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Reflections on the Cult of Stalin
Georg Lukacs
[First published: as “Brief an Alberto Carocci” in the special issues of Nuovi Argomenti, Nos. 57-58, 1962, devoted to the discussion of the Twenty-second Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; it was subsequently published as “Privatbrief über Stalinismus, Brief an Alberto Carocci” in Forum, Nos. 115-117, 1693; abridged English translation, published 1963; Transcribed: by André Nj.]
Dear Senor Carocci,
I am very tempted to reply at length to the problems which you raise in your “eight questions”: for practically everything that has occupied the minds of many of us for years – past is concentrated in them. Unfortunately, the circumstances in which I find myself compel me to renounce this intention. But since I do not wish to keep from you completely the ideas in my mind, I am writing just a simple private letter, which, of course, does not pretend at all to deal systematically with all the essential questions.
I begin with the expression “cult of the personality.” Of course I regard it as absurd to reduce the substance and the problems of such an important period in the history of the world to the particular character of an individual. ...
My first reaction to the Twentieth Congress concerned not only the personality but the organization: the apparatus which had produced the cult of the personality and which had fixed it in a sort of endless enlarged reproduction. I pictured Stalin to myself as the apex of a pyramid which widened gradually toward the base and was composed of many ‘little Stalins”: they, seen from above, were the objects and, seen from below, the creators and guardians of the “cult of the personality.” Without the regular and unchallenged functioning of this mechanism the “cult of the personality” would have remained a subjective dream, a pathological fact, and would not have attained the social effectiveness which it exercised for decades.
"In Italy, An Ambiguous Justice"
Salvatore Palidda (Genoa University)
[This article, “En Italie, une justice ambiguë”, was first published in French in
“Mediapart” on 20 July 2012. Translation by Statewatch.]
Everyone recalls the violence, abuses of power and torture by numerous police officers against demonstrators during the Genoa G8, as well as the violence by the self-styled “black bloc”. Eleven years after the 20th and 21st of July 2001, the third instance of Italian justice [the Corte di Cassazione, Italy’s highest appeal court] has just issued its definitive sentence against the officers accused of beating the 93 demonstrators who were sleeping in the Diaz school and then, straight afterwards, a second verdict against ten demonstrators who were charged for “destruction and looting” and accused of being responsible for the “devastation” of the city and for seriously endagering public order.
Beyond the Old Virtue of Struggle: Autonomy, Talent, and Revolutionary Theory
Richard Gilman-Opalsky
(For the precarious people of Egypt, Tunisia, Greece, and Elsewhere - 4/26/2011)
1. STRUGGLE & PLEASURE: PRELIMINARY GESTURES
[1] The concept of "struggle" has occupied a central place in the radical imagination. For Frederick Douglass, all progress requires struggle, and for Karl Marx, human history consists of human conflict and class struggle. Struggle has become an integral substance, and is often the crux, of transformative projects and politics. Even today, influential thinkers like the autonomist Marxist John Holloway understand that, fundamentally, revolution begins with a scream of sadness. From an affective point of view, however, people do not want to struggle or to scream with sadness. I explore the contradiction of desire embodied in wanting a different world without wanting to struggle. I argue that there is an intractable absurdity at the heart of any politics that valorizes struggle: If the narrative on virtuous struggle is not deconstructed, it shall always be ultimately undesirable to make the world that we desire.
Is capitalism a market society?
Wildcat
It is a common view nowadays that acts of exchange and their logic are at the centre of capitalist society and that many social processes can be explained on the basis of exchange relations. From this viewpoint the current strategies of ‘privatisation’ and ‘neoliberalism’ become more plausible—both for followers and critics of these strategies. This notion has little to do with the reality of global accumulation of capital, but it is socially confirmed in our daily atomisation, which itself is only the flipside of a lack of open struggles and new collective relationships emerging from within them. To the isolated individual, social processes actually appear to be exchange transactions, or more precisely, it rationalises the experience of powerlessness, because the essence of exchange is just the assumption of the independence and autonomy of individualised subjects. By perceiving social relations as acts of exchange—social relations, which are essentially based on organised and institutionalised violence, exploitation and oppression—the idea of ‘freedom’ and ‘autonomy’ of the individual or certain social groups is rescued. For the individual the perception of social relations as being based on exchange is more than mere imagination. It is a very real experience, given that daily reproduction is mediated by markets and acts of exchange. This form of mediation seems to confirm our individual freedom—and in a certain way actually does confirm it.
The Factory of an Urban District
FelS AG Soziale Kämpfe
A “Militant Investigation” at the Jobcenter in Berlin-Neukoelln
The “Jobcenter” is the largest provider of income in the Neukoelln district of Berlin. It is here where people from the district come together – the young and the old, those with a Ph.D. and those without a school leaving certificate, those who have been around forever and the newest district residents. For this reason, the Jobcenter as an institution has not only a great influence on the district – it is also a (potential) place for intervention against disfranchisement and exploitation.
Since their inception in 2005, Jobcenters have been in constant crisis. This is evident in the long waiting times, late payments, a much too high mentoring ratio (the number of “customers” to be mentored per caseworker), as well as in the appeals and legal actions filed against Hartz IV decisions. In Berlin-Neukoelln, there are around 1,500 appeals each month. The ground is shaking, yet each struggle remains individualized and invisible. How to overcome individualization?
On Any Sunday
Martin Hardie
Last weekend my old friend, Timorese ‘boss’ in the days of the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) and the current Secretary of State for Energy Policy (SEPE), Avelino Maria Coelho da Silva, invited me to his traditional land outside of Ossu on the southern slopes of the great mountain range that runs the length of the island of Timor. I had spent the best part of the previous three weeks with Avelino, first travelling with him to remote villages as he campaigned for the Timorese Socialist party (PST) in the Parliamentary elections, and then in his office at the Palacio do Governo, in Dili, working on a draft of a law on renewable energy.
The Meaning of Mondragon
Bernard Marszalek
A picturesque town in the Basque region of Spain has become a Mecca for progressive pilgrims, videographers and journalists. And every few months a glowing report announces that this town, nestled in a lush valley encircled by wooded mountains, holds the future. A future of responsible capitalism, or future socialism, or future, whatever. The tag line depends on the visitor’s agenda.
What’s so special about this town? Something extraordinary for a town with fewer than 25,000 inhabitants, it happens to be headquarters for a complex of modern manufacturing enterprises, a bank – one of the largest in Spain, a university, and more. All these enterprises are tied together to form the Mondragon Corporation, which ranks in the top ten of industrial conglomerates in all of Spain, and it’s a cooperative enterprise.
The Revolution of Living Knowledge
Gigi Roggero
We’re living in a revolutionary situation. We could reformulate the classical definition in the following terms: the ruling elites of global capital cannot live as in the past; the workers, the precarious, the students, the poor, the living knowledge refuse to live as in the past. In the global crisis, the transnational struggles – from the North Africa insurrections to the acampadas in Spain or Syntagma Square, from the Chilean university movement to Occupy and the Québec uprising – are composed by the convergence of a downgrading middle class and a proletariat whose poverty is directly proportional to its productivity.
Occupy Author Examines Archeology of Debt
Ruth Krause
Few books have provoked the kind of media hype, discussion and praise
that David Graeber's "'Debt: The Last 5,000 Years" has in the past few
weeks. DW looks at the movement and the man behind the book.
He doesn't stay in one place for long. One minute David Graeber is in
London, where he teaches anthropology at Goldsmith College, the next
he's in Frankfurt at Blockupy, then in Cologne and Berlin for book
releases, next stop New York. It's no wonder that Graeber is so busy:
He's published three books in 40 days.
On the G20/12
This week’s latest reunion in Mexico of the G20 country-governments—that is to say, the ‘most advanced’ States within the global capitalist system—predictably continued in the tradition of mindlessness and unreason for which the transnational oligarchy should by now be well-known. Meeting in the luxury-resort town of San José del Cabo in Baja California Sur—a locale which, like Cancún in the Yucatan, effectively functions as a beachside colony for the most privileged, whether Mexican or foreign—the parties to the G20 merely worked to attempt to stabilize their dominion over the peoples of the world and non-human nature.
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