> 1. I'm going away till Monday. Doug if it's possible
> to turn off the output stream headed my way. I get too
> much stuff. Mark Jones will probably direct a
> blistering attack during my absence
I'll be at a Central Committee meeting discussing Russia. But I wasn't planning any strikes on your bunker anyway. I nearly sent a raspberry Brad's way for a silly remark he made about why imperialism would like to make every Pakistan into a S Korea (where's the raw materials and the oil, Brad?) but forebore.
The best things anyone is writing here are by Rakesh, altho we haven't saved him from disappearing into his own name-droppings yet unfortunately. Andrew Kliman is good too. If I can get you all to participate in our upcoming cyber conference on Whither the World Crisis it would be good. Russia is entering its fourth revolution this century; interesting, is it not? No people were more morally debauched, humiliated and rendered helplessly cynical than they, by their various disillusionments including principally 'actually existing socialism'. But capitalism is worse.
As for the American working class, I want to tell you that they have not lost their revolutionary potential either. I predict an upsurge of class struggle.
On the general question of predicting events: my policy is boldness. For example on Sunday, 22 Dec 1996 I sent my predictions for 1997 to David Johnson's Russia list. At that time I was tormenting a clever but very misguided quasi-sovietologist called Solomon Ioffe, who is or was at the Hoover Institute. I decided that Solomon Ioffe is actually the grand-nephew of the famous Bolshevik and confidant of Lenin, also called Ioffe; Solomon denied it but not very convincingly.
Anyway these were my predictions for the future of Russia made in 1966. What do you think, was I right? Bear in mind that this was just after Yeltsin's triumphant re-election as president.
Mark Jones's Predictions for 1997 as published in JRL -------------------------------------------------------
"[In 1997] History will reappear and perhaps even historiography, although I am less hopeful about this. 3. Transitionology will be clearly revealed as the study of how to avoid the transition *from* capitalism. 4. Marxism will be resurrected amid a partial rehabilitation of Lenin. I forget who it was that said: 'revolution occurs when the ruling class cannot continue in the same way and the working class refuses to continue in the same way.' This statement evokes the principal feature of revolutions, namely their terrifying unexpectedness (nothing is so unexpected as the discovery that one's master is no longer capable of issuing intelligible orders, unless it is the wildfire of social revolution) and the fact that they commence not with an uprising but a general, systemic crisis affecting all social processes and every sphere of life, from the manufacture of car parts to religion and philosophy [the reference to car parts was a joke about Berezovsky, the now-notorious used car salesman and latter-day Rasputin].
_First prediction._ Some years ago I made a careful study of the work of Leszek Kolakowski, a Polish thinker then in vogue. Kolakowski had been engaged in a polemic with the Hungarian Marxist Gyorgy Lukacs, which he was deemed to have won. He was loudly celebrated for having thereby delivered us from Marxism. Since then it has not been necessary for sovietologists to read Marx or Lenin. Nowadays it is only necessary to read Richard Pipes or Norman Stone (who speaks Russian!) or Orlando Figes, in the same way that unfortunate Russians once studied Kautsky or Trotsky, not by reading them but by consulting unintelligible glosses of them. Thus one can read in Orlando Figes' book A People's Tragedy that Lenin was actually not a worker at all but, scandalously, a noble who was supported by revenues from his estate in Russia where he spent much time in litigation with other gentleman farmers. Dr Ioffe presumably agrees, since he seems to suggest that Lenin was actually a rentier living in Swiss exile. Presumably Dr Palms even knows his secret account numbers. Here on JRL, we have everything.
This is interesting. I am surely not alone in having visited Lenin's childhood home. Therefore many others beside me know that the estate which is supposed to have supported his exile consisted of a garden with a workshop and some fruit-trees and raspberry canes. Presumably people also know that Lenin's father was a school inspector (who did however rise quite high and was awarded a blue uniform to wear on special occasions such as the Tsar's birthday). That the peasants exploited by the Ulyanovs consisted of an odd-job man, a cook, the cook's daughter and a nurse for the children. Presumably it also known that while in exile the Lenins lived in such penury that in 1916 Vladimir Ilyich considered applying for a job selling Encyclopedia Britannica door-to-door to the good burghers of Switzerland.
This simplicity of lifestyle continued even after Lenin's ambitions were bankrolled by the Kaiser, who foresaw no danger to his position by letting the genie out of the bottle in his brother-monarch's part of the park. Even in the Kremlin Lenin owned two suits and lived modestly (I saw his small apartment there; it has now been moved to make way for furniture acquired by the Yeltsins). No doubt Lenin ate children and he was certainly an energetic womaniser but he was not after all a rentier. George Lansbury, a British Labour politician, telegraphed Prime Minister Lloyd-George from Moscow suggesting he come and meet Lenin, whom he likened to 'one of the saints of old, doing what Christians call the Lord's work'. Even the British Guardian newspaper said Lenin and Chicherin were 'profoundly simple in their dress, food [and] life' and that the Soviet government was supported by the 'mass of workers solidly' and by two-thirds of the peasants. As for Lenin's conception of democratic centralism, which the good Dr Ioffe says was based on 'the experience of the German Social- Democrats .. [and] French Socialist ministers ... [and] which is known in any corporation: I'll pay you money, and you do what I need done': this criticism is much weaker than, say, Rosa Luxemburg's - made exactly at the time of Duma-socialism - which savaged Lenin's 'bureaucratic ultra-centralism' and spoke of the '"ego" crushed and pulverised by Russian absolutism re- emerging as the "ego" of the Russian revolutionary [which] stands on its head and proclaims itself anew the mighty consummator of history'. But Lenin was unmoved even by these attacks, gladly accepting the 'charge' that he wanted to turn the party into a 'political factory' in which glorious individuals like Trotsky would be mere 'cogs and screws' and where 'martial law' would operate. He simply would not have noticed Dr Ioffe's attack, which is wide of the mark. The 'iron law' of oligarchy needs more than this. Lenin was not a rentier or a corrupt parliamentarian.
Which brings me back to Kolakowski (incidentally, it is a shame that Lukacs' wonderful book 'The Young Lenin' is out of print). Kolakowski is a locomotive crushing all in its path. Unfortunately the locomotive is not running on rails. It can go anywhere and crush the wrong people. Even chemists. For Kolakowski 's approach to science permits it to have a history. Even in the wake of Thomas Kuhn's epistemological revolution, many do not like to think thisd can be so. It seems vulgar to disagree with Kant. Ideas originate in the mind, surely? Anything else smacks of Marxism (or Artificial Intelligence, which is just as frightening). This refusal to see history immanent in ideas, is an understandable error. It is one which scientists themselves make all the time. But it is still an error. Scientific work is a practice but scientists are often so mesmerised by their results that they cannot help defining theory in terms of one or other form of philosophical idealism. That is why Plato has more lives than a cat.
That I think was Arendt's point, and also perhaps Hegel's. It was certainly Marx's. They all understood that ideas have histories, and not just the history of their discovery. That is why it is no excuse to be stuck in a time-warp populated by ideas about political life which belong in the French Enlightenment. Dr Ioffe's conception of oligarchy is exactly that: an enlightened critique of a form of absolutism which however departed the world stage two centuries ago. It has little current validity or explanatory power. It is a poor orphan. In my opinion, the decent thing is to ignore it and hope it will slink off by itself.
This idea of the nature of power and the theory of history it requires resembles one you often find in the pages of The Economist journal, except that they are optimists and Dr Ioffe rightly is not. Thus, The Economist likes to publish graphs which show that history is doing very nicely thank-you and everything is fine. Health, life-expectancy, living standards, you name it - the graphs (ironed-out to ignore statistical blips like 1914-18, 1939-45 etc) prove it. Dr Ioffe similarly irons out the minor discrepancies. Thus, Russia in 1924 was much the same as in 1914 (I omit qualifications, of course, we can all supply them). All that really happened was that the sons of the old lot of oligarchs somehow took over. And now here they are yet again (for example Yegor Gaidar is the grandson of a famous Bolshevik, ergo presumably former Tsarist oligarch, and himself a former editor of the CPSU's equivalent of the Economist, _Kommunist_ . So naturally he was ideally- placed to start the new game of musical chairs, according to this theory).
Of course, history is full of echoes; in 1792 the French revolution declared a universal republic. In 1918 the Bolsheviks called for world revolution and said 'the working man has no nation'. Both regimes were, as Ioffe reminds us, taken over by people who soon abandoned such theoretical excesses. Dr Ioffe offers this as more evidence for his history-as-musical-chairs paradigm. But I still cannot help feeling that there is more to his insistence on it than that. There is such depth to Dr Ioffe's despair -- one feels his cynicism can only be the result of profound disillusion and the loss of faith. He denies this. But he is such a good historian. How else then, to read his phenomenal glossing-over of so radical a historical caesura as October and its aftermath, except that its irretrievable loss is simply too painful to confront (I know this pain)? But if you draw the veils apart and actually look at what happened, it becomes hard to support such cynicism.
The very maximalism of the early Bolshevik government invites the conclusion that this was no mere procession of oligarchies. Look at the way in which the slogan of world revolution was given effect. It was the moment of _State and Revolution_. Lenin demanded a peace without annexations and an end to the diplomacy of secret treaties which had brought the world to the abyss. This was the stimulus for Wilsonism, an exercise in pure cynicism as Ioffe rightly reminds us. One needs to recall the mood of the times to understand how Wilsonism was even possible given the chuavinist anti-German hysteria of the other Entente powers. Nothing could have produced it except the sheer panic over Bolshevism which was suddenly ignited in western chancelleries by 'the pacifist Ulyanov'. Then hatred of the Hun was displaced overnight by even more murderous hatred of Bolshevik Russia, capable of nationalising (it was alleged) all forms of property including women. Consider the obsession at Versailles with the spectre of Bolshevism. It dominated all their deliberations (the Russians, who'd borne the brunt of the war in the east, were excluded naturally). As Thorstein Veblen said, the desire to destroy Bolshevism 'was not written into the text of the Treaty [but was] the parchment upon which that text was written'.
Thus was the twentieth century set in motion. Another contemporary wrote of the effects of the war: 'Everything was destroyed, commercial treaties and treaties of alliance, conventions between State and State regarding the most jealously-guarded interests, the public and private law of every single State. The elite of the greater European nations, and more especially its youth, were mown down. The Prussian, English and French aristocracies were decimated and the middle class both in France and Germany. The better part of the Russian nation was dispersed or dead [sic]. The States of Western Civilisation finally dared to do what to previous ages would have seemed madness, if not a crime, and that was, to arm the masses.' Naturally, the masses instantly seized the oportunity to enter history on their own account.
According to H G Wells the political cataclysm was 'more universal, more profound and more incurable' than that of ancient Greece and Rome. The Great War had precipitated a universal crisis: it was not just the October revolution. There were the nationalist revolutions which produced the successor states to the Dual Monarchy; the November Revolution in Germany; the Kemalist revolution in Turkey, the Rice Riots in Japan, the May Fourth Movement in China, Gandhi's first Swaraj campaign in India, the ANC in south Africa, Sinn Fein's victory in Ireland, and more. But it was the Russian Revolution which was the wake-up call. Without it the war would have gone on because the Allies and the Central Powers might well have held out for unconditional surrender.
What would be put in place of the collapsed system? Leninism or Wilsonism? If it had been left to the French and British, with their ideas about a punitive peace, there would have been a real revolution in Germany and we'd all be living in socialism by now. But we didn't get the International, we got the ILO and the League of Nations (the proof of the counter-revolutionary efficacy of Wilsonism is what happened when the US Congress made Germany pay reparations and wouldn't agree to join the League of Nations. Hitler. And can someone please explain to me why it's shocking to blame Hitler on Coolidge, whose economic insanity destroyed Weimar and produced the Great Depression and Hoover, who finally put the kibosh on things by agreeing Hawley-Smoot? Didn't Stalin do enough, already? In 1945, even the GOP understood this. This is only one of the reasons why I object to the practice of aggregating massacres, purges, war-deaths and famines -- each the death of an individual in specific circumstances -- like so many kilos of cheese, and laying them all at Stalin's feet. Robert Conquest says its only 50 million so Richard Pipes ups the ante and says, how about sixty? Better use arguments than body-counts.).
In 1918, the target of Lenin's breathtaking initiatives wasn't the secret treaties but the institutions which invented them. That was what he was after. There could be no more radical assault on government-by-oligarchy than his. And this was a question of urgent practice and not his denigrated (why?) utopian dreams. Lenin inherited a Tsarist foreign ministry so reactionary that a senior staffer could greet the notion of employing women with the words: 'Since the Middle Ages it has been known that woman is in league with the devil; it would be contra the laws of God and man to admit her into the ministry.' The civil servants went on strike. The Military Revolutionary Committee sent Ivan Zalkind, a Bolshevik, educated in prison and the Sorbonne. He gained admittance to the Ministry with the aid of a Mauser. Four days later the publication of the secret treaties and documents began. And how was this colossal event, which so terrified and scandalised Entente and Triple Alliance alike, accomplished? Trotsky, the newly-appointed People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, who declared himself 'indifferent to diplomatic ritual' and thought diplomatic relationships should be conducted with 'revolutionary socialist parties bent on the overthrow of existing states', had said: 'I will issue a few revolutionary proclamations and then shut up shop'. He visited the Ministry once. The only other task he could find the staff was to sell off the contents of diplomatic bags which had arrived from abroad full of bribes, a job he gave to a semi-literate sailor, Markin. Two other volunteers -- a permanently-drunk student named Polivanov and Zalkind himself, the only Bolshevik available -- set about the publication of the secret treaties. A little later Pravda published an appeal signed by three Americans for recruits to an 'international detachment of the Red Army'. The World Revolution had started. The White House duly took note.
Unfortunately it soon stopped, and the rest as they say is history. But it is the remarkable tenor of events such as this, and the potent feeling of liberation which still hangs over the year 1917, which is liable to induce subsequent disillusion. And what stopped the revolution? Not any oligarchs. Anyway, it hasn't stopped. We only just began.
Dr Ioffe's musical-chairs theory of history is untenable. When I assert that Arkadii Gaidar was a hero, the youngest Bolshevik civil war commander (age seventeen) who later became a wonderful children's story writer (Timur And His Team -- prototype of the Second World War Timurs who helped grandparents and folks on the Home Front to survive), but that his grandson Yegor is a despicable and obnoxious traitor to his country, Dr Ioffe will surely accept that the grandfather would agree with me, and that what is at stake is, putting it mildly, inter-generational asymmetry and not the replication of an oligarchy. And that is why I confidently predict that in 1997 Dr Ioffe, whom I and my wife Natalya Grigorievna greatly enjoy, will find himself moving towards us, asymptotically perhaps, but moving nonetheless. And he will not be alone.
_Second, Third, Fourth Predictions_
In the eightieth year of Great October, I feel like pointing out that History has not after all come to a full stop.
It is possible that UFOs will land in 1997. In this case, we shall know what attitude to take. Since they come from a superior world, they obviously will have already constructed communism.
That dealt with, I shall address a less momentous but more taxing question -- NATO.
It is obvious to normal people that the Cenozoic Period, which began sixty million years ago, is coming to an end amid a mass extinction of species which probably has no parallel in the history of DNA-based life-forms. It is also obvious that, as the men at the Utopia department (it exists, or something like it) at British Telecom tell us, in the next century we shall all disappear into the machine. To find out what this will be like, you may care to reread E M Forster's wonderful little novella of sixty or so years ago called The Machine Stops. This is the anti- future which awaits us, possibly, and not 1984, which George Orwell originally wrote as a management tool for the BBC during the last war, and converted into an anti-Soviet diatribe only when he realised that the view which he and Arthur Koestler had been putting about -- see Animal Farm -- that Stalin's Russia was actually just another kind of capitalism -- see also JRL, passim -- that this view could not be supported. 1984 in its own way is therefore convincing contemporary evidence that whatever it was, the USSR was not capitalism.
My dear friend Solomon Ioffe -- may I call you so? -- please note: it is impossible for any territory to abstract itself from the capitalist world order for any length of time. But nevertheless, the USSR was not capitalism. What was produced there was defence, and not any kind of commodity. It was Karl Marx who wrote 'at bottom there is only one money in the world'. But the Soviet ruble was not money, it was the defiance of money, its inversion and negation. It was a political act, and the entire history of the USSR can be seen as an attempt to preserve the existence and reality of this non-monetary chimera, against what Trotsky called 'value [in the Marxian sense] chattering at the borders' and chattering inside the borders, too, as every Georgian and Armenian trader and contrabandist knew.
Marx also wrote 'the hive is at bottom one bee'. Human societies per contra have a social division of labour. In Soviet Russia labour was never commensurated as a commodity, which is the definitive proof if one were needed that Soviet Russia, where nothing could be obtained without the help of a friend, was not capitalist, state or otherwise. David Lane is correct to call it state socialism. Those who think otherwise should read Volume I of Capital before replying.
The end of DNA-based evolution and the convergence of technologies capable perhaps of deconstructing us and perhaps reassembling us in some Faustian technofantasy of Internet life, will progress in 1997. BT (who just purchased MCI) are investing money in downloading our memories, for later replay. I think it's called SoulSavr or something like that. But I won't bang on about all this except to make the also by-now perhaps trivial remark that the termination of random, natural-selection based evolution will coincide with its replacing (sublation is a good Hegelian term) by a process which if it exists at all must be to a greater or lesser extent teleological, i.e. rationally predetermined -- I am saying that we are reinventing ourselves as God.
[snip]
On the one hand, catastrophic biospherical crises, endemic, evolving and completely incapable of solution by their begetters -- capitalist Europe, Japan and the USA (and the rest). So, no going back. No more false optimism ala The Economist . General systemic crisis. Revolution. I mean, a revolutionary transformation of every aspect of life (and our lives) which is going to happen, obviously, and which can only be anticipated, like a tidal wave, and not prevented. Yes, capitalism is its own grave-digger, because now, and especially now, its final, furious energies have been released on an unprecedented scale and are acting in concert to one end only -- to speed up the maturation of this general crisis and simultaenously to prepare the only possible solution (see the men from BT -- they have a web page, by the way).
Why is revolutionary upheaval perhaps inevitable? Because economics intersects with politics, or because general accumulation crises necessarily debouch in political ones. Or any one of a dozen other ways of putting it.
[snip] the inevitable is already visible, and Europe is on another glacis like 1906-1914.
[snip]
People seem to think recessionary crises can be avoided forever. It is pure philistinism. But to be concrete, once the looting of Russia is complete [there will be] another of those little blips which The Economist elides on its graphs. Nothing can stop it. "
Mark Jones