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Artificial Intelligence: The Eye of the Master

Ian Parker read this new book, and wrote a review of it without the help of ChatGPT

Before we panic about the impact of AI we need to step back and look at where it has come from, what social function it serves, and how it is meshed, and meshes us, into late capitalism. The detailed history and conceptual-political analysis in this new book, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence by Matteo Pasquinelli (Verso, 2023) does that well. It is an indispensable starting point for thinking through how we use AI, including ChatGPT, instead of allowing it to use us.

There is a wealth of analysis in this book, and a history that ranges from early computer development, in which women’s labour is rendered invisible, to the role of simple “pattern recognition” that underpins most of what we mistakenly describe as “intelligent” in contemporary AI, and the ideological use of research into “neural networks” that actually projects present-day social relations into descriptions of how they seem to operate. It raises a number of crucial questions about how we think about the role of technology in general.

Technology, creativity and change

The Eye of the Master is named for the forms of surveillance and regulation that are necessary for capitalism to develop, with “the master” being the system of control that Marx described – “the power of the ‘master’” he refers to in Capital – rather than a particular individual master who is observing things and pulling the strings behind the scenes. The “eye” of the master is the increasing monitoring of each aspect of the labour process (and of consumer choice patterns), a process that includes, of course, the incitement of each subject to willingly offer themselves up to the gaze of the master.

This, the book argues, is basically what AI is; it is not a supernaturally “intelligent” phenomenon, but something much more banal than that, an entirely “artificial” invention that embeds certain kinds of exploitative and oppressive social relations in society and in the way we think about ourselves. AI is the “eye of the master” as it accumulates the rotten ideological “commonsense” of a society and implements it as if it were the only truth, indeed as if there was no alternative. Pasquinelli puts it this way: “the inner code of AI is constituted not by the imitation of biological intelligence but by the intelligence of labour and social relations”.

The book gives us a history of technology under capitalism, one that emphasises, time and again, the ingenuity and creativity of human beings and the way that ingenuity and creativity is betrayed, absorbed and neutralised, “recuperated,” put in the service of capital accumulation. It is working from within a certain kind of Marxism that takes human creativity as the fundamental founding principle of analysis; “human praxis expresses its own logic (an anti-logic, some might say) – a power of speculation and invention, before technoscience captures and alienates it”.

This is a rather different starting point from the classical Marxist approach that is often taken for granted by many of us on the left, and so we are drawn into a conceptual debate that is important for us to think through in the way we think about history and possibilities of change. So, one traditional way of working with Marxist analysis is to insist that historical developmental technological processes create, give rise to, certain kinds of social relations, including the progressive possible social relations that are the basis for socialist struggle. In this traditional Marxist way of thinking about things, the “working class” is created by capitalism, and then becomes a collective agent to overthrow it; capitalism creates its own gravedigger.

This book is coming from an alternative reading of Marx, one that is linked to Italian Autonomist Marxism, in which workers’ creativity comes first, and capitalism leeches on that, distorting it. Revolution, in this way of thinking, is a reclaiming of collective potential that was always already there. So, the book argues for an analysis of how that creativity is stolen, mechanised, turned against us; Pasquinelli writes about “collective knowledge and labour as the primary source of the very ‘intelligence’ that AI comes to extract, encode, and commodify”. Maybe he is right; the book makes a convincing argument for this interpretation of Marxism. In this way Pasquinelli argues for what he calls a “labour theory of machine intelligence,” that is, one which shows us that labour is ineliminable, and it is only the organisation of labour that gives us a way out.

Knowledge and control

Is this form of knowledge we are subjected to now really a kind of “master?” Yes, in the sense that Marx spoke of the machinery of domination that we are confronted with as workers under capitalism, and this machinery of domination presents itself to us as if it is “open” and transparent. Go to the ChatGPT portal, for instance, and it will tell you that this is a place of “open AI” (while also inviting you to write something about kittens, one of a number of useful tasks you didn’t know you needed to do). What is hidden in plain sight here is that this “master” is distributed, a network of forms of control, and one in which we are made to watch each other and watch over ourselves.

Pasquinelli draws on a range of theoretical resources to make his argument, and they include classical Marxism, Italian Autonomist Marxism, the work of the historian Michel Foucault (who wrote a lot about forms of surveillance and power in modern society) and the work of Foucault’s buddy Gilles Deleuze. It was Deleuze who wrote a Postscript on the Societies of Control, a brief dense text which, Pasquinelli reminds us, “declared that power was no longer concerned with the discipline of individuals but with the control of dividuals, that is of the fragments of an extended and deconstructed body.” These “dividuals” are objectified versions of ourselves, less even than the “individuals” we are told we should be in liberal capitalism. We are broken up, made less than human, and this “society of control” is the basis of the “platform capitalism” that current versions of AI thrive in.

Work and workers

One scary, but, if you think about it, predictable use of AI, is to watch over employees and regulate their work (and we need to watch those who are watching us). Pasquinelli takes that argument further, pointing out that the old and still much-rehearsed hopes (and fears) of AI go back to the earliest experiments with “machine intelligence” and its precursors back in the nineteenth century. According to this story, workers will be unnecessary, and a professional class of thoughtful experts will guide the technology. This has proven to be quite false. It is false on two counts.

First, this “new technology” does not at all dispense with workers, but requires them, requires more and more of them to work more intensively and for longer hours to service the machinery that enables AI to function. As Pasquinelli argues, “platform capitalism is a form of automation that in reality does not replace workers but multiplies and governs them anew”. The servers, and the many other materially-existing technological devices that are needed to keep the AI apparatus running, are served by a new labour army of mostly invisible workers; there is now an “army of ‘ghost workers’ from the Global South.”

These low-paid precarious women and migrant workers and those in out-sourced locations feed the illusion that “the cloud” is immaterial, as if it is a magical mysterious place where the data floats around, thus complementing the illusion that online banking and investment practice is, in a weird inexplicable way growing profit, rather than managing and harvesting living labour. At this point the analysis cries out for an account of social reproduction, the social reproduction of work and workers that learns lessons from analyses of domestic labour.

Second, the flipside of this failed hope, a false promise, is that AI is actually, instead, replacing what was once dubbed (by one ex-Trotskyist, James Burnham, it so happens) the managerial class who are being eaten alive by their own supposed revolution. Thus, there is not an automation of work, but work that needs to be performed under conditions of intensified surveillance and able to fit into the needs of the automated technology, and so, Pasquinelli argues, there is “automation of management” and “algorithms replace management and multiply precarious jobs”.

Unintelligent conclusions

The Official Monster Raving Loony Party candidate in the Rochdale by-election (one of the least worst candidates to stand there) had as one of his manifesto promises to change “AI” to “IA” (less ambitious than the party’s candidate in Wellingborough who wanted to abolish gravity).

We cannot wish these technological developments away, and need, instead, to tackle how the social relations they replicate and reinforce themselves need to be transformed so we will be able to turn technology from being an instrument of control to a means for our liberation. This very useful book holds open the hope of taking control of the machinery that is used to control us, with examples of self-organisation from within the Italian Autonomist tradition; as Pasquinelli argues toward the end of the book, “a collective ‘counter-intelligence’, has to be learned”.

Here is a twist on the story, something that should inspire hope and confidence in our ability to put this technology to good use. Pasquinelli reminds us that “the most zealous development of automation has shown how much ‘intelligence’ is expressed by activities and jobs that are usually deemed manual and unskilled,” so we are not the dolts we are made out to be when we fail to function as simple pattern recognition systems.

When we click on the image boxes to get into a website, selecting the bits of the picture that contains traffic lights say, to prove that we are “human”, it turns out that the “proof” is not so much that we tick the right boxes but rather that our wobbly faltering movement of the cursor is the giveaway; fully competent AI pattern recognition software would do it swiftly and smoothly. All to the good, there are some things that need to be done in that way.

One take-home message of this book is that development is not driven by technology, and that message is already there in Marx, but the driver of development, the “forces of production” are already underpinned, made possible, by certain “relations of production’ that are then crystallised in the technology. AI crystallises peculiar relations of power, and makes it seem like there is really a master with an eye on us. All this means that the alternative is, as ever in revolutionary anti-capitalist politics, self-conscious collective activity that goes way beyond the limited pattern-recognition formulae of AI, confronting the way it is currently used.

You can read and comment on this article where it was first published here

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Frantz Fanon: Martinican, French, Algerian, African Revolutionary

A new full account of Fanon’s short life and work

Frantz Fanon was once known as the “Lenin of Africa,” an inspiration for liberation movements on the continent and then across the world as anti-colonial struggle took centre stage. More than that, he tried to link personal and political liberation in his clinical work, to understand the psychological depths of racism and forms of resistance, and then shifted his focus to directly work for Algerian independence, expanding his analysis from North Africa to the whole continent. A key focus in his theoretical and practical work was on the role of violence under colonialism and in the process of liberation. This new book, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz, published last month (Bloomsbury, January 2024), provides a detailed and helpfully critical account of this remarkable revolutionary.

Life and impact

Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 in Fort-de-France, capital of the island of Martinique, a French “department” in the Caribbean, a colony, still an integral part of France today. During the Second World War the island was under the “Vichy” regime as part of the collaboration with the Nazis, and Fanon left the island to fight fascism. He was decorated for bravery, and rewarded with a bursary after the war to study medicine and train as a psychiatrist in France.

Adam Shatz traces through the journey from Martinique, from a colonial context in which gradations of “Blackness” were used as a tool of oppression, to France where Fanon encountered direct racism first-hand, something he wrote about. Now, as a “French” radical, he worked within medical psychiatry and questioned it, working with some other radical psychiatrists, including those who sought refuge from fascism in France and Spain. A lesson he took to heart was about the interrelationship between forms of oppression, and the way that colonial power maintained its grip through divide and rule, a lesson voiced in advice by a colleague that “When you hear someone insulting the Jews, pay attention, because they’re talking about you.”

Fanon was then appointed to the psychiatric hospital in Blida, just south of Algiers, and it was here that he began to identify with the Algerian liberation struggle, directly aiding fighters from the FLN, the Front de Libération Nationale, while at the same time trying to introduce alternative forms of clinical treatment. Here he attempted to take forward the “institutional therapy” he had learned during his training in mainland France, a kind of therapy that treated human beings as social beings, always in context, in relation to others. It is here that Fanon becomes a self-identified Algerian revolutionary, and his classic, part autoethnographic study, Black Skin, White Masks, published in 1952, tackles the way that racism works its way into the internal lives of the colonised and colonisers. There were signs on the beaches of Algiers and Oran that read “no dogs, no Arabs.” Algerians were seen as less than human, and they were encouraged to internalise that image, seeing themselves as brutes rather than human beings.

Violence

Fanon has now experienced fascist violence and colonial violence, and he is noticing how liberation struggle is also, of necessity, also violent, a counter-violence that not only opposes forces of oppression but also gives rise to healing personal and collective agency. The colonised human being emerges in the course of violent political struggle, from being a mere object to being a revolutionary subject. Violence is, in this way, part of a progressive political process but, as Shatz points out, it is also a symptom of a problem, part of the reproduction of colonial violence that is, in some ways, self-sabotaging. There is, Shatz points out, a tension for Fanon “which he never quite resolved, between his work as a doctor and his obligations as a militant, between his commitment to healing and his belief in violence.”

The argument about violence is made most forcefully by Fanon in a book that was immediately banned in France on publication in 1961, The Wretched of the Earth; in French Les damnés de la terre (which evokes, among other things, lines from The Internationale). There had been massacres in Algeria of hundreds of colonists (events that the French Communist Party was quick to denounce as “Hitlerian”), and then reprisals in which thousands of Algerians died. It was actually the preface by Jean-Paul Sartre that hyped up Fanon’s nuanced and contradictory exploration of violence, and made it seem as if Fanon was advocating all-out violence as a pure cure-all.

Shatz comments on the wording that Fanon used in The Wretched of the Earth: “The English translation of la violence désintoxique as ‘violence is a cleansing force’ is somewhat misleading, suggesting an almost redemptive elimination of impurities, whereas Fanon’s more clinical word choice indicates the overcoming of a state of drunkenness, the stupor induced by colonial subjugation.” For Fanon, it is in violence that the colonized, and this is a direct quote from Fanon himself, find the “key … to decipher social reality.” However you play it, with all the ambiguities, you can see how central violence is to oppression and resistance.

By now Fanon has resigned from the intolerable situation at the hospital and moved to Tunis where he is working for the FLN and develops a reputation as its chief theoretician. As an ambassador for the Algerian liberation struggle, he is in contact with African revolutionaries, and now claims that identity, as African. He writes other important studies, including on the Algerian revolution and on the African revolution, but his life is cut short by leukemia, and he dies in 1961 age 36.

Contested claims

There are some missteps in the book, in the false claim, for example, that Fanon distanced himself from the French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan because Lacan celebrated madness as a kind of freedom. That characterisation of Lacanian psychoanalysis is actually quite wrong, and the Lacanian position on the dreadful “unfreedom” of psychosis is actually very close to Fanon’s own position.

Shatz is very clear about the criminal behaviour of the French Communist Party in relation to the Algerian revolution, and you can see well why Fanon never became a Stalinist; the PCF line was that Algeria was part of France and that the FLN should do a deal. Fanon was never in the Fourth International, FI, but the Algerian liberation movement was a crucial part of the life of the FI in the late 1950s and early 1960s, with the then FI secretary Michel Pablo arrested for gun-running in support of the FLN. Shatz notes that Pablo’s FI operated an arms factory in Morocco (something other leaders of the FI were not so happy about, but which we should now acknowledge as a brave practical achievement).

Pablo wrote about Fanon as a key figure in the anti-colonial struggle; there is much thoughtful reflection by Fanon about the way that a liberation movement that is not explicitly and directly accountable, which does not carry through the socialist tasks of the revolution, risks becoming incorporated into imperialism, with the leadership becoming part of the ruling class of a neocolonial state (as did eventually happen in Algeria). Fanon’s struggle was also ours, and our comrade Daniel Bensaïd has also reflected on his importance for revolutionary strategy.

Fanon now

There is much in this book that resonates with contemporary anti-colonial struggle, including the resistance to genocide in Gaza, and the many ways which colonial institutions attempt to insist only on condemnation of the violence of those who fight back. We are also reminded of the way in which comparisons between the Nazis and other oppressive regimes, comparison that is now treated as a crime in some quarters, was common currency; Shatz notes that “Simone de Beauvoir remarked in her memoirs that French soldiers’ uniforms had the same effect on her that swastikas once did.” Shatz notes that Palestinian psychiatrist Samah Jabr has said of Fanon that “his prophetic insights remain a source of inspiration to Palestinians,” and the recent book Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practising Resistance in Palestine is thoroughly Fanonian.

This new biography by Adam Shatz is a really interesting, and beautifully written introduction to, and overview of, Fanon’s contribution to revolutionary politics, and there is much discussion of the link between theory and practice. It is not uncritical, pointing out, for instance, that Fanon had nothing to say about the role of Islam in the FLN political struggle, and, as far as the “clinic” aspect is concerned, it does seem as if the shadow of medical psychiatry was still a powerful influence, not to be copied; Fanon was impressed with electroshock as a “violent” treatment, as if that was also in some bizarre way liberating.

Among other things ostensibly “non-political,” but actually also infused with political meaning, we learn that Fanon liked the bebop jazz of Charlie Parker, and we are given a rich political and cultural context for the “lives of Frantz Fanon”; we also learn that he wasn’t always a hard-faced killjoy, he liked dancing when he had a chance, liked nice shirts with cuff-links and sometimes changed his tie twice a day (though he was a bit reproving when Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir wanted to take him to a fancy restaurant and talk about the food). There is much to learn from in this book, and an opportunity to return to reassess why Marxist revolutionaries at the time engaged with his work, and need to engage with it now.

You can read and comment on this article where it was first published here

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Psychopolitics, Reviews

Dream Scenario: Getting Cagey about fantasies of alienation and escape

Ian Parker watched a crappy film which got under his skin

Dream Scenario, released at the end of last year, stars Nicolas Cage as Paul Matthews, a college professor seething with resentment at not being recognised for a book he has not even started writing, and then paying a horrible price for being noticed, more than he would have liked. Paul lumbers around the sets with a goofy expression and an anorak pasted onto his back, and gives fake “inspirational” lectures (the staple of Hollywood films about college professors) about how zebras blend into the herd to stay safe and only stand out in order to mate.

Scenarios

Things start going awry when Cage, who is also producer of the film, starts appearing in people’s dream, not doing much, but as a passive onlooker. It’s creepy. People start to compare notes, and Paul can’t resist seizing this opportunity to break out of dumb anonymity into being a celebrity and, his game-plan, to get a contract for his book on evolutionary biology. An agency takes him on, offering him a deal to promote Sprite in peoples’ dreams, which he objects to, or to appear in Obama’s dream, which he likes the sound of.

Paul Matthews does become a celebrity, but people are frightened, and when he is singled out, he reacts, and when he reacts he is perceived, dreamt of, as being violent, and then he is scapegoated – the celebrity becomes a threat – and feared. Along the way there is a ghastly sex-scene when one dreamer tries to get Paul to enact the experience they had fantasised about with him, and one reviewer remarks that you will want to take a pen-knife to scrape away the memory of the scene (and they are right).

You will watch all this unroll for the first agonising four fifths of the film before the narrative lurches into a daft alternative near-future scenario in which people are able to use new technology to leap into others’ dreams. There are ironic references to the commodification of life, but any progressive reading is wiped away, and you are left with the kind of hopelessness that Paul is wallowing in at the start of the film.

Alienation

There is something intriguing about all this because it taps into something of the formation and experience of subjectivity under capitalism. This is a film about alienation in a number of key aspects. One is the reduction of people to being passive spectators, but that passivity, as we can see in the case of Paul, is laced with anger that cannot be channelled into productive activity. It is incited and blocked. People become ill as a result.

Another aspect is anonymity, the kind of thing that was described in US American sociology as the phenomenon of the “lonely crowd,” in which we are living alongside other people without really relating to them, and that lack of recognition also feeds into a sense of being isolated and helpless. Paul craves recognition for his achievements but cannot do anything to break out of his little prison.

The third aspect of alienation is atomisation, the imprisonment in the sense of “individuality” that is promoted as a vision of autonomy and freedom but which actually divides people from each other. This is where Paul’s passionate lecture, which he is fixated upon – he repeats it during the course of the disastrous date with an admiring dreamer – is so emblematic; zebras blend in to stay safe and stand out to get sex, excitement with others.

These three aspects of alienation are at the heart of the escape attempts that are provoked in us, that we might break out, become active, that we might actually link up with others, gain recognition, and that we might realise ourselves as fully human and – here is a trap – become fully independent.

That third escape attempt, and here in the film it is to become a “celebrity” (like Cage is in real life, in a fake-reflexive twist on the ideological core of the film), and so we become all the more locked into the forms of individuality that are provoked by capitalism and intensified under neoliberalism, locked into our little selves instead of becoming human as part of a constructed collective endeavour.

Dreams

This is where dreams come in, and they are not only explicitly a topic of the film Dream Scenario, but we are offered a “theory”, if you can call it that, for how all this works. In the even more crappy final fifth of the film someone marketing the new technology that allows everyone, and not only Nicolas Cage, to enter other peoples’ dreams, opines that the real lesson of Paul Matthews’ celebrity appearance in dreams is that “dualism” – the split between our bodies and our minds, between material reality and the ideas we have about it, is true. More than that, there are specific “theories” that also turn out to be true. Enter stage right one of the ideological master-keys to dreams and our unconscious fantasies, psychoanalysis.

Dream Scenario peddles not only dualism, an ideology about who we are in the world that divides us from it, but also banalised versions of psychoanalytic theory. First off, and this is voiced quite explicitly by some of the characters to explain how Paul Matthews appears in their dreams, is Jung. Carl Jung, who talked about a “collective unconscious” that was “racial”, and who came out with antisemitic and other racist comments during his time as head of the Nazi-controlled psychotherapy organisation in Germany after Freud and his followers were hounded out, is a go-to for some of the most reactionary ideas about our yearning for individuality, collectivity and change.

Here in “Dream Scenario” Jung’s ideas are wheeled in to not only account for the weird events in the first four fifths of the film but actually to advertise the possibility of telepathically-shared dream worlds (even if there are also some little digs at the way that commercial enterprises might harness that to their own ends).

The other psychoanalytic element is hinted it, and actually ideologically underpins how Paul projects himself into dreams. This element comes from the work of Melanie Klein, one of the most biologically-reductive of present-day psychoanalysts, with a mainly conservative influence, following her death, in psychoanalytic organisations around the world. She argued that through what she called “projective identification” it would be possible for fantasies to be conveyed from one mind to another, most significantly, for her, from the mind of the psychoanalytic patient who would “project” feelings into the mind of the psychoanalyst, would then “identify” with them. This daft idea is also, of course, of a piece with dualism, with the independent life of ideas and their circulation outside of material reality.

Some of my psychoanalytic colleagues will tell me that they reach for Jungian and Kleinian ideas in their own work and find them useful. That’s fine, but here in this film we are given an opportunity to notice how those ideas also play out ideologically in popular culture outside the clinic. The real problem is when specific techniques are turned into a complete worldview (and in this case, two complementary psychoanalytic worldviews) that is functional to capitalism.

Real life

So, though Paul Matthews tells us about zebras, and wants to write a book about evolutionary biology, the “explanation” we are sold, under the counter as it were, is a quasi-psychoanalytic one. Dream on. This film might be a critique of alienation, but it offers us no way out, only the fantasy that we might peel off that anorak and turn out to be not Paul Matthews but a famous real-life film producer Nicolas Cage. Avoid it, or, if you are tempted, step back and think critically about what you are being sold in this film, and look to quite different scenarios for combatting alienation, ones that are constructed collectively in our real lives together rather than searching for only fantasied individual ways out.

You can read and comment on this where it was first published here

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History

Two, three, many Lenins

There are over a hundred Lenins a hundred years after he died in this very useful book.

The book, edited by Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichorn and Patrick Anderson, has an unsettling title “Lenin: The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce,” which basically boils down to an affirmation of Lenin against all those who would want to denounce him, whether that is outright reactionaries who have never actually read him to former revolutionaries who now conveniently disown him. Over a hundred authors from (nearly) every corner of the world pit themselves against mis-readings and misunderstandings of Lenin in short essays, most of which are bite-sized and some of which are more difficult to digest.

Commemoration

When Lenin died in 1924 he was mummified and put on display in Moscow, bits of his body replaced over the years so that barely any of the original Lenin is left. He objected to this idea before he died, in fact, Lenin also opposed the project of producing a “collected work”, believing there was no point in collating obscure writings from the past. Since then, “Leninists” of different stripes have been scrabbling over the remains of his work, work which, when published in his lifetime was censored by the very Stalinist apparatus that he warned about. There are quite a range of those interpreters of Lenin in this book, those who venerate him and tie that veneration to some quite horrible bureaucratic regimes that are actually the antithesis of what he tried to build after 1917. The quasi-religious veneration doesn’t do him any favours, still less those who want to put him into practice today.

We are reminded that there were offerings place by his coffin, and afterwards nearly 2,000 different objects – ranging from flowers to books to statues – were photographed and catalogued. There is a danger, of course, that the little chapters in this book will function in this kind of way, reminders of the way that Marxism in the Soviet Union and other “workers’ states” was turned into a belief system rather than a guide to action.

There are some off-the-wall quasi-Stalinist Lenins in this book, formulations that try to press him into some kind of weird justification for some old and some existing regimes, including Maoist and even Putinite distortions of history, and there are some very sound revolutionary Marxist discussions of theoretical issues and practical political questions, and, between those two – those that are dead wrong (but need to be read and grappled with, argued with) and those who do want to bring him alive again (and you will find some of our comrades at work in this book) – there are a range of innovative readings, illuminating, surprising.

Dialectical intersectional Lenins

What comes through in this book is at least two reminders of what is important about Lenin. One is that there is no one fixed “Leninist” position about anything. He changed his mind, argued with those who turned his ideas into dogma, and was engaged in continual critical reflection on what was to be done. As the political context changed, so he was forced to reassess his analysis and to shift political position. The other reminder is that there are multiple ways of connecting with Lenin and taking up his ideas, and this book includes anarchist, feminist, anti-colonial, trans and queer readings of what Lenin was up to in Russia up to 1917 and after it. These Lenins remind us that to be communist is to be many things, to be many contradictory things at the same time.

Notwithstanding some of the old fixed-scheme Stalinist residues in this book, and some confused gobblydygook, structuralist, post-structuralist and phenomenological, what this “heritage” of Lenin does is to effectively reconfigure him as someone who is, in effect, profoundly “intersectional.” In chapters of this book we see how “Leninist” it is to develop analyses of “racial capitalism” and “social reproduction” and much more. Many contrasting standpoints of the exploited and oppressed reclaim Lenin in this book and link him to social movements that we must now be linked with if we are to be authentically Leninist.

The book includes the fruits of careful historical study, so we travel with “Dr Jacob Richter” (his pseudonym to get a ticket from the British Library) around London on the top of a London bus, and we learn about how he spent crucial months just before the Russian Revolution reading Hegel and coming to an understanding of the need to “smash” the state instead of taking it over and of the need to turn to the anti-colonial movements. We are reminded of how and why Putin hates Lenin, blaming him for actively supporting the national independence of Ukraine, and of the debates over the rights of colonised nations with Rosa Luxemburg, who should have known better.

And as well as learning – the book could be used as the basis of an educational course in revolutionary Marxism, tracking theoretical developments, historical processes and some bad mistakes – you will, at moments laugh. Rosa Luxemburg writes to a friend (and this comment is referred to by at least three of the contributors) “Yesterday Lenin came, and up to today he has been here four times already. I enjoy talking with him, he’s clever and well educated, and has such an ugly mug, the kind I like to look at.”

Communism

This is an unashamedly partisan book, on the side of the exploited and oppressed and showing that Lenin, for all his faults, was too. The editors tell us that “The shamelessly immodest purpose of this book is to be an active part of this process of communisting; in our case, an unapologetically Leninist one”. It is a brave project, time-consuming, and now it takes time to read it – this is a big book – but worth it if we are to take Lenin to heart and liberate ourselves.

You can read and comment on this article where it was first published here

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Manchester

Manchester against Police Pursuit

An impressive public meeting organised by the Northern Police Monitoring Project

The meeting took place on Tuesday 13 February on a cold drizzly Manchester evening; outside, with a candlelit vigil, and then inside the Friends Meeting House. Organised by the Northern Police Monitoring Project, the Upper Hall was full, and lively and grieving the deaths of young people killed by police, and angry. Around eighty percent of those attending, and the whole of the speaker platform were women, something significant here in the mobilisation of families to speak out and take action for their loved ones, most of whom were young men. The names of those who had been killed in police pursuit were read out at the vigil and we chanted “We will remember them” after each name, and then inside the building, after a warming drink, there was discussion of where to go next with the campaign.

There has been a shocking rise in deaths at the hands of the police during pursuit in Manchester since the pandemic, one speaker suggesting that it was during that time, precisely when the streets were emptier and there was little to occupy the police, that they began to target young people, many black and all from working class communities. There was discussion during the meeting of the way that short coroner’s inquest meetings saw police mocking and scoffing and lazily reading from prepared scripts, with contempt for those who had died.

Demands

The #EndPolicePursuits Families Campaign demands are that they call for: immediate end to systematic over-policing of racially minoritised and working-class young people by road traffic officers; immediate prohibition of police initiating pursuits for non-violent offences and minor traffic violations; recording and transparent publication of traffic stop data; overhead motorway signs to be changed when police pursuit enters the motorway system; officers to carry out their duty of care and to prioritise the safety of the public; and state agencies and investigatory bodies to hold the police to account.

The scale of the problem was driven home to those who attended right at the beginning of the evening when a family was late to the vigil after they had, once again, been stopped by the police! The anger among the families that evening was evident, and the organisers took care to put support in place to handle the distress that was very evident. Red Clinic operatives had been invited to the meeting to provide emotional support, if it was needed, and there was an invited poet as well as contribution from a solicitor who has been involved in some of the cases, and there was time for break-out activities, for action.

Linking actions

At the vigil during our minute of silence we could hear, from over at the either side of Manchester Central public library, the sounds of chanting from the latest in the series of Palestine Solidarity demonstrations, and there was acknowledgement of this in speeches by organisers; the racism and class oppression experienced by the families present was, one speaker said, also to be seen in Gaza. The poet ended her time inside the meeting by reminding us of what was happening in Gaza, with a poem from a young Palestinian and then her own poem in response.

The NPMP magazine Reflections and Resistance, makes the links clear on the cover, with slogans from “Black Lives Matter” to “Kill the Bill” to “Defund the Police” to “Cops off Campus”, to “End Prevent”. This was very different from many left-group-dominated meetings in Manchester. It was a real mobilisation of people speaking out, working through their pain and hatred of authority, and doing something about it together.

You can read and comment on this article where it was first published here

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November 17, 2023

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History, International, Solidarity

Antisemitism and stalinist realism

Ian Parker argues that an obsession with identities and boundaries is toxic to open Marxism, and we need to grasp that in order to combat antisemitism.

Stalinist realism, which turns Marxism into a bizarre worldview, is no alternative to capitalism, but it is, instead, an ideological force inside the left that complements “capitalist realism” Mark Fisher described. While capitalist realism tells us that there is no alternative to this wretched political-economic system, stalinist realism tells us that the only alternative is a fixed worldview obsessed with identities and boundaries. Antisemitism is one of its manifestations, also then giving further ammunition to those on the right who have often claimed that critique of capitalism is itself antisemitic. We need to examine stalinist realism in relation to antisemitism in more detail in order to understand what it is we are up against in the struggle to build an authentic anti-capitalist movement grounded in an open inclusive form of Marxism.

Origins

The origins of stalinist realism, as the phrase indicates, lie in the bureaucratic apparatus in the Soviet Union headed by Joseph Stalin after 1924. That apparatus turned away from the internationalist ethos of the new soviet state. The communist parties around the world in the Third International were turned into diplomatic tools of the regime, in the process relaying a nationalist as well as bureaucratic ethos into left politics. Defence of the revolution was then interpreted by communists in these Stalinist parties and by fellow travellers as defence of the Soviet Union, which itself closed in on itself with a renewed emphasis carried forward from Tsarist pre-1917 times on the family and Russian ethnic identity, with dire consequences for Jews inside Russia and its territories. With the revival of Great Russian nationalism came a revival of antisemitism, culminating in the so-called “doctor’s plot” shortly before Stalin died.

The years of Stalinist rule saw national “minorities” enclosed in specific geographical areas, humoured for their quaint cultural traditions and increasingly strictly defined and delimited. Anthropological and psychological research during this time operated on the assumption of a hierarchy of development in which “backward” nationalities were derogated. In some cases, with the fate of the Crimean Tatars only one example, that entailed the transporting and relocating of entire populations. In the case of the Jews, there were attempts to settle them far from the metropolitan centres, to Birobidzhan near the border with China. This “Jewish Autonomous Oblast” had Yiddish as its official language, and antisemitism elsewhere in the Soviet Union increased alongside this segregation.

There was a shift in tactics on the part of the Soviet bureaucracy after the Second World War and when the full extent of the Holocaust was becoming visible, but not of strategy. When Stalin endorsed the partition of Palestine in November 1947 into a Jewish state and Arab territory, the policy shift became evident. Then, in May 1948, the Soviet Union was one of the first states to recognise the newly-founded state of Israel after having given the go-ahead to the Czechoslovak regime, an obedient partner in the Soviet bloc, to supply weaponry to the Zionist paramilitary organisation Haganah. These arms shipments implicated the Soviet Union in the Nakba and ethnic cleansing by the Israeli state. In this way, Stalin could continue a policy of collusion and compromise with imperialist powers that would guarantee the project of “socialism in one country,” the “one country” being Russia and its territories.

Zionism

Stalinist diplomatic policy was continued by Krushchev as “peaceful coexistence” and, concerning Jews, involved a double-strategy; there was practical surveillance and containment at home, including in Eastern Europe and Birobidzhan, and accusations of disloyalty levelled at Jews who wished to emigrate to Israel; and there was symbolic containment abroad, with identification of Jews with Israel, treating Israel as a de-facto Jewish state and Jews around the world as spoken for by that state. What should be noticed here is the enforcement of ethnic and racial homogeneity.

This homogenising of identity is one of the trademarks of stalinist realism; while the working class of each nation was expected to follow its own “road to socialism” – the “British Road” becoming the self-description of the Communist Party of Great Britain adhering to the logic of “socialism in one country,” for instance – Jews who did not identify with Israel, and even, inside the Soviet Bloc, those that did, were accused of being “cosmopolitans.”

In the worldview of stalinist realism, “cosmopolitan” becomes the new negative code-word for what was once in Marxism, and in the Bolshevik party that brought about the Russian Revolution, positive inclusive “internationalism,” what we could now term “open communism.” Jews, including Jewish socialists of the Bund – the “General Jewish Labour Bund” in Russia, Poland and Lithuania, where it was founded in 1897 – were subject to antisemitism after the Second World War, in some cases to pogroms, and fled to Israel. There they carried on their socialist internationalist organising and agitation against capitalism in the Israeli state, some of them concluding that the Jewish people were effectively disappearing, being encouraged to abandon Yiddish, and forced to adapt to a Zionist “Israeli” Hebrew-speaking nation state.

Stalinist realism pretends to define what is “real” in social processes, most significantly here as concerns national and cultural-ethnic identity. And so stalinist realism operates as if it is possible to definitively, for state-bureaucratic purposes, define what Jew is. Today this is accompanied by the claim that self-definition is an expression of so-called “identity politics,” which adherents of a stalinist realist view of the world set themselves against. For Jews this attempt at external “objective” definition runs against a tradition of fierce claims and counter-claims about identity which is always self-defined. In addition to the many varieties of Judaism, adherents of which often accuse other denominations of not being Jewish, there are the explicitly anti-Zionist currents inside Israel ranging from the ultra-Orthodox Haredi Neturei Karta to the revolutionary Marxist Matzpen.

Campism

This worldview is elaborated diplomatically on a global scale according the distinctively stalinist realist precept of “campism,” in which it is assumed that one constellation of identities and regimes can be mobilised against another. This is still functional to Russia today which ramps up national chauvinist propaganda internally, demanding conformity to the demands of the state, and claims to defend “Russian” speakers against neighbouring states that are accused of being subject to outside influences and, at times in Putin’s speeches, accused of not really existing.

Against Lenin’s insistence on the right of Ukraine to national self-determination, for instance, Putin implements a stalinist realist definition of identity which defines which identities count and which ones do not. This, at the same time as repeating antisemitic tropes about the Russian Revolution being a time of chaos benefitting outside interests; read “cosmopolitans” and then, by implication, according to an agenda set by the Jews. The favour was bizarrely returned by Israel when it stayed silent in the first days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Israel has benefitted from close economic and arms supply links with China, another ideological source point of stalinist realist diplomacy and reasoning.

Campism is poisonous not only for Jews who still follow the internationalist Bund principle of “doikayt” (in Yiddish) or “hereness” – a principle that declares that the struggle is wherever they live and work, as opposed to the romanticising of another country to which they could travel and live in a homogeneous community – but also for all peoples subject to categorisation and allotment to one side or another, as if either intrinsically “progressive” or “reactionary.” The campist logic in stalinist realism is what leads the Putin regime to operate in an ostensible “axis of resistance” which is then cheered on by supporters around the world who mistakenly believe that they are then siding with the “progressive” states against the “reactionary” ones.

This then leads, as it did in high-Stalinist times, to a downplaying of criticism of a range of regimes, including, depending on diplomatic niceties at any particular moment, Venezuela and Zimbabwe, and Syria and Iran, the latter two adopting what they term an “Anti-Zionist” position that often amounts to little more than barely-disguised antisemitism. In those cases “Anti-Zionism” is often, as right-wing supporters of Israel are prone to claim, indeed code for antisemitism. This kind of supposedly-progressive “axis” or “camp” will also, for those who follow such a worldview, at times include non-state actors such as Hamas or Hezbollah, involvement of which should send further alarm signals to those in alliance with progressive Jews and attempting to combat antisemitism in popular movements, including in the anti-war movement.

Concrete identity

Stalinist realism pretends to specify not only which national cultures or local ethnicities are progressive but also those that are reactionary; this is the propaganda ploy of the Putin regime and its supporters who oscillate between an insistence that Ukraine does not really exist – this is where the “realism” is brought into play to discredit claims to self-determination – and the implication that all Ukrainians, for example, are, by definition, fascist. In the case of Ukraine, this derogation of an entire nation, supposedly in defence of Russian-speaking minorities, is accompanied by claims that Ukrainians are intrinsically antisemitic. Such nationalist Russian state propaganda, note, is targeting a country that is run by a Russian-speaking Jewish president, Zelenskyy, who is not himself “progressive” and seeks identification and alliance with Israel in his call for military support against the Russian invasion. The cultural-political nuances of the situation are washed away in the stalinist realist worldview, one which benefits, as diplomatic manoeuvres and propaganda did under Stalin, certain states posing as somehow progressive.

Here, and in other cases, the much-vaunted criticism of “identity-politics” by those caught in the ideological cross-currents of stalinist realism conceals another more solid notion of identity – “real” identity as opposed to symbolic strategic kinds – that is then defined and, when necessary, enforced. At some moments this wielding of criticism of identity politics is itself tactical, as in the supposed “defence” of Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine (at the very same time as local left leaders are assassinated). At other moments it is much more concrete and permanent, as in the claims that an intrinsically anti-racist and progressive white working class in the “red wall” industrial heartlands are being undermined by those with a fragmentary “identity politics” agenda. Those, including radical Jewish groups who refuse to identify with Israel, and who complain about racism or antisemitism are then themselves accused of being racist, of stirring up discontent and division. Curiously, and paradoxically, it is then the very lack of attachment to identity among “intersectional” leftist and queer activists that is cited as evidence for their supposedly reactionary “identity politics.”

Abstraction

The concrete and assumed underlying “real” aspect of what are actually historically-evolving cultural identities has been at the core in recent years of debates over antisemitism in Germany, debates that threaten Marxism as such. These debates should serve as a stark warning to all of us on the left. Potently present in the caricatures of Marxism that have been thrown around are motifs that actually come from the corrupted bureaucratic version of Marxism that we find in Stalinism and, today, in stalinist realism. This is one place where the antisemitic ideological currents in the Soviet Union and the Eastern European states until 1989 have such a powerful poisonous effect. When such stalinist realism claims that it is the only one alternative to capitalism – the destiny of the concrete and unchanging character of the working class of a nation – then it is understandable, if no less tragic, that some on the left are drawn from practical-critique of this economic-political order to its defence, defence of what are seen as liberal tolerant values against hardened dogma.

It is the particular nature of the dogma that is targeted in the recent so-called “anti-German” debates in which it is assumed that to be “anti-German” is to take a progressive position. This “anti-German” position, and accompanying hostility to Marxism, has then been relayed from that national context into other contexts to weaponise accusations of antisemitism against the left; it has been thrown both against those who are entirely innocent of the charge as well as against some who are, it is true, absolutely guilty of it and need to be called out.

Why is the “anti-German” position, which aims to understand the grip of antisemitism now accompanied by hostility to Marxism? It is more than mere “dogma” that is targeted in these debates; it is precisely the obsession with the “concrete.” Here, a concern with what is “concrete,” which is attributed to Marxists, is countered by a defence of what is “abstract.”

One of the key authors in these debates, someone who brings his own peculiar misreading of Marx to bear in his defence of “abstraction,” is the Canadian ex-Marxist Moishe Postone. Postone claimed, in an influential text circulated in different versions on the Internet, that Marx and then Marxism is hostile to “abstraction,” and in favour, instead, of concrete tangible reality and of forms of community that are adjudged “real.” So, the value form under capitalism, the flow of capital, is, Postone argued, seen by Marx as something intangible, universal and mobile, and this characteristic of capital, Postone claimed, chimes with antisemitic complaints about Jews, ideological tropes that revolve around an assumed “abstractness, intangibility, universality, mobility”.

What is significant and potent here in the “anti-German” debates is not so much Postone’s own formulations, which did vary during the years he was writing, but the uptake of them by those on the right, and some on the left, who compounded the misunderstanding of Marx that was being propagated in these online texts. The ideological effect of these claims is to treat Marxism as an extremist and latently antisemitic belief system that is as hostile to Jews as is fascism.

As has been pointed out in critiques of Postone, there is a double misunderstanding here; of Marx and of the nature of fascism. First, the accounts of Marx’s analytic comments about what is “abstract” in capitalism are actually, a critical response to Postone points out, “an amalgam of individual aspects of Marx’s analysis taken out of context” (Sommer, 2021, Anti-Postone, London: Cosmonaut, p. 16). More than that, the “universality” that capitalism accomplishes is, remember, treated by Marxists precisely as what is most positive about it, a universality that the working class , including the Jewish working class, puts into practice in its internationalism. Secondly, antisemitism under the Nazis, and in other like movements since, have, in fact, mobilised against “concrete” tangible characteristics in the name of higher “abstract” values; one instance is precisely the image of “dirty” practical concern with the material world attributed to Jews that obsessed the Nazis. These are the kind of stereotypical images of the Jews that Marx seizes upon and quotes and throws back as accusations against Bruno Bauer; Marx’s comments are not designed to endorse but to sarcastically challenge such antisemitic tropes.

The appalling consequences of these arguments play into and intensify mainstream German state political discourse, which voices guilt about the Holocaust while channelling that into financial aid to the Israeli state rather than to actual victims of the Holocaust. In place of genuine solidarity with Jewish victims of the Nazis, many of whom now languish in conditions of poverty with little state support inside Israel, the German state allies itself with Zionism, Zionism that is now dedicated to building an expansionist apartheid state that, among other things, is turning into a death trap for Jews as well as for the Palestinians.

This dominant bad faith identification with Zionism by the German state is aided and abetted by those who parrot Postone and contrast the “blood and soil intifada of the Palestinians,” that is their supposed “concreteness,” to the State of Israel which is abstract, “artificial in the best sense of the word” (cited in Sommer, Anti-Postone, London: Cosmonaut, 2021, p. 72). Declared attachment to the land and the rhetoric of blood and soil is, of course, common to fascist discourse and reactionary Palestinian groups and ardent right-wing Zionists, none of which are remotely anti-capitalist.

Concreteness in Marxist political analysis

We should note that the use of and complaint against what is “concrete” by followers of Postone is as misleading as the value given to “abstraction.” Marx explicitly values abstraction as a necessary aspect of any scientific, and social-scientific approach to phenomena. The categories employed in his analysis build on empirical data to construct “abstractions” like “capital,” “value” and, indeed, “the proletariat” as an avowedly internationalist force that will achieve and then dissolve its own specific historically-constituted and claimed identity in the process of overthrowing capitalism. And the “concrete,” for Marx, is the diametric opposite of the appeal to the German “Volk” and their tie to the land in different strains of German pagan traditions, philosophy and then Nazism.

What is “concrete” for Marx is itself something to be conceptualised, grasped, he says, in its “many determinations”; it is not like a lump of concrete to be directly observed and measured, but is given reality for us by its relation to other things. One might even say that this understanding of what is concrete is actually critical of crude caricatures of materialism in Soviet Marxism and quite close to contemporary feminist-inflected accounts of the importance of “intersectionality” to theory and practice.

The recent anti-Marxist movements in Germany feed on the distortions of Marxism that were designed to buttress the Stalinist bureaucracy, and they have buried within them their own strange replication of the very stalinist realism that they ostensibly rebel against. Actually, they make no such fine distinction between Stalinism and revolutionary Marxism, but end up setting themselves against revolutionary internationalist politics. We see this in a peculiarity of the “anti-German” movement that Postone himself drew attention to, one of the drivers of his own analysis of antisemitism. Postone argued for specific analysis of the rise of Nazism in Germany, while his followers today who are busy pushing German politics to the right see antisemitism everywhere, as if it were a universal danger regardless of historical processes in different nation states.

In place of Postone’s own earlier critiques of Nazism as a movement that developed, he says, “in the interests of capital,” there is an allegiance to capitalism in the name of anti-fascism, allegiance to capitalism in German and to capitalism in Zionist Israel. This does not do internationalist Jews critical of Zionism any favours. In fact, it puts them in danger, and continues with many twists and turns the antisemitism that was present in the early days of the socialist movement in Europe. Antisemitism that had to be denounced and combated, was given new life and is carried into the left today by stalinist realism.

Conclusions

There is an alternative to capitalism and to stalinist realism, the tradition of “open communism” that links its analysis of the “many determinations” that are at work in any particular cultural-historical context with intersectional and multi-faceted political action. This is what is needed to understand the trajectory of antisemitism under capitalism. Antisemitism developed as a material force and as an ideological tool to divide the working class under capitalism, building upon the exclusion of Jews from power and their assignment to specific permitted professions, including to those that were then also damned as entailing “usury” (Leon, 1942). The Jews, confined and used by capitalism, were then treated as the prime enemy when capitalism sought to demonise emerging organised working-class threats to large private property, and it was then that the spectre of “Judeo-Bolshevism” was evoked in various conspiracy theories and in the destruction of Marxist organisations in Germany.

The internationalist and effectively “open communist” ethos of Marxism before and during the Russian Revolution was turned, as the bureaucracy under Stalin crystallised, into a nationalist caricature that did often trade in its own versions of conspiracy theory to deal with traitors, including Jews, who threatened internal stability or who argued for an alternative. The Left Opposition to Stalin and then the Trotskyist movement were often attacked by Stalinists as being in some way “cosmopolitan,” effectively as Jewish. Marxist analysis enables us to grasp how and why these brutal phenomena – Nazism and Stalinism – arose, and what the stakes are now in building an anti-capitalist movement that is attentive to the role of stalinist realism and antisemitism as helpmeet of reaction.

This article first appeared in Sublation Magazine

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September 1, 2023

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Socialisms

After “Socialism”: The Republic of Lithuania

Ian Parker visited the Baltic state and describes what he saw and heard and read there

Lithuania bears the scars of a dramatic fall from regional power over the past centuries – in the fourteenth century the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the largest country in Europe – suffering dismemberment, occupation by Russia and Germany and three separate unhappy periods as the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic – in 1918 to 1919, 1940 to 1941 and 1944 to 1990. Independence in 1990 was followed by membership of NATO and the European Union in 2004. These times are written on the body of the state and the people, now just under 3 million, in memories of exile, either to Nazi concentration camps (the fate of Jews who were not murdered during that occupation either by German forces or local collaborators), the 130,000 sent to the Gulag after being deemed suspect by Moscow, or fleeing to the West. There was endemic antisemitism in a country that saw the Jewish population fall from about 7% of the population before Nazis arrived in 1941 to about 0.12% after the war, and a strain of virulent nationalism is still present (though much less so than in Poland now, to which Lithuania was joined in its heyday).

Lithuania’s time as a “socialist” state, and the impact of Russian imperialism and Stalinism has been a significant obstacle to building a democratic socialist society. The Soviet Union eventually acknowledged Lithuania’s 1918 declaration of independence before deals were made between Stalin and Hitler; then there was the structural assimilation of the country as a Soviet Republic after the Second World War. It is in a precarious geographical position with shifting borders. Lithuania, a mainly Roman Catholic country, is bordered by Latvia to the north, and then, running clockwise, by Belarus to the east, Poland to the south west, and Kaliningrad – a Russian exclave to the west – which leaves it a little bit of coast on the Baltic Sea just above Kaliningrad.

There are three main sections in this description of what I learnt about Lithuania – on Stalinism, Fascism and Identities, which include emerging alternative left-wing movements – but the three threads of narrative are necessarily woven together, in histories of Soviet rule, antisemitism and resistance that occasionally blur those three aspects of history and contemporary politics. The experience of Russian imperialist and Stalinist rule has made this a very difficult context for socialists to operate.

1. STALINISM

First stop after driving south from the capital, Vilnius, was Druskininkai near the border with Belarus. The road down was through flat countryside, open fields and then forest, warnings that deer may be loose, and then, as I got closer to Druskininkai, there were cars at intervals at the side of the road with pots of jam and mushrooms for sale on car bonnets or on little tables, a first indication of local produce and of locals needing money from its sale. Druskininkai is, I discovered, a longstanding holiday spa town; the bearded guy in the information centre told me that there were nine large spa resorts in the town. He was happy to tell me anything, but his face fell when I asked where I could get vegetarian food; that was something he did not know, he said; it turned out that there was no problem, and oat-milk was available with cappuccino in most of the cafes. Druskininkai was developed as a spa resort by the Russian overlords, and then by the Polish aristocracy, and then by the Soviet administration. There is a red-brick Catholic cathedral and a stunning Russian Orthodox one in the centre. Families wandered the grassy lakesides and ate ice-cream, and travelled up and down to the indoor ski-slope complex by funicular, and pottered around on electric scooters, and so did I, but I was not here for this. I was here for Gruto Parkas.

Relics

Gruto Parkas is a Soviet-styled theme-park in the south of the country, founded in 2001 by a mushroom tycoon, and known locally as “Stalin world”. This was a grim, mostly empty place that had gathered together statues of old communists which had been removed from plinths across the country after 1990. I saw less than twenty other visitors during my visit, and most of those were with their kids in the playground area girdled by old rocket launchers and other Russian weaponry. It looked like the families were lured in not by the statuary and exhibitions in the wooden huts – mostly lines of plaster and metal busts and portraits and woven carpets of Lenin and Stalin – but by the poor bears, kangaroos and peacocks and other assorted animals crammed into the small cages.

The statues of Lenin, one from the main square in Druskininkai, and Stalin and Lithuanian Communist Party leaders were accompanied by some commemorations of the work of the “partisans” who went into the forests and then conducted a guerrilla campaign against the Soviet occupation, at times fighting alongside the Nazis and later, after the war, aided by Western anti-communist support groups and state intelligence services. A large sign at the entrance to the park in Lithuanian, Russian and English declares that “Historical references have been made by Genocide and Resistance research centre of Lithuania.” There are many such memorials for the partisans in the countryside.

In Grutos Parkas there were also explicit celebrations of the murder of Komsomol (the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League). There was on display in the path leading to the park ticket desk a train that was used for deporting recalcitrant locals to Siberia. More disturbingly still was the description of Lithuanian Communist Party, LCP, leader Icikas Šmuelis Meskupas-Adomas who was once secretary of the Communist Union of Youth, who spent time in a labour camp, fled to the Soviet Union and was then was killed in 1942 back in Lithuania fighting the Nazis. The information plaque in front of his statue at the side of the forest path describes his education in a Jewish high school and then at Kaunas University, and then noted that he “seeked to keep the traditional jewish communists influence upon LCP.”

It is true that there was active involvement of Jews in the Lithuanian left, first through the Bund, and then in the Lithuanian Communist Party, a radical heritage that has at times been used as an antisemitic weapon against them but has also been disavowed, covered over by the right in the community locally and in exile in a bid to be thought respectable and in alliance with the Israeli state. As with the Nazis, one of the most potent antisemitic propaganda tropes was that the main threat was “Judeo-Bolshevism,” and many massacres of Jews carried out by Lithuanian nationalists were driven by claims that the Jews were communists. I chatted to a local Lithuanian-born rabbi in a Chabad-Lubavitch centre in Druskininkai, who was keen to meet my Jewish partner due to arrive soon in the country, and he told me that the centre really only operated in the summertime, mostly catering, he said, for Israeli tourists.

Russia

Many of the translated Lithuanian literary works revolve around the paranoid atmosphere of Soviet times. Stalinist rule continued Russian imperialist control in a bureaucratic and brutal suppression of any dissent, and has now been succeeded by threat from the Putin regime. One example in literature which captures something of this atmosphere is Ričardas Gavelis’ (1989) Vilnius Poker, translated in 2009, a hallucinogenic journey around the capital in which “Everything, absolutely everything depends on you yourself; even Their tentacles don’t reach as deep as They would want.”

In the south-west is the Suwałki region, now thought by some commentators who are anxious about what Putin might do next to obstruct NATO to be its “Achilles’ heel,” and so as possibly, they say, the “most dangerous place on earth.” The “Suwałki corridor“ is the 100 kilometre or so border region between Lithuania and Poland that runs between Belarus and Kaliningrad, a little gap that Russia might want to occupy in order to block land links between Lithuania and Poland, two EU and NATO states. At the moment there are flights overland and trains through Lithuanian territory to Kaliningrad on the Baltic coast. Enemy occupation of the corridor would provide a land bridge between a Moscow-friendly ally, Belarus, and what is effectively now a Russian territory exclave.

It would have been tricky to get into Kaliningrad and even the excuse that it would be nice to visit the place where Western Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant lived and worked all his life would not go down well; recent official propaganda has Kant down as a “Russophobe.” C. J. Schüler’s interesting, if a little amber-heavy 2020 travelogue Along the Amber Route: St. Petersburg to Venice includes an account of his journey down from Palanga and Klaipėda on the Baltic Sea coast down the Curonian Spit into Kaliningrad. It does seem a grim run-down place in that account and, though I did spend many hours investigating how to get there, it eventually seemed like a bad idea. Schüler is on the track, as the title of his book indicates, of the harvesting and trade in amber, which you are supposed still to be able to find on some of the local beaches.

While I was there in August 2023 more checkpoints with Belarus were being closed by the Lithuanian authorities, and locals were fleeing from some villages close to the border, fearful at the location of Wagner group units near the border in Belarus and the prospect of them moving across. Tourism was down, cancellations also the result of unease about the consequences of the invasion of Ukraine, and Belarus’ stance. There were long lorry queues on the road down to the border.

Soviet rule also created difficult questions about what would count as “reparation” for the atrocities and forced exile. The brutal structural assimilation of the country into the Soviet Union after the Second World War meant that much large private property was abolished, collectivised in a corrupt bureaucratic manner but also redistributed. That meant that many property claims by those who had been exiled or by their descendents were difficult to level against current private owners, for such private ownership in most of the country no longer existed. Privatisation after 1990 did not then always proceed through restoration of ownership but through administration and leasing arrangements.

Restoration

The largest Lithuanian manor estate at Pakruojis had been owned by a German family until the war; Baron Wilhelm von der Ropp obtained the estate in the eighteenth century as a wedding gift, dowry from his Lithuanian bride. A member of the different family which was now running the estate as a bizarre “Midsummer Night’s Dream” themed flower festival and hotel told me that the original owners, the Ropp family, had actually visited the manor in the last few weeks after having had to let it go when the Soviets arrived after the Second World War. They had a choice, I was told, either give up the estate and accept nationalisation or “pay a visit to Siberia”; they left Lithuania, and then attempted to regain ownership after 1990, but failed. The municipal government then agreed fifteen years ago to lease it to the current “owners” for 99 years on the condition that the manor was restored, which is being undertaken in gaudy glory for tourists.

There is a restored wooden synagogue in Pakruojis village which, unusually, is decorated with folkloric images and one of a train that was added in 1885. Jews played a prominent role in the town, in business and health provision after the Jewish community was invited back into Lithuania after the population was depleted during the Black Death, a plague they were also at times blamed for. The Nazis took the whole Jewish population to the nearby Morkakalnis forest and murdered them in August 1941. There is a menorah-shaped stone memorial in the forest off the road that runs between the village and the manor to 300 Jews which notes that there were also local accomplices involved the massacre. Family belongings were piled up in the local fire station, which still stands and had been staffed by Jews, so locals could come and choose what they wanted to pillage. Glossy tourist brochures in the local information office try to do justice to this history, including such information and accounts of the lives of original owners of homes in the village. We walked from the manor to the village on a sunny day passing families supporting their children participating in a noisy BMX-race event.

The preoccupation with Soviet occupation understandably bleeds into memory of Russian imperial rule. A glossy magazine “Iliustruotoji Istorija” in the toilet of one of the places I stayed had a picture of Tsarina Alexandra on the cover with a sinister image of Rasputin hovering in the background. This “illustrated history” magazine cover pointed to the feature story inside in which there is the same picture of Alexandra with, on the facing page, another sepia image of Rasputin and, above him, a crowd carrying a banner emblazoned with the word “communism.”

In Grutos Parkas there is a reproduction of the map that Stalin and Ribbontrop signed in 1939 after scrawling a line in blue pencil from north to south that divided Lithuania into separate spheres of influence. This “non-aggression pact” between Stalin and the Nazis sealed the fate of many activists as well as disabling resistance and marking communists as part of the enemy in popular consciousness. Soviet rule also betrayed Jews, with property seizure and deportation directed at the community in a continuation of Russian Tsarist antisemitism that Stalin played to at home and abroad.

It is the Soviet occupation that is sometimes seen by the right as the main scar on the country, with many parks, not only Grutos Parkus, boasting sites of memorials to the anti-Soviet partisans. The 23 of August is marked each year in Lithuania as the anniversary of the Hitler-Stalin pact which both divided the country but also in a strange way united it in the misery of occupation, with the risk that this experience and representation of past oppression would at times lead to an equivalence being drawn between Soviet occupation and deportation on the one hand, and Nazi mass murder on the other.

2. FASCISM

Before the Stalinist repression were the atrocities carried out by the Nazis. Fania Lewando’s The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook was first published in 1938. I have a 2015 English-language version on a shelf in my kitchen, but it was just by chance that a copy of the original Yiddish-language book was found in an antiquarian book fair and translated. The book contains recipes from Lewando’s “Vegetarian Diet Canteen” on “German Street” in Vilnius, now Vokiečių Street, one of the few streets in the city where Jews were permitted to live. The Lewando restaurant was on the corner with Žydų Street (“Jewish Street”). There is a Stolpersteine memorial stone in the pavement for Fania and her husband on the other side of the road by number 14 Vokiečių Street.

The cookery book tells us that Fania, who had attempted to get her recipes taken up by the Heinz company, failed to get to the United States, but it does not say that she was refused a visa by the authorities there, and so she perished when the Nazis took over; basically, racist immigration controls kept the huddled masses out and condemned her and many others to death. This should be a reminder that while there was collusion between the Stalin and Hitler during the 1939-1941 “non-aggression pact,” there was also much effectively deadly collusion between Western states and Hitler, states that also pandered to anti-communist fear of those who would threaten large private property, fear sometimes also shading into “Judeo-Bolshevist” conspiracy themes.

Ghettos

The Vilnius Jewish quarter and then ghetto is marked on street-side signs, mainly for the benefit of those on guided heritage-misery tours. I stood reading one of the information boards in a little cobbled street while a couple who were Lithuanian, I guessed, also stood reading and pointing and commenting. One of them sighed and pointed to the part of the text which read “During the mass killing actions, all the residents of the Small Ghetto were killed and this ghetto ceased to exist;” the other one was evidently less impressed, tutting and muttering while they pointed to the part of the text that read “During the period of December 1941-March 1943 there were no mass killings of ghetto prisoners as the demand for labour force in the German war economy increased.” I didn’t know what they made of these statements, and what the basis of their disagreement was, and I did not want to ask.

There are the remains of a Jewish cemetery in Kavarskas north of Vilnius; the town had 500 Jews living in it in 1940, and there were five left at the end of the war. Lithuanian nationalists ran riot before German troops arrived and arrested Jews who were accused of being communists. The Germans shot these prisoners as soon as they arrived, and shortly afterwards the rest of the Jewish population were murdered in the Fivonia forest. There have been local attempts, by Lithuanian inhabitants of the village, to save what is left of the Jewish cemetery in Kavarskas against the encroachment of a cement works. An amateur map is available on the Internet made by a local Jewish resident in 1940, and from this it is possible to plot the location of the synagogue; now, as far as I could make out, it is now a Saab repair garage.

A particularly notorious event was the “Lietūkis Garage Massacre” in Lithuania’s second city Kaunas. During this pogrom, which took place before the Germans had set up their own administration that systematically rounded up and killed local Jews, around fifty Jews were made to assemble in the courtyard of a garage at 43 Vytautas Avenue in the centre of the city. The photographic evidence of this massacre has made it difficult to deny and specifically implicates local Lithuanian fascists (even though there are claims that one of the main figures involved and caught on camera, the so-called “death dealer,” was actually from a German army unit).

The wiping away of this event from memory takes some bizarre and horrible forms, in, for example, the development of apartments in the Lietūkis complex which is then advertised as “a building with history” without, as the remaining local Jewish community noted, spelling out what that history was. There is a very small memorial stone marking the massacre in the yard of the building on which we placed some stones. Someone comments on Tripadvisor for the memorial that they thank heavens for the State of Israel (one of the few times I had sympathy with this tragically mistaken but understandable response to the brutal destruction of whole communities simply wanting to live in peace).

Exile

The 2019 film Isaac (Izaokas in Lithuanian) is a grim reminder of this event, and has some gruesome graphic reconstructions of the massacre before homing in on the return, in 1964 of one of the main characters, a film director, from exile. He gets an enthusiastic welcome to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania before the Russians get wind of his possible complicity and commence investigations. The film is named after and so ostensibly about the murder during the massacre of a Jewish man ‘Izaokas’, possibly by a local Lithuanian who then carries with him guilt about the killing. The film’s publicity website does explicitly acknowledge that the massacre was carried out by Lithuanians before glossing the plot as being about a love triangle; “This film is about relationship between two friends who where [sic] separated by historic circumstances, shock of war, traumas and experiences of exile, but who shared the love for the same woman.”

The opening titles for the film actually frame the event as being, they read, the result of Lithuanians “influenced by Nazi propaganda” before going on to refer to later Russian deportations to Siberia “regardless of ethnicity,” implying that the victimisation of the whole population was perhaps worse. It seems in the film, and this is a recurring theme in much historical reflection in Lithuania, that the behaviour of the Russians is on a par with, if not worse than the behaviour of the Germans; the bureaucratic heavy-handed official investigation into the massacre sets in train a series of deaths. A main character in the film muses on the difficulty of Lithuanians standing up for themselves as “the problem of our small country.”

The character who returns to make a film about the massacre has (plot spoiler), it turns out, acquired script details from the exiled Lithuanian author Antanas Škėma. There is an unpleasant reflexive aspect to this, for it is the detailed knowledge about Lietūkis that is taken from Antanas Škėma and put in the script that then implicates the director. It is an unpleasant reflexive aspect because the film itself is an adaptation of a 1961 Škėma novella also called Izaokas. This novella has the weird status of being a possible encrypted confession of some kind. The manuscript of that novella was handed over by Škėma to a friend at a liberal Lithuanian Diaspora literary convention before Škėma was killed in a car crash directly afterwards in Pennsylvania while returning home from the convention.

Antanas Škėma’s major novel, his 1958 stream-of-consciousness White Shroud (Balta drobulė, eventually translated into English in 2017) is also heavily autobiographical, raising further questions about what he was up to in Izaokas. White Shroud has as its protagonist a lift operator in a New York hotel, someone who has a nostalgic yearning for the old times in his home country, and there are flashbacks to times during the war in Lithuania and then in Germany in a “displaced persons” camp. Škėma himself did work with the Nazis against the Soviet occupation during the war, and then fled to Germany before making it to the US where, among other occupations, he worked as a lift operator in a hotel in New York. What brief references to Jews there are in the book are not particularly flattering.

Blame

The Nazis did further whip up existing antisemitism, but it is then too easy to characterise the whole Lithuanian population as guilty (a lazy racist trope that mirrors the racism it is claiming to expose). The Encyclopaedia Judaica entry on Lithuania includes testimony from a commander of the German occupation Einsatzgruppe “Action Units” responsible for mass murder of Jews, which include the observation that “On the surface the impression had to be created that it was the local population which had initiated the anti-Jewish measures as a spontaneous reaction to their oppression by the Jews for many years and to the Communist terror to which they had been exposed in the recent past.” The 1941 internal report continues, “evidence had to be created in order to prove, at a later stage, that it was the local population which had squared their own accounts with the Jews and the Communists,” and it notes that “the orders given by the German sources had to be concealed.”

There is an organised right now in Lithuania, though it functions more as a network of pressure groups than shock troops. The resistance to Soviet rule was, by 1990, a mass movement and welded together right-wing forces and a liberal opposition. Not surprisingly, the right and liberal alliance quickly embarked on a neoliberal privatisation programme after taking power in the first free elections for many years and then in later periods of government. This was first in the form of Sąjūdis, the “Reform Movement of Lithuania” that had been organising against Soviet rule through the 1980s, and then in various permutations of the “Homeland Union”, a Christian-Democrat party, and a party formed after 1990, the “Liberal Union.”

More surprisingly, perhaps, and an indication that the demonisation of the Communist Party did not run as deep as the current government would like, these post-Soviet periods of government have been interleaved with those run by the “Social Democratic Party of Lithuania,” basically the old Lithuanian Communist Party. One leftist I spoke to who had been a member of the Social Democratic Party, and worked inside it as part of a left caucus – a kind of hopeful entrism, let us say – put this down to the electorate searching for stability after the turmoil of the transition, which was considerable in the three Baltic states, and neoliberal economic shock treatment. The image of the pre-1990 regime was that it was, at least, a time where there was health and welfare support and some kind of guarantee of employment and rights at work.

3. IDENTITIES

There are minorities and there are alternatives, some of them religious and hearkening back to their own versions of their past, and some more secular and looking to the future. There are, for instance, complaints by Muslims at the lack of mosque in the capital; there are four in the country, still mainly for the remaining Sunni Tatar community who came in two waves of immigration from the south, at the time when Lithuania stretched, as they say, “from sea to sea” and then during Stalin’s mass displacement of the Tatar people. The other longstanding Turkic minority are the Karaims who practice the “Karaite” faith; although an offshoot of Judaism, the Karaims do not consider themselves to be Jews (and neither did the Nazis). Roma were targeted by the Nazis, and life for them now in Lithuania is not easy, suffering exclusion and stereotyping.

There was, we must remember, a radical left in Lithuania. Lithuania was a main base, for example of the “Bund,” the General Jewish Workers’ Union of Lithuania, Poland and Russia. The Bund, which was formed in 1897, was one of the founding organisations of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, out of which the Bolsheviks (misnamed for the “majority” of the RSDLP) emerged. The Bund had its own representation as a left organised current in local Lithuanian state bodies, and expressed a strong secular and socialist tradition inside the Jewish working class, one that was sidelined by the main more conservative organisations and then all-but extinguished in the Second World War.

An admired writer is Jurgis Kunčinas, who died in 2002. His strange modernist and sometimes surreal novel Tūla won awards following its publication in 1993, and it was translated into English in 2016. The narrator visits the old haunts of his lover Tūla, sometimes in the form of a bat, and obsesses about the relationship while recalling times in Soviet-administered alcohol rehabilitation centres in Vilnius.

Tūla includes some telling descriptions of hitch-hiking in Ukraine, and there some telling stereotypical images of Lithuanians in other parts of the USSR. To them, the unnamed narrator comments, “Lithuania looked like the ‘cultured West,’ where people—sober and smiling!—walked on sidewalks, drank coffee, and didn’t spit on the lawn.” A brief encounter with a lorry driver who takes the protagonist back towards the Lithuanian border has the lorry driver asking “How come those Lithuanians are always unhappy about something? Other people are people, we all suffer together, but we don’t moan and groan, just the Lithuanians do. Tell me, what do they want?” Our narrator makes a mistake in his reply; “Freedom! I unguardedly sighed, and he got pissed. Barely stopping, he suddenly leaned over, opened the door, and shoved me so hard I fell out backwards.” A recurring motif in the novel which, we are led to understand, applies both to Soviet and Nazi rule, for this is described as being on graffiti and then repeated at points in the novel, is “Wir sind ein okkupiertes Land,” we are an occupied country.

Užupis

There is a curious cryptic little film of the book on YouTube which gives something of the atmosphere of the book and of the bohemian suburb Užupis where it is mostly set. Užupis (or “the other side of the river”) configures itself as a separate micro-state, and is humoured by the Lithuanian state authorities as a separate entity with its own flag and passport. This is the Republic of Užupis, “independent since 1st April 1998.” Užupis, set up and given its charter by a bohemian artistic community is now something of a chi-chi tourist trap, but it still speaks of hopes that there could be something better in this world than segregation and oppression, and there are elements of this project that are quite moving.

Mirrored plaques in different languages, including in Yiddish and Karaim and many others, are ranged along the wall in one of the side-streets on which is engraved the Užupis Constitution; there are 41 points of which the first is that “Everyone has the right to live by the River Vilnelė, and the River Vilnelė has the right to flow by everyone.” Point four is that “Everyone has the right to make mistakes,” with others specifying the right to be idle, happy, unhappy, silent, to cry and be misunderstood. Point 10 is “Everyone has the right to love and take care of the cat,” and point 13 is “A cat is not obliged to love its owner, but must help in time of need.” (Other points speak of dogs.) More seriously, the other points include that “Everyone shall remember their name”, “Everyone has the right to have a faith,” and “No one has the right to violence.” People stand and muse over these 41 points; they sometimes laugh, and they sometimes cry. In the north of Užupis are the remains of tombstones from the old Jewish cemetery, a reminder of what these hopes for world free of racism are up against.

Kombinatas

I was in Lithuania for the radical Kombinatas 2023 Festival at Saugus Atstumas, a campsite north of Vilnius; this year’s festival was on the theme of “health.” I drove up from Druskininkai past the edge of Kaunas, and stopped for a coffee and a look around Kavarskas, the village where I thought I was to be housed for the night after the festival (I was eventually billeted in the nearby town of Anykščiai). I made my way deep into countryside, the car churning dust clouds from the gravel and then dirt tracks that led to “Saugus Atstumas” which apparently, in a hangover and memory of the recent pandemic, means “safe distance.” There were about a hundred people there, all of them a good deal younger than me, and a majority of them women. There were visitors from other countries. The main stage was on the edge of a campsite where most of the participants were housed for these few days.

The safe space guidelines for Kombinatas are the same as for the queer festival “Sapfofest” that took place at the same location just before. As well as predictable and necessary reminders that there should be “no toxic masculinity,” are nice formulations about learning about oppression from those who are subjected to it, including this: “Reflect upon your own position, and the space you’re taking. Consider checking in with other people in similar positions, if you see them enact fuckery.” There was lots of gender-fluid stuff around here, and it is clear that there is a gay sub-culture in Lithuania, and not only on the left. The 2016 film You Can’t Escape Lithuania is explicitly LGBT-friendly, though not actually so progressive concerning violence to women.

When I arrived at the festival on the Saturday morning there was a panel discussion, in Lithuanian, on disability. A small group on the edge of the stage was for those who wanted translation into English. The discussion ranged from employment to welfare benefits to alliances with other oppressed groups, and to health and mental health. After lunch there was an introduction to solidarity work with Ukraine. There were many Ukraine flags on buildings in Lithuanian cities. It is a popular cause, so it was interesting to see how this was being approached from the left. Last year’s Kombinatas festival had been about the Russian invasion, and included speakers from Ukraine as well as Russian Socialist Movement comrade Ilya Budraitskis and a local left intellectual, Andrius Bielskis who is director of the Centre for Aristotelian and Critical Theory at one of the universities in Vilnius.

This year’s Ukraine solidarity speaker was talking about issues that are very different from the usual solidarity movement discussions in Western Europe. The speaker was connected more with the anarchist Black Cross movements in Ukraine and was concerned mainly with how to build direct military resistance and support for those fighting the invasion. There are apparently now about a hundred leftists from Lithuania inside Ukraine working with the resistance, and the task the speaker addressed at Kombinatas was how to support them.

Because the focus of the festival this year was “health,” the Ukraine solidarity talk focused on mental health issues, which ranged from the impact of post-traumatic stress on those who have undergone training and, for various reasons, are impacted in ways they could not predict, to how those with extreme experiences could be integrated into the left when they returned home. The speaker pointed out, for instance, that while those outside Ukraine tend to respond to deaths of fighters as “sad,” inside Ukraine every death increases “rage.” It was a powerful impassioned intervention that was followed up later that night with discussion about what could be done to give practical help to those inside Ukraine now. I had a sense here of how the ideologically-dominant “anti-Soviet” motifs in Lithuanian culture and the deeper veins of suspicion of Russia could be relayed into something more progressive, something keyed not so much into reaction but into solidarity that was energising the non-Stalinist left.

After two impressive sessions, it was my job to talk about some alternatives to mainstream models of stress and distress. Psychology as a discipline reflects and reproduces preoccupations of Lithuanian society. One of the most prominent Lithuanian clinical psychologists, Danutė Gailienė published the influential 2008 “Ką jie mums padarė. Lietuvos gyvenimas traumų psichologijos žvilgsniu” (“What they did to us: Lithuanian life in the view of trauma psychology”) about the disastrous impact of Soviet rule. I was acutely aware of two things as I spoke, though not sure how to refer to them, so I did not do so directly. One was that Lithuania has an incredibly high suicide rate, much higher than other European countries, and there are stereotypes around of Lithuanians as being introspective and quiet as well as being wary, apparently, of people who smile too much. These stereotypes did not correspond with my experience of being at the festival. The other was the charge that left-wing terminology has in this context. I talked a bit about “Shy Radicals,” fine, and then about the “Red Clinic,” and hesitated when I was describing it, deciding not to say that in its mission statement we say that it is a collective of communist mental health workers. I was gently mocked afterwards when I admitted to this hesitation; no problem using the word “communist” in this context, I was told.

Emma

This festival was one of the expressions of a very “new left,” sensitive to different forms of exploitation and oppression. It was mainly organised by the “Socialinis Centras Emma” in the second city Kaunas. We stayed in Šilainiai on the edge of the city; this Soviet era-housing complex has about 55,000 inhabitants. The “Emma” centre is named for Emma Goldman, who was born in Kaunas and then emigrated to the United States, an indication of the anarchist orientation of many of the activists, though one of them told me that their main political reference points were, in this order, “feminism, Marxism and anarchism.” Political problems in the running of the centre that were mentioned were indicative; one or two men behaving in aggressively sexist ways did need to be excluded.

(Also born in Kaunas, by the way, was the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and I saw a sticker at the Emma centre for the Emmanuel Levinas centre at the main university, though there are disputes among the Levinas family about this centre; some participated in the opening, and others argued that Levinas hated Lithuania and wanted nothing to do with it.)

I picked up stickers for the independent “First of May” trade union that now counts nearly two hundred members and that works with migrant and precarious workers. This trade union is on good terms with the main trade union confederation, but, unlike the main unions, is explicitly political, oriented to the left. On the bookshelf in the Emma centre was Lenin’s little pamphlet “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination.”

There is also a slightly different “new left” tradition in the form of the Lithuanian “Left Alliance” which was formed two years ago to bring together activists in Vilnius and Kaunas, including those in the Emma Centre. There are at least three different issues that could, at some point, provide some fruitful intersection with the Emma and First of May union activists. I was told that at a recent meeting of the Left Alliance there was discussion about approaching the union with a view to linking up with them to build a new political party. When I mentioned this in the Emma centre in Kaunas they smiled and asked why they had not been approached before. Let’s take this as a good sign. Anyway, the three issues are, first, disentangling itself from the heritage of the old Lithuanian Communist Party which survives in mutated form as the Social Democratic Party (the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party, which has good claim to be the oldest Lithuanian political party, distanced itself from socialism and then, in 2001, merged with the old LCP communist party apparatus which had renamed itself as the Lithuanian Democratic Labour Party, itself busily distancing itself from Soviet “socialism”).

Some current Left Alliance activists were inside the Social Democratic Party until just a couple of years ago, though many were not. Those working inside the party reasoned that, given that spaces of the left were so few and under threat in Lithuania after the 1990 transition, this was a place to debate and work with existing left forces. Now the Left Alliance has the perspective of registering as a separate political party, a process that requires the gathering of 2,000 signatures and, more than that, the inputting by registrants of their details on official document systems. When I spoke to the Emma centre about this electoral ambition, they said they were not actually against this idea themselves, having tried to stand in local elections in Kaunas but failed to gather the requisite number of signatures.

A second issue, and linked to the first, is how to take a distance from the Soviet heritage of left politics without succumbing to outright anti-communism. There is potent anti-Russian feeling levelled at Belarus and also at the Polish minority organised in the “Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania – Union of Christian Families.” There were also, I was told, some intense debates among Left Alliance activists around an article ostensibly written from the left that assumed equivalence between the Soviet oppression and the Nazi extermination of Jews and other minorities. That assumption required and got a robust response. The third issue concerns, again, Ukraine, and again connected to the first issue, the legacy of the Lithuanian Communist Party.

I was told by one leftist that there has been no tradition of anti-Stalinist left inside Lithuania that they were aware of, no Trotskyist movement, for instance. (An attempt to rebuild a pro-Soviet “Socialist Party of Lithuania” from the wreckage of 1990 is still listed on an openly Stalinist link site, though thankfully that party appears to be defunct, the link warning “deceptive site ahead”.) There were apparently some inside the Left Alliance who were equivocal about naming the Ukraine disaster an “invasion,” and it was after working through some of those differences that an open letter to the Western European left was written that takes a very clear position against the invasion. There is also, linked through personal political histories, an older “new left,” “New Left 95” which now continues as “Demos Institute of Critical Thought” which publishes a new journal “Lūžis,” or “fracture” that has been including material that connects debates inside Lithuania with broader European political concerns.

So, there are different elements of the left ranging from the remains of the old Lithuanian Communist Party, not as down and out as the official prohibition on its existence after 1990 would make it seem, an electorally-oriented Lithuanian Left Alliance, and a younger more anarchist-inflected Emma collective and independent trade union that is in tune with the radical potential of intersectional identity politics. There is plenty of bad news from Lithuania, grim reminders of the weight of history, but it is not all bad news, and there are progressive movements learning from history in order to change it.

Endings

We finished up on the Baltic coast. Klaipėda just north of Kaliningrad is Lithuania’s third city with only about 150,000 inhabitants – the country counts under three million people in total in an area just a little less than the Irish Republic – and a little further north is the summer resort of Palanga. We were the first English tourists the hotel owner had met. We had been told by a comrade in Kaunas that nearby on the coast was Villa Auska, a grotesque concrete palace resort, due soon to be demolished, originally built for Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin (though humble Alexei was apparently too embarrassed to stay in the main buildings and spent his Lithuanian holidays in a little house in the grounds).

I wandered through the nudist beaches, made a fruitless search for amber in the sand, swam in the very cold Baltic Sea, which was not at all salty because the water flows in from many rivers into the enclosed space, cycled down almost to the airport, and then we left on 21 August. The ‘international’ airport is tiny, and as we drove around searching for the car-hire drop-off we passed yet another brown road-side sign indicating that there was a holocaust memorial to the left. We drove down a track beside a lake until we could go no further in the car, and then walked through the forest. Here was a cemetery, a mass grave for 200 Jews murdered by the Nazis and local accomplices in 1941 exactly 82 years before, on the 21 August.

I was joined early on during my trip to Lithuania and then travelled around with my partner Erica Burman, whose great grandparents came from this region, from Jewish communities that are now just over the border in Belarus. It was a painful and sometimes very upsetting journey, leavened at moments by the kindness and hospitality of local comrades. This account has been immensely helped by discussions with Monika Višnevska who invited me to Kombinatas festival and then welcomed us into her family home, with Jurgis Valiukevičius at the festival and the Emma Centre, and with Andrius Bielskis who bought me šaltibarščiai, glowing pink cold beet soup, for lunch in Užupis.

This was another “socialism, betrayed, mislaid, unmade,” and particularly bitterly so, one that makes it difficult for the left there to regroup and reclaim the vision of communism as a fully democratic collective response to the miseries of neoliberalism and traumatic memories of the past. That there are left forces finding different ways of working through those events and working across borders to build another world is, for all this history, grounds for hope.

NOTE: You can read and comment on this, a version with images, published here: https://anticapitalistresistance.org/after-socialism-the-republic-of-lithuania/ This is one of the Socialisms: Revolutions Betrayed, Mislaid and Unmade

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August 31, 2023

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Sectariana

Anarchists and Marxists

Anarchism is a tricky subject for many Marxists. We know that anarchists should be our allies, but there is bad blood between us and them; blood, anarchists would say, that is mainly theirs. This book Revolutionary Affinities: Towards a Marxist-Anarchist Solidarity (2023, PM Press) by two Marxists, Michael Löwy and Olivier Besancenot, just translated into English, shows that this way of viewing the history overlooks many connections between the two traditions, and, more than that, there are many things that we Marxists need to learn from anarchism.

Confusions

There are a number of sticking points that are bound up with representations of anarchism in popular culture and the bitter history that Marxists keep repeating to account for failures of revolution. One is the appropriation of the term by liberal individualists – those who want to keep a distance from any particular political commitment because they don’t trust “politicians” (which is of itself often an understandable suspicion of authority) – and they tend to use the term as an excuse. How many times have you heard a friend or family member say that they won’t take a position or do anything to change the world because they are “a bit of an anarchist”? But there are plenty of bureaucratic and apolitical characters around the world who use the term “Marxist”, so that isn’t good reason to tar all the anarchists with the same “petit bourgeois” brush.

Another sticking point is the bad example of anarchist movements over the course of history, with the most popular case trotted out by Marxists, particularly Trotskyists, being the participation of anarchist organisations in the disastrous “popular front” government in Spain that led the leadership to call on those resisting fascism to lay down their arms and thus leading to catastrophic defeat. It is then too easy to accuse anarchists of being prone to compromise with authority at the crucial moments of struggle, with the “popular front” being an instance of class compromise in politics (as opposed to the “united front” in which we voice our differences, march separately and strike together). But, again, we will find plenty of instances of Marxists, and not only Stalinists, doing the same kind of thing when faced with opportunities and temptations of power, so that isn’t reason to pin all the blame on anarchists as if they never learn from their own history.

The most problematic confusion and sticking point that makes it difficult for some Marxists to form lively open democratic united front campaigns with anarchists is the accusation that at times of successful revolution when it is necessary to have a degree of discipline, anarchists are just a little too dead set on rebellion against authority and thus liable to be used as cats paws by counterrevolutionary movements.

Here the problem is a little deeper and too many Trotskyists who should know better after their own bloody struggle with Stalinism (in which, indeed the blood is mainly theirs) fall in line with the “defence of the revolution” argument that sees anarchism as a disruptive force, disruptive at the wrong time. But isn’t it the task of revolution to anticipate in its forms of struggle the kind of society we want to build, and shouldn’t we hear the demand for democratic open debate as something that reminds us what revolutionary struggle is all about?

Connections

It is easy to confuse anarchism with chaos and disorganisation, and that is the way anarchism, much to the anarchists’ annoyance, is presented in the mainstream press, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, one of the founders of Russian anarchism, Peter Kropotkin – the anarchist formerly known as prince – was concerned with the way that human solidarity is built into our human nature.

Against the neoliberal image of the human being as intrinsically separate from others, competing with others and only coming together for short term gains, Kropotkin was in tune with the underlying Marxist view of the human being as, in Marx’s own words “an ensemble of social relations”. We are nothing without other people, without the relationships that make us human, and Kropotkin takes this further, showing that our “animal nature” is not something that is waiting to burst out into rivalry and chaos but is itself a source of cooperative activity, “mutual aid”, the very basis of a communist society.

There are countless other theoretical connections between anarchism and Marxism that actually deepen the relationship between the two traditions (and you will often hear this connection being voiced in conversations between anarchists and Marxists on a good day when they are happy to agree on the eventual endpoint of the struggle to end capitalism, patriarchy and the manifold forms of oppression that bind us into authority).

The main concern of this book by two Marxists, Michael Löwy and Olivier Besancenot, writing from a political tradition in the Trotskyist movement that has attempted to learn from the struggles of the oppressed and put democratic organisation at the forefront of its work, is not, however, conceptual but practical. Yes, there is a discussion of some anarchist-Marxist hybrid theoreticians like Walter Benjamin and André Breton and Daniel Guérin, but if we look back at the history of revolutionary struggle, we see highlighted in the book a practical political link being forged between Marxists and anarchists.

There is a history in this book of joint action that range from the “First International” in which Marx and anarchists debated (and sometimes squabbled) and fought together (and sometimes with each other) to the Spanish Civil War. We read about the courageous work of anarchists like Emma Goldman, the one who didn’t want a revolution in which she could not dance, who did actually initially support the 1917 Russian Revolution, and travelled there to argue alongside and, when necessary, with the Bolsheviks. She attended and spoke at the funeral for Kropotkin, an event that was allowed by the Soviet authorities, even at a time of intense threat from outside counterrevolutionary forces such was the level of popular support in the country for anarchist ideas.

Rebellion

The most contentious part of the book for some Marxists, and we should hope that this honest reckoning with the past will be read and responded to by our anarchist comrades, is the account of the Kronstadt insurrection and its suppression by the new Soviet state in 1921. We are at that point when the Russian revolution had managed to hold up against the invasion of the country by twenty-one armies from fourteen different capitalist powers, but, partly as a consequence of the civil war, with a militarised state apparatus still on war footing, and with the Bolsheviks at the head of the state tangled in its own kinds of confusion. The key confusion, Löwy and Besancenot point out, was between the state and the parties, in particular between the Soviet state built from the base up from the workers councils that overthrew the Tsarist state and the Communist Party.

It is in that context that the sailors at the Kronstadt fortress, sailors who had been actively involved in the revolution, put forward a key demand on the front page of their newspaper Izvestia, which was “All Power to Soviets, and not Parties!” Lenin gave a report to the tenth congress of the communist party in the midst of this revolt in which he shamefully branded the Kronstadt rebellion as counterrevolution and “petty bourgeois anarchism”.

Trotsky also condemned the sailors, and it is that defence of the actions of the Soviet state in suppressing Kronstadt in the name of defending the Russian revolution as such that was then relayed down through the years, not only in the Stalinist tradition (where we would expect crocodile tears) but also in the Trotskyist tradition. The phrase “tragic necessity” is then repeated by Trotsky and many of his followers. That, Löwy and Besancenot argue, was an “error and a wrong”.

We need, as Marxists, to come clean about history, and “tragic necessity” is a weasel-phrase that does not do justice to it, instead this is a moment when we need, as Löwy and Besancenot put it, to say that “In plain language, the crushing of Kronstadt signified that, in the soviets, there was no longer any place for freely debating the course of the revolution.” There are difficult lessons from the book alongside inspirations, things to work through in our joint action as well as examples of liberation, of the best practice of revolution.

Lessons

The book, originally published in French in 2014, was translated into English by David Campbell while he was in prison, in Rikers Island, for political activities, and so, while we read the book, we accompany him in the task of working our way through an argument that is by radicals for radicals. We won’t have to struggle through this with dictionary in hand, as David did, but thanks to him we now also have a hopeful prospect, that the book will not only be read by Marxists because it is written by two of them, but will be read by anarchists who will be able to notice something profoundly “anarchist” in the argument.

The overall message is that we need to learn from history instead of simply repeating it, and to put aside what are mainly misunderstandings and petty disputes in order to work together. Affinity is strength, our collective strength, and here is a useful tool to enable us to combine quite different powerful energies of revolt to actually do what activists in both traditions have always wanted to do, change the world for the better.

You can read and comment on this review where it was first published, here: https://anticapitalistresistance.org/anarchists-and-marxists/

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July 17, 2023

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Psychopolitics

Betrayal as liberation: Marxism, psychoanalysis and Irish struggles in Mexican history

[This text was the intervention of David Pavón-Cuéllar for the 6 July 2023 ‘Psychoanalysis and Revolution in Ireland’ symposium, the complete video-recording of which is here]

Somewhere in our Manifesto Psychoanalysis and revolution: critical psychology for liberation movements, Ian Parker and I consider how our ego dominates us, how it betrays us by dominating us, and how we can free ourselves from it through liberation movements. Liberating ourselves is here freeing ourselves from our ego that appears as our master who betrays us and through which we betray ourselves. As always with our masters, we must choose between them and us: either they betray us or we betray them; either we betray ourselves by submitting to them, or we free ourselves from them by betraying them.

We must betray our masters to free ourselves from them. One of the reasons why our liberation is so difficult is because it implies a betrayal, a treason to the master and what is of the master within us, precisely in the form of the ego. Betraying and betraying yourself is not easy, no matter how liberating it is.

I will give betrayal a positive meaning, when the usual thing is that we give it only a negative meaning, such as when we feel that we have been betrayed by someone. I guess this feeling is known to all of us. I felt it, for example, when I was about twenty years old and I read Marx and especially Engels celebrating the United States when it invaded my country, Mexico, in 1846, stealing half of our territory. This first US imperialist intervention in Latin America was being supported by the referents of our Latin American anti-imperialism.

How could someone like me, a young Latin American Marxist, not feel betrayed in his anti-imperialism, betrayed in his desire that he imagined shared with Marx and Engels? I remember that I accused Marx and Engels of the only thing for which one can be guilty for Jacques Lacan. Marx and Engels had been guilty of giving in to their desire, our desire, and thus they would have betrayed us, Latin American Marxists.

Lacan observes that there is always some kind of betrayal in giving in to our desire. This was the betrayal I accused Marx and Engels of when I was a young 20-year-old Marxist.

I’m sure the Irish Marxists would understand me. It is as if Marx and Engels had supported British colonialism in Ireland. However, as we know, you had better luck than us. Marx and Engels strongly supported Irish independence from the 1850s.

Why weren’t you betrayed like us by Marx and Engels? I think that one of the reasons was the moment in which Marx and Engels spoke about each case. As Pedro Scaron has shown, there is a development in the opinions of Marx and Engels on colonialism, from the insensitivity to the Mexican case to openly anti-colonial positions since the Irish case. It is almost as if Ireland has taught Marx and Engels their anti-colonialism that will later be so important to our Global South.

What is certain is that the Irish were ahead of Marx and Engels in the awareness of what was at stake in colonialism. This can be verified in the United States intervention in Mexico in 1846, when hundreds of Irish soldiers deserted the United States Army and enlisted in the Saint Patrick’s Battalion to defend the Mexicans with whom they identified, just as they associated the American invaders with the English oppressors in Ireland. Many Irish lost their lives fighting for Mexico in the Saint Patrick’s Battalion, which also included German, Scottish and English soldiers in a spirit that we would describe today as “internationalist”. Of the few survivors, fifty Irishmen will be hanged by the United States Army. The gallows were their punishment as guilty of treason, yes, treason, but a treason that has nothing to do with the treason that I imputed to Marx and Engels when I was young.

Thirty years ago, I felt that Marx and Engels betrayed because they betrayed our desire. On the contrary, the Irish were considered traitors because they had followed their desire, which led them to betray the United States, the United States Army, the United States Army generals. The Irish in Mexico betrayed their masters to follow their desire, not to give in to it, not to betray themselves.

It was to fight for their desire for freedom that the Irish had to betray their oppressor in 1846. It is not the first time they have done so in Mexico. Twenty-five years earlier, Mexico had gained its independence from Spain in part thanks to the last Spanish viceroy, Juan O’Donojú, son of Irish noblemen Richard O’Donnohue, from County Limerick, and Alicia O’Ryan, from county Kerry, who had to take refuge in Spain to flee from the persecution against the Catholics by Kings George I and George II of Great Britain.

Perhaps the legacy of persecution was what made Juan O’Donojú fight for freedom first against the French invaders in Spain and then against the absolutism of the Spanish crown. This caused him to be imprisoned and tortured twice. Then, as the highest Spanish authority in Mexico, he knew how to listen to ten years of Mexican struggles against Spain and signed the Mexican independence act just before he died. He was also considered a traitor in Spain.

Betrayal against Spain was the only way O’Donojú could be on the good side of history. This side is always that of desire, but also that of freedom. It is the side of those who want to be free, of the oppressed people, whether they are the colonized by Spain, the Jews in the Nazi regime, the Palestinians in Israel or the African immigrants in France or in any other European country. The side of these oppressed people can only be a trench against their oppressors. Defeating the Spanish oppressors required betraying them.

The betrayal by O’Donojú against the Crown of Spain was the same liberating betrayal that another Irishman committed in Mexico, William Lamport, born in Wexford at the beginning of the 17th century, in the bosom of a noble Catholic family. openly hostile to the English occupation of Ireland. First William, as a student in London, was sentenced to death for writing a text against England, but he managed to flee to Spain. Then he arrived in Mexico and planned to pose as the son of the King of Spain in order to rule the Spanish colony and thus be able to free indigenous, black and mestizos. His plan was discovered and he was burned to death at the stake.

Like the 50 Irish soldiers hanged in 1847, the Irish nobleman William Lamport was burned to death in Mexico in 1659. Thus he lost his ego for remaining faithful to us. By not betraying us, he betrayed his master, Spain.

Lamport’s crime was also betraying the oppressor, allying himself with the oppressed, fighting for his desire for freedom. His fault was paradoxically not being guilty of giving in to his desire. It was for not being guilty in the eyes of psychoanalysis that Lamport was guilty in the eyes of power.

Lamport’s political program is evident in his writings in which he presents himself as a forerunner of our anti-racist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles. The desire for freedom and equality is eloquently manifested in his psalm number 632. There he recalls that Africans “were born free” like other human beings, that “it was not lawful” to reduce them to “cruel servitude” just as it would not be lawful for them to made us “captives”, and he asks the Mexicans why they buy Ethiopians when they don’t want to be “bought by them”.

Defending an equal freedom for all, a freedom in equality, William Lamport addresses the Mexicans, the subjects who identify with the Spanish master, and puts them in their place, in the place of subjects. What he does is not simply tell them not to do to others what they don’t want done to them. It is not just asking them to put themselves in the place of others either. It is something more radical: it is telling them that their place is that of the others, that of the subjects, and not that of the masters. It is as if we told Nazis that their place is that of the Jews, or Israeli soldiers that their place is that of the Palestinian they murder, or French policemen that their place is that of the immigrant they shoot.

Our true place is always the one of the subject and not that of the master, that of the oppressed and not that of the oppressors. This place of our truth is the one from which Lamport spoke. It was a place that he knew very well, perhaps because he was an Irishman persecuted by the English crown, or perhaps because he was mad. It must be said that Lamport was what we would describe today as a psychotic. He had what we call delusions and hallucinations.

Sometimes we must be mad to be in the truth. Sometimes the truth is what drives us mad. We don’t know exactly if this was what happened to Lamport. What we do know is that his madness made him speak truthfully –with the truth of his desire for equality and freedom– by translating and betraying the discourse of the master, the discourse of power and knowledge, the discourse of the monarchy and Catholicism. His fervent religiousness and his aspiration to be king were the theatrical staging in which he could articulate his desire. They were the knowledge that he could subvert by expressing his truth. They were the discourse in which he could speak. They were what was to be translated and could be betrayed by being translated.

Lamport’s translation and betrayal was carefully scrutinized by the Inquisition. The inquisitors listened to Lamport, they heard the truth of his desire, and for that they sentenced him to the stake. Today his delusions would have been listened to by a psychologist or a psychiatrist who would have sentenced him to psychiatric hospitalization. The truth always has to be silenced. It is something typical of modernity, since classical times, especially since the 17th century, as Foucault shows us precisely in that century of Lamport.

In the same 17th century, in a scene underlined by Lacan, the Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián tells how the truth terrifies and makes us escape from it. We can’t stand the truth and now we persecute it with psychology or psychiatry as before with the Inquisition. This was also understood very well by Foucault, who also understood that psychoanalysis should be something different. Psychoanalysis should allow us to listen to the truth, the truth of desire, of the symptom, of the word of the subjects who betray the master’s discourse by trying to translate it.

By betraying the discourse of the master, we are in what Lacan called the discourse of the hysteric. This discourse of subversion is at the origin of any revolutionary movement. The revolution begins by expressing and listening to a desire. Then this desire is what allows the revolution to remain open, to describe a spiral movement, to become a permanent revolution instead of returning to its starting point and reconstituting the master’s discourse. All this is what Lacan tells us when explaining what he himself describes as the interest of psychoanalysis for the revolution: an interest consisting in allowing the expression and listening of the desire that keeps the revolutionary circle open.

What psychoanalysis does is hysterize us and sustain the discourse of the hysteric. In this discourse, it is we, subjects, who speak instead of the master, instead of the ego, by usurping his position as master, just as Lamport tried to usurp the place of the king. Only in this way can we express ourselves as subjects when expressing our desire, expressing ourselves as desiring subjects, but also as divided subjects, traversed by power.

The division is flagrant in the case of Lamport. It is as the son of the king of Spain that Lamport wants to free the Mexicans from Spain. His belief in freedom is as solid as his belief in monarchy. His Catholicism is that of a heretic.

Lamport is a divided subject because he can only speak of liberty and equality in the discourse of the master, the discourse of the politics of his time, the discourse of the monarchy, of Catholicism and colonialism. It is the same thing that happened with Marx and Engels when referring to the US invasion of Mexico in 1846. Marx and Engels also required the discourse of the master, that of colonialism and imperialism, in order to express their desire that would end up becoming anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist.

We can say that Marx and Engels, like Lamport, gave in to their desire in order not to give in to their desire. They betrayed themselves in order not to betray themselves. They made concessions in order not to make concessions. This paradoxical ethics will be conceived by Lacan, in his eighth seminar, as the paradigmatic modern ethics, in contrast to the ancient ethics of the inflexible Antigone who does not give up anything on her desire. The new ethical figure is no longer Antigone, but a Claudel character, Sygne de Coufontaine, who agrees to marry her family’s worst enemy in order to preserve the family patrimony.

Sygne must give in to her desire in order not to give in to her desire to preserve the family heritage. Don’t we have here the realistic ethic, the ethic of real politics, of revolutionaries who must make concessions in order to advance the revolution, revolutionaries who must betray themselves in order not to betray themselves, who must deviate from the path towards the communist horizon in terrain as mountainous and rugged as reality? I am paraphrasing Lenin because he understood this new ethic very well. He understood it in his revolutionary strategy and made it explicit in his critique of leftist infantilism.

Lenin understood that Marx’s text itself had to be betrayed when translated into real politics. He glimpsed that there was oppression on the road to any liberation. For this and for more, Lenin spoke from the division of the subject. He accepted this division and assumed it as a contradiction in his materialist dialectic. It is the same thing that Marx and Engels did. It is for this and for more that today we should listen to them and take them seriously in psychoanalysis. This listening is at the base of our Manifesto.

[The Spanish version of David Pavón-Cuéllar’s intervention is here]

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July 13, 2023

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Psychopolitics

Translation and Revolution

[This text was the intervention of Ian Parker at the ‘Psychoanalysis and Revolution in Ireland’ symposium, the complete video-recording of which is here]

This book Psychoanalysis and Revolution: Critical Psychology for Liberation Movements is born of translation. I met up with my Mexican comrade David Pavón-Cuéllar in Havana back in 2019, and he told me there should be an accessible introduction to psychoanalysis for activists on the left. I said that we should write it together. We agreed that it should not be another Marxist or Freudian colonisation of political struggles, but that we should try and learn from those different struggles, and explain something of our struggle with psychoanalysis to those who are puzzled about what the big deal is, wonder why we are interested in all this stuff. We are not evangelists for psychoanalysis, or for Marxism for that matter, but we argue that there are some key ideas from psychoanalysis that are liberating, will help the cause of liberation, of revolution.

Outside language

Then the pandemic hit and we all experienced a simultaneous closing of borders and explosion of internet contact, of Zoom and the suchlike. And that meant that David and I wrote the book on email, shuttling the text back and forth between Manchester and Morelia. Our emails to each other are in Spanish, something I struggle with, and the text carries the traces of formulations in English English and Mexican Spanish, and, I suspect, in David’s French-accented Lacanese. We tried our best not to make the book read like a Lacanian book, but those of you who are on the look-out for it will find some of that jargon there too. The plan was that it should appear in Spanish and English, and if possible be translated into other languages, but the Russian publisher, who has now had to flee the country, was fast, was first.

We are translating all the time in the book, backwards and forwards between theories of liberation, of revolution, and theories of unconscious repetitive processes that drive us and, when they drive us into psychoanalysis to talk to a psychoanalyst, reappear in ‘transference’ so we can re-experience them there and reflect on them and do something different with them. That notion of ‘transference’ is perhaps the trickiest, the scariest, the one that operates in the clinic in the relationship between those who speak, the analysands, and those they speak to, the analysts. Those are little jargon words, of course, by the way; the psychoanalyst, or the analyst for short, is the one who often appears to be doing the analysis, and the analysand, the patient – an old medical hangover word there – is the one who actually analyses as they speak.

Anyway, back to transference. Stuff from the outside world gets translated into the clinical space, and our task as revolutionaries is, among other things, to ensure that it is not stuck there. So, as we talk about four key concepts of psychoanalysis in the book – unconscious, repetition, drive and transference – we are translating them into commonsense, to make them accessible, but then pulling back from that, worried that turning psychoanalysis into commonsense will defang it, simply turn it into ideology, pap. I want me pap! (Fail again, fail better.)

Here’s the thing. Revolution worth its salt should be all about translation. It is not a model that is transposed from one part of the world to another, good news about communism or feminism that we export and make appear in other languages; it is about what happens when we break out of our own language, our own way of doing things, and make that revolutionary change rebound from other places, allow it revolutionise ourselves, ourselves at home, at that place we think is home.

And psychoanalysis is all about translation. It is not at all about making us feel at home, but is about enabling us to live away from home, in diaspora, in exile, outside of that romanticised place we are tempted to retreat to, the impossible place that was never actually there in the past but which we might imagine we could return to. The questioning and self-questioning that psychoanalysis facilitates is something that does not rest but launches us into a different relationship with who we’ve been told we are, and it enables us to live with that. It is a relationship with the outside world we had to encounter when we grew up, otherness, and the otherness that became part of us as soon as we began to speak.

There is a fiction around, an ideological fiction that turns psychoanalysis into a comforting illusion compatible with all the mainstream pop-psychological stuff that is all around us now, the fiction that the psychoanalyst translates what the analysand, the patient, says, and turns it into an interpretation that they then feed back to bring about insight, interpretation delivered as a kind of colonising message about what the psychoanalyst knows, knows better. And, in its worst forms, the idea is that the psychoanalyst has good ideas and good morals, is a good moral character, been through their own analysis, cleansed, and so not only should the analysand believe what the analyst says, but they might try to find a way to cure by being like this good person who has told them how to think.

Then that really is close to the kind of colonising process that the revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon railed against. We think we are sometimes outside language, doing our thinking for ourselves, independent of others before we put our thoughts into words, but we are actually always inside language. The question is how we can open up contradictions so there is freedom of movement, and how we can do it in such a way that is attentive to the way that some people are locked in the language of colonisers, of those with power to define what language is and how a life should be spoken of.

Inside language

There is not only translation between languages, but translation inside a language. So, when a psychoanalyst is speaking about the difficulty of working in translation, with an analysand from a different language, say, they are actually encountering something of the nature of psychoanalysis as such. It is said that Freud put people on the couch because, as psychoanalysis gained in popularity, so many English-speaking visitors made up his case-load, babbling away in a language he had quite good knowledge of but was not completely fluent in; he said he could not bear to be stared at for all those hours in a day, but neither could he bear the exhausting task of responding face to face, showing that he understood what they were saying instead of listening in such a way as to enable translation as part of the psychoanalytic process, a crucial part of the psychoanalytic process.

The psychoanalyst should really know better than think they can deliver interpretations from on high, of course, and would know better if they were to take seriously what psychoanalysis tells them about translation. (A side note: Again and again when we English people visit the United States of America we are reminded that we are two countries divided by a common language; I have had this said to me by car hire or rental companies more than once, for example, when I am trying to work out what this or that rule means. Well, we learn something about translation inside language here.) When we are in psychoanalysis, and we are trying, impossible through it is, to obey the fundamental technical rule of psychoanalysis – free association, to speak freely, to say whatever comes into our mind however irrelevant or stupid or unpleasant it is – we learn something about translation ourselves.

So, together, but in different ways that cannot be directly translated between the two of us, the psychoanalyst and their analysand learn something about the nature of language as well as their own nature as human beings, the beings who speak. Here we make a psychoanalytically-informed differentiation, between translation conceived of as ‘communication’, as if there is some kind of magical transfusion of thoughts by way of words, and translation as transformation. It is intriguing to notice here something crucial in the history of psychoanalysis, how careful Freud himself was to distinguish psychoanalysis from telepathy. If telepathy actually happens, Freud thought – well, who knows what he thought, it is what he actually wrote we are concerned with here – then that would cause all kinds of problems for psychoanalysis. Indeed, what would be the point of psychoanalysis if there was direct communication of thoughts from one mind to another. And since Freud did indeed believe in telepathy, he made sure to prohibit discussion of it in psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis is not the same as telepathy, it is a completely different kettle of fish, a fishy kettleful of words jumbled up inside our heads and between us. The stuff of psychoanalysis is the language we use to try and communicate with each other and what we encounter in the language as a kind of barrier instead, as we would wish, a kind of conduit. We do not control the meaning of the words we use, and neither can we control what other people understand by them. And although psychoanalysis is often called the ‘talking cure’, a description that was given by one of the first patients to describe her own experience of the ‘chimney-sweeping’ she thought she was engaging in as she spoke to her doctor, it is not the putting of things into words that has a curative effect but the failure to put things into words and what we learn from that about our relation to others and what we learn about our relation to ourselves.

Conduits and barriers

So here we are, in a space in which there is indeed an illusion of communication, a necessary illusion in which I think I am conveying to you what I want to say and you are understanding it. That space, and the space in the clinic, is not a level playing field, not an open free space in which the words travel around the ground as on a smooth surface. That space, and the clinic in that space, are historically structured spaces, structured by historically-given forms of power; the power of men who believe they speak less than women but actually empirically speak more, the power of those in the colonial realms who believe they have the right to be heard, and so on.

It is sometimes said that a translator is a traitor, that the process of turning one language into another must necessarily involve a degree of twisting and turning. I am cool with that. In fact, I welcome that what might appear in another translation of the link between Psychoanalysis and Revolution might be genuinely revolutionary and genuinely psychoanalytic, in the sense that, in order to be heard in a different context, to be heard in a different language, something new appears, and what is new then turns back and questions, rebels. Tell us something we don’t know.

We don’t speak in conditions of our own choosing. That was a lesson of revolutions, and is also a lesson from psychoanalysis.