The Nagas of Brazil

Credit: Dick Culbert 

I´ve heard of the Pachamama, but never the Sachamama. Any connection? Note the claims that this is an actual unknown animal! Rather than, say, a very angry nature spirit come to life...

Sachamama

Minhocao

Percy Fawcett did nothing wrong

"Amazon - the lost world" is a three-part documentary from 2020, following archeologists and anthropologists trekking in the Amazon rain forests in South America. Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil and Peru are visited. The goal is to investigate evidence that a high culture once existed in the Amazon basin. Once believed to be pseudo-science, recent discoveries suggest that this was indeed the case. Early European explorers were telling the truth when they reported towns along the Amazon river. Likewise, traditions among certain Native tribes about a more glorious past (and much larger settlements) have also been proven correct. At its height, Amazon was the home to a population of about 10 million people! 

The Amazonian civilizations disappeared during the 16th century due to a variety of factors: lethal diseases inadvertently introduced by the Europeans, poisoning by quicksilver (used in gold extraction), and massive slave-raiding. In some areas, the high cultures were declining already before the conquista, due to climate change. Some mysteries still remain, for instance why one Native group have genetic markers similar to those of Australian Aboriginals, Papuans and the Andamanese! That an ancient high culture can just disappear, its remains overgrown by jungle, its few descendants becoming hunters and gatherers, is quite chilling...  

The documentary is "pro-Native" and features interviews with contemporary Native groups about their land rights struggles against the Brazilian state. We also get to follow a Peruvian army unit attacking illegal gold prospectors. 

Actually quite interesting. Recommended.  

Planet of the profits

In 2020, Michael Moore released a somewhat curious film titled "Planet of the Humans", promoting a Deep Ecology message. The mainstream Green movement reacted by in effect trying to censor the film! The reason? "Planet of the Humans" exposes what complete fraud the environmentalist movement has become, with Green capitalists pushing for "divestment from oil" while supporting mining and logging. Indeed, the entire "transition to carbon neutrality" is based on increased multi-national mining operations in the Global South, and apparently also logging for biomass. 

The article linked below, written by Max Blumenthal, is from the hard left website The Grayzone, which supports Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia. Note the article´s attacks on Naomi Klein. 

Of course, Blumenthal is not a Deep Ecologist, but rather seems to be a "climate change indifferentist". Probably a ChiCom asset, if you ask me. Still, a very interesting and revealing report! I mean, I´m old enough to remember when environmentalist activism was considered scary and super-radical...

How "Green" capitalists and activists tried to suppress "Planet of the Humans"

Still on the Managua trail

Not sure what to make of this, but will link anyway. The far left site Grayzone claims that the recent Nicaraguan elections weren´t as undemocratic as reported in the main stream media. The incumbent president Daniel Ortega of the left-wing Sandinista Front was re-elected in a virtual landslide. Note the article´s attacks on Chile and Peru! 

Debunking myths about the Nicaraguan elections

Revolutionaries are not normal people

"Che Guevara" is a book in Swedish by Dick Harrison, a professor of history. The title is self-explanatory. Yes, it´s a relatively short biography (about 200 pages in paperback format) of the Cuban revolutionary (who was originally from Argentina). 

For obvious reasons, it´s impossible to avoid politics when writing about Ernesto Guevara, but Harrison has tried to make the book as much as possible about Che the man, rather than Che the Guevarista. Harrison does manage to paint a compelling portrait of the Argentine radical, and follows Che from his childhood home in Argentina through Guatemala, Mexico and Cuba to the Congo, and the eventual defeat in Bolivia. Che comes across as an idealistic socialist of deep convictions, but also as a hard guerilla fighter, a brutal revolutionary, an impatient adventurist, and above all as a man who constantly pushed himself to the limits. I was surprised to learn that Che Guevara suffered heavily from asthma! He was also a womanizer of some standing. Another surprise was his intellectual side. He could probably have become a university teacher in another life. 

Che Guevara´s revolutionary career is too well known to be recounted here, yet there are still unresolved mysteries around him. Harrison retells the unconfirmed story that Guevara met former Argentine president Juan Perón in the latter´s Spanish exile. Perón supposedly warned him not to foment socialist revolutions in Latin America, since this was simply impossible! A strange tale *not* discussed in the book is Che´s supposed relations with the kook-Trotskyist "Posadistas" in Cuba. Harrison believes that it was Régis Debray rather than Ciro Bustos who revealed that Che was in Bolivia when Debray and Bustos had been captured and were interrogated by the Bolivian military. (Bustos subsequently moved to Sweden. I don´t know if the author ever met him.)  

Inevitably, "Che Guevara" also discusses the virtual cult of Che after his death by execution in Bolivia. One aspect I wasn´t aware of is that Che is literally worshipped as a saint by the peasants in the area where he was captured and killed. They call him San Ernesto de la Higuera and compare him to both Jesus and John the Baptist. San Ernesto is said to work miracles, and sometimes walks the mountain paths as an ordinary mortal. There are bizarre similarities between the famous or infamous picture of a dead Che in Vallegrande and old paintings of the dead Christ taken down from the cross. There is also a legend that could perhaps be called "the curse of Che", which claims (or points out) that many of the people responsible for his death met violent ends. 

It seems revolutionaries aren´t normal people, after all...

If Swedish is your first language, perhaps recommended. 

The scramble for lithium

"Lithium: New Gold Rush in the Andes" is a short documentary about the perils of "Green" technology, in this case the "electrification" of the car industry in the developed nations of the world. 

In order to replace all gasoline-driven vehicles with electric ones, enormous amounts of lithium are needed for the batteries. Over half of the world´s lithium reserves are believed to be situated in South America, principally Chile, Bolivia and Argentina. Thus, in order to "save the world from climate change", super-exploitation of these mineral resources is necessary. 

Lithium extraction is impossible without enormous amounts of water, which puts pressure on the wells and groundwater in the arid regions where the mines are situated. The documentary features interviews with Natives in Chile who oppose the mining operation, preferring instead to live their lives like they always have (raising llamas and growing their food locally). Somewhat ironically, the Natives on the Bolivian side of the border *support* lithium mining, while the decision to let a German corporation invest in the region proved controversial in the rest of Bolivia, where many left-wing activists fear foreign domination and increased environmental destruction. Bolivia´s left-nationalist president Evo Morales eventually cancelled the deal, although its possible that the current president Luis Arce (a Morales supporter) might renegotiate it. 

Thus, "Green energy" in Europe and North America actually leads to environmental destruction, political instability and a "scramble for South America". I´m not opposed to economic development, per se. Quite the contrary. However, what makes this documentary on the "white gold" interesting, is that it shows how little has really changed. Previously, it was guano. Then, oil and gas. Now? Lithium, copper and REMs. Throw in some bananas there, too. 

Nor is it clear how this will save the world from climate change, since large scale operations of this kind *are impossible without a modern economy based on fossil fuels*. The Green and climate change movements are simply the shock troops of one wing of late capitalism, the wing trying to make profits on minerals related to electrification... 

Wtf, I love Evo Morales now

Evo Morales stand-in, heinous Andean capitalista 
Luis Arce 

I forgot to link to this little gem from 2020. This kind of BS is why nobody in Latin America takes Trotskyism seriously, certainly not in this "pure" version. Had I been a Stalinista, I would have said something really nasty about "Yankee imperialist provocation" and what not, but as it is, I just shake my head. But sure, if the IBT has some kind of fantastic game plan to make a revolution in, ahem, New Zealand, I´m sure Red Aotearoa can somehow come to the aid of the Bolivian working class, rescuing them from the heinous political deviations of "Andean capitalism" (whatever that is exactly). 

I´m not holding my breath, though.

"MAS/Arce Election Win in Bolivia: No Victory for Bolivian Working Class"

What did I tell you, fam?

What did I tell you? Here is a link to what I wrote almost exactly one year ago:

Home for Christmas?

ÄNTLIGEN VINTERTID

Äntligen vintertid. Har varit det i en timme nu. Eller är det två timmar? 

En vit rasistisk kontrarevolution?

Evo Morales. Hemma igen till jul?

Jag känner mig väldigt vänstervriden den här veckan, och länkar därför till nedanstående inlägg om händelserna i Bolivia. De är från Aftonbladet. Annars är det ju intressant att Bolivia och Venezuela, trots liknande "pink tide"-regeringar, ändå har utvecklats på så olika sätt. Det verkar nästan som om blandekonomi vore bättre än planekonomi, or something...

I Bolivia pågår en vit rasistisk kontrarevolution

Kuppen i Bolivia

XR and regime change

No idea whether this is true or not, but it´s certainly intriguing. The small Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG) in Britain attacks Extinction Rebellion (XR) *from the left*, accusing them (among other things) of ties to the United States and the Deep State. The RCG believes that XR is pushing for "regime change" in Venezuela and Bolivia! Note also the criticism of the Labour Party´s Green New Deal in the second article.

XR launches propaganda blitz against Evo Morales

Fighting climate change: Beware of false friends


More about XR (and Labour) here:

Imperialism and climate change

Home for Christmas?

I don´t think we´ve seen the last of this guy quite yet…

Jevons paradox

“Secrets of the Super Elements” is interesting, but I hate the accent of the British narrator and the lack of good background music. Originally, I actually watched it with the sound off! Otherwise, it makes me nervous. But OK, enough about my psychological quirks, LOL.

The “super elements” mentioned in this BBC documentary include indium, rhenium, neodymium, tungsten and some others. Their properties are frequently bizarre. Thus, tungsten is virtually unbreakable. You can probably trick somebody into thinking it´s alien technology! Rhenium can withstand extremely high temperatures. Indium is a metal that can easily turn into a liquid. And so on. These super-elements have become necessary for our modern civilization. Indium is the weird element that makes the touch screen work in your smart phone, rhenium is used in modern jet engines, neodymium makes wind power generators less likely to crash, etc.

While the technological gadgets made possible by super elements are a testimony to human ingenuity, the problem of sustainability constantly rears its head. These elements are often rare and difficult to mine. Half of the world´s lithium comes from a single place in Bolivia, yet lithium is the metal we need to store the power from wind turbines when the wind isn´t blowing. Tungsten is used by the military in the protective armor of tanks, and also in industry for drills hard enough to penetrate steel or rock. Unfortunately, 80% of tungsten is mined in China – imagine the leverage this gives the Chinese government! If you´re American, you might be relieved to hear that most helium deposits are found in the United States. I always assumed helium (which is used in children´s balloons at amusement parks) comes directly from the air around us, but actually it´s an incredibly rare substance that has to be mined.

Population increase leads to increased demand of all the super elements (and, of course, everything else) and it´s not always obvious that the supply is equally abundant. Note also the following irony: rhenium has made air flight cheaper by conserving energy, but this has made flying more popular, thereby increasing total fuel use – and contributing to man-made climate change. A fine example of the so-called Jevons paradox! The documentary proposes mining in space as a solution for resource scarcity, which is (of course) absurd. There are limits even to human ingenuity…

On YouTube, the documentary has been cut at some places by whoever has uploaded it, leading to all kinds of trollish conspiracy ideas in the commentary section. Somehow, I doubt the truth of the Illuminati can be found in a production of this kind, but perhaps that´s just what they *want* us to believe, right?

The end of the Fourth International

This pamphlet reprints several documents from the so-called Vern-Ryan Tendency within the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The documents were originally written in 1952-53. At the time, the SWP was a Trotskyist organization in political solidarity with the Fourth International. I know next to nothing about the dissidents Sam Ryan and Dennis Vern apart from this material. Their opposition group is often accused of being “pro-Stalinist” in its analysis of East Europe. However, the Vern-Ryan Tendency is most famous for its criticism of the Trotskyist party in Bolivia, the POR of Guillermo Lora. Most of the material reprinted here deals with this issue. 

In 1952, the nationalist MNR took power in Bolivia. What began as a classical coup soon turned into a virtual revolution, as the labor union federation COB mobilized thousands of armed workers in support of the MNR. The nationalist cabinet consisted of several different factions, its left wing represented by COB leader Juan Lechín. Eventually, the revolution entered a more moderate phase (or was “betrayed”) as the MNR center faction around Victor Paz Estenssoro got the upper hand.

What made the Bolivian situation almost unique was the important role played in the events by a Trotskyist party, the previously mentioned POR. While the POR was numerically weak, it did exercise a strong influence within the COB leadership and the MNR left wing. POR leader Lora was Lechín's secretary, Lechín's speeches were written by POR cadres and Lechín himself was briefly a member of the Trotskyist party. The mineworkers' union FSTMB (likewise headed by the ever-present Lechín) had adopted a Trotskyist-sounding program. The POR also had several parliamentary deputies, elected as part of a FSTMB-backed union ticket. When the MNR took power backed by COB, FSTMB and Lechín, POR naturally acted as a ginger group on the MNR left wing.

The Fourth International supported Lora's policy, while the Vern-Ryan Tendency accused the POR of selling out the revolution to the nationalists. Instead, Vern and Ryan argued, the POR should have mobilized the working masses against the “bourgeois” MNR government, like Lenin's Bolsheviks had mobilized the Russian masses against the provisional government of Kerensky. Lora's failure to do this was a “betrayal” of the Bolivian revolution. I admit that I find their analysis surreal, but that's another show. Part of the disconnect is that the Vern-Ryan Tendency assumed that the POR was a mass party with a strong working class base, and hence resembled the Bolsheviks in that respect. But as we have already seen, Lora's group was actually quite small. They were influential precisely because they *didn't* oppose the MNR lefts, but rather mingled with them. Mainly, however, we are dealing with a political problem, Vern-Ryan opposing all nationalism (including Third World nationalism) to begin with.

In 1953, the Fourth International split. Neither the “orthodox” International Committee (dominated by the SWP) nor the “revisionist” International Secretariat (led by Michel Pablo) criticized Lora's policies in Bolivia. This is what makes the Bolivian issue so contentious for Trotskyists. If the International Committee was the true embodiment of revolutionary Trotskyism, how could it fail to notice that one of its member parties (POR supported the Committee) had betrayed a working-class revolution? From this, some really hard line Trotskyist elements eventually drew the conclusion that Vern-Ryan had been right, and that the entire Fourth International ceased to be a revolutionary organization in 1952-53. The International died on the Altiplano. These groups either call for the creation of a Fifth International, or the recreation of the true revolutionary Fourth International. This pamphlet is published by such a group, the small League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP) in New York City.

This material clearly isn't for the general reader. However, if you are interested in Trotskyist splits and fusions, “Bolivia: The Revolution the `Fourth International' Betrayed” may be a useful addition to your collection.

Lechínist, not Leninist

“Revolutionary History” is an ecumenical Trotskyist journal published in Britain. This is the Summer 1992 issue (Vol 4, No 3). It carries the slightly menacing motto “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. The journal is very uneven and I can't really recommend it, unless you are extremely interested in the Trotskyist movement and already possess a working knowledge of its many splits and branches. That being said, “Revolutionary History” is interesting in the sense that it's one of the few projects uniting Trotskyists from many different organizations. Usually, these groups fight each other! For a while, even the super-sectarian Spartacist League was involved, but the Sparts left (with their money) after various conflicts. In terms of magazine content, the loss wasn't terrible.

About half of the Summer 1992 issue is devoted to the role played by the Trotskyist party POR in the Bolivian revolution of 1952. To most “Westerners” this event is probably completely unknown, but it's an important landmark in Bolivian history. It was also important for the Trotskyist movement. At the time, the Fourth International supported the POR and its leader Guillermo Lora. Later, some Trotskyist groups got second thoughts and began to accuse the POR of having derailed or even betrayed the revolution. Unfortunately, most articles (or rather lengthy excerpts from such) published in “Revolutionary History” don't really clarify the issue, and the whole thing feels like an exercise in extended bibliography (I admit that a scholarly researcher might find the bibliographical section useful). The one exception is José Villa's article, which proves that Lora's POR supported the nationalist and Peronist-inspired MNR, especially its left wing around Juan Lechín. Villa semi-humorously calls the POR “Lechínist” (rather than Leninist).

I suppose you could say that the MNR “derailed” the 1952 revolution. The problem with Villa is that his political alternative to POR's more pragmatic line is a completely sectarian one: Trotskyists should simply “denounce the bourgeois nationalists”, call on the workers to turn the labor unions into soviets, and that's that. Of course, a small sectarian group will never “derail” a revolution, since it doesn't have any influence over it to begin with!

The most peculiar excerpts translated and reprinted by “Revolutionary History” come from the pen of Guillermo Lora himself. Lora admits that the POR suffered from a nationalist deviation, but blames everything on his fellow party members and on Fourth International leader Michel Pablo, who supposedly kept Lora busy with trivial matters in Paris so he couldn't return to Bolivia in time to take charge of things. Lora also blames his own character – apparently, the man is such a genius that he didn't took his opponents within the POR seriously enough to challenge them?!

Yeah, that's what happened. Sure. The old fox would be more honest simply stating that he really does support Bolivian nationalism…

The other half of “Revolutionary History” is a smorgasbord of book reviews, reviews which often express a distinct political line. The journal's contributors are strongly anti-Stalinist, but occasionally say things which challenge my credulity. Walter Kendall (admittedly no Trotskyist but a pro-EEC broad leftist) seems to imply that Draza Mihailovic, the right-wing Chetnik leader in Serbia during World War II, wasn't a Nazi collaborator, that Churchill was tricked by Stalin's operatives into supporting the Yugoslav Communists, and that perhaps support for “General” Mihailovic would have been preferable. Regardless of what you think of Kendall's article, why was this published in a far left journal? Perhaps I've simply misunderstood a remarkably objective reviewer…

Some intramural Trotskyist polemics have been sneaked in, despite the ecumenical character of the journal, such as ex-Spartacist Fred Purdy's attack on anti-Spartacist Michel Varga. Kendall (again!) contributes an item on the mysterious Bruno Rizzi, whom he apparently knew personally. In an unexpected move, Al Richardson (the editor) accuses US Mandelite Paul LeBlanc of being a dogmatic Lenin-hugger and Cannonite. Usually, Ernest Mandel's supporters (i.e. the dominant tendency within the Fourth International) are accused of being too soft!

Ironically, the potpourri in the second half of “Revolutionary History, Summer 1992” was more interesting than the material on Bolivia, the main staple of this issue…

The Bustelo affair

“Cosmetics, Fashions and the Exploitation of Women” is a somewhat unusual book, published by Pathfinder (the publishing arm of the Socialist Workers Party or SWP). The SWP is a small Marxist party in the United States. It used to be in political solidarity with the Trotskyist Fourth International, but is now a completely independent group. Pathfinder publishes both SWP-centered material, and material about Cuba or South Africa which may be of broader interest.

This book deals with the so-called Bustelo affair or Bustelo controversy, which raged within the SWP back in 1954. The controversy started when a mysterious writer named Jack Bustelo wrote an article in SWP's newspaper The Militant attacking cosmetics and the “beauty” industry as a capitalist profit-making scheme perpetuating the oppression of women. Bustelo later turned out to be none other than SWP leader Joe Hansen! The article, “Sagging cosmetic lines try a face lift”, triggered angry and confused responses from some SWP members, who argued that working class women had the right to use cosmetics, wanted to use them, and that Marxists should support women getting them . The debate continued internally within the party even after The Militant had put an end to the public controversy. It soon touched upon broader issues, such as anthropology and matriarchy.

Joseph Hansen and Evelyn Reed (the SWP house expert on anthropology) defended the traditional Marxist position, arguing that contemporary standards of “beauty” are rooted in capitalist competition, oppression of women and racism. Women haven't always used cosmetics, and a socialist society would create new standards of beauty. Working class fighters will be seen as beautiful! Reed also wrote an extensive article defending the idea that primitive society was classless and matriarchal. Hansen's and Reed's main opponent in the debate, Marjorie McGowan (who is otherwise unknown), took a somewhat different position: “The long-stemmed American beauty, full of natural vitality and physical grace, with shining hair, clear eyes, smooth skin, and natural cosmetics with a trace of accent here and there, is no fiction but an American commonplace. This type of beauty is the American social standard, whatever Bustelo might think of it”. Reed, not without foundation, called this the standard of the Nordic hero, the female white supremacist. (As a sidepoint, “Bustelo” is apparently a strong black coffee popular among Puerto Ricans and Cubans in New York City. Hansen happened to like it, but perhaps his pseudonym was also intended to be an anti-racist marker.)

While none of the participants were “feminists” in the strict sense of that term, the Bustelo affair could be seen as an early example of a controversy over feminism within a Marxist party. Ironically, the orthodox Marxists Hansen-Bustelo and Reed sound more “feminist” than their critics, who had a positive view of cosmetics or long-stemmed American beauties. Even more ironically, the anti-feminist critics of Hansen and Reed were all women!

While Marjorie McGowan's articles sound less extreme if read in their entirety, it's nevertheless obvious that she was a “complementarian” and “essentialist” in her view of gender and gender roles (really a conservative position). She rejects Marxist dogma, but is equally dogmatic in her appeals to “science” as the neutral arbiter of all questions. Reed has little problem showing that McGowan's “science” is anything but neutral, and often dead wrong. As already pointed out, the idea that women “want” to be “beautiful” and hence “need” cosmetics is really a social construct from the American post-war boom. Just 50 years earlier, cosmetics were the marks of a prostitute and honorable women were *not* supposed to apply it! Nor was it hard for Reed to show that standards of beauty have changed considerably over the centuries. So have gender roles. There is nothing “natural” about female sex competition for men, the underlying premise of cosmetics. For instance, among many animals, it's rather the males that compete for females (Reed doesn't mention peacocks, but that would be the classical example).

Reed is on shakier ground when she attempts to prove that matriarchy (or rather her peculiar interpretation of it) was the first human society. Here, McGowan convincingly shows that there isn't a simple historical sequence matriarchy-patriarchy. Nor is there a simple correlation between matriarchy and a classless society, or between patriarchy and classes. Ancient human societies were incredibly diverse. Australian Aboriginals had no classes, didn't care about fatherhood but were extremely patriarchal anyway. Ancient Egypt was “matriarchal” and yet a hierarchical society based on slave labor. Reed's response is to simply appeal, dogmatically, to Friedrich Engels and Lewis Henry Morgan (an anthropologist whose works Engels used as authoritative sources), and cast everyone who disagrees as anti-Marxist. There simply *must* be a clear historical sequence from matriarchy to patriarchy, or else the bourgeois scientists are right, and that's apparently unbearable. It should be noted that the SWP didn't officially endorse Reed's analyses, but since she could publish them in the party's public press, they nevertheless acquired a kind of quasi-imprimatur. As for McGowan, she left the SWP shortly afterwards, and it's not clear what happened to her (or how she felt being attacked in SWP material decades later). I'm not a Marxist, but I would say that Jack Bustelo and Evelyn Reed “won” the debate as a whole, despite Reed loosing the last round to the long-stemmed Aryan blonde from Los Angeles…

A controversy over feminist-related issues in 1954 strikes many people as strange (the feminist movement didn't become strong until decades later), and there are inevitably many rumors concerning this debate. Everyone seems to agree that Hansen knew very well what kind of reactions his hit piece on cosmetics would elicit. His article was a deliberate provocation intended to expose and smoke out the anti-Marxist elements within the party. Some believe that the Bustelo affair had something to do with a factional conflict between the SWP leadership and a dissident group around Murry Weiss and Myra Tanner Weiss, who accused the SWP of pandering to male chauvinism. (Hansen was accused by some angry critics of poking fun at women who use make up, or perhaps women in general.) Finally, some people on the far left believe that Hansen deliberately started the Bustelo controversy in order to avoid a more important political discussion about Bolivia, where a Trotskyist party had just “betrayed” a revolution! Hansen is said to have gone into seclusion for several months, and when he finally emerged, it was with an attack on cosmetics intended as a diversionary maneuver…

However, I think “Cosmetics, Fashions and the Exploitation of Women” stands on its own. Indeed, it seems to be one of Pathfinder's bestsellers, and has been translated to both Spanish and Farsi. The issues it raises are forever new. What is the relationship between Marxism or science, indeed, any political philosophy and science? Can science be a neutral arbiter? Are gender roles (or beauty ideals) “natural” or socially constructed? Are women-related issues such as cosmetics really less important than Bolivian revolutions?

I'll close with this quotation from Hegel (cited by Bustelo), which has a certain relevance to the “culture wars” of the present day: “Since the man of common sense appeals to his feeling, to an oracle within his breast, he is done with anyone who does not agree. He has just to explain that he has no more to say to anyone who does not find and feel the same as himself. In other words, he tramples the roots of humanity underfoot. For the nature of humanity is to impel men to agree with one another, and its very existence lies simply in the explicit realization of a community of conscious life. What is antihuman, the condition of mere animals, consists in keeping within the sphere of feeling pure and simple, and in being able to communicate only by way of feeling-states”.

Amen.

Sectarians united against sectarianism

Claudio Naranjo 

"Taking with the left hand" is a booklet by William Patrick Patterson, a prominent follower of the Fourth Way, the spiritual path associated with Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. The booklet is of interest to other followers of Gurdjieff, comparative religion scholars and cult-watchers. I don't think the general reader would be interested. The booklet is filled with Fourth Way jargon, and it's primary objective is to prove that many groups claiming the mantle of Gurdjieff do so falsely. In other words, Patterson is on a heresy-hunt!

Still, his heresy-hunting seems pretty well-researched, which is why "Taking with the left hand" might be of interest to those who study New Age groups on a more scholarly level. The first chapter, dealing with the Enneagram community, is especially interesting in this regard. The Enneagram is a complex geometrical symbol, used (and invented?) by Gurdjieff, but later popularized and commercialized by people in the Human Potential and New Age milieux. Patterson traces the development through Claudio Naranjo, Oscar Ichazo and Helen Palmer. Frankly, I never understood the original meaning of the Enneagram, but later it became just another self-help technique along the lines of New Age astrology and similar schemes.

The next chapter deals with the Fellowship of Friends, led by Robert Burton. The author describes their beliefs in some detail, mentions various lawsuits against the group, and eventually condemns them as a cult. Since the book was written, the FOF has officially become "a non-denominational church" which no longer sees itself as exclusively Gurdjieffian. I was intrigued to learn that it was the FOF that launched the technique of recruitment through bookmarks, hence its nickname "People of the Bookmark". A Gurdjieff group in Sweden, the Linbu Foundation, recruits people in exactly the same manner! (On a funnier note, the Linbu group has been accused of Satanism, just as the Fourth Way group in Oregon mentioned in David Kherdian's book "On a spaceship with Beelzebub". The reason, no doubt, is Gurdjieff's weird work "Beelzebub's tales to his grandson". However, nobody in Sweden got the idea of organizing an armed posse against it! I guess we are more laid back than settlers in backwoods Oregon. But I'm digressing.)

Finally, William P. Patterson takes on Boris Mouravieff. This chapter seems less well researched, yet contains what could be more explosive pieces of information. For instance, the author believes that Mouravieff may have been responsible for the rift between Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Apparently, Mouravieff (a Russian aristocrat and one-time secretary to Alexander Kerensky) met both men in Constantinople, became interested in their teachings, but preferred the company of the more intellectual Ouspensky, while developing a strong animus towards the decidedly less intellectual Gurdjieff. Much later, Mouravieff developed his own brand of esoteric teaching, fusing the Fourth Way with Orthodox Christianity and Russian Freemasonry, complete with medieval chivalry and courtly love. (Mouravieff's three-volume work "Gnosis" is available from Amazon.) At the same time, Mouravieff strongly criticized both Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, claiming that they had distorted or misunderstood the true teachings of the Great Brotherhood, a top secret society Mouravieff claims to be on a first name basis with.

Since the main point of "Taking with the left hand" is to prove that the Enneagram community, the Fellowship of Friends and the followers of Mouravieff aren't "true" Fourth Way groups, the booklet gives a sectarian, in-house impression. Essentially, William Patrick Patterson is a sectarian fighting other sectarians. Or perhaps less sectarian people! In passing, he attacks many other groups and teachers as well, including our old friend Osho, whose followers practice Gurdjieff dances they picked up from a movie (I can hear Osho laughing).

As already pointed out, however, this short book may nevertheless interest travellers through the New Age jungle.

Fertile ground or revisionist history?

Credit: Augusto Starita

"Fertile Ground" is a book published by Pathfinder, the publishing arm of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party.

The SWP used to be very critical of the guerrilla struggle launched by Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1966-67, and similar efforts in other Latin American nations. The theory and practice of Guevara is sometimes called "focoism", since one of its distinguishing features is the idea that a small guerrilla nucleus (foco) can create the conditions necessary for a successful revolution, even if such conditions are initially lacking. In other words, focoism is based on a misreading of the Cuban revolution. It's probably connected to the general, pseudo-Maoistic voluntarism characteristic of Che Guevara's thought in general. During the 1980's and 1990's, however, the SWP became more and more uncritically pro-Cuban, and "Fertile Ground" is an attempt to square the circle, by claiming that Guevara's adventure in Bolivia wasn't really focoist, after all. I can't say that this revisionist history is very convincing, although I admit that the book is interesting for other reasons.

The bulk of the book is an interview with Rodolfo Saldana, an indigenous Bolivian Communist militant who left the Bolivian Communist Party and instead became a founding member of the ELN, Che Guevara's guerrilla front. For a while, he was in charge of ELN's urban support network. He managed to escape to Cuba after the capture and murder of Guevara in 1967, only to return for a second attempt to launch a guerrilla war in Bolivia. That attempt, too, ultimately failed.

Saldana claims that the mineworkers at Bolivia's main tin mine, Siglo XX, voted overwhelmingly to support Che's guerrillas and even recruited a number of volunteers. This precipitated the Noche de San Juan massacre, during which Bolivian troops attacked the miners and their union hall to restore "order". According to Saldana and the publishers, this was the fertile ground, together with the fact that Bolivia has always been a seedbed of labour radicalism and nationalist populism.

The argument is unconvincing. There were indeed mass struggles in Bolivia during this period, eventually culminating in a revolutionary situation in 1970-71, but it was concentrated in the cities and minefields, and led by the labour unions, leftist parties and nationalist military officers. In other words, "business as usual" as far as Latin America is concerned. It's difficult to see what role a rural guerrilla foco could possibly have played in all this. And since Saldana's mission was to recruit a few mineworkers *away from* the union-centred struggles, it's painfully obvious that the ELN's strategy was at bottom just as focoist as the critics have charged. It wasn't the ELN, after all, which toppled the Bolivian military dictatorship. Indeed, they seem to have pretty much ceased to exist during the crucial months of 1970-71!

Frankly, it's unclear whether the SWP really believes in the contents of their own book, or whether they simply want to capitalize on Che Guevara's status as a revolutionary icon. Nevertheless, "Fertile ground" can be of some interest to students of Bolivian and Cuban history, and for those interested in Che Guevara's life in particular.

Elvis has not left the building

Elvis Presley died in 1977. However, many Americans refuse to accept this, and rumours about Elvis still being alive started almost immediately after his death. "The Elvis Sightings" by Peter Eicher is a collection of such rumours.

The book is a very mixed bag. Some of the tall tales are entertaining, others are plain boring, while others must have been written (or perhaps heavily edited) by the author himself. Most of the Elvis sightings are "natural", but at least one is with a supernaturally risen Elvis, who tells a troubled teen that there are many gateways in the universe, and then promptly vanishes into thin air.

The most bizarre story has Elvis discussing Christian theology with a hiker in the Appalachians. It seems Elvis attempts to harmonize Augustinianism with process theology and a bipolar god! He even cracks the novel theory that the *soul* is dependent on the physical body for survival.

OK.

Other favourites include the story of how Elvis impersonates himself during a performance at a sunky bar, or the tale about a heavy metal guy who meets Elvis at a laundromat. Elvis tells him to listen to his own music instead! Apparently, The King also had a log cabin in the middle of the Everglades. There's even a story about how Elvis died in a plane crash in Bolivia (of all places).

Overall, however, I'd say Eicher's little book is relatively bland. Besides, Eicher is wrong. Elvis is definitely dead. I know it. I saw it happen. You see...

:O