NB: The book itself is available on Libcom here.

The title of Loren Goldner’s latest book, Revolution, Defeat and Theoretical Underdevelopment (Haymarket Books, Chicago, Illinois, 2017) aptly sums up the basic thesis. What links his four case studies of the 1917 Russian Revolution; the experience of the Turkish Communist Party with Russia and the Communist International between 1917 and 1925; the failings of the revolutionaries in the Spanish Revolution and Civil War between 1936 and 1939; and the failure of the Trotskyist Fourth International in the Bolivian Revolution of 1952, is what he terms “theoretical underdevelopment.” None of these revolutionary movements were able to fulfill their promise of a new socialist society. And Goldner makes the case that the lack of a clear theoretical basis that could chart a direction forward was partly responsible for the failures.

In the case of the Russian Revolution, Goldner correctly focuses on the opportunities missed by underestimating the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. Peasants, at the time of the revolution, constituted 90 percent of the population. And 98 percent of them had organized production in the form of communes known as the mir. Furthermore, the peasantry had shown itself for generations to be militant revolutionaries. But there were elements in the revolutionary socialist movement inside of Russia that failed to see the possibilities of a path to socialism based on the mir itself. Instead, the dominant view was that Russia must go through a stage of capitalism to get to socialism. This had been debated in Russia during the time of Marx who, in the last decade of his life, was studying Russian agriculture and alternative paths to socialism. He argued with those who posited the need to have capitalism first that if this was Marxism that he was not Marxist. But after Marx’s death, Engels suppressed much of this work. And Lenin adopted such a stage theory before and after the Russian Revolution. His stance eventually opened up the door to Stalin after Lenin’s death to engage in a mass collectivization of agriculture that destroyed the mir and institutionalized the revolution in a state capitalist form.

This failure was compounded by Russia’s stance in Turkey after World War I. Goldner’s title for his chapter on Turkey is “Socialism in One Country before Stalin and the Origins of Reactionary ‘Anti-Imperialism.’ ” He traces the revolutionary movement in Turkey between 1917 and 1925 when Lenin’s Russia and the Third International chose to support the regime of Mustafa Kemal, known today as “Attaturk,” who had put an end to the Ottoman Empire, over a vibrant revolutionary communist movement that was also active in the region. Kemal had been successful in kicking Greece, which was supported by the British, out of Turkey. But there were soviet-style revolutions throughout what we today call the “Middle East.” Even Trotsky chose the “anti-imperialist” Kemal regime over these movements. In fact two months after the Turkish Communist Party leadership was massacred by the Kemal regime, Lenin signed a trade agreement with Kemal’s Turkey, making it clear that Turkish communists and all the other revolutionary movements in the region would not have the support of the Russians. A narrow focus on a regime intent on constructing first capitalism and then socialism took precedence over possible revolution in the East.

This direction was intensified once Lenin died and Trotsky was first exiled and then assassinated. Stalin was firmly in control of international communism and he demonstrated that in Spain. Goldner traces the origins and practice of the Spanish Revolution of 1936–39, as well as its demise after the civil war between the Spanish Republicans and the military forces of Fascist General Francisco Franco. Goldner contends that in 1936:

the Spanish working class and parts of the peasantry in the Republican zones arrived at the closest approximation of a self-managed society sustained in different forms over two and a half years, ever achieved in history.

According to Goldner, the anarchists were a clear majority and had the support of both the industrial proletariat and the peasantry. In explaining the collapse and military defeat of the Republic, Goldner offers a critique, not only of Stalin’s communism and Trotskyism, but the theory and practice of the anarchists. He argues that:

The Spanish anarchists had made the revolution, beyond their wildest expectations, and did not know what to do with it.

Their reluctance in both theory and practice to seize power, which would have involved imposing a dictatorship, opened the door to Stalin’s gambit of attacking both anarchists and Trotskyists. And that weakened the Republic to such an extent that Franco’s forces were able to defeat it militarily.

In Bolivia, Goldner examines the revolution of 1952 when a formation called the Movimiento Nacional Revolucionarío (mnr) seized state power. A military junta controlled Bolivia at the time the mnr seized power. The mnr was a broad revolutionary movement that had been in existence since 1941. By 1952, they favored the nationalization of the mines and agricultural reform. Goldner goes into great detail about the formation of the mnr in relation to many other political forces that were active in Bolivia. He discusses specifically the fascist influences on the mnr and also a dominant false view of Marxism that was rejected as “Eurocentric.” Instead, the mnr favored a form of revolutionary society that would be some synthesis of European and Andean-Amazonian cultures. The main Marxist current active at this time was Trotskyist. Goldner spends a great deal of time looking at the various currents of Trotskyism that came to bear on its influence in Bolivia. Briefly, its leaders did not believe the time was ripe for socialist revolution in Bolivia. And they saw their role as constituting a “left wing” in a bourgeois-nationalist anti-imperialist movement that could push toward socialism by giving the mnr “critical support.” As a result the actual reforms instituted by the mnr government between 1952 and 1964 were limited to, as Goldner puts it, “corporatist nationalizations and half-baked agrarian reform.”

The theme that embraces all four case studies in this book—Russia, Turkey, Spain and Bolivia—was the need for theoretical clarity in revolutionary movements. Overthrow of a government will lead to missed opportunities if there is not a clear idea of where the movement is headed once state power is gained. The book is well documented so that a serious reader can follow Goldner’s exhaustive research to gain a deep understanding of four important historical revolutionary movements.

One aspect of each case that was not dealt with directly was that each revolutionary regime was threatened militarily by outside forces. After the Russian Revolution, there was an ongoing ferocious civil war aided and abetted by Britain and France. In Turkey, Kemal was opposed by the British who also suppressed communist forces. In Spain, it was Franco who attacked the Republic and Stalin who attacked the anarchists who controlled the Republican regions of Spain. And in Bolivia, there was constant military upheaval up to 1952 and the threat of us intervention. The question is whether strong theoretical clarity could have helped the regimes unite the people in opposition to these threats.

Goldner’s argument is grounded in his view that the wage-labor proletariat continues to be a “key force for a revolution against capital.” He also contends that the number of such proletarians in the world today is greater than ever. I agree and believe this book is an important read for today as we strive to meet the present crisis of capitalism and turn aside the reactionary trends that are on the ascendancy.

NB: The book itself is available on Libcom here.

A review of a book by a libertarian Marxist sympathetic to anarchism who analyses four revolutions in the 20th century and discusses their lessons

This book brings together a set of analyses of popular struggles in a number of countries—as its subtitle indicates. It is written by a someone within “the libertarian or left communist milieu” of Marxism (43), although he expresses a friendly attitude toward anarchism. Overall it has a conclusion, a rejection of “a methodology repeated again and again whereby different variants of the far-left set themselves up as the cheering section and often minor adjuncts to ‘progressive’ movements and governments strictly committed to the restructuring (or creation) of a nation-state adequate to…world capitalism. This methodology involves imagining…a healthy ‘left’ wing of a bourgeois or nationalist or ‘progressive’ or Third World ‘anti-imperialist’ movement that can be ‘pushed to the left’ by ‘critical support’, opening the way for socialist revolution….Their role is to enlist some of the more radical elements in supporting or tolerating an alien project which sooner or later co-opts or, even worse, represses and sometimes annihilates them.” (225)

Goldner believes that rejecting this statist and capitalist “methodology” is necessary to re-arm the far-left if it is to overcome “the nearly four decades of quiescence, defeat and dispersion that followed the ebb of the world upsurge of 1968—77…the long post-1970s glaciation….” (1) “I nevertheless part ways with a swath of currently fashionable theories; I still see the wage-labor proletariat—the working class on a world scale—as the key force for a revolution against capital.” (2) He writes, “the key force,” not the “only force,” since he includes peasants and other oppressed as necessary parts of an international revolution.

This overall conception, from a (minority) trend in Marxism, is consistent with revolutionary class-struggle anarchism, as it developed from Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin to the anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-communists.

However, Goldner shows the limitations of his knowledge of anarchism by a number of errors. For example, he remarks that “the ideology of pan-Slavism [was] also advocated by their anarchist rival Bakunin….” (57) Actually Bakunin had been a pan-Slavist before he became an anarchist, not since. Goldner refers to “the early mutualist (Proudhon-inspired) phase of the Peruvian and Latin American workers’ movement (…superseded by the global impact of the Russian Revolution).” (171—2) But after an early period, most anarchist influence in the Latin American working class was anarcho-syndicalist (although there was still some interest in credit unions and coops, alongside unions). This is why the Sandinistas and other Central American revolutionaries (nationalist and Marxist) later adopted black and red as their colors.These had traditionally been the colors of the anarcho-syndicalist-influenced workers’ movement.

Lenin and the Russian Revolution

Goldner writes that revolutionary libertarian socialist currents, such as anarchism, syndicalism, council communism, and the IWW, “were effectively steamrollered by Bolshevism…and the ultimately disastrous international influence of the Russian Revolution….” (9) In this book, his criticism focuses on Lenin’s misunderstanding of the Russian peasants. Lenin overestimated the extent of the peasants’ production of commodities for sale on the market. He overestimated the extent to which capitalism had taken root among the peasants. He overestimated the decline of the peasants’ communal institutions (the “mir”). He overestimated the class stratification among the peasants. These misunderstandings led to an authoritarian, repressive, and exploitative relationship of the Soviet state to the peasants. They were a major factor in the split between the Bolsheviks (Communists) and the peasant-based Left Social Revolutionary Party. That in turn contributed to the formation of the single-party dictatorship. (See Sirianni 1982) “The Soviet Union emerged from the civil war in 1921 with the nucleus of a new ruling class in power….” (43)

Goldner also reviews the relations of the early Soviet Union with Turkey, then led by the nationalist, Kemal Attaturk. Goldner had previously believed, with the Trotskyists, that it was only under Stalin that international Communist parties were turned into agents of the Russian state and the world revolution subordinated to Russian national interests. But he found that the government of Lenin and Trotsky had sought close relations with the Turkish nationalists, even as the Turkish government was repressing and murdering Turkish communists. He quotes a memo from Trotsky at the time, saying that the main issue of revolutionary politics in the “East” was the need for Russia to make a deal with Britain.

However, Goldner defends Marx, and—more oddly—Lenin from anarchist charges of laying the basis for Stalinism. “I…reject the commonplace view one finds among anarchists who see nothing problematic to be explained in the emergence of Stalinist Russia.” (43) If he means that the Russian Revolution needs to be analyzed in detail, without assuming any inevitabilities, then I agree. And there are libertarian-democratic, proletarian, and humanistic aspects of Marx’s thought. But anarchists correctly rejected Marx’s program of a revolution in which the working class (or a party speaking for the working class) would seize power over a state and establish a state-owned, centralized, economy. The anarchists had predicted that this would lead to state capitalism and bureaucratic class rule. Whether this is “problematic,” it seems to have been justified by experience.

Goldner denies “that there exists a straight line, or much of any line, from Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done? to Stalin’s Russia.” (43) Maybe not; there is a democratic aspect of WITBD?, a call for the working class party to champion every democratic cause large or small (peasants, minority religions, censored writers, etc.), no matter how indirectly related to working class concerns. But Lenin treated support for democratic issues as instrumental, steps toward his party’s rule, rather than as basic values. Overall he had an authoritarian outlook. This can be demonstrated from much more evidence than just WITBD? (See Taber 1988.)

Anarchists and Trotskyists

Discussing the Spanish revolution/civil war of the ‘thirties, Goldner is “anything but unsympathetic to the Spanish anarchist movement.”(119) His views are similar to that of the council communists (libertarian Marxists) Karl Korsch and Paul Mattick. Then living in the U.S., they were supportive of the anarchist-syndicalists in the conflict (Pinta 2017). Goldner writes, “The Spanish working class and parts of the peasantry in the Republican [anti-fascist—WP] zones arrived at the closest approximation of a self-managed society, sustained in different forms over two and half years, ever achieved in history.” (118) He quotes Trotsky saying pretty much the same thing.

However, “Spain was the supreme historical test for anarchism, which it failed…,” adding, “in the same way that Russia was, to date, the supreme test of, at least, Leninism, if not of Marxism itself.” (118) Instead of organizing the workers and peasants in their democratic unions, factory councils, communes, and militia units, to replace the collapsed national and regional states—the mainstream anarcho-syndicalists joined the national Popular Front government and the Catalan regional government. “The Spanish anarchists had made the revolution, beyond their wildest expectations, and did not know what to do with it….Everything in the anarchists’ history militated against ‘taking power’ as ‘authoritarian’ [and] ‘centralist’….” (126-7)

Goldner does note that there were some anarchists who advocated a revolutionary program, not of joining the bourgeois government or of “taking state power,” but of organizing a democratic federation of workers, peasants, and militia organization to manage the economy and the war. In particular, there were the Friends of Durruti who “called for a new revolution.” (141) (For more on the Friends of Durruti , see Guillamon 1996.)

The main lesson Goldner draws from the anarchists in the Spanish Revolution is the need for radicals “to think more concretely about what to do in the immediate aftermath of a successful revolutionary takeover….[to devote] serious energy to outlining a concrete transition out of capitalism.” (149)

Discussing the Bolivian revolution of 1952, Goldner shows how the Trotskyists made the same sort of errors as the anarchists had in Spain. There was a revolutionary situation, where the Trotskyists for once had a large influence among the rebellious (and armed) working class. Instead of advocating independent power to the mass workers’ organizations, the Trotskyists gave support to radical (bourgeois) nationalists, claiming that they were really on the road to socialism (although, Goldner demonstrates, the nationalists had fascist influences in their formation). “The Trotskyist POR…ended up providing a far-left cover for the establishment of the new [bourgeois] state.” (214) Eventually, the Trotskyists were no longer useful to the nationalists and were repressed (the classical “squeezed lemon” process). The regime swung to the right. This was another illustration of the “methodology” of radicals tailing “progressive’ movements and governments strictly committed to the … nation-state [and] capitalism,” as I quoted in the first paragraph.

Anti-Imperialism? Anti-Capitalism? National Liberation?

I find Goldner’s opinions on “anti-imperialism” and national liberation to be unclear. He is correct in rejecting the left program which substitutes national struggles for class struggles, which ignores class (and other) conflicts within oppressed nations, and which spreads illusions about the “socialist” nature of nationalist and Stalinist rulers. But it is unclear whether he regards national oppression as a real issue for millions of workers and peasants. If we recognize this as a real concern, then libertarian socialists can be in solidarity with the people of oppressed nations, while opposing their nationalist would-be rulers. It becomes possible to advocate national liberation through social revolution and to propose a class struggle road to national freedom.

This would seem to be consistent with Goldner’s agreement with Lenin’s WITBD? strategy of revolutionary working class support for all democratic struggles, as well as Goldner’s expressed agreement with Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution.” He specifically condemns the Popular Front government in the Spanish civil war for “the failure of the Republic to offer independence or even autonomy to Spanish Morocco (…) which could have had the potential of undercutting Franco’s rearguard, his base of operations, and, in the Moroccan legionaries, an important source of his best troops. “ (129) That is, the liberal-socialist-Stalinist-anarchist coalition failed to adopt anti-imperialist policies (due to Spain’s imperialism and its attempted alliance with French and British imperialism).

This is a fascinating book, with detailed analyses of revolutionary turning points in world history. Loren Goldner’s discussion of these events and the issues which arise from them is important and useful for anti-authoritarian revolutionaries to consider.

Guillamon, Agustin (1996). The Friends of Durruti Group: 1937—1939. (Trans.: Paul Sharkey). San Francisco: AK Press.


Goldner, Loren (2017). Revolution, Defeat, and Theoretical Underdevelopment: Russia, Turkey, Spain, Bolivia. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Pinta, Saku (2017). “Council Communist Perspectives on the Spanish Civil War and Revolution, 1936—1939.” In Libertarian Socialism; Politics in Black and Red. (Ed.: Alex Pritchard, Ruth Kinna, Saku Pinta, & David Berry.) Oakland CA: PM Press. Pp. 116—142.

Sirianni, Carmen (1982). Workers Control and Socialist Democracy: The Soviet Experience. London: Verso.

Taber, Ron (1988). A Look at Leninism. NY: Aspect Foundation.

*written for www.Anarkismo.net

NB: The book itself is available on Libcom here.

Revolution, Defeat, and Theoretical Underdevelopment:

Russia, Turkey, Spain, Bolivia

Loren Goldner,

Haymarket Books, $28.

When Marx wrote that a specter was haunting Europe, he didn’t mean “national liberation,” anti-imperialism, the “tasks of economic development,” or the stages theory of history. He said what he meant and he said “communism,” requiring the overthrow of capitalism, its ruling class and its ruling relations of production, by the proletariat. Marx didn’t quite imagine the corollary proposition to his evocation of the specter of communist future– that the socialists, the “left,” the big and small C communists would be the ones scared to death of ghosts.

If all of the bourgeoisie’s economics, philosophy, sociology, and psychology of the past century amounts to the evasion of, and flight from Marx’s critique of capital (and it does), that’s only because all of the history of the last 100 years has been the flight from proletarian revolution through the substitution of national liberation, anti-imperialism, stages theory, popular fronts, for class struggle. Nothing persists in capitalism like obsolescence, planned or unplanned. Nothing has more currency, more staying power than the forms of rebellion that embody, embrace, and imitate the capitalist relations of production.

Loren Goldner, activist, author, and editor of Insurgent Notes, has produced four essays on the obstacles placed in the path to power by revolutionists themselves and Haymarket Books has compiled the essays under a single cover, and the single title Revolution, Defeat, and Theoretical Underdevelopment: Russia, Turkey, Spain, Bolivia.

The essays examine four ideologies, Leninism, anti-imperialism, anarchism and Troskyism through the real history of revolutionary struggle.

We begin with Russia. We are always beginning with Russia. The Russian Revolution is, after all, that location in time and space where the working class created and installed the original organs of its power to rule society, the soviets.

Russia was the crucible that yielded up the compounded upheaval of proletarian power and peasant war known as permanent revolution, itself the translation of the theory of uneven and combined development into the practical activity of class struggle.

There is no mistaking that each of Goldner’s studies– Russia before and after the revolution; Russia’s engagement with Turkish nationalism 1920-1925; the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939; the 1952 MNR revolution in Bolivia–is a “grapple” with uneven and combined development and with permanent revolution as the only viable path to the overthrow of capitalism.

The basics of uneven and combined development are well…basic. Capitalism does not develop uniformly, or by formula, across the globe. The ability of capital in any particular, local, environment to refashion society, to revolutionize the relations of production is circumscribed, and compromised, by the existing relations of property in which capital emerges, or is grafted on its “host.”

Marx wrote that a certain productivity of agriculture is required for the development of social organization. Capital, in its quest to fulfill its essential, and only essential task, the accumulation of more capital, requires more than just a certain level. It requires continuous advances in agricultural productivity, expelling the population from rural production, detaching that population from direct production of its own subsistence, and transforming agriculture from a subsistence activity where only a surplus product is available for exchange and into an activity where all product must be exchanged for a) the producer to subsist and b) surplus product to be replaced by surplus value extracted by and for the owner of the means of production.

To create those conditions of laboring, capital has to overthrow the pre-existing relations of property, of private property. That’s a risky business for capital as its private property is enmeshed in the general networks of credit, debt, commerce, and trade with those pre-existing forms. That’s a risky business given the sanctity of private property to the bourgeoisie in general.

Where “local” capital finds itself surrounded, stifled even, by pre-existing relations of land and landed labor, capitalism as an international system is able to insert “islands”– “zones” of industrial activity where the condition of labor is that of wage-labor, essentially the same as the condition of labor in the most advanced countries.

The result of this uneven and combined development is that agriculture does not achieve a level of productivity able to sustain a “reciprocity” between city and countryside; sufficient to sustain the accumulation of capital; and that advanced capitalist economies dominate these areas.

Just as capital is overwhelmed by the weight of all pre-existing relations bearing down on it, the capitalist class cannot make, much less lead, a revolution.

This also means that while the working class can seize power during a social upheaval, that seizure can only be sustained through the transformation of agricultural production beyond the conditions of capitalist accumulation, beyond the condition of labor as wage-labor. For the proletarian revolution to be successful, the transformation of agriculture cannot be the imitation of or analogy to capitalism, i.e “state” as the imitation or analogy to “corporate” units.

So Goldner begins with the “agricultural question” and the Russian revolution. He explores Lenin’s misrepresentation of production in the countryside as being “capitalist” not only in tendency but in fact. No such capitalist dominance had occurred or was even emerging in Russian agriculture. The large landed estate, the landlord-peasant relation, as opposed to landowner-free farmer relation continued to dominate, and the Russian peasant commune, the mir or obschina, remained at the heart (and soul) of the peasant social organization.

While the Czar’s bureaucracy saw the mir as a tax collecting body, the mir was an organization designed to ensure an equitable distribution of land, and tools, among its members. This equitable “rationing” made the commune deeply resistant to commercial penetration

To argue that capitalism was becoming dominant in the Russian countryside required both a distortion of the empirical data and an ideological commitment to “developmentalist” economics, which is itself nothing but stages theory all dressed up in the clothing of “destiny.” It was an argument that, when turned into policy, was made at the expense of historical materialism and ultimately, social revolution.

After the civil war in Russia, the Bolsheviks adopted programs designed to appeal to the so-called “economic rationality”– the “individual commercial interest”– of the rural producer as the mechanism for developing agriculture and transferring surplus from the countryside to the city, from agriculture to industry. Goldner demonstrates that the commune undermined the appeal to such “rational self-interest.” The policies did, however, make the Bolsheviks advocates, even if unwilling or unwitting ones, for an economic differentiation among the peasantry, and thus made them, the Communists, substitutes for a bourgeoisie.

In discussing the NEP, Goldner correctly points out that the Bolsheviks intended it to “guide capitalism” in an effort to revive agriculture and industry. And he’s right when he says that the NEP was not a “restoration of capitalism,” but he’s wrong when he says “because capitalism had never been abolished in the first place.” The NEP was not a restoration of capitalism because capitalism had never been established in the countryside in the first place.

The peasant communes were under attack, prior to the revolution, certainly, as the “enlightened Czarists” (an oxymoron to beat all other oxymorons) sought a capitalist transformation of agriculture, but the communes survived, and remained as they had always been– subsistence plus marginal surplus units of production. The surplus was “marginal” in the sense that the surplus was not the organizing principle of production. The surplus product was made exchangeable, unlike the condition of capitalist agriculture where all product must be produced for exchange in order to realize the surplus value embedded in the whole.

The Bolshevik predicament was that the revolution could not adequately enhance agricultural productivity because agricultural productivity was already too low. The escape from this trick-bag, of course, was only possible through the expansion of the social revolution into the advanced countries, and this in turn required the ability and willingness to continue the pursuit of revolution in the less-developed countries.

Which gets us to Goldner’s second essay “Socialism in One Country Before Stalin.” This essay deals with the ebbs and flows of the Bolsheviks’ accommodation to post-WW1 Turkish nationalism, and in particular the “romance” with Kemalist Turkey under the guise of support for “national liberation.”

The raising of post-Ottoman Turkey as struggle for national liberation endorsed by the Bolsheviks (and the Third International) was a pragmatic decision by the Bolsheviks as no issue of national liberation existed. The conflict was an inter-, and intra-,capitalist, competition. The Bolsheviks engaged in their maneuvering in order to secure their borders with Asia against the British even if, or precisely because, revolution appeared imminent on those borders.

Those maneuvers involved the sacrifice, literally, of Turkish communist militants to the Kemal regime; the transfer of gold and weapons to Kemal after that sacrifice; and all of this in the period 1921-1925, before the policy of socialism in one country was announced; before the sacrifice of the Chinese Revolution on the altar of national liberation.

This might help us understand how of much of the “ebb” of the revolutionary wave was the result of the Bolsheviks’ (and the Third International’s) own actions. The answer? “A lot.”

National liberation has not always been presented as a mechanism primarily for class collaboration with a “national” “patriotic” or simply “petty” bourgeoisie but it has always been rationalized as a precursor, a stage necessarily prior to a proletarian revolution, akin to a “bourgeois democratic revolution” or even the unworkable “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.” What the Russian Revolution exploded in its triumph, the stages theory, the Bolsheviks brought back through the trap door of national liberation.

From precursor, national liberation becomes the substitute for class struggle; and from substitute it moves to become the opponent of class struggle. Thanks to Goldner’s essay we can answer another question: When does a workers’ state stop being a workers’ state? When it establishes policies and undertakes actions separate, apart, distinct from, and in opposition to the advance of proletarian revolution.

Goldner’s remaining two essays in the volume, “The Spanish Revolution, Past and Future,” and “Anti-Capitalism or Anti-Imperialism…” (concerning the MNR and Bolivia), deal with the legacy of two revolutions where defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory.

In both Spain and Bolivia, the revolutionary struggle, populated by workers and rural poor is again sacrificed to the “stages” of history, the “economic tasks of development,” the ideology of substitutionism that becomes the practice of opposition to social revolution.

In the case of Spain, the anarchists presented overwhelming, but atomized class power. Failing to centralize that power, to exercise that power as its class dictatorship, the anarchist organizations allowed the popular front to organize counter that class, counter that proletarian revolution, as if the struggle were one for a bourgeois democracy.

Finally, in the examination of the MNR and Bolivia, Goldner engages in an exhaustive examination of the fascist, near-fascist, populist, and corporate ideologies on the formation of a “national movement.” Goldner is fascinated by the impact of German Romantic Populism, and the German military, on the formation of movements among intellectuals and the military officer in the countries of Latin America. If I were a glib person, I might say comrade Goldner is a bit too concerned with the ideological formulations of intellectuals.

I’m not. I’d say that the development of capitalism in Bolivia was so constrained by internal factors like the Spanish mita, the encomienda, the hacienda, and by the market power of the advanced capitalist countries that intellectuals, administrators, professionals, students, military officers were compressed between the rock and the hard place, that space between the rock and the hard place being a void. Under those circumstances, ideologies of the state, as an entity somehow raised above class differentiation, and representing the “people” as the volk provided the intellectuals with a fantasy of accumulation in the midst of the most impoverished of realities.

Beyond that, the story of the Bolivian Revolution and the MNR is the story of the armed intervention of the workers in the coup initiated by the MNR against the mine-owners’ government; the conversion of a coup into class struggle; the frittering away of that revolution by the Trotskyist POR which, terrified by the specter that once haunted Europe, constituted itself as an adjunct to the “left wing” of the MNR. Goldner is correct when he writes that “to ‘blame’ the POR for ‘betraying’ the Bolivian Revolution is to fall into the idealist trap of saying ‘they had the wrong’ ideas’ instead of explaining why they had the ideas they did.” The explanation is not, however, that those ideas were then— that those ideas were the legacy of a capitalism not sufficiently, nor globally, dominant. In fact, those ‘ideas’ were precisely a recoil, a flinching, in the face of a capitalism that was indeed globally dominant, had itself overgrown the notions of definitive stages– it was and is, and will always be until its overthrow, a capitalism where the limitations are not simply limitations upon capital, but limitations of capital itself.

February 27, 2018

From: https://anticapital0.wordpress.com/impermanent-revolution/

…Silicon Valley fever is a disease of a social body infected with the overheated pursuit of riches and expansion.

—Richard Walker

Richard Walker says in his exceptional book Pictures of a Gone City that someone who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the decades following World War II would not recognize the place today. As one such person, who fled the gentrification of the area decades ago, I can only agree. Walker is an emeritus professor of geography at uc Berkeley and seems to have made the social, political demographic and environmental history of the Bay Area his life’s work. He also uses a Marxist framework of analysis, though is a bit weak on real class struggles and strategies looking forward. He also seems to treat some official state and local institutions with more respect than I would, presenting them as partial ramparts capable of slowing or correcting the negative trends at work, at least under pressure “from below.” He is no fan of the Democratic Party, but also no mass strike theorist, and this blind spot is one main flaw of the book. But I’ll take Walker and this flaw, along with all his rich layers of analysis, rather than neither. (He takes his title from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem “Pictures of the Gone World” which opens the book.)

The Bay Area after 1945 was a unique “scene” in the United States, something of which I only became fully aware when I left it. What happened (or at least accelerated) there after the mid-1970s was the superimposition of a fictitious, artificial, culturally and historically ignorant, self-satisfied and narcissistic tissue over most aspects of the previously lived reality, as if those driving the process were using Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle as a counter-insurgency manual. Not to jump ahead, but the fact that almost no ordinary black people any longer live in San Francisco, says just about everything.

Based on Walker’s title, I for one opened the book expecting more of a portrait of postwar Bay Area Bohemia and its general demise. The San Francisco/Berkeley core of the region was something of a refuge for 1930s and 1940s leftists keeping their heads down during the worst (late 1940s/early 1950s) years of McCarthyism, for which payback came in the 1960 riots against the notorious huac (House Un-American Activities Committee) hearings in San Francisco, which effectively killed it off. The working-class Italian restaurants in San Francisco’s North Beach, frequented by radical longshoremen and poets alike, the cafés, the jazz clubs, the (black) Fillmore district, night clubs such as the Hungry I or the 1960s satirical review The Committee, art cinema houses, Pacifica Radio, bookstores such as City Lights (founded by Ferlinghetti in 1951) or Cody’s in Berkeley, the affordable rental housing in the pre-hippie Haight-Ashbury and elsewhere in pre-yuppie Victorians, were all part of a “scene” that tilted left, building on Kenneth Rexroth’s post-1945 circle of poets and anarchists. Beat poets and writers such as Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac later animated this scene, in which writers and artists and musicians and political activists could live cheaply and pursue their work. It was a scene of a time and a place, about whose broader social and economic limits those who breathed its heady atmosphere did not think too much, until gentrification wiped it out or neutered it, leaving behind little except icons (as with City Lights bookstore or the Cafe Trieste at Vallejo and Grant Streets) of a bygone era. It was the exact opposite of rank apologist Richard Florida’s “creative classes” of web site designers and the startup capitalists who displaced it.

Walker is aware of this demise, and critiques it, but not quite as forcefully as the money-driven forces that buried Bay Area Bohemia and working-class radicalism deserve.

Meanwhile, at the south end of the bay, those money-driven forces, associated with Silicon Valley high tech (or simply “tech”) were preparing to turn parts of the region into one of the wealthiest areas in the world, one which had little or no place for the left Bohemian and labor scene sketched above. Much has been written about the role of the hippie counter-culture in the rise of Silicon Valley, embodied in its best-known icon Steve Jobs of Apple, who traveled barefoot in a saffron robe in India before becoming an entrepreneur. So be it. Walker argues that this counter-cultural background of Silicon Valley tech partially explains its triumph over Boston’s more staid Route 128, being more inclined to “think outside the box.”

This “high tech” scene had origins in the South Bay region (Palo Alto and environs) as early as the 1940s, but truly took center stage in the 1970s, ultimately giving rise to most of “tech’s” contemporary “fangs” (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google and Snapchat). To the high tech “campuses” of the South Bay, however, outfitted with everything from exercise rooms to free gourmet food to childcare available 24/7, Walker counterposes the three or more million proletarians, increasingly Latino and Asian, who do the unglamorous scut work that keeps the region moving, and who are immune to the hype surrounding Silicon Valley since, as he puts it, “so little of the manna from tech heaven fell their way.” Nor does he neglect to mention the extra-long hours that tech workers themselves put in, in between their extra-long commutes. (Some of them merely sleep under their desks.)

Walker gives a “thick description” of the dot.com scene of the 1990s, notorious for such short-lived meteors as pets.com, or others, described by older, less sanguine figures such as banker and onetime Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker, marveling at multi-million dollar ipos (Initial Public Offerings) of startups that had never turned a profit, all of it culminating in the dot.com meltdown of 2000. The 1990s were the era of the “New Economy,” presumably one which had transcended the grey-on-grey laws of capitalist accumulation, until it hadn’t. This was similarly the era of the Bill Clinton mini-boom of the late 1990s, the only uptick to date for workers’ wages in a (briefly) tight labor market since the long stagnation began in the early 1970s. It also saw the ephemeral beginnings of a pay down of the Federal deficit, with “surpluses as far as the eye could see.” It seemed too good to be true, and it was. In a new expansion after 2000, hundreds of millions were again “pouring in to back up start-up Wag Labs, whose app connects dogs owners and dog walkers.” “In the end,” Walker writes, “the ideology of plucky start-ups ran into the hard realities of commerce and capital…”

Given the intrusion of the big tech firms into every aspect of life, as has, for example, been coming to light in Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, it is hardly surprising that disillusionment “with the lords of the Tech World…has been exploding in the last few years, taking the shine off the image of once shining knights of liberty, equality and information for all.” Walker demystifies the “much ballyhooed entrepreneurs and start-ups of today” who in reality draw on a century of earlier electronics technology development. They cannot be reduced to the “discoveries of modern science and men in white coats.” He does not forget the “cold bath of governmental assistance”: World War II purchases of radar and sonar tubes “made” by Hewlett Packard and Varian; the Department of Defense dominated digital computing right through the 1960s. Not to be forgotten was the National Science Foundation, funding research at Stanford and Berkeley: “The original internet was a DoD project…”

The theory of the creative class, writes Walker, “leaves out the majority of workers in the industry.”

The tech industry may be the pinnacle of modern industrial sophistication, innovation, and profitability, but it still rests on a mountain of ordinary labor…the tech industry could not function without a host of people doing manual, routine and unglamorous jobs. Counting such workers is made more difficult still by widespread subcontracting, primarily of people of color, Filipino, Vietnamese and Latino. This goes together with the failure to mention all the labor done in and for the tech industry overseas. The global reach of the Bay Area’s tech giants is motivated by one thing above all: access to cheap labor.

These include Foxconn’s workers making iPhones in Shenzhen, where a wave of high-rise suicide leaps in 2010 led the company to “install nets outside dormitory windows.” Contrary to the dominant ideology touting “risk takers,” writes Walker, “the success of the region rests on broader foundations, which are too often missing from the story of Silicon Valley fever: industrial clustering and urban agglomeration, the base technology of electronics nurtured in the region, and the labor of thousands of skilled workers and millions of others.” The fangs and the tech elite also engage in massive tax avoidance though the usual venues of “the Bahamas, Luxembourg and the Channel Islands.”

For all this wealth, Bay Area tech has been slammed by two major stock market routs, in 2000 and then in 2008. The region lost “half a million jobs, and only crept back to the employment level of 1999 by the end of 2015.” These meltdowns “bankrupted thousands of homeowners”; two million state employees lost their jobs and unemployment hit 12 percent. Commenting on the post-2009 expansion still underway when his book went to press, Walker writes:

The mainstream press rarely delves into the cumulative consequences of recessions, other than quoting unemployment figures. Reports on growing homelessness, poor health, and rising divorce rates are rarely connected to the hidden costs of economic recession crashing down on the heads of ordinary folks. But when the current economic wave breaks on the reef of capitalist excess, a huge amount of wreckage will be revealed on the shores of the Pacific Coast’s star performer.

In the Bay Area work force, the area “may be a high average wage region, but millions of people still go home with middling to lousy paychecks… People in humble jobs, such as custodians, security guards, and nursing aides, are not feeling the buzz.” As for comparative national income differentials, “the four counties of the West Bay come out much worse, ranking somewhere on a par with Guatemala, putting the heartland of High Tech neck and neck with a nation of latifundia…Low-wage work employs well over a third of the labor force, or around 1.3 million people, which translates into 3–4 million in those working families. This is only slightly better than the proportion of low-wage work in California and the nation…the well-off elite and salaried workers depend every day on the labor of millions of ordinary workers who are overwhelmingly not white and not male.” Inequality, Walker points out, “literally makes people sick and unhappy… Not surprisingly, among rich nations, the United States and Britain—where inequality is greatest—come off as the worst in measure after measure, from longevity to obesity, mental health to physical ailments.” The two countries also have “the weakest social safety nets and the harshest attitudes toward personal failure… The glow of the Bay Area’s success is deeply tarnished by the tragic residue of thousands of homeless people on street corners, living out of cars, and camping under freeways.” One troglodyte member of the tech elite did not mince words:

Every day, on my way to and from work, I see people sprawled across the sidewalk, tent cities, human feces and the faces of addiction. The city is becoming a shantytown… The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city. They went out, got an education, work hard, and earned it… I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle and despair of homeless people on my way to work every day.

Cities such as San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland have ramped up the war on the homeless, ejecting (among other things) tent encampments. A “society that allows so many people to fall into public destitution in the face of abundance is a moral failure of the first order.”

“A truly shocking aspect of work in the bay metropolis is how many lousy jobs there are in such a high-flying, sophisticated economy.” Walker identifies these in retail, hotels, cleaning services, food preparation and domestic services. When high costs price such workers out of housing, “a chorus of howls about their absence goes up from employers, politicians, and upper-class households.”

“The postwar regime of stable, full-time and lifelong employment is a thing of the past.” The new normal is flexible or contingent employment, subcontracting, temp work and self-employed “consultants.” These latter make up between one-quarter and one-third of all jobs, culminating in the “Gig Economy.” The latter is “the antithesis of collective responsibility and class solidarity.”

Walker is presenting an ongoing process of class formation: “A new American working class is coming into being and it is heavily weighted with people of color…something unprecedented is happening here in the Bay Area and across the state… The working population has been transformed from majority White to majority Brown, with a touch of other colors.” Day laborers are undocumented immigrants “from native Indio groups in Southern Mexico and Guatemala who do not always speak Spanish, let alone English.” They stand on street corners and work in “heavy landscaping, debris clearing, crawling under houses, and other nasty jobs.” One quarter of all Californians are foreign born, coming from all over the world. This “overlap between immigrant rights and labor organizing” has made California a national vanguard while “the rest of the United States is still trying to get its collective head around mass immigration.” Nevertheless, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump have deported millions, and the current amplified hysteria around “illegal and criminal” immigrants is feeding the raids of ice (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and Homeland Security around the country.

There is much more to Walker’s book, far more than can be included in a (relatively) short review. I urge Bay Area (and other) militant comrades to bracket Walker’s shortcomings as a Marxist and to use this book for more incisive interventions of their own. The hard left would do well to produce its own, improved version of such an exposé.

August 2018

I haven’t written much lately…partly for personal reasons. I’m old and my head and hands find it increasingly difficult to combine chain-sawing and wood splitting with thinking about politics and manipulating a keyboard. However there are some more general reasons for my silence that others may share to some extent. We’re at a political moment that is disorienting on many levels. Experiences that should strengthen us do the opposite. Opportunities and potentials explode on the scene only to disintegrate almost as quickly as they arise…generally leading to increased demoralization rather than providing the foundation for new initiatives. And such initiatives, to the extent they attempt to develop functional and resilient structures on a left mass or left cadre basis, start too small and tend to quickly get smaller—fragmenting and imploding over dismayingly similar conflicts—typically routine dilemmas and disruptions that we should have learned how to deal with, but quite apparently haven’t. And this all happens when a number of features of objective conditions appear to favor the emergence of a generalized opposition to established power.

It’s not much of a comfort, but these problems aren’t unique to our sector of the left, to this part of the world, or to this period of history. This is where I think it might be helpful to remember Gramsci’s oft-cited words about the characteristics of a period where the old is dying but the new is not ready to be born:

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying but the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.1

Not that that such an observation provides much comfort either!

For some decades we have lived through a period where capital’s global triumph also marked the beginning of its secular crisis. The ruling class’s chronic and expanding difficulties in maintaining capital’s productivity and profitability interact with growing fault lines in its political legitimacy and effective power…shredding the pretensions that capitalism marks the end of history that were widespread not so long ago. Our dilemma…or one of them…is that this underlying crisis doesn’t develop uniformly. It passes through rough cycles and we are at a relatively bad point in the latest of these where capital is achieving some adaptive successes. One of the benefits of being quite old is that I have lived through a number of such cycles, including the end days of the one that initiated in an earlier period of capitalism—the depression of the ’30s. Hopefully I’ve maintained sufficient political awareness to provide some context and perspective for the current left malaise.

If we take 1935, 1968, and 2009 as points of significant breaks in capital’s evolutionary stability—a rough periodization that I know doesn’t apply uniformly across the global terrain, although it works for most of the capitalist core—they start from sharp breaks with political routine characterized by a flowering of radical possibility. Elements of creative spontaneous struggle appear everywhere and look to be inexorable. What previously seemed utopian or even impossible becomes a basis for live action on a mass level; mass action that includes widespread epistemological breaks that appear to foreshadow the emergence of a mass revolutionary subjectivity. Experience indicates that every cycle of crisis and the explosion of political possibility that accompanies it lead to an adaptive response of capital on both the level of profit (the economic) and that of power (the state). For examples; the emerging conflict between nationalism and globalism—too simple a dichotomy I know—is both an index of crisis and a path towards a possible capitalist recovery. The juxtaposition of an autonomous fascism with new forms of globalized social democracy should be understood in the same vein in my opinion.

Failures to adequately understand these circumstances promote some distinct left responses and an assortment of illusions. One such rests on the expectations that the dramatic changes of the moment of crisis are linear and incremental—and will define the political context for an extended period—if not permanently. A possible implication of this view—familiar in our tendency—is to limit our role to facilitating the mass process and, above all, to avoid becoming an obstacle to them—even as such processes begin to lose their oppositional potential. An alternative approach of others on the left sees the transformed political scene as the long-delayed fruits and validation of past labor and takes steps to implement a claim on organizational leadership. In the process the “vanguard’s” politics become either irrelevant or more frequently, indistinguishable from those of overt reformists. The best that can be said about such positions is that they fail to recognize major characteristics of these cycles of struggle.

Unfortunately, moments of general insurgency tend to be short-lived and, like the initial burst of popping popcorn, they are followed by increasingly sporadic and incomplete explosions of the lagging kernels. This process creates some forks in the road for radicals where diminishing grouplets search for better outcomes from fewer struggle opportunities while attempting to survive as groups and individuals. This frequently contains a tinge of desperation and results in a moralistic exhortative approach to political work that is not sustainable with normal-assed people. At the same time an increasing fraction of the momentarily radicalized lapse into cynicism or accommodations to some variant of reformist politics—which itself is often only a stepping stone to cynicism and passivity. As the reality of a mass epistemological break with established politics recedes into nostalgic memories and overly hopeful estimates of current forces, we quickly find ourselves in a period which the jaded among us call a lull—sometimes not very helpfully. I think it’s useful to think about what can and should be done in such a “lull”—particularly if it can be kept in mind that no lulls will be permanent.

I want to raise two related responsibilities and opportunities: first it’s important to use the opportunity to collectively think about our circumstances; and second this collective thinking should never lose focus on the potential for the radically changed circumstances which will certainly materialize. Sooner, I think, rather than later. Just a few words on both points!

I emphasize the importance of combining attempts to develop a radical collective will with an organized approach to developing capacities to think collectively—involving exchanges of estimates and hypotheses between positions that don’t agree and don’t necessarily look to reach agreement; exchanges designed to expand critical participation in the discussion rather than gaining adherents to some version of the truth; exchanges that aren’t subordinated to organizational empire-building or distorted by assumptions that the relevant questions are self-evident and that adequate answers are close at hand.

My initial assumption is that the general instability of the situation—the “flailing and churning” within capitalist power and the diverse questioning of its legitimacy and permanence—will turn out to be decisive. However, that is certainly open to question and challenge and I recognize that history is not clearly on my side on the issue. While this assumption is in some tension with the need for clear and critical political discussion that is not weighed down with a lot of preconceptions, I think it is vitally important to focus on the circumstances, objective and subjective, that raise possibilities for breaks, “events,” qualitative changes in context, and to propose approaches to deal with the possibilities that these will create.

• 1“Wave of Materialism” and “Crisis of Authority,” Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers, 1980: p. 276.

The alt-right, or alternative right, represents the most recent major upsurge of far right politics in the United States. Blending white nationalism, misogyny, and aggressive social media activism, alt-rightists helped put Donald Trump in the White House and proclaimed themselves the vanguard of the Trump coalition. Although they never believed Trump shared their politics, most of them hoped he would buy time and political space with which they could further their own goal of a white ethno-state.1

In 2017 alt-rightists made a push to broaden their scope and impact by linking up with more traditional neonazi forces and expanding their activism from the internet to physical rallies and street violence. But since the brutal August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, at which one antifascist counterprotester was killed, the alt-right has suffered a series of setbacks. Several major alt-right websites have been forced to find new platforms or shut down entirely, infighting and personal conflicts have weakened the movement, and antifascist mobilizations have blocked their mobilizing drive. In addition, as Trump embraced conventional conservative positions and priorities on many issues (from cutting corporate taxes to bombing Syria) and pushed out several of his more “America First”–oriented advisors (such as Mike Flynn and Steve Bannon), many alt-rightists became increasingly alienated from Trump. Some declared that he has been bought off or blackmailed by Jewish elites, while others held out hope that his populist-nationalist tendencies could still win out.2

Recent actions by Trump (launching trade wars against China and the eu, criticizing nato allies, and holding friendly meetings with Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin) have reintensified his conflict with the conservative establishment, while the crackdown on undocumented immigrants has made his administration look more nativist and authoritarian than ever. How have alt-rightists responded to these developments? In this article I’ll explore alt-rightists’ current outlook, focusing on three issues: attitudes toward Trump, responses to the border crackdown and law enforcement more broadly, and political strategy in a time of weakness.

In broad terms, the alt-right’s views on Trump fall in between those of the Patriot movement (which appears to be squarely behind him) and neonazi groups unaffiliated with the alt-right (which are generally hostile).3 Alt-rightists like the steps Trump has taken to restrict immigration and punish immigrants, but wish he would go a lot further. Applauding the Supreme Court’s decision upholding Trump’s third ban on travel from majority Muslim countries, Hubert Collins of American Renaissance called on him to ban immigration from El Salvador, Honduras, and Jamaica, claiming that “such a ban would save lives and slow the displacement of white Americans.”4 Identity Evropa (arguably the most successful effort to move alt-right politics from the internet to real-world organizing) simply calls on the president and Congress to end all immigration to the United States.5

Writers at Occidental Dissent have been generally scathing in their assessment of Trump’s administration. Marcus Cicero, for example, wrote, “We were promised isolation and got further Middle Eastern conflict, we were promised a protectionist economy and got watered down free trade, we were promised sealed borders and a wall and got hordes of feral Mestizos, and we were promised realpolitik and got slavish devotion to Israel.”6 Brad Griffin, Occidental Dissent’s founder, who blogs under the name “Hunter Wallace,” agreed with Mitt Romney (an establishment conservative loathed by alt-rightists) that Trump’s actions in his first year as president were very similar to what Romney himself would have done.7 But even Griffin and Cicero have praised a few of Trump’s actions, such as ending Obama-era affirmative action policies and holding peace talks with North Korea’s Kim.8

In contrast, Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer has tended to downplay his criticisms of Trump. “I know his faults. I know there are Jews in his office. I know he bombed Syria. Twice…. But when I watch these rallies, my heart is saying ‘there’s the leader of my people, he is fighting to protect us.’ ” And further: “what he is doing, at least with the rallies and the tone, is Fascist in spirit. He is authoritarian, nationalist, and anti-liberal. The racial element isn’t there yet explicitly, but it certainly is there implicitly.”9

As a rule, alt-rightists have been strongly supportive of the Trump administration’s border crackdown and “zero tolerance” policy toward undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers. Hubert Collins declared that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ice) protects Americans against foreign criminals and deserves full support.10 Many alt-rightists, like Patriot movement activists and other Trump supporters, have deflected criticisms of ice’s family separation policy by turning pro-family arguments against ice’s critics. American Renaissance wrote of “illegals” “using children as human shields” and dismissed criticisms Trump’s border policy as “hysteria” and “liberal viciousness.”11 Huntley Haverstock of Counter-Currents, drawing on the manosphere-type misogyny that has become standard across the alt-right, declared that newsmedia sound clips of immigrant children crying for their parents represented “emotional abuse against women”—more specifically, an “attempt to hijack women’s hindbrains and override all possibility of rational thought” because “the sound of crying has such a powerful mammalian impact on women that it can literally cause them to lactate.” Haverstock called this supposed physiological reaction healthy and positive in the right context, but in a political context it was “an argument against giving women the vote.”12

However, alt-right discussions regarding ice have gone well beyond these sort of reflexive attacks on immigrant rights politics. Anglin proclaimed that ice is Trump’s “Praetorian Guard,” the only non-corrupt federal enforcement agency, which the president will use to implement martial law and impose a dictatorship.13 As with many of Anglin’s statements, it’s hard to know to what extent he was being serious and to what extent he was just mixing wishful thinking with provocation for its own sake. In contrast, VDare columnist Federale has long argued that ice is a sham immigration enforcement agency that actually prefers to target non-immigrants.14 R. Houck of Counter-Currents went much further, declaring that all police and federal law enforcement agencies are part of a “hostile occupation force” and “are used first and foremost to protect Jewish interests.” Reversing the arguments of Black Lives Matter activists, Houck claimed that police actually are more likely to use deadly force against whites than blacks, and that “all bias in policing is in fact against the white race.”15 These assertions, aimed to counteract many rightists’ pro-police sentiments, highlight the difference between system-loyal and oppositional versions of right-wing politics.

The alt-right’s setbacks of the past year and misgivings about Trump have spurred some members to take a sober look at the movement’s strategic prospects. Many Republicans are predicting an electoral triumph this November and see the recent victory of democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a New York congressional primary as proof that the Democratic Party is out of touch with most voters. American Renaissance’s Gregory Hood disagreed, and, like other alt-rightists, his political hostility extended not just to liberals and leftists, but also to conservatives:

Despite (or because of) media coverage, racial dissidents have lost the ability to organize openly, while the socialist Left has gained in strength…. The established conservative movement has largely cheered this process. The Trump victory did not lead to a more welcoming environment for identitarians within the gop but increased scrutiny and barriers.

In contrast, the dsa [Democratic Socialists of America] has the most powerful combination in politics—revolutionary cachet combined with support from the power structure.

* * *

The Republican message of “economic growth” is uninspiring compared to the Democrats’ racial socialism, especially when corporate America and economic elites are more favorably disposed towards multiculturalism than they are to Trump-style nationalism. Unless President Trump can truly transform the gop into the “Workers Party” as he promised during the campaign, it’s unlikely his coalition will last.

In this climate, Hood urged white nationalists “not to daydream about Donald Trump’s ‘Red Tide,’ but to build institutions to ensure our people’s survival in the years when whites will be living under an occupation government.”16

Writing from a similar perspective, James Lawrence of Counter-Currents dismissed hopes that large masses of whites will embrace white nationalism and rise up against the established power structure as “alt-right victory fantasies.” He urged alt-rightists to learn from how twentieth-century fascist movements achieved power. Using Robert O. Paxton’s analysis in The Anatomy of Fascism (which is also a favorite among many critics of the right), Lawrence drew a number of lessons, including these:

• “The fascist experience…illustrates the importance, yet also the limitations, of metapolitical action,” i.e., a “process of mental preparation going back decades, in which the failings of liberalism and democracy were exposed and the decline of Western civilization was discussed. This smoothed the way for the creation of fascist movements in the wake of the Great War, but did not guarantee their success.”
• “successful fascist movements must cultivate not only the masses but also the vested interests of society. They must be encouraged, or at least tolerated, by an established ruling elite focused on the greater threat from leftist revolution.”
• fascism “cannot be recreated in the present era.… The modern avatar of leftist revolution is not a military threat from beyond the frontier [such as the ussr in the 1920s], but a political enemy ensconced in every official institution, and it is now the ‘antifa’ and ‘sjws’ who enjoy judicial leniency and elite patronage.”
• “Of the three stages of fascist pathbreaking, the only one available to us right now is metapolitics…. This can never induce the masses to rise up and replace that oligarchy of their own accord, but it can ensure that they become convinced of its illegitimacy and unwilling to react strongly against threats to its power. That is the first step from which all others must follow.”17

Lawrence and Hood’s pessimistic but reasoned call for alt-rightists to prepare for many years of base-building stands in stark contrast to Anglin’s glib optimism, in which Donald Trump serves as a deus ex machina for the movement’s own failings. These are two sides of the same movement. Today the alt-right is significantly weaker and more isolated than it was a year ago. However, it has bolstered supremacist violence, expanded the space for hardline rightists in mainstream politics, and demonstrated the political power of internet memes and coordinated online attacks. The alt-right remains a significant political force, which could either rebound or pave the way for other incarnations of far right politics. Andrew Anglin and other in-your-face trolls have been the most public face of past alt-right efforts. But in the years ahead, it is strategic thinkers such as Hood and Lawrence who represent a greater threat.

1. Matthew N. Lyons, “Ctrl-Alt-Delete: The Origins and Ideology of the Alternative Right,” Political Research Associates, January 20, 2017.↩
2. Lyons, “An Alt Right Update,” Poliitical Research Associates, August 7, 2017; Michael Edison Hayden, “Is the Alt-Right Dying? White Supremacist Leaders Report Infighting and Defection,” Newsweek, March 5, 2018; Shane Burley, “The fall of the ‘alt-right’ came from anti-fascism,” Truthout, April 7, 2018.↩
3. Shorty Dawkins, “Yes, The Tide is Turning Against the Globalists,” OathKeepers, June 25, 2018; “Yep, Even Donald Trump Serves the Jews,” Vanguard News Network, April 14, 2018; “anp Report for January 27, 2018,” American Nazi Party, January 27, 2018.↩
4. Hubert Collins, “Time for More Travel Bans,” American Renaissance, July 1, 2018. ↩
5. “America First Banner Drop,” Identity Evropa, December 5, 2017. ↩
6. Marcus Cicero, “President Trump Pulls Off Excellent Peace Talks With North Korea,” Occidental Dissent, June 12, 2018.↩
7. Hunter Wallace [Brad Griffin], “Mitt Romney: Trump’s First Year Was ‘Very Similar To Things I’d Have Done My First Year,’ ” Occidental Dissent, May 2, 2018. ↩
8. Hunter Wallace, “Trump Administration Reverses Obama Affirmative Action Policy,” Occidental Dissent, July 3, 2018; Cicero, “President Trump Pulls Off Excellent Peace Talks With North Korea.” ↩
9. Andrew Anglin, “Trump on Putin: ‘He’s Fine. We’re All Fine,’ ” The Daily Stormer, July 6, 2018. ↩
10. Hubert Collins, “The ice Fight Against Criminal Aliens,” American Renaissance, June 20, 2018. ↩
11. Jared Taylor, “Human Shields on the Southern Border,” Podcast, American Renaissance, June 22, 2018. ↩
12. Huntley Haverstock, “Mexicans & Motherhood,” Counter-Currents, June 2018. ↩
13. Andrew Anglin, “ice as Trump’s Praetorian Guard?” The Daily Stormer, July 5, 2018. ↩
14. Federale, “Trump Foes, Friends Fighting It Out At uscis—Director Cissna Must Weigh In,” VDare, May 25, 2018.↩
15. R. Houck, “Law Enforcement & The Hostile Elite,” Counter-Currents, June 2018. ↩
16. Gregory Hood, “Aprés Ocasio-Cortez, le Deluge,” American Renaissance, June 28, 2018. ↩
17. James Lawrence, “Thoughts on the State of the Right,” Counter-Currents, June 2018. ↩

Addendum – A note about Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer I want to add some brief comments about Patriot Prayer (PP) and Proud Boys (PB) in light of the August 4th confrontation in Portland, Oregon, when a Patriot Prayer rally faced off against a larger counterprotest—until the counterprotesters were violently attacked by police. Joey Gibson’s Patriot Prayer and Gavin McInnes’s Proud Boys were both founded in 2016 as part of the wave of right-wing enthusiasm surrounding candidate Donald Trump. The two organizations are not identical, but they represent similar politics and have become closely intertwined. They offer a slightly sanitized version of right-wing racism. Both organizations have longstanding close ties with white nationalists and are staunchly anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant, yet they disavow explicit white supremacist ideology and include small numbers of people of color as members. Both groups uphold patriarchal ideology and glorify political violence. Unlike alt-rightists and other white nationalists, Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer do not advocate a white ethno-state or a radical break with the U.S. political system. Rather, they want to reassert white male dominance within the existing system. As “The Grouch” put it on the antifascist website Its Going Down: “what they want most of all is to be called on by the State in order to attack perceived enemies of the existing social order. Chiefly this means social movements in the streets, but also journalists who are critical of Trump (or the Proud Boys and the far-Right), migrants, people of color, queer and trans people, and so on.” Unlike the alt-right, Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer are solidly and unambivalently pro-Trump. Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys are currently engaged in a drive to rebuild the kind of broad coalition of right-wing streetfighters that operated for several months in 2017. This coalition encompassed alt-rightists, neonazi skinheads, and other white nationalists, alongside “alt-lite” Trump supporters and Patriot movement activists. The effort fell apart in the wake of Charlottesville, amid in-fighting, deplatforming by media companies, and mass antifascist resistance. So far the revival of a right-wing streetfighting force has been limited to the Pacific Northwest. Continued militant opposition is needed to shut it down and keep it from spreading. Yesterday’s events in Portland, like previous confrontations, indicate a close, friendly relationship between Patriot Prayer/Proud Boys and the police. As The Grouch commented, despite the fact that militant rightists are perpetrating more violence than their opponents, police look on right-wingers “as a group of victims, and anyone that stands up to them as instead a group of criminals and terrorists.” System-loyal right-wing groups such as Proud Boys or Patriot Prayer are better positioned to develop a collaborative relationship with the police than alt-rightists or neonazis, who don’t accept the existing system as legitimate. However, the intricate ties between Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys on one hand and white nationalists on the other underscores that we can’t treat the dividing line between system-loyal right and oppositional right as rigid or fixed. This is a dynamic situation, and I would not want to predict how things will develop from here.

Sources:

The Grouch, “In Portland, Patriot Prayer & Proud Boys Want Immigrants Heads ‘Smashed Into the Concrete;’ Gave Nazi Salutes While Screaming Racial Slurs,” Its Going Down 5 July 2018, https://itsgoingdown.org/in-portland-patriot-prayer-gave-nazi-salutes-while-screaming-racial-slurs/

“Unite the Right, Patriot Prayer, Joey Gibson, & the Proud Boys,” Its Going Down, 2 August 2018, https://itsgoingdown.org/unite-the-right-patriot-prayer-joey-gibson-the-proud-boys/

“#AllOutPDX Against Patriot Prayer on August 4th: What You Need to Know,” Antifascist News, 2 August 2018, https://antifascistnews.net/2018/08/02/alloutpdx-against-patriot-prayer-on-august-4th-what-you-need-to-know/

“Proud Boys,” Southern Poverty Law Center, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/proud-boys

About the situation in Iran: it worsened as a considerable part of the Grand Bazaar in Tehran was shut down a week ago. The Bazaar has been one of the main—if not the main—bourgeois supporters of the current regime ever since the uprising of 1979.

Bazaar: its literal meaning is market. It has been there for ages, several hundred years. The Bazaar traditionally was the place where the prices of commodities where set. When it is said someone is Bazaari it basically means that he is a merchant, who also has a lot of cash available and simultaneously can act as a financier (in fact a speculator, a loan shark, a hoarder, short-term speculator who does not invest in production). In the Bazaar, these bourgeois can be observed as having a very simple and small boutique, with few chairs and a desk with a telephone and very few commodities. Sitting some hours behind their desk—doing nothing but talking with other Bazaaris or talking on the phone, buying and selling or hoarding commodities. The Bazaar exists in parallel to the financial system in Iran.

What difference did the Bazaar strike make? Think about the day, for example, when the financial system shuts down. What effect(s) would it have on the economy? Of course the Bazaar strike was relatively small, hence it didn’t have so dramatic an effect as a financial system shut down. However, the Bazaaris’ strike, to some extent, did increase prices. One reason for that is that they are wholesalers and any price increases their actions produce ripple through the marketplace. In addition, if their actions appear to represent a withdrawal of support from the regime, they worsen the political crisis as well.

There are rumors, especially coming from the reformist fraction of the regime, saying that the current protest wave (and the last one) has been initiated by the “hardliners” who were defeated in the last election and hope to make a coup d’état to bring the military to power. While this may or may not be true or at least have some truth in it, some ordinary people who have long been fed up with their living conditions have joined the protests and their slogans change as well.

The recent protests have spread fast in many cities; important issues such as living costs and the bad quality of fresh water, especially in the southern parts of the country, have been the main reason for protests. There are two reports from Aljazeera, one on the protests and one on the water shortage.

While the largest cities were colored by Bazaar protests over the decline of the Iranian currency against the dollar, the southwestern cities, in Khuzestan province (the center of Iran’s oil production and home to a large Arab minority population), have exploded a few days ago mainly because of a lack of fresh water in general and good quality drinking water in particular and air pollution. (As readers may know, water has become and is going to be one of the most important causes of social conflicts in Iran and the larger region. This is another story that needs separate explanations.)

Sky-high inflation and a sharp drop in the national currency value are the results of the us pull back from the jcpa (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) and the us administration’s promises to impose the hardest sanctions on Iran. But when it comes to the condition of the working class, what I have described is not new. This is the condition workers have been living in for decades. Living under the poverty line, working two jobs or two shifts, having everyone in the family working, going without paychecks for months, signing “white contracts” which give up the right to claim insurance or file complaints against an employer for workplace safety matters, even selling body organs and children is not unique for recent months or even years.

There exist very few small independent worker organizations in the form of syndicates/trade unions. The regime has its own “trade unions” called “Islamic workers councils,” and with that as an excuse, suppresses any independent organization. At the moment, while they may be participants in the street protests, workers seem to be “quiet” or conducting their own defensive protests as before in their work places. I really cannot understand how they can manage living with such low salaries and high inflation. To illustrate the situation, consider this: while the minimum wage in Iran is about $200 per month, the level of prices can compete with that of the Europeans!

No wonder the society is exploding or may explode again at any time! Of course, I am not talking about what every single worker will do. Instead, I want to illuminate the conditions wherein a part of the working class is forced to act as such.

Insurgent Notes is publishing the following letter, not because we necessarily endorse the politics, but as a very rich description of the social and political situation in Mexico leading up to the recent electoral earthquake there.

Today, I’m writing to confess my sins. I acted like a vile democrat, participating in elections and calling for a vote for amlo1 and Morena2… I’ve never voted until now; this is the second time in my life that I have voted (the first time was three years ago, also for Morena). I threw all my Marxism overboard. In effect, amlo-Morena is a frontist movement, Social Democratic, nationalist, Keynesian…and all that mixed in with a solid dose of neo-liberalism!

There can be no doubt about this and amlo has been, at least, completely coherent. He never called for anything that might appear as socialist or left-wing; he was a militant of the pri and his outlook has always been clear: nationalism, and his theoretical references have been Lázaro Cardenas,3 Benito Juárez4 and Madero. Never in his life has he mentioned Marx, Lenin, Trotsky or Luxemburg. They never interested him. amlo was not even a typical left-wing militant who “matured” with age.

You know the rest: in Mexico, as a subordinate country, to express reformist nationalism comes across as a revolutionary risk unacceptable to the elites, who are more closely identified with their foreign masters than with any role as the “national” bourgeoisie. Thus, since 1988, we have witnessed fraud, manipulation and intimidation to prevent the “left” from coming to power through elections. In 1988, by way of 1994, 2006 and 2012, we saw the most scandalous cases in the electoral mega-frauds of 1988 (against Cuauhtémoc Cardenas5 and the prd6) and then in 2006 (against Lopez Obrador and the prd). On the current occasion, amlo, at the head of Morena (the party he created barely four years ago as a break with the corrupt and neo-liberal prd), took power in an unstoppable way. It was a massive vote of rejection against the so-called prian (the alternating governments cooked up by the pri7 and the pan,8 along with their lackey the prd). I refer to decades of privatizations and the commercial opening of the country, presented as necessary medicine, and to their flip side of unemployment, immiseration, the migration of millions of people to the United States, ecological disaster, new diseases arising from new types of consumption and, in its most acute phase, the “war on the drug trade” which has killed more than 200,000 people in twelve years, with clandestine graves throughout the country, thousands of “disappeared” and families destroyed by kidnapping at all social levels. All this came to the breaking point in 2018 (of course, in the year of the 50th anniversary of the massacre of university students by army troops in the Plaza de Tlatelolco9 in October 1968).

The bill has come due on the effects of this long-term disaster. History has placed in amlo’s hands a country filled with despair, frustration and tremendous anger. For his part, amlo’s tenacity, caudillismo10 and, most recently, his mysticism, have made him the repository of hope for tens of millions of people from all social classes, from the very poor, by way of the middle classes, to some sectors of small business. It was an electoral tsunami. amlo got more than 50 percent of the vote and won both houses of Congress for his new party. For its part, the pri cranked up its fraud machine (buying votes, manipulation of the media, intimidation, assassinations of political leaders, control of the central voting boards, and many more traps). The pan did its part, being the party with greater legitimacy and ideological credibility, representing the historical right in this country, with its religious, traditionalist, classist and racist baggage. Together, the pri and the pan blared their propaganda, spreading fear about the growth of Chavismo11 and the loss of freedom.

Against this, amlo skillfully and tactically put himself forward with a “centrist” program and a discourse calculated to avoid nationalism, in alliance with a very small and ultra-conservative evangelical party, and with new supporters coming from the pri and the pan, as well as with business people who had been part of the so-called “mafia of power.”

This clash of forces seemed to portend disaster. Many of us thought that the government would again resort to electoral fraud, which would have to be of monumental proportions. The result was unprecedented. amlo won with a solid majority, quite beyond the expectations of both his supporters and his enemies. Most surprising of all was that Peña Nieto, the president, José Antonio Meade, the candidate of the pri, and Ricardo Anaya, the candidate of the pan, all acknowledged amlo’s victory on the very day of the election. Hours later the big boss, the United States president, did the same. The moment was and is historic.

While full explanations are still up for grabs, one reason for all this is clear: the neo-liberal disaster. But it is not clear why the pri and the pan did not join forces and present a simulated common front, as they have done on previous occasions, such as having the candidate trailing in the polls step aside, so that the more favored candidate could guarantee a win against the left, and also use their fraudulent methods to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the necessities in play. This time was in fact different. The pure “neo-liberal” front was divided.

Partisan and personal conflicts, within the parties and between them, are a first explanation. But I think that the most important reason is Trump. The probable breakup of nafta12 represents the end of the main bet of the Mexican elite. Trump has orphaned his most servile employees. The blow has been devastating. Other analysts argue that the division between the pri and the pan is an extension of the confrontation between Trump and Soros.

Without doubt, the rise of amlo is part of the worldwide tendency beginning with Brexit, Trump, Putin, Erdogan and other nationalisms: i.e., the protectionism and nationalism fitting for a period of recession and war scares. At the level of class struggle, the situation is even more serious. amlo’s victory seals the absence and inhibition of any independent struggle of the proletariat. For now, the latter does not exist and has no expression. Movements of the class disappeared some time ago, and remain limited to confused local stirrings; the most important class movement of recent years, that of the teachers, sees its perspective realized in amlo’s electoral triumph. Nonetheless, nothing else could be expected after years of assassinations, justified as a war against “organized delinquency,” and in a country that has sunk into terror, anxiety and despair.

Such were the motives that pushed me to give up my rejection of all electoral activity and any support for bourgeois parties, to shut my mouth and retrace my steps, uniting with those whom I had so strongly criticized for their reformist illusions and bourgeois nationalism. This was one lesson from life which had made me value even more those such as the militants and revolutionaries who lived through fascism and war in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s while maintaining their convictions. This was not my case and, still more importantly and seriously, I do not think it “viable” for a communist organization to maintain a rigid anti-electoral posture in a situation such as the current one. Whatever the case, what has happened has happened, and now come tremendous challenges.

Certainly, the only critical voice heard at all since amlo’s resounding triumph has been that of the Zapatistas (ezln, Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) from its hidden base in the southern state of Chiapas; their intervention is full of historical resonances, since amlo as well has said that he was inspired by Francisco Madero, the liberal politician who launched the struggle against the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz in 1910. Emiliano Zapata was the guerrilla leader who, together with Pancho Villa, put the demands of the peasantry on the agenda, thereby converting the supposed regime change into a social revolution. However, neo-Zapatism is more isolated than ever and its political intervention in elections has been very unfortunate. The experiment with indigenous agrarian communes does not seem to inspire the proletarianized urban masses, not to mention the lumpenproletariat; on the other hand, the supposed radical left represented by Zapatismo suffers from the confusion arising from the collapse of “real existing socialism.” Further, it has never clarified its politics, between its original Maoism, its current “anarcho-alternative” ideology and its references to Cuba and Venezuela.

Fortunately I do not belong to any communist organization, for surely I would be called to account and expelled today. That said, I’d appreciate your critical comments. At least help me to understand what is happening; I do think that many of the keys to the situation are outside Mexico and in the United States!

1. The universal tag for Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.↩

2. Morena, contraction of Movement for National Regeneration, the party built in recent years by amlo.↩

3. Lazaro Cardenas was president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940, remembered for the 1938 nationalization of foreign oil investments and his general reform program in those years.↩

4. Benito Juárez was a liberal bourgeois leader in Mexico in the nineteenth century.↩

5. Cuahtémoc Cardenas, the son of Lazaro Cardenas, ran for president of Mexico in 1988 on a left-reformist ticket and was defeated in an election widely regarded as stolen.↩

6. Partido Revolucionario Democratico, a left reformist party.↩

7. Partido Revolucionario Institucional, which ruled Mexico from 1930 to 2000, and then returned to power in the 2000s.↩

8. Partido de Acción Nacional, traditional right-wing party.↩

9. The Mexico City site of a massacre of hundreds of demonstrating student militants just prior to the 1968 Olympics, held in Mexico City.↩

10. From “caudillo,” roughly “strongman.”↩

11. From Chavez, leader of the “Bolivarian Revolution” in Venezuela.↩

12. North American Free Trade Agreement of 1993, which liberalized trade between the United States, Canada and Mexico.↩

Illegal protests broke out across Vietnam in early June in response to impending plans for new “Special Economic Zones.” Apparently foreign companies would be able to lease land in these zones for 99 years under new rules.

Nationalist anti-Chinese protests broke out across the country almost exactly four years ago in May 2014, in response to China deploying an oil rig to a disputed section of the South China Sea. Those protests led to hundreds of factories being attacked or burned down. Several died and thousands were arrested. In the aftermath it was found that the vast majority of the factories attacked were not actually owned by anyone in or from mainland China. Many businesses attacked were Korean, Taiwanese, Japanese or Singaporean. Close to a hundred Chinese were injured and at least one was killed.

In 2014, there were signs that other demands were emerging even early on in the protests. While the general overtones were nationalist, some among the protests were demanding speech rights or changes at work. Many workers went on wildcat strikes and joined roving rallies, especially where industrial parks are concentrated, in the provinces of Dong Nai and Binh Duong. Factories were variously stormed, burned, emptied out or occupied.

Now in 2018, the protests seem more turned towards the Vietnamese state. The overall sentiment is again anti-Chinese, but more than a few in the crowds carry signs demanding things like “freedom of religion” and “freedom of expression.” In part this may be in response to a proposed cyber-security law set to pass this week that would give the state authorization to censor posts on social media and force companies like Facebook to hand over their data. Beyond that it is not unheard of for people to join nationalist rallies with various other demands and interests as the Vietnamese government is (or at least historically was) perceived as being more permissive of these sorts of protests since its legitimacy is based on its history as a “national liberation movement.”

Three days on, protests continue to grow. In the main, the protests have consisted of a combination of “peaceful rallies” and direct conflict with the state. Information isn’t easy to come by, and it goes away as fast as it comes. Heavy censorship is getting in the way. Many videos and pictures that have been posted to Facebook by people on the ground have been deleted by Facebook soon after.

So far, protests have included the following:

• wildcat strikes in factories not far from Ho Chi Minh City (e.g., Dong Nai and Binh Duong provinces) and possibly at some smaller workplaces;
• “mass protests” in (at least) Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Nha Trang and some provinces;
• blockading roads, including a 10-hour blockade of National Highway 1, the main north-south route that ties Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City;
• attacking police squads and stations, including surrounding a squad of heavily equipped riot police and making them surrender (and strip!) before they were allowed to beat a hasty retreat;
• attempting to seize government buildings, prevented in Binh Thuan only by the use of water canons and, in Phan Thiet, apparently successful, as a crowd took the local People’s Committee building.

It is not clear where this will go as it is happening in fits and bursts. Some thought it ended on the first night only to reappear stronger later. The immediate results are:

• hundreds of arrests, with others rounded up and shipped off on buses to who knows where;
• protesters driven from streets on all three days by nightfall, except in Bin Thuan where the protests went around the clock and the crowd seemed to have the power (for now);
• two forced reversals: first the government said the proposed 99-year lease would be modified to a 70-year lease in accordance with existing laws. Not much later when that didn’t calm the situation, the government announced a postponement of measures entirely at least until October.

Gentrification is a form of producing space that currently attracts a great deal of attention in South Korea. Referring to “a process involving a change in the population of land-users such that the new users are of a higher socio-economic status than the previous users, together with an associated change in the built environment through a reinvestment in fixed capital,”1 gentrification has until recently remained in South Korea a critical term which circulated only narrowly in professional academic fields; now, it has become a commonplace even among ordinary people. Since the mid-2000s, the term has widely been used to refer to urban renewals and beautifications changing the looks and composition of the built environment in the neighborhoods. Strictly speaking, however, what Korean people these days call gentrification should be considered “commercial gentrification,” which is to be distinguished from “new-build gentrification.” The former form has recently become more common and widespread as a capitalist spatial practice, while the latter form appears to have lost much of its vitality.

As far as South Korea is concerned, it was the new-build gentrification that played a dominant role for a long time in the capitalist production of space. This has to do with the fact that the country took a developmentalist approach to its economic growth. As it never provided a robust welfare system to support the population, the Korean state instead constructed a surrogate system in the form of the real estate industry. As the French urban geographer Valérie Gelézeau recently pointed out, South Korea has as a result developed into a “republic of apartments.” In the capital city Seoul, for instance, as of 2010, “apartments”—housing units belonging to buildings higher than 6 stories—and “villas”—housing units cheaper and smaller than apartments and belonging to buildings lower than 5 stories—constitute 60 percent of the total housing stock. The portion of the “private houses” which used to be typical housing units until the 1980s has now dwindled to about 30 percent of the housing stock.

Okbaraji Alley (Prisoner support alley). Family members used to stay in the small inns of the neighborhood to provide clothes and food to the prisoners in the close-by Seodaemun Prison.) Photograph by the Task Force for Preservation of the Okbaraji Alley.

As can be guessed, for most Koreans the ownership of decent apartments has become the major, if not only, dream. For becoming an apartment owner was the same as being promoted to the middle class in the country. And understandably it was Korea’s developmental state that played a crucial role in creating this republic of apartments. Beginning in the early 1970s, the Korean government initiated massive construction projects, building mega apartment complexes in big cities. Of course, Seoul was the first city to develop such complexes. And as a recent global hit “Gangnam Style” suggests, it was the Gangnam area that first saw the urbanization of the capital city. This was the beginning of new-build gentrification in South Korea. And you can see the outcome today in the cityscape of big cities, the capital city Seoul in particular, where “the gray skyline along row after row of near identical concrete apartments” is unfolded across the whole city.

While it was instrumental in determining the looks and composition of Korean cities, new-build gentrification appears to have seen its heyday, however, for, since the global recession of the late 2000s and early 2010s, the number of the development projects underway in the new-build form sharply decreased. Many of the projects planned before the crisis, including that of the International Business Area in the Yongsan District that was to cost $28 billion, and that of the Mega Metropolis Eight City that was to cost a whopping $288 billion, were canceled. In addition, it appears that at least within the vicinity of the capital city, land large enough to permit massive construction projects is no longer available. While there are some projects still going on in the form of new builds, their scale no longer matches that of the earlier projects. While this does not mean that gentrification has receded as a dominant spatial practice in South Korea, its prevailing form seems to have undergone a fundamental transformation from new-build to commercial gentrification.

The alley neighborhood (demolished in 2016) is now being replaced by an apartment complex. Photograph by Kang, Nae-hui.

There are several aspects by which commercial gentrification is distinguished from new-build gentrification. Most noticeable among them is that the construction size of the former is much smaller. New-builds used to be as large as mega apartment complexes, towns, or even cities. Commercial gentrification, in contrast, takes place generally in individual buildings or in street blocks at its largest size. In addition, it tends to keep at least some part of the former buildings—the walls, timber, windows, or color. This practice is radically different from that of new-builds that tends to demolish the entire existing built environment in the area where gentrification takes place. And of course, the new form provides commercial spaces as its products, whereas residential units are the main products of new-builds. It is crucial to note that gentrifiers are different in both forms of gentrification. The features that distinguish commercial from new-build gentrification derive from the fact that the former proceeds with individuals participating in the transformation of the built environment. While new-build gentrifiers are often the “development collectives or alliances” consisting of local influentials, governments, politicians, financiers, banks, lawyers, pro-development academics and the press, commercial gentrifiers tend to be individuals who have accumulated funds—whether borrowed or saved—to invest in the redevelopment of small-scale buildings. One reason why the term “gentrification” should today in South Korea be regarded as commercial gentrification is that since the late 2000s, neighborhood redevelopment in the form of commercial gentrification came to the fore, whereas the new-build form has receded.

The old Gyeongui Line before it was put underground.

A core part of my argument is that this transformation has to do with the recent changes in financialization in South Korea. Commercial gentrification started to show itself not coincidentally in the late 2000s when the world economy was seriously hit by an unprecedented financial crisis. The most important reason that pre-planned new-build projects had to be scrubbed must be found in this crisis. Projects after projects, including the two megaprojects mentioned above, were thrown away in its aftermath. While it was caused by the global failures of financialization and those of the neoliberalism that had turned financializing the economy and other social practices into a new strategy of capital accumulation, it is important to remember that the financial crash in the late 2000s did not bring financialization to an end. In the United States, where the crisis first occurred, in Europe where the “sovereign crisis” took place, and in the emerging economies, where another crisis loomed, economic policy makers without exception kept financialization intact. The strategy taken to overcome the problems of the financialized economy was to further financialize it. One prominent example is the “quantitative easing” programs most crisis-hit countries adopted to keep interest rates at their historical lows. This measure had the added effect of even forcing people to borrow as much money as possible, turning them into investors-cum-borrowers rather than savers. I think that the emergence of commercial gentrification in Seoul as a new form of gentrification had to do with this situation.

While South Korea’s economy became financialized with the introduction of neoliberalism in the early 1980s, its full-scale financialization took place when the country had to borrow a bailout fund from the imf in 1997 in overcoming the foreign currency crisis that shook the entire nation. Before 1997, South Korea did not have a full-fledged financial or capital market other than banking and stock markets, the state tightly controlling money flow within and across the borders. After the foreign currency crisis and the imf’s intervention in its economy, however, the country adopted fundamental policy changes to financialize its economy. It took only a couple years to introduce the necessary financial instruments, including financial derivatives—such as forwards, futures, options, swaps—project finance, asset-backed securities (abs), mortgage-backed securities (mbs), asset-backed commercial paper (abcp), mutual funds, public offering funds, private equity funds, real estate investment trusts (reits), and so on. As the result of this introduction of financial mechanisms, South Korea came to possess a fully financialized economy.

The Yeonnam-dong area along the Gyeongui Line Park recently underwent commercial gentrification. The former railroad has now turned into a 6.3-km-long inner-city park. Photograph by Kang, Nae-hui.

Now, I have to point out that the financialization of the economy encouraged and was intensified by that of space in the country. It was in the late 1990s and early 2000s when a wholly new capital market was formed that the financialization of space in Seoul began in earnest. And this change also affected the way gentrification took place. As mentioned, gentrification had been the most powerful way of producing space in Seoul since the 1970s when capitalist urbanization began in earnest. But before financialization measures were put in effect in the late 1990s, gentrification had little to do with the financial market. Most gentrification projects were largely state-driven, and apartments, their main products, were offered to consumers who depended more or less on their savings to buy homes. As apartments or other forms of housing were the most important property for people, this must be one reason that the savings rate of South Korea was exceptionally high until the 1990s.

The financialization of the economy after the imf bailout fundamentally changed the situation. Gentrification increasingly became financial market-driven. As a result, there began to appear a noticeable change in the way people regarded their properties, especially real estate. While they used to be the most sought-after commodity—for they also served as arguably the major means by which to accumulate personal wealth—apartments tended to be savings or consumption funds until the late 1990s. After the financialization of the economy, they now became more like assets to be exchanged in capital markets. What intensified this trend was the neoliberal policy to turn people into new subjectivities. They were now encouraged to behave not merely as consumers who saved their money but rather as investors in possession of funds. It did not matter whether the money was saved or borrowed. This trend was supported by the government’s changed policy after the (neoliberal) financialization of the economy. Beginning in the late 1990s, financialization measures began to ease money flow or increase financial mobility, mainly through the lowering of interest rates to a historical low. The boom in new-build gentrification in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as shown in the unusual rise of megaprojects, must have to do with the fact that people tended to borrow money to invest in real estate. This can be shown statistically. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the total balance of mortgage loans has increased from 131 trillion won (18 percent of the gdp) in 2002 to 533 trillion won (32.5 percent of the gdp) in 2016. In parallel, the national household debt increased more than six times from 211 trillion won in 1997 to 1344 trillion won in 2016, while the gdp increased three times from 506 to 1637 trillion won in the same period.

In the process, the real estate sector increased its share in the economy even further. The balance of real estate project finance, for instance, reached 100 trillion won, about 8 percent of the gdp in 2010. In 2013, the amount of construction investment was 14.9 percent of the gdp, fourth highest among oecd countries. One result of this can be seen in the new cityscapes currently dominating the visual environment of Seoul. Before the late 1990s, there was only one skyscraper higher than 50 stories. Now the capital city has 21 such super–high rises, and South Korea comes fourth after China, the United States, and the Arab Emirates, in terms of the number of buildings higher than 40 stories.

An alley in Seochon before gentrification. Open source (?).

For the last 10 years, however, South Korea’s capitalist production of space has adopted a new form of gentrification. New-build gentrification still continues, but it has lost much of its vitality. This had to do with the fact that in the late 2000s neoliberalism as a contemporary capitalist regime of domination faced a serious blow from what is considered the greatest financial crisis since the 1929 stock market crash. As already mentioned, neoliberal forces did not abandon financialization as a strategy of accumulation; it clung to financialization as can be shown in the application of the quantitative easing approach in most important capitalist countries to keep their economy running. In the production of space as well, financialization was kept as the main instrument for new construction projects, but in a different form.

Like other capitalist countries, South Korea and its real estate industry could not avoid the effect of the global economic crisis, as shown in the cancellation of such megaprojects as the Eight City. As a result, there followed the retreat of state institutions, big capital, and construction conglomerates from the gentrification market. In the meantime, there emerged a new form of gentrification as an opportunity for certain individuals to increase their wealth. According to a newspaper report, a Mr. Kim invested 13.1 billion won (us $13,000,000) over the six years between 2010 and 2016 to buy six store buildings in the vicinity of Hong-ik University, an area that recently turned into a hot place. What was surprising was that he borrowed most of the funds from banks by putting up 11.2 billion won ($11,000,000) as collateral, which means that he became the owner of the six buildings using just 2 billion won ($2,000,000) as seed money.

A gentrified Seochon alley. Photograph by Shin Sang-soon.

An ardent borrower like Mr. Kim is not rare in today’s Korea, for his kind of practice is being promoted by the official policy decision to lower interest rates to encourage people to borrow money to engage in real estate dealings. Low interest rates, which came further down after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, no doubt, contributed to turning individuals into asset holders and investors with borrowed money, thus boosting commercial gentrification. As a result, however, cases of modern day enclosure increased, displacing more and more people from the base of their livelihood.

One major reason why the term “gentrification” has recently become a commonplace in South Korea is that several incidents of enclosure associated with commercial gentrification attracted public attention. Here I cite just one example. Takeout Drawing was a café that operated as a space for artist-led cultural projects like exhibitions, performances, educational and residency programs. In 2014, its operators faced displacement from the building where they ran the café, when the new owner, world-famous singer psy, wanted to demolish it to construct a higher and more lucrative building in the same venue. They resisted psy’s attempt to displace them, and appealed to the court, with fellow artists, independent musicians, cultural practitioners, civil social activists, and human rights lawyers coming to help them in solidarity. But they lost the case, since the South Korean court considered the private ownership of property a supreme right.

The Takeout Drawing case illustrates how small shopkeepers and tenants in Seoul are affected by gentrification. Gentrification functions to raise the value of land and buildings. When Takeout Drawing opened in 2010, the price of the café venue was about 3 billion won (us $3,000,000), but within six months, it shot up to 6.3 billion won ($6,300,000), and when psy bought it in 2012, the price was 7.8 billion won ($7,800,000). Currently, it’s worth more than 10 billion won ($10,000,000). This rapid rise in the real estate price had to do with the gentrification rampant in the area. When buying his building, psy must have expected that if gentrified, its value would rise even higher. In expecting to increase his capital, psy was a typical financial asset holder in today’s Seoul. But in the meantime, the café operators lost a valuable venue for their business and cultural activity.

In the remaining section of this article, I would like to focus on some cultural, political, and economic implications of gentrification. Gentrification, including its commercial form, is a complex social practice. As such, it comprises not only political economy, but also cultural politics and cultural economy. Or it can be conceived of either as cultural political economy, economic cultural politics, or political cultural economy. This is not a play of words, but an attempt on my part to suggest the complexity of the way the economy, politics, and culture are intertwined together in today’s Seoul. This conception of gentrification as a complex whole consisting of different dimensions of social practice enables us to understand the displacement of Takeout Drawing operators as more than simply an economic, a political, or a cultural phenomenon. The cultural political economic perspective taken here helps us to understand the commercial gentrification in Seoul as a complex spatial practice, with implications related to society as a whole. In the following, I will mention just a few aspects of it.

Let us first take a very brief look at how cultural political economy operates in relation to the commercial gentrification going on in Seoul. We have already seen that South Korea’s political economy favors asset holders’ rights to private ownership over poor people’s rights to livelihood and housing. This political economy operates on the basis of cultural infrastructures. The neighborhoods where commercial gentrification has been active are those that have already turned into hot places like Itaewon or the Hong-ik University vicinity. These places have been made attractive to visitors, due to their location, cultural atmosphere, historical legacy, urban charm, and so on. These resources are basically cultural in nature, as they have non-economic values, and as such, tend to function as what David Harvey called social infrastructures. They may not produce surplus value by themselves, but they can improve the conditions for producing it. One can argue that commercial gentrification makes the best use of cultural resources as such infrastructures.

Commercial gentrification is involved in economic cultural politics as well. If we see culture as having to do with meaning, politics with power, “cultural politics” then refers to a social dimension where crucial power struggles take place over the production of meaning. Commercial gentrification occurs often with the claim to regenerate and beautify lagging-behind neighborhoods, suggesting that it increases their cultural resources and values. Of course, there are opposing interpretations of the same process, as shown by the attempt of Takeout Drawing operators and their friends to resist gentrification. But more often, it is the economic logic that prevails and has a final say in deciding upon whether or not gentrification will proceed. We can thus see how in the actual processes of gentrification cultural politics cannot avoid getting involved in the economy.

To round up the complex relationship between the economy, politics, and culture involved in commercial gentrification, we finally turn to how political cultural economy operates in commercial gentrification. By “cultural economy,” I refer to a double process in which the economy is culturalized, while culture is economicized. Commercial gentrification concentrates in hot places because cultural social infrastructures like galleries, concert halls, street scenes and spectacles, historic sites, and the like are rather intensively available there, offering gentrifiers with chances to make economic profits. In this case, what happens is the economicization of culture. But it is also the culturalization of the economy, for commodities in the gentrified areas tend to be valued for their cultural merits. In Yeonnam-dong, a recently gentrified area near Hong-ik University, one can see that what is being consumed is not only ordinary commodity items like clothes, food or drinks, but also a sense of place, status, belonging, urbanity, or culture. On a typical weekend night, restaurants and clubs in the neighborhood are crowded with customers, but this also means that poorer tenants and shopkeepers cannot stay there, due to the rise of rents. One should also take note of the political effect of gentrification’s cultural economy. I would argue that the over-all political effect of commercial gentrification in Seoul is conservative, since it basically favors the reproduction of capitalist social relations.

Whether new-build or commercial, gentrification is a complex whole as social practice. It certainly has an economic function, since it helps to accumulate capital. As an asset holder, psy must have wanted to make more money by expelling the café operators. Their displacement, however, was made possible also by the current political economic situation in South Korea where interests of private capital prevail over social solidarity and association. Commercial gentrification may prosper as long as the current form of political economy in which commodities are aestheticized to raise their money value. Along with these normal procedures of gentrification, however, cases of modern-day enclosure increase. In order to prevent people from being displaced from their base of livelihood, the current form of gentrification’s cultural political economy, economic cultural politics, and political cultural economy must come to an end. This means that we need to create wholly new ways of producing space and new forms of leading our lives.

• 1Eric Clark, “The order and simplicity of gentrification: A political challenge,” chapter 16, The Gentrification Reader (Routledge, 2005), p. 258.

This past summer, our three-generation family took a vacation trip to Costa Rica. Upon our return, I began doing some research into the country and its history. This is a first draft report about what we saw and what I have learned. I welcome additions and corrections.

We did all of our travelling across the country by small vans. We started in San Jose, the capital, and went northwest to the Arenal Volcano area for a few days and then went southwest to the Pacific Ocean before finally traveling back east to the airport. We travelled on good roads and bad ones and saw cities, suburbs, towns, extensive rural sections and, on the ocean, resorts catering to an international clientele. Everywhere, the small towns looked the same; as one guide told us, Costa Rican towns are required to have three things—a school, a football field and a bar. The football fields were immaculate. Here’s a map of the country:

The Land

The country is not large, a bit smaller than West Virginia, with Panama to the south and Nicaragua to the north. As most readers probably know, the country is defined by its rain forests and is incredibly beautiful; it has pleasant year-round weather in spite of almost daily rainfalls and eight months of a rainy season. The rain, along with the volcanic soil and the warm temperatures, explains why much of the country is covered with forests and the fertility of the soil that’s devoted to agriculture. The country is characterized by the presence of about 100 volcanoes that show some signs of volcanic activity, but only five are classified as “active.”

The terrain of the country is divided into two coastal plains—on the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea—and a double-sided mountain range that runs north and south through the middle of the country. The range forms a Central Valley that includes the major population centers of the country—San Jose, Heredia, Cartago and Alajuela.

The country has a very varied agriculture, forestry and fishing ecology. It includes dairy cows, cattle, rice, sugar, coffee, bananas, pineapples, teak wood, palm oils, and fisheries on both coasts. It appears to be self-sufficient in foodstuffs except for a substantial supply of name-brand American cereals and snack foods in stores.

The People

Costa Rica’s population is about five million. About 60 percent of those live in the areas in and around the cities in the Central Valley. The great majority of the people is considered to be of European or European–American Indian descent; approximately 7 percent is Afro-Caribbean; less than 3 percent of the people are considered to be indigenous; probably less than half of them live on “reserves” that are scattered across the country. There is a sizeable population of Nicaraguan immigrants that continues to grow because of the current political danger in that country. There is also a growing population of American emigres—many of whom have retired to Costa Rica.

In the early twentieth century, thousands of Jamaicans arrived to work on building a railroad connecting the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to allow for the more rapid transport of crops for export. The Jamaican immigrants settled on the Caribbean coast and that region still remains the center of the Afro-Caribbean population.

A Distinctive History

I would guess that many people are aware that Costa Rica has been spared much of the pain and torment that have been the fate of people in other nearby countries. And some may know that one of the country’s distinctive political features is that it does not have a standing army. Of course, the question is how come. I hope to provide some answers.

While we were in San Jose, we had an opportunity to see a quite remarkable permanent exhibit in the National Museum of Costa Rica on the anthropological/historical development of the country. The exhibit was, logically enough, displayed in chronological order, but we managed to see it in reverse order—going from the present to the pre-Columbian period because we misread the directional signs.

In this report, I won’t subject readers to our mistake and will address things in the right order. Since our journey through the museum, I’ve done a bit more reading about Costa Rican history that I’ll incorporate along the way. I’ll begin in the nineteenth century.

Costa Rica achieved its formal independence from Spain in 1821 without violence and soon afterward abolished slavery in 1824. The country secured complete independence from Mexico in 1838.

There appears to have been a significant liberal/enlightenment influence on the development of institutional forms over the course of the rest of the century—affecting matters such as the adoption of representative democratic institutions, public education and universities. As elsewhere, these influences did not extend to the treatment of the country’s remaining indigenous peoples.

Bananas and coffee were the foundational agricultural industries; as is often the case, they were accompanied by the development of artisanal industries, in carpentry and metalworking as complements to the operation of the large plantations. In the case of bananas, the development of large scale planting was an accompaniment to the initial building of a passenger railroad from San Jose to Limon (completed in 1890). The American railroad builder, a man named Minor Keith, planted bananas to feed the workers building the railroad. When the passenger trade fell short of expectations, he switched to growing bananas for export. The arrival of the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica in the early years of the twentieth century marked the turn towards direct external control of the plantations. By 1930, the company owned more than three million acres of land. The worsening labor conditions for ever more agricultural laborers led to the establishment of agricultural trade unions and to the Great Banana Strike of 1934, which subsequently resulted in the negotiation of the first contracts. (It would be an interesting project for another day to compare the 1934 strikes in Costa Rica with the ones that were occurring in the United States at the same time.)

The Caribbean Legion

During World War II, revolts had been successful in installing democratic institutions in Cuba, Venezuela and Guatemala. Those successes inspired individuals from other countries that continued to be ruled by dictators (specifically, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua). Democratic forces from across the region came together in an informal alliance known as the Caribbean Legion. The Legion’s first military action was designed to overthrow Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. In 1947, a group of 1,200 armed men was assembled in Cuba by the Dominican exile Juan Bosch—with the secret support of the Cuban President Ramon Grau. Subsequently, the us government forced Grau to detain the members of the group and the invasion plans were abandoned. This whole episode came to be called the “Cayo Confites affair.” One last note to make concerning it is that the then 21-year-old Fidel Castro was a member of the armed group and arrested—but he managed to escape to go on to bigger things.

Jose Arevalo, the Guatemalan president, continued to support the Legion. He had purchased their weapons for the invasion of the Dominican Republic and he subsequently convinced Grau to release the arrested Legion members and their weapons to Guatemala. At the end of 1947, Arevalo also crafted a Pacto del Caribe that formalized a commitment to the overthrow of the governments of Costa Rica, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. Its language included the following:

We, the undersigned, declare that the immediate re-establishment of the Republic of Central America is necessary for this continent; this principle will be affirmed in the new constitutions of the liberated countries, and each new government will immediately work to implement it with all the resources at its disposal.

The liberated countries pledge to establish a Democratic Alliance of the Caribbean, which will be open to all the democracies of the Caribbean, as well as to El Salvador and Ecuador…

The Democratic Alliance of the Caribbean will constitute an indivisible bloc in all international crises. Its fundamental aims will be: to strengthen democracy in the region; to demand the respect of the international community for each of its members; to liberate the European colonies that still exist in the Caribbean; to promote the creation of the Republic of the Lesser Antilles; to act as one in defense of our common economic, military and political interests.

In the realm of “what might have been,” a Republic of Central America could have been the starting point of a very different regional history that would have spared the people of Central America and its environs of the various miseries that are now dominating the lives of the people of Venezuela, Colombia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras and even Mexico. It might also have provided the space for an alternative trajectory to the Cuban Revolution.

As the United States (and its allies) and the Soviet Union engaged in their postwar maneuverings for political advantage, events in Central America, including Costa Rica, were understood through the framework of that global struggle. The us government increasingly justified its continued involvement in the region in those terms. This was most evident in the cia’s toppling of the Jacobo Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954 and, years later, in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the us invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. To give readers a feel for that last event, here’s Phil Ochs singing “The Marines Have Landed on the Shores of Santo Domingo”:

The Costa Rican Civil War

But before those developments, events in Costa Rica took an unusual turn just after the Arevalo-sponsored Pacto. Costa Rica had an elected government but Teodoro Picado, the president from 1944 to 1948, refused to support efforts to oust the dictators in nearby countries—which had earned him the enmity of the democratic forces. That had led Jose Figueres Ferrer, a Costa Rican rancher, to begin building a Costa Rican wing of the Legion and to launch efforts to oust Picado.

A presidential election was held in January 1948. According to the election law, Picado was not eligible to run for re-election. The party in power, which also had a majority in the national legislature, selected Rafael Calderon (who had been president from 1940 to 1944 and remained the party’s power broker) as its candidate. Calderon’s candidacy was backed by an odd couple of the Catholic Church and the Costa Rican Communist Party, at the time called the Popular Vanguard Party, led by Manuel Mora Valverde. The main opposition party selected Otio Ulate Blanco as its candidate. Perhaps most important, Ulate was effectively backed by Figueres.

Although Ulate Blanco won the popular vote by a decisive margin, the National Assembly (which remained under Calderon’s control) annulled the results and Calderon was declared the victor. With 600 soldiers, Figueres launched a war against the government—which had the support of a small army and the Communist Party’s much more substantial militia. The resulting civil war lasted 44 days and cost 2,000 lives. Aid from President Arevalo of Guatemala proved decisive since the us government’s position remained ambiguous and indecisive. (I don’t know what lessons, if any, the us government learned from its hesitations, although its actions in Guatemala several years later provide a clue.)

The Abolition of the Army

The Figueres forces were victorious and he became the head of La Junta Fundadora de la Segunda Republica charged with establishing a new constitution. On December 1, 1948, Figueres took a “mazazzo” to the tower wall of the army’s central barracks in San Jose to signal the abolition of the army and gave the barracks to the University of Costa Rica for a museum—the museum we visited during our trip.

I confess that I didn’t learn very much during our trip about the ways in Costa Ricans understand the significance of the abolition of the army. Since we returned, I came across a video of a lovely song by children of a song by an accomplished Costa Rican composer intended to promote the understanding of the significance of the abolition:

I should note in passing the quite painful departure in revolutionary politics over the course of the twentieth century from the tradition of anti-militarism once eloquently proclaimed by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg early in the twentieth century. We now pick our wars; the Costa Rican example calls out for something different.

One further thought about the significance of the abolition—it may very well be the case that the reason why Costa Rica has been able to avoid the bloodshed that other countries in Central America and the Caribbean have endured at the hands of the us and its local allies is that the absence of an army deprived the us military and intelligence forces of willing and well-placed conspirators within the country.

During the period of the Junta’s power, there were limited repressive actions directed towards the defeated groups. However, when the communists were discovered to have hidden weapons, the Junta did disband the communist-controlled unions, outlawed the Popular Vanguard Party and arrested two hundred party members. Mora Valverde left Costa Rica for Mexico but he was able to return in 1950 and it appears that he and Figueres achieved some sort of reconciliation. True to its word, after the work of the constituent assembly was completed, the Junta gave up its power and new elections were held. Ulate was elected president. Figueres remained active in Costa Rican politics for several more decades and served two terms (1953–1958 and 1970–1974) as president.

The new constitution adopted in 1949 formalized the abolition of the army. It also recognized the citizenship rights of the Afro-Caribbean population and granted women the right to vote. Existing welfare programs were maintained. All children were guaranteed a free public school education through high school and universal healthcare was secured. The banks were nationalized and numerous industries were folded into public entities. The ground was established for a substantial social democratic republic.

Costa Rica faced one significant military challenge to its new democracy. In the mid-1950s, it found itself “isolated in a sea of dictatorships”—opposed by what was sometimes referred to as “the International of the Swords”—an alliance of Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala (after the removal of Arbenz) and Venezuela. In 1954, a short-lived invasion was launched from Nicaragua but was thrown back by the Costa Rican Civil Guard.

Costa Rica and Cuba

Any accounting of Costa Rican history for the last seventy years presents us with a compelling opportunity to observe connections and contrasts between Costa Rica and Cuba.

At the end of 1953, the young Argentinian doctor and wanderer, Ernesto Che Guevara, arrived in Costa Rica after having left the Argentina of his birth because it was under the control of the idiosyncratic dictator, Juan Peron. He had yet to become a participant in the Cuban Revolution, with which he would be identified for the rest of his life. He was traveling with a friend, Gualo Garcia, and they arrived at the Costa Rican border with Panama all but penniless. By hook and by crook, they managed to secure passage on a boat to Puntarenas, a port on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica (on which most of the passengers became seasick, but, apparently, not Che). I note this because on our recent trip I too became seasick on a water trip off the Pacific coast. Che and his companion then made their way to San Jose. Guevara had hoped to meet various leaders of the Costa Rican government but was mostly unsuccessful. Guevara was aware that Costa Rica had become a haven for political exiles from across the region.

The two travelers spent time at the “Soda Palace”—a café that was a hotbed of exiles. In the slang of the expatriates it was called “The International.” It was in that café that Guevara first met and made friends with two Cuban members of the 26th of July Movement and survivors of the attacks on the Moncada military barracks. They told him about Fidel Castro, about his ideas and about his plans. Guevara did meet Manuel Mora Valverde who apparently filled him in on the events of 1948. Later, Mora would say that he was very impressed by Guevara’s personality and political convictions: “he is a calm man, more than that ‘slowed down,’ because he has a series of movements of tics that indicate a great inner restlessness, a dynamism held back by his method.”

Years later, the Dominican Juan Bosch remembered the young Guevara:

Che Guevara visited my house in Costa Rica sometimes. This happened in the first months of 1954, when no one suspected that the young globetrotting doctor was going to have an international celebrity. My son Leon, who was then beginning to paint portraits and who lived with me in the small and sweet Central American country, had made friends with some Argentine anti-Peronist exiles and through that friendship they came to see me, to have a cup of coffee and to exchange opinions about the problems of an America that in those years was a collection of dictators. It was one of those exiles…who came one day accompanied by a silent, serious young man, who from time to time took an inhaler out of his shirt pocket and applied it to his nose while pressing the tiny bladder of the instrument. That young man was Dr. Ernesto Guevara. By then his friends called him Che, national nickname of the Argentines.

Ernesto Che Guevara was asthmatic—and hence the use of the inhaler—but his body was constituted as if it were not. His chest was not sunken, nor was he short or thin. He did not become tall; he was not thick; he was not muscular. However, he produced sensations of physical firmness. It had features that made it unmistakable: the forehead, the superficial arcs, the eyebrows, the eyes, the nose and the mouth. These features immediately evoked Beethoven, and I remember telling my son Leon these words: “That boy has a Beethovian face.” His gaze was both fixed and intense, but with more fixity than intensity, and very clear, almost illuminated. He listened carefully and only occasionally asked any questions, but it was always a question that went directly to the bottom of the problem that was being addressed.

As he himself told me, Guevara had come to Costa Rica from Panama. He was a doctor specializing in allergies and traveled through America with the illusion of knowing everything. From Costa Rica he was going to Guatemala and asked for some information about the country. In Argentina he had opposed Perón and did not want to return to his land while the general was in charge.

Frankly, I did not expect to see him acting in politics, and even less in Cuba, much less in guerrilla actions. I thought he was temperamentally gifted for scientific research. He was controlled, but certainly not cold, and quickly reached the bottom of the problems that caught his attention. I never assumed that he could ever become a communist leader. A few years later, in Caracas, I was visited by a young American looking at our America who wanted to know from my mouth if Che was a communist when he was in Costa Rica. “No,” I said. “In those times I did not feel any inclination to communism, I do not think he had any idea what that was.” And I was not wrong. A few days later, Guevara declared in Havana that he—properly speaking, “we”—had known Marxism in the Sierra Maestra. And I am very foolish or Guevara was a man who spoke the truth in all circumstances.

Che Guevara became a communist—at least, a Marxist—in the Cuban mountains and embraced that doctrine with such hard faith that he died for it. But whoever carefully observes the trajectory of the legendary character who has fallen in the Bolivian jungles, has to distinguish a peculiar nuance in Che Guevara’s communism: he was communist because he was intensely anti-Yankee. Now, why had he become anti-Yankee to the very root of his soul, he, who, when he was in Central America, was looking for an orientation of another kind?

The answer to that question must be sought in Guatemala…the reports that I have of people who were in Guatemala in those days indicate that the events that took place in that country after the arrival of the young Argentine doctor mid-1954 produced a profound and disturbing impression on his mind.

….

Guevara arrived in Guatemala and the Arbenz government was soon overthrown. Guevara, and everyone in both Americas, knew that he had been overthrown “by superior order”—order, that is, from the United States. That intervention—which was not open, like that of Santo Domingo—left in the soul of the Argentine doctor a trace that was like a wound always alive. Since Che Guevara came out of anonymity I had the impression—and I still have it—that his struggle was dedicated more than anything to fighting the United States, and that the root of that attitude is in the facts of Guatemala.

There is something that the Americans have not learned in a century and a half of relations with our countries, and of course they will never learn it, because if this world has seen a hard people to acquire human knowledge—not scientist—that people is the people of the United States There are swarming technicians in public relations, but there are not among them two who have realized that Latin America is a term of sensitivity, a living unit. A tyrant of Venezuela offends, with his only existence, the young people of Chile and El Salvador as well as the Venezuelan youths; an American intervention in Guatemala hurts a young Argentine doctor as much as it can hurt the most proud Guatemalan.

Guevara left for Guatemala and soon I left for Bolivia, precisely for that land of high pampas and dense jungles where he was going to fall thirteen or fourteen years after having visited my house of exile in Costa Rica. I did not see him again, but as soon as I heard his name in early 1957, when he was already in the Sierra Maestra, I remembered that young Argentine doctor. I remembered it clearly. I remembered not only his physical presence but even his voice. Why? I could not say it. Perhaps I was impressed by that tone of fixity, and of a certain anxiety that I saw in his eyes, in his peculiar type of look. An anxiety as of who needs to be and does not find the way to perform; the one of someone who is sure that he has a destiny and does not know how to fulfill it. The Spanish television transmitted scenes related to the death of Guevara. There was a hamlet in the Bolivian jungle, a hamlet that was the stamp of loneliness, misery and ignorance; there was a general covered in gold ribbons and medals, and Che Guevara’s body was lying on a table. There was summarized the drama of America: The misery, the oppression, not imprisoned, not hurt, but annihilated by shots. I evoked some words of Gregorio Luperón that say something like this: “He who tries to end the revolution by killing the revolutionaries is like the one who thinks he can turn off the sunlight by taking his eyes off.”

Costa Rica, in those early years after its “revolution,” provided both an opportunity for exiles to plot and for revolutionary dreamers, like Che, to nourish their dreams. What became of Guevara’s dreams is beyond the scope of this essay. However, it’s important to note that no matter how much he pushed and pulled against the limits and regressions of Castroism, I don’t think he ever escaped from them. He too needed a different Cuban Revolution.

Figueres provided weapons and other forms of assistance to Castro’s forces as they fought against Fulgencio Batista and secured victory against him in 1959. Later that year, Figueres was invited by Castro to give a speech to a large crowd in Havana. Figueres took the opportunity to praise the Cubans, to declare his solidarity with their cause and to describe what he saw as the challenges facing the American revolutions:

Cubans, what a beautiful word! Cubans sounds like “War of Independence,” sounds like “Martí,” sounds like an epic of the “Sierra Maestra.” Cubans, this hat I bring is called “cachucha” and this “cachucha” means in my country what the “beard” of Fidel Castro means in Cuba…

Sister revolutions are these, Cubans, the “cachucha” of Costa Rica and the “beard” of Cuba. In reality, they are part of a great revolution, the revolution that Latin America is now waging.

In Latin America it is in effervescence—the only continent in the world that is currently in this trance—the idea of representative government, for which one must die—the idea of the division of powers, of the dignity of the judicial power, and above all of the electoral law, the only source of permanent sovereignty for a people.

To the extent that the ruling class, at least in business, that is, the wealthy class, to call things by their names, will support the Revolution because it disagrees with this or that measure, in that same proportion, the Revolution will suffer a retarding effect.

I know those reactions. It is very easy in life to say one such thing they did wrong in my opinion, and therefore I set myself apart. This is the first phase; the second is to speak ill of the Revolution; the third is to criticize it and put the rich companies that own the newspapers at the service of the systematic counterrevolution, and the last one is to get along with the military agencies that want to return to tyranny again. I understand, gentlemen, the feeling of businessmen at this time. They have a great fear, we must say it clearly: the Revolution scares them.

I have faith in the men of the Government of Cuba. A party like this one of the “bearded” brothers of the “cachucha,” a party like this has to tell the people that their struggle and heroism was needed to overcome the tyranny, struggle and heroism will be needed to overcome the misery.

If we live next to a house that burns down, we cannot avoid the consequences; and if we are together with a country as powerful as the United States, we feel the tension of being at war…. Communism, that is Cuban, Latin American, does not keep me awake. The bad thing would be if someone of us made the mistake of associating with an ideology that is sustained by a distant power. [emphasis added]

I very much disagree with the attitude of the United States towards the dictatorships of the Caribbean. I completely disagree with that.

In any case, Cuban friends, you can be sure of one thing: any solution attempted by the Cuban Revolution José Figueres respects it, even if it were against it; I have not come to criticize you, much less to give you advice, but perhaps to expose some of my modest theses, and then hear yours.

Great men have emerged in America and especially here in Cuba. It seems to me that since the time of Independence, nothing as interesting as what is happening now has happened; no men of such magnitude had arisen. Men like Fidel Castro have the right, in the parade of history—which bears a lot of resemblance to this parade of men who has passed through here today—to stand and shout at the heroes who were ahead: “Martí, Bolívar, Moreno, Sucre, San Martín, Santander: Here we are.”

In response to the rather pointed criticism of Castro’s possible alliance with the Stalinists of the Soviet Union, Castro pulled the microphone on Figueres and sent a trade union leader to the stage to attack him. Worse still, Castro attempted to humiliate Figueres by calling him “Pepe Cachucha.” “Cachucha” appears to be a word with both ordinary and slang meanings. Figueres had only intended one meaning but Castro played on both. As he said, the 1948 rebels in Costa Rica had worn inexpensive caps to signal their loyalties and “cachucha” can be understood as meaning a cap. But Castro meant more than that and he contrasted the “Barbados” (bearded ones) men of the Cuban revolution with the Costa Rican rebels who were like women with hair around their vaginas. But “cachucha” does not signal “vagina.” Its equivalent is a vulgar one. A great way to fight and win a political debate!

In 1970, events conspired to bring Costa Rica and Cuba in a face-to-face dilemma. In 1969, Carlos Fonseca, the Nicaraguan founder of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (fsln) in exile in Costa Rica, had been arrested and imprisoned for bank robbery there. Another fsln leader, Humberto Ortega, attempted to free him but was injured, captured and imprisoned. In response, several fsln members hijacked a lacsa (Costa Rican) airliner and took it to Cuba to demand their release. Figueres sent Valverde to Havana to negotiate a resolution. Whatever the terms of the deal were, the airliner was returned and the two fsln leaders were released.

Later, Castro was forced to apologize, sort of, to Figueres. He needed Costa Rica’s assistance in supporting the growing Sandinista revolt against the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. Specifically, he wanted Costa Rica to allow for the transport of soldiers and weapons across the Costa Rican/Nicaraguan border. Figueres agreed. But he exacted a price. For some years, he had provided asylum to Robert Vesco, a corporate gangster fleeing from prosecution in us courts, and he wanted to get rid of him. He “offered” him to Cuba and Cuba said yes. Not too many years later, Vesco’s criminal instincts and deeds became egregious enough that the Cuban authorities sent him to prison—where rumors and other sources suggest that he died in 2007. Whatever else this means, it suggests that Figueres knew how to strike a bargain.

The End of the Golden Age

The “golden age” of Costa Rican stability and prosperity, introduced by the post–civil war agreements, lasted until the early 1970s. Then the country, like all too many others, became caught up in the global wave of economic free-fall, initiated in part by the oil boycott but more fundamentally by the return of the ghost of capitalist crisis. At the end of the ’70s and in the early ’80s, Costa Rica was challenged to reduce its budgets and curb its expenditures on social welfare by the newly empowered international financial institutions—the imf and the World Bank. In spite of initial resistance, it eventually succumbed but the worsened conditions were never quite as severe as elsewhere.

Nonetheless, the challenges to Costa Rican well being kept on coming—even in disguises, such as the imposition of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (cafta) in the wake of nafta. The challenges have been met by continuing forms of popular resistance to the elimination of benefits and privatization of public services but, as elsewhere, things are almost always getting consistently worse.

Today

Today, the lives of most Costa Ricans appear to be ok. But things are not great. The streets in San Jose are safe but cops are everywhere; police cars use flashing lights even when they are not pursuing anyone; private armed security agents are in many stores; iron gates and fences surround most residences and commercial enterprises, and there is barbed wire along the top of the gates and fences. All of this, we learned, is to prevent break-ins. I read one account that suggested that the break-ins are the work of the poorest residents and that much of what they steal is simply recycled back to communities through retail stores that specialize in the trade. The cops apparently don’t trouble themselves with this low-level crime.

We saw no evidence of gentrification in San Jose; in the downtown area there are numerous modern and upscale structures side by side with ordinary homes and retail businesses. The streets are crowded with cars and buses and lots of people walking in the middle of the day; few of the walkers appear to be prosperous. The sidewalks are occupied by people selling crafts, trinkets, jewelry and snacks.

At the heart of the city is a pedestrian boulevard that includes the Old Market (a bit like Essex Street in nyc or the Reading Market in Philadelphia). On the boulevard, one of the most prominent items for sale is lottery tickets—very large lottery tickets, whose value does not likely correspond to their size. The sellers come in all ages—old men and women sitting and waiting behind small tables on stools while taking drags on cigarettes as well as young women more actively trying to attract attention. There are musicians and lots of pigeons getting showers in the fountain outside the National Theater. The whole street reminds me of Canal Street or 14th Street in Manhattan. When it starts to rain, some put up their umbrellas, others just walk on. It’s mostly a drizzle but occasionally it gets a bit heavier.

We didn’t see any of the poorest neighborhoods up close. We did see shacks alongside the highways, although virtually all have electricity, evidenced by omnipresent satellite dishes on rooftops and, according to everything we heard, all have potable running water. One of the odd things that shapes understandings from a distance is that most roofs are made of corrugated iron which I assume is really quite good for dealing with lots of rainfall. And, indeed, Costa Rica is a country that seems to have learned quite well how to deal with the natural landscape that it has inherited and to do as well as it can with it and to do with it as well as it should. That seems like an approach worth learning for a new future.

There seems to be a good deal of drug smuggling coming from South America, mostly along the coasts, that’s intended for the us market and a growing level of gang violence associated with it—although at levels far below other countries. There does not seem to be much of a drug use problem within Costa Rica itself.

Costa Rica is a self-consciously environmentally aware state. Virtually all of its electricity is generated by renewable sources (especially by hydroelectric power). There are lots of symbolic gestures in restaurants and hotels about the careful use of paper and water. The country sells carbon credits to European countries to allow it to pay farmers to let land revert to forests rather than growing crops. On the other hand, all mass transit is based on buses; there are lots of cars and motorcycles and the traffic in San Jose is awful.

And so?

It’s tempting to treat Costa Rica as a relic but we should not. Nothing about its future is pre-ordained. It may yet come again to be a beacon for freedom in Central America. We should pay close attention to this small land of humanity at work.

In the dungeon of the barracks that became the museum mentioned at the beginning of this article, an inscription on the wall for a different exhibit quoted the German philosopher, Hegel, “Nada Es; Toda Deviene.” “Nothing is; everything becomes.” That’s true for Costa Rica.

On September 8, 2018, I participated in a panel discussion organized by the nyu chapter of the Platypus Organization, on the topic of “What is Socialism.” Here’s the description of the proposed discussion that the organization posted beforehand: “The term ‘socialism’ appears to be enjoying a resurgence of public interest—both favorably where it is self-prescribed and pejoratively where it is meant to degrade the respectability of public figures. From early 2016 at the height of Bernie Sanders’s campaign for the Democratic Party nomination to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory over Joe Crowley in June, the term ‘socialism’ appears to be gaining some level of purchase and a whole lot of press. In many instances, ‘socialism’ is commingled with terms as varied as ‘social democratic,’ ‘communist,’ ‘marxist,’ ‘anarchist,’ etc. As such, we view this is as an opportune moment to ask, ‘what is socialism after all?’ What do public figures mean when they identify as socialists or any one of its varied strains? What do their opponents think it means? What does it mean and what can it mean? And perhaps, most important of all, what did it mean in the past?”

There were two other panelists—Andy Gittlitz, a contributor to the New Inquiry and co-host of the Antifada podcast, and Richard Wolin, a professor at cuny’s Graduate Center. The discussion was moderated by Wentai Xiao of Platypus. I won’t presume to summarize what any of them said. I would note that I thought it was a lively discussion.

What follows is a revised and expanded version of my remarks—those I made in my introductory comments, those during the subsequent discussion and those I never got to make because of time limitations.

____________________

I hope to address five topics:

1. The developing popular leftist understanding of socialism—as reflected in Corey Robin’s New York Times op-ed on “The New Socialists” published on August 24, 2018;
2. My youthful daydreams about a socialist future and what they tell me now;
3. The need to expand the range of possibilities to be considered in imagining socialism and a brief enumeration of what some of those expanded possibilities might be;
4. Ridding ourselves of some dangerous notions associated with the theory and practice of Communist Parties;
5. Marx and post-capitalist society.

Corey Robin on “The New Socialists”

Let me begin by acknowledging, along with the organizers of the event, that the reasonably widespread discussion of socialism in the mainstream media and elsewhere should be greeted as an opportunity to open up a long overdue public discussion on the topic.

Corey Robin took advantage of that opportunity and should be given credit for his willingness to put his own ideas out there to be responded to and contested by others. (Robin is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College.) In his Times op-ed, he begins by suggesting that American socialists have not been so good at defining just what they meant to do. As an example of that, he cites a sentence written by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in a 1954 issue of Dissent: “Socialism is the name of our desire!” My all but immediate reaction was quite different from Professor Robin’s. Socialism is the name of our desire? Not so bad! What is such a desire but a vision of a new society? Such a vision is best expressed in a language of inspiration. Over hundreds of years, the vision of a new society has been named: “Jerusalem” by the poet William Blake, “a free association” or a “union of free individuals” by Karl Marx, a “gemeinwesen” by Frederick Engels,1 a “universal republic” by the Paris Communards, a “beloved community” by the American Civil Rights activists, or a “good life” by clr James. In Modern Politics, James described what he meant by the phrase:

An American woman told me once that she forgot herself and told an audience of white women in the United States—she was a Negro woman—speaking to them she said, “When I look at you all, I am sorry for you because although whites are oppressing us and giving us trouble, I am actively on the move; every morning I am doing something, but you all are just sitting down there watching.” It is not the complete truth, but it is a great part of the truth. It is some idea of what I mean by what is the good life—the individual in relation to society. It is not, it never has been, merely a question of what the vulgarians call “raising the standard of living.” Men are not pigs to be fattened.2

For Robin, the limits of the new socialist imaginary are straightforward ones—a society measurably better and fairer than the one we have now. By way of possible next steps, he identifies “state ownership of certain industries, worker councils and economic cooperatives, sovereign wealth funds.”

Indeed, he favorably emphasizes the precedent set by Franklin Roosevelt when he challenged the “economic royalists.” He mentions no critical assessment of the New Deal—its similarities to fascist economic planning; its reconstruction of the white republic (on the basis of the exclusions of domestic workers and agricultural workers, overwhelmingly black workers, from Social Security eligibility and labor law protections, the development and implementation of “redlining” policies by the Federal Housing Administration, the parceling out of the implementation of the gi Bill to the states—thereby allowing the seventeen segregationist states to severely limit the participation of black veterans) all as part of its accommodations to the Southern segregationists in the Democratic Party.

A far cry from the vision that inspired the American abolitionists, black and white, before and during the Civil War; from the vision of the Parisian Communards in 1871; from the vision of the Spanish anarchists and other left-wing activists during the Spanish Revolution of the 1930s; and indeed, a far cry from the vision of the millions of participants in the various worldwide rebellions of the 1960s.

The loss of utopian yearning has happened before. In Eve and the New Jerusalem, Barbara Taylor wrote about English socialism in the second half of the nineteenth century:

In place of the programme for a transformed personal and cultural existence which had been so central to pre-1850 socialism there gradually emerged, in all too many organisations, what William Morris condemned as “utilitarian sham socialism” divested of any genuinely libertarian aims; of what his twentieth century disciple E.P. Thompson, has characterized as:

the whole problem of the subordination of the imaginative utopian faculties within the later Marxist tradition; its lack of a moral self-consciousness or even a vocabulary of desire, its inability to project any images of the future or even its tendency to fall back in lieu of these upon the utilitarian’s earthly paradise—the maximisation of economic growth.3

Youthful Daydreams

Many years ago, at the end of the 1960s when I was young and not so foolish, I remember walking around what was then the heart of Manhattan and imagining how we would re-use all of the luxury buildings for human purposes—after the revolution. My best recollection is that my understanding of the possibilities was fundamentally playful but also completely realistic.

It never occurred to me that what would happen, instead of my fanciful daydreams, is that the domination of wealth manifested in the buildings of Manhattan would only be multiplied across New York City. I now yearn for the Manhattan of 1969 and I certainly yearn for the Brooklyn of 1969. The Brooklyn of 1969 was not so different from the Brooklyn of 1955, when I was seven years old and probably first became aware, in some primitive sense, of where I lived. Almost fifty years of development and redevelopment, under all sorts of political regimes (Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani, Bloomberg, de Blasio), have only given us more that we need to take down before we might move on.

My primitive notions of socialism those many years ago, in spite of having read some of the early Marx and a good deal of Herbert Marcuse, were grounded in a redistributionist logic—let’s take from the few who have way too much and imagine ways of making it beneficial for the many who have too little. It was the 1 percent and the 99 percent before its time.

What I think I now know is there is not much good use to be made of any of it—the imposing structures of a place like New York City need to be taken down, methodically and safely, and as much as technically possible, the materials (the bricks, the steel, the pipes, the toilet bowls, the cables, and so on) need to be used elsewhere for profoundly different purposes.

There is one other all but overwhelming change in the years since my travels around Manhattan—the challenge to the continued existence of a habitable planet by extended degradations of the natural environment and fossil fuel–induced climate change. Back then, I had little idea of what such a threat might be. The first Earth Day was celebrated in April 1970—it was organized as the result of a resolution by then Senator Gaylord Nelson who had been deeply troubled by what he had seen in the aftermath of a large oil spill near Santa Barbara, California. In any case, millions of people in the United States responded by participating in various celebrations of the earth.4 I was teaching eighth grade at the time and I self-assuredly told my students that they should not accept the underlying message that the health of the planet was up to what individuals did. Of course, I was right about the small point but terribly wrong about the big one—the earth did matter—a lot! I am not certain that the most dire warnings regarding the imminent dangers to the well being of the planet are accurate but I take completely for granted that some very obvious developments in countries across the globe that are staring in our faces, let alone the consensus findings of knowledgeable scientists, suggest that the dangers we face should not be underestimated.

Expanded Possibilities

It may well be that the first order of business for a socialist society in the United States will be the undertaking of immediate massive efforts to protect vulnerable locations (and their inhabitants) across the globe from the likely devastating impacts of extreme weather conditions and to initiate even more massive efforts to halt the further damaging of the planet and to begin repairing the damage already done. It is, I think, beyond doubt, that the continued rule of capital will only make the situation worse and provides no basis for thinking that whatever measures capitalist states introduce could be better enough. The possibility of a future requires a profound social revolution.

So, let’s talk about the revolution and what it could lead to. I take for granted the provision of essential goods and services to all; the abolition of private property in the means of production5; the elimination of the various manifestations of militarism (standing armies and navies, weapons of destruction, military bases); the dismantling of the organs of repression (the police, jails and prisons); an end to the routine violence enforced by bosses and bureaucrats; the end of mindless production and the destruction of the natural environment by the dumping of wastes in the ground, the air, the lakes, rivers and oceans and the burning of fossil fuels.6

But we need to imagine much more than that. As a small start towards the recovery of the utopian, I’d suggest a few fundamental socialist principles:

• Not a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work; instead, the abolition of the wages system!7
• Not state ownership and planning; no laying hold of the ready-made state machinery; instead, the direct democracy of the council and the Commune and the abolition of the state!8
• Not better organized time; instead the maximization of free time for all through the greatest possible reduction of required work time for all.
• The cultivation of “social individuals,” prepared for active participation in a wide range of intellectual, technical, athletic and artistic activities, by way of an advanced education that would be available to all throughout their lives.

I see socialism as the epoch of great healings, new relationships and transcendences between:

• individuals and community
• males and females
• city and country9
• agriculture and industry
• craft and technical design
• praxis and techne (tacit knowledge and scientific knowledge)
• humans and nature
• humans and animals
• pleasure and reality
• everyday life and beauty10
• mental labor and manual labor
• creativity and receptivity
• work and free activity
• necessity and freedom
• production and consumption
• imagination and reason
• the misnamed “developed” and “underdeveloped” worlds
• centralization and decentralization.

For the moment, I’ll leave it to my readers to imagine what the actual contents of the different pairings might be and what it might mean for us to re-work their interconnections. I do, however, want to make one comment about the last pairing of centralization and decentralization. It appears evident to me that it is simply out of the question for us to continue the current mode of globalized production and distribution if we have any real interest in preserving the planet and creating the circumstances for individuals to become able to shape their lives in fundamental ways. As much as humanly and technically possible, we need to imagine ways of bringing decisions regarding the complexities of modern social life as close as possible to where people live—in communities that are intentionally designed, especially with regard to size, to enable mutual understandings and real self-government.11 In that context, it would be especially valuable and important to recognize the need for an incorporation of traditional anarchist perspectives on decentralization into any socialist vision worthy of the name.12

Ridding Ourselves of Dangerous Notions

I do not have the time or energy to detail all the barbarities that came to be seen as either the price to pay for socialism or, worse still, as part of the socialist project itself in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution in Russia. But I do want to highlight two of them—one well known, the other not so much. The first, already hinted at, is the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a dictatorship of the party that led, all but inevitably to the dictatorship of a leadership clique over the party and the rest of society (including the establishment of a secret police, the suppression of opposition views, the imprisonment and assassination of those deemed to be enemies of the state). Let’s be clear—these were essential features of the pre-Stalin Bolshevik Party, not deformations that came later.

To the extent that Marx ever used the “dictatorship of the proletariat” phrase, he intended it to mean the class rule of the immense majority of the population during a transitional phase of the consolidation of a new political order. He specifically intended it to be a criticism of those who favored the rule of a small conspiratorial group that had managed to seize power. Very early on in his political life, Marx had warned against this danger:

… the political soul of revolution consists in the tendency of the classes with no political power to put an end to their isolation from the state and from power. Its point of view is that of the state, of an abstract totality which exists only through its separation from real life and which is unthinkable in the absence of an organized antithesis between the universal idea and the individual existence of man. In accordance with the limited and contradictory nature of the political soul a revolution inspired by it organizes a dominant group within society at the cost of society.13

The second was the notion that the goal of a socialist society revolved around the creation of new humans. Trotsky addressed this in the closing paragraphs of his Literature and Revolution:

Man at last will begin to harmonize himself in earnest. He will make it his business to achieve beauty by giving the movement of his own limbs the utmost precision, purposefulness and economy in his work, his walk and his play. He will try to master first the semiconscious and then the subconscious processes in his own organism, such as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion, reproduction, and, within necessary limits, he will try to subordinate them to the control of reason and will. Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments. The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training.14 This is entirely in accord with evolution. Man first drove the dark elements out of industry and ideology, by displacing barbarian routine by scientific technique, and religion by science. Afterwards he drove the unconscious out of politics, by overthrowing monarchy and class with democracy and rationalist parliamentarianism and then with the clear and open Soviet dictatorship. The blind elements have settled most heavily in economic relations, but man is driving them out from there also, by means of the Socialist organization of economic life. This makes it possible to reconstruct fundamentally the traditional family life. Finally, the nature of man himself is hidden in the deepest and darkest corner of the unconscious, of the elemental, of the sub-soil. Is it not self-evident that the greatest efforts of investigative thought and of creative initiative will be in that direction? The human race will not have ceased to crawl on all fours before God, kings and capital, in order later to submit humbly before the dark laws of heredity and a blind sexual selection! Emancipated man will want to attain a greater equilibrium in the work of his organs and a more proportional developing and wearing out of his tissues, in order to reduce the fear of death to a rational reaction of the organism towards danger. There can be no doubt that man’s extreme anatomical and physiological disharmony, that is, the extreme disproportion in the growth and wearing out of organs and tissues, give the life instinct the form of a pinched, morbid and hysterical fear of death, which darkens reason and which feeds the stupid and humiliating fantasies about life after death.

Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman [emphases added].15

These convictions led Trotsky to be willing to do a great deal of harm to actual human beings in Russia. In 1919, N.G. Kuznetsov wrote to Trotsky to tell him that: “Moscow is literally dying of hunger.” Trotsky responded: “That’s not hunger. When Titus was taking Jerusalem, Jewish mothers ate their children. When I have your mothers eating their young, then you can tell me you’re starving.”16

Marx and post-capitalist society

Karl Marx has a great deal to offer us for consideration when we contemplate the possibilities of socialism. I follow the lead of Paresh Chattopadhyay in his estimate of the importance of Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme in understanding the distinctiveness of Marx’s ideas. Chattopadhyay begins by situating the text in its context. Marx wrote what he considered to be “marginal notes” to record and make explicit his criticisms of the program that had recently been adopted by the German Workers’ Party. He was especially concerned that the program not be seen as a representation of his own views. His comments were very narrowly shaped in response to the formulations in the program itself. Chattopadhyay argues:

Nevertheless, in spite of the narrowness of scope and the resulting selective character of the themes involved, this document contains, drawing on the author’s whole life work, a condensed discussion of the most essential elements of the capitalist mode of production, its revolutionary transformation into its opposite, and a rough portrayal, in a few bold strokes, of what Marx had called in Capital, the “union of free individuals” destined to succeed the existing social order.17

Marx thought that the post-capitalist epoch would unfold in two major chapters, with the second chapter divided into two phases. The first chapter would be the period of the revolutionary transformation of political rule after the displacement of capitalist rule. The second chapter would be the chapter of socialism (also referred to by Marx, interchangeably, as communism and the associated mode of production). During the first chapter, the new society would be able to introduce many measures designed to eliminate many of the worst features of current reality—poverty, hunger, unnecessary illness and death, homelessness—but it would not yet be socialist itself.

Marx approached thinking about socialism proper in a manner that I’d describe as “utopian practicality”:

… in his 1857–58 manuscripts, Marx had emphasized that “all economy is finally reduced to the economy of time” and spoken of the two aspects of the employment of society’s available labour time. First, society’s labour time must be economised—[the] less time society requires to produce the daily requirements, [the] more time it gains for other material and spiritual production. Secondly, society must distribute its labour time among different branches appropriately in order to obtain production corresponding to its needs.18

Once production has been completed across all the various branches, the matter of distribution arises. Marx argued that part of that total production needed to be set aside for the replacement (as they were worn out) and expansion of the means of production (to meet expanded needs) and as a kind of insurance against unanticipated events such as natural disasters. Once those set-asides were in place, the rest of the produced goods would be available for distribution for consumption.

In the lower phase, Marx suggested that access to goods should be made available according a direct accounting of labor time: “Here the labour time that each individual offers towards the creation of the social product corresponding to different needs of society, serves as the measure of the share of the labouring individual in the common labour as well as the portion of the total consumption which comes back to the labouring individual.”19

Marx insisted that because, from the very beginning of the lower phase, producers would be integrally involved in decisions regarding the forms and contents of total production, they would no longer be sellers of labor power and they would not be receiving wages. Instead,

… labourers receive from their own (free) Association not [a] wage but some kind of a token indicating the labour time contributed by them to the total social labour time—after [the] deduction for common funds. These tokens allow the labourers to draw from the social stock of means of consumption the amount costing the same amount of labour.20

Furthermore, “…in the absence of commodity production the tokens, that the producers receive from their association…are not money.”21

Marx was aware that this would not at all be ideal. Even without wages or money, the principle of “equal right” would govern. While the measurement of work time would be accomplished with an “equal standard,” different laborers would undoubtedly be making different contributions—as measured by standards other than time. He argued that there was no alternative:

Since the new society has just come out of the capitalist society and has not yet been able to “develop on its own foundations,” the new mode of distribution cannot be completely free from the old mode. The determining principle of distribution among individuals continues to be each one’s labour contribution, and not (yet) human needs, this equal-unequal right being thus still within the bourgeois horizon, it is a “bourgeois right.” The latter is fully overcome only in a “higher phase” of the Association with the overcoming of the enslaving division of labour, with labour becoming a “first need” of life and with the “spring of cooperative wealth” flowing more abundantly.22

In the higher phase, the association would be able to realize the foundational principle of a human society—“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

In no way are Marx’s thoughts examples of what he disparaged as “Comtist recipes for the cookshops of the future.” I don’t think that Marx’s opinions on these matters are in any way the last word but they can serve as very powerful starting points for thinking about socialism. An especially valuable recent text which readers might find helpful if they pursue the topic is Peter Hudis’s Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism. Hudis emphasizes the need to devote time and effort to exploring Marx’s actual writings because of all the terrible damage done to the idea of socialism by many who claimed to be acting in accordance with his views.23

In closing, I’d suggest that we can fruitfully think about the present and future of socialism if we think about it in terms of languages. There are extinct languages (no longer spoken by anyone), dead languages (not spoken by any community of native speakers, such as Latin) and living languages. Socialism has been faced with a number of challenges that has made the possibility of its extinction a real one. Nonetheless, it has managed to hold on as a kind of dead language—a language spoken by relative handfuls of people with various kinds of reasons for learning it. The challenge we face is to turn socialism once again into a living language—one that’s spoken fluently and with passion by many millions of people united by a vision of a new world. The socialism of the future will be created on the basis of that new unity.

Somewhat surprisingly, this might bring me back to the end of Corey Robin’s Times article: “Socialism is not journalists, intellectuals or politicians armed with a policy agenda. As Marx and Engels understood—this was one of their core insights, what distinguished them from other socialist thinkers, ever ready with their blueprints—it is workers who get us there, who decide what and where ‘there’ is.” Perhaps we have more to talk about than I thought.

1. Engels wrote that gemeinwesen, a good old-fashioned German word for community, might capture what the communists wanted.↩

2. clr James, Modern Politics (PM Press: 2013), p. 110.↩

3. Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem (Harvard University Press 1993), p. xvi.↩

4. Interestingly, that first Earth Day had been preceded by almost a decade by the publication of a book, titled Our Synthetic Environment, which detailed the ways in which the earth and its inhabitants were being threatened. The author was the anarchist thinker Murray Bookchin, writing under the pseudonym of Lewis Herber. His book pre-dated what was to become the much better known expose by Rachel Carson titled The Silent Spring.↩

5. See Paresh Chattopadhyay, The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience (Praeger Publishers: 1994). Chattopadhyay argues that Marx had a class-based understanding of private property. For Marx, private property under capitalism was the ownership of the means of production and the control of the conditions of production by the capitalist class. The juridical form of that ownership could be either individual or collective; the juridical forms are derivative from the economic ones. In that context, there is no question but that the Soviet Union was a social system based on class property.↩

6. I’d also note that I take for granted the abolition of commercial advertising; I’ll leave the tv question open.↩

7. The central place of the abolition of wage labor for Marx can only be appreciated in light of what he had discovered the wage to be. Chattopadhyay summarized Marx’s view: “Marx underlines that wage is not what it appears to be, that is value or price of labour. It is, on the contrary, a masked form of the value or price of labour power. ‘Thereby,’ writes Marx, ‘the whole hitherto existing bourgeois conception of wage as well as the criticism directed against it (hitherto) was once and for all thrown overboard and it was clearly shown that the wage labourer is permitted to work for his living, that is to live in so far as he works gratis a certain time for the capitalist; that the whole capitalist system of production revolves around the prolongation of this unpaid labour (Gratisarbeit) through the extension of the working day or through the development of productivity, intensity of labour etc. and that the system of wage labour is a system of slavery and, indeed, a slavery which becomes more severe to the same extent as the social productive powers develop, whether the labourer receives a higher or a lower wage.” Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A Critique of Marxism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 203.↩

8. Maximilien Rubel has argued that Marx can properly be interpreted as a “theoretician of anarchism.”↩

9. In the late nineteenth century, thinkers like William Morris thought that cities like London were abominations; in his utopian News from Nowhere, he placed an apricot orchard in Trafalgar Square.↩

10. See Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (Verso: 2015).↩

11. See clr James, Every Cook Can Govern (PM Press: 2010).↩

12. See the previously mentioned Communal Luxury for wonderful accounts of the insights of the anarchist geographers, Elise Reclus and Peter Kropotkin, on these matters.↩

13. See “Critical Notes on the Article: ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian.’”↩
    

14. This, I assume, provides an explanation for the origins of the well-documented systematic and organized use of doping to enhance athletic performance by the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc nations.↩

15. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Ann Arbor: 1960), pp. 254–6.↩

16. Cited in documents released from the Soviet Union’s archives, according to Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Bolsheviks (Random House, 2017), p. 5.↩

17. Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production, p. 197.↩

18. Ibid., p. 204.↩

19. Ibid., p. 205.↩

20. Ibid.↩

21. Ibid., p. 206.↩

22. Ibid., p. 206.↩

23. Peter Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2013).↩