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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2021-084
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
U.S. 'Democracy'
Wokewatch:
Climate:
JFK:
Use as open thread …
@vk, Roger, Gruff, anyone else who has some expertise on the USSR:
If you get a chance (and there’s not a paywall) I’d be very interested in your opinions on this latest piece by Yasha Levine re: The affirmative action empire that the Soviets were said to have been trying to create.
https://yasha.substack.com/p/doing-some-reading-the-affirmative
Apologies to everyone else, as I think this excerpt is going to be a bit long.
Let me quote a bit from the introduction of the book:
The Soviet Union was the world’s first Affirmative Action Empire. Russia’s new revolutionary government was the first of the old European multiethnic states to confront the rising tide of nationalism and respond by systematically promoting the national consciousness of its ethnic minorities and establishing for them many of the characteristic institutional forms of the nation-state. The Bolshevik strategy was to assume leadership over what now appeared to be the inevitable process of decolonization and carry it out in a manner that would preserve the territorial integrity of the old Russian empire. To that end, the Soviet state created not just a dozen large national republics, but tens of thousands of national territories scattered across the entire expanse of the Soviet Union. New national elites were trained and promoted to leadership positions in the government, schools, and industrial enterprises of these newly formed territories. In each territory, the national language was declared the official language of government. In dozens of cases, this necessitated the creation of a written language where one did not yet exist. The Soviet state financed the mass production of books, journals, newspapers, movies, operas, museums, folk music ensembles, and other cultural output in the non-Russian languages. Nothing comparable to it had been attempted before, and, with the possible exception of India, no multiethnic state has subsequently matched the scope of Soviet Affirmative Action. This book is devoted to an analysis of this novel and fascinating experiment in governing a multiethnic state.
Why did the Bolsheviks adopt this radical strategy? When they seized power in October 1917, they did not yet possess a coherent. nationalities policy. They had a powerful slogan, which they shared with Woodrow Wilson, of the right of nations to self-determination. This slogan, however, was designed to recruit ethnic support for the revolution, not to provide a model for the governing of a multiethnic state. Although Lenin always took the nationalities question seriously, the unexpected strength of nationalism as a mobilizing force during the revolution and civil war nevertheless greatly surprised and disturbed him. The Bolsheviks expected nationalism in Poland and Finland, but the numerous nationalist movements that sprang up across most ofthe former Russian empire were not expected. The strong nationalist movement in Ukraine was particularly unnerving. This direct confrontation with nationalism compelled the Bolsheviks to formulate a new nationalities policy.
This did not occur without contestation. On the one side were the nation-builders, led by Lenin and Stalin; on the other side were the internationalists, led by Georgii Piatakov and Nikolai Bukharin. At the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919, the two sides clashed over the question of the right of national self-determination. Piatakov argued that “during a sufficiently large and torturous experience in the borderlands, the slogan of the right of nations to self-determination has shown itself in practice, during the social revolution, as a slogan uniting all counterrevolutionary forces.” Once the proletariat had seized power, Piatakov maintained, national self-determination became irrelevant: “It’s just a diplomatic game, or worse than a game if we take it seriously.” Piatakov was supported by Bukharin, who argued that the right to self-determination could only be invested in the proletariat, not in “some fictitious so-called ‘national will.'”
Lenin had clashed with Piatakov and others on this issue before and during the revolution? He now answered this renewed challenge with characteristic vigor. Nationalism had united all counterrevolutionary forces, Lenin readily agreed, but it had also attracted the Bolsheviks’ class allies. The Finnish bourgeoisie had successfully “deceived the working masses that the Muscovites [Moskvaly], chauvinists, Great Russians want[ed] to oppress the Finns.” Arguments such as Piatakov’s served to increase that fear and therefore strengthen national resistance. It was only “thanks to our acknowledgement of[the Finns’] right to self-determination, that the process of [class] differentiation was eased there.” Nationalism was fueled by historic distrust: “The working masses of other nations are full of distrust [nedoverie] towards Great Russia, as a kulak and oppressor nation.” Only the right to self-determination could overcome that distrust, Lenin argued, but Piatakov’s policy would instead make the party the heir to Tsarist chauvinism: “Scratch any Communist and you find a Great Russian chauvinist…. He sits in many of us and we must fight him.”
The congress supported Lenin and retained a qualified right of national self-determination. Of course, the majority of the former Russian empire’s nationalities were forced to exercise that right within the confines of the Soviet Union. The period from 1919 to 1923, therefore, was devoted to working out what exactly non-Russian “national self-determination” could mean in the context of a unitary Soviet state. The final result was the Affirmative Action Empire: a strategy aimed at disarming nationalism by granting what were called the “forms” of nationhood. This policy was based on a diagnosis of nationalism worked out largely by Lenin and Stalin. Lenin had addressed the national question repeatedly from 1912 to 1916, when he formulated and defended the slogan of self-determination, and again from 1919 to 1922, after the alarming success of nationalist movements during the civil war.10 Stalin was the Bolsheviks’ acknowledged “master of the nationalities question” : author of the standard prerevolutionary text Marxism and the Nationalities Question, Commissar of Nationalities from 1917 to 1924-, and official spokesman on the national question.at party congresses. Lenin and Stalin were in fundamental agreement on both the logical rationale and the essential aspects of this new policy, although they came into conflict in 1922 over important issues of implementation. Their diagnosis of the nationalities problem rested on the following three premises.
The Marxist Premise
First, the point on which Piatakov and Lenin agreed, nationalism was a uniquely dangerous mobilizing ideology because it had the potential to forge an above-class alliance in pursuit of national goals. Lenin called nationalism a “bourgeois trick” but recognized that, like the hedgehog’s, it was a good one. It worked because it presented legitimate social grievances in a national form. At the Twelfth Party Congress in 1923, Bukharin, by then a fervid defender of the party’s nationalities policy, noted that “when we tax [the non-Russian peasantry] their discontent takes on a national form, is given a national interpretation, which is then exploited by our opponents.” Ernest Gellner has parodied this argument as the “wrong-address theory” of nationalism: “Just as extreme Shi’ite Muslims hold that Archangel Gabriel made a mistake, delivering the Message to Mohammed when it was intended for Ali, so Marxists basically like to think that the spirit of history or human consciousness made a terrible boob. The wakening message was intended for classes, but by some terrible postal error was delivered to nations.”
The Bolsheviks viewed nationalism, then, as a masking ideology. Masking metaphors recur again and again in their discourse about nationality. Stalin was particularly fond of them: “The national flag is sewn on only to deceive the masses, as a popular flag, a convenience for covering up [dlia prykrytiia] the counter-revolutionary plans of the national bourgeoisie.” “If bourgeois circles attempt to give a national tint [natsionalnaia okraska] to [our] conflicts, then only because it is convenient to hide their battle for power behind a national costume.” This interpretation of nationalism as a masking ideology helps explain why the Bolsheviks remained highly suspicious of national self expression, even after they adopted a policy explicitly designed to encourage it. For example, in justifying a wave of national repression carried out in 1933, Stalin characteristically invoked a masking metaphor: “The remnants of capitalism in the people’s consciousness are much more dynamic in the sphere of nationality than in any other area. This is because they can mask themselves so well in a national costume.”
This understanding of nationalism led Piatakov to support the only apparently logical response: attack nationalism as a counterrevolutionary ideology and nationality itself as a reactionary remnant of the capitalist era. Lenin and Stalin, however, drew the exact opposite conclusion. They reasoned as follows. By granting the forms of nationhood, the Soviet state could split the above-class national alliance for statehood. Class divisions, then, would naturally emerge, which would allow the Soviet government to recruit proletarian and peasant support for their socialist agenda. Lenin argued that Finnish independence had intensified, not reduced, class conflict. National self-determination would have the same consequences within the Soviet Union. Likewise, Stalin insisted it was “necessary to ‘take’ autonomy away from [the national bourgeoisie], having first cleansed it of its bourgeois filth and transformed it from bourgeois into Soviet autonomy.” A belief gradually emerged, then, that the above-class appeal of nationalism could be disarmed by granting the forms of nationhood. This was the Marxist premise.
That’s a great and clear way of putting it. We’ll see how the rest of the book turns out.
—Yasha Levine
Posted by: Tom_Q_Collins | Oct 31 2021 18:58 utc | 36
In Re: China’s Current Domestic Policy Moves:
Came across this article via link in another blog and it offers an interesting take on current developments in China
https://palladiummag.com/2021/10/11/the-triumph-and-terror-of-wang-huning/
I am unfamiliar with the author and platform but in any case the ideas are interesting. The author states that Wang Huning and his theories are the eminence grise behind the current domestic moves in China. He mentions that Wang spent some six months in the USA as a visiting scholar in the early ’90s and wrote a book based on his experiences titled America Against America. Wang’s view of the USA was bleak even then and his concern today is that the move towards individual entreprenurial business and ownership in China over the past few decades have imported many of these problems into China.
After bit of a sensationalist opener and a section on Wang’s educational and intellectual development he gets to some of the thoughts about the USA and China.
A few quotes about the USA:
“Eventually, he concludes that America faces an “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” produced by its societal contradictions, including between rich and poor, white and black, democratic and oligarchic power, egalitarianism and class privilege, individual rights and collective responsibilities, cultural traditions and the solvent of liquid modernity.”
“But while Americans can, he says, perceive that they are faced with “intricate social and cultural problems,” they “tend to think of them as scientific and technological problems” to be solved separately. This gets them nowhere, he argues, because their problems are in fact all inextricably interlinked and have the same root cause: a radical, nihilistic individualism at the heart of modern American liberalism.”
“The real cell of society in the United States is the individual,” he finds. This is so because the cell most foundational (per Aristotle) to society, “the family, has disintegrated.” Meanwhile, in the American system, “everything has a dual nature, and the glamour of high commodification abounds. Human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power, and law can all become the target of commodification.” This “commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to a number of serious social problems.” In the end, “the American economic system has created human loneliness” as its foremost product, along with spectacular inequality. As a result, “nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit.”
“he notes a growing tension between Enlightenment liberal rationalism and a “younger generation [that] is ignorant of traditional Western values” and actively rejects its cultural inheritance. “If the value system collapses,” he wonders, “how can the social system be sustained?”
Quotes from the article regarding Wang’s fears for China:
“…his worst fear has become reality: the “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” he identified in America seems to have successfully jumped the Pacific. Despite all his and Xi’s success in draconian suppression of political liberalism, many of the same problems Wang observed in America have nonetheless emerged to ravage China over the last decade as the country progressively embraced a more neoliberal capitalist economic model.
“Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” has rapidly transformed China into one of the most economically unequal societies on earth. It now boasts a Gini Coefficient of, officially, around 0.47, worse than the U.S.’s 0.41. The wealthiest 1% of the population now holds around 31% of the country’s wealth (not far behind the 35% in the U.S.). But most people in China remain relatively poor: some 600 million still subsist on a monthly income of less than 1,000 yuan ($155) a month.
“Meanwhile, Chinese tech giants have established monopoly positions even more robust than their U.S. counterparts, often with market shares nearing 90%. Corporate employment frequently features an exhausting “996” (9am to 9pm, 6 days a week) schedule. Others labor among struggling legions trapped by up-front debts in the vast system of modern-day indentured servitude that is the Chinese “gig economy.” Up to 400 million Chinese are forecast to enjoy the liberation of such “self-employment” by 2036, according to Alibaba.”
“The job market for China’s ever-expanding pool of university graduates is so competitive that “graduation equals unemployment” is a societal meme (the two words share a common Chinese character). And as young people have flocked to urban metropoles to search for employment, rural regions have been drained and left to decay, while centuries of communal extended family life have been upended in a generation, leaving the elderly to rely on the state for marginal care. In the cities, young people have been priced out of the property market by a red-hot asset bubble.”
“Feeling alone and unable to get ahead in a ruthlessly consumerist society, Chinese youth increasingly describe existing in a state of nihilistic despair encapsulated by the online slang term neijuan (“involution”), which describes a “turning inward” by individuals and society due to a prevalent sense of being stuck in a draining rat race where everyone inevitably loses. This despair has manifested itself in a movement known as tangping, or “lying flat,” in which people attempt to escape that rat race by doing the absolute bare minimum amount of work required to live, becoming modern ascetics.”
“It’s true that China never remotely liberalized—if you consider liberalism to be all about democratic elections, a free press, and respect for human rights. But many political thinkers would argue there is more to a comprehensive definition of modern liberalism than that. Instead, they would identify liberalism’s essential telos as being the liberation of the individual from all limiting ties of place, tradition, religion, associations, and relationships, along with all the material limits of nature, in pursuit of the radical autonomy of the modern “consumer.”
From this perspective, China has been thoroughly liberalized, and the picture of what’s happening to Chinese society begins to look far more like Wang’s nightmare of a liberal culture consumed by nihilistic individualism and commodification.”
The article then goes on to place China’s current domestic moves in the context of a reaction to the social distress wrought by the economic liberalization policies of the recent past.
Knowing that a lot of you are more conversent than I regarding both general socialist/Marxist theory and Chinese policy, I am curious if you know of Wang and whether you do or not, what thoughts you have on the ideas in this article.
Link to a machine translation of Wang’s America Against America:
https://archive.org/details/america-against-america/page/n7/mode/2up
Posted by: lone plateau | Nov 1 2021 1:35 utc | 70
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