gyrofry posted:
fart fuck hell

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2012/01/salaried-bourgeois-on-revolt-of.html

Zizek's latest for the LRB is proof of that old adage that those who attack multiculturalism in the name of class instantly forfeit their probity on both subjects. Actually, that isn't an old adage. I just made it up. But it is nonetheless true. To explain: Zizek has expended a lot of polemical energy attacking a certain kind of poststructuralist and post-marxist politics for its abandonment of class. But this critique was bound up with a simultaneous attack on 'political correctness', 'multiculturalism', and so forth, in the name of a 'leftist plea for Eurocentrism'. Of course, it was possible to appreciate the former critique without subscribing to the latter. (And if you want a serious critique of post-marxist fashion, you must read Ellen Wood's The Retreat from Class.) But it was never very clear what Zizek understood by 'class', apart from a structuring discursive principle: it was always invoked somewhat dogmatically. If one doesn't expect from Zizek a scientific analysis of social classes, one would at least expect him to know what he thinks classes are. It's quite clear from his latest piece, which re-states some of the theses earlier expounded in Living in the End Times, that he either has no idea, or has a novel theory of classes that he has yet to explain.


Rent, surplus value and the "general intellect"
Zizek's main argument is that the current global upheavals comprise a "revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie" in danger of losing its privileges. He begins by making an argument about the source of ruling class wealth in advanced capitalist formations. Taking the example of Bill Gates, he asserts that the latter's wealth derives not from exploiting workers more successfully - "Microsoft pays its intellectual workers a relatively high salary" - but "because Microsoft has imposed itself as an almost universal standard, practically monopolising the field, as one embodiment of what Marx called the ‘general intellect’, by which he meant collective knowledge in all its forms". In other words, Microsoft doesn't extract surplus value but rent, through its monopolistic control of information. This is paradigmatic of "the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated through the privatisation of knowledge". The influence of post-operaismo in all this is clear: Zizek accepts and expounds the idea that intellectual labour is "immaterial" labour, which he maintains has a predominant or "hegemonic" role in late capitalism. On this basis, he asserts that orthodox marxist value theory has become problematic, as "immaterial" labour simply cannot be appropriated in the way that "material" labour can.


Before going any further, just note that this whole line of argument is a red herring. Even accepting the narrow focus on Microsoft's "intellectual workers" as a paradigm of 21st century work, their "relatively high salary" has no direct bearing on whether they are efficiently exploited. Or rather, if it indicates anything, it would tend to be that they are likely to be far more efficiently exploited than other workers. Globally, this is the trend: the higher the wages, the higher the rate of exploitation. It is also the trend historically: the famous high wages offered by Ford were possible in part because the techniques of Taylorism allowed the more effective extraction of relative surplus value. (The distinction between relative and absolute surplus value would be a fairly basic one for anyone claiming to operate within a marxisant radius.) This is not to say that all of Microsoft's "intellectual workers" are therefore diamond proletarians. Classes are formed in the context of class struggle, and the extent to which these workers are 'proletarianised' or 'embourgeoised' will depend on how successfully managers have subordinated the labour process, etc. Nor does it strike me as a wholly unreasonable proposition that Gates' main source of added value is monopoly rent - it is arguable, at least. But Zizek's argument in support of this idea is simply a non-sequitur.


Marx, the sock puppet
Zizek goes on to explain how his approach differs from that of orthodox marxism, and much of his argument hinges on how he sets up Marx as a foil. Thus: "The possibility of the privatisation of the general intellect was something Marx never envisaged in his writings about capitalism (largely because he overlooked its social dimension)." Setting aside the curious claim that Marx "overlooked" the "social dimension" of capitalist productive relations, it is worth re-stating what Zizek undoubtedly already knows: the writings on the 'general intellect' are part of an exceptionally brief fragment in the Grundrisse, and would thus be hard pressed to 'envisage' anything; nonetheless, the description of the "general intellect" in the Grundrisse as a "direct force of production" manifest in the "development of fixed capital" assumes that the "general intellect" is already privatized.


What Zizek means, I assume, is that Marx did not anticipate the monopolization of "general social knowledge", and therefore did not anticipate that the major class struggles in an advanced capitalist formation might be over the share of rent rather than over the direct extraction of surplus value. This is clear in the way that he treats the example of oil. For, according to Zizek: "There is a permanent struggle over who gets this rent: citizens of the Third World or Western corporations. It’s ironic that in explaining the difference between labour (which in its use produces surplus value) and other commodities (which consume all their value in their use), Marx gives oil as an example of an ‘ordinary’ commodity. Any attempt now to link the rise and fall in the price of oil to the rise or fall in production costs or the price of exploited labour would be meaningless: production costs are negligible as a proportion of the price we pay for oil, a price which is really the rent the resource’s owners can command thanks to its limited supply." So, this raises two questions: i) did Marx really not anticipate in his theory the possibility that rent extraction would be a source of major class struggles?; and ii) as a corollary, does the example of oil and its absurdly high prices undermine the labour theory of value?


This is fairly straightforward to establish. First of all, the evidence of Marx's writings is that he understood that there could exist a class or fraction of people whose income depended on rent extraction. Marx discussed two main types of rent. These were, differential rent, and absolute ground rent. To explain the first type of rent, it is necessary to specify some implications of the labour theory of value, which Zizek maintains is outmoded. First of all, if the value of goods is determined by the socially necessary labour time invested in them, it would tend to follow that if less labour time is needed to make the goods then over time the exchange value of these goods would decline. But the fact is that producers are in competition with one another for market share, so will tend to invest in labour saving devices so as to reduce their labour costs. And even if, over time, the replication of this tendency throughout the economy - enforced by imperative of competition - the result is to reduce the total profit on the goods, the immediate effect is to enrich whoever temporarily has a more efficient firm as a result. They obtain a differential rent because their investment enables them to obtain a larger share of a diminishing pool of surplus value. The second type of rent, absolute rent, needs no lengthy exposition here, but can be said to be that type of rent that would most naturally arise in monopoly situations. At any rate, it's reasonable to suppose that Bill Gates' wealth must embody some of both types of rent, alongside an unknown quantity of direct surplus labour.


Secondly, Marx's labour theory of value is not rebutted by the fluctuations of oil prices. The theory is not supposed to explain price fluctuations, which respond to supply and demand. The exchange value is an average across the productive chain; there is no mathematically fixed relation between the price of one particular commodity and the exchange value that exists as an average over the whole class of commodities which changes over time. Nor is the theory endangered by the fact that the relation between supply and demand can be manipulated in monopoly situations to drastically increase the actual price of a good. I am well aware that there are valid controversies regarding the labour theory of value. Nor do I imagine that Kliman's heroic work will completely save the orthodox theory from its doubters, many of whom aren't even operating on the same theoretical terrain. But Zizek's challenge is, purely on theoretical grounds, ineffectual. It is a straw man that he dissects to such devastating rhetorical effect in this article. For the sake of concision, I omit other instances in which he travesties Marx, both in this and other articles - we'd be here for a long, tedious time.


The "salaried bourgeoisie"
Zizek uses terms extraordinarily loosely. Take the "salaried bourgeoisie", whose "revolt" apparently motivates this piece. They are said to be leading most of the strikes taking place. Zizek thus presumably includes in this groups like the public sector workers who have struck in most European countries. Yet, he doesn't say what makes them a "salaried bourgeoisie". His useage implies a novel class theory, but the closest he comes to defining this term is where he specifies that he means those who enjoy a 'privilege', being a surplus over the minimum wage. Now, it's not at first clear what he means by the minimum wage. There are, of course, legally enforced minimum wages in a number of advanced capitalist societies, but he doesn't mean that. That would be arbitrary and would tell us nothing directly about productive relations. But mark what he does mean by the 'minimum wage': "an often mythic point of reference whose only real example in today’s global economy is the wage of a sweatshop worker in China or Indonesia". This no less arbitrary, as Zizek himself acknowledges.


Now, while the manner of his exposition implies a critical distance from such concepts, he nonetheless deploys them, arguing that they are themselves constitutive of a politically and discursively constructed division of labour: "The bourgeoisie in the classic sense thus tends to disappear: capitalists reappear as a subset of salaried workers, as managers who are qualified to earn more by virtue of their competence (which is why pseudo-scientific ‘evaluation’ is crucial: it legitimises disparities). Far from being limited to managers, the category of workers earning a surplus wage extends to all sorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors, lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and artists. The surplus takes two forms: more money (for managers etc), but also less work and more free time (for – some – intellectuals, but also for state administrators etc). The evaluative procedure used to decide which workers receive a surplus wage is an arbitrary mechanism of power and ideology, with no serious link to actual competence; the surplus wage exists not for economic but for political reasons: to maintain a ‘middle class’ for the purpose of social stability."


In this sense, the "surplus wage" that characterises the exploitation of the proletariat by the "salaried bourgeoisie" is a discursive fiction, unanchored in real productive relations. Still, having thus qualified his terms, it is nonetheless clear that it corresponds to some material processes. After all, if the labour theory of value no longer adequately captures the workings of surplus extraction, and if the 'hegemonic' pattern of accumulation is the extraction of rent, then the 'surplus wage' has some material basis as that which is paid out of a share of the rent (largely extracted by Western corporations from the citizens of the Third World). Further, Zizek goes on to maintain that the efficacy of such 'classes' is not the less real for their being political and discursive. It explains current political behaviour, he says (and here I must quote at length):


"The notion of surplus wage also throws new light on the continuing ‘anti-capitalist’ protests. In times of crisis, the obvious candidates for ‘belt-tightening’ are the lower levels of the salaried bourgeoisie: political protest is their only recourse if they are to avoid joining the proletariat. Although their protests are nominally directed against the brutal logic of the market, they are in effect protesting about the gradual erosion of their (politically) privileged economic place. Ayn Rand has a fantasy in Atlas Shrugged of striking ‘creative’ capitalists, a fantasy that finds its perverted realisation in today’s strikes, most of which are held by a ‘salaried bourgeoisie’ driven by fear of losing their surplus wage. These are not proletarian protests, but protests against the threat of being reduced to proletarians. Who dares strike today, when having a permanent job is itself a privilege? Not low-paid workers in (what remains of) the textile industry etc, but those privileged workers who have guaranteed jobs (teachers, public transport workers, police). This also accounts for the wave of student protests: their main motivation is arguably the fear that higher education will no longer guarantee them a surplus wage in later life."


Zizek goes on to qualify this observation - each protest must be taken on its own merits, we can't dismiss them all, etc. - but is clearly arguing that the general thrust of the strikes and protests is in defense of relative privilege. This is especially true of the "special case" of Greece, where "in the last decades, a new salaried bourgeoisie (especially in the over-extended state administration) was created thanks to EU financial help, and the protests were motivated in large part by the threat of an end to this". So far the only evidence offered for the existence of this 'salaried bourgeoisie' is in its ostensibly discernible, concrete effects in the political behaviour of social layers affected by crisis. Yet this behaviour can be explained far more efficiently by the class interests of fractions of the proletariat who, due in part to superior organisation vis-a-vis their employers, have obtained a degree of job security and in some cases relatively high wages. In which case, the concept is useless.


As is typical with Zizek, each step in his argument is characterised by an astonishing lack of precision, a slipshod and loose useage of terms, straw man attacks, sock puppetry and so on. There are lots of fireworks, but little real theoretical action: all show, no tell, an empty performance of emancipatory politics. And I just thought I'd spell that out because so many people messaged, prodded and otherwise cajoled me into criticising this latest from Zizek. I hope you're satisfied.

cleanhands posted:

discipline posted:
Yah I stopped reading after that part too

lol he says somethings a red herring and you go ahead and base your opinion on it anyway, whats a brother to do

the stuff he inserts about "non sequiturs" and 'logical fallacies' i wondered if i was reading D&D or a socialist blog.

he's got a weird thing with zizek, i wonder if he read any of his books or is it just the short articles? i think it may be a trot-in-the-barricades arch-response from some deep weird place, kind of like erasing the proof of his annihilation (in this case a fat sweaty guy from the eastern bloc). but anyway, so just pointing out some things briefly:

* (to paraphrasing seymour) the assertion that the general intellect is already privatized is "curious"
* an obsessive fidelity to Marx, his 'intention,' and immediate dismissal of differing approaches
* taking Zizek's modification of the labor theory of value as an Infiltrator's Betrayal

the three interlock, in a slick jet that streams across the superficial top of zizek's article

the 'salaried bourgeois':
Here's Zizek:

The bourgeoisie in the classic sense thus tends to disappear: capitalists reappear as a subset of salaried workers, as managers who are qualified to earn more by virtue of their competence (which is why pseudo-scientific ‘evaluation’ is crucial: it legitimises disparities). Far from being limited to managers, the category of workers earning a surplus wage extends to all sorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors, lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and artists. The surplus takes two forms: more money (for managers etc), but also less work and more free time (for – some – intellectuals, but also for state administrators etc).

And here's Seymour:

I also think that those who call public sector workers - nurses, janitors, job centre workers, teachers, road sweepers, bin men, council workers, librarians, caretakers, cooks etc - "privileged" are usually dumb academics who should shut the fuck up about privilege.

am i the only one who sees the glaring difference?

This is seriously problematic.

Zizek here proposes that Marxist labor of theory isnt a trans-historical theory of commodity production as such, but a theory of capitalist commodity production

from http://ascannerdespairingly.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/quote-it-like-you-stole-it-living-in-the-end-times-part-2/ :

"Returning to Marx, then: there is not so much a poetic as a theoretical justice in the fact tha the manuscript of the third volume of Capital breaks off with a class analysis: one should read this break not as a sign of the need to change the theoretical approach from objective social analysis to a more subjective, but as an indication of the need to turn the text reflexively back onto itself, to realize that all the categories the text had analyzed up to this point, starting with the simple commodity, had involve class struggle."

That is to say, the qualities such as abstract labour and commodity form which had foregrounded the Marxist critique were in themselves the result of the reality of class struggle and the imposition of capitalist forms. This is why, earlier in the chapter, Zizek speculates about the links between “really existing socialism” and their reification of labour, wondering whether these oppressive results were due to an immature reading of Marxist categories.

...

“The paradox is while this “immaterial labour” no longer involves the separation of labour from its immediate “objective” conditions (workers own their computers, etc., which is why they can make contracts as autonomous producers), nevertheless the “substance” of “immaterial labour” (what Lacan alled the “big Other” the network of symbolic relations) cannot be “appropriated by the collective subject(s) the way the substance of material labour can be. The reason is very precise: the “big Other” (the symbolic substance) is teh very network of intersubjective (“collective”) relations, as such its “appropriation” can only be achieved if intersubjectivity is reduced to a single subject (even if it is a “collective” one). At the level of the “big Other,” “reconciliation£ between subject and substance can no longer be conceived as the subject’s (re-) appropriatiuon of the substance, but only as the reconciliation of subjects mediated by substance.” (233)

Ultimately, this gets us here:

“…the problem is that the rise of “intellectual”labour (scientific knowledge as well as practical savoir-faire) to a hegemonic position…undermines the standard notion of exploitation, since it is no longer labour time which serves as the source and ultimate measure of value. But what this means is that the concept of exploitation needs to be radically re-thought.” (241)

The way forward, for Zizek, is to modify the ‘labour theory of value’ which maintains that there is an inherent value to commodities which is a product of their use-value or their labour time. This introduces the basic problem with alternative currencies and so on, as it imagines that there is something other than capitalism and exchange value which regulates the inherent value of a commodity:

“In other words, when Marx defines exchange-value as the mode of appearance of value, one should mobilize here the entire Hegelian weight of the opposition between essence and appearance: essence exists only insofar as it appears, it does not pre-exist its appearance. In the same way, the value of a commodity is not its intrinsic substantial property which exists independently of its appearance in exchange. What this means is that Marx’s distinction between concrete and abstract labour is also a kind of misnomer: in a Hegelian sense, “concrete” labour (an individual working on a natural object, transforming it to make it satisfy some human need) is an abstraction from the network of concrete social relations within which it always takes place.” (214)

from soft target:
http://www.softtargetsjournal.com/web/zizek.php

ST: You often insist, in a very polemical way, on the need to maintain the Marxist categories of class analysis. But when we speak of the favelas, the banlieues, the slums, aren’t we speaking of new social and political forces that indicate the limits of Marx’s categories? Given the fragmentation and complexity of the political at the global level, is it still possible to use the categories of "class" and class struggle to describe the current situation and its antagonisms? Couldn’t we argue that the use of the categories today represents a certain refusal to address the specificity of the "concrete situation"?

SZ: I see your point. The way I try to squeeze out of this problem is to redefine the concept of the proletariat in a way similar to Badiou and Rancière: those who stand for a universal singularity, those who belong to a situation without having a specific "place" in the situation, included but without any part in the social edifice. As such, this excluded non-part stands for the universal. The concept of the proletariat becomes a shifting category. But how can this be linked to the problems of political economy? This is a huge problem. I don’t have a real solution. Are we supposed to abandon the labor theory of value, or redeem it? People as different as Badiou and Fredric Jameson claim we already know how capitalism works, and that the real issue is the invention of new political forms. I don’t think we really know how capitalism functions today. The entire Marxist conceptual structure is based on the notion of exploitation. How does this concept function today? I don’t have an answer. All the terms used to describe the contemporary moment—"post-industrial society," "information society," "risk society" and so on—are completely journalistic categories.

ST: But doesn’t your redefinition of "proletariat" distance it too quickly from the question of production? Don’t we have to begin by examining the redefinition of productive labor itself, to analyze the increasingly unstable categories of productive and unproductive labor, employed and unemployed and so on? Doesn’t a term like "multitude," for example, at least indicate this instability?

SZ: This is where things become perplexing for me. The problems you mention are important. But there is, of course, an economy specific to the slums and the banlieue, an illegal market that is nevertheless extremely "dynamic," without any regulations and so on...

ST: Pure neoliberalism?

SZ: Yes. And so we shouldn’t forget, then, that even if the favelas are outside direct state control, they are still integrated into the mechanisms of the economy. More interesting than the question of productivity and unproductivity is the question of how certain economic forces both do not exist and yet are fully integrated into the networks of capital. Just look at the economy of the newly "liberated" Afghanistan—it’s finally integrated into the world market, though of course the most important product is opium.

From First as tragedy, then as farce:

It is as if the three components of the production process - intellectual programming and marketing, material production, the providing of material resources - are more and more autonomized, emerging as three separate spheres. In its social consequences, this separation appears in the guise of the "three main classes" of today' s developed societies, which are precisely NOT classes but three factions of the working class: intellectual laborers, the old manual working class, the outcasts (unemployed, those living in slums and other interstices of the public space). The working class is thus split into three, each part with its own "way of life" and ideology: the enlightened hedonism and liberal multiculturalism of the intellectual class, the populist fundamentalism of the working class, more extreme singular forms of the outcast faction. In Hegelese, this triad is clearly the triad of the universal (intellectual faction), particular (manual workers), and singular (outcasts). The outcome of this process is the gradual disintegration of social life proper, of a public space in which all three factions could meet - and the "identity" -politics in all its forms is a supplement for the loss of the social space proper. This identity-politics acquires a specific form in each of the three factions: post-modern multicultural identity politics in the intellectual class, regressive populist fundamentalism in the working class, half-illegal initiatic groups (criminal gangs, religious sects, etc.) among the outcasts. What they all share is particular identity as the substitute for the universal public space.

The proletariat is thus divided into three, each part played against each other: intellectual laborers full of cultural prejudices against the "redneck" workers, who display populist hatred of intellectuals and outcasts, who are antagonistic to society as such. The old call "Proletarians, unite!" is thus more actual than ever: in the new conditions of the "postindustrial" capitalism, the unity of the three factions of the working class IS already their victory.

ugh i wanted to be brief and this guy just pulls me in. great. either way, seymour skims the top. i don't put much stock in these sort of polemics.

Crow posted:
And here's Seymour:

I also think that those who call public sector workers - nurses, janitors, job centre workers, teachers, road sweepers, bin men, council workers, librarians, caretakers, cooks etc - "privileged" are usually dumb academics who should shut the fuck up about privilege.

since were d&dpostin in here im allowed to point out that he writes this in response to a commenter not to the article, and you have to treat this with respect and kindness

aerdil posted:
i really hate that guy, i have yet to read an article from him that wasn't totally shallow, and, to use d&dese, strawmannin his opponent

he's more correct than not, that zizek one was just really bad.


also the time he used a communist cat macro to try and get people to give him money

Tsargon posted:
also the time he used a communist cat macro to try and get people to give him money

their called lolcats, pls use correct terminology

Crow posted:
U really like him lol

i dont like his class analysis tbh but, well, criticising him for not engaging with zizek's philosophical project is difficult to do without opening yourself up to the same criticism wrt the leninology project; to borrow a phrase from liberalism: it is what it is

Crow posted:

cleanhands posted:

Crow posted:
U really like him lol

i dont like his class analysis tbh but, well, criticising him for not engaging with zizek's philosophical project is difficult to do without opening yourself up to the same criticism wrt the leninology project; to borrow a phrase from liberalism: it is what it is

i'm not really saying he's not 'engaging' with zizek's philosophical project as much as he is ignoring it and misrepresenting it. and as far as the leninology project is concerned, i am not big on totalizing, orthodox marxism. i've read good leninology entries, this is not one of them, though i'm glad he's trying to engage with zizek

I subscribe to classical Marxism, i.e. Trotskyism, which is defended by the International Committee of the Fourth International, the world party that publishes the World Socialist Website. Frankly, none of the philosphers you list work in a Marxist tradition. Rather, they work in the tradition of the irrationalist subjective-idealist philosophers of the 19th century, such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, who developed their thought in conscious opposition to Marxism.

Marxism as conceived of by Marx, Enges, Lenin, Trotsky et al. was not an interesting cultural theory, it was a guide to the political action of the working class. Surely their is a relationship between the regressive politics of Althusser, Zizek, Badiou, and Heidegger, and their philosophy. It's interesting that you make no comment on the Stalinist politics of these thinkers...

Althusser was not a Marxist - from the World Socialist Website: "Louis Althusser was the first significant theorist to begin a systematic attack on the Hegelian dialectic from inside the French Communist Party. In a number of works published in the 1960s ( For Marx, Reading Capital) Althusser maintained that in his mature writings (especially Das Capital) Marx had broken completely with Hegel. Althusser also directly attacked the heart of historical materialism emphasising the role of what he termed “structures” in social and political development as opposed to the classical Marxist emphasis on the leading role of economic forces." http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/oct2000/niet-o23.shtml

Frankly, qustions such as "Why can we not have both permanent revolution and total ideological fascism?" are theoretically lazy, and politically dubious. They clarify nothing.

I would recommend you carefully read these articles:

The Case of Martin Heidegger, Philosopher and Nazi http://wsws.org/articles/2000/apr2000/heid-a03.shtml

One hundred years since the death of Friedrich Nietzsche: a review of his ideas and influence http://wsws.org/articles/2000/oct2000/niet-o20.shtml

And for an exposition of the genuine Marxist theoretical framework: Marxism, history and the science of perspective http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/le41-s14.shtml

In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery.

Narrating an intellectual history running from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Bentham, and Sieyès, revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual position that has exercised a formative influence on today’s politics. Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.

*whistle* Read this book instead, ya bloody cunt *whistle* :parrot:

babyhueypnewton posted:
Did Seymore actually write that and link to those horrible wsws articles? That makes me sad, I wanted to check out "The Liberal Defense of Murder" but since he's a liberal there's not much point.

haha sorry that wasnt seymour, it was just crow saying "totalizing, orthodox marxism" that gave me the trots

If only Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky could see what has become of his great-grandson, David Axelrod.

The 49-year-old Russian émigré to Israel has adorned his modest living room with a singular-framed photograph: a bird’s-eye view of Jerusalem with the Dome of the Rock — Islam’s third-holiest shrine — digitally replaced with an image of an imagined Third Jewish Temple.

He named his 10-year-old son, Baruch Meir, after two of Israel’s most notorious Jewish figures: Baruch Goldstein, who gunned down 29 Muslims at prayers in Hebron in 1994, and Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose ultra-nationalist political party was outlawed by Israel some years prior.

And he has served three terms in jail, he said, on counts of attacking Arabs and setting fire to a mosque, charges that he denies.

“Let’s put it this way: Every time I was arrested, I didn’t do it. Whenever I violated a law, nothing happened and nobody arrested me. I did things, but they never got close to me,” Axelrod said with a grin, sitting on the porch swing outside his house in this small hilltop settlement of about 150 families, adjusting his large skullcap and chewing on the ends of his beard.

In a case of mistaken identity 20 years ago, Israeli police mistook Axelrod for yet another David Axelrod, from the same settlement, who was a suspect in the killing of two Palestinians the morning after Kahane was assassinated in Manhattan.

...

“Trotsky — he wasn’t really smart,” Axelrod said with a shrug. He called his relation to Trotsky a gimmick and said that Trotsky cared only about his career and didn’t really practice what he preached. For Axelrod, who has dedicated his life to the settlement enterprise, living what you believe matters.

(Alan Woods) is a close friend of Trotsky's grandson Vsievolod Platonovich "Esteban" Volkov, who regards Woods' work as closest to Trotsky's theories.

After the traumas of his early years, Volkov led a relatively normal life with a family; a middle-class professional doing interesting work synthesing hormones in the pharmaceutical industry. He has stayed unswervingly faithful to the memory of his grandfather. This has not taken the form of political activity,