This is footage of speeches at a rally on April 18th 2009.
In January, John had spoken at a 500 strong demo in Portsmouth, against the bombing of Gaza by Isreal. The police arrested and charged him with organising a demonstration without asking their permission.
On the morning of the trial, there was a rally of about 30 friends and supports outside the courts, where John was asked to speak.
The trial was adjourned, on the grounds that the judicial process had become "compromised" by political arguments.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Friday, April 03, 2009
What Would Socialism Look Like?
This is an audio recording of a public meeting on April 2nd 2009, on "What Would Socialism Look Like?".
John Molyneux outlines what a future socialist society might look like, then there questions and discussion from the floor, and finally John summarises the issues, giving his answers to the questions.
This was intended to be a video record of the event, but there were serious problems synchronising the audio stream with the video. As time was short, it was decided to publish as audio only.
Click the play button to stream the recording.
Click here to download the audio in MP3 format.
Discussion begins at roughly the 30 minute mark, and John's summing up at 55. This is an experiment, and somewhat rough. If it works, we'll do more, and get it better.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Left in Vision 3 - Call for Art
LEFT IN VISION 3 – CALL FOR ART
Following the great success of the Left in Vision 2 art show at Marxism last year, Left in Vision 3 is being organised for Marxism 2009 (2-6 July). As before all artists who identify with the left are invited to submit work, and all forms of visual art – figurative, abstract, conceptual, sculpture, film, relational etc – are welcome. International contributions will be especially encouraged.
Anyone wishing to submit work should email John Molyneux, john@molyneux8652.freeserve.co.uk or if necessary phone 07801 290411.
All work should be submitted by Friday 6 June, when curatorial decisions about what is to be shown will be made.
Following the great success of the Left in Vision 2 art show at Marxism last year, Left in Vision 3 is being organised for Marxism 2009 (2-6 July). As before all artists who identify with the left are invited to submit work, and all forms of visual art – figurative, abstract, conceptual, sculpture, film, relational etc – are welcome. International contributions will be especially encouraged.
Anyone wishing to submit work should email John Molyneux, john@molyneux8652.freeserve.co.uk or if necessary phone 07801 290411.
All work should be submitted by Friday 6 June, when curatorial decisions about what is to be shown will be made.
Mak Wallinger's Horse of Another Colour
Mark Wallinger’s Horse of Another Colour
This article appeared in the March 2009 edition of Socialist Review.
The selection of Mark Wallinger’s proposal for a giant White Horse for Ebbsfleet International Station site in Kent is an event of some cultural significance.
In terms of size alone it will be impressive, if not disturbing. An exact replica of a white stallion, it will be 164 feet tall, two and a half times higher than the Angel of the North and roughly the same height as Nelson’s Column, and stand on an area the size of fifty football pitches, making it by far the largest work of public art in Britain.
It is testimony to the huge shift in British public attitudes to modern art that has taken place over the last decade or so.. Britain has been very conservative in these matters: in the thirties Rima, Jacob Epstein’s mild relief sculpture in Hyde Park, was repeatedly defaced and in the sixties The National Gallery’s purchase of a Cezanne(!) was greeted with howls of derision.
The way the public warmed to the Angel of the North in 1998 was one definite sign of the shift, the success of Tate Modern another It confirms the trend whereas until recently a commission such as this would have been almost unthinkable, the White Horse seems to have been met with substantial approval.
As far as local opinion is concerned there is a bit of pattern with this kind of project. The announcement and construction is met with a certain hostility but after a while the new arrival becomes familiar, accepted as part of the landscape, and thereafter an object of local pride. The White Horse is likely to follow this pattern, except with less initial hostility.
Certainly it meets the standard requirement of such a monument in that it combines a number of local and historical references. Kent is a horse breeding area and Horsa, the semi- mythological Anglo-Saxon figure, who gave his name to the horse, allegedly landed at nearby Thanet in the fifth century, with the result that a white horse became the emblem of Kent. There are nods in the direction of the Bronze Age White Horse of Uffington in Berkshire and its modern Folkestone equivalent, as well as the underlying chalk and the White Cliffs of Dover. Though, significantly, Wallinger resisted pressure from Kent Council to depict the horse prancing or rampant as in, the Kent emblem, preferring the less stylised, unheroic image of a grazing horse.
Both Wallinger and his work come distinctly ’from left field’ as it were. Wallinger is best known for his 2007 Turner Prize winning piece State Britain, an exact recreation in Tate Britain of Brian Haw’s anti-Iraq war protest in Parliament Square. In itself this doesn’t make the White Horse good or bad but it does suggest a closer look at Wallinger’s thought processes, especially as he always been quite an ‘intellectual’ theorised artist.
In fact Wallinger has long been making artwork with ‘horse’ motifs in which horse racing / breeding serve as a analogue or symbol of the class system , English identity and other issues. In 1992 he made a series of photo-realist paintings of horses called ‘Race, Class and Sex’ which looked at the relations between breeding, eugenics and class – Wallinger called horse breeding ‘ eugenics by proxy’
.
He also made a black and white replica of Stubbs’ famous 18th century race horse painting Whistlejacket, often hailed as an icon Englishness, added a unicorn horn and called it Ghost – the spectral fantasy of English ‘identity’.
Later he bought an actual race horse which he called ‘A Real Work of Art’ and ran it in suffragette racing colours (purple, green and white) while dressing himself up in the colours as Emily Davison, the suffragette who through herself under the King’s horse in the 1913 Derby. At the same time as commenting on class and gender this work was an exploration, as its name implies, of the issue of realism in art and the perennial ‘what is art?’ question.
Marcel Duchamp, with his ready mades, floated the idea that a work of art was simply what an artist designated as such, and the philosopher of art, Arthur Danto, responding to Warhol’s Brillo Pads, developed the idea that art is what the institutions of the art world (galleries, critics, art colleges etc) say it is. Wallinger regarded the latter as a ‘patently conservative position’ (both are philosophically idealist positions) and set out to challenge it by nominating as art something from life outside the gallery or art world. Clearly there is also an element of playfulness here – imagine the race commentator intoning “ it’s A Real Work of Art coming up on the rails … and the winner is … A Real Work of Art!”
A neglected aspect of realism and naturalism in artistic representation is the question of scale. How can we regard as ‘realist’ an image which is a completely different size? Wallinger investigated this in reverse in Ecce Homo, an exactly life-size representation of a man as a Christ figure, placed on the vacant Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. Because all the other figures on plinths in the Square are much larger than life size, Wallinger’s figure looked uncannily small. The Ebbsfleet horse reverses the issue again by trying to be ‘uncannily realistic’ (Wallinger’s words) on a gigantic scale which somehow manages to recall a tiny model in a child’s farmyard set.
None of this tells us how The White Horse will actually turn out but it does suggest it will be one of the more interesting pieces of public art of recent times.
John Molyneux
15 February 2009
This article appeared in the March 2009 edition of Socialist Review.
The selection of Mark Wallinger’s proposal for a giant White Horse for Ebbsfleet International Station site in Kent is an event of some cultural significance.
In terms of size alone it will be impressive, if not disturbing. An exact replica of a white stallion, it will be 164 feet tall, two and a half times higher than the Angel of the North and roughly the same height as Nelson’s Column, and stand on an area the size of fifty football pitches, making it by far the largest work of public art in Britain.
It is testimony to the huge shift in British public attitudes to modern art that has taken place over the last decade or so.. Britain has been very conservative in these matters: in the thirties Rima, Jacob Epstein’s mild relief sculpture in Hyde Park, was repeatedly defaced and in the sixties The National Gallery’s purchase of a Cezanne(!) was greeted with howls of derision.
The way the public warmed to the Angel of the North in 1998 was one definite sign of the shift, the success of Tate Modern another It confirms the trend whereas until recently a commission such as this would have been almost unthinkable, the White Horse seems to have been met with substantial approval.
As far as local opinion is concerned there is a bit of pattern with this kind of project. The announcement and construction is met with a certain hostility but after a while the new arrival becomes familiar, accepted as part of the landscape, and thereafter an object of local pride. The White Horse is likely to follow this pattern, except with less initial hostility.
Certainly it meets the standard requirement of such a monument in that it combines a number of local and historical references. Kent is a horse breeding area and Horsa, the semi- mythological Anglo-Saxon figure, who gave his name to the horse, allegedly landed at nearby Thanet in the fifth century, with the result that a white horse became the emblem of Kent. There are nods in the direction of the Bronze Age White Horse of Uffington in Berkshire and its modern Folkestone equivalent, as well as the underlying chalk and the White Cliffs of Dover. Though, significantly, Wallinger resisted pressure from Kent Council to depict the horse prancing or rampant as in, the Kent emblem, preferring the less stylised, unheroic image of a grazing horse.
Both Wallinger and his work come distinctly ’from left field’ as it were. Wallinger is best known for his 2007 Turner Prize winning piece State Britain, an exact recreation in Tate Britain of Brian Haw’s anti-Iraq war protest in Parliament Square. In itself this doesn’t make the White Horse good or bad but it does suggest a closer look at Wallinger’s thought processes, especially as he always been quite an ‘intellectual’ theorised artist.
In fact Wallinger has long been making artwork with ‘horse’ motifs in which horse racing / breeding serve as a analogue or symbol of the class system , English identity and other issues. In 1992 he made a series of photo-realist paintings of horses called ‘Race, Class and Sex’ which looked at the relations between breeding, eugenics and class – Wallinger called horse breeding ‘ eugenics by proxy’
.
He also made a black and white replica of Stubbs’ famous 18th century race horse painting Whistlejacket, often hailed as an icon Englishness, added a unicorn horn and called it Ghost – the spectral fantasy of English ‘identity’.
Later he bought an actual race horse which he called ‘A Real Work of Art’ and ran it in suffragette racing colours (purple, green and white) while dressing himself up in the colours as Emily Davison, the suffragette who through herself under the King’s horse in the 1913 Derby. At the same time as commenting on class and gender this work was an exploration, as its name implies, of the issue of realism in art and the perennial ‘what is art?’ question.
Marcel Duchamp, with his ready mades, floated the idea that a work of art was simply what an artist designated as such, and the philosopher of art, Arthur Danto, responding to Warhol’s Brillo Pads, developed the idea that art is what the institutions of the art world (galleries, critics, art colleges etc) say it is. Wallinger regarded the latter as a ‘patently conservative position’ (both are philosophically idealist positions) and set out to challenge it by nominating as art something from life outside the gallery or art world. Clearly there is also an element of playfulness here – imagine the race commentator intoning “ it’s A Real Work of Art coming up on the rails … and the winner is … A Real Work of Art!”
A neglected aspect of realism and naturalism in artistic representation is the question of scale. How can we regard as ‘realist’ an image which is a completely different size? Wallinger investigated this in reverse in Ecce Homo, an exactly life-size representation of a man as a Christ figure, placed on the vacant Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. Because all the other figures on plinths in the Square are much larger than life size, Wallinger’s figure looked uncannily small. The Ebbsfleet horse reverses the issue again by trying to be ‘uncannily realistic’ (Wallinger’s words) on a gigantic scale which somehow manages to recall a tiny model in a child’s farmyard set.
None of this tells us how The White Horse will actually turn out but it does suggest it will be one of the more interesting pieces of public art of recent times.
John Molyneux
15 February 2009
Monday, February 02, 2009
The Question of Charity
KOREA COLUMN 43
The Question of Charity
About nine months ago it was suggested to me that I should write one of these columns on where socialists stand on the question of giving to charity. I never got round to it because there always seemed something more important or more pressing to write about. Right now in Britain, however, the question of one particular charity has suddenly become the hottest political topic of the day, and every socialist, every revolutionary – indeed more or less everyone engaged in politics – has had to take a position on it.
How this came about I shall deal with in a while, but the episode has convinced me that the issue of charity is worth visiting after all.
Posed in general terms the first point socialists have to make about charity is that, in most cases, it is manifestly unable to solve the very issues it is addressing. Take, for example, Oxfam, which aims to respond to world hunger and poverty. Oxfam is one the biggest, most successful and well known charities in Britain , if not the world. In the year 2007-8 it raised £299.7 million and spent £214.2 million. In itself this is quite a large sum but when it comes to solving world poverty it is no more than a drop in the ocean.
It is not that the problem of hunger is insoluble, or even very difficult to solve. It is well known that there is more than enough food in the world to provide a decent diet for everyone. It is just that when it is a matter of dealing with ANY major WORLD problem nothing is serious till we are talking about hundreds of billions not millions.
Children in Need, one of Britain’s best known charity events which receives a whole evening of BBC television coverage, raises about £20 million. The government bail-out for ONE bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland, was £20 billion (1000 times as much as Children in Need). According to Barack Obama the bonuses paid to Wall St bankers at the end of 2008 came to $20 billion. World arms spending in 2008 was $1.47 trillion with $711 billion contributed by the US, and so on.
Of course the advocates of charity have an obvious answer to this. They can simply say we know we are not solving the problem but we are doing something – every little helps. Well yes…but we wouldn’t think much of a fire service that responded to blazing buildings with water pistols ( at least they’d be doing something) or tried to tackle a forest fire with watering cans and garden hoses. And the truth is that many charitable efforts, however well intentioned, are closer to the water pistol than to proper fire engine.
And this is by no means the end of the story for there is more wrong with charity than it just not being enough. We also have to consider its political and ideological role Charity can easily be used by our rulers either to suggest they are doing something about a problem when really they are not, or even when they are actively engaged in making the problem worse. For example, the British government, which has been craven in its support for the state of Israel in general and the assault on Gaza in particular, has pledged a pathetic £20 million (20 million again) in humanitarian aid.
Charitable and ‘voluntary’ efforts can be, and often are, used by governments to excuse their failure to meet their obligations in terms of education, health and welfare services. Every time I see a hospital launching an appeal for funds for some new piece of life saving equipment I find myself asking why the military don’t need to do this. How I wonder would the ‘Trident Appeal’ fare, with only £20 or so billion (billion again) needed to renew the nuclear submarine missile system?
Another problem with many charites is that they become businesses in their own right, involving substantial administrative overheads and supporting lucrative careers for many directors, fund raisers and marketing managers. Even where there is nothing strictly illegal or underhand going on, as there sometimes is, there something obnoxious about people on $100,000 salaries appealing for the poor and needy – America’s largest charity United Way is run by Brian Gallagher, salary $973.000 p.a. This problem becomes especially acute with NGOs operating in poor countries where the NGO agents receive incomes many hundreds of times greater than those of the local people they are supposed to be helping.
Then there are the fabulously wealthy celebrity charity merchants like Paul McCartney and Bono who stage concerts and suchlike urging ordinary people to give to good causes. For example Bono’s charity RED claims on its website to have raised $100 million for Aids in Africa in two years, but the truth is he could pay that out of his own pocket and still have more money than he could spend in a lifetime.
still the ideological problems inherent in its nature that it focuses on symptoms not causes of social and humanitarian issues and it tends to depict its beneficiaries as helpless passive victims, not people capable of resistance or self liberation. For Marxists and revolutionary socialists the conviction that the fundamental problems of poverty and human degradation can only be and will only be solved by the collective struggle of working people themselves is fundamental.
But despite the validity of all these criticisms this is not the end of the story, especially when we approach the question of charity not just in theory but as a matter of concrete day to day politics. For all its faults there is in the motivation that leads ordinary people to donate to charity an impulse socialists need to relate to and encourage and certainly not to dismiss or disparage. For example if someone comes round my canteen at work with a collecting tin for the homeless my inclination would be to make a small donation but combine it with a question about why we have homeless people in a rich country like Britain.
Then, of course, there are many individuals or groups who are not able to help themselves or to wage a collective struggle and many situations where people need emergency help. In such circumstances there is no Chinese Wall between charity or aid and solidarity, which socialists enthusiastically support; moreover the question of aid, or lack of it from governments, can become an issue of political solidarity.
Thus when the tsunami struck South East Asia in December 2004 the generous response from ordinary people {in Britain] embarrassed the British government into increasing its original miserly aid donation. Socialists needed to be part of that. Then with the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans in 2005, the appalling lack of help for the city’s black and poor, became a key event undermining the political credibility of George Bush.
Which brings me to the circumstance I referred to at the beginning of this column. It is hard to think of anyone in the world at this moment more in need of emergency aid than the besieged people of Gaza. Yet the BBC, obviously under direct Zionist influence, has refused to broadcast the (standard) Disaster Emergency Committee appeal for Gaza. This blatant partiality, coming on the back of sustained pro- Israel, pro-Zionist reporting, has made aid to Gaza a matter of international solidarity of crucial political importance.
Two general points in conclusion: first socialists have and need general theory and principles but the application of those principles to immediate practice does not always follow in a simple straight line and for Marxists truth is ultimately concrete. Second in the course of the overall struggle revolutionaries have to relate both to working people’s anger and their humanity and provide a political focus for both.
John Molyneux
1 February 2009
Sunday, January 25, 2009
A Better World is Possible
A BETTER WORLD IS POSSIBLE
Capitalism isn’t working, so what is the alternative? This question must have at least crossed the mind of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, round the world as they watched the credit crunch, financial meltdown and recession unfold over the past few months. The problem, of course, will have been that for those same millions most of their conditioning, from politicians, media, education, and a good deal of their experience, will have been to answer that there is no alternative, at any rate no alternative to capitalism as such, no alternative that goes beyond a modified version of capitalism as represented by the ‘new’ Keynesian Gordon Brown or, perhaps, Barack Obama.
In fact a definite and clearly articulated alternative – socialism - has existed for at least 160 years (it is 160 years since Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto). Socialism is very straightforward and, compared to capitalism, extremely simple. It means social (or collective) ownership and control of the main means of production (land, factories, businesses, banks etc) and production for human need not profit, and with this the abolition of class divisions.
The trouble for many people is not that this is very complicated or hard to understand but that it just sounds too good to be true. We all, or many of us, get so ground down and demoralised by living under capitalism that we become convinced that nothing as evidently sane and good as socialism could possibly ever really happen – life just isn’t like that, so there must be a catch somewhere.
In this article I intend to argue that socialism is NOT too good to be true, that it is a perfectly reasonable and practical way of organising society – and that the various objections to it which spring into our minds because they have been planted there by the dominant capitalist ideology are illusory or even downright silly. I say silly because when people are deeply prejudiced they often think arguments are obvious, because they are based on their prejudice, which are in fact absurd and which disappear like a puff of smoke the moment the matter is tested in practice. For example in Bristol in 1963 there was a dispute about whether black workers should be allowed to drive buses and some of the racists argued that black people lacked the speedy reactions needed for bus driving [ like Pele and Mohammed Ali had slow reactions!]. Another example: before Angela Rippon started reading the TV news in 1974 it was actually maintained by some dinosaur sexists that the public wouldn’t take the news seriously if it was read by a woman. Obviously such arguments evaporate as soon as the colour or gender bar is breeched.
Let us begin by looking at something absolutely basic: feeding people. The world is currently richer and more productive than it has ever been in history, yet, according to the United Nations, 800 million people live in hunger and fear of starvation, and about 25,000 people, mostly children, actually die of hunger or hunger related causes every day. Is this because of a shortage of food. Not a bit of it
Enough wheat, rice and other grains are produced to provide every human being with 3,500 calories a day. That doesn't even count many other commonly eaten foods - vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. Enough food is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day worldwide: two and half pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs-enough to make most people fat!. Even most "hungry countries" have enough food for all their people right now. Many are net exporters of food and other agricultural products. [ Food First : The Institute for Food and Development Policy.]
Perhaps the problem the problem is transport – maybe the hungry are in remote parts of the world where the food can’t reach them. On the contrary many of them are in huge cities where planes, and sometimes tourists, fly everyday – places like Calcutta, Rio de Janeiro or Dhaka. Even when they are in rural refugee camps the TV cameras and crews seem to get there when they want to, but not the food. Besides we know we have the means of getting of getting planes with bombs to the all the remote places of the earth.
Perhaps people just don’t care if thousands of children starve. Actually this is not so. The UN is full of people who ‘care’. There are numerous international charities like Oxfam and Save the Children, who care a lot and depend on donations from people who care, and the poor countries themselves are full of NGOs doing their best, yet the hunger and the malnutrition continue. Why? There is one answer you can read on any website dealing with this issue and which all the agencies and charities from the UN down would agree on: poverty. People go hungry because they are poor and can’t afford to buy the food available.
But actually this is only part of the story. What would we think of parents with four children and a larder full of food, who allowed one of the children to starve on the grounds that the child could not afford to pay for the food? In fact poverty only leads to people going hungry for a reason that you don’t find on the charity websites, namely that in capitalist society food like almost everything else is a commodity, a good produced for sale on the market in order to make a profit.
Socialism would deal with this seemingly intractable problem of hunger in the easiest and most obvious way, the way any ordinary family deals with it, by NOT treating food as a commodity and simply distributing enough of it to people to ensure that everyone had enough for a healthy diet.
Just think what this would mean – no more starving children, no more distended bellies and vacant staring eyes, no need for kids to work twelve hours a day in sweatshops or for old people to die in the gutter or beggars to crawl in the dirt; so much human suffering ended. Even if it achieved nothing else this ALONE would be enough to justify socialism a thousand times over. But, of course, it’s too good to be true, there must be a catch somewhere!
This is where those ‘standard objections’ pop into our heads just as they have been programmed to do. If food was distributed free there would be no incentive, wouldn’t people all stop work? Actually, no. Very few people reading this article will ever have literally gone hungry, very few people in Britain do, but we haven’t all stopped work. The truth is the opposite; if you are starving you soon lose the ability to work at all and people with a decent diet work much more productively than the malnourished.
As it happens there are two major ‘catches’ to distributing food to the hungry: the first is that the big corporations would not be able to make their billions in profits out of it; the second is that if it would work for food it would work for other things too. Housing for example.
Shelter is one of the basic requirements of human life. Yet even in the richest cities in the richest country in the world, the US, there are homeless people sleeping on the streets, just as there are in London. In the mega cities of the world’s poorer countries, with their favellas and shanty towns, the problem is horrendous.
Socialist planning would solve this problem very simply. Take Britain as a starting point. Strictly speaking there is no housing shortage in Britain, only a shortage of affordable housing, and dealing with the immediate problem of homelessness would just involve requisitioning the empty properties, the mansions and second and third homes of the rich etc. But a permanent solution is easy to envisage. Use the census to estimate the housing needs of the population (something like this happens all ready) and establish a public house building programme, employing thousands of bricklayers, carpenters and other building workers, to build slightly more houses than are needed. Then make the provision of a modest but decent residence to every family or individual citizen a basic right, in the same way that every child has a right to a place in school or the NHS provides free health care for all. In other words, stop treating houses as a commodity and distribute them on the basis of need.
The same principles could be applied to transport. At present transport is a complete mess. Technologically, of course, it is possible to transport people round the world more efficiently than ever before in history, but under capitalism the organisation of transport is both inefficient and destructive. The main form of transport is the private car and car ownership and use has become so widespread that the roads are clogged up (to the point where in London travel by horse and carriage in the 19th century was as quick) and the pollution generated is a major, contributor to climate change.
The socialist solution is obvious: set up a comprehensive integrated system of free public transport. This would involve a huge expansion of the railways for freight and intercity travel, since they are clearly faster, more cost efficient and more environmentally friendly than cars and lorries. Within towns it could be a combination of trams, buses, subways, monorails, minibuses, and bicycles. The precise details don’t matter here. The point is that provided the public transport was sufficiently extensive and effective the private car, with its attendant problems of parking, congestion, accidents, petrol and pollution, could virtually be eliminated in urban areas (and rural areas too if the public network was extensive enough).
So at this point we have free food, housing and transport along with, I assume, free health and education. Inevitably the question arises ‘How would all this be paid for?’ Given the unbelievable sums raised to bail out the banks in recent months this question loses much of its charge, but in any case there are two answers to it depending on how far we look into the matter. The first answer is simply that it would be paid for out of taxation, as the NHS and schools and, of course, the armed services and their wars are at present. Clearly if food, housing and transport were all free people would have more money to pay tax with.
However looking a bit further we have to remember that money does not itself create wealth, or goods or services, only the application of labour to nature does that. Money is just a means of exchanging goods and services that have become commodities. The less goods and services are treated as commodities, and socialism would systematically reduce commodity production till it disappeared, the less role money will have. So the real question becomes would it be possible for society to allocate sufficient labour to grow and distribute enough food to feed everyone adequately, to build enough houses for everyone and to make and operate enough trains, trams, buses etc. to move people around. And we know the answer to this is yes because we more or less do it already.
But how would all these collectively owned industries be run? Wouldn’t it involve vast armies of state bureaucrats, at best soulless jobsworths and at worst monstrous tyrants?
Given the history of state ownership and planning in the 20th century – Stalin’s Russia and Kim Il-Sung’s North Korea at one end and British Rail and the NHS at the other – this is a natural and important question. And the answer to it goes to the very heart of what we mean by the socialist alternative. Socialist planning will not be socialist and will not work practically unless it is democratic and actively involves the mass of ordinary people. Again the years of conditioning ensure that here a little conservative ideologue pops up in our head and says, ‘That’ll never happen. Ordinary people, working class people, can’t run things, they are not clever enough, they haven’t had enough education or management training etc. etc. Besides there will always be someone who gets to the top and takes advantage.’
But to see the capabilities of working people just look at any workplace you know. If the manager is off sick or away on holiday does it grind to halt? Of course not because the workers, between them, already know how the place works. A few years ago in my workplace, a University, the boss [the Vice-Chancellor] was suspended and then sacked for corruption and it was awhile before he was replaced. The uni ran perfectly normally. But if the caretakers [apart from the cleaners, the lowest paid workers in the institution] stop working the whole place shuts down or rather doesn’t even open in the morning!
As for some people getting to the top and abusing their position this will be a problem, not because it is human nature but because socialism has to be built by people brought up under capitalism, not by saints and angels. The answer is to develop mechanisms for controlling and removing such individuals, and since the Paris Commune of 1871, the first real experiment in workers power before it was crushed by the army, we have known what those mechanisms are: make all public officials subject to election and recall and pay them a workers wage. And since the Russian Revolution we also know that these mechanisms work best when they are based on elections in workplaces and other institutions where collective debate can take place.
This was the great contribution of the soviet or workers’ council, which was first created, spontaneously, by the workers of St. Petersburg in the Russian Revolution of !905 and then went on in October 1917 and subsequent struggles, to show that it was the main institution through which working people can establish political power over society as a whole. And that is the starting point for everything we have talked about so far.
Feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, ending inequality and class divisions, democratic planning of the economy, stopping climate change, establishing international peace and unity and all the changes that socialism would bring have as their precondition the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism by the working class, first in one country and then internationally. Workers’ councils are key to this. They begin, within capitalism, as organisers of the workers struggle against the bosses, growing out of mass strikes and factory occupations. They develop into an alternative centre of power, rivalling the old capitalist state, and then in the decisive step of the revolution they replace the capitalist and establish workers’ power – a power which rests on the objective position of the working class in the modern world economy but which also liberates and mobilises the creative energies and talents of tens of millions. Once that happens a better world, a far better world, will move from being a possibility to being a reality .
John Molyneux
8 December 2008
A BETTER WORLD IS POSSIBLE
Capitalism isn’t working, so what is the alternative? This question must have at least crossed the mind of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, round the world as they watched the credit crunch, financial meltdown and recession unfold over the past few months. The problem, of course, will have been that for those same millions most of their conditioning, from politicians, media, education, and a good deal of their experience, will have been to answer that there is no alternative, at any rate no alternative to capitalism as such, no alternative that goes beyond a modified version of capitalism as represented by the ‘new’ Keynesian Gordon Brown or, perhaps, Barack Obama.
In fact a definite and clearly articulated alternative – socialism - has existed for at least 160 years (it is 160 years since Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto). Socialism is very straightforward and, compared to capitalism, extremely simple. It means social (or collective) ownership and control of the main means of production (land, factories, businesses, banks etc) and production for human need not profit, and with this the abolition of class divisions.
The trouble for many people is not that this is very complicated or hard to understand but that it just sounds too good to be true. We all, or many of us, get so ground down and demoralised by living under capitalism that we become convinced that nothing as evidently sane and good as socialism could possibly ever really happen – life just isn’t like that, so there must be a catch somewhere.
In this article I intend to argue that socialism is NOT too good to be true, that it is a perfectly reasonable and practical way of organising society – and that the various objections to it which spring into our minds because they have been planted there by the dominant capitalist ideology are illusory or even downright silly. I say silly because when people are deeply prejudiced they often think arguments are obvious, because they are based on their prejudice, which are in fact absurd and which disappear like a puff of smoke the moment the matter is tested in practice. For example in Bristol in 1963 there was a dispute about whether black workers should be allowed to drive buses and some of the racists argued that black people lacked the speedy reactions needed for bus driving [ like Pele and Mohammed Ali had slow reactions!]. Another example: before Angela Rippon started reading the TV news in 1974 it was actually maintained by some dinosaur sexists that the public wouldn’t take the news seriously if it was read by a woman. Obviously such arguments evaporate as soon as the colour or gender bar is breeched.
Let us begin by looking at something absolutely basic: feeding people. The world is currently richer and more productive than it has ever been in history, yet, according to the United Nations, 800 million people live in hunger and fear of starvation, and about 25,000 people, mostly children, actually die of hunger or hunger related causes every day. Is this because of a shortage of food. Not a bit of it
Enough wheat, rice and other grains are produced to provide every human being with 3,500 calories a day. That doesn't even count many other commonly eaten foods - vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. Enough food is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day worldwide: two and half pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs-enough to make most people fat!. Even most "hungry countries" have enough food for all their people right now. Many are net exporters of food and other agricultural products. [ Food First : The Institute for Food and Development Policy.]
Perhaps the problem the problem is transport – maybe the hungry are in remote parts of the world where the food can’t reach them. On the contrary many of them are in huge cities where planes, and sometimes tourists, fly everyday – places like Calcutta, Rio de Janeiro or Dhaka. Even when they are in rural refugee camps the TV cameras and crews seem to get there when they want to, but not the food. Besides we know we have the means of getting of getting planes with bombs to the all the remote places of the earth.
Perhaps people just don’t care if thousands of children starve. Actually this is not so. The UN is full of people who ‘care’. There are numerous international charities like Oxfam and Save the Children, who care a lot and depend on donations from people who care, and the poor countries themselves are full of NGOs doing their best, yet the hunger and the malnutrition continue. Why? There is one answer you can read on any website dealing with this issue and which all the agencies and charities from the UN down would agree on: poverty. People go hungry because they are poor and can’t afford to buy the food available.
But actually this is only part of the story. What would we think of parents with four children and a larder full of food, who allowed one of the children to starve on the grounds that the child could not afford to pay for the food? In fact poverty only leads to people going hungry for a reason that you don’t find on the charity websites, namely that in capitalist society food like almost everything else is a commodity, a good produced for sale on the market in order to make a profit.
Socialism would deal with this seemingly intractable problem of hunger in the easiest and most obvious way, the way any ordinary family deals with it, by NOT treating food as a commodity and simply distributing enough of it to people to ensure that everyone had enough for a healthy diet.
Just think what this would mean – no more starving children, no more distended bellies and vacant staring eyes, no need for kids to work twelve hours a day in sweatshops or for old people to die in the gutter or beggars to crawl in the dirt; so much human suffering ended. Even if it achieved nothing else this ALONE would be enough to justify socialism a thousand times over. But, of course, it’s too good to be true, there must be a catch somewhere!
This is where those ‘standard objections’ pop into our heads just as they have been programmed to do. If food was distributed free there would be no incentive, wouldn’t people all stop work? Actually, no. Very few people reading this article will ever have literally gone hungry, very few people in Britain do, but we haven’t all stopped work. The truth is the opposite; if you are starving you soon lose the ability to work at all and people with a decent diet work much more productively than the malnourished.
As it happens there are two major ‘catches’ to distributing food to the hungry: the first is that the big corporations would not be able to make their billions in profits out of it; the second is that if it would work for food it would work for other things too. Housing for example.
Shelter is one of the basic requirements of human life. Yet even in the richest cities in the richest country in the world, the US, there are homeless people sleeping on the streets, just as there are in London. In the mega cities of the world’s poorer countries, with their favellas and shanty towns, the problem is horrendous.
Socialist planning would solve this problem very simply. Take Britain as a starting point. Strictly speaking there is no housing shortage in Britain, only a shortage of affordable housing, and dealing with the immediate problem of homelessness would just involve requisitioning the empty properties, the mansions and second and third homes of the rich etc. But a permanent solution is easy to envisage. Use the census to estimate the housing needs of the population (something like this happens all ready) and establish a public house building programme, employing thousands of bricklayers, carpenters and other building workers, to build slightly more houses than are needed. Then make the provision of a modest but decent residence to every family or individual citizen a basic right, in the same way that every child has a right to a place in school or the NHS provides free health care for all. In other words, stop treating houses as a commodity and distribute them on the basis of need.
The same principles could be applied to transport. At present transport is a complete mess. Technologically, of course, it is possible to transport people round the world more efficiently than ever before in history, but under capitalism the organisation of transport is both inefficient and destructive. The main form of transport is the private car and car ownership and use has become so widespread that the roads are clogged up (to the point where in London travel by horse and carriage in the 19th century was as quick) and the pollution generated is a major, contributor to climate change.
The socialist solution is obvious: set up a comprehensive integrated system of free public transport. This would involve a huge expansion of the railways for freight and intercity travel, since they are clearly faster, more cost efficient and more environmentally friendly than cars and lorries. Within towns it could be a combination of trams, buses, subways, monorails, minibuses, and bicycles. The precise details don’t matter here. The point is that provided the public transport was sufficiently extensive and effective the private car, with its attendant problems of parking, congestion, accidents, petrol and pollution, could virtually be eliminated in urban areas (and rural areas too if the public network was extensive enough).
So at this point we have free food, housing and transport along with, I assume, free health and education. Inevitably the question arises ‘How would all this be paid for?’ Given the unbelievable sums raised to bail out the banks in recent months this question loses much of its charge, but in any case there are two answers to it depending on how far we look into the matter. The first answer is simply that it would be paid for out of taxation, as the NHS and schools and, of course, the armed services and their wars are at present. Clearly if food, housing and transport were all free people would have more money to pay tax with.
However looking a bit further we have to remember that money does not itself create wealth, or goods or services, only the application of labour to nature does that. Money is just a means of exchanging goods and services that have become commodities. The less goods and services are treated as commodities, and socialism would systematically reduce commodity production till it disappeared, the less role money will have. So the real question becomes would it be possible for society to allocate sufficient labour to grow and distribute enough food to feed everyone adequately, to build enough houses for everyone and to make and operate enough trains, trams, buses etc. to move people around. And we know the answer to this is yes because we more or less do it already.
But how would all these collectively owned industries be run? Wouldn’t it involve vast armies of state bureaucrats, at best soulless jobsworths and at worst monstrous tyrants?
Given the history of state ownership and planning in the 20th century – Stalin’s Russia and Kim Il-Sung’s North Korea at one end and British Rail and the NHS at the other – this is a natural and important question. And the answer to it goes to the very heart of what we mean by the socialist alternative. Socialist planning will not be socialist and will not work practically unless it is democratic and actively involves the mass of ordinary people. Again the years of conditioning ensure that here a little conservative ideologue pops up in our head and says, ‘That’ll never happen. Ordinary people, working class people, can’t run things, they are not clever enough, they haven’t had enough education or management training etc. etc. Besides there will always be someone who gets to the top and takes advantage.’
But to see the capabilities of working people just look at any workplace you know. If the manager is off sick or away on holiday does it grind to halt? Of course not because the workers, between them, already know how the place works. A few years ago in my workplace, a University, the boss [the Vice-Chancellor] was suspended and then sacked for corruption and it was awhile before he was replaced. The uni ran perfectly normally. But if the caretakers [apart from the cleaners, the lowest paid workers in the institution] stop working the whole place shuts down or rather doesn’t even open in the morning!
As for some people getting to the top and abusing their position this will be a problem, not because it is human nature but because socialism has to be built by people brought up under capitalism, not by saints and angels. The answer is to develop mechanisms for controlling and removing such individuals, and since the Paris Commune of 1871, the first real experiment in workers power before it was crushed by the army, we have known what those mechanisms are: make all public officials subject to election and recall and pay them a workers wage. And since the Russian Revolution we also know that these mechanisms work best when they are based on elections in workplaces and other institutions where collective debate can take place.
This was the great contribution of the soviet or workers’ council, which was first created, spontaneously, by the workers of St. Petersburg in the Russian Revolution of !905 and then went on in October 1917 and subsequent struggles, to show that it was the main institution through which working people can establish political power over society as a whole. And that is the starting point for everything we have talked about so far.
Feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, ending inequality and class divisions, democratic planning of the economy, stopping climate change, establishing international peace and unity and all the changes that socialism would bring have as their precondition the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism by the working class, first in one country and then internationally. Workers’ councils are key to this. They begin, within capitalism, as organisers of the workers struggle against the bosses, growing out of mass strikes and factory occupations. They develop into an alternative centre of power, rivalling the old capitalist state, and then in the decisive step of the revolution they replace the capitalist and establish workers’ power – a power which rests on the objective position of the working class in the modern world economy but which also liberates and mobilises the creative energies and talents of tens of millions. Once that happens a better world, a far better world, will move from being a possibility to being a reality .
John Molyneux
8 December 2008
Saturday, December 13, 2008
The Working Class and Social Change
KOREA COLUMN 42
The Working Class and Social Change
According to Marx the working class or proletariat is ‘the only really revolutionary class’ [The Communist Manifesto] and ‘The emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working class itself’ [The Rules of the International Working Men’s Association] and between capitalism and socialism there will be a transition which ‘can only be the dictatorship of the proletariat’ [The Critique of the Gotha Programme].
This conception of the revolutionary role of the working class was described by Lenin as ‘historically the main thing in Marxism’ but it is the idea many people find hardest to accept. On the one hand there are intellectuals like Herbert Marcuse and T.W. Adorno of the Frankfurt School who identified with much of Marx’s critique of capitalism but concluded that the working class was hopelessly bought off and indoctrinated by the system. On the other hand there are ordinary people, workers themselves, who simply say, ‘It will never happen’.
This is not surprising. The notion that working class people are obviously not capable of liberating themselves and running society is an absolutely central pillar of bourgeois ideology – the capitalist view of the world that pervades the media, the education system and our whole society. It is an idea that is particularly appealing to middle class intellectuals and is reinforced by their conditions of life. It also reflects much of the life experience of working class people who, from early childhood on, are treated as subordinates and have their confidence sapped.
Nevertheless, Lenin was right; the self emancipation of the working class is the main thing, the key idea in Marxism. Without it all the economic and historical theory becomes at best a passive commentary on the world rather than a means of changing it, or, at worst, as in Stalinism and Maoism, an ideology masking the interests of a different class [typically the state capitalist bureaucracy}.So let us look at Marx’s reasons for identifying the working class as the principal agent of social change and examine whether they still apply today.
We should begin by noting that Marx’s view was NOT based on the existing consciousness of the working class. Marx was well aware that the dominant ideas in society are those of the ruling class and that most of the time most of us are subordinate to them. For the mass of workers it would not be socialist consciousness that produced revolutionary struggle, but revolutionary struggle that produced socialist consciousness. Nor was it based on workers’ suffering and oppression. Of course, workers do suffer grievously under capitalism and Marxists fight against this, but not more so than the peasants, serfs and slaves whose poverty and oppression stretch back to the dawn of civilisation and who history shows were not able to abolish class divisions or create socialism .Rather it was based on their potential power deriving from their economic position in capitalist society that made the working class the revolutionary class.
As Marx showed, workers in capitalism are not just badly paid but exploited. Wealth, Marx called it surplus value, is extracted from their labour. This surplus value is the source of all the profits of the capitalist class and of the bulk of wealth in capitalism as a whole. The bourgeoisie therefore needs the working class (not as individuals, of course, but as a class). The working class is the special product of capitalism and at the same time it is the producer of capitalism.
Exploitation also puts the working class into an antagonistic relationship to capitalism; it creates an ongoing conflict of interest between labour and capital over wages, hours, conditions, and ultimately every other issue in society and this conflict turns into industrial and political struggle which is ‘now hidden, now open’ as Marx put it. Most of the time victory in these struggles goes to the bourgeoisie, who have at their disposal both far more wealth and state power (the law, police, judiciary, army etc) but no matter how many times they defeat the working class they cannot escape their dependency on its labour. As capitalism grows so the working class grows too, until it becomes the large majority of society.
In addition to increasing its numbers capitalism also concentrates the working class in large workplaces and great cities. This gives the modern working class far greater potential political power than the scattered peasantry or the old artisans employed in small workshops.
This is not only a negative power AGAINST capitalism but also a positive force FOR socialism. The working class is, by virtue of its economic and social position, a collectivist class. It can only resist the employers and improve its conditions of labour by collective action and it can only take possession of modern industry collectively i.e. by turning it into social property. When peasants seized the land from the feudal lords they could divide it up into small farms; this cannot be done with modern industry. Moreover, political power in all modern societies is based in big cities where the key means of production are also located. The urban industrial character of the proletariat enables it to exercise political power [the dictatorship of the proletariat] while also remaining the principal producing class. In this way it fundamentally undermines the division between rulers and ruled, thus opening the way to a fully classless socialist society.
Such, in essence, was the case made by Marx more than 150 years ago. Since then there have been many actual instances of the working class playing a revolutionary role, such as the Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the German Revolution of 1919-24, the Spanish Revolution of 1936, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Portuguese Revolution of 1974. However it is clear that there is now no shortage of commentators, pundits and academics eager to pronounce Marx out of date.
As an aside I have to note that when I first became a Marxist 40 years ago the academics and pundits all said Marx was out of date then. But what I’ve never been able to find is a moment when most of these thought he was in date. Nevertheless we should look at the arguments.
They say that the working class has lost its revolutionary character because it is no longer poverty stricken as it was in Marx’s day. It is true of course that living standards have risen substantially for many, though by no means all, of the international working class, including in Europe and South Korea, but what is key is not the absolute level of pay but the conflict of interests involved in securing that pay. Relatively well paid workers can be forced into collective struggle in order to defend their high wages and that struggle can lead to revolutionary action and consciousness.
They also say that with the demise of the old industries such as mining, steel and the docks, the working class in the advanced capitalist countries is fast disappearing and certainly no longer the majority. But this argument is based on a false and superficial view of the working class as defined by certain traditional forms of work In reality what counts is not the nature of the work, manual or white collar, but the relations of production. Employees of call centres, supermarkets, hospitals and schools are just as much forced to live by the sale of their labour power as miners and car workers, are also exploited and also possess great collective power. For example call centre workers and supermarket workers who went on strike could have a devastating affect on their bosses’ profits.
Finally the notion that the working class is disappearing is the reverse of what is happening in the world as a whole. In reality the second half of the 20th century saw a huge spread of the working class in the great cities of Asia, Africa and Latin America such as Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, Cairo, Johannesburg, Mexico City and Sao Paulo now even further augmented by the dramatic economic growth of China (and to a lesser extent, India). The global working class is today infinitely larger, more internationally integrated and potentially more powerful than it was in either Marx or Lenin’s day. Now more than ever it is the force than can change the world.
John Molyneux
1 December 2008
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
The Liberty of Appearing- the photographs of Yasser Alwan
The Liberty of Appearing –
the photographs of Yasser Alwan
This essay was written for 'The Liberty of Appearing - photographs of Egyptian working people', the catalogue for Yasser Alwan's travelling exhibition of photographs which opens at FOYLES BOOKSHOP, Charing Cross Rd, London on Friday 7 November at 7.30pm (all welcome) and runs till Thursday 20 November, and then at THE ELDON GALLERY, Portsmouth University, Winston Churchill Ave., Portsmouth on Thursday 27 November 5pm - 7pm running till Fri 5 December.
This beautiful catalogue, containing over fifty of Yasser Alwan's wonderful photographs, was designed and published by Richard Peacock, and is available, price £15.00 + postage, from richpeacock@gmail.com*********************************
Yasser Alwan’s photographs express a profound humanitarian egalitarianism that is rare in the long history of art as a whole and almost unique in the relatively short history of photography. ‘Photographs of Egyptian working people’- already this bare factual description raises a multitude of issues and announces an artistic and political stance.
We live in a culture – and by this I mean the total culture of global capitalism and the total historical culture of western and non-western civilisations - in which working people (peasants, agricultural labourers, slaves, artisans, manual and non-manual proletarians) are massively underrepresented. For the last 5000 years working people have been the immense majority of humanity, but in the world’s poetry, drama, novels, film, TV, visual art etc – music and dance may be a partial exception – their presence is marginal.
From Homer to Hollywood working people are the extras, the walk on parts. For every painting of peasant life by Brueghel, for every etching of a beggar by Rembrandt, there are a hundred, maybe a thousand portraits of emperors, kings, queens, aristocrats and bourgeois. This is not prejudice but a simple reflection of reality. In class divided societies, i.e. every society after the transition from foraging to agriculture, the upper classes are few but important and the working classes, the common people, are many but unimportant. Against this background any artist who, like Yasser Alwan, turns this hierarchy upside down and places working people centre stage, is making a political statement.
Add the designation ‘Egyptian’ to the class category and the magnitude of the under representation increases many fold. This is something that applies not just to Egypt, though Egypt has its particularities in this narrative, but to all ‘non-western’ societies and cultures. The Eurocentric view of history, developed alongside racism, as an ideological accompaniment to material conquest, credits Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Egypt with the birth of civilisation and then moves swiftly to Ancient Greece and Rome, from which point the non-European world simply disappears except, exclusively, as an object of European discovery and military engagement. The result is a profound ignorance. The ONLY figures from Egyptian history between Cleopatra and Nasser, known, at all, to the Western public are Salah ad -Din (Saladin) from the Crusades and, perhaps to a few, Mohammed Ali. Ask a British university class (I have tried this often) to name three non- Western artists, three non- western scientists, three poets, three philosophers, and you are setting a test which the large majority are destined to fail – the odd ‘Frida Kahlo’ and ‘Confucius’ and the rest is blank. Results would not be much better among the faculty.
Of course it is a question of the nature of the representation as much as its quantity. Racial, gender, orientalist and colonial stereotyping have all been substantially explored in academic and cultural circles in recent decades, but class has received less attention. However, we should remember that while Shakespeare gives us Othello, Shylock, and Cleopatra (each, incidentally, an achievement of genius) his ‘common people’ are rendered in prose and offer only comic interludes, albeit pointed ones. And what John Berger wrote about Dutch genre painting (painting of ‘low life’) of the 17th century applies to many subsequent representations of working people.
The purpose of the ‘genre’ picture was to prove – either positively or negatively – that virtue in this world was rewarded by social and financial success. Thus, those who could afford to buy these pictures … had their own virtue confirmed. Such pictures were particularly popular with the newly arrived bourgeoisie.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing, Penguin 1988, p.103
Even artists and writers avowedly sympathetic to working people have often produced representations of them that were highly problematic. Thus George Orwell, who broke with his middle class public school background to the extent of living (for a time) with the poor and down and out, and fighting with the POUM in the Spanish Civil War, and who wrote in 1984 that ‘If there is hope…it lies in the proles’, nevertheless depicted those proles as narrow, animalistic creatures more or less incapable of consciousness and higher feelings, while in Animal Farm they were represented by the carthorse Boxer, who was congenitally stupid. Even Brecht never produced a play foregrounding working class characters. (I say this not to criticise Brecht – possibly the greatest playwright of the century- but to show the difficulty of the task.)
This, then, is the general context, in which Yasser Alwan’s photographs of Egyptuian working people demand ‘the liberty of appearing’. But, of course, Alwan’s work also exists in the specific context of the history of photography, which to some extent constitutes a special case. On the one hand, the relative cheapness and availability of its means of production (the camera) and the ease of mechanical reproduction of its output, gives photography a democratic character absent from its adjacent art forms, painting and film .As a result there is a substantial tradition of the sympathetic photography of working people running from early photographers such as John Thompson, through the Americans, Lewis B.Hine, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, the German August Sander, Brassai and Cartier Bresson in France, to the contemporary Brazilian Sebastiao Salgado, and in which Alwan consciously stands.
On the other hand, there is in photography –due to its mechanical and instant character – a potential for domination, coldness and cruelty not present, or not present to the same degree, in painting or drawing. This is manifested in its language – the photographer ‘captures’,’ shoots’ and ‘snaps’ her subject; in its role in social control (mug shots, ID, passports etc) and as handmaiden of imperialism and colonialism (lucidly analysed and illustrated by Alwan himself in his superb study of the photographs of Lehnert and Landrock, Imagining Egypt, Cairo, 2007) and in the paparazzi phenomenon. In the world of art photography it has given rise to the elements of the freak show, objectification, mockery and exploitation, found in varying degrees in the work of Diane Arbus, Joel-Peter Witkin, Robert Mapplethorpe and Martin Parr- a tendency to which Alwan is consciously opposed.
One way of grasping the stature of Alwan’s work is by means of comparison with some of his photographic forebears.
Lewis Hine photographed child labour in the US at the beginning of the last century to expose it and promote social reform. He photographed workers building the Empire State, suspended in the sky above Manhattan, to demonstrate the extraordinary skill and courage of working people in their daily lives. Alwan is also opposed to child labour, supports social reform and is aware of workers’ amazing feats in their work, but this is not the driving force of his photography.
The driving force of Brassai’s photography is the evocation of an atmosphere – the atmosphere of nighttime Paris in the thirties, of Montmartre and Montparnasse. There are some photos of working men at Les Halles, but they are subordinate to the prostitutes, carnival performers, lovers, and petty gangsters of bohemia, and the individuals in the pictures are subordinate to the overall ambience.
Cartier Bresson is certainly interested in ordinary people but what governs his photography is capturing the ‘decisive moment’ when those ordinary people can be configured in a brilliant composition. August Sander, who has been a big influence on Alwan, set out to document the German people of the twenties by ‘type’ according to a systematic classification, rather as in Engels’ classic prescription for realism,’the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances’. At first sight it might appear that Alwan is trying to do something similar for Egypt but any attempt at system is subverted by his interest in the particular subject, as a person, and this gives his work a human warmth lacking in Sander.
In fact there are echoes of all these photographers in Alwan but his work is distinguished from all of theirs by its greater engagement with and representation of the personalities of his subjects.
Take, for example, the photographs of the woman trader at Umm Reda, Waily and the Incense Man at Dar al-Salaam. Both are obviously poor – everyone at that level of society in Egypt is poor – but neither is photographed to represent poverty; nor are they there for their typicality. Rather it is their individuality, their respective specific spirit, that has drawn Alwan, and that Alwan has communicated in his superb photographs.
Alwan is interested in individual people. It sounds like a clich̩, and a bourgeois clich̩ at that, but the moment you insert class into the statement Рindividual working people Рit becomes artistically and politically highly charged. An intellectual who, who, in life, is genuinely interested, as an equal, in specific working class people is a rarity, and one who is interested in them artistically is even more rare. The notion that working people are simple, that they have simple ideas and emotions, compared to the complexity of the middle classes, is a prejudice with five millennia of class society behind it. Breaking with it as Alwan has done, not just in theory but organically as an artist has to do if the break is to be realised in their work, speaks of an art and a politics far more radical than that of social reform, the New Deal, or the Popular Front.
Two political points need clarification here. The first concerns the suffering of working people. In the world today, working people suffer relentlessly, unforgivably and on an unimaginable scale, but those for whom, in the words of Marx, ‘the proletariat exists only as the most suffering class’, miss the main point which is the capacity of working people to resist, to end their suffering, and to emancipate themselves and humanity.
The second concerns the relation between the individual and the collective. It often assumed that an emphasis on the individual is bourgeois and right wing, while stressing collective interests and collective struggle is proletarian and left wing. There is an important element of truth in this in that the working class must struggle collectively to defend its interests and change society, but it can easily be overstated and becomes damaging if it is understood as opposition to the individual, individual development and freedom. This was not Marx’s view. For Marx there was always a dialectical interaction between the individual and the social.
The communists do not put egoism against self-sacrifice or self-sacrifice against egoism…they are very well aware that egoism just as much as self-sacrifice is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self assertion of individuals. Hence the communists by no means want …to do away with the “private individual” for the sake of the “general” self-sacrificing man. (The German Ideology, London 1991. p105)
What is to be avoided above all is the re-establishing of “Society” as an abstraction vis-Ã -vis the individual. The individual is the social being. (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Moscow 1967, p.98)
In place of the old bourgeois society… we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all. (The Communist Manifesto.)
How do these theoretical points translate into the language of photography and how do they relate to Alwan’s photographs in particular? The capacity of workers for resistance and self emancipation can, of course, be shown in photographs of strikes, picket lines, demonstrations etc. Such photographs are absolutely necessary, just as leaflets, banners and posters are necessary, but they are also artistically limited. (Artistically, the best demo photos I have seen are by Tina Modotti, but they tend to sacrifice the demonstrators and their aims to the achievement of a brilliant almost abstract composition). Another possibility is to produce idealised images of well toned workers gazing determinedly into the future. This was the Stalinist way and it was politically and artistically false. Yasser Alwan’s way is to show that working people, despite poverty and toil, remain complex and dignified human beings, damaged but not utterly defeated, with their own take on life and the world.
Consider for example the photos taken in the Tanneries. These show men and boys working in hellish conditions, that probably condemn them to early graves, and this is an essential part of their story but not the whole story. The key photographs in the series – the boy looking out from beneath the hides on his head, and the seated young man squarely facing the camera with a cigarette in his fingers – say more than this. In the eyes of the boy, almost welling up with tears, we see BOTH pain at the almost unendurable weight (physical and metaphorical) pressing on his shoulders AND determination to carry on, with just a glint of hope for the future. A similar contradiction beats in the breast of the seated young man as he bites his lip and looks quizzically at the camera, trying to make sense of his oppressive world.
Then there are the pictures of the limestone quarry diggers at Helwan, south of Cairo – I have been to Helwan, it is an aptly named place. The long shot gives us the overall scene and the sense of the searing heat of the desert. The close ups show us the specifics of their work, bent double, wielding their axes with pinpoint accuracy, releasing precisely cut blocks of great weight to be shouldered and shifted by hand. Then, suddenly, there is the picture of the single digger with the white turban, poised with his pickaxe ready to strike. Of course it is a work picture, he is about to smite the limestone not the international bourgeoisie… and yet…! It is an astonishing photograph.
It might seem that the photographs taken at the Gezira races don’t fit this argument. Not so. Throughout the world the poor gamble – even though gambling increases their poverty. The rich gamble too but in a different way and for different reasons, to show off, to display their wealth or their masculinity, to inject risk into their risk free lives. The poor, especially the older poor, gamble for the right to dream .For the price of a lottery ticket they buy the right to a secret fantasy life for a day or a week. For the price of a few betting slips they purchase hours of intense engagement with life, hours when they can pit their wits against the system and ‘win’, get something for nothing, get paid without working! Of course they don’t really win, but sometimes they do. And where else in poor people’s lives do they ever win, where else can they take on the man and not be instantly crushed? The gambler is not a man resisting politically, but he is a man resisting in his own way, refusing to give in completely and he is a person not just a type. He is the white haired man in photo no? about to put a cigarette to his lips (what a great photograph this is) who, at least outwardly, has kept his dignity, even a little of his authority and certainly his manners. He is the wiry old man with a strange peaked cap and a sheet of paper in his hands (a list of runners, a form guide?) What has he been in life? Where did the hat come from and what does it signify? The hopes of the man in the white jellabiya who screws up his eyes to gaze at the results board (photo no?) may be reduced to the outcome of the 3.30 but they are hopes none the less.
Everyone who appears in an Alwan photograph is shown in a social context that constrains and shapes them, but does not totally define them. Each is a person and personality in his or her own right, making their lives albeit in circumstances not of their own choosing. This is what I mean by the ‘profound humanitarian egalitarianism’ of this work.
‘The Liberty of Appearing’, the title of this exhibition, is a double reference. It is taken from a sentence in Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man ‘But such is the irresistible nature of truth that all it asks, all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.’ But this quotation also appears in The Family of Man, the book of Edward Steichen’s famous photography exhibition from 1955. Both references are appropriate for these photographs but the phrase also points in a third direction.
At the beginning of this essay I spoke of the cultural invisibility of working people, especially working people in the poorer parts of the world. In recent years however the working people of Egypt have been making themselves steadily more visible. Paradoxically, working people make themselves most visible when, together, they stop working i.e. when they go on strike. This, Egyptian workers have been doing with increasing frequency. Earlier this year food riots caused by rising prices were followed by a wave of strikes emanating from the Mahalla textile factory, the largest workplace in the region. In political circles the name Mahalla has become symbolic of working class struggle internationally.
The objective political importance of Egyptian workers is also becoming ever clearer. This is the largest and potentially most powerful working class in the whole region between Europe and India, that is in the central battleground for control of energy supplies and the front line between imperialism and anti-imperialism. It holds the key to the defeat of the brutal Mubarak regime and hence to the overthrow of the other pro- US dictatorships in the area, which in turn would open the door to the defeat of Zionist Israel, in a way that is beyond the power of the Palestinians acting alone.
There is a photographic/artistic reference point here as well as a political one. The photographer whose work might seem to precede, and even preempt Alwan’s is Sebastiao Salgado. but there is a fundamental difference. Salgado’s photographs of the Serra Palado gold mine in Brazil are brilliant but his study of workers as a whole, Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age, is premised on the mistaken (though widely held) notion that the working class is in the process of disappearing. This affects the photography. Salgado, deliberately I think, gives his pictures a grainy elegiac quality as he commemorates this dying breed and so engages in a kind of romantic mythmaking. There is none of this in Alwan whose working people are insistently present in the here and now and have no need of idealisation.
And in fact the world working class is here, is present, in Korea and China, Indonesia and India, the Middle East and South America, in larger numbers than ever before in history. Concentrated in great cities like Sao Paolo, Mumbai, Canton, Mexico City, it possesses awesome potential power. Cairo is one of the greatest of these cities and the Egyptian working class is a key contingent in this international army.
Yasser Alwan’s photographs do not give us the demos, strikes and uprisings, but they give us the people in all their human contradictions. It is highly appropriate that this exhibition should appear at a time when these people may be about to take ‘the liberty of appearing’ on the centre of the world stage. There is a chance, only a chance but a real chance nonetheless, that the young brick and shingle maker who shoulders a bucket the size of his torso and whose face is obscured by his own arm (photo no ?) and the boy with folded arms who is on the front cover of this book will grow up to make history.
John Molyneux
27 August 2008
3,264 words
Some thoughts on the Crisis
KOREA COLUMN 41
Some Thoughts on the Crisis
This month it is very hard for a Marxist to write about anything other than the astonishing crisis that has swept through world capitalism in the last six weeks or so, especially as this crisis is now beginning to have a serious impact in South Korea. However knowing that Candlelight Resistance (along with every other newspaper) will already have been analysing this crisis I will offer only some Marxist observations on the situation rather than an overall account.
Watching the crisis unfold I have wanted both to laugh and to cry. To laugh at the contradictions and contortions the western ruling classes and their political and ideological representatives have fallen into as they have been forced to abandon all the economic doctrines they have been proclaiming with such certainty over the last twenty years or so. To cry at the misery that, without a shadow of a doubt, will be inflicted on the working people and the poor of the world as we are expected to pay up the bill for their crisis.
There has been plenty to laugh about. For example George Bush’s right wing neo- conservative neo-liberal government being forced into the biggest nationalisation in history, with the takeover of mortgage firms, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, followed by a series of other nationalisations. But isn’t that … socialism? Well actually it is state capitalism not socialism but Bush and co. would have denounced it as socialism a few months ago. In Britain it was particularly funny to see the British government complain about the Irish government guaranteeing deposits in Irish banks on one day (unfair competition you know, distorting the market i.e. people would take their money out of British banks and put it in Irish ones), only to complain equally bitterly the next day about the failure of the Icelandic government to guarantee British deposits when the Icelandic banks went bust.
Then there was Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve Bank and the Pope of the free market, admitting there was a ‘flaw’ in his ideology. In truth the whole spectacle of Lehman Brothers, AIG, Merrill Lynch, HBOS, Wachovia, - these giants of capitalism, masters of the universe with centuries of accumulation and exploitation behind them - falling like nine pins and going cap in hand to the state has made schadenfreude impossible to resist [if this wont translate put ‘ has afforded a degree of pleasure’]
But, of course, we know that their embarrassment is going to be followed by real suffering for ordinary people. Wage cuts and job cuts, unemployment and poverty, house repossessions and homelessness – these are the inevitable consequences of recession. Cuts in welfare benefits and social services, in health and education – these, before long, will be the responses of capitalist governments. In the poorest countries there will be famine and starvation, in the developing countries their development will falter and some will collapse, and even in the richest, most advanced countries the working class will feel the pain.
Torn between laughter and tears I am reminded of the motto of the great 17th century philosopher, Spinoza, ‘Neither laugh nor cry, but understand!’. And as a contribution to understanding this crisis I want to make three points. First it is not some natural disaster or weather calamity. Greenspan described it as ‘a once in a century tsunami’, and the media is full of phrases such as ‘economic typhoon’ or ‘hurricane’. This is nonsense: the crisis is neither natural nor an act of god but entirely man made; it was, in broad outlines, predictable and predicted for example by Marxist economists such as Chris Harman and Robert Brenner; and, pace Greenspan, these crises recur a lot more frequently than ‘once in a century’.
Second, it is not basically a crisis of confidence. The capitalist media and its commentators always try to suggest that these crises are fundamentally just a question of investors, speculators and even manufacturers’ confidence. Sometimes they try to get away with the old claim that ‘the underlying real economy is sound’. Now obviously confidence does play a role: if you are worried that a bank is going to go bust you will be tempted to take your money out of it, thus making it more likely to go bust. If you anticipate a low rate of return on your investment in a company you are likely to invest elsewhere, and if you anticipate a general recession you will probably put your money in gold, and this in turn contributes to the depth and length of the recession.
BUT this ‘confidence’ or lack of it is not arbitrary or random. It doesn’t just float into the minds of investors from the ether. It is based on evidence and experience from the real world. For example the problems in the US sub-prime mortgage market, which initiated the credit crunch, were not just problems in people’s heads, they were real problems of people who really couldn’t keep up their mortgage repayments, and from the standpoint of the mortgage lenders the real problem of not being able to sell repossessed houses profitably in a falling house market.
One of the great achievements of Marx’s economics was to show that all wealth creation depends ultimately on the application of labour to nature, and all [exchange] value rests on the expenditure of socially necessary labour time. If prices in the elevated worlds of stock exchanges, hedge funds and currency speculation depart too far from these real material values then, sooner or later, they will spring back like overstretched elastic.
Which brings me to my third point, namely that this is not just a crisis caused by greedy bankers and financiers on Wall St etc. This is not to excuse the bankers and financiers who are undoubtedly greedy, and whose greed is an important component of the dynamic of the crisis. But let’s be clear, in their relentless pursuit of maximum profits the bankers were only following the same logic that drives Exxon and Shell, Wal-Mart and Samsung and every other capitalist company in manufacturing, retail or any other sector, i.e. the inherent logic of capitalist competition. ‘Accumulation for accumulation’s sake’ as Marx put it. The over lending by banks is only a variation on the general tendency towards overproduction in booms, long ago identified by Marx.
Moreover the roots of the present crisis lie not just in the financial sector but in the so-called ‘real’ economy. In Britain figures have just been released showing that the British economy moved into recession in the July-September quarter, the quarter BEFORE the financial meltdown. Clearly it has been problems in the ‘real’ economy that have triggered the banking crisis and brought about the loss of confidence referred to above, particularly the underlying decline, in recent, in the overall average rate of profit.
What lies behind all three of these myths- of the crisis as bad weather, as loss of confidence, and as caused by greedy bankers – is the desire of politicians, and of the media and its tame pundits to pin the blame for the collapse on relatively superficial aspects of the system and avoid any analysis which points to capitalism itself as the culprit.
And that reminds us that Karl Marx went one step further than Spinoza when, in 1845, he wrote, ‘The philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it!’. Changing the world, in the present circumstances, means two things: mobilising the working class to resist the job cuts, wage cuts, house repossessions, welfare cuts, tax increases and all the other attacks that will come our way, and ,at the same time, building a movement and a party which understands that the only ultimate escape from capitalist crisis lies in the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by production for need not profit.
John Molyneux
28 October 2008
Monday, September 29, 2008
Why is Bacon's Pope Screaming?
WHY IS BACON’S POPE SCREAMING?
Francis Bacon: major retrospective at Tate Britain, 11 September – 4 January.
For Socialist Review magazine, October 2008.
Reviewing an exhibition is an invitation to comment both on the exhibition as such and on the art presented.
Since performing both tasks satisfactorily is impossible in the space available I shall concentrate on questions raised by Bacon’s work and say only this about the exhibition. Bacon is now widely proclaimed the greatest British artist of the 20th century and this show offers a selection of his best paintings from each phase of his career – it contains all the really ‘iconic’ works such as the Screaming Popes, the ‘Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion’, the Dyer triptychs, the Self Portraits etc. For anyone interested in modern art this is definitely a show to be seen.
Regarding Bacon’s overall standing I would say that he is not one of those artists, like Picasso, Duchamp, Mondrian, or Warhol, who drove modern art forward to new forms of visual representation, and changed it so fundamentally that it became possible to conceive of an athlete sprinting through the Tate Britain as a work of art. He is, however, one of those like Soutine or Giacometti, who, while using relatively traditional methods, i.e. figurative oil painting, made images of exceptional emotional power.
The source and nature of this emotional power remains much debated. One can point to a number of influences – Michelangelo, Velazquez, Goya, Picasso, Giacometti, the photographs by Muybridge etc – and to certain repeated techniques and devices. For example, the way he uses cage structures to suggest his subjects are prisoners or creatures on display; the way, often, they are placed on plinths, or beds, with a sense of space around them, so that they appear served up like meat or specimens on a dish; or the way he used cubist forms, in his portraits, to knead the flesh round the bones of the skull. But if these are some of the means by which Bacon achieved his effects they leave the driving force of those effects unidentified.
In other words, why is Bacon’s Pope screaming? Alternatively, what or who is he screaming at? I pose this question not just as a means of interrogating Bacon’s best known image but also as a way into discussing the general purport of his work.
We don’t get a clear answer from Bacon himself. Like many artists he preferred to let his paintings speak for themselves, and his response to questions of this nature was to cite the visual sources of his imagery (Velazquez’ Pope Innocent X, the nurse’s scream in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin etc.) while saying nothing about its emotional sources.
Nevertheless, there is a range of plausible answers on offer. The Pope is Bacon himself screaming at the fear and loneliness of being a gay man at a time when homosexuality was still a crime. The Pope is the Pope/Bacon screaming at the horrors of the world at the end of the war (Auschwitz, Hiroshima, etc.) The Pope is the Pope screaming at the wreckage of his faith in a godless world. The Pope is Papa, Bacon’s brutal father, who attempted to beat his homosexuality out of him. – this is the obvious Freudian interpretation and was put to Bacon directly by the art critic, David Sylvester in one of their famous interviews; Bacon simply deflected it. The Pope’s scream, like the figures at the base of a crucifixion, is Bacon’s visceral response to the human condition in toto – a world of violence and despair, hopelessness and terror, essentially meaningless, in which we are all simply ‘meat’. There is probably truth in all these answers. Artists often choose images precisely because they are overdetermined and carry multiple associations.
However there is no doubt that the final reading is the one favoured by the art establishment and by the Tate Britain. This is because it enables them to assimilate Bacon to Michelangelo, Rembrandt etc. as a producer of ‘timeless’ truths about life and because it dovetails with the notion of an unchanging human nature. The bourgeoisie has a place for art that shows the horribleness of life, so long as they can also claim it shows that nothing can be done about it.
For this reason many on the left, including John Berger, have long been suspicious of, even hostile to, Bacon. And, it has to be said that much of Bacon’s outlook was reactionary: he was a kind of Nietzschean, adhering to a sort of ‘exhilarated despair’ and a positive supporter of social inequality as part of ‘the texture of life’ (see the final Sylvester interview).
Nevertheless, I do not believe that the left should reject Bacon’s work, as opposed to his views, and I’m pleased that Berger has recently revised his judgment (in his book Hold Everything Dear). The horror Bacon so powerfully expressed is in reality a product not of human nature but of alienation, in all its aspects, internal and external, and that can be changed. Moreover those artists, such as Kafka, Beckett and Bacon, who look into the abyss, who take on the horror and stare it down, do, through their work, make a form of resistance, a defiance, from which we can benefit and draw hope, whether they did or not.
John Molyneux
Are the Media all Powerful?
KOREA COLUMN 40
Are the Media all Powerful?
One of the immediate problems faced by socialists everywhere is that everywhere the vast bulk of the mass media is hostile to socialism and uses its considerable power to defend the status quo i.e. capitalism.
Sometimes this bias is absolutely blatant and includes not only pro- capitalist but also pro –government propaganda as in most of the world’s dictatorships or Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News in America. Sometimes it more subtle and, as with the BBC, hidden beneath a veneer of impartiality and commitment to political neutrality and the representation of different points of view. But always the fundamental stance is the same: capitalism is the sensible, natural and inevitable way of organising production. Anyone who thinks otherwise is at best an eccentric and most likely a wicked ‘extremist’ because ‘everyone knows’ that ‘moderates’ are good and ‘extremists’ are bad and that anyone who wants to abolish capitalism is an extremist by definition.
Where television, the most important mass media, is concerned this basic stance affects not only news bulletins but also the choice of panellists on discussion programmes, the themes of and commentary on documentaries, the story lines and characters in soap operas and drama series, the nature and tone of game shows- in short the total output. And obviously it is the same with newspapers. Their pro-capitalist standpoint is reflected, first and foremost in what is and, most importantly, in what is NOT reported, as well as in how it is reported, how it is commented on in editorials, and opinion pieces, and again it runs all the way through to the cartoons and the sports coverage. Nor is the basic position any different in thefilm industry, radio or any of the other forms of mass media.
This should not surprise us. Mass media are forms of communication which enable small groups of people to communicate simultaneously with vast numbers of other people. They all involve considerable capital outlay and are therefore owned either by people with lots of capital i.e. capitalists or by states which at bottom represent the interest of the capitalist class. The pro-capitalist bias of the media is therefore, under capitalism, absolutely inevitable. It is one part of the general phenomenon of ruling class ideological dominance noted and explained by Karl Marx in 1845 (before most of the modern mass media even came into existence)
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. (The German Ideology).
The questions that arise therefore are how much does this ruling class control of the media matter, and how can it be challenged? Let’s take the second question first. It is obviously vital that socialists should develop their own means of communication - newspapers such as Counterfire or other forms such as posters, leaflets, magazines, websites, blogs, films etc – and they should also try, wherever possible, to get their ideas across in the capitalist media. However, while capitalism exists and the capitalist class remains in power, socialist media will not be able to displace the bourgeois media, and socialist ideas will not be able to obtain more than marginal representation , anymore than it is possible for socialist education to replace state schools and bourgeois universities. Thus the crucial issue becomes how strong is the grip of the bourgeois media on the minds of the majority of working people and how can that hold be broken?
Clearly the media, taken as a whole, are very influential and sometimes it seems like they can manipulate people at will, stirring up xenophobia and racism one minute, whipping up war fever the next, and always blotting out any challenge to the system. But it is important to understand there are always definite limits to the media’s power.
For a start there are always some people in society (albeit a minority) who reject the media view of the world pretty much as a whole. If you are reading this article it is likely that you are part of this minority. Moreover, we (I am part of it too) are not in any fundamental or innate way different from other people who don’t (as yet) reject the dominant view – it is simply that we have had experiences that have led us to question the system more than others.
Secondly, the vast majority of people who accept much of what the media says, nevertheless remain sceptical of some of its messages. For example, in Britain, throughout the twentieth century the large majority of newspapers supported the Conservative Party and only a small minority backed the Labour Party but this did not stop Labour winning a number of general elections. And in America today the media is overwhelmingly behind the Bush administration’s $700 million bail out of Wall St. but this doesn’t stop it being highly unpopular with the American public.
Then there are things which are so unpopular that the media themselves know they would be wasting their time trying to sell to people - for example, mass unemployment. There are times when the ruling class, privately, thinks that a dose of mass unemployment would be just the thing to undermine the unions and break working class resistance, but they know they can’t say this openly. The best they can hope for is to convince people that some scapegoat (immigrants, refugees, greedy trade unions etc) is to blame, but they always have, at least to pretend to care about unemployment.
In general it is clear that where media influence is at its weakest is when reality diverges most radically from its preferred message and especially when the issue is one which affects people directly as part of their everyday experience. One of the reasons why capitalist economic crisis creates opportunities for socialism is not just that workers are radicalised by the suffering inflicted on them but also because the crisis dramatically exposes and undermines the story the capitalist class wants to tell about itself.
However, the circumstance in which working people are particularly likely to see through and reject the lies of the media is when they are engaged in collective struggle, because then they themselves become the news and their own actions and experiences are what is being lied about. When the collective struggle is also a MASS struggle, when it starts to involve the majority of the majority of the working class in action, for instance in a general strike, then the hold of the mass media really starts to break down., especially as this is also a situation in which the working class gets a sense of its own power and develops the confidence to look for alternatives.
Combine conditions of crisis with mass struggle and one further ingredient is needed, the mass revolutionary workers party with its own media to articulate an alternative socialist worldview. Include that in the equation and we will break not only the grip of the media on the minds of working people but the power of the capitalist class as a whole including its power over the media.
John Molyneux
29 September 2008
Should workers cooperate with employers to make their firms successful?
KOREA COLUMN 39
Should workers cooperate with employers to make their firms successful?
In times of economic difficulty or recession employers frequently turn to their workers and say something like this: ‘Times are hard; we all need to tighten our belts and sacrifice a bit at the moment, but if we all pull together the company will soon return to prosperity and that will benefit us all in the long run’.
This is an extremely popular argument which virtually unanimous support – among employers. In fact I doubt there is an employer on the globe that doesn’t claim to want the cooperation of its workforce.
This is hardly surprising. Oppressors through out the ages have urged their victims to cooperate. Doubtless the Egyptian Pharaohs were pleased when their slaves cooperated in hauling the vast stones that built the Pyramids. The slave owners in the Americas showed their appreciation of cooperative slaves by making the ‘house’ slaves and granting them small ‘privileges’ relative to the ‘field’ Negroes. The SS secured the Jews’ cooperation in boarding the cattle trucks by not telling them their true destination.
The problem with the ‘cooperate with company’ argument, however, is that it is widely accepted not just by bosses (and their allies in government and the media, of course) but also by many workers. Evidence for this can be seen in the way trade union officials so often bend over backwards to appear ‘reasonable’ and to stress that it is the management who are being uncooperative. Indeed the argument can be made to sound like simple ‘common sense. Let us confront it in its strongest form.
Company X, which makes widgets, is in trouble. It has just announced huge losses for the last two quarters and the management admit they are on the verge of bankruptcy. It is a multinational company and there is also the possibility it will close its operation in South Korea and shift production to the Philippines where wages are lower. If, however, the workers will accept a pay cut of 10% and a no strike deal for two years, management pledge to keep the factory open and say they are confident of winning new orders. The Government is backing the deal and there are rumours, if it is accepted, of massive investment. Besides unemployment is high and if Company X closes its workers will struggle to find new jobs. Surely, in these circumstances, it makes sense to cooperate?
There are parts of this argument, which as any decent trade union representative will know, have to be challenged immediately. How real is the threat to move production overseas? Multinationals are always trying to blackmail their workers this way, when often the costs and disadvantages of relocation are prohibitive (which is why they are in South Korea, not the Philippines, in the first place). What guarantees are there for the promises about the future? What is stop the management from coming back in six months time and saying we are very sorry, we meant what we said at the time, but things have changed and now we are closing anyway, or we want another 10% cut?
PLUS what about management salaries ETC
However these points do not really get to heart of the matter. Let us assume for the moment that the employers are, broadly speaking, telling the truth, at least as they see it and as far as they can know it (I strongly advise against making this assumption in practice). Then let us ask what Company X being ‘in trouble’ and facing closure really means. Obviously it means not making a profit or not making enough profit and the most likely reason for that is either: there is another company, Y or Z, capturing the widget market by making them better or selling them cheaper; or there is a decline in the widget market, due to other companies or the public being less willing to spend their money on widgets; or some combination or variation on both these reasons.
Now let us assume that the workers of Company X agree to the 10% pay cut demanded. This will give the profits of Company X a boost and restore its competitive edge over Company Y. Now it will be Y’s turn to be in trouble and Y’s workers turn to face redundancy. Obviously the Y management will say to their workers, the X workers over there took a wage cut, you must do the same or we will be uncompetitive. But if the Y workers follow the example of the X workers, all it means is that the relative competitive positions of Companies X and Y will be restored with both their workforces earning less. This ‘race to the bottom’ has been the essence of neo-liberal globalisation adopted by ruling classes nearly everywhere in their drive to raise profits.
If we look back over this ‘workers should cooperate argument’ it is clear that workers’ ability to see through it is bound up with their ability to see beyond themselves as workers in one isolated workplace and look also at the workplace and workers down the road and ultimately round the world. For the only real answer to the bosses’ strategy, and it is a strategy as well as an idea, is for the workers of company X to link up with the workers of Company Y (and Z etc) and together reject wage cuts and redundancy. It should also be clear that workers ability to do this is a matter not just of their intellectual understanding, their consciousness, but also of their confidence and organisation. For workers the crucial question is not just the abstract argument, but the calculation: if we here at X resist will the workers at Y and elsewhere fight with us?
This why trade union organisation is so important, so that workers in one workplace, then across different workplaces, and ultimately across the class as a whole are linked to each other and can take action together.
It is also why a revolutionary party is vital. In practice in most workplaces there will some workers whose whole inclination is to accept the bosses’ cooperation argument and others who consciously reject it. Between these two poles there will be those, probably a majority, who are unsure. What actually happens, the course of the class struggle, depends on which pole is able to win over the waverers. The revolutionary party is simply an organisation of the rejectionists, in every possible workplace, across all boundaries, to increase their ability to win the argument against the collaborators and lead the majority of the class in struggle.
Thus we see that this single argument contains in essence the whole logic of the class struggle. Either collaborate with the boss and compete with other workers, or join with other workers to fight the boss. The first road leads, in the end, to racism, nationalism, war and fascism, i.e. to barbarism. The second road leads to socialism.
John Molyneux
1 September 2008
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Is Democratic Centralism Anti-democratic?
KOREA COLUMN 38
Is Democratic Centralism Anti -democratic?
Democratic centralism is a principle of party of organisation which combines democratic debate and policy making with united action by all party members to implement the policy.
Since the days of Lenin and the Bolsheviks most Marxist parties have operated, or claimed to operate, on the basis of democratic centralism.
I say ‘claimed’ because in numerical terms the big majority of so-called Marxist parties have, in fact, been Stalinist parties loyal to the Soviet Union and in such parties the centralism was overwhelming, with every party and every individual expected to toe the line decided in Moscow, while the democracy was virtually non- existent. Not surprisingly this experience has given democratic centralism a bad name.
Now, it is clear that if we reject Marxist concepts or practices on the grounds that they were used, perverted or discredited by Stalinism then we have to reject Marxism and socialism in their entirety, but it also clear that hostility to democratic centralism is not confined to its Stalinist incarnations. There are many on the left – left reformists, libertarians, autonomists, anarchists etc. - who criticise Trotskyist and other strongly anti-Stalinist parties over this issue.
For example, in Britain, the Respect MP George Galloway, attacked the Socialist Workers Party for its democratic centralism, saying its members were like ‘Russian dolls’. (If this ‘Russian doll’ metaphor is circulating on the left in South Korea it is doubtless because it was picked up from Galloway). However, leaving George Galloway aside, there is clearly a widespread view on the left, that democratic centralism is a deeply flawed, inherently anti-democratic organisational model.
Despite this I intend to argue a) that democratic centralism is ESSENTIAL for a revolutionary workers party to perform effectively as a leader of the working class in struggle; b) that far from being anti-democratic it is really the MOST democratic form of party organisation.
To grasp the importance of democratic centralism it is necessary to understand that the attempt to combine democracy and centralism is not some arbitrary organisational principle dreamt up by Lenin or any other Marxist, but is rooted, in embryonic form, in the very nature of working class struggle. The working class struggle is a struggle from below, a struggle of ‘the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority’ From its earliest days (for example, the Chartists in Britain) one of its most important demands was for political democracy, the democratic republic. When workers realised that political democracy was not enough to change society they demanded not less but more democracy, democracy extended to production and society as a whole, hence social democracy. It was therefore natural and inevitable that workers’ organisations, trade unions, associations, parties and the like adopted – at least at first – democratic constitutions and procedures.
But there is also an element of centralism inherent in workers struggle. The power of capital is by its nature highly centralised Decision making in any capitalist enterprise is top down, from the owner or the Board of Directors, and enforced with virtually military discipline. As capitalism ages and the ownership of capital becomes more concentrated, so this centralisation becomes ever more extensive and intense. If Samsung, Ford or Exxon, make a strategic decision on pricing, plant closure or dealing with an industrial dispute, they will expect that decision to be implemented by every manager in the company across the world. To assert their rights against this power, workers have no choice but to combine their forces, to agree to act together.
Consider the most basic form of the class struggle, the strike. The workers of a particular workplace, company or industry decide, democratically (ideally through voting at mass meetings) whether or not to go on strike, but that decision is then binding on everyone. If the decision is against striking and some individuals still walk out, they will almost certainly simply be sacked. But if the decision goes in favour of the strike then every worker involved is expected to come out and anyone who does not is a scab and a traitor. This is democratic centralism in embryo. And to those who rail against democratic centralism it is worth pointing out that bourgeois liberals have always denounced trade union solidarity and discipline as an infringement of the sacred rights of the individual, but have never even noticed how the centralised power of capital affects the rights of working people.
The democratic centralism of the revolutionary party is based on the democratic centralism of the astrike, but there is also a difference. In the strike it applies, and is limited, mainly to the economic struggle. In the party it applies also to the political and , to an extent, to the ideological level. This is because the revolutionary party is a voluntary, minority organisation, within the workers’ movement as a whole, whose aim is to lead the working class in the conquest of political i.e. state power and which, in order to achieve that aim must, wage a many sided ideological struggle against the dominance of bourgeois ideas in the working class and against rival political tendencies (reformism, Stalinism etc) who experience has shown, will hold back the workers’ struggle and betray it to the bourgeoisie.
The necessity of this political democratic centralism can be seen if one replaces the example of the strike with the example of a revolutionary situation i.e a situation where the masses are in action, where the old state machine has been undermined, where, perhaps, there are elements of dual power – workers’ councils, occupied workp[laces etc. – and the fateful decision has to be made, for or against insurrection. How can such a decision be taken in the middle of the most intense class warfare?. Some kind of national referendum is not possible, nor can there be a series of parliamentary style public debates, not without alerting the class enemy and inviting counter-revolutionary repression. In fact only a party with roots in every section of the working class and a strong tradition of internal democratic debate will be able to assess correctly the mood of the masses and the chances of success. But once the decision has been made it must obviously be carried out in unity (in Seoul, Gyeongju and Busan, or London, Manchester and Birmingham) if the revolution is not to be crushed.
Be that as it may, the critics will say, we are not in a revolutionary situation, and the trouble with democratic centralism is that it too easily manipulated by bad leaders in the hear and now. In fact anti - democratic manipulation is always possible, whatever the formal constitution of a party, but democratic centralism makes it more difficult not easier. This is because it disciplines not only the rank and file of the party but also the leaders.
Imagine a party with, apparently, a high level of democratic debate and discussion but very little centralism. Such a party was the old British Labour Party before Tony Blair got his hands on it. Its annual conferences were full of passionate debates, criticisms of the party leadership, and resolutions democratically proposed and voted upon. Yet it all counted for nothing . Because there was no centralism the party leadership, especially when it was in government, simply ignored the decisions of the party. Without centralism there was no democracy because the working class majority of the party had no means ensuring its views were acted upon.
At bottom the question of democratic centralism is a class question. The working class needs both democracy and centralism because it is a movement from below which can succeed only by acting together.
John Molyneux
27 July 2008
Monday, July 07, 2008
More than Opium: Marxism and Religion
MORE THAN OPIUM: MARXISM AND RELIGION
About twenty years ago I spoke on ‘Marxism and Religion’ at the SWP Easter Rally in Skegness. I began, roughly, with the words, ‘Today, in Britain, religion – fortunately – is not a major political issue’. Unfortunately this is no longer the case. Today religion, or rather one religion in particular, namely Islam, is at the centre of political debate.
Scarcely a day passes without a news item raising the alarm about alleged ‘hate preaching’ imams or a mosque being taken over by ‘fundamentalists’, or an opinion piece about the deeply flawed nature of Islam, or a radio discussion about whether ‘moderate’ Muslims are doing enough to combat ‘the extremists’ and prevent Muslim youth from being ‘radicalised’, or a TV programme on the plight of Muslim women, or a scare story about some stupidity committed in the name of Islam somewhere in the world. As I start to write this article I see the following report in The Independent on Sunday:
Islamic extremism creates 'no-go' areas, says bishop
By Jack Doyle
Published: 06 January 2008
Islamic extremism in Britain is creating communities which are "no-go areas" for non-Muslims, the Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Dr Michael Nazir-Ali warned yesterday. Bishop Nazir-Ali says non-Muslims face a hostile reception in places dominated by the ideology of Islamic radicals.
Regardless of the merits or accuracy of the individual story or claim, and this is a particularly absurd one, the relentless flow of this kind of comment and coverage, has turned Islam into a religion under siege. This incessant problematisation of Islam and demonisation of Muslims has created the phenomenon now widely referred to as Islamophobia.
For readers of this journal there should be no mystery as to why this has occurred. It is not an expression of some visceral Christian hostility to Islam stretching back to the crusades or the conflict with the Ottoman Empire. (even though these atavisms are sometimes mobilised ideologically).It is because the majority of the people who happen to be sitting on the world’s most important reserves of oil and natural gas happen to be Muslim and, secondarily, because, since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, much of these peoples’ resistance to imperialism has found expression in Islamist form. If the people of the Middle East and central Asia had been predominantly Buddhist or Tibet held oilfields comparable to those of Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran, what we would be dealing with would be ‘Buddhophobia’. Seeping out from The White House, the Pentagon, the
2.
CIA and Downing St., and coursing through the sewers of Fox News, CNN, The Sun and the Daily Mail would be the notion that, great religion though it undoubtedly was, there was some underlying and persistent flaw in Buddhism. ‘Intellectuals’ such as Samuel Huntington, Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis would be on hand to explain that, despite its embrace by naïve hippies in the sixties, Buddhism was really an essentially reactionary creed characterised by its deep seated rejection of modernity and western democratic values and its fanatical commitment to feudalism, theocracy, misogyny and homophobia.
However, the fact that it has happened; the fact that Islamophobia has been developed, nationally and internationally, as the principal ideological cover and justification for imperialism and war (as straightforward racism was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) has enormously increased the importance of a correct theoretical understanding of, and political orientation towards, religion in its many different forms. Indeed it can be said that a deficient, mechanical or one sided understanding of the Marxist analysis of religion has been at least a substantial contributing factor to a number of left individuals and groups completely losing their former political bearings and ending up as left apologists for imperialism.
The most notorious example of this is, of course, Christopher Hitchens, who has written a book on religion, God is Not Great (of which, more later) and whose trajectory from leftist intellectual and radical critic of the system to ‘critical’ supporter of George Bush has been precipitous and extreme – though in Hitchens’ case one cannot help suspecting that material inducements have played a larger role in his race to the right than any mere theoretical error. There are also some members of the Euston Group such as Norman Geras, and Quentin Hoare, and among the left groups, the sorry case of the Alliance for Workers Liberty, and the French socialist organisation Lutte Ouvriere, whose hostility to the hijab turned them ,temporarily, into objective allies of the French imperialist state against its most oppressed women citizens.(NOTE See Antoine Boulange ‘The hijab, racism and the state’, International Socialism 102, )
At the same time, and not by coincidence, there has arisen in the US and Britain, a verbally militant anti religious, pro-atheist campaign, spearheaded by the science writer Richard Dawkins and accompanied by the aforementioned Hitchens, the philosopher Daniel Dennett and others. A critical examination of how these people present their arguments against religion will, by contrast, bring out important features of the Marxist position. But first I want to set out the fundamental principles underlying the Marxist analysis of religion, beginning not with Marx’s direct comments on religion but with the basic propositions of Marxist philosophy.
MATERIALISM AND RELIGION
Marxist philosophy is materialist. According to Engels in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy :
The great basic question of all, especially of latter-day philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being… The question of the position of thinking in relation to being … in relation to the church was sharpened into this: Did God create the world or has the world existed for all time?
Answers to this question split the philosophers into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of the mind over nature and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form or other… comprised the camp of idealism. The others who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.
[K.Marx and F.Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 3, Moscow 1989, pp366-67]
Marxism, argues Engels, not only stands firmly in the materialist camp but is where, ‘the materialist world outlook was taken really seriously for the first time and was carried through consistently … in all relevant domains of knowledge.’ [ibid. p.382]
Marxist materialism, reduced to its essentials, involves commitment to the following propositions:
- The material world exists independently of human (or any other) consciousness.
- Real, if not total or absolute knowledge of the world is possible and has, indeed, been attained.
- Human beings are part of nature, but a distinct part.
- The material world does not derive, in the first instance, from human thought, human thought derives from the material world.
Propositions 1 and 2 correspond to the presumptions and findings of modern science and have attained the status of common sense. This is because they are confirmed in practice, millions or billions of times every day, as are most of the findings of science. Proposition 3 also corresponds to the findings of modern science, especially Darwin and modern paleontology and anthropaleontology ( see for example Richard Leakey, The Origins of Humankind) but, as it happens, was articulated by Marx before Darwin.
The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature….The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.
Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation.[ K.Marx and
F.Engels, The German Ideology, London1991, p.42]
Proposition 4 is the most distinctively Marxist and the least widely shared. Many people who take a materialist view of the relationship between humans and nature, take an idealist position on the relationship between ideas and material conditions and on the role of ideas in society, history and politics.. Almost without thinking they such things as ‘The Cold War was fundamentally a clash of ideologies’ or ‘Capitalism is based on the idea of economic growth’. For this reason proposition 4 is the one Marx and Engels insist on most strongly and repeatedly.
Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces…Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence…
In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrate, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process… Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence… Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. [ibid. p.47]
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?
[K.Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto,]
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure
and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
[K.Marx, Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy]
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 on 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. [F.Engels, Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx]
Thus it is clear that a definite attitude to religion is present, both implicitly and explicitly, in the most fundamental ideas of Marxism. Moreover it should also be clear that this attitude has a dual character. On the one hand, for the thorough going and consistent Marxist, as for the thorough going and consistent materialist, religious faith, in all its many forms, is excluded. Religious ideas, like all other ideas, are social and historical products, i.e. produced by human beings, and this necessarily precludes religious belief since it is precisely their claim to transcendence and priority over nature, human beings and history that make religious ideas religious. By the same token philosophical idealism and religion are intimately linked. If mind has priority over matter whose mind can that be but the mind of God? If ideas are the ultimate driving force in history, where do those ideas come from if not the mind of God? And is not God, as in the terminology of Hegel, ‘the absolute idea’? As the Bible puts it, ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was God’. This is why Trotsky, at the very end of his life, wrote that he would die ‘a Marxist, a dialectical materialist and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist (my emphasis)’. [L.Trotsky, The Age of Permanent Revolution, New York, 1964 p.361.]
On the other hand the same Marxism clearly demands a materialist explanation of religion. It is not enough to view either religion as a whole or any particular religion as simply a delusion or folly that happens to have gripped the minds of millions for centuries. A common habit of less thoughtful religious believers (especially religious believers in imperialist countries) is to mock or dismiss as superstition the religious beliefs of others (especially so-called ‘natives’) on the grounds that they are obviously irrational or contrary to well known laws of nature, without realising that exactly the same applies to their own beliefs – in the virgin birth, the resurrection, the feeding of the five thousand or whatever. But Marxism does not just generalise this mistake by pointing to the equal stupidity of the cargo cultist and the Catholic, the Rastafarian and the Anglican. It requires an analysis of the social roots of religion in general and of specific religious beliefs; an understanding of the real human needs, social and psychological, and the real historical conditions, to which such beliefs and doctrines correspond. A Marxist needs to be able to understand why a belief in the divinity and immortality of Haile Selassie could inspire a musician of the calibre of Bob Marley in Trenchtown, Jamaica in the 1960s, while a belief in the divinity and immortality of Jesus inspired an artist (and mathematician) of the calibre of Piero della Francesca in 15th century Florence.
If we now turn to Marx’s most important statement directly on religion, the first couple of pages of The Introduction to A Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, we find it to be a condensed expression of all these elements. It begins with the assertion that:
For Germany, the criticism of religion has been essentially completed , and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism
By this Marx means that the combined work of the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, especially the French encyclopaedists, and the Bible criticism of German secular Left- Hegelians has demolished the claims of religion (Christianity/ The Bible) to offer a factually true account of nature or history, or even an internally coherent theology. Moreover this work was necessary and progressive because a genuinely critical analysis of the world was not possible until human thought was liberated from the fetters of religious dogma. But this single sentence is all Marx says on this aspect of the question. Taking the factual refutation of religion as given he proceeds rapidly to his main point, the analysis of the social basis of religion.
The foundation of irreligious criticism is: man makes religion, religion does not make man
This is the starting point. What follows is paragraph of exceptional density, typical of Marx, in which a PhD’s worth of insights are compressed into a few sentences
Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But, man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man — state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, it enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Thus religion ia a response to human alienation – man who has ‘lost himself’ – but this not an abstract or ahistorical condition, rather it is a product of certain specific social conditions. This society produces religion, an inverted view of the world in which humans bow to an imaginary god of their own making, because it is an inverted world in which people are dominated by the products of their own labour. But religion is not just a random collection of superstitions or false beliefs, it is the ‘general theory’ of this alienated world, the way in which alienated people try to make sense of their alienated lives and alien society. Therefore it performs the rich array of diverse functions listed by Marx: ‘encyclopaedic compendium’, ‘logic in popular form’, ‘spiritual point d’honneur’,‘moral sanction’, etc. And therefore to struggle against religion is to struggle against that world ‘whose spiritual aroma is religion’, this world of alienation in which people need religion.
Two points need to be made about this passage. The first is that it almost universally ignored by commentators offering summaries or explanations of Marx’s views on religion. This may be because they haven’t read it (which seems unlikely) or haven’t understood it (more likely) or, most likely, because it is radically incompatible with the attempt to reduce the Marxist theory of religion to a simple one or two dimensional analysis as in, ‘ Marx argues that religion is a tool of the ruling class’, or ‘According to Marx religion functions to pacify the toiling masses’. Of course, Marx does say this kind of thing about religion, but he says much else besides and to reduce the complex totality of his theory to just one of its strands is effectively to falsify it. The second is that Marx is so keen on its conclusion that he repeats it again and again in a veritable storm of metaphors and aphorisms.[‘The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness… The criticism of religion is… the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo…Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower …The criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of earth’ etc. etc.]
However, before concluding his argument on religion, Marx inserts one more highly significant paragraph.
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances. It is the opium of the people. [Marx’s emphasis}
This passage is much better known than the previous one but that is largely because of its much quoted final phrase (often presented as the essence or the totality of Marx’s analysis), whereas it is the first sentence that is probably the most interesting and most important for understanding the political role of religion. Marx’s insistence that religion is both an expression of suffering and a protest against it, is the key point, giving the lie to any analysis which focuses only on religion’s narcotic and soporific effects. It also points in the direction of the important historical fact (to which I shall return) that there have been many progressive , radical and even revolutionary movements that have either taken a religious form, had a religious coloration or been led by people of religious faith.
Marx then concludes his analysis of religion with a series of epigrams – ‘the criticism of religion [ is transformed] into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics’, in such a way as to move on to his main theme, the current state of affairs in Germany.
In the course of their immense oeuvre Marx and Engels made numerous references to and analyses of religion In particular the young Marx wrote On the Jewish Question, a polemic in favour of Jewish Emancipation [FOOTNOTE This rather obscure text has been particularly controversial because it has been cited as evidence of Marx’s anti-semitism. Refuting this false charge and dealing with some of the text’s other difficulties would divert me too far from my central theme . Fortunately it is discussed elsewhere in this issue by John Rose whose article should be read in conjunction with Hal Draper, ‘Marx and the Economic-Jew Stereotype’(1977) at http://www.marxists.de/religion/draper/marxjewq.htmin and Anindya Bhattacharya, ‘Marx and Religion’ Socialist Worker, 4 March 2006.] and Engels contributed a number of interesting studies of the historical development and role of Christianity, particularly in The Peasant War in Germany, Anti-Duhring, The Introduction to the English Edition of Socialism:Utopian and Scientific, Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity, and The History of Early Christianity.( all of which can be accessed in Marx and Engels On Religion, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1957 or via the Marxists Internet Archive at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/religion/index.htm). However all these comments have one thing in comment: they never take religious doctrines, sects, churches, movements and conflict at face value, nor treat them as simple follies or deceptions practiced by the priests, but regard them always as distorted reflections and expressions of real social needs and interests i.e. of the class struggle. A few extracts will illustrate the point:
The German ideology of to-day sees in the struggles to which the Middle Ages had succumbed nothing but violent theological bickerings…In the so-called religious wars of the Sixteenth Century, very positive material class-interests were at play, and those wars were class wars just as were the later collisions in England and France. If the class struggles of that time appear to bear religious earmarks, if the interests, requirements and demands of the various classes hid themselves behind a religious screen, it little changes the actual situation, and is to be explained by conditions of the time Germany)
The revolutionary opposition to feudalism was alive throughout all the Middle Ages. According to conditions of the time, it appeared either in the form of mysticism, as open heresy, or of armed insurrection. As mysticism, it is well known how indispensable it was for the reformers of the Sixteenth Century. Muenzer himself was largely indebted to it. The heresies were partly an expression of the reaction of the patriarchal Alpine shepherds against the encroachments of feudalism in their realm (Waldenses), partly an opposition to feudalism of the cities that had out-grown it (The Albigenses, Arnold of Brescia, etc.), and partly direct insurrections of peasants (John Ball, the master from Hungary in Picardy, etc.). We can omit, in this connection, the patriarchal heresy of the Waldenses, as well as the insurrection of the Swiss, which by form and contents, was a reactionary attempt at stemming the tide of historic development, and of a purely local importance. In the other two forms of mediaeval heresy, we find as early as the Twelfth Century the precursors of the great division between the middle-class and the peasant-plebeian opposition which caused the collapse of the peasant war.(The Peasant War in Germany)
Calvin's creed was one fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time. His predestination doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial world of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man's activity or cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him. It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of the mercy of unknown superior economic powers; and this was especially true at a period of economic revolution, when all old commercial routes and centres were replaced by new ones, when India and America were opened to the world, and when even the most sacred economic articles of faith – the value of gold and silver – began to totter and to break down. (Introduction to the English Edition, 1892, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific)
Christianity was originally a movement of oppressed people: it first appeared as the religion of slaves and emancipated slaves, of poor people deprived of all rights, of peoples subjugated or dispersed by Rome…
These risings [of oppressed peasants and town plebeians- JM], like all mass movements of the Middle Ages, were bound to wear the mask of religion and appeared as the restoration of early Christianity from spreading degeneration….But behind the religious exaltation there was every time a very tangible worldly interest. This appeared most splendidly in the organization of the Bohemian Taborites under Jan Zizka, of glorious memory; but this trait pervades the whole of the Middle Ages (The History of Early Christianity)
And, incidentally, the following footnote on Islam:
. Islam is a religion adapted to Orientals, especially Arabs, i.e., on one hand to townsmen engaged in trade and industry, on the other to nomadic Bedouins. Therein lies, however, the embryo of a periodically recurring collision. The townspeople grow rich, luxurious and lax in the observation of the "law." The Bedouins, poor and hence of strict morals, contemplate with envy and covetousness these riches and pleasures. Then they unite under a prophet, a Mahdi, to chastise the apostates and restore the observation of the ritual and the true faith and to appropriate in recompense the treasures of the renegades. In a hundred years they are naturally in the same position as the renegades were: a new purge of the faith is required, a new Mahdi arises and the game starts again from the beginning. That is what happened from the conquest campaigns of the African Almoravids and Almohads in Spain to the last Mahdi of Khartoum who so successfully thwarted the English…. All these movements are clothed in religion but they have their source in economic causes; (ibid)
It should go without saying that the point here is not the historical truth or falsity of all or any of these specific observations, but the consistent methodology underlying them.
DAWKINS, HITCHENS AND EAGLETON
Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist who first came to prominence with his book The Selfish Gene, and thereafter built himself a considerable reputation and career as a populariser of science. In 2006 he published The God Delusion, a full frontal assault on religion and defence of atheism, which became an international bestseller, generated huge controversy, especially in the United States, and attracted plaudits from sources as diverse as Ian McEwan, Michael Frayn, The Spectator, The Daily Mail and Stephen Pinker.
I should say at the outset that I do not at all share the apparently widespread admiration of Dawkins’ style and intellect. Reading Dawkins after Marx is like going from Tolstoy or Joyce to Kingsley Amis or Agatha Christie, i.e. moving down several divisions. Where Marx packs a book into a paragraph, Dawkins expands a short essay into a large book. In fact all 460 odd pages of The God Delusion do not take us intellectually beyond what Marx summed up in the first sentence of his analysis in 1843, namely that the criticism of religion is essentially complete. What Dawkins offers is an ‘enlightenment’, empiricist, rationalist, refutation of religion – a ‘scientific’, i.e. positivist demonstration that there is a complete lack of factual evidence to support what he calls ‘the God hypothesis’ and that on the contrary the evidence makes it almost (if not absolutely) certain that God does not exist. This is supplemented by logical refutations of the various arguments advanced for God’s existence ranging from the venerable ‘proofs’ of Thomas Aquinas and Pascal’s Wager to the bizarre recent speculations of one Stephen Unwin, and numerous examples of the follies and crimes perpetrated in the name of religion. I suppose there are some people for whom this will be revelatory and others who may enjoy it because it makes them feel smarter than the ignorant masses who swallow these superstitions, but theoretically there is nothing new here, indeed very little that isn’t at least two hundred years old.
The only real exception to this lies in Dawkins’ attempt to explain why religion is so widespread in human society but this attempt is a rather miserable failure. Being a committed evolutionary biologist he feels obliged to frame his explanation in evolutionary biological terms, i.e. in terms of genetic advantage in the process of natural selection. Unfortunately his blanket hostility to religion also obliges him to deny that religion can be advantageous for individual or social survival. He tries to wriggle out of this contradiction by suggesting that religion is a side-effect of a characteristic that he claims is advantageous in the struggle for survival, namely a propensity for children to believe what they are told by their elders. Clearly this doesn’t withstand criticism. First it is highly debatable the extent to which youthful suggestibility outweighs youthful skepticism, especially into adolescence. Second, it is equally debatable whether such suggestibility is on balance advantageous. Third, it seems highly likely that both the extent and advantageousness of suggestibility is massively socially conditioned and very different in different societies. Finally, like any theory that explains the behaviour or beliefs of children by the behaviour or beliefs of their parents, it is left with the problem of explaining the parents’ disposition in the first place or is caught in an infinite regress. As Marx pointed out,‘the educators themselves must be educated’ [Theses on Feuerbach:3]. In other words Dawkins’ explanation turns out to be no explanation at all. Moreover it is symptomatic of his whole approach that neither in this section nor any anywhere else in The God Delusion’s 460 pages does the author find time seriously to consider the Marxist theory of religion.
However intellectual unoriginality and mediocrity is by no means the main objection to this book.( It would be churlish to cavil so over a work that was second rate but reasonably sound). The main objection is to the reactionary political conclusions that flow from the weak methodological basis. As Marx argued in relation to Feuerbach, mechanical materialism invariably leaves the door open to idealism, and Dawkins is a particularly clear example of this. Without noticing it he flip flops from a vulgar materialist genetic determinism in his view of human nature and behaviour in the abstract, to a rampant idealism in his view of the role of religion in concrete historical circumstances. Again and again he makes the mistake of assuming that when people do something in the name of religion it really is religion that is determining their behaviour. The following passage from his essay ‘The improbability of God’ epitomizes his approach:
Much of what people do is done in the name of God. Irishmen blow each other up in his name. Arabs blow themselves up in his name. Imams and ayatollahs oppress women in his name. Celibate popes and priests mess up people's sex lives in his name. Jewish shohets cut live animals' throats in his name. The achievements of religion in past history - bloody crusades, torturing inquisitions, mass-murdering conquistadors, culture-destroying missionaries, legally enforced resistance to each new piece of scientific truth until the last possible moment - are even more impressive. And what has it all been in aid of? I believe it is becoming increasingly clear that the answer is absolutely nothing at all. There is no reason for believing that any sort of gods exist and quite good reason for believing that they do not exist and never have. It has all been a gigantic waste of time and a waste of life. It would be a joke of cosmic proportions if it weren't so tragic (‘The improbability of God’ Free Inquiry Magazine, Volume 18, Number 3.)
In fact this no more than a souped up version of the familiar nostrum that lots of wars are caused by religion and it will not stand a moment’s critical scrutiny. Let us take the example of Ireland. The view that conflict in Ireland was essentially or primarily about religion is both manifestly false and plainly reactionary. It is false even in terms of the declared statements and consciousness of the principal protagonists. If many, though by no means all, Republicans were Catholics, no Republican would have said (or believed) that they were fighting for Catholicism; they fought for Ireland, i.e. for an independent united Ireland. Things were less clear on the Unionist side where religious bigotry played a much larger role, nevertheless the principal declared goal was a ‘national’ one, namely remaining ‘British’. Moreover it abundantly clear that behind these conflicting national aspirations lay not religious differences about the doctrine of transubstantiation or the fallibility of the Pope but real economic, social and political issues of exploitation, poverty, discrimination and oppression. To see the conflict as basically about religion was reactionary because it fitted with the racist stereotype of the Irish as primitive and stupid (after all ‘we’ gave up fighting about religion centuries ago) and helped to legitimate the presence of the British army and British rule as a neutral arbiter between warring religious factions.
To his credit Richard Dawkins opposed the Iraq War and politically he is no friend of George Bush, but, in the context of the War on Terror, his approach to religion becomes, even if unintentionally, even more reactionary. For it is central to the Bush/Cheney/ neo-con/ Blair/Brown ideology that Muslim hostility to ‘the West’ is unprovoked and unjustified. It is not a reaction or response to Western imperialism, exploitation and domination, but rather a religion-based offensive campaign aimed at destroying, conquering, or perhaps converting the non-Muslim world. To some this hostility is inherent in mainstream Islam {Dawkins seems to hold this view or something like it –see The God Delusion pp.346-7); for Bush/Blair and co it derives from an ‘evil’ misinterpretation or perversion of Islam, but in both cases the motivation is religious. It is an interpretation which flies in the face of the declared statements of both Al-Quaeda, who made explicit political demands such as the removal of US troops from Saudi Arabia , and the 7/7 bombers in London, who said they were motivated by what was being done to Iraq, and which also defies reason. The notion that America, or Britain or any big western nation, could be destroyed, conquered or, indeed, converted by planting bombs on the underground or flying planes into a couple of tall buildings is so utterly absurd that it cannot be the real motive for any sustained campaign. The idea that the US could be induced by a terrorist campaign to stop supporting Israel or to get out of Afghanistan is also mistaken but it is not completely implausible. For Bush/ Blair and co,, however, the ‘religious’ interpretation is mandatory, as without it they would be forced to concede the culpability of imperialism and of their own policies, and the Dawkins approach dovetails with this and reinforces it.
. "Mindless" may be a suitable word for the vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11… It came from religion. Religion is also, of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated the use of this deadly weapon in the first place. But that is another story and not my concern here. My concern here is with the weapon itself. To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. [Richard Dawkins, ‘Religion’s misguided missiles’, The Guardian, 15.09.01]
Similar to Dawkins, but worse, is Christopher Hitchens. His book, God is Not Great, is on an even lower intellectual level than The God Delusion, with a more arbitrary combination of self serving personal anecdote and rambling journalistic polemic. Its adaptation of the atheist case to Islamophobia is embodied in the title ( a mocking reference to the Muslim cry, ‘God is Great!’) and blatant throughout. I suppose out of deference to his radical past, he actually quotes, approvingly, a couple of the key paragraphs of Marx on religion and then proceeds to ignore their meaning completely. In the key ‘Religion Kills’ section of the book he takes us on a whistlestop tour of six strife torn cities – Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem and Baghdad – in each case offering a swift summation of the conflict exclusively in terms of religious hatreds without any reference to history, imperialism, oppression, or class. It is a travesty of socio-political analysis. The ‘analysis’ of Palestine is especially striking.
I once heard the late Abba Eban, one of Israel's more polished and
thoughtful diplomats and statesmen, give a talk in New York. The
first thing to strike the eye about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, he
said, was the ease of its solubility. From this arresting start he went
on to say, with the authority of a former foreign minister and UN
representative, that the essential point was a simple one. Two peoples
of roughly equivalent size had a claim to the same land. The solution
was, obviously, to create two states side by side. Surely something
so self-evident was within the wit of man to encompass? And so it
would have been, decades ago, if the messianic rabbis and mullahs
and priests could have been kept out of it. But the exclusive claims to
god-given authority, made by hysterical clerics on both sides and further
stoked by Armageddon-minded Christians who hope to bring on
the Apocalypse (preceded by the death or conversion of all Jews), have
made the situation insufferable, and put the whole of humanity in the
position of hostage to a quarrel that now features the threat of nuclear
war. Religion poisons everything.
This is risible, but when Hitchens says, and I quote verbatim from You Tube, ‘ I am absolutely convinced that the main source of hatred in the world is religion’*, he is also saying it is not the material fact of capitalism, not imperialism, not inequality, not exploitation or class conflict, just a mistaken idea people have lodged in their heads.
[* NOTE Its not easy to grasp how far Hitchens has gone . Again I quote from him on You Tube, debating with Rev. Al Sharpton, ‘You see, I don’t love our enemies, and I don’t love people who do love them. I hate our enemies and think they should be killed…And I’m absolutely sure there should be no other country that has a budget that threatens ours, and I’m not sentimental about it.’ And by ‘our enemies’ and ‘our budget’ he means the enemies and budget of US imperialism.]
Vigorously opposing the arguments of Dawkins and Hitchens does not, however, involve diluting in any way the classical Marxist critique of religion or opening the door to some kind of theoretical compromise with religious ideas.At this point we need to leave the odious Hitchens for the far more congenial Terry Eagleton, who provides an example of what should be avoided. Eagleton is an eminent cultural and literary theorist, friendly to Marxism, who, in the past, attacked the racism and other bigotries of Philip Larkin, and who recently distinguished himself [in my eyes] by denouncing the Islamophobia of his colleague, Martin Amis. In 2006 he wrote a highly critical review of The God Delusion for the London Review of Books but although he advances some of the same arguments as this article, for example in relation to Ireland, the general terms of his critique are not Marxist. His principal argument is that Dawkins has attacked fundamentalist religion, Christian and Islamic as if it represents all religion, while ignoring more sophisticated ‘liberal’ theology of which he (Dawkins) is largely ignorant
What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case?
(http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html)
As a criticism of Dawkins book this has some validity, but there are also serious problems here. First, it is not reasonable to argue that it is necessary to master all the ins ands outs of Christian (or Buddhist, or Zoroastrian ) theology before one can make an intellectually sound case for atheism and for rejecting theology as such. Second, in demonstrating his understanding of the liberal theologians’ concept of an immaterial, impersonal god of love and tolerance, in contrast to the Old Testament god of vengeance espoused by Falwell and attacked by Dawkins, Eagleton leaves decidedly open the possibility that this liberal god may actually exist, or be worthy of worship. He does the same when he offers his picture of Jesus as proto – anti- imperialist revolutionary.
Jesus did not die because he was mad or masochistic, but because the Roman state and its assorted local lackeys and running dogs took fright at his message of love, mercy and justice, as well as at his enormous popularity with the poor, and did away with him to forestall a mass uprising in a highly volatile political situation. [ibid.]
For a Marxist the loving caring impersonal god of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the radical Jesus of Terry Eagleton are both just as much human creations, illusory projections, as the unpleasant bigoted gods of Ian Paisley or Osama bin Laden.
RELIGION AND SOCIALIST POLITICS
To conclude this article I shall outline a brief and rather schematic summary of the principal political conclusions that flow, and have flowed historically, from the foregoing analysis.
First, and contrary to widespread opinion (fostered by widespread misrepresentation), Marxist socialists are absolutely opposed to any idea of banning religion. This is not some new position but was explicitly stated by Engels as far back as 1874 in response to a proposal by some Blanquists. The reasons given by Engels remain valid to this day.
In order to prove that they are the most radical of all they abolish God by decree as was done in 1793:
“Let the Commune free mankind for ever from the ghost of past misery” (God), “from that cause” (non-existing God a cause!) “of their present misery. There is no room for priests in the Commune; every religious manifestation. every religious organization must be prohibited.”
And this demand that men should be changed into atheists par ordre du mufti is signed by two members of the Commune who have really had opportunity enough to find out that first a vast amount of things can be ordered on paper without necessarily being carried out, and second, that persecution is the best means of promoting undesirable convictions! This much is sure: the only service that can be rendered to God today is to declare atheism a compulsory article of faith and to outdo Bismarck’s Kirchenkulturkampf laws by prohibiting religion generally....
[http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/refugee-literature/ch02.htm]
Far from banning religion Marxists argue that religion should be a private matter in relation to the state and complete freedom of religion should prevail both under capitalism and socialism. Lenin spelt this out unambiguously in his article on ‘Socialism and Religion’ in1905
Religion must be of no concern to the state, and religious societies must have no connection with governmental authority. Everyone must be absolutely free to profess any religion he pleases, or no religion whatever, i.e., to be an atheist, which every socialist is, as a rule. Discrimination among citizens on account of their religious convictions is wholly intolerable. Even the bare mention of a citizen’s religion in official documents should unquestionably be eliminated.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/dec/03.htm
( Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1965, Moscow, Volume 10, pp84-5 )
The only sense in which Marxists contemplate the elimination of religion is through its gradual withering away as a result of the disappearance of its underlying social causes – alienation, exploitation, oppression etc. Marxist socialists are, however, opposed to any state privileges for religion and call the disestablishment of any or all official state churches (like the Church of England).
Inevitably the general perception of the Marxist attitude to religion is considerably influenced by the experience of the Stalinist regimes in Russia, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea etc. A systematic investigation of this experience is impossible in this brief article and,hopefully, readers of this journal are well aware that the policies of these regimes were in no way representative of genuine socialism or Marxism Nevertheless certain observations are worth making. Stalinist repression of religion is often both exaggerated and misunderstood. It is exaggerated in that in general the Stalinist regimes did not repress the main religions or churches but tolerated them and even formed alliances with them, on condition that these churches were politically compliant ( which they mainly were).It is misunderstood in that where religious groups or individuals were persecuted it was primarily because they were politically troublesome, rather than because of their faith as such, but then these were societies in which all political opposition was suppressed. A broad overview of the communist states’ treatment of the religious can be found in the last chapter of Paul Siegel, The Meek and the Militant – Religion and Power Across the World, [Zed Books, London and New Jersey 1986] and an especially useful case study of the Russian Revolutions dealings with its Muslim minority is provided in Dave Crouch, ‘The Bolsheviks and Islam’ in International Socialism 110. Crouch shows how in the early years of the revolution the Bolsheviks adhered strictly to the Leninist principles outlined above and thus met with considerable success in winning over Muslims, whereas the rise of Stalin led to the adoption of increasingly top-down authoritarian policies, including the assault on the veil, which proved disastrous.
Second, in determining their attitude to popular movements with a religious coloration, which are many and varied, Marxists take as their point of departure not the religious beliefs of the movement’s leaders or of its supporters, nor the doctrines and theology of the religion concerned, but the political role of the movement, based on the social forces and interests which it represents.
To put this in perspective consider the respective historical roles of Catholicism and Protestantism. In the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period Catholicism was essentially the religion of the feudal aristocracy and therefore almost universally reactionary. In contrast radical Protestantism tended to represent either the rising bourgeoisie or the plebeian elements below and to the left of it. The great rebels and revolutionaries of those times, the Thomas Muenzers, John Lilburnes and Gerard Winstanleys, were passionate Protestants – extremists and fundamentalists in the language of today. BUT the moment these bourgeois rebels came to power, in the Netherlands and England, they became participants in what Marx called ‘the primitive accumulation of capital’ and thus vicious colonists and slavers. Cromwell, the revolutionary and regicide in England became Cromwell the oppressor in Ireland (where his name still lives in infamy), and specifically of the Catholic peasantry. Similarly the Dutch protestant burghers were the heroes of Europe in the Dutch Revolt but the villains of Africa with apartheid. The strongly reactionary role of the Catholic Church continued in Europe, especially southern Europe, well into the last century, witness its active support for Franco in Spain and its deals with Mussolini and Hitler, and still survives in attenuated form in the main conservative parties in Italy, Spain and southern Germany. BUT the countries in Europe where Catholicism and religion in general remained strongest were Ireland and Poland where the church was able, very moderately but powerfully, to identify itself with opposition to national oppression. Any socialist looking back to the seventeenth century will identify immediately with the Protestant rebels and against the Catholic monarchs and emperors. Any socialist looking at Ireland in 1916 or Belfast in the 1970s will identify with the ‘catholic’ Nationalists not the ‘protestant’ Unionists.. Any socialist who saw the rise of Solidarnosc in Poland as a conflict between the ‘backward’ Catholics of Gdansk and the ‘progressive’ atheist communists of the Soviet State ended up on the side of the imperialist oppressor. The same applies today to the Tibet/china conflict and above all to the War on Terror and the struggles in the Middle East.
Many other cases can be adduced to reinforce this argument. Where would a socialist be who decided their political attitude to Malcolm X on the basis of his crackpot and reactionary religious beliefs as a member of the Nation of Islam, or to Bob Marley on the basis of his belief in the divinity of that old tyrant Haile Selassie, or even to Hugo Chavez, self proclaimed Catholic and admirer of the Pope? Unfortunately some would- be socialists
who have no difficulty grasping this in relation to Chavez or Marley, under the pressure of intense bourgeois propaganda arre unable to apply the same approach when the religion in question is Islam. To put the matter as starkly as possible: from the standpoint of Marxism and international socialism an illiterate, conservative, superstitious Muslim Palestinian peasant who supports Hamas is more progressive than an educated liberal atheist Israeli who supports (even critically) Zionism.
It also follows that Marxist socialists do not accept the idea that any of the major religions is inherently, or in terms of its doctrines, more or less progressive, than any of the others. For a religion to become ‘major’, that is survive over centuries in many locations and different social orders, it is a precondition that its doctrines be capable of almost infinite selection, interpretation and adaptation. Once again what is decisive is not doctrine but social base in the specific social situation. Thus in the US we find a right wing racist imperialist Christianity in the Moral Majority or the Mormons and a left wing anti-racist anti-war Christian tradition as in Martin Luther King. In South Africa there was a pro-apartheid Christianity and anti-apartheid Christianity; in Latin America there has been a rightwing, pro-oligarchy, pro-dictator Catholicism and a leftist ‘theology of liberation’ Catholicism; and, of course, there are a multitude of different, often sharply conflicting, versions of Islam, ranging from the anti- imperialist Islam of Hezbollah to the pro-imperialist Islam of Hosni Mubarak.
The main argument used to justify the notion of Islam as a specially backward religion is, of course, the attitudes to women and homosexuality prevalent in Muslim countries. Those who put this argument need to be reminded that much the same attitudes were prevalent in Western societies until very recently and are still present in the teachings of many Christian churches. But the fundamental flaw in this argument takes us back to the basics of Marxist materialism – the secret of the Muslim Holy Family lies in the earthly Muslim family. It is not Muslim religious consciousness that determines the position of women in Muslim society, but the real position of women that shapes Muslim religious beliefs. Islam was born in the Arabian peninsular and spread horizontally, west across North Africa and east across Central Asia. For centuries this great belt has been largely poor, underdeveloped and rural, and to a considerable extent remains so today. Other societies, from Ireland to China, with similar levels of development and similar social structures but different religions, exhibit similar oppression of women and gays.
Finally, there is the question of the relationship of the revolutionary party to religious workers. Any such party operating in a country where religion remains strong among the mass of the population, which is much of the world, must reckon with, indeed count on, the fact that the revolution will be made by workers, many of whom will still be religious. The vast mass of workers will be liberated from their religious illusions not by arguments, pamphlets or books, but by participation in the revolutionary struggle, and beyond, in the building of socialism. In such a situation it is incumbent on the party to ensure that religious differences, or differences between the religious and the non-religious, do not obstruct the unity of working class struggle. Moreover in so far as the party becomes a truly mass party, leading the class in its workplaces and communities, it will inevitably find in its ranks a layer of workers who remain religious or semi-religious. To reject such workers because of their religious illusions would be sectarian and non-materialist. It would be to share the religious/ idealist mistake of regarding religion as the most important element in consciousness and consciousness as more important than practice. At the same time the party must not become a religious party, or party whose policy, strategy or tactics is shaped by religious considerations. Revolutionary victory requires that the party should be guided by the theory that expresses the collective interests and struggle of the working class, namely Marxism. Therefore the party must ensure that on this matter it educatesc and iinfluences its religious members rather than vice versa.
One revolutionary party working in such a situation was the Bolshevik Party and its leading theorist, Lenin, wrote on these matters with insight and clarity in his 1909 article ‘The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion’. Here are a few extracts:
Marxism is materialism. As such, it is as relentlessly hostile to religion as was the materialism of the eighteenth-century Encyclopaedists or the materialism of Feuerbach. This is beyond doubt. But the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels goes further …for it applies the materialist philosophy to the domain of history….. It says: We must know how to combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and religion among the masses in a materialist way. The combating of religion cannot be confined to abstract ideological preaching, and it must not be reduced to such preaching. It must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion.
Why does religion retain its hold…? Because of the ignorance of the people, replies the bourgeois progressist, the radical or the bourgeois materialist. And so: “Down with religion and long live atheism; the dissemination of atheist views is our chief task!” The Marxist says that this is not true, that it is a superficial view, the view of narrow bourgeois uplifters. It does not explain the roots of religion profoundly enough; it explains them, not in a materialist but in an idealist way. In modern capitalist countries these roots are mainly social. The deepest root of religion today is the socially downtrodden condition of the working masses and their apparently complete helplessness in face of the blind forces of capitalism
Does this mean that educational books against religion are harmful or unnecessary? No, nothing of the kind. It means that Social-Democracy’s atheist propaganda must be subordinated to its basic task—the development of the class struggle of the exploited masses against the exploiters.
The proletariat in a particular region …is divided, let us assume, into an advanced section of fairly class-conscious Social-Democrats, who are of course atheists, and rather backward workers …who believe in God, go to church, or are even under the direct influence of the local priest... Let us assume furthermore that the economic struggle in this locality has resulted in a strike. It is the duty of a Marxist to place the success of the strike movement above everything else, vigorously to counteract the division of the workers in this struggle into atheists and Christians, vigorously to oppose any such division. Atheist propaganda in such circumstances may be both unnecessary and harmful—not from the philistine fear of scaring away the backward sections, of losing a seat in the elections, and so on, but out of consideration for the real progress of the class struggle, which in the conditions of modern capitalist society will convert Christian workers to Social-Democracy and to atheism a hundred times better than bald atheist propaganda.
We must not only admit workers who preserve their belief in God into the Social-Democratic Party, but must deliberately set out to recruit them; we are absolutely opposed to giving the slightest offence to their religious convictions, but we recruit them in order to educate them in the spirit of our programme, and not in order to permit an active struggle against it.
[Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1973, Moscow, Volume 15, pages 402-413]
What these extracts confirm is what this whole article has argued, namely that handling correctly the issue of religion – so vital in the present political situation- is not just a matter of ad hoc judgments or tactics, still less of electoral opportunism , but of understanding the most basic ideas of Marxist dialectical materialism
John Molyneux
7 July 2008
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
LEFT IN VISION 2
While at Marxism 2008 you are invited to visit our art show
LEFT IN VISION 2 in the Staff Common Room at SOAS.
An exhibition of visual art, curated by John Molyneux with D Rosier,
Chanie Rosenberg, Roxanne Chappell, Donna Snell and Robb Waterfield.
LAUNCH
with introduction by John Molyneux
Friday 4 July, 5.30pm, Staff Common Room, SOAS
Featuring work by over fifty artists including sculpture by Haitian street artist Andre Eugene andMay Ayres and paintings and drawings by Mark Wydler, Peter Clossick, Marcelle Hanselaar, Frances Newman and Leon Kuhn, and films by D Rosier, Margot Hill and Chappell/ Snell.
May Ayres Fallujah
LEFT IN VISION 2
LEFT IN VISION 2 in the Staff Common Room at SOAS.
An exhibition of visual art, curated by John Molyneux with D Rosier,
Chanie Rosenberg, Roxanne Chappell, Donna Snell and Robb Waterfield.
LAUNCH
with introduction by John Molyneux
Friday 4 July, 5.30pm, Staff Common Room, SOAS
Featuring work by over fifty artists including sculpture by Haitian street artist Andre Eugene andMay Ayres and paintings and drawings by Mark Wydler, Peter Clossick, Marcelle Hanselaar, Frances Newman and Leon Kuhn, and films by D Rosier, Margot Hill and Chappell/ Snell.
May Ayres Fallujah
LEFT IN VISION 2
Is the World Overpopulated?
Is the World Overpopulated?
First cut of article written for Socialist Worker (27.06.08)
Just over two hundred years ago in 1798 an English clergyman, the Rev. Thomas Malthus, published his Essay on the Principle of Population which argued that population always tends to grow faster than food production, and that therefore, without severe moral restraint, mass poverty and famine were inevitable.
Ever since then there have been people who have argued that the world and/or Britain was, or was about to become, overpopulated. Overpopulation is cited as a or the main cause of world or national poverty, starvation, damage to the environment, climate change, unemployment, homelessness and so on. Now, with world and British food prices rocketing , oil at $130 a barrel, recession looming and hostility to immigrants being whipped up all over the place, this argument becomes more urgent than ever.
Socialists, beginning with Marx and Engels, who called Malthus’s theory ‘a slander on the human race’, have always rejected the whole overpopulation argument. It is false on principle because it inverts the whole relationship between human beings and their means of subsistence, and it is also completely at variance with the historical and contemporary facts. Let’s begin with some of the facts.
World population stands at about 6.7 billion. It is growing, but it is NOT exploding. The rate of growth is in fact declining. In the fifty years between 1950 and 2000 world population grew from 2.5 billion to 6 billion , an increase of 140%, but in the next fifty years up to 2050 demographers (experts on population) predict it will rise by 50%, and in the fifty years after that by 11%. The reason for this pattern is simple: world birth rates continue to exceed death rates, but birth rates are falling. As living standards, education and medical care improve women, more or less everywhere, tend to have fewer children.
The growth in population is NOT outstripping food production. World population grew 140% in 1950-2000, but world food production rose by 250% in less than half that time, in 1950-1970. There is no world food shortage; on the contrary there is more than enough food produced in the world to supply everyone with a decent diet.
If people are starving and there are food riots breaking out across the world this is because of the inability of particular countries or, more accurately, the poor in those countries to pay the prices demanded by the market. In other words it is because of capitalist economics and capitalist politics. I was in Egypt at the time of the food riots earlier this year – no middle class Egyptian and no tourist went short of food. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations acknowledges the situation openly:
"We have emphasized first and foremost that reducing hunger is no longer a question of means in the hands of the global community. The world is richer today than it was ten years ago…. The knowledge and resources to reduce hunger are there. What is lacking is sufficient political will to mobilize those resources to the benefit of the hungry."
Nor is the prosperity of individual countries determined by, or even significantly related to, their population size or population density. Consider the following table showing five Latin American Countries.
Country Population Area Population density GDP per capita
(millions) ( million sq. kms) (people per sq. km)
Argentina 40.6 2.7 15 $13,300 Brazil 192.1 8.5 22.5 $9.700 Bolivia 9.2 1.1 8.4 $4000 Chile 16 0.75 21.3 $13,900 Venezuela 26 0.9 28.5 $12,200
One can see at a glance that the least populated and least densely populated country, Bolivia, is also, by a long way, the poorest. Whereas Venezuela , which is more than three times as densely populated, is three times as rich.
Now look at these Asian countries:
Country Population Area Population density GDP per capita
(millions) ( million sq. kms) (people per sq. km)
C hina 1,300 9.6 135 $5,300 India 1,140 3.3 345 $2700 Japan 127 0.37 343 $33000 Pakistan 168 0.8 210 $2600
Note here that India and Japan have similar population densities, but very different histories (India was colonised , Japan was a colonising power) and hugely different levels of economic prosperity. India and Pakistan however have significantly different population densities but similar histories and economies, with almost identical levels of per capita GDP.
And these African countries:
Country Population Area Population density GDP per capita
(millions) ( million sq. kms) (people per sq. km)
Chad 10 1.3 8 $1700 Congo 66 2.3 29 $300 Egypt 81.7 1.0 81.7 $ 5500 Nigeria 138 0.9 153 $ 2000
All the African countries are poor, but Egypt which is quite densely populated (but was not devastated by the transatlantic slave trade) is relatively well off, while the very sparsely populated Chad is much poorer and the Congo, which suffered grievously under Belgian imperialism and has undergone a long terrible civil war, is poorest of all.
Finally look at these three ‘western’ countries:
Country Population Area Population density GDP per capita
(millions) ( million sq. kms) (people per sq. km)
Canada 33 9.9 3.3 $38000 UK 60 0.24 240 $35,000 USA 303 9.8 30.3 $45000
They represent completely different points on the population density spectrum, but because they have all had the benefits of industrialisation and imperialism, they all enjoy roughly comparable, high living standards.
What these examples all prove is that is economics, politics, war, in a word history, that determines a country’s (or the world’s) living standards and not the size of its population. And the reason why this is so goes to heart of what is wrong with the whole ‘overpopulation’ argument.
What that argument does is take the world’s or a country’s goods - its food, houses, health service, jobs, wealth, etc – as a given, a more or less fixed quantity, to which the population, i.e. the number of people, should be adjusted. In reality all these things are produced by people, and an increase in the number of people means not only increased demand for these products but also an increase in the number of people available to produce them.
If it were not so, the history of humanity would be an unmitigated disaster of increasing impoverishment and unemployment, for world population stood at 200 million in 1 AD, 310 million in 1000, 978 million in 1800, and 1,650 million in 1900. In fact, of course, the basic tendency has been for humanity to get richer, albeit incredibly unequally, survive better and live longer - which is precisely why the population has increased!
What has prevented the process from being even or harmonious has been the contradictions inherent in class society and, especially capitalism, with its periodic wars and economic crises. Because capitalism makes production dependent on profit, production falls when rates of profit fall, regardless of population size or the effects on the population in terms of poverty, unemployment or starvation.
The politics of this whole question is at its sharpest over the issues of climate change and immigration. Many greens and genuinely concerned people who might broadly have accepted the argument presented so far begin to change their tune when it comes to the environment and especially climate change.
The earth’s resources are finite, they say, and human beings are using them up. The more human beings there are the more pressure it puts on these finite resources . This is unsustainable; it has got to stop or the planet will be destroyed – population growth must cease, indeed the population should be reduced. But this reasoning is as false as the arguments already refuted and repeats the same basic error.
Yes, the earth’s resources are ‘finite’ and ‘limited’ in some cosmic sense but this does not mean that human activity is anywhere near reaching those limits, now or in the foreseeable future. And while some resources e.g.oil may be fixed in quantity others, such as wind and tidal power are ‘produced’ by human labour in the same sense that food is; consequently increased population means more labour to create more of these resources.
Where the carbon emissions that generate climate change are concerned it is not people as such that produce these emissions but, overwhelmingly, the burning of fossil fuels. The reason our societies are locked into the burning of fossil fuels, despite the knowledge that it is leading to catastrophe, is not the size of their populations but the crucial role this plays in the profits of big business – Exxon, Texaco, Shell, BP, Toyota, Ford etc.
Those who cite population reduction as a way to stop climate change are really saying they find it easier to conceive of ‘losing’ a billion or so people than to contemplate overthrowing capitalism, or even seriously challenge its priorities.
When it comes to immigration the overpopulation argument is largely a fig leaf for xenophobia and racism .Of course this is denied . It is a question of numbers not race, they insist . Britain (or Italy, or Spain or wherever) is simply full up. The falsity of this claim, taken literally, is obvious when one thinks of the vast empty spaces in the Scottish Highlands for instance.
However, it is also useful to have a sense of perspective on this. Hong Kong has a population density of 7000 per sq km. , making it one of the most densely populated places on earth. It also has a per capita GDP of $42,000, making it one of the richest places in the world. But at that level of population density you could put the entire population of the world into an area the size of Bolivia or Chad, i.e. one million or so sq.kms.
Clearly what they mean to say is that the country is full up in terms of jobs, homes, and services, but this brings us back to the original argument that jobs, houses and services are not fixed but are produced by people, including immigrants and it is therefore utterly wrong to blame unemployment or housing shortages on immigration.
Unfortunately, underlying the claim that immigration is causing unemployment etc. is the idea that some people (foreigners, blacks etc.) are not entitled to have jobs or houses, or at least are less entitled than others (whites, English etc). Both the absurdity and the racism of this way of thinking are neatly exposed if one simply substitutes some other group (red haired people, young people, women, Jewish people..) for foreigners or blacks, as in ‘ Its those red haired lot that I blame. There are two million Gingers and two million unemployed – kick out the gingers and we’d all have a job’
If there is serious racist or other prejudice against the group named ( as with Jews in 1930s Germany) the argument can sound plausible; if not it just sounds ridiculous – which is because it is ridiculous.
In the end all the claims about overpopulation boil down to same thing, blaming the people for the problems of the system, which is why Marx was right to call them ‘a slander on the human race’ and why socialists should reject them root and branch.
John Molyneux 27 June 2008
Monday, June 30, 2008
The Marxist Theory of Women's Oppression
KOREA COLUMN 37
The Marxist Theory of Women’s Oppression
In last month’s column I argued that patriarchy theory, although very widespread in feminist circles, is unable to provide a coherent or convincing explanation of why women were and are oppressed. In contrast, however, Marxism is able to provide such an account.
A satisfactory theory of women’s oppression must be a) materialist and b) historical. By materialist I mean it must explain how the inferior or second class status of women is rooted in real material social relations which in turn are related to the level of economic development in society. It cannot simply say that is a matter of human nature, or all in the genes; nor can it just say that it is ‘cultural’ if by cultural is meant that women are oppressed because men believe themselves superior or women believe themselves inferior, without an explanation of the material causes of these beliefs.
By historical I mean it must be able to show when and how women’s oppression began, (approximately, of course – it is not a question of a blow - by- blow account), why it has continued up to the present day, and, if it is to be a theory of women’s liberation, how circumstances have changed so as to make equality now a real possibility.
We have already seen that patriarchy theory fails all these tests; we shall now see that Marxist theory passes them.
Marxism begins by arguing that although the oppression of women has been in place for millennia, it is NOT universal or eternal. On the contrary, for hundreds of thousands of years, during the period when people were hunters and gatherers, which is how ALL humans lived prior to the development of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, women were not systematically oppressed at all. In other words for most of human history, well over ninety per cent of it, women and men lived in rough equality. Equality not oppression is thus the norm of human society. How do we know this to be the case?
We know it primarily through studies of hunter-gatherer societies that survived into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and have been investigated by anthropologists. There was the pioneering work on Native Americans by Lewis Morgan on which Frederick Engels based much of his classic Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State.(Some of this anthropological data is now considered false but the method remains valid). There is Eleanor Burke Leacock’s Myths of Male Dominance which investigated the Montagnais-Naskapi people of Canada, William Turnbull’s The Forest People on Pigmies in the Congo, and, especially, Richard Borshay Lee’s The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society which studied the so-called Kalahari bush people.
What these studies show is that in hunter-gatherer societies general material equality was guaranteed by the fact that as nomadic people (following the game) foragers were unable to accumulate more property than could be carried daily on each person’s back. Broad gender equality was a product of the fact that more than half the community’s food was supplied by gathering which was mainly done by women.
The emergence of women’s oppression, Marxism argues, was the result of two great and interlinked social transitions: from foraging to agriculture and from classless to class divided society. It is impossible to put a simple date on this process since it develops at very different times in different parts of the world. However it probably begins about 12-10 thousand years ago with the first signs of agriculture in the fertile crescent of the Middle East (from today’s Iraq to the Nile) and takes about 5-6000 thousand years to fully establish itself as the dominant form of social organisation.
The coming of agriculture, a development in the forces of production, brought with it human settlement, first villages, then towns, and the first production of a social surplus – goods over and above what was needed for day-to-day survival - and thus the possibility of wealth accumulation. However because this early surplus was very limited and insufficient to provide a comfortable life for the majority, it meant that the wealth accumulation, the private property, was concentrated in the hands of a small minority, the ‘ruling class’.These new ruling classes used their property (cattle herds, land etc) to force others to work for them – as slaves or peasants – and to construct state apparatuses (armies, castles, prisons, judges etc) which would defend their property and privileges.
The shift from foraging to agriculture also meant changing from a form of production in which women’s labour – mainly gathering – was equal in importance to that of men, to a form- ploughing and herding - where the bulk of society’s wealth was produced by men. This was because pulling the heavy plough all day and herding cattle were incompatible with nursing and rearing young children. Consequently control of the social surplus and, with it, of the state passed mainly into the hands of men
With this came the abandonment of the loose pairing and collective child rearing practices typical of hunter-gathering societies and the development of the male dominated, exclusive, religiously and legally policed family in which wives were seen as the property of their husbands and as restricted to domestic duties and rearing their own children. This type of family, which took many sub-forms (for example polygamy) in different societies, was most strongly established in and for the ruling classes. It had the economic function of securing the inheritance and non-dissolution of accumulations of property (land, herds. etc) and power but socially it meant the subordination of women to men everywhere. Engels called it ‘the world historic defeat of the female sex’.
The Marxist theory of women’s oppression therefore sees it as deriving from a definite stage in the development of the forces and relations of production. It also sees it as linked to biology (woman and man are, after all, biological categories) but only at a particular long passed moment in history, and not at all in the sense of biology determining the destiny of women now or in the future.
This raises the question of why women’s oppressive, beginning so long ago, has continued through thousands of years and still continues, albeit in moderated form, in modern capitalist society. Obviously, the whole story cannot be told here but in ancient, feudal and Asiatic or tributary type societies the function of securing property inheritance was probably the key to the survival of the male dominated family. In capitalist society this is still a factor but there are a number of other aspects of women’s oppression which benefit the system and in which the ruling class has a huge vested interest.
First, making the care of husbands and children the ‘natural’ duty of women enables the capitalist class to obtain the refreshment and reproduction of this and the next generation of its workers, for almost nothing. Second, by stressing the primacy of loyalty to the family the ruling class is able to foster a narrow conservative view of the world which cuts across wider class consciousness and class solidarity. Third, undermining the ‘ right’ of women to work, especially in leadership roles makes women into a second class sector of the workfoce , who can be paid less and exploited more.
This vested interest of the bourgeoisie in the family and in the oppressed condition of women is why the full liberation of women requires the overthrow of capitalism through a united struggle of the working class. While the unity of the working class requires that working class men , as well as working class women, fight for women’s equality and women’s liberation.
John Molyneux
29 June 2008
Thursday, June 26, 2008
On 'We Need to See Evidence of This'
ON “WE NEED TO SEE
EVIDENCE OF THIS”
This is a text written to accompany the art exhibition We Need to See Evidence of This by Roxanne Chappell and Donna Snell, showing in The Space at Portsmouth School of Art, Design And Media, University of Portsmouth , 27 June -9 July 2008. The Preview, to which all are invited, is Friday 27 June 5-7pm. and features a performance by the poet Tim Evans.
The exhibition comprises a large installation replica of a benefits office, complete with threatening instructions and posters, plus two films - Do You Want Some featuring Tim Evans and Because you're on Benefits, showing a CSA interview with a young single parent.
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Two things make “We Need to See Evidence of This” by Roxanne Chappell and Donna Snell a significant work of art. The first is that it gives powerful visual expression to an area of social experience that is very widespread but has hitherto remained unrepresented in art, and barely represented or, rather, largely misrepresented, in the wider culture. The experience is that of the benefits claimant.
The claimant is, of course, a familiar figure in our society. At any one time millions of people are claimants, and in the course of their lives most working class people experience being claimants at some point. Yet in the public culture and the official (and to some extent the unofficial) discourse the claimant is a thoroughly negative figure – stereotyped, stigmatised and, above all, an object not a subject. The claimant is commented on, discussed, investigated, assessed, threatened, diagnosed, condemned and, occasionally, sympathised with, but the claimant’s voice is not heard.
When politicians and the media discuss the ‘issue’ of the so-called ’benefit culture’ the public are addressed as ‘taxpayers’ and claimants are positioned as their adversaries. [In reality claimants are taxpayers too – think about it – but this is never acknowledged] ‘We Need to See Evidence of This’ reverses this. It makes the claimant the subject and the benefit system and its culture the object of scrutiny.
Many works of art position the viewer. When we view Velasquez’ Las Meninas we are positioned as the sitter, the King of Spain.. When we look at Manet’s Olympia or Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon we are positioned, like it or not, as the prostitutes’ client. When we visit this art installation, indeed from the moment we received our summons to attend, we are positioned as the claimant. And it is not at all accidental that this work grows directly out of the artists’ personal experience., especially that of Chappell who herself underwent an interview like that shown in the film. ‘We Need to See Evidence of This’ speaks for every claimant but in the first place it speaks for Chappell herself – this is what gives it its toughness, its anger, its edge.
In so far as this area of experience has been culturally presented before it has been in literature, film and television drama (e.g. Walter Greenwood’s novel Love on the Dole in 1933, the Jim Allen TV Play for Today The Spongers in 1978, and the Ken Loach film Ladybird, Ladybird in 1994) but not in fine art, which,of the major art forms, has stood at the furthest remove from the lives of the working class and the poor. However this bringing into art and making art out of new social and physical material, material previously regarded as non-artistic, has been one of the hallmarks of the advanced artist. It is what Courbet did in The Stone Breakers and Burial at Ornans; what Seurat did in The Bathers and what Emin has done with the experience of working class girls
The second significant feature of ‘We Need to See Evidence of This’ is that it stands at the forefront of current formal developments in art.
For some years now, the ideas of the French curator and art writer Nicholas Bourriaud on ‘relational aesthetics’ have been gaining influence and followers among up and coming artists. Bourriaud coined the term ‘relational art’ to describe work he had been curating by artists such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Carsten Holler, in which the participation of the audience becomes part of the work of art. He defined ‘relational aesthetics’ as:
judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt.
and ‘relational art’ as:
A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.
In general works produced under this rubric, such as Carsten Holler inviting visitors to use his slides at the Tate Modern or Tiravanija asking them to join in making a Thai curry, or Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre’s Skill Exchange, focus on inducing audience participation in social relations that are convivial and collaborative, perhaps prefigurative of a harmonious society. As such they may be vulnerable to the charge of blandness, of indulging an easy liberalism and of ‘utopianism’, in the sense in which Engels critiqued the utopian socialism of St.Simon and Fourier.
‘We Need to See Evidence of This’ is relational art but it moves beyond this, ‘depasses’ it in dialectical jargon by inducing people to participate in social relations that are oppressive, alienated and conflictual, and through their participation, to critique those relations.[There is an echo of Brecht here]. It is thus an example of what I would call critical relational art.
This combination of new content (subject matter, attitude, material) and formal innovation is striking, indeed it is extraordinary in what is virtually an artistic debut, but in another way it should not surprise. Having something new and urgent to say has ever been one of the main drivers of advances in artistic form. After all the unity of form and content is what good art is all about
John Molyneux
14 June 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Problems of Patriarchy Theory
KOREA COLUMN 36
Problems of Patriarchy Theory
In every society in the world today women are socially subordinate to men. Obviously the degree of this differs from place to place, but the basic pattern is universal: the majority of top positions in business, the state and the professions are occupied by men; men, on average, own a lot more wealth and have higher earnings than women; women are subject to significant and disproportionate amounts of physical violence and sexual assault; women perform the bulk of housework and childcare, which restricts their ability to participate equally in the wider society.
What explains this state of affairs? The conservative explanation, which fundamentally remains dominant in the world, despite lip service to equality, is at the same time a justification of male domination. It is that this is the natural order of things, and therefore always has been the case and always will be the case. The very crudest versions of this explanation focus on physical differences, on alleged male superiority in physical strength, but more common is the claim that men are genetically, or in some other way, psychologically programmed to be active, aggressive, competitive and dominant, while women are programmed to be passive, and subordinate.
The main alternative i.e. the most widely known and held, to this conservative human nature view, is what is generally known as ‘patriarchy’ theory. Patriarchy theory aims and claims to be not a justification but a critique of male supremacy, and, in some form or other, is subscribed to by many, indeed probably a majority of, feminists round the world today.
There are two main problems with patriarchy theory. The first is its numerous different versions, and extreme vagueness and shapelessness, which make it very difficult to pin down. (It should be noted that in some areas of life, especially the academic world, this indeterminacy constitutes a definite advantage.) The second is that in so far as it is possible to identify in patriarchy theory certain specific propositions, they turn out to be remarkably similar to the conservative explanation – simply putting a minus sign where the conservative view put a plus.
The word ‘patriarchy’ is Ancient Greek in origin and means literally ‘father rule’. The term was first used by anthropologists to describe family structures (and thus societies) in which the father/ male head of the family held more or less absolute power over all other family members, including other adult males. But this is not how it is used in modern feminism. Rather than referring specifically to father rule, patriarchy has come to mean simply ‘rule by men’. And here we see an obvious difficulty – explaining male domination by the rule of men is hardly an advance even if you use a Greek word for the purpose. So what, according to patriarchy theory, is the cause of, the reason for, male rule?
Unfortunately there is no generally accepted answer to this question. Some feminists would undoubtedly say simply ‘Men!’ In other words they would claim that there is something inherent in the genetic or psychological make up of (all/most) men that leads them to oppress women, which is what I mean by the similarity with the conservative view. It is as if one asked why were black people enslaved in America from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century and then, faced with the answer that it was because it was in black people’s nature to be slaves, indignantly replied ‘No, it is because it is the nature of whites to be slave owners.’
At this point it is important to understand that patriarchy theory was developed, in the late sixties and seventies, largely in dialogue with and opposition to the Marxist explanation of women’s oppression. The women’s liberation movement, as it was then called, arose from within the pre existing radical movements in the US, partly in response to continued male domination in the society, but also partly in response to the sexist treatment of women within the movement itself. Many of the leading lights and theorists of the women’s movement were critical of Marxism partly because they felt that Marxism had tended to neglect the issue of women’s oppression, but also because, as middle class women aspiring to careers in the media and academia, they were instinctively uneasy about a theory that put so much emphasis on working class struggle.
The arguments went roughly like this. Marxism claims that women’s oppression is caused by capitalism and only socialism will liberate women, but in fact women’s oppression is much older than capitalism and continues in post- capitalist/ socialist societies such as the Soviet Union, China, North Korea etc. Marxism says that it is the ruling class who oppress women but in fact all women, including ruling class and middle class women are oppressed, and all men, including working class men , oppress women . Marxism explains women’s oppression in terms of economics and class exploitation but in fact there is an independent ideological element in sexism, which can be traced back to the Bible/ Confucius etc. From these arguments it followed that Marxism was not able to account for the oppression of women, that male power existed separately and independently of capitalist class power, and that therefore the struggle for women’s equality had to be waged separately from the struggle for socialism. These, or propositions like these, became the key ideas of what is now thought of as ‘patriarchy theory’.
In reality these criticisms of Marxism were largely responses to Stalinism not genuine Marxism (as in the question of Russia etc) or else based on misinterpretations of Marxist theory (e.g. Marxism never claimed women’s oppression originated with capitalism), but leaving that aside, the effect developing negatively in this way was that patriarchy theory failed to produce its own positive, coherent explanation of the root causes of women’s oppression and instead, almost without realising it, fell back in the end on the old human/male nature view.
Thus, if the ideology of sexism exists independently of class divisions and class exploitation, where does it come from? From the nature of the male priests, philosophers and scribes who wrote the old books and sacred texts. If male power exists independently of class power then, fundamentally, this is because of the power hungry nature of men. Why will the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a classless socialist society not liberate women? Because men will continue to oppress women. Why? Because they are men , it’s in their nature … and so on.
The ultimate defect of patriarchy theory is not that it maligns Marxism, or socialists, or working class men, or even men in general, but that it offers no serious prospect for women’s liberation. If male power is not only universal but historically transcendent, and if all men, more or less, are sexist, and those same men control the bulk of the world’s wealth and production, as they do, and the key positions of power, as they do, and the guns, as they do, and if working class men are not potentially the allies of women, and if even a socialist revolution won’t end male domination, then what on earth will?
This is why, in practice, patriarchy theory has so often served as a cover for accommodation to the system and acquiescence in women’s oppression., becoming a ‘radical sounding phrase bandied about by middle class feminists whose real agenda is little more than pursuing their own careers within capitalism – more women MPs, more women professors, more women executives etc – and who have abandoned any thought of real emancipation for the working class majority of women.
John Molyneux
25 May 2008
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
The Fire Last Time
Review of Chris Harman, The Fire Last Time - 1968 and After
Of all the articles, features, memoirs, and books devoted to 1968 ‘The Fire Last Time – 1968 and After’ by Chris Harman, formerly editor of Socialist Worker and now editor of International Socialism Journal, is, by some distance, the best. Its merits are easy to summarise.
First, it is not written in a spirit of nostalgia. I have no problem understanding why people are nostalgic about ’68 – indeed it is much better than being nostalgic about the World Cup or Harold Wilson and old Labour – but nostalgia is a poor basis for history or analysis. This is especially true when the nostalgia for a certain historical moment becomes mingled with nostalgia for lost youth .In my experience, far more people were at Grosvenor Square ( the March 17 Vietnam Solidarity Campaign demonstration that ended in a punch up with the police in front of the US Embassy) in memory than were there in fact. Far more people like to think of themselves as part of ‘the movement’, and think of the movement as far larger than was often the case. The attendance at Grosvenor Square from my university was ten people in one minibus.
By the same token nostalgia can lead to a massive underestimation of the significance of events which didn’t happen to impinge on the narrator’s memory. Harman has none of this. It is an ‘objective’ i.e. impersonal, not neutral or non-partisan, history which deals with the past in order to understand the present and shape the future.
Precisely because of this, it offers a clear, accessible and accurate account of what happened in many different countries in that dramatic year. The focus, rightly, is on the USA and France, but Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Mexico, Ireland and Italy are also covered, while the student revolt in Britain, in which the author played a not insignificant role, is treated as ‘a ripple from the storm’. Of course there is a weakness here, acknowledged in the Prologue, in that events outside of North America and Europe, such as the Naxalite Revolt in India or the rise of Al Fatah in Palestine, are not given their due, but this due to lack of space and Harman is always clear that ’68 was a world revolutionary process.
However Harman’s prime concern is not to describe or even to inspire but to understand. And this is where The Fire Last Time really scores. For Harman 1968, for all its unique features, was not some mythical golden moment that fell from the skies, but a period in which the class struggle, that is continuous under capitalism, burst into the open with particular intensity. It was, therefore, a revolutionary moment like revolutionary moments in the past – 1848, 1871, 1917, 1936, 1956, etc, - and others to come in the future, and it is to be analysed by means of the Marxist method. This means beginning with the development of the forces of production and its impact on social relations.
Harman shows how the post war economic boom produced a period of relative social peace in the fifties and early sixties, which he calls ‘the long calm’, but also how within this calm economic and social contradictions gradually accumulated and intensified – ‘a slow train coming’. He particularly stresses how economic expansion produced a massive process of urbanisation and proletarianisation which undermined and clashed with the conservative social structures inherited from the more rural past (such as Jim Crow in the US South or the protestant ascendancy in Northern Ireland) leading to explosions when the boom began to falter.
The same boom, he argues, produced a big increase in the number of students and a change in their social status, thus preparing the ground for the student revolt which played such a prominent role in 1968. Harman is an enthusiast for the student struggle and gives its full due as a revolutionary catalyst, but he doesn’t make the common mistake of seeing 1968 as being ‘just’ or ‘all’ about students. Although it had a degree of autonomy, the student revolt was fundamentally a reflection of the wider economic, social and ideological crisis in society, and was only able to offer a serious challenge to the established order when it linked up to wider social forces, above all the working class, as in the ten million strong French general strike.
It is impossible to do justice to the range of The Fire Last Time in a short review but it should be said that it deals with far more than just the events of 1968, analysing the whole wave of massive workers struggles that continued through to 1974, including how the ruling class was eventually able, with the aid of the reformist leaders, to bring the upheaval to an end and move onto the offensive, thus inaugurating ‘the downturn’.
But again it is Harman’s ability to combine detailed concrete analysis of specific struggles with a firm grasp of the broad movement of history that makes this such an outstanding work and still so relevant today.
John Molyneux
15 April 2008
Extreme Crimes- What do Socialists Say?
KOREA COLUMN 35
Extreme Crimes– What do Socialists Say?
From time to time in every modern country certain individuals commit horrific crimes against other individuals. These crimes tend to be particularly disturbing when they are of a sexual nature, and even more so when they involve children, either as victims or perpetrators.
The capitalist media invariably relishes these tragic events. They report them in lurid and sensationalised detail, according to well established formulae. At least initially, the victims are always exemplary characters, beloved of family and neighbours, while the suspects or accused are painted as ‘evil’ and ‘monstrous’. If it then emerges that the victim’s family is less than perfect, they too have their private lives picked over and ruthlessly pilloried.
Of course a major motive for this is simply to sell more newspapers or increase audience ratings and thus raise profits. But the media, and the ruling class who control it, also have an ideological and political agenda, which we need to understand and combat.
Our rulers have a general interest in us seeing human beings as basically bad and therefore in need of control from above. The idea that socialism is impossible because of the inherent defects of human nature, has long been a cornerstone of capitalist ideology. Politicians feel they have to flatter the electorate- “ I believe in the American/British/ Korean people’’ that sort of thing – so horrible crimes are a good opportunity for the media to ram home the message about basic human wickedness.
Another strand of bourgeois (and pre- bourgeois/feudal ideology) sees sex as essentially bad and as a dangerous force capable of undermining the social order if not strictly controlled. This view is reinforced by being able to link sex to violence and crime as in cases of serial rape, murder and child abuse.
The ruling class also wants us to be afraid of each other: to be afraid of the foreign enemy (the terrorists or the communists), of foreign workers (immigrants), of young people (in gangs and hanging on street corners) and of the man hiding in the bushes or lurking in the alley. The more we are afraid the less confidence we have in ourselves; the more we fear our neighbours and workmates the harder it is to unite with them against our rulers; the more atomised and isolated we are the less power we have to resist. Fear of crime, especially hideous crime, can easily be exploited to feed general fear and strengthen the grip of our rulers.
And the ruling class prefers the general intellectual level of working people to remain low. It doesn’t want us to develop a coherent or sophisticated understanding of the social world or human behaviour. It is therefore quite happy to foster among ‘ordinary’ people moralistic and superstitious ideas about individuals being ‘born evil’, even if it doesn’t hold them itself. Sex crimes provide excellent material for this. Notice how often the mass media encourage grief stricken relatives to give vent to their emotions, their feelings of hatred and desire for revenge.
Finally, the hysterical atmosphere generated around extreme crimes always includes demands for ‘tough measures’ and ‘action’ from the authorities – longer sentences, return of the death penalty and that sort of thing. And sometimes the ruling class accedes to these demands, or takes advantage of them, and uses the situation to push through increased powers.
So, faced with this kind of response from the media and the ruling class, what should socialists say?
First, we need to explain that these extreme crimes (paedophile murders, serial rapes and killings, etc.) are very rare. The incidence of crime as a whole, and its real affects on most people’s lives, is less than media coverage would suggest and this is especially true of the crimes at the most horrific end of the spectrum. In reality they are far less of a threat to the average person’s life and well being than unemployment, inflation, rent rises, cuts in services, illness, accidents on the roads or in the home, war, climate change and a host of other dangers.
Second, these events are invariably terrible personal tragedies for the victims, the victims’ families, and for the perpetrators’ families and, actually, the perpetrators themselves, NONE of whom benefit from the glare of publicity and sensationalist reporting. The perpetrators are NOT ‘monsters’ or ‘born evil’, no matter how awful the crime, for the good reason that no one, not even Hitler, was ‘born evil’ any more than they were born angels – it is a stupid, reactionary concept. They are people who have broken down, fragmented, gone to pieces under the hideous pressure of alienation, oppression and exploitation to which all of us are subjected under capitalism, and which distort all our lives to some degree.
When it comes to explanations of particular crimes there can be no question of simplistic ‘one size fits all’ theories or answers, in ignorance of specific facts, but socialists should be heavily biased in favour of social and psychological explanations over biological or ‘genetic’ ones and completely opposed to mystical or superstitious ones. It is not a matter of arguing, simplistically, that poverty or unemployment or similar material deprivation makes people into rapists, killers or child abusers but of understanding how these social factors combine with unique individual experiences in the family and in childhood to increase the likelihood of personality collapse, just as they increase the likelihood of infant mortality.
And from this it follows that socialists stand firmly against all the media induced hatred and hysteria. We resist the baying for vengeance, which does NOT benefit victims, and only degrades those who exact it. And we reject calls for longer sentences or harsher laws. This is both because they do not work either as a deterrent – clearly extreme crimes are irrational and cannot be prevented by rational calculation – and because they can be used by the ruling class for other purposes.
All such laws and increased powers granted to the police, the courts, and the prisons, although apparently directed against a small minority of ‘evil-doers’, in fact increase the overall power of the state, and the state is not the friend but the enemy of the working classes, not their protector, as it likes to claim, but the guarantor of their exploitation. Measures pushed through in the period of moral panic following particularly awful crimes (it is the same after terrorist outrages) are then available to the state to use on other occasions and against other enemies e.g. industrial militants or political opponents.
In the end the only way to abolish these horrible crimes is to abolish the sick, violent, sexist, racist, exploitative and alienated society that produces them.
John Molyneux
26 April 2008
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Revolution and the Party
REVOLUTION AND THE PARTY
Written for Socialist Worker, 15 March 2008
‘Philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways, the point however is to change it!’ So wrote the young Karl Marx in 1845.
The need to change the world has seldom been so obvious. Six trillion dollars for an illegal war, while food prices soar and millions starve! Such are the priorities of the system we live under. The accumulation of almost unimaginable wealth by the likes of Bill Gates and the Walton family, while tens of millions live below the poverty line and that is just in the rich United States, never mind the impoverished third world. Imperialism, torture, racism, sexism – all still thriving in the twenty first century – and a recession looming for which working people will be asked to pay the price. The world hurtling towards climate catastrophe, driven by profit, while politicians twiddle their thumbs.
These and a thousand other wrongs cry out to be righted, and for a fundamental change of direction. The question is how to achieve it.
Unfortunately the most obvious method, the method the system itself holds out to people – namely, electing a government to put through reforms – simply doesn’t work. The present New Labour administration is the eleventh Labour government, each and every one elected on a promise to govern ‘in the interests of the many not the few’ or to ‘shift the balance of power in favour of working people’ or some such slogan. And yet we are no nearer a just and equal society. On the contrary, inequality is increasing, attacks on civil liberties are announced by the day by the day, and war mongering grows apace.
If, in 2009, the American people elect Baruch Obama on a programme of ‘change’, they will discover that what changes is not the system but Baruch Obama.
None of this means the right to vote doesn’t matter or that socialists shouldn’t find ways to use the electoral system to put over their views. Socialist Worker will urge its readers to vote for Lindsey German for London Mayor and for other Respect candidates in the May elections. But it does mean that the parliamentary road is not the way to achieve fundamental social change.
A very different strategy was advocated by Karl Marx. Marx argued that change would have to be brought about not for working people but by working people.’The emancipation of the working class’, he wrote,’ must be conquered by the working class itself’. This meant a mass workers’ movement from below overthrowing capitalism so as to establish social ownership of main means of production and production for human need, under democratic workers’ control. To achieve this revolution it would be necessary to break up the existing state machine (army, police, judiciary etc) which serves the capitalist class, and create a new state apparatus serving the working class.
Of course many people dismiss this strategy as unrealistic. In fact it is far more realistic than the strategy of parliamentary reform. It understands that real power in society lies not in parliament but in the boardrooms of big business. It is realistic about the role of the army, police and other state institutions and how they would be behave in a crisis i.e. intervening to protect capitalism. It is realistic about the social force needed to defeat the capitalist class and its state – nothing less than the mass action of millions of workers.
It is also proved by history that this strategy is a real option not a utopian dream. Time and again working people have risen up and challenged capitalism: in July 1848in Paris; in Paris again in 1871 with the Paris Commune, when the working class ran the city for 74 days before it was drowned in blood; in Russia in 1905 and 1917; in Italy in the ‘red years of 1919-20; in the German Revolution of 1918-23, the British General Strike of 1926 and the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27; in Spain in 1936 and Hungary in 1956; in the French May Events in 1968, and in Chile in 1972; in the Portuguese Revolution of 1974-75 and the Iranian Revolution of 1979-80, to give some of the most important examples.
Many of these episodes are not well known because, by and large, they get written out of the school textbooks and the TV history documentaries, but they are historical fact and they prove the revolutionary potential of the working class. In many of them, for example Hungary 1956 and Chile 1972, the working class actually began creating organs of workers’ power with which to establish a new society.
But, of course, there has been a problem. In all these examples bar one, the workers have been defeated, often bloodily. The only exception is Russia 1917 where the Revolution succeeded and the working class held power for a number of years before losing it to Stalinist counter-revolution brought on by the failure of the revolution to spread. What made the Russian Revolution different? Above all, it was the presence of, and leadership exercised by Lenin’s Bolshevik Party.
In February 1917 the Bolsheviks numbered about 26,000: by October they had grown to about 400.000 and had the support of all the key sections of the Russian working class and also of the soldiers and sailors. It was decisive action by the Bolshevik Party that enabled the Soviets (workers’ councils) to take power and prevented the crushing of the Revolution by the fascist General Kornilov.
There are two main reasons why a revolutionary party is essential for the working class to win, and they apply as much to Britain and the world today as they did in Russia in 1917. The first is that the enemy – the capitalist class - is highly organised and centralised, particularly by means of the capitalist state. To defeat this enemy the working class must also be organised and centralised – it must be able to act in a unified way at the decisive moment.
The second is the uneven development of the working class in terms of its consciousness, confidence and struggle. In normal times the ideas of the ruling class, ideas which justify capitalism, dominate society and have a big influence on the working class. The working class can free itself from this influence through mass struggle but this process does not occur uniformly or evenly. In every industry, workplace and community some workers become militant socialists, some remain scabs and racists and many vacillate between these opposed poles. For the class as a whole to act effectively, the socialist elements within it have to organise themselves to increase their influence on the majority and eliminate the influence of the scabs. That organisation of worker socialists is the revolutionary party.
Moreover the experience of the twentieth century has shown, and Lenin was the first to understand this, that this party has to be politically and organisationally independent of the reformist politicians and union leaders, even though it often works with, or they will paralyse its ability to act at crucial moments.
If the revolutionary party is to play its necessary role in a revolution it must be built in advance of the revolution and if in a revolutionary situation that role is decisive the party also makes a difference in all the struggles leading up to a revolution, all the battles of today. Building the revolutionary party is therefore a vital task in the here and now.
In Britain today there are many left campaigns and various left grouplets but there is only one organisation seriously building a revolutionary party in the working class on a nationwide basis – that is the Socialist Workers Party.
The SWP has thousands of members organised in branches across the country and participates in many campaigns. It played a central role in the great mobilizations against the Iraq War and continues to play a leading part in the Stop the War Coalition; it is also actively involved in RESPECT, Unite Against Fascism, Defend Council Housing, the Campaign against Climate Change and it works consistently in the trade unions for militant action to defend workers rights.
The SWP is far from the finished article. Crucially it is still far too small to be able to lead the mass of the working class. It must be built. That’s why everyone who wants to see serious socialist change in Britain and the world should join now.
John Molyneux
5 March 2008
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Left in Vision 2 - Call for Art
LEFT IN VISION 2 – CALL FOR ART
Following the success of the Left in Vision art show at Marxism last year, Left in Vision 2 is being organised for Marxism 2008 (3-7 July). As before all artists who identify with the left are invited to submit work, and all forms of visual art – figurative, abstract, conceptual, sculpture, film, relational etc – are welcome.
It is hoped that this year’s exhibition will be both larger and more international. International contributions will be especially encouraged.
Anyone wishing to submit work should email John Molyneux, john@molyneux8652.freeserve.co.uk or if necessary phone 07801 290411.
Marxism and Art
KOREA COLUMN 34
Marxism and Art
What Marxism has to say about art (by which I mean all the creative arts i.e. music, literature, painting, sculpture, photography, film, drama, dance and so on) is limited but important.
It is limited in that Marxism does not offer, and should not try to offer, any prescriptions or instructions as to how artists should make their art. There is no ‘Marxist’ way to write poetry, or paint, or play the trumpet or compose symphonies, any more than there is a Marxist method of mechanical engineering, playing chess or doing the high jump. (Marx himself wrote some poetry when he was young, but it wasn’t very good and he soon gave it up). Marxism does not require that artists tackle certain themes e.g. class, war or revolution, rather than others such as sex, dreams or religion, or even that art be overtly political or committed.
Nor does Marxism provide a set of ready made political or ideological criteria for the evaluation of art. Mao Ze Dong was a poet as well as leader of the Chinese Revolution , but his merits as a poet are not determined by his merits or lack of them as a revolutionary or ruler of China. A Marxist who argues that T.S. Eliot was a bad poet because he was a reactionary (he was very reactionary) or that Diego Rivera was a greater painter than Picasso because he was more left wing, is not being a Marxist in his or her approach to art. Marx (and Engels) preferred the reactionary pro-aristocratic novelist, Balzac, to the progressive Zola, because he thought Balzac was a better writer who provided a fuller and more insightful picture of French society. The standpoint of Marxism, as Trotsky insisted in his debates over literature and art with the Stalinists, requires that art be judged as art.
What Marxism does do, however, is provide: a) a unique appreciation and understanding of the overall importance of art in individual and collective human development; b) the best analytical method for grasping the course of art and cultural history as a whole; c) an extremely useful standpoint for the analysis of the meaning and significance of individual works of art.
None of the great Marxists ever suggested that either individual works of art or art in general played a key role in determining the outbreak or outcome of revolutions. Nonetheless, they all took a serious interest in art and clearly felt informed and sustained by it. In this respect art seems to operate in a manner closer to medicine or nutritious food than to political action. Also the fact that art has existed in every known society in the history of the world reinforces the case for its social necessity. Marxism enables us to understand this.
For Marxism, creative labour is the essence of becoming and being human. Human beings are animals who have made themselves into more than animals through labour, ‘by producing their means of subsistence’ as The German Ideology puts it (see also Engels, The Role of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man). Through labour humans shape their environment, their history and themselves.
However, in class divided society, and especially in capitalist society, most people most of the time are deprived of the possibility of creative labour. Their labour is alienated: they do not control it , and are forced to perform it not for themselves but at the behest of others and it becomes something that damages and distorts their lives. Art is the name we give to one of the few forms of creative labour, i.e. labour controlled by the producer (revolutionary practice is another) that is possible in class society. This makes genuine truthful communication of ideas and emotions possible in art in a way that is not possible in completely mercenary entertainment, journalism and advertising. And this is why art is important to us as human beings and Marxists even when that art is ideologically conservative and even though the art world and the cultural industries are dominated by the ruling class.
Indeed it is a central proposition of Marxist art history that the class which controls the major means of material production will also fundamentally dominate artistic production. For Marxism approaches art history on the basis of historical materialism which sees art, along with religion, philosophy, politics and law, as part of the superstructure of society which rests on, and is conditioned by, the economic base constituted by the forces and relations of production.
Of course the relations between economic development, class and art are not to be understood mechanically – they are complex and highly mediated – but denying or disregarding them as in the numerous bourgeois schools of formalist art and literary criticism makes it impossible to grasp the overall movement of cultural history or major developments within it.
For example, why was the art of the European Middle Ages so (relatively) static, formalised and unchanging ? Because it reflected the (relatively) slow development of the forces of production under feudalism and their accompaniment by a rigid social hierarchy resting on frozen relations of production. What generated the spectacular artistic and cultural upsurge of the Renaissance that began in Florence at the end of the thirteenth century (with Dante and Giotto), culminated in Italy with Leonardo, Michelangelo and Titian and then spread north through Germany, the Netherlands and England, encompassing such giant figures as Durer, Breughal, Rembrandt and Shakespeare? The historical materialist will answer that it was a reflection of the rise, at first within the fetters of feudalism and then breaking through in its own right, of the dynamic but contradictory system of capitalism and of the class associated with it, namely the bourgeoisie.
How do we explain why the stately procession of artistic phases ( Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Neo-Classical, Romantic) measured in centuries and half centuries, suddenly gave way to the frenzy of modernism in which art movements ( impressionism, expressionism, fauvism cubism , futurism, suprematism, dadaism etc) came and went almost in the blink of an eye, except as a response to the ‘constant revolutionising of production’ and ‘uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions’ imposed by modern capitalism.
Can the succession of blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, hip hop etc, and therefore the whole course of modern popular music from Elvis Presley to Amy Winehouse be understood apart from the freedom struggle of BlackAmerica?
Even where individual works and individual artists are concerned Marxism offers unique insights. In his great book Ways of Seeing John Berger used the Marxist critique of capitalist social relations to produce superb accounts of Holbein’s The Ambassadors and Dutch still-life paintings. Neither Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times nor Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot can be understood without a grasp of Marx’s theory of alienation. In Seoul eighteen months ago I saw the Korean artist, Nam June Paik’s great pagoda of TV monitors The More the Better. It cried out for analysis using the concepts of Trotsky’s theory of combined and uneven development.
No amount of Marxism can substitute for specific knowledge of, and sensitivity to, the art concerned. But art is part of society and evolves in constant interaction with society. The richest, most profound and most scientific analysis of society, which is Marxism, cannot fail to enrich our understanding of art.
John Molyneux
January 15, 2008
Sunday, January 13, 2008
From Ebbw Vale to the Muslim Veil
David Garner’s Art for Our Times
Over the years much ink has been spilled, and wasted, on the issue of the compatibility of art and politics. I say wasted because the merest glance at the history of art reveals an abundance of work of the highest quality either directly occasioned by political events, or with an explicit political message: Michelangelo’s David for a start, commissioned by the city fathers of Florence to celebrate their liberation from the tyranny of the Medicis; or David’s The Death of Marat, or Goya’s Third of May, 1808, or Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, or El Lissitsky’s Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge or Grosz’s satires on Wiemar or Heartfield’s anti- Fascist montages,or Rivera’s murals, or Zadkine’s Rotterdam War Memorial or Whiteread’s Closed Library holocaust memorial .
And, in a different way, were not Rembrandt’s Beggars political and Hals’ Alms House Regents and Blake’s Angels and Courbet’s Stone Breakers and Manet’s Olympia and Seurat’s Bathers and Van Gogh’s Peasants and Leger’s Cyclists and Builders and Warhol’s Electric Chairs and even (for those who actually got the point) Carl Andre’s Bricks? Indeed it is worth pointing out that Raphael’s Madonnas and Holbein’s Henry VIIIs and Rubens’ Baroque swirls and Van Dyke’s swagger portraits and Gainsborough’s gentry and Constable’s rural idylls and Bouguereau’s 19th century academic nudes and Dali’s post Spanish Civil War works and the Chapman Brothers’ Goya pastiches and paedophiliac mannequins, are also bearers of political values, albeit values more or less diametrically opposed to those of my first two lists. Indeed the problem with all these lists is not how continue them but where to stop for, in the last analysis, all art - even Cezanne’s apples and Hirst’s dots – is political in that it gives visual expression (at least partially) to the outlook on life and ideology of one or other social group; even where the art appears to be profoundly individual, as in Blake or Giacommetti or Emin, it is in reality an individually mediated condensation of a collective social experience.as Paul Klee explained in his beautiful metaphor of the artist as tree trunk transmitting experience from its roots in the soil to its crown above.
However, David Garner’s art does not really need this historical – theoretical justification. Both highly politicised and extremely visually powerful, it is its own argument. Indeed I would say that it is among the most powerful, most vital, most necessary, i.e. best, art being produced in Britain. And the reason is simple: it is because Dave Garner has something important to say and knows how to say it.
Of course it doesn’t have to be political in the narrow sense of the word, it doesn’t even have to be something that can be put fully into words (that’s why it is visual art) but, despite all the formalists and the postmodernists, having something significant to say, about human relations, about the human condition at a particular point in time, is a precondition of serious art. Piero della Francesca had something to say about his God and his God’s relation to mankind when he painted The Baptism of Christ and The Resurrection. Jackson Pollock had something to say about his times, ‘the age of the airplane and the atom bomb’, when he painted No 1, 1948 and Lavender Mist. Garner is a socialist artist and his art is deeply imbued with socialist values and the socialist critique of society.
Here the obvious point of comparison and contrast is with the YBAs (the Young Brit Artists collected and promoted by Charles Saatchi). Not surprisingly the YBAs are hardly Garner’s cup of tea: the media hype, the frivolity, the Saatchi wealth, and how it was made, the London parties, the artists’ embrace of PR and entrepreneurship, the mock laddishness – all these are anathema to him, and rightly so. But it is a general rule that modern art develops dialectically with each new wave or generation, each rebel artist reacting against the previous one, while at the same time incorporating and building on some of its achievements. Seurat reacted against the impressionists’ sacrifice of form for colour and light, but he could not have painted the Seine as it appears in The Bathers without Monet and Pissarro. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon declares war on the whole European art tradition but also, palpably, rests directly on Cezanne and Gauguin.
In this process the artist, necessarily, will tend to emphasise the element of negation, while it falls more to the critic or historian to see also the continuity.
So it is with Garner and the YBAs. On the one hand both as a person and in his art he constitutes a polar opposite to YBA cynicism, froth and commercialism. But the YBAs were not all ‘high art lite’ as Julian Stallabrass called them. At their best – some of Hirst (Mother and Child Divided not the dot or spin paintings), Whiteread, Emin, some of Lucas – they produced some serious, powerful and quite radical work, and, much to Garner’s surprise I suspect, I see a definite continuity with Hirst. Ten years ago, seeking to explain Hirst’s work to a very sceptical audience, I made use of T.S. Eliot’s concept of the ‘objective correlative’. For Eliot the way to express emotion in art was to find an objective correlative, ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion’. (T.S Eliot, Selected Prose, Harmondsworth 1965, p.102) and this, I argued, was what Hirst did in works like The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (The Shark) , Mother and Child Divided and A Thousand Years (the mini-ecosystem with cow’s head, maggots and flies). Garner does it too. To create an objective correlative for the terrible tragedy of the Aberfan disaster – a daunting task - he took thirty primary school chairs and placed on each a wedge of bitumen mixed with coal dust which, over time, moulded itself to the shape of the chair. To represent what happened to the miners Garner takes miners’ jackets, boots and helmets and jams them on to a huge metal spike.
Another way in which he is heir to Hirst, among many others, is in the deployment of ‘actual ‘ or ‘real’ objects instead of representations of them. Rembrandt painted his Slaughtered Ox and Picasso drew his doves; Hirst gives us real cut up cows, an actual dead shark and living fluttering butterflies. Likewise Garner, to comment on the fate of the miners and their communities, uses authentic materials salvaged from the pits as they closed down. For Poppycock, his witty and acerbic comment on the War, the helmet has has to be a real soldier’s helmet and the poppies real middle eastern poppies. I reproduce this (wonderful) email to make the point and show how Garner works.
Hi John, Almost finished a new piece that will definitely be in the first show. Recently purchased on ebay a British Army helmet that has been used in Afghanistan and Iraq complete with desert camouflage cover. The entire helmet is to be covered with poppies (actual dried poppy pods with stems) they are being shipped from Turkey via Canada and are due to arrive any day unless customs take a dislike to the package.
The piece is titled 'Poppycock'.
All the best, Dave
The practice of inserting the ‘real’ into the representation can, with hindsight, be traced back – at least – to Degas’ use of a real tutu on one of his little ballerina statues. It continues through Picasso and Braque’s synthetic cubism, Picasso’s sculpture, Duchamp’s ready-mades, Rauschenberg and Johns, Andre and minimalism, Beuys and Kiefer ( evident and acknowledged influences on Garner), (Mary) Kelly, down to Hirst, Lucas, (sometimes) Emin, and, most recently and dramatically, Mark Wallinger in State Britain. In the process all sorts of problems have been caused for aesthetic theory: for the ‘definition’ of art and for the concepts of ‘naturalism’ and ‘realism’. Why is Lucian Freud with his paintings and portraits of people considered a ‘realist’, while Hirst with his actual shark, cows, pigs etc, is not? Do Hopper’s paintings give a more realistic (or naturalistic) image of the inner city than Rauschenberg’s combines?
In Garner’s case, however, he uses his authentic materials for what Mike Wayne, in his important Theses on Realism and Film, has identified as core Realist purposes:
11 Theses on Realism
I
Realism is the exploration of aspects of the conflict-ridden
and contradictory nature of social relationships.
II
The contribution which realism makes to the development of our thinking and feeling (identification/empathy) is also a contribution to the development of our consciousness of the social conditions that shape our thinking and feeling.
IX
Realism interrogates the dogmas of the day as they are propagated, honed and defended by dominant social interests in every sphere of life. Realism expands the critical faculties of the public sphere and any instance of it is ultimately part of a broader collective praxis.
(Wayne, M ‘Theses on realism and film’ International Socialism 116, pp. 173-4)
Even more, he uses them, in a way that is reminiscent of Brecht and Heartfield, to drive home, intensify and render inescapable the connection between what is happening in his art, in his studio, in the gallery, and actual political and social struggles occurring in the outside world. Here is the crucial link between content and form in Garner’s art, with content – as usual- driving the form and here is what really distinguishes him as an artist in Britain today, namely his socialist politics.
Many artists have been or are socialists in one sense or another but there are few if any in Britain today who are socialist and produce socialist art in the defined and organic way that David Garner does. It is not easy to be a socialist artist. First there are the whole range of external and material difficulties deriving from the fact that both the society as a whole and, within it, the art world are controlled by capital. That the art world is ‘controlled by capital’ is a general truth which applies as much to the National Gallery and the Tate as it does to Sotheby’s and Cork St. but it is worth noting the specific and direct role played in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by capitalist billionaires and millionaires: the Rockefellers, the Guggenheims, the Gettys, Saatchi, and now Hirst himself. To this must be added the markedly bourgeois character of all the art world’s key institutions and those who staff them. These are the people who decide whose work gets bought at what price, and influence who gets hyped and who becomes a name, but also, at a much more basic level, control access to most public and private space for the display of work, most space for the storage of work (a largely neglected but crucial practical question, especially for any artist who, like Garner, works on a large scale) and a good deal of the space for the making of work. To succeed, even to show their work and establish a serious practice, the artist has to make her/his way in this world, ‘networking’, making friends and influencing people. The socialist artist enters this rat race in alien territory with an almost physical handicap, and even if s/he does win through runs a huge risk of damage, destruction or cooption.
Then there are the internal, psychic and artistic difficulties. In the main art grows out of lived experience not theoretical abstractions. But we live in a capitalist not a socialist society, and in that sense our lived experience is capitalist and socialism remains an abstraction, an intellectual ideal. Certainly the artist responds critically to that experience and, as Trotsky insisted, there is an element of revolt and critique in all serious art. But critical art is not the same as socialist art. Manet and Cezanne, Picasso and Bacon produced great critical art but it was not socialist art. Of course, from a Marxist standpoint we know that the source and bearer of socialist politics and values within capitalism is the struggle of the working class, but the working class is highly problematic as a base for, and bearer of, art and culture. Trotsky made the case against the possibility of an independent and developed working class culture with great force and eloquence in the debates over Proletcult and the struggle against rising Stalinism in the soviet Union in the 1920s, but it was also summed up neatly by the theorist of Surrealism, Andre Breton:
I do not believe in the present possibility of an art or literature which expresses the aspirations of the working class. If I refuse to believe in such a possibility, it is because, in any pre-Revolutionary period the writer or artist, who of necessity is a product of the bourgeoisie, is by definition incapable of translating these aspirations.
(Andre Breton, The Second Manifesto of Surrealism, cited in C.Harrison & P.Wood ed. Art in Theory, 1900-1990, Blackwell, Oxford 1993 p.448.)
So how does Dave Garner and his art defy the odds and the theories and come to exist? Part of the answer lies in the way his personal biography contradicts the assumptions of Breton. Breton assumed that the artist ‘of necessity is a product of the bourgeoisie’. Not so Garner. He was born, the son of a miner who died of pneumoconiosis, in 1958 in Ebbw Vale in the very heartland of the Welsh and British trade union and socialist movement. He was 14 and 16 respectively for the victorious miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974, which brought down the Heath Tory Government and saw Arthur Scargill in his pomp. He was 26/27 for the epic struggle and terrible defeat of !984-85, and 34/35 for the destruction of the mining industry with the Heseltine pit closure of 1992-93. This is an artist for whom the values of working class struggle, community and socialism were bred in the bone and refined, tested and tempered in bitter battles.
Moreover, and this is important, he still lives and works in the area, in the valleys, as a member of a working class community. I do not mean by this that he is any way the untutored naïf or ‘primitive’ or in the least provincial or limited in outlook: he has a Fine Art MA from the Royal College and knows about Rodchenko and Duchamp and Beuys and Kiefer as well as Hirst and Emin, and also about Marx and Lenin and Trotsky – and this knowledge is crucial for his art too. But neither his education, nor his work, nor his artistic career have separated him from his class roots in the way they could easily have done. His work as a lecturer at Coleg Gwent ( which many people would call middle class) means that in fact he lives by the sale of his labour power, is not part of management, serves mainly working class youth in his area and has a standard of living not that different from other skilled workers. I referred earlier to the intense connection between Garner’s art and political struggles in the outside world as one its key distinguishing characteristics. This political connection is rooted, at least in part, in the fact that the physical, economic and social distance between Garner’s studio and those struggles is small indeed. In short, objectively and subjectively, Garner remains part of the working class while also being in the advanced guard of contemporary art practice. – a combination both Breton and Trotsky would have found hard to imagine.
Garner’s personal story here is, of course, part of, and testimony to, wider processes of social change: the rising living standards and educational opportunities of at least a section of the working class; the decline, in Britain and Europe, of heavy industry and old style manual labour: the proletarianisation of much white collar and professional work (nursing, teaching, lecturing, social work etc); the increased acceptance of, and participation in modern art, by wider numbers (still far from a majority) of ‘ordinary’ people. (See John Molyneux, ‘Art for All?’, Art Monthly, September 2000). The work and the rise of Tracey Emin, though clearly very different from David Garner, are products of the same social developments.
But whatever the validity of this analysis, the evidence in Garner’s case – his powerful socialist art – is here for us to see, both in his body of work as a whole and in this exhibition in particular. The subject matter of Garner’s art can broadly be divided into three main tranches or waves: first, the assault on the miners and South Wales; second, the persecution and scapegoating of refugees and asylum seekers; third, the so-called ‘war on terror’ and the demonisation of Muslims. To some in the art world this might seem a surprising trajectory- from Ebbw Vale to the Muslim veil – and one which might move Garner away from the roots I described above. In fact there is a powerful logic and dynamic here. The miners were Thatcher’s ‘enemy within’, to be crushed and discarded. Asylum seekers (bogus, of course) and those dreadful ‘economic migrants’ were the foreign enemy seeking to get ‘within’ and ‘take our jobs’ or ‘swamp our culture’. The terrorists/ Islamic fundamentalists are the enemy without – in Afghanistan, Iraq…Iran? – and within – on the London Underground , perhaps in the Mosque down the road. And in each case these ‘threats’ are invoked not by, or on behalf of, the British people or the British working class, but by, and on behalf of, the British ruling class precisely as a means of strengthening its hold on the minds of its white working class subjects and as part of its centuries old imperial strategy of divide and rule.
This is the logic of expanding working class consciousness: from the immediate and personal experience of exploitation and oppression, through an identification with your oppressors’ other victims and enemies to global solidarity. It was the logic of the miners’ strike beginning, as all socialists who worked in solidarity with the strike will remember, with arguments with miners about womens’ right to work and Page 3, and ended with women on the picket lines, lesbians and gays leading miners’ marches, and solidarity with Broadwater Farm.
It is a logic which David Garner’s art embodies and expresses with compelling intensity. In this exhibition he confronts us with the terrible sign from the gates of Auschwitz and its awful motto ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’, to situate imperialist war and Islamophobia historically, to remind us of the trajectory and essence of racism and to insist always on the possibility of resistance. He invokes Jim Crow to remind us of the still menacing racism against black people which forms a kind of platform on which current Islamophobia rests and builds. He shows , literally, how the Muslim identity has been besieged and hemmed in by hostile nails and how the ‘war on terror’ has undermined the civil rights and basic liberties of all of us. Above all his art demonstrates, by means of telling visual objective correlatives, that defending the right of a Muslim woman in Baghdad or Birmingham to wear or not wear the hijab is not only defending her human rights and potential liberation, but goes hand in hand with supporting the Palestinian resistance, opposing Bush and Blair’s ‘poppycock’ wars and fighting for the future of working people in South Wales and everywhere. Truly, art for our times!
John Molyneux
January 2008
What is Real Democracy
KOREA COLUMN 33
What is Real Democracy?
‘Democracy’ is about the most abused word in the political dictionary. Almost every reactionary politician you can think of - Bush, Cheney, Blair, Thatcher, Berlusconi – swears by it. Blatantly undemocratic regimes call themselves democracies: the ruling party of the Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak, is called the National Democratic Party; the Stalinist one-party states of Eastern Europe called themselves People’s Democracies..
At the same time, however, democracy is invoked by people who cannot be dismissed as crooks and opportunists. Nelson Mandela proclaimed his willingness die for democracy at his trial before being jailed for twenty seven years. Similarly when Martin Luther King campaigned through the streets and jails of the Deep South until his life was actually taken, it was, for the democratic right to vote. Karl Marx was also a committed democrat.
Even more importantly, millions of ordinary people, over the centuries, have fought and died for democracy. The tradition stretches from the Levellers in the English Civil War, through the Chartists, the Suffragettes, the resistance fighters in the Second World War, the South Korean workers in the 1990s to the Burmese monks and the Pakistani lawyers of today.
Yet it is also true that millions of people who live under what is generally thought to be
democracy, in the USA or Britain for example, are disillusioned with it. Swap the word ‘politics’ for ‘democracy’ and they will rush to express their lack of interest or their contempt and their conviction that it doesn’t matter who gets in, ‘they’ are all the same.
To understand this it is necessary to view ‘democracy’ historically: it was not an abstract concept that fell from the sky or one day popped into the mind of some philosopher, but t was a political ideal and system that developed in specific circumstances The word ‘democracy’ itself, meaning ‘people’s rule’, originated in Ancient Greece but modern democracy comes from the struggle against feudalism in Europe.
Before the emergence of capitalism, between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, the prevailing order in Europe was the feudal system. This rested on a division in society between lords or aristocrats (large hereditary landowners) and peasants. These societies, which ranged from tiny principalities to huge empires, were ruled by a variety of princes, monarchs, and emperors, who each represented the dominant family in that territory and who frequently claimed that they ruled by divine right. At this time there was no democracy of any kind, and the mass of ordinary people had no political rights at all. Similar undemocratic systems existed in most of the rest of the world e.g. China and India.
Gradually, however, a new class of people began to develop within the feudal order. These were mainly artisans in the towns who became merchants, and small manufacturers – often they were called ‘burghers’ (townsmen), hence the later term ‘bourgeoisie, used by Marx.
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Under feudalism the bourgeoisie were treated as second class citizens and denied political power by the aristocracy, even though many of them became rich and cultured. Increasingly the bourgeoisie came to resent the arbitrary power of the aristocracy and its monarchs, which they saw as holding back both their own advancement and society as a whole
Eventually the bourgeoisie was able to cast aside the aristocracy and assume its rightful place at the head of society. This involved a series of revolutions and wars such as the English Revolution of 1642, the American War of Independence and the French Revolution of 1789, as well as lesser battles.
But merchants and manufacturers cannot fight wars and revolutions by themselves. To win power they had to mobilise ‘the people’, the lower orders of urban poor of and peasants. In other cases the lower orders mobilized themselves and the bourgeoisie had to manoeuvre to place itself at their head. To do this they needed a political philosophy that offered something to the masses.
Out of these struggles was born the ideology and rhetoric of modern democracy – of the rule of law, of equal rights, of freedom of speech, of representative and accountable government based on election not inheritance.
At first, however, it was an extremely restricted democracy. The bourgeoisie did not think that people of no property should have the vote in case they used the vote to abolish property. Accountable government, yes, but accountable to them not to the working masses. All men are born equal, yes, but this doesn’t include black slaves, ‘natives’, women or, probably, factory workers.
But once the genie of democracy was out of the bottle it was not so easy to control. As the working classes grew in strength, so they seized on the idea of democracy and made it their own. The world’s first mass workers’ organisation, the Chartists, centred on the question of ‘one man, one vote’.
Then towards the end of the nineteenth century, the British bourgeoisie made a remarkable discovery – that it was possible for them to grant workers the vote without the workers voting to get rid of the bourgeoisie. Indeed it was even possible to persuade some workers to vote for their capitalist bosses. From this point onwards every political reactionary and shyster began proclaiming themselves true believers in democracy (while discretely crossing their fingers behind their backs in the knowledge that ‘sometimes’ democracy has to be dispensed with).
What conclusions should we draw from this? That the whole idea of democracy was or is a mistake? That democracy is irrelevant to real needs of working people? This would be a disastrous mistake. The problem with the democracy that exists in Europe, the US and many other countries today, is not that it’s wrong in itself or even doesn’t matter. It is that it is far, far too limited.
The democracy we have been talking about is political democracy. What is needed is political democracy plus economic and social democracy.
The capitalist class can live with political democracy because the decisive levers of power lie not in parliaments or governments, but, first, in the boardrooms of industry, business and the banks and second, in the permanent institutions of the state, above all the armed forces. The former it owns directly, the latter is bound to it by a thousand economic, social and ideological ties and by these means it can turn parliament into a talking shop and bend governments to its will, as we have seen with reformist governments round the world.
This is why Marxists call this form of democracy, bourgeois democracy: democracy that is based on the rule of the bourgeoisie. To move beyond bourgeois democracy to workers’ democracy, to democracy that means real power for the mass of people, it is necessary to extend it from the political sphere to the sphere of production and then other areas of social life. It means democracy in every factory, call centre,school, university, and hospital. It means democracy in the armed forces, the courts and the civil service.
But none of that can be achieved without overturning capitalist property and the capitalist state, without, in other words, a revolution which creates a new form of state that will enable the working class to run society. Thanks to the experience of the Russian Revolution of 1917, backed by other revolutions such as Hungary 1956 and Iran in 1979 we know that the core institution of such a state is the soviet or workers’ council based on the election of recallable delegates from workplace meetings.
However recognising the extremely restricted character of bourgeois democracy and understanding how this alienates millions of working people, does not mean it is not worth defending or fighting for
On the contrary even a freedom of the press that allows The Sun(PLEASE GIVE KOREAN EXAMPLE) to dominate the market also allows socialist papers to be published. Even a parliament reduced to a talking shop is a platform from which socialist ideas can be propagated. Even an elected New Labour government is preferable to no elected government at all. Even the rule of law which defends the property of the rich, offers some protection against the extremes of repression.
But it does mean that the working class should take the lead in the struggle for democratic demands and not be satisfied with just political i.e. bourgeois, democracy . Instead it should transform the ‘democratic’ struggle into a social revolution which alone will make genuine democracy a reality..
John Molyneux
9 Dec 2007
Thursday, November 22, 2007
The Politics of Migration
KOREA COLUMN 32
The Politics of Migration
The issue of migrant labour and/or refugees is at, or near, the top of the political agenda in many countries round the world today.
There are two main reasons for this. First, the combination of globalisation and war over the last decade or so has generated flows of migration greater, possibly, than at any previous point in human history – in excess, possibly, even of the huge displacement of people caused by the Second World War. Second, the ruling classes in most of the affected countries put it there.
Despite the fact that these ruling classes are directly or indirectly responsible for the bulk of this movement of people (either by driving people out of one part of the world through poverty, unemployment or war, or attracting them to another part to meet labour shortages) they try to ensure that the prevailing attitude to the phenomenon of migration and to the migrants themselves, is one of hostility.
Obviously the details vary from time to time and country to country, but the general thrust of the ruling class argument, presented through the statements of politicians and complemented through innumerable press and media stories, remains essentially the same everywhere. It is that migrants are to be seen primarily as constituting a ‘problem’ for the ‘host’ country into which they come.
For a start there are always too many of ‘them’; ‘they’ are always arriving or about to arrive in vast numbers, like an invading army, into a country which is always already bursting at the seams. Then ‘they’ are pretty much always taking ‘our’ jobs, causing unemployment among ‘native’ workers, and at the same time jumping the queue to get houses and flats thus creating a housing shortage for deserving citizens. Their presence will also be putting all sorts of pressure on public services. Their children will be causing problems in schools because they don’t yet speak the local language or because they speak too many languages. Form time to time they will get sick and this will cause problems in the hospitals as they take up needed beds and use up scarce resources. They are also quite likely to be bringing and spreading foreign diseases. Remarkably these migrants and refugees also often seem to have tendency to crime – stealing, drugs, prostitution, knives etc – and other forms of bad behaviour but despite this the authorities still seem bent on giving them preferential treatment over local people.
But, even if they are not guilty of all this bad behaviour, ‘they’ are still a ‘problem’ because of their different and ‘alien’ culture – language (which makes them hard to understand) clothes, food (which makes them smell funny), religion (which makes their morals doubtful) and so on. It being well known that people of different cultures have difficulty mixing or living together.
Every socialist has to be able to refute these arguments and expose them for the reactionary rubbish they are. She or he needs at their finger tips concrete facts and statistics to dispose of the mass of exaggerations, myths and downright lies that invariably surround this subject and clearly such concrete facts will differ from country to country and case to case. However there are also certain basic theoretical points which underpin the whole debate.
The first is simply that a rise in population is not a bad thing. All over the world the system tries to convince us that the existence of people is a problem, and of more people a calamity. Obviously this is the perfect alibi for governments and ruling classes everywhere – if there is unemployment, homelessness, poverty etc it is because there are too many people – but it is complete nonsense, an absolute inversion of the truth. If an increase in population really caused unemployment or homelessness then unemployment and homelessness would have been rising relentlessly since the year dot. In reality there is not some fixed number of jobs or houses, and every increase in population means an increase in the workers able to make these things.
On the contrary a rise in population is, fundamentally, a result of an increase in the standard of living. The world’s population is not rising because people are having more children but because more children are surviving and living longer, which in turn is caused by caused by improved diet, health care and living standards. Equally an expanding capitalist economy generates a demand for more labour, which can be met either by natural increase in population or immigration. By the same token the real cause of rising unemployment is economic contraction or crisis and nothing to do with population size or, therefore, immigration.
The second general point is the link between hostility to migrants and racism. Many of those who oppose immigration or demand it should be limited, vehemently deny that this has anything to do with racism, saying it is just about numbers, but in reality this is never the case.
Racism as a systematic ideology developed in Europe from about 17th century onwards as a reflection of, and justification for, first the slave trade and then colonialism and imperialism in general. It established a mythical hierarchy of so- called ‘races’ or ethnicities, with white Europeans at the top, followed by Far East Asians, South Asians and African Blacks at the bottom. Attached to this hierarchy were innumerable prejudices and stereotypes, such as Blacks are lazy, Orientals are inscrutable and wily, and so on. Because Europe came to dominate the world culturally and ideologically as well as economically and politically, this racist hierarchy and its stereotypes achieved considerable worldwide acceptance, even in non- European societies. It is against this background, and resting on or mobilising these prejudices (spoken or unspoken), that opposition to migration always operates.
Finally it is necessary to understand the double game currently being played by our various rulers. On the one hand they require large amounts of cheap migrant labour to boost their profits, and they make sure they get it legally or illegally. On the other hand they encourage prejudice and racism against this migrant labour, both because of the general benefit they obtain from having readily available scapegoats and dividing the working class and because stigmatising and marginalising the migrants reinforces their status as cheap super-exploitable labour without employment rights or union organisation.
On this basis it should be clear why the attitude of socialists to migrants and refugees of all kinds is the opposite of our rulers: why we emphasise the potential benefits, economic, political and cultural, of immigration, and fight for the national and international unity of the working class by extending to all immigrants the hand of solidarity and saying ‘YOU ARE WELCOME HERE’
John Molyneux
21 November 2007
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Marxism and Climate Change
KOREA COLUMN 31
Marxism and Climate Change
Climate change is real and it is a serious threat. More or less all rational people, including even the US government who are at the very edge of that category, now know this to be the case. If climate change is not tackled immediately global temperatures will, before very long, rise to the point where millions die through the failure of their food supplies, floods, storms and other catastrophes and many millions more are displaced. If it is allowed to run unchecked even beyond that point incalculable horrors could be inflicted on both the human race and innumerable other species.
Faced with such clear and present danger the most widespread response, both in the media and amongst environmental campaigners is to say that this issue is so big, so urgent, that it stands above politics or ideology. Since, in the long run, climate change threatens all humanity, all humanity should unite to prevent it. Conservatives, liberals. anarchists, Marxists, especially Marxists, should submerge their differences and put to one side their doctrinal squabbles, special interests and philosophical goals and concentrate on the business at hand – saving the planet. This all sounds like common sense. In fact it is completely false.
To see why this is so just think what would be done about climate change if we really did live in a half way rational world, or if even a significant portion of the key players i.e. the politically and economically powerful, really did sink their differences, put aside their special interests and tackle the problem.
First, all the major governments – the US, Russian, Chinese, British, Japanese, German, French etc - would immediately initiate a massive shift from carbon emitting sources of power such as oil and coal to non - carbon emitting sources such as wind, wave and solar power. Second, they would complement this with government led programmes to insulate all buildings effectively so as to reduce drastically the amount of power used to heat them. Then there would be strict regulations introduced to prevent offices and other public buildings wasting power by being lit up at night. Finally there would be huge public investment in environmentally friendly forms of public transport, crucially buses, coaches and trains, so as to greatly reduce dependence on carbon emitting cars,lorries and planes and once the efficient and comprehensive public transport was in place this could be backed up, if need be, by legal limitations on, for example, cars in city centres or on long distance runs between cities.
One could think of many other measures that could and should be taken but the important point is that all these developments would be government led and legally enforced. There would also be education and propaganda directed at the public but this would be to win support for government action, not instead of it. There is nothing unusual about this. It is what governments and ruling classes ALWAYS do whenever they are serious about tackling an issue or meeting a threat. Thus it is inconceivable that ANY government would say that the way to deal with bank robberies and burglaries is to appeal to people’s consciences and to rely on the interventions of publicspirited citizens. Inconceivable that George Bush would say that the combating terrorism should be left to market forces or that the way to invade Iraq was to encourage as many Americans as possible to make their way to Baghdad under their own steam. Indeed it is precisely to secure centralised and effective action that ruling classes everywhere have created state machines to do their bidding.
Yet when we turn away from this utopian fantasy of rational action in a rational world to what is actually happening, we find that almost NONE of the things that most obviously need doing are being done and that just the leave it all up to the individual approach, which would be dismissed out of hand on other issues, is the one being adopted.
The reason for this abject failure is clear: the priorities and logic of capitalism. The principal holders of economic power in the world capitalist system are the giant corporations. According to the Fortune 500 list the world’s ten largest companies are as follows: 1.Wal-Mart, 2. Exxon Mobile,3. Royal Dutch Shell, 4.BP, 5. General Motors,6. Toyota, 7.Chevron, 8.DaimlerChrysler, 9.ConocoPhillips, 10.Total. It should be immediately obvious that of these ten, nine have an absolute vested interest in the oil/car economy.
The other main centres of power in capitalism are the state machines of the major nations but these are tied directly and indirectly by a thousand strings to these same corporations. Moreover they are locked into competition with each other on behalf of their respective national capitalisms. Thus not only do these state apparatuses not want to make the changes necessary to halt climate change they feel they cannot afford to lest their rivals steal a march on them by opting out of the process of change. To put it very concretely the US ruling class says to itself we can’t really cut our carbon emissions (which would hit profits and damage our economy) for fear the Chinese don’t follow suit and thereby gain a competitive advantage.Likewise the Chinese ruling class will not want to cut back in case the Americans use the opportunity to race ahead.
So compelling is the logic of capitalist competition that both corporations and governments are willing to put at risk the whole future of humanity and the planet rather than lose their position in the world market.
And this is why it would be folly for socialists to drop their distinctive politics or put to one side their distinctive Marxist ideology in the cause of stopping climate change. The reality is that only the Marxist analysis of capitalism reveals the true cause of climate change and, even more importantly, identifies the vested interests standing in the way of preventing it reaching catastrophic proportions. And only socialist politics linked to the mass movement of the working class can mobilise the social and political power able to overcome the resistance of those vested interests and force through the changes necessary to save humanity from disaster.
John Molyneux
15 October 2007
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Is Marxism Economic Determinist?
KOREA COLUMN 30
Is Marxism Economic Determinist ?
The criticism of Marxism that it 'puts too much emphasis on the economic factor' or 'falsely reduces everything to economics' is the main theoretical objection to Marxism in academic circles. The reason it is so popular with professional sociologists, historians, political philosophers and the like is because it fits so neatly the needs of their social situation. Academics are people who earn their living, or like to believe they earn their living, on the basis of their ideas. Instinctively they are repelled by a theory which seems to downplay the role of ideas in history, and therefore to downplay the role of people like themselves. The professional ideologist is naturally drawn to theories which suggest that in the end it is the power of ideas that is decisive in shaping the world.
Within this there is a narrower career interest in theories that are 'sophisticated' and 'complex', and in questions 'in need of more research and development' - so many research grants and publication opportunities - and a strong bias against definite answers of any kind. 'Communism', the young Marx wrote,' is the riddle of history solved, and knows itself to be so', but such a claim would appall the typical academic who would much prefer the riddle to remain unsolved.
But if this explains the popularity of the objection we still have to assess its truth and on this I would start by saying that all talk of the primacy of ‘economics’ in Marxism or of Marxism reducing everything to ‘economics’ is inaccurate and, at best, ‘loose’. Marx’s theory of history, as The German Ideology makes clear, does not begin with ‘economics’ or with ‘economic motives’, but with human needs – both biologically determined and historically developed – and with the organization of production to meet those needs. Nor does Marx claim that the organization of production determines everything in history, merely that it constitutes a foundation or base on which everything else in history rests.
Moreover this fundamental Marxist proposition must be true, for the simple reason that any individual who is unable meet their needs for food, drink, shelter etc will die, and that any society unable to organize social production to meet those needs, at least to some degree, for most of its members, will cease to exist. To depart from this premise is, as Marx put it, ‘possible only in imagination’. Ruling classes and their ideologists can avoid it because the material work to meet their material needs is always done by others, and because those others (slaves, peasants, workers) are socially subordinate to them, and can be ignored or dismissed.
But isn’t this a round about way of saying everything reduces to economics? No. The human needs we are talking about range from the very basic and absolute need for air, to the only slightly less pressing needs for drink, food, clothing, and shelter, to the need for social interaction (care, language, socialization etc) for babies to grow up human, the needs for love and sex (both a necessity for the survival of the species and a felt need by individuals) and ‘spiritual’ needs for art, music etc. Which of these needs can be called ‘economic’? In a sense none of them – is the need for air an ‘economic’ need? At the same time without economics i.e. the social organization of production, none of these needs, except air, and even that may become problematic, can be met on a consistent basis. For example, without material production there can be no art, which requires such things as walls, paper, canvas, pencils, paint or whatever and above all people with the time and energy to be artists.
What then is the relationship between this economic base of organized production and what Marx calls the ‘superstructure’ of politics, law, philosophy, religion, art etc.? Clearly, as we have seen, economics is a necessary condition for the rest, but does it determine them in some mechanical or absolute sense? Not according to Marx who mainly speaks of shaping or conditioning rather than strict determination. The conditioning of the superstructure by the base is best understood, in my opinion, in terms of a combination of constraints and impulses.
First, the economic level of society constrains or set limits to what is possible at the ideological or superstructural level. For example, modern art and modern culture generally, is obviously impossible on a feudal or medieval economic base. Equally it was not possible to achieve modern political democracy- parliamentary government, universal suffrage etc. - without the development of capitalism with its cities and its working class.
Second, developments in the economic base create powerful impulses for change. For example the early development of the bourgeoisie within feudalism gave an impulse to the rise of a new form of Christianity – Protestantism- which would challenge the alliance of Catholicism and the feudal aristocracy. Similarly the later development of industrial capitalism into monopoly capitalism created a very powerful impulse towards imperialism, the division of the whole world between the ‘great’ powers, and that in turn generated a huge pressure towards war.
Thus neither the Reformation nor the First World War were accidents of history or mainly caused by ideology; on the contrary they had profound ‘economic’ causes or, more accurately, causes located in the development of the forces and relations of production. At the same time it was by no means economically determined that Martin Luther would nail his 95 Theses to door of the church in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517, or that world war would break out in August 1914 following an assassination in Sarajevo.
Let us apply this historical method to a contemporary problem: the likelihood of a US attack on Iran. On the hand there is a very strong economic impulse to attack Iran. To defend its global economic empire the US needs to assert its military dominance, especially over the crucial regions of the Middle East and Central Asia. The disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq create an incentive to try to recoup the situation with another throw of the dice in Iran, before Iran gets a nuclear weapon. But there are also certain basic constraints ( what the US can afford)and a number of complicating factors such as the real possibility of military defeat in Iran, the danger of provoking huge turmoil in the region with disastrous consequences, the probability of massive opposition domestically and internationally. In such a situation an attack on Iran is fundamentally economically caused and motivated, not ideological or religious, but it is also not absolutely economically determined. It hangs in the balance and may depend on factors such as the judgment and character of US political and military leaders, and the strength of resistance in the Middle East, the US and elsewhere.
John Molyneux
14 September 2007
Friday, September 14, 2007
What about human nature?
KOREA COLUMN 29
What about human nature?
In my experience the two most common objections to Marxism are 1) that it fails to take account of human nature, 2) that it reduces everything to economics.
Actually the two objections contradict each other – the ‘human nature’ argument suggests that socialism won’t work because people are basically greedy and self interested; the overestimating the economic factor argument claims that Marxism fails to take enough account of the role of ideas and ideals in history. The contradiction is not usually noticed because the two arguments are deployed in different spheres. The first is mostly encountered in the sphere of everyday political debate and discussion. The second is most common at the level of theoretical critique in the academic world. For this reason I shall devote a separate column to each.
We should begin by recognising the plausibility of the human nature argument. It is plausible partly because it has such a long pedigree. It embodies an idea that has been central to bourgeois ideology for centuries and to ruling class ideology for millennia. The Christian religion, for example, taught that people were all born ‘wicked’ and this justified both the power of the church to bring them salvation in the afterlife and the power of the state to keep them in order in this life. It is also plausible because it seems to fit with historical experience, with the simple fact that all past attempts to achieve a society of freedom and equality have failed. Finally it is plausible because it seems to explain a lot of our personal experience – all those occasions when we have been treated badly by workmates or let down by friends or people around us just seem to be apathetic.
All this plausibility, however, does not make the argument sound and it is precisely in the last area, the area of our personal experience, that we find the most obvious evidence of its falsity. Yes, it is true that everyday life presents plenty of examples of selfishness, callousness, lack of sympathy and so on, but it is also the case that it offers many examples of the opposite, of kindness, self sacrifice and solidarity – of people who help strangers in difficulties, who risk their lives to save those in danger, who devote their lives to what they see as good causes. IF it really were human nature to be selfish, if we were actually programmed to be that way, such altruistic behaviour would either be non-existent or at best extremely rare, but it is not. What experience actually shows is that human nature permits both selfish and unselfish behaviour, both apathy and commitment,
cowardice and bravery and that which predominates depends on both circumstances and conditioning.
Here we have to remember that the human behaviour we experience is behaviour under capitalism and that capitalism massively conditions people towards selfishness. Of course the system preaches morality and altruism to children but look at how schools are actually organised: the children required to compete to come top of the class (or be punished for not trying), to pass exams, to gain entry to ‘good’ schools and top universities, to get the best jobs, and with any deviation from this self interested agenda subject to severe condemnation.
Nor is it just a question of early socialisation and childhood conditioning. As adults the system virtually forces selfishness on people if they are to survive or be treated with any social respect. Capitalists obviously have to be greedy, in the sense of pursuing maximum profits, unless they are prepared to renounce being capitalists. The managers who work for them have to adhere to the profit/ greed agenda or be sacked. Only the workers are pushed towards, and have an interest in, solidarity (which is what makes workers the socialist class) and such solidarity is not only seriously stigmatised (‘militants’, ‘troublemakers’ etc) but also frequently illegal. The wonder, under capitalism, is not how little but how much self-sacrifice and social responsibility we encounter.
Much the same applies, in a different way, to broader social and historical experience. If we explain the failures of the French, Russian, Chinese and other revolutions – the return of tyranny in Napoleonic or Stalinist form – by human nature, either the greed or ambition of bad leaders or the apathy and inertia of the masses, how do we explain the revolutions in the first place? Of course, in a sense, everything that has happened in human history must be compatible with human nature or it wouldn’t have happened, but in explaining everything in this way we explain nothing.
This raises the question, very seldom asked by most of those who invoke the human nature argument, of just what is meant by ‘human nature’ or what it consists of. I shall take it that by ‘human nature’ is meant a combination of the characteristics which all, or almost all, humans have in common and the characteristics which distinguish humans as a species from other species.
A complete list of such universal characteristics (especially in the biological sense) is obviously immensely long but those that are relevant to the issue of socialism are fairly few and pretty simple. Above all they consist of a number of basic needs which all humans share and which have to be met for humans to survive: the need for air, water, food, clothing, shelter, for social interaction with other humans, for sex. Equally the key distinguishing characteristics of humans relate to the means by which these needs are met, namely collective social labour, followed by language and expanded social consciousness.
Do any of these common or distinguishing characteristics that make up human nature constitute an obstacle to an equal society or to socialism? Both history (real history not bourgeois myth) and reason give a resounding no to this question. History, because for hundreds of thousands of years prior to the development of agriculture, i.e. the vast bulk of human existence, when ‘human nature’ was being forged and consolidated, people lived as hunters and gatherers in deeply egalitarian communities, with no division into rich and poor or leaders and led and with distribution of goods based on the principle of sharing.
Reason, because a glance at the state of the world today shows that capitalism, despite an abundance of resources, is extremely poor at meeting these basic human needs for most of humanity at the best of times and its worst (through war, climate change etc) threatens
even the limited provision that exists. Socialism, by contrast, would make its whole point of departure and raison d’etre the planning of production to meet the basic physical and social needs of human nature
Far from human nature being incompatible with socialism, socialism is just what human nature needs.
John Molyneux
27 August 2007
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