Secret Prisons, Spies, Lies & Democracy II

In a previous entry, "The Rule of Law" and Secrecy: CIA Prisons and the Plame Affair, I drew connections between the Plame Affair and the gulag of secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency. I wrote:

If a CIA agent with a conscience knows where these prisons are located, if she knows the CIA operatives who run those prisons, if she knows the conditions of those prisons and the names of the people in the prisons, if she then reports on the activities of the CIA wardens and their hirelings who run these prisons, and if this person of conscience exposes all of the above, I would celebrate such a person. In my mind, such a person should be considered a courageous fighter for democratic openness. The law that would put such a person in jail should be repealed. All secret security agencies should be exposed to the light of day.

This is not a mere hypothetical. Think of Dana Priest's article exposing the CIA secret prisons. She wrote it without naming names. But she must have sources somewhere in order to write the article in the first place and those sources must know names. The names of the people running those secret CIA prisons are engaging in crimes against humanity and the names of the CIA prison wardens and their accomplices should be exposed to democratic sunlight. Perhaps one reason that they are not so exposed is the threat of jail under Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

According to the BBC, "The US Central Intelligence Agency has taken the first step toward a criminal inquiry into who told the media that it runs secret jails abroad, reports say."

Who are these prisons secret from in the first place? They are not secret from the people in the prisons or their families. They are assumed to exist by most people in countries that fear U.S. imperialism. The U.S. government of course can brush such speculations away as a conspiracy theory and "anti-Americanism" - because, as we know, the people who are under threat by the U.S. government's terror tactics are prone to such conspiracy theories. The truth is that these secret prisons are not meant to be secret from the purveyors of retail terrorism through-out the world. The U.S. government, the main purveyor of wholesale terror in the world today, means to keep these prisons secret from the domestic population of the U.S. and the populations of every country where these prisons are kept. Why? Because if such facts were widely known they would provoke outrage - not the outrage of terrorism, but the outrage of democratic protest.

These secret prisons were never so secret. More than a year ago I read about them. Here is one of the articles I read in June 2004 - Secret world of US jails: Jason Burke charts the worldwide hidden network of prisons where more than 3,000 al-Qaeda suspects have been held without trial - and many subjected to torture - since 9/11.

The people who leaked the information of these secret prisons to the Washington Post may have been playing their own bureaucratic games, but they have done a service to all of us who value the semblance of democracy that remains to us. Democracy is murdered in secret. The bare minimum of a conservative republican form of government, a government of due process and the rule of law, cannot be maintained when the government is maintained by secret organizations of political spies. The fact that our government runs secret prisons is only an end product of the permanent government of secrecy that has existed in the United States since it became a world empire.

As I said in my previous entry, "The demand for the rule of law is a conservative demand in normal times but quickly turns into a radical call in times of 'emergency.'" We live in a time of emergency in the United States. The emergency is for the wounds that are debilitating the republic.

Jerry Monaco
New York City
9 November 2005





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"The Rule of Law" and Secrecy: CIA Prisons and the Plame Affair

The Washington Post has an interesting article on CIA secret prisons, which proves that for the ruling class of the U.S. "the rule of law" and "due process" is applied selectively. I quote the beginning of the article and recommend that all who are interested read the complete report.

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.

The existence and locations of the facilities -- referred to as "black sites" in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents -- are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.

The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.

While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
Debate Is Growing Within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas System Set Up After 9/11
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 2, 2005; A01

The demand for the rule of law is a conservative demand in normal times but quickly turns into a radical call in times of 'emergency.' It is because of the fact that in the U.S. there are no conservatives left in politics that radicals must fill the vacuum. (A non-trivial question for radicals interested in the history of the U.S. ruling class is: Who was the last conservative? Perhaps Robert Taft.) It is the weakness of the left that we must be the conservatives demanding that these rulers of our lives keep to some minimum of the rule of law and provide basic due process.

I propose to use the occasion of the elite media's acknowledgment of secret prisons, and the exposure of an international CIA gulag, to make a small comment on the affair of Valerie Plame. The connection between the Plame Affair and CIA secret prisons, may seem a bit odd but it I think they are thematically the same story. It is an indication of the ideological weakness of the U.S. left that the responses to the Plame affair has been limited to schadenfreude. We are happy that the likes of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby have been caught out in the cold of their own hypocrisy and lies. We would be happier still if they were sent to jail, but that seems to me unlikely. But is this the limit of our contribution to the Plame affair? Is it possible that Rove and Libby were engaged in an unwitting service to democracy by their exposure of a covert operative?

It seems to me completely unnecessary to further expose the pro-war propaganda campaign that the United States Government and the Bush regime engaged in during the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. It was obvious at the time. Those who believed the Bush-Blair propaganda campaign need to look into themselves and ask what made themselves so susceptible to nationalist fantasy. They should make amends by becoming anti-war activists. The lesson that the left should be teaching is simple skepticism of those in power. We should be pointing out that there has rarely been a war advocated by a powerful state that has been justified in retrospect. Yet, all wars are justified at the time by the propaganda of the state and the rulers and war propaganda more often than not turns out to be cooked. The role of a well functioning intelligence agency is to prop calls of war made by the rulers with the necessary scenery of enemy atrocities and threats. At times, the intelligence agency will also engage in covert operations that are elaborate stage productions aimed to convince the true enemies of the rulers of the U.S., in this case the U.S. people, that war is necessary and inevitable. For those of us who oppose the war drums of the latest imperialist adventures the ideological enemy is patriotism, nationalism, jingoism and racism. One purpose of intelligence agencies and the state in general in the lead up to a war is to lie to the domestic population, producing enough fear and hatred of the target country among the people that the frenzy of jingoism overwhelms reason. When the state and its intelligence agencies fulfill its purpose we on the left should not be surprised. Our duty is to educate people in the historical fact that this is always the way powerful states act in the lead up to the war. Powerful rulers lie and fix the facts in order to get the domestic population to tolerate what the rulers want.

Given this general historical viewpoint we should view the framing of the facts and the propaganda campaign as revealed in the Plame affair as politics as usual except for one fact that the affair highlights: A section of the U.S. ruling class and its elite bureaucrats in the intelligence agencies were not cooperating with the Bush regime, led by Chaney and Rove. I think that we can conclude from this that the Bush regime is a relatively narrow clique of the ruling class. One of the reason for the rampant irrationalism of its rhetoric is that a narrow regime has to constantly whip up the various groups of its base. Most of the rhetoric of the Bush regime and many of its actions, political appointments, etc. should be interpreted from the point of view of the narrowness of the Bush regime within the ruling class as a whole. The reason the exposure of Plame is significant, and the only reason it has become an "affair", is that with Plame the Bush regime proclaimed that it has contempt for a portion of the ruling elite that is important to imperial domination. As Nicholas Lemann put it in a recent New Yorker article:

[T]he conservative foreign-policy position generated a vigorous subculture. Life inside it had many charms, one of which was the unassailability of the conservatives’ ideas .... Conservatives were smarter, bolder, more strategic-minded, and more historically aware than moderate Republicans, being less vitiated by the need to appease interest groups and by the grind of running bureaucracies. When the Central Intelligence Agency or the State Department ... was mentioned in conversation with a foreign-policy conservative, the reference would usually draw a derisive chuckle or a rolling of the eyes: those organizations had been captured by the appeasers, and could be counted on to respond insufficiently to threats.
TELLING SECRETS - How a leak became a scandal by NICHOLAS LEMANN The New Yorker Issue of 2005-11-07, Posted 2005-10-31

The ideological battle of the right wing neo-conservatives has always been aimed against the entrenched bureaucracies of "liberal" imperialism, which they look at as a brake on the expansion of U.S. state and corporate power. Thus, attacking people such as Joseph Wilson (a career State Department official) and his wife Valerie Plame, was simply attacking the representatives of the liberal foreign policy bureaucracy. Such attacks are just part of the game for the extreme reactionaries of the Bush Admnistration. And the fact that this is the way that they play the game, without regard for usual ruling class solidarity, is what separates them from the more 'conservative' elements of the U.S. ruling elite. But when powerful people undermine other powerful people an "affair" or a "scandal" will ensue. This is the simple lesson of the Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandals. (See FN 1)

But this does not mean that we who consider ourselves radicals and internationalists should simply parrot those who wish to drive "the affair" for their own interests. Scandals such as the Plame Affair are most useful if we can use them to expose the usual workings of the state and the ruling class. But they are also useful to expose the hypocrisy of the application of "the rule of law." Thus once again I come back to the beginning of this comment.

Let me make a thematic connection between the Valerie Plame Affair and the CIA archipelago of secret prisons. Let us be clear: The law that gave Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald a mandate to investigate the Valerie Plame Affair is an anti-democratic law meant to protect the national security state against exposures of its 'secret' atrocities. The law is known as Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) and it was past in order to protect the criminals at the CIA from exposure. The secrecy of CIA operations is aimed at the domestic population. We are the ones who are not supposed to know the history of subversion of democratic movements of our government. The CIA is not simply an intelligence organization it is also an organization that bribes foreign officials, undermines foreign elections, overthrows foreign governments, fosters foreign secret security agencies and trains them in torture and death-squad operations - in short the CIA is an organization meant to inspire fear in foreign civilian peoples through the use of violence and propaganda. In short, by definition, the CIA is engaged in terrorism. Exposing the CIA, its operations and its operatives is a democratic duty that we must fight to make a 'right.' The Intelligence Identities Protection Act was passed in the early 1980s and was aimed at Philip Agee and the Covert Action Information Bulletin (CAIB). Agee made his own separate peace by defecting from the CIA to the multitude. He published CIA Diary: Inside the Company in 1975 and soon after teamed up to publish CAIB. In both his book and in CAIB he exposed CIA operations and operatives. It was Agee's and CAIB's civic activism in exposing CIA secrets that led to the passage of IIPA. The activities exposed by Agee were largely illegal activities which are condemned (with much usual nation-state hypocrisy) by international norms. Agee, no matter what his motivations, was a whistle blower and IIPA is an anti-Whistle Blower law that will be used mainly against the left. In the usual misapplication of the rule of law those who harm the ruling class will be prosecuted and those who benefit the ruling class will not be prosecuted under this law.

Which brings us back to the CIA run secret prisons.

If a CIA agent with a conscience knows where these prisons are located, if she knows the CIA operatives who run those prisons, if she knows the conditions of those prisons and the names of the people in the prisons, if she then reports on the activities of the CIA wardens and their hirelings who run these prisons, and if this person of conscience exposes all of the above, I would celebrate such a person. In my mind she should be considered a courageous fighter for democratic openness. The law that would put such a person in jail should be repealed. All secret security agencies should be exposed to the light of day.

This is not a mere hypothetical. Think of Dana Priest's article exposing the CIA secret prisons. She wrote it without naming names. But she must have sources somewhere in order to write the article in the first place and those sources must know names. The names of the people running those secret CIA prisons are engaging in crimes against humanity and the names of the CIA prison wardens and their accomplices should be exposed to democratic sunlight. Perhaps one reason that they are not so exposed is the threat of jail under Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

I am cynical enough to hope that despicable hypocrites, such as Carl Rove and Scooter Libby, will betray the norms of their class and expose covert agents, even if they do so only to further their very narrow political interests. In the end, if the Intelligence Identities Protection Act is consistently violated by those who rule this country, perhaps the act will become a dead letter. This is a mere modest proposal in favor of ruling class wolves eating their own puppies. In reality only an active and organized radical democratic left, which has its own organizations willing to expose the crimes and atrocities of the U.S. government and its secret agencies can put some content into the notion of the "rule of law" and someday make such notions of law into a flexible instrument of pragmatic democratic justice.

Jerry Monaco
New York City
2 November 2005

[FN 1] Note that this internecine war between ruling class elite sectors is partially represented by the battle inside the intelligence agencies. Thus Dana Priest reports

The secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the working assumption was that a second strike was imminent.

Since then, the arrangement has been increasingly debated within the CIA, where considerable concern lingers about the legality, morality and practicality of holding even unrepentant terrorists in such isolation and secrecy, perhaps for the duration of their lives. Mid-level and senior CIA officers began arguing two years ago that the system was unsustainable and diverted the agency from its unique espionage mission.

"We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy," said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. "Everything was very reactive. That's how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don't say, 'What are we going to do with them afterwards?' "

Put aside the official media-speak of these paragraphs and what you see is that the CIA has stepped outside its usual role and the "old hands" do not like it very much. In the good old days of the U.S. imperialism the CIA trained other people to do their dirty work. The vision of the Bush regime sees a more active role for the CIA in torture and oppression, mainly because as U.S. military might has increased, it has lost political control over many of its foreign clients and servants. I suppose that one of the results of the reorganization of the intelligence agencies is to bring them under direct political control by the Bush Regime.

Jerry Monaco
New York City
Originally Published 2 November 2005



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Notes, Quotes, Images - From some of my reading and browsing

Science and Common Sense

Science and Common Sense

The exchanges in the posts on 'sexual selection and race' have been fruitful for at least one thing. They have made me realize how badly the methods of scientific thinking are taught in schools in the United States. The anonymous poster in that exchange simply insisted that her 'common sense' was self-evident and therefore there was no need to consider evidence, or apparently even logic.

Richard Lewontin, a biologist who did not shy from controversy once wrote something apropos of our notions of common sense.

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

From Richard Lewontin,, Billions and Billions of Demons, a review of The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan

In my work-life in various factory jobs, I have met many skilled machinists who have never gone to college; all of them, without exception, knew how to think logically and scientifically. They also knew that their 'common sense' notions had to be measured against evidence. This I believe was just an aspect of their profession. I have also met many lawyers who knew how to recognize evidence but, strangely, did not know the difference between evidence that was merely speculative or definitional, and evidence that was in some way testable or repeatable. This I believe is an aspect of the lawyer's profession. The main concern of lawyers is manipulating arguments and definitions, not testing evidence. The 'epistemological standing' of the evidence is a lesser order of importance than how it can be presented in an argument or how it can be used to stretch or contract definitions.

On the other hand most of the people I meet who have graduated from colleges, and have majored in subjects outside of the sciences, do not understand the methods of science or how science and logic can be counter-intuitive and simply destroy our common sense notions of what we think of the world. Further more they don't understand that such a statement as "I don't need evidence because I have my common sense and my common sense tells me X" is simply a non-sense statement. What we call common sense is itself a kind of evidence. But it is a very weak kind of evidence usually based on cultural prejudice or untested and non-verifiable subjectivity.

There are certain statements we simply accept because there are no ways to verify the statement either way or in order to verify or provide evidence for the statement we would have to do too much research. "The chair I see near my writing desk is a 'physically real' chair" is one such statement. I accept the physical reality of the chair without much proof and hope when I sit down that I am not hallucinating. In this sense I accept that a certain class of objects, such as chairs, are solid enough for me to sit upon without investigating the nature of that 'solidity'. I will check on occasion to see if the chair is 'rickety' but not to the extent that an engineer is supposed to check the stability of a bridge. I don't need to be an engineer or a carpenter to decide that the chair is stable enough or solid enough for me to sit upon. The problem is that once we try to go beyond our common sense and investigate the nature of 'stability' and 'solidity' we run into many problems that contradict our common sense. For example I could perform an investigation using my very amaturous study of physics. Quantum mechanics has shown me that this solid chair that is beneath me as I write these words is in fact not very solid. Against common sense, physics has shown me that the chair is made up of atoms that are mostly 'empty space' between the nucleous and the 'planetary' electrons. In other words there is more space than there is continuity. The old saying was natura non facit saltum ('nature makes no jumps.'). Against all common sense this has been disproven, and quantum mechanics has shown us that the physical does not abhor a vacume, but it does abhor our common sense notions of what is 'real.' None of this prevents me from sitting on the chair. It does prevent me from relying on my common sense alone.

Bertrand Russell once wrote:

"It is not to be supposed, in any case that 'perceiving' an object involves knowing what it is like. That is quite another matter. We shall see later that certain inferences, of a highly abstract character, can be drawn for our perceptions to the objects perceived; but these inferences are at once difficult and not quite certain. The idea that perception, in itself, reveals the character of objects, is a fond delusion, and one, moreover, which it is very necessary to overcome if our philosophy is to be anything more than a pleasant fairy-tale." Bertrand Russell An Outline of Philosophy.

This can be said of the opinions that we call 'common sense' in spades.

The idea that our personal observations of our very limited social mileau can reveal very much beyond our own prejudices, cultural biases, and self-justifications is a fairy-tale that only rational thinking can overcome. What most of us believe is 'inevitable' or 'natural' about our social reality is usually only contingent and only a very small part of the many possibilities of human nature. People who don't see this will forever be caught in their own distorting biases with no possibility of learning that many portions of their world view are simply the pleasant fariry-tale that they tell themselves. This is as true of myself as it is of others (such as the anonymous correspondent in the debate on 'race and sexual selectiion'). But I suppose we all think that we try to get beyond our pleasant fairy-tales. Unfortunately this is not easy to do and most of us try to hold on to our narrow biases and do not engage in conversations that might expand our world views. Yes, I too live in 'my own world', as we all live 'in our own worlds.' The first step in trying to obtain a non-subjective view of what ever we call reality is to admit this fact and, then, to try to transcend it by mutual agreement on what we can accpet as evidence and what we can call common ground. Again, unfortunately, many people will not question the little worlds they live in and like a narcissitic child will insist that their little world is the whole world.

There is a sense of security in maintaining our world-views and a sense of secuirty is necessary to continue to live a life that is not too unhappy. In this sense I think our 'world views' connect up with our biological needs in some undetermined way. As long as our world views are not grossly 'dysfunctional' within our given societal and 'natural' environement we usually maintain them. As long as our 'world views' don't kill us and don't put us at a selective disadvantage in relation to other human beings, then they are neutral from an evolutionary point of view. Further, it is possible that some world views that are positively destructive or even 'irrational' might provide temporary advantage over other people, who maintain less destructive world views. But it is also possible that some world views may provide short run selective advantages and, yet, in the long run may destroy us all. (Examples of such world views might be thae secular 'faiths' we call 'nationalism' and 'jingoism' or, when we profess the 'faith', we call these views 'patriotism' and 'national interest.')

How is it possible to convince another person to see that, in order to have a conversation in the first place, our notions of evidence and rationality must be grounded in something beyond our amorphous worldviews and our subjective cultural assumptions? Statements like 'biology is in the face,' and supposed conclusions that the face shows human racial sexual preferences, and that the fact of human diversity ipso facto means that there are human racial sexual preferences, need to be shown through reason and evidence in order to be accepted. If the person holding these views can't show them by reason and evidence, then we must assume that her assumptions are a kind of prejudice. In the case of the exchange that I am referring to here, the actual evidence to a large extent contradicts the cultural assumptions held by the anonymous poster. Also, since the notions put forward are a 'racial theory', I can't help, but conclude that this cultural assumption is derived from the racist and sexist assumptions that are rife in our culture. I would make a similar interpretation in regards to any notion or belief, that a person held without evidence.

My reflections on the difference between the skilled machinist, the lawyer, and the average graduate in humanities is only anecdotal, but my preliminary conclusion is that thinking rigorously, understanding the nature of evidence, and knowing when to use one's own 'intuition' and 'common sense' as an hypothesis to search for evidence is a practical matter of 'doing.' The truism is that people learn by practice. I would push the truism a bit further. People who actually perform this kind of thinking become smarter, self-skeptical, and questioning. People who don't remain within their little worlds without realizing that their 'world' is not the world.

Jerry Monaco
New York
March 2005
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy & Culture
Hopeful Monsters: Poetry, Fiction, Memories by Jerry Monaco





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Moral Intentions and Artistic Tensions in Anna Karenina

A Symptomatic Reading of the Title "Anna Karenina": Moral Intention and Artistic Tension in Tolstoy's Novel
By Jerry Monaco

A Question from a reader
"i just recently read anna karenina. do you know why tolstoy titles the novel after anna when she is not at the center of the novel and it seems that Levin is really the main character. Perhaps it is b/c everyone in the novel is connected to her in some way..i don't know..but she does not come off as strong as levin."
[Note this question was a comment to The Democracy of Minor Characters #1:
"The Character of Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky in Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (Link) which can be found posted at 7 Dec. 2005]

Why is Anna Karenina Anna's novel and not Levin's novel?

The Accidental, the Simple, and the Interesting:
If there is an interesting answer to this question it is simple, but if the answer is simple then we are led to another level where the innocence of the question might reveal deep insight into the creative process. Trying not to be blunt I wrote a pretentious sentence, so let me rephrase. The question is either innocent, answerable in a simple sentence, or deeply profound. I choose to believe it is all three. This is because the simplest questions are the most radical. They go to the root of how we think.

The "Accidental" Novel
Let me say that just possibly there is no interesting answer to this question. In other words the answer is that the title of the novel is a contingent accident of composition and publication history. Anna Karenina was written as a whole but was published in serialized form in one of the conservative Russian magazines of the day. The process of publishing the novel meant that the novel was given its name before Tolstoy actually finished the work. Tolstoy wrote and rewrote the novel between 1873 and 1877. The novel was published in the monthly magazine Russky Vestnik between 1875 and 1877. It is possible that with hindsight Tolstoy might have re-titled the novel to reflect the fact that much of Anna Karenina involves the search for something like a happy family life for Levin. Perhaps the novel could have been called "Love and Death," borrowing from Woody Allen's cinematic pastiche of Russian novels, but also reflecting Tolstoy's previous great novel War and Peace. In other words the title Anna Karenina may simply be an accident of history and we can leave it at that with no more reflection. Tolstoy had a conception of a novel where "Anna" was the main character and that changed in the course of writing but the title didn't change because of its publishing history.

"The Puzzle of the Epigraph" and the Simple Answer
Now that I have argued for the "accidental" nature of the title of Anna Karenina let me say why I think that this is not the whole answer to the question. I will do this by referring to what is known among critics as "the puzzle of the epigraph." Notice that Tolstoy begins his novel with a quote from Paul's Epistle to the Romans 12.19, "Vengeance is mine; I will repay." (The actual quote is "Vengeance is mine, I shall repay, saith the Lord." Why Tolstoy changed the quote and dropped off reference to the agent of vengeance is actually an interesting footnote to Tolstoy's novel's moral view of the universe. It can bear some reflection if the reader is up to it.) After the novel was written and ready for publication in its original edition (four-volume book form), Tolstoy considered leaving out this epigraph. There was a sense on his part that with the growth of Levin's sections of the novel the epigraph no longer fit. Levin's section was meant to work as parallel and as counterpoint to Anna's "fall." But in what sense was the idea of vengeance meant to be the epigraph for the novel as a whole. Much later, during the period of Tolstoy's renunciation of the novel form, he briefly reflected on the reason he let the epigraph remain: "I chose that epigraph simply, as I already said, in order to explain the idea that the bad things man does have as their consequence all the bitter things, which come not from people, but from God, and that is what Anna Karenina herself experienced." One can see from this comment that from Tolstoy's point of view the novel was still Anna's story, both the aesthetic architecture of the story and the moral force of its conclusion could only make sense if the novel is given to Anna's fall. (As a side note I agree with you that Levin is the "stronger" character, if by stronger you mean that he is represented as morally stronger. But I would argue that Anna is the stronger artistic realization. This is a matter of taste of course and as the Latin saying goes, there is no arguing with taste.)

It is also significant from this point of view that Levin's final chapters, the chapters that deal with Levin's revelations were written long after the rest of the novel was finished. In fact Levin's epilogue was not published in Russky Vestnik for political reasons. Tolstoy wrote the final section because he felt he needed the counterpoint as an approach to a solution - it is a dangling and inconclusive solution - to Anna's moral plight and what Tolstoy considered the problem of the reader's sympathy for Anna as a character. So this is the simple answer. For Tolstoy, the novel was still Anna's novel. No matter how much the novel had changed in the course of its writing, from Tolstoy's point of view, the only way the novel could have "moral depth," instead of being a form of "aesthetic fluff," is if we interpret the novel as the vengeance of the "universe" upon Anna. The title of the novel, as well as the novel's epigraph, reflects Tolstoy's original "moral project" to create a work of art that would show how Anna reaped "the bitter things" from the bad she had sown.

The Failed "Moral Project" of Anna Karenina
Now, demonstrably, our reaction as readers to the novel, and the reaction of readers at the time, shows that Tolstoy failed in his "moral project." As a result of his "failure" Tolstoy produced a great work of art. It was partially this realization that eventually led to his renunciation of the novel form, until the last few years of his life. The moral universe which Tolstoy intended to construct in Anna Karenina was one in which the "feeling" of Schopenhauer's metaphysics and the retributive "balance" of Kant's metaphysics would be combined with the moral revelation of the New Testament. All of this was simply to be shown to the reader. The reader would feel it and know it. With out such an ambition, Tolstoy must have thought at the time, what was the use of engaging in this child's play of telling a story?

So these reflections lead to the deeper question of the author's "intentions." We live in an age where "theorists" of literature have questioned the very concept of the "author." Many of the professorate would consider the notion of writing about an author's intentions as a way of exploring some aspect of a novel as a childish way of going about a discussion. But since I neither believe in "literary theory" or in the "professionalization" of reading, I will venture into the territory of "authorial intentions." I believe by thinking about authorial intentions we are able to gain access into the background of a novel and are able to express the contingent aspects of a work, the aspects that derive from a writer's choices in the struggle to create.

The Anti-Madame Bovary"
Anna Karenina was partially written as Tolstoy's moral response to Flaubert's aesthetically intricate Madame Bovary. It seemed to Tolstoy that the very artistic success of Flaubert's novel was a problem, simply because of what he considered its moral vacuity. The novel for Tolstoy was not necessarily an art form to be respected. Tolstoy looked at the novel with some of the suspicion one might look at say a television series such as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." It might be enjoyable but how could anyone ever call it "art"? And in the end doesn't it simply degrade our morals? In other words "Anna" was written from within Tolstoy's own ambivalent response to the very idea of "art" and the "novel." Again I must urge you to keep in mind that this was an author who would end up by renouncing the novel as an art form and declaring that it could only promote immorality. And yet Tolstoy's response to Flaubert was on many levels. He recognized a number of great aspects to the novel: it's high level of "realism," its intricate structure, its "god-like" observation of the little figures in a small provincial town, the ability to reveal the pettiness of Emma Bovary's thoughts while still remaining above the consciousness of the character. It is safe to say that Tolstoy was both enthralled and repelled by Madame Bovary. He saw that Flaubert's ability to reveal the consciousness of Madame Bovary -- to delicately analyze her delusions, to show how those delusions were derived from common ideas and cheap "romance" literature, to trace the development in a rather dull convent girl of the idolatry of "heightened experience" in "love" and adventure - all of this was an accomplishment that could only be achieved by the control of a great artist. But what was the point of this story? Was it simply art for art's sake? Was it an artists little joke on the petty bourgeois mind that accepted literature as mere entertainment? For Tolstoy, if a story was just a story, then it wasn't worth writing.

Tolstoy conceived of Anna Karenina in this artistic context. The novel had to show what a novelist such as Flaubert would never show, the moral arc of the universe, that would show that the "bad things man does have as their consequences, all the bitter things." Unlike War and Peace, which was not "designed" as a "work of art," but where the point of the novel was to show how individuals were "in" history, Anna Karenina would create an artistic architecture, so deftly created by Flaubert, to reveal the "true reality" of the "bad things" and the "bitter things" of the moral universe. If Tolstoy could do this then he could prove the worth of the art form of the novel. His own moral vision necessitated that he show the worth of the novel form to himself in order to justify the time he spent writing stories.

There is so much more I can write about this topic but I must close with a few specific observations and then the larger point about how a strong artist is never contained by his intentions.

Tolstoy's Paradoxical Task and the Symptom of His Failure
If the reader will remember from the story, Anna is riding on a train, coming home from her visit with her brother Oblonsky. She has met Vronsky at a ball, turned Vronsky's head away from Kitty and then fled for home in fear of her own desires. On the train she is reading a novel. She is yearning for the adventures that such novels seem to promise. The novel that Tolstoy describes Anna as reading is the kind of novel both Flaubert and Tolstoy despised but each for their own reasons - Flaubert because he believed such novels were bad artistic works and Tolstoy because he believed they were a bad moral influence. It is also the kind of novel that Emma Bovary would love to read. (Actually, Tolstoy was writing a pastiche of the novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. The best by this author is Lady Audley's Secret and, contra Flaubert and Tolstoy, I consider the novel worth a read.) Now this is not just a reference to one of Tolstoy's sources for Anna Karenina (i.e. Madame Bovary), but is meant to show us how Tolstoy will deal with these subjects in a different way than Flaubert. Immediately after reading the novel Anna dozes and falls into a nightmare that, in the context of the novel can only be called an "omen." How in the context of this novel can we interpret the continual omens that confront Anna from almost the beginning. Unlike Flaubert, Tolstoy had a problem. Flaubert's novel was an "anti-romance" novel and so was Tolstoy's. But Tolstoy had to show that the very fact of a "novelistic imagination," of imagining one self "in" a novel was a kind of "sin" against reality. Tolstoy's paradoxical task is to produce a work of art that shows that life does not imitate art, that the novelistic structure is itself a false consciousness. Everything that the novel can give us - "heightened experience" within a profoundly shaped architecture of motifs which ends with a sense of closure - must be shown as part of what leads Anna astray. So Tolstoy has to add stories that will show the reader that Anna's imagination, that the life that is lived best is lived like a novel, is wrong. Those stories must not have closure and they must "feel" powerful for the reader. Thus the story of Levin will grow and grow along these lines and Levin's story will not end with closure but only further questions.

Anna was not meant to be a sympathetic figure. But again Tolstoy's art was stronger than his moral condemnation. He kept on trying to write Anna as a morally corrupt shrew, but the more he felt himself straining toward what he felt was the "reality" of a woman such as Anna, the more sympathetic she became. What makes a feminist reading of this novel possible is that Tolstoy saw too clearly the situation of a bright, vibrant, and strangled woman from within society, and once seeing he could not bend his insights into the box of his preconceived morality. In other words, no matter what moralistic intentions Tolstoy began with, his artistic integrity, his constant straining to get it right, led him to write a novel that is more than God's vengeance upon Anna. And yet in his mind, unless he wrote such a novel Anna Karenina could not be a success. Thus the title is a symptom of his original intention.

The Symptom of the Author's Intention: The Reader's Counter-factual
Which brings me to what we do as readers. More specifically, to why I think it is important to speak of the intentions of the author in the way I have above. I believe those intentions can be seen as symptoms through out the structure of a great work. They are symptoms of how we as readers later struggle to recreate the work of art in our own minds. Your question, dear reader, was a perception of a symptom of Tolstoy's intention. Your very simple question - "Why is the novel entitled Anna Karenina and not something else?" - was actually a hidden perception of how the aesthetic structure of this novel is in constant tension with the novel's moral expression. Other critics have felt the symptom of Tolstoy's intention in the "puzzle of the epigraph." Even when we have no direct evidence of an author's intention, it is sometimes impossible to express the contingency of artistic choice of an author without tracing the shadow of what that author might have done otherwise and why, this choice was made instead of another. The construction of the "author's intention" within the reader's mind is like a careful thought experiment or counter-factual, which allows the reader to imagine the artistic choices from within the novel, and thus to understand better how the novel works. A good reader will not brush aside these symptoms of the author's intentions but will try to see them and experience them as part of the fullness of the struggle to communicate our experience of the world in stories and art.

Jerry Monaco
26 January, 2005
New York
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy & Culture
Hopeful Monsters: Poetry, Fiction, Memories by Jerry Monaco

I am going to post this now without rereading. I will edit later. Reader forgive me for the typos and the syntax.




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

The Democracy of Minor Characters #1: Oblonsky in Anna Karenina

The Democracy of Minor Characters #1:
"The Character of Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky in Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina :"

[Prefatory Note: The following is from a longer unpublished essay, as all my essays are unpublished, The Democracy of Minor Characters . The essay began with a focus on Tolstoy's use of minor characters in his great novels and proceeded with the contention, that we can imagine a separate novel for all the minor characters in all the great novels of literature. I also made the rather fey suggestion that one might show a Shelleyian progress of minor characters from the 18th through the mid-20th century. It is as if all the world's novels were written by the single hand of humanity and that the real focus of the novels, the key to their actual motifs, and what in fact unifies them all, was the development of the life of minor characters… If the minor characters "live" then the novel feels alive. And then eventually, in some future novel, the once minor character re-emerges, with different clothing, in a different city, at a different time -- perhaps smoking a cigar instead of a pipe, or with nervous little hands instead of nervous little feet -- as a major character in his or her own right. And if the "future novel" is well written it will in turn be populated by more minor characters, that will also inspire future writers, consciously or unconsciously, to repopulate the world of our imaginations. Of course to some extent this also is the work of the theater as we can see for ourselves when the gravediggers with whom Hamlet converses, emerge many years later waiting for Godot.

A sad lament: Up until now all of my essays only meet with the criticism of moths, now posted here on the internet, they only meet the little bytes of "ones" and "zeros." Perhaps this is because I haven't tried hard enough or because my literary essays are largely "appreciative" and militantly anti-theoretical. Still there is more possibility for a reader's eyes to meet my words here than anyplace else. ]

The Opening of "Anna Karenina"
It is curious that the first character we meet in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is Stephen Oblonsky. As we know from the first two paragraphs, "Everything was upset in the Oblonsky's house." The reader is then provided with a brief montage of sentences of the way that the household was upset as a result of the "intrigue" between the husband and a former French governess. Basically we are privy to an establishing shot, which could be a story in-itself, but soon we come to focus upon a person who we might expect would be a major character in the novel.

"On the third day after his quarrel with his wife, Prince Stephen Arkadyevich Oblonsky - Stiva, as he was called in his set in Society - woke up at his usual time, eight o'clock, not in his wife's bed room but on the morocco leather covered sofa in his study. He turned his plump, well-kept body over on the springy sofa as if he wished to have another long sleep, and tightly embracing one of the pillows leant his cheek against it, but then suddenly opened his eyes and sat up."

Stephen is next launched into an enthusiastic attempt to remember a ridiculous and amusing, dream until by habit he reaches for his dressing gown which isn't where his hand autmatically searches for it because he is not sleeping in his own bed. "And then he suddenly remembered that he was not sleeping there but in his study, and why. The smile vanished from his face and he frowned."

In fact, everything that we will ever need to know about Stephen is in the first two paragraphs that introduce him -- his wish to prolong his basic bodily pleasures; his need to reside in his desires and avoid the harshness of reality; his comfort in his habits, and his simple assumption that all in his life would be good if he were allowed to go easy in his pursuits, his habits undisturbed by the pain he may cause to others. A careful reader, well adapted to the style of expression of 19th century novels, might well be able to guess from the fact that this portrait is complete in-itself, that Oblonsky is not going to become a major focus of the novel "Anna Karenina."

In fact Oblonsky is a minor character whom Nabokov calls in his "Lectures on Russian Literature" a plot device. Oblonsky gets characters from place to place, in this case, bringing Anna Karenina, his sister, to Moscow, where she will meet her future lover Vronsky. Oblonsky carries messages between the characters, setting off the next movement of the novel, he casually gives other characters information that they need to know, and he conveniently (and rather vehemently) explains the Shcherbatsky family to the reader, where resides one of our major characters Kitty Shcherbatsky, the love interest of the other main character of the novel, Levin. Finally, Stephen provides all of the characters with a connection in Moscow, when they need such a connection for plot purposes, and this is especially true for Stephen's connection with Levin, who is often hidden away on his estate, sulking or in a kind of mystical ecstasy. One can almost think of him as a kind of Polonius - a figure of fun who serves as a shuttle between the characters, moving them from place to place:

"An attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious and meticulous,
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, almost ridiculous -
Almost, at times, the Fool."
T.S Eliot, "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock."

Oblonsky must seem a bit of a busy-buddy, a stage manager, who won't remain off stage. He will "swell a progress, start a scene or two" and make sure the major characters get their proper cues and hit their marks on stage. All of this Nabokov notices in his peculiar way. If one looks closely at the 19th century novel, many have a "stage-manager" of some sort or other. Already in Part 1 of the novel Oblonsky gracefully brings Anna on stage, calling her forth from Petersburg to mend his upset household and place a Band-Aid on his marriage. He also introduces us to Levin who has come to Moscow to see Kitty. He is a very helpful character.

And yet Oblonsky, who is almost a fool, is given psychological exposition in depth. A reader can't put down the novel without feeling that she has experienced a character in full. In spite of variations of time and place, this is a person who might walk into my life, and if I was as attentive as Tolstoy I could recognize Oblonsky standing in front of my eyes. Oblonsky is the nearest person to a friend to the painfully self-conscious and un-self-forgetting Levin. And this seems right. Who else but the easy going and always self-forgetting Stephen, could be so tolerant, and one suspects secretly amused, of Levin's angst and self-loathing?

It is at this point that we can begin to see why this "minor character" can live inside of this novel, and perhaps be the subject of some not-yet written novel, even though he doesn't change one wit from the first page to the last time that we see him being rewarded for all of his services. Oblonsky, who moves about from place to place more than any other character (except for perhaps Anna), remains in complete stasis, always the same. In effect, Stephen Oblonsky and his situation, is the background, the societal norm, from which society would judge the two main characters of the novel, Levin and Anna. Stephen Oblonsky, who is himself unjudgmental, is a measuring rod of society's condemnation of both Anna and Levin's unhappiness. He is basically happy in his dalliances and his unexamined life and in the end he is successful in his career. Simultaneously he is "Tolstoy's" narrative judgment against the kind of society that would make this kind of life its measure of what is good and successful. As well as Oblonsky himself, his marriage, serves as a contrast of the kind of failed marriage and failed amoral character which passes for success and happiness in the world at large. Everything in Part 1 of "Anna Karenina" is an emblematic portrait turned upside down (like Marx's description of ideology as a camera obscura) by the thrill of ironic misrecognition when compared with the rest of the novel. It is as if Stephen is performing a parody of the adultery that will lead to Anna's demise. It is as if Stephen is engaged in the pretense of the moral agony that Levin will go through in order to learn to live with his spouse.

It is as if Stephen can have his cake and eat it too -- a cliche that fits well his attitude toward life. Stephen is "Tolstoy's" insight into the sexual hypocrisy of a society that condemns what Stephen wants but winks at adultery as his adultery, as long as he is "socially correct." It is another irony of the novel that Stephen and Anna are brother and sister, for while Stephen remains "in" society during all of his dalliances, Anna is excluded from proper society for her adultery. Beneath their differences, Stephen's and Anna's sexual longing are the same. Yet Anna wants more than just a dalliance, she wants a heightened reality, which gives meaning to the world. She looks for it in love. Levin looks for it in "religion." Stephen does not look for it at all. What Anna can not share with her brother is the everyday hypocrisy that allows her to do one thing and pretend to do another. This hypocrisy is simply Stephen's easy-going nature. Levin does not share in this hypocrisy, either, as we can see in Levin's conflicted empathy with Anna the one time he meets her late in the novel.

Stephen is constitutionally happy and does not suffer the vengeance of society or of his inner demons that will kill Anna and propel Levin on a painful search. Stephen is what his society accepts without thinking. All of the conflicting desires and inconsistencies of character felt by Anna and Levin are simply not on the schedule of Stephen's easy going habits. Anna and Levin both desire a singular union with one lover within one family, and yet also desire sexual fulfillment and sexual freedom; Anna and Levin both desire to live up to their ideal of a good life and yet know that their personal actions contradict their ideals. Anna and Levin both believe that all of their rage for life and attraction to death, that all that is their beneath the surface of their skin and consciousness, can not be resolved in a way that will lead to good. It does not seem to matter whether that "good" is judged by society's standards, or by their own peculiarly high standards that set them apart from the society that judges them, there is no resolution to their conflict. But Oblonsky is the well-adjusted man who sees none of this.

I hope I have shown that Stephen Oblonsky, even though a minor character, is an important part of "Anna Karenina. The depth of insight into a character who is a lovable hypocrite shows us much about Tolstoy's art. But more than this it provides us with an in-depth experience, in a way that is impossible to define, of psychological and sociological patterns that are more interesting and more profound than all of the psychology and sociology yet invented.

I will end this part of my essay with a slogan that I hope to show is true: The so-called "human sciences" are facets of the ideology of our time. The best novels give us experiences, which reveal our own truths.

Jerry Monaco
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy & Culture
Hopeful Monsters: Poetry, Fiction, Memories by Jerry Monaco

Part 2 of of a series on Anna Karenina is located at
Moral Intentions and Artistic Tensions in Anna Karenina

I am going to post this now without rereading. I will edit later. Reader forgive me for the typos and the syntax.




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Reponse to Post: Unions are blue-collar says the gen-Xer.....

Subject: but how?
Unions are so blue-collar, sez the gen-xer in me. Is there a tradition of unionizing the office workers, the college
graduates? You talk about factory workers, but you don't seem to be talking about me.

(Below is my reponse to a comment made to my post "Election Reflections.")

My short reply to your question is to ask -- What alternative is there? I think the only good choice is to start educating the vast majority of the people who benefit least from the distribution of resources in our society, about their interests in relation to those who own most of the wealth My longer answer is to try to explain why the alternatives of how to educate people are so restricted.

First, perhaps I should make a few premises of my note on the election explicit.

The first premise is that we on the left need grassroots organizations that are independent of the five-percent of U.S. citizens who own and rule the United States. Another premise is that those independent institutions must be long-lasting. The reason for this is that most of the institutions of those who own the wealth in this country are permanent, highly class conscious and always operating to set a political agenda. If we are to develop countervailing institutions our institutions must also be permanent, highly class conscious, and always operating to set a political and social agenda. They must not be groups tied to a single individual and they must have some stable social base. We on the left have a harder job maintaining such organizations than the Generals Motors and Electric. Corporations are powerful and permanent organizations that are always campaigning for their own narrow interests, and are always buying and creating organizations to look out for their own class interests. The huge public relations industry, which also runs our elections, is an industry that caters to the narrow interests of business entities. G.E. can buy a television network and one can be sure that the people who run the network will have approximately the same worldview as the people who run G.E. General Motors and the auto companies, Microsoft and the high-tech companies, can set up lobbying and public relations organizations, that propagate their worldview by simply spending money and modeling their organizations after hierarchical corporate institutions. Our organizations cannot be set up this way. They must always maintain a consensus among its members and must always educate its own membership. In other words our organizations must at least try very hard to be democratic and consensus building. And this is another premise of my comment. Unless our organizations are always educating, organizing and trying to involve people in democratic decision making, at least by building a consensus, they will fail, or eventually be bought off.

Second, the point of my comment on the recent election was to state that those of us who believe in progressive politics must do the hard work of collecting our resources to educate and organize people. The only way to do this is by creating and building standing institutions that look out for the interests of most of us who are excluded from the councils of power. Most of us look at electoral politics, correctly in my view, as irrelevant to our daily lives. My observation is that the only two institutions that are able to maintain some amount of independence from those who own and rule the country are those organized around religion and those organized by employees around the workplace. In practical circumstances that comes down to "church" and "unions." These are simply observations of the structure of our society and what opportunities we may have to participate in institutions that can educate and mobilize all of us who believe in maintaining a world where we can live decent lives, without constant fear of unemployment, poverty, homelessness, hunger, and lack of medical care, and beyond that, organizations that may help us to build greater opportunities for democracy in industry and social investment. If there are any other institutions that are both independent from the small minority of people that own our society and are relatively permanent I do not know of them. If we can create other kinds of institutions instead of church based or union based institutions which can fill our need to educate and mobilize people around a progressive agenda, I am all for them. But I think that our range of choices are for at least the near future set by the structure of our institutions.

So my first answer to your question is, unless "white collar" workers organize collectively around their workplace and try to educate themselves about the world and their place in it, unless they realize that their interests are not the same as those who own the country, we will fail. As long as white collar workers identify with the interests of their company more than with the interests of their fellow workers they will lose ground as a group. If "white collar" workers, most of whom are no better off than "blue collar" workers, do not realize that it is in their interest to form their own organizations based in the workplace, then they will simply become more and more insecure in their lives, following what ever ruling class agenda that seems best to them, letting other people rule their lives, while they accept the "fact" that the only way to look after themselves, is to adopt the slogan "me first." Unless we work collectively with others who are in similar situations to our own, we will fail. If we don't organize collectively we will leave the field of play to the only group that is self-conscious and has its own organizations, the business classes, the elite producers of culture, and right-wing church groups. We must use the organizational tools that we have and I don't think that there is any alternative to organizing in the kinds of institutions that I have suggested.

I think that the main point of your question actually has very little to do with what is the best method of organization or how to organize or where to organize. The thrust of your question seems to me the idea that unions, etc. are simply old fashion and why should anyone participate in organizations that limit the individual's independence? I think many people who consider themselves middle class have bought into the idea that the only way to be a success is to follow the rules of what ever organization they happen to be in or that somehow they will strike it rich by becoming a "star" or an entrepreneur. All I can do is point out that in places where worker organizations are strong people live better and have more opportunities to live a decent life.

Your basic pessimism that "white collar" workers will not join unions is not easy to answer. In some respects I think that your question is too general to answer in its current form. You ask if there is a tradition of organizing white collar workers. Outside the United States there is such a tradition. Inside the United States the tradition of organizing white collar workers only exists within the public sector. That is an interesting observation for several reasons. One, because the time period for the organization of workers in the public sector was during an historical moment when it was not politically feasible for the people in control of the state to crack down on unionization. In other words white collar workers were organized in the public sector because it was harder to break the union through "legal" means, such as delays of recognition, lay-offs and terminations. But there is another reason why public sector white collar employees were organized. Traditionally, public sector jobs were the first step-up out of marginal working class jobs for first generation college educated sons and daughters of industrial workers with a strong tradition of solidarity in their own right. The teachers who organized the teacher's unions across this country were mostly the sons and daughters of the workers who organized unions in the '30s. So there is an unstated premise to your question that I agree with; tradition matters and what is most important is a tradition of solidarity between people in similar situations. How that tradition is inculcated and developed is another question altogether. I do not have an easy answer to that question. All that I know is that it must be inculcated or else what we love most in our lives will begin to whither away.

Jerry Monaco
New York City
15 November 2004


Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy & Culture
Hopeful Monsters: Poetry, Fiction, Memories by Jerry Monaco




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Election Reflections: The task is to educate, organize - but where?

Election Reflections: The task is to organize -- but where?
Originally Written 10 November 2004 --

I have read and heard election comments from many friends and correspondents and, quite frankly, most of them don't make sense to me. Many people are depressed by Bush's re-election. People here in New York City, where 75% of the voters voted for Kerry, look at themselves as somehow different and despised by the rest of the country. I don't understand the reason for the depression and sense of alienation of so many of my friends or why people believe that things are so much different this week than they were last week. I agree that the people who are currently the governing fraction of the ruling regime in the United States are thugs and rightwing authoritarians; we could better serve humanity by putting Bush and his cronies in front of a war-crime tribunal than placing at the head of the governing councils of the most powerful state the world has ever known. Yet, still, I must emphasize that the tasks remain the same today as they were two weeks ago or 4 years ago. And they would be the same tasks that would have remained before us if Kerry had been elected instead of Bush. Kerry, if he had been elected, would have been the same kind of right-wing president that Clinton became, unless a mass movement had appeared that might have changed the ground that Kerry stood upon. The last "liberal" president the United States elected was Richard Nixon. I am no admire of Nixon. He was one of the worse war-criminals of the past century. He was not a liberal because he cared for the health and wealth of those of us at the bottom of society, but simply because he couldn't be the right-wing nut he would have been in different times. There would have been too much of a reaction in society as a whole if he did not continue the same kind of guns and butter programs that were started by Lyndon Johnson.

What most people of the left who write about the election and are depressed by Bush's second term don't accept is that elections in our society are mostly a public relations problem and at best are surface reactions to what is underneath in society as a whole. Equating an "election" with politics, and then thinking that every kind of political organization that doesn't relate to an electoral politics is a distraction from "real" politics, is one of those middle-class doctrines that only shows that most people who become "professional" loose a good proportion of their capacity to think. Perhaps this is because among our middle class "professionals" every kind of politics that is not electoral politics is simply too messy. It stinks of the "mob". The point I want to make for those on the left who are not afraid of the mob is that elections in our country have become more and more divorced from actual politics. It is true that small changes in the councils of power can make a meaningful differences in limited areas, but the real changes only come when there are larger social movements pushing politicians into making concessions to the rest of us. Only larger social movements, which establish long lasting institutions, can change the ground on which the politicians stand. The last report I read in the "Wall Street Journal" stated that approximately 56% of the electorate voted, which means that Bush was elected by approximately 29% of the electorate, which seems to me to generally reflect his support in society as a whole. Also, the approximately 27% of the electorate that voted for Kerry I think accurately reflects the support for the conservatives in the Democratic party. The rest of us may vote in disgust for what ever candidate seems to hurt us least but let us not think that the simple act of voting tells us anything about politics or the general condition of the United States at this moment. The task that is the same today as it was yesterday is that we have to organize and educate and finds ways to act that gives us all something meaningful to do in changing our workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, churches, etc. The best election comments I have read simply state this obvious fact. The right has spent the last forty years organizing grass-roots organizations, turning apolitical church groups into organizations that educate people into a certain worldview and then mobilize them for the purpose of the powerful. Our task is harder. It is not the task of the Democratic party or any other ruling group. We are not mobilizing people for the sake of the powerful. We are mobilizing people for the sake of spreading power and equality throughout our relations. The right-wing Christian organizations can dictate what is good and bad, and what to do about it. We cannot.

But the question we should be thinking about is the basic one of how, where, and what kind of organizations we should build. There are no simple solutions here and no substitutions for the hard work of everyday self-education and activist self-help. Organizations evolve in the course of building them and often we are unable to see what we are making when we begin. Reality surprises. Yet if we are going to help build the kind of society, based on human values of solidarity, human decency, the end of suffering amid abundance, etc -- the society most of us long for, we must have lasting social and educational institutions of our own. I am just stating the obvious. In our society the two sectors that provide stable venues for organizing are the work-place and the various churches. These are the two major choices for places to spend our organizing time. There are of course other choices but the problem with them is that with out outside institutional support human rights organizations, civil rights organizations, etc. are not self-supporting. Unless they are very small and local they quickly become dependent on institutional forces that influence their direction away from grass-roots activism. On the other hand small local organizations rarely develop into the kind of national network we need except in regard to narrow issues -- reproductive rights, environment, Central American Intervention, etc.

There are many "progressive" church organizations in the U.S. so there is no need to reject religious organizations in a dogmatic manner, but it is hard to see that in the long run Church organizations will be the major institutional support for progressive organizing. One reason for this is that a Church organization is by definition concerned with doctrinal issues that can only be called sectarian. Church organizations can help provided a space for progressive political and worker's organization but I doubt that in our society they will be the major institutions of the "left." I may be wrong. I certainly saw a contrary example in Central America in the 1980s. But I think in our society, even the Civil Rights movement of the post war era (which may be taken as a church based progressive movement to a large extent) of necessity became a secular movement when dealing with larger social and economic issues that formed the foundation of racism. I think that this is only saying that our society is so diverse that organizing around progressive social and economic issues is necessarily secular.

Traditionally the most stable support for "left" and "progressive" issues has been workers organizations of various sorts. This is simply a truism. Also the most stable worker's organization have been unions. Here is where we are stalled. We must continue to organize people around their work places and we must continue to educate people on the values of solidarity, etc., but for the moment, for most of us, this is a limited possibility. I do not discount international solidarity groups, civil and human rights groups, etc. We must continue to work to build such organizations. Yet without the institutional support of a strong union movement or of work-place based organizations of some sort, without the education and resources such organizations can provide, there will be no stable progressive organizations that serve the left in the way right-wing church organizations serve the right.

This is where I run into trouble with some of my "liberal" friends and maybe even with some who would label themselves "radical left." There are so many people in their 20s and 30s who simply think that it is either impossible to form a union (they may be accurately judging reality) or believe that unions are a conglomeration of gangsters or that they are stodgy old conservative organizations. There is some truth to these criticism, but when one sees the courageous attempts of mostly African-American workers to form a union in a chicken processing factory in the south and the brutal tactics the owners use to crush such attempts one does know which side to choose in such struggles. So may I suggest that we try to stick our necks out at our own workplaces and try to form groups to talk about these issues? May also suggest that we try to educate our liberal friends on the need for all of us to have more power through organization among wage earners in our work places. Finally, I would like to say that organizing around our workplaces does not only mean trying to organize a union. Who knows what kind of future organizations we can evolve? They may not be unions. But I am at a loss to think of what other kind of stable organizations we can support that will provide a longer term institutional foundation for the "progressive" agenda except for workplace based organizations.

I hope I am only stating the obvious.

Postscript:
Barbara Ehrenreich has a good article on what I would call the infrastructure of the Christian Right in the Nation. It can be found at the Nation's website or at http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm . The good point that I wish everyone on the left would contemplate is that "today's right-leaning Christian churches represent a coldly Calvinist tradition in which even speaking in tongues, if it occurs at all, has been increasingly routinized and restricted to the pastor. What these churches have to offer, in addition to intangibles like eternal salvation, is concrete, material assistance. They have become an alternative welfare state, whose support rests not only on "faith" but also on the loyalty of the grateful recipients." What I would like to point out is that this kind of self-help has been the foundation of every popular movement of "right" and "left" from ancient Rome to the modern working class movement. The left must find ways to organize self-help that is both democratic and educational or else we will not make progress.

Jerry J. Monaco
New York City
10 November 2004


Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy & Culture
Hopeful Monsters: Poetry, Fiction, Memories by Jerry Monaco




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