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On 25 October 1917, the Russian working class took power. At a meeting of the Congress of Soviets, the peak democratic body representing millions of workers, peasants and soldiers, Lenin declared: We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order. How? Lenin continued: Creative activity at the grass roots is the most basic factor of the new public life ... Socialism cannot be decreed from above. Its spirit rejects the mechanical bureaucratic approach; living, creative socialism is the product of the masses themselves.

Within a fortnight of the revolution, the revolutionary government issued a Decree on Workers Control. Decisions about production were to be made by workers organisations: the soviets, the factory committees and the trade unions.

It was only one of a whirlwind of revolutionary decrees: in its first year, the Soviet government decreed universal suffrage and abolished inherited wealth, removed state control of marriage and divorce, and removed homosexuality from the criminal code. National minorities were granted the right to independenceincluding secession from Russia; religious minorities were empowered through the introduction of full freedom of religion.

Women workers won equal pay with men; many became the elected leaders of soviets and workers militias. To aid womens full participation in political life, the impoverished and war-ravaged country put together communal kitchens, and childcare centres were created, to free them from the burdens of family life.

The revolutionary government issued decree after decree, expecting the empowered revolutionary workers to carry them out through self-organisation. Never since the creation of the world have so many orders been issued, Leon Trotsky later wrote, by word of mouth, by pencil, by typewriter, by wire, one following after the other.

Eight months earlier, in the February revolution, a wave of strikes had overthrown the centuries-old autocratic dictatorship. Months of chaotic debate had followed. From February onwards, Russias population, writes historian Rex A. Wade, burst forth in a dazzling display of self-assertiveness, public meetings, and creation of new organizations. Announcements of congresses, conferences, committees, meetings, organizations being formed, and other manifestations of a newly unfettered public life filled the newspapers. But for months it was unclear what the outcome of this debate would be: a moderate settlement? Capitalist democracy? A restoration of right-wing rule or military dictatorship? After eight months of debate, the working class decided to take power, and the October Revolution took place.

How did workers get from Februarys dazzling display of self-assertiveness to Octobers decision to take power and construct living, creative socialism, without being defeated by counter-revolution or exhausting themselves in disorganisation and internal dispute? The role of the much misunderstood revolutionary Bolshevik Party was the key element.

The Bolsheviks were an overwhelmingly working-class party, composed of some tens of thousands of working-class socialists, mostly organised in the workplaces of the big industrial centres. By the end of 1917 the party had hundreds of thousands of members, as the most dedicated revolutionary activists joined them.

The talking, talking, talking atmosphere had drawn millions of workers into debates. Political questions had been posed and solved. New demands were raised, and aspirations grew. At each point in these debates, the Bolsheviks had argued for workers to be bolder, to organise themselves and take responsibility for leading the revolution.

The horror of the First World War had led to the revolution. Impoverished peasants in Russias countryside demanded redistribution of land, and increasingly militant workers demanded control over their workplaces. These three questions dominated the period after the overthrow of the old dictatorship in February. The Bolsheviks argued that to solve these problems, workers would need to take power into their own hands. They emphasised the connection between political and economic struggle and attempted to forge bonds of solidarity between peasants, workers and soldiers.

The great hope of the February Revolution was that it would end the war. But after the fall of the tsar, a new self-appointed and unelected provisional government proclaimed itself the new authority, and it was committed to the wars continuation. The head of the government, Alexander Kerensky, informed troops that the inevitability and necessity of sacrifice must rule the hearts of Russian soldiers and that I summon you not to a feast but to death.

To continue the imperialist war necessitated order, not revolutionary freedom. Strikes were proliferating, and workers raised demands ranging from wage rises to the eight-hour day; the provisional government called for restraint on both sides. Izvestia, the newspaper of the Menshevik party, argued that the wartime situation in the revolution forces both sides to exercise extreme caution in utilising the sharper weapons of class struggle such as strikes and lockouts. These circumstances make it necessary to settle all disputes by means of negotiation and agreement rather than by open conflict. Both Kerensky and the Mensheviks were supposedly socialists, but now they were arguing to restrain the revolution, to hold back workers struggles and to prolong the war.

The Bolsheviks anti-war position was unique. It drew the connection between the war and international workers revolution. Lenin, the most important leading figure of the Bolsheviks, argued that the provisional governments capitalist nature drove its pro-war stance. To end the war, workers of all nations would have to fight their own ruling classes. Marxs old slogan, Workers of the world unite, was given a concrete meaning: soldiers of opposing armies should fraternise, and workers should make war on their bosses.

The drive to restore order sent the provisional government and its moderate socialist supporters on a collision course with the institutions of popular democracy, which in turn increasingly supported the Bolsheviks. More than 2,000 trade unions emerged in 1917. Factory committeeselected in workplaces by all workers regardless of sex, religion or backgroundemerged to deal with everything from fixing light globes to leading fights for better conditions. But the most significant institution was the soviets: a network of revolutionary councils of representatives of any and all workplaces, plus soldiers and peasants. The moderate socialist chronicler of the revolution Nikolai Sukhanov rightly called the soviets the very crucible of great events, the laboratory of the revolution. Institutions like these had to be repressed to carry out a disciplined war effort.

By the middle of the year, strikes escalated into a movement for workers control of the factories. But workers control at the level of an individual workplace was more and more obviously insufficient. The economy was collapsing under the strain of the war. Prices rose 2,300 percent between February and October; real wages fell by almost half.

In the factories, Bolshevik activists led strikes, but they also raised political slogans like All power to the soviets and Overthrow the provisional government during debates about wages, working conditions and other economic questions. As the historian David Mandel puts it: [T]he very strong interconnections between the economic and political spheres, both in the workers consciousness and in objective reality itself, were evident from the very start. It was the desire of the moderate socialist leadership of the Soviet to keep the two separate that, in fact, underlay the first conflict between it and the worker rank-and-file ... these interconnections would grow into a virtual merging of the two spheres with all threads uniting in one overriding demand: All power to the soviets!

The Bolsheviks called on poor peasants to rise up against landlords and seize land for themselves. Unlike the other political parties, the Bolsheviks encouraged peasants to take direct action rather than wait for the provisional governments constantly delayed inquiries into the land question. By August, 482 of Russias 624 districts had experienced peasant revolts. Bolshevik militants convinced urban workers to champion the needs of the rural poor. They understood that, for workers to take and hold power, they would need to be the recognised champions of all the oppressed.

The Bolsheviks had spent the year arguing for workers to take power while also leading on-the-ground struggles. Their orientation bore fruit in August, when a decisive battle took place against a coup attempt by the tsarist loyalist General Lavr Kornilov. The factory committees, under Bolshevik leadership, organised 40,000 volunteer Red Guards led by Trotsky, while worker militants in key industries took control of the production process to create havoc for Kornilovs troops, redirecting vital shipments, as Trotsky wrote: In a mysterious way, echelons would find themselves moving on the wrong roads. Regiments would arrive in the wrong division, artillery would be sent up a blind alley. The coup was defeated in four days. On the heels of the defeat of the coup, the provisional government attempted, unsuccessfully, to disarm and disband the workers and factory committees.

The Bolsheviks had won the support of the working class, because only they supported the self-activity of the working class in a way that could defeat counter-revolution. All power to the soviets was not just a slogan: it was a perspective that informed their entire intervention. In the permanent debates in the streets as well as in the trade unions, the factory committees and the soviets, Bolsheviks argued for workers to take political positions, make decisions about society and use their collective strength to make those decisions happen.

Not long afterwards, the provisional government threatened to surrender the city of Petrograd to the German army in order to crush the heart of worker militancy. In the second week of October it ordered the radical soldiers of the Petrograd garrison to leave the city and go to war. Historian Alexander Rabinowitch recalls that this provoked an avalanche of anti-government resolutions adopted by garrison units. A meeting of the Petrograd-based Second Baltic Fleet Detachment was reflective of the mood: it adopted a resolution that proclaimed: [A]s ardent enemies of the coalition Provisional Government ... we await with great impatience the portentous opening of the Congress of Representatives of the Soviets of Workers and Soldiers Deputies, in which we have faith, and which we invite to take power. Similar resolutions came out of the factories.

On 22 October, three days before the insurrection, again the masses made their wishes clear. This was the Day of the Petrograd Soviet, when rallies had been called in support of this revolutionary institution. The city became engulfed in mass meetings, concerts, factory debates and gatherings in every available city hall. To the mushrooming crowds Trotsky, at this time one of the Bolsheviks central leaders and best known public figures, posed the question of whether they would support and defend soviet power, and they roared back: We swear it! The intervention of party activists cohered the revolutionary workers on a mass scale, and prepared them for decisive action.

On 25 October, the day of the insurrection, Red Guards stormed the Winter Palace and arrested the remaining leaders of the provisional government. The insurrection had not just mass support, but mass participation, as Trotsky recounts: In the provincial industrial regions ... armed workers would remove managers and engineers, and even arrest them ... Sabotage on the part of the property owners and administrators shifted to the workers the task of protecting the plants ... Roles were here interchanged: the worker would tightly grip his rifle in defence of the factory in which he saw the source of his power.

Trotsky was able to write so clearly of the insurrection because, as a leading activist of the Bolsheviks, he was one of its most active participants. As Sukhanov witnessed: Trotsky ... rushed from the Obukhovsky plant to the Trubochny, from the Putilov to the Baltic works, from the riding school to the barracks; he seemed to be speaking at all points simultaneously. His influence, both among the masses and on the staff, was overwhelming.

The seamlessness of the insurrection reflected the fact that Bolsheviks had spent weeks debating, preparing and organising for it. Red Guards enrolled whole factories as volunteers, women created Red Cross divisions and gave lectures on caring for the wounded and organised factory level bands of nurses. Workers requisitioned and inventoried automobiles to build up their apparatus of self-defence. Debates raged about the potential timing of an insurrection at party congresses and in party papers; polemics were often leaked and reprinted in bourgeois papers.

The idea that October was a coup does a disservice first and foremost to the Russian masses. They had been deep in debate for all of 1917. In fact, defeating Augusts right-wing coup had laid the basis for their uprising in October. They had resisted attack after attack by the provisional government, had thrown bosses out of factories, and by October many were organised into socialist militias. The October revolution was swift and relatively bloodless because it had mass support. Sukhanov wrote: To talk about military conspiracy instead of national insurrection, when the party was followed by the overwhelming majority of the people, when the party had already de facto conquered all real power and authority was clearly an absurdity. Menshevik leader Julius Martov acknowledged: Understand, please, that before us after all is a victorious uprising of the proletariatalmost the entire proletariat supports Lenin and expects its social liberation from the uprising.

Robert Service, an anti-Bolshevik historian, similarly is forced to admit: What really counted was that the Bolshevik political programme proved steadily more appealing to the mass of workers, soldiers and peasants as social turmoil and economic ruin reached a climax in late autumn. But for that there could have been no October revolution.

The art, music, theatre, pedagogy, environmental policies, literacy programs, child care and communal kitchens that proliferated in the first year of workers power are the subject of much admiration and discussion even today. However, to move beyond nostalgia and reach those heights again, we have to take seriously the politics that made it all possible. The workers conquest of power required both their own spontaneous, creative revolutionary energy, and a working-class political organisation dedicated to helping that energy transform the world.

The rest is here:
The Bolshevik revolution: why a revolutionary party matters - Red Flag

By Cole Michaels 18 September 2020

The coronavirus is spreading from urban to rural areas of Missouri, with over 109,000 recorded infections and 1,838 deaths in the state as of this writing. All 114 counties and the independent city of St. Louis have recorded coronavirus infections, with the number of confirmed cases rising sharply since Missouri reopened in mid-June.

Three of the four days seeing the highest number of hospitalizations have occurred over the past week, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.More than 1,020 were in hospitals with confirmed or presumed COVID-19 infections last Saturday, the second-highest day on record.

A recent White House Red Zone report indicates more than 60 percent of Missouri counties have moderate or high levels of community transmission with the remaining counties all having high levels of community transmission last week, according to the report. The report also recommended Missouri bars close.

This week, visitors began to arrive at Lake of the Ozarks for an annual motorcycle event, BikeFest, which local media report could see 100,000 participants. For the Sturgis bike event earlier this year, experts put a 90 percent chance that event created 100,000 new COVID-19 infections, making it a superspreader event.

Columbia and Jefferson City were both included on the reports list of Missouri cities in the red zone. The report said both Mid-Missouri cities confirmed 100 or more new coronavirus cases per 100,000 residents and the positivity rate was higher than 10 percent.

Infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci warned residents of Missouri and six other states to be on guard for a surge in cases after the Labor Day holiday weekend. During an interview with Bloomberg, Dr. Fauci said, There are several states that are at risk for surging, namely North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Arkansas, Missouri, Indiana, Illinois. Those states are starting to see an increase in the percent positive of their testing; that is generally predictive that theres going to be a problem.

The rise of cases has been blamed on people not following mask-wearing and social distancing guidelines, especially young people. While there are individuals who choose to forego distancing recommendations, blame for the rise of cases and deaths in Missouri lies mainly with state and county governments. Mandated lockdowns imposed in March were lifted in a bid to get profits pumping to the ruling elite by forcing people back to work. Many counties, especially ones in rural areas, are resuming in-person instruction in schools.

Rural counties of southeastern Missouri, bordering Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee, remain the states hotspots. According to a New York Times graph of coronavirus spread in Missouri, McDonald County has 1 out of every 22 residents infected with the virus. Cole County set a record for new cases September 4, and Howard County recorded its first coronavirus-related death the same day.

As of September 16, Howell County, with a population of 40,000 people, has 438 confirmed cases, a rate that has been on the rise for weeks. The West Plains R-VII School District had gone for in-person instruction until a countywide increase in cases forced the district to adopt a hybrid model for grades 712. Quote from the district website: COVID-19 exposure levels and positive cases continue to rise in Howell County and in our community. The district is experiencing an increase in student absences as well as students and staff on quarantine. As a result of the feedback from our community and staff, we are changing to a hybrid learning model for grades 712.

The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services has been unable to accurately record state death totals. Eighty-nine previously unaccounted for deaths were added last week to the tally after the DHSS blamed technical difficulties for the oversight. In a September 5 tweet, the DHSS explained, Through continuing efforts to ensure data transparency and quality, DHSS analysts discovered an inconsistency in death certificate diagnosis codes when compared to case information contained in DHSS disease surveillance systems. After thorough analysis and evaluation, these additional COVID-19-associated deaths were identified.

The major metropolitan areas of the state are seeing increasing rates of infection. The Kansas City metropolitan area has over 33,000 confirmed infections. Jefferson County, a rural portion of the St. Louis metro area, has been declared a red zone in terms of increased COVID-19 diagnoses. St. Louis County has over 20,000 cases, while Boone County, which encompasses the city of Columbia, has more than 3,500 cases. Greene and Christian counties which form the metro area of Springfield have nearly 5,000 cases.

In August, a student at Fort Zumwalt South High School in the city of OFallon posted an image on social media of crowded staircases in the school building.

Neighboring Illinois, whose southwestern counties are part of the St. Louis, Missouri metropolitan area, is seeing a surge in cases with current totals at over 240,000 and more than 8,100 deaths. As with Missouri, all counties have recorded cases.

With schools reopening in districts across the state, it is inevitable that students will have to deal with the trauma of losing teachers, parents and fellow students. On September 6, 34-year-old Ashlee DeMarinis, 34, special education teacher at John Evans Middle School in Potosi (Washington County), died after three-week battle with coronavirus.

The pandemic is also being used as an opportunity for the state government to slash social spending. Missouri Governor Mike Parson cut nearly $450 million from the state budget in June, mostly from K-12 schools, colleges and universities. While cutting funds from education, Parson inked a no-bid contract with the McChrystal Group that has paid out over $829,000 in federal coronavirus relief funds to the consulting firm, reportedly to help coordinate Missouris pandemic response.

The fight to save thousands of lives requires a conscious struggle by the working class against capitalism and for socialism. The first step is to form rank-and-file committees in workplaces nationwide to coordinate a national general strike. The WSWS will do all it can to assist the forming of such local committees.

Read more here:
Missouri among top five US states with COVID-19 infections - WSWS

Home > 2020 > Raghuvansh Babu: A committed socialist in times of neo-liberalism | Prem(...)

TRIBUTE

It is an undeniable fact that todays corporate India is intoxicated with the idea the digital. It is constantly on the fast-track to transform all into the digital, and as quickly as possible. In such an environment, Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, popularly called as Raghuvansh Babu in friendly circles, sent his hand-written resignation addressed to Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad Yadav on September 10, on plain paper. Lalu Yadav too wrote the answer on plain paper, by hand. This particular incident can be perceived as peculiar in the light of present corporate Indias political business circles, in which crores and crores of rupees are spent every day, particularly when elections are around the corner. Bundles and bundles of glossy, colourful publicity material are brought out through advertising companies. These letters exchanged between two, down to earth leaders suggest that thrift and simplicity in the politics/governance of a country, burdened by poverty and unemployment should be the one and only option. Raghuvansh Babu wrote three more letters - one for the general reader, and two for Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, on the same day, again by hand.

There is no need for a detailed discussion about the specific concerns/questions raised in these letters here, in this obituary note. How much and how uncontrollably we people, working in every field, speak and write, day and night! Yet our hunger to speak and write does not seem to have a far-reaching end. These three brief letters by Raghuvansh Babu are also a sharp commentary on this contemporary, verbose trend.

Lalu Yadav wrote to Raghuvansh Babu in his reply that he (Raghuvansh Babu) is not going anywhere, that is, RJD will not let him leave). But preparations were already made to go by Raghuvansh Babu. Everyone has to depart from this mundane world. Raghuvansh Babus family, friends and loved ones will regret that he was frustrated and hurt at the time of leaving. (Moreover, an ugly controversy was raised for petty electoral gains even before his last rites were performed.) Whatever, at the end of his life, his conduct once again illuminated the political personality he had carved out and earned for himself through a long political struggle. Indias socialist movement, in which Raghuvansh Babu was groomed, ended politically with the merger of the Socialist Party with the Janata Party in 1977. Since then, some pieces of that movement have been floating in mainstream politics. The RJD happened to be one of them. Raghuvansh Babu remained in the RJD since its formation. He always supported Lalu Yadav. Some people wonder that how could Raghuvansh Babu, even coming from a privileged caste and with a PhD degree in mathematics in hand, get to fit in Lalu Yadavs backward politics pursued in a blunt manner!

The reason can be traced back to the socialist movement itself. Dr Rammanohar Lohia used to tell the political workers of the forward castes in the socialist movement that they would have to work in order to pursue the path of backward leadership in politics. Raghuvansh Babu, who worked with and was trained by the legendary backward leader Karpoori Thakur, did the work of becoming Khaad in furthering the leadership of Lalu Yadav. He did not promote his children in politics, nor did he make politics a means of making assets. People close to him say that feudal arrogance had not even touched his personality. It is a different and ironic story that almost all backward and Dalit leaders, including Lalu Yadav, fall prey to feudal arrogance and conduct as soon as they get power.

Although Raghuvansh Babu was active in mainstream politics throughout his political career, he was well aware about the fact that a group of socialists were engaged in the struggle of alternative politics against the onslaught of neo-liberalism. Senior socialist leader Kishan Patnaik (30 July 1930-27 September 2004), the theorist of that political stream, passed away in Bhubaneswar after which a condolence meeting was held in Delhi to pay him homage. The meeting was attended by political activists and intellectuals in large numbers. Raghuvansh Babu attended the condolence meeting and paid his tribute to Kishanji in a sober and quiet manner. I remember that he was the only leader from mainstream politics to do so.

In his letter written for common public readers, Raghuvansh Babu has raised several issues citing one of Lohias ideas: "politics means fighting evil, religion means doing good". One of the issues mentioned in the letter was that the posters of the party (RJD) on which the photographs of five inspiring leaders - Gandhi, Jayaprakash Narayan, Lohia, Babasaheb and Karpoori Thakur - were printed, now carry the pictures of five family members. This, along with his deep distress, was actually a sort of confession that there had been no point in continuing with the politics of the present avtar of socialism! Raghuvansh Babu was committed to the one, as he mentioned in the letter, that was against "feudalism, casteism, dynasty-rule, family-rule, communalism".

Raghuvansh Babu, you were devoted to your work with utmost honesty, devotion and commitment. Even while following mainstream power politics, there was an aura of socialism in your political persona. You, even while working with a staunch neo-liberal prime minister, had crafted the Mahatama Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) for the benefit of poor masses living in rural India. The scheme is helping them in the troubling times of corona pandemic to some extent. You, being a true inheritor of JP, Lohia and Karpoori Thakur, upheld the socialist values and ideals even during the hostile neo-liberal-communal nexus. My deep respect and humble tribute to your memory.

(The author teaches Hindi at the University of Delhi and was the former president of Socialist Party India)

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Raghuvansh Babu: A committed socialist in times of neo-liberalism | Prem (...) - Mainstream

This week, another round of high-profile Extinction Rebellion (XR) protests began in Britain. In London, climate activists intend on a ten-day occupation of Parliament Square, as politicians return to vote on the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill (CEE).

The CEE bill will be moved by Caroline Lucas MP, the Green Partys sole representative in the House of Commons. It cites two objectives: to ensure that the UK plays its role in limiting global temperature to 1.5 degrees centigrade and to actively conserve the natural world. The key difference between this bill and other climate emergency motions is that it proposes a Citizens Assembly, a consultative group of individuals selected from the general population, with the intention of being representative of the wider citizenry.

The bill warns of a yellow vest effect, alluding to a similar initiative in France. There, however, President Emmanuel Macron has accepted just 3 out of the 149 recommendations from a citizens commission following the gilets jaunes protests. Although such deliberative democracy has been praised in Ireland, for example paving the way for its reproductive rights referendum it contains an assumption that solutions could be found inside the context of our current neoliberal capitalism, so long as the discussion was participatory enough.

For this reason, XR proposes sortition selecting citizens by lot, as an alternative to voting. Doubtless, it is a nice gesture to have citizens discuss ideas for a just transition. But any serious radical proposal on climate must recognize that the capitalist system requires extraction, commodification, and, ultimately, ecological destruction and thus any effective response to this crisis demands a confrontation with capitalist interests.

The absence of these dynamics is where the bill falls short, and so, too, Extinction Rebellions own political proposals. As Natasha Josette from Labour for a Green New Deal wrote last year, what the movement is missing or not stating clearly enough is that the climate crisis is the result of neo-liberal capitalism, and a global system of extraction, dispossession and oppression. Without this, Extinction Rebellion is more of an organization seeking to make a splash in the media, than a movement as such.

The passing of the bill would fulfill XRs third and final demand, which calls for a Citizens Assembly with the task of mapping out a road to climate and ecological justice. The demand implores us to go beyond politics, but is unclear about what, concretely, is meant to replace it. This slogan, however, is indicative of the movements present limitations as led by a broadly liberal tradition. Ironically, it is reminiscent of Francis Fukuyamas End of History: desiring politics but without the conflict, progress but without revolution, and movements but without the radical potential.

Historically, movements in the liberal tradition that have attempted to be broad and popularist to borrow the language of XRs founder Roger Hallam often find themselves politically unmoored when the initial shine wears off. Movements that operate on an all things to all people basis are at threat of dissolving upon contact with reality.

Evading questions of their class and social interests, and representation thereof strips a movement of its political content. You cannot expect to be politically relevant for very long if being politically ambiguous or apolitical is a fundamental component of a movement. In their recent communications explicitly dismissing the notion that the movement is socialist Extinction Rebellion are again committing themselves to this fate.

Activists that do define their political analysis as originating from socialist thought perhaps should not be surprised by the groups repudiation of the socialism or extinction banners during its protests. When a movement says it is not a socialist movement, it does more than insult the activists within it who are socialists. It strips it of serious radical and political content, and hints at its lack of interest in gaining a working-class majority to its side.

This, indeed, is a constituency the group did much to alienate in its recent past. In an action at a London tube station, Extinction Rebellion activists climbed to the roof of the train, keeping commuters from accessing the (relatively environmentally friendly) public transport. A physical confrontation broke out and was caught on the groups social media livestream.

Extinction Rebellion issued an apology for the action and the disruption to commuters. It further fueled perceptions of the group as white, middle-class, and out of touch with working-class people. A recent Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity study on the class composition of Extinction Rebellion rebels lends weight to this perception.

In Tribunes Politics Theory Other podcast interview from last year, Hallam identifies Extinction Rebellion as fitting into a gap between the radical left and the NGO left, dismissing the former as Calvinistic and the latter as corporatist.

This explanation is not only reductive and simplistic, but it also places the group in the same political no-mans-land that has hamstrung populist movements, from Podemos in Spain to Five Star in Italy. In the interview, Hallam further expanded on this claim to stand against politics per se:

my main orientation isnt really political it is more sociological and structural. Thats the starting point its simply impossible for the main social institutions of a society to be able to adapt quickly to rapid change. particularly, the Labour Party isnt going to cope. What were looking at is a complete collapse in the credibility of the political class. The political class is heading for extinction in terms of credibility. Theres no conception of a mass extinction event. Extinction Rebellion is mainly morally mobilised.

There are potentially some ideological components to be teased out from Hallams thoughts, albeit fairly broad ones. There is a recognition of the limits of electoralism from a populist perspective, as well as an acknowledgement of the need to keep up a grassroots movement with climate breakdown on the horizon. It is telling, though, that Hallam is dismissive of political intervention, and goes as far as saying that the mobilizing force of the movement is primarily out of a sense of morality.

For Hallam, politics is not about relations of power and material conditions, but rather a colloquial understanding of the word that denotes unpleasantness and dirtiness. While unpleasant and dirty it may be, political and ideological clarity that places anti-capitalism and anti-racism at its center will give the movement the maturity it lacks, and help it connect to those constituencies that it has tended to alienate. To borrow a line attributed to Chico Mendes, environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening. Extinction Rebellion without socialism is just mass arrests.

But this also leaves XR open to other, dangerous influences. I was myself one of the admins behind Extinction Rebellions social media presence, and saw instances where activists, or individuals posing as activists, have disseminated eco-fascist propaganda. On occasion, we would receive messages asking whether this was official Extinction Rebellion material. Having to clarify that your group is not in favor of population control laws is probably an indication that the politics of the movement is not as clear as it could be.

The process of ideological and political clarity can develop over time for a movement, through internal and external forces. Internally, by methods of discussion and self-critique. Externally, through contact with other forces and groups in society.

This journey to clarity can be better understood if we imagine movements as having life cycles. Extinction Rebellion is young in age, not just in terms of many of its activists but also insofar as being a movement yet to reach maturity. It has a relatively global reach and identifies part of the existential destruction, which makes it relevant to its supporters.

It would be unfair to expect a movement with broad and populist ambitions to be born into a set of ideologically potent and coherent dogma. To reuse the comparison with Podemos and Five Star, some ideological openness is essential at the start in terms of bringing people on board. Having an activist milieu mobilized on moral grounds is not itself a bad thing but it is certainly not enough in the long term.

While that initial ideological openness is arguably necessary, clarity must be an eventual goal. The analytic framework for arriving at that clarity must accept the existence of classes and social groups, where politically meaningful alliances can and must be made between them, and where interests are diametrically opposed to each other. From there, discussions about dealing with those class and social conflicts at a strategic level can fit in, such as the principle of nonviolence and the tactic of mass arrests.

For example, Hallam stressed in the Politics Theory Other interview that the treatment of protestors by the police is far worse in other countries than the UK. Even if this were true, this hardly makes the police potential allies. XRs call for a nonviolent, compassionate attitude toward the police shows that there is a shortcoming in the understanding of the police, not only as the physical arm of the bourgeois state that has so far prevented climate justice, but also as institutionally racist. It should not even be needed, but these times are as good as any to revisit its ideological framework in the light of the Black Lives Matter movement and Extinction Rebellions relationship with working people of color.

For ecological politics isnt just about raising awareness and thus exerting moral pressure. The giants of corporate capitalism have known of the extent of the climate crisis for years. We can already see that making the ruling class more aware of this crisis and even the human suffering it has and will cause has a decidedly limited effect.

The core assumption that the dominant can be reasoned with or convinced, be it by protests like the ones this week or awareness campaigns, has no grounding in experience. Similarly, trusting a randomly selected group of individuals to take action through a citizens assembly, should the CEE bill pass, seems distinctly insufficient.

Just as the socialism or barbarism phrase could be updated to socialism or extinction, so, too, should a nascent movement move from childhood to maturity. This begins with having a clear sense of political conflict recognizing the need to find allies for a common struggle.

Original post:
Yes, Socialism or Extinction Is Exactly the Choice We Face - Jacobin magazine

Theory September 4, 2020 Alex Demirovi

History teaches us nothing, so said Social Democratic Party (SPD) leader Andrea Nahles, to justify discontinuing the SPDs Historical Commission. Long ago, Rosa Luxemburg took the opposite position: history is the only true teacher (GW 4: 480). Perhaps history really doesnt teach us how we should act immediately in our current situation. This is true in general, and also in very specific circumstances. Were we not convinced that the tradition of critical fascist analysis would give us the concepts to resist developments in capitalist society that tend toward an erosion of democracy, toward authoritarian and exceptional state forms which drastically worsen the prospects of emancipation? Didnt we believe that, equipped with this knowledge, with all our historical interrogations, we would be better able to resist and defeat right-wing forces? It appears not to be the case.

But history teaches us something much more fundamental, namely that our present moment is the present of a history. In this present, the struggles and the missed opportunities of the past are condensed in a special way. It is not a question of what might have been, but of concrete decisions, of victories and defeats, of real alternatives. It also teaches us that once decisions have been made, they actually result in long-term developments.

The different attempts made to realize socialism, many of which proved to be wrong or senseless, which failed or were defeated, are all a part of our presents history. Because of these previous attempts, many things associated with the name socialism are now considered historically obsolete, out-dated, or discredited. There are several reasons why this is the case. Socialism was associated with practices that contradicted and discredited socialisms emancipatory ambitions. In many cases it is doubtful that those who acted and spoke in the name of socialist objectives were pursuing anything more than the selfish interests of individual functionaries.

Yet it would be a false consolation to think that an idea that was good in itself was merely abused. Indeed, the ideas and concepts of socialism are the subject of discussion and conflict. Understood in this way, there is no definition of socialism which is valid a priori; rather there are a range of suggestions for how to define it. In many cases, the term encompassed particular social groups who (for a time rightly) believed that they embodied the general will, but who did not understand that the concept of socialism in whose name they were acting was a compromise that enjoyed the support of many people only due to the circumstances prevailing at that moment. They wanted to cling to this moment and this claim to universality, and enforce stability. Unable to adapt to the changes in the social constellation, they denounced different ways of life, perspectives, or contradictions as deviations, or pathologized their critics. In this way, socialism was not an open, free, social organization of collective life, but rather remained limited to certain social groups and their life situations (certain groups of industrial workers, special modes of production, for example large industrial factories in urban regions, and related forms of work organization), which claimed to be universal.

According to this claim, socialism is the only social form through which contradictions are consciously lived and worked out. This is why Karl Korsch was able to say that socialist society needs to be more skilled at processing contradictions, or in other words, that socialism is actually more complex than the capitalist form of social organization. This is because it no longer denies the contradictions and consigns them to anonymous social processes, such as the conflict between consumers and producers over products and product quantities, over working hours or shares in the overall productive output, or over ecological consequences. In this context, Marxs unique contribution to the socialist tradition was to take the objective existence of contradictions seriously, to articulate and analyse them, but without moralizing, sugar-coating, or erasing them through the states claims to universality, or to suppress them by administrative means.

If there are differences and contradictions between the claims to universality and the various social groups, their interests, and needs, then there is a need for forms which can mediate contradictions and tensions between the universal and the particular. Democracy is the process through which this happens. It is a regulated process in which individuals debate about what can be considered universal in a specific situation. Negotiations about universal interests impact the direction in which society as a whole develops. This can involve all aspects of society, including its products, its work processes, educational and qualification processes, forms of housing and town planning, nutrition, and gendered and familial divisions of labour.

Whether due to a lack of effort or other reasons, state socialisms failed to democratically regulate these processes of reconciling universal interests with the diverse interests of particular groups. Although the socialist states saw themselves as democratic peoples republics, hardly any democratic processes of mediating between different interest groups were initiated. Though they often held onto the political form of parliaments and parties, the internal logic of these forms was blocked in order to maintain the Communist or Socialist parties monopoly on power, so that universal interests were not defined through open discussion, but rather by the most powerful working-class party. The workers did not make decisions on matters that affected them. There were no experiments with other forms of democratic coordination (such as those discussed throughout the history of the socialist movement) which would have enabled the workers and the members of society to participate in defining claims to universality.

The bourgeois class can allow its internal differences to find expression by distributing power among several competing parties and political institutions. The left has so far contributed little to the development of a conception of the limitation of political power, or what Michel Foucault called a socialist art of government or governmentality. This is certainly one aspect that has contributed to its defeat. For when it comes to gathering together many different groups and interests under one concept of universality, then it is also necessary that all those involved are able to remove themselves from this alliance without being subjected to negative consequences. They must be able to anticipate this and expect to be able to present a modified, perhaps even different concept of the universal.

It is a very curious thing when people say that socialism has been discredited. Socialism occupies one of the deepest layers of modern society itself. A modern society based on capitalist methods of production would not exist without socialism. This society cannot be separated into an objective reality on the one side and different ideologies and political tendencies on the other, which would include not only liberalism and conservatism but also socialism, which, after it has destroyed its reputation, can then simply be cast aside. Even if there may have been socialisms before modern socialism just as there was class rule and the appropriation of the surplus product by those who did not produce it it was only constituted in modern capitalist society through a series of disputes. It is an aspect of the real movement of this society, not a value or norm that might be added externally to a given reality. Socialism is the name given to those internal tendencies in capitalist society that are necessary to solve the large problems of social development.

These large problems are historically new in this form, because humanity only comes to observe and understand itself as a collective actor under capitalism. People can analyse the exploitation of nature and the disturbance of the Earths metabolism. For example, they know all about fish numbers, oil reserves, the extent of rainforests or whale populations. They are able to understand that economic crises that lead to unemployment, hunger, or migration are not due to unexpected natural processes like a bad harvest, but are caused by humanity itself; they understand that inequality is the result of disparities in education and skills. Humanity is aware of genocides, the global trafficking of human beings, the approximate number of slaves and sexual violence. Each of these major problems calls for concrete solutions: not merely for incremental improvements here and there, but for the problems in each case individually to be surpassed. We need to reach a point where we no longer need to search for solutions, because the problems have simply become superfluous, since they ultimately no longer occur.

Why lump all these efforts together under one single name, the name of socialism? For historical reasons so as not to obstruct access to all the experiences and attempts made at emancipation; so as not to remain naive in the face of all the decisions that have led to the present and which have all contributed to making life better and worse at the same time. But also because socialism refers to a specific moment in modern history. It is the keystone of the whole that holds everything together, since it is constitutively at the beginning of the constellation of the modern, capitalist way of life: wage labour, which makes it possible to produce the historically unique form of social wealth in a specific way money, commodities, means of production, company shares, assets, real estate.

The wage form is the social form which makes it possible to reproduce all other forms of exploitation and domination. It is impossible to change capitalist relations without also changing these forms; in other words, without overcoming wage labour, which refers to the fact that human labour-power is a commodity that must be moulded for the labour market and must strive to find someone who has a need for this commodity at market prices. This entails all the risks for individuals, including being left without work and income, earning too little, or ruining our own ability to work and being unable to actually enjoy our lives.

If socialism appears to be discredited today, then we must count this as a defeat. In light of this, the question arises as to why anyone is happy that this is the case. Because the failure of socialism means the failure of the project of the Enlightenment itself. Understood in this way, it is a matter of people finding the courage to free themselves from their self-inflicted immaturity, that is, from conditions that they create through their own actions and that confront them again and again with the same problems at ever higher levels. Everything progresses except the whole is how Theodor Adorno describes this circumstance. In fact, there is something malicious to criticisms of socialism, since they often misjudge socialisms historical significance.

One of socialisms decisive characteristics is its claim to rationality. The contradictions that permeate society can be openly expressed and, by consciously addressing them, can be avoided, overcome, or transformed into differences and otherness. On the basis of this claim to rationality, all mistakes, all contradictions, all dysfunctions that arise during a transformation of the way of life of a society can be attributed to socialism. Yet this transformation is confronted with extreme forms of nonsynchronism: with regards to peoples level of knowledge and education, their needs, regional developments, the state of production and services, ecological destruction, as well as the production of new, rational cycles of production and consumption. The temporal horizon of socialist transformation is more expansive than that of capitalist processes: this applies both to the past and to the distant future.

The socialist project bears responsibility and must be held accountable for what it tried and what failed in its name. The same does not apply to capitalism. Admittedly, social criticism (particularly that of a left-wing and socialist stripe) attempts to attribute many of our societys problems to capitalism. But these efforts struggle to gain traction; and this is not because there are a host of intellectuals fighting against such an attribution, who work to prevent the formation of such an empty signifier in which violence, wars, and genocides, the destruction of human lives, exploitation, ecological catastrophes, the sexist and racist denigration of human beings is symbolically condensed into the ultimate, morally debased antagonist. Rather the defenders of capitalism point to the complexity of our society, which makes it difficult to attribute these social evils to any one cause.

Nobody seems responsible for the melting of the glaciers and polar ice caps, or if they are, we all are. When it comes to explaining the causes, everything seems to dissolve into a plethora of details: fossil fuels and related industries, agriculture, the automobile industry, container ships, and cruise liners. It all seems fragmented, unplanned, random, uncoordinated the trans-intentional result of many different chains of action for which there is no primary cause. Anyone who tries to identify causes and protagonists, however, is portrayed as lacking nuance or even influenced by conspiracy theories. But the processes are internally interlinked, coordinated, complement each other, and form a constellation. Yet the capitalist reproduction process appears to be an anonymous systemic process for which everyone and no one, and perhaps even the majority the subalterns bear responsibility.

In the socialist tradition, Marx managed to address this perspective most seriously. Despite the fact that via liberal ideas of equality and freedom, of autonomy and the will to justice, a moral criticism of owners of capital is quite plausible and had often been proposed, Marx emphasized that it was mistaken to attempt to morally reproach individual entrepreneurs, capital owners, or politicians. For it is precisely the immorality of social processes that provides the impetus for demanding a transformation of the overall context that is consciously shaped by all. With his remarks, Marx was also able to make it clear that anonymity is not so anonymous after all, since different degrees of freedom already exist in bourgeois, capitalist society.

The bourgeois class is far more capable of determining capitalist relations, of maintaining itself as a social group amidst these relations which it is always reshaping, and of maintaining and changing the relations in its favour than is possible for people who do not possess capital and do not have access to bourgeois consensus-building events such as the World Economic Forum, who are not able to determine public opinion through their media and their cultural industry, who are not included in political decision-making processes, but who are above all objects of administration and useful instruments for the enrichment of fewer and fewer. It is a characteristic of developed modern domination that the wealth of the rich and the power of the powerful appear to be the incidental result of the implementation of practical necessities that supposedly serve the good of all. Only complex conceptual abstractions and statistical studies shed light on the systematic relationships.

Is it even possible for socialism to be defeated and to fail? In her final text, written after the January uprising in 1919 and shortly before her assassination, Rosa Luxemburg answers this question in the negative. The whole path of socialism will be littered with defeats, writes Luxemburg (GS 4: 536f). It is necessary to reflect further on this claim. Strangely enough, for Luxemburg it is not a tragic circumstance, where an unrelenting logic necessarily leads to a hopeless situation. The course of history is driven by its negative side. Defeat is everything that does not contribute to a change in conditions in the sense of a change in the mode of production.

Accordingly, victory is by no means the triumphant victory in a battle, as is sometimes imagined, but the process of implementing a free organization of cooperation, the elements of which are always already present. In this respect, a historical failure is always a moment in an ongoing evolution of understanding and of shaping social relations. This enables the freedom of others, an increase in individualization, where the free development of each person is enabled by the freedom of all, thus creating a dynamic of a continual evolution of freedom, rather than the kind of zero-sum game of freedom that liberalism imagines, under which the freedom of one person can only come at the expense of other people. Such a socialist idea of freedom is only conceivable on the basis of cooperation. For only in cooperation that is, under conditions of a sophisticated division of labour can individuals achieve more and greater things than would ever be possible by themselves alone.

This article first published on the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung website.

Alex Demirovi has taught at various universities, including TU Berlin and Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. He is Senior Fellow of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, editor of the magazine LuXemburg and chairman of the scientific advisory board of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

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