socialism without socialism

Saw this on someone’s user page:

Starting articles on Wikipedia is like building sandcastles on the beach. Down by the surf the sand is nice and wet and the building is easy, but your work will soon be wiped out by an incoming wave. For your work to last, build farther up the beach.

Wikipedia, User:Carrite, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carrite#Timbo.27s_Rules (as of Apr. 27, 2013, 07:52 GMT)

Yesterday someone I know mentioned that I could send them something on twitter, I thought it was weird at the time because I’d only just discovered that they had a twitter account. When I got home I did a search and realised that they’d been following me for two years, and I hadn’t noticed because they’d never retweeted or @replied to anything. The same sort of thing happens on facebook, there’s people on there who added me as a friend, presumably in the hope of ‘reconnecting’ but they’ve never sent me a message, never written on my wall, never commented on anything I post. Admittedly I’ve already given up a bit on facebook at this point.

This person who follows me on twitter knows an awful lot about me, I’ve written a lot of stuff in two years, and all that has taken place without any two-way communication until we actually met in real life. It made me wonder whether social media actually breeds social alienation. There’s a clear case of this where companies want you to start viral conversations about running shoes or toilet paper or other stuff, and this just commercialises the social network, turning it into an advertising channel. One the more optimistic side there’s a popular reading of the Arab spring which is that people all gathered on websites and talked to one another and were empowered through communication and dialogue to unite in a revolutionary movement for the overthrow of their government. I like the idea of this but I don’t know if it’s actually a realistic prospect, at least not here and not now.

Anyway, I was reminded that social media isn’t always that social.

This is an essay I wrote for a module I’m taking this semester, I’m a bit wary of posting essays online for fear of it being flagged up as a false-positive case of plagiarism by the turnitin system. Thankfully I’m not the only person posting up my coursework online and it’s still okay for people to copy this work so long as I’m attributed as the author and they don’t try to profit off it.

Firstly I will establish what we mean when we talk about Leninism and Stalinism. Leninism is not a comprehensive ideology in itself, which is why it’s often paired with Marxism as Marxism-Leninism. It updates the Marxist critique of capitalism for more contemporary conditions and goes further in suggesting practical alternatives. This is understandable as Lenin was constantly engaging with the process of praxis by testing theory against practice and practice against theory.

Broadly we can characterise Lenin’s contributions to Marxism as an analysis of imperialism(Lenin, 1917), some contributions to the field of culture(Claudin-Urondo, 1977), an analysis of the role of the socialist state(Lenin, 1918), and a model of organisation under a vanguard party(“Constitution of the Communist Party of China,” 2006).

Stalinism is more difficult as its definition is contested. In its simplest form Stalinism is just a totalitarian form of socialism(Reichman, 1988), but that is too vague and can be used to describe almost all pre-existing socialist states. This overly broad definition was criticised by Gorbachev and led him to claim that “Stalinism is a concept thought up by the enemies of communism to discredit socialism as a whole”(Nahaylo, 1999). The surviving ideological currents of Stalinism have been absorbed into more comprehensive ideologies, such as National Bolshevism(Dugin, n.d.), or been modified to form Maoism, Juche or Hoxhaism. In light of this I will try to restrict Stalinism down to onlythe policies and ideas pursued by the Soviet Union during Stalin’s leadership.

In using such a definition I’ve already accepted that Stalinism was, at least to some extent, a historically distinct and specific phenomenon. It can be understood as a result of its historical context, for example the rapid drive to industrialisation has been explained as as a necessary stage in the development of the Soviet Union(Nove, 1964). The argument also goes that without industrialisation the Soviet Union might have struggled to defeat the fascist invasion during the Great Patriotic War, thus elevating the industrialisation of the economy to an existential question of national defence. In this case Stalinism was not the personal idea of Stalin, instead it was the only logical course of action in the circumstances. Tucker(1977) does imply that this is the case, but fails to qualify it. It is better backed up by Ellenstein(1978), who said

“When you think of the Stalin phenomenon during the war, what strikes one as extraordinary is that millions of soviet men and women, who had been victims of Stalinist terror, played a heroic part in the struggle of the soviet people. Why had their loyalty not been destroyed? Why indeed had the Soviet Union not disintegrated under the combined blows of Stalin’s rule and Nazi attack? Because the basis of the Soviet state was socialist and in most respects independent of the policies of the men who ruled it”

It’s important to emphasise this common theme being drawn between Ellenstein, Nove and Tucker, that Stalin’s personality and even his ideas are somewhat irrelevant. If this is the case then Stalinism is relevant to Leninism only in the sense that Leninism shaped the conditions in which Stalinism emerged.

So what conditions do define the Stalinist epoch? The Soviet Union faced a constant threat of invasion from the imperialist countries, the same as during Lenin’s time. What changed was the character of capitalism. From the mid-1930s onwards the ‘most imperialist elements of finance capital’(Dimitrov, 1935)moved across Europe to replace bourgeois democracy with fascism. I doubt Lenin would have predicted the Soviet Union would join forces with the imperialist countries to defeat fascism. However, Lenin theorised that imperialism was ‘decaying capitalism’(Lenin, 1916) tending towards monopolisation, and we can take fascism as a more advanced stage of this process(Palme, 1935). In this way Stalin’s anti-fascism flows directly from Lenin’s theory of imperialism.

Another feature of the Stalinist epoch was the need to maintain internal stability, hence the purges of state institutions and retaliations against the kulaks. It can be argued that these measures actually created more chaos and instability than to begin with.

However, the intention of the policy was to take full control of the countryside and to guarantee the unity of the Communist Party. The influence of Trotskyism was particularly worrying as it had potential to split the party. It’s also clear that the party was deeply affected by the Tukhachevsky plot(Emelianov, 2012) and that this underlined the significant danger of allowing anticommunist elements to infiltrate its ranks.

How was this a continuation of Leninism? There were some internal party purges in May 1920, under Lenin’s leadership(Maximov, 1950), but these were not on the scale of Yezhov’s purges in the late 1930s. With regards to the army the dismissal of some high ranking officers might have made the red army weaker, but from Stalin’s perspective it just opened up more opportunities for promotion of potentially more talented people from the lower ranks(Stalin, 1939). He also brings up the fact that there was an issue of education in the higher ranks of the party, state and military. While some cadres were committed communists, they lacked good political education. This was different from Lenin’s pre-revolutionary Bolshevik party whose cadres were generally well educated in Marxist theory.

Now I’ll come to Stalinism as an ideological continuation of Leninism, or more accurately Marxism-Leninism. Brar(1993) wrote a preface to Stalin’s original ‘Trotskyism or Leninism?’(1924) in which he went further than Stalin to argue that the Trotskyist line of ‘permanent revolution’ against ‘socialism in one country’ is anti-Leninist. Brar very briefly mentions a speech to the Moscow Sovietin which Lenin talks about the need to build socialism in Russia, to build a socialist nation(Lenin, 1922). This breaks down the notion of Lenin as internationalist versus Stalin as nationalist. The debate also needs a clarification of terms, internationalism is the interaction between nations, and as such internationalism is not the opposite of nationalism and the two concepts can be harmoniously reconciled.What we do know is that by the end of the civil war Lenin was well aware that communist movements in the wake of 1917 had failed to hold state power, and thus ‘socialism in one country’ was the only logical course of action for both Lenin and Stalin.

Stalin(1954) also defended his position and checked it against Marxism-Leninism by arguing that Leninism is a universal theory which applies to the proletariat. This was in response to Zinoviev who wanted to introduce the peasantry as the ‘main thing’ of Leninism. Zinoviev would imply that Leninism can be separated from Marxism and suggests that Marxism-Leninism is not the model for developed capitalist countries who don’t have a large peasantry. Taking this further Stalinism is only the application of Marxism-Leninism to Russia, and that one of the ‘main things’ of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism is the necessary development of an industrial proletariat.

Lastly I will evaluate whether Stalinism actually represents a break from Leninism. Taking a holistic approach Lenin’s overall strategy was ‘a strategic zigzag from left to right’ in pursuit of the victory of the revolution(Žižek, 2002). He swung wildly from War Communism to the New Economic Policy and wasn’t afraid to steer the revolution through risky and dangerous political territory. This is counterpoised with Stalin whose overall strategy was centrist, one of taking a steady course and correcting any deviations to the left or the right. Stalin’s centrism can also be seen in the Stalinist need for stability and order in society.

Trotsky’s argument(Trotsky, 1937) claims that after Stalin took power he centralised power in the state bureaucracy and turned the Soviet Union into a Bonapartist state. Cliff(1974) has taken it further to claim that capitalist relations of production had been restored in the Soviet Union and that the workers state had degenerated to the point of state capitalism. The same argument is also presented slightly differently from the Maoist perspective after the period of Khrushchevite revisionism(1968). Essentially it goes that the managers and bureaucrats formed a new class, able to assert control over the means of production by abusing the principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This new class then acted like capitalists, engaging in profit-seeking and competition with other enterprises. The new capitalist state also collaborated with imperialist countries in its foreign policy, for example the negotiation with the imperialist powers for control of Europe after the Great Patriotic War.

I find this argument too simplistic as it ignores the formal instruments put in place by the Soviet Union to strengthen the democratic control of Labour over Capital. It also refuses to take into account the socialist nature of the Soviet state.

In conclusion I think Stalinism was a specific phenomenon which did flow directly from Leninism, but was also deeply influenced by the historical conditions of the time.

Bibliography:

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Anon (1968) How the Soviet revisionists carry out all-round restoration of capitalism in the USSR. Peking: Foreign Languages Press
Brar H (1993) Trotskyism or Leninism?
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Cliff T (1974) State capitalism in Russia. London: Pluto Press
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Lenin V (1918) State and Revolution Available at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/.
Maximov G (1950) The Guillotine at Work: Twenty Years of Terror in Russia (Data and Documents). Chicago Available at: http://libcom.org/library/lenins-terror-bolshevik-party-maximov (accessed 11/03/13).
Nahaylo B (1999) the Ukrainan Resurgence. University of Toronto Press Available at: http://www.ditext.com/nahaylo/ukrainian.html.
Nove A (1964) was Stalin really necessary? some problems of soviet political economy Available at: http://prism.talis.com/brookes/items/23804 (accessed 10/03/13).
Palme D (1935) the Question of Fascism and Capitalist Decay. the Communist International. 12 (14). Available at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/dutt/articles/1935/question_of_fascism.htm.
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Stalin J (1924) Trotskyism or Leninism? Available at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/11_19.htm.
Trotsky L (1937) The Revolution Betrayed. Dover Publications Inc. Available at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch11.htm#ch11-1.
Tucker RRC and Studies AC of LSPG on CC (1977) Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation. Transaction Publishers
Urban GR (1978) Euro-communism: its roots and future in Italy and elsewhere. London: Temple Smith Available at: http://prism.talis.com/brookes/items/122800 (accessed 10/03/13).
Žižek S (2002) Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Verso

Some comments:
The marker mentioned that I should’ve put page numbers in the in-line citations. The page numbers are there, they’re just hidden down in the bibliography. On that point the standard Harvard bibliography style I used didn’t originally include urls, and since handing in the essay I’ve discovered the ‘official’ Harvard style for Brookes which includes urls in the bibliography, so I’ve used that here. I didn’t cite the Stalin Society but they were quite helpful in pointing me to stuff written by Harpal Brar. Jean Ellenstein was a eurocommunist and he had a great book called ‘the Stalin phenomenon’, unfortunately when I came to write the essay all the copies of it in the library were taken out, so I’ve quoted him here in another book about eurocommunism which all the other students ignored.

I think that’s everything I wanted to say, this essay got a first, and I’m quite proud of it.

So the results of the election were announced yesterday. The full vote numbers aren’t online yet, in the meantime the SU has posted the elected officers, which are as follows:

President – Joel Holmes
VP: Academic Experience – Tom Smith
VP: Student Experience – Paul McCormack
Environmental Officer – Jayson Quayle
Women’s Officer – Claire Mayne
Ethnic Minorities’ Officer – Miah Mohammad Sohel
International Students’ Officer – Mohsin Raza
Mature Students’ Officer – Rachel Arnold
Disabled Students’ Officer – Emily Pinner
RAG President – Ryan Bratley
Student Trustees – Miah Mohammad Sohel, Asmita Gyawali, Sarah Brice
NUS Conference Delegates – Tom Smith, Mary Foy, Emily McPherson, Andrew Pederson

In the presidential round I was the first candidate to be eliminated with 78 votes. I was pretty surprised by this because while I didn’t expect to win I did expect to come out in front of Lyn and Samer. 78 people. Given that my immediate circle of friends isn’t more than about 30 people that leaves some 48 others who I probably don’t know personally. There’s also two people who voted to Re-Open Nominations first, and voted for me second. I hadn’t thought of that as a voting strategy and might start using it in future.

Joel won president, and it’s already established that he’s politically very dodgy. I guess it remains to see what he’s like in office. He was closely followed up by Ashley who had ~800 votes against Joel’s ~900. I’ve clearly missed a trick somewhere because I’d quite like to mobilise 800-900 people to vote. Joel probably did it through the 1,189 people added to his facebook group, but that doesn’t count for everything because Ashley only had 27 ‘likes’ on his page. Lyn, Samer and Andrew each won ~100 votes, I wasn’t really paying attention at that point.

Tom won an overwhelming number of votes for his re-election and so did Paul. I haven’t spoken about Tom yet, and I don’t quite understand him. Yesterday he confirmed that it was no coincidence that his campaign logo looked suspiciously similar in style to that of the ‘vote Labour’ logo. I just don’t get it, he thinks he’s a social democrat and then he challenges Mary (who is a member of the Labour Party) from a right-wing platform. Maybe he’s confused. Anyway, he’ll carry on in his position next year.

As for the Women’s Officer, I thought Subi had it nailed, but it was actually a close race with someone called Claire Mayne winning. This is weird because Claire didn’t have a photo or a manifesto and as far as I know she didn’t campaign. Also after a cursory browse through her facebook page she ‘likes’ the LAD Bible, and lists her political views as ‘Conservative Party’. Huh.

Incidentally this is one of the reasons I disapprove of facebook. Random friends-of-friends like me shouldn’t be able to trawl through your personal info like I just did.

In the end it looks like the amount of time and effort we put into campaigning didn’t translate into a huge number of votes. The only possible explanation being that students (at Brookes) just don’t care about tuition fees, or courses being cut, or privatisation, or staff being made redundant, or all of these things which deeply affect their lives. It’s their choice of course, and I don’t blame students for not caring, they’ve been taught not to care. I stood this year because nobody else aside from Mary and Subi wanted to stand on a left platform, and I will probably stand again in my final year too (but not for president). I’ll probably also submit some motions to the AGM this year too, again if only because nobody else will. At least then it’ll give people something to talk about.

By way of an introduction which puts the rest of this post in context: I’m standing in the student union elections for the position of president in a slate along with Mary Foy and Subi Wahogo.

I wanted to write something about the elections and I’ve decided to hold off publishing it until the tense period after the polls are closed and before the results are announced. This is partly because I don’t want the result to influence what I write, and I don’t want what I write to influence the results. Oh wait, who am I kidding? Nobody reads this stuff anyway.

One of the main things I’ve been asked so far is ‘how has it been going?’ It’s really difficult to form a proper response because there’s not much to go on to measure student opinion. Of the students I’ve spoken to around 80% will nod passively and say I’ve got their vote, or they’ll say they’ve already voted. I suspect some of those responses are just their escape clause to make me leave them alone and stop talking to them. My sample pool is so low as to almost make it irrelevant, I’ve personally spoken to around 70 students, I’m told the turnout in these elections is 2,310 students, out of a total student population of 18,425 that’s a 12.5% turnout. In that case only around 9 of the 70 students I spoke to are statistically likely to vote. I’m using a flawed method because students are more likely to vote after I’ve spoken to them, but even so I still have no idea how many of them will vote for me.

I’d pushed to get our posters up as quickly as possible. It was a huge success and almost a week went by before I saw a poster from any other candidate, we were the poster champions on every campus. We also went out on two weekend trips to Clive Booth, Crescent and Paul Kent halls and Dorset house knocking on doors, giving out leaflets and putting up posters. Mary and me went on the radio too. The canvassing did at times jump over from engaging students in conversation to subjecting them to a struggle session, but overall I was pretty confident that we were doing well.

Underlining this was a slight sense of unease at the fact that that nobody else seemed to be doing the same. Only on a few occasions did we come across a rival candidate’s leaflets. Then, come the first election day I was up early in the morning to finish an essay and went from handing it in straight on into a lecture, at the end I was exhausted and headed straight home. Meanwhile there was a flurry of activity with candidates all gathering at a safe distance from the voting stations to politely harass students into going to vote. I hadn’t really expected the voting period to be the main focus of all the campaigning and it caught us at a disadvantage because we hadn’t planned to maintain a round the clock presence at the voting stations.

In terms of the other candidates, there’s not a great deal I can say about Lyn Mangisi because I haven’t seen her or any of her campaign materials aside from her manifesto. I knocked on Samer’s flat when I was out canvassing and had a brief conversation with him, but again aside from that there’s not much I can say about him. I predict that both these candidates will not win many votes, just because I haven’t seen them campaigning and there’s not much which sets them apart from the other candidates. Next down on the scale is Andrew Pedersen, who likes wearing a suit, and also likes rugby. Fair enough. He’s done quite a bit of loitering round the voting stations and made a few videos.

Joel Boom Holmes is the most worrying candidate for me. He’s playing a sort of hypermasculine ‘lad’ who wants more funding for sports teams. Behind this I’ve heard from other people that he’s a Daily Mail reading zionist, we also did a bit of digging once the candidates were announced and I suspect he’s a tory. He also has a large facebook group backing him and a dedicated campaign team. The union had a conservative president last year and as a result it was difficult to get it to officially support student activism, I don’t want that same situation to repeat itself.

Ashley-Patson Aryee is the current president and he’s standing for re-election. His campaign branding centers around spamming the #ivegothisback hashtag on twitter, which is in turn inspired by the campaign to re-elect Obama. He’s also become a semi-permanent presence hovering within view of the voting booth. Politically he’s flaky, he thinks the fees battle is over and should not be fought. Of course I disagree, and at the same time I can’t help feeling that there’s nothing particularly wrong with Ashley, he’s friendly, harmless and inoffensive. There’s no substance and no passion, but that almost works in his favour, I can’t say that he’s done a bad job, in fact compared to his predecessor he’s done pretty well. The elections do create a small undercurrent of passive-aggressive hostility between candidates and it’s a shame because I’m not standing in the elections because I think he’s a terrible president, I just think I could do better. I have tried to moderate my tone in the election not to attack Ashley the person, but to attack the fact he doesn’t believe in anything.

Ashley’s nihilism is present in the other candidates too, their manifestos read like copypasted parodies. I’ve been told a few times that the job of president is to represent all students, and I really dislike that position. It’s a populist attitude, that the president places themselves above politics and governs according to (their own subjective experience of) the public interest. The problem with this is that the apolitical position is itself political, in its simplest form to be apolitical is a highly conservative defence of the status quo. I find the progressive language used by candidates very ironic: they want change, and they want things to stay exactly as they are. These candidates have dubious motivation, if they think the job is just a bureaucratic function and they have no opinions of their own then why are they standing?

This has implications for me too, there’s some pressure to moderate my demands, to use modern advertising methods to sell my brand to the electorate. In this case my campaign rests not on the strength of my ideas but my personality, and this is how the elections are seen as a ‘glorified personality contest’. If I was elected I might end up as a bureaucrat, but a Marxist bureaucrat, I am unique in that even as a part of the university machine I would attempt to reform it. This is different from the apolitical union president who would make no attempt to push for systemic change both inside or outside the university. I did take my manifesto to Robin in the union before it was published to see if my plans was possible and he said they were so long as I have the political will to carry them out. As an elected officer you have a mandate, a stamp of approval from the student body, and you can use that to carry out the points in your manifesto.

My campaign is moderated, nowhere on my election materials do I mention that I’m a communist. Instead I’ve made do with subtle hints and clues, a subtext which would easily betray my affiliation to anyone who understood what it meant. I’m torn on this point because I would much rather have campaigned openly stating my affiliation, but I would have to do so knowing that I would probably not be elected. Subi has taken this path, she announces clearly in the first line of her manifesto that she’s a feminist.

The feminist issue is strange, it feels like I’ve taken it up as a surrogate ideology where I can’t talk about free education so I talk about women’s rights instead. Mary and Subi put me down as an ‘ally’, which I think works, I’ve been reluctant to call myself a ‘male feminist’ because of all the negative connotations that implies. I’m also wary of the times when feminism takes precedence over much broader issues. For example the fact that Galloway has said some pretty stupid things about rape doesn’t negate the fact that he’s a socialist. I don’t completely agree with the discourse of ‘privilege’ either as it tends to replace the firm Marxist boundaries of class with nebulous Foucaultian power imbalances. So I’m an ally, albeit one who has some personal reservations, ultimately though there are some areas of student culture which are disgustingly reactionary, and I can happily put aside my differences with radical feminism to help fix that.

The results are announced in a few hours and I’m not sure I’ll win. Hopefully our campaign has forced the other candidates to consider the points we’ve brought up. We’ve certainly provoked a reaction, our posters have been torn down and binned, Mary was subjected to particularly unpleasant comments about her, someone reported our email address and twitter handle as spam which forced us offline for a few days. It’s been a long week, and after all I think I learned a lot.

I’m having an ongoing debate with a friend about the current situation in Mali. It’s been slipping in and out of the news so it’s difficult to keep track of what’s going on. For some reason the British media have not deemed it newsworthy which is a shame because the news has been dominated by an athlete who shot his girlfriend, someone took a photo of a woman who caught pregnancy, an old man decided to retire, and all sorts of other banalities.

Meanwhile 100 million people went on strike in India, a meteorite hit Russia, about 50 people were blown up in Damascus, people are out protesting on the streets again in Egypt and the war is still raging in Mali.

My argument is that the present situation in Mali cannot be treated the same as the invasions of Afghanistan or Iraq in the last decade. My main point is that the Malian government itself invited France to intervene. The current government of Mali is recognised by the international community and its decisions should to some extent be respected as an expression of the national will. I don’t mean to say that the government of Mali is popular or even that it represents the majority of people in the country, but as it stands other states have to accept it as the legitimate authority.

The intervention is not simply a case of European countries interfering in the affairs of countries in other continents. The defense of Mali includes a significant level of regional involvement. Troops have been sent from Nigeria, Togo, and others taking part in the African-led International Support Mission to Mali (AFISMA). It’s interesting to see Nigeria taking part since that country used to be a British colony and has overcome its residual inter-colonial hostility to help out a country which comes from a different colonial legacy. AFISMA also has the backing of the African Union which sent $50 million in aid, and $5 million of this sum is expected to go directly to the Malian army. Incidentally the AFISMA initiative is also officially authorised by the United Nations Security Council.

The Tuareg rebels who were initially the antagonists in this conflict have been pushed aside by radical Islamist groups. The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad is relegated to a third party in the conflict, for the time being their armed struggle for independence has been postponed and they’ve turned on the Islamists. The other invisible third party is Algeria, which was accused of supporting Islamist groups in Azawad. This probably came back to haunt them when they had to deal with the hostage crisis in January.

The Party of African Solidarity for Democracy and Independence (SADI) is the main representative of the communist movement in Mali, and I prefer to take their line. Their position is to support the Malian Army against both the Islamists in the north and the French army.

In this difficult time we live through, the SADI Party asks all its activists and all the Malian People to bring multi-form support to our army, such that she can rid the country of the invaders as rapidly as possible and to avoid our country from being stuck in a war which will justify its occupation and put in doubt its independence.

The support for the Malian army is strange given that there was a brief military coup and the military clearly holds a lot of power in the country. It has a great potential to be a highly reactionary force, and the SADI has had its own share of troubles with its General Secretary being arrested by the Malian security services (he was released two days later). This brings with it another dilemma, ‘Les Generations Libres’ claims that Mali has been a dictatorship of myriad clans and elites since 1968, and that the military coup was to some extent motivated by years of corruption and ‘gangster government’. The Touareg rebellion is also strongly influenced by tribal factors. Basically we have to respect Mali’s sovereignty, but we also have to accept that there are some deep-set internal problems with the Malian state which could be exacerbated by the current situation.

For the moment the greatest threat to Mali’s sovereignty is the Islamic rebellion, and with that in mind it’s a tactical decision to invite foreign troops in to solve the primary threat. The foreign troops will in turn bring with them new problems which need to be accounted for. The imperialist powers are perfectly capable of standing idly by and watching governments tumble to fundamentalist Islam so long as it serves their interests. Of course France has imperial ambitions in Mali and it would be naive to expect the French troops to leave once the war is over without asking for something in return. However it would be equally naive to demand their immediate withdrawal, leaving Mali alone to fight a drawn out civil war where even the possibility of victory would leave the country ruined and impoverished.

I agree with Samir Amin when he says that French neocolonialism doesn’t constitute a “major danger” and that

A reconstructed Mali will also be able to affirm – or to reaffirm – quickly its independence. On the other hand a Mali wrecked by reactionary political Islam would be incapable, for a long time, of conquering an honourable place on the world and regional chessboard. Like Somalia it would risk being wiped off the list of sovereign countries worthy of the name.

This is where the position of SADI comes in useful, the Malian army is kept at bay from the fractious struggles which plague the Malian government, at the same time it has some popular support and, most importantly, it has the authority to assert the right to self determination of the Malian people. It’s not perfect, and I accept that I might be wrong about all this. I’ll be following the events in Mali as closely as I can in the coming months to see how things develop.

The image in this post comes from the blog ‘Bridges from Bamako‘.

I picked up ‘Lenin and the Cultural Revolution’ in the library last week and writing the earlier post about phones reminded me of something Lenin wrote in 1918:

Socialism without postal and telegraph services, without machines is the emptiest of phrases.

Well, there you go. Lenin was conscious of the need to appropriate bourgeois culture and technology for the socialist cause. He was also a big fan of the telegraph.

Also related to my lack of a phone, I’ve almost disappeared from public records. I’ve concluded with no absolute evidence that I’m probably on a police database by now. It’s not so bad though because I’ve changed my address (I no longer live in student halls), I’ve changed my phone number, and I spent a few months abroad in a country most police officers probably couldn’t place on an atlas. I’m not quite at the stage of encrypting my email and wearing a tin-foil hat but I’m quite happy that I’m slightly harder to track down than my peers.

Of course I constantly undermine my privacy by publishing status notices about myself, having a facebook page, writing blogs like this, and generally existing in public life. I could start using a pseudonym and it might not come off so pretentious, after all ‘Lenin’ is a pseudonym.

Image generated from memebase, based on a still of Citizen Smith which was a BBC comedy series from a long time ago.

Last week I finally got a mobile phone, which brings to a close a long period of phoneless existence. Way back in May, I was living half my day in halls and the other half in the occupation, and at some point during that time I lost my phone. I raised it a few times in the tiny general assembly of the occupation, but after about a week without it I’d accepted that it was lost. The actual phone itself wasn’t such a loss, it was a vintage Nokia 5500 Sport from around early 2007, the keys were coming off and the middle button was broken. I was on a £10-a-month contract with the phone coop and they messed me around, it was difficult to cancel the contract and even once it was finally over they took an additional £10 for the month after the contract was cancelled. I understand that this is apparently common practice among all phone companies, but that doesn’t mean it should be acceptable. If it weren’t for the grief I got from them I probably would’ve just carried straight on and bought a new phone on a new contract. But, as things stood I had just over two months before going to Kazakhstan and buying a phone + a contract for such a short time seemed excessive, so I lived without it.

I got a phone in Kazakhstan, because it was necessary, but even there I turned it off occasionally and even neglected to take it with me on long journeys. Jeong lost his phone again in Shymkent so I just gave him my phone before leaving. Once back in Britain I continued to function much the same way as before until about a week ago when I finally caved in and bought a phone. I got one of the cheapest ones I could find, a Nokia 100, and it cost me £20. The giffgaff contract my brother set up needed £10 of starting credit before it would activate the sim card.

See this annoys me because I’ve had people say things along the lines of ‘but phones are cheap’. And they’re wrong. The cheapest phone I could buy on the cheapest contract left me having spent £30 in total. I guess it pales in comparison with people who get the latest smartphones on £30-a-month contracts and will end up spending £720 over the course of 24 months.

When I first got a phone way back in 2007 I didn’t really need it because I was at school and most of my friends were there too and instead of calling them I could just go and talk to them in person. It also helped that mobile phones were (at the time) banned from classes, and anyone found using one could get a conduct card. At best the mobile was a system which afforded some security and reassurance to my parents, even though most days I just left it at home. When we went out our family had a pair of walkie-talkies which we would use instead, we were rarely more than a few kilometres apart so we were always in range.

Coming into sixth-form the mobile phone became a sort of status symbol, I didn’t understand it at first but eventually I realised that I’d skipped a generation, the mobile phone was now something people had to own. It wasn’t just a passing fad like digimon or beyblades or personalised silicon bracelets; the mobile phone had taken its place as an everyday appliance alongside things like fridges or washing machines.

I also dislike smartphones for a number of reasons. A while ago I found out that my favourite pocket camcorder range had been discontinued. Why? Because smartphones now act as pocket camcorders, there’s no need for a single-function camcorder when a ‘swiss army knife’ smartphone can do the job almost as well. This trend continues, smartphones now threaten the existence of portable games consoles, GPS navigators, personal media players, personal organisers, watches, dictaphones, cameras, ebook readers, even netbooks. Taken to its worst excess the smartphone becomes so bloated and unwieldy it has to outsource its core functions to another external device.

Smartphones can do a lot of things, but they don’t do them very well. Sure a cameraphone can take a photo, but you’re better off using a normal camera. You can use a touchscreen to type emails, but you’re better off using a netbook or an external keyboard. You can play games on a smartphone, but they never come close to the level of sophistication and narrative depth found in most titles on a games console. I could go on but I’ve made my point. What works in favour of the smartphone is that it’s convenient, or rather it gives the illusion of efficiency. The smartphone user is the hurried executive who grabs a coffee on the go to drink in the taxi on their way to work. The smartphone user is important, their time is precious.

There’s another dimension to this too which extends out even to brick phones like mine. Someone carrying a mobile phone is instantly available at all times, they are kept ‘on call’ by society at large. When I didn’t have a mobile phone I asked people to email me, or send me a dent, or an instant message, and as a line of last resort they could actually call my home phone. This meant that generally I was able to respond at my own pace. As I’m writing this someone has sent me a message on facebook and I’m ignoring it for the moment, I’ll respond when this is done. If that person had called my mobile I would have been pressed to drop everything I was doing and respond immediately.

In the end the advantage of the mobile phone is for those situations where you’re nowhere near a phone booth and urgently need to contact someone. Thankfully for me those situations didn’t really come up, and eventually people got used to learning that when I was out of the house it was difficult to get in touch with me. Yet even now people cannot imagine their lives without a phone, ‘you didn’t have a mobile phone, how did you live?’

I’ve gone through one phone in 5 years, and to put that into perspective in the same period my brother has gone through 5 4 phones. My mum’s just bought a new Windows phone, and it really deserves a separate post to describe all the problems I have with it. I think I’ve done pretty well and I hope to keep the phone I have now for the next 5 years.

On Monday I was watching France 3 evening news with my family and they announced that a column of French tanks had moved into Timbuktu. This was followed up by an accusation in the Guardian that Islamists had burned down a library containing some really old manuscripts during their retreat out of the city. Crapital was dubious about the claim because the source for the story was not actually in Timbuktu and was telling the Guardian based on second-hand information. Then on Thursday someone called Callum Hamilton posted a link to an article on Science Insider which said that the library was still intact, some of the manuscripts were already smuggled back to Bamako, and that generally the situation wasn’t as bad as initially thought. It’s good news.

The Sky News report cited by the Science Insider article shows the library very much intact. Here’s a person doing an interview next to some empty shelves in the library at about 45 seconds into the report:

These shelves might be empty because, as Science Insider notes, this was a new building and most of the manuscripts were kept in an old building and most of them hadn’t been transferred to the new one before the Islamists arrived. So, all that needs to be done now is for someone to visit the old building and count how many manuscripts were left behind.

I think it’s an optimistic picture, we know that there were between 25,000 and 30,000 manuscripts in the library. Some of them were taken to Bamako and some of them were left in the old building. We also know that the library wasn’t burned down, so the manuscripts would’ve been taken out of the library and then burned. Remember that 25,000 manuscripts is a lot of manuscripts, and it wouldn’t be easy to move them all. Even if they were all taken out and burned there would probably be some huge pile of charred manuscripts lying around nearby the library. I can just about imagine the Islamists loading up crates of manuscripts into trucks, driving out into the desert and then burning them, but I don’t know if they would really go to that much effort.

The downside is that the Islamists did manage to smash a few ancient mausoleums during their stay in Timbuktu, enough to attract the ire of UNESCO. To be clear: I think this is terrible and although I’ve never been to Mali I deeply regret the loss of this collective heritage and our possibility to learn more about it.

Now that that’s out of the way we have to step back from the details a little bit. The destruction of cultural heritage by Islamists is an emotive topic which is used as part of the justification for military intervention in Mali. The tomb-smashing and scroll-burning portrays the Islamists as barbaric and uncultured, when in fact this destruction is a sign of how modern they are. These Islamists are enlightened thinkers ushering in a new age, they’re doing away with traditional forms of Islam to replace them with their radical philosophy. It’s not just in Mali either, it happened in Libya too, but it wasn’t so widely discussed back then because the rebels were sort of on ‘our side’. There’s also a great parallel here with the destruction of Buddhist shrines during Mao’s cultural revolution, but that’s getting beyond the point.

Yesterday and the day before there were articles published in the Guardian with this paragraph:

Until just over a week ago, fighters from al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb controlled Timbuktu, torching its showpiece library of ancient manuscripts in a vengeful departing act. They retreated from the town without firing a shot.

Aside from the issue of lazy journalists copy-pasting the same paragraph in two separate articles, the Guardian is still writing about the ‘torched library’ without any update on the situation. It’s arguable that the Islamists might have intended to burn down the library, but it looks like the French army moved in quickly enough that the Islamists had to retreat without fully carrying out their plan. If the French news really wanted to be patriotic they could print a headline along the lines of ‘French armed forces inadvertently halt destruction of precious library’.

After waiting a few months I was finally able to watch the 1975 Italian film, Fantozzi. Fantozzi works at a company called ItalPetrolCemenThermoTextiFarmSiderChemical where he has a demeaning and alienating job. It’s a slapstick comedy so he gets beaten around a lot in a series of funny gags, but in the end the audience is invited to reflect on the context of it.

There are spoilers beyond this point but since the story doesn’t have much linear or coherent progression it doesn’t really matter.

Fantozzi is moved to an office with a man called Folagra, who is described by the film’s narrator as a ‘left wing intellectual and after three months of studying he finally understands that he is being exploited by the capitalists. So one day he walks towards his office block and throws a brick through a window. Suddenly a figure appears, the ‘Galactic Director’ of the company, he invites Fantozzi to his office and the following scene takes place, between 01:39:25 and 01:39:36

Director: What's the difference between you and me?
Fantozzi: There is.
Director: What do you mean by difference?
Fantozzi: Surely you're not telling me that we are equal? You are the masters, the slavers. We are the starving ones!
Director: Dear Fantozzi, it's just a matter of words, of understanding. You say masters, and I say employers. You say slavers, and I say wealthy. You say starving, and I say lower class. But for the rest, I think the same way as you do.
Fantozzi: What?
Director: I am an enlightened man, like yourself. And I am convinced that in this world there are many iniquities to cure. I think the same way as you do, and the same way Mr Folagra does.
Fantozzi: But excuse me, Sir... you're not going to tell me that you are a communist?
Director: Well, not exactly a communist. I am a moderate progressive.
Fantozzi: But what do you plan to do about all these grievances... and all these injustices?
Director: Well, this would require that for every single problem, all the men of good will, men like you and me, start to... Please, sit down.
Fantozzi: Here, may I?
Director: They would need to start to meet together without any violence and talk until we reach an agreement.
Fantozzi: But, excuse me, your Holiness, this way will take at least 1000 years.
Director: I can wait.


The office of the director is very simple, there’s a church kneeler on the right, on the table is only a pitcher and some bread. The walls are bare. This is clearly not the lair of the super-rich, there are no ostentatious displays of wealth or privilege. The film-maker is making a nod to Weber’s ‘protestant work ethic’, the Director here is a good, efficient capitalist, he even cares for the welfare of his workers. The audience is taken in until the Director reveals his evil persona by admitting to Fantozzi that his chair is made from the skin of an accountant.

The scene also acts as an example of capitalist realism, see the Director wants the same things Fantozzi does, but they are unfeasible, impractical, impossible. Fantozzi is a dreamer whose idea cannot contend with the real world, and this is the problem. Communism is politically desirable, but the world must be changed in order for it to become realistic. If anything the scene betrays the period in which the film is made, one in which the Communist Party of Italy is at the height of its influence, but it reforms its ideas in order to go into a ‘historic compromise’ with the Christian Democrats.