NEW IN ENGLISH & SPALabor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity: The L

Friday, August 31, 2012

U.S. pseudo-left group endorses Green Party capitalism and social democracy

....At present we do not have in America either the mass movement that we need, or a political party which has arisen as an expression of that movement, to put forward an alternative political and economic program representing the needs of working people and of the society at large, that would take up the issues of all of the oppressed, from people of color and women to the LGBT community, advocating the need to replace capitalism with a truly democratic and environmentally sound society. What we have are small parties to the left of the Democrats which have come out of social movements such as the civil rights movement, the anti-war movements, and the environmental movement, or which represent democratic socialist ideals and programs. We believe that while building the movements it is also important to support these independent, left political parties which express our aspirations for a just and democratic society. We vote for them not as a protest vote, but as part of the process of creating a political alternative. Solidarity therefore urges it members, supporters, and the activists with whom we work, as well as the public at large, to vote for the Green Party, the Socialist Party USA, or the Peace & Freedom Party.


http://www.solidarity-us.org/current/node/3692

Thursday, August 30, 2012

New Atheist movement: is the game worth the candle?

"Atheism and Theism" is not a Class Contradiction
from M-L-M Mayhem! by JMP

Recently, EDB, comrade blogger of The Fivefold Path, wrote an insightful post about controversies within the New Atheist movement.  Her commentary on blog atheist Jen McCreight's account of chauvinism within this movement explained what so many of us leftists have known, for quite a while, about the inherent contradictions of this movement: that it is a club primarily for privileged pro-imperialist petty bourgeois males who imagine that they're subversive for rejecting God while, at the same time, accepting everything capitalist-imperialist society has socialized them into believing is holy.  EDB's article, along with the McCreight article she was referencing, got me thinking about the long-standing [non-]issue of atheism and communism.  Moreover, it made me again think through the reasons why Marx and Engels, who did not believe in God or any non-materialist account of reality, at the same time rejected atheism as a viable political project.

As many of my readers are probably aware, the communist movement has had a rather heterogeneous approach to religion and religious commitment.  Religious conservatives like to claim that communism has always endorsed some sort of "state atheism" but this is clearly an oversimplification––for even those communist-led socialisms that have declared something like this always were more concerned with pushing primarily for a secular separation of church and state, targeting proselytization rather than private religious commitment, and in some cases going after specific religious commitments rather than every religious commitment.

For example, Lenin believed that Christianity should be outlawed from the public sphere, but he also thought that it should be permitted in the private sphere––the belief was that it would whither away just like the state… this might seem tantamount to "state atheism" (evangelically minded people of all religions believe that a religion is "under attack" if it is not allowed to proselytize, after all), but it does not precisely fit the definition.  This is not some "Anti-Theocracy" that, like a Theocracy, enforces a religion even upon the private lives of citizens; it simply asks for people to stop pushing their fire and brimstone narratives upon others outside of spaces where people privately agree that this is all fine and dandy.  Another example would be the Chinese Revolution where Confucianism was targeted (since its ideology enforced semi-feudalism) but other religions were generally left alone (though, in the case of Christianity, those types of Christian missionary-ism that were connected to imperialism were also targeted).

Outside of these two world historical revolutions, however, communist history is not entirely certain on the question of religion.  The Irish revolutionary James Connolly (friend of Lenin and Luxemburg, another rebel of the Second International) argued that you could be a socialist and a Christian, and that the two commitments were not mutually exclusive.  There is also a long history of liberation theology, another way of approaching the Jesus of the Gospels and that I've blogged about before, that derives its communism from a radical understanding of Xtian doctrine.  Then there are those who argue that, while you can be a socialist and a theist, the fact that you are committed to the latter should mean that you can never be part of a revolutionary party since you lack the advanced consciousness necessary for qualification––but still, even this camp, wouldn't disqualify one from claiming a socialist outlook, or from even participating in a socialist society, only from party membership.

Where is "communism" on this sign post?  It has nothing to do with these options.

In any case, communists have never, as a whole, been atheists in form even if they have often been atheists in essence.  More specifically, while communists have often refused to believe in the existence of God––some even theorizing that such beliefs would necessarily wither away once the material grounds for these beliefs (anything that allows for religion to be the "opium of the people, the sigh of the oppressed") were annihilated––they did not treat religion and spirituality as the prime contradiction of social struggle.  Indeed, as Roland Boer has pointed out, Lenin even regularly attended church services while he was in exile because he saw these churches as places where the proletariat gathered and discussed, though in religious language, the terms of their exploitation.  [Note: Boer has also written some great books on the long-standing marxist fascination with theology.]  And though Lenin was always clear about the fact that he did not believe in any god or gods, he was not an atheist-qua-atheist in that he did not make atheism into the basis of his ideology.

So what does it mean when I say that communists can be atheists in form but not atheists in essence?  This might seem like some sort of pernicious "commie double-talk" but, as with all accusations of Orwellian "double-talk", it is merely critical dialectical thinking.  And one of my international comrades explained this distinction in a very simple way that I will paraphrase here: "we are not 'atheists' not because we believe in God but because we feel that the issue of God's existence [or non-existence] is not a class contradiction."  That is, neither the capitalist mode of production nor the capitalist world system is dependent upon the contradiction between oppressing theists and oppressed atheists: the former depends upon the contradiction between proletariat (theist or atheist) and bourgeoisie (theist or atheist); the latter depends upon the contradiction between oppressed nations and oppressor nations.  What sort of revolutionary movement can be led by atheists who define their movement simply by atheism?  Well, obviously, a movement that is more secular than the brutal theocracy their opposites would erect but not a movement by itself that can overthrow capitalism.  This is because there are many atheists who are comfortable bourgeois and/or imperialist assholes and, because of this, are not subversive but are simply people who have a different ideology but possibly the same class commitments as the religious assholes they're trying to overthrow––a palace coup, a realignment of ideology but not the material basis of oppression.

I mean, look at the New Atheist movement: pro-imperialist, eurocentric, and anti-feminist to the core.  The McCreight article cited above is a typical account of the core ideology of this movement in that it describes a woman (McCreight) who attempts to talk about her own feelings of oppression within this movement and is met with scorn, chauvinist belittlement, and rape threats.  One only needs to read the comment strings of her posts that have to do with feminism to realize that the movement she wants to save––that she still imagines is politically viable and can be reclaimed––is a movement filled with retrograde bourgeois fucks who think that atheism is tantamount to advanced consciousness.

Obviously religion can be an ideology that endorses class oppression; only a fool would think otherwise.  But we communists have more in common with a theistic proletariat who knows that capitalism has to go than an atheistic bourgeois who wants to maintain hir class position.  The former possesses an advanced consciousness, and understands more about reality than the latter who imagines that hir atheism makes hir superior.  For communists, it is not the fact of religion or non-religion that, at root, makes one more aware of reality; it is the understanding that capitalism and imperialism, rather than religion, is what primarily stands in the way of human progress.

So we must ask why people like McCreight want to waste their time trying to reform a movement that is only united on the basis of [anti-religious] ideology.  Because of rationalism?  Far better to pick the rationalism that understands that one can never be allies based on a commitment against religion, a commitment that will still be divided by class and everything that composes class.  It is not rational to assume that there can be solidarity with one's class enemies, even if you both believe there is no god or gods.  Far better to take your atheism into a different sphere and focus on the end of class rather than the end of religion.  Here, in the communist world, we already have a long history of working out these contradictions.  Here, in the communist world, we know that the atheist who is only committed to atheism might be our class enemy.  Here, in the communist world and despite our messiness, at least we understand that "atheism and theism" is not, and can never be, a class contradiction.

http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/2012/08/atheism-and-theism-is-not-class.html

Rape is not rape when done by U.S. military

.... President Obama stands up for women, and speaks out against rape! “Rape is rape!” Except when the U.S. Military is doing the raping, of course, in which case political expediency requires Barack Obama to whitewash and completely ignore rape, forever.....

Full:
When Obama Whitewashed Rape » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Eat Pray Love Obama: Carl Davidson defends anti-Republican wing of U.S. bourgeois politics




Recently Carl Davidson's undying efforts as a Pinkerton policing the petty bourgeois left in the interests of the imperialist Democratic Party in the United States have led him to interventions even on my paltry blog.  They came as responses to my "walk-through" of that acme of opportunism, the Fletcher-Davidson statement The 2012 Elections Have Little To Do With Obama's Record: Which Is Why We Are Voting For Him.


Carl Davidson August 25, 2012

The underlying problem is that none of us here, on any side of the argument, who would like to speak for the working class has any ability to do so with any force and reach. That's what we meant by politics as 'cafe chatter' and strategy as 'self-expression.'

The task, then, is to start with the working class we have, organize the best of them, and find a path forward. Most progressive-minded workers understand that the danger from the far right is quite real, even if some on the left would like to convince themselves that it's only a 'bogey man.' They'll do what they can to thwart it, and the best of them will do so by also building organizations of their own to wage the wider battles of politics as strategy.

As for OWS, the current conjuncture has brought it to an impasse as well, a crisis of anarcho-syndicalist one-sided reliance on fanning the flames of mass movements to bring pressure 'from below', largely a kind of militant liberalism. I've supported OWS, visited many of them and won over allies for them. But mass movements ebb and flow, and one has to have the ability to know how and when to cast the net out, and draw it back in. As much as I love mass insurgency, I'm not one who worships spontaneity. In my book, organization-building trumps movement-building, even as they are intertwined.

Keep in mind that we are not asking anyone to support Obama or his platform or the Democrats. We are simply asking people to vote for him to defeat the alternative. If you don't think this matters, you are seriously out of touch with those sectors of the masses you think most important for more radical change. At the very least, you could get in the streets to oppose the GOP's efforts to deny the ballot with their new VoterID 'poll tax.' That's just a matter of consistent democracy with a small 'd.'

My reply:

Carl Davidson writes:

"Keep in mind that we are not asking anyone to support Obama or his platform or the Democrats. We are simply asking people to vote for him to defeat the alternative. If you don't think this matters, you are seriously out of touch with those sectors of the masses you think most important for more radical change."

I cannot imagine a more dismissive or contemptuous attitude toward the working class at an international level. What must workers in other countries, under the gun of a bipartisan war by the Wall Street parties, think of Fletcher-Davidson's rationalization for voting for drone death lists, invasions, and unconditional preemptive war.

Are we really to believe, after all the decades of Browder-cum-Fletcher/Davidson, that a vote for Obama is NOT a vote for Wall Street's platform, or all the other millionaire and billionaire Democrats who [like their Republican opposite numbers] have conducted in the last thirty-five years an undifferentiated capitalist assault on life and limb at home and abroad?

In the comment above, Davidson seeks to bait us by saying, "At the very least, you could get in the streets to oppose the GOP's efforts to deny the ballot with their new VoterID 'poll tax.' That's just a matter of consistent democracy with a small 'd.'"

When Obama is re-elected and emboldened on his current course; when missiles strike in Syria and Iran; when Homeland Security rounds up another autumn's protestors; when all this happens because we voted against Romneyism, the Fletcher-Davidson's in the US will have much to answer for, as they do already for their anti-worker actions in 2008. They will have sold US workers on another four years of voting against their interests, defeating their own independence.

"Vote against the ultra-right." This is a decades' old cats-paw for supporting the Democrats, and it has pushed US workers further away from the class political independence we need so badly today. It is time to stop the lesser evilism. Republican and Democratic imperialist agendas and their ideological rationalizations will be stopped only when this process reaches fruition. Better to start now than delay another four years.

--

Carl Davidson August 26, 2012 10:16 AM

Thinking the ultra-right these days is an imaginary 'cat's paw' is a huge illusion held by the far left, which likes to lecture others on 'illusions.'

As for internationalism, who do you think Palestinian-Americans and Iranian-Americans, in good measure, will be voting for this round? An anti-imperialist isn't on the ballot, but someone who criticizes Obama for not invading Iran now, and who thinks the West Bank is poor because of 'Palestinian culture,' is running. Voting to keep him out doesn't mean you 'endorse' Obama. Workers often vote for those they think will do them the least harm without endorsing any of them. The larger task is to create a socialist organization with 100,000+ members--which might be done, if we could cut the number of circular firing squads in half or better.

My reply:

Carl Davidson writes:

"The larger task is to create a socialist organization with 100,000+ members--which might be done, if we could cut the number of circular firing squads in half or better."

What can one make of such thinking? The greatest circular firing squad facing the US working class is the every-four-year squad telling them they need to put off their political independence, even the germinal stage of it, for another four years, [then another, then another] because things are too urgent now.

Urgent how? Because of the horror stories Obama shills tell us, citing Fox news.

Is their really any equal sign between the Republican who says "West Bank is poor because of 'Palestinian culture,'" and the president who leads an international bombing campaign on the population of Somalia and Libya, and every day promotes doing the same against Syria and Iran?

"An anti-imperialist isn't on the ballot"? Hmmm... could be because Fletcher-Davidson and their ilk scare us every four years into voting for actual imperialist war-makers, and denigrate anti-imperialism as a sideshow distraction from defeating the Republican Party at the polls?

"The need to support Obama because of the historic development his election represented"

A current example of [half-hearted] support for an imperialist U.S. president based upon identity politics:

I am firmly opposed to lesser-evilism and voting for the candidates of the two imperialist parties (while respecting that many in the African American community feel the need to support Obama because of the historic development his election represented).

Elections don't bring about radical social change; that happens in the streets. I think it is fine to vote for a socialist or progressive Third Party candidate if you want to. In that case I would choose Peta Lindsey [sic] of PSL.

More urgent, though, is the need to build a real alternative to the bourgeois electoral system. I urge you to check out the National Call for a People's Power Assembly, which we will be building at the RNC and DNC protests.

[Source]

The "Peoples' Power Assembly" sounds, given the lack of a general rise in the tempo of working class resistance, like the utopia of a party [Workers World Party] which felt unable to run a candidate, but realizes they must intervene in bourgeois elections in some way at this late date.  Examining the list of endorsers for the "National Call To Create, Build & Multiply People's Power Assemblies" reveals all are political allies pf Workers World Party or actual party members signing the petition on behalf of their unions or WWP Popular Front-type groups.

Still, it is hard to dispute this:


Regardless of what button or lever is chosen in the elections, the primary factor in ensuring change is action and struggle. The eight-hour workday, Social Security, Civil Rights, the right to vote, unionization, Unemployment Insurance — every pro­gressive law or right was won and secured through struggle in the streets. In this period, the Occupy Wall Street movement opened the door, but it's just the beginning. More is necessary to widen and sustain the rebellion against the 1%'s "take no prisoners" war on the rest of us.

A higher level of organization is called for: a block to block, neighborhood to neighborhood, city to city, state to state, region to region approach; a national network of ­People's Assemblies — assemblies designed to empower at every level, that take up the interests of working people, especially the most disenfranchised, assemblies that defend our rights and fight for real democracy, assemblies where the least of us is made whole by a deepening social contract that puts working people's needs and rights before the interests of the wealthy, corporations and financial institutions.

Such an organization would be the highest expression of democracy. The People's Power Assemblies are the vehicles through which we struggle, whether it is defending a home -owner from eviction, occupying a school from being closed, seizing vacant property, fighting against racism, sexism or LGBT oppression.




Sunday, August 26, 2012

Life of Ernst Thallmann

Democrats: the greater evil

Why We Don't Spend As Much Time Denouncing Republicans As We Do Democrats
By Bruce A. Dixon, Black Agenda Report

In today's political ecology, the job of Republicans is to provide political camouflage to right wing Democrats like the last two Democratic presidents Clinton and Obama, by moving still further rightward, even past the boundaries of lunacy. When Bill Clinton was busy passing NAFTA and ending welfare as we knew it, both measures tried and failed at by Bush 1, Newt Gingrich provided covering babble about taking poor children from their homes. While Barack Obama offered to put Medicare and social security on the deficit cutting table and enacted a so-called "Affordable Care Act" first passed as an insurance company bailout by Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney in 2004, Republicans threaten the piecemeal repeal of Rove V. Wade and cuts to unemployment compensation.

The fact is that 120% evil Republicans offer the only justification for our support of 100% evil Democrats. And with the dissolution of what used to be the black consensus for equality, civil liberties, full funding for public education, and opposing war spending and corporate privilege, Obama-era Democrats continue to flee rightward toward war, privatization and austerity.

This deformed puzzle is not the political logic of free and responsible people. It's the cramped and twisted reasoning of someone trapped in a box urgently trying to convince himself that it's not really a box, that pragmatic acceptance of the box as the whole of the great and free universe is really all that can be hoped, struggled and strived for. It's not. Only a beaten, cowed and enslaved people can imagine their forbears sacrificed and struggled for them to choose among greater and lesser, but both still monstrous evils.

We at Black Agenda Report spend more time denouncing Democrats because they act like and enable Republicans. We don't spend as much time denouncing the party of white supremacy because Republicans rarely bother to pretend to be anything else. African Americans haven't voted Republican in 50 years. But we're more unemployed than we've been in seventy years, and more imprisoned than we've ever been.

http://fuckyeahmarxismleninism.tumblr.com/post/30247814681/why-we-dont-spend-as-much-time-denouncing-republicans

--


Wednesday, August 22, 2012

‘The Future of History’

Francis Fukuyama and the 'absent left'

Phil Hearse

Whatever the (well deserved) derision heaped on the head of Francis Fukuyama for his 'end of history' thesis, he has the merit of posing the big questions. In his 'The Future of History' article (Foreign Affairs, Jan-Feb) he poses two big questions that are vital for Marxists: Is the neoliberal undermining of the social position of the employed working class and poorer sections of the middle class compatible with liberal democracy? and What explains what he calls the 'absent left' – the lack in theory or practice of a powerful left/populist alternative to neoliberalism in a period of such drastic economic collapse and moral bankruptcy of the dominant neoliberal model?

His answer to the first question is clearly 'yes'. Such vast inequality, hargues, undermines trust and community and deepens social conflict – so much so that democracy is put in peril. He's right about that and we'll look more closely at its consequences later.

On the reason for the 'absent' left he has two types of explanation. First is the apparent impossibility of shaking off the right wing Tea Party-type populism that ensnares so much of the American proletariat. Second is the intellectual bankruptcy of the left that is - allegedly - incapable of coming up with ideas that can mobilise mass support.

On the inability of the left to mobilise Fukuyama hasn't looked much outside the United States and certainly not southwards towards Venezuela and Bolivia or indeed other parts of Latin America where he would have discovered plentiful attempts to mobilise mass opposition and alternatives to neoliberalism (how successfully is another question).

Also he wrote his article before the dramatic electoral rise of Syriza in Greece or the challenge the Left Alternative in France. An 'absent left' is a huge exaggeration of the situation in Europe or Latin America; his dismissal of the 'Occupy' movement in the United States (which elsewhere he describes as "the same kind of anti-capitalist kids who were at the Seattle protests" [1] mis-assesses the links and interactions that existed between the core youth activists and the labour movement.

But in any case his argument that the left is much weaker than might have been expected given the depth of the neoliberal crisis is sure correct. But Fukuyama's line that left weakness is due to a poverty of ideas is way off the mark.

Fukuyama's main argument is this: the present crisis needs a new form of left of centre populism, which has yet to be thought of. It cannot however be based on the old leftist formulas that can no longer be afforded.

First he dismisses socialism (aka Marxism): "The main trends in left-wing thought in the last two generations have been, frankly disastrous either as conceptual frameworks or tools for mobilisation. Marxism died many years ago, and few old believers still around are ready for nursing homes. The academic left replaced it with postmodernism, multiculturalism, critical theory and a host of other fragmented trends...It is impossible to generate a mass progressive movement on the basis of such a motley coalition..." [2]

Then social democracy gets short shrift: "Over the past two generations, the mainstream left has followed a social democratic program that centers of state provision of a variety of services, such as pensions, health care and education. That model is now exhausted: welfare states have become big, bureaucratic and inflexible; they are often captured by the very organisations that administer them, through public sectors unions; and most important, they are fiscally unsustainable given the aging populations virtually everywhere in the world. Thus, when existing social democratic parties come to power, they no longer apsire to be more than custodians of a welfare state that was created decades ago; none has a new exciting agenda around which to rally the masses." [3]

The problem with all this is of course that in apparently breaking with the neoliberalism he previously so ardently defended, Fukuyama bases himself on some its lamest and most fatuous central dogmas. They include the supposed superiority of private provision over public, the unaffordability of decent, pensions, health and welfare services, the 'fact' that more older people means public health and pensions are unaffordable etc etc. These are central tenets of so-called 'capitalist realism', a set of axioms that constrict all social choices within the framework of privatised neoliberalism. In fact all these things are the subject of conscious political choices, but political choices the neoliberal right don't want to accept.

Decent public services and decent minimum incomes are perfectly possible provided you are prepared to accept the logic of economic redistribution away from the wealthy towards the poor. That's where the problems start, especially for the social democrats (perhaps we should call them post-social democrats) themselves. In Fukuyama's own country, the United States, the pitiful level of taxation for the super-rich (in practice 0% for many) and the huge expenditure on the military makes it of course extremely difficult to sustain welfare programmes. But Fukuyama is expecting someone to come up with a populist alternative which both challenges the neoliberals and accepts their fundamental arguments.

Contrary to Fukuyama the problem with actually existing social democracy in power is precisely that it doesn't aspire to be the custodian of the welfare state, but has largely gone along with neoliberal cuts and privatisation, although usually at a slower rate than right-wing parties. A period of economic crisis makes it much more difficult to defend the welfare state without being prepared to make inroads into the wealth of the rich and powerful.

Marxism, socialism, doesn't get even a summary dismissal from Fukuyama but just ritual abuse. What then might be elements of a Fukuyama alternative? His "ideology of the future" (aka "exciting new agenda") includes no denunciation of capitalism as such, but a change in the type of capitalism. This is explained in the following way:

"Globalization need be seen not as an inexorable fact of life but as a challenge and opportunity that must be closely controlled politically. The new ideology would see markets not as an end in themselves; instead it would value global trade and investment to the extent that they contributed to a flourishing middle class, not just aggregate national wealth.

"It is not possible to get to that point however without providing a serious and sustained critique of much of the edifice of modern neoclassical economics, beginning with the fundamental assumptions such as the sovereignty of individual preferences and that aggregate income is an accurate measure of national well-being. This critique would have to note that people's incomes do not necessarily represent their true contributions to society (sic). It would have to go further however and recognize that even if markets were efficient, the natural distribution of talents is not necessarily and that individuals are not sovereign entities but beings heavily shaped by their surrounding societies. Most of these ideas have been around in bits and pieces for some time...(sic again)" [4]

You could re-write this as saying: "Left to themselves markets do not ensure fair or efficient outcomes. Society needs to take control of the economy to a significant degree." Fukuyama does add a little to this by talking about 'Buy America' campaigns and the like, and insisting that the 'new ideology' must be 'populist', but in reality it's at least social democratic. And it would be resisted furiously by the US political, business and media establishment, especially the two major parties, both of them parties not of the millionaires but of the billionaires.

The populist alternative to Marxism and social democracy that Fukuyama seeks doesn't exist because it can't. It is absolutely pointless waiting for a radical populist alternative that accepts major concepts of neoliberalism – especially the idea of the superiority of private provision over public. It is like waiting for a mythical land that has constant cloudless sunshine every day with absolutely no water supply problems. Such a paradoxical beast does not and cannot exist.
The strange non-death of neoliberalism

This issue is addressed in Colin Crouch's book The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism [5]. Why is it, asks Crouch, that after such a catastrophic economic crisis neoliberalism is still dominant politically? At first blush this seems an enigma: after all when the Keynesian mixed-economy/welfare state model went into crisis in the mid-1970s the bourgeoisie got rid of it, replacing it by the mid-1980s with full-blown neoliberalism. Why haven't they done the same with neoliberalism?

Crouch, although writing from within a pro-capitalist framework, provides an important part of the answer. He argues that neoliberalism isn't the untrammelled working of the free market, despite the neoliberals doffing their hats to von Hayek, Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand (who claimed that the state had no right doing anything except militarily defending its citizens).

No says Crouch, we don't have the free market, we have a 'controlled free marketism' in which the giant corporations wield gigantic power, especially in the form of government lobbying, to fix markets in their own interests, against other companies, small businesses and workers. The business lobby is mega powerful in the US, where most of the Congress is bought and paid for. In effect big business has massive access to government power – not just in the US. And their interests lie in maintaining the neoliberal framework from which they derive such massive profits.

But Crouch's concentration on the big corporations, while important, is not the whole story. Financial capital, Wall Street, the masters of the universe, have just as much to do with it. They are more powerful than any giant corporation. And neoliberalism is the unfettered dominance of financial capital, the bankers - provided we understand that under neoliberalism the state can and must intervene economically and politically, but only to defend the interests of big banks and big companies.

The contrast with the end of Keynesianism is this. In getting rid of the Keynesian model the bourgeoisie was doing something in the short-term and long-term interests of key components of its own class, the monopoly corporations and the bankers. To get rid of neoliberalism would be to do something against the perceived interests of those self-same sectors. Any attempt to go beyond neoliberalism will be fought tooth and nail by the banks, finance houses, monopolistic corporations and the dominant right-wing political forces that defend them.
Obstacles to left advance

Francis Fukuyama wrote his article before the victory of the Socialist Party in the French elections (and the rise of the Left Front) and the left upsurge in Greece focussed on the radical alliance Syriza. However few on the left would deny that despite the global upsurge of protest, political progress for the radical left has been at best uneven and often slow and halting. Massive demonstrations by the indignados in Spain are wonderful, but where is the left politically in Spain? A huge vote for a radical left alternative in Greece is fantastic, but why does the right wing hang on to power, when working class living standards are being massacred? Why does it seem that protest movements in many countries seem to result in no permanent political or organisational gains? Why do promising left formations like Die Linke in Germany make significant gains and then get thrown back?

Some of the answers to these questions are obvious. Defeats of the left and the workers movement in the 1980s and 1990s have objectively weakened the base of the workers movement and the left and, combined with the fall of the Soviet bloc and the political collapse of social democracy, subjectively undermined socialist credibility. Changes in the production process undermined bastions of the labour movement as manual jobs were shipped out to Asia, in countries with no or weak independent workers movements.

The working movement has far less credibility than 30 or 40 years ago as an alternative 'social subject'. This factor is a crucial one in the evolution of mass protest movements. Tens of thousands who came into politics during the 1960s could immediately and obviously see the centrality of the working class as the instrument for society-wide social change. In Europe the general strike in France in 1968, the prolonged upsurge of the Italian workers movement into the 1970s and mass strike movements in Britain and elsewhere meant the discourse of the far left organisations – the 'orientation to the working class' – had immediate and clear relevance. This is much less so today, although of course to imagine the labour movement and protests movements are totally separate and that there is no interchange between them would be to strongly overstate the case. [6]

And of course the international capitalist class, despite the discrediting of the bankers and capitalism itself, have launched a ferocious fightback. The dominance of the virulent right-wing media today is unparalleled and its influence is often under-estimated by the left, as is the specific task of fighting back against it, as has been recently done in exemplary fashion by the mass movement of Mexican students against political fixing in the main television channels [7]. An explicit purpose of the Fox News/shock-jock type of media is to demonise, de-legitimise and ridicule protest movements and the left.

Harsh semi-militarised repression of protest movements is very widespread and is reaching new levels, so much so that the most familiar figure on the TV news (when it's not an Olympic athlete) is the riot policeman...in Athens, Barcelona, Cairo, New York and Berkeley California.

All these things combine to make the progress of anti-capitalism slow and halting. But there is an ideological factor, the significance of which is also underplayed by some on the left – the persistence of anti-partyism, 'horizontalism' and networking 'movementism' which has been absolutely dominant in, for example, the Occupy movement in the US and elsewhere. In fact it has been dominant in the anti-capitalist protest movement since the anti-WTO demonstration in Seattle in November 1999.

Much has been written about this from a revolutionary socialist perspective, although some of it has been too organisational in tone, excessively rehearsing the dialectical compatibility or non-comparability of democratic centralism and networks [8]. Paul Mason's now infamous turn of phrase – "a network usually overcomes a hierarchy" – has been quite correctly criticised as far too optimistic about 'social network driven activism' [9] For example how does this aphorism stand up in the light of the situation in Egypt 18 months after the January 25 overthrow of Mubarak? When the army hierarchy has withstood the siege of numerous dissident 'networks'?

But the real source of the left's weakness is that precisely identified by Crouch – the lack of an alternative society-wide hegemonic project that has mass support. Crouch himself thinks that such an alternative project is impossible because "The combination of economic and political forces is much too strong to be fundamentally dislodged from its predominance". However "there is no need to despair" because giants corporations can be held to account and pressurised into some sort of social responsibility by the power of civil society. Note here that for Crouch it is not mainly a left intellectual failure that creates the lack of an alternative hegemonic project, merely that the dominance of the big corporations is too powerful, too entrenched to be challenged. He thinks however that while the big corporations cannot be overthrown, their wings can be clipped:

"Whether they like it or not, and whether it can be justified by economic theory or nor, firms are increasingly being seen as politically and socially responsible actors. There is a whole new politics around corporations, as campaigners expose their undesirable actions and try to influence customers and sometimes investors or employers. This can, given the right pressure from activists and regulators, turn corporate social responsibility from being an aspect of corporate public relations to a sharp and penetrating demand for corporate accountability."

And moreover, "Rarely before in human history has so little difference been shown to authority, so much demand for openness, so many cause organisations, journalists and academics devoted to criticising those who hold power and holding up their actions to scrutiny. New electronic forms of communication are enabling more and more causes to express themselves in highly public ways." [10]

This is indeed a forlorn hope, and much less radical than what Fukuyama is saying. But think about it for a moment, and Crouch's view is certainly one widely held in the NGO milieu. And a significant number of radical campaigners, journalists and academics at least act as if this were true, giving no thought to global alternatives and focusing everything on the creation of civil society campaigning in the here and now.

Further along the spectrum many even conscious anti-capitalist campaigners explicitly reject alternative society-wide projects and make the absence of such things a positive virtue. This was certainly true of the Occupy movement in the US and UK.

Far from being a strength this is a devastating weakness. If you demand the end of one system, even if it's just the end of one type of capitalism and not the end of capitalism as such, you have to be able to say something about what should replace it. At least something. The Marxist left cannot be sanguine about this weakness and has to wage an ideological struggle about it, albeit from a minority situation within the movement, and at the cost of temporary unpopularity.

Again, this problem is not of course universal. In countries where Marxism has a stronger tradition, often signalled by the existence of a strong Communist Party, the issue of programme and party is better understood- the examples of Greece and France stand out here.
Can democracy withstand the crisis of neoliberalism?

By the end of his article Fukuyama has forgotten to explicitly answer the question he posed at the beginning: can democracy survive what is being done to the 'middle class' (ie the middle class and the employed working class)? The nearest he come is his account of the deepening social exclusion that maintenance of neoliberalism will necessarily involve:

"..there are lots of reasons to think that inequality will worsen. The current concentration of wealth in the United States has already become self-reinforcing: as the economist Simon Johnson has argued, the financial sector has used its political clout to avoid more onerous forms of regulation. Schools for the well off are better than ever; those for everyone else continue to deteriorate. Elites in all societies use their superior access to the political system to protect their interests, absent a countervailing democratic mobilization to rectify the situation. American elites are no different" [11].

On the more directly political front, there is good reason to believe that the kind of economic attacks being suffered by working and middle class people in countries like Greece and Spain are incompatible with the 'normal' function of liberal democracy. These take a number of related forms: Social and economic priorities are being dictated from 'outside', by what the EU, the bankers and the international rating agencies will accept. Violent austerity projects are being implemented without ever having been approved by the voters, in the Greece through the mechanism of a 'national government'. Growing police authoritarianism and repressive violence is being unleashed in several countries against protest movements, most notably where the crisis is deepest, in Greece and Spain. The failure to resolve the crisis creates multiple morbid symptoms, including depoliticisation and the growth of the radical right and racism. If no way out of the crisis is forthcoming, other than the brutal austerity determined by the bankers, in the long term 'normal' liberal democracy will come under threat and the system is likely to break - either to the left or with the imposition of come sort of right wing authoritarian regime. The liberal democracy that dominated in all of Western Europe after the fall of the dictatorships in the mid-1970s, and to some extent in the Untied States, was premised on an overall social compact.

Capitalist political democracy relied on maintaining living standards at least to an historically determined minimum. Once the social pact breaks down politics will be transformed, as Karl Polanyi explained in his book The Great Transformation about the political changes of the 1930s. Polanyi called the 1930s 'revolutionary', including in this definition extreme right transformation, as well as left wing and progressive.
Perspectives

So Francis Fukuyama, to give the devil his due, wants to break with neoliberalism, sees deepening inequality, especially in the US, as catastrophic, and wants someone to come up with an alternative, that is not however social democratic or – worse still – socialist. This will not happen however:

"...as long as the middle classes of the developed world remain enthralled by the narrative of the past generation: that there interests will be best served by even freer markets and smaller states. The alternative is out there, waiting to be born." [12]

The alternative is certainly out there, but it was born a long time ago (in the 1840s if you want to put a date on it). Fukuyama is limiting himself to discussion of advanced capitalist countries, but if his discussion had more involved looking south, he would have found some people trying to put alternatives to neoliberalism into practice – in Venezuela and Bolivia at least. There has never been a more relevant time to challenge 'capitalist realism' in the name of a systematic ideological alternative, one that already knew that neoliberalism and the neocons were bankrupt at the time that Fukuyama championed them.

-Phil Hearse is editor of Marxsite (www.marxsite.com) and a member of Socialist Resistance, the British section of the Fourth International.

NOTES

[1] Interview with Der Spiegel
[2] The Future of History, Foreign Affairs, January-February 2012 p60
[3] Ibid p61.
[4] Ibid
[5] Colin Crouch, The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism, Polity Press 2011.
[6] See for example The Life and Times of Occupy Wall Street, International Socialism issue 135 http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id...
[7] See http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mex...
[8] See for example The Shock of the New, Jonny Jones, International Socialism 134.
[9] Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere, the new Global Revolutions, Paul Mason Verso 2012.
[10] Crouch, op cit pp 162ff.
[11] Fukuyama p61
[12] Fukuyama ibid

http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article2720

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

It's a gift

Congressman and prospective U.S. Senator Todd Akin [R-Miss.] has given us a peep behind the curtain of respectable bourgeois political hypocrisy.  He has given the game - or perhaps only his election - away.

The Congressman's views on women's biology can be found here

On his 21 August radio program, Rush Limbaugh spent three frothing hours fulmination against the cack-handedness of his own team, their unerring ability to take a sure thing and transform it into purest "Macaca."

You don't want to run around and defend stupidity. What's in it for anybody to defend stupidity? "Well, Rush, didn't you do that?" No. I know what he was trying to say. I know what's in the guy's heart. But, I'm sorry, if he can't 'splain it, then get out! It's not that hard. It's not that hard to say, "It's not the baby's fault." That's all he's trying to say. Just say that instead of this rigmarole about the woman's body "shuts down"? For crying out loud! I just... Aaaugh! Where are some brains? Just get some brains! Let's have some people we can look up to!

In the end Limbaugh seemed to echo his once and future king Rick Santorum: pregnancies under any circumstance are a 'gift.'  [Not be be overly economic-determinist, but to the wealthy, with a limitless supply of prescription pep, aren't most of what Human Resources reps call "life events" easily tossed-off as gifts?] 

The mentality revealed in these statements gives us a snapshot of patriarchy's moral self-absorption and serenity.  As with Dr. Panglosss, all life's setbacks [rape, unemployment, war, eviction, foreclosure] merely underscore how good 'we' have it.  "We" being those who can afford it.

For the rest of us, making the best of it, accepting as a gift capitalism's devastations, turns out differently. 

Akin's view of how women should approach their position in class society [the gift] is an opinion shared by ruling classes throughout history and around the world.  And not just about women.  Today gender oppression is a component part of capital's protective armature, pragmatically incorporated along with other ages-old inheritances of racism and obscurantism to divide and conquer working people and their oppressed allies.  Thus is the reign of capital prolonged, with deadly consequences.

That the oppressed should accept as gift [uncomplaining] ramifications of the lawful workings of capitalism is bipartisan.  There is no alternative perspective from Republicans or Democrats.  After thirty-five years of neo-liberal austerity and union-busting, this fact is clear for all to see.  Who can see.  The fact that it is not clear is a product of the trillion-dollar ideology industry; and in the electoral arena, the idea that the Democratic Party can play an ameliorative role [FDR, LBJ], "lifting all boats."

The material basis for powerful illusions in the stability, fairness, and legitimacy of capital's dictatorship vanished decades ago.  What remains, braking class solidarity and a generalized labor upsurge, are social atomization and cop/prison terror.  Disguising these brutal defensive bulwarks of the state are powerful values reinforced by every official and private institution and apparatus.

These values reduce a world-historical situation for billions into an individual predicament.  Women, doubly oppressed, are told that the most violent and destructive facts of their oppression are but inputs for life's lemonade. 

In the teeth of this, the real gift is the speed of outrage over Akin's comments, and the militancy expressed. 

Jay
08/21/2012

Monday, August 20, 2012

Excerpts from talks given at the Marxist School in Charlotte NC

Marxism and the Woman's Question

What is a Nation?

The Palestine question and Workers World Party

Obama and the National Question

Marxism and Reparations

Larry Holmes on the Capitalist Crisis

Black Nationalist Organizations

Larry Holmes on the Elections

Berta Joubert on Globalization

Gramsci meets Marcy

Earlier this year the Party of Socialism and Liberation briefly posted a Gramsci article.  Before I could copy it, the article was taken down from the PSL website.  Not even the Way Back Machine at archive.org could find it.  Today PSL posts a Gramsci article again.

Jay
08/20/2012




*   *   *

The article below is a Commentary piece. Articles posted in the Commentary section do not necessarily reflect the views of the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the Editorial Board of Liberation.

Remembering Antonio Gramsci: Italian revolutionary and writer
By William West
August 20, 2012

Jan. 22 marks the birthday of Antonio Gramsci, a seminal Marxist thinker. Gramsci was a key activist in Italy during the 1920s. His often misunderstood ideas remain relevant today.

Gramsci moved from rural Sardinia to industrialized Turin in 1911. He saw that while both the workers and the peasants were being exploited, their world-views were very different, and this led to distrust between these two classes. Gramsci was convinced that if workers and peasants could fight together, capitalism could be overthrown in Italy. He wondered how these groups could be made to view their interests as one.

Gramsci joined the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), which strove for socialist reform through electoral means. There were food shortages and riots in 1919. Soviets (workers councils) were set up in many cities. The PSI focused on winning seats in Parliament and did not participate in the soviets. Gramsci saw the need to begin operating independently.

He went to Turin's factories to organize workers' councils that would stay on-site after-hours to study Marxism. Gramsci hoped the councils would help create a fertile environment for a new revolutionary party to grow. The councils started organizing marches and strikes around political issues, and successfully demanded pay raises. The industrial capitalists attacked the councils by locking the workers out of the factories. When unions started negotiating to re-open them, the factory owners demanded an end to the councils. In response, Gramsci and his comrades proposed a general strike throughout Turin. They hoped that a successful strike would help spread the movement throughout Italy.

Most of the workers of Turin participated in the strike. The bosses formed "Commissions of Civil Defense" in which they, their families and friends volunteered to perform civil services, such as distributing food and mail to the population of Turin, thereby blunting the effect of the strike. They made themselves appear to the population of Turin as benefactors of society. The masses were led to believe their interests were tied to the welfare of the city's rich, rather than to that of the striking workers.

By the summer of 1920, the Italian workers' movement was on the defensive. The factory owners demanded increased insurance premiums and a ban on overtime. Throughout the country, workers took to "obstructionism"—intentionally working slowly, or engaging in what is known in the United States as a "slowdown." The owners threatened mass lockouts. In response, more than 400,000 people occupied their workplaces throughout Italy in September 1920. Workers' councils oversaw production and different factories communicated with each other to provide for the needs of the people on a national scale.

Gramsci celebrated the occupation movement but warned against viewing it as a revolution. So long as the state was still in the service of the capitalist class, the workers would eventually see their organizations overthrown.

The parliamentary members of the PSI agreed to exert their influence to quell the movement in exchange for union control of the factories. Gramsci took from this that even when a revolutionary situation presented itself, actual revolution was impossible without a well-developed revolutionary party. He helped found the Communist Party of Italy in 1921. Gramsci viewed union control of the factories still under capitalist ownership as counter-revolutionary, because the Italian workers might come to view themselves as invested in the state of the capitalists who exploited them, thus losing their revolutionary potential.

Union control, however, never came about, as the capitalists paid off rightist parliamentarians and fascist thugs to oppose it. As the fascist movement—headed by Benito Mussolini, formerly a leading member of the PSI—became more powerful, the Soviet Union advised the Italian left to form a united front to oppose fascism.

Gramsci sought to form an alliance between communists, socialists and anarchists, but ideological divisions made this impossible. The fascists took over and outlawed both the PSI and the CPI. In 1926, Gramsci was arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison. After suffering years of harsh imprisonment in solitary confinement, he was conditionally released from prison in 1934 due to his declining health. Gramsci died three years later, in 1937.

Gramsci wrote over 3,000 pages on politics during his years of imprisonment. He believed that the capitalist class had been able to derail revolution in Italy because the peasants had not been made to see their struggle as one with that of the urban proletariat. If they had, the entire nation might have joined in striking against capitalism. Gramsci noted how seizing a revolutionary opportunity from a capitalist crisis depended on developing a sense of unity between different classes and sectors of classes.
This sense of unity between different groups, which Gramsci called a "historic bloc," had been successfully articulated by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution

Those oppressed by capitalism are comprised of different groups with unique life experiences. Although these groups have come to think of themselves as separate from each other, Gramsci believed they must come to understand themselves as one exploited totality.

This sense of unity between different groups, which Gramsci called a "historic bloc," had been successfully articulated by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks' emphasis on the struggle of all exploited classes against national oppression made unity in the Russian Empire possible. Gramsci referred to the successful formation of a historic bloc as "hegemony."

In Italy, however, the capitalist class had formed a historic bloc with the peasants and sectors of more-privileged workers. They peasants and these workers were convinced that their interests lay with the capitalist class rather than the factory workers. Gramsci deduced that for a revolution to be successful in an advanced capitalist society, a historic bloc would have to be formed between the various sectors of exploited and oppressed.

In recent months, we have witnessed initial steps in the direction of what Gramsci would have called the formation of a hegemonic operation. The mantra of the Occupy Wall Street movement—"We are the 99 percent!"—articulates a unity between all but the most privileged in U.S. society—the tiny elite of banks and corporations—the 1 percent.

Rather than expressing the needs of the majority as dependent on the capitalists—the "job-creators" as the right wing calls them—the Occupy Wall Street movement expresses a shared interest between even relatively highly paid "white-collar" workers and the most oppressed members of our society.

Of course, whether or not the Occupy movement evolves into a "historic bloc" that can ultimately overthrow the capitalist system will depend on whether it can move beyond expressing the rightful grievances of the majority against the capitalist class to adopting a working-class program.

Gramsci's ideas misappropriated by 'post-Marxists'

Unfortunately, Gramsci's name has become associated in some circles with counterrevolutionary ideas. In their book "Hegemony and Socialist Strategy," published in 1985, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe hijacked Gramsci's theories to claim that class struggle was no longer viable, and in the process anointed themselves "post-Marxists."

Workers have, according to Laclau and Mouffe, formed a historic bloc with the capitalists through the labor movement, thus becoming invested in the capitalist state. According to the post-Marxist narrative, workers under advanced capitalism are not simply workers but have also become consumers and administrators.

What is needed is not revolution, Laclau and Mouffe claim, but the expansion of participatory democracy to oppressed minorities, who will learn to form their own historic blocs with the "democratic" capitalist state.

What these arguments ignore is that neither "participatory democracy" nor the class-conciliatory line of the labor movement can alter the function of the capitalist state as an instrument of repression against the working class. Advanced capitalist countries are run under the dictatorship of the capitalist class, though imperialist super-profits have made possible what could be termed a "historic bloc" between the capitalists and organized labor. But as evident from the severe weakening of most unions over the past few decades, this bloc has not served the longer-term interests of the working class and is doomed to collapse.

Gramsci, as a Marxist, would not view the participation of workers in capitalist institutions as truly democratic. No matter what possessions a high-paid worker may amass, everything can be taken away from that worker in a time of crisis. The capitalist class can take away every "right," including access to shelter and food, from these "liberated workers."

Further, by promoting divisive ideologies such as racism, sexism and homophobia, the ruling class does not just spread false consciousness but extracts extra profits. The end of national oppression will not come about as the result of workers from oppressed nationalities gaining access to a share of capitalist super-profits. It will come from all sectors of the working class rejecting all forms of exploitation and oppression, and overturning the capitalist system.

Despite the misappropriation of Gramsci's thought, revolutionaries should remember Gramsci as someone who dedicated his life to the struggle of the working class, and for his important contributions to Marxist analysis.

Content may be reprinted with credit to LiberationNews.org.

http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/news/remembering-antonio-gramsci.html

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Communists for Obama: having their cake and eating it, too

Mike Ely on FRSO-FB and Obama: Amazing arguments for a terrible policy

Logos of  planned marches at the political conventions. The one at the RNC is (naturally) called "March on the RNC." But the march AT the DNC is not a march ON the DNC. It is billed a march against an entity called "Wall Street South" — meaning the Charlotte headquarters of various corporations.
Question: Why is there no march ON the DNC? Answer: Because the official protest aparatus in the United States supports the current president Obama and his reelection.

A few days ago, Kasama posted for discussion a position paper by Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO-Fight Back). We pointed out that this document contains a significant public declaration urging readers (and presumably supporters of FRSO) to vote for Obama.

Specifically it said:

"In terms of voting in the presidential election, it is better to vote against Romney, especially in swing states."

Since this is a presidential year, it is no surprise that there will be sharp debate among left and radical forces over whether to support the current president of the United States.  

* * * * *  * *

by Mike Ely

There is profound anger and discontent with this government — which has waged wars, conducted assassinations, maintained Guantanamo Bay, advocated austerity, ignored very basic needs of the people, and generally conducted itself rather close to its Bush-era predecessors on many issues of policy. Further, there has erupted the Occupy movement which consciously took distance from the "lesser evil" approach to politics — and refused to place itself (or its hopes) within the framework of electoral, Republican-Democrat choices.

In the case of FRSO-FB, this call for a vote "against Romney" (i.e. a vote for Obama), is an important moment — and a startling one.

FRSO-FB is well-known for opposing U.S. imperialist policy in the Middle East and Latin America — for opposing the U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan — and the war Obama started against Libya(and his government's threats against Iraq and Iran. And they are well-known for having been the target of outrageous FBI raids (and ongoing threats). And they are well-known for describing themselves as "anti-imperialists" in regard to world events.

So it is particularly startling when their organization puts out a document calling for support for Barack Obama. In my own mind, I had trouble believing they had gone that far.

My first wicked thoughts

I confess that I mumbled imaginary slogans in my mind. I couldn't help myself:

"Oppose the war, support the war-maker!"
"Stop the FBI raids, support the White House that sent them!"
"Drones, FBI raids, presidential kill lists? Romney would be worse!"

But obviously, no one (on the left) is likely to declare their policy in such terms.

The FRSO piece simply buries the endorsement. The sentence announcing  its pro-Obama decision arrives in a long text about organizing the people in the streets. In other words, the explanation of policy could be describes as: Continue building movements, main blow at Romney, and [whisper] vote for the President.

And that essay avoids elaborating (yet) its core argument — that Romney is worse, that supporting Obama will help bring a better outcome, that a pro-Democrat lean will not help disorient or deradicalize people.

No illusions, just support!

The virtue of Josh Sykes' piece is that he offers some detailed explanation. He writes:

"[O]ur position was based on two principles:

"First, it was based on an understanding that the class character of the United States is imperialist, that is, that it is ruled by the monopoly capitalist class and in the interests of that class, and that this character cannot and will not miraculously change over night through an election, despite many people's hopes to contrary.

"Second, it was based on an understanding of the mass line. On the one hand, we have an understanding that it is the people who make history, and not the politicians. On the other hand, we understand that people are paying attention to and engaging elections as their main form of political engagement during an electoral period, and that revolutionaries have to engage people where they are at rather than at where we would like for them to be."

This is an amazing argument on BOTH its points:

First, it expresses a common tendency of some "Communists for Obama"  that they declare, rather proudly, that they have no illusions. Yes, they say, we know these are imperialists. Yes, they continue, we understand that change won't come through elections. Yes, they add, we are very aware of all the terrible and horrific crimes of these killers and oppressors.

And somehow we (the readers)  are supposed to feel better because their support for these killers and oppressors is so conscious and illusion free — that they are so untroubled by supporting forces so sinister!

(Perhaps: Supporting war-makers with illusions would be terrible, but supporting them without such illusions is quite fine?)

Then, it is argued (as Josh unravels his argument) that supporting the current president is part of the mass line: He arguesthat we are forced to start "where the people are at rather than at where we would like for them to be."

This too is a rather amazing argument. Sure we revolutionaries work with the people as they actually are (we can't after all invent some new, and more conscious people out of our desires.) But are we really  forced to adopt their backward and reactionary views?

Sure Josh is right that millions of people will vote for this war-making president. Millions support the drone attacks. Millions will support any policy of any American government.

But there are also people who have come to hate the two major parties. The main institutions of this corrupt society have never been so discredited. The whole Occupy movement rather militantly and generally refused to adopt pro-Democratic politics and demands. Don't those people count? Don't we have an obligation to unite with their consciousness, and not the illusions of others? Isn't the call to vote against Romney an argument for entering this political system on its own (well known and corrupting) terms?

Dare to go against the tide

What kind of a "mass line" requires communists to support imperialists, just because there are illusions among some people? Who are we training if we do this? And what are we training them to do?

Was it somehow "ultra-left" of Occupy to target Democratic mayors and to reject a Democratic posing of demands? Is it to use Occupy-like anti-corporate language at the DNC to avoid targeting the warmaker Obama at his own convention? Does that help radicalize those we reach, or train them in bourgeois politics/logic?

It makes me wonder how we draw the lines? What other backward views of the people should we adopt in this way? Should we appeal to god in our materials, because most people are believers? Should we wave the bloody flag because so many people like that? What happens if we a similar logic approach to racial views among white people? Or (another example) "buy American" has long been a mass demand among working people (and not a progressive one)… are we compelled to support it.

I'm not sure where Josh or FRSO would draw those lines, but the argument and method are themselves disturbing and unjustified. (And I urge readers to compare the opposing views on what the "mass line" actually is….)

An aside: Certain people have been arguing that if mass movements in Syria want NATO bombing "who are we" to oppose that. I feel like (ironically) Josh is making the identical argument: If sections of the people want to vote for Obama, who are we to oppose that?

Perhaps we need to revisit the communist spirit of "dare to go against the tide." Where will we end up without that?

I think, by contrast, that if we have shed illusions about Obama, we should help more other people shed their illusions, and encourage those who already agree with us.

In an election year people need communist work that is not just "organizing" people in various ways within the enforced framework (organizing them into unions, organizing them to vote, organizing them to marches at the DNC that aren't really protests…) We also need to conduct communist political work — analysis, agitation, debates — which (obviously) ALL other political forces are also doing. And our work should expose the imperialists, and their candidates, and their policies, and their political system — and not tail or, worse, promote illusions around those things among communists, among broader radicals or among the people.

The peoples struggles — reinvented a strange anti-Romney slant

Back to the original FRSO document. It says says (as our repost yesterday reveals):

"We must remain firm in knowing that building on these people's struggles is the only way to make the fundamental changes that voting never has and never will be able to make."

The term "these people's struggles" refers a series of rather diverse currents which are listed in detail. I will give their quote (which is one of those long boring lists we leftists write too often), but then I will break it down a bit:

"However, there is great hope in the rising struggles of the past ten years. First came the anti-war movement that rose up to oppose Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then on May Day 2006, the immigrant rights mega-marches made history, with millions of Chicano, Mexicano, Central American and other immigrants marching in the streets of cities across the country. Students who participated in both movements began demanding educational rights on campuses, opposing rising tuition costs and mounting student debt. African-Americans turned out in their greatest numbers ever to vote for and celebrate the election of Barack Obama in 2008, while the nationwide movement against police brutality and police misconduct reached new levels with a campaign demanding justice for Trayvon Martin. Workers in Wisconsin, Ohio and other states rallied to oppose Republican attacks on government workers and labor unions. Inspired by the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street Movement rose up to place the blame for the economic crisis squarely on the richest 1% and demand democratic reforms. Occupy captured the support of the masses until it was driven from the streets by waves of nationally coordinated police repression."

"The anti-war movement that rose up to oppose Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan" — why no mention of the antiwar movement to oppose Obama's wars? Well, first because the election of Obama virtually killed the antiwar movement, and because some forces don't want to mention too often that the President they intend to support launched wars.

The immigrant rights mega-marches of 2006  (again in the Bush era) — what about the resistence to the mass deportation of the Obama years? What about the disappearance (by mutual agreement of the major parties) of discussion of amnesty and the political rights of all immigrant workers? What about the crude politics played around the Dream Act (and the suspension of youthful hopes on an "executive order" — so that the future of all those who declare themselves now hangs on the, say it, reelection of Obama?

The document mentions student movements against debt and tuition hikes, the movement against police brutality, working class resistance to "Republican attacks on government workers and labor unions" and (tellingly) the voting and celebrating among African-American people s around the 2008 election of Barack Obama. (I.e. both the resistance to the Republicans and the pre-disillusion celebration of a new Democratic president are part of the peoples struggles.)

FRSO then adds that "Inspired by the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street Movement rose up to place the blame for the economic crisis squarely on the richest 1% and demand democratic reforms. Occupy captured the support of the masses until it was driven from the streets by waves of nationally coordinated police repression."

Note: This mentions that the attacks on government unions is by Republicans, but its description of "nationally coordinated police repression" chooses to avoid mentioning the Democrats who coordinated it (in the White House, in Holder's DOJ and in offices of mayors like Oaklands Quan.) What is the meaning and impact of such shaving of reality? What does it mean to target Republicans when they are oppressive, but no mention Democrats when they pull out the billy clubs and drones?

In other words, this is two-fold nuanced argument that the change we want is made by "building on the peoples struggles" and in a nuanced way those peoples struggles are described in a way that focuses on George Bush and the more recent Republican attacks (but avoid confronting the actions and impact of an Obama presidency and the Democrats.)

(Just one example, it is necessary to reference an antimovement in the Bush years because (obviously) one of the negative impact of Obama's election has been the throttling and withering of massive antiwar protests.)

We think all of this needs ongoing and in depth discussion. We need to excavate the political positions people take, and explore their implications. What are radical and discontent people being trained to do? How are they being urged to view their oppressors? That kind of discussion has started over the last few days (in several places, including here on Kasama).

FRSO urges votes for Obama: Own it.

I have heard, in the last few days a charge from FRSO supporters that our headline "Freedom Road (Fight Back) urges votes for Obama" was inaccurate.  One piece wrote:

" For Kasama to title their repost of the FRSO editorial as "Freedom Road (Fight Back) urges votes for Obama" is dishonest and harmful…"

I'm not sure what to say, since FRSO's piece obviously urged votes for Obama — and explicitly so.

To be candid: I suspect the real issue is different parts of FRSO have different levels of discomfort with endorsing Obama over Romney. And it may be that some want to split hairs (pretend that a "vote against Romney" is not an endorsement of Obama, or their own personal vote for minor left candidates in non-swing means they are not "supporting" Obama, and so on.) But clearly FRSO is urging votes for Obama, and denying it just  reveals the shameful mess they have backed themselves into.

Every FRSO supporter I have talked to in the last few days has been adament and proud that they (personally) are NOT going to vote for Obama. Well if the organizational lean toward this president is so odious  – why support it? Why announce it and pretend that it really has no meaning?

The other argument I found interesting was a demand to explain "what do you propose doing?" (with heavy emphasis on the word "doing") As if politically exposing the two parties and tickets isn't doing anything. As if organizing an ambiguous event at the DNC is positive because it is "doing" something — even if what it is doing appears to be channeling Occupy-energized forces into the exhausted and often-rejected calculus of lesser evils.

Do we need to list what these parties have in common (despite their major differences)? — on empire, patriotism, military aggression, naitonal defence, CIA assassination, capitalism, exploitation, propping up of banks, counterinsurgency, cutbacks, deportations, dismissal of amnesty…. on and on and on and on?

Well we shouldn't need to list this, but if some want to make all that disappear (and make the "main enemy" appear to be some arc from Bush/Cheny-to-Romney/Ryan) then we do need to revisit basic reality in public (and in polemic).

In an election year, in war time, with a threat of war against Iran in the air, with the Democrats auditioning for Masters of Coming Austerity — we need to expose and oppose both parties, both tickets, and this imperialist system.

But even more to the point: Voting  is really is not the issue, because (as FRSO also explains from their own perspective) voting actually doesn't change things. It is the politics and channeling around the voting that matter. And the politics of emphasizing the evil of Republicans, while soft-pedalingthe crimes of the Democrats (who btw hold a  lot of power) is far more significant than whether this or that leftist votes (or whether this or that FRSO support mobilizes votes). In other words, the significant thing is that FRSO (and its supporters) train people in the terrible logic and practice of the lesser evil (even if each of them insists that they, personally, would never vote for him).

The argument of lesser evil is a demand for politics that is not "at distance from the state of affairs" — that is locked into the grid and logic of dominant politics, that accespts its terms (not just its candidates).

Syria 2011 - Keith Bennett

Hands of Syria!

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Parenting under capitalism

Joti Brar of the COGB[ML] had this to say recently on Facebook regarding the Jubilee and Olympic propaganda pumped into UK kids at school:

As if the jubilee shit at her school wasn't bad enough, now all this Olympic jingoism is further brainwashing my five-year-old daughter.

First was the introduction to Coca-Cola via the 'special Olympic bottle'. "It's really yummy, mummy."

"It's bloody sugary chemical crap, my darling."

Then today she came home from a playscheme trip to Victoria Park in Hackney with a union jack (aka the butcher's apron) painted on her arm, and desperate for it not to get washed off any time soon. ("Can I keep my union and jack till we go back to school?" "Mmmm, let's hope so.")

And then what should we find in her packed-lunch bag when we emptied it out tonight? A pack of 'Top Dogs' cards - Met Police top trumps featuring police dogs of all bloody things (with bonus points for 'criminals caught'). So many levels of wrongness.



Friday, August 17, 2012