Today is the anniversary of the birth of Subhas Chandra Bose. Last month saw a call for it to be made a public holiday in India. That call was signed by the General Secretaries of four parties. One was the All-India Forward Bloc, founded by the man himself. Another was the Communist Party of India, which is Stalinist. A third was the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a Maoist secession from the Communist Party of India. And the fourth was the Revolutionary Socialist Party of India, a half-digestion of Trotskyism by Bengal's pre-existing Anushilan movement of not just Hindu, but explicitly Brahmin, nationalists.
Which brings us to the character of the All-India Forward Bloc, and of the man who founded it, so much the Strasser of Bengal that he ran the Indian National Army, a force which fought with the Japanese during the War. Clearly, then, what with this call for a holiday, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is alive and well in the Bengali heartland of the Indian sectarian Left. (Marxism never takes hold anywhere where it is supposed to in its own terms, at various times having to make do with Bengal, Kerala, Russia, China, Albania, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Peru, Ethiopia, South Africa, Venezuela, Nepal, Korea, Zimbabwe, even Spain during the Republic or France and Italy in the days when their Communist Parties were at the their height, with Sri Lanka and Bolivia accounting for such success as Trotskyist parties have ever enjoyed.)
Oh, well, a different world, isn't it? No, it is not. Not in any sense whatever. We are governed permanently, regardless of the outcome of mere General Elections, by a coalition of Soviet or Fourth International acolytes with those of Pinochet's Chile and apartheid South Africa, for the restoration of which latter at least one of them actively campaigns. And who is the permitted voice of opposition to that coalition's wars, opposed by ninety per cent of the population? Only a coalition of Trotskyists (or, as in Bengal, upper-caste supremacists who have half-digested Trotskyism - the SWP) and the Kim Dynasty's retainers, not only with each other, but with the British branches of the Muslim Brotherhood and of Jamaat-e-Islami. It is by no means even clear that much of a wall really exists between these two supposedly enemy coalitions. Look out for rather a lot of Labour, Tory and Lib Dem candidates this year.
And in the tradition of Subhas Chandra Bose, they will ally with anyone - Stalin, Mao, Tojo, Hitler, Bush, Blair, absolutely anyone at all - against the common archenemy. Britain.
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Excellent post. It is unfortunate that the great political traditions that held at bay the radical movements of both the extreme Right and the extreme Left are now pilloried by so many in the political classes as being "old-fashioned" and finished. If well-meaning people on either the Right or Left want to know who prevented communism and fascism from taking hold or returning to power in various countries, look not to the acolytes of Reagan or Thatcher but to the Old Democrats and the Eisenhower Republicans who largely accepted the New Deal consensus. To Old Labour and the One Nation Tories. To Gaullists in France and to the various Christian Democratic parties in places like Italy and Germany, just to name a few of the countries of Continental Europe that benefited from explicitly religious and explicitly social democratic parties. By addressing the legitimate concerns of the working class within a largely socially conservative framework, these parties not only pioneered the widespread prosperity impossible under older, classically liberal laissez-faire capitalism, but also stemmed the tide of radical, dangerous ideologies on both the Right and Left that grew out of the myriad failures of laissez-faire capitalism. It is unfortunate that these important political traditions are not given their due in the mainstream media. I notice that whenever I read a mainstream publication’s article about “the return” of the Old Democrats in the USA, or of Old Labour or One Nation Toryism in Great Britain, or of authentic Christian Democracy in Italy, the tone is always one of fear and disgust, as if they were talking about fascists or Stalinists. I remember reading an article in “The Economist” that pilloried Pier Ferdinando Casini’s Union of Christian and Centre Democrats for being a “corporatist,”(read: fascist) party and for drawing most of its support from the South of Italy, where many people work in the public sector. So, obviously any socially conservative party that receives most of its votes from people working in the public sector must be fascistic, according to “The Economist.” That right there is a good indicator of the elitist and arrogant mindset of the neoliberal commentariat.
ReplyDeleteThe Communist Parties of the 40s through 60s also largely addressed national problems through socially conservative frameworks. When all the 'liberalisations' took place in the 60s and 70s they either waited for Social Democrats and Liberals to propose them and tepidly voted for them in parliament without campaigning on them, ignored them, or opposed them.
ReplyDeleteMaurice Thorez considered birth control a conspiracy against the Working Class (in a similar vein, many Black Panthers rejected abortion). Abortion was basically illegal in the USSR from 1935-56. The Church was being revived at the end of Stalin's time, even well after the war. Homosexuality was also illegal, and that right up to the end.
The modern liberal centre-left is not an heir of Stalinism, but perhaps of neo-Trotskyism and that vein of Maoism (actually having nothing to do with it except radical slogans) that took root among Western students. Of course there are also the ex-mainstream Soviet Communists (of the John Reid type) who remind me of ultra-Vatican II Catholics in their ease of philosophical evolution, authoritarian enforcement of their will, and a selective memory to go along with it. They are more the type who probably had Stalin killed (there is a lot of both scholarly and speculative work in Russia on this topic that does not travel Westward) and the Church re-repressed.
If you have Old Labour and Old One Nation Tories in Britain, France has the old PCF connected to the old CGT and the old (pre-Eurocratic) Gaullists. The Socialists, Radicals, and Christian Democrats never had France's interests at heart. Italy has the old PCI, with its triumphs and problems, and the old Christian Democrats, with its mafioso corruption and usefulness. The Socialists, Radicals, and Republicans played the wrong side of the culture wars.
In any case, Marxism-Leninism isn't the source of our cultural problems, not that you suggested it was, but you seem to attribute to it an exaggerated role.
The rise of Marxists to control of Britain demonstrates that Britain is now a Third World country.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I would like to apologize for not breaking up my text in my last post. I was in a hurry when posting my comment, and I am sure that it was rather annoying to read my massive block of text, so I apologize for that.
ReplyDeleteMaxime—
Good points. Your comments on the social conservatism of the Communist Parties in the 1940s-1960s are enlightening. I had an inkling of what you write of, for example, I believe the Italian Communists were largely silent on issues like divorce and abortion in the 1940s, ‘50s, and part of the ‘60s, or were in some cases outright opposed to such measures. My understanding, however, is that in the actual Communist Bloc nations, things like easier divorce and easy access to abortion became part of the Communist legal landscape.
But because of the atheism, materialism, and anti-clericalism of Marxist thought (or at least certain strains of Marxism) it becomes hard for me to see how Communism would be able to have a sustainable, socially conservative orientation. It strikes me that some of the 1940s-1960s Communist Parties were socially conservative because that was simply the mood at the time, and because they had to deal with a working-class that was still largely socially conservative.
I think you are right about some of the other parties. In Italy, for example, I believe that support for divorce was largely a phenomenon of the liberal Right (the Liberal Party for example) and some more moderate elements of the Left, like the Socialists and Social Democrats. I think the Italian Communists came to a pro-divorce stance rather late, in either the late ‘60s or early ‘70s.
You are also correct that the Italian Christian Democrats were often very corrupt and had connections to organized crime. But there were some very good politicians in the DC camp, especially the “Little Professors” like Giuseppe Dossetti, Giorgio La Pira, and Amintore Fanfani, who combined Christian social conservatism with left-wing economics. The problem was that the DC was highly factionalized. Fanfani tried to make the DC more like the Gaullists in France, but he was never able to overcome the factional nature of his own party. Fanfani did, however, succeed in putting into action many pro-worker policies like public works projects and government housing for workers. Fanfani also nationalized the electricity industry.
As for what is most likely behind the cultural decline of the West, I would probably have to put the primary blame on individualistic consumerism. The rise of individualistic consumerism in the West probably had more to do with the rise of social liberalism than did Marxism. Some Christian thinkers like Giuseppe Dossetti, for example, understood that consumerism would probably be more dangerous to cultural institutions than would things like the nationalization of industries. But as I think you point out, much of what people in the West see as the Left (especially in the US) comes from the student radicals of the ‘60s and ‘70s. The late 1960s and the 1970s saw the movement of many working-class voters towards a right-wing political orientation because of their opposition to the cultural views of student radicals and other “New Left” types, as I think they were called. This is especially true in the United States.