Anthropology as a revolutionary project: David Graeber's legacy
On revolution: Lenin and C.L.R. James
In 1919, the three most strategic labor unions in Britain combined for the country’s first multi-union national strike—miners (energy), dockers (import/export) and railwaymen (transport). Winston Churchill, as home secretary, ordered the army to shoot the strikers; they refused so soon after the horrors of trench warfare. So did the police. The country came to a standstill and the strikers with their families converged on the Houses of Parliament one weekend. The Prime Minister, David Lloyd-George, asked the leaders inside to his chambers. The miners' leader, another Welshman called Tom Jones, later wrote “It was a mistake, we should never have been separated from our people.” Lloyd-George opened up with ‘Congratulations, gentlemen, you have won the state. But I must tell you that neither I with my colleagues here nor any member of the civil service will lift a finger to help you run it’. “At that moment”, Tom Jones said ruefully, “I knew we had lost”.
He was right. Why did they lose? They were only used to protesting against those in power for the sake of incremental change, not a new social order. They didn't have a Lenin. The General Strike of 1926 was a pushover after that. The middle classes came out in droves to provide soup kitchens for the scabs who replaced the strikers. In 1984 Thatcher mobilised a third of the national police force unconstitutionally to beat the coal miners’s strike. Neoliberal globalization undermined national labor unions thoroughly everywhere
National capitalism is ending now, but we too lack a vision of what might follow it. Politicians need money and money men need political cover. Central banks institutionalized their partnership. Educators insist that our societies are built on the separation of public and private interests. This has never been so. Neoliberalism has reached a ‘Brezhnev moment’, similar to when the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1980s. Like the politburo’s apparatchiks then, the system can no longer deliver even limited versions of its aims; powerful individuals grab what they can and run for cover. The Anglophone empires, past and present, epitomise this impasse.
Here are two occasional pieces by Lenin and James on the dynamics of revolution. In January 1917, Lenin gave a speech to Swiss socialists and said he did not expect revolution in his lifetime, but hoped that the younger comrades would fight in one. The Russian revolution got going in February/March, when the workers’ and soldiers’ soviets took to the streets and the tsar abdicated; in September, Lenin wrote a letter explaining why he called for revolution then, but not in July and by October the revolution was a done deal. Between July and September, two million Russian soldiers quit the Eastern front and returned home, many with their weapons. Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution takes 1300 pages to cover nine months in 1917. It was the first Marxist book that James read, in Lancashire—he was lucky. He used Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin to organize the narrative of Haiti’s slave revolution in The Black Jacobins (1938).
James returned to Lenin’s role in a 1981 speech to Berkeley students about the Guyanese academic-turned-revolutionary, Walter Rodney, who was blown up in a car by an agent provocateur. He says they don’t understand revolution and neither did Rodney. No revolutionary organization should have left its leader unprotected. James was the leading British Trotskyist in the 1930s, dodging the bullets of Stalinist assassins in Paris while researching the Haitian revolution; he had first-hand experience. Lenin once advocated a vanguard party; but he abandoned that idea when he arrived at the Finland station and found the soviets in the streets. Until then, he confessed, he was just another bourgeois politician with a line in extremist rhetoric. Revolutions change people. Lenin says in his letter that insurrection is an art, not a science. James summarizes from it three components of any revolution. The party has nothing to do with any of them.
“Firstly, there must be a clash, a revolutionary upsurge of the people. Then, secondly, there must be a turning point, when the activity of the advanced ranks is at its height; and thirdly, the enemy must be vacillating.”
CLR then recalls a conversation with Trotsky in Mexico in 1938 when he asked:
“How come, time and again, the revolutionary party—this is the party, not the mass movement—was wrong in its analysis of the situation and Lenin turns out to be right and set it the correct way? How did that happen?” I expected him to tell me how Lenin knew philosophy, political analysis, psychology, or just knew the revolution. He did not. “Lenin always had his eyes upon the mass of the population and, when he saw the way they were going, he knew that tomorrow this was going to happen.”
Louis Antoine de Saint-Just brought the revolutionary principle of happiness from America to Paris: ‘happiness is a new idea in Europe’. It never really took root there. James drew heavily on this idea in American Civilization.[1] Happiness appeared repeatedly in his writings, from asserting that Marx and Hegel “believed that man is destined for freedom and happiness”, to emphasizing the centrality of happiness to American society and culture, in contrast to Europeans’ sense of the tragic. The notion of happiness lay too at the heart of his Modern Politics, where he called it “the good life.” Conventionally, happiness has been understood to be a moment of fleeting pleasure. It now often means just material satisfaction. In the eighteenth century, however, the pursuit of happiness in this life was contrasted with religious passivity in the face of earthly suffering. James held happiness to be as essential as the desire for freedom and equality. It was the desire of the modern age, “what people want,” expressive of complex and deeply rooted needs of human beings for integration, to become whole, to live in harmony with others in society.
For James then, happiness had two facets, the freedom to be a fully developed, creative, individual personality and part of a community based on principles conducive to that end. This was the unity of private interest and public spirit that Alexis de Tocqueville found in the early American democracy which James believed was still the palpable goal of the American people. The integration of individuals in modern society requires a fundamental reorganization of how people experience work; and this is what he called “the struggle for happiness.” The United States contributed the idea of happiness to our understanding of civilization itself. Today it has become a universal goal; and the peoples of the global South are potent symbols of humanity’s force in opposing oppression. Happiness is inseparable from the active struggle for its attainment.
Both Tocqueville and James visited the New World after the political landscape had been transformed by the French and Russian revolutions respectively. Each thought that democracy is the moving force in modern history and that America played the leading role in that movement. Their faith was not based on laws and formal institutions, but on the common people, on their pragmatic political sense. They saw ordinary Americans’ customs and attitudes to life as the safeguard of democracy’s future. The structure of both Democracy in America and American Civilization reflects this premise. Each has two parts, the first dealing with the ideas and outward appearance of America’s public institutions, the second with the inner life and social practices of the American people. Each contains a movement from form to content that mirrors the historical contrast between European civilization and its American successor.
James’s study builds on Tocqueville’s. In American Civilization he takes up the themes of liberty, equality and the forms of association; and examines their meaning when the pursuit of material wealth peaked in Henry Ford’s system of mass production. For James the society’s original ideals of freedom and equality had been sacrificed to an oppressive work regime that still allowed many to aspire to the means of achieving these goals. Whereas Tocqueville made equality central to the new democracy, James was preoccupied with freedom or rather with awareness of its loss. Moreover, the worldwide struggle of popular forces against totalitarian bureaucracy had brought Tocqueville’s prediction of rivalry between America and Russia to the nightmare conclusion of the Cold War. Thus, for both, the pursuit of happiness can only take root in a democratic society whose institutional forms and cultural content support the self-expression and free association of equal citizens.
The 1940s saw a cultural explosion in American movies, jazz, art, theatre and fiction. James, writing in New York in 1950, thought the struggle for democracy was most intense in the US; and the main battle ground was popular culture. Industry was controlled by capitalists; workers and consumers took what they could get. But the cultural industry is huge. Here people relate to capitalism on different terms. They spend their own money freely on a wide choice of entertainment, clothing etc. Hollywood studios cannot anticipate which movies will sell most seats. The pop charts are as unpredictable. Economic democracy can be contested here on terms more favourable to the masses.
Popular culture was a stand-off between capitalists and working people. It led to compromises between them. The story of Marlene Dietrich’s ‘pants’ (trousers) is iconic. The men were away fighting and women had taken over industrial production. Marlene Dietrich sometimes wore pants in movies and night clubs. In 1944 she wore them at a New York event. The clothing stores and mail order firms were immediately flooded with women’s orders for pants. Capitalists did not anticipate this demand; they struggled to catch up with it. A distinctively American female fashion—wearing trousers—was born. Consumers are just dupes of manipulative capitalists?
C.L.R. James once explained to me what being a revolutionary meant.
“There are only a handful of radical political activists in a country at any one time, maybe 40,000 in Britain today. These people live for turning the world upside down, but the rest just want to keep what they have. This is good. Society would be impossible if everyone wanted to tear it up. Then things change and because of natural catastrophe, economic collapse, war or revolution those same people realize that they have already lost what they had or are about to lose it. With nothing to hold onto, they now embrace the revolution and fight for a different future or just to save what they can.
“There is a man you see at the bus stop every morning—uptight, rolled umbrella, he looks at no-one, speaks to no-one. When the revolution comes, you find him organizing a street committee. This is when all those tedious political meetings pay off and the masses may accept some professional radicals as leaders. Don’t ever imagine that, because people are normally conservative, they will inevitably stay out of the revolution.”
[1] This passage is taken from the editors’ intruction to C.L.R. James, American Civilizatio, A. Grimshaw and K. Hart eds (1993).