On anti-Communism and the "Third Camp"
If you're willing to entertain certain theories of totalitarianism, some of which do originate in the Right, with an open enough mind to come to a set of conclusions about the Soviet Union, you will realize that there is a certain degree of veracity to the claim that Marxism-Leninism is a "political religion", which is a rather high flown way of saying that it is just simply a mass cult, an attempt to, though, as a self-respecting libertarian socialist, I would never abandon something like free association in the name of some sort of botched pragmatism, establish the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, or "immanetize the eschatonon", is not only sanctimonious but also necessarily ethically suspect, despite whatever rationalizations may have been made so as to suggest that Communism is an ostensibly "scientific" historical process and not an eschatological humanitarian project, which, in my opinion, only further vitiates the ideology, Karl Marx, whose evocative description of the Paris Commune, "the dictatorship of the proletariat", was later appropriated by Vladimir Lenin, whose political legacy was later exploited by Josef Stalin, for all the nuance, complexity, dynamics, and and skepticism of his theories, by his treatment of Mikhail Bakunin, whom I loathe to defend, or Max Stirner, was kind of demagogic, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who, perhaps, sacrificed too much in historical scholarship in order to draw a clear through line between Lenin and Stalin, Hannah Arendt, whose, like it or not, The Origins of Totalitarianism does seem to be what began "horseshoe theory", and Leszek Ko?akowski are just simply good authors, it is quite common for the Left as a whole to completely ignore or dismiss dissident movements within the former Soviet Union, and that there really are people out there who do casually talk about decapitating their political opponents via the guillotine, you do kind of begin to resent having brought yourself up through a myriad of different left-wing ideologies who, to varying degrees, do seem to be somehow complicit within Soviet apologetics.
Having developed this resentment, what you immediately realize is that you can't really leave the Left. I could give you a cursory overview of the rest of the political spectrum so as to explain as to just why this is, but, for brevity's sake, I would just take my word for that, from any anti-authoritarian perspective, you're effectively relegated to either the libertarian Left or the "radical Center", which is another way of referring to a kind of well-reasoned Liberalism that is particularly concerned with human rights. Because there has now become only one political position for you to maintain, all that you really any longer do is engage in critique. What, while doing so, you do not encounter is an ostensive implicitly Marxist-Leninist media dominant "Liberal elite". What, however, you will encounter is left-wing academia and what left-wing academia will do is to ignore you or anyone else with similar concerns almost entirely. This is extraordinarily easy for them to do, as they can always rely upon an appeal to the hysterical reaction to Communism in general, particularly in the United States, or, accuse you of being complicit within a Western Exceptionalist project orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency, as, every last point that I just mentioned was used for just that.
What you then begin to suspect is that thought-terminating clichés like the "Liberal elite" may be more clever than you might expect. The Left does kind of have a tendency to be intellectually domineering, psychologically abusive, and to consistently fall back upon an appeal to ideology, effectively amounting to an assumption on their part that, to be given a voice within a debate, you would have first have to have read this or that text by Marx or this that interpretation of it and so on and so forth, all of which do have the effect of creating an intellectual class that does comprise of an elite, which, though clearly the situation in the West is not so dire, was often referred to as the apparat in the former Soviet Union and its satellites. Regardless as to what the CIA claims about this, what I do suspect is that they want for it to occur. Why this is, I suspect, is that they want to leave the West with only two options. You can choose between the apparently Liberal democratic West and the either nascent or evident totalitarianism of the rest of the world.
What I am suggesting is that there needs to be a "third camp". We are told, by Anarchists and Liberals alike, that it exists already and has always existed. When I consider the general political ethos of the world at large, however, I do feel so inclined to suspect that it has been nothing more than a political sect. In order for it to, I do think that a rather sober analysis of the Soviet political legacy is just simply requisite.
Having developed this resentment, what you immediately realize is that you can't really leave the Left. I could give you a cursory overview of the rest of the political spectrum so as to explain as to just why this is, but, for brevity's sake, I would just take my word for that, from any anti-authoritarian perspective, you're effectively relegated to either the libertarian Left or the "radical Center", which is another way of referring to a kind of well-reasoned Liberalism that is particularly concerned with human rights. Because there has now become only one political position for you to maintain, all that you really any longer do is engage in critique. What, while doing so, you do not encounter is an ostensive implicitly Marxist-Leninist media dominant "Liberal elite". What, however, you will encounter is left-wing academia and what left-wing academia will do is to ignore you or anyone else with similar concerns almost entirely. This is extraordinarily easy for them to do, as they can always rely upon an appeal to the hysterical reaction to Communism in general, particularly in the United States, or, accuse you of being complicit within a Western Exceptionalist project orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency, as, every last point that I just mentioned was used for just that.
What you then begin to suspect is that thought-terminating clichés like the "Liberal elite" may be more clever than you might expect. The Left does kind of have a tendency to be intellectually domineering, psychologically abusive, and to consistently fall back upon an appeal to ideology, effectively amounting to an assumption on their part that, to be given a voice within a debate, you would have first have to have read this or that text by Marx or this that interpretation of it and so on and so forth, all of which do have the effect of creating an intellectual class that does comprise of an elite, which, though clearly the situation in the West is not so dire, was often referred to as the apparat in the former Soviet Union and its satellites. Regardless as to what the CIA claims about this, what I do suspect is that they want for it to occur. Why this is, I suspect, is that they want to leave the West with only two options. You can choose between the apparently Liberal democratic West and the either nascent or evident totalitarianism of the rest of the world.
What I am suggesting is that there needs to be a "third camp". We are told, by Anarchists and Liberals alike, that it exists already and has always existed. When I consider the general political ethos of the world at large, however, I do feel so inclined to suspect that it has been nothing more than a political sect. In order for it to, I do think that a rather sober analysis of the Soviet political legacy is just simply requisite.
Comments (83)
I don't know that the above post explains this well, and, so, I will use a comparison. I think that it's kind of like being a politically active German citizen. What you can do is to dismiss the claim that, by virtue of being born in Germany, you are a Nazi. What you can't do is to just simply ignore the political legacy of Nazi Germany. What, as it does concern the Soviet Union, the Left seems to have done is precisely that.
Perhaps there is more in the beaten way of critique than I am giving them credit for, though?
A good example from the Left is that of the concept of "state capitalism", which originates in Anarchism, but was popularized by a particular sect of Trotskyism. While I can't imagine that labor conditions in the former Soviet Union were at all good, it does seem self-evident to me that that idea is just kind of way of suggesting that, clearly, what went amiss there was just simply their political opponents' doing. There's a lot of things that are kind of odd about the Left like this that go almost completely unaddressed.
I don't really care for politics or utopianism but I have known many leftists over the years who would argue that Russia was never a Marxist state, just a dictatorship. Chomsky has made the point about the revolution being betrayed pretty much the same year it started. Given Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky's status as sociopaths, it's not hard to see how things went amiss.
This reminds me of all the Christians who argue that the Vatican and all the dreadful sins of Christianity over the centuries (and now) were not done by true Christians. In this vein, there's that quote from Chesterton - The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” There are people in the left who would substitute Christian with Communist.
All revolutionary fervor aside, I tend to agree with Milan Kundera - You build a utopia and very soon there's a need to build a small concentration camp.
I am a great fan of Milan Kundera and wished that I listened to him better when I was younger.
To the credit of the libertarian Left, there is a longstanding history of their being persecuted by Marxist-Leninists and the like, but definitely an obvious aversion to facing up to the Soviet legacy.
For me, there's a certain tension as it concerns ideals and the concept of utopia.
Marx and Engels actually wrote at length criticizing such inclinations, first in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and later in The German Ideology, which I haven't entirely read and wouldn't expect for anyone else to either, despite what is seminal of the latter. From what I remember of researching this, though, with kind of a lot of rhetoric, they have this way of associating Liberal ideals with their concept of ideology in opposition to the quasi-deterministic economic theory that they put forth. It's a very complex work of political philosophy, but there's a way of suggesting to that it kind of amounts to their rather spurious claim that not believing in an inevitable Communist revolution is somehow delusional. Marx also had this idea of free association, which is kind of like the total freedom from coercion, and more or less the end goal of Communism that a lot of later Marxists abandoned for being impractical or "utopian". Despite the Soviet Union's evident utilization of Communism as a utopian project with things like the New Soviet Person, within Marxist-Leninist discourse, dismissing ideas as being somehow utopian, idealistic, or ideological, is often a way of justifying some of the more authoritarian elements of the political philosophy.
What I suspect of William F. Buckley's utilization of Eric Vogelin's concept is that it ultimately was just kind of this way to suggest that people just have to cope with however it is that the world currently is because of that any attempt to change it for the better could potentially result in political catastrophe.
Anyways, as it concerns ideals and utopia, I think that there's a great difference between sanctimony and whatever you want to call virtue or righteousness and attempting to create as ideal of a world as you can while you're here and believing that you have established the final project for all of humanity. A person has to be both resolute and humble to be considered in the right. It's quite common in heroic narratives for the protagonist to have potentially destructive power. I think that this somehow speaks to the central conflict inherent to cultivating any good way of life. I don't think of myself as the protagonist of an epic, though.
I've never heard that Chesterton quote before, but found for it to be kind of illuminating. Thanks for sharing.
Quoting thewonder
I'm always terrified by anyone who thinks they know what's best for other people and what 'should' happen. Doesn't matter if it is the right, the left, a guru, a therapist or a rabbi.
You do have to let the world become however it naturally does and can't impose your will upon the world, but there are a few basic inferences about society that I do think a person can make. It's probably generally better for it to be libertarian rather than authoritarian, egalitarian rather than inequitable, and peaceful rather than violent. There's no reason to act like an ethical pseud, but you can make a general ought statement about society in casual conversation.
When I was younger, I was drawn to this kind of "hippie utopianism", which, despite what was absurd of it, I feel like I had let myself be moved too far away from. People would say that it was idealistic or utopian. If the conversation would last any longer, they'd often talk about what can be done in the name of utopianism or even reference the Soviet project. Though ultimately, as is a partial point of this post, a fair critique of the Soviet Union, I did feel kind of like that, of the celebrities who could have been likely to commit genocide, John Lennon probably wasn't one of them.
Another thing that I'll say about the Left is that it hasn't really taught me very much other than how to be critical. I can give such piercing analysis or spit out such extraordinary vitriol, but often find it difficult to just simply hold a good conversation. There are reasons for every neurosis, but they are neuroses nonetheless.
Being said, I will make another attempt to explain this well.
Hans Scholl was a man who I don't have very much in common with, especially as it concerns political philosophy, but have always respected, which is rare, as, though I am loathe to use this term, I can be guilty of a certain degree of recalcitrance. He also happens to have been an idealist. What I suspect about a person who commands such respect is that, through whatever circumstances have led them to become as they are, they have developed a way of life that is in accordance with their ideals. This, I think, both is and ought to be inspiring.
Conversely, you have a man like Vladimir Lenin, who some revere, but I think was kind of a revolutionary chauvinist and minor autocrat. By both his theory and practice, it seems like he just kind of thought that he had a right to wage the October Revolution with or without the support of the Russian populace.
That's, perhaps, an overly simplistic way of explaining what I mean about idealism, but I honestly just haven't thought this well enough out to do so in any other manner.
I, too, like the Nordic Model, but the Social Democrats just have to cope with the political legacy of a different totalitarian regime, being the Third Reich.
Of course social democracy movements have not been historically any friends to the communists, yet otherwise you are right. But as social democrats have been a lot in power in the West, being a communist has it merits in academic and intellectual circles and they do use this denial.
The right wing totalitarian ideologies don't have this ability (which is a blessing). You can obviously notice the difference even here on PF. Anyone claiming on this site that "Hitler simply got National socialism wrong, but it otherwise it's a valid workable ideology" would immediately get banned. To ponder about the Marxist ideology can easily done without any reference to what the historical outcomes of these experiments have been.
I think there's a simple reason for this. In the Cold War era the Soviet system looked like an alternative and it's doom wasn't at all evident. Hence try criticize Western capitalism by being a supporter of Marxism-Leninism was a totally viable and tolerated position in the Western intellectual and academic circles. And after the collapse of the Soviet system these people continued with their careers as if nothing happened. Now many of them can indeed criticize the past quite well (perhaps with a selective memory). There were no American tanks in the Red Square and we don't have a New Russia hell bent on de-Sovietification and going after communists and the Soviet times as (West) Germany has had against nazis and the Third Reich. The German phenomenon of self-criticism and active separation from the past isn't there. If it would be in Russia so and we would be constantly barraged by a Russian media showing the misery and violence of the Soviet system, then the attitudes even in Western academic circles would be different.
And of course, China still is lead by communists, who now seem to be limiting the capitalist cat's ability to catch mice, that for thirty years or so has done a great job.
Nordic countries? How?
Swedes luckily stayed out of the WW2, Denmark and Norway were occupied and my country after being narrowly saved by German assistance in the summer of 1944, had then to fight them. I remember that my grandfather told how the withdrawing German forces methodically destroyed everything useful in Lapland (even telephone poles were blasted into firewood) and some soldiers got mine-shocked due to the amount of mines planted nearly everywhere. Luckily they weren't then made of plastic, as then they would be going off even now under the feet of the unfortunate wanderer. German pünktlichkeit.
The leftists I have known in academia and publishing mainly renounced their support of Marxism and the Soviet project in 1956, when the Soviet tanks invaded Hungary. The rest of them were well and truly out of it by 1974, Solzhenitsyn's book taking out the last of the naive or (look the other way) apologists. Some of these former radicals of course became neocons, a whole different problem for the world.
The "third camp" or "Third Way" are the Fabians. Unfortunately, they are just another form of totalitarian communism. G B Shaw who was one of their leaders said "we must get Socialism out of its democratic grooves".
Plus, you forget big tech and big bucks who are pulling the strings from behind the scenes. What camp do you put them in and how?
And, yes, Kolakowski is a very good author. Unfortunately, on this forum he is deemed to be an "idiot".
I was referring to what happened in Germany. That the German Social Democratic party betrayed the Communist Party of Germany during the Spartacist Uprising and set in motion the course of events which did result in the establishment of the Third Reich is a major talking point for kind of a lot of Communists. If you know any of them on Facebook, you can go more than two weeks without seeing a post about it.
The SPD, I am pretty sure, is the world's largest Social Democratic party. I wasn't accusing the Nordic countries of being complicit in aiding the Axis powers during the Second World War, though.
Within the discourse of the "Cultural Cold War", the "third camp" is a position outside of the Western Exceptionalist ethos that culminated in The End of History or any form of vague support for the former Soviet Union.
Though it existed before then, it came about around the time that "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" was published in The New York Times, and later developed alongside the dissident movements in the former Soviet Union. Though it does have a clear history, there seems to me to still be a tendency to ignore said dissidents and a lack of serious scholarship as it concerns the Soviet catastrophe. The estimated Soviet death toll is somewhere between twenty and one-hundred million people. While I understand that they habitually destroyed their own records, that seems like all too great of a discrepancy.
I remember not knowing what figure to cite for the number of people put to death by either the Reds or the Whites during the Russian Civil War. It seemed like any figure was just kind of a speculative spin on my part.
Why not??
How did the SPD "betray" the Communists? Most German Socialists were Social Democrats not Communists and the Communists wanted to impose Marxism of the Russian Bolshevik type. The Socialists didn't want Germany to become a Soviet colony as planned by Lenin and Trotsky. Don't forget Lenin and Trotsky wanted to establish a Soviet-controlled United States of Europe for which purpose they set up the Communist International (COMINTERN).
The Sparacist Uprising, also known as the January Uprising, was led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who can be described as having been council communists. Luxemburg, I think, explicitly referred to herself as such and was among the first in the Left to come out against Lenin. It was a spontaneous revolt that was crushed by the German military at the bequest of the SPD. The relationship that they had established with the military resulted in that a number of what you might call "proto-Fascist" officials were given the positions of power that do seem to have paved the way for that the Nazis to have been capable of establishing their regime.
If you ask a Communist about this, I am sure that they will inform you better than I ever could. It's one of the few things that they won't slant to the point of just flat out lying to you.
Quoting Tom Storm
This is more than true, but, to my experience, at least, invoking the dissident movement in Czechoslovakia in any left-wing circles is still likely to get you ignored and for people to assume that you are somehow "petit bourgeois", a more or less empty signifier, or "Liberal" in the way that Communists throw around the term, "Liberal", as a pejorative. Invoking the Hungarian Revolution is likely to get certain Marxist-Leninists to claim that you are somehow a "crypto-Fascist", an existing phenomenon that, despite whatever historical claims they have to the contrary, bears little to no relevance to any conversation about the events in Hungary in 1956. Invoking the dissident movement in Poland is likely to get any faction of the Left to merely assume that you are somehow in league with the American Right.
You don't exclusively see this sort of thing from the Old Left. For all that is veritable of the critique in this pamphlet, Solidarity was also just kind of castigating the Czech dissidents, effectively dismissing them as a technocratic Liberal reformists. You'll see this kind of vitriol from the libertarian Left with more or less any dissident movement that is out of keeping with the general ethos of left-wing academia as a whole.
So, what you are saying is that the SPD should have allied itself with the Communists (who wanted to overthrow the government) against the military? Is that what you would have done?
I am saying that the SPD's alliance and appointment of various figures within the German military led to the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and, so, kind of? The crushing of the Spartacist Revolt is one of the oft-cited examples of why collaboration with such parties in the name of facilitating an effective government fails for good reason. Establishing people who could be so inclined to do something like wage a coup d'état in positions of power is not only a strategic, but also an ethical mistake. I feel like that ought to be simply cogent.
Personally, I may have even supported the Spartacists. Surely council communism would've been preferable to the collapse of the Weimar Republic. I am a Pacifist, though, and, so, I don't know, perhaps some other measures could've been taken so that the KPD did not wage a revolution. I kind of doubt that they even could've been capable of doing so.
They say that hindsight is 20/20, and, so, it's easy to speculate upon what should or could have been done, but, even active members of the SPD are willing to admit that enlisting the aid of the German military in the political suppression of the Spartacist Revolt was probably a mistake on their part.
I also think that you may have confused the KPD as it was with Liebknecht and Luxemburg at its helm with the more Marxist-Leninist doctrine that it later adopted. I don't think that it was until the split between Grigory Zinoviev and Josef Stalin that it became as such.
I thought you might. But why support a radical minority against the will of the majority?
There's a certain irony to invoking a majoritarian ethos in a conversation about the legacy of Bolshevism, I think.
Hear me out on this.
If you go to a Communist forum and say something like, "They say that Communism sounds great in theory, but fails in practice. To my limited understanding, the taking of power by one, Vladimir Lenin, was somewhat exemplary of this. How do you respond to the charge that Lenin was just simply autocratic?", what is extraordinarily likely to happen is for this or that left-wing faction to walk you through a rather spurious and elaborate ideology so as to conscript you within this or that left-wing sect, perhaps somewhat paradoxically concluding by sharing a link to Slavoj Zizek's "The Leninist Freedom".
If, however, you go to any left-wing forum, be it Anarchist, Socialist, or Communist, and ask, "I, myself am sympathetic to Social Democracy, but, in passing conversation, I was told that the SPD betrayed the KPD during the Spartacist Uprising and set in motion the course of events that would lead to the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Is this true?", you will be given a lengthy delineation upon just how and why it is with all of the relevant details and figures. While the other party may still attempt to conscript you within this or that political faction, all of the information that you will be given will be completely verifiable.
If you go to an active member of the SPD and ask the same question, it is not likely that you will be given all of the relevant information, but they will probably say something to the effect of, "Well, something had to be done about that the Communists had boycotted the elections, but, as that was what laid the rudiments for the collapse of the Weimar Republic, yeah."
Because of the event in question, those two parties do hate each other and have never politically collaborated since, but, when both of them are willing to give you a consistent analysis of the events in retrospect, I would suggest that such analysis is just simply apt.
Of my own political standpoint, I don't think that Anarcho-Pacifism has ever been within the majority, despite that I should like for it to be, but do see no reason to change it just simply because of that it is what most people don't agree with. Any innovative idea begins apart from prevailing wisdom. Where the world be if everyone only ever agreed to what was generally accepted and understood? We'd still be behind the Copernican Revolution.
Well, it's said that being communist was hip in the 20's while in the 30's it had already passed as the informed noticed what Stalin was doing in the Workers Paradise.
I'd say many intellectuals denounce (or renounce) their actual beliefs they had ten to twenty years ago. I'll argue that many now of those who are woke will be in the 2030's proclaiming that they have all the time been against wokeness of the 2010's and 2020's. Assuming there's a new trendy way for the intellectuals to be.
In relation to 'woke' is this not a term of the right - an updated companion to 'political correctness' and a largely a pejorative? Does anyone actually say they are woke? Or is is said about an individual? I do what I can to avoid political fashions and debates.
I occasionally entertain myself by attempting to use as many commas within one sentence as humanly possible. What of it?
So instead of having later just the Soviet Union and Red China we would have earlier a Soviet Germany and Soviet Russia? That likely would have just made WW2 happen far more earlier. Or for WW1 to continue well into the 1920's.
Of course, one never knows, but the bottom line typically has been that as the emphasis has been on the revolution with a clear ideological and political class enemy, these experiments lead to authoritarian rule with a strongman emerging just to keep the whole thing from collapsing. And the Spartacists where as their name they adopted quite bellicose from start. Without those safety valves as the American revolution created for itself, many revolutions end up going the way the French Revolution went.
A good question is if the Soviet Union would have been able to exist without Stalin. The standard leftist narrative is that it was great when Lenin was in charge, but unfortunately then Stalin took power. Yet it might be that it was Stalin the Soviet system needed. Or Mao in the case of China.
Quoting Tom Storm
Yet doesn't that fit perfectly post-modernism? Truth doesn't exist and it's all a power play!
Kind of. But there is a difference. These folk aren't relativists and they don't deny truth - it just doesn't matter to them.
You must find yourself most entertaining.
But aside from matters of taste, of which it's said there can be no dispute, I think that as a narrative or rhetorical device it's as Tom Storm suggests--intricate and confusing.
I think I understand what you're trying to say. However, the Communists (KPD) had just above 10% of the vote, so they were a minority and the Spartacists were a faction within the Communist minority.
But it’s interesting to read what Luxemburg had to say:
“Only the nationalization of the large landed estates, as the technically most advanced and most concentrated means and methods of agrarian production, can serve as the point of departure for the socialist mode of production on the land. Of course, it is not necessary to take away from the small peasant his parcel of land, and we can with confidence leave him to be won over voluntarily by the superior advantages first of union in cooperation and then finally of inclusion in the general socialized economy as a whole […] the property right must first of all be turned over to the nation, or to the state, which, with a socialist government, amounts to the same thing” – R Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution
So, what Luxemburg is saying is that land must to be taken over by the “nation” which is actually the state which is the government which is the Socialist Party which is (ideally) run by people like Luxemburg herself ....
Obviously, most Germans - and most people in their right mind - would object to that.
I remember Jean Baudrillard writing an article "The Gulf War did not take place". Of course, the war actually was the most conventional war that the US armed forces built up during the Cold War and especially during the Reagan era then ended up fighting before the "Peace dividend" cut backs started to have an effect in the later 90's.
This is all historical speculation, but I think that council communism could've turned out a lot better than the Soviet experiment. I come from a particular set of factions within the libertarian Left, none of whom have ever been in a position of power. It's easy for a libertarian communist, Autonomist, Communization theorist, Anarchist, or libertarian socialist to say that, comparatively, they have an immaculate human rights record because of that they have never been given the opportunity to vitiate it. Of council communism, most people tend to either given them the benefit of the doubt or to be fairly cynical. You can either see it as having been a considerably less authoritarian alternative to Bolshevism or kind of a sectarian distancing from it that paradoxically somewhat fanatically puts forth effectively the same praxis, as, if you ask any Trotskyite about council communism, they will tell you that it is just a rehash of workers' soviets.
I think that Rosa Luxemburg was relatively free of any implicit authoritarianism or intransigence, though, and, so, am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. She's often cited with the quote, "Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.", which is from a critique that she wrote of Lenin's authoritarian nature leading up to and during the October Revolution.
Quoting ssu
Within the Left, there is a definite problem with the aura that Lenin retains. Many are all too likely to excuse, rationalize, justify, defend, or even celebrate the taking and abuse of power on the part of the Bolsheviks leading up to the October Revolution and through the Russian Civil War. When people assess the Leninist legacy, however, they often forget about one of the more infamous absurdities of the Marxist-Leninist regime, being what happened to the Old Bolsheviks. Though I, too, am of the opinion that Lenin did lay the rudiments for Stalin to secure power as such, I don't necessarily agree with Solzhenitsyn in that Marxism-Leninism was effectively just a continuation of the theory and practice of Vladimir Lenin. Of the first People's Commissariat, only two members would survive the Great Terror, none without losing an immediate relative. The Moscow Show Trials are indicative of that Stalin's regime does mark a point of departure from the October Revolution and subsequent Russian Civil War.
As to your question as to whether the Soviet Union could even have existed without Stalin, I, myself have pondered this as well. A continuation of Lenin's New Economic Policy seems like it would have eventually resulted in the abandonment of the Communist project and establishment of some form of Social Democracy. Stalin's forced Collectivization resulted in political, economic, and humanitarian catastrophe. When people all too readily dismiss that "Communism does not work in practice", they often fail to take this into account.
To offer some speculative history, however, had there only been a February Revolution, I do think that there could have been a pluralist Socialist country which people today would find to have been somewhat exemplary.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
It's funny to me that people often find what I say to be perplexing as I make such a deliberate attempt to be explicitly clear.
Quoting Apollodorus
I am willing to admit that Rosa Luxemburg may not have been ideologically pure, but I don't think that you are giving her enough credit to pick out one particular quote so as to cast her lot in with the likes of Nikolai Bukharin, who, in The ABC of Communism compares "communist society" to a collective storehouse where anyone can go to just take whatever they want to.
I also think that you fail to understand that Communism was extraordinarily appealing to many people in the Nineteenth Century. There were many revolts, uprisings, revolutions, and regime changes then and it was quite often the case that the old aristocratic order somehow either remained in power or was incorporated within whatever Liberal democracy in such a manner that their power was still somehow in effect, and, so, I think that there was a general sentiment that, if people didn't want to wait three-hundred years to be liberated from the old order, they should just simply overthrow them in a revolution. There's also that Marx's insistence upon the primacy of class probably rang true for a lot of people living through the Industrial Revolution. Though I don't agree with Marx, I can see how just about any German citizen would be inspired by The Communist Manifesto, especially given the dormant Fascist sentiment of the reactionary ruling class. It's easy to characterize an attempt at revolution as just simply having been "mad" when you don't live in a time where martial law can be declared at more or less the whims of the ruling class.
Given that Socialists felt like their common existence was at stake and had good reason to suspect that reform was going to take longer than they were going to live for, the revolutionary stance of the KPD, regardless as to whether it was either strategic or ethical, does make sense.
Nineteenth Century? We're talking about the 1900s here, i.e. Twentieth Century, when Communists in Germany only mustered 10% of the vote.
That's true but he didn't mean this as a literal statement. He took the line from a French play - The Trojan War Did Not Take Place (Giraudoux). B did believed the war took place but wanted to contrast the gap between how the war was depicted and what happened. Was it in fact a 'war'?
By the same logic, the SPD's opposition to the Communists does make sense and it can't be called "betrayal". Unless you're advocating Communism, i.e., in this case, the rule of a Communist minority over a non-Communist majority?
Less than twenty years into the 1900s. The Communist Manifesto was first published in 1848. I don't think that it's a stretch to suggest that it did take enough of a hold for such sentiments to still exist in 1919.
Quoting Apollodorus
That the SPD was necessarily opposed to that the KPD boycotted the elections obviously makes sense. What I was suggesting is that their deployment and association with reactionaries in the German military was both a strategic and ethical mistake. It did effectively crush the uprising, but at what cost?
The Bolsheviks are called as such because of that Lenin gained a majority at a congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party after a number of Mensheviks who supported Julus Martov walked out. It doesn't quite translate well into English, but Bolshevik means "majoritarian". It's somewhat ironic that they have been called as such, as they only gained the support of the majority of the Russian populace after the October Revolution, leading up to and during the Russian Civil War.
You are correct to assume that it is a problem for a political faction to attempt to secure power without the support of the general populace. By that account, I don't think that I would say that I would have supported the KPD's boycott of the elections. There are similarities and dissimilarities between them and the Bolsheviks, however.
Upon the SPD enlisting the aid of the German military in crushing the Spartacist Revolt, I also would not have supported the SPD. Upon them doing so, I would feel so inclined to be sympathetic towards the KPD, despite my not having agreed with their boycott of the elections in the first place.
Before the Spartacist Uprising, the KPD and the SPD collaborated with one another in the attempt to establish a Socialist Germany. One of the more apparent opponents of theirs was the German military. When a party within an alliance enlists the aid of their enemies in their violent suppression, that is a betrayal. You can say that the KPD drew the line in the sand if you like, but the SPD were the ones to cross it.
What do you mean??? Engels in the Introduction openly admits that the Manifesto had no influence. Most copies were seized by the police and very few were actually read by anyone. Nobody cared about Marx and Engels' Communist revolution except a very small radical faction that as admitted by Engels was not enough for a revolution or even uprising. Maybe a small riot at the most.
The "sentiments" you're talking about were 10% of the population at the time of Luxemburg. So, on one hand you're allegedly against totalitarianism, and on the other hand you're for rule by a small minority with which the vast majority disagrees.
[b]In the federal elections of 1871 the Social Democratic Workers’ Party led by Karl Liebknecht (Marx’s ally and collaborator in the International) received only 3.2% of the vote.
The Communists were a small fraction of that and Marx and Engels' group a small fraction of that small fraction. Maybe a few hundred people in total.[/b]
I would like to say that there were instances of both the SPD and the KPD collaborating with the Nazis in their respective quests to destroy one another, and, so, there is no reason to pass the blame, here, as they were both just kind of historically reprehensible.
I have made a very conscious attempt to be understanding of your point of contention as I am well aware of that this is a highly charged talking point of the far-Left. Though I, myself, am of the far-Left, what I do understand of it is that populated by kind of a lot of fanatics. When it comes to fanatics and their talking points, other people often refuse to listen to a single word that they say, and understandably so.
Being said, I was called to an awareness of the details of this event by the professor of a class that I took on Communism. He grew up in West Germany and, while he did not state his personal political affiliation, it did seem to be very likely to me that he was either a member of or sympathetic towards the SPD. As his response to the question that a young student posed in a discussion about revolution in regards to what to do when people in positions of power deal with others unjustly was "You can always just vote them out.", I do think that it would be safe to assume that he is either a Liberal or Social Democrat. He taught a very good class on Communism from a variety of different perspectives and sources. In said class, this event was portrayed more or less in the exact same manner that I have described it. The KPD boycotted the elections after losing them and the SPD, in turn, betrayed them by the German military, thereby establishing the alliance that would lead to the collapse of the Weimar Republic. That understanding of the event, to my estimation, is well known, understood, and accepted.
Should that anecdote not suffice, what I have been avoiding pointing out here is that the claim to the contrary that the KPD posed enough of a threat to warrant their violent suppression by an extraordinarily, in no misuse of this term, reactionary military was justified, despite that doing so did put the very people in power who would later allow for the establishment of the Third Reich, is, for lack of a better term, revisionist and borderlines on denial.
I am not making the claim that the KPD had a right to boycott the elections. I am merely pointing out that they had their reasons for doing so. What I am emphatically trying to get across, however, is that the SPD enlisting the aid of the German military in order to suppress the Spartacist Revolt was just simply unjustified, which, in retrospect, to any person with any degree of political conviction, ought to be just simply cogent.
Liebknecht was an ally of the late Marx, who effectively advanced both revolution and Liberal reform.
Quoting Apollodorus
What I have repeatedly stated is that I don't really agree with them boycotting the elections but felt vaguely sympathetic towards them after they were betrayed. I don't think that that is an unreasonable way to feel about this.
Well, I think it was quite obvious that you're of the far-Left and usually the far-Left is associated with extremists and fanatics.
But I wasn't refusing to listen to you at all. A (normal) forum is for people to communicate and exchange views. I was just trying to understand what you're actually saying since your statements seem self-contradictory and your facts are wrong too: twentieth century is "nineteenth century", rule by a small totalitarian minority is "not totalitarianism", etc. ...
The seminal Communist text was written in the mid-1800s, i.e., the Nineteenth Century, and we were talking about sentiments within the same country that it was published around seventy years later. As there was a revolution in Russia around the same period of time, I would suspect that being a Communist was common enough for most people to have met one.
You began this debate by defending the SPD's enlisting the aid of the German military in order to quell the January Uprising. I pointed out that their doing so resulted in that the Nazis were capable of taking power because I don't think that it was defensible. If were going to level ad hominem attacks, I don't what you call rewriting the history of the Weimar Republic so as to suit your political agenda other than totalitarian. Well, "Fascist", perhaps?
I, myself, am not a historian, and, so, make no claim to really know what the general mindset of the German military was following the end of the First World War. To speculate, I'd guess that an odd mixture of post-war resentment, an instilled longing for the ostensive security of the aristocracy, popular nationalist vanities and prejudices, and the vague self-interested supposition that the rule of law could be suspended in their vying for power had culminated in an ethos that you could describe as having been "Fascist". As they would later provide the Nazi party with the support with which it needed to take power, it would seem that such a description would be most apt.
What I am discounting is that the Spartacists were like the Bolsheviks. What I have conceded is that they didn't really have a right to boycott the elections. What I flat out refuse to accept is that collaborating with Fascists is justifiable within any given political situation. I don't think that it reflects poorly upon my character to have drawn those conclusions from this discussion.
I enjoyed what you've written. It seems to me your "third camp" is an attempt to find a way to take some of the energy out of the clash of left wing and right wing political beliefs that is playing out in the US now. That's a good thing. You are much more well read in political philosophy and history than I am, so, unfortunately, I don't really have anything to offer on the substance of your post.
A suggestion - use shorter paragraphs. It will make it easier to read. I tend to stay away from posts with long paragraphs. I'm glad I didn't on this one.
Why, thank you! I usually assume for everyone here to just simply be vexed by what I have to say about anything, which is probably my fault, really.
I have been known to be habitually voluble, which is something that I've been working on, but only over goes so well.
Right, but what I am saying is that where the thought-terminating cliché, "social fascists", stems from is this historical event. I have, perhaps, elaborated upon this to a point and intensity of excess, but my claim that, though they may present much of this information in either misleading manners or with some sort of call to action or another, the information that any number of Communists will share with you about it is true is true.
I used to be friends with a number of Trotskyites on Facebook. On a near bi-weekly basis, they would something or another about this event. I never really read the articles because I understood that their sharing them was just kind of a way for them to put forth that only the political praxis proceeding from Hal Draper, who, also, as chance would have it, has also invoked the "third camp", was capable of changing the world for the better.
What I posit of these articles is that the information that they contain about the Social Democrats forming an alliance with high ranking officials in the German military who later facilitated the rise of the Nazi Party is that it is just true. I have provided anecdotal evidence from the class that I took on Communism at a university to support this claim. As both my History professor and the International Socialist Organization agree, it seems unlikely that I have been mistaken.
I was still typing. Nevermind.
"On Sunday 5 January, as on 9 November 1918, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the centre of Berlin, many of them armed. In the afternoon the train stations and the newspaper district with the offices of the middle-class press and the SPD's "Vorwärts", which had been printing articles hostile to the Spartacists since the beginning of September, were occupied. Some of the middle-class papers in the previous days had called not only for the raising of more Freikorps but also for the murder of the Spartacists." - Wikipedia
Not proto-Fascist, but also not as if it were exemplary of the free press.
Quoting hwyl
What I am saying is that Spartacists under Luxemburg and Liebknecht differed from the latter KPD. I am not saying that the KPD was a better political party than the SPD.
"After the overthrow of William II in 1918, Hindenburg collaborated briefly with the new republican government. He directed the withdrawal of German forces from France and Belgium and had his staff organize the suppression of left-radical risings in Germany. With both tasks accomplished (and the old officer corps preserved in the process), he retired once more in June 1919. Living quietly in Hanover, he occasionally expressed antirepublican views but, on the whole, cultivated his image of a nonpartisan national hero." - Encyclopedia Britannica
This is only to my recollection of what I have picked up on all of this, but I vaguely recall there being a connection between the Junkers, Paul von Hindenburg, who later appointed Adolf Hitler as chancellor, a few high ranking military officials, and the SPD. I can't quite find what I'm looking for, but it seemed to be the case that, upon crushing the uprising, the SPD forged an alliance with some set of officials or another who would later contribute to the collapse of the Weimar Republic. It somehow went beyond the theory that the split within the Left left them without enough support to counter the Nazi Party.
I can't find it, though, and, so, perhaps, I stumbled upon a conspiracy theory, perhaps I have mixed-up the information, or perhaps its just the sort of thing that people don't discuss too often? I don't really know.
I have mixed up some of the information, but there is truth to this suspicion.
I was looking for the Ebert–Groener pact. I think that I remember our professor pointing out that there was a lot of speculation about the Riechswehr, which many have called a "state within a state".
So, they occupied the legendary mouthpiece of the SPD in a fit of absence of mind? They only meant to destroy the freedom of expression of the bourgeoisie? If they were not Communists yet, at least they were learning bloody quickly how to best undermine liberal democracy...
Since your own amusement seems a concern of yours, I'm happy to contribute to it.
However, you can't extrapolate from this that Communists enjoyed the support of the majority. They didn't even have the support of the non-Communist Socialists, let alone the majority of the population.
Even in Russia, the Bolshevik revolution or coup was carried out by a small group of Marxist ideologists with the help of radicalized workers and elements of the military that had been exposed to systematic revolutionary propaganda.
As admitted by Luxemburg herself, the rural population, i.e. the vast majority of the population was less than impressed with Communism, which is why it was bribed with promises of "bread and land". These of course were false promises as the country descended into chaos and Lenin in 1921 was forced to introduce his New Economic Policy of "state capitalism".
Of course, Luxemburg was dead by then so she couldn't have known that Soviet Communism was a failure from the start.
But we are in 2021 now, we know what the facts are and we can't pretend otherwise.
In any case, I don't think your claim that Nazism could have been avoided by embracing Communism makes much sense. Or at least it doesn't follow from what you're saying.
The “third camp” should reject statism, collectivism, totalitarianism, and embrace freedom. Only then could they resist using human beings as the brick and mortar of their projects. Unfortunately this means their vision must come about voluntarily.
Luxemburg was critical of Lenin, though. I have already pointed this out in this thread.
I'm not saying that the KPD would've been all bread and roses; I'm just saying that they wouldn't have turned out like the Soviet Union.
Besides, the point that I am trying to get across is that making a secret deal with a state within a state is just simply duplicitous and that Social Democrats just simply ought to be willing to admit this, considering that their doing so directly contributed to the collapse of the Weimar Republic. There is one degree of separation between Ebert and Schleicher and it was common for Groener and Schleicher to collaborate before Schleicher betrayed him. Establishing the pact with the military reestasblished its role as a state within a state. Doing so directly contributed to the collapse of the Weimar Republic. I'm not saying that Social Democrats were somehow Fascists just because of this, as they, quite obviously were later banned by the Nazis. I am saying that allying themselves as such, in retrospect, seems to have been a clear mistake. Regardless as to what political party was preferable at the time, it'd seem ill-advised to suggest otherwise.
Quoting hwyl
I don't understand what you mean. I think that you might have confused Groener and Schleicher with this thread's early mention of Ebert and Noske as I think you're going to be waging an uphill battle to try and prove that Kurt von Schleicher positively contributed to the German political legacy or that of the world at large.
My interpretation of what is invoked by "statism" and "collectivism" is more or less anagolous to the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union, but I think that you mean something else by it. You can feel free to elaborate upon this if you like, though, despite that I have primarily spoken of Communism, the invocation of the third camp would suggest to move away from the meta-narrative of the West as the triumph of Liberal democracy as well.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
Of the paper, you had levelled the charge as if it were akin to Lenin's ban on the press leading up to and during the Russian Civil War. What I was suggesting is that, by that the paper openly called for the murder of KPD members that the analogy didn't quite hold up.
Clearly it was rational. I have not disputed that. I'm saying that it was a strategic mistake, which I don't think can be denied, aside from that it was unethical.
It may have been you or someone else in this thread, but someone had said that they weren't clairvoyants in defense of the SPD, which may free them from the charge of proto-Fascism, but doesn't wholly absolve them of having allied themselves with a faction that they knew operated as a state within a state.
I, apparently, haven't looked too far into this as I just found this on the Wikipedia page for the uprising:
"Rosa Luxemburg drew up her founding programme and presented it on 31 December 1918. In this programme, she pointed out that the communists could never take power without the clear support of the majority of the people. On 1 January she again demanded that the KPD participate in the planned elections, but she was outvoted. The majority hoped to gain power by continued agitation in the factories and by "pressure from the streets"."
I have always associated the Spartacists with Luxemburg, whom I do hold in a certain regard, and, so, have been, in part, defending them by that account. She, apparently, even later came out against the revolt.
There's this as well:
"On 8 January, the KPD resigned from the Revolutionary Committee after USPD representatives invited Ebert for talks. While these talks were taking place, the workers discovered a flyer published by Vorwärts entitled "Die Stunde der Abrechnung naht!" (The hour of reckoning is coming soon!) and about the Freikorps (anti-Communist paramilitary organizations) being hired to suppress the workers. Ebert had ordered his defense minister, Gustav Noske, to do so on 6 January. When the talks broke off, the Spartacist League then called on its members to engage in armed combat."
I'm sure that the Spartacists would've used the talks to levy for power to be given to their councils, but, it does seem like some diplomatic options were available to the SPD. In the general course of the debate in this thread, it has been taken, by that I have been critical of what I have rediscovered was the Ebert-Groener Pact for a tacit support of nearly every aspect of the KPD, which is indicative, to me, of that the people engaged in it are only interested presenting the SPD as having been somehow infallible by characterizing any claims to the contrary by nascent Marxist-Leninist dogmatism. Outside of the historically tennous field of Political Philosophy and within that of History, I think that it's fairly well understood that the alliance that the SPD forged with German military officials led to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and was, therefore, a mistake, depending upon a person's political proclivities, to varying degrees of culpability. What seems to be a matter of debate is of the character of Friedrich Ebert. I am suggesting that he must have known that the military officials whom he allied himself with were just simply proto-Fascist and that he shouldn't be viewed favorably, which you can debate if you like. What doesn't seem debatable to me is as to whether or not effectively granting the person who engineered the decline of the Weimar Republic was a mistake, as it clearly was.
Anyway, I don't see Communism any better than Fascism or even Nazism - below my somewhat lengthy comment on the subject: https://stockholmslender.blogspot.com/2007/05/stalins-willing-executioners-pro.html
In order for me to have made an "apologia" for the Spartacists, they would have be guilty of something. You have only speculated upon that they could have taken power in Germany and that their doing so would've turned out like Bolshevik rule in the former Soviet Union.
I am not quite so sure that you have depicted the events leading up to the revolt well, but that is neither here nor there. I have said that I don't think that the Spartacists had a right to boycott the elections, but that I may have felt sympathetic towards them after they were put down by the Freikorps. I later, though there is no reason for me to have been brought to do so, clarified that, because of that Rosa Luxemburg was one of their leaders, I may have mixed up the general sentiment of the Spartacists with what she explicitly declared.
Though I have no qualms with the utilization of the term, "totalitarianism", which does connote a vague comparison between the Third Reich and the former Soviet Union, I think that your invocation of such theories in what obviously is tacit attack against my person serves only to entangle all too serious of a political concept within your personal propagation of a rather closed-minded interpretation of Social Democracy.
I do understand that I have adopted a near unilateral interpretation of this event, but I have only done so because I just simply think that it is self-evident that it is correct. There is one causal link on the chain of events between the Ebert-Groener Pact and the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Friedrich Ebert established a pact with Wilhelm Groener in order to put down the January Uprising. It was contingent upon their agreement that the German military retain its status as a state within a state. Wilhelm Groener, who later came to be the de facto leader of the German military, was the mentor of Kurt von Schleicher. He, though various machinations, effectively engineered the decline of the Weimar Republic in an attempt to first ally himself with and then blackmail the Nazi Party. He and Groener collaborated in various ploys before he betrayed him. The military retaining the status that it did was what allowed for all of this to happen. Because of the catastrophic consequences of the decline of the Weimar Republic, namely the establishment of the Third Reich, in retrospect, the pact can only be considered as a mistake. You can debate the degree of culpability that Ebert had if you like, but to claim otherwise is just simply to rewrite history.
It is both of those things, but you can make sense of it all if you do read and think about what I post.
Quoting hwyl
My interpretation of Marxism-Leninism is critical to a point of vigilance. I have always assumed that the Spartacists were council communists, as Rosa Luxemburg was one.
Quoting hwyl
For someone with such an idealistic inclination towards the freedom from coercion, you sure have spent a lot of time here defending a clandestine arrangement with a state within a state. I consider for myself to be an idealist and think that you should reflect upon that.
Quoting hwyl
What I have been saying is that, given what we know now, we can only regard the Ebert-Groener Pact as having been a mistake. Personally, I am not willing to give him the benefit of the doubt within the context of which the deal was made, as I think that he ought to have known better than to trust someone like Wilhelm Groener at the time. That, however, is a matter of debate.
Quoting hwyl
I feel like we've been at this for long enough as well. I have only been so adamant because of that I don't think that history of the Weimar Republic is the sort of thing play partisan politics with. Being said, I have gone on with surfeit censure and to an excess of length, and, so, apologize for that. 'Til we meet again!
Correct. And we mustn't forget that Nazism borrowed a lot from Stalinism. Nazism emerged after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and came to power in the 1930s when Stalin was the sole ruler of Russia. By then detention camps for political prisoners (gulags) had been established and millions of innocent people murdered in cold blood.
In 1918, the Soviet government paper Krasnaya Gazeta wrote:
"We will make our hearts cruel, hard and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. We will let loose the floodgates of that sea ... let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois, more blood, as much as possible".
This was pure insanity fueled by a hate-based political ideology. It lasted till Stalin's death in 1953 and carried on in more subtle forms until the collapse of Communism in 1991.
The basic problem is that communist revolutions don't have safety valves: they don't limit the powers of the revolution and I'd say the attitude towards democracy is at least biased. They have the enemy what they are revolting against, which is a class of people. Figure out how democracy and freedoms of the individual fit with that. And the response to violent uprisings is usually violence. It the social democrats who want to "work within the system", not revolutionary communists! And especially in 1919 this would have been totally evident. This means that the Lenin/Trotsky/Stalin types are quite predictable to rise to power just as Maximilien Robespierre was in the French Revolution to "salvage" the revolution. Tough times bring up the no-nonsense tough guys willing to use violence.
In 1919 I don't think that those being opposed to Communism would have noticed any difference in council communism to Leninist bolshevism. If it wouldn't have been the German government, likely then the council communists would have faced the Allies, just as, in a small way, did Soviet Russia, which had earlier been an allied country. Germany naturally would have been geopolitically far more important for the Western allies than far away Russia.
And let's remember that in Germany there was another Communist Revolution, that went a bit (few more days) further than the Spartakists: the Bavarian Soviet Republic, which lasted from 12th of April until 3rd of May 1919. Here again we see the transformation of hardliners taking the helm with which is so typical to communist revolutions with the playwright Ernst Toller (who talked about the "Bavarian Revolution of Love") being replaced with Eugen Leviné, a Russian emigrant, who had gotten his blessings from Lenin. Again something that would be typical later: the interest of the Soviet Union in other communist revolutions. (This brief encounter with communism, which the Bavarians then referred to Schreckensherrschaft, the "rule of horror", made Bavaria quite anti-communist.)
Any Communist revolt in 1918 - 1919 was to see immediate response and would right from the start mean wartime for the communist revolution. How much different council communism would have been after that kind of encounter seems questionable, fighting the allies with with Soviet-leaning bolsheviks stabbing in the back by trying to take over the council communists.
Yes, indeed pure speculation, but one can look at how these revolutions have gone down in history and draw conclusions.
(These guys won in Bavaria)
I think in the clearest case it was.
One side just got beaten so that general Powell, later the secretary of state, thought it was "unchivalrous" (or something similar) to pounce the fleeing remnants of Saddam's army. But wars seldom are as conventional as that one.
Fair enough, but I don't think that you have depicted Baudrillard well. It's been a while since I've read that essay, but he was more or less applying his theory of simulation and simulacra to the Gulf War. He was suggesting that a war does not begin when it is officially declared, but rather when a nation decides that it is going to war. He wasn't saying that the Gulf War did not actually occur.
Actual war isn't the same as the media coverage of the war.
Where Baudrillard puts far too much emphasis on the coverage, the propaganda part of the war or the war being "a message" to other countries. Iraq with the Kuwaiti oil reserves would have become the country with the largest oil reserves and simply the invasion put Saudi Arabia in a threatened position. Saddam prepared a conventional defence with 70's era equipment against a war machine built to fight the Soviet army and then fought on a flat desert. The outcome is quite obvious. Such simple reasoning is perhaps uninteresting for Baudrillard.
It's just a take on how and why it was that the war had begun before it was declared. I think that you expect too much from a series of Libération articles.
The general gist of The Gulf War Did Not Take Place is that the simulation of the war preceded the war itself and that, because of the manner in which the media had stylized the coverage of it, it became difficult to distinguish between the simulation and actual event. It wasn't intended as in-depth analysis on the geo-political situation that incited the Gulf War. It was intended as a series of reflections upon Baudrillard's speculative theories concerning the mass media and fourth-generation warfare.
Your assumption that his conclusions are absurd is because of that you are considering the piece too literally and within the domain of political science, when it is a work of theory written for a fairly broad audience. It's as if you are attempting to apply the technical aspects of music recording to a review of the album, Pet Sounds.
I am not saying it is. I don't think you are able to or want to understand the point and you were way off to begin with. I think this is fruitless and not really what this thread is about. Shall we move on?
Quoting thewonder
Likely so. But also something that came from literary theory doesn't seem to be the next phase of communism, as some say it is.
I interpret Baudrillard as he was, which was one of the parties to come out of the absurd and arbitrary disputes within the Paris 8. I don't think that too many people consider for most of them to have been exemplary examples of academics or capable of creating whatever left-wing political philosophy there could be after the fall of the Soviet Union. The New School may believe such things about itself, but they can't help but know better. They were, however, mostly relatively anti-authoritarian left-wing philosophers, which I don't think anyone denies.
I'm not so sure I believe this.
First of all, likely after the total surprise of the sudden collapse of the Soviet system, the leftist intelligentsia simply denied that they had anything to do with it, hence their ideology wasn't bankrupt. People just move on and forget the issues they weren't correct about earlier. And if right wing thinkers were worried about the Soviet system overcoming us, the belief was far more firm in the leftist camp. And of course, there still were all the defects of our capitalist system to point out.
That's for sure.
How can a postmodernist have failed to have made a paradigm shift towards postmodernism? Perhaps, of the left-wing intelligensia more broadly, but I don't see what that has to do with Baudrillard. There has been a burgeoning libertarian Left since outside of Anarchism since, at least, Socialisme ou Barbarie. Historians often all too readily dismiss both Anarchism and the various theories to precede and follow Socialisme ou Barbarie as small ideological sects with an insignificant influence upon the greater course of human history. What, then, of the Spanish Civil War or the student protests in France in May of 1968?
Historians do mention the anarchist factions in the Spanish Civil War, yet the reason is that anarchism hasn't simply been so successful as Marxism-Leninism, for example. If the Free State (Makhnovia) in Ukraine would have endured for longer, it likely would gather more interest than now from historians. But it was squashed by the Bolsheviks and thus are a side note in history.
Failed attempts are failed attempts and attempts in general are for the sideline notes in history.
Sure, there has never been a longstanding Anarchist commune or whatever, and, therefore, in broad geo-political analysis, it can be considered to be fairly insignificant. Particularly within intellectual currents in France, both Anarchism and libertarian socialism, which can be vaguely synonymous or can denote two different political currents, depending upon which person you ask, has had a definite influence, and, so, while I agree that there was kind of a tacit support of Marxism-Leninism on the part of the left-wing intelligensia that lasted up until the collapse of the Soviet Union, I think that it would be unfair to characterize the postmodern turn exclusively as such.
It seems clear to me that the Situationist International, for all that was absurd of it, established a Left wholly a part from the ideological trappings of Marxism-Leninism. While there is a contemporary phenomenon of Anarchism that has only come about in the information age, probably indirectly because of Wikipedia, I am sure that there have been Anarchists in the world since the Paris Commune whose ideas have had a certain degree of influence.
As I, myself, am from this current, I will say that we have been around and a few people, particularly Continental philosophers, have even been willing to listen to us.
In retrospect, I think that I should've opened the floor for a discussion on Simulation and Simulacra.