SHIPWRECK!

The University of Milan was the place to be in those years. Everywhere else in the country students were taking over classrooms and telling the professors they should teach only proletarian sciences, but at our university, except for a few incidents, a constitutional pact –or rather a territorial compromise –held. The Revolution held the grounds, the auditorium and the main halls, while traditional Culture, protected, withdrew to the inner corridors and upper floors, where it went on talking as if nothing had happened. (Umberto Eco, “Foucault’s Pendulum”,1989)

It seems clear from Hegel that the whole be sought over the part/s –universality. It is this search for universality that characterizes those who follow in his footsteps (and in the footsteps of the spirit of humanity, I would say). The left sought this whole, but what happened in the 20th century is well known –socialism, mainly established in the first half, crumbled during the second half of the century. In fact, it never effectively embraced the whole of humanity.

Although we try to see the whole, it is from our own limited perspectives, perspectives partly driven by the fragmentation of socialism itself. One will see things from his/her own corner –a Trotskyist one. Another from his/her own Stalinist corner –corners that their souls may continue to dwell in, while the spirit seeks sustenance elsewhere.

One person knows a bit about the Stalinists (or Trotskyists, or ) –not empirically, but at a profound (partly unconscious) level –that is, knows a side of this from actual experience. So if that person is given fresh information about them, he/she makes sense of it in a way someone who does not have that experience cannot. But at that level they know nothing much about Trotskyism (or Stalinism, or ), and are drilled (and self-drilled) against Trotskyism (or Stalinism, or ).

I do not want to place these two parts of Marxism side-by-side, like twins –they are distinguished first of all by their degrees of power at various stages in history –the horrors committed by Stalin are nowhere equaled by anything Trotsky or his followers may have done. And while it is common to ask that Stalinists consider the effects Stalin’s policies had on the people, there is an asymmetry in asking Trotskyists to consider what would have happened had Trotsky come to power instead of Stalin. Stalinists inherit a line of Marxism applied (they did); Trotskyists inherit a line of Marxism that remained in opposition (what was sought). But what was done and what was sought were divided by power. Why go around in circles asking whether Trotsky would have acted like Stalin or vice-versa, had power fallen into Trotsky’s hands. But power doesn’t fall, it has to be pushed. By whom? Hadn’t the forces of history asserted themselves in the figure of the workers and peasants? Then shouldn’t they bear the responsibility! So how do you get them to “bear this responsibility”?

They have done so. They have borne that responsibility in suffering, and the more politically committed ones have suffered the most. But does their suffering bring us any nearer to an understanding, a resolution of the problem –a synthesis of the past?

But the problem continued after Russia –it has still not been resolved. I once asked a Trotskyist I worked with if he’d read any books by Stalin. He had not –he could not bring himself to do so; he found Stalin so repulsive. This was not some fly-by-night Trot, but someone very deeply engaged in the movement since he had been quite young, someone with organizing capacities, polemical capabilities.

I spoke around that time, just after the fall of the Soviet Bloc, to a long-time Stalinist I knew, a humble worker all his life, but with a huge library of books, some of them very rare and unknown to most people (not, by any means restricted to the “classics” of Marxism-Leninism). He had never read Trotsky –and probably never would, but even if he did, would it make any sense to him?

What became of these two people I only knew for a few more years. The first had already split from his Trotskyist organization, which had itself already split some months earlier into more than two parts –he suffered the death of a very close friend and the collapse of his organization. The second person experienced a personal tragedy compounded by a severe identity crisis, joined a Christian sect and became involved with some very unusual religious-political people.

It seems worthwhile considering the personal histories of people who were revolutionaries during the post-War period. Another case comes to mind and brings out factors that are already evident to me in the last two cases. This was a very well-placed man, an economist (judging by his writings in the 1970s, I would say he was a brilliant one) whom I did not know until after he had ended his revolutionary days. I don’t actually know whether he was a Trotskyist or a Stalinist (he was probably critical of both). He once showed me his library, which was well-stocked with Hegel’s works –I never knew anything about Hegel in the 1970s-80s, nor did I know anyone who read him. I would say from my conversations with him that he was a very well-informed and well-read person, who had studied Marxism thoroughly, though judging by his behavior I would say he was rather authoritarian –he seems to be a recluse these days. He also seemed to me to be a person who would have obeyed his authoritarian superiors. Between being a well-placed activist and his situation today, he seems to have suffered some kind of breakdown, in which he shifted into something bizarre –the Black Arts –I only have partial accounts of this, and cannot explain why or how he moved in that direction. In one conversation I had with him about UFOs he warned me of sinister beings threatening the Earth from outer space, so that certain truths could not be revealed.

Another former communist from China, told me, when I mentioned the last case to him, that he thought Hegel’s ideas were mystical (and, hence, nonsensical) and it did not surprise him that a left Hegelian would fall into esotericism. Perhaps there is a link between this and authoritarianism on the left.

On a quite different level, I remember a tale I heard of someone I was at university with in the 1970s. He was on the left and fell in with one group of Marxists. His father owned the largest company in his country (not a small country, by any means). Soon after he went back home, his father died and he became its sole heir (I don’t actually know the details of this, but all of it seems very likely from what I did know of him and what I have read since), and tried to turn the business into one that favored the workers –I think it collapsed, but anyway, it was unfortunately, not a success story –no more Robert Owens shall pass?

I’ve picked up and remembered these stories over a fairly long period of time; the odd always stands out, but are they that uncommon? It is difficult to know what happened to many other people from the left groups (not including those who rose to positions of power in governments around the world, whose life histories, thoroughly disgusting in some cases, are at least partly visible) because there seems to have been a massive break-away from the multiple revolutionary groups of the post-war period, and very little sustained regrouping (is Italy really an exception?) –but I do tend to think a lot of people were shipwrecked.

This is nothing new –during the 1960s and 1970s I had also met shipwrecked leftists from earlier times. One man, going blind, whom I used to visit had been a policeman in Guyana –when I entered his tiny flat he showed me his complete collection of Lenin and Stalin volumes –a communist policeman. But as people age, their experiences tend to live alone with them –they seem not to be shared (maybe there are pages on the Internet for putting such experiences together, although I haven’t seen them yet).

On a more general level, in Britain in the 1970s I met many Irishmen who had had dramatic experiences. I remember one telling me how he had worked as a brickie in London in the early 1960s. They had built the Royal Family’s special underground line –the escape route from the Palace –I seem to remember it connected to the Jubilee Line. Another Irishman I visited a few times seemed to be from the IRA –replica guns on the wall, but his flat seemed more like an hotel room. I knocked at his door several times –he didn’t answer, but the last time I passed his flat it seems there had been a fire –his windows were blown out. Another old Irishman I sometimes met used to tell me about the Black-and-Tans he saw beating up people in the streets when he was a boy. A young man I used to work with (his parents were Irish) in a factory told me that underneath all of Britain’s major cities were tunnels with army trucks trundling around way beneath our feet –he found this out because he had worked under one city center as a telephone engineer. I know these things have been written about and can be seen on the Internet (the elite’s preparations for nuclear war), but I am interested here in the way ordinary people have experienced such strange and alarming things and what happens to their memories, their consciousness –why does it die, why do they go on voting to survive…

So while people were being shipwrecked for their good intentions and their loyalty to political lines (disloyalty is not my concern here; and by the way, any discussion on that really ought to consider the disloyalty of organizations towards their members and supporters), the base of the movement was being affected likewise. Indeed, the whole of society can be said to have gone through a process of total breakdown since about the 1970s (when the first worldwide wave of post-war over-production hit America), and, to generalize rather (always dangerous, I know), the attempted revivals I see happening in the left look like the re-assertion of old codes, rather than an appreciation of what has happened to the human race since World War II. These revived organizations still carry some seeds of truth which serve to attract people desirous of real change –in the absence of anything else. 911 seems to have knocked us out though –we think we know what’s going on, but have we really grasped the whole?

How could any of the multiple groups have an appreciation of history –surely, the divisions that have given them their separate existence have worked precisely to exclude any proper appreciation of the whole –they were and are still hermetic (yes, this is forced on them, but not just from outside). That was certainly my experience, and I see no widespread evidence out there yet to contradict me on this. For example, the Maoist experience tells me that most of its aficionados (but what a heterogeneous collection of groups!) could not have had much idea about what was really going on inside China from the 1960s –something very similar could be said of Albania. The few people who had had the privilege to actually visit China in an informed way and who dared make criticism based on their own authentic experiences during the 1950s/70s would have made little headway among Mao’s supporters abroad –to say the least!

I know in hindsight that many true things were said about what was happening within the socialist bloc countries. I do not think, though, that the overall situation could have been appreciated by the critics of Stalinism, notwithstanding their apparent clarity about how it operated, because like the Maoists outside China, they were generally looking in from outside. Good things also happened, good things always do, but only good things …

It may seem a huge jump to start talking about demographic statistics, but I hope my point will become clear –I shall quote no precise figures. Correct me if you think I’m wrong, but my limited experience tells me that the left continues to make its basic target population what it calls the industrial proletariat, the working class, perhaps the urban and rural poor, and so on. But as is well known, the first category has slimmed down substantially during the post-war period –with the rise of the service sector, robotics and so on. I haven’t talked to anyone well-versed in this subject, but I think there are problems today defining the industrial proletariat –divided into material and non-material workers by U.S. official statistics, where the first is a small minority now (check the figures if you don’t believe me; naturally, the statistics can be questioned in various ways). Moreover, within the factory, material (i.e. directly productive) workers are also usually a minority. The poor, of course, have grown dramatically, but the special quality of the industrial workers is not possessed by the poor –their special relationship to the means of production. Then there’s the rise of what Marx and Engels would have called the “lumpen-proletariat”, and the accompanying expansion of informality, criminality, etc.

This brings us to the world division of labor, and the way Capital has concentrated material labor in the peripheral (i.e., super-exploited) capitalist countries, building this on the fairly recent previous existence of slave systems in those localities (under Spanish, French, British colonialism, etc.). But there is nothing homogeneous about these States, either between them or within them. And some of those “Third World” countries are now challenging America’s world dominance now –as capitalist powers, or socialist-capitalist powers.

What has also been growing is a polarization of employee incomes which implies a social polarization, a heterogeneity, where the more highly trained, the professionals, i.e. with university degrees up to and including research level, can earn enormous salaries, perks, and dividends, etc. Their relationship to the means of production is basically as non-owners –their skills etc. are exploited by Capital –although many are employed to exploit others. But the relationships between all these heterogeneous work forces seem not to reflect any class uniformity.

The growth of the professionals has been enormous since World War II, but the problem, despite any special pleadings, is that they tend to identify with Capital. The culture embedded within professionalism has its effects well beyond their reaches. High productivity, inducing greater and greater profits, has reduced material labor and made it possible to employ large numbers in non-material labor, and in this way impose the culture of obedience generally.

I am convinced that post-war Capital has learned to maintain power through a system of bubbles –a modern hermeticism. Divide and rule has become fragment and rule. Where before it was great social blocs (in many places, divided by race as well as by class), today it is a jungle of fragmentation. Is it so surprising then that the left has behaved in a parallel way?

As I mentioned above, some regrouping has occurred –but does it seek unity? Of whom? Of a slimmed-down working class, of the poor? –with the supposed intention of leading the rest of society to a new higher stage?. And along all the lines that existed in the 1960s and 1970s? Do we really have to go through all that again? Isn’t there some way of moving beyond it, really moving forward –history doesn’t just repeat itself, does it? We don’t just get Pareto’s “circulation of elites” do we?

I insist that the search for universality is a human struggle, not simply that of the industrial workers (or one of the other left target groups as the vanguard) –certainly, the groups on whom the left fixates might appear at first glance to be more adaptable, more open to change, and so on. But they can also be manipulated, used and tricked; they have also fallen into the error of our times –fascism. And they are no more homogeneous than society itself –fascism’s tentacles have found their way there too. The middle-class workers/employees (including the professionals,) resist change because they have privileges under the system –more chains, it might be said. But the truth interests them as well. Under fascism –which seems to lurk behind every boulder of “democracy” –everyone is subjected to Capital, i.e. all of those who do not have a direct and specific interest in the power system.

It is, therefore, not hard to see how this fragmentation of the spirit has been at the core of a deliberate trajectory to crush underfoot any attempt at real progress. And today it is again the psychopaths and sociopaths who have universality, while we are disoriented and distraught.

It would seem absurd to aim at getting all the progressive-sounding groups to “unite” –their very existence seems to be based on the hermetic life (they do unite for certain things, of course). Certainly, though, it does seem essential to hope and work for unity, a very, very broad movement. People will move (they have started to) beyond the bounds of a continued obedience to the system, to obey instead the search for the whole, for human universality, the ending of power and privilege based on wealth. Ted Scritch

Continues