Some Cases of Humanitarian Intervention

This is the second part of a recent essay I wrote on the moral justifiability of humanitarian intervention. This section examines several case studies of humanitarian interventions. I'd refer the reader to the previous piece for some general background and discussion of humanitarian intervention (see comments box for link).

Also, one further point. Readers will note the example of Bangladesh in this essay. In this instance I included it in the essay because I was basically taking Walzer at his word on the situation there. As I will develop in the final section of the series, I don't think Humanitarian Intervention by a capitalist country is necessarily ruled out, certainly historically it isn't, but it is very unlikely.

Whilst we would argue that moral justification is guided by general considerations as above, every particular intervention must be justified in its own context. In this sense we are guided by the approach undertaken by Michael Walzer in looking at historical cases to generate these general considerations. In passing we will note that the examples used are ones the writer of this essay way already familiar with, and thus could perhaps be slightly unrepresentative. But nevertheless they yield important facts bearing upon the subject of this essay and are thus valuable in this sense.
It is the case of Haiti that we shall turn to first. As Hallward (2007) discusses, Haiti has had two humanitarian interventions into it in the last 15 years. The first occurred in 1994. The Lavalas government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide had been overthrown by a military coup in September 2001, and after negotiating with the US government was returned to power by a US force which intervened humanitarianly to disarm the Haitian army and paramilitaries. As Hallward (2007) discusses there were several factors that related to the decision to do this, not just humanitarian considerations, including the stream of Haitian refugees coming to the US and its political relationship with the army junta that governed Haiti was deteriorating. However, Hallward (2007:52) goes on to point out that

“It is more than likely that the occupation that began in September 1994 may prove, in the long run, to have been just as damaging to the interests of Haitian democracy as the first US occupation of 1915-34. It gave the occupying power profound and temporarily irreversible influence over the reconfiguration of a state apparatus more compatible with its own practices. As the soldiers themselves began to leave over the course of 1995, a whole swathe of para-civilian advisers, trainers and consultants remained behind to administer the consequences of their work…”

Although the military intervention took place over a short period of time, it gave the US government economic and political influence over the country which played a pivotal role in the second coup against Aristide in 2004 which led to the second, and much longer humanitarian intervention. In this case the backdrop was an insurgency, which Hallward (2004) argues was secretly supported by the political opposition to Aristide who were themselves funded by US government aid.
The humanitarian intervention in 2004 to the present was again premised on disarming the ex-army and paramilitaries, yet the US troops deployed in Haiti, at best, did not do this for several months, as Hallward (2004) after discussing journalistic reports that identify US troops colluding or directly participating the murder of people in the suburbs of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, charges the US government as having “…direct complicity in the mass murder of Haitian civilians…” (Hallward, 2004:258).
Indeed, Hallward (2007:52) states that humanitarian intervention “…has come to replace traditional forms of military action as the primary means of neo-imperial control.”
It would be inaccurate to state that this example is anything but justifies humanitarian intervention on its own. But we should not draw our conclusions on the basis of just one solitary example. Indeed, in his book, Just and Unjust Wars, Walzer (2006) compares two different examples, those of the US intervention into Cuba in 1898 and Indian intervention into Bangladesh in 1971.
The Cuban example appears to be somewhat similar to the events that occurred in Haiti in 1994, which differed in the fact that it was war from independence from Spain, yet the consequence of the intervention was similar in that the US imposed itself economically and politically on Cuba, even establishing a military dictatorship in the immediate four years (Gott, 2004), in the aftermath of the intervention. Indeed, the intervention in Cuban life by the US government at this point and the years afterwards have surely impacted on the hatred on the ‘yankee imperialism’ in Cuba today.
The Bangladeshi example differs in some fundamental ways, although like the Cuban example above, the humanitarian intervention was in support of an independence movement. As Walzer describes, it

“…is a better example of humanitarian intervention – not because of the singularity or purity of government’s motives, but because its various motives, but because its various motives converged on a single course of action that was also the course of action called for by the Bengalis. This convergence explains why the Indians were in and out of the country so quickly, defeating the Pakistani army but not replacing it, and imposing no political controls on the emergent state of Bangladesh. No doubt, strategic as well as moral interests underlay this policy: Pakistan, India’s old enemy, was significantly weakened, while India itself avoided becoming responsible for a desperately poor nation whose internal politics was likely to be unstable and volatile for a long time to come. But the intervention qualifies as humanitarian because it was a rescue, strictly and narrowly defined.” (Walzer, 2006:105)

The distinction that Walzer makes here between the two interventions is summed up when he says that the Indian intervention coincided with what the Bengali population wanted. What makes a humanitarian intervention different from a military intervention in the interests of the intervening which hides behind humanitarian phraseology, is that very factor of being subordinated to a large extent to the interests of the repressed population.
Another consideration that we could make is that of a type of revolutionary war as a type of humanitarian intervention. This may seem like an odd conception to the reader, as a revolutionary war is an attempt to carry forward a new revolutionary type of government in one country into another ‘at the point of a sword’. Yet, consider the following, an uprising occurs in a country, the government of said country attempts to crush it; if a bordering revolutionary country then intervened militarily to stop the repression (which it is likely would include killings) – would this not be a military intervention for humanitarian means?
To further examine this question we will look at the advance of the Soviet Red Army on Warsaw in late 1920. It will be noted that this came first after an offensive of the Polish army against Soviet Russia which turned into a retreat. As Trotsky (2005:527) explains in his autobiography “There were high hopes of an uprising of the Polish workers. At any rate, Lenin fixed his mind on carrying the war to an end, up to the entry into Warsaw to help the Polish workers overthrow Pilsudski’s government and seize the power.” This is not a humanitarian intervention, as it is only coming to the support of a hypothetically existing population that is being repressed rather than an actual one. However, if the Polish population was in danger at that time, ie (an uprising had occurred or was imminent before the decision to march on Warsaw). This is the consideration Trotsky reports he made himself at this time and thus opposed the offensive. It also is what several previous uprsings in various European countries at this time, for example Bavaria in 1919 (Watt, 2003), had counted upon occurring. This would have, in some ways, paralleled Walzer’s example of the intervention into Bangladesh that we have examined above.

Bob Fine on Law and Class – Part 1

This piece looks at the first section of the chapter by the same name in Capitalism and the Rule of Law a book consisting of a selection of papers from the January 1979 joint conference between the National Deviancy Conference and the Conference of Socialist Economics. By the way, I’ll be away for about a week so this post and the one below are to keep you going for some time.

Fine starts his paper by looking at E.P. Thompson’s critique of some left groups, castigating them for dismissing anything to do with the state could potentially be positive. However, Fine isn’t interested in them, rather the assumptions that underlie Thompson’s stance. He argues that

“For the basis of Thompson’s critique consists in an unflinching belief in the democratic character of the legal side of state power. He writes that law seems to him to be ‘an unqualified human good’, in that it ‘imposes effective inhibitions upon power’ and defends the citizen ‘from power’s all-intrusive claims’. No problem is raised over the form of bourgeois law itself, the only issue concerns the struggle against the intrusion of ‘class-bound procedures’ into the legal mechanism”(pg.30)

He goes on to argue that Thompson is stating that bourgeois law will form a basis for working-class power to develop from. To Thompson’s position he contrasts that of Engels, who argued that under communism law would disappear and that capitalist democracy, with bourgeois law and everything, complements the domination of capital. After quoting from Engels he says,

“The issue which these passages from Engels raise is that the bourgeois form of law is contradictory. Between two polar positions, between its dismissal as a mask and its elevation as an unqualified good, we need to understand the way in which law acts as a form of domination, the social basis upon which this form of power emerges and sustains itself, and thence the contradictory functions which it performs both for the rulers and the ruled, capital and labour.”(pg.31)

Fine, then discusses why he feels the form of law is of significance at that time. One is the question of law under Stalinism, and the second is the attacks on civil liberties and increases in police powers occurring at that time in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. He goes on to state:

“It is in this context, when the imperatives of capital accumulation and the class struggle have put into question the viability of the ‘rule of law’, and when we witness a movement toward the substitution of bureaucratic-police rule for social-democratic forms of power, centred around legality and parliamentary representation, that the issue of forms of bourgeois domination has emerged again with particular sharpness… it becomes imperative to differentiate between the forms of power through which the domination of capital is left mediated and secured… this emphasis on form poses its own dangers: that of neglecting the class content behind the forms of law; and of neglecting the significance of the erosion of legality for the imposition of new conditions of exploitation and accumulation.”(pg.32)

He then suggests that quite an apt place to draw from on these issues is Trotsky’s analysis of the rise to power of fascism in Germany and the transition to Bonapartism and then fascism and differences between these forms. He goes on to say

“…the significance of the form of law could not be separated from its content: namely, the class relations which constituted the foundation of the legal form; and the transformation of these class relations hidden behind the move first to ‘Bonapartism’, which relegated legality and parliamentarism to shadows of their former selves, and then to fascism which substituted for them brute force and police terror. The strength of Trotsky’s analysis was precisely to probe the links between these distinct forms of state power and the class relations which provide their substance. Trotsky, in the course of his extended critique both of those who identified social democracy with either Bonapartism or fascism, and of those who defended the spirit of the constitution as it elevated the bureaucracy above society, constantly searches for the class basis of these historical development.”(pg32-3)

After quoting an article of Trotsky’s (Fascism, Stalinism and the United Front) to further elaborate his point, Fine concludes his section with the following words.

“For Trotsky, the defence of the form of law could not be isolated from its content. Bourgeois law was not an absolute elevated above the conditions of civil society which gave it birth; but the expression of capital mediated by the independent organization of the working class. It was for this reason that it had to be defended against attack from the right and against indifference from the left as the political form necessary for the exercise of ‘proletarian democracy’ and for the transition to socialism.”(pg.33)

I have to say, I think Fine’s general point is really good. However, I think, although he states he isn’t making any ‘mechanical parallels’, it’s a little too much to exaggerate the attacks to civil liberties and increasing of police powers during the 70s and 80s to the coming to power of fascism in Germany, but the points regarding form and content which Fine makes through this I think are spot on. There is another point I want to take Fine upon which is the last sentence of the last paragraph I quoted. Whilst capitalist democracy is the most favourable political form for workers under capitalism, it is not ‘necessary’.

An Appeal For Assistance

At the moment I am trying to read some materials in preparation for an essay about the Moscow Show Trials and the Great Purge in Stalinist Russia in the 1930’s. As some people may be aware, as the first trial was taking place Trotsky was placed under house arrest in Norway and unable to immediately reply effectively to the allegations made at this trial against him. In his stead, his son, Leon Sedov wrote the The Red Book on the Moscow Trials to defend both of them. However, Trotsky did publish a book in 1937 called the Crimes of Stalin. However, it was published in French (as Les Crimes Des Staline), but to my knowledge it hasn’t been published in English. The individual articles of course should have been published in the Writings of Trotsky for that period by Pathfinder Press, and sure enough I’ve found some in there – however, an introduction to a PDF of one of them (The Thirst For Power) on the Marxist Internet Archive says there are twenty six chapters of the book, but I’ve only found 8 chapters and the preface. I list them below as articles from two other publications that are mentioned in the notes to Trotsky’s Writings which I’m don’t know whether they are related or not. Can anybody help me work out what other chapters belong to this book?

(By the way I have the second edition of both Writings 35-36 and 36-37 published in 1977 and 78 respectively.)

Les Crimes Des Staline (The Crimes of Stalin)

Preface (36-37, pg.353)
In Closed Court (35-36, pg. 455)
In ‘Socialist’ Norway (35-36, pg.21)
Why They Confessed To Crimes They Had Not Committed (36-37, pg.56)
Thirst For Power (36-37, pg.64)
Hatred of Stalin (36-37, pg.67)
Notes En Route (36-37, pg.72)
On Sending Terrorists Into the USSR (36-37, pg.75)
The Preliminary Inquiry at Coyocan (36-37, pg.264)

El Proceso de Moscu

Seveteen New Victims of the GPU (36-37, pg.110)
The Truth Behind the ‘Voluntary Confessions’ (36-37, pg.131)
The New Trial (36-37, pg.128)
The ‘Voluntary’ Confessions of the Defendants (36-37, pg.149)
The Conspiracy’s Financial Resources (36-37, pg.151)
Industrial Sabotage (36-37, pg.150)
Muralov (36-37, pg.153)
Appeal to the League of Nations (36-37, pg.163)
Prosecutor Vyshinsky (36-37, pg.164)
Will the Defendants be Executed (36-37, pg.165)
Thirteen Are To Die (36-37, pg.181)
Those Who Have Been ‘Spared’ (36-37, pg.182)
Kaganovich Anticipates My End (36-37, pg.184)
The ‘People’ Call for Punishment (36-37, pg.185)

The Truth (About the Moscow Trials)

A New Moscow Amalgam (36-37, pg.115)
Pyatakov’s Phantom Flight to Moscow (36-37, pg.154)
Pyatakov’s Story Vague on Time and Place (36-37, pg.166)
Romm Frequented Dark Paris Alleys (36-37, pg.204)
A Mockery of Justice (36-37, pg.245)

Socialists on the Criminal Justice System – Leon Trotsky

The second in my series of looks at the writings of socialists. This piece looks at the comments of Trotsky regarding the police that he makes in “Stalin’s Gangsters” a compilation of his articles that were published just before his assassination in Mexico in relation to a previous attempt. I also want to briefly comment upon the passage in What Next? Vital Question for the German Proletariat too.

The most bandied about quotation from Trotsky on the police is the one from What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat which goes “The worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state, is a bourgeois cop, not a worker.” This quotation is used by some ultra-left sects to put forward a blanket argument of the complete reactionary nature of all policemen. I don’t think this is necessarily the case as readers of this blog may have noticed, indeed the very sentence before this explains “Consciousness is determined by environment even in this instance”. Rather than saying that the police were wholly a reactionary mass at all times, what Trotsky was actually saying here is that the Prussian police which the SPD technically had control over couldn’t be relied upon as a bulwark against Hitler, indeed concretising that sentence he says “Of late years these policemen have had to do much more fighting with revolutionary workers than with Nazi students. Such training does not fail to leave its effects.”

But I am talking about another period, when Trotsky was in Mexico and the GPU was attempting to murder him. Here Trotsky touches upon a different element to the police – that of trying to catch perpetrators of crimes (that is infringements of the law that are reported to them) and take reasonable precautions to prevent crimes from occurring. Discussing this is frankly tricky – mostly because the police’s role as part of the state defending capitalism can often blend in with this so you get arbitrary controls to defend the capitalist state interests portrayed as vital measures to prevent crime (when fairly often they are nothing of the sort). Because the comments are so scattered I will not use quotations as I’m trying to draw the general line of thought in relation to this from a pamphlet that is mainly concerned with a political expose of the methods of Stalinism.

That there could be potential benefits from the police guarding him in Mexico, Trotsky was in no doubt. Otherwise he would have denounced them for doing so in this pamphlet. However, following the points made above, he also supplemented them with his own guard. During the investigation into the attempt on his life he also cooperated with the investigation and court proceedings. Again he supplemented this by collecting material, which as well as supplementing the political points he wished to make in regards, also added to his defence in court. What is the point I am trying to make? Well, in this respect of dealing with crime, a proportion of the actions of the police are socially useful. This is why I defend the idea of democratic control over the police – to give working people the decision on how the resources of the police are to be used.

Indeed whilst I would argue that a socialist society would cut away at the causes of crime, it is a little utopian to expect all crime to diminish and there be no need for investigative procedures to examine facts in relation to something. Expertise in this area would be something we would need to draw out of the police as it exists presently, and perhaps dedicated investigators may be initially necessary. But let us be clear – this would be on a completely different social and organisational basis – it would need to be clearly separated from security and guarding and be thoroughly democratised.

Socialism 2008 - The Fourth International and After

Before I begin i'd like to give a heads up to some other general reports of Socialism 2008 - there are one's at A Very Public Sociologist, Socialist Party Devon, The Nation of Duncan and The Revolution Decides - if there are anymore that want plugging let us know! (by the way, some of this is a little simplifed but i'm trying to draw out some of the main points made) On a completely different note - maybe we should have a Socialist Party Bloggers meeting next year at Socialism during one of the breaks?

The final session I went to on the sunday was the one on the furth international. Disappointly or nor, there were none of the ultra-left groups there that i had expected. However, we were treated to a leadoff which breifly summarised the history and degeneration of the first three international working class organisations and then Niall Mulholland outlined the emergence of the Fourth International (also referred to as FI).
It had been the defeat of the German working class with the rise of Hitler to power in 1933 which had led Trotsky to break with the Comintern. Although him and other had been expelled, the International Left Opposition created in 1930 (the Russian Left Opposition had already existed for 7 years) saw itself as trying to reform the Comintern and as an expelled faction.
The Fourth International was launched under difficult conditions. It supporters were under attacks in Russia and abroad by the GPU - several of the main supporters of the Fourth International were executed prior to the conference or in the next few year afterwards - Leon Sedov. Rudolf Klement, Erwin Wolf and Trotdsky himself to name a few. But Niall said that the conference was justified by continuing the marxist political programme which the Comintern had moved away from.
The organisation's difficulties didn't stop after the conference. The outbreak of WW2 led to a crisis in one of it's strongest sections, the US SWP, with some of the leaders capitulating to petty-bourgeois ideas over the USSR. The war also scattered the forces of the Fourth International, this was especially so after the assination fo Trotsky. However, there were some acheivements during the war - particularly in Britain by the WIL and RCP organising workers.
But a whole range of political and historical debates where thrown up by the end of WW2. Trotsky had argued that there would be an upsruge in struggle after the war - which did occur, however, as Niall put it, there was a counter-revolution in democratic clothes led by the CP's and Social Democracies. Flying in the face of the situation some of the leaders of the Fourth International argued that the war would continue and that Eastern Europe couldn't be Stalinised. This was criticised by Ted Grant who put forward the best positions in relation to these events and it is the organisation around the Militant that he helped found from which the Socialist Party developed from. We were part of the FI until 1965 - criticisng the illusions of some of the leaders fo the FI, like Mandel and Pablo, had in Tito, Mao and Castro. Although all these regimes differed from the USSR, none were healthy workers democracies. At that time we were based only in Britain, but by linking up with Marxists in other countries (namely Ireland, Germany and Sweden) we launched the Committee for a Workers International (CWI) in 1974 - the Committee part was deliberate as we didn't see ourselves as the whole of the new international (and still don't at this stage - we are far too small despite now being present in over 40 countries)

I didn't make that many notes on the discussion and my contribution came out all wrong. However on of the things in the sum up did interest me and that was on the fact that Trotskyism did build a base for itself in some countries - Bolivia (post on that session coming soon) and Sri Lanka. Now I would really like to read up on Sri Lanka as what Niall alluded to in his leadoff was quite interesting - the NSSP had built up a strong presence in the workers movement there but under the influence of the FI had squandered this by joining a bourgois government - indeed Niall alluded to its capitulation being aprt of the reason for the civil war that rages to this day. There were also more points that I didn't properly take notes of. However, Phil from AVPS was sitting next to me and his notes seemed much fuller on the discussion so hopefully he'll post on that.

On Means and Ends

Yesterday after a lecture on utilitarianism and morals I found myself comntemplating one of the key concepts of utilitarianism - that the end justifies the means. Now, personally I don't think this is necessarily the case - i think one has to be much further sighted than the immediate end for instance. Anyways, to get to the point, I found myself re-reading Trotsky's pamphlet Their Morals and Ours and what he has to say on the matter - part of which I reproduce below
(Taken from Marxist Internet Archive http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/morals/morals.htm)

Dialectic Interdependence of End and Means

A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified, From the Marxist point of view, which expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of man over nature and to the abolition of the power of man over man.
“We are to understand then that in achieving this end anything is permissible?” sarcastically demands the Philistine, demonstrating that he understood nothing. That is permissible, we answer, which really leads to the liberation of mankind. Since this end can be achieved only through revolution, the liberating morality of the proletariat of necessity is endowed with a revolutionary character. It irreconcilably counteracts not only religious dogma but every kind of idealistic fetish, these philosophic gendarmes of the ruling class. It deduces a rule for conduct from the laws of the development of society, thus primarily from the class struggle, this law of all laws.
“Just the same,” the moralist continues to insist, “does it mean that in the class struggle against capitalists all means are permissible: lying, frame-up, betrayal, murder, and so on?” Permissible and obligatory are those and only those means, we answer, which unite the revolutionary proletariat, fill their hearts with irreconcilable hostility to oppression, teach them contempt for official morality and its democratic echoers, imbue them with consciousness of their own historic mission, raise their courage and spirit of self-sacrifice in the struggle. Precisely from this it flows that not all means are permissible. When we say that the end justifies the means, then for us the conclusion follows that the great revolutionary end spurns those base means and ways which set one part of the working class against other parts, or attempt to make the masses happy without their participation; or lower the faith of the masses in themselves and their organization, replacing it by worship for the “leaders”. Primarily and irreconcilably, revolutionary morality rejects servility in relation to the bourgeoisie and haughtiness in relation to the toilers, that is, those characteristics in which petty bourgeois pedants and moralists are thoroughly steeped.
These criteria do not, of course, give a ready answer to the question as to what is permissible and what is not permissible in each separate case. There can be no such automatic answers. Problems of revolutionary morality are fused with the problems of revolutionary strategy and tactics. The living experience of the movement under the clarification of theory provides the correct answer to these problems.
Dialectic materialism does not know dualism between means and end. The end flows naturally from the historical movement. Organically the means are subordinated to the end. The immediate end becomes the means for a further end. In his play, Franz von Sickingen, Ferdinand Lassalle puts the following words into the mouth of one of the heroes:
... “Show not the goalBut show also the path. So closely interwovenAre path and goal that each with otherEver changes, and other paths forthwithAnother goal set up.”
Lassalle’s lines are not at all perfect. Still worse is the fact that in practical politics Lassalle himself diverged from the above expressed precept – it is sufficient to recall that he went as far as secret agreements with Bismark! But the dialectic interdependence between means and end is expressed entirely correctly in the above-quoted sentences. Seeds of wheat must be sown in order to yield an ear of wheat.
Is individual terror, for example, permissible or impermissible from the point of view of “pure morals”? In this abstract form the question does not exist at all for us. Conservative Swiss bourgeois even now render official praise to the terrorist William Tell. Our sympathies are fully on the side of Irish, Russian, Polish or Hindu terrorists in their struggle against national and political oppression. The assassinated Kirov, a rude satrap, does not call forth any sympathy. Our relation to the assassin remains neutral only because we know not what motives guided him. If it became known that Nikolayev acted as a conscious avenger for workers’ rights trampled upon by Kirov, our sympathies would be fully on the side of the assassin. However, not the question of subjective motives but that of objective expediency has for us the decisive significance. Are the given means really capable of leading to the goal? In relation to individual terror, both theory and experience bear witness that such is not the case. To the terrorist we say: it is impossible to replace the masses; only in the mass movement can you find expedient expression for your heroism. However, under conditions of civil war, the assination of individual oppressors ceases to be an act of individual terror. If, we shall say, a revolutionist bombed General Franco and his staff into the air, it would hardly evoke moral indignation even from the democratic eunuchs Under the conditions of civil war a similar act would be politically completely expedient. Thus, even in the sharpest question – murder of man by man – moral absolutes prove futile. Moral evaluations, together with those political, flow from the inner needs of struggle.
The liberation of the workers can come only through the workers themselves. There is, therefore, no greater crime than deceiving the masses, palming off defeats as victories, friends as enemies, bribing workers” leaders, fabricating legends, staging false trials, in a word, doing what the Stalinists do. These means can serve only one end: lengthening the domination of a clique already condemned by history. But they cannot serve to liberate the masses. That is why the Fourth International leads against Stalinism a life and death struggle.

Review – The Red Book by Leon Sedov

There are few serious books that can make you laugh, and this one did which sort of makes me ashamed given the seriousness of the topic it discusses. But Sedov’s ridiculing of the ineptitude of those preparing the Moscow show trials and the glaring contradictions he reveals in the case the accusers are trying prove had me laughing in disbelief.

But the topic is deadly serious, Sedov writes about the first Moscow show trial which saw Zinoviev and Kamenev, two long-standing Bolsheviks shot for a crime they didn’t commit (the Kirov assassination) and the prosecutors trying to make some sort of case to argue that the assassination had been ordered by Trotsky (who was in exile) and Sedov, his son.

Dates are made up, people and places invented and the ‘terrorist network’ that Trotsky supposedly led appears to be the most incompetent in history, calling off all the assassinations they were supposed to be attempting at the last minute. The book leads one very well through the contradictions in the arguments and is well worth a read even today.

But it also got me thinking about whether show trials are not just limited to this period or whether you could group such trials together where the trial is really just a symbolic denunciation of someone done for mostly political reasons with the verdict fixed in advance. Despite Saddam Hussein being guilty of what he was tried for, I think his trial could fit into this category, due to all the things he could have been, but wasn’t, tried for.

Law and Order in Kronstadt

Most people on the left will have heard of Kronstadt – the naval fortress guarding the approach to St. Petersberg. They’ll either know it for one of two reasons, as being a stronghold of the Bolsheviks in the run-up to the 1917 October revolution or for the 1921 uprising. Today, I’m referring to the former, and the running of the fortress by the Soviet during May which Trotsky discusses in his History of the Russian Revolution in the chapter Shifts in the Masses.

So what happened? On May 13 the Soviet resolved that it was the sole power in the fortress and deported the government commissar. According to Trotsky, “Model order was maintained. Card playing in the city was forbidden. All brothels were closed, and their inmates deported. Under threat of “confiscation of property and banishment to the front,” the soviet forbade drunkenness in the streets. The threat was more than once carried into action.”(pg.441)
Of course, the capitalist press at the time tried to slander the soviet, according to them the Kronstadters were “…plundering state property, the women are nationalised(!), robberies and drunken orgies are in progress.”(pg.443) The big contrast here is apparantent, as if the farcical nature of what is being suggested by these newspapers.

The main problem for the dual-power government at the time (the Provisional government and the Soviet ‘executive’) was that eighty officers had been arrested. The government suggested that they were being kept in appalling conditions. Trotsky quotes their appeal as follows “The officers, gendarmes and police arrested by us in the days of the revolution have themselves declared to representatives of the government that they have nothing to complain of in the treatment they have received from the prison management. It is true that the prison buildings of Kronstadt are horrible, but those are the same prisons which were built by czarism for us. We haven’t any others. And if we keep the enemies of the people in those prisons it is not out of vengeance, but from considerations of revolutionary self-preservation.”(pg.442)
In summary, the officers were arrested for purposes of incapacitation are kept in whatever facilities were available. But given that these arrested officers had put down an uprising in 1906 with mass shootings and drownings.

As ever, I much prefer the justice of the oppressed to that of the oppressors.

Review – Their Morals & Ours by Leon Trotsky

This is a semi-comment/semi-review article really, but the point I make I feel is rather important.

Their Morals and Ours is an effective exposition of the class basis of morality. In it Trotsky attacks socialists and other lefts who claim to adhere to a universal morality, exposing that anything that is supposed to remain constant for all time can only emanate from some sort of ‘god’. Marxists on the other hand have a dialectical understanding of society, noting that society changes and that all ideas (including Marxism) are interlinked with the material conditions in a given stage of society.
But it is the discussion of ‘means and ends’ that I found the most interesting. Here Trotsky discusses the famous statement that ‘the ends justify the means’. He explains that for Marxists that these are interdependent, that only the means that genuinely serve the ends of the liberation of humanity from capitalism are justified. Thus they must unite the working class, strengthen its party (both internally and externally) etc. Thus such things as individual terrorism fail such a test as they tend to weaken the working class and divide it rather than strengthen it.
The context of such actions is also important. It is one thing to shoot someone in the street in cold blood, it is a different thing when one is on the front line of a war. Thus the same action can be justified or not depending on the context. The relevance of such a recognition is very useful for developing a Marxist critique of criminology.

Review – Social Democracy and The Wars of Intervention - By Leon Trotsky

I picked this book up second hand as it gave me the opportunity to study the Russian ‘civl war’ just after the Russian revolution. It also gave me the opportunity to compare the repression meted out by both sides during this time too.

The book itself is a defence of the Bolshevik’s attitude towards Georgia. The country had seceded from the Russian Federation in early 1918 (it ceded as part of Trans-Caucasia, which then split apart) under the leadership of the Menshevik who retained there a capitalist state. Subsequently, the Menshevik rulers sought support from the West and ended up supporting indirectly the war of intervention against Russia. Eventually after trying to live side by side, Russia was forced to invade to stop the continual attacks on itself. Throughout this whole period the remnants of the 2nd International supported Georgia as a ‘true’ socialist state against Bolshevik Russia – glossing over a whole load of unsavoury facts, which Trotsky exposes skilfully using the Menshevik’s own documents.

In interesting thing for me from a criminological perspective however is how Trotsky defends Russian actions in this situation. Unlike many human rights activists today, he acknowledges that rights depend on material factors; the conditions already existing somewhere limit them. In this instance, it is not a question of declaring universal rights for all time, but in trying to act in a manner that upholds the rights of as many people as possible. It is no good just having rights for one individual or small group when this means that the rights of many more are quashed.

To give an example from the book, discussing the famine on the Volga, Trotsky says, “In its present form of unprecedented calamity, this famine, at least half of it, is a result of the civil war raised on the Volga by the Czechoslovaks and Kolchak, that is, by the Anglo-American anf French capital which organised and sustained it. This drought fell upon a soil that had been already exhausted and ruined, denuded of working cattle, machinery and other stock. We, on the other hand, have cast into gaol some officers and lawyers (which we by no means hold up as an example of humanitarianism), and bourgeois Europe and America attempted then to picture the whole of Russia, with its hundred million inhabitants, as a vast hunger-prison. They encircled us with a wall of blockade, while their hired White Guard agents applied the bomb and torch to the destruction of our scanty supplies. If there is anyone who handles scales of pure morality, let him weigh up the severe measures that we are compelled to adopt in our life and death struggle against the whole world…”

And this is not the only example Trotsky gives like this. All in all, this book is well worth the read, even 85 years after it was written.

The Dominant Capitalist Superpower in the World

I was recently reading Where is Britain Going? By Leon Trotsky, written in 1925 when I was struck by this paragraph.

“A fairly well-known populariser of British history, Gibbins, writes in his outline of modern British history: ‘In general – though, of course, there are exceptions to this – the guiding principle of British foreign policy has been the support for political freedom and constitutional government.’ This sentence is truly remarkable; at the same time as being, deeply official, ‘national’ and traditional-sounding, it leaves no room for the hypocritical doctrine of non-interference in the affairs of other nations; at the same time it testifies to the fact that Britain has supported constitutional movements in other countries only in so far as they were advantageous to her commercial and other interests. But on the other hand, as the inimitable Gibbins says, ‘there are exceptions to this rule’. The entire history of Britain is depicted for the edification of her people (the doctrine of non-intervention notwithstanding) as a glorious struggle of the British government for freedom throughout the world. Every single new act of perfidy and violence – the Opium War with China, the enslavement of Egypt, the Boer War, the intervention in support of Tsarist generals – is interpreted as an exception to the rule.”

Can’t this depiction, with substitution in of Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam to name a few, also refer to today’s dominant superpower – the United States?

Review – My Life by Leon Trotsky

Having read a year or two ago Issac Deutscher’s three-volume biography of Trotsky, I decided a few weeks ago to get myself a copy of My Life – Trotsky’s autobiography up to 1930.

There are several important differences between Deutscher’s biography and My Life. The first is obviously that My Life doesn’t cover the last ten years of Trotsky’s life. The second and much more important for myself is the different purposes to which they are being written – Deutscher is trying to understand Trotsky’s life from his own position many years later, whilst My Life is an exposition in opposition to the Stalinist slanders that had seen him expelled from Soviet Russia. There are several ways this shows through. Firstly is the constant reference that is made to Lenin at many points, as it was necessary for Trotsky to explain his relationship with Lenin in opposition to accusations about his ‘non-Bolshevik’ past. Secondly are comments on the background of the Stalinist caste at the time of Trotsky’s expulsion, this is not done for the purpose of point scoring, but to contrast them to Trotsky and allow readers to draw their own conclusions.

I don’t know how much point there is in going into the details of Trotsky’s life – most famously he was the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet at points in both the 1905 and 1917 Russian Revolution, the creator of the Red Army. This isn’t to mention the theoretical advances of the Permanent Revolution and the characterisation of the degeneration of Soviet Russia. It’s impossible to do justice to his life here, I’d much prefer to recommend people to read the book to understand for themselves.

But just one last point. In relation to the posts I’ve had on here in relation to human rights I think the last chapter of this book ‘A Planet Without a Visa’ is quite interesting. It tells us of how although the right to asylum formally existed in the countries of Western Europe, the chapter shows how every one of these countries found ways of denying him this ‘right’. I think this illustrates how although rights may exist on paper, the balance of class forces at any one time determines how ‘real’ these rights are.

Review - The First Five Years of the Communist International (Vol.1) by Leon Trotsky

Recently, I read this book. I found it quite interesting, as it re-prints Trostky’s articles, speeches and documents during the first few Congresses of the Third International. In the various documents, you can see how the analysis develops from the huge optimism of the immediate post-war epoch of revolutions, to later on when the analysis becomes more sober, but the fundamental tactics of the movement, such as the idea of the united front and the dangers of ultra-leftism are developed. I would certainly recommend reading it, as the creation of the Third International and it’s subsequent degeneration are even more important in today’s world.
There are some fascinating quotes which I’ve reproduced below too, which give a huge insight into how these congresses and discussions added to the Marxist understanding of the world. In the section ‘On the Policy of the KAPD’, Trotsky says

‘From our standpoint world economy is viewed as an organic unity on whose ground the world proletarian revolution evolves; and the Communist International takes its orientation from the entire world complex, analysing it by means of the scientific methods of Marxism and utilising all experiences of past struggles. This does not, of course, exclude but rather presupposes that the development of each country has its own peculiar features, that specific situations have their peculiarities, and so on. But in order to correctly evaluate these peculiarities, it is necessary to approach them in their international context.’ (pg.175-6)

Or later on the relationship between the economy and revolution is discussed in ‘The Report of The World Economic Crisis and The New Tasks of The Communist International’, he says

‘…Engels wrote that while the crisis of 1847 was the mother of revolution, the boom of 1849-51 was the mother of triumphant counter-revolution. It would, however, be very one-sided and utterly false to interpret these judgements in the sense that a crisis invariably engenders revolutionary action while a boom, on the contrary, pacifies the working class. The Revolution of 1848 was not born out of the crisis. The latter merely provided the impetus…’ (pg.259)

And a little later

‘…It might be asked whether the great struggles over wages, a classic example of which is the miners’ strike in England, will lead automatically to the world revolution, to the final civil war and the struggle for conquest of political power. However, it is not Marxist to pose the question in such a way. We have no automatic guarantees of development…. In general, there is no automatic dependence of the proletarian revolutionary movement upon a crisis. There is only dialectical interaction. It is essential to understand this.’ (pg.261)

On Alcoholism – A Look at a Trotsky’s Problems of Life

For this piece I shall be commenting on Trotsky’s attitude towards alcohol in his book Problems of Life, most of this will draw on the chapter Vodka, The Church, and The Cinema – page references are from Problems of Everyday Life published by Pathfinder Press

The media has been full of stories about ‘binge drinking’ over the last few years. In particular, Britain is thought of as being the ‘binge’ capital of the world. The health consequences of binge drinking are numerous including things such as liver damage etc. People tend to get to do things they usually regret the following day as well as waking up with hangovers. The question we find ourselves asking is why do people put themselves through this?
Trotsky argues that alcohol is used by working class people to distract themselves from the dreariness and boredom of their lives – he says it is “a small flask containing a whole world of images.” (pg.52)
The Russian Revolution inherited what Trotsy terms “the liquidation of the vodka monopoly”(pg.36). I believe this to mean that the sale of vodka had been prohibited at some point during the Great War (please correct me if I’m wrong). In context of this, I think Trotsky is right to say “the fundamental fact that the abolition of the system by which the country encouraged people to drink is one of the iron assets of the revolution”(pg. 37). That doesn’t mean however that socialists support the prohibition of alcohol altogether. As Trotsky explains the reason why this was useful in the situation in Russia was that other entertainments would be partaken instead of this, which would improve the capabilities of the Russian working class, rather than stupefy them like alcohol does.
For present day Marxists I think we would only support alcohol prohibition in a workers state under conditions similar to those of the Russian Revolution. That means as I have said in general we don’t support it. Rather we would seek to supplant the role of alcohol by other alternative entertainments, but fundamentally by removing the alienation caused by the capitalist system that causes the dreariness and boredom Trotsky speaks of that makes people seek and escape such as alcohol or drugs. Only with these measures can the problem of binge drinking be solved.

Review: Permanent Revolution by Catch Twenty Two

Here'a review i wrote that recently got published in the Socialist (although I was a little upset it got published as a letter) Anyway, as you can see I really like this album, hence it being what i've mostly been listening to for the last few weeks (see it's not cos i'm too lazy to bother changing it!)

Review – Permanent Revolution by Catch Twenty Two (Victory Records, 2006)

The ideas of Leon Trotsky seem to be getting a greater airing recently. Firstly I became aware in January that Venezuela’s ‘socialist’ president, Hugo Chavez, had been referring to Trotsky and the Theory of the Permanent Revolution in a speech. Then only a few weeks later I hear several tracks from this album, by US band Catch Twenty Two, based on the life of Trotsky, whom one of the members of the band had been reading about
The band’s publicity describes the album as ‘an uplifting, political and inspirational album for fans of ska, punk and reggae’. It is a description that I wholeheartedly agree with; the political career of Leon Trotsky spanned an era of great revolutionary upheavals from the beginning of the 20th century until the start of the Second World War. Apart from the prologue and epilogue each song is about a period the band has picked out as a key part of his life. Starting with the failed Russian Revolution of 1905, we proceed to the glorious revolution of 1917, Lenin’s death (1924), his final exile from Russia at the hands of Stalin (1927), and assassination in 1940, each song tries to capture the feel of that moment in his life, and I think succeeds in this endeavour.
My only criticism is that unless you know who Trotsky was, then you have no idea who the album refers to, likewise what a Permanent Revolution is. Perhaps the band did not see the need to explain this, although I would have thought they would at least include a dedication and a reference to the book they had read about it for people to find out more. Trotsky isn’t even referred to in the lyrics, of all the leaders of the Russian Revolution only Lenin is mentioned by name.
All that said, my personal conviction remains that this is the best album I have heard in several years. This album is very much recommended, particularly if you are fans of ska or punk genres of music.