In Search of the People (Part II)

(Part I)

The problem for classical Marxists was that workers in the West proved not to be particularly revolutionary at all. They were easily bought off with modest progressive reforms such as shorter hours and better working conditions. They did not suffer alienation in the sense that the very idea of being under the authority of a capitalist did not bother them as long as that capitalist could provide them with ever greater prosperity.

One solution to this problem was Fascism. While we tend to think of Fascism as a right-wing movement, it is important to keep in mind that Mussolini started as a socialist. He then made the perfectly reasonable assumption that he could make socialism palatable in a country like Italy by embracing nationalism and using it to show that the Italian people, as Italians, really did have a revolutionary consciousness. This then led to the acceptance of the Catholic Church as part of the consciousness of the Italian People and even of the bourgeoise, who willingly embraced state control once it was made clear to them that, as Italians, they were not being placed as the villains and their property was not going to be expropriated. (It should be noted that the early Mussolini was not particularly anti-Semitic. Jews had been Italians since the Roman Empire so they were welcomed into the Fascist Party.) From this perspective, it should come as no surprise that Mousellini maintained a high degree of acceptability within leftist circles during his early years. He offered a plausible model for achieving socialist aims by avoiding conflict with the right.  

Marxism's only success in the early twentieth century was Russia, a country that was still transitioning out of an absolute monarchy and still trying to figure out the Industrial Revolution. On top of this, the Czar had managed to bring the entire country to ruin through his disastrous involvement in World War I. So the Bolsheviks managed to seize power by promising basic land reforms to improve the lot of citizens. In the 1920s, it was still plausible to imagine that Marxism would allow the Soviet Union to leapfrog the West and give workers more of the cars and electric appliances that Western workers were beginning to take for granted.

The problem for the Soviet Union was that it was unable to deliver on these economic promises. Furthermore, even trying to outproduce the West in consumer goods would betray the revolution. A worker with a truly revolutionary consciousness would rather labor under the worst horrors of the nineteenth-century factory system as long as it was an agent of the party who was his boss than to enjoy the blessings of Western capitalism if it meant being subjected to a capitalist boss. As such, one had to conclude that the vast majority of Soviet citizens were counterrevolutionaries. Even the seemingly loyal Soviet citizens who honestly believed that the Communist Party could deliver the full abundance of consumer goods had already betrayed the revolution in their hearts. They demonstrated that they did not believe in Communism as a matter of principle. If tomorrow they could be convinced that capitalism could offer more benefits, they would gladly betray the revolution and replace it with capitalism. (Note that this is what essentially happened to the Soviet Union in 1991.)   

This Soviet dilemma explains the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. The attempt to collectivize farms was a failure and led to the deaths of millions, mainly in Ukraine. If you are a good Communist, the explanation for this was that the Ukrainian Kulaks were greedy and sabotaged the plan so they deserved to die. Furthermore, now that we have established that the move toward actual socialism cannot happen unless the population truly develops a socialist consciousness, something most of them lack, the only solution is to declare war on the non-socialist masses in the name of the People. It should be emphasized that, under Stalin, to be guilty of treason, did not require malicious intent. Everyone, particularly those born before 1917, was, by definition, a traitor in spirit. How could it be otherwise if you were born into a capitalist world and instinctually thought in terms of personal benefit? The mark of a traitor was, upon being accused of treason, to deny guilt. Such a person demonstrated that they lacked the proper socialist mindset and still thought in terms of individual actions instead of accepting that they cannot be anything but guilty. The mark of a true socialist believer was to confess and accept any punishment in the hope that this will lead the next generation to develop the necessary socialist consciousness.

Mid and late twentieth-century leftist revolutionaries faced a dilemma. As knowledge of Stalinist atrocities became more widespread, it became harder to openly defend the Soviet Union as any kind of ideal. (This was distinct from taking money from the Soviet Union and working for Soviet interests during the Cold War.) At the same time, Western economic successes made it less likely that urban workers would be willing to risk their unions, pension plans, and welfare benefits on some revolution. As such, leftist revolutionary thought developed along two streams that looked to different groups of discontented individuals to serve as revolutionary classes. These were third-world peasants and members of minority groups in the West.

While classical Marxism had rejected the peasant as a revolutionary class, in the twentieth century they came to be reevaluated. Peasants had the advantage of never being seduced by a capitalist consciousness of individual striving and still maintained a group ethos. Furthermore, while peasants maintained traditional beliefs, outside of Europe and the United States, these were not Orthodox Christian beliefs. Even in Latin America, the Christianity on the ground could assumed to be far enough from Orthodox Christianity that such beliefs could be held up as manifestations of a revolutionary consciousness.

Much as religion suddenly became acceptable when taken out of its Western context, so did nationalism. For example, the nationalism of the North Vietnamese was acceptable as it manifested itself as opposition to imperial powers such as the French and later the Americans. As such, the North Vietnamese demonstrated a revolutionary consciousness and could be counted as a manifestation of the People. Obviously, nationalist movements that were not hostile to the West such as in Poland or Zionism remained illegitimate. Their existence demonstrated that Poles and Israelis lacked a revolutionary consciousness and did not count as part of the People.   

This embrace of nationalism and even religion, despite the fact that these were the things that were supposed to mark someone as a Fascist, eventually led Western leftists to embrace the Arab cause. This started by accepting Arab nationalists such as Nassar but then eventually came to include Islamic fundamentalists such as Khomeini in Iran. From this perspective, the Palestinians became the ultimate “oppressed people.” They combined Arab nationalism with Islam and struggled against Western "Imperialism" by opposing the State of Israel. The destruction and its replacement with Palestine would be the elimination of the Jewish false consciousness of itself as a people and allow for the manifestation of the true Peoplehood of the Palestinians.  

Jewish Capitalism and Religious Liberty

 I would like to follow up on my previous post and consider the implications of what I wrote for Judaism. Does not Judaism have its own tradition of religious liberty, independent of Protestantism? For an explanation, let me turn to the example of Max Weber and Capitalism.

Much as I argued that Protestantism is a crucial ingredient for religious liberty, Weber famously argued that Protestantism played a critical role in the development of Capitalism. For Weber, Protestantism allowed for a “worldly asceticism.” Traditionally societies had operated on the assumption that labor was a curse. Most people were fated to be peasants with only a few having the opportunity to be aristocrats leading lives of leisure. The implication of this was that one worked only as hard as one needed to with the goal of having as much leisure as possible. If you managed to get some money, you should stop working.

In the Protestant model, work became the natural state of affairs for human beings. As such, even rich people, in no danger of starvation, should work. If you managed to get ahold of some money, you should not take an extended vacation. You should not even donate the money to support the Church. Instead, you should invest that money back into your business as capital. Instead of being saved through good works like charity, you are saved by being one of the Elect. A possible sign of being one of the Elect is that God causes you to be successful in business. From this perspective, being a capitalist is not contrary to the Protestant faith. On the contrary, capitalism is the logical fulfillment of Protestantism.

To be clear, Weber recognized that people engaged in capitalist-type behavior long before Protestantism. What Weber was arguing was that Protestantism created an ethical revolution where trade was seen as a principled moral good. Think of it this way, the medieval Church accepted prostitution as a necessary evil. This did not mean that being a prostitute was ok. On the contrary, being a prostitute was something that someone was ashamed of and only did for as long as it was absolutely necessary before trying to get out. Similarly, one was not proud to be a merchant and engage in something as “sterile” as trade. Instead, one made some money from trade before retiring and trying to “atone” for having resorted to such base activity.

In regards to Jews, Weber argued that they were “emergency” capitalists. There is nothing inherently capitalist about Judaism. Ancient Jews were not particularly involved in trade. It was only circumstances in Christian Europe, not anything within Judaism, that caused Jews to develop a capitalist element. Medieval Jews were cut out of most professions, so they turned to money lending. As such, Weber did not believe that Jews provided a model of principled capitalism to say that being a capitalist was a positive good.

In response to Weber, I would argue that it is possible for principles to evolve out of pragmatic necessity. For example, Isaac Abarbanel, living right before the Protestant Reformation, rejected the Aristotelian claim that money was sterile and therefore argued that usury was a positive good. Clearly, Abarbanel did not come to this position from an “objective” reading of the Hebrew Bible. This may have been self-interest, but that should not matter. Abarbanel, presumably, honestly believed that money-lending Jews like himself were morally superior to the Christian nobility responsible for the expulsion of 1492. If claiming that Jews were morally superior to Christians required one to believe that capitalism was a positive good, then we can add capitalism as the fourteenth principle of the Jewish faith.

To be clear, Jews never were in a position to bring about a capitalist ethical revolution by themselves. It is not as if, capitalism ever became acceptable just because the Jews did it. Furthermore, the Jewish experience with capitalism remained linked to their place within Christian society.

Much as Protestantism created the grounds not simply to engage in capitalism as a practical necessity, but as a matter of principle, Protestantism helped lay the groundwork for a principled support for religious liberty. This should be distinguished from a pragmatic tolerance where you refrain from murdering members of another faith because you fear they will murder you back. I would see the Jewish tradition of religious liberty, much like the Jewish tradition of capitalism, as being rooted in the Jewish experience as a persecuted minority. It can be argued that the fact that Jews have needed to support religious tolerance for pragmatic reasons, does not preclude the development of a principled belief in religious liberty that it is better for people to persist in their freely believed error rather than be coerced into the truth. An example of this can be seen in the Jewish disdain for missionary activity. Jews in the ancient world tried to convert non-Jews. During the Middle Ages, Muslim and Christian authorities did not allow Jews to try to convert Muslims and Christians. Today, Jews do not try to convert non-Jews and have even developed theological reasons to justify not trying to “save the souls” of non-Jews.

This does not change the fact that Jewish support for religious liberty came out of a distinct experience with non-Jewish cultures. If you are going to have Jews who support religious liberty on principle rather than as a simple matter of deeming non-Jews as beneath even missionary activity, then it will require someone with positive interactions with non-Jewish religions. An obvious candidate would be some kind of Philo-Semitic Protestantism that acknowledges some legitimacy to the Jewish experience.    

Gone With the Master Narrative

In history, one constantly has to pay attention to who writes a source and what their interests are. This is not a value judgment. All sources have their limitations to some degree or another. This is why we engage in counter-reading. We are skeptical about anything that serves the author’s agenda but we readily embrace anything they say that harms their agenda. In my education classes, which are based around Critical Theory as opposed to critical reasoning, we are being taught something slightly different. We should not only look for the voices behind texts but also whose voices are being suppressed as if authors engage in oppression by the very act of writing. This sets up the concept of master and counter-narratives. 

From the perspective of Critical Theory, it is the job of the teacher to promote counter-narratives to rescue students from the grip of the master narrative. Any teacher who tries to simply do what history teachers have traditionally been supposed to do, mainly teaching facts and how to critically analyze them is guilty of silencing minority voices. It should be understood that, from the perspective of Critical Theory, minority voices are not really literal minorities but the purveyors of Critical Theory themselves, who are supposed to serve as the voice for authentic minorities who have been silenced. By silencing what is meant is that others have failed to fully embrace the assumptions of Critical Theory. In essence, Critical Theory is an attempt by those in power to justify their privilege and suppress anyone who disagrees with them by pretending that their opponents are the master oppressors while they are really the victims attempting to advance their counter-narrative. 

The true power of a master narrative can be seen in its willingness to unabashedly claim the moral high ground of a counter-narrative for itself with every expectation that you can intimidate your opponents into acquiescence. The true master claims to be a victim. If you can claim to be a victim then you implicitly earn the moral right to do all the sorts of terrible things to others that only masters are able to get away with. Real victims know that they do not have power and that it is useless to even speak up and claim to be a victim because the real oppressors will simply use it as an excuse to abuse them further. Morally sane individuals recognize that they are a mixture of oppressor and victim along a spectrum as are their opponents. They try to morally improve themselves in a variety of ways including trying to see things from their opponent's perspective.  

If you wish to understand the logic of a real master narrative, consider the example of the novel and film Gone With the Wind. On the surface, Gone With the Wind’s narrative of the Civil War and Reconstruction is an obvious master narrative. The heroes are literal slave owners and the book is a defense of the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan. All of this is true but it misses the fact that the true diabolical genius of the book is its ability to sell itself precisely as a counter-narrative. 

According to the Gone With the Wind narrative, which I find abhorrent and should not be the premise for any history class, once upon there lived a class of white Southern planters. They were a noble group with an interest in the finer things of life like manners and art as opposed to money. These planters were of such an elevated nature that they were capable of "ennobling" even the blacks who worked for them as slaves as this made the blacks part of the South's "uplifting" culture. The planters looked after their slaves as if they were "their own children." Then came the Northern Capitalist industrialists who cared nothing about culture but only for money. The Northerners built a mighty war machine and crushed the peaceful South. In order to justify their pillaging of the South, the Northerners claimed that they had come to liberate the slaves from the oppression of their masters. Many of the blacks believed these lies and turned against their "kind" masters who had treated them so well. In truth, these blacks were not being liberated. On the contrary, they were being enslaved to the relentless power of Capitalism.

The need to preserve a sense of aristocracy as something above money is critical for understanding the role of the Terra plantation in the novel. Scarlett O'Hara struggles to hold on to Terra in the face of Northern tax collectors even though it does not make economic sense. The fact that Terra is not that valuable is precisely the point. As long as Scarlett can hold on to Terra, she is still an aristocrat, someone who can love a piece of land as something that will continue to exist after she is dead, regardless of the dollars and cents involved. Similarly, Ashley Wilkes is tempted by an offer to get a job in New York. Ashley is a smart guy and would certainly do well for himself. The problem is that going to New York would mean that he is no longer an aristocrat but instead just another guy trying to earn a buck with no sense of the larger sweep of history. 

The "poor oppressed" Southerners, "robbed" of their "rightful" place of wealth and influence struggle to bring justice back to the land and join the Klan. In the novel, Scarlett is warned that she should not ride around by herself conducting her business because they are likely to be attacked by one of the free blacks that the Northern occupiers have allowed to run wild. If this happens the Klan, which all the "good" white men of the town have joined, would be honor-bound to retaliate. Scarlett gets attacked and the Klan is "forced" to go after the camp of free blacks. They run into an ambush and Scarlett's second husband gets killed. This leads Scarlett to agree to marry Rhett Butler as Ashley still insists on being faithful to his wife Melanie.     

At one point, Scarlett is forced to confront the "master" narrative head-on in the form of Northerners whose ideas of the South come straight from Uncle Tom's Cabin. Scarlett responds that the novel is full of lies and that they never abused their slaves. She should be believed as she has actual "lived experience" with slaves, unlike the Northerners who have only read about the South in books designed to convince them to hate Southerners. The stakes are high. Either Southerners really did treat their slaves well or at least justly or it was right for General Sherman to pillage his way across Georgia, freeing the slaves and repaying their owners for their crimes. 

It is hardly obvious how Critical Theorists can dismiss the Gone With the Wind narrative out of hand as a master narrative. The narrative is not really that different from the standard Critical Theory narrative. All you have to do is change the labels. Southern plantation owners can be revolutionary intellectuals and the black slaves can be workers who need to achieve critical consciousness. This is accomplished by the workers joining the intellectuals in a farming commune to labor for the "common good." In both cases, the enemy is Capitalism, the notion that people should be empowered simply because of their ability to make money as opposed to elevating those who can transcend such petty interests.

To say that Southern planters were rich and therefore must represent the master narrative fails to hold up. Loads of horrible things happen to Scarlett and she spends much of the middle part of the book trying to keep everyone around her, including her former slaves, fed and with a roof over their heads. Much of Scarlett’s power as a character is derived from her ability to do this while not losing sight of the higher things in life as embodied in Terra. This is critical because it allows us to forgive Scarlett for the pretty terrible things she does to succeed like stealing her sister's fiance (the one who gets killed riding for the Klan) and using convict labor provided by the Northern occupation. In truth, Scarlett being rich should not exclude her from being a counter-narrative. If you can watch Oprah Winfrey interview Meghan Merkle, two of the most privileged beings who have ever lived, without it being obvious that they are perpetuating a master narrative then you should have no problem seeing Gone With the Wind as a counter-narrative. 

From the perspective of Critical Theory, the real crime of the Gone With the Wind narrative is not that it oppressed blacks but that it empowered the "wrong" sort of people. How dare Southern planters claim to be victims and use that argument to justify holding on to power. The people who should be in charge are leftist intellectuals who have educated themselves about the nature of oppression through the lens of Critical Theory. They are therefore the sort of morally superior individuals who are well-suited to decide who is a victim and who is an oppressor. This is such an obvious fact that if you disagree it can only be because you are an oppressor.  

A proper history education should liberate students by giving them weapons to intellectually challenge those authority figures who seek to rule over them. It is important to expose students to brilliant and evil books like Gone With the Wind so that they can learn to see a master narrative at work. What makes Gone With the Wind a true master narrative is precisely its ability to pretend to be a counter-narrative. The heroes are "victims" who are not in the positions of power that they are naturally entitled to. This gives them the right to strike back at the "oppressors" who wrongfully hold a position better than what they deserve. If my students wish to recognize who is ruling over them, the first thing they should look for is who claims that their status of victimhood is an unchallengeable fact and that anyone who voices any skepticism is automatically a master oppressor.