The Greek Revolt and Freedom of Expression

This December marks one year since the young of Greece rose in revolt after the police murder of fifteen year old Alexis Grigoropoulos.  It was a burst of energy that still thrills me twelve months later…and I wasn’t even on the same continent.  We all go through formative moments in our lives, moments that shape our years to come.  I am sure that those explosive days were such moments for tens of thousands of Greek youth.

I remember hanging out with comrades at the time talking about it.  How exciting it was to see all of those working class kids staking claim to their lives.  Near the end of the conversation a comrade said, “yeah, and I bet there is mad fucking going on behind those barricades at night.”  I bet there was.  Revolt, revolution, is the most life affirming act there is and the ecstasies of that ebullient winter could be felt four thousand miles away.  The generation who experienced that won’t easily forget it.  I am confident that those December rages will reverberate in a thousand ways in a million lives and place its stamp on the future of the Greek class struggle.  Let those that pull the strings of those that pull the trigger rue the day they murdered Alexis Grigoropoulos.

In this essay(1) Savas Michael Mastas of the Greek Workers Revolutionary Party (EEK) gives his take on the revolt.  The translation is by no means perfect and the analysis, in my opinion, “catastrophist” in a number of places. That said, it is a clarion defense of  those workers who would determine their own fate and a just denunciation of those, especially on the left, who would seek to tie the fate of workers to the interests of capital.

The Greek Revolt and Freedom of Expression by Savas Michael-Matsas

The revolt in Greece in December 2008 did not take place, to paraphrase Jean Baudrillard’s well known (but misleading) statement 2, at least according to what the mainstream mass media were presenting to the Greek public and the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) publicly and repeatedly was declaring.

The orgy of bourgeois democratic disinformation and of Stalinist slander during the December events is a monument to the glory of freedom of information and freedom of expression under capitalism. But above all it worked as a weapon in the war of the rulers to repel and defeat the mass rebellion of the ruled, which indeed did erupted challenging the monopoly of violence of the State and bourgeois power itself. It was the most important revolt in the country after the civil war of the ’40s and the 1973 uprising in the Polytechnic University of Athens against the military dictatorship.

The killing of a 15 years old boy by a Special Guard of the Police on December 6, 2008 became the fateful act that played the role of a catalyst for a the explosion; a direct confrontation of the youth with the capitalist State and all institutions of economic, political and bureaucratic power started. Day after day, week after week, the popular revolt with the very young generation of schoolchildren, students, unemployed and precarious workers in the forefront, supported by the broadest layers of working people, was mobilized all over the country, from North to South, in cities, towns and villages, putting under siege police stations, occupying public buildings, schools, universities, offices of bureaucratized unions, burning banks, clashing with the hated riot police which exhausted all its brutality and tear gas against the youth rebels and had to buy new ones from Israel. The places under occupation became centers of action and sites of the general assemblies discussing and deciding future action. Daily demonstrations were taking place

This unprecedented social explosion and its causes were totally disfigured in the bourgeois mass media. These are few examples:

Only the police version of the actual killing of the young Alexis Grigoropoulos was broadcasted claiming that the murder in cold blood by the Special Guard Korkoneas was just an unintentional accident (The killer himself was presented in a very sympathetic light in a disgusting “literary” story in the Arts Section in the Sunday issue of the daily of the Stalinist KKE “Rizospastis”3).

The mass revolt was presented exclusively as the isolated actions of blind violence by small gangs of anarchist hooligans covering their heads with a hood. In the Stalinist version, these hood bearing persons were provocateurs implementing the orders and a plan of local and foreign secret agencies.

The immigrant workers were particularly targeted by the media and demonized as actors of vandalism and looting.

When the night of December 23, a death squad of the bosses attacked with vitriol the Bulgarian immigrant worker and class struggle trade unionist Kostandina Kuneva, there was not only a complete cover up of the crime by the police but also a complete black out of information by the media. When an unprecedented mass movement of solidarity based on the December revolt itself emerged in the country and abroad and the issue could not any more ignored, information was systematically distorted and manipulated not only to cover up the crime but above all to stop the growing workers and popular movement that made the heroic trade-unionist Kostandina the flag of every social battle.

As sectors of the “deep State” turned to a kind of Italian style “strategy of tension” to repel the upheaval generated by the December events, a grenade was thrown by fascists against a gathering of antimilitarist activists in the Club of Immigrants in Exarcheia on February 24, 2009; only by chance the life of more than 35 people was spared. But the Police and mainstream media misrepresented the case as an “armed clash between competing anarchist groups”!

Not only the dimensions and the social depth of the great revolutionary Event of December that interrupted bourgeois normality had to be hidden and/or distorted by the mass media but even its trace had to be erased. In London, it was publicly announced that in the Hellenic Center an exhibition of artistic photography by Spyros Christofis and George Kasolas would be opened on January 14 to last until the end of January 2009. But the same night of the inauguration, after the ceremonial opening, the exhibition was canceled because the pictures were showing Athens in flames with the youth in rebellion clashing with the State repression forces…4

Resistances

This systematic campaign of disinformation did not remained unanswered. On the contrary, the right for information and truth, for freedom of expression became one of the main battlefields.

Cyberspace functioned as a space of freedom of expression and networking, a channel of counter-information and a powerful means for mass mobilization, sometimes instantaneous as in the night of December the 6th.

The challenge to the mass media manipulation condensed to the slogan Stop watching TV! Every body in the streets! took also the form of direct action.

On December the 16th, a most spectacular action was performed: the occupation of the ERT State TV Broadcasting. When the State TV station was broadcasting the main 15.00 pm News, and the Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis was addressing his parliamentary group and the Greek people on the recent huge financial scandal involving the government and an orthodox Monastery in Mount Athos(a scandal that cynically was covered up by the government closing now any further legal investigation on the affair), suddenly the image was interrupted ; another image of a group of 100 militants was broadcasted holding banners with slogans against the murderers of the State and for the liberation of those arrested during the revolt!

Many other TV and Radio Stations all over the country were temporarily occupied and statements of the revolt broadcasted.

Early January 2009 another direct action challenged the role of bourgeois mass media and the “tolerant repression” of freedom of expression: “On Saturday, January 10”, their Declaration announces, “a group of employed, unemployed, and unpaid workers and students in the media industry took over the headquarters of ESIEA (the union of the Greek journalists, photographers and other workers in the media industry). This endeavor, which basically opposes dominant Discourse, aims at demonstrating medieval working conditions in the mass media, as well as at promoting the need for the creation of a single assembly for the expression of ALL those who work in the media industry(See www.katalipsiesiea.blogspot.com).

The connection of overexploitation by “flexible” labour relations under neo-liberal capitalism in crisis and the lack of freedom of expression stressed by the activists of the occupation of ESIEA demonstrates the material social base not solely of this specific group in action but of the December revolt as a whole.

Against the dominant official explanation of the events presented by sociologists and other academics mobilized by the mass media barons focusing one-sidedly to the youth as an age group and denying the deeper class character of the revolt, for all the participants in this historical experience it was clear that the driving social force of the revolt was the emergence of a new proletariat, both native and immigrant, working under “flexible”, precarious, low paid conditions of overexploitation To this factor combined was with the dead end of an educational system that condemns the students to a future of unemployment ( 50 per cent of unemployed youth in Greece has a degree) or of precarious labour that has nothing to do with their studies. The proletarianization of vast petty bourgeois strata and a growing tendency to social exclusion and pauperization has added more explosive material.

“Merry Crisis and a Happy New Fear!”

In direct contrast to the false, artificial image given by the mass media, the ruling classes in Greece, in Europe and internationally, and their spokespersons did recognized its revolutionary potential. The French daily Le Monde, in the first days of the revolt, had published an editorial with the headlines “Greece without a State”5. Dominique Strauss –Kahn, the head of the IMF has admitted in a public statement the real world historical nature of the December revolt as the first political explosion produced by the current world capitalist crisis. President Nicolas Sarkozy spoke about the threat that the Greek virus” spreads in France and in Europe and he had to retreat on an anti-Education bill to avoid the threat by the youth movement6. Despite the efforts, he could not prevent two powerful General Strikes on January 29 and March 19, 2009, millions of demonstrators in the streets and a 40 days insurrectionary General Strike in Guadeloupe that was extended in Martinique and Reunion, the overseas territories of metropolitan France.

Even in the Far East, voices in the Chinese ruling elite warned for the danger to see in Beijing scenes like those seen in Athens!7 In Iceland and Latvia the governments did not even survive to receive the warning. They fell under the impact of the crisis and mass unrest

The December revolt in Greece shows the future, the emerging class war in Europe and internationally. It sent its season greetings to the world bourgeoisie with the writing in the University wall in the center of Athens: Merry Crisis and a Happy New Fear!

The weakest link

Greece became the stage for the fist social political explosion of the current world economic maelstrom because it is the weakest link, economically and politically, in the chain of the Euro-zone countries.

The social economic development of Greek capitalism in the last 20 years was based on the global expansion of finance capital and the process of integration of the European Union after the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the East.

In the 1990s, the PASOK governments, especially the Blairite “modernizers” of the Simitis government tried to adapt Greek economy to the demands of capitalist globalization by introducing privatizations and flexible labour relations, attacking social rights of the workers won after the fall of the dictatorship, increasing the gap of inequality between a rich minority and the increasingly impoverished large majority of the people.. The 1997 international Crash centered in South East Asia made Greece one of the emergent financial markets attracting surplus capital searching an outlet. The boom in the Athens stock market was ephemeral and finished by ruining mass of small investors and enriching a few financial sharks, particularly those connected with the government. Cheap labour by the hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers flooding in the country after the collapse of the Soviet Union and of the “socialist” Balkan countries made possible to make a successful bid to join the Eurozone in 1999.

The link with the Euro provided the necessary guaranty to attract loans as the credit expansion reached new highs in the period of the international economic upturn of 2002-2007. Greek capitalism thought that its old dream to rise as the regional economic hegemonic power in the Balkan Peninsula became finally true as the Greek industries de-localized to the Balkan countries and the Greek banks made unprecedented inroads in Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania.

The parasitic nature of Greek capitalism was exacerbated. The Greek capitalist social formation was “born already old”, as Pantelis Pouliopoulos, the former general secretary of the KKE in the 1920s and later leader of Trotskyism in Greece, had rightly written in 19348; it was industrialized and completed the full formation of its own Nation State in the epoch of wars, revolutions and capitalist decline.

World credit expansion in 2002-2007, permitted to public and private debt to soar from $162 billion in 2003 to $360 billion or even, according to other estimations, half a trillion dollars in 2008. The European Commission estimates that the foreign debt of Greece in 2008 reached the staggering pint of 148 per cent of the national GDP. 9 From 2004 onwards the GDP grew $80 billion in current prices, an average annual increase of $16 billion, from which $6 billion was coming from the EU. The State had a $10 billion deficit and it borrowed $12 billion annually to achieve only a growth of $16 billion or, if are included the EU subsidies, just $ 10 billion, exactly the same as the deficit!10 At the same time, the current payments deficit rose to 15% of the GDP, and there was a continuous flight of capital abroad, increasing from a $100 billion in 2003 to $210 billion in 2008.

On this basis, while the country was leading to a fantastic crisis of over indebtedness and virtual bankruptcy, social inequalities, working conditions, and unemployment were severely worsened and the social tissue was disintegrating. Popular discontent against both parties that ruled the country for 35 years, the social-liberal center left PASOK and the neo-liberal center right New Democracy, was building up. Together with it, State authoritarianism and continuous, unpunished police brutality against the “enemy within”, especially the angry, unemployed or socially excluded youth and the immigrants, intensified. A non stop series of financial scandals of State and party officials exacerbated the crisis of legitimacy of the entire bourgeois democratic political system as it was formed after the fall of the dictatorship in 1974. Social struggles were sharpening. Main landmarks are the victorious 2001 General Strike that blocked the destruction of the workers’ pensions and accelerated the fall of the PASOK government and then the 2006-2007 student revolt led by the far left that prevented the attempt of the New Democracy government to amend the article 16 of the Constitution to permit the privatization of Higher Education.

The illusory upswing of Greek capitalism the last decade was based on finance capital globalization and collapsed with its implosion in 2007-2008. The dreams of the ruling class turned into nightmares. The over-indebted economy is actually bankrupt and only the fears of the impact of an official default on the Eurozone prevent its official declaration. Greece joins Ireland, Portugal and Italy in the higher positions of the list of EU countries under threat of imminent bankruptcy. The bonanza and over-exposure of the Greek banks in the Balkans have turned into an imminent danger of collapse of the entire Greek banking system as well. The government bail out of the biggest banks with 28 billion euros is unable to prevent a process of restructuring by mergers, and at the end, nationalization.

A metropolitan revolt

In meantime, capitalist globalizations has deeply transformed Greece from a country of a medium level of capitalist development in South East Europe into a State-member of the EU and of its Euro-zone, and further more into a metropolitan knot in the plexus of globalized capitalist relations.

This metropolitan transformation of the Greek social formation does not mean its ascent into the position in which they were raised in a previous period of historical development of world capitalism and in the early phase of imperialism, the countries of North America and Western Europe; it takes place when the hegemonic hierarchy of the imperialist centers is long ago established and cannot be challenged by entities like Greece; above all it coincides with a new phase of integration of world capitalist economy in an advanced stage of its historical decline, bringing Greece closer to the “hard core” of the centers of European imperialism while, at the same time, deepening the gulf separating it from them, making its fate more dependent from them than ever in the past .11

The metropolitan transformation goes beyond the dichotomy Metropolis/colonies or imperialist center/colonial and former colonial periphery, internalizing many features of these dichotomies within the urban space of contemporary mage-cities (internalizing for ex. “Third World” zones as ghettoes within the “First World” cities), and re-shaping power relations for the surveillance and control of an heterogeneous population of over-exploited workers and socially excluded.

Greece, and its capital Athens, where nearly half of the population, now increased by important numbers of immigrants, is concentrated, marked symbolically its ascent to a metropolitan status by hosting the Olympic Games in 2004. As a precondition to that symbolic enthronization, the imperialist centers, particularly the United States and Britain, put the integration of Greece in the international “war on terror” by introducing special legislation and by dismantling the remnants of urban armed groups, especially the “ November 17th ” organization and ELA( “Revolutionary People’s Struggle”). The latter, in fact, was already self-dissolved many years ago, while the November 17th group was in an advanced stage of decomposition. The arrests of a number of people on prefabricated charges for most of them, in summer 2002, the hysterical witch hunt atmosphere spread by the mass media, and the show trials that followed were just a pretext to introduce special “anti-terror” laws drafted on Anglo-Saxon patterns, and impose an artificial State of Emergency opening black holes in the constitutional bourgeois democratic order that replaced the dictatorship in 1974. The restoration of parliamentary democracy in Greece proved to be extremely vulnerable to the forces of decay building up together with the inner contradictions of the capitalist system.

State authoritarianism, police brutality, systematic surveillance of all aspects of the life of the citizens against any right to privacy, etc. were not just an adaptation to the post 9/11 international environment; the emergence of an increasingly authoritarian State based on the impunity of corrupt State officials, politicians and police forces, masked with a parliamentary facade and governed by a center left or a center right neo-liberal government, was a necessary complement of the “modernization” process in Greece linked to finance globalization, Euro-zone integration, and over-exploitation of native and immigrant workers.

The decay of bourgeois democracy internally conditioned by the driving forces of capitalist decline produced the framework of the recent rebellion.

In 1973 a dictatorial regime was challenged by a youth uprising in the Polytechnic University demanding democracy. In 2008, it was the turn of decaying bourgeois democracy to be challenged by a young generation demanding not only the end of police brutality but a reorganization of all social relations. It was not just a demand of freedom of expression but a revolutionary expression of freedom itself

The 1973 Polytechnic uprising of the youth against the naked State of the Armed Forces of the victors of the civil war was the last battle of the civil war. The 2008 December revolt was the first metropolitan rebellion in Greece of the young proletarians and of all the wretched of the earth.

The 1973 uprising was interconnected with the international wave of revolutionary struggles unleashed with the collapse of the post war boom based on the Bretton Woods 1944 settlement. The 2008 revolt is one of the first acts of the emerging new international wave of struggles coming with the collapse of the finance globalization that came as a way out to the crisis produced by the end of the post war boom.

All the world’s a stage

As a continuation of the December upheaval, in February 2009 the National House Opera Ethniki Lyriki Skini was occupied for 9 days by young artists and students of Drama, Dance and Music schools. May 1968, 40 years later was revived. Artistic events, debates on art and revolution, on Kostandina Kuneva and immigrant workers, on the struggle for the liberation of all those arrested in December and persecuted by the “anti-terror” laws( more than 200 people, most of them, 15 years old kids!) took place. As usual not a word was said or written in the press or the other media during the occupation- apart of the publication of a Joint Communiqué of the Director of Lyriki and of the bureaucratic trade union leaders condemning the occupation. Once, the occupation ended, all the venom of the ruling class was unleashed against those who have as a banner in the front door of the opera the words Our Art is the Revolt- Our stage is on the streets!

During the occupation of the National Operas House in Athens, in the other side of the world, the artists and workers of the famous Teatro Colon of Buenos Aires expressed together with their own demands their full solidarity in struggle to their Greek brothers and sisters in occupied/liberated Lyriki. Messages of support came to Lyriki not only from Argentina but as well from Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela. If “our stage is on the streets” all world is a stage, to use, in a new context, Shakespeare’s wonderful verse12!

The question of freedom of expression is an international and a class question that merges today with the question of revolt and social revolution. It cannot be limited in the straight jacket of a moribund bourgeois democracy.

Marx had pointed out that a mode of social production is a mode of expression of life.13 And the same time he brought into light the characteristic contradiction of capitalism as a social system: it is this specific mode “whose expression of life (seine Lebensäusserung) is its loss of any expression of life (seine Lebensentäusserung)”.14

There cannot be a real freedom of expression within as system where any expression of life is lost.

One of the main slogans shouted by the young people in the liberated Lyriki was “The last few days I feel to live- It is pity my friend Alexis that you are not here!”

The first revolt of the new era opened by the world systemic crisis of capitalism has put at the center the question of Life itself, of the re-appropriation of what is lost under capitalism, the freedom of expression of life in all its manifestations; a freedom which can be achieved only by the revolutionary expropriation of the expropriators of our life, by the overthrow of world capitalism and universal human emancipation.

Athens, March 25, 2009

1)Paper presented in the Critique Conference 2009 on Capitalism and Repressive Tolerance, London School of Economics, March 27, 2009

2) Baudrillard, Jean (1991) La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu, Paris: Galilée. In English, Baudrillard, Jean (1995) The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Bloomington: Indiana University Press

3)Rizospastis 28 December 2008

4)Art News( Greek edition, Ta Nea Tis Texnis ), No 175, March 2009

5)Le Monde 10 December 2008

6)Le Monde 13 December 2008

7)Jamil Anderlini, “China battles unemployment to deter unrest”, Financial Times, December 21, 2008

8)P. Pouliopoulos, Democratic or Socialist Revolution in Greece? in Greek, first published in Athens 1934, reprinted in 1963, by Difros Publications.

9)Figures published in the Greek daily Avghi, on May 3, 2009.

10)Figures published in the Greek daily Kathimerini, on January 18, 2009

11)The concept of “Metropolis” acquired a new connotation lately and became an object of intense debate among Marxists and various schools of autonomists. See for ex. the article by Giorgio Agamben Metropolis in www.generation-onlien.org/p/fpagamben4.htm . This article is quite informative although our approach differs from Agamben’s as we link the concept of modern Metropolis with that of capitalist decline.

12)William Shakespeare, As you like it, Act 2, Scene 5

13) K. Marx-F. Engels, The German Ideology Marx-Engels Collected Works(MECW), Progress Moscow 1976, vol.5 p. 31

14)K. Marx, 1844 Manuskripts in Marx Engels Gesamt Ausgabe (MEGA) 2nd Edition, Dietz Verlag, Berlin1982, Erster Abteilung, Band 2, p.392

And The Rustbelt’s Truth-Teller Of The Year Award Goes To…

There is the  image and then there is the reality of things.  More often than not the two are in some opposition to each other.  This is no more true than in the case of bourgeois politics.  When I want the image of things I watch the NewsHour on PBS or, rarely, the Sunday morning network wanks.  PBS has the attraction of being utterly conscious of setting the parameters of acceptable debate and of “agreed upon” history.  Ken Burns being only the most arrant example.  That acceptable debate is, of course, the liberal-conservative dichotomy (in the American sense of those terms).  But PBS, contrary to some on the right, doesn’t do liberal well; it’s too culturally stodgy for a start.  Their nostalgia shows about the 60s star the Kingsmen for god’s sake.

No, for the left of the acceptable dial I go over to the Huffington Post and wade through the TnA to watch clips of the Daily Show and read the night-terrors of liberals.  I suggest that it says something pretty profound about the culture of the Late-Imperial United States when Arianna Huffington, a card-carrying member of the Beverly Hills elite, is passed off as someone who “speaks truth to power”.  It’s hard for me to take someone seriously when I am constantly mistaking them for Zsa Zsa Gabor.  Dawling.

The conflict between image and reality took on epic proportions during the last election cycle.  Barack Obama’s ascendancy to the Presidency was followed every step of the way by wonks writing about the symbolism of the historic change represented by a black man, with a decidedly foreign sounding name no less, sauntering to the White House.  But there was a lot more symbolism embodied in Obama than just that.  Far from being the herald of a “post-racial” America, Obama represents an elaboration of racial politics, not its denial.  Obama’s personal, and carefully presented, history is testimony to that.  Isn’t it just as symbolic that the first black man to win the highest office in the land was not a descendant of slaves?

The packaging of candidate Obama as the harbinger of change was a very different proposition than presenting him as bringer of reform.  Reform, aside from the necessary health care pledge (and we see how well that’s turned out), wasn’t promised by Obama.  Why?  Well, to start with Obama’s politics of triangulation are thoroughly  “post-reform.”  I think of him speaking in Denver, standing in front of those theater-prop Roman columns; his real promise was to the ruling class.  “I will be a better steward of the system.”  If you thought Obama was going to bring change rather than simply be a change than you weren’t listening.

Paul Street was listening.  No other writer on the political scene has spilled more cyber ink trying to scrape away the bullshit that embodied Obama’s rise than Paul Street and it is to him that the Rustbelt bestows the highly coveted 2009 Teller-of-Truths Award.

Street has written for years on class, race and history, much of it with a focus on Obama’s adopted hometown of Chicago.  He is also an activist, and this activism informs all of his writing.  Street first started analyzing the Obama phenomenon before the primaries opened (Why I’ve Focused on Obama) and his writings will, in the hope of this blog, be an invaluable chronicle of that period for historians and activists.  Better than that, for us now, he continues to expose the class and imperial character of the present administration at a level that few writers today are achieving (Street on Obama’s Nobel Prize speech).

For many progressives, Paul seemed a stodgy leftist unwilling to accept the zeitgeist of the moment.  A naysayer and a denier of the “seismic shift” represented by Obama in the American cultural landscape who challenged “progressives” and leftist hopes in Obama (See Obama And The Left).  However, his understanding of racial politics was a lot more profound than his detractors (Street’s Because He’s Black).  Other writers, even leftist writers, were blinded by a symbolism that Paul’s keen understanding of capitalism, the reality behind the apologue, allowed him to deconstruct.  Read those angry liberals at the Huffington Post and then read Street (No Left Excuses For Obama); the gap is almost embarrassing.  His quest for the truth, to expose the reality behind the image, seemed Quixotesque in those heady days of hope.  With each passing day Street’s analysis is confirmed.

Street’s output puts most other writers to shame; not just in the volume but in depth as well.  His articles are almost always thoroughly researched; every i dotted, t crossed and enough footnotes to send you off in a thousands different directions should you choose.  He doesn’t just tell the truth; he names the facts, he names the system.  Street starts with an understanding of capitalism and the role of bourgeois politics within it (Obama: Ruling Class Candidate).

When, in the depths of Obamania, and I felt like I lived in a different reality, it was Street’s articles that illuminated the moment and assured me that I wasn’t crazy for not “getting it.”  Even while I do not always agree with Paul, and sometimes slightly more than a little, navigating the rise of Obama without the aid of his articles would have been so much the harder.  It is because I occasionally disagreed with him and he was so clearly on the side I felt, but couldn’t fully articulate, that he’s been so valuable to me coming to terms with what has happened over the last years.  What the symbolism of Obama represents and what it doesn’t, and more than that, the real role of the (as projected) New Face of the American Empire.  He enriched, more than any other single writer, the whole discussion in the left around Obama.

If anyone has the right to hire a plane and fly an “I Told You So” banner it’s Paul Street, but he is too serious a writer for that.  Paul Street continues to expose the truth, dispel the myths, analyze the symbolism and point another way forward.   In a period that saw so much confusion we all owe Street a debt for speaking truth to power and telling it like it is.

The bath soaps and fruit basket normally awarded to winners of this prestigious accolade have been waived this year due to the recession.  However, Paul can accept History’s Vindication at a time of his convenience.

Paul Street’s massive corpus can be accessed at Znet here.

The Luck Of The Irish

OK, so it’s not John Lennon’s best song.  It’s the thought that counts.

Roundup: Copenhagen

The big news this week is, of course, Copenhagen.  What a disaster.  The stars were definitely Hugo, Evo and, most importantly, the tens of thousands in the streets who challenged the pretenses of the conference itself.  The repression was bad, even by post-Seattle standards.

I am certainly heartened that the Marxist left has, by and large, finally come around to incorporating an ecological critique of the capitalist system.  While the elements of such a critique are inherent to Marxism it has taken the profundity of the crisis (and the pushing of certain comrades) to force revolutionaries to explore that critique, but it is being explored.  Here’s a bit of a left round up on the conference itself.  There is a ton more out there than this so have a look for yourself.

Though Cowards Flinch beat me to the punch and has the latest Carnival of Socialism with lots of coverage of the left take on Copenhagen.  Most leftists seems to have been pessimistic about the chances of a climate breakthrough, so at least few will feel disappointed.

Liam’s blog has the video and transcript of Chavez’ (or is it Chavez’s?) speech where he name-checks at least one comrade from each International and that Jewish carpenter from Palestine who hated rich folks.  Liam has another piece well worth reading on the movement after the talks as well.

Ecosocialist Derek Wall at Another Green World has a plethora of posts on the conference as does Climate and Capitalism including an interesting article by Patrick Bond on the Cap and Trade debate.

Democracy Now had extensive coverage all week including this interview with Bolivian President Evo Morales.

The venerable Australian paper Green Left Weekly has enough analysis and reports on Copenhagen to keep you reading throughout the Holiday season.

Blogger Anna Chen, AKA Madam Miaow, was on the BBC’s World Have Your Say program discussing Copenhagen and has a video on her site of the debate where she looks at China’s place in the crisis among other things.

International Viewpoint has an article focusing on the movement coming out of Copenhagen.  Our friends in the International Marxist Tendency offer their take on the future after the Copenhagen collapse.  The ISO offer their analysis of the summit that was “designed to fail.”

According to Chavez, Fidel visited him on the morning he was to leave for Denmark to discuss the conference.  Chavez’ speech certainly had plenty of the  Commandante in it.  Fidel Castro looks at the aftermath and penned these words in his latest Reflection.

I’m certainly glad that socialism was raised as the answer to the capitalist ecological crisis both inside and out of the conference.  Barbarism is staring us in the face so we had better raise (and name) a socialist alternative.  However, one thing was clear from Copenhagen; the working class, as the working class, was largely absent from the debate.  Since the WC is the agent of socialism, this seems a most glaring problem.

—–

Exams are over and a couple of weeks off for the holidays are absolutely in order.  My plan is to relax and enjoy these few weeks off from school with some holiday travel.  Seeing old friends and comrades in Cincinnati.  The blog may be a little lighter than normal, or it may be a little heavier than normal, depending.  I do have some sight-seeing plans for Ohio including a return to the Freedom Center (anti-slavery museum in Cincinnati) and I’m going to try and find Marx’s erstwhile comrade and Civil War hero August Willich’s home as well as some local native american earthworks in Madisonville.  And I’m going to eat Cincinnati chili coney dogs until I can’t any longer.

Engels on ‘Darwinists’ and “bellum omnium contra omnes”

[French]My Dear Mr. Lavrov,

At last, on my return trip from Germany, I have got round to your article which I have read with great interest.  Here are my observations relating to it and written in German and thus enabling me to be more concise.

[German]1) Of the Darwinian doctrine I accept the theory of evolution, but Darwin’s method of proof (struggle for life, natural selection) I consider only a first, provisional, imperfect expression of a newly discovered fact. Until Darwin’s time the very people who now see everywhere only struggle for existence (Vogt, Búchner, Moleschott, etc.) emphasized precisely cooperation in organic nature, the fact that the vegetable kingdom supplies oxygen and nutriment to the animal kingdom and conversely the animal kingdom supplies plants with carbonic acid and manure, which was particularly stressed by Liebig. Both conceptions are justified within certain limits, but the one is as one-sided and narrowminded as the other. The interaction of bodies in nature – inanimate as well as animate – includes both harmony and collision, struggle and cooperation. When therefore a self-styled natural scientist takes the liberty of reducing the whole of historical development with all its wealth and variety to the one-sided and meager phrase “struggle for existence,” a phrase which even in the sphere of nature can be accepted only cum grano salis, such a procedure really contains its own condemnation.

2) Of the three “convinced Darwinists” you cite, only Hellwald would seem worthy of mention.  After all, Seidlitz is at best no more than a minor luminary and Robert Byr a novelist, whose novel Drei Mal is currently appearing in Ueber Land und Meer.  And that’s where all his rodomontade belongs.

3) I do not deny the advantages of your method of attack, which I would like to call psychological; but I would have chosen another method. Everyone of us is influenced more or less by the intellectual environment in which he mostly moves. For Russia, where you know your public better than I, and for a propaganda journal that appeals to the “restraining effect”, [a quote from Lavrov’s article] the moral sense, your method is probably the better one. For Germany, where false sentimentality has done and still does so much damage, it would not fit; it would be misunderstood, sentimentality perverted. In our country it is hatred rather than love that is needed – at least in the immediate future – and more than anything else a shedding of the last remnants of German idealism, an establishment of the material facts in their historical rights. I should therefore attack – and perhaps will when the time comes – these bourgeois Darwinists in about the following manner:

The whole Darwinists teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of Hobbes’s doctrine of bellum omnium contra omnes [from Hobbes’s De Cive and Leviathan, chapter 13-14] and of the bourgeois-economic doctrine of competition together with Malthus’s theory of population. When this conjurer’s trick has been performed (and I questioned its absolute permissibility, as I have indicated in point 1, particularly as far as the Malthusian theory is concerned), the same theories are transferred back again from organic nature into history and it is now claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved. The puerility of this procedure is so obvious that not a word need be said about it. But if I wanted to go into the matter more thoroughly I should do so by depicting them in the first place as bad economists and only in the second place as bad naturalists and philosophers.

4) The essential difference between human and animal society consists in the fact that animals at most collect while men produce. This sole but cardinal difference alone makes it impossible simply to transfer laws of animal societies to human societies. It makes it possible, as you properly remark:

“for man to struggle not only for existence but also for pleasures and for the increase of his pleasures,… To be ready to renounce his lower pleasures for the highest pleasure.” [Engels’ italics – quoted from Lavrov’s Sierra article]

Without disputing your further conclusions from this I would, proceeding from my own premises, make the following inferences: At a certain stage the production of man attains such a high-level that not only necessaries but also luxuries, at first, true enough, only for a minority, are produced. The struggle for existence – if we permit this category for the moment to be valid – is thus transformed into a struggle for pleasures, no longer for mere means of subsistence but for means of development, socially produced means of development, and to this stage the categories derived from the animal kingdom are no longer applicable. But if, as has now happened, production in its capitalist form produces a far greater quantity of means of subsistence and development than capitalist society can consume because it keeps the great mass of real producers artificially away from these means of subsistence and development; if this society is forced by its own law of life constantly to increase this output which is already too big for it and therefore periodically, every 10 years, reaches the point where it destroys not only a mass of products but even productive forces – what sense is there left in all this talk of “struggle for existence”? The struggle for existence can then consist only in this: that the producing class takes over the management of production and distribution from the class that was hitherto entrusted with it but has now become incompetent to handle it, and there you have the socialist revolution.

Apropos. Even the mere contemplation of previous history as a series of class struggles suffices to make clear the utter shallowness of the conception of this history as a feeble variety of the “struggle for existence.” I would therefore never do this favor to these false naturalists.

5) For the same reason I would have changed accordingly the formulation of the following proposition of yours, which is essentially quite correct:

“that to facilitate the struggle the idea of solidarity could finally… grow to a point where it will embrace all mankind and oppose it, as a society of brothers living in solidarity, to the rest of the world – the world of minerals, plants, and animals.”

6) On the other hand I cannot agree with you that the “bellum omnium contra omnes” was the first phase of human development. In my opinion, the social instinct was one of the most essential levers of the evolution of man from the ape. The first man must have lived in bands and as far as we can peer into the past we find that this was the case.

[French]17 November.  Having been interrupted, I have today resumed this letter so that it may go off to you.  You will have seen that my observations apply rather to the form, to the method, of your attack than to its substance,  I hope you find them sufficiently clear; I wrote them in great haste and, upon reading them, find many words I should like to alter, but I fear to make the manuscript unduly illegible.

With Cordial Regards, F. Engels

Letter written November 12-17, 1875

Some Thoughts on Class Independence

There is obviously much more to say on these questions and this small post can’t possibly do them the service they deserve, but this is a question I have been thinking about quite a bit lately and since I have a blog I have the ability to think out loud.  Please take this in that spirit-

For a Marxist all political work hinges on the proposition that the self-emancipation of the working class is a process whereby the class “of itself” transforms into a class “for itself.”  It is for this reason revolutionaries push for the independence of the working class both politically and organizationally.  Nearly all of the most important struggles within the international workers movement historically have revolved around the question of “class independence” and that is no accident.  The process can go the other way and militants “for” the class can become militants “of” the class, politically there is a world of difference.

The struggle between classes is, in some ways, unfair.  After all, a liberated working class, the producing class, has no need for the capitalist class while the capitalist is chained to his worker as the source of his wealth.  It is the working class that can solve the class conflict; the capitalist exists only with it.  As is so often the case that fundamental reality of capitalist society is masked by its culture which presents the capitalist, recently in the guise of a banker, as the indispensable class.  A society whose cultural understandings are so at odd with the underlying reality produces any number of warning signs.  The Cult of the Celebrity is certainly one such sign.

However, this enculturation is based on the reality that in capitalist society the working class is dependent on the capitalists as workers.  Capitalism has long stripped individuals of the means of producing their own subsistence.   They have to sell their labor to a capitalist to exist.  The working class “of itself” cannot liberate itself, because it exists only in the context of that relationship.  It is not only the relationship with the capitalist that needs to change if we are to overcome this contradiction.

Workers are led to believe that choice in life is exercised at the mall and between different brands of the same product.  Real choices about our life, how we enrich ourselves and what we contribute to our society, are left to the market and the value of our labor in it.  Again, culture reinforces the problem for the working class where, with all of the dynamism available to it, the capitalist marketing of commodities has convinced workers that their primary role, indeed their contribution, to society is that of consumer with our job also being a sort of consumer choice with all of the associated status markers of other “choices.”  And just as with products, only the brand is different.

Who produced that commodity?  Money didn’t magically transform itself into a television; hands were bloodied somewhere in that process.  Commodities are produced, actually made, by a whole class of people beyond boundaries.  By now we have all been to a meeting where we are told to look at the tag of our shirt to see where it was made.  It not only takes the grower, the sewer, the truck driver, the store clerk or office worker to make a shirt, moving its components across continents; it also takes the whole of society that sustains that grower, that driver, etc.

While technology may have removed many who sell their labor from the direct manufacture of goods into information and service industries, further masking their role as producers, the fact remains that they labor in the service of that process, it is that process which allows them to labor.  The worker may get her wages from the boss, but she gets her belly filled by other workers, a world of workers.  How convenient for the bosses that the answer to this reality on the part of most US trade union “leaders” is the call: “American Jobs for American Workers!”  The divisions of race, sex, nation, etc. that exist across class lines divide the working class internally too and everywhere is “the other” when it reality it is “each other.”

In the productive process it is the working class that adds value; money only represents it.  But in capitalism it is also true that “it takes money to make money.”  In general, workers, by their labor alone, do not make value.  It also requires means, tools, to produce values.  Marx would call that “fixed capital” and it is the reason it takes capital to transform labor into values.  The worker brings his “capital” to the process in the form of his labor, or rather his ability to labor, which is determined by that world of workers out there.  It is here that lays the central contradiction of capitalist production and the fulcrum on which class transformation rests.  The labor to produce goods, values, is a social labor, collective in form and in essence, while the means, the tools, to produce goods, are owned individually, even if by a group of individuals who then decide on how all of the surplus values are distributed.

In a society where the capitalist is the ruling class the products of the labor process go to the one who owns the tools and not to the one who uses the tools, naturally.  The “right to property” has deprived workers of the products of their own labor, the only “property” they own (we do not include all of the many homes workers “owned” now returning to the banks).  The worker is doubly robbed because the worker also made the “fixed capital” that is the source of capitalists claim to ownership of the product made.   It is to those means of production that the workers’ relationship must change.  As long as the working class accepts the capitalist claim on the means of production any effective struggle with the capitalists is made impossible.  They have you before you start since the rules of the game, and the imagination of the participants, are set.  The capitalist, incidentally, wrote the rules.

A working class that acts “for itself” has to wade through a wide river of muck; that consciousness which is “false” because it is only partial (there is no such thing as unconscious consciousness).  As Marx said “all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.”  As long as workers see themselves simply as consumers then they won’t be able to imagine how to apply themselves as producers.  As long as the working class imagines that it can’t live with out the capitalist they will surely die for the capitalist.  As long as the working class sees its interests tied up with the capitalists system it will never seek to go beyond those interests.

At the heart of that re-expropriation is the class realizing itself as producers and ending itself as workers.  As surely as it must destroy the capitalist class as a class it must also end itself as the dependent class it now is.  This is no easy process, however it is a process that is continually happening.   Even by asserting the interests “of the class” the questions of what is the interest “for the class” arises.  It is what Lenin called “the actuality of the revolution”, it is where form is seen through to essence. The generalization of such everyday lessons is where class consciousness is developed beyond the immediate.  It is where, as a class, workers begin to imagine another world because they begin, through the muck of the ages, to see the world now as it really is.

It is the task of revolutionaries to hold up “the essence of things” and to foster such imaginations, that is why we stick to the principle of class independence.  However, we also understand that the class coming to such independence is a process.  It is only by organizing as workers and putting forward demands as workers that the class can begin to define its own interests for itself.  We participate fully in the struggles “of the class” for better conditions that workers might make conditions for themselves.  In the day to day struggle over living conditions the more independent the demands of the working class are, the greater the threat backing them up is.  It is only with such threats that anything is won in the class struggle.

The struggle for better conditions within the framework of capitalism, necessary as it is, places enormous pressure on revolutionary organizations.  It is all too easy to give up revolutionary imagination, but the requirement for doing so is to reject the essence and embrace the form, to lose sight of the world as it really is.  Mighty Internationals have fallen over the years because of such pressures.  By “independence” we do not just mean political and organizational independence from the interests of capital.  No, it is only by acting “for itself”, independent and in conflict with the needs “of itself,” that the working class can take what, by law and by culture, does not belong to them; the products of their own labor.  By doing so they remake the world, their tools in their hands.

Leonard Nikani Ten Years Gone

Ten years ago this September South African revolutionary Leonard Nikiani died after a long battle.  I had never heard his name until I stumbled upon this video via Socialist Resistance in Britain which published his memoirs My Life Under White Supremacy and in Exile earlier this year.  I wonder how many comrades know of him or his struggle?  That an African Trotskyist would receive military training from Cuba is one of those things about the Twentieth Century that make it so interesting.  I know South African Trotskyism more for its exiles than its work in the country.  In this talk long time South African Marxist Norman Traub, editor of Ninaki’s memoirs, gives his views on the life and politics of Nikani in the context of the ANC’s transformation into the administrator of capitalism in South Africa.  Yep, it’s still about the révolution permanente. Part two here.

That Fairport Stomp

Like all white folks born into the Midwest I have a Pantheon of Rock.  The one handed to me in the neighborhood I grew up in had either Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath at the top, largely dependent on your proclivity for barbiturates (Sabbath) or amphetamines (Zeppelin).  The older kids that influenced me in the tender throws of youth all, more or less, resembled the characters in Dazed and Confused.  I grew out of that relatively young, but old Sabbath will always have a place in my heart.  The punk and skinhead subculture I became a dues-paying member of in my late teens tended to limit what one was allowed to listen to, even if a number of the bands were truly great.

Now I just follow my own evolving tastes (conditioned of course) and am interested in all music; in music in general.  Lots of bands have gone in and out of my Pantheon, but by now it’s clear to me which ones are staying.  Fairport Convention, of the classic years, is staying.  Only a few of their generational peers, like The Band or The Byrds, could match the musicianship of Fairport.  While most of those who used rock instrumentation to explore music focused on the American progenitors of the form, Fairport looked to their own, British, history for tunes.  But this was no revival, it was a reimagining and the band was capable of going to all kinds of different territory.

The personnel changes of the band are legendary, but the line-up that absolutely kills includes Dave Swarbrick, Richard Thompson, Dave Pegg, Dave Mattacks, Simon Nicol and Sandy Denny.  The above video from the late 80s of the Fairport rendition of A Sailor’s Life has most of those.  Sandy Denny, a uniquely talented singer, unfortunately died too young in 1978.  No one could replace her and June Tabor does as well as could be expected in an extremely difficult song to sing.  But the magic here is in the interplay between Swarbrick on fiddle and the indomitable Richard Thompson on guitar as they go all dueling modal while the bursting rhythm section slams that Fairport stomp.  A lesser band would have resolved the musical tension and provided a cathartic power cord; Fairport just lets it twirl away.  It’s why I like music.  The original from Unhalfbricking with Sandy Denny proving why she is irreplaceable below is even better.