(13) October Revolution: the Big Three (Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin)

Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (1870-1924), better know to the world by the last name he adopted, Lenin, was by all accounts the most important leader of the Russian Revolution in the 1917-1922 and in the years leading up to it. Albert Resis in his biographical sketch of Lenin for the reliably staid Britannica Online (accessed 09/23/2017) writes:

If the Bolshevik Revolution is — as some people have called it — the most significant political event of the 20th century, then Lenin must for good or ill be regarded as the century’s most significant political leader. Not only in the scholarly circles of the former Soviet Union but even among many non-Communist scholars, he has been regarded as both the greatest revolutionary leader and revolutionary statesman in history, as well as the greatest revolutionary thinker since Marx.

Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1916)

He fell seriously ill in early 1922, possibly due to the effects of a failed assassination attempt on him in 1918. By the end of that year, he was no longer active in leadership. A stroke in March 1923 left him without speech, and he passed away in January 1924 at the age of 53.

Spiegel TV has a two-minute video of silent clips of Lenin, apparently all from the time of the revolution, although it does not include commentary or captions: Lenin - Führer der Revolution.

Lev Davidovich Bronshtein (1879-1940), better known as Leon Trotsky, was one of the two major contenders for the Communist Party leadership, along with Josef Stalin, after Lenin's death. Trotsky advocated a different development policy and international political strategy than those identified with Stalin's commitment to "socialism in one country." Up until Trosky's death in Mexico at the hands of an assassin wielding a pickax in 1940, Trotskyism was the most important dissenting ideology that identified itself as part of the Communist left.

Leon Trotsky (1918)

In the later ideological disputes, Stalin and Trotsky and their partisans did their utmost to boost the importance of the one during the 1917-1924 period and to denigrate that of the other.

Trotsky had been a visible if erratic figure in the Russian revolutionary movement prior to 1917, sometimes finding himself in agreement with the Bolsheviks, other times not. He was the only one of the three who ever visited the United States, from January to May of 1917, when he returned to Russia and joined the Bolsheviks in August. As Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, he played a decisive role in directing troops loyal to the Bolsheviks in the October 25-26 (Old Style) seizure of power. He later became Foreign Minister responsible for negotiating peace with Germany and the leader of the Red Army during the civil war.

When Lenin fell ill in 1922, the Bolshevik leaders elevated a troika composed of Stalin, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinovyev in preference to giving the central leadership position to Trotsky. Stalin had a established himself as the main leader by 1923, a status he retained until his death. In 1926, Trotsky would join with Kamenev and Zinovyev in what was called the United Opposition to Stalin. He was exiled from the USSR in 1929, and in exile formed the Fourth International, a collection of rival communist parties to those of the Moscow-led Third International.

Trotskyism has been a persistent strain in left thought ever since. Trotskyists are known for presenting themselves as the most uncompromising of revolutionaries while also at times taking positions that echo those of rightwingers and counter-revolutionaries. I once heard a useful definition which said that the Trotskyists are people who support revolution everywhere except where one is actually taking place.

Ioseb Dzhugashvili Stalin, aka, Josef Stalin (1879-1953) was named General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1922, soon becoming the main political leader of the Soviet Union and remaining so until his death in 1953. Though he is widely remembered today as a villain, he was also one of the few most consequential political leaders of the 20th century, leading the USSR in the rapid industrialization of the 1920s and 1930s and during what is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany. And his role during the Russian Revolution of 1917-1921 has also been contested in great detail, both by his partisans and his enemies.

Ioseb Dzhugashvili Stalin

Stalin was from Georgia, then a part of the Czarist Empire. He studied at a Greek Orthodox seminary, where he became attracted to Marxist revolutionary ideas. Which were definitely not part of the seminary's preferred outlook! He joined the Russian Social Democratic party in 1898 and left the seminary the following year, devoting himself to revolutionary political activity. Among other things, he pulled off robberies to fund party activities, notably including a spectacular robbery of a shipment of money to the State Bank at Tiflis in 1907.

Stalin's role during the Russian Revolution itself was significant, though not as visible as that of Trotsky.

Uwe Klußman writes in "Der letzte freie Leser" Russland: Vom Zarenreich zur Weltmacht/Spiegel Geschichte 6:2016:

Im März 1917, kurz nach dem Sturz des Zaren, schloss sich der aus der sibirischen Verbannung heimgekehrte Stalin in Petrograd seinen bolschewistischen Genossen an. Im April 1917 wählten sie ihn zum Mitglied des Zentralkomitees. In dieser Funktion bereitete er den Aufstand der Bolschewiki vor. So wurde Stalin Teilhaber der Macht, als Mitglied der von Lenin geführten Regierung, des „Rates der Volkskommissare". Dort war er zuständig für Nationalitätenfragen.

[In March 1917, shortly after the overthrow of the Czar, he [Stalin] joined up with his Bolshevik comrades in Petrograd after returning from Siberian exile. In April 1917, they voted him to be a member of the Central Committee. In this function, he prepared the uprising of the Bolsheviks. Thus Stalin became a holder of power, as a member of the government led by Lenin, of the "Council of People's Commissars." There he was responsible for nationality questions.]

In the Russian Empire, the nationality problems were extremely important ones. Russia ruled various non-Russian nationalities and was known as the "prison house of nations." During a stay in Vienna to acquaint himself with European Social Democracy, Stalin prepared his best-known theoretical work at the time of the Revolution, Marxism and the National Question (1913), in which he advocated for the right on national self-determination on the part of the nations of the Empire. When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia and various nationalist groupings made cause with the Whites in the civil war, they were forced to take a more, shall we say, nuanced view of those nationalist movements.

During Stalin's stay in Vienna for six weeks in 1913, two other men who would become major antagonists of his later in life: Leon Trotsky and Adolf Hitler. There is no evidence that Stalin's paths crossed with the impoverished young rightwing fanatic Hitler, who was then living in a shelter for homeless men who had been surviving on the margins of society. However, Herbert Lackner ("Stalin unser" Der Erste Welkrieg-Profil History April 2013) recounts that that Stalin did meet Trotsky for the first time in Vienna at Trotsky's apartment at Kolschitzkygasse 30 in the Wieden district. In an account written many years later, in 1939, Trotsky described his first impression of Stalin as not very positive. It was also during his stay in Vienna that he started using the name Stalin, first as a pen name on an article of his that appeared in the newspaper, Der Sozialdemokrat.

Klußman writes further about Stalin's role in the Revolution:

Lenin schätzte Stalin als Multitalent der Machtsicherung. Während des Bürgerkriegs sandte die Partei ihn daher an verschiedene Frontabschnitte zwischen Perm am Ural und Petrograd. In Zarizyn an der Wolga, der Stadt, die später als Stalingrad weltbekannt wurde, zeigte er seinen rigorosen Führungsstil: Stalin ließ Getreide requirieren, Gegner hinrichten und Kritiker unter den aus der Zarenarmee übernommenen Militärberatern einsperren. Für seine militärischen Leistungen verlieh die sowjetische Führung ihm 1919 die höchste Auszeichnung, den Rotbannerorden.

[Lenin valued Stalin as a multi-talent for the securing of power. During the civil war, the Party sent him {Stalin} to different portions of the front between Perm on the Urals and Petrograd. In Tsaritsyn {Volgograd} on the Volga, the city that later would become world famous as Stalingrad, he showed his rigorous leadership style: Stalin had grain requisitioned, enemies executed, and critics among the military advisers taken over from the Czarist army imprisoned. For his military services, the Soviet leadership awarded him the highest recognition, the Order of the Red Banner.

Order of the Red Banner

Strange Paths of Trotskyism (2 of 2): Argentine Trotskyists

In this second of two posts, I'll discuss a contemoporary Argentine variant of Trotskyism. My attention was caught by an essay from the kirchnerista (left-Peronist/supportive of President Cristina Fernández) site La Batalla Cultural smacking down of Trotskyism, El hombre más odiado por la “izquierda” (accessed 08/14/2015). It's not exactly an esasy, though, more a throwaway polemic against unidentified Trotskyists.

The main target is presumably the electoral formation called the Frente de Izquierda y de los Trabajadores (FIT). It is composed of three Troskyist parties, the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS), the Partido Obrero (PO) and the Izquierda Socialista IS).

The FIT formation has a small number of seats in the Argentine Congress. It's main role in the national election this year is heckle the Peronist Partido Justicialista (PJ) and its electoral alliance Frente para la Victoria (FpV) from the left. So they actually do get a few delegates elected.

Adriana Meyer reports on the FIT's national candidates Nicolás del Caño for President and Myriam Bregman in La sorpresa en el Frente de Izquierda Página/12 11.08.2015 discussing the national election in October.

Meyer quotes Del Caño:

“El desafío para octubre no es sólo convocar a todas las fuerzas de izquierda y progresistas, sino también desentrañar esa maniobra del kirchnerismo que busca la polarización para difundir que el mal menor es Scioli contra la supuesta derecha de Macri. Ya lo vimos, en los ’90 convocaban a votar a De la Rúa como el sapo a tragarse frente a Duhalde y a Menem, y así terminó” ...

[The challenge for October is not only to bring together all the left and progressive forces, but also to unravel this manuevere of kirchnerismo that seeks polarization in order to promote the idea that the lesser evil is {FpV Presidential candidate Daniel} Scioli against the supposed right of {PRO Presidential candidate Mauricio} Macri. But we see that in the 90's voters came together to vote for De la Rúa as the toad to swallow in front of Duhalde and Menem, and look how it turned out.]

The reference is to the election of Fernando de la Rúa as President in 1999, which ended with De la Rúa resigning and leaving the Presidential Palace, the Casa Rosada, in a helicopter during massive public protests after the financial crisis of 2001 hit. Eduardo Duhalde is a Peronist (PJ) who served as President in 2002-3 who did a lot to stabilize the country and the economy but wasn't popular.

Carlos Menem was also President 1989-1999 for the PJ. A Muslim who converted to Catholicism - the President of Argentina is required to be Catholic - Menem campaigned as a fairly traditional Peronist defending the interests of the people against the oligarchy. But once elected, he undertook an aggressive neoliberal economic program of deregulation and privatization. And he established a peg between the Argentine currency and the US dollar, which set Argentina up for the financial crisis of 2001. Menem is currently on trial for obstruction of justice in the case of the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in 1994. (Algunas acusaciones fueron selectivas Página/12 14.08.2015)

Meyer quotes Myriam Bregman: "El FIT mantiene la coherencia de ser independiente de los gobiernos y de todas las variantes patronales, y por eso creció." ("The FIT maintains the consistency to be independent of the governments and of all the varieties of management, and because of that we have grown.")

How much they can actually accomplish for their constituents in that state is another question. Doctrinaire Trotskyism can be very self-limiting.

But it can pull some left-leaning voters from PJ candidates. And the FIT does to some extent amplify the complaints of the more conservatives candidates ("oligarchical parties" in the Peronist vocabulary) against the PJ and the current government. So it's easy to see how a kirchnerista website would acuse them of being actually rightwingers. Or, as a Trot might put it, "objectively" supporting the Right:

No son pocos los compañeros peronistas (que hace mucho debieron haber superado ese sentido común) los que hablan de “izquierda” de manera despectiva. Y así es como el trotskismo logra su objetivo, que es precisamente generar confusión y partir al campo popular.

[There are more than a few Peronist compañeros (who should long ago have gotten over this common attitude) who talk about the "left" in a depreciating way. And that is how Trotskyism achieves it objective, which is precisely to generate confusion and divide the popular camp.]

Strange Paths of Trotskyism (1 of 2): Trotskyism and American neocons

I came across a current article on an Argentine website about Troskyism in relation to present-day electoral politics there, which I will discuss in the second post.

I recently referenced a brief and unsympathetic definition of Trotskyists as the people who support revolution everywhere except where there's one going on.

They're purists, in other words. No popular movement, no militant union, no reform, no actual revolution is ever pure enough for them. Trotskyism often finds itself in agreement with rightwingers in attacking left-leaning movements and governments.

I wrote here about Trotskyism and one of its many offshoots, American neoconservatism, in Transformations of Trotskyism: Irving Kristol (1920-2009) and the neoconservtives 09/19/2009. (My description of Trotskyism here is partially adapted from that post.)

Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) lost out in the internal power struggles inside the Soviet leadership in the 1920s and Trotsky himself emigrated from the USSR. Josef Stalin, the main winner of the power struggle, had first met Trotsky in Vienna in 1913 in a residence at Kolschitzkygasse 30. They disliked each other from the start. Trotsky was an on-again, off-again ally of Lenin for years. When the October Revolution came, Trotsky was the most visible Bolshevik leader next to Lenin. He became head of the Red Army. Stalin was a longtime Bolshevik activist and leader. Exactly how important his role was in 1917 was a matter hotly disputed in the later glorification of Stalin and the polemcis with Trotsky and his followers.

Trotsky had supporters in many countries including the United States, which he had visited before the October Revolution. Although Trotskyists were radical left critics of capitalism and considered themselves to be the true custodians of Lenin-style Communism, they were also known for their bitter polemics against "Stalinism" and anything they associated with it. Trotskyists set up leftwing parties to compete for support on the left with the Soviet-line Communist parties.

In what may have been originally a case of Freud's "narcissism of small differences", the Trotskyists tended to be more upset by what they saw as the betrayal of the Revolution by Stalin and the Communist parties than they were about the capitalists in their own countries. Trotskyist intellectuals were exceptionally fond of ideological arguments. Part of guarding their purity was to be sure to denounce ideological deviations in any revolutionary process in any part of the world as early as possible. Political principles that are too pure to be realized in practice are conveniently free from being discredited by actually being put into effect.

This kind of criticism is also useful for conservative or liberal critics of left governments and movements. When the Soviet Union was still around, Trotskyist criticisms of the Soviets had the value for the USSR's opponents of being a way of accusing the Soviet leadership of being big old hypocrites. Not that politicians of any kind are ever lacking when it comes to accusing opponents of hypocrisy. But the Trotskyist narrative played a particularly useful role in that regard when it came to the Soviet Union.

Sidney Blumenthal in The Rise of The Counter-Establishment (1986), Sidney Blumenthal talks about the Trotskyist background of American neoconservatives. He talked about a dinner in 1985 honoring the memory of Whittaker Chambers, whose "pumpking papers" decisively helped Richard Nixon become a national figure:

At the 1985 dinner the featured speaker was Richard Nixon, who was presented with a scroll making him an honorary member. By these rituals the Irregulars commune with the spirit of Whittaker Chambers, who progressed from Bolshevik to conservative, from true believer to true believer, and whose act of hiding stolen government documents in a pumpkin patch inspired the group's name. The neoconservatives, too, are witnesses, and the conversion from left to right is the central political experience in their lives. These are people for whom card-carrying membership still has meaning. [my emphasis](p. 122)

The neoconservatives he discusses there were the "first generation" of that particular trend, including people like Irving Kristol, who actually had been Trotskyists in their younger days. Blumenthal frames their ideological positioning this way:

Neoconservatism is the final stage of the Old Left, the only element in American politics whose identity is principally derived from its view of Communism. Like the conservatives, the neoconservatives depend upon their enemy for their own definition. ... The conservatives believe that the Liberal Establishment has been running the country. Neoconservatives add to this general notion the belief that liberals are either a species of Stalinist fellow traveler or operate "objectively," whether they know it or not, in the broad interest of the Soviet Union. Conservatives would like to believe this, too. But the neoconservatives, many with the benefit of the Trotskyist background, offer an unmatchable authenticity and intensity on the subject. (p. 130) [my emphasis]

And he describes Irving Kristol (the father of William "Butcher's Bill" Kristol) this way:

In his attempted unification of the higher and lower realms of politics, it was apparent that Kristol still believed that while philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it. "We studied radicalism in the 1930s," he said. "It was great training in polemics and sustained political analysis. Being a Trotskyist was highly intellectual. I learned a lot. The neoconservatives are the political intellectuals, and that's what the Trotskyists were. Not the Communists. The Trotskyist movement produced political intellectuals, which is why so many went into sociology and achieved distinction. It was much more rigorous intellectual training than you could get in college. If someone came up with some matter on which you were not well read, my God, you were humiliated. It was jesuitical. The Republican Party, meanwhile, produced antipolitical intellectuals. Those people are not in my tradition."

The neoconservatives are the Trotskyists of Reaganism, and Kristol is a Trotskyist transmuted into a man of the right. He remains a free-floating, intense political intellectual in the vanguard. (p. 154) [my emphasis]

The "paleo-conservatives" who draw their inspiration more from the isolationist Old Right of the immediate post-Second World War period, still like to insult neocons by calling them Trotskyists.

Emir Sader made this useful summary of an essay by a well-known Troskyist named Isaac Deutscher (From Ex-Leftists to Anti-Leftists Monthly Review 13.06.2012:

Isaac Deutscher has an article entitled "Heretics and Renegades," delineating the path of people who begin by breaking with left-wing theories and positions and end up becoming fanatical anti-leftists. They are characters who have, over time, populated the Right all over the world.

Some of them took advantage of Stalinism in order to condemn Lenin and, eventually, Marx and Marxism. It's no accident that a non-negligible proportion of them have Trotskyist origin. Proceeding to equate Stalinism with Nazism in order to absolutize "Stalinist totalitarianism" was already a step toward liberalism and anti-communism.

Here's a standard type: those who are on the Left, even militantly so, suddenly "repent," drop everything, deny and denounce their pasts and their comrades, the idols whom they worshipped blindly, in order to surrender themselves -- together with their arms, history, and, frequently, work -- to the Right.

Some of them remain on the Left, in its most moderate corner, denouncing, in a strongly anti-left tone, what's not "democratic" in the currents of the Left itself. They are loud advocates of alliances with centrist and even right-wing currents, and they tend to dilute the distinction between Left and Right. [my emphasis]

Transformations of Trotskyism: Irving Kristol (1920-2009) and the neoconservtives

Irving Kristol (1920-2009) with George W. Bush

Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism and father of Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, passed away on Friday. Kristol was known as the movement's Godfather because of the prominent role he and his wife Gertraud Himmelfarb played in promoting the movement and creating a professional network among its practitioners. Kristol performed that role from his various perches over the years at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Commentary, The Reporter, The Public Interest and The National Interest. Kristol in 1953 also founded a magazine called Encounter under the auspices of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a European-based cultural group whose members suffered some embarrassment when the group's CIA funding became public knowledge in the 1960s.

The New York Review of Books has made available several of its older articles on Kristol at its Web site. John Kenneth Galbraith reviewed Kristol's book Two Cheers for Capitalism in the Review's 04/20/1978 issue, A Hard Case. Kristol in that book was making a defense of neoclassical economics, which largely ignores the implications of corporate domination of markets and essentially negates the existence of marketing. But Kristol also made some concessions to views like Galbraith's that took serious account of those factors. Galbraith argues that Kristol does not want to concede that some of Kristol's own critical perspectives imply that "the corporation is the enemy of the market by which he defends the corporation." And Galbraith explains that in doing so, Kristol invokes the image of the New Class. Although their destructive contributions to foreign policy are the most notable piece of their disastrous legacy and continuing influence, neocons also have contributed other important notions to "movement conservatism" and the Republican Party. The New Class is one of them. Galbraith writes:

So, deliberately or unconsciously, he comes up with another inimical force where the corporation is concerned. It is the professors, journalists, scientists, assorted pundits, whom he groups together as the New Class. They react adversely to the corporation partly out of a sense of inferiority, partly out of envy of executive pay and expense accounts, partly out of a defensive reaction to the economic preoccupations of the corporation and specifically to its service to the consumer economy. This, in contrast with the concerns of the mind or soul, the New Class holds to be vulgar. Derived from these attitudes are an excessively costly concern for the environment (which Mr. Kristol, after conceding the adverse effect, would leave entirely to his market), a prodigal attitude toward public services and the welfare state, and a generally feckless commitment to closing tax loopholes and redistributing income. The need, he believes, is for a strenuous effort by business and its friends to educate the New Class ... [my emphasis]

One lasting legacy of the first generation of neoconservatives, of which Kristol was one of the most prominent, is that they had been Troskyists in the 1930s. Leon Trotsky lost out in the internal power struggles inside the Soviet leadership in the 1920s and Trotsky himself emigrated from the USSR. He had followers in many places including the United States, which he had visited before the October Revolution. Although Trotskyists were radical left critics of capitalism and considered themselves to be the true custodians of Lenin-style Communism, they were also known for their bitter polemics against Stalinism and anything they associated with it.

Leon Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronstein (1879-1940)

In what may have been originally a case of the "narcissism of small differences", they tended to be more upset by what they saw as the betrayal of the Revolution by Stalin and the Soviet-line Communist Parties than they were about the capitalists in their own countries. I once saw a definition of Trotskyism that said Trotskyists supported revolution in every country except where one was actually taking place. This referred to a prominent characteristic of Trotskyist intellectuals, which is that they were exceptionally fond of ideological arguments. Part of guarding their purity was to be sure to denounce ideological deviations in any revolutionary process in any part of the world as early as possible. Political principles that are too pure to be realized in practice are conveniently free from being discredited by actually being put into effect.

For Irving Kristol and for others who shared his trajectory from Troskyist to neoconservative, it didn't seem to be a difficult transition from being the true communists who were bitterly opposed to the Stalinist brand of Communism (along with anything and anyone that might give it the slightest support) to being just bitterly anti-Communist in a Joe McCarthy mode.

In another of the New York Review articles, An Anti-Intellectual Intellectual 11/02/1995, Theodore Draper describes Kristol's earlier years:

Irving Kristol belongs to a remarkable generation which came of age in the City College of New York just before the Second World War. Among his friends at the time were Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, a somewhat younger Nathan Glazer, and others who have made careers of distinction and influence. They were embryonic Jewish American intellectuals, who went to City College because it was the only college that would take them in or they could afford.

Kristol's own career has been exemplary. He was born in Brooklyn into an Orthodox Jewish family. In City College, he joined up with the Trotskyists, stayed with them for three or four years, and at their meetings met his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, the more scholarly half of this formidable pair. He passes off this Trotskyist experience lightly but says that he learned a good deal from it and has "no regrets." After he served in the army as an infantryman in Western Europe during World War II, they went to Cambridge, England, where his wife did research for her first book, on Lord Acton—an early example of how the Kristols have never been afraid to deal with almost any subject.

Draper himself was a Jewish member of the Communist Party in the 1930s. After he left the Party, he distinguished himself as a critical historian of the US Communist Party. Though unlike people such as Whittaker Chambers or David Horowitz who defined themselves in their public persona as being repentant ex-radicals who became super-conservatives, Draper became a critical-minded liberal historian. (Though the Communist Party didn't much appreciate his reality-based histories of their movement.)

Draper makes an observation that I don't recall hearing before, that it was the US Socialist Party leader Michael Harrington that first labeled Kristol and his like-minded associates "neoconservatives". Draper notes that Harrington didn't mean it as a compliment. But, as sometimes happens with these things, the neoconservatives themselves wound up adopting the description as a self-designation. In the early 1970s, Kristol joined AEI, which is now informally known as Neocon Central.

Draper explains how the idea of the New Class worked in the neocon framework of Trotskyism transmuted into conservatism:

One of Kristol's main ideas was that of the "new class." The term had been used by Milovan Djilas for the Soviet and Communist bureaucracy. Kristol applied it to "a goodly proportion of those college-educated people" who make up the "scientists, teachers and educational administrators, journalists and others in the communication industries, psychologists, social workers, those lawyers and doctors who make their careers in the expanding public sector, city planners, the staffs of the larger foundations, the upper levels of the government bureaucracy, and so on." These people represent a "quite numerous," "indispensable," and "disproportionately powerful class." They "do not 'control' the media, they are the media - just as they are our educational system, our public health and welfare system, and much else." ...

From the "new class" Kristol went on to the new "class struggle." He redefined the term to mean the struggle for status and power between the "professional class" and the "business community." This new class was "persuaded that they can do a better job of running our society and feel entitled to have the opportunity." But these "professional classes" did not originate their "ideological discontent"; they owed it to the "intellectuals - poets, novelists, painters, men of letters." This threat from the professional classes and intellectuals was also opposed by ordinary working-class and lower-middle-class people, who were "basically loyal to the bourgeois order." Still, the picture was neither "pretty nor hopeful." [my emphasis in bold]

It's sociological and empirical problems aside, this view of a New Class provides a valuable propaganda framework for the Republicans' rightwing-populist appeals in which workers are encouraging to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with plutocrats and Christian Right leaders against the snobbism, elitism and contempt supposed imminating from this arrogant New Class against them. While we don't often hear the term "New Class" from the teaparty movement or Republican politicians like Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin, they actually make use of a framework much like this. Providing some kind of intellectual coherence for that framework has been one of the main influences of Irving Kristol and his fellow neoconservatives.

It worth noting Draper's reality-based judgment on Kristol's version of this New Class notion:

Kristol's ideological theses of the 1970s seem in retrospect to be little more than political fantasies. There never was such an almost irresistible drive for power by liberal intellectuals, and they never came close to achieving such an end. His words, reprinted now, seem like echoes of a mythological past.

Draper finds Kristol's claims that his religious outlook is Orthodox Jewish unconvincing, as well as weirdly inconsistent with this praise for Christian conservatism. Here I have to wonder if the influence of Leo Strauss' ideas on the value of the rulers deceiving the population who are uncapable of assimilating the higher truths practiced by the rulers may not have had some effect on Kristol's ideas on the value of religious belief in society. Sidney Blumenthal in his book The Rise of the Counter-Establishment (1986) focused on the history of the neocons, including Irving Kristol. Strauss is a major influence on the neocons, and Blumenthal points to his particular emphasis on Kristol. Especially Strauss idea of virtue, which Bluenthal describes as "a harmonious balance within society, achieved by a higher morality promoted by the state."

Draper writes, "What is clear is Kristol's receptivity to almost any kind of religious orthodoxy, whether Christian or Jewish." Because Jewish and Christian orthodoxies are mutually exclusively, the idea that Kristol was looking for Straussian virtues in religion seems to be a good possibility.

The Trotskyist polemical habits of the neocons is also one of their most dubious contributions to American politics. When Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, rant about socialism and communism and fascism and liberalism and Nazism as though they were all some interchangable mismash of Bad, I have to wonder how someone with that perspective could make even general sense out of the world of the last century.

But intellectuals like Kristol also contributed to this bizarre mode of thinking. (Or, in this case, not thinking.) In the run-up to the Iraq War, neocons commonly accused opponents of the war of being "objectively" pro-Saddam, a weasily way of calling them traitors. As Blumenthal points out, this idea was common in the Marxists polemics in which later neocons like Kristol and Norman Podhoretz participated in the 1930s. The German Communist Party (KPD) attacked the Social Democratic Party (SPD) for being "objectively" pro-fascist because the SPD opposed the KPD. This was a concept of Hegelian descent, in which a person for groups might think of themselves subjectively as favoring a certain position, while the inevitable consequences of their positions or actions was objectively promoting a different result. The Communist Parties attacked the social-democratic parties like the SPD as "social fascists", an expression of their alleged "objectively" pro-fascist position. Trotskyists and Soviet-line Communist chronically accused each other of being "objectively" pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist, pro-fascist, etc.

Blumenthal argues that this notion, particularly in relation to Soviet Communism which was still the neocons favorite bogeyman as it had been when they were Trotskyists, was a very important element in neocon thought, the idea "that the liberals are 'objectively' contributing to the Communist cause" by opposing the neocons' worst-case-scenario, aggressive and militaristic notions of combatting Communism (and later The Terrorists):

Neoconservatism is the final stage of the Old Left [of the 1930s], the only element in American politics whose identity is principally derived from its view of Communism. Like the conservatives, the neoconservatives depend upon their enemy for their own definition. ... The conservatives believe that the Liberal Establishment has been running the country. Neoconservatives add to this general notion the belief that liberals are either a species of Stalinist fellow traveler or operate "objectively," whether they know it or not, in the broad interest of the Soviet Union. Conservatives would like to believe this, too. But the neoconservatives, many with the benefit of the Trotskyist background, offer an unmatchable authenticity and intensity on the subject. [my emphasis]

It would probably have been more accurate in 1986 to say that neoconservatism was the only major element in US politics so inclined. With Glenn Beck as a high-profile cheerleader for a John Birch Society-style ideology playing a major role in today's Republican Party, neocons are not the only significant faction with such a worldview. In the case of both neocons and Birchers, the demise of their main bogeyman, Soviet Communism, hasn't seemed to have much altered their basic outlook.

Blumenthal continues:

In an odd historical refraction, the neoconservatives regularly denounce liberals employing a tactic that bears a through-the-looking-glass resemblance to that of "social fascism." But instead of exposing liberals as dangerously disguised agents of fascists, neoconservatives now unmask them as helpers of Communism. The chief doctrinal device used to prove the point is the notion of "moral equivalence." Many liberals, the neoconservatives claim, criticize official policy by somehow equating the Soviet Union and America, "objectively" aiding the other side. This is "social fascism" upside down and, therefore, can be called the ideological technique of "social communism." [my emphasis]

Draper writing in 1995 suggested that the "neo" part of the neocon label is misleading in that they could also be seen as regular old conservatives but with a Trotskyist stylistic edge:

The term "neo" implies that something new is being added to conservatism. In fact, however, Kristol is almost always proposing something old. He is an advocate of nostalgia, of turning the clock back, of returning to the past.

It is difficult to imagine that Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan found him useful because they had carefully read his articles and had agreed with them. What was most serviceable about Kristol was what he was against, not what he was for. He was obsessively against liberalism and socialism, battering them in one article after another. Of these two, socialism stirs him up the most. Liberals should be called "socialists" or "neosocialists," because they allegedly wish to enlarge the scope of governmental authority indefinitely. He even expends much indignation against "liberal capitalism" or the "liberal-bourgeois society," not merely capitalism.

Kristol almost always attacks "socialism," making little or no distinction between communism and socialism or even social democracy. Yet in the years that he was writing, two European Socialist parties came to power - the British Labour Party from 1964 to 1979 (except for four years in the early 1970s) and the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1969. Sweden had had forty-four years of Socialist governments until 1976. Portugal's Socialist leader, Mario Soares, became Prime Minister in 1976, and his party went in and out of government coalitions for almost twenty years. Since 1974, the Italian Socialists have taken part in coalition governments or have headed the government. The French Socialists took over the government in 1981, and the Spanish Socialists in 1982.

All these parties and leaders might be charged with all sorts of sins of omission and commission, including, in some countries, personal corruption, often the same kind of corruption as that of their opponents. But they cannot be accused of the "coercion" that Kristol attributes to them. [my emphasis]

But Beck, like the neocons, can be expected to go on hurling such accusations, dishonest or incoherent thought they may be.

Tags: neoconservatives, trotskyism

Robert Gates and the Troskyist theory of war

One more post today on the Summer 2008 Parameters. The lead article is by Defence Secretary and former CIA Director Robert Gates, Reflections on Leadership. I was struck in this passage in which he endorses the idea of the "Long War" on terrorism - essentially the Cheney-Bush administration's replacement for the Cold War - he mentions Leon Trotsky, who's thinking really did have a lasting influence on the neoconservatives:

A drawdown of American forces in Iraq is inevitable over time; the debate in Washington is largely about pacing. But the kind of enemy we face today - violent jihadist networks - will not allow us to remain at peace. What has been called the Long War is likely to be many years of persistent, engaged combat all around the world in differing degrees of size and intensity. This generational campaign cannot be wished away or put on a timetable. There are no exit strategies. To paraphrase the Bolshevik Leon Trotsky, we may not be interested in the Long War, but the Long War is interested in us. (my emphasis)

Tags: neoconservatives, robert gates, trotskyism

Joe Lieberman's alternative history and Trot foreign policy inclination

Leon Trotsky and Holy Joe Lieberman: "comrades" at last?

Joe Liberman becomes an increasingly sad case almost by the day, it seems. He's practically become McCain's butler to judge by the number of times he appears with him in public. Does McCain even go outside without Lieberman there any more?

Lieberman's rightwing radicalism - let's call it what it is - was on full display this past Wednesday in his op-ed Democrats and Our Enemies Wall Street Journal 05/21/08. The Democratic Senate establishment was sympathetic to Lieberman in his 2006 Senate re-election campaign, even after he lost the Democratic nomination. Harry Reid is still running around defending the guy.

But here's a good example of how a timely intra-party challenge can be good for the Party rather than simply "divisive". Lieberman is building up to his Zell Miller act at this year's Republican National Convention, and his op-ed gives a good idea of what we can expect. McCain is using Lieberman to boost his "bipartisan" credentials to posture as a phony "moderate" for the general election. I don't expect it, but I also wouldn't be terribly surprised if he picks Lieberman as his running mate.

Since Lieberman, though, was not elected as a Democrat in 2006, that gives the Party a way to undercut his shtick about upholding the true Democratic tradition against that radical America-hating black guy Obama and the anti-American Democratic Party. Of course, the Dems need to actively make the effort to start creating that distance now before Lieberman puts on his clown show at the Republican Convention. Harry Reid, in other words, needs to shut the hell up making excuses for Lieberman and start discrediting him. The Dems all need to emphasize that even though Holy Joe voted with the Dems in organizing the Senate, he is the Senate representative of a one-man party, the Independent Democratic Party. Actually, the FOXist grammar using "Democrat" as the adjective would be appropriate here - the Independent Democrat Party - since Lieberman is the only known member of that organization. (Technically, I don't think it's a Party organization at all, but the point is he's not an elected Senator of the Democratic Party.)

Joe Conason rakes Lieberman over the coals for his Journal op-ed in Joe Lieberman, ideological turncoat Salon 05/23/08. I couldn't hope to outdo Conasaon's version of how tendentious Lieberman is being now. But I will comment on a couple of things that particularly struck me.

Lieberman recites the standard "Reagan Democrat" jive-talk about how Truman and Kennedy and LBJ were tough and warlike but today's Democratic Party is just a bunch of wimps. Actually, it's worse than that. What he says is:

This worldview began to come apart in the late 1960s, around the war in Vietnam. In its place, a very different view of the world took root in the Democratic Party. Rather than seeing the Cold War as an ideological contest between the free nations of the West and the repressive regimes of the communist world, this rival political philosophy saw America as the aggressor – a morally bankrupt, imperialist power whose militarism and "inordinate fear of communism" represented the real threat to world peace.

It argued that the Soviets and their allies were our enemies not because they were inspired by a totalitarian ideology fundamentally hostile to our way of life, or because they nursed ambitions of global conquest. Rather, the Soviets were our enemy because we had provoked them, because we threatened them, and because we failed to sit down and accord them the respect they deserved. In other words, the Cold War was mostly America's fault. (my emphasis)

As Conason sensibly asks:

Which Democrats does Lieberman think represented this dubious worldview? Was it George McGovern, decorated veteran of World War II? Was it Jimmy Carter, the former Navy submarine officer who stood against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan?

Lieberman's caricatured version of Democratic foreign policy post-1968 is actually so far off that it would would be a challenge to dig up even a few leftwing pamphlets, leaflets or articles from "the 60s" that actually stated such a case. And half those would be from FBI front groups. Even among the relatively tiny group of followers of actual Marxist-Leninist parties and sects such baldly-stated views would be scarce. Trotskyist groups always saw the Soviet Union as horribly threatening; the neocons' Trotskyist hostility to the USSR is one thing that didn't change much in their journey from Trotskyism to neoconservatism.

The "Old Left" Communist Party was pro-Soviet but saw other countries like China as big problems. Conversely, Maoist groups saw "Soviet social-imperialism" as just as threatening an evil as American imperialism. And, after 1972 and the US-Chinese rapprochment, the Maoist position was that the Soviet Union was more of a threat in the world than the US.

To the extent any of those Marxist views affected Democratic Party thinking at all, it was primarily through those hawkish Democrats who would later be known as neoconservatives and whose outlook was heavily influenced by Troskyism. Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington, aka, "the Senator from Boeing", was a major mentor and sponsor of the neocons. Elliott Abrams and Richard "Prince of Darkness" Perle both served as aides to Jackson. And Lieberman praises the "principled efforts" of "Democratic Cold Warriors like Scoop Jackson [who] fought against the tide" of Democratic foreign policy thought.

In fact, the very words "empire" and "imperialism" were considered a sign of lack of seriousness in foreign policy discussion among most Democrats until very recently. And that changed because the post-Trotskyist neocons started frankly and approvingly describing the United States as an "empire". In what must be in part some weird kind of projection, a lot of the statements from the neocons in the 2000s sound like what in the 1960s would have been overdrawn parodies of militarists. Michael Ledeen's infamous quote about how the US should pick up some crappy little country every 10 years or so and slam it against the wall just to show we mean business comes to mind.

In fact, given Lieberman's kind of sleaze-slinging, the Dems should insist on more aggressive reality-checking by the press on some of these things. For instance, check out this from Sid Blumenthal's 1986 The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power:

In the 1976 Democratic primaries, the neoconservatives supported Senator Henry Jackson, a black hole of charisma who could not fill the vacuum left by [Hubert] Humphrey. By now some of them were beginning to become an entrenched element within the Counter-Establishment. Their flagship publications, Commentary and The Public Interest, set the line, critical of Great Society social policy and non-interventionist foreign policy. At think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, they occupied chairs newly endowed by corporate benefactors seeking intellectual guardians. Some neoconservatives who, amazingly, still regarded themselves as socialists belonged to the Social Democrats U.S.A., which had intimate ties to key figures within the AFL-CIO leadership. These Social Democrats had battled for decades against the sins of Stalinism [Soviet-line Communism], and they viewed their position as unchanged. As they allied themselves with the right wing, they still quaintly called each other "comrade." Other neoconservatives belonged to the Committee on the Present Danger, trying to persuade the public that the Soviets had achieved military superiority and that the threat was immediate. Every deviation by the Democrats from the neoconservative line was assailed by the entity they founded in the wake of McGovern's intra-party victory, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority [CDM]. The name expressed their desire more than the reality, for they were not the majority and many of them were moving out of the Democratic Party. The CDM was the neoconservative party shadow. (my emphasis)

Since he's so chagrined by such doctrines, maybe Comrade Holy Joe should explain just where he stands in relation to these Troskyist and bastardized social-democratic ideas.

But Holy Joe has another problem in his alternative history. Since he himself was the Vice Presidential candidate of the Democratic Party in 2000, the same Party that Rush Limbaugh and all good Republican white folks were trashing then and now as being hopelessly radical, etc., he has to work in an additional revisionist twist. In Holy Joe's version, Bill Clinton's victory in 1992 represented a return to the Trot-style militarism that Lieberman supports! And the Gore-Lieberman ticket in 2000 was practically the reincarnation of Scoop Jackson and his social-democratic comrades! As opposed to that wimpy foreign policy advocated in 2000 by Dick Cheney and George Bush.

Even in a FOXified world, you would think that this would be too much for any minimally-literate person to swallow. But, at least in Holy Joe's case, you would be wrong.

In Comrade Holy Joe's history, 9/11 changed everything. Cheney and Bush were transmuted into faithful comrades and the Dems responded with "the old voices of partisanship and peace at any price". As Conason observes, "Lieberman's indictment of a party that abandoned the president after 9/11 is just as dishonest as his failure to discuss his own evolution," said evolution from being a peacenik Democrat in his youth to a Comrade Warmonger today.

Tags: joe conason, joe lieberman, neoconservatives, trotskyism

Red-baiting, 2008

Molly, we miss you

Neoconservative honcho Bill Kristol devoted his column The Mask Slips New York Times 04/14/08 to the notion that Obama's "bitter" comment shows he's a Commie. Oh, excuse me, he didn't literally say Obama was a "Commie", he said his ideas reflected the perspective of that "old Communist" Karl Marx. Kristol devotes over a third of his column to make this point in his inimitable sneering style.

He's been joined by others, including "Independent Democrat" Sen. Joe Lieberman (Joe Lieberman Hints Obama May Be a 'Marxist' - After Hailing His Support in 2006 by Greg Mitchell Huffington Post 04/15/08), Todd Gitlin (Maul Game TPM Cafe 04/13/08, whose comment appeared before Kristol's column), Michael Lind (The rubes and the elites Salon 04/15/08), even Gene Lyons (Obama’s remarks feed class resentment Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 04/16/08).

Let's call this what it is, stock McCarthyist sleaze-slinging.

Now in the days when that old alcoholic "Tail Gunner Joe" McCarthy was running about acting like Rush Limbaugh with subpoena power, this kind of attack was called "red-baiting". But that was when the American political rainbow devoted red to Communists. (Red is still the color for social-democrats and "postcommunists" in Europe, where identifying parties by colors is more common than in the US.)

But now that the Republicans are the Reds in American politics, I don't know if we can still call it "red-baiting" when a hardcore Red (Republican) like Bill Kristol calls someone a Marxist. Is that now "anti-red-baiting"? "McCarthyist sleaze-slinging" works for me.

Slinging sleaze is what the Republicans do. With their coalition including the Christian Right, Southern segregationists and neoconservative ideologues, this kind of thing has become endemic to the Republican Party. The Reps and those in the mainstream media who take their cues from GOP talking points don't seem to be focusing on a "flip-flopper" theme against Obama, but rather approaching him more like Old Man Bush's campaign against Michael Dukakis in 1988, attempting to paint him as a scary, bizarre, elitist character with kooky ideas.

The only one I've seen specifically calling out the "Marxist" label is Ed Kilgore, a DLC Democrat, in The Line You May Not Cross TPM Cafe 04/18/08, who writes, "no measure of 'friendship' for McCain can possibly justify [Lieberman's] recent remarks entertaining the possibility that Barack Obama, who endorsed him in [Lieberman's 2006 Senate] primary, may be a Marxist."

This is one of those dilemmas in which you have to wonder if you're giving too much credibility to a sleazy charge by bothering to refute it in some way, or whether you need to pay attention to it even though it's brainless because the Republicans are actually using it. But when a columnist for the New York Times is making an argument for this McCarthyist labeling, it's hard to see how the Dems can just totally ignore it. Particularly since it has been picked up by people like Gene Lyons, who I wouldn't consider one of the usual suspects.

It's times like these when I really, really miss the presence of the late Molly Ivins in the world of political commentary. This was the kind of cheap shot that she could knock out of the park with her unique style.

So, reality check here. However accurate or otherwise Obama's sociology may have been, the notion that voters normally vote heavily on their perceptions of economic prosperity and expectations thereof is as common as dirt in both the Democratic and Republican Parties. That's one of the things that's so very phony about this whole "bitter" flap. There's nothing unusual at all about pols and pollsters trying to explain voter behavior with reference to their economic circumstances.

And, no, boys, that doesn't constitute "Marxist" thought or any other form of philosophical materialism. If Bill Kristol read his old Marx-Engels Reader a little more closely, he might even find Marx's concept of class struggle is based on the structural dynamics of class, not on economic deprivation. He might even catch some hint in Engels' writings that "reproduction" - gender and family relationships - is as fundamental to the Marxist social theory as production relations, though the latter received far more attention in the writing and politics of Marx and Engels.

But Bill Kristol and the rest don't give a s*** about academic comparisons of Marxist theory to Obama's thinking. They're just slinging sleaze.

But while we're on the subject of Marxism, it's a fascinating bit of history to me that the trend of thought we now call neoconservatism actually has its historical roots in the Trotskyist brand of Marxism, more specifically in the sectarian Troskyist politics of New York City in the 1930s. I've often referred to their notion of spreading democracy in the Middle East by the US doing serial "regime change" as being a brand of Troskyist wars of liberation. Leon Trotsky was identified with the theory of "permanent revolution" and the idea that Soviet socialism could not survive in the USSR without worldwide Communist revolutions. There is more than a superficial resemblance between the neocons' Middle East domino theory of democratic revolutions via wars of liberation and the Troskyist idea of the urgent need for world revolution.

But the most obvious heritage from the 1930s Troskyists to today's neocons is their very aggressive polemical style of smears, accusations and ad hominem attacks on their opponents. Sid Blumenthal in his 1986 book The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power, which has just been reissued in paperback, charted the development of neocon ideology from its original Trotskyist roots. Bill Kristol, the son of Irving Kristol, a founding father of the movement, was only beginning to emerge on the national political scene at the time of that book. Blumenthal wrote that Reagan's Secretary of Education, now a professional moral scold (who dated Janis Joplin when they were at the University of Texas together!), Gamblin' Man William Bennett, "filled his department to the brim with right-wingers." He continues:

Among them was a young Harvard professor, William Kristol, son of Irving Kristol, named Bennett's special assistant. The elder Kristol's lobbying had been crucial in Bennett's appointment at [the National Endowment for the Humanities, where Bennett had been previously]. Now Bennett was using his power of appointment to facilitate the generational transition. Young Kristol received a patrimony of disillusioned leftism and abhorrence of liberalism without ever having to pass through the experiences that had led to these attitudes [in the previous generation]. Like father, like son: William had the character of a right-wing Trotskyist, a vanguard ideologue.

One of these days I'm going to blog some more about the interesting and disturbing heritage of Trotskyism outside the far left. There is a popular notion that it's somehow common for people to go from being either far-right or far-left politically to the opposite extreme. But except maybe for teenagers trying on one identity or another for a while, that is actually pretty rare.

In the case of Troskyism, the ideological links between the leftwing version and the neocon ideology include a ferocious hostility to political liberalism and the centrality of anti-Communism (they would call it anti-Stalinism) to the Trotskyists worldview.

But those of us who don't want to just carelessly slap labels on people have to be careful with the Troskyist-neocon heritage. Rightwing isolationists and Bircher types have been known to call this administration's neocons "Trotskyists" as a way to say that Commies control the government, which the Birchers claim has been the case anyway since roughly 1933.

Blumenthal's phrase, rightwing Trotskyism, is more accurate.

Tags: barack obama, neoconservatives, trotskyism