This is a presentation that was given to an ICC Day of Discussion held in London on 23 June 2012, prepared by a sympathiser of the ICC
Islam, as a religion, as a historical, revolutionary moment and as a political force in the modern world, has not been adequately dealt with by the Marxist and proletarian movement in general. This is true of all the religions of the world. Marxism with its ingrained and partly - largely in fact- justified distrust of religion has failed to really develop a clear perspective on the meanings and historical origins of religion. For none is this more true than Islam.
This lack of understanding of Islam has long been a tradition in the West, one which has certainly not been improved in recent years. Norman O. Brown author of Life Against Death, the psychoanalytical meaning of history states in Apocalypse that “to bring Islam into the picture (of the history of what he calls the prophetic tradition) is a Copernican revolution; our Copernicus still not sufficiently recognised is Marshall Hodgson (and his work ) The Venture of Islam.”[1] This may sound like hyperbole and Norman O. Brown certainly was fond of exaggeration as a writing technique, but it holds a lot of truth. The role of Islam in world history has long been overlooked by the West and Marxism. If we are to regain a sense of world history (free from Eurocentrist notions) then Islam is of great importance for many reasons, which we will come back to later, but I will outline some major points here.
The historical role of Islamic civilisation is such that without it the Renaissance would either never have happened or would have been completely different in form and content. The study of Islam can also shed a great amount of light on how we understand religion in general and monotheism in particular. We will also touch on another controversial issue within Marxism, the question of the ‘Asiatic’ mode of production and whether this is a helpful term or concept and what role this concept can play if any in our understanding of Islam and world history.
Islam is clearly of huge significance in the modern world and as ‘political Islam’ has become a by-word for terrorism and oppression, and for many people like Breivik, the EDL and others Muslims now play the role of the ‘new Jews’. That is, a new bogey man who is threatening to destroy western civilisation.
It also is a major source of inspiration and motivation for a huge proportion of the world’s population which we as revolutionaries need to understand if we are to build any serious dialogue with members of the international working class who follow the Islamic faith. In particular studying the historical origins of Islam will allow us to understand why it is still such an inspiration for many people and importantly from a Marxist perspective why Islam, or any other religion, is no longer a plausible solution to society’s problems.
While Islam has been under-researched by the Marxist movement, there have still been numerous attempts to discover the ‘class basis’ for the emergence of Islam. Engels evidently had a significant interest in this question and this topic appears relatively frequently in correspondences between him and Marx. Unfortunately neither had a great deal of available information and neither dedicated a published work to the question. Nevertheless both Engels and Marx made a few observations which can serve as a useful starting point for further investigation.
Engels tended to see Islam as emerging from the division of Arabian society into sedentary and nomadic cultures, “it seems to me to have the character of a Bedouin reaction against the settled, albeit decadent urban Fellaheen whose religion was by then much debased.” He saw in this a cyclical pattern, a pattern interestingly noted by the Medieval Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun in Arabian society, for the settled elites to grow decadent: as Engels puts it “the townspeople grow rich, luxurious and lax in the observation of the ‘law.’ The Bedouins, poor and hence of strict morals, contemplate with envy and covetousness these riches and pleasures. Then they unite under a prophet, a Mahdi, to chastise the apostates and restore the observation of the ritual and the true faith and to appropriate in recompense the treasures of the renegades. In a hundred years they are naturally in the same position as the renegades were: a new purge of the faith is required, a new Mahdi arises and the game starts again from the beginning”[2]
Apart from a few factual errors, such as the fact that the term Mahdi is misunderstood (‘Mahdi’ in fact relates to a character in Islamic eschatology, a character who will bring about a global reign of peace and prosperity in the Last Days). More important however is the fact that Engels’ argument fails to accommodate for the radical ‘newness’ and qualitative difference in the rise of Islam from any other changing of local elites in the area.
Engels himself however at other times seems to be aware of this. For example he sees the expulsion of the Abyssinians from Arab territory 40 years before Muhammad’s birth as “plainly the first act of the Arabs’ awakening national consciousness.”[3] Importantly this recognises the new historical situation which was emerging at this time, that is, a development of ‘civilisation’ and trade had brought about a growing sense of a larger community which transcended the tribal divisions of the old Arab society.
During the 20s there were various Soviet attempts to characterise the social basis and historical context of the origins of Islam. Some seem to have been more valid than others; obviously this period is one in which the Soviet Union was losing its last vestiges of real Marxist thought so its theories have to be seen in this unfavourable context. However I will here simply run through the main trends which you can find in slightly more detail on wikipedia ‘Soviet Orientalist studies in Islam’[4]: the earliest theory put forward by Zinatullah Navshirvanov (at a time it must be noted when the Soviets were keen to build good relations with the Islamic world) basically declared Islam to have been a communist movement, citing ‘primitive communism’ in Muhammad and his companion’s dealings and more overt communist trends in later Sufi movements. This has some validity but overstates the case: Muhammad certainly harked back to Bedouin traditions which had there roots in primitive communism and there was certainly a strong emphasis on equality and caring for the poor and marginalised in society, particularly slaves, orphans and women. However he was not a ‘communist’, he was not against, trade, money or social class. This in itself is an interesting difference between him and Jesus and the early Christians, who came mostly from the urban poor, the ‘proletariat’ of the day, and therefore had a stronger sense of the inherent evils of money and trade, whereas Islam emerged among people in a completely different social setting and therefore had a different attitude, which aimed to make these things fair and to develop a morality which could deal with the new social circumstances.
So what was the social basis of Islam? Well, some, such as Mikhail A. Reisner, argued that Islam was in fact a movement of ‘trade capitalists’ and he saw the Koran, its Law and the tenets of monotheism itself as simply a means by which to unite Arab tribes under one law and religion which could help the weaker tribes and merchants to avoid the constant raids which trading caravans were prey to (the weaker families and traders being the most vulnerable and losing the most from these raids). While this again has a certain amount of truth to it and is certainly part of the story, it is a telling fact that Reisner believed that all the ‘mystical’ elements of Muhammad’s life and teachings were simply added later due to Persian influence; this spiritually blind and rigidly rationalist approach is patently ridiculous and stops such theorists from being able to understand anything of the true nature and source of religious movements.
There was also a theory put forward in 1930 by a Soviet scholar called Mikhail L. Tomara, which claimed that Islam was mainly led by the peasants. This seems at first to be unlikely but may have more validity than at first glance. I am not aiming to answer the question here, only to open the question up. While the peasantry may have played a key role, they alone cannot account for the rise of Islam.
What we can say for certain is that Muhammad and Islam (and the prophetic tradition in general) represents in essence an attempt to synthesise the old ‘primitive communism’ with the new world of ‘civilisation’. To create and establish an order of civilisation which does not offend the moral standards of people recently leaving the tribal community, even if those tribal communities have been degenerating for some time, while also seeing in civilisation on a profound level the possibility of peace and of the unity of humanity in one community which was the dream of Islam, and of Judaism, and represents in essence all that is positive about civilisation and ‘empire’.
In terms of the historical context of the rise of Islam we should look at a few main points of departure. Firstly as has been alluded to the Islamic idea of a Jahiliyyah (age of ignorance) has a lot of validity; that is, pre-Islamic Arabia was at a particular stage of development in which the old tribal customs no longer offered a viable model and faced with the new social environment of trade and private property had completely degenerated into a proud love of wealth, disregard of their neighbour, and the endemic violence of the vendetta.
There is a long held tradition in the West of denigration of Muhammad, stretching back to the time of Charlemagne. Karen Armstrong in her biography of Muhammad gives a good account of this tradition, showing how Muhammad has been used like a Jungian shadow, held up as an image of whatever vice or insecurity the western world happened to harbour most strongly at the time. Islam as a religion has subsequently been viewed for a long time as a mere hodge-podge admixture of Judaism/Christianity and Arabian paganism with nothing new or worthwhile in it al all, lead by a charlatan interested only in personal political power.
Maxime Rodinson (a Marxist of sorts) in his biography of Muhammad makes a good case against such a view, While it is undoubtedly true that some of Muhammad’s later revelations have an air of being suspiciously convenient for Muhammad, as his wife Aisha is in fact recorded as saying, there seems little evidence and little reason to doubt Muhammad’s fundamental sincerity or that he did experience the major revelations he claimed to have experienced. While we may argue about their exact source - God, the unconscious etc, the experiences themselves seem genuine, for many reasons. Firstly as Rodinson points out, Muhammad’s personality seems to conform to a man perfectly suited to a prophetic or mystical career: “Muhammad’s psycho-physiological constitution was basically of the kind found in many mystics”[5] Also, we have to take into account the way in which his experiences themselves conform to universal motifs and characteristics. This is especially true of his famous Night Journey which is extremely similar to many reports of visions from shamans across the world.
Rodinson also insists that the role of Muhammad was of vital importance for the course of history and argues against “some kind of primitive determinism or an elementary form of Marxism (which might say that) ‘if Muhammad had never been born, the situation would have called fourth another Muhammad in his place.”[6] A good example of this view with regard to a Marxist analysis of a founder of a world religion is Kautsky in his Foundations of Christianity in which he takes the view that the origins of Christianity can be explained without regards to “this person” (Jesus). This view is clearly ridiculous. If Trotsky (in his History of the Russian Revolution, vol 1 chapter 16) could say of Lenin that his personality had a decisive role in the triumph of the October Revolution, then how much more true is this of founders of the great religions, which gained so much of their impetus and force from the personality of great individuals who seemed to offer an embodied answer to the question of ‘how man should live’.
This should be qualified by saying, Muhammad was not Jesus, he was not a saint (it is telling that among many Sufis there has been a certain kind of preference for Jesus over Muhammad: one saying goes “Muhammad was the seal of the prophets, Jesus was the seal of the Saints”) and was definitely nothing other than a human being. He was a prophet in the mould of the Old Testament, that is one capable of great extremes of emotion and action, given to anger, joy, love, compassion, ruthlessness, desire and asceticism, also a prophet armed, ready to die and kill for his vision of a better world.
This is a question I can only pose. I would need years to research and answer this accurately. It has been called a form of the ‘Asiatic’ mode of production, it has been called a form of Feudalism and there are many other theories besides, none of which I have had time to really get to grips with.
Marx spoke less about Islam than Engels did, Marx’s main comments were in answer to Engels and in particular he urged Engels to focus on the question which he felt was central to the whole history of ‘the East’; the lack of private property in land. Marx seems to have over generalised about the ‘East’, and the mode of production in Islamic civilisations seems to have been significantly different to say China and India.
It was clearly an extremely dynamic mode of production for a while. From a Marxist perspective its forward looking view of history would suggest a basis in a civilisation that was not as closely tied to the primitive communist view of the world as civilisations that kept to a purely cyclical view of history. Norman O. Brown sees Islam as a synthesis of the western historical mode of thought and the Eastern cyclical view. In the Islamic synthesis, history is a series of cycles in which prophets are sent, their knowledge is lost or corrupted and a new revelation is necessary. However in these cycles their is progress, not only in that Muhammad brings the final and most perfect revelation but also because there is a view of a definite end to history in the Hour of Judgement. Whether this means that Islamic civilisation can be said to be a synthesis of Feudalism and Asiatic despotism may be a step too far in mechanically applying Marxism to what I know.
What a real study of Muhammad brings to the attention is the truly revolutionary nature of early Islam. In fact we can see that historically all three Abrahamic religions began as a revolutionary movement of some strata of the oppressed. Norman O. Brown says: “to apply the term ‘revolutionary’ to the politics of Islam is to suggest that the origins of modern radical politics lie in the transformation of prophetic radicalism into a political movement prepared to seize power”[7].
This reiterates and expands what Engels said about early Christianity - that we as communists are the heirs to the Early Christians; we are also the heirs of the Old Testament Prophets and to Islam and Muhammad. This is the starting point for any dialogue with religious workers.
We obviously would say that we are unique, in that it is Marxism and the proletarian movements which alone can carry forward the search for ‘how man should live’. Only the proletarian movement can allow the dreams of the past to be made flesh.
Jaycee 23/6/12
[1] ‘The Prophetic Tradition’ in Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis, University of California Press, 1991, p46
[2] Engels, On the History of Early Christianity, 1894.
[3] Engels to Marx, 6 June 1853
[5] Maxime Rodinson, Mohammad, New York, 1971, p 56
[6] ibid, p 298
[7] Apocalypse, p 52
Since mid February the students of Quebec have been fighting against increased tuition fees, but for about three of these months there was a more or less unanimous press blackout outside the country. The 82% increase came on top of previous rises, and, faced with the repressive and provocative attitude of the Charest government, the students have shown that they are not willing to accept such measures passively. Their rallying cry has been “demonstrations every day until we win!”. Most of the media from the start focused on the highly ideological issue of the ‘popularity or unpopularity’ of the movement; but the movement itself has shown a tendency to generalise and go beyond the education sector.
In order to have a better understanding of the context in which this movement is taking place, let’s look at some of the similar measures taken by the government in the last few years, and at the conditions the students are facing[1].
The austerity we are seeing all over the world today is the result of the historic crisis of capitalism. So the rise in tuition fees, like all the other measures aimed at reducing the deficit, are not at all new or specific to Quebec. During Robert Bourassa’s second term as Premier in 1990 the government broke the ceiling on tuition costs, which since 1968 had been fixed at C$540 Canadian dollars a year. They were now increased threefold to C$1668 a year. Then in 2007 it was the centre right government of Jean Charest who carried on in the same vein with an increase of C$500 over five years, mounting up to C$2168 for the year 2011-12. With fees like that (even though still only half what they are in the USA) a large number of students can no longer afford to go on to university. In Canada, 80% of students work while in full time study, but even then half of them live on C$12,200 a year (the poverty line for a single person was C$16,320 in 2010).
In the Quebec budget announced on 18 March 2011, the Charest government confirmed its intention to increase tuition fees by C$1,625 over 5 years, taking them up to nearly C$4,500 by 2016 if you add the extra costs that can be demanded by the universities. Following this announcement, the reaction was not long in coming. On 31 March 2011, several thousand students demonstrated in Montreal, and on the initiative of the FEUQ student union a camp was set up every weekend outside the offices of the education minister.
Was this a method of struggle which would allow the movement to extend by looking for solidarity?
That’s by no means certain. In any case, for the next year there were no major developments. It wasn’t until 22 March 2012 that there was a student demonstration which was surprisingly big. Between 200,000 and 300,000 took part, bringing together both students and workers in the centre of Montreal. The demands put forward were part of a wider historic movement. Some people talked about the ‘Printemps érable’ (i.e., Maple Spring) in reference to the revolts in the Arab countries. The underlying anger being expressed was much wider than the question of tuition fees alone, and there was a clear affirmation of solidarity with the Occupy movement. This movement showed that the increasing difficulties of daily living are pushing a growing part of the population to react.
On 7 April, at a cycle of conferences in Montreal, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, a spokesman for the ‘Coalition Large de l’Association pour la Solidarité Syndicale Etudiante’ (CLASSE) had to recognise the breadth of the movement: “our strike is not the affair of a generation, it’s not the affair of a single spring, it’s the affair of a people, it’s the affair of a world. Our strike is not an isolated event, our strike is just a bridge, it’s just a step along a much longer road”. For the Charest government, it’s clear that the students cannot be allowed to occupy the streets, because of the risk that they could win the solidarity of other sectors and spread the movement more widely. The government therefore passed the so-called ‘Law 78’ on 18 May, making any unannounced demonstration illegal. These are the broad lines of this ‘special’ law[2]:
“it removes the right to demonstrate without prior agreement with the police: eight hours in advance, the time, duration, route and means of transport have to be given to the police (this restriction applies to any gathering of more than 50 people. It can impose very heavy fines on organisers of strike pickets: from 1,000 to 5,000 dollars for a single individual and from 25,000 to 125,000 dollars for an association of students – double on the second conviction”.
For the present government, the idea is to strike hard in order to break the mobilisation and remind demonstrators of who makes the laws. These repressive methods bring to mind the violence used against the Spanish or Greek demonstrators in the past year. In France, it is rather similar to the violence used to intimidate the students and school pupils demonstrating in Lyon in 2010, where the police kettled them for hours in Bellecourt Square before finally releasing them one by one after demanding to see their IDs[3]. That looked like an experiment in how to intimidate, to frighten demonstrators, and break their militancy. This also seems to be the aim of the Charest government with Law 78. But events haven’t quite turned out as the Quebec ruling class planned. Far from breaking the movement and bringing the students to heel, this ‘special measure’ was seen as a provocation by the demonstrators and it had the effect of radicalising and spreading the movement. In contrast to most previous student movements in Quebec, students at the major English language universities, McGill and Concordia, have also been on strike.
Police attempts at intimidation were followed by even bigger protests and regular ‘casserolades.’ These are nightly demonstrations, held since 21 May, where workers, unemployed, students and pensioners bang pots and pans, in defiance of the government ban. And the state has responded: “more than 700 people were arrested on the night of Wednesday/Thursday in Montreal and Quebec City on charges of holding demonstrations judged illegal by the police force. Among the 518 arrests carried out after the thirtieth consecutive night of demonstrations in the city, 506 were arrested as a group and 12 as isolated individuals; 14 of them on the basis of the Criminal Code and one on the basis of a municipal rule proscribing the wearing of a mask ‘without reasonable motive’” (le Devoir 25 May 2012)
It’s clear that the strength of this movement is the combative and determined attitude of the younger generation. We can only support this, along with the attempts at extension and the presence of workers from other sectors within it. In one sense, the lack of subtlety and the brutality of the Charest team could serve to generalise the movement. However, the movement does contain a lot of weaknesses and there are many traps that need to be avoided if it is to avoid getting bogged down behind sterile demands.
First there is the idea that that Quebec is different from the rest of North America and can somehow have a more socially responsible ‘non-anglo’ government. Student debt is a central issue, familiar to students across the world, but there is an illusion that Quebec can somehow escape the general tendency. The movement has not really extended beyond Quebec, even though there have been student demonstrations in Ottawa and Toronto. Expressions of solidarity from students in British Columbia can be put alongside demonstrations held in Paris, Cannes, New York, London and Chile. Solidarity from afar, but the struggle has not spread.
Perhaps the most important illusion is that it is possible to live in a better world inside capitalism; the illusion that this system of exploitation can be changed through reforms and through ‘democratic’ channels[4]. This illusion is being peddled by the unions, and particularly by CLASSE with its talk about ‘civil disobedience’. Law 78 also foresees a suspension of courses until August in establishments which are on strike, without the cancellation of the term, and this means that it is difficult to say how the movement is going to continue. What can be said however is that all the workers’ movements throughout the history of capitalism prove that the only way to offer a real perspective is to seek the widest possible solidarity and extension. Toward the end of June demonstrations were still taking place, although not involving the same numbers as at the peak of the movement when 170,000 students were on strike. Meanwhile student unions are engaged in legal battles over Law 78.
Canada is not a backwater in the class struggles. In the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 was a significant episode in the working class’s attack on capitalist social order[5]. In the international wave of struggles that emerged at the end of the 1960s, 300,000 workers were involved in the Quebec general strike of 1972, during which factories and radio stations were occupied, and towns taken over. In the current struggles the lessons for Quebec students are the same as elsewhere with the need to escape the control of the unions and hold general assemblies, open to all, where political questions are debated openly, without handing them over to ‘specialists in the struggle’. These are vital steps towards any struggle becoming effective, along with the concern to spread the struggle to other sectors.
Enkidu/Car 29/6/12
[2] According to Rue89.com
[3] See this eyewitness account of the events in Lyon https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2010/11/lyon-repression [5]
[4] This is what some of the Spanish indignados were criticising when they raised slogans like ‘They call it democracy and it isn’t!’ ‘It’s a dictatorship but you can’t see it!’
We have recently been saddened by the news of the death in hospital of comrade Il Jae Lee, a militant of the Left Communist Group in Korea: he was 89 years old.
Il Jae was born in 1923 in the town of Daegu, in what is now South Korea but which was known at the time by its historical name of Chosun. At the time, the whole of Korea was a Japanese colony valued for its raw materials and agricultural wealth, destined to support the war effort of Japanese imperialism. Official Japanese policy was to reduce Korean culture to the status of a folk curiosity; at school, children were required to learn Japanese, and Il Jae spoke Japanese fluently.
In the midst of the war, not yet 20 years old, he was already taking part in workers' struggles. With the departure of the Japanese occupying forces in August 1945, the country was reduced to chaos and in many places the workers took control of production themselves in what Il Jae described as workers' councils (the Changpyong, or Choson National Workers' Council) – though in the conditions of the time it was impossible for such councils to do much more than produce the bare essentials of life in a war-shattered country.
Il Jae joined the Communist Party in September 1946, and was a leading member of the general strike that broke out in Daegu during the same year. With the suppression of the workers' struggles by the US occupation authorities, Il Jae joined the partisans fighting in the south of the country, being wounded in the leg in 1953.
In 1968, under the dictatorship of Park Chung Hee, he was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment for his continued political activity. His health was permanently damaged by his time in prison, and his face still bore the marks of the torture he suffered there. In 1988 he was released on probation, which did not stop him from involving himself immediately in political activity in Daegu. He became a leading member of the Korean Trades Unions in 1997.
For a young worker to enter the Communist Party in 1946 was perfectly natural. But no matter how sincere and courageous many of its members undoubtedly were, the Party in Korean was in effect no more than the tool of Russian and Chinese imperialism, then at the end of the Korean War, of a particularly grotesque and barbaric caricature of Stalinism: the hereditary dictatorship of the Kim family.
Had this been all there was to his life then we would not be writing this homage: history is full of heroism in the service of bad causes. But Il Jae was truly remarkable in being able, as he neared his 80th year, to call into question the struggle of a lifetime. In 2002 he became active in the Socialist Political Alliance, a new group which was beginning to introduce the ideas of the Communist Left into Korea. When a delegation of the ICC travelled to Korea in October 2006 to take part in the International Marxist Conference organised by the SPA, we met comrade Il Jae. In the debates during the conference, while we disagreed with him on many questions – notably the possibility of reviving the trades union as an organisational form for workers struggle – it was clear to us that we were in the presence of a real internationalist: above all on the key question of North Korea, he rejected any support for that odious regime.
In our discussions with him during his last years, comrade Il Jae was concerned above all with two questions: the international unity of the working class, and in Korea, breaking down the barriers between workers on permanent contracts, casual workers, and the immigrant workers from Bangla Desh and the Philippines who are beginning to appear in Korea. The latter question made him break with the recognised unions, although he still had not given up the hope of using the union form of organisation. He attended the ICC's 17th Congress in 2007, and had hoped to accompany an ICC delegation to Japan in 2008: sadly his declining health made it impossible for him to do so.
Comrade Il Jae Lee was an indomitable fighter for the proletarian cause whose spirit remained unbroken by hardship and prison. He remained an internationalist to the end of his life. Above all, he had the moral courage to continue searching for the truth, even if this meant calling into question the ideas for which he had fought and suffered in the past. The working class is poorer for his loss: it is richer for his example.
The world economic crisis is getting more on more destructive. The bourgeoisie needs the workers' labor more and more in order to strengthen its capital further. With the economic crisis deepening every day, the bourgeoisie started calling more and more for wars, barbarism and exploitation. And in a period as such, the bourgeoisie is increasing its suppression over the working class with its police forces, its governments and all sorts of organs. Preparations against the reaction of the working class is already being made in certain sectors.
The transportation sector is one of the life veins of capitalism. Because of this, the air transportation has an immense significance. So when the Turkish Minister of Economy Ali Babacan said “No offense to anyone, strikes will be banned in strategic sectors such as this one! For example imagine if there is a strike in a bank for three days, it would go bankrupt instantly... The fact that we are stopping strikes is among the elements which made the Turkish Airlines so successful. As a matter of fact I read in a foreign magazine, it said the Turkish Airlines is better than Lufthansa because there are no strikes”, he was clearly expressing not only the significance of this sector but also what was to come.
The working hours in the air transportation sector can go up to 16-18 hours in Turkey. Certain companies are even forcing the cabin crew to sleep in the same rooms to reduce the workers cost when they have to stay outside their hometowns. In a situation like this when the workers have to work for long hours having slept only 2-3 hours before at the expense of their health, social life and human needs, a right such as “the right to strike” has to be out of the question!
For years, strikes weren't banned in the air transportation sector in Turkey; and not a single significant and real strike was planned for the workers who had the right to strike. A strike wasn't declared when hundreds of workers were fired from the Sabiha Gokcen Airport in Istanbul. When Ali Babacan openly declared the governments intentions in the statement quoted above, in other words when the rubber met the road, the union which had done nothing when the workers were fired, when they were forced to work for low wages or for long hours, but when the union itself was losing its area of authority sent a message to workers titled “Urgenttt” declaring that the workers were to use their “not being ready for the flight” right. The workers, responded to the fact that the problems they were experiencing were their problems, answered the call and effectively went on a strike on May the 29th. What followed, the firing of 305 workers, a worker being left abroad because he was on an international flight when he got fired, the workers being text messaged by the company informing them that they've all been fired demonstrated the barbarism the Turkish Airlines was unleashing on the working class. And these attacks of the bourgeoisie were done hand in hand with the unions, who still had the nerve to claim to be workers' organizations. Like the Tek-Gıda-Is1 union in the recent TEKEL workers struggle and DISK2 in the workers' uprising of 15-16th of June 19703, Hava-Is, the air transportation workers' union was ready to play its role. The Hava-Is union didn't claim any responsibility for this action taken in the aviation sector.
Now it was clear for the workers that there was a need to struggle not only against the Turkish Airlines administration and the government but also the union they were members of. The May 29th Association, just like the Platform of Struggling Workers which followed the TEKEL struggle, formed by the airline workers as an organ of struggle independent from the union, took the task to deal with the unions attitude in the process and made the following statement: “The administration of the Hava-Is union we are members of played a large role in the declaration of this justified protest as 'illegal' by not even claiming responsibility for an action they themselves had called for. The bosses of the Turkish Airlines intend to take advantage of this ground and suppress all the employees and almost turn them into slaves. Was the Hava-Is administration so inexperienced that they couldn't foresee this outcome when they left hundreds of their members alone in the face of the Turkish Airlines administration? What sort of a union mentality is this?”4 What is significant about this statement is how it exposes the real face of the union these workers are members of, as well as its role.
To be sure, the Hava-Is union has set up a resistance tent in the Turkish Airlines. However the only people present are Atilay Ayçin, the president of the union, and a number of shop stewards and union officials. The bourgeois left which can't find enough words to describe how combative the chairman of the union is occasionally looks back at the tent and manages to ask the question “Where are the workers?” and the chairman of Hava-Is responds by complaining about how the workers aren't acting with him, thus continuing the game. These unions, who say “the worker pays the price if necessary” have never paid the price for anything in their existence; the chairman of the Turk-Is Confederation of which Hava-Is is a member of kept adding fortune to his fortune, and as they say, the workers paid the price in the Turkish Airlines strike as they did in the TEKEL struggle. Besides, as the May 29th Association says, it is the understanding of showing off which makes “a discrimination between workers who supported the struggle and those who didn't” when it comes to the aids to be given to the workers who 'paid the price'.
The bourgeois left claims that the union is in a position to unite the thousands of workers of the Turkish Airlines, while the May 29th Association is dividing the struggle. However the May 29th Association aims to extend the struggle in the interests of the working class as a whole amongst unionized and non-unionized workers alike and emphasized the importance of solidarity.
The public workers strike of May 23rd where 500,000 public workers participated also demanded the right to strike along with a demand for higher wages. The Turkish Airlines workers went on strike only for the strike ban; the main role played by the unions in both events was to isolate the ripened dynamic in order to prevent it from meeting with the other sectors of the class. In accordance with their role to divide the workers into sectors, the unions tried to melt down the energy present in these two struggles within sectoral limits.
The workers know that they can only rise the struggle with their own hands, what happens when those who aren't workers take the decisions and that the interests of themselves and the interests of the unions are antagonistic. The May 29th Association shows this to us. A significant note in the history of the working class in Turkey has been written by the workers of Turkish Airlines. And this note is that only organizations where the workers can take their own decisions can push the struggle forward. As the practice of the May 29th Association has shown, the workers are capable of coming together in the struggles and organize open meetings and mass assemblies; and these assemblies have to appear as the form of workers' self-organization in every real struggle if it is to succeed.
Gül
1The Union of Tobacco, Alcoholic Beverage, Food and Related Industry Workers of Turkey
2The “Revolutionary” (or Progressive as it is rather ridiculously translated nowadays) Workers Unions Confederation was an allegedly revolutionary and socialist split from the Turk-Is, the Turkish Workers Unions Confederation which had been founded based on the AFL-CIO in the United States.
3A massive workers uprising of the Istanbul proletariat where 150,000 workers took to the streets and clashed with the police and the army.
4 www.29mayisbirligi.com [11] and https://imza.la/ [12]
The main factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie have been slapping themselves on the back in raucous celebration the past two weeks after the Supreme Court dealt it two key victories in its vicious faction fight with the insurgent right-wing factions in the Republican Party. First, the Court threw out just about about every provision of Arizona’s contentious anti-immigrant law (SB 1070). Although, the court let stand a provision that requires police officers to check the immigration status of anyone they have in custody for another crime if they have reason to suspect they are in the country illegally, this provision does not represent a dramatic departure from what police officers already do in most cases. The court threw out the other more contentious provisions of the law that were a direct challenge to federal authority, including making it a state crime for an illegal immigrant to be Arizona and allowing police officers to stop and question anyone they had probably cause to believe was in the country illegally (the so called “Papers Please” provision).
Later the same week, the Court released its decision on President Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement—his plan to reform the nation’s health care system that has become known as “Obamacare.” This decision was nothing less than a political stunner as the Court upheld the central tenant of the law—the so called “individual mandate” that requires everyone who does not otherwise receive health care insurance to purchase a policy from a private insurance company or pay a tax penalty. This decision flew in the face of most political prognosticators and court watchers, who after the court heard oral arguments on the law in March, were fairly certain either the entire law or the individual mandate upon which the rest of the law’s provisions depend—would be ruled unconstitutional.
What was even more surprising was that in each of these decisions, the George W. Bush appointed, generally conservative Chief Justice John Roberts voted with the court’s liberal justices (Breyer, Ginsberg, Soto-Mayor and Kagan) to side with the Obama administration. In fact, it was Chief Justice Roberts’ vote that delivered victory to the President in the health care case when even the Court’s only acknowledged “swing vote” (Kennedy) sided with the court’s right-wing justices (Scalia, Thomas and Alito) to strike down the individual mandate.
This represented a double victory for the President and the main factions of the bourgeoisie he represents. First, on the policy level, his health care reform survived a very aggressive legal challenge from the right and is now the constitutionally validated law of the land. Second, the fact that it was Chief Justice Roberts who sanctioned the law, allows him to make the political case that the law does not represent some attempt to install a Western European socialist style health care system in the United States.
These two legal victories for the President set off a virtual media cavalcade on all sides of the bourgeois spectrum. For the mainstream media, these decisions represented a break in the growing partisan rancor threatening to tear the country apart. According to this narrative, the Supreme Court, and with it the entire American political system, would soon regain a measure of its legitimacy as it dawned on people that despite the growing ideological divide, the nation’s political institutions could come together to get something done of importance for the national interest after all. For the more left leaning media outlets, these decisions, while not ends in themselves, were important moments in checking the right-wing backlash against the President and opening the road to more progressive reforms to come: such as establishing a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants and “Medicare for all.” Not surprisingly however, the right-wing cacophony of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc. was stunned by the decisions. Expecting victory from a Supreme Court that many have described as the most conservative in generations, they got the shaft once again, fueling a vicious outburst in which some right-wing commentators were moved to question Chief Justice Roberts’ mental health.
So, what do these two decisions in the Obama administration’s favor represent for the life of the U.S. ruling class? Regular readers of Internationalism will be familiar with our analysis of the political crisis of the U.S. bourgeoisie, which we have been developing since at least the disputed 2000 Presidential election that brought George W. Bush into office against the consensus of the main factions of the ruling class. As part of this analysis, we have drawn attention to the increasing difficulties of the U.S. state to act in the overall interests of the national capital due to the reciprocal forces of social decomposition that have manifested themselves within the U.S. political apparatus as a deepening ideological decline of the Republican Party. According to our analysis, the GOP has undergone a progressive process of right-wing ideological hardening such that its ability to act as a credible party of bourgeois national government has been called into question.
However, more than simply a process affecting the Republican Party alone—these tendencies have forced the Democratic Party to move ever further to the right itself in order to negotiate the structures of the American state within which it must function. The result of all this has been a general paralysis of the American state capitalist apparatus on many of the burning issues facing the national capital, especially at the domestic level—immigration and health care chief among them.
Does the Obama administration’s recent victories on these issues in the Supreme Court call our analysis into question? Do they mark a reversal in the process of ideological decomposition of the U.S. political apparatus? Simply put, we don’t think they do. It is true that the main factions of the bourgeoisie won two important victories with these decisions. But it is important to put them in the proper perspective, which we will attempt to do below.
On the immigration issue, it must be acknowledged that the Obama administration only won a defensive victory when the Arizona law was ruled unconstitutional in its main provisions. The President’s victory must be seen in the context of the severity of Republican run Arizona’s challenge to federal authority[1]. If upheld, Arizona’s law would have foreshadowed a serious thereat to the national government’s ability to set immigration policy for the entire country. The spectre of each state having its own immigration laws was obviously too much for the national state to tolerate, and as such the Supreme Court’s decision to back the Obama administration is not surprising. However, it should be kept in mind that three justices actually voted to uphold Arizona’s law. The conservative justice Scalia even used his bench statement to attack the Obama administration’s entire approach to the immigration issue expressly sanctioning each state’s pursuit of its own immigration policy. While Scalia’s view may be in the minority on the court at this time, it is telling of the overall crisis facing the U.S. bourgeoisie that such political sentiment can be uttered from the bench of the nation’s highest court—the supposedly “apolitical” branch of government. Scalia’s actions stand in sharp contrast to the Court’s consensus on crucial issues in previous eras of state capitalism, such as its unanimous decision to end segregation in schools in Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954. Scalia’s vitriol is sure to incite the anti-immigrant right and give the right-wing factions of the bourgeoisie a glimmer of hope that a different court—or a different Chief Justice—would have given them different results.
Clearly, the President’s legal triumph on this issue represents only a defensive victory. The political prospects for enacting comprehensive immigration reform anytime soon seem doubtful. This is an issue that the main factions of the bourgeoisie have been trying to address for some time now, including some of the more rational figures in the Republican Party who fear a coming “Balkanization” of American society. The need to establish a rational immigration policy that integrates the more than 10 million illegal immigrants living within its borders into society, gains their cooperation with police and the state bureaucracy and which faces the coming demographic changes to American society is one of the most important domestic issues facing the U.S. national capital today. However, it is unlikely that much progress will be made on this issue as long as the Obama administration faces a hostile Congress dominated by a Republican Party that seems intent on exploiting anti-immigrant sentiment for immediate political gain. Moreover, it is likely that as the economic crisis deepens the issue of immigration will become an even more divisive issue as the state struggles to manage the crisis and maintain its ideological control over the working-class. While it is true that the stream of illegal immigration to the United States has slowed as a result of the economic crisis, this does not mean the issue will go away anytime soon.
On the health care issue, it is true that the Supreme Court’s upholding of Obamacare is a major victory for the main factions of the bourgeoisie. While we can’t go into all the details of the issue here,[2] the need to address the US’s costly and inefficient healthcare system, which is a major drag on its competiveness, is of the upmost importance to the national capital. If Obamacare had been struck down by the court, it would have a serious political and policy catastrophe for the entire US bourgeoisie and President Obama in particular. First, this would have destroyed the only major piece of legislation to reform the nation’s healthcare system to actually make it through Congress in a generation—forcing the main factions of the bourgeoisie to start from scratch. Second, it would have invalidated the President’s signature domestic policy achievement calling the prospects for his reelection this fall into sharp question and raising the spectre of a Republican President governing with a Republican controlled Congress—an arrangement that the last time it was tried delivered disastrous results for the national capital.
Nevertheless, the President’s victory on this issue is only impressive in the context of how close it was to an actual defeat. In the days after the decision was delivered, it was revealed that Chief Justice Roberts originally sided with the court’s conservative justices voting to rule the individual mandate unconstitutional before ultimately changing his mind to uphold this provision. Although Justice Roberts rejected the Obama administration’s argument that the individual mandate should be ruled constitutional under Congress’ authority to regulate interstate commerce; he nevertheless found an alternate legal basis to uphold it: Congress’ authority to tax. [3]
In fact, it has been reported that the court’s supposed swing vote—Justice Kennedy—spent months lobbying Roberts to change his mind once again and vote with the conservatives to overturn the law. So torn was Roberts that it appears he actually wrote both the majority opinion to uphold the law, as well as the bulk of the minority opinion to strike it down! In the end, the fate of the President’s most ambitious policy to date, and perhaps his entire Presidency, rested in the hands of one man—whom Obama as a Senator had voted against confirming to the Court. So much for the rule of the people! It appears likely that it was only a massive media campaign around the growing illegitimacy of the Court in the public’s eyes, its deepening partisanship and ideological decay that moved Roberts to change his vote in order to prove to the nation that the Court can still be a respected legal body that rules according to the law rather than politics.[4] Either that, or somebody other than Justice Kennedy was partaking in some serious arm-twisting behind the scence. In either case, while the main factions of the bourgeoisie celebrated their victory, they probably couldn’t help but be extremely nervous by how close it appears to have come to being a total rout.
However, the upholding of Obamacare does not in any way represent an overcoming of the healthcare issue for the U.S. national capital. Not by a long shot. As we analyzed in our previous article on the issue, Obamacare is at best a modest reform that leaves many of the structural inefficiencies of the system in place. In its main, it is a mechanism for reducing “free riding” by getting more and more people to pay into the health care system, but it does not attack the basic features of the system that make it so expensive.
Beyond this though, just because the law was held to be constitutional by the Supreme Court, does not make it politically legitimate. Although public opinion polls released in the days after the decision showed a modest uptick in support for the law, it remains far from popular with the electorate. Moreover, Republicans have shown no indication that they will let up in their opposition to the law and Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney greeted news of the Supreme Court decision with a vow to “repeal and replace” the law as soon as he is elected President. Of course, the fact that Romney was the original author of Obamacare at the state level in Massachusetts has not prevented him from running against his own plan on the national level.
Many pundits have stated their belief that the court’s decision now gives President Obama and the Democrats the opportunity to resell this law to a skeptical public. And certainly they have not passed up the opportunity. But the ideological terms upon which they have decided to approach this have been curious indeed. All of a sudden, as Democratic operative after Democratic operative on the talk shows have stated, Obamacare is really a law to prevent people from “freeloading,” by forcing them to buy insurance. In the end this shouldn’t be surprising. The Democrats have adopted Republican rhetoric to try to sell a law that was originally devised by Republicans. The hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie—left and right—couldn’t be more obvious! All the talk about how the law will help those without insurance has been downplayed, as the cruel language of punishment has surged to the forefront. In bourgeois politics the logic couldn’t be more utilitarian—whatever it takes to win the election.
However, even more ominous is the fact that despite upholding the individual mandate—the Court struck down the part of the law that mandated the states’ to expand Medicaid coverage (the complex state/federal program that provides modest medical coverage to the poor). This provision of the law required states to expand eligibility for Medicaid to all persons whose income is within 133 percent of the federal poverty level or risk losing all federal Medicaid funding. In ruling this provision unconstitutional, the court made participation in the expanded Medicaid program optional for each state. Despite the fact that the federal government would cover the entire cost of this expansion for the first three years and then 90 percent after that, a number of Republican Governors have already said they will refuse to participate in Medicaid expansion. At least 17 million of the supposed 32 million people who would gain access to health care coverage under Obamacare would have gotten it through the expansion of Medicaid. If a number of Republican controlled states refuse to participate, this number will have to be revised downward, as will the expected overall economic benefits of the law to the national economy that are supposed to accrue from expanded coverage.
In addition to a possible fight over Medicaid expansion, some Republican Governors have already stated their intention to obstruct the setting up of the state level insurance exchanges through which people forced to buy insurance through the individual mandate would obtain coverage. This poses the threat of another round of costly and drawn out legal battles between the Obama administration and the various “red states” surrounding the implementation of the law. While some political pundits believe these Republican Governors to be engaged in a cynical political bluff, as many of them did about acceptance of federal stimulus money, others caution that the virulent revulsion to Obamacare in the Republican Party should not be underestimated.
In the final analysis, it is this political opposition emanating from the Republican Party, incited by its Tea Party faction, that represents the most serious threat to the ability of the state to act in the overall interests of the national capital. Driven more by ideology than a practical approach to the problems facing the state, it is perfectly possible that a Republican President governing together with a Republican Congress might completely overturn Obamacare rendering the last four years a total waste. While this is still an unlikely outcome, it is not impossible to imagine. In the current political climate, the very continuity of the state and its policies is threatened by a deepening ideological decomposition, which is reflected in the vitriolic political clashes that are now common place within the US political class, even on issues that seem as if they should bring a more general consensus.
As for the Supreme Court, it would probably be a mistake to view Chief Justice Roberts’ defection on the issues of immigration and healthcare as indicative of some kind of return to normalcy. Later in the year, the Court is expected to take on yet another series of controversial cases that, if Roberts’ prior rulings are any guide, could see the court invalidate long standing precedents on affirmative action and civil rights. The court is also set to take up the contentious issue of gay marriage. While we can’t say which way the Court will rule on these issues, it seems likely it will continue to be a central factor in the overall political crisis of the bourgeoisie, even if it has received a temporary reprieve of its image as a result of Robert’s defection.
From our perspective, the political crisis of the U.S. bourgeoisie is likely to continue indefinitely. On the same day that the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare, the Republican Congress voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress in their investigation into the “Fast and Furious” gun-waking program. So strange is the Republican obsession with this issue, that it appears their interest in the case is motivated primarily by adherence to a bizarre conspiracy theory according to which the Obama administration was trying to stoke violence in Mexico in order to use it as an excuse to abolish the second amendment right to own guns in the United States. It is this far-out belief that has led to the first ever contempt charge against a sitting cabinet member in United States history.[5]
The forces of social decomposition and their reciprocal effect on the structures of the state are driving this ideological deterioration of the US ruling class. While there will be moments when the main factions of the bourgeoisie win battles (it is not for nothing that they are the “main factions” of the bourgeoisie), it is likely that the US state will continue to be plagued by a certain level of paralysis on the main issues facing the national capital, political vitriol of unprecedented proportions and a deepening crisis of legitimacy in the institutions of bourgeois government.
At the root of these developments is the insuperable crisis of the global capitalist system, which shows no real signs of abatement. Even the more rational factions of the US bourgeoisie are beginning to realize that their ability to manage this crisis is fleeting. The talk shows are rife with fearful discussions of the changing nature of the economy—an economy that many now acknowledge will be marked by high unemployment, low consumer demand and continued financial turbulence indefinitely. While Obamacare may be a rational mechanism for addressing some aspects of the crisis in the US healthcare system—one must wonder what the legal obligation to buy private health insurance will do to the economy. The younger generations of workers already have to pay 10 to 15 percent of their income towards their government-backed student loans. Now, under Obamacare, another chunk of their paycheck will go towards health insurance or the tax penalty, before they have even spent a dime in the consumer economy! The bourgeoisie really does seem to be running out of tricks!
Still, there are even more dangerous rocks ahead for the US bourgeoisie. The volatile nature of the situation in Europe presents a political and economic variable they simply do not control. At the same time, the growing imperialist tensions in the Middle East threaten to spiral out of control as the threat of a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran looms. Domestically, another round of contentious political battles over the debt ceiling and the expiration of the Bush tax cuts are not far off. The announcement of terrible job numbers for the month of June were a strong reminder that whatever Mitt Romney’s political difficulties on health care and his reputation as a “vulture capitalist”, Obama’s reelection is no sure thing.
Against this sordid world of bourgeois politics whose crisis only continues to deepen, revolutionaries pose the class struggle. For all those who seek a more humane and rational world, the path there does not lie through the institutions of the bourgeois state, bourgeois politics and bourgeois legalism. Only the collective struggle of the working class and all the exploited across the globe can point the way forward for humanity today.
Henk 6/7/12
[1] Arizona’s law was only the tip of the iceberg, as a number of other red states had passed anti-immigrant laws of their own. Alabama’s law was probably even more draconian than Arizona’s, making it illegal for anyone to knowingly assist an illegal immigrant in even the most banal of ways, such as giving them ride in one’s automobile.
[2] See our article, “Obamacare: Political Chaos for the Bourgeoisie, Austerity for the Working-Class” Available at: https://en.internationalism.org/internationalismusa/201205/4927/obamacare-political-chaos-bourgeoisie-austerity-working-class [15]
[3] The significance of the decision to uphold the law on taxing authority rather than through the commerce clause is not yet clear. However, it has caused some anxious political moments for all sides as they struggle to explain the difference between a “tax” and a “penalty.”
[4] Of course, if the leaks emerging from the Court about the decision process on Obamacare are true, it is hard not to see Roberts’ actions as a real capitulation to political pressure, rather than pure jurisprudence. What could be more political than changing one’s legal analysis based on public opinion?
[5] Not even any of George W. Bush’s cabinet members were ever held in contempt of Congress, despite strong suspicion by many that certain cabinet members were guilty of war crimes and other gross violations of the law.
The German Bauhaus 1919-1933, the world's most famous art school, was planned as a model of socialistic design and production. Bauhaus, literally translated into English, means ‘house of construction’.
Let us therefore create a new guild of craftsmen without the class-distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artist! Let us together desire, conceive and create the new building of the future, which will combine everything - architecture and sculpture and painting - in a single form which will one day rise towards the heavens from the hands of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith.
Bauhaus manifesto, April 1919.
The architect Walter Gropius, former chairman of the Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Art Soviet), wrote this rather romantic manifesto as founder of the new school. He distilled its aims more prosaically a few years later in the slogan ‘Art and technology, a new unity’.
The intention was to breakdown the distinction between:
high and low art (the Bauhaus incorporated the old fine art academy and the school for crafts in Weimar)
luxury art for the privileged and poorly made junk for the masses
industrial and handicrafts production
Artistic creation was to become an integral part of social life rather than a privileged niche within it. he creative process, previously surrounded by mystery, was to be clarified. Printing, pottery, textiles, metal work, furniture, theatre, were all to be integrated within a new modern architecture of light and space. Festivals, plays, parties, play were deliberately fostered to link the artistic community together and help put student and teacher on an equal footing. Hence the aptness of the title of the Barbican exhibition 'Art as Life'. And the title Lyonel Feininger gave to a woodcut illustrating the first Bauhaus manifesto: 'The cathedral of socialism'.
Despite its short life the Bauhaus has had an immense impact that is felt to this day. For example:
modernist architecture, known as the international style, of which the Bauhaus was a progenitor, has left an indelible imprint on building design. Even architectural trends that have reacted against it, like post-modernism, show by their very name that the international style remains a reference point
graphic design (advertising, magazine, newspaper and web design) would be impossible today without the Bauhaus pioneers
art education today retains the main innovation of the Bauhaus curriculum: a foundation course of basic principles and investigation, to be followed by several years specialisation in a particular field
The October Revolution in Russia in 1917 and the revolutionary wave it inspired throughout Europe in the following years, especially in Germany, seemed, after the mass destruction of the First World War, to offer a new way of living. In the world of art the Bauhaus exemplified this spirit of modernity that today, walking around the exhibition, still inspires. In a society that seems to conspire against man, the Bauhaus held out the hope that modern industry could be re-fashioned for his benefit.
The Bauhaus was part of a wider international movement that attempted to break the stranglehold of bourgeois philistinism on art. Trends like Dada and Expressionism in Germany, De Stijl in Holland, Le Corbusier’s L’Esprit Nouveau in France, all shared similar goals. The Bauhaus was staffed by some of the best known international talents of the time: Walter Gropius himself, and later the architect Mies Van der Rohe, and painters like Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky.
Indeed, in the same period, a Constructivist art school, the Vkhutemas (Higher Art and Technical Studios), with similar principles, but with far fewer resources, was founded in Russia, with the belief that a new proletarian artistic culture could be created on the ashes of the bourgeois regime. Kandinsky, who had helped formulate the curriculum of the Vkhutemas, moved to the Bauhaus in 1921.
Architecture and design were to be brought into harmony with mass industrial production. Hitherto these disciplines had lagged far behind the progress of technology and were still trying to imitate outmoded forms that were appropriate to pre-industrial methods of production, a trend heavily influenced by the conservatism of the bourgeoisie. According to the Bauhaus new forms had to be developed to express the possibilities of new technology at the service of the masses.
The Bauhaus’ radical espousal of modern materials and techniques (such as buildings made of steel and glass; furniture made from metal tubing); their principles of 'less is more', ‘truth to materials’ (elimination of decorative imitation and embellishment) and 'form follows function' (to take a small example: a chess set displayed in the exhibition was designed according to the moves of the pieces rather than composed of traditional figures!), created a new aesthetic sense and developed the appropriate skills to satisfy them.
Ironically in Russia the new materials were so scarce that wood was often used by constructivist architects to imitate the appearance of steel!
Capitalism, in certain periods, has shown a capacity for tolerating educational experiments like the Bauhaus. In the early twenties, in the midst of working class revolt, and the threat of revolution, the Social Democratic Party, the main support of the Weimar Republic, had a strong interest in presenting the latter as a socialist alternative to the danger of a German October. With the reflux of the proletarian movement however the Bauhaus found funding increasingly difficult to obtain and in 1926 it was forced to move from Weimar to Dessau, and from there, in a last ditch move, to Berlin in 1932 where it was finally forced to close by the newly elected Nazi Government in 1933. For the latter modern art itself was ‘cultural Bolshevism’. The National Socialists had no intention of spending ‘German taxes’ on the upkeep of an avantgarde institution that included foreigners and Jews.
In Russia, the Bolsheviks, through the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, founded the Vkhutemas in 1920. Anatoly Lunacharsky, the commissar, favoured the artistic avantgarde. Nevertheless Lenin and Trotsky didn't subscribe to the idea of the former Bolshevik Alexandr Bogdanov that it was possible to create a new proletarian culture from scratch within the isolated soviet bastion. The political power and the relations of production of the bourgeoisie had first to be crushed on a world scale before an extended process of developing a new classless culture could begin in earnest. Within this perspective the working class would have to absorb the achievements of previous cultures rather than simply recreating anew.
The Vkhutemas were closed in 1930 as the Stalinist counter-revolution was tightening its grip on cultural life under the doctrine of socialist realism.
In the end, whatever advances are made within capitalism in the field of education, the ruling class is obliged to subordinate them to its imperialist, political and economic objectives.
The Bauhaus ethos presupposed a system of social production orientated toward consumption and the satisfaction of human needs. But capitalism, while it must satisfy human needs in order to sell goods, nevertheless subordinates this aim for a more pressing one: profit. And if this aim can’t be met, due to the lack of solvent buyers for example, neither can human need.
Capitalist production, in its quest for profit, tries to reduce the consumption of the masses as much as possible by keeping wages to a minimum and by cheapening the production of consumer goods.
For this reason it has proved impossible, despite the great impact of the Bauhaus style, to bridge the gap between quality production for a small luxury market, and low-cost, badly made substitutes for the mass of the population.
Moreover, in the capitalist production process, the quest for profit demands a strict hierarchical division of labour and the unquestioning obedience of the worker, even in the ‘creative industries’. Instead of elevating the craftsman to the status of an artist, as the Bauhaus wanted, capitalism tends to demean him still further to the level of a machine minder – when it is not making him unemployed!
In 2005, according to the United Nations, about 100 million people were homeless in the world. 1 billion people were living in shanty towns. No doubt these numbers have increased since then. The beautiful dream of the Bauhaus appears to have been completely dashed.
But the productive forces of society, which include those of artistic culture, will continue to rebel against the grip of the capitalist relations of production. They will continue to point toward a new society and inspire us.
In this sense it is not the Bauhaus that has failed – it will remain an historical landmark of cultural progress – but capitalism itself.
Como 24/7/12
Links
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Orientalist_studies_in_Islam
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/days-discussion
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/1309/islam
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/quebec_students.jpg
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2010/11/lyon-repression
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/151/winnipeg-general-strike
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/student-struggles
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/1310/quebec
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/korea
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1311/il-jae-lee
[11] http://www.29mayisbirligi.com
[12] https://imza.la/
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/turkey
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/1312/turkish-airlines-strike
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalismusa/201205/4927/obamacare-political-chaos-bourgeoisie-austerity-working-class
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/immigration
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/attacks-workers
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/health-care
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/cathedral.of_.the_.future.jpg
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/1313/undefined
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/1284/art-and-decadence