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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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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Drugs: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, July 2023

I’m a cat person. At one time my wife and I had three indoor cats. As my wife’s asthma grew worse we let them die of natural causes one by one so that now we’re cat-less.

One of their treats was letting our cats indulge in some catnip. They ate it and rolled in the leaves and stems. Then they would start sneezing, licking, rubbing themselves, stretching, jumping, hopping around, stalking imaginary prey, acting dazed, even drooling. It’s not as if they sought it out but they did enjoy catnip when we gave it to them.

Various animals have an affinity for mind-altering substances. Deer, moose and caribou get high on fly agaric mushrooms. Cows graze on locoweed. Bighorned sheep scrape hallucinogenic lichen. Dolphins squeeze puffer fish for their neurotoxins. And numerous creatures demonstrate a fondness for alcohol—from monkeys, chimpanzees and other primates, birds like lorikeets, cedar waxwings, blackbirds and redwings, various species of bats, to insects like bees and fruit flies. Some of the animals that indulge in this panoply of drugs become dependent on them, showing signs of addiction, and experience withdrawal when access to those drugs is removed.Hominids have indulged in alcohol for some 200 million years and hominins for over 8 million years, a primate-alcohol dynamic called the “drunken monkey hypothesis.” Our primate ancestors may have developed our genetic predilection for alcohol from their dependence on ripe, fermenting fruit as their main food source. There is circumstantial proof that Neanderthals and other archaic humans used psychoactive drugs and more significant archeological, anthropological and historical evidence that modern humans have been sometimes avid users of betel nut, khat, kava, nutmeg, nicotine, caffeine, cocaine, opium, heroin, marijuana, peyote, ayahuasca, psilocybin, etc. The spread of human psychoactive drug use always came with frequent instances of addiction and withdrawal.

I grew up in the overwhelmingly white suburbs of California. The only drugs I was exposed to were the legal and readily available ones—caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol. There was secret prescription pill abuse, of course, but the truly illegal stuff—heroin, marijuana, cocaine, etc—was relegated to the poor and people of color. It was when a subculture of literary, nonconformist, nihilistic, downwardly mobile white people—the Beat Generation—came into contact with jazz and poverty that these drugs made their way into mainstream American society. Such drug use was considered “cool” and included experimentation with psychedelics. The beatnik subculture overlapped with the hippie counterculture which was more rock music-oriented, rebellious and idealistic. The concept of “cool” was universalized and the range of experimental drugs broadened.

And that’s when I entered the picture. I joined the counterculture, the New Left, the “Revolution” some time between the Prague Spring and the Chicago Democratic National Convention in 1968. I started thinking politically, if naively, and committed myself to the left side of the culture wars that had been raging for over a decade by then.

That was roughly the same timeframe that the San Francisco Diggers scattered. David Talbot contends that: “[b]y the time the Summer of Love was over, the Diggers leaders had all drifted off to country communes, celebrity entourages, hard drugs, the Hell’s Angels, or all the above,” which was a premature assessment. Digger groups were active throughout the end of 1967 and into 1968 when the Diggers Free City Collective held their last San Francisco event, a summer solstice celebration, on Monday, July 1, 1968. The reasons posited for their demise, however, were correct enough. The San Francisco Diggers emerged in 1965 from the nexus of “the bohemian/underground art/theater scene, and the New Left/civil rights/peace movement.” The Diggers combined “street theater, anarcho-direct action, and art happenings in their social agenda of creating a Free City. Their most famous activities revolved around distributing Free Food every day in the Park, and distributing ‘surplus energy’ at a series of Free Stores (where everything was free for the taking.)” One of the more infamous Digger leaders, Emmett Grogan, took issue with the Left’s insistence that: “[O]ne had to be either a Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Maoist, or hold to some combination of these ideologies, or else be politically categorized an anarchist. All these radical labelers ever did was read, write about or discuss the different revolutionary theories, dealing with semantics, while […] the Diggers refused to discuss publicly or define the political dialectics of the work they never ceased to continue to do. Work which was alien neither to Marxism or Maoism but at the time needed neither to endure.”

Grogan was born a streetwise working class Brooklyn kid named Eugene Leo Grogan (aka Kenny Wisdom), who got addicted to heroin before a teenager, then kicked the habit, won a scholarship to an elite private school, pursued a lucrative career as a Park Avenue burglar, and “retired” to Italy. He briefly attended Duke University after high school. When Grogan returned to his heroin habit in San Francisco he arguably helped contribute to the downfall of the Diggers.“Emmett struck me with a needle twice,” Peter Coyote writes in his introduction to Grogan’s book Ringolevio when Emmett first pierced his ear. “The second time […] the needle was a syringe, loaded with heroin. ‘It’ll change ya,’ he said, and it changed a lot. […] I began the process of ruining a heretofore healthy body […] Emmett’s road petered out ‘at the end of the line’ of the Coney Island subway April Fools Day 1978 – some twelve years later, where his body was found, dead of an overdose.”

Of the counterculture’s various drugs grass was just pleasure and fun, acid was the key to transcendent reality and junk was “associated with creative luminaries like Basquiat, Cobain, Jagger, and Joplin. […] [H]eroin has retained a certain allure, the reigning drug of genius. Those who die at its hands — the famous ones, at least — don’t just die, but flame out terrifically, having ‘lived too hard’ and ‘felt too much’ but barely scratched the surface of their potential.” But alcohol does far more damage physically and mentally and is harder and more dangerous to withdraw from than heroin.

“The Good Earth communards took up where the Diggers left off” in 1968 “but in many ways they were tougher and more resilient. The core group within the commune were life-hardened young men and women—ex-cons, Vietnam veterans, streetwise runaways—who knew how to survive. They called themselves a church and claimed pot as their sacrament, and they preached the usual peace and love philosophy. Still, they were no pushovers. They loved their neighborhood, but they knew it was turning into a jungle, with violent predators and vicious cops around every corner. Good Earth made it widely known that it was prepared to defend its turf.”

The Good Earth Commune was smaller in numbers, but more tightly organized and disciplined than the Diggers; nine well-armed houses in the Haight that were part of the second hippie settler wave when the Haight-Ashbury became a dangerous place overrun by junkies, speed freaks, dope dealers and corrupt cops. The Good Earth made their money from selling “soft” drugs—marijuana and LSD—but at first they forbade members from using, let alone selling, anything harder. One of their main internal debates was whether something was a “soft drug” or a “hard drug,” and that debate resurfaced in 1974 when cocaine started making the rounds in San Francisco. Ultimately, the Good Earth Commune’s leadership decided cocaine was a soft drug, a fatal mistake.“Drugs and money were our downfall,” Steve Kever said. “We became very self-indulgent; we got seduced by all the flash. There was suddenly huge amounts of money from dealing coke, and we had access to a kind of lifestyle that people can only dream of. We had been a hard-working hippie commune, and suddenly people were giving you their flashy cars when they got tired of them because they wanted something flashier.”

The distinction between soft and hard drugs that eventually brought down the Good Earth was debated by a number of countercultural scenes, most notably the Motherfuckers in New York City and the Provos/Kabouters in Amsterdam. And without venturing into Straight Edge puritanism, I don’t think it’s possible to draw a hard and fast line between such categories of drugs. There is really no such thing as a drug that does not have some bad side effects or detrimental consequences. As I’ve mentioned, one of the most dangerous “hard drugs” is one of the most socially and historically accepted, that being alcohol. In my day we were in search of the strongest marijuana we could find, with Colombian Gold much sought after. But by today’s standards of potency, the marijuana in the 60’s was dirt weed. Medical marijuana proponents today argue that cannabis is not very dangerous or can be made relatively safe with vaping or ingesting. Yet heavy use of high-potency cannabis is now being linked to schizophrenia, particularly among young men.

It’s hard to imagine our cats seeking out, demanding or doing crimes for high-potency catnip.

SOURCES:
Personal recollections
http://www.diggers.org
Ringolevio: A Life Played For Keeps by Emmett Grogan (1972)
Introduction to Ringolevio by Peter Coyote (1990)
Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Talbot (2012)
“The heroin mystique” by Alyssa Giacobbe (The Boston Globe, 2-23-2014)

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Holocaust and resistance: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, June 2023

I have heard nothing about Hilberg taking my side. He is pretty stupid and crazy. He babbles now about a “death wish” of the Jews. His book is really excellent, but only because it is a simple report. A more general, introductory chapter is beneath a singed pig.
—Hannah Arendt, letter to Karl Jaspers, 4/24/1964

I have Raul Hilberg’s three volume opus The Destruction of the European Jews. I’ve read it, skimming it in parts, and studying select chapters. I’ve also used the footnotes and index for related research. Hilberg relied on mostly German primary sources supplemented by secondary literature, but precise figures of Jewish deaths were hard to come by. He necessarily had to round his numbers. The conventional view is that between 5 and 7 million Jews perished in the Nazi Final Solution, with the number 6 million cited as standard. Hilberg’s comprehensive research, with various rounding factors taken into account, posits a range of 4.9 million to 5.4 million deaths, with a mid-point of 5.1 million Jewish lives destroyed by the Nazis.

Hilberg’s landmark study, with its exhaustive research, focused on German collective responsibility and bureaucracy, not on the Nazi leadership or their victims, and arrived at a figure that was at the low end of the official range. But Hilberg could be cantankerous and didn’t shy away from controversy. As Hannah Arendt knew, it was possible to like the man’s work but dislike the man. Hilberg was clear on a number of contentious points, principal among them that the Jewish people were overwhelmingly passive in the face of Nazi persecution and murder. “The reaction pattern of the Jews is characterized by almost complete lack of resistance […] [T]he documentary evidence of Jewish resistance, overt or submerged, is very slight,” according to Hilberg, who further stated: “In exile, the Jews […] had learned that they could avert danger and survive destruction by placating and appeasing their enemies. […] Armed resistance in the face of overwhelming force could end only in disaster. Thus over a period of centuries the Jews had learned that in order to survive they had to refrain from resistance.” These historical tendencies were augmented by Jewish communal structures—in particular the cooperation of the Jewish councils, or Judenräte, that made the Nazis’ job easier—and a deference for authority. Further, Hilberg rejected the contention that “[e]ven passivity was a form of resistance. To die with dignity was a form of resistance” as highly problematic.

Hilberg argued that Jewish resistance to the Nazis was grossly overstated and that less than 300 Germans were killed by Jews during the second World War. The Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB, Socialist Zionist and Labor Bund fighters) and the Jewish Military Union (ŻZW, Revisionist fighters) futilely attempted to defend the Warsaw Ghetto from Nazi deportations in 1943.[1] Similar armed actions followed in the Vilna and Bialystok ghettos. But had every Nazi-controlled Jewish ghetto in Eastern Europe rebelled in emulation of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and given the resources the Nazis needed to deploy to crush that insurrection alone, the German military on the Eastern Front would have been totally immobilized. Hilberg disagreed with what he called a “campaign of exaltation” of heroic Jewish resistance to the Nazi Holocaust. Mitchell Hart stated that “[t]his sort of ‘inflation of resistance’ is dangerous because it suggests that the Jews truly did present the Nazis with some sort of ‘opposition’ that was not just a horrible figment of their antisemitic imaginations.”

Yad Vashem disagreed with Hilberg and countered that his thesis amounted to blaming the victims for their plight; that the Jews themselves somehow bore some responsibility for the extent of the Nazi genocide. I visited Yad Vashem in 1974 and walked through the rooms dedicated to depicting Jewish heroism. I choked up over the portrayal of Jewish resistance in German-occupied Europe—from the armed uprisings in Eastern European ghettos and concentration camps and guerrilla groups (like the Bielski and Parczew partisans and the UPO) to the sabotage, disruption, intelligence gathering and participation within national resistance movements in Western Europe. Given my proclivity for revenge, I was particularly taken with the post-war Nokmim partisans/Nakam assassins—the Jewish Avengers—who intended to annihilate as many Germans as the Nazis had killed Jews. But compared to the decades long Vietnamese/Cambodian/Laotian national liberation struggles happening concurrently in Indochina against Western imperialism, I had to admit that Jewish resistance to the Nazis seemed sparse. And I understood why most Israeli Jews believed that European Jewry went “like sheep to the slaughter,” walking meekly into Hitler’s gas chambers. I had burned my draft card, applied for a Conscientious Objector status, and otherwise spent six years of my life protesting against the Vietnam War. My resistance to America’s slaughter conservatively of 1,156,000 Vietnamese, 273,000 Cambodians and 28,000 Laotians, not to mention the reduction of the Indochinese countryside into a subtropical moonscape saturated with Agent Orange, felt exceedingly paltry to me at the time.[2]

My Polish Catholic mother lived through the second World War and was interned in a Nazi forced labor camp as an adolescent. She developed an abiding hatred for all things German and once said that there must be something positive about the Jews because the Germans despised them so much. I inherited my knee-jerk anti-German sentiments from her. As a libertarian Marxist, I’ve found the Jewish left particularly constructive and instructive for my own socialism. The Jewish Labor Bund and its program for diaspora socialism—emphasizing do’ikayt (here-ness), Yiddish, secular Jewish culture, national-cultural autonomy, trade unionism, and community control—was liquidated by the Nazis along with the Jewish community of Eastern Europe. What remained was Jewish nationalism as exemplified by the tens of thousands of socialist Zionists who immigrated from Eastern Europe to Palestine prior to 1940 to found a socialist society. I’ve been an admirer of the former having befriended a Bundist union baker in 1969 who retired from Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, to Ojai, California. And I became a student of the latter at UCSC taking World Systems Theory in Walter Goldfrank’s Sociology class.

I’ve argued that socialist Zionism was perhaps the first example of a modern socialist struggle for national liberation, albeit one with a fatal flaw—that being its program of “socialism for one people” in a settler-colonial context. I sympathize with the bi-nationalist libertarian communism of the Hashomer Hatzair which became MAPAM, and I have a soft spot for the left communism of the Gdud Ha’avoda/Labor Brigades. Socialist Zionism ultimately failed to achieve a socialist society both internally and in socialist peace and justice with the Palestinians. What’s more, when Labor Zionism took power as the social democratic State of Israel in 1948, and especially when Revisionist Zionism—openly rooted in European Fascism—gained control as Likud after 1977, Israel can be understood as a settler-colonial regime little different from apartheid South Africa.[3]

As for the present Palestinian/Israeli conflict I unequivocally oppose the Jewish settler movement, Israeli ethnic cleansing and the IDF’s ongoing repression and massacre of Palestinians. I favor first a decentralized bi-national socialism of autonomous federated Jewish and Palestinian communities residing side by side in the region. Then I support, ultimately, a bi-national democratic one-state solution for all of Palestine/Israel, with the formal two-state solution that Amos Oz called “a peace through gritted teeth” coming in a distant third. Yet none of these solutions are likely, with the current de facto degraded Israeli apartheid state reality of endless occupation and war the norm for the foreseeable future. So I protest Israeli military attacks on Gaza and the West Bank, and Israeli civilian assaults on Palestinians and their lands, without rejecting the promise of a bi-nationalist Jewish socialism upon which that society was founded. And I express solidarity with Palestinian resistance to Israeli settler-colonialism without endorsing Palestinian politics as “objectively anti-imperialist.”

I also plant olive trees in Palestine through a variety of non-Zionist charities, a symbolic act at best but one that I can take whether or not Israel is currently bombing the hell out of the Palestinians. By “supporting the act but not the actor” I reverse the precept held by Gandhi and later Martin Luther King to “hate the sin but not the sinner.” I thus refuse to reduce my politics to simplistic Leftist anti-imperialist drek. It’s a stance I take in confronting Stalinist tankies, crude Leninists and generic campists alike. But the dogmatists, sectarians and vanguardists of this leftover Left have never been good with political subtleties and ambiguities.

SOURCES:
Personal recollections
The Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg
Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926–1969 by Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner
“The historian’s past in three recent Jewish autobiographies” by Mitchell B. Hart
Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation by Isaiah Trunk
The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State by Ze’ev Sternhell

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Zionism warned that the Jewish community in Eastern Europe was in imminent danger of antisemitic persecution and mass murder almost from its inception. But whereas the socialist Zionist/Bundist ŻOB wasn’t formed until 1942 and then mainly in response to the Nazi threat to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto, the rightwing ŻZW—founded by Revisionist Zionism and Betar in 1939—anticipated the threat posed by Nazism. Soviet censorship aside, the ŻZW’s role in the uprising seems to have been exaggerated. I despise Revisionism’s parafascist politics even as I acknowledge its contributions to Jewish resistance to the Nazis.

[2] And these are very much the conservative estimates of the death toll. R.J. Rummel puts the upper estimates of American mass murder at 3,207,000 for Vietnam, 273,000 for Cambodia, and 115,000 for Laos, giving a grand total of 3,595,000 killed by US imperialism in Indochina from 1954 to 1975.

[3] In the 70s I took note of principled bi-national socialist anti-Zionism within Palestine/Israel—mainly Rakah, Maki and the pivotal Matzpen. Inspiring and influential, Matzpen was numerically marginal back in the day. I remember reading Arie Bober’s The Other Israel: The Radical Case Against Zionism and following the various debates and subsequent splits. Now bi-national socialist anti-Zionism within Israel is virtually non-existent, examples like the Da’am Workers Party and Hadash notwithstanding.

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Time: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, April 2023

“We will sell no wine before its time,” Orson Welles proclaimed in sonorous tones in his famous Paul Masson California wine commercials from 1978 to 1981. The motto and those ads became an oft-parodied media trope in the late twentieth century, a meme before memes were invented, when bootleg outtakes of an apparently drunk Welles circulated widely, gaining a second comedic life for the advertising campaign.

Historians sometimes have difficulty in determining how to categorize and periodize historical events. The mere chronicling of short-term, discreet historical events known as evental history—histoire événementielle in the French Annales School—needs to be superseded by the study of long-term historical trends, structures, and collectivities (the longue durée), the broad evolution of economies, societies and civilizations. Once established, the historical long haul—the histoire totale—can then be subdivided into convenient medium-length combinations of events; decades and centuries when more thoroughgoing socio-economic-cultural changes can be studied. Thus the much-vaunted or maligned 1960s becomes the “long 1960s” (1955-1975) as the significant history before and after the actual chronological decade of the 1960s are incorporated. The “long 1940s” spans roughly from 1933 to 1955, and the “long 1970s” overlaps with the “long 1960s” from 1965 to 1981. Periodizing such “long” decades are above all flexible and frequently conjoined, with historians often debating when to start and end a particular period, and what to include in or exclude from their study.

As the Orson Welles/Paul Masson slogan implies, the proper demarcation of time for an historical study is crucial, with the discipline of history preferring more natural historical periods to the simplistic use of standard calendar definitions. The “long eighteenth century” thus spans from the English Glorious Revolution (1688) to the Battle of Waterloo (1815), with some historians extending the period to 1660-1830 in order to encompass broader socio-economic trends. The “long nineteenth century” begins with the French Revolution in 1789 and ends with the start of the first World War in 1914. But the “short twentieth century” starts in 1914 with the first World War and ends in 1991 with the dissolution of the old Soviet Union, and might be subtitled “the rise and fall of Soviet Communism.” Here again natural historical periodicity is key, even as historians argue over the specific dates in question.

Take for example the Italian Years of Lead from 1968 to 1988, a 20-year period of political and social unrest highlighted by the birth and reign of terror, respectively, of the far left Red Brigades and the far right Armed Revolutionary Nuclei. This was in the context of popular workerist/autonomist organizations and movements to the left of the Italian Communist Party and much smaller neo-fascist groupuscules to the right of the Italian Social Movement party. Within the context of the “short twentieth century” and Soviet Communism’s beginnings and demise was the era of Joseph Stalin’s rule from 1922 to 1952. Of all the Communist dictators—Mao, Tito, Castro, Sung, etc—Stalin was easily the most brutal and bloody, presiding over millions of corpses created by forced agricultural collectivization and economic industrialization, a Ukrainian famine, several mass political purges, and numerous political show trials and executions.

[As for the historian-explicated “long decades” and “long centuries” cited above, the self-defined, self-perpetuating dynasties of West and East have them beat. China was ruled by the Shang (16th-11th century bce), Zhou (1046-221 bce), Han (202 bce-220 ce), Song (960-1279 ce) and Ming (1368-1644 ce) dynasties. Europe had the Houses of Romanov (1613-1917), Oldenburg (1101-1917), and Habsburg (1020-1918), not to mention the British (1066-present) and Dutch (13th century-present) monarchies. These capitalist “long duration” periods and, less so, the feudal dynastic spans are the meat and potatoes of my history-based nonfiction inquiries as well as some of my fiction work.]

I write nonfiction essays and fiction books, specifically speculative, near-future, and science fiction. But I’m seventy years old. I have a limited time left on this planet and, in a way, my life is my own personal periodization. I anticipate having only one more novel in me to write.

This next and perhaps final novel is a departure from my usual fiction efforts. I’m switching from the future to the past, specifically 1968. Nineteen sixty-eight was the year I got leftist politics and so this novel attempts to encapsulate my experiences with that year and the 1960s in general. I’ll also hope to elucidate certain “truths” of the era while keeping the process lively and entertaining. My protagonist, who I’ve made a white Western European cis male to avoid claims of cultural appropriation, has a story of political intrigue and mayhem as a National Autonomous University of Mexico student set in Mexico City prior to the 1968 Olympic Games. When the Mexican State gunned down an unknown number of protesting students in Tlatelolco Square. Prior to Mexico’s momentous student uprising, this protagonist travels the Western world to highlight other aspects of the effervescent 1960s. The plot is further drenched with action and politic, fascists and Situationists, and sex, drugs and rocknroll.

I started the book maybe ten years before, dropped it, and returned to it a year ago. I’ve been writing it ever since. I’ve never been prolific but I have been consistent. The historical research is daunting. But I intend to get a rough draft out and to various editors in three to four years. Given my mortality, it’s now a race against time. Lately, I’ve been remembering my residual  Christianity that counts us lucky at eighty years but admonishes that no one knows the hour. I’ve outlived my parents and I’ve had a few serious illnesses. I’m healthy now but I’m also in a hurry.

My rush is being impeded by several factors. I’ve already mentioned the research I’m doing for the book. I’m slowly, painfully reading through the miniature library I’ve accumulated to backdrop the story. The plot comes first, and even if the writing goes more slowly then is my usual pace the story can be altered as I dig up and apply the historical details. Currently I’m reading through Elena Poniatowska’s stunning Massacre in Mexico with its haunting oral micro-histories. More serious is the fact that I don’t speak Spanish. My main character—pretty much all my characters in Mexico—speak Spanish so my lack is a definite disability. I have to do an impossible task, write an authentic story of a time and place without knowing the language that authenticates it. I am hoping to learn some basic Spanish. I constantly rewrite what I write, but since I’m not very good about editing my own writing I always need to hire an editor for beta reading, proofreading, copy editing, line editing, substantive editing, mechanical editing, and developmental editing. If and when I finish this novel I’ll need to hire an editor who speaks Spanish.

Finally, the sheer complexity of this story threatens to sink my efforts. When I first conceived the idea for this book I sketched out four plot lines: (1) the protagonist’s story prior to the October 2, 1968, Tlatelolco massacre in  Mexico; (2) his travels around the US and Western Europe earlier in 1968; (3) his back story growing up; and (4) a parallel plot about a UC Berkeley researcher who encounters evidence of a centuries-old entity that embodies the essence of revolution. The researcher chases down this revolutionary demiurge through photographic evidence during key historical uprisings—Paris Commune, 1871; Russian Revolution, 1917; German Spartacist uprising, 1918; Shanghai Commune, 1927; Spanish Revolution, 1936; Hungary, 1956; Cuban Revolution, 1959—to interact with the novel’s protagonist and witness Tlatelolco.

One of the plots of Paco Ignacio Taibo’s detective novel An Easy Thing is the search for Emiliano Zapata, the folk hero and a leader of the Mexican Revolution—very much alive and rumored to be hiding in a cave outside Mexico City. This element of magic realism aligns well with the science fiction/fantasy bent of the novel’s fourth plot line. But because of my desire to base the novel firmly in the history of 1968 and of the Tlatelolco massacre I abandoned the fantasy element early on.  Even without this however the story’s intricacies are discouraging. Do I switch back and forth between plot elements or do I lay out each plot discreetly from beginning to end? The former threatens to muddy the plot with convoluted flashbacks and flash forwards while the latter simplifies things to the point of trivializing the reading experience.

So what’s left is whether I have the time to finish this project. Emerson’s aphorism that it’s not the destination but the journey only goes so far in assuaging my anxieties. Running out of time is up there with losing my memory or suffering a debilitating accident or disease which prevents me from completing the book. All high level fears for me. But all I can do is write the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next page until I’ve written the book. Or I have nothing left to write.

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