chapters 6- , "lenin: building the party"

The spokesman of Menshevism, Martynov, in his pamphlet Two Dictatorships (1904), spelled out the reasoning behind this attitude in similar terms:

The coming revolution will be a revolution of the bourgeoisie; and that means that ... it will only, to a greater or lesser extent, secure the rule of all or some of the bourgeois classes ... If this is so, it is clear that the coming revolution can on no account assume political forms against the will of the whole of the bourgeoisie, as the latter will be the master of tomorrow. If so, then to follow the path of simply frightening the majority of the bourgeois elements would mean that the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat could lead to only one result – the restoration of absolutism in its original form.

The revolutionary’s goal, therefore, lay in “the more democratic ‘lower’ section of society’s compelling the ‘higher’ section to agree to lead the bourgeois revolution to its logical conclusion.”

(...) In complete contrast, Lenin always relentlessly denounced the Russian liberal bourgeoisie as a counterrevolutionary force. Of Martynov’s campaign tactics for the Zemstvo Assembly, he wrote contemptuously in November 1904:

A fine definition of the tasks of the workers’ party, I must say! At a time when an alliance of the moderate Zemstvoists and the government to fight the revolutionary proletariat is only too clearly possible and probable ... we are to “reduce” our task, not to redoubling our efforts in the struggle against the government, but to drawing up casuistic conditions for agreements with the liberals on mutual support.

(...) He pulled no punches in his outspoken analysis of the reasons why the liberals would prove to be reactionary.

The antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie with us is much deeper than it was in 1789, 1848 or 1871; hence, the bourgeoisie will be more fearful of the proletarian revolution and will throw itself more readily into the arms of reaction.

(...) The experience of the 1905 Revolution demonstrated even more clearly the bankruptcy of the liberal bourgeoisie, particularly on the question that was crucial for the overwhelming majority of the Russian population: the agrarian question. The liberals were against expropriating the great landowners. Their party, the Cadets, supported the distribution of the crown and monastery lands among the peasants, but agreed to the compulsory expropriation of the landlords’ estates only on condition that fair prices were paid to the landlords... The experience of the 1905 Revolution demonstrated even more clearly the bankruptcy of the liberal bourgeoisie, particularly on the question that was crucial for the overwhelming majority of the Russian population: the agrarian question. The liberals were against expropriating the great landowners. Their party, the Cadets, supported the distribution of the crown and monastery lands among the peasants, but agreed to the compulsory expropriation of the landlords’ estates only on condition that fair prices were paid to the landlords.

(...) Lenin’s hatred of the liberals had been seared into his very soul by the experience of his youth. Krupskaya relates:

Vladimir Ilyich once told me about the attitude of the liberals towards the arrest of his elder brother. All acquaintances shunned the Ulyanov family. Even an aged teacher, who had formerly come every evening to play chess, left off calling. There was no railway at Simbirsk at that time, and Vladimir Ilyich’s mother had to go on horseback to Syzran in order to go on to St. Petersburg, where her eldest son was imprisoned. Vladimir Ilyich was sent to seek a companion for the journey. But no one wanted to travel with the mother of an arrested man. Vladimir Ilyich told me that this widespread cowardice made a very profound impression upon him at that time. This youthful experience undoubtedly did leave its imprint on Lenin’s attitude towards the liberals. It was early that he learned the value of all liberal chatter.

Nor did Lenin forget how the great revolutionary Chernyshevsky in his time had been disgusted by the liberals. Chernyshevsky spoke of the liberals of the sixties as “windbags, braggarts and fools”. He clearly perceived their dread of revolution, their spinelessness, and their servility in the face of Tsarism.

(...) However, while the police were making plans, the Petersburg Social Democrats were acting. After a slow start, they finally intervened actively in the movement, and achieved a measure of success. They sent speakers to the district meetings of the assembly, and succeeded in introducing resolutions and amendments into the original text of the petition. It was actually the Menshevik Group that displayed this initiative. (We shall deal below with the tactics of the Bolsheviks at the time.) The result was a petition very different from the one originally envisaged by the leaders of the assembly. A whole string of political demands were included under the influence of the Social Democrats: the eight-hour working day, freedom of assembly for the workers, land for the peasants, freedom of speech and the press, the separation of church and state, an end to the Russo-Japanese War and the convocation of a Constituent Assembly.

(...) Lenin evaluated the events of 9 January very differently. Three days after Bloody Sunday, he writes:

The working class has received a momentous lesson in civil war; the revolutionary education of the proletariat made more progress in one day than it could have made in months and years of drab, humdrum, wretched existence.

Immediate overthrow of the government – this was the slogan with which even the St. Petersburg workers who had believed in the Tsar answered the massacre of 9 January; they answered through their leader, the priest Georgi Gapon, who declared after that bloody day: “We no longer have a Tsar. A river of blood divides the Tsar from the people. Long live the fight for freedom!”

Writing on 8 February he reiterated: “9 January 1905, fully revealed the vast reserve of revolutionary energy possessed by the proletariat.” But then he added in sorrow that it revealed “as well ... the utter inadequacy of Social Democratic organisation.”

(...) [goodness!] Finally, however, the Petersburg Committee decided that the party members should take part in the 9 January procession.

To carry out the measures planned by the Petersburg Committee, the committee of the City sector chose as the gathering point for January 9 the corner of Sadovaia and Chernyshev Alley, where the sub-sector organisers were to come in the morning with their organised circles.

The attendance was pitiful; “only a small group, some 15 workers, no more, appeared at the rendezvous.”

(...) Even more crucial than this fight against the sectarian attitude of some Bolshevik leaders toward the trade unions was the battle Lenin waged against practically the whole St. Petersburg Committee on the issue of the newly established soviet. The Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies was the offspring of the general strike of October 1905. This had been sparked off in Moscow by a small strike of printers, who demanded a few kopeks more per thousand letters set and pay for punctuation marks. The strike spread spontaneously throughout the country. The initiative in establishing the Petersburg Soviet was taken by the Mensheviks, who, however, had no conception of the effect their creation would have in the long run. The Petersburg Committee of the Bolsheviks, for their part, showed extreme hostility toward the soviet... One reason for the Petersburg Bolsheviks’ negative attitude to the Soviet in October 1905 was the fact that the Mensheviks’ attitude to it was a positive one. “Denouncing the inconsistency and lack of principles of the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks intended to boycott the Soviet.”

(...) It needed Lenin’s intervention to call the Bolshevik leadership in Petersburg to order – to pull them back from the abyss of a completely sectarian attitude toward the soviet. He remained abroad for almost a month after its establishment. On his way to Petersburg, where he arrived on November 8, he spent about a week in Stockholm, where he wrote an article, Our tasks and the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. A letter to the editor, intended for the Bolshevik journal Novaya Zhizn. In it he says of the issue:

The Soviet of Workers’ Deputies or the party? I think that it is wrong to put the question in this way and that the decision must certainly be: both the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies and the party. The only question – and a highly important one – is how to divide, and how to combine, the tasks of the Soviet and those of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

(...) A year after writing the important article quoted above, and after the experience of the December 1905 uprising in Moscow, Lenin developed further the concept of the interrelation between the soviet and the revolutionary government. In the article quoted above, he argued that the soviet was the form of revolutionary government of the future. A year later, he argued that the soviet could not exist independently of the immediate revolutionary situation, but also that it was not able by itself to organise the armed insurrection.

The experience of October–December has provided very instructive guidance ... Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are organs of direct mass struggle. They originated as organs of the strike struggle. By force of circumstances they very quickly became the organs of the general revolutionary struggle against the government. The course of events and the transition from a strike to an uprising irresistibly transformed them into organs of an uprising. That this was precisely the role that quite a number of “Soviets” and “committees” played in December is an absolutely indisputable fact. Events have proved in the most striking and convincing manner that the strength and importance of such organs in time of militant action depend entirely upon the strength and success of the uprising.

It was not some theory, not appeals on the part of someone, tactics invented by someone, not party doctrine, but the force of circumstances that led these non-party mass organs to realise the need for an uprising and transformed them into organs of an uprising ...

If that is so – and undoubtedly it is – the conclusion to be drawn is also clear: “Soviets” and similar mass institutions are in themselves insufficient for organising an uprising. They are necessary for welding the masses together, for creating unity in the struggle, for handing on the party slogans (or slogans advanced by agreement between parties) of political leadership, for awakening the interests of the masses, for rousing and attracting them. But they are not sufficient for organising the immediate fighting force, for organising an uprising in the narrowest sense of the word.

(...) It is useful to compare Lenin’s clear formulation with an analysis of the lessons of 1905 by Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky. Rosa Luxemburg, participant in the 1905 Revolution, in her magnificent book The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, does not mention the soviet at all. Not until 1918 did she appreciate its role as a form of workers’ government.

chapters 1-5, "lenin: building the party"

The uneven development of different aspects of the struggle made it necessary always to look for the key link in every concrete situation. When this was the need for study, for laying the foundations of the first Marxist circles, Lenin stressed the central role of study. In the next stage, when the need was to overcome circle mentality, he would repeat again and again the importance of industrial agitation. At the next turn of the struggle, when “economism” needed to be smashed, Lenin did this with a vengeance. He always made the task of the day quite clear, repeating what was necessary ad infinitum in the plainest, heaviest, most single-minded hammer-blow pronouncements. Afterwards, he would regain his balance, straighten the stick, then bend it again in another direction. If this method has advantages in overcoming current obstacles, it also contains hazards for anyone wanting to use Lenin’s writing on tactical and organisational questions as a source for quotation. Authority by quotation is nowhere less justified than in the case of Lenin. If he is cited on any tactical or organisational question, the concrete issues that the movement was facing at the time must be made absolutely clear.

(...)How could the endorsement of this dictatorship be reconciled with the demand for a democratic republic? One of the delegates, Posadovsky, asked the Congress whether the party ought to subordinate its future policy to this or that basic democratic principle, as having an absolute value, or “must all democratic principles be subordinated exclusively to the interests of the party?” Plekhanov gave a clear and decisive answer:

Every democratic principle must be considered not by itself, abstractly, but in relation to that which may be called the fundamental principle of democracy, namely salus populi suprema lex. Translated into the language of the revolutionist, this means that the success of the revolution is the highest law. And if the success of the revolution demanded a temporary limitation on the working of this or that democratic principle, then it would be criminal to refrain from such a limitation. As my own personal opinion, I will say that even the principle of universal suffrage must be considered from the point of view of what I have designated the fundamental principle of democracy. It is hypothetically possible that we, the Social Democrats’ might speak out against universal suffrage. The bourgeoisie of the Italian republics once deprived persons belonging to the nobility of political rights. The revolutionary proletariat might limit the political rights of the higher classes just as the higher classes once limited their political rights. One can judge of the suitability of such measures only on the basis of the rule: salus revolutiae suprema lex.

And we must take the same position on the question of the duration of parliaments. If in a burst of revolutionary enthusiasm the people chose a very fine parliament – a kind of chambre introuvable – then we would be bound to try to make of it a long parliament; and if the elections turned out unsuccessfully, then we would have to try to disperse it not in two years but if possible in two weeks.

Plekhanov’s statement precisely described the actual policies of the Bolsheviks, especially in 1917; he lived to bitterly regret his own words. Martov, who by the time the Congress ended had become Lenin’s opponent, did not at this stage disagree with Plekhanov’s statement regarding the dictatorship of the proletariat. However, his definition was much less extreme. A few weeks later, in a report on the Congress to the League Congress of Russian Social Democrats Abroad, Martov tried to “defend” Plekhanov by toning down his statement: “These words [Plekhanov’s] aroused the indignation of some of the delegates; this could easily have been avoided if Comrade Plekhanov had added that it was of course impossible to imagine so tragic a situation as that the proletariat, in order to consolidate its victory, should have to trample on such political rights as freedom of the press. (Plekhanov: “Merci.”)”

(...) How could Martov and Trotsky, who wholeheartedly supported Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?, which proposed that absolute authority should be given to the Central Committee of the party, reject Lenin’s definition of party membership? To combine a strong centralist leadership with loose membership was eclecticism taken to an extreme.

The harsh necessity for democratic centralism within the revolutionary working-class party is derived from the harsh imperatives of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Martov and Trotsky balked at this. Moreover, the leadership of a revolutionary party must provide the highest example of devotion and complete identification with the party in its daily life. This gives it the moral authority to demand the maximum sacrifice from the rank and file. Years earlier, Engels, in arguing against the anarchists, had said that the proletarian revolution demanded a very strong discipline, a strong authority.

Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, all of which are highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. [23]

Thus the revolutionary party cannot avoid making strong demands for sacrifice and discipline from its own members. Martov’s definition of party membership fitted the weakness of his conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

(...) In his 230-page review of the 1903 Congress and its aftermath, called One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (written February–May 1904), he says that to “the individualism of the intellectual, which already manifested itself in the controversy over Paragraph 1, revealing its tendency to opportunist argument and anarchistic phrase-mongering, all proletarian organisation and discipline seems to be serfdom.” [50]

He quotes a letter written to Iskra (now a Menshevik paper), which denounced him for visualising the party as “an immense factory” headed by a director in the shape of the Central Committee. Lenin’s comment is that the writer

never guesses that this dreadful word of his immediately betrays the mentality of the bourgeois intellectual unfamiliar with either the practice or the theory of proletarian organisation. For the factory, which seems only a bogey to some, represents that highest form of capitalist co-operation which has united and disciplined the proletariat, taught it to organise, and placed it at the head of all the other sections of the toiling and exploited population. And Marxism, the ideology of the proletariat trained by capitalism, has been and is teaching unstable intellectuals to distinguish between the factory as a means of exploitation (discipline based on fear of starvation) and the factory as a means of a technically highly developed form of production. The discipline and organisation which come so hard to the bourgeois intellectual are very easily acquired by the proletariat just because of this factory “schooling.” [51]

(...) In tsarist Russia, the differentiation between consistent revolutionaries, centrists, and reformists was impeded by the autocratic regime itself. In Western Europe, the most moderate elements of the labour movement were frankly describing themselves as reformists. But under the tsarist regime, even the most moderate of socialists could not constitute themselves into a party of reform. The “parliamentary road to socialism” could not attract where parliament did not exist. A semi-parliament at least was needed – the Tsarist Duma of later years – for a parliamentary cretinism to raise its head. Nobody in the Russian socialist movement in 1903 openly unfurled the banner of reformism.

(...) The difference between the concept of centralism expressed in What Is to Be Done? or Letter to a Comrade on our Organisational Tasks, and the reality among the Bolsheviks in 1904 and 1905 is remarkable! There was a total cleavage between the ideal of a coherent, efficient party structure as visualised in Lenin’s writings, and the ramshackle party organisation that existed. Lenin had to strive with all the power at his command, to build up an organisation independent of and in opposition to the Mensheviks, and to create a party machine. He was so absorbed in the struggle against the Mensheviks that, incredible as it may seem, during the whole of the year 1904, there are only three references in his writings to the Russo-Japanese war. The overwhelming dominant theme is the split with the Mensheviks. A whole volume of his Collected Works, one of the stoutest, is all but filled with his writings on the Congress and the split, written in the most polemical, hard and irritable fashion. Was it not madness to concentrate on building a party machine while an earthquake was shaking the state? But Lenin was not one to deviate from a decision arrived at centrally.

(...) Unlike Marx and Engels, who lived in a period of expanding capitalism and hence did not emphasise party organisation, the immediacy of revolution for Lenin meant that party organisation was of cardinal importance. He could never have written, as Marx did to Engels on February 11, 1851:

I am much pleased with the public and authentic isolation in which we now find ourselves, you and I. It perfectly corresponds to our principles and our position. The system of reciprocal concessions, of half-measures tolerated only in order to keep up appearances, and obligation to share in public with all these asses in the general absurdity of the party – all that is done with now.

Nor could he have replied to Marx as Engels did on February 12, 1851:

We now have a chance again at last ... to show that we need no popularity, no support from any party whatsoever ... From now on we are responsible only to ourselves, and when the moment comes that these gentlemen need us, we shall be in a situation to be able to dictate our own terms. Till then we shall at least have peace. To tell the truth, even a certain loneliness ... How can people like us, who avoid official positions like the plague, ever find ourselves at home in a “party”? ... The principal thing for the moment is: some way of getting our ideas into print ... What will all the gossip and scandal mean which the whole émigré pack may circulate against you, once you answer them with your political economy?

(...) To a person standing on the sidelines – even to many of those involved – 1903–04 was a period of squabbles, interminable discussions, splits between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, argument, and splits inside the Bolshevik faction itself – at a time when Russia was on the eve of a revolution. Trotsky at that time considered Lenin’s factionalism to be sheer lunacy. In a pamphlet written in April 1904, he states: “Just at a time when history has placed before us the enormous task of cutting the knot of world reaction, Russian Social Democrats do not seem to care for anything except a petty internal struggle.” What a “heartrending tragedy” this was, and what a “nightmarish atmosphere” it created; “almost everybody was aware of the criminal character of the split.”

My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing. American universities are exemplary here: they are less racist and sexist than they were 40 years ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for the other: when you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity. The neoliberal heart leaps up at the sound of glass ceilings shattering and at the sight of doctors, lawyers and professors of colour taking their place in the upper middle class. Whence the many corporations which pursue diversity almost as enthusiastically as they pursue profits, and proclaim over and over again not only that the two are compatible but that they have a causal connection – that diversity is good for business. But a diversified elite is not made any the less elite by its diversity and, as a response to the demand for equality, far from being left-wing politics, it is right-wing politics.

Brenner makes two serious errors. He does not pay attention to class struggle outside of northern Europe. And he does not notice that what was happening in the non-European world after 1492 was class-based commodity production, not merely "commerce." Euro-Marxism no longer needs Brenner's theory, because Euro-Marxism no longer worries much about the Third World. Euro-Marxism is not entirely sure that the Third World exists (Harris, 1986; Young, 1990). It is not entirely sure that anything exists.

Of course this is nonsense. The overwhelming majority of Americans, along with the overwhelming majority of Haitians and Hondurans, would be absolutely delighted if Haitian and Honduran workers producing clothes for the U.S. market would be paid more. Labor costs are a small fraction of the prices that consumers face. Wages are so low because that yields even more profits for those who already have more money than they can ever spend; the low wage floor is being determined by government policy in Washington, Haiti, Honduras, and elsewhere, not by the desires of consumers. No magic formula of economics determines the minimum wage that can be sustained in Haiti and Honduras. At the margin - whether the minimum wage shall be $3 a day or $5 a day in the export sector in Haiti - it is determined politically. If you say that the leverage of the U.S. consumer market should be used to support higher wages for poor workers in poor countries, rather than the opposite, you're likely to be told that this is not allowed. This leverage has been allocated to something else. The power of the U.S. market can only be used for things like forcing developing countries to enforce the patents, trademarks, and copyrights of U.S. pharmaceutical companies, software companies, and Hollywood.

With more than 150,000 inmates, the California prison system is one of the most crowded in the nation, with many of its facilities holding more than double the number of inmates they were designed for. A federal three-judge panel ruled last week that crowding and poor health care caused one avoidable inmate death each week and that the system was “impossible to manage.”

"[The meeting comes] even though the US three years ago sanctioned the toppling of an administration led by Sheikh Sharif Ahmed himself. It just shows you the desperation. This is the man the United States just a few years ago declared to be a terrorist."

These numbers can be benchmarked to enrollment in regular schools. Public schools run by the government enrolled between 16 and 17 million children in 1998 (Census of Pakistan, 1998); private schools enrolled almost one-third as many, at 6 million in 2000 (Federal Bureau of Statistics, Survey of Private Educational Institutes in Pakistan, 2000). As a percentage of children between the ages of 5 and 19, government schools accounted for 33 percent and private schools for another 12 percent. Again, since roughly one-half of all children between the ages of 5 and 19 are enrolled in school, as a percentage of enrollments these numbers approximately double to 73 percent and 26 percent. This comparison suggests that there are 38 times as many children in private and 104 times as many in government schools compared to madrassas.

(...)Our governments have chosen, over decades, to allow a strange system for developing medicines to build up. Most of the work carried out by scientists to bring a drug to your local pharmacist - and into your lungs, or stomach, or bowels - is done in government-funded university labs, paid for by your taxes. Drug companies usually come in late in the process of development, and pay for part of the expensive, but largely uncreative final stages, like buying some of the chemicals and trials that are needed. In return, then they own the exclusive rights to manufacture and profit from the resulting medicine for years. Nobody else can make it.
(...)But a detailed study by Dr Marcia Angell, the former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, says that only 14 per cent of their budgets go on developing drugs - usually at the uncreative final part of the drug-trail. The rest goes on marketing and profits. And even with that puny 14 per cent, drug companies squander a fortune developing "me-too" drugs - medicines that do exactly the same job as a drug that already exists, but has one molecule different, so they can take out a new patent, and receive another avalanche of profits.

French politicians spoke about their “civilising mission” in Algeria. This was a monstrous lie. In 1834 a French general reported that virtually all the native population could read and write, with schools for boys and girls in each village. A century later only a quarter of the Muslim population could read Arabic. Less than one in ten could read French.
(...) [Setif:] But now the settlers wanted to assert their power. Large numbers of troops were brought in, including Senegalese soldiers, who unfortunately did not make common cause with the local population... Probably at least 15,000 died, though some claim as many as 50,000. Even on the lowest estimate, the Europeans killed 50 Muslims for every European life lost.

"damming the flood: haiti, aristide, and the politics of containment," peter hallward


take-home: primarily, the book is a thoroughly convincing chronicle of the savage, imperial war waged by haiti's comprador elites (and their foreign backers in the US, France, Canada, and the UN) against the haitian people. much of the narrative centers on the person of jean-bertrand aristide--but as aristide himself insists in the interview first published in the LRB and reproduced in the back of the book, this framing of the destabilization campaign(s)--the marketing of the interventions as "humanitarian" and "popular" and directed surgically against only his person--serve to deflect attention from the real issues at-hand: namely, the indisputable fact that this campaign sought to protect, primarily, the thoroughly corrupt morphology of haitian society. it was an expression of the tragic power wielded by the landed elite and their bourgeois comrades-in-arms, arrayed as it was against the simple popularity and resounding base of lavalas ("the flood").

naturally, for a narrative as unfamiliar to the mainstream as this one, much of what hallward writes is deconstructive--his primary task is to expose the well-worn narratives of the coup-makers, according to which aristide embodies exactly what he and his movement have spent their political lives fighting (illegitimate authority, unjustifiable violence, and so on). here, i suppose, it is appropriate to note the critical reviews of hallward's book, which argue he has been too kind to aristide. but his critic (i speak here of the deibert review), let's be honest, has missed the point: hallward's book is not a "defense" of the aristide regime, insofar as defense requires deification (as deibert seems to believe--hence his logic that the several crimes committed by pro-aristide groups put aristide beyond redemption) . rather, it is an attempt to understand the ways in which this indisputably popular movement (was) collapsed. this is where hallward is triumphant, in my estimation.

his argument, approximately, is that we cannot make sense of the scandalous history told here unless we appreciate these few facts: (a) aristide and lavalas were overhwelmingly popular, as proved by the results of the 1990, 1996, 2000 (2x), and 2006 elections; (b) aristide and lavalas were constrained by the political and economic exigencies of the age (haiti's dependence on foreign aid for its budget, the 1994 compromise with clinton, the "impossibility" of fighting the elite on their own terms (i.e., violently and with weapons); (c) aristide, though linked to the violence in slums (which hallward rightly, against deibert's myopia, insists on contextualizing and politicizing), was far, far, far less repressive/violent than the regimes that preceded or succeeded him, or the "opposition" that "resisted" him; (d) aristide, qua radical theologian of liberation and leader of lavalas, was an uncompromising threat to the privileges of the haitian and international elite.

all of this, it needs repeating, is backed by copious statistics, research, and analysis. it is somewhat ironic that deibert's review targets precisely this element of hallward's book, given that deibert's central rebuttal, weak as it is (in the review, at least; i have not read the book), is backed first and foremost by information gleaned from interviews he himself conducted. in general, deibert's principal charge that a voyeuristic and naive hallward interviewed only aristide partisans is patently false. they inform the narrative of the book, of course, but this only complements the research. after all, hallward's insistence on remaining political is critical, i would say; it is precisely his insistence on understanding aristide as an activist--with the critical sympathy borne of solidarity--that makes this book. deibert, it seems, instead takes refuge under the (surreptitiously political) umbrella of a-politics: at best, "they're all bad, everyone's violent, it's all a mess." at its worst, of course, this conscience is activated inconsistently (or, rather, when the Empire comes calling), thereby never becoming more than a hackneyed cover for reactionary politics.

in other words, hallward's insistence on foregrounding structural violence, the changing contours of this violence owing to the elite and imperial insistence on neo-liberal compromises and state under-funding, the political history of haiti's repressive arms--all this informs the discussion of aristide's relationship to the "chimeres", as it must. without it, one will invariably lose themselves in deibert's journalistic moralizing.

that is the crux, and it is highly invigorating reading. a few points of interest, beyond this, though:

(1) exculpation--as already alluded to, hallward tries to balance, in his book, the rightly political nature of his work (qua defense of aristide against Empire and Reaction) with the equally appropriate (and tactical) character of his disagreements with some of aristide's individual decisions. the fact that these criticisms are generally articulated through his interviews with lavalas' activists adds a commendable layer of authenticity and honesty to his critique (though, against deibert, we have to insist that this is not, nor should it be, necessary). in particular, i think, aristide's 1994 decision to grant bill clinton his post-somalia "foreign policy victory" and return to haiti in a neoliberal straightjacket must be scrutinized--not, again, as a decision made by a power-hungry despot deserves to be decried, but rather as the tortured calculus of a comrade might be criticized. (in some sense, in the difference between these two attitudes, i think, lies everything worth fighting for--as soon as we abandon all attempts at making this distinction, it is over.) at some point in the book hallward mentions, through a FL activist, that it may have been better to prolong the democratic struggle than to return with clinton. this is important--though, again, simultaneously a decision that ought not to be pretentiously made by us, as readers, external to the struggle (again: hallward balances these twin necessities--of critique and of hostility to pretense--very, very well in the book).

(2) foreign conniving (USAID, UN, NGOs)--hallward, too, is tireless in his attempt to expose today's civilizing mission ("democracy promotion"). we are obligated, as everyone but the fools these days understands, to reject a priori the Empire and its military tentacles--to remain forever opposed to "hard power." but the theoretically-sophisticated and empirically-rich rebuttal of "soft power", here, is very valuable for reasons sometimes (though not very often, i guess) forgotten. it was, in haiti, this that stands out: (a) the all-too-obvious ways in which the ambitions and agenda of "soft power" are always constituted by "hard power"--it was the agenda and priorities of the US government that USAID and these NGOs towed; (b) the theoretical bankruptcy of "soft power," itself, when counterposed to the overwhelmingly popular force being deemed anti-democratic (here, again, we have the people--in whose name this treachery is being conducted--stripped of their subjectivity in order to be cast as objects fit for intervention and re-education).

as a critique reproduced by hallward emphasized, the bourgeois civil society "trained" and "constituted" by this bevy of NGOs is aristocratic, in form and inspiration. this comprador elite mobilize to tame politics precisely when their world is called into question. they then discover "democracy" and "human rights" and "student movements." "democracy promotion," as hallward argues, therefore represents the calling card of those who can afford to have discovered politics only once they're challenged by the consequences of its genuine flourishing. and the democracy promoters they enlist, of course, are precisely those who live off of politics, without living in it.

(3) reparations--the stunningly bankrupt story behind aristide's failed call for reparations needs to be made more widely known. in 1825, in order to lift the crippling blockade imposed on the newly free colony, haiti paid france 150 million francs (equivalent to france's annual revenue at the time; later the indemnity was reduced, generously, to 90 million ) as punishment for having freed itself. aristide, once it was clear that the international community was intent on suffocating his government by denying him aid, made this the rallying point of the bicentennial celebrations in 2004. haiti calculated that it was owed $21 billion dollars, give or take (at 5% interest). regis debray(!) headed the "commission on reflection" that recommended, to chirac, that they were NOT obligated to pay haiti back. hasta la victoria siempre, regis? (credit where credit is due: paul farmer delivered a brilliant speech to this committee, urging them to fork it out)

(4) populism, popularity, and the Party--hallward's correct insistence on the unremitting popularity of aristide does raise the spectre of populism. but perhaps it's sufficient to defer to his parallel observations about the strength of the people's self-organization, which is perhaps what defines the distinction between genuine and false popularity. after all, as laclau probably suggested in that book i never read, invoking the label of populism is as good (or rather, as bad) as calling the people stupid--and invariably tells us more about the sectarian doing the labeling, than the people. (the next step, of course, is to run off and become a hitchens or horowitz.)

more importantly, i'd argue, aristide raises some critical points about the party and "discipline," in the concluding interview. it is striking, in particular, to note the way in which he insists on the spontaneous, decentralized origins without presenting them as antithetical to the goal of "internal discipline" that he later introduces. it was refreshing to hear this--namely, that someone with years of experience with a genuinely popular politics understands, still, that we need not counterpose self-emancipation to discipline. in this fine balance, i think, lies our salvation.

(5) hope--only a direct quote will do:

[ARISTIDE:] No, I'm not discouraged. You teach philosophy, so let me couch my answer in philosophical terms. You know that we can think the category of being either in terms of potential or act, en puissance or en acte. This is a familiar Aristotelian distinction: being can be potential or actual. So long as it remains potential, you cannot touch it or confirm it. But it is, nonetheless, it exists. The collective consciousness of the Haitian people, their mobilization for democracy, these things may not have been fully actualized but they exist, they are real. This is what sustains me. I am sustained by this collective potential, the power of this collective potential being. This power has not yet been actualized, it has not yet been enacted in the building of enough schools, of more hospitals, more opportunities, but these things will come. The power is real and it is what animates the way forward.

for future reference, an abridged timeline (see page 155 for statistics on violence):

1915-1934: US invasion and occupation of Haiti; moulding of the army to serve imperial and elite interests.

1957-1971: Papa Doc / 1971-1986: Baby Doc (--> together, an estimated 50,000 Haitians were killed by the Duvaliers.)

1986-1990: Baby Doc deposed, Haiti ruled by the ruthless General Henry Namphy and then Prosper Avril. Elections postponed, but finally happen in 1990. (an estimated 700 to 1,000 were killed dead under Namphy/Avril).

December 1990-September 1991: Aristide elected with 67% of the vote. Rules till coup.

September 1991-September/October 1994: Brutal rule of Cedras and soon the infamous FRAPH (4,000 killed under Cedras).

October 1994-February 1996: Aristide finishes term. In December 1995, Rene Preval is elected with 88% of the vote (with Aristide's blessing).

February 1996-May/November 2000: Preval in power; Aristide, meanwhile, has formed Fanmi Lavalas, which wins landslide victories in the legislative/local elections in May (disputed, but Hallward exposes this propaganda) and then the presidential elections in November (92%).

February 2001-February 2004: Aristide rules in the face of mounting opposition from elite opposition groups (G184 and Convergence Democratique) and an "insurgency" of ex-army officers (begins in February 2004 in Gonaives). Destablization hurts, but doesn't do the trick. In sweep the US and French usurpers. (at most, Hallward says, human rights organizatons have pinned 30 political killings on the PNH and/or pro-Lavalas groups; he writes in great detail, also, about the individual massacres they have (mis)reported. as always, the devil is in the context).

March 2004-February 2006: Gerard Latortue appointed prime minister (in absurd move demonstrating the "democracy" being promoted, US ambassador stands in for the non-existent legislative branch and approves his appointment.) Thoroughly brutal rule, complemented by roving, vengeful paramilitaries (in the form of police and ex-army) and an unforgiving, corrupted occupation by the UN. (at least 3,000 killed under Latortue and the UN mission)

February 2006-: The people will not be vanquished. Preval wins an overwhelming majority, reduced to 51% by widespread, acknowledged voter fraud. But Aristide still in exile.

I practiced liberalism as an ideological method that respects private property, private investment, and respects public freedoms. I turned—I went to a social liberalism, a pro-socialist liberalism, so that the economy benefits the people and not just the economic elites. And this irritated the economic elites. They thought it was dangerous for me to organize the social sectors, and they planned the coup d’état.

The damage may be just beginning. In 2005 Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, citing surging markets in food and biofuels, urged the country to increase palm production from 750,000 acres to 15 million acres--an area the size of West Virginia. Critics point out that many of the new palm growing regions exhibit patterns of narco-trafficking and paramilitary violence similar to that in Chocó, including massacres and forced displacement. A report by the international organization Human Rights Everywhere found violent crimes related to palm cultivation in five separate regions--all of which fall within Uribe's initiative. Almost all of these regions have also been targeted for palm cultivation support by USAID.
(...) Oil palm, or African palm, is one of the few aid-funded crops whose profits can match coca profits. Since 2003 USAID's alternative development contracts have provided nearly $20 million to oil palm agribusiness projects across the country. Almost half the palm oil produced in Colombia is exported each year--mostly to Europe but also to the United States. The government now has its sights on the stalled US-Colombia free trade agreement, whose passage by Congress--seen as likely, with President Obama's explicit support--would allow Colombian palm oil to enter US markets duty-free. Although the oil finds its way into various US food imports, Colombia is banking on the burgeoning market for biofuels.
(...) In October 1996 the paras had a macabre coming-out party in Chocó, with the murder of eight campesinos in the tiny town of Brisas on the Curvaradó River, an hour's walk from Petro's farm. What followed was a crescendo of terror locals simply call la violencia. In February 1997 the military, backed that year by $87 million in US support, teamed up with its "sixth division" to hammer northern Chocó. Army helicopters and fighter jets rained bombs and high-caliber gunfire on the jungle communities, while the paras "cleaned up" behind them. Military and paramilitary roadblocks cropped up everywhere. International human rights groups documented massacres, torture, murders and rapes. Paramilitaries capped off the year by slaughtering thirty-one campesinos a week before Christmas.
(...) "They said they came here to clean out the guerrillas," recalls Petro, "but it was us, the campesinos, they cleaned out." In interviews, several survivors tell me that when the violence began, paras came to their farms with the same chilling offer: "Sell us your land, or we'll negotiate with your widow."
(...) In January 2003, ARD began administering $41.5 million for USAID's Colombia Agribusiness Partnership Program (CAPP). Urapalma was one of the first palm companies to send an application; the Macaco-linked Coproagrosur received its $161,000 grant the following year (a third of which was returned, unspent). ARD's quarterly reports show that Urapalma requested $700,000 in financing to cover the planting of palm on some 5,000 acres in Urabá--the epicenter of stolen land. The grant application began working its way through ARD's process.
(...) The investigation files include an affidavit by Pedro Camilo Torres, a former Urapalma employee who from 1999 to 2007 handled the company's loan applications, including the USAID grant proposal. His affidavit charges that Urapalma created campesino "front" organizations to secure phony land titles and gain access to public funds.