If David Edgar had not been a successful British left-wing playwright his political interpretation of world events would not even appear
in the Guardian.
Edgar has claimed that the problem with world politics has been the breaking on the progressive alliance between the intelligentsia and 'the poor'.
There were he writes in 1989 a series of uprisings in 'an obscure corner of Europe' and he and his Marxism today colleagues showed 'the failure to notice the new political fault lines they drew throughout Europe and beyond'.
The reason for that is Marxism Today scribblers did not care about the struggle for freedom in Eastern Europe. As is clear by the fact Edgar seem to think Poland was 'an obscure part of Europe'.
As with so many on the trendy designer left tended to overlook the crimes of Communist regimes as a Stalinist detour and not a logical consequence of Lenin's Revolution.
Certainly playwrights like Stoppard and Pinter gave their support to Vaclav Havel and Charter 77 but Edgar was not involved in taking any active interest in that.
Which has not stopped him pontificating about the nature of revolutionary change.
Many people underestimated or misread the significance of what was happening in eastern Europe in 1989.That's true enough on the Western left who tended to be hostile to Solidarity because it was a trade union movement based upon the values of Catholicism.
It was quite different to the anti-communist dissident movement in Czechoslovakia which was more attractive because it seemed more avant-garde and 'leftist'.
For all the American triumphalism, the revolutions gave the lie to the neocon theory – used to justify American support for brutal military dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere – that rightwing "authoritarian" regimes would peaceably morph into democracies while leftwing "totalitarian" systems couldn't.It is Edgar who misread the significance of 1989. For in Europe it was authoritarian right wing regimes like those in Spain and Portugal which went first in the 1970s. Chile democratised peacefully in the 1980s and it did not need a mass movement like that in Poland to remove it.
Putting the terms authoritarian and totalitarian in scare quotes to doubt their veracity as terms is intended to draw a direct equivalence between them in such a way as to point to their absurdity without having to justify the assertion any further.
Yet its a fact that no matter how brutal Pinochet's dictatorship, civil society institutions were not completely abolished in Chile as they had been in Poland and Czechoslovakia under the Communist system.
Pinochet's coup cannot be compared with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia nor Jaruzelski's Martial Law because in Eastern Europe almost the entire nation was united in opposing Soviet imposed authority whereas in Chile the nation had been polarised by the threat of Communism backed by Moscow.
Edgar is just rehashing history into a self-presentational radical credo that can be flashed around in front of the toytown revolutionaries who turn up to the annual Socialist Workers Part conferences. It's pure radical chic complete with the misuse of the word 'neocon'.
The 'neocons' did not exist back in 1989. They emerged slowly after as an indentifiable group of dissenters from the realpolitik tradition in Republican foreign policy and who believed the USA should take a more staunchly anti-totalitarian position.
Neoconservatives wanted to harness the the appeal of the universalist American revolutionary credo to support and reiforce doctrines of regime change that would win over large numbers of the socially aspirant in such states to support pro-US democratic coalitions.
The revolutions in Eastern Europe actually confirmed to those who later became neoconservatives that market freedoms, consumerism and multimedia visions of infinite prosperity were better ways to get people to support the USA than CIA support for right wing coups.
Not least because with the end of the Cold War there was no longer any pressing need for that cynical realpolitik and in any case it was going to provide the USA with bad Public Relations.
If global opinion was to be manipulated successfully , then it had to return to the principles of creating docile consumers instead of active citizens as had been put into practice in the USA by Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann.
The revolutions in Eastern Europe proved that there was no need to support old style coups. As Aldous Huxley once accurately predicted,
'There is no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation is not merely inhumane..:it is demonstrably inefficient.....A really effective totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not need to be coerced because they love their servitude.
The means to achieve that would be provided by consumerism and a suffocating entertainment economy, a theme developed by Neil Postgate in
Amusing Ourselves to Death. People Power had to be both a spectacle and a divertion, a way of creating the
feeling of change.
The Velvet Revolutions were very much TV spectacles and in any case depended far more upon the disintegration of the power of the Soviet Union than on the actions of the dissidents who were soon swept aside by the deal the US educated elites made to impose 'shock therapy'.
Yet the fairytale ending appealed to US global opinion formers and technocrats who had close connections with the new emerging Power Elites in the 'transition' nations of the post-Communist world, one that later found formal expression through transatlantic think-tanks.
That was quite obviously the situation in Poland where Solidarity leaders like Geremek and Michnik approved of a full scale plunge into free market capitalism under the Balcerowicz Plan. The idea was to destroy the old society and create a brave new world of consumerism overnight.
The reason for that was outlined by Balcerowicz who had been influenced by the Chicago Boys and their experiments in Fascist Chile and Thatcher's Britain:that it how to defeat the spectre of Communism and create a new consumer class that would identify with the system.
Balcerowicz explicitly referred to this as 'extraordinary politics', that is of using the exhilaration of people power liberation to ram through policies that would be questioned by many Poles if they were given time to think about them. Solidarity and grassroots democracy had outlived its usefulness.
This project to engineer a new kind of society was more important than the merely political changes that Edgar thinks the left did not understand,
Optimistic leftwingers thought eastern Europe had risen up for social democracy, not realising that the enticing Swedish (and West German) model was also in deep trouble. Reading backwards off the last east European insurgency (against Ceausescu in Romania), cynics argued that the whole thing was a fake, cooked up by Gorbachev's KGB.Actually many Solidarity members believed they had risen up for something like social democracy or Christian democracy and many Poles are still bitter that they were forced down the road to modernisation via the neoliberal economic model.
They were never given the chance to decide otherwise and apathy and impotence alongside the promise of consumer goods has dampened down any belief that real change is possible.
Besides there was always the feeling in Poland that it was only a backwards Russia Communist system had prevented it being the kind of advanced consumer society it had the right to be as a Western nation in Europe.
Designer revolutionaries like Michnik grew cynical. They came precisely from the 1968 New Left that Edgar was in Britain. Like Michnik they saw the masses as a means to the end of creating a society of the kind in which they felt comfortable.
Edgar complains about the chasm between the designer revolutions of the progressive left and the downtrodden without realising that all the things he wants to see (sexual 'liberation', total individual autonomy etc ) only break down the barriers separating the individual from the market.
That's precisely why so many 1968ers are now New Labour ministers and ideologically aligned with those like Michnik who have made a slick transition into self promoting media figures who can provide slogans and rationalisations for launching messianic 'pro-liberation' crusades against 'Islamofascism'.
It isn't that New Labour in Britain has become 'conservative': it is 'authentically' left wing in so far as it believes that the masses of the people are materially satisfied and that real idealism of the kind that animated 68 now has to be spread across the globe.
That has resulted in the mythology of the Velvet Revolutions in Eastern Europe having become People Power, where the imagination can come to power through contrasting the dullness and boredom of traditional societies with the consumerist Utopias of the West.
The futuristic excitement behind these visions was inherent in that of the revolutionary credo of the 68 student politicians now in power both in Western and Eastern Europe. It owes something to Trotsky's idea of 'permanent revolution' as a revolution not only of society but of the self free from repressive moral codes and material want.
Whilst Edgar is disgruntled about the way it has turned out it is the logical consequence of the politics he has consistently championed since 1968. As David Caute puts it in
Sixty-Eight: Year of the Barricades,
'the new generation of playwrights' in the 1970s 'were the angry children of '68 and not shy of the revolutionary heritage'.
Edgar still is not and clearly he is still trying to rationalise his anger into an authentic creed and looking for just any movement that can attack the established social order that he and his generation did so much to create. That leads him into all kinds of absurdity.
Not least the stupid belief that the Islamist Revolutions can dovetail progressively with the radical inheritors of the New Left.Edgar still fails to get it that secular revolutionary politics is anathema to Islamism, though certain strands of Islamism have taken concepts and ideas about the revolutionary vanguard from it.
So Edgar gets even more desperate when he claims,
For all its religious fervour, Iran in 1979 was a recognisable, 20th- century, third-world revolution, in which the progressive middle class allied with the rural masses to overthrow a hated, foreign-backed autocracy.Well, some progressives in Iran aligned with it and many secular leftists and trade unionists then ensued to be immediately executed by the Ayatollah Khomeini.It was a third world revolution and 'recognisable' as such but it was not 'progressive' in the secular left wing sense.
Which is precisely one reason why so many 68ers like Hitchens and Michnik have forthrightly aligned themselves with what they regard are the fundamentals of the Western Enlightenment against the creeping menace of totalitarian theocracy and that Edgar believes is a 'reactionary' and a 'betrayal'.
Edgar clearly thinks that the criteria for positioning oneself on the left is about being anti-American and then rationalising just any resistance towards it as containing the germ of some global proto-proletarian uprising.
It's easy to see 1989, too, as a variation on that theme. Its seeds lay in the 1980 workers' occupation of the Gdansk shipyard in Poland. Its political mechanisms were borrowed from the 1960s anti-war movement.Every claim here is false. Poland just was not a Third World nation, it was not rising up against what it considered American Imperialism and was not comparable in its violence to the Islamist Revolution that preceded the Gdansk protests of 1980.
The comparison, such as it is, might come in the predominance of Catholicism, that is of a religion and of the Polish messianism of rebellion against a Satanic USSR and some Poles in their hatred of Russia come close to such Catholic fundamentalist ideology.
However, the revolution in 1989-1990 did not see Gdansk workers and women armed with AK-47' shooting people dead and mass executions of hated Communist functionaries or collaborators in the streets.
Nor did the peaceful revolution in Poland owe much at all to the 'anti-war movement' of 1968. Most Poles were fervently pro-American and took no interest in what was happening in Vietnam nor particularly in Latin America.
Only intellectuals like Michnik did make token criticisms in that direction, though in recent years he has perversely mirrored those who once uncritically gave their support to the USSR in supporting the USA exactly such as manner and supporting the Iraq War.
Which is why Edgar just has to see the current crop of Colour Revolutions in some Trotskyist sense as a 'revolution betrayed' or even as 'bourgeois revolutions' against autocratic regimes paving the way for a more radical one later.
....in retrospect, rather than being the last of the 20th-century revolutions, 1989 looks more like an anticipation of the colour/flower-coded revolutions of the 21st: from Georgia's 2003 rose revolution via Ukraine's 2004-05 orange revolution to Kyrgyzstan's initially pink or lemon but finally tulip revolution against another crooked post-communist government, later the same year.Despite considerable, covert American backing for the insurgencies and the highly dubious character and record of the successor governments, the rose, orange and tulip revolutionaries had right on their side
What Edgar fails to understand is that the Rose Revolution of 2004 was not a revolution but a multimedia parody of a revolution which in reality was no more than a grubby coup packaged and presented to credulous Westerners.
There is no case of a popular revolution 'despite American backing' not even the case of the carefully choreographed 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine which really was backed by a large degree of popular discontent.
Colour Revolutions are US style PR Revolutions founded on the concept of selling the future to those craving to be Western Jeans wearing consumers. No mention is ever made of their corporate backing nor of what the necessary reforms' will be.
Which will, of course, has been neoliberal shock therapy and the removal of control from crony oligarch capitalists to other crony oligarch capitalists who support the geopolitical designs of the West in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
The Colour Revolutions have had 'right on their side' if the illusion of freedom American style is consumed and one holds to the idea that nations like Ukraine need to spend billions of dollars on procuring weapons from the USA.
That these Colour Revolutions are a staged drama played over the heads of their people ought to be the first thing that a leading British playwright would see in the light of his knowledge of the theatre of the absurd.
That he does not is because Edgar has not absorbed the lesson that 1968 was essentially a form of of what Raymond Aron, at the time witnessing the student occupation of the Sorbonne in Paris called 'a psychodrama...a verbal delirium'.
Colour Revolutions are the fruit of the 1968 Revolutions, the belief in the rising of the forces of youth against the dead hand of the past. In many cases named after fruit, they are the creations of mass advertising strategies.
Colour Revolutions depend on harnessing Western leftist emotionalism to serve the agenda of global corporations and Western geopolitical hegemony over the oil and gas upon which mass consumerism depends.
Islamism is just not 'progressive' unless that word just means anything which brings 'radical change', though a certain section of the Respect Party left that Edgar champions wants to align Islam with Leninist revolutionary politics.
Yet from the Islamist side of Respect rather than the SWP one, it is the secular revolutionary left that is the junior partner and whose support for just any anti-American 'resistance' at home and abroad is 'useful'.Just as it was during the Islamist Revolution in Iran.
The aim is not to unite British society around a common anti-war agenda but to perpetuate the idea that Muslims are uniquely demonised and form a transnational community of the oppressed whose liberation abroad is the condition for their liberation here.
By creating the myth of a victim community poor Muslims can be radicalised and constitute a large body within the West who can put pressure on Britain to push its foreign policy in the way they demand or else face the prospect of violence.
That has very little in common with the idea of a peaceful revolution of the sort advocated in Eastern Europe and is anathema to Islamists who see Hezbollah as the will of the downtrodden umma and not the Lebanese Cedar Revolution.
As leading British Islamist ideologue Soumaya Ghannoushi snarled when commenting on the way Western feminists criticised the dress of female Hamas supporters,
...the women of Jenin, Falluja, or Tyre are not photogenic enough for them ( the Western media ) Their photos will never adorn the front pages of newspapers and magazines, unlike the girls of the much applauded "cedar revolution" with their tight designer jeans, sunglasses, and expensive hairdos.
Clearly, Islamists either in the West or Near East are not going to be staging peace happenings or staging musicals like Hair. This makes a black farce of Edgar's claim that,
The 21st-century revolution pits the educated, western-oriented, socially liberal, economically neoliberal urban middle class against the economically egalitarian, socially traditionalist rural poor.
For nobody could be more middle class than many Islamists no less than so many middle class ideologues from the Russian Revolutionaries to the Italian Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof were.
Islamists are Western oriented because Islamism is centrally influenced by the Western revolutionary tradition in rejecting a liberal ideology that is seen to conceal the underlying structures of economic repression.
That does not mean that such ideologues middle class or otherwise respect the human rights of the rural poor any more than other revolutionaries did in regarding them as the raw material for a revolutionary war against a system they hate.
As with most revolutionaries the people can only prove their usefulness if they are indoctrinated with the politically correct dogmas and if they resist the experiment they will be excluded from Utopia by death or expulsion from society.
A lesson learnt at least by ex-Trotskyists like Michnik and many of those who rejected Leninist Communism after 1968 but clearly not by Edgar who like Pilger is terminally incapable of admitting that Stalinism is a logical consequence of mass ideological revolutions.
Like the Russian revolution, all of the great progressive campaigns of reform in the 20th century ...grew out of an alliance between the progressive intelligentsia and the poor. That alliance was betrayed in Russia when Stalin turned on the intelligentsia in the Great Purge of the 1930s, as Mao Zedong did in the Cultural Revolution of the late 60s.
The alliance was not 'betrayed' by Stalin. It was betrayed by Lenin who hijacked the Russian Revolution, closed down the Constituent Assembly and instigated the Red Terror and murdering of political opponents even before the counter revolution got a chance to organise.
The progressive intelligentsia detested the Russian masses. Lenin hated the peasantry no less than all radicals for whom traditional and rural societies are full of idiocy, prejudice, bigotry, religion and backwardness.
Neoliberal globalisers have inherited that contempt for ordinary people who should conform to the prescriptions of dogmas worked out on paper and designed to bring about a revolution from above.
When faced with the immiseration and unemployment caused by IMF approved 'shock therapy' in Poland, Balcerowicz later mused that he had forgotten to factor in the element of human motivation into his calculations.
After all, not all the Polish people were mentally capable of rising to the new challenges of a market economy just as Martin Jacques of Marxism Today blamed the British people for being bedazzled by Thatcher.
Which is one reason why Jacques has now fled to China where he writes awestruck commentaries on how it is the future of the world and how the USA and the West is declining with a not so obviously secret sense of satisfaction.
Jacques too shared Edgar's somewhat sniffy ambiguity towards the 'series of uprisings in an obscure corner of Europe' for same the reason that it merely brought globalisation and consumerism to Eastern Europe.
Compared to China's revolutionary capitalism launched in 1978 with Deng, the revolutions in Eastern Europe were a parochial event,
Compared with 1989, 1978 was admittedly a rather dull affair, however far-reaching its implications might have been. But 1989, on the other hand -notwithstanding the fact that it was bloodless and atypically good-natured - had more than a touch of the grand European political theatre. It was recognisably in the European revolutionary tradition. No contest there then.
As a former Communist, Jacques was embittered by the failure of the USSR and even more so by the failure of New Labour to jettison Thatcherism and the way it failed to rebuild an alliance with the working classes.
Seeing how Britain had exported its manufacturing base away to China and the developing world ( no less than the nations of the former Communist bloc did ) Jacques turned to China as the embodiment of his hopes of a 'systemic challenge' to Western hegemony.
Edgar has been left floundering around for a domestic alliance in Britain that can offer a 'systemic alternative' but he is unlikely to find it if Jacques is to be believed because the West, especially Europe is doomed to be a marginal world player anyway.
As Jacques gloats,
Unlike the Soviet Communist party, the Chinese Communist party chose to introduce capitalism. So in political terms, in the language of grand alternatives Europeans are so partial to, 1978 cannot hold a candle to 1989.
Europe, for example, is therefore still largely oblivious to the fact and consequences of this transformation, not least what it will mean politically and culturally for our continent. As a sign of our parochialism - and almost historically coincident with the rapid rise of China - we have become increasingly obsessed with the "Islamic problem".
So long a cipher of the US, and now mired in its own travails and sense of decline, Europe has grown myopic and introspective, a poor vantage point from which to see the future.
Edgar also cannot understand how some of the social changes the New Left campaigned for necessarily have led to the decline of the European states into a state of senescence, especially the feminist movement and the the contempt for the family as a 'repressive social contruct'.
These 68er New Left causes have not been depoliticised nor disarmed but co-opted to serve the neoliberal consumerism of which they were always going to be of great service in stimulating inner desires and sating them with products.
Identity politics was a perfect vehicle for destroying the barriers that has prevented the market being applied to the exploitation of the innermost cravings of consumers, that a person could identify with depersonalised lusts and elevate them to the status of a 'human right'.
One of the striking things about visiting eastern Europe during the 80s and 90s was finding people who shared western liberal values on sex, drugs and rock'n'roll but who regarded Thatcher as a heroine and her politics as a model.
Such values are complementary because based on rampant egotism, individualism and libertarianism of the sort satirised by Michel Houellebecq, an ex-Communist who at least has had the integrity to be honest about what the 1968 generation did.
David Coward summarised Houellebecq's devastating indictment of the 1960s generation as well as can be,
Since the 1960s, market forces have reorganized the economic activity of the Western world. With the collapse of religion and the death of ideology, capitalism acquired a free hand to interfere in those parts of our lives previously governed by faith and political belief. Consumerism, the leisure society and youth culture have radically reconfigured our emotional norms and made sexuality a system of social hierarchy.
The "supermarket society", with its offers of a constantly renewed selection of cheap, easily attainable goods, has delivered a death blow to religion.
In the wake of the Enlightenment, believers became citizens. Citizens have now turned into customers, who cannot conceive of a future, let alone of an afterlife, except in terms of increasing wealth and the acquisition of consumer products for status and satisfaction.
But that is only the half of it. People have also been "emancipated" by the sexual revolution which had the effect of pushing them to disastrous levels of individualism. The sexually free did not stay satisfied for long.
Having been given sex, they wanted more and pushed so hard at all the limits that they were soon demanding child abuse, pornography, torture, snuff movies.
The cult of brute force which had been curbed over the centuries by morality and law was revived in a single generation by sexual liberation. And thus was destroyed the last remaining outpost of the collective spirit, the family, whose members serve each other without hope or expectation of tangible reward.
Individualism, the antechamber to barbarism, is the grave of communal life and ultimately of civilization. It is also an illusion. Only the decay of the flesh, and death, truly belong to the individual. The rest -behaviour, ideas, ideals -is fed to us by politicians, advertisers and assorted stars who want our votes, our money and our admiration.
Nor has Islam or Islamism much of a long term chance of survival either,
Having lived for extended periods in Ireland and Spain, two deeply Catholic countries, he was struck by how quickly religion had collapsed in both places in the wake of modernization. He considers that Islam will go the same way.
Fiercely supported at present by the young, it will disappear in its turn, dismantled by the same appetite for consumer goods that marked the end of Communism in former Eastern Bloc countries. Like Christianity or punk, he says, it will leave only aesthetic remains.
That observation is borne out by recent trends in Poland where the same forces of social, intellectual and moral deregulation are proceeding apace and are only further stimulated by the inability of its Catholic Church to offer anything but sterile dogmas.
The sheer boredom of such an atomised society is also one reason why 'pro-liberation' leftists across Europe like Michnik, Nick Cohen et al believed that left wing idealism could be revived by spreading Western freedoms to places like Iraq. Yet it also accounts for the daft meanderings of Edgar.
As intellectuals and creative artists just are not very influential any more, they feel the need even more to make sense of their alienation by trying to pretend that they can divine the ultimate direction of the world process and attach themselves to some new global wave of future liberation.
The despair is not merely a result of anger over real injustices but a sense that consumerism and the infernal cycle of production and consumption that is eating away at the very foundations of human civilisation and causing worldwide environmental despoilation is 'the end of history'.
It is not, of course, even if the spiritual and moral torpor of Western society at the present time makes it feel that way. Edgar need not worry. Depleting oil, global heating, resource wars and the creation of an ever more authoritarian state to deal with terrorism will mark the next decades.
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Under the "supervised independence" obtained in February 2008, Kosovo is restless again...For the first time since March 2004 the deep-seated public disaffection for the international presence in Kosovo is coming to the surface. Five years ago violent riots redirected the escalating Albanian frustration with the UN protectorate against the Serb minority.
