Date: Mon, 17 Nov 1997 21:45:00 -0800
From: Mark Jones <Jones_M-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: M-I: Lenin


The Met Office has announced the warmest British November since
records began, with one freakish exception a century ago. Temperatures are
averaging 65 deg. F.

Global warming is writing in letters of fire: we cannot go on like this.
Meanwhile life goes on unattended, a bathetic comedy acted by the unknowing
dead.

Thus FoE enthuses on Sustainability initiatives in the US. This is all to 
the good, and the concern of the average American citizen for her 
environment is laudable. But when sustainability is cycle lanes, bottle-banks,
 public transport initiatives and maybe the kind marginal greening of business 
which the Audubon report I posted speaks of:  at best prefiguring the 
antithesis of capitalism, more probably just a pathetic footnote, then we 
have to conclude that the message is not getting thru.

I have a large archive of photos from Russian history, mostly taken from
the revolution, the thirties and world war 2.  Among them is a famous
group portrait of  Russian capitalists, pompous and portly in spats,
penguin suits and silk top hats, some smoking cigars, staring history 
impudently in the eye, seeming to ignore a conflagration that is 
flaring behind them.

In reality it is nothing more ominous than a display by the Moscow fire 
brigade. The year is 1924, and these are Nepmen.

But the picture might serve as an evil icon emblematising today's small
groups of conspiratorial men (they are almost all men) whose behaviour 
is  so perverse, so self-destructive, wilfully-blind and obstinately 
self-deluding, that they really might be devils.

Sometimes I see Lucifer rampaging free. I felt Him the other day when 
I read some UN report that the world centre of traffic in women and
white slavery is no longer some middle eastern entrepot or Thailand or
Ecuador, but Russia. Some facts stick on the threshold of thought like a
fishbone in the throat, and I cannot accept them.

There is no justice, historical or personal, but there is plenty
of nemesis around, most of it directed at the already-victimised. This is 
why many ordinary Russians (according to all the polls) hate capitalism, 
not just dislike it, and why there is so much bitterness, so much anger 
and indignation, mostly now directed at the US, among those who lost 
almost everything when they lost the Soviet Union.

Anti-Sovietism still poisons this list, altho not as virulently as it
did, and there are some (mostly American academics, I don't know 
why) still marinating in it, even (perhaps especially) on the so-called 
left. What they lack is poetry. Or empathy. Or plain ornery anger.

That's their problem. I know Russia. I speak as I find. And I say:
anyone who thinks that Russia has done with revolutions, is wrong. 

And that's what I mean about conspiracy. A fantastic process of concentration 
of wealth and power, unparalleled in human history, is racing ahead in
parallel with the ominous rents and tears appearing in the fabric of the 
ecosphere. Last year less than $3bn inward investment flowed into sub-
Saharan Africa. It's just fallen off the map. The former Soviet Union is 
becoming Biafra (remember Biafra?), its people doomed to the worst fate: 
owners of assets which their comprador (even semi-feudal, even in Russia) 
state busily plunders. East Asia has got asthma and maybe worse.

Wherever you look it's the same. Countless millions unable to meet
their elementary needs, and how can these submerged masses take an 
interest in global warming? As we have seen in the past three weeks,
even marxisant intellectuals have a hard time getting their eyes on the 
ball when it comes to something as arcane as global warming.

Yet for the first time since the time of John Reed and Louise Bryant,
capitalism is in the shit, deep in, and digging deeper all the time. For
the first time, the conspirators look like what they are: slavering, raving-
mad monsters, depraved, endlessly corrupt, cynical, foul, inhuman, worthy 
of no fate but crushing under foot, and so shall they be. People mad enough 
to wreck a planet rather than give in. Our lives are ruled by criminals, 
gangster-politicians, gangster-bankers, priests, poets and filmmakers, 
people incensed with furious greed, the unspeakable in pursuit of the
inalienable.

They shall be dragged kicking and screaming to justice. They shall face
the indignation and anger of the tired, the poor, the hungry and homeless,
they shall face the wrath of the hollow-cheeked children deprived of a present, 
and even and perhaps most terrifying, the implacable anger of cosseted western 
middle class women whose loins shall produce no posterity capable of living in 
the ashes, on the barren soil.

Therefore there never has been such a moment of revolutionary optimism
as the present; but this is just the first hot breath of a scorching wind 
that is going to blow the whole thing away.

What always connects the masses to history is anger: sheer, bloodyminded, 
violent, passionate, boiling rage. That's what fuels revolutions, and there 
is getting to be a lot of it about. The kind of anger that makes heroes of
ordinary women and men, the kind of passion that fuelled October (when 
Kerensky wanted to crush the Bolshevik rising, it wasn't soldiers and sailors 
of the Petrograd garrison so much as these unarmed, simple people from the 
Vyborg Side who stopped him. While Kerensky mobilised cossacks of the 
Savage Division, Petrograd's workers organised to defend their revolution. 
On a snow-swept morning, 25 degrees below zero, thousands upon thousands of
people, in thin, tattered clothes, with white pinched faces, women and
men, even children, poured forth from the factories and working class
quarters; with `infinite courage, infinite faith', as eye-witness
Louise  Bryant recorded,  they marched out `untrained and unequipped to
meet the traditional bullies of Russia, the paid fighters, the paid
enemies of freedom.' No-one knew where the advancing cossacks were so
they followed the sound of gunfire rolling back from the battlefield.
These were the working-class women who on International Women's Day, eight 
months before, began the revolution that overthrew the Tsar.  Angelica 
Balabanova said to Bryant of their passionate courage: `Women have to go 
through such a tremendous struggle before they are free in their own minds 
that freedom is more precious to them than to men.' )

But without a Party that is truly theirs, that speaks to and for them,
that articulates their passion and understands the world of toil, what will 
become of these people ofthe abyss?

They are the "tyomniye silyi", dark forces, poorest of the poor proletarians 
and peasants who rallied to the Bolsheviks, to Lenin, who never wavered, are
still present in history, now as before October, a vast sullen inscrutable
crowd of spectators, waiting for their moment to arrive, and in Russia still 
(as we see in the mass rallies of the Communists) true to the banner of Lenin, 
despite all that has happened and not happened these eighty years.

Intellectuals can propose, in the midst of their isolation, fear, self-
distrust. But it is the people who dispose. They chose the Bolsheviks 
and not from whimsy or sentimentality but because they needed this 
instrument of self-emancipation as much as they needed such things as peace, 
bread, land. It was their party. They made it their own. It spoke for them; 
they trusted it; their faith in it was infinite. When their party was stolen 
from them, they did not lose faith in the idea of it, because that has already 
entered the human lexicon of eternal truths. The idea of such a party, the
party of a new type, cannot and will not die. As will be seen.




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