolution. Guerrilla strategies have sometimes succeeded, at least in the short term, as in Cuba and Vietnam. But revolutions, or near-revolutionary struggles, which involve mass action by the working class, have a special dynamic.

To all appearances, what’s happening in Egypt does deeply involve the participation of the working class. Last month, el-Hamalawy told an interviewer, “Tunisia was more or less a catalyst”, but, “Revolutions don't happen out of the blue... You can't isolate these protests from the last four years of labor strikes in Egypt, or from international events such as the al-Aqsa Intifada of Palestinians and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.”

The labor struggle goes back years. I quote from a 2007 article in the International Socialist Review by Mostafa Omar:

Over the last two years, the number of strikes (which usually take the form of factory sit-ins or occupations since strikes are basically illegal) has been steadily rising. In 2006, there were at least 220 workers’ strikes, walkouts, and street protests.

Millions of Egyptian workers have seen their real wages and benefits plummet after twenty years of the neoliberal policies of structural adjustment and privatization programs pushed on them by the International Monetary Fund and the Egyptian business class. The economy’s shift from a predominantly public sector one, where workers enjoyed a relative degree of job protection, to a privatized, free-market bonanza for the rich and foreign multinationals, has led to rising unemployment (officially estimated at 13 percent), increasing levels of poverty, and simmering anger.

That strike wave interacted with a protest movement which had an independent impetus. Starting in 2000, the Second Intifada in Palestine inspired Egyptians to take to the streets in solidarity. That movement fed into an anti-war movement when Bush announced plans to invade Iraq. That movement in turn fed into the Kifaya or “enough” movement, which demonstrated against Mubarak himself in 2005.

The workers who struck in 2006 were given confidence by these earlier political struggles, and their economic demands had to quickly turn political because the official Egyptian unions are controlled by the regime, and independent trade union organization is illegal. So the political and economic struggles have been mutually reinforcing.

The protests which started on January 25th were called against the police murder of Khaled Said, a middle-class young man, and initiated on Facebook. Though many people left work to attend mass demonstrations in the following week, strikes organized through workplaces did not spread across the country until a few days before Mubarak left. But these strikes, which had both political and economic demands and included crucially the workers in the Suez canal, very well may have been the final tipping point.

There is a very direct parallel here to France in 1968, where student protesters who battled with police and showed that resistance was possible sparked the largest general strike in history.

The military, which still controls the state, has now cleared protesters out of Tahrir Square. If the revolution is to go further, it will have to rely on workers organizing at the point of production. The military junta is right now trying to get workers to go back to work, which thousands have refused to do until more of their demands are met, which include wage increases as well as freedom for thousands of political prisoners who remain behind bars. According to the Times, Suez canal workers just rejoined workers in “textile mills, pharmaceutical plants, chemical industries, the Cairo airport, the transportation sector and banks” who are on strike right now.

Nearly all of Egyptian society was fed up with Mubarak by the end; the regime could only turn out pro-Mubarak demonstrations by putting police in plain clothes and paying cash to desperate people. The Egyptian working class has an interest not only in the overthrow of Mubarak, but also in the radical transformation of Egypt, the right to organize, the rolling back of neoliberalism, and ultimately a different kind of society based on workers’ control.

The Egyptian middle classes, on the other hand, such as the employees of the state bureaucracy and small businesspeople, have a stake in democracy and stability; they don’t want to face arbitrary beatings by regime goons, but their jobs may also be at risk if the state machinery is dissolved, or tourism dries up, or their workers strike. Mohammed el-Baradei, the former UN official, and Wael Ghoneim, the Google manager who some TV outlets are treating as the face of the revolution, seem to represent these groups. They opposed Mubarak and support democracy, but are far from socialist or even anti-imperialist. And both men have indicated they may be willing to compromise with the country’s military rulers if that is what is needed to keep order.

On February 10, Mubarak’s last full day, el-Baradei tweeted, “Egypt will explode. Army must save the country now.” He is now calling for a slow, one-year transition to civilian rule. Ghoneim has met with the military junta now ruling the country, along with an unaccountable handful of others, and on February 13, after military police had cleared demonstrators out of Tahrir Square the night before, he tweeted, “I am in Tahrir Square and can't believe the scene. Its amazingly clean!”

As the situation develops, we can expect that some protest leaders of this type will be pulled to the right and away from the revolution, while others will be pulled to the left and radicalized.

We can see something similar happening with the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest organized opposition group, which has a base among the poor but a middle-class leadership. Its leadership has been cautious and conservative, while its activists on the street have been pulled into struggle by events - as well as an conscious effort to involve them by parts of the left. This dynamic has been at work for years but was on display again in January as the organization endorsed the protests only after the first seemed successful.

The Egyptian army, too, has internal class divisions. The generals are a major part of the ruling class - many of them are capitalists in their own right, managing army-owned industries. The rank-and-file, often conscripted, are part of the working class. Junior officers, like other mid-level state officials, are caught in between. Liberal commentators in the US have often been mystified by the army’s seeming paralysis. An article in Time even gave credit for the army’s restraint to its officers’ training in the US (too bad that’s never worked in Latin America). But if you understand that the ordinary soldiers have no interest in common with the military as an institution, it’s easy to see why the generals wouldn’t want to give orders that might not be obeyed.

The protesters very wisely made a systematic effort to befriend the soldiers who were deployed around the demonstrations. However, according to reporters on the ground, there is a real reverence for the army among many ordinary Egyptians, which is a danger. The experience of Portugal, where the military initially led the revolution but would only take it so far, provides a warning here, and that of Chile, where a military coup undid the revolution and murdered 30,000 activists, an even darker one

The generals, like the rest of the ruling class, were happy with Mubarak, until the point where his attempt to stay in office seemed like more of a threat to the regime than did a coup against him. The capitalists can be forced into confusion and made to turn on their own representatives by popular struggle. Of course, if they will fight each other, they will certainly be willing to murder even those representatives of the working class who abandon their own class interests in an attempt to appease capital, as they did Allende in Chile.

A quick note on Twitter, Facebook, the Internet, etcetera. These are obviously very useful tools. But the revolution continued and grew stronger during a full week when the entire Internet was shut down. Organization in physical space was decisive. The people who give credit for the revolution in Egypt to Western technology companies are putting out condescending, racist bullshit.

What’s going to happen going forward? Given the political forces on the ground in Egypt, we can’t say socialism is the most likely the outcome. But we can’t know what will happen. There could be a dramatic advance, if not to socialism than at least to a really independent democracy, or the old ruling class could ultimately survive more or less intact.

In Chile in ‘73, the revolution was drowned in blood. In France in ‘68, a great upheaval had a lasting cultural impact but led to no change in the basic political economy of the country. In Iran in ‘79, the old ruling class with its ties to Western imperialists was overthrown, only to be replaced by a new and equally vicious ruling class using Islam as cover. Likewise in Poland in the ‘80s, the movement was first defused and then turned towards a “liberalization” that benefited only those at the top. In Portugal in ‘75, fascism was defeated for good, but the historically new society that might have been remained just a glimpse - as in South Africa, with the overthrow of apartheid, and right now in Venezuela.

In a revolutionary situation, very little is certain and nothing stands still. Developments are hugely compressed, maybe even more in the electronic era, but process can still be years-long. Radicalization can swing to reaction and back again repeatedly. And no gain for our side is safe while state power is still in their hands.

In France, the Stalinized Communist Party and trade union bureaucracy were the only forces that could end the general strike. But shortly thereafter, they were decisively defeated in a general election, with their supporters demoralized and waverers seeing no left path forward. In Chile, the initially very threatening bosses’ strike lead by the truckers led to an upsurge of working-class organization, in the cordones, the workers’ councils. Allende and the reformists calmed things down, with the aim of “consolidation”. But that just gave the capitalists time to regroup, and the demobilized workers could not stop a coup. The workers of Iran defeated the Shah. The state power in the hands of the clerics started out as mostly symbolic, while the worker’s shoras filled the vacuum. But the left did not guide the working class towards a struggle for power, and the clerics made their power real.

There are real barriers in the way of Egypt becoming a civilian democracy or obtaining real independence from the US, let alone in the way of it going socialist. But each barrier is at the same time an impetus for the revolution to develop to the next level. When their current methods fail, people turn to more radical ones, if given the opportunity.

In Egypt, there have already been dramatic swings. After the initial protests on January 25, people have gone from terror as Mubarak appeared to be preparing a massacre on February 2, to euphoria as his resignation was announced on the 11th.

There is no dual power as yet. Egypt has no equivalent to the shoras or cordones or soviets, the alternative structures which have developed in every workers’ revolution in parallel and eventually in opposition to the capitalist state.

However, the Egyptians have proved their capacity for both creativity and self-organization. We have seen Christian-Muslim solidarity emerge in the face of old hostility, with followers of each religion guarding the backs of the others as they prayed in the streets. We have seen incredible organization develop overnight, as neighborhood watch committees arose across the country and established checkpoints to prevent looting when Mubarak’s strategy was to associate the revolution with chaos and criminality, and as liberated Tahrir Square developed barricades with shifts, then field clinics, then kitchens and a system for sharing satellite phones.

Lenin described revolution as “the festival of the oppressed”. We’ve seen that in a more literal sense than he meant it in Egypt, with a near continual dance party in Tahrir in the midst of periodic battles. Socialist Worker has published some eyewitness reporting by Mostafa Omar and Ahmed Shawki which gives a great sense of the scene there.

But even short of dual power, a different crucial kind of organization is still missing, if Egypt is going to see the kind of change that will really overcome poverty and tyranny in the lives of ordinary people. There is no mass party with both a revolutionary goal and the centralization and popular roots to seize the moment to drive through a transformation of society. It is one thing for the ruling class to abandon Mubarak’s government, like rats fleeing a sinking ship. If they are threatened as a class, enough will come together to fight for their existence, by whatever means necessary. Power will not fall into the hands of working people spontaneously; they will need to organize to take it.

The most influential single organization on the ground is still probably the Muslim Brotherhood. But so far it has shown no capacity for decisive action, and if the Muslim Brothers were to rule Egypt, that would be far from a liberated society. There are old, self-proclaimed left parties such as Tagammu, which includes the remnants of the Egyptian Communist Party. But these have been thoroughly corrupted and defanged by cooperation with Mubarak.

There is not much of an organized actual left in Egypt. There are the Revolutionary Socialists, an important group, but they are not a mass party, and have no established legal organization. Of course, something similar was true in Portugal in the ‘70s, while in Chile, France, Iran, and Poland, the left was dominated by Stalinists and social-democratic reformists. That did not prevent things from reaching the stage where the question of workers’ power was on the table, and in some cases tantalizingly close to becoming a reality.

Whether Egypt may come to that point is something we will have to see. But whatever country or region does next enter that sort of crisis, the outcome will not be predetermined, but will be historically subjective, dependent on the actions of individual people. And history allows us to be pretty confident that we won’t get rid of the horrendous system under which we live without the existence of a deeply rooted, consistently revolutionary mass party - which is something that might conceivably develop quickly, but might have to be built by a core of people committed through periods of upswing and downturn, over the long haul.

The dialectical structure of capitalism

2010-08-08T22:03:00.001-04:00

That hiatus was longer than I planned, but I'm back...

So far, I have suggested that one can think of the dialectic as a structure, where a system changes as a result of the interaction of opposing tendencies it contains, a structure which, though not universal, is common, and which in particular may be characteristic of capitalism. Here, I'll examine the claim in that last clause and try to remove the hesitant "may be".

Why and how might dialectical forms be characteristic of capitalism?

Let's start with how. There are a number of phenomena in capitalism described by Marxists as "contradictions". Some of the more important:

Goods and services are produced socially, by the cooperation of vast numbers of people in a complex, organized division of labor, but consumed privately, without any planned allocation and according to no principle of human need. Social production gives society the infrastructure for social consumption but our rulers struggle to ensure that it is not so utilized.
Everything that is produced has two kinds of value, an exchange value and a use value. Exchange value requires some sort of use value. But things which people desperately need, such as medicine, sometimes do not have a high enough exchange value to be produced, while things with a high exchange value, say oil, may have a negative social use value.
Capitalism leads to a great increase in humanity's productive capabilities. But this creates the possibility of crises of over-production, where there are too many goods to be sold. This, in turn, halts production, and destroys productive capabilities.
Capital accumulation is necessary for capitalists to compete, and maintain their profits. But labor is the source of their profits. As they accumulate capital, the proportion of their investment which goes to labor decreases. In the context of competition, this ultimately decreases their profit rate.[1]
Capitalism increases humanity's control over our environment, with the advancement of technology and the accumulation of resources. This creates the possibility of greater material freedom. But in fact, under capitalism, society itself confronts each person as something external and impersonal, a set of "forces that arise from [our] relations with each other and which have escaped [our] control",[2] and which rule our lives.
Capitalism creates the modern working class, which has an objective interest in destroying the system which gave it birth; thus Marx calls the proletariat capitalism's "gravediggers".
The working class has a tendency, according to its own objective interests, and driven by the class struggle, towards socialist ideas and action. But it is also pushed, given the way that its members, if unorganized, compete against one another for jobs, housing, and so on, and given capitalist ownership of the means of communication, towards reactionary ideas.
In the realm of ideology, by developing science, by destroying feudalism and its mystified social bonds, by giving everything a calculable monetary value, capitalism encourages a materialistic view of the world, albeit a mechanistic one. But at the same time, by creating an independent intelligentsia, by putting ideological production in the hands of a distinct, privileged class, it encourages an idealistic view of the world, which sees ideas operating according to their own independent logic and driving history. (Lukacs describes these tendencies as the "antinomies of bourgeois thought".)

That's a lot of bullet points. But in fact, these aren't really separate critiques, theses which might stand and fall with complete independence. The difference between exchange value and use value requires a difference between social production and private consumption. In turn it leads to the tendency to economic crisis. The ideological struggle within the working class is predicated on its anti-capitalist class interest, which in turn is predicated on the fact that capitalism can't provide for everyone. And so on.

Nor can we say definitively that one of these points is the most fundamental, and the rest derivative. You can't define classes independently of labor and capital, or vice versa. To give any concrete content to the most general assertions about the relationship of humanity to nature, or society to production and consumption, you need to say something more specific about social relations, which means class relations.

But then how do we understand the relationship between these different theses?

The way suggested by the dialectical idea of the "moment", a way which I think is correct, is to see these points as expressing different aspects of a single system, one which can only be fully understood as a whole, and which has a single causal history, but one which can be approached from many different directions, any of which may be necessary in a given context.

From this perspective, it is in a way a mistake to ask why capitalism has a structure which we can call dialectical. There is no answer short of an analysis of its whole history and internal logic as a developing process. But it does.

So. If the Marxist analysis of capitalism is correct, we have at least a minimal validation of dialectics, within a certain field. But it is not yet a complete validation, because from what we have said, we still don't have a reason to use a dialectical method.

Why focus on the dialectical structure of capitalism, rather than other aspects? What's interesting in dialectical forms, abstracted from the context of capitalism? Why should the dialectic be an independent field of study - if it is validated by, and valid only within, its appearance in capitalism? What's the relationship between a commitment to overthrow capitalism and the use of dialectics in analysis?

[1] That's a very quick sketch. Here's a much longer version.
[2] Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 14.

May 1968 in France

2010-04-24T18:58:00.003-04:00

(This is a slightly edited version of a talk I gave for a small study group.)

1968 was a year of upheaval around the globe. In the United States, it was a high point of the antiwar movement and the Black liberation movement. The Vietnamese National Liberation Front launched the Tet Offensive. Workers and students in Prague faced Soviet tanks. There were violent struggles across the underdeveloped and colonial world and popular movements - facing sometimes violent repression - around the developed world. Masses of rebelling students were beaten in Chicago at the Democratic Party convention, and shot in Mexico City.

But in France, though things started with students battling cops, they did not end there. In France, more than anywhere else in the developed world, the fight spread to the working class and really shook the foundations of capitalism.

My talk has two parts. First I will describe the events in France that year, then I will talk a little about the lessons we can learn.

Most of this talk is drawn from Daniel Singer's fantastic book, Prelude to Revolution. There is also some good stuff written by the British socialist Ian Birchall, for example here with Tony Cliff, and a chapter of the book Revolutionary Rehearsals.

As Singer describes them, the events of May 1968 "started at Nanterre, a campus in the western suburbs of Paris."

"Because leftist students wanted to stage an anti-imperialist rally... and because fascist students threatened to attack them, the Dean chose to close the [school]. A few hundred left activists then met at the Sorbonne, in the heart of the Latin Quarter.

Since they feared an attack, they had crash helmets and sticks. The rector made the not unprecedented but very rare decision to call the police into the Sorbonne. Was there a deal that the students would be allowed to leave free? In any case, they were not. As they were leaving, the student activists were picked up by the gendarmes and thrown into Black Marias...

And then the unexpected happened. As the so-called ringleaders were arrested, students flocked to the Sorbonne from all over the Latin Quarter. They did not sign a petition. They did not write a letter to Le Monde. Chanting "free our comrades" they attacked the police.

Surprised, the latter responded with violence. But they had to deal with an adversary that was mobile, inventive, and knew its terrain. Shells, truncheons, and grenades on one side, cobblestones and... barricade[s] on the other..."

So. The first confrontation at the Sorbonne occurred on Friday, May 3. Battles interspersed with peaceful mass demonstrations continued for a week, growing each day. But by the next Friday, May 10th, the development had reached its limits as a movement of students, teachers, and intellectuals. The students controlled the Latin Quarter. But they could not take any more ground. And at 2:15am Saturday morning, the riot police moved in en masse. Singer again:

"The outcome of the confrontation was never in doubt, though it took nearly four hours to bring down all the barricades. There followed some mopping up with maddened policemen barging into private homes to beat up young men and women seeking shelter. At dawn... defeated prisoners [were] being pushed into vans by the angry victors.

Only the image was deceptive. The vanquished were the real winners... Having listened to the drama overnight, France woke up overwhelmingly in favor of the battered students..."

... and the battered neighbors and passersby. Back to me.

On Monday, May 13th, there was a massive demonstration on the streets of Paris. Called by student organizations and the labor unions of France, it brought out more than million people. This made obvious a transition which had already begun, and weaknesses in the foundation of the French regime of General De Gaulle became apparent.

Charles De Gaulle had become president in 1958 amidst a crisis of French colonialism, by means a semi-coup, with support from the military and the Algerian settlers, though also with the acquiescence of most of the existing political establishment, aside from the Communists and far left. He governed semi-autocratically while allowing basic civil liberties and a weak parliament, legitimizing his policies with a series of referenda. As a war hero he was a gigantic figure, seeming politically invincible.

In the face of this, Singer writes:

"The pampered students... had just shown that one could fight back, that the mighty state could be forced to yield. The demonstrations took place all over France and the message was not wasted on the workers.

On Tuesday, May 14, young workers occupied [an] aircraft company... near Nantes. The day after it was the turn of the Renault car works in Normandy. By Thursday the labor unions were telling their members to join the movement. The biggest of the labor confederations, the Communist-dominated CGT, urged its militants to both spread the movement and keep it carefully within economic channels, to confine it to bread and butter issues.

By then the tide was spreading fast. Within a week it covered the whole of France. After the car industry, engineering, and chemicals, it was the turn of transport, of the mines, of public utilities (though on purpose they didn't cut off the gas and electricity). In the second week, it was the turn of big department stores, of small plants following the big ones. It was the turn of the professional[s]... of teachers, researchers, writers, actors, doctors, architects.

By the end of that week, with about 10 million people, half the labor force, on strike, the country was paralyzed and the mood was one of extraordinary excitement, of frenzy."

You can get a sense of this mood - my words again - by remembering some of the popular slogans. There was a sense of a sudden, dramatic opening: "Be realistic, demand the impossible." There was a sense of utopian possibility lying within everyday life, within reach if you fought for it: "Under the paving stones, the beach." Soccer players went on strike, and so did technicians at the country's main nuclear research facility. There is evidence of a mutiny on an aircraft carrier, though it was successfully kept quiet.

And yet, the general strike was essentially as far as things went. General De Gaulle fled for a day to an air force base in Germany. But government did not collapse, and no one acted to take power. The far-left organizations, anarchist, Trotskyist, and Maoist, though extremely influential within the universities, did not have a wide enough social base to even consider seizing power. On the other hand, the social democrats and even the Communist Party did not want to seize power.

France's Communist Party was the leading political force within the working class at that time. It had gained influence in the struggles of the '30s, and though already thoroughly Stalinized, it won wide respect with a heroic record of resistance to the Nazi occupation. It reached the peak of its membership after the Second World War. By the '60s, however, it was accustomed to operating primarily within the parliament and the conventional industrial union organizations, and its leadership was an entrenched bureaucracy. This bureaucracy was firmly against any attempt to convert the May crisis into a revolution, deriding revolutionaries as childish adventurists.

Now, it's probably true that France was not ripe for an immediate socialist revolution. But the conservative Gaullists had completely lost control in the face of the largest general strike in the history of the developed world. It seems very likely that the Communists could have pushed De Gaulle out and established a transitional government in coalition with the social democrats and the radical left.

But the "transitional" nature of such a government was precisely what frightened them. It might, conceivably, have been transitional to a social revolution (in that sense, like Kerensky's government in the first stage of the Russian revolution). And in such a transition the old-line Communists might have lost control to the real far left, and destabilized the world situation to the disadvantage of the Soviet Union. Ultimately they preferred the stability of a return to capitalist business as usual.

So. The Communist-dominated CGT union leadership reached an agreement with De Gaulle for a substantial increase in wages and many other gains on May 25. They brought this to the striking factories – and it was immediately rejected by the strikers. The workers were feeling their power and did not want to settle for improvements to the existing system, even substantial ones. But after the "no" votes, there was no clear path forward.

(You can see here an analogy to much smaller-scale events in the United States - when New York City transit workers initially refused to end a strike with a concessionary contract in 2005, or when last year Chrysler workers voted down massive concessions. In both cases the concessions were ultimately rammed through, even though the workers were ready to fight, because there was no one in a position to organize for anything else.)

On May 30, conservative Gaullists staged their own massive demonstration in Paris, only slightly smaller than the biggest demonstration of workers and students. Their social power did not even match their inferior numbers, of course - all the centers of production in France were shut down, and a coalition dominated by the upper classes and petty businesspeople, mixing an incoherent stew of pro-American liberals, rural conservatives and "Algeria is France" fascists and anti-semites, could not end the general strike.

But the demonstration gave De Gaulle occasion to return to the country and proclaim new elections for the end of June, which the Communists and - of course everyone to their right - accepted as "victory". The strike thereafter petered out, winning wage concessions, but no structural change. And without the strike, the students had no revolutionary power.

With the achievement of an alternative society apparently proved a futile dream, a reaction against the therefore-apparently-useless chaos set in. The Gaullists won the parliamentary elections, not by a gigantic margin but decisively. Their apparent return was itself an illusion; they had obviously outlived their usefulness to the French ruling class, and within a year they were gone forever. But the survival of capitalism was not an illusion.

The Communists' influence waned over the next two decades, while the social democrats came to power but moved to the right in the '80s. France was rocked by general strikes in 1995 and again in 2005 and -6. But it has not again come so close to revolutionary change as in '68.

That's what happened. What do we learn from this?

One obvious thing is that Western capitalist democracies aren't as stable as they look, and workers in the west are not somehow irredeemably "bought off". System-shaking struggles can happen here too.

What's more, change can come fast, surprising everyone – not just consciously capitalist media like The Economist, which published an article in early '68 lauding French prosperity and the country's "pathetically weak" labor movement. Even the Socialist Register published an article around the same time, by a French Marxist, declaring that "in the foreseeable future there will be no crisis of European capitalism so dramatic as to drive the mass of workers to revolutionary general strikes." We shouldn't make the same mistake, of expecting that things will always continue linearly on the current path.

Another key question is the relationship between students' and workers' struggle. What are the limits of student power, and what is the role of students in organizing the working class into the kind of force that can really change society?

Many students in France in 1968 recognized the key role of the working class. They recognized the need not only to "involve" workers, to build coalitions, but to have a movement led by workers and built on their social power. On May 16 a group of students symbolically marched to a striking factory carrying a banner reading, "The workers will take from the fragile hands of the students the flag of the struggle against the anti-popular regime." On this basic idea, Maoists, Trotskyists, and anarchists were all in agreement, at least in the abstract.

Singer notes a funny idea in the media, which you can actually see echoed today in reporting on the struggle against budget cuts in California:

"Only the students had the right to rebel... Whenever men not in their early twenties or youngsters visibly not with an academic background were discovered in the fighting crowd, the immediate reaction was to speak of the mob and subversion. The implicit logic was that students had the right to lose heroically in splendid isolation as long as they did not upset the wider social order. Naturally, the students did not share this view."

There were major tactical disagreements, of course. In the early stages, some argued for abandoning the Sorbonne to the cops in order to march to the working-class suburbs. On Friday, May 10, the day of the biggest battle, a group of orthodox Trotskyists in a group called the FER decided to abandon the barricades. Fortunately, most socialists and other radicals did not act so mechanically.

Others argued that the key task was to organize factory committees and have them elect regional and national strike leaderships. This was good in theory but very difficult for students to put into practice.

The perspective that went furthest in being carried out was to build "action committees" uniting workers and students on a local basis for communication, propaganda, logistical organizing, and so on.

There were also larger strategic disagreements, the most important being whether or not to build a revolutionary party. Though it did not prevent tactical cooperation, this question was crucial in the larger perspective, and I'll come back to it.

In spite of all differences, there was a basic agreement among student radicals on the need to bring the working class into the struggle. But this faced its own opposition, not only from conservatives but also from the Communist Party, which felt that students were treading on its turf. Already on May 3, the party paper published an article noting that "more and more, [the students] are to be found outside factory gates or in centers of immigrant workers, distributing leaflets and other means of propaganda." But rather than praising this, the writer accused the students of "pretending to give lessons to the labor movement."

Nevertheless, workers were often receptive, especially the younger generation. The students did not only gather at the factory gates, they cooperated in all kinds of day-to-day organizing on action committees. And workers came to the "liberated" universities to find a space to learn and debate politics. The occupied Sorbonne was a place of 24-hour political ferment. Rank and file workers turned out in massive numbers for the May 13th demonstration, led by the students and initiated in response to police brutality against them. And from the demonstration, many went home to argue with their coworkers for a strike.

And all this solidarity occurred in a country with a substantially larger divide between students and workers than the US today: fewer young people went to college (only 12% of the population); many fewer of those who did worked at the same time; about half of students had a parent who was a business owner, manager, or independent professional; and a college education, though no ticket to wealth, was a better guarantee of a comfortable life than it is for people coming out of most colleges in the US today.

Students are not a class, like workers or capitalists. In general, their class has not yet been determined - they have a class background, but this is not the same thing as a class role, a relationship to the means of production. They do not have the power that workers do. However, as Cliff and Birchall write:

Being outside production is a source of weakness, but it is also a cause for quick advance, as it is so much easier for the students to move into action. If a small minority of the university community wants to act on an issue, it can go ahead and do so... The situation of a militant minority in the factory is radically different. It cannot act – by strike action or occupation of the factory – unless the overwhelming majority of all the workers employed are carried along...
Hence the temperature bringing students into combustion is incomparably lower than the one necessary to inflame the workers. But unfortunately the lifespan of their fire is also shorter.

Of course, this picture is complicated in the United States today by the large number of students who also work part-time or full-time jobs.

In any case, in France in '68, the students were the spark for the strike. They played this role mainly just by providing an example that you can fight and win, and suggesting the possibility of a better world. But they could not have served as an example without consistently taking up workers demands as their own, without reaching out in an active attempt at unity.

However, the spark was a limited role. And the limits proved crippling. The far left was isolated from the working class, with the exception of a few factories where Trotskyists had a base. They could not offer an alternative to the Communist Party & reformist line at a national level.

The official strike committees were mostly appointed by union bureaucrats, and so, though to some extent they had to represent the rank and file, they were not going to become a rival to the bureaucracy. The less formal action committees, which were open to students and non-union workers and often more radical, did not, generally, replace the strike committees – often instead forming a sort of division of labor, organizing activity outside the workplace. What's more – though relatedly – the action committees did not have any national structure, partly because of scarce time and resources, and partly because many participants extended a hostility to bureaucracy into a hostility to any kind of centralized or representative organization.

As the strike peaked at the beginning of June and production began to restart at the first workplaces, there was no one in a position to systematically spread news of the workers who were determined to continue the strike until “total victory”, as one factory resolution put it. While the union leadership bargained with the Gaullists, there was no one to put forward a coherent alternative set of demands, and no way to vote on proposed options, except in local elections, which were usually initiated by employers or bureaucrats wanting to end the strike. It was impossible for revolutionaries to put together a united front on a principled basis without some mechanism for making a decision and sticking to it in a disciplined fashion; people were left to either stick to abstract revolutionary demands that they couldn't put into practice alone, or accept whatever compromise they could obtain locally.

The basic issue was the lack of a revolutionary party containing a substantial section – a “vanguard” - of the working class. If there had been a party like the Bolsheviks in France in 1968, there might have been a revolution.

But this would have required a whole different prior history. What could have been accomplished by a left with a mostly student base?

Mistakes were made, of course. There was a current of ultra-leftism, with a hostility to organization and concrete demands. There was disunity, with revolutionaries fragmented into three major Trotskyist groups, several Maoist groups, and various anarchist formations. If these more subjective problems had been overcome, maybe the action committees would have been stronger, maybe a national strategy would have emerged. At the very least, in the absence of a revolution, a better foundation for future struggles could have been laid.

But rather than quibbling, with the benefit of hindsight, over the mistakes of people who made history despite difficult circumstances, we should remember what they showed possible – the spread of a student struggle from one university to the largest general strike in history, in a rich Western country. And we should try to make sure that, the next time such possibilities open up, socialists are in a position to prevent the struggle from ebbing away into reaction, and instead take it forward to its logical conclusion, a better world.

The dialectic as a form

2010-04-07T07:31:00.005-04:00

Let's consider a view of the dialectic as a form, or family of forms, which processes can take.

Hegel was vehemently opposed to any categorical separation of form and content[1]. But this was one thing pushing him towards idealism, via the proposition that thought must be its own subject. So Marxists have rightly allowed some space here where Hegel saw none. John Rees quotes Lenin as favoring the "unity of knowing and being" over Hegel's "identity of knowing and being" for this reason.[2] Form is ultimately dependent on content, "in substance and in structure",[3] but it can be analytically isolated. Interpreting the dialectic as an abstract form rather than a property of the world adds a certain separation, but it does not entail any sort of dualism of substance, so I think we are still on safe ground.

So let us continue. The first thing we have to do is distinguish two meanings of "form" - form as appearance, as the guise in which something shows itself to us, and form as pattern, as a real structure that things can be found to have. The position we are considering here is that the dialectic is the latter, a pattern - but the two are related, and we will come back to form-as-appearance later.

Bertell Ollman provides a clear definition of the "negation of the negation" as an instance of this sort of pattern: "the process by which the most recent phase in a development that has gone through at least three phases will display important similarities with what existed in the phase before last."[4]

This shows a strength of this interpretation of dialectics: it is readily apparent, finally, what saying a process is an instance of a dialectical pattern, in this case the negation of the negation, does and does not imply. Compare with "positive feedback", a pattern of a similar type - an example of which is the tendency of global warming to melt snow and therefore reduce the Earth's albedo and increase the amount of sunlight it absorbs. Just as once we find a positive feedback, we can say that a system will tend towards instability, with small changes being amplified, once we find a "negation of the negation", we can say that a process will tend towards recurring cycles. For example, the tendency of capitalist accumulation to lead to a crisis of over-production, a first "negation", which will then destroy accumulated value and create the conditions for a new boom, a second "negation", leads to repeated booms and busts.

These inferences, from "positive feedback" to instability and from "negation of the negation" to cyclicity, are legitimate, but they are neither scientific laws nor alternatives to empirical study. In neither case does the conclusion give us any certainties; there may be counter-tendencies, or longer-term processes which erode the foundations of the system. But that is to be expected of a concept so general, and is acceptable, if we know what positive content it does have.

On the other hand, Ollman's definition also highlights a real weakness of the view of dialectics as a set of forms: a lack of obvious importance. The applicability of the negation of the negation so interpreted, to processes with three or more phases etc., is relatively narrow. If dialectics was a revolution in logic, in the basic tools of thought, then it would be obvious why it was worth studying. But if it is a mere collection of general patterns, what is the advantage of using or even speaking of a distinct dialectical method?

Consider the definition we have already cited of contradiction, as "the incompatible development of different elements within the same relation".[5] Or Ollman's definition of the unity of opposites (which, perhaps wrongly, he distinguishes from contradiction): "the process by which a radical change in the conditions surrounding two or more elements... produces a striking alteration... in their relations".[6]

There does not appear to be any intrinsic relationship between these concepts, considered as forms. If we find an instance of the negation of the negation, we cannot thereby deduce the existence of a contradiction in the same process, absent the "law" we have already rejected that change itself requires contradiction. And vice versa; if we find a contradiction in a system, that does not automatically mean that the system's equilibrium will fall apart of its own accord, let alone that such a negation will in turn be negated.

Moreover, in finding a pattern in some process which has a dialectical form, we are at the same time choosing a mode of appearance of that process to consider. The two meanings of "form" we discussed are bound together. Since the patterns we are looking for are abstract and apply across different domains, and so cannot be given any precise material criteria, they only appear when we describe - formulate - a process in a certain way. The material reality of any given situation can be stated without dialectical terminology, just as Earth's decreasing albedo can be described in detail without necessarily seeing it as a positive feedback in a larger process of global warming. We need a reason, if not permission, to use the concepts of dialectics.

Thus, dialectics cannot be simply a catalog of forms and remain valuable. In the absence of laws about all reality which dialectical forms express, we need something more. What's needed is a framework with which to unite these forms as a coherent object of study, to give them importance, and to assure us that they are more than mere forms of appearance, more than aesthetics.

The obvious starting point, as suggested in the previous post, is to say that dialectical patterns are characteristic of capitalism, and essential to understanding its functioning. That would fulfill all three of the requirements just listed. And unlike the idea that studies of nature and capitalism use distinct logical laws, this proposition does not require any strict separation of nature and humanity.

It does, however, leave open questions. The most fundamental is - characteristic why? What makes these forms essential to capitalism; why do we see them again and again? Upon the answer to this question depends the answer to a second question - why study the patterns, not simply the material specifics? What unique explanatory role do dialectical structures play?

[1] Science of Logic, p. 36.
[2] Algebra of Revolution, p. 274-5.
[3] George Novack, Logic of Marxism, p. 7.
[4] Dance of the Dialectic, p. 96.
[5] ibid., p. 17.
[6] ibid., p. 96.

The dialectics of nature and capitalism

2010-04-03T11:20:00.005-04:00

Most of the examples I've used of processes that appear to follow the laws of dialectics are from society, and more specifically capitalism. Most of the counter-examples I've used against various interpretations of dialectics come from physics or physical processes. Marx, whose "dialectical method" we are trying to investigate, himself wrote mostly on capitalism.

So, one obvious way of responding to problems with a conception of dialectics as the "laws of motion" of all reality is to re-interpret dialectics as the "laws of motion" of history, or just of capitalism. Then we might reject Engels' "Dialectics of Nature", but stop there.

This should be a fundamentally unappealing solution to a materialist, though. It assumes an untenable absolute division between nature and society. Raymond Williams quotes Marx: "One basis for life and another for science is a priori a falsehood."[1]

Even if we wanted to violate that stricture, where would we draw the line? As Bertell Ollman points out, "People have bodies as well as minds and social roles... capital, commodities, money, and the forces of production all have material as well as social aspects."[2] How could we analyze capital and its organic composition without speaking of machinery and the development of technology, or labor and its alienation without speaking of human bodies and their limits?

There is another problem with isolating dialectics as a science of human history. It is that we do, in fact, sometimes see examples in physics, chemistry, and biology which involve no necessary human intervention but nevertheless obey certain dialectical "laws"; examples where contradictory tendencies cause change, where the accumulation of quantitative change leads to a qualitative state transition, etc. Many of Engels' examples in nature - evaporation, Darwinian evolution, the life cycles of plants - do seem to match dialectical patterns, often more clearly than most social processes. If dialectics does not truly apply to the spheres in which we find these examples, what are we to make of them?

Ollman and John Rees offer essentially the same answer to the question of the scope of dialectics: that while the dialectic takes different forms when applied to humans and to non-human nature, it remains, fundamentally, universal. Rees suggests we say that "dialectical development [is] a feature of the natural world as well as the social world without... assert[ing] that the form of the dialectic [is] the same in both cases."[3] Ollman asserts that "movements on each level of generality must be seen as expressions of laws that are specific to that level as well as versions of more general laws."[4]

A first response to this is that if we have already rejected a conception of the dialectic as a set of laws governing all reality, we need to reject it as a set of laws governing history or capitalism, in order to preserve a unity of method corresponding to the unity of the material world. That's simple enough.

But there's something more suggested by Rees' reference to different "forms" of the dialectic, and Ollman's reference to different "levels of generality". What does it mean that the dialectic is the kind of thing that can not merely be expressed differently, but take a different shape itself, in different cases? That it is the kind of thing that can only be fully defined within a given system, and not as a law identically applicable to all cases? That - if earlier posts were right - there are real things, processes and relationships about which dialectics has nothing to say?

I think the correct conclusion to draw here - though neither Rees nor Ollman explicitly draws it, and Rees, at least, would deny it - is that "law" is the wrong concept. When we look at examples of dialectics in action, we do not really see reality obeying a common set of rules or logic. Rather, we see change taking a certain structure, a form which shares a sort of family resemblance with the forms we see change take in many other places. So perhaps the dialectic is not analogous to the theory of relativity, but to the notion of an unstable equilibrium or that of the positive feedback loop, recurring patterns that we see again and again in different fields.

A conception of the dialectic as a family of forms allows us to make sense of the "unity in difference" of human society and non-human nature: a common basic structure which may take different shapes, or be more or less common, depending on the process. And as above, I think it is hard to deny that we see many real phenomena which have some dialectical aspect, so-defined. But this still leaves open questions.

One set of questions revolves around why we see these forms - and why we should care. In rejecting the dialectic-as-law, we have rejected the idea that change is necessarily structured along these lines. But perhaps these forms are characteristic of capitalism? If so, why? Is there a worthwhile approach to inquiry that should lead us to pay special attention to these forms? Or is dialectics good for nothing more than constructing a rather eccentric and abstract catalogue?

Another set of questions starts from an even more skeptical position. Is there really anything substantial in common among all the forms that are grouped together under the name "dialectics"? If we see some dialectical aspects of a situation, does that give us the right to conclude anything further that we do not already know? Or does "the dialectic" not describe any single coherent thing - at least not if interpreted as a structure of change?

Future posts will take up these questions - starting with the latter set.

[1] Marxism and Literature, p. 63.
[2] Dance of the Dialectic, p. 70.
[3] Algebra of Revolution, p. 75.
[4] Dance of the Dialectic, p. 97.

Change and contradiction

2010-03-16T08:31:00.012-04:00

When reading about dialectics, one repeatedly hears that change and contradiction are intimately and necessarily connected, even for the simplest forms of change.

For example, Engels writes that "Motion itself is a contradiction: even simple mechanical change of position can only come about through a body being at one and the same moment of time both... in one and the same place and also not in it."[1] I don't want to examine this particular physical case too closely, because it is entangled with quantum mechanics (via the quantization of space and time), and this is a whole question in itself.[2] But Engels' statement is nevertheless interesting.

Engels' claim relies on the obviousness of one kind of "contradiction" - that which results from change. A body is in one place; later it is not in that place but in another place. Thus a statement which was once true is no longer true, and we have two true but incompatible statements - a "material contradiction", perhaps? Trotsky finds the same kind of "contradiction" in a pound of sugar: "All bodies change uninterruptedly in size, weight, colour, etc. They are never equal to themselves."[3]

But this kind of contradiction is trivial and uninteresting. Any change involves an entity or process moving from one state to a different state. We have already rejected the idea that literally everything changes, and Trotsky concedes that even when things do change, if the changes are "negligible for the task at hand", we can ignore them, and speak of coherent, "self-identical" entities.[4] So if this is all there is to the relationship between contradiction and change, talk of "contradiction" adds nothing, and we are left with nothing more than an admonition not to assume that things are static when it is not safe to do so.

Engels' non-trivial claim is that change "can only come about through" a contradiction which already exists, embedded in reality at a given instant. Bertell Ollman puts the same point clearly: "Dialectical thinkers attribute the main responsibility for all change to the inner contradictions of the system or systems in which it occurs."[5] This claim, that change necessarily results from contradiction, is the one that seems like it might have really interesting implications.

To evaluate it, we first need to define "contradiction", or material contradiction specifically, more precisely.

One approach would be to start with the relatively clear definition of a logical contradiction - "a proposition, statement, or phrase that asserts or implies both the truth and falsity of something"[6] - and say that a material contradiction is simply a logical contradiction which is true. This is not promising, for two reasons.

The first is that for any of the examples we have used so far, one can disentangle them so that there is no actual logical contradiction. "Capitalism has both an inherent drive to expand and an inherent tendency to crisis which restricts expansion." "Capitalism both empowers its bourgeois rulers and, ultimately, leaves them helpless before their natural enemies, the working class." We are not actually asserting simultaneously the truth and falsity of any proposition in these rhetorical oppositions - we are merely looking at different aspects of the situation.

The second reason not to claim that logical contradictions can be true is the principle of explosion: from a true contradiction, one can derive anything. (And not in a useful way, contra XKCD.)

For example, say that a pound of sugar is itself, and it is not itself. Then it is itself - that is one half of what we have just asserted. Then either the pound of sugar is itself, or Santa Claus exists - to any true statement, one can add "or [whatever]", and the whole, the disjunction, will remain true. But then let us remember the second half of the original contradiction: the pound of sugar is not itself. With this, we can reject the first half of our disjunction. And since we have shown that the disjunction as a whole is true, that means the second half must be true. In other words, we have just proven that Santa Claus exists.

Suspect a trick? Of course, this reasoning isn't valid. But that's because the premise wasn't valid. Each step thereafter used a rule of propositional logic which we rely on all the time and would be very difficult to do without.[7]

So let's abandon the idea of true logical contradictions and look for another definition of a material contradiction.

We could try to retreat a little, without changing direction, and say that material contradictions occur whenever two statements which are somehow contrary or in tension, without being strictly contradictory, are both true. This, however, is almost as bad an option, because there is no good way to define this kind of propositional tension - it will likely come down in each case to rhetoric, whether English offers a way to phrase the two statements so that they sound contradictory.

A more promising approach, I think, is to view a material contradiction as the existence of opposing forces or tendencies. Ollman gives a good definition of a contradiction along these lines: "The incompatible development of different elements within the same relation."[8] Ollman's phrase "incompatible development" is nice because on the one hand we can use the strict sense of "contradiction" - the outcomes towards which various forces tend are genuinely incompatible, that is, they could not occur simultaneously without logical contradiction - and on the other hand we do not have to claim that a logical contradiction is ever actually true, but rather that contradictory forces must result in a change in the system before the state of logical contradiction is reached.

Let us provisionally accept this definition, then, and go back to our original question: does all change result from this kind of contradiction?

Our definition of contradiction excludes one semi-intuitive rationale for the "change requires contradiction" thesis - the notion that change requires some sort of "lack", or imperfection, in what exists.[9] The idea is that a truly complete and self-consistent reality would necessarily be static - from perfection can flow only constant perfection. But given the idea of contradiction as the existence of incompatible tendencies, there is no need to try to explore and clarify this rationale - a "lack" is not by itself a contradiction.

Losing one possible rationale, however, is not necessarily a problem for the original thesis. So let's consider what it implies.

It is at least plausible that all change requires some sort of pre-existing tendency, or else it would be uncaused. The only counter-example I can think of is if there is true randomness, as in some interpretations of quantum mechanics, but even there we might describe the probability distribution which governs the quantum state as an existing tendency, and so preserve our claim.

It is also plausible that all change occurs within some system. Now, certainly all change within any given system does not necessarily stem from a cause internal to that particular system. If the geologists are right, Earth's ecology in the era of the dinosaurs was transformed from the outside in about as dramatic a way as might be imagined - by the impact of a gigantic meteor. And there are many other similar examples, phenomena for which I like the term "Excession", following Iain Banks. But there is always a larger, enveloping system, to which any given cause of change is internal, up to the scale of the universe.

In any case, that still leaves one more step before we have a positive answer to our question - does all change, that is caused within a system, stem from multiple, contradictory tendencies or developments? Or, equivalently, since we have admitted a necessary connection between tendency and change - is every tendency in reality matched by one or more opposing tendencies within the same process?

I think not. Take Engels' simple object in motion - for it to travel in a straight line, there need be no tendency other than its inertia. Or at a more abstract and social level, take the tendency for scientific knowledge and technology to advance. Certainly that does not have only positive effects, or even necessarily advance the average person's knowledge. But is there a counter-tendency for technology to regress?

For any example I can name, I am sure someone can come up with some contrary tendency somewhere. But remember that we are not merely seeking a contrary tendency, we are seeking one within the same system, the same process of change. That, I do not think it is always possible to provide.

One more example: a computer running a sort algorithm on a list of numbers in its memory, say merge sort. There is a tendency, as this process runs, for the list to become sorted - a tendency which is in fact mathematically provable, and can be quantified in various ways (for example, we can find the number of comparisons which must be done in the worst case for a list of any given length). Here we have a well-defined process - in fact, "process" could be a technical term here as well as a philosophical one - which not only contains a well-defined development, but apparently excludes any possibility of a counter-development.

Remember also the dilemma posed in the previous post - in relating dialectics to science, we want to avoid either Lysenkoism or mere mysticism. Now that we have made the question of whether change always stems from contradiction more concrete, we can see that the same dilemma applies here. Either dialectics commands scientists to find opposing tendencies in every system, or it asserts their existence without allowing any concrete conclusions to be derived from this assertion. Neither option is satisfactory.

At best, then, if a conception of dialectics as a set of laws or facts about the world is defensible, its defense requires losing content. We cannot sustain at the same time two universal propositions; that change is always caused by tendencies which are 1) united and internal to a single process, and 2) contradictory. To make either proposition universal we must abandon the other, and doing so would leave dialectics with little to say.

Can this problem be solved by narrowing dialectics' domain? Perhaps we can retain the idea of dialectics as a set of truths about the world, if we speak only of a part of the world - human history, or capitalism. Or do we have to abandon dialectics' claim to describe reality, in favor of a conception of dialectics as method, or form, or critique? These questions still have to be answered.

[1] Anti-Duhring, chapter 10.
[2] One can certainly view something like Schroedinger's cat as a case of a material contradiction. But I think it is more useful to view it as an indication that we should not try to think of quantum mechanical particle as analogous to macro-scale objects like cats.
[3] "The ABC of Materialist Dialectics", in A Petty Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers' Party.
[4] ibid.
[5] Dance of the Dialectic, p. 18.
[6] Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary. (Yeah.)
[7] A few mathematicians have tried to develop logics which allow contradiction while avoiding explosion, most commonly logics which take more values than "true" and "false". But if consistent, they tend to end up adding complexity without having any actual advantages in terms of conceptual power. Timothy Williamson's book Vagueness has a persuasive section on this.
[8] Dance of the Dialectic, p. 17.
[9] Hegel uses the term "deficiency": "Internal self-movement proper... is nothing else but the fact that something is, in one and the same respect, self-contained and deficient, the negative of itself." Cited in Rees, Algebra of Revolution, p. 51.

Dialectics as a "general science"

2010-03-14T15:49:00.009-04:00

In Marxist writing about dialectics, one often finds very general assertions. "The various seemingly separate elements of which the world is composed are in fact related to one another."[1] "The whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is... a process, i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development."[2] "All reality is constantly changing."[3] "As soon as we consider things in their motion, their change, their life, their reciprocal influence on one another... we immediately become involved in contradictions."[4] "Real change must result from any contradictory system."[5]

If we take statements like these literally, the implications are very strong.

Take the claim that "all reality is constantly changing." Does that mean that the value of pi changes? Perhaps we should exclude it from the proposition, since we cannot really even conceive of what it would mean for pi to change. (Or at least I can't; maybe some mathematician has.)

But what about a more material number, the fine structure constant - which is related, among other things, to the speed of light? Physicists know more or less what it would mean for it to change, but from what I understand, most believe it doesn't. Or take protons. Does dialectics imply that they decay, rather than existing indefinitely? Some physical theories predict proton decay, but there is no experimental evidence for it.

Lastly, what about the laws of physics themselves? Rees quotes the biologists Levin and Lewontin to the effect that one of dialectics' key insights is that "the laws of transformation themselves change" - for example, the laws which govern economic dynamics under capitalism will themselves be different in another historical epoch.[6] Does dialectics then imply that, say, if the equations of general relativity are valid today, they were not yesterday and will not be tomorrow?

I am not taking dialectics anywhere new by asking these questions. Engels' writing on dialectics is full of examples from biology, chemistry, and math. But his examples appear mostly intended to illustrate, and are picked to be easy. If you look instead for hard cases like these, where change, contradiction, etc., are at the very least non-obvious, dilemmas begin to arise.

I can see four ways of approaching the question of what dialectics might say about proton decay.

The first approach is the most straightforward - to embrace the scientific implications. Yes, one might say, protons must somehow transform themselves under the impulse of their own internal contradictions;[7] even if dialectics cannot by itself give us a complete physical theory, it can give us certain assertions, like the inevitability of change, as a starting point.

I find this implausible on its face; it would imply a much closer relationship between physics and philosophy than we usually see in real life. One can list plenty more physical examples which at least seem to contradict dialectics in this interpretation - and in the best case, the theory could be no more certain than its contrarian implications for physics. Experiments which extend what we know about the minimum lifespan of the proton would, in challenging one premise of dialectics, thereby challenge even dialectical arguments about capitalism.

A second approach would be to re-describe the propositions of dialectics as tendencies rather than absolute laws. So, one could say, while we should expect everything to change, including elementary particles, we must allow for exceptions when evidence or reason requires them.

This is not very satisfying. It makes dialectics something much less useful than Engels' "science", Rees' "algebra", or Novack's "logic". It is basically impossible to disprove, since there is no way of quantifying the proportion of exceptions across physics, biology, philosophy, and history. And, it would make it strange to even speak of a coherent subject called "dialectics". If dialectics is a mere set of rules-of-thumb - "don't expect things to be static", "look for connections between parts and larger wholes", "look for internal causes of change" - what makes these tendencies special? There doesn't seem to be anything to distinguish these, as rules-of-thumb, from others, like one I once heard from a professor: "If a statement is true for the first three random, non-trival examples you check, it's probably always true."[8]

A third approach to the problem would be to say that in expecting protons to decay, one would be drawing too specific an implication, and looking for the wrong kind of change. Dialectics tells us - one might argue - that everything in the world is in some way involved in a process of change, without telling us that any individual part of the world must change in any particular way. So - the argument might go - protons do change: they move in space and time, they gain and lose energy, they join and leave nuclei. Thus they accord with the predictions of dialectics. Why ask more?

The problem here is subtler, but equally fatal for the original claim of universality. It is that we no longer know exactly what dialectics does imply or even suggest about any particular question; if things must change only in some aspect or in relation to some given system, this does not tell us anything much in practice. And it is not merely a question of needing to use a materialist method, to always apply dialectics to concrete reality. If we say that dialectics only applies to some aspect of any given entity, situation, process, or structure, and we cannot in advance tell which, that is functionally equivalent to admitting that dialectics only applies sometimes, and we cannot in advance tell when.

The third approach thus collapses into the fourth and last approach, which is to admit that dialectics does not give us laws which really apply to everything, even as tendencies, and in particular that it has nothing to tell us about proton decay.

Can the collapse be avoided? I can think of one more distinction which an advocate of the third approach might try to make. That is to say that, while not every true way of describing something must be dialectical, the dialectical way of approaching something will always be more fruitful, getting at a dynamic which is somehow more crucial. So, while dialectics might not tell us whether or not a proton will ever decay, that inapplicability itself tells us that understanding proton decay is not the best way to begin understanding particle physics. Decay is a particular prediction, not the heart of the theory.

That argument may be plausible for the example we have been using, but it does not hold up in general. Take another case: gravitational orbit, e.g. the orbit of the Earth around the Sun.

One way to describe an orbit is to say that it is the result of two balanced opposing forces. Gravity pulls the Earth inward, while centrifugal force pulls the Earth outwards, so in the end it travels in an ellipse. This seems like a classical dialectical triad - two contradictory forces impelling motion in a new, third direction. But in fact, centrifugal force isn't real in the same way that gravity is, even in Newtonian physics. The Earth is not pulled outwards; rather, absent any external force, it would travel in an inertial straight line, and gravity merely bends its path. Inertia is not really a force. Moreover, according to the theory of relativity, even gravity is not really a force. Instead, space-time itself is bent. So the first "dialectical" view is accurate on the surface, but misleading from the perspective of a deeper theory.

I have focused so far on just one universal claim that dialectics might make, the claim that everything changes. There are other claims available to the theory. But without discussing them individually, let's note what's already been established, if, like me, one finds the modest fourth approach the most plausible.

A defensible version of dialectics will be a theory not about everything in the universe, but at most about processes of change, where we have already established that they exist. This isn't necessarily that much of a retreat, and it gives us a handy, non-circular definition of a dialectical "totality": not merely any arbitrary collection of nouns, but a coherent process of motion, development, or transformation - in the maximalist interpretation, any such process. The key question then becomes the concept of "contradiction", and its relationship to change and causality.

That question is worth its own post. But already in this one, we have not just slightly narrowed the territory dialectics might claim. We have also noted a dilemma that any conception of dialectics will have to face. Does the dialectic have specific implications for scientific theory, in any field, or not? Either answer is problematic; on the one hand, we risk an idealistic if not Lysenkoist attempt to make science answer to a 19th-century philosophical theory, and on the other hand, we risk reducing dialectics to a vague and insubstantial mysticism. As we explore what might be valuable in the dialectic, we will have to chart a course between these twin rocks.

[1] Rees, Algebra of Revolution, p. 5
[2] Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, chapter 2. More specifically, Engels says that it is the "great merit" of Hegel that he "represents" the world in this way.
[3] Novack, Logic of Marxism, p. 66. See also Marx's slightly different formulation: "The dialectic... regards every historically developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion" (cited in Rees, p. 100-1).
[4] Engels, Anti-Duhring, chapter 10.
[5] Rees, p. 118.
[6] ibid., p. 78.
[7] Protons are, after all, internally differentiated totalities; they are made up of quarks.
[8] Applied to statements about the natural numbers in a class on discrete math.

Dialectics and formal logic

2010-03-08T06:58:00.012-05:00

In exploring the dialectic, I plan to examine conceptions of it one by one, and consider whether they can be sustained. The goal is to move more or less from the broadest to the narrowest, until we find a core that is true.

So, let's start with a very broad conception of dialectics: as a successor to mathematical formal logic, which "arose out of the criticism of formal logic, overthrew and replaced it as its revolutionary opponent, successor and superior," in the words of George Novack.[1] The idea is that dialectics has a relationship to conventional logic which is analogous to the relationship between the theories of Einstein and of Newton, or between an obsolescent tool and a state-of-the-art one.[2]

This is so immediately problematic that I do not even know how to present it more fully before abandoning neutrality.

Mathematical logic allows the mechanical deduction of results - one can start with an expression like "(A OR B) AND (NOT A OR C) AND (B OR NOT C)" in terms of Boolean (true or false) variables A, B, and C, and then use a computer to determine, given values for the variables, whether the expression is true or false. Or one can even use a computer to check whether the expression is valid - whether it is true for all possible values of A, B, and C - or satisfiable - whether it is ever true given any values of A, B, and C - using an algorithm like resolution which does not require plugging in any specific values for the variables at all.[3]

One cannot do anything like this for dialectics. As Rees writes, dialectics is "not a calculator into which it is possible to punch the problem and allow it to compute the solution."[4] But calculability is precisely what distinguishes logic as logic. It is not an incidental benefit. The reason we can use mathematical logic in a calculator is that mathematical logic, given whatever premises, can tell us unambiguous conclusions which follow necessarily. If the "laws" of dialectics were laws in the same sense that commutativity is a law of Boolean logic, we could tell computers how to obey them, and so use them in programs. We can't.

Logic enables us to go from one or more true statements to another equivalent true statement without the need for additional empirical verification. If I see, say, one protest result in a victory, I know that it is not the case that all protests are defeated, without having to check any additional protests, thanks to a basic equivalence in first-order logic. And when we go beyond single-step deductions, very often logic will take us to non-obvious conclusions.

But deduction of this kind is not available with dialectics. Rees concedes that "once we are sure we have made an accurate abstraction", that does not mean "we can also be sure that any further categories that emerge as a result of contradictions which we find in our concept will necessarily be matched by contradictions in the real capitalist world. This... is only a safe assumption on the basis of constant empirical verification."[5]

So dialectics' non-calculability is not merely a question of a missing formalization. Logic is a mathematical way of examining a process that is essential to reasoning, where we place our knowledge and beliefs into relationship with one another in order to draw conclusions and form a coherent whole, without any necessary mediation by new or additional experience. Dialectics, whatever it is, is a different kind of beast.

Engels writes, "Even formal logic is primarily a method of arriving at new results, of advancing from the known to the unknown — and dialectics is the same, only much more eminently so."[6] But if we are to set dialectics up against formal logic, as an alternate method of deduction, then if it is more "eminent", that is only in the sense that the Pope is more eminent than a subway conductor. The latter does practical work herself, while his eminence has subordinates for that.

Of course, why should one set dialectics up as a rival to logic as studied by mathematicians and computer scientists? Why disparage formal logic with dishonest word games - like Novack's attempt to slide from "A = A", to "A always equals A", to "A cannot be non-A", to "a man cannot be inhuman, democracy cannot be undemocratic", without the reader noticing a non-equivalence, in order to cast doubt on the "law of identity"?[7]

This kind of rhetorical trick has nothing in common with science, but is necessary if dialectics needs to conquer logic's territory in order to have living space. So why not abandon the attempt?

We should. The only problem is that if you do not view dialectics as a logic like Boolean logic or first-order logic, you do not get universality for free. Engels describes dialectics as "the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought."[8] But if dialectics cannot take over logic's universal applicability, and if it cannot be formalized and studied in isolation independent of topical content, there is no clear reason why we should assume it is so general. We will have to reconsider how universally its principles really apply.

[1] Logic of Marxism, p. 28.
[2] The Einstein/Newton analogy is used by John Rees, Algebra of Revolution, p. 271. Of course, he says in the same place that dialectics is not an "alternative" to formal logic, but this seems to be just a confused retreat from the full implications of the original idea. Einstein's theory was, of course, an alternative to Newton's, which is a mere low-energy approximation.
[3] Of course, for general expressions checking satisfiability is NP-complete, and so infeasible in practice, but that's off topic.
[4] Algebra of Revolution, p. 271.
[5] ibid., p. 110.
[6] Anti-Duhring, chapter 11.
[7] Logic of Marxism, p. 18. This is a truly awful passage, which stands out even in a very bad book. On top of the idiotic hackery of the claim that "man cannot be inhuman" follows from the law of non-contradiction, Novack asserts that this law follows "logically and inevitably" from the law of identity, and in turn "flows logically" to the law of the excluded middle. Of course, not only are these three axioms not derivable from one another (or they would not be axioms), there are in fact consistent logical systems which deny the law of the excluded middle, used in constructivist math. And then there's the fact that the three laws Novack discusses are archaic and do not constitute the complete axioms of any modern logical system...
[8] Anti-Duhring, chapter 11.

The dialectic

2010-03-06T15:11:00.005-05:00

I plan to write a series of posts on the Marxist notion of "dialectics" or "the dialectic", with the goal of answering the following questions: What is the dialectic? What is it good for? Is it defensible, or ultimately just mysticism?

I'm no expert - I haven't read Hegel's Logic, nor, except for bits, even Engels' Anti-Duhring. I am not qualified to write a history of ideas - what did Marx himself really think? - nor do I find that question very interesting. But I do think I have read and heard enough arguments on the topic to begin to judge their substance.

John Rees* gives the following definition of the "essentials" of the dialectic:

The world is a constant process of change;
The world is a totality; and
This totality is internally contradictory.

The idea is that the dynamics of change in the world should be examined by seeing it as composed of parts which are in tension with one another but which which are nevertheless united in a systematic way, and that this tension is what propels the system as a whole.

Per Rees, the triadic "thesis"/"antithesis"/"synthesis" pattern which is commonly associated with the dialectic, where the contradictory existence or validity of thesis and antithesis results in a new state or idea, the synthesis, which subsumes and transforms both, is then simply one form taken by such dynamic, contradictory totalities. The phrase "unity of opposites", also associated with dialectics and sometimes called a "law", describes the relationship between thesis and antithesis in this kind of triad. The "negation of the negation", another "law", is a yet more specific version of the triad, in which the thesis comes first, then is apparently defeated or subordinated by the antithesis, which finally is defeated or subordinated by a new synthesis that contains elements of the original thesis. The last common "law", the "transformation of quantity into quality", is, on the other hand, a characteristic of how dialectical transformations more broadly take place: a contradictory set of forces will push a system in one direction without fundamentally changing its character for some time, but eventually the changes will add up to a new and fundamentally different configuration.

Some more-concrete examples of dialectically contradictory totalities, in Marxist theory: The interdependent relationship between the economic "base" of society and the political and cultural "superstructure". The class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat under capitalism and the possibility of socialism as its result. The relationship between productive forces and the mode of production, where capitalism at first advances production and then begins to weight it down through crises. The role of a revolutionary party as both an element of working class consciousness and an actor upon it.

According to a dialectical interpretation, each of these systems is a totality in that its parts are inseparable from one other and can have no independent existence, but are rather aspects or "moments" of one coherent whole, abstracted and treated as separate only in thought, as a means of systemic analysis. (There can be no base without a superstructure, no party without a class.) Each system is contradictory, either containing some kind of struggle, or described by multiple propositions which are somehow opposite but are simultaneously true. (The bourgeoisie and proletariat are at war, the party both acts and is acted upon by the class.) Finally, the contradictions are what propel the system forward - if not for the contradictions, the system would be static, but they give it the possibility of becoming something new. (Capitalism may become socialism not because someone had an idea which wins out in a side-by-side comparison but because it creates its own gravediggers.)

I do think there is something to these examples - their "dialectical" aspects as just described are real and important. But that leaves many questions unanswered.

The key terms, "totality"/system/process, "contradiction"/opposition, and change/motion/transformation, have not been defined. How broadly does the dialectic apply - to nature, to society, or merely to elements of capitalism? Are its laws akin to those of logic and math, to those of physics, or to the more-or-less approximate generalizations of, say, biology - or are they simply rules-of-thumb, useful pointers? Is the dialectic a set of connected theses, propositions about the world as a whole, or is it a structure which things may take, which implies certain properties, or is it a grab-bag of fundamentally unrelated adjectives which sometimes apply together but only coincidentally?

I want to try to answer these questions, at least to my own satisfaction, in following posts.

* The Algebra of Revolution, p. 114. This is an interesting and useful survey of Marxist thinking about dialectics despite Rees' tendency to elide hard questions.

Two essays on the ISO

2009-10-29T13:02:00.004-04:00

Why I Hate the ISO - one of the better written pieces I've seen from a sectarian, but no less detached from reality for it. (I show up in comments, but the discussion ends up mostly insults.)
Why I Am Joining The ISO - an eloquent statement from Paul LeBlanc.

Keynes

2009-05-23T11:09:00.002-04:00

Via Brad DeLong, Keynes on Leninism:

How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, whatever their faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?

See also Petrino DiLeo on Keynes, from the last issue of the ISR.

The Prophet Unarmed

2009-04-10T19:56:00.004-04:00

The Prophet Unarmed is the title of Isaac Deutscher's definitive book on Trotsky's struggle against Stalin and Stalinism between 1921 and his exile from Russia in 1929. The title is apt; the book showcases Trotsky's numerous prophetic analyses, while also exposing the fundamental impotence of his position in Russia. It's also apt in that it hints at Deutscher's major weakness - his tendency to assign some objectively progressive role to Stalinism, however qualified, and so reduce Trotskyism to an otherworldly intellectual position with no useful role to play in the era of the struggle between capitalism and "bureacratically degenerated workers' states".

The Prophet Unarmed isn't, however, just about a piece of history which increasingly seems to be dwindling away after the fall of the Soviet Union and the beginning of a new century. It addresses fundamental issues: the nature of revolutionary leadership, the role of organization in relationship to material circumstances, what it means to be politically in the working class, with the working class, in its vanguard, or standing above it.

The book deserves its great reputation, and in style and content is worthy of the dramatic and tragic events it chronicles. Without effort, it renders ridiculous both the view still held by a few that Trotsky and Stalin were engaged in a dispute over "line" in which Stalin's arguments triumphed, and the now much more prevalant lazy liberal cynicism that says the fight was over nothing more than personal ambition. It grapples more seriously with harder questions. How did a party as democratic, contentious, and rooted in the working class as the Bolsheviks end up acceding to a bureaucratic dictatorship? What does this submission, and the submission of the once-ungovernable Russian people, tell us about the road to genuine socialism and (the same thing) genuine democracy?

The opening chapter contains an answer to the first question as convincing in all its nuance as any I've heard or read. Deutscher describes the effective destruction of the Russian working class and of Soviet democracy by the civil war:

The nation ruled by Lenin's party was in a state of near dissolution [by 1921]. The material foundations of its existence were shattered. It will be enough to recall that by the end of the civil war Russia's national income amounted to only one-third of her income in 1913, that industry produced less than one-fifth of the goods produced before the war... that the exchange of goods between town and country had come to a standstill, that Russia's cities and towns had become so depopulated that in 1921 Moscow had only one-half and Petrograd one-third of its former inhabitants, and that the people of the two capitals had for many months lived on a food ration of two ounces of bread and a few frozen potatoes and had heated their dwellings with the wood of their furniture...

It was a grim and paradoxical outcome of the struggle that the industrial working class, which was now supposed to exercise its dictatorship, was also pulverized. The most courageous and politically-minded workers had either laid down their lives in the civil war or occupied responsible posts in the new administration... Masses of workers fled from town to country during the hungry years... The dispersal of the old working class crated a vacuum in urban Russia. The old, self-reliant and class-conscious labor movement with its many institutions and organizations, trade unions, co-operatives, and educational clubs, which used to resound with loud and passionate debate and seethe with political activity - that movement was now an empty shell. [1]

He describes the Bolshevik resort to one-party rule in the absence of any real alternative:

The Bolshevik party had the usurper's role thrust upon it. It had become impossible for it to live up to its principle once the working class had disintegrated. What could or should the party have done under these circumstances? Should it have thrown up its hands and surrendered power? A revolutionary government which has waged a cruel and devastating civil war does not abdicate on the day after its victory and does not surrender to its defeated enemies and to their revenge even if it discovers that it cannot rule in accordance with its own ideas and that it no longer enjoys the support it commanded when it entered the civil war. The Bolsheviks lost that support not because of any clear-cut change in the minds of their erstwhile followers, but because of the latter's dispersal. They knew that their mandate to rule the republic had not been properly renewed by the working class - not to speak of the peasantry. But they also knew that they were surrounded by a vacuum... [2]

Deutchser also describes how one-party rule became incompatible with the toleration of factions within the party (how else to stop opponents of Bolshevism from simply signing up as members?), the ban on factions became incompatible with real internal democracy and freedom of dissent (what is collective opposition to current policy but the act of a faction?), and the suppression of dissent led directly to first bureaucratic and then one-person dictatorship:

The single-party system was a contradition in terms: the single party itself could not remain a party in the accepted sense... The party maintained its discipline, not its democratic freedom. If the Bolsheviks were now to engage freely in controversy, if their leaders were to thrash out their differences in public, and if the rank and file were to criticize the leaders and their policy, they would set an example to non-Bolsheviks... No body politic can be nine-tenths mute and one-tenth vocal. Having imposed silence on non-Bolshevik Russia, Lenin's party had in the end to impose silence on itself as well. [3]

Yet, even after the civil war, "the logic of the single-party system might... never have become explicit, or the system might even have been undone by the growth of a workers' democracy, if the whole history of the Soviet Union, encircled and isolated in its age-old poverty and backwardness, had not been an almost uninterrupted sequence of calamities." [4]

Deutscher correctly blames material circumstances for Bolshevism's degeneration without denying that, in the famous line of Victor Serge, the "germ of all Stalinism" was (with "a mass of other germs") there from the beginning. He acknowledges that the party's "moral self-reliance, its superiority, its sense of revolutionary mission, its inner discipline, and its deeply ingrained conviction that authority was indispensible to proletarian revolution - all these formed the authoritarian strands in Bolshevism" [5], strands which enabled 1917's vanguard of the working class to become its slave-driver and enforcer of famine by 1928 without a major split or the eruption of widespread rank-and-file revolt. (Trotsky's supporters were crushed mostly without blood; the massacre of the Bolshevik Old Guard came later, in the 1930s.)

An understanding of this history in all of its contradictions is essential for anyone wanting to pursue the kind of revolutionary project at which the Bolshevik Party had more success than anyone before or since. But I do not think too many lessons can be drawn from the simple fact that the ability and willingness to seize power is a double-edged sword. Humanity and the Earth desperately need fundamental change, and revolution is a violent act - this is something with which we just have to deal.

We can be more directly guided, I think, by leaving aside temporarily the revolutionary liberty that was lost, and looking at what replaced it. In this examination, however, we will have to be more critical of Deutscher.

The last chapter of The Prophet Unarmed contains Deutscher's discussion of the nature of the Stalinist state. If my view and that of the International Socialist Organization that the Soviet Union was a state capitalist society is, on this question, to the left of Trotsky (who viewed it as still a workers' state, however twisted), then Deutscher's view is to the right. Deutscher says of Trotsky:

Because ultimately he identified the process of revolution with the social awareness and activity of the toiling masses, the evidence absence of that awareness and activity led him to conclude that, with Stalinism victorious, 'the film of the revolution was running backwards' [towards capitalism] ... The film was not running as... the makers of the revolution had expected: it was moving partly in a different direction - but not backwards. [6]

"The great transformation of the Soviet Union in the 1930's" by forcible industrialization and collectivization of agriculture, Deutscher continues, "was Trotsky's victory in defeat", despite the incredible human cost, for it constituted a "second revolution" establishing a real material basis for socialism. [7]

Trotsky's identification of revolution with the self-activity of the working class is right, and Deutscher is wrong here. The basic tenent of Marxism has always been that "the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself." No bureaucratic dictatorship can substitute.

What, then, did Stalinism represent? Deutscher is on safe ground in pointing out the obvious flaws in Trotsky's early view of Stalin as leader of an unstabled, wavering faction, "balanced between right and left", without "broad social backing." [8] And he is right, too, that this flawed view followed from Marxist tradition - taking for granted not only the obvious fact that Stalin did not represent working class liberation, but also the assumption that a restoration of capitalism could come only from the farmers and traders and not within the Bolshevik party.

The fault lies with that latter assumption, shared by Deutscher and Trotsky - that only private capital and not the bureaucracy constituted a potential new ruling (capitalist) class. In fact, the bureaucracy's coherence as a class explains Stalinism's triumph over opponents both right and left, and its ability to transform Russian society.

Trotsky's mistake also explains his repeated hesitancy and fatal delay in taking his struggle first to the party rank-and-file, then to the Russian working class outside the party. Deutscher writes, voicing Trotsky's views:

The bureaucracy was not yet a new ruling or possessing class... the basic conquests of the October Revolution were intact, the Soviet Union remained essentially a workers' state, and the old party was still in its own way the guardian of the revolution. Consequently, the Opposition must not sever its links with it, but must continue to regard itself as belonging to the party and defend with the utmost loyalty and determination the Bolshevik monopoly of power.

From this it followed that the Opposition must not seek to recruit support outside the party. Yet it was not allowed to recruit it inside either. This was an insoluble dilemma. [9]

From that starting point, the dilemma was indeed insoluble. It is not obvious that going outside the party would have been a solution either - the devastation of the Russian working class to which the Trotskyist Opposition might have appealed remained a material reality, and to the extent there had been a recovery by the late 1920s, it was offset by the demoralization and depoliticization that accompanied years of one-party rule. But any revolt bound by the rules set by the Stalinist party machine was hopeless.

This is partly a dispute about the nature of the Soviet Union, which has been written about at great length. But it is also a dispute about the definition and purpose of a revolutionary party.

What this history should tell us is that it is wrong to identify too closely the vanguard of the working class - its core of leaders and fighters who remember its history and can generalize from that experience to take its struggle forward - with "the" revolutionary party. That the Bolshevik party had been in every sense the vanguard of the class up through 1917 and after did not mean that it retained this role, and a split from the party, futile or not, would not have meant a break with the revolution. The two were far from identical - even well before Stalin's victory. Moreover, Deutscher's persuasive argument that the one-party policy was, necessarily, destructive not only of democracy in the abstract but of the working-class movement including its vanguard, has implications even absent state power. The party can only be a genuine vanguard through a dynamic interchange with a political milieu around it, in which different political views can find organizational expression without having to fear consequences beyond the risk of error - consequences in the form of political repression or the sort of fear of complete alienation from "the" party and emotional abuse that even sects with no capacity for violence have exercised quite effectively.

The International Socialist Organization has always correctly viewed the claim of any grouplet with a membership in the hundreds to be the one and only vanguard as absurd - and for this reason refrains from calling itself a "party". I think the same sort of distinction between organization and vanguard needs to be made clear even where a mass revolutionary party exists.

But I am committed not just to the project of building a revolutionary party, but also to the view that a centralized organization is a necessity for deep and fundamental reasons - to be the material embodiment of class consciousness, in Georg Lukacs' words the "mediation between humanity and history". Can this be reconciled with a strong emphasis on the distinction I've just been defending?

I'm still thinking about these issues, but I believe the answer is yes - we should see the consciously revolutionary leadership of the working class as playing the fundamental historical role, while the party is its tool. A tool which is more effective the more closely its membership overlaps with that leadership, but which can approach identity with that leadership only asymptotically even in the ideal case.

[When I started this blog, I meant to write some kind of review or collection of thoughts on every political book I read, to help ensure that I'm getting something out of it and will retain it. That hasn't been happening, but I hope this is not the last similar post.]

[1] pp. 4-5 (in the 2003 Verso edition)
[2] p. 9
[3] pp. 13-4
[4] p. 390
[5] p. 11
[6] pp. 387-8
[7] p. 392
[8] p. 263
[9] p. 245

Gaza links

2009-01-05T20:50:00.003-05:00

The suffering of both sides in the conflict, in pictures (via)
The Qassams, a healthily polemical take and a more analytical one
Various commentary on Israeli strategy and tactics
Background from Socialist Worker and Electronic Intifada; at more length, from the ISR
Some local grossness from NYC mayor Bloomberg
University bombings which Columbia's Bollinger and fellow defenders of international "academic freedom" will not condemn
Protests around the world

The real story of the Somali "pirates"

2009-01-05T20:46:00.002-05:00

Overfishing, nuclear waste, sea lanes, oil, piracy, and armed struggle off the cost of Somalia.

Shamelessness of the news media

2008-11-30T21:55:00.003-05:00

Glenn Greenwald on NBC, Barry McCaffrey, and the media's role in promoting war propaganda.

Mumbai

2008-11-28T10:29:00.004-05:00

Great piece on the attacks in Mumbai at Lenin's Tomb.

Chomsky on What's Next After the Elections

2008-11-26T18:27:00.004-05:00

Here. A surprisingly negative emphasis - maybe he's making up for having called for a vote for Obama. But his discussions both of the nature of US elections and of the difference between the Obama 'movement' and a real social movement are excellent.

Crisis of capitalism

2008-11-24T07:09:00.006-05:00

The crisis is obviously not over. The stock market crash is, as of last week, officially the worst since the Great Depression (via), while $300 billion bailout has just been announced for the world's largest financial corporation, Citigroup (via).

Joel Geier, who's written several excellent articles on the crisis, gave the best concise explanation of the way what's happening is rooted in the US economic system that I've heard yet in a talk at last weekend's Northeast Socialist Conference. I'm going to try to write up his argument from my notes, here.

Capitalism is a dynamic and contradictory system. It is crisis prone, but it is also able to overcome its crises. An explanation of how this happens must go back to the social relations of production, the relationships between labor and capital, and between use, exchange, and profit.

Capitalism has two kinds of crises. The first are the cyclical crises, which occur every 8-10 years. These are 'realization crises' (that is, the value embodied in commodities due to the labor which produced them cannot be 'realized' as profit) or crises of 'relative overproduction' (that is, too many commodities have been produced relative to the market). The problem in such crises is that capital can't sell the commodities it has produced at the expected profit rate. Supply has become disjointed from demand. This is because the means of production have expanded much faster than the consumption, which in turn is rooted in labor's systematic subordination to capital.

Most bourgeois economists acknowledge these crises, as part of the 'business cycle'. Many of these economists (Keynesians) theorize them as the product of 'underconsumption' - people are not consuming enough, and so demand is too low. But 'underconsumption' has existed since the time of the Pharoahs, without crises taking the form that they do in capitalism. They come at the height of the boom, typically, when wages and profits are both at their highest. (Though this is not true in the current case, since the debt bubble has complicated the process; wages peaked in 1998.)

Capitalism has a second kind of crisis, which is deeper and which bourgeois economists do not acknowledge. This is a crisis, not in the 'realization' of surplus value as profit, but in the rate of profit, caused by too little surplus value being produced, period. The rate of profit falls because the 'organic composition' of capital, the ratio of non-labor expenses in production to the cost of labor, rises, and all profits ultimately come from labor. With the accumulation of capital, which is what capitalism is all about, this ratio naturally rises, meaning higher productivity, but (in an apparent but false paradox) a fall in the rate of profit.

There are ways in which this tendency may be postponed or overcome. Capitalists may get by on a rise in the mass of profit - even if the profit rate is lower, if capitalists invest enough, they will make a lot of money. The working class may be squeezed, directly by union-busting or indirectly through lower taxes & services. Labor may even be paid, for some time, less than its value. New export markets may provide an outlet for surplus capital, and the entry of new populations into the working class may improve the ratio from the other side. The elements of capital may be made cheaper.

Nevertheless, these deeper and more systematic crises occur. The Great Depression was one. The next and most recent one was at the end of the post-war boom, between 1973 and 1982, when the US saw three recessions, and the transformation of a system known as the 'permanent arms economy', where the US was the main world manufacturer and its economy was driven by military spending, by the rise of capitalist competitors such as Germany and Japan. This led to a massive restructuring; at the beginning of the crisis, US wages were higher and productivity lower than in Germany and Japan, but by 1990, the situation had been reversed. With the introduction of deregulation, privatization, and the other policies that went under the name of 'neoliberalism', profit rates were restored. In 1973, per capita GDP was $20000. In 2007, the same figure was $40000. Meanwhil, wages were lower in real terms. Everything went to capital.

A few on the Left (Robert Brenner, Chris Harman) have denied that the neoliberal boom was based on real growth. But the organic composition of capital was really lowered, most obviously by the collapse of Stalinism and the entry of the Russian and especially the Chinese populations into the global workforce, in regions with very little accumulated capital. By some academic estimates this cut the organic composition of capital in half. 2006 was a year with a record high both for profit rates and for profits as a percentage of GDP.

But, in the last business cycle, between 2000 and 2006, there was no expansion of the reproduction of capital in the US. There were fewer factories in 2006 than a decade before. Instead, growth came from a foreign trade deficit and a corresponding debt bubble, where US debt financed growth not just here but across the world.

Marx labeled the process of production from the point of view of a capitalist as 'M-C-M' - money-commodities-money. To a capitalist, the commodities produced are incidental; the point of production is to take money, and invest it to make more money. This perspective lends itself easily to speculation. The most recent speculative bubble is by no means the first in capitalism's history.

When there is an excess of capital, due to a crisis of overproduction, and especially when profit rates are declining, capitalists look for speculations as outlets for investment. The low interest rates and resulting housing bubble of the last decade were not just the work of the Fed - as Alan Greenspan himself put it, there was a 'global savings glut'. This created an asset bubble, a growth in 'fictitious capital'. Fictitious capital is what is created when there is a growth in the paper value of a company or other asset without a growth in its real value, the labor embodied in it. This is what happened in housing. Such bubbles are unstable, and can collapse very quickly, leading to enormous destruction. And the destruction is not 'fictitious' - not only is real capital destroyed, but people are bankrupted and human lives are devastated.

Thanks to the fact that we live in an imperialist world, where capitalist states compete against each other economically and politically when not militarily, there can be no centralized response to crises of this sort. The current crisis is pulling apart the global trading system.

This system has grown very bizarre, especially since the Asian debt crisis of 1997-1998. The US trade deficit went from a miniscule figure to the range of $700/$800 billion each year. Growth in the US surpassed growth in most other developed countries, but not that in China, South Korea, etc, and so US capitalism has become less competitive relative to the world as a whole. Instead of producing things, the US has acted as the 'buyer of last resort'. 55% of goods produced in the East Asian countries are exported. As far as the means of productions go, China has become a full member of the advanced industrial world - but the Chinese working class gets only 35% of what it produces, making it probably the most exploited national working class in the world.

The US can finance its trade and budget deficits by means of a 'savings glut' elsewhere, but this involves a giant transfer of wealth away from the US, and relative US decline. But then, of course, the rest of the world is being hit as hard, if not harder, by the current crisis, so we can't say that the US is necessarily about to lose its dominant position. In fact, this is the first time since 1973 that the entire world is going into crisis together.

Crises are overcome. Profits are restored by cutting the cost of the elements of capital, variable and constant. The two most important ways this happens: (1) cutting wages, which involves a class struggle; and (2) cutting the other element of capital, 'constant' capital, partly by shutting down or destroying factories and offices, and partly by simply devaluing them.

Surviving firms can benefit from collapses and bankruptcies. Best Buy is happy to see Circuit City go bust. Warren Buffet can buy a company whose shares were $100/each a year ago for $0.26/share - and partly the dropping price is just the disappearance of fictitious capital, but he's still getting a deal. PNC can buy National City, with some bailout money. All this leads to the concentration of capital, which can enhance future crises - witness the systemic impact of the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

The US is a low-wage country now. This is already visible in the auto industry, but is extending to others.

The current crisis started with the debt bubble of 1997-8, when, to avoid recession, the US government stimulated an economy already in boom, with massive liquidity. This fed the dot com and stock bubble. This postponed the recession, but still 2001 saw the biggest fall in profits in decades. But then the economy bounced back the next year, with giant government stimulus in the form of a domestic spending package, tax cuts, and war spending. This expanded a debt bubble, especially in housing.

Working class debt exploded, because the only way to maintain consumption was through more credit, more debt, borrowing against houses. $5 trillion in home equity loans were made in the last five years. The expansion of debt was facilitated by the deregulation of the banking system, and the growth of a shadow banking system larger than the regular one, consisting of investment banks, hedge funds, SIVs, etc. All of these were unregulated and held large amounts of mortgage debt. Now, the banks are bankrupt, because the debt is worthless, and they held it at fantastic leverage.

'Leverage', the ratio of money loaned out to money held, is traditionally 10:1 for a bank. But in the last few years it has become effectively 30, 40, 50:1. This led to enormous profits, and therefore even more investments in subprime mortgages, etc. In turn this meant overproduction of housing, followed by price decline, then market collapse, foreclosures, and bank meltdowns, and therefore enormous destruction of both fictitious and real capital.

There have been $11 trillion total in stock losses and $5 trillion in housing, with $2 trillion lost by pension funds and $1 trillion in bank capital - which means a $10 trillion decrease in lending. The rate and mass of profits are in free fall.

How deep is the crisis? It already requires restructuring of the finance, auto, airline, and other industries. Banks have been recapitalized by $2-3 trillion in Europe and $3-4 trillion in the US, but this may not be enough, because the debt bubble was not only in housing, but also in corporate assets, which have not yet really popped. And when banks must sell their assets to raise capital, that leads to further asset deflation. Deleveraging leads to a credit squeeze, preventing economic expansion. Things will get worse. Unemployment will go up; we went from 7 to 10 trillion unemployed last year, and there will be more.

This is an international crisis. There were housing and asset bubbles outside the US too. The theory of 'decoupling', that national economies had become less interdependent, was of course a myth. On top of the debt bubble bursting, there is a commodities bust, and not just in the price of oil. This produces recessions in commodities-exporting countries. Stock markets in most of the world have dropped more than in the US, 50-70% in 'BRIC' - Brazil, Russia, India, and China. There is currency instability, with a rising dollar, and currency crises in Brazil, Mexico, and Korea. Trade has collapsed, withe the cost of shipping measured by the Baltic Dry index down 93%.

Will this be the 1930s again? Bush said it would be worse, absent action. This is possible, but won't necessarily happen. The Great Depression only became 'Great' in 1931, because of international bank collapses which had to do with the post-World War One imperialist system. The world economy even in 1929 had grown no bigger than in 1913.

Capitalism learned its lesson: save the banks! But the bank rescues haven't led to resumed lending. So now Paulson is saying the government will put up money for consumer lending directly. The plan is that the government will put up $50 billion and get 20 times that in private leverage - good luck with that.

It's too early to say what will happen. There will be many more surprises, with new companies and new countries going bankrupt. We do know that this will be a long and deep recession, but not the last crisis of capitalism - unless we overthrow it, the system will find a way out.

Update: Videos of another talk of Joel's at Prisoner of Starvation.

The first Black president

2008-11-21T01:14:00.003-05:00

The blog isn't dead quite yet. I hope to post something on the economy soon. Meanwhile, to complement the critiques of Obama below, a couple of excellent Socialist Worker articles on the possibilities nevertheless opened by his election:

Great expectations

What next for struggle in the Obama era?

Fafblog on Obama

2008-07-28T20:04:00.003-04:00

To complement Adolph Reed's take below:

Change is in the air - bright new shiny change, lemon-scented and shrink-wrapped to preserve freshness, and its bold laminated name is Barack Obama! Oh sure, all the lefties and the liberals and the constitution-coddlers are whining and moaning about Obama right now. Well maybe he's no "liberal Jesus." Maybe he's been "moving to the right" a little lately. Maybe he wants to "restrict abortion rights" and "execute people for non-capital crimes" and "give himself the unchecked ability to spy on everyone whenever he wants." "Oh the rule of law," you say, "oh our basic rights and freedoms." Well boo hoo hoo! Do you hear that, liberals? That is the sound of the world's smallest violin playing just for your basic rights and freedoms. You have to listen pretty close, it's hard to hear over all these other violins getting waterboarded.

The rest.

Adolph Reed on Obama

2008-07-16T20:23:00.007-04:00

I'd been thinking about doing a "See, I told you so" column about Obama; then, especially given the torrent of vituperation and self-righteous contumely I got after arguing that he's not what far too many nominal leftists were trying to make him out to be, I was tempted instead to do a "To hell with you, you deserve what you get" column. But the smug yuppies to whom I'd address that message -- the fan club we encounter in foundation offices, faculty meetings, soccer games and dinner parties and on MSNBC and in the Nation -- are neither the only people who've listened to Obama's siren song nor the ones who'll pay the price for their self-indulgent idiocy. (And Liza Featherstone deserves acknowledgement for having predicted early that the modal lament of the disillusioned would compare him unfavorably to Feingold.) Among other things, as I saw ever more clearly while watching Rachel Maddow talk with another of that Dem ilk about Obama and his family -- how adorable and "well-raised" or some such his kids are, etc, etc -- a few nights ago on Keith Olberman's show, an Obama presidency (maybe even just his candidacy) will likely sever the last threads of any connection between notions of racial disparity and structurally reproduced inequality rooted in political economy, and, since even "left" discourse in this country seems capable of conceptualizing the latter as a politically significant matter only in terms of the former (or its gender or similar categorical equivalent), that could just about complete purging entirely out of legitimate political discourse the notion that economic inequality is rooted fundamentally in capitalism's political and economic dynamics.

Underclass ideology -- where left and right come together to embed a common sense around victim-blaming and punitive moralism, racialized of course but at a respectable remove from the familiar phenotypically based racial taxonomy -- will most likely be the vehicle for effecting the purge. Obama's success will embody how far we have come in realizing racial democracy, and the inequality that remains is most immediately a function of cultural -- i.e., attitudinal, and behavioral -- and moral deficits that undercut acquisition of "human (and/or "social," these interchangeable mystifications shift according to rhetorical need) capital," a message his incessant castigation of black behavior legitimizes. In this context, the "activism" appropriate for attacking inequality: 1) rationalizes privatization and demonization of the public sector through accepting the premise that government is inefficient and stifles "creativity;" 2) values individual voluntarism and "entrepreneurship" over collective action (e.g., four of the five winners of the Nation's "Brave Young Activist" award started their own designer NGOs and/or websites; the fifth carries a bullhorn around and organizes solidarity demos); 3) provides enrichment experiences, useful extracurrics, and/or career paths for precocious Swarthmore and Brown students and grads (the Wendy Kopp/Samantha Power model trajectory), and 4) reduces the scope of direct action politics to the "all tactics, no strategy," fundamentally Alinskyite, ACORN-style politics that Doug Henwood and Liza Featherstone have described as "activistism" and whose potential for reactionary opportunism Andy Stern of SEIU has amply demonstrated. Obama goes a step further in deviating from Alinskyism to the right, by rejecting its "confrontationalism," which severs its rhetoric of "empowerment" from political action and contestation entirely and merges the notion into the pop-psychological, big box Protestant, Oprah Winfrey, Reaganite discourse of self-improvement/personal responsibility.
...

Indeed, Obama represents a class politics, one that promises to cement an alliance anchored in the professional-managerial class (including, perhaps especially, the interchangeable elements of which now increasingly set the policy agendas for what remains of the women's, environmentalist, public interest, civil rights and even labor movements) and the "progressive" wing of the investor class. (See, for example, Tom Geoghagen, "All the Young Bankers," The American Prospect, June 23, 2008.) From this perspective, it is ironic in the short term -- i.e., considering that he pushed HRC out of the way -- that Obama would be the one to complete Clintonism's redefinition of liberalism as conservatism. So there's no way I'm going to ratify this bullshit with my participation, and I'm ready to tell all those liberals who will hector me about the importance of voting that it's the weakest, most passive and least consequential form of political participation, and I'm no longer going to pretend it's any more than that, or that the differences between the Dem and GOP candidates are greater than they are, just to help them feel good about not doing anything more demanding and perhaps more consequential.

That man (Reed) is a talented polemicist.

I haven't been posting to this blog as much as I'd planned - I've had a shortage of time & energy, for various reasons. But it's not going to just die, not without notice.

Achcar interview on Middle East

2008-06-12T10:41:00.005-04:00

Gilbert Achcar makes a number of good points in an interview on ZNet. I can wholeheartedly endorse his discussions of the history of Israel and the PLO, of the surge, the Sadrists, and the Kurds.

There are a couple of points where I'm not sure whether or not I agree. First, his view on the one-state/two-state debate:

To be frank, I consider this debate to be largely a waste of time. I mean this is a debate on utopias in both cases and yet, some are conducting it as if the stakes were at hand... Of course, an "independent Palestinian state" that would be limited to the West Bank and Gaza is totally utopian. But I would also say that a single state with ten million Palestinians and six million Jews is much more of a utopia, since it requires the destruction of the Zionist state... That is why I think that these are utopias and too much energy is focused on this debate, such that it becomes a waste of time. In my view there are two levels to be considered when facing the Palestinian issue. On the one hand are the immediate and urgent interests or needs of the Palestinian people. What are the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank fighting for? They are fighting to get rid of the occupation, of course -- not for the right of voting in Israel. They want sovereignty over their territories. Their fight should obviously be supported... Now, on the other hand, if you are considering a long term solution to the question, I mean if one wants to elaborate a long term program with a utopian dimension, then why limit it to Palestine, whether with one or two states?

... I would say that no long term, final, lasting and just solution can be conceived other than at a regional level and under socialist conditions -- through a socialist federation of the Middle East and beyond. Of course, this is a utopia, but this is an inspiring utopia. As I say all the time, if you want to be utopian, go for an inspiring utopia, not a mean one. Go for the big one... This is an interesting utopia, whereas a one-state, "one person one vote" solution limited to Palestinians and Israelis strikes me as an uninspiring utopia. I'm not convinced at all that the Palestinians would like to be citizens of the same state with the Israelis, even if they were the political majority under hugely unequal social conditions like what you have now in South Africa where whites still constitute by far the main section of the dominant class and are getting richer, many of them living in gated communities. And I am positively sure that the Israelis will never accept being a political minority. So this is a dead end.

Achcar is right, on the one hand, that we must support the demand for an end to the post-1967 occupations. He's also right that there's no solution within historical Palestine alone, and that even a secular binational state modeled on modern-day South Africa would hardly be all joy and goodness. But I'm not sure that makes the one-state/two-state debate "a waste of time". The promotion of a two-state "solution" as, in fact, a sufficient and complete solution, is used consciously both by the Fatah leadership Achcar rightly excoriates and by liberal and centrist Zionists to foreclose debate on Zionism as such and on the settler-colonial nature of Israel. A one-state solution might not be feasible absent a massive regional upheaval of the sort that would place greater things on the table, but it can illustrate the basic issues of justice and equality at stake without assuming agreement on the need for a socialist revolution. This is fine. A revolutionary must agitate not only on the basis of demands that can be won short of revolution, but also on the basis of demands which, while not on their face revolutionary, cannot ultimately be satisfied under the capitalist world order.

The second point, on supporting the resistance:

I don't think that you can have a general rule here. It depends on which situation you are talking about. For instance in Iraq you have groups that are fighting the US occupation but the same groups are simultaneously involved in sectarian violence. And these groups have killed many more civilians on sectarian grounds than coalition troops. In such circumstances, to say "We support the Iraqi resistance" is completely wrong and misleading. You cannot say that you support such forces. One should say "We support the fight against occupation" or better, for didactic purposes: "The fight against the occupation is legitimate, by all means (truly) necessary." That's fine. You support the acts selectively, not the actors when you cannot take responsibility for all their acts. In Iraq, you cannot support any specific force because all forces that are fighting the occupation are at the same time sectarian forces. So two wars are being waged at the same time: a just war and a very reactionary one.

Achcar goes on to argue that by contrast, one can say "we support the resistance" when one is referring to Hezbollah or Hamas in the fight against Israel, though one must also remain critical of their leaderships. With that I have no issue.

The thing is, no one of whom I am aware who says "I support the resistance" means "I support the groups resisting the U.S. no matter what they do, be it attack U.S. soldiers or bomb Iraqi civilians." The "resistance" in leftist usage refers to precisely what Achcar wants to support - "the acts selectively, not the actors". (This may not be just a Western leftist usage; though I do not have the book in front of me, I recall that Nir Rosen writes in In the Belly of the Green Bird that Iraqis too commonly make a distinction between the "honorable resistance" and the salafis or jihadis.) So Achcar's critique here is really linguistic rather than political. Of course, as far as language goes, he may be right.

Cops are here to protect you

2008-06-05T12:25:00.005-04:00

Latest post in an ongoing series from Rad Geek People's Daily:

Cops are here to protect you by stopping an upset man from cutting himself with a knife by shouting at him in a language he doesn’t speak, then, after he fails to obey commands he couldn’t understand, by tasering him, firing pepperballs at him, and then shooting him dead — with several shots fired after he had dropped the knife.

All for his own good, of course. It became necessary to kill Odiceo Valencia in order to save him.

Cops are here to protect you by pulling you over if your car seems suspicious to them and then, if you want to know what you were pulled over for, pulling you out of the car, getting up in your face, and shouting, Ever get smart-mouthed with a cop again, I show you what a cop does, threatening to arrest you for some fucking reason I come up with, bragging that they can come up with nine other things to arrest you for, insisting, when you tell them that their conduct is being recorded, shouting I don’t really care about your cameras, ‘cause I’m about ready to tow your car, then we can tear ‘em all apart, and then proceeding to give you a ten-minute lecture on how you should properly address your public servants.
...
When every fucking week brings another story of a Few More Bad Apples causing Yet Another Isolated Incident, and the police department almost invariably doing everything in its power to conceal, excuse, or minimize the violence, even in defiance of the evidence of the senses and no matter how obviously irresponsible or dangerously out-of-control the cop may be, it beggars belief to keep on claiming that there is no systemic problem here, that cops ought to be given every benefit of the doubt, that the same police department that hires and trains these goons ought to be trusted to handle it internally (which means secretly), and that any blanket condemnation of American policing is a sign of hastiness and unfair prejudice. The plain fact is that what we have here is one of two things: either a professionalized system of control which tacitly permits and encourages cops to exercise this kind of rampant, repeated, intense, and unrepentant abuse against powerless people—or else a system which has clearly demonstrated that it can do nothing effectual to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.

Indeed. It's worth reposting here some of what Tim Wise wrote a few months ago after the Sean Bell verdict:

... there are any number of problems with the resurrection of the "heroic cop" image in the public imagination.

First, if we define heroism by the extent to which one puts his life on the line in the course of his work -- and apparently that's the operative definition nowadays -- then there is nothing all that heroic about policing. According to the Department of Labor, the on-the-job fatality rate for police is lower than that for gardeners, electricians, truck drivers, garbage collectors, construction workers, airline pilots, timber cutters, and commercial fisherman. In fact, fishermen have an occupational fatality rate that is fifteen times higher than that for cops, but rarely do we hear those who provide us with an endless supply of mahi-mahi described as heroes.

An average of 66 police officers per year were killed feloniously during the 1990s, with the number falling to only 42 in 1999. As Marie De Santis, Director of the Women's Justice Center explains, the flawed presentation of cops as embattled heroes is not only inaccurate, but also dangerous: "By cultivating a hyper-inflated myth of heroes sacrificing their lives for you, police have created a shield of public veneration to defend against criticism of any misdeed. Who then can blame police for building arsenals against the citizens, for firing at first blink, for medieval codes of silence?"

...

Secondly, there is nothing inherently noble about police work. After all, would most Americans think highly of law enforcement officers in North Korea? Or Iraq? Of course not. What makes policing noble is always and only the validity of the system for which officers are working. And while I am hardly analogizing the U.S. justice system to that of North Korea, Iraq, or any other authoritarian nation, the point is still valid. If the system is rife with inequality and injustice, then those whose job it is to uphold that system are part of the problem...

The fundamental role of the cops under capitalism is to preserve bourgeois rule. That's not all there is to say, but ultimately it's that simple.

Obama on Israel

2008-06-05T11:59:00.006-04:00

Al-Jazeera:

Arab leaders have reacted with anger and disbelief to an intensely pro-Israeli speech delivered by Barack Obama, the US Democratic presumptive presidential nominee.

Obama told the influential annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Council (Aipac): "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided."

Of course, no one has any justification for being surprised. Ali Abunimah described Obama's move away from any sympathy with Palestine in early 2007, his refusal to promise to be out of Iraq by 2013 was news later last year, and Stephen Zunes outlined the conventional nature of his broader foreign policy thinking several months ago.

Continuing from the Al-Jazeera article:

Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, told Al Jazeera on Thursday: "This is the worst thing to happen to us since 1967 ... he has given ammunition to extremists across the region".

The worst thing? Really? Not Black September? Not the PLO's defeat in Beirut, and Sabra & Chatila? This is a reductio ad absurdum of the Abbas/Oslo position.

The Hamas spokesperson is the only one quoted in the article who is willing to say the obvious:

"These statements slash any hope of any change in the American foreign policy. [They] assure that there is a total agreement between the two parties, the Democratic and the Republican, on support for the Israeli occupation at the expense of the rights of Arabs and Palestinian interests."

Moscow lesbians & gays fool homophobic government and reactionaries

2008-06-04T11:37:00.006-04:00

A press release from the Gay Liberation Network:

Despite the banning of their protest for the third year in row and attempted pre-emptive arrests by the authorities, Moscow Lesbians and Gays today successfully held Pride with widespread coverage by alternative, prominent international and some mainstream Russian media. A few hours before the protest, authorities attempted to arrest Moscow Pride's most prominent organizer, Nikolai Alekseyev, who successfully evaded them in a car.

A little later, the authorities, neo-fascists and religious zealots took the bait that Pride was going to take place as a picket in front of notoriously anti-gay Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov's City Hall. While riot police were busy blockading City Hall and arresting some of the fascists and religious fanatics who showed up to physically stop Pride, Alekseyev had secretly spirited the media to a nearby monument to the great 19th Century Russian Gay composer Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky, where Pride was successfully held with widespread coverage.

To add icing to the cake, Moscow Pride organizers then pulled off a dramatic banner drop right across the street from City Hall while the fascists and riot cops fumed below. The banner read "Rights to gays and lesbians - homophobia of Mayor Luzhkov to be prosecuted."

Russian authorities later arrested some of the activists who pulled off the banner drop, and for several hours put an activist's apartment under siege for more than 7 hours before apparently getting a court order to kick in the door and arrest the four activists inside – but not before they conducted a series of media interviews through the locked door, including with Interfax and RTR (the main TV channel in Russia).

Despite the arrests, the day was a resounding success for Russian gays and lesbians, who through clever organizing and hard work hoodwinked the authorities at just about every turn. As Alexeyev commented in an email posted after the actions:

"No human rights group or opposition [has] ever humiliated the Moscow authorities so much. We wanted to defy the Mayor in front of his office. Not only [has the] homophobia of Mayor Luzhkov been advertised today, but also the full collapse of his administration to prevent gays and lesbians [from] realiz[ing] their constitutional rights to march. Today, we showed that our group is powerful not only in gay and lesbian aspects, but in general. Our fight is only at its beginning."

Even during the siege of their apartment, the activists inside managed to keep good humor about the situation. When a journalist asked one of the besieged, Kirill Nepomnjaschij, if the four had enough food and other supplies to last very long, Nepomnjaschij replied, "Well, we are not going to beat the record of the blockade of Leningrad, but we will stay. We have food here and everything." In the longest siege in the history of modern warfare, during World War Two, Nazi armies besieged the City of Leningrad for more than 900 days, before the blockade was defeated.

Shortly after the arrests of the activists in the apartment, all major Russian gay websites went down, in an apparent attempt to squelch news about the successful Pride events. In spite of the censorship, as of this writing, Russian gays were still able to keep news flowing through their blog, ukgaynews.org.uk/Archive/08/May/3107.htm, which is by far the best and most complete account of the day's events.

This is the third year in a row that Moscow Lesbians and Gays have attempted to commemorate the 1993 decriminalization of homosexuality in Russia. Before the previous two years' events, Russian gays filed for permits to hold Pride events, only to be rejected by Moscow authorities. This year the authorities banned the event even before GayRussia.ru applied for the permit.

Previous years' Pride events have seen physical attacks by Russian fascists on Pride participants, infamously bloodying German MP Volker Beck, British gay activist Peter Tatchell, and Austrian gay activist Kurt Krickler last year. They, along with many other international LGBT supporters, had attended Moscow Pride in solidarity.

Despite the "pre-emptive" ban on this year's Pride, there were contradictory signals from the authorities that indicated that this year's event might not face the same degree of repression that previous year's events had endured. A few weeks ago, in response to active campaigning by GayRussia.ru, Russian authorities finally dropped the ban on gays donating blood – a gain that many western countries, including the United States, have yet to achieve.

A few days ago Russian federal authorities reported that they had "suggested" that the city authorities allow Pride to proceed unmolested this year. Given the near-total control of Russian political affairs by the increasingly autocratic government of President Dmitry Medvedev (and power behind the throne, Prime Minister Vladmir Putin), such a "suggestion," if it were genuine, should have meant clear sailing for this year's Pride.

Fortunately, Russian Lesbians and Gays were not so gullible as to believe this subterfuge by the Medvedev/Putin government, and carefully prepared some subterfuges of their own so as to successfully carry out today's Pride activities.

Activists around the world are strongly encouraged to contact the Russian embassies in their countries and to demand that the Russian authorities immediately release all Pride participants who have been arrested, and drop all of the charges that they are facing.

In the United States, please phone the Russian Embassy at the following telephone numbers:
202-298-5700, 202.298-5701, and 202.298-5704

The Pride participants have since been released, per a blog of events by activists in Russia.

A good example, maybe, of the kind of tactical acumen Roobin recently advocated at Lenin's Tomb.

New Communist Movement working-class colonization

2008-06-03T18:26:00.004-04:00

I've just finished Max Elbaum's Revolution in the Air and will likely have something to write about it sometime in the next few days. Meanwhile, here are an interesting couple of stories from Mike Ely, who was active in the RCP in the 70s, about the role of religion among his fellow coal-miners:

And Don stood up, with great emotion, to speak about the loss of his son. And then, to everyone’s astonishment announced that he would not sign the petition. And no one should either. And the reason, he said, was that the whole meaning of this incident and this death was being misunderstood by everyone. And that it had nothing to do with railroad companies or the disrespect shown to people living on the river bottom. Don said that he believed that his son had died because God had wanted this boy’s great goodness to be with God in heaven. And his son had died to punish him, Don, because his love of this boy had come to rival and even eclipse his worship of God. And that there was a lesson here about the larger meaning and plan behind all events, even when they seemed so horrific and painful.

...

But he did tell me how the split had happened in the larger church. It has happened when my co-worker Don and Ron (the twin holly rollers of the Jimmy Swaggert camp) had asked to come preach (as often happens in these church circuits). And when they got to the podium they had launched a huge attack on the reactionary campaign this church was waging. I later learned that Don had spoken quite boldly (given the times and the kinds of red-baiting going on) about working with me, and knowing my wife, and learning what our views were. And without, for a second (!), retreating from his own, very extreme and conservative views, he tore into (and he could be scorching!) how ignorant and wrong it was to launch a campaign against people active in the cause of working people.

And by the time he was done, folks in that congregation who were uneasy about all this, were embolded to walk out. And the folks left behind were never able to escalate their attacks on us any further.

Fulbrights revoked for Gaza

2008-05-30T03:33:00.004-04:00

Ethan Bronner in the New York Times:

The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.

Of course, even in an article highlighting the absurd inhumanity of occupation, the NYT can't be honest about events in Palestine:

Since Hamas, a radical Islamist group that opposes Israel’s existence, carried out what amounted to a coup d’état in Gaza against the more secular Fatah party a year ago, hundreds of rockets and mortar shells have been launched from here at Israeli civilians, truck and car bombs have gone off and numerous attempts to kidnap Israeli soldiers have taken place.
While Hamas says the attacks are in response to Israeli military incursions into Gaza, it also says it will never recognize Israel.

No mention of the fact that Hamas was the elected governing party in the Palestinian parliament. No mention of Vanity Fair's confirmation via leaked documents that the US "backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off [the] bloody civil war in Gaza" which the NYT prefers to describe as a Hamas "coup". Discussion of the bloody Israeli military incursions is limited to the passing reference quoted. Mention of the 40:1 ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths in the last year of the struggle? Fat chance.

The new smear against Chavez

2008-05-29T10:44:00.005-04:00

Chris Carlson writes:

Washington and its faithful lackeys in the media have launched a new offensive against Hugo Chávez and the government of Venezuela... Washington and its unofficial spokesmen in the media are... accusing Hugo Chávez of having ties to the Colombian guerrilla organization FARC. And they claim that the computer recently "uncovered" from a guerrilla camp has the evidence to prove it.

...

After all, how easy would it have been for the Colombian government to simply load whatever files they wanted onto the computer, or simply prepare the computer ahead of time and claim that it was found it at the FARC camp? As Venezuela expert Eva Golinger said, "How easy it is to just write a document in Word on some computer and say it was written by someone else!"

For this reason, the Colombian government invited the International Police (Interpol) to analyze the data and validate the information found on the computers. But contrary to the claims of the Colombian government and the international media, Interpol did nothing of the sort. The Interpol examination was limited to determining one thing: whether or not the computer files were manipulated after March 1, the date the Colombian military bombed the FARC camp and supposedly gained possession of the evidence.

When Interpol's report stated that there was no evidence the files were manipulated, Colombia and Washington immediately jumped on this as validation for their claims. The international media faithfully echoed the official line. "FARC Computer Files Are Authentic," said one headline from the Washington Post. "Venezuela Offered Aid to Colombian Rebels," read another. And the next day, the BBC confidently stated, "Colombia did not fake Farc files."

But even Interpol's own report reveals that they have no way of verifying this. Many of the files found on the computer were dated in the future, in 2009 and 2010, throwing out the reliability that any of the dates on the computer are accurate, and suggesting that the dates had been altered.

The Interpol report is interesting reading. It's written at a very low level of technical detail - at one point it footnotes the word "encrypted"! ("Encryption is a method of scrambling and encoding data to prevent anyone except the intended recipient from reading that data.") This is a political document, not a technical one. But it's still possible to glean a little bit of technical information about Interpol's forensic methods.

Much has been made of Interpol's acknowledgment that "Access to the data contained in the eight FARC computer exhibits between 1 March 2008, when they were seized by Colombian authorities, and 3 March 2008... did not conform to internationally recognized principles for handling electronic evidence by law enforcement."

Per Interpol's account, soon after the seizure, some Colombian intelligence officer accessed the data on the computers directly, by booting up their operating systems and browsing the files, whereas the proper forensic procedure is to first copy the hard drives bit-for-bit with special computer forensic equipment and then examine the copies. The problem is that even if nothing is deliberately changed by the user while browsing, various system and application files will be automatically updated by the operating system and by applications like Word. (Presumably among other things Interpol is referring to swap and hibernation files.)

However, Interpol asserts, Colombia's improper procedures did no real damage: "The direct access to the eight seized FARC computer exhibits between 1 March 2008 and 3 March 2008 left traces in the system files... However, INTERPOL’s experts found not a single user file... had been created, modified or deleted."

The obvious question is, how do they know? The following is all Interpol tells us in its paragraph on methodology:

Each file on a computer or an electronic storage device has an electronic timestamp that specifies the date and time on which the file was created, last accessed, last modified or deleted. Using forensic software, INTERPOL’s experts extracted the timestamp information for the files on each exhibit, distinguishing between system files and user files. They also verified the system time settings on each of the three seized laptop computers, as these settings provided a baseline for the timestamps. For files on external hard disks or USB thumb drives, the date and time settings are usually taken from the computer to which they were connected when the files were created, accessed, modified or deleted.

This is in accord with Interpol's detailed descriptions of what it found, and in particular with its defense of Colombia's improper handling of the evidence. While many user files were timestamped as "accessed" after March 1, none were timestamped as "created" or "modified" after March 1.

But, the file timestamps prove nothing alone; they're easy to fake. Interpol itself implicitly acknowledges this, when they explain the files dated to 2009 and 2010 as having been copied from a computer with an erroneous system time setting. Changing the system time setting is one way to make fake timestamps, but not the only way; timestamps can also be modified directly. With root access, on a Unix machine, this is within my capabilities, as a half-decent programmer without any expertise on computer security or forensics.

Did Interpol check anything else, then? A few oblique references suggest they did - for example, the assertion regarding the future-timestamped files that "analysis of the characteristics of these files" shows they were "originally created prior to 1 March 2008 on a device or devices with incorrect system time settings". But, the unclassified version of the report doesn't even clearly assert that some deeper examination was carried out, let alone explain how. If we are determined to have faith in Interpol's competence and impartiality, we can assume that the classified version includes better evidence; I admit my faith is lacking. And raw faith is the only option - if I'm reading the report correctly, the classified version with a "full, in-depth forensic analysis" was "delivered to Colombian authorities" and no one else.

There are a couple of reasons to doubt Interpol's ability to detect forgery even assuming timestamps were just the beginning of its investigation. I'm no expert, but the acknowledged modification of system files by Colombian officials between March 1 and March 3 has to have reduced the possibility of using these files, or physical traces of activity on the hard drives, to verify the timestamps. Further, Interpol lauds Colombia's handling of the electronic evidence after it was handed over to the Colombian computer forensics experts on March 3. Apparently, Colombia has access to the same kind of sophisticated computer forensic equipment, capable of bit-by-bit operations on a hard drive, as Interpol. One has to assume that this equipment could also be used to make forgeries of a sophistication beyond what I, or even the most skilled hacker accessing a system remotely, could manage.

There is also reason to doubt Interpol's impartiality. The report tends to conflate the absence of evidence of tampering with proof that no tampering occurred, but it does not use wording as strong as that of Interpol head Ronald Noble, who has insisted, "No one can ever question whether or not the Colombian government tampered with the seized FARC computers", and that, "We are absolutely certain that the computer exhibits that our experts examined came from a FARC terrorist camp." While Noble described FARC as "terrorist", he "commended the professionalism of Colombian authorities", according to the Washington Post. Noble came to Interpol after more than a decade of work in various departments of the U.S. government, which the WaPo prefers not to mention. Chavez' description of him as a "gringo policeman" appears to be basically accurate.

Taking a step back, even if the electronic evidence Colombia claims to have seized from FARC is authentic and unmodified, this doesn't prove Chavez is backing FARC. Others have discovered good reason to doubt both whether the documents and photos leaked by Colombia to the media really come from the computers Interpol examined, and whether the interpretations of their contents given by Colombia and by Chavez' media foes are accurate. We have to conclude that despite all the fuss in the past few weeks, we've really learned nothing new about Venezuela's relationship to FARC.

The blog to come

2008-05-24T23:36:00.003-04:00

At the moment I am only setting up this blog and do not yet intend to start posting regularly. This is a layout test.

I am an activist based in New York City, a programmer, and a member of the International Socialist Organization. Though my identity would not be hard to discover, and is not very interesting, I'd rather remain pseudonymous here. I plan to write about war, occupation, and resistance in the Middle East, struggles in the United States, and socialist theory and practice.