Bourgeois Cosmopolitanism and its Reactionary Role, Part II

The conclusion of Bolshevik writer F. Chernov’s March 15th, 1949 article attacking unpatriotic elements in Soviet society and the arts

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Excerpted below is the second part of F. Chernov’s article on “bourgeois cosmopolitanism” and “rootless cosmopolitanism”, interchangeable terms denoting a form of capitalist internationalism which Chernov presents as being at odds with socialist internationalism. Chernov goes to great efforts in the article to demonstrate how socialist internationalism can be simultaneously internationalist and patriotic. His argument largely boils down to the idea that Soviet internationalism is the only worldview which respects true patriotism, that bourgeois cosmopolitanism  in fact aims to negate and nullify real patriotic feeling in its effort to spread the power and influence of capitalism and chauvinism dressed up as nationalism. As Chernov says, “Soviet patriotism is inseparable from proletarian internationalism, organically connected with it.” This theoretical worldview, the brainchild of Stalin and Agitprop Director Andrei Zhdanov, provided justification not only for the traditionalist and nationalist cultural policies of the period, but also for the entrenchment of Russian imperial rule over its vast post-War empire.

The first part of this article is accessible here. 

III: THE WORLDWIDE struggle against “cosmopolitan” imperialism.

The ideology of cosmopolitanism arises from the same manner of production of bourgeois society.

Cosmopolitanism is the negation of patriotism, its opposite. It advocates absolute apathy towards the fate of the Motherland. Cosmopolitanism denies the existence of any moral or civil obligations of people to their nation and Motherland.

The bourgeoisie preaches the principle that money does not have a homeland, and that, wherever one can “make money,” wherever one may “have a profitable business”, there is his homeland. Here is the villainy that bourgeois cosmopolitanism is called on to conceal, to disguise, “to ennoble” the antipatriotic ideology of the rootless bourgeois-businessman, the huckster and the traveling salesman.

Harmful cosmopolitan ideology serves for the bourgeoisie and its agents as a very convenient ideological tool for excusing and covering up all kinds of antipatriotic actions, national treason and political double-dealing. Marx showed that “bourgeois patriotism…degenerated into a complete sham after its financial, commercial, and industrial activity acquired a cosmopolitanist character” [see the Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 16, ‘A Contribution to the Question of Political Economy’].

In the era of imperialism the ideology of cosmopolitanism is a weapon in the struggle of imperialist plunderers seeking world domination.

Even in the time of the first World War, defending the Bolshevik programme on the nationalities question, fighting for the right of nations for self-determination, Lenin wrote:

“Imperialism represents outgrowing by capital of frameworks for national states, it represents an expansion and exacerbation of national oppression on a new historical basis. Hence it follows that in spite of guns, exactly this, that we must join the revolutionary struggle for socialism to a revolutionary programme on the question of nationality” [see Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. 21, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’].

This Leninist position shows the indissoluble bonds of the revolutionary struggle for socialism with the defense of national sovereignty of nations. Continue reading

Bourgeois Cosmopolitanism and its Reactionary Role, Part I

Bolshevik writer F. Chernov’s March 15th, 1949 article attacking unpatriotic elements in Soviet society and the arts

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The following article on “rootless cosmopolitanism” was originally published during the period of the Zhdanov Doctrine, the post-War cultural policy pursued by Agitprop Director Andrei Zhdanov from 1946 until Stalin’s death in 1953. Zhdanov, one of the chief theoreticians of the Stalinist regime, initiated the Soviet Union’s new cultural doctrine with a number of speeches attacking Soviet literary journals, musicians, film-makers, artists, and novelists for their modernist and experimentalist tendencies. Zhdanov’s intention was to root out and excise all vestiges of Western and foreign influences (“cosmopolitanism”); in their place a new Soviet culture was championed, one based on folk culture and classical arts and merging Great-Russian nationalism with Bolshevik tradition. The article below was not written by Zhdanov, but by a mysterious and possibly pseudonymous ‘F. Chernov’. Nonetheless, its publication in a Central Committee theoretical journal during this period attests to its official nature, and with its attacks on anti-patriotic “cosmopolitans” and its veneration of a culture “national in form, socialist in content” it provides a seminal example of attitudes during this period of Stalinist nationalism. It should also be noted that ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ is often regarded as a euphemism for ‘Jew’; many of the artists and intellectuals hounded for their alleged anti-patriotic or pro-Western sentiment in this period were Jewish, and the Zhdanov Doctrine provided much of the groundwork for the later anti-Semitic ‘Doctor’s Plot’ pogrom which Stalin was preparing before his death.

Due to the length of the article, it has been broken into two segments. The article’s first two sections are reproduced below, and its final two have been posted here.

I: COSMOPOLITANISM infiltrates Soviet arts, sciences, history.

The lead editorials in the Pravda and Kultura i Zhizn [“Culture and Life”] newspapers unmasked an unpatriotic group of theatre critics, of rootless cosmopolitans, who came out against Soviet patriotism, against the great cultural achievements of the Russian people and of other peoples in our country.

Appearing as messengers and propagandists for bourgeois ideology, the rootless-cosmopolitans fawned over and groveled before decadent bourgeois culture. Defaming Soviet socialist culture, they praised to the heavens that which was found in the emaciated and decayed conditions of bourgeois culture. In the great culture of the Russian people they saw echos and rehashings of Western bourgeois culture.

Harmful and corrupting petty ideas of bourgeois cosmopolitanism were also carried over into the realms of Soviet literature, Soviet film, graphic arts, in the area of philosophy, history, economic and juridical law and so forth.

The rootless-cosmopolitan Subotsky tried with all his might to exterminate all nationality from Soviet literature. Foaming at the mouth this cosmopolitan propagandist hurls epithets towards those Soviet writers, who want “on the outside, in language, in details of character a positive hero” to express his belonging to this or that nationality.

These cosmopolitan goals of Subotsky are directed against Soviet patriotism and against Party policy, which always has attached great significance to the national qualities and national traditions of peoples. Lenin spoke out at the 8th Party Congress against the Trotskyite Pyatakov, who had suggested (as a provocation) to eliminate the point about national self-determination from the Party programme, saying, “This could be done, if there were people without national characteristics. But there are no such people, and we cannot build a socialist society any other way.” [see Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. 24, ‘Speech on the National Question’].

In mockery of literary works showing the superior qualities of Soviet people, Subotsky competed with the notorious cosmopolitan Yuzovsky. Yuzovsky venomously sneered that “across the lips of ‘positive heroes’ in these works,” there “inevitably plays such a ‘Marxist smile,’ that the positive hero of Soviet dramatic art knows all, sees all. For to Continue reading

Guidelines of the German Workers’ Party

Anton Drexler’s original party program, first published in ‘Auf gut deutsch’ on January 5, 1919

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The Guidelines of the German Workers’ Party was the original political program of the German Workers’ Party (DAP). Along with Anton Drexler’s pamphlet Mein politisches Erwache (‘My Political Awakening’) it served as the main literary statement of the Party’s aims and worldview until the adoption of the ‘Twenty-Five Point Program’ on February 24 1920, when the Party rechristened itself as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The exact authorship of the Guidelines is unknown, although it was almost certainly written by Drexler; whether or not Karl Harrer (the co-founder of the DAP) was also involved is unclear. What is certain is that the Guidelines were first announced on January 5 1919, and published in Dietrich Eckart’s völkisch newspaper Auf gut deutsch on the same day. In terms of content the Guidelines are briefer and less detailed than the later NSDAP program, being far more a general statement of worldview than an actual outline of specific political goals. Nonetheless, the Guidelines’ National Socialist content is obvious – völkisch nationalism, anti-Marxism, opposition to Jewish influence, and a concern with social reform. The clear emphasis on workers’ issues and on corporatist appeals (“work cooperatives”) should be noted, being typical elements of early pre-Hitlerian National Socialism. 

What is the German Workers’ Party?

The DAP is a socialist organization, composed of all folk comrades [‘Volksgenossen’] engaged in mental or physical work. It may only be guided by German leaders who put aside selfish goals and allow national needs to be the highest concern of the program.

What does the German Workers’ Party offer the worker?

The DAP seeks the ennoblement of the German worker. Skilled resident workers have the right to be considered members of the middle class. A sharp distinction between workers and proletarians should be made. An international agreement with the trade unions of other countries must stabilize wages, making it impossible for the working-class of a particular country to engage in sharp bargaining. In the future the competitive position of an individual country shall be determined not by the lowest wages but by the diligence and efficiency of its workers. In this way the causes of friction among the various countries will be avoided. Big business provides food and employment and is therefore to be protected, as long as it does not relentlessly exploit the worker making it impossible for him to lead a worthwhile life. The DAP believes that the socialization of German economic life signals the collapse of the German economy. By controllingsocialized businesses our enemies would be in the best possible position to collect efficiently the war indemnities which have been imposed on us, and to do so at the expense of the workers. Therefore the German worker should have not socialization but profit sharing. Profit sharing can be made possible by founding work cooperatives in the cities, and in the country, farm cooperatives among the agricultural workers, to protect land and soil.

Who is the DAP fighting against?

The DAP is fighting with all its strength against usury and the forcing up of prices. Against all those who create no values, who make high profits without any mental or physical work. We fight against the drones in the state; these are mostly Jews; they live a good life, they reap where they have not sown. They control and rule us with their money. For these drones Germany and her entire people were just objects of speculation; their party slogans are much the same. Talk, no action. The DAP honors the principle: he who will not work shall not eat. We fight for justice, true freedom, and happiness. No dictatorship of the proletariat! Equal justice for all. No rule of bayonets. Everyone shall feel himself to be a free German. There is no happiness in phrases and empty speeches at meetings, demonstrations, and elections. Our striving is toward the free happiness of good work, the full pot, and prospering children. Continue reading

Revolution from the Right

An excerpt from Hans Freyer’s 1931 booklet ‘Revolution from the Right’

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Born in Leipzig in 1887, Hans Freyer earned his doctorate in Sociology at the University of Leipzig in 1911, becoming something now rarely seen in today’s modern world – a right-wing sociologist. Freyer’s inclinations were towards conservatism, nationalism, and traditionalism, his philosophical ideals arguing for a historical worldview in which hierarchy, elitism, the leader-state, and collectivism were the inevitable highest stage of man’s social development. Freyer’s work in German academia proved influential – his ideas inspired not only sections of the romantic, nationalist-inclined Jugendbewegung (youth movement), but also the growing circle of writers and philosophers extolling the  revolutionary ‘new nationalism’ of the time – the Conservative Revolutionaries.

Freyer’s pamphlet Revolution von Rechts, a brief extract of which is reproduced below, in fact came to be one of the most important and influential contributions to the cause of the Conservative Revolutionaries. In Revolution Freyer describes the concept of the “revolution of the right”, a new revolutionary dialectic in which the Volk as a whole – rather than the bourgeoisie or the proletariat – would, under direction from an elite, sweep away the old order and build a new Total State which would harmonize technology with society and end the primacy of commercial interests over politics. Interestingly, despite the overlap of his ideas with those of the NSDAP, Hans Freyer was never a card-carrying National Socialist, although at the time Revolution was written he was not unsympathetic. Freyer in fact saw the growing influence and strength of the NSDAP and hoped with Revolution to direct it, to provide the movement with clarity about its historical purpose and to guide it away from being co-opted either by “the masses” (like many in conservative intellectual circles, Freyer regarded the NSDAP as too vulgarly violent, too populist, too plebeian) or by the bourgeois reactionaries of the “old right” (monarchists, industrialists, the petite bourgeoisie, etc.). Such elitist purism is typical of the members of the Conservative Revolutionary intellectual tradition. 

A new front is taking shape on the battlefields of bourgeois society: the revolution from the right. With the magnetic force inherent in a watchword of the future before it is pronounced, it draws from all camps the hardest, the most alert, the most contemporary of people into its ranks. It is still gathering its forces, but it will strike. Its movement is still a mere assembly of minds, without consciousness, without symbols, without leadership. But overnight the front will be established. It will undermine the old parties, their stagnated programs and their antiquated ideologies. It will successfully dispute not the reality of the tangled class contradictions of a society become everywhere petit-bourgeois but the arrogance of the claim that they can be politically productive. It will clear away the remnants of the nineteenth century where they persist and free the way for the history of the twentieth.

Those who think in the day-before-yesterday terms of bourgeoisie and proletariat, of class struggle and economic peace, of progress and reaction, who see nothing in the world but problems of distribution and insurance premiums for the have-nots, nothing but opposing interests and a state that mediates among them, they naturally fail to see that since yesterday there has been a regrouping of goals and forces underway. They confuse the revolution from the right with all sorts of honest but harmless troublemakers and eccentrics from the old world: with nationalist romantics, with counterrevolutionary activism, with an idealistically embellished juste milieu, or with the splendid notion of a state above the parties. They think that fascism is being imitated here, bottled Action Française in Germany, or a Soviet Germany, made enticing to romantics too through the assistance of certain reminiscences from German legal history. That which unites us with these is that, despite their confusions, they themselves have a troubled conscience. In the end they sense merely that something incomprehensible is drumming on their blinders from outside. In this, insofar as they are involved, they have hit upon the truth. Continue reading