David Riazanov and the tragic fate of Isaak Rubin

Posted by Ross Wolfe

Д.Б.Рязанов на трибуне

Д.Б.Рязанов в 1916 г.

Д.Б.Рязанов – директор ИМЭ

Д.Б.Рязанов среди преподателей Социалистической Академии

Д.Б.Рязанов в 1910-е гг.

Д.Б.Рязанов в 1905-1907 гг.

Давид-Рязанов

Сестры Д.Б.Рязанова

Д.Б.Рязанов с женой в Париже, 1920-е гг.

Рязанов в 1890-е гг.

Upper row, P. Malkov, E. Rahja, S. G. Said-Galiev, P. Zalutsky, J. Drobnis, M. Tomsky, M. Kharitonov, A. Joffe, D. Ryazanov, A. Badaev, L. Serebryakov, M. Lashevich

Reportedly, the Russian revolutionary and pioneering Marxologist David Riazanov once insulted Stalin to his face at a party meeting held during the mid-1920s. At the time, the major topic of debate was over the feasibility of socialism absent a revolution in the West. In the years that followed October 1917 the fledgling Soviet regime had survived brutal winters, food shortages, and an international blockade while fighting off a bloody domestic counterrevolution staged by disparate elements of the old regime (the Whites) with the support of foreign powers (the Allied Intervention). The civil war was over, but revolution had elsewhere stalled out as the USSR’s borders stabilized: the European proletariat failed to overthrow the crisis-ridden bourgeois governments of France, Germany, England, Austria, and a host of other nations. Now the question on everyone’s mind where the Bolsheviks should go from there. Could socialism could be established in one (relatively backwards) nation?

Bukharin was the chief architect of the program for those who affirmed that it could. His days as a left communist behind him, Nikolai Ivanovich had meanwhile succumbed to pragmatism and unimaginative Realpolitik. Market reforms put in place by Lenin under the New Economic Policy after 1921 were to be continued, and the transition to “a higher stage of communist society” delayed, but its achievement no longer depended on the spread of world revolution. Eager to make a name for himself as a leading theoretician, Stalin interjected with some comments of his own. “Stop it, Koba,” Riazanov acerbically replied. “You’re making a fool of yourself. We all know theory isn’t exactly your strong suit.” Little wonder, then, that Stalin would later want Riazanov’s head on a platter; he’d inflicted a deep narcissistic wound. For as Trotsky would later point out, in a two-part article mocking “Stalin as a Theoretician,” nothing was more important to the General Secretary than to be regarded as well-versed in the science of dialectical materialism.

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Materialism, postmodernity, and Enlightenment

Posted by Ross Wolfe

Jacobin published an article just over a week ago entitled “Aliens, Antisemitism, and Academia,” written by Landon Frim and Harrison Fluss. “Alt-right conspiracy theorists have embraced postmodern philosophy,” the authors observe, and recommend that “the Left should return to the Enlightenment to oppose their irrational and hateful politics.” While the argument in the body of the text is a bit more nuanced, referring to the universalistic egalitarian “roots of Enlightenment rationality,” the two-sentence condensation above the byline at least has the virtue of bluntness. The rest of the piece is fairly mediocre, as per usual, a rather unobjectionable point delivered in a flat popular style. Fluss and Frim strike me as lying somewhere between Domenico Losurdo and Zerstörung der Vernunft-vintage Georg Lukács, minus the Stalinoid politics. But the general thrust of their article is sound, drawing attention to another, more original current of thought that arises from the same source as the irrationalist ideologies which oppose it — i.e., from capitalist modernity. Plus it includes some amusing tidbits about this Jason Reza Jorjani character they went to school with, whose ideas elicit a certain morbid fascination in me. Gossip is always fun.

Is it possible to “return to the Enlightenment,” however? Some say the past is never dead, of course, that it isn’t even past. Even if bygone modes of thought survive into the present, embedded in its unconscious or enshrined in prominent constitutions and legal codes, this hardly means that the social conditions which brought them into existence still obtain. One may insist on untimely meditations that cut against the grain of one’s own epoch, challenging its thought-taboos and received wisdom, but no one ever entirely escapes it. So it is with the Enlightenment, which now must seem a distant memory to most. Karl Marx already by the mid-nineteenth century was seen by many of his contemporaries as a composite of thinkers issuing from the Aufklärung. Moses Hess wrote enthusiastically to Berthold Auerbach about the young revolutionary from Trier: “You will meet in him the greatest — perhaps the only genuine — philosopher of our generation, who’ll give scholasticism and medieval theology their coup de grâce; he combines the deepest intellectual seriousness with the most biting wit. Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine, and Hegel fused into one person (I say fused, not juxtaposed) and you have Marx.” Though steeped in the ancients, he was also a great admirer of modern poets and playwrights like Shakespeare and Goethe. Denis Diderot was Marx’s favorite political writer.

Certainly, Marx and his followers were heirs to the Enlightenment project of emancipation. Louis Menand has stressed the qualitative breakthrough he achieved, however, along with Engels and subsequent Marxists. According to Menand, “Marx and Engels were philosophes of a second Enlightenment.” What was it they discovered? Nothing less than History, in the emphatic sense:

In premodern societies, the ends of life are given at the beginning of life: people do things in their generation so that the same things will continue to be done in the next generation. Meaning is immanent in all the ordinary customs and practices of existence, since these are inherited from the past, and are therefore worth reproducing. The idea is to make the world go not forward, only around. In modern societies, the ends of life are not given at the beginning of life; they are thought to be created or discovered. The reproduction of the customs and practices of the group is no longer the chief purpose of existence; the idea is not to repeat, but to change, to move the world forward. Meaning is no longer immanent in the practices of ordinary life, since those practices are understood by everyone to be contingent and timebound. This is why death in modern societies is the great taboo, an absurdity, the worst thing one can imagine. For at the close of life people cannot look back and know that they have accomplished the task set for them at birth. This knowledge always lies up ahead, somewhere over history’s horizon. Modern societies don’t know what will count as valuable in the conduct of life in the long run, because they have no way of knowing what conduct the long run will find itself in a position to respect. The only certain knowledge death comes with is the knowledge that the values of one’s own time, the values one has tried to live by, are expungeable. Marxism gave a meaning to modernity. It said that, wittingly or not, the individual performs a role in a drama that has a shape and a goal, a trajectory, and that modernity will turn out to be just one act in that drama. Historical change is not arbitrary. It is generated by class conflict; it is faithful to an inner logic; it points toward an end, which is the establishment of the classless society.

Edmund Wilson likewise saw this drama in narrative terms. That is to say, he understood it as having a beginning, middle, and end. Wilson gave an account of this dramatic sequence in his 1940 masterpiece To the Finland Station, for which Menand wrote the above passage as a preface. It began in Paris in the last decade of the eighteenth century. (Perhaps a long prologue could also be included, involving murky subterranean forces that took shape under feudalism only to open up fissures that swallowed it whole). After this first act, though, a fresh set of dramatis personae take the stage. Loren Goldner explains that “it was not in France but rather in Germany over the next several decades that philosophers, above all Hegel, would theorize the actions of the Parisian masses into a new politics which went beyond the Enlightenment and laid the foundations for the communist movement later articulated by Marx… This realization of the Enlightenment, as the revolution ebbed, was at the same time the end of the Enlightenment. It could only be salvaged by figures such as Hegel and Marx.” Buried beneath reaction, the luminous dream of bourgeois society would have to endure the nightmare of industrialization before arriving with Lenin in Petrograd. Among Lenin’s first executive acts after the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 was to organize a Commissariat of Enlightenment [Комиссариат просвещения], where his sister Maria would work under his longtime friend and comrade Anatoly Lunacharsky.

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Marx and Engels on Karl Kautsky

Posted by Ross Wolfe

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That Vladimir Lenin and his fellow revolutionaries of 1917 considered the Social-Democratic leader Karl Kautsky a pedant and a philistine is well known. Lenin pinpointed the reason for Kautsky’s post-1914 renegacy in his dilution of Marxian dialectics. “How is this monstrous distortion of Marxism by the pedant Kautsky to be explained…??” the Bolshevik asked rhetorically in a section of his 1918 polemic, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, “How Kautsky Turned Marx into a Common Liberal.” “As far as the philosophical roots of this phenomenon are concerned,” he answered, “it amounts to the substitution of eclecticism and sophistry for dialectics.” In another chapter, Lenin accused Kautsky of “pursuing a characteristically petty-bourgeois, philistine policy [типично мещанскую, филистерскую политику]” by backing the Mensheviks. Needless to say, Lenin’s immense respect for the so-called “Pope of Marxism” before the war had all but evaporated.

What is less well known, however, is that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels shared this appraisal of Kautsky. But this would only be revealed in 1932, several years after Lenin’s death, in extracts published from their correspondence. Engels confided to Eduard Bernstein in August 1881 that “Kautsky is an exceptionally good chap, but a born pedant and hairsplitter in whose hands complex questions are not made simple, but simple ones complex.” Marx, for his part, suspected that Engels’ fondness of Kautsky was due to his capacity to consume alcohol, as he recorded in a note to his daughter Jenny Longuet from April that same year:

[Johann Most, grandfather of legendary Boston Celtics announcer Johnny Most,] has found a kindred spirit in Kautsky, on whom he had frowned so grimly; even Engels takes a much more tolerant view of this joker [Kautz, punning on Kautz-ky] since the latter gave proof of his considerable drinking ability. When the charmer — the little joker [Kautz], I mean — first came to see me, the first question that rose to my lips was: Are you like your mother? “Not in the least!” he exclaimed, and silently I congratulated his mother. He’s a mediocrity, narrow in his outlook, over-wise (only 26 years old), and a know-it-all, although hard-working after a fashion, much concerned with statistics out of which, however, he makes little sense. By nature he’s a member of the philistine tribe. For the rest, a decent fellow in his own way; I unload him onto amigo Engels as much as I can.

Leon Trotsky was caught off-guard by the casuistry Kautsky displayed after 1914, remembering the praise he had showered on the Russian workers’ movement a decade or so earlier. “Kautsky’s reactionary-pedantic criticism [педантски-реакционная критика Каутского] must have come the more unexpectedly to those comrades who’d gone through the period of the first Russian revolution with their eyes open and read Kautsky’s articles of 1905-1906,” declared Trotsky in his preface to the 1919 reissue of Results and Prospects (1906). “At that time Kautsky (true, not without the beneficial influence of Rosa Luxemburg) fully understood and acknowledged that the Russian revolution could not terminate in a bourgeois-democratic republic but must inevitably lead to proletarian dictatorship, because of the level attained by the class struggle in the country itself and because of the entire international situation of capitalism… For decades Kautsky developed and upheld the ideas of social revolution. Now that it has become reality, Kautsky retreats before it in terror. He is horrified at Russian Soviet power and thus takes up a hostile attitude towards the mighty movement of the German communist proletariat.”

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Rosa Luxemburg and the party

Posted by Ross Wolfe

Chris Cutrone
Platypus Review
May 21, 2016
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In one of her earliest interventionsin the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), participating in the notorious theoretical “Revisionist Dispute,” in which Eduard Bernstein infamously stated that “the movement is everything, the goal nothing,” the 27 year-old Rosa Luxemburg clearly enunciated her Marxism: “It is the final goal alone which constitutes the spirit and the content of our socialist struggle, which turns it into a class struggle.”¹

Critique of socialism

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What did it mean to say that socialist politics was necessary to have “class struggle” at all? This goes to the heart of Luxemburg’s own Marxism, and to her most enduring contribution to its history: her Marxist approach to the political party for socialism — a dialectical understanding of class and party, in which Marxism itself was grasped in a critical-dialectical way. When Luxemburg accused Bernstein of being “undialectical,” this is what she meant: That the working class’ struggle for socialism was itself self-contradictory and its political party was the means through which this contradiction was expressed. There was a dialectic of means and ends, or of “movement” and “goal,” in which the dialectic of theory and practice took part: Marxism demanded its own critique. Luxemburg took the controversy of the Revisionist Dispute as an occasion for this critique.

In this, Luxemburg followed the young Karl Marx’s own formative dialectical critiques of socialism when he was in his twenties, from the September 1843 letter to Arnold Ruge calling for the “ruthless critique of everything existing,” to the critique of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), as well as in The German Ideology and its famous Theses on Feuerbach (1845). Marx had written of the socialist movement that:

The internal difficulties seem to be almost greater than the external obstacles…

[W]e must try to help the dogmatists to clarify their propositions for themselves. Thus, communism, in particular, is a dogmatic abstraction; in which connection, however, I am not thinking of some imaginary and possible communism, but actually existing communism as taught by Cabet, Dézamy, Weitling, etc. This communism is itself only a special expression of the humanistic principle, an expression which is still infected by its antithesis — the private system. Hence the abolition of private property and communism are by no means identical, and it is not accidental but inevitable that communism has seen other socialist doctrines — such as those of Fourier, Proudhon, etc. — arising to confront it because it is itself only a special, one-sided realization of the socialist principle…

Hence, nothing prevents us from making criticism of politics, participation in politics, and therefore real struggles, the starting point of our criticism, and from identifying our criticism with them.… We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for…

The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions.

Such formulations recurred in Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach a couple of years later:

But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice.

For Marx, this meant that socialism was the expression of the contradiction of capitalism and as such was itself bound up in that contradiction. A proper dialectical relation of socialism with capitalism required a recognition of the dialectic within socialism itself. Continue reading →

Henri Lefebvre and Marxism: A view from the Frankfurt School

Posted by Ross Wolfe

Lefebvre and contemporary
interpretations of Marx

Alfred Schmidt
Frankfurt, 1968

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In recent years the literature that has appeared about, for, and against Marx and Marxism has increased to the point where it can hardly be surveyed. Yet it would be false to conclude that the debate over matters of content has been advanced. To the extent that this literature does not speak the language of the Cold War and attempt to establish a dubious “counter-ideology,” it produces (as political science or Kremlinology) works full of information concerning the state of Soviet Marxist doctrines in terms of their dependence on current political trends. To the extent that Marxian theory itself still enters its field of vision, it is dulled by the fact that people (generally following Karl Löwith) classify it in the historical tradition of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, or else reduce it to an ahistorical interpretation of the problematic of alienation in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.

On the other hand, the group of authors honestly interested in the further development of Marxian theory is exceptionally small. They are able to abstract from what still frequently passes for Marxism in the Eastern half of the world without denying the objective significance of the East-West conflict for their thought. They have involved themselves intensively with texts of Hegel and Marx, which by no means have finally been disposed of, without falling into the hair-splitting ontology — with its consecrated body of quotations — that is typical for the post-Stalinist period in Soviet philosophy. To this group belongs Henri Lefebvre (who has recently become known in Germany through his acute analysis of Stalinism).¹ His writings are indispensable to those who aim at an adequate (and therefore critical) understanding of Marx within the limits of the alternatives that have been institutionalized in the political arena: either calling dialectical materialism a “watertight worldview” (Robert Musil) or dismissing it out of hand as a product of the discredited nineteenth century.

If a publisher has decided to bring out an edition of Le matérialisme dialectique,² a work that appeared over three decades ago, it is because it has scarcely lost its actuality — aside from a few points that needed correction. The philosophical discussion of Marxism that began directly after the First World War with Ernst Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia and Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, and was especially furthered by Karl Korsch, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno, broke off with Hitler’s seizure of power. Therefore, works on Marx from that period, as well as those written in western Europe in the late thirties, are still of great importance to us: not least because those works approached problems in a way far more political and closer to reality than was possible for the new West German attempts at an interpretation of Marx after 1945, which remained more or less academic. These were all essentially centered on the “young Marx” in whom the authors (Thier, Popitz, Fromm) wanted to see an “existential thinker.”

Since Lefebvre’s book also seems at first glance to belong to the existence-philosophical, moralizing, and abstract anthropological school of interpretation, it seems necessary to make the reader somewhat more conversant with Lefebvre’s intellectual development.³ Only on that basis can the central concept of “alienation” in his Dialectical Materialism be understood and differentiated from interpretations using this concept in a sense almost exactly opposed to the Marxian one.

First, some dates in pre-World War II French philosophy. About the year 1930, the philosophical aspect of Marxism began to arouse interest in France. At the same time, a broad general receptivity toward Hegel, interwoven with attitudes toward Kierkegaard, was announced by Jean Wahl’s book, Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel. Wahl is inclined to reduce the richness of Hegel’s work to the stage of the “unhappy consciousness.” With this emphasis on the romantic moment in Hegel, it becomes almost impossible to separate Hegel and Kierkegaard. Subsequently, the appropriation of the idealist dialectic is paralleled by an interpretation of Marx’s early writings in the light of Heidegger’s Being and Time. This process led to the birth of the French variety of existential ontology: to existentialism. It was completed between 1933 and 1938, years in which Alexandre Kojève gave his now famous lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit⁴ at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes before students such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Aron, and R. P. Fessard. These lectures follow the same questionable lines as Wahl and see access to Hegel’s entire oeuvre in a single level of consciousness. With Kojève, it is the much-commented-on chapter “Dependence and Independence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage.” Although he wants his interpretation of Hegel to be considered “Marxist,” he does not focus on Marx’s materialist “inversion” of the dialectic. Rather, as Fetscher emphasizes, Kojève already sees in the phenomenological dialectic itself “all the ultimate consequences of the Marxist philosophy of history.”⁵ Thus “motifs of thought” that first arose from Marx’s critique of Hegel are ascribed to Hegel. But even Marx’s position is not done justice, since Kojève lags behind his claim that one should elevate oneself to real history, that is, to the concrete forms of human relationships, which are determined differently at different moments in time. Instead, he is satisfied with the sterile definition of a Heideggerian “historicity of existence” that is supposedly present in the Phenomenology of Mind as an “existential”⁶ and radically “finite”⁷ anthropology. According to Kojève, the anthropological character of Hegelian thought becomes understandable only on the basis of Heidegger’s emphasis on “ontological finitude,” although the anthropology of Being and Time (which Kojève asserts in opposition to Heidegger’s intention) adds nothing new to that developed by Hegel.

The supposedly broader “anthropological-ontological basis”⁸ with which Kojève wants to dote dialectical materialism is more liable to reduce it to a doctrine of invariable structures. Not the least of the ways that this would develop is in strictly political terms. Insofar as Kojève breaks the structural elements of the Master-Slave dialectic away from its specific historical background (which must always be thought of with it), he inflates labor and the struggle for life and death into eternal factors, à la social Darwinism. Stripped of every concrete determination, man appears as an essence “which is always conscious of his death, often freely assumes it and sometimes knowingly and freely chooses it”; Hegel’s “anthropological philosophy” is viewed as “ultimately one… of death.”⁹ Anachronistically, and thus in a way that falsifies Hegel, Kojève equates the struggle for “recognition” with a “fight for pure prestige.”¹⁰ Human essence and knowledge constitutes itself with a decided “risk” of life. It is as if “self-conscious existence is possible only where there are or — at least — where there have been bloody fights, wars for prestige.”¹¹ On the other hand, it matters little that he abstractly holds firm to the idea of the “realm of freedom” that Hegel anticipated and that has to be realized by Marxism.¹² It is a reconciled condition that does not occupy a situation, in which negativity (time and action in their present meanings) ceases, as do philosophy, revolutions and wars as well: his “political-existential” anthropology sharpened by “decisionism” bears fascistoid traces.¹³ If one starts from the premise that the Hegel and Marx exegesis outlined here was dominant in the France of the thirties, it becomes clear that Lefebvre, even with all the unavoidable concessions to the spirit of the times, took a path all his own. Opposed to every ontology, to the late-bourgeois as well as to the Stalinist ones, he developed himself into a critical Marxist whose standards grew out of a materialist analysis of the course of history. His academic teachers were hardly appropriate to lead his thought in this direction. In Aix-en-Provence he studied Augustine and Pascal¹⁴ with the liberal Catholic Maurice Blondel, and at the Sorbonne he worked with Léon Brunschvig, the “intellectualiste” philosopher of judgment who was an enemy of every dialectic. What made Lefebvre (by no means without conflict) turn to Marxism had little to do with university philosophy. It was the political and social upheavals of the postwar period, and more particularly personal problems, psychoanalysis, and association with the literary and artistic avant-garde, the surrealist movement.¹⁵ Lastly, it was the suspicion, which turned into a firm conviction, that philosophy as it had been handed down to us had demonstrated that it increasingly was less able to come to grips with, not to mention master, the problems posed by the historical situation of being and consciousness in society. At this point, the call of Marx and Engels, in their early writings, for the “negation” of philosophy and the turn toward a praxis “which would realize philosophical insight,” seemed to offer itself to him. A possibility seemed to open up, not only of more or less articulately mirroring the fragmentation developing in modern existence — the way it happened in irrationalist ideologies — but of grasping it concretely, that is, as something which could be transcended.

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“Everyone’s a victim”: Relativizing Auschwitz with Adorno

Posted by Ross Wolfe

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Auschwitz was liberated 72 years ago today. In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I am reposting a recent article by Ingo Elbe on a new book by Marc Nicholas Sommer. Elbe is author of the extraordinarily thorough overview Marx im Westen: Die neue Marx-Lektüre in der Bundesrepublik seit 1965. The first chapter of this book has been translated and published over at Viewpoint, which everyone ought to read. He contacted me about this short review, and encouraged me to republish it.

Some brief comments of my own, before proceeding to Elbe’s article. First of all regarding the actors. Readers of this blog will doubtless be familiar with Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, a musicologist and leading critical theorist of the Institut für Sozialforschung. Günther Anders, alias Stern, likewise contributed to the Institut’s journal from time to time, though he was never a member. Anders was also the first husband of the famous German-American political philosopher Hannah Arendt. Like her (as well as Herbert Marcuse, another member of the Frankfurt School), he was a onetime student of the influential Nazi professor Martin Heidegger. In 1948, Anders upbraided his former master in a scathing polemic “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy.”

Jean Améry, pseudonym of Hanns Chaim Mayer, was an Austrian essayist based in Brussels, Belgium. Unlike either Anders or Adorno, he survived the Auschwitz death camp. Between 1962 and 1966, he wrote a series of reflections on his experiences there, compiled under the title At the Mind’s Limits. It is a haunting, angry collection, notable for its absolute unwillingness to forgive anyone complicit in perpetrating the Judeocide. Philosophically Améry inclined toward Sartrean existentialism rather than critical theory. He was generally unimpressed by Adorno, whose 1964 study of The Jargon of Authenticity he lampooned in his own 1967 tract, Jargon der Dialektik. Contemporary theorists who draw inspiration from both Améry and Adorno — such as Gerhard Scheit, of the hard anti-German ISF and sans phrase — have attempted to reconcile the rift in rather torturous fashion, seeking to establish common ground.

Elbe sides, somewhat surprisingly, with Améry in this particular dispute. That is to say, he believes Améry is better able to grasp the specificity of Auschwitz. Adorno is convicted by Elbe of the very “identity-thinking” [Identitätsdenken] decried at length in Negative Dialectics, setting up a false equivalence between the deliberate murder of European Jewry by the Nazis at Auschwitz and the indiscriminate massacre of Japanese civilians by the Americans at Hiroshima. One aimed at annihilation, the other at capitulation. Here I certainly acknowledge the validity of the distinction Elbe is trying to make, but am less bothered by Adorno’s inclusion of Hiroshima alongside Auschwitz (one could mention any number of other atrocities) as an example of the unparalleled barbarism of the twentieth century, following the failure to transcend capital in its opening decades. Stalin’s GULag archipelago disturbs me just as much, if not more, despite the fact they were never meant to exterminate the inmates. For they represented the betrayal of communism, which was at least supposed to promise a better world, as Primo Levi pointed out, whereas with fascism the concentration camps followed from first principles.

Perhaps this is indicative of a broader disagreement between Elbe and myself, and by extension Améry. While I am awake to the dangers of left antisemitism, I do not believe that any and all opposition to Israel is antisemitic. Améry’s charge that anti-Zionism had become “the respectable antisemitism” by the 1970s may ring true in some instances, and he provides several compelling examples where this is the case. (Just a couple weeks ago, a German court ruled that torching a synagogue near Düsseldorf is a legitimate form of anti-Zionist protest). Yet I believe that it is possible to oppose the Zionism within an anti-nationalist framework which does not view it as exceptional, the historical peculiarities notwithstanding. However, I do share Elbe’s dismay at the cheerleading that frequently goes on among Western leftists for Islamist groups that spout some brand of anti-imperialist rhetoric. So there is probably a great deal we’d agree on. Enjoy his article.

“The world as a concentration camp”

Ingo Elbe
History-Net
1.27.2017
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…reducing tormentor and tormented to the common denominator “victims,” by means of a dialectical pirouette.

— Jean Améry¹

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In his book The Concept of Negative Dialectics,² Marc Nicholas Sommer claims to reconstruct Theodor Adorno’s negative philosophy of history as a “philosophy of history from the viewpoint of the victims” (294). Sommer suggests, following Adorno,³ that “since World War II every subject” has become “a potential victim of history” (295). “Every single one” could now “potentially” experience himself as a victim of “the utmost extreme” [„des Äußersten“] (295). Concurring with Adorno, Sommer defines “the utmost extreme” as “‘delusional prejudice, oppression, genocide, and torture.””⁴ Also in accordance with Adorno, Sommer sometimes uses the phrasing the “ever-present catastrophe”⁵ (325) instead of the utmost extreme. Indeed, Sommer readily concedes “that not every single one actually experiences himself as a potential victim” (325) and insofar perhaps people living in more or less functioning constitutional states have better protection against “the utmost extreme” than those living in authoritarian states and under dictatorships, but — and this is his main argument — “with the nuclear bomb a new power has appeared,” making the “utmost extreme” possible for every person. In agreement with Günther Anders he refers to his diagnosis that “‘the threat of nuclear war […] transforms the world into a hopeless concentration camp‘“⁶(325). Sommer uses the term “concentration camps” for being at the mercy of the “arbitrariness of the guards,” for the irrelevance of one’s own behavior regarding the question of whether one becomes a victim or not, and for a not further specified extermination. Further details are not given. Elsewhere, he uses the term “Auschwitz” instead of “concentration camp” (or simply “camp”). Sommer defines the term Auschwitz — once again in reference to Adorno — as “‘administrative murder of millions.””⁷ With the nuclear bomb the “experience of camp inmates” has been generalized, “that the disaster of the arbitrariness of the guards can befall them at any given time, regardless of their behavior.” The nuclear bomb transforms the world into a concentration camp because it constantly threatens us with the possibility of total extermination — regardless of how we behave.” (295f.)

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Once again on the term “identitarian”

Posted by Ross Wolfe

Angela Mitropoulos, an Australian academic and author of Contract and Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia, recently posted a note on her blog about the origins of the term “identitarianism.” This is something that’s come up at different points in debates over the past few years, including the controversy sparked by the late Mark Fisher’s article “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” so I thought it might be germane to treat the issue at greater length. Mitropoulos directly intervened in that debate against Fisher, moreover, so it’s appropriate to engage with her at that level as well.

“Identitarianism” is an unfortunate word, for several reasons. First of all, it’s an awkward and off-putting construction. Ugly neologisms — phrases like “pluriversal transmodernity,” “phallogocentric ontotheology,” “decolonial epistemology,” etc. — are these days sadly all too common. Second, it’s a polysemous expression, signifying more than one thing. Often it refers to things which are not just distinct from one another but even opposite in meaning, a problem I’ve written about before. Lastly, it has both positive and negative connotations depending on what’s meant and who’s using it.

Hopefully, this will become clear in what follows. Returning to Mitropoulos’ entry, mentioned at the outset, we find:

Adorno coined the term “identitarianism” in Negative Dialectics (1966), prompted by critique of Kantian and Hegelian philosophies.

The argument, very briefly, goes something like this: Like Hegel, Adorno rejected the manner of Kant’s distinction between noumenal and phenomenal forms. Put simply, Adorno granted Hegel’s claim concerning the historically- and conceptually-generative qualities of non-correspondence, but wanted to press Marx’s critique of philosophical idealism further against Hegelian Marxism. Adorno remains a dialectician. But, unlike Hegel and more like Marx, he eschewed the affirmative, synthetic moves of consciousness (i.e., philosophical idealism) and accorded epistemological-historical priority to the object (matter, materialism) rather than the subject (idealism) in explaining the course of this generative, non-correspondence (or non-identity). Identitarianism and the idealist philosophies of Kant and Hegel are thereby contrasted to a materialist philosophy of non-correspondence, or what Adorno calls “negative dialectics.”

How it happened that “identitarianism” came to be plausibly used as a synonym for “identity politics” — or, more accurately, co-opted by arch-identitarian Hegelian Marxists against any emphasis on race, gender and/or sexuality, and in their defense of more or less explicit arguments that class is the a priori or primary categorical division of substance — is a mystery to me.

Mitropoulos distinguishes, in other words, between the homogeneity asserted by logical operations of equivalence or identity, which declare unlike things (A & B) to be alike (A = B), and the heterogeneity asserted by various identity groups with competing sectional interests, which declare themselves different from everything else. She indicates, quite correctly, that the former was criticized by Adorno in the sixties, whereas the latter has been criticized by figures like Adolph Reed, Walter Benn Michaels, Nancy Fraser, and Mark Fisher over the last fifteen or so years. Continue reading →

Protest politics in the age of Trump

Posted by Ross Wolfe

So who else is mad as hell about the symbolic transfer of power between rival factions of the bourgeoisie? Remember all the demonstrations that spontaneously broke out eight years ago, when Barack Obama was first inaugurated? And then the acute sense of outrage we sustained throughout his two terms in office, holding regular protests as the government he oversaw deported a record number of undocumented immigrants?

Oh wait…

None of that ever happened. In fact, the first issue of International Socialist Review released during Obama’s presidency featured one of his 2008 campaign slogans: “Yes we can!” Despite the fact his foreign policy platform was virtually identical to that of his predecessor (save some stuff about shifting focus away from the Middle East, toward East Asia), and although domestically he merely followed through on Bush’s bailout of the banks, most self-described Marxists sat back and cheered to themselves as Obama was sworn in. The lead editorial announced that

the election of Barack Hussein Obama as forty-fourth president of the United States is a watershed event. In a country where Africans were brought in chains, were slaves until 1865, where legal (or de facto) segregation was the rule, and where the majority of African Americans were not given the right to vote until 1965, Obama’s election is historic… Engagement is the order of the day.

By contrast, this same publication frowns upon any sort of engagement with the incoming Trump administration. “Resistance” is the order of the day: “Let the resistance begin. The churning fear and revulsion swirling inside us as we watch Donald J. Trump take the oath to become the 45th president of the United States will be at least somewhat balanced by the satisfaction of watching inspiring and unprecedented levels of protest rising up to greet an incoming president…” Conjuring up the ghost of fascism, anyone who entertains the idea of engaging with the new president is branded a collaborator.

What’s so different, though? You’d think that a Marxoid sect that traces its lineage to Lenin would remember his famous paraphrase of The Civil War in France (1871) in State and Revolution (1917): “Marx grasped this essence of capitalist democracy splendidly when, in analyzing the experience of the [Paris] Commune, he said that the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!” Obviously it would be folly to argue that both major American parties are identical. Yet neither represents the interests of the working class, so why engage with either? Continue reading →

Bookchin and Marx

Posted by Ross Wolfe

“The future instead of the past”?

Reid Kane Kotlas
Platypus Review 90
October 22, 2016
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Originally presented as a talk at the 2016 Annual Gathering of the Institute for Social Ecology, held at the ISE compound in Marshfield, VT between August 19-21.
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Platypus as a project seeks to relate to the contemporary left by focusing on the Left in history. We do this because we think one’s understanding of history is in fact one’s theory of the present, of how the present came to be and what might become of it.¹ We try to understand the left politics of the present in light of what the Left has been, so as to provoke critical reflection. Is the Left today living up to the legacy it inherits? Are we falling short of the aspirations of the past? Must we?

Murray Bookchin offers a compelling case of the difficulty of reckoning with history. Bookchin’s political career was fundamentally shaped by his education in and ultimate disenchantment with Marxism. He joined the “official” Communist movement in 1930 at the age of nine. By the end of the thirties, disconcerted by Stalinist leadership, he found refuge in the Trotskyist movement. As the Second World War began, there was an expectation that it would set the stage for a new wave of world revolution, requiring well-prepared revolutionary leadership just as the Bolsheviks had provided at the end of the First World War.

Yet Trotsky’s judgment was not above reproach among his sympathizers and supporters. Questions lingered about his role in the degeneration of the Bolshevik leadership that had culminated in Stalinism. These concerns were only compounded by his insistence that his followers defend the Soviet Union.

Bookchin was frustrated in his efforts to win workers over to the cause of the Fourth International, finding them concerned only with their wages and working conditions. Trotskyist opposition to the war proved a further obstacle due to popular support for the Allied cause. His frustration with Trotskyism as a practical politics would culminate in skepticism of the ostensibly Marxist conception of the working class as essentially revolutionary. His wavering was only encouraged by the perceived dogmatism of Trotskyist leadership after Trotsky’s assassination.

Continue reading →

Fear trumps love

Posted by Ross Wolfe

One sign, waved by someone somehow #StillWithHer, reads: “Not my president.” Another echoes the popular chant: “We reject the president elect.” Finally, and most ubiquitously: “Love trumps hate.”

Such are the slogans seen and heard at anti-Trump rallies since election results rolled in. Calling them riots is pushing it; these are pretty prosaic affairs. I usually don’t put too much stock in the mottoes and phrases mindlessly repeated at rituals of dissent, but here the last example mentioned at the outset instructive. Does love indeed trump hate? Perhaps. Readers of Machiavelli will recall that there’s another sentiment, however, more powerful than love or hate: fear. More on this a bit later; for now, let’s examine the forms of mobilization that have cropped up in response to the prospect of a Trump presidency.

Hysterical liberalism and protest politics

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Liberals know that people are angry, so they’ve brought in their appointed “community leaders,” preachers, and various other “peacekeepers” to prevent these protests from being anything other than impotent cry-ins. M. Harlan Hoke was fortunate enough to attend a demonstration in Philly organized by Socialist Alternative, rather than by disgruntled Dems. He comments that SAlt at least managed to stay on point by focusing on valid economic grievances and the need for comprehensive social reform, while also acknowledging the concerns of groups frightened by Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric on immigration, religious discrimination, and abortion.

Elsewhere, in the more “spontaneous” marches — quickly commandeered by professional activists and NGO representatives loyal to the Democratic Party — their purpose was much less clear. In a post on his new blog, Imperium ad Infinitum, Hoke observes that “in other cities, the theme of the protests is basically angry oblivious Democrats. Their message is what? Vote Democrat in the 2018 and 2020 midterms? Just keep protesting Trump?” Protest politics are fairly limited to begin with, and I have my criticisms even of popular front coalitions formed by parties and organizations further to the left (I’ll get to this later). For now it’s enough to emphasize that liberalism is a total dead end.

Woke celebrities like Lena Dunham, Beyoncé Knowles, and Amanda Marcotte are also out in force, of course, expressing their sanctimonious dismay. Katy Perry is proclaiming open revolution in widely-shared tweets. But these are unlikely to carry over into the real world. Pop singer and Aryan goddess Taylor Swift has remained conspicuously silent throughout all of this. Then again, she’s unwittingly become the darling Valkyrie of the alternative right, so maybe it’s in her best interest to hang back for a bit and see how things play out. Riot grrrl pioneers Le Tigre hopefully regret that cringe-inducing video endorsement of the would-be Madame President. Continue reading →

“Comrades!

The twin fires of war and revolution have devastated both our souls and our cities. The palaces of yesterday’s grandeur stand as burnt-out skeletons. The ruined cities await new builders[…]

To you who accept the legacy of Russia, to you who will (I believe!) tomorrow become masters of the whole world, I address the question: with what fantastic structures will you cover the fires of yesterday?” ⎯ Vladimir Maiakovskii, “An Open Letter to the Workers” (1918)

“Utopia transforms itself into actuality. The fairy tale becomes a reality. The contours of socialism will become overgrown with iron flesh, filled with electric blood, and begin to dwell full of life. The speed of socialist building outstrips the most audacious daring. In this lies the distinctive character and essence of the epoch.” ⎯ I. Chernia,“The Cities of Socialism” (1929)

“The idea of the conquest of the substructure, the earthbound, can be extended even further and calls for the conquest of gravity as such. It demands floating structures, a physical-dynamic architecture.” ⎯ El Lissitzky, The Reconstruction of Architecture in the Soviet Union (1929)

The Charnel-House

From Bauhaus to Beinhaus

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Materialism, postmodernity, and Enlightenment

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1.27.2017
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Once again on the term “identitarian”

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Protest politics in the age of Trump

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Bookchin and Marx

“The future instead of the past”?

Reid Kane Kotlas
Platypus Review 90
October 22, 2016
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Originally presented as a talk at the 2016 Annual Gathering of the Institute for Social Ecology, held at the ISE compound in Marshfield, VT between August 19-21.
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Like this:

Fear trumps love

Hysterical liberalism and protest politics

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With lightning telegrams:

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With lightning telegrams:

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With lightning telegrams:

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Chris Cutrone Platy­pus Re­view May 21, 2016 . .

Cri­tique of so­cial­ism

With lightning telegrams:

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Al­fred Schmidt Frankfurt, 1968

With lightning telegrams:

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Ingo Elbe History-Net 1.27.2017 . .

With lightning telegrams:

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With lightning telegrams:

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With lightning telegrams:

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Reid Kane Kotlas Platypus Review 90 October 22, 2016 .

Originally presen­ted as a talk at the 2016 An­nu­al Gath­er­ing of the In­sti­tute for So­cial Eco­logy, held at the ISE com­pound in Marsh­field, VT between Au­gust 19-21. .

With lightning telegrams:

Like this:

Hysterical liberalism and protest politics

With lightning telegrams:

Like this:

Chris Cutrone
Platypus Review
May 21, 2016
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Critique of socialism

Alfred Schmidt
Frankfurt, 1968

Ingo Elbe
History-Net
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Reid Kane Kotlas
Platypus Review 90
October 22, 2016
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Originally presented as a talk at the 2016 Annual Gathering of the Institute for Social Ecology, held at the ISE compound in Marshfield, VT between August 19-21.
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