The author Milán Kundera wrote that the struggle of human beings against power is, in some important sense, the struggle of memory against forgetting.
As long as I can remember -- and here my memory is admittedly frayed at the edges and tattered like old antiwar posters peeling from the bombed out brick walls of another era -- the policies of our radical political movements and organizations have always involved a soupy, steamy stew of "pure" political analysis mixed with under-recognized sexual jealousies and tawdry intrigue.Nor is this only the "inconvenient truth" of anarchist movements. We can go back to V.I. Lenin's ultimate decisions with regard to the battles between Stalin and Trotsky for control of the Bolshevik Party. The last straw for Lenin in this regard, after the thousand-and-one political analyses, the murderous reports, the debates over "permanent revolution," "new economic policy," and the like, was that Stalin was viciously rude in his dealings with Krupskaya (Lenin's wife). Indeed he was, to put it mildly. And that entered into and became a defining moment in Lenin's calculation near the end of his life of who should lead the revolutionary party in Russia after Lenin's death.
We can go further back to the relationship between Marx and Engels, and their lovers and spouses. Engels was deeply influenced -- in a very good and historically significant way -- by the Irish nationalist and feminist Mary Burns, with whom he lived and loved (but without getting married) for many years, and then by her sister, Lizzie, with whom he became lovers after Mary died (and probably lusting after her all those years). Upon Mary's death, a distraught Frederick Engels wrote to his buddy Karl, who could only sickeningly respond with, "Oh, sorry to hear that .... hey, could you loan me a few bucks, I'm broke again and my family is starving," or something close to that.
And this after Karl acquiesced to his wife Jenny's banning of Engels and Mary from their house because Fred and Mary were "living in sin" or somesuch nonsense -- even though Engels was paying for the destitute Marx family's upkeep. (We won't even get into here Karl's longtime "secret" affair with the Marx family's live-in housekeeper, Helene Demuth (Lenchen) -- where's the honesty, Karl? -- with whom he had a child. Good old Fred "took responsibility" for the scandal for a while to try to save Karl's reputation, but it turned out to be hopeless. The baby, Freddy Demuth, might have even been named after Engels.)
Or we can go even further back -- nearing the edges of Memory (why be bound by the corporeal limits of one's brain?) -- to Menelaus and Agamemnon, and Helen of Troy (the daughter of Leda and the Swan, who was actually Zeus during a state of metamorphosis); Helen's face was said to "have launched a thousand ships", and it is she for whom the Hellenic tradition is named (which will play into part of the story below).
Yes, Memory has long fingers, a strange way of squirming through ancient dust.
And yet there are those who want us to believe -- and who have probably convinced themselves of this delusion -- that sexuality has no bearing on history or on the actions of rational people (as though the non-rational is something to be shunned by leftists or at least transcended).
One of the most important writings from inside our movements exposing how irrationality, sexuality, and repression of one's sexuality have influenced radical political movements is Maurice Brinton's "The Irrationality In Politics", first published in 1970. Often paired with Wilhelm Reich's classic essay "What Is Class Consciousness?" (and I'd also add Sheila Rowbotham's "Woman's Consciousness, Man's World"), Brinton's introduction sums up his small booklet nicely:
"This pamphlet is an attempt to analyze the various mechanisms whereby modern society manipulates its wage (and house) slaves into accepting their slavery and -- at least in the short term -- seems to succeed. It does not deal with "police" and "jails" as ordinarily conceived but with those internalized patterns of repression and coercion, and with those intellectual prisons in which the "mass individual" is today entrapped."Lest one think the history around this to be yes, racy, but also terribly arcane stuff, I call your attention to a very serious debate occurring RIGHT NOW on the Cyprus IndyMedia website where our radical leftist friends in the little but very important country of Cyprus are attempting to untangle the many sexual and analytical threads involved in certain political positions and attacks that impact on our movements today.
Their overview is enlightening -- and it is also painful (for me) to read, as it calls up so much of our own history in the Left in the United States in the 1970s and '80s. In Cyprus a self-described Left party, AKEL, runs the government. And that government is imposing a "solution" to the bifurcation of Cyprus that relies on outside and regional imperialist forces to keep the ethnic separation between Turkish and Greek Cypriots in place.
Cyprus is a place where what small parties say and do, matter. Thus, when popular rebellions have been occurring all over Europe (and especially, for the purposes of this essay, in Greece), Cyprus IndyMedia correctly opposed the actions of those whom Lenin would disparagingly call "Left-Wing Communists" and "adventurists" for their calls to "burn down the City." (Strange, I've been called those things myself on numerous occasions so I am usually sympathetic to those labeled as such. But not in this case.)
Now, it turns out, that some of those infantile sloganistas are exposed in Cyprus Indymedia for whose interests they serve, and not only in the abstract or ideological sense. Who is paying them? What positions do they take with regard to Cyprus' suppression of "inferior" nationalities and ethnicities? How do the political positions of Left-wing groups (and I'd add rightwing and ALL groups) have at their base a very personal and often concealed sexual/psychological component?
Here the details are necessary -- but they are also excruciating. Excruciating because they are so familiar (witness similar escapades with regard to the Green Party of Mexico a decade ago, for example) and because they are so seemingy intractable, imbedded in our collective unconscious such that they keep occurring over and over and over again in each round of rebellion.
One would hope that, I suppose, there is something to be learned each time we are forced to "reinvent the wheel". Otherwise, it is all so hopeless.
On that note I am excited to read how Cyprus Indymedia is addressing these matters, and is willing to overturn iconic stones to get to some truth -- which, in Cyprus, will indeed have impact on larger policies. That is a valuable enterprise in itself; and it is also important because their decisions will affect policies, social forces and even wars involving Europe and the United States. The issues they're dealing with within the Cypriot Left will influence and help shape what we in the real Left will be doing here, in the next few years over which the next wars will be fought ... and our ability (or lack thereof) to resist them.
I write in appreciation of the important work of our friends at Cyprus Indymedia against fascists and stalinists (sometimes masquerading, temporarily, as leftists).
Another Collective Response by Cyprus IndyMedia to New AccusationsMitchel Cohen
http://cyprusindymedia.blogspot.com/2011/01/another-collective-response-by-cyprus.html
Brooklyn Greens / Green Party
About the Author:
Mitchel Cohen is an organizer with the Brooklyn Greens/Green Party, and currently serves as Chair of the WBAI radio station (99.5 FM in NY) Local Station Board (affiliation mentioned for ID purposes only).
He is also the host of the regular radio show titled:
"Steal this Radio"
http://www.nytalkradio.net/moreinfo/moreinfostealthisradio.html
Mitchel Cohen was a member of the Students for a Democratic Society and co-founded the Red Balloon Collective and its "poetry conspiracy" at SUNY Stony Brook in 1969, under whose imprint he continues to publish a variety of political pamphlets and poetry books. He was thrown in jail for antiwar actions during the Vietnam war and throughout the decades has been arrested more than 50 times for his political work.
He is a member of the Brooklyn Greens / Green Party. He is also one of the founding organizers and coordinator of the No Spray Coalition. The No Spray Coalition fights against the indiscriminate spraying of toxic pesticides on communities.
Mitchel Cohen lives in "The People's Republic of Brooklyn," and for many years made his living (such as it is) selling his poems in the subways. He was one of the "Liberty Bell 7", arrested for demanding freedom for political prisoners Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier. He works with the group Recycle This! and NY State Against Genetic Engineering, and co-edits "G", the newspaper of the NY State Greens/Green Party of New York.
His recent book of poetry titled The Permanent Carnival Poems can be had here:
http://www.rawfoodinfo.com/catalog/books_thePermanentcarnival.html
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Related:
The Collective Responses by Cyprus IndyMedia and the various Statements of Support that it has received.
They are here: http://cyprus.indymedia.org/
and here:
http://cyprusindymedia.org/
A. From the Collective:
1.
Cyprus IndyMedia Collective Responds to Accusations from Athens and Patra IndyMedia
http://cyprusindymedia.blogspot.com/2011/01/cyprus-indymedia-collective-responds-to.html
2.
Another Collective Response by Cyprus IndyMedia to New Accusations
http://cyprusindymedia.blogspot.com/2011/01/another-collective-response-by-cyprus.html
B. Statements of Support:
1.
Regarding the attack against Cyprus Indymedia by the para-state apparatus
by the Efylakas Editorial Team
http://cyprusindymedia.blogspot.com/2011/01/regarding-attack-against-cyprus.html
2.
A Comrade from Turkey Speaks Out
by Barkın Karslı, comrade from Turkey
http://cyprusindymedia.blogspot.com/2011/01/comrade-from-turkey-speaks-out.html
also at:
http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-europe/2011-January/0116-fc.html
3.
Cyprus Indymedia: The struggle of memory against forgetting
by Mitchel Cohen, Green Party/ Brooklyn Greens, Red Balloon Collective, No Spray Coalition
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/greensabroad/message/739
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