27 April 2015 — The Wolf Report: Nonconfidential analysis for the anti-investor
Here’s the thing about history: it always, but always, out-goofs me. I mean I’ve been known to use hyperbole, satire, spoof, sarcasm, exaggeration, and near-drunk hallucination to illuminate the macabre humor, the grinning madness that is the result of, and circulates with value production, but I’m an amateur, a naïf, when compared to what capitalism and its attenuated attendants come up with, and come up with constantly, and with straight faces…unlike me. Example, you ask? Example you get. There’s this gem, this perfect, this flawless, this naïf story:
http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/syrizas-reshuffle-step-nonerratic-marxist/3613
Got to love it. And I do. I do so much that I’m going to reproduce the whole thing right here:
I don’t know about you, but my favorite part is the bit about Tsakalatos being a “classic Marxist of the New Left who…comes from that school of Marxism which learned from 1970s onward to make compromises with capitalist reality.”
That’s classic Marxism, all right. Not sure what school it is, maybe the London School of Economics or the Wharton School, but no doubt about it being classic Marxism. I don’t know why Mr. Mason limits the school to the classes of post-1970. After all “compromises” “with capitalist reality”– preserving and reproducing capitalist property, capitalist values– is exactly what Marxism has been all about ever since….well, Bernstein for one; Kautsky for another; and Lenin, let’s not forget Lenin and Trotsky who, in the “interests of the [Russian] revolution” of course, compromised revolutionaries in Turkey; who more or less, more and less, screwed the pooch as we like to say in the railroad biz, the pooch meaning the task, the task being the overthrow of international capitalism. Germany, anyone? What leaders of “world revolution” would or could allow a murdering moron like Bela Kun to act as an agent of the “general staff”? Case closed.
And beyond that? Puhlease. There’s the Third International beyond Germany. In China, in Britain, in Spain, in France, everywhere they could get their hands around the neck of the prospects for revolution. That’s classic Marxism too, isn’t it?
Not that the 1970s come up short when it comes to, well when it comes to coming up short. We have the classic Marxists of the New Left (alma maters unknown) in Allende’s Unidad Popular government. There’s a compromise that worked out well for both parties, don’t you think? And the ever classic Communist Party Espagne doing what it does naturally, or historically (same-same) in Spain during the waning of the light that was Generalissimo Franco. And Portugal, don’t forget the classic Marxist of Portugal, Cunhal, classically trained as a lawyer, and functioning as minister without portfolio in the various provisional governments of and around the MFA in the 1970s. Look at Portugal now, huh? Thing of beauty, that’s what I think.
So we are getting a “classical Marxist” in place of an “erratic Marxist” when it comes to cutting a deal and this is a sign of the “seriousness” of a struggle against austerity, and for compromise?
Meanwhile, the Syriza government cuts a deal to finance overhauling weapons for the military and demands that public institutions, including hospitals and pharmacies, deposit all cash reserves (beyond what 15, 30 days of operating expense coverage?) into the central bank so that……so that the government can negotiate extensions with the Troika, pay its own operating expenses, provide an indeterminate amount of cash for pensions, and make payments to the IMF. Now that’s classic Marxism, isn’t it? Can’t you just see and hear the old Moor applauding?
This must be where my lack of classical training, committed vulgarian that I am, really shows. I mean if I were facing a throw down with my creditors, and I wanted to protect the meager social services still extant in my charade of a government, I would keep that money out of the hands of the national central bank which is in the network of the European Central Bank and whose actions can be constrained at any moment by instructions from the ECB.
Yes, classic Marxism of the 1970s, available in compact disc format or……8-track tapes. This offer expires soon, so hurry.
Meet the New Left classic Marxism that smells just like the classic Marxism of the old left, always looking for the next way to fuck to death the prospects for workers’ power. It’s moments like these when I have to say “classic Marxism” does not exist. There is only the critique of capital,which becomes the weapon for its abolition by social revolution.
April 27, 2015