From Emmanuel Macron to Daniel Cohn-Bendit, from Figaro to Marianne, from BFM TV to Radio France, the extreme-right to the extreme-left, whether criticising or celebrating it, all in their own way commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of May 68 by covering it with a shed-load of lies.

No, May 68 is not a "specificité française"!

No-one can deny that May 68 took place within a dynamic that was international. But in focusing on the night of March 22 at Nanterre, on the "electrifying" eloquence of Cohn-Bendit, the smothering paternalism of De Gaulle, the impact between "the new and old France"... this international dimension is deliberately pushed into the background in order to finally make May 68 a "specificité française". In reality, the wave of student unrest started in 1964, at Berkeley University in California with demands for the right to speak, the end of racial segregation and an end to the war in Vietnam. This wave spread to Japan in 1965, Britain at the end of 1967, Italy, Spain, Germany, Brazil, Turkey and to Mexico at the beginning of 1968. But above all, May 68 was part of an international workers' movement. The wave of strikes which began in France in 1967, reaching its heights in 1968, reverberated throughout the world up to 1974: the famous Cordobazo in Argentina, the "Hot Autumn" of Italy in 1969, Spain and Poland in 1971, ranging through Belgium and Britain in 1972, Scandinavia, Germany...

Nor is May 68 a "student revolt"!

The proletarian character of May 68 is often masked by the emphasis put on the student movement. The most sophisticated and devious version of this mystification clearly comes from the leftists and the unions: "The strength of May 68 is the convergence of the students and the workers!" Lies! If May 68 dynamised the struggle throughout the world, it's precisely because the working class wasn't dumbly following the movement but, on the contrary, it was its motor force.

The student movement of the 1960's was of a petty-bourgeois nature, one of its clearest aspects being its desire for “immediate change". At the time, there was no major threat of not being able to find a reasonable job at the end of your studies. The student movement which began in 1964 developed in a period of prosperity. But, from 1967, the economic situation seriously deteriorated, pushing the proletariat into struggle. From the beginning of 1967 important confrontations occurred: at Bordeaux (Dassault aviation factory), at Besançon and in the region of Lyon (strike and occupation at Rhodia, strike at Berliet), the mines of Lorraine, the naval dockyards at Saint Nazaire, Caen... These strikes prefigured what was going to happen from the middle of May 1968 across the country. You couldn't say that this storm broke out of a clear, blue sky. Between March 22 and May 13 1968, the ferocious repression of the students increasingly mobilised a working class carried along by its instinctive feelings of solidarity. May 14, at Nantes, young workers launched a strike. The next day the movement won over the Renault factory at Cléon in Normandy as well as two other factories in the region. On May 16, other Renault factories joined the movement and red flags flew over Flins, Sandouville and le Mans. The entry of Renault-Billancourt into the struggle was then a beacon: it was the biggest factory in France (35,000 workers) and the saying went "When Renault sneezes, France catches a cold". On May 17, the strike wave hit the whole of France. It was a totally spontaneous movement and all over France it was the young workers who were at the forefront. There weren't any precise demands: this was the expression of a general discontent. On May 18, there were a million workers on strike; on May 22, eight million. This was therefore the biggest strike in the history of the international workers' movement. All sectors were involved: industry, transport, energy, post and communications, teaching, administrations, media, research laboratories, etc. During this period, occupied faculties, some public buildings like the Theatre de Odeon in Paris, the streets, places of work, became spaces of permanent political discussion. "We talk and we listen" became a slogan.

Neither was May 68 a "lifestyle revolution"!

Fraudulently reduced to its "student" dimension, May 68 is presented as the symbol of sexual and women’s liberation.

The great movements of proletarian struggle have always put forward the “woman question”. At the time of the Paris Commune in 1871, in the mass strike of 1905 and the 1917 Russian revolution, women workers played an inestimable role. But what the student petty-bourgeoisie of 1968 extolled is something else altogether: it's liberation “right here and now” within capitalism, it's the liberation of humanity through sexual liberation and not as a product of a long struggle against the system of capitalist exploitation. In short, it's the forsaking of all forms of reflection which aim to really call into question the roots of the established order; it's the negation of the whole process of strikes, self-organisation and discussion within the working class in France during those weeks in May. The importance to the world bourgeoisie of reducing May 68 to burning bras is thus evident. 

Nor was May 68 a union general strike!

Today, with the rail workers' strike in France, the unions and leftist organisations are pretending that another general strike is possible. As in May 68, the unions are about to organise the "convergence of struggles" faced with the policies of Macron[1]. Lies! In May 1968 the workers took up their struggle spontaneously, without union slogans or union orders. The latter in fact ran after the movement in order to sabotage it all the better. The contemporary cartoon by Sine at the head of this article is very explicit about the resentment of the working class towards the dirty work of the unions.

The Grenelle Accords that the left and the unions celebrated as THE great victory of 68 were the outcome of the government and unions working hand-in-hand to stop the movement and defeat it. These accords brought in a rise in purchasing power much less than those gained in the preceding years. A fact that's hidden today is that the workers immediately felt these accords as an insult.  Coming to Renault Billancourt on the morning of May 27, Seguy, Secretary General of CGT, faced plenty of booing and whistling and many union cards were torn up. On May 30, De Gaulle announced the dissolution of the National Assembly, elections at the end of June, and the opening of branch by branch negotiations. The unions took this opportunity to send back to work the sectors (such as EDF-GDF) where the bosses went beyond the Grenelle Accords. They strengthened this pressure in favour of a return to work through all sorts of manoeuvres, such as the falsification of votes, lies about who had or hadn’t gone back to work, and intimidation in the name of the struggle against "leftist provocateurs". One of their biggest arguments was that the workers had to go back to work so that the elections, which were supposed to "seal the workers' victory", could take place normally.

And May 68 is not "a thing of the past"

May 68 is presented as a movement of the period of prosperity. In other words it belongs to the past, another time. Once again, nothing is more false! From 1967, the world economic situation began to deteriorate, opening the period of the permanent crisis that we've known since and confirming that capitalism is a decadent system that it's necessary to overthrow. May 68 confirmed that the proletariat was the revolutionary class; that it had the strength to organise itself and develop its consciousness through debate in autonomous general assemblies; that it could stand up against the established order and shake it to its roots. Above all, May 68 marked the end of 40 years of Stalinist counter-revolution! The importance of this event shouldn't be underestimated. May 68, and the wave of struggles which then swept through various countries, signified that the working class was not ready to accept all the sacrifices demanded in the interests of Capital, and still less to sacrifice its life. It is this, and nothing else, which prevented the confrontation between the Eastern and Western blocs from degenerating into a Third World War! Since then, the development of the proletarian movement has met many difficulties. The idea that "revolution is possible but not really necessary" has given way to "revolution is absolutely necessary but has become impossible". The proletariat has lost confidence in itself. But the reality of proletarian strength in May 68 must be a source of inspiration for the future. The bourgeoisie knows it and that's why it covers it with so many lies!

Bmc, April 28, 2018

 

 

The events of spring 1968 in France, in their roots and in their results, had an international significance. Underlying them were the consequences for the working class of the first symptoms of the world economic crisis, which was reappearing after well over a decade of capitalist prosperity.

After decades of defeat, disorientation and submission, in May 1968 the working class returned to the scene of history. While the student agitation which had been developing in France since the beginning of spring, and the radical workers’ struggles which had broken out the previous year, had already changed the social atmosphere, the entry en masse of the class struggle (10 million on strike) overturned the whole social landscape.

Very soon other national sectors of the working class would enter the struggle.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the struggles of 68, the ICC is holding a public meeting to discuss the meaning of these events. Anyone interested in discussing this important moment in the history of the working class is welcome to attend.

 

Saturday 9th June, 11am-6pm

The Lucas Arms

254A Grays Inn Road, London WC1X 8QY

 

Morning Session: The events of May 68, their context and significance.

Afternoon Session: The development of the class struggle since May 68.

 

 

 

A few months ago, the world seemed to be taking a step towards a nuclear confrontation over North Korea, with Trump’s threats of “fire and fury” and North Korea’s Great Leader boasting of its capacity for massive retaliation. Today the North and South Korean leaders are holding hands in public and promising us real steps towards peace; Trump will hold his face-to-face meeting with Kim Jong-un on 12 June in Singapore.  

Only weeks ago, there was talk of World War Three breaking out over the war in Syria, this time with Trump warning Russia that his smart missiles were on their way in response to the chemical weapons attack in Douma. The missiles were launched, no Russian military units were hit, and it looked like we were back to the “normal”, everyday forms of slaughter in Syria.

Then Trump stirred the pot again, announcing that the US would be pulling out of the “Bad Deal” Obama made with Iran over its nuclear weapons programme. This immediately created divisions between the US and other western powers who consider that the agreement with Iran was working, and who now face the threat of US sanctions if they continue to trade or cooperate with Iran. And in the Middle East itself, the impact was no less immediate: for the first time a salvo of missiles was launched against Israel by Iranian forces in Syria, not merely their local proxy Hezbollah. Israel – whose Prime Minister Netanyahu had not long before performed a song and dance about Iranian violations of the nuclear treaty – reacted with its habitual speed and ruthlessness, hitting a number of Iranian bases in southern Syria.

Meanwhile Trump’s recent declaration of support for Jerusalem as the capital of Israel has inflamed the atmosphere on the occupied West Bank, particularly in Gaza, where Hamas has encouraged “martyrdom” protests and in one bloody day alone, Israel obliged by massacring more than 60 demonstrators (eight of them aged under 16) and wounding over 2,500 more who suffered injuries from live sniper and automatic fire, shrapnel from unknown sources and the inhalation of tear gas for the ‘crime’ of approaching border fences and, in some cases, of possession of rocks, slingshots and bottles of petrol attached to kites.

It’s easy to succumb to panic in a world that looks increasingly out of control – and then to slip into complacency when our immediate fears are not realised or the killing fields slip down the news agendas. But in order to understand the real dangers posed by the present system and its wars, it’s necessary to step back, to consider where we are in the unfolding of events on a historical and world-wide scale. 

In the Junius Pamphlet, written from prison in 1915, Rosa Luxemburg wrote that the world war signified that capitalist society was already sinking into barbarism. “The triumph of imperialism leads to the destruction of culture, sporadically during a modern war, and forever, if the period of world wars that has just begun is allowed to take its damnable course to the last ultimate consequence”. 

Luxemburg’s historical prediction was taken up by the Communist International formed in 1919: if the working class did not overthrow a capitalist system which had now entered its epoch of decay, the “Great War” would be followed by even greater, i.e. more destructive and barbaric wars, endangering the very survival of civilisation. And indeed this proved to be true: the defeat of the world revolutionary wave which broke out in reaction to the First World War opened the door to a second and even more nightmarish conflict. And at the end of six years of butchery, in which civilian populations were the first target, the unleashing of the atomic bomb by the USA against Japan gave material form to the danger that future wars would lead to the extermination of humanity.

For the next four decades, we lived under the menacing shadow of a third world war between the nuclear-armed blocs that dominated the planet. But although this threat came close to being carried out – as over the Cuba crisis in 1962 for example – the very existence of the US and Russian blocs imposed a kind of discipline over the natural tendency of capitalism to operate as a war of each against all. This was one element that prevented local conflicts – which were usually proxy battles between the blocs – from spiralling out of control. Another element was the fact that, following the world-wide revival of class struggle after 1968, the bourgeoisie did not have the working class in its pocket and was not sure of being able to march it off to war.

In 1989-91, the Russian bloc collapsed faced with growing encirclement by the USA and inability of the model of state capitalism prevailing in the Russian bloc to adapt to the demands of the world economic crisis. The statesmen of the victorious US camp crowed that, with the “Soviet” enemy out of the way, we would enter a new era of prosperity and peace. For ourselves, as revolutionaries, we insisted that capitalism would remain no less imperialist, no less militarist, but that the drive to war inscribed in the system would simply take a more chaotic and unpredictable form[1]. And this too proved to be correct. And it is important to understand that this process, this plunge into military chaos, has worsened over the past three decades.

The rise of new challengers

In the first years of this new phase, the remaining superpower, aware that the demise of its Russian enemy would bring centrifugal tendencies in its own bloc, was still able to exert a certain discipline over its former allies. In the first Gulf War, for example, not only did its former subordinates (Britain, Germany, France, Japan, etc) join or support the US-led coalition against Saddam, it even had the backing of Gorbachev’s USSR and the regime in Syria. Very soon however, the cracks started to show: the war in ex-Yugoslavia saw Britain, Germany and France taking up positions that often directly opposed the interests of the US, and a decade later, France, Germany and Russia openly opposed the US invasion of Iraq.

The “independence” of the USA’s former western allies never reached the stage of constituting a new imperialist bloc in opposition to Washington. But over the last 20 or 30 years, we have seen the rise of a new power which poses a more direct challenge to the US: China, whose startling economic growth has been accompanied by a widening imperialist influence, not only in the Far East but across the Asian landmass towards the Middle East and into Africa. But China has shown the capacity to play the long game in pursuit of its imperialist ambitions – as shown in the patient construction of its “New Silk Road” to the west and its gradual build up of military bases in the South China Sea.

Even though at the moment the North-South Korean diplomatic initiatives and the announced US-North-Korean summit may leave the impression that “peace” and “disarmament” can be brokered, and that the threat of nuclear destruction can be thwarted by the “leaders coming to reason”, the imperialist tensions between the US and China will continue to dominate the rivalries in the region, and any future moves around Korea will be overshadowed by their antagonism.

Thus, the Chinese bourgeoisie has been engaged in a long-term and world-wide offensive, undermining not only the positions of the US but also of Russia and others in Central Asia and in the Far East; but at the same time, Russian interventions in Eastern Europe and in the Middle East have confronted the US with the dilemma of having to face up to two rivals on different levels and in different regions.  Tensions between Russia and a number of western countries, above all the US and Britain, have increased in a very visible manner recently. Thus alongside the already unfolding rivalry between the US and its most serious global challenger China, the Russian counter-offensive has become an additional direct challenge to the authority of the US.

It is important to understand that Russia is indeed engaging in a counter-offensive, a response to the threat of strangulation by the US and its allies. The Putin regime, with its reliance on nationalist rhetoric and the military strength inherited from the “Soviet” era, was the product of a reaction not only against the asset-stripping economic policies of the west in the early years of the Russian Federation, but even more importantly against the continuation and even intensification of the encirclement of Russia begun during the Cold War. Russia was deprived of its former protective barrier to the west by the expansion of the EU and of NATO to the majority of eastern European states. In the 90s, with its brutal scorched-earth policy in Chechnya, it showed how it would react to any hint of independence inside the Federation itself. Since then it has extended this policy to Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014 onwards) – states that were not part of the Federation but which risked becoming foci of western influence on its southern borders. In both cases, Moscow has used local separatist forces, as well as its own thinly-disguised military forces, to counter pro-western regimes. 

These actions already sharpened tensions between Russia and the US, which responded by imposing economic sanctions on Russia, more or less supported by other western states despite their differences with the USA over Russian policy, generally based on their particular economic interests (this was especially true of Germany). But Russia’s subsequent intervention in Syria took these conflicts onto a new level.

The Middle East maelstrom

In fact, Russia has always backed the Assad regime in Syria with arms and advisers. Syria has long been its last outpost in the Middle East following the decline of the USSR’s influence in Libya, Egypt and elsewhere. The Syrian port of Tartus is absolutely vital to its strategic interests: it is its main outlet to the Mediterranean, and Russian imperialism has always insisted on maintaining its fleet there. But faced with the threat of the defeat of the Assad regime by rebel forces, and by the advance of ISIS forces towards Tartus, Russia took the major step of openly committing troops and warplanes in the service of the Assad regime, showing no hesitation in taking part in the daily devastation of rebel-held cities and neighbourhoods, which has added significantly to the civilian death toll.

But America also has its forces in Syria, ostensibly in response to the rise of ISIS. And the US has made no secret of backing the anti-Assad rebels – including the jihadist wing which served the expansion of ISIS.  Thus the potential for a direct confrontation between Russian and US forces has been there for some time. The two US military responses to the regime’s probable use of chemical weapons have a more or less symbolic character, not least because the use of “conventional” weapons by the regime has killed far more civilians than the use of chlorine or other agents. There is strong evidence that the US military reined in Trump and made sure that great care would be taken to hit only regime facilities and not Russian troops[2]. But this doesn’t mean that either the US or Russian governments can avoid more direct clashes between the two powers in the future – the forces working in favour of destabilisation and disorder are simply too deeply rooted, and they are revealing themselves with increasing virulence.

During both world wars, the Middle East was an important but still secondary theatre of conflict; its strategic importance has grown with the development of its immense oil reserves in the period after World War II.  Between 1948 and 1973, the main arena for military confrontation was the succession of wars between Israel and the surrounding Arab states, but these wars tended to be short-lived and their outcomes largely benefited the US bloc. This was one expression of the “discipline” imposed on second and third rate powers by the bloc system. But even during this period there were signs of a more centrifugal tendency – most notably the long “civil war” in the Lebanon and the “Islamic revolution” which undermined the USA’s domination of Iran, precipitating the Iran-Iraq war (where the west mainly backed Saddam as a counter-weight to Iran).

The definitive end of the bloc system has profoundly accelerated these centrifugal forces, and the Syrian war has brought them to a head. Thus within or around Syria we can see a number of contradictory battles taking place:

-          Between Iran and Saudi Arabia: often cloaked under the ideology of the Shia-Sunni split, Iranian backed Hezbollah militias from Lebanon have played a key role in shoring up the Assad regime, notably against jihadi militias supported by Saudi and Qatar (who have their own separate conflict). Iran has been the main beneficiary of the US invasion of Iraq, which has led to the virtual disintegration of the country and the imposition of a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad. Its imperialist ambitions have further been playing out in the war in Yemen, scene of a brutal proxy war between Iran and Saudi (the latter helped no end by British arms)[3];

-          Between Israel and Iran. The recent Israeli air strikes against Iranian targets in Syria are in direct continuity with a series of raids aimed at degrading the forces of Hezbollah in that country. It seems that Israel continues to inform Russia in advance about these raids, and generally the latter turns a blind eye to them, although the Putin regime has now begun to criticise them more openly. But there is no guarantee that the conflict between Israel and Iran will not go beyond these controlled responses. Trump’s “diplomatic vandalism”[4] with regard to the Iranian nuclear deal is fuelling both the Netanyahu government’s aggressively anti-Iran posture and Iran’s hostility to the “Zionist regime”, which, it should not be forgotten, has long maintained its own nuclear weapons in defiance of international agreements.

-          Between Turkey and the Kurds who have set up enclaves in northern Syria. Turkey covertly supported ISIS in the fight for Rojava, but has intervened directly against the Afrin enclave. The Kurdish forces, however, as the most reliable barrier to the spread of ISIS, have up to now been backed by the US, even if the latter might hesitate to use them to directly counter the military advances made Turkish imperialism. In addition Turkish ambitions to once again play a leading role in the region and beyond have not only driven it into conflict with NATO and  EU countries, but have reinforced Russian efforts to drive a wedge between NATO and Turkey, and  to pull Turkey closer to Russia, despite Turkey’s  own long-standing rivalry with the Assad regime.  

-          This tableau of chaos is further enriched by the rise of numerous armed gangs which may form alliances with particular states but which are not necessarily subordinate to them. ISIS is the most obvious expression of this new tendency towards brigandage and warlordism, but by no means the only one.

The impact of political instability

We have seen how Trump’s impetuous declarations have added to the general unpredictability of the situation in the Middle East. They are symptomatic of deep divisions within the American bourgeoisie. The president is currently being investigated by the security apparatus for evidence of Russian involvement (via its well-developed cyber war techniques, financial irregularities, blackmail etc) in the Trump election campaign; and up till recently Trump made little secret of his admiration for Putin, possibly reflecting an option for allying with Russia as a counter-weight to the rise of China. But the antipathy towards Russia within the American bourgeoisie goes very deep and, whatever his personal motives (such as revenge or the desire to prove that he is no Russian stooge), Trump has also been obliged to talk tough and then walk the talk against the Russians. This instability at the very heart of the world’s leading power is not a simple product of the unstable individual Trump; rather, Trump’s accession to power is evidence of the rise of populism and the growing loss of control by the bourgeoisie over its own political apparatus - the directly political expressions of social decomposition.  And such tendencies in the political machinery can only increase the development of instability on the imperialist level, where it is most dangerous.

In such a volatile context, it is impossible to rule out the danger of sudden acts of irrationality and self-destruction. The tendency towards a kind of suicidal insanity, which is certainly real, has not yet fully seized hold of the leading factions of the ruling class, who still understand that the unleashing of their nuclear arsenals runs the risk of destroying the capitalist system itself. And yet it would be foolish to rely on the good sense of the imperialist gangs that currently rule the planet – even now they are researching into ways in which nuclear weapons could be used to win a war.

As Luxemburg insisted in 1915, the only alternative to the destruction of culture by imperialism is “the victory of socialism, that is, the conscious struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism. Against its methods, against war. That is the dilemma of world history, its inevitable choice, whose scales are trembling in the balance awaiting the decision of the proletariat”.

The present phase of capitalist decomposition, of spiralling imperialist chaos, is the price paid by humanity for the inability of the working class to realise the promise of 1968 and the ensuing wave of international class struggle: a conscious struggle for the socialist transformation of the world. Today the working class finds itself faced with the onward march of barbarism, taking the form of a multitude of imperialist conflicts, of social disintegration, and ecological devastation; and - in contrast to 1917-18, when the workers’ revolt put an end to the war – these forms of barbarism are much harder to oppose.  They are certainly at their strongest in areas where the working class has little social weight – Syria being the most obvious example; but even in countries like Turkey, where the question of war faces a working class with a long tradition of struggle, there are few signs of direct resistance to the war effort. As for the working class in the central countries of capital, its struggles against what is now a more or less permanent economic crisis are currently at a very low ebb, and have no direct impact on the wars that, although geographically peripheral to Europe, are having a growing - and mainly negative – impact on social life, through the rise of terrorism and the cynical manipulation of the refugee question[5].

But the class war is far from over. Here and there it shows signs of life: in the demonstrations and strikes in Iran, which showed a definite reaction against the state’s militarist adventures; in the struggles in the education sector in the UK and the USA; in the growing discontent with government’s austerity measures in France and Spain. This remains well below the level needed to respond to the decomposition of an entire social order, but the defensive struggle of the working class against the effects of the economic crisis remains the indispensable basis for a deeper questioning of the capitalist system.

Amos, 16.5.18

 

Raoul Peck’s film, which has recently been released in Britain, provides us with much to think about on the bicentenary of Marx’s birth, and we certainly recommend it to our readers. But as the following article shows, it still needs to be viewed with a critical eye… 

This is a film that's surprising because it seems to rehabilitate the character of Karl Marx. Surprising because in choosing to cover five years which perhaps were the most decisive in Marx’s life  - from 1843 to 1848- Raoul Peck aims to break with the caricature of a solitary genius acting outside of the world of the workers. But does he really achieve this? Without doubt the angle from which Raoul Peck deals with the life of Marx corrects somewhat the idea that Marx and Engels were inventors of abstract notions such as "class struggle", "revolution" or "communism". The film does show how these two men, who played a key role in the revolutionary movement, were won over to a cause that had been born well before them from the womb of the proletariat of the most industrialised countries of the 19th century. In this we think that the vision of Peck is totally different from the more rabid intellectuals who, not without a great deal of dishonesty, try to demonstrate that the works of Marx carry the germs of the Stalinist tragedy[i]. And yet this film doesn't totally break from the image of the providential hero, which considerably weakens the attempt to show the militant dimension of Marx, his contemporary relevance, as well as the decisive role that the proletariat will have to play in the transformation of society.

The film correctly emphasises the decisive meeting and the unshakeable collaboration between Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the rebellious son of an industrialist, who opened Marx’s eyes to the political potential of the working class and to the importance of political economy. However there is a lack of subtlety in the portrayal of this meeting, where the coldness of the formal introductions in Arnold Ruge’s drawing room suddenly gives way to declarations of mutual fascination in a night of drinking and games of chess where the two men come to perfect agreement and Marx compliments Engels for having opened his eyes, drunkenly declaiming the celebrated phrase: "Philosophers have only interpreted the world, the task from now on is to change it". Paradoxically, it's a central scene since it announces the vision of the character that the film will develop: a Marx who is not a philosopher, a historian, or an economist but a militant of the workers' movement, addressing himself to workers in meetings, polemicising with Proudhon and his petty-bourgeois reformism or with Weitling and his Christian idealism.

What’s more the hardships of the life of a militant are not neglected. If the element of repression is somewhat flippantly depicted when Karl and Friedrich play cat and mouse with the police in the Paris suburbs, the frustrations and traumas of exile, the poverty of daily life, are shown in their cruel reality. These moments show the strengthening links of friendship and love but also those feelings engendered by militant passion. Raoul Peck thus reproduces a whole revolutionary milieu first in Paris and then in Brussels and London. But, despite all this, these scenes offer an excessively personalised image of the debates and the process of clarification within the revolutionary milieu of the time. For example, Raoul Peck seems to attribute to Marx the discredit suffered by Weitling in the League of the Just, whereas the first to call into question the idealist and messianic aims of the latter were Schapper[ii] and a great majority of workers of the German Workers’ Association in London. We know that Marx followed this polemic with a great deal of attention since it revealed a break between a sentimental communism and the scientific communism that he himself advocated. Through the creation of correspondence committees, the London Association got closer to the conceptions of Marx on the direction to give to the movement and consequently distanced itself from the conception of Weitling. Thus the virulent discussion at the Brussels Correspondence Committee of March 30 1846, shown in the film, ended up in a split that was already a long time coming. In fact the director remains a prisoner of the democratic vision of debate and political action because the attention is regularly drawn to the theoretical jousting between leaders and charismatic chiefs, which obscures what was essential: the theoretical effervescence and the complex, collective reflection which already characterised the workers' movement at that time.

This confusion increases in the way that the relationship between Marx and the League of the Just is treated. We recognise that Raoul Peck wants to show that Marx and Engels had understood that the salvation of humanity resides in the historic role that the working class has to play. They also understood that it was necessary to rid themselves of all idealism, all ethereal, illusory and utopian speeches on the means to attain a superior stage of human society; that the working class needed a practical theory in order to understand the world which had engendered it, and to understand that its situation was not set in stone but transitory.  What the film tries to show, with a certain fidelity it seems to us, is the need for the working class to develop a revolutionary theory and the conviction to act upon it. On the other hand, the way in which the rapprochement between Marx and the League of the Just is shown contains the idea that Marx was ready to engage in intrigues, an ambitious Marx playing on his intellectual stature in order to win the majority of the revolutionary avant-garde to his side. In this version of events, Marx and Engels seem almost to seduce the leaders of the League; they go out of their way to get into contact with them, not hesitating to exaggerate their closeness to Proudhon in order to extend the network of correspondence committees into the east of France. Contrary to the wooliness of the film’s treatment of this event, it was the League, under the aegis of its spokesman Joseph Moll, who invited Marx to join. In their Karl Marx: Man and Fighter, Boris Nicolaevskyi and Otto Maenchen-Helfen write: "he explained in his own name and that of his comrades that they were convinced of the rightness of Marx’s views and agreed that they must shake off the old conspiratorial forms and traditions. Marx and Engels were to be invited to collaborate in work of reorganisation and theoretical reorientation”[iii]. However Marx hesitated in accepting, still doubting the real will of the League to reorganise itself and get rid of the old conspiratorial and utopian conceptions. But "Moll stated that it was essential that he and Engels should join the League if it were really to shake off all its arcane shackles, and Marx overcame his doubts and joined the League of the Just in February or March 1847”[iv].

While it’s true that the weight of personalities was quite strong in the workers' movement of the 19th century, the film, by isolating the theoretical contribution of Marx and Engels, gives the basic impression that this movement depended entirely on personalities of genius. This is confirmed in the unfolding of the congress of the League of the Just on June 1 1847, which Marx didn't actually go to - officially for lack of money but really because he wanted to await the decisions of the congress before definitively joining the League. This scene is a caricature because it presents the congress as a fight between personalities where a minority of "elite" militants are supported or contested by applause and cries from the great majority who remain passive. This is a deformed vision of the real proceedings of a congress of a revolutionary organisation.

Despite the harsh nature of their living conditions, the politicised workers attached great importance to learning and to the deepening of political questions, especially through reading pamphlets. Thus the congresses were not some sort of oratory competition where each side had its own champion, but fundamental moments in the life of a revolutionary organisation with long debates where each militant takes part in the expression and confrontation of positions whatever their theoretical capacity. In his Contribution to the History of the Communist League Engels shows the studious reality of the first revolutionary congresses of the proletariat: "At the second congress which took place at the end of November and beginning of December the same year (1847), Marx was also present and in a debate that was quite long - the congress lasted for ten days at least - he defended the new theory"[v].

To sum up: it's not a question here of denying the decisive role of Marx and Engels in the evolution of the revolutionary movement but of situating their trajectory within the proletarian movement and of underlining that their inestimable contribution could not have happened without this great movement which still makes the working class the active subject of history. The caricatures that the director sometimes gives us mask this reality by putting the accent on the preponderant place of individuals and their providential role.

Art doesn't have the job of serving a political cause. However, the content and form of a work can send a message. While we applaud Raoul Peck’s efforts to exhume Marx from the cemetery of history, the manner in which the film relates certain moments of his life tends to pervert and deform the political lessons that we can draw from them[vi] . This is what we want to try to correct with this article.

DI, 28.10.17

 

 

Under the heading ‘Readers’ Contributions’ we aim 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. Here, a close sympathiser looks at recent discoveries of ‘Neaderthal art’  and the implications for a marxist understanding of ‘pre-history’.

 

Of late, the general tendency of scientific research into the history of humanity has been to put significant dates of certain profound historical events further and further back in time[i]. This has happened quite often over the last quarter century as dating techniques have advanced greatly and as the ideology of the bourgeoisie of the incremental rise of mankind to the natural order of an, albeit slightly imperfect, capitalism has cracked in the face of reality. In some senses science here, following the evidence it has unearthed, has shown a certain independence from the economic base that funds it. At the same time the marxist perspective on the importance of prehistory is reaffirmed through a deepening of its understanding of the past, including  "primitive" communism and its means of production; the intellectual and the no less important spiritual means of production, consciousness, solidarity and the ubiquitous power of belief systems.

The discovery of Neanderthal cave art in Spain

The findings, reported in Nature, 22.2.2018, show that in La Pasiega, a cave in northern Spain there are red linear motifs on a painted stalagmite older than 64, 800 years; at Ardeles in southern Spain, there are different paintings including one between 43,300 and 48,700 years old and another up to 65,000 years old; in Maltravieso, west-central Spain, there's a red hand stencil that was made no less than 66,700 years ago. These dates go back twenty-thousand years before Homo Sapiens arrived in Europe. Providing the dating technique is correct, this shows that these depictions were made by Neanderthals. This is quite an interesting development given that cave art, whose antiquity and sophistication has always been questioned by the proponents of bourgeois ideology, is one of the main tenets of what is supposed to make us "human", and by this is meant to be Homo Sapiens as distinct from all other species.  The Guardian's art critic Jonathan Jones is one of these bourgeois vectors, advocating "representational art" as a sole feature of Homo Sapiens. There's no doubting the power of observation in the depictions of Upper Palaeolithic animals but, leaving that aside for the moment, a concept of "representational art", i.e., painting what you see, completely underestimates the magic, complexities, meanings and fundamentally spiritual nature of cave art even if made by Sapiens. Jones suggests that Neanderthal art is the work of "three-year olds", primitive and "childish", showing himself as nothing more than yet another ignorant art critic. Homo Sapiens' Upper Palaeolithic cave art lasted in all its essentials for a period of twenty-eight thousand years and while quite stunning, its earlier development by Neanderthals is not entirely surprising. If the dates stack up it's quite a discovery that tends to break down further distinctions between Sapiens and Neanderthals.

 Radiocarbon dating is difficult when applied to cave art but the uranium-thorium method used in dating these paintings is a better option and is a well established geo-chronological technique which measures the decay in the calcium deposits covering the painting. Further verification would be useful to be absolutely sure, bearing in mind the uncertainty around Neanderthal cave art at the Nerja caves in Spain where the charcoal remains besides stalagmites painted in a kind of double-helix design were dated by radiocarbon and are open to dispute. But while it's always good to have these dates confirmed, particularly with multiple lines of converging evidence (archaeological, etc.), there's plenty elsewhere to demonstrate that Neanderthals were perfectly capable of such activities.

The humanity of Homo Neanderthalensis

Even without any of these latest depictions there's already more than enough evidence to make a compelling case for the human qualities of Neanderthals. They had a common African ancestor with Sapiens in Homo Erectus and existed and evolved from northern Europe to Central Asia from 400 to 40 thousand years ago. They were the first, and remain the first, human species to survive a glaciation event, which must have required an intellectual and body strength based on a fair degree of wit and organisation. Just as bourgeois ideology and its "specialists", accompanied by the ignorant chatter of its "critics", always look to emphasise division so, since their discovery in 1829, it has sought to paint Neanderthalensis (henceforward, HN) as an ignorant savage in much the same way it used to talk about earlier Sapiens. Thus the extinction of is often described as "the first genocide" by humans,  which neatly turns Sapiens back into murdering savages again[ii].  Demonstrating its fundamentally reactionary nature The Guardian, through it "science" editor Robin McKie, allows such sub-headings as: "How Neanderthals met a grisly fate: devoured by humans". Neanderthals and Sapiens worked alongside each other at an "industrial" flint site in France for up to a thousand years and there's evidence of a HN/Sapiens overlap of ten thousand years in Siberia (Chris Scarre, The Human Past) and, though its impossibility was clearly stated by the scientific hacks of capitalism for ages, the inter-breeding between both is beyond any doubt[iii].

Four hundred metres deep inside the Bruniquel cave in the Pyrenees there is evidence of wall-like structures built out of stalagmites by HN 175 thousand years ago, one of the earliest known building structures. They made tools from bone and had a sophisticated range of tools that would have included those which could be used in making fine etchings on cave walls. At Cueva de los Aviones in south-eastern Spain researchers found HN perforated sea-shells, beads and pigments dated no less than 115 thousand years ago, and no less than from forty thousand years ago, deep in Gorham's Cave, Gibraltar, are ten-foot square etchings of Neanderthal abstract art. Evidence of their varied diet disproved the current idea that they were strictly meat-eaters incapable of cooking and processing food, and they provided themselves with fire, shelter and clothing. There's clear evidence that they buried their dead with some care in some places, that they knew about medicinal plants and cared for the sick, injured and weak (in Shanidar cave in Iraq, amongst others), again qualities that were supposed to be exclusive to Sapiens. All in all these suggest that Neanderthals were perfectly capable of producing a cave art that was some way beyond and much more profound than simple representation.

The paintings

It's very early to comment on the paintings discovered in the Spanish caves above and there's been very little said in the reports about the techniques used. There's a need for detailed text describing them from direct observation and, ideally, 3-D images of sufficient scale in order to fully examine them. Photographs don't tend to do cave paintings justice, distorts them even, particularly as prehistoric cave art is always painted on rough, craggy, uneven and fractured surfaces as flat surfaces were deliberately ignored everywhere, possibly by taboo. This fact alone shows a certain spiritual connection with the act of application, the surface, the pigment and "what lies beyond" the cave's surface. That HN should be using these surfaces, deep into the caves, in deliberately selected locations sometimes in almost inaccessible places, show that, as with Upper Palaeolithic Homo Sapien's cave art, spirituality and belief systems play a big part.

But there are some more or less speculative observations that we can make from a first look at the paintings: the red dotted curve in the composition at La Pasiega comes round perfectly before a sudden turn backwards on itself while rising in a stronger vertical column. This is reminiscent of the description of the Sapiens prehistoric cave art curve by Max Raphael that "The straight line and rigid geometrization and symmetrisation of the concave-convex curve into a sine curve are avoided everywhere. The originally complementary parts of the curve are shifted and their measures and positions become asymmetrical in relation to its turning point..". I think that Raphael would have been amazed that his analysis could be applied to and reflected within Neanderthal art. And this particular curve also raises his analysis of it being related to magic, motion, time and being.  Elements of Epicurean philosophy painted on a cave wall by Neanderthals? Surely not? Why not? "That which is abstractly possible, which can be conceived constitutes no obstacle to the thinking subject, no limit, no stumbling-block" (Marx). At any rate, I think that the expression of free will is undeniable in this composition. The "ladder" symbol adjacent[iv] to the dotted curve is a common "sign" in Upper Paleolithic cave art and to the right of this there's a complex abstract design. What's immediately striking about this element of the composition is its expressive asymmetry[v] which is a feature of all Upper Paleolithic  Sapiens art where the asymmetrical dominates (full face or head-on depictions of animals are very rare in Upper Paleolithic cave art). What's even more interesting in the La Pasiega composition is that "inside" the ladder there are two animals, one of which is a large quadruped, possibly pregnant, which is disappearing into the cave wall[vi]. Underneath this is what looks like a hind (a series of curves) emerging from the cave wall. As with most spiritual elements of cave art there are no ground lines and the feet of the animals disappear into the ether. As with the great majority of animal depictions in this epoch, the feet and the lower part of the leg fade away, giving a "floating" appearance and accentuate the curvature of the animal. This particular disappearance into and emergence from the surface again, possibly transformed, shows the spiritual nature of the action and its depiction of these animals as spirits. It's not clear from the reports if these two animals have been dated to the same time as the rest of the painting, but there are two interesting possibilities: either these were painted by HN which further emphasises their interest in the spiritual[vii] and takes the paintings of animals back twenty-eight thousand years further; or they were added later by HS, which itself shows an important cooperative development in the historical process of art and belief systems. And it raises the question of the African heritage for all art forms.

The hand-print at Maltravieso, red ochre blown over an outstretched hand, dated to 66,700 years, do belong to HN and points to the spiritual nature of this action. The hand was vital; it was the hand that produced everything including this work and the hand is not just stencilled onto the wall, it connects to the surface and penetrates it. This particular symbolism is absolutely everywhere in Upper Paleolithic art from Europe, to Africa, Australia and south-east Asia[viii]. This shows a solid continuity and given that it was probably the shaman who was the artist in the Upper Paleolithic caves, given the spiritual nature of this recently discovered (or recently dated) art, and given that HN would likely had medicine men or women, then these painting show the probability that belief systems, based on magic and expressed by certain individuals, played a very dynamic role and go a very long way back at least to Neanderthals and longer I suspect. But that's speculation.

To give one example of the continuity of these belief systems: Ethnological evidence shows us that when the shamans of the San Bushmen go into their trance-dance - in which everybody joins - they often suffer a nasal haemorrhage and bleed from the nose. Depiction on Upper Palaeolithic caves 40,000 years ago show significant animals in meaningful circumstances bleeding from the nose. There is continuity but it can be argued that any "specialisation" of shamanism is a comparatively recent development that, as with the San Bushmen, it is more diffused among the community, or at least there were gradations and artistic stages of shamanic ability. While there is continuity, this is not a monolithic belief system and neither is it static.

What are the implications?

I've put forward some speculative ideas above on some of the implications but first of all this discovery widens and deepens a marxist perspective on prehistory, adding more weight to a materialist understanding of the development of mankind of which Homo Neanderthalensis is an important component.

With their direct antecedents over 2 million years old, and not much different from them, Homo Nadeli, a small-brained genus of Homo, were burying their dead at a site north-west of Johannesburg (there's some debate about this) over a quarter of a million years ago. At any rate this was a persistent character roaming the African bush around the same time, 300 thousand years ago, as the first Sapiens were appearing in Jebel Iroud, Morocco. And these two species weren't alone. Around the same time, in the Kapthurian Formation of Kenya, Homo Erectus was processing ochre. Ochre is not only used for pigment, it has medicinal properties and a wide range of practical uses. Liquefied red ochre, no less than 200 thousand years old, has been found at a Neanderthal site at Maastricht in the Netherlands. The hematite material was transported sixty kilometres to be processed by heat. At Twin-Rivers, Zambia, there's evidence of a range of ochre production 350-400 thousand years ago, possibly by Homo Heidelbergensis, which includes a "startling purple". This is only (a big "only") Africa and all these "species", all around the same time and there's at least two more, raises the possibilities of inter-action, breeding across various divisions and so on, none of which precludes confrontations, regressions and struggles.

The whole question of "species" is once again raised by this art. Scientific classification delineating different species of Homo is extremely complex and contentious and not something we can go into here. Skull size is one of the factors determining species but this is somewhat fluid. Homo Nadeli, mentioned above, has a skull size about a third of ours but this species managed to survive and flourish alongside another half-a-dozen Homo divisions; and the diminutive Homo Floresiensis had a skull size less than half of Homo Erectus but still produced relatively modern looking tools. And a glance around a modern high street will see people of around the same size and age with any number of different shaped and sized skulls, just as a look around the same high street will reveal both men and women with clear Neanderthal features[ix]. The fact that there were so many extant species of Homo shows that each had in common the defence of the bonds of their society, which could well have included some kinds of belief systems and an extension and openness to others which including breeding with them (the full extent of this has yet to be revealed by DNA). It does show that there was no evolution in the sense of a gradual, linear and incremental progression, an evolutionary determinism which is just as much a distortion of Darwin as Social Darwinism. There is no deterministic outcome but a common African origin and a universal human spirit. Rather than clearly different species there's more than an element of subdivision of species, with definite species not being perennial but groups ranged under different classifications which could be fluid. Of course those less well adapted would have died out for one reason or another.

Homo Sapiens represent a conclusion to the whole period of human history from the Australopithecines onwards. And within the former, the proletariat represents the future for the whole of humanity and it has to struggle for unity against all divisions in order to bring an end to the whole period of prehistory. In the ICC text ‘The question of the relation between nature and culture (on the book by Patrick Tort, Sex, Race and Culture)’ there's a quote which I think applies to the whole history of Homo: "At the beginning of this process it's the elimination of the weakest which predominates then, through a progressive inversion it's the protection of the weak that finally imposes itself, an eminent mark of solidarity of the group". I don't think that this process of the elimination of the weakest would have lasted long given the significant advantage conferred by solidarity; and, further, I think that in order for them to survive, solidarity and some form of society would have existed among the much earlier Australopithecines[x]. The better adapted, with more numerous descendents and advantageous variations, frees them from the grip of natural selection[xi] and imposes, amongst a whole range of the species Homo a non-deterministic development towards a new synthesis. The whole process is one of transformation and, as Marx indicated, as man transforms nature he transforms his own being. This transformation has resulted in our species, Homo Sapiens, becoming the dominant species on the planet and this itself has been a struggle. Archaeological evidence of the early stages of Sapiens in Africa show significant developments in the means of production quickly disappearing and ensuing regressions - it's not been a one-way process. There's no evidence that Sapiens "wiped out" Neanderthals and what evidence there is points to other reasons for their demise. DNA shows that our species bred with them and possibly others but the main reason for the emergence and ultimately "winning out" must be that Homo Sapiens - for a whole range of historical circumstances and developments, not least theory, practice and organisation - adapted better to the spaces that they moved into.

The discovery of the cave art of Homo Neaderthalensis doesn't re-write the history of humanity but it does throw more light on it and shows the variety of the human species. I also think that it underlines the dynamic and independent role that belief systems have played from a long way back.

Baboon 18.4.2018