“By thinking in images the artist cognizes the world in order to change it”
Remarks by Frederick Choate, translator of Art as the Cognition of Life, at New York City book signing
29 September 1998
In his opening remarks at the Friday, September 25 book signing at the Borders Book Shop at the World Trade Center Frederick Choate said, in part:
Over the past few decades, literary criticism has largely been dominated by structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, post-modernism, and what borders on a cult around Bakhtin. Even if one considers Marxist literary criticism, the names most often mentioned are Lukacs, Adorno (and others from the Frankfurt school), Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton or Fredric Jameson. It is strange that Soviet literary critics are seldom given serious attention in the West; for that reason I hope that this anthology of essays by Aleksandr Voronsky comes as a pleasant surprise.
It is no accident that little is known about Voronsky. Since he belonged to the Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky, Voronsky was executed in 1937 and erased from official Soviet history. His books were removed from libraries and it became increasingly difficult to obtain reliable information about his life and the evolution of his views on literature. We did know that Voronsky was editor of the major Soviet literary journal of the 1920s, and in one relatively brief window of time, 1921-27, was able to write a series of brilliant articles before being silenced as a literary critic by Stalinism.
To better understand the significance of his writings, I would like to give an overview of Voronsky’s life. Born in 1884 in the province of Tambov. Voronsky joined the Bolshevik Party in 1904 while studying to become a priest. In 1905 he led a student rebellion and was expelled from the Tambov seminary. Not long afterwards, he took part in the Revolution of 1905 in Petersburg. He was arrested in 1906, spent one year in prison, was rearrested in October 1907 and sent into exile for two years. In 1912, Voronsky attended the Prague Conference where he met Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Ordzhonikidze and other leading Bolsheviks. Soon after returning to Russia, he was rearrested and sent into exile.
After the February Revolution of 1917, he played a leading role in the Minsk Council of Soldiers’ Deputies, then in establishing Soviet power in Odessa. When Odessa fell to the Germans in 1918, Voronsky transferred to Ivanovo, a major textile center and Bolshevik stronghold. There he led the party’s city committee and edited the newspaper Workers Land. From 1918 to 1920 Voronsky wrote over 400 articles for this paper, which gained the reputation as the best provincial newspaper in Russia. Summoned to Moscow in 1921, he met with Lenin, Krupskaya and Gorky to discuss the founding of a ‘thick’ literary journal, Red Virgin Soil.
As editor of this journal, Voronsky published Gorky, Esenin, Mayakovsky, Pilniak, Ivanov and many other writers who would comprise the literary canon of the early Soviet period. Yet he was bitterly opposed by many (often young and poorly educated) communists in the ‘Proletarian Culture’ movement. The Proletcultists claimed that a new, proletarian culture would have to be created by the new ruling class which emerged during the socialist revolution, much like a new culture had been created by the bourgeoisie in the wake of the great bourgeois revolutions.
Trotsky had criticized the Proletcultists in a series of articles in 1922 and 1923 which later would be published as Literature and Revolution. He explained that the next decades would be a cruel period of wars and revolutions, and by the time the proletariat had conquered power on a world scale, it would begin to wither away as a class; in other words, the new culture would be based on universal human principles of solidarity and equality in the new, classless society. Having been denied access to culture during bourgeois rule, the proletariat would not have time to develop a new culture before losing its class identity. Hence there never had been and never would be a truly ‘proletarian culture.’ Voronsky defended these views in a number of essays in this anthology.
In 1923, Voronsky signed the ‘Letter of 46’ in support of Trotsky’s criticism of the increased bureaucratization of the Communist Party. From that time, Voronsky’s position ran parallel to Trotsky’s. When Trotsky was removed as Commissar of War in January 1925, Voronsky was removed as editor of Red Virgin Soil. When Gorky and Esenin threatened to stop publishing in Soviet journals, Voronsky was reinstated. Not long after signing the ‘Declaration of the 83,’ in the summer of 1927, Voronsky was expelled from the party in February 1928. He was not arrested until January 1929, when he was sent into exile to Lipetsk. As Nadezhda Joffe writes in her memoirs, Back in Time, ‘arrivals’ at that time were regulated by ‘departures.’ Voronsky was allowed to return to Moscow in the fall of 1929 because he signed a letter stating that he had departed from the Left Opposition. He was readmitted to the party in May 1930.
There is considerable evidence that Voronsky remained in the Opposition at least through 1932, although intense police surveillance made any open oppositional activity impossible. He was not allowed to publish as a literary critic, but was permitted to work as an editor at the State Publishing House. Soon after the Kirov assassination in December 1934, Voronsky was expelled again from the party, for the last time. He was arrested on February 1, 1937, given a 20-minute trial on August 13, and executed immediately after. He was one of a whole generation of Marxists whom Stalin exterminated in the Great Terror of 1936-38.
I cannot do justice to the many themes covered in Voronsky’s articles, but I will mention a few. Following Belinsky and Plekhanov, Voronsky stressed that art is a means of cognition; by thinking in images the artist cognizes the world in order to change it. In art, however, an enormous role is played by intuition and the subconscious. Because of these views, Voronsky was accused of being a Bergsonian and Freudian (he was neither). He stressed that the task of the critic is to evaluate both the sociological and aesthetic moments in a work of art. Here, the first element is relatively clear (the class viewpoint of the artist).
The second element is more difficult to determine, for it involves the relationship of beauty to truth (for instance, Voronsky echoed Plekhanov’s idea that a false idea cannot find beautiful form, or only in a very limited sense). Voronsky turned ever increasingly to the psychology of the creative process, examining the relationship of the subjective to the objective, and of the social to the individual. In all these areas, many of Voronsky’s ideas remain unfinished–we do not know where he would have gone if he had not been silenced by Stalinism. One thing is clear: he was not the progenitor of socialist realism, which was codified at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in August 1934 and became a means of policing Soviet literature. Although invited to attend this congress, Voronsky refused.
When he was shot in 1937, Voronsky was not quite 53 years old. He was officially ‘rehabilitated’ in 1957, and several heavily censored anthologies were published in the Soviet Union. The cuts made in many of his major articles have been restored in this English edition. Much remains to be written and said about Voronsky, and I invite you to raise any questions you might have about this remarkable Marxist literary critic and his equally remarkable writings.
See also: New York City events introduce Aleksandr Voronsky’s Art as the Cognition of Life
Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky (Russian: Алекса́ндр Константи́нович Воро́нский) (8 September 1884 [O.S. 27 August] – 13 August 1937) was a prominent humanistMarxist literary critic, theorist and editor of the 1920s, disfavored and purged in 1937 for his work with the Left Opposition and Leon Trotsky during and after the October Revolution.[1][2] Voronsky’s writings were hidden away in the Soviet Union, until his autobiography, Waters of Life and Death, and anthology, Art as the Cognition of Life were translated and published in English.[3]
Voronsky was born in the village of Khoroshavka in Tambov Governorate; his father was the village priest, Konstantin Osipovich Voronsky, who died when Aleksandr was a few years old. After attending a Tambov religious school, in 1900 he enrolled in the Tambov Seminary, where he helped organize an illegal library for the seminary students. In 1904 he joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, and the following year he was expelled from the seminary for “political unreliability”.
He moved to St. Petersburg, where he carried out party assignments and met Vladimir Lenin; in September 1906 he was arrested and sentenced to a year of solitary confinement. Soon after his release he was arrested again in Vladimir and sentenced to two years of exile; on his way to Yarensk in Vologda guberniya he met his future wife, Serafima Solomonovna Pesina, another young Bolshevik. After finishing his exile in 1910 he moved to Moscow and then Saratov, where he helped form a provincial group of Bolsheviks and organize a number of major strikes. In January 1912 he was one of 18 delegates to the Prague Party Conference, at which he took the minutes of the conference and spoke strongly for a mass daily workers’ newspaper.[4] On his return to Russia he continued underground work and was rearrested on May 8; his exile ended in September 1914, when he returned to Tambov with his wife and newborn daughter, Galina, moving to Ekaterinoslav the following year.
When the February Revolution came, he became a member of the Odessa Executive Committee of the Council of Workers’ Deputies and edited the local Bolshevik newspaper, Golos proletariya (Voice of the Proletariat). After the October Revolution, he helped the Bolsheviks take power in Odessa and in early 1918 moved to Saratov, Moscow, and then Ivanovo, where he assisted his friend Mikhail Frunze, edited the newspaper Rabochii krai (Workers’ Land), and headed the provincial Party Committee.
In January 1921 Voronsky left for Moscow, where he met with Lenin and Gorky to discuss plans for a new “thick journal” (the traditional Russian combination of literary magazine and political journal), which was called Krasnaya Nov (Red Virgin Soil) when the first issue was published in June. In 1923 he organized a new publishing house, Krug (Circle). In the increasingly fractured cultural-political scene of the early 1920s, Voronsky aligned himself with Trotsky and Anatoly Lunacharsky and opposed the growing power of Joseph Stalin, which led to his downfall in 1927, when he was attacked by the Party and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers and in October relieved of his duties as editor of the journal. In February 1928 he was expelled from the Party, and in January 1929 his arrest was announced. However, he silenced his opposition and was readmitted to the Party and permitted to return to Moscow, where he continued to write and edit for Gosizdat but was no longer prominent as a critic.[5]
Voronsky expounded the idea of aesthetic evaluation, an exercise in dialectical materialism that combined the search for objective truth with the complexity of human emotion and feeling.[6] Voronsky’s criticism of art lay in opposition to the artificial representation of life presented in Stalin’s school of socialist realism. Voronsky, in agreement with Trotsky, viewed art as an exercise between the subjective and the objective world of the artist to facilitate a deeper understanding of humanity. Aesthetic evaluation, he wrote, requires a strong correlation to the nature of the object portrayed.[7]
When does the artistic image appear convincing? When we experience a special psychic state of joy, satisfaction, elevated repose, love or sympathy for the author. This psychic state is the aesthetic evaluation of a work of art. Aesthetic feeling lacks a narrowly utilitarian character; it is disinterested, and in this regard it is organically bound up with our general conceptions of the beautiful (although, of course, it is narrower than these concepts). The aesthetic evaluation of a work is the criterion of its truthfulness or falseness. Artistic truth is determined and established precisely through such an evaluation.— A. Voronsky, Art as the Cognition of Life
American Max Eastman describes Voronsky’s increasingly untenable position in a chapter called “Voronsky’s Fight For Truth” in his 1934 book Artists in Uniform.[8] In 1935 Voronsky was again expelled from the Party, and on February 1, 1937, was arrested by the NKVD.[1] On August 13 he was sentenced to be shot and probably executed immediately after the sentence.[4]
Although Voronsky considered himself an orthodox Marxist, he was far from the ideological rigidity that was enforced after Stalin took control. Victor Ehrlich called him “flexible and humane” and wrote:
He combined political orthodoxy with a strong personal commitment to literature, a commitment underpinned by an aesthetic which, though not incompatible with Marxism, could be easily construed within the Soviet Marxist framework as a “bourgeois-idealistic” heresy. To Voronsky, art was not primarily a matter of mobilizing or manipulating group emotions on behalf of a class-determined world view. It was a distinctive form of cognition, a largely intuitive mode of apprehending reality … a true artist, armed by intuition and creative integrity, cannot help seeing and embodying in his work certain truths that run counter to his conscious bias and to the interests of his class.[9]
He therefore supported such “ideologically confused” writers as Boris Pilnyak, Konstantin Fedin, Vsevolod Ivanov, and Leonid Leonov and was one of the few Party critics to recognize the gifts of Isaac Babel: “No wonder Red Virgin Soil … became one of the most vital and readable Russian periodicals in the 1920s.”[10]
He wrote Za zhivoi i mertvoi vodoi (Russian text) (1927, 1929; tr. as Waters of Life and Death, 1936), “two fine volumes of memoirs.”[11]
Twenty years after his execution, in 1957, Voronsky received official state rehabilitation in the U.S.S.R. However, his work remained heavily censored and devoid of the criticism of socialist realism as well as of the growing Stalinist bureaucracy from his time with the Left Opposition.[12]
Voronsky’s essays were translated by researcher Frederick Choate and published in the book Art as the Cognition of Life in 1998 after four years of extensive research inside Moscow libraries between 1991 and 1995. These writings were finally accessible as a result of the fall of the Soviet Union and the change in political climate.[13]
It is well known that in the autumn of 1870, a few months before the Commune, Marx warned the Paris workers that any attempt to overthrow the government would be the folly of despair. But when, in March 1871, a decisive battle was forced upon the workers and they accepted it, when the uprising had become a fact, Marx greeted the proletarian revolution with the greatest enthusiasm, in spite of unfavorable auguries. Marx did not persist in the pedantic attitude of condemning an “untimely” movement as did the ill-famed Russian renegade from Marxism, Plekhanov, who in November 1905 wrote encouragingly about the workers’ and peasants’ struggle, but after December 1905 cried, liberal fashion: “They should not have taken up arms.”
Marx, however, was not only enthusiastic about the heroism of the Communards, who, as he expressed it, “stormed heaven.” Although the mass revolutionary movement did not achieve its aim, he regarded it as a historic experience of enormous importance, as a certain advance of the world proletarian revolution, as a practical step that was more important than hundreds of programmes and arguments. Marx endeavored to analyse this experiment, to draw tactical lessons from it and re-examine his theory in the light of it.
The only “correction” Marx thought it necessary to make to the Communist Manifesto he made on the basis of the revolutionary experience of the Paris Communards.
The last preface to the new German edition of the Communist Manifesto, signed by both its authors, is dated June 24, 1872. In this preface the authors, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, say that the programme of the Communist Manifesto “has in some details become out-of-date,” and they go on to say:
… One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes” …
The authors took the words that are in quotation marks in this passage from Marx’s book, The Civil War in France.
Thus, Marx and Engels regarded one principal and fundamental lesson of the Paris Commune as being of such enormous importance that they introduced it as an important correction into the Communist Manifesto.
Most characteristically, it is this important correction that has been distorted by the opportunists, and its meaning probably is not known to nine-tenths, if not ninety-nine-hundredths, of the readers of the Communist Manifesto. We shall deal with this distortion more fully farther on, in a chapter devoted specially to distortions. Here it will be sufficient to note that the current, vulgar “interpretation” of Marx’s famous statement just quoted is that Marx here allegedly emphasises the idea of slow development in contradistinction to the seizure of power, and so on.
As a matter of fact, the exact opposite is the case. Marx’s idea is that the working class must break up, smash the “ready-made state machinery,” and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.
On April 12, 1871, i.e., just at the time of the Commune, Marx wrote to Kugelmann:
If you look up the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire, you will find that I declare that the next attempt of the French Revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it [Marx’s italics—the original is zerbrechen], and this is the precondition for every real people’s revolution on the Continent. And this is what our heroic Party comrades in Paris are attempting. (Neue Zeit, Vol. XX, 1, 1901-02, p. 709.)
(The letters of Marx to Kugelmann have appeared in Russian in no less than two editions, one of which I edited and supplied with a preface.)
The words, “to smash the bureaucratic-military machine,” briefly express the principal lesson of Marxism regarding the tasks of the proletariat during a revolution in relation to the state. And this is the lesson that has been not only completely ignored, but positively distorted by the prevailing, Kautskyite, “interpretation” of Marxism!
As for Marx’s reference to The Eighteenth Brumaire, we have quoted the relevant passage in full above.
It is interesting to note, in particular, two points in the above-quoted argument of Marx. First, he restricts his conclusion to the Continent. This was understandable in 1871, when Britain was still the model of a purely capitalist country, but without a militarist clique and, to a considerable degree, without a bureaucracy. Marx therefore excluded Britain, where a revolution, even a people’s revolution, then seemed possible, and indeed was possible, without the precondition of destroying the “ready-made state machinery.”
Today, in 1917, at the time of the first great imperialist war, this restriction made by Marx is no longer valid. Both Britain and America, the biggest and the last representatives—in the whole world—of Anglo-Saxon “liberty,” in the sense that they had no militarist cliques and bureaucracy, have completely sunk into the all-European filthy, bloody morass of bureaucratic-military institutions which subordinate everything to themselves, and suppress everything. Today, in Britain and America, too, “the precondition for every real people’s revolution” is the smashing, the destruction of the “ready-made state machinery” (made and brought up to the “European,” general imperialist, perfection in those countries in the years 1914-17).
Secondly, particular attention should be paid to Marx’s extremely profound remark that the destruction of the bureaucratic-military state machine is “the precondition for every real people’s revolution.” This idea of a “people’s” revolution seems strange coming from Marx, so that the Russian Plekhanovites and Mensheviks, those followers of Struve who wish to be regarded as Marxists, might possibly declare such an expression to be a “slip of the pen” on Marx’s part. They have reduced Marxism to such a state of wretchedly liberal distortion that nothing exists for them beyond the antithesis between bourgeois revolution and proletarian revolution, and even this antithesis they interpret in an utterly lifeless way.
If we take the revolutions of the 20th century as examples we shall, of course, have to admit that the Portuguese and the Turkish revolutions are both bourgeois revolutions. Neither of them, however, is a “people’s” revolution, since in neither does the mass of the people, their vast majority, come out actively, independently, with their own economic and political demands to any noticeable degree. By contrast, although the Russian bourgeois revolution of 1905-07 displayed no such “brilliant” successes as at times fell to the Portuguese and Turkish revolutions, it was undoubtedly a “real people’s” revolution, since the mass of the people, their majority, the very lowest social groups, crushed by oppression and exploitation, rose independently and stamped on the entire course of the revolution the imprint of their own demands, their attempt to build in their own way a new society in place of the old society that was being destroyed.
In Europe, in 1871, the proletariat did not constitute the majority of the people in any country on the Continent. A “people’s” revolution, one actually sweeping the majority into its stream, could be such only if it embraced both the proletariat and the peasants. These two classes then constituted the “people.” These two classes are united by the fact that the “bureaucratic-military state machine” oppresses, crushes, exploits them. To smash this machine, to break it up, is truly in the interest of the “people,” of their majority, of the workers and most of the peasants, is “the precondition” for a free alliance of the poor peasant and the proletarians, whereas without such an alliance democracy is unstable and socialist transformation is impossible.
As is well known, the Paris Commune was actually working its way toward such an alliance, although it did not reach its goal owing to a number of circumstances, internal and external.
Consequently, in speaking of a “real people’s revolution,” Marx, without in the least discounting the special features of the petty bourgeois (he spoke a great deal about them and often), took strict account of the actual balance of class forces in most of the continental countries of Europe in 1871. On the other hand, he stated that the “smashing” of the state machine was required by the interests of both the workers and the peasants, that it united them, that it placed before them the common task of removing the “parasite” and of replacing it by something new.
By what exactly?
2. What is to replace the smashed state machine?
In 1847, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx’s answer to this question was as yet a purely abstract one; to be exact, it was an answer that indicated he tasks, but not the ways of accomplishing them. The answer given in the Communist Manifesto was that this machine was to be replaced by “the proletariat organised as the ruling class,” by the “winning of the battle of democracy.”
Marx did not indulge in utopias; he expected the experience of the mass movement to provide the reply to the question as to the specific forms this organisation of the proletariat as the ruling class would assume and as to the exact manner in which this organisation would be combined with the most complete, most consistent “winning of the battle of democracy.”
Marx subjected the experience of the Commune, meagre as it was, to the most careful analysis in The Civil War in France. Let us quote the most important passages of this work.
Originating from the Middle Ages, there developed in the 19th century “the centralised state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature.” With the development of class antagonisms between capital and labour, “state power assumed more and more the character of a public force organised for the suppression of the working class, of a machine of class rule. After every revolution, which marks an advance in the class struggle, the purely coercive character of the state power stands out in bolder and bolder relief.” After the revolution of 1848-49, state power became “the national war instruments of capital against labour.” The Second Empire consolidated this.
“The direct antithesis to the empire was the Commune.” It was the “specific form” of “a republic that was not only to remove the monarchical form of class rule, but class rule itself.”
What was this “specific” form of the proletarian, socialist republic? What was the state it began to create?
… The first decree of the Commune … was the suppression of the standing army, and its replacement by the armed people. …
This demand now figures in the programme of every party calling itself socialist. The real worth of their programme, however, is best shown by the behavior of our Socialist Revolutionists and Mensheviks, who, right after the revolution of February 27, actually refused to carry out this demand!
The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of Paris, responsible and revocable at any time. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The police, which until then had been the instrument of the Government, was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, instrument of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, public service had to be done at workmen’s wages. The privileges and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the dignitaries themselves. … Having once got rid of the standing army and the police, the instruments of the physical force of the old government, the Commune proceeded at once to break the instrument of spiritual suppression, the power of the priests. … The judicial functionaries lost that sham independence … they were thenceforward to be elective, responsible, and revocable.
The Commune, therefore, appears to have replaced the smashed state machine “only” by fuller democracy: abolition of the standing army; all officials to be elected and subject to recall. But as a matter of fact this “only” signifies a gigantic replacement of certain institutions by other institutions of a fundamentally different type. This is exactly a case of “quantity being transformed into quality”: democracy, introduced as fully and consistently as is at all conceivable, is transformed from bourgeois into proletarian democracy; from the state (=a special force for the suppression of a particular class) into something which is no longer the state proper.
It is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and crush their resistance. This was particularly necessary for the Commune; and one of the reasons for its defeat was that it did not do this with sufficient determination. The organ of suppression, however, is here the majority of the population, and not a minority, as was always the case under slavery, serfdom, and wage slavery. And since the majority of the people itself suppresses its oppressors, a “special force” for suppression is no longer necessary! In this sense, the state begins to wither away. Instead of the special institutions of a privileged minority (privileged officialdom, the chiefs of the standing army), the majority itself can directly fulfil all these functions, and the more the functions of state power are performed by the people as a whole, the less need there is for the existence of this power.
In this connection, the following measures of the Commune, emphasised by Marx, are particularly noteworthy: the abolition of all representation allowances, and of all monetary privileges to officials, the reduction of the remuneration of all servants of the state to the level of “workmen’s wages.” This shows more clearly than anything else the turn from bourgeois to proletarian democracy, from the democracy of the oppressors to that of the oppressed classes, from the state as a “special force” for the suppression of a particular class to the suppression of the oppressors by the general force of the majority of the people—the workers and the peasants. And it is on this particularly striking point, perhaps the most important as far as the problem of the state is concerned, that the ideas of Marx have been most completely ignored! In popular commentaries, the number of which is legion, this is not mentioned. The thing done is to keep silent about it as if it were a piece of old-fashioned “naïveté,” just as Christians, after their religion had been given the status of a state religion, “forgot” the “naïveté” of primitive Christianity with its democratic revolutionary spirit.
The reduction of the remuneration of high state officials seem “simply” a demand of naive, primitive democracy. One of the “founders” of modern opportunism, the ex-Social-Democrat Eduard Bernstein, has more than once repeated the vulgar bourgeois jeers at “primitive” democracy. Like all opportunists, and like the present Kautskyites, he did not understand at all that, first of all, the transition from capitalism to socialism is impossible without a certain “reversion” to “primitive” democracy (for how else can the majority, and then the whole population without exception, proceed to discharge state functions?); and that, secondly, “primitive democracy” based on capitalism and capitalist culture is not the same as primitive democracy in prehistoric or pre-capitalist times. Capitalist culture has created large-scale production, factories, railways, the postal service, telephones, etc., and on this basis the great majority of the functions of the old “state power” have become so simplified and can be reduced to such exceedingly simple operations of registration, filing, and checking that they can be easily performed by every literate person, can quite easily be performed for ordinary “workmen’s wages,” and that these functions can (and must) be stripped of every shadow of privilege, of every semblance of “official grandeur.”
All officials, without exception, elected and subject to recall at any time, their salaries reduced to the level of ordinary “workmen’s wages”—these simple and “self-evident” democratic measures, while completely uniting the interests of the workers and the majority of the peasants, at the same time serve as a bridge leading from capitalism to socialism. These measures concern the reorganisation of the state, the purely political reorganisation of society; but, of course, they acquire their full meaning and significance only in connection with the “expropriation of the expropriators” either bring accomplished or in preparation, i.e., with the transformation of capitalist private ownership of the means of production into social ownership.
“The Commune,” Marx wrote, “made that catchword of all bourgeois revolutions, cheap government, a reality, by abolishing the two greatest sources of expenditure—the army and the officialdom.”
From the peasants, as from other sections of the petty bourgeoisie, only an insignificant few “rise to the top,” “get on in the world” in the bourgeois sense, i.e., become either well-to-do, bourgeois, or officials in secure and privileged positions. In every capitalist country where there are peasants (as there are in most capitalist countries), the vast majority of them are oppressed by the government and long for its overthrow, long for “cheap” government. This can be achieved only by the proletariat; and by achieving it, the proletariat at the same time takes a step towards the socialist reorganisation of the state.
3. Abolition of parliamentarism
“The Commune,” Marx wrote, “was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time …”
Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to represent and repress [ver- and zertreten] the people in parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people constituted in communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for workers, foremen and accountants for his business.
Owing to the prevalence of social-chauvinism and opportunism, this remarkable criticism of parliamentarism, made in 1871, also belongs now to the “forgotten words” of Marxism. The professional Cabinet Ministers and parliamentarians, the traitors to the proletariat and the “practical” socialists of our day, have left all criticism of parliamentarism to the anarchists, and, on this wonderfully reasonable ground, they denounce all criticism of parliamentarism as “anarchism”!! It is not surprising that the proletariat of the “advanced” parliamentary countries, disgusted with such “socialists” as the Scheidemanns, Davids, Legiens, Sembats, Renaudels, Hendersons, Vanderveldes, Staunings, Brantings, Bissolatis, and Co., has been with increasing frequency giving its sympathies to anarcho-syndicalism, in spite of the fact that the latter is merely the twin brother of opportunism.
For Marx, however, revolutionary dialectics was never the empty fashionable phrase, the toy rattle, which Plekhanov, Kautsky and others have made of it. Marx knew how to break with anarchism ruthlessly for its inability to make use even of the “pigsty” of bourgeois parliamentarism, especially when the situation was obviously not revolutionary; but at the same time he knew how to subject parliamentarism to genuinely revolutionary proletarian criticism.
To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament—this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.
But if we deal with the question of the state, and if we consider parliamentarism as one of the institutions of the state, from the point of view of the tasks of the proletariat in this field, what is the way out of parliamentarism? How can it be dispensed with?
Once again, we must say: the lessons of Marx, based on the study of the Commune, have been so completely forgotten that the present-day “Social-Democrat” (i.e., present-day traitor to socialism) really cannot understand any criticism of parliamentarism other than anarchist or reactionary criticism.
The way out of parliamentarism is not, of course, the abolition of representative institutions and the elective principle, but the conversion of the representative institutions from talking shops into “working” bodies. “The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time.”
“A working, not a parliamentary body”—this is a blow straight from the shoulder at the present-day parliamentarians and parliamentary “lap-dogs” of Social-Democracy! Take any parliamentary country, from America to Switzerland, from France to Britain, Norway and so forth—in these countries the real business of “state” is performed behind the scenes and is carried on by the departments, chancelleries, and General Staffs. Parliament is given up to talk for the special purpose of fooling the “common people.” This is so true that even in the Russian republic, a bourgeois-democratic republic, all these sins of parliamentarism came out at once, even before it managed to set up a real parliament. The heroes of rotten philistinism, such as the Skobelevs and Tseretelis, the Chernovs and Avksentyevs, have even succeeded in polluting the Soviets after the fashion of the most disgusting bourgeois parliamentarism, in converting them into mere talking shops. In the Soviets, the “socialist” Ministers are fooling the credulous rustics with phrase-mongering and resolutions. In the government itself a sort of permanent shuffle is going on in order that, on the one hand, as many Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks as possible may in turn get near the “pie,” the lucrative and honourable posts, and that, on the other hand, the “attention” of the people may be “engaged.” Meanwhile the chancelleries and army staffs “do” the business of “state.”
Dyelo Naroda, the organ of the ruling Socialist-Revolutionary Party, recently admitted in a leading article—with the matchless frankness of people of “good society,” in which “all” are engaged in political prostitution—that even in the ministries headed by the “socialists” (save the mark!), the whole bureaucratic apparatus is in fact unchanged, is working in the old way and quite “freely” sabotaging revolutionary measures! Even without this admission, does not the actual history of the participation of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks in the government prove this? It is noteworthy, however, that in the ministerial company of the Cadets, the Chernovs, Rusanovs, Zenzinovs and other editors of Dyelo Naroda have so completely lost all sense of shame as to brazenly assert, as if it were a mere bagatelle, that in “their” ministries everything is unchanged!! Revolutionary-democratic phrases to gull the rural Simple Simons, and bureaucracy and red tape to “gladden the hearts” of the capitalists—that is the essence of the “honest” coalition.
The Commune substitutes for the venal and rotten parliamentarism of bourgeois society institutions in which freedom of opinion and discussion does not degenerate into deception, for the parliamentarians themselves have to work, have to execute their own laws, have themselves to test the results achieved in reality, and to account directly to their constituents. Representative institutions remain, but there is no parliamentarism here as a special system, as the division of labour between the legislative and the executive, as a privileged position for the deputies. We cannot imagine democracy, even proletarian democracy, without representative institutions, but we can and must imagine democracy without parliamentarism, if criticism of bourgeois society is not mere words for us, if the desire to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie is our earnest and sincere desire, and not a mere “election” cry for catching workers’ votes, as it is with the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, and also the Scheidemanns and Legiens, the Semblats and Vanderveldes.
It is extremely instructive to note that, in speaking of the function of those officials who are necessary for the Commune and for proletarian democracy, Marx compares them to the workers of “every other employer,” that is, of the ordinary capitalist enterprise, with its “workers, foremen, and accountants.”
There is no trace of utopianism in Marx, in the sense that he made up or invented a “new” society. No, he studied the birth of the new society out of the old, and the forms of transition from the latter to the former, as a natural-historical process. He examined the actual experience of a mass proletarian movement and tried to draw practical lessons from it. He “learned” from the Commune, just as all the great revolutionary thinkers learned unhesitatingly from the experience of great movements of the oppressed classes, and never addressed them with pedantic “homilies” (such as Plekhanov’s: “They should not have taken up arms,” or Tsereteli’s: “A class must limit itself”).
Abolishing the bureaucracy at once, everywhere and completely, is out of the question. It is a utopia. But to smash the old bureaucratic machine at once and to begin immediately to construct a new one that will make possible the gradual abolition of all bureaucracy—this is not a utopia, it is the experience of the Commune, the direct and immediate task of the revolutionary proletariat.
Capitalism simplifies the functions of “state” administration; it makes it possible to cast “bossing” aside and to confine the whole matter to the organisation of the proletarians (as the ruling class), which will hire “workers, foremen and accountants” in the name of the whole of society.
We are not utopians, we do not “dream” of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination. These anarchist dreams, based upon incomprehension of the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship, are totally alien to Marxism, and, as a matter of fact, serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until people are different. No, we want the socialist revolution with people as they are now, with people who cannot dispense with subordination, control, and “foremen and accountants.”
The subordination, however, must be to the armed vanguard of all the exploited and working people, i.e., to the proletariat. A beginning can and must be made at once, overnight, to replace the specific “bossing” of state officials by the simple functions of “foremen and accountants,” functions which are already fully within the ability of the average town dweller and can well be performed for “workmen’s wages.”
We, the workers, shall organise large-scale production on the basis of what capitalism has already created, relying on our own experience as workers, establishing strict, iron discipline backed up by the state power of the armed workers. We shall reduce the role of state officials to that of simply carrying out our instructions as responsible, revocable, modestly paid “foremen and accountants”(of course, with the aid of technicians of all sorts, types and degrees). This is our proletarian task, this is what we can and must start with in accomplishing the proletarian revolution. Such a beginning, on the basis of large-scale production, will of itself lead to the gradual “withering away” of all bureaucracy, to the gradual creation of an order—an order without inverted commas, an order bearing no similarity to wage slavery—an order under which the functions of control and accounting, becoming more and more simple, will be performed by each in turn, will then become a habit and will finally die out as the special functions of a special section of the population.
A witty German Social-Democrat of the seventies of the last century called the postal service an example of the socialist economic system. This is very true. At the present the postal service is a business organised on the lines of a state-capitalist monopoly. Imperialism is gradually transforming all trusts into organisations of a similar type, in which, standing over the “common” people, who are overworked and starved, one has the same bourgeois bureaucracy. But the mechanism of social management is here already to hand. Once we have overthrown the capitalists, crushed the resistance of these exploiters with the iron hand of the armed workers, and smashed the bureaucratic machinery of the modern state, we shall have a splendidly-equipped mechanism, freed from the “parasite,” a mechanism which can very well be set going by the united workers themselves, who will hire technicians, foremen and accountants, and pay them all, as indeed all “state” officials in general, workmen’s wages. Here is a concrete, practical task which can immediately be fulfilled in relation to all trusts, a task whose fulfilment will rid the working people of exploitation, a task which takes account of what the Commune had already begun to practice (particularly in building up the state).
To organise the whole economy on the lines of the postal service so that the technicians, foremen and accountants, as well as all officials, shall receive salaries no higher than “a workman’s wage,” all under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat—that is our immediate aim. This is the state and this is the economic foundation we need. This is what will bring about the abolition of parliamentarism and the preservation of representative institutions. This is what will rid the labouring classes of the bourgeoisie’s prostitution of these institutions.
4. Organisation of national unity
“In a brief sketch of national organisation which the Commune had no time to develop, it states explicitly that the Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest village.” The communes were to elect the “National Delegation” in Paris.
… The few but important functions which would still remain for a central government were not to be suppressed, as had been deliberately misstated, but were to be transferred to communal, i.e., strictly responsible, officials.
… National unity was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, organised by the communal constitution; it was to become a reality by the destruction of state power which posed as the embodiment of that unity yet wanted to be independent of, and superior to, the nation, on whose body it was but a parasitic excrescence. While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority claiming the right to stand above society, and restored to the responsible servants of society.
The extent to which the opportunists of present-day Social-Democracy have failed—perhaps it would be more true to say, have refused—to understand these observations of Marx is best shown by that book of Herostratean fame of the renegade Bernstein, The Premises of Socialism and the Tasks of the Social-Democrats. It is in connection with the above passage from Marx that Bernstein wrote that “as far as its political content is concerned,” this programme “displays, in all its essential features, the greatest similarity to the federalism of Proudhon. In spite of all the other points of difference between Marx and the ‘petty-bourgeois’ Proudhon [Bernstein places the word ‘petty-bourgeois’ in inverted commas, to make it sound ironical] on these points, their lines of reasoning run as close as could be.” Of course, Bernstein continues, the importance of the municipalities is growing, but “it seems doubtful to me whether the first job of democracy would be such a dissolution [Auflösung] of the modern states and such a complete transformation [Umwandlung] of their organisation as is visualised by Marx and Proudhon (the formation of a National Assembly from delegates of the provincial of district assemblies, which, in their turn, would consist of delegates from the communes), so that consequently the previous mode of national representation would disappear.” (Bernstein, Premises, German edition, 1899, pp. 134 and 136.)
Eduard Bernstein
To confuse Marx’s view on the “destruction of state power, a parasitic excrescence,” with Proudhon’s federalism is positively monstrous! But it is no accident, for it never occurs to the opportunist that Marx does not speak here at all about federalism as opposed to centralism, but about smashing the old, bourgeois state machine which exists in all bourgeois countries.
The only thing that does occur to the opportunist is what he sees around him, in an environment of petty-bourgeois philistinism and “reformist” stagnation, namely, only “municipalities”! The opportunist has even grown out of the habit of thinking about proletarian revolution.
It is ridiculous. But the remarkable thing is that nobody argued with Bernstein on this point. Bernstein has been refuted by many, especially by Plekhanov in Russian literature and by Kautsky in European literature, but neither of them has said anything about this distortion of Marx by Bernstein.
The opportunist has so much forgotten how to think in a revolutionary way and to dwell on revolution that he attributes “federalism”to Marx, whom he confuses with the founder of anarchism, Proudhon. As for Kautsky and Plekhanov, who claim to be orthodox Marxists and defenders of the theory of revolutionary Marxism, they are silent on this point! Here is one of the roots of the extreme vulgarisation of the views on the difference between Marxism and anarchism, which is characteristic of both the Kautskyites and the opportunists, and which we shall discuss again later.
There is not a trace of federalism in Marx’s above-quoted observation on the experience of the Commune. Marx agreed with Proudhon on the very point that the opportunist Bernstein did not see. Marx disagreed with Proudhon on the very point on which Bernstein found a similarity between them.
Marx agreed with Proudhon in that they both stood for the “smashing” of the modern state machine. Neither the opportunists nor the Kautskyites wish to see the similarity of views on this point between Marxism and anarchism (both Proudhon and Bakunin) because this is where they have departed from Marxism.
Marx disagreed both with Proudhon and Bakunin precisely on the question of federalism (not to mention the dictatorship of the proletariat). Federalism as a principle follows logically from the petty-bourgeois views of anarchism. Marx was a centralist. There is no departure whatever from centralism in his observations just quoted. Only those who are imbued with the philistine “superstitious belief” in the state can mistake the destruction of the bourgeois state machine for the destruction of centralism!
Now if the proletariat and the poor peasants take state power into their own hands, organise themselves quite freely in communes, and unite the action of all the communes in striking at capital, in crushing the resistance of the capitalists, and in transferring the privately-owned railways, factories, land and so on to the entire nation, to the whole of society, won’t that be centralism? Won’t that be the most consistent democratic centralism and, moreover, proletarian centralism?
Bernstein simply cannot conceive of the possibility of voluntary centralism, of the voluntary amalgamation of the communes into a nation, of the volunary fusion of the proletarian communes, for the sole purpose of destroying bourgeois rule and the bourgeois state machine. Like all philistines, Bernstein pictures centralism as something which can be imposed and maintained solely from above, and solely by the bureaucracy and military clique.
As though foreseeing that his views might be distorted, Marx expressly emphasised that the charge that the Commune had wanted to destroy national unity, to abolish the central authority, was a deliberate fraud. Marx purposely used the words: “National unity was … to be organised,” so as to oppose conscious, democratic, proletarian centralism to bourgeois, military, bureaucratic centralism.
But there are none so deaf as those who will not hear. And the very thing the opportunists of present-day Social Democracy do not want to hear about is the destruction of state power, the amputation of the parasitic excrescence.
5. Abolition of the parasite state
We have already quoted Marx’s words on the subject, and we must now supplement them.
“It is generally the fate of new historical creations,” he wrote, “to be mistaken for the counterpart of older and even defunct forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness. Thus, this new Commune, which breaks [bricht, smashes] the modern state power, has been regarded as a revival of the medieval communes … as a federation of small states (as Montesquieu and the Girondins visualised it) … as an exaggerated form of the old struggle against over-centralisation. …”
… The Communal Constitution would have restored to the social body all the forces hitherto absorbed by that parasitic excrescence, the “state”, feeding upon and hampering the free movement of society. By this one act it would have initiated the regeneration of France. …
… The Communal Constitution would have brought the rural producers under the intellectual lead of the central towns of their districts, and there secured to them, in the town working men, the natural trustees of their interests. The very existence of the Commune involved, as a matter of course, local self-government, but no longer as a counterpoise to state power, now become superfluous.
“Breaking state power,” which as a “parasitic excrescence”; its “amputation,” its “smashing”; “state power, now become superfluous”—these are the expressions Marx used in regard to the state when appraising and analysing the experience of the Commune.
All this was written a little less than half a century ago; and now one has to engage in excavations, as it were, in order to bring undistorted Marxism to the knowledge of the mass of the people. The conclusions drawn from the observation of the last great revolution which Marx lived through were forgotten just when the time for the next great proletarian revolution has arrived.
… The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which expressed themselves in it show that it was a thoroughly flexible political form, while all previous forms of government had been essentially repressive. Its true secret was this: it was essentially a working-class government, the result of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which the economic emancipation of labour could be accomplished…
Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would have been an impossibility and a delusion…
The utopians busied themselves with “discovering” political forms under which the socialist transformation of society was to take place. The anarchists dismissed the question of political forms altogether. The opportunists of present-day Social-Democracy accepted the bourgeois political forms of the parliamentary democratic state as the limit which should not be overstepped; they battered their foreheads praying before this “model,” and denounced as anarchism every desire to break these forms.
Marx deduced from the whole history of socialism and the political struggle that the state was bound to disappear, and that the transitional form of its disappearance (the transition from state to non-state) would be the “proletariat organised as the ruling class.” Marx, however, did not set out to discover the political forms of this future stage. He limited himself to carefully observing French history, to analysing it, and to drawing the conclusion to which the year 1851 had led, namely, that matters were moving towards destruction of the bourgeois state machine.
And when the mass revolutionary movement of the proletariat burst forth, Marx, in spite of its failure, in spite of its short life and patent weakness, began to study the forms it had discovered.
The Commune is the form “at last discovered” by the proletarian revolution, under which the economic emancipation of labour can take place.
The Commune is the first attempt by a proletarian revolution to smash the bourgeois state machine; and it is the political form “at last discovered,” by which the smashed state machine can and must be replaced.
We shall see further on that the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, in different circumstances and under different conditions, continue the work of the Commune and confirm Marx’s brilliant historical analysis.
Forty years have passed since the proclamation of the Paris Commune. In accordance with tradition, the French workers paid homage to the memory of the men and women of the revolution of March 18, 1871, by meetings and demonstrations. At the end of May they will again place wreaths on the graves of the Communards who were shot, the victims of the terrible “May Week”, and over their graves they will once more vow to fight untiringly until their ideas have triumphed and the cause they bequeathed has been fully achieved.
Why does the proletariat, not only in France but throughout the entire world, honour the men and women of the Paris Commune as their predecessors? And what is the heritage of the Commune?
The Commune sprang up spontaneously. No one consciously prepared it in an organised way. The unsuccessful war with Germany, the privations suffered during the siege, the unemployment among the proletariat and the ruin among the lower middle classes; the indignation of the masses against the upper classes and against authorities who had displayed utter incompetence, the vague unrest among the working class, which was discontented with its lot and was striving for a different social system; the reactionary composition of the National Assembly, which roused apprehensions as to the fate of the republic—all this and many other factors combined to drive the population of Paris to revolution on March 18, which unexpectedly placed power in the hands of the National Guard, in the hands of the working class and the petty bourgeoisie which had sided with it.
A barricade in Chaussée Ménilmontant, March 18, 1871
It was an event unprecedented in history. Up to that time power had, as a rule, been in the hands of landowners and capitalists, i.e., in the hands of their trusted agents who made up the so-called government. After the revolution of March 18, when M. Thiers’ government had fled from Paris with its troops, its police and its officials, the people became masters of the situation and power passed into the hands of the proletariat. But in modern society, the proletariat, economically enslaved by capital, cannot dominate politically unless it breaks the chains which fetter it to capital. That is why the movement of the Commune was bound to take on a socialist tinge, i.e., to strive to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie, the rule of capital, and to destroy the very foundations of the contemporary social order.
At first this movement was extremely indefinite and confused. It was joined by patriots who hoped that the Commune would renew the war with the Germans and bring it to a successful conclusion. It enjoyed the support of the small shopkeepers who were threatened with ruin unless there was a postponement of payments on debts and rent (the government refused to grant this postponement, but they obtained it from the Commune). Finally, it enjoyed, at first, the sympathy of bourgeois republicans who feared that the reactionary National Assembly (the “rustics”, the savage landlords) would restore the monarchy. But it was of course the workers (especially the artisans of Paris), among whom active socialist propaganda had been carried on during the last years of the Second Empire and many of whom even belonged to the International, who played the principal part in this movement.
Only the workers remained loyal to the Commune to the end. The bourgeois republicans and the petty bourgeoisie soon broke away from it: the former were frightened off by the revolutionary-socialist, proletarian character of the movement; the latter broke away when they saw that it was doomed to inevitable defeat. Only the French proletarians supported their government fearlessly and untiringly, they alone fought and died for it—that is to say, for the cause of the emancipation of the working class, for a better future for all toilers.
Deserted by its former allies and left without support, the Commune was doomed to defeat. The entire bourgeoisie of France, all the landlords, stockbrokers, factory owners, all the robbers, great and small, all the exploiters joined forces against it. This bourgeois coalition, supported by Bismarck (who released a hundred thousand French prisoners of war to help crush revolutionary Paris), succeeded in rousing the ignorant peasants and the petty bourgeoisie of the provinces against the proletariat of Paris, and forming a ring of steel around half of Paris (the other half was besieged by the German army). In some of the larger cities in France (Marseilles, Lyons, St. Étienne, Dijon, etc.) the workers also attempted to seize power, to proclaim the Commune and come to the help of Paris; but these attempts were shortlived. Paris, which had first raised the banner of proletarian revolt, was left to its own resources and doomed to certain destruction.
Two conditions, at least, are necessary for a victorious social revolution—highly developed productive forces and a proletariat adequately prepared for it. But in 1871 both of these conditions were lacking. French capitalism was still poorly developed, and France was at that time mainly a petty-bourgeois country (artisans, peasants, shopkeepers, etc.). On the other hand, there was no workers’ party; the working class had not gone through a long school of struggle and was unprepared, and for the most part did not even clearly visualise its tasks and the methods of fulfilling them. There was no serious political organisation of the proletariat, nor were there strong trade unions and co-operative societies….
But the chief thing which the Commune lacked was time—an opportunity to take stock of the situation and to embark upon the fulfilment of its programme. It had scarcely had time to start work, when the government entrenched in Versailles and supported by the entire bourgeoisie began hostilities against Paris. The Commune had to concentrate primarily on self-defence. Right up to the very end, May 21-28, it had no time to think seriously of anything else.
However, in spite of these unfavourable conditions, in spite of its brief existence, the Commune managed to promulgate a few measures which sufficiently characterise its real significance and aims. The Commune did away with the standing army, that blind weapon in the hands of the ruling classes, and armed the whole people. It proclaimed the separation of church and state, abolished state payments to religious bodies (i.e., state salaries for priests), made popular education purely secular, and in this way struck a severe blow at the gendarmes in cassocks. In the purely social sphere the Commune accomplished very little, but this little nevertheless clearly reveals its character as a popular, workers’ government. Night-work in bakeries was forbidden; the system of fines, which represented legalised robbery of the workers, was abolished. Finally, there was the famous decree that all factories and workshops abandoned or shut down by their owners were to be turned over to associations of workers that were to resume production. And, as if to emphasise its character as a truly democratic, proletarian government, the Commune decreed that the salaries of all administrative and government officials, irrespective of rank, should not exceed the normal wages of a worker, and in no case amount to more than 6,000 francs a year (less than 200 rubles a month).
All these measures showed clearly enough that the Commune was a deadly menace to the old world founded on the enslavement and exploitation of the people. That was why bourgeois society could not feel at ease so long as the Red Flag of the proletariat waved over the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. And when the organised forces of the government finally succeeded in gaining the upper hand over the poorly organised forces of the revolution, the Bonapartist generals, who had been beaten by the Germans and who showed courage only in fighting their defeated countrymen, those French Rennenkampfs and Meller-Zakomelskys, organised such a slaughter as Paris had never known. About 30,000 Parisians were shot down by the bestial soldiery, and about 45,000 were arrested, many of whom were afterwards executed, while thousands were transported or exiled. In all, Paris lost about 100,000 of its best people, including some of the finest workers in all trades.
Shooting of Communards during the Bloody Week, May, 1871
The bourgeoisie were satisfied. “Now we have finished with socialism for a long time,” said their leader, the bloodthirsty dwarf, Thiers, after he and his generals had drowned the proletariat of Paris in blood. But these bourgeois crows croaked in vain. Less than six years after the suppression of the Commune, when many of its champions were still pining in prison or in exile, a new working-class movement arose in France. A new socialist generation, enriched by the experience of their predecessors and no whit discouraged by their defeat, picked up the flag which had fallen from the hands of the fighters in the cause of the Commune and bore it boldly and confidently forward. Their battle-cry was: “Long live the social revolution! Long live the Commune!” And in another few years, the new workers’ party and the agitational work launched by it throughout the country compelled the ruling classes to release Communards who were still kept in prison by the government.
The memory of the fighters of the Commune is honoured not only by the workers of France but by the proletariat of the whole world. For the Commune fought, not for some local or narrow national aim, but for the emancipation of all toiling humanity, of all the downtrodden and oppressed. As a foremost fighter for the social revolution, the Commune has won sympathy wherever there is a proletariat suffering and engaged in struggle. The epic of its life and death, the sight of a workers’ government which seized the capital of the world and held it for over two months, the spectacle of the heroic struggle of the proletariat and the torments it underwent after its defeat—all this raised the spirit of millions of workers, aroused their hopes and enlisted their sympathy for the cause of socialism. The thunder of the cannon in Paris awakened the most backward sections of the proletariat from their deep slumber, and everywhere gave impetus to the growth of revolutionary socialist propaganda. That is why the cause of the Commune is not dead. It lives to the present day in every one of us.
The cause of the Commune is the cause of the social revolution, the cause of the complete political and economic emancipation of the toilers. It is the cause of the proletariat of the whole world. And in this sense it is immortal.
(I have been reading and listening to this work for the past few days after finding praise of the work online.)
Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years
Foreword to the first printing by Gore Vidal
Sometime in the late 1950s, that world-class gossip and occasional historian, John F. Kennedy, told me how, in 1948, Harry S. Truman had been pretty much abandoned by everyone when he came to run for president. Then an American Zionist brought him two million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard his whistle-stop campaign train. ‘That’s why our recognition of Israel was rushed through so fast.’ As neither Jack nor I was an antisemite (unlike his father and my grandfather) we took this to be just another funny story about Truman and the serene corruption of American politics.
Unfortunately, the hurried recognition of Israel as a state has resulted in forty-five years of murderous confusion, and the destruction of what Zionist fellow travellers thought would be a pluralistic state – home to its native population of Muslims, Christians and Jews, as well as a future home to peaceful European and American Jewish immigrants, even the ones who affected to believe that the great realtor in the sky had given them, in perpetuity, the lands of Judea and Samaria. Since many of the immigrants were good socialists in Europe, we assumed that they would not allow the new state to become a theocracy, and that the native Palestinians could live with them as equals. This was not meant to be. I shall not rehearse the wars and alarms of that unhappy region. But I will say that the hasty invention of Israel has poisoned the political and intellectual life of the USA, Israel’s unlikely patron.
Talmud
Unlikely, because no other minority in American history has ever hijacked so much money from the American taxpayers in order to invest in a ‘homeland’. It is as if the American taxpayer had been obliged to support the Pope in his reconquest of the Papal States simply because one third of our people are Roman Catholic. Had this been attempted, there would have been a great uproar and Congress would have said no. But a religious minority of less than two per cent has bought or intimidated seventy senators (the necessary two thirds to overcome an unlikely presidential veto) while enjoying support of the media.
In a sense, I rather admire the way that the Israel lobby has gone about its business of seeing that billions of dollars, year after year, go to make Israel a ‘bulwark against communism’. Actually, neither the USSR nor communism was ever much of a presence in the region. What America did manage to do was to turn the once friendly Arab world against us. Meanwhile, the misinformation about what is going on in the Middle East has got even greater and the principal victim of these gaudy lies – the American taxpayer to one side – is American Jewry, as it is constantly bullied by such professional terrorists as Begin and Shamir. Worse, with a few honorable exceptions, Jewish-American intellectuals abandoned liberalism for a series of demented alliances with the Christian (antisemtic) right and with the Pentagon-industrial complex. In 1985 one of them blithely wrote that when Jews arrived on the American scene they ‘found liberal opinion and liberal politicians more congenial in their attitudes, more sensitive to Jewish concerns’ but now it is in the Jewish interest to ally with the Protestant fundamentalists because, after all, “is there any point in Jews hanging on dogmatically, hypocritically, to their opinions of yesteryear?’ At this point the American left split and those of us who criticised our onetime Jewish allies for misguided opportunism, were promptly rewarded with the ritual epithet ‘antisemite’ or ‘self-hating Jew’.
Fortunately, the voice of reason is alive and well, and in Israel, of all places. From Jerusalem, Israel Shahak never ceases to analyse not only the dismal politics of Israel today but the Talmud itself, and the effect of the entire rabbinical tradition on a small state that the right-wing rabbinate means to turn into a theocracy for Jews only. I have been reading Shahak for years. He has a satirist’s eye for the confusions to be found in any religion that tries to rationalise the irrational. He has a scholar’s sharp eye for textual contradictions. He is a joy to read on the great Gentile-hating Dr Maimonides.
Needless to say, Israel’s authorities deplore Shahak. But there is not much to be done with a retired professor of chemistry who was born in Warsaw in 1933 and spent his childhood in the concentration camp at Belsen. In 1945, he came to Israel; served in the Israeli military; did not become a Marxist in the years when it was fashionable. He was – and still is – a humanist who detests imperialism whether in the names of the God of Abraham or of George Bush. Equally, he opposes with great wit and learning the totalitarian strain in Judaism. Like a highly learned Thomas Paine, Shahak illustrates the prospect before us, as well as the long history behind us, and thus he continues to reason, year after year. Those who heed him will certainly be wiser and – dare I say? – better. He is the latest, if not the last, of the great prophets.
– Gore Vidal
Israel Shahak was a resident of the Warsaw Ghetto and a survivor of Bergen-Belsen. He arrived in Palestine in 1945 and lived there until his death in 2001. He was an outspoken critic of the state of Israel and a human rights activist. He was also the author of the highly acclaimed Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (Pluto Press 1999) and Open Secrets: Israeli Nuclear and Foreign Policies (Pluto Press 1997).
Professor Israel Shahak Pluto Press (2002) Buy a Copy!
his book, although written in English and addressed to people living outside the State of Israel, is, in a way, a continuation of my political activities as an Israeli Jew. Those activities began in 1965-6 with a protest which caused a considerable scandal at the time: I had personally witnessed an ultra-religious Jew refuse to allow his phone to be used on the Sabbath in order to call an ambulance for a non-Jew who happened to have collapsed in his Jerusalem neighbourhood. Instead of simply publishing the incident in the press, I asked for a meeting which is composed of rabbis nominated by the State of Israel. I asked them whether such behavior was consistent with their interpretation of the Jewish religion. They answered that the Jew in question had behaved correctly, indeed piously, and backed their statement by referring me to a passage in an authoritative compendium of Talmudic laws, written in this century. I reported the incident to the main Hebrew daily, Ha’aretz, whose publication of the story caused a media scandal.
The results of the scandal were, for me, rather negative. Neither the Israeli, nor the diaspora, rabbinical authorities ever reversed their ruling that a Jew should not violate the Sabbath in order to save the life of a Gentile. They added much sanctimonious twaddle to the effect that if the consequence of such an act puts Jews in danger, the violation of the Sabbath is permitted, for their sake. It became apparent to me, as drawing on Talmudic laws governing the relations between Jews and non-Jews, that neither Zionism, including its seemingly secular part, nor Israeli politics since the inception of the State of Israel, nor particularly the policies of the Jewish supporters of Israel in the diaspora, could be understood unless the deeper influence of those laws, and the worldview which they both create and express is taken into account. The actual policies Israel pursued after the Six Day War, and in particular the apartheid character of the Israeli regime in the Occupied Territories and the attitude of the majority of Jews to the issue of the rights of the Palestinians, even in the abstract, have merely strengthened this conviction.
By making this statement I am not trying to ignore the political or strategic considerations which may have also influenced the rulers of Israel. I am merely saying that actual politics is an interaction between realistic considerations (whether valid or mistaken, moral or immoral in my view) and ideological influences. The latter tend to be more influential the less they are discussed and ‘dragged into the light’. Any form of racism, discrimination and xenophobia becomes more potent and politically influential if it is taken for granted by the society which indulges in it. This is especially so if its discussion is prohibited, either formally or by tacit agreement. When racism, discrimination and xenophobia is prevalent among Jews, and directed against non-Jews, being fuelled by religious motivations, it is like its opposite case, that of antisemitism and its religious motivations. Today, however, while the second is being discussed, the very existence of the first is generally ignored, more outside Israel than within it.
Without a discussion of the prevalent Jewish attitudes to non-Jews, even the concept of Israel as ‘a Jewish state’, as Israel formally defines itself, cannot be understood. The widespread misconception that Israel, even without considering its regime in the Occupied Territories, is a true democracy arises from the refusal to confront the significance of the term ‘a Jewish state’ for non-Jews. In my view, Israel as a Jewish state constitutes a danger not only to itself and its inhabitants, but to all Jews and to all other peoples and states in the Middle East and beyond. I also consider that other Middle Eastern states or entities which define themselves as ‘Arab’ or ‘Muslim’, like the Israeli self-definition as being ‘Jewish’, likewise constitute a danger. However, while this danger is widely discussed, the danger inherent in the Jewish character of the State of Israel is not.
The principle of Israel as ‘a Jewish state’ was supremely important to Israeli politicians from the inception of the state and was inculcated into the Jewish population by all conceivable ways. When, in the early 1980s, a tiny minority of Israeli Jews emerged which opposed this concept, a Constitutional Law (that is, a law overriding provisions of other laws, which cannot be revoked except by a special procedure) was passed in 1985 by an enormous majority of the Knesset.
By this law no party whose programme openly opposes the principle of ‘a Jewish state’ or proposes to change it by democratic means, is allowed to participate in the elections to the Knesset. I myself strongly oppose this constitutional principle. The legal consequence for me is that I cannot belong, in the state of which I am a citizen, to a party having principles with which I would agree and which is allowed to participate in Knesset elections. Even this example shows that the State of Israel is not a democracy due to the application of a Jewish ideology directed against all non-Jews and those Jews who oppose this ideology. But the danger which this dominant ideology represents is not limited to domestic affairs. It also influences Israeli foreign policies. This danger will continue to grow, as long as two currently operating developments are being strengthened: the increase in the Jewish character of Israel and the increase in its power, particularly in nuclear power. Another ominous factor is that Israeli influence in the USA political establishment is also increasing. Hence accurate information about Judaism, and especially about the treatment of non-Jews by Israel, is now not only important, but politically vital as well.
Let me begin with the official Israeli definition of the term ‘Jewish’, illustrating the crucial difference between Israel as ‘a Jewish state’ and the majority of other states. By this official definition, Israel ‘belongs’ to persons who are defined by the Israeli authorities as ‘Jewish’, irrespective of where they live, and to them alone. On the other hand, Israel doesn’t officially ‘belong’ to its non-Jewish citizens, whose status is considered even officially as inferior. This means in practice that if members of a Peruvian tribe are converted to Judaism, and thus regarded as Jewish, they are entitled at once to become Israeli citizens and benefit from the approximately 70 per cent of the West Bank land (and the 92 per cent of the area of Israel proper), officially designated only for the benefit of Jews. All non-Jews ( not only all Palestinians) are prohibited from benefiting from those lands. (The prohibition applies even to Israeli Arabs who served in the Israeli army and reached a high rank.) The case involving Peruvian converts to Judaism actually occurred a few years ago. The newly-created Jews were settled in the West Bank, near Nablus, on land from which non-Jews are officially excluded. All Israeli governments are taking enormous political risks, including the risk of war, so that such settlements, composed exclusively of persons who are defined as ‘Jewish’ (and not ‘Israeli’ as most of the media mendaciously claims) would be subject to only ‘Jewish’ authority.
I suspect that the Jews of the USA or of Britain would regard it as antisemitic if Christians would propose that the USA or the United Kingdom should become a ‘Christian state’, belonging only to citizens officially defined as ‘Christians’. The consequence of such doctrine is that Jews converting to Christianity would become full citizens because of their conversion. It should be recalled that the benefits of conversions are well known to Jews from their own history. When the Christian and the Islamic states used to discriminate against all persons not belonging to the religion of the state, including the Jews, the discrimination against Jews was at once removed by their conversion. But a non-Jew discriminated against by the State of Israel will cease to be so treated the moment he or she converts to Judaism.This simply shows that the same kind of exclusivity that is regarded by a majority of the diaspora Jews as antisemitic is regarded by the majority of all Jews as Jewish. To oppose both antisemitism and Jewish chauvinism is widely regarded among Jews as a ‘self-hatred’, a concept which I regard as nonsensical.
The meaning of the term ‘Jewish’ and its cognates, including ‘Judaism’, thus becomes in the context of Israeli politics as important as the meaning of ‘Islamic’, when officially used by Iran, or ‘communist’ when it was officially used by the USSR. However, the meaning of the term ‘Jewish’ as it is popularly used is not clear, either in Hebrew or when translated into other languages, and so the term had to be defined officially.
According to Israeli law a person is considered ‘Jewish’ if either their mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother were Jewesses by religion; or if the person was converted to Judaism in a way satisfactory to the Israeli authorities, and on condition that the person has not converted from Judaism to another religion, in which case Israel ceases to regard them as ‘Jewish’. Of the three conditions, the first represents the Talmudic definition of ‘who is a Jew’, a defintion followed by Jewish Orthodoxy. The Talmud and post-Talmudic rabbinic law also recognise the conversion of a non-Jew to Judaism (as well as the purchase of a non-Jewish slave by a Jew followed by a different kind of conversion) as a method of becoming Jewish, provided that the conversion is performed by authorised rabbis in a proper manner. This ‘proper manner’ entails for females, their inspection by three rabbis while naked in a ‘bath of purification’, a ritual which, although notorious to all readers of the Hebrew press, is not often mentioned by the English media in spite of its undoubted interest for certain readers. I hope that this book will be the beginning of a process which will rectify this discrepancy.
But there is another urgent necessity for an official definition of who is, and who is not ‘Jewish’. The State of Israel officially discriminates in favour of Jews and against non-Jews in many domains of life, of which I regard three as being most important: residency rights, the right to work and the right to equality before the law. Discrimination in residency is based on the fact that about 92 per cent of Israel’s land is the property of the state and is administered by the Israel Land Authority according to regulations issued by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), and affiliate of the World Zionist Organization. In its regulations the JNF denies the right to reside, to open a business, and often to work, to anyone who is not Jewish, only because he is not Jewish. At the same time, Jews are not prohibited from taking residence or opening businesses anywhere in Israel. If applied in another state against the Jews, such discriminatory practice would instantly and justifiably be labelled antisemitism and would no doubt spark massive public protests. When applied by Israel as a part of its ‘Jewish ideology’, they are usually studiously ignored or excused when rarely mentioned.
The denial of the right to work means that non-Jews are prohibited officially from working on land administered by the Israel Land Authority according to the JNF regulations. No doubt these regulations are not always, or even often, enforced but they do exist. From time to time Israel attempts enforcement campaigns by state authorities, as, for example, when the Agriculture Ministry acts against ‘the pestilence of letting fruit orchards belonging to Jews and situated on National Land [i.e., land belonging to the State of Israel] be harvested by Arab labourers’, even if the labourers in question are citizens of Israel. Israel also strictly prohibits Jews settled on ‘National Land’ to sub-rent even a part of their land to Arabs, even for a short time; and those who do so are punished, usually by heavy fines. There is no prohibitions on non-Jews renting their land to Jews. This means, in my own case, that by virtue of being a Jew I have the right to lease an orchard for harvesting its produce from another Jew, but a non-Jew, whether a citizen of Israel or a resident alien, does not have this right.
Non-Jewish citizens of Israel do not have the right to equality before the law. This discrimination is expressed in many Israeli laws in which, presumably in order to avoid embarrassment, the terms ‘Jewish’ and ‘non-Jewish’ are usually not explicitly stated, as they are in the crucial Law of Return. According to that law only persons officially recognised as ‘Jewish’ have an automatic right of entry to Israel and of settling in it. They automatically receive an ‘immigration certificate’ which provides them on arrival with ‘citizenship by virtue of having returned to the Jewish homeland’, and with the right to many financial benefits, which vary somewhat according to the country from which they emigrated. The Jews who emigrate from the states of the former UUSR receive ‘an absorption grant’ of more than $20,000 per family. All Jews immigrating to Israel according to this law immediately acquire the right to vote in elections and to be elected to the Knesset – even if they do not speak a word of Hebrew.
Article after article details the disappearance of forty-three students who were going to a protest to remember students killed before. Apparently the idea of collecting money to rent a bus never occurred to the students. The ‘populist’ tradition in Mexico is to block a highway and force a bus driver to take you were you want to go. The driver is a worker who is forced by the implicit or explicit threat of violence to abandon his life and work so ‘leftist’ students can go to a protest without paying for bus fare. The drivers life does not matter. The bus drivers are compelled by their companies to stay with the bus that has been hijacked. Some report that drivers are away from their families and homes for months as they have to stay at college campuses with the hijacked bus.
I have read a number of articles about the ’43 Students.’ Almost all of them are mournful remembrances of the heroic students who simply wanted to go to a memorial service. Not one article ever said that it was a stupid idea to go out on public streets and hijack buses. The students are apparently saints and everything saints do is holy. The bad choices these leftist students made should be learned by other leftists, not held up as some selfless revolutionary sacrifice by protesters following the correct methods.
When the Red Army faced the Germans in WW2 there might have been plenty to write about atrocities and unfair killings. The question of the moment was how to fight back against the German Army effectively, not appeal to some vague sense of ‘fair play’ and rules of war. Understand the enemy and act accordingly.
What has happened with the ’43 Students’ is a religiously flavored campaign that glorifies suffering as a validation of the methods these unfortunate students chose.
I have tried to locate the article that I came across that said what the students did wrong was pick a bus that had expensive contra ban drugs. The students had inadvertently intercepted a drug shipment. So, someone was very mad. The people who were shipping the drugs, apparently in cooperation with at least the local authorities took their anger out on the students by killing them.
What lesson should be learned? What is to be done about the forty-three disappeared? Demand answers? Why? Did the Red Army fight the German Army for years because the Red Army wanted answers? What good will ‘answers’ do for the aggrieved families friends and comrades of the dead students. Christianity is built around the suffering and death of a savior, should leftist movements be built around the stories of suffering and deaths of militants who lost and were following very badly thought out actions.
Below: Three videos with an audio reading of What Is To Be Done on Youtube. Parts one, two, and three of the work.
Here is the audio Mp3 of the three videos with the Librivox reading –
Part One of Three – What Is To Be Done? Part Two of Three – What Is To Be Done? Part Three of Three – What Is To Be Done?
“No work in modern literature, with the possible exception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, can compete with What Is to Be Done? in its effect on human lives and its power to make history. For Chernyshevsky’s novel, far more than Marx’s Capital, supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution.”–Joseph Frank, The Southern Review
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I have been trying to approach this work for a while now. My attention was brought back to the paperback edition I have had on my shelf since college when I watched a V.I. Lenin biography and the narrator said that Lenin had read the novel five times during his fifteenth summer.
I was more familiar with Lenin’s echo of the title in his own political work with the same ‘What Is To Be Done’ title.
Looking online I have listened to a few chapters of Chernyshevsky’s ‘What Is To Be Done’ on Librivox. ( LibriVox )
I was surprised that there was no version of the work on Project Gutenberg.
There is a version online that is a scanned edition that is also able to be an audio book with an acceptable machine voice.
I wonder if I could type up a copy for Project Gutenberg. Doing so would be a good exercise for me. I do know how to ‘touch type’ if we still call it that.
I looked for a summary of the work and could not find the usual chapter by chapter I could find for many classic works.
A Plot Summary
The story begins with Vera Pavlovna living under the rule of her oppressive mother who wants to marry her off to the son of their tenement block owner. However, Vera has many other aspirations of her own and longs to be free from her household. She becomes friends with her younger brother’s tutor, Lopukhov, with whom she has philosophical discussions spurred on by the books Lopukhov suggests she read. The two eventually realize that Lopukhov can save Vera from a loveless marriage and a lifelong servitude to her family by marrying her, and he does so, snatching her out from under the nose of her mother and unwanted suitor. The newlyweds set up house together in a thoroughly planned out manner: each with a separate bedroom that can only be entered by the other with permission, and a communal “neutral” room for eating, drinking tea, etc. With this egalitarian setup, Vera feels liberated from what she called “the cellar”, or her previous life of oppression.
Through lengthy talks with Lopukhov, Vera decides to set up a small business as a seamstress in order to gain financial independence, reinforcing their desire for equality among the sexes. Vera runs her business as a cooperative, with all the women living together and sharing the profits. The descriptions of the workshops and lodging houses they create are long and detailed, and advocate the possibility of utopian working and living spaces fueled by the idea that one’s own personal self-interest converges with that of the group, creating the best conditions for the individual and for the common good.
Vera soon falls in love with Lopukhov’s friend and classmate, Kirsanov. Lopukhov realizes that his marriage to Vera was only in order to help her achieve her independence, and that now he stands in the way of real love. With the help of an extraordinary man, Rakhmetov, Lopukhov “removes himself from the scene” so as not to block Vera and Kirsanov’s happiness. Eventually, Kirsanov and Vera marry, and live happily together for the rest of the novel.
Chernyshevsky believed that art should first and foremost serve a social purpose by showing how things should be, and thus help make those ideas a reality. His criterion for artistic beauty, therefore, was how much the artwork helped to bring about social change. His three main protagonists – Vera, Lopukhov, and Kirsanov – were intended to show how men and women could live together in equality, respecting their equal rights. This concept is also applicable to differing social classes. As characters, rather than having real depth, they are more emblems of an ideal. The portrait of Rakhmetov is intended to show the ideal revolutionary, and to describe the process of becoming committed to the Revolution. The narrator even specifically tells the reader that Rakhmetov’s purpose is to show how ordinary the other characters are: “No, my friends, it is not they who stand too high, it is you who stand too low.” Vera and the men are models for the reader, and Rakhmetov is a model for them, personifying the spirit and commitment necessary for a revolution. By illustrating the concept that Vera and the men are in fact ordinary, Chernyshevsky also tries to emphasize the attainability of his goals.
Vera Pavlovna’s Fourth Dream, arguably the most famous and radical part of the novel, shows the coming Golden Age to be achieved by revolution. An agrarian utopia, the aftermath of the revolution, is depicted along with the symbolic crystal palace, and image of technological modernity. Go to The Revolution to read our take on the fourth dream and missing section.
I wrote in one of my notebooks: “If Nikolai Chernyshevsky had not written What Is to Be Done?, Tolstoy could not have written Anna Karenina .”
What was the source of that statement? Probably a critical essay on Anna Karenina. It nagged at me for years. But I must admit, the clunky look of my Cornell University Press edition of Chernyshevsky did not attract me.
But this spring I finally read What Is to Be Done?, and not only did I see similarities between Chernyshevsky’s radical Utopian novel and Tolstoy’s psychological masterpiece, but between What Is to Be Done? and most of the late 19th-century Russian novels I have read.In the introduction to Michael R. Katz’s translation of What Is to Be Done? (Cornell University Press), Michael R. Katz and William Wagner write:
If one were to ask for the title of the nineteenth-century Russian novel that has had the greatest influence on Russian society, it is likely that a non-Russian would choose among the books of the mighty triumvirate—Turgenev, Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky. Fathers and Sons? War and Peace? Crime and Punishment? These would certainly be among the suggested answers; but . . . the novel that can claim this honor with most justice is N. G. Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?,” a book few Western readers have ever heard of and fewer still have read.
Chernyshevsky wrote What Is to Be Done? in prison. He asked permission to write fiction in prison, and the novel was published in 1863. It treats the subjects of the sociopolitical essays he was imprisoned for: collective ownership, free love, scientific education, cures for poverty, and other philosophical and political questions.
And, as you can imagine, a novel based on politics has its strengths and weaknesses. Most of the characters are well-drawn, but occasionally we have stick figures who recite ideas. And at one point, Chernyshevksy describes the economic principles of a sewing collective in such detail that he even includes accounts–needless to say, I skip over anything with numbers. But the plot, about a feminist heroine who loves two men and founds the sewing collective workshop for impoverished women, is rapid-paced and fascinating. Can you imagine a Utopia that works? It’s a nice change from dystopian Y.A. novels.
What’s more, Chernyshevsky’s narrative techniques seem almost modernist. A narrator frequently interrupts to question our assumptions and to berate the so-called “perspicacious reader,” whom he finds to be just the opposite. And even the elaborate structure of the novel seems modernist, or do I mean post-modern? There are actually two bizarre chapters before the preface, regarding a suicide. And the novel contains four surreal dream sequences, in which the heroine progresses in her personal and political understanding with the help of a beautiful goddess: she even sees a future world where everything is made of light-weight shiny aluminum!
I love Edward Gorey’s cover design!
But without the playful women characters at their parties and winter picnics, the novel would be dry. The heroine, Vera Pavlovna, may be a type who represents radical beliefs, but she also is smart, passionate, and believable. When we first meet her, she is a well-educated but stifled young woman living at home. Her father, a none-too-scrupulous clerk and apartment house manager , doesn’t mind pocketing extra money, and her domineering mother runs an informal pawn shop out of their home. Her mother is trying to marry off Vera to the well-to-d0 ne’er-do-well owner of the house, but he wants to seduce, not marry Vera; and Vera refuses to marry a cad.
Fortunately, she falls into conversation with Dmitri Sergich Lopukhov, a medical student and her brother’s tutor. Not only do they discuss politics and their reading of radical books and tracts, but they fall in love. He attempts to find her a governess job, so she can leave her oppressive parents, but the attempt ends in failure: the most liberal of the employers decides not to hire Vera because, by the law, Vera is her parents’ property and they could sue. And that is when Lopukhov decides to marry her. He realizes that she cannot survive with her parents. She is contemplating suicide.
Vera blooms with Lopukhov. In their poor few rented rooms, Vera insists on an unusual arrangement: they have separate bedrooms, and cannot enter them without one other’s permission. Vera believes that people who stay in love are those who don’t see each other all the time, and never see each other at their worst. And it is true that their romance blossoms–for a while.
But what happens when Vera falls in love with Lopukhov’s best friend, Kirsanov? Will the n0vel turn into Anna Karenina? Well, no. The characters are radicals, and they have progressive ideas about love and marriage. And “extraordinary man,” Rakhmetov, who represents the ideal revolutionary, encourages Vera to continue her unconventional love and work. But the plot takes a bizarre turn that I did not anticipate.
Tolstoy is not the writer most influenced by Chernyshevsky, who, by the way, was responding to Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and to Herzen’s novel, Who Is to Blame? But I am such a fan of Anna Karenina that I will make a few observations anyway. Vera and Anna are both married heroines who fall illicitly in love: Vera makes a second very happy marriage, but Anna becomes an outcast for living with her lover, Vronsky. As in What Is to Be Done?, we see several characters In Anna Karenina involved with social reforms. The landowner hero, Levin, is enthusiastic about agricultural reform and wants to create a kind of co-op for the peasants, who are not interested. He cannot even get them to plant the wheat when he orders it done, let alone understand any kind of profit-sharing. And so we have Tolstoy’s realism, contrasted with Chernyshevsky’s idealism.
Really worth reading and lots of fun! It made me look at the Russian novel differently.
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From an Amazon Sales Review for a new translation –
Almost from the moment of its publication in 1863, Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel, What Is to Be Done?, had a profound impact on the course of Russian literature and politics. The idealized image it offered of dedicated and self-sacrificing intellectuals transforming society by means of scientific knowledge served as a model of inspiration for Russia’s revolutionary intelligentsia. On the one hand, the novel’s condemnation of moderate reform helped to bring about the irrevocable break between radical intellectuals and liberal reformers; on the other, Chernyshevsky’s socialist vision polarized conservatives’ opposition to institutional reform. Lenin himself called Chernyshevsky “the greatest and most talented representative of socialism before Marx”; and the controversy surrounding What Is to Be Done? exacerbated the conflicts that eventually led to the Russian Revolution.
“I’m not a ‘conspiracy theorist,’ I’m a conspiracy observer.” Gore Vidal
Tim Foyle
Why is it that otherwise perfectly intelligent, thoughtful and rationally minded people baulk at the suggestion that sociopaths are conspiring to manipulate and deceive them? And why will they defend this ill-founded position with such vehemence?
History catalogues the machinations of liars, thieves, bullies and narcissists and their devastating effects. In modern times too, evidence of corruption and extraordinary deceptions abound.
We know, without question, that politicians lie and hide their connections and that corporations routinely display utter contempt for moral norms – that corruption surrounds us.
We know that revolving doors between the corporate and political spheres, the lobbying system, corrupt regulators, the media and judiciary mean that wrongdoing is practically never brought to any semblance of genuine justice.
We know that the press makes noise about these matters occasionally but never pursues them with true vigour.
We know that in the intelligence services and law enforcement wrongdoing on a breathtaking scale is commonplace and that, again, justice is never forthcoming.
We know that governments repeatedly ignore or trample on the rights of the people, and actively abuse and mistreat the people. None of this is controversial.
So exactly what is it that conspiracy deniers refuse to acknowledge with such fervour, righteousness and condescension? Why, against all the evidence, do they sneeringly and contemptuously defend the crumbling illusion that ‘the great and good’ are up there somewhere, have everything in hand, have only our best interests at heart, and are scrupulous, wise and sincere? That the press serves the people and truth rather than the crooks? That injustice after injustice result from mistakes and oversights, and never from that dread word: conspiracy?
What reasonable person would continue to inhabit such a fantasy world?
The point of disagreement here is only on the matter of scale. Someone who is genuinely curious about the plans of powerful sociopaths won’t limit the scope of their curiosity to, for example, one corporation, or one nation. Why would they? Such a person assumes that the same patterns on display locally are likely to be found all the way up the power food chain. But the conspiracy denier insists this is preposterous.
Why?
It is painfully obvious that the pyramidical societal and legal structures that humanity has allowed to develop are exactly the kind of dominance hierarchies that undoubtedly favour the sociopath. A humane being operating with a normal and healthy cooperative mindset has little inclination to take part in the combat necessary to climb a corporate or political ladder.
So what do conspiracy deniers imagine the 70 million or more sociopaths in the world do all day, born into a ‘game’, in which all the wealth and power are at the top of the pyramid, while the most effective attributes for ‘winning’ are ruthlessness and amorality? Have they never played Monopoly?
Sociopaths do not choose their worldview consciously, and are simply unable to comprehend why normal people would put themselves at such an incredible disadvantage by limiting themselves with conscientiousness and empathy, which are as beyond the understanding of the sociopath as a world without them are to the humane being.
All the sociopath need do to win in the game is lie publicly whilst conspiring privately. What could be simpler? In 2021, to continue to imagine that the world we inhabit is not largely driven by this dynamic amounts to reckless naiveté bordering on insanity. Where does such an inadvertently destructive impulse originate?
The infant child places an innate trust in those it finds itself with – a trust which is, for the most part, essentially justified. The infant could not survive otherwise.
In a sane and healthy society, this deep instinct would evolve as the psyche developed. As self-awareness, the cognitive and reasoning abilities and scepticism evolved in the individual, this innate trust impulse would continue to be understood as a central need of the psyche. Shared belief systems would exist to consciously evolve and develop this childish impulse in order to place this faith somewhere consciously – in values and beliefs of lasting meaning and worth to the society, the individual, or, ideally, both.
Reverence and respect for tradition, natural forces, ancestors, for reason, truth, beauty, liberty, the innate value of life, or the initiating spirit of all things, might all be considered valid resting places in which to consciously place our trust and faith – as well as those derived from more formalised belief systems.
Regardless of the path taken to evolve and develop a personal faith, it is the bringing of one’s own consciousness and cognition to this innate impulse that is relevant here. I believe this is a profound responsibility – to develop and cultivate a mature faith – which many are, understandably, unaware of.
What occurs when there is a childish need within us which has never evolved beyond its original survival function of trusting those in our environment who are, simply, the most powerful; the most present and active? When we have never truly explored our own psyches, and deeply interrogated what we truly believe and why? When our motivation for trusting anything or anyone goes unchallenged? When philosophy is left to the philosophers?
I suggest the answer is simple, and that the evidence of this phenomenon and the havoc it is wreaking is all around us: the innate impulse to trust the mother never evolves, never encounters and engages with its counterbalance of reason (or mature faith), and remains forever on its ‘default’ infant setting.
While the immature psyche no longer depends on parents for its well-being, the powerful and motivating core tenet I have described remains intact: unchallenged, unconsidered and undeveloped. And, in a world in which stability and security are distant memories, these survival instincts, rather than being well-honed, considered, relevant, discerning and up to date, remain, quite literally, those of a baby. Trust is placed in the biggest, loudest, most present and undeniable force around, because instinct decrees that survival depends on it.
And, in this great ‘world nursery’, the most omnipresent force is the network of institutions which consistently project an unearned image of power, calm, expertise, concern and stability.
In my view, this is how conspiracy deniers are able to cling to and aggressively defend the utterly illogical fantasy that somehow – above a certain undefined level of the societal hierarchy – corruption, deceit, malevolence and narcissism mysteriously evaporate. That, contrary to the maxim, the more power a person has, the more integrity they will inevitably exhibit. These poor deluded souls essentially believe that where personal experience and prior knowledge cannot fill in the gaps in their worldview – in short, where there is a barred door – mummy and daddy are behind it, working out how best to ensure that their little precious will be comfortable, happy and safe forever.
This is the core, comforting illusion at the root of the conspiracy denier’s mindset, the decrepit foundation upon which they build a towering castle of justification from which to pompously jeer at and mock those who see otherwise.
This explains why it is that the conspiracy denier will attack any suggestion that the caregiving archetype is no longer present – that sociopaths are behind the barred door, who hold us all in utter contempt or disregard us completely. The conspiracy denier will attack any such suggestion as viciously as if their survival depended on it – which, in a way, within the makeup of their unconscious and precarious psyche, it does.
Their sense of well-being, of security, of comfort, even of a future at all, is completely (and completely unconsciously) invested in this fantasy. The infant has never matured, and, because they are not conscious of this, other than as a deep attachment to their personal security, they will fiercely attack any threat to this unconscious and central aspect of their worldview.
The tediously common refrain from the conspiracy denier is, ‘there couldn’t be a conspiracy that big’.
The simple retort to such a self-professed expert on conspiracies is obvious: how big?
The biggest ‘medical’ corporations in the world can go for decades treating the settling of court cases as mere business expenses, for crimes ranging from the suppressing of adverse test events to multiple murders resulting from undeclared testing to colossal environmental crimes.
Governments perform the vilest and most unthinkable ‘experiments’ (crimes) on their own people without consequence.
Politicians habitually lie to our faces, without consequence.
And on and on. At what point, exactly, does a conspiracy become so big that ‘they’ just couldn’t get away with it, and why? I suggest it’s at the point where the cognitive ability of the conspiracy denier falters, and their unconscious survival instinct kicks in. The point at which the intellect becomes overwhelmed with the scope of events and the instinct is to settle back into the familiar comforting faith known and cultivated since the first moment one’s lips found the nipple. The faith that someone else is dealing with it – that where the world becomes unknown to us, a powerful and benevolent human authority exists in which we have only to place our faith unconditionally in order to guarantee eternal emotional security.
This dangerous delusion may be the central factor placing humanity’s physical security and future in the hands of sociopaths.
To anyone in the habit of dismissing people who are questioning, investigative and sceptical as tin foil hat wearing, paranoid, science-denying Trump supporters, the question is: what do you believe in? Where have you placed your faith and why? How is it that while no one trusts governments, you appear to trust nascent global governance organisations without question? How is this rational?
If you are placing faith in such organisations, consider that in the modern global age, these organisations, as extraordinarily well presented as they are, are simply grander manifestations of the local versions we know we can’t trust. They are not our parents and demonstrate no loyalty to humane values. There is no reason to place any faith whatsoever in any of them.
If you haven’t consciously developed a faith or questioned why you believe as you do to some depth, such a position might seem misanthropic, but in truth, it is the opposite. These organisations have not earned your trust with anything other than PR money and glossy lies. True power remains, as ever, with the people.
There is a reason why Buddhists strongly advise the placing of one’s faith in the Dharma, or the natural law of life, rather than in persons, and that similar refrains are common in other belief systems.
Power corrupts. And, in the world today, misplaced and unfounded trust could well be one of the greatest sources of power there is.
Massive criminal conspiracies exist. The evidence is overwhelming. The scope of those currently underway is unknown, but there is no reason to imagine, in the new global age, that the sociopathic quest for power or the possession of the resources required to move towards it is diminishing. Certainly not while dissent is mocked and censored into silence by gatekeepers, ‘useful idiots’, and conspiracy deniers, who are, in fact, directly colluding with the sociopathic agenda through their unrelenting attack on those who would shine a light on wrongdoing.
It is every humane being’s urgent responsibility to expose sociopathic agendas wherever they exist – never to attack those who seek to do so.
Now, more than ever, it is time to put away childish things, and childish impulses, and to stand up as adults to protect the future of the actual children who have no choice but to trust us with their lives.
This essay has focussed on what I consider to be the deepest psychological driver of conspiracy denial.
There are certainly others, such as the desire to be accepted; the avoidance of knowledge of, and engagement with, the internal and external shadow; the preservation of a positive and righteous self-image: a generalised version of the ‘flying monkey’ phenomenon, in which a self-interested and vicious class protect themselves by coalescing around the bully; the subtle unconscious adoption of the sociopathic worldview (e.g. ‘humanity is the virus’); outrage addiction/superiority complex/status games; a stunted or unambitious intellect that finds validation through maintaining the status quo; the dissociative protective mechanism of imagining that crimes and horrors committed repeatedly within our lifetime are somehow not happening now, not ‘here’; and plain old fashioned laziness and cowardice.
My suggestion is that, to some degree, all of these build on the foundation of the primary cause I’ve outlined here.
An uprising in Paris on March 18, 1871, toward the end of the Franco-Prussian War, burst open the structure of 19th-century European capitalist society. The 72-day social explosion in what would become the capital of the French Empire became the iconic blueprint for workers’ revolution.
Lessons of the Paris Commune, established 46 years earlier, laid the groundwork for the 1917 Russian Revolution, an event that dominated 20th-century class-struggle history.
After the 1789 French revolution executed and deposed the French monarchy, opening the road to political power for the capitalist class, France often set the pace for social conflict and social change in Europe. Uprisings took place in 1830 and 1848 that kept advancing the demands of the working class and city poor. The ruling capitalists used the army and police to crush these uprisings.
Marxists, anarchists and utopian socialists – who aimed to eliminate exploitation and create a society of equals – needed to answer the following question: Can an oppressed and exploited class seize power and run society?
The Paris Commune was the first event in European history that answered this question.
Women defending a barricade during the Commune
Setting the scene for the Commune was the disastrous war that Louis Napoleon (nephew of the first Napoleon and emperor of capitalist France from 1852-70) had begun against Prussia in the summer of 1870. By September, the Prussian army had taken prisoner 200,000 French troops and officers, including the emperor himself.
Political parties representing French capitalists deposed the emperor and set up a French republic. To consolidate their rule, they had to surrender to the Prussians.
The workers and poor of Paris, however, set up a National Guard that was more like a popular militia, refusing to surrender Paris to the Prussian army. The National Guard also began to defend the interests of the Parisian workers against the capitalists. By March of 1871 the conflict between the pro-capitalist National Assembly and the various revolutionary workers’ organizations of Paris, concentrated in the National Guard, had reached a boiling point.
The pot boils over
On March 18, the bourgeois (capitalist) assembly ordered 40,000 troops from what was left of the regular national army to seize the 300 cannons held by the National Guard in the hills of Paris, known as Montmartre. The operation aimed to provoke a battle with workers that would lead to the mass arrests of working-class leaders.
According to the revolutionary anarchist Louise Michel, at 8 a.m., the people in Montmartre, and especially the women, begin to fraternize with the troops of the regular army. At first, there was mutual fear. Then recognition. Soon there was solidarity.
Michel wrote: “The Butte of Montmartre was bathed in the first light of day, through which things were glimpsed as if they were hidden behind a thin veil of water. Gradually, the crowd increased. The other districts of Paris, hearing of the events taking place on the Butte of Montmartre, came to our assistance.
“The women of Paris covered the cannon with their bodies. When their officers ordered the soldiers to fire, the troops refused.” (Nic Maclellan, “Rebel Lives – Louise Michel”)
The troops then arrested their commanding officers. By that evening, some of these generals, who in 1848 had massacred the workers, had been executed.
Before midnight, the uprising had seized the National Guard headquarters, the central police headquarters and Paris City Hall. The rebels held most of the city.
Military mutiny gave birth to workers’ power
At dawn on that day, the central committee of the National Guard had set out merely to defend themselves from a military coup. By midnight they had, de facto, seized power.
This was Day 1 of the 72 days the Paris Commune existed – the democratic rule of the poor, led by the working class.
This uprising of Parisian workers was the essential prologue to the European revolutions of the twentieth century. It was the first revolution in a European capitalist society where the wage workers — the working class or modern proletariat, those who live by selling their labor power — succeeded in setting up their own government and their own state.
The Commune could exercise its power only within the city of Paris, the largest city and largest working-class center in the centralized capitalist state of France. But Versailles, where the French king had his palace before 1789, was just 10 miles away. Commune rule arose in some of the other major cities, like Lyon and Marseille, but could not sustain itself outside Paris.
And conversely, without support from the provinces, the Paris Commune was unable to control the destiny of France. Nevertheless, the historical lessons from this first workers’ revolution allowed revolutionary leaders elsewhere to prepare to carry out revolution in the next century.
The theoretical leader of the International Workers Organization, Karl Marx — who with Friedrich Engels had written the “Communist Manifesto” in 1847 — saw in the Paris Commune the first historical experience of how the working class could overthrow the capitalist ruling class and begin to run society in the interest of all the oppressed classes.
The living experience of the Commune showed that it was impossible for the working class and oppressed sectors of the population to simply win over Parliament and thereby start building a new social system. The old government, bureaucracy and armed forces were tied by innumerable strings to the old ruling class. Only by destroying this old state and building a new one, bound to the working class, could society be changed.
By the end of the day on March 18, 1871, most of the 50,000 rank-and-file troops of France’s regular army who had been in Paris had either changed their allegiance to the National Guard, deserted or been withdrawn from the city, while most of the French soldiers outside Paris were prisoners of the Prussians.
This meant that within Paris, the National Guard was both the political body directing the Commune and the armed force keeping order in the city. The National Guard constituted the new state power, which defended the unemployed, the workers, and the small producers and shopkeepers, all of whom saw the Commune as their government – a type of popular assembly, or what in Russia was called a council or soviet.
Marx, Lenin analyzed lessons of the Commune
Marx wrote of this in his pamphlet, “The Civil War in France,” published in 1871. Marx’s pamphlet became the basis for key chapters of the pamphlet “State and Revolution,” which the revolutionary communist leader V.I. Lenin wrote in the summer of 1917 on the eve of the Russian Revolution, an event which was to shape 20th-century history.
Lenin’s pamphlet provides a clear explanation of why it was necessary to smash the old state, which enforced capitalist rule, and replace it with a new state based on the rule of the working class. Only then could one change society.
For anyone seriously interested in a revolution that frees the downtrodden and oppressed, these two works are indispensable. And they are based on the living experience of the Paris Commune.
The Commune lasted only 72 days, but they were great days, during which laws were passed protecting the workers, poor and women and establishing a popular democracy.
The French ruling class government made what any French patriot would have to consider a “treasonous” deal with the Prussian generals. It ceded to the Prussians the province of Alsace-Lorraine. The Prussians, in return, released the French prisoners of war – soldiers whom the bourgeois government used to drown the Commune in blood.
These troops had been held as prisoners far from Paris, far from the revolutionary Parisian workers. They came mostly from rural areas and remained brainwashed by the lies of the rulers, who had moved their government from Paris to Versailles in 1862. In May, these troops obeyed their officers. They slaughtered the Communards who dared to defend Paris, including many of the women fighters of The Women’s Union, who were the most resolute defenders of the Commune.
Thirty-six years later, the workers of Russia seized state power in that country, using as a blueprint the experiences of the Paris Commune.
Catalinotto is author of “Turn the Guns Around: Mutinies, Soldier Revolts and Revolutions,” which contains a chapter on the Paris Commune. The works by Marx and Lenin mentioned in the article are available free online.
“The proletarians of Paris,” said the Central Committee in its manifesto of March 18, “amidst the failures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs…. They have understood that it is their imperious duty, and their absolute right, to render themselves masters of their own destinies, by seizing upon the governmental power.”
But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.
The centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature — organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labor — originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle class society as a mighty weapon in its struggle against feudalism. Still, its development remained clogged by all manner of medieval rubbish, seignorial rights, local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies, and provincial constitutions. The gigantic broom of the French Revolution of the 18th century swept away all these relics of bygone times, thus clearing simultaneously the social soil of its last hindrances to the superstructure of the modern state edifice raised under the First Empire, itself the offspring of the coalition wars of old semi-feudal Europe against modern France.
During the subsequent regimes, the government, placed under parliamentary control — that is, under the direct control of the propertied classes — became not only a hotbed of huge national debts and crushing taxes; with its irresistible allurements of place, pelf, and patronage, it became not only the bone of contention between the rival factions and adventurers of the ruling classes; but its political character changed simultaneously with the economic changes of society. At the same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the class antagonism between capital and labor, the state power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labor, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism.
After every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class struggle, the purely repressive character of the state power stands out in bolder and bolder relief. The Revolution of 1830, resulting in the transfer of government from the landlords to the capitalists, transferred it from the more remote to the more direct antagonists of the working men. The bourgeois republicans, who, in the name of the February Revolution, took the state power, used it for the June [1848] massacres, in order to convince the working class that “social” republic means the republic entrusting their social subjection, and in order to convince the royalist bulk of the bourgeois and landlord class that they might safely leave the cares and emoluments of government to the bourgeois “republicans.”
However, after their one heroic exploit of June, the bourgeois republicans had, from the front, to fall back to the rear of the “Party of Order” — a combination formed by all the rival fractions and factions of the appropriating classes. The proper form of their joint-stock government was the parliamentary republic, with Louis Bonaparte for its president. Theirs was a regime of avowed class terrorism and deliberate insult towards the “vile multitude.”
If the parliamentary republic, as M. Thiers said, “divided them [the different fractions of the ruling class] least”, it opened an abyss between that class and the whole body of society outside their spare ranks. The restraints by which their own divisions had under former regimes still checked the state power, were removed by their union; and in view of the threatening upheaval of the proletariat, they now used that state power mercilessly and ostentatiously as the national war engine of capital against labor.
In their uninterrupted crusade against the producing masses, they were, however, bound not only to invest the executive with continually increased powers of repression, but at the same time to divest their own parliamentary stronghold — the National Assembly — one by one, of all its own means of defense against the Executive. The Executive, in the person of Louis Bonaparte, turned them out. The natural offspring of the “Party of Order” republic was the Second Empire.
The empire, with the coup d’etat for its birth certificate, universal suffrage for its sanction, and the sword for its scepter, professed to rest upon the peasantry, the large mass of producers not directly involved in the struggle of capital and labor. It professed to save the working class by breaking down parliamentarism, and, with it, the undisguised subserviency of government to the propertied classes. It professed to save the propertied classes by upholding their economic supremacy over the working class; and, finally, it professed to unite all classes by reviving for all the chimera of national glory.
In reality, it was the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation. It was acclaimed throughout the world as the savior of society. Under its sway, bourgeois society, freed from political cares, attained a development unexpected even by itself. Its industry and commerce expanded to colossal dimensions; financial swindling celebrated cosmopolitan orgies; the misery of the masses was set off by a shameless display of gorgeous, meretricious and debased luxury. The state power, apparently soaring high above society and the very hotbed of all its corruptions. Its own rottenness, and the rottenness of the society it had saved, were laid bare by the bayonet of Prussia, herself eagerly bent upon transferring the supreme seat of that regime from Paris to Berlin. Imperialism is, at the same time, the most prostitute and the ultimate form of the state power which nascent middle class society had commenced to elaborate as a means of its own emancipation from feudalism, and which full-grown bourgeois society had finally transformed into a means for the enslavement of labor by capital.
The direct antithesis to the empire was the Commune. The cry of “social republic,” with which the February Revolution was ushered in by the Paris proletariat, did but express a vague aspiration after a republic that was not only to supersede the monarchical form of class rule, but class rule itself. The Commune was the positive form of that republic.
Paris, the central seat of the old governmental power, and, at the same time, the social stronghold of the French working class, had risen in arms against the attempt of Thiers and the Rurals to restore and perpetuate that old governmental power bequeathed to them by the empire. Paris could resist only because, in consequence of the siege, it had got rid of the army, and replaced it by a National Guard, the bulk of which consisted of working men. This fact was now to be transformed into an institution. The first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people.
The Commune was formed of the municipal councilors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time.
Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workman’s wage. The vested interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves. Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of the Central Government. Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the state was laid into the hands of the Commune.
Having once got rid of the standing army and the police — the physical force elements of the old government — the Commune was anxious to break the spiritual force of repression, the “parson-power”, by the disestablishment and disendowment of all churches as proprietary bodies. The priests were sent back to the recesses of private life, there to feed upon the alms of the faithful in imitation of their predecessors, the apostles.
The whole of the educational institutions were opened to the people gratuitously, and at the same time cleared of all interference of church and state. Thus, not only was education made accessible to all, but science itself freed from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental force had imposed upon it.
The judicial functionaries were to be divested of that sham independence which had but served to mask their abject subserviency to all succeeding governments to which, in turn, they had taken, and broken, the oaths of allegiance. Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsible, and revocable.
The Paris Commune was, of course, to serve as a model to all the great industrial centers of France. The communal regime once established in Paris and the secondary centers, the old centralized government would in the provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government of the producers.
In a rough sketch of national organization, which the Commune had no time to develop, it states clearly that the Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet, and that in the rural districts the standing army was to be replaced by a national militia, with an extremely short term of service. The rural communities of every district were to administer their common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies were again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the mandat imperatif (formal instructions) of his constituents. The few but important functions which would still remain for a central government were not to be suppressed, as has been intentionally misstated, but were to be discharged by Communal and thereafter responsible agents.
The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by Communal Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the state power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence.
While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society. Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business. And it is well-known that companies, like individuals, in matters of real business generally know how to put the right man in the right place, and, if they for once make a mistake, to redress it promptly. On the other hand, nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supersede universal suffrage by hierarchical investiture.
It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterparts of older, and even defunct, forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness. Thus, this new Commune, which breaks with the modern state power, has been mistaken for a reproduction of the medieval Communes, which first preceded, and afterward became the substratum of, that very state power. The Communal Constitution has been mistaken for an attempt to break up into the federation of small states, as dreamt of by Montesquieu and the Girondins, that unity of great nations which, if originally brought about by political force, has now become a powerful coefficient of social production. The antagonism of the Commune against the state power has been mistaken for an exaggerated form of the ancient struggle against over-centralization. Peculiar historical circumstances may have prevented the classical development, as in France, of the bourgeois form of government, and may have allowed, as in England, to complete the great central state organs by corrupt vestries, jobbing councilors, and ferocious poor-law guardians in the towns, and virtually hereditary magistrates in the counties.
The Communal Constitution would have restored to the social body all the forces hitherto absorbed by the state parasite feeding upon, and clogging the free movement of, society. By this one act, it would have initiated the regeneration of France.
The provincial French middle class saw in the Commune an attempt to restore the sway their order had held over the country under Louis Philippe, and which, under Louis Napoleon, was supplanted by the pretended rule of the country over the towns. In reality, the Communal Constitution brought the rural producers under the intellectual lead of the central towns of their districts, and there secured to them, in the working men, the natural trustees of their interests. The very existence of the Commune involved, as a matter of course, local municipal liberty, but no longer as a check upon the now superseded state power. It could only enter into the head of a Bismarck — who, when not engaged on his intrigues of blood and iron, always likes to resume his old trade, so befitting his mental caliber, of contributor to Kladderadatsch (the Berlin Punch) — it could only enter into such a head to ascribe to the Paris Commune aspirations after the caricature of the old French municipal organization of 1791, the Prussian municipal constitution which degrades the town governments to mere secondary wheels in the police machinery of the Prussian state. The Commune made that catchword of bourgeois revolutions — cheap government — a reality by destroying the two greatest sources of expenditure: the standing army and state functionarism. Its very existence presupposed the non-existence of monarchy, which, in Europe at least, is the normal encumbrance and indispensable cloak of class rule. It supplied the republic with the basis of really democratic institutions. But neither cheap government nor the “true republic” was its ultimate aim; they were its mere concomitants.
The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favor, show that it was a thoroughly expansive political form, while all the previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true secret was this:
It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.
Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would have been an impossibility and a delusion. The political rule of the producer cannot co-exist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundation upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. With labor emancipated, every man becomes a working man, and productive labor ceases to be a class attribute.
It is a strange fact. In spite of all the tall talk and all the immense literature, for the last 60 years, about emancipation of labor, no sooner do the working men anywhere take the subject into their own hands with a will, than uprises at once all the apologetic phraseology of the mouthpieces of present society with its two poles of capital and wages-slavery (the landlord now is but the sleeping partner of the capitalist), as if the capitalist society was still in its purest state of virgin innocence, with its antagonisms still undeveloped, with its delusions still unexploded, with its prostitute realities not yet laid bare. The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilization!
Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land, and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor. But this is communism, “impossible” communism! Why, those members of the ruling classes who are intelligent enough to perceive the impossibility of continuing the present system — and they are many — have become the obtrusive and full-mouthed apostles of co-operative production. If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production — what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, “possible” communism?
The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par décret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. In the full consciousness of their historic mission, and with the heroic resolve to act up to it, the working class can afford to smile at the coarse invective of the gentlemen’s gentlemen with pen and inkhorn, and at the didactic patronage of well-wishing bourgeois-doctrinaires, pouring forth their ignorant platitudes and sectarian crotchets in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility.
When the Paris Commune took the management of the revolution in its own hands; when plain working men for the first time dared to infringe upon the governmental privilege of their “natural superiors,” and, under circumstances of unexampled difficulty, performed it at salaries the highest of which barely amounted to one-fifth of what, according to high scientific authority, is the minimum required for a secretary to a certain metropolitan school-board — the old world writhed in convulsions of rage at the sight of the Red Flag, the symbol of the Republic of Labor, floating over the Hôtel de Ville.
And yet, this was the first revolution in which the working class was openly acknowledged as the only class capable of social initiative, even by the great bulk of the Paris middle class — shopkeepers, tradesmen, merchants — the wealthy capitalist alone excepted. The Commune had saved them by a sagacious settlement of that ever recurring cause of dispute among the middle class themselves — the debtor and creditor accounts. The same portion of the middle class, after they had assisted in putting down the working men’s insurrection of June 1848, had been at once unceremoniously sacrificed to their creditors by the then Constituent Assembly. But this was not their only motive for now rallying around the working class. They felt there was but one alternative — the Commune, or the empire — under whatever name it might reappear. The empire had ruined them economically by the havoc it made of public wealth, by the wholesale financial swindling it fostered, by the props it lent to the artificially accelerated centralization of capital, and the concomitant expropriation of their own ranks. It had suppressed them politically, it had shocked them morally by its orgies, it had insulted their Voltairianism by handing over the education of their children to the fréres Ignorantins, it had revolted their national feeling as Frenchmen by precipitating them headlong into a war which left only one equivalent for the ruins it made — the disappearance of the empire. In fact, after the exodus from Paris of the high Bonapartist and capitalist bohème, the true middle class Party of Order came out in the shape of the “Union Republicaine,” enrolling themselves under the colors of the Commune and defending it against the willful misconstructions of Thiers. Whether the gratitude of this great body of the middle class will stand the present severe trial, time must show.
The Commune was perfectly right in telling the peasants that “its victory was their only hope.” Of all the lies hatched at Versailles and re-echoed by the glorious European penny-a-liner, one of the most tremendous was that the Rurals represented the French peasantry. Think only of the love of the French peasant for the men to whom, after 1815, he had to pay the milliard indemnity. In the eyes of the French peasant, the very existence of a great landed proprietor is in itself an encroachment on his conquests of 1789. The bourgeois, in 1848, had burdened his plot of land with the additional tax of 45 cents in the franc; but then he did so in the name of the revolution; while now he had fomented a civil war against revolution, to shift on to the peasant’s shoulders the chief load of the 5 milliards of indemnity to be paid to the Prussian. The Commune, on the other hand, in one of its first proclamations, declared that the true originators of the war would be made to pay its cost. The Commune would have delivered the peasant of the blood tax — would have given him a cheap government — transformed his present blood-suckers, the notary, advocate, executor, and other judicial vampires, into salaried communal agents, elected by, and responsible to, himself. It would have freed him of the tyranny of the garde champêtre, the gendarme, and the prefect; would have put enlightenment by the schoolmaster in the place of stultification by the priest. And the French peasant is, above all, a man of reckoning. He would find it extremely reasonable that the pay of the priest, instead of being extorted by the tax-gatherer, should only depend upon the spontaneous action of the parishioners’ religious instinct. Such were the great immediate boons which the rule of the Commune — and that rule alone — held out to the French peasantry. It is, therefore, quite superfluous here to expatiate upon the more complicated but vital problems which the Commune alone was able, and at the same time compelled, to solve in favor of the peasant — viz., the hypothecary debt, lying like an incubus upon his parcel of soil, the prolétariat foncier (the rural proletariat), daily growing upon it, and his expropriation from it enforced, at a more and more rapid rate, by the very development of modern agriculture and the competition of capitalist farming.
The French peasant had elected Louis Bonaparte president of the Republic; but the Party of Order created the empire. What the French peasant really wants he commenced to show in 1849 and 1850, by opposing his maire to the government’s prefect, his school-master to the government’s priest, and himself to the government’s gendarme. All the laws made by the Party of Order in January and February 1850 were avowed measures of repression against the peasant. The peasant was a Bonapartist, because the Great Revolution, with all its benefits to him, was, in his eyes, personified in Napoleon. This delusion, rapidly breaking down under the Second Empire (and in its very nature hostile to the Rurals), this prejudice of the past, how could it have withstood the appeal of the Commune to the living interests and urgent wants of the peasantry?
The Rurals — this was, in fact, their chief apprehension — knew that three months’ free communication of Communal Paris with the provinces would bring about a general rising of the peasants, and hence their anxiety to establish a police blockade around Paris, so as to stop the spread of the rinderpest [cattle pest — contagious disease].
If the Commune was thus the true representative of all the healthy elements of French society, and therefore the truly national government, it was, at the same time, as a working men’s government, as the bold champion of the emancipation of labor, emphatically international. Within sight of that Prussian army, that had annexed to Germany two French provinces, the Commune annexed to France the working people all over the world.
The Second Empire had been the jubilee of cosmopolitan blackleggism, the rakes of all countries rushing in at its call for a share in its orgies and in the plunder of the French people. Even at this moment, the right hand of Thiers is Ganessco, the foul Wallachian, and his left hand is Markovsky, the Russian spy. The Commune admitted all foreigners to the honor of dying for an immortal cause. Between the foreign war lost by their treason, and the civil war fomented by their conspiracy with the foreign invader, the bourgeoisie had found the time to display their patriotism by organizing police hunts upon the Germans in France. The Commune made a German working man [Leo Frankel] its Minister of Labor. Thiers, the bourgeoisie, the Second Empire, had continually deluded Poland by loud professions of sympathy, while in reality betraying her to, and doing the dirty work of, Russia. The Commune honored the heroic sons of Poland [J. Dabrowski and W. Wróblewski] by placing them at the head of the defenders of Paris. And, to broadly mark the new era of history it was conscious of initiating, under the eyes of the conquering Prussians on one side, and the Bonapartist army, led by Bonapartist generals, on the other, the Commune pulled down that colossal symbol of martial glory, the Vendôme Column.
The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence. Its special measures could but betoken the tendency of a government of the people by the people. Such were the abolition of the nightwork of journeymen bakers; the prohibition, under penalty, of the employers’ practice to reduce wages by levying upon their workpeople fines under manifold pretexts — a process in which the employer combines in his own person the parts of legislator, judge, and executor, and filches the money to boot. Another measure of this class was the surrender to associations of workmen, under reserve of compensation, of all closed workshops and factories, no matter whether the respective capitalists had absconded or preferred to strike work.
The financial measures of the Commune, remarkable for their sagacity and moderation, could only be such as were compatible with the state of a besieged town. Considering the colossal robberies committed upon the city of Paris by the great financial companies and contractors, under the protection of Haussman, the Commune would have had an incomparably better title to confiscate their property than Louis Napoleon had against the Orleans family. The Hohenzollern and the English oligarchs, who both have derived a good deal of their estates from church plunders, were, of course, greatly shocked at the Commune clearing but 8,000F out of secularization.
While the Versailles government, as soon as it had recovered some spirit and strength, used the most violent means against the Commune; while it put down the free expression of opinion all over France, even to the forbidding of meetings of delegates from the large towns; while it subjected Versailles and the rest of France to an espionage far surpassing that of the Second Empire; while it burned by its gendarme inquisitors all papers printed at Paris, and sifted all correspondence from and to Paris; while in the National Assembly the most timid attempts to put in a word for Paris were howled down in a manner unknown even to the Chambre introuvable of 1816; with the savage warfare of Versailles outside, and its attempts at corruption and conspiracy inside Paris — would the Commune not have shamefully betrayed its trust by affecting to keep all the decencies and appearances of liberalism as in a time of profound peace? Had the government of the Commune been akin to that of M. Thiers, there would have been no more occasion to suppress Party of Order papers at Paris that there was to suppress Communal papers at Versailles.
It was irritating indeed to the Rurals that at the very same time they declared the return to the church to be the only means of salvation for France, the infidel Commune unearthed the peculiar mysteries of the Picpus nunnery, and of the Church of St. Laurent. It was a satire upon M. Thiers that, while he showered grand crosses upon the Bonapartist generals in acknowledgment of their mastery in losing battles, signing capitulations, and turning cigarettes at Wilhelmshöhe, the Commune dismissed and arrested its generals whenever they were suspected of neglecting their duties. The expulsion from, and arrest by, the Commune of one of its members [Blanchet] who had slipped in under a false name, and had undergone at Lyons six days’ imprisonment for simple bankruptcy, was it not a deliberate insult hurled at the forger, Jules Favre, then still the foreign minister of France, still selling France to Bismarck, and still dictating his orders to that paragon government of Belgium? But indeed the Commune did not pretend to infallibility, the invariable attribute of all governments of the old stamp. It published its doings and sayings, it initiated the public into all its shortcomings.
In every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents, men of different stamp; some of them survivors of and devotees to past revolutions, without insight into the present movement, but preserving popular influence by their known honesty and courage, or by the sheer force of tradition; others mere brawlers who, by dint of repeating year after year the same set of stereotyped declarations against the government of the day, have sneaked into the reputation of revolutionists of the first water. After March 18, some such men did also turn up, and in some cases contrived to play pre-eminent parts. As far as their power went, they hampered the real action of the working class, exactly as men of that sort have hampered the full development of every previous revolution. They are an unavoidable evil: with time they are shaken off; but time was not allowed to the Commune.
Wonderful, indeed, was the change the Commune had wrought in Paris! No longer any trace of the meretricious Paris of the Second Empire! No longer was Paris the rendezvous of British landlords, Irish absentees, American ex-slaveholders and shoddy men, Russian ex-serfowners, and Wallachian boyards. No more corpses at the morgue, no nocturnal burglaries, scarcely any robberies; in fact, for the first time since the days of February 1848, the streets of Paris were safe, and that without any police of any kind.
“We,” said a member of the Commune, “hear no longer of assassination, theft, and personal assault; it seems indeed as if the police had dragged along with it to Versailles all its Conservative friends.”
The cocottes [‘chickens’ — prostitutes] had refound the scent of their protectors — the absconding men of family, religion, and, above all, of property. In their stead, the real women of Paris showed again at the surface — heroic, noble, and devoted, like the women of antiquity. Working, thinking fighting, bleeding Paris — almost forgetful, in its incubation of a new society, of the Cannibals at its gates — radiant in the enthusiasm of its historic initiative!
Opposed to this new world at Paris, behold the old world at Versailles — that assembly of the ghouls of all defunct regimes, Legitimists and Orleanists, eager to feed upon the carcass of the nation — with a tail of antediluvian republicans, sanctioning, by their presence in the Assembly, the slaveholders’ rebellion, relying for the maintenance of their parliamentary republic upon the vanity of the senile mountebank at its head, and caricaturing 1789 by holding their ghastly meetings in the Jeu de Paume. There it was, this Assembly, the representative of everything dead in France, propped up to the semblance of life by nothing but the swords of the generals of Louis Bonaparte. Paris all truth, Versailles all lie; and that lie vented through the mouth of Thiers.
Thiers tells a deputation of the mayors of the Seine-et-Oise — “You may rely upon my word, which I have never broken!”
He tells the Assembly itself that “it was the most freely elected and most liberal Assembly France ever possessed”; he tells his motley soldiery that it was “the admiration of the world, and the finest army France ever possessed”; he tells the provinces that the bombardment of Paris by him was a myth: “If some cannon-shots have been fired, it was not the deed of the army of Versailles, but of some insurgents trying to make believe that they are fighting, while they dare not show their faces.” He again tells the provinces that “the artillery of Versailles does not bombard Paris, but only cannonades it”. He tells the Archbishop of Paris that the pretended executions and reprisals (!) attributed to the Versailles troops were all moonshine. He tells Paris that he was only anxious “to free it from the hideous tyrants who oppress it,” and that, in fact, the Paris of the Commune was “but a handful of criminals.”
The Paris of M. Thiers was not the real Paris of the “vile multitude,” but a phantom Paris, the Paris of the francs-fileurs, the Paris of the Boulevards, male and female — the rich, the capitalist, the gilded, the idle Paris, now thronging with its lackeys, its blacklegs, its literary bonhome, and its cocottes at Versailles, Saint-Denis, Rueil, and Saint-Germain; considering the civil war but an agreeable diversion, eyeing the battle going on through telescopes, counting the rounds of cannon, swearing by their own honor and that of their prostitutes, that the performance was far better got up than it used to be at the Porte St. Martin. The men who fell were really dead; the cries of the wounded were cries in good earnest; and, besides, the whole thing was so intensely historical.
This is the Paris of M. Thiers, as the emigration of Coblenz was the France of M. de Calonne.
Karl Marx
Karl Marx was born in 1818, in the Rhenish city of Trier. Marx was the son of a successful lawyer. He studied law and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Berlin, completing his doctorate in 1841. In Paris three years later, Marx was introduced to the study of political economy by a former fellow student, Frederick Engels. In 1848 they collaborated in writing The Communist Manifesto. Expelled from Prussia in the same year, Marx took up residence first in Paris and then in London where, in 1867 he published his magnum opus Capital. A co-founder of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864, Marx died in London in 1883. At the time of his death there were, perhaps, a thousand people in the whole world who understood what he was saying and writing.
Book Illustrations Reviewed: The Borrowers – Mary Norton and Beth and Joe Krush, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016 (reprint edition of complete series, 1953, 1955, 1959, 1982)
Beth and Joe Krush were a frequent presence in American illustration from the 1940s to the 1980s. They were both born in 1918; Beth died in 2009 and, if the most current information is correct, Joe is still living in the Philadelphia suburbs. There is a moving film about him by director John Thornton, Joe Krush, An Illustrated Life. Joe actually produced courtroom sketches at the Nuremberg Trials. He and his wife Beth are responsible for creating some of the most lasting images in mid-twentieth century children’s literature, for The Borrowers, as well as Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family Downtown, Elizabeth Enright’s Gone-Away Lake, Virginia Sorenson’s Newbery winner Miracle on Maple Hill, and many more (be warned that even when classics are re-issued with the original illustrations, publishers tend to commission another artist to do a new cover). It would be impossible to do justice to the Krushes’ body of work in one post, so I am starting out “small,” with The Borrowers, and really small, with Arietty’s room.
There’s no accounting for taste in Borrowers illustrators. The original British edition of 1953 has pictures by Diana Stanley. They are reddish-brown, similar to engravings, and they approach Norton’s story in an entirely different way. Her people have less defined features but dramatic, even exaggerated, expressions of fear, surprise, or resignation. In the 50th anniversary edition, Leonard Marcus has a typically graceful and insightfully written introduction in which he compares Stanley’s illustrations with those of the Krushes. Marcus refers to the American illustrators’ pictures as more “flamboyant” and “giddily theatrical,” and they certainly are, in comparison with Stanley’s.
Maybe if I had grown up as a child in Britain, the Krushes’ pictures would seem to try too hard. It seems likely, however, that the preference for one illustrator over the others is more idiosyncratic. To me, the intensely imagined and “produced,” (there Marcus’ comparison seems apt), settings for Norton’s tales of little people navigating their way in a larger world, were made complete by the Krushes’ drawings. Full of incredible detail and able to convey both the physicality and the feelings of the Clock family and their surroundings, I became mesmerized by the series. Arietty was a school age girl who longed for independence and adventure, which in the Borrowers’ world consisted of going out expeditions with her father, Pod, to find needed items, without being “seen.” That threat was not only visual; it was existential. If big people found out about the Borrowers’ and learned where their missing blotting paper (carpet), matchboxes, (chests of drawers) and pins (knitting needles) had gone, the Borrowers’ would have to emigrate.
Arietty’s bedroom was made of two Cuban cigar boxes. I remember trying to reconstruct out of one of my father’s. Her bed was a hinged jewelry box with soft looking covers made of someone’s leftover fabric. Next to it stood a very tall pencil, which she used to write in her folded paper journal. Arietty is adventurous, but also loves to read from “those miniature volumes which the Victorians loved to print.” A postage stamp from an exotic location (no image of a British monarch) hangs on the wall, as does a safety pin/borrowing tool and small piece of glass for a mirror. Arietty’s eyes are closed and her hands lie outside the quilt. Before falling asleep, she looks up at the cigar box ceiling, where gaudy paintings of angels blowing trumpets over a Spanish colonial fortress. The curling lines and shaded areas in these black and white drawings became inseparable for me from the story itself.
Other pictures are so full of objects taking up space that they are dizzying. One shows Pod proudly standing over a pile of his findings, thumbtacks, thimbles, watch faces and a box of “Mephisto” matches thrown together in such close proximity that the viewer isn’t sure where to look first. If the illustrations seem light or frivolous, the two-page spread of the rat catchers and their dogs attacking the Borrowers through the floorboards will change your mind. The Krushes capture the sadistic joy of their conquest with pick-axes and poisoned bellows on the small family below. It’s a good thing you can go back to Arietty’s bedroom, and to the Borrowers’ survival and further adventures in the series. Sometimes less is more, but not in the fabulous illustrations of Beth and Joe Krush.
One hundred and fifty years ago today, on March 18, 1871, the working class districts of Paris rose up to prevent the French army from stealing the cannons of the Paris National Guard. This insurrection, which would lead a week later to the formation of the Paris Commune, was of world historical significance. It was the first time in history that the working class took power and formed a workers’ state.
As soldiers fraternized with Parisian workers, refusing their officers’ orders to fire, the French government of Adolphe Thiers fled in panic from Paris to Versailles. With the population of Paris armed and the Thiers government having deserted the city, power passed into the hands of the workers.
A barricade in Chaussée Ménilmontant, March 18, 1871
On March 26, elections were held to the Commune. The Commune enacted policies to reduce the monstrous levels of social inequality created by the French capitalist regime and to rally the working people of France and Europe to its side.
The savagery of the Thiers government’s response was in direct proportion to the mortal threat the financial aristocracy felt to its class rule. After preparing for two months, Thiers fielded an army to crush the Commune and drown Paris in blood. In the infamous Bloody Week of May 21-28, 1871, the Versailles army stormed Paris, using heavy artillery and indiscriminately murdering men, women and children suspected of having fought for or sympathized with the Commune.
An estimated 20,000 Parisians were summarily executed, and 40,000 more were marched to Versailles for imprisonment in France or deportation and forced labor in the penal colonies of French Guyana and New Caledonia.
The Rue de Rivoli after Bloody Week
At an enormous cost in blood, the Commune gave the international working class a priceless experience of the struggle for power. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, tirelessly worked over these lessons as they prepared the October 1917 revolution and the taking of power by the working class in Russia. Today, amid the grotesque social inequality, police state militarism and debauched financial speculation of contemporary capitalism, these lessons are more relevant than ever.
The lessons were drawn, above all, by Karl Marx. His addresses to the world proletariat, written for the International Workingmen’s Association as the Commune unfolded, defended the Commune which he praised for “storming heaven.” Published across Europe and gathered in The Civil War in France, they won Marx the lasting support of workers in France and internationally.
The class struggle in France and the materialist conception of history
The analysis of the Commune by Marx and his great co-thinker, Friedrich Engels, was the product of three decades of theoretical anticipation bound up with the elaboration of the materialist conception of history. In 1844, Marx pointed to the leading role of proletarian revolution in the emancipation of humanity, writing: “The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat.” The 1847 Communist Manifesto written by Marx and Engels began with the famous statement:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another. … Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other—Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
The Communist Manifesto was published on the eve of the first great social eruption of 19th century Europe: the 1848 revolution, which spread across Germany, Austria, France and beyond. Insurrection in Paris that year toppled the last in the line of kings restored to power by France’s defeat in the Napoleonic Wars after the French Revolution. For the first time since the 18th century and the 1789 French Revolution, the Republic was again declared in France.
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
A Marxist analysis alone explained why the 1848 revolution unfolded so differently from its great 18th century predecessor. The Jacobins who came to power after the 1789 revolution—as they expropriated feudal property, abolished the absolute monarchy and founded the First Republic—based themselves on the independent artisans, the sans-culottes. The liberal bourgeoisie that took power in the Second Republic in 1848 came into mortal conflict with the new industrial proletariat.
When in June 1848 the Second Republic shut down the National Workshops built to give jobs to the unemployed, the Paris workers revolted against a policy that meant poverty and starvation. General Eugène Cavaignac led the army and security forces in the bloody repression of the June Days, killing over 3,000 workers, arresting 25,000 and condemning 11,000 to prison or deportation. The Second Republic became so discredited that in 1851 Napoleon’s nephew, Louis Bonaparte, was able to take power in a coup—founding the Second Empire and taking the name Napoleon III.
Marx, who wrote works of genius analyzing the revolutions of 1848-1851 as they unfolded, drew the key conclusion of this great struggle. In a letter to Louis Kugelmann, Marx wrote:
If you look at the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire [of Louis Bonaparte], you will find that I say that the next attempt of the French revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it, and this is essential for every real people’s revolution on the Continent.
The Paris Commune and the Bloody Week
The Commune, the next great revolutionary attempt in France, arose out of the war Napoleon III launched in July 1870 against Prussia. This war was a criminal adventure, aimed at maintaining French imperialism’s world position by blocking Prussia’s moves to unify Germany, while suppressing mounting class struggles at home. Indeed, just six months earlier, in January 1870, after Prince Pierre Bonaparte shot and killed left-wing journalist Victor Noir, a protest by over 100,000 people at Noir’s funeral turned into an attempted insurrection in Paris.
The Franco-Prussian war brought down the Second Empire. Outnumbered, outclassed in artillery and logistics and led by an incompetent, the French army suffered a humiliating defeat. Napoleon III was captured on September 2 at Sedan, and the Prussian army occupied northern France. On September 4, amid mass protests in Paris, the Third Republic was proclaimed. A Government of National Defense was formed, led by liberals and Bonapartist bourgeois figures like Thiers, Jules Favre and General Louis-Jules Trochu. On September 17, the Prussian army laid siege to Paris.
Adolphe Thiers (photograph by Nadar)
The bourgeoisie yet again proved hostile both to democracy and the defense of the people. On October 28, the commander of French armies in the east, General François-Achille Bazaine, surrendered his troops to a smaller Prussian army after a brief siege at Metz. Bazaine, whose hatred of republicanism and democratic principles was well known, was widely accused of treason. The situation in Paris, the besieged capital of the new Republic, grew increasingly desperate.
The population of Paris, armed and formed into National Guard units, held out amid widespread starvation until a ceasefire was signed on January 26, 1871. Victor Hugo, the celebrated novelist and author of Les Misérables, who had returned to Paris when the Republic was formed and who had lived through the siege, gave voice to widespread anger at the ruling elite when he wrote: “Paris was the victim of its defenders as much as of its attackers.”
Class conflict proved far more powerful and fundamental than national conflict between the French and German bourgeoisies. Thiers, as he negotiated an armistice with Prussia, was like Bazaine mainly focused on averting revolution. As for the Prussian army, apart from a brief, three-day occupation of Champs-Elysées Avenue, it studiously kept outside the Paris city limits, avoiding in particular the densely populated, armed working class districts of eastern Paris. The French and Prussian ruling classes were both desperate, above all, to disarm the Parisian workers.
The March 18, 1871 uprising was the spontaneous response of the Parisian working class to Thiers’ first attempt to disarm it by seizing the National Guard’s cannons. The workers fraternized with the soldiers. Two generals who had unsuccessfully ordered soldiers to fire on the workers—Clément Thomas and Claude Lecomte, who had helped lead the repression in June 1848—were arrested and shot. That same day, Thiers fled Paris to Versailles.
Cannons transported by the Communards to Montmartre hill in Paris after the army tried to seize them on March 18, 1871.
Elections to the Commune and the Central Committee of the National Guard were held by district and gave an overwhelming majority to working class areas. These bodies emerged as organs of workers’ power. Members of the Commune and the National Guard Central Committee, who were elected by wealthy western districts, did not bother to attend meetings of either body. In The Civil War in France, Marx explained the nature of the new workers’ state:
The Commune was formed of the municipal councilors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at any time. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. … The police, which until then had been the instrument of the Government, was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workmen’s wages. The privileges and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves.
While surrounded by French and Prussian armies, the Commune advanced socialist and democratic policies. It fixed a minimum wage, set up municipal canteens for the workers and gave vacant apartments to poor families. It granted debt forgiveness to small businesses and renters bankrupted by the siege, at the banks’ and landlords’ expense, and let workers take back valuables from pawnshops. It guaranteed freedom of the press, established civil partnerships, secularized education, and advocated that men and women receive equal pay for equal work.
The Commune made no distinctions of nationality and stood openly for the international unity of the working class. As Marx wrote:
The Commune admitted all foreigners to the honor of dying for an immortal cause. Between the foreign war lost by their treason, and the civil war fomented by the conspiracy with the foreign invader, the bourgeoisie had found the time to display their patriotism by organizing police hunts upon the Germans in France. The Commune made a German working man [Leo Frankel] its Minister of Labor. … The Commune honored the heroic sons of Poland [Generals J. Dabrowski and W. Wróblewski] by placing them at the head of the defenders of Paris.
Communards pose with the statue of Napoleon toppled from the Vendôme Column
A cataclysmic conflict emerged between the proletarian Commune, fighting for equality, and the Third Republic, defending capitalist privilege. Thiers, negotiating with Prussia, worked feverishly to free enough captured French soldiers to form an army, recruited mainly from the rural areas, to crush the Commune. This force, given double rations of alcohol and reinforced by youth from wealthy families who had fled Paris to Versailles, was finally ready to launch its assault in May.
After seizing a poorly defended part of the city wall on May 21, the Versailles army massacred the Commune in the course of a week of horrific slaughter. Bombarding Paris with heavy artillery, it moved eastwards into the working class districts, smashing barricades the Communards set up in streets across Paris. Thiers himself left no doubt about the policy of the Third Republic, publicly declaring in a May 24 speech to the National Assembly, “I shed torrents of blood.”
Communard fighters were shot as they were captured, or, if there were too many, sent elsewhere for execution. Streets ran red with blood around open air spaces used for mass killings, including well-known tourist destinations like the Monceau and Luxembourg Gardens, Italy Square, the Military School and the Père Lachaise Cemetery. Firing squads or machine guns worked round the clock. Some prisoners were forced to dig their own graves and then shot. Others, male and female, were shot or bayoneted, stripped naked and dumped in the streets to terrorize the public.
Shooting of Communards, 1871
A murderous frenzy seized the wealthy. Le Figaro wrote: “Never has such an opportunity presented itself to cure Paris of the moral gangrene which has eaten away at it for the last 20 years. … Let’s go, good people! Help us finish with the democratic and socialist vermin.”
For the financial aristocracy, it was open season on the workers. As wild rumors circulated in the press that female Communards were setting fire to houses with petrol, any working class woman found with oil was in danger. Women trying to cremate dead husbands, or caught after purchasing olive oil for cooking, were murdered. Well-to-do crowds beat Communards held by the army before they were shot or gave money to soldiers who boasted of killing Communard women and children. In his 2014 book on the Paris Commune, Massacre, historian John Merriman wrote:
People were disrobed and their shoulders checked for marks left by a recoiling rifle. If any were found, the bearers were immediately shot. Men who looked “ragged,” were poorly dressed, and could not instantaneously justify their time or did not work in a “proper” trade had little chance of surviving the brief audience before a prevotal court.
After 20,000 Parisians had been shot at the whim of the French army, another 40,000 were marched to Versailles, without food or water, for judgment. On the way, officers and guards shot stragglers or other prisoners at will. Around 11,000 were deported to forced labor camps.
Communards murdered during Bloody Week, taken by André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri in May 1871
Looking back on the Bloody Week in his diary, the well-known literary critic Edmond de Goncourt laid out the murderous calculations of the ruling elite, writing on May 31, 1871:
It is good that there was neither conciliation nor bargain. The solution was brutal. It was achieved by pure force. … The solution has restored confidence to the army, which learned in the blood of the Communards that it was still able to fight; such a purge, by killing off the combative part of the population, defers the next revolution by a whole generation. The old regime now has 20 years of peace and quiet ahead of it, if the state continues to dare everything it dares to do now.
This devastating experience was worked over most profoundly by the great Marxists from the standpoint of the interests of the working class. It was an unforgettable lesson in the horrific consequences of defeat in revolution. It demonstrated the ferocity of the bourgeoisie’s response to any threat to its rule—against which it is willing to destroy cities, entire countries or even the world. The necessity for the working class to suppress the counterrevolutionary violence of the privileged minority required ruthlessly determined action to take and hold state power.
The Paris Commune in history
The central question the Commune poses to the working class in every country is the building of its revolutionary leadership. Writing a century ago, as he led the struggle of the young Soviet republic against imperialist intervention in the Russian Civil War, Trotsky noted that one can “thumb the whole history of the Commune, page by page, and we will find in it one single lesson: a strong party leadership is needed.” Trotsky posed the alternative of what would have happened if the working class, not the Third Republic, had taken power when Napoleon III fell:
If the centralized party of revolutionary action had been found at the head of the proletariat in France in September 1870, the whole history of France and with it the whole history of humanity would have taken another direction. If power was found in the hands of the proletariat of Paris on March 18, it was not because it had been deliberately seized, but because its enemies had quitted Paris. … But it understood this fact only on the morrow. The revolution fell upon it unexpectedly.
Leon Trotsky (1879-1940)
The Commune provided the crucial experience on which the Marxist movement elaborated the political and theoretical foundation of a firm revolutionary leadership.
This found its highest expression in the thorough reworking of the experience of the Commune by the Bolshevik Party as it prepared the seizure of power in October 1917. In The State and Revolution, Lenin masterfully reviewed the writings of Marx and Engels on the issue of the state and the brief experience of workers’ power provided by the Paris Commune.
Marx and Engels, Lenin explained, had concluded that the state is not a tool to reconcile the classes but the product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. They examined both anthropological data on primitive societies where no state exists and the conflict between the capitalist state and the armed population of Paris in 1871. The state, Engels wrote, establishes “a public power which no longer directly coincides with the population organizing itself as an armed force.” He continued:
This special, public power is necessary because a self-acting armed organization of the population has become impossible since the split into classes. … This public power exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men, but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds. … It grows stronger, however, in proportion as class antagonisms within the state become more acute.
The experience of the Paris Commune and this analysis of the state by the great Marxists had far-reaching implications. A reformist perspective, which hoped to use the capitalist state to lessen class antagonisms and provide lasting peace and prosperity, was false and hopelessly utopian. So was an anarchist perspective that called for the immediate dissolution of all forms of state power—thus opposing the formation of a workers’ state in opposition to the counterrevolutionary violence of the ruling class.
Lenin stressed Marx’s conclusion that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” Instead, the working class had to build its own state, as the Parisian workers did in 1871. This meant, first of all, building a party to saturate the working class with political and historical consciousness and the need for a revolutionary policy.
This perspective underlay the October 1917 revolution and the transfer of state power, led by the Bolshevik Party, from the Tsarist autocracy to the organs of workers’ power, the Soviets. Writing amid the carnage of World War I as he rallied the Bolshevik Party to the struggle for power, Lenin insisted that the fight to establish a workers’ state had to be a world policy. Addressing Marx’s remark that the working class had to smash “the bureaucratic-military machine” in order to carry out a genuine revolution on the European continent, Lenin wrote:
Today, in 1917, at the time of the first great imperialist war, this restriction [to the European continent] made by Marx is no longer valid. Both Britain and America, the biggest and the last representatives—in the whole world—of Anglo-Saxon “liberty,” in the sense that they had no militarist cliques and bureaucracy, have completely sunk into the all-European filthy, bloody morass of bureaucratic-military institutions which subordinate everything to themselves, and suppress everything.
Lenin (1870-1924)
In the 150 years since the Paris Commune, there has been no shortage of opportunities for the working class to take power as it did in October 1917. In May 1968, a general strike by over 10 million workers in France defeated the riot police and brought the de Gaulle government to its knees, showing that the working class had lost none of its revolutionary capacities. More recently, in 2011, a revolutionary mobilization and general strike of the Egyptian working class brought down the military dictator and stooge of imperialism, President Hosni Mubarak.
The critical questions of political perspective and leadership raised by the Paris Commune remain, however. In 1968, the French Communist Party prevented revolution. As a Stalinist party, it rejected the internationalist perspective of the October Revolution, agreeing to an accommodation with imperialism justified by Stalin’s nationalist perspective of “socialism in one country” in the Soviet Union. On this basis, during May 1968, it tied the working class, through the Grenelle Accords, to the French capitalist state.
The questions of revolutionary leadership and workers’ power are posed with particular acuteness by the endless imperialist wars, social austerity and enrichment of the financial aristocracy in the decades since the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the capitalist system. Hundreds of thousands have been allowed to die, even in the world’s wealthiest countries, based on claims that there is no money for social distancing and other measures to contain the virus, while trillions of dollars and euros have been handed out in bank bailouts to the rich. The bourgeois parasites of today have proved no less ruthless than those of the French Second Empire, only more decrepit.
Recent years have, on the other hand, seen an explosion of class struggle on every continent. In a recent report surveying the global explosion of social protest now underway, the US imperialist think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote:
We are living in an age of global mass protests that are historically unprecedented in frequency, scope, and size. … [They] are in fact part of a decade-long trend line affecting every major populated region of the world, the frequency of which has increased by an annual average of 11.5 percent between 2009 and 2019. The size and frequency of recent protests eclipse historical examples of eras of mass protest, such as the late-1960s, late-1980s, and early-1990s.
Indian farmers block a major highway to mark 100 days of the ongoing protests near New Delhi, India, Saturday, March 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)
The social problems driving the international resurgence of class struggle cannot be solved without a socialist struggle of the working class for power, raising afresh all the issues posed by the experience of the Paris Commune. The COVID-19 pandemic is but one especially devastating reminder that capitalism is dominated by a financial aristocracy utterly impervious to calls for reform. The alternative posed today, as it was to the French workers in 1871, is not reform or revolution, but socialist revolution or capitalist counterrevolution.
The living standards, health and very lives of humanity depend on the struggle to transfer state power to the working class in every country. Against the dictatorship of the banks, the workers, who produce the wealth of humanity, must take control of their own fate, and to do this they need an international revolutionary leadership.
There will no doubt be those who oppose and reject the workers’ struggle for power as an attempt to install the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” It has become commonplace to falsely associate this term with the crimes of the Stalinist regime, which, in fact, dissolved the Soviet Union and restored capitalist rule 30 years ago, in 1991. To these opponents of the struggle for workers’ power, one can reply, with Engels:
Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Dozens of demonstrators gathered outside Johnston Gate Saturday afternoon in a protest organized by the Korean American Society of Massachusetts against Harvard Law professor J. Mark Ramseyer and his recent controversial paper on comfort women. By Santiago A. SaldivarBy Ariel H. Kim and Simon J. Levien, Crimson Staff WritersMarch 8, 2021
Dozens of demonstrators gathered outside Johnston Gate Saturday afternoon in a protest organized by the Korean American Society of Massachusetts against Harvard Law professor J. Mark Ramseyer, calling for him to apologize for his recent controversial paper on “comfort women” and for the publishing journal to retract the article.
Ramseyer’s paper “Contracting for sex in the Pacific War,” which will be published in the International Review of Law and Economics, stoked international controversy last month by claiming that sex slaves under the Imperial Japanese military, known as “comfort women,” were voluntarily employed. Many of the comfort women were from Korea, and Ramseyer has faced significant backlash in South Korea since the paper was widely publicized in late January.
In front of Johnston Gate, the main entrance to Harvard Yard, members of the organization handed out South Korean flags and posters, in addition to collecting signatures for a white paper condemning Ramseyer’s article. Protest organizer Do Kim said more than 100 protesters attended the event.
In the white paper, the demonstrators demanded an apology from Ramseyer “for distorting historical facts”; for Harvard to hold Ramseyer accountable for “failing to meet research integrity”; for the IRLE to retract the article in question; and for the Japanese government to acknowledge and apologize for its “past atrocity.”
The protesters also chanted for Ramseyer’s removal from the Law School, repeating “Dismiss Ramseyer!” and “Ramseyer out!” The group also repeatedly sang “Arirang,” a folk song considered to be the anthem of Korea.The protesters chanted for Ramseyer’s removal from the Law School and repeatedly sang Arirang, a folk song considered to be the anthem of Korea. By Santiago A. Saldivar
Seo Yong Ae, president of the Korean American Society of Massachusetts, gave a brief, impassioned speech in Korean during the protest, proclaiming the comfort system “clearly and apparently a war crime, sex slavery, and child abuse.”
Former Suffolk County assistant district attorney Linda Champion, who attended the protest, said the Ramseyer’s paper struck a chord among Koreans.
“It just hit a nerve with so many people that it was important for them to come out to express to Harvard University it was not okay for someone to bear a name as prestigious as Harvard and to write propaganda,” Champion said.ADVERTISEMENT
Ohio State University student Madison Ryan said she flew out from Columbus, Ohio, to attend Saturday’s protest. Ryan said she is a member of OSU’s chapter of WeHope, a Boston-based student organization aimed at raising awareness about the comfort women issue.
“We’re fundraising to build a statue here in Boston,” Ryan said, referring to a proposed comfort women memorial. “In order to get that statue erected, we need to prove that this is something that people here do care about.”
June Kim, a sophomore at Boston University, said she attended the protest with her parents to show support for the rights and history of comfort women.
“They need to be heard. Their story needs to be recorded, and it can’t be changed,” Kim said.Protest organizer Do Kim said more than 100 protesters attended the event. By Santiago A. Saldivar
After the protest concluded, organizer Gil Lee said he was disappointed that not many Harvard students attended, adding that many students at the University have been silent on this issue.
“If Harvard students [show up], a lot of others will take more interest,” Lee said. “Especially with the Ramseyer case, a lot of questions we get is, ‘What do Harvard students think?’”
Lee added that his organization hopes to work with WeHope to build a comfort women memorial “right in front of Harvard.”
“I don’t know whether that’s going to work,” he acknowledged.
The protest drew attendees from several states and Korean American groups. Several protests have sprung up across cities in South Korea, but the protest at Harvard is the largest demonstration on the controversy in the United States to date.
On Feb. 17, the Federation of Korean American Associations of the North East held the first major protest in the U.S. in New Jersey with representatives of six states’ Korean American associations, FKAANE president Judy Yoo said in an interview Thursday.
Scholars and activists worldwide have also put together virtual petitions in place of in-person protest, in light of the current pandemic.
(In Dutch Colonies In South East Asia Christian Missionary Women Were Forced Into Sex Slavery By Japanese Forces)
A late February petition by “concerned economists” organized by University of California, Los Angeles political science professor Michael Chwe has garnered more than 3,200 signatures to date, including Nobel laureates, Harvard affiliates, economists, historians, and others.
The letter calls for the journal to retract Ramseyer’s article and “take all necessary corrective measures” to address any factual concerns that have been raised. Though defending academic freedom, the authors of the letter wrote that Ramseyer’s article — which draws on game theory — must acknowledge the “truth of the embedded historical claims that form its empirical basis.”
Yuji Hosaka, professor of political science at Sejong University in Seoul, also penned a letter March 1 pointing out Ramseyer’s “critically erroneous statement.” The letter was signed by 36 individuals, including comfort woman survivor Lee Ok-seon, two members of the National Assembly of Korea, and human rights lawyers.
Hosaka addressed his statement to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow, the IRLE editor Eric A. Helland, and the Speaker of the National Assembly of Korea Park Byeong-seug. He said in an interview with The Crimson conducted in Korean that only the IRLE and the National Assembly of Korea have confirmed their receipt of his letter.
Ramseyer did not respond immediately to a request for comment on the protest. University spokesperson Jonathan L. Swain and Law School spokesperson Jeff Neal declined to comment Sunday.
Andrew Davis, spokesperson for the journal’s publisher Elsevier, wrote in an email Thursday he cannot comment on the journal’s ongoing investigation into the article. The journal delayed print production of the issue, but publication of Ramseyer’s article is still considered final.
—Staff writer Ariel H. Kim can be reached at ariel.kim@thecrimson.com.
—Staff writer Simon J. Levien can be reached at simon.levien@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @simonjlevien.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — A Harvard University professor has ignited an international uproar and faces mounting scrutiny for alleging that Korean women who were kept as sex slaves in wartime Japan had actually chosen to work as prostitutes.
In a recent academic paper, J. Mark Ramseyer rejected a wide body of research finding that Japan’s so-called “comfort women” were forced to work at military brothels during World War II. Ramseyer instead argued that the women willingly entered into contracts as sex workers.
His paper has intensified a political dispute between Japan, whose leaders deny that the women were coerced, and South Korea, which has long pressed Japan to provide apologies and compensation to women who have shared accounts of rape and abuse.
Decades of research has explored the abuses inflicted on comfort women from Korea and other nations previously occupied by Japan. In the 1990s, women began sharing accounts detailing how they were taken to comfort stations and forced to provide sexual services for the Japanese military.
Hundreds of scholars have signed letters condemning Ramseyer’s article, which united North and South Korea in sparking outrage. Last Tuesday, North Korea’s state-run DPRK Today published an article calling Ramseyer a “repulsive money grubber” and a “pseudo scholar.”
Ramseyer, a professor of Japanese legal studies at Harvard Law School, declined to comment.
Ramseyer’s article, titled “Contracting for sex in the Pacific War,” was published online in December and was scheduled to appear in the March issue of the International Review of Law and Economics. The issue has been suspended, however, and the journal issued an “expression of concern” saying the piece is under investigation.
Most alarming to historians is what they say is a lack of evidence in the paper: Scholars at Harvard and other institutions have combed though Ramseyer’s sources and say there is no historical evidence of the contracts he describes.
In a statement calling for the article to be retracted, Harvard historians Andrew Gordon and Carter Eckert said Ramseyer “has not consulted a single actual contract” dealing with comfort women.
“We do not see how Ramseyer can make credible claims, in extremely emphatic wording, about contracts he has not read,” they wrote.
Alexis Dudden, a historian of modern Japan and Korea at the University of Connecticut, called the article a “total fabrication” that disregards decades of research. Although some have invoked academic freedom to defend Ramseyer, Dudden counters that the article “does not meet the requirements of academic integrity.”
“These are assertions out of thin air,” she said. “It’s very clear from his writing and his sources that he has never seen a contract.”
More than 1,000 economists have signed a separate letter condemning the article, saying it misuses economic theory “as a cover to legitimize horrific atrocities.” A separate group of historians of Japan issued a 30-page article explaining why the article should be retracted “on grounds of academic misconduct.”
At Harvard, hundreds of students signed a petition demanding an apology from Ramseyer and a university response to the complaints against him. Harvard Law School declined to comment.
A United Nations report from 1996 concluded that the comfort women were sex slaves taken through “violence and outright coercion.” A statement from Japan in 1993 acknowledged that women were taken “against their own will,” although the nation’s leaders later denied it.
Tensions flared again in January when a South Korean court ruled that the Japanese government must give 100 million won ($90,000) to each of 12 women who sued in 2013 over their wartime sufferings. Japan insists all wartime compensation issues were settled under a 1965 treaty normalizing relations with South Korea.
In South Korea, activists have denounced Ramseyer and called for his resignation from Harvard. Chung Young-ai, South Korea’s minister of gender equality and family, expressed dismay over the article last week.
“There is an attempt to distort (the facts about) the Japanese military’s ‘comfort women’ issue and tarnish the honors and dignity of victims,” Chung said, according to comments provided by her ministry.
Lee Yong-soo, a 92-year-old South Korean and survivor, described Ramseyer’s assertion as “ludicrous” and demanded he apologize.
An influential activist, Lee is campaigning for South Korea and Japan to settle their decadeslong impasse by seeking judgment from the International Court of Justice.
When asked about Ramseyer last Wednesday, Lee said: “That professor should be dragged to (the ICJ) too.”
The controversy, amplified by its source at an Ivy League university, has yielded new scrutiny of Ramseyer’s other work.
In response to new concerns raised by scholars, The European Journal of Law and Economics added an editor’s note saying it’s investigating a recent piece by Ramseyer — this one studying Koreans living in early 20th century Japan. Cambridge University Press said a forthcoming book chapter by Ramseyer is “being revised by the author after consultation between the author and the editors of the book.”
Ramseyer repeated his claims about comfort women in a submission to a Japanese news site in January. In it, he alleged the women entered into contracts similar to those used under a separate, licensed system of prostitution in Japan. He rejected accounts of forced labor as “pure fiction,” saying the Japanese army “did not dragoon Korean women to work in its brothels.”
“Expressing sympathy to elderly women who have had a rough life is fine,” he wrote. “Paying money to an ally in order to rebuild a stable relationship is fine. But the claims about enslaved Korean comfort women are historically untrue.”
Opponents counter that many of the women were so young they would have been unable to consent to sex even if there was evidence of contracts.
“We’re really talking about 15-year-olds,” said Dudden, at the University of Connecticut. “This article further victimizes the very few number of survivors by asserting claims that even the author knows cannot be substantiated.”
Associated Press writers Hyung-jin Kim and Kim Tong-hyung contributed from Seoul.
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I got this set as a present one Christmas. As I found the images online and looked for more I found someone who seems to have recast the set as a labor of love from a childhood use of this toy soldier set.
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This picture shows the detail of the brickwork.
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Students in Seoul protested an article by J. Mark Ramseyer, who argued that Korean women taken by Japan during the Second World War had chosen to be prostitutes.Photograph by Chris Jung / NurPhoto / Shutterstock
In January, I was outlining an article I hoped to write about a recent judgment by a South Korean court ordering Japan to pay compensation for atrocities committed during the Second World War against “comfort women,” women and girls who were transported to war-front “comfort stations” to provide sexual services to soldiers in the Imperial Japanese Army. The women were taken by force or entrapped by deception in many countries in and beyond Asia, but a large number came from Korea, which, at the time, was a colony of Japan. Estimates of the number of victims have ranged widely, from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. On January 23rd, Japan announced that the Korean court’s judgment, which ordered a compensation of ninety-one thousand and eight hundred dollars to be paid to each of the twelve Korean comfort women who were plaintiffs in the case (seven of whom had died since it was filed, in 2013), was “extremely regrettable and absolutely unacceptable.” Japan said that it was not subject to Korea’s jurisdiction and considered the matter to have been previously settled. I was ruminating on how legal decisions relating to Second World War crimes against humanity might help resolve or aggravate historical traumas that seem impossible to leave in the past—in part, because they have been mired in waves of conflict and denial about the truth of what happened.
On January 31st, I began to receive messages from students and alumni of Harvard Law School, where I am a professor, about a longtime colleague of mine, J. Mark Ramseyer, a corporate-law specialist in Japanese legal studies. I knew him slightly, as an unassuming man in his late sixties who had ridden bikes with my husband and once advised us on what Japanese knives to buy. A child and grandchild of American Mennonite missionaries in Asia, he grew up in Japan. I knew that his scholarly contributions had included debunking conventional wisdom about the postwar Japanese economy.
The students and alumni wrote to tell me that Ramseyer had become front-page news in South Korea, owing to two recent articles he had written that challenged the historical consensus on comfort women. Ramseyer had made his views clear in “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War,” an article published online, in December, by the peer-reviewed journal International Review of Law and Economics (and forthcoming in print, this March), and in an op-ed published on January 12th in Japan Forward, an English-language Web site of Sankei Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper known for its conservative-nationalist bent. Read together, their message was unmistakable: the comfort-women system was not one in which Korean women were forced, coerced, and deceived into sexual servitude and confined under threat of violence. Ramseyer called that account “pure fiction.” Instead, he claimed that Korean comfort women “chose prostitution” and entered “multi-year indenture” agreements with entrepreneurs to work at war-front “brothels” in China and Southeast Asia. Purporting to use game theory, he said that the economic structure of the contracts reflected that the sex work was voluntarily chosen. “Prostitutes have followed armies everywhere, and they followed the Japanese army in Asia,” he wrote.
The news of Ramseyer’s article had been reported favorably in Japan, and then made its way to Korea and across the globe. It was a controversy that was not merely academic but that could potentially affect the troubled diplomatic relations between Japan and Korea, and also the delicate role played by the United States as their mutual ally. In the U.S., two members of Congress tweeted that Ramseyer’s claims were “disgusting,” and the State Department affirmed that “the trafficking of women for sexual purposes by the Japanese military during World War II was an egregious violation of human rights.” I understood that messages about Ramseyer were being sent to me, specifically, because I was the first Asian-American woman, and the first and only ethnic Korean, to receive tenure at Harvard Law School. I was born in Seoul, and my parents were refugees from their ancestral home, in North Korea, during the Korean War. At least one alumnus wrote to say that, because of my position, ethnicity, feminism, and writing on matters of justice, my silence was “complicity.”
After I spent time digesting my colleague’s reasoning, I spoke with him to say that we were about to have a public disagreement, but that I would not be joining or encouraging any possible calls for institutional penalty for his exercise of academic freedom to engage in scholarship or express his opinion. I posted a brief critique of Ramseyer’s arguments on social media, explaining that contract analysis assumes voluntary bargaining by free agents, and that when sex is mandatory, without the option to refuse or walk away, it cannot fairly be described as contractual. I was confident that he would not have described it as such if he believed comfort women’s accounts of having been conscripted and confined by force, threats, deception, and coercion. It seemed to me that his view reflected a prior choice not to credit those accounts because he deemed them inconsistent, or, as he wrote, “self-interested” and “uncorroborated.” I noticed, however, that he did choose to credit Japanese government denials, even where they contradicted other statements by the government. Trying to read my colleague’s work most generously, I thought his views might be a product of a skepticism of generally accepted wisdom that had informed his academic career. I approached the matter in the vein of criticism and disagreement over facts, logic, and interpretation, regarding a subject that triggered strong emotions around nationalism and human rights. I expected that scholars, by delving into Ramseyer’s research, would be able to further assess the accuracy of his claims; I could not have imagined how straightforward and yet how mystifying that work would prove to be.
Despite how easy it may be to reduce the issue to a conflict between Korea and Japan, victim and perpetrator, or women and men, historians have carefully explored the features and meanings of the comfort-women system, which involved several hundred comfort stations in war-torn Asia, individuals of many nationalities, and myriad experiences. Scholars have debated the precise role that the Japanese military played, along with private recruiters, in procuring the women. In South Korea, reckoning with the role of native recruiters in entrapping fellow-Koreans, and with impoverished families in allowing their girls to be taken, has been difficult, to say the least. There have been debates about whether the phrase “sex slavery,” given its common associations with chattel slavery, best captures the non-chattel situation of abuse and rape in brutal confinement. Over decades, historians have determined that there was a range of force or coercion used against comfort women, but that violence and threats were endemic. By contrast, Ramseyer’s statements seemed intent on flattening the complexity down to a plain denial: Korean comfort women went to the war front as voluntary prostitutes.
The end of Japanese colonialism in Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, and the Western Pacific, following the Empire’s surrender to the U.S. at the conclusion of the Second World War, began seven decades of recrimination, apology, and denial over Japan’s wartime atrocities. Japan recognized Korea’s independence in a peace treaty with the Allied Powers, signed in San Francisco, in 1951. In 1965, a treaty between South Korea and Japan normalized their relations, and the countries agreed that “the problems concerning property, rights, and interests” of each “have been settled completely and finally,” and that “no claims shall be made with respect to the measures relating” to them. The comfort women were not specifically mentioned, which led to later conflict about whether their claims had indeed been settled.
For decades, the issue of comfort women was not widely discussed in Korea, the society of which stigmatized and ostracized sexual-assault victims. But, by the early nineties, the survivors had begun to share their experiences publicly. In 1993, Japan issued the watershed Kono Statement, which admitted the Japanese military’s involvement in the comfort stations and in recruiting women “against their own will,” and said that “they lived in misery at comfort stations under a coercive atmosphere.” Japan extended “sincere apologies and remorse,” and promised to “face squarely the historical facts” with “firm determination never to repeat the same mistake by forever engraving such issues in our memories through the study and teaching of history.” But after Prime Minister Shinzō Abe took office, in 2006, Japan appeared to back away from the Kono Statement’s apologetic stance. Under Abe, the environment in Japan became “inhospitable to objective historical inquiry” on the subject of comfort women, as Alexis Dudden, a historian of modern Japan and Korea at the University of Connecticut, put it. A key example was an attempt by the Japanese Foreign Ministry, in 2014, to pressure McGraw Hill to erase several paragraphs on comfort women from one of its world-history textbooks; the publisher refused, citing scholars’ work in establishing historical facts. Abe lamented the outcome, saying, “This kind of textbook is being used in the United States, as we did not protest the things we should have, or we failed to correct the things we should have.”
In 2015, twenty historians in the U.S. (including my New Yorker colleague Jelani Cobb) published a letter in the magazine of the American Historical Association expressing “dismay at recent attempts by the Japanese government to suppress statements in history textbooks” about comfort women. They compared Japan’s efforts to erase Second World War atrocities to American education boards’ efforts to “rewrite school textbooks to obscure accounts of African American slavery.” One of the signatories was Andrew Gordon, a historian of modern Japan at Harvard University. Later that year, Gordon and Dudden were among the organizers of a separate letter about comfort women, which was eventually signed by hundreds of scholars of Japanese studies at universities on several continents. Referring to the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, the scholars wrote that “the evidence makes clear that large numbers of women were held against their will and subjected to horrific brutality,” and that “only careful weighing and contextual evaluation of every trace of the past can produce a just history.” The scholars defended “the freedom of historical inquiry” and called upon governments to do the same.
Meanwhile, in South Korea, resentment about Japan’s attempts to downplay its responsibility had been building, sometimes hardening into intolerance of anything short of a purist story of the Japanese military kidnapping Korean virgins for sex slavery at gunpoint. In 2015, a Korean academic named Park Yu-ha was sued civilly by comfort women for defamation, and criminally indicted by Korean prosecutors, for the publication of a book that explored the role of Koreans in recruiting the women and the loving relationships that some comfort women developed with Japanese soldiers while they were confined in a “slavelike condition.” The book did not, as some have claimed, absolve Japan of responsibility or deny the comfort women’s brutal victimization. Gordon, the Harvard historian of modern Japan, signed onto a letter with sixty-six other scholars, in Japan and the U.S., expressing “great consternation and concern” at the South Korean government’s indictment of Park, and conveying appreciation for her book’s scholarly achievement. Park was ultimately found civilly liable, and was ordered to pay damages to comfort women; she was acquitted of the criminal defamation charges, with the trial court citing her academic freedom, but an appellate court overturned that verdict and fined her.VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKERA Daughter and Her Mother Reconnect Over Chinese Dumplings
In 2015, Japan and Korea reached a new agreement, with the encouragement of the Obama Administration, in which Prime Minister Abe expressed “his most sincere apologies and remorse” to the comfort women. Japan contributed $8.3 million to a Korean fund to compensate comfort women, and the two governments promised to “refrain from accusing or criticizing each other regarding this issue in the international community.” Both sides said that the comfort-women issue was “resolved finally and irreversibly.” But the Korean comfort women maintain that their government made this deal without consulting them, in a betrayal by Park Geun-hye, the country’s first female President, who likely wished to obtain Japan’s apology and compensation before the remaining survivors died. The deal was further delegitimized in South Korea when President Park was removed from office, in 2017, and the new President, Moon Jae-in, said that his predecessor’s agreement “cannot solve the comfort women issue.” Meanwhile, Japan has furiously objected to the installation of comfort-women statues around the world: it filed a brief in a U.S. lawsuit that unsuccessfully sought the removal of a memorial in a Los Angeles suburb, and terminated Osaka’s sister-city relationship with San Francisco after a monument was installed there. Japan’s rhetoric has escalated since the Korean court’s decision ordering it to apologize and pay compensation. This month, new language appeared on the Web site of Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, omitting mention of the Kono Statement and decrying “claims that can hardly be said to be based on historical facts, such as the allegations of ‘forceful taking away’ of comfort women and ‘sex slaves.’ ”
The politics of Japan and South Korea’s dispute are difficult to unravel, but the question of how Ramseyer had come to his conclusion about Korean comfort women turned out to be a separate confounding matter. Early this month, Andrew Gordon and Carter Eckert, another Harvard historian, were among the academics who were invited to write a response to Ramseyer in International Review of Law and Economics, the journal that had published his article. (I, too, was invited.) Eckert and Gordon decided to work on a response together. Reviewing Ramseyer’s footnotes, they found that there were no contracts involving Korean women at wartime comfort stations cited, nor secondary sources detailing those contracts, nor even any third-party accounts that confirm the relevant terms. When they examined the one cited source that seemed as if it might lead to data about relevant contracts, from 1938, they found that it provided sample contracts for employment of a Japanese woman as a “barmaid”—“shakufu” in Japanese, a job understood to involve sex work. To know the meaning of a labor contract, one must know the nature of the labor, the pay, and the duration. But, from what Eckert and Gordon could tell from their tracking of Ramseyer’s sources, none led to information about the terms of the contracts, written or oral, with Korean women.
Eckert and Gordon did not think it was reasonable to infer, from sample prewar or wartime prostitution contracts for Japanese women, that Korean women entered similarly termed or structured contracts for sex work serving the Japanese military at the front. The historians also noted that, even assuming Korean women or their families had entered contracts for the women to work at comfort stations, they may not have known the sexual purpose for which they were being recruited—in which case, any contracts could not be considered voluntary. Eckert and Gordon explained, in a statement, that in the decades leading up to the Second World War the term “comfort station” (“ianjo,” in Japanese, and “wianso,” in Korean) would not necessarily have communicated a sexual meaning, having been used in both Japanese and Korean newspapers of the period to refer to such things as recreation areas in municipal parks, a hotel, a shelter for children, and a hot-springs spa. Gordon also shared with me his translation of an article from 1940 in a major Japanese newspaper, which reported on a Japanese woman who travelled to northern China based on a recruiting ad for a “comfort woman,” and who was surprised to learn, upon arrival, the true nature of the work; the author of the article assumed that the reader, too, would not have known that “comfort woman” meant sex worker.
Determining that it wasn’t possible to respond to Ramseyer’s empirical claims without being able to examine the evidence, Eckert and Gordon wrote to the journal’s editors to say that there was a “problem of academic integrity” and to request a retraction of Ramseyer’s article. Within days, the journal issued an “Expression of Concern,” alerting readers that “concerns have been raised regarding the historical evidence” in the article, and that the “claims are currently being investigated.”
When I spoke to Ramseyer for this article, he said, “I don’t have any Korean contracts.” He further explained that he was “building on” an article he’d written in 1991 about indentured-servitude contracts for prostitution in prewar Japan, based on “vast amounts of discussion in historical records.” That article on prewar prostitution did not address war-front sex work during the Second World War or Korean comfort women. Ramseyer told me, “I thought it would be cool if we could get the contracts” for Korean comfort women. “But I haven’t been able to find it. Certainly you’re not going to find it.” Because he’d argued in the 1991 article that Japanese prewar prostitution-indenture contracts were largely for voluntary labor rather than “slavery,” I gathered he thought that, if Korean women had similar contracts for work in wartime comfort stations, that labor could also be characterized as voluntary rather than sex slavery.
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, a senior figure in modern Japanese history and an emeritus professor at the Australian National University, also wrote to the journal to ask that Ramseyer’s article be retracted. In her letter, she noted that, “bizarrely, he transposed his earlier research from one place and historical period to another, so that a study which was originally about systems that existed in Japan in the 1920s and early 1930s was now presented as a statement about the late 1930s to 1940s wartime ‘comfort station’ system, despite the fact that this system operated in a different time, in different places and in drastically different circumstances.” Morris-Suzuki also pointed out that, in many instances, Ramseyer’s sources were at odds with the claims for which he used them. In one case, Ramseyer wrote that “the Japanese government drafted recruiting regulations designed to select only prostitutes already in the industry,” and cited two official Japanese documents. Morris-Suzuki found that one of those documents actually shows that “some women had been recruited by ‘something close to kidnapping.’ ”
Amy Stanley, a professor of Japanese history at Northwestern University, who has written books on Japanese prostitution and women’s social history, told me the established historical evidence that Ramseyer omitted—about physical violence and threats used to keep women from escaping the comfort stations—“destroy” his argument that women stayed there voluntarily. Stanley worked with four other scholars of Japanese history, on three continents, to produce a thirty-five-page document laying out Ramseyer’s misrepresentations of his Japanese sources and highlighting his inaccurate citation practices. Like Morris-Suzuki, Stanley and her colleagues observed that Ramseyer’s statements in the article were often plainly contrary to the sources he cited for their support. In one striking example, Ramseyer wrote about a young Japanese girl who went to Borneo to work as a prostitute: “When Osaki turned ten, a recruiter stopped by and offered her 300 yen upfront if she would agree to go abroad. The recruiter did not try to trick her; even at age ten, she knew what the job entailed.” (Ramseyer raised no question about a ten-year-old’s ability to consent to sex.) Stanley and her colleagues found that the girl’s testimony, in the book that Ramseyer cited, actually said that she and other girls resisted, saying to the brothel keeper, “You brought us here without ever mentioning that kind of work, and now you tell us to take customers. You liar!” The girl further recalled, “After our first night, we were terrified. We hadn’t realized this was what men and women did. It was so horrible, we could hardly believe it.” The scholars also found it “curious” that, while purporting to describe a voluntary contract system, Ramseyer referred to the employer as Osaki’s “owner.” (Ramseyer e-mailed me to say that he was “puzzled and troubled” upon reading the scholars’ allegation of his misstatement, and added, “I don’t know how this happened, but I did in fact make a mistake here.”)https://5b540f53959a1159ef7386152714bce1.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.htmlADVERTISEMENThttps://5b540f53959a1159ef7386152714bce1.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
Michael Chwe, an economist who teaches game theory at U.C.L.A., is an organizer of a group of economists who are calling for the retraction of Ramseyer’s article. “No matter what field you’re in—economics, history, sociology, whatever—there are certain scholarly standards which must be applied,” Chwe told me. “And one of them is, when you cite something, you cite in a way which is true to the source.” More than a thousand economists, many of whom have served as editors of academic journals, have signed Chwe’s public statement rebuffing the idea that economics or game theory justifies Ramseyer’s conclusions. “Game-theoretic principles can be used to interpret many coercive situations, from crime and punishment to nuclear warfare,” they write. “But invoking game theory does not establish the absence of violent exploitation or predation. It does not allow one to conclude that such interactions were consensual. Game-theoretic principles do not provide some magical cover or authority for the article’s reckless claims.”
Alex Lee, a professor at Northwestern’s law school, signed the economists’ statement. He was also among more than thirty associate editors who participated in the journal’s peer-review process. Not having been involved in selecting Ramseyer’s article, Lee became alarmed, upon reading it, that its sweeping claims were not properly supported. He got in touch with an editor and received permission to seek responses from several historians of modern Japan and Korea. (He also invited me to respond.) A few days later, Lee chose to resign from the journal. “The decision to publish this article is, at best, a serious error in judgment, and at worst, highly irresponsible and unethical,” Lee wrote to me, in a statement. “If the journal is not equipped to assess the revisionist historical claims of this magnitude, which can cause serious damage, it should never have accepted the article for publication.” (The journal did not respond to a request for comment.)
My conversations with scholars who spent the past three weeks investigating Ramseyer’s claims have been remarkable to me because of the strength of their commitment to upholding professional standards and procedures. While his claims are provocative and distressing to many, the scholars’ concern was not that, but only the claims’ truth. Eckert and Gordon have spoken out in defense of the academic freedom to follow evidence to uncomfortable or debatable places, including on the topic of comfort women. They and other historians I spoke to objected to the persecution of Park Yu-ha, whose book on comfort women produced insights that could be argued over, based on the evidence. Each of the historians also defended the work of another scholar, C. Sarah Soh, whose textured study of comfort women, which explores the responsibility of Korea’s patriarchal society in the abusive system, has been weaponized by deniers and attacked unjustifiably as being anti-Korean or of absolving Japan. In the researchers’ view, the key issue is scholarly responsibility.
Ramseyer e-mailed me to identify people—in Korea, Japan, and elsewhere—who are supportive of him. He alerted me to a public statement decrying a “witch-hunt” against him, signed by fifteen Korean individuals. They included four co-authors of the book “Anti-Japan Tribalism,” from 2019, which includes the claim that the story of sex slavery in the case of the comfort women is a lie. One of signatories is a retired economics professor at Seoul National University who was seen in a video slapping a reporter; another is an academic who was punched while leading a demonstration for the removal of a comfort-women statue. Their statement pointed out that Ramseyer’s article was “published by the International Review of Law and Economics, a renowned international academic journal, after his paper received appropriate evaluations including peer review.” On February 8th, six people affiliated with Japanese institutions, who identified themselves as historians, issued an open letter defending Ramseyer’s academic integrity and urging against “canceling” his work. Most don’t appear to have history degrees, and most are connected to a right-wing group that is focussed on denying Japanese wartime atrocities.
Ramseyer also showed me supportive letters that two U.S. colleagues in Japanese studies had sent to the journal. One was sent, on February 4th, by Mary Elizabeth Berry, a Japanese historian of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Berry wrote that Ramseyer’s “research is formidable, exacting, and carefully marshaled,” and that she believed his analysis reflected “a mainstream position among reputable scholars in Japan.” But, after she read the documents identifying problems with the article’s integrity, she wrote to me, saying, “They are very powerful. Mark needs to respond to them thoroughly. And to admit error, as appropriate.” Another supportive letter came from David Weinstein, a professor of Japanese economics at Columbia, who wrote, also on February 4th, that “it is important for academic journals to sometimes publish controversial, fact-based pieces and let readers decide for themselves which arguments are persuasive.” But, upon reading the historians’ findings, Weinstein said, “If the editors decide that their refereeing process failed to catch serious errors in the representation of the underlying facts, then retraction would be appropriate.”
I defend the right of academics to express unpopular opinions or views with which I strongly disagree. But the Ramseyer matter has revealed a strong consensus that academic freedom comes with the responsibility, when making claims about facts, to have proper grounding in evidence. In continuing to investigate Ramseyer’s work, scholars have found that he misused historical sources in several recent articles on minority groups that have been subject to severe discrimination in Japan: the Burakumin, a formerly hereditary outcast group; Okinawans; and Koreans. David Ambaras, a professor of Japanese social history at North Carolina State University, told me that he and other scholars were examining the factual bases of Ramseyer’s claims about the Burakumin and Korean minorities, but had not yet made their findings public. On Saturday, Alon Harel, a law professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the co-editor of the forthcoming “Cambridge Handbook of Privatization,” told a Korean news agency that he and his co-editor, Avihay Dorfman, of Tel Aviv University’s law school, had asked Ramseyer to “significantly” revise a chapter he had contributed to the book, which casts doubt on historians’ estimates that six thousand people were killed in a 1923 massacre of Koreans in Japan. In the chapter, Ramseyer characterizes young Koreans as a “high crime group” and repeats discredited rumors about Koreans torching buildings and raping civilians. “We assumed that Professor Ramseyer knows the history better than us,” Harel said, taking responsibility for “an innocent and very regrettable mistake on our part.” On Tuesday, the European Journal of Law and Economics, which days earlier had published the article on which the forthcoming Cambridge University Press chapter is based, alerted readers that it was investigating concerns with the article.
Morris-Suzuki, the historian, wrote to the editors of the journal that, in her forty years as an academic, “this is the worst example of the failure of academic standards” that she has witnessed in her area of research. “It represents a major breakdown in the entire peer review process.” In particular, it may indicate flaws in peer review within legal academia. As experts of methods (including doctrinal analysis, legal interpretation, law-and-economics) or substantive areas (contracts, torts, property), legal academics are often expected to review writing in areas on which they are far from expert, involving historical contexts they have not studied and languages they do not know. This generalist approach, which makes legal academics capable of avoiding silos in a way that is intellectually stimulating, operates on trust in the diligence and rigor of the individual scholar. Following the Ramseyer episode, it may have to be reëvaluated.ADVERTISEMENThttps://5b540f53959a1159ef7386152714bce1.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
For the wider world, however, why not simply ignore articles that are not factually supported? As Morris-Suzuki noted, there are “all sorts of strange articles out there, by all sorts of strange people.” But, in Ramseyer’s case, she said, “the fact that it’s by a Harvard professor gives it a degree of prominence and respectability, which makes it important to look at carefully.” Indeed, in the past weeks, I have heard from colleagues who said that they hadn’t known, until they read Ramseyer’s article, that the “conventional” story about comfort women was in question. Morris-Suzuki thinks this is a “really good test case” for the contemporary problem of people “being overwhelmed by things that present themselves as fact but are not properly based in fact”—not just in academia but in the media and on the Internet. Ramseyer has framed his work on comfort women as that of a debunker coming to refute what he called a “pure fiction” adopted by an academic consensus obsessed with the “trifecta” of “sexism, racism, and imperialism.”
Morris-Suzuki has produced a “study aid,” with Ramseyer’s comfort-women article as the case study, to teach students how to maintain principles of research integrity while also supporting free speech. It explains, “If there are no ground rules, then academic journals would have no basis for rejecting any paper submitted to them, and any statement of opinion—however lacking in logic or factual evidence—would have to be treated as equal to any other. We could then very easily end up spending much of the rest of our lives debating conspiracy theories or fake news which have no intellectual foundation whatever. To put it at its simplest and crudest, if there are no research standards, then we may as well all pack up and go home, because anything goes and any truth claim is just as good as any other.”
In Korea and Japan, controversies about comfort women are nothing new. What appears new is having a familiar extreme denialist position emanate from a university that many around the world associate with legitimate scholarship. Daniel Sneider is a Korea and Japan expert at Stanford who studies how battles over wartime memory affect international relations in Asia. He has also covered Korea and Japan as a reporter in both countries since the nineteen-eighties. Sneider said that Ramseyer’s statements in Japan Forward are “precisely the arguments” of the “revisionist right in Japan.” Sneider told me that a high-ranking Japanese Foreign Ministry official cited Ramseyer’s work to him as “yet more evidence of the false nature of the Korean position.” According to Sneider, the Japanese official, after learning of the historians’ findings about Ramseyer’s article, assured him that the government does not intend to embrace Ramseyer’s contentions. But Sneider observed that “the more the Koreans go after Ramseyer, the more some people in Japan want to embrace him. It is a poisonous dynamic.” This week, a leading Japanese daily newspaper, Yukan Fuji, wrote that a Harvard professor’s scholarly research demonstrated that comfort women were licensed prostitutes, and that there was no sex slavery; it also claimed that crazed Koreans had pressured Harvard professors to criticize Ramseyer.
In the course of seventy-five fraught years, from the end of the Second World War and of Japanese colonialism to today, the Korean grievance that Japan has not sincerely taken responsibility for its actions has been yoked with the Japanese sense that Korea has repeatedly moved the goalposts and can never be satisfied. The Ramseyer controversy could not be more perfectly timed and ready-made to aggravate those dynamics, although I have no reason to believe it was done so by design. As I neared the end of this journey, I reached out to Ramseyer again to see if we could understand each other’s developing thoughts. By then, I’d spent much of the past month steeped in his sentences, logic, and sources—with hours of meticulous help from expert scholars of Japanese. He said he would pass and explain himself in his own time, which I could understand.
Alexis Dudden, the historian of Japan and Korea, was one of the scholars invited to publish a reply to Ramseyer in the journal. In her comment, she observes that a reason for studying past atrocities is to try to prevent similar occurrences in the future, “not to abuse history by weaponizing it for present purposes.” She told me of meeting Korean comfort women in Tokyo, in 2000, at the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery. “One of them had her tongue cut out,” she said. “Another woman literally lifted up her hanbok to show me where one of her breasts had been lopped off.” Dudden said that the tribunal was “a big watershed in terms of understanding how oral testimony really was necessary, to shift the legal approach but also in terms of doing historical evidence gathering” in the study of crimes against humanity. In some sense, such testimony of atrocities is seemingly irrefutable. But historians such as Dudden continually seek to verify it, producing knowledge of unspeakable horrors, through cycles of historical denial, political conflict, and diplomatic irresolution.
Last week, Lee Yong-soo, who was conscripted as a comfort woman at fifteen and is now in her nineties—known as Grandma Lee—spoke at an event organized by Harvard Law School’s Asian-American student group. In the days before, a small far-right fringe group in Korea sent multiple e-mails defending Ramseyer to me and all of my faculty colleagues at the law school and in East Asian studies, and also to students who’d criticized him. The mail I received focussed on my Korean ethnicity and asserted that my speaking about the matter while not being a law-and-economics specialist “will only prevent reasonable debates” and not help “resolve the conflict between Korea and Japan.” The e-mails even claimed that Grandma Lee was a “fake comfort woman,” and that we at Harvard should boycott her event. Grandma Lee chose to address the Ramseyer situation directly. Through an interpreter, she observed that Ramseyer was “maybe actually a blessing in disguise,” because, thanks to him, there is suddenly more interest in the history of comfort women. The more that Japan denies the history, she said, the more attention it brings. She said she hoped that, before she dies, Japan and Korea will work together to bring the matter to the International Court of Justice, so that the evidence could establish the truth of what happened. “I hate the crime but I don’t hate the people,” she said.https://5b540f53959a1159ef7386152714bce1.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
Jeannie Suk Gersen is a contributing writer to The New Yorker and a professor at Harvard Law School.
In this Feb. 25, 2021, photo, high school students hold up banners to protest a recent academic paper by Harvard University professor J. Mark Ramseyer, behind statues symbolizing wartime sex slaves in Seoul, South Korea. The signs read: “J. Mark Ramseyer, are you a 21st century professor at Harvard? Are you a university professor in the Japanese Empire 100 years ago? We criticize anti-human rights research.” (Lee Jung-hoon/Yonhap via AP)AP
A Harvard University professor has ignited an international uproar and faces mounting scrutiny for alleging that Korean women who were kept as sex slaves in wartime Japan had actually chosen to work as prostitutes.
His paper has intensified a political dispute between Japan, whose leaders deny that the women were coerced, and South Korea, which has long pressed Japan to provide apologies and compensation to women who have shared accounts of rape and abuse.
Decades of research has explored the abuses inflicted on comfort women from Korea and other nations previously occupied by Japan. In the 1990s, women began sharing accounts detailing how they were taken to comfort stations and forced to provide sexual services for the Japanese military.
Hundreds of scholars have signed letters condemning Ramseyer’s article, which united North and South Korea in sparking outrage. Last Tuesday, North Korea’s state-run DPRK Today published an article calling Ramseyer a “repulsive money grubber” and a “pseudo scholar.”
Ramseyer, a professor of Japanese legal studies at Harvard Law School, declined to comment.
Ramseyer’s article, titled “Contracting for sex in the Pacific War,” was published online in December and was scheduled to appear in the March issue of the International Review of Law and Economics. The issue has been suspended, however, and the journal issued an “expression of concern” saying the piece is under investigation.
Most alarming to historians is what they say is a lack of evidence in the paper: Scholars at Harvard and other institutions have combed though Ramseyer’s sources and say there is no historical evidence of the contracts he describes.
In a statement calling for the article to be retracted, Harvard historians Andrew Gordon and Carter Eckert said Ramseyer “has not consulted a single actual contract” dealing with comfort women.
“We do not see how Ramseyer can make credible claims, in extremely emphatic wording, about contracts he has not read,” they wrote.
Alexis Dudden, a historian of modern Japan and Korea at the University of Connecticut, called the article a “total fabrication” that disregards decades of research. Although some have invoked academic freedom to defend Ramseyer, Dudden counters that the article “does not meet the requirements of academic integrity.”
“These are assertions out of thin air,” she said. “It’s very clear from his writing and his sources that he has never seen a contract.”
More than 1,000 economists have signed a separate letter condemning the article, saying it misuses economic theory “as a cover to legitimize horrific atrocities.” A separate group of historians of Japan issued a 30-page article explaining why the article should be retracted “on grounds of academic misconduct.”
At Harvard, hundreds of students signed a petition demanding an apology from Ramseyer and a university response to the complaints against him. Harvard Law School declined to comment.
Tensions flared again in January when a South Korean court ruled that the Japanese government must give 100 million won ($90,000) to each of 12 women who sued in 2013 over their wartime sufferings. Japan insists all wartime compensation issues were settled under a 1965 treaty normalizing relations with South Korea.
In South Korea, activists have denounced Ramseyer and called for his resignation from Harvard. Chung Young-ai, South Korea’s minister of gender equality and family, expressed dismay over the article last week.
“There is an attempt to distort (the facts about) the Japanese military’s ‘comfort women’ issue and tarnish the honors and dignity of victims,” Chung said, according to comments provided by her ministry.
Lee Yong-soo, a 92-year-old South Korean and survivor, described Ramseyer’s assertion as “ludicrous” and demanded he apologize.
An influential activist, Lee is campaigning for South Korea and Japan to settle their decadeslong impasse by seeking judgment from the International Court of Justice.
When asked about Ramseyer last Wednesday, Lee said: “That professor should be dragged to (the ICJ) too.”
The controversy, amplified by its source at an Ivy League university, has yielded new scrutiny of Ramseyer’s other work.
In response to new concerns raised by scholars, The European Journal of Law and Economics added an editor’s note saying it’s investigating a recent piece by Ramseyer — this one studying Koreans living in early 20th century Japan. Cambridge University Press said a forthcoming book chapter by Ramseyer is “being revised by the author after consultation between the author and the editors of the book.”https://101d0192e61405344d76320cc51da6fd.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
Ramseyer repeated his claims about comfort women in a submission to a Japanese news site in January. In it, he alleged the women entered into contracts similar to those used under a separate, licensed system of prostitution in Japan. He rejected accounts of forced labor as “pure fiction,” saying the Japanese army “did not dragoon Korean women to work in its brothels.”
“Expressing sympathy to elderly women who have had a rough life is fine,” he wrote. “Paying money to an ally in order to rebuild a stable relationship is fine. But the claims about enslaved Korean comfort women are historically untrue.”
Opponents counter that many of the women were so young they would have been unable to consent to sex even if there was evidence of contracts.
“We’re really talking about 15-year-olds,” said Dudden, at the University of Connecticut. “This article further victimizes the very few number of survivors by asserting claims that even the author knows cannot be substantiated.”
___
Associated Press writers Hyung-jin Kim and Kim Tong-hyung contributed from Seoul.
I make so many short videos on so many subjects that I forget I have made the video sometimes. A subject might come into my head or I see something on the news or online that tickles my interest. I look up still pictures or drawings with a search online. If I get ten or twenty pictures I can easily make a slide show video with motion or some built in effects with an inexpensive video editing program. I find a song or some music, or, for copyright reasons, silence. Yes, the age of easy access and perfect copies has brought me the right to remain silent.
I was making a lot of videos in January and February at my kitchen computer as I cooked or dreamed or looked out the back window at the perpetually rising moon. Sadly, the computer stopped working. The flow of my video output was interrupted as I pondered a replacement for the hearth portal computer and used a laptop to desperately communicate with the outside world. (Well, except when I went outside and spoke with neighbors or relatives or descendants or mythical antecedents or… the animals in the trees all around.)
I checked in to a place on Reddit, I think r/AnythingGoesPic, where I put a lot of videos in the last few months as I realized I could put videos with music on Reddit and there did not seem to be a copyright censor. I keep explaining to anyone who will listen or read or note wall murals – Lenin abolished copyright, Stalin brought copyright back. Do I have to paint a picture? I might. Actually, I might have already. Sometimes I am moving so fast artistically, visually, verbally, and with video, that I forget what I did in the morning after I wake up from a two hour noon nap. I start the day fresh.
But, sometimes I find that elves seem to have finished the work I had cut out for me.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — A Harvard University professor has ignited an international uproar and faces mounting scrutiny for alleging that Korean women who were kept as sex slaves in wartime Japan had actually chosen to work as prostitutes.
In a recent academic paper, J. Mark Ramseyer rejected a wide body of research finding that Japan’s so-called “comfort women” were forced to work at military brothels during World War II. Ramseyer instead argued that the women willingly entered into contracts as sex workers.
His paper has intensified a political dispute between Japan, whose leaders deny that the women were coerced, and South Korea, which has long pressed Japan to provide apologies and compensation to women who have shared accounts of rape and abuse.
Decades of research has explored the abuses inflicted on comfort women from Korea and other nations previously occupied by Japan. In the 1990s, women began sharing accounts detailing how they were taken to comfort stations and forced to provide sexual services for the Japanese military.
Hundreds of scholars have signed letters condemning Ramseyer’s article, which united North and South Korea in sparking outrage. Last Tuesday, North Korea’s state-run DPRK Today published an article calling Ramseyer a “repulsive money grubber” and a “pseudo scholar.”
Ramseyer, a professor of Japanese legal studies at Harvard Law School, declined to comment.
Ramseyer’s article, titled “Contracting for sex in the Pacific War,” was published online in December and was scheduled to appear in the March issue of the International Review of Law and Economics. The issue has been suspended, however, and the journal issued an “expression of concern” saying the piece is under investigation.
Most alarming to historians is what they say is a lack of evidence in the paper: Scholars at Harvard and other institutions have combed though Ramseyer’s sources and say there is no historical evidence of the contracts he describes.
In a statement calling for the article to be retracted, Harvard historians Andrew Gordon and Carter Eckert said Ramseyer “has not consulted a single actual contract” dealing with comfort women.
“We do not see how Ramseyer can make credible claims, in extremely emphatic wording, about contracts he has not read,” they wrote.
Alexis Dudden, a historian of modern Japan and Korea at the University of Connecticut, called the article a “total fabrication” that disregards decades of research. Although some have invoked academic freedom to defend Ramseyer, Dudden counters that the article “does not meet the requirements of academic integrity.”
“These are assertions out of thin air,” she said. “It’s very clear from his writing and his sources that he has never seen a contract.”
More than 1,000 economists have signed a separate letter condemning the article, saying it misuses economic theory “as a cover to legitimize horrific atrocities.” A separate group of historians of Japan issued a 30-page article explaining why the article should be retracted “on grounds of academic misconduct.”
At Harvard, hundreds of students signed a petition demanding an apology from Ramseyer and a university response to the complaints against him. Harvard Law School declined to comment.
A United Nations report from 1996 concluded that the comfort women were sex slaves taken through “violence and outright coercion.” A statement from Japan in 1993 acknowledged that women were taken “against their own will,” although the nation’s leaders later denied it.
Tensions flared again in January when a South Korean court ruled that the Japanese government must give 100 million won ($90,000) to each of 12 women who sued in 2013 over their wartime sufferings. Japan insists all wartime compensation issues were settled under a 1965 treaty normalizing relations with South Korea.
In South Korea, activists have denounced Ramseyer and called for his resignation from Harvard. Chung Young-ai, South Korea’s minister of gender equality and family, expressed dismay over the article last week.
“There is an attempt to distort (the facts about) the Japanese military’s ‘comfort women’ issue and tarnish the honors and dignity of victims,” Chung said, according to comments provided by her ministry.
Lee Yong-soo, a 92-year-old South Korean and survivor, described Ramseyer’s assertion as “ludicrous” and demanded he apologize.
An influential activist, Lee is campaigning for South Korea and Japan to settle their decadeslong impasse by seeking judgment from the International Court of Justice.
When asked about Ramseyer last Wednesday, Lee said: “That professor should be dragged to (the ICJ) too.”
The controversy, amplified by its source at an Ivy League university, has yielded new scrutiny of Ramseyer’s other work.
In response to new concerns raised by scholars, The European Journal of Law and Economics added an editor’s note saying it’s investigating a recent piece by Ramseyer — this one studying Koreans living in early 20th century Japan. Cambridge University Press said a forthcoming book chapter by Ramseyer is “being revised by the author after consultation between the author and the editors of the book.”
Ramseyer repeated his claims about comfort women in a submission to a Japanese news site in January. In it, he alleged the women entered into contracts similar to those used under a separate, licensed system of prostitution in Japan. He rejected accounts of forced labor as “pure fiction,” saying the Japanese army “did not dragoon Korean women to work in its brothels.”
“Expressing sympathy to elderly women who have had a rough life is fine,” he wrote. “Paying money to an ally in order to rebuild a stable relationship is fine. But the claims about enslaved Korean comfort women are historically untrue.”
Opponents counter that many of the women were so young they would have been unable to consent to sex even if there was evidence of contracts.
“We’re really talking about 15-year-olds,” said Dudden, at the University of Connecticut. “This article further victimizes the very few number of survivors by asserting claims that even the author knows cannot be substantiated.”
___
Associated Press writers Hyung-jin Kim and Kim Tong-hyung contributed from Seoul.
Later – 6:47am – As I stepped outside in the bright sunlight I could see the pale moon. I realized I had depicted the half moon facing the wrong way. Oh, cruel reality, why must you be so cruel?
Also, there are no mountains to the south of my back door. The Blue Hills are a few miles away, far from my horizon.
I haven’t constructed a plastic model in many, many years. I discovered the joy of buying assembled models. A couple of decades ago I got an East Asian sailing vessel ‘Chinese Junk.’ I did make that black and orange craft from a set of parts I had to glue together. I remember it on our dresser when I was first married in front of the mirror. I was charmed by movie sets that featured some wise professor or wealthy adventurer who had large wooden models of seafaring ships in the background.
The images of Chinese Junks don’t match the black bodied model I constructed many years ago. As I looked online for pictures I came across a set of toy boats. Of course, the best cost the most.
Perhaps I should craft my own. There is lots of wood around. I live in Massachusetts and there are more trees than people in the state. Massachusetts has more trees now than in 1800. I learned some of these facts about the Commonwealth of Massachusetts trees because I was a wood crafts teacher for a number of summers and taught a few wood shop classes. Some students would say they did not want to use wood and harm trees.
When I had a little bit of extra cash and an empty feeling from a break up with a woman there was a special on wooden boat models at my local supermarket. For twenty or thirty dollars the store featured half decent sailing ship models. I bought just about everyone I could of the series. I placed them around my apartment and made my own movie set to launch and adventure from to the sea a mile away. Or remember past adventures on some of the ships represented.
This is one of the models. Christopher Columbus ship the Santa Maria.
The work is essentially symbolic, but one gets the general idea of how the vessel was shaped and the scale of things on that tiny craft crossing the Atlantic Ocean and keeping a record of the journey.
I have a ‘Cutty Sark’ model, but mine did not cost $250.
During the Plague Years of 2020 and 2021 I have not been down to the sea in ships. Travel is restricted. Imagination is not limited. I have model props to prompt a journey in the mind.
All these ships, and I haven’t had to scrape a single hull. I hardly dust them. Just a gust of breath to clear the decks and flutter the sails.
Dozens of demonstrators gathered outside Johnston Gate Saturday afternoon in a protest organized by the Korean American Society of Massachusetts against Harvard Law professor J. Mark Ramseyer and his recent controversial paper on comfort women. By 
The protesters chanted for Ramseyer’s removal from the Law School and repeatedly sang Arirang, a folk song considered to be the anthem of Korea. By 
Protest organizer Do Kim said more than 100 protesters attended the event. By 
xenagoguevicene 
