THE GLANCE REVEALS @theglancereveals - Tumblr Blog

Two Quotations about Decency, Separated by 75 Years of Capitalism

In Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, the protagonist Rubashov is arrested and jailed next to a veteran Tsarist officer housed in cell No. 402. Rubashov is an Old Bolshevik who still believes in the mission of the Party, despite the absurdity of his own arrest; his neighbor No. 402 is a reactionary critic of communism. By tapping in code through the prison walls, they develop a friendship that seems to transcend their ideological differences.

But when Rubashov decides to confess to his bogus crimes, for the greater good of the Revolution, the friendship breaks down in a bitter clash of creeds:

...smiling to himself, [Rubashov] tapped with his pince-nez:

I AM CAPITULATING

He waited curiously for the effect.

For a long while nothing came; No. 402 was silenced.

His answer came a whole minute later:

I’D RATHER HANG

Rubashov smiled. He tapped:

EACH ACCORDING TO HIS KIND

He had expected an outbreak of anger from No. 402. Instead, the tapping sign sounded subdued, as it were, resigned:

I WAS INCLINED TO CONSIDER YOU AN EXCEPTION. HAVE YOU NO SPARK OF HONOUR LEFT?

Rubashov lay on his back, his pince-nez in hand. He felt contented and peaceful. He tapped:

OUR IDEAS OF HONOUR DIFFER.

No. 402 tapped quickly and precisely:

HONOUR IS TO LIVE AND DIE FOR ONE’S BELIEFS

Rubashov answered just as quickly:

HONOUR IS TO BE USEFUL WITHOUT VANITY

No. 402 answered this time louder and more sharply:

HONOUR IS DECENCY—NOT USEFULNESS.

WHAT IS DECENCY? asked Rubashov, comfortably spacing the letters. The more calmly he tapped, the more furious became the knocking in the wall.

SOMETHING YOUR KIND WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND, answered No. 402 to Rubashov’s question. Rubashov shrugged his shoulders:

WE HAVE REPLACED DECENCY BY REASON, he tapped back.

No. 402 did not answer any more.

Seventy-five years after Darkness at Noon was published, Jeremy Corbyn was elected Leader of the Labour Party, becoming probably the most left-wing figure to lead a major Anglo-American political party in a generation. Corbyn celebrated his victory with these words:

Can I start by thanking everyone who took part in this election, this huge democratic exercise of more than half a million people all across this country. It showed our party and our movement, passionate, democratic, diverse, united and absolutely determined in our quest for a decent and better society that is possible for all...

During this amazing three months, our party has changed. We've grown enormously. We've grown enormously because of the hopes of so many people for a different Britain. A better Britain. A more equal Britain. A more decent Britain. They're fed up with the inequality, the injustice, the unnecessary poverty....

Our passion is intact. Our demand for humanity is intact. And we as a party are gonna reach out to everyone in this country to take us on that journey together, so no one is left on the side. Everyone has a decent chance in life and a decent place within our society. That's what Labour was brought about to achieve. That is what we're gonna achieve.

In all, Corbyn used the word “decent” or “decency” six times in a short speech, slightly fewer than “democracy” (8) but as many as “equality” (6) and more than “justice” (4) or “humanity” (4).

In 1940, “decency” was the self-evident property of the Right -- an intangible refuge of honor, besieged by the arrogant and inhumane hyper-rationalism of Soviet Communism. The Left could not value decency; the Left would never even understand decency. In 2015, decency has become the rally-cry of Left critics of capitalism from Jeremy Corbyn to Pope Francis. It’s amazing the difference that seventy five years of capitalism can make.

#arthur koestler #darkness at noon #jeremy corbyn #communism

Not a Politics of Common Action but a Gesture of Moral Rectitude

Irving Howe on the New Left, 1965:

“Some of the people involved in that movement show an inclination to make of their radicalism not a politics of common action, which would require the inclusion of saints, sinners, and ordinary folk, but, rather, a gesture of moral rectitude. And the paradox is that they often sincerely regard themselves as committed to politics – but a politics that asserts so un-modulated and total a dismissal of society, while also departing from Marxist expectations of social revolution, that little is left to them but the glory or burden of maintaining a distinct personal style.”

#irving howe #politics

Law Has Flourished on the Corpse of Philosophy

Louis Hartz on America's elite liberal tradition and the strange power of the U.S. Supreme Court:

"Surely, then, it is a remarkable force: this fixed, dogmatic liberalism of a liberal way of life. It is the secret root from which have sprung many of the most puzzling of American cultural phenomena. Take the unusual power of the Supreme Court and the cult of constitution worship on which it rests. Federal factors apart, judicial review as it has worked in America would be inconceivable without the national acceptance of the Lockian creed, ultimately enshrined in the Constitution, since the removal of high policy to the realm of adjudication implies a prior recognition of the principles to be legally interpreted...

If in England a marvelous organic cohesion had held together the feudal, liberal, and socialist ideas, it would still be unthinkable there that the largest issues of public policy should be put before nine Talmudic judges examining a single text. But this is merely another way of saying that law has flourished on the corpse of philosophy in America, for the settlement of the ultimate moral question is the end of speculation upon it."

#Louis Hartz #Supreme Court

They Thought Themselves Eternal

I finally saw Visconti's film version of The Leopard last night, and it was about as wonderful as everyone says. Alain Delon's smirk, Claudia Cardinale's pout, and Burt Lancaster's glare are impossible to beat (James Franco, Mila Kunis, and Liam Neeson should still give it a shot, though.)

But I still like the novel better. Watching the movie sent me back to Lampedusa's book itself, crammed with pleasures as rich and varied as the dessert buffet at the Portoleone ball. The bleak aphorisms of the Prince's inner monologue: "How could one inveigh against those sure to die?... Nothing could be decently hated except eternity."

The delicate but crushing irony that enfolds Lampedusa's description of the Prince after shooting a rabbit: "While sympathetic fingers were still stroking that poor snout, the animal gave a last quiver and died; Don Fabrizio and Don Ciccio had their last bit of fun, the former not only the pleasure of killing but also the solace of compassion."

It's no secret that the best parts of The Leopard all concern death--the death of a generation, a class, a world. Visconti's film wraps itself gorgeously around this theme, but Lampedusa's novel has recourse to both the majesty and the mischievous incongruity of the historical perspective. Here is my favorite passage from the novel, where the Prince contemplates the magnificent Porteleone ballroom:

"The ballroom was all golden: smooth on the cornices, uneven on the door frames, in a pale, almost silvery design against a darker background on the door panels and on the shutters annulling the windows, thus conferring on the room the look of some superb jewel case shut off from an unworthy world. It was not the flashing gilding which decorators slap on nowadays, but a faded gold, pale as the hair of Nordic children, determinedly hiding its value…

That solar hue, that variegation of gleam and shade, made Don Fabrizio’s heart ache as h stood black and stuff in a doorway: this eminently patrician room reminded him of country things; the chromatic scale was the same as that of the vast wheat fields around Donnafugata, rapt, begging pity from the tyrannous sun; in this room too, as on his estates in mid-August, the harvest had been gathered long before, stacked elsewhere, leaving, as here, a sole reminder in the color of stubble burned and useless now. The notes of the waltz in the warm air seemed to him but a stylization of the incessant winds harping their own sorrows on the parched surfaces, today, yesterday, tomorrow, forever and forever. The crowd of dancers, among whom he could count so many near to him in blood if not in heart, began to seem unreal, made up of that material from which are woven lapsed memories, more elusive than the stuff of disturbing dreams. From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches, gazed down smiling and inexorable as a summer sky. They thought themselves eternal; but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was to prove the contrary in 1943."

#The Leopard #Lampedusa #Visconti #film

They Will Come Back With Another Story in Their Mouths

Solomon Northup in Twelve Years a Slave:

"Men may write fictions portraying lowly life as it is, or as it is not--may expiate with owlish gravity upon the bliss of ignorance--discourse flippantly from arm chairs of the pleasures of slave life; but let them toil with him in the field--sleep with him in the cabin--feed with him on husks; let them behold him scourged, hunted, trampled on, and they will come back with another story in their mouths."

#history #12 Years a Slave #Twelve Years a Slave #Solomon Northup

Let the Railsplitter Awake

A day late for the birthday, but there's never a bad time for more lefty Lincoln poems.

Here's a bit from Allen Ginsberg's 1982 adaptation of Pablo Neruda's "Let the Rail Splitter Awake":

"Let the Railsplitter Awake!

Let Lincoln come with his axe

and with his wooden plate

to eat with the farmworkers.

May his craggy head,

his eyes we see in constellations,

in the wrinkles of the live oak,

come back to look at the world

rising up over the foliage

higher than Sequoias.

Let him go shop in pharmacies,

let him take the bus to Tampa

let him nibble a yellow apple,

let him go to the movies, and

talk to everybody there..."

#abraham lincoln #allen ginsberg #pablo neruda #poetry

Exactly My Own Sentiments

In the London Review of Books, Ferdinand Mount has a spirited essay on 'the Greatest Victorian,' Walter Bagehot, and his mid-nineteenth century career as a banker, critic, and editor of The Economist. Here's how Bagehot described the average subscriber of the capitalist class's most influential organ:

"Our typical reader is a businessman, banker or trader, who prefers statistics to abstractions and has little patience for padding. He is generally cool, with his own business to attend to, and has a set of ordinary opinions arising from and suited to ordinary life. He does not desire an article that is too profound, but one which he can lay down and say ‘an excellent article, very excellent, exactly my own sentiments’."

Mount concludes: "On such first-rate principles the Economist has been conducted ever since, although few of Bagehot’s successors as editor have stated them so frankly."

#London Review of Books #Ferdinand Mount #Walter Bagehot #The Economist #history

We Are Terribly Smug People

It's a scandal that Eugene Genovese's 1971 essay "On Being a Socialist and a Historian" isn't readily available online. We are talking, after all, about a major statement of creed from perhaps the greatest and certainly the most interesting American historian of the late twentieth century. Get your act together, Marxists.org.

Eugene Genovese at a Rutgers University teach-in, 1966

Writing from within the campus tumult of the late '60s and early '70s, Genovese offered a steely defense of historical research as a valuable and indeed necessary component of Left politics. To radical critics, who asked "how can we sit around and discuss medieval France while children are being napalmed in Vietnam," Genovese responded with characteristic ruthlessness. For one thing, this was hardly a left-wing opinion after all: "a fascist would surely agree, as he marched off to a prowar demonstration and worried about the death of our American boys... The slogan 'Action first, doctrine later,' we would do well to recall, was Mussolini's."

More important, what Genovese called "the children-are-being-napalmed argument" revealed both the intellectual frivolity and tactical futility that defined a broad swath of the campus protest movement. "[O]ne does not ask a welder to stop welding in order to become a full-time political organizer... Only intellectuals are subjected to these ravages, and, of course, only by other intellectuals. Welders normally have more sense than to torment each other with such stupidity."

Did Genovese drive his bulldozer rather too zestfully over his New Left critics? To be sure. Even he later admitted as much, although naturally there remains much furtive pleasure to be scavenged from the bones of his crushed opponents. ("These people and their argument constitute part of the sickness of our time, not the cure.")

But what's most striking about "On Being a Socialist and a Historian" is not so much Genovese's intra-left polemicism, but his monumental faith in the value and the power of historical inquiry. Again, I can't quite go all-in with this kind of Olympian self-assurance--it's a mistake to go all in with Genovese on anything, ever--but damn if it isn't inspiring to read. We are terribly smug people indeed:

Socialists do not advocate pure scholarship and value-free social science because we do not advocate the impossible. But we do insist that the inevitability of ideological bias does not free us from the responsibility to struggle for maximum objectivity.

We must confess other sins as well. We are terribly smug people: we really do believe that our political movement represents the hope of humanity and the cause of the exploited and oppressed of the world. And we are terribly conceited: We are so convinced we are right that we believe we have nothing to fear from the truth about anything. It is our contention, on the contrary, that only ruling classes and the waves of nihilists who regularly arise to entertain those ruling classes have anything to gain from the ideological approach to history. Our pretensions, therefore, lead us to the fantastic idea that all good (true, valid, competent) history serves our interest and that all poor (false, invalid, incompetent) history serves the interest of our enemies...

So when we write a methodological essay on the treatment of slaves, or an interpretive essay on Dante's religious views, or a descriptive essay on the organization of the shipbuilding industry in Bordeaux, or an informative essay on anything else of which men and women have ever been a part--when, in other words, we follow our calling or, as it were, do our thing--we think we are meeting at least part of our political responsibility. We have the strange notion that socialists (and all decent human beings) have a duty to contribute through their particular callings to the dignity of human life, a part of which is necessarily the preservation of the record of all human experience.

- From In Red and Black (1971)

#Eugene Genovese #history #politics

The Socialist Future is Immanent in the Present

I just burned an hour churning through old Terry Eagleton essays in the London Review of Books. The guy can write. On the heels of Scott Poole's recent call for the Left to reclaim the memory of George Orwell, it's worth revisiting Eagleton's 2003 essay on the improbably eventful career and endlessly arguable thought of this singular English socialist.

A review of three then-new books on Orwell, the piece is a rich mine of anecdotal nuggets, which Eagleton deftly converts into polished insights: "Orwell’s father bore in India the Monty Pythonesque rank of Assistant Sub-Deputy Opium Agent, Fifth Grade, so one can see what Orwell meant by designating his background ‘lower upper middle class’... If the Empire co-opted the fathers, it could also make the children feel social misfits in suburban England, and this could later be translated into political rebellion."

The young Orwell (Eric Blair) with his mother, sister, and Pythonesque father.

But the radicalism of Orwell's politics, Eagleton believes, was captive to the even sterner radicalism of his empiricist philosophy. "Whereas Gramsci believed that socialism must become common sense, Orwell at his worst seemed to imagine that common sense was socialism...[He] detested those, mostly on the Left, who theorised about situations without having experienced them... There is no need to have your legs chopped off to sympathise with the legless, and no reason why being legless yourself should necessarily entail compassion for those in a similar state."

I'm persuaded by much of Eagleton's critique, even if it seems odd to attack Orwell for being "in love with Dickens," and, like Dickens, preferring individual 'character' to collective politics -- when Orwell, after all, wrote a famous essay that attacked Dickens, more or less because his novels elevated personal morality over structural critique. (Raymond Williams was right, in any case, that Orwell misread Dickens on this score.)

My favorite section of the essay, though, comes when he stops to assess the power of Orwell's Left ideas. Eagleton argues that Orwell envisioned socialist society not as a mystical or unknowable Eden, but something built from parts that already exist in the real world. If today's socialists are utopians, it is not because their dreams are very large, but the imaginations of their opponents are so pitifully small. By contrast Orwell, like Williams and E.P. Thompson,

...insist[ed] on the continuities between the class-bound present and the socialist future, rather than on some apocalyptic break between them. Socialism will indeed involve such ruptures; but it is primarily an extension of the existing values of comradeship and solidarity to society as a whole... The socialist future is not just a nebulous utopian ideal, but is in some sense immanent in the present, and would not be valid if it were not.

#George Orwell #Terry Eagleton #LRB #Socialism #Jacobin #Raymond Williams #Charles Dickens

Middle Gothic in Celophane

C. Vann Woodward, on visiting Duke's campus for the first time in 1933:

"Duke was a case of loathe at first sight for me—Middle Gothic in celophane; gigantic, turetted, battlemented entrances with pneumatic hinged swinging doors in place of iron portcullisses—innumerable chimneys—all dummies—there being a central heating plant; concrete gargoyles, great ivy vines, clamped on with tin. Cloistered picture show. Replica of Westminster, with elevator in tower. Leaded windows in library that let in no light. Attended opening meeting of Graduate club—Herr Doctor Katzenjammer of German Dept., just back from Vaterland lectured dithyrambically on Der Führer und der Neue Geist—Hitler saving Western civilization from barbarism—Professors applauded & Woodward muttered & finally puked on the floor. Goddam, how I loathe that place..."

From The Letters of C. Vann Woodward

#C. Vann Woodward #Duke #history #hitler

As Though They'd Just Emerged from the Surf

In Katherine Hill's The Violet Hour, Abe Green climbs a hill in San Francisco:

"He could hardly feel the shadow as he walked to the nearest intersection, which looked downhill in two directions. From there he could see the tops of several parks, lying about the city like the contents of a scattered bag. The city offered itself beneath a gaping blue sky, urging him downhill, past staircases wedged like sandbags against the flood of land, past streetlamps riding high upon the waves. In the sun, every house seemed newly painted in whites whiter than his coat, which he removed and slung over his arm, the other colors--the mints and the slates and the saffrons and the plums--shivering in the light as though they'd just emerged from the surf, salt-washed and freshly wet."

#Katherine Hill #The Violet Hour #san francisco

Only the Private Realm Existed

At one point in her novel NW, Zadie Smith leaves us with four successful young professionals enjoying a weekend brunch at a London cafe, sometime in the mid-2000s. The central character, Natalie, has just left her job as a public-interest paralegal for a position at a large law firm.

"It's organic," said Ameeta. She referred to the ketchup.

"It's bad, said her husband, Imran. He was also referring to the ketchup.

"It's not bad. It doesnt have the fourteen spoonfuls of sugar you're used to, said Ameeta...

They continued on with their breakfast. Breakfast tipped into brunch. They did this once or twice a month. Today's brunch seemed, to Natalie, a more lively occasion than usual, and more comfortable, as if by rejoining a commercial set and acting, at least in part, for the interests in corporations, she had lost the final remnants of a troubling aura that had bothered her friends and made them cautious around her...

"It's an insurgency," said Ameeta. Natalie pressed a knife to her egg and watched the yolk run into her beans. "Another cup of tea?" said Frank. They were all agreed that the war should not be happening. They were against war... "But Irie was always going to be that kind of mother," said Ameeta, "I could have told you that five years ago." Only the private realm existed now. Work and home. Marriage and children. Now they only wanted to return to their own flats and live the real life of domestic conversation and television and baths and lunch an dinner. Brunch was outside the private realm, not by much—it was just the other side of the border. But even brunch was too far from home. Brunch didn’t really exist. “Can I give you a tip?” said Imran. “Start on the third episode of series two.” Was it possible to feel oneself on a war footing, constantly, even at brunch?

#NW #Zadie Smith #food #brunch

Each Word Was At First A Stroke Of Genius

Well, I finally got around to reading the wonderful slim volume that helped give this blog its name: Robert D. Richardson's First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process. (I first encountered Emerson's Tumblr-friendly aphorism about glances vs. gazes in John Banville's NYRB review a few years ago).

It's a reliable if sadly infrequent delight to consume an 85-page book -- a delicious between-meal snack that by an accident of material culture is usually inflated into a 200-pp tome or boiled down to a 30-pp article. The midsize morsels that do make it into print, anyway, are often worth your time.

But an 85-page book stuffed to the brim with lines from Emerson is better than most. Not that Waldo himself would have agreed: Americans, he complained, "dote on the old and the distant: we are tickled by great names... every man is a borrower and a mimic, life is theatrical and literature a quotation." Works that collected other writers' opinions earned even fiercer disdain: "Avoid all second-hand borrowing books--'Collections of--', 'Beauties of--', etc... I would burn them. No one can select the beautiful passages of another for you... Do your own quarrying."

We can be grateful that the Sage of Concord isn't around to burn this borrowing book of sorts, because Richardon (who also wrote an award-winning life of Emerson) proves to be an excellent quarrier. Among many upturned nuggets that sent me back to the original rock-pit, my favorite is the passage where Emerson explains his dictum that "words are signs of natural facts."

"The use of outer creation [is] to give us language for the beings and changes of the inner creation. Every word which is used to express a moral and intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. Right means straight. Wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of an eyebrow."

Richardson adds another crisp example -- "the abstract and vague word consider leaps to life when we learn that it originally meant study the stars (In Latin sidus, sideris means star)" -- and then relates how Emerson's 1844 essay "The Poet" anticipated the foundational aesthetic insight of the Oxford English Dictionary:

"The poets made all the words," says Emerson, "and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry." It is the poet's, the writer's job to "re-attach things to nature." "Genius, says Emerson, "is the activity which repairs the decays of things."

The Song Of The Men Who Have No Place

As far as I can tell, From Here to Eternity is mostly remembered today as a two-and-a-half hour film vehicle for one racy-but-not-that-racy make-out scene. If you've actually seen the movie, you know that the legendary Beach Kiss is an abrupt, hectic disappointment: Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr barely pucker up before the tide rolls out and they pop off the sand; thirty seconds later they're bickering over lunch. (The Beach Kiss's fame, I think, counts as paradoxical evidence for Kazuo Ishiguro's claim that we remember still images better than moving pictures -- and the Lancaster/Kerr smooch did produce an epic still.)

This letdown, though, is acutely faithful to spirit of the film and the James Jones novel. "It seems like life," says Pvt. Robert E. Lee 'Prew' Prewitt, "is made up of saying hello to people we dont like and good-by to people we do." From Here to Eternity is about cruelest of life's disappointments: not that good things never come, but that they never last. It's the Great American Novel of good-byes.*

Fittingly, then, it's a novel about soldiers, men who live in constant fear and certain expectation of one final good-bye. Jones's Army is largely a peacetime unit: in an 850 page book about U.S. troops stationed in Hawaii in 1941, Pearl Harbor doesn't get bombed until page 735. Soldiering, for most of the novel, is merely a synonym for everything else -- a world where the civilian routine of work, status, and rejection is neatly concentrated into drill, rank, and punishment. "James Jones," writes Joan Didion in her classic essay on Hawaii, "had known a great simple truth: the Army was nothing less than life itself."

A great theme in From Here to Eternity is soldiering as laboring. The novel's heroes and villains are nearly all workers -- dog privates and roughneck sergeants -- while the officer class, the employers, remain resolutely in the distance. (They're usually out golfing.) The ambivalent but real sense of allegiance the men feel for the Army is thus a kind of class allegiance -- national duty as worker solidarity, and vice versa. The sweaty Popular Front patriotism of Steinbeck and Dos Passos takes its last whiskey-soaked furlough in From Here to Eternity, as imprisoned joes wax nostalgic about the I.W.W. and lament the injustices of "this man's Army" -- but when the planes come for Pearl Harbor, every man wants to do his part.

In many ways this is a foreign sensibility on today's American Left, which since the 1960s at least has preferred rigorous critique and ruthless mythbusting to romantic national pride -- a combination, naturally, that has made for good history and bad politics. But From Here to Eternity is that ancient artifact of a novel that can make a socialist feel all gooey about "Taps." It's too late for May Day (or Loyalty Day!) but I recommend you fire up the YouTube bugler while you read along below. He's not as good with a horn as Prew was, but he fills out Jones's requiem for the common soldier -- the soldier as worker, and the worker as the American everyman who is always having to saying good-bye:

“There was no placed regimented tempo to this Taps. The notes rose high in the air and hung about the quadrangle. They vibrated there, caressingly, filled with an infinite sadness, an endless patience, a pointless pride, the requiem and epitaph of the common soldier, who smelled like a common soldier, as a woman once had told him. They hovered like halos over the heads of the sleeping men in the darkened barracks, turning all grossness to the beauty that is the beauty of sympathy and understanding. Here we are, they said, you made us, now see us, don’t close your eyes and shudder at it; this beauty, and this sorrow, of things as they are. This is the true song, the song of the ruck, not of battle heroes; the song of the Stockade prisoners itchily stinking sweating under coats of grey rock dust; the song of the mucky KPs, of the men without women who collect the bloody menstrual rags of the officers’ wives, who come to scour the Officers’ Club -- after the parties are over. This is the song of the scum, the Aqua-Velva drinkers, the shapeless ones who greedily drain the half filled glasses, some of them lipsticksmeared, that the party-ers can afford to leave unfinished.”

“This is the song of the men who have no place, played by a man who has never had a place, and can therefore play it. Listen to it. You know this song, remember? This is the song you close your ears to every night, so you can sleep. This is the song you drink five martinis every evening not to hear. This is the song of the Great Loneliness, that creeps in like the desert wind and dehydrates the soul. This is the song you’ll listen to on the day you die…”

*For more on this theme, see Lindsay Waters's piece in Harvard's sexy New Literary History of America.

Even Bourgeois Liberalism Is Declared Socialistic

"The more Grover Norquist calls President Barack Obama’s centrist policies 'socialist,' Bhaskar Sunkara writes, "the less threatening that dreaded slur has started to sound." On the heels of my own hopeful talk about a new 21st century socialism, Sunkara's point offers as good an excuse as any to dive back into Karl Marx's greatest historical essay. In fact clever leftists have long held a soft spot for conservative hysteria about the S-word.

The right-wing response to debate in the French National Assembly after the 1848 revolution, Marx wrote, was "flat as a riddle whose answer is known in advance":

Whether it was a question of the right of petition or the tax on wine, freedom of the press or free trade, the clubs or the municipal charter, protection of personal liberty or regulation of the state budget, the watchword constantly recurs, the theme remains always the same, the verdict is ever ready and invariably reads: "Socialism!" Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialistic, bourgeois enlightenment socialistic, bourgeois financial reform socialistic. It was socialistic to build a railway where a canal already existed, and it was socialistic to defend oneself with a cane when one was attacked with a rapier.

So far, so good. This sounds just like Norquist on Obama. (Come on, you know that if Jim DeMint went after the President with a rapier and Barack pulled out his cane, Fox News would be ON IT.) But Marx goes further. The Norquists of the world, it turns out, have a real point:

This was not merely a figure of speech, fashion, or party tactics. The bourgeoisie had a true insight into the fact that all the weapons it had forged against feudalism turned their points against itself, that all the means of education it had produced rebelled against its own civilization, that all the gods it had created had fallen away from it. It understood that all the so-called bourgeois liberties and organs of progress attacked and menaced its class rule at its social foundation and its political summit simultaneously, and had therefore become "socialistic."

Oh shit. Sounds like those bourgeois conservatives had really fucked themselves, no? Unfortunately for themselves, and for nineteenth century France, Marx's right-wing parliamentarians still had a trump card to play: their own political self-annihilation.

Thus by now stigmatizing as "socialistic" what it had previously extolled as "liberal," the bourgeoisie confesses that its own interests dictate that it should be delivered from the danger of its own rule; that to restore tranquillity in the country its bourgeois parliament must, first of all, be given its quietus; that to preserve its social power intact its political power must be broken; that the individual bourgeois can continue to exploit the other classes and to enjoy undisturbed property, family, religion, and order only on condition that their class be condemned along with the other classes to like political nullity; that in order to save its purse it must forfeit the crown, and the sword that is to safeguard it must at the same time be hung over its own head as a sword of Damocles.

So, yeah. It all winds up with Louis Bonaparte's right-wing coup, the end of representative government, and the start of the Second Empire. This is where the analogy to today seems to break down, but it's worth remembering exactly what's at stake in the demonization of "liberal" measures as "socialistic." Marx saw the bourgeois willingness to dissolve democracy in order to preserve its privilege as evidence that democratic reform was useless, and that even contemporary Socialist "twaddles about mind, education and freedom" availed for nothing. For the French left, it was revolution or destruction.

But there's another conclusion to draw here: if even liberal reform threatens the social foundation of class rule, then, fuck, bring on liberal reform. (This is more or less Sunkara's argument, too.) Precisely because a military coup isn't on the agenda in the 21st century U.S., our own democratic "organs of progress" really can present a fundamental challenge to the ruling power of big capital. That's why big capital fights so fucking hard against them, even when they seem so obviously feeble. Unlike its counterpart in the French National Assembly, today's Party of Order can't save its purse by handing off its crown; it has to have both, or it will die.

"The parliamentary regime," Marx noted, "leaves everything to the decision of majorities; how shall the great majorities outside parliament not want to decide? When you play the fiddle at the top of the state, what else is to be expected but that those down below dance?"

Working toward liberal reform is not the only thing the Left can do to do to challenge the power of capitalism -- it's probably not even the most important thing. But it can be part of the fight. Those who insist otherwise do not merely prefer posture to struggle, or the purity of motive to the power of result. They also underrate the radical potential of political engagement, and they misread their Marx.

To paraphrase another great ex-Berliner, there's only one way to find out if those great majorities below have their red shoes on. Let's dance.

#Eighteenth Brumaire #Karl Marx #history #socialism #liberalism

Look at Them Sons of Bitches

On Sunday at the Masters, I came across this bit in From Here to Eternity -- the only worthwhile golf-related passage in American letters.

The truck had to pass toward the Post and around the golf course to the Kolekole black top. “Look at them sons of bitches,” Hanson said bitterly, sitting on tailgate. “Did you ever play golf?” “No,” Prew said. “Me neither,” Hanson said. “The sons of bitches.”

#From Here To Eternity #James Jones #Golf #Sports

Life Strikes the Weak

Strong stuff from the first pages of Trotsky's autobiography:

"The idealization of childhood originated in the literature of the privileged. A secure, affluent, and unclouded childhood, spent in a home of inherited wealth and culture, a childhood of affection and play, brings back to one memories of a sunny meadow at the beginning of the road of life. The grandees of literature, or the plebians who glorify the grandees, have canonized this purely aristocratic view of childhood. But the majority of the people, if it looks back at all, sees, on the contrary, a childhood of darkness, hunger, and dependence. Life strikes the weak--and who is weaker than a child?"

Harsh, but fair; and yet I still stand by the idea that one of the first aims of any worthwhile socialist utopia should be to provide a proper Toad Hall, or at least a substitute Hundred Acre Wood, for every child in every social situation.

#Trotsky #socialism #USSR #Winnie-the-Pooh #Wind in the Willows

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

THE GLANCE REVEALS