“Look deh now, everything crash!”—on this rousing upbeat, The Ethiopians1 , a Ska or neo-Reggae band from West Kingston, Jamaica, took stock of the 1998 gas tax imposed by their government. Then, in celebration of the millenium, French fisherman were so angry at the high cost of fuel that they blockaded such ports as Marseilles and Le Havre, formerly gates to freedom. It was an echo of 1995 when all social classes (from postmen to railway workers, the legendary cheminot) banded together to protest the “fiscally responsible” and conservative cut-backs of Jacques Chirac and Alain Juppé. Singer’s Whose Millenium? (1999) calls this the “French winter of discontent” capable of releasing the first swallow of Socialism (“If winter comes can spring be far behind?”), the first revolt against “T.I.N.A.” (“There Is No Alternative,” likewise the nickname for the “iron maiden,” Margaret Thatcher). The Ethiopians, Rastafarian royalty going back to Haile Selassie, the “Lion of Judah” in the fabled African land of Prester John, concluded with down-to-earth wisdom: “Everyday carry bucket to the well, / Someday the bucket bottom must drop out.”
This did in fact happen in May, 1968 in Paris when students and workers joined to launch what Singer called . Prelude to Revolution (1970)--and what the Ska Techniques might well have meant by their “Festival ’68,” a time for letting down one’s Capitalist hair. It all began far from the Latin Quarter in the suburb of Nanterre, a branch of Parisian university life with an unfinished, institutional look –the alienated and somewhat tacky style of modernity, tackily and ironically American. But this unsightly island was smack in the middle of a shantytown housing thousands of immigrant workers (some of whom may have worked for Citroën and Renault) and on a street whose name could give pause—rue de la Folie or Folly Street. In addition, the faculty was considerably less strait-laced than the average teaching staff, and radical groups protesting the war in Vietnam along with their colleagues in Europe and the United States (for example, the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund or the Socialist German Student Federation) flourished. All of these followed a variety of ideological flags—Maoist, Trotskyist and Anarchist—under the conspicuous leadership of Daniel Cohn-Bendit or “Danny the Red,” a German Jew whose hair matched his ideology. But their protest only came to a head on May 3—just two days after Labor Day—when the government decided to close the Nanterre campus as a “nest of rabble rousers.” It was like the red-brick universities in the days of Britain’s “angry young men.”
Cohn-Bendit was also one of the Nanterre Sociology majors who boycotted their examinations, a highly impudent questioning of “sacrosanct authority” in France, who instead asked in a pamplet, “Why Do We Need Sociologists?” The workers answered with a general strike crippling Citroën and Renault among other factories (May 16-18), and the new task of the sociologist, following Singer’s thorough documentation of the increased “Capitalist goodies” now in the hands of the French workers, became one of guidance through the alienated awareness that “the artificial paradise of leisure for le weekend” was not enough to provide a meaningful social life. This was “consumer advocacy” with a Socialist thrust and, as Trotsky (1970: 6) had written of the Paris Commune of 1871, it showed that only “the consciousness of the workers rather than the level of productive forces” (the amount of bourgeois intrusions into the lives of the working class) produced genuine revolution. It was realized “Cognitive Sociology”: the producers seized the cognition of society along with its means of production hand in glove with the “intellectual workers”—”fists mailed with intellect”—and there was no imposition from above in the revolutionary symbiosis.
In the apocalyptic millenialism of the Middle Ages (still present in some Jamaican lyrics), such despair was called accidie or “sloth” and moral stagnation. In modern urban sociology, it is anomie or “namelessness.” In the Jamaica of the ‘90’s, in answer to the probing questions of “gospel” Skatalite Desmond Dekker, a man’s face and body “favor [favuh, “is like”] cornmeal and spoilt jackfruit”—a tropical melon like papaya to be found in the specialty food stores of the rich in Paris and New York. In other words, a man enslaved by the morality of cash is nothing more than “alienated mush.” Even his most joyous peaks are lowered by the “cash nexus”; a bride is no longer a “vision of loveliness” in the “Sweet and Dandy” of “born-again” Skatalite Toots and the Maytals: she is “a perfect pander”—and a procuress of profit.
But release from the bonds could be won through “the abolition of the exchange value,” as Marx had it following Hegel. Instead of “forking over a greasy greenback in a back alley (or board room of a global corporation),” barter could be ‘above board’ and without a “mark-up” above real labor the source of “use value.” A fresh jackfruit could replace a rotten one and alienated mush could re-assume the consistency of manhood, as Marxist Humanism wanted. People could be encouraged to “save a bread for the future,” in the Skatalite words of Justin Hinds. They could save a portion of undiminished being .
Politically and historically, Trotsky wrote (1970: 52), “the Paris Commune shows us the capacity of the working masses to sacrifice themselves for such a future.” But in order for the sacrifice to bear well-formed fruit, Capitalism had to “exhaust itself” first (1970: 16). This is a long , demanding and often world-wide process . As an additional caution, as Marx learned from a thorough study of the Commune and later inserted into a version of The Communist Manifesto, the triumphant workers could never simply appropriate bourgeois state machinery in order to manage the future their way. They had to undergo extensive training and such preparation involved the contingencies of confrontation with national traditions, shibboleths and stubbornly subjective social facts. Through the inculcation of dialectic insight applied to these facts, they had to be enlightened to their own tenancy in the shoddy housing of the profit motive. Such illumination was “permanent revolution” and meant a protracted, parliamentary waiting game in such technologically advanced republics as France. In the words of Desmond Dekker, it meant a “Rude Boy Train” by which all kinds of “rudeness” or rebellion would finally lead the engine to the station.
Of course, France’s democratic tradition, internalized in the heart as well as externalized in the Assemblée Nationale, was one of the reasons Singer saw in it the first stirrings of Socialist revolution in the world (the U.S.S.R. meant just another failed experiment). Trotsky had in fact stated that the only fit springboard for Socialism was a completely “ripe” Republic, and modern France, from its beginnings in 1789, its adoption of the Rights of Man and its long parliamentary experience, represented the ideal . However, the edge of Jacobinism became dulled by the power ploys of 1848-1850, when the Socialist “Mountain” was leveled by all kinds of recidivist Monarchism only to sink into the petit bourgeois landfill of the “Eighteenth Brumaire,” by the sad failure of 1871, when the Parisian proletariat proved untutored though well-meaning, and by the callow spring of 1968, too full of the “Latin Spontaneity” of a Bakunin rather than the burrowing statecraft of the “Teutonic” Marx. The true revolutionary, it was realized, had to be a “red mole” as well as a “red firebrand.” Nevertheless, even the distant island of Jamaica under Norman Manley flew the banner of “Liberty, Fraternity and Equality” in its “Democratic Socialism –Jamaican and anti-Marxist model.” But such a “revolution” had no anti-Capitalist “rudeness.” Not even Manley’s friendship with Castro and not even his People’s National Party support of Marxist Grenada, purely Pan-Caribbean as these were, could restore both the canniness and the verve, could stave off Reagan and Thatcher.
Given such nationalist identification, it was no wonder that the French Communists of 1968 were really concerned with the survival of the Gaullist regime—it was a patriotic heir of the Resistance against Hitler. As Singer put it expressively (1970: 219): “They drowned the ‘Internationale’ in the ‘Marseillaise and wrapped up the red flag in the national tricolor.” What’s more, they were led by a bureaucrat, Waldeck Rochet, who “recited in his show Burgundian accents that his party was the ‘party of order’ (1970: 215). A party of “legitimacy”—shades of the Eighteenth Brumaire, with its catfights between Légitimistes and Orléanistes ! Rather than welcoming the “Prelude to Revolution,” rather than blessing it as the herald of true globality, they stigmatized it as an “ill-advised adventure.” For this reason, Trotsky had said that the bureaucrat, whether Communist or Capitalist, was by nature a watchdog of the established order and that “law” or “legitimization” were only provincial cover-ups for “legitimate” protest. They could only bring Desmond Dekker’s “Shanty Town” where “De policemen grow taller/ De soldier longer/ De rudeboys a week [are weeping] an’ a wail [are wailing].”
What’s more, trade-unions were no help, even though they were thought of by generations of Socialist pioneers as hubs of the working class; but Marx soon found them unreliable and Rosa Luxemburg in Reform or Revolution (1900—another turning point in Socialist time) insisted that unions were too much a part of the Capitalist world to “lead to the abolition of class exploitation” (North 1998: 16). After all, their goal was “trade” and insuring a fair price for the “commodity of labor” without real concern for overall, global fairness. In this context, the reaction of Prime Minister Hugh Shearer, an ex-trade unionist and leader of the ironically named Jamaica Labor Party (JLP), was typical. When Walter Rodney, a professor of History at the University of the West Indies from Marxist Guyana, may have stimulated a riot for social justice among his students in October, 1968—only a short time after the uprisings in Paris—Shearer expelled him from the island and threw a cloud over the university and the unemployed of nearby West Kingston.
Such an intolerant edict from on high could have come from behind the Iron Curtain (which had to fail because its edicts were out of touch). However, as Singer discusses fully in The Road to Gdansk (1981), the Polish Labor Movement struggled seriously to build its own case free of the Communist bureaucracy and through such expressive “Solidarity” hoped to pave the way for a responsive state. Lech Walesa was a dockworker and trade-union activist himself before becoming the first leader of Poland to wake his country from the mass hypnosis of Jaruzelski and Gomulka.
Unfortunately, though, there were both nationalist and Catholic obstacles, some of which projected disturbing and ambiguous flashbacks on the screen: Marx , for one, had himself spoken up for the Polish freedom fighters while in Paris and London, though he would be solidly against their “governments in exile” today. Tadeuz Mazowiecki, likewise, once stood with Walesa as editor of the simultaneously radical and Catholic Wiez (“Link”) but was now a political rival. This conjunction between messianic hope and radical politics seemed almost inevitable, but it made Singer (1981:233) uneasy:
To put it plainly, if the Polish workers
must carry posters of a compatriot, I would
have been happier had they picked Rosa
Luxemburg rather than Pope John Paul II.
Or, to take another example, I too was per-
turbed on seeing the first picture of a Walesa
interview, not so much by the crucifix as by
the portrait of Pilsudski in the background
(even though my Polish friends tried to explain
that this was not Pilsudski the marshal with his
colonels, but the earlier social democrat and fighter
for national independence).
He would have preferred Rosa Luxemburg because with her he conceived of the Socialist as a supremely tolerant citizen who would feel disgust and shame at being set apart from the average believer, even though he might have been enlightened himself. This man would have understood (without however sanctioning the pious understanding) that the “bread” of a Justin Hinds’ song could be taken as religious communion rather than a secular staple. He would understand that the community as a whole was steeped in religion and often naïve hope and that such “communitarianism,” in addition to fostering a sense of extended family in the Jamaican/ African style, could lead to a kind of Socialist morality, perhaps inferior ideologically but nonetheless real and wide-reaching. He would see that the “ red mole may weave unexpected patterns and assume strange disguises, but it is digging in the right direction” (Singer 1981: 233).
The Polish peasant was definitely in the picture—as of 1987, 30% of the predominately Catholic workforce tilled the land. Its real world was not Warsaw—where, for one thing, Singer was born. Likewise, Jamaica meant not only the University of the West Indies nor the slums of West Kingston, and a Skatalite like Justin Hinds still makes his home in the rural parish of St. Ann on the northern coast of the island. But the French peasant was a vanishing breed, as Singer makes amply clear in both Prelude to Revolution and Is Socialism Doomed?: the Meaning of Mitterand ( 1988). Gone were the days when the “genuine revolutions of this century—from Russia to China, from Vietnam to Cuba—achieved victory with the support of land-hungry peasants” (1970: 230). Now came an exodus in search of middle-class “manna,” giving a new point to Desmond Dekker’s “The Israelites” and The Ethiopians’ “Selah,” whose voice feels “born to live in a freeman land.”
The hunger now was for “the discreet [and Welfare State] charms of the bourgeoisie” (Singer 1988: 272): a higher living standard in a cultural center, salary guarantees against inflation, health insurance, pension and vacation funds as well as expanding public education available to the children of workers; all of these are valid global demands. Trade-unions in fact worked for these “guarantees” and they could even welcome the peasants to town as a function of “social services.” But they could never equal a church social in a parish hall and they couldn’t—nor did they want to—promote radical change through revolutionary dialectic and ideology.
The workers’ parties now had an unexpected and problem-charged constituency. The “industrial proletariat,” their traditional power base and “the vanguard of the revolution,” became open-ended and ready to absorb everyone from a construction laborer through an office worker to a cadre supérieur or a disaffected manager (a member of the “managerial Liberal” class). In addition, large elements of these “new proletarians” worked with computers rather than with their hands, giving a whole new and amorphous definition to productivity. It became wildly inaccurate to brand a clerical worker as an “unproductive petit bourgeois,” a drone in the hive. All were equally employees, all equally alienated. What’s more, urban life all over the world matched their uprooted feelings with the frustration, insecurity and loneliness typical of a torn society.
But found the equality of despair Socialistically exhilarating, especially since it was spiced by a Parisian “consciousness of duping” (Trotsky’s expression, 1970: 27). As analyst of these “street smarts,” Trotsky managed to maintain a “healthy revolutionary optimism based on the strength of reality to overcome the reactionary and barbaric features of Capitalist society,” bound to sink in the global tidal wave of Socialism (1963: 214). At the same time, it was necessary to stay alert and mark out the path as one’s own: for this reason, Rosa Luxemburg had rejected Eduard Bernstein’s “Revisionist” and complacent tolerance for the Capitalist framework while Trotsky had been opposed to the false consensus of a Popular Front as proposed at the Communist International in the 1930’s and embodied in the government of Léon Blum from 1936 to 1937. He was for a “united” stand on tactical maneuvers but against “Popular” generalization, judging it to be a little too close to unradical “popularity” (1963: 267-268). The proper response to Capitalism had to be measured , principled and enduring just as The Ethiopians specified: “Come on now, come on/ Time to change your style/ Come on now, come on/ Stop and think a while/ Come on now, come on/ Too long I’ve been waiting.”
Singer’s ideal style was in harmony with Rosa Luxemburg’s comparison of Socialist activity after World War I to the evolutionary aftershocks of major volcanic movement: “Evolution has received a mighty forward impetus through the outbreak of the imperialist volcano” (from The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy, 1918: 33). Each burst of freedom meant a gush of lava recalling—without repeating exactly—the revolutionary source (May, 1968 for example) and warning of the continued presence of dissatisfaction like a “social gadfly.” An example Singer gives is the growth of vacation rights from the increment of two weeks under the 1936 Popular Front to an expansion of these under Mitterand. Lionel Jospin, current Prime Minister, is renewing this issue and his platform also recommends a shortened work week of 35 hours, thereby increasing “disposable time” or leisure for self-development, which Marx considered the proper reward of Labor and the Socialist life. It is also encouraging that the Trotskyist past of Jospin was recently revealed by Le Nouvel Observateur . The Permanent Revolution is alive in France.
What’s more, it was encouraging—and unexpected—that Mitterand should so thoroughly nationalize French industry (Singer prefers the term “socialize,” 1988: 112). After all, he was no Marxist, did not believe in gathering together the assets of the working class and had no conscious experience of exploitation or feeling for the exploited. But he did have a feeling for cuisine bourgeoise or “home-cooking” which attracted the working class with its nativist odors (Singer 1988: 301/ n. 5). His brand of Socialism was a “mixed economy” (Singer 1988: 196) of pungent nationalism, populist pluralism and “Managerial Liberalism” rather than an ideologically fixed framework of truth.
So his state acquired a full interest in firms producing such socially indispensable commodities as electricity, electronics, military supplies, glass, chemicals, textiles and aluminum. Also, he removed from the United States and Germany control over a computer company and a pharmaceutical giant as well as buying out the French subsidiaries of International Telephone and Telegraph, thus ensuring that globalization be reined in by a national agenda—not really international but preferable to unreined exploitation. In the process, he had the courage to field the objections of the Right, which opposed his nationalization bill on the grounds that it clashed with the prerogatives of property spelled out in the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789. France was now in a position to lead in the creation of a United States of Europe to challenge T.I.N.A. and American hegemony.
Of course, this was no Revolutionary Socialist achievement. Rather, it was that of a canny, grand bourgeois businessman straddling his “mixed economy “ and swelling it with power and respect . As such, Singer writes ironically, “ he deserves a place, if not in the socialist pantheon [he was in fact inaugurated before the Panthéon, “where the French honor their illustrious dead,” 1988: 98] , at least in some Capitalist Hall of Fame” (1988: 257).
Such prestige is not bound by borders, as the Skatalite Techniques rime and chime: “Run, run come have some fun, let us celebrate/ Just look how we have grown on our very own/ From ‘62 to ‘68, progress has been great, great, great.” The first date refers to the regained stature of Jamaican independence (no matter of “alienated cornmeal mush”!), while the second records the stretching of limbs as a founding member of the Caribbean Free Trade Association (CARIFTA), an economic common market for such Commonwealth countries as Barbados and Guyana and analogous to the European Union.
However, although Jamaica did gain something from this expansion , it was in it for co-operation rather than commercial integration, for the respect due an equal trading partner rather than the submersion of national—and Capitalist—self. So Hugh Shearer, already alive to the encroachment of other Caribbean nations and influences during the Rodney Affair, hesitated and only signed on fully the following year—”Festival ‘69” would have been more accurate, though it wouldn’t have dovetailed with the Paris of ‘68.
In fact, Jamaica needed CARIFTA in order to heal from the devastation of globalization, nothing more nor less than the the granting of commercial rights to large corporations like Alcoa for the mining of bauxite, one of the island’s few natural resources. Alcoa had withdrawn its contract—the removal was “lock, stock and barrel,” as Singer phrases globalist abandonment (1999: 184)—and the Jamaican worker was left holding an “empty bucket,” to adapt the words of The Ethiopians. Dependence on a U.S. corporation had gulped down his hard-won status as a proud national and a trading partner, especially difficult to swallow for former slaves on a Commonwealth plantation.
Such globalization is, as Singer stresses, no more than nationalism in disguise and a nation with a swelled head. All of the corporations that use the labor of a country like Jamaica or Mexico are strongly attached to their countries of origin and have no interest in the welfare of their places of business and residence. For them, free trade is protection, giving them carte blanche to enjoy lower labor costs, higher profit margins and looser environmental controls, and their national belonging is swelled into world power status when it has “affiliates” all over the globe, all searching for commercial Lebensraum through piecemeal “exploitation” of the host country and/or outright war with its laws. So when George W. Bush and Vicente Fox, now Presidents but formerly a Texas oilman and a CEO of Coca Cola-Mexico, put their heads together to further the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), it is likely that they are plotting for the spread of a destructive cash connection.
Of course, it is also possible that “economic liberalization” and the riot of profit could help Mexico with investment and jobs. At least Mexico’s largest trade union, the Confederaciíon de Trabajadores de Mexico , thought so—but then the labor movement is not reliable for its faithfulness to international agendas. It is likewise true that Fox’s PAN (Partido de Acción Nacional or “Party of National Action” ) did bring “bread” (Sp. pan) in the shape of relief after seven years of rule by the corrupt and authoritarian “Party of Institutional Revolution” (Partido de Revolución Institucional or PRI). It “adapted” its centrality and loosened the reins enough to parade the acknowledged Marxist Revolutionary Subcomandante Marcos of Chiapas around Mexico City. In addition, Fox has ambitions of making NAFTA like the European Union, with its attendant labor protections. For all this, though, PAN remains enthusiastically Capitalist and Fox’s hold over the Federales instituting order in Chiapas is as tight as ever. And the maquiladoras, the factory towns and slums mushrooming around the new sources of employment near the border as well as the Mexican interior, continue to pollute the streams with the waste of Capital. What’s more, linkage with trade unions in the United States and Canada, which alone might tend to partially legitimize NAFTA, remains troubled: both the American Federation of Labor and the Union of Canadian Workers are so caught up in their own “benefit packages” that they are suspicious of any support or solidarity from south of the border. So much for the working class pulling together!
However, Justin Hinds’ call to “Save a Bread” was broadcast to “mistahs and sistahs” throughout the world, following the universal (and globally Christian) inspiration of Norman Manley’s “Democratic Socialism” and the sight of Manley’s son Michael as President of Jamaica with a jubilant brown arm thrown around Edwin Seaga (the white and Syrian-British leader of the Jamaica Labour Party) and the black reggae singer Bob Marley intoning “Day O, daylight come and me wanna go home.” The thrust was interethnic, interracial and in its own way international, though vastly inferior to that of Rosa Luxemburg, who likewise cited the parable of the Good Samaritan to bolster her Socialism but who pinned this down to precise classes and a concrete economic war. For “bread and butter” reasons, she believed that the hands of the workers should be extended peacefully to an international proletariat. Their “arms,” in other words, should be dismanteled, since the international nature of the class war and the “brotherhood” of workers belied the so-called “just claims” of a “brothah” Austria stooping to return the insults of a Serbian nationalist group based in Sarajevo.
Of course, certain coalitions were internationally justified. Rosa Luxemburg’s Proletariat, the ancestor of the Marxist Polish Socialist Party, contracted with a “sistah” organization in Russia, the Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”), which was likewise fighting against Czarist Absolutism. However, as soon as it became clear that the Narodnaya Volya only signified populist terrorism, the alliance was destined to break down ideologically. Marx had explained the situation fully in an address to the Central Council of the Communist League in 1850 (cited in Cliff 1981: 13/ n. 7):
While the democratic petty bourgeois wish
to bring the revolution to a conclusion as quickly
as possible…, it is our interest and task to make
the revolution permanent, until all more or less
possessing classes have been displaced from
domination, until the proletariat has conquered
state power, and the association of the proletarians,
not only in one country but in all countries of the
world, has advanced so far that competition
among the proletarians of these countries has ceased
(my emphases).
Marx ended his address with the phrase—”The workers’ battle-cry must be, ‘The Permanent Revolution’”. To bring this movement up to date, Isaac Deutscher, the biographer of Trotsky whom Singer calls a dominant influence on his own work, wrote (1971: 42):
…Asia, Africa and even Latin America have been
seething. In appearance, each of their upheavals
has been national in scope and character. Yet each
falls into an international pattern. Permanent revolution
has come back into its own, and whatever its further
intervals and disarray, it forms the socio-political content
of our century.
A constant awareness and execution of Socialist principles is, in other words, the only fitting response to a world in which the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer, in which the inequalities of globalization are increasing by more than double in a relatively short time—in which “Things a go [are going] from bad to worse everyday, “ as The Ethiopians observed. The only solution is for “ships and planes” on an international scale to join Desmond Dekker’s “Rude Boy Train” and for “firemen, watermen, telephone company too/ Down to the policemen do” to participate in a worldwide “crash,” as they also sang.
Facts about strikes throughout the world fall under the heading of “realistic utopia” (1999: 258), by which Singer means the interpenetration of the real and the ideal in the freedom of Socialism, in the peace of ownerless fields and factories. This documentation includes the careful analysis of party conflicts, trade union developments, occupational structures, measures increasing personal freedom and –especially for the new millenium—technological advance. Obviously, the evolution of rights and their development throughout the world are major parts of the analysis and there can be no simple Socialist or Capitalist coordination of the growth. It is as out of the question that Socialism can radiate from one place alone—be it the U.S.S.R. or France—as for “True Socialism” to reside in one country exclusively.
Of course, “Utopia” has in Marx the ill-odor of The Poverty of Philosophy; there, it signifies the “false consciousness” of a Proudhon and the historically and factually unmotivated projections of a Saint-Simon. But in Singer it means direct emanation from fact and the arduously cultivated “potentialities of the existing society” (1999:260). It is the direction of discrete change, the framework within which events tend and a demonstration of the Marxist precept—”Social reality determines awareness.”
According to this credo, the human being, neither bad nor good, as dualistic detractors of Socialism and apologists for international Capitalism would have him, is above all malleable. In this malleability, in the unpredictability of concrete embodiment, lies the miracle of change—as Justin Hinds “wailed” in “Save a Bread,” “You know not the minute nor the hour man shall come.” But he will come as long as “You let it be real,” in the words of The Ethiopians. Only then can Trotsky’s revolution survive assassination, can the load shouldered by Diego Rivera’s peon be lifted off to show the lillies of fact.
1. Available in CDNOW is "Stay Loose: the Best of the Ethiopians" (2001), "Israelites Anthology (1963-1999)" by Desmond Dekker (2001), and "Funky Kingston" (1988) by Toots and the Maytals. Likewise, through Amazon.com, "Ska Uprising" (2002) by the Ethiopians and Justin Hinds and the Dominoes.
Copyright remains exclusively with the author.