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ISR Issue 58, March–April 2008
LETTERS
WE WELCOME LETTERS! E-mail us at [email protected], or send a letter to ISR, P.O. Box 258082, Chicago, IL 60625. Please try to limit your submission to 400 words. We reserve the right to edit for length.
Marxism for today's world
I've been picking up ISR on the newsstand now for about three years, and I'm finding it one of the few journals of current events that makes any sense whatsoever! Thanks to all of your contributors who come through for us in every issue.
But I've noticed that Letters to the Editor are not a regular feature in ISR. Surely it cannot be because your readers have no opinions on anything!
There have been some letters, occasionally, on some topics. But I really think this is a part of the magazine that really must be expanded.
I very much like the balance you have achieved between covering current events (e.g. immigration and the Minutemen), debunking older things (e.g. the ancient crap about the Russian Revolution; e.g. the general sorryness of the Democratic Party), and reviewing both theory and practice (Marx, Luxemburg, Trotsky, etc.)
As a newbie, I need to learn more. I've been reading like a maniac lately (specifically since March 2003, if that date means anything to you). But I'm having trouble in a couple of areas, and as you look through your article submittals for what to print, I would appreciate your keeping these questions in mind:
(1) Given all of the changes that have occurred in capitalism since Marx's day, how can we further his analysis in today's world? How can I apply surplus value theory in my own job? I need to be able explain my employer's insane profits to my fellows, and be able to show them facts and figures proving just exactly how much they are being ripped off. I ask this as a newbie, but also as a troubled employee of a major war profiteer.
(2) I hear the phrase "political education" a lot. I'm working very hard on my own, and I've learned a lot. But what about my peers at work and my neighbors? I want to share what I've learned, and also to get better at debunking the distortions and misstatements of the Right. What does a proper Marxist political education syllabus look like? How is it done? Where would a group start? What materials should be used?
Apropos, I invited a couple of my buddies out for a beer last Friday night with the idea of starting a discussion about the sorry state of Americal political discourse. They were enthusiastic about the idea. They already seemed to agree with me about a great many things, but when I got them together, they surprised me by asking what I thought of Ron Paul. After all, he is a well-known "libertarian." Well, fortunately, I had recently read the "No Friend of the Left" article and was able to tell them a few things that they had not known about Mr. Paul. They seemed shocked by what I told them, but listened politely and did not go "nonlinear" on me.
By the way, I can assure you that, although most of my fellow employees do not seem greatly troubled by the content or implications of their work, there is a small core that very definitely is. I have gotten to know some 15 or 20 people, I guess, who work near me and who are as upset and angry as I am about the direction our society is going and our employer's role in it. Since my company has about 130,000 employees, that must mean at least some 10,000 companywide who have not gotten the message but who would be receptive to it.
An ISR reader from Houston, Texas
Democracy, revolution, and dictatorship
In Kevin Murphy's “Can We Write the History of the Russian Revolution?” (ISR 56), he critiques historian Eric Hobsbawm's “ambivalence over October” in order to “reexamine a set of propositions that I believe reflected the somewhat inconsistent perspective on the Russian Revolution by a much wider audience on the Left after the fall of the Soviet Union.” As Hobsbawm wrote, “That it would have been better if a democratic Russia had emerged from the revolution is something about which most people would agree.” Murphy correctly argues that these “only if” histories are used to distort (or avoid) the actual record of the revolution and to stress the supposed “continuity” between the early years of the revolution and the subsequent Stalinist counterrevolution in the late 1920s. Hobsbawm's politics were critical of the Stalinist states (especially after 1956), but he nonetheless remained within the tradition of socialists who believed that the USSR, China, Cuba, etc. represented some sort of advance over capitalism. Unfortunately, what Murphy identifies as the tendency among left-wing historians to accept many of the distortions about Russian Revolution created by right-wing historians also infects certain socialists from the Trotskyist tradition.
This is not the place for a detailed review of these writings, but readers may be surprised to learn that revolutionary socialist activist and historian Hal Draper, whose writings have been featured in the ISR, holds many of the same ideas that Murphy critiques in Hobsbawn in terms of the Russian Revolution. Of course, this fact does not detract from Draper's important contribution to the Marxist movement. In his five-volume Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, Draper covers a lot of ground, from a fascinating account of Marx and Engels' explanation of how class societies developed and how states are formed to a detailed history of the strategy and tactics they pursued while they led the left-wing of the German revolution in 1848.
Yet, Draper ends this series with a book called The Dictatorship of the Proletariet from Marx to Lenin, which, jarringly, paints Lenin's views on the revolutionary state in colors generally used by the Right. Draper claims that Marx primarily used the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” to simply mean that “a workers' state could, and probably would, be based on the forms of the democratic republic.” (p. 38) Draper implies that this means there are no necessary “dictatorial” measures that need to be taken, such as eliminating suffrage for the bourgeoisie. Despite Draper's obvious command of the material, I am dubious about this assertion. He builds his case by careful quotation and textual analysis, but it seems completely obvious that Marx and Engels were completely clear that revolutions would have to prepare to take emergency measures that would violate certain democratic norms. For example, Marx and Engels were enthusiastic advocates of the North smashing the South in the American Civil War and prodded Lincoln to take more drastic measures to crush the slave power by force of arms. They wanted to win the war; they were not concerned about the civil liberties of the slave owners.
Based on his careful distortion of Marx, Draper then argues that Lenin misunderstood Marx's phrase when he wrote State and Revolution, incorrectly believing that the workers' state would have to immediately and vigorously apply “dictatorial” measures in order to win a civil war against the inevitable attempt at counterrevolution. Although Draper is careful never to come out and say, “Lenin's theory led directly to Stalin,” (as the Right does) he comes very close, saying, in 1918, Lenin advocated a “specially organized dictatorial regime, dictatorial in the sense that it had become increasingly dominant and increasingly counterpoised to abstract democracy.” (p. 105) He then accuses Lenin and Trotsky of taking the theoretical lead in “gutting socialism from its organic enrootment in the mass of the people...” which laid the basis for Stalin. (p. 142) Draper, like Hobsbawm, does not offer an alternative to the Bolshevik's practice, thus contributing to the reigning ambivalence criticized by Murphy.
1917 is not something that needs to be explained away and apologized for, it was working-class liberation in practice. Hopefully, Murphy's Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Steel Factory will soon be joined by many more books that can acquaint a new generation of activists with the truthabout October.
Todd Chretien
San Francisco
How do we spread socialist ideas?
My name is James Rankin, I am sixteen years old and I am currently studying Marxist economics and the history of the Russian Revolution of 1917. My concern is with the status of socialism in America today-it seems the idea of socialism is widely unknown, heavily misconstrued, and often identified with Stalin's USSR and Mao's China. This is caused largely [by] the system of education; namely misinforming textbooks and biased teachers. The reasoning behind it is obvious-to protect American imperialism and to limit the imagin[ation] of the working class, keeping them where they must.
The prospect of a socialist future in America remains entirely shrouded and concealed by the state, which makes it very difficult for the Socialist Party to become broadly recognized as an influential element in the affairs of political economy. Something must be doneto distribute information to the working class effectively. I have personally seen the level of ignorance in America-many people cannot even define socialism, have never heard of Karl Marx, and instinctively believe in the “freedom” and “justice” of American capitalism. They do not know of the alternative to the vicious effects of imperialism. My question to you, comrades, is this: what must be done to convey the idea of socialism to the masses? What steps must be taken to raise the Socialist Party up to the level of the Democratic and Republican parties, and higher still? The inevitable worsening of the economy will ultimately play a role in the development of socialism, but it alone will not be able to break the tradition of years of ignorance engraved in the minds of millions of Americans.
I believe that we must make Marxist literature much more widely distributed, as well as soviet literaturecomposed by Vladimir Lenin or Leon Trotsky. This would lead to a far better understanding of capitalism and Stalinism, and thus the need for international socialism. It would do me much good to hear your response on this matter.
Yours in Comradeship,
James Rankin
Capitalism must be destroyed
I just read ISR issue 56. Please accept my payment for a year's subscription. Your articles on Blackwater and health care alone made it worth it. Capitalism must be destroyed. It cannot be reformed. Keep ruthlessly critiquing the system and upholding the principles of solidarity.
Also, I commend you for exposing the Democrats as the consistent partners with Republicans in perpetuating greed. Keep up the struggle.
In solidarity
Mark from Lancaster, Pa.
Sunni-Shia divisions aren't carved in stone
The U.S.-led occupation of Iraq has brought about the complete destruction of Iraq and has plunged the Iraqi people into a situation arguably more appalling than any in the country's modern history. The imperial presence, as in so many other colonial contexts, has also reshaped the country's various ethnic and religious identities in such a way as to assist in the conquest and subjugation of the Iraqi people and the furthering of U.S. strategic interests. As Dahr Jamail outlines in the last edition of ISR (57), America and her allies have sought to divide Iraqis against one another, first by dividing up positions of authority along religious lines, and then, more damagingly, by creating sectarian death squads under the guidance of John Negroponte and Col. James Steele, veterans of America's dirty wars in Central America. As Dahr points out in his excellent Beyond the Green Zone, this policy of terrorism, kidnapping, and murder led to the bitter and bloody sectarian conflict, with these squads becoming the leading cause of death in Iraq. The opinions expressed by both Ashley Smith and Tariq Ali in the same issue of ISR are somewhat at odds with Dahr's account and it is important to look at why this is. Both of the former imply that religious and ethnic cleavages in Iraq are something fixed, preexisting, and hence to be expected, at least to a certain extent.
Ashley Smith states that, “Because the U.S. has increasingly allied itself with Sunni forces and used them to pressure Shia parties to pass pro-Sunni legislation...they have further deepened the schisms between the Arab sects that could produce greater sectarian violence.” He also says further down, “the U.S. has armed the Sunni resistance in Anbar to the teeth, making it more capable of taking on the Shia militias and Shia-dominated government that they despise.” In an even more essentialist vein Tariq Ali states that, “when the occupying power privileges some sides and not others…people retreat to their very basic, primitive identities.” All of these statements suggest that Shia-Sunni divisions are, at some level, to be taken for granted. Ashley Smith also implies that the resistance in Anbar opposes the Iraqi government chiefly because of the heavy presence of Shia in it and hence that arming Sunni resistance fighters in Anbar will inevitably lead to sectarian violence. Tariq Ali's claim suggests some form of “basic essence” in Iraqi consciousness, as well as a straightforward, almost deterministic relationship between imperial policy and the forms of consciousness that predominate in a colonialcontext.
None of this is justified. Sunni-Shia divisions are not carved in stone. Witness, for example, the impressive Sunni-Shia displays of solidarity at the time of the assault on Fallujah, and the relatively high incidence (prior to the occupation) of Sunni-Shia marriages. Is it not possible that the people of Anbar despise not the “Shia-dominated government” but the “puppet government of the occupying power”? Religious/ethnic cleavages, which for sure exist in potential form in all societies, just as class consciousness does, are distorted and manipulated by the ruling class to divide the oppressed and turn them against one another, but not always with success. Dahr Jamail's courageous and inspiring journalism shows us how this is happening in Iraq, and reminds us that just as Iraqis can become “Sunnis” and “Shia,” they can also become part of a coherent and organized resistance movement, opposing U.S. imperialism and fighting for an Iraq free from foreign control. If we are to effectively combat the bankrupt arguments of the warmongers, arguments that rely on claims about the “inevitably sectarian nature of Arab/Muslim societies” and hence the certain chaos that will follow withdrawal, we must be clear about how sectarianism develops, how it is manipulated, and most importantly, how it can be transcended.
Nick Kardahji
Berkeley, Calif
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