In defence of obscenity.

Whenever you hear the prattle of 'Western values' you should recall Gandhi's words when asked what he thinks to Western civilisation: "I think it would be a good idea".

It's undeniable, Charlie Hebdo spewed a lot of filthy racist trash. However, free-speech should extend to precisely those people with despicable viewpoints; but it's odd that the West pretends it does so. If the French establishment did believe in free-speech then it wouldn't have criminalised Holocaust denial. The same can be said of other countries, if the UK government gives a damn about free-speech then it should ditch its crazy libel laws.

"If you believe in free-speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you dislike," said Noam Chomsky. It's clear much of Europe does not believe in freedom of speech for despicable views. In spite of the fact that the French Republic has long laid claim to the foundations of human rights and civil liberties, it does not act as if it is. It was only in July 2014 that the Hollande government banned the protests over the Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip. So much for freedom of speech.

Many liberals have been calling for the cartoons to be shown on the BBC and CNN as a kind of anti-clerical defiance. As Arthur Goldhammer argues, the satirists at Charlie Hebdo represented a provocative corner of mass-media in the tradition of gouaille. It's meant to be obscene, offensive and on the edges of acceptable opinion. Of course, this is less true of the Muhammad cartoons, which unites much of liberal Europe, than it is of the racist cartoons of the Chibok girls.

The right to free-speech, which may be limited at the point where violence is explicitly advocated, should be stretched as far as it can be. The right may not be the reason to say disgusting and offensive things, but it can't be policed on such grounds. Nevertheless, it is more in line with the Hebdo spirit to excoriate the magazine for its virulent caricatures than it is to embrace them as 'martyrs'. It's suspect that the magazine is celebrated in this way, and I think that the cartoonists would be suspicious of this process too.

What it seems to confirm is that the provocation of European Muslims really isn't that edgy and isn't repressed at all. The question we should be asking ourselves is: should this be the case? In Goldhammer's words: "To transform the shock of Charlie's obscenities into veneration of its martyrdom is to turn the magazine into the kind of icon against which its irrepressible iconoclasm was directed".


This is a separate observation to saying such views don't deserve protection. Free-speech never meant omnipresence, people have the right to express their viewpoint, no matter how vulgar, but we're not obliged to republish it (though I have here, so you can see what I mean). Just as if a neo-Nazi came into your home and put up a poster denying the Holocaust it's not a violation of free-speech for you to tear it down. Publications and public speech is another matter. The people advocating the Muhammad cartoons be shown on the BBC and CNN are looking for a fight. They want to normalise Charlie Hebdo rather than defend it as the filthy rag it is.

Notes on Charlie Hebdo.

As my friend Chris Horner posted on Facebook:

1. The Hebdo murders were despicable, disgusting, awful. The people who did it must be caught and dealt with - preferably in a courtroom. It seems now very likely they've been killed: I've no sympathy for them.

2. The killings prove nothing about Islam, religion, immigration, France etc. Anything you know now, you knew 48 hours ago.
3. The nature of the magazine is irrelevant to the points above. Whether its cartoons were nasty and racist all, some or none of the time is a completely separate point. The writers didn't deserve this. No one does.
4. It's not disloyal to their memory, nor is it to condone the killings to raise issues about the kinds of things our governments have done, and still do, that helped to contribute to the situation in which those murders occurred. And the question of Islamophobia is an entirely legitimate one in that context.
5. A lot of nasty racists on the right as well as a distinct group of nasty, extremist 'Islamists' have the shared goal of promoting a 'war of civilisations'. An assortment of miscellaneous commentators and opportunists are also sounding off in the usual manner, in ways that don't help us to avoid this. Don't pass on their virus of fear and hate.
6. Try to think rationally. Remember it's possible to hold more than one thought at the same time. Don't conflate things that are distinct, but don't deny the way things are connected either.
7. Remember that the vast majority of people are decent, and that the killers and the fanatics of all stripes are an amplified minority, and a tiny one at that. Stand up, not for 'our side' but for the universal that struggles to be visible in all this: help make it visible.

A master of everything.

The title of Bukowski’s second novel is actually stolen property, pilfered by English, like so many others, from Latin. The implications are worth noting for a factotum is a “master of everything” and in the case of Henry Chinaski this means not just repairing bicycles and factory work, it means gambling, drinking and womanising. Just as Karl Marx viewed production as a sensuous human activity, as much a part of our species-being as it is our alienation, Bukowski seems to take a more literal line – he is production.

Henry Chinaski makes his way across the States often desperately penniless and drunk. He works any job he can find and hangs his hat wherever he can. We follow Hank as he sleeps on park benches and rides the rails from place to place. The only thing going for him, in the world of work, is the time he can afford to sell and the sweat he can shed for meagre wage-packets. Inevitably Chinaski is propelled forward by crises. He never seems to hold onto anything for too long, whether it’s jobs or a place to stay. In a society where everyone is supposed to be middle-class, or working to be, Bukowski writes about the gutter and for the gutter.

All in all, I found Factotum (1975) was a much more focused piece of work than Post Office (1971). What do I mean by this? It doesn’t wander too far from its themes. Perhaps because the latter was the first completed book it was inevitably going to encompass a lot. Both read as aimless, staggering odysseys through American society. But it’s Factotum which takes aim at work.

To the reader Bukowski levels his anti-work ethos and prods and pokes the assumptions we hold about work and its demands on us. At one point Bukowski writes: “How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” It’s a good question.

In one chapter Henry loses his job and pushes the boss to make sure that he gets his welfare payments. He speaks as ‘the working-man’ here, not the poet of skid-row. The moment fits well. After all Bukowski stands out from the petty-bourgeois universalism of American society, – pretentions to meritocracy, individual liberty, and even democracy – it’s all up for grabs in this world. Chinaski is in one way an exemplar of the Protestant work ethic. He proves his father wrong by being able to go from job to job. But the story is hardly an advertisement for the ‘American Dream’.

Of course, the narcissism of the dirty old man is on show in the work. He’s both proud of his life as a working-class Joe, but he’s also imbued with self-love over his knowledge of just how worthless it all is. He feels he has profound insights to offer. And even as Hank leads a meaningless life, as we all surely do, his prose makes it meaningful. This is the heart of the heartless world.

Libya slips into a new civil war

In the midst of the ongoing civil strife, Libya’s Parliament fled to Tobruk in August and now resides aboard the Elyros, a Greek car ferry, on the eastern coast of Libya. Tobruk is a stronghold for the coalition of forces behind Operation Dignity, a counter-terror offensive launched in May by General Khalifa Haftar. Since the offensive was launched there has been sporadic fighting and instability as nationalist forces collided with Islamist militias in Benghazi.

The Islamist takeover of Tripoli and Benghazi may be understood as a reaction to this campaign. In July, Ansar al-Sharia declared an Islamic emirate in Benghazi, while fighting continues in Tripoli. Major foreign powers such as the US, the UK and France have withdrawn their diplomatic staff from the country. All of less than three years since the Libyan uprising turned into a revolution and then a civil war in which NATO intervened on the side of the Benghazi rebels.

An important factor could be the fear of a repeat of General Sisi’s coup in Egypt last year. The Sisi government has set out to repress the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in Egypt and similarly the secular nationalists of Libya oppose the influence of the MB in their country. General Haftar has attempted to overthrow civilian rule on more than one occasion in the recent past. As such, the possibility of a coup in Libya is not at all far-fetched given the country’s history and the fragility of its civil institutions.

Libya’s body politic is dislocated as the General National Council (GNC) was disbanded last month in favour of the Council of Deputies, the latter being dominated by liberals and federalists, the former remaining predominantly Islamist. The GNC has continued to act as a power centre in spite of the fact that it has been officially disbanded and lacks UN recognition. The elections to the Council of Deputies left Islamists isolated and this may be an important factor leading up to their takeover of Tripoli.

Voter turnout in the Council of Deputies election in July 2014 came to just 18%, down from 60% turnout in the 2012 elections. "I didn't bother to register this time around, and that should tell you everything," said Mohammed Abu Baker, a Libyan student. "My friends were killed in the revolution, we paid in blood for this democracy, but what was the result of the election?"

In early August, Libya appointed its sixth post-Gadaffi head of state, Aguila Saleh Issa, and by the end of the month Prime Minister Abdullah al-Thani resigned in a bid to quell the power struggle. The recognised legislative body of Libya moved its proceedings to Tobruk as it became untenable to remain within reach of the Islamists. Meanwhile the GNC claims its own President Nouri Abusahmain and Prime Minister Omar al-Hasi. Neither claims are recognised internationally, but the centre of power remains contested.

Last week, Sheikh Sadiq al-Ghariani, the Grand Mufti of Libya, fled the UK amidst accusations that he had influenced the Islamist takeover of Tripoli International Airport from his home in Devon via his website. He had been appointed Grand Mufti in 2011 for the religious support he had lent to the revolution against the Gaddafi regime. He has since taken the side of the Islamist militias, in particular the Libya Dawn coalition, against the civilian government and competing factions.

This seems to signify a common problem facing the Maghreb in particular and the Arab world more generally. Arab nationalism has ceased to be the leading political force, leaving the ground clear for alternatives such as political Islam. The revolutionary wave of 2011 has as yet brought little in the way of new politics to the region, instead creating a vacuum where nationalism once was. Now that vacuum has opened the door for another civil war.

This article was originally published at The World Weekly on September 11, 2014.

Dumbing Down.

There was a good piece in The Guardian by Frank Furedi on the effects of Gove's reforms on the way philosophy is being taught in colleges and sixth forms across the country. As I fell for philosophy as an A-level student I can't help but take an interest in the substance of the reforms. From what Furedi writes these reforms are not a step forwards:

 

Tragically, the draft philosophy syllabus offers an intellectually inferior version of the old. Some of the most intellectually stimulating questions of the existing curriculum disappear, such as that on free will, as does political philosophy. A new compulsory philosophy of religion topic – which counts for 50% of the AS course – suggests a reorientation towards the teaching of RE.

What's most disturbing is that the text disappears, to be replaced by an online anthology of extracts. Why? According to the draft syllabus, to provide "greater clarity on the content so that teachers are clear about what they need to teach". The impulse to remove a teacher's capacity to make judgment calls threatens to turn what has been an exciting intellectual adventure into an exercise in box-ticking. In line with this pedagogical orientation, the assessments have been revised to cater for a more intellectually light curriculum.

The revised assessment appears relatively indifferent to the integrity of philosophical knowledge. The draft says the methods of assessment "focus clearly on the core skills of philosophy". The language of skills and instrumentalism dominates this syllabus. The draft responds to the question, "Why choose philosophy?" with the answer: because "students will develop and refine a range of transferable skills". Philosophy, which originally meant the love of wisdom and which many regard as a guide to life, is now rebranded as the bearer of transferable skills.

 

Of course, I'm not at all hostile to the teaching of philosophy of religion (or as a subject in itself), but I am suspicious of any attempt to depoliticise philosophy in this way. I would view moral philosophy as the vital component, with political philosophy as a continuation of ethics by other means. That's no reason to leave out the God question, of course, and there's no reason why they can't be taught alongside each other. Some would argue that these changes are towards the more juicy end of philosophy of religion. That's not the key problem. It's the depoliticisation coupled with dumbing down (in the form of the raised dependence on extracts) which I'm opposed to. The emphasis on the philosophy of religion may be a crude attempt to supplant politics with moralism. This is the grass-roots impact of Gove's neoconservative agenda.

The tension in education policy has always been between the impetus for critical thinking and the need to churn out well-equipped consumers/workers. The enlightened citizen is far from the ideal of educational policy. If you swing too far towards the latter you end up with high-performing automatons and no innovation. A populace can be too deferential and obedient to the point of stagnation. And, of course, you can run into serious trouble if you find yourself with excess innovation. It could be argued that that was precisely what happened in the 1960s when the post-war generation began to question the Establishment and its authority on a whole series of questions. Education policy will oscillate within this spectrum to try and strike a balance of opening a space for innovation in one area while closing such a space elsewhere.

Far from anything new, we can now properly situate Gove in this bipolar shuffle and this is no matter of speculation. Before Michael Gove was an MP he worked for The Times as a columnist (writing at £5,000 a month for a column he churned out in an hour) and he was not shy about his views on a lot of issues. On the tuition fees set by the Blair government Gove wrote "Some people will, apparently, be put off applying to our elite institutions by the prospect of taking on a debt of this size. Which, as far as I’m concerned, is all to the good." A good education is conceived of as a commodity and, in Gove's mind, it is too readily available to the lesser classes. It's a vision in line with the view taken by Allan Bloom, a fellow neoconservative, that the masses are to be moulded by the ideas of the few great men. The bewildered herd are to be kept in check.

So I think we may risk the suggestion that Gove doesn't mean well when he guts the humanities of innovative capacity. Even the A-level course I took in philosophy, which Furedi foolishly romanticises, actually had political content in the second year. At AS we looked at epistemology, ethics, tolerance, and aesthetics, then at A2 we looked at moral philosophy in greater depth and finally political philosophy. That meant normative and meta for moral thought. Then we moved onto reading JS Mill. On Liberty has its flaws (which the English are impervious to conceding) but the students could at least develop a perspective on its content. So we could then decide whether or not we buy into Mill's utilitarian brand of classical liberalism. You would think Gove would be for this sort of thing. Instead we find the syllabus is being debauched even more than it already had been. 

Censorship isn't the whole story.

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Autocritique: Islam, Europe & Democracy.

My very first blogpost was an article on the British refusal to let Geert Wilders enter the country and to be received by Parliament where his film would then be shown. Later Mr Wilders was allowed into the country, to great controversy, given his own views of Islam as a ‘fascist ideology’. At the time I took the line that it would be much better if Lord Nazir Ahmed didn’t push for Wilders to be blocked from presenting the film. Rather Lord Ahmed should’ve challenged him and defeated Wilders in his claims about Islam, it’s not as though the film’s message is difficult to refute. He equates terrorism with the Quran pushing aside the collapse of Arab nationalism which led to the emergence of radical Islamism. Never mind the legitimate grievances of Muslims, not only the atrocities committed against Muslims in Palestine and Chechnya, but in former Yugoslavia as well. Nothing to do with the hundreds of thousands dead in Iraq either.

 

It still seems clear that if Geert Wilders had been allowed to enter then he could have been defeated in debate. I think that would have been constructive. My stance on this particular issue is not a part of a general position on free speech. It’s not a reflection of any bias towards the reactionary Right in its bid to further marginalise Muslims in Europe. So I would maintain the position I took up to that point. But I should reassess the following claims and implications in my article: 1) Lord Ahmed has a responsibility to adequately represent British Muslims, 2) the assumption that the Muslim population of Britain is a problem community; 3) any implication that if we don't listen to Wilders we'll have fascism on our hands. It's these aspects of my article which I wish to address here.

1. As Lord Ahmed was never elected we shouldn't hold him to the responsibilities of an elected representative and, in actuality, we should be opposed to the position he holds. It's not that Lord Ahmed poses any threat to democracy, it's that the UK doesn't have much of a democracy in the first place. We're a constitutional monarchy and, principally, I would favour a secular republic with a much more democratic form of government. So we should be asking deeper questions and not presupposing a present existing democratic system. We should ask why British Muslims don't have enough representation and head from there. Ahmed could not pose as such a representative even if he wanted to. Nevertheless, I would add that Lord Ahmed welcomed Israel Shamir to Britain and he has little ground to stand on to block Wilders from coming here.

2. It is the case that British Muslims are too often put on the spot to defend their religion. The expectation is that the British Muslim community have to prove themselves as loyal citizens. Instead of a presumption of innocence and loyalty, we have a presumption of guilt and disloyalty. I'm ashamed to say that I wasn't always immune to the mass hysteria which came with the 'War on Terror'. Actually the Muslims in the UK have nothing to prove. The 'clash of civilizations' thesis is a farce which was spawned by a mediocre squirrel-scholar. The facts are that the major allies of the US and the UK in the Muslim world have long included authoritarian regimes and continue to do so. The 'clash' is a convenient narrative. We claim to back democracy in Iraq while we support theocracy in Saudi Arabia. Muslims and non-Muslims alike are right to be critical of this.

3. There is no likelihood of a Fourth Reich popping up in the next few years. Nor was there such a possibility in 2009 when I was writing of the need to ward-off the BNP threat. There is a long-term threat of neo-fascist groups which we have to deal with. Geert Wilders is a manageable threat – just another political whore – as containable a toxin as Nigel Farage (until quite recently). The opposition to his arrival only served to strengthen his Janus-faced persona as a defender of freedom and advocate of banning scripture. He defends individual freedom, except when you want to migrate (if you're a Muslim), if you want to wear a veil, if you want to read the Quran, and so on. The threat we face is twin-headed, humanitarian liberalism and cultural nationalism converge. Wilders is not a fascist, he actually comes from the market liberal tradition; yet he is increasingly aligned with proto-fascists and has now climbed into bed with Marine Le Pen.

The battleground is not just a marginal one which we can block off easily. It is a matter of challenging and undermining the status quo, where we find even progressive liberals effectively take the side of nationalists and reactionaries. The very people we would expect to guard the liberal flame of human rights and civil liberties are no longer trustworthy. Just as the social democrats of most European states have now become the enemies of what is left of social democracy. The difference is that this isn't a matter of preservation (as there was never much there in the first place).

Chomsky on Pornography.

This is one of the more maligned of Chomsky's interviews on YouTube. My own view is that we need a more sophisticated debate on pornography, as an industry, and economic model, rather than falling into the dichotomy between free-choice liberalism and moralistic calls for censorship. I don't think Chomsky's perspective falls into either of the above, but I think it falls short of acknowledging the complexity of the issue at hand. Even if we eliminated conditions of degradation and humiliation it wouldn't rule out the possibility of pornographic production beyond such conditions.

Europe's problem with Muslims.

Now Marine Le Pen has stated that there should be no 'special treatment' for Muslims (and by extension Jews) with school meals. Either they eat pork, or they starve. This isn't to be understood as in isolation. As some of you may have read the Danish have banned halal and kosher slaughter on the grounds of animal rights. Of course, this is just another event in a long procession of bans in Europe. The French government banned the veil in public places, the Swiss government banned minarets, then there was the Cologne ruling against circumcision in 2012, and the 2013 ban on halal and kosher slaughter in Poland. This is at the same time as we've seen calls for the Qur'an to be banned from Dutch politician Geert Wilders. He has found common cause with other self-described 'counter-jihadists' such as Le Pen. We've had a recurring debate about whether Islam is compatible with 'Western' culture. Britain routinely has a debate over whether or not to ban the veil, with similar debates on halal meat and circumcision taking place with less frequency.

We should ask ourselves some stark questions about all of this. No Muslim country has invaded or occupied a 'Western' or European state in recent decades. To the contrary, the UK and the US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and occupied leaving more than a million people dead. The vast majority killed have been civilians and no doubt most of them have been Muslims. The French were totally on board with the NATO intervention in Libya which left thousands dead, just as they also wanted to bomb Syria as US allies Turkey and Israel had already done. This is at the same time that the governments of the US and Western Europe continue to support dictatorships across the Arab and Muslim world. So the idea that there is a 'clash of civilisations' is somewhat absurd, mainly because it's rightists who want such a war. As for European Muslims, here's an excerpt from Yehouda Shenhav:

I would like to go back for a minute to what was known in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century as the "Jewish problem," and to the debates of Jewish emancipation. The debates were originally stirred by a Prussian government effort to extend an identical status to all Jews under its rule; in 1841, it released a draft law concerned with the need for maintaining "the wondrous essence" of the Jews without "intervening with the Christian state." Bruno Bauer wrote that, in a state where Christianity was the official religion, Jews could not be truly emancipated. Religious freedom necessitates the privatization of religion and eschewing it away from the public sphere, but Judaism, being a religion of (public) law rather than of faith, cannot be reduced into a "private religion."

Just as Judaism is a public religion Islam can be understood in these terms as well and liberal societies cannot easily integrate such religious groups into atomised chambers of individual rights and freedoms. The pre-Enlightenment communitarian values of Judaeo-Islamic culture reach beyond the limits of individualism, as such an identity and tradition cannot easily be relegated to a private space. This is where multiculturalism entered as a liberal option of opening up a space for newly settled cultures within the liberal framework. But this has been a beleaguered idea since it first appeared. This is how we are to understand the calls to ban the veil, minarets, and so on. It's no coincidence that the anti-Muslim racism of today can easily overlap with anti-Semitism. This is what bans on circumcision and halal slaughter demonstrate so well. The European fascist parties now have a new means of reinstating old anti-Jewish measures as a programme for defending 'our culture' from imaginary Muslim hordes.

Over the last decade we've witnessed the legitimation of anti-Muslim hatred across Europe in various forms. The actions Breivik undertook can only be understood with this background. The Far-Right used to claim Communism was the Jewish plot to destroy European nationhood, now they claim the Left (and the Jews, no doubt!) are working to flood Europe with Muslims and impose Islamic law in order to destroy 'Western' civilisation. This was the essence of Breivik's ideology: multiculturalism, feminism, and 'political-correctness', are a "cultural Marxist" affront to European nations and their traditional culture. I've covered the growth of this theory among neo-fascists before. It should concern all of us, especially as anti-Muslim hatred is increasingly normalised by the very same liberal intelligentsia who are meant to be the custodians of liberal democratic values.

"If you believe in free-speech, you believe in free-speech for people you dislike."

I've been thinking about the limits of free-speech for quite some time. The case of Robert Faurisson and the position taken by Noam Chomsky is instructive. I suspect the only clear limits on speech are where such speech could encourage violence, and that in itself is still an area of debate, it is at least closer to a clear line. Under this measure statements which call for people to be killed may be restricted, but not statements which are merely offensive.

Hipster Awareness.

I have to be honest. I had no idea what a 'Hipster' was four or five years ago. I was soon alerted to their existence by the Dickhead song of 2010 and since then I have been pretty conscious of Hipsterdom, or at least what we think it is. Ever since I have seen them everywhere and everyone has a disdainful remark to make regarding them. It's worth looking into the history of subcultures to really situate the hipster. Adam Curtis churned out an interesting article on his blog in time for the Mayoral election of 2012. He focused on Norman Mailer, who had been an early proponent and self-described 'Hipster' in the 1950s and 60s. He deemed it a culture of outsiders first pioneered by Black Americans in response to racial oppression, they were the original outsiders, only to overtaken by 'white negroes' as the outsider culture was co-opted. Curtis refers us to this section of Mailer's writing:

"In such places as Greenwich Village a menage-a-trois was completed - the bohemian and the 'juvenile delinquent' came face to face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life. If marijuana was the wedding ring, the child was the language of Hip for its argot gave expression to abstract states of feeling which all could share, at least all who were Hip. And in the wedding of the white and the black it was the Negro who brought the cultural dowry. 

So there was a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man's code to fit their facts. The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro." 

This seems a far cry from the blokes in Shoreditch somehow. You might want to read Rob Horning's piece if you want something more up to scratch. One suspects the Hipster has come a long way since then, and yet Curtis goes on to tell us:

Mailer also pointed out that this new breed of "psychic outlaw" could be equally a candidate for the most reactionary or the most radical of political movements. And in the film there is a fascinating scene where Mailer takes on the trades unions on one of the avenues in New York. He tells them that in the past they were a heroic movement - but that now they have become a repressive, stultifying force in society - in particular in the way they are refusing to allow blacks and hispanics to move up society. It is an odd moment because as you watch you realise that it was elements of this rebellious individualism that both Thatcher and Reagan would later harness. And that possibly, if the left had got hold of it earlier, then the history of the West might have been very different.

Last year I found another video from Mike Rugnetta on YouTube about Hipsterdom. What provokes hatred against the Hipsters is that they don't disavow what every other subculture do, e.g. that their scene is made up of performance Hipsters wear things for irony whereas Punks and Goths and even wannabe gangsters claim a certain dress code, slang, music and mindset to be authentic to their scene. Actually sticking drawing pins through your flesh or leaving the sticker on your cap is about as 'authentic' as Hipsters are in buying over-sized glasses and growing funny beards. Rugnetta suggests it's a matter of cultural capital, and people feel the flippant appropriation of features of fashions undermines the value of the trend. But that still seems incoherent. The reasons to undertake a certain action are inseparable from it to some extent, but not substantial enough to change the content of the action and its significance. The reasons people smoke are not significant enough to change smoking and its consequences.

Gore Vidal and the Swingers.

As a Vidalophile I'm currently reading Myra Breckenridge (1968), a book Gore described as a masterpiece in bad-taste, which has been good fun so far and I foresee much more fun in this wonderful satire written at the apogee of the sexual revolution. The lead character, of whom the novel is named after, sets out to smash traditional masculinity, or in so many words:

I believe in justice, I want redress for all wrongs done, I want the good life - if such a thing exists - accessible to all. Yet, emotionally, I would be only too happy to become world dictator, if only to fulfil my mission: the destruction of the last vestigial traces of traditional manhood in the race in order to realign the sexes, thus reducing population while increasing human happiness and preparing humanity for its next stage.

One wonders how much of Vidal is in Myra. Of course, the author created the protagonist so it is natural for one to bleed into another and possibly vice versa. I bet a lot of the sex and drugs of the book comes out of the author's own lived-experience (he's said to have bedded more than 2,000). Gore had bought into Malthusian fantasies of overpopulation, so does Breckenridge. Gore was suspicious of Freudianism and traditional moralism in almost equal spades, so we find the same in Breckenridge. The work is littered with all of this. In a later passage Breckenridge weighs up the cultural mythology against the socio-economic reality when it comes to masculinity:

On the one hand, they must appear to accept without question our culture's myth that the male must be dominant, aggressive, woman-oriented. On the other hand, they are perfectly aware that few men are anything but slaves to an economic and social system that does not allow them to knock people down as proof of virility or in any way act out the traditional role. As a result, the young men compenstate by playing at being men, wearing cowboy clothes, boots, black leather, attempting through clothes (what an age for the fetishist!) to impersonate the kind of man our society claims to admire but swiftly puts down should he attempt to be anything more than an illusionist, playing a part.

As this is a chapter in which the protagonist attends an orgy, the man born Eugene Luther writes:

It is the wisdom of the male swinger to know what he is: a man who is socially and economically weak, as much put upon by women as by society. Accepting his situation, he is able to assert himself through a polymorphic sexual abandon in which the lines between the sexes dissolve, to the delight of all. I suspect that this may be the only workable pattern for the future...

He goes on to remark that the 'rigid old-fashioned masculinity' is bound to end in either "defeat or frustration". Who can blame him for this conclusion? It's somewhat obvious in retrospect. Perhaps it was much less obvious in 1968 when the old conventions seemed to be approaching a precipice in the minds of so many optimists. It made me laugh, but it also reminded me of those swinger ads from the Sixties posted by Sabotage Times about a month ago.

Progress under Capitalism.

 

1.1 Materialisation of 'History as Progress'

 

The writings of Karl Marx can be understood in a historic-philosophical context that is specifically post-Enlightenment in a number of ways. One of the ways is that Marx seems to still adhere to a kind of historical progressivism. The idea of progress was around long before the Enlightenment, but it gained greater momentum during that time. As a concept progress became bound up with the emancipation of mankind from subservience and superstition. It was a matter of the expansion of scientific knowledge for many. Condorcet and Kant proclaimed progress as a trajectory of increasing reflexive self-awareness, on a cultural and not just individual level. Kant went further to reference to a 'hidden plan of nature' to bring about 'the sole state in which all of humanity's natural capacities can be developed'.[1] Progress has been taken as an uninterruptible evolution in its historic guise; the idea took hold strongly as human interventions began finally to displace the fatalistic acceptance of providence. This adherence to history as progress has manifested itself in terms of political change, technological advancement and even moral questions.

It may be said that the materialist conception of history was a transformation of Hegel’s historicism as a necessary step in Marx’s development of an analysis of capitalism. In Hegel's work we find its most emphatic version, since the real is rational and the rational is real all philosophy sets itself the task of revealing the gradual triumph of reason in all departments of cultured and social life.[2] In the subversion of Hegel's diagnosis of the seamless unfolding of universal reason Marx invoked a materialist conception of history. In this schema, we might say, progress is taken as an emergent emancipation through the realisation of hitherto-suppressed human potentiality and the control of our natural environment.

The integral role of revolution and schism is an objective liberality to the historical process. This could be understood as progress in teleological terms: as a more or less vital journey onwards (from feudalism to capitalism) and upwards (socialism on from capitalism) to a universally redemptive end (communism). Whether or not this historicism should be taken as teleological is a matter which we will explore later. Before we go any further we must first clarify the full quote referred to in the title and its context in Marx's project:

 

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.^[3]

 

This is an excerpt from a section of the Communist Manifesto focused on bourgeois and proletarians. The same section itself opens with the words “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” before elaborating that the modern bourgeois society had sprouted from the ruins of feudal society. That same burgeoning new order had failed to purge itself of the class struggle. In the place of the obliterated means to and forms of oppression the bourgeois epoch has only imposed its own. Yet the ambiguity in Marx’s analysis of capitalism is that he found revolutionary prospects in the universalization of the capitalist system, for he saw the obliteration of the old feudal order and the successive bourgeois liberal society as an advance upon what had existed before it.^[4]  He denoted the bourgeoisie as having played ‘a most revolutionary part’ in history in its capacities for rapid development, its rise hastened by the colonisation of America and exploitation of the East Indian and Chinese markets.^[5]  Marx attributes accomplishments to the bourgeoisie “far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades.”^[6]  In this framework the bourgeoisie cannot exist without revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, in doing so the relations of society as a whole are transformed.

This revolution of the productive forces in its ability to bulldoze away all the old social conditions only to wipe away the new forms before they can become ossified. By these same processes the bourgeoisie circumvents barbarism and draws all countries into civilisation in its pursuit of greater expansion.^[7] This same process of expansion and growth requires as a necessary part of itself the extraction and accumulation of surplus value from the constant toiling of the proletariat. Karl Marx was well aware of the immense cost of this progression, he spent much of his life in critical engagement with the structures of exploitation as well as in political movements looking to overturn those same structures. In Eagleton's words Marx was neither a naïve progressivist nor a total pessimist about the world-historical situation in this sense.[8] It's more like Marx saw historical progress as inseparably from its often horrific costs. The circumvention of immediate obstacles to greater advances had brought not just improvements but limitations to those steps forward.

 

1.2 Species-Being and Directionality

 

For Marx and Engels, capitalism was not only the most dynamic economic model after all of its predecessors it was also just another transient form of exploitation – it was not itself the culmination of all history as progress. The four progressive epochs, in Cohen’s terms, may be designated as 1) pre-class society in which there is no surplus, 2) pre-capitalist class society where there is a growing surplus, which is still less than the reasonably high surplus generated by 3) capitalist society; and finally the enormous material surplus of 4) post-class society.[9] Each stage in this sequence gradually, if not suddenly and violently, supersedes its predecessor only to give way to another stage. In the world-historical situation this process is dialectical in that every advance achieved comes with its own limitations. In his magnum opus Marx takes an aside to comment on his own use of dialectics:

 

My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea’. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.[10]

 

From this we might be justified in concluding that Marx had abandoned his earlier stances as a Young Hegelian. Yet it may be said that Marx was really engaged in the materialisation of Hegel’s framework, to move it from the realm of ideas to the material. Marx goes on to add after this paragraph that it is the “mystifying side” of Hegel’s dialectic which he has long criticised and, less directly, it is that mystification which he seeks to get away from. Marx describes himself as the “pupil of that mighty thinker” before affirming the dialectic as ‘working’ in a manner not mystifying in its Hegelian form.[11] Famously Marx remarks “With [Hegel] it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”[12] He notes that the dialectic became the height of fashion in Germany insofar as its mysticism was effectively conservative as Hegel glorified the ‘existing state of things’. Towards the end of the 1873 preface Marx stresses that the dialectic in its rational form stands as an ‘abomination to bourgeoisdom’.[13] This is so as the dialectic, as he employs it, includes not just the comprehension and recognition of the current epoch but acknowledges its transience and its ‘inevitable breaking-up’. In short, the dialectic reveals the fluidity of society’s development and in doing so may function to destabilise its claims to an unchanging solidity.

If we are to take Lenin’s word and see Marxism as a body of thought in its consummative unity of English economics, French politics and German philosophy, then we may view this materialisation as a transformation of these key areas.[14] We may trace the emergence of this in Marx's early work. In the Holy Family as part of comments on idealist conceptions of history Marx stresses “Just as according to old teleologists plants exist to be eaten by animals and animals by men, history exists in order to serve as the act of consumption of theoretical eating – proving. Man exists so that history may exist and history exists so that the proof of truths may exist.”[15] Noting that Hegel positions his own history, its speculative and esoteric elements, within an empiric and exoteric history, Marx goes on to write that the “history of mankind becomes the history of the abstract spirit of mankind, a spirit beyond all man!”[16] In this way we find Marx looking at the Hegelian framework as limited in its preoccupation with the ideational. It was this that would later lead Marx to embrace materialism over idealism. That isn't to say the Hegelian strain in Marx ends at the dialectic.

As Alasdair MacIntyre observes, the importance of the concept of freedom runs from Hegel into Marx in that it is conceived in each as the overcoming of the limitations and constraints of one social order by hastening the arrival of a less limited order.[17] Hegel had written of freedom that “this very idea itself is the actuality of men – not something which they have, as men, but which they are.”[18] Marx saw human freedom as so essential that even the opponents of freedom realise it and furthermore “No man fights freedom; he fights at most the freedom of others.”[19] Where Hegel interprets those limitations and constraints as primarily the limitations and constraints of a conceptual scheme Marx does not. It is this that distinguishes the materialists from the idealists. The social order is constituted not in ideational but in material form, its prevailing mode of production specifically. Its possibilities and limitations are constituted in the prevailing form of production in that social order.

As MacIntyre notes the forms of labour will vary in accordance with the available technologies, how labour is divided (if at all) and the consequent split of society into masters and labourers in turn producing classes.[20] The conflict between classes is inherent to the mode and relations of production, its contradictions and sudden twists a necessary consequence of the development of the productive forces. MacIntyre notes that the conceptual schemes with which people grasp their own society have a duality of roles: revealing the nature of that activity while at the same time concealing its true character.[21] The critique of concepts and the struggle to transform society are necessarily connected, albeit with variation on that relation over time. In the materialist conception of history Marx replaces the self-development of the Absolute Idea with the socio-economic history of class. In this way Marx transforms the Hegelian conception of individuality, finding its hindrances and advances (which Hegel attributes to conceptual schemes) only comprehensible as part of an analysis of class society.

Consciousness would not be understood in terms of a formative impetus on life, famously for Marx it is life that determines consciousness.[22] In this way the emphasis ought to be on the material conditions and economic formations which constitute the historical epoch. Naturally then Marx worked to demystify political economy. All the while Marx stressed that the mode of production known as capitalism has its own historicity, it is just as transient as the previous forms of society. Marx went as far as to deem the whole of, what we could call, history as 'pre-history', for it is only a record of one exploitative system after another: slavery, feudalism, capitalism.[23] Accordingly the only truly 'historic' act in Marx's mind would be to break with this succession of variations on exploitation. To break with this long record of miserable toil would mean bringing into fruition an epoch wherein the possibilities of self-realisation are as unencumbered as possible. Notably sparse on this matter Marx did have this to say about the end of pre-history and what communism would look like:

 

Within communist society, the only society in which the original and free development of individuals ceases to be a mere phrase, this development is determined precisely by the connection of individuals, a connection which consists partly in the economic prerequisites and partly in the necessary solidarity of the free development of all, and, finally, in the universal character of the activity of individuals on the basis of the existing productive forces.[24]

 

Wilde argues that Marx shares with Aristotle the view that the elements of human essence are sociality and rationality – the exercise of these capacities are what make us human.[25] Primarily Aristotle was concerned with the self-development of citizens, the refinement of virtue through practice, requiring the opportunity to contemplate truth to achieve eudaimonia. Marx saw more in human essence than just the capacity for reason, the distinction of humanity from other animals is in the capacity for productive creativity and mastery over nature. Species-being referring to the human capacity to transform the environment around them. The world can be shaped through the practical engagements of humankind, partly leading to greater and greater self-knowledge. In class society, human beings are left alienated from what we produce and thus cannot understand its species-being.[26] Furthermore, Wilde argues that, the directionality of historical development for Marx lies with the self-realisation of human essence – it is its telos – and only after the overthrow of capitalism can human beings find their social creativity realised in communism.[27]

 

2.3 The Limits of Emancipation

 

The historian Eric Hobsbawm noted that “the world transformed by capitalism which [Marx] described in 1848, in passages of dark, laconic eloquence, is recognisably the world of the early twenty-first century.”[28] It was this prescience demonstrated the Manifesto – for the rising tide of neoliberal globalisation especially – which may lead us to conclude that the analysis of capitalism drafted by Marx and Engels can’t be dismissed easily even more 150 years since it was first written. At the time of writing, Marx and Engels attributed much greater industrial accomplishments to the capitalist system than were actually achieved. By 1850 the world produced no more than 71,000 tons of steel, with almost 70% being produced in Britain, and it had built less than 24,000 miles of railroads with two-thirds of these in Britain and the United States.[29] It was inaccurate of the possibilities of the world, if not most of Europe, in the nineteenth century and the globalisation of capitalism has only been achieved after a long and contorted journey. It is vital not to overlook the fact that Marx has definitely not been proven right in all of his predictions and expectations. Most infamously in the prediction that the capitalist system will, inevitably, produce its own ‘gravedigger’, in its creation of the proletariat and transformation of productive relations through a period of primitive accumulation, and driving the class struggle to a revolutionary conclusion.

The implications of the way Marx theorised of capitalism as a historically transient stage are huge. After all the breakdown of pre-capitalist formations of class society to give way to capitalist class society does not bring the process to a close. As each stage advances it brings with it limitations. This means that the transformative capacities of capitalism can be evaluated and not just described in historicist terms. This is where the distinction Marx made between political and human emancipation may have great relevance. Marx came to this distinction in his exchange with Bruno Bauer on the issue of Jewish emancipation. Bauer had taken the position that it was religion that was the barrier to emancipation. The Jews couldn't be emancipated politically, e.g. granted rights, until they ceased to be Jews, given that the state should retain its secularity it cannot concede space to forms of identity to any religion. Instead Marx argues that the political emancipation of European Jewry is possible, compatible and preferable within a liberal framework to the religious-states of Europe at the time. As Jonathan Wolff notes, Marx makes a central contribution to the criticism of liberal societies in his distinction between political and human emancipation.[30] It’s on this distinction that Marx rests his argument writing that “The political emancipation of the Jew, the Christian, and religious man in general implies the emancipation of the state from Judaism, Christianity, and religion in general. The state as state emancipates itself from religion in the manner peculiar to its own nature by emancipating itself from the state religion, i.e. by not recognising, as a state, any religion, by affirming itself simply as a state. Political emancipation is not the completed and consistent form of religious emancipation because political emancipation is not the completed and consistent form of human emancipation.”[31]

Marx argues that the abolition of religion does not undo the ills of religion, nor is it an end-all solution to society's problems. Secularism is not in itself emancipatory, while liberal societies offer political emancipation it is only to separate social groups into atomised individuals with sets of rights and liberties to protect them from others. In turn this serves to undermine the prospects of human emancipation; it puts up the barriers to solidarity. As Wolff notes, the right to private property leads men to limit their own freedom.[32] The continuing existence of religion is more than compatible in this liberal framework. He gestures to the United States as an example of a republic with a separation between church and state that has always had a large population of religiously observant citizens. As Wolff concludes, the major point is that we have to get beyond liberal society and abolish the gap between the state and civil society.[33] Political emancipation in the form of rights is not the end of all forms of oppression and certainly not of exploitation under capitalism. The bestowing of rights is not the means to solving the problem of alienation. For Marx it is only emancipation from the conditions of the market system which will answer that qualm.

Against human emancipation Marx contrasts its liberal precursor political emancipation as the “reduction of man, on the one hand to a member of civil society, an egoistic and independent individual, on the other hand to a citizen, a moral person.” As we have seen previously, these words may well presuppose an evaluative criterion in Marx's thinking which holds human fulfilment and realisation in the highest of priorities. Liberalism falls short in its devotion to bourgeois freedom and the free-market, bringing with it new forms of unfreedom and servitude. Marx writes “The limitations of political emancipation are immediately evident in the fact that a state can liberate itself from a limitation without man himself being truly free of it and the state can be a free state without man himself being a free man.”[34] He advocates the emancipation of the Jews in political terms of rights, as that would be a significant step forward, while at the same time he has no illusions about the limitations which will come from this advance. This is all in line with the dialectic process by which freedom unfolds over time laid out in Hegel’s work.

We might just as well look at the steps made toward political emancipation of African-Americans may have made them citizens rather than slaves, but they are still enduring the alienating conditions of capitalism. The example of the abolition of slavery was one that Marx was familiar with. He and Engels were vocal supporters of Abraham Lincoln. The American Civil War as a struggle between pre-capitalist class society where there is a growing surplus and the forces of a burgeoning capitalist society. The war between the Union and the Confederacy is understood in terms of a struggle by the impulse of emergent capitalism towards industrialisation and away from agrarian formations. The preservation of the Union required the transformation of the forces and relations of production in conjunction with a victory over the secessionists. Marx believed the war would open the way toward the revolutionary path of free, self-owning labour, and eventually hasten the advent of a post-capitalist society. When Lincoln was re-elected Marx and Engels wrote to him “If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.”[35] Before going on to add that “the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class.”[36]

Elsewhere, Engels elaborated “Once slavery, the greatest shackle on the political development of the United States, has been broken, the country is bound to receive an impetus from which it will acquire a different position in world history.”[37] Just as the American War of Independence initiated a period of middle-class ascendancy, Marx hoped, the Civil War would open a period of working-class ascendancy.[38] The abolition of slavery was framed in this way as a necessary step for the American working-class to attain ‘true freedom’ as well as to support the side of the European working-classes. Slavery was an obstacle to the furtherance of capitalism that had to be shaken off if capitalism were to be overcome. In Marx’s own words “this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.”[39] With all of this in light we might be justified in seeing Marx as an adherent to a form of historical progressivism. It should also be clear that this isn’t the end of the story.



Next: Moral Objectivity in History

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[1] Edgar, A; Sedgwick, P; Key Concepts in Cultural Theory (Routledge, 1999) pg.311-312

[2] Marx, K; Capital v.1 (1873 Preface | Dover Publications Inc., New York, 1906) pg.25-26

[3] Marx, K; The Manifesto of the Communist Party (The Revolutions of 1848 | Verso, 2010) pg.71

[4] Teschke, B; Marxism (The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, edited by Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal, Oxford University Press) pg.163-170

[5] Marx, K; The Manifesto of the Communist Party (The Revolutions of 1848 | Verso, 2010) pg.68-71

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Eagleton, T; Is Marxism a Theodicy? (2010)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJePGD7D_RQ

[9] Cohen, GA; Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford University Press, 2004 reprint) pg.197-201

[10] Marx, K; Capital v.1 (Preface, 1873 | Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1906) pg.25-26

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Callinicos, A; The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx (Bookmarks Publications, 2010 reprint) pg.52

[15] Marx, K; The Holy Family (McLellan, D; Karl Marx: Selected Writings | Oxford University Press, 1977) pg.138-139

[16] Ibid. pg.144

[17] MacIntyre, A; A Short History of Ethics (Routledge, 1967) pg.210-214

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] MacIntyre, A; A Short History of Ethics (Routledge, 1967) pg.210-214

[22] Hobsbawm, E; On History (Abacus, 1997) pg.211

[23] Eagleton, T; Why Marx was Right (Yale University Press, 2011) pg.73

[24] Marx, K; The German Ideology (McLellan, D; Karl Marx: Selected Writings | Oxford University Press, 1977) pg.191

[25] Wilde, L; Ethical Marxism and its Radical Critics (Nottingham Trent University, 1998) pg.32-35

[26] Edgar, A; Sedgwick, P; Key Concepts in Cultural Theory (Routledge, 1999) pg.309

[27] Wilde, L; Ethical Marxism and its Radical Critics (Nottingham Trent University, 1998) pg.32-35

[28] Hobsbawm, E; On the Communist Manifesto (How to Change the World | Little Brown, 2011) pg.110-111

[29] Ibid.

[30] Wolff, J; Karl Marx entry, Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/#2.1

[31] Marx, K; On the Jewish Question, Marxists Internet Archive: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

[32] Wolff, J; Karl Marx entry, Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/#2.1

[33] Ibid.

[34] Marx, K; On the Jewish Question, Marxists Internet Archive: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

[35] Marx, K; Engels, F; Letters to America: 1848-1895 (International Publishers, New York; 1963) pg.65-66

[36] Ibid.

[37] Zaretsky, E; Why America Needs A Left (Polity, 2012) pg.56

[38] Marx, K; Engels, F; Letters to America: 1848-1895 (International Publishers, New York; 1963) pg.65-66

[39] Ibid.