Was George Orwell a Marxist?

In short, George Orwell was a socialist but not a Marxist. One does not always follow the other. Here is an account from Isaac Deutscher on the specific gap between the Anglo-Saxon Left and Marxism:

Like most British socialists, Orwell had never been a Marxist. The dialectical-materialist philosophy had always been too abstruse for him. From instinct rather than consciousness he had been a staunch rationalist. The distinction between the Marxist and the rationalist is of some importance. Contrary to an opinion widespread in Anglo-Saxon countries, Marxism is not at all rationalist in its philosophy: it does not assume that human beings are, as a rule, guided by rational motives and that they can be argued into socialism by reason. Marx himself begins Das Kapital with the elaborate philosophical and historical inquiry into the ‘fetishistic’ modes of thought and behaviour rooted in ‘commodity production’ – that is, in man’s work for, and dependence on, a market. The class struggle, as Marx describes it, is anything but a rational process. This does not prevent the rationalists of socialism describing themselves sometimes as Marxists. But the authentic Marxist may claim to be mentally better prepared than the rationalist is for the manifestations of irrationality in human affairs, even for such manifestations as Stalin’s Great Purges. He may feel upset or mortified by them, but he need not feel shaken in his Weltanschauung, while the rationalist is lost and helpless when the irrationality of the human existence suddenly stares him in the face. If he clings to his rationalism, reality eludes him. If he pursues reality and tries to grasp it, he must part with his rationalism.

Source: Marxist Internet Archive

Epigones of Beria.

The late Alexander Cockburn noted that he was often "savaged as little better than an epigone of Beria" for settling on the figure of five or six million deaths in Stalin's Russia. It shouldn't have to be said that looking for an accurate picture of a monstrous series of crimes is not an act of exoneration. But in this society it would seem that the higher you go the better. Only the maximal estimates of Stalin's victims guarantee credibility. Expect nothing less from the enemies of the people!

Since the passing of Eric Hobsbawm in early October the BBC has made available the widely misquoted interview of Hobsbawm by Michael Ignatieff. It's around 11 minutes in that Ignatieff raises the matter of Stalin's liquidation of huge swathes of kulaks and dooming of millions of peasants in the 30s. The question asked is "If you had known that, would it have made a difference to you at that time?" Hobsbawm responds first by stating that it is an unanswerable academic question. In a retrospective answer, not a historical answer, Hobsbawm said "Probably not". He went on to explain his reasoning, that in a period of universalised mass-murder and mass-suffering the chance of a future at all would be worth supporting. The sacrifices in Russia were unnecessarily great and excessive by any measure and, in his eyes, only marginally worthwhile. The Soviet Union was not the beginning of the world revolution, but if it had been Hobsbawm says he isn't sure if the sacrifices would have been worthwhile.

In the next breathe Eric Hobsbawm asks "Do people now say we shouldn't have had WW2 because more people died in WW2 than in Stalin's terror?" At this point interviewer Ignatieff attempts a summary "So what that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified." It was not posed as a question and Hobsbawn responds in the affirmative, to indicate that this is the view that could be taken. Yet the old man had made it clear, moments before, that he isn't sure if the terror would have been worth it with the advent of communism. He goes on to qualify his emphatic 'Yes' by explaining that this is what people thought about the World Wars. Even though in the end many would say that the First World War was an unnecessary bloodbath, the Second World War was worth fighting. Yet this is not how the Right likes to portray this conversation, as I quote in my last article on this:

According to Robert Conquest, Hobsbawm was asked by Ignatieff in 1994 "What (your view) comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?" Apparently Hobsbawm's only response was "Yes."

We have good reason to suspect the right-wing historian Conquest - a former British intelligence officer and virulent cold warrior - is out to push the worst line possible about the Marxist Left and not just the Soviet Union. It's a sure thing that Conquest wouldn't rebuke in phony moral outrage at someone who sees the slaughter of the Second World War as necessary to bring down the Third Reich. As Hobsbawm emphasises, it was not about the construction of a utopia - it was a case of "a world rather than no world" - at that time for the Communists who saw the world as crumbling at that time. Really it's because Conquest disagrees fundamentally with the ultimate aim, whereas the defeat of National Socialism merely means a return to liberal democratic capitalism. The notion of a "radiant tomorrow" was rhetoric in Hobsbawm's thinking, it was more about a better, more perfect and new world. It was a more upbeat view of the future tempered with the stark realism of the dire situation in the world.

At around 24 minutes in Eric Hobsbawm goes over his view of the estimates of deaths in the Soviet Union under Stalin. He insists that the people involved in the Communist International, in the 1930s, had no substantial knowledge of what was going on under Stalin with regard to human suffering. Hobsbawm makes the same statement about what the anti-Communist intellectuals claim to know about the Soviet Union. Hobsbawm goes on to add that the estimates - ranging from 3 to 14 million in the gulags alone - are speculative and indefensible because of the range of the figures alone. The blunt tool Ignatieff quickly inquired if the old man of British Communism was saying Stalin's crimes have been "exaggerated" and, without hesitation, the old man responded "No... I'm merely saying that nobody knows!" Hobsbawm concludes that the situation in the Soviet Union under Stalin was indefensible and inhuman. And yet the man is still lambasted by the Right as a lifelong apologist for Joseph Stalin's abattoir socialism.

A Tragedy, Not a Statistic.

The reaction to Hobsbawm's death ranges from modest applause in the liberal press to the usual paranoid anti-Communist hysteria of rightist news outlets. The Daily Mail engaged in the usual prattle about Hobsbawm's years spent in the Communist Party even during the exposure of Stalin's crimes. Even though while young Eric was embedded in anti-Fascist politics Lord Rothermere (owner of the Mail) was shamelessly climbing into bed with Adolf Hitler. The Evening Standard even went as strange as to stress Hobsbawm's later associations with Tony Blair and Ed Miliband, as if the Labour Party had been infected by the nonagenarian Marxist even when the Party was sliding further and further to the Right. Then again, this shouldn't surprise anyone as foaming at the mouth McCarthyites have never been subtle! On the upside, if the old man's passing was met with unadulterated adulation from the mass-media we would have to ask ourselves if he was really any good at all. Some people you would never want nor expect praise from.

Fortunately some on the Right weren't so pettily obsessed with Hobsbawm's past to concede his work was worthy of praise. The right-wing historian Niall Ferguson wrote "Hobsbawm the historian was never a slave to Marxist-Leninist doctrine. His best work was characterised by a remarkable breadth and depth of knowledge, elegant analytical clarity, empty with the 'little man' and a love of the telling detail. He and I shared the belief that it was economic change, above all, that shaped the modern era." Ferguson went on to note wisely "The fact that he sided with the workers and peasants, while I side with the bourgeoisie, was no obstacle to friendship." The historian recommends Hobsbawm's tetralogy to the reader - The Age of Revolution (1962), The Age of Industry (1975), The Age of Empire (1987) and The Age of Extremes (1994) - going as far as to call this body of work "the best introduction to modern world history in the English language." As much as this should give one good reason to read Hobsbawm, it reflects rather well on Ferguson.

I have nothing to add to the praise for Hobsbawm's historical writings, though I will recommend Terry Eagleton's review of his last book if you want to dip into the great man's work. This isn't to say that the right-wing hysterics penned nothing worth of reflection about Hobsbawm, as Ferguson demonstrates so well himself. According to Robert Conquest, Hobsbawm was asked by Michael Ignatieff in 1994 "What (your view) comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?" Apparently Hobsbawm's only response was "Yes." No doubt Conquest has his own reasons for emphasising this, I suspect Hobsbawm had much more to say than simply an emphatic endorsement of unimaginable slaughter. But we should for a moment consider the question in terms of the dialectical materialist conception of history. It's certain that the Stalinists of this world have viewed their actions in terms of a service to the Revolution and, ultimately, to historical progress in a certain guise.

If we take history to be a succession of exploitative modes of production with its present culmination in global capitalism, then we could well view history as an appalling and seemingly unending tale of horrifying bloodshed as well as a tale of progress. It was through the tremendous suffering of millions in past centuries that the material resources and conditions to build capitalism, and further advance its productive capacities, were refined and accumulated. The immense injustice and unfreedom of this process cannot be separated from the accumulative development of capitalism, which almost mirrors a natural organism. In turn this mode of exploitation propels itself forward, only to create the proper economic and political conditions for socialism to be built in its place. We find then that in its beginning socialism is inseparable from capitalism in the same sense that capitalism is to slavery and feudalism. The link is in the material conditions fostered by each system. This is roughly the Marxist view, if a tad hastily sketched out as only it can in so few words.

Furthermore, the birth of socialism is not immaculate rather it is born out of the squalor of the capitalist system. The socialist movement could be seen as a project redemptive of capitalism, a view taken by Communists in Beijing today, in that the ultimate collapse of the system in crisis and revolution would give way to a new egalitarian world where the endured inequalities would be undone. The temptation to posit the vindication of capitalism in the advent of socialism should be resisted. Not just because of capitalism with Asian values, but because if you take socialism as simply redemptive of the generations who were worked to death in capitalism then it's tempting to say "What does it matter if a few more go?" It's all too tempting to say that the ends justify the means. This is the reason that many attribute to wily Stalin the notorious line "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic." The big question dangling before us is: will all this misery be worth it if we build a better world? And that's a major debate to be had.

The more nuanced Marxist might concede that the socialist movement may be incapable of making up for the enormous suffering of what has gone on for far too long. Even if socialism cannot compensate for the injustices of capitalism it is the better system. By analogy, the reparations for slavery can and should be made, not because we can really make up for the harm done to Africa but because it's right to try and establish a much more just society. Similarly to the climate change deniers we can retort: even if climate change is a natural phenomenon not to be feared, we're right to reorientate our entire society because it would still be better than what we have. Socialism may be the best that we can do to attempt to make up for all the women and men shredded in the economic propellers of history. Though it may well be utopian to claim that it could do so in its entirety, it is not wrong to attempt at this task. We on the Left are not clutching at straws in a world of chaos in the midst of our own inexorable decline, rather we belong to a tragic tradition.

Socialism as a secular faith.

In God is not Great Christopher Hitchens writes “When I was a Marxist, I did not hold my opinions as a matter of faith but I did have the conviction that a sort of unified field theory might have been discovered.” He goes onto note that there is no supernatural or absolutist element in dialectical materialism, but it did have a ‘messianic’ aspect in its faith in the coming revolution. There are also martyrs and saints in the figures of Che Guevara and Vladimir Lenin. With Stalinism there was the papacy complete with heresy hunts, miracles and inquisitions. He draws parallels between the leftist reverence for Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg and the elevation of particular figures in Christianity to the status of sainthood. No doubt Karl Marx is the founding Jewish prophet of this faith, while Luxemburg is a mixture of Cassandra and Jeremiah in Hitch’s mind.It has been acknowledged by Hitch’s former IS comrade Terry Eagleton that Karl Marx may have been an atheist there are Judaic themes in secular form to be found in his thinking.

This includes notions of justice, emancipation, the reign of peace and plenty, the day of reckoning, history as a narrative of liberation, the redemption not just of the individual but of a whole dispossessed people. You could draw a parallel between Marx’s avoidance of sketching out utopia of the future and the Jewish aversion to any speculation of the World to Come. Hitchens favours this side of the bearded dialectician because this is where we find the hostility to fetishism, idols and illusions. Again, all of this could be seen as Judaic. Yet it is the case that the tenets of dialectical materialism do not consistent of any set of claims about the cosmos. So the religious may subscribe to Marxist materialism, the curious blend of German philosophy, French politics and English economics. In fact Karl Marx once told his wife Jenny that if she wants to “satisfy” her metaphysical needs she’d do better to seek out the Jewish prophets than to attend the Secular Society. Perhaps if Marx is the founding prophet then Leninism serves as a Pauline ‘betrayal’ necessary for the establishment of a universal church.

Today it is no coincidence that the liberals have become increasingly obsessed with secularisation while the radicals have taken up theology as a pursuit. It’s nothing new. Nietzsche’s enmity for socialism came down to his view of the project as a radicalised kind of Christianity. There is an element of truth in this charge:just as the Christians live for the otherworldly the socialists seek to build, out of this world, the other world. It is no wonder then that the New Atheists fall back on liberal shibboleths as a presupposed Gnosticism – especially the notion of history as progress, to which any obstacle must be circumvented. It might be because liberalism really believes in nothing except that the individual should be free to believe that the last obstacle is totalitarian belief itself. The first step towards totalitarianism, in the liberal mind, is any attempt to reach beyond the confines of capitalist society. So for many it would seem the only political project, of any worth, is the fight to rid the world of faith.

In this sense the New Atheists are post-political in their anti-theism. It is apt then that Christopher Hitchens took on this projectafter he lost his ‘faith’ in socialism. Despite Hitch’s tirades against God, conveniently framed to provide a defence of the ‘War on Terror’, he admitted that if he could he would not rid the world of religious conviction. Apparently there is no third camp between Athens and Jerusalem, rationality in one corner and religiosity in another. Yet in his newfound ‘free-thinking’ Hitchens severed any responsible commitments he had before to take on the convictions needed to support the invasion of Iraq.The liberal tradition (which certainly includes the New Atheists) does not have the monopoly over democracy, civil liberties, human rights and notions of equality. The same goes for its claim to science, reason and unbelief. The Marxist project was originally pitched as scientific in its critique of capitalism, which went as far as to take the church as a superstructural institution that serves to legitimatise the economic system.

There is no contradiction here. The New Atheists may adhere to a strenuous conception of secularity, but it was the Catholic tradition which spawned secularism as an irreligious realm where there is space for religious conviction, influence and practice. John Gray traces absolutism and atheism to the advent of monotheism, in its fundamental claim to universal truth. Unbelief is just an extension of the Abrahamic passion for truth.Gray stresses that “Only with Christianity did the belief take root that one way of life could be lived by everyone.” Before monotheism it was taken for granted that the rejection of one god merely meant the embrace of another god and another cult. It was the first time that there was strictly one way to live and believe, which had to be taken above all others. He claims that “If the world had remained polytheist, it could not have produced communism or ‘global democratic capitalism’.”For polytheism is too ‘delicate’ for modern thinking Gray concludes “If we live in a world without gods, we have Christianity to thank for it.”

Communism: A Love Story.

Ye are Many - They are Few!

In the midst of ideological and economic crises, we find ourselves unable to venture out from neoliberal capitalism and when we do it is only to conserve the social democratic post-war settlement which cannot defend itself. Of course, there are those who might have the audacity to walk further to socialism as a political alternative to capitalism in its entirety. We must remember socialism is an intermediate stage which seeks ultimately to undo itself. The time has come to resurrect the language of political ideals in this so-called post-political era of liberal managerialism. This is meant to be a world with no need for ideas and has moved beyond ideology. The anaemia of discourse as it is has gone on long enough. This is the time for serious theory as well as devoted belief and dedicated activism. For these reasons, we should be on the side of those - from Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri - who have devoted their intellectual capacities to developing a new kind of communism.

Even the enemies of socialism might concede it has some moral weight, but communism is irredeemable by comparison because of 20th Century history. We are reminded that not all socialists are communists, though every communist is a socialist. It should be noted that the idea of communism predates Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and actually has ancient roots, but this is not reason to step over Marx to his predecessors. As Terry Eagleton reminds us, in classical Marxian terms, the establishment of communism is preceded by the development of the material base to the point at which it can negate itself and drop clean out of consciousness. The material transcends itself at a certain point of superabundance. It was slavery and feudalism which provided the material conditions for capitalism, but it is capitalism which will produce the conditions for socialism and eventually communism. In a strange sense then socialism is indebted to capitalism, but as the great Nye Bevan would remind us "There can be no immaculate conception of socialism."

To this ultimate end socialism is a self-abolishing project, similarly the idea of communism will remain relevant until it is realised. The end and the means are eschew from one another to the point that the material prosperity, which will fund freedom, is the fruit of unfreedom. As it is inseparable from the horrors of slavery and market forces which laid the path to liberation. We might see communism as the escape from scarcity to the extent that we can actually forget about the very possibility of it. The Marxist notion of communism requires the development of the productive forces, free from the blockages of pre-history, to the extent that the economic system can give birth to a surplus sufficient for the abolition of labour and the fulfillment of the needs of everyone. Capitalism is the only historical mode of production capable of generating such a surplus, but the forces of production are not teleological. The system is not in place for the sake of historical development as it generates the surplus it is committed to the creation of scarcities.

The dialectical twist is that it is the materiality will release you from the forces of the material. We're not free of determinants in class society, we make our own history but by circumstances we cannot choose as Karl Marx reminds us in the Brumaire. The real kind of freedom is that where we're determined in such a way as to sit loose from economic determinants and to free us from the alienation of labour. As Sigmund Freud foresaw without the coercive process of labour we would all lounge about in various postures of jouissance - and this may be le communisme! Here we find the political and the economic are indivisible, as the reality of class society has to be acknowledged in order to eventually get rid of it. Terry Eagleton draws an analogy with revolutionary nationalism, where the point is to assert the unique culture of a nation in order for it to take an ordinary place in the community of nations.

On the Idea of Communism
Why Marx was Right

Capitalism, Regular not Diet

18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Communism in 1848

Liberal Violence.

Barbarians of Civilisation.

We might see John Locke as the father of liberalism today as the Two Treatises of Government were the earliest of liberal ideas. Though it is important to note that at the time John Locke was embedded in the English ruling class and was close to Lord Shaftesbury, the founder of the Whigs. So Locke was one of the elite when England was taken hold by a political crisis in the 1680s as the reign of King Charles II came to an end and the Duke of York succeeded him as James II. The new monarch had ambitions to restore Royal absolutism and Catholicism to England, which would have meant another war of religious sectarianism. The succession was inevitable as Charles II had plenty of illegitimate children, but no legitimate heirs, so when he died in 1685 it fell to his brother. There was a campaign to prevent the succession throughout the 1680s and just as James II stepped up to the throne. The King was successful in crushing all rebels, whether they be Archibald Campbell or the Duke of Monmouth (one of the illegitimate sons of Charles II).

Finally in 1688 the Whig nobles were successful in their treason and found a way for Prince William of Orange to invade England from Holland and seize the crown. This was the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Unsurprisingly, as he was involved in the plot, John Locke set out to provide a retrospective justification for instigating the downfall of King James II. If the Whigs had failed, Locke would not be the father of liberalism and 1688 would just be another year of another failed rebellion. The grand narrative of liberalism is accepted because it has been successful in achieving hegemony. These same writings went on to influence the American Revolution and directly influence the US Constitution. As opposed to the pursuit of happiness guaranteed by the US Constitution Locke advocated property along with life and liberty. The French Revolution was influenced in a more indirect fashion by Lockean philosophy, it was Rousseau and Montesquieu who had a greater influence over the French revolutionaries.

Despite the fact that the French Revolution smashed a lingering feudal order into pieces, which could only then be reconstituted as the liberal order for the sake of capital accumulation, the likes of Niall Ferguson and Simon Schama are not so happy with the "excessive violence" of Jacobinism. The American Revolution is commonly put forward as a favourable alternative of a bloodless revolutionary shift from colony to republic. The only blood that had to be spilled was from the millions of Native Americans and countless African slaves who were butchered and terrorised into subservience. Slavery destroyed the cultural heritage of African-Americans, the religions native to Africa were supplanted by Islam and Christianity. The hands of the East and the West are responsible for the destruction of Africa, but in particular without the material preconditions established in slavery the US would not exist as it is. Not only without slavery but without warfare and genocide, the United States would not exist as the vast concentration of a political and economic power today.

The American Dream.

In the US slavery would drag on for centuries and was officially abolished after the Civil War. During the war between states which raged from 1861 to 1865 at least 630,000 people (equivalent to 2% of the population) were killed out of the 3 million who fought in the war. Around 50,000 were slaughtered in the three-day battle of Gettysburg, close to the number of American soldiers who died in the Vietnam war. Without the bloodbath at Gettysburg the abolition of slavery may have come much later in the history of the United States. This great advance came under Abraham Lincoln, who had suspended habeas corpus, it brought emancipation as well as barbarism in even more advanced forms. After Reconstruction slavery was in effect re-established in the United States through an alliance between the corporations and state-authorities with the courts and prisons. It would last in a covert form through the prison system until the 1940s and slave labour was vital to the process of industrialisation.

As a colony of the British Empire, the American economy was prosperous, none of which would have been possible without slavery and ethnic cleansing, the revolution was a push for independence from which the process could be completed. The inspirational documents of the revolution, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution itself, were based on the ideas of John Locke and provided a retrospective justification for insurgent militias who had killed Crown troops. The white people who had settled in America and had done very well out of it's prosperity did not want to pay taxes, but they did want 'Indian' land and a lot more slaves. Some even wanted to seize Mexican and Canadian soil, which they would go onto attempt and succeed in the theft of half of Mexico. Though these tendencies were real in the colony, the prospect of American independence was not a popular one, it was the revolutionary leadership which had to win over the masses who were heavily armed.

New England had done particularly well out of the colonial experience, specifically out of shipbuilding, whaling and warfare. Out of the booming economy a merchant class emerged with such prominent figures as John Hancock, whose firm had done very well out of supplying the British army and Royal Navy. The idea that the American colonies should gain independence from Britain was held by very few in the Americas until the British began to impose further taxes on the colonies in a period of economic decline. The Treasury was heavily in debt and was looking for a way to shift the tax burden off of the British tax-payer in order to maintain the Empire. Prime Minister Grenville decided that the prosperous colonies should take on more of the burden. So new taxes were imposed on the Americans, the merchant class that had developed around shipbuilding, whaling and war resorted to tax-evasion and smuggling. Even while encouraging the British to smash Louis XV the Americans refused to pay their way.

Revolutionary Terror.

The accepted reading of the French Revolution functions to restore the counter-revolutionary doctrine, in that the cynical liberal wisdom cuts to the 'truth' that all revolutions fail and furthermore "anti-totalitarianism" is preferable to avoid the gulag. Naturally this involves avoidance of any historical analysis of the circumstances under which the Revolution emerged. The obscene situation in pre-revolutionary France is commonly ignored and even glossed over by liberal historians. The country had been devastated by crises of finance and food, which led to the repudiation of the national debt and the bread riots. It was a social order in which there was a huge gulf between the rich and the poor, the latter of whom were the only people who paid taxes in pre-revolutionary France. There was a great explosion in a French society which was inevitable because of the pressures that had mounted up in the stagnant order.

It ultimately led to the rise of the Committee of Public Safety, which initiated a slaughter that was only rivaled by the orgy of violence which would follow after its end. Thousands were slaughtered in reaction to the military assault launched against France by powers such as the Holy Roman Empire, Britain and Russia. Contrary to common sense, order and disorder are not opposites rather the imposition of a contingent order onto a chaotic situation is the highest level of disorder. In the words of Walter Benjamin "There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism." This is the reason that if the Declaration of Independence of US was re-declared by a newly independent society today, we would rightly condemn them as Nazi-ish for the Declaration identifies black people as "subhuman". This is true regardless of the inspirational nature of the Declaration, which is based on the ideas expressed by John Locke and the Putney Debates at the time of the English Revolution.

Just as the unconscious is the founding act of repression upon which consciousness is established, the Act onto which a new political order is predicated are often unjustifiable at the time before the act. Only when looking backwards we might wonder whether or not it was justifiable for an Irishman to shoot a police officer in the head. The Act can lack a justification in preceding standards of justice, politics or even ethics. But violence is not just sequential, it is not just a necessary evil for the establishment of liberal society, it is synchronous to the development of civilisations and the US is no different. The debt owed by liberalism to feudalism and the institution of slavery is hardly, if ever, recognised. Especially by liberals and conservatives, for whom only seductive dreams of egalitarianism might lead to mass-murder. For them any revolution which doesn't fit the idealised vision of the Tea Party is a step too far. The truth is that if we the British had crushed the Americans then we would probably celebrate hanging Jefferson and Franklin as 'traitors'.

The Lesson of Mobile Phones.

Perhaps the greatest irony of the rage and condemnation expressed through mobile phones and laptops about the riots in London, never mind the use of phones to coordinate looting, is that there is a hidden lesson about history in the production of mobile phones. The lesson of mobile phones is a historical one, whenever we send a text or a tweet we should remember that the relation between barbarism and civilisation is synchronous not sequential. It is true that the establishment of states is accomplished through violence, but it should be noted that the development of civilisation is entwined with systemic forms of violence. How does the advent of the mobile phone demonstrate this? The Congo has long been important because it is rich in key resources such as coltan, cobalt, copper, diamond, uranium and gold. It was uranium that was extracted from the Congo that was used to make the atom bombs which the US then used to bomb Japan. Later on, copper became fundamental to the running of the Cold War.

The value of coltan has exploded in recent years because it is essential to the production of mobile phones, laptops and games, thus the cheap extraction of coltan became vital for the consumer boom in the West. Zimbabwe, Angola, Uganda, Chad, Libya and even Rwanda have sought to seize control of the precious resources. Behind them Western companies and consumers were looking for new goods. The interests of foreign corporations are at once a threat to, and in harmony with, the interests of the war lords that have been dominant since Mobutu fell. The war lords control territory with militias that include drugged children, the deal to give China access to the vital minerals in exchange for a railway and highways is a threat to the interests of war lords who maintain control through the broken state of affairs in the Congo. But at the same time these war lords have business deals with multinational corporations that are given the right to start mining without paying any taxes and with minimal complications.

In the meantime over 4 million were slaughtered in the Congo in the last decade or so. In a period of just 18 months the Rwandan army made $250 million just on coltan. The accumulation of the material resources necessary for our daily lives is not that distinct from barbarism, capitalism is indebted to feudalism and slavery in that each of them provided the material preconditions for the explosion and development of capitalism in the last couple of hundred years. We can discuss violence on the streets of London because of a bloodbath in Africa, which the majority of us aren't even aware of and feel no responsibility for at all. Every advance in civilisation is an advance in barbarism, bringing in it's wake new possibilities of emancipation and often arrives coated head-to-foot in blood. The price of the material advantages we enjoy is blood and misery. It is not clear whether we can ever make-up for the immense suffering, unimaginable misery and innumerable generations of people born into filth and squalor; only to amass the material resources that might provide the preconditions for a better existence.

Africa, Barbarism & Civilisation.

In the last installment of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace we saw some of the horrors which Africa has been subjected to. The focus of the episode is on the Congo, which inevitably draws the focus to Rwanda, in the post-colonial era. Curtis shows us the way in which the Belgian documentarian Armand Denis explored Africa in the 1930s and made films to inform audiences in the West about Africa. In Rwanda he helped create the myth that the Tutsis were a noble race of people who originated in Egypt whilst the Hutus were a separate race of ignorant peasants. Actually the Tutsis were the dominant group, though the Hutus held some positions in government, but lived on the same land as the Hutus and neither saw the other as a different race. The myth was constructed to serve the colonial interests invested in Africa at the time. We may be reminded that in the trajectory of history, advances made in emancipation are also advances made in barbarism.

The Belgians brought scientists in to provide a defence of the myth. The scientists conducted some tests and concluded that the Tutsis (15% of the population) were the natural rulers, because they had larger brains and were more intelligent than the Hutus. The Tutsis and Hutus were made to carry racial identity cards to create a segregated system in which the Tutsis ruled. The arrangement was maintained for decades to benefit the Belgian Empire and white settlers in the country. In recent decades the Congo has become increasingly important in the age of globalisation, as corporations have flooded into the country to extract a wide range of resources. The Congo is particularly valuable because of its resources which include copper, uranium and coltan. It was Congolese uranium which was used to make the atom bombs, which were then used against Japan by the US, whilst copper became fundamental to running the Cold War. The value of coltan exploded in recent years because it is essential in the production of laptops, game consoles and mobile phones.

When the Congo first gained independence from Belgium in 1960, the country was ill-prepared for self-governance and Patrice Lumumba was elected. The country soon descended into chaos and Lumumba had to fight against rebel forces for control of the precious resources. The corporations active in the extraction of the valuable resources were unhindered by the chaos in the Congo, which left hundreds of thousands dead, terrorised and mutilated. The US feared Patrice Lumumba might side with the Soviet Union and with the help of the Belgians arranged a coup, he was kidnapped and killed before his body was dissolved in acid. Rwanda became independent in 1962, the Hutus fled massacre by the Tutsis after liberal Belgians had encouraged a Hutu rebellion against the Tutsis. Out of imperialist guilt the liberals called for rebellion in order to make amends. The only way to do so, for the liberals, was to ensure self-government for Rwanda and freedom for the individual over "racial divisions". To the horror of the liberals, the violence spun out of control as the Hutus looked upon the Tutsis as alien to them.

Mobutu Sese Seko emerged out of the violence as the dictator of the Congo in 1965 with the vital support of the CIA. Mobutu changed the name of the Congo to Zaire, he set about to loot millions of dollars from the country whilst the industrial infrastructure collapsed. To maintain his power Mobutu reverted to anti-Communism and anti-imperialist rhetoric, which functioned to marginalise some of the old links to Belgium and strengthen fresh ties to the US. It is significant that Mobutu was keen to stamp out all symbolic remnants of Belgian rule, while he strengthened the hold of the Americans over Zaire. All opposition was quickly killed off and at a much deeper level Mobutu killed the liberal dream of a democratic Africa. Zaire became a place where other dreams went to die. Nazi rocket scientists had taken America to the moon but their job was over, Mobutu brought them into Zaire to build a launch pad on a plateau in the jungle and build a space programme for the country. The German scientists only succeeded in crashing a few rockets into the countryside.

In 1967 Western mining conglomerates backed a campaign of violence in Zaire in a bid to create a separate state based on the concentration of minerals in the East of the country. The corporations sent in white mercenaries and the mission to build a new state soon turned into racist violence as the conflict spilled over into Rwanda. The forces loyal to Mobutu then crushed the rebellion and responded with violence against whites, with looting and violence. At the time Dian Fossey was in the mountains, she aimed to prove that there were deep connections between human beings and primates through evolution. Fossey was detained by the soldiers where she was imprisoned for a fortnight, it is not clear what happened in that time though she told some people she was gang-raped by the soldiers. Eventually she escaped to create a new camp at which she could continue to study gorillas. Fossey then retreated to a isolated existence and tried to protect the gorillas at all costs, which went as far as to kidnap Africans and to humiliate them. The local people began to hate her.

Over 30 years later the ruling Hutus set out to exterminate the Tutsis and the West resorted to the old racist line that the Hutus and the Tutsis were ancient races in conflict. So the massacres were a result of an incomprehensible antagonism, it was only incomprehensible because the Western media were unwilling to recognise the consequences of our actions. The racial identity cards then helped the Hutus wipe-out the Tutsis. As the Tutsis fought back, the Hutus fled into Zaire and Western aid agencies came to the rescue of the innocent victims but found themselves protecting mass-murderers. The Tutsis then invaded the camps and Mobutu then sent troops in to stop the fighting, but they just joined in the looting and Mobutu fell from power. The boom in the West fueled a rise in commodity prices throughout the world, the value of minerals in the Congo skyrocketed. Then troops from Zimbabwe, Angola, Uganda, Chad and Libya to seize the precious resources. Behind them Western companies and consumers were looking for new goods, whilst 4 million people were slaughtered between 1998 and 2003.

The idea of a democratic Africa had died in the Congo, but another liberal idea was born there. The idea that we are not different or superior to animals, we are linked to them in nature and we should recognise that fact. This was the idea which was born out of the research Fossey was committed to, which would further undermine the Enlightenment view of human beings as separate and distinct to animals. Fossey was murdered in 1985 she had become a part of the Western tradition of brutalising Africans for the sake of an ideal which is beyond the comprehension of such primitives. We might use the term post-traumatic subject to describe Dian Fossey, possibly even to excuse her brutality towards the Other as an expression of that trauma. If we are to do so we cannot help but note that there is a condition of permanent trauma in the Congo. In contrast to the Western notion of a post-traumatic condition where in a woman is raped and then may have some hope of moving on. In the Congo women are raped and then raped again, and again and so on, there is no hope.

We should bare in mind that the material conditions amassed through the exploited toil by the impoverished can provide the conditions for the development of civilisation. It is not that barbarism comes before civilisation, the relation between barbarism and civilisation is synchronous rather than sequential. Not every change will arrive peacefully, in fact change often arrives drenched in blood. The conditions created by slavery have enabled capitalism. In a sense it could be said that the horrors of slavery were necessary, though that is not to say that those horrors should just be forgotten. The tragic history of Africa in particular cannot be acknowledged with the great debt of Western civilisation to Africa being acknowledged also. The debt owed by liberalism to slavery and feudalism is hardly, just as the existence of class society is barely made today, if ever, recognised especially by liberals and conservatives. The view of history as Progress is much more popular among that crowd, because it avoids debts and leaves no room for interventions.

The Original Sin of Liberalism.

The Truth as a Whole.

At the origins of liberal thought, in the political writings of a certain anonymous Englishman all the way back in 1691, is the idea of the state of nature and notions of consent. Man is by nature free and equal in the state of nature, in which there was no impartial authority and no solid legal framework to resolve conflict. In order to preserve property and constrain the powers, which might oppress the individual, man entered into a social contract and by consent submit to a government. The writer went on to draw a distinction between expressed and tacit consent. The first of which is obvious, expressed consent is the willful acceptance of society and the state. In exchange for freedom and equality the netural state will act to preserve property, as well as the rights and liberties entrenched in property. Tacit consent is a less simple concept. Everyone who has profited or benefited in any way from the state and society has automatically surrendered equality and freedom in exchange for such rewards.

So in one way or another the people consent to society and the government, all freedom and equality is surrendered for the sake of life, liberty and property. As some critics of Michael Moore will point out, Moore has consented to the system and American society in benefiting so much from it all - so why does he make such terrible films? Next comes the demand that Moore should give all of his money to charity and go to live in Cuba. In other words Michael Moore "consented" to American capitalism when he was born in the US and started to benefit enormously from the system as it had developed. If he wants to criticise America he should give away everything he has gained from living the American dream. This is the line of the American Right, reactionaries everywhere and at the fundamental level of it is the idea of "consent". The assumptions of freedom and equality are embellished throughout liberal ideology, concealed at the base of notions of individual responsibility and meritocracy.


Many of the arguments against positive discrimination and political correctness rest lazily on these assumptions. Affirmative action is often slapped down as putting black people before whites, that in itself is a double-standard and an inequality. This assumes that there were equal in standards and background, when in actuality there is a huge inequality as black people have been disenfranchised and kept in a miserable place. A common argument against political correctness is that while white people are not permitted to use racial slurs, the groups of the ethnic groups often subject to such language are themselves allowed to use the slurs. But there is a difference in context and once again the assumption of equality is false. According to the vague distinction of tacit consent just by the use of money people surrender their equality and freedom. We've all bought into this system of free enterprise and competition, individual freedom and responsibility so stop whining about the crimes of the past and calling for social justice! The historical context of slavery, segregation and racial oppression are removed from the picture.

Look at the grounds onto which the soup-run has been done away with in Westminster, it encourages homelessness and brings more homeless people into the borough so it is being scrapped. The homeless are viewed as a public nuisance and as failed citizens, they were free to work and live normally but failed somehow and are responsible for their own plight. This is consistent with the atomised interpretation of the world which liberals adhere to. This is in denial of the 'Truth as a Whole', so the contextual determinants are removed from view and society becomes a mass of autonomous individuals. Hegel held that there is no phenomenon that can be grasped in isolation because this would ignore the network of relations that constitute such things. To understand the world reasonably is to take into account the context of events. In denial of the 'Truth as a Whole' liberals remove all the contextual determinants which led people to become homeless and instead emphasise the freedom and responsibility of the individual. An informed answer would be to have soup-runs throughout London combined with serious efforts to eliminate homelessness.

If we go further than this to look at the Enlightenment interpretation of history as progress we find this same fundamental problem. The material conditions onto which liberalism is predicated, it's foundations are coated in blood, is the accumulative processes of slavery and feudalism. The debt owed to the suffering of slaves and serfs is quietly kicked under the rug. The advances of Western civilisation are often achieved through slaughter, such advances open up new possibilities of barbarism as well as emancipation. The countless generations butchered and terrorised into subservience to advance the mode of production and amass a vast material resources which enable the emergence of new forms of exploitation. American capitalism is indebted to the genocidal bloodbath and centuries of misery and injustice preceding the Revolution and merely change in form after independence. The liberal order providing retrospective justifications for slavery, low-taxes, the theft of Native American land and the accumulation of capital. The huge debt to the slaves, who built the White House, is the legitimate claim for reparations and positive discrimination.

Protest, a Tragic Tradition.

"Kings and political leaders are remembered for the ideas they imposed on those they governed, but all real progress comes from ideas that begin at the bottom and force their way to the top." - Tony Benn

Why bother protesting? It won't do any good and nothing will change. Nothing ever changes and you best not to focus on meaningless attempts to bring about radical change. It's just a waste of time and effort. Those who commonly hold this position include potential fellow-travellers, the people who would be marching but don't see the point. It is a self-defeatist position in which the amount of change failed to be achieved is equal, regardless of whether or not we march and then from here it jumps to the conclusion that we might as well not bother. If people had not fought for the rights we enjoy today, such as the right to vote, we would not enjoy such privileges. This is the reason that voting is not just a right, it is a civic duty because it was gained after centuries of struggle and to not vote would be to trivialise the suffering to which we owe the vote. Radical change comes from the organised masses and rises to the top, it's true that this is not easily accomplished but it is the only way forward. To sit in apathy and avoid protest would be to assume the inherent goodness of history, that attempts to push for change are unnecessary.

It is not that there is never progress but that progress comes at a horrifying price and an even greater debt, to the struggles and misery of the past. There is nothing inherently good about history and it is not a tale of progress, in fact we move from one form of exploitation to another. But without pain and without sacrifice we would have nothing. Whilst this is not a case of "the ends justify the means", every advance made by civilisation which lead us to new possibilities of emancipation. We ought not forget that each step forward is also an advance in barbarism, let alone that these advances often arrive drenched in blood and gore. The capitalist system pushes this to a surreal extreme and so demands a dialectical analysis of it's detractors. To arrive at a positive outcome we have to be dragged through hell first, kicking and screaming. Resistance is not comfortable but uncomfortable. For the benefits of individual freedom and rights we pay in blood and sweat. This is the reason that activism and civil disobedience are part of a tragic tradition, in the same vein as Marxism.

Through the tremendous toil and misery of millions in past centuries the material resources, which may provide a pre-condition for socialism, are refined and accumulated. The amassed material resources are the fruit of slavery, the price of progress is suffering and injustice. The liberal order of rights and freedoms is predicated on a past of slavery and feudalism which had to be transformed, often through ultra-violence, into a neutral framework for free individuals to compete in the marketplace. Though it is not clear-cut, if you look at the US slavery lingered on into the 20th Century. Similarly socialism is predicated on the surplus amassed under capitalism, gained at the exploitation and oppression of human beings. This is not to say that socialism is guilty of the crimes committed under capitalism, nor are those crimes justified by the advent of socialism. Whether or not the price of such immense suffering in history would be worth the end is debatable. After all the blood spilt by countless generations that had to be forced brutally into subservience is irretrievable.