Please see this new interview on Crimethinc with members of the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization (BOAK) in Russia, which has done important work during the past six months disrupting the railway movements of Russian forces and matériel toward Ukraine, and also targeting army recruitment centers. An excerpt is included below
Crimethinc: In the US, some “anti-imperialists” (including a small number of alleged anarchists) believe that everyone who supports Ukrainian anarchists involved in military resistance to the invasion is fighting “side by side” with Ukrainian fascists, supporting the Zelensky government, and advancing the interests of NATO. Please explain your own position regarding how you think Russian and Ukrainian anarchists should act in this situation and what anarchists in other parts of the world should do in solidarity.
BOAK:The defeat of Ukraine will bring about the triumph of the most reactionary forces in Russia—finalizing its transformation into a neo-Stalinist concentration camp, with unlimited power concentrated in the FSB [the Federal Security Service, successor to the KGB] and a totalitarian Orthodox imperial ideology. In occupied Ukraine, every sprout of civil society and political freedom will be destroyed and the very existence of Ukrainian culture will be called into question. On the other hand, if Russia is defeated, there will inevitably be a crisis for Putin’s power and a prospect of revolution. For anarchists, the choice between these alternatives seems clear.
In any case, we here in Eastern Europe see all this as much more urgent and real than the arguments (which people can have without committing to anything) about the geopolitical games of the United States and NATO, which we prefer to leave to Putin’s propagandists. So, solidarity with us means solidarity with Ukraine, with its victory.
The world is in turmoil. Although Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, his aggressive spirit lives on. Global leaders meet at the United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, to watch the planet burn. The U.S. Congress can’t even pass popular, much-needed socio-economic or environmental reforms. Plus, the COVID-19 pandemic rages unchecked, in no small part due to the everyday capitalist exploitation of workers, not to mention resistance to vaccines and masks, as amplified by conspiracist, right-wing mass-media.
Given these dire circumstances, we believe that the Jewish German-American psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1900-1980) can equip us with profound insights for the struggle for a more egalitarian society.
Toward this end, we invite you to a one-day online conference on April 30, 2022, dedicated to reflecting on the importance of Erich Fromm’s critical and humanist social psychology for leftist strategy today.
We plan to use Zoom Webinar to cast the conference. Please visit the conference website, consider registering, and stay tuned for more details.
On Saturday, October 9, 2021, I’ll be participating on three panels at the Ninth Biennial International Herbert Marcuse Society Conference. The theme this year is “Alternative Futures: Marcuse’s Dialectic of Technology.” While the conference will be held both virtually and in-person at the University of Arizona in Tempe, all panels will be accessible online via Zoom.
“Ecology and Revolution”:Saturday, October 9, 2021, 8:00-9:50am Pacific/local Phoenix Time
Sharing here the text of the flyer distributed by the radicals who protested Ajamu Baraka being a keynote speaker at Left Forum 2018, over his support for Bashar al-Assad’s genocidal regime, with Russia and Iran backing the exterminist despot up. The demonstrators were resisting the latest manifestation of the convergence between fascists and the authoritarian left known as the red-brown alliance. In its place, they invoked an internationalist class politics. Though this action took place nearly a month ago now, it remains acutely relevant, in light of the ongoing regime offensive against Der’aa, and the dozens of thousands of refugees who have fled the assault and are now stranded, given that neighboring Jordan has closed the border to their immediate south. Video of the protest below.
Written by Laurence Davis and published on Open Democracy, 12 February 2017
Walter Benjamin’s observation that every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution speaks poignantly to our current condition.
Horkheimer is front left, Adorno front right, and Habermas is in the background, right, running his hand through his hair, Heidelberg, 1964. Wikicommons/Jeremy J. Shapiro at the Max Weber-Soziologentag. Some right reserved.
Two new worlds are now struggling to be born amidst the crumbling ruins of neoliberalism and market globalisation. The first is the waking nightmare now unfolding in the United States in the glare of the international media. A reality show with a cast of horrors, its politically successful mix of faux right-wing populism and neo-fascism has inspired and emboldened autocrats everywhere and threatens in the absence of an effective counter-power to become our new global reality.
The second, a just, compassionate, ecologically sound and democratically self-managed post-capitalist world, may be detected in what Colin Ward once described as scattered ‘seeds beneath the snow’. Deeply rooted in a rich soil of ideas and grounded utopian imagination nourished by countless counter-cultural critics of capitalism, industrialism and grow-or-die economics from William Morris, Peter Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus to Gandhi, Ivan Illich, Murray Bookchin and Ursula Le Guin – as well as a long history of popular movements from below working together to resist regimes of domination and develop progressive and sustainable alternatives to them – the tender shoots of another world are emerging all around us.
They are visible in a wide range of grassroots practices, movements, and practical utopias, from Buen Vivir in the Andes, Ubuntu in South Africa, Ecoswaraj in India, Zapatismo in Mexico, and the budding degrowth movement in Europe to solidarity economies, commoning activities, permaculture projects, re-localisation movements, community currencies, transition towns, co-operatives, eco-communities, worker occupied factories, indigenous people’s assemblies, alternative media and arts, human-scale technologies, basic and maximum income experiments, debt audit movements, radical democratic movements such as Occupy and democratic confederalism in Rojava, and emerging anti-fascist fronts and coalitions uniting immigrant solidarity groups, anti-racists, feminists, queers, anarchists, libertarian socialists and many others.
The great danger we now face is that newly empowered forces of reaction will use that power to repress progressive alternatives before they are able to coalesce as an effective counter-power, sowing seeds of hatred and intolerance instead.
Many commentators of a liberal democratic or centre-left political persuasion have dismissed such warnings as scare-mongering, and suggested that the most effective antidote to ‘populist politics’ is a renewed commitment to social democracy and market globalisation with a ‘human face’. Rather than seek to understand the complex mix of reasons why American citizens voted for a demagogue like Trump, they blame an undifferentiated ‘populism’ and advocate more elite democracy instead.
The breathtaking naivety of this commentary is perhaps matched in recent memory only by Francis Fukuyama’s equally naïve and now risible prediction in 1989 of an ‘end of history’, i.e. an end to mankind’s ideological evolution with the ‘universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’.
Walter Benjamin, Paris, 1939
Now more than ever, it is vital that we recognise and articulate careful ideological distinctions between competing right and left wing varieties of populism, and that those of us committed to values like equality, democracy and solidarity take urgent action to oppose Trumpism and the rise of fascism not with more of the same failed elite-led liberal democracy, but with a bold left egalitarian and inclusive radicalism.
The Trump campaign gave voice to the ugly authoritarian and reactionary face of popular opposition to the political establishment. It castigated the elitism and corruption of the system, emphasised its ineffectuality in the face of sinister threats to national well-being posed by Muslims and illegal immigrants and other easily scapegoated ‘outsider’ groups, and maintained that Trump and Trump alone could ‘make America great again’. It succeeded by peddling false solutions and scapegoats for real social problems generated by the governance of interconnected political and economic elites.
By contrast, a bold and inclusive left populist radicalism would expose the real roots of festering social problems by speaking plainly and directly to ordinary people’s needs, without pandering to their worst prejudices and fears. It would offer a generous vision of a better world, and a sweeping programme for revolutionary social change that can be translated into everyday practice.
This will require a reconnection with revolutionary roots. Historically, revolutionary ideas and social movements have tended to emerge out of, and give ideological coherence to, popular democratic social forms. However, in our time once revolutionary ideologies and movements like socialism and anarchism have grown increasingly detached from their radical democratic roots, leaving a political vacuum that right-wing populists and demagogues have been quick to fill.
Walter Benjamin’s observation that every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution speaks poignantly to our current condition. It may be interpreted not only as warning, but as a grimly realistic utopian hope that we still have a fleeting historical opportunity to act before it is too late.
Thomas Cole, “The Course of Empire: Desolation” (1836)
The online entry for my forthcoming volume Eros and Revolution: The Critical Philosophy of Herbert Marcuse(Brill Publishers/Haymarket Books) has now been created. The eightieth-sixth title in the Studies in Critical Social Sciences (SCSS) series, the work will be available this summer through Brill in hardcover, and approximately a year later in paperback edition with Haymarket. The summary follows:
In Eros and Revolution, Javier Sethness Castro presents a comprehensive intellectual and political biography of the world-renowned critical theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979). Investigating the origins and development of Marcuse’s dialectical approach vis-à-vis Hegel, Marx, Fourier, Heidegger, and Freud as well as the central figures of the Frankfurt School—Horkheimer, Adorno, Neumann, Fromm, and Benjamin—Sethness Castro chronicles the radical philosopher’s lifelong activism in favor of anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, and anti-authoritarianism together with Marcuse’s defiant revindication of global libertarian-socialist revolution as the precondition for the realization of reason, freedom, and human happiness. Beyond examining Marcuse’s revolutionary life and contributions, moreover, the author contemplates the philosopher’s relevance to contemporary struggle, especially with regard to ecology, feminism, anarchism, and the general cause of worldwide social transformation.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: Marcuse, the Utopian Idealism, Materialism, Romanticism, and Judaism Marcuse’s Importance for Radical Politics Today
PART I: MARCUSE’S LIFE, 1898-1979
2. Early Years: Childhood and Youth, War and Revolution, Romanticism, Utopian Socialism, Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger
Childhood and Youth, War and Revolution Post-War Investigations: Aesthetics, German Romanticism, and Hegel Friedrich Schiller and Charles Fourier: Utopian Socialism Marcuse’s Torturous Relationship with Heidegger Heideggerian Marxism Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (1932) Hitler’s Accession and Flight of the Marcuse Family and the Frankfurt School
3. Militant Theorizing in Resistance to Fascism, 1933-1945 Negations (1934-1938) Studies on Authority and Family Marcuse’s Direct Investigations of Nazism Early Theories of Social Change The Progression of Marcuse’s Thought on Art’s Functions Under Fascism Reason and Revolution (1941)
4. State, Freud, and Orphic Marxism: 1945-1960 Post-War Studies: “33 Theses,” Francis Bacon, Lukács, Goethe, Friedrich Hölderin, and Erasmus Continued Investigations of Historical Progress, Russian Studies, and the Trajectory of Communism and Reason during the Early Cold War On Sartre’s Existentialism Orphic Marxism and the Struggle of Eros against Thanatos Lectures on Freedom and Progress in Freud’s Theory of the Instincts Marcuse’s Debate with Fromm on Freud, Therapy, and Adjustment Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (1958) The Ideology of Death
5. Radical Struggle in the 1960s Marcuse on Cuba Continued Engagement with Critical Theorists and Lecture on Weber Humanism, Feminism, and Revolution Critical Reflections on Science and Technology One-Dimensional Humanity: Diagnosis, Reflections, and Recommendations Marcuse on Marx, Louis Napoleon, and Benjamin Justification of Revolutionary Praxis: “Repressive Tolerance,” “Ethics and Revolution,” Guerrilla Warfare, “The Question of Revolution,” and “Thoughts on the Defense of Gracchus Babeuf” Psychoanalytical Interventions Activism against the Vietnam War Summer 1967 Lectures before the German SDS and Congress of the Dialectics of Liberation: On Utopia, Radical Opposition, and Violence 1968: A New Dawn for Humanity? An Essay on Liberation (1969) Other Interventions from 1969: On Student Protest, “The Relevance of Reality,” Qualitative Change, and Self-Determination The 1969 Debate with Adorno on Theory and Praxis Revisiting “Repressive Tolerance” and Civil Rights with the ACLU and Fred Schwarz of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade “Marxism and the New Humanity: An Unfinished Revolution” “Freedom and the Historical Imperative”
6. Marcuse’s Final Decade: Continuities, Discontinuities, and Intensification (1970-1979) Marcuse’s Assessment of the State of the Radical Opposition in the Early 1970s: “Cultural Revolution,” “The Movement in a New Age of Repression,” and “A Revolution in Values” Revolution or Reform? Marcuse’s Debate with Popper Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972) Marcuse’s Late Championing of Feminism International Relations: Vietnam and Israel/Palestine Continued Engagement with Aesthetics “It is Right to Revolt” and “Theory and Politics”: Late Discussions with Sartre and Habermas Marcuse’s Final Interventions in Life: On Political Violence, the New Left, the U.S. Bicentennial, “The Reification of the Proletariat,” Rudolf Bahro, Technology, and Ecology The Aesthetic Dimension (1978)
PART II: REFLECTIONS ON MARCUSE
7. Nature and Revolution Nature, Evolution, and Morality “Repressive Tolerance” and Radical Struggle for Animal and Earth Liberation Today Conclusion
8. Critique of Marcuse The Limits to Integration The Problem of Sources: Political Philosophy and Empirics Marcuse the Edelkommunist Marcuse the Zionist? Feminism, Gender, Eros Conflicts with Poststructuralism and Postmodernism Marcuse on Authority and the Transition: Between Jacobinism and Anarchism
PART III: CONCLUSION
9. Marcusean Politics in the Twenty-First Century Radical Ecological Politics Feminist Socialism and Anarcha-Feminism The “World Mind” in International Relations: Global Anti-Authoritarianism Means and Ends: The Question of Counter-Violence Close: Eros and Revolution
Notes toward an International Libertarian Eco-Socialism 