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Hobgoblin No.4 2002

Art, Reification and Class Consciousness in the Situationist International - David Black
The Cuban Revolution 1961 - Raya Dunayevskaya
Remembering Pearl Harbour - Felix Martin
Pedagogy Against Capital Today. Peter Mclaren interviewed by Glenn Rikowski
Bombing History - reflections on September 11 - David Black
The Other Afghanistan - Statement by RAWA and Azre Jadid
Debates: Dunayevskaya and Dialectical Materialism - Cyril Smith. Capital and Social Democracy - Naser. In Defence of Toni Negri: and Open Letter to Chris Harman - Goblin
Marx and the First International - Kevin Anderson

Editorials: September 11 - Against the Double Tragedy. Class politics: dead or alive?

Racism and the Unions - Zita Holbourne
The New Reproductive Technology and the Dehumanisation fo Women - Terry Moon
Ukrainian Socialism: national liberation and social revolution - Christopher Ford
Karl Marx and Michael Bakunin - Kevin Michaels

BOMBING HISTORY

The fatal entenglement of capitalism, postmodernism and fundamentalist terrorism

“Modern middle-class society, which has revolutionised the conditions of property, and called forth such colossal means of production and traffic, resembles the wizard who evoked the powers of darkness, but could neither master them, nor yet get rid of them when they had come at his bidding.”
[Marx, Communist Manifesto]
Postmodernism, appeared at the end of the 1970s as the new ideological manifestation (as ‘cultural theory’) for the ‘postindustrial’, ‘knowledge’ economy. As formulated by Jean-Francois Lyotard in 1979, postmodernist theory called for a final showdown with the ‘grand narratives’ of modernity and the ‘rhetoric of totality’ expressed in Hegel’s dialectic of human freedom and in Marx’s supposed ‘universalising’ of the proletariat as the historical agency of socialist emancipation. For Lyotard the task had become not the completion of modernity, but rather to recognise that it had been liquidated, and that its lack of ’reality’ had produced ‘the invention of other realities’: hence the association of postmodernism with notions of ‘diversity’, ‘multiculuturalism’ and ‘identity’ politics. Postmodernism therefore, was a timely ideological intervention at a time when three crucial processes were taking place:
Firstly, what passed for ‘socialism’ in the Soviet Bloc was beginning to fall apart and give way to bourgeois nationalism. Secondly, the material and political gains of the working class in the West were being rolled back in response to the structural capitalist crisis. Thirdly, the radicalism of the regimes thrown up by the anti-colonial revolutions was being undermined: from within by their own counter-revolutionary forces and from without by imperialist pressure and intervention, which often took the form of ‘war by proxy’ between the super-powers (e.g. Ethiopia, Afghanistan).
On one level, the terrorist atrocities of September 11th heralded the first truly postmodernist war. The attackers did not announce themselves in the name of any political ‘tradition’ or invoke the names of any heroes or thinkers. They ‘played’, not with the rules of war but with symbols, signs and signifiers, which seem to make more ‘sense’ to fans of Nostradamus than students of Clausewitz. The attack on the Twin Towers was an inhuman, irrational act, carried in the name of anti-humanism and irrationality. It did indeed attempt to dissolve one ‘reality’ in order to invent ‘another’.
On another level however, September 11th was an act of war by a universalist and internationalist force aiming at world domination. In this sense Islamism is following the same path as those other two universalising totalitarianisms of the 20th century: Stalinism and fascism.
In a book, published shortly after the Moro Assassination in 1978, the Situationist, Giafranco Sanguinetti, wrote that in the modern world, all acts of terrorism are either offensive or defensive. As was shown in numerous terrorist campaigns throughout Europe in the late-20th century, offensive urban terrorist strategy always failed sooner or later - if measured in terms of the actual objectives – and in the end only appealed to those Sanguinetti called the "desperate and deluded". If, on the other hand, terrorist actions are part of a defensive strategy, then those behind them can expect some success, especially in the short-term. The twist is that defensive terrorism, in the context of Italy in the 1970s, was only ever effectively carried out by the State, either directly, as shown by the Piazza Fontana bombing of 1969 and numerous others in the ‘70s; or indirectly as shown by the kidnappings and assassinations carried out by the allegedly 'Red' Brigades, during the ‘seventies period of ‘restructuring’ following the 1974 capitalist crisis.
September 11th, certainly, in the ‘Situationist’ sense, was one of the most ‘spectacular’ terrorist atrocities of what Guy Debord claimed to be the epoch of the ‘Integrated Spectacle’. It was also a ‘defensive’ act carried out by the ‘desperate and deluded’ who actually believed in the reality of a ‘fallacious paradise’. BUT IT WAS ALSO ACT IN DEFENSE OF A ‘STATE’ BY THOSE CLAIMING TO REPRESENT IT: the state being the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and it’s Wahabist clients and assets elsewhere, especially the military dictatorship of Pakistan and the terrorist state of Afghanistan, ruled by the Taleban in conjunction with the Wahabist Al Queda network. All fundamentalist ideologues, whether in Islam, Christianity and Judaism, know that just as the invention of the printing press and the telescope assured the success of the Protestant Reformation, so the Information and Bio-technological revolutions call into question ALL the religious “isms” in the world. The process was first identified by Marx in the Communist Manifesto:
"A continual change in the modes of production, a never ceasing state of agitation and social insecurity, distinguish the Bourgeois-Epoch from all preceding ones. The ancient ties between men, their opinions and beliefs - hoar with antiquity - are fast disappearing, and new ones become worn out ere they can become firmly rooted. Everything fixed and stable vanishes, everything holy and venerable is desecrated, and men are forced to look at their mutual relations, at the problem of life, in the soberest, most matter of fact way." [Macfarlane translation]
Contrary to what some on the left have argued, there is nothing revolutionary about Islamism (or ‘Islamic Fundamentalism’); nor can there be any revolutionary tendencies within it. Fundamentalism of all stamps can be seen today – hopefully – as the dying kicks of those who are in revolt, not so much against capitalism, as against history, which for them (as the James Joyce character puts it), is a nightmare they are trying to awake from. They are in denial of the revolutionizing role of capital in relation to these old forms and they are incapable of recognizing that the counter-revolutionary, inhuman tendencies of capitalism become all the more the pervasive in the absence of the socialist idea worked out anew for the 21st century.
150 years ago, Marx showed how Lord Palmerston had fooled the public into believing he was the side of those nationalities (Poles, Circassians and many others) who were subjected to ‘Muscovite’ rule even to the extent of going to war with the Czar over the Crimea. Marx exposed the commercial underpinning of the pro-Russian secret diplomacy of the British Foreign Office. His description in the 1850s of Britain’s commercial ally, Czarist Russia bears an uncanny remblance to the modern-day relationships between Islamist absolutists their ‘allies’ such as Britain and the US:
“If the Muscovite Czars, who worked their encroachments by agency principally of the Tartar Khans, were obliged to tartarise Muscovy, Peter the great, who resolved upon working through the agency of the west, was obliged to civilise Russia. In grasping upon the Baltic provinces, he seized at once the tools necessary for this process. They afforded him not only the diplomatists and the generals, the brains with which to execute his system of political and military action on the west, they yielded him, at the same time, a crop of brureaucrats, schoolmasters, and drill-sergeants, who were to drill Russians into that varnish of civilisation that adapts them to the technical appliances of the Western peoples, without imbuing them with their ideas’.”
The Russian Empire never did become imbued with such ideas and never did become ‘civilised’. Sixty years after Marx’s critique the 200-year despoiling alliance between Czarism and British Imperialism ended with the October Revolution.
In the early 1880s, Marx visited Algeria. Writing with great admiration for the Moslems of that land he added, ‘but without a Revolution they’ll be damned’. Now, more than ever, we know that everyone else will be as well.#

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Raya Dunayevskaya and 'Dialectical Materialism'

by Cyril Smith

If the supporters and admirers of Raya Dunayevskaya would spend a little less time singing her praises and defending her every word, perhaps they would be better able to see her real contribution - not the production of
a completed system, but a powerful struggle with 'orthodox Marxism'. This battle can only be appreciated as a decades-long process, so we should stop admiring its conclusion and work to take forward its further
development. In this Note, I should like to examine her emerging understanding that Marx's humanism was essentially incompatible with the standard characterisation of 'Marxism' as 'Dialectical Materialism'.

In Marxism and Freedom (1957), Raya has already seen the essence of Marx's humanism, 'distinguishing itself from idealism and from materialism and ... at the same time the truth uniting both', as he put it in 1844. But as yet she sees no conflict between this central notion and the term 'dialectical materialism'. On page 54 she begins a section with the heading 'Dialectical Materialism and the Class Struggle' which goes on to
talk about Marx's 'new dialectical materialist view of history'.

By the time of her 1973 book, Philosophy and Revolution, she knows that 'it was others, not Marx, who named his discovery Historical Materialism, Dialectical Materialism.' (Page 49.) In footnote 106, page 302, she elaborates a little:

Engels coined the expression 'Historical Materialism'; Plekhanov, 'Dialectical Materialism'.... Marx himself preferred more precise though longer phrases, such as 'the mode of production of material life' or 'material base', and 'the dialectical method' or, simply, 'revolutionary.' In the early essays he calls his philosophy 'Humanist', later 'Communist', still later, 'internationalist', but at all times 'revolutionary'. Nevertheless, as a shorthand term, to express what Marx had meant by 'material base', 'dialectical method', 'history and its process', we will use 'Historical Materialism' to designate that specifically Marxian historical dialectic-materialist conception of history.

This, it must be admitted, is not Raya at her clearest. And that is particularly regrettable, because, as far as I know, she never used the phrase 'dialectical materialism' again. From then on - and she produced many important works over the next 14 years - she must have become increasingly aware of its direct conflict with Marx's ideas. However, I know of no text where she discusses this.

Does this matter? Yes, I think it is crucial. It was Plekhanov in 1891 who gave the world 'dialectical materialism', in his essay: 'On the Sixtieth Anniversary of Hegel's Death'. For him, that term was quite reasonable, as a devotee of the eighteenth-century French materialists, like many other nineteenth-century Russians. As far as he was concerned, the materialists,
people who saw 'matter' as prior to 'mind', were the 'progressives', and the idealists, who put 'mind' first, closely allied with 'clericalism', were holding things back. The purely individualist understanding of human thinking of the eighteenth-century thinkers, in which each individual citizen was passively acted upon by bits of matter and their consciousness affected accordingly, was incorporated into 'dialectical materialism'.

Marx was a materialist, Plekhanov told us, but with a dialectical twist, and this enabled him to extend 'materialism' into the realm of history. The old materialism was somehow combined with two further elements: (a) the dialectical method of thinking; and (b) a belief that the three 'laws of dialectics', extracted from Engels' tentative remarks in Anti-Duhring, 'applied' to nature, history and thought. Together, this made up an
overarching world outlook, 'dialectical and historical materialism', a set of ideas dogmatically fitted on to the world. Do I need to show that Karl Marx had nothing in common with these ideas? For one thing, there is no 'matter' in Marx's 'new materialism'. In contrast to 'dialectical materialism', Marx begins, not with 'matter in
motion', but with the lives of human individuals as socially-active natural beings, who relate to Nature only through social forms. Thus Marx's views were quite hostile to the outlook of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century materialists.

Lenin was Plekhanov's most prominent pupil. Even after his reading of Hegel in 1914-15 shook his faith in Plekhanov, he never ceased to call himself a 'dialectical materialist'. You can see the deleterious effect of this on his philosophical health, not just in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908), but throughout his works. For example, look at the 1914 essay 'Karl Marx'. The section headed 'The Materialist Conception of History', (after a quotation from Engels falsely attributed to Marx), starts with this piece of Plekhanovism:

Since materialism in general explains our consciousness as the outcome of being, and not conversely, then materialism as applied to the social life of mankind has to explain social consciousness as the outcome of social being.

But Marx's chief contribution was to show that the old materialism could not 'explain our consciousness'. For there could be no human consciousness - or human anything - which was not simultaneously individual and social. To take another example of the mechanical character of Lenin's materialism, look at his essay Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913). 'The philosophy of Marxism is materialism', he proclaims, explicitly identifying eighteenth-century materialism. Marx went further, of course. 'Just as man's knowledge reflects nature (ie developing matter) which exists independently of him, so his social knowledge ... reflects the economic system of society.'

Lenin, in the privacy of his Philosophical Notebooks, came as close as he could to self-criticism on many issues, and this certainly implies a challenge to his previous conception of materialism. But even within the
Notebooks he does not spell this out, and he certainly never discussed it anywhere else. Rather than 'reading Hegel materialistically' - whatever that means - what was really needed was to re-think materialism.

It is a pity that, in Marxism and Freedom, even Raya, who has clearly seen that Materialism and Empirio-Criticism is vulgar materialism, still tries to make excuses for it. She thinks the book - which did so much intellectual damage to the workers' movement - may have been necessary 'for the specific conditions and purposes of Russia', because 'Russia was so backward that in 1908 one still had to fight against the influence of
clericalism in the Marxist movement.' (Page 171.)

Certainly, Lenin's reading of Hegel had a profound effect on all of his thinking. But no public statement of his shows any sign that his adherence to the old materialism was even slightly shaken. In his last speech to the Comintern, in November 1922, he goes out of his way to recommend his old teacher's philosophical writings, calling for a complete edition to be published, 'with an index'. When, earlier that year, he made a contribution to the journal 'Under the Banner of Marxism', he begins with praise for Plekhanov. Even the title, 'On the Significance of Militant Materialism', is an allusion to Plekhanov's pamphlet Materialismus Militans. Yes, Lenin's article includes his famous appeal for an alliance between Marxists and Hegelians. But the
bulk of the piece is about the fight for materialism, and the need for it to provide a solid foundation for 'the advanced trends in social thinking in Russia', stressing the importance of 'Under the Banner' to promote militant atheism. (This is not the place for it, but someone ought to undertake a critical analysis of all the anti-religious work of Bolshevism, both before and after 1917, carefully disentangling the politics of the Church and the sometimes crude anti-God propaganda of the 'Marxists'. This should be compared with Marx's careful 'critique of religion'.)

There is an important related matter. Neither Plekhanov nor Lenin ever commented on, or even quoted in full, the vital First Thesis on Feuerbach:

The main defect of all hitherto-existing materialism - that of Feuerbach included - is that the Object [der Gegenstand], actuality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the object [Objekts], or of contemplation [Anschauung], but not as human sensuous activity, practice [Praxis], not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in opposition to materialism, was developed by idealism - but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, differentiated from thought-objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. In Das Wesen des Christenthums, he therefore regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and defined only in its dirty-Jewish form of appearance. Hence he does not grasp the significance of 'revolutionary', of practical-critical, activity. (This is a careful retranslation of Marx's text by Don Cuckson.)

Of course, this contains the essence of Marx's humanism, and is particularly relevant to Raya's ideas. It is interesting to note that, in her later writings, as she separates herself from 'dialectical materialism', she is able to get more and more from those vital lines of
Marx. This process begins with Philosophy and Revolution, and continues with the book Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution (1981).

It is a pity that she herself was never able to investigate this inverse relationship and to see just how much Lenin's devotion to 'dialectical materialism' had acted as a barrier to the approach to Marx of all of us. Why don't we try to do this work on her behalf?

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An Open Letter to Chris Harman of the SWP regarding his disgraceful attack on political prisoner Antonio Negri

Dear Chris Harman,
It must be really confusing to wake up in the middle of the first
organized and even televised global movement, and discover that the people in it neither speak your political language nor share your dogmas on how the movement should be, who should "lead" the struggle, and on what they should be struggling for. How do you cope with this mixture environmentalist and trade union activists as in Seattle, or transsexuals and factory workers in Rome, farmers and students in Bangalore, indigenous people and housewives in San Christobal, and so on? How do you cope with the fact that all these "sections" of the movements want to be heard, and within each of these sections another million voices want to be taken into account, made visible, recognised and dignified?
Certainly "no magic victories", as you call them, will ever result if people don't learn the lessons of history. But has ever occurred to you that in the first place, maybe "magic victories" are not the point of struggles and that history can be interpreted in other ways than yours?
No? Well, let me try to explain.

In the first place - and I am sorry to say this because I know your passion for "socialism" and social justice - you share one thing with our enemies. Like them, you carry around a special yardstick, with which you think you can measure struggles. The yardstick is called "the goal" - your goal of course - and in your pocket you have an instruction sheet on how to use it, the "means" to achieve this goal. This nice package of means and goal you call "Theory", with a capital "T". The sheet says that if the struggling group is not what you call "core workers", this is OK.
Join them, try to recruit as many as possible, but warn them that they should not "lead" the struggles. The leadership is the core working class, and, while we are waiting for official trade unions to call a general strike - you are so predictable - everybody should join your group - what is it called? - oh yes, SWP.
Well listen to this. We don't want yours or anybody else's leadership, get it? And you know why? Because the point of real revolution in our lives is that the people of this planet have to decide for themselves the rules of their interaction. You see,when the goals are given and separated from the means, you need generals, board of directors, Chris Harmans and party leaders. Generals want to win wars, boards of directors want to maximise profits, and Chris Harmans want to maximise recruits for winning state power. But if what you want is a way to do things, a human way to relate to each other on this earth, if what you want is dignified freedom for all, then your means - organization - becomes the goal.
Of course we want to end poverty, injustice, racism, oppression,
exploitation, famine, war and all that the drive for profit creates.
But we want to do this in the process of defining what we are for. But we cannot be for anything other than a dignified life, in which we human freely relate to each other, collectively decide how to organise our lives. If this is the case, "organization" is not a means to a goal, but the goal itself. It is the organization of capitalism - humans organized so that they can exploit each other, incessantly compete with each other, and work-work-work - that we want to challenge with our organization of life.
But since organization that puts freedom and dignity first is our goal, we really cannot postpone this to "after the revolution". In fact, our revolution in thinking and acting in new ways in which freedom and dignity rules, does not come after you guys take state power, but it is right now,
here. Sorry Chris, there are no leaders, only humans with different experiences, needs, ideas, and aspirations, and we have to find a way to put them all together, learning from each other and creating a new world.
"What a bunch of bollocks", you will surely respond. Yeah, we have been there. But let me tell you that you also have that nasty attitude when you use that yardstick of yours to read other people's struggles and ideas. Take this Italian bloke, Negri. You can be really vicious there. This is what you wrote in your article called "The Overall Movement". (It can be found on the internet at http://www.swp.org.uk/SR/252/SR5.HTM). Referring to the experience of the Italian movement of 1977, you write:
"But without the backing of the core sections of the employed working class, the 'marginal' sectors were smashed in 1977-78 and Toni Negri himself was soon imprisoned. Unfortunately, however, this did not mean the end of the ideas he had been pushing."
Does that "unfortunately" mean that prison ought to have taught Negri a lesson in SWP recipes for revolution? I shudder to think what would be the "teaching" method about "the socialist goal" you have in mind. No
thanks, not for us. Irrespective of the ideas of Negri or any other political prisoner, we don't think of prisons as a human form of education.
Now to the substantial part of article, your understanding of history. In Italy, as everywhere else although in different forms, the marginal sectors of the working class was "smashed", not only by police repression, but because the "core" sections of the working class started to take on the character of what to be used to be called the "marginals".
It was through restructuring, that, as in UK and other parts of the world, skills, culture, power structure, imaginary job security, and the overall features of what it meant to be "core" working class changed. And this not only "smashed" the movement of 1977, but also created the new conditions for today's struggles, and infected the social realm with new needs and aspirations.
But you don't seem able to grasp this change in the conditions of struggles. Indeed, what is incredibly boring in your analysis is that you completely overlook context. Too bad for a "historical materialist" like you. But get this: there is no static "core" of the "working class", and never has been. The compulsion to do capitalist work comes in many flavours and colours. Indeed, capitalist global production is organised in such a way that it needs the blood and sweat of a diverse variety of people, from Thai slaves, to software programmers in Bombay and Seattle; from students in London, to factory workers in Prague; from
Bengali bonded child labourers to Mayan coffee pickers in Chiapas and women water collectors in Ghana.
While you want to pick a subsection of humanity to lead the rest to revolution, the reality is that all these sections have something to say, some needs to express and aspirations to inform their dreams. All you can tell them is: you are doing it wrong, this is the way. They say, we want to be heard, our needs must become visible, we want to live in dignity.
The way to combine this diversity of perspectives to create a new world is not common acceptance of your (or anybody else's) party line, but a process that engages us all in the definition we give ourselves of what we are for, how we want to organise our lives on this planet. And don't think that wearing white overalls, fancy hats or street dancing are just a question of "tactics".
All the best
Goblin
PS. How come you people have discovered the global anti-capitalist movement only when it became visible to all? Where were you, six, seven or eight years ago when many of us were building that movement? Do I detect a hint of "recruiting opportunism" in your new enthusiasm for "globalising resistance"?

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