Understanding The Protest Movements

There have been at least two great intellectual failures in the last hundred years - the first is Marxism-Leninism and the second has been the liberal rejection of some of the central insights of the Marxists.

Class But Not As We Know It, Jim

This is not to praise Marxism except as an analytical tool under defined condiitions because Marxism is, fundamentally, a poor guide to our human condition. Despite its alleged materialism, it is an idealist philosophy.

Idealism is sanctioned lying about the world. Marxism is Hegelian which, in turn, is an historicism derived from the Western Christian tradition which, in turn and philosophically, is ultimately an adaptation of Platonism.

The trajectory from Plato's Cave to the Gulag has been well if simplistically argued by others but the summary is that this Western tradition of idealism is ultimately religious and 'spiritual' and that it can kill when brooked. History is on my side as I write this.

But the proverbial baby has been thrown out with the bath water in at least two respects. We have forgotten Marx' and Engels' insights that politics and culture derive intimately from economic conditions and that, though each person is greater than his class, there are class interests in politics.

Modern liberal democracy has tried to eliminate the language of class because it is not convenient for its preferred model of professionals organising functional coalitions of special interests and lobbies to share out the benefits of growth - but when growth falters, then Marx becomes analytically relevant.

Where Should We Be Looking

For this reason, in trying to understand what might develop out of the current economic crisis, we have to return both to theory and to what is happening where we are not looking - much as in 1910, we might have been wise not to ignore intellectuals in Zurich or school teachers in Bavaria.

We should be studying not the machinations of the ideologues of the future (that is the job of the security services) but what they are saying that resonates with those who are either resentful of the current order of things or who are suffering and have the energy to do something about it.

It is that last clause that matters 'who 'have the energy to do something about it' - because there are an awful lot of resentful older middle class people, intellectuals and poor and vulnerable people who sit in their armchairs or on their sofas and have neither will nor ability to act.

Indeed, liberal democratic hegemony (indeed, all hegemonies) ultimately relies on inaction - that moan in the pub, grumble in front of the TV, meaningless letter to The Times, rant in a Facebook comment. None of this morphs into organisation or action. It is the 'art of being ruled' (stealing Wyndham Lewis' phrase).

This is why the Occupy Movement, the hackers of LulzSec and the Anonymous operation both fascinate and appall the establishment. They alternately have to try to contain them within their laws and infiltrate them with progressive rhetoric or secret policemen (the Tsarist model).

Who Are These People?

But who are these people as a class? Not who is behind the 'attacks' or 'occupations' because some might as easily be provocations by the establishment as genuine acts of revolt, but who is participating not only in 'new' models of political action but in confused riots as states weaken?

We have written elsewhere about the new anarchism but it is the class base of this movement that interests us here - and further investigation suggests that we are not seeing something new but something very old, the blockage of the aspirations of an educated young by the failed old.

This is a movement of graduates and not of workers (though there is a separate union-driven public sector defence movement whose self interest is so apparent that even very liberal middle classes resent their claims) and of persons who are 'cleverer' than their parents.

We get back to Marx. As in the print revolution of the 1500s, a revolution in communications has created a new technological and economic structure where value has shifted from one generation to another but where the necessary political or cultural change is lagging.

It is an old theme of these postings but the new technologies are not so much removing the ability of intermediaries to make surplus value for themselves out of their oligarchical control of knowledge (the professionals, if you like) but are making an older generation of intermediaries wholly redundant.

Paul Mason's Analysis

The young who know things the old do not know, including the absurdity of many of the rules designed to hold the old system together, are using new technologies to combine and protest in ways that are entirely new.

A recent Left Futures posting referring back to an earlier analysis of Paul Mason of BBC Newsnight that gave a number of reasons why this needs to be understood and, to a degree, embraced if we are to transit from one world to another without repression and killing. This is our gloss on that work.

• Young graduate women are emerging who are not stuck in the feminist resentments of the older generation but simply get on with practical organisation in their own interest and what they believe to be right - Mason is right that educated women are at the core of protest
• Ideological formulations are dead. There will be Marxists, conspiracy theorists, faith-based loons, environmentalists and liberals but none of them can control a propaganda process or impose an organisational model that stifles internal dissent or insists on a 'line'.
• An international 'elite' of protesters is emerging who operate quasi-professionally across borders or who supply technical skills across a borderless internet. This is an analogue with the intellectual diaspora dissidents who fuelled the rise of anarchism and Marxism-Leninism.
• The central economic issue is debt at a time of lack of employment opportunity. The protests might rapidly disappear with job creation or free education and debt forgiveness but States are in no position to deliver these during the current crisis.
• If this problem of a generation without prospects and with old codgers getting in the way is causing difficulties in the West, then it is boiling up to violent proportions in the many countries where there is now a massive demographic bulge of frustrated urban young.
• Organised labour is pretty well bankrupt as a revolutionary force. It has been a conservative force against 'clercs' since the 1940s but it has degenerated further into being representative largely of those who are already ensconced within the State - a truly conservative interest at this time.
• Protest as 'fun' - this should not be underestimated because contemporary protest permits people to 'take a day off' and join a camp. There is a history of carnival and, of course, situationist theory to fall back on, quite consciously so amongst urban anarchists.

There is also no reliable narrative of 'threat' to hold the majority against protest. Truth to tell, a lot of armchair establishment supporters are equally supporters of protest and see no contradiction in this - we have seen churchmen and Tory MPs expressing sympathy for the frustrations of the young.

The educated young activist now has a better understanding of power relations than his forebears. The older generation would move forward on idealistic hope and then become crushed by defeat. The young do not run on hope but on manipulative skills as effective as those of their opponents.

Internal Contradictions

Of course, this fluidity and lack of ideology is also a weakness in the street. Occupy events have proved weaker on the ground than they might have been because they have attracted every type of conspiracy nut, weak-minded New Ager and middle class narcissist looking for self-expression.

It also brings us back to class because, as Mason points out, young activists are driven by this core understanding of power but not by allegiance to class or, bluntly, any real comprehension of economics.

The situationism in contemporary revolt is there for all to see and I am certainly not saying that the young should adopt Marxist models for success, quite the contrary since the end result would be bureaucratism, authoritarianism and soullessness, but there are issues here of organisation.

We are only suggesting, by referring to Marx, that this is, despite its lack of self awareness, a form of class action because it is based, despite itself, fundamentally on economics and on technological changes to the means of production and that this leads to some interesting 'internal contradictions'.

But the intellectual base for rejecting Marxism as anything more than analytical tool is well summarised in a quotation between French intellectuals that Mason offers. Foucault advises Deleuze:

We had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation [a nod to Marx], and, to this day [second half of the twentieth century], we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power [which Mason and we think is now being fully understood]

The problem of organisation is a profound one because the current model of power relations only offers inclusion within liberal democratic coalition-building or the sort of bureaucratic organisational ability that allowed socialists to out-manouevre the anarchists between 1910 and 1940.

The New Anarchism?

The logic of current protest is different but it is, as yet, unclear how it can 'organise' at all. The fundamental self interest of the young and the Darwinian struggle between memes within that generation suggests that their primary tools are their effect on the market and withdrawal from the law.

By withdrawal from the law, I mean not lawlessness but something entirely different and more dangerous to the system - forcing the elite to acknowledge that its authoritarianism is unenforceabe in any practical sense. The internet language of 'work-arounds' when systems fail springs to mind.

The protests are, we are told by Mason, based on 'autonomy' and personal freedom within a democratic framework and (self-evidently) on opposition to state-protected special interests such as Wall Street and the finance markets.

This is where things start to get confused because if Anonymous and libertarian socialists are anti-capitalist, it is also clear that the Greek riots are about preserving an economic system that was socialist in the worst sense - corrupt at every level including the level of the working classes themselves.

The libertarian young Italians coming to London to escape local corruption are in direct class opposition to young public service workers expecting to be feather-bedded for life. Anonymous is with the first and Occupy is increasingly representing the last.

Conservative Welfarism And Personal Autonomy

On the one side, hackers, anarcho-libertarians and situationists and, on the other, a special interest socialistic coalition of state workers, liberals and communitarians. These are very different movements and they cannot work long together.

The 'neo-socialists' are appealing to the police by saying that they are protesting to protect their pensions (and making headway with that argument), while the libertarians are wondering what the police are doing there anyway.

The State also needs economic growth and surplus capital to impose law and order so reducing the need for law and order to its core becomes necessary - and this is why we now have serious public debate on the treatment of sex workers and the war on drugs.

There is some complex intellectual negotiation going here - between justification for tax expenditure on guns and butter, about what constitutes threat to the people and what constitutes threat to the State and about public intrusion into private life.

The Anonymous campaign against child pornography and the Lulzsec exposure of child porn sites is interesting because it drives an unexpected wedge between left-libertarians on appropriate behaviour and accountability but also offers populist support for 'right' laws. This is 'work-around' in action.

States & Protest

It is likely that States have identified or are identifying elite operatives and are already busy not merely tracking but 'turning' and infiltrating them. The operatives are often well-heeled and not representative of most of the young by any means - state funds can permit new entrants to rise rapidly.

There is also a rather sinister potential turn to events that the more naive activists may not see. State bureaucrats may see protesters as allies in bringing the market to heel and protecting the tax base for precisely the sort of activities that Anonymous was set to expose.

Paradoxically, the alliance of States and liberal coalitions might be rather convenient for authority when faced by the demands of finance capital and the Occupy and Anonymous movements may be useful in shifting the terms of political trade back towards 'auctoritas'.

Yet another issue for the protest movements is one already well identified in the mainstream media ... er, what do they actually want?

The 'internal contradiction' here is that much of the rhetoric is anti-State and yet the jobs and free education can only be provided by a strong State with a decent tax base and here we have a possible convergence of State and liberal aspirations at the expense of personal autonomy and libertarianism.

Liberty or Jobs?

In both New York and London, the Occupy protesters appear to be targeting finance capital rather than government and to be drifting from the territory of Anonymous (which emphasises state action as generally 'wrong') to territory associated with socialism and social liberalism (more state is needed).

This internal contradiction is profound, mirroring that between anarchism and socialism in the late nineteenth century and representing the difference between libertarian ideology and the self interest of the coalition of the vulnerable threatened with penury by the current crisis.

We are already seeing libertarians moving away from the Occupy Movement as it falls into the hands of the traditional Left (not helped by an Archbishop backing it).

The point is that the real reason we are in economic crisis is not 'imperialism' (which is unwieldy and expensive but probably pays its way in market access and access to resources) but the massively greater social spending and job creation programmes of social liberal states.

When Anonymous strikes at US behaviour in Iraq, it is striking at the State as both imperialist and liberal capitalist (including its size and welfare basis) whereas when Occupy protesters seize territory, they want the State to remain big but do the 'right thing' i.e. give them economic prospects and security.

Anarcho-Libertarianism or Neo-Socialism?

This internal contradiction is so profound because it is about whether the new generation will be led by neo-socialists wanting to over-turn capitalism by means of the State or anarcho-libertarians wanting to get the State out of the market and stop supporting some big capitalists.

The unpredictability of things lies in another point made by Mason - that there are a multiplicity of narratives from which both the young and the dissatisfied older citizens can draw.

Fundamental world views do not change but the expression of those views can change very rapidly under the influence of the internet. Support or withdrawal of support from causes no longer takes place within a narrative of 'solidarity' or 'loyalty' but one of 'truth' or 'effectiveness'.

This is why older generation liberals are confused and are becoming reactionary. There is now no fixed feminist, black or gay narrative any more than there is a nationalist or working class narrative. There is just 'my' or 'our' narrative according to who I am or to the interest of my adoptive tribe.

Constant self development and neo-tribalism mean enormous adaptability and flexibility but they also difficulty in pinning people down to organised collective action as opposed to participation in an action organised by others from which they may withdraw at a moment's notice.

In this struggle between modes of resistance, nothing is as yet predictable. Church, unions, police and military may join the protesters for a neo-socialist solution or States may have to adapt to situational anarchism by reducing their scope and being better at what they do. Either is possible.

The Baleful Last Days of Leon Trotsky

By the time that Leon Trotsky was assassinated in 1940 after nearly four years of exile in Mexico, the largest concentration of his followers was to be found in the US in the wake of the New Deal.

Why Did American Leftists Love Trotsky?

Why this should be so is partly derivative of the fact that interwar fascism and Stalinist aggression 'did for' most Trotskyists in Europe but it also represented something in the state of the American Far Left that drew it towards the Old Man (as he was called).

We might cite the anarcho-syndicalist legacy of the IWW, the collapse of Eugene Debs' democratic challenge to the system in 1918 and the fact that Roosevelt had created a form of socially aware liberal capitalism that made authoritarian communism a non-starter amongst the American working class.

From the beginning of American Trotskyism, we can see tension (present in all Left movements in the democratic West) between the horny-handed sons of soil, authoritarian, often mid-Western, quite prepared to put fists in the service of change and intellectuals telling them what to think and do.

The attraction of Trotskyism to cosmopolitan New York liberal and Jewish intellectuals lay in part in the fact that Trotsky could combine the attributes of proletarian war hero with ostensible free thinker and modernist for the libertarian and machismo culture of the American Left of the day.

It was, however, what Marx had referred to as an 'internal contradiction' of the first order and one whose eventual resolution reverberates down to our own day. Our budding Hemingways with a social conscience were not constitutionally fitted to bow to any authority in the long run.

Trotsky certainly had a remarkable ability to seem a tad more liberal than he actually was. Stalin's brutal and obviously manufactured war on the Russian Left Opposition (the Purges) made Trotsky the underdog. American 'bourgeois' progressive liberals made a career out of defending the underdog.

Meanwhile, operating in a milieu where surrealists and muralists found Trotskyism a more amenable artistic model than Stalin's simplistic socialist realism (essentially, offering art as mass propaganda), Trotsky's writings on art implied an openness to modernism (probably more apparent than real).

Bertrand M. Patenaude refers in his recent book (see below) to a certain snobbisme and orientalism that may be relevant - "[Trotsky was] the cultivated, Western, internationalist alternative to the peasant, Asiatic and nationalistic Stalin".

Trotsky - Flawed 'Hero'

Intellectuals like to have heroes that are reflections of themselves. Although you can certainly buy intellectuals with cash as the State Department discovered in the 1950s, flattery is much cheaper.

The illusion that you could be both free and Left in Trotsky's world (especially as news emerged of the growing repression within Russia itself and the vicious assault on the POUM in Catalonia by Communist operatives) drew in what can only be described as worshippers.

But let's make it clear - Trotsky was only a hero if a hero can be a narcissist of exceptional moral blindness who would probably have been a disaster for Russia, probably worse than Stalin if civil war and chaos in a peasant society are worse than internal tyranny and the gulag in an industrialising one.

The two men were two peas in a pod. Trotsky consistently lacked judgement during the revolutionary period despite his dynamism in the execution of policy (and of opponents) and he possessed an ego the size of the Kremlin.

The fact that a brutal choice lay between the Man of Steel and this over-intellectual egotist suggests just what a wrong turn the Bolshevik Revolution proved to be.

Kerensky's blind refusal to bring Russia out of the war and mobilise workers and peasants for democratic socialism led to an unnecessary revolution that gave Russia the eventual choice between two monsters.

Perhaps we only had the chance to consider Stalin the worse monster because Trotsky failed to get his chance to show what he could do with the full force of the State.

His treatment of the Kronstadt mutineers alone tells us what Russian workers, peasants and intellectuals had to fear from this man - a round of executions without trial to 'save the revolution'.

Trans-National Ideological Gang War

What we have though in Trotsky's last years is not a story of ideology and politics so much as one of trans-national gang warfare in which our hero is a defeated don, holed up in a near-fortress, with inexperienced young political hoodlums.

By 1940, this group was facing a direct murderous assault on its compound and, eventually, the most brutal and fanatic personal attack imaginable on the Old Man himself. Only in Mexico would a leading artist launch a murderous attack by an assault team on a political figure!

And only Soviet Communism could find a killer like Mercader to do the deed and take the rap in the way that he did - subsequently awarded great honours in the Soviet Union after many years in a Mexican jail.

The fact that this war was conducted over the supply of ideas and power rather than guns, contraband, drugs or prostitutes does not change the essential manner in which business was being conducted. Trotsky was just a less competent gangster than his rival.

What Stalin had was the massive reserves of Russian state power to ensure the eventual elimination of not only Trotsky but of any future leaders with his 'brand'.

Despite the existence of the Fourth International, Trotskyism effectively died with Trotsky in 1940 as anything more than an irritant and pot-stirrer to capitalists and communists alike. It is now just a convenenient bugaboo for the Right of the Left and natural 'splitter' amongst advocates of real change.

Ideology As Biological Dead-End

Having successfully disposed of one dynasty, the Romanovs, Stalin certainly seemed determined not to allow a new Soviet one to appear, the Trotskys - anyone connected to Trotsky within reach of Stalin simply disappeared.

Trotsky was proof positive of ideological obsession as a biological dead end as his gene pool was systematically wiped out by his opponent. At a human level, the story of the killing and disappearances of Trotsky's family is heart-rending and he was by no means immune to the pain of loss.

If we have sympathy it is rendered a little less likely to cause a sleepless night by the sure knowledge that he seems to have had few such nights himself over those he had murdered for equally valid reasons of state in the Civil War.

Perhaps Trotsky might only have survived if the US had permitted him entry. To murder a political opponent in Mexico is one thing, to do so within the rising superpower is another - poison would probably have had to have been substituted for an icepick.

However, the Old Man being an acquired taste for only a small section of American political society, there was no official interest in giving him sanctuary or creating a centre for revolutionary subversion to the Left of the New Deal settlement or unnecessary diplomatic problems at a time of global instability.

The Trajectory of American Trotskyism

But it is American Trotskyists who must interest us. Their numbers may have been small but the ideological squabbles of the late 1930s, taking place while the British Left was preoccupied with the very immediate threat of fascism, proved to have unintended consequences many decades later.

The hatred of Stalin and Communism within America may be associated with the American Right but it was often at its most virulent in the disappointed American Left. Communist bureaucratism deeply offended American values.

In Europe, the challenge of fascism was so immediate that it put many radical socialists firmly into the Communist camp despite repeated political monstrosities (the purge trials of the 1930s, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and, later, the systematic colonisation of Eastern Europe).

In the US, a combination of free worker resentment of Communist practice and Trotskyist rage against Stalin placed much of the American Left in a position of an aggressive universalism which was to privilege the export of American values against the claims of what came to be called the 'evil empire'.

There may be another factor not often recognised. American East Coast WASP 'progressive bureaucratism' was resented by many working people and the claims that Roosevelt was moving towards 'capitalist' dictatorship appeared credible in the context of the time.

The American Left was operating (outside New York) in an inherited context of worker and small farmer populism and Feds tended to break strikes while characters like the wobbies and Al Capone could produce more social benefits than history often likes to record.

American federalism is a form of 'bureaucratic collectivism' (this term will become relevant in a moment) and it is a force that is felt oppressively in London today as the extraterritorial claims of the Department of Justice and Treasury.

To move from a critique of Soviet 'bureaucratic collectivism' to concerns about US 'bureaucratic collectivism' in a populist context may well be at the very core of the trajectory, so puzzling to Europeans, by which Far Left American intelligentsiya ended up as part of the Reaganite claque.

In Extremis - James Burnham and Anti-Sovietism

The key figure, of course, is James Burnham who argued as early as 1937 that the Soviet bureaucracy was not a caste (as Trotsky suggested) but a new exploiting class so that the Soviet Union was not a degenerate workers' state but represented this 'bureaucratic collectivism'.

He was almost certainly right but this revisionism, which caused major splits in the Movement, showed how Trotsky's use value in America was not as independent Marxist thinker at all but as an anti-Communist.

If you condemn bureaucratic collectivism, it soon gets to mean that you are inclined to prefer individualism and certainly free trades unions and pluralism - that is, if you cannot de-bureaucratise collectivism.

The trajectory to free market internationalism which is central to the post-war Western project was embedded even at this very early stage in the thinking of the American Marxist revisionists of the late 1930s.

Pragmatism And Dialectical Materialism

To understand the seeds of the shift, we have, regrettably, to revert to Marxist philosophy - in particular the inability of Trotsky's European followers to get Americans to take the philosophical core of Marxism, dialectical materialism (as developed by Engels), seriously.

Dialectical materialism, already intellectually under severe pressure to Trotsky's dismay during his last years amongst his US followers, crumbled quickly under liberal pressure and anti-Communist virulence in America.

Max Eastman represented the tendency, you might call it romantic-radical, to be moved deeply by the Russian Revolution itself but to hold great doubts not only about its results but about the German Idealist theory of dialectical materialism, especially that of Engels, that underpinned it.

As Trotsky understood things, there was no Marxist-Leninist revolution without dialectical materialism and perhaps that's why the Kronstadt mutineers had to be executed. But Eastman must be seen as operating in a different context, that of Dewey and American pragmatism and progressivism.

Trotsky intellectually feared American pragmatism with great justification. Trotsky was trying to be a better Communist than the Communists when history wanted him to be a better anti-Communist.

In the end, we have a problem for Trotsky that could not be resolved in his favour - the largest number of Trotskyists were in the US, Americans were indelibly pragmatist, ergo Trotskyism could either be dialectical materialist or it could be at the heart of the American Left but it could not be both.

The struggle went on for some years (most notably in the debates between Eastman and Sidney Hook) but, with dialectical materialism captured for the global Communist Party, Trotskyism did not stand a chance as a credible political movement in the American century.

In the end, Eastman, Hook, Burnham, Dewey, Wilson, Shachtman - all those leading thinkers of the American Left of Trotsky's last years who were opposed to the Stalinist capture of the Revolution from their different perspectives - rejected dialectical materialism as a credible philosophy.

End of game for Trotsky intellectually. The Old Man was past it!

Anti-Sovietism And Small Nations

The debates surrounding the purge trials, the invasion of Poland and Finland and the Nazi-Soviet Pact (and around Marxist philosophy), led to a Minority breakaway and to the eventual trajectory of key intellectuals all the way across to what would become the hardest form of Republican anti-Sovietism.

The support for petty nationalist rights against Soviet pretensions is not unimportant in this context because a key part of the Republican anti-Soviet model would come to be support for the often fascist-inclined small states of Europe and for the 'progressive' state of Israel.

Zionism entered into the American Left as a powerful force and thence across to the Republican Right because it 'felt right' as a counter to the Soviet imperial approach to the 'national question' on which Stalin was an expert.

This issue of nationalism and internationalism would require another full posting in itself but it is critical. Trotsky himself was highly 'cosmopolitan' - Jewish in origin but secular and with an anti-nationalist belief in the need to spread Marxism-Leninism as a universal creed.

Stalin was intent on building socialism in one country but not as a Russian nationalist - the sheer force of a strong super state could 'liberate' workers opportunistically from strength, relying on loyal blunt instruments in the Red Army and the Party rather than Napoleonic romanticism.

One can see more 'internal contradictions' immediately. The universalism of Trotsky must support Soviet external strategies despite Stalin. American Trotskyists, raised on wars of national liberation and migrant resentments and aspirations, could not.

In the end, as we shall see, the intellectual Trotskyists created a hybrid in which universal values included the rights to self-determination of small nations with, in the small print, the caveat that they must be 'progressive' (i.e. liberal or socialist) in their values.

The consonance of this hybridisation of American values and Trotskyist universalism with the ideology underpinning the hight point of the post-war American imperium is not accidental. Trotskyism logically led to liberal internationalism's alliance with neo-conservatism simply because of 'how it thought'.

Towards The Republican Right

Not all the 'Partisan Review' mob of the 1930s ceased to be socialists but the trajectory was clearly from late 1930s Trotskyism through Cold War Liberalism to the origins of neo-conservatism for many - and the common denominator in all these positions was anti-Stalinism and anti-'bad' nationalism.

If the ideology of the modern Anglo-American imperium was born to a surprising degree out of Trotsky's circle in those last years of his life, the key factor in this was the differentiation between types of nationalism.

True self-determination had elided from being a workers' state under the dictatorship of the proletariat to being a free workers' state and thence a democratic state. The point was that small nations (like Israel) that were progressive had greater rights of protection against tyranny than others.

James Burnham, for example, the most extreme example, moved from a central position in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party across to Reaganite groupie over thirty or forty years and the move seems, in retrospect, surprisingly natural.

Often but not always Jewish East Coast intellectuals, filled with righteous indignation at Stalin's crimes and replacing the inevitable victory of the proletariat with the inevitable victory of liberal capitalism and 'freedom', many on the Left moved sharply cross the political spectrum.

They influenced eventually, and alongside European conservative nationalists, the circles that eventually coalesced as neo-conservatism or became the base of a more moderate urban Democrat Right represented today by very conservative trades unions and by Senator Lieberman.

Ironically, the high point of that grim European Idealism in politics that started with the French Revolution was probably not the furthest extent of the Nazi or Soviet Empires but the furthest extent of the Anglo-American Imperial tradition in the post-invasion occupation of Iraq.

If you consider that Saddam Hussein consciously modelled his methods in Stalin, then the Iraq War might be regarded as the Marxist struggle of the 1930s replayed once again as both tragedy and farce! If you really are determined on black humour, you can see the funny side of this.

Two sides without the nonsensical philosophy of their ancestors playing radical internationalist and nationalist roles little different from those of Trotsky and Stalin during the struggle for policy and power in Russia in the 1920s. As before, so later - the one with the most firepower wins.

An American Story

But we should not exaggerate the importance of Anglo-Saxon intellectual Trotskyists as representatives of the international revolutionary Left globally. The numbers active in the Minority Trotskyist Movement were always very small. But, in American intellectual history, these were 'players'!

The opposing Majority Fourth International continues to this day with a strong base in France. The French Trotskyists, who hold to the faith, have inherited opportunities created by the collapse of Communism as ideological home for the left trades unions - but this is France.

The revolutionary vanguardism inherited from Lenin (which Trotsky had actually opposed at the time) and the intellectualism of the circle around the Partisan Review created a fairly vibrant politically active set who came to live their hates and anger.

They redirected their universalism and idealism into forms that were imbued with a typically American pragmatism.

The numbers of former Trotskyists who supported the Iraq adventure and who have underpinned the transformation of New Labour (a deeply transtlantic project) is far more than chance would permit. The mentality is consistent.

Trotsky himself gives us a clue to the origins of this thinking when he stubbornly insisted, against the evidence, that the Soviet Union was a progressive state, refusing to condemn the Soviet attacks on Poland and Finland and advocating full American support for Britain against the Nazi threat.

It would not have taken much, once Trotsky was murdered, for increasing numbers of former followers who disagreed with him on the Soviet invasions to shift that 'tide of history' commitment to a different state power as vector for global revolution - the United States.

And The Man?

Trotsky was a political Einstein in some respects - but this was not a man to be followed unless you were prepared for your bones to whiten on some far off plain.

This was a man, like Napoleon or Hitler, who saw other persons as adjuncts to his ideas, expendable in a cause in which he, supreme egotist, must live regardless of others because of the values and beliefs he embodied.

British intelligence agent Bruce Lockhart cruelly wrote of Trotsky in full-on revolutionary mode: "He strikes me as a man who would willingly die fighting for Russia provided there was a big enough audience to see him do it."

The surprise is not that people like him exist but that there are so many mugs in the world prepared to subsume themselves under such people.

It's much more than the banality of evil expressed in Milgram's depressing experiments, it is also about the determination of many people to embody their myth of the world in a person (whether Pope or dictator) to whom they will give up their autonomy as an act of 'heroic' self denial.

In the end, there is only one justification for such 'faith' - that the ultimate vision of salvation (or in this case liberation) permits the cracking of eggs to make the omelette. Again, the similarity with the thought patterns of hard line liberal internationalists is striking. Something must be done (strike pose)!

For a man to sentence his children (in effect) to death for his ideals will strike many as wilfully stupid or inhuman, while for fit young men and women to throw themselves, their labour value and their lives at the feet of others in the way that they did for Trotsky as just plain stupid.

But is it any more stupid than joining the military for patriotic reasons? There may be a marginally greater reason in dying and killing (from a certain perspective) for a better world than the profits of Wall Street - but the rest of us ought to beware of such people!

By 1937, though he fought on gallantly, clinging to his already outmoded beliefs, Trotsky was already an utter political failure whose death in 1940 possibly came at the right time to maintain his credibility for his remaining supporters.

By 1940, he was running out of money, increasingly politically irrelevant, with supporters who were beginning to walk away from ideas honed in the struggle against feudalism at the turn of the century.

Had he lived through to the late 1940s, his fate might have been to have been picked up by the anti-communists of the Cold War era and be turned into a political Vlasov - a convenient tool to goad Stalin and split the Left.

Trotsky as an old and weak king with a subsidised court, a Jacobite in a world of Hanoverians? Maybe it was best that he was forced to move on and died a martyr to his cause.

[With thanks to Bernard M. Patenaude's Stalin's Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky (London, 2009) for the background. The opinions and judgements are TPPR's not his throughout this Posting. However, the book does manage to bring the man to life and is recommended. 

Patenaude is very good at interconnecting family concerns , the left-wing politics of Mexico, the distrust and espionage undermining the networks of Trotskyists in Europe and the often very young circles of workers and intellectuals in North America who provided money and muscle to his court in exile.]

Slavoj Zizek - A Marxist & His World

Today's short suspension of the Copenhagen Summit talks, after protests from the G77-China bloc, may be little more than political theatre but it raises interesting questions about the relationship between the Western centre-left and the interests of the developing world.

The Next Phase of the Crisis

One of the curious aspects of the current economic crisis is the lack of impetus that it has given to the traditional Left. If anything, so far, it seems to have pushed Western populations towards the safe centre-right or, at worst, a form of managed populism.

On the other hand, we may merely be in the phoney phase of crisis with the real pain yet to come and perhaps new forms of politics will arise to deal with that pain.

If 2008 was the year of the Lehman Brothers collapse and of Governments moving to transfer tax funds to shore up the private sector, events at the end of 2009 suggest that the primary concern next year will be the economic survival of nations.

Iceland is one thing. Dubai another, but at least three countries within the European Union are now on the global watch list - Ireland, Greece and Latvia - with the United Kingdom and Spain ready to slip into the economic query basket on their own account.

Greece was already facing some very serious political disruption before the latest news of massive budget cut-backs, being made to please the international economic community. All eyes are now on the balance of revolt and repression in Athens and what it will mean for Europe.

A Marxist Writes

One of the last of the serious philosopher kings of Marxism is the Slovenian Slavoj Zisek who shuttles between London and Ljubljana. Recently, the Financial Times published his short list of five conditions for the return of communism and it is worth setting them out here as markers for our own analysis.

He does make one preliminary point that is worth repeating - that the assumptions that we are at the end of history in which liberal-democratic capitalism will be the dominant form and that a progressive can now only dream of 'global capitalism with a human face' are made far too easily.

Neither he nor we know the future but, whether Zisek is right on his five preconditions for communism or not, the human condition is not one of stability. Innovation in information exchange and communications means that current conditions are unprecedented. Change is more likely than not.

Coming from the Hegelian tradition, Zizek finds it difficult not to think in terms of 'antagonisms' or what an older generation of Marxists would have called 'internal contradictions'. Let us list them here ...

1. The 'looming catastrophe' of ecological crisis - he likes the word 'looming' and uses it twice.
2. The tension between the commons and private ownership of intellectual property - the implication is that shared knowledge will transfer power from the private to the public sector.
3. The new sciences of genetic manipulation and the tension between socially created communities of 'genetically superior' individuals and being free and autonomous but 'flawed' (our terms).
4. The growing use of walls, borders and boundaries to keep 'threats' from the developed world, recreating the Berlin Wall along its borders as a block to economic migration.
5. A somewhat mysterious and abstract sense of apocalypse in the air - that things are changing in ways that will mark out what went before from what is to come.

All this begs a lot of questions. Books could be written not only in defence of Zizek's propositions but in opposition to them and we could add many other potential 'antagonisms' but these five points of tension are all worthy of consideration as markers for increased global political stress.

On Hope

What these 'antagonisms' have in common is that each (except the fifth which is general) represent a sharpening differentiation between those who have and, on the other side, not so much those who have not as those who want what those who have have.

When growth is expected to be eternal and infinite, as the naive right-Hegelianism of (say) Francis Fukuyama might suggest, then the 'haves' can relax. 'Trickle down' will eventually spread freedom and prosperity to everyone who wants it - eventually.

The 'eventually', of course, might be awkwardly distant - hundreds of years - but a sufficient drip-feed of prosperity and, above all, the reasonable hope of prosperity will not only pull the dangerous class of educated outsiders inside the system but it will allow hope to be used a political tool.

This thing called hope is not to be disrespected. Hope of revolution to deal with economic distress fuelled communism in its heyday. When hope went, communism collapsed. The Christian message depends on hope ... if Christian hope disappears, Christianity disappears.

The US in particular has been able to use 'hope', alongside faith and charity, as a driver in building its own constituency in the rising middle classes. President Obama might be regarded as epitomising that mentality. But what happens when the hope goes and the world's middle classes begin to despair.

A Health Warning

This brings us back to Zizek's five preconditions but with a health warning. Zizek is of the Left and wants change. We always have to be careful of Marxist normative statements based on desire being confused with reality. Marxists have always underestimated the resilience and adaptability of conservatism.

Our caution lies not only in the historical fact of conservative resilience but two other 'truths' of history. The first is that the thesis-antithesis model of Hegelian analysis is really not so clear cut in practice and the second is that the world certainly never splits into 'sides' in quite the way democratic politics do.

Each apocalyptic vision of his must be set against the fact that we know that there may be an apocalypse and so we adjust. Our adjustments have a tendency to mean that history rarely results in what we expect and that real threats and surprises will often appear out of the blue.

The vast majority of the world's population will not surge over the West's boundaries and seize what it wants like latter-day German tribes. In practice declining empires can be kept going for a very long time by suborning the leaders and special interests at their periphery.

Class war requires leaders and leaders require ideologically educated followers. Without faith or hope of success, leaders are unlikely not to be suborned into compliance with the ruling order in the long run if they cannot be killed or marginalised. What Zizek wants to offer is hope in this context.

The Countervailing Tendencies

Unfortunately for hope, in each of the areas outlined by Zizek, there is a countervailing tendency that favours the conservative position.

1. Starving people are in no fit state for class war. The technological differential between the West and the developing world means that all the West has to do is retreat behind its walls and adopt draconian measures against economic migration and to conserve its own resources to survive.
2. In the war between the commons and the private sector, a private corporation's ability to lobby a government is far superior to the commons' ability to organise a successful revolt that threatens the survival of a Government - at least to date
3. The control of genetic manipulation is wholly in the hands of the West. If there is turn to genetic enhancement that benefits an elite at the expense of the poor, be sure that it will be offered to developing country elites as a form of suborning them to the West's interest.
4. Walls and borders are unpleasant but they may well work to the degree that the public in the West approves draconian (again) measures to meet their needs. We see few street protests in defence of migrants' rights and liberal regimes tend to promote migration only by stealth.
5. Placing the Mayan prophecies of 2012 aside, in any 'apocalypse' that is social, the likely division is between a West in its laager and the rest of the world surviving as best as it can.

This is too dark a critique because there are two further factors to take account. The rising nations of the new global economy have no interest in class war. They will take on some of the social and policing responsibilities of the West. The Chinese are already beginning to take on that role at Copenhagen.

Similarly, Western values do not easily permit a return to fascistic thought patterns. Although there is a surge to the 'selfish' centre-right, it is a centre-right committed to democracy, human rights and even a humanitarian foreign policy. This moderates tendencies to populism and 'draconian' autarchies.

But Zizek may be right about the strains on the system. The world may well be dealing with major ecological problems, an arms race between population and corporate states over property rights, serious ethical challenges, increased insecurity and a climate of fear and uncertainty.

However, his hopes for a return to 'communism' depend on actual political reactions to these events. There is no intrinsic reason why any population will be minded to give up its instinct for freedom to permit bureaucracies or cadres to allocate resources and set social standards.

The Fate of the Left

Zizek himself agrees that 20th century socialism is dead. The centrally planned economy and social democratic welfarism based on the nation-state, even if desirable, are no longer achievable. The Left should 'begin from the beginning again'.

He does not tell us what that beginning may be but it is clear to see what he is referring to - the construction of a progressive agenda of developmentalism, international solidarity, environmentalism, the commons (rather than communism as we have known it) and enthusiasm (the 'hope' factor).

There are a lot of people out there who are committed to this strategy and they are organising as we speak through the internet, in localities and through NGOs.

This is the New New Left, imbued with a Marxist spirit but transmuted into something softer, almost religious, with its appeal to the 'planet' (from where it elides into the wealthy bourgeois politics of Zac Goldsmith), to sustainability and to indigenous and localist solutions.

But will it get anywhere? Or has it already peaked? And is it really the best tool for dealing with growing unemployment and the cutting of welfare services in the West. Zizek mentions none of these nor the massive contradictions within the progressive Left.

In The Final Analysis

The Copenhagen Summit may come to be seen as a last ditch attempt of this New Left to dominate the ideological and intellectual agenda of the West through the soft corporatism of working with Government and through NGOs - and history will probably judge that it failed.

This Left does speak for the developing countries but it has not mobilised the peoples of the developing world because that would be far too difficult and dangerous. To promote sustainability, democracy and human rights and development sets up multiple internal contradictions before you even start.

Peoples under economic pressure are just as likely to be traditionalist and contemptuous of liberal values as supportive of social programmes of redistribution and sustainability. It is no accident that liberals more concerned with democracy and human rights are rapidly shifting to the 'right'.

The ideals of the intellectual and progressive Left have captured many friends at the soft end of the Western elite, right into the very heart of some centre-right parties, the churches and the consumer or new economy-driven corporations but it has lost the frightened and deprived of the West itself.

The Decline of the Left

The Left is not dead but it is like Christianity after the Enlightenment - powerful enough not to insult, able to fight a rearguard action and hold ground in places but ultimately doomed as a hegemonic force, and increasingly obliged to get its mass support on the periphery of the heartland where power lies.

As time goes on, its profile is also like that of the modern Church - a mix of tribal loyalties in uneasy relationship with idealistic enthusiasm, the same very volatile mix that is at the heart of the failed New Labour experiment. As idealists, the churches, the NGOs and progressives are now in the same camp.

Zizek is right that something new is on the way - 'the present state of things cannot go on indefinitely' - but he has not identified what it is. The chances are that change will arise out of a struggle between states and peoples in the West rather than between the West and the rest.

If this results in a victory for the people in the West, then, to the consternation of Left-liberals, this may mean less political leverage for the states of the developing world and so for the global vision of progressives.