So, a couple of weeks ago I finished a decent draft of my book about transitional justice mechanisms and the success (or otherwise) of conflict-termination efforts in three countries in southern Africa… And I sent it off to a publisher for consideration, since somewhat foolishly I had failed to do much to “market” the text of the book before that. Oh well, can’t do everything at once. The draft is not bad, imho.
At this point, having done that, and having then intensively brainstormed some of these very same issues with the great bunch of learners from many countries (including many conflict-torn countries) around the world in the class I was teaching at Eastern Mennonite Univ. last week (PAX 668), I just want to write some quick notes here about three books that have come out in recent years on different aspects of my same topic, all of which I consider make very constructive contributions to this woefully under-developed field of knowledge.
I should just also re-stress here one of my own strong starting points in all my own work these days, name that war and conflict themselves inflict major violations on all the human rights of people living in areas directly affected by these conflicts. Contrary to the fantasies of some war apologists who live in secure western countries– including those political liberals who believe that wars can be fought “for humanitarian ends”– there is no such thing as a “clean”, violation-free war whose “success” in winning desirable ends is sufficient to justify the always regrettable “collateral” damage inflicted on civilian populations along the way… War, as I know from my own experience, isn’t like that. It kills people– including, always, many many people who are complete innocents. It also sets in train aftershocks of violence that reverberate quite unpredictably into the years and decades that follow…
Anyway, these books I wanted to write about. They are:
- Rama Mani’s Beyond retribution: Seeking justice in the shadows of war (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, and Malden MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002),
Roland Paris’s At war’s end: Building peace after civil conflict (Cambridge UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), and
Eric Stover and Harvey M. Weinstein’s edited volume My neighbor, my enemy: Justice and community in the aftermath of mass atrocity (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
All these books are worth a close read. I’ll take them quickly, one at a time:
(1) Rama Mani’s Beyond retribution
Mani is someone who has worked with various post-conflict development efforts around the world, including as the Africa Strategy Manager for Oxfam GB, based in East Africa. She wrote the book, based on her experiences there, in central America, and elsewhere, as her Ph.D thesis for (I believe) the Peace Studies program at Bradford University in the UK.
She uses a typology that Aristotle first developed when he looked at the various different types of “justice” in the world, namely to divide the concept into “legal justice”, “rectificatory justice”, and “distributive justice”; and she assesses the needs of post-conflict societies along these three dimensions.
I really love her description of the kinds of societies she’s analyzing… those “in the shadows of war”… since that applies to societies that are still trapped in conflict as well as those that have recently escaped from it– along with those that have tried only unsuccessfully or very partially to escape from conflict.
Most of what the now-existing field of transitional justice addresses lies in the first two of those Aristotelian categories, and seriously undervalues (or even ignores) the need for robust action, as part of the escape from conflicts, in the area of (re-)distributive justice. Mani is quite right to stress the centrality of distributive justice issues to peacebuilding. She also refers to the need for considerable strengthening of communities’ basic infrastructure (roads, schools, courthouses, etc) if “legal justice” goals are to be met.
Another strong innovation in Mani’s analysis is that she argues for redefining all members of post-conflict societies as survivors of conflict, rather than trying to impose a dyadic division of these war-damaged peoples into the boxes of “perpetrators” and “victims” (p.123):
- [A]n exclusive focus on individual accountability, and on the individual identification of perpetrators and victims, is not helpful…, as it denies both the guilt and the victimization of the vast majority of society. Moreover, it ignores what all citizens in society share in common: that they are all survivors, whatever their past role, and that they now have a common stake in building a future together.
[Martha] Minow observed the need to define the entire society as one of victims. While this is an advance as it acknoeldges the real impact of conflict on an entire society rather than a targeted few, to do so would only entrench the notion of victimhood, and concomitant helplessness. Rather, it is more useful to recognize that in such circumstances, to emerge alive, regardless of one’s role and affiliation during the conflict, is to be a survivors…
The term ‘survivor’ has positiive etymological connotations. The prefix ‘sur’ connotes moving beyond, overcoming, as in ‘surmount’ or ‘surpass’. It is empowering. It is prospective while not foreclosing retrospection. This identification does not excuse or efface the individual guilt of perpetrators or the individual suffering of victims, but provides an avenue for moving beyond it…
(2) Roland Paris’s At war’s end
Okay, I’ll admit I haven’t read the whole book yet. But I certainly intend to. It looks like a great contribution to the still undeveloped field of “conflict termination studies”. Paris, who I guess is originally Canadian, was basically studying the records– generally, fairly dismal– of the UN’s many efforts since about 1989 to help midwife peacebuilding operations in various places around the world.
He defines peacebuilding, in this context as, “action undertaken at the end of a civil conflict to consolidate peace and prevent a recurrence of the fighting. A peacebuilding mission involves the deployment of military and civilian personnnel from several international agencies, with a mandate to conduct peacebuilding in a country that is just emerging from a civil war.”(p.38) My own definition of “peacebuilding”, in Ch.11 of my just-finished work, is, “a set of policies in different spheres that aim at transforming public attitudes and social and economic relationships in ways that will sustain the non-coercive, post-conflict political order.”
The cases studied by Paris in a systematic way are the UN and affiliated operations in: Angola, Rwanda, Cambodia, Liberia, Bosnia, Croatia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Namibia, and Mozambique. He also added in– presumably at a later date– Kosovo, East Timor, and Sierra Leone.
Of all these, it seems that he considers only Namibia and Mozambique constitute something approaching partial successes (but I need to read deeper to confirm that.)
The first thing that struck me about this book is that Paris makes almost no reference at all in the whole text to any measures that are traditionally considered to be the core of the ‘transitional justice’ agenda. In other words, both when assessing the success of various peacebuilding missions, and when looking at the data in the countries concerned, he was looking hardly at all at things like war-crimes trials, truth commissions, or the other staples of the “transitional justice” agenda.
I don’t comment on this to make a negative judgment about Paris. Far from it. I comment on it mainly to surmise that these kinds of bodies– which are seen by most people in the western-based human-rights organizations as absolutely central to ending the climate of “impunity” in the aftermath of any kind of political conflict– are seen by the people Paris interviewed in the various different UN bodies as almost completely peripheral to their endeavors.
The book’s index has one reference to the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia; none to the parallel ad-hoc tribunal for Rwanda or the permanent International Criminal Court; none to “war-crimes”, “truth commissions”, or any similar or associated terms.
This is really interesting! Might we conclude from this that– if the UN and its managers had paid more attention to efforts in the spheres of war-crimes prosecutions or truth commissions, than their overall peacebuilding missions might have been more successful? Possibly– though also, quite possibly, not.
Paris’s main critique of what the UN and other international organizations including the dreaded IFI’s (the “international financial institutions”– like the World Bank, the IMF, etc) have done in these conflict-torn societies is that they pressed far too fast and in most cases quite inappropriately for the establishment of full-fledged market democracies in these countries… This is what he terms the “Wilsonian, liberal agenda.”
His main argument is that a rush to hold elections and to implement far-reaching market-based economic reforms in countries that have an insufficent infratsructural capacity to bear (and regulate) these kinds of reforms generally tends only to exacerbate existing inter-group differences and thus to perpetuate the conflict rather than underpinning its resolution.
This is a very important argument indeed. It has huge relevance to, for example, the current situation in Iraq– but also, I think, relevance in just about every one of today’s deepseated inter-group conflicts.
What Paris argues for instead is what he calls an agenda of “Institutionalization Before Liberalization”. It’s main pillars are these:
- 1. Wait until conditions are ripe for elections.
2. Design electoral systems that reward moderation.
3. Promote good civil society.
4. Control hate speech.
5. Adopt conflict-reducing economic policies.
6. The common denominator: Rebuild effective state institutions.
This makes eminent good sense to me. Obviously, many aspects of it directly contravene the traditional “liberalizing” agenda. I note, parenthetically, that just about every item on that list describes the kinds of policies adopted by the Western Allies during their amazingly successful post-WW2 “peacebuilding” operation in occupied Germany and Japan.
Regarding electoral systems (#2 there), Paris comes out fairly strongly against what are called “consociational” electoral systems– that is, systems in which each sub-national group more or less generates its own political leaders who then interact across inter-group lines primarily at the national level rather than at every single level of the political system. (This is the system adopted under the Dayton Accords in Bosnia; it’s also the system that more less emerged de-facto in the recent elections in Iraq.)
Paris writes:
- [Arend] Lijphart promotes consociationalism as ‘the best type of democracy that can realistically be expected’ in deeply divided societies, but the record of Bosnia’s multiheaded presidency suggests that consociationalism is ill-suited to the domestic conditions of war-shattered states.”(p.193)
He recommends, instead, electoral systems that strongly encourage candidates to reach out across inter-group lines rather than sticking within the lines of their own group.
… Anyway, there’s a lot more of huge interest to read in his book, I’m sure.
(3) Eric Stover and Harvey M. Weinstein’s edited volume My neighbor, my enemy
Actually, I’ve written a bunch about this book on JWN already, back in mid-January. See here, here, or here.
Stover is (I think) a human-rights law expert and Weinstein is a clinical psychologist who adopts a community-based, “epidemiological” approach to issues of mental wellness in conflict-torn societies. They’ve both been working as part of a team organized by the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, trying to assess how the mental wellness of people in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda has been affected by varuious transitional justice mechanisms used in those societies– but primarily, the war-crimes courts established for their supposed benefit.
Since I’m running out of time, I’ll just copy in here a few important excerpt sfrom their concluding chapter:
- First, our studies suggest that there is no direct link between criminal trials (international, national, and local/traditional) and reconciliation, although it is possible this could change over time. In fact we found criminal trials– and especially those of local perpetrators– often divided small multi-ethnic communities by causing further suspicion and fear…
Second, for survivors of ethnic war and genocide the idea of “justice” encompasses more than criminal trials and the ex cathedra pronouncements of foreign judges in The Hague and Arusha. It means returning stolen property; locating and identifying the bodies of the missing; capturing and trying all war criminals… ;securing reparations and apologies; leading lives devoid of fear; securing meaningful jobs; providing their children with good schools and teachers; and helping those traumatized by atrocities to recover…
Third, there is no direct link between exposure to trauma and a desire for trials of suspected war criminals…
Fourth, social reconstruction after ethnic conflict is a slow process that occurs at mulitple levels– individual, community, and state…
Fifth, attention to public edication and the teaching of history and literature are critical..
Finally, greater attention needs to be paid to the economic and social well-being of post-war communities. Our informants told us that jobs, food, adequate and secure housing, good schooling for their children, and peace and security were their major priorities… (pp.323-5)
—
The findings of all these researchers are largely consistent with my own. Crucially, they all suggest that issues of physical survival and stabilization, and of basic economic/livliehood stability are of overarching importance to people living in conflict zones.
Too many people in the western-based rights movement, it seems to me, show little understanding of these extremely central human needs. Most of these rights organizations started their work by looking at rights issues in eastern Europe and some countries of South America– places that were already fairly well infrastructured, and where people’s basic human needs for food and shelter were already being pretty well met. (In those South American cases– Chile, Argentina– this was true mainly for people in the cities but not true for large rural populations; but the concerns of those rural populations were not really central to western rights activists back in the 1980s and 1990s.)
Anyway, I’m glad just to get these notes about these books pulled together here in this post. I’d welcome any further comments readers might have…
I have to ask.
Don’t you think these institutional arrangements you describe are simply a re-statement of the trappings of bourgeois democracy, only excepting any mention of its institutions of violence?
Isn’t bourgeois democracy secured in the last analysis by “special bodies of armed men”, claiming a monopoly of violence on its behalf?
Is it not the case that proletarian revolution is only constrained by the bourgeois monopoly of violence? And that without the certainty of violent reaction revolutions would break out immediately, and all over? And that these revolutions would succeed, and without any application of violence, if no violence was offered against them?
I think that the drama you have sketched is, so far, only a kind of “Hamlet without the Prince”. Change is the one sure thing in this world. “Rewarding moderation” is a euphemism. It means no change. It means bourgeois democracy for ever.
In the end the solution given comes down to this, that war is to be avoided by avoiding change, which is impossible, because change is the only certainty in this world. Therefore it is no solution at all.
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” is what Marx wrote in “The Communist Manifesto” in 1848 and it has continued to be the case up to now. War is the product of class struggle. Peace is only possible if class struggle can be ended.
A study of how class struggle could be successfully pursued to a conclusion without violence would be useful. “Peace studies” that, on the other hand, have nothing to say about class struggle, are not likely to have any practical use. They beg the question.
Helena, thanks for sharing your reviews of these books. I’ve paged through Stover and Weinstein, but will definitely look into the other two. I’m especially intrigued by Paris, who points the way to resolving some anomalies I observed myself working in Afghanistan and comparing that country with other cases.
Dominic, I’m curious how, in the context of Marx, you would adapt your observations to conditions and “state” of development in so many post-conflict countries that don’t fit the 19th c. European mode, i.e. don’t have a bourgeoisie in any recognizable sense of the term, have not experienced any alienation of labor from capital and so forth … ?
There are many kinds of class struggle. If you live in Africa as I do you can observe all the historical kinds of class struggle carrying on simultaneously in the present time. But the dominant class is bourgeois, and the dominant bourgeois within the bourgeoisie are monopoly finance capitalists, otherwise known as imperialists.
I believe peace is a necessity for life like water. Peace is the first demand that we must make upon each other.
But when there is class conflict, the ruling class uses its greater power of violence.
There is hope in the solidarity of people even in these conditions of war, as Hezbollah demonstrates, as well as many other movements in history. It is possible for defensive organisations to develop into a “polis” and an association with a practical, constructive, and peaceful programme.
Better still than this would be an honest global recognition that class struggle is the cause of conflict and war, and then a global effort to create institutions for the peaceful working-out (not frustration, not temporising, not fudging) of class struggle.
For an example of what might be a class-conscious peace policy, I would suggest a look at China.
China was an awful war zone for the first half of the 20th century. Then it got a class-conscious government which (not without a couple of mistakes) has since managed two enormous revolutions.
The first was “land to the tiller”, the emancipation of the peasantry. Then, before the new peasant order could collapse under its own weight (as it must otherwise do), they have organised a vast waged proletariat and changed for ever the class make-up of the country. For the sake of this second revolution they were not afraid to use private capital.
These huge changes have been accomplished in an essentially peaceful process, and this was only possible because the nature of the process, class struggle, was very well understood and acknowledged in private and in public. Result: success. Long may it continue, and let the world take note.
Design electoral systems that reward moderation
Ha! An electoral system can be “designed to reward moderation” by the world’s best social engineers, but does that mean the voters will cooperate? I say again, ha!
Case in point: Fiji. The electoral system created by the 1997 constitution was practically hardwired to deliver victory to the SVT and National Federation parties, representing the pro-reconciliation forces among the indigenous Fijians and the Indo-Fijians respectively. This was done by means of an Australian-style preference system, on the assumption that most seats would be decided on second preferences and that the moderate parties would be everyone’s second choice. In both elections held thus far under that constitution, however, almost all the seats were decided on first preferences, in favor of radical parties. The communities were sufficiently polarized by that time that each delivered an absolute majority to its most extreme partisans.
Granted, the 1997 constitution encouraged ethnic voting to some extent by reserving 46 of the 71 seats for communal constituencies. That could be taken as a point in favor of Mr. Paris’ anti-consociational thesis – except that the voting behavior in the 25 “open” seats was no different. In the 2001 election, all but two or three of the open seats were won by the (Indo-Fijian) FLP or the (indigenous-nationalist) SDL, depending on which ethnic group predominated in each constituency. One of the open seats on Vanua Levu was even won by the ultra-nationalist CAMV party. There was no evidence that candidates in the open seats were reaching out to other ethnic groups; instead, they reached in and won the seats by sewing up their own ethnic base. The pure Westminster system of 1970-87, which amounted to institutionalized one-party rule, wasn’t much better – and, given the voting patterns in 2001, proportional representation wouldn’t have made much of a difference either.
I’m not sure Paris really has enough evidence to make a judgment on the relationship between consociationalism and peace-building; of the cases he studied, only one (Bosnia) really represented a consociational approach. What’s more, the Bosnian system is a “grand coalition” sort of consociationalism, which Helga Binningsbo describes as the least effective kind. Paris may be plotting a curve from one point, and may also be disregarding cases such as Burundi where power-sharing was essential to persuading the factions to lay down their arms in the first place.
As I’ve said before, I wouldn’t advocate consociationalism in all cases. In some societies, such a system would be highly inappropriate. At the same time, I’m wary of any other one size fits all solution, such as electoral systems “designed to reward moderation.” I think Paris is right to focus on building the institutional predicates for democracy, but the creation of an electoral system is something that has to account for the characteristics and needs of the underlying society.
“legal justice”, “rectificatory justice”, and “distributive justice”
Wouldn’t the latter two (in the Aristotelian sense) converge somewhat in a post-conflict setting? After all, a make-whole remedy in such a context would require society, as well as the victims (or “survivors”), to be restored, and restoration of society would necessitate rectifying the injustices that led to the conflict. To some extent this may involve class justice, although perhaps not in the way Dominic envisions.
all of these writers, and all three commenters so far, seem to share a basic assumption that the heart of any post-war (‘conflict’ seems to me a heartless euphemism that asserts that only Great Powers have wars) society must be “effective state institutions” – Paris’ “common denominator”.
whether Edelstein’s moderate consociational model, Dominic’s revolution-from-above approach, or Paris’ “peacebuilding”, all these state-focused notions seem to me to go exactly against the actual concrete findings of all these writers, which our host so clearly summarized:
“issues of physical survival and stabilization, and of basic economic/livliehood stability are of overarching importance to people living in conflict zones.”
state structures in post-war situations, under any model i’ve seen presented, stand in the way of actual remedies for all these crucial issues. the imperative of a state apparatus is the survival and stabilization of the *state*, not its inhabitants. thus we see post-war states establishing armies before schools, enshrining neoliberal economic policies before builiding water treatment plants, perpetuating tensions along ethnic lines internally and externally.
let me quote it again:
“issues of physical survival and stabilization, and of basic economic/livliehood stability are of overarching importance to people living in conflict zones.”
those priorities are addressed in spite of states, not through them. if we’re serious about listening to what, for instance, Stover and Weinstein have found, we need to develop ways of supporting efforts to address these issues outside of state structures and the international institutions (including most NGOs) which aim at creating “effective state institutions”.
that implies, to my mind, supporting efforts to resist the ‘effectiveness’ of state structures – such as the many-armed efforts in south and central america towards autonomous ways of meeting community needs. from los altos de bolivia to the argentinian assembleas to the indigenous communities of oaxaca, new approaches are being developed that seem to me to hold genuine hope for other post-war situations.
(‘conflict’ seems to me a heartless euphemism that asserts that only Great Powers have wars)
For what it’s worth, I use “conflict” as a generic term to include not only wars but other kinds of social unrest or instability. Not every conflict can be described in terms of international or civil warfare (for instance, the Fiji case described above, in which inter-communal disputes led to a series of coups, was a conflict but not a war). I use the same term to describe events occurring in great powers, and while I can’t speak for Helena, I think she also does (see, e.g., her description of the aftermath of WW2 as a post-conflict situation).
state structures in post-war situations, under any model i’ve seen presented, stand in the way of actual remedies for all these crucial issues.
On the other hand, issues of physical survival and security are harder to resolve in the absence of an effective state, due to the tendency of warlords to fill power vacuums. Otherwise Somalia would be the ideal example of peace-building. For the reasons you suggest, a functioning state isn’t sufficient by itself to resolve post-conflict issues, but I’d argue that it’s necessary. Maybe the autonomous assemblies you describe should be brought into the state, or the state itself should be (re)built around such institutions.
Of course I thought it would be perfectly clear that I was arguing most directly for the end of the state, which is an instrument of class domination that is redundant when there is no class conflict.
And of course I thought that my point about China was that they understood better than others what was happening “below”, and so were able to avoid artificial impositions.
But in these post-modern times everything that one writes seems to take on a life of its own, and metamorphose as it passes from the gaze of one reader into the purview of another.
Still, Rozele, Jonathan and I make a good threesome. An anarchist, a constitutionalist, and a communist. Would that be correct? I’m happy that we all want peace, even if we have not yet agreed how to get it.
Hey! I said something too … 🙂
I’m a little busy and haven’t kept up with the thread, but a couple points:
In the work I’ve done, there does seem to be an emphasis, at the 30,000 foot level anyway, on rebuilding state institutions. The logic is reasonable, but as always the devil is in the details.
One of the things I responded positively to in these three books was the emphasis on the physical survival and stability of people living in post-conflict societies. Aside from addressing immediate human needs, it’s also a way of building political institutions at the ground level — and should be viewed as such. NGOs often turn a blind eye to this aspect, as part of the self-serving fiction that such work is politically neutral.
The other problem pointed out, I think, by Paris was the rush to proxy political development through elections. Obviously, you need to show progress and need some short term deliverables, but building an overnight political structure, whether through consociational means or others, is false comfort. Is it better to throw up a clapboard house with faulty wiring that “counts” as completion, or to build a solid foundation, a decent roof, and four servicable walls … ?
In extended conflicts (I am thinking about Afghanistan in particular), the state may never have really existed in any meaningful sense at all; even where it has, there is a consistent lack of capacity in the first few post-conflict years. The state is the worst place to go to satisfy basic needs, even if it is not an intentional obstruction. In Afghanistan, the state is unable even to coordinate the provision of such public goods. That is why NGOs in Afghanistan have, for the most part, sidestepped the state completely, not worked to build it.
Dominic argues for the end of the state. Some scholars have argued that it is already on its way out (in its nation-state form, anyway). I am not so sure, only because whatever its replacement is has not really come into view yet. The network theory of governance, anyone?
I don’t think the Chinese model is such a great example, either: the Cultural Revolution is not what I would cite as a peaceful transition, nor is the Chinese state a minimalist peasant-friendly paradise. In fact, I think the Chinese state is skirting the edges of complete disaster: the wage peasants are subsidized by inefficient state-owned enterprises that are funded by 1) the unsecured savings of said peasants’ previous decades of labor and 2) bad loans made by the state banks which are backed by nothing. Foreign capital flows into the southern industrial zones and the regional managers’ interests are so strongly aligned with foreign capital that they are now ignore orders from Beijing. This is success … ?
Sorry, windinthewhistle, I didn’t mean to ignore you. Which is a good excuse for quoting Leon Trotsky, from “Stalinism and Bolshevism (1937):
“Marxists are wholly in agreement with the anarchists in regard to the final goal: the liquidation of the state. Marxists are
Nice segue, Dominic.
I’ll take it (if for no other reason than to be provocative) that your quote of Trotsky would be the basis of your defense of the Chinese state …?
Also, I note that the goal of eliminating the state puts you not only in good company with anarchists, but in questionable company with the Bush coalition (who brag about their long term plan being to make the American state ‘weak enough to drown in a bathtub’) and certain ideological free-marketeers.
It’s an area I’ve been interested in for a long time, but I still have yet to find the valuable alternative (which inevitably will come along) to the state. In the provision of public goods, which state-minimalist economists would argue is the sole legitimate province of the state, there are alternatives, as evidenced by communal allocation of property rights and management of common pool resources (especially environmental resources, ‘the commons’) … a fact I’m sure you already know.
My dissertation supervisor (and this is really long ago) was a confirmed anarchist, and wrote a series of quasi-famous books about how the state had supplanted the superior alternative of communities (Michael Taylor, ‘Community, Anarchy and Liberty’, which is all but unreadable but oy, such small portions)… which had, at least as far as his definition was concerned, disappeared from the earth not long after the rise of the state. He and other of his students found plenty of pocket-remnants that performed well locally; they fell apart on any notion of federation, and could not sustain themselves over a wide geographical area: the result, without an overarching state, was a different form of conflict than class warfare, but bloody conflict just the same.
I’m deeply suspicious of communities myself, given my experience of them growing up. Minorities in particular are not well treated, and the potential gains from minority views are lost; to say nothing of the lynchings and involuntary removal.
In the meantime, isn’t it incumbent on us to understand, perhaps graced with a historical understanding as deep as Marx’s, that in the here and now, in post-conflict societies in particular, the situation on the ground warrants engaging with political institutions as given, which may not have developed to the stage of workers having nothing to lose but their chains? I don’t think Marx would have advocated proletarian revolt before the enclosure movement and the rise of the bourgeoisie … do you?
Still, Rozele, Jonathan and I make a good threesome. An anarchist, a constitutionalist, and a communist. Would that be correct?
I can’t speak for Rozele, but that’s a pretty fair description of me.
windinthewhistle, you are not a stranger to these matters. If you were you would not be able to start so many ideological hares in one go. In this circumstance it becomes a disadvantage to have read a lot of the literature, if one is not careful. I don’t have enough space. Even the best all-round short texts are a few pages. The most condensed of all is Lenin’s “3 Sources and 3 Component Parts of Marxism”, which is only a couple of pages, and which deals with utopian socialism as one of the 3 sources. Marx’s 1848 Communist Manifesto is very tender towards the utopians, even though its purpose is to rise above them. Engels’ 1880 “Socialism, Utopian & Scientific” is very good. And then Trotsky’s “Stalinism and Bolshevism” which can be found at http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1937/1937-sta.htm and which addresses all your concerns directly, I think. It is not long but much too long to paste in here, of course.
The quote I gave from it follows on from a considerable lambasting of the anarchists, so don’t get the wrong impression that the Bolsheviks were close to the anarchists.
As for the neocons and the small state, you know they lie and that there are real libertarians in the US (e.g. Justin Raimondo and his pals) who are some of the best anti-war campaigners. The libertarians also take gratuitous swipes at the communists all the time. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s because they don’t have a real strategy and only hope to ignore the state to death in the way that Trotsky described.
Lenin gave a good short lecture on The State in 1919. You can find it at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/jul/11.htm .
When feudalism was overthrown, and “free” capitalist society appeared on God’s earth, it at once became apparent that this freedom meant a new system of oppression and exploitation of the toilers. Various socialist doctrines immediately began to rise as a reflection of and protest against this oppression. But early socialism was utopian socialism. It criticised capitalist society, it condemned and damned it, it dreamed of its destruction, it indulged in fancies of a better order and endeavoured to convince the rich of the immorality of exploitation.
However, utopian socialism could not point the real way out. It could not explain the essence of wage-slavery under capitalism, nor discover the laws of its development, nor point to the social force which is capable of becoming the creator of a new society. Meanwhile, the stormy revolutions which everywhere in Europe, and especially in France, accompanied the fall of feudalism, of serfdom, more and more clearly revealed the struggle of classes as the basis and the motive force of the whole development.
Not a single victory of political freedom over the feudal class was won except against desperate resistance. Not a single capitalist country evolved on a more or less free and democratic basis except by a life and death struggle between the various classes of capitalist society.
The genius of Marx consists in the fact that he was able before anybody else to draw from this and apply consistently the deduction that world history teaches. This deduction is the doctrine of the class struggle.
People always were and always will be the stupid victims of deceit and self-deceit in politics until they learn to discover the interests of some class behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. The supporters of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old institution, however barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is maintained by the forces of some ruling classes. And there is only one way of smashing the resistance of these classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, and to enlighten and organise for the struggle, the forces which can — and, owing to their social position, must — constitute a power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new.
From Lenin’s 3 Sources & 3 Component Parts of Marxism, 1913.
Dominic, you’ve outed me: it’s true that I am not a stranger to these matters (though, er, ‘stranger’ more in some than others) and it’s also true that I was trying to ‘start some shit’ as we say back home. I’ll also confess that, as you suggested, I was not being so careful. That is an outcome of both my distance from my personal library and my 4am posts, deficiencies which alas, I am not in any position to rectify at the moment.
Full disclosure about my idiosyncratic familiarity with some of the literature: I started reading ‘Marx, Mao and Marcuse’ while in the military, in an effort to ‘understand the enemy’. (I acquired the nickname of ‘Watermelon’ … you know, green on the outside, red on the inside …) Truth to tell, the ‘enemy’ won me over; you can’t be in the army and love it as much as I did without coming to a profound appreciation of socialism, because the army is, in the end, an institution with a profound socialist bent. And, class is much more salient an indicator of social divisions I have experienced myself than say, race or other constructs, so I appreciated a rigorous, systematic and historically based account of class such as I found with Marx & Engels.
I know Marx & Engels quite well, most especially Capital, the Manifesto, SU&S and the 18th Brumaire, of which I am especially fond; the writers of the Second International and Lenin only superficially, and Trotsky not at all. Thanks for the links; most of my library is not with me, and this is a valuable resource. I promise I will make use of it.
I read most of this material in an effort to understand that literature and not, except in the limited context I mentioned above, with any eye toward incorporating that into ‘praxis’. That is part of what makes it so interesting and stimulating to talk to those who have.
I wonder, though, what you would say about my original provocations: in defense of the Chinese state, for example, or how you would reconcile the prescriptions of a certain story of class struggle with the post-conflict and developmental issues discussed here.
Finally, about your nefarious company in the states; it’s true, the neocons are cynical liars but the base of their long term vision, and the basis of their alliances among other conservatives (including the vast majority of those populating their 300+ think tanks) does indeed line up behind the Bush position, and your own vis a vis the state, alongside the free-marketeers. How would you distinguish your own vision of the end of the state from that of the ones who don’t lie?
I think the clue is with Hyek, but then again I was not trained in Chicago …
I’m not sure what you mean by “the Chinese State”, but I hope it is a dictatorship of the prletariat. I think your idea of the State is a bit imprecise. If you think that the bourgeois idea of minimal government is anything to do with the withering away of the State as foreseen by Marx & co., then you are mistaken.
The intention of the revolutionaries is to remove the bourgeoisie from power whereas Bush and the 300 think-tanks want to keep it there. Nor are they reducing the State in fact. The Patriot Act establishes new state institutions.
The point is as made by Lenin above. Some class interest is in charge. In the USA it is capitalists. I’m tempted to recommend “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” by Engels, especially Ch. 9, and “State and Revolution”, by Lenin. Both are on http://www.marxists.org. Since you like the 18th Brumaire it is worth looking at “The Class Struggles in France 1848-1850, by Marx” as well.
As I understand it there has never been a basis for socialism in Afghanistan. Afghanistan was a pre-capitalist society and the Soviet Union was supporting a modernising bourgeois revolution. The USA jumped in to frustrate it by supporting the feudals. Hence the current mess.
Of course the State in a feudal set-up does not look like a bourgeois state. But it is there in the sense that class relations are maintained and the ruling (feudal) class rules, backed by means of violence which are always used if the feudal class is threatened.
You have been in Afghanistan. I’m sure you must be able to confirm this. You will know there is a hierarchy backed by force. That’s the feudal State.
If you see things in terms of class struggle as I do, then “post-conflict” is only relative (until the stage of full communism and no more State). My contribution to the peace discussion is to say that if you are aware of class conflict, you may be able to manage it in peaceful ways, as the Chinese have managed to do (with a couple of notable exceptions, as I said before). If not, not.
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