Marvellous Miro
Miro, The Tate Modern, 14 April – 11 September, 2011
Joan Miro is without a doubt one of the supreme artists of the twentieth century and the current exhibition of his work at the Tate Modern is a wonderful experience.
Miro was always politically engaged and committed. In 1924 he joined the Surrealist Movement along with Andre Breton, Max Ernst and Andre Masson. Their aim was to use images from the subconscious to undermine the dominant ‘common sense’ bourgeois view of the world. In 1937, at the time of the Spanish Civil War, he exhibited The Reaper or Catalan Peasant in Revolt in the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic alongside Picasso’s Guernica and Alexander Calder’s mobile sculpture Memory Fountain. At the same time he produced the blazing Still Life With Old Shoe [which he called ‘my Guernica’] and the campaign poster Aidez Espagne. In 1973 he showed May 68, a tribute to the French May Events, and in 1974 he painted The Hope of a Condemned Man on the day of the execution by garrotte of the young Catalan anarchist, Salvador Puig Antich.
However, neither the greatness nor the politics of Miro’s art are properly captured by these external connections: both are drawn from a deeper well.
At bottom the driving force of Miro is his intense involvement with the basics of life, natural and human, in his native Catalonia – with the land, the sun, the sea, the sky, the stars, the night, the moon, the clouds and the people, above all the people of the land, the peasants. And it is a joyful abundant involvement which embraces humour, sexuality, love, romance, the cosmic and the microscopic. All this finds expression in an eruption of colour - of vibrant reds, yellows, blues, oranges, greens, which evoke both a Mediterranean summer’s day, and a tropical parrot - and a carnival of surrealistic forms in which stars resemble starfish, birds are eyes or aeroplanes, and ants and algae are as important as mountains and galaxies.
In Miro even a painting which is predominantly black seems overwhelmingly joyful and bright; even a single black line or blob on a vast field of colour hops, skips and dances like a child at play or a kite swooping and soaring in the sky.
In one sense Miro is one of the simplest of modern artists and one of the easiest to enjoy. All that is required is to open up to the pleasures he offers. No effort of interpretation is needed. Interpretation is possible, of course, but it is not in the least necessary. Moreover this is the simplicity of an absolute master, like that of Giotto or Mondrian. Both his colour and his forms are drawn from a host of other artists, such as Picasso (as always), Gauguin, Goya, Van Gogh, Arp, Tanguy, Matisse and others, and yet his palette and signature are unique and instantly recognisable.
The relationship between Miro’s sensuous delight and burgeoning creativity and his radical politics is both simple and profound. Just as Rembrandt’s deep humanity and Van Gogh’s passionate intensity clashed almost involuntarily with the profit driven calculations of capitalism, so too does Miro’s flow of joyful invention.
Of course Miro’s positive passions exist in opposition to negatives. He is for the people, the peasants, life, nature, creativity, imagination, art; he is against poverty, oppression, hunger, war, dictatorship and fascism(especially Franco, of course). But rather than confronting and exploring the negatives – the horror, the alienation, the barbarism – as Goya did in his Disasters of War and Black Paintings, as Francis Bacon, Kafka and Beckett did in their different ways, Miro’s art overwhelms the negative with positive creative energy. He even quotes Marx in his support;
This is the negation of the negation that Marx spoke of. In negating the negation, we affirm. In the same way, my painting can be considered humorous and even light hearted, even though I am tragic.[Miro cited in Iria Candela, Joan Miro, Tate Publishing, 2011, p. 27.]
If by ‘light hearted’ is meant not serious then it is a false characterisation of Miro’s work but it certainly does lighten the heart, and we all need a bit of that from time to time .
John Molyneux
17 April, 2011
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
What is a Revolution?
What is a Revolution?
‘Thawra,thawra, hatt an-nasr!’ This chant, the Arabic for ‘Revolution, revolution – until victory!’, has been heard repeatedly on the streets of Dublin in recent weeks. It comes straight from Tahrir Square in Cairo and is one of many slogans from Egypt chanted outside the Egyptian Embassy and at the Spire in O’Connell St as groups of Egyptians, Libyans and others gathered in solidarity with various phases of the great wave of revolt that has swept North Africa and the Arab world.
As I write this article the fate of Libya hangs in the balance – by the time you read this article there is no way of knowing what will have happened right across the region. But one thing is already clear: that anyone who wants to know what a revolution is need only look at events in Tunisia and Egypt.
Equally anyone who has ever read the great writers on revolution – Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemberg etc – has been able to see their words coming to life on the streets of Tunis, Cairo and Benghazi.
The Role of the Masses
‘The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historic events. In ordinary times the state, be it monarchical or democratic, and history is made by specialists in that line of business – kings, ministers, bureaucrats... But at those crucial moments when the old order becomes no longer endurable to the masses, they break over the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside their traditional representatives and create by their own interference the initial groundwork for a new regime.’
These lines from what is the greatest account of a revolution ever written, Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, stand as exact description of what occurred in Egypt on 25 January and the 17 days that followed culminating in the fall of Mubarak on 11 February.
‘For revolution.’ Lenin wrote, ‘it is essential, first, that a majority of the workers, or at least of the...politically active workers, should be willing to sacrifice their lives for it’. As we know over three hundred people were martyred in the struggle against with Mubarak’s cops and paid thug ’supporters’ but it was precisely this readiness to die that made victory in the battle of the streets possible.
‘Secondly’ says Lenin, ‘ the ruling class should be passing through a governmental crisis that draws even the most backward masses into politics – a symptom of every real revolution is a rapid, hundred-fold increase in the number of members of the the toiling and oppressed masses – hitherto apathetic – who are capable of waging the political struggle.’
Again what an apt description of the gigantic popular mobilisations in Cairo, Suez, Alexandria and so on which continually reinforced the anti- Mubarak struggle and secured its triumph.
‘Socialism must be created by the masses, must be made by every worker. Where the chains of capitalism are forged, there must they be broken!’ declared Rosa Luxemburg in the midst of the German Revolution of 1918-19. The chains of capitalism are forged in its work places where workers are exploited and profits are made.
Therefore, Luxemburg argued, mass strikes play a crucial role in revolutions. It is at work that working people are organised as collectives, have the greatest power of resistance, can most effectively inflict blows on the profits of the big companies that stand behind the government, and can challenge for control of the economy by occupations and the like.
In Tunisia the trade union federation, the UGTT, which had hitherto been ‘moderate’ and collaborationist, played a key role in mobilising the movement against Ben Ali. In Egypt, it was when mass strikes and occupations started to gain momentum that Mubarak was finally forced out. And since the fall of Mubarak the workers strike movement has been one of the main ways the revolution has continued and begun to enter a new stage.
All these quotations from Trotsky, Lenin and Luxemburg, are developments of Marx’s fundamental principle that ‘The emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working class itself’. And it is the demonstration in practice that the mass of ordinary people are indeed capable of this that is the principle lesson to be drawn from the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions and the so far successful uprising in eastern Libya.
The Question of the State.
‘Ash-sharb yireed iskuk an-nidam! - The People want to Bring Down the Regime!’, is another slogan that made the journey from Tahrir Sq to Dublin. It reflected the understanding among the core of the movement that they needed to remove not only the person of Mubarak but also his whole system of rule, including the hated Emergency Law, the systematic torture and the equally hated Security Police. This in turn found expression in the absolutely heroic struggle over several days and nights against the police which forced their withdrawal from the streets.
In other words the Egyptian masses came face to face with what Marx, Lenin (and all the other great Marxists) regarded as the central issue in any real people’s revolution – the question of the state.
In his key book The State and Revolution Lenin, following Marx, argued : 1) the state i.e. the army, judiciary, police etc., does not represent, as it claims, ‘the nation’ but is an instrument of capitalist class rule; 2) the central aim of the workers’ struggle and of the revolution is the winning of state power; 3) the existing state machine cannot simply be taken over and used by the workers but has to be ‘smashed’ or ‘broken up’ and replaced by a new state apparatus geared to the workers’ needs i.e. a state based on workers’ councils.
The way this can be done, as the Russian Revolution and many subsequent revolutions have shown, is not through defeating the ruling class army in a set piece battle but by winning over the rank-and-file of the soldiers and breaking them from their officers in the course of the revolutionary struggles in the streets.
On this question the Egyptian Revolution, and the Tunisian Revolution, went further than any other mass struggle of recent years, but nevertheless stopped half way. On the one there existed among some of the masses illusions in the neutrality and ‘decency’ of the army – despite the fact that the Generals had been hand in glove with Mubarak. On the other hand the Egyptian Generals did not directly use the army against the protestors. This enabled them to keep it intact until the movement had lost some of its momentum, consequently the state has held on and the revolution is not yet complete, but at the same time it is not yet over.
From Democratic to Socialist Revolution.
The issue of the state is linked to question of turning the democratic revolution into a socialist revolution. Only if the movement is able to go beyond demands for democracy, necessary as those are, to challenging capitalism and the economic power of the capitalist class, will the real needs of the mass of ordinary Egyptians be addressed. The same applies to every other revolution in the modern world. Inequality, poverty, exploitation, unemployment etc exist everywhere and are caused by international capitalism, not just individual dictators.
This in turn leads to the question of socialist organisation. The Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions, like revolutions in general (the Paris Commune of 1871, The Russian Revolution of 1917, the Spanish Revolution of 1936, France 1968 and so on) began spontaneously, but they do not end spontaneously.
To unify and focus the power of the masses, to combat the power of capitalist ideas, and to defeat the highly centralised power of the capitalist state, the leadership of a revolutionary workers party is necessary. Hopefully the magnificent struggle of the Arab masses of Tunisia , Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and the rest will aid the building such revolutionary parties across the region and throughout the world, including here in Ireland.
John Molyneux
24.02.2011
‘Thawra,thawra, hatt an-nasr!’ This chant, the Arabic for ‘Revolution, revolution – until victory!’, has been heard repeatedly on the streets of Dublin in recent weeks. It comes straight from Tahrir Square in Cairo and is one of many slogans from Egypt chanted outside the Egyptian Embassy and at the Spire in O’Connell St as groups of Egyptians, Libyans and others gathered in solidarity with various phases of the great wave of revolt that has swept North Africa and the Arab world.
As I write this article the fate of Libya hangs in the balance – by the time you read this article there is no way of knowing what will have happened right across the region. But one thing is already clear: that anyone who wants to know what a revolution is need only look at events in Tunisia and Egypt.
Equally anyone who has ever read the great writers on revolution – Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemberg etc – has been able to see their words coming to life on the streets of Tunis, Cairo and Benghazi.
The Role of the Masses
‘The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historic events. In ordinary times the state, be it monarchical or democratic, and history is made by specialists in that line of business – kings, ministers, bureaucrats... But at those crucial moments when the old order becomes no longer endurable to the masses, they break over the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside their traditional representatives and create by their own interference the initial groundwork for a new regime.’
These lines from what is the greatest account of a revolution ever written, Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, stand as exact description of what occurred in Egypt on 25 January and the 17 days that followed culminating in the fall of Mubarak on 11 February.
‘For revolution.’ Lenin wrote, ‘it is essential, first, that a majority of the workers, or at least of the...politically active workers, should be willing to sacrifice their lives for it’. As we know over three hundred people were martyred in the struggle against with Mubarak’s cops and paid thug ’supporters’ but it was precisely this readiness to die that made victory in the battle of the streets possible.
‘Secondly’ says Lenin, ‘ the ruling class should be passing through a governmental crisis that draws even the most backward masses into politics – a symptom of every real revolution is a rapid, hundred-fold increase in the number of members of the the toiling and oppressed masses – hitherto apathetic – who are capable of waging the political struggle.’
Again what an apt description of the gigantic popular mobilisations in Cairo, Suez, Alexandria and so on which continually reinforced the anti- Mubarak struggle and secured its triumph.
‘Socialism must be created by the masses, must be made by every worker. Where the chains of capitalism are forged, there must they be broken!’ declared Rosa Luxemburg in the midst of the German Revolution of 1918-19. The chains of capitalism are forged in its work places where workers are exploited and profits are made.
Therefore, Luxemburg argued, mass strikes play a crucial role in revolutions. It is at work that working people are organised as collectives, have the greatest power of resistance, can most effectively inflict blows on the profits of the big companies that stand behind the government, and can challenge for control of the economy by occupations and the like.
In Tunisia the trade union federation, the UGTT, which had hitherto been ‘moderate’ and collaborationist, played a key role in mobilising the movement against Ben Ali. In Egypt, it was when mass strikes and occupations started to gain momentum that Mubarak was finally forced out. And since the fall of Mubarak the workers strike movement has been one of the main ways the revolution has continued and begun to enter a new stage.
All these quotations from Trotsky, Lenin and Luxemburg, are developments of Marx’s fundamental principle that ‘The emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working class itself’. And it is the demonstration in practice that the mass of ordinary people are indeed capable of this that is the principle lesson to be drawn from the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions and the so far successful uprising in eastern Libya.
The Question of the State.
‘Ash-sharb yireed iskuk an-nidam! - The People want to Bring Down the Regime!’, is another slogan that made the journey from Tahrir Sq to Dublin. It reflected the understanding among the core of the movement that they needed to remove not only the person of Mubarak but also his whole system of rule, including the hated Emergency Law, the systematic torture and the equally hated Security Police. This in turn found expression in the absolutely heroic struggle over several days and nights against the police which forced their withdrawal from the streets.
In other words the Egyptian masses came face to face with what Marx, Lenin (and all the other great Marxists) regarded as the central issue in any real people’s revolution – the question of the state.
In his key book The State and Revolution Lenin, following Marx, argued : 1) the state i.e. the army, judiciary, police etc., does not represent, as it claims, ‘the nation’ but is an instrument of capitalist class rule; 2) the central aim of the workers’ struggle and of the revolution is the winning of state power; 3) the existing state machine cannot simply be taken over and used by the workers but has to be ‘smashed’ or ‘broken up’ and replaced by a new state apparatus geared to the workers’ needs i.e. a state based on workers’ councils.
The way this can be done, as the Russian Revolution and many subsequent revolutions have shown, is not through defeating the ruling class army in a set piece battle but by winning over the rank-and-file of the soldiers and breaking them from their officers in the course of the revolutionary struggles in the streets.
On this question the Egyptian Revolution, and the Tunisian Revolution, went further than any other mass struggle of recent years, but nevertheless stopped half way. On the one there existed among some of the masses illusions in the neutrality and ‘decency’ of the army – despite the fact that the Generals had been hand in glove with Mubarak. On the other hand the Egyptian Generals did not directly use the army against the protestors. This enabled them to keep it intact until the movement had lost some of its momentum, consequently the state has held on and the revolution is not yet complete, but at the same time it is not yet over.
From Democratic to Socialist Revolution.
The issue of the state is linked to question of turning the democratic revolution into a socialist revolution. Only if the movement is able to go beyond demands for democracy, necessary as those are, to challenging capitalism and the economic power of the capitalist class, will the real needs of the mass of ordinary Egyptians be addressed. The same applies to every other revolution in the modern world. Inequality, poverty, exploitation, unemployment etc exist everywhere and are caused by international capitalism, not just individual dictators.
This in turn leads to the question of socialist organisation. The Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions, like revolutions in general (the Paris Commune of 1871, The Russian Revolution of 1917, the Spanish Revolution of 1936, France 1968 and so on) began spontaneously, but they do not end spontaneously.
To unify and focus the power of the masses, to combat the power of capitalist ideas, and to defeat the highly centralised power of the capitalist state, the leadership of a revolutionary workers party is necessary. Hopefully the magnificent struggle of the Arab masses of Tunisia , Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and the rest will aid the building such revolutionary parties across the region and throughout the world, including here in Ireland.
John Molyneux
24.02.2011
Tuesday, March 08, 2011
I'm With You In Egypt
This poem was performed in a Dublin bar last week at a Gig for Palestine by Connor Kelly who is a 21 year old SWP member from Derry in Northern Ireland. Connor is a brilliant young musician, poet and comrade.
I'M WITH YOU IN EGYPT
Dedicated to the people of Egypt, and Hossam El Hamalaway (member of the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists)
I’m with you in Egypt, where the streets are filled with fire, women dance in the flames, casting off the muck of tyranny of ages now past.
I’m with you in Egypt, ten thousand Muslims kiss the ground, guarded by Christians, Mohammed and Jesus married in the violence of the class - ah Israel, how you quake in your blood soaked boots.
I’m with you in Egypt, where Coptic chants imbue my spirit with mystical revolutions.
I'm with you in Egypt where El Baradei won’t leave the house.
I'm with you in Egypt, where the Muslim brotherhood are talking to the monster state.
I’m with you in Egypt where freedom is a fist of love.
I’m with you in Egypt where Hossam El Hamalaway leads the vanguard, stands up, lies down, gets shot, then returns home tired and bleeding to inform humanity of his adventures.
I’m with you in Egypt, where you guard your factories - workers of the world unite!!
I’m with you in Egypt in dreams of love and courageous liberation.
I'm with you in Egypt where you risk your life.
I’m with you in Egypt where you bare your soul.
I’m with you in Egypt where you strike the spark that will set the world on fire.
I’m with you in Egypt and I share your tears.
I’m with you in Egypt shoulder to shoulder.
I’m with you in Egypt and I love you.
I’m with you in Egypt, people of Egypt, you are beautiful.
Connor Kelly 2011
I'M WITH YOU IN EGYPT
Dedicated to the people of Egypt, and Hossam El Hamalaway (member of the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists)
I’m with you in Egypt, where the streets are filled with fire, women dance in the flames, casting off the muck of tyranny of ages now past.
I’m with you in Egypt, ten thousand Muslims kiss the ground, guarded by Christians, Mohammed and Jesus married in the violence of the class - ah Israel, how you quake in your blood soaked boots.
I’m with you in Egypt, where Coptic chants imbue my spirit with mystical revolutions.
I'm with you in Egypt where El Baradei won’t leave the house.
I'm with you in Egypt, where the Muslim brotherhood are talking to the monster state.
I’m with you in Egypt where freedom is a fist of love.
I’m with you in Egypt where Hossam El Hamalaway leads the vanguard, stands up, lies down, gets shot, then returns home tired and bleeding to inform humanity of his adventures.
I’m with you in Egypt, where you guard your factories - workers of the world unite!!
I’m with you in Egypt in dreams of love and courageous liberation.
I'm with you in Egypt where you risk your life.
I’m with you in Egypt where you bare your soul.
I’m with you in Egypt where you strike the spark that will set the world on fire.
I’m with you in Egypt and I share your tears.
I’m with you in Egypt shoulder to shoulder.
I’m with you in Egypt and I love you.
I’m with you in Egypt, people of Egypt, you are beautiful.
Connor Kelly 2011
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Workers Strikes in King Abdulla Financial Centre in Riyadh
Workers Strikes in King Abdulla Financial Centre in Riyadh
report received from worker in Saudi Arabia
I went last Thursday to my workplace, and I found out that there were over 3000 workers demanding their rights before they called a general strike in the construction site in Saudi Binladin Group. The workers were very angry, there workplace is one of the largest construction project in the country, which worth SR.100 billion. However, they live in a terrible conditions, one of the workers was telling me how he was living: "I live in a room 4m x 3m with 8 people, and for every 10 people there is only one toilet". Another Egyptian worker was telling me about the working conditions and the restriction of religious freedom: "those are Zionists, they don’t even allow me to pray on time!!", and another worker was speaking about the water at the site, which is infected and full of filth and insects: "the managers wouldn’t even wash their hands with it, but for us we have to drink it because it is the only drinking water at the site". The others talked about the delayed salaries and the unpaid overtime: "can you believe that some of the workers here are paid only 700 riyals a month, and I am paid 1000 riyal, how would we survive??".
They couldn’t continue in the old way, they organized themselves and decided to do a demonstration at the site, to demand their rights immediately. It was the most interesting scene that I have witnessed in my life, when a group of coordinators and security guards tried to persuade them to go back to work the workers replied by smacking their hats on the walls and they shouted we demand "food, money , accommodation – we need to be respected!!", all the managers, for the first time since the start of the project 4 years ago, took the workers seriously.
The police force which had an oppressive role in this socity couldn’t control the workers, when of the police officers told the workers that they need to return to their accommodation and their issue will be solved later, the worker replied by throwing stones at him, and they managed to frighten all the police officers around him. The stones missed the police officer, but unfortunately it did not miss his car! It was the first time in my life I saw a police car smashed in Saudi Arabia.
When several coordinators, sent by thy managers, tried to promise the workers for change, I and several socialist we were pushing for the occupation of the construction site, but that did not work. However, when one of coordinators said: "we will give you a new accommodation with a football pitch", one of the workers replied: "how would we play football after 13 hours of work with an unpaid overtime?!" , then the coordinators promised that every worker will be paid after 5 days, someone replied: "what would we do with todays bread after 5 days, we need it now, we are sick of excuses, a billionaire cannot pay his workers today??!!"
In the end, the owner promised the workers that they will pay them on Saturday – which is after two days – the workers went back, and on Saturday they received an extra SR. 500 on top of their salary and the owners promised them that they will improve their accommodation and they will pay them 100 hour for their overtime each month. The workers started to organized with a sister company which belong to the same owners to start a new wave of strikes in different parts of the construction site. Through this week, there were several strike actions in King Fahad Library and in a construction sites in King Saud University.
report received from worker in Saudi Arabia
I went last Thursday to my workplace, and I found out that there were over 3000 workers demanding their rights before they called a general strike in the construction site in Saudi Binladin Group. The workers were very angry, there workplace is one of the largest construction project in the country, which worth SR.100 billion. However, they live in a terrible conditions, one of the workers was telling me how he was living: "I live in a room 4m x 3m with 8 people, and for every 10 people there is only one toilet". Another Egyptian worker was telling me about the working conditions and the restriction of religious freedom: "those are Zionists, they don’t even allow me to pray on time!!", and another worker was speaking about the water at the site, which is infected and full of filth and insects: "the managers wouldn’t even wash their hands with it, but for us we have to drink it because it is the only drinking water at the site". The others talked about the delayed salaries and the unpaid overtime: "can you believe that some of the workers here are paid only 700 riyals a month, and I am paid 1000 riyal, how would we survive??".
They couldn’t continue in the old way, they organized themselves and decided to do a demonstration at the site, to demand their rights immediately. It was the most interesting scene that I have witnessed in my life, when a group of coordinators and security guards tried to persuade them to go back to work the workers replied by smacking their hats on the walls and they shouted we demand "food, money , accommodation – we need to be respected!!", all the managers, for the first time since the start of the project 4 years ago, took the workers seriously.
The police force which had an oppressive role in this socity couldn’t control the workers, when of the police officers told the workers that they need to return to their accommodation and their issue will be solved later, the worker replied by throwing stones at him, and they managed to frighten all the police officers around him. The stones missed the police officer, but unfortunately it did not miss his car! It was the first time in my life I saw a police car smashed in Saudi Arabia.
When several coordinators, sent by thy managers, tried to promise the workers for change, I and several socialist we were pushing for the occupation of the construction site, but that did not work. However, when one of coordinators said: "we will give you a new accommodation with a football pitch", one of the workers replied: "how would we play football after 13 hours of work with an unpaid overtime?!" , then the coordinators promised that every worker will be paid after 5 days, someone replied: "what would we do with todays bread after 5 days, we need it now, we are sick of excuses, a billionaire cannot pay his workers today??!!"
In the end, the owner promised the workers that they will pay them on Saturday – which is after two days – the workers went back, and on Saturday they received an extra SR. 500 on top of their salary and the owners promised them that they will improve their accommodation and they will pay them 100 hour for their overtime each month. The workers started to organized with a sister company which belong to the same owners to start a new wave of strikes in different parts of the construction site. Through this week, there were several strike actions in King Fahad Library and in a construction sites in King Saud University.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
HAIL THE EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION
HAIL THE EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION!
Friday 11 February 2011 is a historic day. It will be remembered forever as the day a heroic people brought down a hated tyrant.
Let us not, in the midst of our celebration, forget for one moment that three hundred Egyptians, mostly young Egyptians, paid with their lives for this victory. Glory to the martyrs of the Egyptian Revolution! Those responsible should be brought to trial.
Let us not, in the midst of our celebration, forget for one moment, the terrible and heroic struggle waged by the Egyptian people, mostly (as in all revolutions) the youth of Egypt, to win this great victory. The world saw, in the full light of day, Mubarak’s thugs – his police out of uniform and their paid accomplices – attempt, with ferocious violence, to drive the people from Tahrir Square. It saw the people, with courage and organisation and, above all, numbers, drive them back and rout them.
What the world did not see, or saw much less of, was the even more heroic battle of the Egyptian people, again mainly the young, which occurred to a considerable extent under cover of darkness, in which the revolutionaries routed the feared and hated police. This was the seemingly impossible. This was the victory no ‘sensible’, ‘moderate’ or ‘reasonable person’ would have deemed possible. The fact is it happened, and the fact is also that revolutions happen when people are willing to give their lives for them, as they were in Egypt.
Let us not, in the midst of our joy, forget also that the USA, and Britain and Saudia Arabia etc, sustained the hideous Mubarak regime with massive financial and military aid, until the last possible moment. The American modus operandi for these situations is unfortunately well established: support the dictator to the last possible moment, then pose as champions of democracy at the eleventh hour in order to retain influence over the situation.
But nothing – nothing – can change the fact that the ordinary people, with their bare hands, brought down the tyrant and this means that everywhere in the world whenever people say, in their weariness and alienation, ‘it’ll never change’ or ‘it will never happen’ we can say simply ‘Egypt!’.
However, our joy at this great victory does not relieve us of the duty to tell the truth about the situation on the ground. Apart from the fall of Mubarak the central aims of the Revolution have not yet been achieved. As yet we do not know that the practice of torture in Egypt’s police stations and prisons has ended. As yet we do not know if the practice of detaining people without trial is finished. We do not know if there will be a transition to genuine democracy.
At the moment the Egyptian people are asked to trust the military, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, to ensure these things happen. But this Supreme Council consists entirely of generals close to Mubarak and up to their necks in the blood of the Egyptian people and up to their wallets in the people’s wealth. It includes the notorious Omar Sulieman, torturer-in-chief, and the CIA’s man in Cairo. It includes and is headed by Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, former commander of Mubarak’s Presidential Guard, and Sami Hafaz Anan of whom Al Jazeera reports:
Lieutenant- General Anan ... is commander of 468,000 troops. He is seen as having a crucial role in coordinating interim arrangements... He was in Washington when the uprising began ... it was reported that the United States was pushing Anan for a key mediating role, though it was speculated that he was far too close to Mubarak to retain ant role in a new government.
The other members are similar and many are closely linked to the US. Moreover, the basic idea that the army is the army of ‘the nation’, of the people, is an illusion. The Egyptian Army, i.e. its high command as opposed to the ordinary soldiers, like every army, is part of the society’s ruling class and will defend its interests. If the army did not repress the people in the last 17 days it was probably for fear that its rank- and – file would break and side with the people, as has happened in many revolutions from the Paris Commune through Russia in 1917 to the Iranian Revolution. So the army is still there to defend the rich and the regime if need be. I remember with sadness the prevalence of the illusion in a ‘national army’ before the Polish military coup, crushing Solidarnosc, in 1981 and before the Tianenman Square massacre in China in 1989.
There is an even more fundamental problem. The Egyptian people who made the revolution will be hoping for a better life – not only political freedom but also economically and socially. But the poverty and deprivation that is so widespread in Egypt is NOT simply the product of the Mubarak regime. It exists, to a greater or lesser degree, everywhere from Washington to Rio, from London to Cape Town, from Portugal to India. It is a product not of one government but of the international capitalist system and the imperialist structure of the world economy that goes with it.
Economically and strategically Egypt is a highly significant part of this system and structure and closely tied to the US which is the very heart of the system and its main international policeman. Nothing that has happened so far in Egypt will have changed the fact that the Sawiris family, estimated wealth over $20 billion, coexists with millions in slums and abject poverty; nothing to end the contrast between the rich luxuriating in Zamalek or Heliopolis and wage slaves of Mahalla or Helwan or the poor of Shubra or the Cities of the Dead. And the Supreme Council, and the US government and David Cameron and many of the media pundits, who are expressing false solidarity and fake approval of the Revolution, will be desperate to see that nothing does challenge this monstrous inequality or the capitalist system that underlies it.
But what the Revolution has produced already is a power, the power of the working class, that CAN challenge capitalism and, undoubtedly WILL come into conflict with the system in the days, weeks and months ahead.
This is why the struggle goes on: to cleanse the regime of its torturers and thieves; to establish real democratic freedom; to build the people’s power from below that can claim Egypt’s wealth for the people of Egypt. In this struggle the People’s Committees formed to defend communities in the Revolution and the strikes and workplace occupations developing over the last few days are crucial. POWER TO THE WORKERS!
John Molyneux
12 February 2011
Friday 11 February 2011 is a historic day. It will be remembered forever as the day a heroic people brought down a hated tyrant.
Let us not, in the midst of our celebration, forget for one moment that three hundred Egyptians, mostly young Egyptians, paid with their lives for this victory. Glory to the martyrs of the Egyptian Revolution! Those responsible should be brought to trial.
Let us not, in the midst of our celebration, forget for one moment, the terrible and heroic struggle waged by the Egyptian people, mostly (as in all revolutions) the youth of Egypt, to win this great victory. The world saw, in the full light of day, Mubarak’s thugs – his police out of uniform and their paid accomplices – attempt, with ferocious violence, to drive the people from Tahrir Square. It saw the people, with courage and organisation and, above all, numbers, drive them back and rout them.
What the world did not see, or saw much less of, was the even more heroic battle of the Egyptian people, again mainly the young, which occurred to a considerable extent under cover of darkness, in which the revolutionaries routed the feared and hated police. This was the seemingly impossible. This was the victory no ‘sensible’, ‘moderate’ or ‘reasonable person’ would have deemed possible. The fact is it happened, and the fact is also that revolutions happen when people are willing to give their lives for them, as they were in Egypt.
Let us not, in the midst of our joy, forget also that the USA, and Britain and Saudia Arabia etc, sustained the hideous Mubarak regime with massive financial and military aid, until the last possible moment. The American modus operandi for these situations is unfortunately well established: support the dictator to the last possible moment, then pose as champions of democracy at the eleventh hour in order to retain influence over the situation.
But nothing – nothing – can change the fact that the ordinary people, with their bare hands, brought down the tyrant and this means that everywhere in the world whenever people say, in their weariness and alienation, ‘it’ll never change’ or ‘it will never happen’ we can say simply ‘Egypt!’.
However, our joy at this great victory does not relieve us of the duty to tell the truth about the situation on the ground. Apart from the fall of Mubarak the central aims of the Revolution have not yet been achieved. As yet we do not know that the practice of torture in Egypt’s police stations and prisons has ended. As yet we do not know if the practice of detaining people without trial is finished. We do not know if there will be a transition to genuine democracy.
At the moment the Egyptian people are asked to trust the military, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, to ensure these things happen. But this Supreme Council consists entirely of generals close to Mubarak and up to their necks in the blood of the Egyptian people and up to their wallets in the people’s wealth. It includes the notorious Omar Sulieman, torturer-in-chief, and the CIA’s man in Cairo. It includes and is headed by Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, former commander of Mubarak’s Presidential Guard, and Sami Hafaz Anan of whom Al Jazeera reports:
Lieutenant- General Anan ... is commander of 468,000 troops. He is seen as having a crucial role in coordinating interim arrangements... He was in Washington when the uprising began ... it was reported that the United States was pushing Anan for a key mediating role, though it was speculated that he was far too close to Mubarak to retain ant role in a new government.
The other members are similar and many are closely linked to the US. Moreover, the basic idea that the army is the army of ‘the nation’, of the people, is an illusion. The Egyptian Army, i.e. its high command as opposed to the ordinary soldiers, like every army, is part of the society’s ruling class and will defend its interests. If the army did not repress the people in the last 17 days it was probably for fear that its rank- and – file would break and side with the people, as has happened in many revolutions from the Paris Commune through Russia in 1917 to the Iranian Revolution. So the army is still there to defend the rich and the regime if need be. I remember with sadness the prevalence of the illusion in a ‘national army’ before the Polish military coup, crushing Solidarnosc, in 1981 and before the Tianenman Square massacre in China in 1989.
There is an even more fundamental problem. The Egyptian people who made the revolution will be hoping for a better life – not only political freedom but also economically and socially. But the poverty and deprivation that is so widespread in Egypt is NOT simply the product of the Mubarak regime. It exists, to a greater or lesser degree, everywhere from Washington to Rio, from London to Cape Town, from Portugal to India. It is a product not of one government but of the international capitalist system and the imperialist structure of the world economy that goes with it.
Economically and strategically Egypt is a highly significant part of this system and structure and closely tied to the US which is the very heart of the system and its main international policeman. Nothing that has happened so far in Egypt will have changed the fact that the Sawiris family, estimated wealth over $20 billion, coexists with millions in slums and abject poverty; nothing to end the contrast between the rich luxuriating in Zamalek or Heliopolis and wage slaves of Mahalla or Helwan or the poor of Shubra or the Cities of the Dead. And the Supreme Council, and the US government and David Cameron and many of the media pundits, who are expressing false solidarity and fake approval of the Revolution, will be desperate to see that nothing does challenge this monstrous inequality or the capitalist system that underlies it.
But what the Revolution has produced already is a power, the power of the working class, that CAN challenge capitalism and, undoubtedly WILL come into conflict with the system in the days, weeks and months ahead.
This is why the struggle goes on: to cleanse the regime of its torturers and thieves; to establish real democratic freedom; to build the people’s power from below that can claim Egypt’s wealth for the people of Egypt. In this struggle the People’s Committees formed to defend communities in the Revolution and the strikes and workplace occupations developing over the last few days are crucial. POWER TO THE WORKERS!
John Molyneux
12 February 2011
Friday, February 11, 2011
STATEMENT FROM THE APRIL 6 MOVEMENT in CAIRO
April 6 Movement:
Egypt - Mubarak refuses to resign, a general strike is needed to bring him down!The Egyptian masses thought Mubarak would resign, but he had other plans, Simon Hardy reports on what happened and what comes next
In the afternoon of 10 February the Egyptian Army Supreme Council, which had met without its commander in chief Hosni Mubarak, issued Communique number 1. The communique explained that the army had stepped in in order to safeguard "the people's achievements and demands". Omar Suleiman, the Vice President, was sent to meet Mubarak to relay the discussion and opinions of the generals.
ABC news in the US announced that Mubarak would step down. Leading members of the NDP had said that they "did not think Mubarak would be president by Friday." Thousands surged into Tahrir and took to the streets across the country to be there when they heard the news that they had been waiting for.
Everyone thought he would resign - the mood in tahrir square was phenomenal, celebratory - a feeling of triumph surged through the crowd. But Mubarak had other plans.
Mubarak's speech was an astonishing piece of hypocritical filth. This man who sat atop of the regime which brutalised his people for 30 years, and tried in the last 17 days to destroy the movement any way that it could shed crocodile tears for the people that his police had killed. Over 300 people have died to force him from power, and after cursing the movement and trying to drown them in blood he addresses his speech to the "youth of the nation". These are the youth of the nation who have risen up against him and hate him with a passion - they have nothing in common with him or his regime. They are the future and he is the past, that is why he has fought against them so violently.
He promised a full investigation into anyone involved in persecuting protesters and swore again that he would resign in September, but not before.
During his entire speech he did not offer one serious concession to the people - he did not even withdraw the state of emergency. He proposed the amendment of 6 sections of the constitution, including the most controversial ones of article 76 and 77. He said he would scrap article 179. Article 179 is a relatively new anti terrorism amendment which stipulates "the state will assume responsibility for safeguarding security and public order in the face of the dangers of terrorism", which allows for anti terror suspects to be investigated and arressted without any kind of judicial over view.
The crowd in Tahrir square became enraged when word spread that he was not resigning. People began to wave their shoes in the air, the universal sign of disrespect and contempt in the Arab world, they were lifted up on sticks, held aloft above their heads. Mubarak knows that he cannot step down, if he does so it will give a green light to everyone across the region that dictators can fall under popular pressure.
But now the masses will become enraged. Tomorrow will see millions upon millions of people marching across the country. Masses of workers are due to join the protests. The strikes should not be called off, they need to be extended and co-ordinated into an all out general strike. The strikes should be co-ordinated by democratic councils of the workers, they need to organise the defense of the revolution. It is also important now that the rank and file soldiers be won over to the revolution.
Now the demand for a constituent assembly is crucial. It is not the military or technocrats which should decide the new constitution but a democratic assembly composed of recognished deleates from the people.
Whether Mubarak is working in relative agreement with the army or defying them is not clear. Clearly the army wants to consolidate its influence in the political process. Clearly the miltiary are divided over what to do - still the different factions within the regime do not know what to do. Some within the NPD want Mubarak gone, but Mubarak and his clique want to hold on to power. The army's position is changing, but it is not clear yet what role they will play.
Tomorrow may see a revolution in the country, or a military coup. There will be a reckoning between the people and the army sooner or later. All the world is watching history happen in Egypt tonight!
Egypt - Mubarak refuses to resign, a general strike is needed to bring him down!The Egyptian masses thought Mubarak would resign, but he had other plans, Simon Hardy reports on what happened and what comes next
In the afternoon of 10 February the Egyptian Army Supreme Council, which had met without its commander in chief Hosni Mubarak, issued Communique number 1. The communique explained that the army had stepped in in order to safeguard "the people's achievements and demands". Omar Suleiman, the Vice President, was sent to meet Mubarak to relay the discussion and opinions of the generals.
ABC news in the US announced that Mubarak would step down. Leading members of the NDP had said that they "did not think Mubarak would be president by Friday." Thousands surged into Tahrir and took to the streets across the country to be there when they heard the news that they had been waiting for.
Everyone thought he would resign - the mood in tahrir square was phenomenal, celebratory - a feeling of triumph surged through the crowd. But Mubarak had other plans.
Mubarak's speech was an astonishing piece of hypocritical filth. This man who sat atop of the regime which brutalised his people for 30 years, and tried in the last 17 days to destroy the movement any way that it could shed crocodile tears for the people that his police had killed. Over 300 people have died to force him from power, and after cursing the movement and trying to drown them in blood he addresses his speech to the "youth of the nation". These are the youth of the nation who have risen up against him and hate him with a passion - they have nothing in common with him or his regime. They are the future and he is the past, that is why he has fought against them so violently.
He promised a full investigation into anyone involved in persecuting protesters and swore again that he would resign in September, but not before.
During his entire speech he did not offer one serious concession to the people - he did not even withdraw the state of emergency. He proposed the amendment of 6 sections of the constitution, including the most controversial ones of article 76 and 77. He said he would scrap article 179. Article 179 is a relatively new anti terrorism amendment which stipulates "the state will assume responsibility for safeguarding security and public order in the face of the dangers of terrorism", which allows for anti terror suspects to be investigated and arressted without any kind of judicial over view.
The crowd in Tahrir square became enraged when word spread that he was not resigning. People began to wave their shoes in the air, the universal sign of disrespect and contempt in the Arab world, they were lifted up on sticks, held aloft above their heads. Mubarak knows that he cannot step down, if he does so it will give a green light to everyone across the region that dictators can fall under popular pressure.
But now the masses will become enraged. Tomorrow will see millions upon millions of people marching across the country. Masses of workers are due to join the protests. The strikes should not be called off, they need to be extended and co-ordinated into an all out general strike. The strikes should be co-ordinated by democratic councils of the workers, they need to organise the defense of the revolution. It is also important now that the rank and file soldiers be won over to the revolution.
Now the demand for a constituent assembly is crucial. It is not the military or technocrats which should decide the new constitution but a democratic assembly composed of recognished deleates from the people.
Whether Mubarak is working in relative agreement with the army or defying them is not clear. Clearly the army wants to consolidate its influence in the political process. Clearly the miltiary are divided over what to do - still the different factions within the regime do not know what to do. Some within the NPD want Mubarak gone, but Mubarak and his clique want to hold on to power. The army's position is changing, but it is not clear yet what role they will play.
Tomorrow may see a revolution in the country, or a military coup. There will be a reckoning between the people and the army sooner or later. All the world is watching history happen in Egypt tonight!
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Solidarity with Egypt from Portsmouth Trades Unions
This is from the Trades Council in my (former) home town of Portsmouth. This is what Trades Unions should be doing everywhere.John M
On Behalf of Portsmouth Trades Council (the official organisation that represents the various trade union branches in the City of Portsmouth)
Congratulations on the formation of RETAU, the independent federation of Egyptian trade unions.
When our trades Council met on 3 February we discussed the inspirational struggles in Tunisia and Egypt. Our delegates wanted to express our solidarity with you in your revolution against tyranny.
Down with Mubarak! Victory to the Egyptian People! Workers of the World Unite!
As media officer, I issued the press release below. I didn't know how to convey this message to our sisters and brothers in Egypt until some comrades emailed me your contact details. I am so pleased to open up a direct dialogue with you. Your bravery and determination gives us strength to fight our bosses and rulers who are trying to cut our living standards. Many of us are watching your struggle on the TV and internet. We have heard of your strikes, but were concerned that the Egyptian Trade Union Federation was too closely linked with Mubarak. We are delighted that you have formed your own free and independent trade union federation. We wish you every success in your struggle and offer any help that we can provide.
Victory to the Egyptian Revolution!
Yours Fraternally
Jon Woods
Portsmouth Trades Council Media Officer
PORTSMOUTH TRADES COUNCIL
MEDIA RELEASE 6.2.2011
SOLIDARITY WITH REVOLUTION IN TUNISIA AND EGYPT
Portsmouth Trades Council (PTC) is sending a message of solidarity and support to the people in Tunisia, Egypt and across the Middle East fighting for economic demands and political freedom. The uprisings across the region began in Tunisia with protests over unemployment, food prices and the banning of political protest.
‘In Tunisia, the Union Generale des Travailleurs Tunisien (UGTT) trade union confederation called a general strike which helped force Ben Ali from power. Although the Egyptian Trade Union Federation has close links to the Mubarak regime, there have been widespread strikes. Workers in the Suez steel mill that produces 70% of Egypt’s steel are on indefinite strike until Mubarak falls. There are strikes in the centre of the textile industry in Mahalla al-Kubra’, said Jon Woods.
PTC supports our brothers and sisters across the Middle East in their struggle for bread, freedom and social justice. We call for genuine democracy and the removal of tyrants such as Mubarak. We demand an immediate end to violence against the pro democracy protestors. We support workers in forming their own independent and democratic trade unions.
For further information contact;
Louis MacDonald (PTC Secretary) on 07940 503634 or at louismacdonald@ntlworld.com
Mick Tosh (PTC Chair) on 07900 877720
Jon Woods (PTC Media Officer) 0n 07921 775828
On Behalf of Portsmouth Trades Council (the official organisation that represents the various trade union branches in the City of Portsmouth)
Congratulations on the formation of RETAU, the independent federation of Egyptian trade unions.
When our trades Council met on 3 February we discussed the inspirational struggles in Tunisia and Egypt. Our delegates wanted to express our solidarity with you in your revolution against tyranny.
Down with Mubarak! Victory to the Egyptian People! Workers of the World Unite!
As media officer, I issued the press release below. I didn't know how to convey this message to our sisters and brothers in Egypt until some comrades emailed me your contact details. I am so pleased to open up a direct dialogue with you. Your bravery and determination gives us strength to fight our bosses and rulers who are trying to cut our living standards. Many of us are watching your struggle on the TV and internet. We have heard of your strikes, but were concerned that the Egyptian Trade Union Federation was too closely linked with Mubarak. We are delighted that you have formed your own free and independent trade union federation. We wish you every success in your struggle and offer any help that we can provide.
Victory to the Egyptian Revolution!
Yours Fraternally
Jon Woods
Portsmouth Trades Council Media Officer
PORTSMOUTH TRADES COUNCIL
MEDIA RELEASE 6.2.2011
SOLIDARITY WITH REVOLUTION IN TUNISIA AND EGYPT
Portsmouth Trades Council (PTC) is sending a message of solidarity and support to the people in Tunisia, Egypt and across the Middle East fighting for economic demands and political freedom. The uprisings across the region began in Tunisia with protests over unemployment, food prices and the banning of political protest.
‘In Tunisia, the Union Generale des Travailleurs Tunisien (UGTT) trade union confederation called a general strike which helped force Ben Ali from power. Although the Egyptian Trade Union Federation has close links to the Mubarak regime, there have been widespread strikes. Workers in the Suez steel mill that produces 70% of Egypt’s steel are on indefinite strike until Mubarak falls. There are strikes in the centre of the textile industry in Mahalla al-Kubra’, said Jon Woods.
PTC supports our brothers and sisters across the Middle East in their struggle for bread, freedom and social justice. We call for genuine democracy and the removal of tyrants such as Mubarak. We demand an immediate end to violence against the pro democracy protestors. We support workers in forming their own independent and democratic trade unions.
For further information contact;
Louis MacDonald (PTC Secretary) on 07940 503634 or at louismacdonald@ntlworld.com
Mick Tosh (PTC Chair) on 07900 877720
Jon Woods (PTC Media Officer) 0n 07921 775828
Wednesday, February 09, 2011
STATEMENT OF THE REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISTS EGYPT
Statement of the Revolutionary Socialists Egypt:
Glory to the martyrs! Victory to the revolution!
What is happening today is the largest popular revolution in the history of our country and of the entire Arab world. The sacrifice of our martyrs has built our revolution and we have broken through all the barriers of fear. We will not back down until the criminal 'leaders' and their criminal system is destroyed.
Mubarak's departure is the first step, not the last step of the revolution
The handover of power to a dictatorship under Omar Suleiman, Ahmed Shafiq and other cronies of Mubarak is the continuation of the same system. Omar Suleiman is a friend of Israel and America, spends most of his time between Washington and Tel Aviv and is a servant who is faithful to their interests. Ahmed Shafik is a close friend of Mubarak and his colleague in the tyranny, oppression and plunder imposed on the Egyptian people.
The country's wealth belongs to the people and must return to it
Over the past three decades this tyrannical regime corrupted the country's largest estates to a small handful of business leaders and foreign companies. 100 families own more than 90% of the country's wealth. They monopolize the wealth of the Egyptian people through policies of privatization, looting of power and the alliance with Capital. They have turned the majority of the Egyptian people to the poor, landless and unemployed.
Factories wrecked and sold dirt cheap must go back to the people
We want the nationalization of companies, land and property looted by this bunch. As long as our resources remain in their hands we will not be able to completely get rid of this system. Economic slavery is the other face of political tyranny. We will not be able to cope with unemployment and achieve a fair minimum wage for a decent living without restoring the wealth of the people from this gang.
We will not accept to be guard dogs of America and Israel
This system does not stand alone. Mubarak, as a dictator was a servant and client directly acting for the sake of the interests of America and Israel. Egypt acted as a colony of America, participated directly in the siege of the Palestinian people, made the Suez Canal and Egyptian airspace freezones for warships and fighter jets that destroyed and killed the Iraqi people and sold gas to Israel, dirt cheap, while stifling the Egyptian people by soring prices. Revolution must restore Egypt's independence, dignity and leadership in the region.
The revolution is a popular revolution
This is not a revolution of the elite, political parties or religious groups. Egypt's youth, students, workers and the poor are the owners of this revolution. In recent days a lot of elites, parties and so-called symbols have begun trying to ride the wave of revolution and hijack it from their rightful owners. The only symbols are the martyrs of our revolution and our young people who have been steadfast in the field. We will not allow them to take control of our revolution and claim that they represent us. We will choose to represent ourselves and represent the martyrs who were killed and their blood paid the price for the salvation of the system.
A people's army is the army that protects the revolution
Everyone asks: "Is the army with the people or against them?". The army is not a single block. The interests of soldiers and junior officers are the same as the interests of the masses. But the senior officers are Mubarak’s men, chosen carefully to protect his regime of corruption, wealth and tyranny. It is an integral part of the system.
This army is no longer the people’s army. This army is not the one which defeated the Zionist enemy in October 73. This army is closely associated with America and Israel. Its role is to protect Israel, not the people. Yes we want to win the soldiers for the revolution. But we must not be fooled by slogans that ‘the army is on our side’. The army will either suppress the demonstrations directly, or restructure the police to play this role.
Form revolutionary councils urgently
This revolution has surpassed our greatest expectations. Nobody expected to see these numbers. Nobody expected that Egyptians would be this brave in the face of the police. Nobody can say that we did not force the dictator to retreat. Nobody can say that a transformation did not happen in Middan el Tahrir.
What we need right now is to push for the socio-economic demands as part of our demands, so that the person sitting in his home knows that we are fighting for their rights. We need to organize ourselves into popular committees which elects its higher councils democratically, and from below. These councils must form a higher council which includes delegates of all the tendencies. We must elect a higher council of people who represent us, and in whom we trust. We call for the formation of popular councils in Middan Tahrir, and in all the cities of Egypt.
Call to Egyptian workers to join the ranks of the revolution
The demonstrations and protests have played a key role in igniting and continuing our revolution. Now we need the workers. They can seal the fate of the regime. Not only by participating in the demonstrations, but by organising a general strike in all the vital industries and large corporations.
The regime can afford to wait out the sit-ins and demonstrations for days and weeks, but it cannot last beyond a few hours if workers use strikes as a weapon. Strike on the railways, on public transport, the airports and large industrial companies! Egyptian Workers! On behalf of the rebellious youth, and on behalf of the blood of our martyrs, join the ranks of the revolution, use your power and victory will be ours!
Glory to the martyrs!
Down with the system!
All power to the people!
Victory to the revolution!
Glory to the martyrs! Victory to the revolution!
What is happening today is the largest popular revolution in the history of our country and of the entire Arab world. The sacrifice of our martyrs has built our revolution and we have broken through all the barriers of fear. We will not back down until the criminal 'leaders' and their criminal system is destroyed.
Mubarak's departure is the first step, not the last step of the revolution
The handover of power to a dictatorship under Omar Suleiman, Ahmed Shafiq and other cronies of Mubarak is the continuation of the same system. Omar Suleiman is a friend of Israel and America, spends most of his time between Washington and Tel Aviv and is a servant who is faithful to their interests. Ahmed Shafik is a close friend of Mubarak and his colleague in the tyranny, oppression and plunder imposed on the Egyptian people.
The country's wealth belongs to the people and must return to it
Over the past three decades this tyrannical regime corrupted the country's largest estates to a small handful of business leaders and foreign companies. 100 families own more than 90% of the country's wealth. They monopolize the wealth of the Egyptian people through policies of privatization, looting of power and the alliance with Capital. They have turned the majority of the Egyptian people to the poor, landless and unemployed.
Factories wrecked and sold dirt cheap must go back to the people
We want the nationalization of companies, land and property looted by this bunch. As long as our resources remain in their hands we will not be able to completely get rid of this system. Economic slavery is the other face of political tyranny. We will not be able to cope with unemployment and achieve a fair minimum wage for a decent living without restoring the wealth of the people from this gang.
We will not accept to be guard dogs of America and Israel
This system does not stand alone. Mubarak, as a dictator was a servant and client directly acting for the sake of the interests of America and Israel. Egypt acted as a colony of America, participated directly in the siege of the Palestinian people, made the Suez Canal and Egyptian airspace freezones for warships and fighter jets that destroyed and killed the Iraqi people and sold gas to Israel, dirt cheap, while stifling the Egyptian people by soring prices. Revolution must restore Egypt's independence, dignity and leadership in the region.
The revolution is a popular revolution
This is not a revolution of the elite, political parties or religious groups. Egypt's youth, students, workers and the poor are the owners of this revolution. In recent days a lot of elites, parties and so-called symbols have begun trying to ride the wave of revolution and hijack it from their rightful owners. The only symbols are the martyrs of our revolution and our young people who have been steadfast in the field. We will not allow them to take control of our revolution and claim that they represent us. We will choose to represent ourselves and represent the martyrs who were killed and their blood paid the price for the salvation of the system.
A people's army is the army that protects the revolution
Everyone asks: "Is the army with the people or against them?". The army is not a single block. The interests of soldiers and junior officers are the same as the interests of the masses. But the senior officers are Mubarak’s men, chosen carefully to protect his regime of corruption, wealth and tyranny. It is an integral part of the system.
This army is no longer the people’s army. This army is not the one which defeated the Zionist enemy in October 73. This army is closely associated with America and Israel. Its role is to protect Israel, not the people. Yes we want to win the soldiers for the revolution. But we must not be fooled by slogans that ‘the army is on our side’. The army will either suppress the demonstrations directly, or restructure the police to play this role.
Form revolutionary councils urgently
This revolution has surpassed our greatest expectations. Nobody expected to see these numbers. Nobody expected that Egyptians would be this brave in the face of the police. Nobody can say that we did not force the dictator to retreat. Nobody can say that a transformation did not happen in Middan el Tahrir.
What we need right now is to push for the socio-economic demands as part of our demands, so that the person sitting in his home knows that we are fighting for their rights. We need to organize ourselves into popular committees which elects its higher councils democratically, and from below. These councils must form a higher council which includes delegates of all the tendencies. We must elect a higher council of people who represent us, and in whom we trust. We call for the formation of popular councils in Middan Tahrir, and in all the cities of Egypt.
Call to Egyptian workers to join the ranks of the revolution
The demonstrations and protests have played a key role in igniting and continuing our revolution. Now we need the workers. They can seal the fate of the regime. Not only by participating in the demonstrations, but by organising a general strike in all the vital industries and large corporations.
The regime can afford to wait out the sit-ins and demonstrations for days and weeks, but it cannot last beyond a few hours if workers use strikes as a weapon. Strike on the railways, on public transport, the airports and large industrial companies! Egyptian Workers! On behalf of the rebellious youth, and on behalf of the blood of our martyrs, join the ranks of the revolution, use your power and victory will be ours!
Glory to the martyrs!
Down with the system!
All power to the people!
Victory to the revolution!
DUBLIN CITY COUNCIL VOTES SOLIDARITY WITH EGYPT
Emergency Motion passed at Dublin City Council 8th February, 2011
This Council declares its total solidarity with the heroic democracy protesters of Egypt, and especially with those currently occupying Tahrir (Liberation) Square. It strongly supports their demands: for the immediate removal of the dictator, Hosni Mubarak, from his office as President; for the repeal of the anti-democratic Emergency Law (which since 1981 has given the notorious State Security Forces the right to detain people without charge or trial); for the dismantling of the whole Mubarak regime of murder torture and corruption; for full freedom of the press and genuine democratic elections. This Council resolves to refuse all collaboration with the illegitimate Mubarak Government or its agents .
This Council also calls upon the Irish Government to; a) end all diplomatic relations with the Mubarak/Suleiman regime until such time as a new democratically elected government is established; b) to make a public statement of its support for the democracy movement; c)to vote accordingly at the United Nations and in the EU Council of Ministers and European Parliament; d) to call publicly for Mubarak to be put on trial at the International Court of Human Rights at the Hague.
This motion was proposed by Councillor Brid Smith
People Before Profit Alliance
This Council declares its total solidarity with the heroic democracy protesters of Egypt, and especially with those currently occupying Tahrir (Liberation) Square. It strongly supports their demands: for the immediate removal of the dictator, Hosni Mubarak, from his office as President; for the repeal of the anti-democratic Emergency Law (which since 1981 has given the notorious State Security Forces the right to detain people without charge or trial); for the dismantling of the whole Mubarak regime of murder torture and corruption; for full freedom of the press and genuine democratic elections. This Council resolves to refuse all collaboration with the illegitimate Mubarak Government or its agents .
This Council also calls upon the Irish Government to; a) end all diplomatic relations with the Mubarak/Suleiman regime until such time as a new democratically elected government is established; b) to make a public statement of its support for the democracy movement; c)to vote accordingly at the United Nations and in the EU Council of Ministers and European Parliament; d) to call publicly for Mubarak to be put on trial at the International Court of Human Rights at the Hague.
This motion was proposed by Councillor Brid Smith
People Before Profit Alliance
Thursday, February 03, 2011
Solidarity with the Egyptian Revolution
Solidarity with the Egyptian Revolution
As someone who has often visited Egypt and has many friends in Cairo I appeal to everyone everywhere who reads this blog to do everything they can to mobilise support for the ongoing and embattled Egyptian Revolution. Demonstrate, picket your Egyptian embassy, organise meetings, whatever you can do.
Above all it is necessary to combat the idea that the Egyptian people are divided or that it is just chaos and confusion. What has happened is an organised attack by plainclothes police, paid thugs on behalf of a brutal dictator and his regime to attempt to crush the amazingly heroic uprising of the Egyptian masses. Mubarak must not be given another 6 months to scheme, kill, and shore up his position.
MUBARAK AND HIS REGIME MUST GO NOW! VICTORY TO THE REVOLUTION!
Solidarity Rally in Dublin
The Spire, O’Connell St.
Friday 4 February 4pm-6pm
Followed by
Irish SWP public meeting
Egypt in Revolution
Friday 4 Feb 7pm
Cassidy’s Hotel, Upper O’Connell St.
As someone who has often visited Egypt and has many friends in Cairo I appeal to everyone everywhere who reads this blog to do everything they can to mobilise support for the ongoing and embattled Egyptian Revolution. Demonstrate, picket your Egyptian embassy, organise meetings, whatever you can do.
Above all it is necessary to combat the idea that the Egyptian people are divided or that it is just chaos and confusion. What has happened is an organised attack by plainclothes police, paid thugs on behalf of a brutal dictator and his regime to attempt to crush the amazingly heroic uprising of the Egyptian masses. Mubarak must not be given another 6 months to scheme, kill, and shore up his position.
MUBARAK AND HIS REGIME MUST GO NOW! VICTORY TO THE REVOLUTION!
Solidarity Rally in Dublin
The Spire, O’Connell St.
Friday 4 February 4pm-6pm
Followed by
Irish SWP public meeting
Egypt in Revolution
Friday 4 Feb 7pm
Cassidy’s Hotel, Upper O’Connell St.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Trotsky and the Russian Revolution
First of three articles on Trotsky's contribution to Marxism, published in Socialist Worker (UK)
This article was written before the Tunisian Revolution but is worth noting that what is happening in Tunisia at the moment and the way it is spreading to other North African and Middle Eastern countries is an excellent example of the first stages of the process of 'permanent revolution' theorised by Trotsky and outlined here.
Trotsky and the Russian Revolution.
Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) was murdered seventy years ago by an agent of Stalin who drove an ice pick into his head. Why write about him now? Because he was one of the greatest revolutionaries of the twentieth century and because, after the death of Marx, it was he, together with Lenin, who did most to develop Marxist ideas.
Trotsky’s practical revolutionary achievements were enormous. At the age of 26 he emerged as the leader of the Russian Revolution of 1905, when he was elected President of the St Petersburg Workers’ Council (Soviet). Then in 1917, once again president of the Soviet, he organised the October Insurrection which established workers’ power in Russia.
After that he became chief organiser of the five million strong Red Army which defended the Revolution against the counter revolutionary White armies backed by Western imperialism. Finally he led the Left Opposition in Russia which tried, unsuccessfully to resist the rise of Stalin and defend workers’ democracy and the original ideals of the Revolution.
Trotsky not only led the Russian Revolution in action, he was also, again with Lenin, Its main political inspirer and thinker. It was he who, as early, as 1905 most clearly foresaw the course the revolution was going to take.
At the time all Russian socialists and radicals thought that Tsarist Russia was heading for revolution, but they almost all thought it would just be a ‘bourgeois democratic revolution’ like the French Revolution of 1789. That is they thought it would overthrow the Tsar and establish a normal capitalist democracy like in Western Europe, and that only after that would the working class begin the struggle for socialism.
The more moderate wing of the Russian socialist movement, the Mensheviks, thought this meant the middle class would lead the revolution and the working class should limit itself to supporting them.
The revolutionary wing, the Bolsheviks led by Lenin, argued the middle class was too conservative to lead the movement and it would be up to the working class to make the revolution but they accepted the idea that Russia was too economically backward to move to socialism, particularly as the working class were only a minority of the population, compared with the vast majority of peasants.
Trotsky agreed with Lenin that the working class not the middle class would make the revolution. However, he argued that in doing so the logic of the struggle would lead to the establishment of workers power and to breaking with capitalism. To the objection that this would be blocked by the peasants he maintained that the peasants, even though they were the majority, would support the urban working class IF the workers gave a strong enough lead.
To the argument that Russia was not sufficiently economically developed to sustain socialism, Trotsky said this was true if you looked at Russia in isolation, but the Russian Revolution should be seen as the first breakthrough in a wave of international revolution. Workers power in Russia would lead to workers power in Germany and elsewhere in Europe where the level of industrialisation was high enough to make the transition to socialism.
Trotsky’s idea became known as the theory of Permanent Revolution. This didn’t mean revolution going on forever, but revolution not stopping at any intermediate stage until it had achieved its ultimate goal of world revolution.
In 1917 Trotsky was proved right – the workers, not the middle class, brought down the Tsar in February and moved on to take power themselves in October. Lenin came round to Trotsky’s view and won over the Bolshevik Party in April. Trotsky then joined the Bolsheviks and they united to lead the Revolution and to found the Communist International with the aim of spreading the Revolution internationally.
The theory of permanent revolution had significance way beyond Russia. It meant that the working class in colonial and third world countries where it was still a minority did not have to sit back and wait for socialism in Europe but could take the lead in fighting for their own workers revolutions.
Even today when modern capitalism has spread across most of the globe permanent revolution is still important in dictatorships like Egypt or oppressed countries like Palestine, because it says that in these countries the movement should not limit itself to achieving democracy or national freedom, or to methods of struggle acceptable to the middle class . Rather it argues that revolutionary socialists and the working class should take the lead in the struggle and try to transform it into international workers revolution. This is particularly relevant in the Middle East where it is the only way Palestine can really become free.
This article was written before the Tunisian Revolution but is worth noting that what is happening in Tunisia at the moment and the way it is spreading to other North African and Middle Eastern countries is an excellent example of the first stages of the process of 'permanent revolution' theorised by Trotsky and outlined here.
Trotsky and the Russian Revolution.
Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) was murdered seventy years ago by an agent of Stalin who drove an ice pick into his head. Why write about him now? Because he was one of the greatest revolutionaries of the twentieth century and because, after the death of Marx, it was he, together with Lenin, who did most to develop Marxist ideas.
Trotsky’s practical revolutionary achievements were enormous. At the age of 26 he emerged as the leader of the Russian Revolution of 1905, when he was elected President of the St Petersburg Workers’ Council (Soviet). Then in 1917, once again president of the Soviet, he organised the October Insurrection which established workers’ power in Russia.
After that he became chief organiser of the five million strong Red Army which defended the Revolution against the counter revolutionary White armies backed by Western imperialism. Finally he led the Left Opposition in Russia which tried, unsuccessfully to resist the rise of Stalin and defend workers’ democracy and the original ideals of the Revolution.
Trotsky not only led the Russian Revolution in action, he was also, again with Lenin, Its main political inspirer and thinker. It was he who, as early, as 1905 most clearly foresaw the course the revolution was going to take.
At the time all Russian socialists and radicals thought that Tsarist Russia was heading for revolution, but they almost all thought it would just be a ‘bourgeois democratic revolution’ like the French Revolution of 1789. That is they thought it would overthrow the Tsar and establish a normal capitalist democracy like in Western Europe, and that only after that would the working class begin the struggle for socialism.
The more moderate wing of the Russian socialist movement, the Mensheviks, thought this meant the middle class would lead the revolution and the working class should limit itself to supporting them.
The revolutionary wing, the Bolsheviks led by Lenin, argued the middle class was too conservative to lead the movement and it would be up to the working class to make the revolution but they accepted the idea that Russia was too economically backward to move to socialism, particularly as the working class were only a minority of the population, compared with the vast majority of peasants.
Trotsky agreed with Lenin that the working class not the middle class would make the revolution. However, he argued that in doing so the logic of the struggle would lead to the establishment of workers power and to breaking with capitalism. To the objection that this would be blocked by the peasants he maintained that the peasants, even though they were the majority, would support the urban working class IF the workers gave a strong enough lead.
To the argument that Russia was not sufficiently economically developed to sustain socialism, Trotsky said this was true if you looked at Russia in isolation, but the Russian Revolution should be seen as the first breakthrough in a wave of international revolution. Workers power in Russia would lead to workers power in Germany and elsewhere in Europe where the level of industrialisation was high enough to make the transition to socialism.
Trotsky’s idea became known as the theory of Permanent Revolution. This didn’t mean revolution going on forever, but revolution not stopping at any intermediate stage until it had achieved its ultimate goal of world revolution.
In 1917 Trotsky was proved right – the workers, not the middle class, brought down the Tsar in February and moved on to take power themselves in October. Lenin came round to Trotsky’s view and won over the Bolshevik Party in April. Trotsky then joined the Bolsheviks and they united to lead the Revolution and to found the Communist International with the aim of spreading the Revolution internationally.
The theory of permanent revolution had significance way beyond Russia. It meant that the working class in colonial and third world countries where it was still a minority did not have to sit back and wait for socialism in Europe but could take the lead in fighting for their own workers revolutions.
Even today when modern capitalism has spread across most of the globe permanent revolution is still important in dictatorships like Egypt or oppressed countries like Palestine, because it says that in these countries the movement should not limit itself to achieving democracy or national freedom, or to methods of struggle acceptable to the middle class . Rather it argues that revolutionary socialists and the working class should take the lead in the struggle and try to transform it into international workers revolution. This is particularly relevant in the Middle East where it is the only way Palestine can really become free.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
The Politics of Culture
The Politics of Culture
This article was originally published in Socialist Worker (Ireland) No.323
Everywhere in contemporary society there is a division between what is known as ‘high culture’ and ‘popular culture’. High culture refers to things like opera, ballet, classical music, Shakespeare, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Renaissance and modernist art, and Ancient Greek drama; popular culture to pop music, soap operas, TV game shows, romantic fiction, whodunits and Hollywood movies.
As can be seen by these examples the division is international and cuts across different media, art forms and genres. Television features both high and popular culture (if not in equal proportions), films divide into the art house movies of Bergman or Fellini and the blockbusters of Stephen Spielberg. Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and The Sound of Music are both dramas with songs, but we think of the former as an opera and the latter as a musical.
The division is not hard and fast; there are no border guards or checkpoints, and intermediate cases and crossovers abound. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings began somewhere on the fringes of high culture, but migrated into popular culture, especially with the production of the films. Where does jazz fit in, and which jazz? Are we talking about the ‘jazz’ of Bing Crosby or Louis Armstrong or Miles Davis? Nevertheless the division is real.
It can be thought of in various ways: as a question of the taste of minorities versus the taste of the majority (though you can definitely have minority or niche popular culture like grunge music or heavy metal); or as a matter of quality – high culture being seen as better than, superior to, popular culture (or requiring more education or more focused attention to be appreciated). However at bottom it reflects and is produced by the class divisions in society, essentially the division between the capitalist class or bourgeoisie and the working class or proletariat.
It is the profound differences between the life conditions, experiences and resources of the different classes that lie at the root of the split in the culture. Crude material factors – wealth, income, housing conditions, conditions at work etc. – play a big role here impacting directly on such things as numbers of books in the home and amount of leisure time, but they are by no means the whole story. Upper class people are trained from childhood in their families and their schools to be confident and step forward as leaders. Working class people are conditioned from birth to follow orders and lack confidence. It makes a huge difference as to how you feel when you step into a museum, art gallery or theatre or what you want when you open a book or turn on the TV.
Of course it is important not to be mechanical about this. There is no rule stopping a working class person reading Ulysses , listening to Bach or visiting the National Gallery, and many individual working class people do just that. Similarly there are many in the upper classes (the British Queen among them) who are cultural philistines and who prefer Coronation St. to Shakespeare any day. Then there is the complicating factor that between the capitalist class and the working class lie a series of hierarchically structured intermediate layers, commonly referred to as the middle classes , who range culturally from intellectual ‘art lover’ types to avid devotees of popular culture , while there are certainly cultural productions tailored specifically for the genteel middle classes – Gilbert and Sullivan light opera, aga sagas and Inspector Morse in the TV etc.
Overall though it is the basic class division in our society that conditions people’s taste – for what it is worth the radical French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu has proved this statistically – and the division in the arts and entertainment is part of a larger division which runs through the culture in its widest sense, including sport (polo, show jumping, rugby versus football, snooker and boxing), food (fine dining versus fast food), clothing (haute couture versus the high street), language (different class accents) and so on.
What attitude should socialists take to this class cultural divide? Several responses are possible. One would be simply to denounce high culture as irredeemably bourgeois and uncritically support popular culture as the culture of the working class. There are major problems with this: a) popular culture may be consumed by the working class, but it is overwhelmingly controlled and produced by the bourgeoisie and is mostly of very low quality - the bourgeoisie has no interest in raising the cultural or intellectual level of the working class; b) it can very easily fall into or merge with right-wing anti-intellectual populism as typified by The Sun.
Another response is the relativist view, widespread in university Media and Cultural Studies departments, that it is wrong (and reactionary) to make judgements of cultural or artistic quality, and all that counts is ideological analysis. This misses the fact that under capitalism working class people are not only economically exploited but also culturally (educationally, intellectually, emotionally etc) oppressed and they, and socialists, benefit from exposure to high quality art, even if it is bourgeois, because it expands their understanding of the world.
A more radical view rejects the dominant high culture as reactionary and counterposes to it, not mass popular culture but either ‘authentic’ working class ‘folk’ culture or ‘authentic’ avant-garde revolutionary culture, which takes a politically correct line – in other words not Shakespeare, Rembrandt or Tolstoy but either The Blackleg Miner or The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists or The Clash or, perhaps, Jean Luc Godard. In my view this is a preferable position to the previous two but suffers from narrowness. It leaves the working class cut off from many of the greatest cultural achievements of mankind. For, as Leon Trotsky pointed out during the Russian Revolution, the working class as an exploited and oppressed class lacks the opportunity under capitalism (or immediately after its overthrow) to develop an all-round autonomous working class culture.
The classical Marxist position, defended by Lenin and Trotsky, was that the best of bourgeois, and all past, culture should not be rejected by the working class but, as far as possible under capitalism, be assimilated by it, and taken over and preserved under socialism. As Trotsky put it in Class and Art Shakespeare will still speak to us when, ‘Capital will have become merely an historical document, together with the program of our party. But at present we do not yet intend to put Shakespeare, Byron, Pushkin in the archives, and we will continue to recommend them to the workers’. The healing of the split in culture, the achievement of a diverse but unified classless culture, would however be possible only in a classless socialist society.
To this standpoint, which I share, I would make two additions. Changed conditions in the last century have made it possible for some elements in popular culture, coming up from below, to achieve the quality, intensity and complexity associated with the best of high culture. This happens mainly in music, the art form closest to the people, but sometimes in other forms as well. My personal nominations would include Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Shane McGowan, Charlie Chaplin and Tracey Emin.
Also every major people’s movement develops, as it were, its cultural wing and accompaniment. The Irish national struggle is an obvious example with WB Teats, Jack Yeats, Synge, O’Casey etc. But think also of the black movement in the US with Paul Robeson, Miles Davis, Archie Shepp, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Nina Simone and many others, or the Russian Revolution with Mayakovsky, Tatlin, Malevitch, Rodchenko, Eisenstein, Vertov and so on. This has a necessary and positive role to play in helping to bring social change and needs to be encouraged by socialists, not to replace or dispense with traditional art or ‘high culture’ but in addition to it.
John Molyneux
This article was originally published in Socialist Worker (Ireland) No.323
Everywhere in contemporary society there is a division between what is known as ‘high culture’ and ‘popular culture’. High culture refers to things like opera, ballet, classical music, Shakespeare, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Renaissance and modernist art, and Ancient Greek drama; popular culture to pop music, soap operas, TV game shows, romantic fiction, whodunits and Hollywood movies.
As can be seen by these examples the division is international and cuts across different media, art forms and genres. Television features both high and popular culture (if not in equal proportions), films divide into the art house movies of Bergman or Fellini and the blockbusters of Stephen Spielberg. Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and The Sound of Music are both dramas with songs, but we think of the former as an opera and the latter as a musical.
The division is not hard and fast; there are no border guards or checkpoints, and intermediate cases and crossovers abound. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings began somewhere on the fringes of high culture, but migrated into popular culture, especially with the production of the films. Where does jazz fit in, and which jazz? Are we talking about the ‘jazz’ of Bing Crosby or Louis Armstrong or Miles Davis? Nevertheless the division is real.
It can be thought of in various ways: as a question of the taste of minorities versus the taste of the majority (though you can definitely have minority or niche popular culture like grunge music or heavy metal); or as a matter of quality – high culture being seen as better than, superior to, popular culture (or requiring more education or more focused attention to be appreciated). However at bottom it reflects and is produced by the class divisions in society, essentially the division between the capitalist class or bourgeoisie and the working class or proletariat.
It is the profound differences between the life conditions, experiences and resources of the different classes that lie at the root of the split in the culture. Crude material factors – wealth, income, housing conditions, conditions at work etc. – play a big role here impacting directly on such things as numbers of books in the home and amount of leisure time, but they are by no means the whole story. Upper class people are trained from childhood in their families and their schools to be confident and step forward as leaders. Working class people are conditioned from birth to follow orders and lack confidence. It makes a huge difference as to how you feel when you step into a museum, art gallery or theatre or what you want when you open a book or turn on the TV.
Of course it is important not to be mechanical about this. There is no rule stopping a working class person reading Ulysses , listening to Bach or visiting the National Gallery, and many individual working class people do just that. Similarly there are many in the upper classes (the British Queen among them) who are cultural philistines and who prefer Coronation St. to Shakespeare any day. Then there is the complicating factor that between the capitalist class and the working class lie a series of hierarchically structured intermediate layers, commonly referred to as the middle classes , who range culturally from intellectual ‘art lover’ types to avid devotees of popular culture , while there are certainly cultural productions tailored specifically for the genteel middle classes – Gilbert and Sullivan light opera, aga sagas and Inspector Morse in the TV etc.
Overall though it is the basic class division in our society that conditions people’s taste – for what it is worth the radical French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu has proved this statistically – and the division in the arts and entertainment is part of a larger division which runs through the culture in its widest sense, including sport (polo, show jumping, rugby versus football, snooker and boxing), food (fine dining versus fast food), clothing (haute couture versus the high street), language (different class accents) and so on.
What attitude should socialists take to this class cultural divide? Several responses are possible. One would be simply to denounce high culture as irredeemably bourgeois and uncritically support popular culture as the culture of the working class. There are major problems with this: a) popular culture may be consumed by the working class, but it is overwhelmingly controlled and produced by the bourgeoisie and is mostly of very low quality - the bourgeoisie has no interest in raising the cultural or intellectual level of the working class; b) it can very easily fall into or merge with right-wing anti-intellectual populism as typified by The Sun.
Another response is the relativist view, widespread in university Media and Cultural Studies departments, that it is wrong (and reactionary) to make judgements of cultural or artistic quality, and all that counts is ideological analysis. This misses the fact that under capitalism working class people are not only economically exploited but also culturally (educationally, intellectually, emotionally etc) oppressed and they, and socialists, benefit from exposure to high quality art, even if it is bourgeois, because it expands their understanding of the world.
A more radical view rejects the dominant high culture as reactionary and counterposes to it, not mass popular culture but either ‘authentic’ working class ‘folk’ culture or ‘authentic’ avant-garde revolutionary culture, which takes a politically correct line – in other words not Shakespeare, Rembrandt or Tolstoy but either The Blackleg Miner or The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists or The Clash or, perhaps, Jean Luc Godard. In my view this is a preferable position to the previous two but suffers from narrowness. It leaves the working class cut off from many of the greatest cultural achievements of mankind. For, as Leon Trotsky pointed out during the Russian Revolution, the working class as an exploited and oppressed class lacks the opportunity under capitalism (or immediately after its overthrow) to develop an all-round autonomous working class culture.
The classical Marxist position, defended by Lenin and Trotsky, was that the best of bourgeois, and all past, culture should not be rejected by the working class but, as far as possible under capitalism, be assimilated by it, and taken over and preserved under socialism. As Trotsky put it in Class and Art Shakespeare will still speak to us when, ‘Capital will have become merely an historical document, together with the program of our party. But at present we do not yet intend to put Shakespeare, Byron, Pushkin in the archives, and we will continue to recommend them to the workers’. The healing of the split in culture, the achievement of a diverse but unified classless culture, would however be possible only in a classless socialist society.
To this standpoint, which I share, I would make two additions. Changed conditions in the last century have made it possible for some elements in popular culture, coming up from below, to achieve the quality, intensity and complexity associated with the best of high culture. This happens mainly in music, the art form closest to the people, but sometimes in other forms as well. My personal nominations would include Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Shane McGowan, Charlie Chaplin and Tracey Emin.
Also every major people’s movement develops, as it were, its cultural wing and accompaniment. The Irish national struggle is an obvious example with WB Teats, Jack Yeats, Synge, O’Casey etc. But think also of the black movement in the US with Paul Robeson, Miles Davis, Archie Shepp, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Nina Simone and many others, or the Russian Revolution with Mayakovsky, Tatlin, Malevitch, Rodchenko, Eisenstein, Vertov and so on. This has a necessary and positive role to play in helping to bring social change and needs to be encouraged by socialists, not to replace or dispense with traditional art or ‘high culture’ but in addition to it.
John Molyneux
Monday, December 20, 2010
Reflections on Adorno on Beckett
One of the benefits of moving to Dublin from Portsmouth, where I lived and worked for nearly forty years, is the accessibility of top class theatre. Since my arrival in August I have seen productions of O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars (at the Abbey), Miller’s Death of a Salesman (at The Gate), Euripides’ Medea (at The Samuel Beckett), Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (at Bewley’s), Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkmann ( at The Abbey) and two Samuel Beckett’s, Endgame (at The Gate) and Happy Days (at The Project Arts Centre). Seeing the Becketts led me, on the recommendation of a friend, to read T.W. Adorno’s essay ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’ New German Critique, No. 26, Critical Theory and Modernity (Spring - Summer,1982), pp. 119-150.
Adorno’s merit in my eyes is that he defended Beckett (and Joyce and modernism) against Lukacs’ fundamentally conservative condemnation. Nevertheless I found myself in serious disagreement with his interpretation of, and response to, Endgame.
Adorno was plunged into deep melancholy despair by what Victor Serge called the ‘midnight in the century’ i.e. the twin triumphs of Hitler and Stalin, combined, in Adorno’s case, with his view of the twentieth century culture industry as a system of totalitarian control and domination which more or less excluded the possibility of significant resistance. It is tempting to describe Adorno’s attitude as an extreme pessimism, but its main characteristic is not so much gloominess about the future prospects of humanity as a determined negativity about the present, a refusal to countenance the existence of positive developments either in the present system or in rebellion against it. In 1947 he wrote:
Adorno focused much of his miserabilism on the holocaust; witness his famous declaration that ‘there can be no lyric poetry after Auschwitz’. This particular claim has of course been refuted in practice many times over but I also think his general gloom was, though understandable, unjustified, not because the most terrible disasters had not occurred or because the most terrible crimes had not been committed (Auschwitz, the Gulag, the Russian Front, Hiroshima and Nagasaki etc. etc,) but because the situation was still contradictory. The Nazis had been defeated; there had been the resistance movements in Italy, France, Greece, the Balkans, and elsewhere in Europe; India was gaining its independence; China was on the road to revolution, and so on.
In my opinion the roots of Adorno’s negativism lay not so much in the horrors of the holocaust as in his isolated elitism which cut him off, and made him unable to see or respond to any positive developments or initiatives, cultural or political, coming up from below. Adorno was a ‘Marxist’ of sorts, but at no point in his life did he have any engagement with the workers’ movement, or flesh and blood workers in struggle [unlike Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Gramsci, etc]. When he encountered revolting students in his Institute in the sixties he called the police. On the cultural front his elitist tunnel vision was epitomised by his notorious denunciation of jazz. In Adorno’s defence it is sometimes claimed that he was using ‘jazz’ as a general term for what today would be called ‘pop music’ but what is to be said of someone who pronounces general anathemas on contemporary music as though Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Bessie Smith, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk etc did not exist. He claimed that
But were Billie Holiday, Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly really the same as Al Jolson,Stepin Fetchit and Fred Astaire?
In any event, Adorno evidently believed that in Samuel Beckett he had found a kindred spirit. And here is the root of my disagreement. This was not at all my concrete response to the two productions I have just seen, which I found positively inspiring and in a strange but real way uplifting1. Nor is it my considered reading of Beckett as a whole. Beckett is not about surrendering to pessimism and negativity but looking into the abyss and defying it. In this respect Beckett stands in the tradition of the Shakespeare of King Lear, of Rembrandt’s last self portraits and Goya’s Black paintings. Consider three of Beckett’s endings. The Unnamable ends as follows
Waiting for Godot ends:
And then the behaviour of Clov at the end of Endgame which has to be described rather than quoted. After their long tense (and oppressive) relationship Hamm tells Clov he doesn’t need him any more and Clov replies ‘I’ll leave you’. Clov exits and returns ‘Enter Clov, dressed for the road. Panama hat, tweed coat, raincoat over his arm, umbrella, bag. He halts by the door and stands there, impassive and motionless, his eyes fixed on Hamm, till the end.’ Will Clov leave or remain? It is left an open question.
Three endings, three Beckettian variations on Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be?’ question. One ultimately affirmative answer ‘I’ll go on’, and two where the question is batted to the audience to answer for itself. This is challenging, but it is not despair or nihilism.
In contrasting Beckett’s attitude and stance to Adorno’s (and to others who attribute nihilism to him) it is worth noting that during the war Beckett joined the French Resistance and did important and dangerous work as a courier and translator until his unit was betrayed to the Gestapo by a double agent, whereupon he and his partner had to flee (on foot, hiding in barns etc) to a village in unoccupied France where he continued to aid the Maquis in the mountains. For this he was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille de la Resistance by the French Government. He thus engaged in more important, more serious and certainly more dangerous practical anti-fascist work than Adorno or the rest of the Frankfurt School put together.
Adorno’s projection of his own attitude onto Beckett results in a number of evidently false claims and misreading. For example he writes:
This sounds impressive - ‘completed reification of the world’ – but the moment it is actually thought about is clearly an exaggeration to the point of being definitely untrue. A world in which there is no remainder of what was not made by humans, in which there is no more nature, is manifestly impossible, and impossible to present in a play. Even if there were the most destructive imaginable nuclear war (and it is possible to think of Endgame as being set in such a world, with Hamm and Clov as the last survivors), the one thing that would not be abolished is ‘nature’, just as the one thing climate change does NOT threaten is the survival of the planet. Having written these lines I then realised that in the play Hamm calls it an exaggeration too.
Adorno says:
But think for a moment about the state of the world when Endgame was written (it was first performed 3 April 1957): the statements by both Clov and Hamm were quite literally true. On the one hand there were ‘so many terrible things’ – the possibility of nuclear war, starvation in the Third World , the crushing in blood of the Hungarian Revolution, Suez, the war in Algeria and so on. On the other hand ‘there were not so many now’ compared to the recent past – the Second World War was over, the Nazis had been defeated, France was no longer occupied, the standard of living of working class people in Europe was rising etc. Why does Clov and Hamm’s realistic assessment of the situation signify hope creeping out of the world and back into death?
Particularly striking is the difficulty Adorno gets into over humour. Beckett is funny, very funny. Adorno who is never funny, appears not to approve of humour. He writes:
And
Again one has to say this simply isn’t true. Humour has not become aesthetically obsolete and repulsive. I don’t know about Gargantua but it is clearly possible to laugh at/with Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Joyce, Chaplin, Keating, Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, Bill Hicks and The Producers, to offer a fairly random list. And things don’t have to be harmless to be laughed as most of those examples from the Fool in Lear down to Mel Brooks demonstrate. And the laughter inspired by Beckett doesn’t suffocate the laughter.
When, at the start of Happy Days, Winnie waking, buried up to her waste in a pit of sand, proclaims ‘Another heavenly day!’ it is wonderfully funny. It is obviously ironically funny because she is half buried in sand, but, at the same time, it is happily funny because there are still ‘heavenly days’ (with bright sunshine, blue skies etc) and this may well be going to be one. This capacity to write lines that are true in two opposite senses simultaneously, is as Stephen Spender has observed2, a key feature of Beckett’s art, and to grasp only the negative, bitter side and never the affirmative side, which is what Adorno does, is to misread him.
When Hamm at the start of Endgame asks ‘Can there be misery - loftier than mine?’ it is very funny. He could be parodying Adorno, who specialised in lofty misery. And, after all, what about the trousers?
Adorno is also wide of the mark when he attributes ‘meaninglessness’ and ‘incomprehensibility’ to Endgame.
The interpretation of Endgame therefore cannot chase the chimera of expressing its meaning with the help of philosophical mediation. Understanding it can mean nothing other than understanding its incomprehensibility, or concretely reconstructing its meaning structure - that it has none.
Adorno claims textual support:
Not meaning anything becomes the only meaning. The mortal fear of the
dramatic figures, if not of the parodied drama itself, is the distortedly comical fear that they could mean something or other:
HAMM: We're not beginning to... to... mean something?
CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that's a good one!
But again Adorno is misreading. There is no ‘mortal’ fear here, nor is it ‘distortedly comical’. It’s a joke and the joke is funny for the same reason ‘Another heavenly day!’ is funny: it contains the possibility of opposite meanings, resigned irony (not fear) and positive affirmation or the glimmer of hope of positive affirmation.
The meaning of meaninglessness is a philosophical conundrum and the notion of the interpretation of the meaning of any work art, especially a great one, is highly problematic. I will not explore either question here except to say that any ‘interpretation’, however accurate, is almost certain to be ‘less’ than the art work itself i.e. to express only some of the work’s ‘meaning’ , which really is the work as a whole, and to express it less well (less precisely, less powerfully etc.) Nevertheless I want to say that Endgame, and this goes for Beckett as a whole, is neither incomprehensible nor meaningless. On the contrary it is not difficult to follow, the language is simple and packed with meaning, or rather multiple meanings, and as for the play as a whole some, not all, of its meaning can be grasped and expressed fairly straightforwardly.
Endgame (and Beckett’s work as a whole) is a study in and of alienation. The most profound diagnosis of alienation was made by Marx 166 years ago in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Marx’s analysis, expressed as briefly as possible, was that capitalism was based on the alienated labour of working people. The alienation of labour was so significant because it is through labour that the human race created itself and continues to create itself. As a result of the alienation of labour people come to be dominated by the products of their own work which form a hostile world standing over and against them. They also become estranged from themselves, their own essential human nature (as creative makers), from other people (because labour is social labour and mediates the relationship between people), and from nature (because labour is the mediation between human’s and nature.)
Endgame is an exploration of the human condition in this alien world. I do not mean by this that Beckett had read or was influenced by Marx (I don’t know if he was or not) but he experienced alienation and its effects – we all do. The threat of nuclear war, which haunted the imagination of both the general public and many artists in this period, was (and is) an extreme manifestation of alienation, of the human race being threatened with annihilation by the products of its own hands and brains. Endgame at least alludes to such a catastrophe, at least hints that it may have happened: the empty corpsed world seen through the telescope, the seeds that will never sprout.
Alienated labour cripples us physically and spiritually, reduces us as human beings, as Hamm and Clov, Nagg and Nell are crippled and reduced. Alienation distorts all human relations including the most intimate; it separates us from our fellows and sets us against each other. The relationships presented in Endgame between Hamm and Clov, as master and servant, and Nagg and Nell, are clinical dissections of alienated relations. Think of Nell and Nagg in their bins trying to kiss each other but unable to reach.
But plumbing the depths of alienation and laying them bare, as Beckett does and Marx did, does not at all signify surrender or hopelessness. Indeed presenting them to the world in a work of art is in a sense already an act of resistance. And it matters that buried within Endgame are two tragic love stories. When Nell first emerges from her bin her first words to Nagg are ‘What is it, my pet? (Pause) Time for love?’ and a subterranean elegiac note of memory of their past love, in the Ardennes, at Lake Como, permeates their exchanges. Early in the play there is this dialogue between Hamm and Clov:
Then at the end, when Clov is on the point of leaving, Hamm asks him to say something before he goes, ‘ A few words ... from your heart’ and, amazingly, Clov responds:
It is because I believe that this affirmation of resistance (‘I’ll go on’) and affirmation of humanity, in spite of everything, is as much integral to Beckett as all the well justified bleakness, that I disagree so strongly with Adorno.
Notes:
1'After seeing Happy Days I watched the audience leaving the auditorium and was struck by how many were smiling.
2‘Samuel Beckett's theme is the very Irish one in this century: the identity of opposites [my emphasis –JM], a theme with which Yeats made so much play in his idea of the "Antinomes," and which is implicit in Joyce, where the subjective view of the world merges into its opposites, the objective and universal.’ Stephen Spender, ‘Lifelong Suffocation’, New York Times , 1958, http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/reviews/beckett-unnamable.html.
Spender calls this an Irish theme but of course ‘the identity of opposites’ is a key idea in the Hegelian, and Marxist, dialectic, discussed, incidentally, by Lenin who preferred the term ‘unity of opposites’.
John Molyneux
10 December 2010
Adorno’s merit in my eyes is that he defended Beckett (and Joyce and modernism) against Lukacs’ fundamentally conservative condemnation. Nevertheless I found myself in serious disagreement with his interpretation of, and response to, Endgame.
Adorno was plunged into deep melancholy despair by what Victor Serge called the ‘midnight in the century’ i.e. the twin triumphs of Hitler and Stalin, combined, in Adorno’s case, with his view of the twentieth century culture industry as a system of totalitarian control and domination which more or less excluded the possibility of significant resistance. It is tempting to describe Adorno’s attitude as an extreme pessimism, but its main characteristic is not so much gloominess about the future prospects of humanity as a determined negativity about the present, a refusal to countenance the existence of positive developments either in the present system or in rebellion against it. In 1947 he wrote:
'In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.'
Dialectic of Enlightenment, Verso ed. London 1979 p.3.
Adorno focused much of his miserabilism on the holocaust; witness his famous declaration that ‘there can be no lyric poetry after Auschwitz’. This particular claim has of course been refuted in practice many times over but I also think his general gloom was, though understandable, unjustified, not because the most terrible disasters had not occurred or because the most terrible crimes had not been committed (Auschwitz, the Gulag, the Russian Front, Hiroshima and Nagasaki etc. etc,) but because the situation was still contradictory. The Nazis had been defeated; there had been the resistance movements in Italy, France, Greece, the Balkans, and elsewhere in Europe; India was gaining its independence; China was on the road to revolution, and so on.
In my opinion the roots of Adorno’s negativism lay not so much in the horrors of the holocaust as in his isolated elitism which cut him off, and made him unable to see or respond to any positive developments or initiatives, cultural or political, coming up from below. Adorno was a ‘Marxist’ of sorts, but at no point in his life did he have any engagement with the workers’ movement, or flesh and blood workers in struggle [unlike Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Gramsci, etc]. When he encountered revolting students in his Institute in the sixties he called the police. On the cultural front his elitist tunnel vision was epitomised by his notorious denunciation of jazz. In Adorno’s defence it is sometimes claimed that he was using ‘jazz’ as a general term for what today would be called ‘pop music’ but what is to be said of someone who pronounces general anathemas on contemporary music as though Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Bessie Smith, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk etc did not exist. He claimed that
...culture now impresses the same stamp on everything. Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm
But were Billie Holiday, Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly really the same as Al Jolson,Stepin Fetchit and Fred Astaire?
In any event, Adorno evidently believed that in Samuel Beckett he had found a kindred spirit. And here is the root of my disagreement. This was not at all my concrete response to the two productions I have just seen, which I found positively inspiring and in a strange but real way uplifting1. Nor is it my considered reading of Beckett as a whole. Beckett is not about surrendering to pessimism and negativity but looking into the abyss and defying it. In this respect Beckett stands in the tradition of the Shakespeare of King Lear, of Rembrandt’s last self portraits and Goya’s Black paintings. Consider three of Beckett’s endings. The Unnamable ends as follows
Perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
Waiting for Godot ends:
ESTRAGON: Well? Shall we go?
VLADIMIR: Pull on your trousers
ESTRAGON: What?
VLADIMIR: Pull on your trousers
ESTRAGON: You want me to pull off my trousers?
VLADIMIR: Pull ON your trousers
ESTRAGON: (realising his trousers are down). True
He pulls up his trousers
VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go?
ESTRAGON: Yes, let's go.
They do not move.
And then the behaviour of Clov at the end of Endgame which has to be described rather than quoted. After their long tense (and oppressive) relationship Hamm tells Clov he doesn’t need him any more and Clov replies ‘I’ll leave you’. Clov exits and returns ‘Enter Clov, dressed for the road. Panama hat, tweed coat, raincoat over his arm, umbrella, bag. He halts by the door and stands there, impassive and motionless, his eyes fixed on Hamm, till the end.’ Will Clov leave or remain? It is left an open question.
Three endings, three Beckettian variations on Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be?’ question. One ultimately affirmative answer ‘I’ll go on’, and two where the question is batted to the audience to answer for itself. This is challenging, but it is not despair or nihilism.
In contrasting Beckett’s attitude and stance to Adorno’s (and to others who attribute nihilism to him) it is worth noting that during the war Beckett joined the French Resistance and did important and dangerous work as a courier and translator until his unit was betrayed to the Gestapo by a double agent, whereupon he and his partner had to flee (on foot, hiding in barns etc) to a village in unoccupied France where he continued to aid the Maquis in the mountains. For this he was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille de la Resistance by the French Government. He thus engaged in more important, more serious and certainly more dangerous practical anti-fascist work than Adorno or the rest of the Frankfurt School put together.
Adorno’s projection of his own attitude onto Beckett results in a number of evidently false claims and misreading. For example he writes:
The condition presented in the play [Endgame] is nothing other than that in which "there's no more nature." Indistinguishable is the phase of completed reification of the world, which leaves no remainder of what was not made by humans; it is permanent catastrophe, along with a catastrophic event caused by humans themselves, in which nature has been extinguished and nothing grows any longer.
This sounds impressive - ‘completed reification of the world’ – but the moment it is actually thought about is clearly an exaggeration to the point of being definitely untrue. A world in which there is no remainder of what was not made by humans, in which there is no more nature, is manifestly impossible, and impossible to present in a play. Even if there were the most destructive imaginable nuclear war (and it is possible to think of Endgame as being set in such a world, with Hamm and Clov as the last survivors), the one thing that would not be abolished is ‘nature’, just as the one thing climate change does NOT threaten is the survival of the planet. Having written these lines I then realised that in the play Hamm calls it an exaggeration too.
HAMM: Nature has forgotten us
CLOV: There's no more nature
HAMM: No more nature! You exaggerate.
CLOV: in the vicinity
HAMM: But we breathe, we change! We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom! Our ideals!
CLOV: Then she hasn't forgotten us
HAMM: But you say there is none
CLOV : (sadly) No one that ever lived ever thought so crooked as we.
Adorno says:
Hope creeps out of a world in which it is no more conserved than pap and pralines, and back where it came from, back into death. From it, the play derives its only consolation, a stoic one:
CLOV: There are so many terrible things now.
HAMM: No, no, there are not so many now.
But think for a moment about the state of the world when Endgame was written (it was first performed 3 April 1957): the statements by both Clov and Hamm were quite literally true. On the one hand there were ‘so many terrible things’ – the possibility of nuclear war, starvation in the Third World , the crushing in blood of the Hungarian Revolution, Suez, the war in Algeria and so on. On the other hand ‘there were not so many now’ compared to the recent past – the Second World War was over, the Nazis had been defeated, France was no longer occupied, the standard of living of working class people in Europe was rising etc. Why does Clov and Hamm’s realistic assessment of the situation signify hope creeping out of the world and back into death?
Particularly striking is the difficulty Adorno gets into over humour. Beckett is funny, very funny. Adorno who is never funny, appears not to approve of humour. He writes:
Humour itself has become foolish, ridiculous - who could still laugh at basic comic texts like Don Quixote or Gargantua - and Beckett carries out the verdict on humour. The jokes of the damaged people are themselves damaged. They no longer reach anybody
And
Psychoanalysis explains clownish humour as a regression back to a primordial ontogenetic level, and Beckett's regressive play descends to that level. But the laughter it inspires ought to suffocate the laughter. That is what happened to humour, after it became - as an aesthetic medium - obsolete, repulsive, devoid of any canon of what can be laughed at; without any place for reconciliation, where one could laugh; without anything between heaven and earth harmless enough to be laughed at.
Again one has to say this simply isn’t true. Humour has not become aesthetically obsolete and repulsive. I don’t know about Gargantua but it is clearly possible to laugh at/with Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Joyce, Chaplin, Keating, Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, Bill Hicks and The Producers, to offer a fairly random list. And things don’t have to be harmless to be laughed as most of those examples from the Fool in Lear down to Mel Brooks demonstrate. And the laughter inspired by Beckett doesn’t suffocate the laughter.
When, at the start of Happy Days, Winnie waking, buried up to her waste in a pit of sand, proclaims ‘Another heavenly day!’ it is wonderfully funny. It is obviously ironically funny because she is half buried in sand, but, at the same time, it is happily funny because there are still ‘heavenly days’ (with bright sunshine, blue skies etc) and this may well be going to be one. This capacity to write lines that are true in two opposite senses simultaneously, is as Stephen Spender has observed2, a key feature of Beckett’s art, and to grasp only the negative, bitter side and never the affirmative side, which is what Adorno does, is to misread him.
When Hamm at the start of Endgame asks ‘Can there be misery - loftier than mine?’ it is very funny. He could be parodying Adorno, who specialised in lofty misery. And, after all, what about the trousers?
Adorno is also wide of the mark when he attributes ‘meaninglessness’ and ‘incomprehensibility’ to Endgame.
The interpretation of Endgame therefore cannot chase the chimera of expressing its meaning with the help of philosophical mediation. Understanding it can mean nothing other than understanding its incomprehensibility, or concretely reconstructing its meaning structure - that it has none.
Adorno claims textual support:
Not meaning anything becomes the only meaning. The mortal fear of the
dramatic figures, if not of the parodied drama itself, is the distortedly comical fear that they could mean something or other:
HAMM: We're not beginning to... to... mean something?
CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that's a good one!
But again Adorno is misreading. There is no ‘mortal’ fear here, nor is it ‘distortedly comical’. It’s a joke and the joke is funny for the same reason ‘Another heavenly day!’ is funny: it contains the possibility of opposite meanings, resigned irony (not fear) and positive affirmation or the glimmer of hope of positive affirmation.
The meaning of meaninglessness is a philosophical conundrum and the notion of the interpretation of the meaning of any work art, especially a great one, is highly problematic. I will not explore either question here except to say that any ‘interpretation’, however accurate, is almost certain to be ‘less’ than the art work itself i.e. to express only some of the work’s ‘meaning’ , which really is the work as a whole, and to express it less well (less precisely, less powerfully etc.) Nevertheless I want to say that Endgame, and this goes for Beckett as a whole, is neither incomprehensible nor meaningless. On the contrary it is not difficult to follow, the language is simple and packed with meaning, or rather multiple meanings, and as for the play as a whole some, not all, of its meaning can be grasped and expressed fairly straightforwardly.
Endgame (and Beckett’s work as a whole) is a study in and of alienation. The most profound diagnosis of alienation was made by Marx 166 years ago in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Marx’s analysis, expressed as briefly as possible, was that capitalism was based on the alienated labour of working people. The alienation of labour was so significant because it is through labour that the human race created itself and continues to create itself. As a result of the alienation of labour people come to be dominated by the products of their own work which form a hostile world standing over and against them. They also become estranged from themselves, their own essential human nature (as creative makers), from other people (because labour is social labour and mediates the relationship between people), and from nature (because labour is the mediation between human’s and nature.)
Endgame is an exploration of the human condition in this alien world. I do not mean by this that Beckett had read or was influenced by Marx (I don’t know if he was or not) but he experienced alienation and its effects – we all do. The threat of nuclear war, which haunted the imagination of both the general public and many artists in this period, was (and is) an extreme manifestation of alienation, of the human race being threatened with annihilation by the products of its own hands and brains. Endgame at least alludes to such a catastrophe, at least hints that it may have happened: the empty corpsed world seen through the telescope, the seeds that will never sprout.
Alienated labour cripples us physically and spiritually, reduces us as human beings, as Hamm and Clov, Nagg and Nell are crippled and reduced. Alienation distorts all human relations including the most intimate; it separates us from our fellows and sets us against each other. The relationships presented in Endgame between Hamm and Clov, as master and servant, and Nagg and Nell, are clinical dissections of alienated relations. Think of Nell and Nagg in their bins trying to kiss each other but unable to reach.
But plumbing the depths of alienation and laying them bare, as Beckett does and Marx did, does not at all signify surrender or hopelessness. Indeed presenting them to the world in a work of art is in a sense already an act of resistance. And it matters that buried within Endgame are two tragic love stories. When Nell first emerges from her bin her first words to Nagg are ‘What is it, my pet? (Pause) Time for love?’ and a subterranean elegiac note of memory of their past love, in the Ardennes, at Lake Como, permeates their exchanges. Early in the play there is this dialogue between Hamm and Clov:
HAMM:... Why do you stay with me?
CLOV: Why do you keep me?
HAMM: There's no one else
CLOV: There's nowhere else
Pause
HAMM: You're leaving me all the same
CLOV: I'm trying
HAMM: You don't love me
CLOV: No
HAMM: You loved me once
CLOV: Once!
HAMM: I've made you suffer too much?
CLOV: It's not that?
HAMM (shocked) I haven't made you suffer too much?
CLOV: Yes!
HAMM (relieved) Ah you gave me a fright! (Pause.Coldly) Forgive me. (Pause. Louder.) I said,
Forgive me.
Then at the end, when Clov is on the point of leaving, Hamm asks him to say something before he goes, ‘ A few words ... from your heart’ and, amazingly, Clov responds:
They said to me, That's love, yes, yes, not a doubt ...
It is because I believe that this affirmation of resistance (‘I’ll go on’) and affirmation of humanity, in spite of everything, is as much integral to Beckett as all the well justified bleakness, that I disagree so strongly with Adorno.
Notes:
1'After seeing Happy Days I watched the audience leaving the auditorium and was struck by how many were smiling.
2‘Samuel Beckett's theme is the very Irish one in this century: the identity of opposites [my emphasis –JM], a theme with which Yeats made so much play in his idea of the "Antinomes," and which is implicit in Joyce, where the subjective view of the world merges into its opposites, the objective and universal.’ Stephen Spender, ‘Lifelong Suffocation’, New York Times , 1958, http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/reviews/beckett-unnamable.html.
Spender calls this an Irish theme but of course ‘the identity of opposites’ is a key idea in the Hegelian, and Marxist, dialectic, discussed, incidentally, by Lenin who preferred the term ‘unity of opposites’.
John Molyneux
10 December 2010
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
The crisis: Is Keynes the answer?
Whenever there is a serious economic crisis, as there obviously is at the moment, and the ruling class responds, as it always does, with vicious cuts and mass unemployment the working class movement faces a choice: should we fight back with anti- capitalist demands and policies or should we go for policies designed to make capitalism work better?
For those who chose the second option, and that includes most Irish trade union leaders, the economist John Maynard Keynes is almost always a key point of reference, and some variety of Keynesianism is usually the economic strategy they support.
This is because Keynes’s ideas seem to offer a relatively painless option, on the one hand avoiding the need for the massive cuts and job losses being imposed by the likes of Fianna Fail or the British Tories, and on the other avoiding the need for major working class struggle or – God forbid! – revolution. Keynes also appeals to some quite radical people who either think his ideas were more radical than they really were or simply doubt the possibility of a real anti- capitalist struggle.
So who was Keynes; what did he stand for; and what attitude should the workers movement take to Keynesian ideas?
John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), later Lord Keynes, was probably the most famous and influential economist of the twentieth century. He was educated at Eton and Cambridge, a friend and advisor to Lloyd George, and a member of the Liberal Party. He was a fully paid up member of the British establishment, a conscious and consistent supporter of capitalism, and strongly opposed to widespread nationalization or socialism. He despised Marx, calling Capital an "obsolete economic textbook that contains nothing but out-of-date controversialising" and said he had no desire to live in a society dominated by "the boorish proletariat."
He did, however, react to the Great Depression of the 1930s with powerful criticism of the economic orthodoxy of the day. That orthodoxy was basically what today we would call neo-liberalism. It stated that governments should not interfere with the working of the capitalist market – the role of government was only to maintain the general conditions, law and order etc., in which the market could operate. This was because, it was claimed, the laws of the market, left to themselves, would produce the best possible allocation of resources and indeed make any prolonged period of mass unemployment or recession impossible. Government intervention in the economy was not only unnecessary, but positively harmful as it would upset the spontaneous and inevitable restoration of balance and equilibrium.
Keynes flatly rejected this. He denied there was any law guaranteeing that the free market would work well or produce full employment. On the contrary it was perfectly possible for capitalism to settle at a ‘low equilibrium’ of poverty, stagnation and high unemployment. But it was possible, he argued, for governments to intervene in the economy in such a ways to restore growth and prosperity.
What was required was to increase , not cut, public spending so as to raise the purchasing power of the population (what economists call ‘effective demand’) and thus stimulate demand for goods which would in turn generate more production and more employment in an ongoing upward spiral (a ‘virtuous’, as opposed to a ‘vicious’ circle). To the objection, heard then as now, that such an increase could not be afforded, Keynes argued that governments should run a deficit i.e. borrow so as to spend above their income for a period, on the assumption that as the economy expanded so the government’s income from taxation would increase and the deficit would be eliminated.
Keynes’s ideas were generally not accepted in the thirties ( though Roosevelt’s New Deal in America could be seen as a kind of partial, and not very successful, Keynesianism) and the Depression was only brought to an end by the Second World War which ‘stimulated’ economy activity and ‘restored full employment’ by slaughtering 50 million people.
When western capitalism entered its long post-war boom , on the basis of a mixed state-private economy and massive ongoing arms spending , Keynes was given the intellectual credit for this (though they weren’t really Keynesian policies, and a more profound explanation of the boom in terms of the effect of arms spending on the rate of profit, was provided by the Marxist ,Michael Kidron). Keynesianism became the dominant economic theory in governments and universities for twenty five years.
But when crisis returned in the seventies in a form that combined unemployment and inflation Keynesianism was proclaimed dead and the political/academic consensus shifted back to the worship of the market, variously referred to as monetarism, Thatcherism and neo-liberalism. This served as the ideological basis for the sustained assault on trade unions and the working class in the Thatcher /Reagan years. Blind faith in market forces continued to prevail through to the ‘globalisation’ era of the nineties and early noughties. Then came the crash of 2008 which drove a coach and horses through the ideas of neo-liberalism and Keynes came back into fashion.
And no wonder! When a Keynesian economist like Michael Taft, Political & Economic Researcher with UNITE says “Expand demand - more spending, not less, is what the economy needs to maintain and expand business activity... You can’t cut-and-tax your way out of a recession - you spend” .it is a breath of fresh air compared to Cowan and Lenihan’s cuts.
And when Taft demands, “A flat-rate base pay increase between €25 and €30 per week,”and says ‘Re-introduce pay-related unemployment benefit”. [quotations from his article of November 2008 Towards a New Economic Narrative] the workers’ movement should certainly agree.
Unfortunately neither Keynes analysis nor Taft’s proposals go nearly far enough to solve the crisis or point a way forward for the working class. First it must be understood that when Taft says WE should expand , there is no WE, there is the capitalist class and its government which has all the power and there is US, the workers, and if we want them to do something that benefits us , like a flat rate pay increase, we have to force them, by mass action and struggle.
Second, Keynes (and Taft) only grasps one aspect of the crisis of capitalism, namely the problem of over production, or lack of effective demand ( which Marx, incidently, had analysed as early as The Communist Manifesto of 1848) and not the problem of the falling rate of profit. In Capital Vol. 3 Marx shows that capitalism, a system based on production for profit, nonetheless generates a tendency for the rate of profit to fall.
This is because all profits derive from the surplus value extracted from labour (‘surplus value’ is the technical term used by Marx to refer to the gap between the wages paid to workers and the value of what they produce), but each individual capitalist tries to increase their share of the total profits in society by investing more and more in labour saving machinery. This has the effect of reducing labour as a proportion of total outlay and thus reducing the overall rate of profit (the proportion of profit to total investment). When the rate of profit falls capitalists become reluctant to invest. It is precisely such a decline in the rate of profit that has underlain the global crash since 2008.
If public spending, wages and employment are increased, as the Keynesians and socialists both want, the capitalists will likely respond with an investment strike which, if they are left in control, will again plunge the system into crisis and throw workers on the dole.
This is why, going beyond anything Keynes would have countenanced, we need demands that challenge capitalist control of the economy – like the demands for one publically owned bank which serves the people, and for seizing the assets of the rich – and ultimately we need a workers movement to take control of the government and the state, i.e. we need socialism.
John Molyneux
4 October 2010
For those who chose the second option, and that includes most Irish trade union leaders, the economist John Maynard Keynes is almost always a key point of reference, and some variety of Keynesianism is usually the economic strategy they support.
This is because Keynes’s ideas seem to offer a relatively painless option, on the one hand avoiding the need for the massive cuts and job losses being imposed by the likes of Fianna Fail or the British Tories, and on the other avoiding the need for major working class struggle or – God forbid! – revolution. Keynes also appeals to some quite radical people who either think his ideas were more radical than they really were or simply doubt the possibility of a real anti- capitalist struggle.
So who was Keynes; what did he stand for; and what attitude should the workers movement take to Keynesian ideas?
John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), later Lord Keynes, was probably the most famous and influential economist of the twentieth century. He was educated at Eton and Cambridge, a friend and advisor to Lloyd George, and a member of the Liberal Party. He was a fully paid up member of the British establishment, a conscious and consistent supporter of capitalism, and strongly opposed to widespread nationalization or socialism. He despised Marx, calling Capital an "obsolete economic textbook that contains nothing but out-of-date controversialising" and said he had no desire to live in a society dominated by "the boorish proletariat."
He did, however, react to the Great Depression of the 1930s with powerful criticism of the economic orthodoxy of the day. That orthodoxy was basically what today we would call neo-liberalism. It stated that governments should not interfere with the working of the capitalist market – the role of government was only to maintain the general conditions, law and order etc., in which the market could operate. This was because, it was claimed, the laws of the market, left to themselves, would produce the best possible allocation of resources and indeed make any prolonged period of mass unemployment or recession impossible. Government intervention in the economy was not only unnecessary, but positively harmful as it would upset the spontaneous and inevitable restoration of balance and equilibrium.
Keynes flatly rejected this. He denied there was any law guaranteeing that the free market would work well or produce full employment. On the contrary it was perfectly possible for capitalism to settle at a ‘low equilibrium’ of poverty, stagnation and high unemployment. But it was possible, he argued, for governments to intervene in the economy in such a ways to restore growth and prosperity.
What was required was to increase , not cut, public spending so as to raise the purchasing power of the population (what economists call ‘effective demand’) and thus stimulate demand for goods which would in turn generate more production and more employment in an ongoing upward spiral (a ‘virtuous’, as opposed to a ‘vicious’ circle). To the objection, heard then as now, that such an increase could not be afforded, Keynes argued that governments should run a deficit i.e. borrow so as to spend above their income for a period, on the assumption that as the economy expanded so the government’s income from taxation would increase and the deficit would be eliminated.
Keynes’s ideas were generally not accepted in the thirties ( though Roosevelt’s New Deal in America could be seen as a kind of partial, and not very successful, Keynesianism) and the Depression was only brought to an end by the Second World War which ‘stimulated’ economy activity and ‘restored full employment’ by slaughtering 50 million people.
When western capitalism entered its long post-war boom , on the basis of a mixed state-private economy and massive ongoing arms spending , Keynes was given the intellectual credit for this (though they weren’t really Keynesian policies, and a more profound explanation of the boom in terms of the effect of arms spending on the rate of profit, was provided by the Marxist ,Michael Kidron). Keynesianism became the dominant economic theory in governments and universities for twenty five years.
But when crisis returned in the seventies in a form that combined unemployment and inflation Keynesianism was proclaimed dead and the political/academic consensus shifted back to the worship of the market, variously referred to as monetarism, Thatcherism and neo-liberalism. This served as the ideological basis for the sustained assault on trade unions and the working class in the Thatcher /Reagan years. Blind faith in market forces continued to prevail through to the ‘globalisation’ era of the nineties and early noughties. Then came the crash of 2008 which drove a coach and horses through the ideas of neo-liberalism and Keynes came back into fashion.
And no wonder! When a Keynesian economist like Michael Taft, Political & Economic Researcher with UNITE says “Expand demand - more spending, not less, is what the economy needs to maintain and expand business activity... You can’t cut-and-tax your way out of a recession - you spend” .it is a breath of fresh air compared to Cowan and Lenihan’s cuts.
And when Taft demands, “A flat-rate base pay increase between €25 and €30 per week,”and says ‘Re-introduce pay-related unemployment benefit”. [quotations from his article of November 2008 Towards a New Economic Narrative] the workers’ movement should certainly agree.
Unfortunately neither Keynes analysis nor Taft’s proposals go nearly far enough to solve the crisis or point a way forward for the working class. First it must be understood that when Taft says WE should expand , there is no WE, there is the capitalist class and its government which has all the power and there is US, the workers, and if we want them to do something that benefits us , like a flat rate pay increase, we have to force them, by mass action and struggle.
Second, Keynes (and Taft) only grasps one aspect of the crisis of capitalism, namely the problem of over production, or lack of effective demand ( which Marx, incidently, had analysed as early as The Communist Manifesto of 1848) and not the problem of the falling rate of profit. In Capital Vol. 3 Marx shows that capitalism, a system based on production for profit, nonetheless generates a tendency for the rate of profit to fall.
This is because all profits derive from the surplus value extracted from labour (‘surplus value’ is the technical term used by Marx to refer to the gap between the wages paid to workers and the value of what they produce), but each individual capitalist tries to increase their share of the total profits in society by investing more and more in labour saving machinery. This has the effect of reducing labour as a proportion of total outlay and thus reducing the overall rate of profit (the proportion of profit to total investment). When the rate of profit falls capitalists become reluctant to invest. It is precisely such a decline in the rate of profit that has underlain the global crash since 2008.
If public spending, wages and employment are increased, as the Keynesians and socialists both want, the capitalists will likely respond with an investment strike which, if they are left in control, will again plunge the system into crisis and throw workers on the dole.
This is why, going beyond anything Keynes would have countenanced, we need demands that challenge capitalist control of the economy – like the demands for one publically owned bank which serves the people, and for seizing the assets of the rich – and ultimately we need a workers movement to take control of the government and the state, i.e. we need socialism.
John Molyneux
4 October 2010
Monday, August 30, 2010
Marxism and the Environmental Crisis
Over the next ten, twenty or fifty years humanity faces an immense environmental crisis as a result of rapid and chaotic climate change. Indeed the crisis is already underway and its effects are already being felt in many parts of the world such as nearly submerged low lying Pacific islands and drought stricken Sudan
People often talk of the need to ‘save the planet’ but planet earth will survive any amount of climate change. In reality it is living creatures – human beings and animals - who will suffer, who will be wiped out in their millions and hundreds of millions or even face extinction.
In the face of this crisis there is one overriding question. What has to be done to bring climate change under control and prevent the catastrophe? In this article I shall argue that to answer this we need a Marxist understanding of society and to actually take the necessary action we need socialist politics.
The problem is not primarily scientific or technical. The basic science of climate climate change is simple, well established and widely agreed by all scientists not funded by the likes of Exxon Mobile with a vested interest in denying it. It is that global warming is caused by the increasing emission of ‘greenhouse’ gasses, such as carbon dioxide, which form a kind of blanket in the earth’s atmosphere and prevent heat from the sun escaping into space. In scientific terms the solution is equally simple: drastically reduce carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions.
The real problem, therefore, is political: why does our society continue, as it does, producing greenhouse gases at a disastrously high level? Why does it not take the obvious measures required to avoid the impending catastrophe: switch from oil, gas and coal as the main sources of power to non-carbon emitting sources such as wind, solar, and tidal power; slash dependency on the carbon emitting private car by enormously improving public transport; institute a general programme of house insulation.
Understanding why these things are not being done is where Marxist analysis is essential. Marx showed that the driving force of capitalism is not human need or social welfare or even consumer choice, but the need for profit and the accumulation of capital. Capitalism is based on competition at every level – between corner shops and supermarkets, between international corporations and between national economies. I t is not just the greed of the bosses; this competition compels every capitalist firm and economy to attempt to maximise its profits and its accumulation of capital, on pain of bankruptcy or being taken over or marginalised. ‘Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets...Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake’, is how Marx described the basic law of capitalism.
Moreover Marx explained that in capitalist societies governments do not serve the people as they claim, but the interests of the capitalist class. If it is in the interests of the capitalist class to allow global warming to continue that is what capitalist governments will do, despite all their talk of going green.
But, surely, some people argue, it is just as much in the interests of the capitalists to stop catastrophic climate change as it is the rest of us. There are two key features of the system which make this not the case and Marxist analysis points to both of them. The first is domination of the world by a few giant corporations. Marx showed that this concentration of capital was the inevitable result of competition. As he put it ‘One capitalist always kills many,’ so the ownership of capital becomes concentrated in ever fewer hands.
These are the ten biggest companies in the world (according to Fortune 500):
Thus we can see that four of the top five and seven of the top ten of these hugely powerful companies are in oil, gas and cars and so have a direct interest in carbon emitting fossil fuels. The second factor is the international competition between states (on behalf their respective capitalists). This means that the world’s biggest carbon polluters – USA, China, Europe, India etc – face each other as competitors and each fears that if it makes the needed cuts in emissions it will lose out to its rivals who will not reciprocate.
This analysis has been borne out in practice by the behaviour of Obama and the US at the Copenhagen Climate Change talks in 2009. Despite the fact that Obama, unlike Bush, certainly does understand the science of climate change, he intervened personally in Copenhagen to scupper any binding targets for carbon emission reduction.
This Marxist analysis of capitalism as the main cause of climate change and the main obstacle to its prevention differs radically from the views put across in the media or by the Greens or many people in the environmental movement. It rejects the view that the cause of climate change is individual greed and the solution is for all of us to ‘do our bit’. This cannot work because power in capitalist society is so unequal. However much ordinary people cut back and sacrifice it will not stop the big corporations using fossil fuels.
Similarly, it rejects the idea that the problem is overpopulation. Carbon emissions are proportional to the level of capitalist economic development not population. The US produces 19.5 metric tons per person, Ireland 10.6 million tons, China 2.6 million and Ethiopia only 0.04 million. Trying to restrict the world’s population, which always has racist and reactionary implications, will not tackle the central problem at all.
Identifying capitalism as the problem also points to the solution. If capitalist corporations and states are the main polluters what is needed is a social force that is more powerful than these corporations and states. The point of Marxism – the central idea running through all of Marx – is that such a force does exist in the shape of the international working class.
The capitalists everywhere depend on the workers everywhere for all their production and all their profits. Without workers labour the whole system seizes up – its factories, call-centres, i planes, trains, lorries and shops, all grind to a halt. At the same time the development of capitalism increases the size of the working class – there are now major working classes in China, India, Africa, Latin America where once were mainly peasants – and concentrates them in great cities such as Shanghai, Cairo and Sao Paolo.
Clearly what we are talking about here is potential power. To realise that power, working class people have to become active in their millions and united in struggle. This is not easily achieved but there is no other social force that has anything like this potential.
Several conclusions follow from this analysis.
1. Socialists who base their politics on Marxism need to be in the forefront of building the anti climate change movement, arguing their case.
2. Socialists have to work to raise awareness of the real causes of climate change in the labour movement and among working people everywhere.
3. The struggle against climate change needs to be linked to all the other struggles of working people against the cuts, the bankers, the bosses, war, racism and so on. And in all theses struggles, socialists have to work to increase the understanding among working people that they need to take over the running of society themselves.
It is just about possible that capitalism could, theoretically, resolve the climate crisis before it is too late. It is also more than likely that it won’t. We can’t afford to take the chance. The whole future of humanity depends on it.
People often talk of the need to ‘save the planet’ but planet earth will survive any amount of climate change. In reality it is living creatures – human beings and animals - who will suffer, who will be wiped out in their millions and hundreds of millions or even face extinction.
In the face of this crisis there is one overriding question. What has to be done to bring climate change under control and prevent the catastrophe? In this article I shall argue that to answer this we need a Marxist understanding of society and to actually take the necessary action we need socialist politics.
The problem is not primarily scientific or technical. The basic science of climate climate change is simple, well established and widely agreed by all scientists not funded by the likes of Exxon Mobile with a vested interest in denying it. It is that global warming is caused by the increasing emission of ‘greenhouse’ gasses, such as carbon dioxide, which form a kind of blanket in the earth’s atmosphere and prevent heat from the sun escaping into space. In scientific terms the solution is equally simple: drastically reduce carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions.
The real problem, therefore, is political: why does our society continue, as it does, producing greenhouse gases at a disastrously high level? Why does it not take the obvious measures required to avoid the impending catastrophe: switch from oil, gas and coal as the main sources of power to non-carbon emitting sources such as wind, solar, and tidal power; slash dependency on the carbon emitting private car by enormously improving public transport; institute a general programme of house insulation.
Understanding why these things are not being done is where Marxist analysis is essential. Marx showed that the driving force of capitalism is not human need or social welfare or even consumer choice, but the need for profit and the accumulation of capital. Capitalism is based on competition at every level – between corner shops and supermarkets, between international corporations and between national economies. I t is not just the greed of the bosses; this competition compels every capitalist firm and economy to attempt to maximise its profits and its accumulation of capital, on pain of bankruptcy or being taken over or marginalised. ‘Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets...Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake’, is how Marx described the basic law of capitalism.
Moreover Marx explained that in capitalist societies governments do not serve the people as they claim, but the interests of the capitalist class. If it is in the interests of the capitalist class to allow global warming to continue that is what capitalist governments will do, despite all their talk of going green.
But, surely, some people argue, it is just as much in the interests of the capitalists to stop catastrophic climate change as it is the rest of us. There are two key features of the system which make this not the case and Marxist analysis points to both of them. The first is domination of the world by a few giant corporations. Marx showed that this concentration of capital was the inevitable result of competition. As he put it ‘One capitalist always kills many,’ so the ownership of capital becomes concentrated in ever fewer hands.
These are the ten biggest companies in the world (according to Fortune 500):
| Revenues ($mill) | Profits ($mill) | |
| Wall-Mart | 408,216 | 14,335 |
| Royal Dutch Shell | 285,129 | 12,518 |
| Exxon Mobile | 284,650 | 19,280 |
| BP | 246,134 | 16,578 |
| Toyota | 204,106 | 2,256 |
| Japan Post Holdings | 202,196 | 4,849 |
| Sinopec | 187,496 | 5,756 |
| State Grid | 184,456 | 343 |
| AXA | 175,257 | 5,012 |
| China National Petroleum | 165,496 | 10,272 |
Thus we can see that four of the top five and seven of the top ten of these hugely powerful companies are in oil, gas and cars and so have a direct interest in carbon emitting fossil fuels. The second factor is the international competition between states (on behalf their respective capitalists). This means that the world’s biggest carbon polluters – USA, China, Europe, India etc – face each other as competitors and each fears that if it makes the needed cuts in emissions it will lose out to its rivals who will not reciprocate.
This analysis has been borne out in practice by the behaviour of Obama and the US at the Copenhagen Climate Change talks in 2009. Despite the fact that Obama, unlike Bush, certainly does understand the science of climate change, he intervened personally in Copenhagen to scupper any binding targets for carbon emission reduction.
This Marxist analysis of capitalism as the main cause of climate change and the main obstacle to its prevention differs radically from the views put across in the media or by the Greens or many people in the environmental movement. It rejects the view that the cause of climate change is individual greed and the solution is for all of us to ‘do our bit’. This cannot work because power in capitalist society is so unequal. However much ordinary people cut back and sacrifice it will not stop the big corporations using fossil fuels.
Similarly, it rejects the idea that the problem is overpopulation. Carbon emissions are proportional to the level of capitalist economic development not population. The US produces 19.5 metric tons per person, Ireland 10.6 million tons, China 2.6 million and Ethiopia only 0.04 million. Trying to restrict the world’s population, which always has racist and reactionary implications, will not tackle the central problem at all.
Identifying capitalism as the problem also points to the solution. If capitalist corporations and states are the main polluters what is needed is a social force that is more powerful than these corporations and states. The point of Marxism – the central idea running through all of Marx – is that such a force does exist in the shape of the international working class.
The capitalists everywhere depend on the workers everywhere for all their production and all their profits. Without workers labour the whole system seizes up – its factories, call-centres, i planes, trains, lorries and shops, all grind to a halt. At the same time the development of capitalism increases the size of the working class – there are now major working classes in China, India, Africa, Latin America where once were mainly peasants – and concentrates them in great cities such as Shanghai, Cairo and Sao Paolo.
Clearly what we are talking about here is potential power. To realise that power, working class people have to become active in their millions and united in struggle. This is not easily achieved but there is no other social force that has anything like this potential.
Several conclusions follow from this analysis.
1. Socialists who base their politics on Marxism need to be in the forefront of building the anti climate change movement, arguing their case.
2. Socialists have to work to raise awareness of the real causes of climate change in the labour movement and among working people everywhere.
3. The struggle against climate change needs to be linked to all the other struggles of working people against the cuts, the bankers, the bosses, war, racism and so on. And in all theses struggles, socialists have to work to increase the understanding among working people that they need to take over the running of society themselves.
It is just about possible that capitalism could, theoretically, resolve the climate crisis before it is too late. It is also more than likely that it won’t. We can’t afford to take the chance. The whole future of humanity depends on it.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
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