Suicide is about Alienation

Good on Mike King for attacking the gutless, shamefaced, official line on suicide as part of the problem not the solution. And cheers to The Daily Blog for acting as a forum on suicide with activists like Dave Macpherson and Martyn Bradbury exposing the failures of the health system. While we agree that we need to change the official response to suicide, that should be based on what causes suicide. We will argue that suicide is a desperate act of refusal against a powerless, de-humanising, alienated life under capitalism. But so long as the official line of taking the fight against suicide out of the hands of people and keeping it as a function of the bureaucracy, judiciary and medical profession remains, the epidemic of suicide will continue. Not until suicide is properly debated and its causes fully understood can any real solutions be found. An independent inquiry is a start in that process.

Competing theories of suicide

To reduce suicide to a personal choice, something wrong with the genes, or neo-liberal social policy, is to mistake the symptoms for the cause. There is a long trail of bankrupt theories strewn along the painful history of this subject. First, there is the history of the Church, especially the Catholic church, of reducing suicide to a sin in the eyes of God. Who would know? Then there is the mainline bourgeois culture of rampant Western individualism that suicides are ‘failures’ who haven’t found ‘success’ in the market. Both of these superstitions form the underbelly of attitudes toward suicide today. Then there are attempts to find measurable causes that can be traced back to impacts on the individuals of social relations which can then be isolated and treated as ‘abnormal’ or ‘deviant’ by medicine or social policy.

Most notable was Emile Durkheim the French sociologist who wrote ‘Suicide: a study in sociology’ in 1897. Durkheim was a ‘positivist’, someone who observed behaviour and looked for correlations and patterns to infer causes. He found 4 types of suicide based on supposed differences in causation. (1) Egoistic: caused by the excessive individualism of modern (capitalist) society. (2) Anomic: the result of a lack of social norms and institutions that support the individual. (3) Altruistic: due to a lack of strong individual traits when facing authority. 4) Fatalistic: suicide resulting from overwhelming social pressures. The two examples he used were slaves and married women.

Durkheim proposed social policies for each type. Egoistic and Anomic suicides could he prevented by creating new social institutions to recreate the mechanical solidarity (eg extended family and village life) of pre-capitalist society to support individuals. Altruistic and Fatalistic suicides were more problematic because they involved critiquing military and family authority both of which Durkheim endorsed as necessary for capitalism to function. In fact he supported the authority of husbands over wives and opposed divorce. In any event, these tinkerings with social policy have failed to get to the root causes of suicide in the century or more since. The sociology of suicide has fixated on symptoms while the state bureaucracies and the medical profession prescribe “good science” but continue to ignore the fundamental causes.

The most promising 19th century line of attack on suicide was that of Marx which began 50 years before Durkheim. It was not the social effects of capitalism that were the causes but the social relations of capitalism itself. For Marx, the basic cause of all social ills was the alienation of individuals from their labour though this also affected those who lived off that labour – the bourgeoisie. Marx never studied suicide as such, but in 1845 he commented on the work of French statistician and police chief Peuchet, who found an obvious correlation between three young bourgeois females subjected to extreme family abuse (spousal abuse and public humiliation for sexual ‘deviancy’) and their suicides by drowning in the river Seine.

Marx concluded that the common cause was alienation from one’s labour, but more concretely in these cases, alienation in the bourgeois family in which women were the ‘slaves’ of their husbands. Proletarians are alienated, but women are also alienated from their husbands in the bourgeois family. And as the bourgeois family was the model for the proletarian family, working class wives became the “proletarians of the proletariat”. So, to clear the way for socialism the bourgeois “family must be destroyed in theory and practice.”

Does revolution stop suicide?

Before looking as more recent attempts to apply “good science” to suicide, it is worth pausing to consider the “theory and practice” of the Bolshevik revolution and its impact on suicide. Marx’s theory predicts that the end of capitalism would bring an end to alienation and the beginning of real humanism. The end of the bourgeois family would empower women and liberate them from domestic slavery. What is the evidence? First, the freedom from oppression was such that human creativity blossomed in all walks of life. Workers’ control of the state and industry empowered them to make their own lives free of the shackles of capitalist social relations. The place of women became more equal. The bourgeois institutions of marriage and the family underwent massive changes.

The result was that among those who made the revolution and participated democratically in building the new society, suicides were almost nil. Workers were no longer alienated from their labour by capital. They controlled their labour collectively by democratic decisions in the Soviets which planned production on the basis of need. A new individual began to emerge, the proletarian individual. The proletariat was within reach of creating ‘humanity’.  Such were the expectations of a new order that the reversal of these conditions brought the inevitable downfall and with it, waves of suicides.

For Trotsky, the degeneration of the revolution brought about a reversal of these new freedoms. Underlying this reversal was the failure of the revolution in Europe and the isolation of the Soviet Union. The ideals of the revolution came under increasing challenge. In the attempt to negotiate a peace with Germany the vast areas of the South were devastated. The civil war against imperialist invasion required a war economy where the state took more central powers and reduced those of the soviets. To feed the troops the peasantry had their product requisitioned. This turned many peasants against the workers state, and in particular the Bolsheviks. The Kronstadt rebellion was ruthlessly put down. The New Economic Policy virtually restored capitalism in the countryside to feed the industrial workers.

The growing concentration of power in the state disillusioned many and the state responded by clamping down on dissidents. Stalin and his apparatus ushered in bureaucratic rule. At each point in this reversal of the revolution, and as the hopes in the revolution were dashed, the rates of suicide went up. Suicide in the Soviet Union therefore was a direct result of the failure to break completely from capitalism, and the inevitable degeneration of "socialism in one country" as the bureaucracy usurped power from the workers. Most important, socialist equality was stillborn as workers control of their labour was taken over by a state bureaucracy. Surplus labour was not allocated to social needs on a democratic basis, but expropriated by the bureaucracy. Alienation re-appeared in the unequal social relations of the bureaucratic regime.

What to do?

We have argued above that alienation is the fundamental cause of suicide. It cannot be overcome unless there is an end to the unequal social relations that produce alienation. The capitalist state is based upon alienation and designed to reproduce it by legitimising unequal class relations. The state bureaucracy uses its power to monopolize knowledge and prevent any challenge to capitalist rule in the name of "good science".  In the post-capitalist states, a state bureaucracy emerged to suppress the power of workers and to block the road to socialism and take the road back to capitalism.

In Aotearoa/NZ, the first task to stopping suicide is to challenge and expose the state agencies and the Mental Health bureaucracy. An official inquiry will do nothing to expose the bureaucracy, plenty of earlier ‘disasters’ such as the police shooting of Steven Wallace and the Pike River tragedy proves.  An independent inquiry is needed to allow critics of the official line on suicide to be heard and their issues raised and debated publicly.

But even so, more urgent actions are needed along the lines of the self-organising of workers and youth, especially Maori youth, to actively fight against the official silence and apathy towards suicide. There are lessons that can be learned from the story of Yellow Ribbon, that created student groups in many schools to deal with those at risk of suicide and its closing down by the state agencies. And many more public initiatives to organise the grass roots communities to campaign against suicide are important developments. Focusing on the immediate causes of suicide will wake people up to the underlying cause of suicide – the alienation of individuals from their labour, from their friends and family, and finally from themselves.

Notes on In Defence of Marxism

Trotsky mural

Trotsky's writings collected in In Defence of Marxism showed that the degeneration of the Fourth International [FI] was already well under way in the late 30s before his assassination in 1940. Trotsky had to fight against the petty bourgeois opposition which refused to regard a state ruled by Stalin as a degenerated workers state. Underlying this fight was the capitulation of the opposition to US social chauvinism in the labour aristocracy. But even more telling, this capitulation resulted from the abandonment of dialectics or what Trotsky called the ‘Crisis of Marxism’. The FI did not have the social base in the working class nor the leadership cadre capable of sustaining a true internationalism in the face of imperialist war. Thus, already at the time of Trotsky’s death, the leading section, the Socialist Workers' Party [SWP] in the heart of the leading imperialist country, the USA, was set on a course of self-destruction. 
 
Social chauvinism however, was not confined to the US section. Vietnam showed already during the 30s that the FI French section in Vietnam was opportunist towards the Stalinists after the popular front period began in 1936. Conversely the ICL group in Vietnam was sectarian. Thus even before the war and Trotsky’s death the roots of the FI were already degenerating.

During the war the tiny FI split into opportunist and sectarian wings under the pressure of Stalinism. The US section buckled in the face of fascism and defended US ‘democratic’ imperialism. Trotskyism in Europe and in the colonies split along the same lines. This in itself was hardly surprising as the Stalinist parties had to impose ruthless discipline, including assassinations to keep its own ranks from rebelling against its popular fronts propping up the imperialist regimes in pressing revolutionary uprisings.

During the war the imperialist powers used the Stalinist popular front to good effect to behead and destroy working class revolutions in Europe and the colonies. Trotsky’s prognosis that the war would see workers rally behind the FI so that either the imperialists would be defeated along with Stalinism by the socialist revolution, or, that imperialism would win and create a new situation of global barbarism not yet foreseen, was proven wrong. Imperialism survived thanks to the Stalinists. This disoriented the FI. Some like Cannon of the US SWP believed that the war was continuing, while others like Pablo believed that Stalinism was a historically progressive force in the defeat of fascism. Of course had Trotsky survived the war he would certainly have recognised reality and rallied the FI to fight its degeneration and liquidation into reformism.

Weakened by the wartime struggles, the FI failed to recognise or correct the material causes of these weaknesses. Trotsky had made the exposure of the causes of these flaws his main task before his death. At their roots, so Trotsky said, was the failure of the FI to embed itself in the working class (including the colonial and semi-colonial working class) so that it could not function as a truly revolutionary Marxist international party.

A world party of revolution would have to draw on the experience of the struggles in every part of the world; imperialist, semi-colonial and in the degenerated workers states. This would allow the experience of objective reality of these struggles to interact with the subjective experience of the party so that it could correct any errors in its program. For Trotsky, unless the objective and subjective realities were united in the democratic centralist party there could be no application of dialectics. There was no unity of theory and practice.

Without this global grounding in the proletarian and peasant struggles the party would be sucked into the petty bourgeois milieu of the big cities in the imperialist countries. This would result in the over-representation of the petty-bourgeois in the composition of the party in the imperialist sections and huge pressures to capitulate to social chauvinism and Stalinism.

This was the twin crisis of leadership and of Marxism that Trotsky warned of before his death. The crisis of leadership was the failure to build a healthy world party of revolution. The crisis of Marxism naturally flowed from that as Marxism would cease to be a living Marxism and become bogged down in dogma.

Thus the key to understanding the significance of the twin crisis is that any failure of a leadership (and party) to be able to apply the dialectical method in relation to objective and subjective reality must lead to failure and defeat. No wonder Trotsky called Schachtman’s rejection of dialectics a “betrayal of Marxism”.

But without Trotsky the FI leadership succumbed to national chauvinism. The majority ultraleft line taken by the US SWP put the US working class, the most privileged labor aristocracy in the world, at the head of the fight in the ongoing world class war. Trotsky had called the US working class the most backward in the world because its class consciousness was held back by the labour aristocracy living off colonial super-profits. Yet Cannon thought it the most advanced proletariat and the leader of the world revolution.

The majority opportunist line in post-war Europe adapted to not only the survival but victory of Stalinism and liquidated the FI into Stalinism. It called Tito an “unconscious Trotskyist” and saw the expansion of the Soviet Union into Eastern Europe where it smashed workers uprisings as creating ‘deformed’ workers states that could be ‘reformed’ by bourgeois parliaments.

Neither the US or European sections based in the biggest imperialist powers took any notice of the mass Trotskyist sections in the colonies of Asia and semi-colonies of Latin America. In Ceylon, India and Indo-China where were mass Trotskyist sections which had fought bloody wars against the colonial powers aided by the Stalinists who eliminated the Trotskyist leaderships. The lessons of this physical ‘liquidation’ at the hands of the Stalinists would have corrected the ‘ideological’ liquidation of imperial-centric Trotskyism.

Nor after the war was there was there any attempt to draw on the experience of the colonial and semi-colonial Trotskyists to produce an honest balance sheet of the wartime defeats and capitulations. We won’t call these ‘betrayals’ since it was clear that the FI lacked the capacity to prevent defeats and capitulations. But we can conclude that the history of Trotskyism since 1946 was one of almost universal liquidation making the crisis of leadership and of Marxism extreme.

Conclusion

So Trotsky was absolutely correct to spell out in In Defence of Marxism the real problem underlying the ‘Russian Question’. It was the rejection of dialectics which had its material roots in the petty bourgeois composition of the FI leadership in Europe and the US. Dialectics in relation to the defence of the USSR meant understanding that workers property must be defended from capitalist restoration despite the Stalinists. Dialectics explained that the workers states had degenerated so that a parasitic bureaucracy took control of workers property in much the same way as the labour bureaucracy controls the unions in the capitalist countries. Therefore the bureaucracy was a caste inside the working class and not a class antagonistic to workers property unless it was able to defeat workers and restore capitalist social relations. Therefore the working class had to make a political revolution to remove the bureaucracy and restore workers control over it's class property.

Trotsky warned that the petty bourgeois leadership was exposed to the pressure of the social chauvinist labour aristocracy in the lead up to war and during wars. The FI had to confront and counter this. When Trotsky suggested that the SWP call for a vote for the CPUSA in 1939 the SWP leadership refused. Yet when the war began and the SWP leaders were arrested Cannon publicly said that fascism and not the US ruling class was the main enemy of US workers. So the SWP capitulated to the social chauvinism of the labour aristocracy during the war, and after the war refused to recognise it as a backward element in the world working class. In the American Theses Cannon said that the US labour aristocracy was the most advanced in the world and has not prevented the more oppressed layers of the working class from moving upward into the labour aristocracy.

The split in the FI before and during the war was to become congealed as a split between those who revised the bureaucracy from caste to class exploiting the workers in the SU and the other ‘Stalinist states’, and those who revised the character of the bureaucracy as parasitic on workers property, to defenders of workers property. But in both cases these one-sided apparently opposite positions, had a common unity. The subjectivity of the working class (the revolutionary party) was replaced by an objective process of revolution. This subordination of the subjective agency of the proletariat to the objective process of history has a name. It’s called Menshevism.

All currents in the post-war FI liquidated the party of the proletariat into the petty bourgeoisie in the form of one, the social democratic parties of the US and European labour aristocracies; two, the ‘anti-imperialist’ leaders of the colonies and semi-colonies; and third, the Stalinist leaders in the degenerate workers states.

Petty bourgeois parties while masquerading as the champions of the working people, all serve the interests of the ruling class since they are bought and paid for by the imperialist bourgeoisies.

In a future issue of Class Struggle we will look at each in turn.

Tunisia: When is a Revolution a Revolution?

Are the huge protests that spread from Tunisia to Algeria, Egypt and Yemen part of a revolution, or not?  The short answer is yes, and I'll explain why.

Revolutions must overturn existing social relations to qualify as revolutions. Any change in the personel of the ruling class by force is a coup rather than a revolution because there is no change in the class that rules.

Revolutions strictly mean transfers of power which allow one class to replace another class as the ruling class. These may be protracted and wax and wane as revolutionary advances meet counter-revolutionary reactions, but in the end we have to have a point at which we say a revolution was completed or defeated. What decides this point is the historic weight of the respective contesting classes.

The great revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries were therefore bourgeois revolutions in which that class came to supplant a declining feudal ruling class which was being displaced by the rise of capitalist production. Bourgeoise democracy was the product of that revolution. Individual citizens won rights of representation, legal equality etc etc if they were capitalist property owners. This was extended to workers eventually as sellers of the commodity labour power. Women eventually got the suffrage as they became economically more independent.

However, revolutions often take many years to complete and may may become redundant when ovetaken by other revolutions. For example, the American revolution was a revolution to establish an American bourgeoisie independent of Britain. But it didnt succeed in establishing the complete dominance of capitalist social relations until it eliminated the pre-capitalist social relations of slavery and united the federation after the Civil War, and then defeated the resistance of the indigenous nations as it pushed the frontier to the West Coast.

Once the European powers and the US had united their nations and their economies had outgrown their national territories, they expanded to become imperialist states. That is, they dominated all the other nations in varying degrees, subordinating them to a divison of labour in which their raw materials were exchanged for manufactured commodities. This economic dependence, or backwardness, meant that they were incapable of completing their bourgeois revolutions and achieving national independence without a total break with imperialism.

Thus the bourgeosies of the colonies, or even weak imperialisms such as Tsarist Russia, did not have an economic base to allow them to win wars of national independence. These bourgeoisies remained agents of imperialism while the task of completing the bourgeois revolution passed onto those classes who were superexploited by both imperialism and their national bourgeoisies. By the 20th century the complete the bourgeois national revolution it was necessary for the exploited classes to make socialist revolutions. Those classes when taking power did not hand power to a bourgeoisie to rule society, but pressed on to create workers states and socialist societies.

The proof of this was in the fact that it took socialist revolutions to break from imperialism, in Russia, China and Cuba. The Russian bourgeoisie remained tied to imperialism so it was necessary for the workers and peasants to overthrow them with a socialist revolution in order to break from imperialism. Lead by revolutionary socialists with a program for socialism, the goals of the bourgeois, or national democratic, revolution were achieved by the socialist revolution. Lenin called this the 'uninterrupted' revolution, while Trotsky called it the 'pemanent' revolution. China and Cuba followed a similar course. These examples allow us to understand the logic of the current incomplete colonial revolutions of which Tunisia is one of many.

The current uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria and Yemen are a re-activation of historically incomplete colonial revolutions. These colonial revolutions are bourgeois revolutions since their purpose is to elminate barriers to the full development of capitalist social relations. They must break from imperialism, unify the nation, replace pre-capitalist relations with bourgeois market relations (or subordinate them) and create a capitalist market for the production of commodities. These revolutions may take take decades to complete and remain incomplete until reactivated to become socialist revolutions as we have already seen.

Tunisia’s national revolution against France was incomplete and the exploited and oppressed classes are now rising up again under the whip of imperialist crisis which imposes terrible austerity on their lives. At the moment their goal is bourgeois ‘democracy’ i.e. removing a 'corrupt' capitalist class. They have yet to see that this will be insufficient. The examples of the USSR, China and Cuba appear to be irrelevant or worse as models for completing their bourgeois revolution. For that we have to thank imperialism that stranged these socialist revolutions over many decades, and Stalinism for putting its boot on the workers necks.

Today the failure of socialist revolutions is blamed on the socialists themselves, and not the success of the capitalist counter-revolutionary by imperialism to isolate, weaken and destroy these revolutions. Bourgeois apologists say that no attempt to win national independence by means of a socialist revolution has succeeded without sacrificing bourgeois democracy. But of course that is exactly what socialist revolution is intended to do, to replace bourgeois democracy with workers democracy. Insofar as this does not happen it is not the fault of the revolution as claimed by bourgeois apologists, but of the bourgeois counter-revolution. 

If we take the Russian revolution as a single case of a socialist revolution that ended up as a Stalinist counter-revolution, we can show that this was not the necessary outcome of the revolution, but of the counter-revolution. The Russian masses were isolated from the global working class and while they made a socialist revolution and were victorious over the invading white armies, they succumbed to the same fate as many colonial revolutions, though in this case the bureaucracy rather than the national bourgeoisie became a Bonapartist caste balancing between imperialism and the Soviet working class.

In other words the bourgeois revolution succeeded as a socialist revolution in Russia in overthrowing an imperialist Tsarist regime and a weak cowardly bourgeoisie, but failed ultimately because did not spread outside Russia and become and international revolution capable of overturning the power of international capital. The same happened in China, Vietnam etc. Cuba is well on the way to restoring capitalism. The DPRK is an stagnant autarky.

So far then, socialist revolutions in the 20th century have failed to survive because the revolutionary class was defeated by overwhelming force of the counter-revolutionary class.  The advances of the socialist revolutions are now forgotten and the counter-revolutionary defeats attributed to the socialist revolution itself. So speaking about 20th century revolutions we can say that revolutions defeated by counter-revolutionary violence destroy in the process not only the socialist revolution, but also the struggle for national democratic goals, proving that the international bourgeoisie can only pretend to advance bourgeois democracy in the imperialist countries by suppressing it in the neo-colonies or semi-colonies.

The question then of future revolutions, specifically those of North Africa at the moment, is a matter of the strength and international unity of the workers and poor farmers as a revolutionary force against the total class strength of the imperialist powers. The more the working class is united and able to exercise its power to halt production (as we see happening in Egypt) the weaker will the capitalist power be and the more it must resort to open reaction to stay in power.

However, the lessons of these socialist revolutions will remerge more clearly when the the barriers to national liberation become obvioius.  The sooner that the new generation of Arab fighters can see through all the imperialist ploys to pretend they can create a bourgeois democratic state, or the Islamics can create a clerical state, and fight for a popular workers and peasants socialist government, the better. They will break from the treacherous national bourgeoisie which keeps the nation tied to imperialism, and break the power of the armed forces by winning the ordinary soldiers who are workers and the peasants in uniform over to the side of the working masses.

We are at another critical point in history like 1917 when the balance of class forces is being put to the test. In these historic crisis situations, it is the socialist revolution that represents the democracy class rule of the vast majority in the future, and the bourgeois counter-revolutionary forces that represent the tiny privileged democracy of the past i.e. the defrence of capitalist property and the right to exploit the producing classes. What is necessary for this to happen is a new revolutionary leadership that understands the lessons of history and guides the exploited classes to the seizure of state power and the creation of Workers and Farmers Governments, and Federations of Socialist Republics everywhere.