Thanksgiving Vaction!

Finally, Fall break! After a long weekend of partying -- I even went to the Yale-Princeton tailgate -- I've been sick all week. Up all night coughing, I haven't been able to get much work done, and I didn't particularly feel up to writing. I'm feeling a bit better now, though, since my dad is coming to pick me up. Luckily it seems like I didn't miss anything terribly important in my classes this week (I hardly went to them), and so I won't have to catch up on too much work over the break. Most importantly, I have to prepare my presentation on The State and Revolution and begin work on my paper on the February Revolution. I'll be looking at a selection of V.D. Nabokov's memoirs, edited by Virgil D. Medlin and Steven L. Parsons and published as Vladimir D. Nabokov and the Russian Provisional Government, 1917. Nabokov, father of the famed author of Lolita, served as Head of the Chancellory under the Russian Provisional Government. Most interesting for me is his characterization in his memoirs of the February Revolution as a "coup." Was it a coup? That's the million dollar question...

For now, though, I'm heading home to enjoy a good Thanksgiving dinner!

The Russian Revolution

Concomitant with my course on Cuba, I have been taking a seminar, "The Russian Revolution," on...the Russian Revolution! Approaching Thanksgiving break, we have now traced the roots of revolution all the way from the revolutionary terrorism of the 1870s and 1880s through October 1917. Of particular interest have been Vera Zasulich's memoirs, in Five Sisters: Women Against the Tsar; Leon Trotsky's histories 1905 and The Russian Revolution; Abraham Ascher's great book The Revolution of 1905: A Short History; and the unbelievable collection The Russian Revolution and Bolshevik Victory: Visions and Revisions.

At the end of the month, I'll be presenting on Lenin's The State and Revolution and a series of shorter articles written by various Bolshevik authors on revolutionary culture. Needless to say, my enthusiasm for Lenin has waned over time, although I do continue to find his writing and theoretical contributions (along with those of Trotsky) extremely interesting. Friends in the ISO have been encouraging me to join; although flattered, I have had to tell them that, with my ambivalent attitude toward Lenin and Leninism, I don't know if they're the right organization for me. Vanguards, dictatorship, dogmatic and sectarian devotion to the "party line" frighten me. I'm far from an anarchist, but democratic centralism, at least as it is generally practiced, seems to me more about "centralism" and less about "democracy." For now, I'm happy with my political independence. And hopefully I'll have some time to get back to building an SDS chapter before too long!

Before Night Falls II

So, after coming down pretty harshly on Before Night Falls, Reinaldo Arenas' controversial memoirs, in a seminar on the Cuban Revolution, I now think, having neared the end of the book, that Arenas may have swayed me. After a point his vanity, self-indulgence, and incessant "erotic adventures" -- the main themes of the first two-hundred or so pages -- faded into the background (perhaps I just learned to read through them) as a more powerful, and more harrowing, tale came to light: the story of his persecution, arrest, prison sentence, and flight from Cuba on the Mariel boatlift in 1980. The humanity and sincerity found in the introduction, written shortly before Arenas' suicide in 1990 and in which he describes in the most graphic and terrible detail what it is like to watch oneself waste away, dying from AIDS -- the pain, the weakness, the tubes coming into and out of the body -- returns as we near the end of the story. Even more powerful than his description of the abuse which he suffered under the Castro regime, however, is Arenas' incredible portrayal of the corruption of the human soul and heart under such a dictatorial system: his friends, mostly turned informers for State Security in an effort to protect themselves, are truly changed by the end of Arenas' "tale" (it is, after all, a stylized memoir replete with exaggerations and half-truths), and their betrayal pains him greatly. I think more than anything else, the story of figures such as Hiram Prado, the former friend instrumental in Arenas' arrest and subsequent ostracization, serves as a poignant warning of the dangers to the supporters, as well as the opponents, of the socialist experiment gone wrong. There is little left of my former enthusiasm for Cuba or my admiration for the successes of the Revolution, achieved at such a high price to freedom and the human spirit.

Death Sentence for Saddam

So the Saddam Hussein trial is over at long last, and it looks like, unless his sentence is successfully appealed, the ex-dictator will hang. I'm certainly no apologist for Hussein -- I'll leave that to Ramsey Clark -- but the verdict makes me sick. Although for a brief moment at the outset of the war in Iraq I succumbed to the temptation of "left-interventionism" a la Christopher Hitchens -- the idea that the West can and ought to actively enforce human rights through intervention, combat dictators, and export liberal/progressive ideals around the world -- I quickly recanted and have ever since been a firm believer that the war in general, and our government's efforts at state-building in particular, will fail horrendously. Hussein's death sentence seems to me an indication of that failure -- we've now fought a war to build a state that, in the 21st century, maintains the death penalty, enacting it no less by use of the gallows! So much for progressive values. I can't wait to read what the (anti-death penalty) European press has to say about this one...

Before Night Falls

I've just begun to read Reinaldo Arenas' Before Night Falls, and although I find some parts of the work to be a bit much, there are some exceedingly beautiful passages. The following, for example, is an incredible meditation on nature and on life drawn from Arenas' childhood:

...I wanted to fly, to fly like those birds, alone in the downpour. I would go as far as the river, a river that roared under the spell of violence let loose. The power of the overflowing current would sweep away almost everything in its path: trees, stones, animals, houses. It was the mystery of the law of destruction, but also of the law of life. I did not know then where that river was headed, where that frenzied race would end, but something was calling me to go with it, saying that I too had to throw myself into those raging waters and lose myself, that only in that torrent, always on the move, would I find some peace... (16-17)

While I do not necessarily agree with everything Arenas writes, there is no denying that this is simply one of the most beautiful passages I have ever read. I hope to find more like it!

Blast from the Past: Students for a Democratic Society!

Find below my proposed Statement of Principles for a new Yale chapter of the revived Students of a Democratic Society:

In 1962, the original Students for a Democratic Society adopted the Port Huron Statement, with its famous opening, “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit,” as their statement of principles and of resistance to an increasingly undemocratic country and world. Four decades later, a new generation of students – our generation – has awakened to the realization that we too look uncomfortably to the world beyond our universities, a world defined by poverty, discrimination, and war. But we believe, like those who struggled before us, that, starting in our own communities and our own countries, we have the power to change that world, to build a truly democratic society. Today is our day to fight; this is our statement of principles and of resistance.

Born in the prosperous 1980s, we grew up in a world of optimism. In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, freeing a large portion of humanity from brutal dictatorship; the year 1991 saw the last gasps and final collapse of the totalitarian Soviet Union, a “worker’s state” still-born amidst incredible bloodshed. The following year, in 1992, Francis Fukuyama declared the ‘end of history’ – we had arrived, he said. The Gulf War, the first major American conflict in our lifetimes, did little to penetrate our happy childhood; nor did the rapid spread of AIDS, botched interventions in Haiti and Somalia, or the NATO bombing of Belgrade. Rodney King was brutally beaten, and Los Angeles burned. But, although with time our conscience grew, many of us remained dormant, living in relative peace and prosperity with little knowledge of the human suffering within and beyond our borders.

On September 11, 2001, however, our peaceful world was shattered, and our generation awakened. Those of us who came of age amid the struggles in Seattle, Genoa, and Quebec, have been joined by those now emerging from the slumber of childhood in the post-9/11 world to find our nation embroiled in corporate scandal and foreign war. Iraq is our Vietnam; the struggle for immigrants’ rights our Civil Rights Movement. Our generation has awakened to a world of poverty, discrimination, and war, and we demand: Why? Why, in a time of such great abundance, do so many go hungry? Why, forty years after Civil Rights, are our black brothers and sisters still treated as second class citizens? Why does capital move freely while men and women cannot cross borders? Why does our country spread democracy at the point of a gun? Ours is a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” and yet everywhere we see around us slavery and inequality; government “of, by, and for the people” appears to us a sham. These contradictions of our American values are insupportable – and our generation has had enough of them. Enough of poverty. Enough of discrimination. Enough of war. Enough of lying politicians and of greedy elites. The time has come for a New American Revolution.

We are young people from across the political spectrum drawn together by our strong opposition to our country’s current direction and our deep commitment to a radical rebirth of democracy in the United States and around the world. Our one and only goal is the creation of a more democratic society, in which we might live out our lives in peace and freedom, the masters of our own destinies. But “democracy” means many different things to many different people. Our values, therefore, ought be explained in greater detail. Although many years removed, we share the following sentiments with the original Students for a Democratic Society:

1. We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love. In affirming these principles we are aware of countering perhaps the dominant conceptions of man in the twentieth century: that he is a thing to be manipulated, and that he is inherently incapable of directing his own affairs. We oppose the depersonalization that reduces human being to the status of things--if anything, the brutalities of the twentieth century teach that means and ends are intimately related, that vague appeals to "posterity" cannot justify the mutilations of the present…we see little reason why men cannot meet with increasing the skill the complexities and responsibilities of their situation, if society is organized not for minority, but for majority, participation in decision-making.

2. Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority. The goal of man and society should be human independence…[But] independence does not mean egotistic individualism--the object is not to have one's way so much as it is to have a way that is one's own. Nor do we deify man--we merely have faith in his potential.

3. Human relationships should involve fraternity and honesty. Human interdependence is contemporary fact; human brotherhood must be willed, however, as a condition of future survival and as the most appropriate form of social relations. Personal links between men are needed, especially to go beyond the partial and fragmentary bonds of function that bind us only as worker to worker, employer to employee, teacher to student…

4. Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today. These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man. As the individualism we affirm is not egoism, the selflessness we affirm is not self-elimination. On the contrary, we believe in generosity of a kind that imprints one's unique individual qualities in the relation to other men, and to all human activity.

5. We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity. As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.

6. In a participatory democracy, the political life would be based in several root principles: that decision-making of basic social consequence be carried on by public groupings; that politics be seen positively, as the art of collectively creating an acceptable pattern of social relations; that politics has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community, thus being a necessary, though not sufficient, means of finding meaning in personal life; that the political order should serve to clarify problems in a way instrumental to their solution; it should provide outlets for the expression of personal grievance and aspiration; opposing views should be organized so as to illuminate choices and facilitate the attainment of goals; channels should be commonly available to relate men to knowledge and to power so that private problems--from bad recreation facilities to personal alienation--are formulated as general issues.

7. The economic sphere would have as its basis the principles: that work should involve incentives worthier than money or survival. It should be educative, not stultifying; creative, not mechanical; self-directed, not manipulated, encouraging independence, a respect for others, a sense of dignity, and a willingness to accept social responsibility, since it is this experience that has crucial influence on habits, perceptions and individual ethics; that the economic experience is so personally decisive that the individual must share in its full determination; that the economy itself is of such social importance that its major resources and means of production should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation.

8. Like the political and economic ones, major social institutions--cultural, educational, rehabilitative, and others--should be generally organized with the well-being and dignity of man as the essential measure of success.

9. In social change or interchange, we find violence to be abhorrent because it requires generally the transformation of the target, be it a human being or a community of people, into a depersonalized object of hate. It is imperative that the means of violence be abolished and the institutions--local, national, international--that encourage non-violence as a condition of conflict be developed.

It becomes clear, then, that we are, first and foremost, committed to nonviolent revolutionary change. While we cannot sit in judgment over the methods of others, our members, although militant, view violence as inherently undemocratic. Mahatma Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” We believe that a truly democratic society can only be built by a democratic movement committed to democratic change.

Our objection to the war in Iraq, and to all other imperial wars, follows from this commitment to nonviolence and democracy. Violence breeds only violence. Democracy does not come from the barrel of gun – it must be built by the people. Moreover, the imperial ambitions of the United States and other great powers impede not only the building of democracy in the countries subject to their aggression, but also the spread and deepening of democracy at home. In the history of humanity, there has never been a democratic empire – imperialism is the death of true democracy.

But although we oppose the imperial ambitions of the United States and others, little love is lost between our organization and the reactionaries with whom many other leftists make common cause against imperialism. The Saddam Hussein’s, Kim Jong Il’s, and Mahmood Ahmadinejad’s of the world are anathema to us. Although they claim to defend their peoples from foreign aggression and imperial exploitation, they themselves also constitute a repressive, undemocratic elite. They resist the encroachments of the imperial powers and their elites not as defenders of true democratic values and ardent opponents of empire, but as rival elites, equally oppressive if not equally powerful. Their totalitarian, reactionary leadership offers only the illusion of resistance and change. Ours is a forward-looking, progressive movement, with no room for reactionaries and dictators; we refuse to see in them a current or future ally.

Nor do we see in our own American soldiers an enemy. Rather, we recognize that there exists in our society today a “backdoor draft” by which young people of color and the poor, both groups disenfranchised and systematically discriminated against, join the military in disproportionate numbers for the educational and other benefits which it offers. In many communities, young African-American men must decide between prison and the barracks –there are very few other options open to them. American soldiers, therefore, often represent among the most thoroughly oppressed, disenfranchised members of our society. But while the poor fight and die, it is the corporate elite which promotes and benefits from war. Support the troops: bring them home!

The same elite, moreover, while it perpetuates war abroad, perpetuates discrimination at home. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia are the means by which they create divisions and strife among the mass of our people and build the conditions under which imperialism is possible. We therefore oppose all forms of discrimination because of the exclusion and stigmatization which they breed, because of their role in fomenting the imperial project, and because they preclude the creation of a truly democratic society. The disenfranchisement and exploitation of the poor and workers, at home and abroad, are likewise unacceptable.

Finally, while we recognize that the American government and military are the principal bulwarks of the status quo and of imperialism, and American corporate elites the principal beneficiaries, we understand that, in this age of globalization, the empire is no longer an American, but a global empire. Although American elites may be found at the heart of the empire, elites around the world are complicit in its preservation. All people, regardless of race or nationality, moreover, are its victims. Anti-Americanism, therefore, only serves to blind us to the global scope of the corporate interests which have colluded against democracy and against which we must struggle. Although our fight is circumscribed by national boundaries, we must not lose sight of the international nature of the struggle nor of the international nature of the corporate elite against whom we struggle. Short-sighted Anti-Americanism – by which we refer to the belief of many leftists that our country, its culture, and its people are the root of all evil – serves only to alienate the mass of the American people and, moreover, is itself a pernicious form of “American exceptionalism.” Ours is a national struggle for democratic liberation waged against a national corporate elite – in the prosecution of which we must not fear to employ progressive “American values” or our own distinct heritage as American leftists – but it is only one of many such struggles being fought around the globe which together form the international movement for a more democratic society. We express solidarity with our brothers and sisters in the global struggle!

Compass Points: The American South and the American Left

Today on the Hippolytic blog, I encountered an intriguing post by fellow Yale undergraduate Adda Birnir on the "re-emergence of the South in contemporary American photography." In the course of a few paragraphs, Adda proceeds smoothly from a discussion of these photographs (by Sally Mann, Alec Sloth, William Christenberry, and others) themselves to a meditation on American -- and particularly Southern American -- history. In particular, she warns of the dangers of "southern worship," of romanticizing the American South and its sordid history, and asks, "What happens when we so highly regard these images? What sorts of violence -- racial or economic -- are we implicitly condoning?"

Interesting post, but, in my mind, somewhat problematic. Putting aside the photographs themselves -- I have not seen most of them and do not, in any case, know much about photography -- the post speaks in broad terms about American, and particularly Southern American, history and warns of the dangers of romanticism. Certainly, romanticism, especially of the Confederacy , is quite dangerous, and something to which many otherwise well-intentioned people, including some progressives, fall prey.

At the same time, while racial inequality and racism persist as our country's most severe domestic problems and must be addressed, Northern, and especially Northeastern, leftists must come to grips and make peace with American history and allow their Southern compatriots to do the same.

There is a virulent strain of anti-Americanism on the American left which seeks to find the root of all evil in the United States, and especially in the South. But, although not entirely unjustified, the persistence of this attitude and rhetoric among leftists has effectively cut us off from our own history and preempted the formation of any uniquely American and organic left movement in this country. In fact, it is precisely because of our condescencion towards ordinary working-class American men and women -- in both the North and the South -- that we have been, for the most part, banished to academia.

While, as I have said, the point about romanticizing the South is well taken, treating the South as a monolith -- essentializing it, in other words -- is itself dangerous. Our insistence that racism is rooted in the South blinds us to its persistance in the North, just as international leftists' insistence that the United States is the source of all of the world's problems has blinded them to their own domestic problems. And as for the economic violence which Adda fears we are "implicitly condoning" when we admire images of the South, wage slavery persists today in all parts of this country -- cutthroat capitalism was never an isolated Southern phenomenon.

Finally, although I of course oppose all forms of discrimination and institutionalized racism, and I consider apologists for slavery and segregation morally reprehensible, it is nevertheless important -- perhaps more so precisely because of my strong condemnation of Southern race politics -- to recognize that not every Southerner was a slaveowner nor a supporter of that brutal system of humiliation, discrimination, and exploitation. On the contrary, while, according to J. Morgan Kousser, "the dominant familiar myth [of the South] has been conservative, its characters the cavalier planter, the happy slave, the valiant and romantic Confederate cavalryman, the evil or just ignorant Yankee Reconstructionist, the paternalistic New South industrialist, the cosmopolitan, forward-looking Progressive politician or newspaper editor," there is another vision of the South:

The competing, less well-known tradition, crafted initially by Yankees, but since the 1920s, primarily by dissenting Southerners, black as well as white, serves different purposes and has different stock characters, more villains than heroes: the brutal slaveholder and postbellum bossman, the rebellious slaves, the anti-aristocratic, populistic, hill-country small farmer, the exploitative capitalist and his brutal minions, the long-suffering but rebellious sharecropper or miner or lint-head, and the idealistic organizer who seeks to help in the liberation of the underclass...It is an attempt to create a usable past for Southern radicals.

It is important, then, to recognize that many in the South, white as well as black, fought valiantly against slavery and then segregation. In fact, "the rebellious slaves" and the white "long suffering but rebellious sharecropper or miner or lint-head" were natural class allies in the struggle against economic exploitation in the American South -- only the propagation of racist ideology by the plantation aristocracy prevented this potential alliance from ever reaching fruition. The point, then, is that racism has a material, economic basis, and has been and continues to be employed by the exploiters to divide the exploited. Racist attitudes among workers are a prime example of "false consciousness," but why, if racism weakens their struggle against the bosses, do so many white American laborers, especially in the South, fall prey to this pernicious ideology? I don't pretend to have all the answers, but I believe the appeal of racial hierarchy to white sharecroppers, for example, was the stability it granted in an otherwise unstable world of economic exploitation: as tough as life got, the white sharecropper could still feel superior to the black slave, he could find consolation in the fact that he, at least, was not at the very bottom of the social order. We see the same phenomenon among, for example, recently arrived immigrants in the United States: rather than unite, each successive wave has battled those that came before and after for scraps from the exploiters' table. Divide and conquer tactics are a prime tool of the American capitalist in the class struggle.

In any event, understanding racism and its strong ideological appeal in certain regions and among certain sectors is necessary if we are to effictively combat it. Adda's caution against romanticizing the South is appreciated; her implied "essentialization" of that same South, however, is not, and does a great deal of damage to our efforts to truly understand and come to terms with the region's history. She claims that we need "to seize this opportunity of national reflection and push for true introspection," but nevertheless seems to have already come to the conclusion that there can be no redemption for the South, that on the contrary Southerners should be made to wear the stain of their history forevermore. Without reconciliation, however, there can be no progress; the South has a bloody history, but so too does the rest of our country, and I believe it is high time that we as American leftists begin -- for our own sake, as well as that of our Southern compatriots -- to come to terms with our history as Americans and learn that, in order to build a better future for all, we may need to forgive, although never forget, the sins of our collective past.

Navy in New Haven?

So I've been running into Navy guys all weekend. Is it New Haven fleet week or something? Makes me a little uncomfortable, to be honest...

On an entirely unrelated note, Prof. Sam Farber gave an excellent lecture on the nature of Cuban "socialism" today at Columbia. As expected, he argued, convincingly, that Cuba is not a socialist state, or at least not in any meaningful way. Worker's democracy and socialism go hand-in-hand; but Cuba, in his analysis, is a psuedo-Stalinist authoritarian dictatorship. Smart guy: check out his book The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered.