Well, I see in your criticism the full benefits of hindsight (plus a very questionable apologia for the Spartakists). The reformist work of the SPD looked like finally having come to fruition in late 1918 and early 1919. The republic and liberal democracy were finally secured with SPD as the leading force - and then they were brutally attacked by these violent proto-communists. They were not clairvoyants, they reacted to circumstances. They thought that German militarism and German reactionaries were a waning force with good justification. They erred about that but they did not err about Spartakists and Lenism-Marxism.

Anyway, I don't see Communism any better than Fascism or even Nazism - below my somewhat lengthy comment on the subject: https://stockholmslender.blogspot.com/2007/05/stalins-willing-executioners-pro.html

In order for me to have made an "apologia" for the Spartacists, they would have be guilty of something. You have only speculated upon that they could have taken power in Germany and that their doing so would've turned out like Bolshevik rule in the former Soviet Union.

I am not quite so sure that you have depicted the events leading up to the revolt well, but that is neither here nor there. I have said that I don't think that the Spartacists had a right to boycott the elections, but that I may have felt sympathetic towards them after they were put down by the Freikorps. I later, though there is no reason for me to have been brought to do so, clarified that, because of that Rosa Luxemburg was one of their leaders, I may have mixed up the general sentiment of the Spartacists with what she explicitly declared.

Though I have no qualms with the utilization of the term, "totalitarianism", which does connote a vague comparison between the Third Reich and the former Soviet Union, I think that your invocation of such theories in what obviously is tacit attack against my person serves only to entangle all too serious of a political concept within your personal propagation of a rather closed-minded interpretation of Social Democracy.

I do understand that I have adopted a near unilateral interpretation of this event, but I have only done so because I just simply think that it is self-evident that it is correct. There is one causal link on the chain of events between the Ebert-Groener Pact and the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Friedrich Ebert established a pact with Wilhelm Groener in order to put down the January Uprising. It was contingent upon their agreement that the German military retain its status as a state within a state. Wilhelm Groener, who later came to be the de facto leader of the German military, was the mentor of Kurt von Schleicher. He, though various machinations, effectively engineered the decline of the Weimar Republic in an attempt to first ally himself with and then blackmail the Nazi Party. He and Groener collaborated in various ploys before he betrayed him. The military retaining the status that it did was what allowed for all of this to happen. Because of the catastrophic consequences of the decline of the Weimar Republic, namely the establishment of the Third Reich, in retrospect, the pact can only be considered as a mistake. You can debate the degree of culpability that Ebert had if you like, but to claim otherwise is just simply to rewrite history.

To be honest, I find your approach to be so idiosyncratic and anachronistic to not really make much sense. I appreciate your historical knowledge but to my mind you expect totally unreasonable things from actual contempories based on much later events. And your interpretation of the Spartakists and Marxism-Leninism seems bizarrely lenient and accepting. Anyways, very interesting discussion!

And I don't have a very comprehensive theory of "totalitarianism", obviously there are similarities though, but not a very important concept for me. What I focus on is simply violence, systematic state terror - that's where I find that Stalinism and Nazism are virtually indistinguishable. And such wholesale violence will never be just a rational means to a political end, it's an invitation to madness and sadism that we can't resist whatever the nominal ideological reasons for the indiscriminate slaughter of innocents.

To be honest, I find your approach to be so idiosyncratic and anachronistic to not really make much sense. — hwyl

It is both of those things, but you can make sense of it all if you do read and think about what I post.

And your interpretation of the Spartakists and Marxism-Leninism seems bizarrely lenient and accepting. — hwyl

My interpretation of Marxism-Leninism is critical to a point of vigilance. I have always assumed that the Spartacists were council communists, as Rosa Luxemburg was one.

What I focus on is simply violence, systematic state terror - that's where I find that Stalinism and Nazism are virtually indistinguishable. — hwyl

For someone with such an idealistic inclination towards the freedom from coercion, you sure have spent a lot of time here defending a clandestine arrangement with a state within a state. I consider for myself to be an idealist and think that you should reflect upon that.

I appreciate your historical knowledge but to my mind you expect totally unreasonable things from actual contempories based on much later events. — hwyl

What I have been saying is that, given what we know now, we can only regard the Ebert-Groener Pact as having been a mistake. Personally, I am not willing to give him the benefit of the doubt within the context of which the deal was made, as I think that he ought to have known better than to trust someone like Wilhelm Groener at the time. That, however, is a matter of debate.

Anyways, very interesting discussion! — hwyl

I feel like we've been at this for long enough as well. I have only been so adamant because of that I don't think that history of the Weimar Republic is the sort of thing play partisan politics with. Being said, I have gone on with surfeit censure and to an excess of length, and, so, apologize for that. 'Til we meet again!

What I focus on is simply violence, systematic state terror - that's where I find that Stalinism and Nazism are virtually indistinguishable. And such wholesale violence will never be just a rational means to a political end, it's an invitation to madness and sadism that we can't resist whatever the nominal ideological reasons for the indiscriminate slaughter of innocents. — hwyl

Correct. And we mustn't forget that Nazism borrowed a lot from Stalinism. Nazism emerged after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and came to power in the 1930s when Stalin was the sole ruler of Russia. By then detention camps for political prisoners (gulags) had been established and millions of innocent people murdered in cold blood.

In 1918, the Soviet government paper Krasnaya Gazeta wrote:

"We will make our hearts cruel, hard and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. We will let loose the floodgates of that sea ... let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois, more blood, as much as possible".

This was pure insanity fueled by a hate-based political ideology. It lasted till Stalin's death in 1953 and carried on in more subtle forms until the collapse of Communism in 1991.

This is all historical speculation, but I think that council communism could've turned out a lot better than the Soviet experiment. I come from a particular set of factions within the libertarian Left, none of whom have ever been in a position of power. It's easy for a libertarian communist, Autonomist, Communization theorist, Anarchist, or libertarian socialist to say that, comparatively, they have an immaculate human rights record because of that they have never been given the opportunity to vitiate it. Of council communism, most people tend to either given them the benefit of the doubt or to be fairly cynical. You can either see it as having been a considerably less authoritarian alternative to Bolshevism or kind of a sectarian distancing from it that paradoxically somewhat fanatically puts forth effectively the same praxis, as, if you ask any Trotskyite about council communism, they will tell you that it is just a rehash of workers' soviets.

I think that Rosa Luxemburg was relatively free of any implicit authoritarianism or intransigence, though, and, so, am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. She's often cited with the quote, "Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.", which is from a critique that she wrote of Lenin's authoritarian nature leading up to and during the October Revolution. — thewonder

The basic problem is that communist revolutions don't have safety valves: they don't limit the powers of the revolution and I'd say the attitude towards democracy is at least biased. They have the enemy what they are revolting against, which is a class of people. Figure out how democracy and freedoms of the individual fit with that. And the response to violent uprisings is usually violence. It the social democrats who want to "work within the system", not revolutionary communists! And especially in 1919 this would have been totally evident. This means that the Lenin/Trotsky/Stalin types are quite predictable to rise to power just as Maximilien Robespierre was in the French Revolution to "salvage" the revolution. Tough times bring up the no-nonsense tough guys willing to use violence.

In 1919 I don't think that those being opposed to Communism would have noticed any difference in council communism to Leninist bolshevism. If it wouldn't have been the German government, likely then the council communists would have faced the Allies, just as, in a small way, did Soviet Russia, which had earlier been an allied country. Germany naturally would have been geopolitically far more important for the Western allies than far away Russia.

And let's remember that in Germany there was another Communist Revolution, that went a bit (few more days) further than the Spartakists: the Bavarian Soviet Republic, which lasted from 12th of April until 3rd of May 1919. Here again we see the transformation of hardliners taking the helm with which is so typical to communist revolutions with the playwright Ernst Toller (who talked about the "Bavarian Revolution of Love") being replaced with Eugen Leviné, a Russian emigrant, who had gotten his blessings from Lenin. Again something that would be typical later: the interest of the Soviet Union in other communist revolutions. (This brief encounter with communism, which the Bavarians then referred to Schreckensherrschaft, the "rule of horror", made Bavaria quite anti-communist.)

Any Communist revolt in 1918 - 1919 was to see immediate response and would right from the start mean wartime for the communist revolution. How much different council communism would have been after that kind of encounter seems questionable, fighting the allies with with Soviet-leaning bolsheviks stabbing in the back by trying to take over the council communists.

Yes, indeed pure speculation, but one can look at how these revolutions have gone down in history and draw conclusions.

(These guys won in Bavaria)

Was it in fact a 'war'? — Tom Storm

I think in the clearest case it was.

One side just got beaten so that general Powell, later the secretary of state, thought it was "unchivalrous" (or something similar) to pounce the fleeing remnants of Saddam's army. But wars seldom are as conventional as that one.

Fair enough, but I don't think that you have depicted Baudrillard well. It's been a while since I've read that essay, but he was more or less applying his theory of simulation and simulacra to the Gulf War. He was suggesting that a war does not begin when it is officially declared, but rather when a nation decides that it is going to war. He wasn't saying that the Gulf War did not actually occur.

You are too concrete. He was making the fair point that above and beyond anything it was a huge media event, with the sanitised gloss of a video game. People at home watched it like it was a TV show.

He was making the fair point that above and beyond anything it was a huge media event, with the sanitised gloss of a video game. — Tom Storm

Actual war isn't the same as the media coverage of the war.

Where Baudrillard puts far too much emphasis on the coverage, the propaganda part of the war or the war being "a message" to other countries. Iraq with the Kuwaiti oil reserves would have become the country with the largest oil reserves and simply the invasion put Saudi Arabia in a threatened position. Saddam prepared a conventional defence with 70's era equipment against a war machine built to fight the Soviet army and then fought on a flat desert. The outcome is quite obvious. Such simple reasoning is perhaps uninteresting for Baudrillard.

It's just a take on how and why it was that the war had begun before it was declared. I think that you expect too much from a series of Libération articles.

The general gist of The Gulf War Did Not Take Place is that the simulation of the war preceded the war itself and that, because of the manner in which the media had stylized the coverage of it, it became difficult to distinguish between the simulation and actual event. It wasn't intended as in-depth analysis on the geo-political situation that incited the Gulf War. It was intended as a series of reflections upon Baudrillard's speculative theories concerning the mass media and fourth-generation warfare.

Your assumption that his conclusions are absurd is because of that you are considering the piece too literally and within the domain of political science, when it is a work of theory written for a fairly broad audience. It's as if you are attempting to apply the technical aspects of music recording to a review of the album, Pet Sounds.

Actual war isn't the same as the media coverage of the war. — ssu

I am not saying it is. I don't think you are able to or want to understand the point and you were way off to begin with. I think this is fruitless and not really what this thread is about. Shall we move on?

Yep, that's the point.

Let's leave that subject, yes.

I think that you expect too much from a series of Libération articles. — thewonder

Likely so. But also something that came from literary theory doesn't seem to be the next phase of communism, as some say it is.

I interpret Baudrillard as he was, which was one of the parties to come out of the absurd and arbitrary disputes within the Paris 8. I don't think that too many people consider for most of them to have been exemplary examples of academics or capable of creating whatever left-wing political philosophy there could be after the fall of the Soviet Union. The New School may believe such things about itself, but they can't help but know better. They were, however, mostly relatively anti-authoritarian left-wing philosophers, which I don't think anyone denies.

What I referred is to the narrative that once the leftist intelligentsia understood that communism was bankrupt, they changed to the Frankfurt School / postmodernism / Critical race theory etc.

I'm not so sure I believe this.

First of all, likely after the total surprise of the sudden collapse of the Soviet system, the leftist intelligentsia simply denied that they had anything to do with it, hence their ideology wasn't bankrupt. People just move on and forget the issues they weren't correct about earlier. And if right wing thinkers were worried about the Soviet system overcoming us, the belief was far more firm in the leftist camp. And of course, there still were all the defects of our capitalist system to point out.

But also something that came from literary theory doesn't seem to be the next phase of communism, as some say it is. — ssu

That's for sure.

How can a postmodernist have failed to have made a paradigm shift towards postmodernism? Perhaps, of the left-wing intelligensia more broadly, but I don't see what that has to do with Baudrillard. There has been a burgeoning libertarian Left since outside of Anarchism since, at least, Socialisme ou Barbarie. Historians often all too readily dismiss both Anarchism and the various theories to precede and follow Socialisme ou Barbarie as small ideological sects with an insignificant influence upon the greater course of human history. What, then, of the Spanish Civil War or the student protests in France in May of 1968?

Historians often all too readily dismiss both Anarchism and the various theories to precede and follow Socialisme ou Barbarie as small ideological sects with an insignificant influence upon the greater course of human history. What, then, of the Spanish Civil War or the student protests in France in May of 1968? — thewonder

Historians do mention the anarchist factions in the Spanish Civil War, yet the reason is that anarchism hasn't simply been so successful as Marxism-Leninism, for example. If the Free State (Makhnovia) in Ukraine would have endured for longer, it likely would gather more interest than now from historians. But it was squashed by the Bolsheviks and thus are a side note in history.

Failed attempts are failed attempts and attempts in general are for the sideline notes in history.

Sure, there has never been a longstanding Anarchist commune or whatever, and, therefore, in broad geo-political analysis, it can be considered to be fairly insignificant. Particularly within intellectual currents in France, both Anarchism and libertarian socialism, which can be vaguely synonymous or can denote two different political currents, depending upon which person you ask, has had a definite influence, and, so, while I agree that there was kind of a tacit support of Marxism-Leninism on the part of the left-wing intelligensia that lasted up until the collapse of the Soviet Union, I think that it would be unfair to characterize the postmodern turn exclusively as such.

It seems clear to me that the Situationist International, for all that was absurd of it, established a Left wholly a part from the ideological trappings of Marxism-Leninism. While there is a contemporary phenomenon of Anarchism that has only come about in the information age, probably indirectly because of Wikipedia, I am sure that there have been Anarchists in the world since the Paris Commune whose ideas have had a certain degree of influence.

As I, myself, am from this current, I will say that we have been around and a few people, particularly Continental philosophers, have even been willing to listen to us.

In retrospect, I think that I should've opened the floor for a discussion on Simulation and Simulacra.

:up: