The Fatal Paradox

Paréntesis

2011-10-10T22:37:00.000+13:00

Y tú, hombre de hoy, buscas la clave

de tus meditaciones graves,

estrujas tu cerebro

buscando el gran secreto

de todo el Universo.

Hombre, para llegar a todo
ten más reposo,
sé más poeta,
deja a un lado tu ansiedad inquieta,
cierra los ojos ante el sol
- pon en el acto una serena unción -
y después de mirar un largo rato,
verás bajo tus párpados
un continuo girar de átomos.
Eso son todas las cosas en el Tiempo,
eso es todo,
eso es el Universo:
un eterno girar contradictorio a un punto fijo.

(Vicente Huidobro, Adán, ll. 602-620)

Call for papers/Petición de colaboraciones

2010-09-30T15:08:00.010+13:00

Experimental Poetics and Aesthetics

ISSN: 1179-6464. Bi-annual/Semestral
http://www.experimentalpoetics.com/
experimentalpoetics@gmail.com

English:
The editorial team of the online journal Experimental Poetics and Aesthetics invite all interested researchers to submit essays, interviews or book reviews on experimental poetry and aesthetics, especially in the areas of visual, performance, digital, sound and fractal poetry for the inaugural issue.

Works may be sent in English, Spanish or Portuguese. They must include an abstract of no more than 200 words and be written in size 12 Times New Roman font with a line spacing of 1.5. Works must not exceed 25 pages in total, including quotes and bibliography. Authors wishing to submit items must follow the guidelines laid out in the MLA style manual (2008 edition or later). Literary quotes should be in their original language.

Works need to be submitted via email as a Microsoft Word document and any images in .JPG format. In the case of book reviews, which may deal with one or more than one monographs, the length must be between 900 and 1 000 words.

Español:
Los responsables de la revista electrónica Experimental Poetics and Aesthetics invitan a todos aquellos investigadores interesados a enviar ensayos, entrevistas o reseñas para el primer número, relacionados con la poesía experimental y la estética, especialmente sobre los ámbitos de la poesía visual, performance, poesía digital, sonora y poesía fractal.

Los trabajos podrán enviarse en español, inglés o portugués. Los artículos deben incluir un resumen de unas 200 palabras como máximo. Deberán estar escritos con tipo de letra Times New Roman, cuerpo de 12 puntos y mantener un interlineado de 1,5. El trabajo no superará las 25 páginas en total, incluyendo notas y citas. Los autores que deseen enviar sus trabajos deberán seguir las pautas de estilo indicadas según el manual de la asociación de lenguas modernas MLA (año 2008 o versiones posteriores). Las citas literarias se incluirán en su lengua original.

Los trabajos tendrán que remitirse por correo electrónico en formato de texto (Microsoft Word) y las imágenes se enviarán con formato JPG. Para el caso de las reseñas, que podrán referirse a uno o varios trabajos monográficos, la extensión deberá estar comprendida entre las 900 y las 1000 palabras.

More memories of Soria...

2010-06-07T15:37:00.022+12:00

As I sit at home on a miserably cold and wet Queens' Birthday weekend I am reminded of a similarly wintry day six months ago spent wandering along the banks of the River Duero near the Castillian town of Soria. Since blogging here has been fairly sporadic of late, I thought I would put up a few more photos from my visit to the spiritual home of the poet Antonio Machado...

Vázquez Montalbán and the case against rationalism in philosophy and art

2010-04-19T20:21:00.007+12:00

In Madrid earlier this year I had the good fortune to pick up a second-hand copy of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's 1970 philosophical essay-play-poetry collection-novella Manifiesto subnormal, sadly long since out of print and as far as I know never translated into English. Vázquez Montalbán is of course best known for his Pepe Carvalho detective series, about the eponymous Catalán gastronome and ex-communist/ex-CIA (yes, such things are apparently possible!) private investigator.

However, as I have previously hinted at here on this blog, Vázquez Montalban was also an astute cultural critic with many fascinating insights into Spain during the epoch of 'tardefranquismo' ('late Francoism') and subsequent 'transition' to liberal democracy as well as the world of Spanish far left politics, in which he was an active participant - beginning with his involvement with the Guevarist FLP in the 1960s and continuing with his lengthy career as a perennial dissident in the Unifed Socialist Party of Cataluña during the 70s and 80s (Vázquez Montalbán sided with the Eurocommunists during the PSUC's interminable faction fights but at the same time liked to satirise leading Euros such as Santiago Carillo - the 'born again' former hardline Stalinist - mercilessly). Vázquez Montalbán's collection of essays Crónica sentimental de la transición and his 1985 novel El pianista - charting the hopes, tragicomic failures and disillusionment of a generation of Spanish leftists - are essential reading for any serious student of the period.

Manifiesto is, as its publisher's blurb proudly proclaims, a book that is impossible to categorise in terms of genre. Nor is it easy to take away from it a neat didactic message, since the author characteristically satirises even those philosophical positions which he himself would be most inclined to defend. At the heart of it though is a call for leftists to overturn the time-honoured equation of Reason and rational philosophy with revolutionary politics and art and to celebrate instead what Vázquez Montalbán refers to as "la subnormalidad" and "la consciencia subnormal" - terms which I am not quite sure how to translate because nowhere does the author actually explicitly define them, but is perhaps closest to the standpoint of the Surrealist school in its delight in the irrational and absurd.

As Vázquez Montalbán writes "the prestige of Reason has been one of the cultural institutions most firmly established by the bourgeoisie" - and with good reason, since it encourages artists and philosophers to abstract themselves from reality - a reality that will now be mediated through the obfuscticating lens of ideology and false unity. Capitalism has also devised a system - humanist liberal democracy - which is capable of embracing and co-opting its own Hegelian artisitc antithesis, the aesthetic of desencanto or disillusionment, so long as it agrees to play by capitalism's own house rules. Vázquez Montalbán's message is that artists and would-be revolutionaries should try to resist this process of co-option or "recuperación" from "subnormalidad" into the capitalist cultural industry, although he is quite frankly pessimistic about the chances of success.

In the theatrical farce which forms the central section of the book, a dialogue plays out between a number of characters including Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Theodor Adorno, Leonid Brezhnev, the Marx brothers as well as an anonymous narrator (whose views seem more akin to the Stalinist cultural operative Lukács than to Vázquez Montalbán himself - as evidenced by the condemnation of surrealism as "a false cultural terrorism that distracted the attention of philistines from the new literature of social protest influenced by Naturalism"!!).

In what follows, it is Theodor Adorno who emerges in the most sympathetic light. In response to Cohn-Bendit's simplistic revolutionary street-theatre and the narrator's defence of the doctrine of Third Period Stalinist "social-fascism" Adorno declares that he has broken with all such "grand rationalisations" because he wants above all to survive and sees little chance of the socialist revolution succeeding. As he says "without doubt the old dame [capitalism] will pass away, but she will have lived long enough to corrupt both her children and her antagonists."

Summing up, Adorno seems to echo Vázquez Montalbán's exhortations in favour of "subnormalidad" as he proclaims "Reason has prostituted itself - long live Feeling!"

The poetics of language

2010-03-15T22:37:00.008+13:00

¿Habéis notado la fuerza especial, el ambiente casi creador que rodea a las poesías escritas en una lengua que comenzáis a balbucear? Encontráis maravaillosos poemas que un año después os harán sonreír...

[Have you noticed the special power, the almost divine atmosphere that surrounds poetry written in a language in which you are only just beginning to stammer? You come across marvellous poems that, only a year later, will make you smile...]

- Vicente Huidobro, 'El Creacionismo' (1925)

The way in which readers approach poetry in a language not their own is (unsurprisingly) a source of great interest to me, given my field of interest/expertise. Huidobro in the quoted passage above sums up very well, I feel, the way in which those who approach a language as outsiders are often able to find a poetic beauty in certain words that is not so apparent to native speakers habituated to their everyday usage.

Just recently I came across an excellent work which explores this subject in somewhat greater depth and attempts to explain the phenomenon of heightened sensitivity to certain types of poetic language among non-native speakers. In an MA thesis entitled Let There Be Revolution: The Destructive Creacionismo of Vicente Huidobro and Gertrude Stein, Lisa Senneff notes that
"...when one is surrounded foreign language for the first time, the bonds between word and object are fragile; the connection between signifier and the signified is shaky and unclear."

Senneff goes on to argue that this awareness of the arbitrary relationship between language and meaning was a major factor pushing both Huidobro and Stein towards a poetic model that deliberately sought to undermine and de-familiarise these relationships in the mind of the reader, thus freeing artistic creation entirely from any relationship with 'objective reality'. Read the whole thesis here.

Cuando faltamos las palabras...

2010-03-01T21:23:00.008+13:00

Si me preguntáis en dónde he estado
debo decir "Sucede".
Debo de hablar del suelo que oscurecen las piedras,
del río que durando se destruye:
no sé sino las cosas que los pájaros pierden,
el mar dejado atrás, o mi hermana llorando.
Por qué tantas regiones, por qué un día
se junta con un día? Por qué una negra noche
se acumula en la boca? Por qué muertos?

Si me preguntáis de dónde vengo tengo que conversar con
cosas rotas,
con utensilios demasiado amargos,
con grandes bestias a menudo podridas
y con mi acongojado corazón.

No son recuerdos los que se han cruzado
ni es la paloma amarillenta que duerme en el olvido,
sino caras con lágrimas,
dedos en la garganta,
y lo que se desploma de las hojas:
la oscuridad de un día transcurrido,
de un día alimentado con nuestra triste sangre.

He aquí violetas, golondrinas,
todo cuanto nos gusta y aparece
en las dulces tarjetas de larga cola
por donde se pasean el tiempo y la dulzura.
Pero no penetremos más allá de esos dientes,
no mordamos las cáscaras que el silencio acumula,
porque no sé qué contestar:
hay tantos muertos,
y tantos malecones que el sol rojo partía,
y tantas cabezas que golpean los buques,
y tantas manos que han encerrado besos,
y tantas cosas que quiero olvidar.

- Pablo Neruda, No hay olvido (Sonata), Residencia en la tierra

Antonio Machado and the uses of Spanish history

2010-02-22T13:19:00.013+13:00

As I've noted on other occasions (see for instance here and here) the poetry of the Spanish writer and "martyr" for the Republican cause Antonio Machado is both endlessly fascinating and, at the same time, deeply problematic in the way it manages to combine progressive leftist political sentiments with a Romantic attachment to symbols of Spain's imperialist past and ideas of Castillian supremacy. Yet, at the same time there is a powerful argument that poetry is not an exercise in instrumental reason and as such should be judged solely according to political criteria (a fact that I think also makes it hard to dismiss anti-rationalist philosophers such as Unamuno and Zambrano so hard to dismiss).

Looking down the River Dureo towards the Hermitage of San Saturio

I was reminded of this paradox during my visit last month to Soria, high up at the eastern end of the Castillian meseta near the headwaters of the River Duero, where Machado wrote his most famous collection of poems - Campos de Castilla - and where he met, married and then buried his young wife Leonor. While the strident literary nationalism that inhabits much of this collection is disconcerting, when actually physically confronted with the landscape which Machado describes in these poems it is difficult not to feel moved in a similarly irrational, 'Romantic' way... Somehow this desolate, rocky terrain - with its accumulated millenia of ruined cities, fortresses and monasteries - speaks to you in a way that the empty vistas of 'Godzone' can never even hope to aspire to...

The ruins of the 12th century monastery of San Juan del Duero

While the town of Soria itself is perhaps today a little too eager to cash-in on the legacy of its most famous resident (as evidenced by the 'Cervecería Machado' I encountered in the Calle de los Estudios which sold only Belgian beer...) and has lost some of its poetic 'lustre', a short walk across to the other side of the river you find yourself amidst the familiar vistas so beloved by the poet:

He vuelto a ver los álamos dorados,
álamos del camino en la ribera
del Duero, entre San Polo y San Saturio,
tras las murallas viejas de Soria - barbacana
hacia Aragón, en castellana tierra-.

Estos chopos del río, que acompañan
con el sonido de sus hojas secas
el son del agua, cuando el viento sopla,
tienen en sus cortezas
grabadas iniciales que son nombres
de enamorados, cifras que son fechas.
¡Alamos del amor que ayer tuvisteis
de ruiseñores vuestras ramas llenas;
álamos que seréis mañana liras
del viento perfumado en primavera;
álamos del amor cerca del agua
que corre y pasa y sueña;
alamos de las márgenes del Duero,
conmigo vais, mi corazón os lleva!

('Campos de Soria' VIII)

Along the banks of the river it is also possible to see the remains of the monastery of San Polo, which belonged to the Templar military order until their forcible dissolution in the 14th century, and about which the patron saint of Spanish Romanticism Gustavo Bécquer dedicated his gothic tales 'El Monte de los Ánimas' and 'El Rayo de Luna'.

The gatehouse of the monastery of San Polo, which sits astride the old road between San Juan del Duero and the Hermitage of San Saturio

In the midst of all this history, it is hard to begrudge Machado's appropriation of Castile's store of cultural and historical capital in the pursuit of his modernista literary project, even though the nationalist overtones make his poetry difficult to defend from an objective, political point of view. Perhaps the real problem for Machado (and his fellow Republican intellectuals) was not so much their tendency to appeal to nationalist sentimentality and a rose-tinted view of Spain's military past, but rather the fact that Franco's Nationalists were simply more credible representatives of this historical tradition. What was needed therefore was not so much a simple appeal to history but rather, as Juan Goytisolo advocates in his novel Juan sin tierra, a systematic re-writing or re-imagining of the national past, which promotes dissident figures such as Enrique IV (the reputedly - at least according to according to Gregorio Marañon - homosexual and morisco-phile half brother of Isabel 'la Católica') at the expense of the dominant "Golden Age" narrative handed down to us by authors such as Menéndez Pidal.

In this sense then, it might be said that the problem is not so much a surfeit of irrationality or Romanticism on the part of Machado, but rather that in his pursuit of these strategies he simply does not go far enough...

Postscript:

I couldn't conclude this brief soliloquy on Spanish left nationalism without mentioning the website of the Castilian federation of the Stalinist Partido Comunista de los Pueblos de España, which amusingly fights for the self-determination of Castile (along with all the other "oppressed nations" of Spain) and 'liberation' from the rule of EU and US imperialism (since they view Spain as essentially an exploited neo-colony of these latter). Somewhat scarily, in large parts of provincial Spain (such as La Rioja, where I spent the majority of time during my recent trip to the Iberian peninsular) these guys seem to be just about the only organised far left force!

Of festivals, saints and the aesthetic appeal of the irrational

2010-02-04T03:37:00.020+13:00

In Burgos - the old capital of mediaeval Castilla and home of Spain's dubious national hero "El Cid" - during the festival of the San Lesmes (the city´s patron saint) over the weekend I was struck (as I have so often been in my travels around Spain) by the tremendous attraction that Catholicism exerts on a aesthetic level in this part of the world, despite sharing in the manifest intellectual bankruptcy of all religion and blind-faith based ideologies.

Even a cynic such as myself cannot help but be impressed by the visual grandeur of it all - a grandeur with which evangelical and fundamentalist Protestantism simply cannot hope to compete (although perhaps High Church Anglicanism comes a little closer to matching it). It would seem that the Roman Catholic Church understood better than its rivals the importance of offering something more tangible and concrete than the promise of heavenly salvation, which was why it was able to sink such deep and enduring roots in the soil of the Old Roman Empire. Like 19th century Social Democracy, Catholicism achieved hegemony not so much through evangelical fervour but rather through the slow permeation or co-option of every facet of mass, popular culture.
Possibly this is why evangelism (in both its religious and Leninist variants) has been unable to offer anything other than the most fleeting of challenges to the Old Religions - of Saint Peter and of Kautsky and Bernstein - despite the obvious deficiencies and internal contradictions of both. Perhaps the best option for the anti-capitalist left in its efforts to capture the imagination of the working class is also to cultivate, as another blogger has recently suggested, a sense of the irrational and marvelous - as opposed to the standard devices of logic and reason.

Perhaps, like Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno, we should accept that at the end of the day what matters not so much what people believe but rather the objective function that belief fulfils?

Something to go to in Auckland

2010-02-02T09:42:00.005+13:00

Later this month the Spanish Department of the University of Auckland are organising a conference entitled "Historical Crossroads: Spain from the Second Republic to the 21st Century" with a range of participants from Spain, France, the United Kingdom, United States, Australia and New Zealand.

Yours truly will be giving a paper entitled "Exile and the problem of Spanish national identity in the work of Juan Goytisolo". The full list of conference speakers and abstracts is available here. Final timetable TBA.

Meanwhile as I'm in a sentimental mood here's some Mahler to add some suitable gravitas to the occasion:

More random thoughts from the road

2010-01-27T06:03:00.008+13:00

After a lengthy break in transmission I resume blogging on an uncharacteristically lyrical note with some postings inspired by my recent travels around Spain. The following images were taken along the banks of the River Ebro near Logroño, which has been the principal residence of your humble scribe these past three weeks. The text is courtesy of Mr William Wordsworth.

There was a roaring in the wind all night;
The rain came heavily and fell in floods;
But now the sun is rising calm and bright;
The birds are singing in the distant woods;
Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods;
The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters;
And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.

All things that love the sun are out of doors;
The sky rejoices in the morning's birth;
The grass is bright with rain-drops; -on the moors
The Hare is running races in her mirth;
And with her feet she from the plashy earth
Raises a mist; that, glittering in the sun,
Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run.

I was a traveller then upon the moor;
I saw the Hare that raced about with joy;
I heard the woods and distant waters roar;
Or heard them not, as happy as a boy:
The pleasant season did my heart employ:
My old remembrances went from me wholly;
And all the ways of men, so vain and melancholy!

But, as it sometimes chanceth, from the might
Of joy in minds that can no further go,
As high as we have mounted in delight
In our dejection do we sink as low,
To me that morning did it happen so;
And fears and fancies thick upon me came;
Dim sadness -and blind thoughts, I knew not, nor could name...

And finally, for no other reason than my own sheer whimsy, I leave you with this musical reindition of W.B. Yeat's poem "The Stolen Child" by the Waterboys, off the 1997 tribute album "Now and in Time to Be":

Roberto Bolaño: the enfant terrible of Chilean letters

2009-12-07T21:49:00.006+13:00

Recently while on holiday I had the good fortune to stumble across two novels by the Chilean-born writer Roberto Bolaño after I was forced to take shelter from one of Auckland's sudden cloudbursts in Unity Bookshop. I had never previously encountered Bolaño's work, but the darkly humourous and marvellously absurd premise of his Nazi Literature in the Americas captivated me at once and I left the shop shortly afterwards having purchased it along with its "companion" piece, Distant Star.

Bolaño seems in many ways the bastard Chilean literary son that Jorge Luis Borges never had - his politics, to be sure, are somewhat different (Bolaño was imprisoned by the Pinochet regime for his revolutionary socialist acitivities and after being rescued from a detention centre went off to join the FMLN in El Salvador) - but the overarching themes and motifs are startlingly similar. In Bolaño you find the same delight in deliberately blurring the lines between fiction and reality, between literature and life. Bolaño is simulataneously fascinated and troubled by the idea that amidst events of world-historical importance (such as the dictatorships of Hitler and Pinochet), certain individuals can busy themselves in the pursuit of avant-garde poetics and literary utopias and relate to political movements such as fascism as purely aesthetic phenomena. This forms the essential background to the two novels (if "novels" is really the right term) in question here: the first an encyclopedia of imaginary fascist poets and writers who in the age of capitalist mass culture and commodity fetishism find solace in the reactionary idyll of Nazism, the second (Distant Star) seemingly an extension of one of the characters whose fictional biographies is recounted in Nazi Literature in the Americas, the aviator "poet of the skies" Carlos Ramírez Hoffman (renamed here to Alberto Ruiz-Tagle aka Carlos Wieder).

Ramírez Hoffman and Ruiz-Tagle are both essentially amoral, Nietzschean supermen who take advantage of the military coup in Chile to further their own macabre artistic project that involves sky writing, murder, photography and verse. Their careers become so fantastical that doubt is cast on whether they are in fact real, while (in a characteristically Borgesian twist) they are themselves pursued by a private detective (who appears to be conflated with the author himself). Although there is plenty of violence and cruelty, the real subject here is not human morality or politics but rather the subversion of reality through art.

Bolaño, despite his radical marxist background, is distinctly unenthusiastic about those who insist that art must be made to serve some higher political or ethical purpose - as he remarked in the very last interview he gave shortly before his untimely death of liver failure at the age of 50 in 2003 (in response to a question about what he would say to Salvador Allende now if he had the chance):

Los que tienen el poder (aunque sea por poco tiempo) no saben nada de literatura, sólo les interesa el poder.

In the same interview he depricates Pablo Neruda and the "empty rhetoric" of the modern-day left which bores him, equally as much as that of the right. More surprisingly perhaps (given his fondness for the great Chilean "antipoet" Nicanor Parra) he is also unmoved by Vicente Huidobro, whose literary career - especially the preoccupations with futurist/fascist imagery - in many ways resembled so closely his own (Bolaño always thought of himself as a poet and only turned to writing fiction in middle age in order to support his family economically). Like Huidobro though his essential nature it seems (though of course he denies it!) is to be contrarian, to rebel against everything that exists.

Thanks to the recent translation of many of Bolaño's works into English he is now achieving a certain measure of posthumous recognition in the Anglophone world - his novel 2666 (which I have yet to read!) has made a number of critics' short lists for the best book of 2008/9 and won the 2008 US National Book Critics' Circle Award.

As one perceptive critic noted, Bolaño's fiction "...can be described as a chronicle of Latin America's dashed utopias" and perhaps for this reason it seems more 'real' and faithful to the lived experience of our own generation than the 'magical realist' style of the earlier, more hopeful generation of writers like Gabriel García Márquez.

Ferrater Mora on Unamuno's Philosophy of Tragedy

2009-11-23T00:30:00.004+13:00

A brilliant summation of the pessimistic yet infinitely humanist and courageous outlook of Spain's greatest philosopher:

Because he manifests a revolt of naturalism against the idealism of reason, and of the idealism of reason against pragmatical materialism, all attempts to pigeonhole Unamuno in one definite philosophical system are bound to fail. Unamuno does not advocate the union—which would entail a reconciliation, and eventually, a truce—of life and reason within the framework of a system where the idea of harmony would forever preclude any discord. There can be no harmony in that war which each human being wages against himself and his antagonists, but only perpetual strife, interminable contradiction, and continual—and fruitful incivility. This is the only "formal principle," if that is the proper name for it, which permeates Unamuno's thinking. It may be stated as follows: To be, is to be against one's self.

Unamuno's emphasis on opposition, tension, and contradiction is obviously related to that type of thinking which since Hegel has been customarily called "dialectical." Nevertheless, there are two important differences between the conventional dialectical systems and Unamuno's.

On the one hand, dialectical systems attempt to describe and explain the attributes of the Cosmos as an impersonal being. In such systems, human reality follows the pattern of the cosmic reality. Sometimes "the Reality" is identified with "God," but even then the impersonal traits prevail over the personal ones. Unamuno's dialectic, however, is of an entirely personal nature. Unamuno refers mainly, if not exclusively, to human existence. And when the ideas of God and world are introduced, they are endowed with human characteristics. Even when he uses such abstract terms as 'reason' and 'the irrational', they are to be understood as embodied in unique, concrete human beings.

On the other hand, all the philosophers who have tried to describe reality as a dialectical process of some sort—Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno no less than Hegel—have built conceptual systems in which the opposites end in a reunification in the bosom of some ultimate and all-embracing principle. The war between particulars finds peace in the absolute generality of the essential One, so that the principle of identity overcomes, in the end, all contradictions. The dialectical method is one in which as in Hegel—the total, "superior" truth (philosophical truth) reconciles the partial, "inferior" truths (mathematical and historical truth), one which purports to "save" all within the frame of the Absolute—the only realm in which peace is to be found. But in Unamuno's world, animated by the principle of perpetual civil war and unending strife, there is no place for any final harmony and still less, any identity—which would be, in his opinion, the equivalent of death. Among those thinkers who defended the dialectical approach, there was something akin to a headlong rush toward the very identity they denounced, their attempts to dissemble their own longing for an ultimate unity by calling it an "identity of opposites" notwithstanding. In Unamuno there is not the slightest eagerness to be absorbed in this identity, nor the least desire to pour the past into the future; there is just an everlasting will to abide, "to prolong this sweet moment, to sleep in it, and in it become eternal (etemizarse)." Unamuno wishes to prolong his "eternal past" because only the moment most perfectly expresses what he seeks: a sense of being a man of flesh and blood among other men of flesh and blood, yet still longing to be all that one can long to be, to be "all in all and forever," a finite individual and an infinite reality at the same time.

The two souls of Trotskyism?

2009-10-16T16:49:00.006+13:00

The art of this epoch will be entirely under the influence of revolution. This art needs a new self-consciousness. It is, above all, incompatible with mysticism, whether it be frank, or whether it masquerades as romanticism, because the Revolution starts from the central idea that collective man must become sole master, and that the limits of his power are determined by his knowledge of natural forces and by his capacity to use them. This new art is incompatible with pessimism, with scepticism, and with all other forms of spiritual collapse. It is realistic, active, vitally collectivist, and filled with a limitless creative faith in the Future.

- Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 1924

The communist revolution is not afraid of art. It realizes that the role of the artist in a decadent capitalist society is determined by the conflict between the individual and various social forms which are hostile to him. This fact alone, insofar as he is conscious of it, makes the artist the natural ally of revolution. The process of sublimation, which here comes into play, and which psychoanalysis has analyzed, tries to restore the broken equilibrium between the integral “ego” and the outside elements it rejects. This restoration works to the advantage of the “ideal of self,” which marshals against the unbearable present reality all those powers of the interior world, of the “self,” which are common to all men and which are constantly flowering and developing. The need for emancipation felt by the individual spirit has only to follow its natural course to be led to mingle its stream with this primeval necessity: the need for the emancipation of man.

The conception of the writer’s function which the young Marx worked out is worth recalling. “The writer,” he declared, “naturally must take money in order to live and write, but he should not under any circumstances live and write in order to make money. The writer by no means looks at his work as a means. It is an end in itself and so little a means in the eyes of himself and of others that if necessary he sacrifices his existence to the existence of his work....The first condition of the freedom of the press is that it is not a business activity.” It is more than ever fitting to use this statement against those who would regiment intellectual activity in the direction of end foreign to itself, and prescribe, in the guise of so-called “reasons of State,” the themes of art. The free choice of these themes and the absence of all restrictions on the range of his explorations--these are possessions which the artist has a right to claim as inalienable. In the realm of artistic creation, the imagination must escape from all constraint and must, under no pretext, allow itself to be placed under bonds. To those who would urge us, whether for today or for tomorrow, to consent that art should submit to a discipline which we hold to be radically incompatible with its nature, we give a flat refusal, and we repeat our deliberate intention of standing by the formula: complete freedom for art.

- Leon Trotsky and André Breton, Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, 1938

Manuel Vázquez Montalbán on the revolutionary left in Spain during the early 1970s

2009-10-04T12:42:00.011+13:00

Éramos todos subnormales, y sobre todos, los que habíamos intendado poner una palabra detrás de la otra para conseguir ser altos, ricos, guapos y cambiar la Vida y la Historia, insensatez ni siquirea alertada por el mal aspecto que ya entonces tenían Rimbaud y Marx. Peter Weiss había puesto por escrito el final infeliz del testamento de la modernidad. Marat abrazaba hasta la asfixia el fantasma teological de la revolución colectiva y Sade convertía en una sucia colección de gacetillas de El Caso la famosa revolución individual. Pero aún éramos jóvenes, sin duda más jóvenes que ahora, y especulábamos en las catacumbas-alcobas o en las alcobas-catacumbas sobre la revolución sexual y el sexo de la revolución, desdeñosos, aunque aplastados por el Caudillo, que a manera de pétreo comendador presenciaba nuestros jadeos desde su rincón de estatua activa, capaz de cazarnos en sus redes orgánicas en cuanto nuestros jadeos se apartaran excesivamente de los principios fundamentales de todo movimiento...

- Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. Crónica sentimental de la transición. Editorial Planeta, Barcelona, 1985 p. 11

[We were all subnormales, above all those of us who tried by putting two or more words together to become powerful, wealthy, good-looking and to change Life and History - foolish and failing to pick up on the fact that Rimbaud and Marx were already a bad look even at that time. Peter Weiss had put on paper the final unhappy testament of modernity: Marat embracing to the point of asphyxiation the theological ghost of collective revolution and the Marquis de Sade converting the famous individual revolution into a morbid collection of "in-brief" crime reports. But we were still young, much younger than we are now undoubtedly, and in our catacomb-bedrooms and in our bedroom-catacombs we speculated about the sexual revolution and the sex of the revolution, disdainful of the Francoist regime although completely crushed by the Caudillo who sat in on our conspirational gatherings like a stone gargoyle or an active stone statue, enveloping ourselves in his organic webs just as soon as our conspiracies drifted too far away from the fundamental principles of all movements...]

Lots of good background info on Vázquez Montalbán here

Más Huidobriana...

2009-09-27T22:50:00.003+13:00

...este poema se encuentra en El Ciudadano del Olvido (1941)

Trotskyism and the aesthetic of rebellion

2009-09-27T18:54:00.012+13:00

A Brazilian friend told me recently of a proverb that is apparently widely known in his home country, about a Spanish sailor who being shipwrecked on a foreign shore came up the beach to inquire of the locals "is there a government here?" and upon being answered in the affirmative declared automatically "then I am against it!"

I was thinking about this story recently while reading the debate over on British journalist Dave Osler's blog about the links between Trotskyism and the American neo-conservative right, one of whose intellectual godfathers - Irving Kristol - died just over a week ago.

Kristol was not the only Trotskyist to make the transition from one extreme of the political spectrum to the other - others include literary commentator Stephen Schwartz (formerly a member of the dissident current associated with ex-Spanish Trotskyist leader Grandizo Munis) and of course the inimitable Christopher Hitchens.

As a former Trotskyist (who still retains a great deal of sympathy for Trotsky himself, if not necessarily for his followers) I am skeptical of claims regarding the existence of some kind of causal link between anti-Stalinism and neo-conservatism.

However, I do think that Trotskyism because of its marginalised, heterodox status has throughout its history always appealed to people of a certain psychological predisposition, namely those who (like myself) instinctively rebel against the cultural and political consensus in society at any given point in time, those who like our proverbial Spanish sailor feel the need to be siempre en contra.

Michael Weiss, a New York blogger who appears to be part of the same milieu as Schwartz and Hitchens makes a similar point in a recent article entitled "Pilgrim of Doubt" on the life of American Trotskyist Irving Howe (originally drawn to my attention by Poumista), whose greatest influences were the seemingly unlikely pairing of Karl Marx and the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Weiss' point is that what attracted Howe to these two authors (and presumably to Trotsky as well) was their status as rebels and outcasts - the message while important was initially at least secondary to the aesthetic imperative of rebellion (what Weiss refers to as "their fondness for the Promethean").

The same contrarian spirit is alive and well in a 2004 article by Stephen Schwartz that appeared in the Weekly Standard (prop. the late Irving Kristol) entitled "Bad Poet, Bad Man", in which Schwartz takes issue with the literary eulogising/mythologising of the Chilean Pablo Neruda at the expense of some of his contemporaries such as Gabriela Mistral and Vicente Huidobro. Schwartz writes:

In 1938, two singular men sat down to compose a statement about the situation of the global intellect as they then saw it. They wrote, among other things, "The totalitarian regime of the U.S.S.R., working through the so-called 'cultural' organizations it controls in other countries, has spread over the entire world a deep twilight hostile to every sort of spiritual value. A twilight of filth and blood in which, disguised as intellectuals and artists, those men steep themselves who have made servility a career, of lying for pay a custom, and of excuses for crime a source of pleasure." Nobody more embodied the phenomenon described in these lines than Pablo Neruda. The description was written by the surrealist André Breton and the exiled Leon Trotsky.

While I think Schwartz "bends the stick" too far in his blanket condemnation of Neruda, he hits on an essential truth which is that from the 1930s onwards many avant-garde poets like Neruda (along with Rafael Alberti, César Vallejo, Louis Aragon and others) renounced their revolutionary if fragmented and often contradictory vanguard aesthetics under the baleful influence of the Stalinist Comintern and Lukaçs' "dialectical realism", which was grouned on Hegelian assumptions about the need for reconciliation and unity. Thus in Neruda's case the experimental poetics of Tentativa del hombre infinito and the first two cycles of Residencia en la tierra were followed up by crudely didactic works such as España en el corazón and Canto general.

Those few avant-garde writers who continued to defend the possibility of autonomous art within the context of anti-capitalist politics became for a time (André Breton, Octavio Paz) sympathetic to Trotskyism - or else broke with Marxism altogether (Huidobro).

However the same compulsion to question and to doubt everything, while it provided a steady stream of recruits to Trotskyism over the years, proved less valuable as a stable basis for building a coherent, united political movement. This can be seen clearly in Isaac Deutscher's portrayal of Trotsky as an essentially Romantic figure in his classic 3-volume biography of the Russian revolutionary leader - (The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, The Prophet Outcast). This was at once the source of Trotsky's appeal and his downfall, since critical heterodox figures tend to attract similarly independent-minded and critical followers.

However, perhaps we should be grateful that Stalin ousted Trotsky from the leadership of the Bolshevik Party - in the same way that we should be grateful Che Guevara died at the hands of the CIA in Bolivia instead of living on to become a career bureaucrat like Castro.

Recalling Genet's remarks on the justness of the Palestinian national struggle, we could perhaps say that the only revolutionary movement worth supporting is one that has almost no chance of actually conquering state power...

Adorno on the impossibility of political praxis

2009-08-31T16:42:00.002+12:00

From the Prologue and Introduction to Negative Dialectics (1966):

The formulation “negative dialectics” transgresses against tradition. Already in Plato dialectics intended to establish something positive through the thought-means of the negation; the figure of a negation of the negation named this precisely. This book would like to emancipate dialectics from these types of affirmative essence, without relinquishing anything in terms of determinacy. The development of its paradoxical title is one of its intentions...

...Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed. The summary judgement that it had merely interpreted the world is itself crippled by resignation before reality, and becomes a defeatism of reason after the transformation of the world failed. It guarantees no place from which theory as such could be concretely convicted of the anachronism, which then as now it is suspected of. Perhaps the interpretation which promised the transition did not suffice. The moment on which the critique of theory depended is not to be prolonged theoretically. Praxis, delayed for the foreseeable future, is no longer the court of appeals against self-satisfied speculation, but for the most part the pretext under which executives strangulate that critical thought as idle which a transforming praxis most needs. After philosophy broke with the promise that it would be one with reality or at least struck just before the hour of its production, it has been compelled to ruthlessly criticize itself.

Interrogating the myth of the Popular Front

2009-07-23T13:22:00.010+12:00

Reading Mark Derby's book Kiwi Compañeros (which compiles a wealth of primary source material detailing the involvement of New Zealanders in the Spanish Civil War) recently I was struck by the disjunction between the confused and often demoralising experiences of the some of the participants whose stories were reproduced in that volume and the traditional leftist narrative according to which the Spanish Civil War was the most glorious hour of the Popular Front and the struggle against Fascism.

This disjunction between heroic narrative or myth and tragic reality has also been explored in depth in another book which I also happened to pick up recently, Sebastian Faber's Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish Intellectuals in Mexico 1939-1975 and which I strongly recommend to anyone interested in this subject area.

Faber locates the leftist mythologising of the Popular Front in Spain squarely within the context of the struggle between the Spanish Republicans and the Franco regime over who were the genuine inheritors of Spanish national culture and identity, pointing out the striking similarities in the kinds of patriotic rhetoric and appeals to a glorious national past which characterised the propaganda of both sides during and after the Civil War.

These similarities account for the political disorientation felt by intellectuals who flocked to support the Republican cause during the Civil War, most notably the English writer George Orwell whose book Homage to Catalonia describes how the initial euphoria following the electoral victory of the Popular Front coalition of Republicans, Catalan nationalists and the PSOE in February 1936 which saw peasants and workers spontaneously expropriating latifundia and factories and forming their own armed militias was abruptly curtailed and repressed by none other than the Popular Front government later that same year in the name of maintaining "unity" in the struggle against Franco's Nationalist insurgency.

For many Spanish Republican intellectuals this process of disillusionment began even earlier, with the failure of their misiones pedagógicas or educational missions to the countryside which were couched in terms of elitist Krausist ideology to inspire the hoped-for spark of enlightenment among the oppressed pueblo (who naturally were preoccupied with more pressing, material concerns!).

Some of these Spanish intellectuals (such as Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset) were sufficiently disillusioned with the masses as to cross over to sympathising with Franco's Nationalists. However the majority continued to live in a state of denial about the true nature of their relationship with the muchedumbre (multitude).

As Faber points out, this delusion was only intensified during the long exile of the Republican intellectuals in Latin America after 1939, where they founded numerous magazines and reviews dedicated to the task of preserving the flame of "authentic" Spanish culture and identity. Faber cites the journal España Peregrina founded by the Creationist poet Juan Larrea as a typical example of this reinterpretation of the Civil War as a process of national spiritual purification, noting that

...this particular brand of "poetic" historiography, which combined Hegelian teleology with an exceptionalist reading of Spanish history, allowed Larrea to represent the Spanish Civil War ' which had been experienced by most exiles as a great and unnecessary injustice - as a positive event of enormous historical significance.

(132)

Juan Larrea (right) with Vicente Huidobro

In the end though, Faber argues, the struggle of the Republican exiles for cultural hegemony was doomed from the beginning due to several key factors.

The first of these was the concentration of their efforts in the area of literary or "high" culture, which in countries such as Mexico with repressive authoritarian governments was the only avenue open to the intellectuals as it commanded no mass audience and therefore posed no threat.

The second was their need as financial and material beneficiaries of these same regimes to remain silent about the very real injustices and inequalities that existed in their new home countries (Faber returns again and again to the fact that Mexican PRI following the retirement of Cárdenas in 1940 certainly had little reason to be deserving of the appellation "progressive").

Finally, there was the arrogant supposition that with the departure of the Republican exiles the Spanish nation had been deprived of any literary or cultural means of expressing itself. Yet during the 1950s a new generation of writers - such as novelist Juan Goytisolo and the poet Carlos Barral - who unlike the exiles were actually read by the general public yet had no dynastic ties to the Republic.

The failure of the Republican exiles' crusade for cultural hegemony is highly significant, Faber contends, in that superiority in the sphere of cultural and literary production had always been crucial to the Popular Front's claims of political legitimacy - especially from 1937 onwards as it began to repress (now with the enthusiastic support of the Stalinist PCE) left oppositionist forces such as the marxist POUM and the anarchist CNT. It is hardly coincidental that in that same year - 1937 - the Spanish Republican government co-sponsored the "International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture" in Valencia, whose list of participants (Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Vicente Huidobro, Louis Aragon, Tristan Tzara, Bertolt Brecht, WH Auden - to name only a few!) reads like a who's who list of the international literary world at the time.

However, while the Republic may have failed to secure cultural hegemony among the ordinary Spanish masses it did succeed in convincing the international leftist intelligentsia, many of whom to this day do not question the heroic iconography associated with the Spanish Popular Front such as the International Brigades, La Pasionaria and the "Defence of Madrid".

In this respect, it was undoubtedly helped by the Nationalist atrocities which converted figures such as Federico García Lorca and Antonio Machado into martyrs or secular saints.

Faber's book is an important antidote to this powerful and pervasive myth of the Popular Front which enables us to look at the events of recent Spanish history in a clear-eyed, non-sentimental way, without for a moment trivialising the magnitude of the suffering which many of the Popular Front's supporters endured.

Pío Baroja on Don Quixote

2009-07-12T20:47:00.007+12:00

From the dialogue between Andrés and Iturrioz in Part Four of El árbol de la ciencia (1911):

The more one understands the less one desires. This is logical, and furthermore can be proved in reality. The appetite to know is awoken in those individuals who are at the end of a process of evolution, when the desire to live becomes languid. Man, whose necessity is to know, is like the butterfly that breaks out of the chrysalis in order to die. The healthy individual, the individual who is strong and truly alive, does not see things as they are because it is not agreeable to him. He is inside a hallucination.

Don Quixote, whom Cervantes wished to appear foolish, is a symbol of the affirmation of life. Don Quixote lives more than all the sane people around him, and with more intensity than the others. The individual or nation who wish to live envelop themselves in clouds like the ancient gods when they appeared to mortals. The vital instinct needs to invent fictions in order to sustain itself. So then knowledge, the critical instinct, the instinct of inquiry must confront an essential truth: that lies are necessary for us in order to go on living...

Politics as a paint-by-numbers exercise

2009-07-01T14:39:00.008+12:00

While I don't often share the same political conclusions as Chris Trotter, his analysis is nevertheless often acute and thought-provoking.

Chris's latest blog post over at Bowalley Road is a case in point: while the idea that Obama's condemnation of the recent golpe de estado in Honduras somehow proves that the U.S. Democrats are now part of a new left-wing foreign policy axis in Latin America is difficult to swallow, Chris does make the telling observation that many on the left seem either unable or unwilling to come to terms with the fact that since the end of the Cold War the US is actually quite reluctant to support military dictators in the region.

Thus, whenever local reactionaries try to topple a democratically-elected leftist leader (as has just happened to President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras) the pre-programmed response of some activists is not to try to analyse the situation on its own merits but rather to immediately stage a protest outside the nearest US consulate or embassy - a kind of political "paint-by-numbers" exercise if you will.

To a certain extent, these people have become victims of the Latin American oligarchy's own propaganda machine - which insists that Zelaya is "another Chávez" and some kind of revolutionary. In fact he is nothing more than the scion of the establishment Partido Liberal who since coming to office in 2006 has alienated a few of his wealthy backers by enacting some mild social democratic reforms and seeking greater economic cooperation with countries such as Venezuela and Bolivia.

Efforts to gain a clear picture of the situation are admittedly not helped by over-excited journalists such as those of the Spanish liberal daily El País running stories with headlines like "Golpe contra el chavismo" - which just shows I guess that the Latin American oligarchy know how to pander to the anti-Chávez prejudices of the PSOE.

Then we have Joaquín Villalobos, a former FMLN guerilla turned El Salvadorean Gerry Adams wannabe writing in the same newspaper on Monday that

...Sin duda hay que rechazar el golpe, pero la comunidad internacional debe tener en cuenta que las políticas autoritarias en Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua y Venezuela se han convertido en una seria provocación para las fuerzas conservadoras y centristas de toda la región. Las expropiaciones de empresas, los cierres de medios de comunicación, la intimidación callejera, las arbitrariedades judiciales, las reelecciones perpetuas y los fraudes son como golpes de Estado graduales. La polarización ideológica chavista está debilitando sociedades amenazadas por miles de pandilleros y poderosos carteles. Centroamérica puede convertirse en un bastión del crimen organizado que dé refugio a mafiosos y terroristas en medio de un caos y una inseguridad endémica que genere millones de emigrantes.

So now apparently it's all the fault of the Chávez, Morales and Correa whose hugely popular policies of economic nationalisation and wealth redistribution have enabled them to be (shock horror!) repeatedly re-elected and thus provoked the poor oppressed oligarchs into mounting coups...

To come back to the original point though, it is never wise to believe the enemy's propaganda - and still less to assume that because a group of army coup plotters received training in the US that they therefore have the active support of that country's government.

It is also important not to place a + sign over certain political figures or movements simply because your opponents place a - symbol. This is the same mistake made by progressive leaders like Chávez who in their well-intentioned desire to oppose US imperialism bestow upon decidedly less progressive regimes (such as those of Iran and Belarus) the epithet of "anti-imperialist" simply because they oppose Washington.

Finally, at the practical local level while running around staging protests outside the US consulate or some other convenient target may help to boost morale among left-wing activists it serves little logical purpose beyond that.

I say this as one who once belonged to an organisation whose standard practice every May Day was to stage a picket outside the local McDonalds restaurant (it was a small provincial city and as such lacked any more tangible symbols of global capitalism). While it made us all feel terribly important at the time, looking back now it must have presented the most ludicrous and baffling spectacle to those working class punters who had their lunch hour interrupted by a bunch of mangy-looking students waving placards and banging kettle drums on the street outside.

The moral of the story? Simply that mindless activism and breathless articles cobbled-together from the bourgeois press is no substitute for careful and considered analysis.

Where do I sit on the political spectrum?

2009-06-25T14:21:00.005+12:00

My Political Views
I am a left social libertarian
Left: 6.92, Libertarian: 6.47

Political Spectrum Quiz

There seems to be another political spectrum graph meme doing the rounds of the NZ Blogosphere at the moment, so for what it's worth I thought I'd post my results from the latest quiz here.

As you can see, according to this test I am defined as a "left social libertarian" (although previously on the same test I scored "far left moderate social libertarian", which just goes to show as one commentator on Bryce Edwards' blog pointed out that some of the questions in these quizzes don't work so well when you are a revolutionary anti-capitalist who believes in the need for both radical equality AND the complete abolition of the state!).

My Foreign Policy Views

Score: -8.49

Political Spectrum Quiz

My Culture War Stance
Score: -9.02

Political Spectrum Quiz

UPDATE: A graph showing the relative political positions of those NZ bloggers who have taken the quiz has been published here

The Spanish Muslims of Timbuktu

2009-06-23T14:11:00.014+12:00

In a comment on my previous post about the expulsion of the moriscos from Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries, Joaquim Pisa (who besides being the author of numerous fictional, travel and poetical works also maintains an excellent Spanish-language blog out of Barcelona entitled Aventura en la tierra) brought to my attention the remarkable story of the Spanish Muslims of Timbuktu.

Joaquim pointed me to the website of the Fundación Mahmud Kati, set up following the "rediscovery" in 1999 in the ancient city of Timbuktu (in Mali, West Africa) of a library of over 3 000 manuscripts literally "splashed" (as the one report put it) with words written in the Aljamiado script. The significance of this find was simply that the Aljamiado script was the same script used by the mudejar inhabitants of Spain to transcribe words in the Romance dialect of Mozarabic, and moreover that the manuscripts found in Timbuktu contained frequent references to the Spanish peninsular.

The collection of manuscripts in question had spent nearly two centuries scattered among various descendants of the great 16th century Timbuktu chronicler Mahmud Kati (himself descended from Spanish Muslims) before being reunited by one of these descendants of Kati - Ismael Diadiè Haïdara.

In the text of a conference paper delivered in Bamako in 2005 entitled "Andalusians in the curve of the Niger" Antonio Llaguno Rojas (vice president of the Fundación Mahmud Kati) recounts the story of how these Spanish mudejares and moriscos - in all but their religion identical to their Christian compatriots - came to reside in such a far-flung, exotic location.

From this account it appears that the first wave of Spanish Muslims who emigrated to the region of the Niger left Spain either before or just after the fall of Granada, thus escaping the vicious religious persecution suffered by their morisco brethren during the Catholic Counter-Reformation.

The reasons for the emigration of these mudejares can be traced back to the period of the Mali Empire and the reign of Musa I, who flourished in the first half of the fourteenth century. Musa was a devout Muslim, and for this reason went to great lengths to persuade the great poets, philosophers and architects of the Muslim cities of Al-Andalus (i.e. Spain) to come and reside at his court. The Sankoré mosque in Timbuktu - constructed by the Andalusian poet and architect Abu Ishaq Es-Saheli as part of a wider complex that also included a library and a university - dates from around this time.

The Sankoré Mosque in Timbuktu

The remarkable thing about the Spanish Muslim presence in the Niger is that it seems to have been largely unaffected by changes in dynastic politics. Thus in 1468 when the Mali Empire was eclipsed by the neighbouring Songhai kingdom, the new ruler of Timbuktu continued to employ scribes and clerics from Al-Andalus as high-ranking civil servants, notably among them the Kati family.

Mahmud Kati, who was a member of the second or third generation of of this family of mudejar emigrants (depending on which sources you believe), compiled not only the fabled library but also the most important historical account of the Songhai Empire and its predecessors - the Tarikh el-Fettach.

Ironically, in 1591 an army of invasion sent by the Sultan of Morocco and led by a morisco general, Yuder Pachá, conquered Timbuktu and overthrew Mahmud Kati's Songhai patrons.

This Yuder Pachá was born into a family of Spanish Muslims in Morocco, banished by the Spanish Crown following the failed Alpujarras uprising of 1568-71. He fought with distinction on the Moroccan side in the Battle of Alcazaquivir in 1578 when a Portuguese-Spanish army of invasion was defeated and the King of Portugal killed (much to the relief of the local Jewish community, who Don Sebastián had promised to put to the knife if they did not convert to Christianity!).

His conquest of Timbuktu for the Sultan, while only temporary, led to the settlement of a second wave of Spanish Muslims (this time moriscos as opposed to mudejares) who subsequently founded their own "empire" (el Imperio de los Armas) which, according to the scant sources I have been able to find on the subject, survived until being overwhelmed by the invasions of Tuareg nomads and French colonialists in the 18th century.

Random thoughts from the road

2009-06-22T20:24:00.012+12:00

In his first book of poems Fervor de Buenos Aires (published in 1923) the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges writes that

The streets of Buenos Aires
are the core of my being.
Not the energetic streets
choked with crowds and hustle
but the lethargic streets of the suburb,
almost invisible by force of habit
made eternal in the semidarkness and twilight
and those further out
beyond the gentle trees
where austere little houses scarcely venture,
overwhelmed by deathless distances,
losing themselves in the deep vision
of the sky and the plains...

Contrasting with the knife-fights and lurid night life of the suburbs of Buenos Aires, the suburbs of Hamilton struggle to inspire any poetic impulse.

- the quiet desperation of families eating in the buffet restaurant - the café-less waste of mile upon mile of new housing estates - the occasional vast hypermarché of big box retail outlets with the obligatory food court tacked on -

These elements can be found in all New Zealand cities, but arguably none embodies them so magnificently as Hamilton.

In the latest issue of the community newspaper a former ACT party president and local gym owner publishes a paid advertorial lambasting the opponents of "One New Zealand".

His secretary has received only a handful of negative phone calls since last week's "column", he boasts.

One hour's drive east from Hamilton in the town of Putaruru I spent an afternoon behind the counter of a Cambodian bakery, and in amongst the alien chatter my sense of geographic and temporal dislocation converged with that expressed by the poet Mason (who grew up in the tiny settlement of Lichfield some four miles down the road) in a poem from his 1924 collection, The Beggar:

That I go out alone to them it seems
because they see none with me
in the way ignorant that the fabrics of my dreams
are less intangible to me than they

Ignorant that I have heard and seen
Christ break the bondage of his tongue-tied sightlessness
have walked with firm-faithed Mary to the stake
and kissed the hem of martyred Flora's dress

And I in Lichfield have been
Chatterton's accessory in suicide
have Gaius Marius in Minturnae seen
for many hours by Waitemata's tide

Burnt Dian's temple down in Otahuhu
and slain Herostratus at Papatoe
and here in Penrose brought Aeneas
through to calm Ausonian lands from bloody Troy...

Brief Hiatus

2009-06-13T23:31:00.003+12:00

I am away at the other end of the country, probably without internet access, for the next week or so. As a result this blog will most likely not be updated until after I return.

In the meantime, here is something for all the rest of you Vicente Huidobro fans out there :)

The history that europe would prefer to forget

2009-06-12T21:20:00.012+12:00

Given the tide of anti-immigrant fervour that appears to be sweeping Europe at the moment, as evidenced by the victory of Meisseurs Berlusconi, Sarkozy, Rajoy and their lesser brethren (Griffin, Wilders et al.) at last weekend's European elections I thought it might be a good moment to post the following article by Juan Goytisolo that was published in El País back in March.

The translation of this article was originally undertaken as part of a folio of work I submitted for a university course I am taking - as such it is meant for educational purposes only, and no infringement of copyright is intended or implied.

The inconvenient history of the Moriscos[1]

Official and academic Spain is trying to forget the fourth centenary of one of the most ominous deeds in our history: the expulsion in 1609 of hundreds of thousands of our fellow countrymen and women of Muslim descent.

- Juan Goytisolo El País 15/03/2009

To Francisco Márquez Villanueva

The past of all countries contains alternating moments of embarrassment and patriotic pride. The fourth centenary of the expulsion of the Moriscos in the reign of Philip III obviously belongs among the former. Outside of the Andalusí Legacy[2] foundation and the conference of historians it is organising this May, official and academic Spain has maintained a defensive position of diplomatic silence on this issue, revealing its obvious discomfort.

What happened from 1609 to 1614 was an inglorious episode that provided the first European precedent for the bloody ethnic cleansings (of various magnitudes) that we have witnessed over the past century. The “preventive” measures ordered by the Duke of Lerma[3] with the strong support of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and Patriarch Ribera[4] were the subject of a long, uncertain and controversial political-religious debate. It is useful to remind ourselves, albeit only briefly, of its various stages:

1499: forced conversion of the people of Granada by Cardinal Cisneros; 1501-02: Muslims in the Kingdom of Castile given a choice between exile and conversion: the mediaeval Mudéjares[5] became Moriscos pure and simple; 1516: forced to abandon their dress and customs, although the measure was not enforced for 10 years; 1525-26: conversion by edict of the Moriscos in Aragón and Valencia; 1562: a council of ecclesiastics, jurists and members of the Inquisition prohibits the people of Granada from using the Arabic language; 1569-70: rebellion of Alpujarra and the wars of Granada… from the crushing of the Moriscos to the execution of Aben Humeya, the political strategy of Philip II consisted of dispersing the people of Granada and resettling them in Castile, Murcia and Extremadura, far from the southern coasts and possible Turkish invasions.

So many vacillations and changes of direction reflect the contradictions that existed between an ecclesiastical hierarchy with scant respect for the universal Christian ethic on the one hand and on the other the interests of the peninsular nobility, for whom the expulsion of those who worked their lands would spell agricultural ruin. As we now know thanks to historiographical work carried out since the end of the 19th century, the political-religious crusade was the subject of a furious behind-the-scenes controversy.

While some opposed the expulsion and preached baptism and gradual assimilation, the hard-line elements of the episcopacy were strongly inclined towards more forceful proposals: slavery, collective extermination or castration of all the males and the deportation to the Island of Bacalao,[6] in other words to Newfoundland.

Banishment to the much closer African coast, favoured by the majority of the members of the Council of State, was opposed by a venerable bishop with an argument of impeccable logic: after arrival in Algeria or Morocco the Moriscos would renounce their Christian faith, the most charitable thing would therefore be to put them in leaking ships so that they would be shipwrecked during the voyage and their immortal souls be saved.

In the debate that for decades pitted doves against hawks, the hawks relied upon the eloquent pens of propagandists such as Brother Jaime de Bleda, González de Cellorigo, Brother Marcos de Guadalajara and, most importantly of all, Pedro Aznar de Cardona. – for whom the expulsion marked the closing of a long and ignoble historical digression opened by the invasion of 711: thanks to the work of Lerma and Philip III Spain would be Catholic without exception.

Along with their religious arguments, they put forward other ridiculous claims concerning demographics: the supposed danger of a giant increase in the Morisco population in abrupt contrast with a static or declining Christian one due to ecclesiastical celibacy, the cloistering of women in convents, the wars in Flanders and emigration to America. Such arguments, which are being revived today by the European nationalist ultras, were ironically summed up by the dog Berganza in Cervantes’ Symposium of the Dogs.[7]

The Morisco problem and the radical solution applied to it have been the subject of numerous well-documented studies in the last fifty years by historians as diverse as América Castro, Domínguez Ortiz, Julio Caro Baroja, Mercedes García-Arenal, Bernard Vincent, Louis Cardaillac, Márquez Villanueva, among many others. Thanks to these people we now know of the opposition of those whom today we would call courageous citizens to the edict of expulsion four hundred years ago. Very significantly, the majority of these people were recently converted Christians of Jewish origin – no less visible despite having altered their names and outward appearance. Their advocacy in favour of assimilation of the Moriscos was as much a plea on their own behalf and both contradicted and challenged the very recently introduced Christian statutes regarding limpieza de sangre.[8]

The reassertion of commerce, labour and merit against the “black honour” of the Old Christians offered some hope of arresting the already perceptible Spanish decline and the long “holiday from history” which was prolonged for another two centuries until the Cortes de Cádiz[9], despite the eminently sensible policies of Olivares[10] and the enlightened ministers of the 18th century.

Example of this reassertion include González de Cellorigo’s memorial addressed to the monarch Of the Necessary Policies and Useful Restoration of the Republic of Spain –its regenerationist spirit obvious from is title – and Luis de Mármol y Carvajal’s excellent History of the Rebellion and Punishment of the Moriscos – evocative of a human tragedy that could have been avoided with a more pragmatic approach. Both of these books helped to alter the current of Erasmean thought[11] to which the would-be modernisers of self-absorbed Spanish society subscribed.

In a soon-to-be-published work that I have just had the opportunity to read thanks to the kindness of the author – Moors, Moriscos and Turks in the Work of Cervantes – Francisco Márquez Villanueva analyses with his usual aplomb the writings – mostly unedited – of the humanist Pedro de Valencia, disciple and executor of the Hebrew scholar Benito Arias Montano. His Treatise Concerning the Moriscos in Spain, unknown until its publication in 1979 and which only came into my hands very recently, could be perhaps – seen from the perspective of its own time – the most reasoned defence of the cause of those who were expelled.

A convert from Judaism like Arias Montano and an enemy of the Church scholastics and the doctrines propounded by the Council of Trent,[12] de Valencia energetically denounced “the insult that is done (to the Moriscos) in depriving them of their lands and in not treating them with the same equal honour and esteem as all other natural-born citizens.” Like Brother Luis de León (he who is remembered for his famous description of the statute of limpieza de sangre as “an affront to generations that will never cease”), Pedro de Valencia opposed the statute of Cardinal Siliceo[13] and advocated a policy of mixed marriages between Moriscos and Old Christians in order to “persuade the country’s citizens that all of them are brothers of one lineage and one blood.”

Morisco refugees set sail from the Spanish port of Viñaroz, Valencia

The spectacle of tens of thousands of baptised men separated from their children while begging for mercy from God and the King and proclaiming in vain their desire to stay in the country of their birth was difficult for many sincere Christians to tolerate. The brutal nature of the expulsion and the massacres carried out on those who tried to avoid it were received with sadness and compassion by an intelligent minority, but with cries of hatred and spontaneous cheers by those like Gaspar de Aguilar who turned them into songs of heroic deeds.

The majority of the Moriscos took refuge – with varying success – in the Maghreb. The natives of Hornachos[14] set up the so-called republic of Salé in Morocco,[15] with the illusory hope of ingratiating themselves with the King and some day returning to Spain.

During a four-year relaxation those in the Ricote Valley[16] were allowed to voluntarily emigrate across the French frontier and travel on to other European countries. Although they had been completely assimilated, the Duke of Lerma signed without qualm their order of collective banishment in 1614. The episode of the Morisco of Ricote who in the second part of Don Quixote meets with Sancho Panza allowed Cervantes, a master in the art of cunning, to reclaim a voice for those who were victims of such a savage violation.

“I left our town – said the Morisco – entered France and although I was well-received there, I wanted to see it all. I went to Italy and Germany and there it seemed to me that one could live with more freedom, the inhabitants being a good-natured people: each one living as they wished, because for the most part there is freedom of conscience.”

Freedom of conscience! Almost casually and as if not even wanting to, the author of Don Quixote puts his finger on the problem. The agents of the Inquisition did their job well but to a good reader sometimes words are not needed.

________________________

[1] A term that has no direct equivalent in English, but refers to the Muslims living in Spain after the reconquista who converted to Christianity.

[2] Andalusí – person coming from al-Andalus/Spanish Muslim

[3] Don Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, Duke of Lerma (1552/1553-1625), courtier and favourite of Philip III

[4] Saint Juan de Ribera (1532-1611), Archbishop of Valencia and Patriarch of Antioch.
[5] Mudéjares: the name given to those Muslims living in Spain after the reconquista who did not or had not yet converted to Christianity.

[6] Mystery island in the Atlantic depicted on many 16th Century maps as lying just off the coast of Newfoundland.

[7] Reference to one of the Novelas Ejemplares or “exemplary novellas” by Miguel de Cervantes (published 1613) in which two dogs share their bemused observations on the contradictions and nonsensical elements in human society.

[8] “purity of blood” i.e. favouring of those of pure Christian descent.

[9] The Cortes of Cádez met in 1810 during the Napoleonic occupation of Spain and the detention of King Ferdinand VII in France. It promulgated Spain’s first liberal constitution, which provided for a limited constitutional monarchy ruling through parliament and universal male suffrage. It was repealed by Ferdinand after his restoration in 1813.

[10] Gaspar de Guzmán y Pimentel, Count of Olivares (1587-1645) was prime minister for 22 years under Philip IV.

[11] Desiderius Erasmus (1466/69-1536) Dutch Renaissance humanist and Catholic theologian.

[12] Ecumenical council of the Catholic Church which took place in the middle of the 16th century, at the height of the Counter-Reformation drive against Protestantism and other “heresies” in the Church.

[13] Juan Martínez Guijarro (1477-1557), Archbishop of Toledo and intellectual author of the statute of limpieza de sangre.

[14] A town in Extremadura near Badajoz.

[15] A small maritime republic that existed for a brief period during the 16th century encompassing the cities of Salé and Rabat.

[16] In Murcia, south-east Spain

The european elections: a tale of sound and fury

2009-06-09T22:47:00.010+12:00

Liberal commentators across Europe have gone into shock and grief after the comprehensive rout of the Centre-Left parties in last weekend's elections to the European parliament. The Spanish daily El País summed up the mood:

"Tragic", "troubling", "horrible", "distressing"... the overwhelming flood of the anti-system parties into the European Parliament yesterday provoked a cascade of disapproval across the length and breadth of the Union, in particular in the mouths of politicians whose failure at the ballot box has now given seats to a heterogeneous group of ultras, xenophobes, eurosceptics and populists of all sorts.

In Britain, Austria and the Netherlands the main beneficiaries of the Centre-Left's demise were far-right populist anti-immigration parties such as Geert Wilders' PVV, while in France, Italy and Spain the equally racist and xenophobic but respectably "mainstream" parties of Sarkozy, Berlusconi and Rajoy were able to mop up the vote (unlike the Anglo-Saxon Tories, these outfits have not yet fully embraced social liberalism).

Of course, it never occurs to the liberal commentators that it is precisely their own failed policies that have paved the way for the success of the right, as they have worked hand-in-glove with the high priests of neo-liberalism to destroy working class communities and solidarity to the point where the working class is now for the most part an atomised collection of depoliticised, fearful and angry individuals.

The one consolation for the liberal left is that with the likes of Nick Griffin and Geert Wilders strutting the stage their own less than glowing record on the treatment of migrant workers and asylum seekers will be completely overlooked. The Spanish social liberals will also be happy that the abertzale or pro-Basque Independence left failed to make the projected electoral breakthrough, a prospect that scared the columnists of El País far more than the Francoist dinosaurs in the Partido Popular.

At the end of the day though, do these elections really signify anything? Given that on average only around 43% of EU voters bothered to turn out over the weekend (even lower in countries such as Britain and a number of Eastern European states) it is clear that the elections are seen as completely irrelevant by the vast majority. Indeed, for all the gravity that most people associate with it the EU parliament is probably on a par with the Eurovision Song Contest or the 20/20 Cricket World Cup.

This could be seen as a vindication of the revolutionary left, who after all put little faith in parliaments and the various other trappings of bourgeois democracy. However the problem with this is that all the evidence indicates that electoral abstentionism is the product of widespread de-politicisation, not radicalisation. Also, in those cases where the far left did present candidates' lists they scored typically fairly low votes (the 4.88% for the French Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste being the best of the bunch, but even they failed to take a single seat). Only in Ireland did a revolutionary left candidate - the Socialist Party's Joe Higgins - manage to pull off a victory due to a conjunction of strong personal popularity and the especially harsh way in which the global financial crisis has impacted on that country.

So while given the record abstention levels it would clearly be wrong to read too much into these election results, they do at least provide a useful reminder that the revolutionary left cannot afford to be too smug and complacent about the defeat of their political rivals, the former social democratic (now social liberal) parties.

And in the short term for us Antipodean observers, at least these elections offer a welcome diversion from the bathos of the Richard Worth saga - which for reasons that escape me currently seems to be obsessing the entire NZ political blogosphere and Wellington commentariat, not to mention providing an excuse for wall-to-wall media coverage of John Key's crimes against the English language!

Un chien andalou

2009-06-05T20:26:00.006+12:00

Tomorrow marks the 80th anniversary of the Paris premiere of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's surrealist 1929 film Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog), a landmark in the history of the 20th century avant-garde.

A popular story has it that Buñuel and Dalí were so sure they had crafted a film that would "outrage" the intellectual bourgeoisie that on the way to the premiere they filled their pockets with rocks so as to defend themselves once the cinema goers began to riot. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately?) for them, the Parisian crowd loved the film and it became an instant hit.

Some critics have taken this as in some way symbolic of the "failure" of surrealism and the avant-garde, and it is certainly true that these artistic tendencies signally failed to bring capitalism crashing to its knees.

However, if we are to judge the value of artistic creations not in terms of their ability to provide a neat didactic political "reading" or message but rather in terms of the questions that they ask of us as readers/viewers/listeners and of our pre-existing assumptions (see also my earlier posts on this matter here and here), then I think it is still fair to argue that a film such as Un chien andalou is indeed "revolutionary" in every sense.

Un chien andalou is constructed according to the "logic" (if we can really call it that) of dream associations and defies any systematic or rational interpretation. While there are a couple of artistic allusions or in-jokes such as the dead donkeys which reference Juan Ramón Jimenez's Platero y yo that Dalí (like Juan Goytisolo!) apparently hated, there is no overriding skopos or aim in view.

(a further anecdote - despite his billing as pne of the two artistic co-creators of the film the donkeys were virtually Dalí's only contribution to the whole film - with only the one other possible exception of the title which Dalí's rejected lover Federico García Lorca felt might possibly be meant as an insult against him)

The famous opening sequence in which an eye is slit with a razor prefigures a series of scenes in which our expectations of dramatic or temporal unity/continuity are constantly raised and then just as quickly confounded.

The use of Richard Wagner's Liebestod from his opera Tristan and Isolde is also interesting, as the work seemed to hold a strange fascination for other avant-garde artists as diverse as the Anglo-American T.S. Eliot and the Chilean Vicente Huidobro.

Below is the film (in two parts) so that you, dear reader, can give your verdict. 80 years on does Un chien andalou still deliver on its "revolutionary" promise? Or is it, in the immortal words of the Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisentein, proof only of "the extent of the disintegration of bourgeois consciousness" in the epoch of "late capitalism"?

Jean Genet: the writer as a perpetual exile

2009-06-03T13:16:00.009+12:00

The second volume of Juan Goytisolo's autobiography, Realms of Strife (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990 - trans. Peter Bush) contains a very moving tribute to the French poet, novelist and playwright Jean Genet (1910-1986) - whose life in many ways parallels that of the Spanish writer.

Genet was the orphaned son of a prostitute who grew up to become a vagrant, military deserter and petty thief and was only saved from a life sentence of imprisonment in 1948 (after over 10 convictions) by the intervention of André Gide and Jean-Paul Sartre (among others) who recognised the extent of his creative talents.

His works reveal a powerful fascination and empathy with people existing at the margins of society such as criminals, homosexuals and immigrants.

Goytisolo was introduced to Genet soon after his arrival in Paris in 1956 by Monique Lange of the publishing house Gallimard, and from there began a relationship that was to have a powerful influence over Goytisolo's own subsequent political and literary evolution.

Like Goytisolo, Genet was a homosexual who was initially attracted to the Arab countries of the Maghreb because of the relatively more uninhibited notions of masculinity in North African society (despite the dominance of Islam).

From this initial point of attraction Genet became more deeply involved both personally and politically in the Arab world - defending Algerian migrant workers against police brutality in France and traveling to meet with Palestinian freedom fighters in Lebanon.

He was then an exile in every sense of the word.

In his memoirs Goytisolo recounts the time he lent Genet a copy of the poems of Antonio Machado, a writer with whom Genet was not then acquainted but who had the status of a kind of secular saint among the Spanish Republican exiles abroad:

He returned the books to me after a few days and rattled off a string of criticisms: he thought the writer's human and literary horizons narrow and limited; his obsession with Castile was a way of narcisistically contemplating his own navel and resurrecting the retrograde values of the countryside. Machado not only wrote in Spanish - as Genet wrote in French - but wanted to be Spanish, a cultural identification that Genet could not understand and labeled as chauvinist. He was left totally indifferent by the moral landscape of France: neither the gardens of Versailles nor the cathedral of Rheims stirred any emotions in him. So why, then, that love of Soria, Castile, the trees on the riverbank, the slow procession of poplars? The fatherland, he would say much later, could only be an ideal for those who didn’t have one, like the Palestinian fedayeen.

Goytisolo concludes his tribute with the following account of his friend's death some 30-odd years later:

He met his end on one of those short trips to the France he so hated, when he wished to correct the proofs of his last book, Un Captif amoureux. His wish to be buried in Morocco, to leave no trace of himself in his country apart from his beautiful, repellent, and poisoned prose, apparently complicated the formalities of the funeral. As with Abdallah twenty years before, his body remained several days in the morgue; and as Abdallah blackened by poison had returned to his African origins, Genet would in turn be reintegrated symbolically in his adoptive land: as I later learned from his Palestinian friends, the customs official asked those accompanying the coffin whether it was the body of a Moroccan worker. They proudly proclaimed it was.

Finally, Goytisolo notes that

Genet taught me to cast off my early vanity, political opportunism, my desire to cut a figure in the life of literary society…Without him, without his example, I would perhaps not have had the strength to break from the hierarchy of values accepted on the right and the left by my compatriots, to accept proudly my predictable rejection and isolation, to write all I have written from the time of Conde Julián.

St Paul and the imperative of group orthodoxy/infallibility

2009-05-29T12:43:00.016+12:00

Tying together rather neatly two themes canvassed on this blog recently - intra-left sectarianism and the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo - I came across this passage in Goytisolo's memoirs recently which I found quite thought-provoking:

The obsession of Communist parties and revolutionary groups with labelling those who differ from them as "lackeys of imperialism" or "agents of the Pentagon" does not date back, as I thought for a time, to the particular historical conditions in which the Marxist and non-Marxist working class movements were shaped and structured before the victory of the Bolshevik revolution: it is a response to a series of social and psychological factors that, as I would be shown by a reading of Blanco White, have their roots through the centuries in notions of orthodoxy, absolutism and infallibility - the fruits of Saint Paul rather than Marx - firmly anchored in human nature. "Individuals organized professionally in an orthodox body will resist and sanction with every means any attempt to dissolve the vital principle behind their union. And as a consistent political body, an orthodox Church will easily realize that nothing binds groups of humans together better than their opposition to the rest...Hence the fact that condemnation of the latter is the real essence of orthodoxy."* A rigidly hierarchical party will thus have recourse, as Blanco prophesies, to the simple expedient of marking out those who are not in communion with them with some vile or sectarian label...

The future designation as "intellectual bourgeois agents," "shameless pseudoleftists," and "minor agents of capitalism" bestowed by the great Cuban leader in 1971 on Sartre and a group of writers politically aligned with him would again confirm the deep-rootedness of the old custom, but I was not then surprised or upset. My involvement in the political world in my first years of hardened self-exile had revealed the abuses of such a mechanism ad nauseam and I was, you might say, inoculated against such terror.

*See Obra inglesa de Blanco White (Buenos Aires, 1972), 256-263

- Forbidden Territory: the Memoirs of Juan Goytisolo 1931-1956 (trans. Peter Bush) pp. 203-4

While not necessarily subscribing to the idea that there exists such a thing as abstract "human nature", I think that Goytisolo's observations do contain a real kernel of insight in terms of the way in which inner and intra-group dynamics play out on the political left (as well as in society generally).

While the labels may vary (the Maoists' favorite pejorative being "revisionist" or "objectively counter-revolutionary", the Trotskyists - my own tradition - preferring instead "bourgeois intellectual" or "cliquist") the underlying phenomenon is the same - the need to believe that the project we are all engaged in is objectively vital and representing more than just our own subjective hopes or desires, hence no questioning of its validity can be countenanced.

I remember being puzzled some months ago when reading in the New York Review of Books about a recent work by the French neo-marxist philosopher Alain Badiou entitled "St Paul: the Foundation of Universalism". At the time I wondered why on earth the doyenne of the French New Left would be interested in such an esoteric subject, however upon reflection Badiou's characterisation of St Paul as the Christian equivalent to Lenin does make a great deal of sense.

While I admit I haven't read more than the introduction to Badiou's book (such is the impenetrable nature of his prose - like that of French academics in general), his basic contention appears to be that St Paul's role in the history of the Christian church was to place it upon a "universalist" foundation overcoming the various frontiers of language and legal jurisdiction and in so doing creating a new community that transcended the pre-existing multitude of fractured identities (perhaps analogous to the state of the world under global capitalism today).

However quite clearly St Paul's "universalism" is primarily a vehicle to further the propagation of an idea that in its origins and epistemological status is purely subjective i.e. Christianity.

What we can see therefore is that the impulse to "universalise" ideologies or belief-systems often stems from the need to compensate for their tenuous hold on empirical reality (perhaps that is why the Healyites and their latter-day successors the World Socialist Website make such a big deal about the "science" of dialectics - a concept towards which I have always felt fairly dubious)!

This is not necessarily to say that the political ideology of Marxism is only a subjective whim or has no objective basis (although Goytisolo would probably beg to differ) - rather it suggests to me that those political groups within the Marxist left which are the least secure in their foundations are often the most shrill in their denunciations of others (the obvious religious corollary of the WSWS would be the Christian fundamentalists).

In this way I think it is possible to conclude that those groups which feel the need to rationalise the departure of members from their ranks as proving that they have succumbed to defeatism/alien class forces/the devil etc reveal no more than their own intrinsic weakness and insecurity.

Mario Benedetti: la soledad también puede ser una llama

2009-05-20T09:49:00.005+12:00

Mario Benedetti, one of the most important (and universally loved) Latin American poets of the 20th century, died in Monetevideo on Sunday aged 88.

Besides his literary output, Benedetti was heavily involved in promoting leftist causes and was an historic leader of the 28th March Movement (the electoral wing of the revolutionary Tupamaros) - as a result of which he was forced into exile after the Uruguayan military took power in 1973.

Below is a clip from the 1992 Argentine film El lado oscuro del corazón (which I already discussed on this blog a few weeks ago), containing two poems by Benedetti - No te salves (Don't save yourself) and Corazón coraza (Armour-plated heart) - the latter read (in German) by Benedetti himself.

The truly remarkable capacity of the left for self-destruction

2009-05-18T15:12:00.007+12:00

The trainwreck involving my former comrades in the Victoria University branch of the Workers Party that is currently playing out on indymedia and in the pages of the student newspaper Salient is certainly a depressing spectacle - except of course for the denizens of the right wing political blogosphere who predictably enough are taking enormous pleasure from the whole debacle.

I don't propose to comment on any of the specific concrete issues here, as if I wanted that kind of pointless aggravation I wouldn't have needed to resign from active membership of the Workers Party back at the start of the year. All I can really say about the cycle of charges and counter-charges following on from the decision to expel VUWSA president Jasmine Freemantle from the WP is that neither side comes out looking particularly good.

However, I would like to venture some observations about what I see as the underlying causes driving this kind of self-destructive behavior on the left, which is by no means unique to the WP.

Firstly, as I've previously noted on this blog, for a variety of reasons New Zealand society at the moment is characterised by levels of class consciousness and struggle so low as to be almost non-existent. As such, any political organisation (whether revolutionary or reformist) that seeks to appeal to notions of collective solidarity or common interest and build mass support is likely to come up against the fairly solid and impassable barrier of public indifference and apathy.

This phenomenon of protracted political downturn has been responded to by left-wing organisations in this country during the past decade or two in a number of ways -

1. Hyper-activism - trying to galvanise the masses through sheer subjective willpower. Often accompanied by a watering down of political programs in order to boost the chances of generating "broad" appeal.

2. Sectarianism - a conservative strategy based on maintaining the apparatus of a political party or propaganda group with its own distinctive confessional statement of ideas and principles, which supposedly embodies the true interests of workers or "the residual memory of the class" despite the current absence of any working class political constituency.

3. Colonising the student- and trade-union bureaucracy - moving in to fill the void left by the political and organisational collapse of social democracy, in the hope that this will facilitate access to a wider political audience.

During my 10+ years of involvement in left politics, all of the organisations I have belonged to have incorporated at various times one or more of these strategic approaches.

On the face of things, all of these strategies have a certain logic to them. However, I would argue that the very phenomenon of political and social isolation which they seek to overcome in the end dooms all of these projects to failure.

The isolation of the left means that all of these groups are lacking in human resources and especially politically-experienced cadre, with the result that when (for instance) the left succeeds in capturing positions in trade unions or students' associations often their representatives are not equipped to competently discharge their responsibilities. In addition, simply by taking these positions the left do not overcome their isolation since for the most part the various collective "mass organisations" are in reality only paper tigers with very little participation from the rank-and-file.

Meanwhile, those who take the alternative route of hyper-activism soon burn-out and disillusion their members when the various "grassroots" campaigns fail to capture the popular imagination, while the proponents of the sectarian approach also lose members for simple lack of a compelling reason for anyone to stay (and hardly inspire many new members to join!).

Common to all of these strategies in my experience is the frustration that members inevitably feel at their continual political isolation. Often this leads individuals to increasingly rely on the organisation as a kind of social network and refuge. Unfortunately when some of these social networks or relationships break down, this can cause the organisation itself to become dysfunctional and for personal differences to be converted into political ones.

Thus we have petty personal squabbles blown-up into full-blown polemics, with the lines of battle determined by the ever-shifting bond of personal loyalties rather than any rational criteria.

Ultimately, there comes a point for most members (as there did for me) when these negative consequences flowing from trying to maintain a political organisation (with all the implicit additional requirements of a common program, publications etc) in a period of protracted political downturn simply outweigh all of the benefits (real or hypothetical).

At this point I think it is necessary to stand back and assess whether in fact it is worth it to dive back immediately into the political maelstrom, or whether it is better instead to await the coming in of a more propitious tide (i.e. a significant shift in the relation of social forces) before doing so.

Count Julian's revenge

2009-05-13T12:57:00.012+12:00

Count Julian by Juan Goytisolo (trans. Helen Lane)

(continued from previous post)

While each nation has had its legendary betrayers in history - the Athenians had Alcibiades, the Romans Coriolanus - arguably none was as spectacularly successful as the Spanish Count Julian.

Count Julian the novel consists of a series of interwoven experiences, childhood memories, dreams and drug-fueled hallucinations of a Spanish exile living in Tangiers who looking across the Straits of Gibraltar that separate him from his homeland is filled with an overwhelming sense of loathing, such that he imagines himself as the great betrayer - Count Julian himself - leading the Arab army of invasion to the sack of Christian Spain.

Goytisolo prefaces the novel with the following quotation from Luis García de Valdeavellano's Historia de Espana:

In their struggle against the Byzantines and the Berbers, the Arab chieftains had greatly extended their African dominions, and as early as the year 682 Uqba had reached the shores of the Atlantic, but he was unable to occupy Tangier, for he was forced to turn back toward the Atlas Mountains by a mysterious person whom the Moslem historians almost always refer to as Ulyan, although his real name was probably Julian, or perhaps Urban or Ulbán or Bulian. Soon thereafter he became a legendary figure known as "Count Julian". We are not certain whether he was a Berber, a Visigoth, or a Byzantine; as a "count" he may have been the ruler of the fortress of Septem, once part of the Visigoth kingdom; or he may have been an exarch or a governor ruling in the name of the Byzantine Empire: or as appears more likely, he may have been a Berber who was the lord and master of the Catholic tribe of Gomera...

Goytisolo's style takes some getting used to - he avoids the use of full stops and paragraph breaks so that the text appears as one neverending stream-of-consciousness, a kind of Latin Ulysses. The task of the translator Helen Lane in handling this work is therefore one that cannot be underestimated.

Many of Goytisolo's own personal experiences are blended into the narrative - mainly scenes of human cruelty from his childhood spent in 1940s Francoist Spain which also resurface in his memoirs. However despite sharing many aspects of his personality and background (up to and including his self-imposed exile in Morocco) with Goytisolo, the nameless protagonist represents an extension beyond Goytisolo the writer. For example as our exiled Spaniard delights in fantasies of sexual violence perpetrated by the Arab armies he imagines overrunning Spain, it is clear that he is channeling the Marquis de Sade, while at other points in the narrative he seems in equal parts José de Espronceda and Miguel de Cervantes.

The protagonist desires the complete destruction of Spain - physical, political, linguistic and literary. He imagines a variety of ways in which this destructive intent can be encompassed - ranging from the fanciful (ordering the removal from the Spanish language of all words of Arabic etymology) to the truly bizarre (contracting rabies and donating his blood to be used in Spanish hospitals).

He fulminates not only against the Francoist dictatorship but the entire Spanish weltanschauung, symbolised for him by the Roman stoic philosopher Seneca (who we are reminded Nietzsche called "the torreador of virtue) and who our protagonist imagines was not born in Corduba as the historical accounts maintain (which would open him up to the suspicion that he was not of "pura sangre") but rather in the very heart of Castille, in the village of Madrigal de las Altas Torres - the birthplace of Queen Isabella "the Catholic" located in the Sierra de Gredos mountains.

The weary fatalism that he perceives in the Spanish collective psyche is further underlined by the frequent jibes at the figure of Platero, the donkey in the poem by Juan Ramón Jiménez who exhibited an enormous capacity for blind, trusting faith (a positive quality for Jiménez, obviously not so for the protagonist who imagines meeting the inoffensive creature and slitting its throat with a knife).

Elsewhere in the novel the Spanish obsession with racial purity is represented by the continuous praising of the Castillian ibex or capra hispanica by Don Álvaro Peranzules (an obvious caricature of General Franco). Yet the protagonist also feels nothing but contempt for the erstwhile progressive Spanish intellectuals, the partisans of racio-vitalismo and heirs of Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset who claim to oppose Franco:

at literary gatherings and cocktail parties, in arty cafés and elegant salons, men of letters are carefully tending the flame of the brightly glowing Torch of Generations: sons, grandsons, great-grandsons of the giants of '98, bards celebrating the immutable flora of the steppes, the Hispanic essence that has stood the test of centuries: statues who do not yet have a pedestal, but are already masters of the art of tauromachic pedestal...

Of course, these same intellectuals during the Spanish Civil War delighted in stoking the fires of patriotic nationalism against the colonial Moroccan troops used by General Franco and the Nationalists - demonising the alien other instead of seeing them as a people oppressed by Spanish imperialism who could potentially won to the Republican cause.

However in the final analysis Count Julian is not just a Spanish story but a universal one - as the protagonist tells us:

one's homeland is the mother of all vices: in order to be cured of it as rapidly and completely as possible, the best remedy is selling it, betraying it: selling it?: for a mess of potage or for all of Peru, for a great deal or for almost nothing: to whom?: to the highest bidder: or giving it, as a gift filled with poison, to someone who knows nothing about it and does not care to know anything: a rich man or a poor one, a man who is indifferent or one hopelessly in love: for one simple but sufficient reason: the pleasure of betraying...what homeland?: all of them: those of the past, the present, and the future...selling one's homeland into bondage, an endless chain of sales...an unending crime, permanent and active betrayal...

It is this fundamentally irrational yet somehow heroic (or anti-heroic?) sentiment which I think makes Count Julian such a powerful work - worthy of comparison with Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great or Milton's Paradise Lost.

Together these works could form the basis perhaps for a course to be taken in conjunction with all the papers on nationalism and "nation-building" that currently infest our institutions of higher learning, to be entitled "Anti-Patriotism 101".

Juan Goytisolo: the journey into exile

2009-05-06T12:51:00.010+12:00

...Castillian in Catalonia, Frenchified in Spain, Spanish in France, a Latin in North America, nesrani in Morocco, and a Moor everywhere, as a result of my wanderings, I would become a writer not claimed by anybody, alien and opposed to groupings and categories...outside the bounds of abstract ideologies, systems, or entities always characterised by their self-sufficiency and circularity.

- Coto Vedado/Forbidden Territory: The Memoirs of Juan Goytisolo 1931-1956
(trans. Peter Bush)

In the course of my literary perambulations (see previous post) I recently discovered the work of the Catalan-Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, a writer whose name it seems is hardly known in the Anglophone world despite the existence of several excellent English-language translations of his novels.

Goytisolo is a fascinating figure, in that while he has chosen to spend almost his entire adult life living outside of Spain much of his literary work is characterised by a near-total obsession with the land of his birth. Despite living in Morocco, he also still manages to write a regular column for the newspaper El País (for whom he worked as a war correspondent during the 1990s in Bosnia and Chechnya).

Goytisolo is a man of contradictions - he grew up in Barcelona during the 1930s and 40s in an impoverished bourgeois household whose forebears had been the owners of vast sugar plantations (and hundreds of slaves!) in Cuba. Goytisolo's father was a strong Catholic and ardent supporter of General Francisco Franco, however the revelation that his mother's death in 1938 had been due to a Nationalist bombing raid alienated Goytisolo from his father (who had suppressed the truth and always blamed his wife's death on "the Reds").

An additional factor impelling Goytisolo's journey towards exile was his alienation from Spanish culture and the Spanish language, a reaction provoked as Goytisolo says in his memoirs by "the ignorant, small-minded priests" (the Jesuits) who educated him. As a result, he did not even read Cervantes until he was in his late 20s.

In 1956 Goytisolo went into voluntary exile in Paris, France and was soon associated with the leading cultural and literary figures of the French Communist Party. He also became an enthusiastic supporter of the Cuban Revolution, but after a number of visits there he became disillusioned with the Castro regime. In his memoirs he tells of giving a speech at a secondary school in Havana as the invited guest of the Cuban poet Navarro Luna, arriving just as some girls were being publicly censured in front of the entire assembly for being lesbians. Goytisolo describes the overwhelming feeling of hypocrisy he felt as he went onto the platform to give his address

...I, that juan goytisolo suddenly ashamed of his role, of the unbridgeable abyss opened at a stroke between reality and words, overwhelmed by the tumultuous applause for the imposter who has usurped his name...

Goytisolo was discovering at around the same time that he himself was a homosexual, although despite finally confessing as much to his partner Monique Lange in 1965 they maintained an "open relationship" and even later married.

Goytisolo published a number of novels throughout the 1950s and 60s to a modest level of critical acclaim, while at the same time working for the French publishing house Gallimard (in the course of which he came to befriend writers such as the Mexican Carlos Fuentes and the Cuban Cabrera Infante). However, it was with his Álvaro Mendiola trilogy (published between 1966-1975) that he really made his name. The second book of that trilogy in particular - Reivindicación del Conde don Julián (published in English as "Count Julian") - stands (albeit a little ironically as we shall see!) as a masterpiece of Spanish literature and the ultimate condensation of Goytisolo's personal, philosophical and political thought.

To be continued...

The Other Count Julian

2009-05-02T22:32:00.017+12:00

Tariq the conqueror of al-Andalus laying his conquests at the feet of the Umayyad viceroy

It is funny how sometimes a line or fragment of a poem can lead you off on the most circuitous yet interesting of intellectual tangents.

I had this experience a couple of years ago when I was reading the through some of the Civil War poetry of Antonio Machado - the Spanish modernist writer and contemporary of Unamuno and Azorín - and came across a sonnet entitled "A Otro Conde Don Julian" ("to the other Count Julian").

The poem itself, which is far inferior to Machado's earlier works such as those found in his collection Campos de Castilla (Lands of Castile) and of primarily propagandistic rather than literary significance, held little interest to me - but the title, which casts the nationalist leader General Franco in the role of the arch-betrayer of Spanish history Count Julian of Ceuta held a strange fascination.

My knowledge of the half legendary, half historical figure of Count Julian was derived from my early-adolescent reading of Walter Scott's "The Vision of Don Roderick" which with Scott's customary poetic licence recounts the story of the last Visigothic King of Spain and his defeat at the hands of the Moorish invaders (Sir Walter Scott, along with the Romances of King Arthur and Charlemagne, informed most of my 12-year-old world view).

In the poetic account of the fall of Visigothic Spain, King Roderic is betrayed by Count Julian, the governor of the Christian outpost of Ceuta which lies on the North African coastline at the closest point to the Spanish shore (the Romans knew it as the city of Septem). The reasons suggested for Julian's betrayal are many and varied - some say it was because Roderic raped one of Julian's daughters who was a hostage at the Visigothic Court in Toledo, others that Julian was the protector of the sons of the previous Visigothic King Wittiza, whom Roderic was suspected of assassinating.

More recently, historians have suggested that Julian may have been a Byzantine Greek official who had only entered into a temporary alliance with the Visigoths after the fall of Carthage to the Umayyads in 695-698 and the departure of the last Roman troops. Given the fact that the Umayyads proved to be considerably more tolerant towards other religions and denominations than the formerly Arian Visigothic rulers (who with the zeal of recent converts to the one true faith were continually trying to prove their Catholic bona fides to the Pope by violently persecuting Jews and heretics) it is not inconceivable that Julian's decision to enter into an alliance with Musa ibn-Nusair, the Umayyad governor of the newly conquered Maghreb provinces was motivated simply by enlightened self-interest.

Whichever of these scenarios is correct, what is uncontested is that in the year 711 Julian provided the fleet which transported the Berber Umayyad general Tariq ibn-Ziyad and his troops across the narrow straits to the landing place which now bears Tariq's name - the Rock of Gibraltrar (from the Arabic "Jabal Tariq"), echoing the invasion of Republican Spain by General Franco at the head of the Army of Morocco in August 1936, some 1200 years later.

After the defeat of Roderic at the Battle of Gaudalete and the establishment of Umayyad rule in Spain, Julian was rewarded for his "act of treachery" with extensive lands and titles.

These then were some of the literary and historical associations that Antonio Machado's piece of Civil War propaganda rekindled in my head, leading me to look up again the story of the Fall of Visigothic Spain and in the course of this process to discover the work of a remarkable man - also an exile estranged from the political and religious order of Christian Spain, a modern day Count Julian living in Morocco - the novelist Juan Goytisolo.

To be continued...

VUWSA exec incurs student wrath over ANZAC Day boycott

2009-04-30T13:29:00.010+12:00

Apparently the kids just can't get enough of that ANZAC spirit

It seems that the executive of the Victoria University Students' Association (VUWSA) has roused its normally phlegmatic membership to a state of apoplexy over their decision not to lay a wreath at last weekend's ANZAC day commemoration service in Wellington.

(see also coverage on the student magazine Salient's website here)

ANZAC day celebrates the anniversary of the landing of Australian and New Zealand soldiers at Gallipoli as part of the abortive Allied invasion of the Ottoman Empire in 1915. Over 130 000 soldiers from both sides died during the year-long campaign that followed, fought for no other reason than to further the interests of Franco-British as against German/Austro-Hungarian imperialism (the Ottoman Empire being a client state of the latter).

While enthusiasm for ANZAC day declined markedly in New Zealand during the 1960s and 70s (as the post-war generation took up the cause of anti-militarism and progressive social change), recent years have seen an alarming reversal of this trend especially among the younger generation - with thousands of school students now flocking each year to dawn parades around the country and young Kiwis on their OE now increasingly making the secular "pilgrimage" to Gallipoli as some kind of national "rite of passage" (much to the delight of the purveyors of those cringe-inducing Contiki tour packages).

While some left commentators have argued that the renewed enthusiasm for ANZAC Day could represent a desire on the part of a younger generation brought up in an atomised society lacking in mass social movements (either progressive or reactionary) to get a glimpse of something "larger than themselves", and others have claimed it as evidence of the hold of right-wing ideology on the nation's youth, I actually think what the responses to the article on the Salient website show is that most of the students who support ANZAC day (i.e. all apart from the ACT on Campus crowd pursuing their VSM agenda and the Kyle Chapman doppelgänger who posts as "NZ Patriot") are actually operating on a sub-ideological, emotive level.

As I said in an exchange over on Reading the Maps recently:

In some ways I would almost prefer it if the thousands of people from my generation flocking to attend ANZAC day dawn services were actually doing so out of enthusiasm for NZ imperialism - at least that would show they had some political ideas in their heads! But instead all we have is this banal, unthinking vacuousness...

I guess the difficulty stemming from this is that the VUWSA executive is supposed to represent Victoria University students, yet at the same time there is an acute contradiction between the anti-imperialist views of Workers Party members (and WP allies) on the exec and the current miserable level of consciousness among students.

Another problem is that fact that VUWSA has not actually taken a hard anti-imperialist stance on this issue but rather adopted as WP member Don Franks says says an "agnostic" position, of being neither for nor against celebration of the ANZAC invasion of Turkey. Obviously as someone who isn't an active member of WP or studying at Victoria I'm not close enough to these events to know all the details, but I assume that this position was a compromise forced upon the WP exec members who are in the difficult position of being only a minority (albeit a sizable one) on the VUWSA executive.

What all this does highlight though I think are the difficulties inherent in revolutionaries taking on elected political positions in a period where the level of consciousness among students (and workers!) is at all-time historic lows. To be sure, it is necessary to continue to try to do something to reverse the process of de-politicisation but is running for elected political office the best way to do this?

I guess my feeling is that while in national elections it is at least possible to be clear that you are calling for a revolutionary protest vote and stick to your principles, in the world of student politics the very same apathy and de-politicisation that makes it possible for revolutionaries to get elected in the first place can also prove to be your Achilles' heel once you as duly elected representatives try to advance anti-imperialist or socialist politics.

Huidobro and the limits of literary cubism

2009-04-29T13:37:00.009+12:00

Portrait of Vicente Huidobro painted by his friend and artistic collaborator, the Cubist painter Juan Gris

Following on from my last post on Oliverio Girondo's Espantapájaros and its celebration of the poet's ability to transcend the limits of gender, time, space and elemental physics I came across in the course of my reading the following poem by the Vicente Huidobro, which I think forms something of a counterpoint to Girondo's triumphant paean to the power of the artistic vision. It is also interesting given the fact that Huidobro - like Girondo - during the earlier stages of his career was highly influenced by the movement of literary Cubism founded in Paris during World War I by Pierre Reverdy and Guillame Apollinaire (from which other schools such as surrealism later emerged).

The poem is from Últimos Poemas (1948) - published just after Huidobro's death.

Again apologies for the roughness of translation.

LA POESÍA ES UN ATENTADO CELESTE (Poetry is a Heavenly Crime)

I am absent but in the depths of this absence
There is the waiting for myself
And this waiting is another kind of presence
The waiting for my return
I am in other objects I am on a journey imparting a little of my life
To certain trees and to certain stones
That have long been awaiting me

They got tired of waiting for me and sat down

I am there and I am not
I am absent and I am present in a state of waiting
They wanted my language to express themselves
And I wanted theirs to express them
Here is the misunderstanding the atrocious misunderstanding

Such a distressing, pitiful state
I am going deeper into these plants
I am stepping out of my clothes
My flesh falls from me
And my skeleton is reclothing itself in bark
I am becoming a tree How many things I have been transforming into other things…
It is painful and full of tenderness

I could cry out but the transubstantiation would be frightened away
It is necessary to remain silent Waiting in silence

Oliverio Girondo

2009-04-24T21:36:00.012+12:00

My interest in the Argentine vanguardist poet Oliverio Girondo began after coming across a few months ago - quite by chance - a brilliant film entitled El lado oscuro del corazón (The dark side of the heart), which was Argentina's official entry in the Oscar category for best Foreign Film in 1992.

In the film we see the young protagonist - Oliverio - attempting to live his life in late 20th century Buenos Aires according to his own absurdist manifesto.

He refuses to get a job because, he says, his true vocation is that of a poet. When economic necessity compels him, he goes into the streets reciting poetry (of Girondo, Gelman and Benedetti) to random passers-by in return for money:

He also embarks on an impossible quest to find the ideal woman - but they all ultimately disappoint him since they lack what for Oliverio is the absolutely essential quality, the ability to fly.

In 1932 the original Oliverio (Girondo) rented a funeral coach and horses, and, accompanied by footmen dressed all in black and a giant papier-maché scarecrow, drove through the streets of Buenos Aires selling copies of his new volume of prose poems, Espantapájaros (Scarecrow).

In these poems Girondo reveals the revolutionary yet irreverent aesthetic which led fellow ultraísta Jorge Luis Borges to dub him "the Peter Pan of Argentine literature".

Below is my attempt at a translation of one of these poems:

Espantapájaros 16

Some people enjoy mountaineering. Others are entertained by dominoes. I am enchanted by transmigration. While they spend life hanging by a rope or throwing punches over a table, I spend it transmigrating from one body to another, I never get tired of transmigration. Beginning at dawn I install myself in a eucalyptus in order to inhale the morning breeze. I sleep a mineral siesta within the first stone that I find in the road, and before nightfall I am already thinking of night and chimneys with the spirit of a cat. What a delight to metamorphasise into a bumblebee, to lick the pollen of the roses! What voluptuousness to be earth, to feel oneself penetrated by tubers and roots, by a latent life that fertilizes us... and tickles us! In order to appreciate ham is is not indispensable to be a pig? Whoever does not manage to transform themselves into a horse, will they taste the pleasure of the valleys and be aware of what "to pull the cart" means? To posses a virgin is very different to experiencing the sensations of the virgin while she is being possessed, and it is one thing to look at the sea from the beach but another to contemplate it with the eyes of a crayfish. Because of this I enjoy entering into alien lives, living all their secretions, all their hopes, their good and bad moods. Because of this I enjoy grazing the pampa and the twilight personified in a cow, to feel gravity and branches with the mind of a walnut or chestnut, to kneel down in the middle of the countryside in order to sing to the stars with a voice of sap. Ah, the enchantment of having been a camel, carrot, apple, and the satisfaction of understanding, in depth, the laziness of the pool...and of the chameleons!...To think that during all your existence, the majority of men have never even been women! How is it possible that they do not get bored of their appetites, of their spasms and that they do not need to experiment, from time to time, those of the cockroach... those of the honeysuckle? Although I have placed myself many times in the mind of an imbecile, never have I understood that one might live eternally with the same skeleton and the same sexual organ. When life is all too human - only human! - will not the mechanism of thought result in a sickness far longer and more dreary than any other? I, at least, am certain that I would not have been able to endure it without this ability to escape, which permits me to move to where I am not: to be an ant, giraffe, lay an egg, and what is more important still, to find myself in the same moment that I have forgotten, almost completely, my own existence.

Reasons to be skeptical

2009-04-21T08:51:00.008+12:00

The 1930s historical re-enactment society gets ready to storm parliament

These days it seems everyone on the left is getting terribly excited about the prospect of a "return to the 1930s" in the wake of the current financial crisis - with mass unemployment, labour unrest and political radicalisation.

Alas I tend to think this is a case of frustrated activists projecting their own subjective desires onto reality, rather than anything based in actual fact.

My skepticism has just been reinforced after a visit the blog of NZ's favourite right-wing conspiracy theorist Trevor Loudon where it seems that Trev too is predicting a return to the epoch of wars and revolutions - if only so his paranoid fantasies about communism taking over the world can finally find validation...

Footnote: as I have suggested in a comment posted on Loudon's blog, his fervid postings are in many ways similar to the utterances of Boston Legal's Judge Clark Brown as Trev busies himself reposting stuff from socialist and left wing websites while declaiming in a shocked voice "Outrageous!" "How dare they!"

Art and revolution

2009-04-20T23:42:00.008+12:00

In recent weeks there has been an interesting debate taking place on various left blogs on the question of the relationship between art and revolutionary politics. The debate was initiated by Jared Davidson of the Christchurch Garage Collective in a posting on indymedia provocatively titled "Give up art and save the starving?" which you can find here.

The arguments Jared puts forward (summed up in the statement that "Any artistic practice short of advocating the abolition of capitalism and replacing it with logic, frankly, should be left to die" have drawn heavy criticism from Scott Hamilton over at Reading the Maps as well as from fellow Christchurch-blogger Ross Brighton. Below is my belated foray into the debate, originally posted as a comment on Ross's blog (edited for spelling errors!):

I understand where Jared is coming from in his impatience with the failure of successive artistic movements and artists to mount a challenge to the relations of capitalist exploitation which does not merely end up being co-opted by capitalism itself. However I think he may be expecting too much of art, which in the absence of revolutionary movements in wider society can hardly be expected to bring the system crashing to its knees.

Moreover, in a period of protracted political downturn such as we are living through at the moment (at least in the Anglophone countries) where the basic social and economic conditions that would make an anti-capitalist revolution objectively possible *simply do not exist* it seems to me that "giving up art to save the starving" is not only a counsel of despair, but also accomplishes absolutely nothing in practical terms.

As someone who is currently writing a dissertation on the poets of the Latin American vanguardista movement of the period from roughly 1916-1935 (which was at various points influenced by Cubists such as Apollinaire and Reverdy, the Surrealist school, Futurism and Dadaists such as Tristan Tzara) I have quite a keen interest in the political possibilities and limitations of avant-garde art.

It is certainly true that many of the avant-garde had a fairly exalted idea of the role of the individual artist - the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro's characterisation of the poet as a "little god" springs to mind - however I do not think this should be read as evidence of some kind of "will to power over" their fellow human beings or denial of their right to participate in the creative process.

Rather they (the vanguardistas) were concerned to assert their autonomy in the face of hegemonic political and literary ideas. While some avant-garde schools (such as the school of "creacionismo" founded by Huidobro) could be read as containing elitist tendencies, one of the most problematic aspects of the rival surrealist school was its promotion of "automatic writing", based on the idea poetry amounted to nothing more than tapping into the unconscious - an egalitarian idea surely if ever there was one (although it proved to be less than successful!).

But what we should really ask ourselves is how realistic is it to expect art in bourgeois society to escape the social pressures and contradictions inherent in that very same society? Surely you cannot abolish the distinction between artist and non-artist without first overcoming the division in bourgeois society between intellectual and physical labour and between individual and collective consciousness - something which can only happen in a classless, communist society. And to believe that we can expedite this process simply through artists renouncing art nothing more than idealism pure and simple!

Bear in mind too that in the mid-1930s a large number of avant-garde writers (Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Louis Aragon for example) renounced their earlier work in accordance with the diktat of Stalin and those in the Comintern who argued that everything (including art) must now be subordinated to the anti-fascist struggle!

However I am sure that even Jared would not claim that this was a progressive move.

In the end I guess it comes back to the question of what is the purpose of art - to express a political message in crude didactic form or to enliven and enrich human experience? I would argue that it is the latter.

This is why I can enjoy the work of a reactionary writer such as (say) Miguel de Unamuno or TS Eliot - because despite their subjective prejudices they still manage to encapsulate in their work some essential facet of that underlying material reality.

The alternative view put forward by Jared - that it is whether or not the artist stands for or against revolution that is the sole arbiter of their work - concedes I feel too much power and status to the individual artist and perpetuates the kind of elitism that he is so keen to avoid in the first place.

EU and Greek Cypriots reap the whirlwind

2009-04-20T12:47:00.008+12:00

RNZ reports today:

Turkish Cypriot hardliners have swept to victory in elections in northern Cyprus.

The result could hamper peace talks essential to Turkey's ambitions of European Union membership.

Turkish and Greek Cypriots began peace talks in 2008 aimed at creating a state based on two zones that have existed since 1974.

The National Unity Party has won 44% of the vote, giving it an outright majority in the 50 seat parliament. The UBD advocates a two-state settlement on Cyprus and not a federal model now being discussed.

The ruling Republican Turkish Party took 29.25% of the vote.

Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974 after a brief coup by Greek Cypriots seeking union with Greece.

Of course what this report studiously fails to mention is that it was the Greek Cypriots - not the Turkish population of Northern Cyprus - who in 2004 vetoed the Annan Plan which would have led to the reunification of the divided island (albeit on a bi-national, federative basis).

Indeed, over the past two decades both Turkey and the government in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) have jumped through almost every political and diplomatic hoop demanded of them by the European Union and the United Nations, only to be left out in the cold while Greece and the Greek Cypriots secured all the rewards (in the form of EU admission and foreign subsidies etc).

Below is a paper I wrote in late 2006 which provides an overview of some of the key issues relating to Cyprus, viewed through the lens of Turkish foreign policy.

Turkey and problem of Cyprus: an assessment of Turkish foreign policy since the end of the Cold War

The last decade and a half has seen a remarkable transformation in the policies adopted by the Turkish government towards the divided island of Cyprus. At the beginning of the 1990s it seemed as though the attitude of the Turkish political and military elite was essentially that the solution to the problem of bitter communal divisions on the island was actually to have “no solution” at all (i.e. to maintain the status quo of two separate governments – the official Greek-dominated Republic of Cyprus and the internationally unrecognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus administering territory on either side of the UN “Green Line”). However with the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the Middle East as the major global geopolitical fault line the Eastern Mediterranean – and in particular the island of Cyprus – acquired a vastly increased strategic importance for the world’s one remaining superpower (the United States) as well as for the European Union which now increasingly sought to pursue its own political and economic interests on the world stage.[1] As such the 1990s saw greatly increased pressure being brought to bear upon all of the major stakeholders in the Cyprus imbroglio including Turkey for a settlement of the island. Despite some initial moves from Turkish president Turgut Özal in the early 90s though Turkey on the whole continued a policy of standing aloof from any talks on the future of Cyprus and refusing to put any serious pressure on the Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktaş to come to any compromise solution. This stance was reinforced throughout the second half of the 90s by a rapid succession of weak civilian governments and a growing Kurdish insurgency in Eastern Anatolia which allowed the Turkish military and National Security Council to exert a determining influence on foreign policy.[2] The crisis in the Turkish banking sector in 2001 and subsequent sharp economic recession however led to renewed urgency in negotiations for Turkey’s possible candidacy as a member of the EU (in progress since December 1999), with the idea of EU membership being embraced by the business sector in particular as the only hope for Turkey’s economic salvation. The lure of EU membership was skilfully exploited by the members of the European Commission who in October 2003 established an explicit link between Turkey getting a date to start its accession negotiations and a solution to the Cyprus “problem”.[3] This combined with the growing role of business groups and the privately owned media in formulating Turkey’s national foreign policy consensus helped to ensure that economic interests would win out over traditional national security considerations in respect of Cyprus. The culmination of this process occurred in early 2004 when the AKP government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan finally lent its unequivocal backing to the Annan Plan (negotiated under the auspices of the UN Secretary General) for the reunification of the island.

Turkey’s policies towards Cyprus have historically been derived primarily from defensive strategic considerations. While the Turkish people were deeply unhappy about the treatment of the Turkish Cypriot minority in the decade following the setting up of the independent Republic of Cyprus in 1960, the Turkish rulers on the other hand proved quite willing during negotiations on the abortive “Acheson Plan” in 1964 to countenance the possibility of complete enosis or political union of the island with Greece in return for the ceding to Turkey of the Carpas peninsula in northern Cyprus along with some islands in the Aegean.[4] What the Turkish government could not and would not accept however was the possibility of Cypriot enosis with Greece without at least some small slice of territory being handed over where Turkey could establish a military garrison to protect the sea and air approaches to its Mediterranean ports. To allow this would be to permit Turkey’s complete encirclement by the Greek army and navy, and it was arguably fear of this possibility – rather than concern for the plight of the Turkish Cypriots – that was the overriding motivation behind the decision to send in troops to establish a protectorate in northern Cyprus following a military coup against the government of the Republic of Cyprus in 1974.

In addition to cynical realpolitik there were however altogether more constitutional grounds on which the Turkish government was able to base its intervention in Cyprus. As one of the three powers (together with Greece and the United Kingdom) party to the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee Turkey had a right to intervene as a last resort should the independence or constitutional provisions of the bi-communal republic come under threat. Since the Greek Cypriot majority unilaterally abrogated the constitution in 1964 and forced the Turkish Cypriot minority to abandon their posts in the government and the civil service though the use of systematic terror, successive Turkish governments have felt justified in refusing to recognise the legitimacy of the Republic of Cyprus. This has been an important factor in shaping Turkey’s attitude towards possible reunification of the island, in the sense that Turkey views sovereignty as presently residing equally in the Greek and Turkish Cypriot states despite only the Greek Republic of Cyprus enjoying international diplomatic recognition.

Indeed, while during the 1970s and 1980s Turkey was content to insist that any solution to the problem of Cyprus must take the form of a loose federation with ongoing basing rights for Turkish troops, by the mid 1990s the Turkish Cypriot side would have become convinced that without prior recognition of their sovereignty by the international community there could be no progress in negotiations for a settlement.[5]

The post Cold War era in Turkey-Cyprus relations opened badly enough for the Turks when in July 1990 the Republic of Cyprus formally applied to join the European Community and just two months later had its application formally referred by the Council of Ministers to the European Commission for formal consideration. This brought about a swift reaction from Ankara, with the Turkish government indicating its displeasure by signing joint declaration establishing a customs union and abolishing all passport controls between itself and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.[6]

A proposal by President Turgut Őzal in May 1991 to initiate four-way talks between Turkey, Greece and the two sides of the divided island appeared to indicate that Turkey had reversed its long-standing policy of treating the negotiations on Cyprus as the exclusive preserve of the leaders of the Cypriot communities. However when the Greeks insisted on including the five permanent members of the UN Security Council in the talks as well the Turkish side abandoned the idea, with Prime Minister Sűleyman Demirel also rejecting a request from the Greeks that Ankara put more pressure on Denktaş to make concessions.[7]

When the new UN Secretary General Boutros-Boutros Ghali tried and failed to restart negotiations on a proposed framework for unification known as the “Set of Ideas” in 1992 the Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktaş was widely blamed for the failure due to his refusal to negotiate on nine of the articles contained in the UN proposal. Yet despite some criticism from President Őzal the Turkish Grand National Assembly shortly afterwards issued a declaration applauding his stance and declaring that Turkey would not support any settlement that did not also meet with the approval of the Turkish Cypriot community. At the same time Ankara also refused to go along with a reduction in the number of Turkish troops stationed on the island, which Boutros-Boutros Ghali had requested as part of a series of “Confidence Building Measures” after the failure of the “Set of Ideas” initiative.[8]

In March 1995 there occurred an event which was to have far-reaching significance for the future of Turkey’s handling of the Cyprus issue – in return for dropping its opposition to Turkey’s entry into the European Customs Union, the Republic of Cyprus was to be allowed to enter into accession negotiations for full EU membership from July of the following year.[9] Yet despite aggressive rhetoric from Turkish foreign minister Murat Karayalçin (who threatened that admission of Cyprus to the EU could lead to the annexation of Northern Cyprus by Turkey) the DYP government of Tansu Çiller appeared to turn a blind eye to this blatant piece of horse trading.[10]

In August 1996 two Greek Cypriots were shot and killed by Turkish troops during a protest on the UN “Green Line” dividing Northern and Southern Cyprus and tensions swiftly became inflamed. Then four months later in January 1997 a further crisis in relations between Turkey and the Republic of Cyprus broke out over a proposal to deploy Russian surface-to-air missiles in Cyprus which would be capable of striking well into Turkish airspace. In response Turkey and the TRNC signed a joint “declaration of solidarity” and also an agreement setting up a “Partnership Council”, aiming at greater financial and economic integration of Turkey and the Turkish Cypriot state.[11] In September 1997 the new Turkish Prime Minster Mesut Yilmaz threatened ominously that “for the sake of our security, there cannot be anything we cannot do…”[12]

Although the missile crisis was defused with the intervention of the US Clinton administration the decision by the Luxemburg Summit of the European Council in December 1997 to refuse Turkey’s bid for EU candidate status ensured that relations between Turkey and Greece as well as the Republic of Cyprus remained extremely strained. At the same time the Kurdish insurgency in Eastern Anatolia and difficult relations with Syria – combined with the army-engineered coup against Erbakan’s Refah Party administration in the same year – ensured that the national security consensus in Turkey’s foreign policy remained unchallenged for the time being.

Ironically it was as a result of revelations concerning the Greek government’s role in aiding and sheltering the PKK leader Abdullah Őcalan which surfaced following his capture in early 1999 that Turkish relations with Greece began to thaw.[13] This coupled with the mutual assistance and cooperation of the two governments in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake which shook the entire Eastern Mediterranean region in the same year undoubtedly reduced tensions and made constructive dialogue between the two governments possible.

However, the decisive event in terms of adding real impetus to negotiations on the Cyprus issue was the decision at the 1999 Helsinki Summit to put Turkey on the list of candidate countries for EU accession talks. As a quid pro quo for Greece allowing this to proceed though a special communiqué on Cyprus was also issued which stated that although

“…a political settlement [on the island of Cyprus] will facilitate the accession of Cyprus to the European Union [but] if no settlement has been reached by the completion of accession negotiations, the Council’s decision on accession will be made without the above being a precondition.”[14]

Thus the Helsinki summit guaranteed two things; firstly that Turkey now had a material incentive to help speed up the process of unification between the two communities on Cyprus and, secondly, that the Greek Cypriots would have no real incentive to make any concessions in talks on the island’s future, since their membership of the EU was already assured.

Meanwhile the severe financial crisis which hit Turkey in 2001 led business lobby groups and large sections of the media to latch on to the possibility of EU membership with increasing desperation. In 2001 Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit was severely criticised by these same business interests for jeopardising the prospect of EU accession talks because of his support for Denktaş’ boycott of UN talks on Cyprus.[15] Far from being restrained though, in November of that year Ecevit went even further and threatened to annex Northern Cyprus if the Greek Cypriot Republic was allowed to join the EU.[16]

Intensive lobbying by the Turkish Industrialists’ and Businessmen’s’ Association (TUSǏAD) along with various pro-Western think-tanks and NGOs in the run up to both the November 2002 Turkish General Election and the December 2002 European Council summit in Copenhagen [17] undoubtedly helped to mobilise public support against the policies of Ecevit and his DSP-led coalition government (although 11.4% unemployment and widespread poverty undoubtedly helped to create an atmosphere in which the idea of EU membership could be accepted as the magical panacea for all ills).

With the landslide victory of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) led by Tayyip Erdoğan at the 2002 election and the failure of all the other parties except for the CHP to overcome the 10% threshold and make it back into parliament the stage was now set for a radical readjustment in favour of civilian economic and away from exclusively national security concerns in the sphere of Turkish foreign policy. For a time though the direction of the AKP government with regard to Cyprus was less than clear, with the party being accused by some observers of conducting a “double headed” policy with regard to the island.[18] While in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2003 AKP leader Erdoğan voiced open support for the Annan Plan prepared under the auspices of the UN Secretary General and declared that he disapproved of Turkey’s Cyprus policy “in the last 30-40 years” his prime minister Abdullah Gül was sending out more cautious signals. Then in March 2003 with Erdoğan now serving as prime minister and facing a back-bench rebellion over support for the US invasion of Iraq he himself was forced to temporarily withdraw his support for the Annan Plan in a bid to placate some of his domestic critics.[19]

Having become committed to the cause of Turkey’s EU candidacy however the AKP government had little choice but to respond to the ultimatum laid down in the EU Progress Report of November 2003, which for the first time explicitly linked the prospect of accession talks to a successful resolution of the Cyprus problem.[20] In February 2004 Erdoğan on behalf of the AKP government re-opened negotiations on the Annan Plan and pledged to support a Turkish Cypriot referendum on the proposed settlement before April. Yet despite the Turkish Cypriots voting to accept the plan it failed to secure the approval of Greek Cypriot voters, and in May 2004 the Republic of Cyprus became a full member of the EU without any political settlement having been reached.

Although the Turkish government undoubtedly gained some political capital in the wake of the April 2004 referendum it is still not much closer to its main goal of EU membership. While Turkey did finally receive in December 2004 a definite date for the commencement of EU accession talks it has still many miles to go and in the meantime has been compelled to sign an additional protocol extending its Customs Union agreement to the new EU member states including Cyprus. Since Turkey still does not officially recognise the Republic of Cyprus and refuses to open its ports to Greek Cypriot shipping, this has supplied the Greek Cypriots with the perfect excuse to veto financial aid packages promised by the EU to the people of Northern Cyprus in the wake of the April 2004 referendum.[21]

In conclusion, it seems that while in terms of its policies towards Cyprus Turkey has since at least 2002 made a conscious decision to trade in national security interests for the supposed economic benefits of EU membership neither the Turks nor their Turkish Cypriot allies have yet to reap any real rewards. Neither have the US and Britain succeeded in their objective of creating a unified but politically weak Cypriot federation which would be perfectly suited to its strategic role as the West’s “unsinkable aircraft carrier” pointed right at the heart of the Levant. The situation is at an impasse, and promises to remain so for some time since the government in Ankara, however much it might wish to make further concessions to the Greek Cypriots, can sense that there is an active resistance to any such moves among the Turkish electorate – who are in any case increasingly disillusioned with the idea of EU membership.

[1] Nasah Uslu. The Cyprus Question as an Issue of Turkish Foreign Policy and Turkish-American Relations, 1959-2003. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2003. p. 17

[2] Kemal Kirişci. Turkey’s Foreign Policy in Turbulent Times. Paris: Institute for Security Studies, 2006. p.14

[3] Kemal Kirişci. “Turkey and the European Union: the domestic politics of negotiating pre-accession”. Macalester International 15 (Winter 2005). p. 5

[4] Uslu. p.61

[5] Tozun Bahceli. “Cycles of Tension and Rapprochement: Perspectives for Turkey’s Relations with Greece”. In Tareq Ismael and Mustafa Aydin (eds), Turkey’s Foreign Policy in the 21^st Century: A Changing Role in World Politics. Burlington, VA and Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2003. p. 167

[6] James Ker-Lindsay. “From U Thant to Kofi Annan: UN Peacemaking in Cyprus, 1964-2004”. South East European Studies at Oxford European Studies Centre Occasional Paper No. 5 (October 2005). p. 18

[7] Uslu. p. 178

[8] Ibid. p. 179

[9] Ker-Lindsay. p. 20

[10] Clement H. Dodd. “Turkey and the Cyprus Question”. In Alan Makovsky and Sabri Sayari (eds), Turkey’s New World: Changing Dynamics in Turkish Foreign Policy. Washington DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2000. p 159

[11] Uslu. p.182

[12] Dodd. p. 167

[13] Kirişci, 2006. p. 21

[14] Quoted in Bahceli. P. 174

[15] Ibid. pp. 170-171

[16] Ker-Lindsay. p. 23

[17] Kirişci, 2006. p. 44

[18] Müge Kinacioğlu and Emel Oktay. “The Domestic Dynamics of Turkey’s Cyprus Policy: Implications for Turkey’s Accession to the European Union”. Turkish Studies Vol. 7 No. 2 (June 2006). p. 265

[19] Ibid. p. 266

[20] Kinacioğlu and Oktay. p. 267

[21] “Greek Cyprus opens debate on Turkey’s EU bid”. Turkish Daily News, 30 August 2006.

Mass politics without the masses?

2009-04-16T15:58:00.001+12:00

...And freely men confess that this world's spent, When in the planets and the firmament They seek so many new; they see that this Is crumbled out again to his atomies. 'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone, All just supply, and all relation...

First of all, a short disclaimer - what follows is as much a self-criticism as it is a criticism directed against the praxis of friends and comrades still active in the arena of NZ left politics. For the past 11 years, beginning as a naive 17 year-old Labour Party activist before rapidly moving on to the extra-parliamentary socialist left, I have been a partisan of what you might call "working class politics".

During the same time I have also been a trade union delegate/activist (6 years) and been involved in 2 socialist election campaigns.

However I have now reached the conclusion that - in New Zealand at least - the construction of a working class political movement is at the present time a futile endeavour.

Why?

Simply because the working class as a collective conscious subject at the moment does not exist.

This is easily shown by the official government statistics, which reveal the number of workers belonging to trade unions and taking part in industrial action have since the mid-late 1990s remained at all-time historic lows. Even more damning is the fact that in the 2006 NZ Census over 35% of respondents identified as either "managers" or "professionals".

At a more fundamental level though (and despite the current financial crisis), the social conditions which could possibly lead to the emergence of class consciousness are largely absent from this country. Indeed, as a result of the decline in employment in NZ manufacturing and industry since the 1980s most workers are now employed either in white-collar service jobs or as semi-casual or transient employees in areas like retail, cleaning and hospitality. While the white-collar workers such as teachers and public servants are made to feel as though they are part of the bourgeoisie through the rhetoric of "partnership" and managerialism, the workers in supermarkets, hotels etc by virtue of their transient status are for the most part too atomised and too lacking in social weight to achieve any kind of collective consciousness. And I say this as someone who has had extensive experience of trying to unionise workers in the supermarket industry!

While a small number of unions such as Unite in Auckland through their heroic voluntaristic efforts succeed in unionising some of these workers, even their organisers will tell you that the membership turn-over in a 12 month period is nearly 100%.

Then of course there are the lumpen-proletariat - a growing portion of NZ society cast out on the economic scrapheap by the neo-liberal reforms of the past two decades, whose only "identity" such as it is derives from their membership of gang, boy-racer or perhaps the fundamentalist church fraternities.

So what does all of this mean for the political organisations of the left?

Essentially it means that for the most part when conducting protests, election campaigns, paper sales etc these groups - whether they be social democrats, anarchists or marxists - are talking to nobody but themselves. The working class does not exist either as an active subject or as a political audience.

Some left groups are so far away from understanding this that they talk as though "mass anger" and "grassroots rebellion" are imminent, only just lurking below the surface of the apathetic multitude.

Other groups are more realistic and correctly assess the nature of the period in which they are operating as one of political downturn, yet still they do not draw the logical conclusions that flow from this. They continue to maintain the apparatus of a political party/movement/organisation with a paid-up membership, publications, leading bodies etc and to believe that their interventions into other hollowed out "mass" organisations such as student or trade unions (in reality nothing more than paper tigers) actually have some significance.

Even worse, because they have not internalised the reality that trying to conduct "mass politics" without the masses is a futile exercise, they continue to act as though disputes over political program or their various little "interventions" are actually matters of life-and-death importance.

They have not yet understood that trying to maintain the project of working class political representation - in a period where the working class has been comprehensively defeated and atomised - through substitutionist and voluntarist methods is actually positively harmful and dangerous.

It can lead only to the fragmentation and demoralisation of the left, which instead of devoting its time to ideological debate and renewal instead wastes itself arguing over which organisation's program more authentically represents the interests of the working class, a class which is not in any case currently capable of being represented.

No wonder then that ranks of the NZ left are so thin - and so lacking in people of youth and talent as well as (in many ways the most essential ingredient!) personability!

Surely comrades it is time to draw a line through this whole ridiculous farrago, dissolve the Potemkin Villages of the left and put our time and energies into developing serious socialist political debate and analysis (and not just the received truths of 20th century gurus!) among the small number of radicalised individuals who we can hope to reach at the present time.

At the moment though it seems as though we are only running the film of Spain in the 1920s and 30s in reverse - there it was the circle of Republican progressive intellectuals who could not adequately make the transition from the age of ensayistas and tertulias to the age of mass politics and so fell victim to Franco.

Now in the 21st century that the curtain has fallen on the mass political party as a viable option the left is still refusing to exit that stage however and remains alone, sitting in the darkness.