Revolution, war, chess: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, February 2022
“Shachmat,” Uri said in Hebrew, then English, “checkmate.”
I was stunned. I’d dominated the chess board as white, with eleven of my sixteen pieces intact and pushing aggressively into black’s territory. I’d mercilessly attacked him throughout the game until he had only a half dozen pieces left on the board. I was just about to deliver the coup de grâce when he put me in check with his remaining knight, then checkmated me with his remaining bishop.
“Another game?” Uri asked, the right side of his face and his right arm marked by a stroke.
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“No.” I brushed him off. “We’re off to Haifa to be tourists. I don’t know when I’ll be coming back.”
I lived on Kibbutz Mizra in Israel with my Jewish girlfriend during the second half of 1974. Part of an undergraduate study-abroad program sponsored by UC Santa Cruz, the six month immersive kibbutz live/work experience was also a not-so-subtle effort by Israel to encourage Jewish-American students to make aliyah. Aside from ulpan -the study of Hebrew-and communal work the foreign volunteers on the kibbutz were assigned a “kibbutz family” and encouraged to visit them during the mid-afternoon tea time. My girlfriend and I had an official kibbutz family to anchor our stay, but I had also been “adopted” by Uri to share an occasional afternoon tea with his family.
After a brief stint working at the Lul-a four-story chicken coop-I transferred to the Ta’amal-a hydraulics factory that served the Israel Defense Forces among numerous Israeli industries. A month into that new volunteer job the person running the factory’s extensive tool library went into the Army, and was replaced by Uri. His stroke and that he knew little about the factory’s operations made him incompetent. He wandered around aimlessly all day instead of staffing the tool library, so my fellow workers raided the tools, took what they needed, and returned them haphazardly, leaving the library a shambles. The factory’s Jewish and Arab workers sneered at Uri behind his back, calling him stupid and useless. The larger kibbutz population did much the same, calling his wife a fool and his children troublemakers. Given how Israelis felt about children, the latter was the ultimate insult. Uri befriended me at work and insisted I join his family regularly for tea.
My official kibbutz family, whose well-regarded father was a former member of the elite Palmach, spoke English and always had a wide assortment of cookies, fresh fruits, cheeses, and cold cuts from the kibbutz’s meatpacking plant to serve with tea. Uri’s family had only simple biscuits, cubed cheese and sliced watermelon. Uri spoke little English. We struggled to make conversation and teatime was increasingly uncomfortable. A week after our only chess game, Uri was called up to the army reserves. Once he got his hands on a gun, he shot himself.
Uri’s suicide broke me five months in, and made me suddenly, incredibly homesick for America. My adventure in Israel mentally ended with his death. Up to that point I’d been an avid chess player-undisciplined, intuitive, but wildly successful. I never played another game of chess after Uri’s suicide.
There’s an unstated relationship between war and revolution. Many socialist theorists of revolution-Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Tito, Minh, Giap, Castro, Guevara, Debord, Guillén, et al-also explored military theory. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Tito, and Guevara played chess. Mao played Weiqi. The Situationist Guy Debord even devised his own board game- Kriegspiel/ Le Jeu de la Guerre-to help him study the logic of war and consequently how to make revolution. Bourgeois political science has a standard definition for revolution. A revolution is a fundamental and rapid change in political power and organization in a society caused when the vast majority of the people in that society revolt against the government. Such revolts are often due to perceived political, social, or economic exploitation or oppression, or to observed incompetence.
This baseline definition is typically extended in one of two ways. First, the term revolution is popularized and trivialized, made synonymous with “new” and “improved,” and applied so broadly as to become virtually meaningless. Thus we talk of a “revolutionary” laundry detergent or software app, or that the cultural work of a musician or artist is “revolutionary,” or that what is needed is a “revolution” in thinking or state of mind.
The second way to develop the concept of revolution is to deepen and expand it until it encompasses fundamental and rapid changes in all of society, its political, social, and economic power and organization. This is the way the Left understands revolution in order to go beyond discussing merely the overthrow of this or that state apparatus. Radically democratizing political structures, increasing social participation, or expanding public ownership are then considered key to what a revolution means. Such thoroughgoing social change was originally called social revolution before being renamed socialist revolution.
Sometimes though it’s not clear what is or isn’t essential to the idea of revolution. Consider decentralization versus centralization in social, economic, and political organization. Anarchists tend to favor rigorous decentralization in all aspects of society while Leninists are apt to push relentless centralism. A corollary debate on the Left is anti-authoritarianism versus authoritarianism. Anarchists insist that “come the revolution,” which will be inherently liberatory and libertarian,[ 1] the state must be abolished immediately whereas many Marxists consider the “withering away of the state” to be the eventual goal after the revolution. Leave it to Leninists to insist that state power must intensify after any revolution before ultimately disappearing altogether. “[Anti-authoritarians] demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority,” wrote Engels. “Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists.”
The old saying that the only constant in life is change belies that revolutionary social change is rare and that the pacifist notion of nonviolent revolution is an oxymoron. Violence is part and parcel of any social revolution, even if only on the part of the powers-that-be resisting the self-proclaimed nonviolent revolutionaries. Violence is essential to the human condition, beginning with childbirth. Mao’s aphorism that “political power comes from the barrel of a gun” notwithstanding, there is no direct correspondence between revolution and war. As has often been said, war doesn’t decide who’s right, only who’s left alive. Class war is the essence of capitalism, with social revolution its resolution. Social revolution can assert itself in any number of ways aside from military-organized warfare, to include popular uprisings, mass strikes, underground resistance, even social refusal. Indeed, war is humanity’s collective pastime, a hobby frequently indulged in for profit, power, and pleasure.
To sharply contrast the relationship between revolution and war, consider Fascism which emphasizes their essential unity. Fascism claims to be anti-Marxist, anti-liberal, anti-conservative, yet simultaneously ultra-nationalist, totalitarian, and revolutionary. Tamir Bar-On has explored the proto-fascist permanent contradiction of conservative revolutionaries. The German nationalist Ernst Jünger valued the heroic vision of the military in peacetime society and championed Frontgemeinschaft, the front-line camaraderie, the soldiers’ community born of the violence and horror of war that formed the basis for what Jünger considered a true German socialism. “Apart from the military-technical apparatus,” Julius Evola argued in The Metaphysics of War, “the world of the ‘Westerners’ has at its disposal only a limp and shapeless substance-and the cult of the skin, the myth of ‘safety’ and of ‘war on war,’ and the ideal of the long, comfortable, guaranteed, ‘democratic’ existence, which is preferred to the ideal of the fulfillment which can be grasped only on the frontiers between life and death in the meeting of the essence of living with the extreme of danger.” The glorification of war and the warrior ethos is Fascism’s primary assertion to being revolutionary, making it revolutionary in form yet reactionary in content.
I was also into other war-related board games-Battleship, Stratego, Risk, etc-when I was a chess fanatic. That fascination preceded my turn to Leftist politics and I now consider it as what it means to be a male in Western society. Once I became a Leftie I read the IWW’s A Worker’s Guide to Direct Action, Gene Sharp’s The Politics of Nonviolence, and similar tactical/strategic guides instead of guerrilla manuals.[ 2] Collective organizing and struggle-not warfare-are key to my sense of revolution. No doubt a finely honed understanding of tactics and strategy is necessary for both the successful soldier and revolutionary. I’ve written about the US military being a de facto collectivist, even socialist enterprise. What is required is explicit communalism and communization to make a revolution socialist.
SOURCES:
Personal recollections
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
About War by Carl von Clausewitz
“On Authority,” by Frederick Engels, letter (1872)
“Intellectual Right — Wing Extremism — Alain de Benoist’s Mazeway Resynthesis since 2000” by Tamir Bar-On (2011), The Extreme Right in Europe ed. by Uwe Backes, Patrick Moreau
War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century by Domenico Losurdo
“War, Civil War, or Revolution?” by Scott Spillman ( The New Republic, 8–30–2017)
FOOTNOTES
[ 1] “The revolution is the creation of new living institutions, new groupings, new social relationships; it is the destruction of privileges and monopolies; it is the new spirit of justice, of brotherhood, of freedom which must renew the whole of social life, raise the moral level and the material conditions of the masses by calling on them to provide, through their direct and conscientious action, for their own futures. Revolution is the organization of all public services by those who work in them in their own interest as well as the public’s; Revolution is the destruction of all coercive ties; it is the autonomy of groups, of communes, of regions; Revolution is the free federation brought about by desire for brotherhood, by individual and collective interests, by the needs of production and defense; Revolution is the constitution of innumerable free groupings based on ideas, wishes, and tastes of all kinds that exist among the people; Revolution is the forming and disbanding of thousands of representative, district, communal, regional, national bodies which, without having any legislative power, serve to make known and to coordinate the desires and interests of people near and far and which act through information, advice and example. Revolution is freedom proved in the crucible of facts — and lasts so long as freedom lasts, that is until others, taking advantage of the weariness that overtakes the masses, of the inevitable disappointments that follow exaggerated hopes, of the probable errors and human faults, succeed in constituting a power, which supported by an army of conscripts or mercenaries, lays down the law, arrests the movement at the point it has reached, and then begins the reaction.” -Errico Malatesta, The Anarchist Revolution
[ 2] Mao Zedong, On Guerrilla Warfare; IRA, Green Book; Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare; Abraham Guillén, The Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla; Carlos Marighella, Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla; etc.
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Originally published at http://leftyhooligan.wordpress.com on February 1, 2022.