Pope Francis Tuesday

The Pope has been visiting Cuba over the weekend. That visit called to mind this song by Kate Campbell that references an earlier papal visit to the island.

Rosa's Coronas 11/30/2014

Joshua McElwee reports on Pope Francis' major speech in La Habana at the Plaza de la Revolución in Under image of Che Guevara, Francis says Christian service 'never ideological' National Catholic Reporter 09/20/2015

This combination of images of two of the most famous Argentines is surely more jarring for an American audience than for Argentines. When I visited the Presidential Palace Casa Rosada) in Buenos Aires in 2012, the entry hall had two portraits prominently displayed together: Che Guevara and the Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero, murdered by a death squad while presiding over Mass in a hospital. Pope Francis formally declared Romero a martyr this year and he's on the road to sainthood. I doubt any Pope will canonize Ernesto Guevara. Although there was and maybe still is a folk shrine to "St. Che" near the place in Bolivia where he was assassinated in 1967. I think a few miraculous cures have been reported there. Go figure.

The staunchly anti-Communist and theologically conservative Pope Juan Paul II also celebrated mass in Plaza de la Revolución on his visit to Cuba in 1998.

This was also an interesting part of the Pope's message: "At the end of the Mass, the pope appealed to Colombia's government and Marxist FARC guerrillas to ensure that nearly three years of peace talks in Cuba are successful in order to end their 'long night' of war." (Pope meets Fidel Castro, warns against ideology on Cuba trip Buenos Aires Herald 09/20/2015) Cuba has hosted peace talks to end that long-running conflict.

Darío Pignotti notes in Página/12 (Cuba se viste de blanco y amarillo por el Papa 19.09.2015) that the chatter in Cuba he heard before Francis' arrival included many mentions of the "Argentine Pope." (Pignotti goes a bit Tommy Friedman in this piece and reports on an interview with a taxi driver.)

How much of the Pontiff's worldview is actually consistent with that of a government like Cuba's?

Eric Bugyis in a post which,so far as I can tell, is supportive of Pope Francis, argues that there is a great deal of philosophical/ideological agreement It Is Marxism! Commonweal 09/22/2015:

In Bolivia, Francis called for "the just distribution of the fruits of the earth and human labor" saying that this is "about giving to the poor and to peoples what is theirs by right." Linking the fruits of labor to rights in this way suggests the "labor theory of value" that one finds in Thomas Aquinas and in the social encyclicals beginning with Rerum Novarum, but it is also the theory of value that one finds in Marx. It is the theory that says that those who work to produce goods and services, through agriculture or manufacture, ought to have a share in the ownership of those goods. It is a rejection of the wage slavery whereby workers are shackled by policies that seek to interrupt the worker's relationship with the fruits of his or her labor by turning this labor into a commodity itself. The price of this commodity, then, must be weighed against the expected profits to be gained through the sale of commodities owed by stockholders. On this account, it should be made clear, the stockholder owns both the workers (now often more honestly referred to as "human resources") and the commodities that these workers produce and profit to the extent that the stockholder (and the market) values the former less than the latter. Thus, when Francis talks about a "formal market" in which people are "exploited like slaves," what else could he be talking about but the alienation of workers from the means of production? And when he calls for governments to promote "the strengthening, improvement, coordination and expansion of forms of popular economy and communitarian production," what could he be referring to other than supporting the formation of unions (another thing endorsed by the social encyclicals) and empowering local commerce by limiting the monopolistic practices of transnational corporations? All of which, I assume, Mr. Langone would rightly identify as "Marxism." [my emphasis]

Now, I'm hardly allergic to Marxist perspectives, as any of my numerous posts about the Frankfurt School thinkers can illustrate. And I'm definitely in sympathy with the perspectives of the Pope described here.

But this just gets some history wrong. No St. Thomas Aquinas (1224/25-1274) did not invent the "labor theory of value." Marx' version built on those of the distinctly modern philosophers and political economists Adam Smith (1723-1790) and David Ricardo (1772-1823). Marx also made a clear distinction between chattel slavery, where the workers actually are owned, and wage labor, which Marxists also call wage slavery, in which it is not the case that "the stockholder owns ... the workers," as Bugyis puts it.

A great undergraduate professor of mine, the late Howard Bavender, was my adviser on this now long-ago paper ("Just War Concept and American Churches in the American Antiwar Movement" 1974). As I was trying to sort through the relationship of Catholic theology to dissenting movements, he stressed that while the Church took strong positions on issues of social justice and the just war that at times were in accord with left political positions, the Church had never abandoned its criticism of Marxism on matters where it contradicted the Church's view of the nature of humanity.

In fact, what I wrote where I took his advice on that wasn't bad:

The Roman Catholic Church, in the United States and around the world, had been staunchly opposed to "atheistic Communism" before and after World War II. The American hierarchy continued to speak strongly against Communism even during the wartime alliance with Soviet Russia. Many Roman Catholic churchmen really believed that the United States was threatened by Communism, but they were also interested in acquiring American aid in their world-wide battle with Communist governments, particularly in Eastern Europe where the Soviet Urion attempted to break the political power of the church. ...

However, around the time of Pope John XXIII's ascendancy, Catholic attitudes toward international relations began to change. Pope John issued his encyclical Pacem in Terris, which many Catholics took to be "a clear call for total pacifism in a nuclear age." [1970 quote from Francine du Plessix Gray] Pope John stated in that famous document, as quoted above, that war was unacceptable in the nuclear era. The support of the Catholic Church for such projects as the Cold War against Communism was clearly decreasing, although the Church has never abandoned its opposition to those elements of Communism which challenge the Christian conception of man. This notable decrease in support nevertheless was to be an element in the future Catholic opposition to Vietnam policies in the United States.

It's also important to remember that when the Church has criticized capitalism or aspects of it, that also comes from centuries of theoretical development that has some of its roots in pre-capitalist concepts and economic arrangements, i.e., European feudalism. "Corporate state" arrangements like those in Mussolini's Italy or the Austrian Standestaat of Engelbert Dollfuß and Kurt von Schuschnigg were forms of government with which the Catholic Church of that time were generally comfortable.

The Catholic Church is a worldwide institution that has congregations within the entire spectrum of contemporary forms of government: secular ones and ones with established religions (Christian and otherwise); military and civilian; democracies and dictatorships, and varying degrees of both. The Catholic Church doesn't take the position of American neocons that they shouldn't even have formal conversations with governments they finding displeasing. On the contrary, they are interested in negotiating the best possible arrangements for the Church and its members even in countries hostile to the Catholic Church.

Eduardo Valdés, the Argentine Ambassador to the Vatican, notes that Cardinal Jaime Ortega, Archbishop of La Habana, has played a key role in the current process of rapprochement between the US and Cuba which the Holy See has helped to mediate. (Premonición Página/12 19.09.2015)

The Catholic News Service provides this description of Fidel Castro's view of Christianity as expressed in a 1985 book of interviews with Fidel in which he positioned himself as supportive of the views of liberation theology: Cathy Lynn Grossman, Christ, Marx and Che: Fidel Castro offers pope his religious views National Catholic Reporter 09/21/2015. Pope Francis has views more friendly to liberation theology than his two immediate predecessors. John Paul II was a bitter opponent of it. Benedict XVI was known before and during his Papacy as generally reactionary on theological and political issues. However, both of them also took positions based on Catholic social teaching (feudal roots and all) that challenged politically conservative positions. They also took pacifist positions at odds with the normal power politics on which the world runs far too much.

Vatican Radio reports on the meeting between Francis and Fidel in Pope Francis meets former Cuban president Fidel Castro 09/20/2015:

Pope Francis gave Castro several books, including one by Italian priest Alessandro Pronzato and another by Spanish Jesuit Segundo Llorentea. The Holy Father also gave him a book and two CDs of his homilies, as well as his two encyclical letters, Lumen Fidei and Laudato si'.

In return, Castro gave Pope Francis an interview book entitled, "Fidel and Religion," written in 1985 by Brazilian priest Frei Betto. The dedication reads: "For Pope Francis, on occasion of his visit to Cuba, with the admiration and respect of the Cuban people."

The head of the Vatican Press Office, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, said the meeting was "familiar and informal," and the two men spoke about "protecting the environment and the great problems of the contemporary world."

Father Lombardi compared the private encounter to that which took place with Pope Benedict XVI in 2012, saying Fidel Castro asked Pope Benedict many questions, while Sunday's meeting with Pope Francis was "more of a conversation."

Emphasizing some of the differences between the Church and the Cuban regime, Martín Granovsky reports (Ortega, el cardenal de las negociaciones secretas Página/12 19.09.2015):

¿Piensa el cardenal Ortega que el proceso de normalización ya es irreversible? Está en camino a serlo, pero según él “Obama y Raúl tienen enemigos y hay que protegerlos a ambos porque los dos saben que antes de irse todavía tienen mucho que hacer”. Cuando habla de los retos a Raúl, Ortega describe el peso de lo que él llama “ideología”, o sea el resabio del modelo soviético y de la rigidez. Para el cardenal el efecto se nota aún en sectores del Partido Comunista Cubano, en los medios controlados por él, en la TV, la radio y la prensa escrita.

Contó un ejemplo. El periodista Amaury Pérez lo entrevistó para la tele cubana y en vez de la media hora habitual le dio una hora. Era el primer reportaje televisivo en 60 años. El director de TV se opuso. Quería revisar y cortar partes. “La entrevista se pasa sin tocar una coma”, le dijeron a Ortega que fue la frase de Castro. El diálogo se puede ver haciendo click en http://bit.ly/1JCqhe7.

[Does Cardinal think that the process of normalization is now irreversible? It's on the way to being so, according to him: "Obama and Raúl {Castro} have enemies, and we have to protect both of them because the two know that before they leave {the political scene}, there is still a lot to do." When he speaks of Raúl's challenges, Ortega describes the weight of what he calls "ideology," that is, the bad taste of the Soviet model and the rigidity. For the cardinal, the effect can be observed even in sectors of the Cuban Communist Party, in the media controlled by them, in TV, radio and the written press.

He gave an example. The journalist Amaury Pérez interviewed him for Cuban television and gave him an hour instead of the usual half hour. It was the first television report {featuring Ortega?} in 60 years. The TV director opposed it. He wanted to edit it and cut parts. "The interview will air with touching a comma," Ortega was told was the phrase {Raúl} Castro used.]

It's reasonable to assume that when Francis spoke about the problem of "ideology" in Cuba, his meaning was the same or similar to that in which Cardinal Ortega is using it.

In the TV interview referenced, Ortega recounts a conversation he had with Pope Benedict XVI, in which Benedict said that the Church is not in the world to change governments. It's in the world to spread the Gospel. Ortega says it in a context that makes it clear he agrees with that perspective. And he also says that is the perspective of Pope Francis.

Granovsky continues to report on Church-related consequence of the long-standing embargo:

El desafío para la Iglesia es ganar feligreses, sobre todo entre la juventud, y conseguir fondos propios para ayuda humanitaria. Por el bloqueo la Iglesia no puede recibir dólares porque los aportes de afuera son interferidos en algún punto de su curso por Estados Unidos. Ocurrió con fondos regalados por Los Caballeros de Colón, por la Isla de Malta y por grupos irlandeses. Llegaron a Cuba tras operaciones clandestinas e incluso algún obispo debió recorrer el mundo con 200 mil dólares ocultos en una valija. En La Habana no hubo problemas.

[The challenge for the Church is to win parishioners, above all among youth, and obtain its own funds for humanitarian support. Because of the {US} blockade, the Church is not able to receive dollars because donations from outside are intercepted at some point in their course from the United States. That has occurred with funds donated by the Knights of Columbus, from the island of Malta and from Irish groups. They arrived in Cuba after {via} clandestine operations, including one bishop who has said to have traversed the world with $200,000 hidden in a valise. In Havana, he had no problems.]

Meanwhile, columnist George Will prior to the Pope's arrival in the US is griping about the Jesuit Francis defending science on the topic of climate change. (Anthony Annett, On Fact-Free Flamboyance: George Will vs. Pope Francis Commonweal 09/21/2015) Awesome.

Isaih Berlin and the dream of reason

The New York Review of Books website is running a speech that liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin gave  on 11/25/1994, A Message to the 21st Century 10/23/2014.

I'm not that familiar with Berlin's work. But if this speech is representative, a simplistic anti-Communism was a big part of his worldview.

Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997)

I've discussed before the "From Luther to Hitler" position that tries to trace Nazism back to major figures in German intellectual life going back to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. See, e.g., Anthony Quinton on Hegel's metaphysics 10/11/2010.

Berlin's argument in that 1994 speech, he takes what could be called a from Fichte To Hitler And Mao Zedong Too approach:

Men have for millennia destroyed each other, but the deeds of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon (who introduced mass killings in war), even the Armenian massacres, pale into insignificance before the Russian Revolution and its aftermath: the oppression, torture, murder which can be laid at the doors of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and the systematic falsification of information which prevented knowledge of these horrors for years—these are unparalleled. They were not natural disasters, but preventable human crimes, and whatever those who believe in historical determinism may think, they could have been averted. ...

They were, in my view, not caused by the ordinary negative human sentiments, as Spinoza called them—fear, greed, tribal hatreds, jealousy, love of power—though of course these have played their wicked part. They have been caused, in our time, by ideas; or rather, by one particular idea. It is paradoxical that Karl Marx, who played down the importance of ideas in comparison with impersonal social and economic forces, should, by his writings, have caused the transformation of the twentieth century, both in the direction of what he wanted and, by reaction, against it. ...

[Heinrich Heine] predicted that the armed disciples of the German philosophers — Fichte, Schelling, and the other fathers of German nationalism — would one day destroy the great monuments of Western Europe in a wave of fanatical destruction before which the French Revolution would seem child's play. This may have been unfair to the German metaphysicians, yet Heine’s central idea seems to me valid: in a debased form, the Nazi ideology did have roots in German anti-Enlightenment thought. There are men who will kill and maim with a tranquil conscience under the influence of the words and writings of some of those who are certain that they know perfection can be reached. [my emphasis]

Much of what Berlin says there fits so well with stock Cold War rhetoric that many of his hearers and readers may take this speech as a statement of the obvious.

But it's worth asking about those "men who will kill and maim with a tranquil conscience." He's describing psychopaths and sociopaths there, people who seem to have no conscience.

Is there any such evidence that such characteristics emerge "under the influence of the words and writings of some of those who are certain that they know perfection can be reached"?

The short answer would be, no.

Psychopaths and sociopaths may gravitate to causes that allow them to exercise power over others. Police departments try as well as they can (or at least they're supposed to!) to screen such people out. But they aren't necessarily especially linked to totalizing ideologies, much less a quest to reach perfection.

Fanaticism can lead people to do ugly things. Cult environments can create conditions in which people set their consciences aside. But those kinds of things typically happen with certain kinds of leadership. Cults are characterized more by the prevalence of an authoritarian (and often psychopathic) type of leadership.

Training in normal national armies focus not only on teaching particular skills but on building team spirit and group cohesion.

If we ask the general question, "Do ideas matter in peoples' conduct?", of course the answer is, yes.

But do they matter in the way Berlin describes in this speech? Let's take one of his bogeymen, Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814). Fichte was a philosopher who considered himself a disciple of Kant, continuing Kant's work on transcendental idealism. He developed the subjective side of Kant's theory, emphasizing the ways in which the ego constitutes the external world. Put that way, it sounds like a religious mystical dogma. Or a philosophy of autism. But there is much more to it than that. For instance, he had a more radical theory of the social contract than Kant.

But where is there an identifiable train of thought that leads from Fichte to Hitler? Or to Stalin? Fichte was one of the heavies of classical German philosophy, now usually regarded as a transition figure between Kant and Hegel. That classical German philosophical tradition formed the intellectual background for figures as diverse as Bruno Bauer, Karl Marx, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche and many others. Around 1850, the leading philosophical trend in Germany was toward materialist philosophies and away from both Hegelians and Romanticism of thinkers like Schelling (Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling).

It's a long and winding road indeed to get from Fichte to Goebbels!

Fichte is probably a good topic on which to ask whether Berlin's notion of a totalizing idea is well-defined enough to be meaningful. Fichte looked for a unifying point for all of scientific knowledge. But does that translated into developing an idea by which people "know perfection can be reached" in the here-and-now? Fichte wrote about political theory. But he was engaged in a philosophical project, not cooking up an ideology for a cult to use to kill people in order to touch of the final struggle that would bring on the Last Days, or whatever.

I'm assuming that Berlin also realized that a variety of material factors - sociological, economic, psychological, military - played an enormous role in those situations he describes. But did the particular ideologies themselves create the brutality he describes?

In Hitler's case, Nazism was a specifically anti-liberal ideology. That is to say that it was a radical, reactionary philosophy that rejected democratic and republican ideas of the modern era and wanted to construct a different kind of modern state and society in the guise of returning to old values and traditions. Those values being the alleged virtue of the Aryan race. Unlike Western democracy or Communism, Nazism specifically valued racial discrimination and glorified brutality and militarism.

However, the horror we now know as the Holocaust took place in the context of war and annexation. The mass roundup of Jews began in Austria after the Anschluss (annexation) of early 1938. Historians like Christopher Browning have combed through the evidence to establish a timeline on the decision to initiate mass killings. And it's clear that the decision came in 1941 around the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Now, Hitler's determination to get rid of the Jews in Europe was one of the two core ideological points the Nazis consistently took seriously, the other being gaining "living space" by invading and conquering the USSR. So ideology played a part. But the fulfillment of the first point was dependent on the conditions of full-blown war mobilization required by the second. And we have to ask if an ideology which had those two points at its core actually counts as one that made its followers think they were reaching for perfection in the immediate future.

Berlin suggests some kind of straight line influence from Karl Marx' thought to mass deaths in the Soviet Union and China in the following century. In Cold War terminology that sounds entirely plausible. Both countries called themselves "Marxist," didn't they?

But here again, we're talking about very particular structures and specific policy decisions. In both cases, the largest number of deaths directly attributable to state policy came from starvation in the wake of reforms affecting agriculture. In the USSR, it was the massive collectivization of farming in parallel to what the Soviets called the de-kulakization campaign, aimed at breaking the power of the dominant class in agriculture. The disruptions involved with that process contributed to the Soviet famine of 1932-33 that hit the Ukraine particularly hard. Similarly, Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward of 1958-60 disrupted Chinese agriculture and resulted in famine, as well.

But do those events trace backward in a clear intellectual history to Marx and Fichte? It's hard to see how. Marx focused on the advanced economies of Western Europe and the US, and didn't write up any blueprints for how a soviet state would collectivize agriculture. (For that matter, the "soviet" or worker's council as a key phenomenon in a socialist revolution didn't emerge until the Russian Revolution of 1905.) And in practice, Mao's Great Leap Forward was more an attempt to jump-start industrial development than it was an agricultural reform, though it diverted many peasant farmers from farming and therefore generated famine. But the whole idea was a rejection of the Soviet blueprint for a socialist country's development. It's hard to see how one could squeeze as simple a tale of continuity out of that set of events as Berlin seems to be doing here.

And what did poor old Fichte have to do with it?

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814)

Berlin's philosophical liberal argument - which shouldn't be confused with the particular American political meaning of "liberal" - is directed against what came to be called totalitarianism, though Berlin doesn't use that still-disputed term here. This portion not only elaborates his idea of that. It also raises an interesting point about the continuity of "German anti-Enlightenment thought" that he sees at work:

If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used — if necessary, terror, slaughter. Lenin believed this after reading Das Kapital, and consistently taught that if a just, peaceful, happy, free, virtuous society could be created by the means he advocated, then the end justified any methods that needed to be used, literally any. [my emphasis]

Actually, in the real world, people believe all the time in ideal solutions, particularly religious ones, without resorting to the extreme methods Berlin specifies here as the inevitable result of such a belief. People can and do believe that there are solutions that would produce "an ideal society," or something close to it, without throwing away all moral restraints and all respect for established institutions. It may have been obvious in Cold War terms that the Other Side that "must believe that no price can be too high." Just as now Islamophobes of various sorts believe something similar about all Muslims and all forms of Islam. But it doesn't describe the real world.

The Enlightenment notions of Reason weren't the last word on philosophy, either. Even the Enlightenment had it's dark side, as Goya famously depicted in "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters":

I'd be curious to see the context of Lenin's statement about the effect of Marx's Capital on him. (Another Cold War verbal habit: calling it "Das Kapital" in an English sentence makes it sound more foreign and German.) But it also calls into question the from-Fichte-to-Stalin continuity of which Berlin is complaining. Capital is a work on political economy. And it is an imminent critique of the field it analyzes, with lots of attention paid to Adam Smith and David Ricardo, especially. These were classical liberal thinkers and also Brits. Maybe it was the influence of British liberal political economists more than German Idealists and Romantics that so influenced Lenin in that direction!

Ideas do have consequences. Including liberal ideas. Like those of the economic neoliberalism that wreaks havoc on many developing countries and has imposed brutal costs on the economies of the eurozone, Japan and even the United States. (Paul Krugman, Notes on Japan 10/28/2014)

But we would do much better looking at the dangers of dogmatism and fanaticism than to look for one evil idea to eradicate.

Berlin's broad statement of his perspective sounds good to American ears trained to regard them as truisms: "So we must weigh and measure, bargain, compromise, and prevent the crushing of one form of life by its rivals."

But when it comes to real-world cases on an issue like same-sex marriage or abortion, this live-and-let-live credo often quickly gives way in practice to other forms of dogmatism and fanaticism, many of them all the while declaring their allegiance to ideals of liberal democracy.

The continuing return of "Marx"

Sean McElwee in Believe it or not: Karl Marx is making a comeback Salon 06/22/2014 jumps on the bandwagon of using the image of Karl Marx as a symbol of a recognition that neoliberal capitalism isn't the End of History or a democratic utopia.

McElwee's piece also shares the weaknesses of much of the recent popular commentary on the subject. He talks about "the left" without any clear point of reference for the reader of just who that might be. Especially for American readers, it's an awfully vague term. And he toggles back and forth in a short column between Grand Theory and political tactics. For example:

Increasingly, the left is dominated by what the German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg might call Kathedersozialisten – or "professorial socialists." These thinkers, frequently drenched in academese, talk and debate in a way almost entirely designed to alienate anyone who does not already accept their conclusions. The professorial left seems to have innumerable answers for those wondering what Lacanian psychoanalysis has to offer us, but can give us little guidance as to whether the Working Families Party should support Cuomo or run its own candidate. ...

Marx failed to account for the adaptability of capitalism and left little in the way of alternatives. In the end, this void was filled by murderers and fools. Marx, a deeply humanistic thinker, would certainly have abhorred the violence in his name some half a century after his death. But rational people do not blame Christ for the Crusades, nor Muhammad for 9/11 nor Nietzsche for the Holocaust. The taboo of Marx has prevented the left from learning his most important lesson; in the words of Gil Scott-Heron, "the revolution will not be televised." [my emphasis]

Is this hipster Marxism? Hipster commentary on Marxism?

If "the left" is defined to be whatever group out there recognizes the leadership of "professional socialists" (?!), it's a tiny group for sure!

Okay, there's only so much you can say in a few paragraphs, so you have to use some shortcuts to describes the contours of what a symbol like "Karl Marx" can mean.

Here are a few guidelines I use in thinking about the image of Marx functions in political imagery in the US right now.

Karl Marx's political economy presented the classical criticism of capitalism, just as Adam Smith presented the classical advocacy for capitalism.

Both Smith and Marx are relevant to the capitalism of 2014 - as well as David Ricardo, Alfred Marshall, John Maynard Keynes and any number of other important economists, including living contemporaries like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. I recently read Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) for the first time. Being something of a finance geek, I actually found it interesting to learn something about 18th-century markets in corn and wool. I made a point of first reading his earlier book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Because I wanted to understand something about his broader perspective as a moral philosopher and an important figure in what is known as the Scottish Enlightenment.

I was surprised to see that the entry for Adam Smith in the ever-respectable Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite 2012 is by the late left-leaning economist Robert Heilbroner, who writes:

Smith saw humans as creatures driven by passions and at the same time self-regulated by their ability to reason and — no less important — by their capacity for sympathy. This duality serves both to pit individuals against one another and to provide them with the rational and moral faculties to create institutions by which the internecine struggle can be mitigated and even turned to the common good. He wrote in his Moral Sentiments the famous observation that he was to repeat later in The Wealth of Nations: that self-seeking men are often "led by an invisible hand ... without knowing it, without intending it, [to] advance the interest of the society."

It should be noted that scholars have long debated whether Moral Sentiments complemented or was in conflict with The Wealth of Nations. At one level there is a seeming clash between the theme of social morality contained in the first and the largely amoral explication of the economic system in the second. On the other hand, the first book can also be seen as an explanation of the manner in which individuals are socialized to become the market-oriented and class-bound actors that set the economic system into motion.

Do I really need to say that an 18th-century Scottish writer doesn't offer any immediate insights into tactical considerations for New York State politics in 2014?

Like Smith's laissez faire economics, Marx's economics were part of a larger philosophy which had a major influence in the world.

It's fun for modern economists to pick out quotes from Smith's political economy, which was based on a larger psychology and moral philosophy, to make a point against some aspect of present-day capitalism driven by amoral profit considerations that are sometimes blatantly damaging to the public good.

But Marx had the fortune - whether more good or bad fortune is a matter for debate - of seeing his own doctrine enshrined as dogma by the Communist political movements of the 20th century, which included numerous governing parties. This contributed greatly to a proliferation of Marxisms that was already going on before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. To name a few: revolutionary Social Democracy, Revisionist Social Democracy, Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism (a variety of Marxism-Leninism), Maoism (aka, Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought), Titoism, Trotskyism, Eurocommunism, Castroism, Guevarism.

John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in The Age of Uncertainty (1977):

The massive dissent [against capitalism] originated with Karl Marx. In considerable measure he used the ideas of Ricardo to assail the economic system which Ricardo interpreted and described. I've used the word massive to describe his onslaught. If we agree that the Bible is a work of collective authorship, only Mohammed rivals Marx in the number of professed and devoted followers recruited by a single author. And the competition is not really very close. The followers of Marx now far outnumber the sons of the Prophet.

(I'm not sure the numerical comparison with followers of the Prophet still holds in 2014.)

Not only are there many Marxisms, each of them has their own "Karl Marx."

As the study of any famous philosopher, scientist or historical figure shows, getting to the "real" perspective of the individual is a matter of interpreting the available data. And serious researchers can come up with notably different interpretations of what the person "really" meant by this or that.

When a person becomes a symbol incorporated into official dogma, that problem is magnified. In the case of Karl Marx, by several orders of magnitude. When the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China split in the late 1950s, to take just one example, they carried out an extensive polemic over the history of the socialist movement, both sides taking Karl Marx as something like an authoritative guide on all questions involved. Pick pretty much any party or sect that defined itself as Marxist and was large and long-lasting enough to have splits and factions, and you'll find that they frequently justified their differences with highfalutin Marxist theoretical justifications.

So, when we're talking about Marxism, not only are there many varieties we could be talking about. All of them had some effect on how the life  and thought of the real existing Karl Marx of 1818-1883 was viewed.

Marx himself was a materialist philosopher and Marxist politics took place - and continue to do so - in the material world.

Marx had a philosophy of history that held social development to be driven by class struggle. If we accept the reading of his close collaborator Friedrich Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) as part of the original Marxist perspective, it also assumed that the dynamic of sex roles played an equally important part.

Marx had a theory of political economy that he described in the three volumes of Capital (the last two edited by Engels and published after Marx' death), and in other shorter works. It describes the development and function of capitalism, including the system's tendency to periodic crises, which we know today as recessions and depressions.

Marx was also a key political leader in the social democratic movement in Europe. Part of that leadership role came in the form of extensive commentary on political issues of the day, in which he looked carefully at the role of particular players and the contingencies of the moment.

Each of those aspects of Marx' thought and heritage need to be evaluated differently. That's why it's a little silly to dismiss the handful of academics consciously working in a Marxist tradition in the Western world that are well-known enough to be considered public intellectuals on the grounds that their most theoretical formulations don't tell you exactly what's best to do in a particular political decision in this year, this state, and this week. Knowing the science of internal combustion engines doesn't tell you how to tune up the engine on a '57 Chevy. Nor does it give you the skills to be a champion drag racer. But obviously without the science behind it, there wouldn't be Chevy engines to tune or drag races to be run. At least not with automobiles using internal combustion engines.

Politics is politics, as Joe Stalin famously said, not long before he signed a Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler Germany.

Politics is about grand visions. It's also about transient issues of the day. And about constituent service. And about "bringing home the bacon," however much the Tea Party may claim to reject "pork barrel" politics.

The parties in the West today that most directly draw from a Marxist tradition would be those like the Left Party in Germany, which is in part the direct organizational heir of the East German ruling Communist Party. But you don't see them promoting themselves with banners like this one from the German SDS youth group of the 1960s:

"Everyone talks about the weather. Not us."

Those faces would be Marx, Engels and Lenin.

The Left Party in Germany engages with the issues of the day. And, like all parties, they have to be able to show enough success in elections and enough ability to satisfy their constituents in terms of immediate representation and service to keep winning votes. Whether they represent some true Marxist tradition is a matter of judgment. And of polemics, of course, since their opponents are happy to stigmatize them with the old and not-much-lamented East German Communist state. The old symbols that were intensely evocative in the 1910s or 1920s are, not surprisingly, no longer so.

Except in a limited nostalgic role. I'm kind of fond of the Rote Riese (Red Giant) myself:

But like most brands, whether it's the Rote Riese or the Jolly Green Giant, his appeal wasn't forever. Whether some of the strategic perspectives or historical and economic assumptions of the Social Democratic and Communist parties that made use of the Rote Riese's image still have something useful to say to people today is another question.

As William Faulkner didn't quite say: The Cold War is never dead. It's not even past.

The actual quote is from a Faulkner character, Gavin Stevens, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." (Requiem for a Nun [1951], Act 1, Scene 3.)

Cold War polemics spawned a whole set of stigmas and taboos attached to Marxism. Marxism still has the virtue and defect of being on the margins of respectability. Those intellectuals McElwee mocks still find themselves these days tippie-toeing around anything to do with Marx or Marxism. And, as often as not, they seem to be stuck in the Western Cold War role of highlighting the (real and alleged) failures of Marxism. (See "Žižek, Slavoj," although he's so over-the-top in trying to sound counter-intuitive that it's hard to tell how serious he actually is.)

There's always a market for trashing Marx and Marxism. Hipster-wise, or not. Most of what is produced in that vein is pretty boring. And usually lazy.

Why do I say it's also a virtue for Marxism to be on the margins of respectability? Because it still has the transgressive appeal that the German SDS poster above invokes. And if you're trying to shake up tired ideas about conventional wisdom, a little transgressive appeal is usually required. Žižek is one who tries to combine the "transgressive" thing with Cold War respectability, which makes for an awkward mix.

Karl Marx was a man of the 19th century.

Like Adam Smith, his work can still inform us about enduring aspect of our own current situation. But if we're looking at Marx as a philosopher, economist and politician, he does need to be understood in reference to the concrete historical situation in which he lived. (Does saying that make me an "essentialist"? I wouldn't say so, but opinions may differ.)

Sam Gindin, who apparently comes out of the Canadian social-democratic tradition, makes a similar point in Unmaking Global Capitalism Jacobin June 2014:

In terms of the impact of historical defeats, it's worth noting that in the wake of the 1848 revolutions Marx's emphasis on changing the world and not just interpreting it underwent a reversal. Marx was too optimistic about the potential of 1848, and those disappointments led him to return to the importance of understanding the world as a condition for changing it. This search for a historical materialist understanding dominated the rest of his life. In light of our own defeats, it is likewise crucial for us to learn more deeply about the nature of the world we confront.

While Gindin is right about Marx giving high priority to understanding the world realistically, it's misleading to assume that he didn't prioritize changing the world in the direction he thought it needed to go. He was very much politically engaged to the end of his life and highly focused on the actual movements, parties and events that were actually pushing for the kinds of changes he wanted.

For a more substantive current look at Marx's own theoretical heritage, see Nancy Fraser's Behind Marx's Hidden Abode New Left Review 86/March-April 2014. Warning: it does not discuss Andrew Cuomo's current political situation!

Tags: karl marx, left party, marxism

Žižek-ing the sign-language non-interpreter interpreter

Since I've had a couple of occasions recently to comment on the putatively Marxist philosopher
Slavoj Žižek, I thought I would continue with another Guardian commentary of his on Nelson Mandela's death and the media treatment of it, The 'fake' Mandela memorial interpreter said it all 12/16/2013.

But before I get into that one, I was struck by this from David Atkins, a blogging partner of Digby's at Hullabaloo. In a post about the maldistribution of wealth in the US, in which he refers to the wealthiest as the "asset class," he ends with this defensive comment (Assets versus workers again: Wealth is even more disturbing than income inequality 12/18/2013):

But that's just not so. And in a world of increased globalization, mechanization and deskilling, the decoupling of the asset class from the working class is going to become even more severe.

I'm not the first person to say this, but just because Marx didn't have the right answer, doesn't mean he wasn't asking the right questions. State Communism was obviously a dramatic failure. But that doesn't mean our dominant economic system represents the pinnacle of human freedom and progress, either.

As I understand it, David is not only active in the Democratic Party but he's young enough to have no adult memories of the Cold War and the often-warped polemics that were part of it.

So, perhaps from a somewhat more jaded perspective, I'll make some comments about agreeing in some way with something Karl Marx or some famous Marxist may have said.

First, there's this from Jorge Bergoglio/Pope Francis I: "“Marxist ideology is wrong. But in my life I have known many Marxists who are good people, so I don’t feel offended" when, say, a junkie bigot like Rush Limbaugh calls him a Marxist. (Joshua McElwee, Pope: There won't be women cardinals National Catholic Reporter 12/14/2013)

Catholic teaching on economics is complicated, not least because the Church held on to feudal-based criticisms of capitalism well into the 20th century. So it's sometimes hard to tell whether a sweeping Catholic criticism of capitalism is "progressive" in the sense of looking toward an improved future or "reactionary" in terms of looking back to an imagined ideal feudal economy and society. But whatever, the Pope's merits or failings, he obviously knows how to deliver a diplomatic "Bite me!" to fools who criticize him superficially.

To today's Republicans, liberal=moderate=progressive=Marxist=Communist=socialist=atheist=Nazi. The Republican Party has adopted a segregationist outlook, complete the babbling foolishness that the John Birch Society and White Citizens Council were practicing back in the 1950s and 1960s and their political ancestors of the paleo-conservative variety were practicing before that. In other words, if you're a Democrat, or defend labor unions, or question mindless American nationalism, they're going to call you a Marxist. There's a range of appropriate responses, the Pope's representing the polite end of the spectrum, and some form of "bite me, a*****e!"

Cold War polemics condemned "Marxism," "Marxism-Leninism," "Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Zedong-Thought" and other variations of challenges to capitalism, as such. On the center-left/liberal/social-democratic side, Good (non-Communist) Marxism was defended against Bad (Soviet or Chinese or Communist) Marxism. To undermine Marxist or other groups abroad that might be pro-Soviet especially, the CIA liked to promote "Third Force" groups with revolutionary/reformist aims that were neither Marxist or overtly reactionary. Then there were the Trotskyists, who I once heard defined as the people who support revolution everywhere except where there's one going on.

Karl Marx is the classical critic of capitalism. In my first homework assignment in graduate business school, I had to read excerpts from Adam Smith, the classic advocate for capitalism, and Karl Marx. (Okay, it was a Jesuit school, and the Pope's a Jesuit; draw what conclusions you will!)

Marx was born in 1817 and died in 1883. He got some things right, like the chronic tendency of capitalist economies to have recessions, called "crises" in his day, a tendency toward extreme concentrations of wealth, and the ability of great wealth to exercise disproportionate control over even the most democratic of governments. Some things, like what is know as the secular tendency of profit margins to fall, the eminence of an end to the capitalist order, not so much. It's no sin to recognize either. Lots has happened in the world since 1883, e.g., two world wars, the rise fall of the USSR and the Eastern bloc, global climate change. If Marx were still alive and working at 196 years of age, he would have adapted his analyses to changing times.

Very few parties in the world outside of China would identify themselves as Marxist parties these days. Because, you know, times and political challenges have changed since 1883. Even if some major problems like the extreme maldistribution of wealth and income persist and recur. As Arlo Guthrie once said, "Some things change, you know. Some things don't."

One of the economists that has great insights into the euro crisis is Yanis Varoufakis, who I quote here with some frequency. In Confessions of an Erratic Marxist: Keynote speech, Subversive Festival, Zagreb, Croatia – 14th May 2013, he explains that while his professional work has been largely in the Keynesian framework, his larger theoretical outlook is one he considers to be a Marxist one:

In summary, not one of my academic publications can be thought of as explicitly Marxist, while my energies are channeled into preventing capitalism’s collapse. Nonetheless, all along, from my student days in Britain to this very day, the only way I could make sense of the world we live in is through the methodological 'eyes' of Karl Marx. In itself, this 'fact' renders me a theoretical Marxist. Moreover, I feel Marxism in my bones every time I am engaged in any form of intellectual pursuit: from discussing the Arab Spring to debating the intricacies of Art with my artist partner. Furthermore, a democratic, libertarian, socialist future is the only future that I would be willing to fight for. A most peculiar Marxist no doubt, but a Marxist nevertheless.

Make of that what you will. But anyone who just dismisses Varoufakis' solid economics work, which is highly relevant to the euro crisis today, on the grounds that he used the "M" word to describe his outlook, well, it would be a pretty airhead approach to take.

Varoufakis has an expanded version of that presentation in Confessions of an Erratic Marxist in the Midst of a Repugnant European Crisis 12/10/2013.

Which brings us to the article by Slavoj Žižek, a self-described Marxist who has become a notable "public intellectual." In other words, his opinions on current events get more attention than those of most professional philosophers like himself. As I've said before, it's often hard to tell when Slavoj Žižek is making a serious argument and when he's clowning around. Maybe there's no distinction in his case. And by his own somewhat convoluted approach, the very fact that he is a prominent public intellectual who gets occasionally published in the mainstream press is prime facie evidence that the powers that be don't regard his opinions as being in the least threatening to the established order. Whatever.

This piece is thought-provoking. It's about the fake interpreter, who is apparently a schizophrenic, a criminal and maybe even a murderer, who did sign-language translation for President Obama's speech at Mandela's funeral event. And this from Žižek is food for thought:

Jantjie's performance was not meaningless – precisely because it delivered no particular meaning (the gestures were meaningless), it directly rendered meaning as such – the pretence of meaning. Those of us who hear well and do not understand sign language assumed that his gestures had meaning, although we were not able to understand them. And this brings us to the crux of the matter: are sign language translators for the deaf really meant for those who cannot hear the spoken word? Are they not much more intended for us – it makes us (who can hear) feel good to see the interpreter, giving us a satisfaction that we are doing the right thing, taking care of the underprivileged and hindered[?]

I remember how, in the first "free" elections in Slovenia in 1990, in a TV broadcast by one of the leftist parties, the politician delivering the message was accompanied by a sign language interpreter (a gentle young woman). We all knew that the true addressees of her translation were not the deaf but we, the ordinary voters: the true message was that the party stood for the marginalised and handicapped.

It was like great charity spectacles which are not really about children with cancer or flood victims, but about making us, the public, aware that we are doing something great, displaying solidarity. [my emphasis]

The line between the thought-provoking and the cynical can sometimes be a thin one. But I'll give Žižek credit for the former in this one.

But that first sentence I quoted from him - "Jantjie's performance was not meaningless – precisely because it delivered no particular meaning (the gestures were meaningless), it directly rendered meaning as such – the pretence of meaning" - tends to invoke for me Huck Finn's reaction to Tom Sawyer's pretentious and incomprehensible explanations for things: I have no idea what he's talking about, but, boy, does it sound grand!

What I tended to focus more on with the interpreter story was this. The NSA spies on what pretty much sounds like every electronic communication link and every database and every mobile phone in the world. But our NSA super-protectors against The Terrorists ... let this guy stand next to President Obama at his speech at Mandela's funeral? They couldn't even figure out he wasn't a real sign-language interpreter?

And they say they may never figure out how much information Edward Snowden took from their super-duper databases that protect us against The Terrorists always and everywhere. Oooo-kay!!

Tags: marxism, slavoj žižek

Inequality and education - and how Cold War thinking may have messed up understanding them

Paul Krugman in Rise of the Robots 12/08/25012 looks at evidence showing a huge shift of income in the US from labor to capital and explains why his own perspective in the 1990s didn't put a high priority on this. And part of the reason, he suspects, is that bringing it up might have sounded too much like "old-fashioned Marxism."

What has happened [over the last three decades], on the other hand, is a notable shift in income away from labor ...

If this is the wave of the future, it makes nonsense of just about all the conventional wisdom on reducing inequality. Better education won't do much to reduce inequality if the big rewards simply go to those with the most assets. Creating an "opportunity society", or whatever it is the likes of Paul Ryan etc. are selling this week, won't do much if the most important asset you can have in life is, well, lots of assets inherited from your parents. And so on.

I think our eyes have been averted from the capital/labor dimension of inequality, for several reasons. It didn't seem crucial back in the 1990s, and not enough people (me included!) have looked up to notice that things have changed. It has echoes of old-fashioned Marxism — which shouldn't be a reason to ignore facts, but too often is. And it has really uncomfortable implications.

But I think we’d better start paying attention to those implications. [my emphasis]

Another example of the damaging effects of Cold War ideology and post-Cold War Triumphalism.

Tags: marxism, paul krugman

A Marx revival? (5 of 5) The archetypal left challenge to Marxism

I recently came across the book The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx (1952) by political scientist and historian Peter Gay, which was his Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia. I was interested to see one of the earlier books by Gay, whose Freud biography is great. And I was curious to see what he had to say about Bernstein and the "Revisionism" debate in German Social Democracy prior to the First World War.

This dispute became the archetypal dispute over Marxist doctrinal purity. It was followed by the dispute over Social Democratic Parties supporting their respective governments' war efforts in the Great War, which split most of the Socialist parties of Europe. A related but more permanent division occurred over the Russian Revolution of 1917, with the antiwar factions of Social Democracy tending to be sympathetic to the Russian Communists and their methods. Though the continuity is not that simple. Bernstein (1850-1932), the godfather of Revisionism, was very much in the antiwar faction, but then was very much supportive of the Social Democratic government that took power in Berlin in 1918 and opposed to the more radical Spartacus/Communist group.

It was to be followed by many other divisions, splits and bitter doctrinal disputes: Stalinists vs. Troskyists, the Soviet/Yugoslavia split, Khrushchev's reforms vs. Stalin/Brezhnev orthodoxy, Soviet theory vs. Maoist theory, to name some of the more prominent. In addition to substantive policy/strategy/doctrinal differences, more practical factional fights were often cast in doctrinal terms.

The Revisionism disputes became the basic template for all of these. For Communists, all forms of deviation from the True Path were stigmatized as some form of "revisionism". It's tempting to say that Marxism, including the post-1917 Social Democratic varieties, was an especially theoretically inclined stream of thought. And that's true. One of the most intense and consequential early doctrinal disputes in the German Democratic Republic (GDR or DDR from the German initials, Communist East Germany) was over the proper weight to give to the influence of Hegel on the development of the thought of Marx and Engels.

But when I see the dogmatic adherence of both European conservatives and social-democrats today, or I hear the fantastic dogmatic pronouncements from Republican movement conservatives in the US, I'm hesitant to say that Marxism is unusual in its doctrinal emphasis.

In the context of whether there is or could be a "Marx revival" in the US and Europe, if we go beyond general imagery, it's not so easy to say which "Marx" would be revived. That's why I find it useful in this context to look at the issues on which the original Revisionism vs. Marxism dispute was fought.

This was a dispute that took place within the Germany Social Democratic Party (SPD), the largest of the socialist parties in Europe in the 1890s and early 1900s. It was 120 years ago, 1891, when the SPD adopted what was generally understood to be a Marxist program with the official Erfurt Program. Heinz Niemann recalled the event in Ein unabgegoltenes Erbe.Vor 120 Jahren: Sieg Marx'schen Denkens for Neues Deutschland 08.10.2011.

In some ways, the world of the 1890s looks very familiar politically. In other ways, it seems very much another world. The SPD had emerged from 12 years (1878-1890) of being banned from legal party activity in Germany, a time still remembered as the SPD "heroic period". So they had the experience of operating as an underground party, and successfully so. They emerged from illegality as the strongest party in Germany. And they were the leading advocates for full parliamentary democracy and the replacement of the Imperial government. Wilhelmine Germany had a parliament with some power, but it could scarcely be imagined to be a representative democracy.

Eduard Bernstein was one of the SPD's leading publicists and historians, the editor of the Party journal Die Neue Zeit. He was a close collaborator of Marx and Engels. It wasn't until after Engels' death in 1895 that Bernstein began to challenge the SPD to adopt a more explicitly reformist, less revolutionary official doctrine. Gay summarizes the major issues under dispute as follows:

• Dialectical view of history

• Meaning of the dominance of monopolies in capitalism

• Value theory in economics

• Inevitability of capitalist collapse

• Role of the agricultural sectors (farmers and farmworkers)

• Persistence and growth of the "middle class"

As the bullet-point summary illustrates, it's hard for most people to imagine a hot-and-heavy debate extending two decades over such topics. And however brilliant the insights of Marx and Engels may have been - or not - it's scarcely to be imagined that if they could have lived and worked until 2011 that they wouldn't have reframed their outlooks based on actual events. Like their intellectual mentor Hegel - both acknowledged their debt to Hegel's thought - both were immersed in the politics, economics and to a great extent scientific thought of their times.

The more practical side of the political stakes involved in this dispute, which pitted Bernstein as the leader of the Revisionists against party leaders August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht and Karl Kautsky defending the Marxist position had to do with the emphasis on reforms aimed at defending the current interests of the German working class vs. a near-term focus on a fundamental transformation of the Imperial government and the ownership basis of large industry. This does not mean that the Bebel-Kautsky faction were storing weapons and training shock troops for a putsch. Both sides in the theoretical dispute agreed that a radical transformation of the basis of the economy to socialism was needed. And by socialism they meant public ownership of major industries and financial institutions. And both sides agreed that the replacement of the Imperial government by parliamentary democracy was an urgent necessity and very much in the interest of the working class.

Bernstein famously described his attitude, "The goal is nothing, the movement everything." In one sense, it was a Social Democratic instance of temperamental differences between those who want to change things fast and those who want to make haste slowly. In many situations and in many different contexts, history has been unkind to both positions, and occasionally more merciful to one or the other.

Peter Gay in this early book was already showing two of his great strengths as a researcher and writer: careful attention to nuance and a rare ability to communicate historical events in the German-speaking world to audiences in the Anglo-Saxon world. How he treats the dispute over the concept of the general strike is a good example.

The politicians of the SPD insisted on claiming the general political strike as a potential weapon in what back then was generally understood as a class struggle. (Bizarrely, in the US right now, it's become politically respectable in the mainstream to talk about "class war" but not "class struggle"!) The trade union leaders, who tended to support the reformist/Revisionist positions, were opposed to the concept. They wanted the strike to be used only for particular trade union demands over wages, union recognition, contract disputes, etc. Ignaz Auer argued, "General strike is general nonsense."

In this case, Bernstein the arch-Revisionist sided with the left wing in supporting the concept of the general political strike. There was an anarchist concept of a more-or-less apocalyptic general strike that would bring down the capitalist system and the government at the same time, that both SPD Marxists and Revisionists opposed. Gay's description of Bernstein's position is a good illustration of the context in which these events were debated:

The political mass strike, free from Utopian elements, is the "means of putting the strongest pressure upon government and public opinion." [Bernstein, 1905] Its chances of success are small, and that is why it must be used sparingly. Like a revolution, the mass strike cannot be manufactured and cannot be called into being spontaneously; its only hope for success exists at critical moments, particularly when the ruling class is clearly in the wrong. This moral element is of great tactical importance, since it is reflected in public support for the strike. That is why Bernstein could define the mass strike as "an economic weapon with an ethical object."

In fact, one of the most successful general strikes in history was in Germany in 1920, (ironically!) defending the decidedly reformist and anti-revolutionary but democratic SPD government against a far-right putsch, which is remembered as the Kapp putsch, or the Lüttwitz-Kapp-Putsch.

The point in the context of this series is that any "Marx revival" in a meaningful political form, as opposed to the use of the Marx bogeyman by Bloomberg Business Week or other mainstream press outlets, would depend on the relevance of both theory and practice. An intellectual like Slavoj Žižek can have important and sound ideas about philosophy or sociology without necessarily having any particular insights into developments of the day like the Occupy Wall Street/indignados movement. And a party like the German Left Party (Linkspartei/Die Linke) that is consciously drawing from a Marxist political tradition may have a party program that on its face would have made Eduard Bernstein denounce it as hopelessly inadequate for the SPD of 1900.

Posts in this series:

A Marx revival? (1 of 5) The Marx bogeyman 12/28/2011
A Marx revival? (2 of 5) Some intellectual luminaries of the European left 12/29/2011
A Marx revival? (3 of 5): the former Communist states as real-time challenge 12/30/2011
A Marx revival? (4 of 5) Is there actual evidence of such a thing in US and European politics? 01/01/2011
A Marx revival? (5 of 5) The archetypal left challenge to Marxism 01/02/2011

Tags: eduard bernstein, peter gay, marxism

A Marx revival? (4 of 5) Is there actual evidence of such a thing in US and European politics?

To what extent are there parties or groups that self-identify as Marxist that have real clout in politics in the US and Europe?

For the United States, the answer if fairly simple: none.

In both the US and Europe, the protest movements of the 1960s and early 1970s produced a proliferation of small groups hoping to establish a "Marxist-Leninist" party modeled on a heroic notion of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the Chinese Revolution or the Cuban Revolution. In both Europe and the US, those efforts produced mostly endless polemics that served as group identifiers for one tiny sect or the other.

There was a controversy among liberals and progressives in 2002-3 around antiwar demonstrations organized by the International ANSWER coalition, which included people who self-identified as Marxists. There were many other labor and antiwar groups who participated in organizing the impressively large antiwar demonstrations against invading Iraq. The real significance of the marches was the measure they provided of antiwar sentiment among the general public, even at a time where many leading Democrats in Congress were falling all over themselves to not have anyone suspect that they might ever take a stand against an obviously useless and unjust war.

Some of the more fastidious liberal writers found that the fact that some people associated with small leftist sects might be part of those massive demonstrations rendered the marches too impure for them to praise. I thought and still think that it was a plain silly attitude to take. It was perfectly legitimate to look at the broader political agenda of International ANSWER. War advocates would have done so in any case. But it was sad to see some liberal writers obsessing over whether some of the organizers might have impure thoughts.

Republicans now routinely call the Democratic Party and President Obama socialist and Marxist, along with a lot of other things. It's a ridiculous notion. The fact that Glenn Beck and the Republican Party's chief ideologue Rush Limbaugh can babble on about Obama being a revolutionary Marxist who hates America and white people, too, without being dismissed as the bigoted cranks they are, isn't a sign of how radical or "Marxist" the Democratic Party is. It's a sign of how sleazy and dishonest the everyday rhetoric of the Republican Party has become.

The US Communist Party reached the height of its electoral influence in 1932, and barely exists now.

The Communist Parties of Europe are now mostly renamed and are referred to as "post-communist" parties to describe their organizational descent from former Communist parties.

The "post-communist" party with which I'm most familiar is the Left Party in Germany (Linkspartei, DIE LINKE). Their website has some English pages, including their Key Programmatic Points document from March 2007. They describe their program this way:

Democracy, freedom, equality, justice, internationalism and solidarity are our fundamental value orientations. They are inseparable from peace, the conservation of nature and emancipation. The ideas of democratic socialism are key guidelines for the development of the political goals of the Left.

DIE LINKE derives its political action from the connection between goal, path and fundamental value orientations. Freedom and social justice, democracy and socialism are contingent on one another. Equality without individual freedom ends in incapacitation and heteronomy. Freedom without equality is freedom only for the rich. Those who oppress their fellow human beings are not free either. The goal of democratic socialism, which wants to overcome capitalism in a transformational process, is a society in which the freedom of the other is not the limit but the condition for one's own freedom.

At the conclusion of Section 4, the document declares, "Together we fight to ensure that capitalism is not the last word in the history books."

In the fifth part of this series, I'll discuss the original, paradigmatic dispute in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) beginning in the late 1890s over Revisionism and Marxism as the party orientation. It's safe to say that the current Linkspartei program as shown in that document wouldn't have been recognizable as a "Marxist" program back in those days.

Now, official Party programs don't always define the substance of a Party's policies. We are unlikely to see the US Democratic Party adopt a platform plank in 2012 saying that the main purpose of its economic policy is to protect giant banks and their officers and stockholders from ever suffering the consequences of their most reckless and irresponsible policies. Nor will the Republicans explicitly write into their Party platform that they are committed to voter suppression methods aimed at disenfranchising African-American and Latino citizens.

The same is true with the German Left Party and other "post-communist" parties.

But the Left Party is becoming more and more accepted as a legitimate democratic party, and has participated in local governments at the local and provincial (state) levels. Both the SPD and the Left Party are assigned the color "red" in the German partisan color scheme. A "red-red coalition" of the SPD and the Left Party, led by the former, governed Berlin for a decade from 2001-2011. The red-red coalition was defined by its ... austerity economics. ( Markus Horeld, Wahl in Berlin.Rot-Rot war gut für ein Jahrzehnt Die Zeit 18.09.2011)

Former Foreign Minister and longtime Green Party leader Joschka Fischer said this about Berlin's red-red coalition in 2008:

It has been shown in the Federal State of Berlin, which has been governed by a red-red senate for several years, that all fears of a return to socialism are sheer nonsense. Very much the opposite; the red-red senate in Berlin stands for a policy of budget streamlining, the reduction of government jobs, the implementation of the Hartz-IV reforms ["pro-business reforms" which reduce some of the powers of unions] and a friendliness to business that one can with full justification characterize as to the right of red-green. Of socialism, there is not a trace to be found. (From Die neuen Regeln Die Zeit 03.03.2008; my translation)

Neues Deutschland (ND), formerly the paper of the ruling East German Communist Party (SED), today reflects the Left Party outlook.

This article by Karl-Heinz Gräfe, Katastrophe oder Notwendigkeit? 24.12.2011, and this one by Theodor Bergmann, Politisches Buch.»Von der Parteien Hass und Gunst verwirrt« 15.12.2011, discuss the end of the Soviet Union, which officially occurred on December 25, 1991.

I keep looking for some distinctive insights from their articles on the economic crisis and the European Union. But ND's coverage of both has seemed to be pretty lightweight. A current piece by Benjamin Beutler, Mit der Krise in die Arbeitslosigkeit.Rezession in USA und Europa trifft besonders Migranten aus Lateinamerika 27.12.2011, discusses the effect of the current depression in the US on reducing undocumented immigration.

However "Marxist" or not the Linkspartei may be, so far they aren't notably benefitting politically from the current depression. The 2001 election in Berlin left them with too few seats to continue the red-red coalition. And opinion polls aren't signalling some impending shift to the Linkspartei in upcoming elections. National parliamentary elections aren't scheduled until 2013, though if Chancellor Angela Merkel's government falls through the defection of the junior coalition partners, the Free Democrats (FDP), they could come sooner.

A Marx revival? Maybe. But there's no strong evidence of it the US or Europe that I can see.

Posts in this series:

A Marx revival? (1 of 5) The Marx bogeyman 12/28/2011
A Marx revival? (2 of 5) Some intellectual luminaries of the European left 12/29/2011
A Marx revival? (3 of 5): the former Communist states as real-time challenge 12/30/2011
A Marx revival? (4 of 5) Is there actual evidence of such a thing in US and European politics? 01/01/2011
A Marx revival? (5 of 5) The archetypal left challenge to Marxism 01/02/2011

Tags: communism, marxism, german left party

A Marx revival? (2 of 5) Some intellectual luminaries of the European left

In the first post in this series, I cited an article by Michael Sayeau, The Fifth International: n+1 covers the London Conference, "On the Idea of Communism" n+1 04/22/2009. The conference in question, Sayeau writes, featured "Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Antonio Negri, Terry Eagleton, Jacques Ranciere, Peter Hallward, and other key (albeit mostly male and entirely European or American) players in leftist philosophy and theory."

It's safe to say that none of these people are household names in the US.

Alain Badiou holds the impressively-named Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School. His faculty biography notes his indebtedness to Hegel, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze. And to Plato.

Terry Eagleton is a literary scholar who has held chairs at the University of Manchester and at Oxford, and is currently on the faculty at Lancaster University. He writes for the The Guardian, where short articles by him are availble to sample his take on events, such as Occupy London are true followers of Jesus, even if they despise religion 11/03/2011. He is a prominent public intellectual in Britain.

Peter Hallward is a philosopher at Kingston University in London.His faculty profile tells us that he is currently working on a project on "the will of the people" in which he will "develop and defend a notion of democratic political will" drawing "in particular on the political works of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx." The site also has links to several articles of his.

Antonio Negri is described by the leftist site Libcom.org (which apparently stands for "libertarian communism" as "an Italian autonomist Marxist academic who was wrongfully imprisoned by the Italian state for alleged involvement in the Brigate Rosse urban guerrilla group". His profile at the European Graduate School says he "is influenced in great part by Karl Marx and Benedict Baruch Spinoza."

Jacques Rancière, professor emeritus at the University of Paris, is also a professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School. His faculty bio includes this description of his views, "... is the experience of the distance of things; man acts as though his voice can be heard, but is always a proper distance from it."

Slavoj Žižek, a former democratic dissident in Communist Yugoslavia is "professor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London; senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana and regularly a visiting professor to some American university or other," according to a 2011 profile by Stuart Jeffries. (A life in writing: Slavoj Žižek The Guardian 07/15/2011)

John Gray reviews a book co-authored by Negri with Michael Hardt and one by Žižek in a piece called In the Bolshevik cabaret The Independent 11/20/2009. He heaps scorn on the authors, saying that "communism has been reinvented as a kind of intellectual cabaret act. The 20th century's biggest mistake is being marketed as high-end entertainment, with a modish neo-Bolshevism promising the jaded consumer an exciting experience of forbidden ideas." I'm not sure in what circles "neo-Bolshevism" is considered "modish", but whatever.

From my admittedly modest acquaintance with Žižek's work, I can't say whether Gray is entirely accurate in the following description. But my impression is consistent with Gray's suggestion that Žižek is more interested in poking critics of capitalism in the eye than in criticizing capitalism himself:

A Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalytical theorist and film critic, Zizek has become a gadfly of the left establishment, a prolific provocateur whose principal aim seems to be to confound his tender-minded readers. His target throughout this book is not the right but the soft, democratic, meliorist left, which imagines that the egalitarian goals of communism can be realised by non-repressive, liberal means.

Zizek is savagely scornful of this view, writing sharply that "One of the mantras of the postmodern left has been that we should finally leave behind the 'Jacobin-Leninist paradigm' of centralised dictatorial power. But perhaps the time has now come to turn this mantra around... Now, more than ever, one should insist on the 'eternal Idea of Communism' - strict egalitarian justice, disciplinary terror, political voluntarism, and trust in the people."

My interest in these posts that look at whether we are seeing a "Marx revival" is more about the immediate political influence of actual Marxist ideas. I take it for granted that grappling with ideas from Marx and the Marxist tradition are is and will continue to be important in academia and intellectual fields ranging from philosophy, literary theory, and history to sociology and political science and even theology. The very fact that China is ruled by a Communist Party and a Communist government that nominally adheres to a Marxist ideology would itself guarantee some continuing focus on Marxism in the intellectual world.

What struck me about Sayeau's report on that 2009 conference, though, is how little these luminaries of the left had to offer in the way of insight into the current situation. I mean, for the love of the Paris Commune, people, we're in a world depression! You know, like back in the 1930s? The "general crisis of capitalism", as Marxists (and not only Marxists) called it back then? What's the point of having Marxists around if they don't have some useful insights into the situation of a world economic depression?

Sayeau writes:

Despite the billing of the conference, and despite the fact that the papers presented were almost to a one solid pieces of philosophical work, I think it's safe to say that nothing groundbreaking, or even all that unexpected, happened. The speakers routinely erred on the side of contrition and caution. When Marx was cited, which was often, it was apologetically, rounded off with disavowals of dogmatism. When presenters engaged with the current economic situation, they were strident in proclaiming that change was necessary, but defensively so, as if they were still talking themselves into the idea — a holdover from the era of the bubble, when the "rising tide that lifts all boats" wrong-footed leftists for more than a decade.

Perhaps the clearest sign of a new sort of confidence would have been to see the presenters driven off their usual talking points. But the papers largely circled around the same conceptual axes that we would have expected five or ten years ago. The deployment of such familiar keywords as the "commons" (that is, places and objects owned collectively, if "owned" is even the right word for things as disparate as medieval grazing fields and open-source computer applications) and "immaterial labor" (work that manipulates information, feelings, or sensations rather than producing solid goods and materials) endowed the proceedings with an air of roteness, of business as usual. [my emphasis]

My point here is not to encourage sophomoric ridicule of European leftie intellectuals. My point is that their ideas need to be evaluated for their quality, or lack thereof. But with a world economic crisis now underway for going-on five-years with no end reasonably in sight, people in the United States and Europe particularly need to face that some of the dominant assumptions of the political and media elites have been proven deeply defective, such as monetarist economics and "end of history" assumptions about the secure victory of democratic institutions.

As we saw in the first post in this series, it is tempting for those whose goal is to comfort the most comfortable 1% to stigmatize any criticism of the real flaws of the current order as scary and foreign, for which the image of Karl Marx is still serviceable, now 20 years since the fall of the Soviet Union. The John Gray article linked above indulges in some of that.

But that doesn't mean everyone else has to dismiss sensible ideas or useful critical insights, no matter where they come from. One would think that the left in general, including Marxist thinkers, would have useful insights into the current situation. Even utopian thinking has its uses, though if it doesn't get beyond "imagine things can be different," it won't add much distinctive insight. But it is important that people can imagine things to be different!

As far as the economics goes, during the last several years the best insights and more relevant criticisms I've seen have come from Keynesian economists like Jamie Galbraith, Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz. They have done an excellent job of pointing out what happened with the economy and how badly mainstream policy assumptions went off the track.

If more radical thinkers like Alain Badiou, Eagleton, Hallward, Negri, Rancière and Žižek have relevant insights as well, great. I should say in fairness to them that none of them present themselves as economists. Nor is it necessary for scholarly work to have immediate relevance to the day's headlines. Politics and scholarship are different things, to put it mildly, although hopefully both fields would take reasonable insights from each other.

I haven't read the papers from the "On the Idea of Communism" conference, so it's hard to judge how fair Michael Sayeau is being in his report on it. The title of the conference suggests that its focus would be on the experience of Communism in the "real existing socialist" states of the former Soviet bloc. Since as a matter of real-world fact those states aren't around any more, it's understandable that there would be a certain defensiveness among the participants to identify with the cause of those former regimes.

Sayeau notes that the panel wasn't especially receptive to questions from the audience. And he writes:

The anger that the less eloquent questioners provoked may well be a symptom of this fact: after all, the years spent in the ideological desert of the end of history weren't very long ago. For this reason, it was important to uphold the "celebrity" status of figures like Badiou and Žižek: a movement with superstars has staying power. After all, there wouldn’t have been eighty people in the audience, let alone eight hundred, if it weren't for these celebrities, a fact that speaks to one of the more troubling contradictions in the current world of ideas: that though theory was ostensibly about rejecting priority and hierarchy, origin and personality, patriarchal organization and filiation, no field or discipline is so thoroughly defined by a system of stars and acolytes, great men and those who would be great men, as theory is today and has been for quite awhile. [my emphasis]

Yes, academics are known to sometimes have outsize egos. And that can always figure into how they come across, expecially to a general audience.

And the translation from academicese to more general usage is important to keep in mind. Juan Cole, whose expertise on Shi'a Islam and familiarity with Iraq propelled him to prominence as a public intellectual in the US during the last decade, said once that it was part of his learning curve that in TV appearances, he would sometimes find himself asked to explain some snippet of a quote from something he wrote 10 or 20 years ago that was completely off the topic of the discussion. This is the political-campaign style of using "oppo research" to discredit one's oppenent in real time. As nasty as academic debates can and do get, generally academics are used to operating under rules of discussion that exclude off-the-wall, out-of-context quotations being used for ad hominem attacks.

Not only are a lot of academics uninterested in learning to deal in that style. But not every useful idea can be reduced to a 30-second soundbite.

Posts in this series:

A Marx revival? (1 of 5) The Marx bogeyman 12/28/2011
A Marx revival? (2 of 5) Some intellectual luminaries of the European left 12/29/2011
A Marx revival? (3 of 5): the former Communist states as real-time challenge 12/30/2011
A Marx revival? (4 of 5) Is there actual evidence of such a thing in US and European politics? 01/01/2011
A Marx revival? (5 of 5) The archetypal left challenge to Marxism 01/02/2011

Tags: alain badiou, antonio negri, communism, jacques rancière, marxism, peter hallward, slavoj žižek, terry eagleton