East
Side Story
East Slovakia Metallurgical Combine
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The
Eliot, George
English Way of Life, the
Erfurt Programme, the
Eurocommunism is Anticommunism
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East
Side Story
(directed by Dana
Ranga and Andrew Horn, France/Germany, 1997, 78 mins)
This eye-opening
documentary includes clips from nearly two dozen "socialist musicals",
a bizarre hybrid of song-and-dance choreography and Marxist ideology
much encouraged by Stalin after he saw Grigori Alexandrov's The
Jolly Fellows (1934). Over the next two decades -- encompassing
both the Terror and World War II, the bloodiest era in the region's
history -- the Soviet film industry produced similar efforts glorifying
factory hands and farm workers, the latter celebrated by the self-explanatory
1939 musical Tractor Drivers.
The Soviet musical
died with Stalin in the early 1950s, but the Eastern European bloc
attempted its own variation on the genre, though with a corresponding
shift from rural to urban imagery and a focus on the teenager (representing
the glorious socialist future) as opposed to the collective farm worker.
It's easy to laugh
at these films, which on the evidence presented here were crushingly
naïve at best and downright mendacious at worst - but it's greatly
to its credit that East Side Story looks at them from multiple
angles. Talking heads include not just the film-makers and historians,
but also ordinary members of the audience who were well aware that
the musicals were shamelessly trite and manipulative but who loved
them anyway - they reminded them of their youth and a time when the
utopias presented to them really did seem to be just around the corner.
And many of the musical numbers are genuinely catchy, especially the
show-stopping display of synchronised wheat harvesting in Cossacks
of the Kuban River (1946), in which a group of ruddy-cheeked farm
workers sing:
We are working
on the steppes
Before the sun comes up
So we have bread to nourish
Our athletes and heroes
Our girls who should be pretty and skilful
Our boys who should be fiery in their love
Harvest! Harvest! Keep loading! Keep loading!
The quota has been attained!
Be honest -- is
The Sound of Music really any more sensible?
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East
Slovakia Metallurgical Combine
From the Big
Soviet Encyclopaedia (3rd ed., English version, v. 5 p.106), which
is, alas, a touch out of date:
"One of the
largest metallurgical combines in Czechoslovakia, located in the city
of Kosice. The combine operates on imported iron ore (from the USSR)
and Ostrava coking coal. The combine manufactures cast iron, steel,
steel blades, pipes, assembled steel, and bridge sections. The combine
is the principal producer of light-gauge sheet steel for the automobile,
machine-tool manufucaturing and canning industries and for domestic
appliances.
"Construction
of the East Slovakia Metallurgical Combine was begun in January 1960,
and the metallurgical cycle was completed in Jun 1966. The combine
was equipped with the technical assistance of the USSR, Poland, the
German Democratic Republic, and other countries. It is connected with
the USSR by a standard-gaug main railroad line. In 1968 approximately
17,500 workers were employed at the East Slovakia Metallurgical Combine.
In 1968 the combine smelted approximately 2 million tons of cast iron
and 1.7 million tons of steel, and produced more than 1 million tons
of rolled steel."
If you are interested
in this kind of industrial plant, you might also like to read about
the Altai Tractor Plant, or about
the Havana Metallurgical Combine.
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Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The
The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte was hastily written in the aftermath
of the coup d'état of 2 December 1851, yet is justly considered
Marx's best piece of political analysis. The quality of the writing
is remarkable, and the text is littered with memorable phrases on an
almost-Shakespearean scale. The opening pages contain an astonishing
cocktail of poetry, history and philosophy that raise the major questions
for the work that follows. "Men make their own history, but they
do not make it just as they please", Marx proclaims, for "the
tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the
brain of the living". It is not just economic relations that constrain
the political actors of the present, but also the activity of politics
itself, whose scripts were written long ago. Revolutions are exciting
when they bring something new into the world, but the revolutionaries
themselves reach back to the past for their role-models, for the commedia
dell'arte masks that will mark out the parts they have chosen to
play. "Thus Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution
of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman republic and
the Roman empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to
do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793
to 1795". But if the revolutionary text is the same, the context
is quite different, for the class struggle never stands still. The participants
delude themselves as to the objective meanings of their actions; the
re-enactment of the struggles of the past on the stage of the present
sets up the powerful dialectic of heroic intentions and their unintended
consequences: "Cromwell and the English people borrowed speech,
passions and illusions from the Old Testament for their bourgeois revolution.
When the real aim had been achieved, when the bourgeois transformation
of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk".
The political analysis
of the Eighteenth Brumaire updates and clarifies much of the
story presented in the earlier Class Struggles in France, focusing
more on the operation of the republican political institutions and less
on the unmediated clash of class interests in the revolutionary politics
of 1848. In particular, Marx seeks to solve a riddle he has set himself,
for the end of the earlier work predicted that President Bonaparte would
win his battle with the Assembly to win the right to stand for a second
term of office. In the end the Assembly refused to be swayed, and Bonaparte
responded with the coup of 2 December. The central theme of the political
narrative is the way in which the splits among the bourgeois parties
produce a paralysed governmental system where the parliamentary parties
are unable to provide the basis for a stable ministry able to preserve
market order, which is the principal desideratum of any bourgeois regime.
President Bonaparte is able to appoint first a non- and then an extra-,
then an anti-parliamentary ministry, and finally to mount his coup,
which presents itself as the subversion of the bourgeois political institutions
but ultimately works to secure the major bourgois interests. Characteristic
of Marx's summings-up are lines like these: "The parliamentary
party of Order condemned itself to acquiescence by its clamour for tranquillity.
It declared the political rule of the bourgeoisie to be incompatible
with the bourgeoisie's own safety and existence by destroying with its
own hands the whole basis of its own regime, the parliamentary regime,
in the struggle against the other classes of society". And so the
Second Republic gave way to the Second Empire, and to the suspension
of parliamentary government for nearly twenty years.
Although the Eighteenth
Brumaire remains a wonderful piece of political writing, two nagging
puzzles persist. The first is articulated well by Jon Elster in his
Making Sense of Marx, and expresses a worry that the argument
remains intolerably functionalist in nature, for while Marx shows how
the usurpation of power might suit bourgeois interests very well, he
does not say enough to convince us of how this fact can serve as the
cause of the political transformation effected by the coup. The second
concerns the relationship between the first six chapters and the final
chapter. For if a key compenent of the Marxist notion of the Bonapartist
state is the degree of autonomy which the state can win from the class
struggle raging around it, and if Marx has shown that the new regime
serves the interests of the leading class better than the parliamentary
republic ever could, it is unclear what the argument of the final chapter
adds to the theoretical account of the regime when it insists that Bonaparte's
regime does have a distinctive class base of its own, based on the support
of the indebted "potato"-like masses of the French peasantry.
Answers on an email
postcard, please.
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Eliot,
George
The work of George
Eliot (1819-1880), marks the high point of the English realist novel,
although her use of narrator is in fact far more subtle than many others
tarred with the realist brush. Eliot was born Mary Anne Evans and came
to writing late, after encouragement from her live-in lover G. H. Lewes,
with whom she scandalised the establishment by co-habiting for 24 years
without ever marrying. She further assured the disapprobation of society
by refusing to believe in God, following instead the philosophy of the
Young Hegelian Ludwig Feuerbach, and translating various texts of the
German "Higher Criticism".
Eliot, who may have
been the ugliest of the major British novelists, adopted her pseudonym
in 1857 when her first fictional work, Scenes of Clerical Life
-- three mundane sketches of rural ecclesiastica -- was published to
deservedly moderate acclaim. She followed that in 1859 with Adam
Bede, a largely typical rural tale. Adam, our hero, a stolid and
worthy carpenter, is in love with Hetty, a flighty and flirtatious peasant
girl with ideas above her station. She, as a consequence of such ideas,
is impregnated by Arthur, a feckless local aristo, and winds up being
transported -- just avoiding the gallows -- after she abandons the resulting
child. Adam, realising that his love is a) trouble; b) up the duff by
another bloke; and c) in Australia, settles for Dinah, the noble Methodist
preacher who has been a source of comfort throughout. The novel has
attracted disproportionate critical attention because Eliot, in the
notorious chapter 17, lays out her belief that realist fiction fulfils
a moral purpose in making its readers "see" for the first
time their fellow men, thus enhancing their appreciation and respect
for them.
The novels of Eliot's
middle period include The Mill on the Floss (1860), a tiresome
semi-autobiographical neo-feminist tome; Silas Marner (1861),
a simple tale of a misanthropic weaver redeemed after a beautiful golden-haired
child turns up on his doorstep shortly after his secret store of gold
coins has disappeared; Romola (1862-3), an under-rated -- if
only because nobody rates it -- historical novel set in the Florence
of Savonorola; and Felix Holt: The Radical (1866), which, though
set at the time of the First Reform Act (1832) and despite the promise
of its title, delivers little in terms of political statement. As Henry
James, in one of his rare escapes from self-satisfied tediosity, said,
we find Felix a radical and leave him "utterly married". Ultimately
the plot hinges on the discovery of the rightful heir to Transome Hall,
and, surprise, surprise, it turns out to be the bird who's in love with
Felix. The 1860s also saw Eliot's only major dabble at poetry, with
the regrettable epic The Spanish Gypsy, published to general
derision in 1867.
Without doubt Eliot's
crowning glory is Middlemarch (1872-3), probably the greatest
English realist novel of all. Set in the early 1830s, it charts the
fortunes of a whole community under the impact of Reform, the arrival
of the railways and advances in medical science. Again, however, genuine
radicalism is at a premium. The Reform candidate in the local elections
is the comically bumbling Brooke, and his assistant and supposed pamphleteer
for the liberal cause is the dilettante Ladislaw, who must fall under
suspicion of only becoming interested in Reform in order to pursue a
relationship with Brooke's daughter Dorothea, at the time unhappily
married to conveniently-about-to-die Casaubon. Eliot's last novel was
Daniel Deronda (1876), which secured ostracisation from many
of her contemporaries by, heaven forfend, presenting the Jewish community
in a good light.
George Eliot is
buried in Highgate Cemetery.
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English
Way of Life, the
A perceptive set
of comments from the Big Soviet Encyclopaedia (3rd ed., English
version, v.1 p.592):
The distinctive
feature of England's historical development had a lasting effect on
many aspects of English life and contributed to the preservation of
various traditional features of social and daily life. The traditional
two-family houses (consisting of two stories) are still in use --
old-fashioned dwellings with fireplaces for heating; many of the traditional
national dishes still form part of the cuisine (beefsteak, roast beef,
porridge, different kinds of pudding). The attachment to old forms
and traditions in social and public life is most characteristic of
the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois elements of English society. Various
societies and clubs play an important part in the life of England.
English athletic terminology and expressions are commonly used in
almost all European countries. The English people have a rich tradition
of oral folklore. The best-known English national ballads are accompanied
by the harp and the violin.
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Erfurt
Programme, the
The programme was
drafted by Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein in Zürich and adopted
at the German Social Democratic Party's congress at Erfurt in 1891,
replacing the Gotha Programme of 1875. It opened with the claim that
"The struggle of the working class against capitalistic exploitation
is of necessity a political struggle" and insisted that "to
give to this fight of the working class a conscious and unified form,
and to show it its necessary goal -- that is the task of the Social
Democratic Party". The preamble to the programme also included
a strong statement of proletarian internationalism (cruelly betrayed
in 1914) and an insistence that the SPD "does not fight... for
new class-privileges and class-rights, but for the abolition of class
rule and of classes themselves", opposing all forms of oppression
based on class, party, sex or race.
The political programme
itself opened with demands reminiscent of the British Chartists: universal
suffrage for everyone over twenty, the secret ballot, proportional representation,
biennial parliaments and compensation for deputies. The programme advocated
the election of magistrates, the replacement of the standing army with
a popular militia, parliamentary authority over military affairs (hitherto
the prerogative of the Kaiser), the right to freedom of association,
the abolition of "all laws which place women, whether in a public
or a private capacity, at a disadvantage as compared with men",
the separation of church and state, the secularisation of schools (together
with compulsory attendance and free education for "those boys and
girls who, on account of their capacities, are considered fit for further
education"), the free administration of justice and the abolition
of capital punishment, and free medical care and free burial.
It called for the
introduction of a progressive income tax, property tax and inheritance
tax to cover public expenditure, together with the abolition of all
indirect taxes, customs duties, "and other economic measures which
sacrifice the interests of the community to those of a privileged minority".
And its initial demands "for the protection of the working classes"
included an eight-hour day, a ban on child labour under 14, an end to
most night-work, "an unbroken rest of at least thirty-six hours
in every week for every worker", increased regulation and supervision
of factories, "abolition of the laws concerning servants",
and a comprehensive system for working people's insurance.
Kautsky's commentary
on the Erfurt Programme was published as The Class Struggle and
became one of the major texts of of its time, its influence stretching
far beyond the frontiers of Germany. A very old Friedrich Engels was
critical of the programme, owing to its failure to stress the importance
of bringing about the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
Nevertheless, the Erfurt Programme remained the party platform throughout
the period of the Second International, and the SPD ended up claiming
that its demands were embodied in the constitution of the Weimar Republic.
The programme was formally replaced in the postwar years, first at Görlitz
in 1921 and then at Heidelberg in 1925.
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Eurocommunism
is Anticommunism
In response to the
1979 "year of Eurocommunism", Albanian leader Enver Hoxha
published this long pamphlet analysing its lineages. He presents Eurocommunism
in France, Spain and Italy as being a fairly uncomplicated development
from the revisionist currents in these countries that date back to the
1930s (popular fronts, and all that). But he also emphasises the contribution
that other deviant variants of international Marxism have made in nurturing
these trends, singling out the Browderism of the CPUSA, Mao Zedong Thought,
Titoism, Krushchevite revisionism and the philosophy of Herbert Marcuse
for special attention.
His verdict is both
predictable and damning: "Eurocommunism is a variant of modern
revisionism, a hotch-potch of pseudo-theories opposed to Marxism-Leninism.
Its aim is to hinder the scientific theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin and
Stalin from remaining a strong and unerring weapon in the hands of the
working class and the genuine Marxist-Leninist parties for the destruction
of capitalism, its structure and superstructure, to its foundations,
for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the
construction of the new socialist society."
The unhappy Western
countries, gripped by a class struggle whose existence the General Secretaries
now deny, are juxtaposed to "socialist Albania", where "the
proletariat no longer exists in the sense that this notion has in the
capitalist countries, because in our country the working class has the
state power in its hands, is the owner of the chief means of production,
is not oppressed or exploited, and works freely for itself and for the
socialist society... By implementing a correct policy for the industrialization
of the country, it was possible to transform Albania quickly, from a
backward agricultural country into a country with developed industry
and agriculture, with advanced education and culture, a country in which
the people live in true freedom and happiness." After lengthy denunciations
of the politics of Santiago Carrillo, Enrico Berlinguer and Georges
Marchais (who is revealed as a latter-day Proudhonist) Hoxha is still
able optimistically to conclude that "All the different ideas which
seek to revise our great theory will end up in the dustbin
of history, just as they have always done".
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