Baker,
Kenneth
Barricade
Base and Superstructure
Baseball
Basic Law of Contemporary Capitalism, the
Basic Law of Socialism, the
Battle of Algiers, The
Beatniks
Bella Ciao
Berlin, Isaiah
Bibliophilism
Big-Headed Turtle, the
Biological Trend in Sociology, the
Brass Eye
Brezhnev Doctrine, the (so-called)
Brezhnev, Ten Great Prizes won by Leonid
Büchner, Georg
Byzantine Studies
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Baker,
Kenneth
Thatcherite politician
of the 1980s, best known for his smug expression. In his younger, more
thrusting days someone observed that "I have seen the future, and
it smirks". During a fairly short stint at the Department of the
Environment Baker was responsible for abolishing the popular Greater
London Council and for introducing the proposals that culminated in
the poll tax fiasco and the waste of billions of pounds of public money.
His most enduring legislation was the 1988 Great Education Reform Bill,
known as the Gerbil, which increased the amount of time teachers spend
filling in forms no end. But he will always be remembered most fondly
by the Readers of the Turtle as the man who almost sentenced the nation's
dogs to death during the May 1991 Rottweiler scare. Sacked by John Major
in 1992, he reinvented himself as a pompous Euro-sceptic, but it was
never terribly clear why. Now Lord Baker of Dorking, he is a political
irrelevance. He edited poetry anthologies from time to time. One collection
of hate-verse, I Have No Gun But I Can Spit (published by Faber)
is worthwhile, but the others (of parodies, of English history in verse,
and of conservatism) are mediocre, forgettable, and indeed forgotten.
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Barricade
Helpfully defined
by the Big Soviet Encyclopaedia (3rd ed., English version, v.3
p.33) as "an artificial obstacle of logs, sandbags, rocks, trees,
and other materials at hand piled up across streets, roads, near bridges,
on mountain passes, and so on". It tells us that barricades were
used to defend Russian cities in the 13th and 14th centuries against
the Mongol-Tatar hordes, in the 17th century against the Poles and in
the 17th and 18th centuries during peasant wars. They are most important,
however, for their use in urban insurrection, and the Encyclopaedia
notes their use in Paris in 1827, 1830, 1832, 1834 and 1871; in Brussels
in 1830; in Lyon in 1834; in Prague and Berlin in 1848; in Dresden in
1849; and in Russia during the revolutions of both 1905 and 1917, during
the Civil War of 1918-20 and during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45.
Soviet optimism
about the role and function of barricades needs to be tempered, however,
with the observations of the aged Engels. In his 1895 introduction to
the second edition of Marx's Class Struggles in France, Engels
wrote that changes in the class struggle and in military technology
had made "street fighting with barricades... obsolete". Barricades
in 1848 and earlier were powerful moral symbols because men and women
of various classes stood behind them, often creating great reluctance
on the part of the troops to fire on the people. But Engels notes the
reasons why barricade fighting is much harder at century's end: on the
one hand, advances in artillery technology combined with larger urban
garrisons and the use of the railways to move troops around extremely
quickly make it much easier for modern armies to crush urban insurrection;
on the other hand, the insurrectionists would find it harder than before
to obtain decent military hardware, the "long, straight, broad
streets" of the modern metropolis are ideal for cannon fire, and
-- in the event of an insurrection -- the middle classes were much more
likely to abandon the proletariat and its barricades, so that the "people"
come to appear divided, making the troops far less unwilling to shoot.
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Base
and Superstructure
At the heart of
historical materialism is the distinction between the base and the superstructure.
Just how to characterise their interaction is a fiendishly tricky enterprise:
various metaphors are tried out, found to be unhelpful, and discarded.
While we wait for a bold attempt by a Comrade Turtle to illuminate this
question, and to advance beyond the bare-but-unhelpful claim that their
interaction is somehow "dialectical", we here present Karl
Marx's most influential statement of the basic structure of the materialist
view of history:
"In the social
production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are
indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production
which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material
productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production
constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation,
on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond
definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of
material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life
process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines
their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines
their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the
material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing
relations of production, or -- what is but a legal expression for
the same thing -- with the property relations within which they have
been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive
forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch
of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the
entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed."
From:
Karl Marx: Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy (1859)
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Baseball
According to the
Big Soviet Encyclopaedia (3rd ed., English version, v.3 p.43),
the American game of baseball is closely related to the Russian game
lapta. Other "varieties of baseball" apparently include
softball (which is popular in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic),
cricket and pesäpallo in Finland.
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Basic
Economic Law of Contemporary Capitalism, the
"The maximisation
of capitalist profit through the exploitation, ruin and pauperisation
of the masses in a given country, the systematic pillage of other
nations, especially backwards countries and through wars and the militarisation
of the national economy".
From
Josef Stalin, The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR,
1952.
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Basic
Economic Law of Socialism, the
"The securing
of the maximum satisfaction of the constantly rising material and
cultural requirements of the whole society through the continuous
expansion and perfection of socialist production on the basis of higher
techniques".
From
Josef Stalin, The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR,
1952.
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Battle
of Algiers, The
The two best Marxist
films in existence start with the letter 'B'. The first is Sergei Eisenstein's
electrifying Battleship Potemkin, which finds its place in most
cinema cognoscenti's lists of the top ten films of all time. The second,
stands in relative neglect: Gilberto Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers.
The film traces various episodes in the campaign of the Algerian National
Liberation Front (FLN) in their anti-colonial struggle against the French
in the mid-1950's. Like Potemkin, Pontecorvo's film presents
itself in pseudo-documentary form, acting as an idealized reconstruction
of revolutionary events, to further the political education of the citizens
of the newly-independent state. The film's grainy black and white stock,
and its use of non-professional actors, give it a remarkable verve and
rawness. When the revolutionaries begin to wreak havoc on the French
colonial state, the sinister French colonel (Jean Martin) acts as a
narrative conduit to explain what is happening. He sees and comprehends
the inexorable political developments which spontaneously express themselves
through the growing class-consciousness and organization of the Algerian
guerrillas. The colonel knows that history is on the side of the oppressed,
and knows that he is trapped in the headlights of a revolutionary juggernaut
which he can understand, but cannot act to stop. A sinew-tightening
film.
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Beatniks
"(From "beat"
[beat, break]), a spontaneous, anarchically rebellious youth movement
("the insolent generation"; Russian razbitnoe pokolenie)
that arose after World War II, mainly in the USA and Great Britain,
devoid of any positive sociopolitical programme whatever. This movement
was an expression of the dissatisfaction and protest of young people
(primarily petit bourgeois) against the standardized ideal of "success"
and the hypocrisy of the bourgeois morality of "good conduct"
and "decency". In breaking with the generally accepted traditional
bourgeois way of life, the "radicalism" of beatniks was
frequently manifested in the violation of elementary norms of the
human community."
From:
The Big Soviet Encyclopaedia (3rd ed., English version, v.3 p.67)
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Bella
Ciao
A popular Italian
song, celebrating anti-fascist resistance in the Second Worl
d War, and sung to a bouncy tune. Listen to a useful MP3
file provided by the excellent Arbeiterlieder
site.
Una mattina mi
sono alzato,
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao,
Una mattina mi sono alzato,
E ho trovato l'invasor...
O partigiano portami via,
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao,
O partigiano portami via,
Che mi sento di morir.
E se io muoio da partigiano,
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao,
E se io muoio da partigiano,
Tu mi devi seppellir.
E seppellire sulla montagna,
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao,
E seppellire sulla montagna,
Sotto l'ombra d'un bel fior.
E le genti che passeranno,
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao,
E le genti che passeranno,
Mi diranno che bel fior!
E questo è il fiore del partigiano,
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao,
E questo è il fiore del partigiano,
Morto per la Libertà!
Ed era rossa la sua bandiera,
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao,
Ed era rossa la sua bandiera,
C'era scritto Libertà!
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Berlin,
Isaiah
A gregarious old
Oxford curmudgeon, Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) was continually and spectacularly
over-rated as an original thinker, to his own great amusement. Those
who knew him have always claimed that he was a marvellous conversationalist,
but the reports of those conversations suggest that the same topics
continually recurred (Zionism, nationalism, animosity against Hannah
Arendt, et cetera) and the same anecdotes endlessly repeated
(yes, there is one in which he is confused with Irving), making it hard
to dispel the suggestion that he was on at least one level a classic
bore.
An emigré
from Russia, where he witnessed the Revolution, the young Berlin found
a niche in British academic life, and after studying PPE at Corpus Christi
and doing some teaching at New College, he became the first Jewish Fellow
of All Souls College, Oxford, where he remained for much of his subsequent
career. After the Second World War he abandoned the study of technical
philosophy and turned to the hitherto unfashionable history of ideas,
a field he was to dominate in the years before the rise of the so-called
Cambridge School in the late 1960s. He finally left All Souls when he
became the first President of the Wolfson College. He died in 1997,
and following his death Michael Ignatieff published a major biography.
Apart from his short,
readable volume on Karl Marx, Berlin wrote essays, not books,
and these have only been made available to a wide reading public since
the dogged Henry Hardy began his fruitful editorial work on the Berlin
oeuvre, resulting in useful collections including Russian
Thinkers, Against the Current and The Crooked Timber of
Humanity. In his essays Berlin helped to rescue the thought of writers
like Hamann, Herder, Vico and De Maistre from oblivion. Always polished,
sensitive and interesting, these pieces are often criticised for the
extent to which Berlin always seems able to find his own chief ideas
-- pluralism, or anti-monism foremost among them -- embodied in the
works of his subjects. Greatly to his credit, he considered the popularity
of Giuseppe Verdi to be a key indicator of the sanity of a given era.
He is best known among the world's undergraduates, however, as the elaborator
of an overdrawn distinction between 'positive' and 'negative' liberty,
the subject of his 1958 inaugural lecture in the Chichele chair in political
philosophy at Oxford. In all his works, a fine mandarin prose style
makes him the sort of philosopher that non-philosophers tend rather
to enjoy.
As an enthusiastic
Cold Warrior, his clubability brought him near to the corridors of power,
and ensured all the glittering prizes of the liberal establishment including
a knighthood and the Order of Merit. Berlin was undoubtedly a Good Thing,
a wonderful popularizer, lecturer and general intellectual presence.
He was that rare beast, a British public intellectual who was neither
Patrick Moore nor Magnus Pike. Yet the Turtle can't help thinking that
if Oxford had possessed a man of Berlin's talents who was genuinely
on the Left (to which Berlin claimed to belong), then British intellectual
life would be in much ruder health today.
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Bibliophilism
The Big Soviet
Encyclopaedia (3rd ed., English version, v.3 p.258) recommends Bibliophilia
(defined as "a penchant for collecting rare and valuable editions")
and accurately notes its progressive implications:
In addition to
its great importance to the intellectual and spiritual development
of the collector (bibliophile) himself, bibliophilia plays a considerable
social role by facilitating the creation of outstanding collections
of printed works as well as the preservation of rare editions and
specific copies of books Mnay bibliophilic collections have formed
the bases of large public libraries.
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Big-Headed
Turtle, the
We are not the only
ones to be struck by the role that the Turtle plays in progressive social
science. The Big Soviet Encyclopaedia (3rd ed., English version,
v.3 p.265) gave this detailed description of the talents and evolutionary
adaptations of the Big-Headed Turtle:
BIG-HEADED TURTLE
(Platysternum megacephalum), a reptile of the family Platysternidae,
suborder Cryptodira (turtles). It is characterized by a flat
broad shell and by a very large head, which cannot be drawn under
the shell and is protected by a compact, horny shield. The tail is
very long and covered with large scales. Colour on top is olive-brown;
beneath, yellowish. Total body length is up to 40cm. It is found mainly
in mountain streams of the less-populated part of the Indochinese
Peninsula but is everywhere relatively rare. The big-headed turtle
swims well in search of food or of the warmth of the sun, and it climbs
easily onto shore rocks or tree stumps. It feeds on small marine and
terrestrial animals, fishes, molluscs, worms, and the like.
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Biological
Trend in Sociology, the
According to the
Big Soviet Encyclopaedia (3rd ed., English version, v.3 p.313),
the biological trend in sociology refers to
"Doctrines
and schools of non-Marxist sociology of the second half of the 19th
century whose common feature is the application of the concepts and
laws of biology to the analysis of society. Although analogies with
the organic world had been known in social theories since antiquity,
the transference of the laws of biology to social phenomena attained
especial prevalence in the second half of the 19th century as a result
of progres sin biology (discovery of the cell, of the laws of the
struggle for existence and of natural selection, and so on). The doctrines
of H. Spencer, the racial anthropology school (J. A. Gobineau, H.
Chamberlain, G. Lapouge, O. Ammon and others), the organic school
of sociology (P. Lilienfeld, A. Schüffle, R. Worms, and others),
and social Darwinism (L. Gumplowicz, G. Ratzenhofer, A, Small, and
others) are examples of the biological trend in sociology. Schools
of the biological trend held various political and ideological orientations,
from reactionary - validating war and oppression of certain races
and social groups by others (racial anthropological school) - to liberal
(organic school). Biological theories of society posed several difficult
questions (the problem of the integrity of society, its structure,
the function of its separate parts, the study of social conflicts,
and so on). However, these theories wee inadquate for an explanation
of complex social processes and led to antihistoricism; superficial
analogies often replaced concrete study of social phenomena. At the
turn of the 20th century biological theories were gradually supplanted
in non-Marxist sociology by psychological theories."
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Brass
Eye
Undoubtedly the
most subversive programme broadcast on British television in the late
1990s, Brass Eye was a spoof current affairs programme devised
by Chris Morris, a man now widely acclaimed as Britain's leading satirist.
Each edition followed a similar formula, taking a current issue - animals,
drugs, sex, and the like - and covering it via a blend of faked documentary
footage (artfully distressed to make it look like authentic historical/American
TV reportage), apocalyptic editorialising and, most controversially
(and entertainingly), interviews with real celebrities who are sublimely
unaware that they're being sent up.
Although the programme
came under considerable fire from the celebrities themselves and their
tabloid cheerleaders, Morris was making a fundamentally serious point
about the media in general and television in particular, and the way
people will spout any old drivel if they're put in front of a camera
without bothering to do even the most basic background research first.
Some of the inanities uttered on the programme truly beggar belief -
there are far too many juicy items to list in full, but Tory MP David
Amess (whose retention of the Basildon constituency in 1992 heralded
the surprise Conservative election victory that fateful year) deserves
some kind of medal for not only contributing extensive furrowed-brow
interview material but also going on to ask questions in the House of
Commons about "cake", a nonexistent drug apparently mowing
down Britain's teenagers in swathes. This magnificent exemplar of British
parliamentary democracy in action has been preserved in Hansard.
Brass Eye
was initially broadcast in 1997 as a single six-part series, and it
was considered unlikely that more would be commissioned after the final
episode included a subliminal freeze-frame comparing Michael Grade,
the then head of Channel Four, to a part of the female anatomy currently
providing Eve Ensler with a hefty meal ticket. However, a one-off special
edition was broadcast in 2001 and caused a furore of spectacular proportions,
with the Daily Mail describing
it on the front page as THE SICKEST TV SHOW EVER.
The paper's reaction
was unsurprising, since the programme was a no-holds-barred attack on
the then recent sensationalised and repulsively hypocritical tabloid
coverage of various paedophile scandals. Again, unwitting celebrities
were duped into offering helpful advice - notably Phil Collins' emphatic
endorsement of a fictitious sex abuse charity ("I'm talking Nonce
Sense") or the alleged comedian Richard Blackwood finally attracting
genuine laughter as he explains how paedophiles can cause computer keyboards
to emit gases to overpower unwary children. Again, complaints galore
were made to the Broadcasting Standards Council, which refused to condemn
the programme on the eminently reasonable grounds that its victims should
have checked its bona fides before agreeing to appear on camera. Seldom
has the biting wit and vicious underlying anger of Jonathan Swift's
A Modest Proposal been so thrillingly recaptured in a contemporary
work.
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Brezhnev
Doctrine, the (so-called)
The Soviets never
admitted to the existence of the so-called Brezhnev doctrine, that supposedly
justified the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Brezhnev did however
say this to the Fifth Congress of the Polish United Workers' Party later
that year:
"When external
and internal forces hostile to socialism try to turn the development
of a given Socialist country in the direction of the restoration of
capitalism, when a threat arises to the cause of socialism in that
country -- a threat to the Socialist community of nations as a whole
-- this is no longer a problem for that nation but a question of common
concern to all the Socialist parties"[Reported
in Pravda, 13 November 1968].
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Brezhnev,
Ten Great Prizes won by Leonid
1973: The
Lenin Peace Prize, for tireless efforts to strengthen world
peace and security.
1976: Second
Gold Star of Hero of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, for
outstanding services in liberating Czechoslovakia from the Nazis
----- the Order of Klement Gottwald, for promoting the fight
for peace and social progress
----- Marshal of the Soviet Union, for his part in the defeat
of fascism and the consolidation of the USSR's defence potential
----- the Order of Lenin and the Second Gold Star of Hero
of the Soviet Union for his outstanding services to Party and
State while building communism.
----- finally, the Sword of Honour of the USSR, for his outstanding
services to Party and State in building up the USSR's defence capability
and armed forces.
1977: F.
Joliot-Curie Gold Medal of Peace, the highest award of the World
Peace Council
----- the Karl Marx Gold Medal of the USSR Academy of Sciences,
its highest award for outstanding achievements in the social sciences
----- and the Gold Medal of Peace of the United Nations, for
consistent and fruitful activity towards world peace.
[Originally
printed in The Voice of the Turtle #6, 1995.]
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Büchner,
Georg
The German dramatist
Georg Büchner (1813-1837) is remembered today chiefly on account
of his excellent plays. Danton's Death (1835) was an impressive
debut; Woyzeck (1837) an absolutely astonishing tragedy, and
the first with a proletarian protagonist. Yet when he died at an absurdly
young age, he was mourned by his contemporaries as an expert on the
anatomy of the barbel fish, on which he had completed a scientific dissertation.
Drama and Fish Science were not his only talents: Büchner was also
a member of the radical Society of the Rights of Man, and the author
of stirring tracts. The Big Soviet Encyclopaedia (third edition,
English version, v.4 p.132) draws attention to his role in propagating
the slogan "Peace to the huts, war on the palaces" in Germany.
He also wrote a comedy, Leonce and Lena (published 1839), but
it is not funny.
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Byzantine
Studies
Some brief extracts
on this important subject taken from the Big Soviet Encyclopaedia
(3rd ed., English version, v.5 pp.66-8)
"V. G. Vasil'evskii
played a fundamental role in the creation of Russian Byzantine studies.
In 1894 he founded the yearly periodical Vizantskii Vremennik,
which has become a recognized organizational publication of international
Byzantine studies."
"In the USSR
the first historical studies that viewed Byzantine history from a
Marxist position appeared in the 1930s. An organized scholarly center
of Soviet Byzantine studies was established in Leningrad before the
Great Patriotic War... An outline of the development of Soviet Byzantine
studies was presented in Z. V. Udal'tsova's book Sovetskoe Vizantinovedenie
za 50 let (1969)."
"Marxist
Byzantine studies now play an ever more important role in the development
of Byzantine studies all over the world."
"A major
point of dispute concerning the history and cultural development of
the Byzantine Empire has been the question of the significance of
Byzantium in the cultural historical process. The Marxist Byzantinists
acknowledge the peculiarity of Byzantiun's historic fate and at the
same time emphasize the similarity between the course of its developemnt
and that of Western Europe. They defend the idea of the gradual progressive
development of Byzantium and characterize its history as a natural
development of stages in the birth and evolution of a variant of feudal
society. On the other hand, the majority of scholars in the capitalist
countries stress the conservative features of Byzantine social institutions
and their historical origin from Roman institutions and regard Byzantium
as a specific type of Eastern Orthodox society whose evolution was
counterposed, as it were, to the development of Western Europe during
the period of feudalism. Many other questions are also disputed -
the question of the role of state power in Byzantium and Byzantium's
influence on the development of other people's, for example. A large
number of bourgeois Byzantinists describe the Byzantine state as an
institution standing above the classes and exaggerate its influence
on the cultural development of the southern and eastern Slavs."
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