The articles contained in this book were written some ten years ago. Author and reader may well ask why they should be republished just now. At first sight they might seem to lack all topicality. Subject and tone alike may appear remote to a considerable section of public opinion. I believe, however, that they have some topicality in that, without entering upon any detailed polemics, they represent a point of view in opposition to certain literary and philosophical trends still very much to the fore today. Let us begin with the general atmosphere: the clouds of mysticism which once surrounded the phenomena of literature with a poetic colour and warmth and created an intimate and ‘‘interesting’’ atmosphere around them, have been dispersed. Things now face us in a clear, sharp light which to many may seem cold and hard; a light shed on them by the teachings of Marx. Marxism searches for the material roots of each phenomenon, regards them in their historical connections and movement, ascertains the laws of such movement and demonstrates their development from root to flower, and in so doing lifts every phenomenon out of a merely emotional, irrational, mystic fog and brings it to the bright light of understanding.

A Marxist perspective can be most helpful for understanding race and racism insofar as it per- ceives capitalism dialectically, as a social total- ity that includes modes of production, relations of production, and the pragmatically evolving ensemble of institutions and ideologies that lubricate and propel its reproduction. From this perspective, Marxism’s most important contri- bution to making sense of race and racism in the United States may be demystification. A histori- cal materialist perspective should stress that “race”—which includes “racism,” as one is unthinkable without the other—is a historically specific ideology that emerged, took shape, and has evolved as a constitutive element within a definite set of social relations anchored to a par- ticular system of production.

Adapted from https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1960/08/19.htm

I was put onto this article from the reading of the terrific text on the Cuban and Venezuelan healthcare systems and practices by Steven Brouwer: “Revolutionary Doctors: How Venezuela and Cuba Are Changing the World’s Conception of Health Care”

This simple celebration, another among the hundreds of public functions with which the Cuban people daily celebrate their liberty, the progress of all their revolutionary laws, and their advances along the road to complete independence, is of special interest to me.

A small but very important subsection from Robert Fogelson’s book “Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870-1930”. I would say it speaks for itself.

Many subdividers also employed restrictions to exclude ‘‘undesirable’’ people as well as “undesirable” activities. By far the most common of these provisions were racial covenants. Under a typical covenant, an owner was forbidden to sell or lease the property to a member of any of a number of allegedly undesirable racial, ethnic, or religious groups. He or she was also forbidden to allow a member of these groups, other than chauffeurs, gardeners, or domestic servants, to use or occupy the property. A few subdividers had employed racial covenants in the mid-nineteenth century. In Brookline, for example, one forbade “any negro or native of Ireland” to occupy a dwelling, and in Baltimore another barred the sale or lease of a house to “a negro or person of African or Mongolian [that is, Asian] descent.” But such restrictions were very much the exception before the 1890s. Indeed, not even the most racist subdividers imposed racial covenants. A case in point was Francis G. Newlands, the mining magnate and U.S. senator who laid out Chevy Chase in the early 1890s. Newlands saw the United States as “the home of the white race.” To him, “race tolerance” meant “race amalgamation,” and “race intolerance” meant “race war.” Fusing the racism of the South with the racism of the West, he called for repealing the Fifteenth Amendment, thereby denying African-Americans, “an inferior race,” the right to vote, and restricting immigration to “the white race,” thereby excluding Chinese, Japanese, and other Asians. Despite his outspoken racism, Newlands did not include racial covenants among the minimum cost requirements and other restrictions he imposed on the first subdivisions at Chevy Chase.

The conclusion to Mauss’s incredible essay on the uses and concepts of gifts.

Moral Conclusions

It is possible to extend these observations to our own societies. A considerable part of our morality and our lives themselves are still permeated with this same atmosphere of the gift, where obligation and liberty intermingle. Fortunately, everything is still not wholly categorized in terms of buying and selling. Things still have sentimental as well as venal value, assuming values merely of this kind exist. We possess more than a tradesman morality. There still remain people and classes that keep to the morality of former times, and we almost all observe it, at least at certain times of the year or on certain occasions.

Cross posted from Nonsite.org.

Passages between brackets are drawn from the manuscript version of the essay and differ slightly from the published variant.

Published July 7, 1970

We on the democratic left are living through a real crisis. And precisely because I believe the Socialist Party has a very vital role to play in this period, I would like to say something about the problems we confront.

One aspect is that many people on the [so-called democratic] left today substitute psychology for politics. Now, I have no objection to a lifestyle, or how you wear your hair, or whether you eat pig’s feet[, or whether you want to dress so one cannot distinguish between male and female except upon very close inspection]. But to substitute this “how I feel, what my thing is,” for politics, is an extremely dangerous attitude which the Socialist movement must fight. In fact, the Socialist movement is one of the few movements which has the credentials for fighting it.

This brief writing belongs to the Introduction to Boris Kagarlitsky’s book “Restoration in Russia: Why Capitalism Failed”. The work is both a valuable reflection of, and look into, the tumultuous years following the dissolution of the USSR.

‘You can’t hammer in a bolt.’ This was among the slogans used by the pro-government political bloc Russia’s Choice in its campaign for the parliamentary elections of December 1993. Spokespeople for the bloc explained to voters: it’s pointless to dream of a just society, so you have to reconcile yourself to the new order. The slogan turned out to be unintentionally ironic. The attempts by Yelstin, Gaidar and the other Russian ‘reformers’ to construct liberal capitalism in a country where there is neither a normal bourgeoise, nor a market infrastructure, were a case of ‘hammering a bolt’.
History is being repeated as farce. This might not sound very original, but it is nevertheless true. The developments in Russia during the early 1990s have been frightening, but at the same time comic. Highly organized political groups engage in battles without rules in an unstable society where interests are ill defined. One can speak of class conflict only with reservations. The fights inside the government are reminiscent of a squabble in a sandpit.
Psychology plays as big a role here as economics. The instability of social structures, the destruction of former institutions and the crisis of traditions have all helped to make social psychology so important a factor. This applies equally to the country’s rulers, to the opposition and to the millions of citizens living in territories whose names and borders are uncertain, and which no one is yet in a position to rename. These are territories which, despite everything, are still known as the ‘former Soviet Union’.
The dizzying changes began with the elections of 1990. Prior to this everything had taken place within a more of less predictable scenario of ‘managed reform’. The Communist Party was gradually relaxing its control, while not allowing power to slip from its hands. Gorbachev, with full support from the West, was preparing to transform himself from general secretary of the party into president, with unlimited powers. Not the party forums where the necessity of reforms was proclaimed in the late 1980s, nor the conflict between Yeltsin and Gorbachev, nor the discussions in the all-union Congress of Peoples’ Deputies, nor even mass opposition demonstrations and miner’s strikes had as yet testified to the disintegration of the state. But it was already clear that the reformers were losing control of the situation. Their own decisions had called new social forces into being, and these forces were finding the context of the Soviet state constricting.
The 1990 elections became a turning-point. In all the republics indigenous authorities, independent of Moscow, made their appearance. The local bureaucracies, which until this time has been doomed to play a secondary role, gained in self-confidence. Regional and republican-level functionaries did not in most cases stand for election, did not campaign for electors’ votes, and did not debate with rival candidates at meetings, but nevertheless they were the main victors. The numerous popularly elected representatives were their hostages. In order to exercise real power in defiance of the wishes of the union centre, the deputies had to rest on the local apparatus. The ideologue of reform Gavriil Popov called this ’the bloc of democrats with the apparatus’. One way or another, the change took place; from being the leader of the reforms, controlling the situation in the country, Gorbachev was quickly transformed into a commander without an army. People who only recently had been his supporters now abandoned him, while his Western friends prepared to support Yeltsin as the ’new Russian leader’.
Repeating the experience of Gorbachev, Yeltsin had himself elected president of Russia. Lesser figures contended themselves with positions as mayors. Every boss at each particular level sought to grab as much power as possible from the centre. At the same time, these bosses were forced to struggle against rivals from below, also seeking their scrap of power. All of them, however, had one thing in common: despite talking about democracy and freedom, they had no intention of giving the majority of citizens any access whatever to the levels of authority.
In August 1991 all this came to and end. An attempt by the Union level Soviet bureaucrats to change the relationship of forces in their favour led to the creation of the State Committee on the Emergency Situation, whose demise was readily predictable. The members of the committee were declared to be ‘putschists’. By taking his distance from them, Gorbachev managed to keep his post for a few more months, but already in August he was a political corpse.
Now, finally, a degree of certainty appeared. People were in power who had made a simple, final choice in favour of the West. They chose freedom for themselves, and were ready to defend it against all encroachments. This meant that there were no longer willing to be restricted either by the framework of the law, or by generally recognized institutions. Still less were they prepared to take into account the wishes of the majority of the hungry and confused population.
The period which followed saw all institutional structures systematically destroyed. In December 1991, by agreement of the presidents of three republics, the Soviet Union was abolished at Belovezhskaya Pushcha. The Communist Party was abolished. Then it was resurrected, banned, again revived, once more banned and then once again legalized. But this was now a different organization, with different members and goals. The Komsomol vanished more or less of its own accord, with its activists calmly crossing over into commercial organizations. The armed forces began to be split up.
Now it was the turn of the soviets and of the enterprises of the state sector. The ‘property of all the people’ was turned into a boundless reservoir of funds for personal enrichment. The soviets, which has brought Yeltsin to power, were declared to be relics of totalitarianism. However, these structures were not simply elements of the state system. They were part of the accustomed way of life, not just deciding political and economic questions, but also dealing with a multitude of social and even cultural tasks. They dealt with these tasks after their own fashion — vulgarly and inefficiently. But now people discovered that no one was going to deal with these tasks at all.
Before long, many of the people who in the autumn of 1991 had welcomed the dismembering of the USSR wound up in opposition. Some were reacting to the growth of dissatisfaction among voters, others had experienced an awakening of conscience, and still others were distributed by the collapse of structures that were no longer those of the USSR, but Russian, and hence their own. Thus Vice-President Aleksandr Rutskoi and speaker of the Russian parliament Ruslan Khasbulatov were transformed from comrades-in-arms of Yeltsin in his mortal enemies.
The resistance from the soviets was not broken immediately. In December 1992 Yeltsin threatened to disband the Supreme Soviet, but did not carry out this threat. Then he tried to introduce ‘special rule’, but again retreated. The first test of strength became the referendum forced on the country by the authorities in April 1993. This was conducted in conditions that included harsh censorship of television broadcasts and a degree of manipulation of public opinion that was unprecedented even by Soviet standards. The referendum yielded ambiguous results; a third of the population did not vote, and the demand for early election of deputies failed to pass. But the regime was now able to refer to the trust expressed by the population in the president.
The voting in April was a prelude to the bloodshed in October. Throughout 1993 the authorities were preoccupied with only one question: how to rid themselves of the deputies, the laws and the Constitutional Court, all of which were restriction the regime in the exercise of its free initiative. In September the denouement began. First the militia beat people on the streets, and then tanks opened fire on the parliament building.
Securing the victory required free elections and a new constitution, guaranteeing the president and his team complete freedom from responsibility, and most important, enshrining the rights of the new property-owners.
On 12 December 1993 the elections went ahead, despite chaos in the Central Electoral Commission and constant breaches of deadlines and rules. The result, to use the language of advertising, was beyond all expectations. Half the population failed to vote, and of those who turned up at the polling stations, the overwhelming majority gave their votes to opponents of the regime.
The authorities had spared neither money nor energies in organizing a ’triumph of democracy’. Sociological research for the organizing a ’triumph of democracy’. Sociological research for the pro-government Russia’s Choice blog was paid for out of state funds. The voter lists in Moscow included dead people, and residents of long-vacant buildings. By a wondrous coincidence, large numbers of such ‘voters’ were recorded as living in a building once inhabited by Nikolay Gogol, author of the classic nineteenth-century novel Dead Souls. One of the heads of the district electoral commissions in Moscow hanged himself the night before voting, after writing in a last message to his relatives, ‘My dear ones, I have deceived people so grievously that there is no forgiveness for me.’
In St Petersburg, opposition activists who were gathering petition signatures on the streets were confronted by heavily built young men travelling about the city in second-hand Volvos. According to journalists, this squad chased petitioners out of metro stations, seized and tore up petition sheets, and handed out very professional beatings to the most obstinate signature-gatherers. People collecting signatures for pro-government candidates were for some reason not touched.
When ballot boxes were opened in Voronezh, south of Moscow, electoral officials discovered a third more ballot papers than had been handed out to voters. Soldiers were herded into the polling stations in whole units, without even being asked whether they wanted to vote. Scrutineers for opposition candidates were not allowed to be present when votes were counted. Hundreds of such cases were noted throughout the country, and were reported in the press and even on television. Only the foreign observers tried not to notice anything, and even refused to travel to places where breaches had been discovered.
In the Kremlin on the night of 12-13 December, a televised extravaganza had been organized to welcome in the new political epoch. Yeltsin and Gaidar were supposed to take part. The ‘independent’ television programme Itogi, which even on the censored airwaves of Russia was distinguished by its servility, had already announced the success of Russia’s Choice. Alas, the triumph did not come to pass. Around half the voters did not go to the polls. Russian Movement for Democratic Reforms, the grouping closest to Russia’s Choice, failed to attract the 5 per cent of votes needed for the majority of soldiers and junior officers voted for the opposition. This was also true of the units which had taken part in the storming of the parliament.
It is possible to fool people for a long time. It is possible to turn the whole country into a laboratory for fascinating experiments, and its residents into guinea-pigs. But sooner or later the truth emerges that the freedom of the authorities is not unlimited. At that point millions of people realize, on the basis of their own tormented experience, that the less freedom the authorities enjoy, the more there is for the citizens.

This is a chapter out of Graham Harrison’s Book “Neoliberal Africa: The Impact of Global Social Engineering”. Although the book is more of an essay containing fragmentary thoughts, I found this chapter substantial in the sense that it clearly outlined the various institutional avenues in which projects such as neoliberalism cement their ideology.

This chapter considers the global emergence of neoliberalism. It looks at the ways in which neoliberal practice has emerged, expanded and established for itself ‘paradigmatic’ status. In other words, it shows how neoliberalism has shifted from an ambitious and embryonic set of policy interventions to something resembling a framework or set of premisses within which policy is articulated. The practices of neoliberalism have been iterated over such time as to shift the habits, conduct and repertoire of development practice tout court. The layering of large numbers of neoliberal policies has not only led to a progressively more totalising implementation of liberalisation; it has also defined the terms upon which policy and development are thought about and articulated per se. This is, of course, not a completed process (in the last chapter we developed a framework which is anathema to the idea of completed processes, preferring instead a series of practices in place of means–ends distinctions), but it has enabled neoliberal ideas to aspire to ‘meta-development’ status: that is, as the terms upon which development is discussed rather than solely as a predominant model of development. At the level of ideas, this shift or tendency is rather like the analysis of Hay in which neoliberalism moves from normalising to normative (Hay 2004).

Due to the prolific number of footnotes that Michael’s article contains, the essay will simply be linked to here. It is an important walk through the trajectories that various essentialist concepts have taken in the course of modern Northern American history. What surprised me most was this quasi-progess — where it appears that the concept of race has been disposed of, it’s kernel is carried over into a different, yet sadly, familial form.

Herein is a speech delivered in August 1934, and published in 1935. It reappeared in Gorky, Radek, Bukharin, Zhdanov and others “Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934,” page 25-69, Lawrence & Wishart, 1977, and was transcribed by Jose Braz for the Marxists Internet Archive.

The role of the labour processes, which have converted a two-Legged animal into man and created the basic elements of culture, has never been investigated as deeply and thoroughly as it deserves. This is quite natural, for such research would not be in the interests of the exploiters of labour. The latter, who use the energy of the masses as a sort of raw material to be turned into money, could not, of course, enhance the value of this raw material. Ever since remote antiquity, when mankind was divided into slaves and slave-owners, they have used the vital power of the toiling mass in the same way as we today use the mechanical force of river currents. Primitive man has been depicted by the historians of culture as a philosophizing idealist and mystic, a creator of gods, a seeker after “the meaning of life.” Primitive man has been saddled with the mentality of a Jacob Böhme, a cobbler who lived at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century and who occupied himself between whiles with philosophy of a kind extremely popular among bourgeois mystics; Böhme preached that “Man should meditate on the Skies, on the Stars and the Elements, and on the Creatures which do proceed from them, and likewise on the Holy Angels, the Devil, Heaven and Hell."