Paper
Stones
Paris Commune, The
Peatbog Soldiers, The
Père Lachaise
Permanent Revolutionary Slogan Generator
Politics Without Verbs
Practical Idealism
Proletarian
Morality
Puskas, Ferenc
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Paper
Stones
An interesting 1986
attempt by political scientists Adam Przeworski and John Sprague to
account for the electoral failure of socialist parties in Western Europe.
Their analysis hangs on a claim that in reaching out beyond a core working
class vote (never sufficient on its own to produce a democratic majority),
the parties inevitably lose their grip on that core vote: as the Left
tries to reduce the salience of class in politics in order to attract
non-workers, workers themselves become vulnerable to political appeals
based on non-class factors and support ebbs away from the workers' party.
Yet despite some impressive cross-national data analysis to illustrate
their argument, it remains an odd book and an unsatisfactory argument.
Both Marxist (Michael Burawoy) and mainstream (Herbert Kitschelt) political
scientists have mounted objections to the theoretical account of political
and class-identity formation Przeworski and Sprague employ. And because
they concentrate on the failure to attain a 51% majority, their analysis
works to marginalise those cases where Left parties did take over state
power (Britain in 1945; France in 1981), yet it is these failures to
socialise national economies that is of deeper interest in explaining
the general failures of European social democracy than the problems
of constructing the often-unnecessary electoral coalitions of 51% support.
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Paris
Commune, The
In due course the
Paris Commune of 1871 will no doubt get the extended treatment it deserves
in the Dictionary of the Turtle. In the meantime, however, we
content ourselves by providing links to other entries that touch on
this heroic moment in the history of the French working class. These
currently include Aberdeen-Angus Cattle
(oddly enough); "All Power to
the Soviets!"; Père Lachaise; and
the Vendôme Column.
There is an admirable
collection of 1,200 images realting to the Paris Commune available through
the website
of Northwestern University's library.
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Peatbog
Soldiers, The
The Peatbog Soldiers
(Die Moorsoldaten) is one of the great political songs of the
twentieth century. Soon after Hitler came to power in Germany, 5,000
mostly socialist and communist militants were held at the Börgermoor
concentration camp, near Papenburg in East Friesland in the north of
Germany. Owing to a ban in the camp on the singing of traditional leftist
songs, an organised group of prisoners set about assembling a new song
that would serve to inspire the detainees. The Peatbog Soldiers
was the result, with words by Johann Esser and Wolfgang Langhoff (1933)
and a melody by Rudi Goguel. The song did indeed become popular inside
the camp, and its fame spread all over the world. The socialist composer
Hanns Eisler wrote in 1935 "I consider this song one of the most
beautifully revolutionary songs of the international working-class movement...
It is a revolutionary document of great significance", singling
out its unusual combination of having the verse in a minor key, switching
to a major key for the refrain. (The complete text of his article is
elsewhere on the web, here.)
The Dictionary of
the Turtle is pleased to present both the original words, together with
the traditional and eminently singable English translation of three
of them. The fine Arbeiterlieder site has an MP3
file of the German version for download.
|
1. Wohin auch
das Auge blickt.
Moor und Heide nur ringsum.
Vogelsang uns nicht erquickt,
Eichen stehn kahl und krumm.
Wir sind die
Moorsoldaten
und ziehen mit dem Spaten
ins Moor!
|
1. Far and
wide as the eye can wander,
Heath and bog are everywhere.
Not a bird sings out to cheer us,
Oaks are standing, gaunt and bare
We are the peatbog
soldiers,
Marching with our spades
To the moor.
|
2. Hier in dieser öden Heide
ist das Lager aufgebaut,
wo wir fern von jeder Freude
hinter Stacheldraht verstaut. |
|
3. Morgens ziehen die Kolonnen
in das Moor zur Arbeit hin,
graben bei dem Brand der Sonne,
doch zur Heimat steht der Sinn. |
|
4. Heimwärts, heimwärts! Jeder sehnt
sich nach Eltern, Weib und Kind.
Manche Brust ein Seufzer dehnet,
weil wir hier gefangen sind. |
|
5. Auf und nieder geh´n die Posten,
keiner, keiner kann hindurch,
Flucht wird nur das Leben kosten,
vierfach ist umzäunt die Burg. |
5. Up and down the guards are pacing
No one, no one can go through
Flight would mean a sure death facing,
Guns and barbed wire greet our view. |
|
6. Doch für uns gibt es kein Klagen,
ewig kann´s nicht Winter sein,
Einmal werden froh wir sagen:
Heimat, Du bist wieder mein!
Dann ziehn die
Moorsoldaten
nicht mehr mit dem Spaten
ins Moor!
Dann ziehn die Moorsoldaten
nicht mehr mit dem Spaten
ins Moor!
|
6. But for us there is no complaining
Winter will in time be past
One day we shall cry rejoicing
"Homeland dear, you're mine at last!"
Then will the peatbog
soldiers
March no more with their spades
To the moor.
Then will the peatbog soldiers
March no more with their spades
To the moor.
|
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Père
Lachaise
An enormous cemetery
in the middle of Paris, named after Louis XIV's confessor. A large number
of eminent persons are buried here, including La Fontaine, Molière,
Chopin, Rossini and Delacroix. Of especial interest to Anglophones,
Oscar Wilde is buried in a peculiar neo-Egyptian tomb supplied by an
American admirer; Jim Morrison, lead singer of the popular beat combo
"The Doors", is also here, and his admirers like to deface
the surrounding graves with his lyrics. Père Lachaise was also
the final battlefield in the fighting during the destruction of the
Paris Commune in May 1871, and on May 27 many of
the Communards (not referring in this instance to the somewhat less
popular beat combo) were shot at the North East wall -- the Mur des
Fédérés, now the site of memorials to the Commune
dead, to those who fell in the French Resistance, and to the victims
of Nazi terror.
If you are interested
in graveyards, you might also be interested to read about Highgate
cemetery.
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Permanent
Revolutionary Slogan Generator
The wonders of the
world of HTML have been employed to build the Permanent Revolutionary
Slogan Generator, an integral part of the New Turtle Technology
that was implemented at The Voice of the Turtle during the first
half of 1999. The Permanent Random Slogan Generator is installed on
the front page of the website, and randomly
selects a slogan from the Adage Archive, inserting it seamlessly into
the text and inspiring readers in their oppositional struggles. The
Permanent Revolutionary Slogan Generator replaces the old Bolshevik
Soundbite of the Week feature, that ran from the Autumn of 1998 to the
Spring of 1999. To submit your own favourite slogan for inclusion in
the Adage Archive, email
the Editors, and we will see what we can do.
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Politics
Without Verbs
A much-commented
upon feature of Blairist rhetoric is its tendency to get rid of the
verbs. This is, of course, a very shrewd strategy, since verbs often
commit you to specifics which might one day prove to be an encumbrance.
It's also a wonderful way of evacuating any kind of intellectual content
from your speech. The locus classicus for Politics Without Verbs
is probably the peroration to Mr. Blair's Labour Party Conference speech
in 1996. The one verb appears at the beginning, "I want",
and is suitably vague. And the rest is verbless verbiage. Enjoy:
"I want us
to be a young country again.
Young.
With a common purpose.
With ideals we cherish and live up to. Not resting on past glories.
Not fighting old battles.
Not sitting back, hand in mouth, concealing a yawn of cynicism, but
ready for the day's challenge.
Ambitious.
Idealistic.
United."
(Quoted
in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, The End of Parliamentary Socialism,
p.246.)
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Practical
Idealism
Practical Idealism
is the campaign slogan that US Vice President Al Gore has adopted for
his Y2K Presidential run. He is very keen that we should not be confusing
it with arch-rival Governor George W. Bush's preferred campaign slogan
of "compassionate conservatism", even though both men agree
that the policy implications of their rival philosophies -- undermining
the separation of church and state by involving religious groups in
the administration of federal programs, for example -- are often almost
exactly the same.
The key text for
understanding Practical Idealism is a short speech Mr. Gore made to
the Democratic Leadership Council's annual conference in December 1998.
He began by announcing that this "extraordinary time" was
what "historians call an 'open moment' -- a time of limitless possibility;
a time when we can grow stronger together as a nation." Since 1992,
he told his audience, the Democrats in the White House had created "a
new and vibrant politics of the center -- a politics that moved not
left or right, but forward. A politics that allowed us to begin the
most important work of our lifetimes: redeeming the very idea of self-government".
Consider it redeemed. And where cynical leftists, for example, saw in
Clinton's welfare bill a shabby attempt masterminded by Dick Morris
to steal the Republicans' electoral thunder through an unprecedented
rollback of the New Deal safety-net, this episode looks very different
from a perspective informed by Practical Idealism: "We demanded
responsibility from those on welfare -- and instead of spending that
money on welfare checks, we dramatically expanded opportunity, so millions
could say goodbye to welfare, and take their proud places in our workforce."
Having ruminated
on the titanic achievements of the Clinton years, Mr. Gore set out his
personal agenda. "I come before you today to issue a new challenge.
Six years ago, we moved politics forward -- beyond left and right. Today,
let us move politics not only farther forward, but also upward, to a
higher place -- to a place far beyond the false divisions and dichotomies
of the past." These false divisions and dichotomies included labour
versus capital, American interests versus those of the rest of the world,
environmental protection versus economic development, divisions which
President Gore will no doubt find it easy to transcend. With words like
"compassion", "discipline", "mutuality",
"connectivity", "Information Superhighway", "Tipper
and I" and "more cops on the beat" freely falling from
his lips, it is quite clear that Practical Idealism represents a new
and exciting governmental philosophy for our times, taking its place
proudly alongside "Social-ism"
and "The Third Way".
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Proletarian
Morality
"As for the
'sexual urge', though it was officially sanctioned, we were in something
of a quandary about it. Monogamy and the whole institution of the
family were a product of the economic system; they bred individualism,
hypocrisy, an escapist attitude to the class struggle and were altogether
to be rejected; bourgeois matrimony was merely a form of prostitution
sanctioned by society. But promiscuity was equally a Bad Thing. It
had flourished in the Party, both in Russia and abroad, until Lenin
made his famous pronouncement against the Glass of Water Theory (that
is, against the popular maxim that the sexual act was of no more consequence
than the quenching of thirst by a glass of water). Hence bourgeois
morality was a Bad Thing. But promiscuity was an equally Bad Thing,
and the only correct, concrete attitude towards the sexual urge was
Proletarian Morality. This consisted in getting married, being faithful
to one's spouse, and producing proletarian babies. But then, was this
not the same thing as bourgeois morality? The question, comrade, shows
that you are thinking in mechanistic, not in dialectical, terms. What
is the difference between a gun in the hands of a policeman and a
gun in the hands of a member of the revolutionary working class? The
difference between a gun in the hands of a policeman and in the hands
of a member of the revolutionary working class is that the policeman
is a lackey of the ruling class and his gun an instrument of oppression,
whereas the same gun in the hands of a member of the revolutionary
working class is an instrument of the liberation of the oppressed
masses. Now the same is true of the difference between so-called bourgeois
'morality' and Proletarian Morality. The institution of marriage,
which in capitalist society is an aspect of bourgeois decay, is dialectically
transformed in a healthy proletarian society. Have you understood,
comrade, or shall I repeat my answer in more concrete terms?"
From:
Arthur Koestler, in R. H. S. Crossman and Arthur Koestler, eds., The
God That Failed, pp.55-56.
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Puskas,
Ferenc
The greatest Hungarian
football player of all time, Ferenc Puskas was instrumental in defeating
England at Wembley in the most catastrophic home defeat of the 1950s.
Let Jonathan Wilson tell you more
about it here,
in his review of Puskas on Puskas: The Autobiography of a Footballing
Legend for the Turtle's Summer
Books Special.
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