One 20th-Century Totalitarianism, or Two?; & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-12-04 Sa
Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember:
First:
You cannot write a history of the 20th century without it, some time, grappling with the irresolvable question of whether there were two totalitarian movements in the 20th century or whether there was only one. George Orwell is very strong on the side that there is only one. And, in spite of himself, post-World War II English Marxist historian E.P. Thompson, one of the three great post-WWII English Marxists—Thompson, Hobsbawm, Miliband—is on Orwell’s side of this as well.
Not, I hasten to say, that Thompson argues on Orwell’s side. Rather, he illustrates and validates it.
Here he is in the early 1970s, issuing a complaint against Polish ex-Communist Leszek Kolakowski. His major complaint? Not that Kolakowski tells lies about really-existing socialism. It is that Kolakowski tells the truth about it, and because he tells the truth in ways and places that Thompson thinks he should not, he commits unforgivable sins: the sin against the Holy Ghost. But when did Thompson think you should tell the truth? At the time he wrote his Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski, the answer was “nowhere and nowhen”:
E.P. Thompson (1973): An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski: ‘My criticisms of socialist reality have always been made in socialist journals…. When I can no longer criticize socialism from such an unmistakeable anti-capitalist standpoint, I will fall silent…. No word of mine will wittingly be added to the comforts of that old bitch gone in the teeth, consumer capitalism…. The apologists of capitalism appear with newly-soaped faces, and offer their beast as a beast of changed nature. But I know that that beast is not changed….
Capitalist ideology is… a very ancient hegemony… so assured that it can dispense with many of the more vulgar institutional means of imposing orthodoxy…. Even the role of the Jester, which is a role you chose for yourself in the East, is a role which must be played with discretion. For the jester, if he jests in all company and jests unwisely, may provide arguments which acquire a different meaning when employed by the subalterns of the Emperor….
Films… of revolutionary disenchantment… [were] first made in about 1792…. A powerful version was made in the 1930s and it has been running to packed houses ever since. The reactive pattern, by which disenchantment in revolutionary aspirations leads on, after creative difficulties and conflicts, to ultimate reconciliation with the pre-existent status quo—or even zealous ideological partisanship on behalf of the status quo—is deeply inscribed within western culture. And it has, within capitalist ideology today, a very important confirmatory and legitimating function….
Your predicament in this respect was anticipated by [Alasdair] MacIntyre as early as 1958: “The reassertion of moral standards by the individual voice has been one of the ferments of Eastern European revisionism…. [But] one cannot revive the moral content within Marxism by simply taking a Stalinist view of historical development and adding liberal morality to it. But however one may disagree with Kolakowski’s theoretical position, the kind of integrity involved in reasserting moral principles in the Polish situation is entirely admirable…. But to assert this position in the West is to flow with the stream. It is merely to conform.”… MacIntyre does less than justice to your thought at that time. But in coming to the West… as you have done, you appear to fulfil a fifteen-year-old prediction…
LINK: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1973/kolakowski.htm> [Alasdair MacIntyre, Notes from the Moral Wilderness, I, op. cit., p.93.]
Note that Thompson is not alone. I have elsewhere talked about his peer Eric Hobsbawm. And their peer Ralph Miliband strongly, strongly objected to North Vietnam’s overthrow of the Khmer Rouge and thus the interruption of the Cambodian genocide. Why? Because it washed the movement’s dirty linen in public <https://www.marxists.org/archive/miliband/1980/xx/intervention.html>. In all cases the logic seems to be this: The movement has set a direction, and once that direction has been set the Leader (or the Leadership) must not be questioned, for the most important thing is for the Party to present a unified, united phalanx to the outside world.
It is because of this attraction of follow-our-leader-right-or-wrong-and-especially-when-wrong that I come down mostly on the side of only one totalitarianism: a doctrine that claimed that the fatal flaw in liberal capitalist democracy was that it did not understand that people needed to be led by a leader or leader. The sources of the leader or leaders’ legitimacy differed: either an insight into the laws of historical materialism and its plan for humanity or a charisma that enabled the setting of nationalist, communitarian, and ethnic power-goals that gave meaning to the life of the leader or leaders’ subjects. But, still, the same-old same-old.
Later on, as of 1978, Thompson did somewhat change his mind, and would cry out “does the suppression of reason, and the obliteration of the imagination, have any place on ‘the Left’?”—without seeming to notice that he had been eager to deploy that slogan against the washing of really-existing socialism’s linen in public as late as 1973 <https://archive.org/details/povertyoftheoryo00thom/mode/2up>…
One Picture:
<https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:6872862413759369216>
Very Briefly Noted:
Wikipedia: Panic of 1837 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1837>
Michileen Martin: Star Trek Actor Says Racism Turned His Character Into A Joke: ‘In a recent interview with Rolling Stone (via Trek Movie) LeVar Burton blamed the “unconscious bias” of the “white men who wrote the show” for something that remains an ongoing joke among Star Trek fans—that Geordi was so horrible at dating… <https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/star-trek-levar-burton-racism.html#google_vignette>
Molly Smith: Renewed U.S. Jobs Strength Confronts Fresh Challenge in Omicron: ‘Rising infections may keep millions of Americans on sidelines. Report may help determine Fed decision to accelerate taper… <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-02/renewed-u-s-jobs-strength-confronts-fresh-challenge-in-omicron?cmpid=BBD120321_MKT>
Bill Clinton (1992): The “Sister Souljah” Moment <https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=xtSifopiL1g>:
Paragraphs:
Leszek Kolakowski: My Correct Views on Everything: Reply to E.P. Thompson: ‘The national health service, you say, is impoverished by the existence of private practice, equality in education is spoilt because people are trained for private industry, etc. You do not say that all reforms are doomed to failure, you only explain that as long as reforms do not destroy capitalism, capitalism is not destroyed, which is rtainly true. And you propose “a peaceful revolutionary transition to an alternative socialist logic”. You think apparently that this makes perfectly clear what you mean; I think, on the contrary, that it is perfectly obscure unless, again, you imagine that once the total state ownership of factories is granted, there remain only minor technical problems on the road to your utopia…
LINK: <https://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5323/2224>
Mohamed A. El-Erian: Can the Fed Overcome Its Transitory Policy Mistake?: ‘The later the US Federal Reserve is in reacting properly to inflationary developments, the greater the likelihood that it will have to hit the policy brakes hard, causing market turmoil and unnecessary economic pain. The Fed must now do two things quickly. CAMBRIDGE – It took way too long, but key officials at the US Federal Reserve have finally acknowledged that for months they mischaracterized an inflationary surge that has proven larger and more persistent than they expected. That recognition is welcome, especially given the likelihood that inflation will remain uncomfortably high in the coming months. The challenge now, not just for the Fed but also more broadly for the United States and other major economies, is to navigate a policy terrain in which communication and implementation have been rendered significantly more complex by a fundamental misreading of inflation as “transitory”…
Michael Hiltzik: Why Do We Fear Inflation?: ‘There’s a right way and a wrong way to think about inflation. Here’s a right way…. There are no signs that the inflation surge showing up in the latest statistics is caused by sustained overheating of the U.S. economy. The signs point to several short-term factors coming together all at once…
LINK: <https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-11-26/right-way-and-wrong-way-to-think-about-inflation>
Victor Shih: ’Agree that a century is not meaningfully divided right at the year 00. For me, the 20th century began in 1914 and ended in 2020. The 1910s saw the collapse or diminution of land based monarchies or nobilities in England, Russia and China, who had managed to hang on despite industrialization. So from the end of the agrarian economy (in a global sense) to the beginning of the attention economy? That before 1924 the industrial sector had still been more the servant than the master of the agrarian economy? And after 2020 industrial capacity was no longer a constraint—that the key was to grab consumer attention rather than build or buy factory time/space…
LINK:
David French: The Fox News Distortion Field & Other Media Maladies: ‘It’s now been a little more than a week since my friends, colleagues, and Dispatch co-founders Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg announced their resignations from Fox News. After days of online vitriol (and support), the dust has settled a bit, and it’s worth reflecting a bit on what they did and why it mattered…. There are a few things you should notice. First, Fox is the 800-pound gorilla of conservative media. Unlike the more competitive environment in legacy media, where no single outlet comes close to comparable dominance, Fox isn’t just first, it’s first by a mile…. Second, look at who’s surging. Fox is in a state of very modest decline, most other sites are declining at a much faster rate, but the two outlets making dramatic gains—the Epoch Times and Newsmax—are, if anything, more aggressive than Fox. Third, look at the utterly dreadful quality of many of the outlets on the list…. And of course Fox doesn’t just dominate online, it dominates on television…. Fox is conservative media, and almost everything that is not Fox is some variation on the Fox product…. I’m reminded of the awesome power of Rush Limbaugh during his early rise…. New right-wing voices are often engaged in a de facto audition for that coveted Fox airtime. That reality, combined with Fox’s own aggressive defense of its brand, is one reason why so very little right-wing “media criticism” is aimed at the largest, most powerful, and most profitable cable network in the land. Fox broadcasts Seth Rich conspiracies? Memory-holed. Fox gave airtime to Kraken lawyers? Well, they were just asking questions. Its streaming platform airs a deranged Patriot Purge documentary that re-imagines the reality of January 6? Nobody watches Fox Nation anyway…. Look again at the list of the top 20 conservative outlets. How many reliably highlight Fox’s errors unless they’re attempting to scrape off part of their pro-Trump market share?… The cultural and political consequences in the right-wing grassroots are considerable…. Activists don’t know what they don’t know in part because telling them the truth in right-wing spaces carries a cost—and not just in reader disapproval. Fox, the most potent player in the market, will be displeased, and when it is displeased the ceiling on your career gets a little bit lower. And who needs that? After all, why focus on Fox? I’m sure the Washington Post has screwed something up. Let’s take a look over there…
LINK:
I think you're overgeneralizing, because the "follow the leader, deny truth" politics is way older than the 20th century: the Roman Catholic Church is a pretty famous example of it. So if there's one totalitarianism, it dates back thousands of years. That's a reasonable point of view, but once you distinguish the Catholic Church from Stalin, you have to distinguish Hitler from Stalin...
re: the 20th century running from 1914-2020. 2020 seems a little late to me. I would mark it around 2005-2010 and the attention economy and its power over the economy was rising rapidly at that point with VC funding pouring into the software world, primarily into social media-related offerings. Distrust of government and institutions had exploded with the consequences we see today.