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How
Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. By Francis Wheen,
Fourth Estate,
2004.
A few years ago Wheen had a critically and commercially successful
biography of Karl Marx. This survey – A Short History of Modern
Delusions, as the book’s subtitle puts it – takes 1979 as the decisive
year. In that year two key events occurred that shaped the modern
world: Margaret Thatcher came to power in Britain and Ayatollah
Khomeini returned to dominate Iran.
The link between the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the rise of Islamic
fundamentalism is uncontroversial. The Shah of Iran was a stooge of
western governments, there to guarantee oil supplies. The ideology used
to remove him therefore took the form of an anti-western Islam. This
ideology then spread through the Middle East and beyond. But Wheen’s
interpretation of Thatcher’s rise and the global spread of free market
fundamentalism is less convincing. In Wheen’s account, the old status
quo (which he clearly favours) was overthrown by New Right zealots
spouting mumbo-jumbo. Or put another way, the post-war consensus on the
mixed economy, guided by government intervention and Keynesian
economics, was supplanted by monetarism, privatisation and the worship
of market forces. Of course these facts are not in dispute and
Thatcherite/Blairite ideology is mumbo-jumbo dressed-up as common sense
(“we are all ‘Thatcherite’ now,” said Peter Mandelson, Labour MP, in
2002). However, what Wheen fails to appreciate is why the post-war
consensus was so easily swept away. In the 1970s the long post-war boom
had come to an end and the Keynesian status quo was perceived to be a
failure in dealing with recession and high unemployment. Hence the
spread of free market mumbo-jumbo.
Wheen sets great store by the Enlightenment values of reason and
progress. This book is far
more wide ranging than space here permits us
to discuss. Cults, gurus, irrational panics and post-modernists are all
subject to a withering criticism very much in the style of George
Orwell. Despite the reservations above, this is a superb piece of work
and it will be an invaluable resource for socialists.
LEW
Embarrassing Marx
Marx and
Anglo-Russian Relations and Other
Writings.
By D. B.
Riazanov. Francis Boutle Publishers, 2003, £10.
Marx’s views on the
Russia of his day have, to be frank, always been a
bit of an embarrassment. Not that they cannot be explained, and even to
a certain extent understood, in their historical context, but it is
still rather hard to take from the pen of Marx arguments about Russian
Tsarism wanting, like Genghis Khan, to conquer the world and that it
had been plotting to do so for centuries or talk of a threat to Europe
of “Mongol rule” and “Eastern barbarism”, let alone constant calls for
war against Russia. This was unacceptable even in Marx’s day, and we
have said so on many occasions.
The historical context was that, for most of the 19th century,
capitalist economic and particularly political forms were not all that
securely established in continental Europe where the army of Tsarist
Russia was a constant threat to them. This led Marx and other
revolutionary democrats to regard Russia as the main enemy, to be
contained and countered. In the 1850s when Marx was earning a
precarious living as a journalist, some of the articles for the New
York Tribune putting an anti-Russia position came to the attention of
David Urquhart, a former Tory MP and Russophobe. Urquhart encouraged
Marx to write more in the same vein published them in his papers which
in 1857 he republished as a pamphlet entitled Revelations of the
Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century, republished in 1899 as
The Secretary  Diplomatic History
of the Eighteenth Century.
In  these
Marx tried to show how British foreign policy under the Whigs had
always been pro-Russia. He also ventured some ideas on the origin of
Tsarism and on Russian history.
In a special supplement to Neue Zeit, the theoretical organ of the
German Social Democratic Party, in 1909, the Russian Social-Democrat
David Riazanov analysed in detail Marx’s theories of Russian history
and of British foreign policy towards Russia and, respectfully, argued
that they were largely mistaken. This lengthy article makes up
three-quarters of this 200-page book (the rest being two other pre-WWI
articles by Riazanov, on Marx and Engels on the Polish Question - they
wanted an independent Poland so there would be a buffer between Russia
and Europe - and on the Balkans). It is well worth reading as an
application of the materialist conception of history to Anglo-Russian
relations from the 16th century onwards.
Riazanov in fact applies this better than Marx did in this instance,
bringing out the importance of changing trade conditions which Marx had
neglected in favour of purely political considerations. Riazanov’s
article reflected a growing understanding amongst second-generation
Marxists that the situation regarding Russia had changed since Marx’s
day in that Tsarist Russia was no longer capable of being “the gendarme
of Europe” but was now itself threatened by overthrow by internal
forces; and that therefore it was no longer the main enemy. Even so,
those members of the German Social Democratic Party who backed their
government in WWI still quoted Marx’s anti-Russia stand as a
justification for their position.
At the time Riazanov wrote this work he was not a member of
Lenin’s Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democrats but he did join
the Bolshevik Party in July 1917. He became the leading Marx-scholar of
his day, setting up the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow in 1921 to
track down and publish the collective works of Marx and Engels. He was
dismissed from this by Stalin in 1931 and sent into internal exile.
During the purges he was arrested and shot in
1938.
ALB
Bolsheviks as history
The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution in
Petrograd. By
Alexander
Rabinowitch. Pluto Press. £12.99
When this book was first published in 1976 it had some contemporary
significance. The regime established by the Bolsheviks in November 1917
was still extant and many young people, dissatisfied with capitalism,
were discussing Bolshevik tactics and forms of organisation as a
serious way to overthrow it. Today, republished nearly thirty years
later, it is a work of history much as would be a study of Robespierre
and the Jacobins in 1793.
Studying history is not a waste of time of course and Rabinowitch’s
research does bring out some interesting points, in particular that the
Bolshevik Party in 1917 was not a monolithic bloc under Lenin’s thumb.
He shows how in fact Lenin’s views were often ignored by other
Bolshevik leaders in closer touch with the feelings of soldiers and
factory workers in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was then called). It
also emerges that Stalin played a rather more significant role than
Trotskyists attribute him in their polemics.
Lenin favoured a naked seizure of power by the Bolshevik Party; most of
the other Bolshevik leaders were more circumspect; they realised, as
Rabinowitch documents, that while most of the workers and soldiers
wanted “peace, land and bread” and, by November 1917, were in favour of
the overthrow of the Provisional Government under Kerensky because it
sought to continue the war, they wanted to see it replaced by a
government made up of all the “socialist” parties of Russia, i.e. of
the Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries as well as the Bolsheviks,
that would emanate from the Congress of Soviets and which would take
Russia out of the war. The Bolsheviks, therefore, followed the more
subtle approach of disguising the seizure of power advocated (sometimes
hysterically) by Lenin as an assumption of power by the Congress of
Soviets.
Thus the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 looked to be a
“Soviet” revolution, with power appearing to pass into the hands of
these makeshift representative institutions (the Russian word “soviet”
means simply “council”) that soldiers and workers had formed to give
expression to their political views. In fact, power had passed into the
hands of the minority Bolshevik Party which was determined to hold on
to it, alone, come what may. But that’s another (hi)story.
ALB
Capital Resurgent. Roots of the Neoliberal
Revolution. By
Gérard
Dumenil and Dominique Lévy. Harvard University Press.
£35.95.
The first parts of this book are filled with graphs and tables which
deal with categories Marxists can recognise, such as the rate of
profit, the rate of capital accumulation, and the share of wages and of
profits in value added. Dumenil and Lévy argue that what drives
the capitalist economy is the rate of profit and that this had begun to
fall even in the 1960s. They explain this by the slow-down in the
technological progress of the previous two decades which had provided
an expanding market for producer goods and so had driven the whole
economy forward; this resulted in a fall in the rate of capital
accumulation and consequently in the high level of unemployment that
was a feature of the 1970s and 1980s. This is one possible Marxian
explanation.
But then the approach changes. In the 1970s double-digit inflation
benefited industrial capital at the expense of finance capital as loans
could be repaid in depreciated money. According to Dumenil and
Lévy, finance capital fought back by staging what they call a
“coup” on 1979 – a sudden rise in interest rates as a way of trying to
stop inflation. This put the boot on the other foot with, again
according to the authors, firms having to use their profits to repay
loans rather than re-investing them, so penalising growth and
sustaining unemployment. This marked the beginning, they say, of the
current period of “neoliberalism”, of deregulation and return to “free
market” economics, as practised by Reagan in America and Thatcher in
Britain.
Dumenil and Lévy see this as a deliberate policy choice, imposed
by finance capital and its representatives in government rather than
any government’s reaction to a particular set of capitalist conditions.
Their position can be summed up as “another policy is possible” (rather
less ambitious than “another world is possible”, but a more accurate
reflection of what the movement whose slogan this is actually stands
for). This other policy turns out to be the sort of monetary, financial
and tax measures favoured, and applied in the 1950s and 60s, by the
Keynesians which, according to the authors, worked acceptably enough,
as far as this sort of thing is possible under capitalism, until the
rate of profit dropped for other reasons and finance capital staged its
coup.
A rather odd conclusion for writers claiming to be in the Marxist
tradition, but even odder is their analysis of the 1929 crash and 1930s
slump in purely monetary and financial terms, even suggesting that
these could have been avoided if the right policies had been pursued.
ALB |
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Conspiracies
- The Illuminati
Sky Mix, Fri, 9.00pm, Dec 10
“They’re all enslaving you. They call us
cattle, but they’re just scum”. So goes one of Alex Jones’ weekly Texas
radio rants against that supersecret sect of the centuries, the
Illuminati (Enlightened). Established in 1776 in Bavaria as a secular
intellectual club but driven underground by the Church, this mysterious
society has by now infiltrated into every government organisation
including the media. Its aim is nothing less than the dumbing down of a
helpless population and then global dictatorship. Apparently.
We follow the narrator
Danny Wallace on a wild-goose chase round industrial estates, hoping to
meet a real-life Illuminatus, who evidently bottles out of the
encounter (or didn’t exist in the first place), and sundry interviews
with paranoid amateur journalists who say things like: “They are
monitoring my every move. It’s a wonder I’m still alive” (a wonder
you’re not locked up, more like).
Conspiracy theorists
often gain plausibility by taking established fact and embellishing it,
so that one can’t tell where truth ends and fiction begins. There are
undoubtedly shadowy societies of the super-rich which are
well-documented. The Skull and Bones in America includes many senators,
three past presidents, and both George Bush and John Kerry, while in
Britain we have the Masonic Lodge. The Bilderberg Group is also given
lavish treatment in the programme. But of course, they can’t be very
secret or we wouldn’t know about them. The point is, say the neurotic
campaigners, they’re all just fronts for the Illuminati.
What’s really
interesting – more than the unlikely tales of mock human sacrifices
under a giant stone owl – is why some people need to believe the world
is really controlled by a secret society, when it is fairly obviously
controlled by the not-very-secret capitalist class. Perhaps that’s just
too mundane an explanation, or too public, when what is required by
conspiracy theorists is something akin to demonic global possession,
something so unearthly and powerful that it is quite beyond our ability
to exorcise it. Why do they need to believe in this absolute evil?
Perhaps in order to cast themselves as holy crusaders.
There are conspiracies
all the time, little ones. Big ones tend to spring leaks however, and
few are likely to believe in one that has lasted 250 years without
being ‘outed’. The capitalist class is not a conspiracy, not because it
is open and, more or less, above board, but because it is not united,
as the Illuminati presumably are. The disunity of the capitalist class
is their Achilles heel, a weakness workers could use. If you believe
your enslavers have no weaknesses, you won’t struggle against them. The
crusaders against the Illuminati could do with some illumination on
that point.
PJS
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