Comrades Max and Duci
[I first met Simonovic (most of
his friends, family and colleagues call him 'Duci' {pronounced ‘Dootzi’}, but
out of respect—and because he still strikes me as a serious character out of a
great Russian novel—I call him by his family name] at the first meeting of the
International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic (ICDSM) at the Sava Center
in Belgrade, 21 October 2001. I had just presented a paper comparing the
78-day NATO bombing of Yugoslavia/Serbia over Kosovo in the Spring of 1999 with
911 attacks on Lower Manhattan that had just taken place the month before.
When he approached me, his gaze was absolutely riveting: I figured he
had to be either some kind of tortured genius or just another
fellow-bat-shit-crazy Slav. In the last decade or so of close, invaluable
collaboration and, for both Max and me, a dear friendship, he has demonstrated
a sort of dialectical synthesis of those two character traits: like he's
an artistically enraged and philosophically and politically engaged mad-genius. And most importantly, especially as
regards the whole body-mind continuum thing, Simonovic is a world-class
ex-jock. His critique of Fascism
in the Olympic Movement gains a great deal of its authority and authenticity
from his actually having been on the Yugoslav Olympic basketball team in the
late 60s and early 70s.
What follows is Simonovic’s piece on the October 1917 Russian Revolution.
I found this writing the perfect decompression chamber for my post
electorum blues. As always, my great hope is that our President Obama is
concurrently aware of this history (as he has suggested by inviting survivors
of the Tuskegee airmen to his inauguration and making tender gestures toward
Russian Presidents Medvedev and Putin) and how its dynamics might play in his second
term.
And, tangentially, that somehow the Ni-Ni's who make up such a large part
of the revisionist opposition to the Historical record, with their false
antitheses, their negations of the negation (Adorno's thumbnail description of
Fascism), in the ongoing global debate to save Humanity from itself (you know,
Ni-Ni’s, right? Ni-Romney, Ni-Obama, Ni-NATO, Ni-Gaddafi or Assad, like those
nutless fence-sitters of the castrati Left, the Groucho Marxist bourgeois
non-conformists who wouldn’t work with any party that would have them as a
member?), that they we recall and even revisit their roots in Marxist-Freudian
critical thinking and realize that the game being played on the field is the
only game in town: Fascism v
Communism, no third or fourth side, no bystanders, no excuses, no one gets out
alive.
Now, I’m lighting all my candles in the hope that, in five years, Duci and
I can celebrate the Centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution together in
Moscow. –mc]
LIFE-CREATING
MIND AGAINST DESTRUCTIVE MINDLESSNESS
By becoming a totalitarian destructive order, capitalism called into question
the modern way of thinking based on existential apriorism and the corresponding
idea of progress. In that context, humanism with its essential character and
its critique of capitalism that departs from the essential criteria were also
called into question. By increasingly destroying life on Earth, capitalism
abolishes that ontological relativism based
on existential certainty. What indeed exists
is, thus, determined by capitalist annihilation with its totalitarian
character. Nothing is no longer just not being or existential nothingness,
but a complete and final perishing of humankind.
It is necessary to create a way of thinking that will enable proper
understanding of the ruling tendency of global development and, on the basis of
the humanist legacy, establish a broad social movement that will work to
prevent the destruction of life. From a historical point of view, the mind acquired
self-consciusness from man's struggle for freedom. Considering the fact that
capitalism dramatically threatens the survival of the living world, the
contemporary mind can acquire self-consciousness from the struggle of humankind
for survival. The criticism of capitalism based on essential relativism should be
replaced by a criticism that departs from the existential challenges capitalism
poses for humankind. Instead of a dominating destructive mindlessness, which
leads to total annihilation, a life-creating mind should be affirmed, a mind
that can create a humane world.
The life-creating quality as a universal and totalizing principle should become
the starting point in the struggle against capitalism. It acquires a concrete
historical meaning relative to capitalism as a totalitarian destructive order
from the life-creating potential of nature and man. The life-creating quality
means bringing to life this life-creating potential of the matter, living
nature, man, history, human society .... The most important result of the
practice of life-creating must be a society that is a community of free and
creative people and nature as a cultivated life-creating whole. Capitalism does not
animate but rather destroys the life-creating potential of matter, living
nature, history.... It instrumentalizes and degenerates man's life-creating
powers: they arel used to create a „technical world“, where there is no place
for either nature or man.
The human life-creating quality involves freedom, which means overcoming
sheer naturalness through an active and changing relation to nature and through
the creation of a new world. The specific life-creating potentials of man, as
the highest form in the evolution of nature, represent a bond between nature
and man and are the bases for the evolution of man as a specific natural being.
It is about turning man from a sheer natural being into a libertarian being. Through
a cultivated life-creating practice, man turns from a generic being into an
emancipated life-creating being, which does not only reproduce its
life-creating capacity, but creates his own world. In that sense, we should
differentiate between the life-creating quality as the creation of sheer life
and the life-creating quality as the creation of a humane world. In other
words, a difference should be made between naturalistic and historical
life-creating principles: the essence of the naturalistic life-creating
principle is determinism; the essence of the historical life-creating principle
is freedom.
The life-creating nature of man, as a natural and human being, can be realized
only in nature as a life-creating whole. Man's active relation
to nature gives a possibility to overcome sheer naturalness, if that means the
preservation and development of nature's life-creating powers. The
life-creating principle is the umbilical cord connecting man and nature and
turning them into a life-creating whole. Living nature is not mere
matter, but, through the life-creating process of evolution, a formed and
thus specific matter, which as such forms the basis of the human world as a
specific universe. It is organized as a life-creating organic whole that
creates higher living forms, which means that it is characterized by a
life-creating activism. Man is the highest life-creating form in the evolution
of living matter through which nature became a self-conscious, life-creating
whole. Man's libertarian and creative practice is the power which gives
matter a historical dimension, which means that through it a meaningless
mechanical movement becomes a meaningful historical movement. Man's universal and
creative being, which has limitless self-reproductive potential, represents the
basis of the human life-creating principle. Each creative act opens in man a
new creative space, and so on, ad infinitum. Man's becoming a
self-conscious historical being, which means a being of the future, is the most
important result of the realization of nature's life-creating potentials, and
the ability to create its future is the most authentic expression of the
life-creating force of human society.
Not only does capitalism, as a
totalitarian destructive order, destroy history, it also destroys the evolution
of living beings, which above all means the evolution of human beings as the
highest form of life on the Earth. It is a capitalistically conditioned
mutation of man, which amounts to a his degeneration as a natural, creative and
social being. Capialism destroys man's naturally- and
historically-conditioned life-creating potential and reduces him to a
technically organized entity, at the same time reducing human society to a
mechanical ant colony. Thus, it degenerates and destroys the life-creating
potential of living matter accumulated in the human genome over more than three
billion years of evolution, as well as man's creative capabilities, which are
the product of historical development and can only be realized within society
as a humanized natural community. In essence, capitalism devalues and abolishes
man as a humane and natural being. The ever more present thesis that
“traditional humankind” has become obsolete and that a race of cyborgs should
be created, indicates that man as a human and natural being has become an
obstacle to the further development of capitalism and, as such, is an
unnecessary being.
The bridge to the future
man has built during his historical existence has begun to crumble. The capitalist
propaganda machinery works to prevent man from becoming aware of that process.
To make matters worse, capitalistically degenerated life creates a
type of consciousness that prevents people from realizing the nature of the
looming threat against humankind. Capitalism imposes a way of thinking that
does not allow man to pursue answers to questions that are of vital
importance to his survival and freedom. At the same time, the economic downfall
of capitalism, which directly threatens the lives of an growing number of
people, marginalizes the questions which are of paramount importance to the survival of
humankind and relativizes their dramatic character. How important is the
destruction of forests and the melting of glaciers to a man whose family is
dying in poverty? The most fatal consequences come from the fact that the
existential challenge posed by capitalism to humankind stands in complete
contradiction to the nature of man created by capitalism. That man is a petty
bourgeois, who does not feel any responsibility for the survival of the world
or for whom the question of survival comes down to the question of his
personal survival. A spontaneous reaction of the atomized petty bourgeois to
the increasingly realistic possibility of global annihilation is not to prevent
global demise, but rather to find a safe retreat for himself. All the more so
as the preservation of the bridge poses a challenge which far surpasses man's
individual powers, and man, as a lonely individual, feels helplessness
before the imminent cataclysm. The most important task of the life-creating
mind is to point out the existential importance of sociability and, thus, to
increase the need of man for his fellows. Without an emancipated and
fighting sociability, man is condemned to a solitary and lethal
hopelessness.
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ОCTOBER REVOLUTION
Considering Marx's notion of history, are the socialist revolutions that took
place in the 20th century still historically legitimate? According to Marx, not
every existential crisis of capitalism presents a historical an opening door
for a socialist revolution; it is more likely to be that crisis that presents
the productive (proprietary) relations developing as obstacles to the
development of the productive forces with fully developed capitalist
contradictions. Social conditions are neccesary but insufficient precursors to
a revolution. Socialist revolution is possible only upon the creation of
appropriate historical conditions. According to Marx, a possible socialist
revolution in the Russian Empire would have had historical legitimacy solely if
it had been the spark that ignited the fires of socialist revolutions in the
most developed capitalist countries of Europe. In other words, it is only
through the emancipatory legacy of the most developed capitalist countries,
those brought to full expression by a socialist revolution, that a revolution
in under developed capitalist countries could acquire the character of a
socialist revolution.
In
view of Marx's notion of a socialist revolution, the Russian Empire in 1917 had
none of the historical conditions for a socialist revolution, possessing only
the historical conditions for a civil and anti-colonial revolution and the
social conditions for a workers' and peasents' uprising. In the Russian Empire,
the existential crisis did not occur because productive relations had become an
obstacle to the development of the productive forces, and, above all, because
of the war. Instead of the capitalist contradictions reaching their full
intensity in the economic crisis of capitalism due to a halt in the development
of productive forces, these contradictions resulted from a general social
crisis brought on by the war. The war, as the most lethal form of class
exploitation of workers and peasents by capitalists, made the class struggle so
acute that it became a class war. The deaths of millions of workers and
peasents, military defeats, poverty and mass starvation, brought about the
existential crisis that led to a general upheaval of the peasents and workers,
directed by the bolsheviks towards revolutionary changes. In the Russian Empire,
swept by the storm of the First World War, there were no pertinent historical
conditions, but there were existential conditions, and they created the
political conditions for a socialist revolution.
The Russian Empire was not overthrown by the bolsheviks. The October Revolution
was not the cause but the consequence of the fall of the Russian Empire, just
as the Munich Revolution was not the cause but the consequence of the fall of
the German monarchy. The defeat in the war with Japan, just as the bourgeois
revolution of 1905 that was drenched in blood by the Romanovs, foreshadowed the
collapse of the Russian Empire in the First World War and the bourgeois
Revolution which broke out in February 1917. The bolsheviks did not build the
Soviet Union on the foundations of the Russian Empire, but on its rubble.
Since for Marx the most important criterion for determining the historical
legitimacy of any order is whether it advances the development of the
productive forces, the October Revolution has the utmost historical legitimacy.
In the Russian Empire, capitalism did not develop autonomously. The Russian
Empire was a Western colony, and its economic development depended on the
economic expansion of the West. The anti-colonial character of the October
Revolution was of crucial importance since it enabled the independent
development of the Soviet Union and, thus, the development of education,
science, the economy, military and industry. It enabled the Soviet Union to go
from being a backward agricultural country to being a developed industrial
country. By relying exclusively on its own forces and in complete economic
isolation, the Soviet Union, 20 years after the October Revolution, became the
first scientific and the second economic power in the world. During the Second
World War (in spite of over 25 million war dead) it was the strongest military
power in the world, which destroyed over 75% of Nazi Germany’s military
assets and captured Berlin.
With capitalism becoming a totalitarian destructive order, the October
Revolution acquires a new dimension. If the historical development of
humankind is viewed in an existential context, and bearing in mind that the
development of capitalism is based on the destruction of nature and the entire
human race, the October Revolution has a supreme historical legitimacy. Its most important
quality is that it abolished capitalism and, with it, the colonial domination of
Russia by the most developed capitalist powers. In Russia, as well as in other
countries where workers' revolutions broke out under its influence, the full
development of the contradictions of capitalism was halted as an ecocidal and
genocidal order, the capitalist destruction of the natural environment in
Russia and of its population was stopped. Without the October Revolution and
the Soviet Union’s economic, scientific and military potential, the Slavic (and
Asian) peoples would have faced the same destiny in the 20th century that
befell the original North American peoples in the 19th century. Hitler's Drang nach
Osten was but a continuation of the genocidal march by the capitalist West on
the East, beginning in the second half of the 19th century during the
Industrial Revolution in Germany, then with the First World War, and continued
after the onset of the October Revolution. The western interventionist troops
in WWI did not „defend“ the Russian Empire, they rather used the uprising of
the bolsheviks as an excuse to deal with the creative potential of the Russian
people (and, in that context, with the Russian bourgeoisie), in order to
prevent Russia from becoming a power capable of opposing the West in the
struggle for global domination. Ultimately, the interventionist countries did
not seek to preserve the Russian state, but rather to divide it into
protectorates, just as they have done in China, in the Arab world, in Africa,
Central and South America, and in the Balkans. The relation of the West
towards Russia was based on the ruling principle of monopoly capitalism
„Destroy competition!“, as it had an ecocidal and genocidal nature. The same can be seen
today. The West supports only those political powers in Russia which seek to
turn Russia into a colony of the most powerful capitalist corporations in the
West, those whose intention is to destroy the biological, creative and
libertarian potential of the Russian people.
As far as the humanist legitimacy of the October Revolution is concerned, the
Revolution enabled free education for all, resulting in the eradication of
illiteracy, which, at that time, afflicted over 80% of the population;
universal free healthcare; full employment, the eight-hour work day and the
humanization of working conditions; equal value to male and female work
(something still non-existent in the most developed capitalist countries);
sufferage and other political and civil rights for women; free housing.
Most importantly, child labor, which in the Russian Empire as in the West, was
exploited up to 14 hours a day, was also abolished. During the
industrialization of England, the USA, France, the Russian Empire and other
capitalist countries, tens of millions of children died in factories and mines
from exhaustion, illness and starvation. As far as the humanist legitimacy of
bourgeois revolutions is concerned, the French still celebrate the French
Bourgeois Revolution today, although the number of its fatalities far exceeds
the that of the October Revolution, with over 36 000 members of the French
aristocracy being publicly guillotines! And what about the First World
War, provoked by capitalists in order to “overcome” the economic crisis of
capitalism, in which over 20 million workers and peasents were killed, with the
same number wounded; in which millions of children died of starvation and
diseases, and whose direct consequence was the “Spanish fever” causing the
deaths of over 20 million people? Is this not the crime of capitalists? Another
humanist characteristic of the October Revolution was the fact that it pulled
the Russian people out of the slaughterhouse of the First World War and, thus,
prevented the deaths of millions of people.
In the 1930s, Leon Trotsky, commander of the Red Army, published the book „The
Revolution Betrayed“, in which he questioned the socialist character of the
post-revolutionary Soviet Union for having departed from the revolutionary
ideals of the October Revolution. Trotsky does not question the historicity of
the revolution, and he deals with the political voluntarism of the party
leadership that led to the perversion of ideals and compromised the goals of
the revolution. The October Revolution, according to Trotsky, had historical
legitimacy as a socialist revolution because it was a mass workers' revolution,
while in the post-revolutionary period the goals of the Revolution became
distorted by the party leadership’s seizing the power that the workers had won
in the Revolution and becoming a power alienated from the workers. Trotsky does
not understand that the nature of the Revolution conditioned the nature of
post-revolutionary developments. It does not mean that there were no
alternative political ideas, only that there were no political forces strong
enough to redirect the course of events. The Kronstadt rebellion is a typical
example. By viewing the event through an ahistorical lens, some theorists
oppose a revolutionary romanticism to the voluntarism of the party leaders and
turn the Soviet working class at the beginning of the 20th century into a
mythological power that embodies not ony the emancipatory legacy of the
workers' class struggle in the most developed capitalist countries, but also
the humanist ideals set forth by Marx as the guiding idea for the workers'
movement. According to these ideal, by being able militarily to defeat the
bourgeoisie (and the interventionist Western powers), the workers and peasents
were able to create a socialist society. Actually, the seizure of power by the
workers was only a first step toward the development of the socialist society
that was supposed to eventuate from the socialist revolution.
The
“Cult of the Party” and the “Cult of the Leader”, which were created during the
Revolution, were possible because there were no historical conditions for a
true socialist revolution. There was a revolutionary party, but there was no
revolutionary working class. The uprising of the workers and peasents started
from “below”, but the revolution started from “above”. The fanaticism of
revolutionary voluntarism was based on the human endeavours needed to bridge
the gap dividing a backward Russian Empire from the developed industrial West.
Lenin maintains that: “Socialism is electrification plus industrialisation!”.
The reality of the undeveloped Russian Empire, devastated by the First World
War and then the civil war, had to be “adjusted” to the historical conditions
neccesary for a socialist society to be created (and to survive). Socialism
in the Soviet Union did not occur at the peak of the development of capitalism
or as a product of a historical, and in that context, a general social
development; it was rather a politically founded “project” that was to be
realized by the Party. The party leaders literally acquired the status of
“social engineers” whose task was to “build socialism” in the Soviet Union,
while the “working masses” became the means to that end. One of the most
important of Lenin's theses from that period was that of “taking from
capitalism everything that enables the development of socialism”. The
mechanicistic nature of this way of thinking indicates the ahistorical nature
of the “building of socialism” in the Soviet Union. The voluntarism of the
party leaders, instrumentalised in the apparatus of the state, was primarily
conditioned by the fact that capitalism was not eradicated by the Revolution.
The struggle against the restoration of capitalism was a strategic point of
reference for the ruling order up until its downfall.
The ruling order in the Soviet Union had historical legitimacy only until
productive forces were sufficiently developed. When state ownership became the
chief obstacle to economic development, it became a burden. Instead of a
“corrective” socialist revolution, where the workers would seize power from the
corrupt bureaucracy and then directly take over production and the overall
processes of social reproduction, those with executive power carried out a coup
d'etat that restored capitalism and turned the Soviet Union into the colony of the
most powerful capitalist countries in the West. What Nazi Germany failed to do
was acomplished by the “red bourgeoisie” embodied in the corrupt and alienated
leaders of the Communist Party. Instead of growing the productive forces, the
newly established private ownership led to widespread plundering and the
economic, scientific, ecological and biological downfall of the former
republics of the Soviet Union. The destruction of the Soviet Union and the
“introduction” of capitalism without a mass opposition by the working class was
possible because, on the one hand, the ruling political structure was entirely
aliented from the workers and had unchallenged power, while, on the other hand,
workers in the Soviet Union as abstract “citizens” lost their class authenticity
and, thus, their ability to have a say in the life of the country as an
organized political force. The disintegration of the Soviet Union by the “red
bourgeoisie” marked, in fact, the ultimate defeat of the Soviet working class –
a defeat from which it has not yet managed to recover. The dissolution of the
Soviet Union, along with the dissolution of Yugoslavia, were the final phase in
the destruction of the emancipatory potential of the socialist movement and the
establishment of a capitalist dictatorship over workers.
In spite of ever more radical demands for change, the growing existential
crisis created by capitalism as a totalitarian destructive order, more and more
dramatically destroys any humanist vision of the future. Everybody is drawing a
sword. Some intent to kill, some in self-defence. Instead of essence, existence
is becoming an unquestionable imperative. The ruling capitalist corporations in
the West brought humankind to the brink of the abyss, and the struggle for
survival is being carried out on the edge of a cliff. Those who are the
weakest will be the first to fall into the void and perish forever. That is the
main reason why in Russia, despite the crimes of the Stalinist regime, the
“Cult of Stalin” is being revived. The ever deeper crisis of the West and the
increasingly aggressive policies based on it, aimed at destroying billions of
“surplus” people and seizing foreign territories, has caused Russia to
attach great importance to the historical figures who managed to build its
economic, scientific and military power and to oppose the West. Stalin is a
symbol of victory, which, above all, is a symbol of the existential power of
the Russian people, and this is what makes him popular. The same goes for
Lenin. His popularity in Russia, as well as in those countries fighting against
contemporary imperialism, is based not only on a social (class) character, but,
even more, on the anti-colonial nature of the October Revolution and the
foundations of the economic, scientific and military power established by it.
When the Russian Empire is being commended, the periods referred to are mostly
those of state formation. In that context, Peter the Great acquires substantial
importance.
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