The following article is a contribution on the question of refugees as it is posed today in Germany. Certain aspects are not easily transferable to other countries of Europe. For example the demographic problem treated in the article doesn’t exist in countries such as France, Spain or Italy, given that a high youth unemployment rate exists in these countries despite a low birth rate. However, because of the economic and political weight of Germany in the EU and in the world this article has an importance that goes beyond its national borders.
When, surprisingly and suddenly last September, Chancellor Merkel opened the doors wide to the Promised Land of Germany (and has more or less kept them open since) to thousands of refugees camping in shameful conditions in the Central Station of Budapest and its environs, when she defended with speeches full of emotion (unusual for her) the opening of the frontiers to Syrian refugees, facing considerable criticism from her own camp, and then declared that despite the more and more open protests from municipal authorities that couldn’t cope with the influx, that there was to be no upper limit to the welcome of political refugees, the entire world asked itself why Merkel, who is reputed “to reflect on consequences”, to weigh up everything before acting, could engage in such an “adventure”. Because in fact this is an equation with a good number of unknowns which is facing Germany’s Grand Coalition. The question is also posed of how to stop the wave of refugees. A little while ago it was a matter of 800,000 refugees arriving in Germany this year; predictions are even saying that it will be at least a million-and-a-half. Merkel equally seemed, which is also unusual, to have badly calculated the effect of the policy of the helping hand on the local population; for the first time in a long while, she has, according to the opinion polls, gone backwards in the eyes of the electorate and has even been overtaken by a Social-Democrat (Minister of Foreign Affairs Steinmeier). She has not done well here in keeping the populism of the extreme-right at bay; endless waves of refugees, the majority of them Muslims, are grist to the mill of the Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD)[i] which has been rising in the polls as least in Thuringia as a third force catching up with the SPD.
Why has the Coalition government under the leadership of Merkel and minister of the Economy Gabriel engaged in such a perilous game? Could it be a product of the Merkel-bashing that came out of the Greek crisis, an attempt to brighten her image, or is it some form of sentimentalism? Perhaps the pity of Merkel at her “town-hall meeting” regarding the fate of a young Palestinian girl threatened with expulsion, or the outward emotion of Gabriel regarding the no less cruel fate of a Syrian family in a refugee camp that he visited in Jordan, are really sincere? Even bourgeois politicians have an emotional life…
In our opinion the open door policy has far more material causes. It has motives which are not as altruistic and disinterested as the numerous acts of kindness we’ve seen from the German population, without which the chaos which reigns in the receiving centres for asylum-seekers would be much greater. The objectives of the policy have an importance which largely go beyond the risks and effects involved in such a policy. Let’s examine in some detail the secret objectives pursued by “the policy of opening up the frontiers”.
For some years now the theme of the “demographic problem” has haunted the media. According to the Federal Institute of Statistics, the Federal Republic is threatened with the ageing and lowering of the national population which decreased by 7 million inhabitants to fall to around 75 million around 2050. Already, since the reunification of 1989, the population of the whole of Germany had fallen by 3 million, in particular with the dramatic fall in the birth rate in East Germany. As much literature referring to this issue these last years has shown, it is clear to the German bourgeoisie that if this process isn’t checked and continues, it will in the long-term turn into a considerable loss of influence and prestige of German capitalism on the military, economic and political levels.
Already today, the lack of well-trained workers constitutes a brake on the necessity for Germany to remain a strong economy. In about a sixth of all professional branches there is a lack of qualified personnel which is so serious that according to some managers it badly affects the competiveness of a good number of enterprises. According to a study of Prognos AG (Arbeitslandschaft 2030) “.. in 2015 a good million higher diplomas were lacking -180,000 more than the number expected by economists for this same year before the arrival of the refugees. Concerning professionally qualified workers the gap is still estimated at 1.3 million. And there is even a lack of some 550,000 unqualified workers in 2015”( Handelsblatt, October 9 2015 ). In eastern Germany the lack of qualified personnel is already creating the following vicious circle: the flight of young workers towards western Germany at rates constantly above those of arrivals leading to the closure of small to medium-sized firms, which in their turn accelerate the process of departure.
In this situation the flux of numerous war refugees is manna from heaven for the German economy. The latter has recognised this: Telekom offered its help with lodgings and provisions for the refugees as well as personalised support towards some cases. Audi has spent a million euros in initiatives favouring refugees. Daimler and Porsche aim to create places for apprenticeships among the young refugees; Bayer supports the initiative of its employees in favour of the refugees. It goes without saying that the “personal responsibility” on which these firms pride themselves serves their real interests. It is quite simply a question of drawing a profit from the potential for exploitation that the refugees hold.
The Syrian refugees in particular represent an interesting source of human capital, for which many enterprises now have a pressing need. Firstly, the great majority are young; they can thus contribute to rejuvenating the age of workers in firms and – in general – lower the average age of society. Secondly, the Syrian refugees are clearly better educated than other refugees, as the enquiries from the Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge – the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees - show. More than a quarter of them had higher levels of education and represent a particularly lucrative source of labour power, including engineers, technicians, doctors, care workers among others - all categories which are most eagerly looked for. German businesses even profit from the refugees from a double angle: first of all, it allows them to fill in the gaps in the workforce; then, German capital draws advantage from the effect (called the “brain drain” in the 70’s) of siphoning off highly-qualified workers from the Third World, allowing the saving of a considerable part of its costs of reproduction (that’s to say the cost of education, school, university, etc.).
On to the third advantage offered by refugees of a Syrian origin which is attractive to the German economy. It is the extraordinary motivation of these human beings which fascinates the bosses of the economy such as the President of Daimler, Dieter Zetsche. The mentality of these people has been forged by the experience of being rendered powerless by Assad’s incendiary bombs and the horrors of Islamic State, of losing everything they had and going through the terrible experience of the flight to Europe. And it’s precisely this which makes them recognisable prey for the system of capitalist exploitation. Escaping from Hell, they are ready to work hard for little wages, thinking that for themselves things will only get better. It’s exactly the same mentality that the Trummerfrauen (“the women of the ruins”) had after World War Two: rather than submit to fate and do nothing, they swept and cleaned up the ruins of the devastated German towns with their bare hands, thus taking a decisive role in the reconstruction and the German “economic miracle” (Wirtschaftswunder) after the war, something the bourgeois economists deliberately forget.
This energy and this remarkable spirit of initiative seen among the refugees offers the German bourgeoisie a source of promising human capital full of profits. In addition, just as with the immigrants from the 1960’s and 70’s, in the short-term they can be used to serve capital’s efforts to maintain or even increase the pressure on wages.
But the refugees also form an area of manoeuvre for German imperialism, as it turned out in the past days and weeks in the context of the aggravation of the war in Syria; and for more than one reason. The Federal government used the refugee question not only on the moral level, but also on the political level by pillorying other countries, which as it happens include the country of immigration par excellence, the United States, for their hesitations about welcoming the refugees. Just lately, we have been able to see clear indications showing Germany giving a new orientation to its policy towards Syria. Knowingly linking the refugee drama to a so-called solution to the Syrian crisis, the main representatives of German foreign policy (Steinmeier, Genscher, among others) have underlined the necessity to integrate Russia, Iran and even, temporarily, the butcher Assad into the Syrian peace process. Moreover, Berlin and the Kremlin are acting together in putting the war in Ukraine to one side so all of their forces are concentrated on the question of the situation in Syria. Not even the move by Putin to deploy additional military forces in the Syrian town of Latakia has caused any particular irritation to the Federal government. The Minister of the Economy, Gabriel, even called for the end of economic sanctions against Russia, affirming that:”...sanctions couldn’t be maintained in the long term on the one hand, and on the other hand, what is needed is (...) collaboration”.
With this political reorientation Germany is again moving, for the first time since the war in Iraq, towards an open confrontation with the United States. The latter, via the State Department, has lately upped the tone against Assad and have shown themselves far from amused by the latest diplomatic offensive of Putin at the last UN General Assembly. On the other hand the US has a very ambivalent attitude towards IS to say the least; its role towards the Islamic State has been extremely dubious, and the half-hearted way in which the US has attacked it poses a whole series of other questions as to the real intentions of American imperialism towards this terrorist organisation.
The change of course in German foreign policy seems to be partly the result of interventions and pressure from German industry. Within the latter criticisms towards the sanctions against Russia are growing as it becomes clear that it is the German economy that is bearing the brunt, while the big American enterprises such as Bell and Boeing continue to do major business with Russia despite the sanctions. Whereas the volume of German economic trade with Russia has fallen by 30%, in the same period trade between the US and Russia has increased by 6%. And further to these economic reasons political arguments also come into play for German capitalism in its opposition to the maintenance of the economic embargo against Russia. Not having a military potential to threaten and dissuade comparable to that of the United States, German imperialism has to have recourse to other means in order to validate its influence on a global scale. One of these is the economic and industrial power that German policy can use to force and constrain the development of commercial relations. One aspect that shows the mixture of politics and business as well as the political use of economic projects are official state visits to countries like China, Brazil, India or Russia, where the Chancellor is systematically accompanied by a whole suite of influential German business leaders and even representatives of small and medium businesses for the construction of machine-tools. In this sense, the policy of sanctions deprives the German bourgeoisie of more than a contract and thus goes against its general imperialist interests.
The mass of Syrian refugees welcomed by Germany must also be considered as another means of compensation for military weakness – and here, the circle is complete. In this context we shouldn’t underestimate the way that the profound human need for recognition and gratitude can be manipulated in the relations between countries. The evident sympathy for the refugees, expressed by the attempts at assistance by the greater part of the local population, is a point that the German bourgeoisie can profitably use. This debt of thanks towards Germany by a good number of those stranded there can in the longer-term become an opening for its imperialist interests in relation to the Middle East; it can bring about the rise of pro-German factions who through their lobbying could act for the profit of German interests in their country of origin.
What immediately strikes us is the change of appearance in German nationalism. Up until just recently the Greek crisis saw Germany described abroad as the “IVth Reich” and its representatives caricatured, decked-out in Nazi paraphernalia, heartless and merciless. But this is being repaired by its newly-acquired glory as the saviour of the wretched of the earth. Globally the Germans are the “good guys”. Never since its foundation has the reputation of the German Federal Republic been so good as it is today. And as well as this external effect, it also spreads inwards, in the form of democratism. At this moment the German state has provided itself with the bearing of a paragon, tolerant, close to its citizenry, open to the world, thus animating a process that is actually deadly for the working class – the dissolution of social classes into a national unity. Chancellor Merkel, the cold scientist, clearly finds a growing pleasure in her new role as the Holy Mother, the saint of the asylum-seekers. How did she put it? “If we now have to begin to excuse ourselves for showing a friendly face in a situation of urgency, then that is not my country”.
You couldn’t put it better. In fact it’s simply a question of showing a sympathetic front; and behind this friendly face they continue to hunt down and divide. Thus, in parallel to this “culture of welcome” a cynical division is put in place between refugees from war and the “false asylum-seekers”, a merciless selection of “economic refugees”, mostly young people from the Balkans with no perspective but pauperisation. Very quickly the federal state and the Lander have agreed to deliberately declare Kosovo, Serbia and Montenegro as safe countries, thus preventing any asylum for people coming from those regions. However even the “real” asylum seekers are themselves not spared from the venomous attacks of the political world or the media, as was shown by the Federal Ministry of the Interior De Maiziere against recalcitrant refugees.
Moreover, some parts of the media, despite the diehard rhetoric from the Chancellor (“we ourselves are going to succeed, we will get there”) are tireless in stirring up worry and panic within the national population. They talk about entire peoples coming towards Europe, denouncing the threat of terrorist attacks by Islamic “moles” coming with the army of refugees and asking when the atmosphere is going to “change”. But above all, the chorus of those hysterically warning about Germany being “overwhelmed” by masses of refugees and shouting that the place is full up are getter louder.
It’s not very difficult to foresee how the two routes, the opening or closing of frontiers, will end up. To be sure the policy of “open frontiers” has only been an exceptional intermission, unique in time: the near future will be marked by a new locking-up of the frontiers, as much on the national level as by EU as a whole. In the future its plans propose that the selection of asylum-seekers “useful” to Germany must directly take place at source in the country of origin. The campaign against smugglers is particularly perfidious: it is not solely aimed at the mafia gangs but also those who professionally help the refugees in flight without profiting from it. “The European Union, which says it is a place of liberty, security and rights, as well as its member states, have created a system making it almost impossible for people being pursued, tortured and oppressed, who have need of urgent help, to find protection in Europe without having recourse to professional smugglers. To bring these people in front of courts and put them in prison is hypocritical, contradictory and profoundly inhuman” wrote the Republikanische Anwaltinnen-und Anwaltevein (RAV) in its Information Letter “Praise to the smugglers”.
It’s incontestable that the world sees in the present wave of refugees a drama of a dimension that they have never known before. In 2013 there were 51.2 displaced persons, by the end of 2014 their numbers reached 59.5 million – being the most important increase in the space of a year and recorded by the UNCHR: these are unprecedented figures. After Syria, Libya threatens to slide into a civil war – with all the consequences identical to Syria. In the refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey where the great majority of refugee from the Syrian war have found asylum, the threat is shaping up of a new mass immigration towards Europe following drastic reductions in aid from the UN, with hunger now adding to the desperate absence of perspective.
However, the media is deliberately over-dramatising the already dramatic conditions and adding another layer to them. Thus for some time now the spectre of immigration of entire peoples haunts the greater public, television broadcasts the frightening scenario of millions of Africans, waiting with bags packed, for the least chance to set out and try their luck in Europe. Such assertions serve only to sow worry and fear in the population and – to say the least – do not correspond to the facts. If one examines the movement of refugees closely one can see that the greater number of them in the world look for shelter close to their countries of origin; it’s only when all hope of a return has disappeared that those refugees who have the financial means to move can make the long and perilous trek towards Europe, North America or Australia. The rumours of a mass exodus coming from Africa has no basis at all up to now; migrations from the continent are largely less chaotic than the scare stories in the media would have us suppose. Often entire village communities sell their goods and belongings and club together to finance the voyage to Europe for a single young man chosen by the whole of the community and who is given the responsibility to then support the village – this is the model for the search for work tested over decades.
However, startled by the growing number of refugees, the Federal government has been compelled to act on the profound causes of the refugee drama, as it said. But the mountain gives birth to the molehill. Everything coming from the minds of Merkel & Co in relation to solving this basic global problem is only fine words and hundreds of millions of euros out of the coffers to finance the refugee camps of Turkey and Lebanon. Not a word of responsibility of the major industrial nations in the destruction of the foundations of human existence in the Third World. Let’s look once again at the words of Republikanische Anwaltinnen-und Anwalteverein (RAV) who come close to the real causes of the misery in the so-called developing countries, even if they inevitably lack precision (what do they mean by “the Europeans”, who is “us”?): “For many reasons, Europe has created the causes and continues to still make them today. The political relations that the European colonial powers left behind after their retreat, including the tracing of arbitrary frontiers, are only part of it. From the 16th to the 18th centuries the Europeans invaded South America, wading up to their thighs in blood, robbing gold and silver by the boatload which served as start-up capital for an economy about to flourish. The Europeans turned about 20 million Africans into slaves and sold them throughout the entire world. Through the vampirisation of their raw materials, overfishing to death of their waters, the exploitation of their workers for the least costs of production and the export of highly subsidised provisions which wiped out local agriculture, it turns out today that the population of the majority of the countries of emigration are still on the hook”.
The formation of nation states in the industrial countries of the 19th century rested on two fundamentals. The first of them – economic centralisation – was very rational; on the other hand the other was by its nature completely irrational. The constitution into nations of the 18th and 19th centuries took place on the basis of founding myths containing all sorts of narratives but one fundamental idea, one common fictitious myth united them – the fable of a great national community, of a family even, defining itself by a common origin (“the blood line”), culture and language. It was characteristic of the bourgeois nation to turn inwards and close in on itself in relation to the outside on one hand, while on the other hand the outward tendency of each capitalist power aspired to the conquest of the planet, forming one of the contradictory principles inextricably gripping capitalism.
The present refugee crisis shows to what point it is difficult to reconcile these two principles. If one solely takes the economic point of view, the flow of refugees of good working age should, if possible, never cease. A million people arriving every year pose no problem. However what makes sense at the economic level can have fatal consequences politically because within capitalism refugees are not just poverty-stricken but at the same time competitors for lodgings, social benefits, jobs. What isn’t a problem for the capitalists is one for the authorities, wages are lowered and the locals uprooted.
It is of course not the first time that a wave of refugees has broken over Germany. In the five years after the war (1945-1950) more than 12 million were expelled from the eastern provinces of Bohemia-Moravia, making their way towards a ruined Germany whose population suffered from deprivations. It’s evident that at this time there could be no question of “a culture of welcome”; on the contrary these refugees came up against resentment, hatred and massive rejection from the local population. Finally, the social integration of all the deported was achieved with much less difficulty than it was feared. This was down to two conditions: firstly the fact that the deported came from the same linguistic and cultural space, secondly, it took place in the context of the reconstruction, which was starting up in West Germany with the creation of the monetary union. The need for available workers was such that it was the bosses who were in competition for the dwindling numbers. Today, on the other hand, the masses of refugees almost without exception come from a foreign cultural and linguistic zone, and come up against a society which for a long time has suffered a constantly worsening economic crisis where competition for work, lodgings, education has taken on an unexpected scale, while catapulting important layers of the population into pauperisation.
When a general economic crisis is added to a lack of perspective and the absence of a social project to counter capitalist misery, then political populism is on the rise, nourishing a phenomenon that Marx called “The religion of daily life”. It’s the “little person’s” mentality which refuses to recognise that capitalism, contrary to past social forms, is a depersonalised, objectified system in which the particular capitalist isn’t a sovereign actor on the move but on the contrary is moved by the latter. As Engels said, the capitalist is dominated by his own product, and the representative of the political class is animated by “necessities” and not his own predilections. Populism is the philistine outrage of the petty-bourgeoisie which confronts the dominant class and blames “its” representatives, but ends up throwing itself into the arms of those it still calls “traitors to the people” in the hope of finding protection against “foreigners”. It is a completely reactionary mentality celebrating conformism as a supreme ideal, and is quite capable of leading pogroms against those that think otherwise, those who have another colour, against everyone who is different.
The Pegida movement[ii], principally established in the east of Germany is a striking, as well as abject, example of this spirit of the extreme right. Intolerant and hypocritical, its war-cry is “We are the people” completely ignoring the working class: the people (to use its jargon), have never, in Germany nor elsewhere – and today still less – been the homogenous collective which this movement fantasises about. Its boycott of the “lying press” as well as its shrill fury against the established parties (going towards death threats against politicians) only illustrates its disappointments over the “betrayal” by politicians and the media, as if the aim of these profoundly bourgeois institutions was to restore or represent the “will of the people”. In reality their unbridled hatred doesn’t confront the ruling class but the weakest layers of society as shown day after day by their rallies in front of the lodgings of refugees, as well as their cowardly attacks against them and foreigners. What is completely typical of pogromism is that it is the parts of the population that are least able to defend themselves which serve as the scapegoats and are made to pay the added costs of their already perilous existence.
The problem of populism and pogromism is that it forces the established parties, particularly the governing parties, to play with fire. In their actions they resemble the famous sorcerer’s apprentice who lets the (bad) genie of panic and hatred of strangers escape from the bottle, thus risking a loss of control. Up until now, contrary to the majority of other European states, the German bourgeoisie has prevented the emergence of a populist party, of the left or right, the reason being that its deadly past is a particularly important preoccupation. It will depend on the way the refugee crisis is treated if things remain thus. Everything seems to indicate that it’s particularly the populist milieu of the right which has profited from the policies of Merkel. The AfD, as we mentioned earlier in the introduction, is presently moving up in the opinion polls, the Pegida movement, quoted above, seems to have the wind in its sails. The “Monday demonstration” at Dresden was again accompanied by crowds of more than 10,000 people, whose potential aggression was sharpened by the speeches into real acts of violence.
How has the German bourgeoisie dealt with this problem? Firstly we should note that a part of the political class is not fundamentally opposed to the attacks of the extreme right. This is shown by the way the seriousness of these attacks has been minimised up till very recently. Now however those who carry out the attacks are being labelled as “terrorists”. That’s important inasmuch as the term “terrorism” provokes certain reflexes and associations of ideas linked to the Second World War where large numbers of so-called saboteurs were immediately executed; or else it evokes the memory of the “German autumn” of 1977 where the terrorists of the RAF were raised to the rank of Public Enemy Number 1. Moreover, by using the accusation of terrorism, the state can call on a number of instruments to prevent the torments and harassments getting too far out of hand. At the same time the AfD is divided. Finally one can see how desperate the politicians and media are by the way they place the Pegida movement close to neo-Nazism, which has always constituted a tested means to socially isolate movements of protest, whatever their colour.
On the other hand the established parties are working to give the impression that they understand the preoccupations and worries of the population. Thus the Federal government tries with financial inducements and moral pressure to relieve Germany of the burden of a part of the Syrian refugees onto other countries of the EU, so far without success. The Great Coalition has quickly concocted a law for a fast-track return to the borders and has begun to strongly enforce it even before it becomes law, solely with the aim of being able to preach to the electorate that it will protect them against Überfremdung or “foreign super-colonisation”[iii]. Within the government there is already a question of returning 50% of the refugees arriving in Germany back across the borders. This essentially comes from the President of the CDU Seehofer and General Secretary Soder who, as part of a division of labour, assume the role of the “bad guys” by vehemently asking for the closure of the frontiers as well as the limitation of the right to asylum written in the Constitution.
In a certain sense these different conceptions within the Coalition reflect the diffused state of spirit in the population, that’s to say among the wage-earners and unemployed of this country. There’s a very loud and growing minority within the population in general and the working class in particular, composed of its least qualified part, often socialised in the context of the old GDR and/or those living on state benefits, who form an open terrain for the anti-Muslim campaigns orchestrated in the world of politics or culture (Sarrazin, Broder, Pirincci, Buschkowsky, etc.) who appear as the spokesmen of the CSU and of certain sectors of the CDU[iv]. There is a silent majority, which up to now left it to young activists, those mainly coming from the anti-fascist milieu, to respond to the racist harassment by blocking roads and counter-demonstrations, feeling obliged to act by the images of misery coming from the Balkans. They are also strongly expressing their protest against the inaction of European states and their indignation over the exactions against foreigners at Dresden, Heidenau and Fretal, by demonstratively applauding the refugees when they arrive, or getting involved by the thousands in helping the masses of refugees, inundating the relief centres with all sorts of assistance and donations.
The spontaneous solidarity of significant parts of the population has surprised the ruling class and wrong-footed it; it wasn’t disposed to promote sympathy towards the war refugees but rather to create an atmosphere of panic and isolation. However, Merkel once again showed her infallible flair for sensing the moods and feelings within society. Just as after the serious nuclear accident at Fukushima, when the principles of maintaining atomic energy were practically got rid of from one day to the next, Merkel took the same abrupt turn regarding asylum policy, annulling a passage in the Dublin Agreement which up to then gave permission to the German bourgeoisie to rid itself any responsibility towards refugees stranded in Italy and in other parts of the EU’s ‘exterior borders’.
We have already mentioned some of the motives which have pushed Merkel to adopt her “policy of open borders”. It is however possible that another motive has played a role in this risky policy. Since the Bundestag elections of 2005, where the expected victory was lost because the then Chancellor Schroder managed to use against her the liberal turn that she had taken at the Leipzig Congress of the CDU in 2003, Merkel learnt something about the consequences that can come from not taking into account the feelings of the “rank and file”. Just imagine what the impact of images of hundreds of thousands of refugees abandoned at the Hungarian border, as well as the endless headlines, would have today on the electoral behaviour of those wishing to give a welcome to the refugees from war in Syria.
According to all appearances two groups in the population are particularly implicated in solidarity with the refugees. On one hand the young, who have been involved in other movements in other places, participating in the anti-CPE movement or that of the Indignados. On the hand, older people who, either from their own experience, or else through the experience transmitted by their parents about the mass expulsions at the end of the Second World War, know about the fate of refugees and so cannot be indifferent to the camps, the barbed wire and the new wave of deportations. Having grown up in the dark decades of the 20th century, this generation is impulsively pushed to act differently today. The important participation of retired workers reveals something else as well: the profound desire for the rejuvenation of society, expressed in the combination of children and adolescents with older people. This demand for rejuvenation can be distinguished from the need for younger workers for the German economy. The ageing of society constitutes a central problem not only for capitalism but for humanity, quite simply because the absence of youth doesn’t only mean a deprivation of a source of joy, life and a vitalisation of the old but is above all a negative setting for one of the most important functions in the evolution of humanity: the transmission of the treasures of experience to the generation of grandchildren.
Finally, the question posed is: does this wave of solidarity constitute a class movement? We don’t think that it possesses any of its characteristics. What’s immediately striking is its completely apolitical character: solidarity takes the form of charity. There is almost no discussion, no exchange of experiences between young and old, between natives and refugees (with the language difficulty in respect of the latter). Any point of departure for any self-organisation outside of the state isn’t there: instead of that, hundreds of thousands of volunteers become casual labourers for a state which, despite the gestures to the gallery by Merkel, provides very little; a state whose representatives, having led the volunteers to exhaustion by their own inaction, are now talking about the “limits of capacity”.
Once again: the wave of solidarity across Germany these last weeks is not unfolding on a class terrain. The working population, the principle subject of this solidarity, is dissolved almost to non-existence into the “people”. This was also the case with the solidarity towards the victims of the Tsunami in 2004. Then as now the solidarity was emptied of all class character and expressed itself in the framework of an inter-classist campaign. However, the difference with the Tsunami was that it happened far away in Asia whereas the misery of the refugees is happening right here under our eyes, so much so that solidarity and everything that concerns it takes on quite another dimension.
In fact this refugee crisis, which has only just begun, can become a decisive question for the working class. It is not yet determined how the working class, or rather its preponderant parts at the national as international levels, will react to the stakes: through the development of solidarity or though demarcation and exclusion. If our class aims to recover its class identity, solidarity can be an important means of unification in its struggle. If, on the contrary, it only sees in the refugees competition and a threat, if it doesn’t form an alternative to capitalist misery, to a system which forces millions to flee under the threat of war or of hunger, then we will be under threat of a massive extension of the pogromist mentality and the proletariat at the heart of it will not be spared.
FT, 7.11.15
[i] The Alternative for Germany is a Eurosceptic party created in 2003, following the “no-alternative” policy in response to the debt crisis in the Eurozone. It is nicknamed the “party of professors” because counted among its founding members are numerous professors of the economy, public finances and the right. It presents itself as anti-euro but not anti-Europe; its main demand is the progressive dissolution of the Eurozone. Its party members (who claim to be neither of the right nor the left) are united in the feeling that Germany has paid too much for the other states, notably in the relief funds for the Eurozone, and call for the return of the Mark. It doesn’t so much insist that Germany leaves the Eurozone but that those who don’t respect its discipline do so (according to Wikipedia).
[ii] Abbreviation of the “Patriotische Europaer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes” (European Patriots against the Islamification of the West), a movement of the extreme-right against Islamic immigration into Germany. The movement was launched on October 20 by Lutz Bachmann and a dozen other people. Bachmann was a petty criminal who was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for a number of burglaries he made in the 1990’s. He fled to South Africa and took a false identity before being extradited. He was later sentenced for drug trafficking. Since October 2014, the Pegida movement has demonstrated each Monday at 18h30 in a Dresden park against the government’s asylum policy and the “Islamification of Germany”.
[iii] A difficult term to translate that, in bourgeois political language, has taken on a palette of nuances since the 70’s. Today it seems to mean “an excessive proportion of foreigners” and a colour prejudice.
[iv] The CDU/CSU is the political force formed in Germany at the Federal level by the two “brother parties” of the conservative, Christian Democrat right. The Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) is present in the all the Länder except Bavaria and the Social Christian Union (CSU) in Bavaria only.
Water is vital to life, to humanity. Two-thirds of the planet is covered by water. However... potable water is becoming a rare, precious commodity, including in some of the most developed urban zones. To live and survive by drinking a simple glass of water is no longer an easy thing! And there is also drought linked to climate change and desertification in Africa, Asia and Australasia.
The reasons for this are not just industrial or agricultural pollution in themselves. The corruption of the ruling class is also a powerful factor.
The scandal of the polluted water of Flint, a small town in Michigan USA, is the latest example of this problem. The facts: in 2014, in order to reduce costs, the municipality of Flint, rather than continue buying water from the town of Detroit, decided to draw its supply from a local river of doubtful quality. After the discovery of bacteria, the local authorities started a chemical treatment process which ended up leaching lead from the pipework and into the distribution network supplying households. For a year-and-a-half, between April 2014 and autumn 2015, the inhabitants of this town of 100,000, the majority black and poor, used and consumed this lead-contaminated water. Many ongoing complaints were ignored and there were 87 cases of Legionnaires disease, ten of whom died; thousands of children are affected with risks of irreversible damage to their nervous systems by lead poisoning.
The scandal which followed forced Barack Obama to declare an emergency, the President himself affirming with hand on heart: “If I was responsible for a family there, I would be outraged that the health of my children could be in danger”. The political mobilisation then unleashed is almost an example of unanimity! The state governor and the Flint municipal administration are accused of negligence and having knowingly closed their eyes for months. There was a clamour for resignations, including from the film-maker Michael Moore, himself a native of Flint: “It is not only a water crisis. It is a crisis of race, a crisis of poverty”, he said, intimating that such a scandal wouldn’t have happened in a comfortable and white part of Michigan. Because Flint, an industrial centre in the shadow of Detroit, has suffered a total collapse of the automobile industry, in particular that of General Motors (founded in Flint in 1908). In fifty years, Flint has lost half its population. The unemployment rate today is close to twice the national average and 40% of its inhabitants live below the poverty level.
So there it is: all you need to know! Those that are responsible for the water crisis have been found: they are racists and profit from the misery of the poor in order to make economies on their backs! Here are the guilty, the “bad guys”!
Is it that simple? That these local and regional authorities bear a heavy responsibility is beyond dispute. And good capitalist managers that they are, all these administrators must balance their books faced with economic crisis. And they are not always in agreement on this. But the American state, like all states, wants to reinvent itself with a good account: the guilty must be punished and the situation has to return to “normal”. “Never again!” we are told (yet again). This sort of language has already been heard with each financial, health or ecological scandal for years and years and applied to this or that barbaric act of war and terrorism over the whole of the planet. From Bhopal to Fukushima, from the contaminated blood scandal in the NHS in the 1970s and 80s to the Amoco Cadiz, to the recent factory explosion at Tianjin in China and thousands of other episodes, we see the same story: the prosecution of the guilty is called for in order to pacify indignation and prevent any reflection on the underlying causes of these scandals.
In the circumstances, the American state, with Obama at its head, puts itself forward as the guarantor of public health faced with all the crooks or politicians greedy for profits. They want to look like champions of morality or knights in shining armour protecting the quality of life. Dream on... or rather, put up with the nightmare! It is the same state that reduces its working and social budgets, establishes austerity programmes, reducing the population to mass unemployment and tipping people into permanent precariousness. Never mind: sacrifice the guilty and above all keep the states and the capitalist system as a whole out of any responsibility.
In fact this logic hides what’s essential and this is the aim of the manoeuvre. Behind each scandal or catastrophe, there is usually the search for profits. But the principle of profit is not the privilege of this or that badly-intentioned or corrupt bourgeois: it is the permanent logic of a system at bay, a barbaric system, of a bourgeois class which only lives by competition for profit. These are the implacable laws inherent in capitalism.
Engels already declared in 1845: “I have never seen a class so profoundly immoral, so incurably rotten and so corroded within by egoism as the English bourgeoisie and by this I mean especially the bourgeoisie proper (...) With such avarice and greed it is impossible for a sentiment, a human idea to exist which is not soiled (...) all the conditions of life are evaluated by the criteria of what can be gained and everything that doesn’t bring forth money is idiotic, unrealisable, utopian (...)”[i]
Nothing has fundamentally changed since then. On the contrary. After a century of capitalism’s decadence, which has now reached the stage of outright decomposition, the quest for profits pushes the war of each against all to the planetary level just as it does at the local level. Capitalism is a permanent catastrophe. And to survive it must find in each spectacular and disastrous episode someone responsible, a scapegoat: a “bad political choice”, a “rotten leader”, a case of “human error”, or it blames “the climate”, “bad luck”, “madness”. The bourgeois states, with the USA at their head, thus try to smarten up their image in order to preserve their rotting society.
Let’s be clear: we are not defending a fatalist analysis of history, or saying that everything is written in advance, or that each catastrophe is banal and ineluctable. It’s exactly the opposite! It’s the bourgeoisie itself with all its various ideologies which defends the inevitable existence of the capitalist world and demands that we resign ourselves to it. All that’s needed is a little more individual “good will” or for us to be confident in a “really democratic” state in order to attenuate the effects of these catastrophes, to make our “fate” more tolerable.
The left parties of the bourgeoisie’s political apparatus present themselves as champions of the “democratic solution”. The democrats in power and the movements on the left never stop telling us that with a state that listens to the needs of the people everything will be better and scandals will finish! The end of war! The end of exploitation! But the very reason for the state is precisely the preservation of the interests of capital, the profits of which are at the centre of all sorts of health scandals. With the idea of “democratic renewal” the capitalist left hopes to anesthetise the working class, render it docile and reinforce its impotence.
The Flint scandal, following many others, is the occasion for new political manipulations by the democratic bourgeoisie. But it’s their whole world which scandalises us and we reject its deadly logic altogether. It is this entire system which must be overthrown, from the roots, and at the global level. Despite appearances, despite the real difficulties and feelings of impotence which dominate the working class, the latter remains, as Engels said, the only social class able to take on this task. The affirmation of the collective international force of the proletariat has in fact been demonstrated by history and it is still able to overthrow the established order and launch itself against the dictatorship of capital.
Stopio, 21st February 2016
[i] The Condition of the Working Class in England
Much has changed in the nearly forty years since 1978 when this article was first published. The disappearance of the USSR dealt an all but fatal blow to many of those “bourgeois factions” around the world which in the past resorted to marxist phraseology to justify their crimes. The Good Friday Agreement signed in 1998 by the governments of Britain and Eire set up an Assembly for Northern Ireland where the one-time mortal foes Sinn Fein and the DUP share power on the backs of Northern Irish workers. The IRA and the UDA occupy themselves with more “normal” gangsterism: drug-running and protection rackets.1
One thing has not changed: nationalism in all its forms remains the working class’ mortal enemy. The positions set forward in this article thus remain essentially valid: and, one hundred years after the Dublin Easter Rising, it still stands as an answer to all those who would hijack the memory of James Connolly, an Irish revolutionary socialist shot down by the British army, for the cause of Irish nationalism.
“The Labour movement is like no other movement. Its strength lies in being like no other movement. It is never so strong as when it stands alone” (James Connolly from “What is Our Programme”, published in the Workers' Republic, 22 January 1916).
Ever since the outbreak of World War I, desperate factions of the bourgeoisie, determined to survive, have resorted to marxist phraseology and claimed a continuity with the workers' movement in order to save their own skins. In Ireland, the Republicans and their leftist followers have laid their hands on James Connolly in order to justify their dirty work. In equating “Lenin and 1917” with “Connolly and 1916”, they try to sell their nationalist garbage to the workers.
The bourgeoisie has been telling us what has been happening in Northern Ireland since 1969.2 On the one hand we have been told about the brave and disinterested attempts of the democratic British state to keep the Irish from tearing each other to pieces. On the other hand we have heard much about the struggle of the Irish nation for freedom and independence. In 1969, the leftists declared that in Ulster, the oppression of the Catholics (who in every other country in Western Europe, including Britain, are free men, unless they happen to be wage slaves) was the very basis of capitalism and imperialism in Ireland. And they declared that the workers of Ireland, both Catholic and Protestant, should support the IRA in the fight for national independence, because until such time as this all-Ireland State of Republican and Stalinist butchers has been established, the Irish working class remains too sectarian, too bigoted and ignorant to fight for its own class interests. Today, evidently, the patriots of the IRA are in retreat and disarray, hammered to the ground by the British Army. Ten years of bombings, mutilated corpses found in back alleys, a decade of massacre in which the British and Irish states, the Republican and the Protestant Extremists have all taken part, appears to be coming to an end. But we have seen that under decadent capitalism there is no peace, only the reorganization and reorientation of the slaughter. The workers of Belfast and Derry have certainly had enough of the politicians of Left and Right, of Orange and Green, who wipe the red blood of the workers from their hands in order to respectfully commemorate the dead. The conflict of factions of the bourgeoisie, their struggle for survival in a capitalist system locked in permanent crisis, leads inevitably, as it has in Ulster, to a terrorisation of the working class. We condemn all of these factions of the bourgeoisie, not simply as brutes and maniacs (of which there is of course no shortage), but as our class enemies.
When we consider the question of nationalism in relation to the workers’ movement of the last century, we do so in order to show the absolutely anti-proletarian nature of the PLO, Polisario, the IRA and all the imperialist gangs of today. Marx was analysing capitalism in its period of emergence and development, when the bourgeoisie was declaring war on reactionary modes of production. For the advanced workers' movement of his time, it was clear that nationalism – wars of unification to create nation states – was the economic and political means by which the bourgeoisie could crush feudalism and create an industrial society, an industrial proletariat. The creation of nation states meant the securing of particular areas of the globe for the development of capitalism. Communists at that time supported nationalist revolutions directed against feudalism, not out of patriotic feelings – on the contrary, the Communist Manifesto already announces that the workers have no fatherland – but because feudalism as such represented a threat to the development, indeed to the very existence not only of the bourgeoisie but of the proletariat as well. Therefore, support for national struggles is dependent upon the conviction that capitalism remains a progressively expanding system. In the last century the progressive role of capitalism remained obvious and indisputable. Today, however, only capitalism's biggest supporters can find anything progressive about it.
In the period when Connolly was developing his analysis, towards the turn of the century in Ireland and the USA, it was becoming clear to revolutionaries that capitalism could no longer develop as before, in the days of headlong economic growth. Connolly concluded that there was no longer any place for an independent, industrialised Irish capitalism in this world:
“...the thoughtful Irish patriot will throw rant aside and freely recognise that it is impossible for Ireland to do what other countries cannot do, with their greater advantages, viz. to attain prosperity by establishing a manufacturing system in a world-market already glutted with every conceivable kind of commodity. It is well also to remember that even under the most favourable circumstances, even if by some miracle, we were able to cover the green fields of Erin with huge ugly factories, with chimneys belching forth volumes of smoke and coating the island with a sooty desolation, even then we would quickly find that under the conditions born of the capitalist system our one hope of keeping our feet as a manufacturing nation would depend upon our ability to work longer and harder for a lower wage than the other nations of Europe, in order that our middle class may have the opportunity of selling their goods at a lower price than their competitors” (Erin's Hope, 1897).
Despite the confusions which Connolly held concerning nationalism, and which we shall examine in a moment, and despite the lack of clarity of the entire workers' movement at that time concerning the possibility of a transition to socialism taking place within national or continental boundaries, for Irish revolutionaries at this time the reactionary character of Irish capitalism was already obvious. The revolutionary wave of 1917–23 and its defeat proved the impossibility of a transition to socialism except on a world scale, just as the fifty years of barbarism since then have shown that no country can escape the ever narrowing circle of economic chaos and imperialist slaughter. Today, the Republican/Left, blabbering about the nationalism of Marx and Lenin are about as marxist as the West German3 Maoists who propose a national war of German unification because Marx did likewise in 1848 (when Germany consisted of over 30 petty principalities and before the capitalist system had even been created on a world scale):
In 1898, Connolly wrote in the Workers' Republic:
“Every war now is a capitalist move for new markets, and it is a move which capitalism must make or perish.”
With regard to the situation in China at that time, he added:
“...if this war cloud now gathering in the East does burst, it will be the last capitalist war, so the death of that baneful institution will be like its birth, bloody, muddy and ignominious.”
But how did it come about that this marxist who denounced his own bourgeoisie so clearly, and who denounced the entry of the Socialist Deputy Millerand into the French Cabinet as a compromise of the 2nd International with the class enemy, continued to put forward the struggle for national independence in Ireland as a struggle to be supported by the proletariat? Historically we can situate the growth of confusion on the national question within the context of the period of reformist activity leading up to the imperialist war of 1914-18. This was a period when the permanent organs of the working class were tending more and more to find a place for themselves within capitalist society. Connolly's schema of an Irish Republic as a stage along the road to socialism is absolutely typical of the epoch in which he was writing.
“Since the abandonment of the unfortunate insurrectionism of the early Socialists whose hopes were exclusively concentrated on the eventual triumph of an uprising and barricade struggle, modern Socialism, relying on the slower but surer method of the ballot box, has directed the attention of its partisans towards the peaceful conquest of the forces of government in the interests of the revolutionary ideal.”
And in the same article, written in 1897, he concludes:
“Representative bodies in Ireland would express more directly the will of the Irish people than when those bodies reside in England. An Irish Republic would then be the natural depository of popular power; the weapon of popular emancipation, the only power which would show in the full light of day all those class antagonisms and lines of economic demarcation now obscured by the mists of bourgeois patriotism.”
In other words, whereas within Ireland a majority might be found who would vote for socialism, this Irish majority for Irish Socialism would vanish if the votes were counted within the Empire as a whole. Therefore, the need for an Irish Republic. Socialism in Ireland becomes purely an Irish affair. Years of reformist struggle within national boundaries were trapping revolutionaries inside a nationalist and parliamentary framework. The theoretical work, of clarification undertaken by revolutionaries like Lenin, Trotsky, or indeed Connolly, was part of a bitter fight against the degeneration of the 2nd International. Their stand on the national question was a reaction to the brazen chauvinism and imperialist policies of the “Labour leaders”. In the case of Connolly, we find real encroachments of bourgeois ideology in his writings, which show that he never grasped the capitalist nature of the nation so clearly as Marx did. It was clear that under imperialism, nationalism would have a different significance than in the days of ascendant capitalism. Whether this new significance would be positive or negative for the proletariat remained to be seen. Lenin and Luxemburg debated this question in one of the most important attempts to come to terms with decadent capitalism.4
In Labour in Irish History, Connolly describes capitalism as being something alien to Ireland, whereas capitalism is no more “alien” in Ireland than in the USA. Connolly had always insisted upon the necessity for the proletariat to defend its class autonomy against the bourgeoisie. But the basis of organisational and 'military' independence is political autonomy – class consciousness. Because revolutionaries in Ireland were unable to break with nationalism after 1914, when capitalism's progressive role had clearly come to an end, they were unable to firmly defend the class autonomy of the proletariat.
The final collapse of the pre-war workers' movement in 1914, and the mobilisation of millions of workers for the imperialist slaughter, came as an enormous shock to revolutionaries. These events precipitated immense confusions: Liebknecht of the German Social Democratic Party failed to oppose the first war credits because he accepted party discipline; many Bolsheviks called for an end to the war through “pressure” on the governments. In Ireland, Jim Larkin, the hero of the 1913 Dublin lockout, at first spoke about the possibility of conditionally supporting the British government. One of the most magnificent proletarian responses to the war was Connolly's A Continental Revolution, published on 15th August:
“But believing as I do that any action would be justified which would put a stop to this colossal crime now being perpetrated, I feel compelled to express the hope that ere long we may read of the paralysing of the internal transport service on the continent, even should the act of paralysing necessitate the erection of socialist barricades and acts of rioting by Socialist soldiers and sailors, as happened in Russia in 1905. (...) To me therefore, the Socialist of another country is a fellow-patriot, as the capitalist of my own country is a national enemy!”
These hopes for a continental revolt were not fulfilled in Connolly's lifetime. In face of a total mobilisation of the European proletariat, and the apparent lack of any possibility of a class solution to the crisis, Connolly began to abandon any class perspective. Because Ireland was under the control of the British state, opposition to that state was indeed the first duty of any revolutionary in Ireland. But only the proletariat can stop the war, just as only the proletariat can smash the system which produces such barbarism. The path which Connolly took after 1914, which led him to the barricades in the company of the petty bourgeois nationalists, was a total abandonment of what he had previously fought for. On 8th August he pointed out the conflict of interests between the workers on the one hand, and the bourgeoisie and the farmers within Ireland on the other; and he called for armed struggle in the streets, in order to “set the torch to a European conflagration”.
Nonetheless, the increasing importance of the nationalist perspective leads him to write: “Should a German army land in Ireland tomorrow we should be perfectly justified in joining it if by so doing we could rid this country once and for all from its connection with the Brigand Empire that drags us unwillingly into this war” (“Our Duty in This Crisis”, 8th August 1914).
The position which he develops, that the British Empire alone is responsible for the war – for a "war upon the German nation" opens the way for a military alliance with other imperialist powers. This reaches an absolute zenith of confusion in the spring of 1916, where he holds up the patriots of Belgium (who were after all the cannon fodder of Belgian and British imperialism) as models to be emulated in Ireland.
The nationalist opposition to the war crystallised in Ireland around the Irish Republican Brotherhood whose petty bourgeois madness was well expressed by their leading luminary, Patrick Pearse. He announced in December 1915:
“The last sixteen months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe. Heroism has come back to the earth (...) the old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields. Such august homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country.”
Because the workers were evidently not prepared to fight for the Irish Nation in 1916 the way they had fought for their own class interests in 1913, Connolly, in turning his back on the proletarian solution, was forced to join forces with such people as Pearse, despite his profound mistrust of them. Even while workers in Dublin were striking, Connolly and his Citizens Army of the 1913 lockout,5 were negotiating for a putsch with the nationalists, to be armed by German imperialism and which would declare the erection of precisely the kind of parliamentary-democratic state as would soon be used to crush the German workers. For the Easter Rising, the Citizens Army was dissolved into the Volunteers of the nationalists. All pretence of class autonomy had to disappear. The Easter Rising of 1916, staged in the middle of the war (“England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity”) was quickly and savagely crushed by the British Army. The promised German aid, insufficient in any case, never got through. Just as to this day the IRA lacks a serious backer.
The workers' movement in Ireland collapsed after 1916; its traditions obliterated in a half century of nationalist and sectarian counter-revolution. 1916 paved the way for the War of Independence which was the last hopeless attempt of the Irish bourgeoisie to assert a measure of independence. And when, in response to the world-wide proletarian upsurge which followed the war, the Irish workers began to struggle on their own class terrain, the bourgeoisie of Belfast and Dublin turned their weapons against them. In Belfast, the class solidarity of the workers, Catholic and Protestant, culminating in the strikes of 1919, was repeatedly sabotaged by Loyalists and Nationalists. In Limerick the patriotic unions, forced to call a general strike, kept it with the help of the IRA and the local bourgeoisie in Limerick within the bounds of an "anti-British" movement, before abruptly breaking it off, after the intercession of the local bishop. In early 1922 the Republican government in Dublin smashed the strike and occupation movements of the railway workers in Cork, and the mill and creamery workers in Mallow. The workers were turned out by the local IRA commandant on the orders of the cavalier guerrilla, Michael Collins, and by the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, the proud “followers” of Larkin and Connolly. In addition, IRA troubleshooters were moved in to prevent the outbreak of “disorder”.
Regarding these events, the Workers' Dreadnought wrote: “The Transport Workers' Federation had entered into an agreed national compromise from which the Mallow workers had dissented, we think, not only because they objected to any decrease of wages whatsoever, but because they are prepared to stand forth as rebels against the existing social order. They are fighting for a Workers' Republic and opposing the policies of the bourgeois Republicans, Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins and the others who at present hold the reins of power in Southern Ireland. The Mallow Workers' Council, whether a temporary example which they knew could not be sustained, or as an attempt to put the match to the tinder of revolt for all Ireland, deliberately raised the Red Flag of proletarian rule.”
The participation of Connolly in 1916, which would never have happened had the European proletariat risen earlier against capital, is hailed by the bourgeoisie as the “fitting climax” to Connolly's political career. Once again the dispossessed class is to be robbed of its own experience, the memory of its own class fighters, who are now presented as calculating capitalist politicians on a par with bloody functionaries like Mao or Ho.6 The October Revolution showed that the real way out of barbarism does not involve fighting for nation states which are now so many barriers to the development of the productive forces. And so it remains the historic task of the world proletariat today: the global destruction of capitalism, the abolition of nations.
RC
1Sinn Fein is essentially the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, the Democratic Unionist Party is that of the various Protestant para-militaries like the Ulster Defence Association.
2This was the year that the British Army was sent into Derry and Belfast in response to serious violence between Catholics and Protestants.
3In 1976, Germany was still divided into a Western zone occupied by the American, British, and French armies, and an Eastern zone occupied by the Russian troops of the then USSR.
4 The First World War did not drag all parts of the world into the conflict, so that proletarian elements could be confused about the nature of the war and the period. The possibility of “independent” bourgeois development in the colonies or the concept of the imperialist war was seen as a manifestation of the decadence of the metropolitan capitalist countries rather than of the decadence of global capitalism. Despite the confusions within the Bolshevik Party on this question, this did not at this time lead them to identify with their own national capital. On the contrary, their views on this subject threatened to dismember the Russian Empire. Whereas for Connolly, his position led him into direct alliance with his own bourgeoisie.
5The 1913 Dublin strike and lockout was one of the most important struggles of the working class in the last years before the war. The vast majority of the workers of Dublin were involved, but they suffered a serious defeat in part because of the failure of unions in Britain to offer them sufficient support.
6Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, the leaders of the Stalinist state capitalist regimes in China and Vietnam respectively.
By starting a new heading of ‘Readers’ Contributions’ on our website, and occasionally in our paper, we hope to encourage our readers and sympathisers to write texts and articles which can go into greater depth than is possible in our discussion forum, and so stimulate a longer term reflection. These articles, while being broadly based on proletarian politics, need not fully represent the positions of the ICC, or may deal with issues on which the ICC does not have a collective view. The question of art is clearly such an issue, and we welcome Boxer’s effort to deepen our understanding of the marxist approach to humanity’s creative productions.
In part one [6] we blew a bit of dust off the surface of the question of art by taking up some of the marxist analyses of Max Raphael in relation to a ideological domain of art, which he said included the “sovereign nature of architecture” and the “importance of folk-poetry”. We attempted to look at the relations between different expressions in the domain of art, the relations between the domain of art and other ideologies, and also to the economic base from which these ideological expressions spring. Using an intriguing quote from Marx in Grundrisse we looked into the question of the “eternal nature” of Greek art, a seeming contradiction if art is linked to an economic base that’s since disappeared. Part of the answer to this question lies in the integral nature of Greek mythology which was generally shared in an immediate and pressing way due to the historical conditions. But it is with the cave paintings, engravings (and portable art) of the twenty-five-thousand-year long expressions of the Upper Palaeolithic that we are once again confronted with an “eternal nature” of art from a people whose magic and mythology would have been even more pressing and widely shared in their spiritual production than that of the Greeks. Raphael has bought all his artistic and marxist criticism to bear on the question of Upper Palaeolithic art, on its possible meanings and spiritual depth. We will look at this below but first a slight diversion entirely in keeping with Raphael’s marxist approach to the period.
From the long “procession” on the Lion Panel at Chauvet Cave. Discovered in 1994, the paintings are around 33,000 years old and described by its discoverers as seeing “time stand still”. The paintings confirm Raphael’s analysis that detailed compositional art would date back to the Aurignacian, a period much earlier than the caves he studied. While there is powerful realism here there are also strange and human-like lions in the pride. The bison are shown in a typical pose and many other paintings over thousands of years indicate that the bison clan would have been the one that was composed of shamans and sorcerers.
Around thirteen thousand years ago in a cave called Roc-aux-Sorciers of the Magdalenian period in Vienne, France, there were on the wall, amongst other profound expressions of art, three life-sized depictions of women deeply etched into the rock face in a natural and harmonious pose. Despite the damage done to them over time, they appear like floating, erotic goddesses. There are obvious similarities with these once-painted figures and the Classical and Renaissance trio of Graces, “But by far the most extraordinary thing about these figures is the mastery of perspective and the three-quarters view, as they half turn like dancers in a line”[i] as if they are ready to peel off and join the dance. In the same period, on a cave wall in Tarn, France, there are reliefs of two reclining women, which again despite the damage, have “... caused a great deal of astonishment because of the mastery of perspective and easy freedom of pose with its foreshadowing of Classical and Renaissance art” (ibid). At Osatrava Petrkovice, in the Czech Republic, there is a small figure of a woman’s torso carved in hard, shiny black haematite. The piece comes from the Gravettian period some twenty-five thousand years ago, and draws these remarks from Nancy Sandars above: “In a setting that gives a weird foretaste of the Industrial Revolution with its coal and iron, the artist has produced a figure of touching naturalism and truth. The rugged quality in the work is probably due to the material but the slim, youthful figure has the proportions and even equilibrium (the weight on the right leg) of the late Classical Venus or of the three Graces”. I agree that the ruggedness of the latter carving is due to the material but the cubist appearance of this portable work also enhances its expressive nature and has similarities to the cubist appearance of the symbolic Acheulean “hand-axes” of at least half-a-million years ago, one of the first expressions of art. The works of art on the walls of the Franco-Cantabrian caves studied by Raphael includes Les Combarelles and Font-de-Gaume in France and Altimira and Covalanas in Spain are expressed in the context of compositions that include certain animals and abstract “signs”, but their aesthetic qualities, their similarities and links with classical art are undeniable.
However, we do have to be careful here because a classical symmetry is not the rule on the cave walls; on the contrary asymmetric expressions abound. And animals, not classical human figures, are at the centre of Upper Palaeolithic art. I make this point about aesthetics because very recently the idea was still being put forward, in much the same way, of the “savage past of humanity”, of a development to a finer art from ignorant childlike beginnings. This view that has been soundly contradicted by the analyses of Max Raphael despite the greatly limited access of his sources and it has been further contradicted by many later discoveries since his book was written in 1945. Raphael wrote seventy years ago: “... the dogma that Palaeolithic paintings belong to so-called primitive art gained favour. It has been said that Palaeolithic artists were incapable of dominating surfaces or reproducing space: that they could produce only individual animals, not groups and certainly not compositions. The exact opposite of this is true: we find not only groups, but compositions that occupy the length of the cave wall or the surface of a ceiling; we find representations of space, historical paintings and even the golden section! But we find no primitive art”[ii].
Even apparently random patterns of squiggles, doodle-like appearances (sometimes called “macaronis”) that are widespread in the Upper Palaeolithic caves of Europe have a depth and expression of their own that’s not at all related to some sort of “primitive” expression as a basic stage in a linear development of prehistoric art[iii]. This finger-fluting – sometimes the areas of the soft cave walls have also been incised by some stone or other instrument – relate to hand prints and compositions of animals, with studies showing that in some cases under the “random” patterns lie representational images[iv]. Whatever we are looking at in these caverns at any time during the period of the Upper Palaeolithic, it is not “primitive” art. As abstractions alone there is a depth and consistency to these “doodles” that suggests a spiritual relationship to the cave wall and the cosmos which was believed to lay behind it. There’s no doubt that, along with the development of society, forms of art have suffered advances and regressions with some distinct expressions during the Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods clearly being overthrown and superseded, with cave paintings being deliberately defaced and megalithic stones literally overturned, making way for new expressions. This is to be expected in art forms that, amongst other things, represent social organisation, spiritual belief and conflict as well as, as I’ll suggest below, the possible mediation and resolution of conflict, paving the conditions for advance in a situation which is dynamic rather than static. The reverse is also true in that the dynamics of art can turn to the status-quo which in its turn favours regression. Artistic techniques and the more cosmopolitan use of materials have certainly seen major developments over thousands of years, but the fundamentals of art are profoundly embedded in the prehistoric period of humanity and particularly in the Upper Palaeolithic whose peoples Raphael called “history-makers par excellence”[v]. Intuition would suggest that the roots of this art lie in Africa and our understanding of the global geographic dispersion that had its source in this continent would tend to support that view; the fundamentals appear in cave paintings in Australia and Salawasi, Indonesia around the same time and similar expressions occur at different times throughout Africa and into the Americas as it was colonised by humanity.
The cave paintings of Chauvet in the Ardeche region of France, discovered 20 years ago and dating back to 33,000 years, and the paintings discovered last year in Salawesi, Indonesia dating back 40,000 years show, at least, the paucity of those who dismiss the artistic strength of early Palaeolithic artists - already underlined by the virulence and abuse of their arguments[vi] . Against these pernicious ideas the discoveries of Chauvet, Salawesi, Cosquer, Costlllo and many others, made decades after his book, confirm and strengthen the analyses of Max Raphael and, looking at them, can’t fail to again bring up the question of Marx’s “eternal charm” in a period whose specifics were totally unknown to him.
The “birdman” from the depths of the Shaft at Lascaux. The painting is on a wall in a hardly accessible place with many spent lamps on the floor. Only one person could have possibly got in here at a time. The bison is wounded and an accompanying rhinoceros and horse looks fit. Surrounded by “signs” it seems some sort of magic is at work here and, while it’s very difficult to say what’s going on, the ithyphallic figure appears elsewhere at Trois-Freres, Ariege France with similar figures appearing elsewhere in the Magdalenian period. Birds are regular but unusual in Upper Palaeolithic art, appearing much more in later, Neolithic barbarian art. Also found in this “apse” were flint blades, ivory spears with signs on them, sea-shells from the 200 km distant Atlantic Coast which have been stained with red ochre.
We are not looking for the origins of art because these lay much deeper. What we want to look at is a particular expression within the domain of art: the Upper Palaeolithic cave paintings, etchings, engravings, scrapings and doodles, collectively called parietal art (as opposed to sculptured mobile art). These expressions, while the artist is also something of a magician, are not, in the main, solitary specialised functions (though they definitely are in places), but they belong to the whole of society and were no doubt recognised by the peoples of the time as such. Max Raphael says that these paintings tell us little about the functioning of society but then, as usual, very methodically, he tells us a great deal about just that: the clear relationship of the artistic superstructure to the economic base of hunter-gatherers, the organisation in families, the material means of production, the spiritual production, the importance of magic, the differentiations and conflict within a society that was by no means an idyll: “Upper Palaeolithic art shows faith in all natural beings and their affinity and the existence of an organisational force capable of translating magic into reality. This was the magic of the Palaeolithic age and its art. In the best Palaeolithic paintings are shown charges of energy that comes from an objective supernatural character and these charges are perpetrated through the existential intensification of the object.... (The) artist as a magician had all the powers of society at his[vii] disposal, inspired by the group who believed in and took magic and resurrection seriously... the physical and ideological forces of the social group were always there to translate the magic into actual or imagined reality”.[viii] Today, these paintings look modern but there is no art that is more alien and distant from us. Just as symmetry and balance is unusual in these works, then so is the depictions of individuals. We’ve already mentioned that, like the Greeks, the integral and generalised nature of prehistoric mythology favoured the development of an art form that was timeless: “Today, mankind, amidst enormous sacrifices and suffering is, with imperfect awareness, striving for a future in the eyes of which all our history will sink to the level of ‘prehistory’. Palaeolithic man was carrying out a comparable struggle. Thus the art most distant from us becomes the nearest; the most alien to us becomes the closest”[ix]. The basis of this art and its animal compositions is an expression of the conscious break from the animal kingdom and a drive forward to new and wider conditions of existence from a much earlier stage of humanity, involving the identification of obstacles in order to overcome them and move onto a new stage. As in many areas of anthropology, we can’t mechanically reconstruct this period from ethnology – we’ve seen this danger elsewhere in ideas about the “primitive killer savages” of the past from today’s examples of isolated tribes that have descended into pure superstition.
For example, the totemism of today’s “primitive” peoples is nothing like that of prehistory. In this case, any resemblance between the “primitive” tribes of the 20th or 21st century and the Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, struggling against their clear and present dangers as well as their own internal conflicts, has to be treated with care, even if ethnological evidence can be a useful pointer and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. See for example the work of Jerome Lewis among the ‘pygmy’ tribes in the Congo which doesn’t point in the direction of “killer savages”[x]; and there are further examples, some of which are quoted below.
Raphael’s work consists of trying to understand the importance of the group: the interpretation of the parts in relation to the whole; the drawing out of the meanings of the groups and individual animals, because in art form and content tend towards the same expression. The groups of animals relate to social organisation and this social nature is essential to Max Raphael’s analysis. In these compositions of animals the paintings acquire a greater significance. In the caves that he examines (and in many others that he knew nothing about) certain animal species dominate; there’s antagonism and conflict in various compositions. These expressions are much more than hunting magic, probably pre-date it, and the same animals appear almost everywhere, though their frequency varies with the caves and in the main they are not the ones that served as a food source. There are the carnivorous animals that were not hunted, shown in the most meticulous detail with their associated behaviours (Raphael wouldn’t have known about most of these from the caves he knew about): “The character of each animal seems to be as limited as the subject matter, everywhere the reindeer live a bright cheerful idyll, just as the bison live a stormy drama, the horses display playful sensitivity and the mammoths (painted long after they were extinct in places) unshakeable dignity and gravity”[xi]. The force of these compositions is a combination of naturalism, magic and totemism. Some animals form pairs taking up certain positions in relation to others to the point of “crossing” one another, and even the same or different animals merging into one hybrid form; these are also different from the anthropomorphic sorcerer figures. Horses take in different breeds of horses and there is a clear relationship of horses and hinds to mammoths. Later discoveries of earlier works also show the rhinoceroses living a “stormy drama”. There appears to be a “transference” of one animal to another (lions and horses for example) and “processions” of animals. Larger groups appear as spectators, in what Raphael says seems to be a “chorus”. There are vulvas and sexually excited animals demonstrating the magic of fertility and the sexual overtones of some of the compositions. Sometimes the struggle of groups is separated as at Les Combarelles in France where on the left wall conflict dominates and on the right the scene is peaceful and the conflict seems to evolve into a united group. These are obviously not cast-iron interpretations from Raphael but they are based on a sound methodology that has been confirmed and validated by later finds.
“Palaeolithic man knew no magic without action, nor could he imagine action without magic; to him theory and practice were one”[xii]. And this unity maintained all its force to the very last expressions of this art over a period of twenty-five thousand years. In fact, with later evidence unknown to Raphael, we can clearly see that strong elements of this art were maintained and developed into barbarian society for over a further fifteen millennia as expressed in the stone, ceramics and metal workings of this universal barbarian culture(s). Raphael saw this himself in the early Egyptian pottery that he studied. Before and outside of civilisation, and in continuity with their ancestors, these barbarians were another “history-making peoples”. In the Upper Palaeolithic, magic was the “science” of its time: it included the totality of all existing knowledge and took into account the means of production through which society was to be transformed. This knowledge certainly included a detailed study of animal behaviour and nature, and confirmed mankind’s conscious superiority over the animal which embraced a developing mythology. Mankind in this period was very much social and according to Raphael the animals symbolised the clan [xiii]. The social unity of society was represented by the groups of animals but this art also represented social tensions, conflict and confrontation: it represented an arena of struggle. There are also clear expressions of catharsis and reconciliation. Within his marxist analysis Raphael uses his structuralist strengths to counter-pose and differentiate sides of oppositions, even evoking the Wagnerian theme of Liebestod “Love Death” as one of many[xiv].
As with many other aspects of this society we can’t know very much for certain and this applies to the question of magic as the “science” of its time. But there are many aspects to this very detailed pictorial record that point us in this direction. Raphael looked at the paintings on the ceiling of the cave at Altamira – which had compositions just like the earlier paintings at Chauvet, as well as contemporary with the caves of Niaux, Castillo, Les Combarelles, etc. It was probably the shaman, the distinctive member of society, who was in most cases the artist. Behind the apparent disorder of the bison and hinds on Altamira’s ceiling, Raphael detects the magic of the eye and magic of the hand – action at a distance. These compositions, along with “signs”, will stand a great deal of examination The scene here is a battle, one where reconciliation takes place. Raphael uses ethnological evidence to explain the unequivocal positions of propitiation and atonement that some of the animals, the bison particularly, take up. There’s clearly a power at work here and this expression of atonement has been seen in much later “primitive” societies such as the Siberian Kamchatkans and Ostiaks, as well as the Nootka Indians of British Columbia. Raphael gives some time to the study of these societies in the work of James George Fraser[xv] . As elsewhere, Raphael warns that we have no way of knowing exactly the mind of this prehistoric period, in relation to magic as to anything else. But the pictorial record, the sheer force of the art, and the analysis given to it, as well as decent and relevant ethnological evidence, suggests we are on the right track.
The aurochs and horse clans represented on a pendent wall at Chauvet. There’s ambivalence over the positions of the rhinoceroses with animals “crossing” one another. The horses have expressions of undoubted feminine tenderness while the aurochs show some masculine bulk. There are also indeterminate animals and signs and this particular painting shows additions over a period of some thousands of years.
The family group is expressed in this art again through animals and not by human figures. Sometimes the male figure is at the centre of the group and sometime the female figure. Woman as Being is expressed in the female deer and horses; clans with their femininity and “combined wisdom and a warlike spirit and from which derive the Amazon, Hagia Sophia and the witch”[xvi], later finding their way into barbarian art and Greek mythology. Raphael rejects a simple form of totemism: “But whatever the social organisation may have been in each case, however tenaciously each group clung to its own as best, all these groups express and embody the consciousness of their unity in the shape of an animal. This is the fundamental expression of totemism”. Just as Jews and Muslims were forbidden to make images of their God so too did the peoples of the Upper Palaeolithic adopt a similar approach with the animal figures representing humans – taboo plays a part here and a wider part in general. Not only are human forms rarely expressed but there even seems to be a taboo on full-face representations of animals – they are mostly asymmetrical and this is also related to motion. This totemism did not remain static but developed into a “realism that transcended nature itself”. One of its developments is into monumentalism – the mammoth, you might say, is the elephant in the cave. Only the mammoth follows a general pattern and is a source of stability, reconciliation and power. The mammoth clan, if such a thing existed, must have been greatly respected. In Chauvet alone there are some 60 plus depictions of mammoths; their appearance is similar to everywhere else and this includes here the “embracing” of other animals. Magic was the means of art and it drove the synthesis between naturalism and monumentalism as expressed by the symbolism of the mammoth. The decorated ceilings of Altamira and Lascaux are works of monumental proportions. The same is true of the cave walls of Chauvet where along one panel (there are several different panels) there’s a “procession” involving felines, bison, various canids, rhinoceroses, ibex, horses and indeterminate animals in states from a powerful calm to frenzy, following each other in a staggering “occasion of state” overlooked by a half-bison, half-woman sorceress painted onto a large pendent rock. The “procession” is broken by a large inverted natural “V” shaped undulating cleft in the wall from which emerges a mammoth, a horse, a rhinoceros and a bison. Unlike the animals and “signs” in the procession, which are all painted red, these animals are all in black. Beneath these figures there is a shallow blood-red pool formed through the drips permeating the walls and stripping out the ochre. There’s no reason to think that the morphology of the cave has changed much in 33,000 years so this is probably an original feature. The sexual tension is apparent and the whole composition, like others in the cave, can only be described as theatrical. Magic was socialised and society became a magic force. This is beyond the punctual expressions of hunting magic and has a more profound basis than assistance to the kill, i.e. it’s more than predators and prey. It was in the social observation of nature, of cause and effect of animal behaviour, in its conscious assimilation, that society advanced: “At Les Combarelles the scenes that have social significance are so solemn and include so many participants that they impress one as state occasions. At the same time, both morally and politically, Palaeolithic ideology reaches universal human dimensions, and some of the scenes have the grandeur of Aeschylian tragedies”[xvii]. From the observation of nature magic endowed this art with life without detracting from the unity of the image. And despite the many different depictions of animals, bison, hind, horse, lions, mammoth, bear, stags, aurochs and so on, none are identical, they are all different.
Totemism not only developed into monumentalism with the ubiquitous depictions of the mammoth and “state occasions”; it also expressed itself in abstract symbolism where truncated versions of the concave and convex curves of the animal’s bodies and legs were reduced to “signs” and “motifs”. Later research has further shown that the curves and features on some of the animals were painted or incised along or on natural fissures and features of the cave wall. Along with the hand prints pressed against the wall this indicates that the wall itself had a meaning as a way into the spiritual world. Some of the paintings at Chauvet (and elsewhere) show great use of the natural features of the cave, with animals appearing to emerge from the wall itself. There are also offerings, bone, antler, quartz, roots, etc., that have been pushed into cracks in the wall, all of which tends to reinforce its importance for access to the “other world” (for more on this see The Mind in the Cave, by David Lewis-Williams, Thames and Hudson, 2002. This was research that Raphael would have been unaware of). And it’s important to remember here - and Raphael was well aware of this - that the caves were not dwelling places, certainly not the areas where the paintings were done: they were often not on flat, accessible walls, these being deliberately ignored. These were places of festivity and spirituality where tensions and conflict could be confronted. The wealth of the art on display at Chauvet, and its age, tend to support many of the points made by Raphael: the duality and continuity of the human and animal world, the oppositions and antagonisms of the compositions, the anthropomorphic figures, the animals with human expressions; and in Chauvet, the spiritual link between the two worlds. It’s also necessary to mention here the importance of the choice of surface and the sophistication of the preparation, the range of materials and the techniques used. At Chauvet, where the different and autonomous morphology of the various cave walls are linked together by decoration of both representations and “signs”, there appears to have been few “visitors”, though there are signs of adolescents having been taken there. Bears inhabited the cave before and after humans: this is evidenced by the paintings over and under their scratch marks, with at least one claw mark incorporated into a painting.
The “Hall of Bulls”, early Magdalenian at Lascaux in France. There’s a number of aurochs and deer coming from the opposite direction in some sort of confrontation and/or meeting-up. The panel is 9 metres long and scaffolding would have to have been used. Some of the depictions are very large and were possibly painted by a number of people. There are a few signs around the animals and black and red dots and dashes.
Raphael talks a lot about the “force” and “motion” of these paintings, the “Being” “that has divested itself of all mere relationships and yet includes the individual not as an accident but as an essence”. This Being doesn’t transcend the world but expresses its constancy. The present sense of danger in the Upper Palaeolithic world could only accentuate this sense of Being, bringing forth the “self-assertion, self-revelation and self-creation of its substance... in general the Upper Palaeolithic artists achieve the same objectivity, the same freedom from purely subjective elements and even from human consciousness... The artist’s ability lies in its reproduction of the social world in materials that speak to our senses”[xviii]. Here is part of its eternal charm and timeless quality[xix]. And if the artist can rise above his time, and the evidence here is that he clearly can, and produce such works, “his will nevertheless remains the social slave of the compulsions of his time”. The anthropomorphic figures, which are everywhere, can express fertility but are more concerned with the motion of magic; there are those that appear at the beginning of a composition, there are those right in the centre and those that are actors in the whole. Movement and motion was fundamental to this society from the appearance, agglomeration and dispersion of the herds. It must have been conceived in a way we can’t imagine. These shaman-type figures are also found alone in the recesses and the deepest and most difficult places to in the cave. The spiritual journey and communication via the animal and into the cave wall are evident here. The historical record of the different clans, which include the shamans, sorceresses and the like, could include the specific artist. Raphael says that it looks like the sorcerers posed the question: ‘Who are you?’ famously answered by Odysseus, ‘Neither man nor animal: No one’. “The main task of a history of art is to show that these forms, forms and not contents! – must necessarily arise from definite economic, social, political, moral, religious, etc., roots, that these forms express them, manifest them; vice-versa, that they react on these roots and play a part in their transformation”[xx]. Given our knowledge of this period and its art we can only do this in a fragmented way, but we can attempt it.
For the purveyors of the idea of unbroken progress, there’s a gulf between the primitive “signs” and later animal representations that further develop into the “proper” art of civilisation. For them it is inconceivable that Upper Palaeolithic artists could express a synthesis of geometric figures and animal representations, a unity in diversity. Some “signs” came from truncated versions of animal figures, possibly expressions of magic, and others have been universally demonstrated to come from various forms of altered states of consciousness – in this respect see The Mind in the Cave by David Lewis-Williams already mentioned above. The dashes and dots, usually at the beginning of the artistic presentations of the cave, are a short-hand for something. They appear on their own, usually equidistant, sometimes over long distances, they make up animal figures entirely, link them or are superimposed over them. Sometimes they are contrasted to continuous lines. What they mean is by no means sure but hunter-gatherer existence is separated by motion through space that must have been particularly immediate and relevant to them in following the herds and in their closeness to nature. These signs are possibly representative of a motion of a distinct and energising kind. Just looking at one bison on the Altamira ceiling shows connections between continuous lines and discontinuous dashes that seem to point to a sense of movement and this is expressed many times elsewhere. The contradiction between Being and motion could possibly be addressed by the artist through a series of patterns, of dots and dashes. If we don’t know what they are saying it is still quite possible that, overall, these signs represent some sort of written language. Some of these signs and compositions make their way into general barbarian art prior to and during the Neolithic. Raphael himself points to some similarities with these signs and the some of the letters of the Latin alphabet.
From one side of the world to the other around forty thousand years ago, hand-prints were used as an artistic expression and in Chauvet and elsewhere they make up entire expressions. Raphael doesn’t underestimate the importance of the hand, seeing it representing superiority over the animal kingdom, driving forwards man’s spiritual, physical and productive forces. There’s symbolic meaning to the hand and the fingers in some major religions: “In Upper Palaeolithic art the hand was laid on the animal both magically and artistically”, underlining a further stage in human evolution. But while humanity was “... no longer dominated by animals (it was) still subjected to its own spiritual means of domination over the animal world”. Like the great majority of animals depicted, the hand is asymmetrical and this is emphasised when it is spread. In the Upper Palaeolithic the animal was everything and it was such through the intermediary of the human hand.
Part of a mammoth procession in a typical monumental pose in the Rouffiignac cave in the Dordogne from the Magdalenian period in France. The wider drawing shows Capricorn hinds and other animals accompanying the mammoths. There’s both gravity and lightness in the depiction. In the 8 km of underground caves there are 150 mammoths depicted, 70% of the total animals shown.
The counter-posing of different structures and compositions, what could be argued as its dialectical nature, is a major feature of prehistoric cave art and it is expressed in almost every cave that has been surveyed. As elsewhere the ceiling of Altamira shows both the stillness and concrete nature of the animal and the infinite possibilities of movement. The effect of movement/stillness here, as at Font-de-Gaume, Les Combarelles, Lascaux and Chauvet is palpable. The magic also changes the movement of sexual passion into the stillness of exhaustion. Struggle and death is represented in the animal and it’s the genius of the artist that brings out the universal meaning in a transcendence of reality. These clear oppositions expressing the inner and outer worlds, and the tensions behind them allowed “... the artist to rise above the historically given and limited magic totemism into the sphere of timeless aesthetic object and this translation is in turn a condition for the formal development of the theme into an artistic whole”. The oppositions are between nomadic and sedentary, masculine bulk and feminine tenderness, totemism and magic, magic and political power, agglomeration and dispersion, spirituality and physical force, divergence and convergence, unity and diversity. These works of art are attempts to overcome and synthesise these tensions. The paintings of the herds and prides at Altamira and Chauvet are compositions of a whole range of elements: processions, a “chorus”, crowds and dispersion, parallel steps with the focal point at Altamira being the bison/shaman figure confronted by a very large hind with the crucial distances between the animals, along with the definitely placed signs and the expression of a definite concrete content.
Upper Palaeolithic art is as distant as it is as close and, for the most part, we are unable to read and interpret its expressions. We’ve seen the “scientists” who brand this art “... with the mask of primitiveness, the laziest excuse of humanistic science in the period of monopoly capitalism, intended to conceal the lack of ideas and their deterioration in a whole historical period”. Max Raphael puts forwards the thesis of homogeneous compositional art for a period of tens of thousands of years and raises the question of the artistic unity of other periods (and the relationship to their economic substructures); the theme of Greek art based on Euclidian frames of reference; the art of the Renaissance derived from the human anatomical structure. All of this underlying a general thesis of the human spirit and progress that humanity has made in understanding itself. The art forms, particularly the later expressions of Christianity, centred on the human or the god-like figure whereas these paintings clearly centre on animals, animals as humans, as clans, opponents, allies; and animals who override contradictions as magic: “ (This) enables us to show why a definite world of forms must necessarily correspond to definite material and religious bases. Thus the history of art can leave the Linnaean stage of cataloguing unessential characteristics and become a serious science”. I haven’t done a detailed study of them, such a study would be interesting, but even a superficial look at the many cave paintings and engravings discovered since his book show the strength of Raphael’s hypotheses with a remarkable validation. It’s a validation of the marxist method.
Rhinoceros in an agitated state at Chauvet, They appear to be chased by a group of horses and other animals that are out of picture appearing on the right. Watching this from a rock opposite is what appears to be a contemplating baboon – the only primate shown in any cave art of this period. Unfortunately, while it looks definite, it is an optical illusion and the animal is in fact another rhinoceros. The whole episode is another “stormy drama”.
There’s one question where we would take issue with Raphael’s analysis and that is where, at the end of his book, he suggests, quite against his overall arguments, that this society was a class society based on oppression: “On the other hand Palaeolithic art is close enough to us to make us feel the unity of mankind and reduce the seeming differences between history and prehistory. The difference is justified by the fact that so-called prehistory has no written tradition, no historical documents we are able to read. Then, as today, man was oppressed by man; then, as today, art represented the wishes and interests of the ruling classes which possessed the spiritual and material tools and weapons.”
Where would exploitation come from in this society, where is its economic base and who is the ruling class? There is no class society and no basis for exploitation but Raphael points to the control of tools and weapons. Archaeological evidence, plenty of it, shows us that throughout the whole lithic period – over two million years – there was an abundance and development of tools, i.e., the means of production. From the early time of the Acheulean “axe”, vast deposits of these tools have been found, often unused. The Acheulean axe itself became one of the first works of art and symbolism. In the Upper Palaeolithic, again there’s evidence of an abundance of tools and their refinement shown in whole tool “industries” where, incidentally, Sapiens and Neanderthal worked side by side for a while. There is no economic basis for exploitation and whatever form of alienation these peoples felt – and this is another question we can’t answer here – it wasn’t from the means of production.
And who is the ruling class? Among the Australian aborigines thousands of years ago, different ‘classes’ were set up in order to avoid inter-marriage. But this is no different from the later gentes (or the earlier clans – if they existed) where inter-marriage became taboo and descent firmly fixed in the female line. If there was oppression of “man by man” where could it have come from? It can only be from the shaman/sorcerers, the warriors or the Chiefs/Judges. The paintings show clear distinctions and differentiations in this society but no expression of exploitation or oppression – on the contrary Raphael constantly emphasises the unity of these works above all other. And most of them were probably painted by the shaman/sorcerers. In fact when we move from the Upper Palaeolithic into the Neolithic farming/metal-working barbarian society prior to civilisation (and class society), which also brought the art of its ancestors into its own, we find shaman/sorcerers, warriors, chiefs/judges but still no class society – no exploitation, no ruling class, no state. In fact what we do find are clear expressions of communistic practices: everyone has a voice, the balanced role of the sexes, no private property, etc. Class society developed along with civilisation, the state and private property and then art came to be completely at the service of the ruling class. The communistic tendencies of barbarian society were crushed but not extinguished by class society and, just like the Upper Palaeolithic, this society had its “chains”, its limits and had to fall. The abiding feature of these societies compared with the proletariat today is the sense of struggle, of a “history-making” people, but no class society nor exploitation.
We must leave on a positive note for Raphael’s work on this amazing art: the dynamic of struggle; differentiation within a unity; the dialectical asymmetrical nature of this art in expressing myth, magic and symbolism. Marx posed an apparent conundrum in ascribing an eternal charm to the art of a long dead society. I think that in his analyses of prehistoric art Raphael has gone some way towards bridging the question. Today, despite its distance, we feel a unity with this art, a unity which in its timeless quality to some extent breaks down the difference between prehistory and history This earlier period was no idyll but one with the “comfortable chains” of primitive communism (Marx) and a period of struggle for survival shown by the written records of these paintings. And we should remember that in the main this society succeeded because it lasted for some twenty-five thousand years: “The study of Palaeolithic art should serve as a reminder to us that it is high time to put an end to the prehistory of mankind and to begin a new era in which the human race will consciously make its history. ‘What’s past is prologue’”[xxi]
Boxer. 11.3.16
[i] Prehistoric Art in Europe, Professor N. K. Sandars. Yale University Press, 1985.
[ii] Prehistoric Cave Paintings, Max Raphael, Pantheon Books, 1945. The “golden section” referred to here is a post-Euclidian geometric relationship that appears in many forms of art and mathematics. There is some discussion about this.
[iii] This kind of linear, mechanical view implied in the idea of a crude primitivism moving towards a refined, superior product is a view that can be used to support the idea of the supremacy of bourgeois society. Primitive here is used as a term of denigration and abuse which it doesn’t have to be.
[iv] Michel Lorblanchet, Finger markings in Peche-Merle and their place in prehistoric art. 1992.
[v] Prehistoric Cave Paintings. Pantheon Books, 1945.
[vi]One of the greatest proponents of sarcasm and abuse has been the British archaeologist Paul Bahn, described on his Wikipedia page as an “active consultant expert” for the BBC. See Membrane and Numb Brain. A Close Look at a Recent Claim for Shamanism in Palaeolithic Art” P. G. Bahn, 1997 and the response to his reactionary views: Les chamanes de la prehistoire. Text integral, polemique et reponses, Jean Clottes et David Lewis-Williams, 1998.
[vii]Raphael makes the central role of woman clear in all the activities around spiritual production. Subsequent archaeological finds have pointed to the likely role of women as shamans, sorcerers and magicians in prehistoric society.
[viii] The Demands of Art, Max Raphael. Princeton University Press, 1968.
[ix] Prehistoric Cave Paintings
[xi] Prehistoric Cave Paintings.
[xii] Idem.
[xiii] Raphael is not entirely clear about the “clan” but I think that we can surmise a relationship between the Palaeolithic clan, if it existed, and its relations of parts to the whole, to the development of the barbarian gentes as outlined by Lewis-Henry Morgan in Ancient Society... and Engels in Origin of the Family.
[xiv] I think that David Lewis-Williams (see below) was correct in defining Raphael as a “structuralist”, in part anyway. Structuralism began and is epitomised in the works of Giambattista Vico. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giambattista_Vico [8].
[xv] The Golden Bough, a study in magic and religion, 1890, James George Frazer, which, among other things, documents the similarities in magic and belief systems from ethnological evidence around the world.
[xvi] Prehistoric Cave Paintings
[xvii] Idem.
[xviii]Idem.
[xix] We know that this particular expression of art lasted for twenty-five thousand years and continued in content some millennia after. It must be very likely that these expressions were in line with earlier developments in Africa. The developing form and its content were one and the same for a long period.
[xx] Prehistoric Cave Paintings. All quotes now from this work.
[xxi] Idem.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/germany
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/flint_water.jpg
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/james-connolly.jpg
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/2065/easter-rising
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/james-connolly
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201509/13379/max-raphael-and-marxist-perspective-art-part-1#_ftn5
[7] https://radicalanthropologygroup.org/sites/default/files/pdf/pub_lewisthesisfull.pdf
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giambattista_Vico
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/263/culture