One of the last Cold Warriors left standing finally bit the dust last night. If we’re lucky, Henry Kissinger will also be dead by year’s end. Good fucking riddance. Comrade Emanuel Santos put it splendidly: “Fidel Castro, Stalinist butcher and enemy of the workers, is dead. The working class won’t be happy until the last bureaucrat is hung with the intestines of the last capitalist.” [Fidel Castro, verdugo Estalinista y enemigo de los obreros, ha fallecido. La clase trabajadora no estará contenta hasta que el último burócrata cuelgue de las entrañas del último capitalista].
Another comrade, Ashmeet Teemsa, exclaimed that “the enemy of Cuban proletariat is dead, a man no more a friend of the working class than Thatcher,” adding: “Shame on the ‘anarchists’/’communists’ who eulogize or mourn!” He then quoted from the International Communist Current’s Basic Positions: “The stratified regimes which arose in the USSR, eastern Europe, China, Cuba etc and were called “socialist” or “communist” were just a particularly brutal form of the universal tendency towards state capitalism.”
There is no such thing as socialism in one country, and nationalism (whether American or Cuban, “right-wing” or “left-wing”) is nothing more than the consort of war, designed to facilitate the division of the world proletariat, to lead the working-class onto the battlefield, marching under “its own” national flag, and prepare the separated sections of the working class for reciprocal slaughter, all this in the name of “their” national interest, the interest of “their” nation’s bourgeoisie. The self-proclaimed Castroite “anti-imperialists” (i.e. anti-western imperialism) fail to understand that imperialism is simply the logic of world capitalism’s atomic components, nation-states — imperialism is capitalism’s metabolism in a world divided into nation-states. As competing zones of accumulation within this world-system, nation-states are led to clash with one another. Only the dissolution of nation-states, as politico-economic units, can put an end to this system, and hence bring about world proletarian revolution.
What we see in Cuba, Venezuela, etc., contrary to tankie/Chomskyite nonsense, is nothing progressive, no step forward for the working class. The displacement of the old bourgeoisie and their replacement by a new, “red” bourgeoisie and the replacement of privatized industries and free-market capitalism with nationalized industries and state-capitalism (and a flourishing black market) are irrelevant. The obvious features of capitalism, as described by Marx in Capital — the accumulation of value, commodities, the exploitation of workers, etc. — remain the same. Internationalists reject the choice between “capitalist” bosses, police and prisons and “socialist” bosses, police and prisons. Between “right-wing”/pro-American and “left-wing”/anti-American regimes or countries. This is all superficial, leftist (left of capital) nonsense. International relations are inherently fluid. Those who eulogize or propagandize on behalf of the “red” bourgeoisie help to foster and reinforce illusions about the “revolutionary” or “progressive” nature of various anti-proletarian, nationalist regimes and state-capitalism. We have reason neither to mourn nor celebrate.
My own thoughts add little to this, though one might also consult the excellent 1966 bulletin on “Cuba and Marxist Theory.” Leaving aside the egregious treatment of LGBT individuals in Cuba under Fidel, forced into labor camps from 1959 to 1979, a few words might be said.
Castro was a nationalist strongman first, and a Marxist second. He was somehow naïve enough to believe that the United States would smile upon his popular uprising against Batista’s dictatorial regime, because of the USA’s supposed commitment to “democracy.” After it became clear that they actually didn’t give a shit about democratic government, just wanting a friendly dictator to run its tropical resort off Florida, Fidel went window shopping for ideologies. Khushchev’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China were already a couple years into the Sino-Soviet split, competing for hegemony within the non-aligned or “Third World” sphere.
Out of the two main brands of “actually-existing socialism,” Castro ended up going with the USSR, opportunistically declaring himself a Marxist-Leninist (long after the fact). So his personal political history was largely rewritten from this point onward to reflect his later disposition as if it had been the case all along. Following the collapse of communism in 1991, Cuba’s economy went into a tailspin, since the island nation didn’t have big daddy Brezhnev around to pay its bills anymore. Even Castro began openly admitting that “the Cuban model” never worked, and had been overly reliant on subsidies from its socialist allies.
What lessons did Castro take from this? Naturally, that socialists ought to be more indulgent of religion and nationalism. Hence his cordial visits with three sitting popes, including the virulent anticommunist John Paul II. Below one can read an article by Martin Jay on Castro’s surprising endorsement of an antisemitic conspiracy theory originally by Daniel Estulin. It appeared in 2010, and can be accessed in the original Spanish by clicking here. The theory has circulated even more recently, with the rise of the so-called “alt-right.” Don’t mourn Comandante Castro’s passing too much, though, comrades. Fidel’s son and Paris Hilton have joined forces of late, so Cuba’s future is clearly in good hands.
Dialectic of counter-enlightenment:
The Frankfurt School as scapegoat of the lunatic fringe
Martin Jay
Salmagundi
Fall 2010
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On August 18, 2010, Fidel Castro contributed an article to the Cuban Communist Party paper Granma in which he endorsed the bizarre allegations of an obscure Lithuanian-born conspiracy theorist named Daniel Estulin in a 2005 book entitled The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club.1 In an Associated Press wire story written by Will Weissert, which was quickly picked up by scores of sites online, Castro’s infatuation went viral, and suddenly Estulin was unknown no more. Soon after, he was invited to Havana for a meeting with his new admirer, who was untroubled by Estulin’s ambiguous political affiliations, and before the day was out, the aging Cuban leader and his unexpected friend had declared that Osama Bin Laden was really a secret CIA agent and the United States was planning to destroy Russia’s still potent military forces, if necessary by nuclear means.2
Estulin’s claim in the book that captivated Castro goes something like this: beginning with a meeting in 1954 in the Bilderberg Hotel in a Dutch town, a group of powerful men — heads of state, economic tycoons, even the occasional monarch — have gathered annually in order to decide the fate of the world. Among the usual suspects, the Rockefeller family, the Rothschilds, Prince Bernhard, and Henry Kissinger are prominent eminences grises. With the ultimate goal of installing a world government — or more precisely, a “one-world corporation” — under their control, they pull the strings of the economy, aiming to create chaos, and plot to narcotize the population by any means possible. Perhaps their most effective gambit has been the concoction and dissemination of mass culture, in particular the rock and roll that turned potential social revolutionaries into countercultural stoners.
After decades of battling actual conspiracies dedicated to overturning his Revolution, the 84-year-old Castro is, I suppose, as entitled as anyone to paranoid fantasies. But what makes his embrace of Estulin’s book especially risible is the subordinate argument — and this is the part that most concerns me here — that the inspiration for the subversion of domestic unrest came from Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal and their colleagues at the Institute for Social Research in the 1950s. To cite the Associated Press condensed version: “The excerpt published by Castro suggested that the esoteric Frankfurt School of socialist academics worked with members of the Rockefeller family in the 1950s to pave the way for rock music to ‘control the masses’ by diverting attention from civil rights and social injustice.”3 The Radio Research Project under the direction of Paul Lazarsfeld, which had hired Adorno when he came to America in 1938, had, after all, been funded the Rockefeller Foundation. It was here that the techniques for mind control via pop music had been developed. And then according to Estulin, the task of realizing their sinister potential was given to no less a luminary than Walter Lippmann (!), who was somehow able to engineer the Beatles’ conquest of the American media in the 1960s. What followed was a new and more powerful opium of the people (although, to be sure, opium or substitutes were doing a pretty good job as well). For after all, didn’t John Lennon admit as much when he so memorably sang, “you say you want a revolution… you know you can count me out, don’ you know it’s gonna be all right, all right, all right.”
Here we have clearly broken through the looking glass and entered a parallel universe in which normal rules of evidence and plausibility have been suspended. It is a mark of the silliness of these claims that they have even subjected to ridicule by Rush Limbaugh on his August 20, 2010 radio show. Even he had to point out that the Beatles were on the side of social change, not opposed to it. Limbaugh, to be sure, ignored the other most blatant absurdity in Estulin’s scheme, which was attributing to the Frankfurt School a position precisely opposite to what its members had always taken. That is, when they discussed the “culture industry” it was with the explicit criticism, ironically echoed here by Castro, that it functioned to reconcile people to their misery and dull the pain of their suffering. Whether or not the Frankfurt School’s argument is fully plausible is not the issue here, but rather the pathetic miscomprehension of Estulin and the credulity of Castro in seeing them as agents of the Bilderberg project to make the world safe for capitalist elites. The even weirder fantasy about their assigning Lippmann the job of reconciling theory and practice is so outlandish that it is impossible even to guess how it might have been concocted.
I have no stake in exonerating or blaming the Bilderberg gang for ruining the world. Until this episode, I had, in fact, never heard of them. Like other candidates for the role of chief conspiratorial clique — the Masons, the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, the denizens of Bohemian Grove, take your pick — they can surely take care of themselves. Anyone, moreover, who believes, to take one of Estulin’s sillier claims, that Watergate was a frame-up devised by Bilderberg kingpin Kissinger to get rid of Nixon because he was failing to carry out their orders is not going to convince many sober-minded observers. What concerns me here instead is the transformation of “the Frankfurt School” into a kind of vulgar meme, a charged unit of cultural meaning that reduces all the complexities of its intellectual history into a sound-bite sized package available to be plugged into a paranoid narrative able to sucker no less a figure than Fidel Castro.
Although the process was foreshadowed in the 1960s when Herbert Marcuse became the media’s favorite “guru” of the New Left and was often portrayed in simple-minded terms, it wasn’t really until a decade or so ago that the School as a whole entered the netherworld of garbled memedom, and began circulating in a wide variety of narratives, such as that promoted by Estulin and Castro. Most of these, to be sure, came from a very different political direction. Patrick Buchanan’s 2001 best-selling screed against the nefarious impact of immigration, The Death of the West, was one major source, stigmatizing as it did the Frankfurt School for promoting “cultural Marxism” (a recycling of the old Weimar conservative charge of “cultural Bolshevism” aimed at aesthetic modernists). But the opening salvo had, in fact, been fired a decade earlier in a lengthy essay by one Michael Minnicino called “New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and ‘Political Correctness’,” published in 1992 in the obscure journal Fidelio.4 Its provenance is particularly telling: it was an organ of the Lyndon Larouche movement cum cult, one of the less savory curiosities of nightmare fringe politics.
Larouche and his followers have, to be sure, always remained on the fringe of the fringe, too confused in their ideology to be taken seriously by either radical left or right, with little, if any significant impact on the real world. But the germ sown by Minnicino was ultimately to bear remarkable poisonous fruit. The harvester was the Free Congress Foundation, a paleo-conservative Washington think tank founded by Paul Weyrich, who was also in on the creation of the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority movement. Much of the financial support came from his collaborator Joseph Coors, who knew how to turn all that pure Rocky Mountain water into a cash flow for the radical right. The FCF sponsored a satellite television network called National Empowerment Television, which churned out slickly produced shows promulgating its various opinions.
In 1999, it broadcast an hour-long, skillfully crafted exposé of “Political Correctness: The Frankfurt School,” which was put together largely by William Lind, one of Weyrich’s colleagues at the Foundation and head of its Center for Cultural Conservatism. Weyrich himself appeared only at the end during a question-and-answer session with viewers who called in. In addition to Lind, a number of the usual suspects — the right-wing pundits Roger Kimball and David Horowitz, and the former football star and homophobic religious preacher Reggie White — comment on the School’s history. There is as well one anomalous figure, the author of the first history of the Frankfurt School, The Dialectical Imagination. The book was itself displayed at the end of the show, and recommended to anyone interested in the full story, albeit with the cautionary reminder that its author was himself a dangerous apologist for the School’s philosophy. Later Lind would crow in a column in The American Conservative, “The video is especially valuable because we interviewed the principal American expert on the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay, who was then the chairman of the History Department at Berkeley (and obviously no conservative). He spills the beans.”5
Ever since that lamentable broadcast I have often been asked how I fell among such dubious characters, and so let me beg the reader’s indulgence for a moment to explain before moving on to the larger issues at hand. When I was approached for the interview, I was not informed of the political agenda of the broadcasters, who seemed very professional and courteous. Having done a number of similar shows in the past on one or another aspect of the history of the Frankfurt School, I naively assumed the end results would reflect my opinions with some fidelity, at least within the constraints of the edited final product. But what happened instead was that all my critical remarks about the hypocrisy of the right-wing campaign against political correctness were lost and what remained were simple factual statements confirming the Marxist origins of the School, which had never been a secret to anyone. Interweaving my edited testimony into the larger narrative may have given it an unearned legitimacy, which I now, of course, regret, but it’s likely the effect would have been pretty much the same without my participation as “useful idiot.” Those beans I allegedly spilled had already been on the plate for a very long time, and it would have taken no effort at all to confirm that, yes, they were Marxists, and yes, they thought cultural questions were important, and yes, they — or at least Marcuse — worried about the effects of “repressive tolerance.”
In any event, the “documentary,” soon available on the net, spawned a number of condensed textual versions, which were reproduced on a number of radical right-wing sites. These in turn led to a welter of new videos now available on You Tube, which feature an odd cast of pseudo-experts regurgitating exactly the same line. The message is numbingly simplistic: all the ills of modern American culture, from feminism, affirmative action, sexual liberation and gay rights to the decay of traditional education and even environmentalism are ultimately attributable to the insidious influence of the members of the Institute for Social Research who came to America in the 1930s. The origins of “cultural Marxism” are traced back to Lukács and Gramsci, but because they were not actual émigrés, their role in the narrative is not as prominent. Nor do most of the commentators attribute responsibility to the Communist International, although occasionally, as in the case of Cry Havoc!, a 2007 book by a founder of the National Review, Ralph de Toledano, the crackpot claim is actually advanced that the Frankfurt School was a Commie front set up by Willi Muenzenberger.6
There is a transparent subtext in the original CFC program, which is not hard to discern and has become more explicit with each telling of the narrative. Although there is scarcely any direct reference to the ethnic origins of the School’s members, subtle hints allow the listener to draw his own conclusions about the provenance of foreigners who tried to combine Marx and Freud, those giants of critical Jewish intelligence. At one point, William Lind asserts that “once in America they shifted the focus of their work from destroying German society to attacking the society and culture of its new place of refuge,”7 as if the very people who had to flee the Nazis had been responsible for what they were fleeing!8 Airtime is also given to another of Weyrich’s colleagues at the FCF, Lazlo Pasztor, who is innocently identified as a “leader of the Hungarian resistance against Communism,” but had already been discredited a decade earlier as a former member of the pro-Nazi “Arrow Cross,” who had to leave the Bush campaign in 1988 when he was outed.
A number of years later a fringe neo-Nazi group called “Stormfront” could boldly express what had hitherto only been insinuated, and in so doing really spill some foul-tasting beans:
Talking about the Frankfurt School is ideal for not naming the Jews as a group (which often leads to a panicky rejection, a stubborn refusal to listening anymore and even a “shut up”) but naming the Jew by proper names. People will make their generalizations by themselves – in the privacy of their own minds. At least it worked like that with me. It was my lightbulb moment, when confusing pieces of an alarming puzzle suddenly grouped to a visible picture. Learn by heart the most important proper names of the Frankfurt Schoolers – they are (except for a handful of minor members and female “groupies”) ALL Jews. One can even quite innocently mention that the Frankfurt Schoolers had to leave Germany in 1933 because “they were to a man, Jewish,” as William S. Lind does.9
Now that the real origins of political correctness in the cultural Marxism devised by a clever bunch of foreign-born Jews had been revealed, the full extent of the damage they had caused could be spelled out. Here is a list cited verbatim from many of the websites devoted to the question:
- The creation of racism offenses
- Continual change to create confusion
- The teaching of sex and homosexuality to children
- The undermining of schools’ and teachers’ authority
- Huge immigration to destroy identity
- The promotion of excessive drinking
- Emptying of churches
- An unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime
- Dependency on the state or state benefits
- Control and dumbing down of media
- Encouraging the breakdown of the family10
Well, I suppose at least the second plank has been realized, with perhaps the self-inflicted help of the sixth. In this confused world, it is only a short step to blaming everything from Roman Polanski’s lust for underage girls to the allegedly liberal curriculum at the Naval Academy to Obama’s health care initiative — these are among many of the wild assertions one can find online — on the sinister influence of Horkheimer and his friends. One site even asserts that the Fabian Society, the reformist intellectuals of late 19th-century British socialism, was “a division of the Frankfurt School,” which suggests that linear chronology can be swept aside when it comes to exposing the work of the devil. The ultimate goal of “cultural Marxism” in their telling is thus far more than the leftist thought-control that denies alternative positions under the guise of restricting hate speech. It is the subversion of Western civilization itself.
It is, frankly, very difficult to know what to make of all of this and even harder to imagine a way to counter it. The radical Left, it has to be conceded, has at times also scapegoated émigré intellectuals for their sinister, covert influence. After Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the neoconservatives supposedly inspired by Leo Strauss and his followers were blamed for inspiring a foreign policy that was ultimately in Israel’s interest. Here too a certain anti-Semitic subtext could easily creep into the discourse.11 And as we see in the unholy alliance of Castro and Estulin, the Frankfurt School could be assigned the same role by leftists also fighting against the shadowy string-pullers allegedly running the universe. Indeed, if we go back to Estulin’s original Spanish text and look for the source that he cites to make his absurd claim that was swallowed whole by the gullible Castro, we find the very same 1992 essay by the Lyndon Larouche minion Michael Minnicino that was the source of the Free Congress Foundation video!12 But the vast majority of accusations of this sort come out of a swamp of shockingly ill-informed, logically challenged demagogues on the radical right, whose easy access to the internet allows them blithely to spread the most egregious nonsense.
Does the sheer quantity of sites devoted to disseminating it, almost always drawing on the same obsessively repeated pseudo-facts and unfounded speculations, suggest a genuinely widespread phenomenon? Although it may be hard to gauge its real extent, the momentum of the dissemination has certainly accelerated in the past few years. What began as a bizarre Lyndon Larouche coinage has become the common currency of a larger and larger public of addled enragés. As the case of Pat Buchanan shows, it has entered at least the fringes of the mainstream. Indeed, if you include right-wing radio demagogues with sizeable audiences like the thuggish Michael Savage, it has now become their stock in trade as well.13 Can it be doubted that if you polled the crowds at Tea Party rallies about the influence of “cultural Marxism” on the decline of American culture, which they want to “take back” from immigrants, recent and otherwise, you would find significant familiarity with this discourse?
Until very recently and then only in passing has the radical right’s obsession with “cultural Marxism” and the Frankfurt School even been noticed, let alone systematically analyzed.14 There has, in contrast, been a sustained scholarly interest in the ways in which Critical Theory has been received in America, including scrupulously researched and judiciously argued new books by David Jenneman and Thomas Wheatland about the ways in which they interacted with American culture during their actual time as émigrés.15 But only their influence on and interaction with other intellectuals has attracted real attention. There is little, if any, connection between this reception and the one detailed above. The latter functions instead on the far lower level of the demagogic propaganda spewed by the very “prophets of deceit,” to cite the title of Lowenthal’s contribution to the Institute’s Studies in Authority, who were analyzed sixty years ago by the Frankfurt School itself.16
It is very disheartening to see how robust this phenomenon remains today, and a source of bitter irony to observe how the School itself has become its explicit target. But if there is one positive implication of these developments, it is the perverse tribute today’s radical right pays to the School’s acuity in revealing the workings of their deplorable ideology and its origins in their political and psychological pathologies. In looking for a scapegoat for all the transformations of culture which they can’t abide, they have recognized the most acute analysts of their own condition. In the fog of their blighted understanding, they have discerned a real threat. But it is not to some phantasm called “Western civilization,” whose most valuable achievements they themselves routinely betray, but rather to their own pathetic and misguided worldview and the dangerous politics it has spawned in our climate of heightened fear and despair.
The answer should not be to replace one scapegoat with another and trace all critiques of political correctness and the anxieties of those who level them back to the machinations of an extremist cult. Only a solution in which the deeper sources of those anxieties can be reduced will lessen the attraction of such theories to the people who find them persuasive. But perhaps at least exposing the paper trail leading from Lyndon Larouche to both Paul Weyrich and Fidel Castro can cause some of the more gullible to pause before they leap into the abyss. If not, at least we can always fall back on those death panels mandated by our foreign-born Muslim socialist president, himself a tool of the Frankfurt school,17 to keep those who resist our plot to destroy Western civilization in line. Oops, sorry, more beans spilled…
Notes
1 Originally written in Spanish as La Verdadera Historia del Club Bilderberg, the book is translated as The True Story of the Bilderberg Group (Waterville, Or., 2007). In the English translation, all references to the Frankfurt School, Walter Lippmann, and the Beatles are purged.
2 Daniel Estulin and Fidel Castro, “Humanity Must Preserve Itself in Order to Live for Thousands of Years,” Granma Internacional, Tuesday, August, 31, 2010.
3 Castro’s paraphrase of Estulin reads as follows: “The responsibility of devising a social theory of rock and roll fell to the German sociologist, musicologist, and composer Theodor Adorno, ‘one of the leading philosophers at the Frankfurt School of Social Research…’ Adorno was sent to the United States in 1939 to direct the Princeton Radio Research Project, a joint effort between Tavistock and the Frankfurt School with the aim of controlling the masses, which was financed by the Rockefeller Foundation and founded by one of David Rockefeller’s trusted men, Hadley Cantril…” One of Estulin’s main players in the Bilderberg conspiracy, it should be noted, is the Tavistock Institute for Social Relations in London.
4 Michael Minnicino, “New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and Political Correctness,” Fidelio, 1 (1991-1992); reprinted by the Schiller Institute.
5 See here.
6 Ralph de Toledano, Cry Havoc! The Great American Bringdown and How it Happened (Washington, 2007).
7 In later incarnations of his narrative, Lind would elaborate this point, arguing in a chapter of a 2007 book edited by Pat Boone and Ted Baehr, The Culture-Wise Family: Upholding Christian Values in a Media-Wise World: “The Frankfurt School was well on the way to political correctness. Then suddenly, fate intervened. In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, where the Frankfurt School was located. Since the Frankfurt School was Marxist, and the Nazis hated Marxism, and since almost all its members were Jewish, it decided to leave Germany. In 1934, the Frankfurt School, including its leading members from Germany, was re-established in New York City with help from Columbia University. Soon, its focus shifted from destroying traditional Western culture in to doing so in the United States. It would prove all too successful.”
8 Here. For a similar anti-Semitic rant, see here.
9 Here. Although it’s not clear that the website really represents a group or just a lone psycho, he is clearly not alone. For similar anti-Semitic rants against the Frankfurt School, see here; and here. Kevin Macdonald, a Professor of Psychology at California State, Long Beach, has written several unapologetically anti-Semitic books blaming the Jews for the fall of Western civilization, in which the Frankfurt School figures prominently.
10 Timothy Matthews, “The Frankfurt School: Conspiracy to Corrupt”, Catholic Insight, March, 2009.
11 When the invasion took place, I was asked to support a commission set up in Belgium by Lieven de Cauter on the model of the Russell Tribunal during Vietnam to have a public trial of the perpetrators, who turned out in the first version of the initiative to share certain ethnic traits. When I pointed this out to de Cauter, he publicly acknowledged my warning. See his blog of March, 18, 2003.
12 Estulin, La Verdadera Historia del Club Bilderberg, p. 15, footnote 25.
13 See Savage’s show on You Tube entitled “Liberalism and Frankfurt School Marxism” where he blames Obama on the influence of the evil Herbert “Marcoosee.”
14 See the incredulous response to one of the more prominent conservative voices, Andrew Breitbart, in the May 24, 2010 New Yorker by Rebecca Mead and the internet piece by John Knesel on May 18, 2010. They focus on Breitbart’s claim that Obama was a tool of the Frankfurt School, but do not comment on the larger phenomenon.
15 David Jenemann, Adorno in America (Minneapolis, 2007) and Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis, 2009).
16 Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (New York, 1949).
17 For an example of the link, see James Simpson, “Frankfurt Reigns Supreme at Notre Dame,” American Thinker, September 8, 2010.
what is this counterrevolutionary garbage
This is not well written and the title is misleading.
Ross Wolfe, why the cheap shot against Paris Hilton?
On Sat, Nov 26, 2016 at 6:35 PM, The Charnel-House wrote:
> Ross Wolfe posted: “One of the last Cold Warriors left standing > finally bit the dust last night. If we’re lucky, Henry Kissinger will > also be dead by year’s end. Good fucking riddance. Comrade Emanuel > Santos put it splendidly: “Fidel Castro, Stalinist butcher a” >
Right-wing critiques of the Frankfurt School’s The Authoritarian Personality go back to the 1950s, way predating the LaRouchite article. Much later, both Kevin MacDonald and Jewish paleoconservative Paul Gottfried focus on that specific work in their attacks on the Frankfurt School.
rofl at this pathetic bastard, i.e. me ross wolfe known anti-communist ‘leftist’
Reblogged this on radicalsubjectivityblog.
Do you really care about something an almost senile man wrote at his 84?
By the way, ditching whole processes without realizing there’s something to save it’s something I don’t see you doing with Russia (using that kind of reasoning, all things done and said by Lenin should be ditched because of -i.e.- NEP famines). Even trots, anarchists, ‘libertarian’ Marxists and other collectivist anti-capitalists in the Island want to save the process in some way -it doesn’t matter if they hate Castro or not (some of they do, some of they don’t).
For somebody who has studied so much about dialectics and history, you aren’t considering how Castro’s Cuba -as a totality- emerged from particular historical conditions (including how Stalinists and Trotskyits alike twisted Marx and Engel’s thought here in Latin America during the whole 20th century). Castro was brutal and he was a beast from his era, he was totalitarian and succumbed to the typical traits of the leftist third world leaders of the Cold War. All of that is true. But it’s also true that it’s because of his regime that Cuban education raised, universal health-care was possible in a small island, HIV transmission from mother to child was eradicated, and a big “Etc.” a lot of hypocrite unapologetic tankies are already spreading like fire.
I’m not saying we have to support what Castro did, I’m certainly critic of his legacy with a bittersweet sentiment. The fucker was a bureaucratic dictator and imprisoned a lot of comrades, indeed, but if we are going to analyze the Cuban process, we need to do more than echoing liberal cries. I have been reading you for a whole year now, and I know you usually do more than that, at least with American, Slav and Jewish worker movements.
PS: In another whole different subject, I think you should take a look at Fernando Salinas’ work, he was a really interesting figure of Cuban architecture (before Castro destroyed architecture as a professional discipline). A good start point would be contacting Ernesto Oroza (http://www.ernestooroza.com/), he’s a Cuban artist from Miami interested in Cuban’s DIY culture. You both are leftists and hate that dead, maybe you could get along.
Thanks for the input. Perhaps I did paint with too broad a brush. I’ll take a look at the links.
I agree broadly with Diego’s comments on Castro (warts and all) and also commend Ross for owning up to “paint[ing] with too broad a brush”.
He might also undertake a thought experiment in alternate history. Imagine if the folks who landed in Cuba aboard the Granma had been of like mind and philosophy as the new left. They (or their offspring) might still be sitting on the beach trying to come to a consensus on strategy and tactics because they didn’t believe in hierarchical structures.
In faulting Castro for not aligning with Cuba’s workers enough, one might also look at the trajectory of the new left in America. Following the views of C. Wright Mills and Marcuse into a movement which in theory urged bypassing old Marxist and social democrat “workerism” into student and lifestyle oriented, and essentially, liberal directions. Those that weren’t eventually sucked into the Democratic party took off into ultra-left Maoism and/or the Weather Underground – and see how well that turned out.
Coda: ….turned out; and to one degree or another led us to the identity politics so loathed by Ross today.
Reblogged this on Cbmilne33’s Blog.
There is a photo in this article depicting Fidel Castro saluting militarily next to Pinochet. Probably it is aimed at presenting Fidel Castro as a fascist. This is not peculiar from someone rejoicing at the death of Castro or that the USSR exists no more (incidentally Trotsky would not have rejoiced for such events [very far from it], had they occurred in his own lifetime. But then again what does most of ‘Trotskyism’ have to do with Trotsky’s thought and practice anyhow?).
Anyway, to proceed to my point, the photo is from Castro’s visit to Santiago (Chile) in 1971, when Pinochet was Allende’s appointed army chief. It is really very-very sick to post such a photo without any comment on where and when it was taken.
Castro’s Cuba maintained very close relations with Franco’s Spain, and according to some Chilean socialists later expressed his admiration for Pinochet during the nineties.
Needless to say, there are those on the left (SEP) who also demonize the Frankfurt School for trashing the idea of “Progress” and traditional forms of political organization, blaming them for sapping the working classes of their ‘revolutionary potential’.
We should not forget that Castro and his regime found themselves hostage to the logic inherent in wielding state power within the larger context of imperialism, the cold war and the global scheme of accumulation. I’d like to see you do better. All leftist revolutions suffered the same fate because as Leslie White once pointed out: a capitalist state remains a capitalist state even if is run by ‘labor’ politicians.
I am reminded of Pontecorvo’s film Burn! and the scene where the leader of the slave rebellion, Jose, is confronted with the reality of wielding state power in the form of markets and contracts. He quickly discovers how little room he has to maneuver and his dreams of freedom for his people quickly vanishes under the pressing forces tirelessly at work transforming the planet into grist for the mill of capital.
Its seems to me that Castro’s regime were insufficiently skilled and sophisticated enough to transform Cuba and were unable to maintain power through much softer means of social control – obviously something that takes a long time to accomplish. They had to rely on the more crude methods to defend themselves from the 50 years of hostility and aggression by the US and the world system.
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Having sneaked into Cuba 20 years ago and spent a month traveling around the country staying with everyday Cubans, if you can judge a political system by the people who live under it, Cuba was an exceptional experience. There was no fear for the most part anywhere except in Habana. Even there I was able to walk the streets in the worst parts of the city without much to worry about. Police presence was rare on the street and the entire city was for the most part, dark as there were few working street lights. The high point of these nocturnal ventures was walking the arcades that were vacant and largely boarded up. Instead of shopping, people sat on the doorsteps of their homes, the interiors illuminated and the thousands of conversations were like the singsong of crickets on a summer eve. People would immediately take notice that you were not one of them and strike up a friendship, if only for 10 mins. Would that happen here if a Cuban immigrant was walking down an average street in the US? – hardly.
Cubans were very joyous, relaxed and welcoming – and well fed and healthy from what I could see and I was over most of the island. Cities, towns, villages, hamlets. I would often find myself invited into homes for coffee and snacks just to talk politics and world events. Children were joyous and curious and the overall climate highly social and engaged. Peoples’ self-built homes were remarkably charming, warm, clean and well cared for…. the public spaces ,too.
Since I had a car, it would be constantly filled to the gills with hitchhikers of all kinds – young, old, professional, worker, male/female – the entire day of driving. And that was really an enlightening experience to listen to the stories of everyday life. I found no real immiseration, material or otherwise, although the country was quite poor. There was, strangely, no trash to be found for the most part – everything was recycled out of necessity. It was a very human-scale society with much face to face.
My travels to Eastern Europe after the fall, was the exact opposite, not surprisingly: dirty, mean, shabby – you could buy a ten year old girl for a couple dollars. In Cuba, you would have probably been killed if you were caught trying to procure a child.
Habana was another story. The only fear I found there was among the black marketeers who wanted to avoid the ever watchful eyes of the state security forces. I ended up staying an apartment controlled by one and got a call at 3:00 in the morning by police asking how much I was paying to stay there. Police probably looking for cut of the action – most likely why they were looking to evade them.
Very interesting comment and very informative description of life in Cuba during your visit.
I would just like to point out that, since you mention that your journey there occurred 20 years ago, your visit took place during the so-called ‘special period’. That is, the period following the fall of the USSR when Cuban GDP was reduced by almost 1/3 and foreign trade virtually collapsed.
For some good music from the revolution:
https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/music/index.htm
This essay is a trash.
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I’m from Spain. From Galiza, in the north-west of the country, and Fidel Castro’s father was from there. In 1992 Fidel visited his father’s birthplace, His Cicerone during that trip was Manuel Fraga, former big boss of the Franco fascist regime (later turn into one of the “fathers of our democracy”) and president of our autonomous community at that time. The visión of Castro, the “revolutionary communist” and Fraga, “the defender-of-the-West hunter of marxists” playing checkers like good old Friends is a the perfect picture of what really Fidel represented. Apart from this, in 1975, after Francisco Franco’s death, he ordered three days of mourning for him… He was always a fake, talking and writing all these screeds to say absolutely nothing (at least Mao did some interesting theoretical work). One must recognize the “genious” of this man: Not everyone is able to keep the fidelity of his loyal “revolutionary” followers after so many decades of (not revolutionary, as Lukács once said about Lenin) realpolitik. A myth and only a myth, and real revolutionaries don’t base their praxis on anything like that, only the fascists.
That Castro ordered a three-day mourning in Cuba following Franco’s death is a blatant lie.
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This is ultraleftist garbage. Martin Jay and all the little US professors that peddle Marxology can also spare me their garbage. And Trotskyists, when will you stop accusing everybody of Stalinism or collaborationism and start your own revolution. You have never led anything. Even Cannon, one of your own, said you were all talk talk talk and no walk walk walk. You’re no better than a liberal.