Tag: Non-Fiction

Moshe Lewin – The Soviet Century

The Soviet Century

Moshe Lewin – The Soviet Century (Verso 2005)

Moshe Lewin was one of the great historians of the former Soviet Union writing in English.  He actually lived in the Soviet Union for a time, working on a collective farm and later in the Soviet Army, eventually ending up in the West in academic positions.  His breakthrough book in the late 1960s was the superb Lenin’s Last Struggle (first published in French), which here he confirms was on the right track but which formerly secret documents now show did not go far enough in establishing how much Lenin despised Stalin and his political ambitions.  What separates Lewin from so many other English-language historians is that he approaches the Soviet government, and its attempts to realize the “communist hypothesis” (Alain Badiou‘s term), in a sympathetic yet critical light.  Mostly that takes the form of accepting the original Bolshevik objective in founding the USSR, together with rather commonplace statistical measures and evaluations against the government’s own internal objectives, and asking how well the government operated against those sorts of metrics, in context, without dwelling on the insentience that Bolshevik objectives were and are normatively wrong.  As Lewin puts it near the end of this book:

“Reflection on the USSR has been marred — and still is — by two frequent errors . . . .  The first is to take anti-communism for a study of the Soviet Union.  The second — a consequence of the first — consists in ‘Stalinizing’ the whole Soviet phenomenon, as if it had been one giant gulag from beginning to end.

“Anti-communism (and its offshoots) is not historical scholarship: it is ideology masquerading as such.”

To that end, Lewin occasionally reminds readers how anti-communist detractors are often quick to criticize the Soviet Union while at the same time overlooking similar if not worse occurrences in other countries.  Such a decontextualized approach he likens to propaganda.

Lewin does not resort to hagiography or fawning praise for the former Soviet Union.  He does hew pretty close to the Lenin/Trotsky analysis of the new nation’s prospects for becoming socialist (which in turn drew from various non-Bolshevik commentators of the day), describing Stalinism as “agrarian despotism” that rebuilt many aspects of the failed tsarist system, and the post-Stalin period as “bureaucratic absolutism”.  As Lenin and Trotsky both believed that it would take a long time and much effort to actually reach socialism, Lewin looks back and finds that socialist objectives were never achieved (though such conclusions can be taken too far, suggesting an impossible purity).  But he is ready to credit many advances in industrialization, literacy and education, feminism, science, life expectancy, and so on, plus a critical role in the defeat of Nazism.  He laments how some scholars have omitted the decline in many of these measures after the fall of the Soviet Union — he likens the immediate post-Soviet economy to a “mafia” capitalism, something that he suggests materialized in part because there was already a kind of privatization of the commons underway in the late Soviet era proper.

The book is not a chronological history, but rather is more of a collection of essays on various topics.  This fits in the category of reflective history, cutting across subspecies of universal, pragmatic, critical and fragmentary methodologies, following Hegel‘s taxonomy in Reason in History.  What emerges here is a useful portrait of the administrative and bureaucratic aspects of the state, and how those elements rose and fell, and engaged in internal fields of struggle with other social elements.  The segments on Stalinism make for difficult reading, given the gruesome nature of arbitrary persecutions that involved massive waves of executions and institutionalized slavery via the gulag system.  And yet, Lewin admirably traces the both the rise and fall of Stalinism, and some of its lingering effects.

There is an enlightening segment tracing the careers of various post-Stalin politburo members (i.e., the top leaders).  Lewin shines in some of these portraits, drawing on a host of memoirs from these figures and the people working around them, as well as from reports made public only decades later.  He skips past many of these politicians as hapless fools, and focuses only on those with wits about them.  Khrushchev is the first of them.  He was a kind of country-bumpkin of sorts, who did numerous admirable things leavened with politically naive mistakes.  It was Khrushchev who dismantled the gulag system and instituted reforms of the NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB that operated the gulags) and the state’s dependence on the economics of gulag slave labor.  And yet, he was ousted and the incoming Brezhnev regime was neo-Stalinist in some respects, setting the stage for overall decline based on a tendency to corruption (including, in Stalinist style, blaming all mistakes on the lower rungs but taking all credit at the top) and ineffectiveness (epitomized by surrounding the general secretary with mostly dumb, non-threatening, and self-interested loyalists).  For comparative purposes, the Khrushchev era offers useful examples for how the dismantling of corrupt and discriminatory policing structures in other countries, like the United States, might proceed, and the challenges those efforts will face during the inevitable pushback by those invested in the status quo.  Andropov is the most interesting figure chronicled (I admit to being unfamiliar with him until this book).  A former head of the KGB, he was well-informed about the unvarnished facts of the state’s decline and inefficiency, and encouraged free communication in his office, thereby developing new theories and rapport with officials who reported to him.  This is surprising, in that he was seen as part of the conservative Brezhnev block and headed the KGB — although he was a liberalizer when it came to internal political repression via the KGB.  Although Andropov died too quickly to achieve anything of significance once he assumed the position of general secretary, Lewin ponders what a vaguely Leninist but quite radical restructuring of the state under Andropov might have accomplished to avoid the entire state’s collapse a decade later (most likely a sort of New Economic Policy [NEP] part two).

Another memorable passage is Lewin’s takedown of the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  He says, “Solzhenitsyn considered himself the depository of higher values inherited from Russia’s distant past[,] *** [a] fine writer, but politically inept and with a highly inflated sense of his own importance . . . .”  He considered him a dubious source of information on the gulag system, quoting extensively Vladimir Lakshin, of the literary magazine Novyi Mir, an outspoken contemporary Soviet critic of Solzhenitsyn.  Lewin also suggests that Solzhenitsyn was a bit of a fraud in the way he criticized the gulag system after it was essentially dismantled, without ever explicitly noting that the gulag system was already a relic of the past.  He sees Solzhenitsyn as finding notoriety principally via anti-communists who didn’t question his underlying reactionary anti-democratic impulses.  These are biting criticisms, and worth reading for anyone who might otherwise rely on Solzhenitsyn.

Lewin is a fine writer and historian, drawing mostly from secondary sources with a scrupulous eye for their shortcomings and biases.  This is still “eat your vegetables” sort of reading, though well worth it in terms of revealing a lot of information that was previously secret during the Soviet era and most certainly presenting a view of the former Soviet Union not regularly taught (or even suggested) in Western schools.  It would have been nice had Lewin included a few more topics, such as more about the arts, and some sort of discussion about ecology (in a country whose government basically destroyed the Aral Sea).  But no matter.  Historians have a tough task, in that mere collections of isolated facts serve no purpose, and meaningful histories tend to require the application of theory from sociology, political science, and even, in the case of sketches of important personages, psychoanalysis.  Lewin proves adept in many of those areas, even if he occasionally stumbles by suggesting that it is possible for historical analysis to step outside of ideology and be “objective”.

David Roediger – Class, Race, and Marxism

Class, Race and Marxism

David Roediger – Class, Race and Marxism (Verso 2017)

I found this book to be quite trivial.  It pulls together previous essays that Roediger has written with some new material, and focuses its attention on a selected history of pro- and anti-“identity politics” commentators, together with extensive personal anecdotes.  The book’s major fault is that its central premises are disingenuous.  Roediger claims in the introduction to have undertaken self-criticism.  But on close examination that is not exactly what he does.  Rather, he carefully frames his self-criticism in order to advance certain underlying ideological presuppositions, and to signal that he identifies with certain groups and not others.  He claims that he is investigating the need to engage in both theory and action.  Yet this is just an alibi for conclusions already drawn up beforehand and independently.  He ends up not really questioning his theoretical assumptions, and instead dwells on action — in a way highly reminiscent of the discredited Alinsky Method.  So, for instance, he opens the book with a mild critique of David Harvey, only to immediately signal that his disagreements with Harvey and a few others are really minor and constructive and that they are really on the same side — by which he means they can both support “identity politics” and craft/trade union social democracy reformism.  He then mentions the anti-“identity politics” positions of Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr., dismissing them as “simplistic”, and, later in the book, also dismisses the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant and others’ similar views.  And yet, Roediger’s dismissal of these contrary positions actually reveals much more about his own simplistic frame of reference than it explicates the supposed flaws of these other thinkers.  For example, Roediger argues from the vantage point that craft/trade union advocacy is of crucial importance, that “Marxism” is about “class” identity rather than a universalism of shared antagonisms, that such groups tend to have substantially consistent/homogeneous internal cohesion, and, crucially, that “ideology” is not an important framework.  Accordingly, his overview of the anti-“identity politics” position (which he clearly rejects) omits any discussion of many of the most prominent recent advocates of that position: Jodi Dean, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Sharon Smith, etc. While many of these other thinkers rely on psychoanalysis, it is psychoanalysis of an entirely different sort than what Roediger occasionally references.  This is significant.  It is possible to disagree with Roediger’s flavor of “class” consciousness and on that basis alone arrive at a different balance of class and race (and gender, etc.) concerns.  Much of the book explores a history of what amount to “tactical” considerations, without digging into deeper philosophical and theoretical underpinnings.  While some of Roedinger’s statements ring true, I tend to think a better and more far-reaching formulation of the theory and action dialectic that Roediger professes to apply in this book is stated by Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, for example, or in Antonio Gramsci‘s “critical marxism”.  Adolph Reed’s criticism of Roediger and his ilk (echoing Walter Benjamin), that they are part of “a strain of the professional-managerial class whose worldview and material interests are rooted within a political economy of race and ascriptive identity-group relations[,]” seems spot on — hardly something “simplistic”.  This is evidenced by the extensive bloviating that Roediger puts forth about academic appointments and the trials and tribulations of various race-conscious academics seeking prestigious university positions.  This recalls “lean in” boardroom (neoliberal) feminism, or Maresi Starzman’s critical statement, “Even if precariously employed academics may be, in economic terms, best considered part of the working class, their interests are aligned with the aspiring middle and upper-middle classes. At the end of the day, academic desires — for a career, for status, or maybe for some fame — ensure that even the ‘lumpen professor’ remains a professor, cash strapped but with a solid middle-class habitus.  The result is a seeming paradox: an impoverished workforce deeply loyal to the exploitative structures it is embedded within . . . .”  It all gets very tedious.  I was left feeling that Roediger is furthering a debate in what I consider a cul-de-sac of increasingly irrelevant non-Marxist discourse that panders to chauvinistic craft/trade unions, the university appointment system, and defeatist sentiments that the “communist hypothesis” must be tempered if not rejected. While no doubt, “identity politics” has become hegemonic in academic departments of late, Roediger too easily relies on that hegemony to proffer very superficial criticisms of anti-identity politics positions.  But, again, this is essentially a critique of the ideology that Roediger adopts, and Roediger is careful to bracket out ideology from his purview.  He also makes some dubious characterizations of fact.  For instance, in the introduction he claims that police unions actually have very little power.  This is borderline laughable.  Take for instance Minnesota, where in around 2011 the police union succeeded in having state law modified to shield them from disciplinary investigations by citizen boards.  When Martin Gilens & Benjamin Page released their widely publicized study of the impact of ordinary citizens and unions on government policy, they concluded that unions, as interest groups typically aligned with ordinary citizen interests, have very little influence.  These examples, taken together, tend to show that police unions have considerably more influence than other types of unions, calling Roediger’s claim into doubt.  In spite of his claim to be self-critical, he spends these pages mostly trying to rally allies to fend off criticism from the likes of Reed, Benn Michaels, Rob Urie, and a host of others he doesn’t bother to cite — something that is fundamentally populist rather than Marxist, and is not a problem unique to Roediger.  It is rather hard to see how this book is of any interest to anyone other than the “opposition” academics specifically mentioned, to the extent that they might wish to rebut specific claims Roediger makes.  Though this book is best ignored.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara – The Motorcycle Diaries

The Motorcycle Diaries

Ernesto “Che” Guevara – The Motorcycle Diaries (Verso 1995)

The Motorcycle Diaries is a book based on a diary that Ernesto “Che” Guevara kept while on a lengthy journey through South American in 1951 and 1952 with his friend Alberto Granado.  Guevara was 23 when he began the more than six-month trip, and was still in medical school (in his native Argentina) at the time.  These aren’t raw diary entries, but are eloquently re-written vignettes based on the diary notes.  The prose is excellent, poetic even.  Guevara comes across as a more compelling version of beat writer Jack Kerouac, with more of a sense of purpose and minus the narcissism of Kerouac.  There are a few comments here and there about politics and political economy, but for the most part this is just an engaging coming-of-age travelogue about two bohemian vagabonds getting to know a wider world and its people.  Tennessee Williams‘ character Blanche duBois has the famous line in A Streetcar Named Desire, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”  That more or less perfectly describes Guevara and Granado’s approach to their expedition, as they lacked sufficient funds and provisions and therefore begged, connived, and (sometimes) worked for food, shelter, rides, and other provisions much of the time.  Guevara has a keen eye for character and motivations as he describes the people he encounters.  He also acknowledges the undercurrent of decadence in the trip.  Some editions of the book reprint part of a 1960 speech Guevara gave that nicely adds context to how the expedition shaped his own character, and also contextualizing how such experiences are the sort of thing that are socially necessary in shedding goals that involve striving for individual recognition in favor of advancing common dignity.  After his assassination, Jean-Paul Sartre would famously describe Guevara as “not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age.”  And as Thomas Sankara said about Che in a speech October 8, 1987 commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Che’s assassination, a week before Sankara too was assassinated, that Che “turned his back on the easy road in order, on the contrary, to assert himself as a man of the people, a man who makes common cause with the people, a man who makes common cause with the suffering of others.”  He added, “Finally, let us remember Che simply as an embodiment of eternal romanticism, of fresh and invigorating youth, and at the same time of the clear-sightedness, wisdom, and devotion that only profound men, men with heart, can possess.”  One can get a glimpse of why Sartre and Sankara, and so many others, said these things by starting with The Motorcycle Diaries, which sounds out a portrait of an imperfect human being trying to be better.

Elaine Brown – The Condemnation of Little B | Review

The Condemnation of Little B

Elaine Brown – The Condemnation of Little B (Beacon Press 2002)

More than 15 years ago, Elaine Brown wrote a wonderful book named The Condemnation of Little B.  It is both a sympathetic tale of Michel Lewis, known as “Little B,” who — when he was barely a teenager — was tried as an adult and convicted for a murder he most certainly did not commit, and a larger story of “New Age Racism” that explains why Little B’s individual story is, unfortunately, not all that unique.

The thrust of Brown’s analysis is conveyed by the way she recounts the prosecutor’s closing statement in Little B’s trial, which she says ended “with a dramatic flourish that revealed what the case against Little B was really about, about accommodating a powerful racist political socioeconomic agenda that at once invented and condemned black boys as superpredators.”  (p. 336).  This is part of the “New Age Racism” she describes, which is but an extension of old-fashioned racism:

“More than a century after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, more than 130 years since the legal end of slavery, the black communities of the United States effectively formed a third world enclave of subcitizens within the confines of this richest nation in the world.  Indeed, among the richest nations in the world, the United States, as the richest, maintained the highest poverty rate, with blacks at the bottom.”  (p. 355).

Brown’s scope is sweeping.  She manages to balance a sort of fast-paced “true crime” courtroom drama with a broader social science analysis of societal tends, as well as injecting the story of her own involvement investigating the case — while making that merely a framework to tell the story in an engaging way, without being a distraction from the real substance of the book.  The book opens with a tale of how Brown became aware of Little B and the dominant media narrative about him, which leads into an explanation of how her research ended up debunking that narrative.  She returns to Little B’s trial at the end of the book.  Throughout, it is as if she repeatedly asks, “Qui bono? [to whose benefit?],” in analyzing Little B’s situation and the actions of all the players involved.

In the middle part of the book, she covers the politicians who grandstand about being “tough on crime” while being fully aware of the racially discriminatory purpose and effect of the policies they enact behind a wall of public denial and feigned ignorance.  She covers the police and prison functionaries who viciously enforce degrading policies, careful not to question their own moral culpability in the process.  She discusses how courts have failed to uphold principles of universal justice, for instance, ruling that plea bargains for witnesses are shielded from laws against bribing witnesses that on on their face would make prosecutors dealing them out felons.  She discusses prosecutors repaying political supporters by engaging in witch hunts and duplicitous prosecutions — she even tells an anecdote about calling a prosecutor duplicitous to his face.  She critiques lickspittle journalists of the so-called “fourth estate” who act as “an extension of the powerful” (p. 37) and who promote narratives that are contrary to fact but bolster the policies of ruling elites — others have called this a “propaganda model” or simply the media socially constructing phenomena.  She calls out many who benefited from past affirmative action programs only to now kick the ladder away and deny others the benefits they themselves received.  She also discusses how the United States’ “founding fathers” were unrepentant slave owners.  In short, she portrays the larger context for how Little B’s story is the natural and intended consequence of the interrelated institutions of government, law enforcement, and society that today make up the politically dominant neoliberal program, itself a product of a top-down reassertion of power.  And she names names.  She never blinks in calling out by name the particular actors in Little B’s saga, or those on a regional or national level, even historical figures, who have acted to maintain systems of (racial) oppression.

The person who comes in her sights for the most criticism is undoubtedly former President Bill Clinton.  There is a wealth of information here about Clinton’s duplicity, not only betraying campaign promises but ushering in the “New Age Racism” that Brown describes as a return to the Plessy v. Ferguson era.  Central to this is the Clinton crime bill of 1994, which greatly expanded incarceration rates, predominantly among blacks, introduced severe mandatory sentencing, increased prison and law enforcement spending, and was an ignoble model for similarly severe state laws, combined with Clinton and Al Gore‘s legislative push (again an inspiration to states) to “end welfare as we know it.”  For that matter this trend was just a continuing part of what Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers called a “Right Turn” in American politics.  It is summed up well by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu‘s metaphor of “the left hand and the right hand of the state” — with the “left hand” social welfare programs starved of funds and the “right hand” (really, more of a right fist) coercive police and military institutions expanded — a metaphor explored in depth in by Loïc Wacquant‘s Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, and echoing the “Pyrrhic Defeat” theory of Jeffrey Reiman‘s The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, Katherine Beckett‘s Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics, etc.

Brown’s research is astute and reliable.  As one example, she even mentions government involvement in promoting drug trafficking in a way that acknowledges the still under-publicized and under-taught history of such activities.  She also peers into the so-called “prison-industrial complex” to explain how private for-profit prisons need a supply of prisoners, and how manufacturing companies exploit forced convict labor.  She peppers statistics throughout the book to support her arguments, without ever becoming bogged down in them.  This is how readers know that during the 1990s, there was a 465.5% increase in the number of blacks imprisoned for drugs!  (p. 352).  And, at that, mostly for victimless nonviolent drug charges.

While much of her general historical analysis relies on Howard Zinn‘s A People’s History of the United States, a central part of her discussion of the “New Age Racism” of the people directly and indirectly involved in Little B’s case leans on Malcolm X‘s parable about the “field negro” and the “house negro”.  (See pp. 209-212).  Brown adopts the parallel terminology “New Age House Negros” — the contemporary version of Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s “Uncle Tom” character.  Norman Kelley coined the derisive term The Head Negro in Charge Syndrome to describe the same phenomenon.  This is very much the same concept that political economist Ruy Mauro Marini noted (the same year Malcolm X was assassinated) in relation to a “sub-imperialism” that involved peripheral economies (like the Brazilian junta) collaborating actively with the imperialist expansion of core economies (like the United States), assuming in that expansion the position of a key nation.  It is also something Thomas Sankara, President of Burkina Faso, mentioned in his speech at the United Nations on October 4, 1984.  For these “New Age House Negros” — Brown names people like Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, William Julius Wilson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and others in this ignoble role — they are accepting personal benefits in exchange for betraying the larger cause of racial justice on a society-wide basis.  It is worth quoting Brown at length here:

“More than merely advocating and sanctioning government policies that contributed to and maintained the wretched state of ghettoized and millions of other poor blacks, there had now come to be a new crop of Negros who, positioned to actually influence the outcome of government activity, were actively undermining the cause of improving the lot of blacks in America.  Although their positions had been purchased with black blood in more than one hundred years of struggle, these new Negroes had become collaborators in a scheme that was imprisoning and further impoverishing more and more blacks.  Given the moribund state of independent efforts by blacks for freedom, government policies and programs still represented the sole resort of blacks for redress and remedy for past harm, the sole relief and hope for the millions of Little Bs.”  (p. 220).

These aren’t just blanket accusations.  Brown goes into sufficient depth to identify precisely the positions publicly advocated, the benefits obtained, as well as contrasting examples for context.  The people she criticizes generally deny these things, naturally, but Brown’s evidence in each case is more than adequate to convincingly show that these individuals got ahead by participating — as privileged collaborators and exceptions — to social systems of (racial) oppression.  And she does that without leaning merely on a “Beautiful Soul” contradiction or the inadequate description of “tokenism”.  Her position ends up close to that of Adolph Reed, Jr.‘s essay, “What Are the Drums Saying, Booker?: The Curious Role of the Black Public intellectual.”

A useful critique she offers in passing is of rapper Sean “P-Diddy” (formerly “Puff Daddy”) Combs, and the way his music’s message revolves around “a presumed conflict between the ‘player’ — a ghetto black who has gotten rich — and the resentment of the ‘player-hater’ — the black still stuck in the ghetto.”  (p. 240).  As a contrast, the TV show Good Times had a season two episode in 1975 called “The Debutante Ball” in which the protagonist Evans family, living in a public housing project, is confronted by the Robinson family, led by a father who became rich, left the ghetto, and wishes to sever all ties and connections to it — and hence does not want his daughter to attend a debutante ball with J.J. Evans, who is from the ghetto.  Unlike Puff Daddy/P. Diddy, who sides with the “player”, the Good Times episode has sympathies in the other direction, accusing the rich man (“player”) of forgetting where he came from and suggesting that he is being anti-social and betraying necessary black solidarity.  This regression is precisely the point Brown makes so well about “New Age Racism.”

When it comes to the discussion of Little B’s trial, Brown is critical of mistakes that his own lawyer made.  Actually, she felt that the senior defense attorney was ineffective and Little B would have been better served by his less experienced but more competent co-defense counsel.  In some instances, Brown has the benefit of hindsight.  Yet there were still some rather glaring errors and oversights made.  Those were compounded by a disinterested judge droning on in a monotone voice — something all too typical in criminal cases.  But Brown spends ample time on the prosecutor, who used “emotionalism to cover the barrenness of facts” in the state’s case.  (p. 327).  In other words, she calls her out for utilizing a psychological persuasion trick that lowers public opinion of lawyers in general:  like a magician using distraction to perform a sleight of hand illusion, the prosecutor makes an emotionally manipulative case that distracts from the cold impersonal evidence that leads to a different conclusion.  Partly for this reason, some other countries use professional jurors, who can become more familiar with both courtroom procedure and tenth rate lawyer tricks, to perhaps see beyond them.  For those interested, Brown does point a finger at the mostly likely murderer, a neighborhood drug dealer known as “Big E”, who avoided a life sentence on other charges as part of a deal with prosecutors to testify against Little B (the guilty party providing false testimony against another to avoid consequences is hardly unique to Little B).

While Brown’s book is about as thorough and well grounded as could be hoped, there are a few minor points where it might be improved.  Brown frequently reproduces quotes using “[sic]” to highlight supposed errors.  In at least a few cases there are no errors to be found, and Brown comes across as trying to shame the quoted speakers/writers in an exceptionally petty way.  Cornell West gets dissed here, which may have been fair at the time of publication, but since Brown’s book was published West has changed his public positions in ways that would seemingly satisfy Brown.  She also comes close to taking a very reductionist stance on racism, nearly divorcing it from other factors like economics, though she always pulls back from falling into that trap — resoundingly so with an MLK quote that closes the book.  Still, much of her analysis of political ideology comes up a bit short in general, left mostly to implication, and might have been bolstered by citing to some other authors who have already developed similar lines of thinking.  Adolph Reed, Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels come to mind.  It also would have been interesting, if a digression, to have read Brown’s views on the argument that race is a social construct not supported by scientific genetics.  Anyway, back on point, in the middle part of the book Brown criticizes “Enlightenment” era thinkers in a somewhat slipshod way.  She lists many of the big names, and then criticizes most of them.  But, for instance, she never gets around to debunking Jean-Jacques Rousseau on her list, which is curious because most of the framework of her book rests on concepts that run through Rousseau one way or another.  It isn’t so much that her political/philosophical analysis is wrong as much as it is vague and undeveloped.  Domenico Losurdo‘s Liberalism: A Counter-History was published after Brown’s book, which is too bad because it fills in the holes in Brown’s analysis in a perfectly complementary way.  Losurdo argued that Liberalism is and always has been premised on the exclusion of some from enjoyment of its loudly self-professed support of freedoms and civil rights.  He details at length how Liberalism has always advocated freedom while seeing no contradiction in supporting slavery at the same time — this being an essential aspect of Liberalism and not a deviation from it.  Rather, Liberalism always places the maintenance of some form of social hierarchy, however softened or limited, above rights and freedoms.  That is why the freedom that Liberalism promotes most strongly is ultimately only that of the unimpeded movement of economic capital.  Brown is advocating for the universal applicability of personal freedom, seemingly free from the limits of hierarchy.  This underscores something that is never explicitly stated in Brown’s book: she is really criticizing neoliberalism (the dominant strain of Liberalism at the time) from the left through the lens of one particular person’s story and the context behind it.

In this light, Brown’s book presents Little B’s case as a situation not terribly unlike the so-called “Dreyfus Affair” in Third Republic France a hundred years previous (1894-1906), in which an article by Émile Zola run under the iconic headline, “J’accuse!” publicized how the Jewish military captain Alfred Dreyfus was framed by military commanders.  That case illustrates a political divide manifested through law enforcement and judicial proceedings.  The basic split is between, on the one hand, those who believe that every person is equally entitled to a fair trial and that the innocent should never be punished for crimes they did not commit, and, on the other hand, those who believe in maintaining social institutions and traditions even at the cost of throwing a few innocent people in prison once and a while.  The latter tend to evoke Plato‘s idea of a “noble lie” used by elites to sustain a society of their own design, and Kant‘s position that such lies must never be questioned or exposed or else the legal foundation of society will collapse.  In this way, the people who throw innocents in prison often sincerely believe that they are doing good, even if they lie, plant evidence, deny access to an attorney, etc., because they are preserving a system that is necessary in their eyes — denying or concealing the essentially political choice involved in selecting a particular system in the first instance that puts some in power over others.  Elaine Brown is of course on the former side, decrying the imprisonment and punishment of any innocent person, and, by extension, seeing corresponding change to existing social systems to equalize power relations as desperately needed and long overdue.  Another reviewer put it well by writing, “She is witheringly good at exposing the myths that allow power groups, both black and white, to exploit and crush the weak with a comparatively untroubled conscience — all more or less veiled versions of racism, ranging from Jefferson‘s theories on why blacks can’t write poetry to today’s trumpeted ‘new phenomenon’ of young, black male ‘Superpredators’ sprouting in our midst.”  Taking Losurdo’s analysis as a reference, this amounts to saying that the centrist neoliberals are, at a very fundamental level, actually more aligned with the conservative/reactionary right than they admit.

Brown does inject herself into the narrative, particularly in the very beginning and very end of the book.  It is clear she rejects the so-called journalistic “ethics” of “non-involvement”, which can be questioned on moral grounds as being far too convenient for journalists.  But her perspective adds to the story, and orients readers to the author’s perspective.

The Condemnation of Little B is a landmark.  Unlike trashy, novelistic “true crime” books like Truman Capote‘s In Cold Blood, which epitomize an emotionalism that sidesteps the deeper moral questions about social constructs and institutions, Brown dissects and critiques those overlooked questions with surgical precision.  It is remarkably comprehensive, always defends the moral high ground, and is relentless in questioning the legitimacy of social power structures.  Hats off to Brown.

Michael Lewis, “Little B”, remains in prison:  http://freelittleb.com/

Walter Scheidel – The Great Leveler

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

Walter Scheidel – The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press 2017)

Ah, more liberal-conservative historical revisionist drivel.  Scheidel’s book follows in the ignoble footsteps of Steven Pinker‘s moronic The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff‘s discredited This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.  That is to say it sidesteps and obscures crucial philosophical and ideological (and moral) questions in favor of lots and lots of quantitative data, analyzed with dubious methodologies.

I didn’t actually read this book.  What I did do is a litmus test.  I looked up anything about the Bolshevik revolution in the index, and read those pages.  Scheidel cites Niall Ferguson (!!!!) primarily, and, in much the same way soviet history scholar Moshe Lewin has eloquently described regarding similar writings, engages in the lowest kind of anti-communist propaganda by singling out isolated incidents stripped of context and presenting them as representative.

Fortunately there is a book that already existed to (premptively) rebut Scheidel’s: War and Revolution: Rethinking the 20th Century, by Domenico Losurdo, which aimed to offer a “vigorous riposte” to “imperial revivalists”.  The aim of Scheidel and his ilk is to assert that “there is no alternative” to inequality, and anything that redresses inequality (i.e., revolution) cannot be contemplated.  But why can’t it be contemplated?  Scheidel does not engage this question in any serious way.  But that is his aim: to bracket that question out of consideration and normalize the “structural violence” of actually-existing inequality, by lamenting it from a distance but taking any pragmatic solutions to it off the table.  He is not concerned with the horrors of the status quo, only the alleged horrors that accompany any change of the status quo.  To put it more bluntly, The Great Leveler is nothing but an apology for the status quo.  As Robespierre put it long ago in response to odious fools much like Scheidel with their cynical “humanitarian” concerns, “A sensibility that wails almost exclusively over the enemies of liberty seems suspect to me. Stop shaking the tyrant’s bloody robe in my face, or I will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains.”

Take the opportunity to make a hard pass on Scheidel’s book and perhaps instead look to something by Losurdo.

David King – Red Star Over Russia

Red Star Over Russia: A Visual History Of The Soviet Union From 1917 To The Death Of Stalin Posters Photographs And Graphics From The David King Collection

David King – Red Star Over Russia: A Visual History Of The Soviet Union From 1917 To The Death Of Stalin Posters Photographs And Graphics From The David King Collection (Abrams 2009)

Red Star Over Russia is one of the best English-language overviews of the birth and early decades of the Soviet Union.  This is primarily a collection of visual materials, presented in large format with high-quality printing/reproduction.  There are extensive annotations to contextualize the images, which increases the value of the book tremendously.  This is really an essential collection.  It is a very nearly necessary supplement to written histories and biographies of the era in question. For instance, the war photographs from the Great Patriotic War (WWII) are quite indescribable, and are, alone, the sorts of things every human being should be exposed to as part of a historical education.

There are, however, a few things to note about this book.  King is a Trotskyist.  So there is a disproportionate amount of material on Lev (Leon) Trotsky, and essentially no criticisms of Trotsky (such as of his well-documented arrogance).  There is also a staunchly anti-Stalinist perspective.  While documenting Stalin’s crimes is necessary, readers should be aware that the book is tilted against Stalin (and others) in a typical Troskyist way — without, say, the acknowledgment that many Troskytists have made in recent years that elements of Stalinism were inevitable in the USSR or recognizing some of Stalin’s achievements.  Anyway, as a book that focuses on visual art, with tangential discussions of the text on propaganda posters and such, readers will have to look elsewhere to lean more about the music and writing over the early Soviet era — like the great writers Andrei Platonov and Mikhail Bulgakov.  Moreover, there are a few misleading comments in the book.  Take for instance an indication on page 308 that TASS window posters were “hand-painted”.  As detailed in Windows on the War, the TASS news agency did release a few window paintings that were free-hand painted on easel, in the manner King implies, but they were very limited in number.  More common were (small-scale) reproduced stenciled posters with painterly effects (what today might be called “artisinal” in the West).  Although maquettes may have been initially hand-painted, these stencil posters were not free-hand painted.  The images on pages 308 and 309 of King’s book are stenciled reproductions (evident by the individual sheets glued together to form the overall image).

The criticisms of this book are all ultimately minor.  King’s Trotskyist slant should, however, be noted by readers.  Yet King certainly does not hide his outlook, which is commendable.  Everyone has an outlook — there is no such thing as “objectivity” in these matters.

Maria Lafont – Soviet Posters: The Sergo Grigorian Collection

Soviet Posters: The Sergo Grigorian Collection

Maria Lafont – Soviet Posters: The Sergo Grigorian Collection (Prestel Publishing 2007)

An interesting book reproducing poster art from the Soviet Union from 1917 to the 1980s.  All of the reproduced posters come from the private collection of Sergo Grigorian.  While many are rare posters — the Soviet government did not value preservation of posters as “art” — this is a somewhat arbitrary and partial representation of what Soviet poster art encompassed.  It specifically leans toward posters mass-produced using lithographic techniques.  Fortunately, there are numerous other books (in English) on Soviet art that can be consulted to gain a wider perspective, including catalogs of individual artists like Aleksandr Zhitomirsky, Aleksandr Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Gustav Klutsis, Viktor Koretsky — not to mention in-depth treatments of photography, photomontage, constructivism and socialist realism in general.  David King‘s Red Star Over Russia: A Visual History Of The Soviet Union From 1917 To The Death Of Stalin Posters Photographs And Graphics From The David King Collection is also a more comprehensive multi-media collection of Soviet historical and artistic materials, with explanatory text that greatly aids in contextualizing the materials.  While Soviet Posters may be a very second-tier book on Soviet art, it is reasonably-priced, widely available, and still full of interesting images.

There are a few particular things worth noting about this book, pro and con.  The book has a short introduction, which is highly general and rather short, but deserves to be commended for avoiding the anti-communist editorializing that is endemic to so many English-language books about the Soviet Union — by way of comparison, Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941-1945 has much more detailed text but contains many irrelevant anti-communist editorial comments.  On the negative side, the lack of text makes contextualizing these posters more difficult, and the identifications of the titles and other background information is printed sideways and partially in a back index, which increases the difficulty in finding and reading such information.  The editor does not translate all of the posters’ text to English, usually only the titles.  Only a select few posters have additional explanatory text.  That added text is helpful, and one wishes there was (much) more of it.  Then again, better to have no text and let the posters stand on their own than to have merely anti-communist exhortations.

The book is organized chronologically, which presents a fascinating look at some of the changes in the poster art form across Soviet history.  The early years feature interesting innovations.  The Stalin years, and during the Great Patriotic War (WWII), the posters start to lack ingenuity and become drab and bleak — that holds for those posters selected for this book, but not for all Soviet art of the era.  But then during the Khrushchev era there are again more interesting posters presented.

It is common to identify these as “propaganda” posters.  While that is fair, the excessive emphasis on “propaganda” content by commentators is usually hypocritical.  These Soviet posters were explicitly and overtly political and ideological.  Look to any capitalist (or monarchist) country, by way of comparison, and the art is just as propagandistic.  Take, for instance, the film The Pursuit of Happyness, which is conservative, neoliberal capitalist propaganda.  So often, that other art simply denies its ideological content — it is ideology masquerading as post-ideological neutrality, much akin to “end of history” theory of the conservative political scientist Francis Fukuyama.  It is refreshing to see artworks that openly admit their propagandistic content.

I visited the Art Institute of Chicago recently and was struck by how the entire collection on display focused on artwork from capitalist, feudal, and related cultures.  There was an almost complete lack of any artwork from communist/socialist/anarchist/etc. societies.  The museum had featured temporary exhibitions on such art in the past, and their gift shops had commemorative books on the subject.  But it is good that this sort of art is being widely published, though there is still a ways to go to overcome anti-communist biases that still suppress it and relegate it to an inferior status.  This sort of artwork deserves, at a minimum, a place in the permanent collections of major museums and to be placed on regular display.

Christopher Read – Lenin | Review

Lenin

Christopher Read – Lenin (Routledge 2005)

Christopher Read offers what might be called a generous liberal account of the life of Vladimir Ulyanov — better known by one of his pseudonymns, Lenin.  As others have pointed out, it is impossible to write an “objective” biography of Lenin.  On the one hand, it could be said that objectivity is impossible under any circumstance, regardless of the biographical subject.  But for Lenin, the problem of objectivity is more of a concern than ever.  Read dismisses most of the official Soviet Lenin biographies as hopeless, ridiculous hagiography.  He doesn’t bother to quote any of them to support that conclusion — as we will see, that problem recurs throughout the bio — but those Soviet-era biographies are available for free online and even quickly skimming them does reveal them as rank hagiography just as Read claims.  On the other side of the spectrum, many English-language Lenin biographies written in the West are tainted by overt anti-communist ideology.  Read repeatedly calls out Richard Pipes as one of the most biased writers on that front.  Read notes how such writers have an axe to grind and are interested in little else than dragging Lenin through the mud, usually by seeking anything (no matter how tenuous) they can use to support a narrative of Lenin as an inhuman monster of epic proportions, with a willingness to take events and statements out of context and ignore countervailing evidence.  Even Robert Service — Read says only positive things about his work — has been accused by many of anti-communist bias.  On the question of political perspective, Read is most definitely looking at Lenin from a liberal perspective, and that shows in places.  But the editorial comments from that specific political perspective don’t swallow the whole book.  This is the only English-language Lenin bio that the independent leftist scholar (if still to the political right of the Bolsheviks) Lars Lih recommends in Lenin (Critical Lives).

What Read does most admirably is to free up Lenin from what came later.  This is to say he spends little time trying to explain the policies of the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin and other leaders through reference to Lenin’s statements and writings.  He mostly avoids historical determinism and tries not to attribute posthumous events in the Soviet Union back to Lenin — a favorite tactic of anti-communist writers (even if those same writers wouldn’t think of saying that the practices of Andrew Jackson or Richard Nixon were the inevitable outcomes of the politics of Thomas Jefferson or James Madison).

This is a traditional biography, in that it is organized chronologically and focuses on being a repository of factual circumstances about Lenin’s life from birth through death.  It is not primarily an account of Lenin’s political ideas, though some of those are introduced.  Yet simply stating the facts of Lenin’s life in an accurate way is a challenge all by itself.  After Lenin’s death — and directly contrary to his wishes — Stalin built up a cult of personality around Lenin and the Soviet government went so far as to retroactively distort historical facts to suit whatever official government position prevailed at a given time.  Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the opening of previously secret Soviet archives has allowed for a much more complete and accurate biographic picture than would have been possible for much of the Twentieth Century.  And yet, a large number of English-language biographies (like Richard Pipes’) have used the archives for nefarious purposes, such as scapegoating Lenin and taking his positions out of context, usually to try to blame Lenin for being some kind of “root cause” for the crimes of Stalin and others long after Lenin’s death.

Read breezes through Lenin’s early life.  He is clearly less interested in that period.  Still, all the basic facts are there and Read doesn’t waste ink on pointless factoids.  The middle period of Lenin’s life, spent mostly in exile, is where Read really shines.  He does a good job condensing the period down without grave distortions, and manages to convey some feeling of what it was like to be there.  Though readers wanting to gain an understanding of Lenin’s political objectives in this period should look elsewhere. Lars Lih‘s Lenin (Critical Lives) is a good choice as a follow-up — it is not a conventional biography but rather is a sketch of Lenin’s political ideas, with an emphasis on historically contextualizing them.  Lih makes clear that Lenin’s political outlook was centered on the use of the “heroic” narrative, and leadership by example.  Read’s book also includes a generous amount of information about Lenin’s relationship with his family, from the motivation that arose after his brother’s execution to the support that his mother and sisters gave him.

In the last part of the book, from the February (1917) revolution through Lenin’s death, the book is a little skimpy.  Read’s political biases are a bit more problematic here.  Read is clearly opposed to most of Lenin’s mature political ideas, and can’t bring himself to discuss them in any sort of sympathetic way, that is to say, without a distasteful sneer.  It is partly a problem of concision.  Read simply does not allot enough space to the crucial revolutionary period from 1917 on to contextualize Lenin’s views and so instead resorts to conclusory, unsupported generalizations.  Read’s book is understandably meant to be a compact and accessible biography, but readers should be warned that Lenin’s political views get short shrift in the last part of this book.  There are other books that treat Lenin’s final years more fully.  For instance, Moshe Lewin‘s Lenin’s Last Struggle is a short and readable summary of how Lenin fought against despotism during his last years, despite crippling health problems, and sought to block the rise of Stalin.  Read clearly disagrees with that characterization, arguing that Lenin had only minor and mostly personal qualms with Stalin near the end of his life.  Though in The Soviet Century Lewin notes that the opening of the Soviet archives added further support for the Lenin’s Last Struggle thesis, thus casting further doubt on Read’s position.

In the introduction, Read states that he will mostly cite to Lenin’s own writings when possible.  This later proves disappointing in that Read directly quotes Lenin rather sparingly, and more often relies on conclusory summaries (then again, more quotations would make this a much longer and very different book).  This creates a problem compounded somewhat by the (unhelpful) tradition of historians of not using footnotes to precisely identify the support for each statement.  For instance, Lenin famously argued (in The State and Revolution) against “bourgeois democracy” in favor of the Marxist concept of “smashing the [bourgeois] state” in order to rebuild it under the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, followed by a gradual “withering away of the state”.  Read does nothing to contextualize or explain these points.  He instead raises concern about Lenin’s critiques of (bourgeois) democracy.  But many academics have studied the question and there is considerable evidence a hundred years later to empirically support Lenin’s theoretical position.  C. Wright Mills is one, but also the liberal political scientists Martin Gilens & Benjamin Page recently showed (admittedly, after Read’s bio was published) that voting in the United States does not allow most people any significant influence on government policy, etc.  In other words, there is empirical evidence that Lenin’s points about bourgeois democracy being a fraud are well taken — Read’s criticisms are therefore counterfactual and principally ideological.

The book recounts Lenin’s public achievements as filtered through a liberal lens — only those that are palatable to liberal views are discussed as being actual achievements, while Marxist/proletariat objectives that oppose liberal views are mostly treated unsympathetically if not in an openly disdainful manner.  For example, in the last part of the book, the crucial question of the Russian peasants and their central role in food shortages and famines is glossed over.  This is a tremendous omission.  Moreover, Read spends much time on Lenin’s period of exile, when he was endlessly arguing over matters of theory and party organization — precisely the sort of endless debate that is the centerpiece of Liberalism — while frowning upon Lenin’s period of revolutionary action toward the end of his life.

And yet, Read does portray Lenin’s personal life as admirable.  The portrait of a personal character ideally suited to the role of statesman and the most prominent philosopher king (Read’s term) of the Twentieth Century is wonderfully drawn.  How many other world leaders published books on substantive political theory while in office? — during a civil war and simultaneously under foreign invasion no less!  Read mentions that Lenin became angry when a bureaucrat gave him a modest raise.  Though unmentioned are other details that would contextualize Lenin’s years in political office, such as how he mostly ate kasha (cream of wheat) and thin vegetable soup.  A minor detail, yes, but also one that emphasizes how profoundly different Lenin was from just about any major political leader then or now.

Another issue throughout the book regards Read’s occasional editorial comments.  For instance, he concludes that Lenin’s refusal to compromise was a personality defect.  He doesn’t really draw out that argument.  It is offered as if it is self-evident.  Yet one could easily have argued this was Lenin’s greatest virtue.  Though, really, what Read implicitly means is that Lenin refused to compromise with bourgeois liberals, which is a sign that this is ultimately an unsympathetic biography.  Lenin was arguably more willing than most world leaders to change his position; only he remained dedicated to the egalitarian principles of Marxism.  He never succumbed to the liberal idea of endless debate to always put off the decisive bloody battle (to paraphrase Carl Schmitt‘s characterization of liberalism).  Lenin argued for the need to take things to the end.  In the neoliberal era (the period in which Read’s book was published), the essence of the dominant political ideology is destroying collective structures which may impede pure market logic.  Surely no one would disagree that Lenin’s goal was precisely the opposite?  Read may not be a full-fledged neoliberal, but he gravitates toward merely softening the ill effects of (neo)liberal ideology rather than resolving the underlying class-based contradictions the way Lenin advocated.  On the other hand, it could be argued that Lenin made numerous compromises, many of which are documented in Read’s book: adoption of the Menshevik agrarian land reform program, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (surrender to Imperial Prussia), the New Economic Program (NEP), etc.  Of course, all these represent strategic economic/political concessions to avoid compromises to liberal ideology.  But aren’t liberals just as insistent on the absolutism of their own “process over substance” ideology?

One of the most divisive aspects of Lenin’s political career is the seeming Machiavellian nature of much of it.  Machiavelli’s work The Prince is often oversimplified as suggesting that “the ends justify the means”.  But that is an unfair characterization, in that Machiavelli was really arguing that a particular end — the founding of a republic — justified engaging in means that would otherwise be unacceptable.  Lenin deployed somewhat similar logic, but in a narrower way, namely, that eliminating class conflict to create a state based on egalitarian communist principles justified fighting back against class oppressors.  Lenin was very clear that the bourgeoisie were already fighting a class war against the working class — they simply obscure, conceal and deny the harms they and their institutions inflict on the poor and the proletariat.  Some of that might today be termed “structural violence”.  And yet, it can be said that Lenin wasn’t exactly Machiavellian, but rather followed the French revolutionary model laid out by the likes of Saint-Just: “Those who make revolutions resemble a first navigator, who has audacity alone as a guide.”  He grounded his actions in only their own efficacy.  (This was not far from the ethical model of U.S Republican politician Thaddeus Stevens).  Or it might be further said that “every authentic ethical position by definition paradoxically combines universalism with taking sides in the ongoing struggle.”  Lenin wagered (accurately, in the case of Russia) that the ruling class would not voluntarily surrender any meaningful amount of power to the proletariat.  This concept that, in the general sense, violence is necessary for radical emancipatory projects, predated Lenin.  Far from being a hypocrite, Lenin simply discarded the liberal utopianism that avoids outright political struggle and also the “beautiful soul” attitudes that accompany it.  It took the French revolution to institute the metric system, and the October revolution to move Russia to the same (Gregorian) calendar as most of the rest of the world.  The belief that these seemingly “simple” things can be instituted merely through parliamentary debate is usually naive!

This book certainly won’t be the last word on Lenin and his life.  But, for English-language biographies, this keeps the anti-communist bias to a relative minimum, without getting past it entirely.  Readers looking for a more sympathetic treatment of Lenin’s ideas and actions as a public figure should look, first and foremost, to the writings of Slavoj Žižek (Revolution at the Gates, various short articles, and Lenin 2017 [AKA The Day After the Revolution]), but Lars Lih also provides useful historical context (Lih is ultimately opposed to many of Lenin’s political ideas, though less so than Read).

[For a much better review of Read’s book than this one, and an unparalleled summary of other available English-language Lenin biographies, see Paul Le Blanc‘s “Lenin and His Biographers”]