Brits are famed for their “pragmatism” - which basically means
their inability to take the world (or ideas) very seriously. Our easy-going
flexibility does, however, mean that we are out of our comfort zone when we
face unreasonable people and/or cataclysmic events such as the current financial
crisis and the political pygmies who pass for world leaders. Two articles in one
of this year’s issues of
New Left Review have brought home to me our insularity –
first is a wonderful interview –
Words from Budapest - with a Transylvanian Romanian -
GM Tamas – born in 1948 After a stint as an
assistant editor of a literary weekly in his native Transylvania, he got into
political difficulties with the authorities of the time and emigrated to
Hungary in the late 1970s where he taught at the University of Budapest. Sacked
for political reasons again, he became known as a dissident intellectual and
published only in the underground or abroad. In the late 1980s he supported and
was a founding member of the Liberal Party in Hungary, and was elected to
parliament as a liberal member of the Hungarian Parliament in 1989.
He quit
professional politics in 1994; became an acadenic again; was sacked (?)... and is now...... a revolutionary socialist (!!). What a life! Someone I would very much like to meet......
The interview covers these very different phases of his incredible life - and his honesty in admitting his blindness to what was going on around him after the collapse of communism-
I was born in 1948, in what Hungarians call Kolozsvár and
Romanians, Cluj. The principal city of Transylvania, it had been transferred
from Hungary to Romania in 1920 by the Treaty of Trianon, awarded back to
Horthy’s Hungary by Hitler in 1940, and was under direct Nazi occupation from
early 1944 until the arrival of Soviet forces, when it was incorporated into
Romania again. Both my parents were Communists. They had come back from the War
broken and bitter. My father, a Hungarian writer, was dispatched from prison to
the front, where he was seriously wounded—he walked on crutches, later with a
sturdy walking-stick, which I still have—by those whom he considered his
comrades: the Red Army. My mother, ironically, escaped being deported to
Auschwitz because she was in jail as a seditious Bolshevik. But her mother and
her favourite elder brother were killed. My father’s family belonged to the
petty nobility, or rather yeomanry, in the mountainous Szekler region of East
Transylvania; his father was a tailor in a small town. The movement—they never
spoke of the Party—meant mostly suffering and persecution: arrest, prison,
beatings.
Later, when my father was thoroughly disenchanted with the
system, I asked him why he still called himself a Communist. He showed me a
little plastic—well, I suppose, bakelite—cube, with six little photos glued on
its sides: the portraits of some of the best friends of his youth, tortured to
death by the royal Hungarian and Romanian secret services, or by the Gestapo in
that awful year, 1944. ‘Because I cannot explain it to them’, he said. It was
the perfect Christian idea: bearing witness, martyrdom as the theological
guarantee of truth. They were justified by heroic death, and so was the cause.
He could not escape it. Keeping faith in the teeth of adverse political
experience, the rotting away of the movement, was the only course. Anything else
would have been treason. Duplex veritas also: he never denied that
‘state socialism’ was a failure. His identity and his principles were at
loggerheads. Some of his comrades, back from the concentration camps, had been
rearrested by the Communist authorities, ‘disappeared’ without a sound. This destroyed
him as an intellectual.
In the absence of revolution, he suddenly found himself with
time on his hands, so he had the leisure to be a wonderful parent. He showed me
historical Transylvania, limping on mountain paths, propped on his stick before
some redoubt or castle, or another ruined medieval church. There aren’t many
intellectuals today who have working-class friends, but we did. Some of our
family were peasants, in the poorest regions of Europe. I was taught, without
great success, to do things in the fields and the garden.
Then two harrowing experiences of communist harassment and dissidence; one highly-charged political phase as a liberal member of parliament and then, in past 20 years....
......... I decided to throw out my whole so-called oeuvre,
break with my entire life so far, and go to school again. This has of course
liberated my passionate repudiation of the state of affairs we wrought, my
sympathy and compassion for people impoverished and made illiterate again by
the market turn. I was obliged to recognize that our naive liberalism had delivered
a nascent democracy into the hands of irresponsible and hate-filled right-wing
politicos, and contributed to the re-establishment of a provincial, deferential
and resentful social world, harking back to before 1945. The break was
naturally quite painful, as it excluded me from the circle of people I was
associated with for decades—the dissidents—so that my friends at the moment are
mostly generations younger than I am; wonderful people, but without the shared
memories so necessary for true friendships. At the same time, young Romanian
leftists made it possible for me to have a consoling shadow existence in
Transylvania, and to get rid finally of the feeling that poisoned my youth—the
sense that ethnic conflict was irremediable. After a thirty-year absence, for
the first time in my life when I give talks and sometimes write for journals in
Romanian, I am made to feel welcome in my own land: a source of great delight
and maybe undeserved justification.
The second article (in the same issue of NLR) is a tour de
force from one of Francois Mitterand’s eminence gris -
Regis Debray – entitled
Decline of the West? - of which this is a typical excerpt -
The West guarantees and shapes the formation of
international elites through its universities, business schools, financial
institutions, officer-training colleges, commercial organizations,
philanthropic foundations and major corporations. No empire has ever ruled by
force alone. It needs relays among native ruling circles, and this centrifugal incubator
produces a global class of managers who incorporate its language, its
references and revulsions, its organizational models (rule of law and ‘good
governance’) and economic norms (Washington Consensus). It is this moulding of
managerial cadres from an already globalized middle class that transforms
domination into hegemony, dependence into acceptance. Beyond the internships
for young leaders—3,000 per year, organized by American embassies—this digital
brain drain engenders a shared collective unconscious. China’s ‘red princes’
send their boys to be educated in the US, whence they return well-equipped
for the pursuit of wealth. In Europe, the young find it not just natural but
indispensable to obtain a qualification from one of these ‘centres of excellence’.
There is no far-flung land, minority or sect that does not
have its suction pump of more or less well-implanted representatives in the US,
with their connections in Congress and in the Administration, whose best-placed
elements can, if they wish, return to their country of origin, making it their
second home. They are the Afghano-ricans, Albano-ricans, Mexico-ricans,
Afro-ricans (the Jean Monnet-style Gallo-rican was merely a prototype). This
planetary HR department can pull a Karzai out of its pocket in an
instant. A Palestinian from the World Bank, an Italian from Goldman Sachs, a
re-cast Libyan or Georgian: the ease with which America is able to install a
captain at every helm is the reward for its generous embrace of foreigners, an
opening of national identity that the British Empire never risked, but which
has earned its successor hundreds of thousands of adoptive children, of every
nationality—and the possibility of filling its ambassadorships with people
originating from their countries of residence.
China, India, Egypt, even little states like Israel or
Armenia, benefit from loyal diasporas as channels of influence. The function of
the 30 million Chinese expatriates in Southeast Asia is well known. America,
which is no more a land of emigration than are the Nordic countries, does
better: it has 42 million immigrants at home, the diasporas from every
continent—Hispanics, Asians, Africans. Only the Western states—and the US first
and foremost—have so many gangways to distant countries. We might periodize as
follows: from 1850–1950, the West sweats the natives, inoculates, opens
schools. From 1950–2000, the natives who have survived and learned the language
come as immigrants to the West. From 2000–2050, the West educates the most
talented and sends them back to top jobs in their country of origin, to
propagate the West’s ideas and defend its interests. Win–win?
Whatever we think of French intellectuals, they can always
be relied upon to stick it to the Americans! Please read the whole article – it
is a real thought-provoker
I’ve always had a soft spot for the New Left Review which
first appeared as I was starting University in 1960 and trying to make sense of
the world. On its 50
th anniversary, it received the
following glowing tribute from an observer -
When so much of even the so-called "serious" media
is given over to celebrity-fuelled ephemera and the recycling of press releases
and in-house gossip; and when the academic world is struggling to mitigate the
worst effects of careerist modishness; and when national and international
politics seem to consist of bowing to the imperatives of "the market"
while avoiding public relations gaffes; then we need more than ever a
"forum" like NLR. It is up to date without being merely journalistic;
it is scholarly but unscarred by citation-compulsion; and it is analytical
about the long-term forces at work in politics rather than obsessed by the
spume of the latest wavelet of manoeuvring and posturing. Despite its
self-description in its guidelines for contributors, the journal is not in any
obvious sense "lively". It is downright difficult (but none the worse
for that), because what it tries to analyse is complex and its preferred
intellectual tools are often conceptually sophisticated. It is difficult where
being easy would be no virtue, difficult where aiming to be
"accessible" would mean patronising its readers, difficult where
ideas need to be chewed rather than simply swallowed. That's what I admire
above all about NLR: its intellectual seriousness – its magnificently strenuous
attempt to understand, to analyse, to theorise.
I am grateful to Wikipedia for its entry which runs as follows -
New Left Review was launched in January 1960 when the
editors of The New Reasoner and Universities and Left
Review merged their boards. The founders of the new journal hoped that it
would provide the motive force for a new round of political organisation in
Britain, inspiring the creation of "New Left Clubs" and helping to
reinvent
socialism as
a viable force in British politics.
From 1962, with
Perry
Anderson as editor, it has had a book-like format with long articles,
footnotes, and more than 100 pages per issue.
The NLR — as it came to be known — drew on debates
within
Western Marxism. It published work by
Walter
Benjamin,
Jacques Lacan,
El Lissitsky,
Hans Magnus Enzensberger,
Herbert
Marcuse,
Theodor Adorno,
Antonio
Gramsci, and
Louis Althusser, and interviewed
Jean-Paul
Sartre,
Georg Lukács, and
Lucio
Colletti.
A distinctive feature of the journal was a series of
'country studies' with
Perry
Anderson and
Tom Nairn supplying an account of the peculiar
formation of capitalism and the state in Britain. The journal has also
specialized in sweeping global surveys. In 1966 the journal published
Juliet
Mitchell's essay 'Women, the Longest Revolution', a founding text of second
wave feminism. Nearly every issue from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s carried
an account by a worker of their experience at work.
Texts of the aesthetic avant-garde were published and a
series of articles on film by
Peter
Wollen. The journal covered third world anti-imperial movements. It
reflected the concerns of the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s and
documented the crises of the Communist regimes in Russia and eastern
Europe.
Isaac Deutscher,
Raymond
Williams,
Raphael Samuel, and
Ralph
Miliband published in the journal and their work gave rise to
important exchanges.
In the 1970s and 1980s a debate between
Ernest
Mandel,
Alec Nove and
Diane Elson focussed
on the respective weight of plan, market and worker or community control in
socialist economics.
In the 1990s and after the journal published major studies
of the growing evidence of global capitalist disorder by
Robert
Brenner,
Giovanni Arrighi,
David Harvey,
Peter Gowan and
Andrew Glyn.
Benedict
Anderson,
Mike Davis,
Fredric
Jameson,
Terry Eagleton,
Ellen Wood,
Tariq Ali and
Nancy
Fraser published some of their most important texts in the review.
Notable studies included
Robert
Brenner on the origins of capitalism,
Erik
Olin Wright on class,
Göran
Therborn on the advent of democracy
The implications of the Soviet collapse were extensively
covered. Post-modernism, post-Marxism, the fate of feminism and the real
configurations of the "New World Order" were plotted and assessed. In
every decade since the mid-1970s the journal has wrestled with the historical
meaning of nationalism with essays by
Tom Nairn,
Eric
Hobsbawm,
Miroslav Hroch,
Benedict
Anderson,
Stuart Hall,
Ernest
Gellner,
Ronald Suny,
Régis
Debray,
Michael Lowy, and
Gopal Balakrishnan.
In its new form, NLR has led with controversial editorials
on the direction of world politics and major articles on the
United
States,
Japan,
Turkey,
Europe, Britain,
Cuba,
Iraq,
Mexico,
India and
Palestine. It
has published work by
Alain Badiou,
Slavoj
Žižek,
David Graeber and
Michael
Hardt and featured analysis of global imbalances, the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the credit crunch, the Egyptian Revolution and
Arab Spring,
prospects for nuclear disarmament, the scope of anti-corporate activism, the
prospect of a "planet of slums," and discussions of world literature
and cinema, cultural criticism and the continuing exploits of the avant-garde.
Since 2008, the Review has followed the economic crisis as
well as its global political repercussions, with in-depth country studies of
Iceland, Ireland, Spain and Greece, an ongoing debate on US-China economic
imbalances (and their political consequences), as well as on the crisis's toll
on California and the US health-care debate. An
essay by Wolfgang Streeck in NLR 71 was called "most powerful description of what has gone wrong in western
societies" by the Financial Times's columnist
Christopher Caldwell.
And the relationship I have developed with the very knowledgeable bookshop owner is priceless.
