Reflections from Damaged Life - Writing My Free Time

Adorno has a short essay entitled 'Free Time'.  It is one of the places where the grumpy old mandarin shows that he perhaps has a sense of humour.  He  notes how when the 'giants of the culture industries' are interviewed in the weekly magazines, their interviewers never fail to ask them about their 'hobbies'. 

Adorno is horrified at the idea of a hobby.  He points out that the idea of 'free time' or 'leisure time', is a confection of industries which seek to market our private or even intimate lives.  I like to imagine him being interviewed by a callow journalist, who eventually enquires: 'And so, Herr Doktor Professor Adorno, what do you do with your free time?  Have you any hobbies?'  Teddy recoils from the question, almost  like Lady Bracknell reacting to Ernest Worthing's admission that he'd been born in a handbag.  'Hobbies??????'  And he explains, in exasperation no doubt, that he regards the whole notion of 'free time' and 'hobbies' as an expression of the capitalist reification of domestic and personal life, and that he does what he does with the utmost seriousness.

I am not sure if I always manage to write in my 'free time' quite so seriously on this blog, but I hope that the material I put up on it is of some interest some of the time, and so that it justifies its title.  I am delighted to report that just in the last few minutes the blog has recorded its 30,000th pageview.  Brilliant news!

Onward and upward!

Conor

Resurrecting the Revolution - In the Spirit of Lenin, Trotsky, Kollontai

November 7 brought the centenary of the storming of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg in 1917, when the Bolsheviki decisively seized power in Russia, nine months after the February Revolution and after a long hot summer of Menshevik ambivalence and war-making  and attempted reactionary counter-revolution.  Verso marked the anniversary with a battery of excellent and interesting  material on its website, from a tremendous roster of writers: Alain Badiou, Sheila Rowbotham, Tariq Ali, China Mieville, Slavoj Zizek, Rochelle Ruthchild.  Here it is!

China Miéville on the Russian Revolution

Tariq Ali asks "Why Lenin?"

Lenin: Remembering and Repeating

Women in Russia Before and After the Revolution

Women in Russia Before and After the Revolution (Part II)

Alain Badiou on the Russian Revolution of October 1917

“Weren’t We Women First Out on the Streets?": The Incomplete History of 1917

The Russian Revolution: A Verso Reading List

And four articles from Jacobin -

China Mieville - an excerpt from his October:

The Day That Shook the World

Alexander Rabinowitch on Bolshevik strategy:

How the Bolsheviks Won

Ronald Suny on the revolution in Baku: 

The Baku Commune

And Kevin Murphy on the radicalization of the Petrograd Soviet:

From Compromise to Power

All power to the Soviets!

Conor

That Letter - the Balfour Declaration

On November 2, 1917, Arthur James Balfour, Britain's Foreign Secretary,  wrote the letter below to Baron Rothschild, one of the leaders of the Zionist movement in Britain:



This is the notorious 'Balfour Declaration', which is one of the crucial documents and statements in the history of Palestine, and which represented a very significant victory in the story of Zionism.

Zionism is best understood as an ethnic nationalism, much like the ethno-nationalisms that were taking form in eastern Europe in the middle- to late-nineteenth century at the moment of Zionism's  birth.  Unlike the nationalisms of Russia,  Poland, Germany, Zionism was not in possession of, or  anywhere near, a recognisable  national territory.  One possible location for a 'national territory' was Palestine, home then to a small but ancient Jewish community and long yearned-for in the Judaic tradition.   Palestine at this time was an Ottoman province, but Britain now committed itself to facilitating a 'Jewish national home' in anticipation of the collapse of the Turkish empire.

Zionism, a century ago, and in our own time, has always offered itself as an ally or instrument of imperialisms.  In the era of the Balfour Declaration, Zionists had already sought aid from Tsarist Russia, from France and Britain, and even (paradoxically) from the Ottoman Porte.  In each case, the movement sold itself as useful to those great powers: Zionism would bring its  financial resources to the bankrupt and tottering  Turkish empire,  in return for land purchases in Palestine; it would 'solve' Russia's 'Jewish problem' and its revolutionary instability, by removing or luring away the Jewish radicals who contributed so much to Russian dissent; it would set up a bastion of Western values in the Middle  East, and guard Britain's access to the Suez Canal, and the route to India.  Most recently, of course, Israel has allied itself to the last remaining global power, the United States (especially since the 1967 war), and taken an eager part in America's proxy struggles with the USSR and then its real  struggles with Arab nationalism since.

We can see the future of Zionist exclusivism already in the Declaration - its reference to the  'non-Jewish communities in Palestine' adopts the Zionist terminology of 'non-Jews' to discuss in negative terms all other potential national identities or national communities in the territory.  The seemingly anodyne nature of the reference is also undercut by observing only their 'civil and religious rights'.  No Palestinian Arab political sovereignty is even imaginable, let alone desirable, in this vision.  The discourse of what Baruch Kimmerling called 'politicide' is already in place.  Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

Here are some essays on the Declaration and its centenary, taken first from Jacobin - Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Middle East Studies at Columbia:

After Balfour

Now from Mondoweiss: Jonathan Cook

Balfour Declaration: Britain broke its feeble promise to the Palestinians

And Irishman David Cronin at ElectronicIntifada: 

The racist worldview of Arthur Balfour

Conor