#I am not a proper critic I don’t even write goodreads reviews | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

encephalonfatigue · 4 years

Text

hybrid warfare and leftist alliances

this was originally written as a goodreads reflection on Masha Gessen’s book “The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia”, but turned into a sprawling mess.

I breezed through all six seasons of The Americans not long ago — another product of my podcast listening habits involving the Magnificast, hosted by two Christian communists. The Americans certainly stoked a smouldering interest in Soviet history for me. I only recently found out that Gessen did the Russian translations for many of the seasons.

This book was recommended to me by a pen pal who did her Master’s thesis on Soviet hockey propaganda, and will soon be starting a PhD on Russian democratic activism (and lesbians). So she certainly knows her stuff, and am glad I took the time to read this.

As a qualifier, before I begin this review, I have seen Gessen use she/her pronouns and other places that say Gessen uses they/them. I will use she/her because that is the most recent source I have found. And also the pronouns Gessen uses in reference to herself in the book. I will correct this review if I find my use of pronouns incorrect. With that out of the way, I’ll proceed onto the book.

I thought it was an absorbing read, well-structured, entertaining, and full of stuff I was completely ignorant of. There was a fascinating section on the practice of sociology under the Soviet Union, a really interesting section on Freudo-Marxism and its interaction with the Soviet state, and this later comes up in Gessen’s use of Erich Fromm for her stuff on totalitarianism. I think Fromm has helped me a lot better understand the dynamics of fascism. Gessen’s meeting with Putin was very fun to read. The difficulties I had (at times) keeping up with the history, dates, names, etc were some indication that I likely need to brush up on my Russian history. Once in a while I would recognize something, like when Gessen mentions Gorky in her typically humorous style:

“The city was named Gorky, after the Russian writer Alexei Peshkov, who, as was the Revolutionary fashion, had taken a tearjerker pen name: it meant “bitter.” When Zhanna was first becoming aware of her surroundings, she had no idea that a writer named Gorky had ever existed: she thought the name was a literal description of her town. The Soviet government seemed to agree: four years before Zhanna’s birth, it had chosen Gorky as the place of exile for the physicist Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the country’s best-known dissident.”

I encountered Gorky a couple years ago by way of the Indonesian anti-colonial writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer (a political prisoner in Indonesia for decades, wasting away in various penal colonies, perpetually accused of being a communist, though always denying that label) who was an enthusiastic translator of Gorky’s writing. Translating Gorky’s novel “Mother” into Indonesian was one of Pram’s first sources of income after his wedding, as I read in his memoir “The Mute’s Soliloquy”. He did the Indonesian translation working off from an English translation, and later found out sections were missing after going through a Dutch translation. He humorously wrote that he had to put up with pointed and critical queries about his translation when visiting the University of Leningrad.

I think my affinity for anti-colonial politics and its attendant resistance and revolutionary movements have created a certain (though limited) sympathy for the Soviet Union at times, although I know that when people like Pram were invited to the Soviet Union or Mao’s PRC — or for that matter when African Americans like W. E. B. DuBois, various members of the Black Panthers (like Angela Davis and Huey P. Newton), or Paul Robeson were also — they were shown a very curated view of those countries (as any diplomatic visitor to the West would be shown also), and these were concerted initiatives to project particular images of Communism into the so-called Third World (and Fourth World as ghettoized areas of the ‘First World’ are sometimes called). These are basic tactics to be expected of modern statecraft. My dad’s friend is Nigerian, and while politically and socially conservative (e.g. homophobic), he has a very high view of the Soviet Union as his father was invited to tour Soviet Russia and was very impressed with the place. This positive view of Russia has extended into the post-Soviet Putin years, and this is a theme in Gessen’s book. I will get into these issues a bit later, but first a word about Arendt.

I think the book’s main thesis and orientation draws substantially on Hannah Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism. Arendt is a figure I have been meaning to read for a while. Her work was very important for leftist philosophers engaged in theology like Giorgio Agamben who elaborated on the notion of ‘bare life’ from Arendt’s writing on Aristotelian distinctions of ‘bios’ and ‘zoe’. I do believe in the value of political life and political engagement, and I think those notions come through in Gessen’s focus on how Soviet repression of political engagement carried on into post-Soviet years. Arendt is not a leftist though (in my view), and while I haven’t read much of her work, I get the sense she would not have identified herself as such (nor would have even accepted the political spectrum birthed forth from the French Revolution). And so I think where I depart from agreement with Gessen’s work is where Arendt’s work on totalitarianism comes into view, and I think part of it also involves disagreements I have with Arendt’s views on Marx and leftist politics more broadly that she elaborates on in “On Revolution”. First I will make some remarks on Arendt’s book “The Origins of Totalitarianism”.

So I think the ‘milieu’ (lol) of literature and essays I spend most of my time thumbing through makes certain distinctions between authoritarian fascism and authoritarian communism. Many anarchists will emphasize similarities, yet I don’t think they would consider Hitler and Stalin as equivalents. Even libertarian communists who are against authoritarian tactics of communist ends, still generally hold similar goals as Marxist-Leninists, e.g. the abolition of class, but differ on how to get there. Now of course there are some Leninists who still use the word ‘liquidation’ and are vague about what they mean — likely some variation ranging from ‘the wall’ to ‘re-education camps’. The problem of realizing a classless society without violent coercion and force is an issue, I’d admit, but there are other mechanisms that disincentive acts of domination without the need for terror. The question of their efficacy is another matter. That being said, even though I think Nazism/fascism did have certain overlaps with Stalinism, I don’t think fascism and communism (even Soviet communism) are inherently two manifestations of the same underlying essence. This is Gessen’s summary of Arendt’s notion of totalitarianism:

“Whatever premise formed the basis of the ideology, be it the superiority of a particular race or of a particular class, was used to derive imagined laws of history: only a certain race or a certain class was destined to survive. The “laws of history” justified the terror ostensibly required for this survival. Arendt wrote about the subjugation of public space—in effect the disappearance of public space, which, by depriving a person of boundaries and agency, rendered him profoundly lonely. ”

In my mind, I don’t see eliminating a race and class as the same thing, although I do agree that many authoritarian communist regimes ended up empowering people who treated ‘ruling classes’ as almost metaphysical entities and one’s ‘class’ could almost be inherited genetically, e.g. if one’s ancestors were landowners, one could some how be held accountable for that (Gessen brings this up). I think many people who identified as communists in those regimes didn’t think that way, but it only takes a portion of people (who do) to cause irreparable trauma and terror, especially when they have power. I of course find that very troubling, but if one treats classes as relationally constituted, which is exactly the whole point of Marx’s body of work, then abolishing class might involve expropriating already expropriated wealth to return it to the people who produced it and need it more, trying to better distribute all the things produced by society such that no one is lacking hygienic housing, proper health care, healthy food, leisure time to enjoy the fruits of one’s labour etc… and fostering a world where people don’t feel superior to other people and have their identity based around having inordinately more than other human beings. I mean that is another way of abolishing class, and I see no problem with ‘eliminating’ class by such means. It’s an ‘elimination’ of a relation not a person. That is, working towards removing relations of domination between people. How that happens in practice is a whole other issue, if it’s at all possible. Authoritarian impulses not only go back to Marx and Engels, but back to utopian socialists, and even show up in Thomas More’s Utopia. So Arendt’s accusations cannot be so easily dismissed.

So this issue of violence is important to Arendt, and she will work though how Marx is connecting it with issues of scarcity and necessity. Arendt accuses Marx of turning issues of scarcity into accusations of exploitation, saying:

“Marx's transformation of the social question into a political force is contained in the term 'exploitation', that is, in the notion that poverty is the result of exploitation through a 'ruling class' which is in the possession of the means of violence… If Marx helped in liberating the poor, then it was not by telling them that they were the living embodiments of some historical or other necessity, but by persuading them that poverty itself is a political, not a natural phenomenon, the result of violence and violation rather than of scarcity.”

Arendt said something similar, but more forthcoming, in a footnote contained in her 1972 book “Crises of the Republic”:

"Behind it, however, stands the illusion of Marx's society of free producers, the liberation of the productive forces of society, which in fact has been accomplished not by the revolution but by science and technology. This liberation, furthermore, is not accelerated, but seriously retarded, in all countries that have gone through a revolution. In other words, behind their denunciation of consumption stands the idealization of production, and with it the old idolization of productivity and creativity"

This is an argument that Jordan Peterson perpetually peddles. I actually agree that capitalism is a far more productive and dynamic economic system than communism in most situations. I think Marx saw that too, and that’s why he believed capitalism was the stage that must precede socialism and then communism. Now you can debate the morality of whether we should accept such terms, but it’s merely a practical assertion on Marx’s part. That’s the grounds on which China’s liberalization occurred, and I think Soviet industrialization found similar justifications under Marx. I haven’t read enough Arendt, but from what I’ve read, I think Arendt’s focus on technology (especially in the American development case) as the answer to scarcity fails to recognize how organizations engaged in technological development under capitalism are in fact very political. Chomsky has called corporations some of the most totalitarian institutions on the face of the planet. I can say that engineering firms are even worse than other corporations. They are often very toxic work environments, deeply connected to the military industrial complex and resource extraction industries. The fact that military-fuelled corporations are behind so much of the innovation and increased productivity that exists today raises questions if it’s worth it. With all the technology that exists in 2020, how much more innovation is worth the continued exploitation and highly authoritarian working conditions that such increased productivity demands. The ‘falling rate of profit’ as the Marxian economists call it is some indication that ‘value-adding’ innovation can only increase by so much more. We have garnered enough productive capacity to meet all basic human needs. Is it time for something new?

Of course Arendt recognizes Marx’s typically Hegelian reversal from [violent expropriation causes poverty] to [scarcity and poverty necessarily causes revolutionary violence] which she strongly finds objectionable throughout the European tradition, including in Robespierre and Hegel. But in this Hegelian move, Marx is suggesting that only by assuring abundance and meeting material needs can one avoid violence. I agree with Marx in his assertion that poverty produces violence, because poverty is a form of structural violence which poor people are reacting too. Arendt later jokes even Lenin saw the technical basis of abundance as true, though I don’t think it’s that far off Marxist dogma as she asserts:

“…when asked to state in one sentence the essence and the aims of the October Revolution, [Lenin] gave the curious and long-forgotten formula: 'Electrification plus soviets.' This answer is remarkable first for what it omits: the role of the party, on one side, the building socialism on the other. In their stead, we are given an entirely un-Marxist separation of economics and politics, a differentiation between electrification as the solution of Russia's social question, and the soviet system as her new body politic that had emerged during the revolution outside all parties. What is perhaps even more surprising in a Marxist is the suggestion that the problem of poverty is not to be solved through socialization and socialism, but through technical means; for technology, in contrast to socialization, is of course politically neutral; it neither prescribes nor precludes any specific form of government.”

Arendt’s characterization of technology as neutral is maybe somewhat similar to the Saint Simonian vision of the neutral ‘administration of things’ reiterated by Engels.

I think maybe a few decades ago, the problem of productivity and scarcity were still central issues, or as Deng Xiaoping put it: the ‘principal contradiction’. But the so-called ‘principal contradiction’ today for China under Xi Jinping is ‘uneven development’. Haha, I’m quoting CCP Central Committee brass now, and I’m not even a Marxist, lol. So this issue is most often rendered as ’inequality’, but I think ‘uneven development’ is actually a good way of putting it. It’s an inequality of both (1) consumption: the distribution of all that we produce collectively as a species within a larger ecosystem of species, and (2) production: the focusing of labour onto producing things primarily for the interests of richest 10% of the global population (although the rationale here is that this stuff eventually trickles down — now 60% of the global population have access to the internet and 20% have been able to enjoy a plane ride).

Now to take a few steps back again, the question of how much violence is acceptable and justified to pursue a particular iteration of a ‘just society’ does pose a problem, which might be glossed over by simply stating violence is inevitable. This is what Arendt writes about in her work “On Revolution”, where she thinks ‘pity’, which undergirds revolutionary politics, quickly turns to cruelty and justifies almost any degree of violence or vice. In this sense I can see how Aristotle’s virtue ethics has really laid claim to Arendt’s arguments here. She has a certain disdain for the ‘by any means necessary’ folks. I never take that phrase literally. I think it is meant to be an assertion of political force more than anything. I don’t know any radical who uses the phrase ‘by any means necessary’ to literally mean that. They would never justify racial genocide if it led to a classless society. Their values are informed by their goals, and ultimately do constrain their means, but maybe less so than Aristoteleans like Arendt who writes:

“Robespierre's pity-inspired virtue, from the beginning of his rule, played havoc with justice and made light of laws. Measured against the immense sufferings of the immense majority of the people, the impartiality of justice and law, the application of the same rules to those who sleep in palaces and those who sleep under the bridges of Paris, was like a mockery to the foundation,of freedom and the establishment of lasting institutions, and to those who acted in this direction nothing was permitted that would have been outside the range of civil law. The direction of the French Revolution was deflected almost from its beginning from this course of foundation through the immediacy of suffering; it. was determined by the exigencies of liberation not from tyranny but from necessity, and it was actuated by -the limitless immensity of both the people's misery and the pity this misery inspired. The boundlessness of the 'all is permitted' sprang here still from the sentiments of the heart whose very boundlessness helped in the unleashing of a stream of boundless violence.”

This is why Arendt prefers the American Revolution to the French Revolution, because it was not concerned with ‘compassion’ or ‘pity’ for the poor, but because it was solely about freedom, yet she recognizes the glaring problem of her example, which is American slavery:

“Yet we deal here with men of the eighteenth century, when this age-old indifference was about to disappear, and when, in the words of Rousseau, an 'innate repugnance at seeing a fellow creature suffer' had become common in certain strata of European society and precisely among those who made the French Revolution. Since then, the passion of compassion has haunted and driven the best men of all revolutions, and the only revolution in which compassion played no role in the motivation of the actors was the American Revolution. If it were not for the presence of Negro slavery on the American scene, one would be tempted to explain this striking aspect exclusively by American prosperity,'by Jefferson's 'lovely equality', or by the fact that America was indeed, in William Penn's words, 'a good poor Man's country'. As it is, we are tempted to ask ourselves if the goodness of the poor white man's country did not depend to a considerable degree upon black labour and black misery - there lived roughly 400,000 Negroes along with approximately 1,850,000 white men in America in the middle of the eighteenth century, and even in the absence of reliable statistical" data we may be sure that the percentage of complete destitution and misery was considerably lower in the countries of the Old World. From this, we can only conclude that the institution of slavery carries an obscurity even blacker than the obscurity of poverty;”

Often historians will call the American Civil War America’s real revolution. The French Revolution brought about movements to liberate slaves in the colonies (though slaves themselves of course were the initiators, by way of revolts and uprisings), even if not well sustained. The political impetus behind the American Revolution differed from the French Revolution in that its disregard for liberation by ‘political means’ and its disregard for the suffering of slaves cannot be divorced from this exact ideology enabling slavery. (A particularly scathing critique of the American Revolution is given in J. Sakai’s “Settlers”, which criticizes white communists who lionize the American Revolution.) I think Arendt’s whole view on the matter is succinctly summarized in these couple sentences:

“All rulership has its original and its most legItimate source in man's wish to emancipate himself from life's necessity, and men achieved such liberation by means of violence, by forcing others to bear the burden of life for them. This was the core of slavery, and it is only the rise of technology, and not the rise of modern political ideas as such, which has refuted the old and terrible truth that only violence and rule over others could make some men free. Nothing, we might say today, could be more obsolete than to attempt to liberate mankind from poverty by political means; nothing could be more futile and more dangerous.”

I have been thoroughly propagandized by theorists of the left (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Althusser) to see things somewhat differently than Arendt, though I still have a lot to think through and I think Arendt’s critiques of the left and revolutionary politics more broadly must be taken seriously. They are carefully thought out and worth sitting with. But I think one should be cautious about how Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism are weaponized by certain centrist interests. This critique Gessen made of Bernie Sanders with respect to Cuba and Chomsky’s discussion with Arendt maybe reflects this divergence of opinion (although I agree with her critique of Castro’s homophobic purges must always be foregrounded). This is an excerpt from an article in Monthly Review by Reuven Kaminer on ‘totalitarianism’:

“The concept serves as the basis for a specific historical narrative built around the struggle of good (liberal democracy) against evil (totalitarian) dictatorship. According to this narrative, we are at the present enjoying the fruits of great victories in the battle against totalitarianism which stem directly from the comparatively recent demise of the Soviet Union. This, of course, makes it all the more easier to promote the concept of totalitarianism.

One of the ‘magical’ aspects of the concept of totalitarianism is that it appears to be “fair,” “even-handed,” and really above day to day politics. It seems completely objective because it warns that the dangers to freedom emanate from both the Right and the Left. Thus, the concept of totalitarianism is (almost) universally accepted and admired at all levels of political and intellectual life. All participants in current prevailing ideological and political discourse are assumed to be opponents of totalitarianism. The hegemonic rules of discourse are such that dissenting views may be disqualified if their proponents exhibit any lack of militancy against totalitarianism in thought and in practice. The final Part Three, on Totalitarianism, is devoted to the presentation of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as a new and unique form of government. The point of the author’s argument is clear and direct. Arendt sees a common basis to the two regimes in that they both are embodiments of radical, absolute evil. The content is clear, and so is the context. Never, for a moment, can the reader escape the clear and insistent message that Arendt is writing on behalf of the “Free World” against the looming evil of Soviet Russia.”

He goes on to do a sort of guilt by association thing with Arendt and various neocons. I will get into this a little later (especially how different leftists do this to each other) when discussing so-called red-brown alliances, which is somewhat similar to Arendt’s totalitarian thesis, and which I think is a threat the left should take very seriously. Anyway, Kaminer writes about a similar dynamic of a Trotskyist to neo-conservative pipeline (though I would argue this is not exclusive to Trotskyists: Bayard Rustin was a democratic socialist, Eugene Genovese an orthodox ML in the CPUSA):

“The fact that former leftists, and especially “graduates” of the revolutionary Marxist anti-Stalinist (Trotskyist) movement during the thirties and the forties, became leading ideologues of US reaction from the fifties onwards is well documented. The path of development among this particular section of US intellectuals would have been impossible without the Trotskyist stage. The “family,” as they were known by many, moved step by step from revolutionary, communist, Marxist anti-Stalinism during the thirties to just plain anti-Stalinism. From there the path was short to fervent, militant anti-Communism (minus Trotsky, minus revolution) and on to passionate support of the United States as the bastion of the Free World during the Cold War. Those who began their political life as convinced revolutionary Marxists moved via their core position of “anti-Stalinism” to condemnation of the Soviet dictatorship and on to identification with official US policies, as the only reliable bulwark against the tide of Bolshevik aggression. Current experience with the neo-conservative movement in the United States will help the reader to understand how a relatively small intellectual group can indeed become a vital factor in the ruling circles. It is not pure chance that one can even trace personal and family connections of the present influential grouping back to the anti-Stalinist Left.

This fascinating collection of intellectuals, which attracted Arendt and Bluecher, has been dubbed the New York intellectuals in a book with the same title. Even a partial list of some of the main representatives of the group is studded with highly influential and even famous names such as, inter alia, Irving Kristol, Sydney Hook, Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer. In New York, Arendt and her husband became a prestigious social, cultural, and political addition to the New Yorkers. During the war, she had already made a name for herself with articles in various magazines, including Partisan Review and Commentary. She certainly made a strong impression on the local colleagues as someone who spoke on the basis of intimate acquaintance with the broader horizons of European culture. It soon became clear that Arendt knew everything that her new colleagues knew and more.”

I find this very interesting, but it’s worth pointing out that Arendt was very critical of neo-Conservativism. I think Corey Robin, who is in fact a great admirer of Arendt’s work, makes a more compelling case that her writings on totalitarianism, though popular in western discourse, are in fact not the most important parts of her oeuvre. Robin writes, in the London Review of Books:

“This last section [on the Soviet Union as ‘totalitarian’] is the least representative – and, as historians of Nazism and Stalinism have pointed out, least instructive – part of the book. But it has always attracted the most attention. Young-Bruehl claims that the section on imperialism is of ‘equal importance’ to the one on totalitarianism, yet she devotes a mere seven scattered paragraphs to it. Samantha Power uses the last section to examine recent genocides, despite Arendt’s insistence that totalitarianism seeks not the elimination of a people but the liquidation of the person. And when Power tries to explain al-Qaida or Hamas, she also looks to the last section, even though Arendt’s analysis of imperialism would seem more pertinent…

If Arendt matters today, it is because of her writings on imperialism, Zionism and careerism. Composed during the 1940s and early 1960s, they not only challenge facile and fashionable applications of the totalitarianism thesis; they also eerily describe the dangers that the world now faces. By refusing to reckon with these writings, the journalists, intellectuals and academics who make up the Arendt industry betray her on two counts: they ignore an entire area of her work and fail to engage with the unsettling realities of their own time. The latter would not have surprised Arendt: empires tend to have selective memories. The history of ‘imperialist rule’, she wrote at the height of the Vietnam War, ‘seems half-forgotten’, even though ‘its relevance for contemporary events has become rather obvious in recent years.’ America was so transfixed by ‘analogies with Munich’ and the idea of totalitarianism that it did not realise ‘that we are back, on an enormously enlarged scale . . . in the imperialist era.’”

The issue of imperialism is one of the most pressing matters in global politics and I think it’s one of the pivotal factors behind these red-brown alliances that Gessen mentions. Gessen’s elaborations on the National Bolshevik Party and Aleksandr Dugin were likely some of the most important aspects of the book for me. They helped me understand a whole dimension of leftist infighting that I had previously not fully grasped. This is Gessen’s explanation of the red-brown alliances that her grandfather was very taken with:

“He now spent his days reading the emergent ultranationalist press, newly known as the red-brown part of the political spectrum for its combination of Communist and brownshirt fervor. Boris Mikhailovich took to reading antisemitic passages out loud. Tatiana diagnosed this as senility and told her daughter that such was the tragedy of old age: Boris Mikhailovich, who had been an articulate, if generally quiet, opponent of the Communists his entire life, was now aligning himself with people who were not only brown but also red. More to the point, after his brief love affair with politics, Boris Mikhailovich was angry and disillusioned, and the “red-brown” press was the vehicle most immediately available for the expression of his disgust with politics.”

One of Russia’s most prominent figures fusing far-right fascism with certain communist ideas was Aleksander Dugin, one of the pioneers of National Bolshevism which combines Soviet nostalgia with ethno-nationalist and fascist ideas. Gessen actually spends a lot of time sketching out Dugin’s intellectual formation during Soviet years and his emergence into popular Russian attention, and he is mentioned throughout the book. This is one of the places she describes his fascination with fascism:

“Dugin made his own pilgrimages to Western Europe. In 1990 he went to Paris, where he met Belgian New Right thinker Robert Steuckers… He… suggested to Dugin that his ideas might combine into something called National Bolshevism. Within a year, Dugin met a number of other Western European New Right intellectuals, was welcomed to the conferences of the ethno-nationalist think tank Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne in Paris, and was published by an Italian New Right house… If Evgenia and Boris Mikhailovich were merely listening to people who were flirting with ultranationalist and fascist rhetoric, then Dugin was going to the source. He had grown fascinated with Hitler’s philosophy and system of governance.”

The extent to which Dugin has had an influence on Putin has been debated. Gessen seems to think Dugin had Putin’s ear. Whatever is the case people saw strong parallels between Dugin’s ideas and Putin’s geopolitics. This is where the red-brown issues come into focus. Putin is not a communist, and most western communists do not like Putin as far as I know. He is a conservative and reactionary, who has actively stifled celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution and Lenin within Russia, because he is ultimately an anti-revolutionary. Yet he has remained somewhat esteemed among Latin American leftists, especially within the domain of the Pink Tide, like Castro and Chavez, and even to an extent Lula and Morales. In part, this is part of Putin’s geopolitics which favours the weakening of American hegemony for Russian advantage; Latin American countries despise American hegemony for slightly different reasons. But also these countries, especially Venezuela, are often great sources of market demand for Russian military goods, which is good for the Russian economy. And ceaseless American intervention in the region, which Washington continually refers to as America’s ‘backyard’, is the principle driver (in my view) of their demand for military technology.

So I first encountered Max Blumenthal by way of a video on the Palestine-Israel conflict shared with me by a Libyan friend who is very into Palestinian politics. I have followed the work of Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton over the past while, their podcast Moderate Rebels and their website The Grayzone. I find their analysis of Latin American politics and parts of the Middle East the most useful, but I’m a little more skeptical about their coverage on China and Ukraine, and a lot more skeptical about their coverage on Syria.

They are Marxist-Leninists involved with the PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation) — a communist party in the U.S., whose members are often accused of being ‘tankies’, although interestingly enough PSL has its origins in the American Trotskyist movement lead by Sam Marcy. As commented on libcom.org this Trotskyist connection is often carefully written out of their history. Norton has connections with the Communist Party of Canada (speaking at one of their events for a candidate in the Danforth riding) and PSL (like the CPC) is very supportive of ‘really-existing’ Socialist countries, especially in Latin America, so I can see how that might colour their views on Russia. But Ben Norton has very clearly stated he thinks Putin is a “right-wing nationalist” and “anti-communist”.

Norton’s and Blumenthal’s news platform ‘Grayzone’ is (I believe) a reference to what is called ‘hybrid warfare’ in U.S. military discourse. Francis G. Hoffman offered this definition of the ‘gray zone’ in a paper published in PRISM (a journal of the U.S. National Defense University) called “Examining Complex Forms of Conflict Gray Zone and Hybrid Challenges”:

“A formal definition of gray zone tactics is offered: Those covert or illegal activities of nontraditional statecraft that are below the threshold of armed organized violence; including disruption of order, political subversion of government or non-governmental organizations, psychological operations, abuse of legal processes, and financial corruption as part of an integrated design to achieve strategic advantage. This definition emphasizes the actual activities over intent. Placing this to the far left of the proposed continuum of conflict, short of violent military force or war, represented by the thick red line, positions it clearly along the continuum of challenges that our security policy must address.”

Hoffman later writes:

“Numerous foreign sources describe President Vladimir Putin’s preferred method as “hybrid warfare,” a blend of hard and soft power. A combination of instruments, some military and some non-military, choreographed to surprise, confuse and wear down an opponent, hybrid warfare is ambiguous in both source and intent, making it hard for multinational bodies such as NATO and the EU to craft a response.”

I think titling their platform The Grayzone, Blumenthal, Norton, and company are making a self-conscious admission, or maybe a sarcastic non-concession, that the journalistic work they do is inevitably caught up in the complex web of hybrid warfare between superpowers. They primarily see themselves as anti-imperialists, and Empire for them is American Empire. So anti-American sentiment is their common terrain with Russian nationalists. Numerous PSL members like Brian Becker and Eugene Puryear host podcasts/radio shows on Sputnik Radio, and many leftists internationally have RT shows. This acceptance of support of the Russian state by leftists has often generated accusations of red-brown alliances. Numerous articles on libcom and IWW sites go into this phenomenon, often using guilt-by-association tactics, but I don’t mean to say that pejoratively. One example I recently saw on The Grayzone itself was an interview Anya Parampil did with Mark Sleboda who is a Eurasionist (Gessen discusses this movement) who was one of Dugin’s main translators, though he’s since distanced himself from Dugin. But I wonder why even give Third Positionists like him a platform? This is more so the case with other PSL-affiliated media on Sputnik like Brian Becker’s show “Loud & Clear”.

The Grayzone itself is independently funded (at least it claims to be), but some of its PSL comrades in journalism are not. They have support of Russian state-media. I don’t want to be too judgemental here, but I think it’s fascinating when The Grayzone starts harping on anarchists in Rojava accepting indirect American military aid or Hong Kong protestors accepting funding from US state-funded ‘democracy’ NGOs. The issue is about agency, alliances of convenience, and I think it is a complex matter, yet I think the polemical nature of the Grayzone yields to a double standard they feel no shame about asserting. Even anti-colonial leftists like Wilfred Chan (who founded Lausan) have been continually criticized by Grayzone journalists like Ajit Singh. I read Singh’s work, appreciate it, and I think it’s important, but I really don’t get why he spends so much time criticizing leftists in the Hong Kong protest movement. I am personally critical of many dimensions of the Hong Kong protests, but I think it’s absurd for Singh to smear leftist HK protestors by showing how “Ukrainian neo-Nazis and US white nationalists” support the ‘pro-democracy’ protests in Hong Kong, especially in light of the support PSL receives from Russian state-media. I think it is worth contemplating why so many American conservatives and reactionaries support the Hong Kong protests, but it’s also worth considering why reactionary right-wing forces in Russian state-media support communist journalists in the U.S.. It is part of the “hybrid warfare” that the people at the Grayzone know perfectly well about, as it’s enshrined in their platform’s name. U.S. conservatives don’t care about Hong Kong citizens themselves or the actual socio-economic demands of protestors, as long as it destabilizes China and poses new legitimacy problems to the Communist government there. It’s a geopolitical game for them. “Democracy” has always been cover for US intervention that is primarily about economic market interests. The US is one of the most flawed democracies of the West so of course it’s absurd. In a leaked US Army publication, Field Manual 3-05.130 “Army Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare”, US interests and its military goals are made perfectly clear:

“If the United States is to ensure that countries are set on a sustainable path toward peace, democracy, and a market economy, it needs new, institutionalized foreign-policy tools—tools that can influence the choices countries and people make about the nature of their economies, their political systems, their security, and in some cases, the very social fabric of a nation. In July 2004, Congress created the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS). The mission of the S/CRS is to integrate military expertise and best practices into the civilian world…”

One of the approaches they state is to: “Work with international and multilateral organizations, individual states, and NGOs…”

U.S. Unconventional Warfare (UW) tactics involving the support of ‘resistance movements’ are plainly stated in the document (and this is not actually surprising at all, nor even really controversial, I think):

“Operations conducted by, with, or through irregular forces in support of a resistance movement, an insurgency, or conventional military operations.

This definition reflects two essential criteria: UW must be conducted by, with, or through surrogates; and such surrogates must be irregular forces. Moreover, this definition is consistent with the historical reasons that the United States has conducted UW. UW has been conducted in support of both an insurgency, such as the Contras in 1980s Nicaragua, and resistance movements to defeat an occupying power, such as the Mujahideen in 1980s Afghanistan.”

And again, often times ARSOF (Army Special Operations Forces) is seeking out what it considers as “democratic” elements to achieve these objectives:

“Perseverance in pursuit of U.S. objectives is fundamental to the conduct of ARSOF UW. If the seeking out and support of democratic elements in every nation and culture as outlined in the NSS is “the work of generations” and ARSOF UW is a central tool to achieve this policy, ARSOF UW requires a persistence of USG effort far beyond most other enterprises of government.”

So I understand anti-imperialist critiques of Hong Kong protests in light of all the meddling the U.S. is involved in, but again this is a question of agency. Does communist journalism funded by Russian state-media affect its legitimacy also? Granted Joshua Wong wishing Marco Rubio happy birthday and photo-ops with Tom Cotton are all bad form. I can’t imagine PSL cadre wishing Putin a happy birthday. But leftists Wilfred Chan and Lausan have been actively trying to convince fellow protestors to stop accepting funding from State Department-backed groups like the National Endowment for Democracy because it is delegitimizing their cause. But he is perpetually criticized for giving left cover for Hong Kong protests by MLs. I think the Chinese Communist government has accomplished a number of positive things, but that’s no reason to remain in denial about the terrifying way it’s treating Uyghurs, or the fact that many billionaires are members of the Chinese Communist Party but no one who publicly practices a religious faith can join. I recognize a new cold war with Russia, but especially China is at stake. Biden mentions Uyghar concentration camps in the same breath as moving 60% of American sea power to China. By ‘sea power’ I presume he means naval ships or submarines, some of which I imagine must be armed with nuclear weapons. Can you imagine China doing that to the US over the concentration camps it has for undocumented migrants?

youtube

And yes, it is extremely ironic that NATO makes YouTube videos about Russian information warfare, when the US is one of the world’s greatest meddlers. All this being said, I don’t automatically think anything the U.S. supports is wrong. Chomsky always brings up the example of Trotsky’s criticism of Stalin was agreement with fascists but that didn’t automatically make Trotsky wrong about Stalin. This is also the case with the U.S.. Even still, I’m almost certain what the U.S. does is for U.S. interests alone and it would stop as soon as it no longer benefitted U.S. interests enough.

Gessen goes into a section on the severe crackdowns on Russian NGOs receiving foreign funding, legislation requiring labels like “foreign agent” for such organizations, the removal of USAID from Russia, and mentions Kremlin attempts to shift blame on protests to US intervention:

““They are just doing their jobs,” said Putin, meaning that protesters were working for money—state television channels had by this time aired a series of reports claiming that the protests were bankrolled by the U.S. State Department.”

Now of course the U.S. State Department is constantly meddling in Russia and many other countries. In my view the U.S. was also responsible for Putin’s crackdown. They provide easy justification for gangsters like Putin to crush dissent. Yet the anti-semitism and terrifying homophobia that undergirds so many aspects of the Russian state, including many of its media platforms on RT and Sputnik raises deep concerns about leftist alliances with them, especially when it comes to how dissident journalists sometimes cover terrifying Russian intervention in places like Syria.

In a few episodes of Moderate Rebels, Blumenthal and Norton go off on the anarchist writer Alexander Reid Ross, his ‘red-brown smears’ of them, and his book Against the Fascist Creep. The book is an exhaustive look at red-brown alliances. I’ve actually listened to a talk he gave on it and found it fairly useful for understanding how individuals can cross into radically diametrically opposed poles of the political spectrum. A few months ago I discovered Mussolini was actually a socialist, before eventually becoming a fascist. Ross remarks that Lenin actually liked Mussolini. I looked it up and what Lenin said was: "What a waste that we lost Mussolini. He is a first-rate man who would have led our party to power in Italy." Yet these red-brown alliances are not restricted to MLs, but actually came to Ross’s attention when he saw reactionary ideology entering the ecological green and anarchist movements he was a part of. I haven’t read Ross’s book and I’m not sure if he mentions this, but that fascism, communism and anarchism have common roots in Romanticism is likely part of why people can cross extremes of the spectrum so easily, or at least find common cause. As Cornel West points out that Romanticism was a secularization of the Christian gospel, it’s unsurprising that, almost all leftists are pretty good at calling other people either fascists (at the other end of the spectrum) or liberals (the common enemy of the center):

One of the most important aspects of Gessen’s book was her elaboration on LGBTQ activism in Russia. Definitely the parts on Pussy Riot were very interesting. But the vigilante violence against gay people in Russia is at an unimaginable level. Many have basically been lynched for lack of a better word. They are frequently beat up. Some murdered. It’s not illegal to be gay in Russia as it is in authoritarian countries like Singapore, but in places like Chechnya the vigilante violence is extreme. I really think it’s at the detriment of the left to ignore this. If one uses Russian state media as a platform, one has a responsibility to denounce violence against LGBTQ communities in Russia. Leftists often shrug off the horrible homophobia that has latently possessed so many of their movements. Clara Sorrenti, a trans-woman who ran for the Communist Party of Canada in London, Ontario left the party over the Central Committee’s refusal to adapt notions of indigenous sovereignty. In her reflections after leaving, she points out that communist refusals to accept the violence revolutionaries like Che Guevara enacted on gay people was especially wounding to her. The left cannot remain in denial about the homophobia of people like Castro and Chavez. Ignatz, the pen name of an orthodox christian, trans lesbian, communist wrote a piece called “Communism, Catholicism, and Sexuality” in response to an article Dean Dettloff wrote in the Jesuit journal America (Dettloff is one of the hosts of the Magnificast, the podcast I mentioned at the beginning of this reflection). In this piece she writes:

“If the relationship between Catholics and communists has sometimes been more positive than some might assume, we should also address those places where this positive relationship is objectively a form of reaction and a failure of compassion that ought to be inimical to communists, Catholics, and any combination thereof. The Argentine theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid tells the story of how when the Argentine Junta cracked down on homosexuals and other sexual ‘deviants’, a letter was written to a number of major Latin American Catholic liberation theologians asking them to sign a statement of solidarity. All refused, claiming sexual issues were not their concern.

Yet, as Althaus-Reid argues, this is to neglect the role of Christianity in creating the political system of heterosexuality that now dominates the globe. Christians created heterosexuality; it is now Christians’ responsibility to help overthrow it… whilst there are severe problems with homophobia and transphobia in both the Catholic Church and the secular left, there are people in both or either movement who are committed to resisting that and finding new ways of practicing these traditions.”

While I might disagree with some aspects of Gessen’s book, I think she offers very important critiques of the left, especially where they have made common cause with right-wing forces. I believe the left must take seriously these issues of violence, terror, and neglect of social issues, especially where racial, religious and LGBTQ persecution are concerned. I did not even go into the anti-Semitism that Gessen takes time to explore in the book. So much to think about; I think it’s a book worth reading.

0 notes