tag:theconversation.com,2011:/ca/topics/leon-trotsky-24239/articlesLeon Trotsky – The Conversation2020-11-16T14:58:20Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1501822020-11-16T14:58:20Z2020-11-16T14:58:20ZSouth Africa’s auditor-general Kimi Makwetu: an exceptional and true civil servant<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369545/original/file-20201116-15-1ka8iwl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The late Kimi Makwetu was mortified by the extent of corruption. </span> </figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.agsa.co.za/AboutUs/TheAuditor-General.aspx">Kimi Makwetu</a>, who passed away on 11 November 2020 after a battle with lung cancer, was the quintessential civil servant who took his job as South Africa’s auditor-general seriously and threw every sinew of his being into it.</p>
<p>I knew Kimi since our student days at the University of Cape Town in the late 1980s. Three months ago, I had an online conversation with him as part of a distinguished speaker series run by the <a href="https://www.wbs.ac.za/">Wits Business School</a>. The conversation dwelt on his personal and career journeys. This tribute to him and his leadership legacy draws on our conversation and on personal reminiscences of our interactions over the past three decades.</p>
<p>Born and bred in the <a href="https://businesstech.co.za/news/trending/132269/these-are-the-biggest-townships-in-south-africa/">township</a> of <a href="https://www.capetown.travel/gugulethu-the-official-guide/">Gugulethu</a> in Cape Town, Kimi was the middle of five children.</p>
<p>He was raised by hardworking and politically conscious parents. He was strongly influenced by his mother Maureen Makwetu, an entrepreneur who hawked meat she sourced from the municipal abattoir in Maitland to “African migrants” who were hostel dwellers, mainly from the Eastern Cape. She entrusted Kimi with looking after the finances of the family business. This planted a seed in him and nurtured his lifelong interest in finance. </p>
<p>He jokingly noted that his mother chose him to handle the business finances because she trusted him, as his middle name Thembekile (<a href="https://wits-za.zoom.us/rec/share/9MxrD5qtr2ZJXJHu2Fvxa5ElP6LZX6a82nccr_NenUjEONQ1587eLYUrc7JsXlgD">“the one who can be trusted”</a>) attested.</p>
<p>Kimi was exposed early on in life to the ravages of the apartheid system. His experience of apartheid, in particular, was shaped by the iniquitous <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/pass-laws-south-africa-1800-1994">pass laws</a> and <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/archive-files2/rejul87.5.pdf">“influx control” measures</a> that regulated black lives, especially people’s movements. From childhood, his commitment to political freedom and social justice was deep-seated.</p>
<h2>Education and political activism</h2>
<p>Having attended local schools in Gugulethu – Songezo, Luzuko and Fezeka – Kimi moved to St John’s College in the Eastern Cape in 1982. Established by Anglican Church bishops <a href="http://home.intekom.com/stjohns/history.html">in 1879</a>, St John’s represented a formative experience for him and influenced his worldview. The school enjoyed a reputation for excellence in natural sciences and it was there that Kimi developed a love for mathematics and science. Above all, St John’s instilled a rigorous sense of self-discipline that served him well in subsequent years.</p>
<p>After St John’s Kimi went to study at the University of Cape Town. It was during this time that I first met him. This was during orientation week in 1989. I was browsing through various sets of political literature at the orientation stalls on the upper campus. </p>
<p>He came up behind me, looked at a pamphlet I was reading and voiced disapproval. I was taken aback, as I did not know him and could not understand why he objected to me reading the pamphlet. It dawned upon me later that his action was not unrelated to the raging battles among student organisations then for the “ideological soul” of the university.</p>
<p>During the 1980s, the place was a hotbed of political ferment, derisively described as <a href="https://www.uct.ac.za/main/about/history">“Moscow on the Hill”</a>. It was a theatre of sharp ideological contestations, pitting student political formations aligned to the African National Congress against those affiliated to other liberation movements and organisations, such as the <a href="https://pac.org.za/about-us/">Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania</a> and <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/azanian-peoples-organization-azapo">Azanian People’s Organisation</a>. There were also other stridently assertive political voices such as the <a href="https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv02424/04lv02730/05lv03188/06lv03213.htm">New Unity Movement</a>, as well as those representing an assortment of <a href="https://www.bl.uk/people/leon-trotsky">Trotskyist</a> ideological currents.</p>
<p>Kimi was one of the leading lights within the student movement, alongside other stalwarts who would later occupy senior leadership positions in successive post-apartheid governments. Kimi held leadership roles in the Black Students Society, South African National Students Congress and South African Tertiary Institutions Sports Council.</p>
<p>Amid the growing influx of working-class black students, the University of Cape Town was constantly convulsed by protests against academic and financial exclusions, accommodation shortages and institutional cultural problems. During these tumultuous times, Kimi always led from the front, opining, counselling, guiding, cajoling and restraining. He was a member of numerous student delegations that met the university management, led then by Vice-Chancellor <a href="http://ucttrust.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Newsletter-2012.pdf">Dr Stuart Saunders</a>.</p>
<p>An ardent champion of non-racialism, he was <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/2-student-groups-merge-in-south-africa-blacks-win-campus-posts/">one of the leaders</a> who astutely steered the process of merging the predominantly black <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/south-african-national-students-congress-sansco">South African National Students Congress</a> and the mainly white <a href="https://www.aluka.org/struggles/collection/NUSAS">National Union of South African Students</a>. His political activism extended beyond the university campus and he was, among others, a prominent figure within the Cape Youth Congress.</p>
<h2>Professional career</h2>
<p>After he left university, Kimi took up positions in the corporate sector, including accounting firm Deloitte. It was at Deloitte that he completed his articles and sharpened his auditing skills, rising to the position of director in the firm’s forensic unit. His experience at Deloitte exposed him to multiple industries and companies. It also empowered him to understand complex financial statements.</p>
<p>Soon after being appointed auditor-general in 2006, <a href="https://www.agsa.co.za/MediaRoom/Previouscolumns/tabid/237/Author/5/Default.aspx">Terence Nombembe</a> approached Kimi and asked him to consider joining his office as his deputy. They had worked together for many years and had built a strong personal and professional rapport. Kimi joined the office in 2007. He cited public interest considerations as <a href="https://wits-za.zoom.us/rec/share/9MxrD5qtr2ZJXJHu2Fvxa5ElP6LZX6a82nccr_NenUjEONQ1587eLYUrc7JsXlgD">central to his decision</a>.</p>
<p>Kimi succeeded Nombembe as auditor-general in 2013. He did well to shape his role in ways that made him a visible champion of public accountability and probity. He also managed to cement the reputation of the office as a beacon of meritocracy and a training ground for ambitious and talented professionals who yearned to make a positive contribution to South Africa.</p>
<p>Although diplomatic in his <a href="https://www.agsa.co.za/Portals/0/Reports/PFMA/201819/MR/2019%20PFMA%20media%20release.pdf">public pronouncements</a>, he was privately mortified by the <a href="https://democracyworks.org.za/policy-brief-12-combating-corruption-in-south-africa/">pervasive corruption</a> that paralysed governance in the country. He was optimistic that the new powers granted to the office would yield positive results. These powers authorise the auditor-general to take remedial action against corruption, ensure that losses suffered by the state are recovered, and refer certain suspected irregularities <a href="https://www.agsa.co.za/Portals/0/AuditPerspectiveAGApril2019.pdf">for investigation</a>.</p>
<h2>Debt of gratitude</h2>
<p>Kimi was not oblivious to the dangers of his job and his audit staff were <a href="https://pmg.org.za/committee-meeting/27484/">frequently subjected to political intimidation</a>. He recalled how when he was installed as the deputy auditor-general he went to see his father, Vela Makwetu, to break the good news. To his surprise, his father was not overly excited. He warmly congratulated him but quickly <a href="https://wits-za.zoom.us/rec/share/9MxrD5qtr2ZJXJHu2Fvxa5ElP6LZX6a82nccr_NenUjEONQ1587eLYUrc7JsXlgD">cautioned that</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>when you get better at your job and improve on your disciplines others will feel threatened.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Kimi believed in the importance of strong leadership and in empowering his subordinates to do their work. He took pride in seeing young professionals rise through the ranks and attain a high degree of confidence and technical efficiency. Under his leadership, the stature of the office grew and the organisation produced an enviable talent pipeline. Key to his leadership success was his willingness to create a work environment that prized openness, discipline and engagement.</p>
<p>Kimi was an extraordinary South African. He embodied the values of integrity, selflessness, humility and hard work. He was an exceptional leader who served South Africa with distinction. He was also a fine gentleman with a witty and irreverent sense of humour. </p>
<p>The country owes him a massive debt of gratitude. He had just been <a href="https://www.sapeople.com/2020/11/06/outgoing-sa-auditor-general-joins-united-nations/">appointed</a> to the United Nations’ Independent Audit Advisory Committee. He was also due to receive the University of Cape Town President of Convocation Medal for 2019.</p>
<p><em>The author’s <a href="https://wits-za.zoom.us/rec/share/9MxrD5qtr2ZJXJHu2Fvxa5ElP6LZX6a82nccr_NenUjEONQ1587eLYUrc7JsXlgD"> online conversation</a> with Kimi Makwetu (access passcode: Xw0u.E&N)</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/150182/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mills Soko does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Kimi Makwetu embodied the values of integrity, selflessness, humility and hard work. He steadfastly believed in the South African constitution.Mills Soko, Professor: International Business & Strategy, Wits Business School, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1216702019-08-13T14:58:59Z2019-08-13T14:58:59ZRussian protests highlight how authorities crackdown on activists – by targeting their families<p>When <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/06/couple-face-losing-son-after-bringing-him-to-unsanctioned-rally">Dmitri Prokazov and his wife Olga Prokazov</a> recently found themselves caught up in an <a href="https://time.com/5639451/what-the-protests-in-russia-mean-for-president-putin/">unsanctioned demonstration</a> in Moscow, while out with their one-year-old son, they didn’t expect it to end with prosecutors threatening to strip them of their parental rights.</p>
<p>But this is exactly what has happened – a district court in the city pressed for the <a href="https://www.mosproc.ru/news/moscow/prokuratura_moskvy_provodit_proverki_po_faktam_uchastiya_lits_s_maloletnimi_detmi_i_nesovershennolet/">child to be taken into care</a>, on the grounds that at one point during the protest their son was handed over to a third person (a close friend) – which supposedly put the child’s life in danger. Investigations have also been carried out against other people who took part in the <a href="https://www.mosproc.ru/news/moscow/prokuratura_moskvy_provodit_proverki_po_faktam_uchastiya_lits_s_maloletnimi_detmi_i_nesovershennolet/">protests with young children</a>.</p>
<p>The July 27 demonstration was one of a <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-49125045">series of protests</a> that have been held in the city recently after authorities disqualified a number of opposition candidates from standing in local elections. Thousands were detained at the protests which authorities consider unauthorised and illegal.</p>
<p>Investigators have now <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/russian-protest-row-parents-dmitri-and-olga-prokazov-live-in-fear-of-losing-baby-son-vgqh2tpv3?ni-statuscode=acsaz-307">dropped criminal charges</a> against Dmitri and Olga Prokazov after public outcry. But the couple say they continue to <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/russian-protest-row-parents-dmitri-and-olga-prokazov-live-in-fear-of-losing-baby-son-vgqh2tpv3?ni-statuscode=acsaz-307">live in fear</a> that child protection services could come and take their son away at any moment.</p>
<p>For demonstrators, the implication is clear: opponents of the regime who have young children should think twice before getting involved in any protest – and there is a tradition here.</p>
<h2>Intimidation and control</h2>
<p>“Hostage-taking” is not a new tactic for the Russian state. Indeed, the targeting of the families and networks of “enemies” goes back at least to the Russian Civil War. In the summer of 1918, for example, <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/cw/pdf/lenin-cw-vol-44.pdf">Vladimir Lenin ordered that 25-30 hostages</a> be detained in every grain-producing region, with the idea that they would be answerable with their lives for failing to meet grain procurement targets. </p>
<p>During the Russian Civil War, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/650938">Leon Trotsky also insisted on the imprisonment</a> of the families of former tsarist officers serving in the Red Army to ensure their loyalty. While the Cheka (later the KGB) used hostage-taking ruthlessly during the <a href="https://time.com/5386789/red-terror-soviet-history/">Red Terror</a> – a period of political repression and mass killings, that began in 1918. This was terror as a form of propaganda, with the justification that the regime was in a struggle for survival.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/dispatches-from-red-square-reporting-russias-revolutions-then-and-now-63370">Dispatches from Red Square: reporting Russia's revolutions then and now</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p><a href="https://www.bbc.com/timelines/z8nbcdm">Joseph Stalin also deployed similar methods</a>. In the 1930s the family of any “enemy” became a legitimate target. A decree of June 1935 established that spouses and children of people who fled abroad were liable to five-year terms of exile – whether or not they knew anything about it. </p>
<p>A couple of years later, in the <a href="https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/nkvd-mass-secret-operation-n-00447-august-1937-november-1938">infamous Order 00447 of July 1937</a> – which set out numbers for people to be killed or incarcerated – one of the targeted groups was families whose members were “capable of anti-Soviet actions”. The phrasing was conveniently elastic. In the <a href="https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/modern-world-history-1918-to-1980/russia-1900-to-1939/the-show-trials-in-the-ussr/">show trials of the late 1930s</a>, pressure was put on defendants to toe the line in exchange for lenient treatment of their relatives. </p>
<h2>Heavy-handed tactics</h2>
<p>Stalin’s death in 1953 <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-stalins-great-terror-can-tell-us-about-russia-today-56842">led to a decline in terror</a>, but authoritarian practices did not disappear. The KGB under <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Yury-Andropov">Yuri Andropov</a> – a figure much admired by Vladimir Putin – was adept at devising subtle forms of coercion, sometimes termed “prophylactic methods”. </p>
<p>Applying pressure on people through their families and friends continued to be a trusted method of intimidation. The editors of the human rights journal, <a href="https://chronicle-of-current-events.com/">Chronicle of Current Events</a>, founded in 1968, were once told that whenever any edition of the magazine appeared, <a href="http://www.interpretermag.com/soviet-era-dissident-chronicle-of-current-events-resumes-publication-on-the-internet/">there would be arrests</a> of people not directly involved. And that they could improve the conditions of political prisoners if they moderated their activities. </p>
<p>The intention in this was to load onto dissidents a sense of guilt for actions that the regime was itself responsible for. The physicist and dissident, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1974/12/28/archives/soviet-dissident-arrested-in-inquiry-on-secret-journal-special-to.html">Sergei Kovalev</a> – who was for a time chairman of the President’s Human Rights Commission in the 1990s – once observed that hostage-taking was the “foundation” of the Soviet system. But he insisted that responsibility for repressions lay “not with us, but with the regime”. His colleague, <a href="http://www.rightsinrussia.info/archive/voices-from-the-past/9">Tatiana Velikanova</a> – who helped produce the Chronicle of Current Events – fiercely rejected all forms of hostage-taking, declaring herself determined not to engage in what she called “these compromises and collusions”. </p>
<p>Hostage-taking also had pre-revolutionary roots, in the practice of what in Russian is called krugovaia poruka. This phrase, which translates as “circular guarantee”, means something like “collective responsibility”. If for example someone failed to pay their taxes, other families were required to step in. This encouraged local institutions to take a strict line against dissent to guard against the possibility of everyone’s lives suffering for the behaviour of one person. </p>
<h2>A powerful message?</h2>
<p>But of course, hostage-taking is <a href="https://theconversation.com/putins-patriotism-and-paranoia-will-be-russias-undoing-34683">not a technique exclusive to Russia</a>. Many countries have used it either in a military or a psychological sense. Indeed, if <a href="https://theconversation.com/zero-civilian-casualties-why-the-face-of-western-war-gives-us-a-false-idea-of-conflict-93090">threats to civilians in war</a> are counted as a kind of “hostage-taking”, then it would be difficult to find any powerful country that has not deployed these means at some point.</p>
<p>But such methods <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=russia+democracy&sort=relevancy&language=en&date=all&date_from=&date_to=">will not create an enduring stability</a>. Indeed, the tactics of hostage-taking can only have unhappy consequences for a country – as a climate of fear stifles creativity and destroys the possibility of <a href="https://theconversation.com/little-prospect-of-regime-change-in-russia-short-of-a-popular-uprising-and-thats-unlikely-82465">healthy national development</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/121670/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Philip Boobbyer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Targeting the families of protestors is highly effective as a means of control.Philip Boobbyer, Reader in History, University of KentLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1072302019-04-08T14:07:25Z2019-04-08T14:07:25ZMaking sense of the world: why ‘Marxism and Freedom’ still resonates<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/267791/original/file-20190405-180020-neae93.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Raya Dunayevskaya believed "Marxism is a theory of liberation or it is nothing."</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dunayevskaya-raya.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The world’s a mess. How do thoughtful people make sense of it all? In this series we’ve asked a number of our authors to suggest a book, philosopher, work of art – or anything else, for that matter – that will help to make sense of it all.</em> </p>
<p>The world we live in is a dangerous and confusing place. In my quest to make sense of it, I’m returning to <a href="https://www.imhojournal.org/publications/marxism-and-freedom-from-1776-until-today/"><em>Marxism and Freedom</em></a> – 40 years after reading it for the first time.</p>
<p>It was written by the founder of the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism, <a href="https://newsandletters.org/raya-dunayevskaya/">Raya Dunayevskaya</a> (1910–1987). I read the book for the first time in 1979: the year <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/margaretthatcher">Margaret Thatcher</a> was elected in Britain, and the formal beginning of the <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/07/david-harvey-neoliberalism-capitalism-labor-crisis-resistance/">neoliberal counter-revolution</a>. Dunayevskaya called it a “changed world”. At that point the book was already over 20 years old, but I found something refreshing about its engagement with Marxism as a living philosophy connected with daily life struggles. </p>
<p>My return to <em>Marxism and Freedom</em> here in 2019 has focused on some of its ideas that might help orient our thinking in the present. This, at a time when we’re facing the morbid stages of neoliberalism in its neo-fascist and authoritarian-nationalist forms: from Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro to Donald Trump in the US, from Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.</p>
<p>Dunayevskaya (who was born Raya Shpigel but took her mother’s maiden name) was not an academic but a revolutionary intellectual schooled by organisations and their struggles. She joined the revolutionary movement in the United States as a teenager in the early 1920s, and was kicked out of the Communist Party at age 18 after asking for a discussion about <a href="https://www.bl.uk/people/leon-trotsky">Leon Trotsky</a>. He was a leading Marxist revolutionary who was expelled from the USSR in 1929 after criticising Joseph Stalin.</p>
<p>Dunayevskaya joined the Trotskyist movement. She is probably best known as Trotsky’s Russian language secretary in Mexico, which is where he settled after his expulsion and where he was assassinated in 1940. By the time he died, Dunayevskaya had broken with Trotsky over his defence of the Soviet Union after the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. </p>
<p>She argued that Russia was a state-capitalist rather than a socialist society, and held that Marx’s theory of liberation had been transformed into its opposite by the Communist Party intelligentsia to justify a ruthless totalitarian system. </p>
<h2>New passions</h2>
<p>“Marxism is a theory of liberation or it is nothing” Dunayevskaya held in <em>Marxism and Freedom</em>. Concerned with the freedom of humanity and the destruction of human life under capitalism, one aim of <em>Marxism and Freedom</em> was to,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>reestablish Marxism in its original form, which Marx called ‘a thoroughgoing Naturalism, or Humanism’. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Prefiguring what is now called intersectionality, she highlighted “new passions and new forces” that emerged in freedom struggles. She argued that activists and intellectuals must keep their ears open to these new voices and new articulations of freedom that had often been silenced or ignored. </p>
<p>Dunayevskaya <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1963/american-civilization.htm">considered</a> black liberation movements the vanguard of historical freedom struggles in the United States.</p>
<p>She also <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Nationalism-Communism-Afro-Asian-Revolutions-Dunayevskaya/dp/B001QYPAS6">declared</a> the African and Asian decolonisation movements that developed after the end of World War II epochal, as they <a href="https://archive.org/details/DunayevskayaNationalismCommunismMarxistHumanismTheAfroAsianRevolutions/page/n39">raised</a> the question of human relations as a “totality of devotion to the struggle for freedom”.</p>
<p>The brilliance of <em>Marxism and Freedom</em>, and its re-articulation of Marx’s Marxism as a theory of liberation, is that it was written in collaboration with miners, autoworkers and students who contributed to “a new understanding”. The point was not only that people think, but also that people in struggles develop new ways of knowing through experience, dialogue and self-reflection. </p>
<p>The question of freedom was intimately connected to the question that every struggle needs to ask itself: what happens the day after the struggle has seemingly been won? In short, Dunayevskaya continually challenged activists to think beyond activism: to think not only of tearing down the old society, but also about creating a new one. She believed in questioning everything, especially the division between intellectual and physical labour. </p>
<h2>A legacy of learning</h2>
<p>All this was exciting to me as a 21-year-old who had already become cynical about programmatic socialist groups that often viewed movements as fodder to be mobilised. I probably didn’t understand it fully at the time, but I remember meeting Dunayevskaya in 1985 just after the year-long British miners strike had suffered an <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/06/how-miners-strike-1984-85-changed-britain-ever">historic defeat</a>.</p>
<p>When we met she had just completed a book <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/DUNRLW"><em>Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution</em></a>, the last part of her “trilogy of revolution” (her second book was the 1973 <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/phil-rev/index.htm"><em>Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre and from Marx</em></a>). Asked about love in an interview on International Women’s Day in 1984 she <a href="https://newsandletters.org/writings-raya-dunayevskaya-womens-liberation-experimentation-revolution-permanence/">remarked</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I don’t think it’s correct for us to try and solve it for others. I think what we have to do is to create the conditions for everyone to be able to experiment with choices, in love. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>When we met she spoke to me about the importance of worker-intellectuals to Marxist-Humanism. Here she included the black auto worker from Detroit, Charles Denby, the author of <a href="https://newsandletters.org/charles-denbys-life-story-story-struggle-freedom/"><em>Indignant Heart: A Black Worker’s Journal</em></a>. They met in the late 1940s and remained colleagues until his death in 1983. </p>
<p>When Stalin died in 1953 Denby phoned her. He wanted to tell her what the workers in the plant were saying: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I have just the man to fill Stalin’s shoes — my foreman.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Alive today</h2>
<p><em>Marxism and Freedom</em> remains alive to me in 2019. It’s not only because we live in an age of myriad crises that threaten humanity, but the book reminds humanity to keep our ears and minds open to new and often unthinkable revolts.</p>
<p>In this moment of violent suppression, new forms of struggle continuously emerge and reach for a future. It is here that the ideal and the real are revealed as being not far apart: where Marx’s humanism as a living body of ideas is enlivened by real movements for freedom.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/107230/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nigel Gibson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The book, Marxism and Freedom was written in 1958. Yet, it remains relevant today.Nigel Gibson, Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Emerson CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1021552018-09-13T10:47:56Z2018-09-13T10:47:56ZLessons from White House disinformation a century ago: ‘It’s dangerous to believe your own propaganda’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235446/original/file-20180907-90578-r5riyx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1917%2C939&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bolshevik leaders Nikolai Lenin and Leon Trotsky</span> </figcaption></figure><p>One hundred years ago, the U.S. government published <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015025039804;view=1up;seq=5">documents</a> that fueled the mounting Red Scare, helped justify the American military invasion of Russia and poisoned American-Russian relations for years to come.</p>
<p>Newspapers across the United States began to publish the <a href="https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030431/1918-09-15/ed-1/seq-1/#date1=09%2F15%2F1918&index=10&date2=09%2F15%2F1918&searchType=advanced&language=&sequence=0&words=Bolshevik&proxdistance=5&state=&rows=20&ortext=Bolshevik+&proxtext=&phrasetext=&andtext=&dateFilterType=range&page=1">fake papers</a> on Sept. 15, 1918. </p>
<p>Unbeknownst to the government, the documents were forgeries. They were created by Russian political interests whose party affiliation remains obscure, but whose objectives were clear. The documents were part of a Russian disinformation campaign – a common propaganda tactic during World War I – to discredit the Bolsheviks, who had just seized power in Russia after leading a Marxist revolution. </p>
<p>The publication of the documents was a classic case of the American government accepting bogus information because it confirmed its preconceptions and justified actions it wished to take. </p>
<p>We are scholars who work at the intersection of media and politics. We believe the incident illustrates the base power of disinformation lies not in technology, which many blame for the rise of counterfeit information today, but in weakness in human nature. The desire to confirm their beliefs about the Bolsheviks led top U.S. leaders to ignore credible and persistent warnings of the documents’ inaccuracy and aggressively assert government authority to discredit those few who questioned them. </p>
<h2>The Sisson documents</h2>
<p>By 1918, World War I had raged on for nearly four years, and the Russians, who fought on the side of the U.S. and others against Germany, had experienced two recent revolutions. </p>
<p>The first revolution ousted the Czarist regime. The second, led by Bolshevik leaders Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, ousted the provisional government. </p>
<p>Despite the chaos, the U.S. and Allies desperately needed Russia to continue fighting. But the Bolsheviks were intent on taking an exhausted Russian military out of the war and promised to begin peace talks with Germany once in power.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/committee-public-information">The Committee on Public Information</a>, which operated as an American propaganda ministry during the war, sent Edgar Sisson, a former muckraking journalist, to Petrograd in November 1917, before the Bolsheviks seized power. He was to use publicity tools, which included press releases, films and speeches, to urge Russians to remain in the war. </p>
<p>By the time he arrived, the Bolsheviks were in power. A month later, they began peace negotiations with Germany. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235449/original/file-20180907-90565-snrg8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235449/original/file-20180907-90565-snrg8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=747&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235449/original/file-20180907-90565-snrg8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=747&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235449/original/file-20180907-90565-snrg8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=747&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235449/original/file-20180907-90565-snrg8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235449/original/file-20180907-90565-snrg8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235449/original/file-20180907-90565-snrg8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">President Woodrow Wilson wanted to build a case against the Bolsheviks.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Library of Congress</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The peace talks played into widespread rumors in Russia and elsewhere that Lenin and Trotsky were paid German agents. Before its ouster, the Russian provisional government tried to use the rumors to discredit the Bolsheviks and hasten their demise. But the rumors had never been proven.</p>
<p>This all seemed to change, however, in February 1918.</p>
<p>Raymond Robins, head of the American Red Cross Commission in Russia, gave Sisson confidential documents that implied Germans financed and directed the Bolsheviks. Sisson deemed the documents valid despite Robins’ doubts.</p>
<p>President Woodrow Wilson and the State Department encouraged Sisson to collect evidence that Lenin and his comrades were German pawns, which would support the administration’s anti-Bolshevik policies. </p>
<p>By the time he left Russia in March, Sisson had collected <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/One_hundred_red_days.html?id=woDLMR9lJg0C">68 documents</a>, mostly with the help of a shadowy figure, Evgeni Petrovich Semenov. Semenov, a former secret service agent in the provisional government, told Sisson he lifted the papers from Bolshevik headquarters. </p>
<h2>Documents make news in the US</h2>
<p><a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1918/09/15/112640794.pdf">American press coverage</a> of Sisson’s story was sensational. Most stories appeared on the front page and were published in installments during the week. They accepted the government view of Bolshevik treachery. </p>
<p>The government’s timing of the release was politically strategic. Wilson had by this time agreed to an Allied military intervention in Russia for the purpose of protecting stockpiles of Allied war material and ensuring the safe travel of anti-German forces through Siberia to the Eastern Front. </p>
<p>In August and September, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=B1n_ydotyMsC&dq=when+the+united+states+invaded+russia">U.S. troops were arriving in Russia</a>. This move constituted a threat to the Bolshevik government and violated Wilson’s promise of self-determination. </p>
<p>But the fake documents legitimized intervention by suggesting that the Bolshevik stooges were not representative of the Russian people. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235450/original/file-20180907-90574-1ga4mff.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235450/original/file-20180907-90574-1ga4mff.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235450/original/file-20180907-90574-1ga4mff.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235450/original/file-20180907-90574-1ga4mff.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235450/original/file-20180907-90574-1ga4mff.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=627&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235450/original/file-20180907-90574-1ga4mff.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=627&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235450/original/file-20180907-90574-1ga4mff.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=627&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The New York Times, Sept. 15, 1918.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">New York Times archive</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Compliant journalists</h2>
<p>The documents presented a problem that often arises in national security reporting. </p>
<p>With little time or expertise to properly determine an account’s authenticity, journalists often rely solely on the government’s word. When a majority of the public is mentally prepared to accept the government’s account because it conforms to their preconceptions, the government can easily beat back doubts by calling doubters disloyal and un-American. </p>
<p>In a <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=HbE3AQAAIAAJ&pg=PA1064&dq=John+Reed,+%E2%80%9COn+Intervention,%E2%80%9D&hl=en&sa=X#v=onepage&q=John%20Reed%2C%20%E2%80%9COn%20Intervention%2C%E2%80%9D&f=false">reasoned analysis</a> of the documents published in a pamphlet by the Liberator, left-wing journalist John Reed showed they were probably forgeries and said they falsely justified military intervention in Russia. </p>
<p>George Creel, the head of the Committee on Public Information, sought to discredit Reed by labeling him the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/063.html">“center of the Bolsheviki movement in this country</a>.”</p>
<p>Mostly, though, Creel evoked government authority as the chief basis for accepting the validity of the documents when they were questioned. This was the case with the <a href="https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1918-09-22/ed-1/seq-25/#date1=09%2F22%2F1918&index=0&date2=09%2F22%2F1918&searchType=advanced&language=&sequence=0&lccn=sn83030213&lccn=sn83030212&lccn=sn83030214&words=Evening+Post&proxdistance=5&rows=20&ortext=&proxtext=&phrasetext=%22EVENING+POST%22&andtext=&dateFilterType=range&page=1">lone establishment newspaper</a> that challenged the authenticity of the documents, the New York Evening Post. </p>
<p>In letters found at the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/063.html">National Archives</a>, Creel said the Post gave “aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States.” He expressed surprise that the New York Evening Post refused to accept evidence put forth by the government. And he told the paper’s owner that his editor had acted as an advocate of Lenin and Trotsky. He said the paper behaved as if it, too, had taken German money.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235451/original/file-20180907-90553-1y9mq41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235451/original/file-20180907-90553-1y9mq41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235451/original/file-20180907-90553-1y9mq41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235451/original/file-20180907-90553-1y9mq41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235451/original/file-20180907-90553-1y9mq41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235451/original/file-20180907-90553-1y9mq41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235451/original/file-20180907-90553-1y9mq41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Edgar Sisson of the Committee on Public Information.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikipedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The New York Evening Post, he complained bitterly, was demanding “the Government should take the witness stand.”</p>
<p>The credulous acceptance of the documents by <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02684527.2017.1294643">the press</a> can be traced to the effectiveness of extensive wartime propaganda by the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/happy-100th-birthday-information-warfare/2014/08/01/3786e262-1732-11e4-85b6-c1451e622637_story.html">Committee on Public Information</a>, which we have been studying for the past several years. One of the committee’s chief propaganda messages was widespread German spying and treachery in the United States and abroad. </p>
<p>It was an easy step, when nudged by the government, to believe the Germans enlisted godless Bolsheviks in their cause. </p>
<p>As the <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=PbsmtAEACAAJ&dq=literary+digest+september+1918&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiU--Lji5vdAhVGC6wKHSL_D-MQ6AEIKTAA">Literary Digest</a> magazine observed, editors found “great satisfaction in adding legal proof to their moral certainty, and when the Government guarantees the authenticity of the documents proving that Lenin and Trotzky are German agents, it gives them an opportunity to speak their minds without hesitation and without reserve.” </p>
<p>Congress, too, was willing to endorse this view. The Democratic majority in the Senate used a <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Brewing_and_Liquor_Interests_and_German.html?id=JnZIAQAAIAAJ">special subcommittee</a> to emphasize Bolshevik-German ties. They found witnesses who testified the Bolsheviki movement was a branch of the German government. </p>
<h2>Power in plausibility</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/237884">George Kennan</a> and <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/151612?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">other historians</a> have concluded the Sisson documents are “unquestionable forgeries,” but this does not mean they were devoid of truth. </p>
<p>As with all effective disinformation, their power lay in their plausibility. The documents’ authors enhanced their forgeries with facts.
<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=UBnv9I_guMUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Unknown+Lenin&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjG9Ibvk5vdAhUBOKwKHb_CAwMQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=The%20Unknown%20Lenin&f=false">Germans did help the Bolsheviks</a>, funneling millions of Deutsche marks to them during the war. </p>
<p>But, as <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/archival/collections/ldpd_4078682/">one diplomat</a> noted, the Bolsheviks would have accepted money from anyone. More important, the Bolsheviks sought to foment a communist revolution in Germany as soon as they could.</p>
<p>For those who spread disinformation, then, it is often not a matter of being tricked into believing the information they have spread. Creel, Sisson and others recklessly ignored warnings the documents were false. They wanted to believe the conspiracy, so they did. </p>
<p>Today, we call this <a href="https://theconversation.com/confirmation-bias-a-psychological-phenomenon-that-helps-explain-why-pundits-got-it-wrong-68781">confirmation bias</a>. </p>
<p>The United States’ path to war with Iraq in 2003 eerily recalled that element of the Sisson documents. To make the case for an invasion, the George W. Bush administration relied heavily on <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=-kykEEiazfgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Isikoff+and+Corn,+Hubris,+49%5C&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwitqvWflJvdAhVGmK0KHfYNDgMQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=Isikoff%20and%20Corn%2C%20Hubris%2C%2049%5C&f=false">Ahmadi Chalabi</a>, an exiled Iraqi politician, and fellow Iraqi dissidents who wanted Saddam Hussein ousted. </p>
<p>Chalabi lined up a parade of Iraq defectors to provide compelling – and inaccurate – stories of Hussein’s terrorist connections and his stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. In addition to selling the invasion to the public, the campaign solidified the administration’s conviction that it was right to do what it wanted to do. </p>
<p>“It’s dangerous,” Chalabi was known to say from time to time, “if you believe your own propaganda.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/102155/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Forged documents were used by the US government 100 years ago to justify hostile actions against Russia. All but one US newspaper accepted the government’s propaganda. The lessons for today are stark.John Maxwell Hamilton, Global Scholar at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC and Hopkins P Breazeale Professor, Manship School of Mass Communications, Louisiana State University Meghan Menard McCune, Ph.D. candidate, Manship School of Mass Communication, Louisiana State University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1016002018-09-12T05:57:34Z2018-09-12T05:57:34ZIvor Montagu: Communist aristocrat, Soviet spy and activist filmmaker<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235726/original/file-20180911-144479-14wf637.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=77%2C31%2C1144%2C1085&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ivor Montagu during the 1980s.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">People's History Museum</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A little more than a century ago, with the Great War raging, Admiral of the Fleet <a href="https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/4j4/jellicoe-john-henry-rushworth">Lord Jellicoe</a> paid a visit to a 13-year-old schoolboy. </p>
<p>He had come to play a naval war game the boy had invented, involving the movement of the opposing fleets by mathematical calculations of speeds and distances, with visibility conditions to be determined by the umpire. </p>
<p>Impressed, Jellicoe invited the precocious lad to lecture on his brainchild to the Naval Staff College. The invitation, however, was not taken up. In the interim, the youthful inventor had become a socialist and decided he was against war.</p>
<p>The boy was the Honourable <a href="http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/446857/index.html">Ivor Montagu</a>, third son of the second Baron Swaythling, scion of a prominent Jewish banking dynasty and one of the richest men in Britain. The aristocrat Montagu would go on to become a pioneer of film culture, a collaborator of two of the most famous directors of the era, an activist documentary maker and an ardent supporter of Soviet communism.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235724/original/file-20180911-144485-hkbnoa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=236%2C116%2C2259%2C1294&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235724/original/file-20180911-144485-hkbnoa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=342&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235724/original/file-20180911-144485-hkbnoa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=342&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235724/original/file-20180911-144485-hkbnoa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=342&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235724/original/file-20180911-144485-hkbnoa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235724/original/file-20180911-144485-hkbnoa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235724/original/file-20180911-144485-hkbnoa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ivor Montagu accepting the Lenin Peace Prize in 1959.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">People's History Museum</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The making of a socialist</h2>
<p>Intelligent and committed to his beliefs, young Ivor joined the Marxist-oriented British Socialist Party and helped the cause by hiding contraband copies of <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/vladimir-lenin">Lenin</a>’s <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/">State and Revolution</a> on the landing of his lavish Kensington Court home, in London’s West End. At war’s end, when police attacked a protest march of discharged soldiers, Ivor joined the fray as a top-hatted public schoolboy, bringing down a copper by striking him on the ankle with his silver-tipped ebony cane. </p>
<p>Horrified to discover they were harbouring a teenage radical, his parents insisted that he cut back on his political involvements until he turned 21. More or less, according to Ivor’s later account, he did.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234357/original/file-20180830-195331-kd8zbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234357/original/file-20180830-195331-kd8zbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=756&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234357/original/file-20180830-195331-kd8zbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=756&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234357/original/file-20180830-195331-kd8zbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=756&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234357/original/file-20180830-195331-kd8zbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=951&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234357/original/file-20180830-195331-kd8zbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=951&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234357/original/file-20180830-195331-kd8zbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=951&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ivor Montagu, around 1930.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">People's History Museum</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Montagu’s privileged background and his rebellion against it were to mark him for life. A representative of the left-leaning British intelligentsia of the interwar years, he was deeply immersed in the political dramas and cultural ferment of the times. </p>
<p>In researching his biography – now published as <a href="https://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/publication/codename-intelligentsia/9780750987059/">Codename Intelligentsia: The Life and Times of the Honourable Ivor Montagu, Filmmaker, Communist, Spy</a> – I was struck by the man’s passion for social justice, his energy and initiative, and the sheer variety and multiplicity of his projects. I was also appalled, as I dug deeper, by his blindness towards the murderous criminality of Stalin’s regime in the Soviet Union. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-eastern-bloc-dissidents-can-teach-us-about-living-in-truth-75356">What eastern bloc dissidents can teach us about 'living in truth'</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Ping pong and rare fauna</h2>
<p>One of Montagu’s enthusiasms, and the one for which he is probably best known, was table tennis. He revived the game as a competitive sport and in 1922, at the age of 17, he founded the (English) Table Tennis Association, and in 1926, the International Table Tennis Federation. </p>
<p>This story is told in <a href="http://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Nicholas-Griffin/82324826">Nicholas Griffin</a>’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ping-Pong-Diplomacy-Secret-History-Changed/dp/1634505565">Ping-Pong Diplomacy: The Secret History Behind the Game That Changed the World</a> (2014), and I touch on it only in passing in my book. </p>
<p>Another of his passions was zoology, which he studied at Cambridge. Each summer in his university days, he would traverse remote regions in a scientific hunt for the always elusive small burrowing mammals that were his speciality. In 1925, with the help of local peasants high in the Caucasus mountains, he was able to lay his hands on a few specimens of the rare mole vole Prometheomys. </p>
<p>Getting them back to Britain, however, proved a challenge. On the long train journey back to Moscow, the Prometheomys fought and killed one another, escaped from their cages in the goods van, had to be recaptured with the assistance of a squad of Red Army men, got infested with parasites (as did their handlers), and began to die of disease. </p>
<p>Montagu hastened the process with one creature by coating it in alcohol to kill the bugs. It was mortally chilled and died within ten seconds. None of the menagerie was alive by the time he set sail from Leningrad. Post mortems indicated lung infection. Ivor did not pursue zoology as a profession.</p>
<h2>Film culture</h2>
<p>The cinema was to prove a more lasting preoccupation. <a href="https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Michael_Balcon">Michael Balcon</a>, the renowned film producer, called him “one of the first real intellectual artists of the cinema”, and <a href="https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Rachael_Low">Rachael Low</a>, doyenne of British film historians, “an exceptional man in many ways and a brilliant film maker”. He was, according to the critic <a href="https://theartsdesk.com/users/geoff-brown">Geoff Brown</a>, “the period’s most dynamic, visible, and well-connected fighter for art cinema”. </p>
<p>His first foray into the field was as founder (in 1925) and chairman of the (London) <a href="http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/454755/index.html">Film Society</a>. Negotiating censorship hurdles and distribution hassles, he and his colleagues brought to the English screen - for a select coterie only, to be sure - previously unseen examples of imaginative and audacious cinematic art from around the world, shaking up what was otherwise a deadly bland filmic culture. </p>
<p>Becoming film critic for the The Observer, he stepped up his subversive stirring. In his first column, he launched a ferocious attack on the <a href="https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Rudolph_Valentino">Rudolph Valentino</a> vehicle <a href="https://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Eagle_(1925_film)">The Eagle</a> (Clarence Brown, 1925): </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The picture has no merit of any kind whatsoever. A fast, exciting, if hackneyed story is made dull, slow, inconsequent, and every dramatic situation is bungled, set out without being led up to climactically … . Everyone’s acting was preposterous. Mr Brown must have found directing Mr Valentino rather like directing a sack of potatoes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Montagu had only intermittent stints as a reviewer, but his observations were characteristically marked by acute insight, mordant wit and a pioneering application of Freudian and Marxist concepts. </p>
<h2>The film industry</h2>
<p>Montagu got started in filmmaking himself when he was asked by Balcon to take a look at <a href="http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tours/hitch/tour1.html">Alfred Hitchcock</a>’s <a href="https://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Lodger:_A_Story_of_the_London_Fog_">The Lodger</a> whose release had stalled because of misgivings on the part of the distributor. He made some modest alterations, chiefly concerned with cutting down the large number of intertitles. The film made it into theatres to become a critical and commercial success.</p>
<p>Before long the tyro found himself heading up both the scenario and editing departments at Balcon’s <a href="http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/448996/">Gainsborough company</a>. A disagreement with Hitchcock over the cutting of <a href="http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/437747/index.html">Downhill</a> led to his departure from the studio to concentrate on his work in the editing firm run by his friend Adrian Brunel, in which he soon became a partner. </p>
<p>In years to come Montagu would direct three short silent comedies from story ideas by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._G._Wells">H.G. Wells</a>, collaborate on scripts in Hollywood with <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/where-begin-sergei-eisenstein">Sergei Eisenstein</a>, team up again with Hitchcock as his producer at Gaumont-British, and co-direct a documentary, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zK4WblHxkI">Wings Over Everest</a>, which <a href="https://film.avclub.com/81-years-ago-the-first-movie-camera-over-everest-won-a-1798262310">won an Academy Award</a>.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9zK4WblHxkI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The 1933 documentary Wings over Everest charts the first flight over the world’s highest mountain.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Montagu was about to direct his first feature, <a href="http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/501662/index.html">King Solomon’s Mines</a>, when he fell ill and had to withdraw. However, the Spanish Civil War had broken out, and he seized the opportunity to leave Gaumont-British and fly to the war zone with a young <a href="https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Norman_McLaren">Norman McLaren</a> as his cameraman. His documentary <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/4ce2b6bcdb050">The Defence of Madrid</a>, shot and edited at breakneck speed, was released in December 1936. </p>
<p>It was far from a perfect piece of work, yet it provided for many Britons their first chance of seeing close-up images of the impact of aerial bombardment on a civilian population. Later, Montagu produced and distributed several more documentaries on the conflict. </p>
<h2>Communism</h2>
<p>The films took, of course, the Republican side. By now, Montagu was a leading figure in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Association_of_Friends_of_the_Soviet_Union">Friends of the Soviet Union</a> and heavily invested in promoting anti-fascist and Communist causes. He had, for a time, been close to <a href="https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Leon_Trotsky">Leon Trotsky</a>, corresponding regularly, lobbying for his admission to the UK, and striking up a friendship when he interviewed the exiled revolutionary in Turkey. But in 1931, he joined the Communist Party, and the two grew apart. </p>
<p>When Trotsky was accused, in absentia, at the first of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/25/trotsky-russia-show-trials-moscow-guardian-1937">Moscow show trials</a> in 1936, of taking part in a terrorist conspiracy against the Soviet leaders, Montagu joined in the chorus of denunciation of his former friend. As a journalist for the Daily Worker and other left-wing papers, he stridently upheld the probity of the judicial process and vehemently attacked those who questioned it. </p>
<p>When the Great Terror, a brutal political campaign led by Soviet dictator <a href="https://www.bbc.com/timelines/z8nbcdm">Joseph Stalin</a> to eliminate dissenting members of the Communist Party, erupted in the Soviet Union in 1937, Montagu likewise belittled anyone attempting to expose the truth. His commitment to Stalin’s USSR was such that in 1940 he was happy to be enlisted as a spy for the <a href="https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Main_Intelligence_Directorate">Soviet military intelligence, the GRU</a>. </p>
<p>During the postwar years, Montagu returned to filmmaking, directing an exposé of Nazi ideology, <a href="http://collections-search.bfi.org.uk/web/Details/ChoiceFilmWorks/150023833">Man – One Family</a>, and co-scripting the well-received <a href="https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Scott_of_the_Antarctic_(film)">Scott of the Antarctic</a>. Later, he worked in the secretariat of the Moscow-backed <a href="https://www.wikiwand.com/en/World_Peace_Council">World Peace Council</a>. </p>
<p>In 1964, he published <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15992550-film-world">Film World</a>, which revealed, sadly, how unresponsive the erstwhile champion of experimentation in the cinema was to the French New Wave and other exciting new developments in film from elsewhere in Europe. </p>
<p>In reflecting on his life story, I could not help but meditate on where his creative energies and generosity of spirit had led. In joining the Communist Party and becoming a propagandist for the Soviet Union, Montagu surrendered his intellectual and moral integrity. His cultural thinking became ossified, his political thinking warped. </p>
<p>His biography is a tale of corruption, but it is not his alone. It is the melancholy story of the havoc wreaked by Soviet Communism on the progressive causes of the 20th century, and of the individuals who espoused them.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/101600/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Russell Campbell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Ivor Montagu’s childhood was privileged, but he rebelled against his wealthy upbringing to become a pioneer of film culture, an activist documentary maker and an ardent supporter of Soviet communism.Russell Campbell, Adjunct Associate Professor of Film, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of WellingtonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/851182017-10-08T10:05:08Z2017-10-08T10:05:08ZThe Russian Revolution: a reflection on the role of women revolutionaries<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/188784/original/file-20171004-6713-vkl7ga.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>This year marks the centenary of the <a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/the-russian-revolution-of-1917-1779474">Russian Revolution</a> – in fact it’s two revolutions. The one in February 1917 overthrew the Russian monarchy. The second one, in October 1917, came about after a nearly bloodless coup put the Bolsheviks in charge under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin.</p>
<p>Creating the world’s first communist country, it was a central event of the twentieth century. It’s an event experienced as an electric shock throughout much of the colonialised world. </p>
<p>Recollections of this seismic event often revolve around images of powerful men – the ideas of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/marx_karl.shtml">Karl Marx</a> and <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1895/misc/engels-bio.htm">Friedrich Engels</a>, and the political strategy of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/lenin_vladimir.shtml">Lenin</a> and <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/trotsky_leon.shtml">Leon Trotsky</a>. But women have always been key participants in the Communist movement, in terms of theory and practice, including in the October Revolution. </p>
<p>Leading Marxist historian <a href="http://vijayprashad.org/">Vijay Prashad</a> recalls that in October 1917 women factory workers in St Petersburg marched to see Lenin in the <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1917/lenin-smolny.htm">Smolny</a>, the compound in the city where he worked, and asked him to, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Take power, Comrade Lenin: that is what we working women want. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Lenin famously replied: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is not I, but you - the workers - who must take power. Return to your factories and tell the workers that. </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Before the Russian Revolution</h2>
<p>But women played decisive and revolutionary roles even before the Russian Revolution.</p>
<p>In seventeenth century England women were a powerful presence in what was known as the <a href="http://www.northamptonshiretimeline.com/scene/1607-newton-rebellion/">Midland Revolt</a>. The more than thousand-strong crowd that gathered at Newton in 1607 to protest against the land enclosures by the Tresham family, who were aggressively enclosing the lands of East Midlands, included women and children. </p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.onthisdeity.com/5th-october-1789-%E2%80%93-the-womens-march-on-versailles/">Women’s March</a> on the Palace of Versailles in October 1789 was a decisive moment in the struggles that brought down the power of the French Monarchy. Nearly 7,000 women, <a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/womens-march-on-versailles-3529107">chanting “bread! bread!”</a>, marched from Paris to the palace. The uprising contributed to the fall of Louis XVI and the much-hated Marie Antoinette.</p>
<p>The women who initiated the march were called “Mothers of the Nation”. Importantly, the march wasn’t only a turning point for Republicans, but also crucial for gender equality. </p>
<p>In 1802 Edward Despard, an Irish soldier who served in the British army but who became involved in revolutionary politics, and his African-American wife, <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/2011115131942562643.html">Catherine Despard</a>, led a plot to seize the Bank of England and the Tower of London, and to assassinate King George III. He was arrested for the failed Despard plot.</p>
<p>Catherine <a href="https://mikejay.net/edward-and-catherine-despard/">publicly defended</a> her husband against charges of terrorism and sedition, and also lobbied and campaigned on his behalf. She <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/02/22/catherine-despard-abolitionist/">petitioned</a> the Home Secretary and
enlisted the help of an independent MP who raised the plight of the men incarcerated at the Coldbath Fields prison, where Edward was detained. Catherine also worked with the wives of other political prisoners. </p>
<p>Despite Catherine taking the fight to the highest authorities, Edward was found guilty on charges of <a href="http://equianosworld.tubmaninstitute.ca/content/edward-despard">high treason</a>. He was hanged, drawn and quartered. Catherine was one of 20,000 people who witnessed his execution. </p>
<p>As capitalism consolidated its hold over land and labour through the industrial revolution the <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/">Luddite movement</a> attacked factories and destroyed machines. It was not to halt the development of technology but to subject it to the interests of the workers. </p>
<p>Ned Ludd, a fictional character, based on an amalgam of various apprentices came to provide the name and face of the movement. But women often led the attacks on the factories. On 24 April 1812, a particularly successful attack was launched against a mill outside Bolton in North West England under the leadership of sisters <a href="https://womenshistorynetwork.org/luddite-women/">Mary and Lydia Molyneux</a>. The mill was destroyed. </p>
<p>In 1871, just over a hundred years after the Women’s March on Versailles, French women took to the streets with the same militant vigour, during the <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/kristin-ross-communal-luxury-paris-commune/">Paris Commune</a>. Leftwingers took over the French capital, but the radical experiment in socialist self-government only lasted 72 days.</p>
<p>In stark contrast to the supposed fragility of women, the militant anarchist and feminist, <a href="https://spaceinvaderjoe.wordpress.com/2012/05/06/female-badasses-in-history-nathalie-lemel-1827-1921/">Nathalie Lemel</a> <a href="https://www.marxist.com/women-in-the-paris-commune.htm">called</a> women to militant action during the Commune:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have come to the supreme moment, when we must be able to die for our Nation. No more weakness! No more uncertainty! All women to arms! All women to duty! Versailles must be wiped out!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>On Sunday 22 January 1905 women, once again were at the forefront of the march on the Winter Palace in St Petersburg that came to be known at Bloody Sunday. Many paid with their lives for the transformation of Tsarist autocratic rule. </p>
<h2>Women and Communist thought</h2>
<p>Before and during the Russian Revolution, the Polish-born German philosopher <a href="http://spartacus-educational.com/RUSluxemburg.htm">Rosa Luxemburg</a> was a leading Communist theorist. Thereafter women like the American Marxist, <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/">Raya Dunayevskaya</a>, Trinidad-born journalist, political activist and feminist, <a href="https://theculturetrip.com/europe/united-kingdom/england/london/articles/claudia-jones-communist-black-activist-and-mother-of-notting-hill-carnival/">Claudia Jones</a> – also known as the “mother” of London’s Notting Hill Carnival, South African academic and journalist, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/ruth-heloise-first">Ruth First</a>, and longstanding American activist and feminist, <a href="https://feministstudies.ucsc.edu/faculty/singleton.php?&singleton=true&cruz_id=aydavis">Angela Davis</a>, played key roles in the development of Communist thought.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/188788/original/file-20171004-32388-yy8x9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/188788/original/file-20171004-32388-yy8x9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188788/original/file-20171004-32388-yy8x9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188788/original/file-20171004-32388-yy8x9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188788/original/file-20171004-32388-yy8x9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188788/original/file-20171004-32388-yy8x9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188788/original/file-20171004-32388-yy8x9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">South African journalist and activist, Ruth First.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sunday Times</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A closer look at the great male figures in the Communist tradition often shows that they worked closely with and relied heavily on radical women. Engels could not have written <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/824042.The_Condition_of_the_Working_Class_in_England">“The Condition of the Working Class in England”</a> without the guidance of his working class Irish partner, <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-friedrich-engels-radical-lover-helped-him-father-socialism-21415560/">Mary Burns</a>. </p>
<p>Marx’s daughters <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/bio/family/laura.htm">Laura</a> and <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/11/how-eleanor-marx-changed-world">Eleanor</a>, were leading communists and significant activists in their own right. <a href="http://www.counterfire.org/women-on-the-left/15628-women-on-the-left-nadezhda-krupskaya">Nadezhda Krupskaya</a>, Lenin’s lifelong partner and comrade was a leading educational theorist and radical communist. <a href="https://socialistaction.ca/2014/06/08/celia-sanchez-heroine-of-the-cuban-revolution/">Cecilia Sanchez</a>, one of Fidel Castro’s closest and most trusted comrades, is hardly known outside of Cuba.</p>
<p>When women are remembered as part of the Communist or any other political tradition it is often as an afterthought, or as part of the support system of the revolution, taking care of the home and the family. These are important tasks in any struggle but by focusing only on this precludes women from inhabiting the identity of a revolutionary or a theorist. This is in marked contrast to one of the most significant of the achievements of the Russian Revolution in its early phase – it’s radical action in support of full equality between men and women.</p>
<p>Lenin, often invoked by very <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=r8_OCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT15&lpg=PT15&dq=Lenin+masculinist+forms+of+politics&source=bl&ots=7pAVaDY3lS&sig=_7h1QaDct1Dk6PFVF5r5XbMGCDQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwie3MfL09bWAhWHKsAKHR6YA8kQ6AEIMjAC#v=onepage&q=Lenin%20masculinist%20forms%20of%20politics&f=false">masculinist</a> forms of politics was crystal clear on this score. He <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/mar/04.htm">insisted</a> that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The female half of the human race is doubly oppressed under capitalism. The working woman and the peasant woman are oppressed by capital, but over and above that, even in the most democratic of the bourgeois republics, they remain, firstly, deprived of some rights because the law does not give them equality with men; and secondly — and this is the main thing — they remain in ‘household bondage’, they continue to be ‘household slaves’, for they are overburdened with the drudgery of the most squalid and backbreaking and stultifying toil in the kitchen and the individual family household.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>This is the first of a series of articles on the centenary of the Russian Revolution.</strong></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85118/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Vashna Jagarnath is affiliated with the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa</span></em></p>When women are remembered as part of the Communist or any other political tradition it’s often as an afterthought, or as part of the support system of the revolution.Vashna Jagarnath, Senior Lecturer, History Department, Rhodes UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/847062017-10-02T16:49:32Z2017-10-02T16:49:32ZWhy the dream of a prosperous, united nation continues to elude South Africa<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187576/original/file-20170926-19571-1we1vpx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Violent service delivery riot near Soweto, Johannesburg.Millions of poor South Africans live in shacks.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Nic Bothma</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The goal of one united South African nation living prosperously under a constitutional democracy remains elusive. This is in spite of the constitution boldly <a href="https://www.gov.za/documents/constitution-republic-south-africa-1996-preamble">declaring that</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>South Africa belongs to all who live in it, both black and white, united in our diversity.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The central issue raised by the struggle against <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-apartheid-south-africa">racial injustice</a>, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-slavery-and-early-colonisation-south-africa">colonialism</a> and <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/imperialism-and-socialism-context-africa">imperialism</a> – what is referred to in South Africa as the <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/content/national-question-post-94-south-africa-discussion-paper-preparation-50th-national-conference">National Question</a> - reemerged dramatically three years ago. It started as a demand for the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/16/the-real-meaning-of-rhodes-must-fall">removal of the statue</a> of arch imperialist and colonialist, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/cecil-john-rhodes">Cecil John Rhodes</a>, from a prominent position at the University of Cape Town. It rapidly grew into a powerful movement in support of <a href="https://theconversation.com/africa/topics/decolonisation-17372">decolonisation</a>. The National Question, it appears, remains highly relevant and unresolved.</p>
<p>In a new book, <a href="http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/the-unresolved-national-question-in-south-africa/">The Unresolved National Question: left thought under apartheid</a> a number of authors set out the multifaceted origins of the idea.</p>
<h2>Political traditions</h2>
<p>Four main contested political traditions have shaped this debate. </p>
<p>The first is the <a href="https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/study-guide/">Marxist-Leninist</a> tradition, which goes back to the <a href="http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Soviet_Union">Soviet Union</a> in the 1920s and the debates between <a href="http://www.notablebiographies.com/Ki-Lo/Lenin-Vladimir.html">Lenin</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Stalin">Stalin</a> and <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/roy/index.htm">Manabendra Nath Roy of India</a>. </p>
<p>At the centre of these debates was the idea of two distinct stages in the struggle for national liberation, a <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv02424/04lv02730/05lv03005/06lv03132/07lv03140/08lv03145.htm">national democratic stage</a> and then a <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/dec/31.htm">socialist stage</a>. This strategic approach was <a href="http://www.sacp.org.za/main.php?ID=2638">adopted</a> by the Communist Party of South Africa - now the South African Communist Party (SACP), in 1928/1929. It later developed into the idea of South Africa as a <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/content/apartheid-south-africa-colonialism-special-type">colonialism of a special type</a>.</p>
<p>The second is the Congress tradition, associated with the African National Congress <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/organisations/african-national-congress-anc">(ANC)</a> and its iconic leaders, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/chief-albert-john-mvumbi-luthuli">Albert Luthuli</a>, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/oliver-reginald-kaizana-tambo">Oliver Tambo</a> and <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/page/biography">Nelson Mandela</a>. At the heart of this tradition is the idea of one <a href="http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/the-origins-of-non-racialism/">non-racial nation</a>. Historian Luli Callinicos shows how Mandela and Tambo steadily widened their concept of the nation to include all races.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187791/original/file-20170927-24173-15rxnsy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187791/original/file-20170927-24173-15rxnsy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187791/original/file-20170927-24173-15rxnsy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187791/original/file-20170927-24173-15rxnsy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187791/original/file-20170927-24173-15rxnsy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=546&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187791/original/file-20170927-24173-15rxnsy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=546&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187791/original/file-20170927-24173-15rxnsy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=546&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Life-long friends and ANC leaders Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Professor Robbie van Niekerk, a South African expert on social policy, traces the roots of the ANC’s economic and social thought to the 1943 <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/africans-claims-south-africa-adopted-anc-1943-annual-conference">Bill of Rights of African Claims</a> and the 1955 <a href="http://scnc.ukzn.ac.za/doc/HIST/freedomchart/freedomch.html">Freedom Charter</a>. In these documents “the nation” can only be fully realised through the universal extension and provision of public goods by a democratic state. Or, as Luthuli <a href="http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/the-unresolved-national-question-in-south-africa/">put it</a>, the new government should have as its objective the creation of a democratic welfare state with redistributive social policies in health, education and welfare.</p>
<p>The third is the <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/65974.Leon_Trotsky">Trotskyite</a> tradition. This goes back to the thirties in the Western and Eastern Cape and is associated with the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/organisations/non-european-unity-movement-neum">Unity Movement</a>. This approach is developed in the book by the late Marxist historian and then activist <a href="http://www.historicalstudies.uct.ac.za/hst/news/martin-legassick-has-passed-away">Martin Leggasick</a>. Leggasick and his colleagues were to form the <a href="https://eng.ichacha.net/zaoju/marxist%20workers%20tendency%20of%20the%20anc.html">Marxist Worker Tendency</a> of the ANC developing Trotsky’s notion of the <a href="http://www.redletterpress.org/Permanent%20Revolution.html">“permanent revolution”</a>. Revolution, they argued, developed continuously and unevenly on a world scale, rather than proceeding through discrete chronological stages. Legassick was eventually expelled from the ANC.</p>
<p>Finally, there is the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/DC/Acn1964.0001.9976.000.019.Oct1964.7/Acn1964.0001.9976.000.019.Oct1964.7.pdf">Africanist tradition</a> identified with <a href="https://theconversation.com/sobukwes-pan-africanist-dream-an-elusive-idea-that-refuses-to-die-52601">Robert Sobukwe</a> and the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/pan-africanism">(PAC)</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187790/original/file-20170927-24188-1akg7hx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187790/original/file-20170927-24188-1akg7hx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187790/original/file-20170927-24188-1akg7hx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187790/original/file-20170927-24188-1akg7hx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187790/original/file-20170927-24188-1akg7hx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187790/original/file-20170927-24188-1akg7hx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187790/original/file-20170927-24188-1akg7hx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sobukwe, founder of the Pan Africanist Congress.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As political scientist Siphamandla Zondi makes clear, Africanism is a much broader tradition than the PAC. For the Africanists, the nation state is a product of Western modernity and colonialism. At the centre of the tradition is the notion of “epistemic disobedience”. The decolonisation of knowledge and its production are seen as a “rebellion against the neocolonised order of things”</p>
<h2>Continuity and rupture</h2>
<p>In the book, we discuss the debates that emerged after the banning of South Africa’s national liberation movements in 1960. We suggest that a process of continuity and rupture takes place. On the one hand, movements emerge that attempt to break with the past. These include:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>the ethnic nationalism promoted by the apartheid government through its <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/first-bantustans-or-homelands-comes-existence-when-transkei-regional-authority-institute">Bantustan policy</a>, </p></li>
<li><p>the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/definition-black-consciousness-bantu-stephen-biko-december-1971-south-africa">black consciousness movement</a> associated with Steve Biko, </p></li>
<li><p>the emergence of a strong feminist movement, </p></li>
<li><p>the creation of a powerful workers’ movement with an emphasis on the primacy of the working class, and</p></li>
<li><p>a surprising outcome of the national democratic struggle - a “liberal” constitution. </p></li>
</ul>
<p>But in spite of these new ideologies and movements, there is a great deal of continuity with past political traditions. Two examples illustrate this process of continuity and rupture. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187788/original/file-20170927-24149-mpv4mz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187788/original/file-20170927-24149-mpv4mz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=711&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187788/original/file-20170927-24149-mpv4mz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=711&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187788/original/file-20170927-24149-mpv4mz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=711&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187788/original/file-20170927-24149-mpv4mz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187788/original/file-20170927-24149-mpv4mz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187788/original/file-20170927-24149-mpv4mz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Steve Biko, leader of the Black Consciousness Movement.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The first one is the championing of ethnic nationalism and the endorsement of traditional <a href="http://overcomingapartheid.msu.edu/multimedia.php?id=65-259-7">Bantustan</a> leaders after 1994. </p>
<p>We introduce the idea of the ethnic nation in the book through a chapter by Dunbar Moodie. He examines the debates that took place in the <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv02424/04lv02730/05lv03188/06lv03190.htm">Afrikaner Broederbond</a>. These show how liberal Afrikaner nationalist intellectuals, such as <a href="http://www.tafelberg.com/authors/330">NP Van Wyk Louw</a>, argued that Afrikaners cannot deny Africans what they claim for themselves, namely the right to self determination. Hence apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd envisioned the idea of the Bantustans culminating in a federation of “independent ethnic nations” in southern Africa.</p>
<p>The chiefs and tribal authorities that were created by apartheid were authoritarian, deeply undemocratic, and often corrupt. Yet they survived into the post-apartheid era. </p>
<p>The second example is the constitution and its Bill of Rights. There are those who believe that these rights, especially the socio-economic rights, such as the right to education and housing, provide the key to resolving the National Question.</p>
<p>Indeed, Jeremy Cronin and Alex Mashile, from the SACP, argue that under Thabo Mbeki the National Question was reduced to the deracialisation of monopoly capitalism. The goal of the national democratic revolution became the consolidation of a capitalist democracy by opening up South Africa to global markets and promoting a black capitalist class.</p>
<h2>Resolving the National Question</h2>
<p>What became clear in our conversations about the book that the National Question cannot be resolved solely through the country’s constitution. Much as it contains the potential for a far more radical transformative project than traditional liberalism, it cannot resolve the National Question.</p>
<p>The resolution of the National Question will require the resolution of what has been called the “social question”. This is a historic demand for the redistribution of wealth and the right of all citizens to education, health and welfare. Without addressing the legacy of land dispossession, economic exclusion, long term unemployment and racialised inequality, the National Question will remain unresolved.</p>
<p><em>The article is drawn from a recently published volume of research based essays titled <a href="http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/the-unresolved-national-question-in-south-africa/">The Unresolved National Question: left thought under apartheid</a>. It was edited by Edward Webster and Karin Pampallis and published by Wits University Press</em>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84706/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Edward Webster does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The National Question cannot be resolved solely through South Africa’s constitution. There’s potential for a far more radical transformative project than traditional liberalism.Edward Webster, Professor Emeritus, Society, Work and Development Institute, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/755992017-04-05T14:54:45Z2017-04-05T14:54:45ZWhy every generation of students must find, fulfil or betray its mission<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/163641/original/image-20170403-21966-10yk9fp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Student protests in South Africa have centred around free tertiary education.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Sumaya Hisham</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In a recent opinion piece in the Business Day newspaper, author and academic Jonny Steinberg <a href="https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/business-day/20170303/281767039009215">suggested</a> that a “generational estrangement deeper than we have acknowledged” had emerged between the Fees Must Fall generation – those who’ve led protests against high university tuition fees and higher education structures they say are unjust – and their “scorn for almost everyone over the age of 40”. </p>
<p>At times over the past two years it may have seemed that a generation had emerged on South Africa’s campuses that has disowned the past. But generational rebellion is an enduring feature of all societies. Indeed, it’s the dynamic through which societies renew themselves and move forward. </p>
<p>Reflecting on more than 40 years of teaching three generations of University of Witwatersrand (Wits) students – incidentally, Steinberg was among them – I couldn’t help observing how each generation developed a distinct self consciousness; a world view. Each generation was shaped by particular political icons and engaged in particular forms of political action.</p>
<h2>Repression and state violence</h2>
<p>The first generation, the Soweto generation, looked for theories of radical – even revolutionary – change. The central figure was <a href="http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/marx.HTML">Karl Marx</a>, whether students chose to reject him and go in a different direction or to adopt one or other of the intellectual currents that had their source in Marx. These included <a href="https://global.britannica.com/biography/Antonio-Gramsci">Antonio Gramsci</a>, <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/leon-trotsky-9510793">Leon Trotsky</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/23/ernesto-laclau">Ernest Laclau</a>, <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/vladimir-lenin-9379007">Vladimir Lenin</a> and so on.</p>
<p>In 1981 half of the students in my honours class in industrial sociology were held under the <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv01538/04lv01828/05lv01829/06lv01927.htm">Terrorism Act</a>. Some were detained for months without trial. It was the time of the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/organisations/united-democratic-front-udf">United Democratic Front</a>; of trade union militancy and nationwide resistance to apartheid. </p>
<p>But it was also a time of repression, of state violence – even assassination. The assassination of <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/david-joseph-webster">David Webster</a>, a colleague in the department of anthropology, was a dramatic illustration of those times.</p>
<p>The release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and 1994’s new democratic government was an event that profoundly changed the classroom. This, the 1994 generation, was quite different from those who’d come before.</p>
<h2>Decolonisation of knowledge</h2>
<p>For many, the classroom was an opportunity to escape the poverty and political turmoil of the townships for a career in a transformed public sector or the private sector. But they were rebels too. I recall students occupying the administrative building and trashing the campus in support of their demands for the transformation of Wits. Indeed, one of the demands was for free education. </p>
<p>By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, around 2009, I sensed a new assertive spirit in the corridors of the humanities faculty at Wits. A new generation was in the making, a third generation. It was to culminate in the Fees Must Fall movement of 2015 and 2016. </p>
<p>In February 2016 I was in discussions with my new, black female Masters interns about what they wanted to research for their theses. They announced: “We are tired of white people studying blacks; we want to study whites.” This generation had found its voice and the language to express their feelings of discomfort and <a href="https://mulpress.mcmaster.ca/globallabour/article/view/2839/2543">sense of racial injustice</a> in a world where knowledge production is still dominated by whites. </p>
<p>The decolonisation of knowledge was their aim. Post-colonial theory was their guide. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/26/arts/edward-w-said-literary-critic-advocate-for-palestinian-independence-dies-67.html">Edward Said</a> and <a href="https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/fanon/national-culture.htm">Frantz Fanon</a>, and African intellectuals such as <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/stephen-bantu-biko">Steve Biko</a> and <a href="http://www.ngugiwathiongo.com/">Ngugi Wa’ Thiongo</a> were now the key theorists. </p>
<p>What’s striking about this, the third generation, is the leading role played by black female students. Black feminism, the black body and sexuality become the dominant discourse of this generation. This third generation had found its voice. They were now comfortable in their skin and proud of their identity.</p>
<p>The teacher student relationship – what I call the chalk face – is a crucial interface between the generations. It’s here that academic generations are made. A central demand of the current generation of students is the need to recognise their dignity, their material needs, their distinct family and cultural backgrounds, and of course their language.</p>
<h2>Discovering a new mission</h2>
<p>But the generational rebellion that Steinberg refers to is not simply about the need for better communication. </p>
<p>It’s a demand that goes back many generations. Indeed it was <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/robert-sobukwe-inaugural-speech-april-1959">a demand</a> made by Pan African Congress founder <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/robert-mangaliso-sobukwe">Robert Sobukwe</a> when he was a tutor at Wits nearly 60 years ago. </p>
<p>It’s a demand to change the content of the curriculum so that South Africans, especially black men and women from all over Africa, can become the producers of knowledge. </p>
<p>To rebuild trust and mutual respect between the generations we need to make our classrooms places where our students are not only the consumers of knowledge produced elsewhere. This is the challenge for the graduating class of 2016. In the memorable words of Fanon:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Each generation must discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Your mission is to become the authors of the books the next generation of students read; the articles they cite and the theories that shape their thinking. </p>
<p><em>This is an edited extract of the author’s speech on the occasion of being awarded an <a href="https://www.wits.ac.za/news/latest-news/graduations/2017/a-life-servicing-many-generations-.html">honorary doctorate</a> from the University of the Witwatersrand.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/75599/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Edward Webster does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Generational rebellion is an enduring feature of all societies. Indeed, it is the dynamic through which societies renew themselves and move forward.Edward Webster, Professor Emeritus, Society, Work and Development Institute, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/536672016-01-25T15:19:22Z2016-01-25T15:19:22ZOur understanding of states, sovereignty and statelessness is being tested<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/109155/original/image-20160125-19667-bbr0pc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Refugees walk through a frozen field after crossing the border from Macedonia, near the village of Miratovac, Serbia</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Marko Djurica</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>One leg of a complicated travel schedule over the holidays imprisoned me in an airport lounge for 12 hours: caught in this liminal space, I began to think about the state, its sovereignty, and the idea of statelessness.</p>
<p>It is not the first time these thoughts have come around.</p>
<p>When the glamour of globalisation was the rage a decade or so ago, it was tempting to believe that - to invoke Leon Trotsky’s famous 1917 phrase - the world was on the edge of condemning the state and sovereignty to the <a href="http://dinafainberg.com/about/">dustbin of history</a>.</p>
<p>But I was disbelieving that globalisation could herald some kind of new market-driven nirvana where states and sovereignty would no longer count for much.</p>
<p>The idea of making both peace and paradise through the power of the purse was never really on: too many messy corners remained to be tidied up, and it is to several of these that my holiday peregrinations took me.</p>
<p>In the late-1960s, however, I was attracted to an earlier strain of post-sovereign thinking, the idea of “the global village”. This has been largely associated with Canadian media theorist, <a href="http://www.mcluhanmedia.com/m_mcl_manmessage.html">Marshall McLuhan</a>. The idea was that greater connectivity would “shrink” the world, but leave state sovereignty intact.</p>
<p>This notion of shrinking the world was recently re-captured by the acclaimed Marxist theorist, David Harvey, in the phrase <a href="http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199874002/obo-9780199874002-0025.xml">“time-space compression”</a>. We live in a “24/7” world, while geographical boundaries have been rendered meaningless.</p>
<p>In one form or another the ideas – globalisation, the global village, time-space compression - were once easily illustrated by pointing to what was happening in Europe.</p>
<p>After centuries of promoting conflict, sovereignty within Europe was demonstrably losing its grip: states previously at war were willing to surrender their dominion in order to merge, mingle and mix. Surely, this was the pathway to modernisation.</p>
<p>But Europe’s value as the proverbial case-in-point has recently been drawn into question.</p>
<p>The promise of economic prosperity for all who live within its capacious borders has been hobbled by market-inspired thinking. The very idea of Europe has been eroded by the incessant bleating by the British that their sovereignty is exceptional – destined to command the world, not be sullied by European provincialism.</p>
<p>But importantly for present purposes, events in Europe suggest something new about states, sovereignty – and the stateless.</p>
<p>Notwithstanding solemn declarations by Brussels - and separate deals with neighbouring states - it is a sure bet that the inward <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34131911">migration to Europe</a> will continue unabated.</p>
<p>The reason for this is plain: those dislodged by conflict in the Middle East know that Europe – a place with no internal borders – is almost within walking distance.</p>
<p>It is true, of course, that around the wider EU borders are in place. These were once the edge of what, a decade and more ago, was called <a href="http://www.movingpeoplechangingplaces.org/migration-histories/fortress-europe.html">“Fortress Europe” </a> – a ring of legislation and international law which could protect prosperous Europe from the intrusion of outsiders.</p>
<p>But it is difficult today to see how – short of war, as in the Ukraine – Fortress Europe can reassert this outer boundary of its sovereignty.</p>
<p>The lesson of this is clear: no longer bound by states, those who have become stateless seem to be seeking a place in the only space where sovereignty has little purchase on the lives of individuals.</p>
<p>There seems to be something else going on too: our understanding of states, sovereignty and statelessness is being tested.</p>
<p>Paradoxically, as the stateless seek out Europe, thousands are leaving it to join the <a href="http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/597254/ISIS-Map-Europe-Terror-Organisation-Andrew-Hosken-Caliphate-Abu-Musab-al-Zarqawi">ISIS caliphate</a>, a sovereign-free zone straddling two nominally sovereign countries – Syria and Iraq.</p>
<p>But here, law and politics clash. In effect the caliphate exercises political sovereignty, although legally it has none. So it occupies that liminal space between “what is” and “what should be”.</p>
<p>As a result, the idea of the caliphate is testing our lexicon, our grammar and our political imagination.</p>
<p>Many questions follow of which this may be the most important: short of war, how are we to deal with it if it is invariably seen as dystopian, or described a “threat”?</p>
<p>A <a href="http://www.e-ir.info/2016/01/22/neglected-yarns-and-new-beginnings-a-delhi-diary/">small conference in Delhi</a>, which came at the end of a month-long perambulation, drew me towards the understanding that we can only read state, sovereignty and statelessness as a process of social negotiation. Seldom are these notions settled: instead, they are continuously mediated by circumstances.</p>
<p>In contrast to what we have been taught - or teach our students - we live in an increasingly hybrid world. </p>
<p>In this world outcomes are produced that are not stable and so generate only doubt, not certainty.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/53667/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
In contrast to what we have been taught - or teach our students - we are living in an increasingly hybrid world.Peter Vale, Professor of Humanities and the Director of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS), University of JohannesburgLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.