Daily Archives: February 20, 2024

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February 20, 2024

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Reviews

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.

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