Tag: Socialism

Alexander Herzen, Moderate Revolutionary

Alexander Herzen was one of the towering figures of Russian culture in the 19th century. His epic memoirs, My Past and Thoughts, are considered the best example of that genre in that language. As a man he defies easy categorisation – he was a thinker, a revolutionary, the first Russian socialist and the person almost singlehandedly responsible for the creation of Russian public opinion through the establishment of Russia’s first uncensored news organ. For Isaiah Berlin, he was something of a hero. For Aileen Kelly, his former student and author of The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen, which I have just finished reading, he is “one of the most talented and complex figures of his time”.

Kelly’s biography diverges from previous literature on Herzen to highlight his scientific education, which lead him to approach the practical matters of political agitation from an unideological and much more empirical standpoint. It also led him to distrust all goal-orientated ideologies, seeing the role of chance in evolution and human history as equally important. But the thinker that Kelly describes is less complex than she wishes him to be. Instead, Herzen’s own judgement of himself as the thinker of “two or three ideas” seems more accurate. But still, they are good ideas, and it’s worth knowing what they are. 

Alexander Herzen

Herzen’s Life

Alexander Herzen was born in 1812, the illegitimate son of a landowner and his German mistress. This was a difficult time to be alive. After the elation of Russia’s victory over Napoleon stagnation set in, and then after 1825, when a group of officers attempted to stage a coup in favour of Western reforms, stagnation turned into reaction. Herzen suffered not only from his alienation as an illegitimate child (though his father, a wealthy man, succeeded in arranging for Herzen to be admitted to the nobility), but from his own country’s backwardness. Similar to how the Germans had created Romanticism out of the national shame caused by French domination, Russians disappointed with the status quo after 1825 turned inwards. In this they borrowed from the Germans their thinkers and writers – Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, and so on. Kelly does a good job exploring the intellectual climate.

Herzen went to university and studied the natural sciences. He was then arrested on limited evidence and exiled to various unpleasant regions of Russia. Eventually he succeeded in fleeing Russia, ending up in London after some time. This is where he published The Bell, Russia’s first uncensored newspaper, which was smuggled into the country in great quantities. As he grew older, he witnessed the transition from his own generation into a new, more radical one. He made the acquaintance of such figures as Sergei Nechaev (the model for Verkhozensky in Dostoevsky’s Demons) and attempted to persuade them of his political views. In addition, he got to know such thinkers as Carlyle and revolutionaries as Garibaldi. His personal life, as we’ll see, was miserable, but it was certainly interesting.

One Life, One Chance: Herzen’s Thought

Herzen described himself as having only two or three ideas. By this he meant that his goal was not to present a system of his own, but rather to destroy what he saw as the pernicious systems and ideas of others – in this, we might think of him as similar to Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. “I’m not a teacher but a fellow seeker,” Herzen wrote. “I won’t presume to say what must be done, but I think I can say with a fair degree of accuracy what must not be done.” How did he know what must not be done? For Kelly, this comes from his scientific education. He had an eccentric relative called “The Chemist” who exposed him early on to the excitement of science, and throughout his life he continued to keep abreast of scientific developments.

Science was useful because it taught Herzen the importance of method. It’s not enough to have a theory, because “There is no absurdity that cannot be inserted into the mould of an empty dialectic in order to endow it with a profound metaphysical significance”. Instead, we must be more empirical, going from our own experience. We must look at the world before we attempt to change it, otherwise we will not have the right approach. To be aware of difference is a key skill for Herzen. For the revolutionary, it allows him to understand the best approach for achieving a given goal – at times violence may be necessary, while at others it may not. But the only way to know is not through theory, but through using our eyes.

Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species was an important influence on Herzen, or rather a confirmation of his suspicions about the role of chance in our lives. Evolution, Darwin argued, is not goal orientated. We develop through chance – sometimes improving, sometimes getting worse – but without any goal in sight. We simply improve our adaptation to a given environment. Herzen believed that chance was equally important in human affairs. Progress is not a given, and it is not a goal that we should consider a justification for the present.

Herzen was obsessed by natural disasters. As they are random, they proved for him that development could as easily be destroyed as it was created. If we think that we know the future, we can justify any means to achieve it. This is the foundation of the dangerous ideologies of the 20th century, and it was Herzen’s insight to realise that all attempts to claim knowledge of the laws of a random process (history) would lead inevitably to a kind of despotism.

Everything is chance, at least in the future. There is only one place where we are given a certain responsibility – this is the present. If we make use of it well, we can help create a good future. But we must always be aware that chance will determine the future, not any laws. We can only do our best. Herzen was scathing of both optimistic and pessimistic visions of human development. He thought that optimists failed to see the potential for collapse and decay in humanity that stemmed through chance and potential bad decisions, while pessimists failed to see that things need not necessarily get worse, provided we are willing to act to make them better in the present. In the long run, as Keynes said, we are all dead. But we can make a better present. Herzen, ultimately, comes across as a realist. His stoicism involved controlling what he could, and accepting what he could not. But given a life of personal tragedy (dead wife, family members drowning, infidelities, betrayals) he found his acceptance of chance pushed to the limits.

He admits that chance is not something we easily accept, but he insists that we do. For Herzen makes chance the basis of human dignity – we can only see people as themselves when we have no theory of the future that lets us turn them into objects.

“All the individual side of human life is buried in a dark labyrinth of contingencies, intersecting and interweaving with each other: primitive physical forces, dark urges, chance encounters, each have their place. They can form a harmonious choir, but equally can result in dissonances that can tear the soul apart. Into this dark forge of the fates light never penetrates: the blind workmen beat their hammers aimlessly, not answering for the results.…

There is something about chance that is intolerably repellent to a free spirit: he finds it so offensive to recognize its irrational force, he strives so hard to overcome it, that, finding no escape, he prefers to invent a threatening fate and submit to it. He wants the misfortunes that overtake him to be predestined—that is, to exist in connection with a universal world order; he wants to accept disasters as persecutions and punishments: this allows him to console himself through submission or rebellion. Naked chance he finds intolerable, a humiliating burden: his pride cannot endure its indifferent power.”

Herzen wanted us to see that we believe lies for a reason, because the alternative – accepting chance – is a challenge. But we cannot believe in ideologies, we must not believe in them, because they destroy the very things that make life meaningful – people as distinct, valuable, individuals:

“If progress is the end, for whom are we working? Who is this Moloch who, as the toilers approach him, instead of rewarding them, only recedes, and as a consolation to the exhausted, doomed multitudes crying “morituri te salutant” can give back only the mocking answer that after their death all will be beautiful on earth. Do you truly wish to condemn all human beings alive today to the sad role of caryatids supporting a floor for others some day to dance on, or of wretched galley slaves, up to their knees in mud, dragging a barge filled with some mysterious treasure and with the humble words “progress in the future” inscribed on its bow.… An end that is infinitely remote is not an end, but … a trap. An end must be nearer … at the very least, the laborer’s wage, or pleasure in the work done. Each epoch, each generation, each life had, and has, its own fullness; and en route new demands grow, new experiences, new methods.… This generic growth is not an aim, as you suppose, but the hereditary characteristic of a succession of generations.…

The struggle, the reciprocal action of natural forces and the forces of will, the consequences of which one cannot know in advance, give an overwhelming interest to every historical epoch. If humanity marched straight toward some kind of result, there would be no history, only logic.… If there were a libretto, history would lose all interest, become unnecessary, boring, ludicrous.”

Herzen saw that as we destroy God, indeed as science forces our idea of God to retreat further and further from life, then ideologies will necessarily take God’s place. But he also saw that we can only live and make life good if we focus on the life to hand, and not some future abstract life. His words are fiery, passionate. In many ways, they remind me of Carlyle, but unlike Carlyle, there is no authoritarianism lurking under Herzen’s words. He despised nationalism, and he saw the Russian peasant commune note as a utopia, but as a good way for people to organise themselves, and one that should become more popular. He wanted a compromise between individual rights and collective feeling. Like almost every thinker from the end of the Enlightenment to the present day, Herzen wanted to restore the lost unities of Western Civilization, to bond together again the people. But this cannot be done by force, and it cannot be done under tyranny. The great challenge for any theory is “To comprehend… The full sanctity, the full breadth and reality of the individual’s rights and not to destroy society, not to shatter it into atoms, is the most difficult of tasks.”

To summarise these one or two ideas, all Herzen really wants to say is that an overreliance on future goals can mislead us at best and lead to terror at worst. My favourite quote of his on this is not in Kelly’s biography, but is still worth sharing:

“We think the purpose of a child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of life is death”

The Political Actor

Beyond the need to concentrate on the present due to the unpredictable effects of chance, Herzen disliked all things whose foundations could not be proved and tested through experience, such as organised religion or Tsarist autocracy. Beyond these two thoughts, he simply had his own values. He wanted humans to have bonds without compromising their freedom. He saw the peasant commune, such as it then existed in Russia, as an ideal structure for achieving this. He did not idealise the peasants themselves, at least he was not as guilty of this as Tolstoy.

Still, he failed to see them for who they were. In 1863 there was an uprising in Russian-controlled Poland. Herzen had been in touch with the Polish revolutionaries for long before they actually revolted, and he had done his best to dissuade them from their chosen course. He had looked at the situation and decided that the timing was not right – they did not have a chance. But the Poles did not listen. Once they had risen up, Herzen did what he could for them, supporting them through The Bell, his newspaper. He condemned the Russian response, which was vindictive and brutal. But for all that, he found himself increasingly isolated. Russian society, which hitherto had been increasingly divided between different groups – Slavophiles and Westernisers, Radicals and Liberals and Conservatives – all united against the Poles and in support of the Tsar. The Bell’s circulation plummeted, and it lost the esteem it had held. Herzen had thought that socialism would be the idea capable of rebuilding the bonds between society’s many elements. He was incorrect – what actually was capable of drawing people together was nationalism.

After the Polish uprising Herzen’s influence was limited. The radicals who came to visit him in London or elsewhere were more interested in gaining access to his money than to his mind. To a new generation, determined to use more radical means to secure their goals, Herzen’s moderation was a problem. They preferred Herzen’s contemporary, the anarchist Bakunin, who is best-known for his declaration that “a destructive urge is also a creative one”. This generation had little time for the suggestion that violence may not be the only way of securing a successful revolution – indeed, it may not even be the best way. Herzen died, in some sense forgotten, in 1870.

Concluding Remarks

Jules Michelet, the French historian, wrote on Herzen’s death that with him had fallen silent “the voice of numerous millions of people.” Indeed, there had. But these were not, all told, Russian voices. In his refusal to acknowledge authorities based on trust, and his hatred of oppression, he was an anti-imperialist avant la lettre. His support for the Poles and for all oppressed peoples makes him an important figure in socialist history. His creation of The Bell, Russia’s first uncensored newspaper, and his own writings, give him a central place in Russian intellectual history, even if he failed to have a significant impact on its political history.

And, perhaps most importantly for us reading him or about him now, what he said, however simple it is, retains a definite power and wisdom. We are danger, especially in our own day, of a progress that looks always towards the future, and never at the present, and that sees people rather than individuals. When we start to acknowledge the role of chance in our lives, we successfully reorientate ourselves towards the one thing we can change – the present moment. We come to realise the “irreplaceable reality”, as Herzen termed it, that individuals themselves constitute. We are only alive once, and we must work to make a better world right now. This, whatever our politics, seems reasonable enough.

Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time

I’ve always found it strange that to think, whether on the metro or while wandering through the streets of my beloved Petersburg, that not thirty years ago this all was a completely different country. By that time, of course, it was clear that the Soviet Union was on its way out. But what would replace it was anybody’s guess. Gorbachev, ever the idealist, hoped to reform the USSR into a new confederation – the Union of Sovereign States – that would alleviate many of that country’s worst failings by decentralizing its power structure. An attempted coup in August of 1991 put this proposal on ice and led to the collapse of the USSR in December of that year. But though the Soviet Union was no more, its people remained. Belorussian writer Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time gives these people a voice.

Its pages explore the lives of these people whose homeland evaporated before their eyes. The book is structured as a series of interviews, edited into monologues. “I’m trying to honestly hear out all the participants of the socialist drama”, Alexievich explains. These monologues are presented almost without judgement or comment, and are divided in theme between the end of the Soviet Union and Yeltsin’s years of power, and the time after the dawn of the new millennium when Vladimir Putin became dominant. But in contrast to the historic scope of much writing on this period, these stories are fundamentally human in scale. Love again and again comes up, alongside the pain of women and immigrants in a society that – after the collapse of the Soviet Union – became fundamentally reactionary and nationalist in terms of its culture.

A photo of Svetlana Alexievich, author of Second-hand Time
Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel prize in literature in 2015, was born in Ukraine, is Belorussian, but writes in Russian. As you read Second-hand Time it’s worth remembering that Alexievich lost her homeland too. Photo by Elke Wetzig (CC BY-SA 3.0)

A lot of people will tell you it’s a miracle that the Soviet Union collapsed bloodlessly. Second-hand Time goes against that clinical view and shows that even the “little” violence that did take place had a real and terrible human cost. Especially in the West, we also tend to take the rather parochial view that the USSR was an “Evil Empire”, that its citizens were relentlessly crushed under the wheels of a terrifying totalitarian regime. But the Soviet Union outlived Stalin, and things got better than that. Second-hand Time does not paint the closing days of the Union as filled with joy and plenty, but it shows through its many and varied speakers how great the loss experienced by its citizens in many cases was. The creation of the USSR may have been a tragedy, but its collapse – in light of what’s come after – seems even worse.

Maybe Gorbachev had the right idea after all.

Hopes and Ideals

Anybody who has come into contact with Russia and its culture knows that Russia is special. It likes to tell you as much. “we’re so soulful, we’re so special” one speaker says without irony. It retains a belief in itself as a country of chosen people, with a unique path. A path of suffering, not of joy. The Soviet Union was created because of the great faith – and opportunism – of the communists. Its collapse, likewise, was a moment when Russia seemed to be special once again. Freedom meant everything to everybody, and people were soon disappointed. The nineties were a time of lawlessness and extreme poverty – Yegor Gaidar’s “shock therapy” brought capitalism to the masses, but not the money to take advantage of it. People died in the streets and the sheets, and few could afford the coffin to bury them in, or the ambulance to try to save them.

“Instead of a Motherland, we live in a huge supermarket”. Salami comes up again and again as this symbol of capitalism’s allure. In the Soviet Union it wasn’t easy to get access to good meat – and impossible to get to choose it. But people soon realised that meat isn’t a substitute for anything good – especially when you don’t have the money to buy it. The first section of Second-hand Time, The Consolation of Apocalypse, shows people falling out of love with the changes brought about by the collapse of the USSR. There is a continual lament for the values they have lost. In the Soviet Union, people read books, people talked in kitchens – the atmosphere is decidedly intellectual. The small guy was looked after.

But alongside of shock therapy the Russians were also introduced to a new set of values, ones that were more suitable to the new system. Buy buy buy – greed grew dominant. The poor weren’t to be pitied – they had failed to show the skill and hard work that the rich (apparently) had. Instead of discussing books, people get excited about new technology, blue jeans. One speaker, a rich man who made himself in this system, says “money is a test, like power or love”. It’s hard not to agree. And this early part of Second-hand Time shows that the Russians weren’t quite ready to pass it. Next to the chaos of the new free market, socialism is utopian: “Socialism isn’t just labour camps, informants, and the Iron Curtain, it’s also a bright, just world: Everything is shared, the weak are pitied, and compassion rules”. One party official tells Alexievich.

Faulty Memory and Greatness

We remember what we want to remember and, except for those of us whose depression is particularly great, in the end the good memories rise above the bad and we come to remember the past as a better place. For the Russians of today, that innocent trick of the mind is potentially dangerous. It leads to a longing for the Soviet Union. “You forget about the long lines and empty stores faster than you do about the red flag flying over the Reichstag.” Again and again, those interviewed mention the war with Germany as a high point in their nation’s history. They were great; they saved the day.

The challenge that Russians face now, when the belief in their country’s unique path is so strong, is to decide between “great history and banal existence”. It’s not entirely clear which choice is best. One path seems to hold the salvation of the soul, the other the salvation of the body. “I can do without a lot of things, the only thing I can’t do without is the past.” – these are not the words of a salami-lover.

“We all believed that the kingdom of freedom was right around the corner… But life just kept getting worse. Very soon, the only thing you could buy was books. Nothing but books on the store shelves…” Russians turned the wheel of history with the collapse of the USSR, but very soon their naïve hopes turned to bitterness and despair. Socialism was a way of looking at the world, and without it the ground fell out from under people’s feet. And few were ready to fly… There are a great many suicides in Second-hand Time.

“I cannot go on living while my Fatherland is dying and everything I heretofore considered to be the meaning of my life is being destroyed.”

Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow. It’s hard not to feel sorry for those who truly believed in the Communist project and had their world fall apart. Ed Yourdon from New York City, USA (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Butcher Returns

Each one of the stories in Second-hand Time is worth telling. It’s hard to decide what to mention here. Each one hit me in different ways, but some were so powerful – so frightening – that they left me speechless. The final story in the first part of Second-hand Time is such a story. It begins with the experience of a woman who had grown up in one of Stalin’s camps in Kazakhstan as she searched for the truth of her past, but ended even more shockingly with her son’s story of a betrothal gone wrong. He is a lieutenant in the army, about to get married. The girl and her family live well for Soviets. They have crystal chandeliers, porcelain, rugs. The old grandfather, the patriarch, is an honoured veteran. He’d speak at schools, get kids as visitors to hear his stories.

Before the wedding the lieutenant and the veteran go out to the family country house to get drunk. They’re completely alone, and the grandfather begins to talk about his past and his views. He’s an old man, and sounds like one… with a particularly Russian bent. He rails against the liberals, the new generations – they don’t need freedom, they need to work, to suffer. And he reveals he was in the NKVD, how he executed the Soviet people…

“I watch TV, I listen to the radio. It’s the rich and poor all over again. Some people gorge themselves on caviar, buy islands and private jets, while others can’t afford a loaf of white bread. This won’t last long around here! People will once again acknowledge Stalin’s greatness. The axe is right where it always was… the axe will survive the master. Mark my words…”

This idea of the axe, of the power of the state for mass power through fear – this for the grandfather is message of hope. Russia demands a strong leader, it demands control and violence and destruction – not cheese and salami and blue jeans.

It is too much for the lieutenant. He breaks off the engagement without explanation. A note at the end of the story explains that he and his family emigrated to Canada before he let Alexievich publish the story. He adds “I’m glad I left in time. For a while, people liked Russians, now they’re afraid of us again. Aren’t you?”

Support for Stalin is currently at a record high in Russia. In 2000 Vladimir Putin became president and the dominant political actor in Russia, the latter being a role he has not relinquished since then. The story is the perfect end to the chaos of the 1990s. Russia’s period of anarchy – everybody agreed – had to end some way. But it is only the angry old man, filled with hate, who understood fully what would have to happen – since he believed there had been no change to the Russian people, then just as before they needed to be crushed rather than raised up. Putin is no new Stalin, but the idea that Russia needs a strong leader is dangerously ingrained into the Russian idea of its own path that with hindsight it’s hard to see what else could have happened. The second part of Second-hand Time looks at the consequences.

“The Friendship of the Peoples”

The Friendship of the Peoples was a cultural policy introduced under Stalin in 1935, designed to reduce the ethnic barriers between the various peoples of the Soviet Union. Stalin himself was a Georgian; Brezhnev was Ukrainian; and in the USSR as a whole the Russians only constituted about half of the overall population. It was a good idea, but it should be mentioned that Stalin was also responsible for large-scale population transfers, genocide in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, and generally was not exactly a paragon of ethnically harmonious leadership. All the same, the policy continued after his death, and a degree of unity began to form between the peoples of the Union. A number of monologues in Second-hand Time serve as evidence for the success of the policy.

For some people, the collapse of the Soviet Union didn’t just mean the loss of their homeland – it also meant the loss of their homes as ethnic tensions tore the new states apart. Here are some Azeri refugees displaced from Ngoro-Karabakh in Azerbaijan – a territory that was predominantly ethnically Armenian, but only after the fall of the Soviet Union became almost homogeneously so – through violence. Oleg Litvin (CC BY-SA 3.0)

And all this success was destroyed by the collapse of the USSR. In scenes that are reminiscent of the persecution of Jews under the Nazis, so too we read here of families hidden in attics to avoid being murdered – whether by Azeris, or Georgians, or Abkhazians, or Tajiks. Moldavia was split in two, Georgia and Tajikistan underwent civil war, and even in those countries that did not go to war there were still forcible expulsions.

Today there remain many Russians abroad, particularly in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and the Baltic states, while in other former Soviet Republics there are almost none. Russia itself attracts immigrants from all over the former Soviet lands, but Second-hand Time shows that the dream of ethnic harmony remains as dead now as it was then. A particularly unpleasant interview deals with the lives of the Tajiks in Moscow in our own days and the ways they are treated by the Russians – killed, beaten, left unpaid. It’s something I’ve come to notice a lot recently in my own time in Russia – just how racist the Russian people are towards those who were once their equals. There’s a hierarchy here, one that’s almost invisible unless you look for it. It’s easy to live in Russia without meeting a single non-Russian. But you see them every day, cleaning the metro, manning stalls at the market.

I’ve travelled in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Armenia, and other former Soviet countries. The people I met there were no better or worse than the Russians are. It’s disappointing that after the collapse of the USSR the peace that very nearly existed was replaced by a revival of ethnic and religious tensions that nobody, really, needs or wants.

The New World and Its Heroes

“What’s the point of changing governments if we don’t change ourselves?” People changed after the end of the Soviet Union – they had to change or else die. Their values, as I’ve written above, were overhauled. But their hearts were harder to change, and many of the characters in Second-hand Time didn’t succeed in shaking off the Soviet past. But Alisa Z, one interviewee, did succeed. She’s 35, an advertising manager, and the kind of shark that found the new world one of endless opportunities. Her monologue is fascinating… in a way, it’s like a deranged Dostoevsky character going on a rant to explain their worldview. She took advantage of the “revolution of desires” to desire everything. Sex, money, power. And she got it.

“Loneliness is freedom… Now, every day, I’m happy I’m free: Will he call or won’t he, will he come over or not? Is he going to dump me? Spare me! Those aren’t problems anymore! So no, I’m not afraid of loneliness… What am I afraid of? I’m afraid of the dentist! People always lie when they talk about love… and money… They’re always lying in so many ways. I don’t want to lie… I just don’t! Excuse me… please forgive me… I haven’t thought about any of this for a long time…”

She’s repulsive; she’s free and completely hedonistic. Her confidence, her directness of experience and existence is mesmerising. She is the kind of person who needed, truly needed, the world of capitalism. She sleeps with oligarchs and eats and drinks and enjoys herself. The world is her oyster. In my own experience of oligarchs (bless the British public school system!) I’ve seen the same brutal hunger. I’m not sure it’s the best way to live, but there’s no denying that this is a type of life… just one that I find terrifying and alluring in equal measure. And when so few of us live, even a repulsive life is more attractive than death-in-life…

Love

History was taking place all the time these people were speaking, but what almost always stands out is not the history, but the love that tries to get in the way of it. A good friend of mine in Moscow is dating a Ukrainian and – would you believe it! – both sets of parents have been trying to keep them apart from the first day of the relationship. But that’s nothing compared to the loves that are described here. There’s a woman who falls in love with a murderer stuck for life in a prison, a woman who is separated from her husband for seven years because his family refuse to let him be with an infidel, and many other examples of loves that refuse to let anything stand in the way.

Russia is a country of romantics, and it seems that love is one of the ways that the Russians – the women especially – were able to survive the horrors that the 1990s brought with them. It’s a way of living and loving that seems strange at best, and silly at worst, to us in the West. But giving oneself up truly to another person, just like giving oneself up completely to an idea like Communism, seems one of the surest ways to salvation of the soul. In any case, the passages of self-sacrifice in the name of love were regularly touching, even if it made me deeply sad to read about all the challenges these people faced, and perhaps ought not have had to.

Photo of protesters in Minsk in 2010. Second-hand Time ends on a high, suggesting that the youth will be able to change the world the way everyone had naively hoped to in the 1990s.
Protests in Belarus took place in 2010 as Alexander Lukashenko was re-elected to the office of president. The young generation in the former Soviet Union may not be placed well politically to enact changed, but from my experience of them their hearts are almost without exception in the right place. Things in these countries, which have suffered so much, will only get better. Photo by Isabel Sommerfeld (CC BY 2.0)

Conclusion – Future Hopes

The last chapter of Second-hand Time details the experience of a few students in the ill-fated protests in Belarus to Alexander Lukashenko’s re-election in 2010 to the office of president. Many of these people were put in prison and kicked out of university; others were simply beaten by riot police; Lukashenko won, of course. He also won a fourth term in 2015, and is standing for a fifth term in 2020 – although at the time of writing it’s not clear whether Belarus will be absorbed into Russia at some point after that. However much these people faced pain and disappointment, like the protesters in Moscow in 2011, the fact that they tried – Alexievich seems to hint – is already a huge achievement, and a step towards the future.

I’ve lived in Russia for two years now, and I intend to live here after university. I can’t say I love the Russians, but for me they really are a special people, just as theirs is a special country. And the times are changing. The dreams of the 1990s are not yet dead. If there is one thing that gives me more hope than anything else it is the young generation – here, and across the world. People may complain about the present situation – regarding Russia, it’s not my place to – but Russia’s youth will surely, once they come of political age, change the world for the better. Perhaps the dream of love and brotherhood that the Soviet Union held so dear may also, one day, prove not simply idealistic twaddle, but something really worth believing in.

Alexievich’s book is probably the best book I’ve read all year. Both heartwarming and heart-rending, hopeful and hateful, it is a roller-coaster of real emotions. But most importantly, it’s making me go with reopened eyes into the world and realise yet again that every human carries with them their own story, like a cross. And if we do not listen to them, however misguided or deluded they may be, how can we hope to change the world?

For more of the challenges faced by people living today, look at my thoughts on Joker, and on Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism.

Ambiguity, Class Conflict and Mental Health in Joker

I watched Todd Phillips’ Joker yesterday and it may well have been the best film I’ve ever seen – but then, I’m not exactly a film person. When I watch films, I generally balance out my serious reading by choosing light-hearted movies. Joker shows an alternative path forward for the ever-popular comic book movie genre – one that says that films about costumed heroes and villains can be every bit as introspective and challenging as other “serious” films. Indeed, given the violence, destruction, and brutal origins and lives of many comic book heroes and villains, perhaps the films should be.

 Joker is also a highly political film, as much of the more negative media coverage of it has indicated, but the suggestion that Joker supports the cause of “incels” is to my mind very much a misplaced one. Instead, using ambiguity as its guiding principle, Joker carefully explores the connections between class, violence, and mental illness. In this way, I’d like to use it as a companion piece to explore a few of the ideas I mentioned in connection with Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, which I looked at here.

A film still showing Arthur putting his makeup on while crying
Joker asks us to consider how whether our own seemingly benign actions, whether at the ballot box or on the street, may have real and painful consequences for people like Arthur Fleck, the Joker.

Medication and Meetings – Austerity in Joker

At school I ended up doing some community service. I’m pretty sure it was there only because it’s one of the things private schools in the UK need to do retain charitable status. Either way, there were various activities on offer, ranging from picking up litter to looking after our (private!) library… I, however, somehow ended up doing one of the few serious activities – I chose to help a local theatre company teach people with Down’s and autism how to act. It lasted about half a year and was a life-changing experience. Never before had I spoken to anyone with Down’s. I remember the unease I felt on first entering the school buildings they used for the training. I’d thought these people were monsters. And when I first went to the bathroom and heard one of them noisily coming in a felt a real fear come over me.

Luckily, all that passed. With time I got to know each of the people there. Not well, but enough to realise that my preconceptions of them had been completely out of touch. They were, even though they often needed help, people like the rest of us, with their own passions, loves, and sadnesses. But I mention all this for another reason. One session one of our acting tasks was to pretend we were in a political rally. Obviously, the whole idea was strange for a bunch of boys who saw nothing amiss in the current system. But the others were excited. Each and every one of them chose the same topic for their protest – cuts to their benefits, challenges in getting medication and access to counselling when they needed it. It was a humbling moment to realise that these peoples’ entire lives were actually affected by our votes and politicians.

I couldn’t, after that, consider blindly the consequences of austerity and cuts the same way. Joker likewise features relatively prominently those political-economic decisions that can cause real consequences for our mental health. The first scene in the film features Arthur Fleck, the future Joker, having a meeting with a mental health worker. Although she doesn’t much care for him, she at least tries to help by encouraging him to open up and organising his medication. But when they meet again, later on in the film, she announces that her department’s budget has been cut. She can’t help him anymore, and he loses access to his medication. The film doesn’t suggest that she is doing a good job – in fact, Arthur gets angry at her for ignoring what he says and just repeating the same questions – but it’s undeniable that he suffers when her support is removed. Politics has human victims.

Violence in Joker – Purpose and Effect

The high point of the film’s early stages and the first decisive moment in Arthur’s transformation into Joker is his killing of three young men on the subway. They are well dressed but drunk, and turn out to be employees of Wayne Enterprises. After verbally abusing a young woman they turn on Arthur and begin – randomly – beating him. However, using a gun given to him for his protection, he shoots two of them and finishes the third off as he tries to escape. The murders – as determined by the media, and by Thomas Wayne himself – are politically motivated. Such “clowns” are simply envious of the rich for being more successful than they are. Wayne’s remarks lead to a general increase in civil unrest. What was not a murder to begin with – it was self-defence – is morphed into a symbol of class conflict by Wayne’s ignorance.

Violence as a Reflection of Moral Decay

Joker is a violent movie, but its violence is brutal and infrequent rather than sustained, as in a superhero movie. It’s important, considering the criticism of the film, to note that all of the violence serves a thematic purpose. There are a few scenes I’d like to mention and explain why the violence is, in its way, necessary. The first scene, which features in the trailers of Joker, involves the theft of Arthur’s sign by a few children. After chasing them through town they eventually hit him over the head with the sign and begin kicking him while he’s on the ground. The violence is unmotivated and pointless – its purpose in the film is to show the state of moral decay into which Gotham has fallen at the film’s beginning.

In the film, Thomas Wayne enters the mayoral race with the aim of bringing prosperity back to the city. He comes at it from a standard right-wing perspective, arguing that what will work for his business is bound to bring happiness and economic rejuvenation back to the people too. I’m not an economist by any stretch, but I’m willing to say that his view is dangerously simplistic – (just as opposing views from the left can be). Wayne himself is a big fellow, the very model of a serious capitalist. He encounters Arthur once in the film, in a bathroom at a theatre, where Arthur claims he is Wayne’s son and begs for kindness – more on that later. Wayne’s reaction, however, is to punch Arthur to the ground. As soon as he realises that Arthur won’t accept his answer, he resorts to violence. A simple solution, but not the moral one.

Does Violence Have to Beget Violence?

When violence is undertaken by the representative of the status quo in Joker instead of a search for a peaceful solution it becomes clear what kind of moral decline Arthur’s world is undergoing. One of the most poignant moments, if I’m remembering right, is when Arthur declares to the talk-show host Murray Franklin that if people only showed a little human decency then he himself wouldn’t have turned out the way he was. But instead, violence often begets violence, as Arthur discovers when he learns from a trip to Arkham Asylum that as a child he was physically abused. In fact, his recurrent uncontrollable laugh turns out to be due to head trauma undergone during that time.

A still showing Arthur laughing
Arthur’s uncontrollable laugh is the result of childhood trauma. But it is the cruelty of those around him who humiliate and denigrate him that leads to his own violence, and not the initial trauma at all.

But it’s interesting the way that the abusive childhood trope is used in Joker. Instead of simply becoming bad because of his brutal childhood, Arthur is left damaged – with his laugh – but able to live normally and kindly. It is only the endless mocking of his laughter by other people that leads him to violence, rather than the original abuse. The responsibility for his murderous madness becomes (partly) that of those who mocked him instead of showing warmth. He could easily have turned out differently if they had. When Arthur murders one of his old colleagues, Randall, but spares another – Gary – for treating him kindly, it isn’t madness on his part so much as the only possible action given a world in which violence becomes acceptable for solving problems. It’s difficult not to look at Joker’s violence and find that Arthur’s actions are the necessary results of his surrounding world.

Capitalist Realities – Who Decides What’s Real?

I found Joker at times difficult to watch, and not just for the violence. To me it ended up echoing a world that I was all too familiar with myself, growing up in highly privileged circumstances in the UK. The challenge of Joker is that it forces us to become aware of the multiple “realities” that exist in the highly unequal societies engendered by capitalism, and the way that they are easily manipulated. The manipulation of reality by the rich that is most interesting when comparing Joker with Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. I’ve already mentioned how Thomas Wayne, using his influence and the media, creates a reality in which the deaths of the three businessmen is as a sign of class resentment instead of self-defence or simply a mystery. This idea of jealousy comes up again and again from his mouth and that of other wealthy characters like Murray Franklin.

But what the film is equally clear about is that this idea is a lie. There is resentment against the inequality, but it is in no way from jealousy. What the film instead shows is the way that, carelessly, the rich can hurt the poor without realising it. From cuts to mental health services to Murray’s television show, where he plays a clip of Arthur’s bad stand-up to laugh at him, there is a sense that the although the rich think they understand the poor, by their actions they repeatedly deprive them of their dignity. When Arthur tells Murray that his show humiliated him for entertainment Murray’s response is that “you don’t know me”. But the evidence of Joker is enough to condemn him, just as it condemns Wayne. It reveals a disjunct between their self-perceptions and their actions that they refuse to acknowledge.

A still showing Murray meeting Arthur
“You don’t know me” – Joker showcases the disjunction between Murray’s view of his actions and the real, harmful, results they have on people like Arthur.

Of course, this idea of the accidental cruelty of the wealthy towards the poor out of ignorance is a simplification made inevitable by the length of the film. In the real world we are a little more lucky with our rich people, if only a little. But the point remains a valid one. Without trying to understand people through talking with them – and in doing so, respecting their dignity as individuals – we can’t avoid ignorance of our actions’ consequences, however well-intentioned we are.

Parentage

Arthur lives with his mother, Penny Fleck. There’s no sign of a father, and for most of Joker the comedian, Murray, is his surrogate father figure. His true parentage is only revealed later on, probably. Arthur opens one of the many letters that his mother writes to Wayne – she had once been employed by him, and trusts to his goodness to help an old employee out – and learns that Wayne is in fact his father. Arthur then heads to Wayne Mansion, outside of the city, where he encounters the young Bruce and a his guardian in the grounds. The guardian has a loud and violent argument with Arthur, who says he wants to see Wayne because he knows the truth.

But the guardian says that Arthur’s wrong, that there was no relationship, and that his mother was instead crazy. This is the officially accepted story, and, seeking the truth, Arthur goes to Arkham Asylum, where he steals his mother’s medical records. He learns that he was adopted and that his mother has Narcissism and various other disorders. Now there are two conflicting truths – the one that his mother possesses, and the one that the rich have determined. At this point it’s impossible to know who is right. But later on, we find a photo of Penny as a younger girl and see that it’s signed by Wayne. To my mind, this is proof that her story is the right one. Wayne used his power to have Arthur made an adopted foundling and have his mother discredited, all to protect himself. Through connections and power, Wayne’s reality comes to dominate.

Arthur’s hallucinations

An interesting point of comparison is between Arthur’s own hallucinations and the reality-shifting antics of the rich. For much of the film Arthur believes that he is dating a single mother who lives down the hallway, but as the film reaches its conclusion, we learn that he had hallucinated the whole thing. The moment of realisation is terrible. He enters her flat in complete despair and hoping for support but instead she asks the stranger to leave her house. All of this points to a sad truth – all of us are capable of creating our own realities, but only those who are given power are able to expand their realities beyond themselves. Wayne can erase his illegitimate son’s existence and make it something everyone accepts, but Arthur cannot count on even one other human heart to accept his need for comfort.

A still from Joker showing Arthur's imagined girlfriend.
Arthur’s imagined girlfriend in Joker. Our minds can sometimes offer comfort, but when we need a real hug and a pat on our back the illusions we create prove inadequate – unless we have the power to make them be considered reality.

Overall, what all of this serves to do is make us ask questions about what we believe, and how far we can trust the reality of things as it’s shown to us. It’s easy to believe that the political actions of the privileged rarely have consequences, but Joker shows that for people living in a different, harsher reality, the consequences are real. But without any listening – whether it’s Arthur’s psychiatrist or Wayne himself, this gap of experience and privilege cannot be bridged, and we talk and act past each other. And so, the film ends in a violent cacophony. It may inspire some youthful would-be revolutionaries, but the final scenes really shouldn’t. The pointless violence may be a release of pent-up energies, but rioting achieves nothing and shows as little respect for the rich as the rich of Joker show to the poor.

Joker is clever enough to raise its questions while discrediting the easy answers it puts forward. It doesn’t advocate violence, but it forces us to ask whether or not we ourselves have a hand in creating a world in which violence is inevitable.

Conclusion

Joker is simply a fantastic film. Joaquin Phoenix and Robert De Niro give excellent performances, the music is perfect throughout – the score by Hildur Guðnadóttir takes us right into the mind of Arthur, whether we want to be there or not. It raises the questions of social inequality’s connection to mental health and violence and in doing so gets us talking about topics both taboo and rarely raised in polite discourse.

It is true that the film’s politics can, as happened with Fight Club, create its own clown-sympathisers and imitators. But I’m not sure how far we should let that turn us off the film. It’s far better to have the courage to raise the questions, even if we don’t know the answers to them, than to pretend that the problems Joker depicts – the effects of cuts to social welfare on the people who need it most, and the dreadful consequences of inequality and class conflict – don’t exist.

To devalue Joker for its politics is to do exactly the thing that Arthur warns us about in his rant to Murray when he compares killing the young businessmen to being killed himself. If Joker had only been about how being “crazy” leads you to murder then we wouldn’t be talking about it. Like a beaten madman on the street it’s easy to nod and accept such a moral and move on. But when, without excusing Arthur’s actions or suggesting that they are caused by capitalism alone, Joker shows us that our own system and its politics can exacerbate our mental illnesses and bring a man to violence – this provides a challenge to our mental status quo that we can’t just ignore in the same way.

The answer is not class violence, but – perhaps – rather a newfound sense of responsibility. We have to do our best to listen to those we’d otherwise pass over without a second glance. Otherwise, we ourselves become to blame for when they can take our neglect no longer. Ultimately that is the central message of the film – to listen and care – much more than any anti-capitalist note. And luckily, it’s a message that’s easy to accept and worth every effort to act on.

For my piece on Capitalist Realism, click here. If you’ve seen Joker and have your own view whynot leave a comment of what you thought of it and my own ideas on the film?