Markin comment:
It would seem impossible that in the early years of the 21st century as we are now deep into the age of the Internet, instant communications, and about twelve million other discoveries, inventions and human-made technological delights (stuff way beyond the capacity of god to understand never mind create) that we still would be fighting the now hoary battle between science and superstition (religious, mainly, but other forms as well). Under any circumstances. But we are, and we will continue to do as an elementary duty. In fact, although we will have our share of “angel” believers as the Bolsheviks did in the early days of their revolution, we cannot be successful in making the American socialist revolution until we can break a critical mass of the working class and their allies from that dependence. Simple, right? I wish, but I will take my chances with the scientific method any day.
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Workers Vanguard No. 971
7 January 2011
In Defense of Marxism and Science
We print below, edited for publication, a presentation by T. Marlow of the Spartacist League at a Chicago forum last July 24.
When the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace went to present a copy of his treatise on celestial mechanics to Napoleon, the latter is said to have stated: “M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator.” Laplace replied, “I had no need for that hypothesis.”
Two centuries later, any American politician caught on tape saying something like that would never be able to run for dogcatcher, let alone the Senate or presidency. The U.S. is peculiar among the advanced industrial countries in its level of religiosity—over three-fourths of respondents in an AP poll said they believed in angels. Worse still is an increase in the rejection of scientific thinking, from the millions seeking miracle cures from a panoply of snake-oil vendors to a politically cohesive and dangerous sector of religious fundamentalists out to turn the U.S. into a theocracy. I am not referring to the demented followers of Osama bin Laden. I am speaking of the Christian right, which has abortion and evolution as focus points of attack.
In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels state: “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.” Well, we have a ruling class that could be described as drunk with power. The collapse of Stalinism in East Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989-92 was a world-historic defeat for the working class of the world. The American bourgeoisie declared the “death of Communism,” and even the “end of history.” With military power far greater than any of their imperialist rivals in Europe or Japan, the U.S. rulers have acted with little restraint on their predatory desires, as in Iraq and Afghanistan and recently in Haiti.
At the same time, the consciousness of the proletariat has been thrown back so far that even advanced workers and others involved in social struggle no longer identify their goal as building a socialist society. In the U.S. in particular, there is the question of race: black oppression is the bedrock of American capitalism; the notion of black people as being inferior, which survives to this day, was the ideological counterpart to black chattel slavery. America is if anything more segregated than 25 years ago.
Especially since the September 11 attacks, the “war on terror” has been used to beat the working class into submission and squelch opposition to the predations of U.S. imperialism across the globe. It is not just the linguistically challenged George W. Bush—Obama was made Commander-in-Chief in part to give the image of U.S. imperialism a needed facelift. But smoother words have not changed American military rampaging in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor the extension of police-state measures at home. The American ruling class sees no reason why it cannot continue to literally get away with murder.
In these circumstances it is no wonder that religious reaction is ascendant and even the rationalism of the Enlightenment of the 18th century is under attack. You don’t have to be a Marxist to oppose things like creationism, but without a Marxist program you have no way out of the impasse in which society finds itself. Society is rent by class struggle, legal and extralegal, as the bourgeoisie seeks ever greater profit from the exploitation of labor and workers resist. As Marx showed, there is a fundamental contradiction between the private ownership of the means of production and the further advance of productive forces. The rule of capital must be smashed by the working class, organized and led by a revolutionary Trotskyist party.
Part of the process of building that party is to educate the proletariat as to its historic role and responsibility for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. That means a Marxist understanding of society, and that in turn means an understanding of the work of science and its defense against the purveyors of mystical and medieval rubbish. So first we have to review a bit of history.
The Middle Ages and Renaissance
The fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 to the birth of Leonardo da Vinci in 1452 (or the victorious siege of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks a year later) marked about a thousand years. That’s about one-fifth of the entire history of human civilization since the first example of writing (the cuneiform tablets of southern Mesopotamia from about 3000 BC). In West Europe this period is called the Middle or Dark Ages. Not coincidentally, the dominant political and economic institution in this period was the Roman Catholic church. Along with the nobility, the church was a major landowner. The vast majority of the population was made up of serfs tied to the land of their lord, to whom they owed service as a feudal obligation. Illiterate, disease-ridden, all but slaves to their temporal and spiritual masters, the peasant masses faced, to quote Thomas Hobbes, “continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” (Leviathan [1651]).
The Renaissance, which began in the city-states of northern Italy and was spurred by the growth of trade with the East, helped engender a new class of merchants, later to become the bourgeoisie of modern capitalism. As these merchants’ ships went further out into the world, they needed better knowledge on the workings of the natural world and the cosmos. In his 1883 Introduction to Dialectics of Nature, Engels succinctly notes:
“The main work in the first period of natural science that now opened lay in mastering the material immediately at hand. In most fields a start had to be made from the very beginning. Antiquity had bequeathed Euclid and the Ptolemaic solar system; the Arabs had left behind the decimal notation, the beginnings of algebra, the modern numerals, and alchemy; the Christian Middle Ages nothing at all.”
The church dogma on what we would call astronomy was what Ptolemy wrote in the second century AD. In his system, the Earth formed the center of motion, around which the Sun and planets rotated. The stars were fixed on a celestial sphere further out from the Sun and planets. What was on Earth was corrupt; what was in Heaven was perfect.
What passed for medicine also came from the Greeks, in particular, Hippocrates, in the 5th century BC. Human health was determined by the interplay of the four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile). Ill health meant an imbalance of the humors, which could require purging or bloodletting. These and other often fatal remedies continued to be used in the 18th and 19th centuries: George Washington himself died most likely as a result of bloodletting by his doctors when he fell ill in 1799.
In the 1500s, things started to crack for the feudal order and especially for the church. The Protestant Reformation is normally tagged to 1517, when Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the cathedral door in Wittenberg. This doctrinal split would lead to no small amount of bloodletting not intended for medical purposes—for example, the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). Rather more unnerving to the feudal structure was the Peasant War in Germany, beginning about 1525. The same Martin Luther wrote a pamphlet on this occasion titled “Against the Murderous and Thieving Hordes of Peasants.”
Galileo was born in 1564 to a noble—but not rich—family. Like many children before and after, he was taken to church by his parents, and evidently the sermons were as boring then as now. Unlike other kids, he made some good use of the time. He observed the great chandelier in the church, which would swing when disturbed by a breeze. He timed the swings using his pulse and found that the period was independent of the amplitude of the oscillation. That’s now Physics 101, and laid the basis for the first accurate clocks based on pendulums.
Galileo was above all a keen observer and experimentalist. When he heard that spectacle lenses were being used in Holland to view distant objects, he immediately constructed a crude telescope. Spurred by the results, he worked out his own procedures for grinding lenses to the exquisite tolerances needed for higher magnification, and produced a relatively small 20X to 30X telescope. He viewed the Moon, and saw not a perfect luminous disk but a place with geologic features just like the Earth—mountains, valleys, plains. When he looked at Jupiter, he saw little stars nearby seeming to move across the planetary disk. He immediately realized these were moons. Subsequently he observed Venus and saw it go through phases like the Earth’s moon.
These observations shattered the Ptolemaic model of an Earth-centered system and convinced Galileo that Copernicus’ idea that the Sun was the center of motion was in fact correct. For publishing this belief, Galileo was tried by the church in 1633 and, not surprisingly, convicted of heresy. Threatened with torture by the Inquisition, he recanted and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. From there he wrote his Mathematical Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences and had it smuggled out of reach of the Vatican to Holland, where it was published in 1638. His observations on the motions of falling bodies anticipated Isaac Newton’s synthesis 48 years later.
Why did Galileo recant? One answer is that he was scared by what happened to Giordano Bruno, the itinerant ex-priest who supported Copernicus’ idea about the Sun at the center, and much else. He was accused of heresy, imprisoned and tortured for seven years during his trial and finally burned at the stake in 1600. And the man who had ordered Galileo to abandon Copernican ideas in 1616 was the same Cardinal Bellarmine who sent Bruno to the stake. From what I have read, it is unfair to say that Galileo was a coward. First, Galileo’s book, giving very thinly veiled support to Copernicus’ theory, had been published in 1632 and already had circulated throughout Europe. Second, he had no substantial religious differences with the church on matters of theology, so a refusal to recant would mean torture and death for no real purpose.
Giordano Bruno was another matter, and it is very doubtful whether his recantation would have saved his life—he actually offered to partially recant in an appeal to the Pope. Just to give you an idea, here are a few of the things with which he was charged: 1) erroneous opinions on the Trinity and the divinity of Christ; 2) belief in the reincarnation of souls in new bodies, human or animal; and (the kicker) 3) denial of the virginity of Mary. There are not a few Christians who would roast poor Bruno today for that! You can imagine how well it went down with the Pope in 1600.
Science and the Industrial Revolution
Following Galileo, Newton produced his three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation. Along with Gottfried Leibniz, he also invented differential calculus—the mathematics needed to solve the problems of moving bodies with forces such as gravity acting upon them. In biology, Carl Linnaeus introduced the systematic classification of animals and plants, based on form and structure. And in 1785, the Scot James Hutton laid the basis for modern geology and showed that the Earth had to be much, much older than the 6,000 years deduced by Bishop James Ussher (1581-1656) from a study of the biblical sources.
The middle to late 1700s was a period of tremendous advances in science and technology, driven by (and pushing forward) the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Science was held in high esteem by the rising entrepreneurs, and in the growing manufacturing city of Birmingham there arose an informal grouping called the Lunar Society, which coalesced around 1765 and lasted about 30 years.
The name came from their routine of evening dinner meetings on the Monday closest to the full moon, a practical idea since many had a trip of several miles on horseback to their homes, and there were no streetlights. That would change—one of the Lunatics (as the Society members jocularly called themselves) was William Murdoch, who was developing the production of gas from coal to use for illumination. Other notable members included James Watt, inventor of the condensing steam engine (which made steam power practical and efficient enough for its later use in locomotives); Joseph Priestley, the preacher and chemist credited with the discovery of oxygen; Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles and an evolutionist; and Josiah Wedgewood, chemist and mineralogist who made a fortune by making fine ceramics and pottery. Benjamin Franklin was a corresponding member—he was celebrated throughout Europe as an eminent scientist for his work on electricity.
Politically the Lunatics were pretty progressive for their day. Many had favored the colonists during the American War of Independence and also supported the revolutionaries in France. In fact, on 14 July 1791 they were having a dinner in Birmingham to celebrate the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille when the inn was threatened by a mob howling “Church and King!” The mob’s main target was Joseph Priestley, whose support for the National Assembly won him an offer of French citizenship. Priestley’s house was set on fire by the mob, but fortunately he and his family escaped. They later emigrated to the U.S.
It is literally inconceivable to envisage something like the Lunar Society today. An approximation would be for the heads of U.S. Steel and General Motors to have joined with the leading professors of MIT and Harvard to sign a petition supporting Fidel Castro in his struggle against the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in Cuba in 1958!
The Lunatics mirrored capitalism in its youth, breaking down the barriers of feudalism as part of the practical struggle of the marketplace. Capitalism did bring a large increase in the productivity of labor and a corresponding vast increase in the amount of goods produced. Some of this trickled down even to the working class, whose labor created the surplus value pocketed by the capitalist as profit. However, exploitation of the most brutal fashion remained the lot of the masses, and the next economic dislocation causing a reduction or cessation of industrial production would (and did) throw the workers on to the street with no means of support. The scientific unraveling of the basis of capitalist production and profit was presented in detail by Karl Marx in his work Capital in 1867. But the core of Marxism—dialectical materialism—had been enunciated 20 years earlier in the Communist Manifesto.
The Science of Marxism
In his 1883 preface to the Communist Manifesto, Engels wrote:
“The basic thought running through the Manifesto—that economic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the primeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development; that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression and class struggles—the basic thought belongs solely and exclusively to Marx.”
For the first time, the study of human society and its development had been given a firm scientific and materialist foundation. It is not surprising that Marx and Engels immediately appreciated the significance of Darwin’s Origin of Species, first published in 1859. The astounding variety of animals and plants in their myriad shapes and forms were not static sculptures made by a divine Creator, but had evolved from a common ancestor and differentiated over the expanse of geologic time. As Engels said in his 1883 speech at Marx’s grave:
“Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.”
The philosophical scaffold of Marxism is called dialectical materialism. Materialism, meaning that the world exists in reality; it was not created within the realm of the human mind. Dialectical in the fact that the essence of our world (indeed our universe) is matter in motion. All things exist not in stasis but in a process of development. An analogy is the difference between a still photograph and a motion picture. We know this almost by instinct when we look at plants and animals—consider the bud of a cherry tree, from emerging green speck in spring to flower to tasty fruit. But from birth in a class-divided society, we are made to accept the idea that the social structures and norms of human relations are essentially static—there are rulers and ruled, usually with God blessing the whole arrangement.
The genius of Marx was to apply the dialectical materialist method to the study of society and economy. In a 1914 piece titled “Karl Marx,” V.I. Lenin quotes Engels, adding his own interpolations:
“‘Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern natural science that it has furnished extremely rich [this was written before the discovery of radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements, etc.!] and daily increasing materials for this test, and has thus proved that in the last analysis Nature’s process is dialectical and not metaphysical.
“‘The great basic thought,’ Engels writes, ‘that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which the things apparently stable no less than their mind images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away…this great fundamental thought has, especially since the time of Hegel, so thoroughly permeated ordinary consciousness that in this generality it is now scarcely ever contradicted. But to acknowledge this fundamental thought in words and to apply it in reality in detail to each domain of investigation are two different things…. For dialectical philosophy nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendency from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain.’ Thus, according to Marx, dialectics is ‘the science of the general laws of motion, both of the external world and of human thought’.”
The Dialectic of Science
Scientists seek to be as objective as possible, to eliminate systematic errors and to require that facts be established by experiments which can be repeated by others to confirm the results. Theories are built upon testable hypotheses, which lead to more experiments and further refinements of existing theory or creation of a new and better one. Science has its own dialectic—it is not static, but ever-changing. It is also materialist. Nature and her workings are to be explained using natural causes. Things happen for physical reasons, not the whim of a Zeus, Yahweh, tree spirit or water nymph. On one side science, on the other superstition, and ne’er the twain shall meet.
Any human activity such as science is subject to error, sometimes conscious, sometimes not. The human brain is very good at finding patterns. This was selected for by evolution. Our ancestors did not have the luxury of extended observation time to determine whether that shadowy figure in the grass was a grazing gazelle or a Smilodon with 7-inch fangs. But that pattern-seeking neural circuitry can also fool us. When I look at the sky I don’t immediately see bulls and crabs and hunters with studded belts. But given enough boredom, or perhaps eating the right mushrooms, one could certainly explain the constellations seen by Greek shepherds 2,500 years ago.
Another common fallacy is that correlation implies causality, which actually is an offshoot of seeking patterns where none really exist. An amusing example of correlation not being cause comes from an open letter to the Kansas School Board written by Bobby Henderson on behalf of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which was set up as a satirical protest against creationism:
“You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.”
Above all, one must remember that scientists are human and work in the midst of a class-divided society. Even a religious physicist can be objective when measuring the distance between the Earth and Moon, but as one approaches social questions and research, ingrained bias emanating from the dominant social mores can sometimes overwhelm the best of objective intentions.
A striking case in point is given by the late Stephen Jay Gould in his book The Mismeasure of Man. He recounts the story of American physician Samuel George Morton, who had collected some 600 skulls representing populations on the continents of North and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia. Morton measured the cranial volume of the skulls (a good measure of the brain size of the person when alive) and published his results, including the original data. Just as Morton would have expected, Anglo-Saxons had the highest average (92 cubic inches), followed by Asians in the middle and blacks on the bottom (83 cu in). When Gould re-analyzed Morton’s data he found biases built into the specimens used for each racial group. For example, the aboriginal sample was heavily represented by skulls from Peruvian people who are short. Similarly, the black sample included proportionally more women than the Caucasian. Smaller bodies means smaller brain mass—it has nothing to do with intelligence, and should have been corrected (but wasn’t). As Gould noted, this was done “without conscious motivation; expectation is a powerful guide to action.”
In medicine today, researchers use the double-blind randomized clinical trial to eliminate such subjective biases from influencing the results. Double-blind means that both the study subjects and those providing the treatment do not know whether any particular patient is receiving the actual medicine or a sham control. Blinding the patients by randomization helps correct for the placebo effect—people want to be cured or get some relief from illness or pain and will respond just to the soothing voice of a caregiver or to a sugar pill (especially if brightly colored!). Blinding the caregiver prevents unconscious cues being given to the patient that would allow the latter to guess that they are receiving real treatment rather than the control.
Medical Quackery
It is true that what is now called science-based medicine is rather a recent innovation. Voltaire is credited with the aphorism, “Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of which they know nothing.” In 1891, the writer and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes acidly noted that if most of the drugs then in use were loaded on a ship and if it “could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes.”
Times do change, and procedures such as MRI or CT scans which are routine today would have seemed like science fiction a generation or two ago. As advances have been made in physics and chemistry, and especially molecular biology, they have dramatically affected the practice of medicine. Yet the popularity of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) is great and rising. Many people can’t afford regular medical care, and patients will grasp at anything that promises a cure. I.e., CAM is a social problem.
What is alternative medicine? There are lots of definitions, but at bottom it is the same division that separates science from non-science. Real medicine is based on substances or procedures whose efficacy can be explained by purely natural causes. All the rest depends on something non-physical, be it divine intervention (prayer healing) or the invocation of some mysterious “energy” or “life force” outside the laws of physics. Medicine is real and the rest is faith-based, not unlike religion, though at times without the guy in the sky.
Buzzwords like “energy” and “life force,” which are at the heart of all alternative medicine nostrums, are really nothing but a cover for the idea of “vitalism”—i.e., that there is something unique about living systems. This was scientific mainstream until the 1820s when German chemist Friedrich Wöhler accidentally synthesized urea from inorganic compounds. This was the first time a molecule previously only obtained from living organisms had been created in the laboratory, and it marked the birth of organic chemistry. Actually the division of chemistry into organic and inorganic is itself a vestige of the vitalist era. The laws governing chemical reactions are the same.
Edzard Ernst, an MD and also practitioner of CAM, and Simon Singh, a British science journalist, have written a useful book, Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine. If anything the authors bend over backwards to give CAM the widest latitude to show proof of some shred of benefit beyond the placebo effect. And what is the conclusion? Acupuncture and homeopathy: useless; chiropractic: maybe you could try it but only for lower back pain, though a physical therapist would be just as good, and cheaper; herbal medicines: a few have a mildly positive effect, but in most cases conventional drugs work as well or better.
So why is CAM still around? Here are 33.9 billion reasons: that is the number of dollars Americans spent out-of-pocket on alternative medicines in 2007, according to the National Institute of Health’s alternative medicine center. This does not even include charges to insurance. Out of that, about $15 billion went for supplements—that’s about one third of the out-of-pocket expenses for real prescription drugs. One possible reason is the odd belief that nature is this kind, gentle, holistic entity that has only your best interests at heart. This shows a profound ignorance of the natural world. I would suggest that those so believing pick up a good book on human parasitology, preferably with good color pictures!
Chiropractic Pseudoscience
I’ll pick on chiropractic. These guys not only fleece you but can cause great damage in the process. Chiropractic started in the 1890s when one Daniel David Palmer came up with the idea that diseases were caused by misalignments of the vertebrae that interfered with the flow of “innate intelligence” from the nervous system to the organs. These disruptions were called subluxations. Was this on the basis of systematic investigations of any kind? No. Palmer’s epiphany came one day when he claimed to have cured a person with hearing problems by adjusting his spine. One slight problem is that the cranial nerves controlling hearing and balance go directly from the lower brain to the middle ear—they do not emanate from the spinal cord at all. As for the “innate intelligence,” not a shred of physical proof has ever been given for its existence.
Chiropractors perform what they call manipulation to cure the subluxations in the vertebral column. This is a rapid acceleration thrust on the bone which moves it just past the point where muscles could conceivably move it on their own, but short of bone and tissue damage. Well, that’s the theory. For my book, it sounds more like what happens to your spine in an automobile accident. When applied to the cervical vertebrae—the seven vertebrae of the spinal column in your neck—the results can be vertebral arterial dissection. This can obstruct blood flow to the brain or throw a clot that leads to a stroke.
Chiropractors, like all purveyors of “alternative medicine,” like to portray themselves as little Davids struggling against the Goliaths of Big Pharma and the American Medical Association. But chiropractors pull in almost $4 billion a year—it’s a business, just like Big Pharma. Chiropractor Web sites are full of handy tips on “practice building”—roping in more patients, preferably for weekly or biweekly office visits. Even if you are well, they want you to get an adjustment—like a tune-up, I guess. Even cars only need an oil change every 6,000 miles, not every week!
Religious Obscurantism
Now we come to the granddaddy of all quackery: religion. I’m going to concentrate on the Christian fundamentalists, in particular the very political anti-science, anti-evolution movement now masquerading as Intelligent Design (ID). All three of the so-called Abrahamic faiths share a common creation myth. God created everything, and all the animals and plants have come from that creation pretty much unchanged. Some of the anti-evolution types allow for a bit of change within a species, but no speciation. So, it was no surprise that Darwin’s book was met with such hostility by the believers of theism: God was removed as the causative agent for the wonderful variety of living things, and man was an animal like the rest and descended from primate ancestors. And what the yahoos couldn’t stomach at all was Darwin’s speculation—now backed by overwhelming evidence—that the human ancestor had come out of Africa.
Intelligent Design is a relatively recent sprout on the Christian bush. Actually, it is an example of rapid speciation into a new environment. Prior to 1987, the creationists were touting “creation science” and demanding that it be taught in the public schools alongside evolution. That got shot down by a series of court decisions, starting with an Arkansas case in 1982, and then in the Supreme Court in 1987. So rather quickly—no evolution here!—“creation science” transformed itself into “intelligent design.”
Intelligent Design pretends that it is scientific, but its basic premises are very wrong and it is important to see why. Premise one is “irreducible complexity”—there exist things in nature like the eye, or with a nod to nanotech, cellular assemblages such as the bacterial flagellar motor. According to ID, such things have to be taken as a whole, with every part essential to function—remove one piece and it is non-functional. Supposedly there is no step-by-step way of building these structures, i.e., no Darwinian method. Since they are so complex, they couldn’t have come about by chance and therefore had to have been created by a Designer. They’re careful not to say God, but it’s pretty clear they are not referring to the Tooth Fairy.
In the Origin of Species, Darwin anticipated such problems, including the example of the vertebrate eye, and the creationists love to quote his sentence: “To suppose that the eye…could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.” But they never mention his answer in the very next sentence of the passage: “If any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.” Think about it: would you rather have blurred vision, or be totally blind? Even an imperfect eye gives an organism a selective advantage compared with no sight at all.
The second premise is the Anthropic Principle. There is such vastness to the universe. There is the beautiful, intricate motion of the planets around the Sun, moons around the planets, of the stars and the galaxies—they now agree with Copernicus and Galileo—and here is Earth, just right for living things to exist on. If the Earth were closer to the Sun it would be too hot—look at Venus. Further away and it would be too cold. It looks like the whole universe was created or fine-tuned with human life in mind, so to speak. Hence, there must have been a Creator. Sir John Polkinghorne, a respected British physicist and also a Christian minister, stated: “The fundamental parameters of the universe are such as to permit the creation of observers within it.”
Sounds profound, right? But physicist Robert L. Park translated Polkinghorne into something less pretentious, more along the lines of what Yogi Berra might have said: “If things were different, things would not be the way things are.” There is another amusing argument put forward by the late author Douglas Adams, who, among other things, wrote the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and was a script editor for the famous British series Doctor Who in 1979. He compared the Anthropic Principle to a “puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’”
Of course the whole geological record shows that the Earth is much older than 6,000 years, and that thousands of species have come and gone over the ages. Creationists used to wail on about the lack of transitional forms for whales—how could a terrestrial mammal smoothly evolve into one now at home only in the oceans? Well, in the last 15 or so years, a whole string of fossils have been discovered showing in beautiful detail all those “missing forms.” In any case, the creationists aren’t about to let facts get in the way. Henry Morris, founder of the modern creationist movement, stated: “No geological difficulties, real or imagined, can be allowed to take precedence over the clear statements and necessary inferences of Scripture.”
While the creationists may seem fringe oddballs (comedian Lewis Black described them as the people who are “watching The Flintstones as if it were a documentary”), they are very political and they have supporters with deep pockets. In 1998, the Discovery Institute, a major think tank for creationism/ID, produced an internal memo called the “Wedge Document.” It was called that because they considered their attack on Darwin and evolution as the “thin edge of the wedge” for their broader “Governing Goals”: “to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies” and “to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.”
Science and Communist Liberation
Human evolution happened in such a way that no hominid ancestor survived; it could have been otherwise but wasn’t. All humans are genetically members of the same species and there is no biological basis for the separation into races. It should be noted that Darwin was a staunch abolitionist, and during the U.S. Civil War hoped that the North would put emancipation on its banner and eliminate slavery no matter the cost in blood. As we wrote in “Hail Charles Darwin!” (WV No. 854, 16 September 2005):
“America’s other peculiarity among advanced capitalist countries is its deeply religious character. Nowhere else—not even in Italy where the Vatican still heavily influences civil society—is there such refractory religiosity and visceral hostility to the long-established facts of Darwinian natural selection as the motor force of evolution. Why? The absence of even a mass reformist workers party that expresses in even a blurry way that working people have needs and interests counterposed to those of their exploiters is a large part of the explanation for political backwardness in the U.S. But like everything else in this country, it also boils down to the central intersection of race and class. Religion in the U.S. supplies an ideology that can seemingly harmonize conflicting class interests while keeping this society with two races firmly ordered: capital above labor and white above black.”
Liberals worry about the denigration of science and rationalism—how is the country to maintain a competitive position in the world if the next generation knows more about the Book of Numbers than about algebra? Marxists are materialists and take it as a given that science and religion are incompatible.
Here we come to the fundamental difference between Marxists and liberals. At bottom, liberals accept the existence of the capitalist order and their most radical demand is for reforms. Their high point was the French Revolution—liberty, fraternity, equality. All abstract ideals, behind which lurk the sanctity of private property and the class rule of the bourgeoisie. Liberals, it is true, will recognize the class struggle, but what they reject is that the proletariat should actually seize state power from the bourgeoisie.
The “liberty” so beloved by a capitalist is his liberty to make a profit, which necessarily comes through the exploitation of the workers he employs. Such exploitation is built into the capitalist system, a system that is at bottom irrational. Economic competition inevitably leads to military competition, and imperialist war. Imperialism can’t be reformed—the whole system of private property has to be overthrown. The goal of the Marxists is the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which on a global scale can lay the basis for a classless communist society.
Science can open up as yet undreamt possibilities for humanity. But under capitalism today, vast resources devoted to research are for military purposes. The American ruling class was the first to own and so far the only one to use nuclear weapons, and the warheads in the U.S. arsenal are now each 20 or more times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Even a “limited” nuclear war could have catastrophic consequences, beyond the initial effects of the explosions. Climactic changes could wreak havoc on key agricultural areas, putting the survival of the human species at risk.
The imperialists have to be removed from power and disarmed by the workers before the rulers kill us all. That will require building a revolutionary workers party, independent of all the parties of capital, including the Democrats. Obama has continued to carry on all the essential policies of the administrations before him. That is actually why the bourgeoisie put him in power. The whole racist, murderous edifice of American imperialism has to be smashed by the multiracial working class, organized into democratically elected councils and led by its Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party.
As this talk has been in defense of Marxism and science, it is worth noting Marx’s words at the end of the preface to the first German edition of Capital: “The present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing.” This dialectical mode of thought inspired Lenin, Trotsky and the whole Bolshevik Party that made the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. It remained a cornerstone of Trotsky’s thinking until the day he died.
In The Prophet Unarmed (1959) Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher cites a revealing sample of Trotsky’s vision of a future society, after capitalism’s demise: “The drudgery of feeding and bringing up children…will be lifted from the individual family by social initiative…. Woman will at last emerge from semi-slavery…. Socio-educational experiments…will evolve with a now inconceivable elan. The communist way of life will not grow up blindly like coral reefs in the sea. It will be built consciously. It will be checked by critical thought. It will be directed and corrected…. No sooner will one crust begin to form itself on the human existence than it will burst under the pressure of new inventions and achievements.”
The men and women of the future will no longer need religion, what Marx described as solace, the “opium of the people.” And the key to unlock human potential will be science, not superstition.
Showing posts with label MARXISM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MARXISM. Show all posts
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Monday, January 10, 2011
*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor Early German Communist Party Leaderkarl Korsch
Markin comment:
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
********
Karl Korsch 1921
Evolution of the Problem of the Political Workers Councils in Germany
First Published: in Neue Zeitung fur Mittelhüringen, Vol.3, March 1921.
Source: the Collective Action Network Website.
Marked up: by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
I
The counterrevolutionary character of political developments in Germany since November 9, 1918 is most clearly demonstrated by the history of the political workers councils. Of those revolutionary councils of workers and soldiers which in November 1918 were generally recognized as platforms of sovereignty, and which exercised the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Reich, the state governments, the municipalities and the army, all that remained in November 1919 was a meager handful of “local workers councils”, deprived of power and the means to exercise it, which were still tolerated – that is the word – as burdensome remains of a revolutionary era already viewed as the “past”, but which in certain regions are still conceded some respect. In this miserable sort of existence the local workers councils survived, and occasionally they still fulfill a certain function in some small towns, whenever a conflict breaks out between the municipality’s administrative organs and the local proletariat. But there have been no authentic political councils among us in the revolutionary sense of the term. It is true that the legal “Enterprise Councils” and those examples that still remain of the institutions formed for various purposes and organized according to the Council principle (Shop Stewards and factory delegates, Council Associations and Federations, Councils of the Unemployed, Councils of Housewives, etc.) still incidentally exercise a political function, just like the trade unions; in their innermost essence, however, they are only economic councils and sometimes they are not even councils. And as for the revolutionary “Soldiers Councils”, it is true that, as was verified in a recent court case, to everyone’s surprise, they have not yet been formally abolished or declared illegal. In practice, however, it has naturally been a long time since soldiers’ councils existed.
Thus, a history of the political workers councils as authentic institutions in Germany ends in late 1919. From then on one can only trace the development of the problem of the political workers councils in the form of the various positions on the question of the political workers councils taken by the diverse political orientations over the course of time, and their vicissitudes.
If we look back on the general development of the political councils in Germany, we can state that, in the chapter on the causes of the rapid decline and disintegration of the Council institutions, together with the well-known main causes, which are naturally found in the domain of general economic and political developments, other concomitant causes of an ideological kind must be mentioned as having played a role: in the brief period of time when the real preconditions for laying the foundations for and building a solid proletarian dictatorship existed in Germany, the opportunity was necessarily wasted due to the fact that, among broad swaths of the revolutionary proletariat, even in its own functioning “Councils”, there was an almost total lack of real understanding concerning the organizational bases of a revolutionary Council System and the essential tasks which it must perform.
1.The most important organizational failing consisted in the fact that, in most cases, the political Councils were not elected by the proletarians themselves organized by factories and trades, as they should have been, but by the socialist parties; and simultaneously, almost on the same day, a “Workers Council” was formed in every town and city in Germany (even the smallest peasant communities of a totally non-proletarian character elected their “Workers Councils” through a kind of political mimicry ... in order to protect their local interests against the interference of the neighboring urban “Workers Councils”). Nevertheless, if afterwards the will to create authentic councils were to have been clearly asserted and seriously invigorated, this shortcoming could very well have been rectified over the following months. But this happened practically nowhere. It is true that some discredited members were “deposed” and that others, deceived romantics of the revolution, withdrew on their own initiative; the great majority of the members of the political workers Councils, however, “stuck” to their posts until, more or less by the force of circumstances, the whole splendor of the Councils fell to earth.
2.The extremely grave consequence which resulted from this ignorance of the tasks of the political councils consisted in the fact that the “sovereign” Councils were in many if not most cases content with a very ineffective “control”, when in reality they should have demanded full powers in the legislative, executive and judicial fields. Due to this self-limitation, not only was the preparation of the later repression and elimination of the Councils by the new organs of the democratically-constituted State power made possible, but, from the very beginning, a good part of the pre-revolutionary powers and laws were left completely intact. In this way, after a brief waiting period, the pre-revolutionary tribunals and the old bureaucracy as well as even a good number of legislative organs of the pre-revolutionary period were able to conduct their old activities without too much interference. Only the “Executive Committee” of the Greater Berlin region (Berlin and its environs) tried, as long as it was capable of doing so, to make a clean break with the old powers; it demanded full legislative and regulatory powers, and allowed only the six “Peoples Delegates” nominated by the workers and soldiers committees of Greater Berlin to form the “Executive”.
On the other hand, most of the urban and rural local communal councils limited themselves to the exercise of mere control functions, even with regard to State and municipal “legislative” bodies. Thus, not only were the organs of the local legislative branch (elected in Prussia, and elsewhere as well, in accordance with the Three Estates voting law!) and the legislative organs of the Reich and all the larger states and most (but not all!) of the smaller ones not abolished, but they were even granted legal recognition; precisely the same thing had previously taken place with respect to the executive organs of the Reich, the states and the municipalities (regional Councils, presidents, etc.), with only purely sporadic dismissals taking place and the prevailing attitude being restricted to a certain “control” of their activities, becoming less effective with each passing day; and, in precisely the same way, a complete distrust towards “independent jurisdiction” was manifest, and the controlling organs only declared they were satisfied when, during the first period, this jurisdiction gave no signs of life. Together with this great lack of clarity with respect to Council power on the part of the Councils’ own local representatives, a great deal of the fault with regard to these sins of omission lies with the “Council of Peoples Commissars”, which was hostile to the Councils; and even the “Executive Committee” of Greater Berlin, later so revolutionary, was not totally blameless either, since on November 11, 1918 it promulgated an appeal whose first sentence reads: “All the communal authorities of the various Länder, of the entire Reich, and of the army are to continue in their activities.” Such was the lack of clarity which, during the first period immediately following the November events, prevailed with respect to the essential tasks of the Council dictatorship, even among the most renowned defenders of the revolutionary idea of the Councils in Germany.
3.Another point where understanding was lacking regarding the tasks of the political Councils and which also had fatal consequences in the subsequent period, consisted in the fact that no one knew how to distinguish the tasks of the political Councils from those of the economic Councils, a distinction which is totally necessary in the period of transition from a capitalist order to a socialist order of society. Many months after November the greatest lack of clarity continued to persist concerning this distinction, which enabled the government, the bourgeoisie, the SPD, the trade unions and other open or disguised enemies of the Council System to manipulate the Workers Councils by successively confronting them with their economic and political tasks (thus, for example, for a certain period at the beginning of 1919, some leading right wing members of the socialist party demanded that the Councils be restricted to “economic” tasks, while on the other hand the leaders of the right wing socialist trade unions sought to restrict the Councils to “political” tasks). This entire trend culminated in Article 165 of the new Reich Constitution, which, together with the workers councils restricted to purely economic tasks (enterprise councils, territorial workers councils, Reich workers councils), also envisioned the creation of various economic councils (territorial economic Councils, Economic Council of the Reich) which would authorize and promote “far-reaching socio-political legislative proposals” and which would also be granted certain “jurisdictions of administration and control”. As a result, in these provisions of the Reich Constitution not only did the whole economic system of the councils find written expression, but so too did the whole political system of the Councils which, in post-revolutionary Germany, became a legal institution.
II
If we now follow the vicissitudes of political power in particular, we can distinguish: 1) the period of the Councils properly speaking, from November 1918 until the First Congress of the Councils on December 16, 1918. This period of provisional Council rule was followed, after the elections for the National Assembly on January 18, 1919 and for the executive of the National Assembly on February 6, 1919 in Weimar, by 2) the period of struggle between the democratic principle and the Council principle. This period came to a conclusion with the definitive government challenge to the economic system of the Councils, under the pressure of the great general strike in the Rhineland, Westphalia, central Germany and Greater Berlin at the end of February and the beginning of March 1919. Then came 3) the period of the extinction of the remains of the political institutions of the Councils, a period which lasted until the end of 1919 (the Second Congress of the Councils was held on April 8, 1919!); and 4) the survival of the political idea of the Councils, in other forms, to the present.
These four stages of the political evolution of the Councils can be more fully characterized as follows:
During the first period, both the extreme right as well as the center, the SPD and the USPD right wing, pressed fervently and anxiously for the National Assembly. But at the same time the idea of the Councils was surging: extensive circles reaching even to the highest layers of the intelligentsia and wealth, spoke, wrote and dreamed of the Council principle as a supreme organic principle, in opposition to the mechanical procedure of democracy, with its slip-of-paper voting. This went so far as to lead to the founding of “Humanist Workers Councils” and things of that sort. The sovereignty of the Councils was then universally recognized as a provisional condition that would last until the constitution of a National Assembly.
In terms of institutions, during this period there were:
1.the Council of People’s Commissars, elected by the Workers and Soldiers Councils of Greater Berlin, which comprised the Executive, and later also exercised the Legislative power;
2.the Executive Committee of Greater Berlin as a municipal Workers Council;
3.territorial Executive Workers Councils in all the population centers of each state;
4.local Workers Councils; and
5.rural and property-owners councils, in all rural and urban communities.
In addition to the above:
a.“Workers Councils” in every large factory or industrial complex; in the big cities these met in plenary assemblies that elected their Executive Committees and imposed upon the latter strict mandates and resolutions;
b.“Soldiers Councils” in every military detachment, organized and coordinated by company, battalion, etc. These were represented at the First Congress of Councils, where they passionately demanded the National Assembly and where they won recognition of the so-called “Hamburg Seven Points” concerning military command. [1] Later, at the beginning of March 1919, they also held their own “General Reich Congress of Soldiers Councils” in Berlin. Shortly thereafter they quickly disappeared almost without a trace, in step with the dissolution of the remains of the old army.
The First Congress of Councils in 1918 (which Däumig called a “suicide club”) almost completely relinquished political power. It voted for elections to a National Assembly slated for January 19, 1919; until that date it handed over Executive and Legislative powers to the Council of People’s Commissars, and elected a “Central Council” whose powers were limited to minor jurisdictions with nearly non-existent powers of control, after the fashion of the old central German Councils, and in which neither the communists nor the independents were represented (which consequently also led to the resignation of the three USPD people’s commissars). This Central Council (composed of members of the SPD, with Cohen-Reuss as its president) was dragging out its colorless and insipid existence – as we immediately expected – until the end of 1919 and the beginning of 1920. It only yielded its powers over the Reich to the National Assembly which met at the beginning of February, and handed over its powers in Prussia to the National Assembly of Prussia which convened in mid-March, but it continued to exist; it still convoked the Second Congress of Councils, but retreated whenever the least insinuation of government power was brought up, and proceeded on its own initiative to enact a restriction of the Councils, limiting their tasks to purely economic affairs through the creation of community-labor “chambers of labor” (which were later rejected by the general assembly of the SPD and by the National Assembly of Weimar and which today, however, have undergone something of a resurrection in the current government proposals concerning the constitution of higher economic Councils, territorial economic Councils and a Reich economic Council). Along with this Central Council, the revolutionary “Executive Committee” of Greater Berlin still existed (composed of members of the SPD, the USPD, the KPD and the democratic parties; and later also the USP and KPD with Däumig, Müller, etc., as presidents) more or less illegally, based on the plenary assembly of the Workers and Soldiers Councils of Greater Berlin, until it was violently expelled by Noske’s troops on November 6, 1919 from the offices it had originally been assigned in a government building; then it moved, following a brief period of complete illegality, to Münzstrasse, where it continued to conduct business as a “Council Central”, and today is the “VKPD Trade Union Central”.
III
On January 11, 1919, Noske entered Berlin. The 19th, elections for the National Assembly! A bourgeois majority! Nonetheless, the great general strike movements of February and March came to have great political significance for both the socialization question as well as the Councils. Throughout this period the political newspapers were filled with the most violent polemics concerning possible points of agreement between “the Council System and the parliamentary-democratic system”. Some elements (the majority of the USPD, some members of the SPD and some democrats) wanted to “find a place for the Councils in the constitution”, that is, to introduce, alongside the democratic parliament (as a chamber of consumers), a chamber of producers in accordance with the Council principle (a chamber of labor); others, individually (the Hamburg communist Dr. Laufenberg, for example), wanted to do the opposite, to find a place for parliament, as representative of bourgeois interests, in the Council System; and there were also other diverse positions between these two outlooks (some of which are still making the rounds today among numerous people, disappearing and reappearing when the time is ripe). The only consistent supporters of the political system of the Councils as a form of the rule of the dictatorship of the proletariat were the recently created KPD and the sections of the USPD grouped around Däumig and his journal Der Arbeiterrat (The Workers Council). But even the supporters of the revolutionary vocation of the Councils ended up making many concessions in practice, for the purpose of staying alive as communal Workers Councils and to continue to receive public subsidies. Such communal Workers Councils had nothing to do with the revolutionary idea of the Councils, and instead served to discredit it. These “Political Workers Councils” no longer carried out any “illegal” planned projects on a large scale; in short, they passed from their first stage as spokesmen of revolutionary demands, when the momentary political situation seemed favorable, to sink below the surface again as the revolutionary barometer fell. With respect to the revolution, their practical activity was futile enough; they usually played the role of intermediary between the authorities and the public, and organized the supply of food, coal, housing and expropriations and even the formation of civil guards, as auxiliary organs. The warnings of the leaders of the Council Centrals, calling for an end to this fruitless “positive” work for the revolution, and for a strict focus on revolutionary agitation and the preparation of revolutionary actions, for most part had no significant impact of any kind.
The Second Council Congress, held on April 8, 1919, could not affect the course of this development, and in fact did not try to do so, given that the revisionist, majority-socialist element, which was basically hostile to the Councils, now openly supported other arrangements. It is true that the Central Council, which had already in January tried to declare the communal Workers Councils extinct after the introduction of universal suffrage, was made responsible for fighting to preserve the communal Workers Councils as control offices by a Congress resolution. But these last remains of political Councils lost their miserable prerogatives almost everywhere during the course of the year; in most cases their end was imposed by the fact that they lost their public subsidies. And on this reef of the financial question the feeble attempt by the Central Council, in October 1919, to convoke elections for a Third Council Congress also came to grief.
From that moment on, the political movement of the Councils was totally transformed into an economic movement of the Councils, above all in the struggle over the Enterprise Councils. At the same time, the supporters of the “pure council movement” (the USPD left) continued to attempt to oppose the isolated system of enterprise councils created by legislation, with a “revolutionary Council organization” (that is, a unity organically articulated by industrial sectors and economic regions, of Councils and regional offices which, regardless of party or trade union affiliation, were to be conceived solely in their role as revolutionary Councils), and to transfigure this Council organization so that it should be the bearer of not just the economic idea but also the political idea of the Councils. They were supposed to become the specific organization of the class of the revolutionary proletariat, at both the economic and the political levels. But this attempt, in which the communist party quickly ceased to participate, only had a temporary practical impact in certain industrial centers (Greater Berlin, central Germany, Rhineland-Westphalia), and can today be judged as a failure. Other attempts occasionally undertaken in situations judged to be opportune by the KPD and groups further to the left, for the purpose of getting the working class, “over the heads of the party and trade union leaders”, to demand new elections to revolutionary political Workers Councils, also failed. In Germany today there is no longer an “independent Council movement”. The political Councils have completely disappeared, the economic Councils exist only as legal representative bodies of the workers (Enterprise Councils), which are under the influence of the trade unions, are usually elected along party lines, and often also congeal into fractions based on party membership. Parliamentarism, the party and the trade union system have thus obtained, externally, a total victory over the revolutionary “Council System”, and it is only underground where, in the consciousness of the suffering masses, the embers of the idea of the revolutionary Council System continue to smolder, together with the idea of the revolution, in an insoluble unity. On the day of revolutionary action this idea will re-arise like the Phoenix from the ashes.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note
1. The “Hamburg Points” stipulated that the power of command over the army and the navy be transferred to the Council of People’s Commissars under the control of the Central Council; that the symbols of rank be abolished; that the carrying of arms off-duty be prohibited; that the responsibility for the troops’ loyalty be transferred to the Soldiers Council; that military commanders be elected; that the existing army be abolished; and that a people’s militia be formed as soon as possible. The Congress ratified these points. (Author’s note)
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
********
Karl Korsch 1921
Evolution of the Problem of the Political Workers Councils in Germany
First Published: in Neue Zeitung fur Mittelhüringen, Vol.3, March 1921.
Source: the Collective Action Network Website.
Marked up: by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
I
The counterrevolutionary character of political developments in Germany since November 9, 1918 is most clearly demonstrated by the history of the political workers councils. Of those revolutionary councils of workers and soldiers which in November 1918 were generally recognized as platforms of sovereignty, and which exercised the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Reich, the state governments, the municipalities and the army, all that remained in November 1919 was a meager handful of “local workers councils”, deprived of power and the means to exercise it, which were still tolerated – that is the word – as burdensome remains of a revolutionary era already viewed as the “past”, but which in certain regions are still conceded some respect. In this miserable sort of existence the local workers councils survived, and occasionally they still fulfill a certain function in some small towns, whenever a conflict breaks out between the municipality’s administrative organs and the local proletariat. But there have been no authentic political councils among us in the revolutionary sense of the term. It is true that the legal “Enterprise Councils” and those examples that still remain of the institutions formed for various purposes and organized according to the Council principle (Shop Stewards and factory delegates, Council Associations and Federations, Councils of the Unemployed, Councils of Housewives, etc.) still incidentally exercise a political function, just like the trade unions; in their innermost essence, however, they are only economic councils and sometimes they are not even councils. And as for the revolutionary “Soldiers Councils”, it is true that, as was verified in a recent court case, to everyone’s surprise, they have not yet been formally abolished or declared illegal. In practice, however, it has naturally been a long time since soldiers’ councils existed.
Thus, a history of the political workers councils as authentic institutions in Germany ends in late 1919. From then on one can only trace the development of the problem of the political workers councils in the form of the various positions on the question of the political workers councils taken by the diverse political orientations over the course of time, and their vicissitudes.
If we look back on the general development of the political councils in Germany, we can state that, in the chapter on the causes of the rapid decline and disintegration of the Council institutions, together with the well-known main causes, which are naturally found in the domain of general economic and political developments, other concomitant causes of an ideological kind must be mentioned as having played a role: in the brief period of time when the real preconditions for laying the foundations for and building a solid proletarian dictatorship existed in Germany, the opportunity was necessarily wasted due to the fact that, among broad swaths of the revolutionary proletariat, even in its own functioning “Councils”, there was an almost total lack of real understanding concerning the organizational bases of a revolutionary Council System and the essential tasks which it must perform.
1.The most important organizational failing consisted in the fact that, in most cases, the political Councils were not elected by the proletarians themselves organized by factories and trades, as they should have been, but by the socialist parties; and simultaneously, almost on the same day, a “Workers Council” was formed in every town and city in Germany (even the smallest peasant communities of a totally non-proletarian character elected their “Workers Councils” through a kind of political mimicry ... in order to protect their local interests against the interference of the neighboring urban “Workers Councils”). Nevertheless, if afterwards the will to create authentic councils were to have been clearly asserted and seriously invigorated, this shortcoming could very well have been rectified over the following months. But this happened practically nowhere. It is true that some discredited members were “deposed” and that others, deceived romantics of the revolution, withdrew on their own initiative; the great majority of the members of the political workers Councils, however, “stuck” to their posts until, more or less by the force of circumstances, the whole splendor of the Councils fell to earth.
2.The extremely grave consequence which resulted from this ignorance of the tasks of the political councils consisted in the fact that the “sovereign” Councils were in many if not most cases content with a very ineffective “control”, when in reality they should have demanded full powers in the legislative, executive and judicial fields. Due to this self-limitation, not only was the preparation of the later repression and elimination of the Councils by the new organs of the democratically-constituted State power made possible, but, from the very beginning, a good part of the pre-revolutionary powers and laws were left completely intact. In this way, after a brief waiting period, the pre-revolutionary tribunals and the old bureaucracy as well as even a good number of legislative organs of the pre-revolutionary period were able to conduct their old activities without too much interference. Only the “Executive Committee” of the Greater Berlin region (Berlin and its environs) tried, as long as it was capable of doing so, to make a clean break with the old powers; it demanded full legislative and regulatory powers, and allowed only the six “Peoples Delegates” nominated by the workers and soldiers committees of Greater Berlin to form the “Executive”.
On the other hand, most of the urban and rural local communal councils limited themselves to the exercise of mere control functions, even with regard to State and municipal “legislative” bodies. Thus, not only were the organs of the local legislative branch (elected in Prussia, and elsewhere as well, in accordance with the Three Estates voting law!) and the legislative organs of the Reich and all the larger states and most (but not all!) of the smaller ones not abolished, but they were even granted legal recognition; precisely the same thing had previously taken place with respect to the executive organs of the Reich, the states and the municipalities (regional Councils, presidents, etc.), with only purely sporadic dismissals taking place and the prevailing attitude being restricted to a certain “control” of their activities, becoming less effective with each passing day; and, in precisely the same way, a complete distrust towards “independent jurisdiction” was manifest, and the controlling organs only declared they were satisfied when, during the first period, this jurisdiction gave no signs of life. Together with this great lack of clarity with respect to Council power on the part of the Councils’ own local representatives, a great deal of the fault with regard to these sins of omission lies with the “Council of Peoples Commissars”, which was hostile to the Councils; and even the “Executive Committee” of Greater Berlin, later so revolutionary, was not totally blameless either, since on November 11, 1918 it promulgated an appeal whose first sentence reads: “All the communal authorities of the various Länder, of the entire Reich, and of the army are to continue in their activities.” Such was the lack of clarity which, during the first period immediately following the November events, prevailed with respect to the essential tasks of the Council dictatorship, even among the most renowned defenders of the revolutionary idea of the Councils in Germany.
3.Another point where understanding was lacking regarding the tasks of the political Councils and which also had fatal consequences in the subsequent period, consisted in the fact that no one knew how to distinguish the tasks of the political Councils from those of the economic Councils, a distinction which is totally necessary in the period of transition from a capitalist order to a socialist order of society. Many months after November the greatest lack of clarity continued to persist concerning this distinction, which enabled the government, the bourgeoisie, the SPD, the trade unions and other open or disguised enemies of the Council System to manipulate the Workers Councils by successively confronting them with their economic and political tasks (thus, for example, for a certain period at the beginning of 1919, some leading right wing members of the socialist party demanded that the Councils be restricted to “economic” tasks, while on the other hand the leaders of the right wing socialist trade unions sought to restrict the Councils to “political” tasks). This entire trend culminated in Article 165 of the new Reich Constitution, which, together with the workers councils restricted to purely economic tasks (enterprise councils, territorial workers councils, Reich workers councils), also envisioned the creation of various economic councils (territorial economic Councils, Economic Council of the Reich) which would authorize and promote “far-reaching socio-political legislative proposals” and which would also be granted certain “jurisdictions of administration and control”. As a result, in these provisions of the Reich Constitution not only did the whole economic system of the councils find written expression, but so too did the whole political system of the Councils which, in post-revolutionary Germany, became a legal institution.
II
If we now follow the vicissitudes of political power in particular, we can distinguish: 1) the period of the Councils properly speaking, from November 1918 until the First Congress of the Councils on December 16, 1918. This period of provisional Council rule was followed, after the elections for the National Assembly on January 18, 1919 and for the executive of the National Assembly on February 6, 1919 in Weimar, by 2) the period of struggle between the democratic principle and the Council principle. This period came to a conclusion with the definitive government challenge to the economic system of the Councils, under the pressure of the great general strike in the Rhineland, Westphalia, central Germany and Greater Berlin at the end of February and the beginning of March 1919. Then came 3) the period of the extinction of the remains of the political institutions of the Councils, a period which lasted until the end of 1919 (the Second Congress of the Councils was held on April 8, 1919!); and 4) the survival of the political idea of the Councils, in other forms, to the present.
These four stages of the political evolution of the Councils can be more fully characterized as follows:
During the first period, both the extreme right as well as the center, the SPD and the USPD right wing, pressed fervently and anxiously for the National Assembly. But at the same time the idea of the Councils was surging: extensive circles reaching even to the highest layers of the intelligentsia and wealth, spoke, wrote and dreamed of the Council principle as a supreme organic principle, in opposition to the mechanical procedure of democracy, with its slip-of-paper voting. This went so far as to lead to the founding of “Humanist Workers Councils” and things of that sort. The sovereignty of the Councils was then universally recognized as a provisional condition that would last until the constitution of a National Assembly.
In terms of institutions, during this period there were:
1.the Council of People’s Commissars, elected by the Workers and Soldiers Councils of Greater Berlin, which comprised the Executive, and later also exercised the Legislative power;
2.the Executive Committee of Greater Berlin as a municipal Workers Council;
3.territorial Executive Workers Councils in all the population centers of each state;
4.local Workers Councils; and
5.rural and property-owners councils, in all rural and urban communities.
In addition to the above:
a.“Workers Councils” in every large factory or industrial complex; in the big cities these met in plenary assemblies that elected their Executive Committees and imposed upon the latter strict mandates and resolutions;
b.“Soldiers Councils” in every military detachment, organized and coordinated by company, battalion, etc. These were represented at the First Congress of Councils, where they passionately demanded the National Assembly and where they won recognition of the so-called “Hamburg Seven Points” concerning military command. [1] Later, at the beginning of March 1919, they also held their own “General Reich Congress of Soldiers Councils” in Berlin. Shortly thereafter they quickly disappeared almost without a trace, in step with the dissolution of the remains of the old army.
The First Congress of Councils in 1918 (which Däumig called a “suicide club”) almost completely relinquished political power. It voted for elections to a National Assembly slated for January 19, 1919; until that date it handed over Executive and Legislative powers to the Council of People’s Commissars, and elected a “Central Council” whose powers were limited to minor jurisdictions with nearly non-existent powers of control, after the fashion of the old central German Councils, and in which neither the communists nor the independents were represented (which consequently also led to the resignation of the three USPD people’s commissars). This Central Council (composed of members of the SPD, with Cohen-Reuss as its president) was dragging out its colorless and insipid existence – as we immediately expected – until the end of 1919 and the beginning of 1920. It only yielded its powers over the Reich to the National Assembly which met at the beginning of February, and handed over its powers in Prussia to the National Assembly of Prussia which convened in mid-March, but it continued to exist; it still convoked the Second Congress of Councils, but retreated whenever the least insinuation of government power was brought up, and proceeded on its own initiative to enact a restriction of the Councils, limiting their tasks to purely economic affairs through the creation of community-labor “chambers of labor” (which were later rejected by the general assembly of the SPD and by the National Assembly of Weimar and which today, however, have undergone something of a resurrection in the current government proposals concerning the constitution of higher economic Councils, territorial economic Councils and a Reich economic Council). Along with this Central Council, the revolutionary “Executive Committee” of Greater Berlin still existed (composed of members of the SPD, the USPD, the KPD and the democratic parties; and later also the USP and KPD with Däumig, Müller, etc., as presidents) more or less illegally, based on the plenary assembly of the Workers and Soldiers Councils of Greater Berlin, until it was violently expelled by Noske’s troops on November 6, 1919 from the offices it had originally been assigned in a government building; then it moved, following a brief period of complete illegality, to Münzstrasse, where it continued to conduct business as a “Council Central”, and today is the “VKPD Trade Union Central”.
III
On January 11, 1919, Noske entered Berlin. The 19th, elections for the National Assembly! A bourgeois majority! Nonetheless, the great general strike movements of February and March came to have great political significance for both the socialization question as well as the Councils. Throughout this period the political newspapers were filled with the most violent polemics concerning possible points of agreement between “the Council System and the parliamentary-democratic system”. Some elements (the majority of the USPD, some members of the SPD and some democrats) wanted to “find a place for the Councils in the constitution”, that is, to introduce, alongside the democratic parliament (as a chamber of consumers), a chamber of producers in accordance with the Council principle (a chamber of labor); others, individually (the Hamburg communist Dr. Laufenberg, for example), wanted to do the opposite, to find a place for parliament, as representative of bourgeois interests, in the Council System; and there were also other diverse positions between these two outlooks (some of which are still making the rounds today among numerous people, disappearing and reappearing when the time is ripe). The only consistent supporters of the political system of the Councils as a form of the rule of the dictatorship of the proletariat were the recently created KPD and the sections of the USPD grouped around Däumig and his journal Der Arbeiterrat (The Workers Council). But even the supporters of the revolutionary vocation of the Councils ended up making many concessions in practice, for the purpose of staying alive as communal Workers Councils and to continue to receive public subsidies. Such communal Workers Councils had nothing to do with the revolutionary idea of the Councils, and instead served to discredit it. These “Political Workers Councils” no longer carried out any “illegal” planned projects on a large scale; in short, they passed from their first stage as spokesmen of revolutionary demands, when the momentary political situation seemed favorable, to sink below the surface again as the revolutionary barometer fell. With respect to the revolution, their practical activity was futile enough; they usually played the role of intermediary between the authorities and the public, and organized the supply of food, coal, housing and expropriations and even the formation of civil guards, as auxiliary organs. The warnings of the leaders of the Council Centrals, calling for an end to this fruitless “positive” work for the revolution, and for a strict focus on revolutionary agitation and the preparation of revolutionary actions, for most part had no significant impact of any kind.
The Second Council Congress, held on April 8, 1919, could not affect the course of this development, and in fact did not try to do so, given that the revisionist, majority-socialist element, which was basically hostile to the Councils, now openly supported other arrangements. It is true that the Central Council, which had already in January tried to declare the communal Workers Councils extinct after the introduction of universal suffrage, was made responsible for fighting to preserve the communal Workers Councils as control offices by a Congress resolution. But these last remains of political Councils lost their miserable prerogatives almost everywhere during the course of the year; in most cases their end was imposed by the fact that they lost their public subsidies. And on this reef of the financial question the feeble attempt by the Central Council, in October 1919, to convoke elections for a Third Council Congress also came to grief.
From that moment on, the political movement of the Councils was totally transformed into an economic movement of the Councils, above all in the struggle over the Enterprise Councils. At the same time, the supporters of the “pure council movement” (the USPD left) continued to attempt to oppose the isolated system of enterprise councils created by legislation, with a “revolutionary Council organization” (that is, a unity organically articulated by industrial sectors and economic regions, of Councils and regional offices which, regardless of party or trade union affiliation, were to be conceived solely in their role as revolutionary Councils), and to transfigure this Council organization so that it should be the bearer of not just the economic idea but also the political idea of the Councils. They were supposed to become the specific organization of the class of the revolutionary proletariat, at both the economic and the political levels. But this attempt, in which the communist party quickly ceased to participate, only had a temporary practical impact in certain industrial centers (Greater Berlin, central Germany, Rhineland-Westphalia), and can today be judged as a failure. Other attempts occasionally undertaken in situations judged to be opportune by the KPD and groups further to the left, for the purpose of getting the working class, “over the heads of the party and trade union leaders”, to demand new elections to revolutionary political Workers Councils, also failed. In Germany today there is no longer an “independent Council movement”. The political Councils have completely disappeared, the economic Councils exist only as legal representative bodies of the workers (Enterprise Councils), which are under the influence of the trade unions, are usually elected along party lines, and often also congeal into fractions based on party membership. Parliamentarism, the party and the trade union system have thus obtained, externally, a total victory over the revolutionary “Council System”, and it is only underground where, in the consciousness of the suffering masses, the embers of the idea of the revolutionary Council System continue to smolder, together with the idea of the revolution, in an insoluble unity. On the day of revolutionary action this idea will re-arise like the Phoenix from the ashes.
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Note
1. The “Hamburg Points” stipulated that the power of command over the army and the navy be transferred to the Council of People’s Commissars under the control of the Central Council; that the symbols of rank be abolished; that the carrying of arms off-duty be prohibited; that the responsibility for the troops’ loyalty be transferred to the Soldiers Council; that military commanders be elected; that the existing army be abolished; and that a people’s militia be formed as soon as possible. The Congress ratified these points. (Author’s note)
Sunday, January 09, 2011
*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Honor Early Italian Communist Party Leader Antonio Gramsci
Markin comment:
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
*********
Frank Rosengarten
An Introduction to Gramsci's Life and Thought
Transcribed to www.marxists.org with the kind permission of Frank Rosengarten.
Antonio Gramsci was born on January 22, 1891 in Ales in the province of Cagliari in Sardinia. He was the fourth of seven children born to Francesco Gramsci and Giuseppina Marcias. His relationship with his father was never very close, but he had a strong affection and love for his mother, whose resilience, gift for story-telling and pungent humor made a lasting impression on him. Of his six siblings, Antonio enjoyed a mutual interest in literature with his younger sister Teresina, and seems to have always felt a spiritual kinship with his two brothers, Gennaro, the oldest of the Gramsci children, and Carlo, the youngest. Gennaro's early embrace of socialism contributed significantly to Antonio's political development.
In 1897, Antonio's father was suspended and subsequently arrested and imprisoned for five years for alleged administrative abuses. Shortly thereafter, Giuseppina and her children moved to Ghilarza, where Antonio attended elementary school. Sometime during these years of trial and near poverty, he fell from the arms of a servant, to which his family attributed his hunched back and stunted growth: he was an inch or two short of five feet in height.
At the age of eleven, after completing elementary school, Antonio worked for two years in the tax office in Ghilarza, in order to help his financially strapped family. Because of the five-year absence of Francesco, these were years of bitter struggle. Nevertheless, he continued to study privately and eventually returned to school, where he was judged to be of superior intelligence, as indicated by excellent grades in all subjects.
Antonio continued his education, first in Santu Lussurgiu, about ten miles from Ghilarza, then, after graduating from secondary school, at the Dettori Lyceum in Cagliari, where he shared a room with his brother Gennaro, and where he came into contact for the first time with organized sectors of the working class and with radical and socialist politics. But these were also years of privation, during which Antonio was partially dependent on his father for financial support, which came only rarely. In his letters to his family, he accused his father repeatedly of unpardonable procrastination and neglect. His health deteriorated, and some of the nervous symptoms that were to plague him at a later time were already in evidence.
1911 was an important year in young Gramsci's life. After graduating from the Cagliari lyceum, he applied for and won a scholarship to the University of Turin, an award reserved for needy students from the provinces of the former Kingdom of Sardinia. Among the other young people to compete for this scholarship was Palmiro Togliatti, future general secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and, with Gramsci and several others, among the most capable leaders of that embattled Party. Antonio enrolled in the Faculty of Letters. At the University he met Angelo Tasca and several of the other men with whom he was to share struggles first in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and then, after the split that took place in January 1921, in the PCI.
At the University, despite years of terrible suffering due to inadequate diet, unheated flats, and constant nervous exhaustion, Antonio took a variety of courses, mainly in the humanities but also in the social sciences and in linguistics, to which he was sufficiently attracted to contemplate academic specialization in that subject. Several of his professors, notably Matteo Bartoli, a linguist, and Umberto Cosmo, a Dante scholar, became personal friends.
In 1915, despite great promise as an academic scholar, Gramsci became an active member of the PSI, and began a journalistic career that made him among the most feared critical voices in Italy at that time. His column in the Turin edition of Avanti!, and his theatre reviews were widely read and influential. He regularly spoke at workers' study-circles on various topics, such as the novels of Romain Rolland, for whom he felt a certain affinity, the Paris Commune, the French and Italian revolutions and the writings of Karl Marx. It was at this time, as the war dragged on and as Italian intervention became a bloody reality, Gramsci assumed a somewhat ambivalent stance, although his basic position was that the Italian socialists should use intervention as an occasion to turn Italian national sentiment in a revolutionary rather than a chauvinist direction. It was also at this time, in 1917 and 1918, that he began to see the need for integration of political and economic action with cultural work, which took form as a proletarian cultural association in Turin.
The outbreak of the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917 further stirred his revolutionary ardor, and for the remainder of the war and in the years thereafter Gramsci identified himself closely, although not entirely uncritically, with the methods and aims of the Russian revolutionary leadership and with the cause of socialist transformation throughout the advanced capitalist world.
In the spring of 1919, Gramsci, together with Angelo Tasca, Umberto Terracini and Togliatti, founded L'Ordine Nuovo: Rassegna Settimanale di Cultura Socialista (The New Order: A Weekly Review of Socialist Culture), which became an influential periodical (on a weekly and later on a bi-monthly publishing schedule) for the following five years among the radical and revolutionary Left in Italy. The review gave much attention to political and literary currents in Europe, the USSR, and the United States.
For the next few years, Gramsci devoted most of his time to the development of the factory council movement, and to militant journalism, which led in January 1921 to his siding with the Communist minority within the PSI at the Party's Livorno Congress. He became a member of the PCI's central committee, but did not play a leading role until several years later. He was among the most prescient representatives of the Italian Left at the inception of the fascist movement, and on several occasions predicted that unless unified action were taken against the rise of Mussolini's movement, Italian democracy and Italian socialism would both suffer a disastrous defeat.
The years 1921 to 1926, years "of iron and fire" as he called them, were eventful and productive. They were marked in particular by the year and a half he lived in Moscow as an Italian delegate to the Communist International (May 1922- November 1923), his election to the Chamber of Deputies in April 1924, and his assumption of the position of general secretary of the PCI. His personal life was also filled with significant experiences, the chief one being his meeting with and subsequent marriage to Julka Schucht (1896-1980), a violinist and member of the Russian Communist Party whom he met during his stay in Russia. Antonio and Julka had two sons, Delio (1924-1981), and Giuliano, born in 1926, who lives today in Moscow with his wife.
On the evening of November 8, 1926, Gramsci was arrested in Rome and, in accordance with a series of "Exceptional Laws" enacted by the fascist-dominated Italian legislature, committed to solitary confinement at the Regina Coeli prison. This began a ten-year odyssey, marked by almost constant physical and psychic pain as a result of a prison experience that culminated, on April 27, 1937, in his death from a cerebral hemorrhage. No doubt the stroke that killed him was but the final outcome of years and years of illnesses that were never properly treated in prison.
Yet as everyone familiar with the trajectory of Gramsci's life knows, these prison years were also rich with intellectual achievement, as recorded in the Notebooks he kept in his various cells that eventually saw the light after World War II, and as recorded also in the extraordinary letters he wrote from prison to friends and especially to family members, the most important of whom was not his wife Julka but rather a sister-in-law, Tania Schucht. She was the person most intimately and unceasingly involved in his prison life, since she had resided in Rome for many years and was in a position to provide him not only with a regular exchange of thoughts and feelings in letter form but with articles of clothing and with numerous foods and medicines he sorely needed to survive the grinding daily routine of prison life.
After being sentenced on June 4, 1928, with other Italian Communist leaders, to 20 years, 4 months and 5 days in prison, Gramsci was consigned to a prison in Turi, in the province of Bari, which turned out to be his longest place of detention (June 1928 -- November 1933). Thereafter he was under police guard at a clinic in Formia, from which he was transferred in August 1935, always under guard, to the Quisisana Hospital in Rome. It was there that he spent the last two years of his life. Among the people, in addition to Tania, who helped him either by writing to him or by visiting him when possible, were his mother Giuseppina, who died in 1933, his brother Carlo, his sisters Teresina and Grazietta, and his good friend, the economist Piero Sraffa, who throughout Gramsci's prison ordeal provided a crucial and indispenable service to Gramsci. Sraffa used his personal funds and numerous professional contacts that were necessary in order to obtain the books and periodicals Gramsci needed in prison. Gramsci had a prodigious memory, but it is safe to say that without Sraffa's assistance, and without the intermediary role often played by Tania, the Prison Notebooks as we have them would not have come to fruition.
Gramsci's intellectual work in prison did not emerge in the light of day until several years after World War II, when the PC began publishing scattered sections of the Notebooks and some of the approximately 500 letters he wrote from prison. By the 1950s, and then with increasing frequency and intensity, his prison writings attracted interest and critical commentary in a host of countries, not only in the West but in the so-called third world as well. Some of his terminology became household words on the left, the most important of which, and the most complex, is the term "hegemony" as he used it in his writings and applied to the twin task of understanding the reasons underlying both the successes and the failures of socialism on a global scale, and of elaborating a feasible program for the realization of a socialist vision within the really existing conditions that prevailed in the world. Among these conditions were the rise and triumph of fascism and the disarray on the left that had ensued as a result of that triumph. Also extremely pertinent, both theoretically and practically, were such terms and phrases as "organic intellectual," "national'popular," and "historical bloc" which, even if not coined by Gramsci, acquired such radically new and original implications in his writing as to constitute effectively new formulations in the realm of political philosophy.
Saturday, January 01, 2011
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-"The Internationale"- A Working Class Song For All Seasons
Click on the title to link a YouTube film clip of a performance of the Internationale.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
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The Internationale [variant words in square brackets]
Arise ye workers [starvelings] from your slumbers
Arise ye prisoners of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant.
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We'll change henceforth [forthwith] the old tradition [conditions]
And spurn the dust to win the prize.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
No more deluded by reaction
On tyrants only we'll make war
The soldiers too will take strike action
They'll break ranks and fight no more
And if those cannibals keep trying
To sacrifice us to their pride
They soon shall hear the bullets flying
We'll shoot the generals on our own side.
No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear
E'er the thieves will out with their booty [give up their booty]
And give to all a happier lot.
Each [those] at the forge must do their duty
And we'll strike while the iron is hot.
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L'Internationale
Debout les damnés de la terre
Debout les forçats de la faim
La raison tonne en son cratère
C'est l'éruption de la fin
Du passe faisons table rase
Foules, esclaves, debout, debout
Le monde va changer de base
Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout
C'est la lutte finale
Groupons-nous, et demain (bis)
L'Internationale
Sera le genre humain
Il n'est pas de sauveurs suprêmes
Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun
Producteurs, sauvons-nous nous-mêmes
Décrétons le salut commun
Pour que le voleur rende gorge
Pour tirer l'esprit du cachot
Soufflons nous-mêmes notre forge
Battons le fer quand il est chaud
L'état comprime et la loi triche
L'impôt saigne le malheureux
Nul devoir ne s'impose au riche
Le droit du pauvre est un mot creux
C'est assez, languir en tutelle
L'égalité veut d'autres lois
Pas de droits sans devoirs dit-elle
Egaux, pas de devoirs sans droits
Hideux dans leur apothéose
Les rois de la mine et du rail
Ont-ils jamais fait autre chose
Que dévaliser le travail
Dans les coffres-forts de la bande
Ce qu'il a crée s'est fondu
En décrétant qu'on le lui rende
Le peuple ne veut que son dû.
Les rois nous saoulaient de fumées
Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans
Appliquons la grève aux armées
Crosse en l'air, et rompons les rangs
S'ils s'obstinent, ces cannibales
A faire de nous des héros
Ils sauront bientôt que nos balles
Sont pour nos propres généraux
Ouvriers, paysans, nous sommes
Le grand parti des travailleurs
La terre n'appartient qu'aux hommes
L'oisif ira loger ailleurs
Combien, de nos chairs se repaissent
Mais si les corbeaux, les vautours
Un de ces matins disparaissent
Le soleil brillera toujours.
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Die Internationale
Wacht auf, Verdammte dieser Erde,
die stets man noch zum Hungern zwingt!
Das Recht wie Glut im Kraterherde
nun mit Macht zum Durchbruch dringt.
Reinen Tisch macht mit dem Bedranger!
Heer der Sklaven, wache auf!
Ein nichts zu sein, tragt es nicht langer
Alles zu werden, stromt zuhauf!
Volker, hort die Signale!
Auf, zum letzten Gefecht!
Die Internationale
Erkampft das Menschenrecht
Es rettet uns kein hoh'res Wesen
kein Gott, kein Kaiser, noch Tribun
Uns aus dem Elend zu erlosen
konnen wir nur selber tun!
Leeres Wort: des armen Rechte,
Leeres Wort: des Reichen Pflicht!
Unmundigt nennt man uns Knechte,
duldet die Schmach langer nicht!
In Stadt und Land, ihr Arbeitsleute,
wir sind die starkste Partei'n
Die Mussigganger schiebt beiseite!
Diese Welt muss unser sein;
Unser Blut sei nicht mehr der Raben
und der machtigen Geier Frass!
Erst wenn wir sie vertrieben haben
dann scheint die Sonn' ohn' Unterlass!
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(The English version most commonly sung in South Africa. )
The Internationale
Arise ye prisoners of starvation
Arise ye toilers of the earth
For reason thunders new creation
`Tis a better world in birth.
Never more traditions' chains shall bind us
Arise ye toilers no more in thrall
The earth shall rise on new foundations
We are naught but we shall be all.
Then comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale
Unites the human race.
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(Zulu) i-Internationale
n'zigqila zezwe lonke
Vukan'ejokwen'lobugqili
Sizokwakh'umhlaba kabusha
Siqed'indlala nobumpofu.
lamasik'okusibopha
Asilwise yonk'incindezelo
Manj'umhlab'unesakhiw'esisha
Asisodwa Kulomkhankaso
Maqaban'wozan'sihlanganeni
Sibhekene nempi yamanqamu
I-Internationale
Ibumb'uluntu lonke
*****
British Translation Billy Bragg's Revision[16] American version
First stanza
Arise, ye workers from your slumber,
Arise, ye prisoners of want.
For reason in revolt now thunders,
and at last ends the age of cant!
Away with all your superstitions,
Servile masses, arise, arise!
We'll change henceforth the old tradition,
And spurn the dust to win the prize!
So comrades, come rally,
And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale,
Unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally,
And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale,
Unites the human race.
Stand up, all victims of oppression,
For the tyrants fear your might!
Don't cling so hard to your possessions,
For you have nothing if you have no rights!
Let racist ignorance be ended,
For respect makes the empires fall!
Freedom is merely privilege extended,
Unless enjoyed by one and all.
So come brothers and sisters,
For the struggle carries on.
The Internationale,
Unites the world in song.
So comrades, come rally,
For this is the time and place!
The international ideal,
Unites the human race.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
********************
The Internationale [variant words in square brackets]
Arise ye workers [starvelings] from your slumbers
Arise ye prisoners of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant.
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We'll change henceforth [forthwith] the old tradition [conditions]
And spurn the dust to win the prize.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
No more deluded by reaction
On tyrants only we'll make war
The soldiers too will take strike action
They'll break ranks and fight no more
And if those cannibals keep trying
To sacrifice us to their pride
They soon shall hear the bullets flying
We'll shoot the generals on our own side.
No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear
E'er the thieves will out with their booty [give up their booty]
And give to all a happier lot.
Each [those] at the forge must do their duty
And we'll strike while the iron is hot.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
L'Internationale
Debout les damnés de la terre
Debout les forçats de la faim
La raison tonne en son cratère
C'est l'éruption de la fin
Du passe faisons table rase
Foules, esclaves, debout, debout
Le monde va changer de base
Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout
C'est la lutte finale
Groupons-nous, et demain (bis)
L'Internationale
Sera le genre humain
Il n'est pas de sauveurs suprêmes
Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun
Producteurs, sauvons-nous nous-mêmes
Décrétons le salut commun
Pour que le voleur rende gorge
Pour tirer l'esprit du cachot
Soufflons nous-mêmes notre forge
Battons le fer quand il est chaud
L'état comprime et la loi triche
L'impôt saigne le malheureux
Nul devoir ne s'impose au riche
Le droit du pauvre est un mot creux
C'est assez, languir en tutelle
L'égalité veut d'autres lois
Pas de droits sans devoirs dit-elle
Egaux, pas de devoirs sans droits
Hideux dans leur apothéose
Les rois de la mine et du rail
Ont-ils jamais fait autre chose
Que dévaliser le travail
Dans les coffres-forts de la bande
Ce qu'il a crée s'est fondu
En décrétant qu'on le lui rende
Le peuple ne veut que son dû.
Les rois nous saoulaient de fumées
Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans
Appliquons la grève aux armées
Crosse en l'air, et rompons les rangs
S'ils s'obstinent, ces cannibales
A faire de nous des héros
Ils sauront bientôt que nos balles
Sont pour nos propres généraux
Ouvriers, paysans, nous sommes
Le grand parti des travailleurs
La terre n'appartient qu'aux hommes
L'oisif ira loger ailleurs
Combien, de nos chairs se repaissent
Mais si les corbeaux, les vautours
Un de ces matins disparaissent
Le soleil brillera toujours.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Die Internationale
Wacht auf, Verdammte dieser Erde,
die stets man noch zum Hungern zwingt!
Das Recht wie Glut im Kraterherde
nun mit Macht zum Durchbruch dringt.
Reinen Tisch macht mit dem Bedranger!
Heer der Sklaven, wache auf!
Ein nichts zu sein, tragt es nicht langer
Alles zu werden, stromt zuhauf!
Volker, hort die Signale!
Auf, zum letzten Gefecht!
Die Internationale
Erkampft das Menschenrecht
Es rettet uns kein hoh'res Wesen
kein Gott, kein Kaiser, noch Tribun
Uns aus dem Elend zu erlosen
konnen wir nur selber tun!
Leeres Wort: des armen Rechte,
Leeres Wort: des Reichen Pflicht!
Unmundigt nennt man uns Knechte,
duldet die Schmach langer nicht!
In Stadt und Land, ihr Arbeitsleute,
wir sind die starkste Partei'n
Die Mussigganger schiebt beiseite!
Diese Welt muss unser sein;
Unser Blut sei nicht mehr der Raben
und der machtigen Geier Frass!
Erst wenn wir sie vertrieben haben
dann scheint die Sonn' ohn' Unterlass!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(The English version most commonly sung in South Africa. )
The Internationale
Arise ye prisoners of starvation
Arise ye toilers of the earth
For reason thunders new creation
`Tis a better world in birth.
Never more traditions' chains shall bind us
Arise ye toilers no more in thrall
The earth shall rise on new foundations
We are naught but we shall be all.
Then comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale
Unites the human race.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Zulu) i-Internationale
n'zigqila zezwe lonke
Vukan'ejokwen'lobugqili
Sizokwakh'umhlaba kabusha
Siqed'indlala nobumpofu.
lamasik'okusibopha
Asilwise yonk'incindezelo
Manj'umhlab'unesakhiw'esisha
Asisodwa Kulomkhankaso
Maqaban'wozan'sihlanganeni
Sibhekene nempi yamanqamu
I-Internationale
Ibumb'uluntu lonke
*****
British Translation Billy Bragg's Revision[16] American version
First stanza
Arise, ye workers from your slumber,
Arise, ye prisoners of want.
For reason in revolt now thunders,
and at last ends the age of cant!
Away with all your superstitions,
Servile masses, arise, arise!
We'll change henceforth the old tradition,
And spurn the dust to win the prize!
So comrades, come rally,
And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale,
Unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally,
And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale,
Unites the human race.
Stand up, all victims of oppression,
For the tyrants fear your might!
Don't cling so hard to your possessions,
For you have nothing if you have no rights!
Let racist ignorance be ended,
For respect makes the empires fall!
Freedom is merely privilege extended,
Unless enjoyed by one and all.
So come brothers and sisters,
For the struggle carries on.
The Internationale,
Unites the world in song.
So comrades, come rally,
For this is the time and place!
The international ideal,
Unites the human race.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
From The "Renegade Eye" Blog- "Why We Are Marxists"-From The IMT Leader Alan Woods
Why we are Marxists
Written by Alan Woods
Monday, 13 December 2010
Two decades have passed since Francis Fukuyama published a book entitled The End of History and the Last Man, proclaiming the definitive triumph of market economics and bourgeois democracy. This idea seemed to be confirmed by almost 20 years of soaring markets and virtually uninterrupted economic growth. Politicians, central bankers and Wall Street managers were convinced that they had finally tamed the economic cycle of booms and slumps.
Now, two decades after the fall of the USSR, not one stone upon another remains of the illusions of the bourgeoisie. The world is experiencing the deepest crisis since the 1930s. Faced with a catastrophic situation on a world scale, the bourgeois of the USA, Europe and Japan are in a state of panic. In the 1930s, Trotsky said that the bourgeoisie was “tobogganing to disaster with its eyes closed.” These words are precisely applicable to the present situation. They could have been written yesterday.
For the last twenty years the bourgeois economists boasted that there would be no more boom and slump, that the cycle had been abolished. It is an actual fact that for decades, the bourgeois economists never predicted a single boom and never predicted a single slump. They had worked out a wonderful new theory called the “efficient market hypothesis.” Actually, there is nothing new about it at all. It amounts to the old idea that: “Left to itself the market will solve everything. It will automatically balance itself out. As long as the government doesn’t interfere, sooner or later everything will be fine.” To which, John Maynard Keynes issued the very celebrated reply, “Sooner or later we’re all dead.”
In the first decade of the 21st century, it is becoming increasingly clear that capitalism has exhausted its progressive potential. Instead of developing industry, science and technology, it is steadily undermining them. The productive forces stagnate, factories are closed as if they were matchboxes, and millions are thrown out of work. All these are symptoms that show that the development of the productive forces on a world scale has gone beyond the narrow limits of private property and the nation state.
That is the most fundamental reason for the present crisis, which has exposed the bankruptcy of capitalism in the most literal sense of the word. The plight of Ireland and Greece provides graphic confirmation of the diseased state of European capitalism. Tomorrow the contagion will spread to Portugal and Spain. But Britain and Italy are not far behind. And France, Germany and Austria will follow them inexorably on the downward path.
The bourgeois economists and politicians, and above all, all the reformists, are desperately seeking some sort of revival to get out of this crisis. They look to the recovery of the business cycle as salvation. The leaders of the working class, the trade union leaders and the Social Democratic leaders believe that this crisis is something temporary. They imagine it can be solved by making some adjustments to the existing system, that all that is needed is more control and regulation, and that we can return to the previous conditions. But this crisis is not a normal crisis, it is not temporary. It marks a fundamental turning point in the process, the point at which capitalism has reached a historical dead end. The best that can be expected is a weak recovery, accompanied by high unemployment and a long period of austerity, cuts and falling living standards.
The crisis of bourgeois ideology
Marxism is in the first place a philosophy and a world outlook. In the philosophical writings of Marx and Engels we do not find a closed philosophical system, but a series of brilliant insights and pointers, which, if they were developed, would provide a valuable addition to the methodological armoury of science.
Nowhere is the crisis of bourgeois ideology clearer than in the realm of philosophy. In its early stages, when the bourgeoisie stood for progress, it was capable of producing great thinkers: Hobbes and Locke, Kant and Hegel. But in the epoch of its senile decay, the bourgeoisie is incapable of producing great ideas. In fact, it is not capable of producing any ideas at all.
Since the modern bourgeoisie is incapable of bold generalisations it denies the very concept of ideology. That is why the post-modernists talk of the “end of ideology”. They deny the concept of progress simply because under capitalism no further progress is possible. Engels once wrote: “Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as onanism and sexual love.” Modern bourgeois philosophy prefers the former to the latter. In its obsession to combat Marxism, it has dragged philosophy back to the worst period of its old, outworn and sterile past.
Dialectical materialism is a dynamic view of understanding the workings of nature, society and thought. Far from being an outmoded idea of the 19th century, it is a strikingly modern view of nature and society. Dialectics does away with the fixed, rigid, lifeless way of looking at things that was characteristic of the old mechanical school of classical physics. It shows that under certain circumstances things can turn into their opposite.
The dialectical notion that gradual accumulation of small changes can at a critical point become transformed into a gigantic leap has received a striking confirmation in modern chaos theory and its derivatives. Chaos theory has put an end to the kind of narrow mechanical reductive determinism that dominated science for over a hundred years. Marxist dialectics is a 19th century expression of what chaos theory now expresses mathematically: the inter-relatedness of things, the organic nature of relations between entities.
The study of phase transitions constitutes one of the most important areas of contemporary physics. There are an infinite number of examples of the same phenomenon. The transformation of quantity into quality is a universal law. In his book Ubiquity Mark Buchanan shows this in phenomena as diverse as heart attacks, avalanches, forest fires, the rise and fall of animal populations, stock exchange crises, wars, and even changes in fashion and schools of art. Even more astonishing, these events can be expressed as a mathematical formula known as a power law.
These remarkable discoveries were anticipated long ago by Marx and Engels, who put the dialectical philosophy of Hegel on a rational (that is, materialist) basis. In his Logic (1813) Hegel wrote: “It has become a common jest in history to let great effects arise from small causes.” This was long before the “butterfly effect” was ever heard of. Like volcano eruptions and earthquakes, revolutions are the result of a slow accumulation of contradictions over a long period. The process eventually reaches a critical point at which a sudden leap occurs.
Historical materialism
Every social system believes that it represents the only possible form of existence for human beings. That its institutions, its religion, its morality are the last word that can be spoken. That is what the cannibals, the Egyptian priests, Marie Antoinette and Tsar Nicolas all fervently believed. And that is what Francis Fukuyama wished to demonstrate when he assured us, without the slightest basis, that the so-called system of “free enterprise” is the only possible system—just when it is beginning to sink.
Just as Charles Darwin explains that species are not immutable, and that they possess a past, a present and a future, changing and evolving, so Marx and Engels explain that a given social system is not something eternally fixed. The analogy between society and nature is, of course, only approximate. But even the most superficial examination of history shows that the gradualist interpretation is baseless. Society, like nature, knows long periods of slow and gradual change, but also here the line is interrupted by explosive developments ‑ wars and revolutions, in which the process of change is enormously accelerated. In fact, it is these events that act as the main motor force of historical development.
The root cause of revolutionary changes is the fact that a particular socio-economic system has reached its limits and is unable to develop the productive forces as before. Marxism analyses the hidden mainsprings that lie behind the development of human society from the earliest tribal societies up to the modern day. The materialist conception of history enables us to understand history, not as a series of unconnected and unforeseen incidents, but rather as part of a clearly understood and interrelated process. It is a series of actions and reactions which cover politics, economics and the whole spectrum of social development
The relationship between all these phenomena is a complex dialectical relationship. Very often attempts are made to discredit Marxism by resorting to a caricature of its method of historical analysis. The usual distortion is that Marx and Engels “reduced everything to economics.” This patent absurdity was answered many times by Marx and Engels, as in the following extract to Engels’ letter to Bloch:
“According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimate determining element in history is the production and reproduction of life. More than this neither Marx nor myself have asserted. Hence, if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract and senseless phrase.”
The Communist Manifesto
The most modern book that one can read today is the Communist Manifesto, written in 1848. True, this or that detail will have to be changed, but in all the fundamentals, the ideas of the Communist Manifesto are as relevant and true today as when they were first written. By contrast, the immense majority of the books written one and a half centuries ago are today merely of historical interest.
What is most striking about the Manifesto is the way in which it anticipates the most fundamental phenomena which occupy our attention on a world scale at the present time. Let us consider one example. At the time when Marx and Engels were writing, the world of the big multinational companies was still the music of a very distant future. Despite this, they explained how “free enterprise” and competition would inevitably lead to the concentration of capital and the monopolisation of the productive forces.
It is frankly comical to read the statements made by the defenders of the “market” concerning Marx’s alleged mistake on this question, when in reality it was precisely one of his most brilliant and accurate predictions. Today it is an absolutely indisputable fact that the process of concentration of capital foreseen by Marx has occurred, is occurring, and indeed has reached unprecedented levels in the course of the last ten years.
For decades the bourgeois sociologists attempted to disprove these assertions and “prove” that society was becoming more equal and that, consequently, the class struggle was as antiquated as the handloom and the wooden plough. The working class had disappeared, they said, and we were all middle class. As for the concentration of capital, the future was with small businesses, and “small is beautiful”.
How ironic these claims sound today! The entire world economy is now dominated by no more than 200 giant companies, the great majority of which are based in the USA. The process of monopolisation has reached unprecedented proportions. In the first quarter of 2006 mergers and acquisitions in the USA amounted to $10 billion dollars a day. This feverish activity does not signify a real development of the productive forces, but the opposite. And the pace of monopolisation does not diminish but increases. On November 19-20, 2006 the value of mergers and acquisitions in the USA amounted to a record of $75 billion - in just 24 hours! Takeovers are a kind of corporate cannibalism that is inevitably followed by asset-stripping, factory closures and sackings – that is, by the wholesale and wanton destruction of means of production and the sacrifice of thousands of jobs on the altar of Profit.
At the same time there is a constant increase in inequality. In all countries the share of profits in the national income is at a record high level, while the share of wages is at a record low. The real secret of the current boom is that the capitalists are extracting record amounts of surplus value from the working class. In the USA the workers are producing on average a third more than ten years ago, yet real wages stagnate or fall in real terms. Profits have been booming and the wealthy are becoming ever wealthier at the expense of the working class.
Let us take another, even more striking example: globalisation. The crushing domination of the world market is the most important manifestation of our epoch, and this is supposed to be a recent discovery. In fact, globalisation was predicted and explained by Marx and Engels over 150 years ago. Yet when the Manifesto was written, there was practically no empirical data to support such a hypothesis. The only really developed capitalist economy was England. The infant industries of France and Germany (which did not even exist as a united entity) still sheltered behind high tariff walls ‑ a fact which is conveniently forgotten today, as Western governments and economists deliver stern lectures to the rest of the world on the need to open up their economies.
On a world scale the results of globalised “market economics” are horrifying. In 2000 the richest 200 people had as much wealth as the 2 billion poorest. According to the figures of the UN, 1.2 billion people are living on less than two dollars a day. Of these eight million men, women and children die every year because they do not have enough money to survive. Everybody agrees that the murder of six million people in the Nazi Holocaust was a terrible crime against humanity, but here we have a silent Holocaust that kills eight million innocent people every year and nobody has anything to say on the subject.
Alongside the most appalling misery and human suffering there is an orgy of obscene money-making and ostentatious wealth. Worldwide there are at present 945 billionaires with a total wealth of $3.5 trillion. Many are citizens of the USA. Bill Gates has a personal fortune estimated at around $56 billion. Warren Buffet is not far behind with $52 billion. Now they boast that this unseemly wealth is spreading to “poorer nations”. Among the super-rich there are 13 Chinese, 14 Indians – and 19 Russians. And this is supposed to be a reason to celebrate!
Class struggle
Historical materialism teaches us that conditions determine consciousness. The problem is that consciousness is lagging behind the objective situation, the mass organisations are lagging behind that, and above all, the leadership of the working class is lagging even further behind. This is the main contradiction of the present period. It must be resolved, and it will be resolved.
Idealists have always presented consciousness as the motor force of all human progress. But even the most superficial study of history shows that human consciousness always tends to lag behind events. Far from being revolutionary, it is innately and profoundly conservative. Most people do not like the idea of change and still less of a violent upheaval that transforms existing conditions. They tend to cling to the familiar ideas, the well-known institutions, the traditional morality, religion and values of the existing social order. But dialectically, things change into their opposite. Sooner or later, consciousness will be brought into line with reality in an explosive manner. That is precisely what a revolution is.
Marxism explains that in the final analysis, the key to all social development is the development of the productive forces. As long as society is going forward, that is to say, as long as it is capable of developing industry, agriculture, science and technology, it is seen to be viable by the great majority of people. Under such conditions, men and women do not generally question the existing society, its morality and laws. On the contrary, they are seen as something natural and inevitable: as natural and inevitable as the rising and setting of the sun.
Great events are necessary to permit the masses to throw off the heavy burden of tradition, habit and routine and to embrace new ideas. Such is the position taken by the materialist conception of history, which was brilliantly expressed by Karl Marx in the celebrated phrase “social being determines consciousness.” It takes great events to expose the unsoundness of the old order and convince the masses of the need for its complete overthrow. This process is not automatic and takes time.
In the last period it appeared that the class struggle in Europe was a thing of the past. But now all the accumulated contradictions are coming to the surface, preparing the way for an explosion of the class struggle everywhere. Even in countries like Austria, where for decades the ruling class bought social peace by reforms, stormy events are being prepared. Sharp and sudden changes are implicit in the situation.
When Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto, they were two young men, 29 and 27 years old respectively. They were writing in a period of black reaction. The working class was apparently immobile. The Manifesto itself was written in Brussels, where its authors had been forced to flee as political refugees. And yet at the very moment when the Communist Manifesto first saw the light of day in February 1848, revolution had already erupted onto the streets of Paris, and over the following months had spread like wildfire through virtually the whole of Europe.
We are entering into a most convulsive period which will last for some years, similar to the period in Spain from 1930 to 1937. There will be defeats and setbacks, but under these conditions the masses will learn very fast. Of course, we must not exaggerate: we are still in the early beginnings of a process of radicalisation. But it is very clear here that we are witnessing the beginning of a change of consciousness of the masses. A growing number of people are questioning capitalism. They are open to the ideas of Marxism in a way that was not the case before. In the coming period ideas that were confined to small groups of revolutionaries will be eagerly followed by millions.
We can therefore answer Mr. Fukuyama as follows: history has not ended. In fact, it has hardly begun. When future generations look back at our present “civilisation”, they will have approximately the same attitude that we adopt towards cannibalism. The prior condition for attaining a higher level of human development is the ending of capitalist anarchy and the establishment of a rational and democratic plan of production in which men and women can take their lives and destinies into their own hands.
“This is an impossible Utopia!” we will be told by self-styled “realists”. But what is utterly unrealistic is to imagine that the problems facing humanity can be solved on the basis of the present system that has brought the world to its present sorry state. To say that humanity is incapable of finding a better alternative to the laws of the jungle is a monstrous libel on the human race.
By harnessing the colossal potential of science and technology, freeing them from the monstrous shackles of private ownership and the nation state, it will be possible to solve all the problems that oppress our world and threaten it with destruction. Real human history will only commence when men and women have put an end to capitalist slavery and taken the first steps towards the realm of freedom.
London, November 19, 2010
Written by Alan Woods
Monday, 13 December 2010
Two decades have passed since Francis Fukuyama published a book entitled The End of History and the Last Man, proclaiming the definitive triumph of market economics and bourgeois democracy. This idea seemed to be confirmed by almost 20 years of soaring markets and virtually uninterrupted economic growth. Politicians, central bankers and Wall Street managers were convinced that they had finally tamed the economic cycle of booms and slumps.
Now, two decades after the fall of the USSR, not one stone upon another remains of the illusions of the bourgeoisie. The world is experiencing the deepest crisis since the 1930s. Faced with a catastrophic situation on a world scale, the bourgeois of the USA, Europe and Japan are in a state of panic. In the 1930s, Trotsky said that the bourgeoisie was “tobogganing to disaster with its eyes closed.” These words are precisely applicable to the present situation. They could have been written yesterday.
For the last twenty years the bourgeois economists boasted that there would be no more boom and slump, that the cycle had been abolished. It is an actual fact that for decades, the bourgeois economists never predicted a single boom and never predicted a single slump. They had worked out a wonderful new theory called the “efficient market hypothesis.” Actually, there is nothing new about it at all. It amounts to the old idea that: “Left to itself the market will solve everything. It will automatically balance itself out. As long as the government doesn’t interfere, sooner or later everything will be fine.” To which, John Maynard Keynes issued the very celebrated reply, “Sooner or later we’re all dead.”
In the first decade of the 21st century, it is becoming increasingly clear that capitalism has exhausted its progressive potential. Instead of developing industry, science and technology, it is steadily undermining them. The productive forces stagnate, factories are closed as if they were matchboxes, and millions are thrown out of work. All these are symptoms that show that the development of the productive forces on a world scale has gone beyond the narrow limits of private property and the nation state.
That is the most fundamental reason for the present crisis, which has exposed the bankruptcy of capitalism in the most literal sense of the word. The plight of Ireland and Greece provides graphic confirmation of the diseased state of European capitalism. Tomorrow the contagion will spread to Portugal and Spain. But Britain and Italy are not far behind. And France, Germany and Austria will follow them inexorably on the downward path.
The bourgeois economists and politicians, and above all, all the reformists, are desperately seeking some sort of revival to get out of this crisis. They look to the recovery of the business cycle as salvation. The leaders of the working class, the trade union leaders and the Social Democratic leaders believe that this crisis is something temporary. They imagine it can be solved by making some adjustments to the existing system, that all that is needed is more control and regulation, and that we can return to the previous conditions. But this crisis is not a normal crisis, it is not temporary. It marks a fundamental turning point in the process, the point at which capitalism has reached a historical dead end. The best that can be expected is a weak recovery, accompanied by high unemployment and a long period of austerity, cuts and falling living standards.
The crisis of bourgeois ideology
Marxism is in the first place a philosophy and a world outlook. In the philosophical writings of Marx and Engels we do not find a closed philosophical system, but a series of brilliant insights and pointers, which, if they were developed, would provide a valuable addition to the methodological armoury of science.
Nowhere is the crisis of bourgeois ideology clearer than in the realm of philosophy. In its early stages, when the bourgeoisie stood for progress, it was capable of producing great thinkers: Hobbes and Locke, Kant and Hegel. But in the epoch of its senile decay, the bourgeoisie is incapable of producing great ideas. In fact, it is not capable of producing any ideas at all.
Since the modern bourgeoisie is incapable of bold generalisations it denies the very concept of ideology. That is why the post-modernists talk of the “end of ideology”. They deny the concept of progress simply because under capitalism no further progress is possible. Engels once wrote: “Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as onanism and sexual love.” Modern bourgeois philosophy prefers the former to the latter. In its obsession to combat Marxism, it has dragged philosophy back to the worst period of its old, outworn and sterile past.
Dialectical materialism is a dynamic view of understanding the workings of nature, society and thought. Far from being an outmoded idea of the 19th century, it is a strikingly modern view of nature and society. Dialectics does away with the fixed, rigid, lifeless way of looking at things that was characteristic of the old mechanical school of classical physics. It shows that under certain circumstances things can turn into their opposite.
The dialectical notion that gradual accumulation of small changes can at a critical point become transformed into a gigantic leap has received a striking confirmation in modern chaos theory and its derivatives. Chaos theory has put an end to the kind of narrow mechanical reductive determinism that dominated science for over a hundred years. Marxist dialectics is a 19th century expression of what chaos theory now expresses mathematically: the inter-relatedness of things, the organic nature of relations between entities.
The study of phase transitions constitutes one of the most important areas of contemporary physics. There are an infinite number of examples of the same phenomenon. The transformation of quantity into quality is a universal law. In his book Ubiquity Mark Buchanan shows this in phenomena as diverse as heart attacks, avalanches, forest fires, the rise and fall of animal populations, stock exchange crises, wars, and even changes in fashion and schools of art. Even more astonishing, these events can be expressed as a mathematical formula known as a power law.
These remarkable discoveries were anticipated long ago by Marx and Engels, who put the dialectical philosophy of Hegel on a rational (that is, materialist) basis. In his Logic (1813) Hegel wrote: “It has become a common jest in history to let great effects arise from small causes.” This was long before the “butterfly effect” was ever heard of. Like volcano eruptions and earthquakes, revolutions are the result of a slow accumulation of contradictions over a long period. The process eventually reaches a critical point at which a sudden leap occurs.
Historical materialism
Every social system believes that it represents the only possible form of existence for human beings. That its institutions, its religion, its morality are the last word that can be spoken. That is what the cannibals, the Egyptian priests, Marie Antoinette and Tsar Nicolas all fervently believed. And that is what Francis Fukuyama wished to demonstrate when he assured us, without the slightest basis, that the so-called system of “free enterprise” is the only possible system—just when it is beginning to sink.
Just as Charles Darwin explains that species are not immutable, and that they possess a past, a present and a future, changing and evolving, so Marx and Engels explain that a given social system is not something eternally fixed. The analogy between society and nature is, of course, only approximate. But even the most superficial examination of history shows that the gradualist interpretation is baseless. Society, like nature, knows long periods of slow and gradual change, but also here the line is interrupted by explosive developments ‑ wars and revolutions, in which the process of change is enormously accelerated. In fact, it is these events that act as the main motor force of historical development.
The root cause of revolutionary changes is the fact that a particular socio-economic system has reached its limits and is unable to develop the productive forces as before. Marxism analyses the hidden mainsprings that lie behind the development of human society from the earliest tribal societies up to the modern day. The materialist conception of history enables us to understand history, not as a series of unconnected and unforeseen incidents, but rather as part of a clearly understood and interrelated process. It is a series of actions and reactions which cover politics, economics and the whole spectrum of social development
The relationship between all these phenomena is a complex dialectical relationship. Very often attempts are made to discredit Marxism by resorting to a caricature of its method of historical analysis. The usual distortion is that Marx and Engels “reduced everything to economics.” This patent absurdity was answered many times by Marx and Engels, as in the following extract to Engels’ letter to Bloch:
“According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimate determining element in history is the production and reproduction of life. More than this neither Marx nor myself have asserted. Hence, if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract and senseless phrase.”
The Communist Manifesto
The most modern book that one can read today is the Communist Manifesto, written in 1848. True, this or that detail will have to be changed, but in all the fundamentals, the ideas of the Communist Manifesto are as relevant and true today as when they were first written. By contrast, the immense majority of the books written one and a half centuries ago are today merely of historical interest.
What is most striking about the Manifesto is the way in which it anticipates the most fundamental phenomena which occupy our attention on a world scale at the present time. Let us consider one example. At the time when Marx and Engels were writing, the world of the big multinational companies was still the music of a very distant future. Despite this, they explained how “free enterprise” and competition would inevitably lead to the concentration of capital and the monopolisation of the productive forces.
It is frankly comical to read the statements made by the defenders of the “market” concerning Marx’s alleged mistake on this question, when in reality it was precisely one of his most brilliant and accurate predictions. Today it is an absolutely indisputable fact that the process of concentration of capital foreseen by Marx has occurred, is occurring, and indeed has reached unprecedented levels in the course of the last ten years.
For decades the bourgeois sociologists attempted to disprove these assertions and “prove” that society was becoming more equal and that, consequently, the class struggle was as antiquated as the handloom and the wooden plough. The working class had disappeared, they said, and we were all middle class. As for the concentration of capital, the future was with small businesses, and “small is beautiful”.
How ironic these claims sound today! The entire world economy is now dominated by no more than 200 giant companies, the great majority of which are based in the USA. The process of monopolisation has reached unprecedented proportions. In the first quarter of 2006 mergers and acquisitions in the USA amounted to $10 billion dollars a day. This feverish activity does not signify a real development of the productive forces, but the opposite. And the pace of monopolisation does not diminish but increases. On November 19-20, 2006 the value of mergers and acquisitions in the USA amounted to a record of $75 billion - in just 24 hours! Takeovers are a kind of corporate cannibalism that is inevitably followed by asset-stripping, factory closures and sackings – that is, by the wholesale and wanton destruction of means of production and the sacrifice of thousands of jobs on the altar of Profit.
At the same time there is a constant increase in inequality. In all countries the share of profits in the national income is at a record high level, while the share of wages is at a record low. The real secret of the current boom is that the capitalists are extracting record amounts of surplus value from the working class. In the USA the workers are producing on average a third more than ten years ago, yet real wages stagnate or fall in real terms. Profits have been booming and the wealthy are becoming ever wealthier at the expense of the working class.
Let us take another, even more striking example: globalisation. The crushing domination of the world market is the most important manifestation of our epoch, and this is supposed to be a recent discovery. In fact, globalisation was predicted and explained by Marx and Engels over 150 years ago. Yet when the Manifesto was written, there was practically no empirical data to support such a hypothesis. The only really developed capitalist economy was England. The infant industries of France and Germany (which did not even exist as a united entity) still sheltered behind high tariff walls ‑ a fact which is conveniently forgotten today, as Western governments and economists deliver stern lectures to the rest of the world on the need to open up their economies.
On a world scale the results of globalised “market economics” are horrifying. In 2000 the richest 200 people had as much wealth as the 2 billion poorest. According to the figures of the UN, 1.2 billion people are living on less than two dollars a day. Of these eight million men, women and children die every year because they do not have enough money to survive. Everybody agrees that the murder of six million people in the Nazi Holocaust was a terrible crime against humanity, but here we have a silent Holocaust that kills eight million innocent people every year and nobody has anything to say on the subject.
Alongside the most appalling misery and human suffering there is an orgy of obscene money-making and ostentatious wealth. Worldwide there are at present 945 billionaires with a total wealth of $3.5 trillion. Many are citizens of the USA. Bill Gates has a personal fortune estimated at around $56 billion. Warren Buffet is not far behind with $52 billion. Now they boast that this unseemly wealth is spreading to “poorer nations”. Among the super-rich there are 13 Chinese, 14 Indians – and 19 Russians. And this is supposed to be a reason to celebrate!
Class struggle
Historical materialism teaches us that conditions determine consciousness. The problem is that consciousness is lagging behind the objective situation, the mass organisations are lagging behind that, and above all, the leadership of the working class is lagging even further behind. This is the main contradiction of the present period. It must be resolved, and it will be resolved.
Idealists have always presented consciousness as the motor force of all human progress. But even the most superficial study of history shows that human consciousness always tends to lag behind events. Far from being revolutionary, it is innately and profoundly conservative. Most people do not like the idea of change and still less of a violent upheaval that transforms existing conditions. They tend to cling to the familiar ideas, the well-known institutions, the traditional morality, religion and values of the existing social order. But dialectically, things change into their opposite. Sooner or later, consciousness will be brought into line with reality in an explosive manner. That is precisely what a revolution is.
Marxism explains that in the final analysis, the key to all social development is the development of the productive forces. As long as society is going forward, that is to say, as long as it is capable of developing industry, agriculture, science and technology, it is seen to be viable by the great majority of people. Under such conditions, men and women do not generally question the existing society, its morality and laws. On the contrary, they are seen as something natural and inevitable: as natural and inevitable as the rising and setting of the sun.
Great events are necessary to permit the masses to throw off the heavy burden of tradition, habit and routine and to embrace new ideas. Such is the position taken by the materialist conception of history, which was brilliantly expressed by Karl Marx in the celebrated phrase “social being determines consciousness.” It takes great events to expose the unsoundness of the old order and convince the masses of the need for its complete overthrow. This process is not automatic and takes time.
In the last period it appeared that the class struggle in Europe was a thing of the past. But now all the accumulated contradictions are coming to the surface, preparing the way for an explosion of the class struggle everywhere. Even in countries like Austria, where for decades the ruling class bought social peace by reforms, stormy events are being prepared. Sharp and sudden changes are implicit in the situation.
When Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto, they were two young men, 29 and 27 years old respectively. They were writing in a period of black reaction. The working class was apparently immobile. The Manifesto itself was written in Brussels, where its authors had been forced to flee as political refugees. And yet at the very moment when the Communist Manifesto first saw the light of day in February 1848, revolution had already erupted onto the streets of Paris, and over the following months had spread like wildfire through virtually the whole of Europe.
We are entering into a most convulsive period which will last for some years, similar to the period in Spain from 1930 to 1937. There will be defeats and setbacks, but under these conditions the masses will learn very fast. Of course, we must not exaggerate: we are still in the early beginnings of a process of radicalisation. But it is very clear here that we are witnessing the beginning of a change of consciousness of the masses. A growing number of people are questioning capitalism. They are open to the ideas of Marxism in a way that was not the case before. In the coming period ideas that were confined to small groups of revolutionaries will be eagerly followed by millions.
We can therefore answer Mr. Fukuyama as follows: history has not ended. In fact, it has hardly begun. When future generations look back at our present “civilisation”, they will have approximately the same attitude that we adopt towards cannibalism. The prior condition for attaining a higher level of human development is the ending of capitalist anarchy and the establishment of a rational and democratic plan of production in which men and women can take their lives and destinies into their own hands.
“This is an impossible Utopia!” we will be told by self-styled “realists”. But what is utterly unrealistic is to imagine that the problems facing humanity can be solved on the basis of the present system that has brought the world to its present sorry state. To say that humanity is incapable of finding a better alternative to the laws of the jungle is a monstrous libel on the human race.
By harnessing the colossal potential of science and technology, freeing them from the monstrous shackles of private ownership and the nation state, it will be possible to solve all the problems that oppress our world and threaten it with destruction. Real human history will only commence when men and women have put an end to capitalist slavery and taken the first steps towards the realm of freedom.
London, November 19, 2010
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