The Balance Sheet of October

This is an excerpt from a book highlighting the pluses and minuses of the Russian Revolution. It shows even a deformed socialism as Stalinism, will make great gains, that can't be met by capitalism.

By Ted Grant
July 2008



The Advances of the Planned Economy

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.
Alfred Tennyson.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was one of the greatest events in history. If we leave aside the heroic episode of the Paris Commune, for the first time millions of downtrodden workers and peasants took political power into their own hands, sweeping aside the despotic rule of the capitalists and landlords, and set out to create a socialist world order. Destroying the old Tsarist regime that held sway for a thousand years, they had conquered one-sixth of the world's land surface. The ancien régime was replaced by the rule of a new democratic state system: the Soviet of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies. It heralded the beginning of the world revolution, inspiring the hopes and dreams of millions who had lived through the nightmare of the first world war. Notwithstanding the terrible backwardness of Russia, the new Socialist Soviet Republic represented a decisive threat to the world capitalist order. It struck terror in bourgeois circles, who rightly regarded it as a threat to their power and privileges, but comforted themselves with the notion that the Bolshevik regime was likely to only last a matter of weeks. The nationalised property relations that emerged from the revolution, the foundations of an entirely new social system, entered into direct conflict with the capitalist form of society. Despite the emergence of Stalinism, this fundamental antagonism existed right up until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even today events in Russia continue to haunt world politics, like some Banquo's ghost that continually overshadows the festivities of the capitalist class.

Read the rest here

RENEGADE EYE

What Is Bonapartism?

The Arab Revolution brings out the question of the nature of the authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. Marxists have long talked about bourgeois Bonapartism, Leon Trotsky and Ted Grant added to Marxism, the the concept of proletarian Bonapartism. This definition is helpful to understand some of the so called socialist regimes. The Chinese Revolution was based on where the Russian Revolution ended 1949 Russia. Mao vigorously defended private property, and based the revolution not on workers, but peasants. Mao only nationalized industry, because capitalists fled to Taiwan. Just about every colonial revolution followed the Chinese model.

A transitional form of government between the regimes of parliamentary democracy and fascism, based on dictatorship and military force during a period when class rule is not secure. A strong government which appears to stand 'above parties' and 'above classes' due to relative equilibrium between the working class and the bourgeoisie. It is based on the military, police, and state bureaucracy rather than on parliamentary parties or a mass movement. So called after Napoleon Bonaparte, the classic example of Bourgeois Bonapartism. Stalin's totalitarian regime and others like it are classified as Proletarian Bonapartism.

RENEGADE EYE

Christopher Hitchens and Robert Service Discuss Trotsky

Christopher Hitchens discusses Leon Trotsky with the author of a recent biography of Leon Trotsky, Robert Service. Hitchens defends Trotsky to the best of his ability. While this discussion is not a debate, Hitchens comes off weak, because he is discussing Trotsky in Service's language, that of clash of personalities and intrigues. The article by Rob Sewell is a clenched fist as opposed to Hitchens's taps.

Bolshevism and Stalinism

Written by Rob Sewell
Wednesday, 13 January 2010

An avalanche of books has recently been published to discredit Lenin, Trotsky and the Russian Revolution. First and foremost of these writers is Professor Robert Service. The aim of his latest book on Trotsky is to prove that Bolshevism leads to Stalinism and totalitarianism. Here Rob Sewell sets the record straight and explains the huge gulf that divided genuine Bolshevism from the monster of Stalinism that was built on the physical destruction of the Bolshevik party.

here

RENEGADE EYE

Nepali Maoism and Prophet the “Outcast” Leon Trotsky

This article was written by a Trotskyist from Nepal, about an article a Maoist from Nepal wrote, admitting Maoism is a dead end, and that Maoist cadres in Nepal are interested in the revolutionary ideas of Trotskyism. This post I admit to my readers isn't for everyone. Just like on rightist blogs, some discussions are more for their own group. I disagree with the comrade's conclusion about Maoists and Trotskyists uniting. I believe unity is based totally on common principles.



70 Years after the brutal murder of Bolshevik Revolutionary Leader Comrade Leon Trotsky by Koba’s criminal regime (Joseph Stalin), Nepal’s Maoists for the first time have accepted that, in the current context of the globalised capitalism, the revolutionary ideas of Leon Trotsky are “more relevant” than those of his killers (Koba Stalin).

In a recent Maoist Publication “Rato Jhilko” (The Red Spark), Maoist ideologue, Baburam Bhattarai writes: “Today, the globalization of imperialist capitalism has increased many fold as compared to the period of October Revolution. The development of information technology has converted the world into a global village. However, due to unequal and extreme development inherent in capitalist imperialism has created inequality between different nations. In this context, there is still (some) possibility of revolution in a single country similar to the October revolution; however, in order to sustain the revolution, we definitely need a global or at least a regional wave of revolution in a couple of countries. In this context, Marxist revolutionaries should recognize the fact that in the current context, Trotskyism has become more relevant than Stalinism to advance the cause of the proletariat”. (The Red Spark, July 2009, Issue, -1, Page-10, our translation from Nepali language).

So far, Maoists were trying to hide the truth about the life and contribution of comrade Leon Trotsky from their own cadres. But after our intervention on this issue through the internet, it seems that, Nepali Maoists could not hide the truth about comrade Trotsky any more. As the 14 year old Maoist campaign in Nepal based on Stalinism and Maoism is heading to a dead end, and as the party cadres are demanding explanation from the Leaders, the latter have been forced to speak the truth about Bolshevik Revolution in general and about comrade Leon Trotsky in particular.

This recognition is also an indication of the fact that, Maoists are trying to draw a balance sheet of their decades long campaign, and have come to face the truth about the fallacy of Stalinism and Maoism.

We appreciate this positive first step of Nepali Maoists to embrace the truth, and urge them to educate their cadres about the life and work of comrade Leon Trotsky and his teaching on “permanent revolution”.

We also urge the Maoist leadership to take immediate steps to bring the Maoists and Trotskyists from different nations together in order to establish a global nucleus of revolutionary forces to fight imperialism more effectively.

RENEGADE EYE

The Stalin-Hitler Pact

Today is the seventieth anniversary of the infamous The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact. This article is a good analysis from a Marxist viewpoint, about the several wars together called World War II,.

Written by Ben Peck
Monday, 24 August 2009



In the early hours of August 24 seventy years ago Germany and Soviet Russia signed a "non-aggression pact", which divided the states of Northern and Eastern Europe into German and Soviet "spheres of influence", effectively slicing Poland into two halves. Ben Peck looks back at what happened and explains why such an incredible event could take place – and the price that was paid

Be sure to read the rest of the article HERE

RENEGADE EYE

Thoughts On the Town Hall Disruptions

By Louis Proyect
August 09, 2009

On August sixth, a Marxmail subscriber posed the question of “proletarian defense guards for Democrats, specifically Democratic congress members attempting to hold town hall meeting.” He, as the rest of us, must have realized how anachronistic such a term was but added:

It sounds weird, true, but I was contacted today as part of a mobilization to confront the hysterical collection of Ron Paulites, birthers, and other associated storm troopers who will be attempting to shut down a discussion of health care tonight by our aging congressman. In other parts of the country liberal representatives have had to flee of be escorted out by the police. The UAW is also supposed to lend some rank and file militants to this so we shall see how things turn out.

Does a proletarian defense guard for an aging Democratic hack make any sense to anyone here? It is true that the local right wing is particularly virulent and I noticed several “Death to communists” at the “tea party” tax protest. It brought to mind the fact that all the Obama signs/ stickers I saw on campus were defaced with a Soviet flag stickers. Given how incensed these people are one wonders what they would do if a real socialist were in any elected office.

I am not going to agonize now over the popular front overtones about all this but I really hate these creeps and I can be as loud as these assholes any day of the week. The larger question remains is that what is the correct path in this era of political polarization and the increasing virulence of the neo-Nazi faction of the Republican Party. I would appreciate other comrades’ experience and thoughts on this issue.

A Huffington Post article fleshed out the Marxmail subscriber’s report on trade union involvement, as well as the frenzy that this had driven the rightwing into:

Union officials continued to receive a barrage of threats on Friday evening and into Saturday punctuated by warnings that if organizers were sent to counter-demonstrate at health care town halls they would be met with violence.

An official with the AFL-CIO, a federation of labor organizations, passed on what he described as a “pretty direct threat” to those union hands who were showing up to balance out anti-Obama demonstrations being waged at local Democratic forums.

“I will be going to a local town hall this weekend, all you union members BEWARE!” an emailer wrote at 9:40 Saturday morning. “We will be waiting for you. better make sure you have arrangements with your local ER. today is the day when the goon meets the gun. see you there.”

The rightwing has been posting Youtube clips about these confrontations. The one below shows the trade union defense guard clearing them out of a town hall meeting organized by Kathy Castor, a Democratic Congresswoman from Florida. It reminded me of some of the assignments I had defending meetings in the 1960s but I was about half the size of these guys.

So far most of the violence at these meetings has consisted of pushing and shoving from the rightwingers, but we cannot rule out an escalation at some point especially in light of the recent murder of an abortion provider in Kansas. For the last several months, talk radio, Fox TV, Lou Dobbs on CNN, the “birthers”, and the far right wing of the Republican Party in Washington has worked itself into a lather around a number of seemingly unrelated issues: whether Obama was born in the US or not; the supposed possibility that health care reform will lead to old people being thrown to the wolves; and a general sense of economic vulnerability.



When the evening newscast the other night was showing footage of the chaos at another one of these town meetings, I told my wife that it reflected the basic difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. The Democrats do everything they can to demobilize their base, who are seen as inconvenient and extraneous to their main way of getting things done, namely through closed door meetings with corporate executives and nonprofit honchos over how to screw the American people while giving the opposite impression. Meanwhile, the Republicans are much more reliant on an activist base because their social support is much narrower. As a party that rules directly and openly in the interests of the moneyed elite, it requires all sorts of grass roots organization to push its filthy agenda forward.

But in practice, this means that the grass roots is almost always reliant on seed money from deep-pocketed foundations and corporate benefactors. Conservatives for Patients’ Rights takes credit for interventions at these town meetings. A character named Rick Scott, who is a millionaire investor and formerly head of the Columbia/HCA health-care company, leads CPR. A fraud investigation in the 1990s resulted in the Columbia/HCA pleading guilty to charges that it overbilled state and federal health plans. It ended up paying a record $1.7 billion in fines. According to Politico, CPR has raised $20 million to fight health care reform. You can bet that this is more than enough to pay for transporting mobs from one town hall meeting to another, including the one that just got the heave-ho from trade unionists in Florida.

It is impossible to predict what the next four years have in store but you cannot rule out such confrontations being repeated with some regularity given the sharpening of class tensions in the U.S. over what looks like a protracted L shaped recession. Even though the Dow-Jones index is heading toward the 10,000 level, the job and housing situation remain bleak.

Obama will do everything in his power to convince those who voted for him to remain patient while he carries out what amounts to a third Bush term, but there will be more and more defensive measures by the poor and the working class in defense of its own class interests. One can be reasonably assured that the level of discontent in the US will rise despite the African-American President’s clear gift for demagogy and deception.

And as the workers and the poor begin to fight for their rights, the retrograde social forces churned up from a capitalism in decay will become more and more violent and inclined to direct action. While this does not pose any immediate threat of fascism, largely a function of the unlikelihood of a revolutionary socialist movement gaining the necessary numbers and influence any time soon, there will be a need to study the 1930s just as the Marxism list subscriber alluded to when he referred to proletarian defense guards—the sort of thing that hasn’t been seen since then.

For one of the best introductions to the period, I can recommend Leon Trotsky’s Whither France, a sharp polemic against a Popular Front Government that like Obama’s tried to keep its social base demobilized while the fascists were taking over the streets. Trotsky wrote:

It is not the spirit of combination among parliamentarians and journalists, but the legitimate and creative hatred of the oppressed for the oppressors which is today the single most progressive factor in history. It is necessary to turn to the masses, toward their deepest layers. It is necessary to appeal to their passions and to their reason. It is necessary to reject the false “prudence” which is a synonym for cowardice and which, at great historical turning points, amounts to treason. The united front must take for its motto the formula of Danton: “De l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace.” To understand the situation fully and to draw from it all the practical conclusions, boldly and without fear and to the end, is to assure the victory of socialism.

I imagine that everybody will have no trouble understanding Danton’s French, but it turns out that he was saying: “Audacity, again audacity, and always audacity.” Given our weakened state, most leftists have difficulty thinking in terms of audaciousness. But if the period we are entering is marked by open conflict between workers and their class enemies, we have to dust off our weapons and march off to the class war once again.

RENEGADE EYE

One Day In July: Remembering The 1934 Minneapolis Teamster Strike

THE 1934 MINNEAPOLIS TRUCKERS STRIKE On "Bloody Friday", July 20,1934,at 3rd and 6th, 67 striking truckdrivers and their supporters were shot by Minneapolis police, acting on orders from the Citizens Alliance, an anti-labor employers' group, which controlled city government. Seventy-five years later, WE REMEMBER THEIR SACRIFICE!

This weekend Minneapolis returned to an old tradition and celebrated the 1934 general strike in Minneapolis, that brought unionism to Minneapolis. The first day was a music festival in the streets where the fighting took place. Today was a picnic attended by relatives of strikers, and representatives of the UE who took part in the Republic Windows occupation in Chicago. No known 1934 strikers are living.

Teamsters got their name from starting out organizing drivers of teams of horses. There was less time between the 1934 stike and the Civil War, than the strike and today.

By Dave Riehle

Three successive strikes by Minneapolis truck drivers in 1934 resulted in the defeat of the Citizen's Alliance, the dominant employer organization that had broken nearly every major strike in that city since 1916. The strikes also established the industrial form of union organization through the medium of an American Federation of Labor (AFL) craft union and set the stage for the organization of over-the-road drivers throughout an 11-state area, transforming the Teamsters into a million-plus member union. The strikes were notable for their almost unequaled advance preparation, military tactics, and the degree to which they drew the active participation of union, non-union, and unemployed workers in Minneapolis alike into their struggle. Veteran union militants expelled from the American Communist Party in 1928 as Trotskyists led the strikes.

Carl Skoglund and V R. (Ray) Dunne, the central leaders, had also been expelled from the AFL Trades and Labor Assembly in Minneapolis in 1925 for their political views, along with 20 other Communists. In 1931 Skoglund obtained membership in Teamsters Local 574, a small general drivers. local. The president, William Brown, was supportive of their perspective for organizing drivers, helpers, and inside workers into an industrial union formation that could break the hold of the Citizen.s Alliance.



By late 1933, working in Minneapolis coal yards, they had consolidated a volunteer organizing committee, including Grant and Miles Dunne (V.R's brothers), Harry DeBoer, and Farrell Dobbs. Dobbs, DeBoer, and Shaun (Jack) Maloney became key leaders of the over-the-road drivers' organizing campaign from 1935 to 1940.

On 7 February 1934, a strike was called in the coal yards, shutting down sixty-five of sixty-seven yards in three hours. Under the leadership of DeBoer, an innovative strike tactic was introduced for the first time, cruising picket squads patrolling the streets by automobile. Cold winter demand for coal brought a quick end to the strike two days later, resulting in a limited victory for the union. Local 574's membership rose to three thousand by April, as the organization drive continued.

In preparation for a general drivers. strike, 574 got agreement for active support from Minneapolis unemployed organizations and the Farm Holiday Association, allied with the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party. On 15 May, Local 574, now 6,000 members strong, voted to strike all trucking employers, demanding union recognition, the right to represent inside workers, and wage increases.

The union deployed cruising picket squads from strike headquarters, a big garage where they also installed a hospital and commissary. A strike committee of one hundred was elected, with broad representation from struck firms. A women's auxiliary was established at the suggestion of Carl Skoglund.

On Monday, 21 May, a major battle between strikers and police and special deputies took place in the central market area. At a crucial, point, 600 pickets, concealed the previous evening in nearby AFL headquarters, emerged and routed the police and deputies in hand-to-hand combat. Over thirty cops went to the hospital. No pickets were arrested.

On Tuesday, 22 May, the battle began again. About 20,000 strikers, sympathizers, and spectators assembled in the central market area, and a local radio station broadcast live from the site. Again, no trucks were moved.

Two special deputies were killed, including C. Arthur Lyman, a leader of the Citizen's Alliance. No pickets were arrested. On 25 May a settlement was reached that met the union's major objectives, including representation of inside workers.

In the following weeks, it became clear the employers were not carrying out the agreement. Over 700 cases of discrimination were recorded between May and July. Another strike was called on 16 July. The union's newspaper, The Organizer, became the first daily ever published by a striking union. Trucking was again effectively closed down until Friday, 20 July, when police opened fire on unarmed pickets, wounding 67, two of whom, John Belor and Henry Ness, died.

The Minneapolis Labor Review reported attendance of 100,000 at Ness's funeral on 24 July. A public commission, set up later by the governor, reported: "Police took direct aim at the pickets and fired to kill. Physical safety of the police was at no time endangered. No weapons were in possession of the pickets." On 26 July, Farmer-Labor Governor Floyd B. Olson declared martial law and mobilized four thousand National Guardsmen, who began issuing operating permits to truck drivers.

On 1 August, National Guard troops seized strike headquarters and placed arrested union leaders in a stockade at the state fairgrounds in Saint Paul. The next day, the headquarters were restored to the union and the leaders released from the stockade, as the National Guard carried out a token raid on the Citizen's Alliance headquarters. The union appealed to the Central Labor Union for a general strike and the governor issued an ultimatum that he would stop all trucks by midnight, 5 August, if there was no settlement. Nevertheless, by 14 August there were thousands of trucks operating under military permits.

Although the strike was gravely weakened by martial law and economic pressure, union leaders made it clear that it would continue. On 21 August, a federal mediator got acceptance of a settlement pro-posal from A. W. Strong, head of the Citizen.s Alliance, incorporating the union.s major demands. The settlement was ratified and the back of employer resist-ance to unionization in Minneapolis was broken. In March 1935 International president Daniel Tobin expelled Local 574 from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT). However, in August 1936 Tobin was forced to relent and recharter the local as 544. The leaders of 544 went on to develop the area and conference bargaining that exists today in the IBT. Local 544 remained under socialist leader-ship until 1941, when eighteen leaders of the union and the Socialist Workers Party were sentenced to federal prison, the first victims of the anti-radical Smith Act, a law eventually found by the United States Supreme Court to be unconstitutional.
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RENEGADE EYE

Ted Grant and The Chinese Revolution

I was asked to have a discussion on this blog, about the differences between Maoism and Trotskyism, or the difference between the Maoist concept of mass line as opposed to the Trotskyist transitional program. The Maoist method is synthecizing opinion into an action program. The transitional program is raising demands that bridge reform demands with revolution demands. An example is the slogan Peace, Land and Bread during the 1917 Russian Revolution. Peace meaning end Russia's involvement in WWI, Land meaning land to the peasants, and Bread meaning better worker's lives. transitional demands challenge capitalism. That doesn't mean reform demands are ignored.

This is an excerpt from the writings of Trotskyist Ted Grant. What is remarkable, is that it was written before the victory of the Chinese Revolution.

Two Sides of the Coin

While supporting the destruction of feudalism in China, it must be emphasised that only a horrible caricature of the Marxist conception of the revolution will result because of the leadership of the Stalinists. Not a real democracy, but a totalitarian regime as brutal as that of Chiang Kai Shek will develop. Like the regimes in Eastern Europe, Mao will look to Russia as his model. Undoubtedly, tremendous economic progress will be achieved. But the masses, both workers and peasants, will find themselves enslaved by the bureaucracy.

The Stalinists are incorporating into their regime ex-feudal militarists, capitalist elements, and the bureaucratic officialdom in the towns who will occupy positions of privilege and power.

On the basis of such a backward economy, a large scale differentiation among the peasants (as after the Russian revolution during the period of the N.E.P.) aided by the failure to nationalise the land: the capitalist elements in trade, and even in light industry, might provide a base for capitalist counter-revolution. It must be borne in mind that in China the proletariat is weaker in relation to the peasantry than was the case in Russia during the N.E.P. owing to the more backward development of China. Even in Czechoslovakia and other Eastern European countries similarly, where the capitalist elements were relatively weaker, nevertheless the danger of a capitalist overturn existed for a time. The fact that the workers and peasants will not have any democratic control and that the totalitarian tyranny will have superimposed upon it the Asiatic barbarism and cruelties of the old regime, gives rise to this possibility. However, it seems likely that the capitalist elements will be defeated because of the historical tendency of the decay of capitalism on a world scale. The impotence of world imperialism is shown by the fact that whereas they intervened directly against the Chinese revolution in 1925-7, today they look on helplessly at the collapse of the Chiang regime.

However, it is quite likely that Stalin will have a new Tito on his hands. The shrewder capitalist commentators are already speculating on this although they derive cold comfort from it. Mao will have a powerful base in China with its 450-500 million population and its potential resources, and the undoubted mass support his regime will possess in the early stages. The conflicts which will thus open out should be further means of assisting the world working class to understand the real nature of Stalinism.

Read The Whole Article


RENEGADE EYE

At the Dawn of a New Year

By Alan Woods
Friday, 02 January 2009

With the exception of New Year, the most important festivals in the western world are associated with events in the Christian calendar. However, it is well known that these festivals have their real roots in the old pagan religions and were generally linked with the different solstices and their relation to agriculture.

Christmas was the old pagan winter festival derived from the Roman Saturnalia with other pagan admixtures of Germanic and Scandinavian origin. There is no mention of the date of Christ's birth in the Bible. The early Christians celebrated the birth of Christ on the sixth or seventh of January (a tradition still maintained in the Orthodox Church). With their customary opportunism, the leaders of the Church changed the date to the 25th December to take advantage of the old pagan tradition.

Easter was the festival of the Spring Equinox, with its associations with ancient fertility rites (the English word Easter is derived from the pagan goddess Eostre or Ostara). Haloween has roots in the Celtic festival of Samhain, when people communed with the spirits of the dead and thereby averted their anger. There are countless other examples that bear witness to the stubbornness with which humanity clings to the past.

The persistence whereby men and women preserve ideas and beliefs rooted in a remote and primitive past is proof of the profoundly conservative nature of human thought in general. Tradition, habit and routine weigh heavily on human consciousness. As a rule people do not like change, particularly sudden change that upsets their preconceived notions and beliefs.

But at decisive moments a series of small, imperceptible changes reach a critical point where quantity becomes transformed into quality. Then all the old ideas and prejudices are thrown into confusion. Men and women are forced in spite of themselves to question their old ideas, and also the kind of society they live in, its morality and justice.

Such a critical point was reached in 2008, when, after a long period of economic growth, the world economy entered into a sharp decline, which has not yet run its course. This fact has profoundly impacted on the consciousness of all classes in society, from the ruling class, the bankers, politicians and bureaucrats, through the middle class, small businesspeople and intellectuals, to the majority of humankind: the workers, peasants and poor people.

After a long period of relative prosperity, in which the values of "free market economics" were accepted without question and the impressive firework display of globalization dazzled the vision and befuddled the brains of the so-called intelligentsia (including the "Left"), it is no wonder that the first reaction to the economic crisis is one of shock and disbelief. Consciousness, with its innate conservatism, is still lagging far behind events, which are moving at breathtaking speed throughout the planet.

This state of affairs can only be surprising for minds that have been atrophied by formalistic thinking. For anyone with the slightest knowledge of dialectics, it is no surprise at all. Formalism rejects contradictions and cannot cope with them, whereas dialectics embraces contradictions and explains their logic and necessity.



It will take some time for the consciousness of the masses to catch up with events. This consciousness still lives in the past and is hoping against hope that the present crisis will be only a temporary interruption of "normality" which, if we are patient, will surely return. The alleged "backwardness" of the masses is only apparent and is destined to change into its opposite.

The real backwardness is in the psychology of the leaders of the mass organizations: the leaders of the trade unions, the socialist and communist parties, who have long ago abandoned all idea of socialism and adapted themselves to capitalism. Their only aspiration is that capitalism will, for some reason unknown to science, shed its ugly and oppressive features and acquire a humane and progressive character.

But the economic crisis has placed on the order of the day not a peaceful and democratic capitalism, but mass unemployment, savage cuts in wages and conditions, the abolition of social reforms and a general worsening of living standards. This is a recipe for class war on a massive scale. That is the reality of capitalism in 2009 and not the sugary illusions of the reformists who understand nothing and are only capable of seeing the backside of history.

It frequently happens that the intelligent representatives of Capital come to the same conclusions as the Marxists. At the time when the reality of the financial collapse finally made itself clear to all, the Financial Times on 5/11/2008 published a very interesting article by Chrystia Freeland, which deserves to be studied carefully for what it reveals about the current state of mind of the ruling class in the United States.

Ms. Freeland begins with a small anecdote that in the Halloween celebrations last October, in addition to the time-honoured witches and demons, current events inspired many of the revellers at the street party in New York's Greenwich Village to put on a more unusual costume - Sarah Palin disguises. This fact, trivial in itself, reveals the degree of contempt with which people in the USA viewed the discredited Bush administration - a contempt which they subsequently expressed at the polls.

However, far more interesting was the comments this journalist quoted from leading figures in the US Establishment. And when we read these comments, let us bear in mind that they are not meant to be read by ordinary men and women. The Financial Times is not an ordinary newspaper but something like an internal bulletin for the bourgeoisie. This makes what we read here even more important:

"That day a senior Wall Street executive ruefully predicted to me that next year it will be New York bankers who are the nation's villains of choice." And the article continues: "In private, some of America's most influential business and political leaders are uttering the same warning: with the election resolved, the big political story in the US will be the wave of public anger directed at capital and capitalists, particularly of the financial variety." (My emphasis, AW).

These are quite extraordinary things to read in a paper like the FT. What do they mean? They mean that the ruling class in the USA is well aware that the political and social effects of the economic crisis have not yet manifested themselves. The growing anger of the people has temporarily been diverted by the electoral circus (this is its main purpose in any case). The blame for the crisis is placed on the shoulders of the Bush administration in the first place. And while the masses were distracted by the Obama campaign (which undoubtedly sowed great illusions) the bankers and capitalists were temporarily forgotten. But this will not last.

The banker quoted in the above lines is not any banker, but a senior Wall Street executive (who does not want to be named for obvious reasons). What is he predicting? He predicts that as soon as the intoxicating fumes of the Presidential elections clear away, there will be an explosion of popular anger directed against capital and capitalists, particularly of the financial variety. It would be impossible for us to put it any clearer than this! The article continues:

"In recent weeks, a former Clinton cabinet member warned a private equity firm he advises that this new hostility will be the single biggest threat facing the company. An east coast senator told a lunchtime group of Wall Street supporters that public anger toward them will top the political agenda, and expressed sympathy for the peoples' rage. A memo about the financial risks the new president will face prepared for Barack Obama's transition team listed as point one the possibility that ‘sympathetic victims drive policy response' ". (My emphasis, AW)

Here again, the real situation in the USA is admirably expressed. This unnamed former cabinet member warns the US capitalists that they will face the anger of the population, that this question will "top the political agenda" in 2009 and that he himself has some "sympathy for the peoples' rage".

Some of this anger already found expression during the election campaign, when both Democrat and Republican politicians sought popularity by denouncing "Wall Street greed". The article continues:

"But this riveting election campaign, and the financial wildfire that erupted in the middle of it, may actually have served to muffle public anger. The financial crisis is the reason Wall Street is out of favour, to be sure, but from September 15, when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, to October 13, when Treasury secretary Hank Paulson coercibly bought an equity stake in all of America's big banks, the urgency and the severity of the economic threat were so great as to preclude much of a hunt for culprits. The political battle, meanwhile, featured many rhetorical shots aimed at Wall Street, but the real fight was between the two political parties, and their two champions, who have been the main focus of public passion in recent weeks.

"Today, that has changed. The credit crisis, ever so slowly, seems to be easing, and with it the fears of a second Great Depression. America has chosen a new president. The country now has the leisure to reflect on its economic plight - and demand that the man it elected yesterday act on its conclusions."

This is the central problem. Having struggled to divert the attention of the public from the crisis of capitalism by building up the image of Obama as the miracle man, the American ruling class is preparing the ground for a colossal backlash when the miracles do not appear. We continue to read:

"Americans already are unhappy -Wharton economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers have found that overall happiness plunged in September, the month the Dow did, and has now declined as deeply as it did during the 1981 recession. Things are likely to get worse, with further economic contraction and concomitant job losses and bankruptcies. Moreover, the hundreds of billions the state has committed to shore up the financial sector have not translated into cheaper personal credit, or fewer foreclosures, for ordinary Americans.

"Financiers are bracing themselves for a wave of public rage - hence, for instance, the recent meeting at which they agreed collectively to promise not to use the Treasury's $135bn capital infusion to pay bankers' bonuses. They know, however, that gestures like this one won't be enough."

Barak Obama reminds one of the fake medicine men in the Old West who travelled around the small towns selling bottles of "snake oil" guaranteed to cure every known ailment for a modest fee. The promise was highly attractive and many people queued up to purchase this wondrous medicine. The problems arose when, after consuming it, no signs of improvement were observed, by which time the medicine man, now considerably richer, had driven his wagon to the next town. However, Barak Obama cannot just get into his wagon and move on. He must stay and face the consequences of the expectations he has aroused.

The revelations of fraud and downright corporate robbery that are already emerging will pour petrol on the flames. Smart politicians like congressman Henry Waxman will make their careers from mercilessly exposing leading hedge fund managers in Washington. In an attempt to pacify public opinion there will be Enron-style trials, and some bankers are certain to go to jail. But all this will not be enough to prevent the gathering storm. The article ends with a significant historical parallel:

"Americans will be pressing their new leader to help them determine who is to blame. That is, after all, a favourite question of angry people during turbulent times: it was one of the slogans of the Russian revolutionaries. If he is to be successful, the president-elect must find a way to move the national debate beyond this vengeful query to the other great Russian revolutionary cri de guerre: What is to be done?"

The problem for the ruling classes of the USA and the rest of the world at the dawn of the New Year is that they have not the slightest idea of what to do. The vast quantities of money that have been handed over to the bankers in various ways have had very little observable results. The snake oil is not working. The banks pocket the loot and refuse to lend to the consumer, the industrialist or even to each other. Demand and credit continue to shrink, leading to more bankruptcies, closures and unemployment.

At first sight 2009 has opened under the black flag of reaction. Israeli imperialism has concentrated all its military might on the bloody task of battering a defenceless Gaza into submission. As usual the "United Nations" display utter impotence, while the leaders of the "Free world" reveal their nauseating hypocrisy by placing victims and aggressors on an equal plane, shaking their heads and weeping crocodile tears about the evils of "violence".

The bloody events in Gaza are a further expression of the impasse of capitalism on a global scale. It manifests itself in universal turbulence at every level: economic, social, political and military. These are the convulsions of a socio-economic system that has no future yet refuses to die. The results of this contradiction will be untold misery, poverty, unemployment, wars, death and suffering for millions. This is the only future that capitalism has to offer the peoples of the world at the dawn of 2009.

But appearances are deceptive. Beneath the surface, powerful forces are maturing. As the crisis unfolds, millions of people will begin to draw the necessary conclusion, which is this: the capitalist system must die in order that humanity can live. The capitalist class is well aware of the dangers facing them. The strategists of Capital look to the future with fear and trembling. The pages of their press are filled with the blackest pessimism and foreboding.

The year 2009 is a year of many anniversaries. It is the anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, when the people of that courageous island stood up against the might of US imperialism and defeated, ending the rule of landlordism and capitalism. Today the Venezuelan Revolution is reaching the decisive moment when it must also break the economic power of the oligarchy by expropriating the landlords and capitalists, or else face defeat in the future.

As they will soon be reminding us, this is also twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That was a time when the capitalists and their spokespersons felt triumphant. They announced the end of Communism, the end of Socialism, even the end of History. But now it is clear to all that their predictions were false. What collapsed 20 years ago was not socialism or communism but only a bureaucratic and totalitarian caricature of socialism.

The collapse of Stalinism was a great historical drama, but in retrospect it will be seen by history as only the prelude to an even greater drama: the collapse of capitalism, which is already being prepared. Of course, capitalism will never collapse under its own weight, through its own contradictions. History requires the conscious intervention of men and women, fighting for their own emancipation. It requires the revolutionary movement of the working class, organized and led by its most conscious representatives.

January 1919 is a tragic anniversary in our revolutionary calendar. It is the anniversary of the Spartakist uprising in Berlin, which ended in defeat and the murder of two of the most outstanding revolutionary leaders of the international proletariat: Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. That was a terrible blow against the German working class. Then too, the bourgeois and their agents in the leadership of the Social Democracy, Noske, Ebert and Scheidermann, felt that they had triumphed. But the German proletariat recovered from the defeat - as the workers of all countries always recover from every defeat - and went on to defeat the Kapp putsch in 1920 and two years later formed a mass Communist Party.

1919 was not only the anniversary of a terrible defeat but also of a great step forward. In March of that year in Moscow the Communist International held its first Congress, uniting the genuine proletarian revolutionaries of the whole world. In the programmatic documents of the first four years of the CI we find the summing up of all the rich experience and theoretical heritage of our movement, beginning with the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels.

Today, ninety years later, we stand on the basis of these marvellous ideas, which have been vindicated by history and which today are more relevant than ever. While the bourgeoisie and its ideological defenders and reformist hangers-on are plunged in despair and pessimism, we Marxists look to the future with confidence and optimism. The American banker who spoke to the Financial Times last Halloween was already terrified of a phantom - the same phantom that haunted Europe in 1848 - the phantom of Communism.

The forces of genuine Marxism were thrown back for decades by the material conditions of capitalism and the crimes of Stalinism, forced to swim against a powerful current. Now the tide of history is beginning to flow in another direction and we are beginning to swim, not against the current of history, but together with it.

The International Marxist Tendency, which is proud to stand on the basis of the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, has consistently defended these ideas when it was difficult to do so. Other tendencies that laid claim to the name of Marxism have sunk without trace or else abandoned the defence of these ideas. The next period will create the most favourable conditions for the growth of the IMT.

When the agents of the ruling class murdered Luxemburg and Liebknecht, they thought they had settled the matter. When the agents of Stalin murdered Leon Trotsky, they thought the same. But you cannot murder an idea whose time has come. On this historic anniversary, as we pay homage to the memory of the martyrs of our movement, we call out with a confident voice: "WE ARE HERE AND READY TO CONTINUE THE FIGHT!"

RENEGADE EYE

John Peterson: The Spanish Revolution 70 Years Later

On November 13, 2008 at Mayday Books in Minneapolis, Graeme and I, attended a forum on the Spanish Civil War. The speakers included this blog team member John Peterson, talking about the Trotskyist position on the war. In addition an anarchist and moderator spoke.

A good movie to see about the Spanish Civil War is Ken Loach's Land and Freedom, based on George Orwell's Homage To Catalonia. In addition Bertolucci's 1900 deals with lessons similar to those of the Spanish Civil War.

RENEGADE EYE

Blogs and Food Part I

There is no interest in my sardine tacos, or my use of coffee as a spice. I asked several bloggers, to send me recipes; preferably easy to prepare, common ingredients, ethnic etc. In addition if I print the recipe, I'll plug your blog. Send recipes to me at the email address at my profile. I was going to print them all in one post, but I acquired too many. Political agreement doesn't matter. Atleast every month I'll continue this series. Leave comments about food, the blog, restaraunts etc. Everyone who sent recipes, will eventually have them published. I'm going in random order.

My first recipe comes from Chris Ioanniu G, from Athens Greece. Chris's blog is Blog #1. It covers art and on occasion politics. My favorite post was about film credits and poster graphic designer Saul Bass. That post will give you the feeling, you get when you see great art. Chris got on my good side with this.

Now the main event:

Lemon Anise Cookies

Ingredients

½ cup oil

½ cup sugar

½ tsp anise extract

½ tsp lemon extract

3 cups flour

3 tsp baking powder

Prep Time

15-30 minutes

Ouantity

About 3 dozen

Preparation Instructions

Beat eggs with mixer 3 minutes then stir in oil, extracts & sugar. Add flour and baking powder to the mixture, mix to form dough. Form balls & roll in the palm of your hands to form 4 inch strips & then shape into a knot. Place on lightly grease cookie sheets and bake at 350 for 10 - 15 minutes. Cookies are done when lightly browned. Serving: serve warm with coffee or cool and frost with a vanilla cream frosting using confecters sugar a little warm milk, tab of melted butter, 1 tsp of vanilla extractRENEGADE EYE

Cuba: "One day of the blockade is equal to 139 urban buses."

By Darrall Cozens
Wednesday, 14 November 2007
The large sign on the wall says it all: "One day of the blockade is equal to 139 urban buses."

There is no doubt that Cuba has suffered at the hands of the USA since the blockade was imposed. Yet despite being starved of essential resources the Cuban people have demonstrated a remarkable resilience and inventiveness. As they say here: "Todo se resuelve." Everything will be solved.

When you walk around the streets of the capital, you can see examples everywhere of this creativity in the face of adversity. Buses are often made from tin boxes put together and then placed on the back of a lorry. Children make scooters from old bike parts. Old cars from pre-1958 trundle along on a wing and a prayer. Yet these old models and lorries belch out choking thick black smoke that pollutes the streets.
It is, however, in the area of medicine and health that the blockade takes its greatest toll. Children suffering from kidney problems are denied basic life saving help in drug treatment. This is only one example. In the early 1990s after the collapse of the subsidies from the Soviet Union in exchange for Cuban sugar, some people suffered from blindness resulting from a vitamin deficiency. This was cured from scarce resources.

Cuba's ability to get by whilst at the same time help others has to be admired and it is an indication that the Cuban revolution is still alive despite all the difficulties it faces. Despite being isolated at the behest of the USA, Cuba has a patient doctor ratio that is the envy of even so-called advanced countries. And while Cuba takes care of its own in terms of health care, it also exports its skills and personnel to other countries.
The Granma newspaper of October 28th reported just one example. The retired Bolivian officer Mario Teran, who fired the fatal shot that killed Che Guevara, was cured of blindness in Bolivia under Operacion Milagro staffed by Cuban doctors. Since 1963 Cuba has sent medical teams to help others even more unfortunate than itself. Some 42,000 Cuban medical staff are active in 102 countries around the world and 53,000 young people are being trained in medicine both in Cuba and in their own countries. 60 million people world wide are benefiting from this medical help and since the programmes began some 300 million have been treated. In Nicaragua alone since Daniel Ortega was elected back in January some 10,000 have received eye treatment and for many it is the first time that they have been able to see. The whole of Misión Barrio Adentro which provides basic primary health care in the poor communities in Venezuela would not have been possible without the 20,000 Cuban doctors and nurses who participate in it.

The vote therefore at the United Nations to call on the USA to end its blockade of the island was welcomed in Cuba. 184 countries voted against the USA blockade and only four in favour of it. The USA was able to muster voting allies in favour of its policy from Israel, the Marshall Islands and Palau. Yet the question that has to be asked is why the blockade has not ended already, since the UN has voted by majority since 1992 against it. On the one hand it is clear that the UN's decisions can be vetoed by powerful members and therefore it is an instrument of the status quo on a world scale, used as a fig leaf when it suits the interests of imperialism, discarded when it goes against them. On the other hand the need is raised for an international campaign based on workers organisations that can truly defend the gains of the Cuban revolution.

Despite the heroic attempts by the Cuban people to carry on under extremely harsh conditions, problems remain. In the capital Havana many buildings are in a state of collapse yet provide homes to many Cubans. Roads are full of potholes and when it rains, they fill up with water that lies stagnant, a breeding ground for mosquitoes. There are regular disinfestations of commercial premises using smoke machines.
The blockade of Cuba has also meant that many traditional industries like sugar have reached the stage of collapse. However, unlike in capitalist countries, all workers from the sugar industry have been either re-employed elsewhere or been given access to full time education.

The sugar workers of Cuba were like the miners in the UK. Thatcher set out deliberately to destroy the mining industry in order to destroy the NUM. The sugar industry here has collapsed due to a combination of the end of subsidised purchases from the Soviet bloc and the collapse of prices in the world market, with the result that the most militant section of the working class has been dispersed.

There are two currencies working side by side; the official national currency and convertible pesos which are exchanged on par with the US dollar at a rate of 1:1. The local currency will pay for newspapers, public transport and is used in some food and clothes shops. Even if you are working and getting paid in the national currency, most find it very hard to make ends meet. If you want shoes or many items of clothing, you need convertible pesos. How do ordinary Cubans get them?

Firstly, there are remittances sent to families by Cubans abroad. Secondly, you work in the growing tourist industry and get tips from foreigners. Thirdly, you hustle. It is called "jineterismo". You are approached all the time by mainly young men, but often young women, who start by asking the time. If you respond, the play continues until you are hooked. And this is a problem. How do you know if a Cuban wants to speak to you because they are interested in what you think or wants to find out where you are from? You don't until gradually the motives become clear. On my second day here 6 young men tried to hustle me. Initially I engaged in conversation and it soon became clear what the main gripe was.

People also get by selling sandwiches on street stalls or by directly begging, especially the old.

The worst aspect of all of this is that on almost every street corner in the tourist centre of Havana there are pimps and prostitutes, while on opposite corners there are one or two police, some with dogs and some without, stopping and checking the IDs of anyone they want to stop. Yet prostitution is illegal and severely punished.

There is also a growing problem of street thefts using physical violence, something that previously did not exist. But people have to survive by any means possible.

On every street corner and in every doorway there are groups of young people, especially men, with nothing to do. Some of them might be receiving money from relatives abroad so they can live without working. Poverty is evident in terms of diet and clothing. Sections of society have become marginalised and therefore many seek a solution to their problems not in collective action but as individuals against the system

Almost every building has one or two guards in case someone tries to steal something. I walked past a very small organic garden in the old part of the city and there was a guard with a dog. He explained that it was his job to ensure that no plants were stolen!

This fear of theft reflects a growing unease and malaise. People have to survive and will find any and every method in order to do so.

While these problems exist in Cuba, they are nothing compared with the situation of poverty, destitution and crime one finds in any Latin American country and by comparison living standards (in terms of health care, access to education, living expectancy, etc) are still much higher in Cuba.

The other thing that strikes you is the growing level of disbelief between government pronouncements and the reality at street level. The papers are full of targets that have been met in different areas of the economy, but many basic needs remain unmet at street level. Even the TV voices occasional criticisms where for example a theatre has been closed for 6 months for minor repairs that should only have taken a few weeks, yet when wood was needed to effect the repairs it was not available.

People in the street realise that many of the shortages are due to the blockade, yet they are also beginning to realise that the way society is organised also has a lot to do with it.

On the one hand the planned and state owned economy has enabled Cuba to enjoy free education, free health care, very cheap housing and public transport that is so cheap it is practically free. Yet on the other hand there is almost no opportunity for ordinary Cubans to participate in the running of society. Socialism needs the oxygen of a workers' democracy with all citizens having the right to decide on policy at all levels.

The growing discussion here is therefore, where is Cuba going and what part can everyone play in that discussion? What you don't often hear is a desire to emulate the model of capitalist development that took place in the old Soviet bloc countries, but China is growing in influence here with 3 TV stations that all Cubans can access. Is this a sign that certain sections of the bureaucracy are looking at the Chinese model of capitalist development controlled by a "Communist Party" as a way out of the impasse?

In this context the recent visit of Hugo Chavez provoked some very interesting reactions. In his speech that was televised live he declared that he was a Trotskyist. When the speech was retransmitted that part was edited out and the press also said nothing of it. Yet millions heard it. It was just like the old photo of Lenin on a wooden podium with Trotsky standing on the steps that was airbrushed under Stalinism.
The effect here was electric. On the one hand those who are looking for a revolutionary Marxist way out of the crisis based on defence of the planned economy but seeing the need to extend the revolution to other countries as well as fighting for a genuine workers democracy were emboldened. Those who had perhaps only heard of Trotsky but knew nothing of him were then asking how they could get hold of his writings. Chavez is a hero here, so if he is a Trotskyist then they should be too! Even elements within the military are reading Leon Trotsky in their search for a solution.

There is an opening. Fidel released a speech that was published in Granma, official organ of the Cuban CP, on October 27th. The occasion was the 48th anniversary of the death of a leading revolutionary, Camilo Cienfuegos. Fidel quoted the famous words of Abraham Lincoln: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." The words were directed at the USA but could equally be directed at sections of the bureaucracy here, which have been criticised by Fidel in the past.

What epitomised what is happening was a meeting that I went to on October 31st. It had been billed as a discussion on October 1917. The actual title was the influence of different socialist ideas on the Cuban CP up to 1953. Out of the three speakers on the platform, two of them mentioned the importance of Leon Trotsky and his writings, with one specifically saying that the development of the Cuban Communist Party cannot be understood without people having read the ideas of Leon Trotsky. There were about 70 people at the meeting.

These are early days here. There has been a small opening that is pushed wider by events, such as the visit of Chavez. There is a thirst for ideas at all levels of society. Ideas that will defend the gains of the Cuban revolution, will not mean a return to capitalism, but will mean a growing influence of the ideas of Trotsky. The concept of Socialism in one country has proved to be a fallacy as has the theory of the two stage revolution. Only the idea of the permanent revolution of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky will provide the answer to the Cuban revolution.


Havana
November 1st 2007
RENEGADE EYE

THE DINNER PARTY GAME

The rules for The Dinner Party Game:

1) You can only invite four people. The can be living or dead, from any time in history.

2) All previous games don't count anymore. I've played with different rules before, as the party can only be bloggers.

I'll start

Marlon Brando

Astor Piazzolla

Pablo Picasso

Leon Trotsky

RENEGADE EYE

Token Open Thread Excluding Spam: Blog Surf

Occasional poster here Sphinx at Morning Fire has a long post about the Palestinian situation. It is worth reading, with much to discuss, as the nature of Hamas, Fatah and the boycott of Israeli academics.

I have been having correspondance with a surrealist blogger at The Midlope, including talking about Trotsky's relationship with Andre Breton and Diego Rivera

One of my favorite blogs is Histologian. This Greek journalist has a story about agent provocateurs in large demonstrations including the anti-globalization movements. The Republican Party convention will be in St. Paul, MN, and I expect it to be a provocateurs gathering.

Louis Proyect The Unrepentant Marxist, has a story about the checkered history of "The Nation Magazine", initiated by after Cindy Sheehan quit the antiwar movement, she denounced the Democratic Party. "The Nation" and the MSM left out her attacks on the party. The magazine goes back to the days of the abolitionists. Even at that time, their politics was as sharp as a butter knife.

ADDENDUM

My friend wrestled Chris Benoit when he was a rookie, wrestling in Calgary. He was a loose cannon even then. My friend saw him hit a child in a wheelchair. That was a glimpse of things to come. Benoit didn't have a steroid problem, he always was a sociopath. The murders were not rage killings, they were ritualistic and planned.

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RENEGADE EYE

The Non-Jewish Jew

Dennis Prager a television and radio regular, is called a Zionist, conservative commentator. Prager is the one who first raised the fuss about Congressman Keith Ellison swearing on the Koran, for his inaugeration ceremony. Ellison is the first Muslim in the House of Representatives in the USA. I'm from Ellison's district. He is a typical slightly left liberal politician, who was smeared by Prager.

A few weeks ago, Prager wrote an essay about the non-Jewish Jew, That term was invented by Isaac Deutscher, the biographer of Trotsky. It pertains to the leftist, internationalist Jew. Prager tries to use ex-Trotskyist Deutscher's writing against the left. Deutscher in his later years identified with socialist-humanism. In his words to sum up his Jewish identity. "Religion? I am an atheist. Jewish nationalism? I am an internationalist. In neither sense am I therefore a Jew. I am, however, a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated. I am a Jew because I feel the pulse of Jewish history; because I should like to do all I can to assure the real, not spurious, security and self-respect of the Jews." Deutscher uses the term 'Non-Jewish Jew" and not "Self Hating Jew", often used in Zionist polemics.

Prager's Polemic

What do Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Noam Chomsky and George Soros have in common?


They were/are all radicals, born to Jewish parents, had no Jewish identity and hurt Jews (not to mention non-Jews).


The term "non-Jewish Jew" is generally attributed to the Jewish historian Isaac Deutscher, who wrote an essay by that name in 1954. The term describes the individual who, though born a Jew (Judaism consists of a national/peoplehood identity, not only a religious one), identifies solely as a citizen of the world and not as a Jew, either nationally or religiously.


Once the walls of Jewish ghettos broke down and European Jews were allowed to leave Jewish societies, many Jews became non-Jewish Jews. In most cases, either they or their children assimilated into the societies in which they lived. However, a small but significant percentage became radicalized. They came to loathe "bourgeois," i.e., traditional middle class, values and Judeo-Christian society; Western national identities (though they generally supported anti-Western national identities); and they particularly loathed Jewish religious and national identity.


Karl Marx, the grandson of two Orthodox rabbis (and, to be entirely accurate, son of parents who converted to Christianity), wrote one of the most significant anti-Semitic essays of the 19th century, "On the Jewish Question" (1844). In it one finds such statements:


"Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist. . . . The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of the world. . . . The social emancipation of Jewry is the emancipation of society from Jewry."


Leon Trotsky, born Lev Bronstein, may be regarded as the intellectual father of Russian, later Soviet, Communism. He along with Stalin and three others fought to succeed Lenin as leader of the Communist Party after Lenin's death in 1924. In 1920, when Trotsky was head of the Red Army, Moscow's chief rabbi, Rabbi Jacob Mazeh, asked him to use the army to protect the Jews from pogromist attacks. Trotsky is reported to have responded, "Why do you come to me? I am not a Jew." To which Rabbi Mazeh answered: "That's the tragedy. It's the Trotskys who make revolutions, and it's the Bronsteins who pay the price."


Noam Chomsky has devoted much of his life to working against America and Israel. He is alienated from the very two identities into which he was born. Indeed he has vilified both his whole life. To cite but one example, he traveled to Lebanon to appear with Hizbollah leader Sayyed Nasrallah and lend his support to a group that is committed to the annihilation of Israel and is officially listed as a terrorist organization by the United States.


George Soros is the fourth example of an individual born Jewish who has become a radical world citizen who is alienated from America and from his Jewish origins, and damages both.


As described by Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic, "George Soros is ostentatiously indifferent to his own Jewishness. He is not a believer. He has no Jewish communal ties. He certainly isn't a Zionist. He told Connie Bruck in The New Yorker — testily, she recounted — that 'I don't deny the Jews their right to a national existence — but I don't want to be part of it.'"


Writing in The Wall Street Journal, writer Joshua Muravchik reported that Soros has publicly likened Israel to the Nazis.


Of course, Soros supports Palestinian nationalism, but that is a consistent feature of radicals — anti-Jewish and anti-American nationalisms are good, Jewish and American nationalisms are bad. Thus, as reported in the Jerusalem Post, "Soros and his wealthy Jewish American friends have now decided to aim their fire directly at Israel . . . to form a political lobby that will weaken the influence of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC."


How to explain such Jews? People with no national or religious roots who become politically active will often seek to undermine the national and religious roots of others, especially those in their own national/religious group. It is akin to the special animosity some ex-Catholics have toward the Church. Non-Jewish Jews are far more likely to work to weaken Christianity in America than Jewish Jews, especially religious Jews. Religious Jews celebrate religious Christians.


Jews with no religious or national identity do not like Jews who have those identities, and Americans who have likewise become world citizens do not much care for Americans who wave the American flag.


Just as chauvinism — excessive and amoral nationalism — can lead to nihilism, so, too, the absence of any national or religious identity can lead to nihilism. The radical non-Jewish Jew loves humanity, but hurts real humans, especially his own.

The conversation between Leon Trotsky and Rabbi Mazeh, occured. They were joking with one another. The rabbi also said, "The Trotskys lead the revolution and the Bronsteins pay for it." They were having laughs together. I'm not directly related to Trotsky, but my family tree has been traced to intersect with his family's in Russia. Prager is ahistorical. Trotsky was against Hitler a decade before Winston Churchill. He wasn't opposed to a Jewish state, after he saw the extent of anti-Semitism in Germany, without believing in Zionism.

As a Jewish, internationalist and socialist, the Non-Jewish Jew should not be defined by a Dennis Prager.

From the American Socialist Collection of Sol Dolinger

By virtue of his special environment and social position,
the “non-Jewish Jew” from Spinoza to Freud has often
made important contributions to science, culture, politics.

Message of the Non-Jewish Jew

by Isaac Deutscher

The following article by the biographer of Stalin and Trotsky, whose writings on Russia and Eastern Europe appear regularly in periodicals throughout the world, is based on a lecture delivered in London last February during Jewish Book Week to the World Jewish Congress. This text, revised and extended by the author, appeared in Universities and Left Review, and is reprinted here with the author’s permission. A summary of the lecture had previously appeared in the British Jewish Observer and Middle East Review.

I REMEMBER that when as a child I read the Midrash I came across a story and a description of a scene which gripped my imagination. It was the story of Rabbi Meir, the great saint, sage, and the pillar of Mosaic orthodoxy and co-author of the Mishna, who took lessons in theology from a heretic Elisha ben Abiyuh, nicknamed Akher (The Stranger). Once on a Sabbath, Rabbi Meir went out on a trip with his teacher, and as usual they became engaged in deep argument. The heretic was riding a donkey, and Rabbi Meir, as he could not ride on a Sabbath, walked by his side and listened so intently to the words of wisdom falling from heretical lips, that he failed to notice that he and his teacher had reached the ritual boundary which Jews were not allowed to cross on a Sabbath. At that moment the great heretic turned to his pupil and said: “Look, we have reached the boundary—we must part now: you must not accompany me any further—go back!” Rabbi Meir went back to the Jewish community while the heretic rode on—beyond the boundaries of Jewry.

There was enough in this scene to puzzle an orthodox Jewish child. Why, I wondered, did Rabbi Meir take his lessons from the heretic? Why did he show him so much affection? Why did he defend him against other rabbis? My heart, it seems, was with the heretic. Who was he?,

I asked. He appeared to be in Jewry and yet out of it. He showed a curious respect for his pupil’s orthodoxy when he sent him back to the Jews on the holy Sabbath; but he himself, disregarding canon and ritual, rode beyond the boundaries. When I was thirteen or perhaps fourteen I began to write a drama on Akher and Rabbi Meir and tried to find out more about Akher’s character. What made him transcend Judaism? Was he a Gnostic? Was he the adherent of some other school of Greek or Roman philosophy? I could not find the answers, and I did not manage to go beyond the first act of my drama.

The Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry belongs to a Jewish tradition. You may, if you like, view Akher as a prototype of those great revolutionaries of modern thought about whom I am going to speak this evening—you may do so, if you necessarily wish to place them within any Jewish tradition. They all went beyond the boundaries of Jewry. They all—Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Freud—found Jewry too narrow, too archaic, and too constricting. They all looked for ideals and fulfilment beyond it, and they represent the sum and substance of much that is greatest in modern thought, the sum and substance of the most profound upheavals that have taken place in philosophy, sociology, economics, and politics in the last three centuries.

HAVE they anything in common with one another? Have they perhaps impressed mankind’s thought so greatly because of their special “Jewish genius"? I do not believe in the exclusive genius of any race. Yet I think that in some ways they were very Jewish indeed. They had in themselves something of the quintessence of Jewish life and of the Jewish intellect. They were a priori exceptional in that as Jews they dwelt on the borderlines of various civilizations, religions, and national cultures. They were born and brought up on the borderlines of various epochs. Their minds matured where the most diverse cultural influences crossed and fertilized each other. They lived on the margins or in the nooks and crannies of their respective nations. They were each in society and yet not in it, of it and yet not of it. It was this that enabled them to rise in thought above their societies, above their nations, above their times and generations, and to strike out mentally into wide new horizons and far into the future.

It was, I think, an English Protestant biographer of Spinoza who said that only a Jew could carry out that upheaval in the philosophy of his age that Spinoza carried out—a Jew who was not bound by the dogmas of the Christian churches, Catholic and Protestant, nor by those of the faith in which he had been born. Neither Descartes nor Leibnitz could free themselves to the same extent from the shackles of the medieval scholastical tradition in philosophy.

Spinoza was brought up under the influences of Spain, Holland, Germany, England, and the Italy of the Renaissance—all the trends of human thought that were at work at that time shaped his mind. His native Holland was in the throes of bourgeois revolution. His ancestors, before they came to the Netherlands, had been Spanish-Portugese Maranim, crypto-Jews, at heart Jews, outwardly Christians, as were many Spanish Jews on whom the Inquisition had forced the baptism. After the Spinozas had come to the Netherlands, they disclosed themselves as Jews; but, of course, neither they nor their close descendants were strangers to the intellectual climate of Christianity.

Spinoza himself, when he started out as independent thinker and as initiator of modern Bible criticism, seized at once the cardinal contradiction in Judaism, the contradiction between the monotheistic and universal God and the setting in which that God appears in the Jewish religion—as a God attached to one people only; the contradiction between the universal God and his “chosen people.” You know what the realization of this contradiction brought upon Spinoza: banishment from the Jewish community and excommunication. He had to fight against the Jewish clergy which, having itself recently been a victim of the Inquisition, was infected with the spirit of the Inquisition. Then he had to face the hostility of the Catholic clergy and Calvinistic priests. All his life was a struggle to overcome the limitations of the religions and cultures of his time.

AMONG Jews of great intellect exposed to the corradiation of various religions and cultures some were so torn by contradictory influences and pressures that they could not find spiritual balance and broke down. One of these was Uriel Acosta, Spinoza’s elder and forerunner. Many times he rebelled against Judaism; and many times he recanted. The rabbis excommunicated him repeatedly; and repeatedly he prostrated himself before them on the floor of the Amsterdam Synagogue. Spinoza had the great intellectual happiness of being able to harmonize the conflicting influences and to create out of them a higher outlook on the world and an integrated philosophy.

Almost in every generation, whenever the Jewish intellectual, placed at the concatenation of various cultures, struggles with himself and with the problems of his time, we find someone who, like Uriel Acosta, breaks down under the burden, and someone who, like Spinoza, makes of that burden the wings of his greatness. Heine was in a sense the Uriel Acosta of a latter age. His relation to Marx, Spinoza’s intellectual grandson, is comparable to Uriel Acosta’s relation to Spinoza

Heine was torn between Christianity and Jewry, and between France and Germany. In his native Rhineland there clashed the influences of the French Revolution and of the Napoleonic Empire with those of the old Holy Roman Empire of the German Kaisers. He grew up within the orbit of classical German philosophy and within the orbit of French Republicanism; and he saw Kant as a Robespierre and Fichte as a Napoleon in the realm of the spirit; and so he describes them in one of the most profound and moving passages of Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland. In his later years he came in contact with French and German socialism and communism; and he met Marx with that apprehensive admiration and sympathy with which Acosta had met Spinoza.

Marx likewise grew up in the Rhineland. His parents having ceased to be Jews, he did not struggle with the Jewish heritage as Heine did. All the more intense was his opposition to the social and spiritual backwardness of contemporary Germany. An exile most of his life, his thought was shaped by German philosophy, French socialism, and English political economy. In no other contemporary mind did such diverse influences meet so fruitfully. Marx rose above German philosophy, French socialism, and English political economy; he absorbed what was best in each of these trends and transcended the limitations of each.

To come nearer to our time: Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Freud—every one of them was formed amid historic cross currents. Rosa Luxemburg is a unique blend of the German, Polish, and Russian characters and of the Jewish temperament; Trotsky was the pupil of a Lutheran Russo-German gymnasium in cosmopolitan Odessa on the fringe of the Greek-Orthodox Empire of the Czars; and Freud’s mind matured in Vienna in estrangement from Jewry and in opposition to the Catholic clericalism of the Hapsburg capital. All of them had this in common, that the very conditions in which they lived and worked did not allow them to reconcile themselves to ideas which were nationally or religiously limited and induced them to strive for a universal Weltanschauung.

Spinoza’s ethics were no longer the Jewish ethics, but the ethics of man at large—just as his God was no longer the Jewish God: his God, merged with nature, shed his separate and distinctive divine identity. Yet, in a way, Spinoza’s God and ethics were still Jewish, only that his was the Jewish monotheism carried to its logical conclusion and the Jewish universal God thought out to the end; and once he had been thought out to the end, he ceased to be Jewish.

HEINE wrestled with Jewry all his life; his attitude towards it was characteristically ambivalent, full of love-hate or hate-love. He was in this respect inferior to Spinoza who, excommunicated by the Jews, did not become a Christian. Heine did not have Spinoza’s strength of mind and character; and he lived in a society which even in the first decades of the nineteenth century was still more backward than Dutch society had been in the seventeenth. At first he pinned his hopes on that pseudo-emancipation of Jews, the ideal of which Moses Mendelsohn had expressed in the words: “Be a Jew inside your home and a man outside.” The timidity of that German-Jewish ideal was of a piece with the paltry liberalism of the gentile German bourgeoisie: The German Liberal was a “free man” inside his home and an allertreuester Untertane outside. This could not satisfy Heine for long. He abandoned Jewry and surrendered to Christianity in order to obtain an “entry ticket to European culture.” At heart he was never reconciled to the abandonment and the conversion. His rejection of Jewish orthodoxy runs through the whole of his work. His Don Isaac says to the Rabbi von Bacherach: “I could not be one of you. I like your cooking much better than I like your religion. No, I could not be one of you; and I suspect that even at the best of times, under the rule of your Kind David, in the best of your times, I would have run away from you and gone to the temples of Assyria and Babylon which were full of the love and the joy of life.” Yet, it was a fiery and resentful Jew who had, in An Edom, “gewaltig beschworen den tausendjaechrigen Schmerz."

Marx, about twenty years younger, surmounted the problem which tormented Heine. Only once did he come to grips with it, in his youthful and famous Zur Judenfrage. This was his unreserved refection of Jewry. Apologists of Jewish orthodoxy and Jewish nationalism have because of it severely attacked Marx as an “ant-Semite.” Yet, I think that Marx went to the very heart of the matter when he said that Jewry had survived “not in spite of history but in history and through history,” that it owed its survival to the distinctive role that the Jews had played as agents of a money economy in environments which lived in a natural economy, that Judaism was essentially a theoretical epitome of market relationships and the faith of the merchant; and that Christian Europe, as it developed from feudalism to capitalism, became Jewish in a sense. Marx saw Christ as the “theorizing Jew,” the Jew as a “practical Christian” and, therefore, the “practical” bourgeois Christian as a “Jew.” Since he treated Judaism as the religious reflection of the bourgeois way of thought, he saw bourgeois Europe as becoming assimilated to Jewry. His ideal was not the equality of Jew and Gentile in a “Judaized" capitalist society, but the emancipation of Jew and non-Jew alike from the bourgeois way of life, or, as he put it provocatively in his somewhat over-paradoxical Young Hegelian, idiom, in the “emancipation of society from Jewry.” His idea was as universal as Spinoza’s yet advanced in time by two hundred years—it was the idea of socialism and of the classless and stateless society.

AMONG Marx’s many disciples and followers hardly any were, in spirit and temperament, as close to him as Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky. Their affinity with him shows itself in their dialectically dramatic vision of the world and of its class struggles and in that exceptional concord of thought, passion, and imagination which gives to their language and style a peculiar clarity, density, and richness. (Bernard Shaw had probably these qualities in mind when he spoke of Marx’s "peculiarly Jewish literary gifts.") Like Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky strove, together with their non-Jewish comrades, for the universal, as against the particularist, and for the internationalist, as against the nationalist, solutions to the problems of their time. Rosa Luxemburg sought to transcend the contradiction between the German reformist socialism and the Russian revolutionary Marxism. She sought to inject into German socialism something of the Russian and Polish revolutionary elan and idealism, something of that “revolutionary romanticism” which so great a realist as Lenin unabashingly extolled; and occasionally she tried to transplant the Western European democratic spirit and tradition into the socialist underground movements of Eastern Europe. She failed in her main purpose and paid with her life. But not only she paid for it. In her assassination Hohenzolleern Germany celebrated to last triumph and Nazi Germany—its first.

Trotsky, the author of the Permanent Revolution, had before him the vision of a global upheaval transforming mankind. The leader, together with Lenin, of the Russian revolution and the founder of the Red Army, he came in conflict with the State he had helped to create when that State and its leaders put up the banner of socialism in one country. Not for him was the limitation of the vision of socialism to the boundaries of one country.

All these great revolutionaries were extremely vulnerable. They were, as Jews, rootless, in a sense; but they were so only in some respects, for they had the deepest roots in intellectual tradition and in the noblest aspirations of their times. Yet, whenever religious intolerance or nationalist emotion was on the ascendant, whenever dogmatic narrow-mindedness and fanaticism triumphed, they were the first victims. They were excommunicated by Jewish rabbis; they were persecuted by Christian priests; they were hunted down by the gendarmes of absolute rulers and by the soldateska; they were hated by pseudo-democratic philistines; and they were expelled by their own parties. Nearly all of them were exiled from their countries; and the writings of all were burned at the stake at one time or another. Spinoza’s name could not be mentioned for over a century after his death—even Leibnitz, who was indebted to Spinoza for so much of his thought, did not dare to mention it. Trotsky is still under anathema in Russia today. The names of Marx, Heine, Freud, and Rosa Luxemburg were forbidden in Germany quite recently. But theirs is the ultimate victory. After a century during which Spinoza’s name was covered with oblivion they put up monuments to him and acknowledged him as the greatest fructifier of the human mind. Herder once said about Goethe: “I wish Goethe read some Latin books apart from Spinoza’s Ethics." Goethe was indeed steeped in Spinoza’s thought; and Heine rightly describes him as “Spinoza who has shed the cloak of his geometrical-mathematical formulae and stands before us a lyrical poet.” Heine himself has triumphed over Hitler and Goebbels. The other revolutionaries of this line will also survive and sooner or later triumph over those who have worked hard to efface their memory.

I AM afraid I have said very little about Freud. But it is very obvious why he belongs to the same intellectual line. In his teachings, whatever their merits and demerits, he transcends the limitations of earlier psychological schools. The man whom he analyzes is not a German or an Englishman, a Russian or a Jew—it is the universal man in whom the subconscious and the conscious struggle, the man who is part of nature and part of society, the man whose desires and cravings, scruples and inhibitions, anxieties and predicaments are essentially the same no matter to what race, religion, or nation he belongs. From their viewpoint the Nazis were right when they coupled Freud’s name with Marx’s and burned the books of both.

All these thinkers and revolutionaries have had certain philosophical principles in common, although their philosophies vary of course, from century to century and from generation to generation. They are all, from Spinoza to Freud, determinists. They all hold that the universe is ruled by laws inherent in it and governed by Gesetzmassigkeiten. They do not see reality as a jumble of accidents or history as an assemblage of caprices and whims of rulers. There is nothing fortuitous, so Freud tells us, in our dreams, follies, or even in our slips of the tongue. The laws of development, Trotsky says, “refract” themselves through accidents; and in saying this he is very close to Spinoza.

They are determinists all because having watched many societies and studied many “ways of life” at close quarters, they grasp the basic regularities of life. Their manner of thinking is dialectical, because, living on borderlines of nations and religion, they see society in a state of flux. They conceive reality as being dynamic, not static. Those who are shut in within one society, one nation, or one religion, tend to imagine that their way of life and their way of thought have absolute and unchangeable validity and that all that contradicts their standards is somehow “unnatural,” inferior, or evil. Those, on the other hand, who live on the borderlines of various civilizations comprehend more clearly the great movement and the great contradictoriness of nature and society.

All these thinkers agree on the relativity of moral standards. None of them believes in absolute good or absolute evil. They all observed communities adhering to different moral standards and different ethical values. What was good to the Roman Catholic Inquisition under which Spinoza’s grandparents had lived, was evil to the Jews; and what was good to the rabbis and Jewish elders of Amsterdam was evil to Spinoza himself. Heine and Marx experienced in their youth the tremendous clash between the morality of the French revolution and that of feudal Germany.

Nearly all these thinkers have yet another great philosophical idea in common—the idea that knowledge to be real must be active. This incidentally has a bearing on their views on ethics, for if knowledge is inseparable from action of Praxis which is by its nature relative and self-contradictory, then morality, the knowledge of what is good and what is evil, is also inseparable from Praxis and is also relative and self-contradictory. It was Spinoza who said that “to be is to do and to know is to do.” It was only one step from this to Marx’s saying that “hitherto the philosophers have interpreted the world; henceforth the task is to change it."

Finally, all these men, from Spinoza to Freud, believed in the ultimate solidarity of men; and this was implicit in their attitudes towards Jewry. We are now looking back on these believers in humanity through the bloody fog of our times. We are looking back at them through the smoke of the gas chambers, the smoke which no wind can really disperse from our eyes. These “non-Jewish Jews” were essentially optimists; and their optimism reached heights which it is not easy to ascend in our times. They did not imagine that it would be possible for “civilized” Europe in the twentieth century to sink to a depth of barbarity at which the mere words “solidarity of men” would sound as a perverse mockery to Jewish ears. Alone among them Heine had the poet’s intuitive premonition of this when he warned Europe to beware of the coming onslaught of the old Germanic gods emerging “aus dem teutschem Urwalde,” and when he complained that the destiny of the modern Jew is tragic beyond expression and comprehension—so tragic that “they laugh at you when you speak of it, and this is the greatest tragedy of all."

WE do not find this premonition in Spinoza or Marx. Freud in his old age reeled mentally under the blow of Nazism. To Trotsky it came as a shock that Stalin used against him the anti-Semitic innuendo. As a young man Trotsky had, in most categorical terms, repudiated the demand for Jewish “cultural autonomy” which the Bund, the Jewish Socialist Party, raised in 1903. He did it in the name of the solidarity of Jew and non-Jew in the socialist camp. Nearly a quarter of a century later, while he was engaged in an unequal struggle with Stalin and went to the party cells in Moscow to expound his views, he was met there with vicious allusions to his Jewishness and even with plain anti-Semitic insults. The allusions and insults came from members of the party which he had, together with Lenin, led in the revolution and civil war. In Trotsky’s archives I have found a letter which he wrote about this to Bukharin in 1926. He described the scenes in the Moscow organization and asked: “Is it possible...”—and you can feel in the words and in his underscorings the anguish, the astonishment, and the horror of the man—“is it possible that in our party, in workers’ cells, here in Moscow, people should use anti-Semitic insults with impunity? Is it possible?” With the same astonishment and anguish he asked the same question at a session of the Politbureau, where his colleagues shrugged him off and pooh-poohed the matter. After another quarter of a century, and after Auschwitz and Majdenek and Belsen, Trotsky’s question had to be asked anew when once again, this time much more openly and menacingly, Stalin resorted to the anti-Semitic innuendo and insult.

It is an indubitable fact that the Nazi massacre of six million European Jews has not made any deep impression on the nations of Europe. It has not truly shocked their conscience. It has left them almost cold. Was then the optimistic belief in humanity voiced by the great Jewish revolutionaries justified? Can we still share their faith in the future of civilization? I admit that if one were to try and answer these questions from an exclusively Jewish standpoint it would be hard, perhaps impossible, to give a positive answer. As to myself, I cannot approach the issue from an exclusively Jewish standpoint; and my answer is: Yes, their faith was justified. It was justified in so far, at any rate, as the belief in the ultimate solidarity of mankind is itself one of the conditions necessary for the preservation of humanity and for the cleansing of our civilization of the dregs of barbarity that are still present in it and poison it.

Why then has the fate of the European Jews left the nations of Europe, or the gentile world at large, almost cold? Unfortunately, Marx was far more right about the place of the Jews in European society than we could realize some time ago. The major part of the Jewish tragedy has consisted in this, that in result of a long historic development, the masses of Europe have become accustomed to identify the Jew primarily with trade and jobbing, money lending and money making. Of these the Jew had become the synonym and the symbol to the popular mind.

Look up the Oxford English Dictionary and see how it gives the accepted meanings of the term “Jew": firstly, it is a “person of the Hebrew race; secondly—this is the colloquial use—an “extortionate usurer, driver of hard bargains.” “Rich as a Jew” says the proverb. Colloquially the word is also used as a transitive verb: to jew, the Oxford Dictionary tells us, means “to cheat, overreach.” This is the vulgar image of the Jew and the vulgar prejudice against him, fixed in many languages, not only in English, and in many works of art, not only in the Merchant of Venice.

However, this is not only the vulgar image. Remember what was the occasion on which Macaulay pleaded, and the manner in which he pleaded for political equality of Jew and Gentile and for the Jew’s right to sit in the House of Commons. The occasion was the admission to the House of a Rothschild, the first Jew to sit in the House, the Jew elected as a Member for the City of London. And Macaulay’s argument was this: If we allow the Jew to manage our financial affairs for us, why should we not allow him to sit among us here, in Parliament, and have a say in the management of all our public affairs? This was the voice of the bourgeois Christian who took a fresh look at Shylock and hailed him as brother.

I SUGGEST that what had enabled the Jews to survive as a separate community, the fact that they had represented the market economy amidst people living in a natural economy—that this fact and its popular memories have also been responsible, at least in part, for the Schadenfreude or the indifference with which the populace of Europe has witnessed the holocaust of the Jews. It has been the misfortune of the Jews that, when the nations of Europe turned against capitalism they did so only very superficially, at any rate in the first half of this century. They attacked not the core of capitalism, not its productive relationships, not its organization of property and labor, but its externals and its largely archaic trappings which so often were indeed Jewish.

Had the peoples of Europe remained attached to capitalism they would not have spent their frustration and fury on the Jew, the traditional and, in the main, primitive agent of the money economy. Had they, on the other hand, risen against capitalism seriously, they would have overthrown it and would not have found scapegoats in Jewish shopkeepers and peddlers. It was because the peoples had turned against capitalism only in a half-hearted and half-witted manner that they turned against the Jews. Bebel once said that “anti-Semitism is the socialism of the fools.” The masses of Europe have been socialist enough to accept the socialism of the fools but not wise enough to embrace socialism.

This is the crux of the Jewish tragedy. Marx and Rosa Luxemburg imagined that mankind would pass from capitalism to socialism before it had degenerated culturally through remaining too long under the sway and spell of capitalism. They had imagined that mankind would make its exit from capitalism in good and civilized form. This has not happened. Decaying capitalism has overstayed its day and has morally dragged down mankind: and we, the Jews, have paid for it and may yet have to pay for it.

All this has driven the Jews to see their own State as the way out. Most of the great revolutionaries, whose heritage I am discussing, have seen the ultimate solution to the problems of their and our times, not in nation-states but in international society. As Jews they were the natural pioneers of this idea, for who was as well qualified to preach the international society of equals as were Jews free from all Jewish and non-Jewish orthodoxy and nationalism? However, the decay of bourgeois Europe has compelled the Jew to embrace the nation-state. This is the paradoxical consummation of the Jewish tragedy. It is paradoxical; because we live in an age when the nation-state is fast becoming an archaism—not only the nation-state of Israel but the nation-states of Russia, the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and others. They are all anachronisms. Do you not see it yet? Do you not see that when atomic energy daily reduces the globe in size, when man starts out on his own interplanetary journey, when a sputnik flies over the territory of a great nation-state in a minute or in seconds, that at such a time technology renders the nation-state as ridiculous and out-lived as medieval little princedoms were in the age of the steam engine?

EVEN those young nation-states that have come into being as the result of a necessary and progressive struggle waged by colonial and semi-colonial peoples for emancipation—India, Burma, Ghana, and others—cannot, in my view, preserve their progressive character for long. They form a necessary stage in the history of some peoples; but it is a stage that those peoples too will have to overcome in order to find wider frameworks for their existence. In our epoch any new nation-state, soon after its constitution begins to be affected by the general decline of this form of political organization; and this is already showing itself in the short experience of India, Ghana, and Israel. The world has compelled the Jew to embrace the nation-state and to make of it his pride and hope just at a time when there is little or no hope left in it. You cannot blame the Jews for this; you must blame the world. But Jews should at least be aware of the paradox and realize that their intense enthusiasm for “national sovereignty” is historically belated. They did not benefit from the advantages of the nation-state in those centuries when it was a medium of mankind’s advance and a great revolutionary and unifying factor in history. They have taken possession of it only after it had become a factor of disunity and social disintegration.

I hope, therefore, that, together with other nations, the Jews will ultimately become aware—or regain the awareness—of the inadequacy of the nation-sate and that they will find their way back to the moral and political heritage that the genius of the Jews who have gone beyond Jewry has left us—the message of universal human emancipation.RENEGADE EYE