Presentazione di: Stalin. Storia e critica di una leggenda nera. Domenico Losurdo, Docente ordinario di storia della filosofia dell'Università di Urbino

REVIEW OF STALIN: THE HISTORY AND CRITQUE OF A BLACK LEGEND BY ROLAND BOER


Domenico Losurdo’s well-reasoned and elaborately researched book, Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend, has not as yet been translated into English. Originally published in Italian in 2008, it has been translated into French, Spanish and German.[1]

Since I am most comfortable with French, I set out to read the 500+ page book – as bed-time reading.

But first, let me set the context for Losurdo’s philosophical project, which has been admirably outlined in a translation of a piece by Stefano Azzará.[2] This project has a few main features.

First, he has developed a systematic criticism of liberalism’s bloody, particularist, racist and supremacist origins.[3] In this ‘counter-history’, he argues that bourgeois democracy is by no means a natural outcome of liberalism, but rather the result of a continued struggle of the excluded from the limited realm of liberalism.

Further, and as part of his wider project, he has also explored the dialectical tension between universal claims and the limited particularisms from which they arise. In this light, he has explored the tensions and qualitative leaps in the German tradition of idealist philosophy, with a particular focus on Kant and Hegel.

Third, he applies this criticism to the Marxist tradition, which ran into significant trouble through its wildly universalist and utopian claims and the unexpected limitations that emerged during the constructions of socialism after the revolution.

Although he draws on Gramsci to argue for Marxism as a patient and pragmatic project in which everything will not be achieved in rush, he tellingly sees the example of China as an excellent example of what he means. Putting aside any pre-established blueprints for socialism, or indeed the ‘utopia-state of exception spiral’, it realises the gradual nature of project.

Not afraid to face the power of capitalism, as well as its many problems, it simultaneously – in a massive and sustained ‘New Economic Project’ that defies all orthodoxies – proceeds to construct a socialist constitutional state that is working towards a socialist market for the production and redistribution of wealth. Here is, then, Italy’s leading philosopher in the Marxist tradition vouching for a China that may well reconfigure and refound the Marxist tradition.

By now, Losurdo’s controversial and provoking theses should begin to be a little clearer. The Stalin book is yet another instance of his ability to take on unexpected and supposedly ‘dangerous’ topics and thoroughly recast one’s understanding. Is not Stalin, after all, the epitome of the paranoid dictator ruling by his personal whim and destroying millions of lives in the process? Is he not the mirror-image of Hitler and thereby a travesty of the Marxist tradition, as so many Marxists would have us believe? For Losurdo, this is an extraordinary caricature, so he sets out to explore how and why it developed and then to demolish it. This entails a complete reset of the mindset that unthinkingly condemns Stalin before any sustained analysis.

The book has eight chapters that are simultaneously philosophical and historical. Given the fact that it is not available in English, I outline the arguments of each chapter.

Introduction: The Turning Point in the History of Stalin.

This covers the period from the worldwide admiration and appreciation of Stalin’s pivotal role in the defeat of Hitler to the moment when Khrushchev’s ‘secret report’ was delivered. For the rest of the book, he juxtaposes these two images in constantly changing formats. One appreciates Stalin for what he actually did; the other condemns him for what he supposedly did.

1. How to Send a God to Hell: The Khrushchev Report.

This chapter is a detailed criticism of the ‘secret report’, given by Khrushchev after Stalin’s death. This is a useful complement to Grover Furr’s Khrushchev Lied,[4] with a focus on the politically motivated distortions by Khrushchev, who depicted Stalin as a ‘capricious and degenerate human monster’, and created the myths of Stalin’s abject reactions to Hitler’s attack, his anti-semitism, the cultivation of his own personality cult and much more.

2. Bolshevik Ideological Conflict in Relation to the Civil War.

This is a more philosophical chapter, dealing with what Losurdo calls the ‘dialectic of Saturn’. By this he means the pattern of conflict and struggle in which the way the Bolsheviks came to power continued to influence their dealings in power: ‘the history of Bolshevism turns itself against soviet power’. This revolutionary struggle continued, in relation to external and especially internal opponents. And so the means for resolving such a struggle became – internally – both purges and plots to overthrow the government. The Trotsky-Bukharin-Kamenev plot was therefore part of the internal logic of revolutionary power and very real. In this way may we understand the Red Terror, which is one aspect of what Losurdo calls three civil wars: the one against the international counterrevolution via the White armies; the second against the rich peasants (kulaks) during the collectivisation drive; the third against the internal plot of Trotsky and others.

3. Between the Twentieth Century and the Longue Durée, Between the History of Marxism and the History of Russia: The Origins of ‘Stalinism’.

Again philosophical, this chapter argues for two main points. The first is that Russia was undergoing a long ‘time of troubles’ from the late nineteenth century. The state was gradually collapsing, social institutions were disintegrating and the economy was in free-fall. Continuous warfare played a role, from the Russo-Japanese War to the First World War. In this light, the major achievement of the communists was to reconstruct the state. Not just any state, but a strong socialist state. Needless to say, this required immense energy and not a little brilliance. At the centre was Stalin. Second, Losurdo develops his argument for the problematic nature of the communist universal. Bred out of the particularities of the Russian revolution and its situation, it developed an ‘ideal socialism’ that is still to come and to which one strives. This in turn produced the perpetual state of exception under which the Soviet Union found itself. For Losurdo, Stalin may have at times been subject to this universal ideal, but less so that others like Trotsky and Kautsky, who criticised Stalin for not living up to the ideal. Instead, Stalin’s various strategies, such as continuing the New Economic Project for a while, the collectivisation project, the restoration of the soviets, and the efforts to foster socialist democracy indicate a significant degree of practical concerns.

4. The Complex and Contradictory Course of the Stalin Era.

As the title suggests, Losurdo continues his philosophical analysis of contradictions, now focusing on: socialist democracy and the Red Terror; bureaucracy and the ‘furious faith’ of the new socialist order; planned economy and the extraordinary flexibility of worker initiatives (so much so that the workers would have been regarded as unruly and undisciplined in capitalist industries); and the role of a ‘developmental dictatorship’ in contrast to totalitarianism. Of particular interest in this chapter is the systematic refutation of the alignment between Soviet Gulags and the Nazi ‘concentration camps’, in which the former sought to produce restored citizens, while the latter simply sought to destroy ‘sub-humans’. Here Losurdo begins a theme that becomes stronger as the book progresses, namely, that fascism is much closer to the liberal powers such as the United States and the United Kingdom. Much more is said on this connection.

5. Repression of History and Construction of Mythology: Stalin and Hitler as Twin Monsters.

A long chapter, where Losurdo now begins to show how the ‘black legend’ of Stalin developed. A central feature, thanks to Hannah Arendt, is what Losurdo calls the reductio ad Hitlerum. Two key items are supposed to show the ‘elective affinity’ between Stalin and Hitler: the so-called ‘Holodomor’, the Ukrainian holocaust that is supposed to be similar to the Nazi holocaust, and Stalin’s anti-semitism. Here he shows that the Holodomor is a piece of historical fiction (developed above all by the old Cold War warrior, Robert Conquest) and that the famine was the result of the United Kingdom’s Russian Goods (Import Prohibition) Act 1933. On anti-semitism he spends a good deal of time, after which it is perfectly clear that Stalin was anything but. Stalin repeatedly condemned anti-semitism in no uncertain terms, to the point of being – one of the few in the world at the time – an enthusiastic supporter of the state of Israel. Even more, the establishment of the ‘affirmative action empire’ in the Soviet Union ensured that Jews, among many other ethnic groups, were protected and fostered under the law, so much so that a significant number held posts in the government apparatus. Also in this chapter is a further development of the close connections between Hitler and ‘Western liberalism’, especially in terms of anti-semitism. Churchill in particular was a bigoted racist and white supremacist, and Roosevelt was also sympathetic. Indeed, they and others contrived to turn, through ‘appeasement’, Hitler’s attention eastward, with the aim of using Hitler to destroy the USSR.

6. Psychopathology, Morality and History in Reading the Stalin Era.

This chapter carries on the arguments of the previous chapter, especially in relation to the reductio ad Hitlerum, where Arendt once again comes in for some sustained criticism. It also deals with the common portrayal of Stalin’s paranoia, showing that the continued threats to the USSR – such as systemic sabotage and bombing of key industrial sites, spying, fostering coups, and simple economic sanctions – were hardly the products of a suspicious mind.

7. The Image of Stalin Between History and Mythology.

This brief chapter continues to trace the way the myth of a brutal dictator developed. Not only is he interested in the polarisation of Stalin, but also in the contradictions of the myth as it has been perpetrated and repeated since the initial work of Trotsky, Khrushchev and Arendt. But this is not the first time such diabolisation had happened in relation to revolutions. Losurdo closes the chapter by showing how it also took place in relation to the French Revolution – especially The Terror and in relation to Robespierre – of the late eighteenth century.

8. Diabolisation and Hagiography in Reading the Contemporary World.

Losurdo closes by showing how the process of diabolisation continues in relation to more recent communist revolutions: China, Cambodia, Haiti. Here the ideological warfare is coupled with brutal repressions, especially in Haiti, which was not large enough to resist the invasion of counterrevolutionary forces. China, however, was able to withstand the consistent raids and bombings that the United States undertook through its air bases on Taiwan, although it did suffer through what may be called an ‘economic atom bomb’.

The economic blockade of China was specifically designed to leave China – already with a destroyed economy from the Japanese invasion and a long revolutionary civil war – far behind economically. The cost was in millions of lives from starvation. Not without satisfaction does Losurdo note that China is overcoming the strenuous effects of the United States and its allies. In the end, however, the main purpose of this chapter is to focus on a favoured theme: the continued bloodthirstiness of ‘Western liberal’ powers.

What are we to make of Losurdo’s argument?

I was less taken with his efforts to show how close Nazism is to Western liberalism. This is a theme he has developed elsewhere, and while the points are often well made, they at times tended to dominate his argument. To counter a false image of Stalin by pointing out that the accusers were really the guilty ones is not always the best move to make.

However, Losurdo does offer some real strengths in his work, relating to Stalin at war (although others have already this argument for Stalin’s vital role), the reality of plots and threats to the government (in relation to purges and the Red Terror), the rebuilding of a strong state, Stalin’s consistent opposition to anti-semitism, and the ridiculousness of the image of Stalin of as a paranoid dictator ruling by means of his capricious bloodlust.

The complex task of unpicking the contradictions and fabrications of the ‘black legend’ is very well done, particularly via close analysis of Trotsky, Khrushchev, Arendt and Robert Conquest’s dreadful works. And I found his analysis of the dangers of an ideal, romanticised and universal communism very insightful.

However, I would have liked to see a more sustained analysis of the veneration of Stalin, apart from showing a longer history of such veneration in Russian history (Kerensky is offered as one of the more extreme examples of self-propelled adulation).

 Here the veneration of Lenin was more important, since Lenin’s heritage was the focus of struggles between Stalin and his opponents. I missed an examination of the social and economic role of such veneration, particularly in relation to economic and extra-economic compulsion.

Further, while I would have liked to see more of an exploration of Stalin’s faults along with his virtues, this is perhaps not the place for such an analysis. Instead, Losurdo’s brave book has another task: to counter a strong and long tradition of the diabolisation of Stalin on the Left.

Perhaps a careful analysis of Stalin’s real (and not mythical) faults and virtues is a task for the future.

[1] Italian: Stalin. Storia e critica di una leggenda nera (2008); French: Staline: Histoire et critique d’une légende noire (2009); Spanish: Stalin: historia y crítica de una leyenda negra (2011); German: Stalin: Geschichte und Kritik einer schwarzen Legende (2013).
[2] It may be found in a solitary blog post: http://domenicolosurdopresentazazing.blogspot.com.au.
[3] This book has been translated into English as Liberalism: A Counter-History (Verso 2011).
[4] Grover Furr, Khrushchev Lied (Erythros, 2011).

Source: http://stalinsmoustache.org/2014/08/29/losurdo-on-stalin-a-review/

Democracy and Class Struggle has been investigating the work of the Italian Marxist intellectual Domenico Losurdo and we have been very impressed by his 

War and Revolution - Rethinking the 20th Century published in English in 2015 by Verso Press.

Losurdo criticizes the concept of totalitarianism, especially in the works of Hannah Arendt.

He argues that totalitarianism is a polysemic concept with origins in Christian theology, and that applying it to the political sphere requires an operation of abstract schematism which makes use of isolated elements of historical reality to place fascist regimes and the USSR in the dock together, serving the anti-communism of Cold War-era intellectuals rather than reflecting intellectual research.

Losurdo asserts that the origins of fascism and national socialism are to be found in what he views as colonialist and imperialist policies of the West.

He examines the intellectual and political positions of intellectuals on modernity. In his view, Kant and Hegel were the greatest thinkers of modernity, while Nietzsche was its greatest critic.

Source Wikipedia

We feel Domenico Losurdo is a very competent philosopher and historian but very weak on political economy hence his analysis of contemporary China is apologetic and pragmatic and Dengist and he has not understood or appreciated the revolution in thought brought about by the revolutionary practice and theory of Marxism Leninism Maoism which in our view incorporates the revolutionary Gramsci and his war of position in the West.

Our Democracy and Class Struggle position on China and political economy was published in 2012 as Marxism Against Market Socialism. 

Furthermore for someone like Domenico Losurdo who has seriously  studied Liberalism and Neo Liberalism he has failed to see its pernicious influence in China Today both as economics and Dengist ideology.

However our frank criticism of his revisionist political economy is also tempered by an appreciation of his philosophical and historical studies which are insightful.

Domenico Losurdo is not afraid to take on controversial subjects like Stalin and while his book on Stalin is not available in English it has been published in French and we are publishing a review by Blogger Roland Boer of Losurdo for comrades to gain an insight into Domenico Losurdo's positive work

India: Varavara Rao and Arundhati Roy speak in Barnala condemning Fascist Genocide in Tuticon and Gadricholi reports Harsh Thakor

SALUTE HISTORIC RALLY AND CONVENTION IN BARNALA IN PUNJAB TODAY CONDEMNING FASCIST GENOCIDE IN TUTICON AND GADRICHOLI AND WITCH HUNT ON ACTIVISTS.

SHIMMERED THE TORCH OF RESISTANCE TO EXTINGUISH THE FASCISM PERVADING IN INDIA TODAY REPRESENTING THE VOICE OF THE ENTIRE OPPRESSED MASSES OF INDIA.

Salute this historic convention in Barnala today organised by democratic front against Operation Greenhunt Punjab shimmering the torch of liberation from the clutches of fascism .

The presidium comprised of Dr Parminder Singh, Professor Jagmohan Singh and AK Maleri.

The main Speakers were Varavara Rao and Arundhati Roy.

A major event in building revolutionary resistance to fascism.

An inspiration to people of the whole world

Most qualitative significance with around 300 people attending.

Speakers condemned massacre of Gadricholi and tuticon,False framing of democratic activists and conspiratorial charges on Maoists for plotting to kill pm.Tribute to meticulous efforts of Democratic Front against Operation Green hunt addressed by two. of India's greatest crusaders for liberation in Varavara Rao and Arundhati Roy.

Gathering represented the voice of the entire oppressed masses of India. Varavara Rao highlighted the massacres in Gadricholi and Tuticon and summed up the state repression particularly in Telengana and Dandkaranya.

He narrated how over 15000 comrades were languishing behind the bars without any proper trial. And how laws like article 160 were used to enforce police deployment in areas.

He spoke on how the govt unleashed repression in 1997 ,2007and later.The brutal assassination of Adivasis in Gadricholi and a farmers in Tuticon was recalled and the murders of leaders falsely portrayed as encounters.

He summarised how the Maoist led resistance of the Adivasis was a thorn in the flesh for the corporate giants by preventing their entry,

He went on to explain how no land reforms promised by the state were implemented in practice and state suppressed any possible resistance of Adivasis to procure land.The Rohit Vemula suicide and subsequent events was also touched upon. Arundhati Roy spoke at the micro level.

She described how now robots were infiltrating every walk of life and ultimately kill the job aspirations of millions .She called upon the people to resist the micro fascism which she felt would replenish the entire workforce from the factories to the fields.

She also spoke about the fascist murder of  activists and journalists in Kashmir and how virtually fascism took over in those regions. 

What was remarkable was the patience and intensity the audience mainly comprising the peasantry displayed revealing the painstaking ground work in class struggles.

The event concluded with a March of around 150 persons to the railway station from the venue.

An event of immense qualitative significance in educating the broad masses.

Above all they could relate the speeches to the day to day struggles of their lives.

An ideal example of how a democratic revolutionary ant-repression platform should function not being a front organization of any political group or trend and should be emulated all over the nation. 

Sergey Lavrov interviewed by British Channel 4 News

Domenico Losurdo - Nazism and Racism and Colonialism ( French Language)

TOWARDS A CRITIQUE OF THE CATEGORY OF TOTALITARIANISM
https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-dfBD-isycOcvHvqS/Domenico%20Losurdo%20--%20Towards%20a%20Critique%20of%20the%20Category%20of%20Totalitarianism_djvu.txt

WAR AND REVOLUTION IN THE 20th CENTURY

https://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.com/2015/05/a-review-of-war-and-revolution-by.html

A popular understanding of history in today’s world involves blaming the most radical revolutionaries of France in the late 18th century and Russia in 1917 for many of the modern ills. 

This trend is espoused in intellectual and popular culture and is the foundation on which much of modern politics is based. For the wealthy and the currently powerful, it is a self-serving and incredibly useful understanding. 

Hence, any popular attempts to alter this view are ruthlessly belittled and denied. It was exactly this that took place in the 1960s and the 1970s when colonized peoples, young people, workers and others reconsidered their role in history and took to the streets, forever changing the political/cultural landscape we live in.

In the years since, however, it is the historical understanding that serves the powerful that has been on the ascendant. Most commonly known among historians as revisionism, this understanding not only blames revolutionary forces for humanity’s murderous excesses, it also urges a return to a semi-feudal situation that stratifies people in terms of class, race and gender, allowing different levels of economic and political freedom according to a hierarchy designed by those in power.

In effect, it wishes to legally create the political world already being formed economically through neoliberalism.

Revisionism is a liberal approach to history. 

It equates the colonialism, racism and anti-Semitism of Nazism with the anti-colonial, anti-racist and liberationist foundations of communism. 

In doing so, it also ignores essential indisputable facts of western capitalist development. Foremost among these denials are the role the African slave trade played in every European nation that was involved, its fundamental role (along with slavery itself) in the United States, and colonialism. 

By ignoring colonialism’s essential role—and because of the racism inherent in the revisionist analysis—wars against colonized peoples are not even considered wars. 

In other words, unless Europeans are dying on a massive scale, there is no war. This is especially the case in those situations (for example, the massacre by German settlers of the Herero and Nama peoples in southern Africa or the US in Grenada, Panama and the first Gulf War) where the number of dead at the hands of the victor far outweighs the number of the victorious army’s dead.

In the conduct of war, all governments involved are more alike than different, more genocidal than peace seeking, more authoritarian than rights protecting. Total war means total mobilization and imprisonment or even death to those who disagree. God forgive the soldier unwilling to participate: Losurdo writes of an Italian general during World War One who “carried out trench inspections with an execution squad in tow” to save time. The battle is the most important thing, after all. The unwilling cannon fodder had best be aware.

The end of the 1970s did not mean an end to the non-revisionist understanding of history made popular by the masses in the streets. It did, however, signal a renewed effort to stifle that particular strain. This was in line with the times. Thatcher and Reagan were presiding over neoliberal capitalism’s opening salvos on the Keynesian economic state and re-arming their already powerful militaries. 

The Soviet Union was heading towards a demise fostered by political and economic miscalculation intensified by a war against its 1917 revolution that began before the revolution had the means to solidify. 

In the face of the neoliberal attack, socialist and social democratic governments in Europe were beginning to become their opposite, remaining socialist or social democrat in name only. Ever since then, the Left has been either fighting to regain a sense of possibility or signing up with the neoliberal offensive pretending it can still be leftist while embracing monopoly capitalism’s most inhumane incarnation to date.

Domenic Losurdo is an Italian Marxist and philosopher. He is also one of today’s most acute critics of liberalism. 

His latest work to be translated into English, War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century, is an intellectual rebuke to the revisionist historians masquerading as objective arbiters of the past when in reality their words serve finance capital and its ravaging of the planet. 

Losurdo rejects the West’s portrayal of itself as civilized and humane in contrast to Russia and the East. 

Philosopher by philosopher, historian by historian, he dissects those western intellectuals’ attempts to mythologize these lies cleverly and decisively. 

Losurdo takes the attempts by various revisionist historians to blame the Bolsheviks and French Jacobins for the history of terror and turns them on their head. 

Instead, he writes, It is the reactionary and liberal capitalist regimes whose policies of total war and forced removal of populations (the Native Americans and the Africans, most notably) which created the reaction of the revolutionary governments. 

In other words, it was not the revolutionary forces as represented by the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks who brought mass murder, ethnic cleansing and slavery into this world, but the governments against which they revolted. 

Furthermore, Losurdo includes the phenomenon of twentieth-century fascism in the western colonial tradition. 

In other words, Hitler’s plans to colonize Eastern Europe were not outside of the West’s previous colonialist endeavor. 

In fact, as Losurdo repeatedly mentions, Hitler admired the totality of the American settlers’ eradication of the indigenous peoples whose land they stole and saw it as a model for his brand of fascism.

Losurdo argues that in the reactionary system there is no war but “racial” war. 

He cites the propaganda used by the capitalist nations to mobilize the citizens in their respective states, turning the twentieth century wars against communism into wars against foreign, “Asiatic,” even Jewish ideologies. 

One finds a similar scenario in the twenty-first century where wars against nations with large Muslim populations have become “racialized” wars against the Muslim world itself. 

As Losurdo makes clear, this racialization has helped create a mindset allowing for what he calls “the rehabilitation of colonialism.” 

In other words, the powers that be promote their self-serving idea that there are parts of the world—mostly non-white—that could benefit from being colonized by those powers. 

In what can only be described as an ironic instance, I heard this sentiment expressed by two African-American men in Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park on September 11, 2001 while the smoke from the burning Twin Towers scraped the nostrils and throats of every one present.

War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century is a relentless document. 

It is dense and disconcerting. This is precisely why it should be considered one of the most important history books written since the events known as 9-11.

 After all, it was those events which took the revisionist project already underway since the late 1970s and put it into hyperdrive. 

By intention, there has not been a day of peace.

REVIEW BY RON JACOBS

United Nations rights experts urge India to release jailed Delhi University professor GN Saibaba Saibaba was arrested in 2014 for alleged links with Maoists and sentenced to life imprisonment last year.

United Nations rights experts urge India to release jailed Delhi University professor GN Saibaba.

Saibaba was arrested in 2014 for alleged links with Maoists and sentenced to life imprisonment last year.

United Nations rights experts on Thursday urged India to release jailed Delhi University professor GN Saibaba, as he is suffering from several health problems.

The wheelchair-bound academic was arrested in May 2014, after the police in Gadchiroli, Maharashtra, claimed he had links with Maoists. He was sentenced to life in prison in March 2017 and has been in the Nagpur Central Jail since.

“We are concerned about reports that Saibaba is suffering from more than 15 different health problems, some of which have potentially fatal consequences,” the experts said in a joint statement in Geneva.

The experts include special rapporteurs Catalina Devandas, Michel Forst, Dainius P?ras and Nils Melzer, the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad Al Hussein said. “Saibaba’s health is progressively and severely deteriorating because of poor jail conditions and untrained staff unable to adequately assist prisoners with disabilities,” the experts said, adding that he is now in “urgent need” of adequate medical treatment.

“We would like to remind India that any denial of reasonable accommodation for people with disabilities in detention is not only discriminatory but may well amount to ill-treatment or even torture,” they said. “In particular, solitary confinement should be prohibited when the conditions of prisoners with disabilities would be made worse by this measure.”

The human rights commissioner’s office called Saibaba a “long-standing defender of the rights of various minorities in India against corporate interests”. It claimed that the judgement convicting Saibaba “allegedly failed to point out a single instance in which Saibaba was a conspirator to commit violence or provide logistical support to violent acts”.

The case against Saibaba

The case began in 2013, with a police raid at Saibaba’s Delhi University accommodation. The police alleged he was “an urban contact” for the Maoists and that he was named by Hem Mishra, then a Jawaharlal Nehru University student who was arrested in Gadchiroli.

He was first arrested in May 2014. In late June 2015, the Bombay High Court granted him bail on medical grounds, and he was released in July 2015. He went back to jail in December and was released again in April 2016, after the Supreme Court granted him bail.

Saibaba had extensively campaigned against the Salwa Judum militia in Chhattisgarh and the human rights violations that accompanied Operation Green Hunt against Maoists in central India that was launched by the previous United Progressive Alliance government.

SOURCE:
https://scroll.in/latest/884552/united-nations-rights-experts-urge-india-to-release-jailed-delhi-university-professor-gn-saibaba

Putin to talk to his "partner" Trump : We like the Russian People would like Putin to learn one diplomatic word "nyet"

THE PAST AS PRESENT IN JULY 2018 
IN FINLAND 

Molotov was Foreign Minister of the USSR from 1939 to 1949 and 1953 to 1956 had "nyet" in his vocabulary.

Even the revisionist Gromyko could say "nyet".

Suggested Greeting from Putin for Trump at July Finnish meeting

This is not the first time that our people have had to deal with an attack of an arrogant foe - Molotov 1941

Learn from Molotov: 

The fact that atomic war may break out, isn't that class struggle? There is no alternative to class struggle. This is a very serious question. 

The be-all and end-all is not peaceful coexistence. 

After all, we have been holding on for some time, and under Stalin we held on to the point where the imperialists felt able to demand point-blank: either surrender such and such positions, or it means war. 

So far the imperialists haven't renounced that

* Molotov said it in 1976 when he was in active retirement.Molotov, Vyacheslav; Chuev, Felix; Resis, Albert (1993). 

Molotov remembers: inside Kremlin politics : conversations with Felix Chuev. I.R. Dee. p. 20. ISBN 1566630274.

Interview with Domenico Losurdo: Marx and the counter-history of Liberalism

Domenico Losurdo, one of the most significant contemporary Marxist thinkers, died at the age of 77. He was a Professor of Philosophy at Urbino University as well as President of the International Association Hegel-Marx for Dialectical Thought. 

Despite any possible disagreements of different views regarding his work, the death of Losurdo consists a major loss for marxist thought - we at Democracy and Class Struggle have sharp disagreements with Domenico Losurdo on the role of the market but that does not blind us to his historical insights on Liberalism, Communism and Fascism.

Below, we republish an interesting interview he gave to the Platypus Affiliated Society in 2012, based on one of his latest books titled "Liberalism: A Counter-History". 

What follows is an edited transcript of a live conversation of Ross Wolfe and Pam Nogales with D.Losurdo. 

Ross Wolfe: How would you characterize the antinomy of emancipation and de-emancipation in liberal ideology? From where did this logic ultimately stem?

Domenico Losurdo: I believe that this dialectic between emancipation and de-emancipation is the key to understanding the history of liberalism. 

The class struggle Marx speaks about is a confrontation between these forces. What I stress is that sometimes emancipation and de-emancipation are strongly connected to one another. Of course we can see in the history of liberalism an aspect of emancipation. 

For instance, Locke polemicizes against the absolute power of the king. He asserts the necessity of defending the liberty of citizens against the absolute power of the monarchy. But on the other hand, Locke is a great champion of slavery. 

And in this case, he acts as a representative of de-emancipation. 

In my book, I develop a comparison between Locke on the one hand and Bodin on the other. Bodin was a defender of the absolute monarchy, but was at the same time a critic of slavery and colonialism.

RW: The counter-example of Bodin is interesting. He appealed to the Church and the monarchy, the First and Second Estates, in his defense of the fundamental humanity of the slave against the “arbitrary power of life and death” that Locke asserted the property-owner, the slave-master, could exercise over the slave.

DL: Yes, in Locke we see the contrary. While criticizing the absolute monarchy, Locke is a representative of emancipation, but while celebrating or legitimizing slavery, Locke is of course a representative of de-emancipation. In leading the struggle against the control of the absolute monarchy, Locke affirmed the total power of property-owners over their property, including slaves. 

In this case we can see very well the entanglement between emancipation and de-emancipation. The property-owner became freer, but this greater freedom meant a worsening of the conditions of slavery in general.

RW: You seem to vacillate on the issue of the move towards compensated, contractual employment over the uncompensated, obligatory labor that preceded it. By effectively collapsing these two categories into one another—paid and unpaid labor—isn’t there a danger of obscuring the world-historical significance of the transition to the wage-relationship as the standard mode of regulating social production? Do you consider this shift, which helped usher in the age of capitalism, a truly epochal and unprecedented event? 

What, if any, emancipatory possibilities did capitalism open up that were either unavailable or unthinkable before?

DL: It was Marx himself who characterized the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688–1689 as a coup d’état. Yes, the landed aristocracy became free from the king, but in this way the landowners were able to expropriate the peasants and inaugurate a great historical tragedy. 

In this case, too, we can see this dialectic of emancipation and de-emancipation. 

After the Glorious Revolution, the death penalty became very widespread. Every crime against property, even minor transgressions, became punishable by death. 

We can see that after the liberal Glorious Revolution the rule of the ruling class became extremely terroristic.

RW: Insofar as the de-emancipation of the serfs led to the development of an urban proletariat (since the peasants thus uprooted were often forced to move to the cities, where they joined the newly emerging working class), to what extent did this open up revolutionary possibilities that didn’t exist before? Or was this simply a new form of unfreedom and immiseration?

DL: Of course, you are right if you stress that the formation of an urban proletariat creates the necessary conditions for a great transformation of society. 

But I have to emphasize the point that this possibility of liberation was not the program of the liberals. The struggle of this new working class needed more time before starting to have some results. 

In my view, the workingmen of the capitalist metropolis were not only destitute and very poor, they were even without the formal liberties of liberalism. 

Bernard De Mandeville is very open about the fact that to maintain order and stability among the workers, the laws must be very strict, and that the death penalty must be applied even in the absence of any evidence. 

Here too we can speak of terroristic legislation.

I also describe the conditions in the workhouses as approximating later internment camps and concentration camps. 

In the workhouses there was no liberty at all.

Not only was there no wealth, or material liberty; there was no formal liberty either.

RW: You compile some disturbing passages from Locke, Mandeville, and Smith in which they liken workers to horses and other beasts of burden. 

You also offer a selection from one of Abbé Sieyès’s private notebooks in which he refers to wage-laborers as “work machines.” Hobbes claimed that there was a sensate understanding “common to Man and Beast,” and La Mettrie famously wrote of the “machine-man.” 

Might this language reflect these thinkers’ encounter with British and French materialism just as easily as it might indicate deliberate dehumanization?

DL: With the dehumanization of the working class in the liberal tradition, I don’t believe that this has to do with the materialistic vision of the world. 

These liberal theorists, on the one hand, dehumanized the working-man, while, on the other hand, they celebrated the great humanity of the superior classes. 

I quote in my book a text by Sieyès, a French liberal who played a considerable role in the French Revolution, in which Sieyès dreams of the possibility of sexual relations between black men and apes in order to create a new race of slave. 

That is not a materialistic vision. On the contrary, it is a futuristic, idealistic, and eugenicist vision to create a new race of workers who can increase productivity but who would be forever obedient to their masters.

Pam C. Nogales C.: In the seventeenth century, at least in England, doesn’t private property become the grounds on which certain demands of liberty can be made against the order of the king? Was it merely a historical necessity that demands of liberty could only be made through this particular form of private property? Or was this already a reactionary position to take, even in the seventeenth century?

DL: I would continue to stress this entanglement of emancipation and de-emancipation. The statement according to which men have the right to think freely and convey their opinions is of course an expression of an emancipatory process. 

But we must add that this class of property-owners, once free of the control of the government, could impose a new regime of control over their servants and slaves. 

In the first phase of the bourgeois-liberal revolution, the servants were without even liberal liberty, as well. I have quoted, for instance, that the inhabitants of the workhouses were deprived of every form of liberty. The [indentured] servants who were transferred to America, they were more like slaves. 

They were not modern wage-laborers. For instance, Mandeville writes that the worker must attend religious services. That is, they were not free in any sense of the word. 

On the workhouses, I quote Bentham at length, who claimed to be a great reformer, but was truthfully a great advocate of these workhouses. 

He envisioned the formation of an “indigenous class” of workers born within these workhouses, who would therefore be more obedient to their masters. This has nothing to do with modern wage-workers.

PN: This gets back to the question of whether or not capitalism offers new forms of freedom while simultaneously posing new problems of unfreedom. On the one hand, we live in a most unfree moment. One could highlight the historically unprecedented living conditions for the worker in the crowded tenement houses of Manchester, or point out that his employer is only interested in gaining profit and not in granting him any form of freedom. 

But is the formation of a working class not at the same time a historical transformation of the conception of a subject in society that has implications beyond its manifestation in its present moment? After all, the worker is not identical with his social activity. He, as a bourgeois subject, has the right to work. Does bourgeois right point beyond itself and is thus not reducible to how it immediately appears?

DL: Of course I agree with you that some theorists from the ruling class end up inspiring other classes that were not foreseen as participants in liberal right. Consider Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the slave revolution in Santo Domingo, which later became Haiti. How can we explain this great revolution? We see in France the Declaration of the Rights of Man. 

In the original version of this document, the Rights of Man did not include colonial peoples or the blacks. 

But we see Toussaint Louverture who read this proclamation and claimed these rights for the blacks, as well. And we have this great revolution as a result. This is not a spontaneous consequence of liberalism, however. On the contrary, Toussaint Louverture was obliged to struggle against the French liberals of the time, who admired the conditions that obtained in the southern United States of America and strove to continue the oppression of the black slaves. 

In Santo Domingo, the slaveholders were at first positively impressed by the French Revolution. They thought this meant freedom from the control of the king, such that they could now freely enjoy slavery, and their property, the slaves. 

Toussaint Louverture drew the opposite conclusion, and thus became the organizer of one of the greatest revolutions in history.

PN: Concerning the radical inspiration for the framework you set up between Toussaint and the French Revolution, the striking thing about the Haitian Revolution is that it caused a division within France. It was not simply Toussaint versus the French liberals; the Haitian Revolution actually caused the French liberals to split and led to disarray. It raised another problem: Insofar as France could militarily continue to defend itself from counterrevolutionary forces in Europe, at this particular moment, it still depended on colonial production. 

It therefore seems to me that the Haitian Revolution posed the problem of the radicalism of liberalism straightforwardly and there were a number of responses. 

Is it possible to call Toussaint a liberal because he believed in the promises of liberalism?

DL: No! Toussaint was a Jacobin. Between the Jacobins and the liberals there was a great deal of struggle. 

If we read all the authors who are generally classified as liberal—for instance Constant, de Tocqueville, and so on—they spoke very strongly against Jacobinism. 

For these liberal authors, Jacobinism was something horrible. I don’t agree, therefore, with your claim that there was a “split” within the liberal parties of France. 

Jacobinism is in my interpretation a form of radicalism, because they appealed not only to the liberation of the slaves “from above,” but struggled together with the slaves in order to overthrow slavery. 

After the fall of the Jacobins in France, the new government began to immediately work for the restoration of slavery. The French slave-owners had acclaimed the first stage of the French Revolution, since they thought they could then freely exercise control over their slaves. 

After the advent of Jacobinism and the radicalization of the Revolution, the liberals went to the United States and expressed their admiration.

RW: Could you elaborate on the historical and conceptual distinction you draw between liberalism on the one hand, and radicalism on the other?

DL: Even if we conceive of radicalism as the continuation of liberalism, we should not forget that, for instance in the United States, even the formal abolition of slavery was the consequence of a terrible conflict, a war of secession. We don’t see a direct continuity between liberalism and the abolition of slavery, because this liberation was only made possible by a protracted Civil War. 
But Lincoln, too, was not a representative of radicalism because he never appealed to the slaves to emancipate themselves. Only in the final stage of the war of secession, in order to add more soldiers in the struggle against the South, did Lincoln agree to let some black soldiers fight.

It is another fact that in the history of liberalism, Robespierre is not considered a liberal, but a strong enemy of liberalism. In the French Revolution, it was Robespierre who abolished slavery, but only after the great revolution in Haiti. He was then compelled to recognize that slavery was over.

The author who makes the best impression on the issue of slavery is Adam Smith. Smith was for a despotic government that would forcibly abolish slavery. But Smith never thought of the slaves as catalysts of their own liberation. So on the one hand, Adam Smith condemns and criticizes slavery very harshly. But if we asked him what was in his eyes the freest country of his time, in the final judgment, Smith answers that it is England.

If we look at the history of the American continents, we can ask: Which was the most liberal country? I believe it was the U.S. But now, if we ask the question: Which was the country that had the greatest difficulty in the emancipation of the slaves? Again, it was the United States.

But if we consider the succession of emancipation in the American continents, we see Haiti first, followed by the countries of Latin America (Venezuela, Mexico, and so on), and only later the United States of America. 

If we read the development of the world between the United States and Mexico, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States—after defeating Mexico, after annexing Texas—reintroduced slavery into these territories where it had already been abolished. This, in my eyes, demonstrates that we cannot consider the abolition of slavery as a consequence of liberalism.


RW: How would you account for the admiration of Marx for a figure like Lincoln, who created the conditions (through war) for the emancipation of the slaves?

DL: Of course Marx was right in his admiration for Lincoln. Lincoln was a great personality, and Marx had the merit to understand that the abolition of slavery would bring about great progress. Why do I say this? Because in utopian socialism, there were those who constructed this argument: “Yes, capitalism is slavery. 

Black slavery is only another form of slavery. 

Why should we choose between the Union and the Confederacy?

We see in North and South only two different forms of slavery.” Lassalle, for instance, was of this opinion. 

Marx understood very well that these two different forms of slavery—wage-slavery and slavery in its most direct form—were not equivalent. 

The South was for the expansion of slavery.

PN: For Marx, what was really at stake in the Civil War were the historical gains made by the bourgeois revolutions, on which any proletarian revolution would have to depend. 

And insofar as liberalism in its post-1848 moment had begun to undermine the promises of the bourgeois revolutions, it was no longer revolutionary. 

Do you think that with the relationship between Marx and the American Civil War, there was a certain promise that, insofar as slavery could be abolished, bourgeois right could potentially be radicalized?

DL: I am critical of some ideas of Marx, but not the enthusiasm with which he greeted the struggle of Lincoln or the Northern Union. In this case Marx was correct. 

But Marx spoke of the bourgeois revolutions as providing political emancipation. Perhaps he didn’t see the aspect of de-emancipation. 

We can make a comparison with the middle of the nineteenth century: the U.S. and Mexico. In Mexico, no bourgeois revolution took place. In the U.S. we must say that the American Revolution was a form of bourgeois revolution. 

Comparing these two countries, we see that in Mexico, slavery was abolished. In the U.S. slavery remained very strong. Why should we say that in the U.S. the political emancipation was greater than in Mexico? I don’t see why.

RW: In explaining the manifold “exclusion clauses” that restricted the application of bourgeois rights to certain privileged groups or individuals, you use the old dichotomy of the “sacred” and “profane.” According to this model, those fortunate enough to live inside the boundaries of this “sacred space” at any given moment can be said to inhabit the “community of the free,” while those who fall outside of its domain are meanwhile relegated to the “profane space” of unfreedom. Why do you associate freedom with sanctity, and unfreedom with profanity?

DL: In this religious analogy, the “sacred space” is, of course, the space that is more highly valued than any other. With liberal ideology, we see a religious attitude. But that isn’t the most important point, because even in normal language, “sacred” has a more positive meaning. 

Regardless of whether one is religious, when people speak of something that is “sacred,” what this means is that this thing has a particular importance.

RW: How do you account for the rise of nationalism, the role it played in carving out the “sacred space” of the “community of the free”? Nationalism goes virtually unmentioned in your account. Lost, then, is the patriotic particularity that emerged opposite Enlightenment universality at the outset of the eighteenth century. 

In your work on Heidegger, you draw on the sociologist Tönnies’s distinction between “society” [Gesellschaft] and “community” [Gemeinschaft] to explain the exclusivist connotations of the ideology of the national or folk community (the Volksgemeinschaft promoted by the Nazis).[1]

Insofar as it displaced the spiritual energies traditionally invested in religion to that of the nation, might this be the root of the “sacred space” that you associate with the (national) “community of the free”?

DL: Regarding “sacred space” and “profane space”: I make a comparison with religion because religion proceeds in this way. Profane derives from a Latin word. Fanum was the temple or church. Profanum was what was outside the church. 

That is the distinction that we find already in the first phase of religious consciousness. Liberalism proceeds in the same way—we have the fanum, or temple, which is the space of the community of the free. Profanum is for the others, those outside of this space.

Why do I use this formulation for the community of the free? I don’t believe that the category of “individualism” is adequate to the description of liberal society. “Liberalism” and “individualism” are self-congratulatory categories. Why? If we consider individualism, for example, as the theory according to which every individual man or woman has the right to liberty, emancipation, and self-expression—that is not what we see in liberal society. We have spoken of the different forms of exclusion, of colonial peoples, of workingmen, and women. Therefore, this category is not correct.

RW: But is it liberal society or the national community that is free? In your study on Heidegger, you distinguish between the more universal category of “society,” the socius or Gesellschaft, and the more particular category of “community,” the communitas or Gemeinschaft. Isn’t this distinction useful here?

DL: If we consider the history of liberalism, we see on the one hand a “community of the free” that tends to be transnational. 

But on the other hand, we already see nationalism in this liberal society. 

For instance, Burke speaks of “the English people,” a people in whose “blood” there is a love of liberty. There is a celebration of the English people. 

The ideology of nationalism was already present in liberalism. England—though not only England—claimed to be a special nation, a nation involved in a project of liberty. 

Of course in the twentieth century we have a new situation, where Heidegger celebrates the German nation.

PN: Isn’t the transformation of concepts like nationalism symptomatic of a deeper problem in liberalism itself? 

Doesn’t the shift that takes place in 1848 indicate the conservative (and thus reactionary) transformation of the liberal tradition, because a latent conflict within bourgeois society was only now being historically manifested? 

Since you raised the criticism of how Marx conceived of bourgeois revolutions, I would like to talk about the relationship of liberalism to Marxism, specifically in the moment of the mid-nineteenth century. 

To what extent would you say that the success of a radical or Marxist conception of revolution be the negation of liberal society, and to what extent would you say that it would be the fulfillment of liberal society?

DL: One can find a new definition of liberalism and say that the October Revolution of 1917 was a liberal revolution—why not? But in normal language, the October Revolution is not considered a liberal revolution. All the liberal nations of the world opposed the Bolshevik Revolution.

Marx does not speak at any great length about liberalism. He speaks about capitalism and bourgeois societies, which claimed to be liberal. I criticize Marx because he treats the bourgeois revolutions one-dimensionally, as an expression of political emancipation. Marx makes a distinction between political emancipation and social emancipation. Social or human emancipation will be, in Marx’s eyes, the result of proletarian revolution. On the other hand, Marx says the political emancipation that is the result of bourgeois revolution represents progress.

Again, I don’t accept this one-sided definition of political emancipation, because it implied the continuation and worsening of slavery. 

In my book I quote several contemporary U.S. historians who claim that the American Revolution was, in reality, a “counter-revolution.” Why do I quote these historians? 

They write that if we consider the case of the natives or the blacks, their conditions became worse after the American Revolution. Of course the condition of the white community became much better. 

But I repeat: We have numerous U.S. historians who consider the American Revolution to be, in fact, a counter-revolution. 

The opinion of Marx in this case is one-sided. Perhaps he knew little about the conditions in America during the American Revolution. 

He knew the War of Secession well, but perhaps the young Marx was not familiar with the earlier history of the U.S.

Another example of the one-sidedness of the young Marx can be found in On The Jewish Question. He speaks in this text of the U.S. as a country of “accomplished political emancipation.” 

In this case, his counter-example is France. In France, he claimed there was discrimination based on wealth and opportunity. 

This discrimination was disappearing, and was now almost non-existent, in the U.S. But there was slavery in the U.S. at this time. Why should we say that the U.S. during the time of slavery had “accomplished political emancipation”?

RW: “Radicalism,” as you have been defining it, would be liberalism without exclusion. If one were to get rid of the division between the “sacred space” and “profane space,” it would just be liberalism for all. Insofar as radicalism purports to remove any distinction between those who are inside and those outside the realm of freedom, and thereby bring everyone into the “sacred space” of freedom, wouldn’t radicalism to some extent just be universal liberalism?

DL: It is impossible to universalize in this way. For instance, colonial wars were for the universalization of the condition of the white slave-owners. That was the universality proclaimed by colonialism. The universalization of liberal rights to excluded groups was not a spontaneous consequence of liberalism, but resulted from forces outside liberalism. These forces were, however, in some cases inspired by certain declarations, for instance of the Rights of Men.

In speaking of the enduring legacy of liberalism, I have never said that we have nothing to learn from liberalism. There two primary components of the legacy of liberalism. First, and perhaps the most important point: Liberalism has made the distinction between “sacred space” and “profane space” that I have spoken about. But liberalism has the great historical and theoretical merit of having taught the limitation of power within a determined, limited community. Yes, it is only for the community of the free, but still it is of great historical importance. 

On this score, I counterpose liberalism to Marxism, and rule in favor of liberalism. I have criticized liberalism very strongly, but in this case I stress the greater merits of liberalism in comparison to Marxism.

Often, Marxism has spoken of the disappearance of power as such—not the limitation of power, but its disappearance—the withering of the state and so on. This vision is a messianic vision, which has played a very negative role in the history of socialism and communism. If we think that power will simply disappear, we do not feel the obligation to limit power. This vision had terrible consequences in countries like the Soviet Union.

RW: So you believe that historical Marxism’s theorization of the eventual “abolition” of the state, or the “withering away” of the State—as Lenin, following Engels, put it—was misguided?

DL: Totally misguided!

RW: So do you feel that society 
can never autonomously govern itself without recourse to some sort of external entity, something like the state? Must the state always exist?

DL: I do not believe society can exist without regulation, without laws. Something must ensure obedience to the laws, and in this case the “withering away” of the state would mean the “withering away” of rights, of the rule of law. Gramsci rightly says that civil society, too, can be a form of power and domination. 

If we conceive the history of the United States, the most oppressive forms of domination did not take the shape of state domination, but came from civil society. The settlers in the American West independently carried out the expropriation, deportation, and even extermination in more extensive ways than the state. Sometimes, even if only partially, the federal government has tried to place limits on this phenomenon. Representing civil society as the expression of liberty—this is nonsense that has nothing to do with real Marxism.

Marx himself speaks of the despotism in the capitalist factory, which is not exercised by the state, but rather by civil society. And Marx, against this despotism, proposed the interference of the state into the private sphere of civil society. He advocated state intervention in civil society in order to limit or abolish this form of domination, in order to limit by law the duration and condition of the work in the factory.

RW: That’s the famous passage where Marx describes industrial capitalism as “anarchy in production, despotism in the workshop.” In other words, haphazard production-for-production’s-sake alongside this kind of militarized discipline of industrial labor. But insofar as Marx conceives the modern state as the expression of class domination, the domination of the ruling class over the rest of society, do you believe that a classless society is possible? Because it would seem unclear why a classless society would need a state, if the state is only there to express class domination.

DL: On the one hand, Marx speaks along the lines you just laid out. In many texts, Marx and Engels say that the state is the expression of one class’s domination over the other. But at other times, they speak of another function of the state. They write that the state functions to implement guarantees between the different individuals of the ruling class, the individual bourgeois. 

And I don’t understand why this second function of the state would disappear. If we have a unified mankind, in this case too there is the necessity of guarantees between individuals within this unified mankind.

Furthermore, we are not allowed to read the thesis of Marx and Engels in a simplistic way. Sometimes they speak of the “withering away” of the state. In other circumstances, however, they speak of the “withering away” in its actual political form. These two formulations are very different from one another. But in the history of the communist movement, only the first definition was present, the most simplistic definition: the “withering away” of the state as such. The other formulation is more adequate: the “withering away” of the state in terms of today’s political form.

RW: And the other great legacy of liberalism?

DL: The other great legacy of liberalism exists in its understanding of the benefits of competition. And here I am thinking of the market, too, about which I speak positively in my book. We must distinguish different forms of the market. For a long time, the market implied a form of slavery. The slaves were merchandise in the market. The market can assume very different forms. Not that the market is the most important fact. We cannot develop a post-capitalist society, at least for a long time to come, without some form of competition. And this is another great legacy that we can learn from liberalism. 

Transcribed by Ross Wolfe