Curmudgeon: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, May 2024

I’m a curmudgeon.

I’m an ill-tempered old man who’s starting on my seventies and thoroughly pissed that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. Capitalism still rules the planet, now more than ever given the collapse of “real existing socialism” and the inviability of most socialist struggles for national liberation. The radical utopias I’ve fought to realize for most of my life—left anarchism and left communism—have mostly failed to pan out. So I’ve got maybe ten years, twenty years tops if I’m “lucky,” as I watch the world go down the old porcelain highway before I die.

Things weren’t always so. Some fifty-five years ago I believed that some form of socialism was positive, necessary and all but inevitable. I honored the legacy and spirit of anarchism in its final stand during the Spanish Republic which went down to defeat at the hands of Fascism. For the next two decades, despite my growing mistrust and rejection of orthodox Leninist socialism as it expanded, I held onto the belief of the efficacy of socialism in the abstract. And by socialism I mean internationalism, workers’ power, democracy, and collective, cooperative economics. Two approaches influenced me during the Long Sixties; the progressive religious strain (social gospel Protestantism, liberal Catholicism, reform Judaism) that undergirded the New Deal, Civil Rights Movement and social justice movements, and the Marxist theory of history (historical materialism) which posited that “scientific laws” of historical development would bring about the secular utopia of socialism, a “workers’ paradise.”

I’m not religious and at the time I wasn’t a Marxist. Nevertheless I believed a better world was in the making. Certainly I thought that much of humanity was trending progressive. I was part of a variegated, rapidly expanding New Left in the capitalist West. There were halfway decent innovative social democratic countries and a promising non-aligned movement of nations. Then there was the growing “real existing socialism” of the Soviet bloc’s COMECON and Warsaw Pact, as well as several anti-revisionist regimes and successful national liberation movements that constituted a Marxist-Leninist “Second World.” By 1988 “real existing socialism” (RES) alone encompassed one-third of the world’s population (over a billion people), close to a fourth of world’s land surface, and 26 sovereign countries.

I’ve never been a fan of Marxism-Leninism nor do I consider that form of socialism—one based on one-party authoritarian regimes, centrally planned command economies, collectivized agriculture and industry, nationalized property and strictly controlled societies—to be truly socialist. Frankly I was appalled that the Leninist Left had managed to bamboozle a third of humanity and a fourth of the planet with the false promises of its brand of “socialism of scarcity,” let alone convince numerous Western liberals, progressives and radicals—useful idiots all—to support them. When the Anti-Vietnam War Movement was the largest, most inclusive form of political protest around and encompassed millions of people, all manner of Democrats, democratic socialists, Social Democrats, anarchists, independent socialists and communists, and Leninists participated. But Leninists ended up controlling many of the main anti-war organizations, not through numbers and majority democratic rule, but through political gerrymandering and minority machinations.

Once the Vietnam War ended the anti-war movement disintegrated and the New Left turned New Communist Movement was decimated. Reagan deliberately set out to bankrupt the Soviet bloc, leading to the collapse of the Leninist Second World from 1989-1991 until only five explicitly Marxist-Leninist countries remain standing today—China, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea. Colonialist and imperialist powers used everything from subterfuge to brute military force to defeat socialist struggles for national liberation or overthrow them once successful, strategies that eventually curtailed the nonaligned movement of nations. And neoliberalism’s austerity policies—the rollback of government regulations, the welfare state, the public realm, and union power—were coupled with issues of diminished national sovereignty and expanded undocumented migration to fuel the decline of Social Democracy and the rise of the Right.

There are only a handful of RES countries left in the world, with perhaps another handful of RES-adjacent nations claiming hard socialist regimes. Venezuela’s United Socialist Party and Syria’s Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party are among the few repressive one-party states claiming non-market socialist economies left. Not countries I would be caught dead in. A more authentic, liberatory socialism can be found in far fewer places. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) practices indigenismo, horizontal autonomy, mutual aid, women’s independence, and mandar obedeciendo in Chiapas, Mexico. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and Peoples Defense Units (YPG/J) promote democratic confederalism, cantonal autonomy, women’s liberation, and confessional freedom in Rojava, Syria. While these are in many ways excellent examples of true socialism, their power to expand globally is not promising.

The Russian Revolution de facto divided the world into anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, socialist countries opposed to imperialist, colonialist and capitalist nations. But Stalinism formalized that division into socialist versus capitalist camps. With the collapse of RES, the Left can only muster an anti-imperialist versus imperialist campism that barely implies the latter is socialist. There is nothing socialist or anti-imperialist about an irredentist, oligarchic capitalist Russia attempting to crush Ukraine. An even vaguer partition happens around the concept of the Global South against the Global North, with India, Iran, Uganda, Argentina and many other reactionary countries in the Global South not even remotely approaching socialism let alone freedom or democracy.

All of this does not bode well for socialism as a project for human liberation. I’m experiencing a crisis in faith, an inability to summon optimism, and a profound unhappiness about the future. I no longer believe that socialism is likely. But I fear that capitalism will crash-and-burn, destroying the planet in civil war and ecological disaster in the process. I protest, I belong to a union, I write my columns, I have a life. So I don’t despair even though I do mourn what seems to be an epochal demise of socialism.

I thought revolution was just around the corner when I was young. Now that I’m old I fear, instead, that death and destruction are imminent. I know that the former was false and I only hope that the latter is as well.

War: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, April 2024

The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

From 1914 to the present, between one hundred and eight million and one hundred sixty million people died in war. War between capitalist powers but also war between capitalist powers and socialist nations—Soviet bloc, Red China, the Third World—has produced mass human casualties. I’m a socialist who believes such forms of socialism were never really socialist. So-called “real existing socialism” has largely failed and we now live primarily in a capitalist world run by an international bourgeoisie.

According to the Left, war is only one of the many evils that capitalism causes. Genocide, exploitation, poverty, ableism, ageism, classism, racism, anti-semitism, sexism, homophobia—the list is long. When socialism is achieved—when the stateless, classless, global human community is attained—all the above evils of capitalism will disappear. Yeah, right! I’m a socialist, but I’m not an idiot. To illustrate the absurdity of that claim, let’s consider just the prevalence of war.

But first some Marxism.

The classic Renaissance periods of human history (Ancient/Medieval/Modern) was augmented by the Scottish Enlightenment model of human development (Hunting/Pastoral/Agricultural/Commercial Societies). Marx then propounded a stage theory of economic development where humanity passed through “modes of production,” each mode a combination of productive forces and social/technical relations of production. Beginning with classless primitive communism, class societies moved from ancient through feudal to capitalist stages, finally advancing to classless advanced communism. Each class-oriented mode of production is defined by how labor was organized, starting with the slave societies of ancient Greece and Rome, moving through serf-based feudalism, finally reaching capitalist societies reliant on workers. I consider this Marxist schema vulgar, riven with anomalies like the “Asiatic mode of production/Oriental despotism,” and thus needs to be taken as descriptive rather than prescriptive.

Now let’s consider the mortality figures from a selection of wars throughout history.

The ancient Roman civil wars (Servile and Social) cost between 3 and 5 million lives. The feudal Chinese Three Kingdom War had a death toll of 36 to 40 million. The purely capitalist first World War produced over 40 million military and civilian casualties. The mixed capitalist/socialist second World War drestroyed between 70 and 85 million lives. But the winner is the rise of the Mongol Empire. The Mongol invasions/conquests of Asia and Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries combined various factors; aspects of “Asiatic mode of production/Oriental despotism” (centralized state structure), feudalism (decentralized fief system), and ancient labor practices (enslavement of Turkish and Slavic peoples), resulting in subjugating almost 25% of the world’s inhabitants. Between 40 and 70 million people were slaughtered across Eurasia in a population loss that may have affected up to 11% of the world’s population. Besides gruesome military battles and sieges, the Mongols practiced wholesale massacres, intentional famines, forced migrations, crude biological warfare, genocide and androcide.

At least one billion humans have died in war throughout all of human history, and that figure could easily be doubled without exaggeration. The horrors of class-based human civilization with regard to warfare alone makes the allure—the utopian fantasy—of classless post-capitalist egalitarian communism obvious. Marx’s “mode of production” theory, in bookending class-based civilization with primitive communism and advanced communism, in turn fueled the primitivist myth that our Paleolithic ancestors were peaceful, ecological, goddess-worshipping hunter/gatherers uncorrupted by civilization and science. Put forward by John Zerzan and Paul Shepard, it simplistically reprises Romantic era fantasies of the primeval paradise and the noble savage.

Marx and Engels asserted that Paleolithic humans existed in a state of “primitive communism,” a relatively classless, communalist social order of nomadic hunter/gatherer bands and tribes. These egalitarian societies practiced mutual exchange and resource sharing. Marshall Sahlins argues that such a social order was the original affluent society in which people worked as little as ten to twenty hours a week in order to survive. Such societies were affluent because their members were content with little in the material sense, enjoying more leisure and working less than did members of modern society. But when hunter/gatherer communities experienced environmental drought and famine they tended to become culturally/physically extinct.

Human beings existed for hundreds of thousands of years as nomadic tribal hunter/gatherer societies, “over 99 percent of the time that the genus Homo has existed on the planet, about two million years.” This primitive communism wasn’t a “utopia of basket-weaving peace lovers” (per Dean Burnett) by any stretch. Our early ancestors may not have engaged in the organized lethal violence we call warfare until they developed sedentary agricultural societies, but there is evidence that intergroup aggression often occurred between hunter/gatherer bands in the form of raids to steal foodstuffs and perhaps women. (Engels’ thesis in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that primitive matriarchies were overthrown by patriarchal coups intent on securing male lineages for children is inaccurate. Apparently, women have often been considered “spoils.”) This includes observations that modern hunter/gatherers engage in ritual team fighting games to learn and exercise the coordination and motor skills needed for lethal raiding and warfare, suggesting there are elements of sport and pleasure to such homicidal behavior. Then and now, a particularly deadly raid against a small, culturally or ethnically distinct tribe might result in its complete annihilation. In other words, primitive genocide.

There are disputed theories that genocidal violence was used to wipe out the Neanderthals. More evidence of war exists for late Paleolithic massacres at Jebel Sahaba, Sudan, and Nataruk, Kenya, when scenes of human violence started to be depicted in cave paintings. Warfare seems to have begun in earnest with the transition from nomadic to sedentary societies between the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods.

The problem with anthropological and archeological theories regarding Paleolithic warfare is that there’s virtually no physical evidence pro or con. To repeat, there’s almost no proof for or against primitive warfare. Those who find the lack of evidence an affirmation that hunter/gatherer societies were overwhelmingly peaceful dispute those researchers who would use ethnographic comparisons with historical or modern hunter/gatherer societies to speculatively fill in the gaps of prehistory, accusing the latter of cultural bias. Those who contend that egalitarian Paleolithic hunter/gatherers were peaceful argue that most lethal disputes were personal and directed toward particular individuals, not group versus group conflicts that amounted to raids and blood feuds if not low-level warfare. Hunter/gatherers, being mobile, tended to move to avoid threats and conflict. Only when natural disaster, resource scarcity, territorial impingement or overpopulation put stress on hunter/gatherer societies did they resort to intergroup aggression and killings which on occasion escalated into raids, blood feuds and warfare. To insist that nomadic hunter/gatherers were warlike is to postulate without proof, on gut instinct or from an agenda. Few scientists doubt that prehistoric humans were incapable of murder. What is in question was whether individual, personal killings could transmute into intergroup warfare. Absence of evidence unfortunately is not evidence of absence.

Marx postulated a basic human nature, what he called species-being. Humans are social animals. Their essence, their nature, is in reality “an ensemble of social relations.” To change the totality of social relations is to change that essence. And to change the mode of production is to change aspects of human nature. Some forms of social behavior—language, music, work, play, intoxication, transcendence—seem to have endured throughout human existence—history and prehistory. I’m afraid that war may be one of those persistent social relations, part of the social panoply that constitutes human nature even during Paleolithic times.

This also means that if and when capitalism is overthrown not all the social ills attributed to capitalism will necessarily be eliminated. I purposefully limited the discussion to war so that the whole range of evils (exploitation, racism, sexism, et al) associated with class societies will not also have to be considered. But if war is a fact of human nature, part of classless primitive communism, will war manifest through advanced classless communism? Certainly the countries practicing “real existing socialism” engaged in warfare with each other (USSR/China, China/Vietnam, Vietnam/Cambodia, etc). Then contemplate the war games practiced by the fictional ecological utopia in Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia as a way to avoid war.

Whereas I like and love certain human beings individually, I fear and despise humanity collectively and in the abstract. Thus I reverse Dostoevsky’s literary observation. I’ve become more cynical of humanity the older I get. In a previous column discussing alien life and the Drake Equation, I mentioned the “Great Filter Hypothesis” as to why intelligent life might not naturally arise or sustain itself for any length of time. One possibility is that the evolution of intelligence cosmically might go hand in hand with self-destruction so that as life becomes more sentient it becomes more suicidal. Human history seems to bear out that hypothesis as we humans increasingly destroy our own species and the world.

SOURCES:
Personal recollections
“Theses on Feuerbach” by Karl Marx (1845)
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Friedrich Engels (1884)
Les hommes fossiles by M. Boule (1920)
“Social Stratification in Polynesia: a Study of Adaptive Variation in Culture” (1954) and “Stone Age Economics” (1974) by Marshall Sahlins
War Before Civilization by Lawrence Keeley (1996)
The Ecological Indian by Shepard Krech (1999)
The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory by Cynthia Eller (2000)
How War Began: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage by Keith Otterbein (2004)
Reinvention of Primitive Society by Adam Kuper (2005)
The Origins of War: Violence in Prehistory by Guilaine and Zammit (2005)
Constant Battles: Why We Fight by Le Blanc and Register (2013)
War, Peace, and Human Nature edited by Douglas P. Fry (2013)
“Inter-group violence among early Holocene hunter-gatherers of West Turkana, Kenya” by M. Mirazón Lahr et al (Nature volume 529, 1-20-2016)
“Hominin interbreeding and the evolution of human variation” by Kwang Hyun Ko (Journal of Biological Research-Thessaloniki, 2016)
“Coalitional Play Fighting and the Evolution of Coalitional Intergroup Aggression” by Sugiyama, Mendoza, White & Sugiyama (Nature, 6-29-2018)
https://leftyhooligan.wordpress.com/2009/11/01/long-live-war-whats-left-november-2009-mrr-319/https://leftyhooligan.wordpress.com/2021/12/01/alien-life-lefty-hooligan-whats-left-december-2021/https://leftyhooligan.wordpress.com/2022/07/01/left-of-the-left-lefty-hooligan-whats-left-july-2022/

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Defeatism: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, March 2024

I had an unquestioned moral certitude early in life. I was a pacifist for a New York minute in 1968. To create a peaceful world I believed you needed to practice nonviolence. I was a left anarchist for some two decades. To realize an anti-authoritarian society I believed you needed to use anarchistic organizational methods. I was an anti-state communist for another two decades. To implement a revolutionary defeatism I believed you needed to demand no war but the class war. I subscribed to a kind of political homeopathy, a theory of treating “like with like.” It was the classic “ ends and means” discussion from a purist perspective.

Those who pursue political purity rarely attain their goals however. Mahatma Gandhi played a part in the horrific intercommunal riots between Muslims and Hindus when India and Pakistan sundered the subcontinent thanks to British colonial disentanglement in 1947. Spanish anarchists perpetrated repressive massacres in seeking revenge against the autocratic Spanish clergy, aristocracy and bourgeoisie during the 1936-39 civil war. The mutinous troops and largely failed social revolutions from the first World War continued the process of reducing much of Europe to rubble. Given humanity’s violent history I’m prone to see pacifism, anarchism and revolutionary defeatism as half-baked forms of idealism, misplaced theories that never become reality beyond a year or two of blood and slaughter.

My last three columns focus on the strategy of revolutionary defeatism that emerged from the near global conflict between the Allied and Central European powers and their colonial empires from 1914 through 1918. Defeatism was embraced by the minority international socialist tendency of the disbanded social democratic Second International that espoused true internationalism, anti-militarism and radical class struggle. They opposed social revolution to war and advocated fighting against “one’s own” bourgeoisie and nation, turning their guns against their leaders. The OG Zimmerwald defeatists asserted the international proletariat could not win in a capitalist war. The true enemy of the proletariat were the imperialist leaders who send their lower classes into battle. Workers gained most from their own nation’s defeats if the war could be turned into civil war and then international revolution. Today, revolutionary defeatism is being touted by class war anarchists, anti-state communists and revolutionary internationalists.

According to Hal Draper per his The Myth of Lenin’s “Revolutionary Defeatism” however Vladimir Lenin abandoned defeatism early on due to sectarianism, correct Marxist analysis, Russian feudal history, and a consistent revolutionary anti-war position. Draper further argued that even the non-Bolshevik anti-war socialist-internationalists like Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg were not defeatist, but rather Third Campist. They insisted that the international working class remain opposed to either side of any imperialist war and constitute itself an independently organized, autonomous Third Camp seeking  not defeat but “the victory of their own working class struggle for socialism.” For Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky the goal was winning socialism for the working class. Lenin put forward a “variety of shifting and inconsistent formulations on ‘defeatism’ at various times,” but we’re interested in “the canonical form of ‘defeatism’” codified as Leninism and adopted by defeatists today.

The history of revolutionary defeatism is at best one of Pyrrhic victories. The Russians lost 1,500,000 civilians and 1,811,000 military casualties during the first World War. After two revolutions the Bolsheviks forced Russia to withdraw from the war, but the revolutionary defeatist wave of the working classes across Europe did not stop the war. It contributed to the collapse of the Central Powers’ war effort, but the Allied Powers continued fighting unabated. The rebellions were all brutally crushed by their respective ruling classes, eventually giving rise to Fascism in their stead. Sadly, the failed troop mutinies and aborted European social revolutions are socialist heroes and martyrs minus the socialist victories. Most occurred only at a horrific cost to the working class itself. This hasn’t stopped the current crop of revolutionary defeatists from converting the dubious history of defeatism into a transhistoric principle, a new orthodoxy and an old myth: “Then of course we remember that at the start of the First World War, the revolutionaries were a tiny minority. Yet four years later they stopped the war.”

Buenaventura Durruti, the revolutionary anarchist-syndicalist member of the CNT/FAI and workers’ militia leader once commented that:
We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a while. For you must not forget that we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing in this minute.

First, consider the death toll. As the Red Army battled the combined White Armies during the civil war from 1917 to 1923 Russia experienced a loss of 7 to 12 million mostly civilian casualties. Forty million civilians and military personnel died during the first World War, fifty-three million perished during the second World War and twenty-five million expired during the Cold War.  Given another fifteen to twenty million snuffed out since the collapse of the Soviet Union and we’re still left with a planet overwhelmingly dominated by capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Durruti’s “new world in our hearts” promised by the Russian Revolution, Soviet bloc, and attendant Third World national liberation movements never materialized. Most in the present internationalist, anti-militarist, revolutionary defeatist bloc would consider that vision flawed from the start, a faux utopia betrayed by vanguardism and nationalism. And what does it mean if Durruti’s ruins are ultimately radioactive, infectious or poisonous?

I started by relating my naive youthful commitment to principles, purity and moralism through my involvement in pacifism, left anarchism and anti-state communism. Libcom, RevLeft, Insurgent Notes and similar forums are replete with essays, articles and declarations insisting that defeatism requires a commitment to principles, purity and moralism and is the only true revolutionary political strategy. Certainly their conflation of means with ends is similar. Yet in my opinion the need for an effective radical praxis remains. I’ve talked in the past about a disingenuous “diversity of tactics” that nevertheless fails to square the circle of means and ends or assuage the brutality of realpolitik. The Long 60s developed a pragmatic baseline politics of survival that countered oppression based on Malcolm X’s catchphrase “by any means necessary.” Ultimately, its become my go-to stance for politics beyond equating means with ends.

If revolutionary defeatism during its prime (1917-1922) is considered a success by its present-day proponents, we unfortunately know what failure looks like.  There are two mid-sized wars (Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Palestine) and dozens of spot conflicts (Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Burma, Mali, Burkina Faso, Myanmar, et al) around the globe today. No major wars, no regional conflicts, and no world wars. Yet the advocates for revolutionary defeatism adhere to their orthodoxy and treat every conflict as if Lenin were declaring the April Theses. Civil war not civil peace! Revolutionary defeatism against all bourgeoisie! Not one tank for Ukraine!

I openly support the Ukrainian people against Russian imperialism and I’m unapologetically pro-Jewish, anti-Israeli state, pro-Palestinian, and anti-Hamas armed party in the Israel/Palestine conflict. I’m also against US imperialism and NATO expansionism. I’m not concerned with political purity or finding a politically correct algorithm for revolutionary demands. In part that’s because of the sectarianism that such pursuit of principles engenders even among die-hard class war leftists. It’s been eighty-seven years after the Condor Legion of Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria bombed the town of Guernica into oblivion to demonstrate the effects of total warfare. The destructive power and genocidal potential of modern warfare has only multiplied exponentially. The capacity to proliferate a Nazi Holocaust or Cambodian genocide has never been greater. Little wonder that Ukrainians and Palestinians are worried about being annihilated by an enemy that will not be fazed by their attempts at revolutionary defeatism.

But Class War/Třídní Válka in Milan, Italy reveals how skewed the revolutionary defeatist orthodoxy is. “We support the need for defeatism in the ongoing war in Ukraine, against Russian imperialism and against the US/Europe/NATO imperialist bloc, against the prospect of a global, inter-capitalist war, starting from this war.” Yet Třídní Válka stands “on the side of the Palestinian masses” and “against the ethnic cleansing of Palestine,” in that the “Western ‘democratic world’ is collaborating in the erasure of the very existence of the Palestinians.”

I argued last column that national liberation struggles, while ostensibly independent and socialist, share most of the same features of bourgeois nationalism and empire. Both consider the nation-state the be-all-and-end-all in its founding, defense, and expansion; both suppress or conceal class divisions beneath nationalism and nationality; both lend in the formation of the national or global bourgeoisie; and both serve the interests of the ruling class. These common features of all nationalisms are precisely what left anarchists, anti-state communists and revolutionary internationalists—our present-day defeatists—should categorically reject. Either the international working class is united and one and it’s “no war but the class war.” Or special dispensation is made for the most ethnically oppressed among the proletariat.

Politics based on pragmatism, contingency and the practical details of any given scenario are par for the course. I’m much more interested in revolutionary socialist strategy, but unfortunately this discussion has been singularly bereft of both successful revolution and socialism. The “like treats like” political homeopathy I began with is looking more like magical, ineffectual thinking. That usually means I have a lot more analyzing to do. More to the point, what needs to be considered is the suicidal consequences of defeatism as a strategy, best exemplified by the routed German Revolution of 1918-1919. That’s when on January 15, 1919 Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were assassinated and martyred by the proto-Fascist paramilitary Freikorps. This was typical of the fate of the defeatist efforts to stop the war in general. Far from “blaming the victims” I hope to challenge what I consider to be a losing anti-militarist strategy. We need to take seriously the task of winning the revolutionary struggle for socialism.

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National liberation: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, February 2024

Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! The NLF is gonna win!

The chant rang out from certain quarters of the Anti-Vietnam War Movement during marches and rallies. It was voiced by anti-imperialist components of the movement, a minority element comparable to the pacifist portion that believed in nonviolence and called themselves “the Peace Movement.” Most of the rest of us were neither anti-imperialists nor pacifists, and while some of us considered ourselves revolutionaries few of us were sycophantic cheerleaders for Third World national liberation movements.

Last column I discussed how the GI organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War was a stellar example of revolutionary defeatism during the Long 60s. The concept of revolutionary defeatism arose with the first World War, the near global conflict between the Allied and Central European powers and their colonial empires. European Social Democratic Parties—all avowedly Marxist and internationalist, some like the Social Democratic Party of Germany extremely popular, and none in power prior to 1914—split when the war began. The majority of these parties went pro-war, and defended their respective countries involvement in the war effort. Hence the term revolutionary defensism and the epithet social patriotism.

The social democratic minority—Luxemburg, Lenin, Liebknecht, Kautsky, Jaurès, et al—called themselves genuine internationalists, defended radical class struggle, and espoused revolutionary defeatism. The ruling classes of nations at war send their working classes to fight and die in battle against each other, so workers can never win when fighting capitalist wars. Workers need to turn these nationalistic conflicts into civil war and then international proletarian revolution to overthrow their national bourgeoisies. The imperialist ruling classes are the only true enemy and workers of the world need to turn their guns against them.

The VVAW attempted to do just that and caused the near collapse of the US Military in the process. But there are limitations to considering the GI revolt during the Vietnam War as unalloyed revolutionary defeatism. First, the concept had its ascendency during and soon after the first World War which experienced dozens of troop mutinies and a half dozen mostly-failed social revolutions. Revolutionary defeatism was a real option, as was the potential for international socialist revolution. In the Long 60s however, and despite our wishful thinking that revolution was imminent in America, the VVAW and the larger 60s social movements didn’t have any real opportunity for overthrowing the US government or Western imperialism.

Second, while the VVAW arguably practiced a form of revolutionary defeatism, the Vietnamese side of the war was not practicing revolutionary defeatism but rather revolutionary defensism. Right off, I’ll get blowback contending that the Vietnamese fight was not revolutionary defensism but a genuine “socialist struggle for national liberation.” To understand why the distinction is not so clear-cut, start with the preamble of Marxism’s retreat into nationalism.

When Social Democracy split into a “social patriotic” majority and a newly-minted Communist minority, the latter’s internationalism was short-lived. After the Russian Revolution, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were keen advocates of anti-imperialism and self-determination for all peoples, demanding freedom from colonial oppression for the Third World. Marxist-Leninists insisted they stood for international socialism, yet they also insisted that national liberation movements were not about chauvinism but about revolutionary democracy. Stalin took power in 1924 and declared his doctrine of “socialism in one country.” Mao then insisted that “Chinese Communists must therefore combine patriotism with internationalism.” These are the cornerstones of Third World national liberation struggles, including the Vietnamese one.

Imperialism and colonialism were also defining characteristics of Third World national liberation struggles, starting with the small elite of the colonized class that emerged during the colonial period known as the national bourgeoisie. This Third World national bourgeoisie was Western educated and organized with the consent of and by the imperial interests of the colonial powers. (Regarding Vietnam, Hồ Chí Minh traveled extensively throughout the West, gaining his political education and commitment to socialism while living in France. Võ Nguyên Giáp studied at the French Indochinese University at Hanoi.) The native bourgeoisie in the Third World possessed limited capital and so cooperated in the exploitation of their nations with their colonial overlords. Their commitment to nationalism was an article of blind faith, and their national liberation struggles were an uncritical replica of European modernity, born of the successful bourgeois revolutions starting in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Their commitment to socialism was frequently born of Leninist vanguard party politics and Stalinist “socialism in one country” ideology. This national bourgeoisie, once in power, administered imperialism, decolonization, capital accumulation and the restoration of ruling class power. The national bourgeoisie claimed to be revolutionary and benefit “the people,” but in fact they underdeveloped certain sectors of their national economy while developing the whole economy to assist imperialist exploitation, and thus made the people dependent on global capitalism through hegemonic practices like national debt. (Vietnamese sweatshops mercilessly exploited native/child labor and indebted the country to the World Bank as Vietnam ostensibly became a mixed “socialist-oriented market economy.”) Ultimately, this native bourgeoisie prevented their people from achieving their full potential and maximizing their wealth by separating the working classes from direct ownership and control of the means of production, specifically the land. This is classic substitutionism; of the vanguard party substituting in power for the working classes, and of the central committee or the chairman substituting for the vanguard party. This national bourgeoisie was relentless against workers and people holding resources coveted by that bourgeoisie, insisting once in power that they were presiding over the end of colonialism, the birth of socialism, and the achievement of true national liberation. Rather than helping the people and the workers however, they only helped themselves and often the imperialists of a global capitalism.

National liberation struggles in the Third World attempted to mimic Europe in virtually every way, and not just its sometimes virulent nationalism. The contradictions between the French Revolution’s “Rights of Man” with its supposed humanism, freedom and autonomy and the increased exploitation, slavery and even mass murder of European history are paralleled in the Third World as it decolonized. (Vietnamese “re-education camps,” forced labor and economic relocations, brutal treatment of national minorities like the Hmong, Montagnards and Khmer Krom, expulsion of boat people, atrocities and massacres committed during Vietnam’s invasion and occupation of Cambodia, all while professing the ideals of “international socialism.”) Third World national liberation struggles attempted to “overcome” racism by instigating their own, often more relentless racism within the racist framework inherited from Europe. Much as European racism was initiated and fueled by Spanish, Portuguese, English and other colonialist powers through “primitive accumulation” against native peoples in the Americas and the rest of the world, Third World national liberation recapitulated both Europe’s “primitive accumulation” and racism. The national/racial/ethnic identities constructed by these struggles were in turn joined to the alienation, fragmentation, and consumerism fostered first by monopoly capitalism and then late-stage capitalism.

Third World national liberation movements, once in power, had numerous other problems beginning with failing to stem the flow of capital out of their country despite efforts at decolonization and anti-imperialism after political liberation. This is partly due to false decolonization and anti-imperialism. According to Franz Fanon, “if the native bourgeoisie takes over power, the new state, in spite of its formal sovereignty, remains in the hands of the imperialists.” But it’s also due to rampant corruption, and not just state capture where private interests significantly influence a state’s decision-making processes to their own advantage. Widespread systemic political corruption, the corruption of politicians, bureaucrats and civil servants as well as the commodification of everything, including the integrity and conscience of the leadership, accounted for the flight of capital. (Vietnam’s rates of political/party corruption, bribery, etc stand second only to India, with foreign direct investment lagging at barely $28.5 billion, far below its ASEAN neighbors, due to mistrust.)

Third World national liberation struggles had hazy definitions of “democracy” that separated political from economic democracy, adulterated participatory democracy with Leninist faux democratic centralism, and postured that one-party dictatorships were actually European-style social democracies. Similarly, imprecise applications of “socialism” and “Marxism” were often insufficient, usually cultural formations disguised as economic, and denying the importance of economic democracy, workers’ self-management and community control against state ownership and bureaucratic control. The national bourgeoisie pretended to usher in democracy and socialism while actually incorporating itself within and entrenching the global capitalist system of imperialism. Thus national liberation movements seamlessly coalesced with new, anti-colonial forms of imperialism. Third World national liberation struggles, their politics and manifestations, became reified. György Lukács in History and Class Consciousness called reification “the structural process whereby the commodity form permeates life in capitalist society.” Since all is capitalism these days—from the inner workings of individual consciousness to external corporatist economic structures, from “socialist” China and Vietnam to Campist so-called anti-imperialist regimes—we live in a totally reified world. The distinction between revolutionary defeatism versus revolutionary defensism I initially expressed by comparing the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to Vietnam’s national liberation struggle remains. Sanctifying national liberation is fraught at best, lethal at worst.

– – – – –

Half of this column was stolen from Idylls, Imitation, Ideology and Imperialism: A Fanonian Critique of National Liberation by Seshadari Jesse Moodley,  Picasso said mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal. I’m not a great writer, but I do know when someone is. This University of Cape Town MA thesis is brilliant. (Download at https://open.uct.ac.za/handle/11427/33870)

 

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“Thank you for your service”: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, January 2024

Thank you for your service.

catchphrase of the day

The world was in upheaval in 1968. I identified with the anti-Vietnam War movement at the time and even considered myself a pacifist for a minute. I helped with the Quaker-run draft counseling held at the Ventura Unitarian Church and joined the War Resisters League. And I attended local anti-war demonstrations every chance I got, affiliating with a community group called Ventura County Committee for Peace. That was when I was a junior in high school. In September, 1969, my senior year teachers and administrators herded the males of our school class in small groups into a classroom where we were confronted by a man dressed in full Army uniform. After introducing himself, the recruiter got right to the point.

“You owe six years of your life to your country in military service. Two years active duty, two years ready reserve, two years inactive call-up, or some combination thereof. You will need to register for Selective Service within thirty days of your 18th birthday to fulfill this obligation.”

The Army recruiter was matter-of-fact, and I was freaking out. How dare he claim I owed any of my life to the government!? What about becoming a Conscientious Objector to all war? When’s the next bus to Canada?

I was almost a year away from having to register for Selective Service and acquiring my student deferment (1-S) in 1970. But I was already compiling evidence for my intended Conscientious Objector claim (1-O), having no desire to end up in the rice paddies of Indochina. Terrified as I was by that possibility, the process of putting together a file to defend my case for refusing to comply with serving in the military was both an act of resistance and intoxicating. One stipulation of the rules governing conscription allowed me to put anything in my file that I considered as influencing me in my anti-war convictions. So once registered I could walk into my draft board and insist that they put in the latest Jimmy Hendrix album or part of a highway sign graffitied with peace symbols or a rotting fish carcass that revealed the plight of the world and my commitment to peace and my CO status.

Thus my fear of being drafted was counterbalanced by my excitement over “sticking it to the Man” through my anti-war activism. But things quickly got complicated once Nixon took office. America’s war in Indochina had sparked the broadest, most persistent anti-war movement in US history. The movement rapidly spreading in terms of consciousness, activism and resistance to other parts of society, and which Nixon attempted to quell at all costs. In addition to an extensive law and order campaign that unleashed the FBI, state and local police against The Movement, he promised to relieve the class and racial inequities built into conscription by first introducing a lottery draft system (12-1-1969) and then by moving to an all-volunteer military (AVM, 1973). Nixon’s other measures—withdrawing US troops, Vietnamization of the ground war, expanding and intensifying the air war, negotiating the Paris Peace Accords—didn’t amount to crap. By 1970, and my birthday’s high lottery number, I gave up my CO claim because it was just too much trouble. By 1973 the anti-Vietnam War protest movement had been decimated. By May 1, 1975 the Vietnamese people had won their war against the greatest military power the world had ever known.

I grew my hair long, started smoking dope, talked big about The Revolution and continued participation in anti-war activities. But I was also a middle-class happy-go-lucky college student, first at Ventura Community College and then at UC Santa Cruz. That’s where I met Walter Goldfrank, a junior professor who taught Sociology, specifically World Systems Theory. When I told him my rather petty travails of getting out of military service he told me that being drafted into the US Army was the best thing that ever happened to him. Wally was an upper middle class Jewish boy from Brooklyn who graduated from Harvard and whose first real encounter with people of different races, in particular black and brown folks, was in the military. He considered the Army a profoundly democratic and democratizing experience. Now, at the time I attended UCSC, Wally was a full-on Maoist, an admirer of Red China, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the People’s Liberation Army. So, there was some affinity between his politics and his evaluation of his military service even as he became a full professor, department chair and eventually professor emeritus.

What we in the Long 60s called The Movement had plenty of elements dedicated to toppling the United States of America. There were New Left groups committed to armed struggle and overthrowing the government—Weather Underground, Black Panther Party, May 19th Communist Organization, etc. And there were countercultural groups ardent about dropping out and moving back to the land—Drop City, the Diggers Kaliflower Commune, the Farm, etc. But Wally and I, and most of us in The Movement, were “Summer soldiers and Sunshine patriots” in the words of Tom Paine. We considered ourselves revolutionaries but in truth we’d essentially made peace with “The System.”

I became a member of the Winter Soldier Organization of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1975. VVAW/WSO was the vanguard of the GI/Veterans Movement during the Vietnam War, a practical example of revolutionary defeatism. After the Tet Offensive the US was losing the war although few citizens realized it and almost none admitted it. There were nearly a half million American troops in-country by 1967. Whereas Black Americans constituted just 12% of the population, they occupied 31% of the ground combat positions in Vietnam and suffered 24% of the casualties. Martin Luther King called Vietnam a white man’s war but a Black man’s fight. It was also a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight, in that high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam while the children of the educated got college deferments.

American soldiers were considered a horror and an abomination who killed babies, perpetrated genocide, and promoted imperialism. Drug use among the troops—from marijuana to heroin—was rampant, as was racial unrest. What followed was the near-collapse of the US Military with murder, riot, beatings, arson and mass refusal to deploy or follow orders. Troop casualties rose annually, reaching nearly 17,000 in 1968, at which time Nixon’s multilayered strategy went into effect. A growing number of US military bases in this country and abroad were host to anti-war GI coffee houses off-base where propaganda, support and organizing was available. And veterans were returning to the burgeoning mass Anti-Vietnam War Movement in the streets spearheading creative protests like Operation Dewey Canyon III in 1971 where Vietnam Veterans Against the War threw back their medals, awards, ribbons and commendations onto the US Capitol building.

VVAW pioneered some of the more imaginative tactics known to The Movement. It advanced veterans rights and health advocacy, fighting to recognize the dangers of Agent Orange and the disabilities of PTSD. After 1973, it pursued a more and more explicit anti-imperialist line, and opened its membership to civilians with the Winter Soldier Organization auxiliary. But by the time I started volunteering for VVAW/WSO’s Vets Coop in Santa Cruz in the beginning of 1975, participation in The Movement and membership in VVAW/WSO had declined precipitously. The Maoist Bay Area Revolutionary Union (BARU) started infiltrating the organization, seizing control of the National Office through which it removed members, expelled chapters, disbanded the WSO and placed the organization under ideological conformity. VVAW was integrated into the RU which—with the Revolutionary Student Brigade, Unemployed Workers Organizing Committee, National United Workers Organization and Wei Min She—reconstituted itself as the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) under the pro-Gang of Four leadership of Bob Avakian.

Vietnam veterans were a minority of American veterans in 1975 yet their problems—homelessness, indigence, drug addiction, suicide, physical disabilities, mental illness—became the default face of all veterans. What’s more they were accorded no sympathy because they were supposed to have served their country out of patriotism, nationalism and loyalty, yet had rebelled and mutinied to the point of crippling the US military.

Military mutinies among conscripts have been common throughout history. The first World War was nearly scuttled by waves of revolutionary defeatism—mutinies and rebellions of enlisted and drafted soldiers and sailors on both sides of the conflict. Leaving aside dubious notions of “honor” military conscripts are duty-bound to serve, forced in fact by law. They’re not told “thank you for your service.” That phrase came into vogue after the advent of the All-Volunteer Military as sport stadium’s full of lazy entitled civilian spectators gave standing ovations to thank volunteer troops for serving in the military. I’d rather honor the Vietnam-era soldiers, sailors, marines and pilots—draftees all—whose greater service to humanity nearly broke the American empire with acts of revolutionary defeatism.

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anti-nationalist action: CRITIQUING CAMPISM | GA Matiasz (aka “Lefty” Hooligan)

CRITIQUING CAMPISM

I’m on the left of the Left. A libertarian socialist. I have been for fifty-five years now, ever since 1968 and the anti-Vietnam War movement. But since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2-24-2022 and Israel’s invasion of Gaza on 10-27-2023 I’ve been leery of mass anti-war protests organized by crude Leninists, terror apologists and left anti-semites like the Tweedledum-Tweedledee vanguardists of the PSL/WWP joined-at-the-hip by their faux ANSWER “Coalition.”

This hard Stalinist/anti-imperialist/anti-revisionist/campist/tankie Left divides the world into imperialist nations versus anti-imperialist nations. It’s assumed that those countries in the imperialist “camp” are reactionary whereas those countries in the anti-imperialist “camp” are progressive. This basic campism insists that the US is the center of global imperialism and therefore the primary enemy, with Israel an imperialist appendage. The anti-imperialist forces arrayed against the US are considered “on the right side of history” and are, if not socialist, at least leaning Left. So campism implies that those who oppose imperialism, even reactionary Islamist Hamas, are progressive.

I’m pro-Jewish, anti-Israeli state, pro-Palestinian, and anti-Hamas armed party. But I’m convinced there can never be a simple, easy solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. The Israeli government has committed war crimes; the indiscriminate use of white phosphorous, collective punishment of Palestinians, massacres of unarmed Arab civilian protesters, the relentless assault on Arab hospitals and communities. Hamas has also committed war crimes; suicide bombings, indiscriminate rocket fire, using Palestinian civilians and hospitals as human shields, the massacre of 1,200 Israelis on October 7. And there’s been populist pogroms on both sides, grassroots war crimes like the murders of West Bank Palestinians by the Israeli Settler Movement and the looting of Israeli communities and bases by Gazans after October 7.

According to the anti-imperialist camp however Hamas can do no wrong and Israel can do no right. Hamas is engaged in a “decades long fight for national liberation,” a legitimate “struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.” Israel is “settler-colonial, Zionist apartheid” and “fascist-type oppression,” the “genocide being carried out by the Zionist terror state.” Resistance against “the Zionist entity-by any means necessary” is “a morally and legally legitimate response to occupation” by “Palestinian freedom fighters” who “are not terrorists!” Indeed. “when a people have been subject to decades of apartheid and unimaginable violence, their resistance” (by massacring civilians) “must not be condemned, but understood as a desperate act of self-defense.”

The campist anti-imperialist “unwavering solidarity” and “unequivocally expressed support” for the Palestinian people and “their attack against Israel” becomes pure Manichaean “good vs evil.”[*] I prefer the straightforward approach of Gilles Dauvé who argued: “I am against imperialism, be it French, British, US or Chinese. I am not an ‘anti-imperialist,’ since that is a political position supporting national liberation movements opposed to imperialist powers.” I too am against imperialism, but I’m not an anti-imperialist.

Much has been made of former Greek minister Yanis Varoufakis’s refusal to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacres when he said: “Back in South Africa in the era of apartheid, what was the problem? Was it that some members of the Black resistance, including the ANC but not only the ANC, took up arms against the South African regime and sometimes killed innocent people? Was that the problem of apartheid? No. The problem was apartheid.” What this skirts is the history of the original apartheid system. That the ANC actually signed onto the Geneva Protocols in 1980, that the ANC was party to the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that clearly found the ANC in violation of the Geneva Protocols, and that ultimately the ANC accepted those judgments. What we need is to hold Israel and Hamas, Britain, the US and Europe accountable for the 75+ years of heinous war crimes in Israel/Palestine, not make excuses for them.

Campist anti-imperialism discredits the Left as a whole. The machinations of the PSL, WWP and ANSWER “Coalition” are particularly destructive, with their retro-Marcyism, support for dictators like Putin and Assad, disdain for workers struggles, sabotage of other socialists, sectarianism against alternative movements, and strong-arm tactics to silence radicals of different views. Throughout the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars they’ve sought to control the anti-war movement specifically and the Left generally as vanguardist fiefdoms. John Reimann (“Oakland Socialist”) insists the present anti-war movement should be democratically organized and all points of view be represented. Jason Schulman and Dan La Botz contend (“Socialist Forum”) there is only one camp, “our camp,” “our commitment to democracy, to the workers’ movement in all countries, and to the struggle for international socialism.” I heartily concur.
 
[*] Preceding pastiche of quotes from Democratic Socialists of America, National Lawyers Guild, Black Lives Matter, Party of Socialism and Liberation, Workers World Party.

by GA Matiasz (aka “Lefty” Hooligan)

Denialism: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, November 2023

“Trump did nothing wrong.”

It’s a sentiment that’s become a chant, an incantation from Republicans—from their base to on high—that summarily dismisses Trump’s two impeachments and ninety-one criminal charges. And no one says it louder and stronger than Trump who proclaims in the third person that “Trump Won” at every opportunity.

“Trump did nothing wrong” is part of a long line of right-wing apologetics that started with the anti-semitic canard “Hitler was right” shortly after the second World War which evolved into the 4chan meme “Hitler did nothing wrong” by 2011. Proud Boy Tusitala “Tiny” Toese wore a “Pinochet did nothing wrong” t-shirt to a Portland, Oregon, far-right rally in 2018. Proud Boys at the December 12, 2020 “Stop the Steal” rally wore “Enrique Tarrio did nothing wrong” t-shirts to counter the revelation that Tarrio worked repeatedly as an FBI informant after his fraud arrest in 2012. And Proud Boy Tarrio himself wore a “Tarrio did nothing wrong” t-shirt after his indictment for seditious conspiracy and his sentencing to 22 years in prison for orchestrating the failed plot to keep Donald Trump in power after the Republican lost the 2020 election.

My friend recently did a faux meme that made me laugh; a scruffy man wears a t-shirt captioned “Stalin did nothing wrong” from a sham company called “Tankie—Mind.” There’s been an uptick of declarations that “Stalin did nothing wrong” since 2014 as part of the Stalinist/anti-imperialist/anti-revisionist/campist/tankie idiocy that began after February, 1956. That’s when Nikita Khrushchev consolidated his power in the Politburo with his secret speech denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality and its consequences for the Soviet Union. The changes he instigated in the USSR—his liberalizing domestic reforms and easing of Cold War tensions (the khrushchovskaya ottepel)—were opposed by increasing ranks of anti-revisionists, Mao being the “Stalin was right” OG. There were unrepentant Stalinists, then pro-Stalin Maoists and Hoxhaists, and now execrable Marcyists; all of whom continue to peddle their falsehoods on the Left that “Stalin did nothing wrong.”

Clearly, pro-Stalin polemicists have often been orthodox, even vulgar Leninists like Ludo Martens, Domenico Losurdo and Michael Parenti, and Soviet fellow travelers like Paul Robeson, Joseph E. Davies and Grover Furr. But there are a number of far right apologists like conspiratorial Synarchist Annie Lacroix-Riz, neo-Nazi Kerry Bolton and mystic Eurasianist Aleksander Dugin who admired Stalin for fascistic reasons. There was even an occasional all-purpose appeaser of bloody dictators like E. H. Carr who praised not just Stalin and Mao but Hitler as well. That “Stalin did nothing wrong” or “Mao did nothing wrong” is more and more conflated with “Hitler did nothing wrong.” In this time of growing red/brown crossover politics it is captured in the congruity of the tropes used to defend their respective historical dictatorships. The pattern of argumentation used by Stalin apologists versus Hitler apologists is virtually identical.

I’ve concluded this column with two appendices listing historical crimes of the Third Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union respectively. To play the game of “they did nothing wrong” it’s not important whether the crimes were Fascist or Communist, nor what particular offense is singled out so much as the kneejerk defense that’s universally applied to them. The most infamous comeback is denialism, the claim that said crimes never happened. That for instance the Holocaust murder of six million Jews by the Nazis or the Holodomor starvation of five million Ukrainians by the Soviets never happened. There are concocted nuances to denialism; for instance that Hitler actually protected German Jews or that Stalin was desperately dealing with a countrywide famine caused entirely by climate. But the point of denialism is not to counter facts with facts, documents with documents, or experts with experts. Denialists make up facts to spec, construct documents to order, and recruit experts for hire. They outright lie, cherrypick or misrepresent evidence, and engage in false equivalencies, half truths or other disingenuous argumentation (by “moving the goalposts” and other debating tricks).

Closely related to denialism is trutherism, the idea that Hitler’s or Stalin’s crimes were deliberately faked or fabricated. Trutherism raises the claim more directly than denialism that someone or something is behind this falsification as an intentional hoax. And here’s where distinctions between Left and Right arise. For Stalin apologists it’s Nazis, Trotskyists, Khrushchevites, anarchists, Western liberals, the ruling bourgeoisie, the CIA and Zionists. For Hitler apologists it’s primarily the Jews and secondarily Marxists, Western race mixing liberals, the Freemasons, Illuminati, the New World Order, George Soros and our Lizard Overlords. The Stalin and Hitler trutherist apologists insist that their opponents engage in propaganda and subterfuge as part of dangerous conspiracies or as secret cabals bent on world domination. Without contradicting that their crimes never happened or that they were faked these apologists imply that the victims deserved what they got or brought their fate on themselves; for instance the Ukrainians for being class enemy kulaks and the Jews just for being Jews.[1]

An apologist ploy contends that even though Hitler and Stalin were ruthless dictators and while the crimes of their regimes were real enough they weren’t really in control of their governments or subordinates.  It has been argued that the NKVD acted alone in Stalin’s Soviet Union and that the Gestapo actually ran the Third Reich. To argue that Hitler and Stalin weren’t really responsible is revisionism lite. Regular revisionism contends that neither Stalin’s nor Hitler’s crimes were really all that bad, that the body counts of both regimes are exaggerated, that any evidence for genocide is hyperbole. Furthermore, the impact of each is minimized by comparing one to the other in a fallacy of totalitarian relativism and whataboutism. Stalin killed more people in the Holodomor than Hitler murdered in the Holocaust and visa versa.

An interesting footnote to revisionist Stalin apologetics is that it was championed by the arch anti-revisionist Mao Zedong. Mao argued that Stalin’s crimes were merely “mistakes” because he didn’t really understand contradictions and dialectics very well. Clever how the Great Helmsman managed to simultaneously minimize Stalin’s crimes while demoting his Marxist-Leninist credentials. That Mao’s bloody reign was historically less murderous than Stalin’s and that Mao’s legacy remains potent in China to this day attests to the shrewdness of those who promote “Mao did nothing wrong.”

I’m not talking here about the relative body counts of Nazism versus Stalinism. I’ve detailed that in past columns Piling up the corpses: “What’s Left?”, July 2015, MRR #386 and Left of the Left: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, July 2022. I’m also not averse to refuting apologists for genocide with history and fact. I have taken on Holocaust denialism in Holocaust and resistance: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”,  June 2023 for example. But neither Stalin apologists nor Hitler apologists are really interested in facts, truth, history or reality. They are delusional at best or lying sacks of night soil at worst and debating them has only limited value. What’s more, I consider the merits of free speech in the “public square” and “marketplace of ideas” in countering threats to individual and collective freedoms highly overrated. Apologists for murder and genocide are not quite the same as advocates for totalitarianism although they are siblings frequently working hand-in-glove. Yes, information, education and debate are necessary but by no means sufficient. Organizing and taking action are absolutely crucial. That intra-Left and red/brown alliances have made Left/Right political distinctions dubious at best. Formulating plans against apologists is also problematic. For instance, activists have long advocated deplatforming Nazis from social media. Whether deplatforming Stalinists would even be possible for Leftists to conceive of let alone carry out makes the difficulty of acting against Stalin apologists obvious.

The Left considers itself one grand solidarity, one extended family. Yet from 1918 to 1953, Stalin presided over—in one capacity or another—the mass arrest, imprisonment, reeducation, and murder of Mensheviks, anarchists, syndicalists, Social Revolutionaries, renegade Bolsheviks, Left Communists, Trotskyists, Left Oppositionists, Bukharinists, et al. Fellow Leftists all, and part of the Soviet Union’s bloodstained body count under Stalinism. As a libertarian socialist, I’ve often felt like I’m in an abusive relationship with the Left. We must not kowtow to our would-be executioners, the Stalinist/anti-imperialist/anti-revisionist/campist/tankie Left. Nor must we accept their epitaph for us that “Stalin did nothing wrong.”

FOOTNOTES:
[1] There are also those who are proud of their legacy of mass murder. There are Nazis who contend that all Jews are the spawn of Satan, and Stalinists who blame everything on “counterrevolutionaries” and “social fascist Trotskyites.” For them, genocide was too good for their victims.

APPENDIX ONE: HITLER’S CRIMES:

• Holocaust-6 million Jews killed
• Soviet POWs-3.3 to 5 million killed
• Polish/Slavic ethnic cleansing-3 to 5 million killed
• Le Paradis massacre
• Wormhoudt massacre
• Lidice massacre
• Normandy Massacres
• Ardenne Abbey massacre
• Graignes massacre
• Malmedy massacre
• Wereth massacre
• Wahlhausen massacre
• Gardelegen war crime
• Oradour-sur-Glane massacre
• Massacre of Kalavryta
• Medical experimentation on concentration camp prisoners
• Liquidation of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
• Liquidation of Vilna Ghetto Uprising
• Liquidation of Bialystok Ghetto Uprising
• Liquidation of Slonim, Łachwa, Mizoch, Mińsk Mazowiecki, Częstochowa, Będzin, Kraków, Łódź, Lwów, Lutsk, Marcinkonys, Minsk, Pińsk, Riga, Sosnowiec Ghetto uprisings
• Unrestricted submarine warfare against merchant shipping.
• The intentional destruction of major medieval churches of Novgorod, of monasteries in the Moscow region (e.g., of New Jerusalem Monastery) and of the imperial palaces around St. Petersburg.
• Commando Order
• Commissar Order
• Nacht und Nebel decree

APPENDIX TWO: STALIN’S CRIMES:

• Forced collectivization of agriculture
• Forced industrialization
• Dekulakization of Ukraine-800,000 to 5 million killed
• Holodomor/Ukraine famine-3.5 to 10 million killed
• Kazakhstan famine-1.5 to 2.3 million killed
• Political purges
• The Great Purge
• Moscow Show Trials
• Gulag prison camp system
• Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
• Katyn massacre
• Murder/deportation of Crimean Tatars
• Murder/deportation of Chechens
• Murder/deportation of Ingush
• Murder/deportation of Germans
• Murder/deportation of Balkars
• Murder/deportation of Kalmyks
• NKVD Polish Operation
• NKVD German Operation
• NKVD Greek Operation
• NKVD Latvian Operation
• NKVD Korean Operation
• NKVD Chinese Operation
• NKVD Estonian Operation
• NKVD Finnish Operation 

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Apocalypse: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, October 2023

I’ve lived through my share of apocalypses starting with the ur-apocalypse of nuclear war. We did duck-and-cover drills in elementary school and my parents converted a windowless back room into a slapdash fallout shelter. I remember at ten seeing the cover of the National Enquirer at a grocery checkout stand with “psychic” Jeane Dixon predicting that a planetary alignment would herald the end of the Earth. From 1962 on, predictions of the end of the world from fringe Christian religious types happened regularly—George Williams, Herbert Armstrong, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses among them. Combine these religious charlatans with the countercultural/New Age/new religious movement apocalyptarian grandstanding of murderous cultists—Jim Jones, Charles Manson—and you cover the first 20 odd years of my life. Comets have played prominently in apocalyptic dramas—Halley’s, Kohoutek and Hale-Bopp for instance. More recently, there’s the coincidental apocalypse of Y2K and how all the world’s computer systems might have ceased functioning along with the planet when the date changed from 1999 to 2000.

All of these “end of the world” scares occurred in a country that until recently was profoundly optimistic. America proclaimed itself the greatest country in the world, a land of freedom and opportunity bar none. Even my involvements in the counterculture and the New Left were from optimism, a sense of this country’s driving potential and its people’s boundless ingenuity. Yet I also witnessed the collapse of American New Deal liberalism and the rise of the Right, beginning with Reagan’s dismantling of the welfare state under the slogan “Morning again in America. Prouder, stronger, better.” (Note: Nixon was America’s last “liberal” president.) What followed was an inexorable slide to the right through the second New Right, right-wing populism, neo-Nazism, the “countercultural” fascism of skinheads and the Abraxas group, ultimately reaching Trump and the third New Right. This was well after George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party and George Wallace’s segregationist populism.

Let’s return to Y2K for a moment.

The Year 2000 Problem was an issue of coding potentially interacting with hardware, and of people praying that the double-ought two-digit date switchover would not confound and crash modern technological civilization as the fear at the time claimed. It piggybacked on a more esoteric chronological issue of the twentieth century (the 1900s) transitioning into the twenty-first century (the 2000s) as well the transition from the second to third millennium. Such century/millennium changes have always inspired millennial apocalyptic scares and movements so Y2K was just one more drama among scores of others, including Nostradamus, Jerry Falwell, the Nuwaubian Nation, Sun Myung Moon, and Edgar Casey. Except that for as long as millennial apocalyptic predictions have been around there’s been the common idiocy that they’ve been somehow triggered chronologically.

When we started categorizing things into BC and AD, or BCE and CE, we started dating things from the year 1. There was no year 0. The first century thus ran from year 1 to year 100, with the turn of the century occurring from the year 100 to the year 101. The same holds true for the first millennium, which started in the year 1 and ended in the year 1000, transitioning to the next millennium from the year 1000 to the year 1001. So the twentieth century and second millennium did not end on the last day of 1999 but on the last day of 2000, meaning the actual esoteric apocalypse should have occurred a year after Y2K. But of course, neither the apocalyptic predictions of faux spiritual/religious idiots nor Y2K hackers materialized.

Similar end-of-the-world sensibilities prevailed at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Called the fin de siècle (French for the end of the century), this turn of the century was understood to have been the end of one era and the beginning of another. Starting in the 1880’s the old era of Enlightenment liberalism, individualism, democracy and the Rights of Man gave way to a time of anxiety, malaise, distrust, pessimism, and decadence. Civilization was considered in crisis, requiring a total overhaul by a generation imbued with emotionalism, irrationalism, subjectivism, and vitalism in revolt against materialism, rationalism, positivism, bourgeois society, and democracy. This “fin de siècle, fin du monde” sentiment gave rise to Fascism which Roger Griffin summarized as “a political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.”[Fascism is] a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti-conservative nationalism. As such it is an ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led “armed party” which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation’s imminent rebirth from decadence. (“The palingenetic core of generic fascist ideology,” 9-10-2008)

Sui generis during the fin de siècle, Fascism has become the terror of subsequent centuries.

There is an historical argument that the American revolution of 1776, far from being a “conservative revolution,” was actually a class war between a radical democratic majority and a conservative “republican” elite. The radical democratic majority won the first round and formed the Articles of Confederation of thirteen independent states that championed decentralization, a bill of rights, paper money, etc. The conservative “republican” elite of large landowners, merchants and slave holders staged a counterrevolution through the Constitution that centralized power in a Federal government and Alexander Hamilton’s financial regime favoring gold and a national bank. Everyone from Charles A. Beard to Robert Ovetz pushes this overly simplistic analysis.

A similar argument holds that FDR’s New Deal, far from being a stopgap attempt to prevent the United States from turning either Fascist or Communist during the Great Depression, was a genuine effort to form a welfare state just shy of European social democracy. I buy neither the “America’s original democratic revolution” nor the “New Deal social democracy” arguments. That one faction of American capitalists triumphed over another does not make American socialism an historical possibility. Let me repeat my above contention that with the steady demise of Democratic Party liberalism and the New Deal welfare state the United States has been moving relentlessly to the Right. What has changed is America’s unerring optimism.

The Penn Schoen Berland Poll of June 8-19, 2015 revealed Americans to be personally optimistic yet nationally pessimistic. If anything, this trend has broadened with a number of recent polls (PEW, Gallup, AP-NORC, etc) indicating that no matter their age, race, economic status or politics, Americans think most things are worse than they actually are. Spencer Sunshine recently analyzed a new wave of neo-Nazism that he argues is “a result of the robust state of the U.S. far right as a whole, which has been able to outlive the Trump presidency, continue to dominate the Republican Party, and keep energized and active.”
Anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns have been its most popular issues, and far right activists have taken over school boards, banned books from libraries and disrupted Drag Queen Story Hours. There is no doubt that the far right will only pick up steam as the election approaches, and especially if Trump is convicted. Within that movement there is always a militant edge, partly underground and partly on the street. Neo-Nazis have always positioned themselves as the hardest of the white supremacists, and their stress on hating Jews is in tune with the antisemitic propaganda that has flooded social media. (“A New Wave of Neo-Nazism Has Become Visible in Wake of Jacksonville Shooting” by Spencer Sunshine, Truthout, 9-9-2023)

Whether pessimism contributes to the demise of democracy or the rise of Fascism is debatable. I’ve certainly gotten more pessimistic as I’ve grown older. I don’t have high hopes that the rightward trend in American politics will be halted let alone reversed, nor do I consider a democratic socialism or a libertarian one on the horizon anytime soon. I’ve had a fascination with apocalypse most of my life but even the threat of that has wimped out. I coined the phrase “slow-motion apocalypse” well before the Grotus album of the same name. T.S. Eliot’s last lines of “The Hollow Men” have never felt more relevant: “This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.”

 

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The Long Sixties: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, September 2023

The Sixties, henceforth designated the Long Sixties, are a touchstone for me. I make a lot of “coming late to the party” as I became aware of politics only in 1968 at age 16. And so I return to this period of my life obsessively in my writing. This piece treats the historical period as crucially intertwined with the history of the United States. To understand what I’m hoping to accomplish, consider that from one perspective the Vietnam War (1946-1975) was a war for national liberation—part of the decolonization wave of Africa, Asia and Latin America—that saw the defeat of first France and then the United States, and inspired similar armed struggles around the globe. But from another perspective America’s initial involvement in the Vietnam War—when the US first shipped military aid to the French colonial administration in 1950 and Eisenhower first sent military advisors to train the South Vietnamese Army in 1955—was crucial to the historical impact of the Long Sixties through the numerous movements I detail below. Because so much happened in these two decades, I’m necessarily selective about what I’m including in this synopsis. Instead of my regular column, I’m fashioning this as a type of “CliffsNotes,” a shorthand attempt to summarize the Long Sixties every time I drop the term. Expect this to be periodically updated in future installments as I expound and expand on it.

THE LONG SIXTIES: 1955-1975:
Contours Of U.S. History:

Colonial origins, continental expansion (Manifest Destiny) with displacement of the native population, and hemispheric hegemony (Monroe Doctrine). Capitalist individualism and entrepreneurialism alongside Black plantation slavery, Civil War, failed Reconstruction, codification of Jim Crow racial segregation reinforced by white supremacist terrorism. Beginnings of empire and imperialist interventionism, robber baron capitalism mythologizing laissez-faire while creating monopoly, US entry onto international stage with first World War. Assumption of two-camp capitalist/socialist global division around 1917 Russian Revolution, economic crisis in world capitalism, Great Depression, beginning of US welfare state with FDR/New Deal. Second World War between fascist Axis powers and US/USSR allies of convenience, US supersedes British imperial reach. Post-war consolidation of American corporate state and Pax Americana.

Elements Of The Long Sixties:

• American Way Of Life: American Liberalism’s welfare state, as constructed by Franklin D. Roosevelt (New Deal), Harry Truman (Square Deal), John F. Kennedy (New Frontier), and Lyndon Johnson (Great Society), integrated with the team cooperation, bureaucratic management, and multinational scope of Monopoly Capitalism. The individual subsumed to the organization. This required worker-management cooperation to guarantee labor peace through a liberal corporatist consensus. The American Way of Life defined a time of suburbanization, consumerism, material surplus and affluence; “the world’s highest standard of living.”

• The Cold War: The post-second World War division of the world into two contending power blocs, the US-dominated “Free World” and the USSR-dominated “Communist bloc.” Instead of direct military conflicts between the two superpowers, proxy or brush wars were fought indirectly between their spheres of influence, often in nations on the periphery (Korea, Vietnam). Anti-imperialist wars of national liberation often relied on asymmetrical guerrilla warfare to achieve decolonization, national self-determination and putative socialism. The rise of China (PRC) and the Third World further fractured and complicated the Cold War internationally. A bipartisan Cold War consensus about the means and ends of American foreign policy against the Soviet threat was considered to have prevailed domestically

• Rock Music/Youth Culture: The cross-pollination of rhythm-and-blues and gospel music from American Black culture with country/western music to create rock-and-roll, a cross fertilization of ethnic and regional styles that included the trend toward inter-racial bands. Rock Music/Youth Culture emphasized the importance of youth trends, tastes, and consumption and spread almost immediately to Britain, then to Western Europe, and finally to the rest of the world. A number of distinct rock-and-roll sub genres emerged by the late 1960s (blues rock, folk rock, country rock, psychedelic rock, jazz/rock fusion, progressive rock, heavy metal, etc). Dovetailing with the Beat Generation’s nihilism, youthful rebellion became social discontent that, when combined with quasi-sacramental drug use and liberated sexuality, formed the “turn on, tune in, drop out” freethinking communalist Hippie Counterculture/Youth Movement. Large, multi-day music festivals and intentional communities were hallmarks of the movement. The collective organizing, urban cooperatives and back-to-the-land rural communes of the San Francisco Diggers, Merry Pranksters, Good Earth, Hog Farm, White Panther Party, UATW-MF, etc. attempted to establish a practical alternative society on the ground and had decidedly anarchistic sensibilities.

• Civil Rights Movement: Starting with Brown vs Board of Education, the NAACP, and desegregation the rise of Black protest, nonviolent civil disobedience and various tactics (marches, boycotts, sit-ins, etc) through ML King, SCLC, SNCC and CORE. The move away from moderate incrementalism and nonviolent civil disobedience led to the Black Power Movement as enunciated by Stokely Carmichael and embodied by the Black Panther Party (BPP) for Self Defense. Both revolutionary Black nationalist and socialist, the BPP was influenced by one of the legacies of slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction—Black Nationalism—specifically Marcus Garvey (Back to Africa) and the Nation of Islam (Black separatism) both of which emphasized cultural and economic autonomy. The BPP monitored the Oakland Police with armed patrols and ran a Free Breakfast for Children Program. In turn, Black Power led to Brown Power (Brown Berets, Young Lords Party), Yellow Power (Red Guard, I Wor Kuen), and Red Power (American Indian Movement). The Black Student Union and Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State College led a successful 3-month-long strike demanding ethnic studies in 1968, and AIM occupied the island of Alcatraz for nearly 19 months (1969-1971).

• New Left: Students for a Democratic Society, founded in 1962, and the sit-in occupation at UC Berkeley in 1964-65 known as the Free Speech Movement represented an ever-widening student rebellion that consciously set itself apart from the party-oriented/class-oriented Old Left of the Socialist Party (social democratic), Communist Party USA (Marxist-Leninist), and Socialist Workers Party (Trotskyist). The New Left’s sit-ins, teach-ins, occupations, demonstrations and strikes in colleges and universities across the country cross-pollinated with the Hippie Counterculture and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement, sometimes producing hybrids like the Yippies. SDS continued with university and community/neighborhood organizing, shifting to anti-draft/anti-war work as the 60s went on. The attempt by the anti-revisionist Maoist Progressive Labor Party-Worker/Student Alliance to take over SDS led to sectarianism, factional infighting and splintering, and eventual dissolution. An ever-increasingly fractious landscape of multiplying groupuscules known as the New Communist Movement roughly polarized between a clandestine armed struggle tendency [Weatherman/Weather Underground Organization, May 19th Communist Organization, Black Liberation Army, Symbionese Liberation Army, et al] and a vanguard party-building tendency [October League/Communist Party (Marxist–Leninist), Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, Organization for Revolutionary Unity, League of Revolutionary Struggle, Communist Workers Party, Sojourner Truth Organization, Venceremos Organization, ad nauseam] The NCM’s ideological hodgepodge of anti-revisionism, anti-imperialism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, support for Cuba, Vietnam, national liberation struggles generally and various Third World ideologies, Maoism, Stalinism, Hoxhaism, etc., never congealed into a single coherent organization. Its endless wrangling over the “correct line,” macho posturing, overt homophobia, and support for genocidal Third World movements (Khmer Rouge, Shining Path) were notable negatives. A notable positive was the turn to rank-and-file labor organizing (Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, Miners for Democracy, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, etc) emphasized in the Long Seventies (1965-1981). Other tendencies survived the collapse of SDS with a revival of anarchism, a Gramscian/socialist-feminist New American Movement etc. And the NCM was paralleled by a bewildering proliferation of Trotskyist groupuscules (International Socialists, Revolutionary Socialist League, Freedom Socialist Party, etc,) [Precursor Revolutionary Labor Movements: The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) with its emphasis on direct action and use of free speech fights. The Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO, later Congress of Industrial Organizations) with its stress on collective bargaining and use of the sit-down tactic. Both deployed various labor actions (strikes, boycotts, slowdowns, sabotage, etc) culminating in the all-encompassing General Strike.]

• The Women’s Liberation Movement had its roots in Women’s Suffrage, with the goal of complete social equality for women, ending the patriarchy, and ultimately abolishing all sexual and social hierarchies in a realization of full human intersectionality. Feminist organizations included NOW (liberal), New American Movement (socialist), Bread and Roses (anarchist), and Redstockings (radical). Because homosexuality was illegal until recently, the Gay Liberation Movement relied on secret social clubs—Mattachine Society for gay men, Daughters of Bilitis for lesbian women—to organize. The San Francisco Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in 1966 and the New York Stonewall Riot in 1969 propelled the Movement into the public eye.

• Ecology Movement: The first pictures of the whole earth from space inspired both Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog and the environmental movement, which celebrated the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Environmental organizations range from liberal (Sierra Club) to radical (Earth First!). Without the planet there were no sixties, long or otherwise.

• GI/Veterans Movement: Whereas Black Americans constituted just 12% of the population, they occupied 31% of the ground combat positions in Vietnam and suffered 24% of the casualties. Martin Luther King called Vietnam a white man’s war but a Black man’s fight. It was also a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight, in that high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam while the children of the educated got college deferments. After the Tet Offensive the US was losing the war although few citizens realized it and almost none admitted it. There were nearly a half million American troops in-country by 1967. Drug use among the troops—from marijuana to heroin—was rampant, as was racial unrest. What followed was the near-collapse of the US Military with murder, riot, beatings, arson and mass refusal to deploy or follow orders. Troop casualties rose annually, reaching nearly 17,000 in 1968, at which time Nixon’s combined strategy of Vietnamization and expanding the air war across Southeast Asia went into effect. A growing number of US military bases in this country and abroad were host to anti-war GI coffee houses off base where propaganda and organizing was available. And veterans were returning to the burgeoning mass Anti-Vietnam War Movement in the streets spearheading creative protests like Operation Dewey Canyon III in 1971 where Vietnam Veterans Against the War threw back their medals, awards, ribbons and commendations onto the US Capitol building. Early anti-conscription, civil disobedience and anti-war organizing came from traditional peace groups (Quakers, War Resisters League) and took hold among students facing the draft. The Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party formed the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (New Mobe) in 1966 and organized ever larger national marches and rallies, a mass demonstration strategy demanding “immediate withdrawal” as opposed to “negotiated peace.” Replaced by the SWP-dominated National Peace Action Coalition after acrimonious splits in 1970, other anti-war organizations and strategies arose (MayDay Tribe with mass civil disobedience, People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice with a “People’s Peace Treaty”). Divisiveness weakened the anti-war movement, causing a lull in protests and demonstrations. The largest protest against the Vietnam War occurred on April 24, 1971 in Washington, DC where upwards of half a million participated, with another 150,000 marching in San Francisco, CA. The National Chicano Moratorium Committee Against The Vietnam War reached its peak on August 29, 1970 with a march of 30,000 in East Los Angeles.

 

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DIY socialism: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, August 2023

We were challenged with a peace-time choice between the American system of rugged individualism and a European philosophy of diametrically opposed doctrines—doctrines of paternalism and state socialism.
Herbert Hoover, Inaugural Address, 3-4-1929

Herbert Hoover coined that threadbare phrase “rugged individualism” as his presidency teetered on the brink of the 1929 Wall Street crash and subsequent decade plus Great Depression. Rugged individualism means the individual who is independent and self-reliant, standing alone without assistance from the state or government. At its most extreme however the term refers to the man (and it’s usually a man) who makes his own way in life, self-sufficient, without help from any larger collective entity, be that a business enterprise, local community, or even an extended family.

The country’s founding ideology was a particular subset of eighteenth century liberal enlightenment thought that emphasized both individual rights and the general welfare—both self-interest and the common good. Compared to reactionary medieval Christianity and monarchism, America’s brand of liberal enlightenment was eminently progressive. And this particular mix of individualism and communitarianism has been part of the warp and weft of the country’s society and politics for centuries. Despite the claim that rugged individualism has its origins in the American frontier experience, the modern invention of the term suggests that it’s a product of propaganda more than history.[1]

Americans, true Americans, supposedly eschew any form of charity as a demeaning handout. This is notwithstanding a rich history of “pioneer” mutual aid and decentralized communitarianism in the colonial era and during our extended frontier development. There are ample instances of collective and communal work—barn raisings, working bees and workers cooperatives—in native American, slave and free Black, religious (Amish, Mennonite, Mormon), original Anglo-Saxon/Scotch-Irish, and immigrant Scandinavian, German, Italian, and Jewish communities. The self-activity and self-organization of the American working class after the Civil War produced labor unions and federations, associations of trade and industrial workers based on class solidarity and mutual aid to protect and advance their rights, interests and power. The bloody struggle for the eight-hour day, the wildcat Industrial Workers of the World, and the militant Committee for Industrial Organization were highlights of this period. While the individualism of the American experience remains a constant throughout this history, the rugged aspects of it are far less accurate.

Which brings us to the long 1960s (1955-1975). The rise of the Civil Rights and the Black Power movements revived Black cooperatives and mutual aid societies. The hippie counterculture was characterized by its urban cooperatives and back-to-the-land communes. The New Left exploded with cooperatives, collectives, councils, and a militant wave of labor organizing. The goal of the movements in the long 1960’s was self-emancipation for workers, women, gay people and racial/ethnic minorities. Part of that involved reinvigorating an American do-it-yourself culture and its transformation from an individualistic emphasis to collective practice.

I started driving my parents’ VW Beetle in 1968 when I got my first driver’s permit at 16, the same year I became a social anarchist. At 17 I bought a used 1958 off-white VW bug with a canvas sunroof, the year when Volkswagen changed from the oval back window to the enlarged rectangular one. And in 1969 I purchased my first copy of John Muir’s classic wire-bound manual How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive; A Manual of Step-By-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot.

I began buying tools to do my own car maintenance almost immediately, first to change my own oil and spark plugs, and then gradually to repair almost everything else. While attending UC Santa Cruz I lent my car to a friend who blew out a piston. So during the summer, home for a job, I rented an apartment and took apart my engine in my small combined living/dining room. Not the most pleasant experience living and eating with the smell of oil, grease and gasoline, but I did successfully repair my VW using Muir’s Compleat Idiot book. In all, I have owned three VW bugs and two buses.

The Volkswagen—literally the “People’s Car” designed and manufactured for “the masses” under the Nazi Party’s German Labor Front—rose to prominence as a symbol for post-war West German capitalist regeneration, and became a default people’s car symbolic of a generation of hip white youth in North America and Europe. The VW’s simple styling and usefulness for home, work and play combined practicality with free expression. VWs could handily haul people and goods cross country, were easy to operate and maintain, proved uncomplicated and fun to customize, and became the statement of an entire generation bent on collective self-reliant DIY activism. Owning a VW was a form of protest both against Detroit’s oversized, overpowered and overpriced cars and the “country’s role as a nuclear superpower and its reliance on commercialism to feed a voracious appetite for more, more, more.” The Beetle’s cute curves and the Microbus’s boxy appearance—“so unlike anything the major auto manufacturers in Detroit were producing—became a symbol for counterculture types, who wanted to stand out from the rest of crowd.”[a] Some VW owners painted peace signs, flowers and psychedelic art on their vehicles to further the “turn on, tune in and drop out” connection between car and counterculture.

The sterling example of all of this was Muir’s book. John Muir was a structural engineer who collaborated with the artist Peter Aschwanden to design the authoritative manual for Volkswagen owners, with handwritten lettering and intricate and often humorous hand-drawn illustrations. The exploded views of various aspects of the VW were spectacular works of art in their own right. (Tosh Gregg updated and appended material for subsequent editions.) An iconic 60s manual for an iconic 60s vehicle, the Compleat Idiot was entirely self-published and self-promoted, selling over two million copies and becoming one of the most successful independent author published and financed books in history.

“The legend of John Muir, 60s counter culture auto mechanic, runs something along these lines; a distant relative of the namesake American naturalist, he worked in the American defense industry during the Fail Safe/Dr. Strangelove days of the Cold War, until he’d had enough of it and decided to drop out. In the late 1960s, he moved to Taos, New Mexico and became a VW mechanic.”[b]

As a DIY VW mechanic I belonged to a couple of enthusiastic shadetree mechanic collectives who performed car repairs with minimum tools and equipment in our home garages, backyards or driveways. This included jerry rigging, basic maintenance, DIY upgrades, and more sophisticated repairs and customization. One of these was associated with the William James Work Company. Founded in 1973 by Page Smith and Paul Lee in Santa Cruz, the project organized unemployed or marginally employed people to enable them to find jobs. The pragmatic 19th-20th century philosopher William James proposed what came to be called “work service” as a substitute for military service and as such the Work Company dovetailed nicely with the counterculture.[2] The San Francisco Diggers laid out a utopian scheme for the post-competitive, comparative game of a Free City based on the idea that “[E]very brother and sister should have what they need to do whatever needs to be done.”

“Each service” in the Free City “should be performed by a tight gang of brothers and sisters whose commitment should enable them to handle an overload of work with ability and enthusiasm. ‘Tripsters’ soon get bored, hopefully before they cause an economic strain.” Under Free City Garage and Mechanics, the Diggers proposed:

[T]o repair and maintain all vehicles used in the various services. The responsibility for the necessary tools and parts needed in their work is entirely theirs and usually available by maintaining friendly relations with junkyards, giant automotive schools, and generally scrounging around those areas where auto equipment is easily obtained. The garage should be large enough and free of tripsters who only create more work for the earnest mechanics.[c]

This DIY culture was an extension of the larger mech culture of the 1950s, typified by magazines like Popular Mechanics and Mechanix Illustrated which provided their readers a way to keep up-to-date on useful practical skills, techniques, tools, and materials. Since many of those readers lived in rural or semi-rural areas, this was a part of the even larger make-do culture on farms and small towns that still constituted the vast majority of the country. In the long 1960s this included everything from artists rebelling against mass production and mass culture with self-made crafts, artisanal cooks and brewers, farmers going organic, back-to-the-land homesteading, home improvement and smaller construction projects to build-your-own ham/crystal radio, telescope, robotic and computer projects. A recent outgrowth of this has been the “fair repair/right to repair” movement that seeks to mandate access to repair tools. “If you own something, you should be able to repair it yourself or take it to a technician of your choice.”[d]

You might have noticed the “hyphenated self” throughout this column. Self-reliance, self-sufficiency, and self-interest often have a right-wing, individualistic focus. In turn self-activity, self-organization and self-emancipation have a left-wing, collectivist emphasis. As with self-defense, all of these “hyphenated self” terms can be seen in both individual and collective aspects. There are two sides—an individual and a collective side—to the self.

SOURCES:
Personal recollections
Books/Pamphlets:
A Moral Equivalent of War by William James (1910)
History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 10 volumes, by Philip S. Foner (1947-1994)
The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962) and Socialism: Past and Future (1989) by Michael Harrington
The Digger Papers (1968) www.diggers.org[c]
How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive; A Manual of Step-By-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot by John Muir and Tosh Gregg. Illustrated by Peter Aschwanden. (1969)
Communalism, From It’s Origins to the Twentieth Century by Kenneth Rexroth (1974)
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn (1980)
Women, Race & Class (1981) and The Meaning of Freedom (2012) by Angela Y. Davis
Socialism and America by Irving Howe (1985)
Marxism in the United States: A History of the American Left by Paul Buhle (1987)
Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice by Jessica Gordon Nembhard (2014)
Communalism, a Liberatory Alternative by Marcus Amargi & Stephanie Armagi (2016)
Articles/Essays:
“Socialism, American style” by “Lefty” Hooligan (“What’s Left?” 9-2012, MRR #352)
“Forward Into The Past With John Muir’s ‘Idiot’s Guide’” by Samuel John Klein (The Zehnkatzen Times, 6-10-2016)[b]
“What Is Socialism? A History of the Word Used as a Scare Tactic in American Politics” by Jeremy Hobson and Serena McMahon (WBUR, 3-7-2019)
“How Socialism Made America Great” by Jack Schwartz (Daily Beast, 7-1-2019)
“The myth of the rugged individual” by Robert Reich (Salon, 8-11-2019)
“How the Volkswagen Bus Became a Symbol of Counterculture” David Kindy (Smithsonian Magazine, 3-6-2020)[a]
“What You Should Know About Right to Repair” by Thorin Klosowski (New York Times, Wirecutter; 7-15-2021)[d]
“American socialism revisited” by “Lefty” Hooligan (“What’s Left?” 10-2021)

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Herbert Hoover’s former Secretary of the Interior and long-time Stanford University president, Ray Lyman Wilbur, wrote in defense of the concept of “rugged individualism”: “It is common talk that every individual is entitled to economic security. The only animals and birds I know that have economic security are those that have been domesticated—and the economic security they have is controlled by the barbed-wire fence, the butcher’s knife and the desire of others. They are milked, skinned, egged or eaten up by their protectors.”

Now compare this to a quote from the famous anarchist-communist Peter Kropotkin who wrote in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution that reveals the newspeak in the Hoover/Wilbur concept of “rugged individualism”: “In The Descent of Man [Charles Darwin] gave some powerful pages to illustrate its proper, wide sense. He pointed out how, in numberless animal societies, the struggle between separate individuals for the means of existence disappears, how struggle is replaced by co-operation, and how that substitution results in the development of intellectual and moral faculties which secure to the species the best conditions for survival. He intimated that in such cases the fittest are not the physically strongest, nor the cunningest, but those who learn to combine so as mutually to support each other, strong and weak alike, for the welfare of the community.”

Other relevant quotes from Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid abound: “[I]n the long run the practice of solidarity proves much more advantageous to the species than the development of individuals endowed with predatory inclinations.” “[U]nder any circumstances sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life.” “Practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual and moral.” and “The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history.”

 

[2] The Work Company was subsumed into the William James Association.

 

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