I must say, at the risk of exposing some sort of reactionary longing for the past, I truly do regret being born too late to enjoy old-style Gentlemens’ Clubs and Smoking Rooms. The whole bourgeois idea is very attractive to me and I wonder where they all went nowadays. Whatever happened to the Liberal Club and the Reform Club, I wonder? Not that my politics are particularly fond of either one of those words.
I find the notion of the old early 20th Century Gentlemens’ Clubs appealing. The idea of sitting around in a warmly-colored room dressed in a fancy smoking jacket, surrounded by fancy leather furniture, a full bar, poker playing and other men discussing economics and politics while smoking cigars and sipping brandy gives me a wonderful Victorian vibe. Imagine if I managed to start up a Communist Club with leather-bound works of Lenin and Stalin on the cherry-stained oak shelves. Imagine what stories could be told in places such as that that couldn’t be told in your average pub, not to mention we would have a fireplace and compare facial hair.
I propose starting up a new Communist Gentlemens’ Club. It will serve food, brandy, cigars and have all-leather furniture with a healthily-colored portrait of Lenin above the fire. It will be called “Gentlemen of the Red Flag.”
What do you say, chaps? Break out the humidors and let’s get it started!
Out of money already—simply amazing. Well by Jove old boy, you’ve really done it this time now, hadn’t you? You didn’t see the rent check coming, no? The utilities almost as much as the rent, they were. The aircon was a pretty penny. Damn these Atlanta summers! Now you’re back to borrowing from Peter to pay Paul once again! Well, enjoy it while you can, old bean, since all students end up in debt.
I have continued to live quietly and frugally in Atlanta, working by night, sleeping by day. I am a helpless prisoner in my own study/bedroom during the hot summer, and exist as a wanderer during the spring, autumn and winter months. Of course, this simple formulation is not to garner sympathy. My position as a writer/recluse does not exclude occasional trips out of state or out of country, nor meeting with friends and foreign correspondents. Apart from frequent so-called “vacation” trips to places such as New Orleans, I customarily travel to Maryland during the Christmas holidays and visit members of the “old gang” on excursions through my beloved Atlanta.
During an era of economic depression in which literary employment is increasingly precarious, the most I have managed to obtain is a vague promise of a spot on a literary presentation forum to present a research paper, a few essay contests and perhaps a small shot at an assistantship. Please note that while all of these adventures are worthwhile and will raise my prestige, none of them pay a single cent. Right now my only dependable source of income is a rapidly diminishing savings reserve.
Despite my slight recognition as both a political and, to a far lesser and more writers-blocked extent, a fiction writer, I have recently become exceptionally critical of my work to the point of paralysis in the field of fiction, all the while writing political tracts more easily than ever. I have the problem of thinking of my fiction and science fiction as too uncompromisingly noncommercial for popular lists, and yet unworthy for preservation as a serious, hardcore literary endeavor. When judged by historians of the new nanotech age, if some shadow of a scholar bothers to write a dissertation on my efforts, they will find my financial situation due to writing is desperately poor, an abject failure even by depression standards. Though, how could it be otherwise for an overtly ambitious yet unpublished writer who spends his time protesting the capitalist system and all its machinations?
Still, what a man does for a living is not the final measure of him. What he is, his essence, is everything. I never ask what a man I have just met does for a living, because it does not interest me. Some are offended, since I do not ask, and when told forget quickly. But the essence of someone—that is wealth that shall persist far beyond death, and it shall be the only wealth I have for many years.
If one looks up volumes written on the subject of coffee, most likely they will take the form of table books or cookbooks with very little instruction, aside from a few attractive pictures of the drink, and perhaps some rudimentary tours of its various flavors, coupled with only a very few frustrating teasers of tips on how to make it. It is difficult to find any detailed exploration of coffee. In addition, aside from books totally centered on the subject, even the best breakfast books contain no explanation of the flavors of various types of coffee, nor do they explain the exact difference between espresso and cappuccino, brewed coffee or French press, or what are the costs and benefits of a Turkish grind.
This is very odd, seeing as how not only has coffee been one of the foundations of global civilization and trade as we know it, but also given the fact that the method of making coffee is the center of many disputes.
In Europe and America it has only a few hundred years of history, contrasted with hundreds of thousands in Africa, and yet as a worldwide commodity coffee is on the level of cereal grains and crude oil. Most of the modern workforce cannot start the day unless they have a cup of coffee. Indonesian students rise in the wee hours to have breakfast consisting of boiled bananas and coffee even from the age of eight. The coffee industry currently employs millions. All this, and yet finding information about it is still a matter of trial and error. When looking through my head for the recipe for my perfect cup of coffee, I find many points which I have had to acquire myself over years of consumption.
First of all, one should never buy pre-ground coffee unless desperate. Buy bags that contain whole beans, since once ground the flavor of coffee begins to dissipate almost immediately. If you’re one of those people lucky or rich enough to have your own grinder, then don’t grind more coffee than you need immediately. If you are like me and prefer more economical methods, have the store grind it for you and store it in Tupperware or some sort of airtight container. Never store in the refrigerator, for I have found that actually saps the flavor quicker, even if inside a container. When buying, never buy coffee beans that appear very oily or have an unpleasant aroma—that means they have been on the shelf for far too long. Some of the more corrupt, Machiavellian or otherwise hassled coffee house employees will still try to sell you these, but I have once or twice had employees refuse on principle and tell me the truth—that the beans were more for display and were several months old.
One should buy African or Latin American coffee beans. Obviously there are different kinds of coffee. Here in America the coffee is so weak one could look down through a full cup and read Ezra Pound’s poetry at the bottom. Meanwhile a cup of European coffee would have your average American dancing on the ceiling. From what I’ve tasted the ones grown in Africa and Latin America, and not say, Southeast Asia, are the strongest and possess the freshest taste. Coffees from Kuna or Hawaii are also very exotic-tasting. The biggest exporters of coffee worldwide are Latin American countries such as Brazil and Columbia, followed closely by Vietnam, whose coffee is simply infamous for being so foul that is has to be drunk with condensed milk. Any coffee has merit to it—Southeast Asian and Vietnamese coffee is economical and can be strong, but there is not much good flavor to it. Most coffee served here comes from Brazil, but I have gone out of my way to buy African coffees, which are usually the most intense.
As a general rule of principle, coffee should not be made in huge quantities, since that makes it harder to measure how many spoonfuls of grounds to put in the filter. This is not an absolute rule however, since I myself posses a 12-cup brewer. Coffee should be made in a glass coffeepot always. Coffee made in one of those heat-insulated tanks is always the most flat and tasteless stuff, while instant pre-ground coffee like that distributed to the workplace tastes of preservatives and cheap artificial flavors. Mound the coffee grounds gently and evenly in the filter basket, leaving no paper on the bottom exposed. Do not compact the coffee or press it down—you want the maximum exposure of water to the surface area of the grounds.
The pot and the cup should be very clean beforehand. I know there are some coffee drinkers who prefer to never wash their favorite cup or their pot, thinking that it somehow makes the coffee taste better. The problem is that all coffees are not the same, and built-up oils will definitely affect the flavor you taste if you decide to try a new species. Believe me, three-week-old traces of dried, stale coffee are not the flavors you want mixing with your freshly-bought Kenyan.
Of course the coffee should be strong and not weak. Why drink coffee if you’re not going to drink it? One should always take the cup to the coffee pot and not the other way around. The coffee should be freshly hot at the moment of being poured into the cup, and one should keep the coffee cooking until the moment it is poured. That said; do not let the coffee stay on the eye longer than is necessary to keep it hot, as leaving a pot on for several hours will noticeably rob it of its flavor.
Drink out of a mug or tall cup, not the flat, wide-mouthed type, since the mug holds more and the wide, stylish cups make the coffee go cold before finishing half of it. Pour the coffee into the cup first, before any sugar, milk or any other additives. It would be better also, unless you are desperately ravenous for a taste of coffee right this moment and cannot wait to cool it with milk, to blow on it and take a sip of black coffee before any additives in order to get the full, raw taste. Some people prefer to stylishly put sugar or milk in first, which hardly makes sense, since until you’ve poured the coffee you can’t know what amount of each to put in. In addition, there seem to be a great deal of people who prefer to dump milk or cream in their coffee before any sugar. The reason for this escapes me, since milk cools down the coffee and makes any sugar added afterwards that much harder to dissolve. Better to add any sugar first, while the coffee is still black and hot, so that it can dissolve quicker, and finish off with milk or creamer and a thorough stirring.
Health effects must be addressed here, since most of the population, while remaining somehow firmly convinced that tea of all sorts is simply wonderful for you, have no such conviction when it comes to the verdict of coffee. Let me stress that time and time again it has been found that coffee, caffeinated or not, has no link to heart disease, stroke or hypertension, even with those drinking more than four to six cups a day. No link has been found between it and high blood pressure, nor with high cholesterol levels. Coffee does not make you gain weight unless taken with a huge amount of sugar (which obviously can be said for any sort of food whatsoever) nor does it help you lose weight. No link with cancer has been found at any site on the human body either, except to lower the risk of colon cancer, for obvious reasons.
It is worth paying attention to such details as the grind of one’s coffee beans, so one can make sure to squeeze out the right number of strong cups that the purchased amount ought to represent. The typical drip grind is the very coarse grind you will find in most instant and pre-ground coffees. This makes the coffee about the size of small pebbles, and makes for a weaker brew. The finest grind of all, even finer than espresso and only available upon special request at coffee houses, is the Turkish grind. It grinds the coffee down so fine as to look like black powder, and render it so light that a sneeze in the wrong direction could be disastrous.
Different methods of brewing need different grinds, but there is no absolute rule of course. It also depends on how strong you want your coffee to be. A finer grind will expose more surface area to the hot water and give much stronger flavor, but oversaturation and bitterness can result. Coffee made for a regular drip brewer, unless one is a seasoned vet, should be about the roughness of table sugar. Espresso requires an extremely fine grind, only one notch in coarseness above the Turkish.
The “French press” is a glass pot with a lever that cooks coffee out of beans the same way tea is steeped out of tea leaves. The French press has no strainer or filters to separate the grounds from the water, only a lever that pushes the grounds to the bottom. This lets it infuse with the water properly. You will want to grind your coffee very course for this method. If you grind too fine, not only will you have unreasonably strong coffee, it will also be impossible to push the lever down and press the grounds to the bottom if the grind is too fine and you’ll end up drinking powdered grounds.
A French press is a must for someone who likes their coffee very strong, but it must be mentioned that it would be easy to abuse this method. A few cups of French press coffee will send the average drinker to a wide-eyed, hand-shaking state of caffeine high. The taste is simply exquisite however, since the French press does not filter out the oils and fats of coffee beans, while your paper filters and drip-brewers absorb them. Hence the oil spots on the top and the deeper, richer flavor. A French press should be enjoyed in moderation for all except those who wish to explore a yet-unforeseen level of horrendous caffeine addiction. That said, a French press is a well-kept secret that can be requested at almost all coffee houses, and is usually very cheap, though they never seem to put it on the menu.
A lot of these tips are controversial among coffee fanatics, including the question of whether sugar should be added to coffee at all, since coffee is meant to be bitter, but these disputes only highlight how commonplace and passion-inducing the whole art and practice of coffee-drinking has become.
Filed under: Oddities
I myself have never experienced the bowels of hell, but if I had, I would surmise it feels very close to what it felt like to go to Dr. Y’s class every day. I reckon that attending this class could hardly be considered much more hospitable than thumbscrews, the rack or burning at the stake, nor could it be considered much more educational. I deeply regret not dropping the class, which I should have done from the first day. But I foolishly believed with a little hard work I could overcome the lack of structure and teach myself—I was horribly, horribly wrong.
Imagine if you will, what it feels like to receive a 31-point quiz, to know the answers of the first eight and to take your time in answering them, not knowing and not being told how much time you had to complete it, and also not knowing that the last two questions are worth 21 points until you finally see them, while the ones you already answered were worth practically nothing. Imagine abruptly being told you had one minute left and not completing those questions that are worth the bulk of the points, thus failing the quiz. This is what Dr. Y’s class is like every single day.
Imagine renting a movie with your own money and taking the time to carefully prepare a presentation on the film, which ends up not happening. Imagine never knowing when something is due, and re-marking your calendar to the point of writing a novel on it. Imagine never getting answers to your emails. Imagine not following the syllabus at all. Imagine dreading going to class and feeling euphoric relief when it lets out. Imagine feeling that a call-out of your name during class is as the executioner calling the condemned to stand against the wall with a cigarette and blindfold. This is what Dr. Y’s class is like three days a week.
That is why I would not recommend this class to anyone, any more than I would recommend withdrawing one’s life savings from an ATM and burning it. I have easily passed 3000-level classes with an A grade, and nevertheless have found this the single hardest class of my entire college career. At this point the entire contribution of this class to my education has been as a warning to never be afraid to use those W’s.
Filed under: Common Sense, Enver Hoxha, Imperialism, Joseph Stalin, Khrushchevism/ Brezhnevism, Lies & Propaganda, Maoism, Marxism-Leninism, Myth-Busting, Polemics & Refutations, Revisionism, Social-Imperialism, The 5 Heads
This article is not my work. It was originally printed in the journal of the ICMLPO (Unity & Struggle) in the May 2008 issue #16. It was published under the title “Concerning Certain Distortions of Stalin’s Work and L. Martens Revisionist View of Socialism.” You can find it here: http://anasintaxi-en.blogspot.com/search/label/Ludo%20Martens. It appears here with no alteration.
Issue Cover
It has been more than ten years since the book “Another view of Stalin” by Ludo Martens was published. This book was hailed by many unsuspected and well intentioned communists all over the world as an “excellent pro-Stalin book”. However, at the same time a number of Khruschevian revisionist and opportunist parties that have traditionally adopted an anti-Stalinist line advertised and promoted the book in many ways. Taking into account the virtually unchanged ideological and political line of all these parties, Marxists-Leninists-Stalinists should be suspicious about the “sudden” urge to publish a book about Stalin. Indeed, a careful look at the contents of this book we will find out that, at least, in three very fundamental questions, the answers to which delineate Marxists-Leninists-Stalinists from Khrushchevian revisionists, Martens maintains essentially revisionist views.
Question of Stalin: The question of Stalin, that is, the revolutionary theoretical and practical work of the great communist leader of the world proletariat and classic of Marxism, has been, since the middle of 1920s, at the centre of a sharp ideological-political struggle between the revolutionary communists and all kinds of counter-revolutionaries (social democrats, Trotskyites, anarchists, titoists, Kruschevians and others). All the fundamental issues of socialism and the revolution come down to this. It marks the boundary that separates the real Marxists-Leninists and all kinds of revisionists and opportunists.
In the first and most important question of the revolutionary movement, the question of Stalin, to which all the fundamental issues of socialism and the revolution come down to, Ludo Martens propagates, not the crude anti-Stalinism of Khrushchev, but a more refined and camouflaged version that appeared in the communist movement between the mid-50’s and the beginning of 60’s, namely the “mistakes’ theory”. The latter is usually comes from various “anti-Khrushchevian” opportunists and it is formulated in certain clichι phrases such as: “Stalin was great but he made mistakes”. It is exactly this “mistakes’ theory”, of an allegedly “left orientation”, that is adopted by L. Martens in his “criticisms” of Stalin and exposed in the chapter “Weaknesses in the struggle against opportunism”.
In this context, Ludo Martens blames Stalin that “this struggle was not done to the extent that was necessary”, that “he was not able to formulate a consistent theory explaining how classes and the class struggle persist in a socialist society”(!) that he “had not completely understood that after the disappearance of the economic basis of capitalist and feudal exploitation, that there would still exist in the Soviet Union fertile ground for bourgeois currents”(!), that Stalin “was not able to formulate a theory about the struggle between the two lines in the Party” and “did not appreciate” the dangers of “bureaucracy and technocratism” and many other things that Stalin “was not able to do…,understand” etc.
But if there was any grain of truth in any these accusations related to Stalin’s views on the most fundamental question of the revolutionary communist movement, namely the one of socialism-communism, any person of good intentions would ask the following: in which, then, questions Stalin developed Marxism-Leninism further if not in this question and how can he be considered a classic of Marxism since he “committed”, according to his critics, so grave “mistakes” in such fundamental, theoretical and practical, questions of the communist movement?
Question of socialism: Stalin, as a Marxist, had, first and most importantly, a scientific view of socialism and, secondly, approached the question of the construction of socialism-communism in a materialistic, historic-dialectic way in contrast to all the representatives of the various bourgeois-revisionist currents. He understood the construction of socialism – the first stage of the communist society which constitutes a period of class struggle that is inevitable as long as classes still exist during which the dictatorship of the proletariat is absolutely necessary” (Lenin) – as a long process of revolutionary transformations that passes through different phases of historical development wherein a class struggle is waged in all levels that becomes sharper as the construction of socialism proceeds. The transition period from capitalism to communism, as Lenin pointed out, “cannot be but a period of struggle between the dying capitalism and the newborn communism or in other words: between the defeated but not yet liquidated capitalism and the, new born but still very weak, communism”.
Ludo Martens, as mentioned above, blames Stalin that “he was not able to formulate a consistent theory explaining how classes and the class struggle persist in a socialist society”.
First of all, the theory of the “persistence of classes” in socialism even after its economic basis has been constructed, is an anti-Marxist, bourgeois theory because: in the first place, it contains the bourgeois revisionist view of socialism according to which the exploiting classes and the proletariat will be preserved; in the second place it revises the Marxist-Leninist theory of the classes when it maintains that there can be exploiting classes without private property, that is, after the construction of socialism’s economic basis and in the third place it completely contradicts the final goal of the revolutionary communist movement which is the liquidation of all exploiting classes in socialism and, subsequently, of all classes in communism.
Contrary to the groundless attack of Martens, it is obvious that Stalin, as a Marxist, neither had formulated, nor could he have done so, a theory on “how classes persist in a socialist society”, that is, a bourgeois-revisionist theory because it would directly oppose the theory of scientific socialism-communism. On the contrary, he followed and put into practise the Marxist theory on the liquidation of the exploiting classes in socialism and, subsequently, of all the classes in communism. This liquidation proceeds gradually and it is completed together with the construction of the economic basis of socialism, that is, with the establishment of the social ownership on the means of production in the form of state- and kolkhoz-cooperative property and the transition to the unified type of communist property.
Persistence of the exploiting classes in socialism after the construction of its economic basis? By purporting the theory “on how the classes persist in a socialist society”, L. Martens doesn’t specify either which classes (exploiting or not) or which exactly historical stage of the socialist society (before or after the construction of its economic basis) he is referring to; this is an characteristic example of the anti-historical, anti-dialectic approach of socialism. It is obvious, however, that he means the persistence of the exploiting classes after the construction of its economic basis, and concerning the Soviet Union, in particular, he refers to the phase after the Constitution of 1936 was voted when Stalin pointed out that in this phase “all the exploiting classes were liquidated, leaving the working class, the peasants and the intellectuals” (I.V. Stalin “Questions of Leninism).
Stalin in his report on the Draft Constitution of USSR (1936), having scientifically analyzed the new economic, social, class reality of the socialist Soviet Union, rightly concluded that the country’s class structure had changed since the 1924 the year the then Soviet Constitution was established: “The landlord class, as you know, had already been eliminated as a result of the victorious conclusion of the Civil War. As for the other exploiting classes, they have shared the fate of the landlord class. The capitalist class in the sphere of industry has ceased to exist. The kulak class in the sphere of agriculture has ceased to exist. And the merchants and profiteers in the sphere of trade have ceased to exist. Thus all the exploiting classes have now been eliminated. There remains the working class. There remain the peasants. There remains the intelligentsia”.
The above extract from the report should convince even the most recalcitrant opportunist that Stalin doesn’t talk about “absence of classes” or “elimination of classes” in the Soviet Union of that period but only about elimination of the exploiting classes, of landlords, capitalists, kulaks, merchants-profiteers whereas the classes of workers, the peasants, and intelligentsia remained.
It is necessary to emphasize that Stalin’s analysis of the Soviet Union’s society at that time is the only one carried out on Marxist lines and its scientific conclusion is absolutely correct, that exploiting and antagonistic classes neither existed nor could exist since they had been deprived of the means of production: there are no that exploiting and antagonistic classes without the existence of capitalist property on the means of production. “With the term bourgeois class we mean the class of modern capitalists who own the means of social production and exploit wage labour. With the term proletariat we mean the class of modern wage labourers who sell their labour power in order to survive since they don’t possess no means of production at all” (Engels).
In the Soviet Union of that period, there were no antagonistic classes but remnants of exploiting classes and the new bourgeois elements that inevitably appear during the transition period from capitalism to communism. Of course, it is perfectly possible that the numerous remnants of the exploiting classes and the bourgeois elements (which are not classes according to the Marxist since they had lost their domination in the means of production) can form illegal organisations and wage their struggle against socialism-communism in a coordinated way and in increasingly acute forms.
It is therefore obvious that when the revisionist L. Martens attacks Stalin blaming him that he hasn’t formulated a “theory on how the classes persist” in socialism, in essence, he criticises him for applying the Marxist theory on liquidation of the exploiting classes in the course of socialist construction instead of the bourgeois theory on the “persistence of the classes” (in other words, of the exploiting classes)!
The class struggle during socialism. L. Martens falsely claims that Stalin didn’t formulate a theory explaining “how class struggle persist in a socialist society” when, as known to everybody, the theory maintaining the continuation of class struggle in socialism had already had already been enunciated by Lenin – “the dictatorship of the proletariat is period of class struggle which is inevitable as long the classes are not liquidated” – and it was defended and further developed by Stalin who stressed that “the progress we make, the more successes we achieve, the sharper forms of struggle these remnants (of the exploiting classes) will adopt, the more harm they are going to cause to the Soviet State, the more desperate methods of struggle they are going to employ, as the last resort of people doomed to disappear”.
Consequently, the further development of the theory maintaining the continuation of class struggle in socialism by Stalin lies in the thesis that the more socialist construction advances, the sharper the class struggle becomes, a thesis that was fully confirmed by the historical course of USSR when, following Stalin’s death, the dictatorship of the proletariat was overthrown.
When the opportunist L. Martens claims that Stalin “thought that the class struggle in the ideological sphere would continue for a long time”, he distorts his thesis even more: first because he restricts the class struggle only in the ideological sphere and second because he rejects the thesis of the sharpening of the class struggle with the advance of socialist construction.
But this is not sufficient for L. Martens since, as we saw, he makes the provocatively false claim that Stalin allegedly didn’t even have a theory on “how class struggle persist in a socialist society”, obviously implying that he allegedly deviated from Leninism, that is, he had abandoned the theory of class struggle already formulated by Lenin!
Another claim made by L. Martens is that “this struggle was not done to the extent that was necessary” and that “after 1945, the struggle against opportunism was restricted to the highest circles of the Party”, rendering, thus, Stalin responsible for the appearance of revisionism which is refuted by the activity of the Bolshevik Party during that period: first, during the war and afterwards, the Bolshevik Party headed by Stalin waged a continuous ideological-political struggle against the bourgeois-revisionist ideology and the various degenerate phenomena; there are the well-known party decisions and wide discussions held on questions of art-literature (1946), philosophy (1943 and 1947), political economy (1947-1952), music (1948), linguistics (1950) etc. Second, the revisionist counter-revolution didn’t prevail during Stalin’s lifetime but after his death. Stalin’s great historical contribution to the construction of socialism lies in the scientific analysis of the competitive and the non-competitive contradictions in the soviet socialist society and the successful and victorious waging of the class struggle against the internal and external enemies, preventing thus the restoration of capitalism.
We conclude with two brief observations: the one has to do with Martens’ claim that Stalin “was not able to formulate a theory about the struggle between the two lines in the Party” and the other with the claim that he “had not completely understood the dangers emanating from bureaucracy”. Regarding the first claim, we note that Stalin as a Marxist could have never formulated a revisionist theory “about the struggle between the two lines in the Party” which presupposes the existence of two factions in a party and, as a result, leads to the negation of the revolutionary party of a new type defended by Stalin. A revolutionary, communist party has only one line: the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist line and fights all revisionist, opportunist deviations. As for the second claim, there is nothing to be said except that it emits the unpleasant odour of Trotskyism.
The question of the dictatorship of the proletariat. As all the “anti-Khrushchevian” versions of contemporary revisionism, Ludo Martens doesn’t raise the issue of the overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat after Stalin’s death and in combination with the 20th Congress of the CPSU – the first and absolutely necessary condition for the gradual restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union. It is more than obvious of every Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist that the open, official domination of the Khrushchevian revisionist counter-revolution was preceded by the violent overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat and its replacement with a bourgeois-revisionist dictatorship. Domination of the Khrushchevian revisionist is tantamount to the overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the ousting of the working class from power, the beginning of the capitalist restoration. The overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat was ratified by the 20th Congress and the counter-revolutionary, social-democratic line it adopted.
Question of the capitalist restoration. L.Martens, just like the “K”KE leadership, regards the period of Khrushchev-Brezhnev, the period of capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union, as a period of “socialist construction” and believes that the breach with socialism took place in the Gorbachev era. He writes that it is only the 28th Congress, on July 1990, that “clearly affirms a rupture with socialism and a return to capitalism”. At the end of his book, after having quoted an excerpt from the “History of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of the USSR” in which, among others, is mentioned that “it is from within that fortresses are more easily captured”, Martens makes the following comment: “thus Stalin had foreseen what would happen to the Soviet Union the day a Gorbachev or a Yeltsin entered the Politburo”. This comment is quite indicative and revealing because it confirms the fact that L. Martens is identified with “K”KE leadership on this important issue.
But the communists, the Marxists-Leninists-Stalinists, know very well that the fortress was captured from within not in the time of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who are anyway legal “heirs” of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, but almost 40 years earlier, after Stalin’s death, by the agents of international imperialism Khrushchev, Mikoyan, Brezhnev, Kuusinen, Suslov and others. Moreover, contrary to the claims of the Belgian revisionist “the breach with socialism” – first in the level of political power, and subsequently in other levels – didn’t take place in the 28th Congress (1990) but shortly after Stalin’s death and this breach was officially inaugurated in the 20th Congress which paved the way for the gradual liquidation of the socialist productive relations, through the introduction of capitalist reforms, and restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union.
There is nothing paradoxical that the parties of Khruschevian revisionism – including “K”KE – have published and promoted the book of the Belgian revisionist L. Martens. Essentially, it expresses their own views on the questions of Stalin, socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Without abandoning any of these views, they found an opportunity to wear a “pro-stalin” mask. The “K”KE in particular, was unmistakeably carrying out its class mission – as it was when it funded the publication of D. Volgogonov’s anti-Stalinist abortion “Triumph and tragedy” in 1989 – assigned one of its chief ideologues, Eleni Bellou, to conclude the book review in “Rizospastis” with a lengthy presentation of the infamous “mistakes theory”.
Even within the current of contemporary revisionism – expressed in the “mistakes theory” – the views L. Martens are clinging to the right. This is shown by the criticism that these views received by a party that belongs to the same ideological current as L. Martens’ Workers’ Party of Belgium, namely the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD). Stefan Engel writes:
”To pose the question of power – dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat – is tantamount, for L. Martens, to the “scholastic restriction of reality. In this way, he rejects the ABC of Marxism. Lenin clearly emphasized that “there can be nothing intermediate between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Any dream for something else is a petty bourgeois attitude. The vacillating character of the petty bourgeois thinking is typical for neorevisionism, When Gorbachev appeared in 1985, the petty bourgeois immediately promoted him. In total euphoria, L.Martens got attached to this current writing, in 1991, that “in this ideological confusion comrade Gorbachev emerged; he unleashed himself like a hurricane all over the hibernating country to steer up the dormant consciousness of the people” (Ludo Martens, “The USSR and the velvet counter-revolution”).
“The bedazzled L. Martens used this chance in order to introduce a new appraisal for the Soviet Union after 1956 and to revise the programmatic basis of the Workers’ Party of Belgium declaring that: ”New appraisal means also to take into account that the economic basis and the core of the political structure remained socialist despite the influence of the dominant revisionism. New appraisal means, finally, to take into account the possibility of a positive development, of a Marxist-Leninist rebirth”(ibid)
“When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, neorevisionists regarded Gorbachev as the main culprit. But Gorbachev didn’t bring the restoration of capitalism, as the Workers’ Party of Belgium argues. Rather, it is the restoration of capitalism itself that brought Gorbachev. He completed the capitalist restoration and took openly the side of the international social democracy. Neorevisionism covers up the fact that the restoration of capitalism started in Khrushchev’s time”.
“According to L. Martens: it is possible today to get over the divisions among the Marxist-Leninist parties, broken up in pro-Soviet, pro-Chinese, pro-Albanian and pro-Cuban factions and achieve their re-unification”. Such a conglomeration is doomed to fail” (Stefan Engel: Der Kampf um die Demkweise in der Arbeiterbewengung, Essen)
“Concerning the defeat of socialism, the contemporary revisionists reproduced the bourgeois propaganda: For Erich Honecker, it was “the greatest defeat of the worker’s movement in global scale”, for the former president of the German Communist Party Herbert Mis it was “the greatest defeat of socialism” and for the president of Workers’ Party of Belgium Ludo Martens it was “an important regression for the communist and progressive forces al over the world” (Stefan Engel: Der Kampf um die Demkweise in der Arbeiterbewengung, Essen).
In a speech in Wuppertall (May 9th, 2002) Stefan Engel underlines that: “A variety of multi-colored currents of revisionism exists all of which we have summed up under the term neo-revisionism.
Thus the leader of the Party of Labor of Belgium (PTB), Ludo Martens, in an adventurous explanation, says on the times subsequent to the Twentieth CPSU Party Congress:
This great strength of the socialist system could still be felt even when the party leadership chose the path of revisionism, that is, the path of the progressing renunciation of Marxism-Leninism. In 1975, the Soviet Union had reached the peak of its power …, but this power was already thoroughly undermined by the ideological and political currents which were soon to destroy it. Breshnevism is the continuation of a great strength inherited by Stalin and, simultaneously, an ideological and political degeneration which deepened progressively and which resulted in the complete destruction of socialism under Gorbachev. (“Leonid I. Brezhnev and the National-Democratic Revolution,” p. 1; our translation from the German)
What an absurd theory!
On the one hand, the CPSU party leadership is said to gave gone the path of revisionism since 1956. On the other hand, the Soviet Union, in spite of this, could remain a socialist country and even gain strength until 1975. This means: socialism can exist and take a positive development even on the basis of revisionism.
This is not a Marxist-Leninist analysis, this is saying farewell to Marxism-Leninism, Mr. Martens!”
Concluding, we want to underline once again that Ludo Martens is a neorevisionist, anti-Stalinist (“mistakes’ theory”) that has developed as a prima ballerina of the international Khruschevian revisionism and supports counter-revolutionary reactonary positions such as that “Parties who used to belong to different tendencies, who support the positions of Mao Zedong or Brezhnev, of Che Guevara or Enver Hoxha, can unite on the basis of Marxism-Leninism, proletarian internationalism and the struggle against revisionism” (Speech of Ludo Martens in Leningrand Conference, 1997).
Movement for the Reorganisation of the
Communist Party of Greece (1918-55)
Filed under: Albania, Countries, Enver Hoxha, Life in Socialist Countries, Maoism, Marxism-Leninism, Revisionism, Science, The 5 Heads
Some readers of this blog may be wondering about the man in the display banner. Who is this person? Why is he so important I would put him there? Even further, why is he important enough to have an entire communist ideology named after him?
The man is Enver Hoxha, the Marxist-Leninist leader of Albania and the last Marxist-Leninist head of state. He was the resolute defender of proletarian socialism, the leader of the International Communist Movement and of the anti-revisionist struggle, the great friend of the oppressed peoples and the architect of the revolution and socialist construction in Albania.
Here are a few of the main reasons I uphold Enver Hoxha, concisely explained in more or less chronological order:
- Hoxha remained a loyal Marxist-Leninist to the end of his life.
- Hoxha defeated Mussolini’s fascist forces and lead the Albanian liberation movement to victory against occupation and colonialism.
- Hoxha led the world’s longest-lasting and most advanced socialist state for almost 40 years.
- Socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat were established under Hoxha’s rule. His economic revolution was even more advanced than Stalin’s, with even more working class control over production centers.
- Albania was industrialized and turned into an almost entirely self-sufficient country, despite being the poorest and most backward nation in Europe (it was a tribal society until the 50s) and being a fascist colony with only 1.5 million people.
- Life expectancy under Hoxha went from 32 in the tribal days to 76.
The Five Heads
- Illiteracy before Hoxha was 90-95% in 1939, which by 1950 went down to 30% and by 1985 was equal to that of the United States.
- Women’s rights were increased a thousand fold under Hoxha.
- Tribal warfare and honor killings were ended.
- Hoxha consistently fought against imperialism and particularly U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, Cuba, Indonesia, Africa, Latin America and everywhere else.
- Hoxha was the most consistent fighter against revisionism the world has ever known, exposing revisionism wherever it might be, from within his own party to the Soviet Union, China, Korea, Cuba, Yugoslavia, Italy and onwards. He exposed revisionism on principle even when it was in his best interests to keep his mouth shut, such as with China and the Soviet Union.
- Hoxha made an in-depth analysis of imperialism and social-imperialism, and explained in numerous works the connection between the two.
- Hoxha was the first socialist leader to recognize Khrushchev’s revisionism and was the first to publically speak out against it.
- Hoxha consistently fought against the renegade Tito and the Yugoslav revisionists.
- Hoxha fought against the Greek monarcho-fascists.
- Hoxha defeated coup attempts by the US, Tito, the Soviets and the Greeks.
- Hoxha was the first, even before Mao, to offer a correct analysis of Khrushchev’s invasion of Hungary.
- Hoxha was the first to offer an analysis of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia as well.
- Although he originally supported it, Hoxha later spoke out against the Cultural Revolution as anti-Marxist after it became clear it was a struggle between rightist factions.
- Hoxha recognized the nature of the Chinese state and, though he had spent decades praising it, decided to bravely push forward with his findings once and for all and declare Maoism a revisionist ideology.
- Hoxha spoke out against the “Three Worlds Theory.”
- Hoxha refuted the idea put forward by Mao that Soviet social-imperialism was somehow “more dangerous” than U.S. Imperialism.
- Hoxha was the first to speak out against Eurocommunism and wrote an entire volume refuting it.
- Hoxha condemned Nixon’s visit to Beijing and China’s collaboration with US imperialism.
- Hoxha condemned the fascist coup in Chile by Pinochet and the mass slaughter of communists in Indonesia by US imperialism.
- Hoxha condemned the genocidal acts in Kosova by Tito.
- Hoxha created an International based solely on his own prestige.
- Hoxha developed Marxism-Leninism further by exposing where revisionism comes from and how it can be fought.
I uphold Hoxha because he was and is the most correct communist of the modern age.
Filed under: Common Sense, Enver Hoxha, Lies & Propaganda, Maoism, Marxism-Leninism, Myth-Busting, Polemics & Refutations, Revisionism, The 5 Heads | Tags: Enver Hoxha, Hoxhaism, Mao Tsetung, Mao vs. Hoxha, Mao Zedong, MIM
Maoists have long tried to separate themselves from Mao’s reactionary and revisionist ideas, from the role of the peasantry to the role of mass organizations, from collaboration with the bourgeoisie in building socialism to the counterrevolutionary actions of Cultural Revolution, and finally, from the most infamous of ideas, the “Three Worlds Theory.”
Within the revisionist tendency of Maoism, there are presently two current lines of thought. One of those is the more “hardline” of the Maoist movement, the half that keeps the mask of Marxism-Leninism firmly planted on its revisionist face, though it usually refers to itself by some other name, usually either “Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Tsetung-Thought,” or more recently “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism,” or simply “Maoism.” In this category are most of the various Maoist parties, though as eclectic as Maoism is, no two of them are exactly alike in practice or in political line. Still, they manage to keep up the illusion quite well. The people in this category, most of them anyway, usually uphold the classic Marxist-Leninist leaders. They usually also pay token support to Stalin, though that has been fading in recent years, which I’ll go into some other time. It is in this category that the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM) belongs. The other current line of thought residing in Maoism is the “nutty” sort of Maoist, the ones who take all of Mao’s revisionist theories to their logical conclusion. It is in this category that the Maoist Internationalist Movement (or MIM) belongs.
Both trends, though separate and antagonistic, have a great deal in common. They both uphold the reactionary anti-Leninist phenomenon of the so-called “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (which Enver Hoxha once aptly described as “neither Great, nor Proletarian, nor Cultural, nor a Revolution”) as “the farthest advance of socialism in human history.” Both depart from the line of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin, to say nothing of Hoxha’s developments. Both criticize the stance taken by Hoxha against revisionism from opportunist standpoints. Most notably for the purposes of this article however, is that both trends have an absolutely seething, rabid, fanatical hatred for Enver Hoxha and the Albanian Party of Labor. Let’s have a look at what they say.
Hoxhaites uphold Albanian socialism and the leader of the Albanian Communist Party, Enver Hoxha.
Well, this is true at least, except that the Albanian Party of Labor was only called the Albanian Communist Party until about the forties, when Stalin himself suggested the new name. It is worth saying here that the use of the word “Hoxhaite” is clearly meant as pointless slander, since ending any ideology with “-ite” is meant as an insult because of association with “Trotskyite.” The proper name for the ideology is “Hoxhaist” or “Hoxhaism,” despite what Third-World nutters say, although we consider and call ourselves “Marxist-Leninists.”
The line between “Hoxhaites” and “Stalinists” is blurring in recent years, as is their separation from Castro and Kim.
Actually, Mao’s ideas of a hybrid state-capitalist “socialist” state are still alive these days in Cuba and North Korea. Where this accusation of us being the same as them comes from, I have no idea, since though Hoxha was pro-Kim in the 50s (so was Mao, as a note), he later realized the revisionist nature of the DPRK and called him a “megalomaniac with a cult of personality yet unforeseen” in his Reflections on China diary. Not to mention his identification of Cuba as being firmly planted in the revisionist camp on the pro-Soviet side, which no one will deny. Kim Il-Sung was also part of the “Non-Aligned Movement” with the renegade Marshal Tito and the Yugoslav revisionists, which damn near half of Hoxha’s writings are spent blasting. Castro was a puppet of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, who Hoxha’s writings also analyze thoroughly, not to mention the Albanian army used to train using dummies with Khrushchev and Brezhnev’s faces on them as bayonet targets. Hoxha describes Castro as a “progressive democratic leader,” but not a Marxist-Leninist. Had MIM bothered to actually read his Selected Works, they might know that.
All of the writings and speeches of Castro and both Kims indicate the truth: socialism and Marxism-Leninism were never practiced in either country, since they reject the dictatorship of the proletariat and the hegemony of the proletariat, much like the populist rule of Mao Zedong.
Hoxha claimed public unity with Mao until the latter’s death in 1976. Throughout the 1960s and till Mao’s death, Hoxha referred to China as undergoing “socialist construction” and he referred to Mao as a “Marxist-Leninist.”
Despite the fact that MIM might have a heart attack from sheer shock when it hears this truly startling revelation, not everyone on the planet has a completely correct line on every issue right from the beginning, and—though this is CERTAINLY departing from Marxism and science in general to say so—things do occasionally change. Dialectics teaches us that nothing ever stops developing or changing, there is no “total and final” development.
Hoxha was pro-Mao for many years, this is true, and particularly after Mao came out against Khrushchev openly (four years after Hoxha, I might add). But the truth is that he had certain contradictions with the Chinese even from the start. Again, this is incredibly obvious if you read his Selected Works.
In addition, not everything is clear right from the start. Information, evidence and data are needed in order to perform a dialectic process. Really, if MIM would read a little it might learn a thing or two. Hoxha addresses the fact that he was wrong about China, just as he was wrong about the USSR after 1956, throughout the whole of his magnum opus “Imperialism & the Revolution.”
After Mao died and Albania lost its aid from China, Hoxha attacked Mao’s legacy that he used to uphold.
Interesting formulation indeed! Apparently Hoxha is a narrow opportunist, eh? So this must mean while he was still getting aid from China, Hoxha praised Mao to the high heavens and shows no contradictions with them? I would put forward that his essays in Volume III and IV of his works say otherwise. Here are a few for your own reading pleasure:
“The Revolutionary Communists Expect China to Come Out Openly Against Khrushchevite Revisionism” – April 3, 1962
“The Stands of the Chinese Comrades are Improper in Several Directions” – Dec. 24, 1962.
“The Struggle Against Khrushchevism Must Not Be Diverted Into Territorial Claims” – Aug. 22, 1964.
“The Chinese Idea About An Anti-Imperialist Front Including Even the Modern Revisionists is Anti-Leninist” – Oct. 15, 1964.
“In No Way Can We Reconcile Ourselves To These Views of Chou En-Lai” – Oct. 31, 1964.
“The Chinese Want To Impose Their Opinions On Us” – Nov. 3, 1964.
“The Defeat of Chou En-Lai In Moscow” – Nov. 21, 1964.
“Opportunist Tactic of the Chinese Comrades” – Feb. 3, 1965.
Even more notably, in Volume IV:
“Some Preliminary Ideas About the Chinese Proletarian Cultural Revolution” – Oct. 14, 1966
“Reflections On the Cultural Revolution. Anarchy Cannot Be Combated With Anarchy” – April 28, 1967.
“It Is Not Right to receive Nixon in Beijing. We Do Not Support It.” – Aug. 6, 1971.
“Nixon’s Journey to China, The Sino-American Talks, the Final Communique” – March 21, 1972.
MIM’s statement is even historically inaccurate, since all aid to Albania was stopped during the Cultural Revolution, far before “Imperialism & the Revolution” was published.
In 1979, Hoxha publicly criticized the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
God forbid. The Holy Cultural Revolution which all Maoists worship.
First off, it is obvious the Cultural Revolution was simply great in conception—workers checking the Party against revisionism! But in its practical execution became an adventurist disaster characterized by opportunistic youths & students rather than the working class. Marxism-Leninism was never the guiding force, but rather the cult of Mao, who eventually lost control and called in the PLA to take control of all the Party organizations and dissolve the Red Guards. The GPCR also killed whatever was left of the CCP.
New Democracy was a state-capitalist disaster that never led to the socialist revolution. Mao’s revisionism later manifested itself more severely when he announced the “Three World Theory” and allied China with the reactionary bourgeoisie of a number of countries throughout the so-called “Third World,” even down to Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger, CIA puppets like Mobutu Seko and anti-communist butchers like Augusto Pinochet, whom Mao’s China was the first to recognize.
As Comrade Hoxha observed, Mao made some very characteristically un-Marxist theoretical stands, which combined traditional Chinese philosophy with bourgeois democracy; such as his political pluralism, his thesis that socialism can be built on the collaboration of all classes, and his cyclical interpretation of society and revolution which is in direct contradiction to the science of dialectical materialism.
The unfolding of revisionist lines in China began from the start, with particular regard to the liquidation, by the mid-fifties, of the Marxist-Leninist grouping headed by Kao Kang and the subsequent launching of the “Great Leap Forward”—a revisionist campaign initiated by Mao in alliance with the Chinese comprador bourgeoisie in order to mobilize the peasantry into conflict with the national bourgeoisie headed by Liu Shao-chi.
Instead of “Marxist-Leninist” as Hoxha earlier called Mao, Hoxha said that Mao was a “progressive figure” and “nationalist.”
I agree with that formulation. A good book to read for a thorough analysis of Mao’s revisionism is “Class Struggles In China” by Bill Bland.
Hoxha said it was impossible for a bourgeoisie to exist in the party unless the party was revisionist and tolerated the bourgeoisie; hence he opposed Mao’s theses and the reason for a Cultural Revolution, which Albania never had.
This is perhaps the strangest sentence by MIM, seeing as how nothing in it is true—literally nothing. Hoxha never said it was impossible for a bourgeoisie to exist within the party, Hoxha initiallyy supported the GPCR until he learned it was a shallow power struggle between the comprador and national bourgeoisie factions headed by Mao Zedong and Liu Shao-Chi respectively, and Albania did in fact, have a Cultural Revolution.
It most certainly is a tenet of Hoxhaism that bourgeoisie can manifest inside the Communist Party, particularly when you let them in as Mao did. Revisionists do not always “sneak in” from outside the Party. Some do, no doubt. But others are generated from inside, as any good Marxist-Leninist (and no, not just Mao, and not Mao first), knows very well. Hoxha’s ideology preserves Marxism-Leninism rather than throwing it out the window in exchange for an ideology that assures us that under communism the proletariat and the bourgeoisie can coexist. This is Maoism.
In practice, Hoxha’s own hand-picked successor Ramiz Alia restored open, traditional capitalism in Albania;
It would take far too much space to give a true timeline of how capitalism was restored in Albania, but it is not so cut-and-dry and MIM makes it out to be. Alia did loosen the grip of the PPSH on Albania quite a bit, but did not suddenly, overnight and metaphysically “restore open capitalism.”
Even if they were right, and Alia did such a thing, MIM seems to think people should be able to recognize this instantaneously, as if class struggle in socialist society is conducted in an obvious cowboy-and-Indian way where everybody knows who the “good guys” and “bad guys” are. Their whole argument boils down to, “They lost, therefore they must be wrong.” Pitiful.
yet, Hoxhaites have still failed to draw any correct scientific conclusions about who was correct: Mao or Hoxha.
What? If they are “Hoxhaites,” as MIM so chauvinistically put it, wouldn’t they have already arrived at the conclusion that Hoxha was right (not that their caricature of him is in any way accurate)? Otherwise, how could they be called Hoxhaists? MIM literally just contradicted itself in one sentence.
They fail to say, “yes, look at Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Alia: they were all inside parties alleging to be communist, so how can we deny Mao’s thesis about a bourgeoisie in the party?” It can still be said that Hoxhaites talk about class struggle under socialism, but without a bourgeoisie!
Let’s start with the idea that Mao developed the idea of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. As can easily be shown, this concept was originally put forward by Lenin and Stalin. Was Mao the first one to put forward the term “the new bourgeoisie?” Let’s take a gander.
“Lenin also stated that ‘the new bourgeoisie’ was ‘arising from among our Soviet government employees.’” (Lenin, Collected Works, Chinese ed., Vol. 29, p. 162. Quoted in Lin, Biao. Report to the Ninth National Congress of the Communist Party of China. English ed. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, April 14, 1969.)
OK, so was Mao the first one to suggest that Party’s role in production relations trigger a new bourgeoisie?
“[...] the bourgeoisie, whose resistance is increased tenfold by its overthrow (even if only in one country), and whose power lies not only in the strength of international capital, in the strength and durability of the international connections of the bourgeoisie, but also in the force of habit, in the strength of small production. For, unfortunately, small production is still very, very widespread in the world, and small production engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a mass scale. (Lenin, Collected Works, Chinese ed., Vol. 31, p. 6.)
Well, so much for Mao’s so-called developments, and so much for MIM’s revisionist slander.
Less Than Zero is a novel, or perhaps a very short semi-autobiography, about rich young Americans in college, in Los Angeles. In a word, it is a much less innocent Catcher In the Rye. Reading this 22,000-word novel (barely longer than a short story) is as easy and as inexplicable as the feeling of gazing out a sunny window for a long period of time.
As the dear reader may or not may not know, your author is a near life-long fan of Mr. Ellis’s work, even though I am quick to label it reactionary. As I have mentioned before in my essay on postmodernism, his documentary-like style does an excellent job of examining the emptiness of life under bourgeois capitalism while at the same time doing all it can to romanticize the basis of it. Ellis sneers at the age’s excesses while at the same time flaunting its greatest achievements. The good news is, that is barely pronounced here at all, and not nearly to the extent it would be in his second book, The Rules of Attraction.
Most of the focus is on the main character Clay, who narrates the story alone, but Ellis has masterfully made it feel as though it is third-person rather than first. This is because Clay is a passive narrator; he makes no harsh judgments, he does not limit our vision to his own. Clay has no investment in the world around him—he merely watches and observes, opportunistically waiting for a chance for personal gain, while at the same time trying not to hurt anyone too badly. He is as confused and as hesitant as a youth with no identity to go with his lines of cocaine would be. In effect, this means there is never any overbearing “voice” or narrator in the story to impose a definite moral compass. Hence the reader will join Clay in his amoral, directionless carnality and in his careful disconnection.
There is much that is remarkable about Less Than Zero, for example the fact that it has virtually no plot (which is very much a good thing, there are far too few stories without plots these days; it only makes it more life-like), but more than anything what stands out is something Ellis is known for—his descriptions of sexual encounters.
These are far less frequent here than say, in his magnum opus novel American Psycho, but they are his typical fare in that they have no pornographic appeal (quite the opposite), and are narrated with an emotionless, callous tedium and arrogant boredom which is fairly common in modern fiction, but never done quite this well. In fact, these sex scenes are only concentrated versions of the attitude of which the rest of the novel is made. A book like this, which deals with the deepening disconnections between people under the alienation of capitalism by brutally insisting on the facts, is common, but Ellis has a voice of his own that is refreshing and pure.
Two of the consequences of the breakdown of religious belief under today’s imperialism (polls today show today that less people are religious than ever before) are 1) an increase in social awareness, and, paradoxically, 2) an increase in the focus on individualism and the physical side of life. For if there is no higher plane beyond the grave, surely the sole purpose of life, the highest goal any being can dedicate himself to (or so the capitalist logic goes), is to expanding and enhancing himself, to improving oneself by amorally experiencing every sensation in this world.
Taken as a whole, Ellis’s books are moralistic vilifications of human nature as selfish, bratty and excessively hedonistic, all the time not realizing that these are merely symptoms of a larger disease: the alienation felt by all, especially the youth he seems so disgusted with, under capitalism. As brilliantly honest and taboo-bashing as his stories are on the surface, and as hilariously dead-on his parodies of the so-called “American dream” may be, deep down his purposes are undeniably conservative.
Mr. Ellis would not answer to someone calling him a pessimist, though all his books are about angsty, egoistic and childish characters dealing with loneliness and drug addiction. What makes him unique is that he avoids the trap that his fellow postmodernist writers, such as the infamous Chuck Palahniuk, so often run into. Ellis refuses to say that by desensitizing oneself to the ugliness of the world, one will end up finding life more worth living, nor does he repeat the older-than-dirt cliché that “ugliness and violence can be beautiful in a way.”
No, Ellis is far too royalist for that. He has cultivated the image of the California Bohemian, the libertine, eccentric and educated “artist” who while stressing fulfillment, also stresses ethics. He sees no “better” possible relations for mankind, he sees only the avoidance of “excessive” excesses. In his mind’s eye, he sees himself as the post-beatnik, clean-cut rebel, while at the same time the lone guardian of a feudal code of honor, a pair of hands holding back the deluge of a thousand spoiled young Marquis De Sades.
To add a personal touch to this review, I read this marvelously short book that says so much in one day, in perhaps two sittings. There are no chapters to speak of, merely sections of perhaps a few paragraphs each, separated by spaces. It makes the work gently episodic but never choppy. There is nothing here as balls-out violent and raw as the sex-and-murder scenes from his later American Psycho – there is nothing here that seeks to “grab the reader by the throat” or make him experience challenging slices of animal emotion.
Less Than Zero flows so smoothly and so straightly that it can only be compared to a modern, R-rated Catcher In the Rye. Never have I read a book that so beautifully captures the lost, barren irreverence of youth while doing it in such a streetwise manner. There is never any attempt to impose an intensity or a purpose to the narrative; it merely exists. As such, it is intensely relaxing even as it is profound and fleeting. Here, Ellis does something that so few authors can do gracefully: he relaxes his grip, and he lets the story flow.
Kipling, Conrad and Robert Louis Stevenson all address the colonial experience through a hermetically sealed bubble of subjective, individual unreality. Alex Garland in The Beach, Chuck Palahniuk in Fight Club and Bret Easton Ellis in American Psycho all explore the emptiness of bourgeois ideology in modern urban man within this same bubble, frequently arriving at the most reactionary and hedonistic of places. Why are they reactionary?
Let’s take a novel as an example. Ellis’s novel The Rules of Attraction consists entirely of stream-of-consciousness rantings from a revolving door of different narrators. As might be expected, each narrator has his/her own voice and subjective take on things. The characters themselves are all incredibly empty and tainted by what can only be called “selfishness,” and they all find solace in hedonism through drug abuse and promiscuous sex. Do I even need to say all of them are secretly depressed and feel hollow, corrupted and lost?
What does this plot mean? Either this is supposed to be a representation of the state humanity under bourgeois ideology finds itself in (which would be a progressive work), or, more likely, it is meant to be a moralistic social critique of the state of young people today with the idea that they should “correct themselves” by falling back into the places alloted for them by the dominant social order.
Fight Club fares even worse. It starts off as an idealist “liberal” critique of consumerism, which then evolves into a promotion of primitivism and secular humanism, and then of course takes its petty-bourgeoisie ideas to their logical conclusion at the end, where it becomes an essentially fascist and militarist work.
Most entertainment today does this sort of thing—showing a world that has no meaning with all the class interests and prejudices that entails. What does this mean?
Never have intellectuals and artists displayed the hubris they show here, attributing to themselves the power to arbitrate all meaning. In the postmodernist movement, their celebration of complexity and ambiguity becomes a form of boundless egoism. Richness of meaning, which sounds good to most of us, cannot take the form of no limits on meaning, which would amount to meaninglessness.
For more information, see: Samuel Beckett. (Yes, ANY of his works.)
As Marx said, the dominant ideas of any era are the ideas of its ruling class. What does this culture say about the class nature of our society and what class interests does this movement represent? It is a petty-bourgeoisie, or small landowner or producer, way of thinking.
Why is this? Generally speaking, the petty-bourgeoisie, when tackling a problem, thinks in a subjective and one-sided way. He does not practice Marxist dialectics, which analyzes things concretely and rationally from every possible angle in order to get an objective and complete picture of reality, but instead starts from his own wishes, preconceived notions and subjective desires about how actual conditions should be. People who live in imperialist countries, intellectuals or more privileged strata of society (wealthier people, whites, petty-bourgeois) who are detached from the concrete conditions of reality often think in this way, because they have only book smarts and lack practical knowledge.
What the idealists, the postmodernists and the “free speech” advocates fail to understand is that a man’s mind is not his own. Who would deny that in each society throughout history man has operated in personal relations independent of their own will?
One of the chief discoveries of the science of Marxism, and materialism in general, is: it is not consciousness that determines reality, it is reality that determines consciousness. To imagine that the mind alone, in this case the individual mind, and the will, in this case that treasured idealist concept of the “free will,” can change reality based only on its own individual wishes is the most vulgar form of bourgeois and capitalist ideology.
How is this inherently capitalist ideology? Since subjectivism and relativism (“nothing is true, it’s all just in your mind”) is the logical ideology of late industrial capitalism, where individualism has taken its toll and everything becomes dependent on what you think, rather than what exists. This sort of thinking is also beneficial to capitalism, since it fuels the “I can make the world my own” attitude of the small producer.
This is reflected especially in the idea that scientific and materialist minds are somehow “intolerant” or “imposing” by subjecting others’ beliefs to the scientific method. This view ignores the fact that it doesn’t matter at all what one thinks of reality; what matters is what is objectively true and what is not.
The argument is frequently made that if the individual believes it hard enough or passionately enough, then it must be true. Hence, “religion is objectively true for religious people.”
Putting aside the fact that this so-called “objective truth” is therefore neither objective nor truth, this whole capitalist and postmodernist way of thinking digs its own grave.
To expand on this, here are a few key points to consider, that MUST be conceded:
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Reality functions and exists outside man’s own individual mind. This must be a given, since if one individual dies, reality does not cease to exist. Therefore reality is separate from the individual.
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Reality is not changed by the individual mind alone. If someone is falling from a cliff, wishing it is not so does not make it stop. Similarly, no matter how hard you wish it, you cannot push your hand through a solid wood table. You can imagine it, but the fact remains that your molecules repel the molecules of the wood. Even if you got two people together, one who admitted he could not pass through walls, and one who was absolutely convinced he could, the fact could still be shown objectively that both of them were incapable of it. The man who believed he could pass through walls would not be able, materially, to cross into the next room.
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If reality is separate from the individual mind, and is not affected by it, we must then admit that the two can disagree and be completely parallel.
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If we admit that the two can disagree, then there must be such a thing as concrete objective truth and mere fantasy. If the desires of the mind were the same as reality, then they could never be separate.
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Therefore, what is true and existing can only be measured not in wishes, but in matter.
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Finally, if all of the above is true, then we must say that not everything the individual mind believes is true, and that in order to be proved true it must pass the scientific method.
From these points, we can see that there are perceptions that are correct, right and actually existing, and there are those that are incorrect and not actually existing.
Logically, if something cannot be weighed or measured, it does not exist. Otherwise the very concept of “not existing” becomes moot, since the sole definition of “not existing” hinges on not being able to prove that it DOES exist.
Why? Because it is impossible to prove a negative. It is impossible for me to prove that something can’t be done. Likewise, it is impossible to prove that something does not exist. So the only definition that there can be for not existing is the absence of proof that it does exist.
For example, it would be impossible for me to prove that there are not pink dragons flying everywhere, except for me to point out the absence of material evidence: no sight of them, no feeling of wind from their wings.
Conclusion: the capitalist ideas of relativism and postmodernism are bankrupt. Reality exists outside the individual mind, and there are right ideas and wrong ideas, as well as true and false ideas.
