Quotes of the Day - March 16, 2012

I read Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler, today. It was a nice change from my usual focus on non-fiction, and I thoroughly enjoyed the philosophical debates so neatly incorporated into the book's prose. That said, there were a few clunky metaphors here and there, and one or two instances of hyperbole taken too far. I recommend reading the book in a single day or sitting, since it is short enough to get through in a single sitting and since it's power is best felt when one is immersed in the text. Being a work of fiction, Darkness at Noon has fewer passages I want to highlight on philosophical or political grounds, but there are a few. There are also a few passages so well written I could not resist highlighting them.

As a likely history major in college (when I finally escape from the doldrums of high school), I've always found the description of History (yes, capital "H" in the Marxist sense) as a science strange. The explanation of history is a matter of interpretation, not a study of scientific fact. Koestler's comparison between history and astronomy points out this strangeness.

"That was probably the reason that history was more of an oracle than a science. Perhaps later, much later, it would be taught by means of tables and statistics, supplemented by such anatomical sections. The teacher would draw on the black board an algebraic forumla representing the conditions of life of the masses of a particular nation at a particular period: 'Here, citizens, you see the objective factors which conditioned this historical process'" (pg. 17).

I mentioned this before in one of my posts on To the Finland Station - what attracts me to Marxism is the idea that one can interact with history. It is possible to fuel the engine of historical change.

"'Certainly,' said Rubashov. 'A mathematician once said that algebra was the science for lazy people - one does not work out x, but operates with it as if no knew it. In our case x stands for the anonymous masses, the people. Politics mean operating with this  x without worrying about its actual nature. Making history is  to recognize x for what it stands for'" (pg. 85).

With such an uplifting and inspirational tenor, this passage reminds of me of a song that seems to embrace the idea of making history. (Make Your Own History, by Stray from the Path)

I recently had a discussion with a friend about the obligations of the currently existing, living generations to the generations of the future. He asked, is it worth making the world better for a generation that has yet to be born if this entails making life for the living generations more difficult? We went back and forth for a while, and I was reminded of Natasha Lennard's piece in the latest issue of the New Inquiry. In it, she discusses how certain strands queer theory challenge the child- and future-centric nature of policy and all forms of society. In Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler, too, weighs in on this issue through his character of Rubashov, the aging revolutionary now put on trial for betraying the revolution.

"Acting consequentially in the interests of the coming generations, we have laid such terrible privations on the present one that it's average length of life is shortened by a quarter. In order to defend the existence of the country, we have to take exceptional measures and make transition-stage laws, which are in every point contrary to the aims of the Revolution. The people's standard of life is lower than it was before the Revolution; the labour conditions are harder, the discipline is more inhuman, the piece-work drudgery worse than in colonial countries with native coolies" (pg. 162).

Not only does the above passage assert that no, it is not worth immiseration of the living generations in order to provide the potential of a better life to the generations to come. For Rubashov, and other revolutionaries, the Revolution represents the promise of that better life for future generations; it has not yet been realized, and in order to realize it, significant sacrifices must be made. Rubashov's heresy - just one of many - is that he rejects the idea that the present must be made miserable in order to make the future better.

One of the remarkable things in Koestler's writing is the way he captures the brutal logic of the State establishment. Ivanov, Rubashov's initial prosecutor, lays out the chilling moral calculus that underlies the foundation of the totalitarian state.

"Yes, we liquidate the parisitic part of the peasantry and let it die of starvation. It was a surgical operation which had to be done once and for all; but in the good old days before the Revolution just as many died in any dry year - only senselessly and pointlessly. The victims of the Yellow River floods in China amount sometimes to hundreds of thousands. Nature is generous in her senseless experiments on mankind. Why should mankind not have the right to experiment on itself" (pg. 165)?

An orthodox adherent to the faith of the Revolution, Ivanov believes that death, if achieved with the purpose of furthering the Revolution, is more meaningful than death due to natural causes. Thus, those who die due to political experimentation should be considered lucky; they died for a reason rather than at the hands of indifferent Nature. This kind of reasoning is dangerous, as thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Sir Isaiah Berlin have noted. The glorification and worship of death characteristic of totalitarian regimes, be it Nazi or Stalinist, make stopping tyranny difficult; adherents to the governing ideology are ready and willing to die to protect the cause. Likewise, there is no cost too great if there is an objective moral goal. If the Revolution and the realization of emancipatory existence is the end, all means are justifiable, regardless of cost or impact on other people. An ideology that imbues death with a sense of purpose therefore justifies endless suffering.

To address philosophical matters in the novel, Koestler employs a nice, though not necessarily original technique. He begins several chapter with excerpts from Rubashov's prison diaries; these writings provide an intellectual backdrop to the plot. In one of these excerpts, Koestler appears to address the problem of revolutionary politics - democracy has a tendency to retard revolutionary progression.

"The maturity of the masses lies in the capacity to recognize their own interests. This, however, presupposes a certain understanding of the process of production and distribution of goods. A people's capacity to govern itself democratically is thus proportionate to the degree of its understanding of the structure and funding of the whole social body" (pg. 170). 

A vanguard, then, is needed until the people attain the proper level of consciousness to understand the processes of production and distribution. The need for the vanguard, or some variant of a dedicated intellectual revolutionary cadre (maybe an epistemic community), is compounded by the constant change in conditions of the post-industrial age.

"Now, every technical improvement creates a new complication to the economic apparatus, causes the appearance of new factors and combinations, which the masses cannot penetrate for a time. Every jump of technical progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses as a step behind and thus causes a fall in the political-maturity thermometer" (pg. 171).

A more apt way to descrive the "political-maturity thermometer" is to view it as a measure of mass-political elasticity. How significantly does political behavior given a change in the conditions of production. Of course, such a metric could not exist, but it certainly is interesting to think about. For Rubashov, once the measure of mass-political elasticity is perfectly inelastic, the masses are mature enough for democracy.

"When the level of mass consciousness catches up with the objective state of affairs, there follows inevitably the conquest of democracy, either peaceably or by force. Until the next jump of technical civilization...again sets back the masses in a state of relative immaturity and renders possible or even necessary the establishment of some form of absolute leadership" (pg. 171). 

During an exchange with another prisoner, in which messages are tapped in a form of code on the walls of prison sells, Rubashov challenges the reactionary and aristocratic conceptions of honor with a simple and perhaps admirable phrase:

"Honor is to be useful without vanity" (pg. 177).

If only we could all incorporate even just a small sense of that sentiment into our daily lives. Things would be much different.

Quotes of the Day - March 8, 2012

I finished Power and the Idealists last night, but I didn't have time to write about my favorite passages and  quotes. The second half of the book is fantastic (the book itself has become one of recent favorites). I found myself dog-earring nearly every page, so at one point I chose to highlight only the very most noteworthy or important passages, which, of course, turned out to be nearly half the book.

One of things I like so much about Paul Berman is his ability to see across ideological divides and recognize the similarities between ideologies that at first glance seem opposed to each other. In the chapter "The Muslim World and the American Left", Berman points out the similarities between religious social conservatism and tiers-mondiste Marxism.

"But Nafisi's description of classroom debate suggests eomthign else. The diatribe by this one student, holding up his copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald criminal text, is not at all a seventh century speech, nor a speech by a peasant from the hills, herding his goats...This speech enunciates some of the principles established by the extreme right in Europe long ago - the notion of an authentic culture under insidious attack by evil cultural forces from abroad" (pg. 162). 

"Then again, these ideas have sometimes made themselves perfectly at home on the Marxist left, in a different version. Mike Gold was F. Scott Fitzgerald's contemporary and rival, and in the early nineteen thirties Gold used to issue literary interdictions in precisely this condemnatory spirit on behalf of the American Communist Party - to maintain the proletarian purity of the slum-dwellers and factory workers, and to rescue revolutionary ideas from bourgeois contamination. Even the sexual imagery in the Iranian student's classroom speech - 'a rape of our culture' strikes a familiar note" (pgs. 162-3).

In the same vein, Berman points out the ideological parochialism in which the students of the New Left found themselves immersed during their infatuation with Maoism.

"American New Leftists cited Mao Zedong's 'taks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art', a much-thumbed essay in its time. (This is the essay where Mao asks, 'Literature and art for whom?' and ends up by calling for the destruction of 'feudal, bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, liberalistic, individualistic, nihilistic, art-for-art's sake, aristocratic, decadent or pessimistic, and every other creative mood that is alien to the masses of the people and the proletariat.')" (pg. 163).

Maybe this puts me off because of my affinity for "bourgeois" art or because I want so desperately to see a revived version of Socialisme ou Barbarie. But, I really have a hard time getting behind Mao's statement. Without waxing philosophical about the inherent beauty of art, I think it's sufficient to say that a world in which all art is directed towards the singular task of "revolution" would be a very monochromatic world.

Berman again takes a shot at certain segments of the radical Left when he discusses the similarities between the Left's fetishism of insurrection and the Right's fetishism of the glory days of yore. That is, both the far Left and Right have the tendency to become violently infatuated with fantasy.

"Fantasy role-playing, it occurs to me, is the defining quality of all totalitarian movements and systems - role-playing by totalitarian militants who feel entirely justified in liquidating everyone who fails to have a proper role in the grand tableau of the reigning mythology" (pg. 164).

Burrowing deeper into territory covered by Hannah Arendt in the Origins of Totalitarianism, Berman even hints at the problems of vanguardism - it is predicated upon a kind of condescension that implies the ignorance or weakness of the general population. It's a violent kind of elitism, in short.

"That is why the totalitarians always end up slaughtering masses of people - out of frustration at the huma race's stubborn refusal to be anything but the human race, and out of the lust for thrills, and out of a realization that only in death can the mythic universe be fully achieved" (pg. 170).

 Through his discussion of the work and thought of Kanan Makiya, Berman nicely points out the value of the Enlightenment.

"Makiya went on, 'We in the Middle east had taken over certain themes from the West wholesale - Germanic nationalism, Marxism, the imperative toward industrialization - but we'd never experienced the Enlightenment, in which these themes needed to be grounded if they were going to make any real sense" (pg.178).

I always get a big frustrated when certain Leftists attempt to argue that the Enlightenment was just another page in the book of bourgeois, patriarchal domination. Whether or not the title of heirs to the Enlightenment has been taken by opponents of progress and an egalitarian society, it's still necessary to acknowledge the intellectual heritage of today's flavors of Leftism.

Slavoj Zizek often refers to (like in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g) Soviet communism as the greatest moral catastrophe - greater than Nazism, because at least with the fascists you knew things were going to be horrific. With the Soviets you were told there would be utopia, but in reality there was exactly the opposite. Since I feel a kind of personal connection to left-wing history, it always upsets me when atrocities are committed in the name of ideals to which I am sympathetic. Berman, again while discussing Makiya's Republic of Fear, neatly describes this feeling" (pg. 182).

"So here again...was a book by somebody who had enlisted in the left-wing student movements of circa 1968 in order to fight against imperialism and capitalism - only to stumble on the existence of another kind of oppression, which was even worse, and which he knew from his own experience and not merely from his readings."

I typically describe myself as a libertarian leftist - opposed to both the tyranny of the market and the tyranny of the state - so I've always been sympathetic to the work of Socialism ou Barbarie. That Sartre thought it necessary to disparage them is certainly disappointing. There is a tendency on the Left, as there is in most ideological camps, to limit the diversity of thought and criticism. Sartre's behavior is a perfect example.

"Sartre attacked the libertarian left of the nineteen-fifties as 'dirty rats,' referring to the Socialism or Barbarism comrades, who were busily trying to reveal Stalinism for what it was; and Sartre's reading public, which was vast, turned away from the dirty rats" (pg. 183).

It's fairly common for Americans to consider Islamic fundamentalism to be an antiquated notion, one that conjures up images of Saladin and the defeats of the crusades. For those in more Jewish milieus, like the one in which I've been raised, Islamic fundamentalism carries with it a similar old-world connotation. So, I was totally surprised to see Berman, by way of Azar Nafisi (here's the article he quotes: http://www.tnr.com/article/muslim-allies-septmember-11-taliban-islam ) describe Islamic fundamentalism as a modern conception.

"In that same February 2003, Nafisi published an essay in the New Republic making a simple observation: 'What we call Islamic fundamentalism, for lack of a better word, is a modern phenomenon, in the same way fascism and Communism, both products of the West, are modern'" (pg. 190). 

A significant portion of the anti-imperialist Left exploded when Christopher Hitchens used the phrase "fascism with an Islamic face" to describe Islamic fundamentalism, but I think it's a remarkably apt description; it puts Islamic fundamentalism into the proper context and "deorientalizes" it. Islamic fundamentalism, then, no longer appears as a caricature of traditional Islam taken to the extreme. Rather, it is seen as it it truly is - a synthesis of totalitarianism with the theocratic currents of Islam and as an unequivocally modern construction.


The other insight that, when revealed, nearly made me exclaim out loud, was the description of Daniel Cohn-Bendit's comparison between the U.S.'s Bush Doctrine and the grandiosity of the Bolsheviks.

"'You want to change the whole world!' he said. "Like them, you claim that history will show that truth is on your side. You want the world to follow the American dream, and you believe that you know what is best for ... all other countries.' Here was arrogance. 'Because you are Americans, you have the biggest army in the world - you can do anything you want. This is revolutionary hubris'" (pg. 195).

With all the mendacity and veiled imperial aspirations, Bush Doctrine era U.S. rhetoric and the rhetoric of the Bolsheviks do indeed seem remarkably familiar, not to mention the fact that many of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration owed their intellectual foundations to the work of ex-Trotskyites like Irving Kristol.


Perhaps it is just the exalting tone in which Berman discusses Kouchner, but I found myself genuinely admiring the former French foreign minister. I'm certainly not a fan of Kouchner's preference for hierarchy, but I somehow associate with his former self a kind of pragmatic leftism that is sorely needed right now.

"But Kouchner remained a little skeptical on some other outcomes of the uprisings and the countercultural spirit. Maybe his own leftism always retained a few habits and assumptions of a slightly earlier age, pre-'68 - a leftism that insisted on being practical, more concerned with measurable consequences, less interested in mere attitudes and styles" (pg. 226).

I also chose to highlight the above quotation because it seems to me to be a subtle criticism of the "lifestylism" that resulted as the revolutionary momentum from '68 waned. Though maybe not the what Berman means by describing Kouchner's leftism as practical, I see it as the reasonable but still radical counterweight to the old maxim of "turn on, tune in, drop out" - which brought nothing constructive to the campaigns for socioeconomic justice during that time.


Lenin famously slandered Left-communism as "an infantile disorder." I think the same can be said for left-wing tribalism and left-wing sympathies for Arab nationalism in particular; it completely defies the corner stone of the Left - internationalism.

"The ancient left-wing principle that used to go under the name of internationalism showed no concern at all for the integrity of duly constituted states. 'Workers of the world' meant workers without borders" (pg. 244).

Internationalism desperately needs to be reemphasized. Leftists marching alongside Islamic fundamentalists or locking arms with totalitarian nationalists is, if anything, a sign of a very "infantile disorder." In recounting the debate between Cohn-Bendit and Kouchner, Berman puts this pointedly.

"The mass marches against the war, the placards, the slogans, the chanting crowds - every last aspect of this movement reminded him of the grossest errors of the left-wing past. 'In our generation,' [Kouchner] told Cohn - Bendit, 'antiwar marches used to offer protection to the worst Stalinist regimes, the most frightening massacres, and because of this, I wouldn't let myself take part anymore - nor would you, Danny. God knows how often we heard people shout, "Down with Bush!" But I didn't hear even the tiniest cry, "Down with Saddam!" And let's not even mention - or rather, we had better mention - the anti-semitic incidents" (pg. 265).

From now on, every mention of ANSWER will remind of the above passage.

I shall close this post with the words of Joschka Fischer, who so eloquently explained the necessity for alter-globalization, rather than anti-globalization. Anti-globalization carries with it a sense of opposition to progress and a rejection of the need to expand civil liberties for all people. And, after all, we cannot halt globalization, we can only attempt to change it; anti-globalization promises us nothing, while alter-globalization promises the co-option of the very mechanisms that seek to co-opt expressions of liberty.

'"It depends,' he said at Princeton, 'even more on the globalization of fundamental values, such as human rights, respect for life, religious and cultural tolerance, the equality of all human beings, of men and women, the rule of law and democracy and a share of the blessings of education, progress and social security...positive globalization is the real strategic response to the deadly challenge of a new totalitarianism" (pg. 285).

Quotes of the Day - February 29, 2012

I just finished To the Finland Station, and there are a number of great lines I want to highlight and review.

The following is noteworthy, considering much of the world is still embroiled in some form of crisis:

"Marx believed that a new rebellion on the part of the petty bourgeoisie would upset the big bourgeoisie in France...and they announced in the last number of the Revue that "a revolution can hope for success only when the modern factors of production and the bourgeois tecnhique are at varience. A new revolution is possible only after a new crisis" (pg. 201).

Thoughout the book, Wilson makes numerous references to Marx's Jewish background. Perhaps I like these passages because I can relate to them, or perhaps it's because they flatter my sense of Jewish tribalism.

"If Marx is contemptuous of his race, it is primarily perhaps with the anger of Moses at finding the children of Israel dancing before the Golden Calf" (pg. 207).

"It was here that Karl Marx as a Jew had his great value for the thought of his age. The characterisic genuis of the Jew has been especially a moral genius. The sacred books of the people of Israel have served as a basis for the religions of three continents; and even in the case of the great men among the jes who do not occupy themselves with religion proper, it is usually a grasp of moral ideas which has given them their peculiar force" (pg. 301).

At certain points, passages like the one above make me uncomfortable with Wilson's philo-semitism.

In the chapter "Karl Marx: Poet of Commodities", Wilson provides a fantastic explanation and simplification of Marxist economic thought:

"The capitalist system was based on private property andso was inevitably competitive. The aim of every manufaturer was always to undersell the rest, sothat there would be a contunyal stimulus to more efficient methods of production. But the more efficient an industry became - the fast the machiens were able to do the work and the fewer people were needed to tend them - the more people would be thrown out of jobs and the more would wages be reduced. That is, the more the commodities produced, the fewer the people who would be able to buy them. In order to get rid of his goods under these continually tightening conditions, the manufacturer would have to undercut his competitors, and that would mean further reduction of wages and still more efficient machinery, consequently again in the long run, fewer people able to buy what he was making. This situation had already produced a jam and a depression about every ten years; and the only way for the manufacturer to get a reprieve from the vicious cycle was to find new foreign markets for his prodcuts - an escape which would not save him in the long run" (pg. 313).

Back to the topic of the Jews. Wilson's comparison between the marginlization of the Jews in Europe and the marginalization of the proletariat is instructive.

"...proletarian children, as Engels had said, were not aware that they were unfortunate or unhappy because they had never known anything else; whereas the Jews, though their outlook had been narrow, had been accustomed to intellectual traning" (pg. 314).

This may actually explain the attractiveness of socialism to European Jewry and the presence of Jews, like Trotsky and Zinoviev, at the forefront of the Marxist struggle. For, of the proletarian Wilson writes:

"The men who employed him had an interest in keeping him ignortant. By vertue of his very position, he was deprived of the things that would enable him to rise to a higher status. The mediaeval dissabilities of the Jew were in the nature of a mere national accident; the disabilities of the proletarian were disabilities indissoluble from his class" (pg. 314).

My favorite part of the book is Wilson's discussion of Lenin. While Wilson certainly glosses over the negative aspects of Lenin's personal life and philosophy, his comments on Lenin's Marxism are definitely worth highlighting.

Lenin's political philsophy, Wilson writes,

"grew out of his intellecutual enmity toward the striving for petty ends, toward out-and-out pragmatism, and toward all that is ideologically without form and theoretically ungeneralized" (pg. 430).

There is also an honest critique of Lenin's authoritarianism.

"[H]e is quite clear about the intellectual inequalities between the intelligentsia and the masses. He quotes in What Is to Be Done? as 'profoundly true and important' a statement by karl Katusky to the effect that the proletariat, left to itself, can never arrive at socialism; socialism must be brought them from above: 'the vehicles of science are not the proletariat but the bourgeois intelligentsia.' And 'our very first and most pressing duty...is to help turn out worker -  revolutionists on the same level in regard to party activity as intellectual revolutionists" (pg. 387).

" 'All power to the Soviets' had never really meant what it said and that it had soon been exchanged by lenin for 'All power to the Bolshevik Party'"(pg. 431).

Though written over seventy years ago, the following phrase shows Lenin to be more relevant to American politics than ever before:

"In What Is to Be Done?, Lenin characterizes Russia as 'a politically enslaved state, in which nine hundred and ninety-nine of the inhabitants have been corrupted to the marrow of their bones by political subservience and by a complete incomprehsension of party honor and party ties'" (pg. 388).

Just switch out Russia for America, and you definitely have a voice that might add something to contemporary political discourse!

These aren't all the passages I want to highlight, but unfortunately I neglected to note every passage of interest in my copy of the book.