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=By= Gaither Stewart

Social Democracy

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n the beginning there was Social Democracy. In the beginning, in the time of Marx, after the first cracks and faults of Capitalism began to show, the new political philosophy, from the start filled with wildly varying ideas of what was to be done, was born.

After the failure of the revolutions of 1848-49 and after the restoration, old antagonisms and haggling among the power blocs reflowered across Europe. Social Democrats smelled the evils of Capitalism and imperialism and debated how to replace the old system with “Socialism”.

Many still believed they could achieve Socialism gradually through social and political reforms. Many hung onto their conviction desperately. Yet, as has been said repeatedly in the course of history, the state of emergency, the desperation in which we live, is not the exception but the rule. Therefore, today’s general amazement that the things happening in our world are still possible is amazing in the same manner that the rulers’ stubborn faith in progress, its faith in “false” mass support of subservient allies-enemies is unbelievable for the thinking person… The entire radical and not so radical Left gathered around what would prove to be the new great moment in the history of ideas, Socialism, though at the time still a vaguely delineated political philosophy, each faction with its own idea of what should be done.

The situation was grim. Things did not look good for Social Democrats. As time passed, the revolutionary Vladimir Lenin arrived on the scene and turned many former beliefs upside down in his direct, straight-to-the-point manner. I like to imagine Lenin as a Russian Epicurus, suspicious of too much eloquence, a political realist who called a spade a spade, the truth of the moment in plain unadorned speech. Holding tight to the teachings of Karl Marx, Lenin truly believed that rapid, abrupt revolution was necessary to change things, to destroy Capitalism and establish Socialism in its place and to cause the world to swerve in a new direction.

On the nature of the class struggle for equality, Hegel made his famous statement in 1807: “Seek for food and clothing first, then the Kingdom of God shall be added unto you.”

Benjamin added his more subtle ideas on the class struggle in his Thesis on the Philosophy of History:

“The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers.”

After World War II, the majorities in most of the proliferated social democratic parties abandoned the goals of real Socialism, that is, possession of the means of production and the overthrow of Capitalism, and threw their support for a reformist welfare state within a capitalist economy. They eventually became willing and even eager appendages —instruments if not downright agents—of international capitalism. The potential for a real curative type of leadership was thus eliminated.

Yet, many Social Democrats who had first created the major socialist parties of the second half of the nineteenth century also claimed to hold to Marxism, although at the same time many were already revising the ideas of Marx and Engels and had become less and less hostile to Capitalism. The radical wing of social democracy considered attempts to reform Capitalism a failure and they prophesied the reformers would anyway be corrupted and end up as capitalists themselves. They were proven right.

Still suffering from the trauma of the failed revolutions of 1848-49, Social Democrats organized the First International Workingmen’s Association in 1864. Marx, in London, still an unknown figure to most, was invited as a representative of German workers and quickly rose to a dominant position in the movement. However, this first gathering was a confusing affair of radicals of all kinds: English Robert Owen utopists, French Proudhonists and followers of the Communist-oriented utopist Auguste Blanqui, anarcho-Communists, Irish nationalists, Polish patriots, Italian Mazzinists, German Socialists.

No common ideology united them, though all of them were thoroughly pissed at the deteriorating conditions of the workers and the general state of things. Due to this wide variety of political philosophies, there was conflict from the opening session. The Mutualists-Anarchists opposed Marx’s Communism and statism, emblematic of the polarization into two camps of Social Democracy divided over how to achieve their differing visions of Socialism.

In any case, the First International was a success in that it was the first major international forum for the promulgation of socialist ideas. Secondly, it succeeded in forming a General Council of which Marx was a member and who because of his restless, electric force quickly became the predominant figure, whose authority succeeded in holding the structure together for eight years. Moreover, Marx, in the long run, was to transform the intellectual and political life of his time. As an aside, readers today will find curious (touching and rewarding, too) the truly workers composition of the General Council of the First International:

Architect – Karl Marx, Peter Fox
Tailor – Eccarius, Lessner, Maurice, Milner, Stainsby
Carpenter – Applegarth, Cremer, Lochner, Weston
Weaver – Bradnick, J. Hales, Mottershead
Shoemaker – Morgan, Odger, Serraillier
Furniture Maker – Dell, Lucraft
Watchmaker – Jung
Mason – Howell
Musical-instrument maker – Dupont
Hairdresser – Lassassie

THE ANTI-SOCIALIST LAWS IN BERLIN While this conglomeration of noisy troublesome radicals published their writings and traveled incessantly around Europe to meetings, state authorities must have been confused—and some, most likely amused at the great to-do. Others however like the German government under the fist of Otto von Bismarck, were genuinely concerned about the threat to traditional order. In 1878 the German Reichstag passed the first of five successive Socialist Laws (Gesetz gegen die gemeingefährlichen Bestrebungen der Sozialdemokratie, or Law Against the Public Danger of Social Democratic Efforts.) The laws were passed after two failed attempts to assassinate Kaiser Wilhelm I by two radicals. The laws were intended to curb the growing strength of the Social Democratic Party, which was blamed for instigating the assassination attempts.

The law did not ban the party as such, but the prohibition of its meetings, the banning of its forty-five newspapers, the outlawing of trade unions crippled it as an organization. As a result the German Social Democrats (SPD), then the biggest workers party in Europe, ran their Parliamentary candidates as independents and published their party materials abroad.

Behind the anti-SPD law hovered the figure of the conservative Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who in the 1860s had carried Prussia to successful wars against Denmark, Austria and France and unified the smaller German states with Prussia. The wily Bismarck smelled the danger of Socialism and struck against it quickly as at a poisonous snake; he feared a German repetition of the Paris Commune of 1871. (In a Paris of two million people, over a million of whom were industrial workers, servants and immigrants, the people led by Socialists, the most radical led by the professional revolutionary, Auguste Blanqui, revolted and ruled Paris from March 18-May 28, which Marx later described as the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.) Nonetheless, in Germany, despite the promulgated new laws and intrigues against Social Democracy, the SPD continued to grow.

[dropcap]A [/dropcap]major break in Social Democracy occurred in WWI when most Social Democrats split with Revolutionary Socialists/Communists and supported their individual nations in the Great War. At the same time, social democratic minorities in some countries refused to accept the authority of the Comintern in Moscow (the Third International), by then synonymous with the leadership of the new Soviet Union. In 1912 the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party formed a separate party, the Russian Social Democratic Party, Bolshevik. It was this party that seized power in the October Revolution of 1917.

In 1918, the victorious party changed its name to the All-Russian Communist Party. In his biography of Stalin, Trotsky recalled Lenin having remarked that it was no longer permissible even to bear the same name as the Mensheviks, i.e. Social Democrats. “I propose for my part that we change the party name, that we call ourselves the Communist Party,” Lenin said.

The Russian Revolution was a watershed in German Social Democracy. Revolutionary socialists became Communists, while reformists held to the title of Social Democrats. Then, following the split with the Communists, another split occurred between German Social Democrats who considered it necessary to abolish Capitalism, (without revolution) and its replacement with a socialist system and those who believed it possible to retain a reformed Capitalism. In the long run all social democratic parties adhered to the latter view and today have abandoned former commitments to abolish Capitalism. The German SPD is in a coalition government with the conservative Christian Democrats.

Since then social democratic parties throughout the industrialized world adapted many of the policies espoused in the early 20^th century: nationalization of some industries, greater public spending, subsidized health care and education, reduced work time, maternity benefits, paid vacations, etc. In Europe, most of such reforms are embraced also by liberals and conservatives.

Today, European Social Democrats have generally abandoned the goal of building an alternative economic system to Capitalism and support the market economy and private entrepreneurship. Yet they still pay lip service to the welfare state and state intervention to improve the lot of the underprivileged. Many Social Democrats are often indistinguishable from their conservative opponents as a result of both converging around the center of the political spectrum. Though key elements of the welfare state remain popular in Europe, spending on welfare policies has been reduced by both center-right and center-left governments as a result of privatizations, increased weapons and war spending as well as for reasons relating to the profit motive inherent to today’s (once-again) rampant Capitalism.

Social Democracy introduced the modern welfare state model in numerous countries, all of Scandinavia and France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, in fact in all of Europe. At the same time economic growth was robust. Statistically, capitalist USA has purportedly performed better in recent decades, though these gains in America went to the wealthy. (Celebrated GDP growth as a measure of “general social well-being”, a mantra constantly repeated by the ignorant and complicit media, hides the simple fact that a society can experience growth and, at the same time, greater poverty for the majority, as the key index is how the benefits of production are actually distributed. Not to mention that the idea of indefinite growth itself is a nefarious concept at a time of direct collision with the limits of nature.—Eds). Perhaps only Norway with its oil has a higher per capita income than that of the USA. However, this discrepancy—if it exists—is due to shorter working hours in European countries, while worker productivity in the US and in advanced European countries is at similar levels. Economic growth, employment numbers, and inflation tend to either be comparable to the US or greater, while Northern European countries are ranked extremely high in terms of economic competitiveness. While average personal income in Western Europe is somewhat lower after taxes, in nominal terms the Nordic countries outstrip the US by far: long vacations and more leisure time, free education and health care, maternity leave for mothers and fathers. With such programs factored in, disposable income in Northern Europe exceeds that of the US.

Although the United States has never had a firmly established Social Democratic Party, some members of the most leftist parts of the Democratic Party can arguably be defined as modern “Social Democrats”.  (In recent decades, the Democratic party—ever an opportunistic formation unburdened by too many moral scruples, has trumpeted its allegiance to the “Third Way”—intrinsically a social democratic agenda. This is actually an “Atlanticist” concept binding the British Blairite wing of Labour with the Democrats, in terms of overall programmatic visions. The facts so far show nothing in the way of true socialist achievements, and much in the area of imperialist shilling.)

In any case, traditionally for much of the postwar, Social Democracy in the United States has been associated with the left-wing of the Democratic Party (wrongly, I believe) and the right-wing of the United States Socialist Party. The latter party once had both Social Democratic and Marxist wings. The Democratic Party’s left-wing, during the post-World War II era, was typified by organized labor and writers like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who viewed Social Democracy as the “vital center” of politics in opposition to both far-left Communism and far-right laissez-faire Capitalism. Other groups, like the Social Democrats USA, and the related Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, swung hard-right on foreign policy and advocated a strong anti Soviet Union stance, but remained economically leftist.  Their eager participation in Cold War campaigns and propaganda fully qualified them as “Left anticommunists”, as Daniel Wirt once aptly characterized as the “Left boot of NATO.”  (For further reading on this, see M. Parenti’s Left Anticommunism: the unkindest cut).

The 1912 election was a high water mark of leftist ideology on the national stage, as it pitted an outright socialist (Eugene V. Debs) and a candidate of the Progressive Party (Teddy Roosevelt) as well as a self-described “progressive” for the Democrats (Woodrow Wilson) against an incumbent Republican (Howard Taft) who, considering those über capitalist times got truly clobbered and placed third.

Sidney M. Milks of The Heritage Foundation writes in his article “The Transformation of American Democracy … (unfortunately manqué. GS) that:

“Progressivism came to the forefront of our national politics for the first time in the election of 1912. The two leading candidates after the votes were tallied were both Progressives: the Democratic Party’s Woodrow Wilson, who won the presidency, and the Progressive Party’s Theodore Roosevelt. The election was truly transformative. It challenged voters to think seriously about their rights and the Constitution and marked a fundamental departure from the decentralized republic that had prevailed since the early 19th century. The 1912 election did not completely remake American democracy, but it marked a critical way station on the long road to doing so. In a very real sense, Theodore Roosevelt won the 1912 election: The causes he championed with extraordinary panache still live on today.

SOCIALISM

The name “Social Democracy” continued to designate even Lenin’s Russian Socialists up to the eve of the October Revolution. In general, there is still much confusion among the general public over the terms Social Democracy, Socialism and Communism so that they must be constantly re-defined as to time and place. Leninists considered themselves a Social Democratic Party until the Revolution. And Lenin himself often used Socialism and Communism interchangeably. The East European Communist countries were officially known as Socialist Republics. In Germany the early SPD was split between revolutionary and evolutionary Socialists. The radical leftists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht first founded the “Spartacists” movement in opposition to SPD support for the WWI, and then in December 1918 founded the German Communist Party at a time “Communist” was a dangerous word because of what was widely perceived as the “Red Plague” in Russia. Then the Hitlerian Nazi Party stood for National Socialist Party. The British Socialist Labour Party in time became a center party, while Italian Socialist parties became rightwing. And now, US Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has termed himself a “Democratic Socialist.”

Count Henri de Saint-Simon, a French social theorist of the 18^th-19 centuries is regarded as the first to coin the term Socialism. Saint-Simon was fascinated by the potential of science and technology and advocated a socialist society that would eliminate the disorderly aspects of Capitalism and would be based on equal opportunities.

The British socialist organization, the Fabian Society, was founded with the purpose of advancing Socialism and a socialist economy through reformism while supporting British imperialism which it considered a progressive and modernizing force… As such it laid the foundations of the Labour Party. Today it functions as a think tank affiliated with the Labour Party, with, I should think only faint memories to support its imaginary link to real Socialism.

The Second International (1889–1916. As the ideas of Marx and Engels took hold, particularly in central Europe, socialists sought to unite in a real international organization of Socialist parties. In Paris, in 1889, on the centennial of the French Revolution, the “Second International”—or the Socialist International”—was founded by 384 delegates from 20 countries representing about 300 socialist organizations from which anarchists were ejected due to pressure from Marxists. At its third congress in 1893 Engels was elected honorary president.

However, as to be expected, the issue of reformism as an alternative to revolution soon came to the fore. Eduard Bernstein, a leading German Social Democrat proposed the concept of evolutionary socialism. Revolutionary Socialists like Rosa Luxemburg quickly targeted reformism: in her 1900 essay Reform or Revolution? she condemned Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism. Meanwhile the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was the largest and most powerful socialist party in Europe, despite its working illegally until the anti-socialist laws were dropped in 1890. In the 1893 elections, it gained 1,787,000 votes, a quarter of the total votes cast. In 1895, the year of his death, Engels underlined the Communist Manifesto’s emphasis on winning the “battle of democracy” as a first step, The Germans were accomplishing that objective.

DEFINITIONS

Somewhat confusingly, Democratic Socialism is not the same thing as Social Democracy, their nearly-identical names notwithstanding. Modern Social Democrats believe in maintaining the capitalist system — Democratic Socialists as a rule (in fact, all Socialists) do not. While all tendencies of Socialism consider themselves democratic, true socialism being inherently democratic, the term “Democratic Socialism” is often used to highlight its advocates’ high value for democratic processes and political systems and usually to draw contrast to other socialist tendencies they may perceive to be undemocratic in their approach.

By the 1860s “Socialism” had become the predominant term among descriptive synonymous words like “cooperative”, “mutualist” et al. The term “Communism” also fell out of use during this period, despite earlier distinctions between Socialism and Communism, according to which Socialism aimed to socialize only production while Communism aimed to socialize both production and consumption (the latter in the form of free access to final goods). However, as time passed Marxists employed the term “Socialism” in place of “Communism”, which had meanwhile come to be considered an old-fashion synonym. Then in 1917 after the Bolshevik revolution “Socialism” came to refer to a distinct stage between Capitalism and Communism, introduced by Lenin in defense of the Bolshevik seizure of power despite Marxist criticisms that Russia’s productive forces were not sufficiently developed for “Socialist revolution”. Furthermore, a distinction between Communist and Socialist as descriptors of political ideologies arose in 1918 after the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party renamed itself the All-Russian Communist Party, where Communists came to mean specifically Socialists who supported the politics and theories of Leninism, Bolshevism and later Marxism-Leninism. All the time, Communist parties continued to describe themselves as Socialists dedicated to Socialism.

As noted, Democratic Socialism causes some misunderstandings and misconceptions because of its similarity with Social Democracy. Nonetheless, the term has its own legitimacy and is in fact widely used. The name is a label for a person or group who advocates the pursuit of Socialism by democratic means. The term is used by parliamentary socialists who put parliamentarianism ahead of Socialism, and therefore oppose revolutionary action against “democratically elected governments.” (Real “democratic” elections cannot exist in a regime of capitalist rule due to the numerous constraints put in their path by the overwhelming power of capital, as clearly seen in the US and other developed nations, where periodic elections are largely a legitimating farce.—Eds)  Less ambiguous than Social Democracy, it claims a place on the right of real socialist parties. Most Democratic Socialists typically advocate a mixed economy with generous welfare provision, and re-distribution of wealth. People or groups who describe themselves as Democratic Socialists, are generally farther to the left and more radical than the more moderate Social Democrats. Many people see Scandinavian countries such as Sweden as a model of Democratic

 

Socialism.

Other definitions of Democratic Socialism sharply distinguish it from Social Democracy. Peter Hain, for example, classes Democratic Socialism, along with Libertarian Socialism, as a form of anti-authoritarian “Socialism from below” in contrast to authoritarian state Socialism. For Hain, this democratic/authoritarian divide is more important than the revolutionary/reformist divide. In this definition, it is the active participation of the population as a whole, and workers in particular, in the management of economy that characterizes Democratic Socialism, while nationalization and economic planning are characteristic of State Socialism.

Democratic Socialism became a prominent movement at the end of the nineteenth century. Eugene V. Debs is one of the most famous American Democratic Socialists and leader of a movement of Democratic Socialism while making five bids for President. In Britain, the Democratic Socialist tradition was represented in particular by the William Morris’ Socialist League in the 1880s and by the Independent Labour Party. Today Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats coexist in the same party in some nations. Still, Democratic Socialists tend to be more left wing than Social Democrats today. For both, the international forum has been the Socialist International. However, this seems to be changing. Many Democratic Socialists in the European Union Parliament are in a different group than the Social Democrats; instead, they join with reform Communists in the Party of the European Left.

Prominent names linked to Democratic Socialism include besides Debs, the Marxist Salvador Allende who as President of Chile was considered so dangerous that he was deposed in a CIA coup and killed. George Orwell, a leftist anti-Communist wrote that he was a Democratic Socialist. Hugo Chavez, Olaf Palme , Nelson Mandela, Naomi Klein. Now, Vermont Senator and 2016 Democratic presidential primary candidate Bernie Sanders, long known as a Socialist, who has defined himself as a Democratic Socialist is on the national political stage, blithely ignoring the red-baiting used against him. Judging from current polls he has a shot at winning some primaries and/or forcing annoying Hillary to the left. But who really knows whom our real rulers will choose? For as many of us remember Hillary Clinton was considered “inevitable in 2008.”

SOCIALISM’s PROGENY

Socialism comprises a variety of economic systems characterized by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production, plus the ideology, theories and organizations that aim at its establishment. Social ownership—public, cooperative or collective—is the common element shared by the various forms of Socialism. Non-market Socialism seems to me the most “socialist” of the various economic mechanisms, aiming at circumventing the inefficiencies causing the crises associated with the pure profit system. Although operations would produce profits they would accrue to the society as such or directly to the workforce of each firm.

We are more familiar with the socialist political debate which ranges over a number of political philosophies that originated amid the historical anti-Capitalist revolutionary movements that emerged as a result of the problems associated with Capitalism. Within this debate emerge basic dichotomies that continue down to our day: reformism versus revolutionary Socialism, and state Socialism versus libertarian Socialism. As we have seen socialist politics has been both centralized and decentralized; internationalist and nationalist in orientation; organized through powerful political parties and opposed to party politics; overlapping with trade unions and independent of and critical of unions; and Socialism is present in both industrialized and developing countries.

By the end of the nineteenth century, after its further articulation by Marx and Engels, Socialism has come to signify opposition to Capitalism and advocacy of a post-capitalist system based on some form of social ownership of the means of production. During the twentieth century, Socialism emerged as the most influential political-economic worldview. The emergence of the Soviet Union, the world’s first Socialist state, as a rapidly developed industrialized country changed everything; a Socialist country became a superpower, second only to the USA. Western opposition, its accusations that the Soviet model was in fact a dictatorship (which, according to Trotsky, Lenin termed a “democratic dictatorship), and constant Western interventions notwithstanding, the Soviet political-economic model spread throughout the developing world, and in fact threatened to overtake the USA. Today, Socialist parties and ideas enjoy power and influence throughout the world, here and there adopting the causes of other social movement such as environmentalism, feminism, social liberalism and animal rights.

Socialist models and ideas espousing common or public ownership have existed since antiquity. It has been claimed, though controversially, that there were elements of socialist thought in the politics of classical Greek philosophers. The first socialist movements developed in the 1820s and 1830s like the Owenites and Saint-Simionions who provided coherent analyses and interpretations of society. They overlapped with other working-class movements like the “Chartists” in the United Kingdom, who demanded the extension of suffrage to all male adults, a more equitable distribution of income and better living conditions for the working classes. An important socialist thinker in France was Pierre-Joseph Proudhom who proposed his philosophy of mutualism in which “everyone had an equal claim, either alone or as part of a small cooperative, to possess and use land and other resources to his or her capacities and rewarded according to his or her work.”

Pure Marxism!

I began this text with Walter Benjamin and will end it with a complex but thought-provoking summing up:

“A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the “eternal” image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called “Once upon a time” in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.”

And change it.

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SOURCES, REFERENCE MATERIALS AND GENERAL BACKGROUND READING:

The Swerve, (How the World Became Modern) Stephen Greenbelt, W.W Norton &Company, New York-London, 2012.

Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Grosset &Dunlap, New York, (translated from the Russian by an old acquaintance, Charles Malamuth, copyright, 1941.

The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, Bertrand Russell, Unwin Books, London, first published in 1920.

Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Joseph Stalin, International Publishers, New York, 1940.

A Short History of Socialism, George Lichtheim, Praeger Publishers, New York-Washington, 1970.

Karl Marx, David McLellan, Paladin, Great Britain, 1976.

Illuminations, Essays and Reflections, Walter Benjamin, Schocken Books, New York, copyrighted in 1968 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc, the paperback edition published in 1969. See above all in the volume, Benjamin’s Thesis on the Philosophy of History.

See the Internet under Social Democracy, Socialism and Communism for elaboration on the general flow of the text of this article.

 

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Senior Editor Gaither Stewart, based in Rome, serves—inter alia—as our European correspondent. A veteran journalist and essayist on a broad palette of topics from culture to history and politics, he is also the author of the Europe Trilogy, celebrated spy thrillers whose latest volume, Time of Exile, was recently published by Punto Press.

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=By= Gaither Stewart

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he unequal relationship between fictional literature and psychoanalysis has always rankled literary critics whose task it is to clarify, interpret, classify, rank and, especially in cases of political literature, bad-faith critics grant themselves the right to brand and censor literature. While the responsibility of literary criticism often fails to perform positively (especially concerning the political novel), it is true that the entire realm of literature has consequently had to bow to the “scientific” authority of psychoanalysis and its claims of dominion over the mysteries of the writer’s “unconscious”, whereby it interprets and informs what the writer, on the deepest level, is really saying with his words crafted in such a manner as to create “literature” from what would otherwise be just texts of connected words.

Today, perhaps, due to a simultaneous tendency of literature and literary criticism to recognize the role of psychoanalysis and the tendency of psychoanalysis to step down a bit from its scientific pedestal from which, because of its “special knowledge”, it has claimed a monopoly in the realm of meaningful interpretation of the body of language that is literature. the two realms show signs of drawing closer together.

Meanwhile, the poor lonely writer—you might sympathize—is still squashed between literary critique on the one hand and scientific interpretation on the other. Just imagine the situation from the writer’s point of view. The writer, who in a long, arduous and lonely act has created a story from scratch and composed a text that qualifies for the denomination of “literature”, hopes his genius has produced real art that will appeal to the formidable array facing him consisting of publisher, reader and critic.

On the completion of the work, the writer’s fundamental role ends. The good writer in fact steps aside. The rest is salesmanship and exposure. The responsible publisher who has hovered in the background thus far has nonetheless been performing multiple crucial tasks: at the very start he chose a text he believes will appeal to many readers, a text hopefully favorable to critics and to the media and if possible to academia as well.

Literary critics will then “translate”, approving or sacking the poor writer’s text for the public, judging it and explaining to readers what the writer says in his work. Up to this point the swimmers in the literary pond comprise elements directly involved in the production and dissemination of the final product.

It is here—not a specific point in time—that a fifth component enters the scene like an swashbuckling invader—the psychoanalyst—who will interpret the interpretations of the literary critics, delving into aspects of the facts, events, characters in the text and the persona of the author from which he or she draws conclusions from the “unconscious” (Freud) of the writer and his characters, conclusions capable of stunning and bewildering the poor unsuspecting creator who naively believed that only his genius had dreamed up and created the whole thing.

So how did he do it? As a rule, memory provides the material. Childhood, life experiences with other persons, and with the Other encountered in a full life. Day-dreams and fantasies, even those the writer is ashamed of (the use of which often results in the writer being considered naïve and childish) are treasure houses of material, also for the analyst.

Many writers use their dreams for ideas and inspiration in their literary creations. Years ago I underwent one year of therapy because of psychological problems resulting from the tragic loss of a loved one. My German therapist, a Freudian , prompted me to begin recording and making a “conscious” effort to remember parts of my rich and active dream life. Doing that I became aware of how difficult it is to recount even the most vivid dream about which I had even made notes during the night. That difficulty is well-known to creators of the arts. The gap between the vivid, significant dream and the ragged bits and pieces you succeed in assembling and reproducing is a veritable morass of memory and language capacity. The words you manage to save (or liberate, according to Freud) emerge vague, gray and dull, incommensurate with the original. It is the same as the difference between your real-life experiences, what you see or do in reality and the deficient and pale words you find to describe in a literary fashion that experience and what you really felt about the experience at the time.

Therefore, the materials, i.e. the emerging words the writer offers analysts, are simply too scant, too untrustworthy for analysis because deformed, distorted, perverted and corrupted in the reporting process, if not simply made up on the spur of the moment, so that the analyst searching for the thus far “inaccessible” in the unconscious mind of the subject is forced to accept as a given a false image of reality. As a result the analyst too must improvise.

Imagine then the difficulty for the writer of political fiction, whose only resource is some kind of compromise between what he feels he must say and the diluted expression of the idea. For, both critic and analyst will respond not with criticism or analysis of the literary text but with a rebuttal based on their own personal political ideas or opinions as to what the writer said or should have said, a criticism or analysis that will be more and more deformed as it passes down from hand to hand, as with, say, the philosophies of Marxism or, to cite the most deformed and maligned, Leninism.

To underline the manner in which scientific/academic analysis—because of the absence of authentic information—deforms and corrupts instead of clarifying the writer’s intentions, I will employ again the anecdote related by Socrates in The Republic about the difficulty of ever attaining real truth, which I used in my novel, Time of Exile. For me his metaphor of the three beds will always be emblematic of the problem of the degeneration from the ideal to the banal. According to the Socrates metaphor, the first bed, made by God, is the Platonic ideal; a carpenter then makes a second bed in imitation of that ideal bed; and the artist subsequently paints a third bed in imitation of the carpenter’s imitation of the ideal bed. Later imitators then capture less and less of the ideal. They might just barely graze the reality of a carpenter making a bed or of an artist painting a carpenter making a bed, but they can never attain the true ideal of the original creation.

MARXISM AND EXISTENTIALISM

These two philosophies provide a wealth of materials for the contemporary fiction writer, who, if the writer is honest, cannot even conceive of an authentic novel without them. Both Marxism and Existentialism are materialisms close to human existence. “Both reveal an area in which human consciousness is not ‘master in his own house.’” (Frederic Jameson, “Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject”, included in the anthology Literature and Psychoanalysis, Johns Hopkins Press, 1982).

The two philosophies present a number of common major themes: the relation of theory and practice; the resistance to false consciousness and the problem of its opposite; the role and the risk of the concept of the “midwife” of truth, whether analyst or vanguard party; the re-appropriation   of an alienated history and the function of the narrative; the question of desire and value and of the nature of “false desire”; the paradox of the end of the revolutionary process, which, like analysis, must surely be considered “interminable” rather than “terminable”. (A list composed by Jameson, who adds:) “It is therefore not surprising that these two nineteenth century philosophies should be the objects, at the present time and in the present intellectual atmosphere (Cold War), of similar attacks, which focus on their ‘naïve semanticism.’”

Jean-Paul Sartre in his Question de Mode sees Marxism as the dominant philosophy of his era (20^th century) and existentialism as a reinforcing element. He thought at one time that Marxism was corrupted by the Soviet Union and other Communists who abused the system of thought, making it a tool for policies of the USSR.

According to Sartre’s form of Existentialism “existence precedes essence”. Existentialists from Soren Kierkegaard to the contemporaries Sartre and Albert Camus believed that philosophical thought begins with the living human subject. Its supreme values are freedom of the individual and authenticity. Other philosophies are too abstract, too remote from the human experience. For Sartre and Camus, for example, the existentialist attitude is one of disorientation in the face of a meaningless or absurd world.

For that reason Sartre in general has a low opinion of traditional ethics which he condemns as a tool of the bourgeoisie to control the masses, thus again reinforcing Marxist thought. Nor is he enamored of Freud’s unconscious which he considers a scapegoat for the paradox of simultaneously knowing and not knowing (in the conscious and the unconscious minds) the same information.

I like to imagine Sartre and Camus sitting at their table in Café de Flore on Paris’ Boulevard St. Germain exchanging experiences and thoughts. In my imagination Sartre might say something like: “The bourgeoisie’s support for liberals has always been and always will be a great mystification to confuse the revolutionary. That is the reason for our mistrust of bien-pensant liberals, yesterday as today. The more liberals turn to the Right, the happier the bourgeoisie and the greater its support for ‘liberal’ causes. And therefore the marriage of (bourgeois) liberal democracy and market capitalism.”

And Camus might respond: “The gap between the people and what we call bourgeois capitalism is by definition unbridgeable. Meek protest does not count a whit. (Updating Camus several decades, I let him continue): “Though the ultimate tremendous effect on the American people of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is unimaginable, popular protest still goes unheeded. It is really quite simple: superpowers should never be confused with democracies.”

 

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Senior Editor Gaither Stewart, based in Rome, serves—inter alia—as our European correspondent. A veteran journalist and essayist on a broad palette of topics from culture to history and politics, he is also the author of the Europe Trilogy, celebrated spy thrillers whose latest volume, Time of Exile, was recently published by Punto Press.

 

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---

=By= William T. Hathaway

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[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s the viciousness of capitalism engulfs ever more of us, our yearnings for change are approaching desperation. The system’s current [FIGUREHEAD] leader, Barack Obama, has shown us that the only change we can believe in is what we ourselves create.

To do that, we need to know what is possible in our times and what isn’t. The bitter probability is that none of us will see a society in which we’d actually want to live. Even the youngest of us will most likely have to endure an increasingly unpleasant form of capitalism. Despite its recurring crises, this system is still too strong, too adaptable, and has too many supporters in all classes for it to be overthrown any time soon. We’re probably not going to be the ones to create a new society.

But we can now lay the groundwork for that, first by exposing the hoax that liberal reforms will lead to basic changes. People need to see that the purpose of liberalism is to defuse discontent with promises of the future and thus prevent mass opposition from coalescing. It diverts potentially revolutionary energy into superficial dead ends. Bernie Sanders’ “long game” campaign is really only a game similar to that of his reformist predecessor, Dennis Kucinich, designed to keep us in the “big tent” of the Democratic Party. Capitalism, although resilient, is willing to change only in ways that shore it up, so before anything truly different can be built, we have to bring it down.

What we are experiencing now is the long war the ruling elite is fighting to maintain its grip on the world. The current phase began with the collapse of Keynesian capitalism, which flourished from the 1950s into the ’70s, when the primary consumer market was in the capitalist headquarter countries of North America and Western Europe. Corporations were able to stimulate domestic consumption and quell worker discontent there by acceding to labor’s demands for better wages and conditions. That led to a 30-year bubble of improvement for unionized workers, predominantly male and white, that began to collapse in the ’80s as capitalism gradually became globalized.

Then to maintain dominance Western corporations had to reduce labor costs in order to compete against emerging competition in low-wage countries such as China, India, Russia, and Brazil. Also international consumer markets became more important than the home market, but reaching them required low prices. So capitalist leaders reversed hard-won reforms, forcing paychecks and working conditions in the West down. And they tried to keep control of crucial Mideast oil resources by tightening their neo-imperialist hold on that region: overthrowing governments, installing dictators, undermining economies.

This aggression generated armed resistance: jihadist attacks against the West. Our response has been the current holy war against terror. All of this horrible suffering is just one campaign in capitalism’s long war for hegemony. Any dominator system — including capitalism, patriarchy, and religious fundamentalism — generates violence.

Since we are all products of such systems, the path out of them will include conflict and strife. Insisting on only peaceful tactics and ruling out armed self defense against a ruling elite that has repeatedly slaughtered millions of people is naïve, actually a way of preventing basic change. The pacifist idealism so prevalent among the petty-bourgeoisie conceals their class interest: no revolution, just reform. But until capitalism and its military are collapsing, it would be suicidal to attack them directly with force.

What we can do now as radicals is weaken capitalism and build organizations that will pass our knowledge and experience on to future generations. If we do that well enough, our great grandchildren (not really so far away) can lead a revolution. If we don’t do it, our descendants will remain corporate chattel.

Our generational assignment — should we decide to accept it — is sedition, subversion, sabotage: a program on which socialists and anarchists can work together.

Sedition — advocating or attempting the overthrow of the government — is illegal only if it calls for or uses violence. Our most important job — educating and organizing people around a revolutionary program — is legal sedition, as is much of our writing here on The Greanville Post and Uncommon Thought.

For subversion we could, for example, focus on institutions and rituals that instill “patriotism” (really loyalty to the corporate plutocratic status quo and its deep state and not the American nation) in young people. School spirit, scouts, competitive team sports, and pledges of allegiance all create in children an emotional bond to larger social units of school, city, and nation.

Kids are indoctrinated to feel these are extensions of their family and to respect and fear the authorities as they would their parents, more specifically their fathers, because this is a patriarchal chain being forged. It causes us even as adults to react to criticism of the country as an attack on our family. This hurts our feelings on a deep level, so we reject it, convinced it can’t be true. It’s too threatening to us.

This linkage is also the basis of the all-American trick of substituting personal emotion for political thought.

Breaking this emotional identification is crucial to reducing the widespread support this system still enjoys. Whatever we can do to show how ridiculous these institutions and rituals are will help undermine them.

For instance, teachers could refuse to lead the pledge of allegiance, or they could follow it with historical facts that would cause the students to question their indoctrination. When a teacher gets fired, the resulting legal battle can taint the whole sacrosanct ritual and challenge the way history is taught in the schools.

Subversive parenting means raising children who won’t go along with the dominant culture and have the skills to live outside it as much as possible.

Much feminist activism is profoundly subversive. That’s why it’s opposed so vehemently by many women as well as men.

Spiritually, whatever undercuts the concept of God as daddy in the sky will help break down patriarchal conditioning and free us for new visions of the Divine.

Sabotage is more problematic. It calls to mind bombing and shooting, which at this point won’t achieve anything worthwhile. But sabotage doesn’t need to harm living creatures; systems can be obstructed in many ways, which I can’t discuss more specifically because of the police state under which we currently live. They are described in my book Radical Peace (http://www.amazon.com/Radical-Peace-People-Refusing-War/dp/0979988691).

We’ll be most successful by using both legal and illegal tactics but keeping the two forms separate. Illegal direct action is sometimes necessary to impair the system, impede its functioning, break it in a few places, open up points of vulnerability for coming generations to exploit. This doesn’t require finely nuanced theory or total agreement on ideology, just a recognition of the overriding necessity of weakening this monster, of reducing its economic and military power. It does require secrecy, though, so it’s best done individually with no one else knowing.

As groups we should do only legal resistance. Since we have to assume we are infiltrated and our communications are monitored, illegal acts must be done alone or in small cells without links to the group. Security is essential. Police may have the identity of everyone in the group, but if members are arrested and interrogated, their knowledge will be very limited. The principles of leaderless resistance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaderless_resistance) provide the most effective defense for militants.

Using these tactics, we can slow down this behemoth, curtail its expansion, make it a less effective murderer. The government will of course try to crush this resistance. But that very response can eventually seal its doom because it increases polarization and sparks more outrage. People will see the rich have not only taken away our possibility for a decent life, but now they are taking away our freedom. Then the masses revolt.

When the police and military have to attack their own people, their loyalty begins to waver. They realize they too are oppressed workers, and they start disobeying their masters. The power structure grinds down, falters, and falls. At this point the revolution can succeed, hopefully with a minimum of violence. Then the people of that generation, with the knowledge and experience we have passed on to them, can build a new society.

This is not a pleasant path of action, and those whose first priority is pleasantness are repelled by it. That’s why reformism is so popular: it’s an illusion that appeals to cowards. But when their backs are to the wall, which will inevitably happen, even they will fight back. And there’s something glorious in that revolutionary fight even in its present stage — much more vivid and worthwhile than the life of a lackey.

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William T. Hathaway is an adjunct professor of American studies at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. His new book, Lila, the Revolutionary, is a fable for adults about an eight-year-old Indian girl who sparks a world revolution for social justice. Chapters are posted on www.amazon.com/dp/1897455844. A selection of his writing is available at www.peacewriter.org.

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Note to Commenters
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We apologize for this inconvenience.

Nauseated by the
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Had enough of their lies, escapism,
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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.

---

=By= Gaither Stewart (Rome)

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n the first line of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s famous “poem”, often referred to as “the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”, Ivan Karamazov says to his brother Alyosha that a preface is necessary to the unwritten story he is about to relate. Then in the third line of chapter V in Part Two of THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, Ivan asks rhetorically “For what kind of a writer am I?”, implying that although he, Ivan, is not even an artist, his creator, the author of the written book, Fyodor Dostoevsky, is the greatest of all.

The writer and/or his character, Ivan, seem to be informing future readers that this novel is Dostoevsky’s greatest work.

Is that what Dostoevsky is about in these lines? Is he reaching out of the book toward future generations of readers? Is he begging for praise or simply praising himself? Most likely all three. For like most writers he is vain, vain about his creations and their legitimacy. Especially vain about this novel, the work of three years and his most ambitious work. Whatever this great writer had in mind—there is always a chasm between a writer’s unarticulated ideas and the words that he puts on paper—from the reader’s point of view he certainly succeeds.

Meant to crown his entire incredible work with this novel, Dostoevsky first did meticulous background studies because as he himself recorded THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV was his most difficult book. During those three years of the writing he was afraid his creative force would not suffice or that he would die before completing it.

“The older I get, the harder it is,” he wrote in his diaries. For in this book he had the Karamazov’s to deal with! The performances of his creations—the good (Alyosha), the cynical (Ivan) and the ugly Fyodor)—could not be banal lest he, their creator, be a failure.

Above all, it had to be a work of art too, “and that”, he wrote very realistically and truthfully, “is a most difficult and risky affair: it (the novel) should elevate and affirm my name, otherwise I have no hope.”

In other words, he who had been sickly, indecisive and an addicted gambler to boot, was betting his creative life on it. So vanity or not—which is forgivable in any case—this book was both his commitment and his desperation. In his turbulent and chaotic life Dostoevsky, like his creations, had already shown both his flawed character and his ambitious creative-intellectual force.

Dostoevsky’s characters, all parts of his complex person, are always at odds with and striving against their unstable identities; in this sense Dostoevsky resembles more modern authors than himself, especially in the philosophical and existential realm. All of his characters seem to be desperate in their seeking what they have in common with Dostoevsky himself. Just as one hundred years later, the Italian Alberto Moravia proclaimed that writers had to be desperate, as if to say, if not what would they write about? Such is the direction of Dostoevskian characters, dark, unformed, withholding, moving around in mysterious restricted places where anything can happen and in extremely short and cramped periods of time, where nothing is ever certain, everything is in flux, everything is innuendo, even ideas which are the essence of Dostoevsky’s work. He is simply too Russian to explain all the mysteries, even if he knew the answers. For the hand of God and/or Russian sudba (fate) had to play their role at the end … even though sudba too is as volatile as the soul of man.

“The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” is the culmination of the novel THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, just as THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV is the culmination of Dostoevsky’s lifetime work, his final word on the question of man’s freedom.

In pure Dostoevskian style, the “Grand Inquisitor” is more an idea than a story. Even the narrator of the “poem”, Ivan, fades from the reader’s mind. His interlocutor, Alyosha, hardly exists; he only smiles from time to time (mystically of course) and says, ‘I don’t understand, Ivan!’ So the legend is really not even a legend; Dostoevsky too calls it a poem. A poem-accusation against the organized Church, in this case and time, against the Roman Catholic Church.

The story line is threadbare: in the sixteenth century Christ returns to earth to the city of Seville where people immediately recognize Him and want to benefit from His miracles. The ninety-year old Grand Inquisitor who runs things in Seville also recognizes Him; there is no doubt in his mind about His identity. Immediately the priest has Him arrested. At night in His cell the old man interrogates Him. The interrogation is an accusation-monologue. Christ never speaks. The Grand Inquisitor (that is, Ivan the narrator and one part of Dostoevsky) prefaces his terrible charges with one question: “Why did you come back?”

In this chapter of twenty-one pages the Grand Inquisitor articulates the Church’s devastating message: God is God and the Church is the Church; the Church does not believe in God and man no longer needs God; the Church promotes His work like a product and uses His name, but it renounces Christ. The Church does God’s work for Him; it is a Church without God.

After threatening to burn Him at the stake like a heretic, the Grand Inquisitor is disconcerted by Christ’s silence. The prisoner only looks at him and then at the end quietly kisses the old man’s bloodless lips with a kiss that the reader knows will burn for all eternity.

The old man starts, something moves on his lips, he goes to the door, opens it and tells Him: “Go and never return again.”

The prisoner leaves.

That is the story line.

Yet the meaning, the idea behind the story, is terrible. With Christ’s wordless departure, Dostoevsky, whose faith is always shaky, pronounces the divorce between faith and the Church. Neither Ivan—who pronounces Dostoevsky’s famous existentialist claim that “if God is dead, all is permitted”—nor Dostoevsky himself in reality attack Christ; they attack the Church. Ivan does not defend his atheism; he defends true belief. Dostoevsky charges the Catholic Church of having robbed Christ’s message for its own imperialistic ends. In substance, the writer charges all churches and organized religions of what was then called Caesarism—the rule by force of one charismatic leader.

The priest-Grand Inquisitor is not a believer. He does not believe in God and refuses to hear or listen to the God-Man. “You have no right to add one single word to what you have already said,” he tells his prisoner.

He does not believe in man either and insists that the Christian doctrine of free choice between good and evil is too great a responsibility for man. Christ’s man could choose freedom but if he did his conscience would torture him because of his sins. The Christianity offered by Christ is a religion of pain and suffering. A religion for only a few. For an elite of the strongest.

The Grand Inquisitor points out that man can choose submission instead. Man, he affirms, prefers comfort, or even death, to the freedom of choice between good and evil. Man only wants to be happy. He wants earthly bread. And that, he tells Christ, is the Church’s concern: man’s happiness on earth.

The Grand Inquisitor-Procurator claims that the Church loves man more than does the creator who placed on man’s shoulders a too heavy burden to bear. He charges that Christ overestimated the strength of his creation when he gave him the freedom of choice: “You acted without pity for him, you demanded too much from him.”

The religion Christ created is impossible for the masses. It is aristocratic. Ceasarist. Today we would be speaking of the 1%. Religion, the old man claims, must be for the masses. It must comfort all, the ignorant and the weak and the mean and the sick. It must be vulgar, as the 1% knows. Instead of the freedom and the uncertainty and spiritual suffering that Christ offers, the Church of the masses offers happiness. Since the weak and hungry and mean masses are not interested in heavenly bread, that Church promises them only earthly bread.

The Grand Inquisitor and his Church have chosen for man. For man, weak robot. The Church’s work, he says, is to correct Christ’s work. The earth is the reign of mediocre happiness. “None of your great spiritual aspirations!” he says. “Oh yes, men will have to work. But then during their leisure we organize their lives like a child’s game, childish songs and dancing. We even let them sin.” (To this writer, this recalls the political programs of contemporary political parties.)

Here appears the highest point of Dostoevsky’s dialectical genius: he is for man, his whole idea is the human problem; he believes that godlessness leads to the denial of the freedom of the spirit to be a true individual. He foresaw revolution in Russia against the 1% ofhis time; he was in the Socialist camp and wanted revolution. But he wanted a revolution with God and Christ. Religious philosopher, Nikolai Berdyaev, labels Dostoevsky “a socialist with Christ.”

Dostoevsky aspired to a spiritual Communism in which all would be responsible for each other.

He opposed the idea of an aesthetic state, of the aesthetic socialism the Grand Inquisitor proposes. In that sense too his novels are tragedies of the human condition—double tragedies in that they are never resolved, no more than are his great mysteries. No more than did he resolve his dubious form of Christianity. Yet universal ideas stand behind those decisions he makes. In his revolutionary attack on the Church, he is attacking the Grand Inquisitors in every church, in every state.

Dostoevsky was the embodiment of the very Russian idea of vsyechelovechnost, the idea of an all-human brotherhood. Berdyaev suggests that the Internationalism (of Soviet Communism) was in reality a distortion of the Russian idea. Hence, at least until the Russian Revolution and the great wars of the twentieth century nationalism was largely foreign to Russian mentality. (That is something for the contemporary imperialist US Empire to think about—if they only had some real understanding of others!)

In his interrogation-monologue the Grand Inquisitor reminds Christ of His rejection of the three temptations in the desert. First, He refused to use earthly bread to convince man to follow Him. Then, He refused to use authority to force man to follow Him because He wanted to be loved freely. Third, He refused to use miracles.

The Grand Inquisitor’s Church instead is founded precisely on Christ’s rejections: on earthly bread, authority and miracle. Man on earth wants three things, the Grand Inquisitor insists: someone to bow down to, someone to hand over his conscience to, and a way to unite everyone in one common anthill. The Christianity of his earthly Church is a Church for all, not only for the strong. For love of man, the Church betrayed God. According to the Grand Inquisitor the figure of Christ is a symbol to hide the fact that the Church is not spiritual but social.

As the oral poem develops Alyosha grasps that the great secret of Ivan’s Church is that it does not believe in God. Yet for Ivan and for Alyosha, for the Church and for all Dostoevsky’s characters, God is always the question. Disorder and anxiety are everywhere, in every character, caused by the question of God. Is He there or not? The mystery in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV is God.

In this big book an enormous number of events take place in a very few days. The canvas is peopled by a vast cast. All with God on their lips. Everyone from the simplest of fools to the intellectuals to the monks have deep thoughts about God. Danger threatens, mystery reigns, presentiments and fates, crimes and passions, and secrets abound, but everywhere God is the question. If God does not exist, all is permitted!

In this work Dostoevsky does not question the existence of God, as Nietzsche was soon to do. Nor is his Christianity the vague type that Kierkegaard depicted. Dostoevsky is not interested in transforming the particular into the universal, or vice versa. He does not attack Christ-God; he attacks the Church. His Church calls to mind the contradiction between the life of St. Francis of Assisi who opted for God and poverty and lived in simplicity and talked with birds and the institutions his followers constructed: a super rich order and the town of Assisi turned to gold, all in His name.

The Existentialist Dostoevsky does not search for the secrets of creation. He does not delve into the idea of two Creator Gods as others have. He does not search for the secret of two humanities. His characters do not note that in Genesis God created one man on the sixth day and another on the eighth day, and that Adam, the man He formed on the eighth day, the man who could eat from all the trees except the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but did eat and that in such a manner the confusion began between a good strain and an evil strain of man.

Already here the mystery of mankind begins. Through most of his work Dostoevsky examines the evil strain, but he does not question God. Instead he questions the Church. The Church that in “The Grand Inquisitor” does not believe in God.

Today I find it strange that Ivan does not bring up the two CREATOR GODS and the two strains of man theories History shows that monotheism is not for all men. Primitive peoples saw the need for more. A plurality of gods, sometimes one against the other. A system of spiritual checks and balances. Besides, some philosophers contend that God needs man as much as man needs God. Even the God of the Old Testament complained through the mouth of His prophet Isaiah that He was a slave of man. That He needed help.

But the question remains that if there are two—or more—Creator gods, one good and one evil, which is the God of the Christian Church? Or, as Dostoevsky rightly says, does it have none? For the God of the Old Testament is truly terrible, committing all the sins He forbade to man. He blessed theft and treachery. He was jealous, no other God but Him! He fornicated with any woman He wanted under the eyes of their husbands. He favored genocide. He lied and made false promises. He cursed man in every way. And though He has absolutely nothing in common with Jesus of Nazareth, according to the Church’s Bible He even sent His own son to hang on a cross. And moreover, why did He always hide his face? Some think because He was the evil God, ashamed to show His face.

Dostoevsky continually mixes countless details and minute particulars with great universal truths. The Church of the Grand Inquisitor is the Roman Catholic Church of his times, the Church in incessant dispute with Russian Orthodoxy for the soul of European man. The sickness of the Church he attacks is an old sickness. The sickness infecting organized religions preceding Dostoevsky’s age that has now burgeoned in our times. Today, religion and God and Allah are on the lips of all, of believers, false believers and non-believers in every part of the world who claim to know the right way and the true God or gods. And perform the vilest actions in His name.

I would transpose the Grand Inquisitor’s society into our times in the guise of the immoral, big brother, capitalist, imperialist, Orwellian state which is leading inexorably to the death of the nation-state and democracy, the result of the aesthetic choice of earthly bread and non-freedom of the brainwashed herd, as opposed to Dostoevsky’s ethical choice of oneself and the freedom of the thinking, truly social man.

Here are some suggestions for readings for getting to the heart of Dostoevsky:

1. DOSTOEVSKY, Henri Troyat, Fayard, Les Grandes Etudes Littéraires, 1960. In English: FIREBRAND: the life of Dostoevsky, Roy Publishers, 1946.
2. THE ORIGIN OF RUSSIAN COMMUNISM, Nicolas Berdyaev, Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1960. (Maybe in out-of print books.)
3. LES HUMEURS DE LA MER-INTERSECTION, Vladimir Volkoff, Julliard/ L’Age d’Homme, 1980. (For thoughts on the idea of two Creator-gods and two strains of humanity.) See Internet for English translations.
4. EITHER/OR, Kierkegaard, Doubleday, 1959. In volume two, the “Or” part, in the chapter on Equilibrium, the author discusses freedom in Dostoevskian terms: man can choose himself as an individual, and thus choose freedom. The choice of freedom is an ethical choice, of oneself, as opposed to the aesthetic choice, which is the life of earthly bread the Grand Inquisitor offers. Nothing is further removed from Dostoevsky than the choice of the aesthetic life. Kierkegaard says that “the more one lives aesthetically, the more requirements his life makes, and if merely the least of these is not fulfilled, he is dead.”
5. AS MUCH as I admire Harold Bloom and his THE WESTERN CANON, I do not take to his reduction of Dostoevsky to “his nihilists” and his “preaching anti-Semitism, obscurantism and the necessity of human bondage.” In his many references to the writer, Bloom continually misses the point of Dostoevsky’s dialectic, and that his message was on the contrary human freedom.

Gaither Stewart

Re-worked in Rome

January 2016

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Senior Editor Gaither Stewart, based in Rome, serves—inter alia—as our European correspondent. A veteran journalist and essayist on a broad palette of topics from culture to history and politics, he is also the author of the Europe Trilogy, celebrated spy thrillers whose latest volume, Time of Exile, was just published by Punto Press.

---

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience.

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.

---

=By= Gaither Stewart (Rome)

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]y pure chance the two events occurred simultaneously: On a summer morning I read a reference to Aristotle’s discussion of possibility and probability in Meyer H. Abrams’ book, The Mirror and the Lamp, (in 1998 labeled by Modern Library one of the one hundred greatest English-language non-fiction books of the twentieth century). On the same day, I read several press articles concerning the demands of neocon madmen in the U.S. to “pull the trigger” on Russia, Iran and/or Syria

Also, or rather, especially Liberals, who today continue their love affair with warlike-Peace Prize winner, President Barack Obama and—conveniently forgetting Libya, Ukraine and Serbia-Kosovo—obstinately refuse to believe the probability or potentiality of a U.S military attack on Russia, Iran or Syria, who think widespread torture by the USA unlikely and reject outright the mere idea that the USA is, or is rapidly becoming, a fascist state, would do well to read up on the subject of possibility-probability.

The question belongs to philosophy and history, yes. But the duality of possibility-probability is an eye opener in our comprehension and evaluation of daily news feeds and the shortcomings of the mendacious mainline press: I have in mind what the press does not tell us at all, or, worse, that it tells us only what it thinks we need to know. The question plays a major role in each of our lives.

While possibility can be measured and quantified, no one understands for sure what probability means. Mathematicians and statisticians—as did Aristotle himself—have many complex theories but they really do not know. Some people consider probability merely a feeling or a hunch, an expression of something that might or might not happen. In fact probability is in reality nothing more than the estimated measure of the possibility that an event will occur. We see it in police films, the decisive “probability” that fingerprints or DNA match which can clinch a death sentence.

However, since apparent impossibilities sometimes happen, another approach is to distinguish probability from what is possible and what is plausible, and not forgetting the terrifying consequences if the improbable does occur. Here we should keep in mind the folly of pinpointing Russia and Iran as US targets. But, as we all should know by now but unfortunately precious few do chiefly because of the great American brainwash and the mendacious and lazy US media.

It is of course true that just because a thing is possible does not have to mean it is necessarily probable. Yet in the example of a US attack on any one of its targets today we have the following factors to deal with: American possession of—in the words of the President—“the best military in the world”, a huge nuclear stock pile and the possibility-capacity to deliver a nuclear bomb wherever it desires, combined with the unknown X factor of the nature of man and his propensity to harm others and himself. So what seems improbable to many people because of its very enormity—e.g. nuking the ancient country of Iran—is possible.

For improbabilities after all do occur. And man has always had that unpredictable evil stain. Therefore, uncertain futures—cyber crimes of gigantic proportions,, disastrous floods, financial market collapse, or devastation by a terrorist nuclear attack must be considered as distinct possibilities, in fact, probable.

In the same light, I think philosopher-sociologist-historian Paul-Michel Foucault (1926-1984) must have always kept in mind the system of similitudes (similarities) in measuring probability: fresh possibilities are (nearly) always present. Successive comparisons can indicate increasing probability … though it can never be certain that the event will happen. So our convicted murderer can go to the gas chamber- especially if he is black) even though the one-billionth DNA comparison-possibility might have proven him innocent.

I recall vividly arguments of the time before the great acceleration of the war in Vietnam with two close friends who maintained that America could never, in no case, commit the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. And that, despite the historical fact that we had already dropped at least two atomic bombs on Japan. However, that was before the massacre at My Lai and before the USA napalmed Southeast Asia for the world to see, before it unleashed wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and resorted to systematic waterboarding and other tortures in Guantanamo.

So we know that under certain conditions and in a certain environment man is capable of almost any good or evil act. Man can be peace-loving and warlike at the same time. Depending on his culture and ethic and environment and mood and the very nature of man each characteristic is both possible and probable.

Which completes the circle, so to speak. We are drawn back to the loadstone of the socio-political question. To the struggle that has gone on since private property emerged in ancient societies. We should know this old story. The proprietor-capitalist lords it over the wage earner who to change his situation is obligated to rebel. But the capitalist does not change; the capitalist is capable of any act he can get away with. He can torture or nuke and imperialize as he pleases. Each according to his own nature. Within the realm of possibilities the most abominable improbabilities can occur.

In the capitalist sphere the political leadership makes the decision to nuke A or B country, the intellectuals justify the decision ethically, and the military and police execute it. In these times the fact that a hostile odious act is possible becomes the ethical justification of the event.

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Senior Editor Gaither Stewart, based in Rome, serves—inter alia—as our European correspondent. A veteran journalist and essayist on a broad palette of topics from culture to history and politics, he is also the author of the Europe Trilogy, celebrated spy thrillers whose latest volume, Time of Exile, was just published by Punto Press.

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