The dragon and the bear

First of all, (sort of) belated blessings for Spring Festival this year, and a Happy Year of the Dragon! It’s the middle of Golden Week, so I’m still in the window!

恭喜发财！幸福安康！万事如意！身体健康！龙马精神，财运亨通！

According to the Yijing, the relevant hexagram seal for this year is qian 谦, or ‘modesty’, composed of an upper trigram kun 坤 (the receptive, field) and a lower trigram gen 艮 (keeping still, mountain).

The judgement associated with this seal is as follows:

MODESTY creates success.
The superior man carries things through.

And the associated image for his seal is that of a subterranean mountain.

Within the earth, a mountain:
The image of MODESTY.
Thus the superior man reduces that which is too much,
And augments that which is too little.
He weighs things and makes them equal.

This image in fact reminds me of something that Fr Thomas Hopko of blessed memory once wrote on the subject. Modesty (that is to say, humility) is not a matter of self-abasement in his view:

Humility does not mean degradation or remorse. It does not mean effecting some sort of demeaning external behaviour. It does not mean considering oneself the most vile and loathsome of creatures. Christ Himself was humble and He did not do this… Genuine humility means to see reality as it actually is in God. It means to know oneself and others as known by God… The humble lay aside all vanity and conceit in the service of the least of God’s creatures, and to consider no good act as beneath one’s dignity and honour.

In order to ‘reduce that which is too much’, we have to have a certain standard as to what ‘too much’ is; and we can’t do that without looking outside of ourselves for the standard. The same goes with ‘augmenting that which is too little’, ‘weighing things’ and ‘making them equal’. The standards are not to be found in us, but to realise that requires that we understand reality by a different measure than our own fallible perspective. Faith may move mountains, even if it is as small as a mustard seed which is buried in the earth. But to understand this parable, we can’t be reading it with the eyes of worldly pride.

~~~

And, by the way, in the interest of rectification of names, it is properly called Spring Festival (春节). That is even though this festival does mark the New Year on the agrarian calendar, and even though it technically falls during winter. Traditionally, farmers used Spring Festival as a yearly marker to prepare for the necessary work that needed to be done by the vernal equinox—hence the name.

Despite the woke usage nowadays, Spring Festival is not, properly speaking, a ‘Lunar’ New Year, because the traditional agrarian calendar is in fact a lunisolar calendar, with intercalations to make up for discrepancies with the solar year, and not a true lunar calendar. And thank goodness for that, because if it were a true lunar calendar, Spring Festival would jump around as much as Ramadan does. But I don’t see anyone lining up to call Spring Festival the ‘Lunisolar New Year’.

And… wait, where and when was the traditional agrarian calendar developed again? It wasn’t developed in Seoul. It wasn’t developed in Tôkyô. And it sure wasn’t developed in Manila (where agricultural work is based on the tropical ‘dry’ and ‘rainy’ seasons with no need for a lunisolar marker for the coming of spring). It was developed along the Yellow River in the Central Plains of China. The agrarian calendar is traditionally accredited to the Yellow Emperor in about 2700 BC, with reforms to it being made during the Shang (1600 BC – 1046 BC) and Zhou (1046 BC – 256 BC) Dynasties. The New Year on this calendar was first celebrated in the Central States: what is now China.

So, for English-speaking people to call it ‘Chinese New Year’ is, even if not exactingly correct as a translation, still completely understandable. Further: it’s asinine for the perpetually-aggrieved wokesters, Redditors and bourgeois Korean and Japanese nationalists to try to ‘correct’ them prescriptively, to the even more incorrect ‘Lunar New Year’.

~~~

Two days before Spring Festival, also, media personality and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson held an interview with the President of Russia, released on the Social Media Platform Formerly Known as Twitter. It’s a two-hour-long interview, but I highly encourage watching it.

What somewhat surprised me about it, actually, was how unsurprising Putin’s historiographical position was. There was nothing at all idiosyncratic, revisionist or even overtly nationalist in Putin’s reading of medieval and early modern Russian history. If anything, it was a standard textbook treatment of the subject which held to consensus positions on the creation of the Rus’ polity under Ryurik, the baptism of Kievan Rus’, the Tatar yoke, the geopolitical struggle between Muscovy and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Treaty of Pereyaslavl and so on. But the fact that he dwelt upon the history of medieval and early modern Rus’ far longer than Carlson was clearly comfortable with, shows that Putin not only takes that history seriously but thinks it is worthwhile for Americans to be exposed, even to an abridged textbook version of it.

It somewhat restored my respect for Putin, as well, that he refused to be baited or led, as Carlson was clearly attempting to do, into acceding to or supporting American conservative culture-war aims or narratives. Most notably: when Carlson attempted to push forward his idea that China would attempt to exert its hegemony over Russia in a more intolerable way than America would, Putin at once dismissed this as a ‘bogeyman story’. He further emphasised that China was Russia’s neighbour with a long land border; that it was a valuable partner in trade; and that its leadership is much more interested in compromise than in confrontation or domination. Putin is not about to sell out his good relationship with such a neighbour for a fistful of empty promises from the West.

To give another example, Putin steadfastly declined to delve into the details of any of his dealings with former (or current) American leadership. At first I found this rhetorical tactic a little frustrating. I was wondering why he was protecting these people, or lending them a cover of plausible deniability. But after a while I came to realise that Putin was simply being a diplomat. Even though he clearly has grievances with the way Russia has been treated by America and by the West more broadly, even under Yeltsin’s tenure, he isn’t in the business of singling out particular American political figures for particular instances of blame. For similar reasons, he also didn’t give in to Tucker’s questions about the current state of the American social fabric and its relations with the government… though there it might really be a weak point in his knowledge rather than a gentlemanly attempt not to take sides.

But Putin also, to his credit, refused to offer support even implicitly, for the idea that a change in administration alone could bring about a thaw in relations with Russia. Carlson was clearly leading him with his questions toward an admission that Trump would be preferable to Biden for Russia. But for Putin, it clearly isn’t a question of a Republican or a Democrat in the White House. (I made exactly this point eight years ago also; I’m glad it still holds up!) Putin observes that the American élite mentality which prevails in both parties, and which attempts to destroy anything that it can’t control, needs to shift first.

So, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but a major tip of the hat to Tucker Carlson for holding this interview. It needs to be seen; Carlson has provided a valuable service to the American people to be able to hear the arguments of the other side for themselves. As for Carlson himself, though, as an interviewer… he seemed to be rather out of his depth, and one could get the impression at a couple of points that Putin was playing with him, even trolling him a bit (as when he hinted at Carlson’s unsuccessful attempt to join the CIA).

I hope that (in the spirit of the Yijing for this New Year), we can approach this interview with the Russian President in a spirit of humility, in the interest of correcting our deficiencies or exaggerations in vision, and making things equal.

Good general wisdom from VK

A Belarusian woman, Marishka B—, whose account I follow on VK posted the above two images to her public feed. I thought they made some very profound points in general, not just with relation to this war, so I’m resharing them here on my blog with a quick-and-dirty translation.

1. Any war will end.


2. Every nation is made up of different people. Not everyone participates in war. Don’t insult everyone in one group.


3. The politicians will end up agreeing. And you? You’ll be left with the mud you fling at your ‘ideological opponents’.


4. In wartime, EVERYONE lies. Don’t spread info that you're not 101% sure (or can’t verify) is true. If you want to write something, write only about what you saw with your own eyes. That’s being honest. The rest is participation in lies.


5. If you want to express your attitude to politics, express it. It’s not necessary to insult someone [while doing so].


6. You don’t like somebody else’s opinion, but you really want to speak out? Then speak out - about the opinion and not about the person. Because most often you don’t know them personally.


7. Hating people you don’t know is pathological.


8. People’s relationships are very complicated, even at the level of a family or a work group. [Relationships] between states are still more difficult. Only to idiots is everything clear and simple to understand. Don’t be an idiot. Don’t jump to conclusions.


9. Always be human and remember point 1.

Some very sound advice from Ms. B—, to always be human no matter what side of an argument you fall on. I won’t pretend I’ve always been (or still am) a model of good online behaviour according to these nine points, but with God’s grace I can try.

Critical race theory: brought to you by the killers of Eric Garner

So-called ‘critical race theory’ is merely a tool in a ruling-class toolbox meant to divide working-class people from each other. If you have doubts about this, consider that it is being promoted (avidly, as seen here, here, here and here) by Bloomberg.

That’s right: the news outlet owned and run by Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York. Avid proponent of stop-and-frisk, who not only supported but expanded the practice. If there was any one person whose policies may be held responsible for the death of Eric Garner at the hands of the NYPD, it’s Michael Bloomberg. And yet he is the one whose news outlet is most active out there in promoting and defending this theory against its Republican attackers, and preaching to Americans about the evils of racial injustice.

But let’s go back and take a look at the context for a clearer picture here. Bloomberg only ever started apologising for ‘Stop and Frisk’ in 2020, just as he was starting his campaign for president. Bloomberg’s run for the presidency was aimed at one thing and one thing only: denying Bernie Sanders the nomination. What’s more: he knew he couldn’t do that without rebranding himself as an anti-racist, and appearing to outflank Bernie Sanders from the left on race issues by pointing to the supposed ‘Bernie Bro’ phenomenon. Michael Bloomberg only began burnishing his non-existent or barely-existent credentials as an anti-racist, only when the Bernie Sanders phenomenon became a threat to be repulsed. That is to say: he began embracing a capitalist mode of ‘anti-racism’ in the form of critical race theory, in order to undermine a movement based on class solidarity.

This should stick in people’s crenshaws, so to speak (although Crenshaw herself did not support Michael Bloomberg, but rather Elizabeth Warren). The fact that a vulgar form of ‘critical race theory’ was already, in the public forum being weaponised against Bernie Sanders, who was protesting for black people’s civil rights back in the 1960s, by the man whose racist policies killed Eric Garner, really takes the biscuit. As it is, ‘if this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction!’

But this is precisely the problem. Critical race theory subsists solely within the superstructure. It is a language developed by academics, for academics – not for the vast majority of non-white folks! – precisely to serve the material interests of academics (guarding tenured positions, carving out intellectual niches, preserving credentialed authority to speak on certain issues, et cetera). The standpoint-epistemology and post-structuralist focus on narrative emphasised by the critical race theorists, in particular, point to a material interest in maintaining small specialised fiefs within academia. This works out nicely for them, clearly.

But when critical race theory is translated to realms outside academia, usually in a vulgarised form, it is quickly leapt on by capitalists as a marketing and public relations strategy to appeal to particular demographics and ward off close scrutiny of corporate practices. Michael Bloomberg has clearly found it useful as a ready weapon to hand against any movement for real œconomic justice that has any broad-based appeal across race, sex and language lines. In addition, it allows grifters and corporate consultants like Robin DiAngelo and Howard Ross to make tidy profits out of selling white guilt to hapless low-level employees of corporations like Raytheon. Raytheon, in turn, makes tidy profits bombing Palestinian children in Gaza, innocent civilians in Syria and busses full of Yemeni schoolchildren on the other side of the globe.

But even if critical race theory stayed inside academia, even if it wasn’t used to railroad candidates genuinely interested in issues of œconomic justice, even if the vulgarised forms of it were not used to whitewash odious corporate actors like Raytheon with a veneer of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’, even if it wasn’t used by the likes of Michael Bloomberg (the man responsible for Erik Garner’s death) to save face – it would still be a terrible organising principle for any movement or community. Why? Because it undermines the basic epistemological premises needed for any such movement or communicate to undertake a common action. The idea of ‘standpoint epistemology’ – that is to say, the idea that one aspect of your oppression gives you a particular gnōsis unavailable to and incomprehensible by those who do not share the experience of that aspect of your oppression – is a non-starter when it comes to building any sort of common good. A true politics of the common good will invariably include people from multiple ‘standpoints’, not all of whom share the same experiences of oppression.

The primary critics of standpoint theory in its modern form were the original critical theorists. The Marxists of the Frankfurt School – Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse – correctly saw this idea as relativistic and atomising, and a turn back to the idealism of the Young Hegelians whom Marx criticised in ‘The German Ideology’. Yet, in a rather bleakly ironic twist, many of the Republican lawmakers and talking-heads who are opposing the teaching of critical race theory – actually vulgarised ideas selected from critical race theory – in schools, insist that critical race theory is a form of Marxism derived from the Frankfurters. Oy vey.

In short, then: don’t be suckered. The fact that Mr Stop-and-Frisk, Michael Bloomberg himself, can use vulgarised concepts from critical race theory to bash ‘Bernie bros’ and railroad a campaign that would genuinely help everybody – including women and people of colour – should give its supporters pause. It should also be a warning sign that the critical race theorists tend to be Jean Jaurès ‘radicals’, who are more concerned with protecting their academic fiefs and maintaining their relevance and marketability within particular niches of academic output and corporate consulting, than they are with matters of substantive justice. It’s a ‘theory’ that appears radical, but it is in fact deeply alienating, and when put into practice its results tend to be deeply regressive.

Batting zero

The Forever War rolls on...

This past election cycle, I made for myself a five-item ‘litmus test’ that I would cast my primary ballot on, as well as decide how to cast my general election ballot. My litmus items were: Medicare for All, $15 an hour, ending the forever war, relaxing visa restrictions on legal immigrants and meaningful criminal justice reform. (As I have said before: even though I am solidly pro-life in my political convictions, that issue has been relegated to a position of electoral irrelevance, largely by the fact that Republicans want to keep it as a culture-war ‘wedge’ and won’t do anything about the issue.)

Even this five-item litmus test was in fact a slightly watered-down and dumbed-down version of the seven-item litmus test that I made early in the primary season in response to the candidates’ answers to survey questions in the press. I pulled a 1944 Russell Kirk and voted for Gloria La Riva on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket, because Biden’s record was against him on all five of the issues that I care about and decided to stake my vote on.

Recent events, and at least two events this past week in particular, have confirmed over and over again my choice to not support the Democratic Party with my vote. We’re back to Bourbon Democracy, in that the Democrats have both forgotten nothing about their failure in 2016, and learned nothing from it. Biden is clearly hankering after a thorough drubbing in the midterms next year, and a devastating loss in 2024 to a Republican candidate who will no doubt make Trump look like a tame kitten in comparison.

Let’s start with Medicare for All – a reform to our healthcare system which we desperately need, and some version of which all other industrialised countries and even conservative monarchies have… and which Biden said he would veto if it crossed his desk. Biden’s healthcare plan was literally written by the insurance companies. And not only does it fall short of Medicare for All, but it doesn’t even provide for a public option, which was the compromise position for the Democratic candidates back in 2008 when Obama was running for president! Joe Biden is facing down a massive crisis in the American healthcare system and doing nothing to fix it. He’s not even slapping a plaster on a massive hæmorrhage.

Now let’s go to the issue of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Biden has privately told governors he is not going to fight for it, despite this having been his one single campaign promise that I liked, and which could have swayed me to vote for him if I thought he was sincere about it. Clearly he wasn’t. His politics around wage increases are clearly a cynical ploy to attract working-class voters into his electoral base before abandoning them. Biden having won the election, he could very easily put pressure onto Democratic senators like Joe Manchin with vulnerable seats, and twist their arms to get them to support a $15 per hour mandate in the relief bill. But that promise was all hot air. He isn’t going to do it, for the same reasons that Obama didn’t push for a public option in the Affordable Care Act. His interests are with the donor class, and the donor class simply doesn’t want to pay their workers more.

Asking for meaningful criminal justice reform or meaningful policing reform from the key Democratic sponsor in the Senate of the infamous 1994 crime bill should probably have been seen as trying to squeeze blood from a stone. And the recent attempts by centrist Democrats to continue qualified immunity for police officers accused of wrongdoing, in the name of quixotically-elusive ‘bipartisanship’ and ‘political compromise’, along with Biden’s administrative attempt this past week to refund the brutal COPS initiative of the Clinton-era Department of Justice (which placed resource officers in public schools, for example), do not offer a great deal of hope that he’s likely to advance this cause either.

Visa reform? Rights for legal immigrants and asylum seekers? I had little enough hope for that on the campaign trail, when Biden decided to blow up at immigrant-rights advocate Carlos Rojas and told him to vote for Trump. This past week saw Biden open new detention facilities, and reopen an infamous Texas tent camp to continue processing deportations and family separations. Biden is not only straight-up continuing all of Trump’s most hideous abuses of legal asylum seekers, he actually appears to be expanding them.

And then there is the forever war, of which Biden has long been a supporter, and now appears to be continuing with all the incontinence and callous disregard for human life we ought to have expected from him from the start. Biden has just bombed Syria. Again. Just like Trump did and just like Obama did. The people of Syria and especially the long-suffering Orthodox Christians of that country have suffered more than their fair share and certainly more than they ever deserved at the hands of the American government and its hideous head-lopping takfiri-jihâdist proxies. Backed up by the war propaganda and manufactured consent from inane mouthpieces of the CIA like 60 Minutes, the Biden Administration seems as hellbent on continuing this revolting, heinous, profligate, destructive war on sæcular and Christian Arabs, Assyrians and Armenians in the Middle East. Biden also seems to be continuing in Trump’s determination to harass, beleaguer and starve the people of countries like Venezuela and Haiti. And still he continues to ramp up a strategically-insane new cold war with both China and Russia.

(It goes without saying that on life issues, Biden stands foursquare against his own church, and with the most radically-libertine elements within his own party that seek to trample down all legal humane considerations for unborn and even recently-born children. Again, though, this issue is so politically-polarised as a culture-war wedge that it is impossible to expect anything productive in policy to result from voting one way or another on it. Republicans continue to fund Planned Parenthood, for example.)

Biden is currently batting zero in terms of his actions in the fields of policy that I pinned my vote to this time around. That isn’t to say, by the way, that he isn’t undoing some of the damage to American infrastructure and the mechanisms of government that Trump did. But those gains are as ephemeral as the executive orders and signing statements that enacted them, and they can be blown away with the next shift of the electoral weathervane. But on the issues that can sway significant portions of the middle America that has remained so alienated in politics in the past two election cycles, Biden is either doing nothing or worse than nothing. I take no pleasure in saying this, since many of the options that are looming on the horizon when democratic legitimacy collapses in this country are far more horrifying than the banality of Biden’s evil, but these things needed to change long ago if we are to have any hope of recovery as a nation.

The class politics of Eastern Catholicism, part 3: nobles, burghers, peasants and Brest-Litovsk

Carpathian Ruthenian oprishki, ca. 1500

Continued from Part 1 and Part 2.

Now, before I go and fire this blog-post off into the rushes, let me set some goals for myself here first. A lot of the historical analysis I’m going to lay out here, is going to share considerable overlap with my piece from 2017, ‘Mountain bandits, hedge-priests and the Unia’, for understandable reasons. The first goal I’m going to set is to not offer a warmed-over rewrite of that article, exploring the different class positions of Eastern Catholics versus Orthodox in the Ruthenian [or Rusin] territories. I’m hoping to focus a bit more here on the class alignments and shifts among both the Catholic clergy in Poland and the Orthodox clergy in Russia in order to broaden the scope of this discourse. That ties into my second goal: to attempt to contextualise these ecclesiological and religious-ideological disputes within the structure of world-systems theory. Again, this is in keeping with my attempt to introduce a grain of Fr Sergei Bulgakov’s quasi-materialist scepticism of ‘pious’ forms of hegemony and dominance, both contemporary and historical, into my historical thinking.

So the first necessary task, when examining this next phase of Uniatism, is to examine the relative positions, historical relations and class structures of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth under the Jagellonians, and their eastward neighbour, the Russian Tsardom, around the turn of the seventeenth century. To do this, we need to examine the relations of both to the evolving structure of the world-system of trade. That means taking into account the œconomic and political developments of their neighbours as well, and the shifting centre of the world-systemic core and peripheries.

When we left off in Florence in the middle of the fifteenth century, the first ‘seeds’ of proto-capitalist innovation were being sown in the northern Italian city-states, with bankers like the de’ Medici family taking a prominent rôle, in their political presence outwardly as ‘enlightened’ republicans but in practice more as oligarchs. It would be a mistake to assume, as many idealistic Whig historians do, that the ‘new sciences’ and ‘new arts’ which were assiduously promulgated in Renaissance grew out of any philosophically-driven ‘humane’ interest in the subject of man. They grew just as much out of a material need to justify the predatory practices and power-plays of these bankers, who succeeded largely by flying in the face of centuries of the Church’s moral teachings against usury. The two are, however, intimately connected. It can often be difficult to untangle, in history, where the idea precedes the material drive, and the material drive the idea, because the two reinforce each other – whether Hegel is right in a given instance, or Marx.

However, what becomes clear is that the most enthusiastic disciples of these Italian-developed ‘new sciences’ in the fields of œconomics and governance, by the middle of the sixteenth century, were the governments of England under Elizabeth I, Spain under Philip II and Charles IX and Henry III in France (themselves de’ Medicis on their mother’s side). The œconomic doctrines of mercantilism, as practised by these three powers, were the next stage in the Commercial Revolution that had begun with the Italian merchant-princes and bankers in the Big Four over four centuries previously. This new doctrine of the Commercial Revolution, the art of enriching the state, meant a scramble for new forms of œconomic exploitation and political consolidation.

But by the end of the century, England, Spain and France had to contend with the disputes of an older established thalassocratic colonial empire – that of Portugal – against a newer, leaner, meaner and more vicious one in the newly-established Dutch Republic. By the time that the treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed in 1596, the Republic was already in its twenty-eighth year of open revolt, during all of which time it was financing its revolt against the Habsburgs with income derived from a rapidly-expanding network of colonies and mercantile ventures, which of course included chattel slavery in kidnapped Africans (a market which had been dominated by the Portuguese for the past century). These five powers, between them, had not only begun emulating the city-states of Italy in their policy doctrines – they had also begun to not so much gently pull as yark the core of the world-system from the Eastern Mediterranean, past Italy, to the Western part. The Catholic Church, even as it began to deal with the fallout from the Reformation, had to shift its attention from the East to the West as these centres of political and œconomic power began to shift – away from fallen Constantinople (now Istanbul), and towards Paris, London and Amsterdam.

Eastern Europe began to notice this as well. The creation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which had a small but notable bourgeois class centred on Lublin and Krakow, deliberately modelled itself on both the Roman Republic and the Venetian one. The unique political system of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was an experiment in aristocratic liberty and ‘noble republicanism’ – albeit one which came at a hefty price for those below the landed gentry. The Polish state, along with the parts of the Holy Roman Empire which would come to constitute Germany, represented what one might consider a semi-periphery of the new world system. Poland-Lithuania did have an œconomy based on agricultural extraction and export – predicated on brutal exploitation of the peasantry – and a market structure which was thus partially integrated into the Western core. In this – and in its reliance on a democracy of planter-aristocrats – it somewhat resembled the export-oriented agricultural and extraction-based œconomies of the rural colonies of the American South.

The differences between the semi-peripheral Polish and Russian œconomies at this stage in capitalism’s development are subtle, but for our purposes important. The Russian class structure was always such that the military ruling class – the knyaz or the tsar plus his boyary – was never truly autochthonous; as a result, the laws governing the native Slavic peasantry suffered from a good deal of vagueness, and the ability of the nobility to exploit them was thereby limited. One can see this from the often ill-defined distinctions in early Russian law between holopy, zakupy, izhoi and so on; there was always, however, a free peasantry which could fend for itself, and had limited tax obligations to the lords. At first, the Polish class system was similar to this. However, the rise of a new bourgeois legal class in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries meant rapid erosion of the rights of the Polish peasantry. Polish historian Edward Corwin points to the Piotrków Statutes as the beginning of the entrenchment of serfdom in Poland, stripping peasants of their rights to ownership of land and their right to move, and levying punishing corvée and tax requirements on them. Notably, these statutes also removed tariffs and guaranteed free trade between Poland and merchants from the Netherlands and the Hanseatic League. These things are not unrelated.

Intriguingly, despite the Game of Thrones-style violence and cruelty of tenuously-independent Moldavia at this time, the obligations on the Moldavian peasantry were remarkably lighter and less exploitative by comparison to Poland-Lithuania: a tenth of the crop, corvée of twelve days a year, and most importantly legal freedom of movement. This relatively light and unoppressive legal environment for the rural working class would continue in Moldavia for the rest of its independent period. As a result, a significant number of Ruthenian peasants under Polish-Lithuanian rule voted with their feet and ran away into Moldavia. A similar pattern held on the border between Poland-Lithuania and Russia, with many Polish peasants fleeing into Russia, not because Russian masters were necessarily any kinder, but because they had less legal ability to extract labour and produce from them. (This would change for the worse under Peter and Catherine.) Another tactic of the Ruthenian peasants was to band together and rise up extralegally against this tightening legal régime, forming bands of oprishki, or mountain bandits.

Hora de la Aninoasa, by Theodor Aman. Oil on canvas, 19th c.

It is directly against this backdrop – colonial expansion among the Western European powers; growth of mercantilism; inroads of trade in the semi-periphery; the rise of a local bourgeoisie; the tightening of the screws on the peasants; the rise of social banditry – that the Union of Brest-Litovsk needs to be understood. Historian Andrei Nikolaevich Mouravieff, in his History of the Russian Church, writes of ‘the oppressions of the [Polish] nobles’ under Sigismund, who ‘violently appropriated to themselves the property’ of the Orthodox peasantry and black-robed clerics in the Carpathians – causing Metropolitan Onisifor to bring a complaint against the king himself. Considering this Metropolitan’s general timidity and… um, highly questionable sex life – this event is all the more striking, and it hints at the dire œconomic straits and general powerlessness of Orthodox parishes under the ‘tolerant’ Commonwealth government.

The growth of overtures toward Unia in Ruthenia during the latter half of the sixteenth century was largely the pet project of the Jesuit diplomat and polemicist (of northern Italian mercantile extraction) Antonio Possevino, who at first attempted to bring Ivan Groznyi and his realm into the Catholic Church on the terms of the Florentine Union (and to secure special privileges for Venetian merchants in Russia in the process), but was thwarted in both by the efforts of Tsar Ivan himself. Mouravieff, though his style is itself fairly polemical when he speaks of Possevino’s ‘zealous exhortations and wily policy’, is nonetheless convincing It is directly tied to a cohort of highly-educated, merchant-class seminarians in Lublin and Krakow: Piotr Skarga and Benedykt Herbest most notably. These missions took as their outward motivation the notable laxity of church discipline and personal morals among the Orthodox bishops: the Catholic Encyclopædia states that ‘the Ruthenian clergy were steeped in immorality and ignorance; the bishops made no scruple of setting their flocks an evil example, living in open concubinage, and practising the most brazen simony’. If this is overstating the case, then it is not by much. However, the Jesuit missions were more directly tied to the desire on the part of the nobility to more effectively expropriate and exploit the Ruthenian peasantry, as well as to secure the semi-periphery for a world-system that was shifting its centre to the commercial and financial cities of Western Europe. If the Jesuits could not secure Russia for Western Europe’s commercial interests, then they would do the next best thing and use their influence to freeze Russia (and the northern Tea Road) out of Europe.

Possevino, Skarga and Herbest did indeed contact the bishops Cyryl Terlecki and Hipacy Pociej in their effort to secure a Church union. Both of these bishops were from noble backgrounds and had firmer connexions with the Commonwealth state than the other bishops. They managed to procure the signatures for a union with Rome from the other bishops largely by suasion, though they were not above subterfuge, fraud and even force as it suited them when it came to procuring agreement: Mouravieff makes mention of Cyryl Terlecki ordering a monk to be beaten and robbed on the road in order to intercept a letter from Michal Rahoza to Patriarch Jeremias II of Constantinople. In any event, Terlecki and Pociej managed to convoke a local council in Brest where a union with Rome was signed. The pro-Union church and the Œcumenical Patriarchate promptly excommunicated each other. In the twenty years of the ascendancy of the Union of Brest, Pociej in particular sought to subject the churches under the Unia to the teaching authority of upper middle-class seminarians coming out of Lublin and Krakow.

Mouravieff is not the best source when it comes to class analysis. His is a ‘Great Men’ history; his narrative is largely oriented – as one can probably tell from what I have excerpted and paraphrased above – to the clash of personalities, of stratagems in high courts, generals’ tents and bishops’ chambers. But even so, hints of what this history looked like from the ‘bottom up’ peek through. He speaks of the ‘persecutions’ of Orthodox in the Commonwealth and how they were ‘deprived of their civil rights’ in general terms. He describes how the Orthodox clerics and laity in the Commonwealth ‘solemnly assembled in a private house, because they could not obtain the use of a Church’. As seen above, he occasionally speaks of expropriation and subjugation of the peasantry. He speaks of how Orthodox schoolmasters – generally of peasant, not merchant, backgrounds – had to depend on the selective and altogether inadequate patronage and protection of Orthodox nobles. More directly, though, he speaks of the expropriation and privatisation of Orthodox monastery lands at Hipacy Pociej’s orders, something one normally associates with the abuses of the Protestantising Henry VIII. He also makes passing reference to the more violent resistance of the oprishki and the Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Unia. Though this is not his focus, what emerges from Mouravieff’s narrative is a clear distinction of class interest between the Unia and the Orthodox Church in the Commonwealth’s Ruthenian territories.

Asymmetrical warfare in the Carpathian Mountains

Jesuit historians like the late Robert Taft ludicrously insist, in a theatrical form of handwashing worthy of Pilate, that the impetus for ‘uniatism’ came largely from the Ruthenian bishops themselves, when the sources that he himself cites in fact claim otherwise (including Possevino’s own writings). Taft then follows this up with what should be recognised as a breathtakingly-fallacious tu quoque: apparently the uses of force against Catholics by Tsars and Soviet premiers, and the existence of the twee boutique phenomenon of ‘Western Rite Orthodoxy’, are somehow enough to balance the scales of historical wrong. So far from offering a ‘healing of memory’, it seems that Taft’s contribution to this dialogue was merely to offer another list of recriminations without any meaningful overarching analysis.

In recognition of this: no, the Russian state’s hands are not clean; nor are those of the Orthodox hierarchs. We see indictments of Orthodox wrongdoing clearly enough within Orthodox historical accounts, which Taft ridiculously accuses tout court of ‘victimhood pretense’! As mentioned above, the differences in class structure between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth state and the Tsarist Russian state were largely differences of nuance. One was a ‘noble republic’ of planters; the other a burgeoning autocracy – both had large social gaps which were enforced with sanguine brutality. But the nuances in these gaps were not meaningless to the people at the bottom of the social ladder, just as they were not meaningless to the people designing œconomic and religious policy in these states.

Any real ‘healing of memory’ must begin and end with truth, not with diplomatic approximations of truth. As such, in this case it needs to begin with a frank, unapologetic analysis of how capitalism emerged within the world-system, how it dragged the core of the world-system away from Asia and into the Atlantic, and how it made use of existing ideological supports – including the ones within the Western European Christian world – to siphon wealth away from the periphery and direct it to the core. This may seem a Hegelian tack to take, rather than Marxist. But even those on the liberation-theology end of the scale should be able to agree that we cannot view all instances of civil force in religious questions in the strictly value-neutral and blandly panglossian terms that Taft, Guzniak and other would-be gatekeepers of this memory demand. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian Tsardom may have been neighbours and may even have been similar in social structure, but their internal dynamics and their relations to the rest of the world show some important differences. The actions of a semi-peripheral state like the Commonwealth, seeking to integrate itself and its territories into the emerging dynamo of capitalism, cannot be equated to the actions of a semi-peripheral state seeking to countervail against that dynamo, as the last Rurikoviches and the first Romanovs before Peter tried imperfectly to do. Even more so: the retaliatory violence of the people at the bottom, including the Ruthenian Orthodox oprishki of this era, must not be equated to the force of the state and the bourgeois class exploiting them.

A broadside volley against self-defeating Americanism

An unfortunate perennial genre in American Christian literature which has seen a bit of a resurgence in light of recent events, is that which states that American Christians should have nothing to do with anything regarded as ‘left’ in politics. Of course, on its face this is an absurd anachronism – the ‘left’ being a constellation of political values from a later time starting around the seventeenth century, most of which accord with Christianity and some of which do not – and this blog hopefully stands witness against it going all the way back to its beginnings, but it seems necessary to refute some of the core claims of this genre.

This doctrine proclaimed by these passionate haters of all things related to the political left make four core claims: that Christianity is first and foremost concerned with judging or saving individual souls and not with judging or saving systems or collectivities; that Christianity is supposed to promote a uniform social unity instead of division; that Christianity is pacific in nature and should have nothing to do with the passions of anger that are stirred up by left-wing political doctrines; and that Christianity is not concerned with material goods but instead spiritual ones.

There are some obvious theological and indeed simply logical contradictions that this voluntarist-individualist reactive hæresy falls prey to that can be noticed right off the bat. In short, however, I take strong issue with the first three of these assertions and hold that they are not Christian – and I happen agree with the last one, though I hold together with Nikolai Berdyaev that it is ultimately a bigger problem for Christians on the political right than for Christians on the left. In the end, despite the stated intentions of defending Christianity against Marxism, this genre of writing only creates greater confusion for Christians, and in the process only creates more space for actual Marxism to thrive.

Christ does judge nations

The most absurd claim of the American Christian right, on its face, is that God does not judge systems or collectivities, but is instead concerned only with the fate of individuals. Such a position can only even come about as a result of the legalistic understandings of sæcular modernity, with its narrow juridical focus on the exact guilt or innocence of an individual for a particular instance of criminality. But God has judged entire cities and entire nations for their sins. I’m not going to give a whole bunch of proof-texts for this because that work has already been done; suffice it to say that all one has to do is crack open the Old Testament at any given point to ascertain that this is the case. As Fr Stephen Freeman pointed out recently, God judging the nations is one of the key themes of the Old Testament, and in much of the Mosaic narrative and indeed most of the Hebrew Prophets, Israel as a whole is judged in the light of the Law. God judges Sodom and Gomorrah as a whole, God judges Ægypt as a whole. God is ready to judge Nineveh as a whole before Jonah urges the people of that city to repent. The judgement of God often comes through the actions of individual human beings: the Babylonian captivity and the destruction of the Temple are interpreted in the Hebrew Scriptures as examples of God’s judgement against the Hebrews, even though these were actions undertaken by kings, the enemies of Israel.

This is not only a præoccupation of the Hebrew Scriptures, by the way. It extends into the Greek Scriptures, which are a recapitulation of the Law and not a reversal of it. In the Synoptic Gospels, particularly the Gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint Luke, Jesus tells his disciples that whole cities will be judged according to how they treat the Gospel: ‘And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust from your feet. Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgement, than for that city.’ He also issues a condemnation against Capernaum in Saint Matthew 11: ‘And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to Hell: for if the mighty works which have been done in thee, had been done in Sodom it would have remained until this day. But I say unto you, That it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgement, than for thee!’ Even in the Apocalypse of Saint John – once so popular amongst American conservatives – entire churches, entire cities and entire nations are subject to the judgement of God as communities and not as individuals.

To give one modest example of how the Fathers thought about the question of whether salvation is individual or communal, the Hymns of Saint Ephraim the Syrian carry this idea into the history of salvation, with the Persians, Medes and Babylonians atoning for the sins of their nations and the sins of their peoples in the persons of the Magi, bringing gifts to the Theotokos and the Heir of David. This beautiful typological imagery in the Hymns of Saint Ephraim is only possible to appreciate within a Patristic worldview in which we are responsible for each other, and in which it is possible for many to be saved through the sincere repentance of fifty righteous people, of twenty, of ten, or even of one righteous person within a nation. This is the worldview of Father Zosima in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov as well, who tells Alyosha that ‘all men are guilty for everyone’, and therefore that it is necessary to ‘forgive everyone for everything’; and this is the point of the sinful old woman in the parable in the same book, who was ‘given the onion’ at the Judgement – and stood ready to empty Hell with it, until she grew greedy and desired that salvation only for herself.

It is an explicit denial of the entire worldview of the Prophets, of the Apostles, of the Church Fathers and indeed of Christ Himself, to say that salvation is a purely individual matter, and that we are only responsible in a narrow and juridical sense for what we ourselves do. Do we respond to God at the Judgement and reply with Cain, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ No: all are guilty for everyone; and everyone must be forgiven for everything. This is what the Christianity of Dostoevsky proclaims. But American individualists attack this Christianity and call it Marxism.

‘I come not to bring peace, but a sword’

But the foregoing is not to say that salvation in Christ aims at a monistic and nirvanic dissolution of all personality within the grand unity of the cosmos, the way the dharmic religions do. Christ does not erase our histories, our particularities or our backgrounds when He saves us and when we join ourselves to Him. One sees this in the theology of the Incarnation itself: in becoming man, the God Who is the source of all things and is therefore beyond any description or appellation – even beyond being and non-being – became a poor, working-class Palestinian Jewish baby, with a biological mother, a hometown, an ethnic, a religious and a political identity. It is not possible to adequately know or to love a ‘what’, or even to love something that is beyond ‘what’. It is, however, possible to love a ‘who’, and Christ is very much a ‘who’.

And yet, the hæretical assertion of voluntarist individualism by American Christendom ironically results in precisely such an erasure of personality. One sees this, ironically enough, in the same Federalist article which attacks ‘neo-Marxist’ theology – only to end up advocating for a bland, nondescript, deracinated, outwardly-enforced cultural ‘unity’ (as opposed to ‘divisiveness’) that is every bit as grey and dull and conformist and oppressive as the most caricatured of communist dictatorships! There is no room for personality in an individualist society. As Wendell Berry put it: ‘Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.’

Christ did not come to bring such a conformist unity. Christ did not even come to preserve any sort of pre-existing social unity. Christ did not come to say to us, in that execrable contemporary phrasing: ‘You do you.’ Christ, the Incarnate God, stands against both reductive voluntarist individualism, and blind, stultifying conformity. Christ is divisive. The call to follow Christ is divisive. The Cross takes up one from her bed and leaves another sleeping. Again, in the Gospel of Saint Matthew, our Lord says this: ‘Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.’ The Gospel explicitly cuts across the power relations and group markers that the world foists upon us: it even cuts across family relations. The Gospel is such that men are delivered up before governors and kings and councils. The Gospel is such that men who proclaim it are ‘scourged in the synagogues’.

The Gospel is such that those who proclaim it are hated even in their own countries, and even among their own families. If your Christianity is such that you are not hated by the governors and the kings and the councils and scourged in the synagogues – if your Christianity is such that you are ready to side with an unthinking ‘majority’ in the name of a voluntarist individualism masquerading as the Gospel – then whatever you are doing, you are not taking up the Cross.

‘Be ye angry, and sin not’

Christ got angry. He was not a Tolstoyan pacifist; He was not a Vulcan from Star Trek. Christ struck a fig tree with a curse when it did not provide fruit. Understand what this means in the typological worldview in which the Gospel was first read: the fig tree is symbolic of Israel, and the fruit of the fig tree is symbolic of the works of mercy and compassion. (Here again, Christ is judging a nation, that ‘neo-Marxist’!) When Christ got to Jerusalem, He went into the Temple, denounced the money-changers as a den of robbers, overturned their tables and drove them out with a whip of cords. Why did He do this? Because he saw them taking advantage of the poor, using the structural advantages afforded by the Temple as an instrument of social ‘cleansing’ and expiation of debts to coerce the poor into buying animals for sacrifice.

Saint Paul tells us in his letter to the Church in Ephesus: ‘Be ye angry, and sin not’. This is in a passage telling the people of that Church how they are to forgive each other. Saint Paul is an excellent psychologist: he does not tell the people that their anger is unjust, or that they should paper it over or hide it or coat it over with layers of sentimentality and false piety. He tells them that if they are angry, they should be angry, but that they should not let the sun set on their wrath. That is to say: they should not let that anger fester and darken silently and accumulate over days and weeks and years, but instead seek to deal with it openly and in a constructive way when it appears. What we are seeing now in the society is what happens when Saint Paul’s advice is ignored. We have allowed so much anger to build up between different sections of the society, and so many suns to set on that anger, that it spills over into violence and social conflict. So when the Federalist uses the letter to the Philippians to tells black activists to ‘be content’ with their lot and quiescent in the face of deadly violence and injustice, what they are saying is precisely the opposite of what Saint Paul meant.

Bread for my neighbour is a spiritual question

Finally, there’s the old canard about any concern for equity in the distribution of a polity’s goods and services being an expression of ‘materialism’. By that very same token, the early Christians in the Book of Acts were materialists – because they all gave of their own possessions and then distributed them to the needy, and those of them who held back their goods from the Apostles and lied about it, like Ananias and Sapphira, were cursed and expelled. The arbitrary and utterly-modernist dividing line between ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ giving in light of political realities about the way goods are distributed is likewise a recurrent frustration of mine in dealing with Americanists. The saccharine Americanist piety wrongly presumes that – not even the intentions, but the voluntary status of the giver – is the sole determining factor in whether or not a transfer of wealth is ‘materialistic’ or not. This is literally the piety of the Pharisee who stands in the marketplace loudly proclaiming his gifts to the poor! I’ve talked about this classically-idiotic libertarian canard so much and so often over the years – as here, here and here – that it feels a bit like I’m a broken record player.

Ultimately, my retort has to be Berdyaev’s, from The Fate of Man in the Modern World: ‘The question of bread for myself is a material question, but the question of bread for my neighbour is a spiritual question.’ And my retort has to be the retort of the Russian Orthodox Church, which more than any other institution on the face of the planet has reason to distrust Stalinism: ‘The Church always comes out in defence of the voiceless and powerless. Therefore, she calls upon society to ensure the equitable distribution of the fruits of labour, in which the rich support the poor, the healthy the sick, the able-bodied the elderly.’ Jesus spoke against the maldistribution of wealth in the Temple when he called attention to the widow’s two copper coins; and the Church has spoken against the maldistribution of wealth since at least Saints Basil and John and Gregory.

The concern over the just distribution of wealth is not, a priori, a ‘materialist’ concern in the pejorative sense meant. What’s more, insofar as Marxism is a doctrine that applies materialist logic to its subject matter – which is to say, the œconomy – it is analysing precisely the materialist priorities of the society it inhabits. The analytical materialism of Marxism is precisely a reflection of the self-interested materialism of the bourgeoisie. Even ex-Marxists and critics of Marxism like Berdyaev and Bulgakov both understood this. It’s particularly telling that the Federalist does not condemn materialist striving for selfish reasons – ‘try[ing] to better our conditions on this side of heaven’, that is. It’s as if they are saying that materialism is only bad when it’s not self-interested.

If you’re going to try and attack Marxism, in short – make sure that you understand what Marxism is. The Federalist, scared stiff by Black Lives Matter, sets out to attack Marxism and defend Christianity. But in the process it attacks what is truly and authentically Christian going back to the first centuries of Our Lord, and contributes to an ideological atmosphere ideal for creating Marxists!

Fr Jonathan’s primer on Orthodoxy and politics

Over at the excellent WordPress blog Second Terrace, Fr Jonathan Tobias of ACROD has put together a neat piece summarising the core commitments of an Orthodox political stance and how that reflects (or fails to reflect) the present political reality in this country. It’s worth reading in its entirety, but here are some of the good parts:

It’s hard to put the Orthodox Church on a political spectrum. If asked whether Orthodoxy is Republican or Democrat, Conservative or Liberal, an Orthodox Christian would (or should) say “None of these.”

To be sure, the Orthodox Church has always taught what is commonly called “traditional morality.” This includes a high view of family life; sex within a heterosexual marriage; rejection of abortion and euthanasia.

It is lamentable that these traditional affirmations are often taken as a “rightwing” affiliation, and that Orthodoxy — just because it is traditional — is lumped in with partisan politics.

This should not be the case, because there is a lot of Orthodox traditional morality that will not fit nicely into a partisan agenda…

Gregory [of Nyssa], along with many other Fathers of the Church, also condemned “usury,” which is the charging of interest. And thus, the Church has long harbored deep unease about the possibility of “money making money,” and has protested the modern habit of affixing a commercial value to everything in nature. The Church has never signed on to an economics based on centralized industrial profit-making…

We should persist in our longstanding opposition to various social ills, but we should be “equal opportunity” in our criticism all along the political spectrum. We cannot attack a politician personally, but we can and should criticize political policies according to the whole Orthodox Tradition. This means that while we as “Pro-Life” continue our opposition to abortion, we must be completely Pro-Life in advocating for all children — unborn and born — and for the poor, and for the earth. Just like the Fathers did.

This is a good place to start when thinking about Orthodox politics, because there are still a lot of Orthodox people who think that the beginning and end of political involvement is the issue of the preborn. It’s true that on one side, the Orthodox Church is quite emphatic that there are only two genders tethered to biology; that family life lies at the root of the human œcology; that sex is blessed only within the confines of heterosexual, monogamous marriage; and that abortion is equivalent to murder.

But Fr Jonathan is absolutely right that the witness of the Church does not always fall on the ‘right’ side of the American political spectrum. There are issues on which it falls emphatically on the ‘left’. The Church also has very strong things to say about money and about usury. He is absolutely right that the witness of the Church has very strong things to say about care for œcology and the natural environment. And he is absolutely right that the witness of the Church has very strong things to say about how we treat poor people. In fact, I would go further than Fr Jonathan. Historically, the Orthodox Church – and the Russian Church in particular – has had strong things to say about the inherent dignity and worth of indigenous people and indigenous cultures that the Western churches simply have not done until quite recently, after the 1970’s or so.

The deeper question of how the Orthodox laity, not just priests and monks and bishops, are to engage politically is still very much an open one. There are some, unfortunately, who call for an ‘Essene option’. And at the other extreme, there are those who believe that the Orthodox faith can be subordinated to loyalty to one of the two major political parties in the United States. I have never held with either the extremist Essene politics of Reynolds Wood, nor with the politics of Giacomo Sanfilippo or Fr Josiah Trenham, who in their willingness to compromise with one or the other Janus-face of King Herod are actually far more like unto each other than either of them realise, despite being on opposite sides of the American party-line divide. At the same time, I do take some issue with the political minimalism of Fr Stanley Harakas when he says that the most an Orthodox Christian can faithfully do would be to engage on one or two issues of overriding political importance in the modern climate. I have my doubts that such ‘narrowing of bandwidth’ is either healthy or faithful in the long run; some level of direct political engagement (not just voting!) is necessary on a number of issues.

At any rate, Fr Jonathan’s post here is a highly-worthwhile ‘primer’ for anyone looking to understand the basic political commitments of Orthodox Christianity. Suffice it to say that, like our Latin brothers and sisters, we cannot be boiled down to a simple cliché within the existing political culture. We share a ‘both-and’ mentality that is rooted deep in the Patristics. And we also happen to share the position of being comfortable on neither side of the party divide.

Ideological history: the Fourth International take on 1619

An early colonial Quaker meeting

Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman and David North over at the World Socialist Web Site have a rebuttal to the New York Times’s 1619 Project that is interesting and infuriating in nearly equal measure. I suppose that is to be expected from Trotskyists. But all the same there’s enough that’s substantially correct about their critique that it’s worth dwelling on at some length.

First of all, I have to admit that I agree with the overall general thrust of the Fourth International’s critique of 1619. Given my antiracist positions, as well as my High Tory scepticism of the American project generally, a casual blog reader might be tempted to conclude that my sympathies are firmly on the side of the Times in this case. That would be incorrect.

Racism is indeed an evil. Racism is indeed an evil that is deeply enmeshed in American society going back to colonial times. However, I have also always held that racism is historically circumscribed and that concrete things can be done to combat it. Useless white liberal self-flagellation on the op-ed pages of the Times is not one of them. Community policing reforms, criminal justice reform, instituting rent controls, providing equitable funding and staffing for public schools, instituting Medicare for All, ending informal population-control policies in black neighbourhoods, ending private for-profit prisons, ending redlining and predatory credit practices by both banks and payday institutions, ending the damn Forever War that runs on and destroys primarily black and poor bodies: these largely œconomic fixes would go a long way toward eliminating the most intolerable forms of racism in American society. In short, ending capitalism would also end the great bulk of the race-based misery of black America.

I agree wholeheartedly with Niemuth, Mackaman and North insofar as they hold to the limited argument against the 1619 Project and its central conceit. It is indeed not ‘in the DNA’ of America or Americans to hate each other based on the colour of their skin – either literally or figuratively. The biological and sociological determinism of the worldview behind the 1619 Project is ahistorical and, indeed, morally noxious – for the very reasons they describe.

But the problems begin to crop up very quickly when the authors for the Fourth International stray from this narrow critique into a broader take on world history, and their sweeping and reductive takes on ‘the global history of slavery, which extends back into the ancient world’. For one thing, classical slavery and modern chattel slavery were and are very different institutions, underpinned by very different material conditions. It’s actually something of a travesty, that authors proclaiming themselves to be Marxist overlook this. Any Marxist worth his salt should have a ready materialist explanation for the differences between classical and early modern slavery, because – as it happens – there is one.

In Europe itself, the two institutions – the slavery of Antiquity, and the chattel slavery of the Age of Exploration – were separated by a good half millennium of gradual abolition and humane developments in law, like those undertaken by Adamnán of Iona in the British Isles and by Eike von Repgow on the Continent. This gradual abolition happened in large part because of the building reliance of the agrarian œconomies of the late-antique barbarian kingdoms on arable land and its produce rather than on labour. This œconomic structure, which was still largely in place on the continent during the capitalist revolution, was the source of a great deal of the early resistance to the new institution of modern chattel slavery, and made up a significant element of the abolition movement going forward. This is something I have laid great stress on over the course of my writing on this blog. The old feudal resistance to the new money-based, urban and mercantile œconomy provided an early basis for the proletarian resistance that was as yet in its germinal stage.

This article series takes aim at a distorted and blinkered view of the social history of the Americas, which obliterates the contributions – as the authors purport to see it – of the nascent proletarian movement in the Northern United States in combatting both chattel slavery and Jim Crow, as well as a host of other forms of œconomic and social exploitation. And that is good and right and just. Every one of their critiques of Hannah-Jones and her Project is fully deserved. But it’s more than a bit infuriating to see the authors themselves fall into the same trap when it comes to the early history of the movement for abolition.

Tracing abolitionism as a movement back only to Wilberforce – as Niemuth, Mackaman and North do – is in fact its own form of erasure. For the same reasons that it is dishonest to omit, elide or downplay the rôle of the Northern white working class in abolitionism, so too it’s dishonest to do the same for the religious predecessors of the movement. Omitting the religious convictions of the Society of Friends or the anti-slavery activism of James Oglethorpe, or the later political syncretism of Richard Oastler (which actually got results for the working-class in Britain), from the story of abolition is every bit as great an act of distortion and violence to historical truth. Why? Because it shows the actual instance of a Marxist dialectical synthesis between the advocates of ‘feudal’ reaction and the advocates of anti-slavery radicalism, in directing a humane change in œconomic relations.

Now, I do understand that my gentle readers are likely to think, after reading all this, that the foregoing is just Cooper on one of his genealogical or arcane political hobbyhorses. And you might be right to think so to some degree. But getting the history right is something for modern leftists to be concerned with, precisely because there is simply no critical mass or critical constituency for any sort of ‘pure’ leftism in the United States. And that constituency is very unlikely to be built without some kind of populist rapprochement.

It’s telling that the closest that the working class has ever come to achieving meaningful degrees of political power in the United States was the ultimately-failed populist uprising of the 1880s and 1890s – and that was born precisely out of a fruitful alliance between urban workers who wanted to expand public ownership of infrastructure, and rural farmers who wanted to reduce their debt burden. It’s also telling in a negative way: even the most liberal elements of the professional class have always put their own interests first, and never those of the working class. It’s worth pointing out that there is considerable discontent nowadays among the very people who identify as conservative or independent, against the neoliberal consensus the authors justly rail against. A lot of that discontent is voiced in opportunistic or cynical ways, but it’s there and it’s genuine. If the left wants to gain power, it has to work with this discontent rather than in isolation from it.

I agree with the authors of the critique that history is not a morality play. Therefore, there is nothing to be gained by rendering one side of that history idealistically ‘pure’, any more than by rendering it racially ‘pure’. We only impoverish our own historical understanding when we airbrush out of our history the religious Dissenters, the Royalists, the Nonjurors and such who prepared the fields for abolitionism, built up much of the œconomic infrastructure which made abolition possible, and even tended the first fruits of its harvest. Even though, to a large degree, they were either neutral or on the ‘losing side’ of the American Revolution.

‘Early English’ versus ‘Anglo-Saxon’

Some cultural-academic news this past week has not been without interest to me, given that it involves a handful of mostly-American professors – beginning with Dr Mary Rambaran-Olm, formerly of the ISAS, but now including also John Overholt at Harvard – calling for the retirement of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ from polite academic usage, based on the history of the term in racialist circles and its continuing use to marginalise women and scholars of colour. On the other side (of the pond, mostly) are scholars who believe that the politicisation of the term is silly. For academics living in the UK including Tom Holland, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is a value-neutral term that simply refers to the cultural and political period of their own history that preceded the Norman Conquest.

As is usual with these sorts of cultural-politics fights, I seem to be lacking a dog. (Don’t let the blog’s title fool you!) That’s not because of any lack of interest in things English and old, either, as my gentle readers will well be able to attest. In the interests of full disclosure, my preferred usages are ‘Old English’ (which is a readily-understood and handy term that is taken from linguistics to refer to all the related dialects spoken in the kingdoms of pre-Conquest England) and ‘pre-Schismatic English’ (because I happen to be Orthodox Christian and the Great Schism is a readily-available and -apt point of historical reference).

So I don’t really have any skin in the game for preferring to keep the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’, both because I don’t use it too often, and because (I admit) I laboured under the mistaken impression that it was an anachronism, imposed by later observers on a culture that considered itself ‘Ænglisc’. And yet my perspective, which comes from having studied Old English hagiography and other literature fairly intensely over the past year, comes closest to that of Dr Michael Wood.

Dr Wood agrees in the broad strokes with Dr Rambaran-Olm that something needs to change in how we study history in general. He does see certain problems in the ethnic makeup of university history and antiquities departments; he also sees some significant problems in the way these academic fields communicate with laypeople in the broader culture. The lexical differences between the way ‘Anglo-Saxon’ was used in the academy, and the way it was used in political discourse to shore up the illusion of ‘whiteness’, are reason enough not to dismiss Rambaran-Olm’s concerns out-of-hand.

But then he also notes that the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is in fact useful in the former setting, because it was authentic to how the Old English thought of themselves; because it was not an ethnic signifier; and because it indicates that the culture and outlook of pre-Conquest England was neither monolithic nor xenophobic. It was a land ‘of many different languages and customs’. ‘We may drop “Anglo-Saxonists”, then,’ Wood writes, ‘we may prefer “Early English” – but we cannot dispense entirely with “Anglo-Saxons”.’

The original migration consisted of settlers from three different places and tribes in Europe, for one thing – and then they were joined by Italians, Germans, Norsemen, Irish and Scots. He also dwells rather strongly on my very favourite point about Old England, which was that it had a deeply cosmopolitan and culturally-humble outlook. The Orthodox saints of Old England looked outward not only to Rome but also to Greece, to Palestine, to Syria, to Ægypt and to Africa. (Dr Wood name-drops both Saint Hadrian and Saint Theodore, and focusses on their paramount importance as educators in Old England!) The Old English did not pride themselves on being any better than anyone else; quite the contrary! They were eager to learn from their spiritual elders no matter where they came from – even from the Greek- and Syriac-speaking Christian East.

Dr Wood gently (a bit too gently, if you ask me) pushes back on what he seems to view as a certain streak of regressive fatalism in Dr Rambaran-Olm’s argumentation. He looks at the scholarship on Old England and does not necessarily see a field that is damnably mired in white supremacy. Instead, what he sees is a teachable moment in academia where studies of late-antique and mediæval Europe can really gain some traction in the broader culture – and not merely to bolster the nationalist-cæsarist turn in global politics. Here, I agree completely with him. It’s a dire necessity of our time to learn from the cultures that witnessed and survived the fall of Western Rome. We need to be examining carefully the coöperative solutions (the real Benedict Option!) and ascetic demands they made on themselves in order to do so. We shouldn’t be making concessions in the humanities to the radical-right sans-culottes and their myth-building exercises. Speaking as a descendant (and student) of these people – and also as a descendant of people who were very much not Anglo-Saxons – I think we need to be firmly on guard against engaging in this kind of erasure based on the surface-level political concerns of the moment. If there is any chance that ‘Anglo-Saxon’ might be reclaimed for its earlier, humbler, outward-facing meaning cited by Dr Wood, then that chance ought not to be thrown away.