A diary turned upside down

Owen Hsieh – 02/03/2025

Diary of a Crisis: Israel in Turmoil

Saul Friedländer

304 pages / September 2024

Verso Books

Introduction:

Saul  Friedländer is a historian of repute, having previously written an acclaimed history of the holocaust, The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (1997) and The Years of Extermination, 1939-1945 (2007). In Diary of a Crisis he writes about a year in Israeli politics from January to December 2023, commenting on the protests against Netanyahu’s judicial reforms, with a latter section added which is devoted to October 7 and its aftermath, while the first section contains some interesting insights on the protest movement which was underreported and little understood in the west. The section on October 7 is politically problematic and ends up uncritically repeating IDF talking points and propaganda, all while the IDF is on a rampage throughout Gaza. 

Protests against Judicial Reforms:

The aging  Friedländer writes from the vantage point of his home in France, complaining that he is too old and infirm to fly there and see events in person. His book is therefore lacking first-hand material, comprised of observations and notes he has taken from watching the news and reading the Hebrew language press from abroad.

In its first half, discussing Netanyahu’s proposed Judicial reforms and the protests they engendered,  Friedländer writes in his introduction:  

I knew what political fanaticism is, and I know that Netanyahu was desperately attempting to get rid of the indictments that would land him in jail. His new alliances would allow him to subvert the judicial system to a point that would make it subservient to the political majority in power and thus allow him to dodge the sword hanging over his head.

The Judicial reforms sought to implement the “reasonableness bill” which removed the power of the Supreme Court (and lower courts) to cancel government decisions interpreted to be  "extremely unreasonable", while simultaneously weakening the ability of the Supreme Court to review or throw out laws - by enabling a simple majority in the Knesset (parliament) to overrule the courts. There was also a push for greater control over the appointment of judges.

These reforms were slated to be implemented while Netanyahu faces trial for three separate cases of corruption: Case 1000, Case 2000, and Case 4000, which include allegations of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. These charges could lead to a potential sentence of 10 years in prison. Many saw the Judicial reforms as an attempt to shield Netanyahu from prosecution.

A typical entry for each day’s events is 150 words, supporting the protestors. Friedländer’s diary entries contain wry observations and pithy snippets taken from the news of the day which give a good picture of the tenor of Israeli politics at the time: 

Excerpts from a typical series of entries are as follows:

Saturday, January 21:

Some 130,000 anti-Netanyahu demonstrators took the streets in Israeli cities, 100,000 of them in Tel Aviv.

Saturday, February 4:

The number of protestors in Tel Aviv (40,000) was not up to that of previous weeks but there were many more demonstrations all over the country.

Monday, February 6:

Three things are quite bothersome regarding the protest movement: the lack of leadership, the quasi-total exclusion of the Palestinian issue, and the danger of again having a majority of Ashkenazim facing the great mass of Sephardim. Avoiding this trap should be an important aim of those who organise the demonstrations.

 

Saturday, March 5:

Thirty seven out of the forty reserve pilots of an elite air force unit will not report for training in protest against the judicial initiative. This kind of abstentionism is rapidly spreading to other units. Minister of Defence Gallant is worried enough to call for immediate talks.

Saturday, March 25:

The protests against the judicial overhaul are spreading to the army conscripts. Thousands of demonstrators in front of Defence Minister Gallants house….Massive protests all over the country.. ..Gallant has called for the [Judicial] overhaul to be paused. According to him, the rift has penetrated the army and there is an immediate and tangible threat to Israel’s security.

October 7:

These paint the picture of a revolutionary situation. The first series of reports on the protests against the judicial reforms was completed and appeared in the German language press before a second section was added after October 7, capitalising on the massive wave of interest and hunger for knowledge that appeared after the attack.  Friedländer writes from October 7 to Dec 13, but while the first section of the book was vibrant, bringing a lot of new information to light on the character of the mass protests, his writing on October 7th sometimes descends to the level of a rant and shows elements of  Friedländer’s untrammelled bias. 

For example:

On Anti Semitism in the British Labour Party and Western Europe generally:

Wednesday, November 15:

After being presented to Congress, a video recording of the Hamas attack on October 7 was screened to 70 members of both Houses of the British Parliament. In both cases, the incredible brutality of these images made a deep impression. However, there are 650 members in the House of Commons alone and more than 750 in the House of Lords. It is probable that no member of the Labour Party attended the screening … The negative (or shall we say, somewhat negative) attitude toward Israel and, often toward Jews, in the UK nowadays remains puzzling.

Thursday, November 16:

The rise of antisemitism in western Europe and the US shows that hatred of Jews was merely dormant since World War II and the Holocaust, and that any pretext can revive it. This hatred is being amalgamated with social conflicts that have nothing to do with it. Jews are portrayed as oppressors, either directly oppressing the Palestinians or using the money they have supposedly accumulated to oppress any possibly disadvantaged social group. Antisemitism certainly is the oldest hatred, and it does not end.

We can only infer from this that the Labour Party of Britain, seemingly did not attend the screening of the Oct 7 documentary, as they, like their compatriots in Western Europe, are not immune to the world’s oldest hatred: beholden to an irrational, immutable antisemitism. 

Friedländer’s invective is particularly charged here as it comes shortly after Corbyn was removed as British Labour leader and expelled from the party in 2020 after facing spurious charges of Anti-Semitism – he legitimises this witch hunt after the fact. 

Hamas base beneath Al-Shifa hospital:

Tuesday, November 7:

We only know that IDF ground forces are fighting in the heart of Gaza city, near Al Shifa hospital. Ironically, the hospital was built by Israeli architects in the 1970s, when Israel was occupying Gaza. But the tunnels beneath the hospital were not built by Israel.

Friday, November 10:

Israel is convinced that Hamas tactically established its headquarters in tunnels under the hospital compound, and that Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas chief, is holed up there. Time will tell, but in the meantime civilians are getting killed.

Friday, November 17:

The New York Times and the Guardian both express doubts today about the evidence provided by the IDF regarding Hamas’s military activity at Al-Shifa Hospital. Apart from the corpse of Yehudit Weiss, which was found near the hospital, and the weapons and uniforms that supposedly belonged to Hamas fighters, the IDF uncovered a shaft with steps leading down to tunnels that could not yet be explored because of the danger of booby traps. Only such hard evidence would justify the Israeli incursion into the hospital with its thousands of patients and refugees.

Friday, November 18:

The New York Times has confirmed that the IDF has lowered a camera down the opening of the tunnel uncovered under Al-Shifa. At the bottom of a short flight of stairs, there was a short passage of approximately fifteen meters leading to an armoured door with a slit through which to fire weapons, but only from the inside out.

Repeating and defending the IDF’s claims about Al-Shifa is probably one of the most egregious aspects of the book:

If Hamas had a military base beneath Al-Shifa hospital it would lend support to the idea that it’s a legitimate military target and justify the IDFs incursion. Despite his frequent invocation of the New York Times reportage, borrowing their credibility to lend credence to his claims, the evidence of a Hamas command building beneath Al-Shifa Hospital was always flimsy.

After occupying the hospital for a number of days, and being pressured by the international community to justify their act, it has been suggested that the IDF were planting evidence inside the building. According to CNN reporters:

An IDF video on November 15 showed a military spokesperson touring the facility, during which an AK-47 gun is seen behind an MRI machine. Fox News and the BBC were subsequently granted access to the hospital. In their reports filmed after the IDF clip, two AK-47 guns are visible in the same location. It is unclear where the second assault rifle came from. [1]

Planting the guns behind an MRI machine was a clumsy move. It's implausible as MRI machines use high-powered magnets to generate medical imagery. Metal objects are strictly prohibited around MRI equipment.

The video that we do have access to, after a vertical tunnel was found while IDF bulldozers were breaking down walls in one part of the hospital complex, shows: 

Throwing doubt on the veracity of the clip, one analyst has suggested that “the video is actually clips of two different tunnels spliced together.” [2]

By its own admission, while occupying Al-Shifa, the IDF killed 90, interrogated 300 and arrested 160 persons, including top hospital medical staff. [3]

Of those killed, it has been reported that many were extrajudicial executions of unarmed persons [4]

This transformed Al-Shifa into the site of one of Gaza’s largest mass graves after their departure: 

 

Photos of Al-Shifa show the aftermath of the siege with extensive damage to the building facade, with the majority of its medical equipment burnt and destroyed and internal walls blown up, rendering what was once the largest and most important referral hospital in Gaza unusable.

By uncritically repeating claims about tunnels beneath Al-Shifa hospital, Friedländer has helped legitimise and defend these repugnant acts by the IDF. 

On Fuel Deliveries:

The New York Times writes that Hamas has stockpiled enormous quantities of fuel and provisions in anticipation of a protracted war, even as the population in Gaza lacks the essentials. The organisation’s constant demands for fuel was just camouflage: it seems to have all it needs for a long war stored along hundreds of miles of tunnels.

Here Friedlander is essentially solidarizing himself with the Israeli extreme right who campaigned against fuel deliveries to the enclave to stave off a humanitarian catastrophe during the war, allying himself with those who use the slogan: “Fuel equals weapons.”

On calls for a Ceasefire:

In his musings,  Friedländer is seemingly for 

…tactical pauses in military operations that would allow more humanitarian aid to get to the population, without necessitating a general ceasefire that would seriously hamper pursuit of Israel’s objectives.

The external challenge has already been mentioned. It is the growing pressure for humanitarian pauses, which may turn into a ceasefire that allows Hamas to regroup and replenish its arsenal.

The trouble is that Israel cannot let Hamas survive with its 1988 charter (revised in 2017) advocating the destruction of the Jewish state, as it will, in one way or another, repeat its murderous attacks.

Again, Friedländer solidarizes himself with the Israeli right-wing forces who have opposed the calls for a general ceasefire and campaigned for shorter pauses in the fighting where they did occur.

Conclusion:

Considering all this, it’s odd to think why Verso Books would have published Friedländer’s unfiltered stream of consciousness writings which contain a barrage of right-wing maxims which fundamentally disagree with its stated aims. To give one example: Verso has taken up the defence of Corbyn as a cause célèbre, against charges of antisemitism which were used to unseat him and install Starmer, while simultaneously publishing accusations of antisemitism inside the British Labour Party. This is the character of a very confused, to put it mildly, support campaign. 

Highlighting his contrarian views, Friedländer notes in his acknowledgements: 

I wish to thank Verso for agreeing to publish the book, notwithstanding our, hopefully small, differences of opinion.

From this, one surmises that the decision to publish the book through the “socialist” press was made purely for commercial considerations.

We can also note that Diary of a Crisis was announced the same month that Verso declared its dire financial position and a threat to its existence after its UK distributor declared bankruptcy with an outstanding debit of £1 million for book sales stretching back to January! [5]

To end, while it’s a legitimate subject to examine the links between the mass protests against Netanyahu Judicial Reforms and October 7,  Friedländer’s book undermines itself. Where the first section of Diary of a Crisis contained a lot of new and interesting information about the character of the mass protests against Netanyahu, the second component on October 7 and after is tainted  by its repeated use of right wing misnomers and doggerels as  Friedländer is unable to recuse himself of his own antipathies.  Friedländer winds up  repeating IDF talking points uncritically – as a trained historian of the Holocaust he does understand how to think critically and interrogate source material – so he should know better.  Why then has  Friedländer written a diary whose post-October 7 portion can be attributed to a political hack?   Friedländer is a lifelong Zionist but has been active in the leftist “Peace Now” movement in Israel.  Yet when faced with what Israelis consider an existential crisis  Friedländer abandons any sense of compassion for the Palestinians and the critical attitude of a good journalist with which the diary began. The result is a diary that contradicts itself - a diary turned upside down. Shame on  Friedländer and shame on Verso. 

---

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/17/middleeast/israel-al-shifa-gaza-what-we-know-intl/index.html

[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/20/what-israels-video-of-hamas-tunnel-under-al-shifa-tells-us

[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/20/israeli-military-says-90-people-killed-in-gazas-al-shifa-hospital-raid

[4] https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/international-community-must-act-immediately-stop-israeli-armys-massacre-palestinians-al-shifa-hospital-enar

[5] https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/comrades-verso-needs-your-support

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From Hobbes to Trotsky

Daniel Lazare

02.19.25

Note from the editor: We are publishing this essay as the start of an ongoing discussion and debate on Marxism and philosophy. Readers can expect a response to this essay shortly.

 

Note to readers: I wrote this for Platypus Review, but withdrew it following Platypus founder Chris Cutrone’s disgraceful embrace of Trump’s aggression toward Canada and Greenland.  See “Cheering on Trump,” Jan. 13.

 

There’s a rumor going around that the great English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was a conservative.  The Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt thought so,[1] the left-liberal writer Corey Robin does so as well,[2] while a Maoist website informs us that “Hobbes’ political philosophy’s emphasis on an absolute sovereign is unacceptable for modern socialists.”[3]  By the same token, Hobbes’s verdict on life in nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” is traditionally taken as an expression of anti-social pessimism and misanthropy – yet more evidence, supposedly, of Hobbes’s conservative leanings.

Hobbes at 89 portrait by John Michael Wright

But it ain’t necessarily so.  The reason, simply, is that there is a direct line from the supposedly reactionary Hobbes to the most radical democratic movements of the eighteenth century and after.  When Declaration of the Rights of Man stated in 1789 that “[t]he fundamental source of all sovereignty resides in the nation,” it was hard not to hear an echo of Hobbes’s argument concerning the necessity of establishing a monopoly of power.  Although there is no evidence that Lincoln read Hobbes, his “House Divided” speech in 1858 not only employed one of the philosopher’s favorite biblical maxims,[4] but replicated his views on the indivisibility of the sovereign state.  The same goes for Martin Luther King’s statement in Letter From Birmingham Jail: “Any law that uplifts human personality is just.  Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

 

As students of Hobbes will immediately notice, this is a reiteration of the Hobbesian principle that sovereignty’s sole concern is its own self-aggrandizement and hence that any law that enhances human sovereignty is good and that anything that detracts from it is bad.  Whether sovereignty expresses itself in moral or political terms, whether it concerns itself with human personality or raw political power, its driving need is for more, i.e. more domination, more development, more control.

 

Then there is Trotsky, who declared in his 1920 polemic Terrorism and Communism:

 

...the road to Socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the State.  And you and I are just passing through that period.  Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the State, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the most ruthless form of State, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction.[5]

 

While there’s no evidence that Trotsky read Hobbes either, this can’t help but call to mind his role as a pioneering theoretician of the modern state.  As for the idea that Hobbes’s concept of absolute sovereignty is somehow at odds with socialist self-governance, Maoists, as usual, have it backwards.  Not only does Hobbesian absolutism accord with socialism, it lies at its very core.

 

To be sure, it’s easy to see why people would get Hobbes wrong since he was an arch-autocrat whose ideas were extreme even by seventeenth-century standards.  He conceived of sovereignty not just as power or even supreme power, but as the sole power from which all others derive.  Not only would Hobbes have regarded Louis XIV’s statement, “L’État c’est moi,” as unobjectionable – he was a fan of the Sun King[6] – he might well have added, “L’État c’est tout” – the state is all.  A sovereign according to Hobbes does not share power with lesser authorities.  He or she does not agree to behave within set limits.  To the contrary, his authority is permanent and unconstrained – “supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled,” in the words of the eighteenth-century legal commentator Sir William Blackstone.  It is so complete and self-contained as to recognize no authority other than its own. 

All of which Hobbes set forth in his master work, Leviathan, published while in exile from Cromwellian England in 1651.  In it, we learn:

• That no one can interpret the law other than the sovereign.
• That individual freedom extends only so far as to what “the sovereign has permitted.”
• That sovereignty is incapable of doing wrong because “nothing the sovereign representative can do to a subject, on what pretense soever, can properly be called an injustice or injury.”
• That the sovereign is above the law because “to be subject to laws is to be subject to the commonwealth – that is, to the sovereign representative – that is, to himself, which is not subjection but freedom from the laws.”  

 While granting the sovereign total control over what people may say or publish, Leviathan – named, by the way for a biblical sea monster in the Book of Job – falls short of modern totalitarianism by specifying that only public behavior is worthy of concern and that whatever one does in private is no one’s business other than one’s own.  So there’s no danger of the KGB breaking down the door in search of private notebooks.  But it otherwise comes close.  According to Hobbes, the individual has no freedom since freedom is solely a sovereign attribute.  The sovereign commands while everyone else obeys.

 

Orwellian?  Perhaps.  But why did he take his arguments to such shocking lengths, what made him think that readers would find them persuasive, and what on earth does Hobbesian ultra-authoritarianism have to do with socialist democracy?

 

The answer to the first is easy: civil war, i.e. the Wars of Religion that ravaged France from 1562 to 1598, the Thirty Years’ War that destroyed much of Germany in 1618-48, and the English Civil War that began in 1642 and was still ongoing.  The consequences were catastrophic.  France was still recovering from the chaos by the time Hobbes wrote Leviathan, Germany had lost a third or more of its population, while fighting was engulfing the three realms of England, Scotland, and Ireland.  Supposedly, Hobbes’s mother was so frightened by the approach of the Spanish Armada, which would have subjected English Protestants to a Catholic reign of terror, that she prematurely went into labor.  As Hobbes recalled, “my mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear.”

 

But no less important than war was the secular response, which is to say a new generation of French politiques who sought to transcend the Protestant-Catholic divide; the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which sought a pragmatic and secular solution to the Thirty Years’ War, and Leviathan itself.  Although it was a politique named Jean Bodin (1530-96) who invented the modern theory of sovereignty, it was Hobbes who would put it on a far more rigorous footing.

 

His inspiration was Euclid.  While traveling as a tutor to a wealthy English family, the Oxford graduate found himself in a private library in Geneva in which a text by the Greek mathematician lay open to the Pythagorean theorem, which holds that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.  Thunderstruck at how an ancient thinker could use a handful of axioms to prove something so complicated, he resolved to put politics on an equally solid footing. 

 

His starting postulate was not only the horrors of civil war but its necessary concomitant, the absence of authority capable of reining it in.  “Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice,” Leviathan would declare.  “Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.”  Labor, investment, and profit were all inhibited.  As a consequence:

 

In such condition there is no place for industry because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and, which is worst of all, a continual fear and danger of violent death.[7]

 

Hence his conclusion about life in such circumstances being solitary and poor – not, contrary to popular opinion, because human beings are innately vicious, but because an absence of law leaves even the mildest among them no choice but to resort to violence in order to defend oneself, one’s family, and one’s possessions.  The problem, as Hobbes put it, is not that “man hopes for a more intensive delight than he has already attained to, or that he cannot be content with a moderate power,” but, rather, that “he cannot assure the power and means to live well which he has present without the acquisition of more.”  Do unto others before they do unto you – such is the rule amid a war of “every man against every man.”[8]  Hobbes’s thesis is that the more supreme power stamped out such anarchy, the better off society would be.

 

All of which may seem logical enough.  But given Hobbes’s assumption that royal absolutism was best suited to the exercise of such power, it fairly begs the question of how he can be classified as anything other than a conservative, especially since the mid-1600s saw the first stirrings of modern democracy on the part of the Levelers, the Puritans in far-off New England, and other such forces.  How can one squeeze a square peg like Hobbes into the round hole of democracy at all?

 

The answer has to do with certain loose threads that Hobbes was never able to tie up.  While Leviathan assumes that monarchy is best, it allows that an aristocratic or democratic assembly could exercise sovereignty as well.  Hobbes never explored how such alternatives would work or what effect they would have on the concept itself.  But the fact that he allowed for the possibility suggests that he didn’t intend for the concept to be limited to any specific political form.

 

More important was his concept of social contract.  This is what he saw as the grand bargain that would allow society to elect a sovereign guaranteeing the life and safety of all.  While this, too, was less than fully worked out, the implications were paradoxical: the awesome tyranny that sovereignty represents is not merely something that people would submit to, but something they would democratically create.  Where we tend to think of autocracy as yielding to democracy, Hobbes saw it as the other way around, which is to say democracy yielding to autocracy.  As James Harrington, the author of the Cromwellian classic, The Commonwealth of Oceana, summed it up: “Mr. Hobbes holdeth democracy to be of all governments the first in modern order of time.”[9]

 

For royalists, this was a case of sneaking democracy in through the back door.  Even worse was his assertion that not only was society’s task to place a sovereign on the throne, but to continuously monitor whether he was still up to the task.  As Leviathan puts it: “The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long and no longer than the power lasts by which he is able to protect them.”[10]  Conservatives were aghast.  “The argument that there was a reciprocal relationship between a government’s protection and a subject’s obedience was ... distinctive and scandalous,” one historian notes.[11]  Although Charles II was personally fond of Hobbes, he came under pressure from hardliners to let it be known that his old math tutor was no longer welcome in his Parisian court.  Since this deprived Hobbes of protection against French Catholics who detested him even more, his only choice was to return to England and swear loyalty to the republican government he had previously opposed.

 

Hobbes was the kind of thinker who makes everyone uncomfortable, one with a foot in both autocratic and democratic camps, or perhaps in neither.  Although Charles II welcomed Hobbes back into his good graces following restoration in 1660, Anglican churchmen continued to snipe at him for his reputed atheism while John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, published a decade after Hobbes’s death in 1679, was, with its theory of limited government, virtually an anti-Hobbesian polemic from start to finish.  A new generation of radicals viewed him “as an apologist for tyranny, calumniator of republican assemblies, champion of censorship, and a thinker who had drawn an excessively pessimistic picture of natural humanity,” to quote the intellectual historian Jonathan Israel.[12]  His fate seemed clear.  However interesting and provocative his ideas, he would pay a growing price for being increasingly out of step with the times.

 

But a funny thing happened on the way to intellectual eclipse: the loose threads in Hobbesian ideology came together in a new and unexpected way as democracy emerged in more militant form.  Rousseau was fiercely hostile, describing Hobbes’s concept of sovereignty as a means of extracting slavery from liberty.  But Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès was a straight-out Hobbesian of the most unabashed sort.  Sieyès, a free-thinking clergyman, was a key figure since his 1789 pamphlet “What Is the Third Estate,” virtually invented the modern bourgeois-democratic state.  Indeed, entire passages read as if they were lifted straight out of Leviathan, except that it was now the people or the nation – terms that Sieyès viewed as synonymous – that were sovereign rather than a king.

 

“The nation is prior to everything,” the pamphlet declares.  “It is the source of everything.  Its will is always legal; indeed, it is the law itself.”  It continues:

 

The power exercised by the government has substance only in so far as it is constitutional; it is legal only in so far as it is based on the prescribed laws.  The national will, on the contrary, never needs anything but its own existence to be legal.  It is the source of all legality. ...  Let us not be afraid of repeating it: a nation is independent of any procedures; and no matter how it exercises its will, the mere fact of its doing so puts an end to positive law, because it is the source and the supreme master of positive law.

Where Hobbes thought of sovereignty and society as separate and distinct, “What Is the Third Estate” marked the start of a process of convergence that would unite them in one.  Where formerly only the king was free, it was now popular sovereignty that was free to govern the people as it saw fit.

 

This did not make the doctrine any less tyrannical.  If anything, it made it more so.  Formerly, even an autocrat like Louis XIV had struggled to transform France from a patchwork of provincial customs and privileges to something more centralized and uniform.  Yet he failed to the point that, following his death in 1715, France found itself in the grips of a full-blown aristocratic reaction in which provincial privileges were once more on the ascendant.  Yet the new constituent assembly that took power in 1789 abolished such privileges at a stroke by doing away with age-old provinces like Normandy and Brittany and replacing them with uniform départements.  It was rather as if the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia had abolished Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York and replaced them with uniform administrative districts.   The regional law courts known as parlements were strongholds of aristocratic power that had also hampered the crown at every turn.  Yet a few months after sweeping away the provinces, the constituent assembly swept them away too.  Where previously the parlements were a constituent element that shaped the ancien régime, the new super-Hobbesian society reduced such elements to just one: the people.

 

The new Hobbes turned the old Hobbes on his head – or on his feet.  Simultaneously, it tied up the loose threads that Hobbes had left hanging.  Try as one might, it was hard to imagine how showering Louis XIV with ermine and silk might benefit the beleaguered French peasantry.  But now that the people were sovereign, it was clear how they would benefit by the concentration of absolute power in their hands.  As a good Puritan, Hobbes had described God as “sovereign of sovereigns.”[13]  But how could multiple infinite powers rule simultaneously even if they were as far apart as heaven and earth?  As divided as Jacobins were on the religious question, the revolution opened the door to a new concept of “storming the heavens” in which revolutionaries resolved to overthrow divine sovereignty so that human sovereignty might flourish. 

 

The new Hobbes also shed light on what might be described as the “e pluribus unum” problem.  Declared Leviathan:

 

A multitude of men are made one person when they are by one man, or one person, represented; so that it is done with the consent of every one of that multitude in particular.  For it is the unity of the representer, not the unity of the represented, that maketh the person one.

 

A formless aggregate thus transformed itself into a unified entity in the course of creating a sovereign power to rule over it.  Its unity depended on the unity of the sovereign.  For Sieyès, who defined the people as “a unity capable of constitutive action,” many became one by constituting themselves as a sovereign force.  Rather than unity without, they short-circuited the process by creating it within.  Not only were they sovereign over society, but they were sovereign over themselves.

 

Self-constitution, self-transformation, self-sovereignty – all began to stir with the great bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1789.  Then there is socialism.  Obviously, Marxism does not believe in the social contract other than in the most abstract metaphorical sense.  But when the Communist Manifesto declared that “[t]he proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority,” what it was saying, in effect, was that the task before the working class was to remove sovereignty from the bourgeois state and make it its own.  Where the manifesto declared that “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” it implied that the Hobbesian converse was also true, which is that the free development of all is the condition for the free development of each.  If man is to “revolve about himself as his own true sun,” it means that humanity must assert its sovereignty over society, nature, and itself so as to collectively address its own needs and wants.  The state withers away to the degree that human society and sovereignty merge so completely that each disappears as a separate element.  External coercion vanishes the more collective self-discipline is fully internalized.

 

The idea that Hobbes is somehow at odds with socialist self-governance is therefore nonsense.  Communism is human self-sovereignty raised to the highest degree.

 

As for Terrorism and Communism, which Trotsky says he wrote “in the car of a military train ... amid the flames of civil war,”[14] the book is nothing if not controversial since, rather than apologizing for the militarization of labor and other draconian policies, it celebrates them.  As Trotsky put it:

 

...we are making the first attempt in world-history to organize labor in the interests of the laboring majority itself.  This, however, does not exclude the element of compulsion in all its forms, both the most gentle and the extremely severe. The element of State compulsion not only does not disappear from the historical arena, but on the contrary will still play, for a considerable period, an extremely prominent part.

 

To be sure, Trotsky stressed that “[i]f compulsory labor came up against the opposition of the majority of the workers, it would turn out a broken reed, and with it the whole of the Soviet order.”  The militarization of labor therefore had to be “by the will of the workers themselves.”  But militarization is still militarization, so it still raises the question of how a society in which compulsion plays “an extremely prominent part” can lead to one in which it plays no part at all. 

 

As Hobbes might have replied – had he freed himself from Christianity, private property, and all the rest – the establishment of proletarian sovereignty is the first task.  Democracy must lead to the proletarian dictatorship, “the most ruthless form of State,” which in turn must lead to socialism the more class rule is democratized.  But just as the sovereign’s first duty is to its own self-aggrandizement, revolution’s first duty is to its own survival.

 

Like Hegel, Hobbes is an example of a thinker who helped propel bourgeois ideology in the direction of revolutionary democracy and then socialism.  Marx, who did read Hobbes, paid tribute to him and his fellow materialists.  As “[g]eometry is proclaimed the cardinal science,” he wrote in 1845, “...materialism is rationalized, and it develops also the ruthless logicality of reason.”  He went on:

 

It needs no special ingenuity to discover in the doctrines of materialism (concerning the natural goodness and the equal mental endowments of man, the omnipotence of experience, habit, and education, the influence of external circumstances on man, the great importance of manufactures, the legitimacy of enjoyment) the necessary connection with Communism and Socialism.  If man receives from the external world and from his experience in the external world all his feelings, ideas, etc., then it is evidently our business to reorganize the empirical world in such a manner that man should only experience the really humane and acquire the habit of it. ...  If man is formed by circumstances, then we must humanize the circumstances.  If man is social by nature, then man develops his true nature in society only, and we must not measure the power of his nature by the power of a single individual, [but] by the power of society.[15]

 

The royal “we” becomes the proletarian “we” under socialism as workers “humanize the circumstances and empower society.”  Society taking control of itself in order to transform itself – this is the process that Hobbes first glimpsed in 1651.  The task of revolutionary socialism nearly four centuries later is to carry the same process through to completion.

---

[1] In 1938, Schmitt identified his fate with the “lonely philosopher from Malmesbury,” whom he described as “lonely as every pioneer; misunderstood as is everyone whose political thought does not gain acceptance among his own people; unrewarded, as one who opened a gate through which others marched on....”  Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan and the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, trans. G. Schwab and E. Hilfstein (Westport: Greenwood Press. 2004), 86.  See also R. Omur Birler, The Leviathan and the Contours of Conservative Imagination: The Role of Thomas Hobbes in the Works of Schmitt, Strauss and Oakeshott (Ottawa: Carlton Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 2007), 75.

[2] Corey Robin, “The First Counter-revolutionary,” The Nation, Sept. 30, 2009, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/first-counter-revolutionary/.

[3] Carlos L. Garrido, “Thomas Hobbes – The Communist?” Midwestern Marx Institute, July 7, 2021, https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles/thomas-hobbes-the-communist-by-carlos-l-garrido.

[4] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1958), 150.  See also Mark 3:25, Matthew 12:25, and Luke 11:17.

[5] See chapter eight “Problems of the Organization of Labor.”

[6] James J. Hamilton, “Hobbes the Royalist, Hobbes the Republican,” History of Political Thought 30, no. 3 (Autumn 2009), 419.

[7] Hobbes, Leviathan. 107-08.

[8] Ibid., 86, 106.

[9] Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), 226.

[10] Ibid., 179.

[11] Timothy Raylor, “The Anglican Attack on Hobbes in Paris, 1651,” The Historical Journal 53, no. 1 (March 2010), 159.

[12] Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 226.

[13] Hobbes, Leviathan, 266.

[14] L Trotsky, The Defence of Terrorism (London: Routledge, 2014), i.  The quote is from an introduction to a new British edition of Terrorism and Communism that Trotsky wrote in 1935.

[15] The Holy Family (1845), available at  https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/english-materialism.htm.

 

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Disentangling another WSWS web of deception

by the Permanent Revolution Editorial Board 

We beg our readers’ indulgence concerning the lengthy polemical exchange that has erupted between Permanent Revolution and the World Socialist Web Site.  The ICFI (full name: International Committee for the Fourth International), which publishes the WSWS, is well known for both its bulldog tenacity and its loose approach to the facts, not to mention its paranoid worldview.  So it’s hard not to get dragged into the ICFI labyrinth.

 

Gerry Healy, who falsely accused David North of being a "CIA agent".

In the past couple of weeks we have been bombarded with several iterations of increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories in response to the fact that we mistakenly published a letter alleging a security lapse on the part of the ICFI.  When we learned that the information we published was false, we immediately took down the letter and issued an apology.  Ever since, the WSWS has been tossing accusations our way, escalating the level of slander with each iteration, while at the same time hiding some very significant facts from their readers.  

 

It’s worth pointing out that the website’s latest contribution, “Alex Steiner’s tangled web of political deceit,” contains an important admission with regard to Dan Reznik, the ex-ICFI associate who triggered the controversy by accusing the International Committee of a major security lapse concerning Bogdan Syrotiuk, the Trotskyist who is currently on trial on entirely spurious charges of “high treason” to the Ukrainian state.

 

The admission concerns the ICFI accuser’s political identity.  As we noted on Feb. 7 (“Scurrilous libel from the WSWS”), we now believe that Reznik was spreading false tales because he had been left “demoralized like so many others have been over the years after falling foul of the ICFI leadership” and was therefore taking revenge.  Since we know how the ICFI chews such people up and spits them out, we believe  that was the case in this instance as well.  It is still our best understanding of how this incident arose.

 

But now, after nearly two weeks of silence, WSWS has finally come up with its own explanation for Reznik’s behavior.  Rather than someone who was angry and upset, it now seems that he was “an agent-provocateur, who most likely was working on behalf of the Ukrainian state.” 

 

The WSWS elaborates:

 

Reznik is an agent provocateur, adopting and deleting identities in accordance with whatever operation he is engaged in.  In 2022 he wrote to the WSWS, declaring full support for the ICFI and offering to translate articles into Serbo-Croat.  There are many individuals who contact the WSWS and offer assistance for translations.  As is now evident, Reznik,’ aka Daniel Bukvasevic, was attempting to infiltrate the ICFI.  His activities serve as a warning of the need for vigilance against the activities of state agents.  Reznik was unsuccessful.  He was never a member of a section of the International Committee or any party organization.  Reznik never held a personal meeting with a single party member.  His association with the party was limited to occasional online discussions and the exchange of emails.

 

This account is a significant distortion.  As we noted on Feb. 7, Reznik, used the handle “@DanReznikWSWS,” published voluminously on Twitter/X and contributed regularly to the r/Trotskyism Reddit page.  We published a screenshot of his Reddit page in which he identifies himself as a “a member of the International Committee for the Fourth International” and lists more than 1,300 posts.  Yet not only did the ICFI make no attempt to correct what it now says is a misrepresentation, but prominent members regularly “liked” and re-tweeted his posts.  The ICFI gave every impression that he was an active and prominent member of the organization.

 

But now the long-time ICFI internet warrior turns out to be a Ukrainian agent.  The WSWS says it sensed something was amiss when Reznik tweeted in support of a Stalinist assassination of a Croat nationalist writer in 1978.  “The ICFI was attentive to signs of Reznik’s political instability,” its latest article declares.  Therefore, Alex Lantier, a leader of the ICFI’s French section, wrote to Reznik demanding that he take the tweet down.  According to the WSWS, Lantier wrote:

 

This tweet is not Trotskyist.  The Trotskyist perspective for the ‘extinction’ of the nation-state system is a world socialist revolution by the international working class.  It is not for the physical extermination of everyone who, at one or other point in time, supports the nation-state system or his or her nation-state.  Nor do Trotskyists outsource the political struggle against nationalism to the murderers in the Stalinist intelligence services, which were staffed by virulent nationalists.  If you have any question about this, you can read Stalin’s Gangsters by Trotsky.

 

Lantier added that he was “concerned about you tweeting what will be seen as an endorsement of the Stalinist assassination of a literary figure” and for that reason “insisted that Reznik delete his tweet.”

 

But that was in October.  While accusing him of a political blunder, Lantier said nothing about Reznik serving as an agent-provocateur on behalf of the Ukrainian state for the better part of two years.  There is nothing in the WSWS account indicating the slightest suspicion in this regard.

 

The ICFI allowed itself to be duped.  Unlike David North and his collaborators, we are not in the habit of tossing about charges of bourgeois intelligence activities without proper evidence.  But if the WSWS’s suspicions are correct, then, by its own standards, it is guilty of a significant security lapse.  From early 2022 until October 2024, it entered into an active relationship with a hostile agent.  It promoted his internet posts, supported his views, and allowed him to pass himself off as a bona fide member – even though they now say that  he was an enemy agent attempting to penetrate its ranks.

 

To be sure, Reznik misled us as well.  But where we have taken responsibility, the WSWS has not.  Rather than conducting a thorough inquiry into how it supposedly fell victim to a hostile intelligence operation, it has sought to minimize and conceal its role.   This is yet another example of the ICFI school of historical falsification that has made the ICFI a byword for mendacity in international socialist ranks.

 

The WSWS engages in other distortions that, while less serious, are still worthy of attention.

 

Alex Steiner, a member of the Permanent Revolution editorial board, stated in his original article that he emailed David North twice seeking a comment on Reznik’s allegations prior to publication.  On Feb. 4, the WSWS accused Steiner of lying on the grounds that no email was ever sent.  “The WSWS has conducted a search of all its email addresses, as well as those of David North,” it declared.  “No such letter was received.”

 

But now it says Steiner was merely guilty of using an email address that was out of date: “The email address used by North is not located on the WSWS server.  Due to technical problems, North ceased using it well over a year ago.”  So did the website conduct a search of all its email addresses as it originally stated or not?  After two weeks of saying that it did, it now appears that it did not.

 

The latest WSWS article - likely written by David North - further states that Steiner “received what he claims to have been an anonymous communication ... on December 17,” but then goes on to say that it was “not an anonymous communication” because “[i]t bears the name “danielbukvasevic” and the email address danielbukvasevic@proton.me.”  But all Steiner said was that he received an unsolicited letter from someone “who wished to remain anonymous.”  So what is the point?

 

Indeed, a WSWS contact form that North helpfully reproduces in his latest article assures individuals writing to the website that “[w]e will protect your anonymity.”  North seems to be confused about the difference between an anonymous letter and one written by someone wishing to have his or her name withheld.

 

The article goes on to make other bizarre accusations. It would be a fool’s errand to deal with all of them. But to cite one example,  the author of the article – likely David North himself – states that Steiner was lying when saying that he had no previous acquaintance with the author of the letter - that Steiner must have had a long-standing relationship of “familiarity” with the letter-writer because the person addressing Steiner wrote “Dear Alex” in the salutation portion of an email.  Needless to say even a six-year-old can unravel the stupidity of such an inference.

 

Elsewhere North says of Sam Tissot that he “was expelled from the French section of the ICFI last year for refusing to respect the confidentiality of internal party communications.”  But as Tissot made clear on this website last September,   in the official account provided by the ICFI at the time, he was expelled  for “denying the historical continuity of Trotskyism,”. In fact he was actually expelled for doing nothing more than raising questions within the leadership of the French section about policies and practices of the ICFI and asking for a discussion on those issues. So this claim from North is false as well.

 

The WSWS article   concludes with a 630-word disquisition on the “major investigation” that the ICFI has conducted since 1975 concerning,

…the death of its founder Leon Trotsky in 1940, the infiltration of his household by agents of the GPU, and the subsequent infiltration of the Trotskyist movement and in particular the American Socialist Workers Party, by agents of imperialism.

 

The investigation has already produced irrefutable evidence of such infiltration,

the article adds. 

 

Bravo! 

 

But then how come they could not discover that someone who was publicly representing them for over two years was in fact, according to them, “an agent-provocateur, who most likely was working on behalf of the Ukrainian state”?

And why did they hide this information for more than two weeks after we made public the identity of Dan Reznik? 

And why do they even now try to whitewash his past deep involvement with the ICFI?

 

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