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Farewell Comrade Limonov! – Rébellion – March 17th 2020

22 Sunday Mar 2020

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With an immense sadness, Rébellion’s editorial team has just learned of Eduard Limonov’s death at the age of 77. A writer and combatant, he embodied for us the model of a trouble-maker in a world of tranquil fools. Farewell comrade!

Eduard Limonov did us the honor of according an interview to our magazine in April 2004. On Limonov’s demand, Sergei Fomchenkov, a member of the Central Committee of the National Bolshevik Party, presented the organization. The writer then mentions his first imprisonment and his political ideas.

Could you present to us the ideology and objectives of the National Bolshevik Party?

The National Bolshevik Party is a political organization with a ten year old history of struggle, which counts around 12,000 members, more than 50 regional sections in Russia. The party members are youth (15 to 30 years) for the most part. All social classes are represented, as well as different ethnicities and religions.

Our ideology is based on the writings of the theorists of National-Bolshevism like Ustryalov, Agursky, on Eduard Limonov’s works. We also borrow relevant ideas from Lenin, Mussolini, Mao, etc.

Our goal is the seizure of power in Russia by means of a National Revolution. We demand the establishment of national and social justice in Russia, the complete change of the ruling class, the adjustment of the power of public officials, of the old bureaucratic elite, the redistribution and nationalization of property. We also fight for the vital space of Russia, for the alteration of Russia’s borders by means of the annexation of traditionally Russian territories. The short term objectives, more vital, are the fight for civil rights and freedom in the Russian Federation, and the protection of the rights of Russian and Russophone populations in the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent State, the Baltic countries, and Asia.

What tactic has the NBP chosen in Russia? What is the attitude of the authorities towards your activities?

Our tactic of combat is dictated by the political situation in Russia itself. The Russian Federation today is an aggressive police state with a hard repressive system. The Constitution (adopted in 1993) and the Criminal Code (1999), give the penal and judicial system practically limitless possibilities to combat the radical opposition forces. That’s why our methods are on the margins of the law. On one side of this margin, we have years of rotting in prisons and the reduction of the party to an illegal existence; on the other side of the margin a docile existence as respectable opposition. In the present stage of our struggle we employ acts of peaceful, non-violent, protest, like the occupations of the tower of the Marine Club of Sevastopol (Ukraine) under the slogan “Sevastopol is a Russian city!”, the Moscow – Kaliningrad train (a protest against the introduction of a visa regime), the rooftops of the Ministries of Justice in Moscow and other regions, and many others. A variety of these actions are called “velvet terrorism,” which was started by comrades Bahur and Gorchkov, who threw eggs at Nikita Mihalkov. This tactic could be called a “precision shot,” that is to say a strike at a weak point of the system. We chose a symbolic figure as a target and the action itself is a sort of political execution. Firstly, it’s a means of openly expressing the crimes committed by one or another person against the people, secondly it helps destroy the myth of invincibility and inviolability of people who are surrounded with a halo of power or popularity. They soon acquire concrete physical traits, showing their true face. Some start to turn on us in derision, responding to us with cowardly accusations, which doesn’t succeed without a text prepared in advance, for example, Zhirinovsky lowered himself with vulgar insults addressed to the executors of an action and orders to beat them up, which would suit a 19th century innkeeper. “Velvet terrorism” actions attract enormous attention on the part of mass media, stimulating interest in the Party, its work, its opinions on the present political situation. We receive sympathy and support from the part of society who are also discontented with situation within the state but who do not dare or who are not capable of radical actions.

Moreover, the organization of similar political actions is good entertainment for people.

We try to remain on the margins of legality (our actions could be qualified by the law as administrative infractions or minor delinquency), unlike the authorities who fight against us. It’s not for nothing that one of our slogans is “We’ll teach you to love the Constitution!”

The authorities’ attitude towards us is also demonstrated by the fact that in many regions, the regional departments for the fight against organized crime “concern themselves” with the NBP. The explosions in Moscow, the fight against Chechen and international terrorism announced by the president have also become a pretext for the reinforcement of the police regime.

They’ve refused our registration as a political party on Russian territory four times, the last time directly before Duma elections, on made up bureaucratic “red tape” grounds. Against the National Bolsheviks they use illegal detentions, during mass events and during arrests – severe blows, threats, blackmail, torture of the detained and accused – standard operating procedure of the organs of “law keeping.” In the apartments of NBP sectional leaders and activists everywhere in Russia they’ve proceeded with searches, illegal confiscations of literature and party material. The special services do not hesitate to use such methods as kidnapping (a recent example – the kidnapping of Central Committee member Dmitri Bahur, who was savagely beaten by FSB agents who tried to convince him to “collaborate”), trumped up by planting drugs or weapons for them to “discover” much later during the search and also … murders which will probably never be proved.

Presently the Party counts four political prisoners. Among them, the last victim of judicial and bureaucratic sloppiness is the 27 year old activist from Belgorod Anna Petrenko, a single mother, senior teacher at a local university, social science diploma holder. Anna was thrown behind bars (she was accused of having planted an alarm clock inside a cake box in front of the Belgorod regional administrative building, which the FSB and the Prosecutor deemed a “mock explosive device”), her child was transferred to a youth home.

All these ignoble methods of combat against our party demonstrate the attitude of the authorities towards us as a powerful political force that threatens the criminal Russian Federation, the bureaucracy and police. And these very methods discredit its power before the people, stimulating only contempt and distaste for it among them.

What are your relations with other political parties in Russia?

In ten years of existence, the NBP has called for cooperation with political organizations many times. We’ve always called people, whatever their particular ideology, nationality, religious affiliation, or anything else, to rally together in the struggle against our common enemy – the system. But if such alliances form, our allies soon betray us, like what happened with Anpilov’s Labour Russia for example. Political parties don’t want to cooperate with us, either because our radicalism frightens them while they want to provoke sympathy among voters through their moderation, or they’re afraid of disappearing in our wake from their outmodedness, their dogmatism, the inertia of their ideology and the inadequate modern political situation in the country and world. We could give these political forces a real active life, the result of our success. They could give us their support, for example as official registered sympathizer parties, who have a certain status in relation with and an influence in the eyes of the population and authorities, a material support.

Today, on the eve of presidential elections in the Russian Federation, we call once more for political organizations independent of their ideology and left-right orientation as well as all citizens of Russia to rally together to boycott this crime organized amidst the people.

We calmly accept the short duration of such alliances. We have our goal and there only remains the means to attain it. Those who understand the advantage of collaboration with us on the path of struggle with the authorities presently in place will come to us on their own, because nobody else really fights with them in Russia now.

Recently a split happened between Labour Russia and its youth movement, the Vanguard of Red Youth (AKM), created on the model of the NBP, under Udaltsov’s direction. At the moment, the AKM has asked us to collaborate and of course we’ll try to meet them.

Do you have contacts with other National Bolshevik organizations outside of Russia? Do you desire to develop your political links on the international scale in the future?

Yes, we have contacts with National Bolsheviks in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Venezuela, Belarus, Israel, Sweden. We are striving to develop political links on the international scale. Presently, we’re actively working on the Anglophone version of the principal internet site of the NBP and the translation of the program into other languages.

According to Western European opinion, Putin’s policies lack clarity. How do you evaluate his policies? Are they different from Yeltsin’s policies?

This Western European opinion is not surprising. Putin tries to maneuver between the West and the United States. Having spent a few years in Germany, Putin idealizes Europe, endeavoring to join the European Union, not understanding that even if that happened, Russia would be a sort of economic “black hole” for Europe. Putin tries to construct relationships with Germany and France but soon betrays their interests under the pressure of the United State.

There is probably no radical difference between Yeltsin’s policies and those of Putin. Yeltsin made all his decisions under the secret influence of the United States or other Western states. Putin however, under the pretext of the fight against international terrorism after September 11th has openly declared his pro-American position. Putin’s Russia calmly returns it’s spheres of influence to the Americans: American troops are based in the former republics of the Soviet Union – in Uzbekistan, Kirghistan, Tajikistan, they landed troops in Georgia and Kazakhstan and also started construction of radar detection systems for their anti-missile system in Azerbaijan according to the entente with the Kremlin and Baku. The Baltic countries have become NATO members. The Putin regime depends entirely on its principal patrons, it plays no autonomous role in the global arena.

The internal political situation of Putin’s Russia is characterized by the fact that power is concentrated in the hands of bureaucratic functionaries, former members of the Communist Party. Neo-liberals and oligarchs who received many liberties under Yeltsin are now completely sidelined from power and clearly losing in the competition with the bureaucrats.

Despite optimistic declarations on television, the facts don’t speak in favor of Putin at all. In four years the Russian population has decreased two million. On the map of the Russian Federation about nine hundred inhabited points have been crossed out, small towns in Siberia and the Far East where any prospect of life disappeared after the collapse of the Soviet Union. On the Kaliningrad – Moscow route a visa regime was introduced, the situation of the Russophone population in the countries of the CIS and Baltics has worsened. On Putin’s account there’s the sunken submarine “Kursk”, the houses blown up in Russian cities, the interminable bloody butchery of the war in Chechnya, the collapse of the remains of the old Soviet army, the “Nord-Ost” theater hostage crisis in Moscow … and many other shameful and irreparable missed opportunities.

Presently, on the eve of presidential elections, our party is organizing the social movement “Russia without Putin” whose president is Eduard Limonov. The movement’s activities are directed towards preventing the reelection of Putin for a second term by means of boycotting the elections.

How do you evaluate the results of the last parliamentary elections in Russia?

I deem the elections that have taken place as well as their results an organized crime that was conducted against the citizens of the Russian Federation. The terms of the pre-electoral competition were unequal from the start. Gigantic administrative resources (that is to say means issued by the state for pre-electoral expenses) were at the disposal of the “United Russia” party that received the absolute majority of votes. Long before the official start of the pre-electoral campaign, “United Russia” positioned itself as the “ruling party” and insolently used its privileges. The key media platforms, practically monopolized by the state have become the loudspeaker of their obsessive propaganda. From independent observers of electoral precincts and simple citizens in many regions of the Russian Federation we’ve received information of the most glaring infractions during the elections, the violation of voters’ civil rights. For example, we know of employees being coerced by many companies, professors threatened with dismissal or non-payment to vote for “United Russia” in the presence of management. In the electoral precincts they throw supplementary ballots with votes for “United Russia” in the ballot boxes. Directly under the eyes of observers, who are forcibly thrown out if they try to stop the malfeasance, under the pretext, for example, of invalid identification papers. The same falsifications also occur during the counting of votes.

What attitude can we have regarding such elections?

Such elections are predictable but they surpassed even our expectations. The government has become so arrogant that it “massacred” the entire opposition – not only the Communist Party which has been politically dead for a long time, but also the miserable “Yabloko” and “The Union of Right Forces” that could have been put there as camouflage at least. The parties that displease the government, the NBP among others, were quite simply ignored: by refusing us registration the Ministry of Justice declared an active organization of thousands of people quite simply nonexistent. The others were neutralized by the 5% barrier, which only allows parties who surpass it to obtain seats in the Duma according to our laws.

What conclusion can we draw from the experience of the Soviet years?

We, the National Bolsheviks of Russia presently make the following conclusion: the revolution of 1917 was not as radical as various historians and the mass media present it. Under the influence of external factors and harmful Russian traditions the project named “revolution” fell. Since the end of Stalin’s rule, the decomposition of a passable project of a Russian state had already begun. The conclusion is quite pessimistic – there was never socialism in Russia, just as there’s not capitalism now (it’s described in Limonov’s book “The Other Russia” in more detail). And the positive conclusion is that Lenin evidently created the precedent for such a situation and we hope that it will be possible again in one or another form. That’s why we fight and rot in prisons.

The following questions are addressed to Eduard Limonov

Recently you were freed from prison. What caused your imprisonment?

Firstly they arrested me because of Karyagin’s testimony, accused under article 222 (illegal purchase, possession, and transport of weapons) (Dmitri Karyagin, arrested in March 2001, resident of the town of Balashov in the Saratov region – ed.). And then the FSB started weaving the spider web and it was only August 31st that they subjected me to charges under article 205 (terrorism) and 208 (creation of illegally armed organizations). In October they added article 280 too (calling to overthrow the constitutional order).

Everyone present at the trial can confirm it was a matter of literary texts. It was a matter of three documents named “NBP-info”, and some other articles, the prosecutor even asked to add a request to ban the “Limonka” newspaper to the case. The newspaper would be banned because of my articles, chapters of a book already written in prison. Only the third charge, article 222, has any relation with reality: real sub-machine guns, real weapons. They spoke of text, paragraphs, who was the author of this text, who was the author of another, etc. This links my trial with that of Chernyshevsky. It’s the same, as bizarre as it seems. I studied him a lot and I know that he was arrested on August 7th 1862 for a proclamation entitled “To the Lord’s Peasants”, this proclamation wasn’t even written by him. It was written by Mihailov. Then there was the provocateur Kostomarov who supposedly was going to print this proclamation via letterpress. There was a letter, seized at the border, by Herzen, addressed to Serno-Solovievich, in which Chernyshevsky was mentioned. It was about the publication of “Le Contemporain” in Geneva or elsewhere else in the West. We also have a letter intercepted at the border by the French citizen Morignac. It’s surprising and striking that 140 years later there’s practically the same precedent. After the Soviet government, after the Great October Revolution, 70 years of the dictatorship of the proletariat , we suddenly see our brave secret services turn towards 140 year old methods. In the Chernyshevsky affair there were 130 police reports about external surveillance. He had been tracked since autumn 1861. He was kept in the Petropavlovskaya fortress, where he wrote his famous “What Is to Be Done?” and then was sentenced to 20 years in a penal colony. The state practically destroyed him. Moreover he wasn’t just anyone, he was a revolutionary democrat as Lenin called him. He was one of the most brilliant men of his time. And so we discover 140 years later exactly identical methods.

I was confronted with the monstrous cruelty of the state, moreover with a cruelty so stupid and blind that it destroys everything completely. It’s surprising that during the course of the trial the prosecutor affirmed more than once that he agreed with our ideas. If he agreed, then what were we being judged for? For methods, as the prosecutor said. But we couldn’t have even applied our methods, we weren’t given this chance. And yet we’re judged for intentions, even if they cannot judge intention. Despite that, such is this monstrous cruelty.

What were the conditions of your detention in prison?

Prison is as difficult as camp. I went to three prisons and one camp. Of course it’s difficult, obviously. That is to say the idea of the Russian prisoner as martyr remains true because the traditions of executioners in Russian society have been preserved. You’re put in the hands of power – it presses you, it eats you up like a dog, and it’s satisfied. It chewed me up for two years and some of a third – they proved nothing and spit me out.

I can only compare the conditions in the SIZO [Translator’s note: detention center, следственный изолятор ] of Saratov with the Lefortovo prison, I suppose for Russian conditions, I was treated decently. Three people in a cell for 4 – around nine meters. My fellow detainees were there for robbery and banditry, from what I know. Coincidentally, they read some of my books. We were allowed to walk outside once a day, outside packages in a practically unlimited quantity. They gave me books from the library as I asked: the letters of Lenin, Herzen, and others. In the cell I had a television, sent by Viktor Alksnis. I suppose if I was an ordinary detainee the conditions would have been a bit worse.

As a writer, do you have relationships with cultural milieus in Russia?

Eduard Limonov maintains relationships with cultural milieus in Russia but very selectively, because even after they charged him with the most odious accusations, numerous personalities in Russian arts kept silent when he was in prison. Also, even before that, he maintained relationships and was friendly with people who were close to him in spirit, and those are few in number. We have numerous party members in cultural circles who are poets and musicians. Natalia Chernova, who attacked prime minister Kasyanov, is a poet and painter. Lukovnokova, who attacked the governor of St Petersburg, is a well known poet.

How do you evaluate the existing anti-globalist movement? Do its echoes reach Russia?

I would say right away that in Russia there is not and cannot be anti-globalists of the type that exists in Europe. It’s not relevant. Of course there are small groups under the leadership of the Communist Party. Habitually they only meet for a conversation around a cup of tea. With us, to survive as a political force it is necessary to have a party and not only a party but a living organism. People must be devoted to ideas, fanatics. Willing to sacrifice themselves if they must. And obviously, less words and debates on theory, but more action. As Eduard Limonov said one day: “There is no longer any left or right, there is the system, and the enemies of the system.” While we discuss who had more correct policies, Lenin or Stalin, Castro or Mao – the faceless anti-national system of global bureaucracy rules us, destroys us. Of course, compared with our struggle (we have around 10 dead and more than 50 people have spent time in prison) the demonstrations of many thousands of well fed anti-globalists makes us smirk. Because this quantity of people could easily organize a revolution and no police could stop them. Hope remains that the ideas of National-Bolshevism will be accepted by the turbulent youth of Europe and more serious and more malicious organizations will appear.

Do you believe that Russia will still play a role in Europe’s future?

Of course. If we happen to change the present course of Putin and the ruling class then Europe can also expect an outbreak of radical movements. It happened once in 1968 after Mao’s famous operation. The youth of France were lit up by ideas of a social revolution. Although the opposite reaction would also be possible because the mass media will necessarily blacken our movement. But if the policies of Putin and his gang continue (and he wants to lengthen the presidential term to seven years, this new tsar) then there is a possibility of Russia’s disintegration. With this option the consequences for Europe would be disagreeable.

Source: http://rebellion-sre.fr/adieu-camarade-limonov/

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Jean Thiriart and the “Great Europe” : Interview with Yannick Sauveur – Rébellion September 16th 2019

18 Friday Oct 2019

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Yannick Sauveur was one of Jean Thiriart’s close associates for nearly twenty years. He revisits the thought of this figure of the “Great Europe” for us.

R/ How did you know Jean Thiriart?
Before responding to your question, I would like to clarify my journey for you: I took my first steps in the Mouvement Jeune Révolution (MJR), a movement created by Captain Pierre Sergent in 1966 as a continuation of the OMJ (OAS Métro Jeunes). The MJR attracted me with its neither right nor left, neither capitalism nor communism positions. I realized, like other leaders and militants, taking into account the evolution of the movement (MJR then Action Solidariste MJR then Mouvement Solidariste Français and GAJ) that the aforementioned positions were a decoy and that the movement was the umpteenth variety of the extreme right. But, from that time, I felt neither right wing nor extreme and I had already declined to take part in these splits that seemed quite artificial to me. In a confused manner I already sensed the System’s great interest in taking advantage of these divisions, including those of pseudo-opposition movements, which were created by the regime if need be or rendered it great service, consciously or not.
During the course of 1973, this consideration lead me to quit the Mouvement Solidariste Français (MSF) in order to join Organisation Lutte du Peuple (OLP), the organization founded by Yves Bataille, a defector from Ordre Nouveau. Beyond what originally attracted me to MJR, I understood that Politics could not limit itself to the pettiness of domestic policy, everyday politics. On the contrary, OLP’s preoccupations were focused on international politics, the politics of blocs, European independence and sovereignty vis-à-vis the USA and the Soviet Union. Geopolitics necessarily seemed to take precedence over the ideology in the exact measure where we sensed freedom was gauged on the European scale, Europe as the master of its destiny. These ideas had been expressed by Jean Thiriart during the 1960s in his writings: Un Empire de 400 millions d’hommes L’Europe, Brussels, 1964 and La Grande Nation. L’Europe unitaire de Brest à Bucarest, 1965, then in La Nation Européenne.
Following this initial intellectual encounter with Jean Thiriart, a second one, physical this time, took place during a militant voyage that took us from Paris to Brussels via Rome and Munich. In Rome, we met the militants of Lotta di Popolo.
Our meeting with Jean Thiriart in July 1973 at his store (Opterion, avenue Louise in Brussels) would be brief and rather cold. Distanced from all active politics for nearly five years, he didn’t necessarily see four young militants barging into his place positively. We must recognize that presenting ourselves as such, in his professional venue, was doubtlessly not the best idea for an introduction. Thiriart was naturally distrustful, and very absorbed in his optometric activities, he didn’t want to hear about politics anymore. His wife, Alice, who was not without influence on him, also feared the reemergence of the political virus. In fact, as will be explained later, he no longer wanted to be the leader of a movement and terribly distrusted militants, young ones especially.
Nevertheless undiscouraged, I re-initiated contact personally in the summer of 1974, and I found another man there, approachable even warm. The private man was infinitely different from the public man and those who rubbed shoulders with him in these circumstances unanimously recognize the empathy that his personality radiated. Henceforth, our relations endured until his death, in November 1992.

R/ What was his conception of the European idea?
The major basic ideas were present very early in the history of the movement directed by Thiriart. We already find them in the Manifeste à la nation Européenne whose first version appeared on September 1st 1961 and which would be revised many times.
On foreign policy, the manifesto (in its 1962 version) summarizes that “Europe must obtain for itself peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union, otherwise the USA will haggle an accord with Moscow on our backs.”
The Europe he envisions is a unitary Europe, a Europe of Europeans against a “Europe of fatherlands,” for a European patriotism against “constrained nationalisms”, a Jacobin and imperial Europe. Europe must be one and indivisible, its preoccupations and combats likewise. Only the unitary Europe would give Europe the power to face the blocs (the USA and the Soviet Union at the time). He advocated for withdrawal from NATO and the creation of a European Army. Economic nationalism must be a factor for Europe’s unification.
Jean Thiriart didn’t have words harsh enough for the petty nationalisms embodied in France by Michel Debré, Prime Minister for 1959 to 1962, or the extreme right movements in Italy, Germany, or elsewhere. For Jean Thiriart, one of the ideological tragedies of obtuse “petty nationalism” was that “German nationalists” were only interested in Berlin and German reunification, “French nationalists” were only interested in Algeria, “Belgian nationalists” only humiliated by the Congolese affair of 1960. That’s why he was strongly involved in supporting the OAS during the Algerian affair because “beyond the war in Algeria, beyond the FLN and OAS, we see the future of Europe. We need a solution that leads or returns Muslim Africa to the European community. We need a solution that keeps a European army in Algeria without humiliating the pride of Algerian Muslims …”
Jean Thiriart didn’t confound Europe and the West. “The West goes from Bucharest to San Francisco, with its priests, its rabbis, its bourgeoisie, its outmoded nationalisms and pretend values.
Europe will be something totally cut off from the USA by an ocean. Europe will also be something that extends past Bucharest, the extends past the Urals. Europe will go to the Chinese border in Manchuria. Europe will go to the Indian Ocean. For me Europe is firstly labeled in geopolitical terms.” (106 réponses à Mugarza).
Thiriart’s unitary Europe is inseparable from the concept of omnicitizenship, “By omnicitizenship, I mean any citizen, any place, can run for any office, up to the supreme level.
It’s this absence of the least discrimination, the least restriction; its harmful “dosage” is unknown. […] The principle of non-discrimination by territorial origin is a key principle of our unitary solution to consolidate Europe.”

R/ In 1989 the Berlin Wall collapsed. How would Thiriart analyses the opportunities that emerged from this new world?
Long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jean Thiriart placed his hopes in a reorientation of alliances with a Great Europe extending to Vladivostok. Thanks to his translator Viktor Nikolaev, he had many of his translated texts sent to the Soviet Union. In fact, Jean Thiriart’s position evolved from the sixties: “My perspective of a Europe formed WITH the USSR or more exactly (peacefully) BESIDE it progressively changed , from 1982 onward, to a Europe formed THROUGH the USSR.” In these conditions, the fall of the Berlin Wall followed by the disintegration of the USSR would reshuffle the cards and open other horizons. Would Jean Thiriart’s ideas finally enjoy a favorable reception in Russia? That would be the reason for the voyage to Moscow he undertook in August 1992 and the various contacts established: Besides Alexander Dugin and Anatoli Ivanov, he had meetings with:
– Yegor Ligachev (born in 1920), the former leader of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, the number 2 of the CPSU.
– Sergey Baburin, leader of the opposition within the Parliament of the Russian Republic and leader of the “Rossiya” group of deputies, deputy, jurist.
– Viktor Alksnis, nicknamed “the black colonel,” of Latvian origin and former military engineer in the Baltic fleet, member of the CPSU from 1974 until its banning in 1991. Close to Sergey Baburin and Alexander Dugin.
– Gennady Zyuganov, former adviser to Gorbachev on issues relating to anti-Soviet movements, intelligence and secret services, founder of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF).
– Geydar Dzhemal, founder of the Islamic Renaissance Party (PRI) in 1991.
– Alexander Prokhanov, director of the newspaper Dyenn.
-Nikolai Pavlov, associate of Sergey Baburin.
– Valentin Chikin, director of Sovetskaya Rossiya, associate of Ligachev.
– Eduard Volodin, philosopher and advocate of the national communist synthesis.

R/ Russia has a central place in Jean Thiriart’s thought?
From 1964, while the Atlanticists of all stripes were violently anti-communist, Jean Thiriart developed a unique position: “The key to European diplomacy will be peaceful neighborly relations with the USSR. Only a strong and united Europe can force Moscow to understand that it’s also in the USSR’s interest (Un Empire de 400 millions d’hommes L’Europe, p.24).” And he already envisioned Europe from Brest to Vladivostok: “Let’s make a brief incursion into the realm of anticipation and let’s imagine the stage following Europe’s unification. It will inevitably inscribe itself, from the facts of political geography, in terms of a Brest- Vladivostok axis (…) All European policy will consist of building its strength and demonstrating its power to the USSR in order to lead the latter to a more realistic position (…) But the great prelude to our entire policy of rapprochement with Moscow, my sine qua historical position, is the liberation of our provinces and capitals from the Center and the East of the great European fatherland. (ibid. p. 28-31).”
“Great Europe (…) extends from Dublin to Bucharest. Greater Europe stretches from Dublin to Vladivostok.
Russian extends to Vladivostok. Of course Europe will inherit this geographical profile.” (L’Europe jusqu’à l’Oural, un suicide! In La Nation Européenne, n° 46 – 15/02-15/03/1966).
For Thiriart, the only schema he envisioned (even if he was aware that it fell within the long term) was that of a greater Europe as Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals was “nonsense:” “We must firstly create the great Europe extending to Bucharest. Then we must demand the greater Europe with the Russians cured of their pretension of hegemony over Europe’s interior.
And this greater Europe will extend to Vladivostok – and not to the Urals as the very poor geography student who responds to the name De Gaulle believes” (ibid).
After the end of Jeune Europe and the La Nation Européenne (1969), Jean Thiriart retired from all militant political activity. He picked up the pen again at the start of the eighties. There’s no 180 degree turn but rather there’s evolution of his thought: “My position is that we mustn’t fight against the USSR, a European power, but we must fight against the fossilization of Marxist thought.” (106 réponses à Mugarza) He explained his progression: “From 1980-1981 (…) the following schema grew inside of me: let’s no longer rely on Brest – Bucharest unity as the preparatory phase of Dublin – Vladivostok unity, but directly pass to the Vladivostok – Dublin phase.
(…) My slide towards communism hasn’t escaped many observers. This slide was already implicit, subtly appearing in my writings from 1966 to 1968.” De-Marxified communism understood according to Thiriart’s terms “purged of its ideology,” “renovated, rendered clearer.” He also evoked a “Spartan communism.”
Because the “USSR is the the last European power not domesticated by the American – Zionist project of global domination” Jean Thiriart’s thought progressively evolved towards the Euro – Soviet Empire.

R/ You rediscovered a forgotten text “ L’empire euro-soviétique”. What does this rare document contain?
Actually, I neither discovered nor rediscovered it because I knew of this text during its composition and I have successive annotated, struck-through, penciled-in versions. I worked from two versions only to remember that the latest one seemed to correspond the most to Thiriart’s final thought and in which he returned to certain references and formulations. For example, he suppressed any reference to Francis Parker Yockey that José Cuadrado Costa had suggested in a preceding version.
I also tried to be as faithful as possible to Jean Thiriart’s wishes ordering the table of contents. In addition to the labor of re-writing, I added footnotes because the base text didn’t contain them and limited itself to anticipating them in the future. They are observations or complement the information in the original text. They also include many bibliographic facts.
Finally, in a long preface I sought to explain the origin of this text, putting it in perspective with its time and situating it contemporaneously. It seemed interesting to me to exhume this document and its publication thirty years after its composition shows a certain clairvoyance.
L’Empire Euro-soviétique de Vladivostok à Dublin is a very dense text. The guiding line is as follows: Jean Thiriart returns to his evolution from 1964 to 1984 in order to explain why “I came to consider as the USSR as the last and only chance for Europe to unite today” then he looks at the broader picture of the present (1984) geopolitical situation, namely a declining USSR and the United States on the way to planetary hegemony. He then exposes what he calls an “explosive algebra” or the “great switch-over,” the USSR reinforcing Western Europe. He indulges in a certain number of geopolitical considerations connected with the “third world war.” We must have in mind the bellicose climate that reigned at the start of the 1980s and I recall the “war psychosis that was developing in every level of French public opinion” (Pierre Viansson-Ponté in Le Monde). The bellicosity of the Israeli – Zionist lobby is highlighted and Thiriart makes a parallel with 1939: “Die for Danzig?” (Marcel Déat) will become “Die for Tel-Aviv?” Jean Thiriart has no illusions about the USSR as it was. It must radically change and propose a “European discourse,” which is supposed to surpass Marxist communism and its conception of the nation to promote a “community of destiny” henceforth this notion of Empire. He contrast the Empire that unites with the imperialism of domination (of the United States). Who will form this greater Europe? Referencing Alexander Zinoviev (The Yellow House), Jean Thiriart also desires a new Stalin. This new Stalin will have the duty of creating European unity tomorrow: “A new Phillip of Macedon, a new Stalin, that’s what we need to give birth to the unitary Europe.”

R/ Do you think Thiriart’s thought is still relevant?
Yes incontestably and I don’t think I’m the only one to think so if I judge by the interest he arouses today. In Sweden, in Eastern Europe, in Italy, in Spain, in England, in Latin America, in Australia, Jean Thiriart is translated, cited, mentioned favorably. Academic works, books are in progress. The magazine of geopolitical studies Eurasia, directed by Claudio Mutti, very regularly reproduces writings by (or on) Thiriart. In Robert Steuckers’ work Europa (three volumes), two chapters are devoted to Jean Thiriart.
The retrospective relevance of Thiriart’s writings in the light of ongoing tensions and upheavals is evident upon reflection because the Russian enemy has replaced the Soviet enemy (from the point of view of American strategy!), and Europe, absent or insignificant on the international scene, is still the same political dwarf under the American thumb. Do we need to clarify that the European Union has nothing to do with the Europe we want: powerful, independent, removed from NATO.
From Thiriart’s thought, we must retain an authentically political methodology and reasoning, detached from emotions and literary verbiage, as well as the games of everyday politics.
We must also insist on Thiriart’s organizational sense that created a structured, disciplined,militant unit, Jeune Europe, with its press, its cadre school, its camps, a Party that was a sort of prefiguration of the unitary Europe.

Source: http://rebellion-sre.fr/entretien-avec-yannick-sauveur-jean-thiriart-et-la-grande-europe/

Michel Clouscard, The Capitalism of Seduction – Rébellion 46 – February 2011

03 Thursday Aug 2017

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At the end of the 1970s, Michel Clouscard debuted an analysis of the phenomena arising from triumphant liberalism. His approach was clearly a response to the PCF’s (then locked into a dogmatic “orthodoxy”) lack of comprehension regarding mutating capitalist society. Faced with serious leftist ideological drifting after Mai 68, he proposed updating theory and revolutionary strategies by taking the mutation of the dominant system into account.

That lead him to unearth the root of what he named “the capitalism of seduction.” He makes it the heart of capitalism’s praxis, that is to say the whole of the dominant class’ maneuvers to transform social relations and expel the class struggle from history. The discourse of seduction rests on the destruction of Being by seeming, of Truth by representation, of Intelligence by conditioning. Reinforcing the already existing exploitation and alienation in capitalism, it even destroys the consciousness of the working classes.

A Genealogy of the Transformation of French Society

In the work of Michel Clouscard, and especially in “The Capitalism of Seduction,” we find a complete critical review of post 1968 society. Aymeric Monville recalls the context this book was written in: “At the time where ‘The Capitalism of Seduction’ was released for the first time, in 1981 from Editions Sociales, this decryption of this new society’s initiatic rituals (pinball, jukebox, posters, jeans, long hair, hash, motorcycles, rock) seemed like an event. Structuralism had barely emerged and the ‘human sciences’ only seemed interested in the (otherwise exciting) initiatic rituals of the Bororos [Translator’s Note: A Brazilian tribe] If it suited some to update a few of these rituals, on the other hand, let us admit that the Zeitgeist, the collective unconsciousness, had not changed. At best, the spectrum of ‘protesting innocence’ had expanded.”

Through this exercise in the anthropology of mores, he showed that the pseudo-rebel postures of the bourgeois youth had become included in a global system. They are initiation rites into the consumer society that “libertarian liberalism” had established to assure the reproduction of the capitalist model. I must desire what everyone desires, normality reached through the integration of the false values of merchant society.

Michel Clouscard traces the origin of the Capitalism of Seduction to the Marshall Plan. This plan to aid reconstruction was a “gift” to Europe made through the economic force of the United States at the start of the Cold War France, after Great Britain, was the principal beneficiary of this totally disinterested manna from heaven.

The penetration of the American model was the start of the death of old traditional French society. The working classes, peasants and workers alike, put thrifty and rigorous values into practice, the basis of a strong communitarian consciousness, “the alliance of an ethic of necessity and a morality of thrift.” But the openness to the American economic and cultural model would overwhelm this society with the complicity of the national bourgeoisie. Michel Clouscard didn’t idealize this society of necessity, but he thought that socialism could inherit values from it.

The conquest of French consciousness was rapid, consumer society predicated the disappearance of traditional values. They were replaced by frivolity and mercantile attitudes. At the start of the 1960s, this marginal cultural model of ludic, libidinal consumption tended to become the model of the elements who were the least involved in the life of traditional society: youth and women. Note that it was not antipathy towards the youth or latent misogyny that lead Michel Clouscard to make this observation, but a study of the social structures of the era and the processes of production.

On the contrary, capitalism gave birth to a new category with veritable ferocity: parasitic non-productive jobs (a large category extending from the false artists of “modern art” to the intellectual sell-outs to the system, passing through publicists and other dealers).

The Reign of the Savage Beast

With Mai 68, the culture of seduction, selective and marginal until then, would stretch to cover global society. The sociologist then mentions the role of libertarian-liberalism in breaking down the last moral and cultural locks against the capitalist tidal wave.

According to Clouscard, “libertarian-liberalism” is not libertarian for everyone all the time. On the contrary, it’s a strategy that permits the reciprocal begetting of the permissive and the repressive, putting in place a system that presents itself, as Clouscard said, with the elliptical thoroughness that we often find in his prose, as “permissive regarding the consumer and repressive regarding the producer” (A. Monville).

In appearance, capitalism is the system that offers greatest chance to satiate ones’ basest passions. Impulses of every type are exalted by the ideology of “always more.” Henceforth, in the field of merchandise, every desire must be immediately satisfied as a need, through possession. Desire is placed on the level of vital needs. We exist according to what we consume and not through what we construct ourselves. The experience of a relationship to another is enclosed in the desire to possess the same attributes of success and individual performance. The dynamic of desire is manipulated in the service of capital’s development.

This social process aims for the atomization of the social body, which would be the end of the Political, everything will be available to the market of desire. Michel Clouscard wrote, “The savage beast, unbridled and insatiable, is the image chosen by Hegel to designate civil society when it’s merely a marketplace, when the hegemony of liberalism of liberalism (or neo-liberalism) is realized … Then capitalist conditioning becomes all powerful…”

Social classes must experience a break with their origins, with the historical culture that begot them. This rupture must be forgotten. Thus an increasing availability to other values appears and permits their integration into the system. The negation of the reality of class struggle is the priority of capitalism, it allows the negative consequences of its domination to be denied.

Capitalism leads to “the impoverishment of history.” Michel Clouscard remarks that “crisis has become a strategy for the management of crisis.” Society is perfectly frozen and blocked, “The more it rots, the better it holds! This stalemate that no longer allows any momentum is the impoverishment of history.” Society falls into depression and the individual closes up on himself. “Everything is permitted, but nothing is possible. The harsh reality of prohibition in crisis follows the permissiveness of mass consumption,” he wrote at the start of “Trentes calamiteuses” [Translator’s note: referring to the 30 years of stagnation following the economic boom of “Trentes glorieuses” of the post-World War 2 era].

Mad Love Against Every Simulacrum of Capitalism

How to escape this blocked situation? Michel Clouscard responds that it’s necessary to return to fundamentals. At the end of his life, he reaffirmed the importance of re-founding a collective destiny. “I defend the organic essence as such of this social body. It’s the substance of the state. It belongs to history and not to some survival instinct inspired by nature, collective interests transcend local divisions in the face of a common external peril … It already acts to combat the moral peril created trough the collaboration of internal reaction and external imperialism.” Faced with the globalization of capital, he affirms the necessity of the idea of the nation in a clearly revolutionary sense, “The state was the super-structural instance of capitalist repression. That’s why Marx denounces it. But today, with globalization, it’s totally the opposite. While the nation state could be the means of oppression of one class by another, it became the means to resist globalization. It’s a dialectical game.”

He also endeavored to respond to the Capitalism of Seduction with a much stronger notion. His “Treatise on Mad Love” address the myth of Tristan and Yseult at length. In its medieval and Wagnerian versions, it would be a response to the evil that devours our society. For him, the interpretation of the myth reprises the Platonic conception of love. The Platonic reminiscence – that of lost unity, the reconciliation of opposites – is also the recognition of the Other, and the support, the means of looking forward, of the couple’s journey. Love is made from these tender moments which cannot be separated: retrospection and looking forward, attachment to the past and the quest for the future, obsession and seeking.

The transient agitation of desire is not love, it only leads to frustration. It’s only a simulacrum of souls eaten down by the spirit of the era. A quest towards the void that only leads to depression.

Michel Clouscard revisits the importance of this double anchoring in the ideal and reality that love offers. In Greek mythology, “Love visits Aphrodite in the day and spends the night with Psyche. Sharing the body and soul: structure. Libertarian liberalism tramples on what the human consciousness produces, its intimate debates, its freedom. Transgressive consumption erodes the Psyche. I propose conjugal life and the Psyche as a progressive foundation. They are the two loves of man, and his great grief, the double pursuit of the Eternal Feminine.”

Who was Michel Clouscard?

He was born in 1928, in a very modest peasant family from Tarn. “He crystallizes the course of a worker’s world, which, by seizing the means of intellectual expression, accesses consciousness for itself,” writes Aymeric Monville, who continues the re-edition of his principal works with éditions Delga.

After his philosophy studies (his thesis director was Henri Lefeuvre), he became the professor of sociology at the University of Poitiers from 1975 to 1990. From the start of the 1970s, Michel Clouscard developed a critique of “liberal-libertarian” capitalism and social-democracy. He proposed the ‘de-dogmatization’ of Marxism, without abandoning the theoretical work of Marx: “we must update the sociological schema of the class struggle, reconstitute the terms of the workers’ economic oppression in the context of the mode of serial production, analyze the anthropological and political-cultural mediation of the passage from use value to exchange value, address the social initiations to capitalist civilization, challenge theoretical subjectivism or economism in order to allow for a joint analysis of the market of desire and the new exploitation.”

Close to the Parti Communiste Français, he refused its reformist orientation in a radical manner: “We must change strategy and philosophy. No longer ape the PS and the third way. We must be those who endure, proposing serious issues. That’s what people expect. When I saw them have a fiesta at the Central Committee (Prada and others), I found that derisory. Communism means taking charge of the world’s misfortunes, without pathos. We aren’t here for conviviality. That’s what Jack Lang is for. What we must do, is to rediscover praxis. We must reshape a world where ‘action will be the sister of dreams’, to cite Baudelaire. To make an alliance between Prometheus and Psyche. The adversaries of Marxism have gotten a grip on psyche; we must take it back from them.” Retiring to Gaillac, Michel Clouscard passed away on February 21st 2009.

Published in Rébellion 46 (February 2011)

Source: http://rebellion-sre.fr/michel-clouscard/

Revolutionary Syndicalism: A French Specialty- Rébellion – September 16th 2014

11 Wednesday Jan 2017

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“French Syndicalism was born from the reaction of the proletariat against democracy” (H. Lagardelle)

In the history of the European worker’s movement, French revolutionary syndicalism holds a special place due to the originality of its organization and its style of action.

Its Origins

The confiscation of the Revolution of 1789 by the bourgeoisie to their benefit alone, lead to the establishment of its domination. One of its priorities was to prevent the workers from organizing themselves in order to defend themselves against their exploitation. Under the fallacious pretext of eliminating the guilds of the Ancien Régime, the “Le Chapelier” law of July 1791 forbid any agreement between workers to assure their interests. Any attempt on their part was judged as “an attempt against liberty and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.”

Consequently, the worker’s movement was born in secrecy. The growing development of worker’s mutual aid organizations was recognized under the Second Empire which ended the criminalization of unionizing in 1864. But the bloody repression of the Commune lead to the disappearance of the best revolutionary cadres; shot, exiled, or deported to penal colonies overseas following the Bloody Week.

The working class would then be under the draconian surveillance of successive governments. The bourgeoisie, fearing a general uprising at any time against its power, encouraged the harshest resolve. We cannot understand bourgeois selfishness without taking into account the permanent fear of being denied the property they had bought up. For the workers, the state became the repressive tool of Capital. In 1831, 1848, and 1871, the ruling classes responded with violence to the legitimate claims of the working class. This experience of repression forged the conviction of the proletarian vanguard that faced with the authorities, they could not negotiate but only fight. The anti-parliamentarianism of revolutionary syndicalism is explained by the conviction that no reform is possible in a system derived from and dominated by capitalism. Anti-militarism also comes from that. The army was no longer the defender of the nation, but the breaker of strikes. The deployment of troops was the response of public power to the people’s expectations. The intense anti-militarist propaganda of the revolutionary syndicalists meet a favorable response in the popular classes forced to see their sons drafted into the service of the repressive regime.

The Labor Exchanges

The proclamation of the Third Republic did not put an end to repression. The disorganization of the syndicalist structures lead to the appearance of reformist groups, preaching agreement with the state and the bourgeoisie, which only confirmed the uselessness of dialogue with oppression. Which transcribed itself into a resurgence of revolutionary oriented syndicates.

During this period, with the goal to control the circulation of its workforce, the employers encouraged municipalities to create labor exchanges with the goal of regulating the labor market at the local level. They multiplied with prodigious speed (the first in Paris in 1887 and from 1890 in Toulouse).

Very quickly, their re-appropriation by revolutionary militants turned the exchanges into centers of social struggle. Organizing workers’ solidarity, they were a laboratory for future forms of action by French syndicalists. This movement was lead by an exceptional man, Fernand Pelloutier who was one of Georges Sorel’s inspirations, who qualified him as “the greatest name in the history of syndicates.” He drove the creation of the French Federation of Labor Exchanges (Fédération des bourses du travail de France). The French workers’ movement owes the idea of the general strike and the independence of the syndicates from political parties and the state to him. He was then in total opposition with Jules Guesde, founder of the Marxist inspired Parti Ouvrier Français, which affirmed the priority of the party’s political action over syndicalist struggles.

The exchanges pursued two axes of action in parallel. In the first place, social action, which consisted of employee placement, to help the workers qualify professionally and improve themselves. The labor exchanges were concrete applications of the revolutionary socialist program through professional and general teaching courses, medical dispensaries charged with fighting against insurance companies too complacent with the employers during work accidents, libraries for the workers’ ideological formation and leisure, or legal teaching services to inform workers about new social laws of the Third Republic. The dimension of popular education was one of Pelloutier priorities, according to his famous quote “educate in order to revolt.” The emancipation of the workers happens first by the realization of the reality of their exploitation. As Emile Pouget declared, “the task of revolutionaries does not consist of attempting violent movements without taking into account contingencies. But to prepare the spirits, so that these movements erupt when favorable circumstances present themselves.”

Secondly, the action of connecting and unifying with worker’s syndicates. The establishment of exchanges lead to the development of syndicates that could rely on their networks. They were gathering places for striking workers, strikes funds were raised from dues in the factories in order to aid the workers in the struggle. CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail) and the Federation of Exchanges merged in 1902 during the Montpellier congress, thus constituting a single central organization composed of two sections, that of the worker’s federations, and that of the labor exchanges. But before that a founding event for the French syndicalist movement took place: the birth of the CGT.

 

1895: The CGT

In 1884, when the law authorized the creation of syndicates, the Republic tried to seduce the working class in order to make them forget its objective alliance with big capital. The majority of the workers remained distrustful, considering that this law was conceived in order to control the existence of structures that were clandestine until then.

After preliminary negotiations, at Limoges in September 1895 the Confédération Générale du Travail arose, which fixed its principal objective as “to unite workers in struggle on the economic field and in bonds of tight solidarity, for their complete emancipation.”

After the first chaotic years, under the leadership of Victor Griffuelhes the organization would experience a period of intense activity. Named secretary general of CGT, this old worker was a fierce Blanquist militant, devoted to making the organization a machine of class war.

With Emile Pouget, his faithful comrade, we find him everywhere where strikes erupt. Not accustomed to interminable discussions, he imposed his authority with an iron hand. For which he would often be reproached and which would earn him many enemies, but we can never question his interest. Thanks to his relentless character, disputes between different currents were muted and the syndicate could retain total independence regarding the state which tried to corrupt the syndicalist leaders.

During the adoption of the Charter of Amiens, during the confederate congress of 1905, we recall that : “The CGT, beyond any political school, gathers all the workers aware of the struggle to bring about the disappearance of wage labor and the employers… The congress considers that this declaration is a recognition of the class struggle in the economic domain that opposes the workers in revolt against any form of exploitation and oppression, both material and moral, established by the capitalist class against the working class.

Direct Action

In the socialist movement in January 1905, Victor Griffuelhes gave the following definition of direct action: “Direct action means the action of the workers themselves. That is to say, action that is directly exercised by the interested parties. It is the worker himself who directs his efforts; he personally exercises them against the powers that dominate him, in order to obtain the benefits he demands from them. Through direct action, the worker creates his own struggle, he leads it , resolved not to grant to another person the responsibility for his own emancipation.”

The revolutionary syndicalists lead the struggle for the improvement of labor conditions so that “the daily struggle prepares, organizes, and realizes the Revolution” as Griffuelhes wrote.

Direct action, done by active and aware minorities, aimed to strike the spirits (like during the general strike of 1907 where Paris found itself plunged into darkness following a sabotage action by revolutionary syndicalist electricians). It must impose the will of the workers on the employer, the possible use of just proletarian violence can enter into this strategy. “Actually there is only complete emancipation if the exploiters and bosses disappear and if the slate is wiped clean of all capitalist institutions. Such a task cannot be conducted peacefully – and even less legally! History teaches us that the privileged have never sacrificed their privileges without being compelled and forced to do so by their revolting victims. It is improbable that the bourgeoisie have exceptional magnanimity and will abdicate willingly… It will be necessary to resort to force, which, like Karl Marx said, is the midwife of societies.” (Emile Pouget-La CGT).

The Myth of the General Strike in Action

A fierce battle between the CGT and the state for the eight hour work day engaged in 1904. The campaign culminated in a demonstration of force on May 1st 1906, which was actively organized for a year. All the forces of the organization were thrown into the battle for eight hours. The context was then insurrectionist, the world of labor was seething following the drama of the Courrières mine where 1200 miners found death. 40000 miners in Pas-de-Calais went on strike spontaneously. Repression didn’t solve anything and the anger spread. Nearly 200,000 strikers mobilized in construction (a bastion of revolutionary syndicalists), metallurgy, printing … the movement culminated with 438,500 strikers throughout France! The government maintained the fear of imminent social war and collusion between the two anti-system forces of the epoch: the revolutionary syndicalist movement and the nationalist movement (convergences observed by Professor Zeev Sternhell).

Before this alliance, the Republic rapidly reacted, Clemenceau, named Minister of the Interior, directed the repression. Griffuelhes and the principal directors of the CGT were arrested without reason (including the treasurer Lévy who would be returned by the police during his imprisonment). The 1st of May was accompanied by an important mobilization of the Republic’s guard dogs that multiplied the arrests and fired on the crowd of strikers. In common agreement, the authorities and the employers organized the dismissal of the functionaries and workers most engaged in direct action, blacklists of militants were created to make their hiring impossible.

But where Clemenceau and his successor A. Briand were the most effective, was in the turning syndicalist leaders through corruption and the infiltration of provocateurs (the archives of the police prefecture are full of their reports on the activities of the CGT) who spread discontent and discredited the action of revolutionary syndicalists. Furthermore, the aggravation of internal dissent and the wars of tendencies created an explosive situation among the leadership.

The Rupture: The Proletariat Against the Republic

It was the Draveil-Vigneux affair, assembled from scratch by Aristide Briand, then Minister of the Interior that put flame to gunpowder. A demonstration of diggers and railway workers in the Parisian region on July 30th 1908 turned into a riot. We note two deaths among the workers. The CGT called for the workers mobilization in a general strike. Following a demonstration at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges they lamented seven more deaths. By the aid of an agent provocateur, the Minister of the Interior found the pretext to arrest most of the confederate leadership, among them secretary general Victor Griffuelhes, which allowed the traitors to benefit from his imprisonment in order to stage a veritable putsch.

The liberation of the imprisoned leaders was not delayed, but in the shadows the henchmen of Briand, and notably the treasurer Lévy (likely corrupt) and Latapie, launched a veritable cabal against Griffuelhes, openly accusing him of misuse of funds in the affair of the purchase of a confederate local. The following congress exonerated Griffuelhes of any suspicion, but the crisis was opened, as the embittered secretary general resigned. Niel succeded him, who was elected the 25th of February 1909, as secretary general of the CGT with the reformist votes. But the revolutionary syndicalists didn’t leave him alone: six months later Niel was forced to resign in turn.

He was replaced by Léon Jouhaux. It is not astonishing that tension with the state powers started to rise again from 1910. In October, the strike of railway workers, situated in the scheme of a grand campaign against the high cost of living, made Briand envision the dissolution of the CGT. Briand decided to make an example: the Durand affair. The secretary of the charcoal burners syndicate of Havre was condemned to death for strike actions that he was entirely uninvolved with. A vast workers’ protest movement was unleashed.

At this crucial moment in its history, the working world was largely opposed to the liberal Republic. It was disgusted by the attitude of the old Dreyfusards (Clemenceau et Briand), who had called for the working class to mobilize for justice and then once in power revealed themselves to be assassins of the people. This rejection of democracy was demonstrated until the war. The eruption of the Great War was a failure for the revolutionary syndicalists. After having done everything to halt the march towards war, the patriotic elan towards the Sacred Union carried them away. Léon Jouhaux, at the grave of Jaurès, called for the workers to rally towards the regime. This rally towards the Sacred Union marked the end of the heroic period of the syndicalism of direct action within the CGT, which, after the war was taken over by bureaucrats who made it the reformist tool we know today.

Source: http://rebellion-sre.fr/le-syndicalisme-revolutionnaire-une-specificite-francaise/

Georges Sorel: A Revolutionary Socialist -Thibault Isabel – Rébellion – November 16th, 2016

10 Tuesday Jan 2017

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Georges Sorel (1847-1922) was one of the great leaders of socialism at the end of the 19th century and at the start of 20th. Similar in spirit to Charles Péguy, he was also a reconciler of Marx and Proudhon, he had a highly mystical and moral vision of revolution, which made him hate reformists “like Jaurès,” who he said were ready to sell the purity of socialist ideas in the name of a policy of conciliation with bourgeois and parliamentary democracy.

For Sorel, like for Proudon, the purpose of the fight for justice was firstly moral: men must strengthen their character through the exercise of struggle. It is exactly through the free action of syndicates that the working classes can preserve the greatness of their culture, free from any purely political purposes. Furthermore Sorel defended the values of the producers, attached to work, effort, creativity, and the shaping of material, in opposition to the decadent values of the propertied, only concerned with enjoyment and profiting from the work of others.

It was firstly and above all the nihilistic hedonism of the bourgeois world that repelled Sorel, as well as the absence of convictions that was inevitably its corollary, the small-mindedness, the pettiness, the narrowness of view. But paradoxically, in the eyes of the thinker, there was hardly any difference between the morality of the bourgeoisie and that of the socialist leaders: if he castigated the mediocrity of present world of money, which no longer even had the force and will that the grand captains of industry of the past demonstrated, he didn’t have words harsh enough for the existential misery that he found in all the reformist compromises, or even in the regular strikes lead by the workers, ready to sacrifice the nobility of their struggle in order to earn a few social advantages accorded for purely clientelist ends.

Sorel demanded that they substitute the idea of the general strike, borrowed from Fernand Pelloutier, and destined to serve as the regenerating myth of the worker’s world, in place of the aforementioned strikes. The general strike, he said, must be lead in a spirit of excess, with the goal of realizing the most worthwhile revolution, in which the greatest number are liberated. It must not reestablish an economic logic, but on the contrary aim at an ethical reform of society, furthermore it’s how the proletariat could truly learn to be itself and fulfill all its most remarkable potentials.

Long a supporter of unions, nevertheless Sorel would be immensely disappointed by the evolution of the social struggle. He therefore experienced a period of wandering, that would lead him to criss-cross alternately from the side of the royalists, the nationalists, and the Bolsheviks, before finally returning, not without a certain skepticism, to his first political loves. But, despite his multiple wanderings, Sorel’s ideas evolved very little, in substance, during the course of his life. If his personal journey lead him to successively join many different groups or movements, each time he was disappointed to see ideas as intransigent as his could hardly incite broad shared agreement. So he would eventually die quite disillusioned…

Source: http://rebellion-sre.fr/georges-sorel-socialiste-revolutionnaire/

Introduction to the dossier “Africa – Europe” from issue 76 of the magazine Rébellion – Rébellion – October 16th 2016

09 Wednesday Nov 2016

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The world has profoundly changed in 15 years. We have left the hegemonic situation the United States inherited from the fall of the Eastern Bloc. The “unipolar” world, completely dominated by the American superpower and its servants is collapsing to make way for a multipolar world. The reemergence of “new” actors on the international scene (Russia, China, Iran) reshuffles the cards.

Two civilizational areas were dispossessed of their sovereignty, to certain different degrees: Europe and Africa. If the European states still conserve a facade of independence and the means to assure the relative maintenance of a state of law, Europe risks being the next victim of the policy of chaos required by capitalism in order to reinforce itself. The radicalization of neo-liberal hegemony implies government by crisis. Shattering the protective national framework of states is the first step in a new strategy of tension and shock which will have the consequence of creating a permanent instability suitable to deliver our continent to the voracity of the globalist oligarchy.

Africa was the laboratory for this policy. Since decolonization, everything was done to prevent the emergence of a true sovereignty in the countries of the dark continent. From Patrice Lumumba (killed in 1961) to Thomas Sankara (killed in 1987), they have assassinated the heroes of a properly African alternative in order to replace them with imperialist lackeys. The multinationals have pillaged the wealth of Africa and its thousand year old traditional culture has disappeared under the bulldozer of liberal globalization.

In the Clutches of Neo-Liberalism

Some will find that the link between the two situations is exaggerated. Comparisons are misleading, but do they know that the chains of debt which imprison the countries of Southern Europe, in particular Greece (1), were firstly set up in the countries of the Third World?

The IMF and the WTO enslaved African countries mercilessly. They perfected their methods there. Those who frightfully observe the start of land purchases in the French countryside by China and soon by the other great economic powers, should look at the situation in Africa … The destruction of African peasant agriculture for the profit of export plantations (European or Chinese products sold in the biggest market in black Africa, the Sandaga market in Dakar, are less expensive than local products), has overturned the identitarian structure of African countries, as industrial agriculture destroyed our peasantry.

The African migratory wave towards Europe is directly linked to this logic. Leaving the countryside to join the metropolises, the African migrants can only pour into Europe. Nothing is going to prevent that. Immigration destroys the countries of departure as much as the destination countries, only producing chaos and frustration. The frantic promotion of the globalized sub-cultural model (consumption, hi-tech, music, so-called “social” networks, etc …) is not foreign to the phenomenon of deracination whether in Europe or in Africa.

Europe – Africa: Same Fight!

Confronted with the same attacks, Europe and Africa have common interests. If they want to become independent and sovereign again, they must lead the same unified and revolutionary struggle of liberation on the scale of their respective continent.

Europeans and Africans must discard the burden that globalist “right thinking” imposes on them. We must leave behind blame and victimization. The executioners of today are the globalist oligarchy.

Post-colonial resentment by Africans or by Europeans regarding mass immigration, should not prevent us from seeing the convergence of interests. There are no contentions between the popular classes on both sides. The French peasants barely freed from the serfdom of the Ancien Régime had no benefit from the enslavement of their counterparts by the merchants of Bordeaux. The mine workers of the North of France had nothing to do with colonialism. The troops that they sent to shoot strikers or crush African kingdoms were well commissioned by the Republic (2).

Immigrant workers did not disembark by magic into our factories, and family reunification owes nothing to the knowledge of marabouts. On the contrary, it’s the employers who produced this demand from thin air. They pursue it today as it serves the interests of the dominant class just like imperialist domination in African countries.

Finding Its Own Way

We will certainly be treated as “Third Worldists” or simpletons, but we do not see the clash of civilizations that they try to sell us as an inevitability. We bet on intelligence and the convergence of interests. Obviously the race towards barbarism that we know on a global scale and the weakness of the forces that try to stop it both in Europe and in Africa leaves little place for optimism. But we want to sew seeds in the spirit that could grow in due time.

A difference must be made between solidarity with peoples in the struggle against globalist domination and the drift we find the in the “extremes” which we call “the sickness of substitute struggles.” Incapable of politically influencing their countries of origin, some individuals fantasize of exotic revolutions. This resignation before the demanding task of seriously leading the combat in their country, causes these people to discharge their frustrations on virtual territory from Nicaragua to Palestine, nationalist Ukraine to Donbass … Whatever camp they choose, they reveal themselves incapable of bringing concrete support to the cause that they are supposed to defend and now rant on the net. If we want to support the cause of the peoples, we must fight in Europe in order to be the masters of our destiny and become capable of supporting other peoples.

The European and African peoples must fight the same system on their respective continent. A policy of friendship whose reason and sentiment should be a basis of our external actions. They will benefit from knowing and sharing their reciprocal experiences in this respect. By shedding outdated ideological illusions, they will unmask their false allies (bien pensants, useful idiots of globalization, drawing room revolutionaries …) and will find the way towards the national and social liberation of their continent.

Notes:

1) Furthermore, we must insist on the role of Germany, which which has crushed Greece and welcomed 1 million “refugees”, a good number of which passed through Greece.

2) The “right”, once hostile to colonization (“I’ve lost two sitsters [Alsace and Lorraine], and you offer me twenty domestic servants”; Paul Déroulède to Jules Ferry, 1881), opened the way to reverse colonization of the French homeland for economic reasons (docile labor). As for the”left,” which had historically extolled the merits of colonization (“Superior races have a right over inferior races”; Jules Ferry, July 28th 1885), it changed tack and started – oh the joys of repentance! – to flatter everything that came from elsewhere (culture enrichement, etc.). The responsibility of one or the other in the creeping rot of the country is unquestionable.