To Lead the People: Notes on the Russian Revolution: Part II

The worst thing that can befall the leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class he represents, and for the realization of the measures which that domination implies . . . Thus he necessarily finds himself in an insolvable dilemma. What he can do contradicts all his previous actions, principles and the immediate interests of his party, and what he ought to do cannot be done . . . Whoever is put into this awkward position is irrevocably doomed.              Friedrich Engels 1

In the spring of 1924 . . . I said to Smirnov: “Stalin will become the dictator of the U.S.S.R.”  Smirnov knew Stalin well . . .  ”Stalin?” he asked me with amazement.  ”But he is a mediocrity, a colorless nonentity.” “Mediocrity, yes; nonentity, no,” I answered him. “The dialectics of history have already hooked him and will raise him up.  He is needed by all of them — by the tired radicals, by the bureaucrats, by the nepmen, the kulaks, the upstarts, the sneaks, by all the worms that are crawling out of the upturned soil of the manured revolution.”                              Leon Trotsky 2

According to Marx, being the leader of a community inevitably requires defending first and foremost the individuals who are most politically active.  Given the conservative nature of political activity, that means defending first and foremost those who are socio-economically dominant.  Failing to give an established elite primary representation, an advocate for equality must either make war against them or abandon the quest for leadership.

The idea of an equalitarian leader in a non-equalitarian society not undergoing violent conflict is a contradiction in terms.  That Lenin, Trotsky and other Bolshevik leaders forgot or ignored this fundamental Marxist axiom explains the personal tragedies which befell them in the years which followed their mighty October.

War Communism: 1917-21

As noted in part I of this essay, prior to the revolution, Russia’s Marxist intellectuals had agreed it was going to be capitalist in nature.  The various historical stages Marx described would have to be traversed; skipping a stage was impossible.  Since Russia was feudal, it followed that its bourgeois-democratic period would be next: “Lenin accepted as unequivocally as the Mensheviks the bourgeois character of the incipient revolution, and the necessity to pass through the stage of bourgeois democracy on the way to socialism”.3 According to Lenin, “He who seeks to advance toward socialism by any other road, bypassing political democracy, inevitably arrives at conclusions both inept and reactionary.”4

The Bolsheviks also argued, and most Mensheviks agreed, that by transforming their country’s relationships with capitalist Western Europe, and by strengthening the resolve of West European workers, a victorious bourgeois revolution in Russia would,“spark” proletarian-socialist revolutions on the continent.  In turn, Western Europe’s socialist revolutions would then “spark” a subsequent proletarian-socialist revolution in Russia.5

The Bolshevik-Menshevik accord broke down over the question of what to do after Russia’s bourgeois revolution occurred.  Concluding the process which would eventually bring about its socialist revolution would take many years, the Mensheviks urged tempering the capitalist government’s hurtful practices by working from within.  The Bolsheviks, conversely, argued the “sparking” would be rapidly completed, and stood for opposing the bourgeois government from without, contending that would expedite continental Europe’s, then Russia’s, passage to the socialist stage of history.

In keeping with their analyses, the Marxist intellectuals uniformly welcomed the February 1917 revolution as capitalist.  The Mensheviks moved to support it, while the Bolsheviks adopted a stance of semi-loyal opposition; although their opposition was sufficiently moderate that it, too, often entailed assistance.

Yet, given the theoretical framework they employed, the Bolsheviks’ hesitancy to vigorously oppose the Provisional Government made sense.  Who would have the audacity to suggest Russia’s bourgeois-democratic stage could be passed through in only a few months; that the proletarian-socialist revolution was already approaching before the predicted outbreak of Western Europe’s socialist revolutions had even begun.

Initially, Lenin alone proved to be so rash.  Returning to Russia in April, “Lenin shocked the party leaders by stating flatly that ‘the bourgeois or bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia had been completed.’”6 Small wonder that he was promptly regarded by his fellow Bolsheviks as mad.

Lenin’s identification with Russian workers and peasants was much closer than that of other Bolsheviks.  He had little that was bourgeois about him. “When he lived in the Kremlin Lenin quite unaffectedly continued to live in the most simple style, sleeping on an iron bedstead in a carpetless room; he did not even consciously dispense with luxuries, but was merely rather irritated when anyone tried to force them upon him.”7

Between February and October 1917, Lenin’s empathy for the cruel suffering of peasants and workers repeatedly led him to interpret events in ways compatible with their interests and understandings; though unlike them, he filtered those interpretations through an absolutistic understanding of Marx’s paradigm in reaching  his conclusions.

It was the logic of the worker-peasant-soldier experience that no revolutionary change whatsoever had occurred in February. The Provisional Government was still guarding the interests of the preindustrial elite, just as the Tsar had always done.  It was attempting to prevent peasants from seizing land and workers from taking over factories, and it continued to prosecute the disastrous war.

Simple survival required the workers, peasants and soldiers to oppose the Provisional Government.  They had no elaborate theoretical justification. Nor did they need one.  They found the egalitarian perspective which defending their social existence demanded self-evidently true.  “Among the wage-earners and the land-working people it was common to hear talk of ‘all land to the peasants, all factories to the workers.’”8

Soon after the February uprising, Lenin began to offer a rationalization for the actions which workers, peasants, and soldiers were finding imperative.  In his pamphlet State and Revolution, and again in his April Theses, he described the proletarian revolution which he insisted was near at hand. “’The peculiarity of the current moment in Russia,’” Lenin reasoned, “’consists in the transition from the first stage of the revolution, which gave power to the bourgeoisie as a result of the insufficient consciousness and organization of the proletariat, to its second stage, which should give power into the hands of the proletariat and poorest strata of the peasantry.’”9

While believing Russia’s socialist revolution was at hand required Lenin to turn Marx’s theory inside out and upside down, his depiction of the approaching transformation was certainly radical-equalitarian.  Quoting Engels at length, in State and Revolution, he prophesied:

“‘The proletariat seizes state power and turns the means of production into state property to begin with.  But thereby it abolishes itself as the proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, and abolishes also the state as state. . . .  /The/ proletarian state will begin to wither away immediately after its victory because the state is unnecessary and cannot exist in a society in which there are no class antagonisms.’”10

“The bureaucracy and the standing army,” Lenin argued, “are a ‘parasite’ on the body of bourgeois society — a parasite created by the internal antagonisms which rend that society, but a parasite which ‘chokes’ all its vital pores.”11

Taking power into their own hands, Russia’s workers, peasants and soldiers would smash the existing bureaucratic state, abolish the army, and establish a proletarian state whose exclusive function would be to control the bourgeoisie while the sources of its power were discovered and dismantled.  That quickly accomplished, the workers/peasants/-soldiers would then disassemble their proletarian state, which no longer served any useful purpose.

As Lenin envisioned the proletariat’s remarkable undertaking:

“. . . the ’state’ is still necessary, but this is now a transitional state.  It is no longer a state in the proper sense of the word; for the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of the wage slaves of yesterday is comparatively so easy, simple, and natural a task that it will entail far less bloodshed and it will cost mankind far less . . .  Naturally, the exploiters are unable to suppress the people without a highly complex machine for performing this task, but the people can suppress the exploiters even with a very simple ‘machine,’ almost without a ‘machine,’ without a special apparatus, by the simple oganization of the armed people (such as the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, we would remark, running ahead)”.12

Furthermore, this very simple peoples’ machine, “almost not a machine at all,” would require no special expertise or grand emoluments to run.

“. . . the great majority of the functions of the old ’state power’ have become so simplified and can be reduced to such exceedingly simple operations of registration, filing and checking that they can be easily performed by every literate person, can quite easily be performed for ordinary ‘work-men’s wages,’ and these functions can (and must) be stripped of every shadow of privilege, of every semblance of ‘official grandeur’.”13

Lenin and Trotsky were both adhering to this utopian vision at the moment of the Provisional Government’s overthrow.

“Fellow workingmen!” Lenin wrote a few days after the October Revolution, “Remember that you yourselves now govern the state.  No one will help you if you yourselves do not unite and take the whole business of state in your own hands.  Your soviets are from now on the organs of state authority.”14

In a speech declaring the end of the Provisional Government Trotsky proclaimed:

“We, today, the Soviet of Soldiers’, Workers’, and Peasants’ Deputies, are going to undertake an experiment unique in history, the establishment of a government that will have no other aim than the satisfaction of the needs of the soldiers, workers, and peasants.  The state must become the instrument of the masses in the struggle for their liberation from all slavery.”15

The Natural Necessity of the New Industrial-Elite

Following the overthrow of the Tsar, Russia’s workers, peasants and soldiers had faced a collapsed economy.  Their situation was one in which they could preserve their socio-economic existence only by discontinuing the war and seizing land and factories.  It was no longer possible for them to sanction a continuation of the feudal institutional structure which formerly the Tsar and now the Provisional Government defended.  Peasants were already expropriating landlords and workers were taking over industries, despite the Provisional Government’s reproach.

While the workers, peasants and soldiers were prepared to tolerate arguments which rationalized what they were doing, they had no need for the involved theoretical justifications which Lenin, Trotsky and other Bolsheviks offered. Such justifications did not evolve naturally out of a defense of their lowly status.  On the other hand, since permitting the Bolsheviks’ interpretation of events to hold sway did not prevent them from defending their social existences, workers, peasants and soldiers made no effort to reject it.  Initially, they seemed puzzled by, and indifferent to, the Marxists’ theorizing.  They were enthusiastic when Lenin proclaimed Russia must stop fighting the war, or when he urged peasants to seize the land and workers the factories.  But his elaborate philosophical arguments made little impress.

For Menshevik and Bolshevik leaders, however, it was a very different matter.  If Lenin’s analysis was correct, if workers, peasants and soldiers were preparing to make another revolutionary gesture, it would be necessary for the Marxist intellectuals to come up with a new theoretical defense of their favored social existence.

Although, in sum, Lenin’s arguments would require modifications here, reformulations there, they promised to serve that critical function.  Certain aspects of his proposed program greatly disturbed his fellow Bolsheviks, particularly the talk about a genuine worker-peasant state.  But there was another, much less radical Lenin, who directly addressed their personal interests.  That more cautious Lenin spoke of:

“. . . the practical need, which he had propounded almost at the same moment with no less vigor in Will the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?, to take over and utilize the technical apparatus of economic and financial control created and left behind by capitalism. . . . /In that essay/, Lenin had cautiously foreseen that the new regime would need a greater number than ever before of ‘engineers, agronomists, technicians, scientifically trained specialists of every kind,’ who would have ‘for the period of transition’ to be paid a higher wage than other workers.”16

This more practical Lenin, appealed to the Bolsheviks, and to Mensheviks, as well.  The analysis he presented could, and did, become the basis for an elite dictatorship in the name of, rather than by, the teeming masses, a dictatorship which would protect the Marxist intellectuals’ superior status against challenges coming from the below.

If the Marxist intellectuals wished to secure their hegemonic social existences in the developing post-February crisis they would need to drag their feet where the implementation of revolutionary change was concerned.  Insofar as the change took place anyway, they would be best served by gaining control of it, using the inherently elitist features of Lenin’s theory.  Which, of course, is how they behaved.

Except for Lenin and Trotsky, the Bolsheviks had balked at the idea of an uprising against the Provisional Government, though most workers believed it was imperative.  Of the Bolshevik Central Committee’s discussion of insurrection held only days before the government was actually deposed, John Reed reported:

“All night long the 23rd they met.  There were present all the party intellectuals, the leaders, and delegates of the Petrograd workers and garrison.  Alone of the intellectuals Lenin and Trotsky stood for insurrection.  Even the military men opposed it.  A vote was taken.  Insurrection was defeated!  Then arose a rough workman, his face convulsed with rage. ‘I speak for the Petrograd proletariat,’ he said harshly. ‘We are in favor of insurrection.  Have it your own way, but I tell you now that if you allow the Soviets to be destroyed, we’re through with you!’”17

When the Bolsheviks seized power two days later they did so because they were forced into it; defensively responding to the Provisional Government’s attempt to crush them once and for all.

Having gained power, the Bolshevik Party next proved reluctant to cease involvement in the war.  In a speech to the soldiers’ delegates on November 11, Lenin acknowledged: “The vast majority of peasants, soldiers and workers are in favor of a policy of peace. . . . This is not the policy of the Bolsheviks: it is not a ‘Party’ policy at all; but it is the policy of the workers, soldiers, and peasants, that is, of the majority of the people.”18  ”The soldiers were tired of fighting.” ‘They are voting with their feet,’ said Lenin mockingly to those who wanted him to continue with the war.”19  ”In a stormy meeting of Bolshevik leaders on 8 January 1918 Lenin was voted down by an absolute majority for continuing the war.”20

Only by threatening resignation, only by confronting his fellow Bolshevik intellectuals with the wrath of the masses, did Lenin wreak his will. “Under threat of Lenin’s resignation his peace policy scraped through the Central Committee on 23 February, and on 3 March 1918 the treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed.”21

The Bolshevik coup had conclusively stripped the last remnant of institutionalized political protection from the landholding, preindustrial-elite.  While for a brief time the war with Germany had served to preserve nearly everyone’s social existence, it was now necessary for defending those with feudal interests alone, and was therefore no longer to be waged.

For the feudalists, the overthrow of the Provisional Government had been a changing-of-the-guard. With the treaty of Brest-Litovsk they would either accept expropriation, or, they would have to fight.  Predictably, they chose to do the latter. The actual revolution, the productive order conflict between those whose social existences could be sustained only if Russia’s feudal structure was preserved, and those who could no longer survive unless it was razed and an industrial system of production constructed, was about to begin: the Russian civil war.

The feudalists were immediately assisted by military forces from nations with shared interests. “Even before the war /with Germany/ ended in November 1918, Soviet territory was invaded by British, French, Japanese, United States’ and other allied troops.”22 Like Russia’s feudal elite, the foreign powers were acting defensively, and Lenin had predicted their involvement saying: “the confiscation of the landed estates will provoke the resistance not only of Russian land-owners, but also of foreign capital, with whom the great landed properties are connected through the intermediary of the banks”.23

For three years, the Civil  War would ravage Russia’s economy.  When the fighting finally ended, the pro-industrial forces controlled the country and the feudal order of production and distribution was being dismantled. But, however necessary and progressive, the Soviet Union emerging from the womb of feudal Russia would have no more to do with the classless world of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky’s dreams than did England or France after undergoing the same struggle in the 1640s and 1789 respectively.

Throughout the Civil War all the various Russian social segments continued to follow the courses of action which most readily defended their social existence.  By the spring of 1918 the distribution of land to the peasantry was essentially completed.  But, although “the expropriation of the landlords and the state lands brought the peasants upwards of half a billion gold rubles a year, . . . in the prices of state products /they/ were paying out a much larger sum.”24

To protect themselves the peasants began hoarding and engaging in what the government regarded as black market trading.  The Bolsheviks’ arguments for sharing notwithstanding, peasants resisted sending their produce to the cities via channels established by the new government. “The city demanded grain and raw materials from the rural districts, giving nothing in exchange except varicolored pieces of paper . . . and the muzhik buried his stores in the ground.  The government sent out armed workers’ detachments for grain.  The muzhik cut down his sowings.”25 Whatever small quantities of industrial goods the peasants required were most profitably acquired by doing their own trading.

Workers who had been most thoroughly urbanized, and whose connections with the countryside had long ago been severed, were naturally those most in need of industrialization.  Hence, they were the ones who had been most willing to prosecute the civil war against the feudal forces. They formed the nucleus of the Red Army which defeated the White Russians and the invading foreign armies.  Five million strong, they suffered and died in behalf of establishing the industrial framework without which they, like the nascent industrial elites, could no longer exist.

Other, less urbanized workers, joined with the poorest peasants in suppressing and expropriating wealthier peasants who would not share.

“. . . the Bolsheviks appealed to those among the peasantry who had least to gain by speculative hoarding, and most to lose by the defeat of the revolution. They formed Committees of Poor Peasants in every village, gave them wide rights of search and confiscation, and entrusted to them the provision of food for the towns.”26

“. . . the machinery of exchange and distribution established by recent decrees was quickly pushed aside; and for some time to come the most effective instruments in extracting grain from the peasants were the ‘iron detachments’ of workers from towns and factories reinforced by the local committees of poor peasants.”27

“/T/he Bolshevik workers’ detachments, a Left speaker declared, were conducting ‘little short of war declared by the town on the country.’”28

With the Soviet economy in total disarray, millions of workers who had more recently arrived in the city and retained some rural roots, sought to preserve their socio-economic existence by returning to the countryside.  During this period there was “a mass exodus of industrial workers from the towns and reversion to the status and occupation of peasants.  The dislocation of industry in the first winter of the revolution had already started such a movement. The larger the city, the greater the decline; Petrograd had lost 57.5 percent of its population in three years, Moscow 44.5 percent.”29

“By the autumn of 1920 peasant discontent was too widespread to be concealed.” Lenin acknowledged “the majority of the peasants feel only too bitterly the cold and hunger and intolerable imposts” and “the majority of those who have spoken openly or indirectly abused the central power.”30

The situation was even worse for many workers. “The British Labour delegation visiting Russia in the spring /of 1920/ noted ‘the ragged and half-starved condition’ of factory workers, and learned that the peasants employed men at higher wages than the factories, plus /had/ a plentiful supply of food which the town worker does not get.’”31

Victor Serge wrote of “Petrograd, where the people are dying of hunger in the streets and dead horses are piled up in front of the Grand Opera.”32  ”Nobody knows how many millions died by violence, by starvation, by epidemics. The Moscow food-cards in 1918 gave each recipient about one-seventh of the calories which the Germans received on their ration cards during the war, and about one-tenth of what was distributed in Great Britain.”33

Meanwhile, in defense of their favored socio-economic existences, the sons and daughters of the tsarist nobility, including some members of the nobility itself, had been flooding into the Bolshevik party, or into close association with the party, from the very moment of the October uprising. “Early in 1917 /the Bolshevik Party/ had no more than 23,000 members in the whole of Russia.” By 1922 that number had risen to 700,000.34  According to Trotsky, within five years of October more than 97 percent of the party consisted of members who had joined after the victory of the revolution.35  E.H. Carr writes: “It is indisputable that the Soviet bureaucrat of these early years was as a rule a former member of the bourgeois intelligentsia or official class, and brought with him many of the traditions of the old Russian bureaucracy.”36 The Thermidor of the revolution had already begun.

The needs of the indicated elite elements immediately brought them into conflict with the more equalitarian Old Guard of the Bolshevik Party; those disciples of Lenin and Trotsky who had closer ties with the worker-peasant masses.  Isaac Deutscher reports that as late as 1922:

“The Old Guard still lived by its austere code of revolutionary morality.  Under the partmaximum a party member, even one who held the highest office, was not allowed to earn more than the wages of a skilled factory worker. True, some dignitaries were already availing themselves of loopholes and supplemented meagre earnings by all kinds of benefits.  But such evasions were still the exception.”37

More recent members of the Bolshevik Party, now the great majority, abided by no like morality.  Having a higher status to defend, they were far more energetic when it came to wooing and pressuring the Old Guard than were the worker-peasant masses.

As a consequence, despite the conviction they were engaged in building an egalitarian society, when the Old Guard, Lenin and Trotsky included, employed violence to induce compliance with the Party’s (increasingly conservative) dictates, they employed it against those who were poorer and less politically active.

For dealing with peasant horders of food Lenin prescribed the gun. In January 1918 he “advocated ‘mass searches’ of all storehouses and goods’ yards and the shooting on the spot of speculators found to be holding up grain supplies.”38 For anarchists, who insisted power should at once be equalized by dismantling the political state, and whose position was closer to that of Lenin in State and Revolution than was his own spring 1918 stance, likewise, death.

In April 1918, his consciousness remarkably transformed, Trotsky declared:

“I am asked further: ‘You call yourselves socialist Communists, and yet you shoot and imprison your comrades, the anarchist Communists?’. . . I will first explain in a few words wherein the mistake of the anarchist doctrine lies. The anarchist declares that the working class needs no state power; what it does need is to organize production. State power, he says, is a bourgeois service.  State power is a bourgeois machine, and the working class must not take it into its hands.  This is a thoroughly mistaken view . . . We say: in order to organize production in a new manner, it is necessary to wrest the state apparatus, the government machine, from the hands of the enemy and grasp it in our own hands”.39

For making this ”mistake”, Lenin and Trotsky dictated anarchists would have to pay with their lives.

But whereas recalcitrant peasants and anarchist workers were to be handled violently, those who would constitute the new industrial-elite would be coaxed into giving assistance through economic and social rewards. Equality would be built by encouraging inequality.  Despite Lenin’s contention in State and Revolution that “’technicians, managers, and bookkeepers, as well as all /Party/ officials, shall receive salaries no higher than a ‘worker’s wages’”, “no specific commitment was undertaken to equalize wages; nor was any serious attempt made to enforce equality in practice.”40

“For the purpose of fighting intervention, officers from the old army, doggedly supervised by political commissars, had been employed by the Red Army.  Similarly, many of the old civil servants had to be re-employed.  Both these categories remained to form the centre of that ’soviet bureaucracy’ which Lenin never tired of denouncing, but which has proved so tenacious of life.”41

The Bolshevik policies soon provoked a reaction.

“In the spring of 1918 . . . opposition began to come from Left groups within the party which accused the party leadership of opportunist tendencies and of an abandonment of Bolshevik principles. . . . /The opposition/ turned its attention to the critical economic situation, attacking Lenin’s policy on such matters as the employment of specialists, the formation of industrial trusts and one-man management in industry. . . .  At the Eighth Party Congress of March 1919, with the civil war at its height, a ‘military opposition’ unsuccessfully challenged Trotsky’s building up a new national conscript army with professional officers partly drawn from the old Tsarist army.   At the Ninth Congress of March 1920 a group using the party slogan of ‘democratic centralism’ objected to the introduction of one-man management in industry and secured the support of the trade unions in the person of Tomsky . . .  A special ‘Kremlin control commission’ was set up to investigate ‘Kremlin privileges,’ which were giving rise to complaints within the Party, and ‘to bring them, insofar as it was impossible to eliminate them alto-gether, within limits which would be understood by every Party comrade.’”42

“/I/n its theses read at the Party gathering of 4 April 1918 and published a fortnight later in Kommunist, /the opposition/ referred indignantly to ‘a labour policy designed to implant discipline among the workers under the flag of ‘self-discipline,’ the introduction of labour service for workers . . . of piece-rates, of the lengthening of the working day, etc., and argued that ‘the introduction of labour discipline coupled with the restoration of the leadership of the capitalists in production . . . threatens the enslavement of the working class and excites the discontent not only of backward strata, but of the vanguard of the proletariat.’”43

In the autumn of 1920 a group which came to be known as the “Workers’ Opposition” formed.

“Its program was a hotch-potch of current discontents, directed in the main against the growing centralization of economic and political controls, against the growing efficiency and ruthlessness of the machine . . . /I/t protested against the predominance of intellectuals in the party and called for a drastic purge of nonworkers; and it wanted open election to all party posts and free discussion within the party, with facilities for the dissemination of dissident views.”44

Neither Lenin nor Trotsky showed any sympathy for these early reactions from the left.

“Trotsky accused the Workers’ Opposition of putting forward dangerous slogans. ‘They turn democratic principles into a fetish.  They put the right of workers to elect their own representatives above the Party, thus challenging the right of the Party to affirm its dictatorship, even when this dictatorship comes into conflict with the evanescent mood of the workers’ democracy.  We must bear in mind the historical mission of our Party.  The Party is forced to maintain its dictatorship without stopping for these vacillations, nor even the momentary falterings of the working class. This realization is the mortar which cements our unity. The dictatorship of the proletariat does not always have to conform to formal principles of democracy.’”45

Lenin and Trotsky had travelled a long way in a very short time, and their journey had not been in the direction of anything resembling a socialist, let alone a communist, society.  Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit describe Lenin’s and Trotsky’s actions as reactionary in that respect.  They note, and their argument is certainly supported by the evidence, that the party program, even in the early post-revolution years, constituted a complete renunciation of the program Lenin outlined in State and Revolution.  It was an even more pointed renunciation of socialism ala Marx.

However, the Cohn-Bendit’s then go on to blame the Bolsheviks for creating the bureaucratic counter-revolution, and in doing so, they are guilty of the very thing for which they took Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolshevik Party to task when they claimed the Party’s vanguard efforts had created the revolution. As Marx emphasized over and over, neither an individual nor a collaborative group of individuals/a party ever determines the course of a nation’s history.  Rather, its history is the result of material forces impinging on all of its citizens and the sum of their self-interested reactions to those forces.  The Bolsheviks did not start, could not have started, the Russian Revolution.  Just as no small body of individuals has the power to begin a revolution, neither can it determine its course once the revolution is in progress.

To be sure, Lenin and Trotsky must bear their share of responsibility for helping to stultify or redirect egalitarian currents in the Russian revolution.  Particularly after the beginning of the civil war, the thrust of their efforts worked against, rather than for, the construction of a classless society.

But the Cohn-Bendits neglect to ask themselves the most important question; namely, “Why did Lenin and Trotsky behave that way?”  Clearly, it was not out of a desire for a new hierarchically structured social order.  Trotsky, and in particular Lenin, yearned for communism far more than the majority of Russians, peasants and factory workers included.  The problem was that neither their hegemonic social existence nor the political consciousness which that hegemonic social existence produced, prepared the Bolsheviks to represent the classless community of their aspirations.

Given the conditions existing in the Soviet Union at the time, and the nature of political activity, Lenin and Trotsky were continually forced to choose between relinquishing power or abandoning their egalitarian objectives.  They repeatedly opted to do the latter, often reluctantly, and with convoluted rationalizations.

But far from being singularly to blame for the establishment of a new bureaucratic-capitalist elite, Lenin, Trotsky, and most other members of the Bolshevik Old Guard, were unwilling to move right fast enough or far enough to be relevant as leaders very long.  In only a few years most of the Old Bolsheviks would be dead, Trotsky exiled and subsequently killed, because of their hesitancy to adequately solidify the power and positions of the new industrial-elite and their Bolshevik Party protectors in the context of the world economic collapse that began in the late 1920s.

In retrospect, there is nothing very puzzling about the path of the Russian Revolution. The Marxist intellectuals were right when they argued the country had reached a point at which either the feudal productive order must be razed and an industrial system established, or, the majority of Russians would be unable to maintain their social existence and growing numbers would fail to survive. In this regard, Milovan Djilas said of the Marxists:

“. . . only the Communist parties were both revolutionary in their opposition to the status quo and staunch and consistent in their support of the industrial transformation.  In practice, this meant a radical destruction of established ownership relations.  No other party went so far in this respect.  None was ‘industrial’ to that degree.”46

Yet, if it was their aggressive pro-industrialization stance which made the Bolsheviks momentarily relevant, they soon discovered that insofar as razing the country’s feudal strucure permitted peasants and workers to move back from whence they had fallen, they automatically diminished their political activity.  For them to battle with the educated sons and daughters of the old Tsarist nobility, particularly when they needed their unique industrial-world skills, would be a far more disruptive undertaking than to vie with each other within the state-capitalist framework aborning.  E.H. Carr remarks of the post-revolutionary period: “The rank and file for the most part made their submission or abandoned political activity.”47

“’The chief shortcoming of the masses,’” Lenin “told the chairmen of provincial soviet executive committees in July 1918, ‘is their timidity and reluctance to take affairs into their own hands.’”48  It is another irony that this reluctance was due in no small part to the fact that tens-of-thousands of Marxist intellectuals were struggling hard to prevent such an eventuality, even Lenin and Trotsky often providing them assistance. The Marxists might yearn for a genuinely socialist man.  But, in defense of their own hegemonic interests, for the moment they would have to cripple or kill any who began to arise.

Despite Marx’s personal abhorrence of capitalism, if given an absolutistic and  Hegelian interpretation, his theory would be useful for justifying the construction of a state-capitalist order. The anarchist Michael Bakunin had foreseen this in 1873 when he prophesied that Marx’s followers would:

“. . . proceed to liberate humanity in their own way. They will concentrate the reins of government in a strong hand.  They will establish a single state bank, concentrating in its hands all commercial, industrial, agricultural, cultural, and even scientific production, and then divide the masses into two armies – industrial and agricultural – under the direct command of state engineers, who will constitute a new privileged scientific and political class.”49

Faced with foreign invading armies, with peasants and workers who acted upon their immediate self-interest, with military men, technicians, party bureaucrats and professionals of every kind who did the same, it was a relatively simple matter for Lenin and Trotsky to proceed dictatorially.  Like the other Marxist intellectuals, they already had the requisite condescending attitude.

Unlike Marx:

“The Bolsheviks had never contented themselves with giving expression to the actual moods or aspirations of the working class.  They regarded it as their mission to shape those moods and to prompt and develop those aspirations.  They looked upon themselves as political tutors of the working class and were convinced that as consistent Marxists they knew better than the oppressed and unenlightened working class could know what was its real historic interest and what should be done to promote it.”50

The more anarchic the situation became, the more Lenin and Trotsky strove to centralize political power, to take the reins into their own hands, believing they might somehow steer the nation in the “proper” direction.  It was a notably non-Marxian assumption which underlay their effort.  Marx started with the proposition that all of politics is superstructure, that political relationships and institutions, including the state, will merely reflect relationships of an economic variety.  The former can never be used to create a new form of the latter.  Lenin and his followers discarded this idea as passe and became builders of the Russian state-capitalist productive-distributive order whose birth they had once predicted.  Lenin sometimes appeared to understand and accept this. In May, 1918 he argued:

“Evolution towards state capitalism—there is the evil, there is the foe against whom we are invited to struggle.  And yet when I read these references to such enemies in the paper of the Left communists, I ask: What has happened to these people, how can they through poring over extracts from a book forget reality?  Reality says that state capitalism would be for us a step forward.  If we in Russia in a short space of time could get state capitalism, that would be a victory.  How could they fail to see that the small proprietor, small capital, is our enemy?  How could they see the chief enemy in state capitalism?”51

The Lenin who had once argued Bolsheviks should oppose Russia’s revolutionary capitalist order from without, now dogmatically justified representing and defending it from within.

Neither Lenin nor Trotsky were willing to accept that in the final analysis the Russian people—acting upon immediate self-interest–were dictating the course of events, not the Bolshevik party, or they as the party’s leaders; though at different times both men seemed near to reaching that conclusion. In a conversation during the civil war Lenin likened himself to the engineer of a runaway train, hurtling downhill along a track.  By using all his strength, Lenin observed, the engineer might nudge the train almost imperceptibly left or right against the rails.  But he could not alter its speed, and he could not change its direction.

By 1921 the battle of each against all–peasants against workers, lower peasants against middle and upper peasants, soldiers now against workers, now against peasants, party bureaucrats against anyone who threatened their political, hence their socio-economic dominance–was threatening to destroy the last semblance of national existence.

“Theft in factories was so common it was estimated that half the workers normally stole the things they themselves produced.”52  ”Cases occurred in which the workers, having taken over a factory, simply appropriated its funds or sold its stock and plant for their own advantage.”53

“Russia’s national income /in 1921/ amounted to only one third of her income in 1913 . . . industry produced less than one-fifth of the goods produced before the war . . . the coal mines turned out less than one-tenth and the iron foundaries only one-fortieth of their normal output. . . . the railways were destroyed . . . all stocks and reserves on which any economy depends for its work were utterly exhausted . . . the exchange of goods between town and country had come to a standstill . . . Russia’s cities and towns had become so depopulated that Moscow had only one-half and Petrograd one-third of its former inhabitants.”54

By the end of 1921 famine was raging in the Volga farming areas, and the number affected had climbed to 36 million. “Cannibalism reappeared, a ghastly mockery of the high socialist ideals and aspirations emanating from the capital cities.”55 And all the while the nouveau elites and members of the rapidly growing Bolshevik bureaucracy strove to secure their own favored socio-economic positions, the latter fighting more radical party members with a vigor which kept pace with, because it was a defensive reaction to, the deepening crisis.

“Now that we were in power,” recalled Victor Serge, “we were surrounded by revolutionists of the latest vintage, who would have been glad to turn against us at the first sign of bad weather.  Already they occupied a good many offices, each one demanding his little bit of power, his special ration of herring and tobacco – and an automobile at the first possibility.”56

“The end of the civil war revealed the full extent of the losses and destruction which it had entailed and removed the restraints of loyalty which war commonly imposes; discontent with the regime became, for the first time outside political circles, widespread and vocal, extending both to peasants and factory workers . . .” 57

The Kronstadt rebellion, an uprising of soldiers and sailors who demanded freedom and an end to party dictatorship, took place in 1921.58  The Makhno movement, a largely peasant fight against all central authority and for total democracy, reached its zenith the same year.59

Something drastic would have to be done if the Soviet Union was going to remain a nation.  As is ever the case in a crisis of this sort, the alternatives before Lenin and Trotsky reduced to a sharp move either to the left or or to the right.

Unfortunately, a sharp left turn would put workers and peasants in direct conflict with the nascent industrial-elite and their Bolshevik party defenders; neither of which would accept socio-economic diminishment without a bloody struggle.  In effect, an assault on the new state-capitalist elite would entail asking workers and peasants to continue with civil war, to go on jeopardizing their lives.  And for what?  Even if they were successful, the workers and peasants would lose, since the new elite included the chemists, engineers, physicists, teachers, etc., needed for industrializing the country, and they would leave for the capitalist west where their talents would be rewarded.  It’s reasonable to assume the workers and peasants would not have heeded such a suicidal call if it had been given; in which case Lenin and Trotsky would immediately have fallen from power.

With reluctance and expressed misgivings on the part of some, the Bolshevik leaders elected to move to the right, embarking upon a “New Economic Program” (NEP), which Lenin described as taking “one step back” so that the country could subsequently take “two steps forward.” Under the NEP state-capitalism would be openly encouraged, and the favored social existences of the pro-industrial elites made secure.  With his usual candor, Lenin acknowledged that the NEP was a “retreat.”

The radical swing to the right would at least enable most workers and peasant to survive, though it would mean continued suffering for many of them, and it would greatly strengthen the hand of their new masters.  Because it had the backing of party bureaucrats and the nascent industrial-elite, along with the acquiesence of the worker-peasant masses, moving to the right would also permit Lenin and Trotsky to continue as leaders for awhile.

But while the natural necessity of veering right is apparent, there was an obvious contradiction in Lenin’s decision to oversee it.  In 1900 he had conceded the Tsarist regime was sufficiently viable to last a few more years.  Only weeks before the February Revolution he argued that he did not expect the anti-feudal revolution to occur within his life time. Yet on neither occasion did he recommend abetting feudalism because of what he considered its momentary inevitability.  The Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski has given a pithy explanation why being a revolutionary always means acting out a denial of the immediately inevitable, writing: “The striving for revolution cannot be born only when the situation is ripe, because among the conditions for this ripeness are the revolutionary demands made of an unripe reality.”60

In determining to make peace with an unripe reality Lenin was moving still further away from the revolutionary posture with which he had begun.  The Lenin of 1917 was rapidly withering away.

Lenin appears to have employed the time-worn liberal justification for moving right: “If I don’t do it, an extremist will take my place and the result will be yet more abhorrent.”  Certainly, in embarking upon the NEP he attempted to centralize Bolshevik political authority more than ever before out of an expressed fear that reactionaries might otherwise gain control.  Lenin spoke of the need for ever greater vigilence and discipline when a step back is being undertaken. Using the analogy of a retreating army he warned of the possibility some people might start running, causing much that had been accomplished to be lost.61

Trotsky, too, endorsed the further destruction of what little remained of party democracy, using the same sort of reasoning.  The Party must remain aloof from, and uncontaminated by, the temporary retreat. “We allow the NEP-men,” Trotsky acknowledged, “but in the party we will allow no NEP-manism or petty bourgeois, no – we shall burn it out of the party with sulphuric acid and red hot irons”.62

With its redoubled emphasis on the importance of leaders in determining the course of history, the Bolshevik’s new position was non-Marxist to the core.

The Results of the NEP

“Insecure from the beginning of its tenure of power,” Harold Shukman observes, “the Bolshevik government lurched towards stability on the two crutches of political oppression and economic concession.”63

Trotsky relates:

“/The/ economy revived . . . With it came a revival of theaters, restaurants and entertainment establishments. Hundreds of thousands of people of the various professions who spent the vigorous years of the Civil War in a kind of coma, now revived, stretched out their limbs and began to take part in the re-establishment of normal life.  All of them were on the side of the opponents of permanent revolution.”64

Victor Serge, a poet of the revolution as well as an activist, writes:

“In a few years time the NEP restored to Russia an aspect of prosperity.  But to many of us this prosperity was sometimes distasteful and often disquieting. . . . Money lubricated and befouled the entire machine just as under capitalism.  A million and a half unemployed received relief–inadequate relief–in the big towns.  Saloons were open until three o’clock in the morning in the heart of the cities. There was gambling, drunkenness, and all the old filth of former times . . .  Classes were reborn under our very eyes; at the bottom of the scale, the unemployed receiving 24 rubles a month; at the top, the engineer receiving 800; and between the two, the party functionary with 222, but obtaining a good many things free of charge.  There was a growing chasm betwen the prosperity of the few and the misery of the many . . .  There was squalid, heartbreaking poverty, an ulcer in our young society, while wealth was arrogant and self-satisfied. Our socialist militia arrested the poor apple-woman who neglected to take out a license, while the fat shop-keeper, enriched by the sale at speculative prices of articles manufactured by our socialist industry, looked on and decided that by and large, order was returning . . . “65

The process was repeated in the countryside.  Recovery commenced, but “the growth of the kulak far outstripped the general growth of agriculture.”66

The rightist mood even swept the campus, where “teachers and students staged anti-communist demonstrations and strikes, and communists were man-handled for singing the Internationale, the revolution’s anthem.”67

“Cries of betrayal” now began to come from the left of the party ranks.68 “Shlyapnikov and Kollontai /of the Workers’ Opposition/ charged the government with promoting the interests of the new bourgeoisie and of the kulaks, with trampling upon the workers’ rights, and with the gross betrayal of the revolution.”69  ”Men of the Workers’ Opposition had already said that NEP stood for the New Exploitation of the Proletariat; and the quip had become something of a slogan.”70

Consistent with Marx’s logic, the bureaucratic elites quickly gained the political control of the party apparatus needed to defend their hegemonic social status. With the arrival of the NEP, Serge notes:

“The old militants, those who had experience of prison and the love of ideas, were only a handful; and these few were placed in jobs isolating them from the rank and file . . .  Already bureaus were replacing the party; the worker, the militant rank-and-filer, hardly dared open his mouth.  We sensed the coming omnipotence of the functionaries.”71

Trotsky observes:

“Professor Ustryalov wondered whether the New Economic Policy of 1921 was a ‘tactic’ or an ‘evolution.’  This question disturbed Lenin very much.  The further course of events showed that the ‘tactic,’ thanks to a special configuration of historical conditions, became the source of ‘evolution.’  The subsequent strategic retreat of the revolutionary party served as the beginning of its degeneration.”72

By April of 1922 Lenin was reported to be deeply troubled about the course events were taking, “suffer/ing/ from long spells of insomnia.”73 ” /I/n November 1922, he admitted that the old state apparatus, which ought to have been smashed, had instead taken over, and might yet win out over the communists even while they thought they were at its helm.”74 A month later he complained: “That which we call our apparatus is still completely alien to us; it represents a bourgeois, tsarist mechanism.”75 In 1923 Lenin again described the Soviet state as “a bourgeois Tsarist machine . . . barely varnished with socialism.”76  ”Our anxiety at seeing this degradation of the state and these first symptoms of the bourgeoisification of Soviet society,” says Serge, “was, of course, not emotional, it was intellectual.”  ”Lenin died on January 21, 1924, haunted by this anxiety,” Serge continues. ‘Is not the helm escaping from our hands?’ he asked.”77

There is no denying that Lenin played a counter-equalitarian role in promoting the New Economic Policy, a policy which “followed lines not far removed from those adumbrated by Left SRs and Mensheviks at the eighth All-Russian Congress of Soviets.”78 It brought into full flower the use of piece-work rates, preferential rations, bonuses, all the myriad methods “appealing to personal, selfish interests.”79

At the same time, Lenin was the first Old Guard casualty of the thermidorian process through which the Soviet industrial-elite established unchallenged authority over the country.  There “appears to have been a sudden change of Lenin’s attitude during the last few months of his working life.”80 Alarmed at the turn of events emanating from the NEP, he suddenly returned to his former concern with the growth of the bureaucracy.  In February of 1922 he came out against the growing nationalism of the  bureaucrats, stressing once more the dependency of Russian socialism upon the success of socialism in industrialized nations. “’We have always proclaimed and repeated this elementary truth of Marxism,’” he exhorted, “’that the victory of socialism requires the joint efforts of workers in a number of advanced countries.’”81

Increasingly anxious, in May of 1922 Lenin suffered the first of a series of major strokes. His speech was impaired, his right arm and leg paralyzed.  Following the stroke he seemed more determined than ever to take on the bureaucracy.

“With great effort he drew up a comprehensive survey of the situation of the country, worked out a program of action, and tried hard to persuade his colleagues on the Politburo and the Central Committee to accept it.  This program, which was not requested by the members of the Politburo, involved considerable changes in government methods, in personnel, and to some extent in objectives.  The majority of the Politburo were unenthusiastic.”82

“After every spell of illness, when he returned to watch anew the movements of the state machine, Lenin’s alarm grew; and with pathetic determination he struggled to grip the steering wheel in his paralyzed hands.”83 His conflict with the bureaucracy inevitably brought him up against Stalin, the epitome of an amoral, apolitical, bureaucratic personality.

“One of the bitterest disappointments for Lenin was to see that the very commissariat which had been created for the purpose of combating red tape, corruption, and other ills of bureaucratism, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection headed by Stalin, turned out to be the worst of them all.”84

“The so-called ‘Lenin testament”‘- that is, his last advice on how to organize the Party leadership – was written in two installments during his second illness; on December twenty-fifth, 1922, and on January fourth, 1923. ‘Stalin, having become General Secretary,’ declares the testament, ‘has concentrated enormous power in his hands, and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution.’  Ten days later this restrained formula seemed insufficient to Lenin, and he added a postscript. ‘I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position and appoint to it another,’ who would be, ‘more loyal, more courteous and more considerate to comrades, less capricious, etc.’”85

To his wife Krupskaya Lenin said of Stalin, “he is devoid of the most elementary honesty, the most simple human honesty”.86 But there was no interest among the bureaucrats for this sort of thing.  A month later Lenin severed all personal relations with Stalin.87  “And when at last, a dying man, his mind ablaze, he moved to retrieve the revolution from its heavy encumbrance,” writes Isaac Deutscher, “it was to Trotsky that he turned as his ally.”88

However, Trotsky, usually very farsighted concerning matters political, hesitated to take up the attack upon Stalin.  In Deutscher’s estimation, at the time:

“The truth is that Trotsky refrained from attacking Stalin because he felt secure.  No contemporary, and he least of all, saw in the Stalin of 1923 the menacing and towering figure he was to become.  It seemed to Trotsky almost a bad joke that Stalin, the willful and sly but shabby and inarticulate man in the background, should be his rival.”89

Following Lenin’s first stroke, the party machine came under the control of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev working as a team. While Lenin had tapped Trotsky as his natural heir, the conservative bureaucrats found those three “masters of mediocrity” more to their liking. Initially, Trotsky even went so far as to assist the triumvirate in keeping Lenin’s testament from being made public.  But his commitments were far too radical for him to long find acceptable the path they immediately began to follow.

“/T/he triumvirs sought assiduously to please everybody, promising something to every social class and group, pandering to every kind of complacency, and flattering every imaginable conceit.”90 Meanwhile, Stalin “used his wide powers of appointment to eliminate from important posts, in the centre and in the provinces, members who might be expected to follow Trotsky”.91  ”Trotsky watched this change in the party, grasped its significance, but could do nothing to arrest it. There was only one way in which he might have tried to counteract it: by appealing openly to the rank and file.”92 That he hesitated to do.

In the summer of 1923 workers in Petrograd and Moscow engaged in spontaneous opposition to the labor policies of the triumvirate.

“Throughout July and August there was a great deal of industrial unrest.  Workers felt that they were made to carry too much of the burden of industrial recovery. . . .  ’Wild’ strikes broke out in many factories, spread and were accompanied by violent explosions of discontent.  The trade unions were caught by surprise; and so were the party leaders. The threat of a general strike was in the air; and the movement seemed on the point of turning into a political revolt.”93

The triumvirs lashed out at their most visible and vocal adversaries, the Workers’ Opposition.94  Myasnikov, Kuznetsov, and Moiseev, who back in April and May had circulated a manifesto “denouncing the New Exploitation of the Proletariat and urging the workers to fight for Soviet democracy,” were arrested.95  Left groups active in the factories, such as the “Workers’ Truth,” were suppressed.

At this point, Trotsky began to dissociate himself from the triumvirs.  However, his initial reactions were notably moderate.  After verbal clashes with them he “asked to be sent abroad as ‘a soldier of the revolution’ to help the German party to prepare its revolution.”96 When his request refused by the party, Trotsky finally began to go on the offensive, hesitantly, feeling his way.  Then, at the close of 1923 he formed the “Left Opposition,” “dedicated to revolutionary internationalism and the restoration of workers’ democracy inside the Soviet Union and the Communist International.”97

At the outset Trotsky stood virtually alone among the intellectuals.  Nor could he hope to gain much support from within the party, considering that by 1924 “those who had belonged to the Bolshevik party since the early days of 1917 already formed less than 1 percent of the membership.”98 In addition, “only 15 or 16 percent of the entire membership consisted of factory workers.”99 And these were predictably the elite of that element, hardly good prospects for building a serious opposition.

Moreover, because the triumvirs were responding to worker protests with carrots and sticks in an ad hoc fashion, there was no wide base of support for the Left Opposition within the working class. The Opposition was urging permanent revolution, identification with and concern for the international movement.  It argued for stopping the growth of a wealthy kulak class, and for moving against the interests of party bureaucrats. “‘Strike against the Kulak, the NEP-man and the Bureaucrat!’, ‘Down With Opportunism!’, ‘Carry out Lenin’s Testament!’, ‘Beware of a Split in the Party!’, ‘Preserve Bolshevik Unity!;, such were the Opposition’s watchwords.”100  For workers and peasants to follow the Left Opposition would have meant a return to violent struggle.

“The last thing the workers, most of whom had their roots in the country, could look forward to was a conflict with the peasantry.  They wished for safety first. As this was what Stalin seemed to offer them, they were wary of sticking out their necks for the Opposition.  Stalin’s strength lay in the appeal he made to the weary and disillusioned mass, and not merely the ‘petty official and hanger-on’ responded to the doctrine of consolidation more readily than to the heroic evocation of permanent revolution.”101

“Ten years ago the workers of the two capitals were ready to give their lives at Trotsky’s word of command.  Now they would not even turn their heads to listen to him.”102

Trotsky was becoming politically irrelevant.   As he subsequently reflected:

“The masses lacked faith that the new situation could be seriously changed by a new struggle.  Meantime the bureaucracy asserted: ‘For the sake of an international revolution, the Opposition proposes to drag us into a revolutionary war.  Enough of shakeups!  We have earned the right to rest.  We will build the socialist society at home’.  This gospel of repose firmly consolidated the apparatchiki and the military and state officials and indubitably found an echo among the weary workers, and still more the peasant masses.”103

“. . . the workers were tired. . . . On the other hand, the bureaucracy fought with extraordinary ferocity.”104

The lines were now sharply drawn.  To be for Stalin was to be against Trotsky.  It was to be for socialism in one country (an impossibility according to Marx), and against a primary commitment to the world revolution.  It meant being for the NEP encouragement of inequality and against Trotsky’s insistance that further socio-economic leveling be undertaken.

The minority of workers who were sympathetic to the Left Opposition justified their inaction with the sort of arguments individuals have always used when asked to risk their socio-economic existence, possibly their lives, for offensive purposes. “’You understand, said the printers in my /Serge’s/ unit. If I join up with you and you are defeated, what’s going to become of me and all the kids?’”105

And leading members of the Opposition, quite reasonably, did expect to lose.

“I did not believe in our victory /Serge recollected/, and at heart I was even sure that we would be defeated.  When I was sent to Moscow with our group’s messages for Lev Davidovich /Trotsky/, I told him so.  We talked in the spacious office of the Concessions Comitteee. . . .  /H/e was suffering from a fit of malaria; his skin was yellow, his lips were almost livid.  I told him that we were extremely weak, that we, in Leningrad, had not rallied more than a few hundred members, that our debates left the mass of workers cold.  I felt that he knew all this better than I did. But he, as a leader, had to do his duty and we, as revolutionaries, had to do ours.  If defeat was inevitable, what else could one do but meet it with courage?”106

“Off the record /Trotsky/ admitted that the ideas and slogans of the ruling group met an emotional need in the rank and file, that this overlaid their antagonism, and that the Opposition was at variance with the popular temper.  It is not the business of the Marxist revolutionary, Trotsky reflected, to bow to the reactionary mood of the masses. At times when their class consciousness is dimmed, he must be prepared to become isolated from them. . . .  The revolutionary has to fight no matter whether he is destined to end as Lenin did – to live and see his cause triumph – or to suffer Liebnecht’s fate who served his cause through martyrdom.  In his private notes and in talks with friends Trotsky hinted at this last alternative more than once; and . . . he seemed already more and more resigned inwardly to ‘Liebnecht’s fate.’”107

In terms of numbers, the Opposition was hardly worthy of its name. “The estimates of its actual membership . . . vary from 4,000 to 8,000. . . . Compared with the party’s total membership, which amounted to about three-quarters of a million, a few thousand oppositionists formed a tiny minority.”108

Serge recorded Trotsky’s address to the Central Committee meeting which preceded the Opposition leaders’ subsequent expulsion from the Central Committee:

“Trotsky: ‘Through the present apparatus, through the present regime, the proletarian vanguard undergoes the pressure . . . ‘ (The noise increases more and more, the orator can hardly be heard.) ‘of the upstart bureaucrats including the worker-bureaucrats’ (tumult, whistling), ‘of the administrators, the petty bosses, the new-born proprietors, the privileged intellectuals of city and country . . . “‘Voroshilov: ‘Zinoviev, it’s outrageous!’ Skrypnik: ‘The platform of the Central Committee wasn’t made for such infamy.’109

On October 23rd, 1927, Stalin asked the Central Committee for Trotsky’s expulsion, along with that of Zinoviev, who by then had gone from being an enemy of the Opposition to a central member.

Of the latter meeting, Serge writes:

“There was a morbid tenseness in the air, such as might be felt at an execution where hangman and accomplices view their victim with deep hatred but also with deep awe and with gnawing uncertainty about the justice of the deed and the consequences.  At the session, the Stalinists and the Bukharinists constantly interrupted Trotsky’s last pleas with bursts of hatred and vulgar vituperation.  They shut their ears to his arguments; and they urged the chairman to shut his mouth.  From the chairman’s table inkpots, heavy volumes, and a glass were flung at Trotsky’s head while he spoke.”110

The expulsions from the Central Committee carried.  The following month Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Communist Party, and in January 1928 Trotsky was exiled to Alma Ata, a few hundred miles from China’s border. One year later he was exiled from the country.

The Material Logic of Stalinism

The “natural leader” during a time of political reaction will necessarily possess unique qualities.  Since it is his function to defend an existing state of affairs, and defending the existing state of affairs requires no broad theoretical constructs, he must be an atheoretical, non-philosophical personality.  Toward the same end–preserving the status quo–he must also be extremely sensitive to which way the various political winds are blowing, attuned to the lay of forces which are pulling in other directions.  In that regard, it’s helpful if he possesses a sizeable ego, since being egoistic will lead him to personalize every disagreement with his own position, thus providing him with the requisite political sensitivity.  Finally, an innate lack of consistency, save for the constant desire to be in charge, even a devious opportunism, will stand him well.

Stalin had all of the requisite attributes in abundance. “Cautious, cunning, and caring not a straw for logical and doctrinal niceties, he borrowed ideas and slogans from both right and left and combined them often quite incongruously.”111 A supporter of the Provisional Government’s war policy following the February Revolution, Stalin immediately fell silent when Lenin returned to urge defeatism.  As soon as he saw that Lenin’s stance was gaining mass support, he embraced it as though it had always been his own. Long considered an intellectual weathercock by party members, indecisive, moving with the winds of the moment, he possessed the narrow vision and aphilosophical disposition required to oversee the country’s descent into fascism in seemingly automatic fashion.

“Stalin looked neither far ahead nor far behind,” observed Milovan Djilas.112 “His mind,” said Trotsky, “is not only devoid of range but is even incapable of logical thinking.  Every phrase of his speech has some immediate political aim.  But his speech as a whole never rises to a logical structure.”113  “When faced by great problems Stalin always retreats – not through lack of character as in the case of Kamenev, but through narrowness of horizon and lack of creative imagination.  His suspicious caution almost organically compels him at moments of great decision and deep difference of opinion to retire into the shadow, to wait, and if possible to insure himself against both outcomes.”114

If Stalin’s qualities led him to take positions which workers and peasants now found more acceptable than those of the Opposition, those same qualities were indispensible to the bureaucracy as well.  Trotsky observes:

“Before he felt out his own course, the bureaucracy felt out Stalin himself.  He brought it all the necessary guarantees: the prestige of an Old Bolshevik, a strong character, narrow vision, and close bonds with the political machine as the sole source of his influence.  The success which fell upon him was a surprise at first to Stalin himself.”115

Stalin “was dependent on the system created under his administration, and on the opinions of the party oligarchy”, adds Djilas. “He could do nothing against them nor could he dispense with them.”116 From the moment of his rise to prominence, Stalin defended the pro-industrial party-state elite as though the revolution had occurred principally to serve their interests, which, in a Marxist-materialist sense, it had.

“In Georgia, Mensheviks /came/ into power and persecuted Old Bolsheviks. While the men who had fought in 1917 were expelled from the Party—soon to be deported—newcomers, who had been counter-revolutionaries during the Civil War, carved out splendid careers for themselves by their zeal in approving the new leader.”117

“Under Stalin,” Serge argues, . . . the party became a mass of ideologically disinterested men, who got their ideas from above, but were wholehearted and unanimous in the defense of a system that assured them unquestionable privileges.”118 Stalin’s thermidor “stood for the crystallization of a new privileged stratum /and/ the creation of a new substratum for the economically dominant class.”119 “To guard the nationalization of the means of production and of the land,” observed Trotsky, “is the bureaucracy’s law of life and death, for these are the social sources of its dominant position.”120  “The weight of its responsibilities renders the bureaucracy implacable,” echoed Serge. “It must defend itself. . . . Its entire policy since the consecration of its power, has been aimed solely at the preservation of that power and has been dominated by fear and panic. The Stalinist bureaucracy no longer pursues the policies of the working class, but its own policies. This is the inner significance of its acts.”121

Djilas writes: “No other class in history has been as cohesive and singleminded in defending itself and in controlling that which it holds—collective and monopolistic ownership and totalitarian authority.122. . . A communist member of the new class also believes that without his Party society would regress and founder. . . . But he is not conscious of the fact that he belongs to a new ownership class, for he does not consider himself an owner and does not take account of the special privileges he enjoys.”123  “The leader who succeeds in getting to the top, along with his assistants, is the one who succeeds in most logically expressing and protecting the interests of the new class at any given time.”124

“During the /early Stalinist/ period the kulak was allowed to rent his land from the poor peasant and to hire the poor peasant as his laborer.  Stalin was getting ready to lease the land to private owners for a perior of forty years. . . .  The kulak, jointly with the petty industrialist, worked for the complete restoration of capitalism.

“In Marx’s letter concerning the Gotha program of the German Social Democracy, Stalin found a phrase to the effect that during the first period of Socialism inequality will still be preserved, or as he expressed /it/, the bourgeois prerogative in the sphere of distribution. . . . /The bureaucracy/ charged that the Left Opposition was trying to deprive qualified labor of the higher wage to which it was rightfully entitled. . . . With unbridled cynicism, equality was denounced as a petty bourgeois prejudice . . .  The struggle against equality welded the bureaucracy more strongly than ever not only to the agrarian and urban petty-bourgeoisie but to the labor aristocracy as well.”125

Until 1928, Stalin’s policies succeeded in maintaining the socio-economic existence of nearly everyone, including the majority of peasants and workers; though for many this existence continued to be miserable by any humane standard. But then the world economy entered the outer rim of the Great Depression, and Russia, being an economically weaker, only partially industrialized nation, began to feel the savagery of its grip before Japan and highly developed western nations.  Suddenly it became necessary for a large segment of Soviet society to be expropriated if the remainder were to be sustained.

To take on the proindustrial bureaucracy would be a major, and in many respects an immediately self-defeating effort for workers.  Factories would close and the functioning of Soviet society would grind to a halt as the management abilities and technical skills of this nouveau elite were removed.  Conversely, the bureaucracy needed the workers if its own social existence was to be protected.  Under the circumstances, the peasant masses were foredoomed.

“In order to feed the cities, it was necessary immediately to take from the kulak the daily bread.  This could be achieved only by force.”126

“When the kulak began directly to threaten the bureaucracy itself, it turned its weapons against the kulak.  The panic of aggression against the kulak, spreading also to the middle peasant, was no less costly to the economy than a foreign invasion.  But the bureaucracy . . . defended its position.”127

“/A/fter the Great Slump . . .the terms of trade turned sharply against the Soviet Union.” “The value of Soviet exports shrank to one-third and that of imports to one-fourth between 1930 and 1935. Part of this fall was due to adverse trade terms.”128

“In January 1928 the working class stood faced with the shadow of advancing famine.”129 In February Stalin directed a full-scale attack upon the peasantry, a procedure which entailed prompt and wide-reaching collectivisation.  Stalin, who had villified Trotsky as anti-kulak, pragmatically apolitical Stalin, now used the word kulak to identify as an enemy almost anyone with a couple of pigs or a cow.

“Almost every village became a battlefield in a class war, the like of which had never been seen before, a war which the collectivist state waged, under Stalin’s supreme command, in order to conquer rural Russia and her stubborn individualism.”130

“These years are a nightmare.  Famine comes to the Ukraine, the Black lands, Siberia, to all the Russian granaries.  Thousands of peasants flee across the frontiers to Poland, Rumania, Persia, or China. They escape.  . . .  For the theft of a sheaf of wheat from a kolkoz: the death penalty.  By virtue of the decree of August 7, 1932, socialist property is declared sacred; its theft is punished by death.”131

And there was no one to whom the peasants might turn for help. “The peasants say with right: ‘The army is well fed and dressed; it will not support us.”132

Confronted with expropriation, many peasants attempted to slaughter and sell what they could of their livestock.

“Collectivization appeared to the peasant in the form of an expropriation of all his belongings. They collectivized not only horses, cows, sheep, pigs, but even new-born chickens. . . .  As a result there was an epidemic selling of cattle for a song by the peasants, or a slaughter of cattle for meat and hides.”133

“Men, women, and children gorged themselves, vomited, and went back to the fleshpots. . . . People suffocated with the stench of rotting meat, with the vapours of vodka, . . .  Such was often the scene upon which a brigade of collectivizers descended to interrupt the grim carouse with the rattle of machine-guns; they executed on the spot or dragged away the crapulous enemies of collectivization and announced that henceforth all remaining villagers would, as exemplary members of the kolkhoz, strive only for the triumph of socialism in agriculture. . . . In 1931 and 1932 vast tracts of land remained untilled and the furrows were strewn with the bodies of starved muzhiks.”134

Peasants who sent their small children out to the field to “steal” an ear or two of corn, thinking the collectivizers would not kill children, often found their bodies lying between the rows.

Simultaneous with the forced collectivization and expropriation of the peasantry, the pace of industrialization was accelerated. “Self-satisfied quietism was replaced by a panic of haste.”135

While millions of peasants starved, vast quantities of their expropriated foodstuffs were sold to Europe in order to obtain the money needed to maintain the social existence of the elites and speed up industrial development.

Although factory workers did not suffer and die like the peasants, they, too, felt the growing crisis. “‘They are squeezing us and how!,’” one worker wrote to Serge. “‘Twenty-five percent increase in the productivity of labor and 1.9 percent increase in wages.  For three years wages have not varied, though production has very much increased.’”136

However, since factory workers were the primary source of the elite’s largesse, their interests were given second priority during the years of international depression, and most workers comprehended the favored treatment they received.  Along with the speed-up of industrialization an elite corps of workers was created.  Called Stakhanovites, they were given special rewards. Recognizing Stalin’s policies were preserving their social existence during a time of terrible crisis (never mind that millions of peasants were being destroyed in the process), many workers joined the bureaucracy in building a cult of worship around their sturdy helmsman.

“Two million workers in White Russia sign/ed/ a message in verse addressed to the beloved leader:

O wise master, genius of geniuses!

Sun of the workers!

Sun of the peasants.

Sun of the world!

Power of rivers,

Glory and pride of labor!”

“Peter Vetchora, the Ukranian poet, exclaims:

Stalin’s greatness is a halo

Around the constellations of the firmament,

Around men and factories.

“The poet Kabard:

Stalin, thou golden sun, thy name

Speaks the death of our enemies . . . “137

This was 1936. “In Moscow, a market woman was arrested for saying that he was the people’s misfortune.”138 Tens of thousands were being placed in slave labor camps for the slightest hint of opposition.

“Four to five thousand Oppositionists were arrested between 1928 and 1930.  The number of suspects was even higher.  After 1934 and the assassination of Kirov by a young Leningrad communist, communists and other suspects were herded into captivity by tens and more probably hundreds of  thousands. With this labor, excluded from the benefits of the Labor Code, canals are dug, strategic roads built.  Several hundred thousands of prisoners worked on the Baltic-White Sea Canal.  How many of them died in the process?  The official writers do not tell us.”139

Human personalities becomes more sharply defined during crises which have the dimensions of the one the Soviet Union was enduring.  Serge refers to such emergencies as “an hour when the redeeming choice between cowardice and courage is possible.”140 Though they constituted a small minority of the population, there were thousands of Russians of profound courage and integrity who forfeited everything–including their lives–in opposition to Stalin-ism; Russians whose courageous acts will strengthen the resolve of other opponents of oppression in other times and other places.

Kote Tsintsadze, a prominent Oppositionist who suffered jail and torture, was one of the many who gave his life. “Ill with tuberculosis, suffering from hemorrhages of the lungs, he fought on, went on hunger strikes, and died in pris-on. /Before his death Tsintsadze wrote to Trotsky:/ ‘Many, very many of our friends and of the people close to us will have to … end their lives in prison or somewhere in deportation. Yet in the last resort this will be an enrichment of revolutionary history: a new generation will learn the lesson.’”141

From his exile in Tara, Muralov wrote to Trotsky: “I capitulate?  I shall die, but I shall never capitulate.  They can draw and quarter me, but I shall not capitulate.  Even if I remain alone I shall not capitulate. . . .  They shall not make liars out of us or drive us to passivity.”142

Late in November of 1927 Adolf Abramovich Yoffe committed suicide.  Sick, a disciple of Trotsky, forbidden by Stalin to leave the country, refused medical assistance, convinced that in his physical condition he could only prove a burden to the Opposition, he shot himself in the head.  In a farewell message to Trotsky, Yoffe said:

“All my life I have been convinced that the revolutionary politician should know when to make his exit and that he should make it in time. . . . when he becomes aware that he can no longer be useful to the cause he has served.  It is more than thirty years since I embraced the view that human life has sense only insofar as it is spent in the service of the infinite–and for us mankind is the infinite. To work for any finite purpose–and everything else is finite—is meaningless.”143

Several noted Russian artists also chose suicide over capitulation:

“Sergei Yessenin, a lyrical poet, opened the funereal series: Andrei Sobol, prosaist and tormented revolutionist, followed him; Mayakovsky, social poet, renowned, rich, and loaded with honors, blew out his brains a few days after having adhered to the party’s general line in literature. /Mayakovsky actually shot himself in the heart./ Young ones like Victor Dmitriev, passed away without noise . . . “144

“/E/ven after all the surrenders there were still unrepentent Oppositionists in the prisons and places of deportation; and in the early nineteen-thirties, while Rakovsky guided them, their ranks were at times reinforced by new adherents and by the return of capitulators disillusioned with surrender.”145

“From exile Trotsky repeatedly implored the Stalinist Politbureau to call a halt to the barbarous warfare against rural barbarism, and to revert to the more civilized and humane course of action to which their Marxist-Leninist heritage committed them.”146

Oppositionists of lesser mettle expressed regret for not going along with Stalin, or tried to make their peace the moment they realized  he would be victorious over Trotsky.

“Radek packed his books, with the intention of selling them; and, handing out to those around him volumes of German poetry as souvenirs, muttered sarcastically: ‘Haven’t we been idiots!  We are left penniless when we could have prepared a nice war chest.  Lack of money is killing us. With our famous revolutionary probity we have been but feckless intellectuals full of scruples . . . ‘”147

As early as November, 1927, Zinoviev and Kamenev urged Trotsky: “Lev Davidovich . . . the time has come when we must have the courage to surrender.”148 In defense of their surrender, Zinoviev and Kamenev reasoned: “We must cling at the helm. This can only be done by supporting Stalin.  We must not hesitate to pay him the price he demands”.149

“Smilga, an Oppositionist ‘capitulator’ . . . said: ‘We must retreat, surrender for the present, and when the masses awaken, we shall put ourselves at their head. . . .  Zinoviev often said the same thing: we must remain within the party, even ‘flat on our belly in the mud,’ in order to be there on the day of the great awakening of the working masses, and not, by acting outside of the party, play into the hands of the counter-revolution”.150

Abandoning their revolutionary values in an effort to preserve life and position, many, including Zinoviev and Kamenev, did “crawl on their bellies in the mud.” But in most cases even that failed to save them.

“No sooner had Zinoviev and Kamenev announced their capitulation than the ruling factions declared that they did not accept it, and that the capitulators must fully repudiate their ideas and recant . . .  On 18 December /1927/ Zinoviev returned and knocked at the doors of the congress to say that they condemned their own views as ‘wrong and anti-Leninist.’ . . .  But Stalin and the majority, drunk with jubilation, went on to kick the prostrated.  They refused to reinstate them even after the recantation.”151

In their effort to “keep a grip on the helm,” Kamenev and Zinoviev watched the peasant massacre in silence.  Yet, Stalin was not willing to take a chance even on these two pliable Old Bolsheviks.  In 1936 they were executed along with countless others as “agents of German fascism/accomplices of Trotsky.”

The bureaucracy and the military continued to be sparsely populated with equalitarian Old Bolsheviks, who might at some point permit themselves to recognize the fascist drift of events, so many of them would have to be killed.  Their trials and liquidation were used to justify the argument that a dire threat existed, a threat severe enough to necessitate the vast concentration camp complex.

“Victor Kravchenko, a former high Stalinist official who survived the purges and escaped abroad, reports in his book, I Chose Freedom, that the victims numbered as many as ‘nine or ten million, including 60 to 80 percent of the top leaders of the Party, the Consomols, the armed forces, the government, industry, farming and national culture.’ The slave labor armies of the GPU swelled to unknown size.  Some estimates of their number go as high as fifteen, twenty million, even more.”152

“The vast purges mark times of sharp danger to its existence which the bureaucracy sought to overcome by stricter consolidation around the personal dictatorship of Stalin.”153  ”The Red Army was decimated . . .  In 1937 the entire leading staff from Marshall Tukhachevsky down were shot without the pretense of an open trial.”154 At the 1936 Moscow trial, prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky “hints at one of the political motives behind the trial: ‘It is now clear,’ he reported, ‘why there are interruptions of supplies here and there, why, with our riches and abundance of products, there is a shortage first of one thing, then of another. It is these traitors who are responsible for it.’”155

The meaning of the purge trials of 1936 and 1937 is dramatically revealed by noting the identities of the accusers and the accused.  Of the 1936 trial Joseph Hansen reports:

“Among the prisoners sat Gregory Zinoviev, Leon Kamenev, I.N. Smirnov, S.V. Mrachkovsky, G. Yevdokimov, V. Ter-Vaganyan, Ivan Bakayev and Y. Dreitser. They were outstanding figures in Lenin’s ‘general staff’ which led the November 1917 revolution in Russia, cofounders of both the Bolshevik Party and the Communist International, men who held the highest Soviet posts.  Against them as prosecutor stood Andrei Vyshinsky, a former member of the counter-revolutionary, right-wing Menshevik opposition to Lenin’s regime in the early days.”156

Max Shachtman observed:

“Volumes are said by the fact that among the accused there is not to be found a single former kulak, manufacturer, banker, Czarist, White Guard, Menshevik, Social Revolutionary, anarchist, or any other one-time opponent of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Regime.  Not a single one!  All of them . . . are tried and true Old Bolsheviks.”157

Trotsky made the same observation respecting the purge trials of 1937. “Who are the principal defendents?” he asked. His answer:

“Old Bolsheviks, builders of the party, of the Soviet State, of the Red Army, of the Communist International.  Who is the accuser against them?  Vyshinsky, bourgeois lawyer, who called himself a Menshevik after the October Revolution and joined the Bolsheviks after their definitive victory. . . .  The former editor of Pravda, Bukharin, is arrested. The pillar of Pravda is now Koltzov, bourgeois feuilletonist, who remained throughout the civil war in the camp of the Whites.  Sokolnikov, a participant in the October Revolution and the civil war, is condemned as a traitor.  Rakovsky awaits accusation.  Sokolnikov and Rakovsky were ambassadors to London. Their place is now occupied by Maisky, Right Menshevik, who during the civil war was a minister of the White government in Kolchak’s territory.  Troyanovsky, Soviet ambassador to Washington, treats the Trotskyists as counter-revolutionaries.  He himself during the first years of the October Revolution was a member of the Central Committee of the Mensheviks and joined the Bolsheviks only after they began to distribute attractive posts.  Before becoming ambassador, Sokolnikov was people’s commissar of finance.  Who occupies that post today?  Grinko, who in common with the White Guards struggled in the Committee of Welfare during 1917-18 against the Soviets. One of the best Soviet diplomats was Joffee, first ambassador to Germany, who was forced to suicide by the persecutions. Who replaced him in Berlin?  First the repented Oppositionist Krestinsky, then Khinchuk, former Menshevik, a participant in the counter-revolutionary Committee of Welfare, and finally, Suritz, who also went through 1917 on the other side of the barricades.  I could prolong this list indefinitely.”158

With the Moscow trials and the slave labor camp formation in the mid and late 1930s the last revolutionary impulse was exorcised from the Soviet system.  The Stalinist bureaucracy had succeeded in turning Marxism-Leninism on its head and there would be no  further threats to the nascent industrial-elite productive order.  Henceforth the Party would automatically provide the new state-capitalist elite protection.  Like Christianity and other revolutionary-equalitarian philosophies before it, the Soviet Union’s brand of Marxism had now been transformed into a justification for the grossest inequalities and a defensive strategy for those who profited from that inequality.

In Conclusion

A theory has value only insofar as it facillitates the ordering of experience; i.e., only insofar as it leads to an understanding of what Marx called the “natural necessity” of events.  Ironically, Trotsky, along with other self-described Marxist scholars, found it impossible to make any material sense of the Russian Revolution’s aftermath, particularly the Stalin phenomenon. Of the latter, Trotsky mused:

“It remains of course incomprehensible, at least with a rational approach to history, how and why a faction the least rich of all in ideas, and the most burdened with mistakes, should have gained the upper hand over all other groups, and concentrated an unlimited power in its hands.”159

Isaac Deutscher said of Trotsky:

“He did not and could not satisfactorily explain the change in the climate of the revolution which made his defeat both possible and inevitable; and his account of the intrigues by which a narrow-minded ‘usurpatory’ and malignant bureaucracy ousted him from power is obviously inadequate.”160

Deutscher, an avid admirer of Trotsky, is himself perplexed by Stalin’s easy success. “Tsardom had failed to stifle any opposition, even though it imprisoned, deported and executed the revolutionaries,” he reflects. “Why then should Stalin, who was not yet executing his opponents, succeed where the Tsars had failed?”161

Deutscher is puzzled by other features of the Russian Revolution as well. “How is one to account . . . for the abysmal wickedness and moral depravity which has revealed itself in the Bolshevik party,” he asks, “a party that had consisted of honest, dedicated, and courageous revolutionaries?”  ”It was not enough to blame the ruling group or the bureaucracy,” he concedes. “The deeper cause was the ‘apathy of the masses and the indifference of the victorious working class after the revolution.”162

But, using “apathy” to explain Stalinism does not demonstrate the natural necessity of that tragic event, and Deutscher is unable to identify any material reason for the apathy.  He writes:

“Marxists had tacitly assumed that once the working class achieved the social self-integration and political awareness that made it a ‘class for-itself’ it would maintain itself indefinitely in that position and would not sink back into immaturity.  Instead, the working class of Russia, having overthrown the Tsar, the landlords, and the capitalists, relapsed into the inferior condition of a class unconscious of its interests and inarticulate.”163

On the other hand, if one reasons from Marx’s basic proposition that all politics, including revolution, is conservative of social existence, it is a simple matter to expose the natural necessity of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, answering the questions posed by Trotsky and Deutscher.

The Russian revolution occurred because Tsarist Russia’s feudal socio-economic-political order was no longer able to preserve the socio-economic existence of that country’s large and growing population.  Since people follow the path of minimum difficulty when it comes to maintaining their social existence, prior to 1917 the majority of Russians did it by struggling against one another.  With the total collapse of the economy in 1917, that option was no longer available.  For the majority, defending their social existence now required dismantling the feudal-elite structure and building an industrial replacement.

However, once the old framework had been razed and its industrial-elite successor was being constructed, it again became the path of least pain for most Russians to secure their status by struggling with each other.

As in every nonegalitarian society, whatever it may call its political philosophy, the Russians who sought, gained and used the predominant amounts of political power were individuals with  hegemonic statuses to protect.  Some proindustrial bureaucrats were children of Tsarist bureaucrats.  Many had been members of the Tsarist bureaucracy themselves.  As late as the mid-1930s, in large cities, over 50 percent of the bureaucrats had been in office before the revolution.  Having an elite status to defend, the bureaucrats fought with a vigor and a brutality which preserving their lowly social existence did not require peasants, soldiers and workers to match.

None of us is born with an assurance that at some point our expressed values and our lives will not become mutually exclusive.  Finding their equalitarian values increasingly inimical to leadership after 1917, particularly after 1921, most Bolsheviks decided to place those values in storage and become reactionary, non-egalitarians, convincing themselves of the mind-numbing contradiction that they were doing it in behalf of building an eventual classless society. Thus did they preserve their favored socio-economic existence.

Many of the more rigidly moral Old Bolsheviks, Trotsky among them, soon fell by the wayside.

When in 1928 a new disaster struck in the form of an international depression, the Soviet Union’s economy was dealt a staggering blow.  Since the new bureaucracy was proindustrial, the least costly alternative for the majority of people was to maintain their social existence by destroying a huge portion of the peasantry, along with any recalcitrants among their own numbers.  And so it was done.

Whenever maintaining the social existence of a nation’s majority leads to the annihilation of a weaker element at home or abroad we refer to it as “fascism.”  Stalin’s regime was a classic example, akin to Naziism in Germany, and, in terms of the number of lives taken, considerably worse.  Many of the Old Guard Bolsheviks had humanistic predilections and could not be trusted.  Therefore, they, too, were eliminated.

When the Soviet Union’s crisis became so profound that the new elite and the majority could only be socio-economically sustained through the use of slave labor, that labor was provided by labelling Stalin’s detractors, real or imagined, “reactionaries” and sentencing them to work camps.

Perhaps the most fundamental contradiction in the Marxist intellectuals’ position was that they wished to constitute a government which was truly “of the people.” As Marx understood, and consistently argued, given the conservative character of political activity, no one can ever perform that task except the people.  A ”vanguard party” will always be the captive of those who exert primary political force, which will inevitably be the community’s socio-economic elites. The Cohn-Bendits argued that principle well when they wrote: “Democracy is not suborned by bad leadership but by the very existence of leadership.”164 The Russian experience provides a lesson to be remembered by all industrial-elite nation populations, as the world moves toward that point when some of their numbers will discover they can only be socio-economically sustained by the sudden creation of genuinely equalitarian systems.

Marx contended that elite elements within every progressive revolutionary community spontaneously create a political philosophy which enables them to justify taking control following the revolution.  Russia’s Marxist intellectuals provided a sterling illustration of Marx’s point by transforming his materialistic and relativistic theory into an absolutistic and idealistic rationale for a new, state-capitalist elite to wield authority over Soviet society in the name of classlessness.

Had they looked, Russia’s Marxist intellectuals would have discovered materialist explanations for their own behavior as well as the course of their revolution in Marx’s writings.  But, like their counterparts in the West, Russian “communists” found it more expedient to create their “Marxism” out of Hegelian cloth, and leave their prophet thrashing in his grave.

FOOTNOTES – Part II

1.   Frederick Engels, The Peasant War in Germany.

2.   Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An appraisal of the man and his influence, New York: The Universal Library, Grosset & Dunlap, 1941, pp392-3.

3. E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. I, Baltimore,

Maryland: Penguin Books, 1950, p. 65.

4.  Ibid.

5. Ibid., p. 73.

6. Alfred G. Meyer, Leninism, Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., New

York: 1962, p. 169.

7. Christopher Hill, Lenin and the Russian Revolution, Middlesex,

England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1971, p. 156.

8. John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World, New York: Signet

Books, The New American Library, 1967, p. 29.

9. E.H. Carr, op. cit., p. 90.

10. V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution, in James E. Conner, ed.,

Lenin on Politics and Revolution, New York: Pegasus, 1968,

pp. 191, 200.

11. Ibid., p. 200.

12. Ibid., p. 221.

13. Ibid., p. 209.

14. Meyer, op. cit., p. 201.

15. Leon Trotsky, Leon Trotsky Speaks, New York: Pathfinder

Press Inc., 1972, p. 72.

16. E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. II, Baltimore,

Maryland: Penguin Books, 1952, pp. 185-6.

17. Reed, op. cit., p. 57.

18. Quoted in Meyer, op. cit., p. 42.

19. Victor Serge, From Lenin to Stalin, New York: Monad Press

(Pathfinder Press), 1973, p. 30.

20. Anatoly Vasilievich Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes,

New York: Hill & Wang, 1968, p. 50.

21. Ibid.

22. Sarah Lovell, in Leon Trotsky Speaks, op. cit., p. 93.

23. Quoted in Reed, op. cit., p. 264.

24. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, New York: Pathfinder

Press, Inc., 1972, p. 25.

25. Ibid., p. 22.

26. Hill, op. cit., p. 77.

27. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. II, op. cit., p. 129.

28. Ibid., p. 151.

29. Ibid., pp. 196, 198.

30. Ibid., pp. 171, 173.

31. Ibid., p. 197.

32. Serge, op. cit., p. 33.

33. Hill, op. cit., p. 133.

34. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, Vol. II, New York:

Vintage Books, 1959, p. 17.

35. Leon Trotsky, Stalin, op. cit., p. 385.

36. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. II, op. cit., p. 190.

37. Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, op. cit., p. 21.

38. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. II, op. cit., p. 55.

39. Trotsky, Leon Trotsky Speaks, op. cit., pp. 109-10.

40. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. II, op. cit., pp. 117-18.

41. Hill, op. cit., p. 139.

42. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. I, op. cit., pp. 195, 202,

203.

43. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. II, op. cit., p. 115.

44. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. I, op. cit., pp. 203-4.

45. Quoted in: Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete

Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative, McGraw-Hill Book

Co., New York: 1968, p. 232.

46. Milovan Djilas, The New Class, New York: Praeger Paperback,

1957, p. 15.

47. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. I, op. cit., p. 184.

48. Hill, op. cit., p. 126.

49. Sam Dolgoff et al., Bakunin on Anarchy, New York: Vintage

Books, 1971, p. xxii.

50. Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, op. cit., p. 12.

51. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. II, op. cit. p. 97.

52. Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, Vol II, op. cit., p. 7.

53. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. II, op cit., p. 76.

54. Deutscher, Vol. II, op. cit., p. 4; See also: Hill, op. cit., p. 132.

55. Ibid., p. 5.

56. Serge, op. cit., p. 35.

57. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. I, op. cit., pp. 183-4.

58. See: Harold Shukman, Lenin and the Russian Revolution, New

York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967, p. 199; Also: Serge, op. cit.,

p. 33; Cohn-Bendit, op. cit., pp. 220-45.

59.  Ibid.

60 . Leszek Kolakowski, Marxism and Beyond, London: Paladin

Press, 1969, p. 92.

61.  Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. I, op. cit., pp. 216-17.

62. Trotsky, Trotsky Speaks, op. cit., p. 173.

63. Shukman, op. cit., p. 200.

64. Trotsky, Stalin, op. cit., p. 405.

65. Serge, op. cit., pp. 38-40.

66. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, op. cit., pp. 25-6.

67. Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, Vol. II, op. cit., p. 22.

68. Ibid.

69. Ibid., pp. 30-1.

70. Ibid., p. 44.

71. Serge, op. cit., p. 40.

72. Trotsky, Stalin, op. cit., p. 405.

73. Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, Vol. II, op. cit., p. 36.

74. Meyer, op. cit., p. 214.

75. Ibid.

76. Serge, op. cit., p. 44.

77. Ibid., p. 40.

78. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. II, op. cit., pp. 175-6.

79. Hill, op. cit., p. 144.

80. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. I, op. cit., p. 233.

81. Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, New York: Vintage

Books, 1970, p. 4.

82. Ibid., p. xii.

83. Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, op. cit., p. 69.

84. Meyer, op. cit., pp. 214-15.

85. Trotsky, Stalin, op. cit., p. 375.

86. Ibid.

87. Ibid., p. 377.

88. Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, Vol. II, op. cit., p. 74.

89. Ibid., p. 93.

90. Ibid., p. 104.

91. Ibid., p. 105.

92. Ibid.

93. Ibid., p. 106.

94. Ibid., p. 107.

95. Ibid.

96. Ibid., p. 111.

97. Sarah Lovell, Trotsky Speaks, op. cit., p. 174.

98. Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, Vol, II, op. cit., p. 152.

99. Ibid., p. 122.

100. Ibid., p. 373.

101. Ibid., p. 283.

102. Ibid., p. 377.

103. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, op. cit., p. 92.

104. Trotsky, Stalin, op. cit., p. 387.

105. Serge, op. cit., p. 51.

106. Quoted in: Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, Vol. II. op. cit.,

p. 310.

107. Ibid., p. 309.

108. Ibid., pp. 281-2.

109. Serge, op. cit., p. 48.

110. Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, Vol. II, op. cit., p. 366.

111. Ibid., p. 246.

112. Djilas, op. cit., p. 50.

113. Trotsky, op. cit., p. 393.

114. Leon Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, New York:

Doubleday Anchor, 1959, p. 301.

115. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, op. cit., p. 93.

116. Djilas, op. cit., p. 83.

117. Serge, op. cit., p. 51.

118. Ibid., pp. 48, 59.

119. Trotsky, Stalin, op. cit., p. 408.

120.  Ibid.

121.  Serge, op. cit., p. 59.

122. Djilas, op. cit., p. 59.

123. Ibid.

124. Ibid., p. 81.

125. Trotsky, Stalin, op. cit., pp. 396-7, 407.

126. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, op. cit., p. 36.

127. Ibid., p. 273.

128. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, Vol. III, New York:

Vintage Books, 1963, p. 103.

129. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, op. cit., p. 33.

130. Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, Vol. III, op. cit., p. 91.

131. Serge, op. cit., p. 60.

132. Ibid., p. 63.

133. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, op. cit., p. 39.

134. Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, Vio. III, op. cit., pp. 118-19.

135. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, op. cit., p. 35.

136. Serge, op. cit., p. 63.

137. Ibid., pp. 104-5.

138. Ibid., p. 108.

139. Ibid., p. 69.

140. Serge, op. cit., p. 142.

143. Ibid., pp. 78-9.

144. Ibid., p. 142.

145. Deutscher, Vol. III, op. cit., p. 124.

146. Ibid., p. 106.

147. Deutscher, Vol. II, op. cit., p. 380.

148. Ibid., p. 384.

149. Serge, op. cit., p. 98.

150. Ibid., p. 86.

151. Deutscher, Vol. II, op. cit., pp. 387, 389.

152. Joseph Hansen, in Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s Frame-Up System

and the Moscow Trials, New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1950,

p. xiii.

153. Ibid., p. xvii.

154. Ibid., p. xiii.

155. Ibid., p. viii.

156. Ibid.

157. Max Shachtman, Behind the Moscow Trial, New York:

Pioneer Publishers, 1936, pp. 20-1.

158. Trotsky, Trotsky Speaks, op. cit., p. 292.

159. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, op. cit.

160. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, Volume I, New York,

Vintage Books, 1954, p. vii.

161. Deutscher, Vol. III, op. cit., p. 9.

162. Deutscher, Vol. II, op. cit., p. 436.

163. Deutscher, Vol. III, op. cit., p. 116.

164. Cohn-Bendit, op. cit., p. 250.

To Lead the People: Notes on the Russian Revolution: Part I

A historical work only then completely fulfills its mission when events unfold upon its pages in their full natural necessity.  Leon Trotsky

We have to make the ossified conditions dance by singing them their own melody! We have to cause the people to be frightened by their own image, in order to give them courage. Karl Marx

The Material Dynamics of the Russian Revolution

Like earthquakes, revolutions are dramatic events that are notably slow in the making; products of an ever-so-gradual accumulation of unrelieved stresses and strains which suddenly burst constricting boundaries and establish new ones in the reachievement of homeostatic balance.

The Russian Revolution was like that.  Russia had been in a state of chronic crisis for over a century.  Mild social tremors had periodically shaken the nation for half that time.  Intellectuals had been talking and writing about revolution throughout the same period.  Some spoke with fear in their voices, some with anticipation, others with a bit of both.  Even those who did not talk of revolution nevertheless sensed that something was terribly amiss.

If one had to give a unicausal reply to the question: “Why did it happen?,” the answer would be that for the multitude survival itself had finally come to necessitate the economic, social and political overthrow of the preindustrial elite which dominated the country.  Milovan Djilas made that observation, writing: “The basic reason – the vital need for industrial change – was common to all the countries such as Russia, China and Yugoslavia, where revolution took place.”1

For many Russians, it was becoming a question of industrialize or die.  In such a situation, Djilas remarks, “People never die willingly; they are ready to undergo any sacrifice to overcome the difficulties which stand in the way of their economic production and their existence.”2 Leon Trotsky frequently noted this fundamental feature of Russia’s Revolution.  It seemed, he said, “a reproduction in the twentieth century of those convulsions which England had suffered through in the middle of the seventeenth century and France at the end of the eighteenth century.”3 Elsewhere Trotsky observed: “The basis of the revolution was the agrarian problem: the antique land system, the traditional power of the landlords, the close ties between the landlord and the local administration.”4

Although he never fully explored the idea in his voluminous writings, Trotsky, like Djilas, was also cognizant of the emergency nature of the revolution. “A revolution,” he reflected, “takes place only when there is no other way out.”5 “Peoples never resort to suicide. When their burdens are intolerable, they seek a way out through revolution.”6 “It is enough to remember that nowhere and never was the transition from the feudal to the bourgeois regime made without disturbances.”7

Like other Russian Marxists, and like Marx, by a feudal society Trotsky meant one dominated by a land-holding elite that derived and maintained hegemony through its control of agricultural and raw-material production.  For Marx, the progressive (vis-a-vis the feudal order) bourgeois-democratic (capitalist) society was one in which the new elite’s status obtains from its control of finance and industrial production.

One way to illustrate the fundamental character of Russia’s pre-revolutionary crisis is to note that if citizens of an industrial-elite society like the United States elected to adopt a feudal productive system they would have to kill off a significant portion of their numbers.  Simply to feed, let alone provide clothing and housing and meet general medical requirements for 300-plus million people, presupposes a highly sophisticated industrial technology.  The process works both ways.  When a confined population grows to a certain point, socio-economic preservation/survival, demands that industrialization be undertaken.

Seventy or so years before the revolution Russia was a typical feudal society, with a dominant landlord class, a clergy and a military tied in interest and attitude to the landlords, and a mass peasant population.  The latter, the bulk of the population, were as controlled and confined in their daily lives as have been serfs everywhere.   Their masters could beat, maim, even kill them with relative impunity.  A troublesome serf could be sent off to serve in the military for up to twenty-five years merely at his master’s discretion.  To distinguish between the life of a slave and that of the average Russian serf would entail making fine distinctions.

As the Russian population grew in the 19th century it became impossible for the feudal structure to assimilate the fast-growing numbers.  Many individuals, more each day, would have to accept socio-economic diminishment if the agricultural-elite framework was not to be dismantled.

Initially, this meant the serfs.  Having the least socio-economic status to protect, Russian peasants had always sought, and in the developing crisis were able to exercise, the least political power.  Controlled by the landlords, clergy and military, the established political institutions were now used to facilitate a dispossession of the serfs. Various mechanisms were employed, chief among them the “freeing” of the serfs in 1861.

Prior to that time serfs enjoyed certain minimum rights to land usage. Their lords were also responsible for providing them with the basics of life: housing, clothing, firewood and food.  Under the changing circumstances, with not only the serf population but that of the aristocracy increasing rapidly, continuing such practices meant the lords would themselves have to accept a goodly portion of the unavoidable diminishment.  To prevent this, they “freed” their charges.

Henceforth, former serfs could be charged for basic necessities. And they could be driven from lands which the feudal lords needed to preserve the socio-economic status of their own multiplying numbers of sons and daughters.  After 1861 “the peasants eventually found themselves in some ways worse off than they were before.”8 In area after area land was taken from them.  In Saratov, for example, the peasants wound up with less than half the land they had formerly tilled. In the Volga provinces, all of the peasants were able to farm less than was previously worked by two-thirds of their number.9

Freeing the serfs worked to preserve the social existence of elite Russian elements in yet another way.  The former serfs provided a ready source of cheap labor for the cities.  Unable to sustain themselves in the countryside, many children of the feudal aristocracy were moving to the towns to undertake rudimentary, mostly extractive, industrial development.  Others promoted rail operations. “By the late 1880s trade was beginning to move on a colossal scale. In the Donets Basin a new mining industry was expanding, and peasants were migrating there in thousands in search of better wages and conditions . . . a whole new range of industries was springing up around the principal cities.”10 Whereas “in the first quarter of the 18th century the town population numbered somewhat more than 328,000,” by 1897 “the population of the towns numbered 16,289,000.”11

Russian Revolutionary Theory

Simultaneous with the beginning of extractive industrial development Russian political thought began to take on a Marxist coloration. As commercialization of the economy became the only means whereby a majority of the growing population might defend their socio-economic existence, sons and daughters of the elite, particularly children of the top-heavy bureaucratic elite, began to recognize the necessity for razing the country’s feudal structure and undertaking a concentrated industrial development.

In the early years of the crisis, many young people acted to preserve their social existence by fighting against industrialization. These were the Narodniks. “They called for the overthrow of the old regime, the expropriation of the landlords, and the establishment of some sort of peasant socialism based on the traditional Russian peasant commune.”12 While this would have maintained their own status, along with that of a minority, for the majority of Russians it would have been disastrous.  Most young intellectuals grasped that if their socio-economic status was to be maintained industrializing Russia was the only workable solution. Given the intransigence of the feudal-elite who would be expropriated in the process, that meant revolution.

Under the circumstances, for many young intellectuals Marxism had an understandable appeal.  Marx had declared feudalism was no longer viable in many countries.  Capitalism–the industrial-elite/bourgeois-democratic state–was its “natural and necessary” successor he had insisted.  “/That/ truth was acceptable to the nascent Russian middle class as an ideological reinforcement in the struggle against feudalism and autocracy.”13

Many college educated Russians were professionals: lawyers, teachers, chemists, doctors and engineers, for whom job opportunities were few.  As a consequence, a growing number of them took tentative steps in the direction of revolution.  They began to dream, plan and argue for it.  They became, in effect, social workers of revolution. (In a revolutionary era, those who play this “vanguard” role are the liberals of a nonrevolutionary time).  Among members of the intellectual city elite revolutionary ideas soon became quite respectable.  Anatoly Lunacharsky, a major figure in the Russian Revolution, had a rather typical experience:

I became, /he says/, a revolutionary so early in my life that I don’t even remember when I was not one.  My childhood passed under the strong influence of Alexander Ivanovich Antonov /his mother’s friend/ who, though an acting Privy Counsellor and head of the Control Chamber of Nizhi Novgorod, and then of Kursk . . . did not at all conceal his leanings towards radical and left aspirations.14

Many of the “revolutionary” Marxist intellectuals discovered that the easiest way to maintain their increasingly threatened social existence was by trying to organize themselves and workers for an eventual revolution.  “Russia’s factory-working class was scarcely born before it became the chosen vehicle of the revolutionary intelligentsia.”15 “In the 1880s, in various Russian towns, Marxist intellectuals began to set up small propaganda circles to educate workers.”16

Until the abortive revolution of 1905, the “revolutionary” intellectuals often found they could sustain themselves with “lavish donations from rich sympathizers” who had industrial interests they were having difficulty protecting within the feudal framework.17  Occasionally, wealthy individuals like the Moscow millionaire Morozov left their estates to the “revolutionaries.”18 In Morozov’s case his fortune was bequeathed to the Social Democratic Party from which the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions emerged in 1903.  (The Bolsheviks were subsequently accused of diverting Morozov’s funds to their own coffers.)  Georgi Plekhanov, Lenin’s mentor and founder of the first Marxist intellectual organization, the Emancipation of Labour Group, was “wholly dependent on funds raised within the movement, a situation which reinforced his sense of importance.”19

The reference to the Marxist intellectuals as social workers of revolution is apt.   As a job category, social work in industrial nations came into existence and grew as automation, and then cybernation, eliminated jobs of the middle and upper-middle classes.  Whereas its stated function has been to alleviate/eliminate poverty, in practice it has served chiefly to maintain the socio-economic status of the middle class segment who gave it birth and practice it so enthusiastically.  By the 1970s it had become a well-paying profession in the United States, one which provided the social workers not only socio-economic preservation but a sense of purpose and pride, an historic mission.  In like manner, the pro-industrial sons and daughters of the Russian upper-middle classes and elite bureaucrats assured themselves their “revolutionary” efforts were solely for the benefit of workers and peasants, whereas in actuality “revolutionary activism” had become a job category created by the deepening crisis confronting the intellectuals, and its benefits went almost exclusively to the intellectuals themselves.

Prior to 1917, before Russia’ chronic crisis became acute, workers and peasants usually found they could best preserve their socio-economic status by working within the existing institutional framework.  Revolutionary ideas therefore held little or no appeal for them. “During the early 1890s workers were staging strikes quite independently of the /Marxist intellectual circles/, of Marxist influence or even of the influence of the circle-educated elite. . . . It became almost impossible to bring Marxist influence to bear on the workers, who succeeded in winning ever more concessions from employers anxious to exploit the economic boom.”20  ”Workers /correctly/ felt they were best equipped to look after their own interests.  The interference of the authorities or of the Marxist intellectuals introduced an entirely alien and undesirable element which could only diminish the prospects of industrial peace and better working conditions.”21

Throughout the pre-revolutionary period, the Marxist intellectuals and the workers and peasants whom they addressed showed almost no understanding of one anothers’ positions. The latter comprehended that to act upon the arguments of the Marxist intellectuals would not only fail to sustain them socio-economically it would embroil them in a struggle which might take countless numbers of their lives.  They were aware, too, that there was no small amount of hypocrisy in the intellectuals’ position.  Whereas they asked workers and peasants to forfeit much, many, their very existence, the intellectuals were not moving to set an example.

“/I/n accepting Marxism, the Russian middle-class intellectual emptied it of any immediate revolutionary content, so that the authorities, who still feared the Narodniks as the main revolutionary party, were not unwilling to tolerate these sworn enemies of the Narodniks whose own programme seemed to carry no immediate threat.”22

When repression was finally directed against the Marxist intellectuals, unlike workers and peasants most of them had sufficient money and connections to escape to Western Europe.  “/F/rom the middle of the 1890s under the combined impact of intensified police activity and a harsh reactionary attitude in the universities, young Russian students and revolutionaries began to leave Russia in large numbers to settle in the emigre colonies of the European university towns.”23

Given that the central function of politics is the preservation of socio-economic status, during this period workers and peasants understandably never comprehended that the intellectuals would eventually become right about their fundamental premise: revolution was going to be a necessity.

On their part, the Marxist intellectuals had a vested interest in remaining ignorant of the rationality of worker-peasant attitudes and behaviors.  Had they recognized that the revolutionary truths necessary for protecting their personal socio-economic existences, could not yet perform the same function for workers and peasants– and were therefore untrue for them–they would have abandoned the very rationale required for carrying out their revolutionary social worker activities.

In justifying their revolutionary social work, Russia’s Marxist intellectuals reflexively stretched and reworked the ideas of their prophet.  Lenin was one of the most adept at this.  Though forced by experience to accept that “the basic aim of planting even the seeds of political awareness in the working masses was almost as far from realization as it had been for the Populists of the seventies,” the intellectuals never questioned the rightness of their analyses for the masses.  Instead, they developed an elitist Hegelian understanding of the role of ideas in determining the course of history.  “/W/hereas Marx had believed in the spontaneous growth of working-class consciousness under the impact of capitalist realities, Lenin tended to assume that the workingman was forever doomed to insufficient consciousness, no matter how miserable his conditions.”25

Under Lenin’s direction:

“/T/he party seem/ed/ to negate the role attributed to the working-class by Marx, that of the chosen people who would destroy the social structure of capitalism and construct a socialist commonwealth.  Similarly, the importance that Lenin attach/ed/ to party doctine seem/ed/ to be opposed to original Marxist conceptions of the negligible role of ideas in history. . . .  /U/nlike Marx, he /Lenin/, did not generally attribute the attainment of consciousness to the working class at all. . . .  According to Leninism, the carriers of proletarian class consciousness were bourgeois intellectuals . . . who had been declassed and uprooted by acquiring an education.”26

“Lenin insisted and consistently argued in Iskra that ‘class political consciousness’ was not a ‘spontaneous’ growth, and could come to the worker only from without’”; from the Marxist intellectual vanguard.27  “’The history of all countries,’” Lenin intoned: “‘bears witness that by its own resources alone the working-class is in a position to generate only a trade-union consciousness, . . .  The teaching of socialism has grown out of philosophical, historical and economic theories worked out by educated representatives of the possessing classes, of the intelligentsia.  The founders of contemporary socialism, Marx and Engels, belonged themselves by their social origin to the bourgeois intelligentsia.  Similarly in Russia the theoretical teaching of social-democracy has arisen altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the workers’ movement.’”  28

While Lenin was right about Marx being from the intelligentsia, rather than the working class, unlike Lenin, Marx never proposed to play the role of commander for a socialist revolution.  To the contrary, he focused instead on explaining why only the working masses would be able to conceptualize and carry out that transformation.  Marx had foretold that the working class, precisely because it was the most economically oppressed, would ultimately discover in its own experience the ideological understanding necessary for a socialist revolution.  The Russian intellectuals proposed workers were not up to the task, that a vanguard would have to make the discovery for them from its middle class experience.  E.H. Carr has noted the “faint aroma of condescension” (not so faint at that), in this position, an aroma which came through in the writings of Plekhanov and Lenin as well as the others.29 Certainly the material connection between the vanguard’s perspective and their elite, vis-a-vis workers and peasants, socio-economic status is apparent.

As the availability of jobs for the young Marxist intellectuals became increasingly restricted, it prompted them to make hesitant moves against the feudal order.  Whereupon the order’s representatives punished them with a variety of additional restraints, which usually had the effect of inflicting further socio-economic injury.  Predictably, that in turn inclined the intellectuals to take second and third steps in the direction of a social revolution.  This was especially the case with members of Russia’s Jewish community.

With few exceptions, Jews throughout feudal Europe had never been allowed to become large landholders; i.e., had not been permitted to enter the feudal aristocracy.  As a consequence, more than most Russians, they had found it necessary to survive by establishing factories and becoming financiers in the towns and cities.  Tied in interest to an industrial world, when Russia’s feudal order crisis began changing from chronic to acute, Jews naturally suffered greater socio-economic injury than other identifiable segments of the population.  Hence, a significant number of them became actively involved in the developing struggle.  As the feudal order was drained of viability and came under attack by pro-industrial elements, finding Jews a major force in the latter community, the landed aristocracy became increasingly anti-Semitic.

Historian Harold Shukman observes:

“Whether or not Alexander III believed the fantastic argument of his advisers that the Jews were behind the discontent of his subjects, he nonetheless opted for the policy that would eventually engender this belief in wide sections of the population.  First, violent pogroms were instigated and demonstratively tolerated by the authorities. . . . To Jewish economic ruin the government added, in 1887, restrictions on education which as much as poverty and civic humiliation fostered in the young an intense hatred of the regime.”30

Lenin’s personal history likewise provides dramatic evidence of the fundamental conservatism of Russia’s incipient anti-feudal revolution.  Lenin and his wife Krupskaya were “both children of reduced noble families.”31 When Lenin was seventeen years of age his brother was hanged for being involved with an assassination attempt on the Tsar.

Lenin’s mother:

“Had to go up to Petrograd alone to plead for her son’s life.  None of the respectable neighbors in Simbirsk would accompany her; it was socially bad and even perhaps politically dangerous to be associated with a case of the sort. The widow sat through the court hearing, saw her son for the last time before he died, and when she returned home she and her family were to some extent socially ostracized.”32

“The young Lenin’s promising educational prospects were disrupted by this event, for the university authorities at Kazan, where he began his law studies soon after his brother’s death, found an early opportunity to expel the bearer of the notorious name.”33

Lenin had been permitted to enter Kazan only on the strength of a letter from the director of his previous school testifying that he was a serious student who would give no trouble.  (Ironically, the letter was written by the father of Aleksandr Kerensky, head of the Provisional Government which the Bolsheviks would overthrow in October 1917). His expulsion came over a rather minor infraction of school rules on political activity. “Repeated requests by Lenin and his mother to regain admission to the university, or to go abroad to study, met with refusal, but by the end of 1891 he succeeded in gaining, with distinction, his law degree as an external student.”34 Acquiring the law degree a year and a half after being expelled from Kazan, “Lenin spent the next four years in forced idleness.  He engaged during this period in no gainful employment and lived entirely off his mother’s widow’s pension.”35 Although “a brilliant, hard-working student, a recent gold-medalist, he found himself condemned because of a minor breach of discipline to a parasitic existence without any hope of reprieve.”36

Martov, Lenin’s closest associate during his early years of revolutionary social work, had walked the same road.

“Martov had already served a short prison sentence in 1891 when his revolutionary views scarcely went beyond romantic protest.  Like Lenin, it was after his university career was cut off that he turned his considerable academic ability to a serious study of Marx and the Marxist writings filtering into Russia . . . “37

In the mid-1890s Martov,  Lenin and other Social Democrats worked enthusiastically in Petersburg to make inroads with the workers.  However, “the group was scarcely able to provoke activity on the factory floor, nor yet capable of exploiting existing strife.  Thus, strikes that took place and to which the group turned its attention were almost completely unaffected by its agitational literature.”38

Coming to the End of the Road

They had a limited and in many respects a bourgeois understanding of its dynamics.  They would drag their feet, even work against it when it arrived.  Yet, the Marxist intellectuals had caught a glimpse of future events which no one else, neither aristocrats, peasants nor workers was able (nor, if their socio-economic status was to be preserved, could afford) to see.  A mighty revolution was coming.  That it would prove to be not a socialist-equalitarian but a bourgeois-industrial-elite/capitalist revolution goes far toward explaining their clearer vision.

Following defeat in a war with Japan, in 1905 the Russian crisis reached a new extreme.  Tens-of-thousands of workers were suddenly ground out of the economy.  Others had to work 12 to 16 hour days for reduced wages.  As a result, virtually overnight workers surpassed the Marxist intellectuals in the fervor of their revolutionary activity, just as Marx’s theory regarding the conservative nature of all political activity would lead us to expect.

Equally predictable, given their more secure social existences, at this juncture the Marxist intellectuals, including the Bolsheviks, neither foresaw nor fully understood the spontaneous worker uprisings.  “It is a cliche in the histories of the /Bolshevik/ party that 1905 (like February 1917) took it by surprise.”39

Seizing the factories, workers began to govern themselves in mass-democratic organizations called “Soviets.” Leon Trotsky, who was active in St. Petersburg during the 1905 uprising, acknowledged of the Soviets: “These were not previously prepared conspirative organizations for the purpose of seizure of power by the workers at the moment of revolt.  No, these were organs created in a planned way by the masses themselves for the purpose of coordinating their revolutionary struggle.”40

But Russia’s feudal order of production had not yet exhaused its capacity to defend the socio-economic existence of the multitude, including workers, and there would be no immediate revolution.  Marx described people in community as always taking up those political attitudes and actions which, under existing circumstances, will maintain them with a minimum of pain, a minimum disruption of their lives.  His thesis provides a convincing materialist explanation for why the 1905 Revolution aborted.  Using the carrot and stick technique, the Tsarist elite bought off those they could afford to buy off and beat down those they could not.  The soldiers, most of them of peasant origin, were still being socio-economically sustained, the government was viable enough for that.  Hence, the soldiers readily carried out the order to suppress the workers’ rebellion.  In Trotsky’s words, the 1905 proletarian revolution was “broken on the bayonets of the peasant army.”41 Spokesmen for the movement, including Trotsky, were brought to trial, jailed or exiled.

“Between January, 1905 and the convocation of the First Duma on the twenty-seventh of April, 1906, the Tzarist government, according to approximate calculations, had killed more than fourteen thousand people, had executed more than a thousand, had wounded twenty thousand, had arrested, exiled or imprisoned about seventy thousand.”42

At the same time, the Tzar issued his October Manifesto authorizing the election of a parliament, the Duma. Although it would have no de facto power, because its creation provided socio-economic maintenance for many of the restive intellectuals who would take their places in it, the Duma served a pacifying function. In addition, a new influx of foreign, primarily European, investment capital was invited.  As before, the capital would only be permitted to develop industries which were not injurious to the interests of the feudal elites who controlled the country.  Additional extractive industries and foreign-owned assembly plants were developed, and the economy immediately responded.

“The country was more prosperous than it had ever been before; the budget was balanced and even showed a surplus, the vast railways network was expanded at a greater rate than any subsequent Communist government has been able to achieve, private trade was booming, and from all over the Western world firms like International Harvester and the Singer Sewing Machine Company began to set up their own establishments in Russia.  Then too, these were years of good harvests, and heavy industries like mining broke all records in production.”43

Since nearly everyone was being socio-economically maintained, political apathy inevitably returned.  “After 1906 both strikes and terrorist activities steadily diminished, and by 1911 the revolutionary movement was virtually at a standstill.”44 The number of persons involved in strikes dropped from a 1905 high of  around 2 million to a mere 8 thousand in 1909.45  “The years 1907-14 are sometimes designated the ‘years of reaction.’”46

The new prosperity inevitably affected the fortunes of the Marxist intellectuals and their organizations.  Many of the intellectuals now began to work within the establishment; although because of their previous organizational activities this was difficult-to-impossible for some of them to accomplish. Those who did return to working within the feudal framework, and those who had hopes of doing so, became noticeably more conservative.  Even the old guard Social Democrats who could not, or would not, forsake their commitment to the eventual revolution, often felt compelled to moderate their positions in an effort to keep up party membership.  In this they were only partially successful:

“The Fifth /Party/ Congress had exulted over a total membership of 150,000, including the national parties and the Bund.  By 1910 the figure was estimated at 10,000 while the total number of Bolshevik committees in Russia amounted to no more than five or six.  Between 1907 and 1912 the Russian Social Democratic Party existed more in the minds of the factional leaders than anywhere else.”47

“From militancy, the mood of the party changed to languor.”48

Just as predictable, the large sums of money formerly available to Marxist intellectual organizations was drastically reduced.  Some funds continued to be received from the wills of wealthy sympathizers.49   But in general, these were lean days, especially for the most militant organization, the Bolshevik.  To maintain the socio-economic status of its members, the latter turned to bank robberies and other expropriative measures during this period.50  Alan Moorehead writes: “Lenin himself gave up hope.  More than once at the time he used the phrase: ‘I do not expect to see the revolution.’”51

But Lenin’s pessimism soon proved unfounded.  The revolution was now only a few years away.  In retrospect, the wholly precarious nature of the 1906-14 boom is evident.  Russia’s population continued its rapid growth and with it grew the dire necessity for industrialization.  The feudal aristocracy, which would have to be economically, socially and politically expropriated in order to finance the industrialization, was not about to accept that alternative without a violent struggle.  They were willing to permit the development of non-threatening extractive and assembly industries only, and while these were greatly responsible for the momentary upswing, they could not long forestall the deluge.

Even if the aristocracy had been willing for foreign investors to undertake the creation of a heavy industrial base, ever looking for opportunities of maximum profit, foreign investors showed no interest in obliging.  (As they continued to express disinterest when Lenin gave them an invitation to industrialize the U.S.S.R. in 1921). The country’s increased dependence on the world economy further heightened the precariousness of its situation, for the international economy was preparing to enter one of its periodic collapses.

By 1914 the deepening world economic crisis was making its negative impress upon Russia.  Unemployment quickly rose.  So, too, did peasant and worker unrest.  Whereas the number of persons involved in strikes had fallen to 8 thousand in 1909, in 1914 it quickly climbed back to a million.52  With that, the Marxist intellectuals began to take heart again.

However, the revolution was still not at hand.  First, there would be a war.  And in respect to that war the Russian intellectuals’ rigidly absolutistic interpretation of Marx’s logic again failed to disclose the natural necessity of events. For years they had argued, at the Stuttgart and Basel congresses they formally avowed, and when World War I began many of them continued to believe, that the workers of Western Europe would simply refuse to fight.  The “class consciousness” of West European workers was extremely high it was reasoned.  Many employed the Marxist jargon, referring to themselves as the exploited and to factory owners as capitalist exploiters. Many had long regarded war as in the interest of capitalists and imperialists only.  Surely they would refuse to take up the gun.

“Lenin expected the social democratic parties of the countries at war to act in accordance to the resolutions discussed at the Basel and Stuttgart congresses.  He expected, that is, the European workers and their leaders to show international solidarity, to declare themselves disinterested in the war and unwilling to shoot at brother proletarians across the trenches; he thought they would be ready to turn the bayonets given them against their own governments and ruling classes.”53

It was even hoped that Russian workers and peasants might resist the cry for war.  Instead, not only did the workers and peasants of Europe and Russia rush enthusiastically to the fray, the Marxist intellectuals, almost to a man, excitedly joined them.  With the beginning of the war on August 1st, 1914:

“Suddenly everyone /in Russia/ discovers that he is possessed with an intense hatred of the Germans and a new emotional love for Russia and the Czar.  The workers abandon their strikes at once, and their demonstrations now are all in favor of the government. . . . Now finally after twenty bitter years /Czar/ Nicholas is at one with his people. 54  The next afternoon, August 2, 1914, the Tzar issued a formal proclamation of hostilities at the Winter Palace. . . .  The palace square, one of the largest in Europe, was packed with thousands of sweltering, excited people carrying banners, flags and icons and waiting impatiently for the moment when they could pour out their emotion in the presence of the sovereign himself. . . .  When Nicholas and Alexandra stepped onto the quay at the Palace Bridge, wave on wave of cheers rolled over them: ‘Batiushka, Batiushka, lead us to victory!’”55

“Overnight, a wave of patriotism swept over Russia.  In Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, Kharkov, Kazan, Tula, Rostov, Tiflis, Tomsk and Irkutsk, workmen exchanged their red flags of revolution for the icons of Holy Russia and portraits of the Tzar.  Students rushed from the universities to enlist.  Army officers, caught in the street, were happily tossed in the air.”56

“The war checked the rising revolutionary tide,” Trotsky lamented. “We have witnessed a repetition of what happened ten years before, in the Russo-Japanese war.”57 Now that war was declared “defeatism was a sentiment felt only by the extreme left, and expressed solely in the European exile,” and even there, only among a minority living in nations such as Switzerland not engaged in the war.58   Within Russia, Trotsky observed, “not one of the Russian organizations or groups of the /Bolshevik/ Party took the openly defeatist position which Lenin came out for abroad.”59  ”’/N/ot a trace was left of the revolutionary movement,’ declared Kerensky. ‘Even the Bolshevik members of the Duma were forced to admit–though somewhat sullenly–that it was the duty of the proletariat to cooperate in the defense.’”60

Not all of the Bolsheviks still in Russia gave their full support.  A few wavered.  But “where the Bolsheviks wavered, the Mensheviks in Russia almost entirely disintegrated and became indistinguishable from other ‘progressives’, combining a patriotic attitude towards the war with a demand for ‘democratic’ reforms.”61  ”Among the 9,000 Russians who volunteered in Paris were the majority of Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries who were living there.”62

Given the extent of the world economic crisis in 1914, for the majority of Russians–as for the majority of Western Europeans– the least costly way to preserve their respective socio-economic existences was war.  For workers to have turned upon their employers instead would have meant revolution; and, to date, revolutions have been the most expensive of political undertakings, something all Russians were soon to discover.  In a war, one sends the boy down the street, or a son.  In a revolution everyone’s life and livelihood are temporarily devastated as the established socio-economic-political order is dismantled and replaced.  For that reason, no nation has ever experienced a revolution if it still possessed the strength to maintain it’s population’s social existence by prosecuting a war.  Moreover, any nation which, having proceeded to a certain point with a revolutionary restructuring, found itself again able to prosecute a war less disruptively, has promptly done so, discontinuing the revolutionary struggle.  France under Napoleon Bonaparte is a classic example.

There is nothing particularly mysterious about war.  Like revolution, war is a political act (a “continuation of politics by another means,” as the Prussian theoretician Karl von Clausewitz put it), and political humanity is intent upon on preserving an existing socio-economic condition with minimum effort.  This the war succeeded in doing for the Russian people for a few more months. Unemployment immediately disappeared as a result of war expenditures.  The government “met the immense cost of the war not through increased taxation, but by huge foreign loans and the issue of paper money.”63  ”Economic progress and the gradual but certain benefits from the reforms,” writes Harold Shukman, “were the basis of the popularity of the war.”64

But, while no one saw it coming–even Lenin and Trotsky despaired–Russia’s revolution was finally approaching.  It is a testimonial to the conservativism of humanity that the Russian people elected to go to war rather than revolution, though war would very soon become a costlier means of preserving their social existences.

A vast feudal state, with armies equipped, trained and supplied in the manner of a feudal nation, Russia undertook a wholly impossible feat in going to war with the far more modern and mechanized armies of industrial Germany, however apparent the natural necessity of that act.  The cost of the war to Russia quickly became enormous. Accounts of the country’s suffering read as though written by a single author.

“By the end of 1914, after only five months of war, one million Russians – one quarter of the army – had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner.”65

“Although appropriately armed, as it seemed, on the first day of the war, the troops soon turned out to have neither weapons nor even shoes. . . . After a series of partial catastrophes, in the spring of 1915 came the general retreat. . . . About five and a half million were counted as killed, wounded or captured.  The number of deserters kept growing. . . . The Russian army lost in the whole war more men than any army which ever participated in a national war, approximately two and a half million killed . . . “66

“The war had exhausted the Tzarist army.  Something like 15 million men had been called up /by 1916/, and many of them had been sent into the trenches without proper clothing, without boots, even sometimes without a rifle. . . . /According to Hindenberg, the German commander/, ‘the page on which the Russian losses were written has been torn out.  No one knows the figures.  Five or eight million?  We too, have no idea.  All we know is that sometimes in our battles with the Russians we had to remove the mounds of enemy corpses from before our trenches in order to get a clear field of fire against fresh assaulting waves.’”67

The suffering quickly reached the cities and the countryside. “Since 1914 wages /in the cities/ had increased by 100 percent, but in the same period prices had gone up by 400 percent  . . .68   “The rise in the cost of living automatically lowered /the value of the increased/ wages.”69   “By the end of 1916 prices are rising in leaps and bounds.  To the inflation and the breakdown of transport, there is added an actual lack of goods.”70 ” The cities naturally suffered more than the countryside, and Petrograd, farthest from the regions producing food and coal, suffered most.  Scarcities sent prices soaring: /by 1917/ an egg cost four times what it had in 1914, butter and soap cost five times as much.”71

While the cities experienced greater misery, the economy of the countryside was also collapsing. “The number of peasants selling tracts of land they could not live on had risen by the beginning of the war to a million, which meant no less than five million souls added to the proletarian population.”72 In the towns and cities, “economic strikes were the inevitable mass reflection–stormy in proportion as they had been delayed.”73 In the countryside, peasants began to seize the land.

The very arteries of the nation were collapsing:

“Russia began the war with 20,071 locomotives; by early 1917 only 9,021 were in service. Similar deterioration had reduced the number of /railway/ cars from 539,549 to 174,346. . . .  In February 1917, winter weather dealt Russia’s railroads a final blow.  In a month of extreme cold and heavy snowfall, 1,200 locomotive boilers froze and burst, deep drifts blocked long sections of track and 57,000 railway cars stood motionless.  In Petrograd, supplies of flour, coal and wood dwindled and disappeared.”74

By 1916, only the civilian and military elites were still being socio-economically sustained by the carnage, and they alone remained enthusiastic.  Trotsky related:

“In the drawing rooms of Petrograd and the headquarters at the front they gently joked: ‘England has sworn to fight to the last drop of blood . . . of the Russian soldier.’  These jokes seeped down and reached the trenches.

“In the State Duma and in the press a few of the war profits for 1914 and 1915 were published. The Moscow textile company of  the Riabushinskys showed a net profit of 75 percent; the Tyer Company, 111 percent; the copper-works of Kolchugin netted over 12 million on a basic capital of 10 million.

“/E/verybody splashed about in the bloody mud–bankers, heads of the commissariat, industrialists, ballerinas of the Tzar and the grand dukes, orthodox prelates, ladies-in-waiting, liberal deputies, generals of the front and rear, radical lawyers, illustrious mandarins of both sexes. . . . All came running to grab and gobble . . . And all rejected with indignation the shameful idea of a premature peace.”75

As life in the cities drew to a stop and the nation became unable to prosecute the war, the self-protective reactions of the Russian elite damned them further in the eyes of the broader population. “When the ancients said that Jupiter first makes mad those whom he wishes to destroy,” said Trotsky, “they summed up in superstitious form a profound historical observation . . . the impersonal Jupiter of the historical dialectic . . . withdraws ‘reason’ from historic institutions that have outlived themselves and condemns their defenders to failure.”76 Russia’s feudal order of production had unquestionably outlived itself. By this point, it had been all but drained of viability for the majority of the country’s people.

Yet, not for a moment could Russia’s feudal elites entertain the possibility that they and their institutions must be overthrown. Wrote Trotsky: “The privileged caste cannot believe that no policy whatsoever is possible which would reconcile the old society with the new.”77

In desperation, the aristocracy, the bureaucracy and the monarchy now fell upon the only remaining analyses which gave any hope of maintaining them: they commenced to blame one another for the country’s misfortunes.  Each fastened onto the hopeful conviction that things could be made aright if only the others were reformed or eliminated. “The aristocracy, finding itself in the focus of a general hostility, lays the blame upon the bureaucracy, the latter blames the aristocracy, and then together, or separately, they direct their discontent against the monarchical summit of power.”78 Trotsky speaks of the nobility’s “death weariness”, which he says it converted “into opposition against the most sacred power of the old regime, that is, the monarchy.”79

Thus:

“The killing of Rasputin was a monarchist act. It was intended by the Grand Duke, the Prince and the Right-wing deputy to cleanse the throne and restore the prestige of the dynasty. It was also intended, by removing what they conceived to be the power behind the Empress, to eliminate the Empress herself as a force in the government.”80

Visiting Russia from Britain, General Sir Henry Wilson wrote home:  “It seems as certain as anything can be that the Emperor and Empress are riding for a fall.  Everyone–officers, merchants, ladies–talk openly of the absolute necessity of doing away with them.”81

Until the last, Tzar Nicholas dreamed of preserving his own office, either by force or through democratic political reform.  But it was all over, the revolutionary struggle was about to start.

The February Rehearsal

In keeping with Marx’s thesis respecting the arch-conservative nature of all political activities, including revolutions, the Russian revolt began in the cities, and there, among the most sorely afflicted.  Trotsky recorded:

“On the 19th /of February, 1917/ a mass of people gathered around the food shops, especially women, all demanding bread.  These were the heat lightnings of the revolution coming in a few days.82

“The 23rd of February was International Women’s Day.  The social-democratic circles had intended to mark this day in a general manner: by meetings, speeches, leaflets. . . . Not a single organization called for strikes on that day. What is more, even a Bolshevik organization, and a most militant one –the Vyborg borough-committee, all workers–was opposing strikes. . . .  On the following morning, however, in spite of all directives, the women textile workers in several factories went on strike, and sent delegates to the metal workers with an appeal for support.”83

“On the following day the movement not only fails to diminish, but doubles.  About one-half of the industrial workers of Petrograd are on strike on the 24th of February . . .  The slogan ‘Bread!’ is crowded out or obscured by louder slogans: ‘Down with autocracy!’  ’Down with the war!.’”84

“/Then the cossacks begin to go over./ . . . the masses will no longer retreat, they resist with optimistic brilliance, they stay on the street even after murderous volleys, they cling, not to their lives, but to the pavement, to stones, to pieces of ice.”85

“/D/esertion began in the Russian lines. . . . Within a few weeks of the /February/ rising about a million soldiers had deserted and were making their way home in trains, in carts, and on foot, and there was no authority capable of holding them back.”86 When neither war nor the fascist oppression of a minority can preserve a people’s social existence, when, in Trotsky‘s words, “there is no other way out,” then, and only then, do they turn upon the existing socio-economic-political system and violently, painfully, wrought those structural changes which their survival demands.

“/T/he Russian workers, who could not improve their position by one kopeck without blood liquidations, had no choice but to use weapons to escape despair and death by starvation.”87   “/S/o was industrialization /at long last/ a matter of survival for those who were in their turn about to become proletarians.”88

Explicit in Marx’s paradigm is the notion that where building an equalitarian socio-economic-political order is concerned people do not require leaders to direct them.  The aim of political activity being the preservation of socio-economic existence, the head of a peasant or a factory worker can solve the problem of how to realize that goal just as efficiently as the head of an intellectual.

Indeed, insofar as the intellectual has a hegemonic social existence to protect and/or is more socio-economically secure, Marx’s theory argues that in a revolutionary situation he will not move as far as they do in the direction of dismantling non-egalitarian institutions; that in this regard he is bound to be less revolutionary than the people he would lead; that if equality is their objective, in heeding his preachments they are sure to be misled.  So it was with Russia’s Revolution.  In February 1917 the most militant Marxist intellectuals were abroad, untouched by the socio-economic devastation being suffered by Russian peasants and workers; conveniently ignorant of the immediate needs of their people.

“Lenin was in Switzerland, Trotsky was on his way to New York. Plekhanov, Axelrod, Martov, Dan and many others were scattered through Europe; and most of them were quarreling bitterly among themselves. None of them were planning to return to Russia, none had any idea that revolution was at hand.  Lenin was even saying at this time that he did not believe he would ever live to see it.”89

“The mob was in the streets, and the truth was that this March rising, like so many other lesser risings in the past, was not directly provoked by the revolutionary leaders, least of all by Lenin and the Bolshevik exiles.”90

“The February revolution of 1917 which overthrew the Romanov dynasty was the spontaneous outbreak of a multitude exasperated by the privations of the war and by manifest inequality in the distribution of burdens . . . The revolutionary parties played no direct part in the making of the revolution.  They did not expect it, and were at first somewhat non-plussed by it. The creation at the moment of the revolution of a Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ Deputies was a spontaneous act of groups of workers without central direction.”91

With his usual honesty, Trotsky acknowledged that the February uprising received no direction from above, and that the Bolsheviks’ impact was to mitigate, not expedite, the revolt. He relates:

“For no one, positively no one—we can assert this categorically upon the basis of all the data—then thought that February 23 was to mark the beginning of a decisive drive against absolutism. . . . Thus the fact is that the February Revolution was begun from below, overcoming the resistance of its own revolutionary organizations, the initiative being taken of their own accord by the most oppressed and downtrodden part of the proletariat—the women textile workers.”92

“Only on the morning of the 25^th, the Bureau of the Bolshevik Central Committee at last decided to issue a handbill calling for an all-Russian general strike.   At the moment of issue, if indeed it ever did issue, the general strike in Petrograd was facing an armed uprising.  The leaders were watching the movement from above; they hesitated, they lagged—in other words, they did not lead.  They dragged after the movement.”93

“Even at the meeting of the Vyborg committee the evening of the 26^th—that is, twelve hours before the victory—arose discussions as to whether it was not time to end the strike.  This may seem astonishing. But remember, it is far easier to  recognize victory the day after than the day before. . . .  Among the rank and file workers there were fewer oscillations.94 . . .  The masses had almost no leadership from above. . . .  Without a look back, the masses made their own history.”95

“We must lay it down as a general rule for those days that the higher the leaders, the further they lagged behind. . . .  Shliapnikov, the chief figure in the Petrograd center of the Bolsheviks, tells how he refused the demands of the workers for firearms—or even revolvers—sending them to the barracks to get them. He wished in this way to avoid bloody clashes between workers and soldiers, staking everything on agitation—that is, on the conquest of the solders by work and example.”96

“How was it with the Bolsheviks? . . .  The principal leaders of the underground Bolshevik organization were at that time three men: the former workers Shliapnikov and Zalutsky, and the former student Molotov. . . .  Up to the very last hour these leaders thought that it was a question of a revolutionary manifestation, one among many, and not at all of an armed insurrection.”97

With virtually no one left to give him support, with even the landed aristocracy now in opposition, the Tzar abdicated. Everyone now took up the cry of revolution.  “In all the commanding staff there was not found one man to take action in behalf of the Tzar.  They all hastened to transfer to the ship of the revolution, firmly expecting to find comfortable cabins there.   Generals and admirals one and all removed the tzarist braid and put on the red ribbon.”98 The centuries-old Russian monarchy came to an end as quietly as the life of an old man.  A Provisional Government was immediately constituted with Aleksandr Kerensky functioning as its most active spokesman and ultimately its head.

But, where changing Russia’s productive-distributive system was concerned, toppling the Tzar and establishing the Provisional Government were only cosmetic alterations. They were in no sense a revolution. The Russian feudal order was still very much intact.  Those who rushed to occupy the seats of the Provisional Government were in the main representatives of the propertied classes.  “Everything had changed. Everything remained the same,” lamented Trotsky:

“. . . the tzarist generals remain generals, the senators senatorialize, the privy councillors defend their dignity, the Table of Precedence is still in effect.  Colored hat-bands and cockades recall the bureaucratic hierarchy; yellow buttons with an eagle still distinguish the student.  And yet more important–the landlords are still landlords, no end of the war is in sight, the Allied diplomats are impudently jerking Russia along on a string. . . .  Wild parties are in progress in the private dining rooms of expensive restaurants.”99

There would be no major alterations in Russia’s policies either foreign or domestic.  The war would continue to be fought and peasants would not be permitted to seize the land, nor workers the factories.  Yet, while nothing significant had changed, the Marxist intellectuals, including the Bolsheviks, promptly demonstrated their willingness to play the role of a loyal opposition.  Kamenev, Stalin and Muranov returned to take over the editorship of Pravda on March 15^th and in a lead editorial they argued:

“While the German army obeys its emperor, the Russian soldier must ’stand firmly at his post answering bullet with bullet and shell with shell.’  ’Our slogan is pressure upon the provisional Government with the aim of compelling it . . . to make an attempt to induce all the warring countries to open immediate negotiations . . . and until then every man remains at his fighting post.’”100

“The policy of the Party throughout the whole country,” noted Trotsky, “naturally followed that of Pravda”.101

However, the soldiers, peasants and workers were entertaining very different ideas.  They understood, even if the Marxist intellectuals did not, that their own survival required the war be terminated, and that land and many factories be seized and operated for their immediate benefit.  Organized in Soviets which, as in 1905,  came into spontaneous existence with the February uprising, workers began to formulate and carry out policies expropriative of the Russian elites; policies which entailed “making the revolution.” Simultaneously: “Peasants began to seize the squires’ estates and divide the land among themselves.  The peasant soldiers, fearful lest they be left out, voted for peace ‘with their feet’ in a growing wave of desertions.”102

“It was of no avail to flog the soldiers (it had come to that) or shoot them, for whole regiments simply melted away in the summer’s heat.  Men left the front, carrying their guns and ammunition along with them, demanding that peace be concluded.  The garrison and the factories of Petrograd went out into the streets, urged on by the anarchists, but against the advice of the Bolsheviks, who felt that the country was not yet ripe for the seizure of power.”103

A period which has been aptly described as one of “dual governments” now began.  There was the Provisional Government, representing all the old feudal interests and policies which had to be overturned if the masses were to survive; as noted, the Provisional Government was controlled by the landlords, with Mensheviks and Bolsheviks going along while tugging to the left, the former moderately, the latter with considerable vigor.

Then there were the Soviets, which came much closer to representing the will of the masses.  In the Soviets, workers’ and soldiers’ deputies met and made policy, ignoring or opposing the directives of the Provisional Government.  In respect to these bodies, which were dominated by workers and soldiers of higher status, and were therefore more conservative than the Russian masses in general, the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks pulled to the right.

According to Marx, the political “truths” people entertain invariably betray their interests as well as their aspirations. The Marxist intellectuals, who would in time come to politically represent and defend the nascent financial-industrial-elite, had already constructed theoretical justifications for playing that role. In keeping with their Hegelian interpretation of Marx’s theory, they held it was “objectively true” that countries must pass through specific stages in a specific manner.  A feudal system of production must be supplanted by a bourgeois-democratic (capitalist) order, a bourgeois-democracy by a socialist structure.  The latter would then gradually, non-cataclysmically, metamorphose, into communism.

Both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks considered it a truism that feudal Russia was about to undergo a bourgeois-democratic revolution.  What divided them concerned not what sort of society Russia was: it was feudal.  Nor did they disagree over what it would soon become: obviously capitalist.  Rather, their disputes concerned how long the country would remain capitalist before experiencing a second, socialist revolution; and how, as a consequence, they, as Marxist revolutionaries, should behave after the capitalist revolution occurred.

The Mensheviks believed it would take a long time for Russia’s capitalist order to fully develop, exhaust its creative capacities, and give birth to a socialist-egalitarian working class which could only be protected by carrying out an anti-capitalist revolution.  Hence, they proposed that following the capitalist revolution Marxist revolutionaries should work within the government to provide workers protection as the industrial-elite system flowered.

The Bolsheviks, conversely, expected Russia’s progression from feudalism to capitalism to socialism to happen quickly.  They argued that by transforming the country’s relationships with Europe, a capitalist revolution in Russia would throw Western Europe’s mature capitalist systems into crisis, “sparking” (the Bolshevik newspaper was named Iskra, “the spark”) socialist revolutions on the continent.  The latter, in turn, would push capitalist Russia back into crisis.  Aided and abetted by West European revolutionaries, Russia would then undergo its own socialist revolutionary transformation. Believing the entire process would be rapid, the Bolsheviks held that following Russia’s capitalist revolution Marxist revolutionaries should pressure the government from without, just as they had done with its feudal predecessor.

More conservative than the Bolsheviks in interest and outlook, Mensheviks were inclined to see the Provisional Government as genuinely revolutionary, the political representation of the new capitalist productive order, and, to give it their assistance.  Conscious of, and disturbed by, the Provisional Government’s feudal ties, the Bolsheviks hesitated to consider it a truly capitalist organ, adopting the position of a reluctant, only semi-loyal, opposition.

For Russian workers and peasants, on the other hand, survival demanded that the Marxist intellectuals’ abstract philosophical conceptions be ignored while they went about the daily business of defending their livelihoods and their lives.

“From the very beginning the masses repudiated the liberal bourgeoisie, deeming it no different from the nobility and the bureaucracy. . . .  The workers, and not only the Bolsheviks, looked upon the Provisional Government as their enemy.   Resolutions urging the transfer of power to the Soviets passed almost unanimously at factory meetings. The Bolshevik Dingelstead, subsequently a victim of the purge, has testified: ‘There was not a single meeting of workers that would have refused to pass such a resolution proposed by us. . . .’ But, yielding to the pressure of the compromisers, the Petrograd Committee of the Bolshevik Party stopped this campaign. The advanced workers tried their utmost to throw off the tutelage on top, but they did not know how to parry the learned arguments about the bourgeois nature of the revolution.”104

“‘It must be openly acknowledged,’” wrote the Bolshevik Angarsky, who had passed through the same evolution as the others, “‘that a great many of the Old Bolsheviks . . . maintained the Old Bolshevik opinions of 1905 on the question of the character of the Revolution of 1917 and that the repudiation of these views was not easily accomplished.’”  “As a matter of fact /observes Trotsky/, it was not a question of ‘a great many of the old Bolsheviks’, but all of them without exception.  At the March /1917/ conference, at which the Party cadres of the entire country met, not a single voice was heard in favor of striving to win the power for the Soviets.”105

Such was the political climate when Lenin returned to Russia on April 3rd and dropped a bombshell in the form of his April Theses. To the consternation of his party, Lenin sided not with those who were supporting the Provisional Government, nor even with the majority sentiment in the Petrograd Soviet, but with the ultra-left anarchist sentiment of the mass of Russian peasants and workers.  He backed their demands for no further prosecution of the war, upheld their insistance on an immediate expropriation of the land-holders, and on workers’ control of the factories.  Most shocking of all to the Party, he advocated immediate government by workers, soldiers and peasants organized in their Soviets.

“He swept aside legislative agrarian reform . . . along with all the rest of the policies of the Soviet, /saying/ ‘We don’t need any parliamentary republic.  We don’t need any bourgeois democracy.  We don’t need any government except the Soviet of workers’, soldiers’, and farmhands’ deputies’. . .’  At the same time, Lenin sharply separated himself from the . . . majority, tossing them over into the camp of the enemy.  That alone was enough in those days to make his listeners dizzy.”106

“‘All power to the Soviets!,’” Lenin proclaimed, and, seeming to abandon Marxism altogether, “‘Hail the world-wide socialist revolution.’” “It did not even fit the context of the Russian revolution as understood by all without exception who had witnessed or taken part in it.  Lenin had spoken; and his first words had been not of the bourgeois, but the socialist revolution.”107

Not the Bolsheviks, but Lenin, had momentarily caught up with the workers. Now he would attempt to drag members of the party along with him.  Their immediate response was predictably negative.  When Lenin read them his famous April Theses:

“Bogdanov interrupted with cries of ‘Delirium, the delirium of a madman’.  Goldenberg, another former Bolshevik, declared that ‘Lenin has proposed himself as candidate for a European throne vacant for 30 years, the throne of /the anarchist/ Bakunin.’”108

“’Among the newly arrived anarchists,’ wrote the British ambassador, ‘was Lenin.’”109   “Stankevich testifies that Lenin’s speech greatly delighted his enemies: ‘A man who talked that kind of stupidity is not dangerous.  It’s a good thing he has come.  Now he is in plain sight. . . .Now he will refute himself.’”110

Lenin not only asked for all power to be transferred to the Soviets, he insisted that a single state bank be created with state control of all production and that nationalization of the land be immediately undertaken.  He wanted the police, the army and the bureaucracy to be abolished, and every worker and peasant armed and made eligible to hold office.111  “/T/he Petrograd committee of the party discussed Lenin’s theses and rejected them by thirteen votes to two . . . “112  ”/T/hey were published in his own name and his only. The central institutions of the Party met them with a hostility softened only by bewilderment.  Nobody, not one organization, group or individual, affixed his signature to them.”113

Over the next six months the Party would learn that under the existing circumstances Lenin’s proposals were the minimum the masses could, and therefore would, accept.  They would need to discover that their own positions as “leaders” were dependent upon their going along. “There was nothing in the program which could not be carried out; on the contrary, it would have been difficult and dangerous at this time not to carry it out.”114 But the Bolshevik intellectuals would prove reluctant pupils, manifesting all the hesitation to be expected of them by virtue of their greater socio-economic security.  Like the masses themselves, they would move to the left only when they came under assault; only when they, too, were made to choose between revolution and socio-economic survival.

A revolution, argued Marx, only occurs when the social existence of a significant portion of a nation’s population becomes mutually exclusive with that of the individuals who control the institutional structure.  As the two sides discover they must have at it or fail to be sustained the battle commences. The initial reaction of people who are not as immediately threatened as either of the protagonists is to watch and wait, to vacillate, then gradually move over to the winning side.  In Russia, the social existence of workers and peasants had now become mutually exclusive with that of the landed aristocracy.  The Marxist intellectuals, including the Bolsheviks, acted true to form.  They wavered until the final moment; indeed, they wavered until they were shoved into the revolutionary camp.

Just how far the Marxist intellectuals had to travel is further revealed by the fact that only two months before Lenin’s return Stalin, who as indicated was one of three then speaking for the party through editorship of Pravda, had greeted the February Revolution with the observation: “‘To the extent that the Russian Revolution has won . . . it has already created actual conditions /for national freedom/ by having overthrown the sovereignty of feudalism and serfdom.’”115  In his biography of Stalin, Trotsky commented:

“As far as our author was concerned the Revolution was already completely a thing of the past. . . .  Yet still untouched was not only capitalist exploitation, the overthrow of which had not even occurred to Stalin, but even the ownership of land by the landed gentry, something he himself had designated as the basis of national oppression.  The government was run by Russian landlords like Rodzianko and Prince Lvov.”116

Trotsky was virtually alone when, upon returning to Russia in May, he went over to Lenin’s position.  In a speech given on May 5th, Trotsky said: “What do we recommend?  I think that the next step should be the handing over of all power to the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers Deputies.”117

In the weeks which followed it became ever clearer to members of the Bolshevik Party that Lenin’s proposals alone would gain them any attention from the masses.  Victor Serge remarks: “/S/uddenly it becomes apparent that he has the ear of the man in the street, and of the man in the factory and barracks!  His whole genius consists only in his ability to say what these people want to say, but do not know how to say . . . “118 Alan Moorehead writes: “In a situation where every party and every politician was being pushed first one way and then another Lenin alone stuck to one uncompromising line of argument, and it was closer to the feelings of the illiterate and irresponsible mass of the Russian people than any other.”119 The elitism and rank condescension contained in the remarks of Serge and Moorehead aside, they make the point that Lenin was coming to be in step with those whom the Marxist intellectuals wished to guide.

All the while, deserting soldiers continued to stream back from the front, workers continued to seize factories and run their affairs in factory committees, and peasants continued to forceably appropriate the land.  The landed aristocracy began to grow desperate.  The Provisional Government was failing to perform the vital function of a political organization: defending the socio-economic existences of those who give it support.  “/T/he institutions and organs of the possessing classes began to denounce the dual power, and to lay blame for the disorders upon the Soviets.”120

“The property-holders, deprived of the possibility of using their property, or protecting it, ceased to be real property holders and became badly frightened Philistines who could not give any support to the government for the simple reason that they needed support themselves. They soon began to curse the government for its weakness, but they were only cursing their own fate.”121

In July the Provisional Government issued an order for a large-scale military operation in Galicia. More peasants and workers would be sent to the slaughter.  The masses again responded by taking to the streets in spontaneous protest. They would refuse to go. “On July 16, half a million people marched through the streets /of Petrograd/ carrying huge scarlet banners proclaiming ‘Down With the War!’  ‘Down with the Provisional Government!’”122

Whereupon, the Bolshevik Party again procrastinated.  According to Trotsky:

“The Bolsheviks were caught up by the movement and dragged into it, looking around the while for some justification for an action which flatly contradicted the official decision of the party.  And, so as not to lose face, rank and file Bolsheviks were forced to go flatly against the decisions of their leaders: Their Central Committee addressed an appeal to the workers and soldiers: ‘Unknown persons . . . are summoning you into the streets under arms, and that proves that the summons does not come from any of the Soviet parties . . .’  Thus the Central Committee, both of the Party and the Soviet, proposed, but the masses disposed.”123

“When the July demonstration was under discussion, Stalin argued that the workers were not eager for the fray. That argument was disproved by the July days themselves, when, defying the proscriptions of the Compromisers and even the warnings of the Bolshevik Party, the proletariat poured into the street, shoulder to shoulder with the garrison.”124

The July riots constituted a serious attack upon the Provisional Government and the feudal interests which that government (now inadequately) represented, making a counter-attack imperative.  The government responded by striking at the most visible and organized, albeit hesitant, body of opposition, the Bolsheviks. “On July 19th Kerensky got back from the front and writs were issued for the arrest of Lenin, Kamenev, Zinoviev and others. /Zinoviev and Lenin escaped to Finland./ Trotsky at his own request was arrested later on.”125  ”Loyal troops were drafted into the capital . . . “126  ”Workers were shot, Bolshevik establishments were raided and looted, party leaders were thrown in jail, and the Party itself was outlawed.”127 Trotsky observes: “The Bolsheviks were blamed for what was really a spontaneous movement and one which the Bolsheviks actually sought to restrain, believing the movement immature and insufficiently directed.”128

At last the Bolsheviks had begun to share the fate of the masses.  They, too, were now engaged in  a battle for socio-economic survival.  Accordingly, they took a few more steps in the direction of revolution.

In August, General Kornilov, acting at the urging of sore-beset aristocrats who had grown disillusioned with Kerensky’s feeble protective efforts, attempted to march on Petrograd and overthrow the Provisional Government.  To save himself, Kerensky issued a general appeal, addressing it even to the Bolsheviks.  Considering him a lesser evil, the Bolsheviks agreed to help, which served to strengthen their hand when Kornilov was easily routed.

As the interests of the masses and the landed aristocracy grew daily more incompatible, it became imperative for the Bolsheviks to give full support to one side or the other; fence straddling was rapidly becoming impossible.

From Finland Lenin sent messages urging that the party seize power.  But “Lenin’s urgent demands for immediate action met stiff resistance from those Bolshevik leaders who had remained in Petrograd, living underground, to direct the work of the Party on the spot.  They tried to disregard the appeals with which Lenin bombarded them from his hideout across the border . . . “129 Lenin argued, it seemed an indisputable fact to him, “that the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks would be supported by the vast masses of Russia’s workers and peasants, and would not be opposed by any unsurmountable forces.”130 Nor would the troops present opposition. “All the units were united by a single sentiment: Overthrow Kerensky as soon as possible, disperse, and go home and institute a new land system.”131

Finally, Lenin contended, for the Bolsheviks to continue hesitating would be to seal their doom.  The Provisional Government was even now preparing its own attack.  On the 5th of October, 1917 Lenin appeared in disguise at a special Central Committee meeting held for the express purpose of discussing insurrection.  He drafted a Committee resolution which stressed the need to act. Among other things, the resolution pointed to: “the obvious preparation of a second Kornilov attack (the withdrawal of troops from Petersburg, the importation of Cossacks into Petersburg, the surrounding of Minsk with Cossacks, etc.)”132 His resolution concluded: “all this places armed insurrection on the order of the day.”133 But Lenin’s blandishments, even at this late date, failed to persuade his comrades. “In private argument” they said of him: “Lenin is a crazy man; he is pushing the working-class to certain ruin.  From this armed insurrection we will get nothing; they will shatter us, exterminate the party and the working-class, and that will post-pone the revolution for years and years, etc.”134

“At a session of the Petrograd Committee on the 15th /just ten days before the Bolsheviks seized power/, Kalinin said: ‘The resolution of the Central Committee was one of the best resolutions ever adopted by the Central Committee . . . We are practically approaching the armed insurrection.  But when it will be possible, perhaps a year from now, is unknown.’”135

Trotsky appears to understate the case when he observes: “plenty of testimony has been preserved in the newspapers, memoirs and historic journals of that time, to prove that on the eve of the overturn the official machine even of this most revolutionary party put up a big resistance.” In actuality the Bolsheviks would not move until they were attacked.

But let Trotsky tell the tale of the final hours:

“On the night of October 24th the government summoned up its courage and passed a resolution: to institute legal proceedings against the Military Revolutionary Committee; to shut down the Bolshevik papers advocating insurrection; to summon reliable military detachments from the environs and from the front. . . . Early in the morning the authorities began their preparations for aggressive action.  The military schools of the capital were ordered to make ready for battle. The cruiser Aurora, moored in the Neva, its crew favorable to the Bolsheviks, was ordered to put out and join the rest of the fleet.  Military detachments were called in from neighboring points: a battalion of shock troops from Tzarskoe Selo, the junkers from Oranienbaum, the artillery from Pavlovsk.  The headquarters of the Northern Front was asked to send reliable troops to the capital immediately. . . .  The Minister of Justice, Maliantovich, gave an order for the immediate arrest of those Bolsheviks released under bail who had again brought themselves to attention by anti-government activity.”136

In self-defense, the Bolsheviks finally responded by seizing power.  “The key points in the city were /almost effortlessly/ occupied; the members of the Provisional Government were made prisoners or fugitives; and in the afternoon Lenin announced to a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet the triumph of the workers’ and peasants’ revo-lution.”137

The Resilient Myth

In their book, Obsolete Communism, Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit point to “the myth of the Bolshevik Party as the revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat.”138 They note, and this essay has documented, that the evidence conclusively demonstrates otherwise.  To be sure, the idea they were playing a critical vanguard role was the utilitarian logic of the Bolsheviks’ own experience and interest.  But, at the time, their personal “truth” was shared by few other Russians.  The Cohn-Bendits speak of a “fundamental contradiction” in Leon Trotsky’s writings.  On the one hand, they observe, there is Trotsky the “honest historian” who acknowledged:

“‘The soldiers lagged behind the shop committees.  The committees lagged behind the masses . . .  The Party also lagged behind the revolutionary dynamic — an organization which had the least right to lag, especially in a time of revo-lution. . . .  The masses at the turning point were a hundred times to the left of the extreme left party.’”139

It is Trotsky the honest historian who grants that where acting was concerned Bolshevik Party members were reluctant revolutionaries every step of the way; that in the years prior to the revolution they had little or no success in even gaining the ear of workers or peasants, let alone educating them; that as late as the beginning of 1917 they “were little known to anybody”;140  that throughout its history the Party had always been what Shukman terms a “cacophony of dissonant voices.”141

Trotsky the honest historian was fond of reminiscing that “Lenin said more than once that the masses are to the left of the Party.  He knew that the Party was to the left of its own upperlayer of ‘Old Bolsheviks.’”142

Yet, the Cohn-Bendits argue, unable to accept the logic of his own experience, Trotsky the “Bolshevik theorist” reasoned: “‘The mystic doctrine of spontaneousness explains nothing.’  ’To the question, Who led the February revolution? we can then answer definitely enough: Conscious and tempered workers educated for the most part by the party of Lenin.’”143

The Cohn-Bendits are obviously right.  Trotsky’s argument respecting the importance of the Bolshevik Party for organizing and guiding the Russian Revolution makes no sense whatsoever.  Nor does Trotsky offer a shred of evidence to support his proposition.  He simply states it as a given.  His discussion of the indispensible role of the Bolshevik vanguard is theosophic and wholly unconvincing. Why, then, did he persist with this belief, and why did his comrades?

Consider, again, the value of this myth for middle-class Russian intellectuals during the long years of the pre-revolutionary crisis.  Consider the implications if they had abandoned it.  They would have at once forsaken their role of revolutionary social workers, a role which, as noted, not only gave them socio-economic sustenance but a sense of considerable purpose as well, and this right up to and after the October Revolution.

As the Cohn-Bendits remark: In 1917 “It was the /Bolshevik/ Party that had to rise to the level of the masses, not the other way around.  Lenin had to turn ‘anarchist’, and to carry an incredulous Party with him.  October thus represents the point where the action and aspiration of the masses coincided with those of the temporarily de-Bolshevized Bolshevik Party, and this happy state of affairs persisted until the spring of 1918.”144

Following the October Revolution, for Russia’s Marxist intellectuals to understand and accept Marx’s argument concerning the conservative and thoroughly relative nature of all political understandings would have been to forsake their rationale for exercising control.  So, they did not understand and accept. Instead, they adopted an ideational and absolutistic interpretation of Marx’s paradigm, an Hegelian vision ideally suited to the building of a non-equalitarian society dominated by an industrial-elite; however emotionally committed to equality a few Bolsheviks like Lenin and Trotsky might happen to have been – and they were.

Following the Civil War (1918-21) Russia’s “Communist” Party ever more consciously and confidently embrace its psuedo-Marxist “Scientific Socialism,” as it turned to overseeing a thermidorean reaction.  The country’s financial-industrial-elite, state-capitalist order had at last been born and, acting in the name of socialism and communism, the Party would now energetically represent it.

One of Marx’s central tenets was that the elite which dominates every productive order claims to rule in the interest of the masses.  Russia’s “communist” leaders would provide a graphic illustration of his thesis.

FOOTNOTES – Part I

1. Milovan Djilas, The New Class, New York: Praeger Paperbacks,

1975, p. 13.

2. Ibid. p. 12.

3. Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His

Influence, New York: The Universal Library, Grosset & Dunlap,

1941, p. 412.

4. Leon Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, New York: Doubleday

Anchor, 1959, p. 242.

5. Ibid. p. 304.

6. Leon Trotsky, Leon Trotsky Speaks, New York, Pathfinder

Press, Inc., 1952, p. 261.

7. Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, op. cit., p. 92.

8. Alan Moorehead, The Russian Revolution, New York: Bantam

Books, 1959, p. 12.

9. Lionel Kochan, Russia in Revolution 1890-1918, London:

Wiedenfeld and Nicholson, 1966, p. 2.

10. Moorehead, The Russian Revolution, op. cit., p. 15.

11. Leon Trotsky, Permanent Revolution and Results and

Prospects, London: New Park Publications Ltd., 1962, p. 178.

12. Alfred G. Meyer, Leninism, New York: Frederick A. Praeger,

Inc., 1962, p. 11.

13. E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. I, Baltimore:

Penguin Books, 1950, p. 21.

14. Quoted by Isaac Deutscher in: Anatoly Vasilievich

Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes, New York: Hill and

Wang, 1968, p. 9.

15. Harold Shukman, Lenin and the Russian Revolution, New

York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967, p. 25.

16. Ibid., p. 27.

17. Ibid., p. 102.

18. Ibid., p. 127.

19. Ibid., p. 31.

20. Ibid., pp. 27-9.

21. Ibid., p. 39.

22. E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, op cit., p. 21.

23. Shukman, op. cit., p. 31.

24. Ibid., p. 32.

25. Meyer, Leninism, op. cit., p. 31.

26. Ibid., pp. 21, 29, 31.

27. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, op. cit., p. 27.

28. Ibid., p. 28. (From the collected works of Lenin).

29. Ibid.

30. Shukman, op. cit., p. 36.

31. Moorehead, The Russian Revolution, op. cit., p. 40.

32. Ibid.

33. Shukman, op. cit., p. 42.

34. Ibid.

35. Richard Pipes, “The Origins of Bolshevism,” in Richard Pipes

ed., Revolutionary Russia, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard

University Press, 1968, p. 31.

36. Ibid.

37. Shukman, op. cit., p. 44.

38. Ibid., pp. 45-6.

39. Shukman, op. cit., p. 90.

40. Trotsky, Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, op.

cit., p. 192.

41. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, op. cit., p. 64.

42. Trotsky, Stalin, op. cit., p. 81.

43. Moorehead, op. cit., p. 63.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid., p. 76.

46. Shukman, op. cit., p. 123.

47. Ibid., p. 126.

48. Ibid., p. 123.

49. Moorehead, op. cit., p. 80.

50. Ibid., p. 76, Also: Shukman, op. cit., pp. 102-3.

51. Moorehead, op. cit., p. 64.

52. Ibid., p. 76.

53. Meyer, op. cit., p. 156.

54. Moorehead, op. cit., pp. 93-4.

55. Robert K. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra, New York: Dell

Publishing Co., 1967, p. 277.

56. Ibid., p. 278.

57. Trotsky, Leon Trotsky Speaks, op. cit., pp. 40-1.

58. Shukman, op. cit., p. 141.

59. Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, op. cit., p. 35.

60. Massie, op. cit., p. 279.

61. Carr, op. cit., p. 79.

62. Shukman, op. cit., p. 160.

63. Ibid., p. 144.

64. Ibid., p. 141.

65. Massie, op. cit., p. 309.

66. Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, op. cit., pp. 16-18.

67. Moorehead, op. cit., pp. 3-4.

68. Ibid., pp. 4-5.

69. Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, op. cit., p. 37.

70. Ibid., p. 40.

71. Massie, op. cit., p. 396.

72. Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, op. cit., p. 45.

73. Ibid., p. 37.

74. Massie, op. cit., p. 396.

75. Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, op. cit., pp. 18, 22.

76. Ibid., p. 91.

77. Ibid., p. 73.

78. Ibid.

79. Ibid.

80. Massie, op. cit., p. 386.

81. Ibid.

82. Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, op. cit., p. 42.

83. Ibid., p. 97.

84. Ibid., pp. 98-9.

85. Ibid., pp. 109-10.

86. Moorehead, op. cit., p. 161.

87. Djilas, op. cit., p. 13.

88. Ibid., p. 16.

89. Moorehead, op. cit., p. 7.

90. Ibid., p. 139.

91. Carr, op. cit., p. 81.

92. Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, op. cit., p. 98.

93. Ibid., p. 107.

94. Ibid., p. 110.

95. Ibid., p. 113.

96. Ibid., p. 115.

97. Ibid., p. 139.

98. Ibid., p. 86.

99. Ibid., pp. 336, 338.

100. Ibid., p. 217.

101. Ibid., p. 218.

102. Meyer, op. cit., p. 171.

103. Victor Serge, From Lenin to Stalin, New York: Monad Press

(Pathfinder Press), 1973, p. 19.

104. Trotsky, Stalin, op. cit., p. 186.

105. Ibid., pp. 197-8.

106. Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, op. cit., pp. 225-6.

107. Carr, op. cit., p. 89.

108. Ibid., p. 90.

109. Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, op. cit., p. 237.

110. Ibid., p. 235.

111. Moorehead, op. cit., p. 191.

112. Carr, op. cit., p. 91; Moorehead, op. cit., p. 191.

113. Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, op. cit., p. 227.

114. Serge, op. cit., p. 16.

115. Trotsky, Stalin, op. cit., pp. 189-90.

116. Ibid.

117. Trotsky, Leon Trotsky Speaks, op. cit., p. 52.

118.         Serge, op. cit., p. 15.

119.         Moorehead, op. cit., p. 192.

120.         Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, op. cit., p. 193.

121.         Ibid., p. 194.

122.         Massie, op. cit., p. 464.

123. Trotsky, Quoted in: Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit,

Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative, New York:

McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1968, p. 204.

124. Trotsky, Stalin, op. cit., p. 208.

125. Moorehead, op. cit., p. 209.

126. Carr, op. cit., p. 101.

127. Meyer, Leninism, op. cit., p. 172.

128. Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, op. cit., p. 254.

129. Meyer, op. cit., p. 175.

130. Ibid., p. 176.

131. Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, op. cit., p. 320.

132. Ibid., p. 286.

133. Ibid.

134. Ibid., p. 289.

135. Ibid., p. 288.

136. Ibid., pp. 340-1.

137. Carr, op. cit., p. 109.

138. Cohn-Bendit, op. cit., p. 202.

139. Ibid.

140. Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, op. cit., p. x.

141. Shukman, op. cit., p. 128.

142. Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, op. cit., pp. 264, 412.

143. Ibid., pp. 145, 147.

144. Cohn-Bendit, op. cit., p. 217.

Machiavelli and Marx Debate IV

Marx’s First Rebuttal

Chronicled by Theosophus

Philadelphia: Saturday, January 24th, 2009.

Most readers are probably aware there was a long interruption in the debate following Machiavelli’s first rebuttal.  The initial reason was that both men were taking far more than their alloted times, and, it was getting very late.  Baruch S. Blumberg, MD, President of the American Philosophical Society, jokingly remarked he doubted even Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine or Elihu Root, all known for giving lengthy speeches, would have been quite so long-winded.  After consulting with Machiavelli and Marx, Dr. Blumberg announced the debate would resume as soon as it proved convenient for the debaters.

Subsequently, both men suffered illness, Machiavelli an upper respiratory infection, Marx “coffin burn,” or so he said.  Because Dr. Marx would have more than a year to prepare for his initial rebuttal, it was agreed that Mr. Machiavelli would be allowed additional time for his second rebuttal.

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To give life a meaning: that has been the grand endeavor of all who have preached ‘truth’; for unless life is given a meaning it has none.   At this level, truth is not something that can be proved or disproved: it is something which you determine upon, which, in the language of the old psychology, you will.  It is not something waiting to be discovered, something to which you submit or at which you halt: it is something you create, it is the expression of a particular kind of life and being which has, in you, ventured to assert itself.                                                                      R.J. Hollingdale

Theories are instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.  We don’t lie back upon them, we move forward, and on occasion, make nature over again by their aid. . . .   Any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us prosperously from one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumentally.

Human motives sharpen all our questions, human satisfactions lurk in all our answers, all our formulas have a human twist . . . We carve out stars in the heavens and call them constellations, and the stars patiently suffer us to do so. . . . We name the constellations diversely . . . In all of these cases we humanly make an addition to some sensible reality, and that reality tolerates the addition.  All the additions “agree” with reality.  No one of them is false. Which may be treated as the “more true” depends altogether on the human use of it. William James

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism—that of Feuerbach included–is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively.  Feuerbach does not conceive human activity as itself objective activity. . . .  The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question.  Man must prove the truth–the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice.  The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.                                                                                                                                                             Karl Marx

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Friedrich Nietzsche once suggested that where politics and philosophy are concerned one should love enemies more than friends. Reaffirming what one already believes, he reasoned, friends don’t help one grow.  Enemies do.  One must either accept their compelling arguments, or, try to counter them by building a better defense of his own position, profiting either way.

Marx seems to embody Nietzsche’s recommendation.  Even his bitterest enemies never quite succeed in portraying him as malevolent or mean.  While he’s capable of great anger, his anger is directed at arguments, rather than the individuals who make them.  He can be dismissive of silly propositions.  But one has the impression it’s the silly propositions, not their defenders, who are being casually dismissed.

Where Machiavelli appeared tense and agitated as he approached the lectern for his first rebuttal, Marx looked as relaxed as his worn tweed jacket.  Resting his hands on the edges of the podium, he gave Machiavelli a warm, avuncular smile, then turned to address the audience.

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Marx: Mr. Machiavelli did me a favor by focusing on what he called my ‘peculiar theory’ of truth.”

”From the 19^th century Hegelians I railed against, to 21^st century American democrats, liberals have pragmatically found the question ‘What is truth?’ abstract, irrelevant, boring.”

”But applying my theory to today’s troubled events—the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan,  Georgia, Montenegro, India and Sudan, the in-process collapse of the global economy, and the United States’ lurch toward fascism—convinces me that wrangling about the nature of truth may, for a time, become a universal preoccupation.”

“Perhaps by ‘peculiar’ Machiavelli meant he’s having difficulty understanding my theory.  His review of it certainly suggests he has faint comprehension.”

“Twice, he accused me of proposing truth doesn’t even exist.”

“He couldn’t be more wrong!”

“At another point, apparently deciding I do believe in truth after all, he exhorted: ‘For a scientist, truth is discovered. For Marx, it’s not discovered, it’s created.’”

“And with that observation he became half right.”

“Let me begin, then, by stating my position clearly.”

“I believe in truth!”

“Furthermore, being a materialist, I believe EVERY truth is at once a product of discovery AND creation.”

“To illustrate:”

“I consider the 7-year-old boy who declares a 100-lb weight ‘really heavy,’ to be objectively correct.”

“But when an Olympic weight lifter proposes the same weight is ‘remarkably light,’ I regard his contrary description as no less objectively true.”

“For most people it’s an objective truth that peanuts are a healthy food and penicillin’s a life-saving drug.”

“For large minorities, the objective truth is both are deadly poisons.”

“Most of you would describe the leaves on the oak trees outside this Center as green, though you’re aware millions of people would observe them as gray.”

“If, like Mr. Machiavelli, you metamorphose into an absolutist when judging that color blind minority, you will argue they fail to see ’the truth’.”

”On the other hand, if you remain a materialist, you’ll reason they see what ‘the truth’ is for people with their visualizing equipment; a truth no less objective than your own.”

“Scientists observe (and Machiavelli keeps insisting his approach is scientific), that just as no two people have the same fingerprints and no two snowflakes are exactly alike, so no two of the 6.7 billion humans on earth have identical eye structures, or identical neurons to transmit visual images, or identical areas of the brain to organize and interpret what their eyes are seeing.”

“As a consequence, if all 6.7 billion stood before me now, the indisputable material reality is no two of them would have precisely the same image of Karl Marx.”

“According to Machiavelli’s absolutist metaphysics, all objects and events have finite dimensions which a genuinely objective individual may discover.  Therefore, to ask: ‘Which of the 6.7 billion people comes closest to seeing the real Marx?’ is, for him, a perfectly logical question.”

“But it’s a fatuous question for me!”

“Being an empiricist, I regard every truth as a product of an ‘out-there’ viewed, the ‘in-here’ of a particular viewer, and, the unique relationship between them; concluding each of  the 6.7 billion would have his/her equally objective personal view of my appearance.”

“As I said in an 1842 debate with Prussian censors: ‘The essence of the mind is always the truth itself.’”

“Physicist P.W. Bridgman made this simple point when he asked: ‘If measurements vary right along with variations in our measuring instruments, and, if the human brain is but the measuring instrument par excellence, does it not follow that what is true for one brain is, for another brain differently coded,  false, and, that both brains are correct?’”

“Now, I would agree with liberals that discussions about the meaning of truth are ‘abstract, irrelevant and boring,’ IF our concern were limited to things like weights, peanuts, penicillin and the color of leaves; things with respect to which the majority of people have common experiences, and, as a consequence,  share common definitions and truths.”

“But it isn’t!”

“We are all intimately involved with, affected by, and therefore deeply concerned about, momentous issues: wars and revolutions, the building, maintenence, dismantling and replacement of productive-distributive orders, the very evolution of human history. And with respect to such vital matters, individuals and communities often have different, at times mutually exclusive, experiences and interests, making the question ‘What is truth?’ of paramount importance for anyone who seeks to understand how we got here, and where it is that we are headed.”

“Mr. Machiavelli was right when he said I agree with Hegel that consciousness and experience–knowing and doing, theory and practice–are ‘a unity’ for everyone.”

“He was right that where Hegel reasoned communities formulate new philosophies which then lead them to carry out fundamental material changes, I contend it’s always injurious material changes communities suffer which prompt them to defensively transform their assumptions about what truth is, where it comes from, and how it gets passed around; i.e, which induce a community to create and internalize a new Spiritual Quintessence.”

“In short: ‘I found Hegel standing on his head and put him on his feet!’  ‘Life is not determined by consciousness,’ I’ve consistently argued, ‘but consciousness by life.’”

“How does my inverted Hegelian logic enable us to acquire a scientific understanding of history?”

“Stay with me!  It’s not really hard to understand.”

“If consciousness and experience are a unity, it logically follows that whenever you declare something is a ‘fact’ (an idea of superior value) you implicitly declare the superior value of the experience which produced it; and, assuming you aren’t psychotic, you reveal your intention to act in ways consistent with, ergo protective of, that experience right along with the facts it yields.”

“It also follows that for anyone who will be hurt by a continuation of your experience—i.e., for someone who’s being injured by what you’re doing—your simple statement of ‘fact’ is a menacing expression of intent; not a disclosure of ‘fact’ at all, but a declarations of your pernicious values and objectives.”

“Sociologist Lewis Wirth put it succinctly, when he wrote: ’Since every assertion of a “fact” about the social world touches the interests of some individual or group, one cannot even call attention to the existence of certain “facts” without courting the objections of those whose very raison d’etre in society rests upon a divergent interpretation of the “factual” situation.’”

“Material examples of the socio-economic-political truth discovery-creation process are all around us:”

“Respecting U.S. and British media depictions of Israel’s practice vis-a-vis Palestinians, a Palestinian businessman recently observed:”

”’Occupied Palestinian territories are called “disputed”  . . . Illegal settlements built on demolished Palestinian lives, homes, confiscated lands and farms, are called “neighborhoods”, the occupiers are called “settlers” in the tradition of the European immigration to the US and Australia. . . . Gaza has been turned into one of the biggest prisons in the world, /but/ the resistance to Israel’s occupation is labelled “terrorism”.”

“In an April 4^th, 2004 news briefing, General Richard Myers and then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld described Iraqis fighting against American forces as ‘terrorists,’ and ‘thugs.’”

“On the same day, Al Jazeera referred to them as ‘resistance fighters defending Iraq against a U.S. occupation,’ and the Iraqnet Information Network called dead Iraqi fighters not ‘terrorists,’ but ‘martyrs.’”

“Which of these diverse characterizations are correct?  For a materialist, all are equally objective!”

“Each of the combatants is fighting to preserve their social existence in a situation which does not permit all of them to succeed, and their definitional disagreements merely express their underlying material conflicts with words.”

“According to the materialist perspective, all our truths represent our experience, and, since no one either is, or could possibly become, an indifferent observer of his experience, that means all our truths bespeak our interests.”

“Philosopher Leszek Kolakowski was making this point when he inquired: ’What justifies our belief that the visual world of a fly, made up of light and dark spots of neutral colors, is less “authentic” or less “true” than ours, except the fact that ours is better adapted to our needs?,’  ’In all the universe,’ Kolakowski concluded, ‘man cannot find a well so deep that, leaning over it, he does not discover at the bottom his own face.’”

“As I reminded Prussia’s censors: ‘One and the same object appears differently to different individuals and expresses its various sides in as many various intellects.’ Like a Prussian censor, Mr. Machiavelli ‘conceive/s/ the truth abstractly and turn/s/ the mind into an inquisitor who dryly records the proceedings.’”

“Intent on discovering ‘absolute truths’ he believes exist independently of the interests of individuals and communities who accept or reject them—truths passively waiting to be discovered—Machiavelli is unable to say anything meaningful regarding the material basis of human history’s unfolding.”

“Employing his absolutist metaphysics and epistemology leads Mr. Machiavelli to depict objects and events as static; whereas, experience tells us they are always and inevitably dynamic.”

“Machiavelli speaks a language of  that ‘is’ and this ‘is,’ in a universe of ceaseless ’process and becoming.’”

“Acorns are in-the-process-of-becoming-saplings, saplings in-the-process-of-becoming-oak-trees, oak trees are in-the-process-of-becoming-dead-trees, if utilized by humans, in-the-process-of-becoming-firewood, tables or chairs.”

“Fertilized human eggs are in-the-process-of becoming-embryos, embryos in-the-process-of-becoming-fetuses, fetuses in-the-process-of-becoming-babies, babies in-the-process-of-becoming-children, children in-the-process-of-becoming-adults, etc.”

“So it is, too, with our orders of production and distribution.”

“When you look back, is it not indisputable that hunting and gathering tribes were in-the-process-of-becoming-nomadic-slave-communities, nomadic slave communities were in-the-process-of-becoming-feudal-societies, and feudal societies were in-the-process-of-be-coming-capitalist-states?”

“Yet to the question ‘How did this happen?,’ Mr. Machiavelli’s absolutistist paradigm provides no empirical, i.e., no scientific answers.”

”When the creative,  protective-of-social-existence, component of truth is acknowledged everything suddenly starts to make material sense.”

“Our paleolithic hunting and gathering ancestors were animists who believed the forests that furnished them game, the rivers which offered fish, the meadows that provided berries, all possessed spirits which could be propitiated with the proper ceremonies and iconic symbols.”

“The Spiritual Quintessence of those tribal communities wasn’t written by a minority with an elite social existence to protect.  It was born of, and directly expressed, experiences and interests shared by every community member.  It was, in that regard, an egalitarian logic. (You’ll note Mr. Machiavelli conveniently misunderstood my argument on this issue).

“Obviously, none of the hierarchically structured communities which followed the hunters and gatherers could have functioned if they had attempted to employ the self-understanding/Spiritual Qunitessence of the hunting and gathering world.”

“Needing to increase their populations during their early stages of development, as well as the populations of animals being domesticated, nomadic slave communities defensively originated fertility gods to appease, many of which were believed to have animal forms.”

“Since maintaining their social existence sometimes required them to fight other nomadic-slave tribes, they  created/prayed to both gods of war and gods of peace.  The fact that they were often most effortlessly sustained by working with, rather than battling, the other nomadic communities—which had somewhat different experiences/interests, and, therefore, somewhat different gods—was an additional material reason for all of them to practice polytheism.  Not until settled communities began to be established in the fertile Nile Valley did monotheistic faiths become pragmatic logics.”

“Like their hunting and gathering and nomadic-slave predecessors, Europe’s feudal communities also required a distinctive consciousness/Spiritual Quintessence to exist.  Being hierarchically structured but stationary, to reproduce their social existence they created a philosophy which proposed God determined everyone’s position in life, one that dictated serfs must be submissive to royalty, royalty and serfs submissive to the Roman Emperor, and to the Pope, Bishops, Cardinals and priests who wrote and directed the application of Religious Absolutism, which was the Spiritual Quintessence of settled land-owning-agricultural-elite orders of production and distribution. In appropriately modified form, I noted, Religious Absolutism is presently the Spiritual Quintessence of Asian, African and Middle Eastern raw material-elite communities.”

“As I explained in my opening remarks, via the same defensive/conservative process, feudal systems were, in turn, succeeded by hierarchically structured financial-industrial-elite (capitalist) orders, which created, and continue to employ, their own unique Spiritual Quintessence for their perpetuation.”

“Which brings us to what is for you a vital question:”

“If Religious Absolutism was feudalism’s Spiritual Quintessence, what, then, is the Spiritual Quintessence of the capitalist productive-distributive order; i.e., what is the internalized understanding with which capitalist communities reflexively justify and direct that order’s minute-by-minute, day-by-day, year-by-year preservation?”

“Why, it’s Scientific Absolutism, of course! The very philosophical paradigm Mr. Machiavelli so enthusiastically promotes!”

“Based on the proposition all truth comes from God, is found through prayer and revelation, then disseminated by religious authorities, the feudal order’s metaphysics and epistemology, was wholly inadequate for building and maintaining a capitalist order of production and distribution.”

“Capitalist elites would have to personally oversee the construction of factories, and the design, operation and repair of machinery, along with intricate financial transactions; all tasks which required them to take control of their lives, rather than appealing to God through church figures and feudal aristocrats.”

“The capitalists needed banks to service their commercial operations.  But, Europe’s feudal-elites proscribed the creation of national banks, even as they sowed the seeds of their order’s destruction by enriching the bankers of Venice and Genoa with deposits of stolen wealth—in Spain and Portugal’s case—wealth gleaned from the people through indulgences in the case of the clergy.”

“Capitalist communities would need secular laws in place of feudalism’s restrictive regal edicts, binding legal agreements in lieu of vague expressions of loyalty and personal commitment. The secular laws were urgent for giving the capitalists’ agreements legitimacy, as were secular courts to make the laws enforceable, and secular police to do the enforcing, and to make the capitalists’ lives and fortunes secure.”

“In sum, to perpetuate their social existence it was necessary for the capitalists to create and internalize a secular Spiritual Quintessence, one which rationalized and directed a revolutionary dismantling of the feudal productive-distributive system with its landed aristocracy, and the building/maintenance of a hierarchically structured financial-industrial-elite order in its stead.”

“Now, if you’re a materialist who focuses on what people DO, not on what they SAY, it’s evident that for industrial-elite communities around the world, Scientific Absolutism has been that Spiritual Quintessence.”

“As land-holding/agricultural-elite (feudal) societies became financial/industrial-elite (capitalist), the church was replaced by the university everywhere, the priest by the professor; a change often sudden and striking.”

“Prior to the U.S. Civil War, the president of nearly every major college and university was a theologian who looked out upon the world through the prism of Religious Absolutism.  Only a decade after the war, the heads of most major institutions of higher learning were scientists or businessmen with Scientific Absolutist perspectives.”

“In 1917 the Russian Revolution brought the same dramatic paradigm transformation to the U.S.S.R..  Theologians were swept from philosophy and social science departments almost overnight, their places taken by Leninist ‘Marxists’ who, as Machiavelli correctly noted, employed a Scientific Absolutist interpretation of my theory.”

“Nietzsche remarked the natural and necessary metamorphosis in consciousness that accompanied the birth of capitalism, observing: “God is dead, and we have killed him!”

“But capitalist communities were not going to be equalitarian, with workers and the poor deciding what was true for themselves.  Like the feudal church and its theologians before them, capitalist universities and professors would ‘deliver truth’ to the masses.  Unlike the priests, however, the professors would find their capitalism-sustaining truths through what they sincerely believed was ‘impartial and objective investigation,’ rather than through prayer.”

“Western capitalist nations, and the academicians who create-discover the ideas needed to justify and defend their hierarchically structured productive-distributive orders, have reasoned Marxist propositions will inhibit, if not prevent, the discernment of socio-economic-political ’reality’. Their Soviet, Chinese, Vietnamese, et. al counterparts, on the other hand, have insisted absolutistic Marxism alone can lead one to ‘the truth’.”

“Since their disagreements have only been about techniques/methods/procedures, not about metaphysics and epistemology (i.e., not about what truth IS and how it’s determined) they are able to adopt one anothers positions with the same ease that Methodists become Catholics or Presbyterians become Baptists; no paradigmatic transformation/change of Spiritual Quintessence  is involved.”

“Moreover, as Frederich Nietzsche, William James, F.C.S. Schiller, John Dewey, Leszek Kolakowski and other materialists discovered, capitalist country academics East and West have defended Scientific Absolutism against Relativism with an aggressivity equal to that of the 18^th century European priests who protected the feudal logic.”

“Having given you a scientific-materialist explanation for absolutistic interpretations/applications of my theory, I’ll return to what is for you the critical issue: where the U.S. and world community are currently at, and, where I believe they are headed.”

“Declaring our species inherently evil, Mr. Machiavelli concluded his rebuttal by throwing up his hands and announcing he supports the U.S. global strategy, which, to cite him, he considers: ‘a strategy that’s both an imperative, and, the lesser evil.’”

“Let me begin my more sanguine perspective with an assertion I made at the close of my opening statement:”

“The U.S. economy, (along with much of the global economy), is being held together by  increasingly destructive U.S. military-industrial expenditures and operations.”

“Granted, it used to be true that the defense industry, however injurious or fatal for hundreds of  millions of  the Third World poor, helped sustain the United States’ economic viability.”

“Following World War II, the rapidly growing populations and deepening poverty of non-industrialized Asian, African and Latin American nations began leading many children of their middle classes and elites to the conclusion they needed to dismantle their countries’ agricultural/raw-material systems of production, carry out land reform, and industrialize.”

“Unfortunately, from the U.S. perspective, their only sources of money for industrializing were U.S., and to a lesser extent, British and French, agricultural, raw-material, communications and banking industries.”

“So, they started confronting large American interests with expropriation.”

“Cuba’s seizure of U.S. sugar, tobacco, gambling and other industries; Chile’s take over of Kennicott and Anaconda Copper, I.T.T. and U.S. banking corporations; Nicaragua’s confiscation of U.S. owned or controlled banana, sugar, coffee, beef and tobacco operations, and the growing threat posed by Indonesian pro-industrial forces during Sukarno’s presidency are prime examples.”

“The United States’ response?   I mentioned it earlier:”

“Learning from the failure to retain its profitable Cuban interests, the U.S. aggressively employed financial and economic pressures.  More importantly, it used, and got threatened Third World agricultural and raw-material elites to use, military force, driving Allende, Ortega and the Sandinista National Liberation Front from power.  It advised, subsidized and provided CIA assistance and military equipment for overthrowing Sukarno and slaughtering 800,000 pro-industrial Indonesians.  It killed 3,000,000 Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians, successfully stopping the drive toward threatening industrial development in that region.”

“That accomplished, the U.S. began loaning/granting vast sums of money to all the Third World countries in which it had large investments, and/or from which it profitably obtained agricultural and raw-material products, or which provided land access and waterways vital for defending American interests: Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, the Philippines, etc., enabling them to purchase huge quantities of U.S. weaponry to keep their increasingly restive populations in check.  It also sold, in Israel’s case donated, billions-of-dollars worth of arms to allied industrial nations that helped protect its Third World interests, or, which shared the benefits of its oppressive foreign policy.”

“For everyone (everyone except the Third World peoples being subjugated or killed), that policy worked well for over half a century.  U.S. investments in Third World countries were protected, as were the wealth and hegemonic existences of those countries’ raw-material and agricultural elites.  At the same time, U.S. arms-manufacturers, producing everything from F-15s, F-16s, and F-22s, B2 bombers, nuclear bombs, smart bombs, cluster bombs, phosphorous bombs and bunker-busters, hand grenades, fueling tankers, unmanned aerial vehicles, Blackhawk helicopters, Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, jeeps, Paladin Howitzers, automatic rifles, M-40 sniper rifles, uniforms, armored vests, helmets, battlefield kitchens, and, memorial gear for the servicemen who didn’t survive, reaped billions-of-dollars in profit yearly.”

“Gradually, however, with its non-defense manufacturing being exported to Mexico, Taiwan, China and India, the huge cost of arms production associated with its ’hold the restive bastards down’ foreign policy became so embarrassingly enormous that today Americans no longer admit its dimensions even to themselves.”

“Chalmers Johnson has noted: ‘In an attempt to disguise the true size of the U.S. military empire, the government has long hidden major military-related expenditures in departments other than Defense.  For example $23.4 billion for the Department of Energy goes toward developing and maintaining nuclear warheads; and $25.3 billion in the Department of State budget is spent on foreign military assistance (primarily for Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Republic, Egypt and Pakistan).  Another $1.03 billion outside the official Department of Defense budget is now needed for recruitment and re-enlistment incentives for the overstretched U.S. military, up from a mere $174 million in 2003, when the war in Iraq began.  The Department of Veterans Affairs currently gets at least $75.7 billion, 50 percent of it for the long-term care of the most seriously injured among the 28,870 soldiers so far wounded in Iraq and 1,708 in Afghanistan. . . . Another $46.4 billion goes to the Department of Homeland Security.’”

“’By 1990 the value of the weapons, equipment and factories devoted to the Department of Defense was 83 percent of the value of all plants and equipment in U.S. manufacturing.  From 1947 to 1990, the combined U.S. military budgets amounted to $8.7 trillion.  Even though the Soviet Union no longer exists, U.S. reliance on military Keynesianism has, if anything, ratcheted up, thanks to the massive vested interests that have become entrenched around the military establishment.’”

“Robert Higgs, ‘a senior fellow for political economy at The Independent Institute,’ suggests: ‘A well-founded rule of thumb is to take the Pentagon’s basic budget and double it.’  ‘Some 30-40 percent of the defense budget is ‘black;’ ‘meaning, /Johnson adds/, ‘that these sections contain hidden expenditures for classified projects. There is no possible way to know what they include, or whether their total amounts are accurate.’”

“’The Pentagon’s 2009 budget doesn’t even include money for actual wars,’ Tom Engelhardt observes.  Those ‘wars are all paid for by “supplemental” bills like the $162 billion one Congress /recently passed/.’‘The Pentagon not only produces stealth planes, it is, in budgetary terms, a stealth operation.  If honestly accounted, the actual Pentagon yearly budget, including all the ‘military related’ funds salted away elsewhere, is probably now more than $1 trillion.’”

“The producer and vender of more than half the world’s weaponry, the U.S. has over 730 overseas bases; and ‘more than 50 percent of income tax dollars goes to the Pentagon.’”

“Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing rank 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd on the list of global arms producers, and all three are Fortune 500 corporations.  Boeing and Lockheed Martin each have weapons contracts with a yearly value in excess of $19 billion, Northrop Grumman, approximately $16 billion.  CorpWatch estimated Lockheed Martin received $105 from every U.S. taxpayer in 2007.”

“With ‘annual revenues of $20 billion,’ relates Michael Dickinson, ‘Raytheon, manufacturer of the 100 bunker buster bombs kindly flown by America to Israel at the height of their bombardment of Lebanon, and supplier of electronic equipment for the apartheid wall built on Palestinina land . . . /is/ the world’s largest producer of guided missiles, and fifth largest defense contractor in the world, provider of aircraft radar systems, weapons sights and targeting systems, communication and battle-management systems, and satellite components.’”

“American academic institutions are profiting greatly. ‘Since 2000,’ writes Bryan Farrell: ‘universities have seen defense-related research contracts increase 900 percent, from $4.4 billion in 2000 to $46.7 billion in 2006. . . . Penn State pulled in $1.6 billion in endowment funds last year, a 20 percent increase over the previous year . . . Not surprisingly, such corporate gifts come from defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Exxon Mobil, which, in exchange, get the privilege of recruiting students to work for the war machine . . . Since Penn State is home to one of the U.S. Navy’s top civilian research facilities, . . . science and engineering students are a prized commodity to the ever-expanding defense industry.’”

“Senators and members of Congress have become heavily dependent upon defense industries for the money needed to run for office.  Matt Taibbi points to the ‘influx of cash from would-be military contractors’ in the 2008 election, observing: ‘John Lehman, a former secretary of the Navy whose firm builds the Superferry transport vessel, not only donated $28,500 of his own money, but bundled at least $250,000 for McCain from other donors. Donald Bollinger, who is a contractor on the controversial Littoral Combat Ship, gave $27,300 and bundled a whopping $500,000.’”

“The legislators are also reliant on voters who either work for, or, whose counties, cities and states are dependent upon military bases and/or defense corporations. ’With bases, factories or other components of the military-scientific complex in almost every congressional district,’ Saul Landau laments, ‘it is unlikely to see a groundswell to drastically reduce the military budget.  Indeed, some corporations that service the military, with weapons or science, exert serious pressure to not withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq and dismantle bases that have become beyond obsolete.’”

“Many legislators own stock in defense corporations, Associated Press writer Anne Flaherty reports: ‘Members of Congress have as much as $196 million collectively invested in companies doing business with the Defense Department, earning millions since the onset of the Iraq War . . .  Overall, 151 members hold investments worth $78.7 million to $195.5 million in companies that receive defense contracts . . . These investments earned them anywhere between $15.8 million and $62 million between 2004 and 2006.’”

“Dividing the high figure of $62 million by the 151 members of congress with defense company investments gives one an average per-member profit of $410,596.  If the lowest total profit estimate of $15.8 million is used, the average is $104,600.  Not a bad take from a killing machine venture either way.”

“Defense spending has become so lucrative, and so vital for keeping the U.S. economy afloat, that immense waste expenditures are blithely ignored.  ‘According to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO),’ relates Taibbi: ‘The Department of Defense has already “marked for disposal’ hundreds of millions of dollars worth of spare parts—and not old spare parts, but new ones that are still on order!  In fact, the GAO report claims that over half of the spare parts currently on order for the Air Force—some $235 million worth, or about the same amount that /Senator Bernie/ Sanders unsuccessfully tried to get for the community health program last year—are already marked for disposal!  Our government is buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Defense Department crap just to throw it away!  “They’re planning on throwing this stuff away and it hasn’t even come in yet,” says Sanders.’”

“Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney recieved a small amount of attention but no answers to her question: ‘What happened to the $2.3 trillion dollars’ the Pentagon ‘quietly’ disclosed was ‘missing’ from its funds on the day before 9/11?”

“Predictably, Pentagon officers, defense industry executives and legislators who make hay together, often play together. ‘Pentagon elites and high government officials are teeing off at taxpayer expense at hundreds of courses all over the planet,’ notes Nick Turse.  Many of the golf courses are on U.S. military bases.”

“Now the crucial question about consciousness:  How has the U.S. rationalized its all-out militarization of the globe?”

“From the late 1940s, to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-91, Americans told themselves they were battling ‘socialist-communist’ enemies inspired by me, aided/abetted by socialist-communist Russia and China.  That was the vaporous and unexamined logic initially used to build its awesome military-industrial complex, and to manufacture, distribute and employ its terrible wares in defense of Third World interests.  It was America’s ‘operative foreign policy truth.’”

“What material evidence did the U.S. have to support that ‘operative truth’”?

“About the same amount Spanish Inquisitionists had when they put Jews on the rack in the name of Christ, or the Taliban has to justify disfiguring women’s faces with acid for the pleasure of Allah.”

“Anyone who has bothered to read my writing knows that what the Soviet Union, China and Third World revolutionaries were/are saying and doing has had nothing whatsoever to do with my concept of socialist revolution or socialism-communism in practice.”

“It was a fundamental axiom of my theory that after a socialist revolution everyone would receive the same wage, enabling each working person to acquire an equal share of the nation’s production of  goods and services: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.’ Following the failure of the Paris Commune in 1871 I modified this prediction, but only slightly.  For a brief period I suggested, the highest paid might receive twice the income of the lowest.”

“However, to quote from my Critique of the Gotha Program, there would be residual inequality in a socialist organization of society because: ‘one man is superior to another physically or mentally; one worker is married, another not; one has more children and so on.  Thus with an equal output, and an equal share in the social consumption, one will in fact receive more than another.’”

“Although initially ‘inevitable,’ this problem would resolve itself, I concluded.  As the socialist order of production and distribution matured it would become communist, wherein the operative principle would be: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’”

“Clearly, at no point has any of this described the Soviet Union or China, where new, albeit progressive, anti-feudal, pro-industrial elites were already forming while their revolutions were in progress; elites who were, and are, as socio-economically removed from their nations’ poor as any found in the West.”

“I argued that because everyone seeks, gains and utilizes political power in defense of their social existence, so long as one segment of society enjoys an elite existence, its members will automatically acquire greater political authority to protect it, and a political state will continue to exist under their control.”

“Since a socialist revolution would bring the end of inequality, I reasoned (and continue to believe), no one would any longer need political power.  Ergo, no one would pursue it, and politics, along with the political state, would die a natural death.  Only an administrative structure for the equitable distribution of community goods and services, would remain. Furthermore, as in the Paris Commune, the socialist administrators would all be subject to immediate recall by the people.”

“Would any of you seriously suggest this has described  post-revolutionary Russia, China, Cuba or Vietnam in any way, at any stage?”

“Then, there’s the matter of personal freedom.”

“Whatever you may think of my theory, I insist my reasoning is at least syllogistic.  Only a political state has the power to control freedom of speech, press, and assembly I noted: ‘Censorship is criticism as government monopoly’. Since neither a political state nor political authorities would exist under socialism, I concluded freedom of speech, press and assembly would be unrestricted.  People would now decide for themselves who was right and who was wrong, what was true, and what was false.’”

“‘Freedom of the press proceeds on the presumption of anticipating world history,’ I wrote, ‘sensing in advance the voice of the people which alone has hitherto judged which writer was “competent,” which “incompetent.”  ’Freedom is so very much the essence of man that even its opponents realize it, in that they fight its reality.  They want to appropriate that most costly jewel, which they will not consider the jewel of human nature.  No man fights against freedom; at most he fights against the freedom of others . . . the free press is the omnipresent open eye of the spirit of the people, the embodied confidence of a people in itself . . .  It is the ruthless confession of a people to itself  . . . The free press is the intellectual mirror in which a people sees itself, and self-viewing is the first condition of wisdom.”

“To those who argued freedom of the press would bring hurtful changes to society, I replied: ‘Freedom of the press causes “changeable conditions” as little as the astronomers’ telescope causes the perpetual motion of the planetary system.  Wicked astronomy!’”

“Could I have stated my view on this subject any more clearly?”

“As for the materially indefensible proposition that Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, or any other self-proclaimed socialist-communist country has ever acted upon that view—Please!”

“Insisting orders of production and distribution are razed only if and when they have lost the ability to maintain the social existence of those who tear them down, I argued a dismantled order could no more be resurrected than a dead tree or dead animal can be brought back to life.  People living in feudal communities would not be able to restore a hunting and gathering or nomadic slave way of life; citizens of a capitalist society would find it impossible to reconstitute a feudal structure; and members of a socialist community would be unable to reestablish a  capitalist-world existence.”

“The Soviet Union/Russia, China et al., past or present?”

“Then, there’s the issue of state ownership of/control-over property and the means of production.  Soviet and Chinese leaders have often described that as a distinguishing feature of socialism, and most U.S. politicians have opportunistically agreed.  I, on the other hand, argued that the unification of property, corporations and the state, occurs during the advanced stages of capitalist production.  However, unlike socialism, I noted, state-capitalism defends the hegemonic social existences of a financial-industrial elite first, rather than serving all members of the community equally.”

“In making that argument, I reasoned as follows:”

“During the early period of capitalist production factories were small and manufacturers were able to obtain sufficient money (which I call ”surplus value”), from workers to build and repair their factories and machines.  But, as the number of individuals and nations forced to adopt capitalist production to survive increased, so, too, did the aggressivity of their competition. In time it became impossible for capitalists to extract enough surplus value from workers to construct the large factories, and install the costly equipment, which competing required.”

“At that point, I observed, it became necessary for capitalists to obtain the requisite funds by selling stocks and bonds; which I described as ‘seeds of socialism,’ since it meant the capitalists were relinquishing a modicum of control over their corporations.  Eventually, I argued, with more and more capitalist nations coming into existence, factories becoming ever-larger, machines more sophisticated and expensive, even the sale of stocks and bonds no longer provided sufficient money, and it now became necessary to glean surplus value from everyone via the state.”

“But, as I’ve indicated, with the benefits of production still accruing mainly to a financial-industrial elite, state-capitalism was/is no less capitalistic; a point my colleague Friedrich Engels emphasized in his essay ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,’ writing:”

“’/T/he transformation, either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces.  In the joint-stock companies and trusts this is obvious.  And the modern state, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists.  The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital.  The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit.  The workers remain wage-workers-proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. . . . State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.’”

“As you’re undoubtedly aware, the U.S. government has long provided American agriculture about $4 billion dollars yearly, most of that money going to the biggest producers, along with tens-of-billions-of-dollars to pharmaceutical corporations and other capitalist industries in the form of grants, and hundred-of-billions in tax write offs.”

“Today, with large banks and mortgage institutions being rescued with enormous sums of government dollars—$170 billion to AIG, $350 billion to Citi Group and other banks, with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s debts taken over and Big-3 auto industry executives waiting in line, while at the same time the government resists pressures to save desperate middle class homeowners from losing their homes—surely my argument respecting the marriage of finance, industry and the state under capitalism requires no further defense.”

“Mr. Machiavelli argued that finding neither the U.S.S.R. nor China adopted my relativistic interpretation of history proves I was wrong.  To the contrary, my theory provides a material explanation for what transpired in the U.S.S.R. China and other self-styled ‘socialist-communist’ nations, a point Machiavelli managed to miss.”

“Because the primary objective of everyone’s political consciousness and practice is to secure their own social existence, I reasoned that if some members of a revolutionary contingent have privileged social existences they automatically take control of the revolution in order to defend them.  As a result, when an established order has been razed and its elites have been expropriated, discovering that to move any further in the direction of equality will mean expropriating themselves, the revolutionaries promptly cease their revolutionary practice.  To quote myself here: ‘As the main thing is not to be deprived of the fruits of civilization, of the acquired productive forces, the traditional forms in which they were produced must be smashed.  From this moment the revolutionary class becomes conservative.’”

“In ‘The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System,’ Milovan Djilas convincingly documented that my theory, and Engels’ depiction of state-capitalism, aptly describe the origin and operation of Russian-Soviet and East European systems.“

“To be sure, Soviet and Chinese leaders pragmatically believed they represented socialist-communist construction; much as Spain’s inquisitionists believed they were doing the work of God; or the Nazis believed they were building a 1,000 year humanitarian utopia; or Israel believes it’s carrying out God’s will when it expropriates, ethnically cleanses, oppresses, maims and kills Palestinians; or (staring hard at O’Reilly and Hannity), FOX News pundits believe FOX’s programming to be ‘fair and balanced.’”

“But, anyone who holds that people and nations, like things, are defined by what they do, not by what they think or say, will dismiss all such presumptuous, self-serving declarations.”

“Prior to the Russian Revolution its leaders—Mensheviks and Bolsheviks alike—accepted that part of my theory (a part Thomas Jefferson would have understood), which describes all revolutions and all revolutionaries as conservative, in that they dismantle inadequate systems of production and distribution and build more beneficient ones, in order to be socio-economically sustained.”

“Recognizing Russia’s feudal system could no longer maintain the country’s growing population, the Russian revolutionaries argued Russia, like France, England, Japan and Germany before it, needed to undergo a capitalist revolution.  After Russia lost a war with Japan in 1905 Lenin, Trotsky, et al., urged the country’s financiers and manufacturers to lead one.  When they failed to do so, consistent with my logic, the revolutionaries decided they would have to oversee Russia’s capitalist revolution themselves.  Arrested and tried for promoting a capitalist revolution in 1905, Trotsky addressed the court: ‘Gentlemen of the judges. You fail to understand that, in the context of the time, we revolutionaries are the true conservatives.’”

“The Bolsheviks, and most Mensheviks, predicted Russia’s capitalist revolution would break the country’s economic ties with Western Europe, throwing the latter deeply into crisis.  Since West European states were already capitalist, the revolutionaries reasoned that to survive the crisis they would be forced to undergo socialist revolutions.  In turn, they concluded, European socialist revolutions would throw Russia back into a crisis it could resolve only by having a socialist revolution of its own.”

“In sum, a capitalist revolution in Russia would ’spark’ socialist revolutions in Western Europe, which would then ’spark’ a socialist revolution in Russia. The Bolsheviks even named their newspaper  ‘Iskra’ (‘The Spark’).”

“When Russia had its anti-feudal revolution and West Europeans were not ’sparked’ into carrying out socialist revolutions, Russian anarchists began demanding that the Bolsheviks proceed with establishing a classless-egalitarian society in the Soviet Union anyway.”

“Lenin was adamantly opposed.  He argued, (plausibly, I believe), that in order to industrialize the Soviet Union would need the expertise of its businessmen, engineers, metalurgists, chemists, biologists and other professionals, all of whom enjoyed a socio-economic status well above that of the average Soviet citizen.  Many of those professionals had already gone into exile in Western Europe or the United States.  If the elite existence of those who remained was not protected Lenin insisted, they, too, would leave; making industrialization impossible, and socio-economic-political chaos a certainty.  Therefore, the U.S.S.R. must concentrate on building a capitalist structure, as originally planned.”

“Furthermore, Lenin reasoned, because England, France and the U.S. had no serious competitors when they established their capitalist systems, they were able to start with small firms and gradually proceed to ones which were large.  The U.S.S.R. on the other hand, was going to industrialize in a world already dominated by huge corporations which operated internationally.  To compete in that world would require starting with firms of grand scale; and that would necessitate tapping the energies of everyone via the state, just as Japan and Germany had done before it for the same reason.  For now, Lenin concluded, the U.S.S.R. needed to focus on becoming state capitalist.”

“In a famous speech given in June 1921,  Lenin exhorted:”

“’The alternative (and this is the last ‘possible’ and the only sensible policy) is not to try to prohibit or put the lock on the development of capitalism, but to try to direct it into the channels of “state capitalism.”  This is economically possible, for state capitalism—in one form or another, to some degree or other—exists wherever the elements of free trade and capitalism in general exist.  Can the Soviet state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, be combined, united with state capitalism?  Are they compatible?  Of course they are.  This is exactly what I argued in May 1918.  I hope I proved it in May 1918.  Nor is that all.  I then proved that state capitalism is a step forward compared with the small proprietor (both small-patriarchal and petty-bourgeois) element.  Those who juxtapose or compare state capitalism only with socialism commit a host of mistakes, for in the present political and economic circumstances it is essential to compare state capitalism with petty-bourgeois production.’”

“Which brings us to a consequential question for you inhabitants of the present/builders of the future:”

“If there was not a whit of material evidence the Soviet Union, and subsequently China, were socialist; if, to the contrary, all the material evidence described them as state-capitalist nations; if their only links to socialism were abstract claims made by political representatives of neuveau financial-industrial elites (at the time of Lenin’s speech, Trotsky remarked that Lenin alone would dare to make such an honest public statement), how did the U.S. ever come up with its preposterous narrative?”

“Who were its authors?  Who its most vigorous promoters?  What did they mean by “communism?  And, why did Americans act out acceptance of their fairytale; not merely workers, but academicians, movie moguls, scientists, almost everyone?”

“Who it was that authored, then aggressively promoted, the U.S. anti-communist crusade against a mythical communist threat is hardly a mystery.”

“It was the political representatives of defense industries and corporations with menaced Third World, particularly Latin American, investments; other people joining in as they found that doing so was vital for protecting, often enhancing, their own interests as well.”

“Mr. Machiavelli contends they were merely lying to defend the state.  I’ll let you decide.”

“Years before the formation of the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities, defense company executives and their legislative representatives were already engaged in suppressing union leaders whose ‘communist’ efforts to increase defense company workers’ wages were found to be a threat.”

“Similarly, the Communist Control Act of 1954, passed by both houses of Congress, specifically prohibited Communist Party members, who were trying to improve the lot of workers, from holding official positions in labor unions.”

“The government used this and other acts ‘to investigate and harass’ any organization which demonstrated ‘communist leanings’ by taking the side of workers in  their conflicts with corporations, or Third World countries in their struggles against U.S. companies, or blacks in their battles against whites.”

“Furthermore, how the elite interests involved defined ‘communism’ was clear:  ‘That which threatens my economic interests is ‘communist,’ and the more it threatens, the more ‘communist’ it becomes.”

“But why did Americans, one-and-all, act out agreement with the elite’s fairytale, the majority enthusiastically, a  minority with reluctance, a few kicking and screaming in protest while, like the others, they continued their daily routine of work, school and paying taxes, in other words, went along?”

“Would you offer the liberal-absolutist explanation that they did it because they were ignorant of their own ‘true interests’ and needed to be enlightened?”

“Or—as my theory argues—was it another instance of people internalizing, then, acting upon, an understanding necessary for protecting the social existence of the nation’s elites because doing so was the least disruptive way to maintain their own less favored interests; including that of liberals, most of whom, however reluctantly, also marched in step?”

“During the Vietnam War, I was amused to note that the majority of American war protesters seemed able to convince themselves they ‘really were’ what they thought, wrote, read and said, rather than what they did; as, like everyone else, they participated in the mass killing of Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, and subsequently, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans. and others.”

“Hundreds of academicians were writing and speaking against the war, while acting-out the same acceptance and support as the war’s capitalist proponents.”

“Ironically, since the latter were often adept at avoiding taxes, it’s probable some protesters did more than many pro-war capitalists when it came to assisting that project; a project which was destroying the lives of the very people with whom the protesters claimed to identify, and for whom they claimed to care.”

Was this yet another instance of mass ignorance?   Or, was it one of people conveniently believing that which most effortlessly sustained them?”

“The minority of American protesters who did accept culpability had little difficulty justifying their cooperation with the on-going exploitation, oppression and slaughter of Third World poor.”

“They (correctly?) told themselves there was really no effective way to stop.”

“Move to England, Germany or France?  Those countries not only supported the U.S. effort, they were carrying out their own Third World suppressions.”

“Take up exile in the U.S.S.R.?  Although the Soviet Union’s state-capitalists were self-interestedly providing a moderate amount of assistance to Third World liberation movements in regions dominated by the U.S., they were equally energetic when it came to protecting their own hegemonic existences by stepping on the poor at home and in Eastern Europe.  During the Great Depression Russia’s state-capitalists had demonstrated there were no limits to the depravity they would be willing to manifest in defense of their favored socio-economic situations.”

“Let me return, now, to the matter of America’s deeply troubled immediate situation.”

“As I noted in my opening statement, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and ending of the Cold War, U.S. defense budgets fell throughout the 1990s and employment in the defense industry went down with them; more than 2 millions defense industry jobs were lost between 1992 and 2001.”

“In The End of America, Naomi Wolf observes: ‘the U.S. defense industry was staring into the face of a falling market share.  To grow it would have to find a new enemy.  It would also help if it expanded its product line from building fighter jets to the newfangled demand for applications involving surveillance.’”

“As I also observed in my opening remarks, with the United States’ economy depressed, with much of its manufacturing base exported, and the largest, most profitable, remaining industries military-industrial in nature, representatives of the U.S. elite whose social existences were most in jeopardy predictably discovered/created that requisite enemy, one whose defeat would require the country to spend from hundreds of billions, to incalculable trillions of dollars on military hardware and military conquest: namely, Islamic and assorted other ‘terrorists,’ meaning anyone who stands up against the United States’ increasingly injurious practices in their countries.”

“First on the list of Islamic terrorist threats was oil rich Iraq.”

“For many major U.S. corporations, I noted, the financial benefits coming from the invasion of that country were immediate.”

“To briefly recall some of those benefits:”

In March 2004 the San Francisco Chronicle reported:

“’. . . the invasion provided a multi-billion-dollar boost to the United States’ largest construction and engineering firms.  Although Bechtel Corp. and Halliburton have received the most public scrutiny, the billions of tax dollars pouring into Iraq’s reconstruction also flow through such competitors as Parsons Corp., Fluor Corp. and Washington Group International.  For sheer size of contracts, none of the reconstruction firms can rival Halliburton . . . . The company, once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, holds contracts potentially worth between $12.6 billion and $16.8 billion.  Bechtel won $2.83 billion in contracts for repairing electrical plants, water systems, airports and railways.’”

“As for U.S. weapons manufacturers: ‘Since September 12, 2001’, writes Robert Dreyfuss, ‘defense spending has exploded.  For 2008, the Bush Administration /has/ request/ed/ a staggering $650 billion, compared to the already staggering $400 billion the Pentagon collected in 2001 . . . U.S. defense spending in 2008 will amount to 29 times the combined military spending of all six so-called rogue states: Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.’”

“Between 9/11, 2001 and June 2007, President Bush also requested, and Congress granted, $44 billion for biological warfare research. BASF, GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly Corp, Monsanto and Pfizer are among the many companies reputed to be involved.”

“Momentarily, then, like the campaign against Third World ‘communists’ which preceded it, the anti-terrorist crusade, formulated and promoted by representatives of defense industries, oil corporations and global construction firms like Halliburton and Bechtel, other Americans submissively/pragmatically in tow, has unquestionably done a lot to help keep the troubled U.S. economy afloat.”

“Declaring that its ‘core mission’ is ‘to enhance the ability of state, local and tribal governments to prepare, prevent, respond to, and recover from terrorist attacks and other disasters,’ by 2003 the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the chief instrument for persuading Americans to enlist in, and benefit from, the new crusade, had already provided states and counties $9 billion.”

“What constitutes ‘countering terrorism’ has, of course, been left conveniently vague.”

“Huntsville, Alabama was given $70,000 to turn an abandoned mineshaft into a nuclear fallout shelter, just in case muslim terrorists get their hands on a nuclear weapon.  In 2006 Worcester, Massachussets purchased a $514,000 ‘Mobile Command Center’ truck with ‘a 40-foot-high panoramic camera and multiple communications devices.’  Martha’s Vineyard was granted $900,000 to ‘upgrade one of its harbors with fencing and video cameras.  And five North Dakota fire departments were recently granted $581,000 to ‘help boost their ability to respond to emergencies in their communities.’”

“The volunteer fire department of Cheshire, Massachussetts, a town of 3,500 people, was given a Homeland Security Grant of $665,962; though it was told it could not use the funds to purchase the new fire truck it badly needed.  The endowment amounted to a gift of $190,275 for each Cheshirean,  more than enough, one supposes to produce Alice In Wonderland smiles.”

“With the U.S. now in a deepening recession, Washington Post reporter Spencer Hsu writes the DHS has announced it will give ‘state and local agencies . . . $3 billion in counter-terrorism grants in 2009, with fewer strings attached than in past years.’ It will also permit more of the distributed money to trickle down, ‘allow/ing/ recipients to spend up to 50 percent of homeland security grants for personnel expenses, up from 25 percent . . . a concession to sharply tightening budgets at all levels of government.’”

“Unfortunately for Americans of conscience and humanity the new crusade has  particularly ominous features.”

“While moderately helpful where propping up many state and local economies is concerned,  the U.S. anti-terrorist crusade, merged with a Homeland Security program reminiscent of Nazi Germany, is not only devastating Third World peoples, it poses a growing threat to the freedom of Americans, to many, a threat to their lives.”

“Consider the inherent weaknesses of this new campaign, relative to its anti-communist predecessor:”

“Leaders of the anti-communist jihad were able to empirically define their enemies; namely, anyone (or anything) which threatened them with expropriation.”

“They could point to those enemies: specific Third World countries, Chile under Allende, Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, Castro’s Cuba, North Vietnam, Sukarno’s Indonesia.”

“They could identify specific enemy organizations: political parties, revolutionary groups and trade unions, as well as specific individuals: liberation movement leaders, left-leaning Third World artists, professors and priests.”

“Finally, they could identify specific countries—the U.S.S.R. and China—which sympathized with, at times supported, the mythical Third World ‘socialist-communist’ movements.”

“Today’s anti-terrorist crusaders are almost overwhelmed by problems in all of these respects.”

“To start with, they have found it impossible to clearly identify their enemies, or, to determine who their leaders are. They initially described the principal enemy as ‘al Quaida,’ calling it a tight-knit organization directed by the wealthy Saudi, Osama bin Laden; though they’ve had some difficulty deciding how their enemies’ names are spelled: ‘bin Laden’ or ‘bin Ladin,’ ‘al Quaida’ or ‘al Quaeda;’ not a very propitious beginning for a national campaign.”

“Having declared al Quaida the leading terrorist enemy, the anti-terrorist crusaders have had great difficulty deciding who is and who isn’t, a member of, allied with, or supportive of, that organization.”

“Under the crusaders’ direction, the U.S. initially argued Saddam’s Sunni tribesmen were associated with al Quaida. Later, needing the Sunni’s assistance to counter Iran’s growing influence in Iraq, it changed its mind and began paying large salaries to Sunnis who backed Iraq’s Shia-dominated government.”

“No less problematic for the anti-terrorist jihadists, while industrial nation arms dealers may sell the ’terrorists’ weapons, not a single industrialized country has openly defended them or any of their terrorist acts.  In addition, although the U.S. has accused Iran of fomenting Islamic terrorism in Iraq, most of the material evidence counters that proposition.  Iran is actually supportive of the Iraqi government put in power by the U.S., convinced it’s interests are thereby best protected.”

“From week to week, the U.S. has vacillated about whether, and to what degree, Pakistan is behind, or against, its anti-terrorist crusade, which Afghani organizations, tribes and individuals are enemies, which of them are friends.”

“Then, there are the crusaders’ ‘demonstration terrorists’ captured and imprisoned at Guantanamo, Cuba.  Wolf relates a Seton Hall University investigation found ‘most of the Guantanamo prisoners are innocent, and were swept up by Northern Alliance warlords in Afghanistan simply because the United States had offered bounties of up to $5,000 per prisoner, a major sum for that area.’”

“To compound the difficulties confronting the anti-terrorist crusaders, 12 of the 19 terrorists who were said to have carried out the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon which generated the crusade, were later determined to still be alive.”

“Worse still, polls reveal more than half of the U.S. population reject the government’s account of 9/11, believing members of the Bush Administration were either complicit, or, at least aware the attacks were going to happen.”

“The leading ’9/11conspiracy theorists,’ who are demanding a new, more thorough investigation of that event, include 861 architects and engineers, many of national repute; hundreds of scholars; more than 90 pilots, including test pilots, pilots of the latest fighter jets, and pilots with 30-plus years experience flying large commercial airlines; scientists who not only argue the World Center buildings were brought down by controlled demolition but have presented compelling physical evidence to that effect; and firefighters, some of whom were on the scene when the WTC towers fell.”

“Conversely, only a few scientists, and virtually no experienced pilots or firefighters have attempted to defend the anti-terrorist jihadists’ telling of 9/11; and the conspiracy theorists have adroitly revealed their arguments to be implausible, duplicitous or silly.”

“Yet, the major problems facing the U.S. anti-terrorist crusaders notwithstanding, their campaign is continuing unabated.  In late July, 2008, the defense department released a ‘strategy paper’ which placed ‘the “long war” against extremism above potential conventional challenges from China and Russia as the top priority of the U.S. military in coming years. . . . For the forseeable future, winning the Long War against violent extremist movements will be the central objective of the U.S.,’ the strategy paper continued.  And ‘U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates defended the new strategy, saying it is an attempt to incorporate the lessons learned from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.’”

“Now, when the leaders of a crusade necessary for securing their hegemonic social existences are unable to clearly identify their enemies, their enemies’ leaders, or their enemies’ allies; when they aren’t even sure how to the spell their enemies’ names; when their accounts of enemy operations are continually refuted by material evidence and logical argument, often by simple common sense, it’s clear they are going to have difficulty unifying the nation behind their cause;  and that difficulty will become insurmountable insofar as their crusade loses its ability to secure the social existence of the general population.”

“Throughout history, whenever the consciousness/truth necessary for protecting a nation’s elite began turning into error for a large minority (an understanding which could not maintain their social existence) the elite has reflexively turned to the ultimate instrument for achieving national unification: force!”

“Is the U.S. elite moving in that direction?  As I also argued in my opening statement, the clear answer is YES, and with alacrity!”

“’By October 2001,’ Naomi Wolf relates, ‘the USA Patriot Act, /which/ topped 400 pages, was rushed through Congress. Lawmakers passed it overwhelmingly, though many said that they had scarcely read it.’”

“’In July 2002, the Bush Administration rolled out Operation TIPS, the Terrorist Information and Prevention System, which sought to recruit ‘a million letter carriers, meter readers, cable technicians, and other workers with access to private homes as informants to report to the Justice Department any activities they think suspicious. . . . Though Congress prohibited the administration from funding TIPS, according to the ACLU, a version of the program was simply shifted to the Pentagon’s ‘black budget.’ . . . /In addition/,  a Defense Department program called Talon created a database of ‘anti-terror’ information about peaceful U.S. citizens and activists.’”

“’Within days of the 9/11 attacks,’ Wolf observes, ‘security companies were lobbying airport and government officials to invest in new technologies of surveillance.  Six years later, the surveillance industry is huge. . . . In 2003, business writers estimated that this burgeoning industry was worth $115 billion a year.’   ‘A 2003 study found that 569 companies had registered Homeland Security lobbyists after 9/11’. The New York Times reported that ‘the major defense contractors want to move into the homeland security arena in a big way.’  ‘Dr. William Haseltine, who sits on the boards of many of the organizations that analyze this industry, . . . says that the ‘security-industry complex’ rivals the ”military-industrial complex” in influencing policy.’”

“Unfortunately, not only for Americans, but for the world, the ‘security-industry complex’ and the ‘military-industrial complex’ are merely different features of the same crusade.”

“The Military Commissions Act, passed in October 2006, ‘gives the president the authority to establish a separate justice system for trying unlawful enemy combatants.’”

“How are ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ defined?   The Bush government’s declared position was that the president has the authority to designate anyone, including any U.S. citizen, an ‘enemy combatant.’ Furthermore, notes Columbia University Law Professor Michael Ratner, he can ‘detain them for whatever reason he wants. . . . /T/here are no charges and prisoners have no lawyers, no family visits, no court reviews, no rights to anything, and no right to release until the mythical end to the ‘war on terror.’”

“With a mere ‘signing statement,’ ‘Bush struck down Posse Comitatus, which has prevented, with a penalty of two years in prison, U.S. leaders since after the Civil War from sending military forces into our streets.’ In September 2008, the Army Times reported that ‘for the first time an active /U.S. Army/ unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.’  ‘That brigade,’ notes Salon.com, is ‘the 1^st Brigade Combat Team of the Army’s 3^rd Infantry Division.  /It/ has spent most of the last four years fighting a war in Iraq, and will now be assigned on a permanent basis to engage in numerous domestic functions—including, as the Army Times article put it, ‘to help with civil unrest and crowd control.’”

“Among the many additional signs of approaching despotism:”

* ‘Security corporations,’ identified by sinister flags and other dark icons, and employing private armies of grim-faced mercenaries, are now carrying out American foreign policy in the Middle East, Latin America and Asia: Blackwater U.S.A. (recently renames ‘Xe’), Custer Battles LLC, Wolverine Solutions, Global Risk Strategies, and Steele Foundation.”

* “Airlines use ’no fly’ and ‘watch lists’ furnished by the federal government to prevent a small number of individuals from flying and harrass a million others.  Beginning in 2009, under a new program called ‘Secure Flight’, the Department of Homeland Security will oversee airport screening.  Airports have also begun using terahertz radiation scanning machines which look through clothing to give airport security agents an invasive (and pornographic), image of passengers bodies.”

* “The National Security Agency (NSA) ‘Domestic Wiretapping Program,’ under which AT&T wiretaps phone conversations in secure locations set up for just that purpose.  AT&T and other  telecommunications companies which engage in domestic surveillance have also been granted immunity from prosecution.”

*“American cities with populations of 50,000 or more now have SWAT teams of heavily armed, black-clothed and black-helmeted officers who, without judicial warrants, and disregarding the 4th Amendment guarantee ‘against unreasonable search and seizure,’ break into the homes of suspected drug dealers and other ‘criminals’.”

* “Small town Post Offices across the U.S. no longer deliver local mail directly.  Under federal orders, the local mail is taken to a city which has equipment to examine it for explosives, anthrax and other biological weapons, then routed back for delivery.”

* “Computer repair shops are paid to download the files of ‘politically suspicious’ individuals to new hard disks and forward the original disks to a government agency.”

* “In 2006, the Halliburton subsidiary KBR was granted $385 million to construct ‘detention centers’ capable of housing 400,000 ‘aliens’ and ‘potential terrorists.’”

“Fascism has been coming to America!, Wolf asserts, and she’s unquestionably correct.”

“However, for those who seek a free and humane future for coming generations, the problem with Wolf’s analysis is that it suddenly floats free of the physical world.”

“Having recognized that leading members of the military-industrial complex created/discovered their anti-terrorist crusade in order to perpetuate themselves, Wolf suddenly abandons her material analysis of what’s occurring and enters the world of abstraction.”

“To reverse what she calls a ‘fascist shift,’ Wolf naively urges freedom loving Americans to join hands and ‘roll back the laws that are associated with the opening of the door into darkness.’  ’We still have the choice to stop going down this road,’” Wolf asserts. ‘We can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.’”

“If only it were that easy to determine history’s course.”

“Wolf is right, of course, where each of you is individually concerned:  Nothing and no one can make you go along with fascism, whatever others may elect to do.”

“But, getting enough Americans to join hands and reverse the process requires a far more serious exploration of the material reasons for the sharp turn toward fascism than Wolf has offered, a turn occurring not only here in the U.S. but in England and Australia, and, to a lesser extent, in Germany, Italy and France.”

“Let’s try, then, to bring the discussion back to the world of our shared material reality.”

“Robert Jensen identified the heart of the problem, though, having done so, he, too, stopped.”

“We live in a system that, taken as a whole, is unsustainable,’ Jensen argued, ‘the nation-state and capitalism are at the core of this unsustainable system.’”

“The implicit question which needs to be asked and answered is Why? What is it about the capitalist productive-distributive order and the nation-state that’s making them ‘unsustainable?

“I discussed capialism’s mounting destruction of the environment and world health, in my opening remarks.”

“Now, I’ll focus on its inherent economic contradiction, the contradiction I have always insisted would eventually bring this remarkable system down.”

“Stated succinctly, capitalism’s inherent contradiction is that in order to compete capitalists must make production ever more cooperative/socialized, while consumption, on the other hand, remains essentially non-cooperative/non-socialized, with the inevitable result that periodic crises of over-production and under-consumption occur: too few people receiving enough money to purchase all the goods the vibrant system churns out.”

“To date, at critical junctures that problem has been painfully remedied through a mass destruction of consumers and consumables in war.  World wars One and Two resolved crippling global economic depressions that way.  The leading capitalist countries made instruments of war, then used them to kills tens-of-millions of each others consumers, along with billions of dollars worth of weaponry and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of basic necessities, including factories and homes.  The wars also gave the winning capitalist nations access to new sources of raw materials, and new markets for their finished products. Even the financial-industrial elites of countries which lost such inter-capitalist wars have usually profited greatly.”

“However, as Japan and Germany demonstrated following WWII, factories destroyed in war are inevitably rebuilt to be yet more productive, aggravating the inherent problem over time.”

“While Engels and I identified capitalism’s inherent contradiction 167 years ago and predicted its ultimate resolution, neither of us ever imagined the desperate situation 21^st century capitalist nations have managed to create.”

“Automated and cybernated machines are now doing more and more of the production, creating a vast and rapidly-growing international army of extraneous workers, ’white collar’ as well as ‘blue collar’. Nuclear weapons have rendered full-scale war between industrialized nations impossible; while national economies have become so thoroughly integrated and inter-dependent that for a capitalist nation to try alleviating its problem of over-production and under-consumption by devastating a major Third World country or two would be to devastate itself, along with other First and Third World nations.”

“Recognizing that the preservation of their favored social existences required that the mass of people must be able to purchase the goods their increasingly cornucopean, but environmentally destructive, systems of production were turning out, but intent on making that possible without any forfeiture of social existence on their parts, the capitalists of Western industrial nations—the U.S. and England in the lead—created an immense credit bubble using money borrowed from China, Japan and the Middle East.”

“Now that credit bubble has (predictably) burst, and the American capitalists whose hegemonic social existences derive from arms production, oil and oilfield technology, have joined forces with representatives of global engineering and construction firms to make a ‘last stand’ defense of the capitalist order of production and distribution with an anti-terrorist jihad.”

“When their last stand begins to suffer the fate of George Armstrong Custer’s at Little Bighorn, as it inevitably must–since there’s no way on earth the capitalist system will be able to maintain the social existence of most Americans over the next decade–the anti-terrorist crusaders’ only remaining option will be to identify a large segment of the U.S. population as terrorist enemies, then proceed to plow them under.”

“Grasping what’s happening, Naomi Wolf has called for a revolution to turn the country around.  But, as with every revolution, turning the U.S. around will require that Americans take a cold-eyed look-in-the-mirror and honestly tell what they see.”

“Since my first-rebuttal time is nearly up” (actually Karl, it was up over half an hour ago), “I’ll only very briefly describe what I think the cold-eyed look will reveal.”

“To begin with, it won’t be necessary to move beyond the nation-state, since, practically speaking, the nation-state no longer exists!  All of the social, economic and political characteristics which identified nations have already been erased.  It will only be necessary to recognize that universally shared material fact.”

Moreover, most of the nation-states defining characteristics have been erased by capitalists, busily engaged in defending their hegemonic social existence.”

“Several tens-of-millions of Mexicans, South Americans, Chinese and other Asians, have entered the U.S. ‘illegally,’ and the minority who have sufficient funds for paying the requisite bribes go in and out with ease.   Why have they been permitted to enter?  Because the poverty in their home countries makes them willing to work for low wages, thereby benefiting American, German, French, and English capitalists by keeping their own nations’ wage-scales low; the profitability of many large industries, poultry, beef, pork, clothing manufacturing, has become directly dependent upon the employment of illegal low-wage workers.”

“It’s no longer possible to purchase a ‘foreign’ car.  All the leading U.S., Japanese, German, Korean and British car manufacturers now manufacture their cars and trucks in each other’s countries, including Volkswagen, Honda, Nissan, Toyota, Kia, and Hundai.  Furthermore, in most cases the states and large cities in which ‘foreign’ auto plants are located paid the firms tens-of-millions of American tax dollars to move there.”

“While General Motors and Chrysler executives are pleading for assistance, including bailouts, to keep their U.S. production going, along with Ford, they are heavily invested abroad.  GM’s Buick is the biggest selling car in China, where its Hummer is also doing remarkably well.  Both cars are made in that country.  Ford Rangers, a big seller in China and Malaysia, are likewise manufactured and/or assembled in those countries.”

“GM is presently constructing a $350,000,000 plant in Russia, to build cars that will be sold there.  Given the growing profitability of GM and Ford’s overseas operations and their loss of profitability in the U.S., a cynic might wonder if their not-so-long-run intention is to close down much of their American production, using bailout money to pay for the process.”

“Americans, like their European, Asian and Latin American counterparts, have acquired global food tastes, enjoying tacos, burritoes, couscous, falafel, sushi, Thai curry, wonton soup, fried noodles, sweet and sour pork, pita bread, dolmathes, brie, roquefort and camembert cheese, and wines from France, Chile, Australia, Germany, and a couple dozen other countries.”

“Europeans commonly speak English and at least one other language besides their own.  Chinese Malaysians are generally fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese and Malay as well as one or two local dialects.”

“That dwindling minority of Americans, French, Chinese, British, etc. who are not at all internationalized are by and large less educated inhabitants of small towns and remote country regions.”

“In short, little remains of nation-states except flags, national anthyms, and memorial celebrations.

“With capitalists leading the way, we’ve created a world in which national icons have become as out of place and atavistic as the face paint and feathers of hunters and gatherers, the fertility statues and identifying tents of nomadic slave communities’, and the coats of arms and painted saints of feudal Europe.”

“The ultimate irony, of course, is that the singing of national anthyms and the waving of national flags is most energetically promoted by the very capitalists who’ve had to make those icons irrelevant in order to preserve their favored social existence.”

“Howard Zinn summed our situation in an article entitled ‘Put Away the Flags’, saying: ‘We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.’”

“But what, exactly, would ‘asserting allegiance to the human race’ entail?

“To begin with, it would entail admitting the species nature of the brutal things we people  collectively do.  The Sunni terrorist bomber, the U.S. infantryman killing Iraqis, the West Bank Palestinian who shoots Israelis, the Israeli pilot strafing Palestinians and the drug dealer in a Los Angeles ghetto who shoots members of a rival gang, are all engaged in the same operation: trying to kill people who threaten their social existence.  Either all of them are to be equally condemned or none of them are.”

“‘To put it a little differently, ‘asserting allegiance to the human race’ will entail ceasing to identify people as ‘good’ or ‘evil,’ ‘enemies’ or ‘allies’. It will mean comprehending all people have the same basic objective and that a way must be found to enable everyone to reach it.”

“Where the poor of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, the Philippines and other poverty ridden Third World countries is concerned, that would mean informing them the U.S. is going to stop  destroying their lives by dumping cheap industrial manufacture, and by occupying their territory to procure oil and other raw materials; that henceforth the U.S. will work with them to facilitate their secure entry into the modern world.”

“Respecting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ’asserting allegiance to the human race’ would involve acknowledging and condemning Israel’s fascistic and oppressive practices vis-a-vis Palestinians, cutting off all assistance, both military and financial, now being given to that country.”

“On the emotional level, it would entail being enraged at the injustice and inhumanity of the evening news encouraging Americans to shed tears because ‘terrorists’ killed 200 people in Mumbai, but to feel nothing about the 650,000 to 1,500,000 Iraqis slaughtered by, or because of, the U.S. invasion of their country.”

“To end on an optimistic note, while believing the capitalist productive-distributive system is on its death bed, I also continue to believe:”

“‘No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.  Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.’”

“A hundred-and-one solutions for the problems capitalism has caused, but is unable to resolve, are already being proposed, and the creativity that will be released when all the members of the human community consider themselves to be working as a team, is sure to produce myriad others.”

“As for where the money will come from to pay for the massive programs needed to assist Third World peoples, repair our badly polluted planet, construct rapid transit systems, provide everyone with adequate medical care, etc., an equalitarian society will immediately confront the question: Do we really want to bother with money when there are so many other equally efficient or more efficient ways to regulate and record our interchanges.”

“No one has ever accused me of being naive, and I expect the trilogy of capitalist interests behind the anti-terrorism jihad will become violent when masses of people begin acting upon the demand that capitalism metamorphose into socialism.”

“However, they will quickly discover the deck is stacked against them. Their fellow capitalists, those who have exported their manufacturing operations, will follow their investments and banked money abroad, rather than stay in the U.S. to aid in a counter-revolutionary struggle.  In addition, the tactics available to 21 century revolutionaries, blocking bridges and tunnels with abandoned rented vehicles, hacking CIA, FBI, military, police and energy-grid computers to bring society to a halt will prove impossible to counter.”

“I have a lot more to say on these and related topics, but I may have already gone over my alloted time.”

With an apologetic shrug of his shoulders, and wearing a resigned expression, Marx  returned to his chair.

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Machiavelli and Marx Debate III

Machiavelli’s First Rebuttal

Chronicled by Theosophus

We /conservatives/ believe that America is a superior society not because Americans are superior human beings, but because our culture was founded on a recognition of our God-given natural rights—the “unalienable rights” referred to in the Declaration of Independence.  From that awareness flows a basic, shared respect for humanity, individual liberty, limited government, and the rule of law.                                                                                                   Sean Hannity

History has demonstrated time and time again that disciplined, just societies prevail, while weak, utopian systems crash and burn. . . .  The world is, and always has been, a struggle between good and evil. Bill O’Reilly

The fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives is: Conservatives believe man was created in God’s image; liberals believe they are God.                                                                                                                                               Ann Coulter

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Machiavelli bent awkwardly forward in his chair while Marx spoke.  His face still wore Dick Cheney’s condescending sneer.  But, unlike Cheney, whose demeanor is perpetually languid, Machiavelli was clearly agitated.  Every now and then his right leg pumped nervously. Springing to his feet the moment Marx finished, he rushed to the podium and began speaking before Marx got back to his seat.

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Machiavelli: “Velo!”

“Dr. Marx insists he’s a scientific materialist.”

”But he has given us ample material proof that he’s not!”

“A scientific materialist deals with reality/with ‘truth’!

“Not Herr Marx!”

“In Marx’s bizarre world ‘truth’ is whatever individuals and communities acting in defense of their interests say it is.”

“In his world the questions: ‘What would it benefit me to believe?’ and ‘What is objectively true?’ are the same.”

For a scientist, truth is ‘discovered!’ For Marx, it’s not discovered, it’s ‘created.’”

“It is this wondrous proposition that truth doesn’t exist which holds all the pieces of Dr. Marx’s elaborate theory together.”

“Yet, he hasn’t offered us one scintilla of empirical evidence in its support.”

“He simply posited that the earliest hunting and gathering communities understood truth and practical solution to be one, then conjured his way to the idealistic conclusion that their relativistic consciousness will be universal in the post-capitalist world his too-fertile imagination describes.”

(Giving Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly and Neil Cavuto, a meaningful ‘we’re-all-in-this- together’ look, Machiavelli continued . . . ).

“Like the great majority of people, no doubt like most of you, I place Marx’s amazing hypothesis about the non-existence of truth in the same category as a belief the moon’s inhabited, or, that Planet Earth is flat.”

“Science, he forgets, is based upon the conviction objective truths exist—independently of what anyone might want—and, that it’s a scientist’s obligation to determine what they are.”

“Unlike Dr. Marx, I am a scientist!”

“To repeat Paul Mattick’s apt characterization of my position: ‘A true Machiavellian separates scientific questions concerning the truth about society from moral disputes over what type of society is most desirable.’”

“Adopting Marx’s peculiar theory would not only mean abandoning science, it would mean discarding its universally spoken language as well.”

“Science defines ‘truth’ as: ‘synonymous with observer-independent facts’, i.e., with ‘reality.’”

“’Those are only fictions,’ Marx protests.”

“Scientists speak of views which are ‘biased’ or ‘distorted;’ meaning they are biased away from/distortions of, ‘the truth.’”

“’More fantasy’, says Marx.  No observer-independent ‘objective truths’ exist which one’s personal views might be ’biased away from’ or ‘distort’.”

“Scientists caution against ‘false prophets:’ people (like Dr. Marx?), who present deceptively appealing arguments that misrepresent reality/distort ‘the truth.’”

”Science honors ‘geniuses:’ individuals who discover fundamentally important features of reality.”

“‘False prophets?’  ‘Geniuses?’ ‘Objective’ and ‘impartial’ understandings’?”

“They’re all mythical conceptions, according to Marx’s abstract logic; leaving those of us committed to science not simply puzzled, but stunned; since, according to the dictionary: ‘myths are distinguished by their failure to be based on fact or scientific study.’”

“One is left wondering what Marx intends when he speaks of ‘fantasies’ and ‘myths’. What does he suppose an idea which isn’t ‘fantasy’ or ‘myth’ is, if it’s not an idea that’s objectively true?”

“He agrees leaders often lie.  But what is there to lie about, other than ‘the truth?’”

“Dr. Marx calls himself a ’dialectical’ materialist.”

“But central to the belief that reality and our consciousness of it are dialectic is the proposition that knowing what things are involves knowing what they are not: i.e., being able to identify their opposites.  Hot is the opposite of cold; east, the opposite of west; up, the opposite of down; big, the opposite of small; good, the opposite of evil.  And error?  What can that be, pray tell, if it isn’t the opposite of truth?

“’All truths are relative!’, Marx insists; though he apparently believes that particular assertion alone to be ‘absolutely true?’”

“Dr. Marx’s paradigm literally makes my head spin, and I suspect your head may be spinning too.”

“Let me try to bring the debate back to reality with a genuinely materialist consideration of socio-economic-political truth.”

“To begin with, lacking any empirical evidence how the first homo sapien communities thought, we can only speculate.  However, I find it reasonable to suppose that, like hunters and gatherers today, they had voodooists, shamans and medicine-men, whose principal function was to discover ’the truth’; however convinced you and I may be that they often failed at the endeavor.”

“As for subsequent nomadic-slave and feudal communities, we have several thousand years of material evidence that one-and-all of them were absolutist where truth was concerned.”

“They were religious communities, and a belief in objective truth has always been a pivotal feature of every religion.”

“According to Christianity’s Holy Bible, God commanded Adam and Eve not to eat fruit from ’the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,’ revealing he had not granted humans the authority to decide for themselves what was truly good and what was truly evil.”

“Genesis describes merely presuming to have such omniscience as diabolic.”

“When Satan told Adam and Eve if they ignored God’s proscription and ate the forbidden fruit they would ‘be as gods, knowing good and evil,’ he wasn’t proposing they’d acquire the ability to differentiate between good and evil. That’s a faculty Christianity, like other faiths, grants to everyone. Choosing good over evil is considered critical for Christians if they would enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

“No, the Bible describes Satan’s appeal as, well, downright Satanic.”

“By eating the forbidden fruit, he urged, Adam and Eve would gain that ultimate power religions grant only to their gods: the power to dictate the very nature of good, and evil.”

“Capitalist country scientists generally distinguish their industrial-world metaphysics from those of nomadic slave and feudal states by proposing values are indeed relative, while facts are not.”

“However, unlike Dr. Marx, they do not dispute that values, too, have observer-independent, objective dimensions.”

“Common sense tells us if they didn’t we would not be able to identify them, or give them names, or, point to instances of their application.”

“It is because values have an objective existence, that people with different values always dispute the facts which they claim support their own.”

“This is everyone’s material reality, and there are no exceptions!”

“Marx and I are agreed, then, that both the values and the interpretations-of-fact of communities with clashing economic, social and political interests will also be in conflict.”

“Where we disagree is that Marx proposes all fact-value understandings are equally valid and cannot be given an authoritative justification.”

”Being a scientist who believes in objective truth, I hold that the facts and values of  individuals and communities can be dispassionately identified, then, defended or opposed.”

“As I emphasized in my opening remarks, an objective look at the world reveals the primary value of a leader is the preservation of his state, upon which the lives and well-being of his people depend.”

“An objective look also reveals that while there may be times when preserving his state requires a leader to employ authoritarian methods, over the long run, he will not be able to do it unless he has the voluntary/democratic support of his people.”

“Which is why I endorse the current U.S. foreign policy.”

“No other country has so faithfully defended the democratic values spelled out in the American Bill of Rights: freedom of speech, religion and assembly, freedom from ‘unreasonable searches and seizures,’ the right to bear arms, and the right to a speedy trial by a jury of one’s peers when accused of a crime.”

“Now, let’s take an objective look at Dr. Marx’s fanciful theory of history:”

“Understand!  While I believe it to be wrong, I recognize his reasoning is logically consistent; just as I recognize Ptolemy’s reasoning about the physical universe was logically consistent, but wrong.”

“Google ‘Copernicus’ and you’ll discover there are still Ptolemaists; as, remarkably, there are still a few people who believe Earth is flat.”

“However, scientists understand that the Ptolemaic system, like the flat Earth theory, is not a materialist explanation. It does not objectively describe our solar system, let alone the universe.”

“Consider, then. a few of the empirically indefensible conclusions Marx syllogistically drew from his bizarre metaphysics.”

“Having convinced himself all socio-economic-political consciousness is defensively created, accepted, modified or rejected, it followed that ‘classes’ are but: communities of people who find maintaining their social existence requires them to join forces and deny other communities of individuals the opportunity to do the same.”

“In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx said of the peasantry: ‘Insofar as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes and put them into hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class.’”

“Similarly, in The German Ideology he and Engels wrote of the bourgeoisie: ‘The separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors.’”

“According to Dr. Marx’s relativistic metaphysics, if you tell a peasant, a worker or a capitalist he’s a member of a class and he rejects your designation, it is you, not he, who are wrong. His very rejection tells you that, under existing circumstances, for him to battle as a member of a peasantry, a working, or a capitalist class, is not the least disruptive way to preserve his social existence.”

“In writing and in speeches Marx, quite logically, directed his most aggressive attacks not against feudal lords or capitalists, but against Proudhon, Feuerbach, Left Hegelians and other absolutist liberals who, treating ideas and reality as independent of one another, proposed to rescue the masses by bringing them objective truth; something Herr Marx argues does not exist.”

“Marx was often scathing in his denunciations, writing:”

“’Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact, all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men . . . the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these illustions of the consciousness.  Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their limitations, are products of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. . . . They forget . . . that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they  merely combat the phrases of this world. . . . All forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism, by resolution into “self-consciousness” or transformation into “apparitions,” “spectres,” “fancies,” etc., but only by the practical overthrow of the actual social relations which gave rise to this idealistic humbug; . . . not criticism, but revolution, is the driving force of history, also of religion, of philosophy and all other types of theory.’”

“Marx insisted the masses would acquire an egalitarian consciousness only when defending their social existence made it imperative for them to do so.”

“On the other hand, being a utopian idealist, he deemed that magical situation was at hand.”

“The capitalist order of production and distribution was nearly drained of viability Dr. Marx reasoned, and workers would soon find themselves in the desperate circumstances which would turn them into a class: the proletariat.”

“To quote his wildly exaggerated description of the mid-19^th century workers’ situation:”

“’Along with the constantly diminishing number of magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too, grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.’”

“After becoming a unified proletariat, Marx enthused, the workers were going to raze the capitalist productive-distributive system; then, they would build an egalitarian order in its place.”

“And they would do these things not because someone won them over to a revolutionary consciousness by bringing them ‘the truth’.  They would do them because they had to in order to survive.”

“’Things have now come to such a pass,’ Marx wrote, ‘that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence.’”

“’/I/t becomes evident’ he, again very logically, but  also very mistakenly concluded, ‘that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law.  It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery’.”

“I suppose if you’re a diehard supporter of Dr. Marx’s distorted logic you might protest it was nevertheless found indispensible, therefore ‘true,’ during and after the Russian and Chinese revolutions.’”

“If so, you would be wrong!”

“Consider the fate of Marx’s linchpin proposition respecting the nonexistence of truth.”

“In the late 1800s, Alexander Bogdanov, a philosopher, a physician, and a prominent member of the Bolshevik Party, began promoting that epistemological nonsense in Russia.”

“Bogdanov argued his relativistic-Machian interpretation of Marx’s theory—he called it  ‘Emperiomonism’—was correct, writing three volumes on the subject.  By the early 1900s Bogdanov’s popularity among Bolshevik leaders had become second only to Lenin’s.”

“Whereupon Lenin penned his famous rebuttal, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism; scornfully, but on this occasion, I would add, correctly observing:

“’The “naive realism” of any healthy person who has not been an inmate of a lunatic asylum or a pupil of the idealist philosophers consists in the view that things, the environment, the world, exist independently of our sensation, of our consciousness, of our self, and of man in general . . . . /O/utside us, and independently of us, there exist objects, things, bodies, and . . . our perceptions are images of the external world.’”

“Which epistemological construction of Marx’s theory won the day?  Which was said to empirically represent the Russian experience? “

“Vladimir Lenin’s, hands down! “

“Bogdanov the relativist was expelled from the Bolshevik Party in 1909, and played no role in the Russian Revolution.”

“In brief, in order to give Dr. Marx’s theory relevance, Lenin had to turn it back into the very kind of objectivist logic Marx himself had railed against.”

“The proletariat would not ‘create’ its own way forward, the Leninists decided. The  ‘way forward’ would have to be discovered by leaders, and the workers would need to be led.”

“In 1903, fourteen years before the Russian Revolution, Lenin wrote:”

“’The history of all countries bears witness that by its own resources alone the working-class is in a position to generate only a trade-union consciousness . . . The teaching of socialism has grown out of philosophical, historical and economic theories worked out by educated representatives of the possessing classes, of the intelligentsia.  The founders of contemporary socialism, Marx and Engels, belonged themselves by their social origin to the bourgeois intelligentsia.  Similarly in Russia the theoretical teaching of social-democracy has arisen altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the workers’ movement, has arisen as the natural and inevitable result of the development of thought among the revolutionary-socialist intelligentsia.’”

“Post-1917, Lenin’s objectivist-Marxism became, to use Marx’s own terminology, the ‘Spiritual Quintessence’ of the Soviet Union’s self-understanding.  Reality possessed an observer-independent form, Soviet leaders thereafter contended; a form which, using their absolutist interpretation of Marx’s arguments, their ideas would reflect.”

“’Marxism,’ the Russian theorist V. Afanasyev reiterated in 1967: ‘is a science dealing with the ways and means of destroying capitalism, with the laws governing the creation of the new communist society . . . it is a science dealing with the conscious, purposeful, direction of social processes in the interests of man.’”

“During and after China’s revolution, Mao Tse-tung and other Chinese Communist Party leaders embraced the same objectivist , dare I say ‘deformation’?, of Dr. Marx’s theory.”

“’Facts’ are all the things that exist objectively.’ Mao instructed. ‘Truth’ means their internal relations, that is, the laws governing them’.  ‘We should proceed from the actual conditions inside and outside the country, . . . and derive from them, as our guide to action, laws that are inherent in them and not imaginary, that is, we should find the internal relations of the events occurring around us.  And in order to do that we must rely not on subjective imagination . . . but on facts that exist objectively’.  ‘We are Marxists, and Marxism teaches that in our approach to a problem we should start from objective facts, not from abstract definitions, and that we should derive our guiding principles, policies and measures from an analysis of these facts.’”

“Of course, I vigorously disagree with most Leninist and Maoist depictions of socio-economic-political reality.  But at least Russian and Chinese leaders have had the intelligence to recognize reality exists!”

“What, then, has been the fate of Dr. Marx’s theory in the West?”

“With very few exceptions, Western Marxists have given their high priest’s ideas the same absolutist construction it received in the East.”

“The British Marxist-philosopher Maurice Cornforth stipulated that by ‘truth’ he meant a ‘correspondence between ideas and objective reality.’”

“George Novack, a popular American Trotskyist, wrote an entire book distinguishing his ‘Marxist’ conviction truths are ‘demonstrably anchored in objective reality’ from pragmatist-philosopher John Dewey’s view that they are merely utilitarian constructs.”

“Respecting Dr. Marx’s most passionate anti-objectivist arguments, Western Marxists often felt it was important to explain he hadn’t really intended them to be interpreted that way.”

“Shlomo Avineri, an Israeli theorist, observed Marx’s ‘historicist attitude did not . . . lead Marx to mere relativism.’ Similarly, Melvin Rader, a leftist University of Washington philosopher stressed: “It would be a mistake to classify Marx as no more than a relativist.’”

“Louis Althusser, a French philosopher who from the late 1960s to the early 1980s spoke for much of the Left in France and Italy, carried the objectivist understanding of Marxism still further.”

“Perhaps finding it difficult to reconcile the relativism manifest in Dr. Marx’s writing with his own absolutist perspective, Althusser decided most of Marx’s theory remained to be formulated.”

“’Marxist philosophy,’ said Althusser: ‘founded by Marx in the very act of founding his theory of history, has still largely to be to be constituted, since, as Lenin said, only the cornerstones have been laid down. . . . The Marxist theoretical practice of epistemology, of the history of science, of the history of ideology, of the history of philosophy, of the history of art, has yet in large part to be constituted.’”

“’/W/e so miss the Dialectics which Marx did not need and which he refused us,’ Althusser continued, ‘even though we know perfectly well that we have it, and where it is: in Marx’s theoretical works, in Capital, etc., yes, and of course this is the main thing, we can find it there, but not in a theoretical state!’”

“Even more problematic, Althusser amusingly proposed, Marx himself often failed to think like a Marxist.”

“After agreeing with Hegel that experience and consciousness are ‘a unity,’ Marx made his famous observation that he’d found Hegel standing on his head and righted him.”

“Hegel reasoned history moves because communities of people come up with new ideas which prompt them to alter their behavior: consciousness leads experience.”

“’He had the process upside down!,’ Marx exhorted. History moves because communities of people discover they must formulate, then act upon, new strategies in order to maintain their social existence: consciousness, including revolutionary consciousness, never leads, it follows. ‘The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class!’”

“Althusser described this particular argument as ‘ambiguous’, saying: ‘A man on his head is the same man when he is finally walking on his feet, and a philosophy inverted in this way cannot be regarded as anything more than the philosophy reversed, except in theoretical metaphor.’”

“Recognizing that Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts do represent an inverted Hegelian dialectic, Althusser concluded: ‘That is why the rigor of this rigorous text is not Marxist;’ suggesting the inversion makes more than just a metaphorical difference after all.”

“Regarding the humanistic/anti-objectivist passages in Capital, Althusser said he was able to determine they ‘had no theoretical significance.’”

“As for Marx’s eloquent relativistic observations in his Theses on Feuerbach, Althusser affirmed: ‘One day we will have to show that these eleven deceptively transparent theses are really riddles.’”

“Althusser also took a swipe at two prominent European philosophers who were viewing Marx’s arguments through a relativistic prism writing:”

“”Theses like those defended by John Lewis and Jean-Paul Sartre prevent the development of existing scientific knowledge. These things are an obstacle to the development of knowledge. Instead of helping it to progress, they hold it back.  More precisely, they drag knowledge back to the state it was in before the scientific discoveries made by Marx and Lenin.  They take us back to a pre-scientific philosophy of history.’”

“Marxist scientists, Althusser counselled, must concentrate on identifying the objectively ‘essential’ and ‘inessential’ components of the historical process, then isolate the latter in order to understand the former more fully.”

“Since Marx had not provided adequate instructions for accomplishing this critical task, Althusser advised Marxists they would need to ‘listen to his silences’ in carrying out their investigations.”

“To sum: it’s objectively obvious that, with few exceptions, Marxist political leaders and political theorists East and West have ignored the very essence of Dr. Marx’s theory; that relativistic epistemological glue which holds all his axioms together.”

“Marx, they determined, did not describe the real historical process. “

“Now I’d like you to answer a simple question: If a self-styled meteorologist never got the weather right, or a chemist was never able to predict the results of his experiments, would you consider him a ‘scientist’ nevertheless, his efforts ‘scientific?’”

“If not, why, then, should anyone listen to Marx?”

“Dr. Marx made that most rudimentary of mistakes, the one we scientists continually warn against: He allowed his personal values to distort his reading of the world.”

“More than 160 years have passed since Herr Marx made his failed predictions. Unfortunately, idealists seem to be unruffled when the world doesn’t conform with their analyses, and Marx has said nothing this evening which suggests he’s having second thoughts.”

“He still proposes reality’s form is creative, that political theories become true insofar as they constitute the least painful and disruptive strategies for maintaining the social existence of the individuals and communities who call them that.”

“Since the U.S. war in Iraq is a primary subject of this debate, I’d like to direct your attention to the present objective situation respecting the war. Then, I’ll explain why it is that objective situation exists.”

“As you know, for the past several months the number of U.S. troops being killed in Iraq has been plummeting, prompting Senator John McCain, the Republican candidate for president of your country, to declare: ‘The war is being ‘won’!”’

“Polls show the majority of Americans agree with McCain’s blithe appraisal.  That is, they agree to talk of ‘winning,’ despite the empirical fact that Iraq’s infrastructure and economy have been destroyed, over a million Iraqis have been killed, 6 million have been severely wounded, and 4 million more have been driven from their homes.”

“Let me place these figures, and the references to ‘victory,’ in a dispassionately objective context for you.”

“Imagine that a war occurred here in the United States in which Americans suffered a proportionate loss: The nation’s infrastructure—highways, hospitals power plants, bridges and waste disposal systems—would be destroyed; streams, lakes and rivers would be badly polluted; eleven million Americans would be dead, 66 million gravely injured.  In addition, 44 million Americans would have been driven from their homes, 22 million of them exiled from the country.”

“Now suppose the invaders were heard to speak of ‘winning.’”

“What would any objective observer conclude about the aggressors in particular, and, humanity in general?”

“I submit they would reach the conclusion stated in my Discourses on Levy.”

“’ . . . all men are bad, and  they will use their malignity of mind every time they have the opportunity . . . the same desires and passions exist in all cities and people, and  always have existed.’”

“Is it not obvious to you no people has ever declared:”

“This is the maximum number of children our consciences will permit us to slaughter; this, the upper-most number of women and old people we would ever terrorize, maim or kill; this, the greatest number of innocent people’s homes we could justify destroying; this, the largest number of their hospitals we would bomb; this, the greatest number of their lakes, rivers and streams we would pollute.  Beyond these stated limits we will never go!”

“Is it not objectively apparent there are no limits?”

“During the last century: the Japanese celebrated the slaughter of more than a million Chinese; the Germans cheered butchering 4 to 6 million Jews, along with 5 million Poles and Romanians, and 20 million Soviets; Americans applauded the slaying of between 1 and 2 million Japanese, and, with Britain, they toasted the killing of more than 5 million Gerrmans; under Stalin, the Soviet majority approved murdering over 10 million of their own countrymen, and the Chinese did the same under Mao; during the administrations of presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, Americans tolerated, many of them praised, the massacre of 3 million Vietnamese, Laotians and other South East Asians.”

“Today, Americans, British, Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis and others are doing it all over again in the Middle East.”

“Open your eyes and confront the reality of our species!”

“We are evil by nature!”

“Moreover, thousands of years of human history objectively prove it’s as impossible to change our nature as to change the nature of a hippopotomus, a pine tree or a stone.”

“Stalinist Russia and Maoist China gave brutal demonstrations that movements which attempt to do it cause more suffering, not less.”

“Let me make myself clear!”

“I’m not suggesting leaders shouldn’t strive to be good, and to make their people good.”

“As I argued in The Prince, both with his people, and in his dealings with other nations, a leader ‘should if possible, be merciful, faithful, humane, upright and religious.’”

“’He should not diverge from the good if he can avoid doing so!’”

“But, it is critical for him to understand that in the endless struggle between good and evil, he will never confront a clear and unqualified choice between the two.”

“He will always be forced to choose between actions which are ‘better’ or ‘worse,’ ‘more or less evil’.”

“As I observed in my opening remarks, ‘sometimes nations must make war, and in war all people do things which are evil.’”

“When he is compelled to protect his state and his people by doing evil, it is therefore critical for a leader to ‘know how to go about it.’”

“’You must know there are two ways of contesting,’ I wrote in The Prince. ‘The one by the law, the other by force; the first method is proper to men, the second to beasts; but because the first is frequently not sufficient, it is necessary to have recourse to the second.  Therefore it is necessary for a leader to understand how to avail himself of the beast and the man.’”

“Defending his state, particularly during a time of war, makes it imperative that a leader keeps his people unified and supportive of his policies.”

“Whenever possible, he should do this by using ‘the method proper to men’: laws.”

“Unfortunately, as I noted in Discourses, while the laws required will be ‘very well understood by prudent men, they do not contain evident reasons capable of persuading others.’”

“‘Wise men who want to remove this difficulty therefore have recourse to God.’”

For a leader to secure his people’s obedience to the law through fear of him is difficult, and will not work for an extended period of time.  For that reason, it is vitally important that he keep them obedient through religion and a fear of God.”

“’As the observance of divine institutions is the cause of the greatness of Republics, so the contempt of it is the cause of their ruin, for where the fear of God is lacking it will happen that the kingdom will be ruined.’”

(Chancing to glance at Ann Coulter, I was startled to see her face had assumed the beatific expression of a Jehovah’s witness, a Scientologist, or a Moonie).

“’Princes of Republics, /leaders of nations/, ought, therefore, to maintain their Republics’ religions well and united.’”

“‘They ought in all things which arise to foster it, and even if they should judge them false, to favor and encourage it: and the more they understand natural things, so much more they ought to do this.  Because this practice has been observed by wise men, there has arisen the belief in miracles that are celebrated in Religion, however false; for the prudent leaders have increased their importance from whatever origin they may have derived, and their authority gives them credence with the people’.”

(Ann’s beatific expression just as suddenly changed to one of puzzlement when Machiavelli referred to a leader fostering religion and a belief in miracles ”even if he believes them to be false”).

“I’ve already explained why I believe it to be the path of ’least evil’ for the Cheney-Bush government to take firm control of the Middle East’s oil, and, what it must do to realize that objective.”

“Today, I propose Senator McCain is right.  The U.S. is winning.”

“As I argued was necessary for seizing control of Iraq’s oil, its economy has been destroyed; the Sunni elite and middle class have been killed or driven into exile;  and maleable, corruptible individuals have been permitted to assume power over religious and tribal communities whose members are sufficiently poor that their ways of life can be sustained with a minimal amount of oil money and a use of the velvet glove.”

“In my opening remarks I also explained that all people resist seeing themselves as evil, regardless of how deeply evil they become; that to avoid seeing themselves as evil they will avidly seek to be deceived; and, for this reason, particularly in a time of war, a leader must be adept at deception.”

“When it’s necessary to ‘avail himself of the beast,’ ‘he must know how to disguise this characteristic, how to be a great pretender and dissembler.’”

“By the end of this debate you will have formed an opinion about which of us, Dr. Marx or myself, most objectively describes the world.”

“To help you decide, I’m going to close this first rebuttal with a citation from an article by Paul Craig Roberts.”

“Once a conservative, Dr. Roberts is now a leading voice on the American Left.  You’ll recall that Marx quoted him in his opening statement.”

“My reason for citing Roberts is simple.  For 500 years I’ve had to tolerate being described as reactionary, rather than realistic, and quoting someone on the Right would do nothing to dispel that misconception.”

“Each of you will be able to judge for yourself how well my theory of politics accords with the events Dr. Roberts describes; events he disparages, but which I understand and respect.”

“Roberts’ begins by discussing Sami Al-Arian, a Palestinian professor of computer engineering at the University of South Florida, who the Department of Justice charged with ‘conspiracy to assist the cause of Islamic Jihad’.”

“I’ll let Dr. Roberts take it from here:

“’The charges against Al-Arian were rejected by a jury, but the Bush Regime could not accept the obvious defeat.  If Al-Arian was not a terrorist, then other of the Bush Regime’s fabricated cases might fall apart, too . . . . The Justice Department itself knows that it is persecuting a totally innocent person for reasons of a political agenda—the need to convince gullible Americans of an ongoing terrorist threat . . . . The Al-Arian case proves that terrorists are in short supply and that the Bush Regime has had to create them out of total innocents. The “war on terror” is a hoax used to justify war crimes and the overthrow of America’s civil liberties. . . . The anthrax scare is one more example of the Bush Regime’s use of disinformation to advance an undeclared political agenda. . . .The Bush Regime stands against the truth. . . . We now know for a fact that the “terrorist anthrax attack” had nothing whatsoever to do with Muslim terrorists. . . . Many Americans lack the mental and emotional strength to confront the facts.  The facts are too unsettling and many are relieved when the “mainstream media” spins the facts away.  Many Americans find it too appalling that any part of “their” government, even a rogue operation, could possibly have been involved in any way in the anthrax attacks. No evidence—not even full confessions—could convince them otherwise.  Many Americans have welcomed their brainwashing by the neoconservatives: Åmerica is pure; her shining virtue causes evil men to attack her; they hate us because we are good and they are evil.’”

“I contend Roberts is correct, albeit naive.  Through a selective use of duplicity and persecution the Cheney-Bush government is successfully molifying and unifying Americans behind its global strategy; a strategy I believe is at once both an imperative, and, the lesser evil.”

“With that, for the moment, I rest my case.”

(Having remained animated throughout this first rebuttal, Machiavelli looked visibly tired as he returned to his seat.)

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Machiavelli and Marx Debate – II

MARX’S OPENING STATEMENT

Chronicled by Theosophus

The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with their material productivity, produce also principles, ideas and categories, in conformity with their social relations.  Thus, these ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express.  They are historical and transitory products.”

“Ideas can never lead beyond an old world order but only beyond the ideas of the old world order.  Ideas cannot carry out anything at all.  In order to carry out ideas men are needed who can exert practical force.”                    Karl Marx

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Judging by his facial expressions, Marx’s mood changed dramatically during Machiavelli’s opening argument: from bemused, to bewildered, to irritated, to angry, and finally, to fierce determination.  Watching him, I recalled the remark of a Communist League friend who knew him well.  “In everyday conversation,” the friend observed, “Marx often rambles.  But whenever the smallest part of his theory is questioned, his mind immediately acquires the clarity of a dagger.”

Walking purposefully to the lectern, Marx took rumpled sheets of paper from the right pocket of his jacket.   Smoothing them out, he placed them, along with dog-eared copies of Grundrisse, The German Ideology, The Holy Family and The Poverty of Philosophy, next to a lined pad on which he had been scribbling notes.  Throughout his presentation Marx referenced the notes and books with the seeming ease of a Horowitz using the keys of a piano.

Clearing his throat, he began speaking.

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Marx: “Good evening.  Like my opponent, I want to thank everyone involved in bringing this debate about, as well as all of you in the audience, for your open-minded interest and civility.”

“I also want to thank my adversary.”

“Mr. Machiavelli presented a truncated materialist logic, one diluted with non-material assumptions and assertions.  But, given the plethora of idealist theories which describe human history as a product of ‘lofty aspirations,’ ‘intelligent choices,’ ‘errors’ and ‘misunderstandings,’ rather than people acting upon their hard-and-fast socio-economic interests, I found it refreshing.”

“Machiavelli called himself a scientist. So, I’ll start by reminding him what science has established concerning our species’ history.”

“We homo sapiens have been around between 200,000-250,000 years, and for all but the last 10,000 we lived in hunting and gathering tribes with 20 to 100 members, depending upon the available food.”

“It was only a short 10 millenia ago that we finally began to progress: from hunting and gathering to horticulture—planting various crops together; then, to agriculture–sowing and harvesting larger tracts of specific grains.”

“Over the course of that critical 10,000 years the populations of our communities grew continually larger.  Hunting and gathering tribes had 20-100 members.  Their semi-nomadic horticultural/agricultural replacements had hundreds; and the latter, in turn, were succeeded by stationary feudal societies whose populations sometimes numbered in the millions.  Today’s capitalist communities are bigger still, the U.S. presently having three hundred million people.”

“For what portion of humanity’s 200,000 year historical journey does Mr. Machiavelli offer a materialist explanation? Approximately 0.3 percent: the last few hundred years, characterized by the existence of principalities and nation-states.”

“It would be hard to formulate a theory of our species’ social, economic and political evolution more truncated than that.”

“Mr. Machiavelli’s materialist logic is also badly diluted with idealist propositions.”

“Describing himself as an ’objective scientist,’ he declared: ‘I limit my analyses to explaining what’s happening and the material reasons why.’”

“However, immediately thereafter he informed us he would have supported the United States during World War II, saying the U.S. was ‘more democratic than Germany or Japan.’”

“Is this, one wonders, what Mr. Machiavelli means by scientific observation?”

“If you’ve read The Prince and the Discourses, you’re aware he depicts leaders as ‘democratic’ insofar as they enjoy the backing of their people.  That definition, to his misfortune, objectively renders his conclusion about Hitler’s Germany and Hirohito’s Japan pure nonsense.”

“Anyone who’s studied World War II knows that until 1943 Hitler was more wildly popular with Germans than either Roosevelt or Churchill was with their respective populations.  That is, Germany was objectively more, not less, democratic.”

“As for Japan, historians have also documented its peoples’ enthusiasm–from a western perspective, a manic enthusiasm–for Prime Minister Tojo and Emperor Hirohito.”

“When confronted with these material realities, American sociologists often conclude the Germans and Japanese were ‘duped’ or ‘deluded’ into giving their leaders such unquestioning support.  But those are idealist, not materialist propositions.”

“A genuinely scientific Machiavelli would have limited his inquiry to disclosing the Natural Necessity of WWII and the Natural Necessity of the roles played by each of the combatant nations, refusing to take sides in a conflict that entailed the slaughter of over 70 million people.”

“Abandoning materialist inquiry altogether, Machiavelli then went on to defend the United States’ destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure and its grotesque killing of countless thousands of Iraqis as ‘necessary for the preservation of Western Culture.’”

“Now, to anyone who’s the least bit objective, it’s obvious that the positive and negative cultural contributions of our species have never been preponderantly Eastern or Western, or the exclusive offerings of particular states.”

“The German culture which graced the world with Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the Aachen Cathedral and the Altes Museum, is the same German culture that cursed it with Adolph Hitler and Hermann Goering, the Holocaust, the extermination of homosexuals and gypsies, and the slave labor of millions of East Europeans in National Socialist factories.”

“The French culture that contributed Descarte, Voltaire, Renoir, Jean Jacques Rousseau, the Eiffel Tower, Sacre Couer and Notre Dame, is the same French culture which in 1572 massacred 50,000 Huguenots in a six-weeks orgy of blood.  It’s the French culture that killed Arabs indiscriminately during Algeria’s 8-year battle for independence, torturing children in front of parents and parents in front of their children.”

“The Italian culture of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, is the Italian culture which produced Pope Gregory XIII, who congratulated Catherine de Medici for exterminating the 50,000 Calvinist Huguenots, ordered celebratory bonfires lighted and a gold medalion minted with the inscription: ‘Slaughter of the Huguenots.’ It’s the Italian culture that gave us both the brilliant Galileo and the Inquisition authorities who forced him to recant his heliocentric vision, then put him under house arrest for the remainder of his life.”

“Spain’s cultural offerings include Goya, Velasquez, Dali, Picasso, Miguel de Cervantes, the Iglesia de Montserrat and Botanical Gardens, along with the Inquisition’s torture racks and the cruelly oppressive 40-year regime of General Francisco Franco.”

“Russian culture donated Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Dostoyevsky, Anton Chekov, St. Basil’s Cathedral and the Cathedral of St. Michael the Archangel.  It also furnished Ivan the Terrible; and Joseph Stalin, who rationalized and directed the killing of millions.”

“In addition to Confucius, Lao Tsu, the compass, paper, printing, gun powder, the Potala Palace, the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, China’s cultural contributions to humanity include General Chiang Kai-shek who, in ‘Summing Up at Seventy,’ observed that while reconquering the mainland would mean death for many millions, it would be well worth the effort. Today, Chinese culture includes the use of brute force to suppress the rights of Tibetans as well as millions of its own people.”

“Then there was Ancient Greece.  Called ‘The Fountainhead of Western Culture’ because it emphasized the use of reason and introduced our species to democracy, Ancient Greece also waged centuries of bloody war over the control of land; and its democracy, which lived less than a hundred years, was never available to women or slaves (and almost every free family had slaves) or even to freedmen.”

“As for hapless Iraq, in addition to Saddam and Chemical Ali, its cultural offerings go all the way back that momentous 10,000 years, to the dawn of modern civilization. ‘The first cities, the first written language, and the first legal system all began there.’”

“Let’s have the courage to be honest!”

”The United States wanted Iraq’s oil!  But it was destroying, not preserving our species’ cultural heritage when it brought about the burning of Baghdad’s National Library and National Archives; the sacking of its museum; the destruction of Mosul’s rare book and manuscript collection, and Basra University’s museum.  And the U.S. carried out this wrack-and-ruin with remarkable indifference.  Asked how he felt about the devastation, former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, a leading neocon custodian-of-anti-culture, blithely responded: ‘You can’t make an omlet without breaking eggs.’”

“On this occasion, Rumsfeld was at least being sincere.  As Mr. Machiavelli documented, making an omlet of Iraq was what the U.S. was about.”

“Where determining the role the neocons and the U.S. are playing in the Mid East is concerned, Machiavelli did start with a materialist observation.  ‘Only by joining in national communities which they give allegiance and fight to protect,’ he argued, ‘are people able to acquire physical, emotional and psychological security, find employment, build homes, feed and clothe their children, and raise them to share the values they hold dear.’”

“But a scientific-materialist observer would not have been so provincial.”

“Common sense, as well as all the available evidence, indicates our ancestors also paid fealty and fought to defend their various pre-national communities.

“Besides being equally objective, the much simpler proposition that: ’The easiest way for people to reproduce their social existences is to join in communities which they give allegiance and fight to protect’, has a universal reference.”

“It accurately describes the practices of ancestral tribes and other pre-national communities, as well as those of the feudal and capitalist states with which my opponent seems so exclusively concerned.”

“Constructing a materialist theory of humanity’s social practice requires that we give the same species-applicable rephrasing to Machiavelli’s deduction about leaders.”

“‘It follows, he reasoned, ‘that the foremost objective of a nation’s leader, whether president, prime minister or prince, must be the preservation of the state upon which the lives and the well-being of his people depend.’”

“If we make the rational, and, again, the materially obvious, assumption leaders are as interested in perpetuating their hegemonic social existences as followers are in protecting less enviable conditions, we can rephrase Machiavelli’s conclusion to state:”

“The foremost objective of a leader who wishes to maintain his favored status must be the preservation of the community upon which a reproduction of his people’s social existences depends.”

“Common sense, and the historical record, make it clear any leader who fails to accomplish that feat will be in serious trouble.”

“Having reworded Mr. Machiavelli’s central axioms to make them representative of human behavior, not just the behavior of people joined in national communities, I’ll   give you a scientific-materialist explanation of our species’ socio-economic-political evolution: where we’re at, how we got here, and, by logical implication, where we are going.”

(Pausing to retrieve additional sheets of wrinkled paper, this time from his jacket’s left pocket, Marx examined them briefly, then continued:)

“Those of you unfamiliar with my theory may be surprised to hear I begin by agreeing with my conservative predecessor Adam Smith that we humans are driven by self-interest.”

“It is natural necessity and interest that hold the members of civil society together,’ Engels and I emphasized in The Holy Family.”

“We repeated this keystone tenet in The German Ideology, saying: ‘Individuals seek only their particular interest.’”

“What is this ‘self-interest’ which unifies communities of people around the employment of particular methods of production and distribution?”

“It’s here that Adam Smith’s thinking and my own diverge sharply.”

“Smith described the populations of capitalist communities as engaged in trying to better their socio-economic conditions/enhance their material situations, while an ‘Unseen Hand’ binds them together.”

“For me, however, the preservation of their ‘social existences;’ by which I mean a reproduction of the socio-economic conditions they already enjoy, is far more important than improving it for the members of every community.”

“And it is the things which people cooperatively do to achieve that paramount objective, not some mythical ‘Unseen Hand,’ which unifies them around any given system of production.”

”’Production,’ as I stated in Grundrisse: ‘aims at the reproduction of the producer and his objective conditions of existence.’”

”Don’t misunderstand me. I am not denying given members of a community will strive to improve their socio-economic situations.  My point is more fundamental.”

“In the immediate present, that is, in-the-here-and-now, every community’s production of goods and services has a fixed dimension; which is what enables economists to assign the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of nations a specific monetary figure.”

“It therefore follows that insofar as some individuals acquire more of the productive pie in-the-here-and-now, other members of the community must receive less; and that will be creative of tension/conflict/enmity, rather than amity, between them.”

“Which is why politicians always attempt to make pies bigger, rather than give more to one social segment by taking from another.  It’s also why conservative legislators (correctly) accuse liberal colleagues who dare to suggest policies expropriative of the wealthy of engaging in ‘class warfare.’”

“In other words, in-the-here-and-now, the acquisitive efforts of particular individuals will be destructive, not creative, of community. Since to speak of a community’s existence presupposes its members are somehow bound together in-the-here-and-now, it’s obvious they are not being bound by the attempts of some to gain.”

“Smith theorized they’re held together by an ‘Unseen Hand.’ I contend that for a materialist the nature of the hand is clear. It is nothing other than the shared desire of every community member to reproduce his/her social existence; i.e, to keep what they already possess.  And, as I will demonstrate, it is the members of a community acting upon this shared material objective, an objective assumed and unspoken, which has driven our species forth.”

“When hunting and gathering tribes became too large to obtain adequate food in a given territory they initially did what bees and ants do.  Intent on reproducing their primitive social existence, some members of the tribe simply swarmed to a new location.“

“Population growth and the desire to maintain social existence gradually led our earliest ancestors to inhabit remote regions of the earth, adapting to different climates and different food sources as they moved.”

“Eventually, however, with tribal populations continuing to increase and the amount of new habitable territory declining, fighting began over the control of specific lands.  Judging from the practices of tribes who presently inhabit tropical regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, our warring tribal ancestors used a variety of symbols–tattoos, feathers, paints and animistic deities—to identify themselves and their causes and to strengthen their resolve.”

“At various times, in various locations, reproducing social existence required tribes to turn their enemies into a source of protein.  Their cannibalism was similarly justified/made rational with elaborate beliefs, ceremonies and incantations.”

“After hunting and gathering for 190,000-plus years our ancestors approached a critical juncture: There were too many people for the earth to feed, house and clothe if they continued using that order of production and distribution.”

“As I remarked in Grundrisse:”

“‘The overpopulation among hunting peoples, which shows itself in the warfare between the tribes, proves not that the earth could not support their small numbers, but rather, that the condition of their reproduction required a great amount of territory for few people.’”

“To succinctly describe the oxymoronic situation our hunting and gathering predecessors now faced: their quest for a constancy of social existence would force them to radically change.”

“As war ceased to be the easiest way for hunters and gatherers to reproduce their social existence, they began making slaves of enemies rather than killing them, establishing nomadic-slave communities, domesticating animals, and practicing rudimentary agriculture.”

“Whereupon, a territory which had provided for 20-100 hunters and gatherers could now  sustain several times that number; and, do it at a significantly higher socio-economic level, providing better food, clothing and shelter.  The problem of overpopulation and consequent violent struggle was momentarily relieved, and, our species social evolution  at long last began.”

“Und dort haben Sie es!  The Dialectical Materialist nature of humanity’s historical progress! Fundamental socio-economic-political changes have been the result of an assumed desire for no change, under material circumstances which were themselves undergoing transformation; principally, though not exclusively, because of an increase in population.”

“From hunting and gathering, to nomadic slave, to feudal, and, I believe, to capitalist, each succeeding order of production and distribution has been able to sustain a given number of people at a given socio-economic level.”

“Each has ‘sowed the seeds of its own destruction’ by creating problems it could not solve, including the formation of a growing sub-community whose members social existences it lacked the capacity to sustain.”

“Fortunately, at the same time each has spawned, then nurtured into adolesence, a more cornucopian and flexible system which was able to socio-economically maintain the community, and, to heal the wounds its parent order had inflicted.”

“In Grundrisse, I recounted the Dialectical Materialist development of colonialist and slave-holding practices in ancient Rome, explaining:”

“’After the City of Rome had been built and the surrounding countryside cultivated by its citizens, the conditions of the community were different from what they had been before.  The aim of all these communities is survival; i.e., reproduction of the individuals who compose it as proprietors, i.e. in the same objective mode of existence as forms the relation among the members and at the same time therefore the commune itself.  This reproduction, however, is at the same time necessarily new production and destruction of the old form.  For example, where each of the individuals is supposed to possess a given number of acres of land, the advance of population is already underway.  If this is to be corrected, then colonization, and that in turn requires wars of conquest. With that, slaves, etc.  Also, e.g., enlargement of the ager publicus, and therewith the patricians who represent the community etc. Thus the preservation of the old community includes the destruction of the conditions on which it rests, turns into its opposite.’”

“Throughout much of temperate Western Europe our ancestors’ defensive formation of feudal productive orders was brought about by the equally defensive predations of Scandinavian Vikings in the 8^th century.”

“Natives of Sweden, Denmark and Norway, the Vikings were farmers with large families who could no longer feed, house and clothe their increasing numbers in their climatically less hospitable homelands.”

“They initially raided Europe’s coastal regions in search of silver, gold and slaves.  But Central Europe’s fertile land and warmer weather soon led them to establish villages and settle down, further destabilizing the lives of those whose territories they invaded.”

“British historian William Stubbs noted that for indigenous Central Europeans the: ‘chronic absense of any effective central government and the threat of war and famine contributed to the general awareness of the need for security and protection.  It was in this atmosphere of collapsing central authority, civil war, invasion and overall economic stagnation that the institution known as feudalism appeared.’”

“Within Europe’s nascent feudal communities everyone’s life practices became rigidly, but protectively, defined.  Control of the land was of prime importance. Serfs worked it. With the king’s sanction, lords owned it, but were above doing any physical work.  The lords were warriors, whose principal function was to defend everyone, including the monarch and the serfs, against invasion.”

“In addition, the lords were sworn to furnish adequate land, firewood and housing materials for their serfs.  On their parts, the serfs’ tasks included animal husbandry, crop raising, building and maintaining the monarch’s and lords’ dwellings, carrying their water, making their clothing, currying their horses; and, as the feudal productive order matured, following the lords into battle.”

“All relationships between lords, peasants, religious authorities and kings were justified and sustained not by monetary exchanges or legal agreements, but by ‘personal loyalty and service’ enforced by each individual’s sense of obligation.  Barter (this-for-that trade), rather than currency, controlled nearly every other movement of goods.”

“Money-lending for interest was considered usury and sinful on the part of borrowers as well as lenders.  Behind it all stood the Roman Catholic Church, unified with the State, formulating and propagating the appropriate philosophical rationales (feudalism’s manifestation in ideas), and pressuring recalcitrants to abide by their obligations lest they suffer punishment at the hand of God.”

“Europe’s progressive feudal communities then grew and prospered.”

“But, like hunting and gathering and nomadic slave communities before them, in time they started having difficulty maintaining the social existence of their increasing populations.  For a few hundred years, again, like their predecessors, feudal principalities/states eased that problem by warring with one another.”

“Gradually, however, taking another progressive step and establishing the more cornucopian capitalist order of production became a Natural Necessity.”

“While it’s possible that by reducing Western Europe’s population by one-quarter to one-half the bubonic plague (‘Black Death’) of 1347-50 may have delayed exhaustion of the feudal productive system, in some ways it appears to have accelerated the process.”

“Historian Fernand Braudel argues the plague aggravated an economic recession which had started 50 years before.  With hundreds of small villages depopulated, surviving peasants were driven into cities to endure.  In turn, the growth of cities made it increasingly difficult for landholders to simply barter agricultural products for things they needed.  Money began to be an imperative.”

“Recession was also making Europe’s battles, hence its armies, grandscale.  That entailed using hired soldiers, cast-iron cannon, and swords in ever-larger quantities, all of which likewise had to be paid for with money.  Finally, the recession prompted many lords to expand their landholdings in an effort to hang on.  That, too, required the use of legal tender.”

“In order to obtain the necessary funds, lords had no alternative to borrowing from the inchoate financiers located in cities, which meant usury would have to begin losing its feudal, church-dictated, stigma.  Land-holding nobles further undermined their feudal productive orders by sending sons who were unable to acquire personal estates to the rapidly growing cities where they became financiers and merchants, as well as engaging in handicraft and rudimentary industrial production: makers and sellers of the swords, cannon and uniforms the feudal elites so desperately needed.”

“Confronting Europeans with the material reality that religious devotion could no longer offer them protection, economic recession and plague had also begun eroding the Catholic Church’s unquestioned authority. ‘The Black Death led to cynicism toward religious officials who could not keep their frequent promises of curing plague victims and banishing the disease.’”

“Purporting to be Jesus’ earthly intermediary, the feudal Church had traditionally absolved individuals of their sins for confession, and/or good deeds, such as aiding the poor.”

“But by the late 13th century, feudalism’s growing inability to sustain Europe’s population was squeezing the clergy, whose numbers were also increasing, prompting the Church to begin selling forgiveness in the form of ‘indulgences.’”

“Theologian Richard Hooker related the indulgences: ‘subsituted good works of the Catholic clergy for the good works required of the individual believer.  Proof of this substitution was in the indulgence itself, which was a piece of paper . . . that certified good works of the clergy had paid off “the good works debt” of the individual believer.  Inspired by the need to raise money,’ Hooker argued, ‘indulgences reproduced the very logic of money.’”

“Like the nobility, the clergy were actively engaged in ‘sowing the seeds’ of their feudal productive order’s destruction.”

“The first perceptible signs of capitalism’s fetal development within the feudal  structure appeared in Spain.”

“Machiavelli described how a lack of rain and fertile land led the Spanish to conquer New World territories in order to ‘defend their state.’ I’d like you to read his  ‘defend their state’ as ‘maintain their people’s social existences.’”

“But there was another, equally important, material process at work in Spain.  Financiers, workshop manufacturers and merchants, with Jews in the forefront, were effecting changes which threatened the country’s feudal structure.”

“With rare exception, Jews had not been allowed to become members of Europe’s land-owning elite.  As a consequence, they maintained social existence by adopting the indicated industrial-world occupations, making them urban-dwelling leaders of the revolutionary capitalist transformation.”

“By the mid-15^th century the anti-feudal roles which socio-economic survival was requiring Jews to play began bringing them into open conflict with Spain’s landed nobility as the country’s feudal system became daily more inadequate.”

“Conservatively, predictably, the landholding elite initially responded to the mounting threat with a cautious antisemitism, demanding Jews either leave the country or convert to the elite’s feudal understanding of Christianity.”

“While hundreds-of-thousands of Jews took the second course, of necessity, their every-day practices continued to have the same capitalist-order impact as before.”

“In 1478, acquiescing to pressure being exerted by the landed nobility through King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, Pope Sixtus IV authored the brutal Spanish Inquisition.  The principal targets of the Inquisition would be the Jewish converts, who, it was argued, correctly in most cases, were not sincere about their conversion.  According to the King’s decree, ’Ecclesiastical Tribunals’ were formally established and instructed: ‘to judge heretical depravity, to search out and punish converts from Judiasm who have transgressed against Christianity by secretly adhering to Jewish beliefs and performing Jewish rites.’”

“Fourteen years later the King and Queen ordered that Jews be expelled from the country.”

“But, though the feudal-elite could not foresee it, Spain would soon relieve its developing productive order crisis by exporting excess population to, while acquiring huge quantities of gold, silver and other mineral riches from, the New World.”

“Christopher Columbus wrote in his diary: ‘In the same month in which Their Majesties issued the edict that all Jews should be driven out of the kingdom and its territories, in the same month they gave me the order to undertake with sufficient men my expedition of discovery to the Indies.’”

“Portugal’s situation was similar to that of Spain: insufficient arable land, infertile soil and inadequate rainfall; and, like Spain, it relieved its feudal-order crisis by exporting people and importing New World pelf.”

“Spain and Portugal’s New World successes were rapid, ruthless, and astoundingly profitable. During one period of only a few weeks Columbus: ‘shipped to Spain nearly two tons of gold.’”

“Francisco Pizzaro had a similar experience when he entered Peru.  After slaughtering 7,000 of Atahuallpa’s warriors in a single night, Pizzaro agreed to give the Inca king freedom in exchange for silver and gold.  Atahuallpa provided him with two and a half tons of gold and five tons of silver as his part of the bargain.  Pizzaro then had him strangled to better secure control of the country.”

“Portugal, too, reaped and raped remarkable profit during this period.”

“Neither the resistance of native populations, nor their disappearance through European diseases to which they had no natural defense, proved to be obstacles of great significance.  Flagrant brutality and extermination solved the first, the importation of millions of African slaves the second.”

“By the latter part of the 16^th century, comfortably ensconced in the New World, Spain had founded universities in two of its conquered territories: the University of Mexico in 1553, and the University of San Marcos at Lima, Peru in 1572.”

“With large numbers of their people moving to the New World and establishing the grand fiefdoms no longer available at home, their economies infused by stolen New World treasure, for the next three hundred years Spain and Portugal’s feudal systems again became secure.”

“But where colonialism and the theft of Latin American wealth–also African wealth in Portugal’s case–would enable the Spanish and Portuguese land-holding elites to preserve their pre-capitalist orders, such efforts did not work nearly so well for France and England.”

“Because their feudal systems of production began experiencing structural crisis a little later than those of Spain and Portugal, England and France trailed those two countries where attempting to vent excess population in the New World and seize its riches were concerned.”

“Not that the late comers failed to try.  Without exception, all of England and France’s New World incursions during the 17^th century were expressly aimed at acquiring wealth in the form of  gold, silver and precious stones.”

“Yet, however much they prayed, God seemed unsympathetic.  There were no vast stores of mineral wealth waiting to be seized in the unconquered regions of North America.  In addition, the northern territories had a far less hospitable climate, and were inhabited by Indians who, not living in large, easily destroyed cities, were able to fight back when their own social existences were threatened.”

“The first shipload of England’s Jamestown settlers arrived in May 1607.  Eight months later, weakened from hunger and infected by disease, ‘only 38 of the 104 colonists were still alive—barely.’ George Percy, Jamestown’s president, recorded that by 1610 they were reduced to eating ‘dogs, cats, rats, and mice.’”

“Additional hundreds of colonists reached Jamestown over the next couple decades.  Yet, where energizing England’s feudal economy was concerned, the Jamestown settlement continued to have little value, and the colonists were soon at war with natives.”

“In 1622, 347 of what were by then approximately 1,400 settlers were murdered by Algonquians enraged at being driven from traditional lands by the colonizers’ tobacco farming.  Writer Karen Lange notes that ‘three out of four who came to Jamestown between 1607 and 1624 died from disease, hunger and conflict with the Indians.’ In 1644, a second attack by the Algonquians, whose own population was now in radical decline, killed another 400 colonists.”

“Under the circumstances, very few English were interested in moving to the New World, and France’s New World ventures proved even less rewarding.”

“Both countries then tried to ease their feudal order crises with piracy.  If they could not compete with Spain and Portugal in stealing New World wealth, they could at least profit by robbing the robbers.”

“But, though highly remunerative, and ample justification for getting Francis Drake knighted, the piracy would not solve their problem of having inadequate productive systems either; which, in England’s case, was already changing from chronic to acute.”

“The number of French and English who were finding it necessary to take up capitalist-world occupations to survive had long been growing.  The construction of ships needed to export colonists and raid Spanish and Portuguese vessels, the manufacturing of axes, plows, hammers, nails, guns, clothing, etc., for provisioning their own, as well as, ironically, Spanish and Portuguese settlers, only accelerated that transformation.”

“Having no less painful and disruptive alternative left for maintaining the majority of its people’s social existence, in the mid-17^th century England underwent the capitalist revolution, followed by France a hundred years later.”

“With their capitalist revolutions, political power was wrenched from the increasingly decrepit hands of landowners and given to the financiers, merchants and industrialists whose hour of authority had arrived.”

“In a letter to P.V. Annenkov I described the Dialectical Materialist overthrow of  England’s feudal order of production, writing:”

“’The privileges, the institutions of guilds and corporations, the regulatory regime of the Middle Ages, were social relations that alone corresponded to the acquired productive forces and to the social condition which had previously existed and from which these institutions had arisen.  Under the protection of the regime of corporations and regulations, capital was accumulated, overseas trade was developed, colonies were founded.  But the fruits of this men would have forfeited if they had tried to retain the forms under whose shelter these fruits had ripened.  Hence burst two thunderclaps—the Revolutions of 1640 and 1688.  All the old economic forms, the social relations corresponding to them, the political conditions which were the official expression of the old civil society, were destroyed in England.’”

“I reiterated my central thesis in the Annenkov letter, observing:

“‘Men never relinquish what they have won, but this does not mean that they never relinquish the social form in which they have acquired certain productive forces.  On the contrary, in order that they may not be deprived of the result attained, and forfeit the fruits of civilization, they are obliged, from the moment when the form of their commerce no longer corresponds to the productive forces acquired, to change all their traditional social forms.’”

“The Natural Necessity of each successive order of production and distribution, and the material reason it had a much shorter life-span than its predecessor, should be evident.”

“By producing a drastic improvement in people’s security, clothing, housing, food quality, and, therefore, their health and longevity, each generated a more explosive increase in population than its forerunner, leading, in turn, to its own more rapid exhaustion and demise.”

“Hunters and gatherers lived about 17 years, rarely more than 20.  The average life span of many capitalist country populations is over 75.”

“Demographers estimate that when Columbus set sail the total world population was about 400 million. At present, only a few hundred years after capitalist systems of production began to be erected, it’s over 6.6 billion and rapidly growing.”

“It’s also obvious why the changes in productive-distributive orders have all been unidirectional.”

“If the United States decided to return to a feudal existence, at least 60 perecent of Americans would either have to be exiled or killed.  An estimated 2 percent of the population currently produces over 90 percent of the country’s foodstuffs, using sophisticated irrigation systems, tractors, plows and combines that only a highly advanced industrial economy can provide.  The foodstuffs are then distributed via trains, planes and semis, which likewise require a complex industrial order for their manufacture.   So, too, with everything else Americans enjoy, including housing, clothing, medical care, entertainment and travel.”

“Similarly, maintaining the social existences of the French or English during the 16^th century would have been impossible if they had decided to raze their feudal productive orders and revert to using nomadic-slave or hunting and gathering systems of production.”

“A materialist explanation for the origin of social classes, politics and ideology is also inherent in what I‘ve said about our species’ social evolution.”

“The transition from hunting and gathering to the nomadic-slave mode of production introduced an important new ingredient: a division of labor. Specific tasks began to be performed by specific individuals.  As the slave order achieved viability, it started turning out goods and services in excess of the amount required to reproduce everyone’s social existence.”

“Due to the division of labor, some individuals—the slave masters—found themselves in control of that excess.  So long as the slaves’ social existence was being maintained, they would exert little or no pressure for a share of the surplus, making the formation of an elite social class a Natural and Necessary result.”

“Having a hegemonic status to be preserved, the elites then needed special protective devices. Politics and the political state were the practical weapons reflexively born of that need.  In the same way, and for the same reason, abstract philosophies and religions were spontaneously created to provide the requisite blueprints and justifications.”

“Individuals calling themselves ‘Marxists’ sometimes portray elites as duplicitous where the creation and employment of philosophy/religion and political institutions are concerned.”

“Their idealist reasoning has nothing whatsoever to do with my own materialist logic.”

“To the contrary, I’ve argued elites instinctively and sincerely formulate those religio-philosophical ideas, create those political institutions, engage in those practices which most effectively/least disruptively enable them to secure their favored social existences.”

“For the same reason, middle classes and the poor just as spontaneously adopt the elites’ philosophical-religious ideas, embrace their political institutions, and adhere to the associated political practice.”

“If non-elite members of a community were to reject the elite’s philosophical vision, refuse to act upon it, they would have to confront the elite physically, and neither of them would be socio-economically sustained.”

“Therefore, as long as productive orders have been able to perpetuate (reproduce) their social existences, non-elites have reflexively internalized and acted upon the elites’ perspectives, some times enthusiastically, sometimes with reluctance, sometimes under dramatic protest, depending upon how well they were being sustained.”

“Engels and I emphasized this point in The German Ideology, writing:”

“‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. . . . The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.’”

“Mr. Machiavelli described the fundamental logics leaders promote as ’lies told  to preserve their states.’”

“On this matter, our disagreement could not be more complete.”

“The American elites who defended their favored interests with the argument that settlers of Western territories were fighting ‘bloodthirsty indian savages’ believed it to be true.  So did the settlers.  Respecting that issue, no deception whatsoever was involved.”

“Stalin and the Soviet bureaucrats who protected their more prosperous social existences and that of the country’s state-capitalist elite with the claim they were imprisoning or killing tens-of-millions of pro-capitalist traitors during the Great Depression were thoroughly convinced that was what they were doing.”

“So, too, with the Nazis’ proposition Germany was involved in a fateful struggle against a Jewish-Communist conspiracy to dominate the world.  Hitler, Goering, Himmler, Speer and other National Socialist leaders were more than willing to lie in the service of what they considered true.  But, the idea of a Jewish-Communist conspiracy was, for them, among the most essential of realities.”

“Finally, American leaders were not lying when they described a ‘communist’ threat to  U.S. investments in Latin America, Asia and Africa from the 1960s to the late 80s.  The utilitarian meaning of ‘communist/communism’ which those with menaced investments employed was: ‘anyone or anything which threatens our interests.’ Hence, for them, raping, torturing and killing–into submission or out of existence—individuals who posed the threats, was seen as a painful but imperative endeavor; a ‘removal of cancer in order to save the patient,’ they often intoned.”

(With a wry smile, Marx then added:)

“If any of you still believe this country’s leaders were insincere about their anti-communist crusade I suggest  you discuss it with Ann Coulter.”

(Staring intently, first at Coulter, who had visibly paled and was squeezing the arms of her chair as though trying to break them, then at Bill O’Reilly, whose red face and bulging eyes threatened an explosion, Marx finished making his point.)

“During the same period, the Soviet Union’s elite employed their own unique interest-protective definitions.  Threats to their favored socio-economic status which came from the right were repressed as ‘capitalist.’ Threats from the left were labelled ‘leftist adventurism’ and crushed with equal vigor.”

“In each of these cases, elites and their political representatives spontaneously defined the world in defense of hegemonic social realities.  In each case, the non-elites whose social existences were being sustained reflexively followed.”

“’Are we homo sapiens really so conservative?,’ I can hear some of you asking.”

“Have you ever noticed that no one, whether politically Left, Right or Liberal, knowingly calls ‘true’ ideas which, when they act upon them as valid, result in their own socio-economic expropriation?”

“Now, we must either regard this as a miracle of walking-on-water and raising the dead proportions, or, consider it irrefutable empirical evidence that, before anything else, people’s political truths are blueprints and justifications for defending their personal social existences.”

“’But,’ you may protest, ‘there are individual exceptions to the above rule; Christ, for example, and Che Guevara.’”

“Granted.  However, history is made by people acting in community, and there are clearly no community exceptions.”

“Moreover, we know very well how people communally rationalize not following the individual egalitarian exceptions.  Proclaiming Christ ‘the Son of God,’ Christians excuse their own failure to share as the action of mere mortals; driving expensive cars to church, and drawing comfort from the biblical assurance Christ died to atone for their sins.”

“Similarly, the people of self-described socialist/communist nations have rationalized not imitating Che by calling him ‘the socialist man alive today;’ an elevated status they concede they have not yet personally attained.”

“In both instances the exceptions are idolized, and, as all of human history affirms, when people idolize they never emulate.”

“If tomorrow everyone began behaving as Christ prescribed, common sense argues it would mean the end of Christianity.  People might thereafter love Christ.  But is it rational to think they would continue worshipping someone no better than themselves?”

“The men who joined Che in the Bolivian mountains probably loved him.  But it’s illogical to suppose they idolized him for doing the same thing they were doing.”

“Do you still question our species inherent conservatism?”

“Then, let me give you another example.”

“It’s the reality of our universally shared experience that insofar as groups/communities of people have the same socio-economic existences to defend the question whether they should permit one another complete freedom of speech, press and assembly never arises.”

“Here in the United States, conservatives like William Bennett, Ramesh Ponnuru and Richard Mellon Scaife don’t debate granting each other such license.”

“Neither do their liberal counterparts. It would never occur to Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emanuel and Harry Reid to argue the propriety of allowing one another unfettered rights to organize, publish and speak.”

“Nor, again, do individuals on the Left: Michael Parenti, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore  and Alex Cockburn for instance.”

“It’s the reality of our shared experience that insofar as communities of individuals do not have the same socio-economic existences to protect, but, for one to keep does not require that the others fail to do so, with a great show of magnanimity, they concede one another the indicated liberties.”

“However, it’s also the (less admirable) reality of our shared experience that whenever members of one community have found they could no longer preserve their socio-economic existences if those in another community were permitted to do so, they have readily taken each others’ lives; and, with a lot less hesitation, they’ve denied one another freedom of press, speech and assembly.”

“At such moments, stifling any democratic impulses they might have, people have begun to oppress, and to kill.”

“U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes defended the principle involved when he argued no one should be allowed to ‘yell fire in a crowded theater.’”

“The vital questions, of course, are ‘What constitutes a political yell of fire?’, and ‘When should the theater be said to be crowded?’”

“If you examine the Court’s application of the Holmes doctrine you will find that political ideas labelled ‘yells of fire’ were invariably ones which, if acted upon by the public to whom they were addressed, would have been expropriative of the socio-economic existences of the people who called them that.  And, the theater was said to be crowded insofar as it appeared likely the broader public might act.”

“I noted that while a community’s productive order remains viable, being conservative, non-elites act out support for the state and the elite’s vision.”

“Besides protecting the elite’s hegemonic interests, the state of a viable productive system serves everyone by defending from threats, both foreign and domestic, the order which enables a reproduction of their socio-economic conditions.”

“As Engels and I argued in The German Ideology, at such times ‘the State is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests, and in which the whole civil society of an epoch is epitomized.’”

“I said it again in Grundrisse: ‘Protection of acquisitions, etc.  When these trivialities are reduced to their real content, they tell more than their preachers know.  Namely, that every form of production creates its own legal relations, form of government, etc..’”

“As I noted in my letter to Annenkov: ‘assume particular stages of development in production, commerce and consumption and you will have a corresponding social constitution, a corresponding organization of the family, of orders or of classes, in a word, a corresponding civil society.’”

“For the same reason, when an exhausted order of production and distribution has been razed, as its successor begins to acquire viability its self-understanding, i.e., its philosophy, ‘becomes philosophy generally, in presence of the world.  It becomes the philosophy of the world of the present.’”

“’The formal features which attest a philosophy has achieved that importance, that it is the living soul of the culture, . . . were the same in all times,’ I observed in an article written for the Reinische Zeitung, calling the operative philosophy of a productive-distributive order its ‘Spiritual Quintessence.’”

“In other words, every community-self-consciousness (philosophy/religion) is the product of a desire on the part of the people who hold it to preserve their particular web of social existences, in their particular circumstances, at their particular time.”

“It follows that whether a community’s philosophy/religion is perpetuated, undergoes modification, or, is discarded entirely in favor of another, will be determined by the kind and degree of material change occurring in the situations of those who embrace it.”

“Engels and I spelled out the implicit Natural and Necessary conclusion in The German Ideology, proposing:”

“‘Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of  independence.  They have no history, no development, but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking.’”

“Are we humans really so inherently conservative?”

“If we judge our species by what we do, and not by what we say, our answer to that rhetorical question must be YES!

“If you’ve followed my materialist logic, you’ll understand my dismissal of the idealistic reasoning of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and other contemporary Hegelians, who put ideas in the lead and blame the world’s suffering on religion.”

“Declaring the search for ‘scientific truth’ urgently important, these lightheaded philosophers give ’truth’ the same nonobjective and hyper-orthodox meaning as the Muslims, Jews, evangelical Christians and Pagans they so roundly condemn.”

“Remarkably, having asserted ‘We live in a world in which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle’, Sam Harris then shows us how it’s done.”

“If by ‘obvious’ he means ‘the logic of experience’ (that philosophical stance I call ‘materialism,’ and William James dubbed ‘radical empiricism’), Harris quite obviously confronts a dilemma:”

“Without exception, the members of feudal communities East and West are known to have believed God dictated how society should be organized, and, that God’s directives arrived on earth via the elites and the high religious authorities who shared their favored status and authored its ideological defense: the ’Divine Right of Kings’ in feudal Europe, the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ in feudal China and Japan.”

“Like me, most of you will undoubtledly agree with Harris that the feudalists were ‘wrong.’”

“However, we also know, because both common sense and our experience demand it, that if today the people of Japan, France, or any other industrial nation, decided to restore the feudal order they’d immediately find it necessary to adopt its system-sustaining web of beliefs.”

“For a week or two everyone might simply ‘play along,’ with those who elected to be peasants bowing to the dictates of priests and bishops, lords and ladies, kings and queens, just for the fun of it all.  But if the resurrected feudal system was going to have any permanence, it would be imperative that everyone internalize its logic, sincerely believing God had determined their respective stations, who they were, what they thought, and how they behaved toward one another.”

“In short, acknowledging the ‘materially obvious’ in this instance means recognizing that Religious Absolutism was the mental expression (representation in the form of ideas), of the feudal world; a metaphysics and epistemology which continues to exist in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other pre-industrial regions of Asia and the Middle East today.”

“Hence, to call it ‘wrong’ in the abstract is like labelling the blueprint for a building we don’t like to be ‘in error.’”

“If, when confronted with this predicament, Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, et al. still insist on maintaining their idealist stance, it goes from being implausible to being absurd.”

“Since what these psuedo-scientists hold to be the ‘errors’ of hunters and gatherers, nomadic slave holders, feudalists, contemporary Muslims, Pagans, Evangelical Christians and Zionist Jews, have obviously had a far greater creative impact on history than the ideas they personally consider ‘truth,’ they must now explain why anyone should ever bother looking for the latter.”

“They have, in short, adopted the mind-boggling position that—scripted by understandings they consider “wrong”— all of human history has been “a mistake”. That’s hardly a conclusion one might characterize as “scientific”.”

“We materialists are criticized for referring to historical processes as ‘inevitable,’ ‘Natural Necessity,’ and ‘dialectic.’ Hopefully, you now understand what we mean by those terms.”

“We’re not suggesting the transition from hunting and gathering tribes, to nomadic-slave communities, to feudal and capitalist nations, was pre-determined by an inflexible universe or a manipulative god.”

“What made the journey ‘inevitable’ was us: i.e., our ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ insistence on reproducing our personal social existences in the least painful and disruptive way possible, whatever the cost to others; and the ceaseless changes in community theory and  practice/knowing and doing which realizing that objective has entailed.”

“This always seemed so self-evident to me that in a letter to Ferdinand Lassalle I once (naively) enthused: ‘Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle. . . . teleology in natural science is not only dealt a mortal blow but its rational meaning is empirically explained.’”

“A ‘mortal blow to teleology’ indeed!”

“While our species has reaped ever-more-wondrous benefits from the last ten millenia of its 200,000 year trip, for equally clear material reasons, hundreds-of-millions of us have also suffered terrible pain.“

“Whenever the assumed truths of an exhausted productive-distributive order have become injurious errors for members of a progressive sub-community, and the latter have started formulating and acting upon a system-transforming logic, the elites whose interests were threatened have declared the established order and its justifying philosophy (its deities, rituals and shrines, its icons and incantations) sacrosanct and gone on the attack. Predictably, they’ve been assisted in that effort by the members of other classes whose social existences were still being maintained.”

“At the apex of such tragic moments, describing challenges to their interests as a conflict between good and evil, elites have decided individuals who rejected the established order and its rationales would have to be silenced; if necessary, they would have to be killed; thereby causing transitions from one productive-distributive system to another to be experienced as dialectic.”

(Marx’s expression suddenly softened as he added:)

“Being an inveterate optimist, I’ll remind you that while frenzied assaults by defenders of expended orders have proven fatal for countless representatives of nascent systems, they have also affirmed every new system’s propriety.”

“As I observed in a Koinische Zeitung article, the self-consciousness/philosophy of every new order of production and distribution: ‘is introduced into the world by the clamour of its enemies who betray their internal infection by their desperate appeals for help against the blaze of ideas.  These cries of its enemies mean as much for the philosophy as the first cry of a child for the anxious ear of the mother.  They are the cry of life of the ideas which have burst open the orderly hieroglyphic husk of the system and become citizens of the world.’”

“As France’s feudal system became drained of viability, the landed aristocracy, for whom preserving feudalism was vital if their socio-economic conditions were going to be maintained, went on the offensive against upstart pro-capitalist-order protestants, whose rejection of the Catholic Church’s authority the feudalists considered downright ‘satanic.’”

“’In 1521 the Parliament of Paris, with the approval of the king, forbade publication of Lutherian tracts coming from Germany . . .  The theological faculty of Paris formulated a plan for preventing the spread of such errors.  The/ir/ plan dictated that heretical books should be forbidden, and that bishops should be exhorted to seek out such works in their dioceses and have them destroyed.’”

“A decade later, Frenchmen who openly challenged the feudal Church, whether in speech or in writing, were being put to death. Twenty-four Parisian ‘heretics’ were burned at the stake in 1534 alone.”

“The bloodiest struggles attending the exhaustion of European feudalism took place in Germany.  Limited and insecure access to the Atlantic Ocean, and none to the Mediterranean Sea, had restricted trade between Prussia and other countries/regions, including Africa and the New World.  As a result, the creation of a subcommunity of capitalist financiers, craft-producers and merchants had not proceeded as far as it had in France.”

“Instead, as Germany’s feudal order lost viability in the 13^th century, hundreds-of-thousands of  Germans reproduced their social existence by migrating eastward, settling less populated regions of Hungary, Austria, Croatia, Poland and, eventually, Russia.”

“By the 16^th century that door was closing, making the expropriation of Church property the easiest, for many young nobles, the only remaining option.”

“As a consequence, from 1618-48, Prussians battled over who would exercise feudal control of the land.  When the Thirty Years War ended, more than 9 million Germans, 20-30 percent of the population, had been killed.  But the strain on the region’s feudal socio-economic-political organization had been momentarily relieved.”

“Not until the unification of Germany under Otto von Bismark in 1871 were capitalist financiers and industrialists finally brought into the ascendant.”

“In his celebrated book, The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler acknowledged the violence which accompanied the capitalists’ accession to power in the United States, saying:

“’The Civil War was not fought exclusively, as it seemed to many, over the moral issue of slavery or such narrow economic issues as tariffs.  It was fought over a much larger question: would the rich new continent be ruled by farmers or industrializers’”.

“The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the three-year Civil War which followed ended  feudalism in that country, transferring control to state-capitalist financiers, industrialists, and their political representatives, ironically, in the name of socialism and communism.  Twenty million lives were lost in that struggle; a metamorphosis Toffler called  ‘Russia’s version of the American Civil War;’ ‘/F/ought not primarily, as it seemed, over communism, but once again over the issue of industrialization.’”

“China underwent the same revolution in the 1930s and 40s, suffering an even greater loss of life. There, too, the building of an increasingly vibrant, though environmentally devastating, state-capitalist productive-distributive order has been the result.”

“Mr. Machiavelli observed China has 10 billionaires.  According to the latest Financial Times, that number has now grown to 106, ninety percent of them children of the country’s top 2,900 political authorities.”

(Marx paused briefly before posing another rhetorical question).

“What does our species 200,000 year socio-economic-political evolution have to do with the neocons’ strategy for seizing control of Iraq’s oil and making the United States’ imperial leader of the world?”

“’Everything!’”

“Today, Americans need to ask themselves five fundamental questions:”

“* Has capitalism, like hunting and gathering, nomadic-slave and feudal productive-distributive systems before it, been drained of viability; has it, as I will argue, reached its terminal stage?”

“* Is capitalism ‘sowing the seeds of its own destruction,’ creating ever-larger communities of people whose social existences it cannot sustain, and momentous  problems it’s unable to resolve?”

“* Is capitalism simultaneously forging its own successor; i.e., is a new, problem-solving, order coming into being within capitalist countries, a new way of relating people to one another, and to the production and distribution of goods?”

“* If so, are representatives of that nascent order beginning to threaten the elites who continue to benefit from the moribund capitalist system of production and distribution.”

“And the most urgent question:”

“* Are those whose interests are challenged moving toward an oppressive good-versus-evil, defense of their troubled order?”

(Marx paused once more, this time for several moments.  When he resumed speaking he had riveted his gaze on Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Brit Hume, John Gibson and Neil Cavuto as though addressing them alone).

“After proposing the United States has been defensively exporting its manufacturing base to low-wage nations, Mr. Machiavelli added: ‘Dr. Marx and his disciples would have us believe capitalists are driven by an insatiable lust for increased profit.’”

“He, very conveniently, misrepresented my position.”

“I’ve consistently argued what every successful businessman will confirm: For capitalists, there can be no treading water.”

“With more and more countries having to construct capitalist systems to maintain their growing populations, with the U.S. population and that of other established capitalist states increasing, the choice for each individual entrepreneur is  clear: Go forward or go down!”

“To compete, not merely with each other, but with South Korean, Chinese and Indian neo-capitalist producers entering the global market, U.S., Japanese, French, German, British et al., manufacturers must sell ever greater quantities of shirts, shoes, suits, plates, pots and pans, hand tools, refrigerators and blenders, TVs, cars and motorcycles, etc.”

“Selling that greater quantity of goods forces capitalists to engage in a never-ending expansion and sophistication of production; which, in turn, requires a  constant growth in profit.”

“I described this process in Das Kapital, writing: ‘The development of capitalist production makes it constantly necessary to keep increasing the amount of the capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition makes the immanent laws of capitalist production to be felt by each individual capitalist as external coercive laws.  It compels him to keep constantly extending his capital, in order to preserve it, but extend it he cannot, except by means of progressive accumulation.’”

“The problem for many Third World states today is that when capitalist countries buy their labor-non-intensive mineral/agricultural products and pour in ever-larger quantities of shoes, shirts, pots and pans, they cut the throats of millions of poor Saudis, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Afghanis, Indonesians, Algerians, Moroccans, Egyptians and Filipinos who survive by hand-making shoes and sandals, shirts, turbans and other items of native attire, or by hammering out pots and pans, or, by forming and firing pottery and plates.”

“And it’s not only the poor whose lives are being ravaged.”

“Capitalism’s aggressive economic penetration of nonindustrialized countries with TVs, CDs, DVDs and movies, is also devastating middle-class artists and actors, replacing their nations’ traditional tastes with those of Japan and the industrial West, while  providing them, like the poor, with nothing in the way of alternative occupations.”

“Even highly educated children of Mid Eastern elites, doctors, dentists, architects, chemists and engineers, are finding the virulent capitalist invasion leaves no place for them.”

“The poor can’t afford doctors and dentists.  There aren’t enough people in the middle class to pay for their professional services.  And the elites fly to New York, London or Paris for their own medical/dental procedures.”

“When Mid Eastern oil Sheikhs have palaces and shopping malls constructed in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, when they build airports, seaports, luxury hotels, theaters, fantasy playlands and skyscrapers in Dubai, or a massive water pipeline in the United Arab Emirates, they contract with global corporations like Halliburton, Bechtel, Fluor, Parsons, Kajima and Taisei.”

“Those companies have their own architects and engineers. They don’t hire local professionals.  They also bring in low-paid, semi-slave workers from the Philippines, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, who toil 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, doing the menial labor.”

“With no less painful option left for maintaining their social existences, or that of their nations’ middle class and poor, some educated sons and daughters of Mid Eastern and Asian feudal elites begin formulating plans for expropriating Western interests, along with their countries’ Western-oriented elites, and establishing structures which can, at least momentarily, sustain them all; structures which, e.g. post-Khomeini Iran, are in some ways terribly reactionary, in others, progressive.”

“Ergo, the material origins of the ‘muslim terrorist’ challenge now confronting capitalist states.”

“It’s not mere chance that Osama bin Laden, whose father was the billionaire owner of a construction company, studied Business Administration and Engineering; that Ayman al-Zawahiri was a pediatric surgeon, his father a pharmacologist; or that Abu Hafisa, the Moroccan who directed the 2004 Madrid train bombing, is a psychiatrist.”

“Nor is it chance that Mohamed Atta’s university degree was in architecture, while ‘terrorist’ Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s was in mechanical engineering.”

“So, too, with ‘terrorist’ Palestinian leaders whose peoples’ lives Israel is currently destroying.  Fathi Abd Al-Aziz, the founder of Islamic Jihad, was a physician.  Mahmoud al-Zahar, a co-founder of Hamas, is a surgeon, as was the late Hamas leader, Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi.”

“Moreover, it’s not just capitalist manufacturers and financiers whose activities are  devastating Third World peoples.  The agribusinesses of advanced capitalist nations are equally aggressive in eliminating their jobs. They are also destroying their environments, and impairing their health.”

“Under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for the past 13 years Mexico’s corn and bean farmers have suffered a relentless assault by U.S. agricultural corporations, driving an estimated 6 million of them from the land.”

“According to investigative reporter John Ross, ‘New Years 2008 may prove to be /their/ doomsday.’”

“On that day, in accordance with the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) ‘all tariffs on corn and beans will be abolished.’  The ’Zero tariffs,’ ‘are expected to trigger a tsunami of corn imports, much of it genetically modified,’ Ross predicts, forcing additional millions of Mexico’s small producers from their farms.”

“The Organic Consumers Association (OCA) has documented that the U.S. agribusiness Cargill uses ‘massive government subsidies’ to dump huge quantities ‘of grains in poorer countries,’ ‘undermining small farmers, destroying local food production systems, and making rural economies dependent.’”

“Greenpeace charges the U.S. agribusiness corporations, Cargill, Archer-Daniels-Midland, and Bunge, with ‘Eating up the Amazon,’ financing ‘unscrupulous’ Brazilian farmers who ‘seize and clear’ ‘publicly owned rainforest land for the production of soybeans.’”

“Ten thousand square miles of Amazon rainforest were cleared in 2006 alone, the burning of tree stumps and branches spewing 370 million tons of hydrocarbons into the air.”

“Cargill, Brazil’s largest exporter of soybeans and sugar, provides few jobs, nearly all of them extremely low-paid.  Many Brazilian farmers under contract with Cargill have been found to use slave labor.”

“Monsanto, Cargill, and other U.S. agribusinesses are also destroying the infrastructure of rural India. By bribing Indian officials, they’ve succeeded in promoting cotton and rice seeds genetically engineered to produce sterile plants, forcing the country’s small farmers to buy new seeds yearly at prices few of them can afford.”

“Nor can Indian farmers rely on traditional seeds, since their plants cross-pollinate with those of Monsanto and Cargill, producing seeds which are also sterile.”

“Adding insult to injury, when an agribusiness corporation is able to demonstrate that a farmer’s fertile seeds contain a gene of its engineered plants, it takes him to court and forces him to pay for using his own seeds.”

“If, despite the formidible hurdles U.S. agribusinesses place in his path, an Indian farmer has a good crop, it must then compete with cotton the same corporations produce in the U.S., using a $4 billion government subsidy they receive each year to keep the international price of cotton low.”

“India’s farmers once produced all of the country’s edible oils from mustard seed, sesame seed, linseed and coconut.  Then, in 1998, Physicist Vandana Shiva relates, ‘Monsanto and Cargill obtained a ‘ban on indigenous oils.’  Today, 70 percent of India’s edible oils are soya and palm, ‘dumped on’ the country by U.S. global corporations.”

“During the past decade, the activities of Cargill, Monsanto, Unilever, ADM and other agribusiness corporations, have led more than 165,000 of India’s small farmers to commit suicide; many of them (the cruelest of ironies), by drinking Monsanto’s glyphosphate pesticide, RoundUp.”

“Where Cargill’s soybean production is destroying the Amazon rainforest, the purchase of massive and growing quantities of palm oil by U.S., Japanese and European capitalist corporations is doing the same thing to the rainforests of Borneo.”

“Since 1990, Indonesia has razed 61 million acres of its South Borneo rainforests, planting palm oil trees in their stead; and, it plans to level and palm-tree-plant another 61 million acres by 2030.”

“Replaced with palm oil tree plantations, Malaysia’s immense North Borneo rainforests have almost disappeared, along with the orangutan and exotic birds which lived in them.”

“Finally, the U.S., and other capitalist states whose productive orders are approaching the terminal stage, are not only eliminating employment in the Third World, they are doing it at home as well.”

“The off-shoring of U.S. manufacture was Step-One of a process now impacting nearly every occupation.”

“If you have a problem with your computer (probably made in China) and phone the  manufacturer, you’ll speak with a technician living in India.”

“Call your hospital to challenge an expense and you may discuss it with someone in Ireland employed by the firm that does the hospital’s billing.”

“Doctors and dentists have begun to feel the effect of this Natural and Necessary phenomenon.”

“Google ‘medical tours,’ and you will receive over 500 ‘hits’ promoting plastic surgery, kidney transplant, heart-bypass, knee, hip and shoulder-joint replacement at hospitals located in Mexico, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, even Iran.”

“You’re assured the physicians have received the latest training—very likely in the West—and, that they use the most up-to-date diagnostic and medical equipment, sold to them by Japanese or Western capitalist corporations.”

“Besides a round-trip flight, surgery and hospitalization, the tour agency will arrange for your recovery in a luxury hotel, fed according to your personal tastes, and visited regularly by a physician; all for a fraction of what you would pay for these services at home.”

“Google “dental tours,” and you’ll get only a few less ‘hits;’ with Costa Rico, Turkey and Croatia included among the countries where you could have transmacular joint surgery or tooth implantation performed.”

“Then, there’s information technology (IT).”

“According to the conventional wisdom of large corporations which obtain H1 and L1 visas for foreign (principally Indian) IT employees, there’s a dire shortage of Americans trained in that field.”

“Economist Paul Craig Roberts has countered that proposition, citing numerous corre-spondents who are unable to find IT jobs despite having impressive credentials.”

“One, a resident of Dayton, Ohio, wrote Roberts: ‘I feel like an alien in my own country—as if Dayton had been colonized by India.  NCR and other local employers have either offshored most of their IT work or rely heavily on Indian guest workers.  The IT department of National City Bank across the street from LexisNexis is entirely Indian.  The nearby apartment complexes house large numbers of Indian guest workers filling the engineering needs of many area businesses.’”

“Today, Roberts adds, ‘the jobs of Indian guest workers may /themselves/ be on the verge of being offshored’.  ‘The relentless drive for cheap labor now threatens the foreign guest workers who displaced America’s own engineers.’”

“‘Princeton University economist Alan Blinder estimates 30 to 40 million American high end service jobs ultimately face offshoring.’”

“’In the developed world, Asia Times /recently reported/, particularly in the United States, the scope of jobs disappearing overseas is widening beyond all imagining, to professions that almost nobody expected to be hit, and with far higher incomes than anybody thought possible . . .  From engineering to equity research and financial management, to knowledge management, to revenue-cycle management – a whole panorama of high-income employment are inexorably going. . . .  McKinsey & Co, the international consulting firm, projects that the flight of jobs offshore to developing countries will grow by 30-40 percent a year over the next five years.’”

“Regarding the lower-end service jobs of middle-class Americans, it’s fairly obvious who’s helping capitalism do them in: They are! ”

“From food chains, to Walmart, to Home Depot and Lowe’s, large retail stores have  installed do-it-yourself checkout stands, significantly reducing the number of employees required for given dollar amounts of sales.”

“Provided helpful instructions by Home Depot and other hardware outlets, millions of  Americans are doing their own plumbing, painting, electrical work and remodeling.”

“Using Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), and internet on-line banking, in little more than a decade Americans have produced a 50 percent decline in the number of cashiers and tellers banks need.”

“What kinds of low-tech jobs is capitalism providing to replace those which disappear?  Drug pusher, prostitute, police officer, prison guard, security guard and border guard are among the more important.”

“Over 260 privately operated prisons have sprung into existence, offering investment opportunities and modestly paid ‘careers’ to Americans who are able to justify defining fellow citizens as ‘criminals’ for using or selling, often small amounts, of marijuana or cocaine.”

“The U.S. now has 2.2 million people in jail: 737 per 100,000, as compared with its closest capitalist-country rivals (England 148 per 100,000, Japan 62, and France 85.)”

“Fifty-five percent of federal prison inmates are incarcerated for drug offenses, only 11 percent for violent crimes.”

“Selected American universities have been designated ‘Homeland Security Management  Institutes,’ and offer a wide variety of courses on law enforcement.”

“The Department of Labor predicts that by 2012 there will be a 22.4 percent increase in detectives and criminal investigators, a 24 percent increase in patrol officers, correctional officers and ‘first line managers of police and detectives,’ and, a 31.8 percent increase in security guards.”

“But the most expedient instrument being used to keep the U.S. capitalist economy afloat is the Military-Industrial complex.”

“Professor Joan Roelofs detailed its operation in a CounterPunch essay.”

“’Spread throughout the country,’ Roelofs wrote: ‘war industries are crucial in providing employment in . . . the rust belt of the Midwest, the shoe belt of New England, the cotton belt of the South.’”

“’The MI corporations and their employees are major consumers in their communities, purchasing real estate., furniture, clothing, food, medical services, entertainment, tap dancing lessons, etc.’”

“’/T/he military is deeply involved with disaster relief, which brings many more good people into its orbit: Red Cross volunteers, state and local government officials and staff, Vista Workers, etc. . . . Northrop is very generous to career services’ officers in higher education.  Programs preparing disadvantaged students for college do well.’”

“’Military contractors are attentive to every kind of minority organization: Asians Against Domestic Abuse, and the Vietnamese American Community (Halliburton); the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, and the National Society of Black Engineers (Northrop Grumman); the Holocaust Museum and the Chinese Community Center (GE).  Boeing has funded the Congressional Black Caucus and the Urban League.  Lockheed even contributes to the Sons of Norway. . . .  Children are nurtured: Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Boys and Girls Clubs, YMCAs, YWCAs, Little Leagues, UNICEF, Children’s Defense Fund, etc., receive substantial grants.’”

“In the ‘go forward or go down’ world of capitalism, preventing its economy from imploding now requires the U.S. to sell ever-increasing quantities of guns, planes and bombs.  That, Roberts observes, makes Hezbollah and Iran ‘terrorists’ ipso facto, for the simple reason ‘they don’t receive billions in U.S. military aid and cannot put armies in the field with American tanks.’”

“Machiavelli tacitly acknowledged the connection between the United States’ military-industrial complex and its foreign policy when he remarked that defending the country’s Third World interests from expropriation after WWII led it to drastically increase the production and sale of weapons.”

“However, he offered no materialist explanation for the growing challenge to U.S. investments in the underdeveloped world.”

“From the 1960s to the 90s U.S. corporations with threatened Latin American interests had their own novel theory.”

“A ‘Revolution of Rising Expectations’ was taking place, they reasoned.  Life for Central and South Americans was improving.  But, made aware of First World luxuries by the media, many young people were impatiently, and unjustly, proposing violence to acquire a share.”

“The U.S. government promoted this idealist nonsense, ignoring the mountain of material evidence presented by social scientists and investigative journalists that, except for the region’s elites, conditions were rapidly worsening for most Latin Americans.”

“As in the Middle East today, many of the elites’ sons and daughters were unable to find employment which could socio-economically sustain them; while, particularly in Peru, Northeastern Brazil, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Uruguay and El Salvador, poor indian communities were experiencing a suffering they hadn’t known since the 1930s.”

“As in the Middle East today, the socio-economic injury which children of South America’s elites were experiencing prompted the more humane among them to discover/empathize-with the far greater distress of the poor.”

“Embracing that part of my theory which describes exhausted feudal orders of production being replaced by capitalist systems, like the Russian and Chinese revolutionaries before them, they proposed seizing large foreign businesses and using the profit which operating them yielded to industrialize their countries, erecting state-capitalist systems that would provide employment for their middle class and poor, as well as for themselves.”

“You know the rest of the story, so I won’t waste time on elaborate detail.”

“The Latin American rebels were menacing major U.S. corporations, and that was sufficient for the U.S. to identify them as ‘communists’ and go on the attack.”

“”Make the economy scream!’, Nixon ordered when Chile’s President Salvador Allende seized I.T.T. and the U.S. copper multinationals, offering to pay what the expropriated corporations claimed their properties were worth when paying taxes.”

“With indispensable U.S. assistance, Allende was overthrown on September 11^th, 1973, and General Augusto Pinochet, a fascist dictator who sincerely believed he was purifying his country of evil, seized power.”

“That corporate victory was followed by ’Operation Condor,’ beginning in 1975.”

“Right-wing generals and admirals took control in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay and joined with Pinochet to identify and assassinate the hotheaded youths leading the struggle for change; simultaneously suppressing worker/peasants movements.”

“At least 30,000 humanistic young men and women lost their lives in Operation Condor. Many were brutally tortured and buried, or, tossed into the sea, some alive, some dead, from helicopters and planes.”

“As with Allende’s deposal, Operation Condor would have been impossible without U.S. sponsorship and grandscale military and logistical aid.”

“During the 1980s Central America was similarly bought, bullied and butchered back in line.  An estimated 200,000 poor indians were slaughtered in the process, entire villages wiped out.”

“Then, came the 2000  dot-com catastrophe.”

“Machiavelli observed the attendant U.S. stock market losses exceeded $7 trillion.”

“What he neglected to add is that 82 percent of those stocks are held by the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, which meant over $5.7 trillion of the loss was suffered by the rich.”

“The U.S. economy was in the doldrums, with many large companies hurting badly.”

“Bechtel Corporation’s earnings peaked at $15.1 billion in 1999, then plummeted to $11.6 billion in 2002.”

“Halliburton was also having trouble.”

“Under Dick Cheney’s guidance Halliburton merged with Dresser Industries in 1998, becoming the largest oilfield engineering, services and construction corporation in the world.”

“But Dresser had lost numerous suits for asbestos related deaths, resulting in a 43 percent drop in the value of Halliburton’s stock in 2001.”

“With the collapse of the Soviet Union and ending of the Cold War, U.S. defense budgets had also fallen throughout the 1990s and employment in the defense industry fell with it.  More than 2 millions defense industry jobs were lost between 1992 and 2001.”

“Keeping in mind that communities always unify around those ideas which will most effortlessly sustain them: With the United States’ economy depressed and much of its manufacturing base off-shored, with the largest, most profitable remaining industries military-industrial in nature, what would you expect this country to do?”

“Exactly!”

“Representatives of the U.S. elite whose social existences were most in jeopardy spontaneously discovered/created an enemy whose defeat would require spending from hundreds of billions, to incalculable trillions of dollars on military hardware and military conquest: ‘Islamic terrorists;’ meaning any Muslim who stands up against the United States’ increasingly injurious practices in their countries.”

“Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy and a neocon defender, has stated the essence of their brilliantly profitable and pragmatic logic:”

“We’re in ‘a war for the Free World. . . . /a/ conflict in which nothing less is at stake than our ability—and that of our children and grandchildren—to live in freedom and prosperity. . . . We are at war primarily with adherents to a dangerous, totalitarian ideology–Islamofascism.’”

“Since Saddam was a Muslim, since he sided with the Palestinian struggle against Israel, and resisted U.S./British attempts to gain control of his country’s economy, and, more importantly, its oil, it made sense to begin the war against Islamofascism by invading Iraq.”

“In preparation, a month before the attack Cheney convened an ‘Energy Task Force’ whose members included executives and lobbyists from Enron, Exxon-Mobil, Conoco-Phillips, Shell and BP America.’”

“Richard Behan relates Cheney’s Task Force ‘poured over detailed maps of the Iraqi oil fields, pipelines, tanker terminals, refineries and undeveloped oil exploration blocks /and/ studied two pages of “foreign suitors for Iraqi oil field contracts”; companies negotiating with Saddam Hussein’s regime, none of which was a major American or British firm.’”

“For many major U.S. corporations, the remarkable financial benefits coming from the ‘anti-terrorist’ invasion of Iraq were immediate.”

“Bechtel enjoyed ‘a revenue of $16.3 billion in 2003, reversing a three-year slide.’”

“In March 2004 the San Francisco Chronicle reported:”

“’. . . the invasion provided a multibillion-dollar boost to the United States’ largest construction and engineering firms.  Although Bechtel Corp. and Halliburton have received the most public scrutiny, the billions of tax dollars pouring into Iraq’s reconstruction also flow through such competitors as Parsons Corp., Fluor Corp. and Washington Group International.  For sheer size of contracts, none of the reconstruction firms can rival Halliburton . . . . The company, once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, holds contracts potentially worth between $12.6 billion and $16.8 billion.  Bechtel won $2.83 billion in contracts for repairing electrical plants, water systems, airports and railways.’”

“For U.S. weapons manufacturers, the ‘war on terror’ has been downright glorious. ’Since September 12, 2001’, writes Robert Dreyfuss, ‘defense spending has exploded.  For 2008, the Bush Administration /has/ request/ed/ a staggering $650 billion, compared to the already staggering $400 billion the Pentagon collected in 2001 . . . U.S. defense spending in 2008 will amount to 29 times the combined military spending of all six so-called rogue states: Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.’”

“In an article of October 31^st, 2007, Robert Scheer noted Lockheed Martin had already ‘reaped a 22 percent increase in profit’ for the year, ‘while rivals for the defense buck, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, increased profits by 62 percent and 22 percent, respectively, and Boeing’s profits jumped 61 percent.’”

“Following their anti-Muslim-terrorist logic, the Bush neocons have spread the largess derived from conquering and killing them widely.”

“Between 9/11, 2001 and June 2007, Bush requested, and Congress granted, $44 billion for biological warfare research. BASF, GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly Corp, Monsanto and Pfizer are among the many companies reputed to be involved.”

“U.S. mercenaries are benefitting handsomely.  The State Department’s ‘private security’ corporations DynCorp International, Triple Canopy and Blackwater USA, have been awarded contracts valued at over $4 billion, Blackwater alone receiving $1 billion since 2001.  Dyncorp was awarded a contract for $1.2 billion to train Iraqi police, and another $600 million to assist with ‘drug eradication’ in Colombia, Bolivia and Peru.”

“Even two public relations firms, The Rendon Group, and The Lincoln Group, have been cut in on the take.”

“By 2005 Rendon and Lincoln had been paid more than $400 million for helping sell the Iraq War to Americans and Iraqis, and for polishing the image of the U.S.-installed governments of Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“From the outset of the war, with its economy starved for profit, the U.S. has made a ‘grab-and-gobble’ effort to extract it from Iraq.”

“The Organic Consumers Association describes how in 1991, and again in 2003, ‘U.S. bombing raids targeted cattle feed lots, poultry farms, fertilizer warehouses, pumping stations, irrigation systems, fuel depots and pesticide factories, the very infrastructure of Iraqi agriculture.’”

“Then, ‘one month after shock and awe,’ Daniel Amstutz, a ‘former Cargil Corporation executive,’ was assigned ‘to oversee’ Iraqi agriculture’s ‘rehabilitation’. “

“Before leaving Iraq in June, 2004, L. Paul Bremer, Head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, issued a body of ‘orders’ mandating the kind of make-money-by-driving-Third-World-peoples-to-the-wall policies which are causing such deep hatred of the United States throughout most of the Middle East.”

“Antonia Juhasz reviewed Bremer’s more truculent dictates in Foreign Policy in Focus:”

“’Order #17: grants foreign contractors, including private security firms, full immunity from Iraq’s laws.  Even if they kill someone or cause environmental damage, such as by dumping toxic chemicals or poisoning drinking water, the injured party can not turn to the Iraqi legal system; the charges must be brought to U.S. courts under U.S. laws.’”

“’Order #39: Privatization of Iraq’s state-owned enterprises; allows 100-percent foreign ownership of Iraqi businesses; unrestricted tax-free remittance of all profits and other funds; 40-year ownership licenses; /it permits/ U.S. corporations operating in Iraq to own every business, do all the work, and send all their money home.  Nothing needs to be reinvested locally . . . no Iraqi need be hired, no public services need to be guaranteed, and workers’ rights can easily be ignored.’”

“’Order #40: turns the banking sector from a state-run to a market-driven system, allowing foreign banks to . . . purchase up to 50 percent of Iraqi banks.’”

“’Order #49: drops the tax rate on corporations from 40 percent to a flat rate of 15 percent.  The income tax rate is also capped at 15 percent.’”

“IF your understanding of matters economic, social and political is determined by material evidence, by now I will have convinced you that:”

“Except for a diminishing number of First and Third World elites, 21^st century capitalism is making it difficult-to-impossible for peoples in both hemispheres to reproduce their social existence; and, the principal instrument the United States currently uses to hold its capitalist structure together is military-industrial expenditure, justified by the neocons’ insane anti-terrorist vision.”

“But that’s not the worst of terminal capitalism’s tragic impresses.”

“Straddling the earth like a biomechanical beast, it inflicts environmental destruction and lethal pollution around the globe; and those injuries are being done to everyone, from wealthy Saudi, U.S. and Chinese elites, to the most destitute communities of Afghanistan and Sub-Saharan Africa.”

“Google ‘pollution of _________,’ typing in the name of any country, state, province, large city, ocean, river or lake, and you will get page after page of ‘hits’ describing the poisoning of our species’ food, air and water, the destruction of the global environment, the crippling-to-fatal diseases which the poisoning and environmental destruction are producing; and, the failure of anyone, anywhere, to do anything meaningful about it.”

“To quote from just a few such ‘hits’.”

“The Mediterranean Sea: ‘Italy’s environmental minister said that in thirty years care of the Mediterranean Sea it has not improved, /it/ has worsened. . . . Much of the fish we eat comes from the Mediterranean, so if we pollute it, we are polluting ourselves. . . . Mercury levels in fish are 20 times the maximum levels recommended by the UN World Health Organization, while human intake of polycylic hydrocarbons—derived chiefly from petroleum and coal tar—are 100 times permissible levels.’”

“The Caspian Sea: ‘The oil industry is one of the main sources of Caspian Sea pollution. /T/wo countries, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, extract oil from offshore fields, /and/ Russia plans to start in the next one or two years.  There is also contamination of soil and groundwater with agricultural chemicals, pesticides, salination, and water-logging of soil due to poor irrigation methods.’”

“Lake Baikal: ‘Fed by 300 rivers, Lake Baikal is the world’s deepest (more than a mile), and oldest (30 million years), lake and its largest body of fresh water.  Baikal is now badly polluted, principally by pulp and paper mills and oil spills.’”

“The Aral Sea: ‘The Aral Sea of Central Asia is laden with sewage, pesticides and fertilizers.  When the Soviet Union diverted the Ama Dariya and the Syrdariya rivers which fed the Aral to grow cotton in the desert, they created an ecogical and human disaster. What was the world’s fourth biggest inland sea is now mostly desert.  The human misery is huge.  Tuberculosis is rife and on the increase in the population.’ ‘Cancers, lung disease and infant mortality are 30 times greater than they used to be because the drinking water is heavily polluted with salt, cotton fertilizers and pesticides.’”

“Onondaga Lake: ‘New York’s Onondaga Lake, which feeds Lake Ontario, is now among the world’s most polluted, laced with hazardous chemicals by the Olin Corporation, one of the companies which dumped tons of toxic chemicals into Love Canal, destroying the town.  Olin also shipped 40-tons of mercury to Nicaragua and poured it into Lake Managua.’”

“The Great Lakes: ‘Industry and farmers on land surrounding the Great Lakes have used the lakes to dispose of waste chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) produced in the manufacture of electrical equipment, and organochlorine insecticides such as dieldrin and DDT.   A report for the Canadian government has called living by the Great Lakes a “hazard to human health”.  Scientists have found increasing evidence that pollutants in the water are causing insidious neurological damage, particularly in children, and infertility among adults.’”

“The Hudson River: ‘People living in towns and cities along New York’s Hudson River are cautioned not to eat its PCB-laden fish, including shad and sea bass, or, to drink or bathe in its waters.’”

“The Nile River: ‘Nile River pollution includes municipal waste water, industrial “black spots,” and household rubbish that find their way directly to the 120 kilometer area where the Nile ends its journey and meets the Mediterranean. Damietta, Egypt’s population of over 914,614 depends on this heavily polluted stretch of river as its only source of water.  More than half of the patients treated at Damietta Hospital’s Internal Medicine Unit suffer liver and kidney diseases and infections because of the polluted water they drink.’”

“The Amazon Rainforest: ‘Environmentalists estimate that around 2.5 million acres of the Amazon rainforest were compromised or destroyed in Texaco’s search for oil in Ecuador.  It is a disaster that has left the jungle ravaged and its people dying of cancer.’”

“’Members of an indigenous tribe from the Peruvian Amazon are suing the oil giant Occidental Petroleum in California’s Superior Court  . . . Andres Sandi Mucushua, a tribal representative, said: “My people are sick and dying because of Oxy.  The water in our streams is not fit to drink and we can no longer eat the fish in our rivers or the animals in our forests.”’

“The Amazon River: ‘In the last 20-30 years, carnivorous predators have undergone large declines and native fishermen have an increasing number of health risks facing them.’ ’The Amazon River Dolphin was listed as a vulnerable species in 1994.  The Giant Otter has been listed as an endangered species since 1973.  Along main tributaries epidemiological and toxicological data have shown high mercury levels in fish-eating riverside populations.’”

“The Yangtze River: ‘The Yangtze River has become the biggest sewer system in China.’  According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in the Three Gorges reservoir area alone ‘there are over 3,000 industrial and mining enterprises, which release more than one billion tons of wastewater annually, containing more than 50 different pollutants.  Included in the wastewater are such poisonous elements as mercury, cadmium, chronium, arsenic, phenol, lead, and cyanide.’”

“The Gulf of Mexico: ‘Three times as much nitrogen is being carried into the Gulf today compared with levels 30 years ago or at any time in history.  The Mississippi River enters the Gulf as a “toxic soup.” Every summer there is an area south of the Louisiana coastline larger than Massachusetts that is hypoxic.  These waters do not carry enough oxygen to sustain marine life.’”

“The Indian Ocean: ‘During a six-week expedition from February to April 1999, a team of scientists from the U.S.A., Europe, India, and the Maldive Islands, participating in the Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX), found a mass of pollution as large as the area of the United States – four million square miles or 100 million square kilometers.  The polluted areas include the Arabian Sea, between India and the Arabian peninsula, and the Bay of Bengal, between India and Southeast Asia.  Countries located within the Indian Ocean include Sri Lanka (Ceylon) and the Maldives, located southwest of India. The whole Indian subcontinent is surrounded by massive pollution.’”

“As for the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, it should suffice to remind you of what you’ve been reading and hearing about for several decades: the dying of coral reefs vital to ocean food chains; pollution from nuclear testing; pesticide and fertilizer runoff from large farms; medicines—ranging from aspirin, to contraceptive pills, to antibiotics—excreted and leached into the seas; the Pacific swordfish you’re warned to avoid, the salmon and tuna you’re cautioned to eat no more than once a week, and not at all if you’re pregnant.”

“Then, there’s ‘acid rain’. The use of coal as a primary fuel is a major source of the pollution of earth’s air and water with sulfur dioxide and mercury.  ‘China’s dust and soot cloud travels all the way to the United States.  In California, Professor Tom Cahill tracks pollution across the Pacific, and a lot of what he sees these days comes from China.’  ’It’s estimated China may one day generate five times more pollution than it does today.’”

“Poured into the air by coal burning power plants, the coal dust returns to earth as acid rain and snow.  Sulfuric acid, nitric acid and carbonic acid from cars, trucks, and factory farm operations are acid rain’s other main components.”

“As a result, hundreds of thousands of acres of trees in the Northeastern U.S. are either threatened or dying; as are forests throughout Scandinavia and Western Europe.”

“Vast tracts of the Czech Republic’s Jizera Mountains’ forests have perished, and acid rain has destroyed so much of Germany’s famous Black Forest that it’s often referred to as ‘dead.’”

“Driven by rapid industrial development, acid rain is an impending disaster in China, India, Russia and the Republic of Korea. Between 1990 and 2010 Asia’s sulfur dioxide emissions are predicted to tripple.”

“And it’s not just trees that are being injured by the acid rain. Entering lakes, stream and rivers, the acid is killing insects, fish and shore birds.  Virgina’s native trout streams are succumbing, as are many of the lakes, streams and rivers of Wales.

“The world’s oceans are also becoming increasingly acidic.  Their acid content increased by 30 percent in the last few decades, affecting everything that lives in, or is dependent upon them, including humans.”

“Yet the U.S. Big-Coal industry (which is at once Big-Oil, Big Natural Gas, and Big-Nuclear, since they are now largely merged) is pushing for more.”

“’Antrim Caskey laments: ‘Just as the American people and the world are beginning to recognize the necessity of shifting to renewable energies, Big Coal is pushing its dirty fossil fuel as the solution to /the United States’ energy/ crisis.  Big coal and its cohorts envision a “clean coal technology” future by liquifying and gasifying coal, capturing the carbon emissions and injecting them underground.  But scientists and environmentalists say “clean coal” does not exist. The National Resources Defense Council says that using the term “clean coal” makes about as much sense as saying “safe cigarettes.’”

“’The extraction and cleaning of coal inevitably decimates ecosystems and communities.’ Robert Kennedy Jr. writes: ‘Coal is only cheap if one ignores its calamitous externalized costs, dead forests and sterilized lakes from acid rain, poisoned fisheries in 49 states and children with damaged brains and crippled health from mercury emissions, millions of asthma attacks and lost work days.  If the American people could see what I have seen from the air and ground during trips to the coalfields of Kentucky and West Virginia: leveled mountains and ruined lives, there would be a revolution in this country.’”

“Big Coal’s representatives have been licking their lips at the prospect of tearing the tops off more U.S. mountains to sell vast quantities of coal to China, whose own coal mining operations result in the deaths of 6,000 miners every year.”

“ENOUGH!”

“What can be done about the global catastrophe I’ve described: the environmental desolation, the elimination of social existence sustaining, earth-protecting, employment?”

“While I’m open to argument, my own answer to that question is Nothing! Nothing—until and unless the capitalist order of production and distribution is dismantled and replaced.”

“Alarmed, governments around the world have been passing laws aimed at cleaning up streams, lakes and seas and regulating acid producing emissions, but the problems only continue to worsen.”

“According to a recent estimate published in Time Magazine, reducing sulfur dioxide emissions by 50 percent in the Northeast U.S. alone would cost $7 billion yearly.  If so, doing it globally would cost trillions.  And that would do nothing about all the other environmental devastation.”

“Just cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch ‘isn’t an option,’ says Chris Parry of the California Coastal Commission, and his colleagues agree.”

“The ‘Garbage Patch’ may be the ultimate iconic representation of what our species is doing to the environment.  ‘An enormous island  of trash, twice the size of Texas, floating in the Pacific between San Francisco and Hawaii,’ the patch is ’80 percent plastic, weighs more than 3.5 million tons,’ and is ‘growing at a brisk rate.‘”

“Given its size, content and distance from land, removing the patch would be a mega-trillion-dollar operation, requiring the design and construction of special equipment; and a second, smaller garbage patch is floating between Hawaii and Japan.”

“As for the world’s mounting unemployment, European capitalist states have begun following the United States’ and Israel’s lead, labelling individuals whose actions disrupt their injurious practices at home ‘criminals,’ then putting them in jail; those who do it abroad, ‘terrorists,’ and employing military violence to suppress them.”

“An honest examination of capitalism’s contamination of the planet’s air, streams, lakes, rivers and seas with myriad pollutants from myriad sources, the oil, mercury, arsenic, lead, cadmium, nitrogen, cyanide, toluene, styrene, phosphate, sulfur dioxide, antibiotics and PCBs, its mad use of nuclear energy and equally mad proposals to ‘safely’ store nuclear waste, along with its elimination of jobs in both the First and Third worlds, can only lead to one conclusion:”

“The capitalist productive-distributive order isn’t up to the task of stopping the global cataclysm it’s creating, let alone building a better world.”

“Capitalist states are no more capable of solving the disastrous problems they’re causing than nomadic slave communities could have built houses and chateaux for feudal Europe, or European feudal communities could have satisfied the need for factories, and the clothing, weaponry, railways, steam engines and trains those factories produced.”

“Which brings us to the third of our fundamental questions:”

“If capitalism has turned into a monster devoid of self-control, has it, like its predecessors, also spawned a more effectual successor which many capitalists are having to nurture in order to reproduce their own social existence?”

“Once that question has been posed, the answer screams for recognition.”

“Remaining competitive is obviously forcing capitalists to construct an integrated global community in which everyone is a potential buyer and seller of goods and labor, and cost is the only thing determining who buys or sells what to whom.”

“When capitalists took that Natural and Necessary step they opened a can of worms.”

“Or, more descriptively, they entered a den of snakes.”

“The integrated global community which capitalists are defensively building can only be made to function with increasingly sophisticated high-technological devices: Global Positioning Systems (GPS), robotic machinery, computers, the internet, broadband, bluetooth, etc..”

“As the computer and the internet are already demonstrating, though an indispensible tool  for capitalism, high-technology is also a revolutionary threat, because living and working in the high-technology world aborning will require that people take full and free control of their lives, and, it will require that they share.”

“The high-techies who write capitalism’s most complex software programs use an ‘open source software’ called Linux. ‘Open source software projects,’ writes Steven Johnson, ‘tilt heavily in the direction of freedom: No one owns the underlying code behind Linux, thousands have contributed to it’, and ‘the software grows more sophisticated over time.’”

“The very ‘ethos’ of this high-tech community, Johnson continues, ‘has a strong communitarian tradition that encourages contributions which are rewarded only by the respect of one’s peers.’  ‘/M/odern software applications are modular enough to be built by committee, with thousands of dispersed participants chipping in their ideas; and, because the code base is openly shared with anyone interested in looking at it—unlike Microsoft’s hidden Windows source code—interesting new ideas “spread freely from one to another over the globe”’.”

“The high-technology world of freedom, participation and sharing Johnson depicts doesn’t just touch some people’s lives. Everyone’s becoming immersed in it, and the reproduction of everyone’s social existence increasingly depends upon its continued evolution.”

“As a consequence, the open source egalitarian virus is spreading like a virulent flu.”

“In 1999, Shawn Fanning helped lay the foundation of the post-capitalist order when he founded Napster. Fanning’s objective was to enable anyone with a computer and a little high-tech savvy to download and distribute music freely. Though the original Napster was quickly sued into oblivion, other ‘peer-to-peer’ (P2P) programs just as quickly replaced it: iMesh, Morpheus, Limewire, BearShare and Kazaa.”

“Morpheus’ website contains a disclaimer: ‘Using Morpheus for the uploading or downloading of copyrighted works without the permission or authorization of the copyright holders may be illegal and could subject you (or the ISP subscriber) to civil and/or criminal liability and penalties.’”

“The disclaimer is a tacit recognition many users are going to do precisely what it cautions against; namely, freely download and exchange music, movies and other copyrighted files.”

“Besides circumventing the film and music conglomerates which previously exercised unchallenged and highly profitable control over their industries, P2P groups are also undertaking a significant reduction in the corporate advertising to which subscribers are subjected.”

“Then, there’s ‘Wikipedia,’ a ‘people’s encyclopedia’ freely written and modified by any person who has access to the internet and interest in a given subject.”

“Wikipedia’s relativistic truths are determined not by ’voices of authority’ or individuals with vested interests. What determines whether a given Wikipedian truth will stand, and for how long, is the amount of material evidence and syllogistic reasoning its defenders can provide the world in its support.”

“The website YouTube allows anyone, anywhere, to freely share their camcorder clips with the global community, permitting each individual viewer, not a corporation, to determine what is sad, humorous, or politically important..”

“Founded in 2003, MySpace enables users to connect with people in other cities, states, countries, who have similar interests, and to freely exchange pictures, music, etc. MySpace now has over 300 million users.  FaceBook, also free, performs the same essential functions, has approximately 60 million users, and is rapidly growing.”

“With thousands of Left, Right and Liberal websites/blogs available, internet users can circumvent the national/international news presented by major media, getting news representing the experiences and interests of the people making the news directly, rather than news interpreted by corporate executives, or political representatives of the elite, individuals who have their own sharp axes to grind.”

“As a result, the viewership of corporate-controlled evening news programs has, as one observer phrased it, ‘fallen like a rock.’”

“CBS Evening News had 19 million viewers in 1980, 7 million in 2006.  During the same period NBC’s Evening News viewership dropped from 17.2 million to 8 million; ABC’s from 15.9 million to 8.25.”

“To make up for a consequent loss in advertising revenue, the media increased the number of ads viewers must endure, driving more people from the TV to the computer.  Aware those still watching TV tend to be older, the media run more ads for drugs to ease/remedy every conceivable illness—real or imagined—suffered by the aged, turning additional younger, healthier viewers away.”

“Through Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and other internet search engines, computer users are moving in the direction of becoming their own doctors, psychologists, washing machine repairmen, lawyers, etc..  Free or low-cost professional and non-professional advice and assistance is readily available on nearly every subject.  Internet users can also purchase every kind of goods on line, including prescription drugs.”

“Robert Scheer has noted even rabbis, ministers and priests find their lives are being transformed by the high-technology crusade.  ‘The open source programming movement which harnesses the wisdom of crowds to collectively make a better product has grown beyond its software roots to embrace religion,’ Scheer writes.  ‘The holy texts of “yoism” shun the wisdom of high priests and rely instead on teachings that evolve online organically.’ I.e., people are creating their own philosophical perspectives.”

“In 2006, musician Bob Ostertag posted all of his recordings on the Web where they can be downloaded free.  Ostertag’s explanation for doing it is worth citing at some length:”

“’When record companies first appeared, . . . making and selling records was a major undertaking. . . . Making recorded music available to the general public required a significant outlay of capital, which in turn required a legal structure that would provide a return on the required investment.  The contrast with the World Wide Web today could not be more striking. . . . Putting 28 years of recordings up on my Website for free download was a simple procedure involving a few hours of effort, yet resulting in instant, free, world-wide distribution.  It makes no difference if 10 people download a song or 10,000, or if they live on my block or in Kuala Lumpur: it all happens at no cost to either them or me other than access to a computer and an Internet connection.  Recording companies used to provide you with the tools you needed to hear recorded music.  Now they charge you for permission to use tools you already have, that they did not provide . . . /W/hat they are doing is imposing a “listening tax.’”

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