Rjurik Davidson

Revolutionary organisations and the history of the DSP

Rjurik Davidson, author of Unwrapped Sky (Tor, 2014) and the forthcoming The Stars Askew, gives his recommendations for summer reading and viewing.
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What to do for summer? As in the last couple of years, I’ve put together some suggestions for books to read and films to watch. This year, they’re arranged around the theme of crisis, which has been on my mind lately.
Crisis – it’s a word we’re going to be using more and more. Seven years since the 2008 global financial crisis, and the mess shows little sign of abating.
A long boom nourished the long years of social democracy that dominated the second half of the 20th century. This was a time of political stability, in the rich countries at least – the time of baby boomers and mass education and suburbia filled with the latest technological knick-knacks.
But the long boom couldn’t last forever. The massive destruction of World War Two was repaired, the technological revolution ground to a halt, and corporate profit rates began to decline.
Australia has in recent times remained afloat on the back of its mining boom, but that too is coming to an end. The international economy might just have entered a new more crisis-prone phase.
What follows are a few suggestions that might get you thinking about what this means. Though some of the suggestions might seem a little depressing, it’s important to remember that periods of crisis are also periods of opportunity for the left. Crises tend to lead to polarisation. People look for radical solutions in radical times. In the shadows of crisis lurks the possibility of light.
Documentary
What sparked the 2008 crisis? It began with the subprime crisis, in which US banks happily lent prospective homeowners money, even though it was clear that many of those people would not be able to pay their mortgage. This occurred partly as a result of changes to the financial sector; mortgage brokers and banks could buy and sell debt without much regulation.
The documentary Inside Job – narrated by Matt Damon – does a good job of introducing some of the key players and neoliberal policies that contributed to this crisis. Though the film has a social democratic outlook, it’s impossible to watch without rising fury at the sheer greed and lies of the US elites, in particular the financial players whose sole aim seems to be to enrich themselves.
Film
What was the human cost of the crisis? The film 99 Homes is not the kind of film you’d expect to come out of the US. The film industry there is itself neoliberalised and seems to have devolved into endless rewritings of superhero films. 99 Homes is instead the kind of social realism that Ken Loach might make.
When unemployed builder Dennis Nash cannot pay his mortgage, the rapacious real estate magnate Rick Carver takes charge of his eviction. Nash later becomes Carver’s henchman and is quickly transformed into an instrument for the same forces that ruined his own life.
A morality tale with a powerful sense of tragedy, 99 Homes does a fine job of depicting Nash’s moral quandaries. Unfortunately, as the plot develops, the film mistakenly confuses illegal actions with the perfectly legal forms of predatory practices that the housing crisis encouraged. Still, the essential dilemma of Nash is well set up and the eviction scenes devastating to watch.
As an aside, I’d also recommend two films featuring Marion Cotillard – surely one of the finest actors of recent years – The Immigrant and Two Days, One Night. Both are relevant to the crisis-ridden times. And in both, Cotillard gives virtuoso performances.
Journalism/politics
Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything is an important analysis of climate change, which has been made all the worse by the global financial crisis. Readable, informative and pressing, this should be required reading for any environmentalist.
It’s climate versus capitalism, argues Klein. Which one will we choose? Any book on climate change faces an irresolvable contradiction: how do you convince anyone to read about what is a fundamentally depressing topic? While I’m not quite convinced by Klein’s resulting attitude and tone – aimed to inspire hope – the book is both readable and prescient.
Klein’s voice is just one going against the current flood of right wing misinformation. The question is how the left can express itself collectively. That is, it’s a question of political strategy, which Klein is fairly weak on.
Economics
If Inside Job, 99 Homes and This Changes Everything show us different aspects of the crisis, what lies at its core? David Harvey’s The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism is an excellent introduction to capitalism’s crises.
Harvey begins with the generally accepted figure that any capitalist economy needs 3 percent growth. As with Naomi Klein’s argument, this immediately suggests that the contradiction between the environment and capitalism is irresolvable. Our societies simply cannot continue to grow (and thus increase in population) ad infinitum – something has to give.
Leaving that aside, there are plenty of other barriers to growth. Harvey paints us a picture of capitalism as a system of revolving crises, which are solved in one arena only to erupt somewhere else. Though Harvey can be a bit dry, the material is compelling enough to carry you through.
The classic
Crises shake things up. Old ways of doing things cannot be maintained. New political forces emerge. Across Europe, we’ve seen the re-emergence of left social democratic forces, but more worryingly, a re-emergence of the far right and fascism.
The French National Front, the “true Finns”, Sweden’s “Democrats”, Greece’s Golden Dawn, the neo-Nazi movement in Germany – all these parties are based on virulent racism and anti-left rhetoric. What do they represent and how can one fight them?
Probably the finest of his writings in exile, Trotsky’s The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany examined the rise of the Nazis. In this book, Trotsky’s political acumen shone forth as he tried desperately to rouse the left and the working class out of its passivity and alert it to the terrible danger it was facing.
The novel
What kind of world will we live in, if we don’t deal with the crisis? Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl is a powerful prediction of the kinds of disaster we face. A “biopunk” dystopia, the book presents us with a world of climate catastrophe, in which frequent plagues sweep through the population and corporations control agriculture through genetically modified crops and use violence to organise and develop markets.
Set in a Bangkok below sea level but kept dry with levees and pumps, the novel develops into a political thriller. The city is a neoliberal paradise, which is at the same time a disaster zone. There’s violence, political jockeying, all written with noirish style.
Some find the thriller plot hardest to enjoy. And, like any of the “punk” subgenres (cyberpunk, steampunk), Bacigalupi’s biopunk is a combination of critique and celebration (look how cool this technology is).
Still, it’s one of the best recent science fiction novels and a dire warning about the crisis-ridden future unless we apply the brake, as Walter Benjamin might have said, to capitalism’s runaway train.

Curiosities for the crisis

Another summer rolls along, and it is time to think once more about what we’re all going to do with our extra time. Below are some projects readers of Red Flag might like to undertake over the Christmas period.
Last year, I suggested works around a theme of structure and agency: do social groups like the working class forge society, or are they forged by it? 
This year, I’m proposing projects that relate to the individual in society. What does it feel like to live under contemporary capitalism? What are our responsibilities as individuals, both politically and ethically? How do we understand ourselves and our place within broader history? How might we negotiate our own personal problems in a world that makes a political or ethical life so difficult?
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Film
Ken Loach is rightly considered the greatest left wing filmmaker of the last 30 years. Again and again he returns to examine the trials and satisfactions of working class life.
In his early Kes, a young and troubled working class boy finds meaning through the training of a kestrel; Riff Raff depicts the plight of Britain’s itinerant builders; his historical Land and Freedom tells the story of a young man’s experience in the international brigades during the Spanish Civil War; and the recent It’s a Free World shows a mother setting up a business aimed at employing illegal immigrants, and the tragic human consequences of accepting the neoliberal vision.
Loach is primarily a social realist, and his films work in the way that the Hungarian revolutionary György Lukács understood that genre. His characters are “typical”: they stand in for social groups or forces. In this way, a piece of art can build up a picture of the driving forces of society.
Loach is prolific, so there are plenty of films to choose from. If you’re unsure, I’d recommend any of the above to begin with, and though he can be uneven, each of his films has something to offer.
Novel
Hilary Mantel has rightly become famous for her novels about Thomas Cromwell and the English reformation, when the rising English bourgeoisie broke the power of the Catholic Church and reconstructed religion on the basis of individualism.
But for my money, her early novel A place of greater safety has a more incendiary power. Mantel’s study of three key leaders of the French Revolution – Desmoulins, Robespierre and Danton – presents that momentous event with localised intensity.
Mantel takes a very personal angle, and much of her rendition occurs in drawing rooms and other localised spaces. Great events are seen only from afar or at oblique angles. Like all great books, it’s also flawed. A place of greater safety certainly lacks the smoothness of Wolf Hall, and its density can be at times challenging.
We can also quibble about the way the characters banter as if they were in the London Review of Books coffee shop. But Mantel knows her history. Written when she was still in her 20s and, from what I can tell, still a socialist, Mantel’s novel is an extraordinary book, dense and visionary.
Memoir
There’s been a slow-burning interest in women’s liberation of late, especially on the left around such works as Lise Vogel’s recently reprinted Marxism and the oppression of women and Heather Brown’s Marx on gender and the family.
Sheila Rowbotham’s Promise of a dream gives us a picture of the second wave in its early days, as well as a lively memoir of the British left in the 1960s. Rowbotham spent an early year in Paris as a beatnik, fell under the tutelage of historians Edward and Dorothy Thompson, became friends with Tariq Ali, Sally Alexander and Robin Blackburn and many other significant figures, and was deeply involved in the radical left.
Her particular version of socialism was finely attuned to the importance of personal experience and exploration – in this it reflected its time. It was also open and self-attenuating. Rowbotham is an attractive personality, partly because she is so prepared to emphasise her own frailties and insecurities: she suffered from low self-esteem and would, for example, feel sick before public speaking.
She was also deeply engaged in the counterculture, which so closely cleaved to the radical political movements of the time. We might not agree with all her political positions, but to my mind, the most interesting writers tend to be those with whom we have much agreement, but with whom there remains a frisson. How else might we interrogate our own ideas?
As a picture of the British left in the 1960s, together with Tariq Ali’s Street fighting years, Rowbotham’s memoir is essential reading.
Theory
Long before Marx wrote his magnum opus, Capital, he composed an unfinished masterpiece that has been called The economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844. Still in his most Hegelian and humanist phase, Marx’s focus on alienation drew him closer to the concerns of the individual than in later, more structuralist works.
In the manuscripts, he explains that the modern worker is alienated from the object of his/her work. Instead of being the master of that object, the worker becomes a slave to it. This alienation, Marx argues, means that workers are alienated from their own humanity, and hence from each other.
When they were rediscovered in the 20th century, the manuscripts made an immediate impact on socialists, especially those who wanted to develop a critique of dehumanising Stalinism. While the philosopher Althusser is probably right to draw a distinction between the early and the later Marx, The economic and philosophic manuscripts remain a brilliant contribution to social thought. Like most of Marx, they can be at times challenging, but the rewards are worth it.
Literature and culture
When Marshall Berman discovered Marx’s Economic and philosophical manuscripts, it was as if a light bulb went off in his head. For Berman, the manuscripts presented an unexpected and deeply human Marx.
Indeed, he was so excited that he bought a handful of copies for friends and family, who looked at him with incomprehension. Berman later went on to write one great book of humanist Marxism: All that is solid melts into air. 
Magnificently written (for both scholars and a general audience) and warm, the book surveys what Berman considered “modernism”, a condition of humanity that emerges under modern capitalism, best encapsulated by Marx’s famous phrase, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”
For Berman, capitalism is a system which is both deeply creative and profoundly destructive. To live inside that system means to live with these two possibilities inscribed into one’s soul.
Tracing this new sensibility through literature and culture, All that is solid melts into air contains wonderful chapters on Goethe, Marx, Baudelaire, St. Petersburg and New York.
Berman’s book was wildly influential but also controversial. For those keen to continue with this line of thought, Perry Anderson’s critique, “Modernity and revolution” (in Zones of Engagement) and Berman’s response (an essay available in his lovely collection of essays, Adventures in Marxism) are worth reading.

Red Flag’s summer suggestions

Summer is a time for big projects, for big books, long movies and intense television. Below are projects that Red Flag readers might like to take on. Each is a fine stand-alone project, but I’ve suggested works that complement each other thematically.
I’ve chosen to focus on meditations on the issue of free will and determinacy. How much of history is predetermined and how much can we alter it? What role can any individual play? Are we condemned to float over history like a boat in a storm, or can we help direct that storm? The films, books and television below offer some fascinating opinions.
The classic
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. When first published, the book was a revelation – a massive, sprawling history not only of the emergence of the English working class in the early 19th century, but of that class’s self-making.
Thompson here emphasised the active nature of what has been called “class formation”. A class, he implied, cannot be considered one simply by its place in the economy, but is an active project (complete with its own wide array of political and cultural institutions). 
This was an idea much disputed and, from a more theoretical angle, revisited in Thompson’s classic polemic – The Poverty of Theory – with French structuralist Louis Althusser. For those keen to follow the debate to its conclusion, Perry Anderson’s rejoinder to Thompson, Arguments Within English Marxism – a work that finds Anderson ruminating not only on theory but importantly on political strategy – is a fine place to end a survey of the great historian Thompson.
Theory
In recent years high theory has made something of a comeback with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek. For my money, Peter Thomas’s The Gramscian Moment is one of the most significant works recently published. Written for the academy, The Gramscian Moment asks a lot of its reader, but it repays careful study. 
For a long time, the revolutionary tradition in the Anglophone world has viewed Gramsci through the lens of Perry Anderson’s “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci”. Thomas shows the profound ways in which Anderson led himself off track. 
Having cleared the way, Thomas then reconstructs Gramsci’s philosophical and political theory with rare depth, revealing a Gramsci who sought to answer the question: why, during the serious crisis in most of Europe following World War One, was it impossible to repeat the victorious Bolshevik revolution?
Given the book’s scholasticism, readers might want to preface Thomas by reading the recent translation of Coutinho’s Gramsci’s Politics, a fine introduction which covers some of the same ground, though without the same depth or radical edge.
Novel
For more than 20 years, Kim Stanley Robinson has been the centre of leftist science fiction, mostly through his Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars).
What begins with a small group of scientists travelling to Mars to begin a colony quickly develops into a multi-global critique of capitalism and the story of a transition to an ecologically sustainable, socially just society – for want of a better word, socialism.
As multinational corporations destroy Earth, the Mars population struggles to find a better way. Robinson himself is a radical of the ’60s, lives in an environmentally friendly community in California and is one of the soundest critics of the madness of a profit-driven economy.
His entire career has been dedicated – with uneven success – to trying to envision the transition to a better world. But if your taste doesn’t run to science fiction, try out Anna Funder’s searing All That I Am.
Television
The Wire is still the best television from the current “Golden Age”, said to have started with The Sopranos over a decade ago. Part of its genius is the decision for each series to focus on a different institution of Baltimore, one of the US’s neoliberal disaster cities.
So The Wire examines, in five successive seasons: the drug economy in the housing projects; the plight of the blue-collar working class on the Baltimore dockyards; the “political class” involved in the mayoral election; the schooling system; and the print media. 
Altogether, the series works as social realism of the type that so excited Georg Lukacs. Each institution and character can be taken as “typical”, as standing in for a larger social force or institution. More interestingly, it is the closest to a structuralist-Marxist television series, almost as if Louis Althusser had found his way to HBO.
The Wire is filled with characters setting out to do things, to make things better, to free themselves, only for the structure as a whole to reassert itself. There is no individual free will here. The Wire’s brilliance lies in it ability to keep you on the edge of your seat despite this very fact.
Classic television
For a more explicitly socialist television series, track down the 1988 BBC classic A Very British Coup (based on the eponymous novel) in which a socialist-labour government comes to power.
Led by the charismatic former miner Harry Perkins and his group of former Trotskyists, feminists and radicals, the government’s radical-reformist program quickly causes a structural crisis of capitalism. The elite and their networks of power quickly strike back at the Perkins government, which quickly finds itself in a death struggle.
Though there is little sense of a socialist movement, the series neatly undercuts its own focus on the upper echelons of government and the notion of an electoral path to socialism. Pay attention to the final radio report just before the final credits in order to get a sense of its real position on political power.
Film
The 1994 Burnt by the Sun is director Nikita Mikhalkov’s film in more ways than one. Mikhalkov also wrote and is the central actor in this brilliant tragedy. Set on a long summer’s holiday in the late 1930s, it depicts the family life of Bolshevik General Kotov, most likely based on the Red Army’s most famous civil war general, Mikhail Tukachevsky.
The Chekhovian hues – the picturesque summer house, the pastoral landscapes – probably stretch the truth, but the film still manages to be a masterpiece of tragic irony.
Its mood is elevated by the delightful relationship of Kotov and his six-year-old daughter (played by Mikhalkov’s own daughter) and at the same time hushed by the arrival of the mysterious Mitya, who lends the film an ominous undercurrent.
The film’s single serious flaw is that it is dedicated to all those “burnt by the sun of revolution”, when it should have been dedicated to those burnt by the sun of counter-revolution.
Biography
Who can go past Isaac Deutscher’s trilogy on Trotsky, The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed and The Prophet Outcast? By an extensive margin the best of the Trotsky biographies, these books can be appreciated on several levels. At once works of literary brilliance and immense scholarship, they are also exemplars of Marxist historiography. 
To read them is like reading some wondrous fusion of Tolstoy and Marx. Fascinating questions about the determinism of history rise in various iterations: had they acted differently, could Trotsky or others have resisted the rise of Stalinism? Once Stalinism had consolidated, could the Trotskyist movement ever have broken out of its isolation, or was it caught is some historic cul-de-sac? Should individuals retreat to their “watchtower” and wait for the next radical wave, or struggle against the tide even in the face of overwhelming odds?
 Inevitably one has disagreements with Deutscher, but each of these questions speaks to our own political situation. It’s unlikely these books will lose relevance in any foreseeable future.
[Rjurik Davidson is associate editor of Overland literary journal and author of a collection of short stories, The Library of Forgotten Books. His debut novel, Unwrapped Sky, will be released in 2014.]

Books, TV, Films: summer suggestions

The only time I briefly met Norman Geras was at the Marxism 2000 conference, held in Amherst, Massachusetts. Geras was one of three keynote speakers. Angela Davis spoke on the prison-industrial complex, with typical charisma; Gayatri Spivak packed the hall and gave a paper that was interminable and incomprehensible (though to be fair, her work really only suits the printed page).
Fewer people attended Geras’s lecture, and he spoke without the charisma of Davis or the superficial complexity of Spivak. He had just written The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy after the Holocaust and his talk – from what I recall – recapitulated many of its themes. He railed against the kind of amoral society that could allow cruel poverty to co-exist with the riches of a sportsman like Greg Norman and he outlined his notion that our society rested on mutual indifference: unless I know you, I do not care for you and I cannot expect you to care for me. It was a presentation which might have equally been at home at an activist conference and after the high-theoreticism of some of the papers (there was an ongoing stoush at the conference between Althusserians and others) it was fresh and endearing.
Geras himself was polite and reasonable, in the best sense of those words. When I complimented him afterwards, he was equally warm. I was already familiar with his early work, and I left the conference thinking a great deal of him.
What I didn’t know was that at that point Geras stood on the threshold of a series of decisions which would divide his adult life into two distinct chapters.
Born in Rhodesia in 1943, Geras moved to England to study at Oxford in 1962. In the UK, he became a part of the brilliant circle around New Left Review and for the best part of thirty years wrote as a ‘classical’ Marxist, defending the essential categories established by the lineage leading from Marx through to Trotsky. His articles on Rosa Luxemburg were acute examinations of the richness of her thought. His most original work, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend argued that Marx did indeed have a conception of human nature.
In the late 1980s, Geras defended Marxism against the theories of the ‘Post-Marxists’ Laclau and Mouffe in a pair of devastating articles that became standard reading of the time. These two articles were of immense importance to those who were still cleaving to Marxism. More importantly, for me at least, they were models of argumentation: Geras was hard, but also showed a fairness too often missing from Left discourse. He showed how the post-Marxist claims were nade ‘without regard for normal considerations of logic, of evidence, or of due proportion.’
‘Of due proportion’ – how that phrase rang in my ears the first time I read it! Afterwards, I saw that lack of due proportion again and again in the culture of the Left. How often I’ve wished that the Left’s political culture could hold to Geras’s standards!
In his critique, Geras showed that Laclau and Mouffe relied upon an argumentative strategy of ‘All or nothing at all’. That is, on the notorious claim that the economic base determines the political and ideological superstructure, we must answer that either the base determines in the most economistic way all superstructures, or we must admit that it does not determine it at all. There can be no middle ground. If the base/superstructure concept is more problematic than Geras presents, his critique of this kind of discursive method is devastating. Again, this kind of either/or method is too often used on the Left today.
Importantly, Geras explained that these kinds of ideas have a material context:
“In the advanced capitalist world from the mid-1960s a generation of intellectuals was radicalised and won for Marxism. Many of them were disappointed in the hopes they formed – some of these wild but let that pass – and for a good while now we have been witnessing a procession of erstwhile Marxists, a sizeable portion of the generational current they shared in creating, in the business of finding their war ‘out’ and away. This exit is always presented, naturally, in the guise of an intellectual advance. Those of us unpersuaded of it cannot but remind its proponents of what they once knew by seem instantly to forget as they make their exit, namely, that the evolution of ideas has a social and material context. We cannot help wondering how far their recent trajectory may have been influence by a range of factors which they themselves would doubtless prefer to overlook: the pressures upon them of age and professional status; the pressures of the political time and environment we have been passing through, not very congenial in the West at least, to the sustenance of revolutionary ideas; and then the lure of intellectual fashion, a consideration not to be underrated by any means.”
If there were reasons to question Marxism, Geras argued, the claims of the post-Marxists weren’t among them. Rather, he found Marxism lacking on the field of morality. He began to shift his interests in this direction, first in a couple of articles, then in his books. According to Geras, the definitions of morality and ethics given by Trotsky in his bookTheir Morals and Ours, for example – that the good is whatever furthers the class struggle – were signally inadequate.
Geras’ attempts to develop a new moral structure for Marxists were laudable but they were also the moment that he started to engage more and more with the abstract universalist principles of liberalism: ‘human rights,’ ‘democracy,’ ‘freedom’ and so on. Unlike, say, Norberto Bobbio, Geras was never able to reconcile these two worlds. The concerns of liberalism began to overwhelm the Marxism to which he had adhered his whole life.
Recent obituaries of Geras have focused on this last period, where, to the shock of many (including me and his former comrades at New Left Review), Geras began to move to the Right. He launched his well-known ‘Normblog’, partly to explain his support for the invasion of Iraq and his support of the Israeli state. He was co-author of the Euston Manifesto, written by a group of leftists who called for a ‘new alignment’ and which codified his concerns.
The manifesto reached out beyond the radical Left to ‘democrats’. Its principles stated that the writers stood for: ‘no apology for tyranny’ and opposed ‘Anti-Americanism’. It’s not hard to see how these principles – borrowed from Western governments – were used to justify intervention into the Middle East. Geras became the Right’s favourite ‘Blairite Marxist’, a kind of intellectual complement to Christopher Hitchens’s vacuous journalism.
Geras seemed to forget the very things he had claimed the post-Marxists had forgotten. Worse, he forgot all the arguments against imperial interventions like those in Iraq: that this method of overthrow of a dictatorial regime will never result in the liberation that Geras was claiming.
In the later years, I could not bear to read Geras’s blog, though I understand it became very popular.
The friends Geras made during his final years are now writing his obituaries. I suppose that is not surprising, but they provide a skewed view of the man, based mostly on his last decade. In his polemics with Laclau and Mouffe, Geras noted that ‘times change and people change. Their ideas change; develop, progress – and regress … But each person has to take his leave or make her peace, as the case may be, in a way comfortable to his or her own sense of dignity.’
For me, the Geras with the greatest dignity was the author of those lines, the Geras who sought to develop a theory of human liberation, not the one who supported the imperial adventures of Western governments. He is the man I choose to remember.
[First published at <a href="http://overland.org.au/">Overland Literary Journal</a>.]

Revolutionary organisations and the history of the DSP

Curiosities for the crisis

Red Flag’s summer suggestions

Books, TV, Films: summer suggestions

Norman Geras: an obituary

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