Alan Wald on the Decline of the Socialist Workers Party

The new issue of Against the Current features a long essay by historian Alan Wald on the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (“A Winter’s Tale Told in Memoirs“), of which he was a member in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is safe to characterize the piece as largely an exercise in SWP nostalgia and nowhere near as interesting as his book The New York Intellectuals (1987), in which he discusses in penetrating depth the actual period of the disintegration of the SWP and Trotskyism as a whole (1939-1941). Wald, a sympathizer of the Cannonite tradition, instead places the decline in 1970s when the (in his account) semi-natural phenomenon of “radicalization” began to wane and the current leadership consolidated its position. Even though  this piece is disappointing, Criticism &c. looks forward to the third installment of Wald’s trilogy on American leftist writers (see Exiles from a Future Time and Trinity of Passion for the first two).

A Comment on Trotsky, Defeatism and the U.S.S.R.

Several weeks ago, Criticism &c. noticed a statement released by the Marxist-Humanist Initiative on the subject of the Libyan revolt and U.S. and NATO intervention (“Support Libyan Rebels While Opposing U.S./NATO Intervention“—March 12, 2011). At that time, comment was not deemed worth the effort involved. Upon a second reading, however, at least one distortion of the historical record contained in the statement has prompted a change of opinion. Although the comment below is limited to just one point in the MHI statement, as a whole it can be described as being rendered incoherent by its total abstractness.

Reproduced below is a passage from the MHI statement followed by a critical comment.

• • •

From the Section “War and Imperialism: Our History”

“Raya Dunayevskaya, like Trotsky and the Trotskyists of her time, refused to take sides in World War II. While many Leftists supported the Allies because fascism was so horrendous, she insisted that neither side should be supported by the Left. Our task, she repeated, was to defeat our rulers at home. Her advice to young men on serving in the military was that revolutionaries should serve—in order to organize fellow soldiers around socialist ideas.”

Comment: The document under discussion here (“A Step towards Social-Patriotism: On the Position of the Fourth International toward the Struggle against War and Fascism”) must be described as occupying a relatively obscure place in the debates on war and revolution inside the Trotskyist movement at the time and it does not make the full importance of the issue of defeatism clear. For a more relevant text, see “The U.S.S.R. in War” (September 1939), included in the collection titled In Defense of Marxism. Trotsky did take sides during World War II: he supported the defense of the U.S.S.R. Raya Dunayevskaya split from him on precisely this issue. She was an advocate of the position of defeatism with respect to the U.S.S.R. and, as such, left the official U.S. Trotskyist organization in 1940 in the split that produced the Workers Party. She did not advise revolutionaries to serve in the armed forces of a state engaged in an imperialist war. This instead describes the position of the defensists (James P. Cannon and the Socialist Workers Party), which was called the Proletarian Military Policy.

Bosnia-Herzegovina and the ‘Left Revisionists’

The long-delayed arrest of the butcher Ratko Mladic (he had friends in higher places than Radovan Karadzic—it took longer for them to decide it was no longer worth protecting him) dreges up memories of the Balkan intervention debates of the 1990s.

Criticism &c. recently came across an article by Marko Attila Hoare—author of The History of Bosnia: from the Middle Ages to the Present Day—which delivers a comprehensive critique of the Red-Brown pro-Milosevic current so prevalent at that time.

Below is a brief excerpt from “Genocide in the Former Yugoslavia: a Critique of Left Revisionism’s Denial,” which appeared in the Journal of Genocide Research (published by the International Network of Genocide Scholars) in 2003.

While I don’t agree with his inclusion of Lenin this excerpt (let alone his mention of Marx elsewhere in the article), this piece is a devastating account of an intellectual trend which—unfortunately—still thives.

Hoare’s context is the British left, but the position of the U.S. left was by and large equally bad, if not worse. Some important exceptions were the positions of News & Letters Committees, Solidarity, and David Watson of the journal Fifth Estate and author of Against the Megamachine.

• • •

from ”Genocide in the Former Yugoslavia: a Critique of Left Revisionism’s Denial”

by Marko Attila Hoare

Journal of Genocide Research (2003) 5(4), December, 543-563

The left revisionists accuse the Western alliance of double standards in its approach to the Kosovo Albanians on the one hand and to the Turkish Kurds and Palestinians on the other. They argue that the West’s claim to have intervened in Kosovo for humanitarian motives is inconsistent with its connivance at the oppression of Kurds and Palestinians. Yet the left revisionists employ the very same double standard, only in reverse: they verbally champion the rights of Turkish Kurds and Palestinians while turning a blind eye to the suffering of Bosnians, Croatians and Kosovars. They condemn Western military action against Serbia, the Taliban and Iraq but not Serbian military action against Croatia, Bosnia or the Kosovo Albanians; in their eyes the 600 or so Yugoslav civilian deaths during the Kosovo War were “worthy” victims in a way that the tens if not hundreds of thousands of Bosnians killed by Serbian forces were not. This double standard may only in part be attributed to anti-Americanism or “anti-imperialism,” whereby members of the far left subordinate their morality to the “higher cause” of opposing the United States. There is a long tradition on the far left of supporting the weaker country against the stronger on an anti-imperialist basis. V. I. Lenin wrote in 1915 that “if tomorrow Morocco were to declare war on France, or India on Britain, or Persia or China on Russia and so on, these would be ‘just’ or ‘defensive’ wars irrespective of who was the first to attack; any socialist would wish the oppressed, dependant and unequal states victory over the oppressor, slave-holding and predatory ‘Great Powers”’. Such a line of reasoning might conceivably have led members of the far left to support Milosevic’s Serbia as a victim of “American imperialism,” even to the point of ignoring or denying its crimes against the non-Serb peoples of the former Yugoslavia. Simple “anti-imperialism” is, however, insufficient to explain the motives of the left revisionists, who do not themselves couch their arguments in “anti-imperialist” terms. Rather they prefer to make pedantic, legalistic quibbles over such issues as the sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the authority of the UN Security Council and the exact numbers of Albanian dead; appropriate arguments for international lawyers, perhaps, but scarcely the kind usually favored in the polemics of the revolutionary left. The rhetoric of the left revisionists in fact goes beyond denouncing the US as an evil in itself to defending politically the Milosevic regime.

‘Murderous Humanitarianism’, 1932 and 2011

The regime of Muammar el-Qaddafi is richly deserving of a definitive overthrow and Criticism &c. is in firm sympathy with the Libyans who are attempting—against long odds—to achieve one. The pathetic intervention of Britain, France, Italy (Libya’s fomer colonial master and present neo-colonial patron) and the U.S., with the blessing of the sclerotic Arab League, however, prompts one to say, “Really ladies and gentlemen, this is just too much.”

Qaddafii had only recently diverted a generous stream of his petroleum cash-hoard from his preposterous sub-Saharan goodwill construction campaign to buy his way back into the graces of Europe and the U.S., after decades in the proverbial cold. It hasn’t been long enough to forget Tony Blair’s visit to the colonel’s celebrated bedouin tent in 2004 to shake every extended hand and prepare the ground for a serious reentry into the oil exploration game.

For its part, the policy of the U.S. since the start of the democratic revolutions in the Arab world can only be described as totally incoherent. Here the U.S. supports the murderous regimes in Bahrain and Yemen, there Secretary of State Hilary Clinton makes a pilgramage to Cairo’s Tahrir Square and declares it, “A great reminder of the power of the human spirit.” Clearly, no value is placed on diolomatic consistency.

The moment calls for a reproduction of “Murderous Humanitarianism”, a 1932 statement of the Surrealists on racism and colonial hypocrisy. This brilliant manifesto was translated from the French by Samuel Beckett and appeared in the historic collection Negro: An Anthology (1934) edited by the unjustly forgotten Nancy Cunard. For a fascinating account of the production of the anthology (which has not been reproduced in its entirety since the original edition) and Cunard’s relationship with Beckett, see Beckett in Black and Red: the Translations for Nancy Cunard’s Negro (1934) by Alan Warren Friedman. I have taken the text below from this work, but it also appears in Franklin Rosemont’s What Is Surrealism? (where I first came across it) and Surrealism Against the Current, edited by Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski. It should be noted that among the signatories, two (Jules Monnerot and Pierre Yoyotte) were from Martinique.

•  •  •

Murderous Humanitarianism

by the Surrealist Group in Paris

For centuries the soldiers, priests and civil agents of imperialism, in a welter of looting, outrage and wholesale murder, have battened with impunity on the coloured races; now it is the turn of the demogogues, with their counterfeit liberalism.

But the proletariat of today, whether metropolitan or colonial, is no longer to be fooled by fine words as to the real end in view, which is still, as it always was, the exploitation of the greatest number for the benefit of a few slavers. Now these slavers, knowing their days to be numbered and reading the doom of their system in the world crisis, fall back on a gospel of mercy, whereas in reality they rely more than ever on their traditional methods of slaughter to enforce their tyranny.

No great penetration is required to read between the lines of the news, whether in print or on the screen: punitive expeditions, blacks lynched in America, the white scourge devastating town and country in our parliamentary kingdoms and bourgeois republics.

War, that reliable colonial endemic, received fresh impulse in the name of “pacification.” France may well be proud of having launched this godsent euphemism at the precise moment when, in throes of pacifism, she sent forth her tried and trusty thugs with instructions to plunder all those distant and defenceless peoples from whom the intercapitalistic butchery had distracted her attentions for a space.

The most scandalous of these wars, that against the Riffians in 1925, stimulated a number of intellectuals, investors in militarism, to assert their complicity with the hangmen of jingo and capital.

Responding to the appeal of the Communist party we protested against the war in Morocco and made our declaration in Revolution first and always.

In a France hideously inflated from having dismembered Europe, made mincemeat of Africa, polluted Oceania and ravaged whole tracts of Asia, we Surréalistes pronounced ourselves in favour of changing the imperialist war, in its chronic and colonial form, into a civil war. Thus we placed our energies at the disposal of the revolution, of the proletariat and its struggles, and defined our attitude toward the colonial problem, and hence toward the colour question.

Gone were days when the delegates of this snivelling capitalism might screen themselves in those abstractions which, in both secular and religious mode, were invariably inspired by the christian ignominy and which strove on the most grossly interested grounds to masochise whatever peoples had not yet been contaminated by the sordid moral and religious codes in which men feign to find authority for the exploitation of their fellows.

When whole peoples had been decimated with fire and the sword it became necessary to round up the survivors and domesticate them in such a cult of labour as could only proceed from the notions of original sin and atonement. The clergy and professional philanthropists have always collaborated with the army in this bloody exploitation. The colonial machinery that extracts the last penny from natural advantages hammers away with the joyful regularity of a poleaxe. The white man preaches, doses, vaccinates, assassinates and (from himself) received absolution. With his psalms, his speeches, his guarantees of liberty, equality and fraternity, he seeks to drown the noise of his machine-guns.

It is no good objecting that these periods of rapine are only a necessary phase and pave the way, in the words of the time-honored formula, “for an era of prosperity founded on a close and intelligent collaboration between the natives and the metropolis”! It is no good trying to palliate collective outrage and butchery by jury in the new colonies by inviting us to consider the old, and the peace and prosperity they have so long enjoyed. It is no good blustering about the Antilles and the “happy evolution” that has enabled them to be assimilated, or very nearly, by France.

In the Antilles, as in America, the fun began with the total extermination of the native, in spite of their having extended a most cordial reception to the Christopher Columbian invaders. Were they now, in the hour of triumph, and having come so far, to set out empty-handed for home? Never! So they sailed on to Africa and stole men. These were in due course promoted by our humanists to the ranks of slavery, but were more or less exempted from the sadism of their masters in virtue of the fact that they represented a capital which had to be safeguarded like any other capital. Their descendants, long since reduced to destitution (in the French Antilles they live on vegetables and salt cod and are dependent in the matter of clothing on whatever old guano sacks they are lucking enough to steal), constitute a black proletariat whose conditions of life are even more wretched than those of its European equivalent and which is exploited by a coloured bourgeoisie quite as ferocious as any other. This bourgeoisie, covered by the machine-guns of culture, “elects” such perfectly adequate representatives as “Hard Labour” Diagne [1] and “Twister” Delmont.

The intellectuals of this new bourgeoisie, though they may not all be specialists in parliamentary abuse, are no better than the experts when they proclaim their devotion to the Spirit. The value of this idealism is precisely given by the manoeuvres of its doctrinaires who, in their paradise of comfortable iniquity, have organised a system of poltroonery proof against all the necessities of life and the urgent consequences of dream. These gentlemen, votaries of corpses and theosophies, go to ground in the past, vanish down the warrens of Himalayan monasteries. Even for those whom a few last shreds of shame and intelligence dissuade from invoking those current religions whose God is too frankly a God of cash, there is the call of some “mystic Orient” or other. Our gallant sailors, policemen and agents of imperialistic thought, in labour with opium and literature, have swamped us with their irretentions of nostalgia; the function of all these idyllic alarums among the dead and gone being to distract our thoughts from the present, the abominations of the present.

A Holy-Saint-faced International of hypocrites deprecates the material progress foisted on the blacks, protests, courteously, against the importation not only of alcohol, syphilis and field-artillery, but also of railways and printing. This comes well after the former rejoicings of its evangelical spirit at the idea that the “spiritual values” current in capitalistic societies, and notably the respect of human life and property, would devolve naturally from enforced familiarity with fermented drinks, firearms and disease. It is scarcely necessary to add that the colonist demands this respect of property without reciprocity.

Those blacks who have merely been compelled to distort in terms of fashionable jazz the natural expression of their joy at finding themselves partakers of a universe from which western peoples have wilfully withdrawn may consider themselves lucky to have suffered no worse thing than degradation. The 18th century derived nothing from China except a repertory of frivolities to grace the alcove. In the same way the whole object of our romantic exoticism and modern travel-lust is of use in entertaining the class of blase client sly enough to see an interest in deflecting to his own advantage the torrent of those energies which soon, much sooner than he thinks, will close over his head.

André Breton, Roger Callois, René Char, René Crevel, Paul Eluard, J.-M. Monnerot, Benjamin Péret, Yves Tanguy, André Thirion, Pierre Unik, Pierre Yoyotte

[1] Blaise Diagne, a Senegalese politician who collaborated with France’s colonial efforts in exchange for some small reforms and privileges.

Allen Willis, Filmmaker and Marxist-Humanist

Allen Willis, pioneering African-American filmmaker and Marxist-Humanist, passed away in February. He led a long and extremely productive life and was involved in radical politics since his youth in Washington, D.C. He lived in Chicago for a time in the 1930s (where he was active in the Revolutionary Workers League) before moving to San Francisco, where he studied photography. Among his teachers was Ansel Adams.

Willis was a prolific maker of documentary films and worked with many notable artists in the 1950s, including a young Melvin Van Peebles and the poet and proprietor of City Lights Bookstore, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

In addition to his filmmaking, Willis wrote a column in News & Letters which had its origin in a meeting convened in Detroit in January of 1969 to bring together Marxist-Humanists and Black radicals. Willis used the pen name “John Alan” for the column and two books he authored, Frantz Fanon, Soweto and  American Black Thought (with Lou Turner) and Dialectics of Black Freedom Struggles.

Below is a short piece written by Alan Willis at the time of Raya Dunayevskaya’s death in 1987, which imparts a strong sense of his deep roots in the anti-Stalinist American left. While directly about Dunayevskaya, you learn much about Willis in reading it.  It appeared in the Dunayevskaya memorial issue of News & Letters, dated July 25, 1987.

•••

I first met Raya Dunayevskaya a half century ago when I attended a series of lectures sponsored by the Socialist Party on “The New Deal and the Negro.” This may not be the exact title of those lectures, but it was essentially what those lectues were all about—held in a hall on 14th St. in the Northwest section of Washington, D.C. At that time, I considered myself to be part of a “new generation of radicalized Black youth” and came to those lectures both because of the subject matter and the fact that they were featuring a speaker from Howard University.

I can still remember the experience of climbing the steep stairs from the lobby of that hall through a set of double doors that openend into the main auditorum, and just to the right was Raya Dunayevskaya standing in front of a table piled with radical literature, engaged in an animated discussion with several people. On the wall behind the table was colorful display of large Spanish Civil War posters, mostly of CNT (National Confederation of Workers) origin.

Eventually Henry Payne, a Black friend and a former “walking delegate” for the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) in the South, introduced me to Raya. My first impression was mildy skeptical. I thought that she was a small, friendly, white radical literature agent selling Marxist pamphlets. I had encountered many of these people before in Roosevelt’s “New Deal.”

But I began to learn, as I continued to attend the forums, that Raya Dunayevskaya was no mere “literature agent,” but was a veteran, for a decade or more, of the historic, ongoing battle against racism in the United States. We were soon engaged in a number of conversations on the current Black political situation such as Roosevelt’s refusal to support an anti-lynching bill, the vile racist speeches of Southern “New Deal” white Congressmen, Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia and the Civil War in Spain. There were no limits to the range of subjects. Raya even brought up Joe Louis as an important symbolic expression of Black liberation as well as Countee Cullen’s poem “Heritage” that opens with the line, “What is Africa to me.”

I don’t want to give the impression that Raya spent a great amount of her time in 1936 discussing current events with a fledgling young Black radical who was at that time a member of the National Negro Labor Congress and the Workers Aliance. Far from it. She was an activist and agitator par excellence. Indeed, she had come directly to Washington in 1936 from her West Coast activity in the San Francisco General Strike. And at the very moment I met her, she was hard at work building a support organizaion for striking Black sharecroppers in Arkansas, in cooperation with Professors Ralph Buche and Dorsey, both then at Howard University. At the same time, she was the most energetic personality among the small group of Trotskyists of which I became a member.

Raya’s activity in Washington was only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, of her previous decade-long activity in the labor and Balck movemnts. It was to take Raya several decades to develop her original, sensitive concept of the Black movement into understanding it it as the “touchstone of American civilization” and Black masses in motion as crucial at every turning point in American history. Thus, she established in her philosophy of Marxist-Humanism that the Black struggle for freedom is deeply grounded in “Absolute Negativity” because it seeks a new beginning, a totally new dimension in the concept and practice of human freedom.

—John Alan

Black/Red columnist

Criticism &c. List on WorldCat

I have created a list on OCLC’s WorldCat titled “Books Reviewed on Criticism &c.” As of this writing, there are just a total of 41 titles on it, but I’m sure I’ve missed a few books that I may have mentioned in passing. WorldCat isn’t much fun to look at, but the sheer volume of the records in it make it, as far as I’m concerned, an indispensable tool for identifying books.

Claude Lefort, 1924-2010

The French philosopher and political theorist Claude Lefort has passed away at the age of 86. Lefort was a co-thinker of Cornelius Castoriadis when the two worked together on the journal Socialisme or Barbarie (Lefort’s pseudonym was Montal). He last contributed to the journal in 1956 and split with Henri Simon to form a group even more oriented towards the spontaneity of the working class than SoB. After their break, the two contributed (along with Edgar Moin) to an analysis of the 1968 events in France titled, Mai 1968: la Brèche.

I can’t say that I’m familiar with his post SoB work but I know that he, like Castoriadis, moved away from Marxism, becoming a theorist of radical democracy and an editor of writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

There is a lot of Lefort’s work in English, including Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy.

Two of his English-language champions are David Ames Curtis, who translated Writing: the Political Test and Dick Howard (a professor of philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook), whose Specter of Democracy (which I recommend, but disagree with ) contains a chapter on Lefort. I intend to comment on this book later, but briefly,  the attraction of Lefort’s work for Howard is the complete rupture of the concept of democracy from any kind of basis in the material production of things to meet human needs.

Google Books has a scan of Specter of Democracy available which includes the chapter on Lefort (“Claude Lefort’s Passage from Revolutionary Theory to Political Theory”).

Ernst Bloch, nonsynchronism, and the Tea Party movement

The fever pitch of commentary on the racist and reactionary political phenomenon that goes by the name “Tea Party” since the recent primary elections necessitates at least an attempt at a class analysis of this movement. The often-used term “populist” is an inadequate description, as there have been strong movements in U.S. history with what can be broadly called leftist content, just as there have been right-wing populist movements.

The current reactionary backlash can best be understood as a revolt of the small bourgeoisie against the big bourgeoisie. This class—a large and influential one in U.S. society—is in part made up of small (and failed) business owners, entrepreneurs, retirees, and others fearful of being crushed by the workings of the economic system and thrown down into the proletariat, a fate worse than death in contemporary society. The members of this class have a strong objective tendency to identify with the long-gone laissez faire era of American capitalism, in which the state did not impinge upon what they consider their divinely-granted right to pay low wages. In fact, the economic program of the movement is basically identical to that of Herbert Hoover, the last political leader of U.S. capitalism before the consolidation of era of state-capitalism, which we are far from leaving today. The “socialism” that the Tea Party and its media allies rail against is in reality 100% American state-capitalism.

This economic program is ultimately one of the grave weaknesses of this movement and represents the chief impediment to its long-term viability. The big bourgeoisie (which is secure in the knowledge that it has the state as its helpmate and ultimate guardian) leads capitalist society and cannot and will not permit a return to earlier stage of capitalism, one which has definitively perished and to which humanity will never return. The Bernanke/Paulson/Geithner policy of massive state intervention into the private economy, so-called, is what saved capitalism capitalism from itself in 2008. The big bourgeoisie knows this and is not going to countenance an attempt to return the U.S. economy to the tenets of the 1920s, even if this were possible.

The constitution fetish of the movement is, similarly, a throwback to the era of nullification and states rights, revealing the organic affinity of the Tea Party to the segregationists of the 1960s. Despite his subsequent disclaimers, U.S. senate candidate Rand Paul’s stated antipathy to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 graphically exposed the position of the movement on the issue.

I supply below several excerpts from Heritage of Our Times (1935), a magnificent philosophical and cultural critique of the phenomenon of fascism in German society by Ernst Bloch. Bloch develops here his idea of “nonsynchronism,” that is, the idea that different classes of a society may be co-existing contemporaneously in objective terms, but subjectively dwelling in different periods of cultural development. Although Bloch was a loyal supporter of the Communist Party, and therefore, its line on the Nazis, he criticizes here the limitations that made the Communist line totally inadequate to combat the subjective appeal that Hitler had for large segments of German society.

Much of what Bloch develops here is on the strength of Germany’s pre-capitalist cultural remnants. The U.S., however, was born with capitalism (the year 1776 saw both the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations) and has no such equivalent phenomenon. Despite this, I believe the idea of nonsynchronism has great relevance for comprehending the current  backward-looking, right-wing revival.

These excerpts come from a translation of the chapter titled “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics,” which appeared in the Spring 1977 issue of New German Critique. The translation is by Mark Ritter. Heritage of Our Times was published in its entirety in 1991 in a translation by Neville and Stephen Plaice, who also collaborated on the translation of Bloch’s greatest work, the three-volume The Principle of Hope.

•••

Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics

(excerpt from section)

A. Early State of Affairs

Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, by virtue of the fact that they may all be seen today. But that does not mean that they are living at the same time with others.

Rather, they carry earlier things with them, things which are intricately involved. One has one’s times according to where one stands corporeally, above all in terms of classes. Times older than the present continue to effect older strata; here it is easy to return or dream one’s way back to older times. Certainly, a person who is simply awkward and who for that reason is not up to the demands of his position, is only personally unable to keep up. But what if there are other reasons why he does not fit into a very modern organization, such as the after-effects of peasant descent, what if he is an earlier type? In general, different years resound in the one that has just been recorded and prevails. Moreover, they do not emerge in a hidden way as previously but rather, they contradict the Now in a very peculiar way, awry, from the rear. The strength of this untimely course has become evident; it promised nothing less than new life, despite its looking to the old. Even the masses flock to it since the unbearable Now at least seems different with Hitler, who paints good old things for everyone. There is nothing more unexpected, nothing more dangerous than this power of being at once fiery and puny, contradicting and nonsynchronous. The workers are no longer alone with themselves and the bosses. Many earlier forces, from quite a different Below, are beginning to slip between.

(excerpt from section)

B. Nonsynchronisms, Reported

As we know, the urban type, too, has been learning to lag behind for the past few years. An immiserated middle class wants to return to prewar conditions when it was better off. It is immiserated and hence susceptible to revolution, but its work is wide of the mark and its memories make it completely out of touch with the times. Insecurity, which produces only homesickness for what has been as a revolutionary impulse, sets characters into the middle of the city such as have not been seen for centuries. But here, too, misery does not invent anything or not everything; rather, it only divulges something, namely, nonsynchronism, which was long latent or seemed at most to be from yesterday, but which now refreshes itself beyond the Yesterday in an almost mysterious St. Vitus’ Dance. Older types of being thus occur right in the city, older ways of thinking and objects of hate as well, such as the image of Jewish usury as exploitation itself. The infringement of “interest slavery” (Zinsknechtschaft) is believed in, as if this were the economy of 1500; superstructures that seemed long overturned right themselves again and stand still in today’s world as whole medieval city scenes. Here is the Tavern of the Nordic Blood, there the castle of the Hitler duke, yonder the Church of the German Reich, an earth church, in which even the city people can feel themselves to be fruits of the German earth and honor the earth as something holy, as the confessio of German heroes and German history. This sort of patriotism, this foam at the mouth and dimming eye with which people honor Germany in Germany, is not merely a substitute for the lost sense of station. “The power and honor of the land” is not merely a dream (a very convenient dream for the arms industry), which with its collective feelings compensates the individual petty bourgeois for his factual powerlessness and degradation. This is not just a transfusion of the “chosen people” to a Germanic, completely idolatrous object; rather, the obvious excesses recall a primitive-atavistic “participation mystique,” the ties of primitive man to the soil which contains his ancestral spirits. More than ever, the petty bourgeoisie is the moist, warm humus for ideology. But it is also clear that the ideology spreading today has long roots, longer than the petty bourgeoisie.

Peasants sometimes still believe in witches and exorcists, but not nearly as frequently and as strongly as a large class of urbanites believe in ghostly Jews and the new Baldur. The peasants sometimes still read the so-called Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, a sensational tract about diseases of animals and the forces and secrets of nature; but half the middle class believes in the Elders of Zion, in Jewish snares and the omnipresence of Freemason symbols and in the galvanic powers of German blood and the German land. The white-collar worker lashes out wildly and war-like; he still wants to obey, but only as a soldier, struggling, believing. The desire of the white-collar worker not to be proletarian intensifies to orgiastic pleasure in subordination, in magic civil service under a duke. The ignorance of the white-collar worker as he searches for past levels of consciousness, transcendence in the past, increases to an orgiastic hatred of reason, to a “chthonism,” in which there are berserk people and images of the cross, in which indeed—with a nonsynchronism that verges on extraterritoriality—Negro drums rumble and central Africa rises up. The reason: the middle class (in distinction to the proletariat) does not directly take part in production at all, but enters it only in intermediary activities, at such a distance from social causality that with increasing ease an alogical space can form in which primal drives and romanticisms, wishes and mythicisms come to the fore. Even the directly economic content of middle-class fascism is nonsynchronous or has become so since freedom of trade and industry has benefited only the large entrepreneurs and destroyed the small ones; parliamentary democracy is in this way the hated guarantor of free competition and its corresponding political form form. Instead of free competition, the corporative state wishes to lead the economy back to the level of the early capitalist small enterprise; it recommends itself to big capital as an instrument against the class struggle, to the middle class precisely as its salvation and the up-to-date, romantic expression of its non-synchronism. Likewise, the middle class cannot hold out ideologically within “rationalization” and sacrifices ratio that much sooner, the more it has appeared to the middle class only in hostile form, doubly hostile. That is, it appears as mere late capitalist rationalization and as a subversion of traditional intrinsic values—equally late capitalist, but understood as “Marxist-Jewish.” The superman, the blond beast, the biographical cry for the great man, the scent of a witches’ kitchen, of a time long past-all these signs of flight from relativism and nihilism, which had become the stuff of educated discussions in the salons of the educated upper classes, became genuine political land in the catastrophe of the middle class. It is, to be sure, still occupied only by employees, no matter how savage it seems; its houses are those of the family and “clean” business, be it of the pre-war era, be it of the corporative state; and the benefits go to the monopoly capitalist upper class, which utilizes gothic dreams against proletarian realities.

(excerpt from section)

E. The Logical Constitution of Nonsynchronous Contradictions

In a resolution about fascism formulated by communists it was once said that it contains within itself both the offensive of the ruling class and the elements of its dissolution; in short, that it reflects the contradictions of late capitalist development and thereby its own demise. This is completely correct, but does not exhaust the nonsynchronous contents which express themselves remotely enough in pent-up anger and left-over ties.

A Comment on Hayek

Jennifer Schuessler has a fascinating essay on the forgotten history of Friedrich von Hayek’s American enthusiasts (“Hayek: The Back Story”) in the July 11 The New York Times Book Review.  She details a cartoon version of The Road To Serfdom based on a condensed version of the text published in a mass edition by Reader’s Digest. The cartoon version appeared first in Look magazine in 1945 and was subsequently distributed in pamphlet form by General Motors (you can view a scan of the pamphlet at the web site of the Ludwig von Mises Institute) . While the irony may be lost on Hayek’s contemporary acolytes, I can’t think of a more hilarious contradiction—in the dialectical sense—than for this document to be disseminated by GM, a perfect model of the tendency of the entire society of the U.S. to inexorably organize itself on the ground of authoritarian state-capitalism.

One of the most penetrating comments on Hayek I have come across appears in the footnotes to an essay by the philosophers Patrick Murray (author of Reflections on Commercial Life: an Anthology of Classic Texts from Plato to the Present) and Jeanne Schuler titled, “Karl Marx and the Critique of Bourgeois Philosophy.” This essay is included in Social Justice: Its Theory and Practice.

Here is the note:

F.A. Hayek contended that a market society was the only free society precisely because it imposed no compulsory collective goals on its members. Hayek was mistaken in this belief because the endless accumulation of capital is a compulsory collective goal imposed upon the participants in a market society.

‘A Machine With a Single Spring’

The recent verdict and sentence announced in the trial of Khmer Rouge prison warden Kaing Guek Eav calls the world’s attention, however fleetingly, to the experience of Cambodia in the Pol Pot years. The Khmer Rouge seized complete control of Cambodia in April 1975 and embarked upon a methodical four-year attempt at a reconstruction of society along the lines of Stalin’s war against the Ukranian peasantry of the early 1930s and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The reign of terror of the Khmer Rouge ended when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979 and installed a compliant regime which held power for a decade.

The horrible outcome of Khmer Rouge rule was a death toll estimated to be as high as two million, or twenty percent of the population of the country at the time. The victims of the brutality perished from overwork, malnutrition, and incessant murderous purges of those deemed to be politically unworthy. As François Ponchaud put it in his book Cambodia Year Zero, the first account to expose to the world what was transpiring inside the country, “To learn a new art of living, many of the living have died.”

The trials are taking place so long after the events took place that they are transpiring virtually unnoticed by the world. The convoluted political history of Cambodia since 1979, during which the U.S. actually lent support to the deposed Khmer Rouge and other anti-Vietnamese political forces, has subordinated justice for the millions of victims to the interests of those competing to run the country. Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, died peaceably at his home on the border with Thailand in 1998. Duch (Kaing Guek Eav’s more commonly used name), received a sentence of only 35 years.  In reality, Cambodia is now seen as just another low-wage haven for international capital, or as some might call it, “a normal country.”

This situation is convenient for those on today’s left unwilling or unable to stare the negativity of the Cambodian experience in the face. The revelations of the horrors of Khmer Rouge rule had an enormous impact on international intellectual opinion and, along with the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, contributed to the emergence of the so-called “New Philosophers” in France. These former defenders of Mao’s Cultural Revolution became influential proponents of what is essentially the standard liberal intellectual position of the day: revolution inevitably leads to totalitarianism. On the other hand, those who simply say, “Cambodia had nothing to do with Marxism,” while not wrong, shirk the burden of history.

Patrick Murray, a professor of philosophy at Creighton University and one of the best academics writing on Marx today, makes a fascination contribution to the effort to criticize the Cambodian events in a footnote to his 1988 book Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge:

The regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia must rank as one of the most gruesome realizations of Hegel’s picture of the political logic of the French Revolution. “However, in recent theories, carried partly into effect, the fundamental presupposition is that a state is a machine with a single spring which imparts movement to all the rest of the infinite wheelwork, and that all institutions implicit in the nature of a society should proceed from the supreme public authority and be regulated, commanded, overseen, and conducted by it (The German Constitution in Hegel’s Political Writings, p. 161).