Marxism International

                           On a Roll? 

Pity our poor President.   Even half a world away, the increasingly popular image of him as an affable bumbler continues to dog his efforts.   His recent Asian trip, from which he has just returned, is already being archived as the latest episode of an Administration increasingly riven by one marvelous catastrophe after another.   There is still much talk, though somewhat muted over the past week, of a “lame duck” presidency, and the abandonment of some of capitalism’s most hoped-for “reforms”, especially the disabling of Social Security.

Such verdicts I think are premature.  Bush’s trump cards are formidable; the lack of a tenable alternative (the Democrats, apparently, are even more heartily despised); and, most importantly, a national media that is willing to overlook a lot in the interests of securing Israel.  For the time being, at least, Bush is their man.  Weaken him, the reasoning goes, and the war against radical Islam, the main force threatening the Jewish state, is dangerously compromised.   There, too, the lack of an attractive alternate reality in the Middle East (sectarian Arab autocracies) is a handsome asset to both Bush and the Israelis.  Until a viable secular ideology looms as a rival to the fundamentalism of Zionism and Islam, this, as they say, is “it”.

So, what is the future?  I mean, what will America look like in four years, regardless of the nomenclature of a succeeding Washington Admnistration?  

I imagine we will still be firmly ensconced amid the ruins of our Iraq “democracy” adventure.  We may have even “won” by then; that is, we and our opponents may have finally settled on the price of collaboration.   The perfectly awful regimes in Damascus and Tehran, too, may be gone.  Or, perhaps, having been driven from power either by force of arms or, more likely, through the good offices of  “people power,”  their proprietors might settle into that sullen acquiescence that has marked so much of the Arab world’s relations with the West.  I am reminded again of Macaulay; “There, never, perhaps, existed a people so thorougly fitted by nature and by habit for a foreign yoke.”   (Where, I wonder, too, is the Arab Lenin?)

And what about China?  Or Japan?  It is a safe bet that within a few years the latter will have substantially re-armed herself as a formidable American surrogate, ready at the right time to take the field against Beijing.  India, too, I suppose, will have further tied herself to Washington, at least as tightly as her shaky political milieu will credibly allow.   The West has never trusted India, nor she they.  Nevertheless, Bush may well be remembered, at least in the short term, as the President who both precipitated the re-configuring of the Middle East (in the graven image of Israel and the West), and who ”saved” south and east Asia from China.  

I think the world media has been a bit off about Bush’s Asian trip, too.   I mean, the part about his being a bungling ignoramus at the mercy of forces far beyond his capacity to comprehend, let alone control.  There is a hint of truth here.   But, wasn’t his trip designed and executed as an exercise in re-assurance?   Yes.  It was meant as a clear signal that, despite troubles in Iraq and back in Washington, the Bush administration is determined to preserve the status quo in Asia, at least for now.   Side trips included supporting Koizumi in his drive to privatize Japan, Inc., as well as solidarity with Taiwan, and a cautious invitation to “ancillory” nations like Mongolia to take a seat at the table.   Such goals might seem at first light mundane and unspectacular, but Mr Bush has generally succeeded in reaching them.  And at a time when his leadership is widely seen as being beyond redemption, especially by those within his own class and party.

Bush’s latest effort, in short, is an important step in further articulating the goals of Western policy in the coming decades.  He has done nothing less than provide a template for future administrations to more or less follow, regardless of their political color. 

Of course,  the continual prattling on about “human rights” and “freedom” is an enervating reminder of just how much things have changed.   Such shibboleths — once a sure-fire means of exciting popular indignation and hostility towards Communism – now ring hollow in a world where economic development has become the talisman of power, regardless of the political color of a regime.  “Moral concerns”, particularly if they’re promoted by Western patricians with suspect motives, have been nearly eclipsed by the marvels of booming economies, including ostensibly “Marxist” ones. 

And why not?  There is something almost unseemly about the leader of a country like the United States –whose history includes the enslavement of one race and the near-extermination of another, and whose overseas entanglements have led directly to the deaths or impoverishment of hundreds of millions of people, – assembling the brass to lecture the rest of humanity on “human rights”    Washington’s apparent adoption of torture as a means of waging war has not helped, either.

And then there is the fabled cultural divide between the West and the Far East.

Just what do Asians really think?   Do East and West differ in their perceptions of reality?   Well, yes, according to Richard Nisbett, whose book The Geography of Thought has just been published by The Free Press.   East Asians, the professor tells, tend to be more “holistic” than their Western counterparts, making relatively little use of categories of formal logic.  The Chinese, in particular, emphasize the constant of change and recognize inherent “contradictions” and the usefulness of multiple perspectives.   Us Westerners on the other hand are prone to the analytic and focus more on objects and their categories.   We, unlike them, don’t spend inordinate amounts of time searching for “middle ways” between opposing propositions.  

Now, I rather like Professor Nisbett’s book, but he often times seems to be ascribing to Asians what are really the properties of Western liberals like himself.   Aren’t things like “attention to contexts” so universal as to be almost impossible to describe as a racial or cultural characteristic?   Appreciation of “multiple perspectives”, too, would seem to me to be more at home in a raucous multi-party democracy like India’s (where it is difficult to get anything done in a hurry) than in China’s one party state (where many things get done, and quickly).   And do East Asians focus more on contexts and relationships in assessing criminal behavior than, say, readers of The New York Times?

Kudos, though, to the author for at least getting people to start thinking about the relationships between cultures that have been in sharp conflict in the past.  I would have liked it better if he had sought to explain such behaviors in the context of capitalism and imperialism and colonialism.  The relationships between us and them have been rife with all three.  There are differences in perspective when one has been subordinate to a power that until recently has seemed to have gone from strength to strength or when one has been occupied at length by foreign capital and foreign ideas.   At such times things like the “constant of change” and the efficacy of “multiple perspectives” assume a new poignancy.

Perhaps we in the West are doomed to savor some of those same experiences as capitalist democracy inevitably runs out of steam and people begin to haltingly but inexorably think about the greatest good for the greatest number — a supposedly “Oriental” trait celebrated in Chinese history and culture — as a model for all civilization.

Now, that’s one change I would like to see.   Constantly. 

No matter what else has been happening in my life, I have always enjoyed reading history.  A bit like Condorcet, who, while in prison awaiting the guillotine, rejected the consolations of religion in favor of those of history and wrote The Outline of a Table of Progress of the Human Spirit.    As I too am devoutly secular I find the analogy amenable.  

As my mother lay fatally ill (I was seventeen), I buried myself in James McKee’s Civil War Narrative of the Surrender of U.S. Forces at Fort Fillmore, New Mexico.   That was at the start of a lifetime love affair with the history of the American westward movement.   Later, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire kindled my love of the panoramic ethos of the “big” history.  (I never came close to finishing it, though I intend to someday.)   I began reading Parkman’s Conspiracy of Pontiac right after my infant daughter died.   Lately, I’ve gone back to Macaulay’s Essays.  I am always working on Carr’s History of Soviet Russia (I’m up to volume 5),  and, of course, Marx is never far away.  Although rarely remembered as a historian, he was perhaps the most history-conscious of modern philosophers and indeed remains indispensable as a primary source in the history of political economy. 

I also love reading about history; that is, the history of history-writing, or historiography.   Here, I am for once the “professional” historian’s ideal audience.  Why?  Well, for one thing, I readily engage with the subject.   Secondly, I am not encumbered by academic position, and thus am no threat.   I have no awards or prizes to garnish, no tenure to win, no feckless constituencies to amuse.   Most important, I am easily inspired.   The dreariest historian can for me excite possibilities and provoke new thoughts.   And anyone who has read, say, J.H. Hexter, or Norman Stone, or any of the vast host of academic disciples and imitators will know that this is not always easy.

I mention Hexter because he did introduce me, via a collection of essays, Doing History, to my all-time favorite, E H Carr, someone he heartily depised and whom, partly as a result, I came to greatly respect and admire.   So, thank-you, Professor Hexter, in whatever form you may be inhabiting nowadays.

Speaking of Carr, whose What Is History? and The New Society have been profoundly welcome influences in my life; all of my favorites among the practitioners of the historian’s craft have worked outside of academic departments of history.  Of course, most of those I admire were not professional historians at all.  And most of them practiced long before there existed that bloodless race.  They ran the gamut of callings.   Men of politics (Tacitus), men of God (Bede), journalists (Gibbon), men of letters (Macaulay), and scientists (Joseph Needham).   Even Carr himself, though finally ensconced during his later years in a fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, began his career as a diplomat followed by a stint, during the Second World War, as the assistant editor of the London Times.  

There is sadly a lack of good working-class historians (aside from Marx and Engels), a lacunae that in our own age at least is quite galling, given the profusion of “working class studies” spawned by university bureaucracies.   Carr and Needham were very sympathetic to Marx and this more or less extended to regimes ruling in his name, but neither focused on the working class as such.   There are of course the pedestrian studies of E P Thompson and Ralph Miliband, but neither they nor their contemporaries or successors can be called first-class practitioners of the historian’s art.

So, why in fact is there no George Bancroft or Francis Parkman of the working class?   No first-class literary chronicle of the Haymarket Riots, or the Dearborn Strike, or industrial organizing in the South?   No comparable modern complement of Engels on Manchester’s working class or Marx on the Paris Commune?   Could a William Hickling Prescott have written an account of Boston’s working class that would still be in print 160 years later?  

“Working people never did anything.”  That from one of my professors at Harvard, a Pulitzer Prize winner and a writer of fair repute.   That pretty much sums up the attitude of the shining lights at the apex of the American historical profession.  But, of course, there is more to it than that.   A number of things killed, finally, the art of history; capitalist mass education, political correctness, the decline of language, identity politics, and other culprits too numerous or too impolitic to mention. 

Does it matter?  Perhaps not.  History in the end is nothing more than what those in power say it is.   Our rulers now promote a way of thinking about the past that is itself rapidly passing into history; its successor, under new dispensations, will in time redefine not only the future but, as a natural and necessary pre-requisite, history itself.

In the meantime, it is good for Marxists to go on reading and absorbing the wisdom of a Tacitus (read enough of him and you can gain a real sense of such modern writers as Berlin and Arendt and the employment of the “moral voice” for rational purposes; in their case, the revival of Jewish capital in the immediate post-Holocaust era and the legitimacy of Israel) or a Gibbon (a modern secular critique of religion, which he pioneered, is long overdue; his Decline is must reading for students of the American Revolution).   The devout Bede is a venerable lesson in the opacities of human character under the most adverse conditions.   Even Macaulay’s 19th century essays throw new light on our own vexing dilemmas, free from the cant of modern “democracy” and the despairing ennui of its bifurcated citizenry.   He stated the case for an industrializing British empire without squeamishness.   And echoed Marx in his dismissal of “humanitarian” prescriptions for reform.  Macaulay has a good deal to say not so much about “human nature”, but the contexts in which that nature is lived out and experienced.

Which, as history tries to tell us, is the beginning of wisdom.

.

It is now official; in the brothel that is modern American journalism, The New York Times is the vilest of whores.   “She” of course is not without devout competitors for this honor, but no broadside quite rivals our paper of record in reconciling our nation’s credulous “middle strata” with the sordid aims of its royalty.

During my all too brief career in high school (I dropped out when I was 17), I found it advantageous (and not a little fun) to “sell” my body to the attentions of admiring editors whose publications, delicately speaking, catered to the tastes of the then underground homosexual American male.   A friend had told me about one in particular which ran a regular feature titled, prosaically, “Jacking Off” and which depicted boys of my age (we were supposedly all over the age of 18 and were in fact required to sign a pledge to that effect, and most of us who did, I suspect,  lied) engaging in the gentle art of masturbation.   I applied.    There were a few ground rules; we were to maintain at all times a look of bucolic eroticism (no grimacing allowed); the engorged glan, ideally,  was to remain constantly exposed, and (for their part) the actual ejaculation was not to be published.    We pocketed a (usually good) check for $100 and another $900 if our efforts saw print.   My thousand went for a car, parts for my farm tractor and (as I recall) some Velvet Underground albums.   Sex with the photographer(s) was almost always de rigeur.   Some resisted.   I did not.  I had long had an unrequited crush on my locker mate, but settled instead for two of his friends whom I had caught doing the deed one summers’ evening in the woods south of my house.   Besides, my fascination for blood-engorged genitals had been awakened the year before and went on to include very quickly that of both genders.   Too, the photographer and his assistant, though both a good ten years older than myself, were, un-stereotypically, gentle and considerate.

Age, for most of us, raises hell with beauty.   Twenty-five did it for me, or maybe thirty.   Growing older is “good” (I know).   Growing old, with its concomitant social and personal ills (I am not, thankfully, there yet) is not.    I imagine that the conquest of aging and death — and discovering what if anything lies beyond death — will be the most seminal moment in human history.   It will change everything.   We will not be fully human after all until we have reached a point where every promiscuous wish is not only granted but is in fact recognized as being good for us.   

Deprivation may have some nostalgic appeal to the sufferer, just as its material benefits accrue to that class represented by the New York Times, but it is poor coin compared to a life where need and desire are routinely and promiscuously met.   

Contrary to the religious myth proffered by the priests of Islam, Judaism and Christianity, “suffering” does not bring wisdom.   Wisdom after all is nothing more than knowledge tempered with generosity.    Wisdom can come with happiness or pain.   Just as one can “pose” as a “journalist” for prestigious national publications while represnting interests quite foreign to her professed object,  another can do likewise with less social harm and with, arguably, greater good.

In the meantime, sex is still a delicious adventure, and I imagine few my age reflect much yet on its beginnings, let alone on what life may be like without it, or at least without so much of it.   Compared to those whose malevolent influence darkens the pages of the Times, as well as their disciples and imitators throughout our land with their toxic biases and demoralizing ambience designed to vitiate any resistance to capitalist America,  sexual ”sin”, even for money, becomes virtuous in comparison.  

It’s not surprising of course when a high French official publicly calls the rioting crowds of largely Muslim youth “scum”.   That and worse I imagine is routinely uttered by officials in like situations everywhere.   It is rather unsettling to read that at least one leader in the Islamic community agrees with him.   But then the fortnight of unrest precipitated by the untimely deaths of two youths on the run from the police has little, really, to do with the devout of any faith.   It really comes down to jobs, or, rather, that steady and vexing lack of them that has increasingly plagued the capitalist West during the past two decades.   Increasing immigration was designed to both drive down wages for all workers  AND provide a model of worker “flexibility” which would facilitate the movement of capital across increasingly fissiporous borders.   It is no longer a tenable policy.   In fact, the capitalist model of development, hailed only a decade ago as the apogee of human civilization, is, increasingly, in disarray.  

In China, by contrast, it is a matter of urgent policy at all official levels to facilitate the creation of at least fifteen million tenable jobs over the coming year.    Similar programs, in fact, are taking root throughout Asia’s growing economies.    India and Vietnam have over the past two years inaugarated programs that assign job-creation supreme status in national policy.   Both, like China, have radically increased spending on ancillory social programs, a practice all but junked in the modern capitalist economy.   

The youth of the European muslim diaspora, orphaned by the fabulously wealthy and the fabulously corrupt of all nationalities, are finding neither jobs nor subsidies in their new home.    Theirs is, increasingly, the despairing rejoinder of “surplus populations” throughout the capitalist world.

But the growing insurrection goes far beyond that.   There is a revolt sweeping  the older capitalist states and the ”newer democracies” alike that takes many forms but which can best be described as a growing and general resistance to received models of “globalization”.   It is much in evidence everywhere, from this summer’s resounding “No” votes on the EU Constitution to the growing political crises in the Ukraine, Georgia, Poland, Germany and, indeed throughout the capitalist world.   It is even beginning to appear on the streets of America in the wake of Katrina and the burgeoning scandals among the ruling elite.   Ordinary people of every faith and nationality are more and more loathe to accept precipitously declining standards of living in the name of some pie-in-the-sky ideology preached by those who famously care only about fattening themselves or those who pay them at the expense of the public good.  

As for the devout; will a disintegrating capitalism, finally, teach them the salient wisdoms of human existence?  Life is first of all the struggle over the division of goods and services.   The need for productive work is essential to the health of the human psyche.   We are, all of us, transient citizens of an amoral universe, possessing neither a soul nor innate ideas, but a common origin and a common fate.

And there is no God of any kind.  

Anywhere.