Marxism International

Why Is He (Still) One of the Most Popular Writers Around?

The Index Translationum, published every year since 1931 and detailing the most translated authors in the world, has just been announced.   Guess who’s No 4?

The Twelve Miners Who Died in Sago Have Become Briefly Famous, But Who, Really, Knew They Had Ever Lived?

                     ”Miner’s Housing”

Martin Toler & grandson                                                       Company Housing, Sago, West Virginia 1930s

West Virginia is seven thousand miles from Iraq, but when I saw the pasty, anguished faces of the relatives of those Sago miners, the words “Abu Ghraib” kept coming to mind. 

This is Lynndie England country.   It is a world of stunted lives and impoverished emotions, a place where bad life decisions and limited opportunities combine to make this hell-hole a fertile ground for the recruiters of capitalism’s dirty work, whether that be torturing prisoners or digging coal.   In such communities generations work long, hard and cheap, with nary a word of protest other than the sullen acquiescence with which they greet each experience.   To them, history simply happens.  

Come to think of it, though, workers everywhere in America live in their own Abu Ghraib.   For them it is the unedifying sequel to post-industrial America; anaesthetized by drugs, alchohol & pornography, uninformed by any consciousness other than that needed at the moment to briefly escape one’s brutish surroundings, demeaned and humiliated, the best of them struggle to escape.  Or at least help their children to.  But what of those people in Sago?   Some seem, perversely,  to almost relish their predicament, as if in some post-nuclear nightmare with which they at last have made their peace.  The real tragedy is above-ground; they have pathetically made themselves easy prey for the Wilbur Rosses of the world.

Which is just fine with the coal companies .   Here and throughout coal-mining country.   Such wretches are almost custom-made, in fact.   Not only does this tragedy take the Iraq fiasco off of the front page (how many disasters many times the gravity of this one get this kind of 24 hour coverage?), it has all the features of “Bush capitalism”.  Docile and devout (non-union) labor.  An almost child-like faith in god, government and “the company” (there were so many violations at this mine that the owners may as well have blown it up themselves).   And a willingness — verging on slavering stupidity – to believe everything that they are told.

After some initial sympathy, is it difficult not to feel contempt and even anger for people who seem to be so easily resigned to being abused by their “betters” that even the negligent deaths of loved ones cannot shake them out of their stupor?   Do these people really care about one another?   Do they know right from wrong?   Would they fight for their own children if it meant going up against the rich and powerful, or doing something more than acting out in front of tv cameras?  

I have my doubts.  If one needed a graphic illustration of the moral corruption of some of America’s most abused workers, this West Virginia coal town, sadly, seems made to order.

As NATO Draws Closer, Putin and the KGB Turn Up the Heat

Victor Yushchenko’s fingernails are probably a bit shorter this evening.  True, he had the usual support in Western capitols during the brief crisis over gas deliveries from Russia (the “Orange Revolution” which brought him to power was, after all, a nomenclature designed and financed by Washington, London and Brussels).  And the stock of the beleagured Ukrainian president has doubtlessly risen a notch or two in the pages of the capitalist press.   But, Yuschchenko knows such currencies are short-lived.   Tomorrow, when details of the agreement are more closely scrutinized, it will be Putin who has the last laugh.  Already there is opposition to the deal among Ukraine’s opposition, left and right, and Yushchenko’s fractious government may find itself more isolated than ever.

So, what, exactly, happened?  Ukraine now will pay $230 per 1,000 meters of natual gas piped in from Russia (though it will be less than $95 once cheaper gas from Central Asia is mixed in), roughly double what it is paying now.   But, that is merely a detail.  The agreement’s real significance lies in who will be running Ukraine’s (and much of the rest of Europe’s) energy show.

I think that Putin got exactly what he wanted; namely, the direct assumption by Russia’s security services for the transferance of Russian energy resources to the West.  Virtually everything that has to do with the flow of energy westward into Europe will now be through the good offices of something called RosUkrEnergo.  Of Swiss registry and managed by an Austrian (Wolfgang Putschek, of the Raiffeisen Zentralbank), RosUkrEnergo is actually owned by Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, and Centragas, a front for Russians and Ukranians with links to the old Soviet KGB.   By raising the stakes with his threat to cut off the pipeline, Russia effectively put paid to growing efforts by Ukraine to put RosUkrEnergo out of the energy business.   Ukraine’s access to Russian energy will now be under the auspices of Russia’s security services.   And, with the deal signed yesterday, RosUkrEnergo stands to become the third largest energy dealer in Europe. 

It is clear to Putin that, with an ever more aggressive NATO determined to subordinate the former Soviet Union (including and especially Russia), a line has to be drawn somewhere.   A fully ”independent” Ukraine (that is, one obliged to Washington and Brussels) is seen in both camps as the first and necessary step in the subjugation process.  It is not likely to be tolerated let alone welcomed by the Kremlin.  Certainly, Putin knows that Russia’s energy fortunes (one of her few trump cards at the moment) cannot be left to the mercies of Washington or its surrogates in Kiev or Warsaw.  This was doubtless behind his announcement yesterday that China would henceforth be given preference in Russian energy sales.  Putin is serving notice; Russia’s enormous energy reserves will not easily fall prey to western arsenals.   And the same goes for western subsidiaries on Russia’s border, like Ukraine.  

Maintaining “credibility” as a supplier of raw materials for Western consumption has costs.   And its limits.                

  ‘Rising Sun’; The Swimwear for 2006 by Speedo

2006 is finally here.   So, what’s ahead?   My predictions for the New Year;

Westerners, especially Americans, will still think of freedom in terms of having money, and not in having the right to vote.  They will expect others, though, to retain a superstitious reverance for elections.  Americans, for their part, will obstinately continue to believe in a benign god, even though deep down most know of them know better.  And will act accordingly.

There will be a major crisis in Japanese/Chinese relations, shares will rise and then flatten.  Housing prices (and interest rates) will cool. Unions will resume their backward march.  The credit cycle will turn.  GM will muddle through.  Africa will continue to suffer.  There will be no bird flu pandemic.  Iraq will go off the radar.  Democrats will remain a minority.  Communism, or at least its core idea, will begin to emerge from its long torpor. The Renminbi will not be revalued, and India will move closer to Washington.  

Germany’s “recovery” will be sluggish.  Unemployment will remain high there as well as in the rest of Europe.   Poland, in fact, will see joblessness climb to 25%.  Most of their plumbers will emigrate to France.  Russia’s economy will continue to rebound, fulfilling in part Putin’s wish to see the Kremlin become the world’s energy kingpin.

But the really, really big story for 2006 is that China will continue to emerge as a tenable alternative to Anglo/American capitalism.   

In other words, 2006 will be a lot like last year.

Only more so.

After a pause, refreshed?  

Harry Magdoff (1913-2006) 

Ideas, though nothing more than a reflection of the materiality of being, do matter.  And the most powerful idea of the twentieth century was Communism.  Harry Magdoff came into this world just as that idea was bursting on the international scene from the unlikeliest corner of Europe, full of spite and vinegar and credibly promising to transform humanity itself.   He death this morning in his ninety-third year saw off an exemplar of a much-reduced idea, that of “Western Marxism”, or a Marxism without the proletariat and retaining only its function as a sort of cultural criticism of bourgeois civilization.  

Mr Magdoff is best remembered both for his stewardship of the much-admired but little read Monthly Review and a half-baked theory of imperialism that was briefly in vogue shortly before North Vietnamese regulars drove into downtown Saigon in the wake of the most spectacular defeat ever suffered by an imperialist power.   Western Marxism at that moment was at its zenith, flattering itself by its imagined (but largely fictitious) role in the Communist victory before quickly degenerating into the phalanx of failed social-welfare economies and ”identity” politics that was to follow hard on the heels of April, 1975.

The post- Vietnam denouement has in fact been so unkind to the generation of western marxists exemplified by Mr Magdoff that it is fitting to speak of his as a “failed generation” of thinkers on the Left.   Never quite sure of where they stood at any particular moment — at various times flirting with Maoism, Trotskyism, anarchism, syndicalism, or what-have-you — most finally settled into the vapidity of calling, forlornly, for a welfare state financed by taxing the market.   Largely gone was Lenin’s wager on class struggle and political will to reach the classless society.   As constituencies shrank, many quit the fight altogether, though Harry Magdoff remained steadfast in his belief in socialism, even if he could never cogently define quite what he meant by it.

So, Mr Magdoff is finally gone.   And with him are gone most of the illusions of the Western Left.  The social-welfare state is dead or dying;  strident nationalisms and noxious fundamentalisms vie to fill the vacuum left by socialism’s eclipse.   The Left itself is divided into a galaxy of minute, warring sects, united only in their inability to attract more than an insignificant fringe of the workers’ movement or, even, to present a tenable program of action.   All that is left, really,  of the Monthly Reviews of the world is the genre’s cultural critiqe of the bourgeoisie.   There is little to reckon such an asset will facilitate a renewal of the Marxian project.

What follows, then,  for the heirs of Marx here in the West?   Perhaps a rejuvenation of Leninism’s uncompromising prescriptions for class struggle.   More likely a nostalgic tailing after of Chinese “confucian collectivism” fueled by the dynamic of “authoritarian” Asian economies.  Marxism, after all, was once a canon of the inexorable, the unstoppable, the super-dynamic of inevitability.   Magdoff’s generation succumbed to the liberalism that everywhere surrounded them, whereupon the Marxist doctrine of the future descended into a catechism of the weak, the incompetent, the perennially unsuccessful, the raison d’etre of the welfare state.  

Marxism could not flourish within such strictures.  Perhaps the passing of the generation which best exemplified the degeneration of Marx into a garden-variety liberal will prove to be the necessary pre-requisite for the beginnings of a new and productive era in Marxism itself.