“The followers of historical materialism reject the existence of a special woman question separate from the general social question of our day. Specific economic factors were behind the subordination of women; natural qualities have been a secondary factor in this process. Only the complete disappearance of these factors, only the evolution of those forces which at some point in the past gave rise to the subjection of women, is able in a fundamental way to influence and change their social position. In other words, women can become truly free and equal only in a world organised along new social and productive lines.”[1]

Alexandra Kollontai

“We in Russia no longer have the base, mean and infamous denial of rights to women or inequality of the sexes, that disgusting survival of feudalism and medievalism which is being renovated by the avaricious bourgeoisie … in every other country in the world without exception.”

V. I. Lenin

“The most important distinguishing feature of socialist schools should be the child’s fullest possible and most comprehensive development. They must not suppress his individuality but only help develop it. Socialist schools are schools of freedom in which there is no room for regimentation, rote learning and cramming.”

Nadezhda Krupskaya

“Until the old forms of family life, domestic life, education and child-rearing are abolished, it is impossible to obliterate exploitation and enslavement. It is impossible to create the new person, impossible to build socialism”.

Inessa Armand

“Much better to die in open combat, among comrades, with weapons in their hands. That’s how I want to die. That’s how hundreds and thousands die for this republic every day.”

Larissa Reisner

“Only a Socialist society will solve the conflict that is nowadays produced by the professional activity of women. Once the family as an economic unit will vanish and its place will be taken by the family as a moral unit, the woman will become an equally entitled, equally creative, equally goal-oriented, forward-stepping companion of her husband; her individuality will flourish while at the same time, she will fulfill her task as wife and mother to the highest degree possible.[2]

Clara Zetkin

Kristen Ghodsee’s new book examines the lives of three revolutionary women and two non-revolutionary women between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the consolidation of Stalinism in the former USSR.

One assumes that Ghodsee chose these five women, which were not handed to her by her editor. Strangely, she leaves out two women revolutionaries, Rosa Luxemburg and Larissa Reissner. They were far more deserving of appreciation than the two apologists for the Stalinist regime, Ludmila Pavlichenko and Elena Lagadinova.  

Red Valkyries is a limited attempt to counteract the recent narrative of liberal feminism and the #Me too movement and replace it with a revolutionary tradition espoused by “socialist women”, many of whom have been largely ignored or turned into harmless icons.

Ghodsee’s choice of Alexandra Kollontai is a logical and welcome one. If young women today looking to fight against capitalism wanted a role model, they should stop doing their TikTok dances and study the work and life of Kollantai.

Kollontai was, by all accounts, an extraordinary woman. She broke decisively with her aristocratic upbringing and dedicated her life to the revolution. Like many of her generation, she well conversed with the work of the great Marxist writers Karl Marx, Frederick Engles and August Bebel. Kollantai specialised in the study of women’s oppression.

She was one of only a handful of Bolsheviks that wrote extensively about sexual relationships. She opposed bourgeois feminism and understood that the emancipation of women was a class question and could only be carried out in partnership with the male working class, as this quote shows: “The feminists see men as the main enemy, for men have unjustly seized all rights and privileges for themselves, leaving women only chains and duties. For them, a victory is won when a prerogative previously enjoyed exclusively by the male sex is conceded to the ‘fair sex.’ Proletarian women have a different attitude. They do not see men as the enemy and the oppressor; on the contrary, they think of men as their comrades, who share with them the drudgery of the daily round and fight with them for a better future.”[3]

Like all good revolutionaries, she lived by what she wrote. She formed a close political relationship with Vladimir Lenin, who appointed her social welfare minister in the new Bolshevik government. Kollantai and her staff made legal changes that put the rights of Russian women light years ahead of any western capitalist government.

Ghodsee correctly restores Nadezhda Krupskaya, who historians often portray as only Lenin’s companion, to her rightful place as a revolutionary. She not only supported Lenin but looked after the family household and, at the same time, played a crucial role in building the Bolshevik Party.

Like Kollantai, Krupskaya believed that the fate of the woman worker was closely tied to that of the male working class. Her pamphlet, The Woman Worker, states, “The woman worker is a member of the working class, and all her interests are closely tied to the interests of that class.”

She had a passion for education matched only by a few others. She advocated a child-centred pedagogy, saying, “The most important distinguishing feature of socialist schools should be the  child’s fullest possible and most comprehensive development.”They must not suppress his individuality but only help develop it. Socialist schools are schools of freedom in which there is no room for regimentation, rote learning and cramming.”One can only hope that the attention paid to Krupskaya by Khodsee is the beginning of a revival in the interest of this important Bolshevik.

One striking aspect of this book is the failure to mention the second most important revolutionary in the Bolshevik Party that of, Leon Trotsky. Trotsky knew and worked with these three revolutionary women and held them in high esteem. Krupskaya was particularly fond of Trotsky even when it was very dangerous.

In a letter to Clara Zetkin, Zetkin relays what Krupskaya thought of Trotsky “She said to me recently that it is false what [Lev] Kamenev and [Gregory] Zinoviev assert, that Lenin had never trusted Trotsky. On the contrary, at the end of his days, Lenin was fond of Trotsky and held him in high regard. After his death, she wrote to Trotsky.”

Dear LEV DAVYDOVICH, I write to tell you that about a month before his death, as he was looking through your book, Vladimir Ilyich stopped at the place where you sum up Marx and Lenin and asked me to read it over again to him; he listened very attentively, and then looked it over again himself. And here is another thing I want to tell you. The attitude of Vladimir Ilyich toward you at the time when you came to us in London from Siberia had not changed until his death. I wish you, Lev Davydovich, strength and health, and I embrace you warmly.”

Leon Trotsky returned the compliment when he wrote a letter upon hearing about her death in 1939 “Nothing can be further from our mind than to blame Nadezhda Konstantinovna for not having been resolute enough to break openly with the bureaucracy. Political minds, far more independent than hers, vacillated, tried to play hide and seek with history – and perished. Krupskaya was, to the highest degree, endowed with a feeling of responsibility. Personally, she was courageous enough. What she lacked was mental courage. With profound sorrow we bid farewell to the loyal companion of Lenin, to an irreproachable revolutionist and one of the most tragic figures in revolutionary history.”[4]

Inessa Armand was an extraordinary woman, and few others matched her work rate. She carried out many translations for Lenin and was often sent by him to represent the Bolsheviks at numerous congresses.

In a short time, she became a leading Bolshevik. She was in Lenin’s sealed train when he returned during the height of the war to partake in the revolution. After the Revolution, Armand was elected to the Moscow Soviet (workers’ council) and was in the All Russian Central Executive Committee, the highest body in the new workers’ state. She taught in party schools and organised conferences for working women.

Despite working under the conditions of Covid 19, Ghodsee manages to carry out important research into the life of this important revolutionary. It would be important to know more about the 1918 national congress for working women held 1918. After which she wrote, “Until the old forms of family life, domestic life, education and child-rearing are abolished, it is impossible to obliterate exploitation and enslavement, it is impossible to create the new person, impossible to build socialism”.[5]

Armand herself had led a complicated personal life with five children, the last by her young brother-in-law. Ghodsee correctly pays little attention to her alleged intimate relationship with Lenin. After her tragic death from cholera, Lenin and Krupskaya looked after her two young children.

As Vladimir Volkov writes “Women played an important role in this milieu. Such vivid and versatile figures as, Alexandra Kollontai and Inessa Armand were best known, of course, but they were not exceptions. Behind these stood dozens and hundreds of other women who entered the history of the revolution and left their own indelible traces.If we remember the classic phrase of Charles Fourier that the degree of society’s progress may be measured by its attitude to women, then the Russian Revolution must be considered a great leap forward towards social liberation of that part of humanity that over the centuries was considered the most dependent and deprived.Informed by knowledge rather than outdated prejudices, free revolutionary attitudes towards the family were inseparable from the revolution’s political perspective. This morality had a real material existence and was expressed in personal relationships between the men and the women who made the revolution.[6]

The three chapters about the three revolutionaries are well worth reading. The book has several major weaknesses: the most important being the lack of differentiation between the period of the Bolshevik revolution and the counter-revolutionary period dominated by the Stalinist bureaucracy. There is Nothing wrong with deeply appreciating the three leading Russian revolutionary women, but it is another thing lionising two women that largely supported the Stalinist regime. With this reservation, I recommend this book for a wide readership and hope it provokes further study into these important revolutionaries.

Kristen R. Ghodsee is a prolific and award-winning Russian and East European Studies professor and a Graduate Group in Anthropology member at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of eleven books, including Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Duke University Press, 2019) and Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (Bold Type Books, 2018 and 2020.

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[1] The Social Basis of the Woman Question- https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1909/social-basis.htm

[2] Only in Conjunction With the Proletarian Woman Will Socialism Be Victorious(1896)

[3]The Social Basis of the Woman Question Alexandra Kollontai 1909- https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1909/social-basis.htm 

[4] Krupskaya’s Death-(March 1939) https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/03/krupskaya.htm

[5] https://socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/red-valkyries-feminist-lessons-from-five-revolutionary-women-by-kristen-ghodsee/

[6] The letters of Natalia Sedova to Leon Trotsky- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/07/sedv-j01.html

Do you want to quell a social revolution? The easiest recipe is to defuse its incendiary social content by simply publicizing it as a quest for the sensational and voyeuristic. Short of ideas? You already have a rich arsenal of Oriental imagery and tropes. Therefore, portray those asking for their rights as unworthy of such demands since they haven’t resolved the simplest of concerns; they are still mapping the geography of their second half, women. Diverting attention from demands for “bread, freedom, and social justice”, the initial call of the Egyptian Uprising 2011, often works by portraying these revolutions as sensationalist and spectacular demands for gender equality. Worse, the counterrevolutions’ best weapons narrate a story about how restrictive and addictive to restrict women’s freedom because, as unworthy people, Arabs asking for their rights cannot see beyond their women’s vaginas. Hence, they cannot be serious when asking for “bread, freedom and social justice”.

Kraidy is neither naïve nor wicked to synthesize the Arab uprisings as a quest for voyeurism. His premise, however, hinges on the idea that the social uprisings can be approximated as a creative insurgency that is infatuated with, even fixated on, the body. The body has been the most salient trope that marks the creative insurgency, otherwise known as the Arab Spring. To illustrate his point, Kraidy distinguishes between three varieties of artworks, each deploying the body to serve its message. First, there are those incendiary works such as Bouazizi’s suicidal self-inflammation, an act that had a domino effect as it deposed several dictators. Second, there are those sarcastic works with scornful references to dictators. Kraidy brings to evidence Omar Abulmaged’s April 2, 2014, court sentence in consequence of the latter calling his donkey Sisi and adorning its head with a military cap. The case underlines a situation stretching decades before wherein Egyptians used to deride President Hosni Mubarek as the laughing cow, imitating the famous French cheese commercial brand, La vache qui rit. The third trope combines the serious and the sarcastic through nude art and is spearheaded by the young blogger Alaa El-Mahdy in her 2011 A Rebel’s Diary.

It is not farfetched to conclude that the early two trope variations pave the way for the third, assumedly the most enigmatic and puzzling. Thus, The Naked Blogger of Cairo “explores the mixture of activism and artistry characteristic of revolutionary expression and tracks the social transformation of activism into Art and ensuring controversies.” (p. 5) Towards this end, Kraidy finds that creative insurgency cannot be restricted as an instantiation of one artistic expression or another. A fair analysis of that creative insurgency’s emergence must grapple with the one it finds confusing. Interestingly, El-Mahdy’s nude photo is compared with other creative expressions from the mother of all revolutions, the French one, zooming on Eugène Delacroix’s La liberté guidant le Peuple (1830).

With the human body as the governing principle for a creative insurgency, The Naked Blogger of Cairo lies in four sections with an introduction and conclusion. The introduction “In the Name of the People” highlights a problem: Why is the body so fundamental to the Arab uprisings? Furthermore, “How does the rise of digital culture complicate our understanding of the body in revolutionary times?” (p. 12) Standing in awe of the naked blogger, Kraidy develops: “by inviting both moral opprobrium and threats of physical oblivion, al-Mahdy’s digital nude selfie had immediate rhetorical and physical consequences.” (p. 18) Understandably, the sky is the limit for the readers’ expectations to find all those rhetorical and physical consequences. 

Section One: “Burning Man” zooms into the visible and invisible dimensions of radical militancy, mostly in Tunisia, namely Bouazizi’s act of self-inflammation. Kraidy finds the act has been less directed toward the dictator’s stifling renditions of the country and more against his countrymen’s approach to that stifling as a fait accomplait. Section Two: “Laughing Cow” invests in the opposite direction of section one. The gradual mode of activism, namely the sarcastic laugher, and mostly in Egypt. Like radical militancy, sarcasm too hinges on the body politics, and Kraidy finds that armed with only sarcasm and laughter, ordinary Egyptians have defied megalomaniacs ever since pharaonic times.

Section Three: “Puppets and Masters” explains how the human body is often at ease with both moods of expression: the radical and the sarcastic. As a result, revolutionary or creative insurgency chooses to mix the extreme with the gradual, using examples from Tunisia, Egypt, global activism, and the French Revolution. Understandably, the chapter prepares readers to register the content of the following section. With Section Four: “Virgins and Vixens”, comes Kraidy’s opportune time to sell readers the presumed seriousness of bodily undressing. Through a rhetorical phraseology, the author succeeds in affecting an aura of seriousness by what political scientists qualify as the blind spot of the king’s two bodies. The blind spot—understood to be the king’s male organ since it is only this organ that puts him on the same bar with other humans—facilitates the acceptance, even the balancing, of naked activism with all political, aesthetic, and ethical militancy.

“Requiem for a Revolution” or the conclusion asks whether simply women’s bodies are engaged in men’s political tussles less to liberate women and more to galvanize the populace around what is ultimately men’s fixation on power. Women’s bodies become tools whereby women are ultimately emptied of subjectivity and the capacity for free thinking and decision-making.

In order to make space for the voyeuristic and the sensational, Kraidy has to beat about the bush and lecture readers about the uses and abuses of body politics so that his rendering of the Arab uprisings may sound plausible. To buy his idea is to embrace an insult and participate in the still unfolding counterrevolution. There is simply no way whereby one may even begin to compare the conscious and principled acts of either Bouazizi, Shaimaa al-Sabbagh, or the Kurdish Women of Kobani fighting ISIS with the nude selfies of El-Mahdy and her several pretenders. Kraidy does not want to acknowledge that the counterrevolution aims to cast the class struggle as a gender, race, or faith struggle. The further to stay away from the class struggle, the safest the counterrevolution remains. To equate Bouazizi’s act with El-Mahdy’s is to participate in distortion as perpetuated by the false omnipresent and to ensure that the narrative of the revolutionaries of Tahrir and elsewhere will stay forever tarnished and uninviting.

Quite the contrary, the revolution precipitates a world order that does not call for spectacles and where bodies are loved, caressed, and cared for in dignity and mutual love. Only love is revolutionary and triumphant orders presiding over the false omnipresent always seek to divert attention from true and mutual love. What does El-Mahdy in her diary preach? In a nutshell, she communicates men-hating as if the world is short of hatred. Other than seeking to destroy the pillar of the nonetheless corrupt values of society, her method is hatred. Let us all recall how revolutionary couples married and committed to sacral (not sacred) vows and principled living in Tahrir. Their revolutionary friends congratulated them and savoured the delight of simply witnessing the promise of social love (not just harmony) and larger emancipations come true. Had Kraidy bothered to read El-Mahdy’s A Rebel’s Diary, he would find ages-old litanies and ill-articulated cliches regarding the alleged oppressive practices of the Orient.

Again, had Kraidy bothered, he would have found the right parallel to El-Mahdy’s selfie, Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (1834), and certainly not La Liberté guidant le peuple (1830). It is not rocket science to note that with the latter, the bare-chested woman is a participant in the arduous struggle and an active one, for that matter, against forces of regression. Perhaps, she was among the group of women protestors whom Louis XVI famously ordered croissants au beurre when they were dying for lack of bread, showcasing the sovereign’s divorce from reality which ultimately sealed his fate for good. With Femmes d’Alger, one traces a process that eventually propagated into El-Mahdy’s selfie: the fetishizing principle, the need for a mysterious form of freedom, and freedom in Capital as slavery since both Algerian or Egyptian men do not know how to handle/to man their women. Hence, the reason why these women are slowly rotting in the harem. Only Capital—the logic in the selfie and the classical painting—is savvy and reliable when extracting value from these oriental women. What is most painful is the self-Orientalizing act that academics and serious academic publishing such as Harvard UP deem liberating and introduce it to the world as such.

But since the neoliberal order glamorizes El-Mahdy’s daring act, Kraidy could see no alternative but to give his final assault and insult “… most revolutionary martyrs-at-large were dead and clothed men, whereas the emergence of women as icons in the Arab uprisings tended to result from their disrobement.” (p. 13) How else to read this statement other than a reproduction of the patriarchal mindset that Tahrir revolutionaries brazenly fought against? Besides the insult, disrobement is glamorized because it is the only way to ensure the restructuring of capital forces and the valuation of surplus value. Every rebel-à-la-El-Mahdy labour is further devalued, literally prostituting workers, even those who never heard of El-Mahdy. How else to afford the imagined independence of one’s place except through increasingly lower wages?  

Fouad Mami

Université d’Adrar (Algeria)

ORCID iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524

fouad.mami@univ-adrar.edu.dz

The keyword for this edited volume is transnational. It deploys the transnational as a cultural output of the Arab Spring, the popular uprisings that swept several countries in the Middle East and North Africa in two waves, the initial one in 2011 and the latest in 2019. Interestingly and to the exception of one single essay by Hager Ben Driss on the poetry of Tunisian Sghaier Ouled Ahmed’s incendiary poetry, all contributions seem to be fascinated with works that are either a celebration of multiculturalism or transhistorical. In doing so, their essays are narcissistic projections of what the editors aim for the Arab Spring to be remembered, a culturalist quest for some mysteriously lost and regained identity, the one caught between past and present, modernity or traditionalism. In reality, though, these projections, regardless of how apparently nuanced or informative, stand at odds with the core principle of the uprisings: a class struggle seeking the foundation of an egalitarian society.  

The editors start with the premise that the social explosions, otherwise dubbed the Arab Spring, cannot be explained by postcolonial or nationalistic theories. The latter are anachronistic and unhelpful. The uprisings, they add, far supersede the capacity of a single idea or approach to account for the ideological, cultural, historical, or economic realities “that have unsettled the power structures of state formations and processes of subjectivation…” (p. 1). It is not difficult to note that the book’s core question veers into an identity quest imagined to require assimilation to European multiculturalism, or so the material advances of Europe are supposed to be premised. For purposes of lending that quest a heavy and serious endeavour, the book hinges its rationale on “…the deeper reality [that is supposed to have fueled the uprisings, precisely those] …collective modes of knowing, and of knowing collectively, beyond institutional politics, national and postcolonial histories, and the established discursive modes of expert sciences and intellectual discourses.” (p. 2) Hence, the preaching of transcultural is almost in tandem with the reigning neoliberal order, which seeks to simultaneously resolve two contradictions: the fall in the rate of profits and the squashing of the class struggle through banalising immigrants and immigration as a free and conscientious choice. With one contribution, Katie Logan, one cannot overlook in her reading of Etel Adnan’s 1993 novel, Paris, When It’s Naked, an infantile admiration of the European Union and an evocation of reproducing the ‘melting pot’ in the Arab World.  

Western discourses of social mobilisations, the editors trust, cannot account for the recent changes taking place in the MENA region. Social movements such as the ones that spearheaded the studied uprisings are presumed to have become governed by new modes of social mobilisation, namely the internet. Hence, there is little, if at all, historical continuity between past and present struggles in the Arab World. The book lies in four parts, comprising twelve chapters: four in the first and third and two in the second and the fourth. They are contributions by scholars of social and human sciences.

The first part trusts that the Arab Spring marks the emergence of a multiplicity: ideological, cultural, religious, educational, class-based, and gender-based. It claims to find and marshal a methodology rooted in the dynamics of the Arab Spring. A methodology that breaks away with the old norms of study “…sublimation of the Other—and especially of the United States as pervasive—has built an idea of fragile Arab communities… [together with] the emergence of the digital citizen opens ways for conceiving oneself differently from decades–, if not centuries—old narratives.” (p. 23) Through shuttling back and forth from the mother countries to the hosting places, Diaspora communities are deemed to facilitate the perceived need for change. Thus, the transcultural reality fueled exasperation with the likes of Mubarek and Ghaddafi, and triggered a new mode of digital citizenship that undid censorship and broke rigid borders. Caroline Rooney, in her contribution, proposes that even old enmities (Jewish and Arab) are no longer operative, and the new generations are receptive to the undoing of political manoeuvrings and discourses.

Part II investigates a culture’s diversifying and assimilative practices that help to re-narrate identity after traumas. At stake in this is a rethinking of the idea of inclusiveness.” (p. 5) Negotiating a new, universal identity wherein Facebook plays a key role is what Ben Driss notices in the poetry of Sghair Ouled Ahmed (201). This poet used to write with a universal audience in mind for which he sought not only solidarity but the need to register a different hypothesis or vocabulary with which he, the poet, “…rectif[ies] the Western grammar of revolution.” (p. 84) In the name of reclaiming one’s history and saving it from the falsifications by victors, Jeanna Altomonte finds the Iraqi artist, Adel Abidin’s 2007 interactive installation, Abidin Travels: Welcome to Baghdad a recreation of Iraq and Baghdad’s millennial history in Western capitals. With its subversive character to neo-Oriental tropes pushed by heavy Western media, Adidin’s installation is supposed to “…promote social and political change in regions affected by war.” (p. 102). The logic of the essay goes assumes that the simple fact of living outside Iraq (in diaspora) facilitates new esteem for the Iraqi as a productive and respectable subject. 

Part III highlights how migration enforces the sociopolitical collision around issues of cultural identity. As Melissa Finn and Bessma Momani argue, Settling in Canada surveys over 860 Canadian-Arab youth to explore the possibility of a transnational outlook on oneself and others through metissage. Differently put, in being a hybrid, that is, both Arab and Canadian, one leaves the parochial and ravishes inclusive, “…demarcating the inside and outside of cultural boundaries, and choosing positions on an issue-by-issue basis.” (p. 121)

Part IV stands apart from the other three sections in how it claims that “…identity is a false problematic.” (p. 7) and where the staging of the revolutionary/protest act in the artistic work cannot be taken for granted. The Houthi sarkha (scream) is found to be a self-contradiction in movement in the sense that it “serves the Houthi’s solidification of power but not without rendering the sarkha‘s context of the struggle against violations of Yemen’s sovereignty meaningless.” (p. 206) Embraced as an identity, the chapter finds that sarkha‘s capacity for galvanising the struggle for life in dignity is a false radicalism because it reduces complex history and culture into a follower of either the Sunni brand of Islam or Zaydi Shia. Hamid Dabashi’s essay on the art of protest carries out this section’s investigation of falsehood. He finds that radical art is precisely the one that cannot be recuperated and championed by museums and art galleries because that radical art lies at the interstitial and transitory, “specific to the moment of their staging” (p. 236). The ‘interstitial’ is his term for the truly subversive art as it haunts counterrevolutionary forces, the ones that have feasted on the Arab Spring’s propulsion for emancipation.

In asking what is about the self-immolation of a single man in Tunisia that sparkled the revolution in Egypt and elsewhere, the first section finds that the answer lies with the emergent trans-cultural identities in the Arab World and beyond. What an elusive approximation to a point-black question! Instead of discussing the dictatorial orders as the latter unflinchingly pursued the extraction of surplus value/profit, thus stifling the possibility of mere survival, the contributions in the section project their own biases and jumpstart singing the song of capital, rendering the incendiary radicalism a quest for a transcultural identity and self-referentiality. The fluidity of movements is supposed to combat “the essentialism, ghettoisation and fundamentalism.” (p. 14) Any objective reader cannot miss the insult to the sacrifices of the activists who paraded the squares and streets of Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, and Syria. It is fallacious to assume that technology (social media) galvanises the rebellious subject. Rather, the burdensome thresholds of exploitation and grab cancelled the possibility of decent living and triggered the way for a social explosion.

Resisting the tendency to represent and reproduce the revolutionary act, as with the fourth section, sound like a promising venue to embrace the universal. In practice, though, the area veers into the irreproducibility of the revolutionary act, less to give people the opportunity to register the act and more to fetishise it. The alleged distinction between the act and the reporting of the act reads as infinite masturbation with words. Indeed, how can one celebrate the photo of Shaimaa al-Sabbagh’s last breath or the one picturing Kurdish women of Kobani standing up to ISIS as the most radical with the same zeal as the nude photos of Alaa Elmahdy or Goldshifteh Farahani’s? Dabashi overlooks how the radicality in each contradicts the other in balancing the two as even remotely comparable. al-Sabbagh’s paves the road for the incendiary. At the same time, Elmahdy veers into voyeuristic and spectacle hence, how an authentic work of art has to reproduce the emergency, not just the emergence, of the revolutionary act.

Overall, the transnational and transhistorical as championed in this book seek to dispose of the incendiary content of the uprisings surgically. In making the uprisings look like an orgy for metissage, historical and intergenerational continuity is the target since only the one who embraces their history can convincingly shout ‘no’ to the neoliberal order. One cannot possibly develop the same stance toward their two histories—even if awareness is possible, acting and standing for the two roots is impossible. Sometimes, if not often, the two roots are mutually exclusive. That explains why metissage, transhistorical, and transcultural are the darling ideologies of the current neoliberal and counterrevolutionary orders

Fouad Mami

Université d’Adrar (Algeria)

ORCID iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524

fouad.mami@univ-adrar.edu.dz

Objectively considered, icons should not be celebrated as either revolutionary or counterrevolutionary. Still, Siobhán Shilton finds them problematic because—she thinks—they are reductive of how revolutions and resistances unfold in practice. Such is the premise of Shilton’s impressive volume on art in the context of the Arab uprising. This revolutionary movement started in Tunisia in December 2010 but swept to Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen in the following months and years. Even when this movement, otherwise known as the Arab Spring, toppled long-reigning dictators, it has not so far led to a smooth transition or translation of the revolutionaries’ aspirations. Hence, the role of artists is traced in this book as they accommodate the social explosions and change.  

Given the usual channels of sense-making, famous among which is iconography, “The significance of the uneven phenomenon which has often been named the ‘Arab Spring’ is still not fully understood.” (p. 1) because iconography often, if not always, falls into either black or white portrayals and binary stratifications. Art is, thus, supposed to encourage an informed and nuanced engagement with the events. And icons fall short of this prerequisite for all intents and purposes. In this volume, Shilton asks a pertinent set of questions: How “…photography, sculpture, graffiti, performance, video, and installation—forges a way between internal and external cliches? How does it invent new aesthetics? How do these works call for alternative critical approaches?” all for propagating an art that does not subscribe to propaganda. Irrespective of how we look at icons, they essentialize what is usually considered a fluid phenomenon, “…places these revolutions outside history and sets up Arabs as apolitical” (p. 2). hence, the call for an aesthetic form that exceeds the iconizing—Bouazizi’s iconography, a single act that unseats a dictator! Therefore, “My focus, by contrast, is on art that negotiates a way between a range of icons, including these revolutionary (or anti-revolutionary) bodies or objects; that is, art that reveals the unsaid, the unheard, or the unseen of ‘revolution’….” (p. 11) By exceeding icons, Shilton means those artistic works that target the senses instead of the merely visual. She seems to be sharing Slavoj Zizek’s concern about the post-euphoria phase or the next day of the revolution. That is why she addresses only those pieces whose preoccupation is the ” ‘reordering’ space, [as they] challenge sites of power through elements such as framing, camerawork, editing, and corporeal movement.” (21)

The work lies in four chapters, each extensively addressing one form. The first two zoom-on pieces are exhibited in museums and galleries. Galleries do not restrict the second two as they have been displayed to the wider public through social media. The first one addresses a technique founded by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) known as the “Infra-thin Critique”: Shilton brings Duchamp’s technique to enable art goers to distinguish and, at a second level, negotiate the relationship between the visible and invisible. The chapter elaborates on distinctions that resist essentialization by exploring Nicène Kossentini’s video, “Le Printemps arabe” (2011), and later versions of this work, among other works by other artists. Shilton zooms in on what she labels the ‘poetics of absence’ as instantiated through the layering of colours or sculptural ‘casts’ along with transparent materials. Other than encouraging a transnational outlook, Shilton finds that reworking modernist themes and techniques can be an opening for “…the transhistorical and multidirectional.” (p. 32)

In the second chapter, “Contingency and Resistance: Exceeding Icons through Matter and Motion Chance Aesthetics”, Shilton insists that contingency is anti-iconic par excellence, hence its value in resisting essentialization. Aïcha Filali’s sculpture pieces: Bourgeons en palabres (Buds in Discussion) and Bourgeons d’i (n)vers (Opposing Buds). Similar works by other Tunisian and Syrian artists are studied too. Decomposing portraits of deposed dictators (and other icons) such as Ben Ali’s are meant to communicate the limitations of power.

Chapter three follows on Contingent Encounters as the pieces considered encourage comparisons with revolutionary situations elsewhere. Shilton calls these situations: transnational practices of resisting through social media. Unlike how participatory art is classically viewed, Shilton insists on those pieces that reiterate artisans’ work (weavers) with an artist in a collective ensemble, such as Majd Abdel Hamid’s mural titled: Mohammed Bouazizi (2011). The second part addresses how spectators reorder space through the generation of alternative iconography. Mouna Jemal Siala and Wadi Mhiri’s Parti Facelook / Parti Facelike (2012-13).

To further challenge iconography, chapter four addresses the interface of bodies as they can be ambivalent and defy easy categorizations. The interface, in a nutshell, is based on a collage of various images or scripts, even icons, so that they start evoking alternative meanings and stories in contradistinctions with the ones specified by orthodox narratives of the uprisings as celebrated in media or by politicians. Among several examples, Shilton studies Lalla Essaydi’s Bullets and Bullets Revisited (2012) along with Majida Khattari’s Liberté, j’écrirai ton nom (Freedom, I Will Write Your Name) (2012). A dancing performance occurs in markets, transportation junctions, and the least expected spaces of downtown Tunis. Unused to confusing spectacles, crowds react differently to the phenomenon.

Espousing the ultra-conservative, if a not reactionary journalist, Rami G. Khouri, particularly when the latter claims that “There is no single, unifying theme to the Arab Uprising”, as a rationale for her approach to the book epiphenomenon (The Arab Uprisings), one wonders why Shilton trust certain renderings and choose to overlook diametrically-opposite others, hence, how the book does not answer the criteria for its selection of the impressive body of artistic works. Why not, for the sake of example, Mohamed Mounir’s song “Ezay” (2011) or “Ragg’een” by the group, Eskenderalla, knowing that, along with several works, they do not hinge their message on icons and do not cheaply excite listeners as they address the sense, perhaps more than the ones Shilton select. This leads us to observe that every work which pretends to connect with the Arab Uprisings, even when it dialectically opposes these uprisings’ destiny, is chosen and extensively commented on. Khattari’s allegedly ambivalent dance spectacles aim to distract and confuse, not to invite and discuss. Not for nothing, the dancing spectacle starts and closes in markets, with an eye on smoothing everyday shopping and transactions regardless of the crisis and distracting people from tracing the causes and drawing the essential consequences, which are how counterrevolution answers through hyperinflation.

 Meanwhile, non-spectacular and truly subversive works are ephemerally mentioned and never studied. It is not until the end that Siobhan’s work is seen as a field of testing/experimentation of the infra-thin, chance aesthetics, participatory art, and corporeal images. The author is less interested in how the selected works communicate the revolution’s strongest or weakest and more engulfed in how the expressive techniques deployed in each artistic piece advance the infra-thin and other aesthetic formulations. And here lies the problem of projection, the presumption that theory exists in a realm separate from history’s real movement. Other than a depressive narcissism, readers cannot seize the benefit(s), if any, from seeing Marcel Duchamp, Michelangelo, or any other celebrity artist reproduced in the streets or the galleries of Tunis, Cairo, or Damascus.

The book is overly technical to the point that it is disorienting in its technicality. Does one wonder what is behind its penchant for reproducing the revolution at its weakest? That is producing those situations when disagreements between revolutionaries emerge. Has anyone told you that Gaddafi’s two-scores rule ended with a tsunami or that Bouteflika’s bid for a fifth mandate was reversed by his democratic inclination, not an incendiary revolution? The antinomy against icons and iconicity, which is how the book is premised, is motivated by a stigma against division and diversity. But division and diversity, even polarity of opinions, are the natural consequences of defunct regimes and decades-old orders. The real motive for dispositions against icons is how icons facilitate the historical transmission of past struggles and victories. Similarly, what if the divergent opinions stem from historical outlooks, that is, between those radical elements of society against those who are reformists and desire only applying some make-up for the unjust and enslaving order?    

Art, in a nutshell, expresses the reversal of the reversal, the alienating world order that corrupts the senses and which needs to be ultimately abolished for the process of emancipation to set in. Shilton reclaims those works of art she thinks are more revolutionary than abolishing them, mostly to celebrate them and develop an identitarian affiliation with fetishistic outlooks that keep alienation in place. While the select works of art variably criticize the dictatorial powers, commodity fetishism remains intact because it is never questioned. Similarly, portraying the Arab Spring as a movement of a population stuck between modernity and tradition is a classical veering into the culturalist approaches, which are anti-historical and counterrevolutionary.    

Overlooking the author’s disposition against icons even when knowing it is icons that galvanize action and sharpen intentions, the celebration of the transnational is the most bothersome. Transnational, as conceived under the current global order, not only does not but never propagate toward the universal. Transnational is a celebration of parochialism and enclosures—a process similar to international cocktails or Parisian banlieues that facilitates the circulation of goods and capital. Transnational is revolutionary only because it seeks the explosion/forced openings of national markets and cultures to give leverage for multinationals to exhort profit from previously protected markets. A true revolutionary work of art, however, targets the fetishization of interiorities through culturalist approaches. Culturalists target the few remaining defence mechanisms, opening the way for the vassalization by capital with the same vehemence culturalists fetishize icons under the pretext of exotism. Transhistorical outlooks are anti-historical. Being the privileged weapon in the arsenal of capital, a transhistorical subject is forced to scorn intergenerational history and its legacy of resistance so that capital forces flood the few remaining vestiges of defence. 

Fouad Mami

Université d’Adrar (Algeria)

ORCID iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524

fouad.mami@univ-adrar.edu.dz

Amy Zegart, in this study, proposes reshaping American intelligence institutions to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. America boasts of exactly eighteen agencies, but instead of aspiring awe or efficacy, the number should underline the limitations of the current structuring of intelligence bodies. Since each apparatus was added after a major failure, the lingering challenges remain unsurmountable, and the strategic advantage over adversaries is unmet. The challenge facing the intelligence community and America now lies less in half-hearted coordination work between diverse and specialised agencies and more in the fundamental contradiction between business and national interests. The two claims are mutually exclusive and cannot be reconciled. Unless some formula is found to harness business for the nation’s benefit, the intelligence agencies’ operations will stay largely dysfunctional and bypassed by tenacious adversaries.  

With eighteen intelligence agencies and the result is America is underperforming. Zegart thinks this is a lingering and counterproductive Cold War mindset. In the age of open-source information, with the internet doubling its volume of knowledge every two years, secrecy, the cornerstone of all eighteen bodies, emerges as a certain way towards disaster. Teenagers using Google Earth and other freely available and inexpensive applications can now perform feats that used to consume considerable time and Personale. In this environment where anyone can spy, and everyone with a reasonable set of skills can access sensitive data, secrecy is a liability. And as such, the intelligence community needs to harness the courage to rethink its work. 

To mount her revamp proposal, Zegart deploys ten chapters, introduction and conclusion included. She lays out the problem of her argument slowly in “Intelligence Challenges in the Digital Age: Cloaks, Daggers, and Tweets.” The first of these challenges is power. Being powerful translates not only invincibility but also vulnerability. The second is democratised data which the internet revolution has introduced. Satellite images from Google Earth are perfect. Anyone with a computer and connection can monitor what Iran, North Korea, or any other government does not share. No state monopoly over access to sensitive information is possible. This leads us to the third challenge, which is secrecy. In the past, maintaining secrecy gave an advantage in intelligence collection tasks. Now, secrecy is almost detrimental because no government can entirely protect its power grids, financial records, or start-up inventions—all of which can be accessed online—by disengaging or “standing apart from” (p. 8) the world. Hence, why private actors such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google, among others, should be involved in securing America as most cutting-edge technologies can be used and often are used as weapons against American interests. Similarly, this is why secrecy in the old sense translates to disadvantages that severely hurt U.S. interests. A lot of catching up is facing the U.S. intelligence community concerning secrecy. 

Chapter two: “The Education Crisis: How Fictional Spies are Shaping Public Opinion and Intelligence Policy.” Here, Zegart addresses the inhibitive impact of Hollywood in the sense that spy entertainment (she calls it: ‘spytainment’) provides a completely distorted image of intelligence work. Equally damaging, spytainment clouds public perceptions of the real challenges facing America. Fiction maintains the myth that America is invulnerable le whereas, in reality, America is vulnerable. Besides, Hollywood fuels conspiracy theories such as President Trump’s conviction of Deep State rhetoric and plotting against his policies. With conspiracy roaming wide, congressmen and judges tend to believe spytainment flat plotlines, featuring “heroes, escapism and the triumph of good over evil” (p. 26) more than intelligence reports they have access to. Clouded in secrecy, the culture of the supremacy of the intelligence agencies set in motion through fantasised decades of intelligence success during the Cold War does not help break the ingrained myths. 

To get a consistent picture of U.S. intelligence, Chapter three, “American Intelligence History at a Glance: From Fake Batteries to Armed Drones.” In providing a snapshot of the development of intelligence institutions since Geroge Washington, Zegart aims to remind policymakers and the general public alike that America is vulnerable. In its brief intelligence history, America could not bridge over halted development, organisational fragmentation, and democratic tension. During peace times, before World War II, America had the habit of dismantling its spy bodies. Whatever experience gets accumulated, it is soon lost to the wind. Besides and a latecomer in the spy industry, America should not be engrossed with its Cold War success, particularly when compared with countries such as China, a millennial history of warfare and intelligence. The rules of the games are quickly changing, and America—Zegart never tires of reminding—should not sleep on past feats. Again, Zegart hammers how technological advances are more disorienting than conducive to any strategic advantage. In her opinion, intelligence agencies should resist the temptation to violate their mission as information-gathering bodies, giving decision-makers an informational gift. 

Chapter four: “Intelligence Basics: Knowns and Unknowns” Here, Zegart dispels myths from reality and underlines how intelligence operates in practice. The three core missions: the analytic, the human, and the operational, interact to make any intelligence agency what it is now. The analysis is geared toward giving policymakers an “advantage over adversaries.” (p. 79) For successful executions of analytic missions, one has to be aware of the fine distinction between knowns and unknowns. Intelligence now, we find, is not necessarily the amassing of secrets, and as such, it cannot be confused with policymaking. The mission’s human side sheds light on various motivations and traits, animating the analyst, the officer, and the informant. We read too about how intelligence officers balance their jobs with their private lives. There is a section on how officers grapple with moral dilemmas. In carrying out their mission, intelligence agencies handle interrogations of detainees. Still, evidence often amounts to no more than a good bet since cases where conclusive evidence can be reached is rare. Zegart finds that the golden rule with intelligence professionals is ways of “…challenging their prevailing hypotheses.” (p. 103) 

Chapter five: “Why Analysis is so Hard: The Seven Deadly Biases”, is key to the book’s overall thesis. Given the abundance of open-source data, the chapter seeks to answer why analysis has become excessively hard. Other than outside compromises, Zegart outlines the sinister role of seven deadly biases. Even when an institution is sure it has neutralised internal endemics such as “bureaucratic turf protection, agency cultures, career incentives, ingrained habits, and a desire for autonomy” (p. 114), not a simple task. However, it can move on to work on the seven biases. These last range from confirmation bias, optimism bias, availability bias, fundamental attribution error, mirror imaging, framing biases, and groupthink, to the secret for super forecasting (p. 136). The key strategy to outsmart these biases lies in encouraging dissent, finding a team of experts that reviews an intelligence case and makes the opposite argument on the devil’s behalf. She similarly notes that advances in artificial intelligence can help overcome human limitations. 

Chapter six: “Counter-intelligence: To Catch a Spy”, grapples with traitors’ motivations and how intelligence officers recruit informants in the digital age. We read that “China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran are among the most aggressive foreign intelligence services seeking to steal American secrets. Of them, China stands apart as the most serious counter-intelligence threat. American military experts have said that there isn’t a single major Chinese weapons system that isn’t based on stolen U.S. technology.” (pp.146-7) The chapter elaborates on early tell-tale signs for suspecting, investigating, and uncovering sell-outs (or molls in intelligence jargon) without compromising trust among intelligence community members. Three counter-intelligence challenges are: trusting too much, paranoia: or trusting too little, and technology that made it possible to recruit assets from afar. Technology makes it equally likely to incur considerable damage if a trusted insider breaches their trust oath. For example, we read how the damage done by turncoats such as Snowden has been irreparable. 

Chapter seven: “Covert Action: A Hard Business of Agonising Choices”, studies those undercover operations that aim to serve a certain line of policy but which can either be claimed or officially disowned depending on interest, not on success or failure. The operation that killed Bin Laden counts as one, but so is the CIA’s funnelling of money to help Italy’s Christian Democratic Party to win parliamentary elections back in 1947. (p. 174) Since only the president can authorise covert actions, the chapter weighs those uneasy choices presidents take or circumvent to serve a policy. When all policy lines have been tried and extinguished, covert actions serve as the last resort. How drone technology and the war on terror have been operating forces policymakers to face how the blurring of intelligence and military mandates is counterproductive. 

Chapter eight: “Congressional Oversight: Eyes on Spies”, recounts that as lawmakers, congressmen are not trained or sufficiently motivated to do the oversight work stipulated by the constitution. Zegart summarises three challenges facing congressional intelligence committees in three words: information, incentives, and institutions (p. 198). Given the inhibitive influence of spytainment and the poor payoff from carrying out proper oversight on intelligence agencies, Zegart observes an information and motivational lag beneath successive congressional committees charged with cross-checking intelligence agencies. Besides, she highlights a structural and deeper problem of these committees’ culture that does not encourage rigorous second opinions about the work of intelligence agencies. The compounding effect from the three challenges explains the scandals, such as the presumed weapons of mass destruction owned by Iraq. In short, one comes face to face with how policy becomes outpaced by technology. 

Chapter nine: “Intelligence Isn’t Just for Governments Anymore: Nuclear Sleuthing in a Google Earth World”, further advances the cause of renovating U.S. intelligence. Underneath the chapter lies, a call for humility as “estimating nuclear threats is hard. Assessing the intelligence track record is, too.” (p. 230) A new phenomenon, democratising intelligence, breaches governments’ monopoly over sensitive information. Low-cost satellites with competitive image capacity than military satellites are routinely put in orbit. Machine learning and computer modelling enhance surface-to-air missile launching site identification for anyone with an internet connection and the patience for tracking terrestrial alterations. Hobbyists using only Google Earth images can chase Iran or North Korea’s uranium-enrichment facilities and the activities taking place therein. Once the intelligence ecosystem is widely open to non-governmental actors, intelligence policy has to accommodate the informal branch lest the latter adds salt to injury by encroaching unforeseen and further damage beyond malign actors in the pay of foreign intelligence agencies. 

Chapter ten: “Decoding Cyber Threats” here, the argument runs that cyber-threats have opened the door for a new generation of warfare rooted in deception, sabotage, and misinformation. Hacking and deepfake can sow the seeds of social discord and upheaval. The examples with which Zegart illustrates her point are telling. Shadowy Kremlin-backed organisations armed with automated Facebook accounts or bots sow discord in American cities. The intelligence community registers the 2016 presidential elections as a cyber Pearl Harbor. We read too that “China is believed to have stolen trillions of dollars of intellectual property, including terabytes of data and schematics for the F-35 and F-22 stealth fighter jet programs.” (pp. 261-2) Without the cooperation of the private sector with state agencies, such complex intelligence challenges triggered by the digital age cannot be met, and the cost will be American democracy and liberalism. This explains Zegart’s initial call to rethink the structuring of intelligence agencies along lines that do not abandon Cold War methods but without overlooking the need to engage with open-source data and other unorthodox initiatives.  

The book draws on thirty years of research experience, advising the U.S. government, and hundreds of interviews with current and former intelligence people. As a career academic, Zegart comes as an outsider, but that counts to her advantage since probably only an outsider can reflect on that, which makes the institution’s chances of facing the new threats pretty grim. 

Contrary to Hollywood’s overblown portrayals of American invincibility, the records of American intelligence agencies, though professional and functional, are far from adequate to meet cyber threats and other challenges put by the digital age. What Zegart has in mind is the recent failure as America’s spy network has been blown, hence, how the call for renovation and accommodation to the new-brave world reality is nothing short of a call for revolution. In outlining, “Today’s technological demands, though, are even greater because there are more breakthrough technologies. They’re spreading faster and further. They’re inherently hard to understand. They’re driven by commercial companies seeking global markets, not governments seeking national security.” (p. 222), we realise that Zegart has touched on the core of the problem. America is experiencing a self-contradiction in movement: the forces of nationalism against globalism. The American establishment can no longer postpone the question: are they for American capitalism or capitalism without qualifiers? 

All else, such as debates over the competency of congressional oversight, cyber threats, and breaches of secrecy, are secondary and disappear once the earlier question is resolved. Addressing the efficiency of democratic measures in the form of congressional oversight to prevent personal or institutional abuses become a liability, a crippling structure. Because authoritarian regimes are free from similar democratic stipulations in their accountability system, they have an advantage over America. 

Indeed, it is not the lack of patriotism and sense of national service among those heading tech companies (p. 276) that drives the present fixation on U.S. intelligence. Predisposed to markets, tech companies’ allegiance resonates with clients, not citizens. To account for this contradiction, Zegart improvises an implicit willingness to sacrifice democracy that “[o]versight has rarely worked well because the sources of dysfunction run deep—in information, incentive, and institution.” (p. 224) Other than being a discreet call for jingoism, the problem with the book is that it sees intelligence agencies and the state that these agencies presumably protect as independent totalities. The successes of World War II and the Cold War were dictated by economic miracles as U.S. companies, not the U.S. government, beat up all competitors (foes and allies alike) combined. These companies’ hunt for profit now presupposes any allegiance to the state as a mechanism that leads to asphyxiation. Between asphyxiation and global growth, tech companies have chosen the latter. Given this context, the state with its eighteen intelligence bodies can do very little except postpone, not reverse, the collapse of the Westphalian state order. Instead of addressing the major transformation ahead, Zegart contemplates how companies should be loyal. 

Fouad Mami

Université d’Adrar (Algeria)

 “Books have their destinies.”

“Lenin despised anybody who disagreed with him, even – especially – within his own party”

Anthony Beevor

“Just as a blacksmith cannot seize the red hot iron in his naked hand, so the proletariat cannot directly seize the power; it has to have an organisation accommodated to this task. The coordination of the mass insurrection with the conspiracy, the subordination of the conspiracy to the insurrection, and the organisation of the insurrection through the conspiracy constitutes that complex and responsible department of revolutionary politics which Marx and Engels called “the art of insurrection.” It presupposes a correct general leadership of the masses, a flexible orientation in changing conditions, a thought-out plan of attack, cautiousness in technical preparation, and a daring blow.”

History of the Russian Revolution, Chapter 30 (1930) Leon Trotsky

“ Arguments to the effect that all violence, including revolutionary violence, is evil and that Communists, therefore, ought not to engage in “glorification” of armed struggle and the revolutionary army amount to a philosophy worthy of Quakers and the old maids of the Salvation Army. Permitting such propaganda in a Communist Party is like permitting Tolstoyan propaganda in the garrison of a besieged fortress.”

Introduction to the Military Writings (1923) of Leon Trotsky

The Russian Revolution and the Civil War 1917-1921 are two events that, even after over one hundred years, are still buried under layers of myths, lies, distortions and a few hundred dead dogs.[1]

Hopefully, a new book covering both subjects written by Anthony Beevor would counter the lies and myths perpetrated by historians and writers who belong to the Post-Soviet School of Historical Falsification. It has proven not to be the case. Beevor, despite having one of the foremost researchers in Russia, Lyubov Vinogradova, who used the most up-to-date scholarship and archival research, tends to repeat largely verbatim previous lies and falsifications.

Antony Beevor is a military historian best known for his books Stalingrad and Berlin. His books have sold in the millions. His latest book takes pride of place amongst the already large pile of anti-Marxist literature from the Post-Soviet School of Historical Falsification. Beevor is now vice president of that elite group.

He believes the Russian Revolution was a putsch or coup d’état carried out by a few ruthless, deranged people determined to impose a totalitarian dictatorship upon the people. Beevor asserts, “Lenin was the only one within the Bolshevik party who believed a coup was possible, and even Trotsky was nervous. Lenin perceived – and he was absolutely right – that the success of a coup depends on the apathy of the majority, not on how many real supporters you have.”[2]

If one is to take this analysis at face value or without one’s tongue in cheek, you would have to conclude that Beevor has a very low intellectual understanding or interest in complex political and historical processes. Beevor continues this lack of knowledge by arguing that the Bolshevik Party was a small sect and utilised the great confusion created by the revolution to grab power. Beevor’s lies and distortions are nothing new and merely repeat what previous historians, such as the right-wing historian Richard Pipes, have said.

Pipes, too, believed that the revolution was carried out by a group of crazed intellectuals who he defines as “intellectuals craving power. They were revolutionaries not for the sake of improving the conditions of the people but for the sake of gaining domination over the people and remaking them in their image.”[3]

Most of the capitalist press has sided with Beevor, with one person saying, “Beevor is not interested in the revolutionaries’ ideology (rightly so, since hatred and vengeance were the underlying motive forces, and Marxist or anarchist slogans were mere rallying cries). Nor does he delve deep into revolutionary psychology, though he denounces Lenin’s mix of cowardice, callousness and obstinacy and singles out Trotsky’s hypnotic charisma. He chronicles Stalin’s brutal and often disastrous military interventions without comment.”

According to Beevor, revolutionaries like Lenin carried out their work in secret behind the backs of the people. He leaves out that Lenin wrote enough books, articles, and letters to fill fifty-one volumes, none of which Beevor quotes. Beevor’s stupid assertion can be easily refuted. As the Marxist writer David North does very easily asking us to “Consider this: To produce fifty-five volumes of political literature, each volume between 300 and 500 pages, means that Lenin, in the course of his thirty-year political career, had an average annual written output of between 600 and 1,000 pages (in printed form). This output included economic studies, philosophical tracts, political treatises, resolutions, newspaper commentaries and articles, extensive professional and personal correspondence, innumerable memoranda and private notes, such as the Philosophical Notebooks, which enable us to follow the intellectual development of Lenin’s conceptions. Much of Lenin’s working day, for years on end, was spent at the writing desk. And yet all this writing was nothing more than the means by which Lenin skilfully concealed what he was really thinking!”[4]

I somehow doubt if Beevor studied a single page of Lenin’s collected works. The same can be said of the co-leader of the Russian revolution and leader of the Red Army Leon Trotsky. Trotsky, without military training, won a stunning victory over White reactionaries and seventeen capitalists and still found time to write five volumes of military writings again, none of which Beevor consults. If Beevor had read Trotsky, it would have been very uncomfortable for him because he refutes all his arguments.

Take this quote on the need for revolutionary violence “Arguments to the effect that all violence, including revolutionary violence, is evil and that Communists, therefore, ought not to engage in “glorification” of armed struggle and the revolutionary army, amount to a philosophy worthy of Quakers and the old maids of the Salvation Army. Permitting such propaganda in a Communist Party is like permitting Tolstoyan propaganda in the garrison of a besieged fortress.”[5]

The reader of this book will need a strong stomach because large chunks of the text contain lurid tales of violence committed on both sides. The Guardian writer Andrew Anthony backs up Beevor’s squeamishness stating, “the violence committed by all sides was unconfined, with torture and executions widespread, and it was not uncommon for people to be thrown alive into blast furnaces. As Lenin saw any opposition as tantamount to treason, he demanded that all signs of resistance be met with brutal force. Trotsky, charming intellectual though he could be, was no less willing to issue orders that opponents should be shot on sight.”[6]

The reader must ask whether Beevor makes a serious attempt to understand the objective causes of the Civil War when Beevor states, “What has stood out is the sheer horror of the civil war? There’s savagery and sadism that is very hard to comprehend; I’m still mulling it over and trying to understand it. It was not just the build-up of hatred over centuries but a vengeance that seemed to be required. It went beyond the killing; there was also the sheer, horrible inventiveness of the tortures inflicted on people. We need to look at the origins of the civil war: who started it, and was it avoidable? But one also needs to see the different patterns seen in the “Red Terror” [the campaign of political repression and violence carried out by the Bolsheviks] and the “White Terror” [the violence perpetrated by that side in the war] – and consider the question: why are civil wars so much crueller, so much more savage than state-on-state wars?”[7]

Beevor continues in the same mode when he asserts that “Lenin wanted the civil war. Civil war is the sharpest form of class struggle. In his view, it was the only way for the Bolsheviks to take power. The other socialist parties – the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks – were horrified by his plans because they knew that after he had smashed the liberal and conservative parties, he would turn on them – and he certainly did. Lenin despised anybody who disagreed with him, even – especially – within his own party. The less-extreme members who warned against this complete seizure of power, this total dictatorship that Lenin was planning, were either more or less rejected from the party or kept in a kind of subservient position.” Beevor turns events on their head and is guilty of falsifying the historical record. Counter-revolutionaries caused the civil war with the aid of seventeen capitalist powers seeking to drown the revolution in blood.

The book presents no objective understanding of the complexities of the revolution or civil war. We get a cataloguing of violence in the Civil War that does not enlighten the reader one iota. Beevor quite deliberately downplays the fact that much of the violence, such as the execution of Czar Nicholas II and other examples in the book {which should be taken with a large pinch of salt and on many occasions, are not factual and have no supporting evidence} were extreme measures forced upon the revolution when it was fighting for its life against a savage and ruthless enemy, backed by the armies of all the major imperialist powers. Beevor is forced to admit that the counter-revolutionary White officers “wanted to bring back the punishments used by the tsarist army, which meant that they would be allowed to punch soldiers in the face on a summary charge, whip them using rifle-cleaning rods, things like that.”

                                                     The War In Ukraine

Although the book concentrates on the Russian Revolution and the subsequent Civil War, much of the media interest has centred on Beevor’s attitude towards the current war in Ukraine, the war in Ukraine has mistakenly been compared to the Rusian Civil War. Beevor holds the same position as other capitalist media. Beevor’s analysis of Russia’s war with Ukraine is shallow, chaotic and wrong. He equates Putin with Hitler and Stalin and says, “Putin Wants to Be Feared – Like Stalin and Hitler, and he sees Russia as a “prisoner of its past.”

Christoph Vandreier writes that while the Russian invasion of Ukraine is politically reactionary, “it cannot be compared to the Wehrmacht’s war of annihilation, let alone the Holocaust. The forces deployed by the Putin regime against Ukraine are minuscule compared to the invasion force hurled by Hitler against Russia in 1941.

Vandreier, in his article, quotes Historian Stephen G. Fritz, who made the following remarks “Deploying over 3 million men, 3,600 tanks, 600,000 motorised vehicles (as well as 625,000 horses), 7,000 artillery pieces, and 2,500 aircraft (a number that was smaller than that employed during the invasion of France), the Germans had launched the largest military operation in history. Germany’s “Operation Barbarossa,” Fritz continued: was not only the most massive military campaign in history, but it also unleashed an unprecedented campaign of genocidal violence, of which the Holocaust remains the best-known example. This Judeocide, however, was not an isolated act of murder; rather, it formed part of a deliberate, comprehensive plan of exploitation, a utopian scheme of racial reorganisation and demographic engineering of vast proportions.[8]

                                                 Conclusion

The author is an accomplished historian, and his book is accessible and written in a vivid style. However, the book is no masterpiece. Beevor’s tendency to ignore politics and his lack of understanding of complex historical processes weakens the book beyond rescue. The book is too short, given the magnitude of the subjects covered. Beevor’s references and notes are virtually nonexistent, as is his use of previous historiography. As the great historian E.H Carr once said, “Great history is written precisely when the historian’s vision is illuminated by insights into the problems of the present” [9] . Beevor’s book is not great history. It would be precise to say that his historical falsification is bound up with his efforts to obscure an understanding of the present.

 Notes

Melvyn Bragg and historians discuss Lenin on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time at bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p00546pv

Letter to a Young Trotskyist in Russia- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/06/30/oqgd-j30.html

Imperialism and the lie of the soul- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/05/24/rach-m24.html

The Military Writings of Leon Trotsky-Volume 1, 1918-How the Revolution Armed- https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1918/military/index.htm

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[1] Thomas Carlyle, who had complained that his study of Cromwell had required that he “drag the Lord Protector from out of a mountain of dead dogs, a huge load of calumny and oblivion.”

[2] https://www.pressreader.com/uk/bbc-history-magazine/20220609/282239489241759

[3] Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 495.

[4] https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/01.html

[5] Introduction to the Military Writings (1923)-Leon Trotsky

[6] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/05/russia-revolution-and-civil-war-1917-1921-antony-beevor-review

[7] https://www.pressreader.com/uk/bbc-history-magazine/20220609/282239489241759

[8] Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East- Stephen G. Fritz

[9] [E.H. Carr, What is History? p. 37].

“I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice, for it is myself that I portray. My defects will here be read to the life, and also my natural form as far as respect for the public has allowed. Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in sweet freedom of nature’s first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.”

Michel de Montaigne

“It’s hard…to keep one’s illusions about anything in Paris. Everything is taxed, everything is sold, everything is manufactured, even success”

[Balzac/Hunt, 1837/1971: Lost Illusions

“There are some persons who may do anything; they may behave totally irrationally, anything becomes them, and it is who shall be first to justify their conduct; then, on the other hand, there are those on whom the world is unaccountably severe, they must do everything well, they are not allowed to fail nor to make mistakes, at their peril they do anything foolish”

[Balzac/Hunt, 1837/1971: Lost Illusions

“These are the prisms through which I have come to know myself. I tried to undo their acts of refraction.”

Jia Tolentino

A staff writer for the New Yorker since 2016, Jia Tolentino’s book is a collection of sophisticated, semi-insightful, and well-written essays on subjects including religion, drugs, feminism, the cult of the difficult woman, and the Internet.

While not quite at Michel de Montaigne’s intellectual level, Tolentino mirrors his attempt to understand the world. She joins a growing number of young women writing about their experiences. Some have done a better job than others.[1] 

What sets this book apart from the rest is Tolentino’s attempt to place her own life and the subject matter she writes about in a social, economic and political context. It must be said that it has become unfashionable to do such a thing. While certainly not a Marxist, and unless I am mistaken, Tolentino has not read Karl Marx but does have a certain amount of intuitive insight. Also, she highlights the relationship between base and superstructure on a very limited basis.

As Marx beautifully wrote, “men (and women) inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework in which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.”[2]

Perhaps one of the most interesting essays concentrates on the huge number of scams that are now part and parcel of capitalist society.  The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams: presents a damning indictment of capitalist society. While concentrating on a few obvious scams, Tolentino ignores a large number of prominent scams, which could probably fill another book. It would be interesting to see her thoughts on economic cons like the Wirecard Scam, which shows the true nature of capitalism. As Peter Schwarz writes, “the political establishment and the media are trying to portray the Wirecard scandal either as the result of the machinations of a brilliant impostor or the failure of state institutions, which can be corrected by some administrative changes. Wirecard is not some terrible lapse but shows the true face of capitalism in the 21st century. The accumulation of wealth and assets has completely detached itself from the real economy for a long time. The result is unprecedented social polarisation and the criminalisation of all sectors of the capitalist economy.”[3]

Another scam left out of the book is that of the so-called “romance scams”.[4]In 2020 I wrote a series of articles on one aspect of this nasty scam which has conned many people out of millions. After two years of research, certain things can be said to warn others. The first job of a scammer who proliferates the various online dating sites is to get their prey off the original dating website and onto sites such as Gmail and WhatsApp. Gmail is a favourite hunting ground for your African scammers. It is a simple scam.

They send you a picture of a gorgeous voluptuous woman usually lifted from a porn site. Most men think, yum, I am in here. They don’t ask why this beautiful 25-year-old woman would have anything to do with a balding middle-aged man. Unperturbed most men would want to see this hot girl on video chat. This is the first part of the scam. To see this beautiful woman, you need to purchase an Amazon card or other such items for them to get an internet connection for the video call. When they finally agree to your demand to see them in the flesh, you do not see the beautiful young thing in the flesh, but a rather clumsy video these amateurs have somehow managed to upload onto Gmail. On one occasion, I could see the real person behind the scam as his hand slipped, revealing his real identity. Suffice to say; he was not a gorgeous blonde woman.

The second great scam not touched upon in the book centres on the launch of the Facebook dating app in 2019. This free dating app was a means by which Facebook sought to promote the launch of its own digital currency Meta. Facebook is riddled with fake profiles. In the first quarter of 2022, Facebook removed 1.6 billion fake accounts. This is down from 1.7 billion in the previous quarter. In 2019, in one quarter alone 2.2 billion counterfeit bills were removed.

Their dating app was full of fake profiles, and these people were allowed to act with impunity by Meta. The few that were real promoted the use of cryptocurrency. Many counterfeit profiles, although not all, came from China, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.

These gorgeous-looking Asian women were not interested in dating. They used Facebook to lure punters into a Cryptocurrency scam. They would take your money, saying they will invest it in Cryptocurrency. The reality is that they take the money and run along with their uncles. It was amazing that all these girls had fantastic relatives willing to help others get rich. When yours truly threatened to report these scammers, he was on the receiving end of some very nasty death threats and one ugly video threatening DECAPITATION. Facebook turned a blind eye to the whole scam. After all, a significant number of these Asian scammers were promoting Facebook’s digital currency, Meta. We all know how that turned out.

Some of the strongest pieces in Trick Mirror deal with the commodification of the self or, to be more precise, the commodification of sex. Jia Tolentino writes in the book that “commerce has filtered into our identities and relationships.”

To her credit, Tolentino is critical of sites like Tik Tok and Instagram, whose main purpose seems to make money out of a large number of scantily clad men and women shaking their bits. To be brutally honest, sites like Tik Tok are nothing more than glorified soft pornography.

Pornography, as Emanuele Saccarelli so perceptively writes, “is the commodification of sexual relations; a more modern, sanitised, impersonal, and therefore more peculiarly bourgeois form of prostitution. Instead of accepting the moralistic posturing of the defenders of the status quo, one must consider the possibility that, far from being a perverse deviation from the dominant values of a capitalist society, pornography might, in fact, be the most logical and limpid translation of bourgeois values into the sexual sphere. Acts and relations that are natural and spontaneous are turned into commodities to be purchased and sold.”[5]

While it is wrong to over-generalise about Tik Tok, there appears to be a significant connection between the sexy videos on the platform and outright prostitution. While researching dating sites, one girl offered to have sex with me if I paid her £300. This was very tempting given that she was a gorgeous Brazilian beauty. Her main mistake was to give me her real name and photo. I did a title and image search on Google. Low and behold, it turns out that aside from having a loud voice, she has 2.6m followers on Tik Tok. Apart from making money as an influencer, she was a part-time hooker earning £300 for two hours of work. A case of life imitating art or art imitating life I am not sure which.

There is not much point in recommending this book as it has already sold many copies. It is worth reading and is packed with a significant number of essays that require further reading. Tolentino could have done with a little more study of academic papers on her chosen subjects, and the scams she chooses, while interesting only scratch the surface of the criminality of life under capitalism.

Further Reading

Pornocracy Generalized: Fetishizing the Body and Selling the Process as Empowerment-Fouad Mami-

www.academia.edu/66949139/Pornocracy_Generalized_Fetishizing_the_Body_and_Selling_the_Process_as_Empowerment

A comment on the viral TikTok “Devious Licks” trend-Renae Cassimeda

6 October 2021- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/10/07/tikt-o07.html

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[1] See -A Lot of Sex But Not Much Revolution-Unmastered:-Katherine Angel 10.99 Paperback 368 Pages / Published: 03/07/2014-http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/p/problems-of-everyday-life.html. See Also: My Body by Emily Ratajkowski’s-Hardcover – November 9 2021-A Quercus publication. http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/p/problems-of-everyday-life.html

[2] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

[3] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/27/wire-j27.html

[4] https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/search?q=maia

[5] A comment on Boogie Nights- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1998/07/boog-j04.html 

Postal workers throughout Britain voted for strike action by 97.6 per cent, with 77per cent turnout over Royal Mail’s 2 per cent pay offer. The offer comes with wide-ranging changes that amount to a fundamental re-organisation of the business to the major detriment of its workforce and promises a bonanza for shareholders. 

The strike vote was the largest ever and represented not only anger at Royal Mail’s attack on their pay and conditions but shows frustration at the CWU bureaucracy by postal workers. Postal workers still remember the last huge strike vote that the CWU deliberately ignored while they used it as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Royal Mail. Again it would appear that the union has no intention of calling a strike. 

Rather than call immediate strike action, the CWU has launched a second ballot over the changes Royal Mail want to activate. Dave Ward, CWU Leader, refused to call the strike saying, “it would be right to allow the company to think again on pay.” The CWU’s suppression of the strike is to stop the struggle of the postal workers from being linked to that of other striking workers. Instead of mobilising postal workers against Royal Mail’s vicious attacks, Ward reached out to shareholders and pleaded, “We’re saying to shareholders, you shouldn’t be supporting what these people are doing and what they’re paying themselves, and you should be getting behind the workforce.” 

The CWU bureaucracy has admitted being surprised at Royal Mail’s actions. To what degree the bewilderment of the CWU leadership at Royal Mail’s vicious attack on pay and conditions is real is open to conjecture. Ward’s found the company’s so-called sudden turn “Very difficult to understand. How did we get to this situation, with the same people in charge?”.  

In a recent speech, Terry Pullinger echoed Ward’s disbelief “The attack we’re under now has no rational explanation. Things were going well, but then suddenly they disengaged, and nobody has explained why they’ve done that.” Maybe it should be clear to Ward and Pullinger that this was always Royal Mail’s intention to reorganise the business fundamentally, and to Amazonisation the business.  

The CWU openly bragged that they were able to prevent this plan with the Pathway To Change agreement. They told the new Royal Mail leadership they could implement the changes it wanted without strike action. The CWU wanted to deepen its corporatist relationship with Royal Mail. 

Royal Mail saw things differently. While reluctantly agreeing to the Pathway to Change agreement, Royal Mail wanted to suppress strikes and give themselves time to implement their plan. After the union sa econd time refused to strike, CEO Simon Thompson issued detailed plans to decimate postal workers’ pay and conditions and reorganise the business. 

One day after the CWU announced that they would give Royal Mail time to reconsider their position Royal Mail published a seven-page document called “The change we need”. The first thing Royal Mail wants to bring in is a system of yearly Flexi hours. This means postal workers would be at Royal Mail’s beck and call instead of working a fixed week. Annualised hours will be the norm, and cuts to supplementary payments. Many workers will have a huge cut in sick pay and compulsory Sunday work for all new starters. The creation of a two-tier workforce, with “the next generation of postal workers coming in on 10 per cent less.”  

Royal Mail chairman Keith Williams stated the company was making a loss of £1 million a day and needed these changes to fix the business. If this is the case, workers should demand to open up the books. He threatened to break up the company if workers didn’t accept these changes. While not contained in the company’s recent statement, they intend to run down the letters business to concentrate on the more lucrative parcels business. This would be based around the international parcel delivery operation called GLS. GLS’s appalling wages and conditions make Amazon look like an enlightened employer. Also, it is only a matter of time before Royal Mail bosses start to cut to the Universal Service Obligation, which means they must deliver letters to every address, no matter how remote or inaccessible, six days a week. 

Since Royal Mail was privatised in 2013, it has been an unmitigated disaster for postal workers who have seen their pay and conditions eroded. Now Royal Mail wants to quicken up the process. From day one, postal workers and the public were fed the lies that privatisation would benefit society. The reality is a looted pension fund with two tiers, much to the detriment of new starters.  A large-scale closure of offices and a land sale that echoed the American wild west. 

Every attack that Royal Mail has launched on the pay and conditions of postal workers has happened with the intimate collaboration of the CWU. The CWU has openly boasted that it had delivered unprecedented increases in productivity and revisions through the Pathway to Change. It also boasted of its close relationship with Royal Mail. So much so now that it invites Royal Mail Group to observe its union meetings. 

At a recent National Briefing meeting In Liverpool, current CWU deputy general secretary Terry Pullinger explained that there were RMG observers in the discussion, saying, “We must remember that we cannot allow them to set the agenda. The deal we want is a pay-only no-strings deal, and this is what you and the members need to remember when management speaks to you in the workplace. Even today, the 2% deal with no strings is a derisive offer and nowhere near enough to what we want, and you deserve. It may be a step from the 3.5% with all the strings, but the deal is still unacceptable. The Pathway to Change Agreement is there to deal with the strings they want to discuss in the pay deal, and that is where they will stay”. 

There you have it. The Pathway To Change has led to unprecedented change, increased productivity, cut in hours and duties, led to redundancies and forced workers to work through a pandemic that has cost many lives, left some postmen with long-term sickness due to long Covid and has led to massive disruptions in delivery offices up and down the country. 

The latest episode is no different, with the union saying it has bent over backwards to facilitate the changes Royal Mail wants, saying, “We’ve delivered more change than ever in a short period and embraced more automation.”…and so, therefore, this union needs no lectures from the Royal Mail senior leadership on the nature of this current period, the changing needs of customers, what is necessary and what must be done.” 

The CWU’s treachery and cowardice is mirrored by several pseudo-left groups organised within the union. They play a crucial role in isolating and hindering the number of postal workers prepared for a fight. Many of these pseudo-left maintain high positions within the union. 

To take their struggle forward, postal workers must take the struggle against Royal Mail out of the hands of both the CWU bureaucracy and the pseudo lefts and form rank and file committees based on a socialist programme for the renationalisation of Royal Mail under workers’ control. 

Under neoliberalism, Basu Thakur finds, postcolonial theory has become a race for victimhood, “a brand of culturalism…” (p. xxiii). Following Gayatri Spivak’s specification that subalternity is a position and not an identity, Basu Thakur argues that postcolonialism has drifted into conceiving subalternity as an identity in practice. That explains why it has become anti-emancipatory. Relying on insights from psychoanalysis, Basu Thakur finds that postcolonial writers have to conceive identity as an ontological lack to be truly empowering. Indeed, it does not behove contemporary Indians or Algerians to merely reinstate the Other, the colonial master, by some postcolonial acolytes-disguised-as-authors. This is so because the Other remains rooted in fantasy, functioning as a governing structure that lacks substance. This explains why the best policy for decolonised peoples is neither to disavow nor take the European worldview seriously. Instead of addressing the lack on which postcolonial subjectivity sits as a frightening void, the book encourages readers to view it as a call toward universalism, a step toward revoking both the coloniser and the colonised.   

Basu Thakur proceeds by reconciling what are considered irreconcilable disciplines: postcolonialism and psychoanalysis. He finds that the two fields share common ground more than what each avows. The book is divided into two sections: the first contains three chapters and the second two plus a conclusion. The chapters in the first explain why postcolonial writers cannot counter the ontological challenge posed by the big Other. The second section teases how neoliberal modes of expression perpetuate the colonial/oriental project, thereby testifying to how the colonised/decolonised remains crippled with the same ontological fixation.

Chapter One: “The Subaltern Act of Freedom” distinguishes between acting out, ‘the passage to the act’ and act in Lacan’s theory of the Act in the sense that the first two never challenge the Other because they maintain the fantasy, whereas ‘to act’ is to decimate both the big Other and the imagination. Basu Thakur illustrates this point with one subaltern character, Draupadi, in Mahasweta Devi’s story with the same title, wherein the subaltern abolishes politics by putting the signifier’s symbolic order under duress. The revolutionary dimension in Draupadi’s act is specifically that one that does not solicit recognition; its spontaneous and eruptive unfolding breaks the monopoly over the symbolic framework because the master signifier through the show is deeply shaken. Indirectly Basu Thakur is telling readers that postcolonial texts fall below this bar set by Mahasweta. 

Chapter Two: “Postcolonial. Animal. Limit” revises postcolonial to criticism by claiming that the real animal is the one whose capacities escape humans’ imaginary: it shocks and destabilises the seemingly ever-strong symbolic order. (p. 36) only to learn that all extended orders remain rooted in lack. Only fantasy exhibits the Other’s apparent invisibility. Through a reading of Mahasweta Devi’s story, the postcolonial animal interpreted through a pterodactyl underlies less and less the occasional failures of language by zooming on the expressive shortcomings of language. Encountering the flying demon uncovers the impossibility of representing the condition of subalternity. In as much as it is real, not a symbol, the radical alterity in the pterodactyl remains an insult to subjectivity; it disrupts facile renderings and certainly cancels the capacity of representation to render any experience translucent. The animal’s death drive can be effectively countered through “explosive love” (p. 44), never through desire, allowing readers to confront universally traumatic nothingness.

Chapter Three: “Hysterization of Postcolonial Studies; or, Beyond Cross-Cultural Communication” builds on the Lacanian principle wherein people “…desire to remain in desire without satisfaction…” (p. 68). The author finds that the colonial archiving of knowledge is fundamentally rooted in nuisance or that excessive enjoyment from the dream of controlling the colonised. But this orientalist project wherein knowledge is sought less for its own sake and more for domination remains paradoxically an expression of lack and non-being besetting the master signifier. The evidence from reading Leila Aboulela’s “The Museum” and Tony Gatlif’s film, Gradjo Dilo (The Crazy Stranger, 1997), shows that the archive amassed to qualify for cross-cultural communication miserably fails. Hence, how postcolonial theory, when restricted to answering back, is destined to remain a self-defeating endeavour. Only the willing blind refuses to note that the archive cannot be exhaustive. By extension, a counter archive similarly expresses hysteria that craves acknowledgement from the Other’s symbolic order.

Chapter Four: “Fictions of Katherine Boo’s Creative Non-Fiction, or, The Unbearable Alterity of the Other” reads an American journalist’s Behind the Beautiful Forever: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (2012). Basu Thakur finds that neoliberal accounts have remained consistent with colonial narratives regarding how oriental spaces remain marred in poverty. Instead of chastising capitalism for the proletarization of India’s undercity, the report underlines postcolonial mismanagement and the elites’ corruption. White supremacists remain incapable of noting that the impoverished multitudes in Calcutta and other cities are essential to the prosperity of residents of upscale neighbourhoods in Mumbai or New Delhi in the sense that the two antagonistic sights go together. Narrative accounts wherein poverty is humanised, such as in Boo’s, risk “gutturalising the politics of globalisation by strategically redrawing the phantasmatic screen of third world abjection over the real conditions of global inequality suffered in the third world.” (p. 108). The argument wherein only in India (or other decolonised spaces) where corruption explains sights of depravation fortifies the idea that the West cannot tolerate despicable depravities because only the West/Other knows how to address gross economic inequalities systematically.

Chapter Five: “Political Correctness Is Phallic: Idaho Politics, Black Panther, and Gran Torino”, considers how representational politics, as shown in these films, facilitates disengagement from reality and remains complicit with neoliberalism. As displayed in these films, the conflict between communities is geared less toward provoking audiences to register the injustice of political choices but is precisely directed toward culturising injustice. The films serve as an ideological apparatus obfuscating the precariat’s chances of reversing their misfortunes by feeding them the illusion that solid opportunities are waiting for them just around the corner if they only stay patient. Meanwhile, the neoliberal order remains untouched. Instead of highlighting institutionalised segregation or the ensuing discrimination that followed the formal abolishment of slavery, Black Panther reverses the typical image by showing the imaginary African republic of “Wakanda as a site of pure plenitude.” (p. 148) But the technologically advanced Africa and Africans are nowhere nearly helpful or emancipatory as ‘Africa-as-the-heart-of-darkness’ since it is still through fantasy that the West mediates Africa. Readers reach this understanding that whoever seeks an acknowledgement from the master signifier is counterrevolutionary.

The Conclusion: “Particular Universal” underlines how postcolonial writers’ penchant for competing representations of misery and victimhood subscribes to the logic of illogic wherein gratification is expected and generated from the Other’s acknowledgement. Besides illustrating how this logic is sick, the conclusion claims how this logic enforces the other’s phallic image and justifies postcolonial oppression. Differently put, no matter how exhaustive the native informants’ knowledge of the subaltern will be, that knowledge stays rooted in lack and has to be mediated through fantasy. The subaltern cannot be reduced to any set of archives or manuals. The particularity of the urban precariat stands for the new universal. Following Žižek, Basu Thakur credits Malcolm X for accurately seizing on the radical understanding wherein “…the only possibility of moving forward lies through embracing the negation, claiming it as part of one’s identity, hence the ‘X’ in his name.” (p. 192)

When reading Basu Thakur’s volume, the reader cannot avoid the question, why would one seek to fix a theory by invigorating it with another one? But lest one precipitates, what seems like a fixation on the palliative is found out to be indeed revolutionary. Similarly, there are several instances of convoluted writing like in: “This is not freedom in the sense of Liberty as a metaphysical attribute. But, rather, freedom here is action illuminating the lack of freedom.” (p. 28), where they attempt to follow through the prose becomes a challenge. But soon, Basu Thakur’s discussion of his selected fiction comes to the reader’s rescue, convincing us to remain glued to the book. Indeed, Basu Thakur’s reading of Mahasweta’s Draupadi reads to me (at least) like the Tunisian Bouazizi, the man who inflamed himself in December 2010: an act that deposed several dictators. I could not overlook this quote: “By erasing their bodies to correspond with their already erased speech, that is, unravelling the body as an object of speech, the subaltern shocks the big Other. Their wanton disregard for the body delivers a traumatic truth. Namely, there’s a difference between having and being a body.” (p. 7). Insights such as these underline the author’s insistence on historical totality and the class dimension in the precariat’s misfortune with which he reinvents communism from the debris of postcolonialism and neoliberalism. How can readers afford to bypass Basu Thakur’s insights as to the latter recall Marx and Engels’ underscoring of the class struggle? Only that Postcolonial Lack deploys a different approach to solve the same theorem.

Fouad Mami

Université d’Adrar (Algeria)

ORCID iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524

fouad.mami@univ-adrar.edu.dz

Albert Camus (1913-1960), a Nobel Laureate for literature, was born and raised in colonial Algeria. He is largely considered in independent Algeria as the spokesperson of white settlers, perhaps even the pride of a social class better known as Les pieds noirs. The latter underlines the descendants of white settlers or colonists (French but also other Europeans) who joined the colony after the conquest of Algeria in 1830. Almost all of them acquired the most fertile land at a fraction of the cost following the decimation of Arab tribes and the ruinous policies that led to the dispossession of the remaining inhabitants from their communal lands. In the literature about the period, the first colonists are branded as pioneers. They worked the land and rendered it extremely productive.

It was rumoured during the 1930s that if America was proud of California, then France was proud of Orléansville, today’s the governorate of Chelf and the region around, spreading from Oran in the West to Médéa in the East. True, these colonists were industrious, but they too exploited the dispossessed native population. Russian convicts, who lived through the reign of the last Tsar and were serving prison terms around the 1910s in Bône (today’s Annaba), were shocked to find that the colonists treated Algerians worse than sheep.[1] With the end of military rule in the 1880s, colonists (not Metropolitan France) were responsible—through exclusionary practices—for literally sending Algerians behind the sun. Understandably, by the time the Algerian revolution broke out in November 1954, everything the colonists fought and stood for became at stake. Most of them, at that point, had been four generations in the colony.

To give non-Algerian and non-French readers a foretaste of la déchirure or the disheartening misfortune of these colonists brought about by Algeria’s independence in 1962, consider this analogy. In South Africa, Nelson Mandella was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace simply because he did not repeat the Algerian tragedy. Mandella kept intact the economic privileges white colonists enjoyed during the apartheid. He did not start a policy or propagate a process leading to their eventual eviction or dispossession. White liberals and their media adore Mandella for not doing what the FLN is thought to have done with white colonists three decades earlier.

Here enters Camus’s conciliatory discourse during Algeria’s war of independence. He is notoriously famous/infamous for adopting his mother’s point of view at the expense of justice.[2] Because I hailed from the very people sent behind the sun by Camus’ ancestors, I find any engagement with that ‘justice versus mother’ discussion’ a dead horse. How so? The terrorism Camus refers to in the quote was not terrorism; these were some people’s deliberate actions of emancipation to re-enter history after more than a century of denial. Hence, the euphoric reactions captured through Algerian songs and other cultural artefacts such as: “يا محمد مبروك عليك الجزائر رجعت ليك”[3] While a student during the 1990s at Algiers University, I grew up having a part in several discussions regarding whether or not Camus was a misunderstood universalist or bloody racist. I can say now that lyricism does not even begin to approach, let alone solve historical necessities. Reading Camus may make one more sensible and more sensitive to certain complexities, but at the end of the day, poetic formulations of his and his like (Mouloud Feraoun, for one) do not advance the cause of emancipation a single centimetre. Lyrics and poeticism are what the French brilliantly capture through the expression: des masturbations a l’infini.

That explains why there exist perhaps a few solid reasons why the world will want to read one more book about Camus. Advancing this position, I am aware, comes at the risk of effecting a major offence to liberal sensibilities since Camus has been the darling of this class. It is worth knowing that Camus did not hail from these classes, but he had been accultured—appropriated, if you will, not without his tacit approval, though, and as such, he becomes an idol for anyone who wants to change their social skin. With class as a matrix for meaningful analysis, the methodological line is drawn for what comes below.

Similarly, it is worth recalling that with the conclusion of the Evian Agreements (Accords d’Évian), colonists became personas non grata, undesired in a country they called theirs. Many of them knew no other country to call theirs except Algeria. Most Algerians perfectly understand and even sympathise with their misfortune. Strangely, the Evian Agreements guaranteed the colonists’ right to stay. But it is they who sealed their fate in calling for and acting to keep Algeria French. Long story short, had they stayed, I and my kind (practically sons of peasants with living standards barely different from feudal times) would never have had the chance to make it beyond primary school. Like our forefathers, we would have been condemned to remain subservient to colonists, the lowest class on the social ladder. My father was coerced to leave school at the age of 10, and that is what France was able to offer him and his generation.

Meanwhile, it is no exaggeration that by literally enslaving Algerians, not a small number of colonists used to live like royalty. Hence the nostalgia and the rumination over a French Algeria in contemporary France has been more of a re-memory than a memory, properly speaking. Knowing that originally these colonists hailed from peasant and working-class backgrounds, it is understandable what they have gained and lost. Camus is an icon for everything they aspire to, the self-made entrepreneurial model.

Now, concerning how independent Algeria has fared without colonists, that is less significant to colonists and more appealing to capitalists. Volumes can be written about dysfunctionalities, imagined or real corruption, and money laundering. But for the sake of fairness, every Algerian is entitled to free education, health insurance, dignified lodgings, etc…… Only those blinded with unsurmountable hatred can deny these relative material gains. Still, the class struggle remains the perfect arbitration for any measure of success or failure.

The predominant nationalist discourse prevailing after independence only seeks to asphyxiate the class war. Through several slogans, Le hirak (peaceful uprising) of February 2019 articulated that class dimension. Still, the triumphant narrative tried and succeeded in portraying it as only an exasperation with Bouteflika and his cronies. Rather, le hirak expresses an incendiary insurrection against the entire setup of postcolonial order, not just about the Bouteflika episode. The muffled class war has its explanation, which is further elaborated below, but the class dimension after independence remains there for all to see.

This leaves subaltern Algerians with no hatred against France or at least they do not hate France, les français de souche. In this connection, it is worth recalling that no hatred or admiration exists outside space and time. Sales of French cars do not compare with Asian ones; Algerians cannot resist French brands. So is the case with French cheese, delicacies, language, etiquettes, and above all, the French love for life! For most Algerians practically leading their daily lives (not when some journalist pushed a microphone their way), what happened happened, and one cannot sit around crying over spilt milk or reinvent the wheels of time. Algerians trust in the Hegelian law of historical necessity (not they know Hegel), through which he means: that what happened could NOT happen. Still, for historical accuracy and fairness in judgment: the colonists kept Algerians outside time. This is not some nationalist ruminating over colonial atrocities to cover for his postcolonial shortcomings and even crimes!

Ever since the end of military rule toward the end of the 1880s, the colonists and their offspring dominated the colonial administration. They made everything in the book to block the scanty metropolitan policies that aimed to provide, care for, and ‘civilise’ the native (Algerian) populations regarding schooling and caring for the health of Les indigènes. Who stood against the progressive policies of the French state? None but the colonists. In 1962 these colonists got what they have historically always deserved. Outlining this does not make Algerians blind to the fact that several colonists served in FLN ranks and openly supported decolonisation. The violence during the revolution settled scores; that violence, as Frantz Fanon brilliantly puts it at the beginning of Les dames de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth), has purifying effects. No one, no matter how Zen or humanist, could undo that violence and bloodshed.

To counteract the sweeping lyricism in Camus’ prose, I always refer for the benefit of students (most of whom are historically removed from the colonial context) to the first page in Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma. Reading Nedjma’s first page, one will see how Camus has been out of touch with reality. Camus’ lyricism perfectly fits a middle-class sensibility full of: ‘either and or’, indecision, and mental fogginess. The first page of Nedjma saves readers from that fogginess and makes them fully register the class struggle. One will realise how acute Algerians’ living conditions after 1945 were and how they were aware of the necessity of bloodshed and violence, not that they liked it, but because they were squeezed out of options. Kateb Yacine remains a master had he written only that first page in his career. For there, one captures Algerians’ logos, the reflective consciousness that looks at the abyss but is not afraid to tease it out and distil the sensible course of action. Perhaps, it is not an exaggeration to conclude that Camus does not even begin to compare with Yacine. If literature is but another means of changing the world, not just an instantiation of the bourgeois hunt for the beautiful, then it is Yacine who deserves recognition, not Camus.

Now, after 1962 and as outlined earlier, one does not need to be an apologist for the FLN and their misrule. But it is unquestionable that materially speaking, Algerians fared well under post-independence rule than during colonial times. Regarding present Franco-Algerian relations, they too cannot be stripped out of context. Not all the criticisms one reads in the French media are accurate or innocent or not propaganda. It is not news that there exists corruption in reporting corruption in Algeria. Many observers recall that the French media were the first people who brought public attention to overpricing the 1200 km highway in 2006. Why? French companies, like American, Japanese, and South Korean, made their bids. But the project was contracted by three large and state-owned Chinese construction companies and one Japanese. How so? Simply because Algerian bureaucrats did their job. They handed the project to the lowest bidder. Like everywhere in the world, the initial fund meant to cover the construction was not enough, and the contracted companies asked for what was legally theirs. The highway is not Germany’s Autobahn, but its cost is reasonable. And the delivered infrastructure is not bad, as is often reported. Likewise, the French media became furious when the authorities handed the contract for building the largest damn in the Maghreb, that of Beni Haroun, in 2001 to the Chinese. The contract was mouthwatering, and soon the usual media faultfinding started. Bouteflika’s reign has been no short of objections, but it remains a duty to be fair.

Big contracts for building key infrastructure such as the one outlined above are a handful of examples of why tensions have always governed the relationship between independent Algeria and France. The cultural explanation proposed by the Algerian establishment often aims to confuse, justify, and never explain. The tension has deep roots in material history and the meaning of primitive accumulation. The tendential fall in the rate of profits [as specified by Karl Marx in volume three of Capital] obliges French companies to compete against more vibrant American and other competitors from around the world for parts of Algerian markets that dictate the tension. The corruption in corruption-related discussion seeks to cover that public officials and their cronies’ swindling of assets, large or small, cannot significantly account for the contradictions in international trade. And that these contradictions in international trade cannot be resolved through globalisation (Global Market) since the latter precipitates an equal standard when contracting from among national capitals—a situation that remains full of odds and engenders tensions among competing capitalisms making international trade. To provide a taste of this contradiction, Algeria’s decision to nationalise its energy sector in February 1971 gave leverage to American companies at the expense of French ones.

That explains that if one aims to address the subterranean forces that shape Franco-Algerian relations, then one has to read and consider the underlying thesis proposed by Gregory D. Cleva in JFK Algeria Speech (2022). It is not as if we only want to read the book, but we have to. The gist of it is how in the wake of that speech, a pattern was set for the relationship not only between the U.S. and Algeria or the U.S. and France but between Algerian and French establishments. (the two peoples here are outside the power equation) Leaving the ephemeral (that which French media deems newsworthy) and embracing the essential, the JFK Algeria Speech is the way to go. The intricate web of connections is barely highlighted, let alone sufficiently addressed neither by staunch Algerian nationalists nor by largely nostalgic French journalists and academics.

For a large sway of ordinary Algerians, the FLN eventually won because it forced de Gaulle to accept negotiations. Under the carpet, however, is how the FLN, by the time JFK made his speech, was militarily defeated. Remember, it was in the context soon after the battle of Algiers and when FLN masterminds were chased down, nearly all of them were decimated. French generals’ strategy to defeat the insurrection started bearing fruits. And still, the FLN, in the final analysis, got what it wanted! Strange. Some other forces were working against French policymakers of the time and in favour of the FLN, not necessarily in favour of the Algerian people or the revolutionaries. We read in Cleva’s account that American general consuls in Algiers serving from 1942 to the late 1950s each and all of them played key roles by accurately reporting the pitfalls of French colonial policies. As a member of the Senate’s committee for foreign policy and thus a likely candidate for the presidency, JFK formalised what the American establishment, up to that point, had always wanted and discreetly planned.

The U.S. did not emerge from WWII victorious just like that. The world still remembers how President Donald Trump, in November 2018, reacted to French President Emmanuel Macron’s allusion to the need to create an independent European army, a framework outside NATO. Trump angrily retorts: “Without the U.S. help in two world wars, today’s Parisians would be speaking German.”[4] It is no secret that between the two world wars, the French establishment was quickly ageing and bitterly divided. To further explore this topic, here is a 2006 study: Le choix de la défaite: Les élites françaises dans les années 1930 by an imminent scholar, Annie Lacroix-Riz. The point here is that while the French generals and army overwhelmingly succeeded in suppressing the insurrection in Algeria, French politicians could not capitalise on that success because Washington wanted otherwise. The latter embarked on a decolonisation policy, and not even Britain was immune. India, the jewel of the empire, won its independence! So, who could openly say no to Washington? Who could dare? Not even de Gaulle.

With his return to power in 1958, le generale tried his best to secure Algeria as French, but eventually, he knew his manoeuvres would amount to a little showmanship. In mounting a rebellion, the FLN’s gamble, for that is what it was, somehow ironically paid off. U.S. geostrategic interests wanted an end to colonisation, lest upheavals and insurrections in the colonies would break the capitalists’ new orders. Decolonisation as a policy was meant to contain the colonised, regardless of how on the surface, it gave them better terms (not the best) to negotiate their fate and future emancipations. For Indians, as much as for Algerians or Kenyans, the colonised’s national independence, besides the pains and sacrifices, has been largely decided elsewhere, although it is disrespectful to presume that battlefields did not matter.

This gives us an accurate picture of how the French establishment views Algeria today. Perhaps less so than how Britain views India, France sees Algeria as a bitch that got tired of sleeping with Paris and decided in a fit of anger to go to bed with Washington. All other approximations to those relations are meant to confuse, perhaps justify, never to explain what the French establishment to this day cannot overcome what it considers as the impossible loss! Now for Algerians, both the establishment and ordinary people, severance of ties with France spelt good riddance with an abusive and unjust colonial system. But it is precisely here where Algerians prefer to overlook the American role and attribute victory exclusively to their forefathers’ sacrifices. Worse than a taboo, the refusal to acknowledge the American role spells the bewilderment of Algerian elites since they are not even aware this pivotal role exists. Perhaps apart from a handful of core FLN negotiators all perished by now, a few—if any—realise the U.S. part in Algeria’s independence.

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[1] Owen White, 2021. The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria. Harvard University Press. Please refer to my review of the book. https://www.theleftberlin.com/review-owen-white-the-blood-of-the-colony-wine-and-the-rise-and-fall-of-french-algeria/

[2] “I have always denounced terrorism. I must also denounce a terrorism which is exercised blindly, in the streets of Algiers for example, and which someday could strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice, but I shall defend my mother above justice.” Herbert R. Lottman, Camus, A Biography (1979)

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DT29_wJJmvU or consider this largely forgotten one now “Fransa mellat” by Cheikh Bouregaa decrying how colonial France treated Algerians as sub-humans as well as the latter’s fight for their own self-respect during the revolutionary war 1954-1962: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gmvUlFr-Aw

[4] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/french-would-be-speaking-german-without-us-trump-tells-macron-cw668ssdw#:~:text=The%20US%20president%20told%20Mr,higher%20tariffs%20on%20French%20wine