THREE MEN IN A BOAT

Author: Jerome K Jerome
Year: 1994 (1889)
Publisher: Forum
Language: Swedish (translator Birgitta Hammar)

What a silly little book ”Tre män i en båt” (Three Men in a Boat”) by Jerome K Jerome is! It is as silly as books come. Utterly, utterly silly.

Three decadent young men – George, Harris and the narrator J – all of whose wits are vastly overshadowed by their laziness, having concluded that they suffer from exhaustion, embark on a recreational boat trip upon the River Thames from London to Oxford. They are accompanied by J’s dog Montmorency. They first consider other travel options but every time someone in the party recalls a story of a friend or family member who has already tried it with discouraging results and so the three discard the idea. In the end, a boat trip on the river remains the only feasible choice.

They rent a boat and off they go. The comical situations they encounter on the way and the more or less loosely connected anecdotes they tell each other during the journey are what the book is famous for. Jerome finds room to ruminate on such diverse issues as the fallibility of the weather report, the ease of getting lost at Victoria Station, the disadvantages of learning how to play the banjo from a manual, and the challenges of cooking and Irish stew on a river boat.

The book also has some exceptional quotes and one-liners.
“I like work, it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”
“George goes to sleep at a bank from ten to four each day, except Saturdays, when they wake him up and put him outside at two.”
“He told us that it had been a fine day to-day, and we told him that it had been a fine day yesterday, and then we all told each other that we thought it would be a fine day to-morrow; and George said the crops seemed to be coming up nicely.”

To me, the descriptions of the humorous events read a bit like a manuscript to Mr Bean episodes. Although some of the jokes are fresh and on target, the difficulties of writing as opposed to acting out slapstick frequently shine through quite strongly. More often than not, I have the feeling that I am listening to someone relating a funny incident from their lives or a scene from a movie they have seen. It must have been hilarious to have been there, but rather less captivating to have it re-told to you.

“Tre män in en båt” was originally intended to be a serious travel guide. The Thames had only recently been made available for recreational sailing after it had been cleaned up by the government only a few decades earlier. The railway revolution had moved most goods transport from the English waterways to the tracks which in a short time had afforded an abundance of room on the river. By the late 19^th century, boating up and down the river had become something of a fad among the prosperous bourgeoisie and Jerome decided to write a vade mecum for prospective boaters. It seems the skits were designed to intersperse the fact-laden portions in order to make the book more pleasurable (and perhaps to mirror the author’s jocose personality) but they soon took the upper hand and the book turned out to become a satirical commentary on the vacation habits of the privileged classes; popular with the reading masses, scoffed at by literary critics.

A fun fact is that, if applied as a travel guide, “Tre män i en båt” is still perfectly useful. All the landmarks described and all the pubs and inns recommended along the river stretch between London and Oxford are still there to this day. So if you are so inclined, hop on a boat, ropes away, and off you go.

“There is no more thrilling sensation I know of than sailing. It comes as near to flying as man has got to yet - except in dreams.”     

THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS

Author: Arundhati Roy
Year: 2017
Publisher: Brombergs Bokförlag
Language: Swedish (translator Peter Samuelsson)

Now and again you come across a work of art that tests the limits of your cognitive abilities. Almost as if it nudged your centre of gravity or shifted your points of reference. In some cases, it is the topic that the artist examines that boggles your mind. At other times, it is a perspective offered that thus far had remained unrevealed. Yet every now and then, you encounter artwork, be it a musical piece, a poem, drama, painting, performance, or dance that by its sheer anatomy thrusts a new layer of consciousness onto your existence.    

Such provocative art will chip away with surgical precision at the joints in the fabric of your world-matrix where concepts meet; right at the edge between the familiar and the foreign, black and white, good and bad, heaven and earth. These are the points of our Weltanschauung where we as humans are already struggling and therefore easily provoked, angered, and frustrated when our conceptual compartments, chiselled with such painstaking meticulousness are challenged.

This might explain why Arundhati Roy’s second and most recent novel “Den yttersta lyckans ministerium” (“The Ministry of Utmost Happiness”) became so controversial. Particularly in her native India. Her book-launches have been interrupted by violent protesters and her critics have burned effigies of her in the streets and attacked her rabidly in the media. The truth of the matter is that the novel methodically homes in on some of the most widely open wounds in the Hindu society: Kashmir, the Caste system, and the culture of toxic masculinity. To people who are unable or unwilling to take a step back and observe their world at a distance for a second, this will be painful.

The novel opens with a child being born in a dark room during a blackout and being presented to her mother as the long-coveted son she was hoping for. She calls him Aftab. At a closer inspection in better lighting the next morning she realises that Aftab is actually a hermaphrodite with both male and female genitalia. Neither boy nor girl. Or both. Right on the joint in the matrix.  

“In Urdu, the only language she knew, all things, not just living things but all things- carpets, clothes, books, pens, musical instruments- had a gender. Everything was either masculine or feminine, man or woman. Everything except her baby. Yes of course she knew there was a word for those like him- Hijra. Two words actually, Hijra and Kinnar. But two words do not make a language.
Could you live outside of language?”  

Roy knows exactly what she is doing with her writing. By this intense prelude, she declares the purpose of her novel. Aftab goes on to grow up and decides to cast off the gender identity ascribed to him by his mother and embrace his female side. He becomes she. Aftab becomes Anjum.

In the second part, Roy breaks with the bustling capital and hurls the reader into the hotbed of political turmoil that is Kashmir. This part of the book pivots on another woman, Tilo, and the three men who all love her for different reasons and each with a love of a different kind. The three men come to represent the scattered identities of Indian citizens in the Kashmir conflict. Musa is the casteless soldier of the Muslim resistance and an active enemy to the Indian forces stationed in Kashmir. Biplab is the Indian intelligence officer and member of the highest caste. Naga is right in between, a journalist who is seemingly impartial and makes it look like he is holding the policy-makers responsible but who in reality is a useful idiot who runs the errands of the government, and knows about it.

Tilo is a mix of them all. Born of a high-caste mother and an untouchable father. A Kashmiri activist from Kerala far away from the northern provinces. She ends up marrying two of her three friends but never the one with whom she has the strongest bond.

What then unites a hermaphrodite prostitute from Shahjahanabad with a reluctant warrior from Kashmir? The former having violently broken with every premise of her middle-class existence to glissade into the bliss of resigned harmony. The latter evolving gradually through the mounting pressure of society until violence envelopes her in a climactic discharge of defiance and rebellion. One clue is in exclusion; the common experience of being a stranger in one’s own land, and the intimate acquaintance with being considered an outcast, a provocation, and a menace.

Roy brings them together at a graveyard where Anjum has created a makeshift asylum for unwanted Indian residents of all kinds. The same way the dead are being removed and deposited outside of the city walls, so are the living ejected from the community. They all gather in the same place, sharing the same site. The living, in Musa’s words, are after all “only dead people pretending to be alive.”  

In the hands of Arundhati Roy, musings such as these can only culminate in a literary masterpiece. I dare say that the main thing standing between Roy and the Nobel Prize in literature is her meagre production. Den yttersta lyckans ministerium is but her second work of fiction since her debut “The God of Small Things” almost 25 years ago. Her writing is gentle and sublime. The attention to detail is astounding. The strength is neither in the plot nor in the characters – the plot is almost non-existent and the characters, although manifold and diversified, incomplete – but rather in her unrelenting low-frequency pecking on the social fabric to which her characters are barely but inescapably connected and her ability to shine the light on the feeble threads that unite them. In this, her authorship reminds me of that of Doris Lessing (reviewed August 2020) and Virginia Woolf (reviewed September 2020). Similarly to theirs, Roy’s writing forces you to recognise that you are in fact largely ignorant of your world, as if it was poking you with a stick and pushing you against your will toward the precipice of wisdom. You do not necessarily have to love the art that does this to you. You may even hate it for tearing down a perfectly good illusion that has served you well for half a lifetime or more.

But you might have to acknowledge that the joints in your matrix are actually cracks ready to burst.

THE PIANIST

Author: Wladyslaw Szpilman
Year: 2000 (1946)
Publisher: Wydawnictwo Znak
Language: Polish

The Second World War is probably the lowest point of our species so far. Mankind, undressed to all its bare-naked evil, rage, bigotry, hypocrisy, savagery, and moral bankruptcy, deliberately imprinted an indelible bloodstain on its history. It is estimated that up to 60 million people perished. They died from genocide, massacres, bombings, and disease. Some were killed in battle. Some committed suicide. Some starved to death. Many more still went through unspeakable hardship, pain, despair, horror, and trauma.

Truth be told, I try to avoid reading books about the Second World War. It marks such a revolting epoch that it makes my stomach turn at the mere thought. And yet, some books just have to be read, contemplated, and shared. Some experiences may never be forgotten and by reading them, I imagine that I add my own conscience to the collective memory of the people and events of the 1930s and 1940s. One such book is “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank (see my review from June 2020). Another is “Pianista” (“The Pianist”) by Wladyslaw Szpilman.

The book ventures to capture the haunting memories of a Varsovian Polish-Jewish pianist and employee of the National Polish Radio, from the day the Second World War broke out to the day the Nazis surrendered and Warsaw was liberated.

Szpilman recounts how despite German bombs barraging the once prosperous Polish capital, shattering windows and setting entire neighbourhoods aflame, tossing carts, vehicles, horses, and people into the air leaving only charred shadows in their stead, he made his way to the studio of the radio station to make his final broadcast. In the midst of this inferno, where the noise of the crumbling city and the blasts from the enemy’s relentless bombardment much of the time overcame the sound of his grand piano, he gave an incandescent Chopin recital to his horrified listeners as a musical valediction to the country that was to be no more. The Polish radio was soon thereafter taken off the air and replaced by Nazi-controlled transmissions.

He reminisces how one day, the dwindling population of Warsaw, already decimated by being systematically  bit by bit transported out of the city and to the extermination camps, is shocked to learn that a sizeable portion of the centre was to be designated Jewish and surrounded by walls on each side making it impossible to get either in or out without authorisation. Jews living in other quarters needed to move inside the walls, and non-Jewish Poles having thitherto resided within the designated area needed to move out. Neighbourhoods, friendships, households, businesses, schools were broken up in an instant and the ghetto came into existence.

In fact there were two ghettos, connected only by a narrow passageway across Chlodna Street which was, and I seem to recall still is, a busy thoroughfare in Warsaw with some critical tramlines running along it. It was guarded by German soldiers who had to stop the heavy traffic in order to allow the residents to cross from one of the ghettos to the other. In one memorable sequence, Szpilman relates how the soldiers, having grown bored with their monotonous jobs of keeping the Jews at bay during rush hours, came up with a game where they commanded a group of street musicians to play some merry tunes and then forced some unfortunate individuals from the anticipating masses on the pavement on each side of Chlodna Street to dance for their amusement. They found particular pleasure in matching up conspicuously silly pairs such as the shortest man they could find with the tallest woman or elderly and crippled couples which they spurred to dance faster and faster under the threat of being shot on the spot, until their frail bodies succumbed to the fatigue and tumbled to the ground.

The book is packed with stories like these. Every single page saturated with disbelief, fear, humiliation, despair, sacrifice, and senseless killing and death. Wladyslaw Szpilman would lose everything and everyone to the war; except his life. As if by a miracle, almost six years after he had given the last live recital on the wireless in 1939, he gave the first to a once again free Poland in 1945, playing the same piece by Frédéric Chopin as if to declare the indomitability of the Polish resolve through the music of one of the nation’s most illustrious patriots.     

Szpilman was to recover quickly after the war and his loyalty to Polish music and the Polish National Radio would become his path back to some sort of normality. Rebuilding the fine arts would prove to be a slow process facing many obstacles. While the Germans had prohibited much Polish music during the occupation years, Chopin among them, after the war the Russian overlords continued to restrict the freedom of Warsaw’s musicians, artists, writers, poets, and film-makers. Not until after Joseph Stalin’s death, did the Communist grip loosen enough to permit western influence and a more liberal production of art and entertainment.

In 1962, Szpilman, who was already an established and respected pianist, composer and songwriter at the time, became one of the founding members of what was to be the global phenomenon “The Warsaw Quintet” and from that moment his fame was secured.*

All this without anybody even having heard about “Pianista”.

The fact is that as early as 1946, the first edition of this book was released under the name “Smierc miasta” (“Death of a City”). The actual author was the Polish nobleman, socialite, intellectual, and cultural celebrity Jerzy Waldorff, to whom Szpilman had entrusted the literary composition of his memoir. The book was quickly censored by the totalitarian pro-Stalinist regime and soon put out of print. Not until 1998, when Szpilman was 87 years old, would it see the day of light in an uncensored German translation. It instantly became a global success and within two years had been issued in several languages, including the original Polish now under the title “Pianista”. Roman Polanski’s film adaptation another two years later went on to win three Academy Awards.

During the course of this revival, Jerzy Waldorff’s name was somehow lost. Still, the language of the Polish original could only have been produced by a lettered and sophisticated writer, far from Szpilman’s direct and sometimes crude way of communicating. The contrast between the literary and high flying language on the one hand and the horrendous events that it describes on the other, time and time again punched me right in the gut and I found that I could only read one chapter at the time on account of my heart-rate and blood pressure. Graphic descriptions of one unthinkable atrocity after the other are, after all, emotionally rather taxing.

What then can be said about actually living through this experience?   

 

*A comprehensive detail on the exploits of the Warsaw Quintet based on interviews with surviving members as well as historical records and documents is brilliantly provided in the Master thesis “Kwintet Warszawski – historia i opis dzialalnosci” by Karolina Orzelska from 2010.

  

THE QUEEN OF SPADES AND OTHER SHORT-STORIES

Author: Alexander Pushkin
Year: 1954 (1831, 1834)
Publisher: Tidens Förlag
Language: Swedish (translators Manja Benkow, E von Sabsay, C Sterzel)

Many nations have their own literary deity; a towering figure who stands as a standard-bearer for the collected belle-lettre, poetry, and drama of a group of people which communally subscribe to the national identity with which the apotheosised wordsmith is associated. I imagine such personas to be Homer for Greece, William Shakespeare for England, Adam Mickiewicz for Poland, Johann Wolfgang Goethe for Germany, and perhaps Molière for France.

Yet none of these giants, revered as they are both nationally and internationally, enjoy a stature in their respective country similar to Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin’s in Russia. Every generation of Russians in the last 150 years have learned, and continue to learn, his poems by heart; all his dramas and novels are analysed in primary school; quotes from his works have entered daily Russian language; one would be hard-pressed to find a city, town, or hamlet in Russia without a Pushkin Street; and “Пушкин: наше всё” (“Pushkin: our everything”) is a slogan known to every Russian.

Having read some of his short stories, more specifically “Spader Dam” (“The Queen of Spades”) and “Bjelkins berättelser” (“The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin”) it is easy to understand why Pushkin was and still is an appreciated writer, but it is not immediately obvious why he has become such a monumental entity.

“Spader Dam” is a gothic tale of a young officer who hears a story about an old countess who is said to know the secret of how to always win at cards. In order to get to the old lady with the aim to obtain the auspicious formula, he decides to court her young but lethargic ward. Things do not exactly go according to plan.

“Bjelkins berättelser” is a collection of short stories which Pushkin pretends to have heard from a fictional acquaintance of his, Ivan Belkin. In the Russian original, there are five stories but for some reason, the editor of my Swedish translation, the legendary Nils-Åke Nilsson (see my post on Nicolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” from March 2019) chose to omit one of them.

The first Belkin, “The Shot”, is the story about Silvio who is a civilian but hangs out with a group of young officers drinking, playing cards, and telling stories. He is widely considered to be the best marksman in the region. One day he shocks and confuses his friends when a newly arrived officer at the regiment insults him in his own house and yet Silvio refuses to challenge him to a duel, which would be the honourable thing to do. But as it will turn out; there is a reason.

The second Belkin, “The Snowstorm”, tells the tale of two lovers who decide to elope and get married against the will of the young woman’s parents. They decide to meet in the middle of the night in a small nearby village and perform the wedding ceremony in the local church. When the night arrives, a terrible blizzard hits the area and the groom-to-be loses his directions as he tries to sled to the meeting point and gets hopelessly lost. The hapless lovers never see each other again. Some years later, a young hussar wins the heart of the forsaken bride, but the snowstorm has one more surprise up its sleeve.

The third Belkin, “The Undertaker” is the one that Nilsson excluded from my copy. Hence, no comment.

The fourth then is “The Postmaster” wherein a traveller recounts his meeting with the fair Dunya, the daughter of a keeper of a rural post station. The postmaster is very proud of his daughter who is the epitome of beauty, wit, and charm. Three years after their first meeting, the traveller returns to the station on official business and encounters the postmaster in a state of deep depression. It appears that a wealthy nobleman has seduced Dunya and swept her away to St Petersburg without her father’s approval. The traveller agrees to seek her out and bring her back to her father’s home.

The fifth and final Belkin, “The Mistress as Farm Girl”, is yet another love story where two feuding landowners are unable to reconcile with the different lifestyle of the other. Incidentally, one of them has a son and the other a daughter of roughly the same age. The young woman grows curious about the allegedly handsome son of her father’s foe and disguises as a farm girl to have an excuse to ostensibly accidentally run into him without revealing her true identity. Sure enough, they fall in love. Things get complicated when their respective parents mend fences and decide to introduce their children to one another.

All of these short stories are an absolute delight to read. There is not a boring moment, not a cumbersome passage or redundant word in the whole book. Pushkin was quite simply a superb writer. Still, the leap from superb to divine is not immediately clear. In fact, internationally Pushkin is not even the best-known Russian writer, overshadowed outside of Russia by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, and probably even Bulgakov given the global cult status of “The Master and Margarita” (see my review from May 2021). And yet to Russians, he remains without equal.

I can identify two possible explanations for this. The first is that Alexander Pushkin was first and foremost a poet. His preeminent works “Ruslan and Ludmila” and “Eugene Onegin” are written in poetic form and he is the author of several large and small format poems. Poetry is notoriously difficult to translate, linguistically as well as culturally, which may have impeded the penetration power of his works in other languages. The second is that in Russia, Pushkin’s importance is measured against the backdrop of the evolution of Russian literature and his role in modernising the art of poetry and fiction in Russia. All great Russian writers who came after him are in a way his artistic heirs. On a global scale, however, his impact has been much less crucial which is likely to have prompted rather less admiration for his art in the rest of the world.

Reading “Spader dam” and “Belkins berättlser” hardly qualifies me to pass judgment on the totality of Pushkin’s legacy. All I can say is that I had a jolly good time reading them and I have no hesitations to recommend them to anyone who is looking for easily digestible stories with a twist conceived and penned by a true master.   

COMMUNIST MANIFESTO

Author: Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
Year: 2018 (1848)
Publisher: Modernista
Language: Swedish (translator unknown)

In November 1842, 22-year-old Friedrich Engels was on his way to Manchester, where his father ran a successful cotton mill, to finish his internship which would introduce him to the family business and prepare him for a professional life in the cotton industry. As a young idealist, he had already read some of the modest and little known publications of Karl Marx and as his journey to England happened to go via Cologne, where at the time Marx was the editor-in-chief of the daily newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, he decided to pop in. This would be the first time he and Karl Marx met in person and the beginning of a life-long friendship, and philosophical and political cooperation.

Six years later, the London-based Communist League commissioned the two, who were members and co-founders of the League, to write a “declaration of faith” for the communist party. As an atheist ideology, the term “faith” was subsequently abandoned and in 1848, shortly before the attempted revolutions in France and Germany, the pair published “Kommunistiska manifested” (“The Communist Manifesto”), or as it is more accurately named: “Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei” (“Manifesto of the Communist Party”).

To be honest, I hesitated a while to write about this work. Few pieces of political literature are as divisive as the Communist Manifesto. It is a short book more akin to a pamphlet.  I read most of it during a lunch break. Its brevity, however, was fully intended. It must be understood when reading the Manifesto that it is not a philosophical essay; it is a call to arms. It is agitation, not philosophy. It is designed not to appeal to the intellect, but to the emotions.

Having said that, its ideological roots are certainly implanted in rich philosophical soil which would later produce more elaborate and valuable pieces of academic literature, climaxing with the legendary “Das Kapital”. It is therefore of immense importance, that this text be read carefully and with a critical mind. I do not in any way claim to have the intellectual capacity to do that adequately but I still allow myself to jot down the following notes. Please do not base your school essay on them. 

Here it goes! Marx and Engels open with a bold statement. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. They then go forth on a historical exposition where they claim that the class struggle between patricians and plebeians in ancient times, and lords and serfs in the medieval era, is continued in our day and age by the bourgeoisie and the proletariat respectively. The argument goes that one group oppresses the other by accumulating capital. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Both groups participate in the production of goods and wealth, the difference being that the former brings capital and the latter labour to the table. The continued argument is that the capitalist process will make the capital-owning elite more and more exclusive and the wage-earning proletariat more and more numerous as time passes. 

However, in order to usurp the workers, the capitalists need to make a minimum investment into them. Most essentially, they need to keep enough of them alive to populate their factories and plants. Then they need to train them and they need to provide them with tools and equipment. In so doing, the bourgeoisie will by necessity put the weapons in the hands of the proletariat and the revolution will be inevitable.

In the second chapter, Marx and Engels claim that the Communist Party differs from the other workers’ movements of the time (NB workers’ movement is not synonymous with Socialism as is specified in chapter three) only in the respect that Communism does not allow itself to be constrained by national borders. Workers, as Marx and Engels say, need to deal with their own domestic bourgeoisie first and foremost, but as an ideology and as a community, the proletariat is cosmopolitan. In fact, the authors go so far as to claim that there is no philosophical or ideological basis for Communism at all as it is simply a general expression of reality and a natural response to the world system as it is. The response is not to abolish ownership of property, but to abolish bourgeois ownership of property specifically. By this, Marx and Engels specify that ownership of goods and valuables as a result of work is perfectly acceptable. It is wealth generated by capital that they oppose since it is in their definition the fruit of other people’s work and therefore the instrument for oppression. My understanding is that all accumulation of the means of production, such as land, machines, buildings, infrastructure, etc need to be owned jointly by the people, whereas personal belongings such as clothes, jewellery, toys, pets etc may have individual owners. To a certain extent.   

The Manifesto contains a list of “generally applicable measures” by which such abolition private property can come about.

“1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.”*

The third chapter is dedicated to the literary heritage of the various coeval socialist movements that Marx and Engels identify and which they forthwith reject. They group the different kinds of socialist thinking into three main categories: Reactionary socialism, Conservative or Bourgeois socialism, and Critical-Utopian socialism. This is generally the least well-known part of the Manifesto, probably because much of the literature and many of the ideologies that produced it have since then disappeared into oblivion. 

In a day and age, such as ours, where an increasingly vocal minority of cognitively impaired Swedish voters seek what can only be described as a form of masochistic gratification through rendering themselves fools in the eyes of the educated masses, it may be useful to dwell for a moment on the third chapter of the Manifesto. Marx and Engels here make a commendable effort to differentiate Communism from other forms of Socialist movements. The feeling is mutual, as Socialists in general and Social Democrats in particular, have for well over a century considered Communism one of their main adversaries. It is therefore useful to hear Marx and Engels elaborate on this contrariety from their perspective.

The fourth and final chapter is just a couple of pages long. It drives home the point that wherever there are workers ready to revolt against the oppression of the capital-owners, there will be communists. Although Germany is stated as the main battleground for the Proletariat in Marx’ and Engels’ days, the final chord is a call for action to all workers around the world: “Working Men of All Countries, Unite!”   

Any critical reader will soon react to the fact that this short work is rife with blanket statements and unfounded claims. From the outset, the two authors venture into murky waters and suggest that class struggle is a universal phenomenon. They do nothing to substantiate their claim and it is fair to argue that this is a problematic statement. As different societies organise themselves and their production in different ways, and the ownership of the production functions varies, so will the set-up of the hierarchy. As one obvious example, the fundamental thesis of the Communist Manifesto affords no space for spiritual/religious oppression unless it is connected to the distribution of capital.  Nor do they actually care to define the terms “Bourgeoisie” and “Proletariat”, and instead leave it to the reader to deduce the meaning from the rest of the text. Perhaps the terms were so well established in the 1840s that such a definition seemed superfluous.  Friedrich Engels had previously written “The Principles of Communism” in which the Proletariat was defined as “... that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital” or what in modern days would be called ”wage earners” which would hence include the large majority of what we today consider a rather well-to-do middle class in most advanced economies. This is helpful to us, but wouldn’t have been to the readers in 1848 as Engels’ work remained unpublished until 1914.

Another problematic term is ”ownership” or ”propriety” which are also decidedly European-American concepts and which have no or vastly different meanings in other social or cultural constructs (see e.g. Keen, Ian (2013). The language of possession: Three case studies. Language in Society, 42(2), 187-214.) I also recommend a thorough reading of Bronislaw Malinowski’s research on the Kula-trade in the Trobriand archipelago. For a phenomenon to be so fundamental to a theory and, perhaps more decisive still, to a revolution, it is lamentably inadequate not to define it more precisely than Marx and Engels do.

Extrapolating on that, in an effort to connect me to my final note, Marx and Engels say nothing about what sort of political system they want to institute after the Communists have toppled the current state of things? What governmental institutions do they propose to uphold the new rule? The well-known term “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” is never used in the Manifesto and was coined later by one of Marx’ disciples. Although the text is both poignant and verbose on the point of what the Communist revolution is against, it has precious little to say about what it wants instead. A possible explanation to why the authors find no reason to elaborate on this point may perhaps be found in their argument that the developments they advocate are inevitable. “Its [the bourgeoisie] fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” One may surmise that the results are expected to be organic, too.

Marx and Engels go on to write that “The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.” If the proletariat is aiming at the conquest rather than abolition of political power, then anarchy is off the table. We saw in chapter 2 what measures a Proletarian government may apply. High taxes, expropriation of capital, free education, etc . All of this requires some sort of administration.  

The age-old defence against the argument that whenever it has been tried, Communism has irrefragably failed is “Has it ever really been tried, though?” This response from left-wing sympathisers is routinely shrugged off as an attempt to move the goalposts, but as I read the Manifesto, the question does have some merit. One would no doubt be right to argue that the ten bullet-points in Chapter 2 were actually implemented to greater or lesser degree in the USSR and that therefore passing a verdict is fair. Yet, the very next sentence that follows the list in the Manifesto complicates this argument:

“When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the entire nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so-called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.”

No community or nation where Communism has been tried, ever reached this point. The state has in no instance been dissolved, the class struggle never ended. Small elites of power-hungry men and women have continued to exploit the populations, and capitalst elites have been replaced with proletarian elites, the same way the bourgeois elite once ousted the aristocracy. Historical conclusions, in fact, seem to land closer to the thinking of Marx’ and Engels’ contemporary socialist activist and antagonist Louis Auguste Blanqui who rejected the idea of a public uprising and instead favoured the concept that a dedicated and highly qualified task force topple the government and establish a rule on behalf of the proletariat. Marxism could thus be said to have indeed failed, not so much because it was implemented and found unfruitful, but rather because it has proven impossible to implement in the first place.

*Quotes are from Samuel Moore’s translation to English from 1888.

NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

Author: George Orwell
Year: 1984 (1949)
Publisher: Bra Böcker
Language: Swedish (translator Thomas Warburton)

“Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt”, Ludwig Wittgenstein submits in his most famous work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (see my review January 2019). This is usually understood to mean that a person’s perception of the world is constrained by what he or she is able to express (or comprehend) through language. Language on aggregate is ultimately a totality of thoughts. From this follows that by controlling the language one should be able to control thoughts. And by controlling the thoughts of a population one controls its actions.

This premise is at the core of George Orwell’s iconic novel “1984” (“Nineteen Eighty-Four”). The Big Brother-government of the united transcontinental state of Oceania, presumably similar to the other two superpowers in the world, Eastasia and Eurasia, with which Oceania is alternately at war or in an alliance, has gone at great length to monitor and control the actions of the denizens but they have not yet gained complete domination of their thoughts. Granted, the Thought Police have certain tools to pick up on criminal thinking by means of reading body language, facial expressions, perspiration levels, heartbeat, etc but that only offers a reactive response to individual thoughts which, from the government’s perspective, remain annoyingly free, comprehensive, and impenetrable.

By the time we are thrown into the action in the year 1984, the project of replacing the old language with the new, so-called Newspeak, is underway but still has a long way to go. New articles and official correspondence are already written in Newspeak but conversations and thoughts are usually still conducted in Standard English. Also, the efforts to fine-tune and tweak Newspeak has not yet been finalised and is a work in progress. The idea is to drastically simplify the language to ensure that grammar and vocabulary are useful for the most essential communication only.

But contorting a society’s ability to engage in logical thinking requires more layers. It is not enough to merely do away with opposites of what the regime deems “goodthink” in order to incapacitate “crimethink”. People can be further pacified by conflating opposites into ideas that are contradictory to a healthy mind and make them palatable to the mind of an enslaved nation. One of the most prophetic of Orwell’s constructions, and one which is still today available for real-time field study, is this very concept of “doublethink”. Doublethink is basically the ability to accept and find unproblematic two inconsistent and mutually exclusive thoughts at one time. Doublethink is typically an ability acquired by (or imposed on) a population ruled by an autocratic regime which has had the time and resources to systematically break down its subjects’ ability to think rationally and clutter their sense of reason. A typical example of doublethink is the famous Big Brother motto: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

A systematic implementation of doublethink, albeit not as absolute as Orwell envisaged, was enacted in the USSR by the Communist dictatorship where the Soviet public was taught to accept contradictory claims as truth. To the Russian citizen, the USSR was both the most powerful country on earth and a victim at the same time. It was the perfect society that other countries could only aspire to but no one was allowed to leave the country without intense screening and special permission. Two concepts that ought to give rise to reasonable questions were widely accepted as truths. After the fall of the USSR, it was widely expected that doublethink would die out with the old generations but several observers, such as Masha Gessen (see my review February 2021), have shown compelling evidence that doublethink is part of Russian world-view to this day.

On the other side of the Atlantic, there is a less systematic but equally efficient roll-out of doublethink. In a growing community of the confused far-right, it is perfectly logical to demand that Donald Trump is given credit for delivering the life-saving Covid-vaccine in record time and refusing to take the same vaccine claiming that it is a liberal/Colombian/BillGates/enter-your-personal-favourite-flavour-of-the-day conspiracy. Doublethink in all its depressing splendour.

It is well-known that George Orwell was a staunch socialist but more than that, he was a defender of liberal democracy. In today’s era of a polarised public discourse where the intellectually challenged general population seems to get some sort of perverse gratification from bundling Western Democratic Socialism with Stalinism (and effectively Sweden with North Korea), as well as Conservatism with Nazism (no, Boris Johnson is not a Nazi), it is a useful reminder that democracy is a fundamental value independent of property tax, class analysis, and capitalism. Democracy must be the non-negotiable foundation of any functioning political system. Orwell understood this and demonstrated with his life how one can support the ends while condemning the means.   

Alas, as a work of literary art, “1984” is not brilliant. Compared to other dystopias (e.g. “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood, reviewed in November 2020, and “Kallocain” by Karin Boye, reviewed in June 2021) I find the language of “1984” barren and the dramaturgy sketchy and incoherent. Indeed, the very Big Brother-motto “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength” appears to be erroneously constructed as it breaks with the pattern “Undesirable is desirable” and therefore becomes rumpled, non-intuitive, and nebulous.

The sloth and inconsistency with which Orwell’s characters make their choices, too, on numerous occasions effectively ejected me from Oceania and interrupted the flow of my reading experience. It is baffling to me how a person who has lived all his adult life in a world where anybody could be a government agent, the telly spies on you, children turn in their parents, and people are removed from all written records when they are liquidated can unreservedly trust a person after receiving a simple love note or a barely noticeable look. I can see how that would be enough to convict a person, seeing as the Thought Police will have very little to lose from making an occasional mistake, but an individual taking such risks is just not plausible.

If “1984” had been written by a Swedish writer and “Kallocain” published in Britain or the US, I am quite sure that “Kallocain” would have been the benchmark dystopian novel of the global literary canon. In fact, sacrilegious as it may sound, I honestly do not think that today “1984” would have been published at all without comprehensive editing and significant improvements.

This is not to say that Orwell’s is not an important book. On the contrary, Orwell would have been astonished at how current his novel still is more than 70 years after it first appeared and he would, most likely, be appalled by the complacency of today’s general public in the face of the rising authoritarianism in the Western hemisphere. His warning is as topical to European politics in 2021 as it was in 1949.

If not more.

 

DISCOURSE ON VOLUNTARY SERVITUDE

Author: Étienne de la Boétie
Year: 2017 (1577)
Publisher: Ersatz
Language: Swedish (translator Ervin Rosenberg)

We have all heard of Niccolo Machiavelli and “The Prince”. We know it as the monolith in philosophical literature in which the Florentine diplomat delves into the murky depths of power; how to obtain it and how to maintain it. Less famous, and as history has shown, infinitely less influential, is the French lawyer and poet Étienne de la Boétie. De la Boétie was also interested in power but approached the topic from the opposite direction. In his essay “Avhandling om frivillig underkastelse” (”Discourse on Voluntary Servitude”) he attempts to bring clarity to why a community, a city, or indeed an entire nation not only allows a single person to dominate and even enslave them, but moreover, encourage him or her to do so.

“For the present I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him”*

For it is most certainly true, that human history is but a series of temporally interconnected states of affairs where the few subjugate the many. Historical events taught in schools are nothing but episodes where a small élite either seize or abuse the power over one or another population. Monuments are raised, poems are written, and myths are retold by the oppressed in celebration of their oppressors. How is this possible?

Unquestionably, there seem to be certain processes within a community that shrewd pretenders to power can exploit in order to propel themselves to the top of the hierarchy or, indeed, thrust a new order onto said community. Machiavelli’s book deals with these processes and the manipulative techniques a ruler might want to employ to manage them to his or her advantage. De la Boétie in no way questions the existence of such processes or denies the efficiency of various power techniques, but moreover challenges the mere necessity of these processes. His remedy is as simple as it is provocative.

“Obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement: it is not necessary to deprive him of anything, but simply to give him nothing; there is no need that the country make an effort to do anything for itself provided it does nothing against itself.”*

Perhaps this is a mirror of Marcus Tullius Cicero’s famous statement “Nulla enim minantis auctoritas apud liberos est.” To a free man, threats are impotent.

De la Boétie argues that humans are naturally predisposed to obeying their parents as children but equally prone to rebelling against them in adolescence. In the same way, a refusal to submit to all other authorities is just as natural to him, and yet all of us who rebelled against our guardians as teenagers remain servile to the government throughout our adult lives. We are so preoccupied with the illusion of owning whatever measly earthly possessions we convince ourselves that we have amassed, that we fail to see that we do not even own ourselves in the first place.

Étienne de la Boétie is one of a great many philosophers, some of whom have achieved far greater fame than he, who have wrestled with the concept of freedom and slavery. Thomas Hobbes polemised that autocracy was inevitable, as the only alternative would be chaos. One can either be free in a chaotic and hostile world, or subjugated in an organised and safe one. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was decidedly more optimistic. Although he recognised that humans are systemically enslaved (“L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers”) he made great intellectual efforts to unify order and liberty by means of a so called “social contract” through which society as a whole would guarantee the citizen collective safety and individual freedom at the same time. John Stuart Mill, in his “On Liberty” (reviewed on this blog in December 2019) argues that the role of the government can only be legitimate in so far as it protects the liberties of society. Additionally, he argued, that the greatest threat to individual freedom was not the government or state, but the self-controlling structures of society itself.

Still, I would venture to argue that Jean-Paul Sartre came the closest to answering de la Boétie’s principle question. While de la Boétie argues that all you have to do to stop being oppressed is to stop obeying, Sartre claims that all you need to do is to stop thinking that you are not free. The illusion of slavery, “mauvais fois” in Sartre’s terminology, is a self-fulfilling prophecy which serves only to shackle us with invisible chains. He even argues that humans are “condemned to freedom” and that this is something we generally detest. By being completely free, we are also made directly responsible for our actions. No one to blame. No fingers to point. It is thus easy to imagine mankind, horrified by the crushing responsibility of freedom, rush into the shade of a tyrant who mercifully lifts freedom, and consequently responsibility, from its grateful shoulders.

400 years before Sartre, de la Boétie already promoted a form of anarchy. Essentially, “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude” is a call to civil disobedience. He is adamant about revolutions being unnecessary where simple passivity suffices. At the core of the argument is anarchism.

De la Boétie lists three types of ruler.
1. The ruler by election
2. The ruler by force
3. The ruler by inheritance
Of these three, he suggests that the former is the most tolerable, but at the same time he postulates that even that type of ruler will do whatever they need to make themselves absolute and that will in the end make them even more ruthless than any of the other two.

Put in a modern perspective, this leads us to a couple of interesting observations. There is certainly no shortage of anarchists in modern day Europe. They often argue that all governments of all kinds need to be abolished. We can find them to the far left where the state is perceived as nothing but a watchdog for the capital and elite, and to the right where the war-cry “Taxation is theft” is nothing but a catchphrase for anarchy.

This is where I propose that a modern reader needs to tread carefully. De la Boétie lived in an era where the government looked upon the people as their subjects. In a modern democracy, the government’s mandate is from the electorate. This is a fundamental difference which people have fought and died for ever since the rise of liberalism and it must not be neglected or diminished. An orphan growing up in a working-class foster family in a small village far away from the capital becoming the prime minister and leader of the country would be a fairy-tale in de la Boétie’s times but is democracy in ours. It is thus folly to advocate nihilism and anarchy based on writings from the 16^th century.

I do not know if Sartre read “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude”. Nor do I know if de la Boétie read “The Prince”. Yet these behemoths in the history of thought are closely interlinked through the study of domination and submission, and they all help us understand ourselves and the choices available to us.

*The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, trans. Harry Kurz (Indianapolis: 1942).