Spirit of Contradiction

14N and some thoughts on the conjuncture

Posted on 17/11/2012 by modulus

First off, by 14N I mean the European Day of Action and Solidarity which took place the 14th of November. It’s a Spanish convention to abbreviate dates that way, hence the 15M movement, the 23F coup, etc. Here in Iberia–both Spain and Portugal–there were strikes called. In the Spanish case, a general strike whose success I was extremely dubious about. It turns out I was wrong, and I’ll be discussing some of that on this post.

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Posted in Bourgeois politics, Politics | Comments Off

Some notes on the historiography of revolutions and revolutionary events

Posted on 04/11/2012 by yeksmesh

The study of revolutionary events, and besides that the study of the movements that aspire to create them, is one area of historical study that is very relevant and very popular within the radical left, and as I would argue crucial in the determination of key issues such as the character of the revolutionary organization and basically any questions surrounding the issues of tactics and strategy of class struggle. Nevertheless, when viewing dominant interpretations of historical events and movements through the eyes of various current radical leftist movements and scholars, there seems to be a significant number of problems associated with their study of history. In this article I hope to sketch and criticize some of the most dominant and crucial mistakes made throughout the radical left in the study of revolutionary movements and history, which in turn have dire implications for the positions these groups adhere to and base their actions on.

Posted in History, Politics, Proletarian politics | 2 Comments

Why I joined the ULA

Posted on 25/10/2012 by Gavin Mendel-Gleason

Well, at least they didn’t support the war.

I recently joined the United Left Alliance and shortly after I received a number of questions from people about why I would bother.

One person asked me why I thought that it would have any chance of success given the history of the two constituent parties which are left. Others have asked what the point is in being involved in something which is currently little more than electoral alliance.

Of course having had an anarchist pedigree, a number of my friends are surely questioning my sanity in being involved in a political party which takes part in elections, especially with the history in Ireland of betrayal of mass parties by elected officials.

These are good questions.
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Posted in Politics, Proletarian politics | 5 Comments

Can Communists Learn to Fly – Book Review: The Tailor of Ulm

Posted on 22/10/2012 by Gavin Mendel-Gleason

Schneider von Ulm

Lucio Magri’s The Tailor of Ulm is a fascinating account of the history of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). He begins his account with an anecdote regarding the tailor of Ulm.

Ingrao, who had already fully explained his reasons for proposing a different course from that of the Party secretary, Achille Occhetto, replied in a jocular (though not too jocular) vein – by invoking Brecht’s apologia for the ‘Tailor of Ulm’, a German artisan who became obsessed with the idea of building a machine that would enable men to fly. One day, convinced that he had succeeded, the tailor took his device to the ruling bishop and said: ‘Look, I can fly!’ The ruler challenged him to prove it, but when he finally took to the air he crashed to the pavement below. And yet centuries later – Brecht concludes – human beings did learn to fly.

It is in this spirit of trying to understand why the PCI “crashed into the pavement below” that Magri begins his investigation. The book is imbued with a mixture of intransigent hope and a realistic sadness. The hope stems from his determination to keep the entire project from being written off without a careful critique which might be used by future socialists in coming to terms with our defeat. An account that can be used to know what was good along with what was bad. The sadness stems in the fact that all that remains of the project is the account of its demise.
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Posted in History, Proletarian politics | Comments Off

Dreaming a New Freedom

Posted on 18/10/2012 by Alistair Davidson

Capitalism is in crisis… again. There is a glaring need for alternative visions of society, but few are being presented, and none taken seriously. The old alternative, the communist dream of a free and equal society, has been in a terminal crisis of its own for decades. Humanity desperately needs new dreams of freedom.

It was not so much Stalin’s terror that stripped communism of its utopian aura as it was the bureaucratic mediocrity of socialist life: the closed society, the out-of-date planned fashions, the state-mandated art forms. While Socialism in the East collapsed in economic failure and military defeat, the communist dream in Britain simply deflated.

Posted in Economics | 3 Comments

Orthogonal, by Greg Egan: a review

Posted on 22/09/2012 by modulus

Perpendicular

Greg Egan’s books are remarkable for two rather unrelated reasons: on the one hand, the attention to detailed world-building which makes of his work “diamond-hard” science fiction, often including a great deal of mathematical rigour; on the other, a deft and penetrating insight into social and political conflict. Orthogonal, the yet incomplete–rather incompletely published–trilogy under review, is not an exception. Perhaps these two characteristics, which may at first seem orthogonal themselves, bear a non-zero inner product after all: the same mind which delights in the relentless consequential reasoning giving rise to novels such as Distress, can’t do anything else but apply a materialist analysis to the societies of those imagined worlds, just as it does to their physics.

As this review attempts to introduce not only Orthogonal, but Greg Egan himself, to those readers who haven’t encountered his work before, I’ll quote a short excerpt from Teranesia, which is not only funny and perceptive, but also one of the sharpest attacks on the post-modernist pseudo-left I’ve ever read, in its own lair: the narrative:

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Violence and socialism

Posted on 18/09/2012 by Maximilien Robespierre

A red triangle smashing into a white circle on white and black, representing the Russian Civil War

A painting representing the Russian Civil War

Today, more than it has in the past, the topic of violence is one that is being debated hotly, especially in the aftermath of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the workings of SYRIZA in Greece, and the wave of unrest in the Arab world.

To the Utopian socialists, violence was abhorrent: many of them had been appalled by the supposed excesses of the French Revolution. In line with their view of the progress to a socialist society as one that was not based on class but an appeal to reason and enlightenment, the cooperative society based on common ownership was to take place as a result of social experimentation (cf. New Lanark and the various utopian communities established in America¹) and long-term peaceful transition by building model societies and education which would attract all lovers of reason and humanity.

Posted in History, Politics, Proletarian politics | 7 Comments

Debate on sortition

Posted on 15/09/2012 by modulus

On the 27th of August, the IRC ##marxism channel on Freenode celebrated its first team debate. If this doesn’t mean a lot to you, check the ##marxism debates page for more information.

Basically, ##marxism is a channel on IRC–a text chat protocol–where Marxists and, admitedly, quite a few fellow travellers, meet to discuss politics, theory, etc. Since we don’t have a single viewpoint, we often end up arguing, and somehow we began celebrating formal debates on issues of interest. So far we’ve debated the class nature of the USSR, the role of the party, and, this time, sortition. We have reasonably readable logs for all the debates if you care to read them.

Sortition and its relation to democracy is something that’s been coming up quite often, so we decided to hold a debate on it. We also used it as a dry run for a future debate on the European Union, since we’d never conducted a debate with teams before. While some things may have gone a little bit smoother, it was well enough for a first attempt–and I’ve cleand up most of the “messy” things from the log so it’s more pleasant to read. If you’re interested, check the html log of the debate, or, if you prefer, read the log in PDF.

Posted in Meta, Politics, Proletarian politics | Comments Off

Poetry: what it is for

Posted on 03/09/2012 by modulus

Dante and Virgil in Hell witnessing an event of cannibalism.

Dante and Virgil in Hell (1850) William Bouguereau

Poets have from ancient times enjoyed a special status, which connected them with the sacred and the sublime. They were often believed to be inspired by divinity² and this position as mediators between a mundane everyday existence and something higher and more noble has often given them licence to transgress social mores and to bear a certain other-worldly eccentricity as a sign of the favour of the muses. While other men are expected to conform to certain norms, poets, by their habitual contact with things beyond our realm are granted not only the right, but the expectation of oddness. This manifests differently in different societies: it can take the shape of affectation, fragility, or unwise sincerity and bluntness.

Yet it should be obvious to modern man that poetry, just like any other manifestation of culture, must be ultimately grounded on material concerns, relating to the production and reproduction of the social matrix. This reality, which ought to be self-evident, hasn’t however made much way in correcting the notion that poets bring us insights from other worlds, and that their art is, so to speak, a terra incognita where analysis is not just unable to trace maps, but also unwelcome to try. The mystique of art, and this is not exclusive to poetry, suggests that there is something to be lost in understanding what the principles which make some things beautiful or moving, and other things ugly or dull, are. Thus, a truly materialist theory of culture eludes us yet, but perhaps we may try to inquire why poetry exists, and what function it fits in social life, so that it continues existing.

Posted in Cultural analysis, Culture | 1 Comment

Limited liability: why we should want more of it

Posted on 30/08/2012 by modulus

On my previous post on corporate personhood I intended to also deal with the matter of limited liability–hence the URL of the post. However, I couldn’t do that in that post, so here it goes.

Limited liability is a privilege conferred by the state, without which much of the progress capitalism has achieved would have been unthinkable. The risks necessary to carry forward large-scale industrial operations would exceed any person’s capacity to plan for and mitigate. If every failed enterprise led to destitution, there would soon be few people crazy enough to start new ones.

Posted in Bourgeois politics, Economics, History, Politics, Proletarian politics | Comments Off

Colonising Venus

Posted on 23/08/2012 by Gavin Mendel-Gleason

James: On the face of it colonising Venus appears ridiculous. With temperatures of over 500 degrees celsius and atmospheric pressure 90 times that of earth how is it even possible to get started on a colonisation mission?

Gavin: All target locations for colonisation in our solar system are going to have extremes of temperature. However, it's certainly true that Venus is leaning towards the hot side, and heat can be harder to deal with in terms of finding appropriate materials which can withstand the temperatures. In addition, heating things is almost always simpler than cooling them.

Posted in Sci-tech | 1 Comment

The proletarian class party, part 5 (final)

Posted on 18/08/2012 by Maximilien Robespierre

The organ of the Communist Party of Italy (after WWII known as the Italian Communist Party)

This post (which I have been reluctant to make in the first place given my relative uneasiness this particular topic) is the final part of my series of posts on the “party question.” This post will examine, basing itself on the same general principles used in previous posts, the question of internal party organization and other questions related to the internal affairs of the party. The first four parts can be found at the following links: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4. Continue reading →

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The WSM and Anarchism: A Political Analysis

Posted on 16/08/2012 by James O'Brien

Cover of the first issue of “Workers Solidarity”

The Workers Solidarity Movement is one of the more impressive anarchist organisations of modern times. While always a small organisation it has been active on the radical left in Ireland for close to thirty years and at the same time it has exerted considerable influence on Anarchism internationally, particularly in the early years of the Internet.

The organisation has gone through a number of different periods and has seen its fortunes rise and fall repeatedly in that time. Not that the ride has been a roller-coaster of ups and downs; the highs were, in the grand scheme of things, modest enough, the lows correspondingly tolerable. The WSM, in other words, is no Workers’ Party.1

Founded in 1984, the WSM was oriented towards socialism at a time when radical liberalism was particularly influential in British Anarchism, which was as culturally influential then as tendencies from the United States are today. Given the historical weakness of Irish socialism, let alone anarchism, the few precursors of which came out of the Official Republican Movement, this explicitly left ideological foundation served to ground the WSM throughout its history. The avowedly socialist orientation served to inoculate for a long-time against too great a penetration of the more individualist strains that have bedevilled Anarchism since the 1880s.

Posted in Politics, Proletarian politics | 6 Comments

What is to be done: The Menshevik Programme July 1919

Posted on 11/08/2012 by James O'Brien

Eva Broido, secretary of the Menshevik Central Committee in 1917.

Below is an excerpt from the programme adapted by the leftists dominated Central Committee of the Mensheviks in July 1919. The introductory section is omitted. The document provided the basis for the alternative economic programme put to the Congress of Soviets in December 1919.

As Francis King, translator of that document, suggests, its interest lies in the fact that it represents a fairly well-defined alternative policy to that of “war communism” then being pursued by the Soviet government. Indeed, its approach in many respects foreshadows the “New Economic Policy”; the changes in economic policy introduced by the Soviet government in the spring of 1921.

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