Eruditorum Press

This is not a place of honor

socialism

Summing Up, Part 2

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In an article entitled ‘Democracy Isn’t Freedom’, Ron Paul wrote:

Americans have been conditioned to accept the word “democracy” as a synonym for freedom, and thus to believe that democracy is unquestionably good.

The problem is that democracy is not freedom. Democracy is simply majoritarianism, which is inherently incompatible with real freedom. Our founding fathers clearly understood this, as evidenced not only by our republican constitutional system, but also by their writings in the Federalist Papers and elsewhere. James Madison cautioned that under a democratic government, “There is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.” John Adams argued that democracies merely grant revocable rights to citizens depending on the whims of the masses, while a republic exists to secure and protect pre-existing rights. Yet how many Americans know that the word “democracy” is found neither in the Constitution nor the Declaration of Independence, our very founding documents?

Now, an important thing to note here is that Paul is absolutely right.  Most of the Founding Fathers did not envisage their new republic as a democracy.  Indeed, Madison (as Chomsky is fond of reminding us) explicitly saw the task of designing the new government as one of designing a system which would protect “the minority of the opulent against the majority”.  Chomsky also likes to quote John Jay as saying “The people who own the country ought to govern it”. As he writes in The Common Good,

Madison feared that a growing part of the population, suffering from the serious inequities of the society, would “secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of [life’s] blessings.” If they had democratic power, there’d be a danger they’d do something more than sigh. He discussed this quite explicitly at the Constitutional Convention, expressing his concern that the poor majority would use its power to bring about what we would now call land reform.

So he designed a system that made sure democracy couldn’t function. He placed power in the hands of the “more capable set of men,” those who hold “the wealth of the nation.” Other citizens were to be marginalized and factionalized in various ways, which have taken a variety of forms over the years: fractured political constituencies, barriers against unified working-class action and cooperation, exploitation of ethnic and racial conflicts, etc.

This is nothing surprising.  We can go back to the dawn of bourgeois democracy in England, the Putney Debates, and see the bafflement which enveloped Ireton and the other Parliament Men when Rainsborough and the Levellers demanded that every man should have a say in the government that ruled over him, even if he lacked a “permanent interest” (i.e. property).  Ireton and his fellow propertied gentlemen not only didn’t agree with such a concept – they couldn’t even comprehend it.  It was utterly alien to them.  The very radical ideas thrown up by the revolution they had led were now confronting them, shouted from the mouths of the common men they’d relied on as their muscle, and they might as well have been speaking a foreign language.…

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Close but no Cigar

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“And that’s what he’s been like for forty-five years.  Fantastic!  Speeches that go on for four, five, six, seven hours…  I wonder if when he gets to 90 he’ll stop and say ‘But that’s enough about me… let’s talk about you’.” – Mark Steel, 2001

 

So, as you might have heard, Fidel Castro died.  Aged 90.  Ruler of Cuba since the revolution of 1959, which he led, and which unseated Batista.  Something something survived x many US Presidents something something Che Guevara something something Bay of Pigs something something…

…aaaaaand at this point we would normally go into a recitation of certain obvious points.  Different points depending on the political orientation of the writer, his publication, etc.

For the Right, we would recapitulate that Castro was a dictator, that there is little democracy in Cuba, that it’s a one-party system, that post-revolution Cuba has a dismal human rights record, that dissidents are persecuted, that political prisoners are often ill-treated, that the regime cruelly persecuted LGBT people, etc.

Unusually for the Right, this is all true. They generally don’t have to lie about Cuba.  They would if they had to, but they generally don’t need to.  Not about the basics anyway.  Which must be refreshing for them.  (Actually I don’t think they give a flying toss.)  They lie about the bigger picture, of course, characterizing Cuba as an exceptional abhorrence, while suppressing votes and supporting privatised slave gulags at home, and bombing Syria and cuddling the Saudi royalty and arming Israeli apartheid and invading Iraq, etc etc etc.

For the Left, we would probably stress the enormous improvements in education, literacy, health care, etc, which came from the revolution.  We’d talk about Castro’s support for the ANC against South African Apartheid (in contrast to most Western governments) and for similar liberation struggles across the world, Palestine for instance.  We’d talk about how bad Batista was (and he was a vicious dictator), about how pre-revolution Cuba was a playground for the US corporations and the mafia, about how badly the USA treated post-revolution Cuba (very badly), the hypocrisy of the West in condemning Castro when it snuggles up to friendly dictators (Pinochet, the Saudi royals, etc etc etc) and commits imperial atrocities itself, including multiple coups to put US-friendly dictators in charge of Latin American nations.  We’d talk about 600-odd CIA assassination attempts, and exploding cigars, and so on.

Again, all true.  Truer, perhaps.

Occasionally, you’ll get an article which mixes the two approaches in the name of nuance and balance.  Even Owen Jones managed this basic feat.  But even in such cases, the exercise is still in the mixing of two distinct approaches.  (With Jones, the result was a classic case of ‘this, but on the other hand this’, followed by his customary moralising at the Left.)

And that’s the point.  Both sides are more-or-less right about Castro and his Cuba.  Maybe not in their ideological conclusions, but in their factual cases.  

But very few commentators have stopped to ask why these two realities overlap.…

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Resist in Peace Tony Benn

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Paul Foot on Tony Benn in the LRB:

For nearly a century, Labour MPs have been going to Parliament to change the world, but have ended up changing only themselves. Tony Benn is unique. He went to Parliament to change himself, but has ended up determined only to change the world. This extraordinary conversion has taken place not on the backbenches, where a young socialist’s revolutionary determination is often toughened by being passed over for high office, but in high office itself. Indeed, the higher the office Tony Benn occupied, the more his eyes were opened to the horror of capitalist society, and to the impotence of socialists in high office to change it.

And in his book, The Vote:

Any workers fighting redundancy, any school standing up for the comprehensive system, any persecuted foreigner seeking asylum could rely on his active support.  Again and again, he deliberately abandoned his base in Parliament and worked among those who, he hoped and believed, would one day trigger a new Chartist agitation, and a revolution from below.

In 1999, after two years of the Blair Government, he made a historic announcement: he would not be standing for Parliament in the 2001 general election.  He would be leaving Parliament ‘in order to devote more time to politics’.  His own enormous experience in the highest places in the land drove him to the conclusion that the place to fight was in the lowest: that any future for an egalitarian socialist society rested not on what happened in Parliament but on the resistance and determination of the workers and the poor.

***

Despite his age and the cruel death from cancer of his wife, he continued resolutely down the path he had set himself: to argue and agitate for change from below.

…

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14

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“I’ve known many times,” says the Doctor, “some of them much more pleasant than others.”

“Well, I quite like it here, I must say,” interjects Jo to cover the awkward moment, “Everyone’s been most kind.”

The Controller (what a giveaway that title is) nods in appreciation of her remark.

The Doctor, however, is unimpressed.  He swills more wine.  He looks like an sozzled, opinionated guy at an unsuccessful party, spoiling for a fight.

“Well, I met some people today who were far from kind,” he says.  He spent the earlier part of the day taking a forced tour of the Controller’s utopia, being subjected to the tender mercies of a surprisingly well-sketched terror state.

“That was a simple mistake, Doctor, I assure you,” says the Controller, his voice as smooth and silvery as his strange, quasi-robotic face, “You must not jump to conclusions.”

“Better than jumping from the crack of a whip from some security guard,” snaps the Doctor, “Do you run all your factories like that, Controller?”

We have been granted an unusual thing earlier in this episode: a glimpse into the productive centres of a Dalek-ruled regime.  It looked like a gulag.  People in rags lugged grain while being monitored at every moment.  At one point, we cut straight from that to the Controller handing Jo a plate full of grapes.

Grapes make wine, of course.  Wine is strangely present in this story.  Back at the start, the Doctor raided Sir Reginald Styles’ wine cellar.

“That was not a factory, Doctor,” returns the Controller mechanically.

“Oh? Then what was it?”  The Doctor looks still more like a half-cut guy, up for some aggro.

 “A rehabilitation centre.  A rehabilitation centre for hardened criminals.”

“Including old men and women, even children?”

“There will always be people who need discipline, Doctor,” says the Controller, as though the point is beyond debate… but then, to people like him, it always is.

“Now that’s an old fashioned point of view,” says the Doctor “even from my standards.”

I love that line, but it makes me feel sad.  It dates this story far more than the mullets and flares and glam rock facepaint.  I mourn a long lost time, before neoliberalism got to work on popular culture, when it was a mainstream assumption that we could dispense with crusty, reactionary stuff about some people basically being indolent animals who needed to be forced to work… so much so that even the Third Doctor could come out with it.

“I can assure you that this planet has never been more efficiently, more economically run,” says the controller.

Note that.  It’s never been more efficient and more “economically run” than when the bloody Daleks are in control.

“People have never been happier or more prosperous,” he continues.

“Then why,” asks the Doctor, “do you need so many people to keep them under control? Don’t they like being happy and prosperous?”

This cuts right to the quick.  It cuts to the delusion – still widespread on the left at that time – that ‘really existing socialism’ was in some meaningful way an improvement. …

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Homage to the Future

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I’m currently re-reading George Orwell’s best book Homage to Catalonia.  It’s one of those books I re-read every few years.

I came across this lovely, compact, resonant passage:

I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy ‘proving’ that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the ‘mystique’ of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all.

Orwell saw the essential nature of Stalin’s Russia better even than Trotsky.  A state-capitalist bureaucracy, with the role of private capitalists taken instead by an equally-exploitative class of managers.  He also saw that Stalin’s Russia was not socialist, since the essence of socialism is the abolition of an exploiting class, not its replacement by a new set of exploiters.

However, what I love most about this quote is that Orwell is writing in 1937 about Stalinists, but it applies today to the ideological commissars of capitalism.  Fox News, Thomas Friedman, etc, etc, et-bloody-c.  All the corporate goons and mainstream ideologues (all of them far more reminiscent of old-style Stalinist hacks, apologists and party-men than they’d ever dream possible) endlessly telling us that Socialism is the religion of state ownership, state control, state regimentation of the individual, etc.

They tell us this to scare us away – not away from socialism, of which they affect to live in fear but which they secretly regard (wrongly, as history will hopefully show) as a busted flush – but away from ANY criticism, even the mildest bit of reformism, of corporate neoliberalism.

Their bogey is the authoritarianism of old Russia or China… and yet their world of corporate-rule is eerily like such tyrannies.  Corporations are utter tyrannies; pyramidal command structures with little or no internal democracy, scarce accountability, no levers by which the public may control them, the ability and willingness to use violence to defend themselves, etc.

Just as the Stalinized Soviet Union wanted its acolytes and fellow travellers and useful idiots to believe that socialism meant state control, so do today’s ultra-capitalist thinkpriests… and for exactly the same reason, only in moral photo-negative.  The Stalinist argument was: if state control is socialism, then Stalinism is socialism, ergo Stalinism is good.  The neoliberal argument is: if state control is socialism, and socialism was Stalinism, then any state control over capital is Stalinism, ergo state control of any kind of evil.

These arguments are clones of each other, wearing different suits.  And both are the purest cant, invented by tyrannies for the justification of tyranny. …

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